C. S. Lewis by A. N. Wilson

Author:A. N. Wilson [A.N. Wilson ]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780007378883
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers

There is one encounter worth mentioning before we bring to an end this account of Lewis in 1939. Some time during the course of that summer, Dr Havard introduced Lewis to the Roman Catholic Chaplain to the University, Monsignor Ronald Knox. One would have assumed that as two classicists, Punch contributors and men of letters of an old-fashioned Christian temper, Lewis and Knox would have known each other for years. But Knox, who was the most brilliant orator of his generation at Oxford – star of the Union, wit, punster in tongues ancient and modern – had left Oxford before the end of the First World War to become a Roman Catholic, and after his return there as chaplain to the Catholics, it was perhaps understandable that he should have kept a low profile. Lewis greeted him warmly with the assertion that he was possibly the wittiest man in Europe. Knox modestly demurred, but the meeting was said to be happy and humorous. Perhaps they might have developed into friends. Though Lewis was not friendly to Catholicism, the two men had much more of a playful kind in common. Both enjoyed ‘bad’ literature – in Knox’s case, the poetry of Ella Wheeler Wilcox, in Lewis’s the novels of Amanda McKittrick Ros. Both were brilliant parodists. Both liked spontaneous rhyming. Their friendship, however, was not to be. Within a few weeks of their meeting, England was at war. Knox had gone into the country to translate the Vulgate into English and Lewis was being prepared by an unseen providence for war work no less surprising.

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