C.S. Lewis in his letters

With the passing of time C.S. Lewis’ shadow grows longer. Renowned as a literary scholar, science fiction writer, Christian apologist and children’s writer, Lewis himself has been the subject of a feature film (“Shadowlands”). His fantasy books for young readers, “The Chronicles of Narnia,” have been adapted to film several times, the most recent being Walden Media’s version of “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.”

(Production is underway for the second of the “Chronicles,” “Prince Caspian,” while work has also begun on a film version of Lewis’ “The Screwtape Letters,” missives of advice from a “senior tempter” in the “lowerarchy” of Hell to a demonic apprentice.) In the meantime, Lewis’ many books continue to sell briskly, and interest in the author’s life and influence remains high.

Now Lewis’ literary executor, Walter Hooper, has released the third and final volume of Lewis’ collected letters: a doorstop-size volume that encompasses the final 13 years of Lewis’ life (he died in 1963).

These were key years, for while many of Lewis’ best known works were behind him — including “The Screwtape Letters,” “Mere Christianity” and the “Ransom Trilogy” of science fiction novels comprising “Out of the Silent Planet,” “Perelandra” and “That Hideous Strength” — he wrote other minor classics during that time.

The years 1950 through 1963 were the years when Lewis published the seven-volume “Chronicles of Narnia,” his autobiographical “Surprised by Joy,” a long-awaited scholarly volume on English literature for Oxford University Press and his most accomplished (though curiously underrated) novel, “Till We Have Faces.”

It was the period in which he celebrated the publication of a work he had encouraged for many years, “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy, written by his friend J.R.R. Tolkien. It was the time in which this longtime Oxford don left the college he had worked at for 25 years to take the Chair of Medieval and Renaissance English, a position created especially for him, at Cambridge University.

During the 1950s this confirmed bachelor met and married an American divorcee, Joy Davidman Gresham, comforted and encouraged her through her struggle with bone cancer and then grieved deeply when she died in 1961.

The marriage between “Jack and Joy” began as an act of mercy but ended as a true marriage of love, though this took time to develop. It is amusing to read Lewis’ almost-offhand comment to mystery writer and Dante scholar Dorothy L. Sayers, announcing his marriage, in late 1956:

“You may see in the ‘Times’ a notice of my marriage to Joy Gresham. She is in hospital (cancer) and not likely to live; but if she gets over this go she must be given a home here. You will not think that anything wrong is going to happen. Certain problems do not arise between a dying woman and an elderly man. What I am mainly acquiring is two (nice) stepsons. Pray for us all, and God bless you.”

Interesting as well are three letters, included here, from Lewis to Joy’s ex-husband, Bill Gresham, which range in tone from gallantly kind to boldly defensive, as he encourages Gresham to cease trying to gain custody of his two sons, who feared him.

Lewis answered innumerable fan letters and in some offered spiritual counseling. He worried about the health and wanderings of his older brother, Warren, an alcoholic who tended to go on binges and require long periods of recovery. Finally, by a strange coincidence, Lewis died on the same day novelist Aldous Huxley died and John F. Kennedy was assassinated: Nov. 22, 1963.

In a fitting bookend to the present collection, the final letter Lewis wrote — the day before he died — was an answer to a letter from a boy who had asked him about “The Chronicles of Narnia.” He commends young Philip Thompson “on writing such a remarkably good letter; I certainly could not have written it at your age,” and adds: “It is a funny thing that all the children who have written to me see at once who [“The Chronicles’” Christ-figure] Aslan is, and grown ups never do!”

Nearly a decade earlier, the members of a fifth grade class in Maryland had written to ask Lewis several questions about Narnia and to describe his own appearance. After answering their questions about the “Chronicles,” he replied: “I’m tall, fat, rather bald, red-faced, double-chinned, black-haired, have a deep voice, and wear glasses for reading.”

Here and elsewhere in this collection, the reader is struck by the honesty and humility of Lewis’ responses to everyone who wrote to him — a hard task when a writer is regularly showered with praise.

As Lewis wrote to one correspondent who had thanked him for the strengthening effect of his Christian-themed books upon her life, he wrote, “As for my part in it, remember that anybody (or any thing) may be used by the Holy Spirit as a conductor. I say this not so much from modesty as to guard against any danger of your feeling, when the shine goes out of my books (as it will) that the real thing is in any way involved. It mustn’t fade when I do.”

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