C.S. Lewis
Gopnik in The New Yorker takes a fresh look at the complicated life of the beloved (at least in the US) story-teller, medieval literature scholar, and Christian apologist extraordinaire:
"The two Lewises—the British bleeding don and the complacent American saint—do a kind of battle in the imagination of those who care as much about Narnia as they do about its author. Is Narnia a place of Christian faith or a place to get away from it? As one reads the enormous literature on Lewis’s life and thought—there are at least five biographies, and now a complete, three-volume set of his letters—the picture that emerges is of a very odd kind of fantasist and a very odd kind of Christian. The hidden truth that his faith was really of a fable-first kind kept his writing forever in tension between his desire to imagine and his responsibility to dogmatize. His works are a record of a restless, intelligent man, pacing a cell of his own invention and staring through the barred windows at the stars beyond. That the door was open all the time, and that he held the key in his pocket, was something he discovered only at the end."
Was he a prig, a sensualist, a saint, or a mensch? A fantasist constricted by dogma? An everyday neurotic, mixed-up writer? I'd guess the latter. Read the whole thing if you are at all interested in this brilliant and fascinating fellow who was transformed by earthly love, and then loss, late in his life.
A brief bio of Lewis here. There are lots of C.S. Lewis websites. Here's one.
By the way, Disney's (!) The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe comes out Dec. 9. Can Disney possibly do it justice?
And finally, if you ever wondered in which order the Chronicles of Narnia ought to be read, here's the website on that important subject. (I read them out of order.)
