The Odd Story of C.S. Lewis, an Extremely Odd Man

Mar 10, 2013 The Daily Beast

The author who understood so little about the emotional life still speaks eloquently to millions of us 50 years after his death, writes A.N. Wilson.

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C.S. Lewis at Magdalen College, Oxford, circa 1950. (John Chillingworth/Getty)

C.S. Lewis died on Nov. 22, 1963: the very day that John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Few people attended his funeral in Headington Quarry, just outside Oxford, partly because his brother, Major Warnie Lewis, had taken to his bed with a whiskey bottle when Lewis died and told no one of the burial arrangements. The figures around the grave included his estranged friend J.R.R. Tolkien, some members of their famous discussion-group called the Inklings, who had not convened for more than a decade, and his stepsons, themselves by then not the best of friends. Many considered that Lewis’s influence as a Christian apologist was on the wane. But, 50 years on, he is regarded in many circles, especially among American Christians, as “the Aquinas, the Augustine, and the Aesop of contemporary evangelicalism.” His Narnia books, now made into films, break box-office records. His fame is greater than it ever was.

There have been plenty of biographies of Lewis—I once wrote one myself—but I do not think there has been a better one than Alister McGrath’s. He is a punctilious and enthusiastic reader of all Lewis’s work—the children’s stories, the science fiction, the Christian apologetics, and the excellent literary criticism and literary history. He is from Northern Ireland, as Lewis was himself, and he is especially astute about drawing out the essentially Northern Irish qualities of this very odd man. And he is sympathetic to the real oddness of his story.

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