Wandering the Worlds of C.S. Lewis, Part I: Boxen
C.S. Lewis loved walking, and in one letter to his friend Arthur Greaves he wrote of a fifty-mile three-day expedition he undertook alongside other friends: walking by day through woods and river valleys, at evenings stopping at local houses where the company might discuss the nature of the Good. Bearing this image in mind I’ve decided to begin wandering through the terrain of Lewis’ fiction. It is well-trodden ground, as many others have done this before me. But there’s a certain charm in seeing things for oneself. It is also just possible that another pair of eyes may spot something new in even the most familiar landscape, if the terrain is varied enough. And Lewis’ writing, as a whole, stands out as heterogeneous indeed.
I have read some, though far from all, of Lewis’ non-fiction; I intend to talk about it only insofar as I see a bearing on his fiction. I’m interested in seeing what images, tones, ideas, and approaches unite a fairly disparate corpus of writing. I want to see how Lewis’ approach to storytelling developed over his life, and how motifs and themes recurred in his work. I hope that by doing this I’ll better understand his individual books. At any rate, I’ll begin here with a look at Lewis’ published juvenilia. Tomorrow I’ll have a look at his early collection of poetry, Spirits in Bondage, then the day after that his long poem Dymer. Next Sunday I’ll move on to his first long prose work, The Pilgrim’s Regress, and see what sort of schedule I can manage from there until I reach Lewis’ last novel, Till We Have Faces.
Note that these posts will be merely my own impression of Lewis’ work, rather than, say, an attempt to read Lewis by his own lights. So while Lewis believed that a writer’s biographical details were by and large irrelevant to their literary accomplishments, I’m a little more interested in how the story of a writer’s life maps onto the stories they choose to tell. Some chronological landmarks therefore follow by which to survey Lewis’ early writings.
