Surprised by Joy; the Shape of my Early Life by C.S. Lewis is his spiritual memoir of his journey to Christianity. I have been listening to a Great Courses lecture series on C.S. Lewis and was inspired to try to actually read Lewis again. I actually haven't read that much by him. When I was a child I read The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe but frankly it wasn't my favorite book! Later in life I tried to read The Screwtape Letters and couldn't get through it either. After I got married someone recommended Mere Christianity and again I only got half way. I really thought something was the matter with me because everyone else seemed to rave about him. I didn't understand why he didn't click with me. I don't know why but usually I connect better with Lewis if someone is doing the interpreting of Lewis for me. I can listen to lectures about him. I read a really interesting book by Joseph Pearce about C.S. Lewis and the Catholic Church. It wasn't until I read Til We Have Faces that I appreciated Lewis' genius. That book knocked me off my feet! Then I read The Great Divorce. Absolutely brilliant! I read his Reflections on Psalms and I felt like I was too stupid to really take in what he was saying - I read it in a group and it was wonderful listening to other people talk about Lewis' ideas. Again, I needed someone else to interpret. I read the Four Loves and frankly I was a little bit rankled by Lewis' take on things. I've been steeped in JPII's Theology of the Body for so long that Lewis' take struck me as a bit crude almost. I've since read a couple more Narnia books and frankly I think The Magician's Nephew and Prince Caspian are better than The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. The last Lewis book I read I also thought was absolutely brilliant - The Abolition of Man. So I am becoming more acclimated to him, but it is a hit or miss deal for me.
My reaction to Lewis is similar to my reaction to Augustine. I don't know if I'd actually like them in person. They seem to be almost cold in their intellectual capabilities. They are brilliant and they try very hard to connect with us unbrilliant types and sometimes they do so with great impact. But other times they seem to me priggish and almost sneering - even as they talk about trying not to be priggish. Lewis does this in Surprised by Joy.
I had not realized how many quotes from this book I have read over the course of my life. People love to quote Lewis. I'd be reading along learning new things about him and then suddenly there'd be a short or long passage that I"d recognize. Sometimes the quote would be something I had remembered slightly differently or the context in which it was quoted changed the meaning slightly. For instance, recently I read the passage that talks about Lewis' ideal work day. But the quote is really from when he was studying under a tutor, Kirk. It is an idealized memory of how he liked to study. But it was quoted in the context of how brilliant people organized their days. Well, when Kirk was his tutor, he was preparing for Oxford so he was a teenager studying full time. And even in the book, Lewis admits this was an idealized recounting of how he wished all his days would go.
Lewis is weirdly honest and yet elusive in the way he recounts his spiritual growth. He keeps referring to things as erotic in an oblique, almost stuffy way. After a while I thought, what the heck is he talking about? He details his academic life from the beginning - first his mother taught him at home in Latin and French (made me think of Tolkien, and also it occurred to me that women must have been encouraged to study languages back in the olden days. I remember in the book North and South, Margaret translates Dante's Inferno from Italian into English as a hobby! So it must have been one intellectual field that women were allowed to pursue). Then Lewis gets sent to school in England. It is a terrible place, pretty Dickensian. He is there for a couple years until the school closes due to lack of students. For one semester he goes to a day school nearby in Ireland, but then he gets transferred to another school in England. He gives it the fictional name Chartres and he really thrives there. But he isn't there for long. He gets admitted to a place he calls Wyvern; a 'college' which really means high school. He hates it there. He talks about the fagging system, where older boys cruelly treat the younger ones, including demanding sexual favors from them. The society is divided into Bloods (the ones who rule, usually because they are wealthy and athletic) and the Tarts, the younger ones who have to do what the Bloods say. Lewis says he was a big rather hulking boy so no one tried pederasty on him, but it went on all around him. He was very philosophical about it, saying that all the boys who were abusing the younger boys wound up dying in WWI so he can't stay angry at them. Later on he comments that he could never tolerate male physical acts of affection. Hmm. Wonder why? He really couldn't stand the fagging system and the emphasis on sports. He had no talent for athletics. Every minute of the day was either studying (under not inspiring teachers for the most part), being oppressed by the older boys or being forced to participate in sports. He just wanted to be left alone. He says that during that time he became so sleepy. All he wanted to do is sleep. He sounded depressed as all get out to me. His brother who had also gone to the same school had apparently really enjoyed it - maybe he was more of a sports person. Lewis had been very close to his brother so this was a sticking point. But I think what saved Lewis was he got sick and sent home. Then his father decided not to send him back to the school, but instead to have him go live with this remarkable tutor, Kirk.
Lewis' mother died when he was young. It was a great tragedy and to exacerbate the pain of abandonment, Lewis never got along with his father, even though he loved him. His father was a very difficult person that Lewis found it almost impossible to communicate with. Lewis and his older brother Warren were extremely close. They were alone together a lot and both had wonderful imaginations. They created an imaginary world. Lewis's was called Animal-land and Warren's was India. They combined them together into Boxen. It reminded me of the Bronte family and their make believe land of Glass town.
Lewis grew up in a largely non-practicing, nominally Christian home. He gradually lost any rudimentary faith he may have had. He was an intellectual who read ravenously and was very influenced by the Ancient myths, Wagner and philosophers of the time. Kirk, his great tutor was also an atheist. Lewis was accepted to Oxford but WWI which had been going on for quite a while now, always looming over Lewis' future, now became very real. Lewis was drafted and sent to France. He had good and horrible times there. He doesn't go into it much at all. But he was wounded in a blast that killed another man near him. He was sent away to recover and then the war finally ended. He was one of the lucky ones who had survived. He went back to Oxford where he made great friends with many influential people who eventually helped him convert to Christianity. He mentions Owen Barfield and Tolkien among many others. But really the whole journey to faith began as a child when he discovered 'joy' the otherworldly feeling that would come to him only occasionally and which he called 'aesthetic experience' when he was an atheist. He kept seeking that thrill only to discover in the end that it was a signpost to something greater. His conversion was a highly intellectual process. I couldn't always follow it!
Something that made the story even harder to follow was the really terrible edition I was reading. I bought this book on my Kindle for $7.91. There were so many typos in it that at times I simply couldn't figure out what a sentence was saying. It was so bad that I wrote a review at Amazon. Wow, it is really shockingly shoddy. I understand that formatting sometimes is off on Kindle editions so occasionally words will run together but this was misspelling after misspelling: fife for life or five for live; the word horkon for horizon, or vike for vile; chivakrous instead of chivalrous. Desire was rendered deske. So all the typos generally had something to do with 'l' and 'k'. It went on and on. Terrible, terrible, terrible. While I do think Surprised by Joy is a worthwhile read, don't read it on the Kindle edition!
Lastly, I kept wondering about the title Surprised by Joy. Wasn't Lewis' wife's named Joy? It was, and he wrote this book while either in love or married to her. I think he did that intentionally, even though he doesn't ever mention anything about it.
A very interesting book. I wish I was smarter and could appreciate him on a more immediate level. I will keep chugging along though in exploring his works. Lewis is definitely worth the effort.
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