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Alan Jacobs is professor of English and director of the Faith and Learning Program at Wheaton College in Illinois. He is the author of several collections of essays.
The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C.S. Lewis, Alan Jacobs, Harper, 2005.
Some quotations from
the book:
About his boarding school, which he started when he was about 10 after his mother died. “The school that Albert Lewis, after careful study and deep reflection, chose for his sons was run quite autocratically by a man who had already been prosecuted for cruelty to his students and who, within a very few years, would be certified as insane.” p. 23.
About his military service in World War I. “Jack was hit by three pieces of shrapnel—one in the hand, one in the upper leg, and one under the arm that broke a rib and entered his left lung—but he was able to crawl out of danger. He was soon found by stretcher-bearers and quickly taken to a mobile army hospital in Etaples. … There is a cemetery in Etaples, Le Memorial Britannique, where 11,000 British soldiers from the Great War are buried. Jack Lewis would not be one of them; after three and a half months at the front, he was out of the war for good.” p. 71-72.
About his life as a university student. “That Jack was able to make friends at all seems rather remarkable in light of his shadowy presence at Univ. When Ronald Pasley sought to introduce Leo Baker to Jack, he told Baker that this Lewis was ‘a strange fellow who seemed to live an almost secret life and took no part in the social life of the college.’ In a very short time Jack had become the object of joking attention from other Univ. men: “He has never been noticed coming into college and going out.’ ” p. 92.
About getting his first position. “In April 1925 Lewis wrote to his father, ‘A Fellowship in English is announced at Magdalen [Oxford] and of course I am applying for it, but without any serious hopes as I believe much senior people including my own old English tutor are in for it’ … On the twentieth of May, in Belfast, Albert Lewis received a telegram that said, simply, “ELECTED FELLOW MAGDALEN, JACK.’ In his diary Albert records what he did then: ‘I went up to his room and burst into tears of joy. I knelt down and thanked God with a full heart. My prayers had been heard and answered.’ ” p. 116.
Example of a helpful footnote. “The name is pronounced ‘Maudlin’; it is named after Mary Magdalene, from whom Jesus cast out seven demons and who then followed him up to and after his crucifixion.” p. 117.
About the ten years or so prior to 1935, when he was 37, in a letter to a one-time friend. “My father is dead and my brother has retired from the army and now lives with us. I have deep regrets about all my relations with my father (but thank God they were best at the end). I am going bald. I am a Christian. Professionally I am chiefly a medievalist. I think that is all my news up to date.” p. 111.
From the famous account of his conversion. “You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him Whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I had greatly feared had come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.” p. 129.
About his writing. “This burst of fluency had therefore to be completely unexpected to Lewis—unexpected, but also gratifying, for he learned, in that fortnight with Arthur, that he could write vivid prose and write it quickly. with minimal revision. And so he would write prose for the rest of his life: with a nib pen flowing across page after page of paper with few pauses—except to dip the pen in the inkwell—and still fewer corrections or crossings out. (He never learned to type.)” p. 156.
“Alan Jacobs is an ideal biographer for Lewis. Like his subject, he is a lay Christian whose nonprofessional theology is nonetheless deeply informed.
He is, moreover, a discerning literary critic. … Even nonbelievers may find themselves drawn to this deft portrait of a man whose ineffable longing for grace speaks to the experience of us all.”
–The Wall Street Journal.
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