Selected Literary Essays, part I

In 2002, I had the great privilege of attending and presenting at the two-week C. S. Lewis Summer Institute in Oxford and Cambridge, England. I could talk to you for two weeks about the experiences I had. I could mention meeting Barbara Reynolds – Dorothy L. Sayers’s secretary – for the first time, when she walked up to me without knowing me, put her hand on my chest, and asked, “Have thought about what your legacy should be?” I could tell you about the more-than-disappointing showing at my session, in which all three people present simply sat at a table, and I read to the session chair and the other presenter, after which the other presenter read to the chair and me.

But for today’s purposes, I just want to say a bit about two dramatic presentations by the marvelous David Payne. One evening we enjoyed Mr. Payne performing his one-man C. S. Lewis show in a two-act play written by himself called “An Evening with C. S. Lewis.” The stage was set with two chairs and a little table. Lewis said hello to us and welcomed us all in to his sitting room at The Kilns and apologized that his brother Warnie had just stepped out to the pub to buy some beer to bring home. (Warnie never got back.) For about forty-five minutes, Lewis told us various details of his life, concentrating on his conversion to Christianity. After an intermission, he came back, apologized about Warnie taking so long, and proceeded to tell us the story of Joy Davidman, whom he married while she was in a hospital battling cancer. For some reason, I had trouble seeing Lewis clearly starting about halfway through this second act; his face wouldn’t hold still but seemed to wave as if I were seeing him through water. Must have been the humidity. I’ve said somewhat recently on a post here that there was a time in my life when I considered Lewis my only friend. After the show, I went up to Mr. Payne and thanked him for letting me spend an evening with my friend.

On another occasion, Mr. Payne went to the pulpit in St. Mary’s Church, Oxford, to deliver the inaugural address that Lewis delivered upon starting his second job, as Professor of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge. The speech, entitled “De descriptione temporum,” or “On the Description of the Times,” spent a bit exploring the sense in which the Middle Ages and the Renaissance indeed go together without a great dividing point between them and then proceeded to look for actually dividing points in western history. Lewis posited that the greatest historical division lay not between Roman civilization and barbarism, not between a medieval “Age of Faith” and a modern “Age of Science” or “Age of Reason,” but somewhere between Jane Austen and the time of the speech, 1954. The division, he says, lay between a culture of belief and a culture of disbelief. His argument was so startling and yet so clear, there was one moment when several people in the audience (congregation?) audibly gasped, not, as people usually gasp, in reaction to the scandalous, but in shock as the scales fell from our eyes.

When I got home I immediately went to the library and checked out a collection called Selected Literary Essays, which begins with “De descriptione temporum” and includes several other of Lewis’s professional essays, none of which, I believe, are included in the collections of essays put out by Christian publishing houses (God in the Dock, Christian Reflections, etc.). I was excited to dive into this part of my friend’s life, but found that, since I didn’t know enough of the literature he wrote about, I couldn’t understand much. So I read the essays on Austen and Shakespeare and returned the book.

Last month, twenty-three years later, I read the whole volume. I’m pleased to report that I’ve read quite a bit more and as a result understood quite a bit more of the book this time – not everything by all means, but more. As this introduction has taken up enough space, I’ll call it “part I” and go into more details on the book in the next post.