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To write the biography of a man of genius as many-sided as C.S. Lewis is a daunting task, and it has not been undertaken lightly. His ideal biographer would have to be at once a Classical and English scholar, a theologian, a philosopher, an expert on fantasy, science fiction and children’s books – and no one but Lewis himself possessed all these qualifications in sufficient degree.

The two of us who have collaborated in the present volume fall far short of his learning, even in our own subjects: Walter Hooper is a theologian who has read English; Roger Lancelyn Green is an English scholar who has written fantasy and children’s books – both of us know and love the classical lands and have studied their literature; neither of us is a philosopher.

Why, then, are we undertaking this book? As early as May 1953 Lewis suggested to Roger Lancelyn Green that he should one day undertake his biography: when asked by his publisher Jocelyn Gibb of Geoffrey Bles Ltd to write a more formal autobiography than Surprised by Joy, Lewis replied: ‘Oh, no, but when I’m dead I suppose Roger will write my biography and Jock will publish it.’ And during the last six months of his life he was apologizing to Roger for giving Walter material which he might have thought was his special perquisite as chosen biographer.

Under these circumstances when we were approached by several of Lewis’s closest friends, including Jock Gibb, and supported by Warren Lewis, it seemed our duty, as it was our pleasure, to accept the honour, however frightening.

Our particular qualifications were fairly evenly balanced. Green had attended Lewis’s lectures, been his pupil for a B.Litt. course, and later became his friend at the time when the Narnian books were being written – a friendship that grew closer with time and with shared interests and experiences, culminating in the visit to Greece in 1960; he had also written the Bodley Head Monograph on Lewis which its subject had read in manuscript and approved, though usually averse to books about himself or other living authors.

Walter Hooper’s personal acquaintance with Lewis was shorter – fewer months indeed than Green’s years. He had already studied Lewis’s works preparatory to writing the critical volume which did not materialize, and since Lewis’s death had given much of his time to collecting and editing his miscellaneous and unpublished works, making collections of his letters or copies of them, and generally soaking himself in everything written by or about Lewis until he had become the leading authority on his life and works.

The material for any authorized biography of C.S. Lewis is immense, though singularly uneven. When the family home on the outskirts of Belfast was broken up after his father’s death in September 1929, Lewis found a gigantic mass of old letters, diaries and papers: his father seemed to have kept everything and destroyed nothing. He transported most of this to Oxford, and during the next few years his brother, Major Warren Lewis, selected and typed the larger portion, making a history of the family to the end of 1930. The ‘Lewis Papers’ takes up eleven volumes of single-spaced typing averaging 300 pages to a volume. When the typescript was completed all the original manuscripts were destroyed.

This colossal monument of paper contains many hundreds of letters from C.S. Lewis to his father, his brother, his close friend Arthur Greeves, and a few other family connections; it also includes diaries, sometimes kept with great minuteness, covering many years. After 1929 Lewis wrote no more diaries.

Thus the basic material for the first chapters of the present book was so vast that it took many months to read and sift – and many more to convert into a balanced narrative, and then cut and prune so as not to overweight this biography. Doubtless in time to come other books on C.S. Lewis will be written which will incorporate much of what we were forced to leave out: for we would like to stress that the present work is only a biography of C.S. Lewis; it was never intended to be the biography, a book which, if ever written, must still be well in the future when Lewis will have found his true level among writers and theologians.

Also, the material contained in the Lewis Papers covers the period about which Lewis had written most fully in Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life (1955) and many of the letters, with numerous extracts from the diaries, had been included by Warren Lewis in his volume of Letters of C.S. Lewis (1966), from neither of which did we wish to quote more than was necessary, or overlap except to present a rounded picture of our subject and the story of his life. The diaries and letters in the Lewis Papers, though of considerable interest, deal mainly with the simple, everyday facts of his life, and tell at great length of his adventures among books – of his vast reading and of his own early literary attempts – but surprisingly little of his inner life, his more personal experiences, or even of his spiritual pilgrimage: for almost all that we are likely to know of these we must turn to his published works, notably The Pilgrim’s Regress and Surprised by Joy.

After 1930 the material available consists mainly of letters, and recollections of Lewis’s many friends and acquaintances. Since he died at the relatively early age of sixty-four, most of these friends survived him and have supplied an almost embarrassing largesse of recollections. Indeed, only Arthur Greeves and Charles Williams, two of Lewis’s closest friends, were no longer available for consultation – and Greeves had preserved a remarkable series of letters from Lewis, mainly from the earlier part of his life, which has enriched the present volume considerably.

But Lewis had many other friends who by their age or position knew him far better than either of his present biographers could ever have done – and to these we, and our readers, owe a deep debt of gratitude. Foremost among these is Lewis’s brother, Major Warren Hamilton Lewis, who gave us full access to the Lewis Papers, many extracts from his own diary, and the benefit of his own personal recollections: and there can seldom have been two brothers so devoted to each other. It is a matter of the deepest grief and regret that Major Lewis died before this book was published, though he had read and approved all but the last chapter in manuscript.

Among the close friends of longest standing we would like in particular to thank Owen Barfield, Nevill Coghill, J.R.R. Tolkien, Colin Hardie, Gervase Mathew, Jocelyn Gibb, Lady Dunbar of Hempriggs, the late Austin and Kay Farrer, George Sayer, John Lawlor, Richard Ladborough, Adam Fox, Clifford Morris, and many less intimate acquaintances at University College and Magdalen College, Oxford, at Magdalene College, Cambridge, together with all those numerous correspondents who have placed their treasured letters from Lewis at our disposal, and have told us of their contacts with him as friends, colleagues, pupils or pen-friends. Among these we would particularly like to thank Cyril Hartmann, Laurence Whistler, Sir Donald Hardman, Miss Kaye Webb, Miss Pauline Baynes, John Wain, Derek Brewer, Arthur C. Clarke, Chad Walsh, Warfield M. Firor, and Charles Gilmore. Also the Literary Executors of the late Charles Williams, Dorothy Sayers, T.S. Eliot, E.R. Eddison.

Many books and articles have already appeared about C.S. Lewis as writer or religious teacher, and many more will doubtless be written. We have not attempted in this book either to criticize Lewis’s works or to assess his place in literature. Accepting that there are very many readers both young and old who consider that place to be high, and who take a natural interest in the man himself, we have sought to tell his story as best we could, to lay before them as clear a picture as we could capture of his everyday life, of his friendships and interests, and of how he came to write the books which are still claiming a wide and appreciative public in many parts of the world and particularly in Great Britain, the British Commonwealth and the United States.

Works of scholarship are superseded sooner or later, though some of Lewis’s critical and appreciative writings are likely to survive and be read with enjoyment for many years to come; new generations demand fresh approaches to the Word of God, though Mere Christianity and The Screwtape Letters do not seem likely to lose any of the vitality and directness of their message. As tastes in literature come and go, fade and return, the Ransom trilogy and Till We Have Faces will probably fall out of fashion, be condemned by critics and readers of a different tradition and may well be rediscovered and reinstated, perhaps even higher than anyone expects, in some future shake-up of the kaleidoscope of literature. At present the seven Chronicles of Narnia, that unexpected creation of his middle age, which are selling over a million copies a year, seem to be Lewis’s greatest claim to immortality, setting him high in that particular branch of literature in which few attain more than a transitory or an esoteric fame – somewhere on the same shelf as Lewis Carroll and E. Nesbit and George MacDonald, as Kipling and Kenneth Grahame and Andrew Lang: a branch of literature in which there are relatively few great classics but in which, as he himself said, ‘the good ones last’.

And so we offer our humble tribute to a great man, an important and interesting writer, an inspiring teacher – and above all such a friend as we are not likely to find again.

ROGER LANCELYN GREEN

WALTER HOOPER