C.S. Lewis’ appeal has always escaped me.
He is too donnish, too much of a weirdo, to be the best advertisement for Christianity.
It’s the same with Chesterton. Can we PLEASE have a few folks who aren’t fat and filthy? Please?
Normally I’m a defender of dead white males, but in their case, haven’t they truly outlived their usefulness?
And I just don’t want to read about the measly, crabbed life of the protagonist in The Screwtape Letters; what an awful, shabby place his England sounds like.
Darling I love you but give me The Fountainhead…
Lewis was personally shabby and unkempt, and he let his house get into an unhealthily filthy state. He refused to learn to type or drive a car. He smoked and drank heavily: Tolkien was amused to hear a reference to “the ascetic Mr Lewis” on a day when he had seen him down three pints of beer at lunchtime.
McGrath quotes Lewis’s confession of sadomasochistic tendencies, recording that at a drunken undergraduate dinner in 1917 he went round the guests imploring each to let him “whip them for the sum of 1s a lash”. The ménage at The Kilns was bizarre, and its true nature was concealed from relatives and friends. There was, according to McGrath, a sexual as well as a maternal element in Mrs Moore’s relations with Lewis, while brother Warnie repeatedly disappeared on alcoholic binges from which he was dried out by Irish nuns.
After Mrs Moore’s death, quarrels between her daughter and Lewis’s wife about the ownership of The Kilns support the view held by many of Lewis’s friends that Joy Davidman was a mercenary gold-digger.
