My metaphorical Advent calendar opened today and dispensed paying translating work. This is excellent. I’ve been idle for a couple months, and I can use the income. An interesting project, too.
So, little time for reading and no book to review today. Of what shall I write?
I watched the Most Reluctant Convert movie, as I said. Then I watched it again. And last night I thought, “Might as well watch Shadowlands too, and close the circuit.” And when I say Shadowlands, I mean, of course, the original 1985 BBC production with Joss Ackland and Claire Bloom. The 1993 version, with Anthony Hopkins and Debra Winger, isn’t even on my radar. I watched it once and was unimpressed (except by Winger, who is much closer to the real Joy Davidman than the refined Claire Bloom. But otherwise the 1985 version is more authentic and more concerned with the characters’ Christian faith. My impression of the 1993 movie is that it portrays Lewis as an immature man rescued by True Love. And his Christianity is regarded as one of his immature traits).
Anyway, you get a pretty good overview of Lewis’ life by watching the two movies in sequence. The Most Reluctant Convert offers a fairly authentic (though necessarily incomplete) picture of Lewis’ life up to his conversion. Shadowlands (if you watch the right version) gives a broadly decent impression of what happened in his later years, when he got married and suffered bereavement and a crisis of faith.
Of course, it’s an incomplete picture, as any cinematic portrayals must be. The Most Reluctant Convert leaves out much of the story, notably Lewis’ unhappy time in English public schools (what we’d call private academies in this country). And the book it’s based on, Surprised by Joy, omits much in the first place. In particular, Lewis’ domestic life with Mrs. Moore, the mother of a friend killed in the Great War, whom Lewis cared for in fulfillment of a promise to that friend. He wouldn’t have liked that story re-told; it began in infatuation in his atheist days and was transformed into voluntary servanthood after his conversion.
Shadowlands is a moving story, but heavily tailored to its dramatic form. Jack’s and Joy’s marriage actually lasted four years – her sons were nearly grown and away at school when she died. The affecting scene at the end where Jack and the boy Douglas Gresham grieve together never happened – sadly.
Most of all I was wondering what Jack himself would have thought about all this bother. And I thought I’d ponder that tonight in this post, to see if I could figure out what I think. I’m pretty sure Jack would have been mortified by the whole business. Aside from his personal modesty, there’s the fact that he deplored any examination of a writer’s life in order to interpret his work. The work, he frequently insisted, must stand on its own. It’s not for the critic to poke around in the author’s history and personality, hunting for repressions and obsessions.
Although I’m pretty sure he didn’t object to Boswell’s Life of Johnson. Because that’s a work of literature in its own right.
However, the two films I’m discussing are works of art in their own rights too. So does that make it OK?
Well, we have to deal with things as they are, I suppose. Whether he liked it or not, Jack Lewis was an interesting man. And people who love his books frequently want to know more about the man who wrote them.
This interest, surprisingly, even generally survives their first exposure to a picture of Lewis, something he himself described as a “most undecorative object.”
Maybe – and I’m very likely projecting here – it’s the fact that people experience Lewis’ writings as letters from a friend. We’d very much like to have a friend like that. Friendship is an experience that’s fallen on hard times in our evil world. Lewis had a splendid gift for friendship, as we know from his life story.
I know what he’d say to that, though – “Do you live on a deserted island? Is there no church in your community? You might be surprised what qualities lie concealed in the people in the next pew.”
