{"id":17600,"date":"2022-12-07T20:13:04","date_gmt":"2022-12-08T01:13:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/?p=17600"},"modified":"2022-12-07T20:13:04","modified_gmt":"2022-12-08T01:13:04","slug":"jack-and-his-privacy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/?p=17600","title":{"rendered":"Jack and his privacy"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"\/
Joss Ackland and Claire Bloom in the 1985 “Shadowlands”<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

My metaphorical Advent calendar <\/strong>opened today and dispensed paying translating work. This is excellent. I\u2019ve been idle for a couple months, and I can use the income. An interesting project, too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, little time for reading and no book to review today. Of what shall I write?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I watched the Most Reluctant Convert<\/a><\/em> movie, as I said. Then I watched it again. And last night I thought, \u201cMight as well watch Shadowlands <\/em>too, and close the circuit.\u201d And when I say Shadowlands<\/em>, I mean, of course, the original 1985 BBC production <\/a>with Joss Ackland and Claire Bloom. The 1993 version, with Anthony Hopkins and Debra Winger, isn\u2019t 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\u2019 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).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Anyway, you get a pretty good overview of Lewis\u2019 life by watching the two movies in sequence. The Most Reluctant Convert<\/em> offers a fairly authentic (though necessarily incomplete) picture of Lewis\u2019 life up to his conversion. Shadowlands <\/em>(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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Of course, it\u2019s an incomplete picture, as any cinematic portrayals must be. The Most Reluctant Convert<\/em> leaves out much of the story, notably Lewis\u2019 unhappy time in English public schools (what we\u2019d call private academies in this country). And the book it\u2019s based on, Surprised by Joy<\/a><\/em>, omits much in the first place. In particular, Lewis\u2019 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\u2019t have liked that story re-told; it began in infatuation in his atheist days and was transformed into voluntary servanthood after his conversion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Shadowlands <\/em>is a moving story, but heavily tailored to its dramatic form. Jack\u2019s and Joy\u2019s marriage actually lasted four years \u2013 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 \u2013 sadly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Most of all I was wondering what Jack himself would have thought about all this bother. And I thought I\u2019d ponder that tonight in this post, to see if I could figure out what I think. I\u2019m pretty sure Jack would have been mortified by the whole business. Aside from his personal modesty, there\u2019s the fact that he deplored any examination of a writer\u2019s life in order to interpret his work. The work, he frequently insisted, must stand on its own. It\u2019s not for the critic to poke around in the author\u2019s history and personality, hunting for repressions and obsessions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Although I\u2019m pretty sure he didn\u2019t object to Boswell\u2019s Life of Johnson<\/a><\/em>. Because that\u2019s a work of literature in its own right.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, the two films I\u2019m discussing are works of art in their own rights too. So does that make it OK?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This interest, surprisingly, even generally survives their first exposure to a picture of Lewis, something he himself described as a \u201cmost undecorative object.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"\/<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Maybe \u2013 and I\u2019m very likely projecting here \u2013 it\u2019s the fact that people experience Lewis\u2019 writings as letters from a friend. We\u2019d very much like to have a friend like that. Friendship is an experience that\u2019s fallen on hard times in our evil world. Lewis had a splendid gift for friendship, as we know from his life story.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I know what he\u2019d say to that, though \u2013 \u201cDo 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.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My metaphorical Advent calendar opened today and dispensed paying translating work. This is excellent. I\u2019ve 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 … Continue reading Jack and his privacy<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2,13,14],"tags":[432,2553,3821,3840],"class_list":["post-17600","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-authors","category-reading","category-religion","tag-c-s-lewis","tag-shadowlands","tag-surprised-by-joy","tag-the-most-reluctant-convert"],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17600","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17600"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17600\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17601,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17600\/revisions\/17601"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17600"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17600"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17600"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}