The Spiritual Odyssey of an Oxford Don

As C. S. Lewis puts it in his preface. "How far the story matters to anyone but myself depends upon the degree to which others have experienced what I call 'joy'." While his spiritual autobiography, Surprised by Joy, is not confined to religious experience (Lewis is also adept with educational and litearary experiences), its value is still dependent upon some community of past history and sensation. Few modern American readers will find this bond.

For those who do, the book will perhaps rank with the best of Lewis. An acute and complex mind analyzes an early family history, a despicable educational system, a precocious not to say avaricious literary experience, and the spiritual roots of England in the twenties, with wit, insight, and dignity.

But for an American who has known neither the alienation of a broken English middle-class family, nor the indignity of the tyrannical master, much less the search for philosophical stability which came in an age so recently disillusioned, the story is seldom real. Wander through it with an admiration for the man's mind, a sense of having done little where he has done much, but you will not in all probability find any rapport. While the story is not typical of those born at the turn of the century, (as he suggests, he "has always been a converted Pagan living among apostate puritans,") it has certainly many familiar threads for men of his temper and background. But for me, it is only a strange alien tale.

The religious experience, for example, begins in the childhood sensation he calls 'joy'. This, he says, "has only one characteristic in common with happiness and pleasure; the fact that anyone who has experienced it will want it again." He does not expect, however, to recreate joy for the reader. He has spent much time trying to induce it in himself, and did not discover for many years that joy could only be experienced, not contemplated.

Although he cannot convey what he means, the full incomprehensibility is not seen until he suggests lines which aroused the experience.

I heard a voice that cried

Balder the beautiful

Is dead, is dead--

There is, simply, something which he cannot explain, something he sees in his affinity with the Romantics, which is for most readers inoperative. Even admitting that his voracious appetite for literary experience gives words a peculiar power, and that his "humdrum, prosaic happiness" of childhood makes the image of frozen nordic mythology powerful, even then I must doubt that many have experienced this thing which is at once unhappiness, grief and joy, for which he "would not exchange all the world's pleasures."

And so, the biography is alien. It can for most readers prove only an interesting, not a moving account, because at heart, conversion is unsharable, and Lewis too much respects both his own and others' privacy to recreate what in himself would be accessible to most readers. His use of false names and his resentment above all else of what he calls intrusion are appealing, but they do not make compelling autobiography.

As a spiritual account, this history is nowhere nearly so effective as much of his other work. Instead of the penetrating commentary on contemporary atheism as an excuse for sloth, vice, and weakness which he gives with urbane wit in The Screwtape Letters, we find a revolution of 'vices' in himself. This is of course natural; he points out that he has never attacked the two vices which never tempted him--homosexuality and gambling. But many readers will find what he now regards as vices not at all wicked, for Lewis before conversion is much like the world today.

Indeed, the most amazing thing about the book is how completely it fails to sell the position, especially when compared with the power of Beyond Personality, or Mere Christianity. His life becomes, as he says, a kind of chess match with deity, which of course loses, checkmated into Christianity, dragged by the internal logic of all he as ever done, into the fold. Whether it is freedom or necessity does not matter, but that it makes his position entirely individual becomes clear. The reader emerges with the feeling that "for that kind of man, conversion was a necessity, but his story has no bearing on my spiritual position; it is idiosyncratic."

And that is, as he warns at the very beginning, the failing of the book. It is of no value or meaning to most readers, it is rather the turning of an acute mind on a particular unique set of circumstances. Unless you share the circumstances, it is only an idle curiosity.