C. S. Lewis: A Biography. Walter Hooper
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Название: C. S. Lewis: A Biography

Автор: Walter Hooper

Издательство: HarperCollins

Жанр: Биографии и Мемуары

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isbn: 9780007404476

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СКАЧАТЬ 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      Works of scholarship are superseded sooner or later, though some of Lewis’s critical and appreciative writings are likely to survive and be read with enjoyment for many years to come; new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

       ABBREVIATIONS

      AMR = All My Road Before Me: The Diary of C.S. Lewis 1922–1927, ed. Walter Hooper (1991)

      BF = Brothers and Friends: The Diaries of Major Warren Hamilton Lewis, ed. Clyde S. Kilby and Marjorie Lamp Mead (1982)

      CG = Walter Hooper, C.S. Lewis: A Companion and Guide (1996)

      FL = Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis: Volume I, Family Letters 1905–1931, ed. Walter Hooper (2000)

      LP = unpublished ‘Lewis Papers’ or ‘Memoirs of the Lewis Family: 1850–1930’ in 11 volumes

      ‘Memoir’ = Memoir by W.H. Lewis contained in Letters of C.S. Lewis, ed. with a Memoir by W.H. Lewis (1966), and reprinted in Letters of C.S. Lewis, ed. with a Memoir by W.H. Lewis, revised and enlarged edition, ed. Walter Hooper (1988)

      SBJ = C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life (1955)

      TST = They Stand Together: The Letters of C.S. Lewis to Arthur Greeves (1914–1963), ed. Walter Hooper (1979)

       PROLOGUE ANCESTRY

      ‘Live in Hope and die in Caergwrle’ says the pun still current in these two North Wales villages between Hawarden and Wrexham in Flintshire. C.S. Lewis’s great-great-grandfather, Richard Lewis (c. 1775–1845), fulfilled at least the second part of this dictum, though he was probably also born in Caergwrle and was certainly a farmer there for most of his life. He had one daughter and six sons, the fourth of whom, Joseph (1803?–1890) – a farmer like his father – moved some miles north-east and settled at Saltney, then still a little village just south of Chester.

      The family were members of the Church of England until Joseph, thinking he was not being given the prominence that was his due in the parish, seceded and became a Methodist minister. Farming must have been merely the necessary means of supplementing the scanty tribute of his congregation, for it is as a Methodist minister that he is remembered, and in this capacity he enjoyed a considerable local reputation. Though the handwriting and letters of Joseph Lewis are not those of an educated man, it is recorded that he was an impressive speaker of an emotional type.

      Of Joseph’s eight children, it is his fourth son, Richard (1832–1908), who first emigrated to Ireland, where he found work in the Cork Steamship Company as a master boiler maker. Richard was one of the working-class intelligentsia in the fore of that artisan renaissance of which the chief symptoms in the 1860s were the birth of the Trades Union and Co-operative movements. In his concern for the elevation of the working classes, he set about improving his education, and writing essays for the edification of fellow members of the Workmen’s Reading Room in the Steamship Company. Most of his essays were theological and are remarkably eloquent for a man who had had so little education. Though he had returned to the Anglican Church, his essays were sufficiently evangelical to satisfy his Methodist father.

      In 1853 Richard married Martha Gee (1831–1903) of Liverpool. Their six children, Martha (1854–1860), Sarah Jane (1856?–1901), Joseph (1856–1908), William (1859–1946), Richard (b. 1861), and Albert James, were all born in Cork. Albert (1863–1929), the father of C.S. Lewis, was born on 23 August 1863, and in 1864 his father proceeded to Dublin to take up a better job. His new position was something like an ‘outside manager’ in the shipbuilding firm of Messrs Walpole, Webb and Bewly.

      In 1868 Richard moved with his family to Belfast where he and John H. MacIlwaine entered into partnership, trading under the name of MacIlwaine and Lewis: Boiler Makers, Engineers, and Iron Ship Builders. The business was a success, for a time anyway, and in 1870 the Lewises moved from the area of Mount Pottinger to the more fashionable one of Lower Sydenham.

      Whether it was because of his early precocity or because of the rising fortunes of the family, his father was induced to give Albert a more elaborate education than had been bestowed on his three brothers. After leaving the District Model National School he went in 1877, when he was fourteen, to Lurgan College in Co. Armagh. This was a fortunate choice and was to have far-reaching effects, for the headmaster of Lurgan College at this time was W.T. Kirkpatrick – the ‘Great Knock’ who was to play an important part in C.S. Lewis’s life, and of whom we shall hear more in the course of this narrative. Kirkpatrick was thirty-one at the time and a brilliant teacher. He seems to have taken Albert under his wing, and, once it was decided that the boy would pursue a legal career, he set about preparing him for it.

      The following year Albert qualified СКАЧАТЬ