REVIEW: Surprised by Joy, by C.S. Lewis

Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life, C. S. Lewis (1955; HarperOne, 2017).

Mine is a mixed marriage: I love C. S. Lewis and my husband much prefers G. K. Chesterton.

This probably won’t surprise anyone who reads our Substack, because it’s very clear where the two of us fall on the autistic-to-schizotypal spectrum,¹ and if you’re familiar with those great twentieth century Christian apologists you’ll know that Chesterton is the one way down at the “painting with a broad brush of metaphor and joie de vivre and enthusiastic, impressionistic riffs” end of things.² I am at the other end. I do like Chesterton — I wrote about him a bit here, and I’m very fond of his poetry — but he’s not the one who (as the Quakers say) speaks to my condition. I like my nice neat arguments. I do not have the soul of a poet or a Gothic cathedral. Lewis is also a wonderful stylist, but his writing is clearer, more pointed — something neoclassical, perhaps, if we’re to continue this architectural metaphor. And of course Lewis and Chesterton are not opposites in any meaningful way: Lewis read and greatly enjoyed Chesterton’s work, a fact that whoever does the marketing for Chesterton’s books today makes a big deal about. But the two of them do tend to suit different tastes.

Anyway, as you may also have guessed from this Substack, we have one invariable practice when we like something: we buy a book about it. So obviously we own a copy of Chesterton’s autobiography, and one day my husband picked it up and read me the opening sentence:

Bowing down in blind credulity, as is my custom, before mere authority and the tradition of the elders, superstitiously swallowing a story I could not test at the time by experiment of private judgment, I am firmly of the opinion that I was born on the 29th of May, 1874, on Campden Hill, Kensington…

Which is 1) very funny, 2) very Chesterton, and 3) exactly the reminder I needed that I’d never actually read Lewis’s autobiography. It seemed like just the ticket for sleepy early mornings with a baby when I couldn’t brain well enough for anything complicated. But that’s not quite what I got.

First off, it’s not really a proper autobiography at all. For one thing, it stops a decade before Lewis did any of things that made him famous. (Today he’s best known for Narnia, published through first half of the 1950s, but before that runaway commercial success he had already given a popular series of radio lectures on Christianity and written several books on the topic.) And for another, it narrows: it begins like any biography, with an overview of a quiet childhood in the suburbs of Belfast, then focuses more and more closely on the actual topic of interest: how Lewis became a Christian. As he puts it:

In the earlier chapters the net has to be spread pretty wide in order that, when the explicitly spiritual crisis arrives, the reader may understand what sort of person my childhood and adolescence had made me. When the ‘build-up’ is complete, I confine myself strictly to business and omit everything (however important by ordinary biographical standards) which seems, at that stage, irrelevant. I do not think there is much loss; I never read an autobiography in which the parts devoted to the earlier years were not far the most interesting.

The early years are a delight, at least to read about — they don’t sound very pleasant to have lived. Lewis’s mother died when he was young, leaving him and his brother with a lonely father who loved them but never quite seemed to listen, a suffocating combination of closeness and no connection. His schools were dreadful. Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, the real gem of his childhood is the time Lewis spent reading, writing, and imagining. He was fond of the “dressed animals” of Beatrix Potter and John Tenniel, and of “knights in armour,” so he wrote chivalric tales of heroic mice and rabbits who rode mail-clad into battle against ferocious cats. (You can see the origins of Reepicheep, or possibly Redwall avant la lettre.)

And of course he wanted to be able to play with his brother, three years older and with his own fascinations: largely India, steamships, and train timetables. (Dudes, as they say, rock.) Thus “Animal-Land” had to be brought into the present day, with maps and a written history that touched lightly on the earlier stories as questionably historical “legends,” India became an island with the Himalayas forming its north coast, and many more steamship routes had to be devised. India and Animal-Land would officially merge in the late eighteenth century — “their eighteenth century, not ours,” Lewis helpfully clarifies — to form the land of Boxen, about which he gives a few delightful paragraphs.³ This story of gentle co-creation — each child’s particular obsessions clearly visible in the joint venture, but adjusted to accommodate his brother’s — reminded me so powerfully of my own children’s imaginary games that I was immediately smitten. (This is also the advantage of conversation or debate over essays, or role-playing games over novels — it’s only the fallen nature of adults that demands rules and dice.)

But despite these moments of peace, it was not a happy childhood. The grown-up Lewis is tremendously generous both to his younger self and to those who made his life difficult — primarily his father, whose “theory that we were three boys together actually meant that while he was at home we were as closely bound to his presence as if the three of us had been chained together,” but also his schoolfellows. Thus at the end of a harrowing description of the better of his two boarding schools, where the rampant pederasty was mostly consensual and the older boys usually didn’t take advantage of their privilege to run the younger ones ragged with menial labor or beat them bloody as a means to extort sexual favors from the barely-pubescent, he drops this:

Peace to them all. A worse fate awaited them than the most vindictive fag among us could have wished. Ypres and the Somme ate up most of them. They were happy while their good days lasted.

😶

The most important part of Lewis’s early years is the discovery and pursuit of what he calls “Joy.” Frankly I think it’s a bad word for what he’s describing, which is something much more like longing: a sudden, intense desire that arises out of nowhere, fills the heart and mind, and then disappears just as quickly, leaving behind only a desperate wish to feel that desire once more. He likens it to Milton’s “enormous bliss” (enormous here meaning out of the ordinary rather than large), an almost sickeningly intense desire for something spacious, severe, and remote, a pang of inconsolable yearning, a heart both broken and exalted. As a child he glimpsed it in Squirrel Nutkin and Longfellow’s poetry, and years later re-encountered the sensation in Rackham’s Siegfried and the Twilight of the Gods:

Pure “Northernness” engulfed me: a vision of huge, clear spaces hanging above the Atlantic in the endless twilight of Northern summer, remoteness, severity…and almost at the same moment I knew that I had met this before, long, long ago (it hardly seems longer now) in Tegner’s Drapa, that Siegfried (whatever it might be) belonged to the same world as Balder and the sunward-sailing cranes. And with that plunge back into my own past there arose at once, almost like heartbreak, the memory of Joy itself, the knowledge that I had once had what I had now lacked for years, that I was returning at last from exile and desert lands to my own country; and the distance of the Twilight of the Gods and the distance of my own past Joy, both unattainable, flowed together into a single, unendurable sense of desire and loss, which suddenly became one with the loss of the whole experience, which, as I now stared round that dusty schoolroom like a man recovering from unconsciousness, had already vanished, had eluded me at the very moment when I could first say It is. And at once I knew (with fatal knowledge) that to “have it again” was the supreme and only important object of desire.

What follows, threaded amidst the more typically memoirish stories of school and books and friendship and war, is the hunt for Joy. For a time Lewis catches glimpses of it in the “Northernness,” but soon enough his fascination becomes a merely academic enjoyment of the Sagas and Eddas: as he puts it, “I woke from building the temple to find that the God had flown.” Undeterred, he keeps looking, obsessively surveilling his own subjective experience with every walk, every poem, every piece of music — is this Joy now? Quick, grab it! But of course it was only in self-forgetting that he tasted Joy at all; standing anxious sentinel over himself is precisely the thing best calibrated to prevent Joy entirely. (Have you ever woken yourself up by realizing that you’re almost asleep?) Years later, Lewis will realize that however much he wants Joy, it’s not the sort of thing you can get — it’s a byproduct:

Its very existence presupposes that you desire not it but something other and outer. If by any perverse askesis or the use of any drug it could be produced from within, it would at once be seen to be of no value. For take away the object, and what, after all, would be left?—a whirl of images, a fluttering sensation in the diaphragm, a momentary abstraction. And who could want that?

As the book progresses, it focuses more and more tightly on the young Lewis’s inner life. I think this is rather a shame: I would have quite enjoyed the book he didn’t write, the one that didn’t progress so quickly towards its singular vanishing point on the horizon. But even this portrait of half-a-life shows a recognizable kind of guy — brainy, cynical, intellectually committed to rationalist materialism but intensely romantic at heart. Everything he thinks is true is lame and boring; everything that actually moves him, he considers in some sense fake. His fate, as he puts it, is “to care for almost nothing but the gods and heroes, the garden of the Hesperides, Launcelot and the Grail, and to believe in nothing but atoms and evolution and military service.”

The world is full of guys like this. (Okay, that’s not actually true, but the parts of the world I frequent are, and isn’t that what really matters?) Ideally we call them “freshmen,” and by the time they’ve really grown up they’ve also grown out of it, but that’s a complicated process and it can take a long time. There’s really only one way to grow out of the sorts of insane intellectual edifices guys like this construct: you have to change your mind. And I don’t mean the sort of boring, normal, everyday adjustments we make on the fly when we accumulate new data — this is a fundamental shift, an abandonment of an entire way of thinking. It’s not “oh, there’s a traffic jam up ahead, I’ll take side roads,” it’s an entirely different destination.

How does it happen? Typically, when you realize that what you think you think contradicts something you really think. If you’re this kind of guy, you like to build an elaborate, internally consistent structure, adding ever more pieces that must be true given what’s already there — if it’s all a meaningless dance of atoms, then… — and then one day you realize the whole sparking crystalline edifice you’ve made, which fits together perfectly, can’t actually stand up on the firm ground of something you hold dear. And then you have two choices: you can knock it all down because you are more sure of (say) Launcelot and the Grail, or you can bite the bullet and throw out Launcelot instead.

Does this look like a place you want to live?

But biting the bullet is easier said than done. Lewis tries it for a while as an undergraduate — “no more Avalon, no more Hesperides” — but in the end he fails. Most people do. The Ur-example here is of course David Hume, who indulges in hundreds of pages of the most radical skepticism about causality and knowledge, then goes out of his study to play backgammon with his friends as though there’s some actual relationship between his sense impressions and underlying reality. Or consider the people who claim to think there’s no such thing as free will and then…go around trying to convince other people to change their minds about it? Whatever you’re telling yourself in your head, it’s nigh impossible to really live your life without reference to the things you truly, deep-down, believe. You can lie to yourself, but Man is a creature so constructed that Truth speaks to our hearts and seeps in around the edges. That’s the nice thing about Truth! It’s always there, whether or not you believe it. You can always go back to it. It’s waiting. You can’t ever get it, not wholly, but you can catch glimpses here and there, and if you’re honest with yourself it’s hard to live a life that contradicts those glimpses.

Lewis’s story is a case in point. He doesn’t think the things he loves actually exist, but he’s drawn to them anyway, and especially to the people who think they are real. He encounters MacDonald and Chesterton and loves them for their goodness and good sense — a pity about the whole Christianity thing, really. Actually, it’s weird — all the writers “on whom I could really feed” seem to have that same funny quirk, and all the atheists, Shaw and Wells and Gibbon and Voltaire, seem thin and “tinny.” Then a clever young friend in the War, a Christian, surprises him by having, well, principles: “…it had not seriously occurred to me that people like ourselves, people…who wanted to know whether beauty was objective or how Aeschylus handled the reconciliation of Zeus and Prometheus, should be attempting strict veracity, chastity, or devotion to duty. I had taken it that they were not our subjects.” Come on, you absolutely know this guy!

Anyway, if you are this guy, and you’re very lucky, you’ll have friends who point out to you when the things you claim to think contradict the things you act like you think.⁴ And Lewis was famously lucky in his friends. Surprised by Joy has very little to say on his most famous friendship,⁵ but Owen Barfield make an important appearance: like Einstein, Lewis had at one point believed that the only reality is what can be revealed by the senses. Barfield was the one who convinced him that he couldn’t think that and also believe that abstract thought leads to truth, that moral judgments can be valid, and that aesthetic experience had value beyond the subjective pleasure it provides. The edifice of Realism, however satisfying it might be on its own, was incompatible with something Lewis was more sure about — so out went the Realism. That was the first step.

There were others, and the last few chapters of the book are given over entirely to the “Moves” in his great chess game with — well, spoiler, it’s God — but they are in some sense irrelevant. They’re highly specific, highly individual, based on what Lewis was thinking and reading and discussing at the time, as one by one the pieces of his worldview fall apart. Did he become a Christian because of Samuel Alexander’s Space, Time, and Deity? No, not really, but it made him realize that Joy (remember Joy?) was not a thing itself but simply the desire for an enormous Absolute, an aching for “that impossible reunion which would annihilate us or that self-contradictory waking which would reveal, not that we had had, but that we were, a dream.” Finally, step by step, he found himself slowly forced back into the miserable and reluctant admission that the only thing that made sense of the world was God.

Every conversion story I’ve ever heard has been, in some sense, a let-down. (Acts 9 may be the exception.) And here I don’t just mean religious conversion: change the details of Lewis’s “Moves” and you can produce any one of a dozen structurally identical narratives about how people have changed their minds. I have one of my own! But they all go roughly the same: there’s lots of buildup, lots of times where some piece of what you thought you thought falls away, lots of things slowly becoming plausible — even likely — the ground shifting under your feet — and then at last there comes a Moment, like a key turning in a lock or a supersaturated solution suddenly crystallizing. It feels enormous. It feels as though the entire world has suddenly shifted on its axis. But when you tell the story to someone else, that Moment is the smallest possible part. Here, for instance, is how Lewis becomes a Christian:

I was driven to Whipsnade one sunny morning. When we set out I did not believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and when we reached the zoo I did.

The Moment is boring from the outside because it isn’t the change itself, it’s the realization that the change has already happened. The Moment is, Lewis continues, “like when a man, after long sleep, still lying motionless in bed, becomes aware that he is now awake.” All the while you’ve been so busy watching pieces of that cold, perfect, inhuman structure fall away that you’ve missed the thing growing up in its place — until at last you notice it and realize that everything you’ve been sure of has been pointing this way all along. The Moment is the revelatory scene at the end of the movie where everything you’ve already seen reconfigures itself: nothing is actually happening, you’re just understanding. It’s a glorious experience, but it has to be experienced. Someone telling you about the end of The Usual Suspects would be a let-down, too.

Surprised by Joy is a funny sort of book. When Lewis wrote it he was the English-speaking world’s most famous Christian, but it hardly touches on Christ. These days he’s better known as the English-speaking world’s second-most-famous fantasy author, and it touches still less on his writing or his literary friendships. It’s not, as I vaguely hoped when I picked it up, the story of pleasant evenings arguing about dwarfs (or at least unpleasant evenings arguing about the Pope). Instead, and quite to my surprise, it’s an exquisite portrait of what it looks like — what it feels like — to chase after Truth and change your mind.

Of course, you don’t actually have to change people’s minds on a fundamental level to change how they behave: mood affiliation and social desirability go an awfully long way, because most of the time even the thinkiest among us are operating on the level of prerational cultural scripts. (That’s why it matters so much whether your culture is good!) There’s a long and interesting argument to be had (not here) about whether doing the right thing out of unreflective conformity is still virtuous: are you a better person if you don’t expose your baby on a hillside because you’ve concluded that doing so would be wicked, versus because the possibility simply never entering your mind? But if you do live in a bad culture — like, say, the British intelligentsia’s “atoms and evolution and military service” — someone needs to find a way out. It doesn’t matter that small-batch artisanal maieutics don’t scale: they don’t have to, most people aren’t interested anyway. All you really need are a few gifted people who can manage to escape, then come back and show a better world.

1. You can also call this the “Bert-to-Ernie spectrum” if you want to avoid complicated explanations to your normie friends.

2. If you’re lucky enough to be encountering one or both of them for the first time, the books to read are Chesterton’s Orthodoxy and Lewis’s Mere Christianity for apologetics, and Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday and Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia for fiction. (You must read Narnia in publication order.) Other people may disagree with me. These other people are, like everyone else who disagrees with me, wrong.

3. You can apparently purchase a copy of some of the Boxen stories, complete with illustrations. It seems as though it might be interesting for the Lewis completist, but thank goodness I’ll never be famous enough anyone wants to read my juvenilia.

4. This, incidentally, is why philosophy simply must be done in person — if philosophy is the study of how we ought to live, it has to be done as part of our actual lives, between friends. Philosophy is like a living flame — and like a flame, books make great kindling. (If philosophy is something other than the study of how we ought to live, who the hell gives a damn?)

5. There is this funny little bit: “At my first coming into the world I had been (implicitly) warned never to trust a Papist, and at my first coming into the English Faculty (explicitly) never to trust a philologist. Tolkien was both.”