Published December 6, 1963

In the midst of the national tragedy which struck two weeks ago, from which the United States and the world are still recovering, the death of another great man went unnoticed. Per-haps it would have anyway, for Clive Staples Lewis was hardly in the public eye as was John F. Kennedy, and he was not assassinated, but died naturally of a heart attack at the age of 65. Yet in his own world C.S. Lewis was just as important as John Kennedy was in the political world. We as Christian scholars should feel his loss as keenly as that of our late president.

First of all Mr. Lewis was a brilliantly competent scholar in medieval and Rennaissance studies, who had as well the gift of teaching. He lectured at Oxford and was a Cam-bridge don, the first to occupy the Chair of Medieval and Ren-naissance Studies founded (probably with him in mind) not quite ten years ago. His scholarly works, for example, A Preface to Paradise Lost, The Allegory of Love, and English Literature in the Sixteenth Cen-tury, are already critical clas-sics; any critic who disagrees with Lewis may in any event not safely ignore him. Yet in spite of his formidable and well - earned reputation, his critical writings are rarely dog-matic. There is a delightfully personal air about them, as if Lewis were eagerly giving his opinions on a favorite book to an intimate friend over cof-fee, and were asking for his friend's opinions in return. The scholarship, the scholar, and the man come all together in these books.

If Lewis had written only literary criticism, his work would be important, and his death a great loss. But some-how he found time to write an amazing variety of other books as well; and he demonstrated in the process that he was one of those rare critics who is cap-able of putting books of their own together as skillfully as they take other books apart.

Lewis wrote eleven novels, and two other well known fictional works, ``The Great Di-vorce'' and ``The Screwtape Let-ters.'' Three of the novels he wrote make up a trilogy of what might be termed Christian science fiction, though the term is hardly adequate. ``Till We Have Faces'' is both a savage and a beautiful retelling of the myth of Psyche and Eros. The other seven, ``The Chronicles of Narnia,'' give astounding evi-dence of Lewis' versatility: they are a series of fantasies written for children, every one of them a rollicking good story, and allegorical to boot.

What is a good story?

In ``Essays Presented to Charles Williams,'' there is one essay by Mr Lewis entitled ``On Stories,'' which he hoped would contribute ``to the encouragement of a better school of prose story in Eng-land.'' Whether or not the essay has done this, it does give Lewis' opinion as to what a good story, considered simply as ``a series of imaginative events,'' should be. Some people, he says, think excite-ment, suspense and surprise, ``the alternate tension and appeasement of imagined anxiety,'' are all that make a good story, and the more excitement and surprise there is, the better the story will be. Of course this is partly right, says Lewis, but ``in some books, and for some readers, another factor comes in.'' There are kinds of excite-ment; qualities of fear and surprise; types of danger and suspense. And one very im-portant thing a storyteller does is to arrange the events in his story in such a way that they create in his listeners these specific qualities of fear or excitement or surprise or sensed danger or relief. When he suc-ceeds, we want to hear his story over and over again. Surely not because we want to be sur-prised again -- that cannot happen -- but because we de-light in being shown again that one precise quality of excite-ment and in observing the ex-act sequence of events which produced it.

A Craftsman's Skill

Lewis is just such a story teller. With the skill of a Ren-aissance craftsman he ar-ranges just the right events in just the right order, fitting in minor characters and minor bits of setting and action, until he has aroused just that one particular sort of reaction which lie wants. When you have finished a Lewis story, the mood he has described will be hard to forget. Now and again something will happen to you of which you will say ``That is just like...well al-most...like in `The Last Bat-tle,' when...'' or ``Do you remember, in `Perelandra,' where...?''

The assertions Lewis makes about stories can be generalized to describe other aspects of his fiction. He is able as few other novelists are to define types of things, situations, thoughts and experiences, and people, without talking in gen-eralities. A dreary day, a calm night, a waterfall, the taste of a fruit or the sound of a melody, a solemn procession or a race, an argument, a cruelty will all seem different to a man after he has read Lewis. Lewis' people and the things they do are real, individual, and never trite. The imaginary worlds in which he places them have their own internal consistency, yet the people, the happenings, the settings, and the imaginary worlds demand to be related to us and to the things that hap-pen to us every day in our own world.

In the area of morality, par-ticularly, Lewis' fiction is un-comfortably relevant to human life. As he himself admitted, Lewis was somewhat of a freak in the twentieth century; for, like Aristotle, Sir Philip Sidney, and Dr. Samuel Johnson, he be-lieved that poets and authors should inspire good conduct and discourage bad. This, of course, is a very hard thing to do. But I think Lewis succeeds in doing it, provided, of course, we are willing to listen to him. He succeeds first of all by a-voiding the most common er-rors of moralistic novelists. He does not moralize, and he colors no one all black or all white except demons, God and unfall-en persons. Though there are no tragic endings in his fiction, he does not try to encourage goodness by saying that good guys always win and bad guys get theirs sooner or later. Rather, he shows goodness and badness, innocence and depravity in action. He leaves us with a choice whose answer is so obvious it hurts.

Nowhere is the nature of good and evil so powerfully and convincingly described by Lewis as in ``Perelandra,'' the second novel of his trilogy, and, in my opinion, the best book he ever wrote. ``Perelandra'' dares to tell the story of Eve's temptation over again on another planet, and, what is more, with another ending. There are two extra characters: Ransom, a man from earth taken to the planet Venus by angels for reasons he does not know; and Weston, the space-traveling scientist whose body becomes Satan's vehicle as the serpent's was before. Adam does not appear till the end, for as in the original it is Eve who is tempted first.

To portray both pure in-nocence and complete depravity, even with the aid of fallen man as a reference point, is a job few writers dare to attempt, for as Lewis himself says in his preface to ``Paradise Lost,'' no one of us can know ex-perientially what ``un-fallen-ness'' is like.

To say that any author has outdone Milton is a dangerous thing, but I honestly believe that Lewis comes closer to the truth about Paradise, Adam and Eve, and Satan, than Milton does. For example, when he is tempting Eve, Satan is a dia-lectician whom no analytic philosopher could refute; when she sleeps, he spends his time methodically slitting open little frogs with his fingernails, or repeating Ransom's name over and over, and when Ransom asks ``What?'', saying ``Nothing.''

But of course the real reason for Lewis' success as a moralist is that he knows very well that no man will be good simply be-cause he has been told to be good. Lewis makes the choice between good and evil as clear as he can. But he is a Chris-tian, and in every novel he makes it obvious, by allegory or by simple and direct statement, that no man chooses the final good but by God's grace, and no man is finally made perfect in righteousness except by Christ's redemption. The glory, sovereignty and redemptive love of God shine through all his writings, giving a compre-hensive and joyously optimistic unity to all of his imaginative worlds.

Amateur Apologist

Time magazine, in the ``Re-ligion'' section of their Dec. 6 issue, called C.S. Lewis ``a minor prophet of the church'' because of such works as ``Mere Christianity.'' He did make some attempt at amateur apolo-getics, but he was not a theo-logian, and it would be a shame if he were remembered first of all for ``Mere Christianity.'' It is in his criticism, and es-pecially in his fiction, that he is truly an apologist. In a way unique to him, Lewis turns a topsy-turvy world right side up, putting God in his heaven, the devil in hell, and man where he belongs. His writings overwhelm one with the con-viction that the Christian view of life, and the Christian life as well, are natural, healthy, and glorious. To rebel against God is not dramatic, not darkly and grandly magnificent; it is just pathetically silly, like the ac-tion of a child who refuses to eat Thanksgiving dinner be-cause his parents would not let him gobble mud pies in the back yard an hour before.