"...I often find myself living at such cross-purposes with the modern world: I have been a converted Pagan living among apostate Puritans."
— Surprised By Joy
Clive Staples Lewis ("Jack" to his friends and family) (1898-1963) was a mid-twentieth century Irish author of many sorts of books: scholarship regarding medieval literature, lay Christian theology, Science Fiction, and Fantasy.He was born and raised in Ulster. His mother died when he was young. He was educated in a series of English Boarding Schools, the first of which was run by a Sadist Teacher. He fought in the Great War. He was a member of The Inklings and a friend of Charles Williams and J. R. R. Tolkien, whose influence partially led to his conversion to Christianity (though Lewis being an Anglican and Tolkien a Roman Catholic led to some friction). He published an autobiography of his early life and conversion titled Surprised By Joy. Afterwards, he met Joy Gresham and married her so she could remain in the UK. Then, they fell in love and had an Anglican ceremony after Joy was diagnosed with terminal bone cancer. She died four years later. Lewis himself died the same day as Aldous Huxley and John F. Kennedy; this led to his passing being almost unpublicized.Trope Namer for The Four Loves (from the book The Four Loves).
C. S. Lewis' fictional works:
Dymer (1926): A narrative poem, published under the pseudonym Clive Hamilton.
The Pilgrim's Regress (1933): His first publication following his conversion. An allegory generalizing from the details of Lewis' own, somewhat unusual, conversion.
The Great Divorce (1945): A dream-visit to a semi-Mundane Afterlife, where the joys of Heaven are available to all, and the punishments of Hell are entirely self-inflicted (and therefore all the more inescapable).
Boxen: the Imaginary World of the Young C. S. Lewis (1985): Stories about talking animals which Lewis and his brother wrote from childhood through their teen years, which he never considered publishing during his life.
All Take and No Give: Repeatedly. Discussed more than once in The Four Loves. Particularly the pathological Giver variant.
Author Tract: Everything Lewis ever wrote, no exceptions.
Actually, not quite true. Lewis himself explained that the first book of what is now the Chronicles of Narnia, the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, was initially written as a stand alone piece revolving entirely around the image of a faun carrying a pile of packages and an umbrella, in the snowy woods, next to a lamppost. The symbolism of Aslan as Jesus was entirely accidental. He attributed it to his values subconsciously coming out. It wasn't until this similarity was pointed out to him by fans and critics that he started purposely writing that way; he saw writing as way to spread the Gospel. This is why, in a study of the Chronicles in their entirety, this book has some of the weakest symbolism and allegory, much more akin to Tolkien's "applicability" in the Lord of the Rings.
A Very British Christmas: In a very humorous piece in God In The Dock,Herodotus visits the island of Niatirb and concludes that the resident barbarians observe two entirely separate holidays on 25 December: Exmas (a commercial racket) and Crissmas (a religious festival). Also, Father Christmas shows up in Narnia.
Big Creepy Crawlies: In Surprised by Joy, Lewis writes that his nightmares during childhood were either about ghosts or insects. Of the two, he found the dreams about insects much more frightening.
In The Pilgrim's Regress, young John is told that the damned are tortured by scorpions the size of lobsters.
In Perelandra, Ransom encounters flies and beetles larger than himself in the caverns of Venus. Subverted in this case. Once the Un-man's presence is gone, Ransom ceases to find them frightening, and speculates that they may, in fact, be sentient.
In The Problem of Pain he discusses the moral problem of the suffering of animals(who after all are not either being punished for something or being trained in how to be good and therefore not subject to some of the possible explanations for human suffering). In fact he does take the question seriously. But when he gets to discussing animals and the afterlife, he imagines someone asking "Where do you put all the mosquitos" and then notes ironically that heaven for mosquitos and hell for humans might be "very conveniently combined."
Boarding School of Horrors: Lewis had an extremely unpleasant experience at school, compounded by the fact that his first teacher was a literalSadist Teacher to the level of actual clinical insanity. Not surprisingly, boarding schools in Lewis's works are very unlikely to be positively portrayed.
Another school he went to had an overweening "aristocracy" of Jerk Jocks supported by teachers which engaged in organized bullying and even rumored pedophilia toward the underclass students. (The second of which Lewis actually said was, under the circumstances actually a saving grace because it got their minds off their snobbishness!) Lewis hated that school so much that he almost considered World War One less unpleasant: no one said you had to pretend to like it, after all.
In general, C. S. Lewis's father was not good at picking boarding schools.
Combat by Champion, Prince Caspian features a particularly gut-churning edge-of-your-seat example. All the more so for Peter's quiet dignity.
Humans Are Bastards: Appears to some extent in practically all his work, but his non-fiction dedicates entire chapters to expounding on how and why humans are bastards, and how the bastardliness can be reduced.
In one of his essay's, he mentions Dark-Gods-of-the-Blood which comes down to how we must always fight off the desire to give into the baser desires we feel as we go through daily life.
It's All About Me: A theme of many of his theological works, especially The Great Divorce. Lewis views Pride as the cardinal sin, and the source of all other sin.
Viewers Are Geniuses: His work geared at adults is often peppered with untranslated Latin or French phrases, under the assumption that his readers will know what they mean.
Likely enough at the time when large numbers of upper and middle class English would have learned those at school.
What Could Have Been: A scholarly book entitled Language and Human Nature was begun but never completed. The rub: It was to have been coauthored with J. R. R. Tolkien. [1]. Mind you, he fought in a World War, so we should really be thankful we had him at all....
World War II: Much of Lewis's fiction takes place during the War — The Screwtape Letters, The Great Divorce, five of the seven Chronicles Of Narnia books, and the second book in The Space Trilogy, specifically. It's usually not dealt with extensively, but you can catch plenty of references to the Blitz and the subsequent air raids, blackouts, etc. This is understandable, as the 1930s and '40s were the prime of Lewis's career.
What later became Mere Christianity was originally a series of wartime radio broadcasts given by Lewis, meant to lift the spirits of the British people. These broadcasts were only edited and put into print after the war was over.
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