Surprised by Joy by C. S. Lewis

First published: 1955

Type of work: Autobiography

Time of work: 1898-1929

Locale: Great Britain

Principal Personages:

• Clive Staples Lewis, a writer
• Albert James Lewis, his father
• Flora Augusta Lewos (NEE Hamilton), his mother
• Warren Lewis, his brother
• William Kirkpatrick, his tutor
• Owen Barfield, his friend

Form and Content

A longtime friend and literary executor of the Lewis estate, Owen Barfield, has suggested that there were, in fact, three C.S. Lewises. That is to say, there were three different vocations that Lewis fulfilled—and fulfilled successfully—in his lifetime. There was, first, Lewis the distinguished Oxford don and literary critic; second, Lewis the highly acclaimed author of science fiction and children’s literature; and third, Lewis the popular writer and broadcaster of Christian apologetics. The amazing thing, Barfield notes, is that those who were familiar with Lewis in any single role may not have known that he performed in the other two. In a varied and comprehensive writing career, Lewis carved out a sterling reputation as a scholar, novelist, and theologian for three very different audiences. In Surprised by Joy, written seven years before his death, Lewis helps to shed light on all three of his personas.

Surprised by Joy represents one of the few works within the Lewis canon that speaks directly and unabashedly about his personal life. Given the almost stifling attention that Lewis’ private life has received since his death in 1963, Surprised by Joy stands apart as an astonishingly candid yet self-effacing volume by one widely regarded as the premier Christian apologist of the twentieth century. Lewis proceeds in Surprised by Joy as one reluctant to reveal specific details of his life but who relents, as he suggests in the preface, in order both to answer “requests that I would tell how I passed from Atheism to Christianity” and “to correct one or two false notions that seem to have got about.” Lewis’ reluctance does not simply involve the conventional modesty of the autobiographer who wishes to downplay the importance of his life but stems as well from his conviction that no writer’s work is especially illuminated by psychological inquiry into his or her life. As a renowned literary critic and literary historian, he had witnessed too many works passed off as “literary criticism” that were instead imagined reconstructions of the author’s composing process or thought life—poor substitutes for thoughtful attention to an author’s text itself.

Lewis referred to this twentieth century critical preoccupation as “the personal heresy”: the tendency to identify authors with their creations, assuming that each work is somehow and essentially a rehearsal of a writer’s own life. Lewis believed that this critical heresy robbed works of their power and meaning by reducing all literary criticism to biographical skullduggery. He thus rejected out of hand the notion that an artist was obligated to lay bare his private life—either for the sake of celebrity or for its putative insights into his literary works. To accomplish the task he set for himself, then, Lewis was forced to overcome his “distaste for all that is public, all that belongs to the collective.” The record of his life, to the extent that it contributed to his defense of Christianity, would be temporarily opened to the world at large—but only under his conditions. It would not be submitted for approval to those pundits or self-styled critics of his career who were merely seeking evidence to undermine his arguments for Christian faith. Nothing is recalled that is directly related to this purpose. Nevertheless, Lewis was clearly uncomfortable with the genre of autobiography and warns the reader in his preface:

The story is, I fear, suffocatingly subjective; the kind of thing I have never written before and shall probably never write again. I have tried so to write the first chapter that those who can’t bear such a story will see at once what they are in for and close the book with the least waste of time.

The subtitle of the book, The Shape of My Early Life, succinctly captures the scope of Lewis’ autobiography; it deals almost exclusively with his adolescent search for “joy” and those events leading up to and just subsequent to his conversion at age thirty-one. It constitutes what Lewis himself would refer to as “spiritual autobiography,” but not in the genre of “confessions” such as those of Saint Augustine or Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Lewis views himself in Surprised by Joy as no more or less a sinner than anyone else, but it is chiefly his intellectual journey that needs charting; his is not a grand repentance from fleshly indulgence but a recovery of a childlike wonder at the world and its mysteries. To further this specific goal, the volume contains only those people and events, ideas and contexts that help Lewis explain his conversion—first to himself, and secondarily to his readers. Never one to be accused of hyperbole, Lewis’ grand climax to his journey of faith is announced in matter-of-fact, demure terms: “Every step I had taken, from the Absolute to ‘Spirit’ and from ‘Spirit’ to ‘God,’ had been a step toward the more concrete, the more imminent. . . . To accept the Incarnation was a further step in the same direction.”

Critical Context

Lewis’ life and work have been the focus of countless books since his death in 1963. Ironically, he may eventually suffer the same fate as other authors he himself championed and “rehabilitated” during his scholarly career. Surrounded by volume after volume of analysis, paraphrase, and critique, Lewis’ own canon may be dwarfed by secondary sources, a development he opposed all of his life in reading others. One does not need the critics to enjoy Chaucer, he once said, but Chaucer to enjoy the critics. As it stands, both his fiction and his theological writings have been endlessly anthologized and hypercritically explored, creating a trail of footnotes and asides long enough to camouflage the essential viewpoints and facts about his life—thus discouraging even the most diligent student of Lewis. It must be said, however, that Lewis’ own works remain the most reliable sources and insightful interpreters of his thought and personality. Surprised by Joy, while, as noted, emerging as one of the most personal of Lewis’ books, retains the characteristic stylistic and thematic modes found elsewhere in his oeuvre.

It is in Surprised by Joy, for example, that one learns the extent to which Lewis is indebted to a romantic view of both life and culture, that is, a mind-set in which reason and imagination are held in tension at all times and neither is allowed to dominate or cancel out the other. Haunted in his search for joy, Lewis turned first in his youth to the strange and preternatural—the darker myths of the North. His youthful trek into the vagaries of philosophy landed him within various camps of pantheism and theism, and, finally, led him to the Christian theism wherein reason and imagination are married in the Eternal Logos, the “Myth Become Fact,” which he discovered in Jesus of Nazareth. Despite his judgment that his text seems “suffocatingly subjective,” the deliberate, methodical way in which Lewis narrates his life parallels the meticulous arguments with which he constructed his scholarly treatises and theological briefs. Here, as elsewhere, Lewis steadfastly refuses to include any details of his life to titillate the amateur psychologist or self-styled debunker.

Therefore, even when he is revealing innermost thoughts and private incidents, Lewis still maintains a distance from both the reader and his subject matter—as if he were creating a persona, a fictional Lewis (as he indeed did in the first volume of his space trilogy, Out of the Silent Planet, 1938), whose life and personality he must discern through the same careful historical research and fundamental objectivity that underlies such scholarly works as The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition (1936) and A Preface to “Paradise Lost” (1942). Even though Lewis’ circle of friends include a veritable Who’s Who of popular fiction, among them J.R.R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, and Dorothy L. Sayers, only those who had a direct influence on his coming to faith receive specific citation or focus. In a word, Surprised by Joy represents the kind of scholarship about his own life that Lewis practiced in his own literary criticism and theological works and remains an admirable model of autobiographical restraint and insight.

Bibliography

Carnell, Corbin Scott. Bright Shadow of Reality: C.S. Lewis and the Feeling Intellect, 1974.

Edwards, Bruce L. A Rhetoric of Reading: C.S. Lewis’s Defense of Western Literacy, 1986.

Edwards, Bruce L., ed. The Taste of the Pineapple: C.S. Lewis as Reader, Critic, and Imaginative Writer, 1988.

Green, Roger Lancelyn, and Walter Hooper. C.S. Lewis: A Biography, 1974.

Hannay, Margaret Patterson. C.S. Lewis, 1981.

Holmer, Paul. C.S. Lewis: The Shape of His Faith and Thought, 1976.

Howard, Thomas. The Achievement of C.S. Lewis, 1980.

Lindskoog, Kathryn. C.S. Lewis: Mere Christian, 1981.