Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
Clive Staples Lewis was man who was driven by love and loss. The writer of many books, papers and poetry, the man who bought to life the world of Narnia, of Aslan and a flickering lamppost that marked the end of the wardrobe and the beginnings of a series of children’s stories that dominated the world of English fantasy literature alongside his Oxford University friend J.R.R. Tolkien.
For those who have read his books, whether the children’s classics The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe or The Magician’s Nephew, part of the astounding body of work that makes up The Chronicles of Narnia or the Christian apologist works of The Screwtape Letters or The Problems of Pain, the author and academic certainly wrote with an almost zealous feel of the teachings of the Bible and how this shaped him as a man. However as his biographer A.N. Wilson discussed with a certain amount of pride in his voice in Narnia’s Lost Poet: The Secret Lives and Loves of C.S. Lewis, there was so much more to than man than being a person who returned to the Christian faith after being a confirmed atheist after the First World War.
Set against the backdrop of Westminster Abbey, where finally fifty years after his untimely passing, he now has a plaque dedicated to him at Poet’s Corner, the family home in Northern Ireland and the dreaming spires of Oxford in which he spent the vast majority of his life, A.N. Wilson showed with almost great solemnity that C.S. Lewis had three other loves in life apart from Christianity. The mother that he lost when he was nine years old and for whom was perhaps the greatest of losses as it tore a hole in his early life as he was sent from home to go to boarding school in England; the woman who he looked after he came home from fighting at the end of the First World War, a woman who gave him the maternal need and the love he required as a growing man and finally his wife, the American poet Joy Gresham who wrote as Joy Davidman.
It is these great loves that show the writer to be more than just someone who spent his time theorising, postulating and trying to convince others on the ways of Christianity, it showed a man who needed an earthly substance, the gentleness of another human being in his life who would spur him on. The programme dealt with this weighty issue in such a manner that even the most hardened humanist could not feel a river of admiration for the man and his convictions.
Fifty years after his death, at the time overshadowed by the assassination of President Kennedy and the death of one of the great minds of 20th Century literature Aldous Huxley, this very deeply moving documentary made the most of his legacy, of his insistence that English Literature be taken seriously as an academic science, that it was so much more than a weak subject, of his ability to thrill millions of children with his prose and that throughout it all, there were three women who guided him to become the man worthy of being heralded in Poet’s Corner. A respectful look at C.S. Lewis’s life and the type of television that B.B.C. Four makes so well.
Ian D. Hall