Jack: A Life of C. S. Lewis by Sayer George & Lyle W. Dorsett

Author:Sayer, George & Lyle W. Dorsett [Sayer, George]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Good News Publishers/Crossway Books
Published: 2005-06-19T16:00:00+00:00

(“Because so many thousands looked at it with him”—here is the effect on Jack of becoming a communicating member of the Church and part of the mystical body of Christ.)

The final section makes clear the significance of the title. Now that he has become a Christian, John is told to retrace his steps. He passes once again through all the countries of the mind that he had traversed before his conversion. He now sees them quite clearly as the unpleasant or irrational delusions they really are.

In the end, he comes to his parents’ cottage in the land of his childhood, Puritania, where he finds his final resting place and his deep joy.

In its latter pages, the book contains several religious lyrics, among them two of his finest: “He whom I bow to only knows to whom I bow” and “My heart is empty.”19 It is not unlikely that he spent more time on them than on all the prose in the book.

The manuscript was sent to J. M. Dent and Sons in December 1932 and published in May 1933. It was bound in brown cloth and had attractive maps on its endpapers that Jack had “had great fun drawing the sketch for.” The reviews, though few in number, were mostly favorable. Nevertheless, only about 650 of the first printing of 1,000 copies were sold. Jack was far less upset by this failure than by that of Dymer, probably because he had spent so little time on the book and because he had cared more for success as a poet than as a writer of prose. Although he was disappointed, he could also regard the cauterization of his literary ambitions as a blessing. He wrote to Arthur Greeves as early as 1930 that a man cannot enter the kingdom of Heaven until he has reached the stage “of not caring two straws about his own status.”20

The later history of the book is quite interesting. Two or three of the reviewers assumed that the author was a Roman Catholic, probably because of the introduction of Mother Kirk (Mother Church) and the rational defense of Christianity. This brought the book to the notice of Frank Sheed, of Sheed and Ward, the Roman Catholic publishing house. Dent printed an additional 1,500 copies for them, and Sheed issued this second edition in 1935. Jack’s letter to Arthur describing this event reveals that he was still very much a Belfast man:

He did not like having a book of his handled by a “Papist pub lisher,” but he submitted since they thought they could sell it, and Dent couldn’t. For doing this he was “well punished,” for without his authority Sheed printed on the inside of the dust jacket this blurb, “This story begins in Puritania (Mr. Lewis was brought up in Ulster).” This implied that the book attacked his own country and his own religion. He asked Arthur to tell anyone interested that he was not consulted and the blurb was “a damnable lie told to try to make the Dublin riffraff buy the book.

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