Lewis · 1931
C. S. Lewis at Whipsnade
On the afternoon of Sunday the twenty-eighth of September 1931, on the sidecar of his brother Warnie's BSA motorcycle on the road from Headington Quarry in Oxford to Whipsnade Zoo in Bedfordshire (about a forty-mile run via Aylesbury), C. S. Lewis, thirty-two years old, the Belfast-born Magdalen College Oxford English Literature fellow, completed the religious conversion that had begun on the summer night of the nineteenth of September. By his own account in *Surprised by Joy* (1955), the late-summer conversation he had had on Addison's Walk by the Cherwell with his fellow Magdalen fellow J. R. R. Tolkien (a devout Catholic) and Hugo Dyson (a Anglican literature lecturer) had been the philosophical-and-literary-mythological turning-point. The conversation, on a mid-September night by Magdalen Bridge between eight in the evening and three in the morning, had argued the question of whether the Christian story was, in its narrative form, the truth of which all the pagan-mythological dying-and-rising god-stories Lewis had been studying as a classicist were partial-shadowy reflections. By Whipsnade on the morning of the twenty-eighth, sitting in the sidecar in his leather-helmet, Lewis came finally to the internal-acceptance of the Christian story. The conversion of C. S. Lewis is, by every careful judgment of the twentieth-century English-language Christian apologetic tradition, the foundational personal-conversion of the Lewis Christianity that produced *The Screwtape Letters* (1942), *The Chronicles of Narnia* (1950–56), *Mere Christianity* (1952), and *Surprised by Joy* (1955).
It is twenty past ten on the morning of Sunday the twenty-eighth of September 1931, on the road south from Oxford to Whipsnade Zoo in Bedfordshire (a road that runs through Wheatley, Stokenchurch, the Hambleden valley, Berkhamsted, the Chiltern Hills, into the Dunstable downs), in the passenger sidecar of his brother Major Warren Hamilton Lewis's BSA motorcycle, in pale autumn sunshine through the September leaves. He is thirty-two years old. He is Clive Staples Lewis, born at 47 Dundela Avenue, Belfast, on the twenty-ninth of November 1898, son of Albert James Lewis the Belfast solicitor and Florence Flora Hamilton, schooled at Wynyard School Watford, Malvern College, the Bookham, Surrey tutorial of W. T. Kirkpatrick, and Oxford from 1917, fellow of Magdalen College in English Literature since 1925.
The motorcycle is, by Warnie's driving, at about thirty miles an hour on the Oxford-Aylesbury road. Warnie, three years older, retired from the Royal Army Service Corps that summer, is driving in the front. Lewis is in the sidecar in a leather flying-helmet, a tweed jacket, and a blanket over his knees.
He thinks, by his 1955 memoir Surprised by Joy: when we set out, I did not believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and when we reached the Zoo I did. Yet I had not exactly spent the journey in thought. Nor in great emotion. It was more like when a man, after a long sleep, still lying motionless in bed, becomes aware that he is now awake.
He thinks: the Addison's Walk conversation with Tolkien and Dyson on the night of the nineteenth, which ran until three in the morning, settled the philosophical question. The pagan mythological dying-and-rising god-stories I had been studying as a classicist for fifteen years (Balder, Adonis, Bacchus, Osiris) are, on the Tolkien argument, the shadowy partial reflections of the Christian story. The Christian story is the true myth: the only myth in which the dying-and-rising god is not a personification of a natural cycle but a historical person who lived and died and rose in a specific year of the Roman Empire.
He thinks: the philosophical argument has been settled for ten days. The personal acceptance has not. The thirty-mile drive to Whipsnade is the distance over which the personal acceptance has, without my conscious decision-making, taken place.
They arrive at Whipsnade at about half past twelve. Lewis and Warnie walk through the zoo for the afternoon, look at the Bactrian camels and the Asian elephants, and have a picnic-lunch by the bear enclosure. Lewis is in a quiet mood that Warnie, by his 1956 memoir, had not seen in him in seven years. They ride back to Oxford in the evening and arrive at the Eastgate Hotel for a late dinner at ten.
C. S. Lewis spent the remaining thirty-two years of his life as a public Christian. He published The Pilgrim's Regress in 1933, The Screwtape Letters in 1942 (serialised in The Guardian church-newspaper through 1941–42, published in book form by Geoffrey Bles in February 1942), the Ransom Trilogy of science-fiction theological novels (1938–45), The Great Divorce (1945), Mere Christianity (1952, from a series of BBC radio talks given through 1941–44), the seven-volume Chronicles of Narnia (1950–56), and Surprised by Joy (1955). He moved from Magdalen Oxford to Magdalene Cambridge in 1954 to take the chair of Medieval and Renaissance Literature, which he held until his resignation in 1963 on the grounds of declining health. He died at the Kilns, his house at Headington Quarry, on the twenty-second of November 1963 (the day of the Kennedy assassination and the death of Aldous Huxley; all three deaths fell within twelve hours of each other). He is buried in the Holy Trinity churchyard at Headington Quarry, ten yards from the house. The headstone is in Magdalen-Oxford lettering with the inscription his brother Warnie chose, in English, in the form of the Shakespeare quotation that had been their mother Flora's favourite, from King Lear: men must endure their going hence.