C. S. Lewis at Whipsnade

Some conversions arrive as thunder on the road to Damascus. Others arrive the way light enters a room at dawn, while the sleeper, still motionless, becomes aware that the night is over. The mind has done its work in private, below the level of decision, and the man who stands up at the other end is not the man who lay down. The hinge has turned without sound.

THE BELFAST INHERITANCE

Clive Staples Lewis was born at 47 Dundela Avenue, Belfast, on the twenty-ninth of November 1898, second son of Albert James Lewis, solicitor of the Police Courts, and Florence Hamilton, daughter of a Church of Ireland chaplain. His mother died of cancer when he was nine; his father sent him across the water to Wynyard School at Watford, then to Malvern, then to W. T. Kirkpatrick at Bookham in Surrey, a logician of the old Ulster Presbyterian severity who taught him to parse a sentence as if it were a piece of evidence. He went up to University College, Oxford, in 1917, was commissioned into the Somerset Light Infantry, was wounded on Mount Bernenchon in April 1918, and came back to Oxford to take a triple first. By 1925 he was Fellow of Magdalen College in English Literature. By 1929 he had, as he put it later, admitted that God was God and knelt and prayed, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England. Theism, however, is not Christianity. Between the philosopher's God and the Galilean carpenter lay a country he had not yet crossed.

ADDISON'S WALK

The crossing began on the night of the nineteenth of September 1931. He had asked Hugo Dyson of Reading and J. R. R. Tolkien of Pembroke to dine in Magdalen. After Hall the three men walked along Addison's Walk by the Cherwell, under elms still in late-summer leaf, and the talk turned to myth. Lewis had been a classicist for fifteen years. He knew the dying gods by heart, Balder and Adonis, Bacchus and Osiris, and he had always held them to be lies breathed through silver, beautiful and untrue. Tolkien, the devout Catholic, would not have it. Myth, he argued, was not lie but refracted light: the splintered fragments of a true story God had been telling through the gentile imagination for millennia, until at last He told it once in history, in a province of the Roman Empire, in the body of a Jewish workman. A sudden wind came up the river and shook the leaves down on them as if to underline the point. They walked Tolkien home to Northmoor Road at three in the morning; Lewis and Dyson paced the New Building cloister another hour. By breakfast the philosophical question was settled. The personal one was not.

THE ROAD TO WHIPSNADE

On the morning of Sunday the twenty-eighth of September, his brother Warnie, Major Warren Hamilton Lewis, lately retired from the Royal Army Service Corps, kicked the BSA into life in the yard at Hillsboro and proposed the zoo at Whipsnade for the day. Lewis climbed into the wickerwork sidecar in a leather flying-helmet and a tweed jacket, with a tartan rug across his knees. They left Headington Quarry at about half past nine in pale autumn sunshine. The road ran out through Wheatley and Stokenchurch, down into the Hambleden valley, up over the chalk of the Chilterns, through Berkhamsted and onto the Dunstable downs, forty miles of beech-wood beginning to turn and stubble fields already ploughed. The motorcycle did its steady thirty. Warnie's broad back was a windbreak. Lewis, in the sidecar, did not speak.

A SECOND OF TIME IN HISTORY

He had not exactly spent the journey in thought. Nor in great emotion. There was no argument running in his head, no fresh proposition to weigh against the old reluctance; the arguments were nine days finished. There was only the hedge sliding past, the cold rush of air against the leather of the helmet, the rattle of the chain, the smell of petrol and damp ploughland, and somewhere underneath it the obscure motion of a thing settling. He noticed, as one notices weather, that the resistance was gone. The proposition he had held at arm's length for thirty-two years, that the Galilean carpenter was the dying god of the myths made flesh in a particular year under a particular procurator, had, while he was looking at a beech wood, ceased to be a proposition and become a fact about the world, like the shape of the Chilterns or the existence of his brother's back. He recorded the second later, in Surprised by Joy, in the only sentence he could find for it: When we set out I did not believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and when we reached the zoo I did. It was, he added, more like when a man, after long sleep, still lying motionless in bed, becomes aware that he is now awake. No prayer was made. No vow taken. The hinge turned in the sidecar of a BSA motorcycle somewhere between Aylesbury and Dunstable, and no man on the road that morning, including the man it turned in, could have said the exact mile.

THE BEAR AT WHIPSNADE

They reached the zoo at about half past twelve. Whipsnade had been open three years; Chapman's herd of Bactrian camels stood on the chalk, the Indian elephants swung their trunks at the rail, wallabies grazed loose on the down. The brothers walked the paddocks and ate a picnic by the bear enclosure. The bear was called Bully. Lewis watched it for a long time. Warnie, in the diary he kept faithfully for fifty years, noted that his brother had been quiet on the ride up and quieter still over the sandwiches, and that he had not seen Jack so much at peace in seven years, not since before their father's last illness. They rode home in the dusk by the same road and ate a late dinner at the Eastgate Hotel in the High. Lewis went up to his rooms in New Building and wrote nothing in his diary that night. The thing was too plain to need recording.

THE LONG AFTERMATH

The Lewis who climbed out of the sidecar at Headington Quarry that evening was the Lewis the twentieth century would know. The Pilgrim's Regress followed in 1933, the Ransom novels through the war years, the Screwtape Letters serialised in The Guardian in 1941 and bound by Geoffrey Bles the next February. The BBC asked him to give the wartime broadcast talks that became Mere Christianity in 1952. The seven Narnia books ran from 1950 to 1956. In 1954 he left Magdalen for the new chair of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Magdalene, Cambridge, which he held until ill health took him out of it in the summer of 1963. He died at the Kilns at Headington Quarry on the afternoon of the twenty-second of November that year, an hour before the rifle fired in Dallas and within the same twelve hours that took Aldous Huxley in California; the wireless that evening had room for one death only. Warnie chose the inscription. It was their mother Flora's favourite line, from a King Lear calendar that had hung in her bedroom in Dundela Avenue the year she died: Men must endure their going hence.

THE SIDECAR

The decisive hour does not always announce itself with cannon. Sometimes it arrives at thirty miles an hour, in a wickerwork sidecar, on a Sunday in late September, on the Aylesbury road. The man inside the leather helmet does not know the second in which it passes. He knows only, when the engine stops and his brother offers him a hand out, that he is on the other side of something he was on this side of an hour ago. The sidecar is still in a photograph in the Lewis papers at the Bodleian: black wickerwork, a folded tartan rug, a leather strap, the empty seat.