The Reluctant Convert

SURPRISED BY JOY (238 pp.)-C. S. Lewis-Harcourf, Brace ($3.50).

C. S. (for Clive Staples) Lewis is a High Anglican Lorelei in the gown of a Cambridge don. The author of The Screwtape Letters lures not to shipwreck but salvation, and many a troubled 20th century secularist who came to scoff at Lewis' faith has fallen prey to his urbane style and good sense. Years ago, he was a highly troubled secularist himself ("I had tried everything in my own mind and body; as it were, asking myself, 'Is it this you want? Is it this?' "). Surprised by Joy is an autobiographical mirror held up to a questing soul, and across it flash revealing images of a time, a place, and a class. For Lewis' memoir reflects a public-school England-more courageous than moral, more devoted to good form than to the good-that shaped many men who still make headlines. This England, demi-paradise and demi-hell, is the inevitable setting of Lewis' own personal search for God.

Decent Godless People. The world wore a smiling mask in his childhood: "good parents, good food, a garden to play in." Born in Belfast in 1898, Lewis was reared in the Church of Ireland, but his parents' religion was sheer rote, the kind T. S. Eliot was to satirize in the line: "Here were a decent godless people ..."

Death tore the mask off a happy childhood and an easy faith, when his mother died of cancer. "To this day I do not know what they mean when they call dead bodies beautiful. The ugliest man alive is an angel of beauty compared with the loveliest of the dead."

A year later, young Lewis was in the hands of the ugliest man alive. "Oldie," as the boys dubbed him, was the half-insane master of a decrepit boarding school, "a big, bearded man with full lips like an Assyrian king on a monument, immensely strong, physically dirty." Smacking his lips after breakfast. Oldie would gaze round the classroom, pick the day's victim: "Oh, there you are, Rees. you horrid boy. If I'm not too tired, I shall give you a good drubbing this afternoon." When he could, Lewis would withdraw to an oasis of private joy-books, nature and the music of Richard Wagner.

From Oldie's floggings, Lewis graduated via a preparatory school to college fagging, a fetch-and-carry round of misery in which the New Boy was always jumping at the whim or whip of the "Bloods," an athletic elite corps. At Chartres, as he calls his school, Lewis, a lifelong bachelor, lost his virginity to a dancing mistress, and the remnants of his Christianity to his house mother. The house mother was running "the mazes of Theosophy, Rosicrucianism, Spiritualism; the whole Anglo-American Occultist tradition . . . From the tyrannous noon of revelation I passed into the cool evening of Higher Thought, where there was nothing to be obeyed, and nothing to be believed except what was either comforting or exciting."

A Worse Fate. What was exciting his college classmates Lewis describes with direct and unsensational candor: pederasty. "You will have missed the atmosphere of our House unless you picture the whole place from week's end to week's end buzzing, tittering, hinting, whispering about this subject . . . who had 'a case with' whom, whose star was in the ascendant, who had whose photo, who and when and how often and what night and where . . ." Lewis was not tempted; he was bored.

"Peace to them all. A worse fate awaited them . . . Ypres and the Somme ate up most of them."

In the trenches, as a subaltern of 19, Lewis himself was blooded-hit in the back "oddly enough by an English shell." During the postwar decade, first as a starveling poet and then as tutor at Magdalen College, he felt something else at his back-the Hound of Heaven. He fled over the shifting ice floes of intellectual fashion: rationalism, realism, idealism, materialism. Still the Hound pursued, and Lewis was finally backed into a corner that became home.

Along with Christian humility, readers of Lewis will find traces of the snob-inChrist. He calls churchgoing "a wearisome 'get-together' affair . . . Hymns were (and are) extremely disagreeable to me. Of all musical instruments I liked (and like) the organ least." But apart from such culture crotchets. Surprised by Joy is a crisply logical, eloquent statement of faith that makes one man's con version as convincing as it is ever likely to be to another. Lewis is a special type. And yet there is universal meaning in his description of his final crisis of faith:

"You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling . . . the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet ... I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the x/rost dejected and reluctant convert in all England. I did not then see . . . the Divine humility which will accept a convert even on such terms ... a prodigal who is brought in kicking, struggling, resentful . . . The words com-pelle intrare, compel them to come in ... plumb the depth of the Divine mercy. The hardness of God is kinder than the soft ness of men, and His compulsion is our liberation."

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