Laura Miller by The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia Read Free Book Online

Wilson, regards the boys’ coolness toward their father as a personal failing, at least on Jack’s part. He characterizes the portrait of Albert in
Surprised by Joy
as “devastatingly cruel” and Jack’s resentment of his financial dependence on his father during his early Oxford years as amounting to a “venomous” hostility; Albert’s own diary confirms that he sometimes felt mistreated and disrespected by Jack. Yet in Jack and Warnie’s defense, consider how much easier it is to reconcile with a charming friend who has wronged you once (if seriously) than it is to get along with someone who aggravates you three times an hour every single hour you spend with him. People like this are not any more endurable because they’re technically harmless or mean well.
    Wilson argues, plausibly, that guilt over how he’d behaved toward Albert would haunt Jack for the rest of his life; “I treated my own father abominably,” Lewis once wrote to a friend after Albert’s death in 1929, “and no sin in my whole life now seems to be so serious.” No doubt Lewis learned to value patience and forbearance in his later years because he knew all too well how difficult it can be to summon both. In his adulthood, when he would be sorely tested in this department, Lewis’s Christianity gave him a moral framework in which to place all the small annoyances of difficult relationships. Indulging a querulous person’s unreasonable little demands and eccentricities could then be transfigured in Lewis’s mind into a cross to bear, a hair shirt, an opportunity to demonstrate that his faith had humbled him.
    I have more sympathy for the young Lewis (and his brother) than Lewis had for himself — more than Wilson has, too. In their memoirs, Warnie and Jack both try repeatedly to capture the particular manner that Albert had of vexing them; you can sense their frustration at not being able to get it right, at failing to convey just how bad things could be. Their grievances do sound minor, but they’re revealing all the same. In a memoir that was later condensed to serve as the introduction to a volume of his brother’s letters, Warnie explained why Jack avoided inviting Arthur Greeves, the boy who lived across the street and who would become a lifelong friend, into their family home:
    My father would certainly have welcomed his son’s friend very cordially, but not for a moment would it have occurred to him that the two boys might want to talk together, alone. No: he would have joined them, inescapably, for a good talk about books, doing nine-tenths of the talking himself, eulogizing his own favorites without regard to their interests. Two bored and frustrated youths would have been subjected to long readings from Macaulay’s essays, Burke’s speeches, and the like, and my father would have gone to bed satisfied that he had given them a literary evening far more interesting than they could have contrived for themselves.
    Albert Lewis was, furthermore, perpetually anxious and prone to hysteria, particularly about money. He did not hide this from his children. In
Surprised by Joy,
Lewis writes of how seriously he had once taken his father’s frequent, melodramatic talk of the poorhouse: “All security seemed to be taken from me; there was no solid ground beneath my feet.” Albert was exaggerating, but until Jack grew old enough to understand that these panicky warnings were mere “rhetoric,” he believed them, and was terrified that his family would soon be begging on the street.
    Albert, although essentially kindhearted, didn’t really listen to Jack or Warnie, usually got whatever they told him about themselves wrong, and then could never be persuaded that he had misunderstood them. (This imperviousness occasionally became a serious problem, as when he sent the boys to a small boarding school run by a sadistic headmaster who eventually had to be institutionalized.) When they were all at home, he insisted that his sons be, in