Clive Staples Lewis: A DRAMATIC LIFE by William Griffin (Harper & Row: $24.95; 535 pp., illustrated)

“No one read C. S. Lewis these days except children and Christians,” declared a 1979 New York Times review of a book edited by William Griffin. He and his colleagues at Macmillan took the taunt in good humor, since they were selling more than a million copies a year of Lewis titles.

Still, though his literary criticism and philology remain in print and his fiction continues to appeal to old-fashioned science fiction and fantasy fans, Lewis is almost unknown in literary and academic circles. What sales of Lewis’ books and the hundreds of books about him and his work betray is the enormity of the Christian book market and his stature in it.

To thousands of American Christians, Lewis is a beloved, if unlikely, hero. Reading his “Mere Christianity” has been for many the crucial experience in their conversion or renewed commitment to orthodox faith. The Logos bookstore chain was built on sales of Lewis books and those that his fans went on to read. A remarkable influence for a most Oxonian professor of literature who never visited the States and always regarded himself as an amateur spokesman for Christianity. Lewis smoked and drank with gusto and lived in a small, predominantly male university world of repartee, poetry, philosophical debates, punting on the Cherwell and skinny-dipping at Parson’s Pleasure, eating and drinking clubs devoted to Icelandic or fantasy, and long evenings in pubs like the Bird and Baby. Griffin grandiloquently hails him “a poet as contemporary as Auden and a versifier as funny as Gilbert,” “a satirist as slashing as Waugh and a social critic as clever as Coward,” “a scholar as sharp as Leavis and a mythologer as wise as Tolkien,” although the samples scattered through the book reveal him to be a lesser practitioner of all these arts.

Those who appreciate how unlike their hero is from the many sanctimonious talking hair-dos that pass for popular Christian spokesmen today will be delighted at the intimate portrayal this book affords. They can witness the tortuous stages in his conversion from atheistic humanism to staunch orthodoxy. They can eavesdrop on the creation of his now-famous books, such as “The Screwtape Letters,” “Miracles,” “The Problem of Pain,” “The Narnia Chronicles,” from their haphazard inceptions through drafts delivered as radio talks or readings before his fellow Inklings. They can swell at his camaraderie with lifelong friends J. R. R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, Owen Barfield, fellow writers John Masefield, Dorothy Sayers, W. H. Auden, T. S. Eliot, Arthur C. Clarke, students John Betjeman, Kenneth Tynan, Dom Bede Griffiths. There are glimpses of his mastery of languages and literature: Barfield and Lewis’ joint holiday reading of Aristotle in Greek and Dante in Italian; epistolary banter on Old English and luncheon games in iambic pentameter; challenges to students to pick a verse from any book on his shelves and he’d recite the rest of the poem. He’s lionized as “apostle to the skeptics” in the Atlantic and “Don v. Devil” in a Time cover story. He emerges as a true Christian not only “untinged with modernist reservations and committed to supernaturalism in its full rigor,” but devoting all his earnings as an apologist to a fund from which he dispensed charitable contributions, being there for friends and loved ones when it really counted, counseling correspondents with hard-won spiritual insight. The book climaxes with the affecting story of his most reluctant falling in love, in late middle age, with the Jewish American convert and divorcee, Joy Gresham, and the surprise of finding true happiness, soon tempered by her slow death from cancer.

The whole drama of Lewis’ 65 years flashes by in chronological series of hundreds of “incidents and episodes” in which, in monologue or dialogue, he mostly speaks for himself. The effect is almost cinematic, and the 39 chapters (one for each year from his installation as a teaching fellow at Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1925 to his death in 1963, the same day as John Kennedy), could provide the raw material for a Christian Masterpiece Theater series. Through this parade of brief, seemingly disjointed encounters, one comes to know Lewis as his close friends did--incrementally, through heart-to-heart talks and conversational snatches, social gatherings, stories and reminiscences shared with mutual friends, his writings and talks, exchange of letters. And part of the fun of reading Griffin’s biographical assemblage is figuring out for oneself what made Lewis tick, who he really was.

For me, he emerges as an admirable man who was also an odd duck. His mother died when he was 9, and he was reared more by his public school and then Oxford than by his lonely lawyer father. He remained a lifelong child of Oxford: Once he became a fellow, the university gave him room and board, a regular allowance, ample incentive to remain a perpetual student, and plenty of friends to play word games with. When he went home, it was not to his father in Belfast but to Mrs. Moore, the mother of a friend killed in the war, with whom Lewis lived as virtually an adopted son until he had to put her in a nursing home. His religious conservatism rooted in a thoroughgoing distaste for modernity, he comes across as a donnish, apolitical William F. Buckley Jr., an amiable Waugh. He lived in his ramshackle village house like a dowdy aristocrat, receiving with slight embarrassment big hams and other goodies mailed regularly by his well-off American correspondents and hauled in by his servant.

But there are downsides to Griffin’s method. At times, the book works less like the novel he intends than like a bibliography made into a script. Lewis loved “the monotonies of life,” and many readers will feel they get an overdose in the detailing of his far-from-dramatic daily life. Giving equal weight to the incidental and the momentous may be realistic, but it tends to reduce everything to the episodic. Too, the documentary approach lets Griffin off the hook of making the critical features of Lewis’ life, such as his conversion, fully intelligible. It leaves vital issues such as Lewis’ sexuality shrouded in mystery: Hints suggest that though he struggled with temptation and “fell” occasionally, his disregard of women and commitment to chastity kept him virtually celibate until his honeymoon with his dying wife, and he was relieved that his “whole sexual nature” seemed to die with her.

Though Griffin flatters Walter Hooper, the American who lucked into executorship of the literary estate late in Lewis’ life, with the wish that Hooper will eventually write the definitive biography, “Clive Staples Lewis” should suffice for most.