Ripeness Was All : C.S. LEWIS A Biography <i> by A. N. Wilson (W.W. Norton: $22.50; 334 pp.) </i>

I shall make no bones about it. I have been in love with C. S. Lewis since my early teens, when an English teacher recommended “The Chronicles of Narnia,” cautioning his very hip charges (what 14-year-olds are not very hip?) that these children’s books were not just for children.

I have no idea if anyone else in the class followed his recommendation (the very hip do not discuss profound reading experiences with one another), but I was hooked by the first chapters (perhaps the first paragraphs) of “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe,” the first volume of the “Chronicles.” It seemed to me that this man wrote about my deepest dreams--the ones one cannot quite recall on waking--and that he did so in an English that stirred the embers of the soul.

Subsequent readings in the Lewis canon (even during my darkest, unbelieving days) have given me no reason to alter that opinion. At this distance, it is easy to say that his works of Christian apologetics are his worst, though even these are awfully good--of their kind. His fictions, even when they fail, are among our noblest imaginings. Of his literary criticism it may be said that no one else--not even the fabled Dr. Johnson--has written better or more lasting stuff.

He is best when he is being autobiographical, so it is not surprising to discover that “A Grief Observed,” his most intimate book and a healing balm to millions of readers, is so often ranked as his masterpiece. Of 20th-Century writers, I find but three or four besides him whose lifetime achievements leave me with the same awed admiration, who give me what Lewis said one could expect of great literature:

“Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality. There are mass emotions which heal the wound; but they destroy the privilege. In them our separate selves are pooled and we sink back into sub-individuality. But in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like a night sky in the Greek poem, I see with myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.”

Now, we who love Lewis (and there are surely more in this category than there are for any other writer of the English-speaking world, dead or alive) have been given a great gift--a biography worthy of its subject.

A. N. Wilson, though not so familiar to American readers, is well-known and -respected in Britain as a good novelist and biographer (he has done lives of Tolstoy and Hilaire Belloc). He is no stylist (the sentence, “Everything on earth is not rational,” which appears on the very first page, could never have escaped from Lewis’ pen). Nor is he the most methodical scholar. Indeed, to Americans, reared in the Ellmanesque-Edelesque school of “more is more,” he may appear downright slapdash. But Wilson, by dint of unerring intuition, has captured the man in all his richly contradictory humanity.

Clive Staples Lewis (“Jack” to his family and friends) was born in 1898 in a Belfast suburb to a middle-class solicitor and his wife. He was the second and last child; and he and his brother Warren (“Warnie”), elder by three years, remained fast friends until Jack’s death in 1963 (on the same day as President Kennedy’s assassination).

When Jack was 9, his mother died, an event that impelled the grief-stricken widower to ship his younger son off to an English boarding school two weeks later. Warnie already was boarding at the same school, an establishment run by an arbitrary tyrant worthy of Dickens. It is hard for us post-Spock Americans to conceive how a loving father could do such a thing, but Wilson makes credible both old Lewis’ love and his utter obtuseness--that was, indeed, the norm for British parents of the period and that E. M. Forster called so aptly “the undeveloped heart.”

From these circumstances, Wilson reads all of Lewis’ emotional development (and undevelopment): his lifelong love-hate relationship with his father, his attraction to sadomasochism, his peculiar relationships with women (especially his decades-long attachment to the difficult Mrs. Moore, mother of his dead wartime buddy), his fondness for an exclusively male camaraderie that also excluded all personal confidence. (No one of the famous Inklings circle at Oxford was ever to speak of wives or children or private suffering. All was drinking, story-telling and verbal pyrotechnics.)

From these peculiar elements, Wilson builds his portrait of the misshapen Lewis, the not-quite-whole adult who after a slow evolution from brilliant debater to bluff but caring Oxford tutor was at last able to pour his heart out--not, God forbid, to friends, but to unknown readers in the dazzling form of well-shaped children’s stories.

What is especially admirable is that Wilson, though willing at all times to look at the things that were wrong with Lewis (and call them by their proper names), never tries to make the inexplicable explicable. He questions Lewis’ assertion in the autobiographical “Surprised by Joy” that his father’s death “does not really come into” his (re)conversion to Christianity. He rightly sees that Lewis was terrified of self-revelation on the subject of his relationship with his father--and perhaps even more terrified that anyone might interpret his conversion in merely Freudian terms.

The largeness of Wilson’s embrace of his material--his willingness to let Lewis be Lewis, his unwillingness to refuse to look squarely at the essential mystery of individual human destiny--pays off in the final chapters. Here was a man destined (it seemed) to write whole and beautiful works out of the pain of his unhealable childhood wounds--in other words, an artist blessed and cursed with the motive that fires all art--but one who would go to his grave still bleeding. For in the sacrament of art, the artist is the redeemer and we are washed and made whole in his blood.

But in these final chapters much more happens than we have any right to expect. Lewis is given a woman in almost as unlikely a manner as Adam was in Paradise. “Do you know,” Lewis confessed to two of the Inklings, “I am experiencing what I thought would never be mine. I never thought I would have in my sixties the happiness that passed me by in my twenties.”

She was Joy Davidman, a loud American divorcee of Jewish antecedents. Lewis could not have thought her up any more than Adam could have thought up Eve. He was, as he archly entitled the book he was writing at this period, “Surprised by Joy.”

The Inklings--Tolkien, Dyson, Coghill et al--could not abide her, but Jack loved her madly. They became lovers, then married (it would seem in that order); and the greatest lay theologian the Anglican Communion has ever produced found himself deliriously happy in a (from an ecclesiastical point of view) questionable union.

The end of the book is best of all, for it ends the way an impossibly good mystery story might. (And, as in a good mystery, it is incumbent on the reviewer not to reveal too much.) Wilson, by the clarity of his insight, is able to show us how all the strands of Lewis’ life come together to create at last, in collaboration with Lewis’ own generous responses to every sadness and disjunction, a man of wisdom and holiness, who at his death knows who he is and where he’s going.

Almost the last image we are given of Lewis is that of the crusty, resolutely undemonstrative Oxbridge don with his arms wrapped around his young stepson, both weeping profusely, comforting each other over the loss of mother and wife. As we may read in the text Warnie was to choose for Jack’s tombstone: “Ripeness is all.”

By eschewing all the false emolments of hagiography and insisting on calling a spade a spade at each turn of events, Wilson has succeeded in showing what few have shown before him--how God can enter a life and, using the most unlikely series of occurrences, transform a man and take him back.