CS Lewis - Obscene, Bigoted, Hater of Literature?
I found this amusing quote about CS Lewis from Touchstone Magazine’s Blog “Mere Comments,” which I recommend and have just added to the blogroll.
The December 2006 issue of Harper’s magazine includes an excerpt from a January 28, 1951, letter by Hugh Trevor-Roper, Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford, to Wallace Notestein, Sterling Professor of English History at Yale, on the subject of C.S. Lewis.
Trevor-Roper wrote:
Do you know C.S. Lewis? In case you don’t, let me offer a brief character-sketch. Envisage (if you can) a man who combines the face and figure of a hog-reever or earth-stopper with the mind and thought of a Desert Father of the fifth century, preoccupied with meditations of inelegant theological obscenity; a powerful mind warped by erudite philistinism, blackened by systematic bigotry, and directed by a positive detestation of such profane frivolities as art, literature, and, of course, poetry; a purple-faced bachelor and misogynist, living alone in rooms of inconceivable hideousness, secretly consuming vast quantities of his favorite dish, beefsteak-and-kidney pudding; periodically trembling at the mere apprehension of a feminine footfall; and all the while distilling his morbid and illiberal thoughts into volumes of best-selling prurient religiosity and such reactionary nihilism as is indicated by the gleeful title, The Abolition of Man.
Meow comments, to be sure. But I think, if Lewis ever knew of this, he must have at least relished the comparison to the Desert Fathers, perhaps over a secret dish of beefsteak-and-kidney pudding.