Here is another recent Letter to the Editor in TLS:
C. S. Lewis's letters
Sir, – In his May 7 review A. N. Wilson gives a too-clever-by-half
account of Volume Two of C. S. Lewis's Collected Letters. Mr Wilson
highlights Lewis's archaic "funny language"; he does not mention how
often Lewis is being intentionally Johnsonian to his brother Warren in
the very passages cited. Nor does he relate the "funny language" of
letters in Anglo-Saxon, Middle English, Latin, and Greek which Lewis
composed brilliantly. Wilson then brands Lewis as a misogynist, as
good a stick as any these days. However, he conveniently neglects the
sensitive and sympathetic letters to Dorothy Sayers, Sister Penelope,
and Ruth Pitter.
I remember that Sir Maurice Bowra, no Lewis devotee, had the fairness
in his memoirs to describe Lewis as highly cultured. Wilson finds only
a pervasive coarseness. He then goes on to make the cavalier remark
that it is Lewis's coarseness which secured his success as a Christian
apologist and children's writer.
Combine this with Wilson's equally cynical review of the Letters of
Dorothy L. Sayers in the TLS (March 31, 2000), and one begins to lose
faith in his objectivity. What is truly coarse, moreover, is the
condescension to Walter Hooper's indefatigable editing of Lewis's work
over the past four decades.
Wilson characterizes the "faithful" Walter as the editor of his
"Master's" letters, as someone who could misspell T. S. Eliot's name
(Mr Wilson should check the MS of the letter), and as the supplier of
otiose footnotes. The sum of this is A. N. Wilson, the enfant
terrible, sniping at his betters with his customary panache. A senior
editor like Hooper who has published over twenty of Lewis's works
deserves better.
ANDREW CUNEO
Department of English, Hillsdale College,
Hillsdale, Michigan 49242
(From TLS website; posted here by Arend Smilde, Utrecht, The
Netherlands)
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