Lewis biography takes an honest approach

C.S. Lewis: A Life,
By Michael White, Carrol and Graf, 288pp, $25

In external events, the life of Clive Staples Lewis offers little promising material to a biographer. He pursued sedentary work as a literature professor and followed a predictable routine for most of his 65 years. We know next to nothing about his service in World War I (which he barely addresses in his autobiography) and little more about his romantic life, in spite of the play and film ''Shadowlands" that depicted his five-year relationship with Joy Davidman.

But Lewis's life was rich in intellectual excitement and emotional drama. He was in the vanguard of 20th-century fantasy writing, a powerful influence on the academic discipline of English when it was still a relatively new (and suspect) field of study, and possibly the most famous (if not the most successful) writer of his century who attempted to provide an intellectual framework for religious experience. His relationships with his father, brother, and friends were intense and problematic.

And as with many beloved writers, readers turn to Lewis's biographies to learn of these things, the workings of the mind and heart, to try, insofar as is possible, to know the man who brought hours of joy to so many childhoods (''The Chronicles of Narnia") or comfort in a time of loss (''A Grief Observed").

And at this point in the aftermath of Lewis' life, when his worldwide cult following comes all too close to preaching his sainthood, we are in need of biographies such as this, that remind us that he was, after all, just a man -- and a very complicated one. The members of the C. S. Lewis Society of Oxford discuss an angelic, High Church Lewis who was a lifelong celibate -- regardless of the facts that he was married for four years and before that lived with another woman for nearly 30, or that his letters to his lifelong friend Arthur Greaves discuss both masturbation and sadomasochism. Many of Lewis's admirers never seem to grasp that they do him no favors by making him an unfallen angel -- his virtues and accomplishments would have been without merit and his life would have nothing to say to us.

Michael White, the author of a much-lauded biography of Stephen Hawking as well as works on J.R.R. Tolkien and Isaac Newton, does a competent job of depicting Lewis's life in all its richness and complexity. Here is Lewis the failed poet but accomplished prose writer, the conscientious (if sometimes bullying) teacher, who always sought to bring out the best in diligent students but could be remarkably spiteful about pupils he disliked. Here is the expansively generous Lewis, who gave his royalties to charity; who encouraged and praised Tolkien's work on ''The Lord of the Rings" even as their friendship cooled and Tolkien excoriated the Narnia chronicles. Here as well is the Lewis who led a double life as an undergraduate and Oxford Fellow, living with Janie Moore, a married woman nearly 30 years his senior in a relationship he kept a secret from university authorities and never discussed with his closest friends. And here is Lewis the Christian apologist, whose religious conversion horrified his common-law wife and alienated many of his colleagues.

The one problem with this book is that all of these themes were covered much more thoroughly by A.N. Wilson in his 1990 ''C. S. Lewis: A Biography." Every theme in Lewis's life that White addresses he covers adequately, but Wilson invariably does it better, with deeper analysis, more information, and better prose. For example, White is right to point out that Lewis's view of the Christian God changed during his lifetime -- particularly after the death of Joy Davidman. Wilson is better at analyzing how Lewis's religious views changed, and rightly takes Lewis to task for the callowness and bad theology of his early religious works as well as his ignorance of biblical scholarship. Wilson also does a better job, with admittedly little evidence, of the vexing question of Lewis's sexuality. White notes that Janie Moore was ''bossy" and concludes that Lewis, who had lost his mother early in life, ''needed more than anything to be mothered," and makes the rather puzzling comment that his sadomasochistic streak was a ''rebellion" against this ''strongest inner drive" -- a return to childhood innocence. Wilson, on the other hand, sees Lewis's sadomasochism less as a rebellion against the impulse that led him to Moore, but as an integral part of their relationship. Throughout their life together, Lewis was at Moore's beck and call during waking hours, dropping academic duties to run errands or do housework -- ''he is as good as an extra maid," she once commented. Wilson remarks, ''Some men pay prostitutes for humiliation of the most humdrum kind . . . others find emotional fulfillment in being made to scrub kitchen floors or scour out pans."

While White takes up most of the strands of Lewis's life -- his relationships, his fiction, his religious writings, his teaching -- Lewis the critic is maddeningly absent. Admittedly, his fame is due to Christian apologetics and the Narnia chronicles, but he was also a professor of English literature for almost 40 years. White refers briefly to ''The Allegory of Love" and Lewis's other critical works, but says little about them. Thus we get no sense of the contagious enthusiasm and lightly worn learning that made him such a readable critic and entertaining lecturer, and that today cause even non-academics to read works such as his ''Studies in Words" with genuine pleasure. And considering that White devotes an entire chapter to Lewis's literary legacy, it's maddening that he says nothing about Lewis's legacy as a scholar. What, if anything, does the criticism of a man trained in classical languages and pre-Wittgensteinian philosophy have to offer the literature students in a post-Derrida universe? It's a question anyone attempting a thorough biography of Lewis is obligated to tackle. On this as on other topics, Wilson does a much better, if still incomplete, job.

In spite of its failings, ''C. S. Lewis: A Life" is a welcome addition to the growing stack of books on Lewis, in that, unlike most of them, it is actually biography rather than hagiography.