All My Road Before Me: The Diary of C.S. Lewis, 1922-1927

No sudden "plunge into a new life," Warren Lewis wrote of his brother Jack's conversion, but rather a slow steady convalescence from a deep-seated spiritual illness of long standing." In his "spiritual autobiography," Surprised by Joy, Lewis described that convalescence, an account that begins with the devastating death of his remarkable mother and ends with his conversion proper, first to theism, then to Christianity. He did indeed include much that qualifies as "spiritual illness" but not all, omitting "one huge and complex episode" about which he would steadfastly refuse to speak (even with Warren) for the rest of his life. His diary completely, to be sure, and often disingenuously-at last narrows that gap, showing us more thoroughly and graphically than any other source just what it was that Lewis converted, or recovered, from.

Before shipping out to the trenches of the Great War, Lewis and his bunk-mate, Paddy Moore, swore a reciprocal vow: If one were killed, the survivor would care for the dead friend's family. Lewis was already well acquainted with, and quite fond of, Paddy's mother and his young sister, Maureen, who overheard the vow and is the source of our knowledge of it. When Paddy was killed, Lewis set up a household with Mrs. Moore (with whom he had stayed occasionally before the war) near Oxford, where he was an undergraduate at University College. Lewis's father, Albert, quizzically aware of his son's friendship with a woman in her late forties, knew nothing of the household, believing his son to be in residence at his college, as required by university regulations.

During the preceding years Lewis had grown apart, then become estranged, from his father, who was nevertheless the unwitting chief benefactor of this menage. Lewis's diary comments on the earnest Albert (whom he dreaded visiting at the family home in Belfast) are the most distasteful he ever wrote, especially when contrasted with those on the domineering Mrs. Moore, who was "so anxious not to influence" Lewis and "hates a lie above all things." It is likely, too, that the Moore-Lewis liaison was sexual at its origin, as Walter Hooper cogently argues in his introduction (so cogently that one gets the idea Hooper knows more than he is able to say). Whether or not the presumed sexual intimacy recurred during the years of the diary (Mrs. Moore was fifty years old in 1922) is for the reader to decide. (My guess is that it did, for a time.) In any event, the household is a settled affair when the diary opens; it, not Belfast, is "home" to Lewis. And Mrs. Moore, who urged her unenthusiastic consort to keep the diary in the first place, is its primary audience. Lewis regularly read it aloud to her.

We have only a fourth of what Mrs. Moore heard, but it is a provocative, amusing, sometimes gripping, and always interesting (though not uniformly engaging) fourth. Hooper's transitional commentary is elegant and adroit, his notes often compelling, and his Biographical Appendix indispensable. The thread of arresting and indefatigable intellect, foreshadowing not only greatness but specific themes (and even specific passages) in Lewis's later writing, intertwined with the threads of prolonged adolescence, quotidian busyness (often to the point of frenzy), and what would later prove to be settled habit (much talking and walking)-all these, in Hooper's editing, make for a seamless fabric.

From the man who is not yet the converted pagan living among apostate Puritans" that he would later become, we learn that a reminder of Maureen Moore's first Holy Communion "somehow emphasized the dreariness of this most UNcomfortable [sic] sacrament," that her Confirmation was like "the slaughtering of a pig," that he had "never sunk so low" in combat as to pray, and that he was relieved to learn that a certain Price (who beat him out of more than one fellowship) was not "the beetle-faced Jew" with whom Lewis had confused him. No wonder Lewis was beset by both recurring headaches and unsettling dreams-about his mother, an arranged marriage, and his blasphemous response; about attempted stabbings, during which he "behaved like the prig hero of an adventure story"; and about "aesthetes of Satanic sneer," one of whom he converted.

But as Hooper has it in his introduction, "life is more richly textured-or as Lewis would put it, "thicker'-than we expect it to be.... [W]e and all the 'ordinary people' we meet and know are many things at once, full of shading and nuance." The young Clive Staples Lewis was a hardworking and generous man; we see him laying linoleum, providing hundreds of hours of free tutoring (amidst occasional penury), sitting up with a friend who, for two weeks before his eventual death, became a raving lunatic, helping to rescue a young neighbor whose parents horribly abused her. His reading is catholic-some Freud (with real interest in psychoanalysis) and Havelock Ellis, much Chesterton-and his mind largely open (except on Christianity and women; but on the latter his bark is very much worse than his bite).

More than anything else Lewis wanted to be a poet; and as much as anything else this diary is about the writing of the narrative poem Dymer, wherein, as Lewis put it, "a man ... on some mysterious bride begets a monster: which monster, as soon as it has killed its father, becomes a god." One need not be guilty of what Barfield calls "over-elaborated psychologism d'la mode, our twentieth-century rococo" to assemble the pieces of prematurely dying mother, alienated father, the multi-purpose Mrs. Moore (mother surrogate, pretend wife, instrument of punishment upon God/father, who allowed the death of mother), and benumbed spirituality. Chronology bears out the paradigm. Lewis took up with Mrs. Moore shortly after the publication of his cycle of lyrical poems, Spirits in Bondage; very shortly after the publication of Dymer Albert Lewis died; and within two years Lewis converted.

Was he, as Barfield has suggested, emerging from the husk of his previous immaturity"? Not entirely, I think; rather he was hounded (as Lewis put it), then liberated, becoming what Hooper has called "the most thoroughly converted man" he has ever met. In All My Road before Me (the title is from Dymer) Lewis is lost; this revealing and central document shows us, among many things, just how lost. And Hooper makes exactly the right point: "This story may have begun in self-indulgence, cynicism and sin, but it ended as an enduring exemplum of Christian charity-and of Divine Economy."

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