The news of George Sayer's death on 20 Ocotber 2005 reached me through a message of 15 December in the present forum. What follows here is a little tribute I want to pay to George Sayer, whom I met in 1991 in Malvern and whose CSL biography, Jack (1988), I translated into Dutch in 1996.
I can’t say I admire this biography. To be sure I am very glad to have it, but it is far from excellent or definitive and I know Sayer was quite ready to admit this. I often think his book on Lewis might have been better kept at the level of a long personal memoir, without need of being also a balanced and well-ordered fund of facts. George Sayer’s significance as an authority on C. S. Lewis doesn’t seem to lie in any thorough or generally fascinating “biographication” of the subject. It is the way he could and did act as a responsible and kind provider of personal memories.
The single most valuable piece of testimony which I know he has given on C. S. Lewis is a passage in his review of A. N. Wilson’s biography of Lewis, which book was published less than two years after his own:
“If the treatment of Lewis himself had been on the whole as good as that of the other characters, and Wilson’s pages on some of the books, I should have little but praise for Wilson’s biography. Unfortunately, it is seriously flawed, and in one vital respect wrong-headed. This is his belief that Lewis and Joy [Davidman] had sexual intercourse before the Christian marriage that took place in the hospital. This is a most important matter; if it is true, it shatters Lewis’s credibility as an honest man and a Christian moralist. For Lewis not only believed and taught that sexual intercourse outside marriage was for the Christian utterly wrong, he told his brother and a few of his closest friends (I had the honor to be among them) that the registry office marriage was a formality to enable her to stay in the country and that any living together as man and wife was, of course, out of the question. If at the time of such statements he was making love with Joy, he was a contemptible liar and a hypocrite. But I am sure that those who knew the secret [of their civil marriage], and indeed all his friends, had no doubt that he was an honest man who practiced what he preached.”
(Crisis, November 1990, reprinted in The Canadian C. S. Lewis Journal No. 74, Spring 1991, p. 16.)
This and more from that review was repeated almost verbatim in Sayer’s afterword to the 1994 re-issue of Jack. One change he made was to replace the words This is a most important matter by This is a most serious charge.
The value of this passage is not, for me, that Sayer goes on to refute this particular piece of Wilsonian gossip by one or two facts he checked. There is no end to that kind of enterprise; and Sayer in his own book was perhaps himself technically no more accurate than Wilson. What I think important in George Sayer’s reaction is that it provides a safeguard for one crucial element in any right understanding of his friend. We are not invited to share Jack’s view of sex and marriage, nor even anyone’s view of that view. But Sayer makes us realize that you can’t without serious confusion have a high regard of Lewis while cheerfully believing that he wasn’t practicing what he preached.
This I think is essential sanity; and I feel that this sanity has infused all of George Sayer’s contributions to our knowledge and understanding of C. S. Lewis. Along with other signs of his deep familiarity with the subject, it makes his contributions invaluable.
