by larry gilman » March 1st, 2006, 12:54 am
What's interesting about the officemate's remark about Lewis going back to atheism is that it is a member of a class. I've noticed that deflationary legends of this type tend to gather around many admired writers: if nothing factual can be dug up, then something gets made up. I have heard at least five or six remarks of this sort about Henry Thoreau, for instance: from the interesting claim that he didn't live two years at Walden Pond, only a weekend (!), to the claim that he could well afford to have odd ideas, since he was wealthy by birth. (He didn't and he wasn't.) Always from people who "heard" it somewhere.
What happens, I think, is that some people are haunted by a voice from behind the mirror that whispers to them that they aren't living as fully, as well, as virtuously, as passionately, or as something as they could be. That there is something sham or automatic or dead about their inner self. And then along comes some admired figure, Lewis or Thoreau or whoever, and the very fact that this figure lived at a pitch beyond the norm seems a judgment, a rebuke, a threat to the person secretly self-convicted of mediocrity. So the psychology of denigrating the great is often embarrassingly, nakedly obvious: insecurity issuing in aggression.
Though one must grant that the fans of figures like Lewis sometimes do trot out their gal or guy like a human Macy's Parade balloon that will Shock and Awe the Opposition by their Sheer Excellence. A religion-doubting friend of mine writes, "I'm a little tired of CS Lewis always needing to be around to rescue the current dominant practice of Christianity from its near-ubiquitous stupidity." Hm, touche.
"Every light gathers to itself shadows." --- Ursula K. LeGuin (close paraphrase of something she wrote in an essay)
Sincerely,
Larry Gilman[/i]