SURPRISED BY JOY (238 pp.)-C. S. Lewis-Harcourf, Brace ($3.50).
C. S. (for Clive Staples) Lewis is a High Anglican Lorelei in the gown of a Cambridge don. The author of The Screwtape Letters lures not to shipwreck but salvation, and many a troubled 20th century secularist who came to scoff at Lewis' faith has fallen prey to his urbane style and good sense. Years ago, he was a highly troubled secularist himself ("I had tried everything in my own mind and body; as it were, asking myself, 'Is it this you want? Is it this?' "). Surprised by Joy is an autobiographical mirror held up to a questing soul, and across it flash revealing images of a time, a place, and a class. For Lewis' memoir reflects a public-school England-more courageous than moral, more devoted to good form than to the good-that shaped many men who still make headlines. This England, demi-paradise and demi-hell, is the inevitable setting of Lewis' own personal search for God.
Decent Godless People. The world wore a smiling mask in his childhood: "good parents, good food, a garden to play in." Born in Belfast in 1898, Lewis was reared in the Church of Ireland, but his parents' religion was sheer rote, the kind T. S. Eliot was to satirize in the line: "Here were a decent godless people ..."
Death tore the mask off a happy childhood and an easy faith, when his mother died of cancer. "To this day I do not know what they mean when they call dead bodies beautiful. The ugliest man alive is an angel of beauty compared with the loveliest of the dead."
A year later, young Lewis was in the hands of the ugliest man alive. "Oldie," as the boys dubbed him, was the half-insane master of a decrepit boarding school, "a big, bearded man with full lips like an Assyrian king on a monument, immensely strong, physically dirty." Smacking his lips after breakfast. Oldie would gaze round the classroom, pick the day's victim: "Oh, there you are, Rees. you horrid boy. If I'm not too tired, I shall give you a good drubbing this afternoon." When he could, Lewis would withdraw to an oasis of private joy-books, nature and the music of Richard Wagner.
From Oldie's floggings, Lewis graduated via a preparatory school to college fagging, a fetch-and-carry round of misery in which the New Boy was always jumping at the whim or whip of the "Bloods," an athletic elite corps. At Chartres, as he calls his school, Lewis, a lifelong bachelor, lost his virginity to a dancing mistress, and the remnants of his Christianity to his house mother. The house mother was running "the mazes of Theosophy, Rosicrucianism, Spiritualism; the whole Anglo-American Occultist tradition . . . From the tyrannous noon of revelation I passed into the cool evening of Higher Thought, where there was nothing to be obeyed, and nothing to be believed except what was either comforting or exciting."