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A Worse Fate. What was exciting his college classmates Lewis describes with direct and unsensational candor: pederasty. "You will have missed the atmosphere of our House unless you picture the whole place from week's end to week's end buzzing, tittering, hinting, whispering about this subject . . . who had 'a case with' whom, whose star was in the ascendant, who had whose photo, who and when and how often and what night and where . . ." Lewis was not tempted; he was bored.
"Peace to them all. A worse fate awaited them . . . Ypres and the Somme ate up most of them."
In the trenches, as a subaltern of 19, Lewis himself was blooded-hit in the back "oddly enough by an English shell." During the postwar decade, first as a starveling poet and then as tutor at Magdalen College, he felt something else at his back-the Hound of Heaven. He fled over the shifting ice floes of intellectual fashion: rationalism, realism, idealism, materialism. Still the Hound pursued, and Lewis was finally backed into a corner that became home.
Along with Christian humility, readers of Lewis will find traces of the snob-inChrist. He calls churchgoing "a wearisome 'get-together' affair . . . Hymns were (and are) extremely disagreeable to me. Of all musical instruments I liked (and like) the organ least." But apart from such culture crotchets. Surprised by Joy is a crisply logical, eloquent statement of faith that makes one man's con version as convincing as it is ever likely to be to another. Lewis is a special type. And yet there is universal meaning in his description of his final crisis of faith:
"You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling . . . the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet ... I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the x/rost dejected and reluctant convert in all England. I did not then see . . . the Divine humility which will accept a convert even on such terms ... a prodigal who is brought in kicking, struggling, resentful . . . The words com-pelle intrare, compel them to come in ... plumb the depth of the Divine mercy. The hardness of God is kinder than the soft ness of men, and His compulsion is our liberation."