Sherwood Wirt on the Last Interview with C. S. Lewis (part 3)

drawing published in Decision magazine
based on Wirt's photo of C. S. Lewis

On March 17, 1975, the Portland C. S. Lewis Society was privileged to meet with Dr. Sherwood Wirt, editor of Decision magazine. In May of 1963, Dr. Wirt conducted an interview with C. S. Lewis. It was to be the last that Lewis gave. The following November C. S. Lewis died.

The interview was first published in the September and October, 1963, issues of Decision magazine. It has been reprinted in God in the Dock.

The following is the final part of an edited transcript of Dr. Wirt's remarks to the Society.

QUESTION: How do you think Francis Schaeffer and Lewis would have gotten along?

DR. WIRT: Well, Schaeffer would go after him on scripture right away. I suppose Lewis would say he was not a theologian and take refuge in the Renaissance.

QUESTION: Did Lewis say anything more about his theology of space than the comment in the interview?

DR. WIRT: He said it would be a terrible thing to take sin to the other planets. If we took good things, the gospel, that would be a quite different matter. But he didn't say much more than that. I didn't ask him too much about it. He certainly had a vivid mind in this area of educated life on other planets. This whole thing is fascinating. It's delightful, a work of genius.

QUESTION: Do you think Lewis would have been interested in seeing men land on the moon?

DR. WIRT: It seems to me that C. S. Lewis lived in the world of his own imagination. I don't think it would have interested him much. I think that what he was telling us was not really about outer space. He was using the intriguing attraction of life on other planets as a way of inviting his reader to other things. I think Lewis had an ax to grind in all of these books. Didn't he always have a spiritual message? He was trying to show the futility of the materialistic culture in That Hideous Strength. He did a beautiful job. Planners were going to come in and whack out all these little English villages, and it turned out that the planners were of the devil. Well, that was a spiritual message. I don't think the photos Mariner has taken of Mars, for example, would have interested him. He had Mars in his mind--take it or leave it.

QUESTION: Why do you think some people find Lewis hard to understand?

DR. WIRT: He's an Englishman. We have a cultural problem here. I'm used to it. I've lived over there, and I understand (to a degree) the way they think, so I make the adjustment. But, it is English writing at its best. It gets down to simple terms but maintains a high level of thought. Others tend to become very fusty and obscure, but I don't think we can ever charge Lewis with being obscure; sometimes difficult but never deliberately obscure like some writers.

QUESTION: In the interview, Lewis recommended some books that helped him. Do you know anything about Bevan's book Symbolism and Belief?

DR. WIRT: Yes, I looked it up once. It was very hard going, very difficult. But I can see why he would like it. I had read Otto's The Idea of  the Holy. I had studied it in seminary so I knew something about his idea of the numinous. But Symbolism and Belief just makes me feel as though I'm not educated.

Let me go back and make one more point. It's true that Lewis was a traditionalist. It's true that he loved the Church of England. I'm sure he loved the old cathedrals, the old hymns, the old music. It's true that he loved the great classics of the faith and the King James Bible. But I think that if we were to peg Lewis just as a traditional Anglican on that level that we would completely miss the point. Because he loved the Lord Jesus Christ. He was spiritually a semite just like we are. Now, a lot of English people aren't like that. There's more anti-semitism in England than there is in this country. Some of them talk the way we talked around here before World War II. Part of it goes back to Dickens and Shakespeare--the image of Fagin and Shylock. But Lewis was over all that. He loved the Jews. He loved Jesus. He was a man who went back beyond the tenth century, or whatever, to the first century. I think that we ought to give him that honor.

Lewis wasn't a low churchman. You can ask, "Did he believe in missions?" But he won more people to Christ than any missionary. He had more influence on the 20th century than any other Christian of our time--whether preacher, saint, or whoever. This man had a bigger impact and is still having it.

QUESTION: Does Billy Graham read Lewis?

DR. WIRT: He has read some of Lewis. Billy is in many ways an enigma. He sometimes comes across as a Carolina farmer, and it is deceptive because he's very widely read. He insists that he is not an intellectual. He has a real humility, and it really puts you out in left field. Billy has an amazing ability to come through on a simple level, but he's much more complex than that. So though you could say he's not the type for C. S. Lewis, on the hand he's reading all the time. He reads The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Chicago Tribune.

QUESTION: How would you rate Lewis in the perspective of the whole Church? For example, in relation to Augustine or, in this century, Chesterton?

DR. WIRT: He criticized Chesterton. When I quoted Chesterton to him that was the one time he got quite sharp. I said that someone had asked Chesterton why he joined the Church. Chesterton replied, "To get rid of my sins." And Lewis quickly came right back and said, "That's not right." I wish I'd had that on tape because he exploded at that. But I know he was an admirer of Chesterton. Chesterton was a fascinating person. He's in the same category with C. S. Lewis. They think alike. I must confess that some of Chesterton leaves me bewildered. I've read his Orthodoxy, but some of it I just don't get.

As far as Augustine is concerned, I didn't ask him this, but I'm sure he was a great admirer of Augustine. I think you've got to remember the essential thrust of the two men. Lewis was a Medieval/Renaissance teacher. That was his job. He was not an apologist for the Christian faith. This was all added on. It got to be the tail that wagged the dog. He got to be very popular as an exponent of Christianity, but his life work was in this other field.

Now, Augustine as a young man wrote one book on philosophy, which is lost. When he was 33 he became a Christian. For the rest of his life, and it was a long life, he wrote all his books. It takes a life time to read them. I don't think anybody has ever completely read everything Augustine ever wrote. It was all apologetic. He was writing as an apologist, as a defender of the faith, as a theologian. He set the course for the Roman Catholic Church. It didn't follow it completely, which is why Calvin could go back to Augustine to defend the reform position. Because he had the evangelical position. The Roman Church departed from that into the medieval type of cultural trend of Christianity. Augustine would never have gone along with their ideas of salvation by semi-works. He would have thrown that out. They picked up his theology, but only a part of it.

But the influence of the two men, Augustine a thousand years after he wrote and Lewis a thousand years after he wrote, would be different because Lewis wasn't aiming in that direction. He wasn't a theologian. He wasn't a churchman in that sense. So his influence is going to be sort of incidental. It's a terrific influence, but it was not what he intended with his life. His life was spent in other directions. God just added this to it. Whereas Augustine's was spent writing about the Christian faith.

Now, I was just really not interested in Augustine's argument with Pelagius on the Trinity. It's tedious for me to wade through all that theology, but when I get to the man in his Confessions, it's beautiful. He comes through as a human being. In his own life time priests were reading his Confessions for their own spiritual welfare, which is a beautiful thought. I wish somebody could say that about my confessions. But to be honest with you, I could never write my confessions the way he wrote. I couldn't be that honest. I'd probably get sued. Lewis never really wrote his confessions. Surprised by Joy is just a series of gaps, as you know. The most unforgettable line in Surprised by Joy is where he tells about being seduced by his dancing teacher. He said she said, "Don't you love the smell of bunting?" And he said, "I lost my heart to her." Just like that. And that's all you know. Of course, it would be wise not to put that in. Augustine could put it in, but we can't today. It's just as well. But there's so much that Lewis doesn't say. I guess that's part of his genius.

(The written content in this post is copyright of the Sherwood Wirt Estate and The Portland C. S. Lewis Society. The drawing of C. S. Lewis is copyright of the Sherwood Wirt Estate and Decision magazine.)

Sherwood Wirt on the Last Interview with C. S. Lewis (part 2)

Sherwood Wirt

On March 17, 1975, the Portland C. S. Lewis Society was privileged to meet with Dr. Sherwood Wirt, editor of Decision magazine. In May of 1963, Dr. Wirt conducted an interview with C. S. Lewis. It was to be the last that Lewis gave. The following November C. S. Lewis died.

The interview was first published in the September and October, 1963, issues of Decision magazine. It has been reprinted in God in the Dock.

The following is the second part of an edited transcript of Dr. Wirt's remarks to the Society.

QUESTION: Didn't Lewis believe that people come to Jesus in different ways?

DR. WIRT: He told me that God has a habit of bringing people into the Kingdom in ways he especially disliked. So he said he had to be careful. That has helped me many times when I have tended to criticize some of the hotshots.

QUESTION: What did you first read by Lewis?

DR. WIRT: I think The Great Divorce was the first book I read, when I was in seminary. I was very much intrigued by it. Also, his Broadcast  Talks. I remember how he irritated Arthur Koestler because he was making Christianity credible. Nobody else was doing it. It was a great source of irritation to some people. He was on the intellectual scene and able to deal with these people.

QUESTION: What did you think of Lewis's account of his conversion in Surprised by Joy?

DR. WIRT: Kicking and struggling and eyes darting in every direction. I thought it was beautiful. In fact I asked him about that because our emphasis is on choice, and it seemed that he wasn't saying that. He said, "I was decided upon." Yet, he didn't compromise it when he said that the most controlled action is also the freest, which is a paradox. He did allow the fact that there was some choice in choosing the Christian life. But his main, essential point was that this was God's doing and not his. And I'm all for that.

QUESTION: You said that when the interview got started Lewis turned very sober, and yet there is much humor in some of his answers. Did he see it as humorous when he said it?

DR. WIRT: Oh, yes. There was a twinkle in his eye. I asked him specifically why he wrote in a light vein. He said that he chose this deliberately rather than the heavy approach because he felt that this was the kind of writing that appealed to readers the most. I didn't mean to say that he was sober all the way through. He had some nice interchanges, but he was businesslike. He wasn't there to waste his time.

I read that he had a tremendous correspondence, all of which he kept up by hand. People would write him from all over the world. He had nobody there to help. He had no typewriter, no tape recordings. I don't think he had a telephone there. It was just so barren and English, you couldn't believe it. His housekeeper was very stern, no nonsense. Everything in that place was. Well, we walked through this one room into the other room and came out to the sitting room for tutorials where he would sit and talk to his students. Back in there where he would do writing was just the barest of furniture. There was this old clock, and as I recall, no heat in the room--no electric coil or anything like that. You would just put on another sweater.

QUESTION: Was he still teaching at Cambridge at that time?

DR. WIRT: Well, he was still there. They wanted him. I don't know if he was actively teaching at that time. He was still in his "digs." Now, he was at Oxford for many years, and then he made the change over to Cambridge. Cambridge made a big thing out of this. And he had settled there for life. He did retire, I think, from active teaching. I don't know what his relationship to the University was at that time.

QUESTION: Did he answer more than you asked for?

DR. WIRT: On the contrary, he gave you exactly what you asked for, and that's what scared me. For example, President Eisenhower was a Kansas farmer, and he would keep rambling, and you would have to bring him back to the point. But not this man.

QUESTION: Did Lewis consider himself an Anglican?

DR. WIRT: Lewis considered himself a layman in the Anglican Church. He wasn't as disgusted with the clergy as Muggeridge is. Muggeridge is absolutely fed up with the clergy because he thinks they are the most naive and gullible people in the world. But not Lewis. I think he said somewhere that he didn't like to sing hymns. I can see that, because he's just not the hilarious, booming type at all. I think that he had a layman's sincere respect for the clergy and for the church.

One thing I was going to tell you. I mentioned his smoking. I got the feeling that he was trying to kill himself--that after his wife died there was no more real zest for living. It was the smoking that brought on the heart attack. Honestly, I never saw anybody smoke so rough. He smoked continuously for an hour and a half. So, I just got the feeling that he was turning himself into a chimney. I felt sorry for him. I used to smoke, and I know what heavy smoking can do to you. I knew in my heart that he couldn't last at that rate. I didn't expect it to happen quite so suddenly, only two months after I visited him. But I knew this man couldn't last, because he was 65 or so. I attributed it right at the time to the fact that I knew his wife had died. I knew that he was very much in love with her, and this was the great love of his life. He had waited 56 years and had 4 years with her, much of it spent in pain. I think maybe he felt cheated. Of course, what he felt comes out in A Grief  Observed. It's remarkable to read. (COMMENT: At one time he wanted to quit smoking, but he said it was a full time job.) I suppose he would have liked to quit because he knew that was the way to health. But my point was that at the time I talked to him he didn't care. He was just living marking time.

QUESTION: Was he working on anything at that time?

DR. WIRT: I didn't ask him--yes I did. He was working on Letters to  Malcolm.

QUESTION: Some people have seen a change in his writing after his wife died and have suggested that he might have lost his faith. Do you think the change in tone they detect is due to this weariness with life you mention?

DR. WIRT: Oh no, he never lost his faith. That is a very superficial accusation. He was still going to church, and he was still conducting services as a lay reader, fulfilling the various functions as he was invited to. But I think it was more of an inner, unconscious thing of not expecting much of life. He'd had his great love, and now that chapter was closed. He didn't expect anything more, and so it was just a case of how the rest of his life was spent. He died in the faith.

(The written content in this post is copyright of the Sherwood Wirt Estate and The Portland C. S. Lewis Society. The photo is copyright of the Sherwood Wirt Estate.)