This peculiar biography more nearly resembles a diary with running asides and connecting passages than it does a conventional life and letters of a famous writer. Year by year, from 1925 to 1963, Griffin traces the actions and thought of the Oxbridge don who, almost against his own intention, accomplished more than anybody else in his time to restore Christianity as a credible understanding of reality.
A tiny book not mentioned by Griffin, George MacDonald's allegory The Golden Key, foreshadows the actual earthly course of C.S. Lewis. "I have never concealed the fact that I regarded him as my master," Lewis remarked of MacDonald in 1946. "I know hardly any other writer who seems to be closer, or more continually close, to the spirit of Christ himself." The moral imagination of MacDonald moved Lewis, as it had moved G.K. Chesterton a generation earlier, to open the eyes of young and old to that transcendent realm of being so contemptuously ignored by the scientism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
All life is an allegory, Chesterton tells us, and we can understand it only in parable. In that strange fascinating symbolic tale The Golden Key, a boy and a girl, Mossy and Tangle, wander hand in hand through the forest of Life, the shadow place, and then lose one another at the gates of death; yet they are reunited at the rainbow's end. Such a pilgrimage through the dark wood of our time is the subject of Lewis' first prose work, The Pilgrim's Regress (1933), a book that has influenced this reviewer mightily. Through all of Lewis' writings there runs a powerful sense of the poignancy of the human condition: Bewildered, we trudge along labyrinthine ways until, all unprepared, we are called to an account. Life is short, the average sensual man is driven by will and appetite, and desperately do we require the grace of God.
Griffin's painstaking record of Lewis' pilgrimage over four decades (with flashbacks to earlier days) reminds us of the poignancy of a good man's progress toward the rainbow's end. Lewis found his Golden Key, his awareness "that God was God," by 1929. Not until 1956 did he find his Tangle, in the person of Joy Davidman, and soon he was parted from her by her death. In 1963, he went upon the final journey that ends, God willing, at the door which the Golden Key will unlock. Lewis has left to us a map of sorts, pointing the way to the little house with the narrow gate, "but the many will be too chill and tender, and they'll be for the flow'ry way that leads to the broad gate and the great fire." A great walker in the English countryside, Lewis has seemed to some worth following, up hill and down dale, despite the perilous attractions of broad gate and great fire.
This Dramatic Life (which distinctly is not a fictionalized biography, though some of its minor details may be conjectural) gives us the true Lewis, virtues and foibles, with much lively detail. Yet, readers lacking any previous knowledge of Lewis may find themselves bewildered by Griffin's fat book: For Griffin does not undertake the biographer's usual labor of fitting all the events of a life into a neat coherent pattern. Nor will people looking for keen analysis of Lewis' thought and influence find this Dramatic Life very helpful: Although occasional shrewd observations may be encountered, in general Griffin leaves the critical task to other hands. No, it is Griffin's aspiration to trace with sympathy Lewis' peregrination through the corridors of life, as revealed for the most part in Lewis' own words and those of his
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