Love's Labor

By John Elson (

C.S. LEWIS: A BIOGRAPHY

by A.N. Wilson

Norton; 334 pages; $22.50

To a substantial battalion of devotees, Clive Staples Lewis -- the Christian apologist, children's fabulist and Oxbridge don who died in 1963 -- was a contemporary saint. His latest biographer notes with some bemusement that there is a kind of shrine to his memory at Illinois' evangelical Wheaton College: one of his old tankards is enclosed there in glass, like a relic. But difficulties face those who would canonize the author of Mere Christianity and the Narnia chronicles. A.N. Wilson, a British writer who has previously taken sensitive measure of Milton, Tolstoy and Hilaire Belloc, portrays Lewis as a blustery, hard-drinking eccentric whose private life included sequential liaisons with two married women.

The second son of a Belfast lawyer, Lewis never quite recovered from the death of his mother when he was nine. After graduating from Oxford, he predictably became a teacher there. Less expectably, he began to live with Janie ("Minto") Moore, who had been deserted by her husband; she was Lewis' senior by 25 years. Initially lovers, or so Wilson speculates, they settled into a surrogate mother-son relationship after their unorthodox menage was joined by Lewis' elder brother Warren, who had been cashiered from the army for alcoholism.

Four years after Moore's death in 1951, Lewis fell in love with someone young enough to be his daughter. Chicago-born Joy Davidman Gresham, a Jewish convert to Roman Catholicism, had two sons from a failing marriage. When she and Lewis wed -- privately, since Anglican canon law barred his marriage to a divorcee -- he was 58; Joy was 39 and already suffering from the cancer that would kill her in 1960.

In her declining years, Moore had become a querulous termagant. Gresham was an assertive "battle-axe" (Lewis' term) whose brassiness embarrassed his donnish cronies. Lewis' hagiolaters seem almost as uncomfortable with these relationships as he was. Yet both women were central to his life's pilgrimage: Moore as nurturer, Gresham as stimulus to erotic feelings long suppressed. Sainthood, Wilson suggests, is all in the beholder's eye. If Lewis deserved the honor, his love for these two unlikely consorts was a reason why.