Books, Arts & Manners: The Road Home

All My Road before Me: The Diary of C. S. Lewis, 1922-1927, edited by Walter Hooper, foreword by Owen Barfield (Harcourt Brace, 508 pp., $24.95)

NO sudden “plunge into a new life,” Warren Lewis wrote of his brother Jack’s conversion, “but rather a slow steady convalescence from a deep-seated spiritual illness of long standing.” In his “spiritual autobiography,” Surprised by Joy, Lewis described that convalescence, an account that begins with the devastating death of his remarkable mother and ends with his conversion proper, first to theism, then to Christianity. He did indeed include much that qualifies as “spiritual illness” but not all, omitting “one huge and complex episode” about which he would steadfastly refuse to speak (even with Warren) for the rest of his life. His diary— incompletely, to be sure, and often disingenuously—at last narrows that gap, showing us more thoroughly and graphically than any other source just what it was that Lewis converted, or recovered, from.

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James Como

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All My Road before Me: The Diary of C. S. Lewis, 1922-1927, edited by Walter Hooper, foreword by Owen Barfield (Harcourt Brace, 508 pp., $24.95)

NO sudden “plunge into a new life,” Warren Lewis wrote of his brother Jack’s conversion, “but rather a slow steady convalescence from a deep-seated spiritual illness of long standing.” In his “spiritual autobiography,” Surprised by Joy, Lewis described that convalescence, an account that begins with the devastating death of his remarkable mother and ends with his conversion proper, first to theism, then to Christianity. He did indeed include much that qualifies as “spiritual illness” but not all, omitting “one huge and complex episode” about which he would steadfastly refuse to speak (even with Warren) for the rest of his life. His diary— incompletely, to be sure, and often disingenuously—at last narrows that gap, showing us more thoroughly and graphically than any other source just what it was that Lewis converted, or recovered, from.