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Fairy Tales About Narnia's Chronicler
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18763 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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12 / 1991 |
3,875 Words |
| Author
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John Bremer
John Bremer, a Cambridge philosopher and educator, writes
mostly on Plato. |
ALL MY ROAD BEFORE ME
The Diary of C.S. Lewis, 1922-1927
Edited by Alter Hooper, with a Foreword by Owen Barfield
New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1991
508 pp., $24.95
The possibility of there being such a thing as literary style is a continuing source of wonder. On the one hand, the number of words relevant to the expression of a particular thought seems fairly limited, and the number of syntactical ways in which they can be properly combined is even more restricted. On the other hand, there is the unmistakable fact that one writer--one great writer, at any rate--does not write like another. They differ, and often as clearly as fingerprints or genetic codes.
Part of the difference may come from what is being written about, a matter clearly within the choice of the writer, and part may come from the point of view from which the subject is treated, also within the competence of the writer. But the moment we begin to speak of point of view we are, it seems, crossing over into another domain, passing from the intellectual into the moral. The writer's choice, always present, becomes increasingly significant as we move from subject to point of view. The intellect may be important in the choice of subject, but the manner in which it is treated, while not without intellectual content, is more a moral question, finding its resolution in the ordering of the writer's soul, to use a somewhat old fashioned phrase. The style is the man, and the way in which he exercises his freedom of choice creates his style. This clearly relates to the writer's effectiveness, for we are moved to thought and feeling by the orderliness of the words because they reflect the orderliness of the writer's soul. In common language, we are influenced by the character of the writer (real, sometimes mistaken, and sometimes feigned), and, as Aristotle says, the most powerful single element in any rhetorical situation is the character of the speaker.
Of no modern writer is this more true than of Clive Staples Lewis, whose unfailing popularity (attested by annual sales of 1.5 million copies of his books) is undoubtedly due both to the range of subjects on which he wrote and the unfailingly free and human style with which he wrote. We think, on reading him, that these are the words of an honest man, of a moral man, of a man who writes at peace with himself, of a man who writes out of affection for us and not of a desire for glory, of a man interested in truth and
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