All My Road Before Me: The Diary of C.S. Lewis, 1922-1927

National Review, Dec 2, 1991 by James Como

More than anything else Lewis wanted to be a poet; and as much as anything else this diary is about the writing of the narrative poem Dymer, wherein, as Lewis put it, "a man ... on some mysterious bride begets a monster: which monster, as soon as it has killed its father, becomes a god." One need not be guilty of what Barfield calls "over-elaborated psychologism d'la mode, our twentieth-century rococo" to assemble the pieces of prematurely dying mother, alienated father, the multi-purpose Mrs. Moore (mother surrogate, pretend wife, instrument of punishment upon God/father, who allowed the death of mother), and benumbed spirituality. Chronology bears out the paradigm. Lewis took up with Mrs. Moore shortly after the publication of his cycle of lyrical poems, Spirits in Bondage; very shortly after the publication of Dymer Albert Lewis died; and within two years Lewis converted.

Was he, as Barfield has suggested, emerging from the husk of his previous immaturity"? Not entirely, I think; rather he was hounded (as Lewis put it), then liberated, becoming what Hooper has called "the most thoroughly converted man" he has ever met. In All My Road before Me (the title is from Dymer) Lewis is lost; this revealing and central document shows us, among many things, just how lost. And Hooper makes exactly the right point: "This story may have begun in self-indulgence, cynicism and sin, but it ended as an enduring exemplum of Christian charity-and of Divine Economy."