On C. S. Lewis, Research, and Kindred Spirits

This past week I got to do something I've been wanting to do for years: visit the Wade Center at Wheaton College. Ever since I wrote my dissertation on Lewis in the 1980s I've been aware that the Wade Center is the mecca for Lewis scholarship in the United States. Clyde Kilby, a professor at Wheaton, is often credited as the man who "discovered" C. S. Lewis and helped make his writings known in this country. Kilby struck up a correspondence with Lewis, visited him in England, and, eventually, became friends with Lewis and Lewis' brother, Warnie. As a result, Warnie began to send his brother's letters, papers, and books to the Wade. Today the center holds about 2,500 books from Lewis' personal library, as well as personal books, manuscripts, and papers from British writers of period associated with Lewis: J. R. R. Tolkien, Dorothy L. Sayers, G. K. Chesterton, George MacDonald, Owen Barfield, and Charles Williams.

It has been said that Disneyland is the happiest place on earth, but, I tell you, for someone like me, the Wade Center is the happiest place on earth!

Here's a shot of me at work at the Wade Center. One of the great benefits of being in this setting is the immediate acccess you have to research materials. For example, one day I was reading through Lewis' letters and came across a reference to a 17th century spiritual work called The Way to Christ by Jacob Boehme. Though I had never heard of Jacob Boehme, the reference was interesting because Lewis wrote the letter in 1929, some two years before his conversion to Christianity. I asked one of the archivists at the Wade if I could see Lewis' copy of the book and within a few minutes, I was holding it in my hands. I could see what passages Lewis had underlined, and I could read his annotations in the margins of the book. It was so cool!

As I planned and anticipated my trip, this is pretty much what I envisioned myself doing. I saw myself mining the vast resources of the center. In my more optimistic moments, I saw myself making some remarkable discovery that would change the face of Lewis scholarship forever. I imagined myself putting in long days of reading and notetaking and then returning to my little apartment in the evenings, perhaps to do more research--or maybe watch some baseball.

Well, I didn't make any earth-shattering discoveries during my week at the Wade. I did rent a remarkably comfortable apartment from two Wheaton graduates that was perfect and very reasonably priced. I did watch some baseball and even parts of the NBA draft. I did find some great new resources and clarified the direction of my current research project. I also came upon several other topics of interest that I would like to do research on in the future.  Many of these clarifications and new topics came not simply from researching but from talking to the people I met during the week: Chris Mitchell, the Wade Center director and Marj Mead, the associate director; the two archivists who hang out in and supervise the Reading Room: Laura Schmidt and Heidi Truty; Wheaton College professors Jerry Root and Wayne Martindale; and Andrew Lazo, a fellow CSL scholar from Wheaton whose research trip coincided with mine.

Here's a shot of me and Andrew. Andrew is a high school teacher in Houston who spends his summers researching and writing about Lewis--not for his job, not for tenure, but simply because he loves it. The people I met on this trip--that's what I had not anticipated. I was awed by the kindness of strangers, with their eagerness to answer my questions, with their interest in my research project, with their generosity, and with how quickly they became new friends rather than strangers. They took me to lunch; they invited me into their homes; they offered me pipes and scotch (more on that in another post); one even gave me a first edition of a Dorothy L. Sayers book because, as he said, "When I give my books away, I experience two moments of joy: one when I find the book and buy it, the second when I give it away. 

In the space of a few days, I discovered a whole community of scholars, bound together by their common interest in the writings of a British professor who died in 1963. In retrospect, I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised. It was Lewis, after all, in The Four Loves, who noted that it is often common interests that draw us together as friends. He talked about that "aha" moment when we realize that someone else is interested in the same books (or music or movies or gardens or ideas) that we are when we thought we were the only ones.

Out of many great moments in the week, this picture will probably stay with me the longest (unfortunately I don't have a photo of this one).  I'm sitting in the garage of a Wheaton College professor with another scholar who is doing research at the Wade. We're sitting in the garage rather than on the patio because there's thunder and lightning outside (for my Northwest friends, this is real thunder, not the measly, soft rolling thunder we get in the Portland area). We're drinking red wine and smoking pipes (though unlike my more experienced companions, I'm having a hard time keeping mine lit), and we're talking about C. S. Lewis. At one point the other Wade researcher talks for a good 30 minutes about a discovery he thinks he's made from reading the letters of Joy Davidman. He thinks he's found that, contrary to what the Lewis biographies say, Lewis invited Joy to stay at the Kilns the first day they met in Oxford and that the widow of Charles Williams advised Joy on the dress she should wear to make the best impression at her first meeting with Lewis. He meticulously traces the dates and tries to reconstruct the chronology and present the evidence for his theory as the two of us listen with rapt attention. It strikes me that if someone overheard our conversation they would think we were talking about someone still alive, a friend or relative that had just begun an exciting love affair. It also occurs to me that if that same person found out that our intense discussion was about someone long dead, she would think we were crazy or geeky or both.

As the night winds down (at about 2:30 a.m.; the other researcher had a 5:30 a.m. flight), I express my gratefulness for the many kind people I'd met during the week and wonder aloud whether all the folks attracted to the study of Lewis are so nice. Our host says, "I've been lots of places and met lots of folks, and, in my experience, there's no chumps among the lovers of  C. S. Lewis."  I can only hope that he won't change his mind after meeting me!