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

2.5 stars, Metaphorosis reviews

Summary
C. S. Lewis' diary for the years 1922-1927 - after the war, while he was finishing his studies and struggling to find a paid position that could support him and his household.

Review
Feet of clay – that's invariably what you find when you read an autobiographical document. At least that's my experience, and it holds true here.

That said, I'm not a big reader of biographies, and this one, to quote Lewis himself on someone else's diary, “consist[s] almost entirely of the most hum drum and ordinary events.” The diary, often completed in arrears, is largely a bibliography of Lewis' reading, his daily chores, his interactions with his lifelong friend and co-resident Mrs. Moore (mother of a Lewis companion killed in WWI), and his social schedule. Nonetheless, it generally held my interest.

What we find, overall, is that Lewis is a voracious reader, a determined deep thinker, a dutiful man, a snob, and a prig. There's a lot of the search for authority and sense of duty we see in Narnia, and the appreciation of beauty in the Silent Planet trilogy, but relatively little of the humor found in either. While Lewis here is not yet a Christian, it's evident how his thinking will one day tend that way.

Lewis is both smart and intellectual. He translates Icelandic sagas from the original for fun, reads widely, and works hard. He rates each conversation he has by how elevated it was and whether he and others did good work in discussion. He's also, often, and insufferable snob, often denigrating the folk he meets as vulgar and incapable. And that's only counting people of ‘his class'; he complains constantly about poverty, and there's no question his life is hard in many ways. However, ‘the servant class' barely get a look in, except in noting how many children they have, and how they must be unused to solitude, living in such close quarters. Virtually every woman he meets is also rated in looks; most of them are plain, but some are nice anyway.

Lewis, in this period striving constantly to find a paying Fellowship that will allow him to support himself, Mrs. Moore and her daughter in security, is also keenly aware of how others are doing and how they're perceived. He enlists others in what seems a very cruel scheme to mock T.S. Eliot's poetry by submitting disguised parodies in the hopes some magazine will take them for the real thing. Whatever its true intent, it comes across as jealousy. I'm leaving aside commentary that perhaps could be partly excused by the timeframe – notes about women, blacks, Indians, Jews – e.g., that ‘women are bores until they are forty'.

While there's a biographical appendix with information about some of Lewis friends and colleagues, it's often difficult to follow who all the people are, aggravated by abbreviations and nicknames. For example, Dotty (Dorothea Vaughan) appears heavily in the final years of the diary – apparently a friend of Mrs. Moore's daughter Maureen, but also somehow a tremendous imposition that they cannot avoid. I just went with the flow, and tried not to worry that I often had little clear idea of who was being discussed.

Lewis is somewhat hyperbolic in the early years, often describing a book or passage or situation as the best he's ever seen. I looked up some of the poems referenced, and was unimpressed. He also spends the bulk of the period working on his narrative poem, “Dymer”. I can't say I've read it, but I've looked through it, and found it not to my taste. For a man whose prose clear and relatively simple, his poetry is (and feels) carefully, ponderously constructed.

The Foreword hints heavily that Mrs. Moore took great advantage of Lewis and that since she had access to the diary (and Lewis often read from it to her), we should take descriptions of her with several grains of salt. Perhaps seeded by that warning, it did seem to me that Mrs. Moore would have been hard to live with – demanding, whiny, and irritable. But we don't have her side, and frankly Lewis himself seems like a man I wouldn't enjoy spending much time with.

The diary doesn't cover the periods most readers will be intrigued by – the writing of his classic SFF books or his conversion to Christianity – though it does mention his first meeting with J.R.R. Tolkien. It does, however, give insight into Lewis' own view of himself during his long struggle to find a way for himself and to pay his own expenses rather than relying on an allowance from his father. I don't know that I can recommend it to many, but for those seriously interested in Lewis formative academic years and literary outlook, this is worth reading. If you want to preserve your view of Lewis as the sensitive genius behind Narnia, you may want to skip it.