Is it true that CS Lewis would challenge people to pull any book out of his library, start any line in the book, and he would finish it? I had a teacher tell me that in High School and I was wondering how true it was.
I’ve read the four adult biographies of Lewis (and a lot of other material about him) and I’ve never come across any story quite like that. He may have done this with one or two people with certain selected books, but he didn’t do it in general. Lewis had a pretty good memory, but he wasn’t interested in showing off in that way. There would have been few occasions that he could have done this, since people didn’t come to visit him at his house that much and only his students and a select group of his colleagues came to visit him at his rooms at the university. Finally, he didn’t have a huge library, so this wouldn’t have been a very interesting demonstration. Go back to your teacher and ask him/her for a citation of where he heard this. It’s the teacher’s job to defend his story, not yours.
Sounds very unlikely. Out of character for Lewis’ personality and approach to scholarship. $10 says your teacher heard if from somebody who heard if from the guy who’s brother used to know …
I read the same story about Lewis in a biography, but I can’t remember which one.
Possibly the one written by Douglas Gresham, his step son. Or else just a story told by Walter Hooper, his secretary.
Regards,
Shodan
Lewis’ library had at least a couple of thousand books–I’ve visited Wheaton College here in Illinois where the famous wardrobe has its own little shrine which also houses “more than 2,000 volumes from C. S. Lewis’ personal library,” according to the Wheaton College website.
I know there has been controversy over whether Walter Hooper is a legit figure–he has been accused of writing some of the stuff he subsequently published as Lewis’ own work. There is also a question as to how well he knew Lewis before Lewis died. Is there a definitive conclusion to this debate yet?
I’ve been to the Wade Library at Wheaton College (where Lewis’s books are, along with a lot of other material relevant to the Inklings) a couple of times. I don’t consider 2,000 books a huge library. Douglas Gresham’s book isn’t a complete biography. It’s a memoir of his times with Lewis and with his mother. Nothing Walter Hooper says can be trusted, and in any case he only knew Lewis over a period of a few weeks in 1963 when Lewis was quite ill. If someone can give us a citation where someone who knew Lewis mentions his showing people that he had memorized the contents of books, it would go a long way to answering this question.
There are two libraries that claim to have “the” wardrobe. The other is at Westmont College in California. One is from Lewis’s childhood home and one is from the house he lived in the last 30 or so years of his life. It’s not a very interesting claim in either case. Why should a single wardrobe have inspired Lewis any more than a single lion should have inspired him to create Aslan?