Ahead of Netflix’s version of the Chroncles of Narnia to be shown early next year, Patrick Little in the Guardian has reclaimed the celebrated writer and visionary scholar Clive Staples ( always known as CS) Lewis for his specifically east Belfast roots. Some of us like to think that Narnia was inspired by Norn Irn – a nice thought anyway. Little has done a very precise piece of tracking to some particular local locations I hadn’t known had inspired Lewis.
The murals of the city have long projected the power of paramilitaries, but in recent years they have also begun to reflect the more positive contributions made by other local people, including the author CS Lewis..
“Looking south with a little east in it, a different world,” he writes in Surprised By Joy. “And having seen it, blame me if you can for being a romantic. For here is the thing itself, utterly irresistible, the way to the world’s end, the land of longing, the breaking and blessing of hearts. You are looking across … the plain of Down, and seeing beyond it the Mourne Mountains.
Because Lewis didn’t write as a self conscious Irishman, his extensive writing is not claimed as part of the Irish tradition– unlike strangely Oscar Wilde thanks perhaps to Micheal MacLiammoir, aka Michael Wilmore who revived and celebrated Wilde’s portrayal of a very particularly slice of English upper class life while identifying as an “Irish gentleman” during the Gaelic Revival. No WB Yeats he.
Closer to our time Lewis was an example of the Ulster Protestant elite who could move to England without any obvious awkwardness unlike for example Louis McNiece, the son of a Carrickfergus rector MacNeice wrote about everywhere from his home town to Primrose Hill north London, the US and Spain during the civil war in the late 1930s. He struggled for a sense of belonging between the beat of the Lambeg drums, the guns of revolutionary Ireland and drinks at the George with fellow creatives involved in his nice life as a BBC Radio Features producer.
CS Lewis’s struggles lay elsewhere but his roots were discernable all the same. He delivered his wartime broadcasts in a posh Ulster accent about life in what is already a different era. He spent part of is honeymoon in the Crawforsdburn Inn, he dedicated a window to the memory of his parents in the family parish church of St Mark’s Dundela on the Holywood Road. But for religion the Screwtape Letters owe nothing direct to Irish Christianity and his commentary on life living and literature owe much more to the very particular environment of an English don in mid C20 Magdalen College Oxford. His private life especially his marriage commemorated in the very moving biographical Shadowlands written by William Nicholson, as a television and theatre play and a film in which his wife Joy’s terminal cancer tests his love for her and his faith.
Lewis’s range was massive, extending from children’s books to literary scholarship, science fiction and spiritual struggle in published correspondence He was a unique character who more than anyone defied the stereotype of the Ulster Protestant as a person with a narrow mind and little imagination.
Former BBC journalist and manager in Belfast, Manchester and London, Editor Spolight; Political Editor BBC NI; Current Affairs Commissioning editor BBC Radio 4; Editor Political and Parliamentary Programmes, BBC Westminster; former London Editor Belfast Telegraph. Hon Senior Research Fellow, The Constitution Unit, Univ Coll. London
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