C.S. Lewis Died 60 Years Ago Today, Not That You'd Have Noticed
Ten years ago, I wrote about the famous, ironic death day of Lewis, JFK, and Aldous Huxley.
Hello, writerly people.
Whether you’ve noticed or not, I’ve neglected this newsletter lately. We welcomed a new daughter back in July, and I’ve got a few larger writing projects to which I’m giving attention. I do hope to return to this effort in the new year. But, as many of you well know, today represents a significant anniversary in American, Christian, and literary history, and today is my chance to share the one thing I’ve written about it.
They say celebrities die in threes, and November 22, 1963, took that real seriously. Sixty years ago, president John F. Kennedy Jr., novelist Aldous Huxley, and the Oxford Don, C.S. Lewis, all died on the same day. Though at the time, you’d probably not have noticed. Of course JFK’s assassination immediately became a world-historical event. Huxley at the time still enjoyed a level of celebrity status. Lewis, though, died a lonely death in relative obscurity, a dynamic that forms one of the more interesting ironies of the last hundred years. Ironic because Lewis will end up with the longest-lasting legacy of the three.
Several years ago — 10?! — I put some extended thought into this idea in an essay called “Why C.S. Lewis Never Goes Out of Style.” I’m pretty sure I’ve shared this piece here before, but there are a lot more of you now — and you only get so many November 22s, you know. Here’s the first section of the essay and a link to the whole thing, which is at The Atlantic:
Last month marked the 50th anniversary of a bizarre day in history. Three men of significant importance each died on November 22, 1963: President John F. Kennedy, author Aldous Huxley, and author and scholar C.S. Lewis.
On that day, the developed world (appropriately) halted at the news of the assassination of the United States’ 35th president. The front page of The New York Times on Saturday morning, the day after the tragic shooting, read, “Kennedy Is Killed by Sniper as he Rides in Car in Dallas; Johnson Sworn in on Plane,” and virtually every other news service around the world ran similar coverage and developed these stories for days and weeks following.
Huxley’s death, meanwhile, made the front page of The New York Times the day after Kennedy’s coverage began. The English-born writer spent his final hours in Los Angeles, high on LSD. His wife, Laura, administered the psychedelic drug during the writer's final day battling cancer, honoring his wishes to prepare for death like the characters in his novels Eyeless in Gaza and Island. Huxley’s Brave New World depicts a haunting futuristic world where a sovereign, global government harvests its tightly controlled social order in glass jars; the Times obituary writer declared that Huxley’s well-known book “set a model for writers of his generation.”
The news of Lewis’s death, though, didn't appear in print until Nov. 25, and it appeared in the normal obituary section of The New York Times weekday paper. At an earlier point in his life, Lewis enjoyed vibrant community with family, friends, and colleagues displayed famously in his writers’ club, the Inklings—which included, among others, J.R.R. Tolkien. By the time Lewis died, however, many of those relationships had fizzled out, and only a handful people even knew about Lewis’s funeral in time to attend. In one of the new biographies of Lewis by Alister McGrath (the now-definitive C.S. Lewis: A Life), the writer lists eight attendees, and assumes others, at the funeral for Lewis. No immediate family members were present—his brother, Warnie, stayed in bed, too drunk and distraught to venture to the ceremony. Lewis’s stepson, Douglas Gresham, represented the family at the understated memorial.
But amid all of the attention to these three men during the past year—new biographies, films, conferences, magazines, articles—the legacy of Lewis stands out in relation to both those of the 35th U.S. president and of the prescient Brave New World author.
As Henry L. Carrigan, Jr. puts it in Publishers Weekly, “While Huxley is now largely forgotten and Kennedy remains a symbol of lost promise, Lewis lives on through his novels, stories, essays, and autobiographical works.” While I think that oversimplifies Kennedy and underestimates Huxley, the underlying point is worth considering: In one of the great ironies of history, Lewis at his death received less attention than Huxley, and far less than Kennedy. But it may be true that Lewis’s ideas claim the most lasting influence, both on the Christian tradition and on the Western culture beyond.
Here’s that link. Happy Thanksgiving, people. I, for one, am grateful for you.