The 100 best nonfiction books: No 22 – A Grief Observed by CS Lewis (1961)
This powerful study of loss asks: ‘Where is God?’, and explores the feeling of solitude and sense of betrayal that even non-believers will recognise
Robert McCrum
Monday 27 June 2016
“N
o one ever told me that grief felt so much like fear.” From its famous opening line, A Grief Observed propelled its readers into a no-man’s-land of mourning and loss. It dramatises bereavement and ruthlessly confronts the desolate survivor with an insistent and overwhelming question: “Where is God?”
Lewis’s answer to this existential conundrum resonates through the rest of the book with a kind of tangible fury: “Go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double-bolting on the inside. After that, silence. You may as well turn away. The longer you wait, the more emphatic the silence will become. There are no lights in the windows. It might be an empty house. Was it ever inhabited? It seemed so once. And that seeming was as strong as this. What can this mean? Why is He so present a commander in our time of prosperity and so very absent a help in time of trouble?”
Even a confused non-believer can appreciate the deep sense of betrayal here. In good times of happiness and security, you might have no sense of needing any consolation and might even assume that God will not be available when he is needed. For a believer, writes Lewis, bitterly, “the conclusion I dread is not ‘so there’s no God after all’, but ‘so this is what God’s really like. Deceive yourself no longer.’”
Much of his text is quasi-theological; other parts have a self-help flavour that quickly morphs into lyricism: “Sorrow,” instructs Lewis, “turns out to be not a state but a process. It needs not a map but a history, and if I don’t stop writing that history at some arbitrary point, there’s no reason why I should ever stop. There is something to be chronicled every day. Grief is like a long valley, a winding valley where any bend may reveal a totally new landscape.”
A Grief Observed is an unsettling book for a secular age, plunging the reader, as it does, into allusions to St Augustine, considerations of heaven and eternity, coupled with some intense, self-analytical discussions about separation, solitude and Christian suffering. Some of Lewis’s exclamations are raw and modern. “Cancer, and cancer, and cancer. My mother, my father, my wife. I wonder who is next in the queue.”
Once the reader has tuned his or her sensibility to Lewis’s wavelength, this unsentimental, even bracing, account of one man’s dialogue with despair becomes both compelling and consoling in several intriguing ways not necessarily associated with death. As Rowan Williams has written: “If the anguish of loss can be honestly lived in (not ‘through’), it must be with a clear recognition of the impossibility of possessing or absorbing anyone we love.”
Indeed, some of Lewis’s best passages recall the intensity of an earlier and very passionate essay, The Four Loves: “We have seen the faces of those we know best so variously, from so many angles, in so many lights, with so many expressions – waking, sleeping, laughing, crying, eating, talking, thinking – that all the impressions crowd into our memory together and cancel out in a mere blur.”
This series of nonfiction greats does not typically narrate the backstory to the classics it selects, but the circumstances of A Grief Observed are worth repeating. Throughout his life, “Jack” Lewis was a man tortured by the tragedies of love. He was born in Northern Ireland in 1898, enjoyed a quasi-public school education in England, and then served as an officer in the first world war, where he was quite badly wounded in action. For him, the horror of the trenches was just another kind of association with death. He had lost his mother as a small boy, aged 10. In Surprised by Joy, he says that, when his mother died, “grief was overwhelmed by terror” at the sight of her dead body.
Thereafter, in honour of a pact made on the battlefield with a fallen fellow soldier, he formed a highly unconventional relationship with Jane Moore, a woman 26 years older than him, whom he referred to as “mother”, and who eventually died of dementia in 1951.
When, in 1956, he abandoned his bachelor security for Joy Davidman, an American poet, he experienced a kind of conversion to the joys of feminine intimacy, and also acquired two stepsons through his marriage. This late flowering was cut short when Joy was diagnosed with cancer. Four years later, she was dead. Her death plunged Lewis into the crisis of faith he addresses in A Grief Observed. Perhaps he was more deeply wounded by his loss than he realised. Lewis died a week before his 65th birthday in November 1963.
The typescript of this fiftysomething page text [reference: Readers’ Edition, Faber, 2015] was submitted to Faber as the work of a pseudonymous author, Dimidius, by a literary agent, Curtis Brown, who declared he was neither at liberty to reveal the author’s name, nor much interested in further inquiries about it. The first person to read the text, TS Eliot, a Faber director, claimed to have “guessed the name of the author”, typically kept his hunch to himself, recommended immediate publication and requested a less contrived pseudonym. (Dimidius, in Latin, implies “cut in half”.) CS Lewis at once suggested an alternative, and A Grief Observed by NW Clerk was published in the autumn of 1961. Thanks to Eliot’s connections and support, this little book attracted a disproportionate attention for the work of an unknown. When Lewis died a couple of years later, early in 1964, his estate gave permission for the book to be republished under his own name, adding to its growing status as a contemporary classic.
A signature sentence
“The time when there is nothing at all in your soul except a cry for help may be just the time when God can’t give it: you are like a drowning man who can’t be helped because he clutches and grabs.”
Three to compare
CS Lewis: Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life (1955)
Joan Didion: The Year of Magical Thinking (2005)
Paul Kalanithi: When Breath Becomes Air (2015)
A Grief Observed is published by Faber (£7.99).
