Book Review: The Major and the Missionary

The Major and the Missionary: The Letters of Warren Lewis and Blanche Biggs, ed. Diana Pavlac Glyer (Rabbit Room Press, 2023).

After the death of C. S. Lewis, what happened to the beloved older brother with whom he had shared his life? Until now, there haven’t been many accounts available to the public of the final years of Major Warren “Warnie” Hamilton Lewis.

Douglas Gresham, C. S. Lewis’s stepson, gives us a pretty dire view of those years in his book Lenten Lands. He writes of visiting a sad old Major Lewis, increasingly dominated by the alcoholism he had struggled with for years. “Warnie’s suffering … was too much for me,” Gresham writes, “and, while Warnie fought a valiant rear-guard action, I turned tail and ran.”

This is one reason why I’m so glad to have The Major and the Missionary, a new book edited by my sometime colleague Diana Pavlac Glyer, because it provides a significant alternate perspective on Warren Lewis’s life during that period. It’s a collection of letters between Lewis and Blanche Biggs, a Tasmanian missionary doctor working in Papua New Guinea. Diana kindly endorsed my own book about a Lewis brother’s correspondence with a woman, and she turns out to be just the right person to work on a similar book herself!

Blanche Biggs first wrote to Warren Lewis in October 1968, after reading his collection of C. S. Lewis’s letters. She was thinking of someday turning her own collection of letters into a book, and wanted to ask Warren’s advice on how to do it.

Warren Lewis wrote back a couple weeks later with warm encouragement, and a regular correspondence between the two was quickly established. They had very different lives and experiences to discuss, but also a lot in common. They shared a robust Anglican faith and a love of reading. And from his military days, Lewis knew a little about what life south of the Equator was like, and could sympathize with Biggs’s accounts of the rough weather and the spotty mail service and so on.

Unlike Lewis, Biggs was someone I’d never heard of before, but I found her quite likable. She was a tireless worker among the Papuans, not only striving to heal and eradicate disease, but also training local men and women in the medical field, and at one point buying a motorbike to traverse the rough roads of her adopted country! She was at times unfortunately inclined to stereotype these locals in the way that too many of her generation did, but at the same time she was genuinely invested in their well-being, and worked with and spoke of them as equals.

As for Lewis, in some ways he perfectly fits the mold of an old-school British military officer—a hidebound, strict “law and order” type. “I was born conservative and hate all change,” he confides in one letter. But he can surprise us with a quirky opinion or recollection, like the strange effect on him of a visit to the Buddhist Temple of Kamakura, Japan. He surprises Biggs by telling her about his own writing career and sending her one of his books on French history. And he listens and responds to this feisty woman, some fifteen years his junior, with respect and a willingness to learn from her. Even when her religious ecumenism—a willingness to receive Communion with other denominations, for instance—is a little too much for him, he tries to be understanding.

Anyone familiar with the life of C. S. Lewis will learn as much from what Warren doesn’t say as what he does say. Unlike his brother, who loathed politics of all kinds, Warren shows a keen interest in the subject. He writes frequently about the rash of strikes breaking out across England, and closely follows the turmoil in his native Ulster, getting so riled up that he often has to say “an instant prayer for forgiveness.” One wonders, though he never says so, whether he used to keep his political opinions to himself during his brother’s lifetime.

And of course the reader who’s aware of his alcoholism will notice that he very carefully avoids mentioning it. Over the course of the book, he begins to spend more and more time in the hospital, sometimes for a bad heart or a bad leg, but also sometimes for reasons he says nothing about. He writes bravely and even wittily of his time there—“I flatly declined to indulge in any such foolery,” he says of an attempt to make him do a craft project. But those who know his story might glimpse something heartrending through the gaps in his account.

Perhaps Biggs glimpsed it as well. After reading C. S. Lewis’s posthumous Letters to an American Lady, she writes to Warren, “One thing that struck me in the new book … is the frequent reference to you being away ill. Is it the bad leg that assaults you from time to time?” Warren never answers the question.

But against this terrible difficulty, we can set his own description of this time in his life:

I don’t really find my life a lonely one except in so far as all old age must be lonely owing to the steady disappearance of old friends and one’s loss of touch with and sympathy towards contemporary ideas and morals. But if the present becomes less and less comprehensible, there is the compensating fact that the past becomes more vivid and more real every day—or at least this is what I find, but then I tend to live in the past deliberately, re-reading my old favourite books, ignoring the modern so far as is possible. Wisely or unwisely? I don’t know.

If Douglas Gresham could see only the dark side of Warren Lewis’s later years—magnified, perhaps, by his own grief and guilt over not spending more time with the man—Diana Glyer has showed us that there was more to those years than that. If the darkness was real, so was the happiness Lewis found in books and faith and an unexpected friendship with a woman a world away, and from now on, no account of his life will be complete without that part of the story.

(Cover image copyright Rabbit Room Press)

Book Links:

The Major and the Missionary on Amazon
The Major and the Missionary at Rabbit Room Press

(Note: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualified purchases.)

Goodreads Links:

Losing Our Religion: An Altar Call for Evangelical America by Russell Moore
Bournville by Jonathan Coe

Other Links:

Over at Dickensblog, I have a … well, a semi-review of The Fraud by Zadie Smith.