Extract

“Somehow what Lewis thought about everything was secretly present in what he said about anything.”1

- Owen Barfield

“You’ll never get to the bottom of him.”2

- J. R. R. Tolkien

In a 1931 letter to Arthur Greeves, Lewis confessed that he did not always like his students. He admitted, “In every given year the pupils I really like are in a minority.” But he also added, “… but there is hardly a year in which I do not make some real friend. I am glad that people become more and more one of the sources of pleasure as I grow older.”3 For Lewis, “older” meant 33. One of his students who was to become a “real friend” was George Sayer.

Sayer, whose biography of Lewis is considered among the best because he knew Lewis over a span of many years as both teacher and friend, writes of his first experience in meeting Lewis, as well as a chance encounter with one of Lewis’s life-long friends, J. R. R. Tolkien. Sayer relates arriving at Magdalen College and searching for Lewis’s room in New Building (built in 1734—new for Oxford).4 ←71 | 72→He first sees “Tollers” whom Sayer describes as “a neat, gray-haired man with a pipe in his mouth and a puckish face.” Tollers asks, “Are you a pupil come for a tutorial?”

“No,” replies Sayer. “But Mr. Lewis is going to be my...