THE "TRUTH"
283
novels, they lose their humanity-as did Lewis himself-just as Joyce's
characters never do.
A corollary to the demonstration of "character is fate," and again
not superimposed by the author but inherent in the materials, is a
"macrocosm-microcosm" structure. Almost everything Lewis did is a
miniature illustration of his whole life. This is true, in a general
sense, of everybody although usually people of Lewis' complexity and
talent periodically break through their own pattern. But Lewis' life is
an illustration of Blake's parable that eternity is in a grain of sand, and
thus the whole biography is made up of microcosmic summations of
his whole fate. He was always doing something wrong, different, and
characteristic. At what he regarded as the climactic moment of his
life, the acceptance of the Nobel Prize, he characteristically made a
mistake, slight, to be sure, but nevertheless showing him stilI to
be
the "endearingly incompetent boy." As Lewis descended down the
red carpet to King Gustav to receive the award, he stopped too far
from the King and bowed unnecessarily low. The King had to motion
him forward. And when he went fishing with Claude, he lost two
complete trolling spoons.
IV
But it is all
de te tabula
after all.
If
Lewis is a series of antitheses
encircling a void, he is also a kind of exaggerated Everyman, sus–
pended between the bright stars and the dark hole.
If
he remains
an electronic mystery, he is also like a series of receding mirrors,
which, as we peer into them, give us back only a distorted picture
of ourselves. Mankind is a mystery, but every man is representative
of mankind and every man is an Everyman, including Lewis. Here
m Lewis' story are all the basic male fears and loss fantasies : loss
of potency, loss of creativity, loss of wives, mistresses, friends, loss of
roots, loss of identity, all acted out literally. It is as if Lewis had
been chosen to be the scapegoat for the modern male, and the read–
ing of this magnificent biography is genuinely cathartic-pity for the
man, fear because he is a man like ourselves. Likewise every man
has tucked away in him somewhere some little pocket of emptiness.
Lewis' pocket happened to turn out to be a chasm. Americans al–
ways like to think that what happens to them happens because they
are Americans. But the burden of being an American is minuscule
in comparison with the burden of being a human being. That
Lewis
was totally unequal to the task is only a reminder that no one bears
that burden with entire honor.
