Thomas Wolfe and C. S. Lewis walk into a bar. Actually, make that a pub, because the only place it could have happened was Oxford, England.
It was the fall of 1924, and Wolfe was in Oxford for a short stay at the beginning of a months- long tour of Europe. As he later wrote to a friend, “I really love the place and thought the few weeks I spent there some of the happiest of my life.”
Other than a year fighting in the trenches of France during World War I, Lewis came to Oxford as a student in 1917 and stayed for the rest of his life (later dividing time between Oxford and Cambridge).
Wolfe would eventually write four novels including “Look Homeward, Angel” and “You Can’t Go Home Again,” as well as many short stories and novellas. Lewis would write “The Chronicles of Narnia” and “The Screwtape Letters” among many other works. But in 1924, all of that lay years in the future. In their mid-twenties, the two men were still unknown to the wider world.
Yet what was known to both of them was an inner ache that gnawed at their hearts and prodded them to search for something elusive that they could not yet grasp.
If the two men had ever met, they would have found they had much in common. They were less than two years apart in age — Lewis was born on November 28, 1898, and Wolfe on October 5, 1900. Both had attended prestigious universities, and both taught English.
In 1924 both men were also frustrated authors. Lewis’s greatest aspiration was to find acclaim as a poet. He had published a book of poetry by this time, though it neither sold well nor received much in the way of positive reviews.
Wolfe had been an aspiring playwright. He wrote a number of one-act plays that were published in the University of North Carolina’s magazine, some of which were performed. He enjoyed similar success when at Harvard, but when one of his plays was rejected by the Theatre Guild in New York, he gave up hope of becoming a playwright and took a position teaching English at New York University.
But their similarities went much deeper: Both men longed for a meaning to life that neither had found yet.
Wolfe’s Effort to Escape
From Wolfe’s later writings, we can surmise that his search for meaning began early in life. The subtitle of Wolfe’s highly autobiographical first novel sums up his assessment of his childhood in Asheville, North Carolina: “A Story of the Buried Life.”
Wolfe’s alcoholic father was often abusive to his mother. His mother eventually moved out of the house, taking six-year-old Tom with her, to buy and run a boarding house called the Old Kentucky Home. It offered 29 rooms to house the many vacationers and tuberculosis patients seeking the clean mountain air, yet not a single room for young Tom to call his own.
In “Look Homeward, Angel,” he wrote, “The first move I ever made, after the cradle, was to crawl for the door, and every move I have made since has been an effort to escape.”
Furthermore, Wolfe’s novels make repeated references to the search for the enchanted city, to remember the lost language. At a writers’ conference he gave an address wherein he described his second novel, “Of Time and the River,” as follows:
And the central idea was this: the deepest search in life, it seemed to me, the thing that in one way or another was central to all living was man’s search to find a father, not merely the father of his flesh, not merely the lost father of his youth, but the image of a strength and wisdom external to his need and superior to his hunger, to which the belief and power of his own life could be united.
Knowing this, it is all the more heartbreaking to read in that novel, “Father, I know that you live, though I have never found you.”
Lewis Stabbed by Joy
Lewis had also known that elusive wonder, that ache that could not be held onto which he would later describe as a stab of joy. The first time he could recall that stab was itself a memory, a memory as a young boy of his brother presenting him with a toy garden he had made inside a biscuit tin.
The bliss of that garden awoke a desire in him, yet, just as Wolfe had described, the sensation passed like a puff of smoke in the breeze. Lewis described the sensation in “Surprised by Joy”:
And before I knew what I desired, the desire itself was gone, the whole glimpse withdrawn, the world turned commonplace again, or only stirred by a longing for the longing that had just ceased. It had taken only a moment of time; and in a certain sense everything else that had ever happened to me was insignificant in comparison.
In time, Lewis came to recognize those stabs as Joy, a Joy coming from beyond, and not found in those sunsets, in those gardens, but coming through them, coming from God.
If Lewis had met Wolfe years later, he could have shared that with him. He likely would also have sought to introduce him to the (Heavenly) Father Wolfe was searching for, who could bring him into that enchanted city, the one “that has foundations, whose builder and maker is God” (Hebrews 11:10). But all of that lay in the future.
Lewis had his own troubled childhood. When his mother passed away before his tenth birthday, “all settled happiness, all that was tranquil and reliable, disappeared from my life.” After that, much as Wolfe grew up in a boarding house, Lewis’s distraught father unwittingly enrolled him in a boarding school worthy of a Dickens novel. A childhood experience that he had wanted to escape just as Wolfe had, one he could only describe in his memoir as “Concentration Camp.”
Wolfe and Lewis’ similar stories are all the more intriguing in light of the sharp turn that Lewis took a half dozen years or so later. For then he found in Jesus Christ all that he and Wolfe had been searching for back in 1924. Or rather, he would say that God found him.
Lewis described his conversion as the result of God pursuing him like a hunter tracking a deer. And when asked by Billy Graham’s “Decision” magazine whether he had made a decision for Christ, he replied, “I would not put it that way. Rather, I was decided upon.”
God’s Mysterious Work
Sadly, Wolfe, a compulsive chronicler of his inner life through his novels, never reported finding that enchanted city nor the father for whom he searched so longingly. He possessed a zest for life and a great confidence in America’s future, yet on the next to last page of his last, posthumously published novel, “You Can’t Go Home Again,” he confessed, “I believe that we are lost here in America.”
In the summer of 1938, Wolfe contracted pneumonia while in the Pacific Northwest. It awakened latent tuberculosis in his lung, and he became seriously ill, suffering excruciating headaches. By the time he underwent brain surgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, doctors determined that nothing more could be done for him. He died only a few days later on September 15, 1938, just short of his 38th birthday.
While still in the hospital in Seattle, Wolfe briefly recovered enough to write a final letter. Knowing he was very sick and unsure how it would all end, he wrote to his former editor and good friend, Maxwell Perkins, reminiscing about their friendship and expressing his hope to see him again if he recovered.
Wolfe also mentioned something about a “hunch” he had. He didn’t explain what his hunch was about, but he claimed he was a changed man: “I know now I’m just a grain of dust, and I feel as if a great window had been opened on life I did not know about before — and if I come through this, I hope to God I am a better man, and in some strange way I can’t explain I know I am a deeper and wiser one.”
What was Wolfe’s “hunch”? What led him to realize he was a grain of dust? What window was opened to him? Why did he think he was a better man? Had he found the father he had been longing for after all, his Heavenly Father? We don’t know. We can only hope that Wolfe took the same sharp turn as Lewis.
But the hope of such a “perhaps,” of the mysterious workings of God, should motivate us never to grow weary in our efforts to bear witness of Christ.
The story of Wolfe and Lewis’ lives provides a needed reminder for all Christians. Young men and women are walking around our towns (and pubs) looking to escape the pain of the past and find hope for the future. They may look to writing, drinking, or a host of other things as part of their efforts to escape or find joy. But they need the church to tell them the truth about the God who made them and sent his Son to redeem them. This is how God introduces people to true meaning and deep joy.
Douglas Falls is a retired PCA pastor who volunteers at the Thomas Wolfe Memorial in Asheville, North Carolina.