Book Review:

A Grief Observed

C.S. Lewis

C.S. Lewis published

A Grief Observed

under the pseudonym N. W. Clerk, (the N. W. is Anglo-Saxon shorthand for

nat whilk

, “I know not whom”). In fact, the book was never published under Lewis’ name while he lived. First published in 1961, it has been called an unsettling book and the use of a pseudonym seems to indicate that Lewisknew that it would be found so.Some argue that it is not about Lewis’ anguish over his wife’s, Joy’s, death but instead a fictional account of grief.Mary Borhek summarizes the position of those who hold this view: “The only reasons I can see for believing the book to be a fictionalized account are a desire to distance oneself from the extreme discomfort of confronting nakedagony and an unwillingness to grant a revered spiritual leader and teacher permission to be a real, fallible, intenselyreal human being.”Still others object to Lewis’ candid expressions of anger at God, suggesting the book demonstrates Lewis’ loss of faith: John Beversluis in his

C. S. Lewis and the Search for Rational Religion

states that “There is no case for Christianity in this book. Gone are the persuasive arguments and the witty analogies. Gone, too, are the confidenceand urbanity evident in The Problem of Pain…The fundamental crisis of the book is a crisis of meaning, a crisis of such paralyzing magnitude that Lewis tries to distance himself from it in every possible way.” Noelene Kidd in

A Grief Observed: Art, Apology, or Autobiography?

argues the book “is not simply a record of Lewis’s grief at the loss of his beloved wife…but a dissection of grief itself. The work is chiefly an apologyconcealed by art.” Still others find the book, while a deeply moving account of loss, overly introspective andemotional, verging on the maudlin. Yet Lewis avoids bathos in the book at least in part because of a clipped, prosestyle characterized by short, simple sentences and brief, almost snapshot-like paragraphs. These stylistic devices prevent his wallowing in excessive self-pity; in effect, he becomes a surgeon analyzing a patient’s medical chart.Ironically, of course, he is at the same time both surgeon and patient."Don King has written:"A close consideration of the prose style of A Grief Observed suggests the book may be read as

vers libre

or free verse, poetry relying not upon a regular metrical pattern but instead upon pace or cadence. Furthermore, whereas conventional poetry places a premium upon the foot and the line,free verse finds its rhythm in the stanza. Accordingly, the short paragraphs of

A Grief Observed

function as stanzas linking it with other ostensibly prose works such as Psalms and the Song of Songs. If we read Lewis’ book this way, we may find that while his focus upon traditional poeticconventions in his consciously conceived poetry actually restrains his poetic impulse—that is, hisconcern with form overshadows his poetic sensibilities—the release he experiences unconsciouslyin free verse liberates his poetic impulse so that

A Grief Observed

becomes his greatest poem."As I read

A Grief Observed

I had all this in the back of my mind. Occasionally I would find myself pulling parts of it out and rewriting them in my mind to reflect more of what I saw in a poetic structure. Here are afew of what I did. I found they made the book more memorable for me, rather than saving a few quotations,which is my normal reading practice.

Her Absence

At first I was very afraid of going to places where H. and I had been happy,Our favorite pub, our favorite wood.But I decided to do it at once,Like sending a pilot up again as soon as possible after he’s had a crash.Unexpectedly, it makes no difference.Her absence is no more emphatic in those places than anywhere else.It’s not local at all.I suppose that if one were forbidden all salt one wouldn’t notice it much more in any one food than in another.Eating in general would be different, every day, at every meal.It is like that.The act of living is different all through.Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything.