AS USUAL, LACK OF CHARITY LEADS TO BAD READING: A reader rightly takes issue with one aspect of the big Payne-book-post below:

Lewis would have destroyed those letters because at that time (the 1950s) homosexuality was still illegal and its practise could land you in jail, destroy your reputation, embarrass your family, and have any number of nasty consequences. Lewis was a public figure and knew his correspondence would be read by people other than himself and might some day be published.

He destroyed his correspondent’s letters out of charity, not disgust or hostility. Your reaction is–for you–surprisingly “present-minded” and lacking in insight.

It doesn’t sound as though the Payne book was really worth the anger and distress it seems to have caused you! Forgive me–I don’t mean to play the analyst, but your response to this book seems so uncharacteristic.

No, that’s totally fair. I definitely was wrong to conflate Lewis, operating in his own time and his own position, with Payne, holding him up as a model in 1981. By the time I reached that section of the book I was unwilling to cut her any slack, and the fact that she seemed to present the Lewis quotes without any context or sense that some aspects of his situation and mental framework were problematic or no longer applicable made me a) do the same thing, taking Lewis badly out of context, because I b) assumed that Payne was nostalgic for the attitudes of an earlier era. Both of those are really bad reading-moves, and I shouldn’t’ve made them.

As far as why the book upset me… well, a couple things: 1. It did have some insights, as I mentioned. In some ways that makes the huge problems seem worse!
2. It really was recommended to me. It’s incredibly hard to find anything worth reading on the whole God-and-gays subject; thus extremely disappointing to read something on a recommendation and find out it’s unhelpful to say the least.
3. I mean… the book gets into all kinds of very raw personal issues, and does so in a way I found clumsy and lacking in understanding.
*shrug* Now I’ve read it, and it’s over; so I think I’ll go have lunch with Ratty.