I now come to the next to last factor: C.S. Lewis’ near-perfect “retention” of everything that he ever read. Of the twelve factors that comprise my framework, I suspect most C.S. Lewis aficionados are aware of this rare talent, and many might believe it is the single most important one. And with good reason—for it is the stuff of legend.
Lewis had extraordinary powers of “Retention”. Taken in unison with his unparalleled powers of “Comprehension,” these two comprise a compelling case for Lewis. When we add in several other factors, such as the massive number of books that Lewis read, his broad fields of learning, and the fact that he read nearly everything from the 16th century, I believe it is “plausible” that C.S. Lewis is the “most erudite person in history.”
Lewis’ Unparalleled “Retention”
What is the case for Lewis’ near-perfect retention? To be candid, it is based on anecdotes. There were no tests administered which would lend scientific validity to this claim; there are only remembrances. But then there are a great many such stories from people who worked with him and knew him well.
Oxford Lore
There are many tales in Oxford lore about the perfect retention Lewis had of virtually everything he read. With regard to his prodigious memory, Lewis said that he was “cursed” with not being able to forget anything he read. His reputation was renowned–so much so that students and fellow Oxford professors often put Lewis to the test. To my knowledge, there are no reports of Lewis failing to perform on these memory challenges.
Kenneth Tynan
(Kenneth Tynan was a student of Lewis in the 1940s. He later became a renowned writer and theatre critic and was the quintessential “angry young man” of the 1960s.)
Perhaps the classic example of this “test” was reported by Kenneth Tynan. The way he described the “memory game” is pretty much how it played out with other students, and faculty members. It went like this:
- Lewis would turn his back to Tynan and allow him free access to his bookshelves (estimated to be 3,000 books in his Oxford quarters).
- Tynan would choose a number from one to forty, representing a specific shelf in Lewis’s library. He then selected a number from one to twenty, representing the position of some unidentified book on that shelf.
- Tynan would retrieve this book from Lewis’ bookshelves, without showing Lewis the book cover, or revealing any clues as to which bookcase, and which shelf it came from.
- Tynan then selected a number from one to a hundred, for the page; and then a number from one to twenty-five for the specific line on that page.
- Tynan then read aloud a line from this unidentified book.
- Within a sentence or two, Lewis raised his hand and announced “STOP!”
- Lewis immediately identified the work, its author, and proceeded to set the line in its proper “locational context” including its position in the book and the topic it related to.
- Next, Lewis continued to recite the text, finishing the sentence, then the rest of the paragraph. He then went on for several pages, reciting verbatim from the original text in the book.
This so-called, “parlour trick” that C.S. Lewis had performed for Kenneth Tynan was challenging even when the text of the book was modern English. One can imagine the escalating difficulty if the text were in a different language.
Richard Selig
(Richard Selig was an American Rhodes Scholar and student of C.S. Lewis.)
One story illustrates this escalating difficulty. Stephen Schonfield, in his book In Search of C.S. Lewis, tells of the farewell dinner when Lewis left Oxford for Cambridge. Lewis commented to Richard Selig, an American Rhodes Scholar, that he was having a problem with writing poetry:
“’The difficulty is that I remember everything I’ve ever read and bits pop up uninvited.’
“Surely not everything you’ve ever read Mr. Lewis?”
“Yes everything, Selig, even the most boring texts.”
Selig proceeded to go to the college library, took out a volume of a long and little read poem, and returned to the dinner event.
The book he selected was Siege of Thebes by John Lydgate, a contemporary of Geoffrey Chaucer. Written in 1421, it is a poem with 4,716 lines written in the Middle English of the late Medieval era. The Siege of Thebes is considered by Oxford students to be the single most boring book in the Bodleian library.
Selig read a few lines, as best he could since it was written in Middle English.
“Stop!” said Lewis, who lifted his eyes toward the ceiling and began to recite the poem in the original language. He stopped after ten lines or so and looked at Selig, now silent. Conversation was slow to resume at that end of the table.
Other accounts of his amazing memory are sprinkled throughout the recollections of his friends.
John Walsh
(Dr. John Walsh was a historian and Research Fellow at Magdalene College, Cambridge and later an Emeritus Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford.)
“He was a very nice man. Kind. Faintly alarming. But then that made him rather more attractive in some ways. There was an unpredictable element about him. He was quite amazingly learned, not in a brow-beating way. He just seemed to have read everything that anybody else could conceivably have read. And he had an amazingly retentive memory. I came in once having read the works of John Calvin . . . found a very striking passage in Calvin, and quoted it to Lewis, who said: ‘Ah, John, but do you remember how he goes on. And he then quoted the next four lines, to my astonishment.”
Douglas Gresham
(Douglas Gresham was the younger of two sons of Lewis’ beloved Joy Davidman Gresham, and the author of several books about Lewis.)
Douglas Gresham writes in his foreword to A Grief Observed “Helen Joy Gresham, the ‘H.’ referred to in this book, was perhaps the only woman whom Jack ever met who was his intellectual equal. . . They shared another common factor: they were both possessed of total recall. Jack never forgot anything he had read, and neither did she.”
George Sayer
(George Sayer was a student and later a close friend of C.S. Lewis. He is the author of Jack, perhaps the most admired biography of C.S. Lewis.)
“Everyone recognized the breadth of his knowledge. He was widely read and had a remarkable memory that enabled him to quote at length from any author who interested him and even from some who did not.”
— Jack: A Life of C. S. Lewis by George Sayer
William Empson
(William Empson was a protégé of I.A. Richards at Cambridge, and later an eminent literary critic and ardent advocate of the “New Criticism”.)
“C.S. Lewis was “the best-read man of his generation. Lewis read everything and remembered everything he read.”
James Como
(James Como is a retired professor at York College of the City University of New York and a founder of the New York C.S. Lewis Society, the oldest society for the appreciation of C.S. Lewis in the world.)
“He could remember almost everything he read, not generally but word for word. When an undergraduate complained of not being able to remember what he read, Lewis said the opposite, too, was burdensome: quite a claim. Someone would then choose a book at random, read part of a page, and Lewis would complete that page from memory: a parlour trick, perhaps, but one he would repeat.”
— C. S. Lewis: A Very Short Introduction by James Como
Richard Ladborough
(Richard Ladborough was Lewis’ closest friend at Cambridge.)
“Lewis took it for granted, with his usual modesty, that his hearers knew the text as well as he did. It is now common knowledge that Lewis’s memory was prodigious and that he seemed to have read everything. The authors and books I liked hearing him talk about most were, I think, some of his own favourites: Dr. Johnson (with whom he had many affinities), Jane Austen . . . The one author he was usually silent about was himself.”
— Remembering C.S. Lewis: Recollections of Those Who Knew Him by James Como
Derek Brewer
(Derek Brewer, a Chaucer scholar, studied at Oxford under Lewis in the mid-1940s.)
“Lewis listened with extreme intentness, not, I am all too sure, because of the fascination of my words, but because it was his duty. Once, in the middle of my essay, his phone rang, I stopped, and he answered it in the other room. When he returned after a five-minute interruption, he repeated verbatim my last sentence as far as it had got. He had an astonishing verbatim memory and could repeat whole passages of prose to illustrate a point arising in discussion. Given any line in Paradise Lost, he could continue with the following lines.”
— The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, Volume 3: Narnia, Cambridge, and Joy, 1950-1963by C. S. Lewis
What Does This All Mean?
A mind of this magnitude is a divine gift.
Is C.S. Lewis the most erudite person in history? That we cannot know for certain. But we can assess the evidence and formulate our own conclusion. I believe my premise is “plausible” and that it is reasonable to hold this view.
So, too, would some of his fellow Inklings and contemporaries. Lewis’ fellow Inklings spoke with awe and admiration for his incomparable knowledge and cerebral firepower.
Charles Williams said: “. . .perhaps the most powerful and best-trained intellect in the world”
Owen Barfield said: “To argue with Lewis ‘was like wielding a peashooter against a howitzer’”
J.R.R. Tolkien said (to a young student named George Sayer): “You’ll never get to the bottom of him.”
I do not know the nature of C.S. Lewis’ extraordinary powers of “Retention” other than it being “a divine gift.” In the next post I will discuss several of Lewis’ practices that enhanced his natural gift.
I will say this now: I do not believe it was “photographic memory.” I will reveal why in the next post.
Part 19 | Part 20 | Part 21
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