Reviewing A.N. Wilson's biography for the London Review of Books back in 1990, C.H. Sisson took seriously the idea that this rout had much to do with Lewis's turn to writing for children:
Lewis was unpopular ‘in the English Faculty in Oxford, and indeed in the University at large’. ‘He disliked his colleagues at Magdalen.’ ‘Even colleagues who were Christians ... noticed that his variety of Christianity did not extend to meekness, or even necessarily to politeness.’
A notable debate took place in 1948 in the Socratic Club, when Elizabeth Anscombe – represented by Wilson as being as tough and unscrupulous in argument as Lewis himself – ‘thoroughly trounced’ him in argument, and showed up his inadequacy as a philosopher.
This occasion seems to have had an extravagant effect on Lewis, arousing ‘not least’, according to Wilson, ‘his fear of women’. ‘Once the bullying hero of the hour had been cut down to size, he became a child, a little boy who was being degraded and shaken by a figure who, in his imagination, took on witch-like dimensions.’
Lewis, who is said to have preferred boys’ books in the second half of his life, became a real – if perhaps somewhat unwholesome – success as a children’s writer with The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, ‘being stung back into childhood’, Wilson plausibly informs us, by his defeat at the Socratic Club.
Going back to Popper for a moment, his reply to Wittgenstein was surely a joke. A joke by Popper sounds like no laughing matter, but I have been told that he was very aware when writing in English that it was his second language, so concentrated above all on making himself clear. His writing in German, by contrast, can be wittier and more allusive.
Elizabeth Anscombe and her philosopher husband Peter Geach eventually retired to Bishop's Castle in Shropshire, where Geaches can be found to this day. Anscombe was an acolyte of Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose philosophy dominated the second half of the 20th century.
So was Norman Malcolm, who agreed with a point I made in the after-dinner discussion when we had him as a guest of out philosophy society at York. If felt like a laying on of hands from Wittgenstein himself - I get much the same feeling when Frank Muir's son applauds one of my witticisms on Bluesky.
