Finding the Landlord: A Guidebook to C.S. Lewis's Pilgrims' Regress

It took me forty years to get this 165-page book into print!

I first started exploring The Pilgrim's Regress in 1955, and after 20 years I decided to write a helpful guide made up of all I had learned. To my surprise, it took me another 20 years (from 1975 to 1995) to find a publisher who cared enough about The Pilgrim's Regress to publish the guide. That turned out well, because by 1995 I knew more than I had known in 1975.

To my delight, Lewis's chosen illustrator, Pauline Baynes, read the manuscript and created a detailed painting for the cover.

Comments from Five Lewis Enthusiasts

"Kathryn Lindskoog has written a perspicacious and winsome guide to one of Lewis's most underappreciated works, the quasi-autobiographical The Pilgrim's Regress.... Finding the Landlord is a welcome companion volume, helping casual readers and serious scholars alike..."
----Bruce Edwards, editor of The Taste of the Pineapple: Essays on C.S. Lewis as the Reader, Critic, and Imaginative Writer, Professor of English at Bowling Green State University, Ohio.

"Shortly after he became a Christian, C. S. Lewis wrote his semiautobiographical Bunyanesque allegory, The Pilgrim's Regress. This book, which from one standpoint is a marvelously mature witness to the finding of an adult faith, is from another standpoint a visionary satire on post-Christian intellectual life of England between the two World Wars. Few of us today know that background, and hence we miss much of the brilliance of this haunting firstfruit of Lewis's Christian imagination. But Kathryn Lindskoog's notes supply our lack and will help many to appreciate The Pilgrim's Regress in a new way."
----J. I. Packer, Professor of Theology, Regent College, Vancouver

"A timely interpretive tool for a new generation of readers of this difficult but rewarding classic."
--Roger Stronstad, Editor of the CANADIAN C.S. LEWIS JOURNAL

"The Pilgrim's Regress is a book I greatly like and have many times read. . . . But I am aware that some find it difficult. Kathryn Lindskoog in her Guidebook brings a fine mind and a clear style to the task of resolving those difficulties."
----Sheldon Vanauken, author of A Severe Mercy

"This is a very useful book and Kathryn Lindskoog is to be commended for the light she brings to the labyrinth of ideas C.S. Lewis travelled on his way to Christianity. I recommend it both to the first time reader of The Pilgrim's Regress and to those who are familiar with its story."
----Christopher Mitchell, Curator of the Marion E. Wade Center

Review by Thomas Howard
Published in Cornerstone Magazine
Chairman, the Department of English, St. John's Seminary College, Boston
Author of The Literary Legacy of C.S. Lewis

The Pilgrim's Regress has never been one of the favorite of C. S. Lewis's books with his reading public. It is unabashedly allegorical, for one thing, and if allegory is too obvious or slavish it can become boring. Many readers perhaps fear that they will be thus bored if they persevere with the reading of this book. But no doubt the principal reason for the public's skittishness about The Pilgrim's Regress is that it is so allusive, and seems to presuppose one's having mastered almost the whole intellectual history of the West.

The latter fear is not altogether unfounded. If there is any legitimacy to it, Kathryn Lindskoog has done the work which ought to dispel it.

There are too many books and dissertations about Lewis; most of them will prove, mercifully, to be ephemeral. My own guess is that this work by Mrs. Lindskoog may well find a secure place among the few books that ought to remain on the shelf next to Lewis's own work.

The work is nothing if not thorough. We begin with an excellent literary biographical sketch of Lewis. It is a sketch, in the sense that it is brief, and does not mire us in the thousand details that might be diverting, or interesting, but are not strictly necessary to the single course Mrs. Lindskoog is following, namely, to illumine Lewis's text itself. Lewis's early (and persistent) experience of "Joy" is explained and illustrated for us with an economy and clarity that is wholly satisfying.

Scholars will be thankful for the history of Lewis's publications which leads up to, and anticipates, The Pilgrim's Regress . And both scholars and ordinary readers will be the beneficiaries of Mrs. Lindskoog's amazing knowledge of, apparently, every line of Lewis's entire oeuvre, and her mastery of the relevant material in letters, diaries, and so forth. She marshals all of this with an unprepossessing ease that is a rarity in scholarly work.

The approach to the text itself is systematic - almost delightfully so. You begin on page 1, and you are told everything that you might need to know. Latin superscripts are all translated, every image is explained, and allusions are cross-referenced either by way of suggesting their actual sources in literature, or at least of hearing echoes. Scripture, myth, philosophy, and culture are all touched by Lewis's allegorical imagery, and we are assisted at every point. (Again, one is amazed at Mrs. Lindskoog's exhaustive knowledge of things: she is a polymath. She has smoked things out of D. H. Lawrence and Clive Bell, who did their work at a polar distance from Lewis's world, as well as out of Spenser, Bunyan, and the Bible.)

The experiences of John, the protagonist, lead him from fear through desire and lust, and thence through rationalism, thrill, romanticism, squalor, and the barren uplands of "Northern" philosophy (not to be confused with the "northernness" which so haunted Lewis in connection with the tales of Balder, Siegfried, and the Norse gods). The itinerary - West, then South, then North - is pursued for us, with the points in the compass and the landscape itself being explained. If this sounds pedantic, or perhaps even patronizing (Come: I don't need to be taken by the hand in QUITE this solicitous way), then one has not yet put himself into Mrs. Lindskoog's hands. There is no pedantry, and no patronizing. All is helpful, clear, and to the point.

It would not be stretching a point to venture that this study of The Pilgrim's Regress turns out to be as helpful an introduction to Lewis's entire life's work as any book that has yet been written on him and his work. I myself would be happy to give it to anyone as a first book on Lewis - always urging, as would Lewis and Mrs. Lindskoog, that the point, of course, is that one get on into the original text itself.