AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY – All My Yesterdays

This is a remarkable and unusual book which charts the growth of a man through a highly coloured and varied career towards an inner life where deeper values prevail. 

The account begins with childhood, parents and the adventurous years of Cecil Lewis’s development through youth to maturity. He recounts his survival, flying with the Royal Flying Corps over the front line of the Somme Battle in 1916 and following this, almost without pause, taking up the romantic and unheard of assignment of travelling to Peking to teach the Chinese to fly! 

But the high-spirited adventure of these early days is followed, even more remarkably, by Cecil Lewis’s lucky chance of helping to found the BBC. To have been in at the start of two of the greatest social developments of Western civilisation flying and broadcasting would have been enough to fill out many men’s lives: but for Lewis they only marked a pattern which continued right up until the end of the Second World War. 

Over those wonderful twenty years between the wars Lewis wrote a highly successful book, directed the first Bernard Shaw films, picked up an Oscar for the script of Pygmalion in Hollywood, was married three times and had at least two highly romantic ‘affairs’ en route.

But the fact that his life is unusual, and truly remarkable, does not appear until these happy-go-lucky years are over. Throughout the story there have been hints for the careful reader that another level of thought has been growing in his private world and this surfaces, just after the end of the Second War, with him seeing the emptiness and aimlessness of his own life and finding by chance – as often happens – inspiring possibilities in the teaching of a little-known spiritual leader, someone he could really believe in as a talisman and whose teachings he could aim to follow for the rest of his life. 

For the next twenty years, until he reaches 70, Lewis tells of his full involvement in the ideas of Georgi Ivanovitch Gurdjieff and the book is an account of how this inner growth affected the rest of his life. 

Gurdjieff’s work is now widely recognised throughout the world, but a good deal of what Lewis has gained from it has not yet been fully recognised for what it is; a guide of great importance in the future destiny of Western civilisation. Over the last 25 years until the age of 95 and now working alone, Lewis has charted his own development and, wide awake to the crisis that confronts us all, closes the book with a long life’s judgement of the inescapable fruits of present trends but at the same time gives us hope for the future.

Source: Publisher's summary printed on cover