On C. S. Lewis and Endurance

I find this perplexing:

...Lewis’ contemporary appeal may strike some as odd at first because he seemed so firmly planted in the past. A scholar at the University of Oxford in England, he wore shabby tweed jackets, smoked a pipe in the pub and was wounded in the trenches of World War I...

Something firmly planted in the past having contemporary appeal makes no sense...why?  Are my contemporaries truly people who can only appreciate something new, and not anything older than a week?  And for heaven's sake--what exactly is there about pre-sexual revolution things that make people somehow lump them in with pre-modernity?

...Lyle Dorsett, author of “Seeking the Secret Place: The Spiritual Formation of C. S. Lewis,” says Lewis was fearless.

“He didn’t dodge the tough questions,” says Dorsett, who told the story of Lewis’ conversation with his lawyer in “Seeking the Secret Place.” “People find that refreshing...”

That a Christian who writes wouldn't dodge the tough questions? Is that really so rare?  Ladies and gentlemen, tell me--what is so uniquely refreshing about Lewis's engagement with the fundamental questions of life, death, and eternity?  The man worked in the train of a long, long tradition, drawing from a ton of sources and other authors.  Were the churches really guilty of such terminal avoidance of the "tough questions"?

...According to some accounts, Tolkien, a Christian intellectual, helped convert Lewis. He showed Lewis that many of the mythological books he loved to read were Christian allegories...

Didn't know or didn't want to mention that Tolkien was Catholic? And I'm not entirely sure that covers what exactly Tolkien showed Lewis...

...In “Shadowlands,” Joy Gresham is portrayed as a party crasher who alienated a stuffy Tolkien. Some scholars have suggested that Lewis and Tolkien’s friendship suffered because of Lewis’ marriage to Gresham.

“Tolkien was a devout Catholic,” says Dorsett, Lewis’ biographer. "He found her quite abrasive.”

Gresham, though, snorts at the suggestion that his mother damaged Lewis’ friendship with Tolkien.

“It never happened,” he says...

What on earth does Tolkien's Catholicism have to do with his perceptions of Lewis's wife?

So there's good moments in the piece as well, but--it could have been a great deal better. Why is his writing enduring? Because he was an astute observer and critic of modernity, because he told the truth in remarkably clear prose, and because he wrote well about enduring realities--God, man, the world, the created order, the spiritual combat--rending his writing just as enduring.

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