This actually happened three times, though we don’t have most of the letters that J.R.R. Tolkien sent to his friend C.S. Lewis over the years.

The first letters that changed Lewis’ life were more than letters. Throughout the 1920s Lewis had moved from atheism to a belief in God, relying mostly on philosophical constructs to move, piece by piece, into the Enemy’s camp (from Lewis’ perspective as reluctant convert). Lewis hesitated to convert to Christianity, however. Among the reasons for this hesitation were his concern about the “Christ myth.” While he loved myths, he thought they had little representative value–they don’t tell us much about real life. And he felt the Christ myth was derivative, or even distasteful. Why not turn to Osiris, Dionysus, or Balder and get better poetry thrown in?

Tolkien responded in a few ways. To the first objection, that myths have no value, Tolkien wrote a poem, “From Philomythus to Misomythus“–from MythLover to MythHater, what we now call the Mythopoeia poem. The first lines show a bit of how Tolkien won Lewis to the idea that myths were not just “lies … breathed through silver,” but contained deeper truth than bare fact could tell us:

You look at trees and label them just so,
(for trees are ‘trees’, and growing is ‘to grow’);
you walk the earth and tread with solemn pace
one of the many minor globes of Space:
a star’s a star, some matter in a ball
compelled to courses mathematical               
amid the regimented, cold, inane,
where destined atoms are each moment slain.

The second objection was overcome in a slower process: with long talks and long walks, with beer and pipes and late nights whispering as we did as children.

Now what Dyson and Tolkien showed me was this: that if I met the idea of sacrifice in a Pagan story I didn’t mind it at all: again, that if I met the idea of a god sacrificing himself to himself … I liked it very much and was mysteriously moved by it: again, that the idea of the dying and reviving god (Balder, Adonis, Bacchus) similarly moved me provided I met it anywhere except in the Gospels. The reason was that in Pagan stories I was prepared to feel the myth as profound and suggestive of meanings beyond my grasp even tho’ I could not say in c old prose ‘what it meant’.
Now the story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened (letter to Arthur Greeves, Oct 18th, 1931; Collected Letters, 976-977).

This one-two punch not only brought C.S. Lewis into the Christian faith that he would engender for the rest of his life, it gave Lewis back the idea of “myth” that slid away during his university years. The deepest truths of myth informed all of Lewis’ ideas about literature and philosophy, and was the foundation of his best fiction.

The second life changing moment involved a conversation now kept in the Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, and a humorous note by Tolkien to a publisher.

It is not often that we have the conversation of intimates left to us in history, which probably means that we don’t know know much about history. In one instance, though, Tolkien shared a moment in the mid-1930s, a conversation that Lewis and he had:

L. [Lewis] said to me one day: ‘Tollers, there is too little of what we really like in stories. I am afraid we shall have to try and write some ourselves.’ We agreed that he should try ‘space-travel’, and I should try ‘time-travel’. His result is well known. My effort, after a few promising chapters, ran dry: it was too long a way round to what I really wanted to make, a new version of the Atlantis legend. The final scene survives as The Downfall of Númenor. This attracted Lewis greatly (as heard read), and reference to it occurs in several places in his works: e.g. ‘The Last of the Wine’, in his poems (Poems, 1964, p. 40). We neither of us expected much success as amateurs, and actually Lewis had some difficulty in getting Out of the Silent Planet published. And after all that has happened since, the most lasting pleasure and reward for both of us has been that we provided one another with stories to hear or read that we really liked – in large parts. Naturally neither of us liked all that we found in the other’s fiction (Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, 378).

It is now a famous story. It captures the “double dare” of two good friends, as well as their characteristic writing styles. Lewis was quick to the pen, even if it took the audience a while to get it to their bookshelves. Tolkien was slow, cautious, and self-deprecating, and wrote for an audience that still hangs on every word.

While Lewis could write quickly, this was still 1978. In the popular world, Lewis had had two books of poetry that sold poorly, and an obscure spiritual autobiography that barely counts as fiction. Although his academic work was well received, there was no audience for Out of the Silent Planet, a H.G. Wells-like interplanetary romance. Lewis struggled to find a publisher.

Solid and hesitant both, J.R.R. Tolkien decided to use his modest voice as the successful author of The Hobbit to try to help Lewis to popular print. He wrote to Stanley Unwin, the publisher who had discovered Tolkien’s potential. First, he confirms the double dare story:

We originally meant each to write an excursionary ‘Thriller': a Space-journey and a Time-journey (mine) each discovering Myth. But the Space-journey has been finished, and the Time-journey remains owing to my slowness and uncertainty only a fragment, as you know (Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, 29).

Tolkien continues in this letter and another–bundled and sent together–to encourage its publication. Tolkien notes first that the protagonist, Dr. Ransom, is only coincidentally a philologist (like Tolkien), and that Out of the Silent Planet had passed the test of being read to the Inklings. In the second note, solicited by Unwin, Tolkien is more careful in his apology since it had received a poor review from one of Unwin’s readers, who called it “bunk.” Tolkien’s humour shines through in response:

I was disturbed by your reader’s report. I am afraid that at the first blush I feel inclined to retort that anyone capable of using the word ‘bunk’ will inevitably find matter of this sort – bunk (Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, 33).

More than wry humour, Tolkien tells the story of the Silent Planet‘s worth:

I read the story in the original MS. and was so enthralled that I could do nothing else until I had finished it. My first criticism was simply that it was too short. I still think that criticism holds, for both practical and artistic reasons. Other criticisms, concerning narrative style (Lewis is always apt to have rather creaking stiff-jointed passages), inconsistent details in the plot, and philology, have since been corrected to my satisfaction. The author holds to items of linguistic invention that do not appeal to me (Malacandra, Maleldil — eldila, in any case, I suspect to be due to the influence of the Eldar in the Silmarillion – and Pfifltriggi); but this is a matter of taste. After all your reader found my invented names, made with cherished care, eye-splitting. But the linguistic inventions and the philology on the whole are more than good enough. All the pan about language and poetry – the glimpses of its Malacandrian nature and form — is very well done, and extremely interesting, far superior to what one usually gets from travellers in untravelled regions. The language difficulty is usually slid over or fudged. Here it not only has verisimilitude, but also underlying thought (Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, 32-3).

Tolkien, of course, would be concerned with philology! After all, he spent decades working on the languages for Middle Earth with “cherished, eye-splitting care.” While Tolkien did not really get Narnia (Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, 32-3) or some of Lewis’ philosophical fiction, he though Out of the Silent Planet had real value:

I should have said that the story had for the more intelligent reader a great number of philosophical and mythical implications that enormously enhanced without detracting from the surface ‘adventure’. I found the blend of vera historia with mythos irresistible (Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, 33).

Any literary praise from Tolkien is high praise. The letter contains some criticism as well, a balanced assessment that is able to check Tolkien’s love for Lewis and his desire for Lewis’ success. Although Unwin’s firm did not publish Out of the Silent Planet, Stanley Unwin invited its submission to The Bodley Head. Unwin was the chair of the board of The Bodley Head, and they took the risk (Jack 235). Thus began C.S. Lewis’ world-class career as a popular storyteller.

The third life-changing moment I will only share in brief. Because of his public voice as a Christian intellectual and because of the popular literature that we love, Lewis never got tenure at Oxford–he never was elected to a chair. For years, Tolkien was quietly working to try to help Lewis move forward to a position as professor, which would give him more time to publish (e.g. Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, 108).

Eventually, Tolkien took another path. Despite the fact that their relationship had cooled, when a Chair in Medieval and Renaissance Literature opened at Cambridge, Tolkien worked hard to lead Lewis to the promotion, negotiating for Lewis to be considered even when he withdrew his name for the chair (Lewis had recommended another candidate). Finally, Tolkien arranged it so that Lewis could live at his home in Oxford out of term and on weekends, being near his family and gardens.

It was enough. At Tolkien’s urging Lewis took the chair and Lewis began an era–1954-1963–that was rich for him. Lewis wrote perhaps his best work, Till We Have Faces, as well as his spiritual autobiography, Surprised by Joy. He met, married, taught, wrote, and felt the fading of his own life–first with the death of Joy, his wife, and second in his own failing health.

In one of those letters, Tolkien wrote that he and Lewis were “amateurs in a world of great writers” (378). I’m not sure that we are really in a world of great writers, but it was Tolkien and Lewis’ friendship with each other that brought them to the level of “great” in fantasy and popular literature. Truly, these letters and late night talks changed C.S. Lewis’ life, and changed the lives of so many readers after him.

Carpenter, Humphrey, ed. The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien. New York: HarperCollins, 2006. Print.

Hooper, Walter, ed. The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, Volume I: Family Letters 1905-1931. New York: HarperCollins, 2004. Print.

Sayer, George. Jack: A Life of C.S. Lewis. Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 1996.

J.B.S. Haldane was one of the last renaissance men. A polymath, writer, and public intellectual, his Possible Worlds helped give C.S. Lewis a model for writing theological fiction. While Lewis relished in the model–science fiction as a platform for thinking about God, humanity, and the nature of the universe–he disagreed with Haldane’s “scientism.” In unpublished notes, Lewis wrote that scientism is:

“the belief that the supreme moral end is the perpetuation of our own species, and that this is to be pursued even if, in the process of being fitted for survival, our species has to be stripped of all those things for which we value it—of pity, of happiness, and of freedom” (now in Of Other Worlds 77).

Haldane, with H.G. Wells and Olaf Stapledon, were in Lewis’ mind an oligarchy that tyrannized social thought, transforming the science of Darwinism into a cosmic myth with frightening moral consequences. Embedded in the Ransom Cycle is a war of worldviews, a narrative that puts pressure against the philosophical fiction of Wells-Stapledon-Haldane.

As it turns out, neither Lewis’ idea of humans made in the image of God nor scientism’s philosophy of humanity as the ultimate of evolution prevailed. But their stories have remained, and where they were good stories as stories, they are still read by lovers of literature and fans of early science fiction. This was something they recognized in each other. Lewis was clearly a lover of this scientistic Triumberate, and Haldane speaks highly of Lewis’ skill.

It is this latter move–Haldane’s praise of Lewis–that provides a bit of fun. In “Auld Hornie, FRS”–a witty, sarcastic reference to the devil in a Screwtapian mode–J.B.S. Haldane says of Lewis’ science fiction books, the Ransom Cycle:

“The tale is told with very great skill, and the descriptions of celestial landscapes and of human and nonhuman behaviour are often brilliant. I cannot pay Mr. Lewis a higher compliment than to compare him with Dante and Milton…” (Mark R. Hillegas, ed., Shadows of Imagination, 16). 

It sounds like an impressive response to pretty humble books, but it is also a backhanded compliment. Haldane would go on to shred Lewis’ understanding of science.

However, Haldane did miss the import of what Lewis was about. First, Lewis’ interest wasn’t in science but scientism. He was fine with science, from the pen he was using to the cancer treatments his wife would one day receive and his mother did not. Haldane said of Lewis that, “The application of science to human affairs can only lead to hell” (Shadows of Imagination, 18). This misses the point. Second, Lewis’ interest wasn’t in science, but in story. He admitted the theoretical framework of his science fiction was weak (Of Other Worlds, 87). This may have been something that Arthur C. Clarke saw as a weakness in Lewis’ work. Clarke worked so hard at tight, consistent fictional universes; Lewis’ universes leaked.

But something of that correspondence between Clarke and Lewis highlights Lewis’ view. It was (probably) Lewis’ first letter to Clarke. He wrote:

I don’t of course think that at the moment many scientists are budding Westons [the evil proponent of scientism in Ransom]: but I do think (hang it all, I live among scientists!) that a point of view not unlike Weston’s is on the way. Look at Stapledon (Star Gazer ends in sheer devil worship), Haldane’s Possible Worlds and Waddington’s Science and Ethics. I agree Technology is per se neutral: but a race devoted to the increase of its own power by technology with complete indifference to ethics does seem to me a cancer in the universe (Walter Hooper, ed., Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis: Volume 2, 594).

I agree with Haldane (and Clarke would agree too) that Lewis’ story would have been stronger if his science was better. But there are a lot of gaps in Haldane’s essay. I want to leave the reader, though, with a great quotable: a four-paragraph sarcasta-summary of the Ransom Trilogy.

Mr. C. S. Lewis is a prolific writer of books which are intended to defend Christianity. Some of these are cast in the form of fiction. The most interesting group is perhaps a trilogy describing the adventures of Mr. Ransom, a

Cambridge teacher of philology. In the first volume Ransom is kidnapped by a physicist called Weston and his accomplice, Devine, and taken in a “spaceship” to the planet Mars, which is inhabited by three species of fairly intelligent and highly virtuous and healthy vertebrates ruled by an angel. Weston wants to colonise the planet, and Devine to use it as a source of gold. Their efforts are frustrated, and they return to earth, bringing Ransom with them.

In the second volume the angel in charge of Mars takes Ransom to Venus, where he meets the Eve of a new human race, which has just been issued with souls. Weston arrives, allows the devil to possess him, and acts as serpent in a temptation of the new Eve. Ransom’s arguments against the devil are inadequate, so he finally kills Weston, and is returned to earth by angels, with thanks for services rendered.

In the final book two still more sinister scientists, Frost and Wither, who have given their souls to the devil, are running the National Institute of Co-Ordinated Experiments. Devine, now a peer, is helping them. The only experiment described is the perfusion of a severed human head, through which the devil issues his commands. They are also hoping to resurrect Merlin, who has been asleep for fifteen centuries in their neighbourhood. Their aim appears to be the acquisition of superhuman power and of immortality; though how this is to be done is far from clear, just as it is far from clear why a severed head perfused with blood should live longer than a normal one, or be a more suitable instrument for the devil. However, Mr. Ransom is too much for them. He obtains the assistance not only of Merlin, but of the angels who guide the planets on their paths, and regulate the lives of their inhabitants. These angels arrive at his house, whose other inhabitants become in their turn mercurial, venereal (but decorously so), martial, saturnine, and jovial, but fortunately not lunatic. Merlin and the angels smash up the National Institute and a small university town, Frost and Wither are damned, and Ransom ascends into heaven, bound for Venus, where he is to meet Kings Arthur and Melchizedek, and other select humans who escape death. One Grammarian’s Funeral less, in fact.

You can find this article in a number of places. My thanks to Arend Smilde, who transcribed the entire article here, as well as gave a good introduction and included another anti-Lewis article Haldane wrote. Arend Smilde’s Lewisiana website is a singularly useful resource. 

Perhaps the essay that C.S. Lewis took the longest to write is “On Stories.” It began as an Oxford talk in 1940 called, “The Kappa Element in Romance.” After Charles Williams’ death 70 years ago this week in 1945, Lewis went back to the material and wrote a longish essay called “On Stories,” published in Essays Presented to Charles Williams (1947) with J.R.R. Tolkien’s famous essay, “On Fairy-Stories.” “On Stories” didn’t get much traction at first, and Lewis went on to work some of the same ideas into his late-in-life book, An Experiment in Criticism (1961).

“On Stories” is now recognized to be some of the earliest critical thinking about fantasy writing, and a precursor to the study of “story” and “atmosphere” as important to literature. The atmosphere idea is pretty intriguing. The most important part of a Story is not its plot, or in a romance (i.e., adventure story), its ability to create “excitement.” Lewis explains:

If to love Story is to love excitement then I ought to be the greatest lover of excitement alive. But the fact is that what is said to be the most ‘exciting’ novel in the world, The Three Musketeers, makes no appeal to me at all. The total lack of atmosphere repels me. There is no country in the book – save as a storehouse of inns and ambushes. There is no weather. When they cross to London there is no feeling that London differs from Paris.

If we think of Lewis’ own work, they are truly “atmospheric.” The Malacandrian aliens in their vertigo-inducing landscapes, the floating islands of Perelandra, the melting snows in the Narnian hills, the dreamy fog of the Wood Between the Worlds—Lewis is a sensual painter of the story’s imaginative environment.

I have just picked up Larry Niven’s SciFi classic, Ringworld (1970). The first character we meet, Louis Wu, is a bored interplanetary playboy of the future. He has been to every party, conquered every elite circle on every world, and even started most of the social trends back on earth. Look at the way Niven describes this earth of the future as Wu teleports from city to city:

For a few moments, he watched Beirut stream past him: the people flickering into the booths from unknown places; the crowds flowing past him on foot, now that the slidewalks had been turned off for the night. Then the clocks began to strike twenty-three. Louis Wu straightened his shoulders and stepped out to join the world.

In Resht, where his party was still going full blast, it was already the morning after his birthday. Here in Beirut it was an hour earlier. In a balmy outdoor restaurant Louis bought rounds of raki and encouraged the singing of songs in Arabic and Interworld. He left before midnight for Budapest….

In Budapest were wine and athletic dances, natives who tolerated him as a tourist with money, tourists who thought he was a wealthy native. He danced the dances and he drank the wines, and he left before midnight

In Munich he walked.

The air was warm and clean; it cleared some of the fumes from his head. He walked the brightly lighted slidewalks, adding his own pace to their ten-miles-per-hour speed. It occurred to him then that every city in the world had slidewalks, and that they all moved at ten miles per hour.

The thought was intolerable. Not new; just intolerable. Louis Wu saw how thoroughly Munich resembled Cairo and Resht … and San Francisco and Topeka and London and Amsterdam. The stores along the slidewalks sold the same products in all the cities of the world. These citizens who passed him tonight looked all alike, dressed all alike. Not Americans or Germans or Egyptians, but mere flatlanders.

In three-and-a-half centuries the transfer booths had done this to the infinite variety of Earth. They covered the world in a net of instantaneous travel. The difference between Moskva and Sidney was a moment of time and a tenth-star coin. Inevitably the cities had blended over the centuries, until place names were only relics of the past. San Francisco and San Diego were the northern and southern ends of one sprawling coastal city. But how many people knew which end was which? Too few, these days.

Pessimistic thinking, for a man’s two hundredth birthday.

But the blending of the cities was real. Louis had watched it happen. All the irrationalities of place and time and custom, blending into one big rationality of City, worldwide, like a dull gray paste. Did anyone today speak Deutsche, English, Francais, Espanol? Everyone spoke Interworld. Style in body paints changed all at once, all over the world, in one monstrous surge.

What a tremendous fictional illustration of C.S. Lewis’ concern about atmosphere. Wu exists as a listless figure in front of a green screen of all the cities of the world, each shifting one by one in the background behind him. All the cities look the same: “there is no feeling that London differs from Paris,” as C.S. Lewis said.

Is it a coincidence that Niven so poignantly fictionalizes Lewis’ critique, and does so in such a close way, using cities in exactly the way that Lewis did?

And… the protagonist’s name is Louis (=Lewis). Coincidence? Or conspiracy?

We know that Larry Niven has read Lewis. I blogged last week about how The Great Divorce inspired one of his projects, and he used Lewis’ characters in some stories (see Niven’s Rainbow Mars).

My vote is that this is a literary conspiracy, and no accident on Larry Niven’s part. What do you think?

Without doubt, Ray Bradbury is one of the greatest 20^th century genre fiction writers. His Fahrenheit 451 is one of the trinity of great dystopian novels of the generation (with Orwell’s 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World). The mind behind the b/w SciFi cult classic It Came from Outer Space, Bradbury burst onto the science fiction scene in the 1950s, creating gripping worlds in whatever genre he took up. I still regard his short story “All Summer in a Day”—the tale of a schoolgirl on Venus who remembers Earth’s sun and looks forward to the once-in-seven years occurrence of the sun on her new planet—as among the greatest short stories produced in English.

By the time Bradbury had published his famous story collection, The Martian Chronicles, Lewis had grown weary of the genre. Although he is now one of the recognized fathers of “scientifiction,” the stories he had encountered since WWII were not to his taste. His own Ransom Cycle really moves from classic space SF to speculative fantasy to technological dystopia. For Lewis, the explosion of SciFi magazines, especially in the United States, were not helping what he still considered to be the real core of science fiction: the “romance,” or classic adventure story.

As it turns out, Lewis’ interest in SciFi was reinvigorated in a number of ways–and often with surprising connections to the great SF of the 1950s.

A lively letter correspondence with a young Arthur C. Clarke—another of the greatest SF writers ever—probably helped Lewis recover his science fantasy love. At one point in their letter writing, Clarke invited Lewis to give a counterpoint lecture to the British Interplanetary Society. This gathering of science fiction writers and readers were thinking about the future of interplanetary travel, and Clarke knew that Lewis thought that space travel would ruin space stories. Clarke suspected Lewis’ lecture would be controversial—Clarke actually said,

“It would be only fair to point out that your position might be somehow analogous to that of a Christian martyr in the arena, but I trust that consideration would not deter you” (Feb 13, 1953 letter).

Lewis refused not because of danger—even though “Probably the whole thing is only a plan for kidnapping me and marooning me on an asteroid!” (Feb 14, 1953 letter)—but because he had already said what he wanted to say.

Clarke’s correspondence helped, and so did a letter from William Anthony Parker White. The pseudonymous “Anthony Boucher” was editor in the 50s of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction—a magazine that was formative for many readers and writers in those early years, and still is today. Boucher offered Lewis a free subscription and invited him to submit. In return, Lewis praised Boucher’s work—“You, and (in a different way) Ray Bradbury, are the real thing”—but he was not sure if he would submit anything for Fantasy & Science Fiction. Lewis wrote:

“All my imagination at present is going into children’s stories [Narnia]. When that is done, I may try another fantasy for adults, but it wd. be too quiet and leisurely for your magazine” (Feb 5, 1953 letter).

As it turns out, Lewis would send two stories to Boucher in the mid-1950s, “Ministering Angels” and “The Shoddy Lands.” Neither of these are brilliant, but “Ministering Angels” shows Lewis’ sense of parody well. It also shows that Lewis had a mounting renewal of interest in SF as a way of telling stories. Lewis went on to give a lecture at Cambridge called, “On Science Fiction.” And one of the delights of the collection Of Other Worlds is an interview between Lewis and two other genre writers, Kingsley Amis and Brian Aldiss. Now called “Unreal Estates,” it is a brilliant peak into science fiction conversations at the dawn of a generation lost in space.
How Lewis gets to the point of thinking critically about SF and actually writing stories may also be because of “the real things” he had been encountered recently. Anthony Boucher’s stories, but especially Ray Bradbury’s, were influential in the renewed interest.

“I have just read two books by an American ‘scientifiction’ author called Ray Bradbury. Most of that genre is abysmally bad, a mere transference of ordinary gangster or pirate fiction to the sidereal stage, and a transference which does harm not good. Bigness in itself is of no imaginative value: the defence of a ‘galactic’ empire is less interesting than the defence of a little walled town like Troy. But Bradbury has real invention and even knows something about prose. I recommend his Silver Locusts (Feb 3, 1953 letter to Nathan Comfort Starr).

It is high praise from someone who described himself to Boucher as “extremely hard to please.”

In one of the few surviving letters from Lewis to the woman he would soon fall in love with, author and poet Joy Davidman, Lewis praises both Arthur C. Clarke and Ray Bradbury in comparison:

“As far as I can remember you were non-committal about [Clarke’s] Childhood’s End: I suppose you were afraid that you might raise my expectations too high and lead to disappointment. If that was your aim, it has succeeded, for I came to it expecting nothing in particular and have been thoroughly bowled over. It is quite out of range of the common space-and-time writers; away up near Lindsay’s Voyage to Arcturus and Wells’s First Men in the Moon. It is better than any of Stapleton’s. It hasn’t got Ray Bradbury’s delicacy, but then it has ten times his emotional power, and far more mythopoeia” (Dec 22, 1953 letter).

Lewis didn’t prefer the “gadgetry” of Childhood’s End, but thought it was “a self-riching work, harmony piling up on harmony, grandeur on grandeur, pity on pity.” It led Lewis to tears at points, and Lewis declares that “There has been nothing like it for years.”

It could that if Lewis lived he would have returned to Science Fiction. Note that all of these letters are from 1953. Lewis is just at the point finishing his last three Narnian chronicles. He will never return to the fairy tale form of Narnia. Instead, he will spend the last decade of his life focussing on short literary criticism books (often converted lectures), writing some Christian books, and working on his spiritual autobiography, Surprised by Joy. He was perhaps caught up in myth-retelling in his vision for fiction; mythmaking is, after all, what he liked best about the best SF and fantasy authors. His Till We Have Faces was a brilliant version of this, and though slow in sales, is a superb example of what Lewis could do in the genre of the novel. He sketched out another myth retold, writing a few pages of something about Troy. But he never got his teeth into it.

All of these 1950s SciFi superstars helped lift Lewis’ chin to the possibilities of Science Fiction—a vision that may have blurred a bit over the years. It testifies to the quality of post-WWII SF writing, how the genre becomes its own. Technological, dystopic, robotic, and space fantasies explode in popularity, forming the imaginations of a generation—not just in reading, but in social and scientific possibilities. The quality of Ray Bradbury’s writing, the generosity of Anthony Boucher’s critical eye, and the tenacity of Arthur C. Clarke’s vision were influential not just for boys like me reading library copies in his farmhouse bedroom, but also for leading lights like Lewis.

This week we are celebrating the 70th anniversary of the publication of That Hideous Strength (THS). While George Orwell’s 1984 is considered among the great 20th c. dystopian novels and C.S. Lewis’  THS is read mostly by fans of dystopia or of Lewis’ work, it is Lewis that preceded Orwell. Even Orwell’s genius “newspeak” finds its prepubescent cousin in the technocratic rhetoric of the evil N.I.C.E. in THS. Orwell was aware of Lewis’ project, and reviewed THS the day it was published–the same week that Animal Farm hit the stands.

Setting aside the connection between the two authors (which I will discuss on Wednesday), Orwell’s great bias is in his first line:

On the whole, novels are better when there are no miracles in them.

While you may or may not agree with him, this way at looking at books shapes his response to THS. Orwell is not without admiration for Lewis’ dystopia, and there is humour and enjoyment behind the review. Let me ask readers two great discussion questions: 

1. Did Orwell review the book that he wished Lewis had written (rather than the one Lewis wrote)?
2. Are books really better without miracles?

Feel free to leave comments below, answering these questions or asking your own.

On the whole, novels are better when there are no miracles in them. Still, it is possible to think of a fairly large number of worth-while books in which ghosts, magic, second-sight, angels, mermaids, and what-not play a part.

Mr. C. S. Lewis’s “That Hideous Strength” can be included in their number – though, curiously enough, it would probably have been a better book if the magical element had been left out. For in essence it is a crime story, and the miraculous happenings, though they grow more frequent towards the end, are not integral to it.

In general outline, and to some extent in atmosphere, it rather resembles G. K. Chesterton’s “The Man Who Was Thursday.”

Mr. Lewis probably owes something to Chesterton as a writer, and certainly shares his horror of modern machine civilisation (the title of the book, by the way, is taken from a poem about the Tower of Babel) and his reliance on the “eternal verities” of the Christian Church, as against scientific materialism or nihilism.

His book describes the struggle of a little group of sane people against a nightmare that nearly conquers the world. A company of mad scientists – or, perhaps, they are not mad, but have merely destroyed in themselves all human feeling, all notion of good and evil – are plotting to conquer Britain, then the whole planet, and then other planets, until they have brought the universe under their control.

All superfluous life is to be wiped out, all natural forces tamed, the common people are to be used as slaves and vivisection subjects by the ruling caste of scientists, who even see their way to conferring immortal life upon themselves. Man, in short, is to storm the heavens and overthrow the gods, or even to become a god himself.

There is nothing outrageously improbable in such a conspiracy. Indeed, at a moment when a single atomic bomb – of a type already pronounced “obsolete” – has just blown probably three hundred thousand people to fragments, it sounds all too topical. Plenty of people in our age do entertain the monstrous dreams of power that Mr. Lewis attributes to his characters, and we are within sight of the time when such dreams will be realisable.

His description of the N.I.C.E. (National Institute of Co-ordinated Experiments), with its world-wide ramifications, its private army, its secret torture chambers, and its inner ring of adepts ruled over by a mysterious personage known as The Head, is as exciting as any detective story.

It would be a very hardened reader who would not experience a thrill on learning that The Head is actually – however, that would be giving the game away.

One could recommend this book unreservedly if Mr. Lewis had succeeded in keeping it all on a single level. Unfortunately, the supernatural keeps breaking in, and it does so in rather confusing, undisciplined ways. The scientists are endeavouring, among other things, to get hold of the body of the ancient Celtic magician Merlin, who has been buried – not dead, but in a trance – for the last 1,500 years, in hopes of learning from him the secrets of pre-Christian magic.

They are frustrated by a character who is only doubtfully a human being, having spent part of his time on another planet where he has been gifted with eternal youth. Then there is a woman with second sight, one or two ghosts, and various superhuman visitors from outer space, some of them with rather tiresome names which derive from earlier books of Mr. Lewis’s. The book ends in a way that is so preposterous that it does not even succeed in being horrible in spite of much bloodshed.

Much is made of the fact that the scientists are actually in touch with evil spirits, although this fact is known only to the inmost circle. Mr. Lewis appears to believe in the existence of such spirits, and of benevolent ones as well. He is entitled to his beliefs, but they weaken his story, not only because they offend the average reader’s sense of probability but because in effect they decide the issue in advance. When one is told that God and the Devil are in conflict one always knows which side is going to win. The whole drama of the struggle against evil lies in the fact that one does not have supernatural aid. However, by the standard of the novels appearing nowadays this is a book worth reading.

Transcription by Arend Smilde at www.lewisiana.nl. Original review found in the Manchester Evening News, 16 August 1945. Reprinted in The Complete Works of George Orwell, ed. Peter Davison, Vol. XVII (1998), No. 2720 (first half), pp. 250–251. If you haven’t found Arend’s page (which I’ve featured before), check it out.

On Wednesday I am asking the question, “Why did That Hideous Strength, which preceded 1984 and was reviewed by Orwell, not become a classic while Orwell’s 1984 did?”

I look forward to your comments!

Last week I shared some research in The Screwtape Letters—research that has changed the course of my research. You can read it here, but basically it showed that C.S. Lewis was thinking about his work in ways we never knew. Between 1937 and 1945 he wrote a Trilogy around the character of Dr. Ransom, but he also wrote The Screwtape Letters and some other Christian books.

When you read The Screwtape Letters (1941) you see in the preface that C.S. Lewis is a character in his own book. He has discovered a series of demonic letters that give us a peak at the strategy that demonic tempters use to reduce our humanity and separate us from God. Lewis used a similar technique with Out of the Silent Planet, the SciFi novel he wrote a not long before (1937). Out of the Silent Planet was written as a novel, but was “really” a true story about Dr. Elwin Ransom’s experience. Lewis novelized the account of Ransom’s trip to Malacandra and published it as a fictional story. Out of the Silent Planet begins an interstellar counter-conspiracy that continues in Perelandra and That Hideous Strength. The Lewis characters is in the background in THS, but is part of the Perelandra narrative.

I don’t know of many that have made the link of Lewis’ technique of including himself as a character in his books as he does both in Ransom and Screwtape. As it turns out, there are more links between the Ransom Trilogy and The Screwtape Letters than we could have imagined.

In a file at the Marion E. Wade Center, a C.S. Lewis archive in Wheaton, IL, there is a handwritten preface to Screwtape. Like the preface in your edition, the demonic letters are found, though not by C.S. Lewis. In this handwritten preface, the letters are found and translated by Dr. Ransom, Lewis’ protagonist in the SciFi books that come before and after Screwtape.

It is a transformational discovery. It changes the way we read the Ransom Trilogy—indeed, it means we don’t have a Ransom Trilogy, but a Ransom Cycle. We can read The Screwtape Letters as part of the conspiracy against the Silent Planet (Earth) that Ransom and his friends have to face. And, especially, we can reread the Ransom Trilogy in a Screwtapian way.

C.S. Lewis fans and scholars are intrigued by the idea that Lewis toyed with the idea of publishing The Screwtape Letters as part of the Ransom Universe (the Field of Arbol). I have a paper in draft form that starts to work out the implications. But there is a great question that has come from a number of sources. One blog commenter put it well:

While I find this fascinating, I also find myself slightly perplexed as to why it wasn’t noticed before. I mean, the handwritten preface didn’t fall out of an obscure book in the Bodleian library or turn up in a book gifted to one of Lewis’s collaborators (as is the case with the Tolkien map). It is in the Wade collection so shouldn’t it have been noticed?

He is correct. The handwritten Screwtape preface is in the Wade. The amazing staff there can help you see it for yourself.

Even more than that, at least a dozen people have seen the Screwtape file. And these are smart people, leading C.S. Lewis scholars and careful researchers. Of these, only one researcher has talked about it in print. That scholar is Charlie Starr in his manuscript study, Light. Charlie, who is one of a group of scholars helping get Inklings manuscripts to public notice, mentions the Screwtape-Ransom connection in a footnote. There could be other scholars that have noted it—let me know if there were—but I haven’t seen any. I didn’t even see Charlie’s book until well after that fateful visit to the Wade.

Still, we are left with the question: why didn’t anyone else see the significance of this Screwtape-Ransom connection? Why did it take a religious studies scholar in 2012 to stumble upon it?

It isn’t because of the caliber of scholarship involved. As I’ve said, I found it by accident, and I am still really an emerging scholar. The people that looked at the file came with their own questions and probably did what they came to the Wade to do. They are good researchers, focussed on their tasks.

It also isn’t because the idea itself is without merit. I thought about this for a long time. Before publishing the Ransom-Screwtape preface in Notes & Queries in 2013, I talked to leading scholars in order to ensure that the publication had merit. This is not only a fun discovery, but it is one that lets us see Lewis’ writings in new ways, and helps us to think about how Lewis invented his fictional worlds.

Why has no one else every published this great discovery? The answer actually reveals one of the most beautiful things about academic research.

The answer is this: One of the most important features about academic research is that each researcher brings his or her unique set of experiences and questions to the data that is in front of us. While you might think it is tough to add much to Shakespeare studies or certain historical fields (burnt over regions of research), I am always amazed at how a new set of eyes on an old question can bring new life to a subject.

In my case, I was a biblical studies specialist in the larger field of theology. I had a general B.A. in Bible, then focussed on New Testament exegesis for my master’s degree (exegesis is where we use a number of techniques to decide what a text means). The techniques include history, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, language and linguistics, literary criticism, and the tools of the study of religion. We try to determine what a sacred text might have meant in its original context (exegesis), and how it works in our world today (theology and application).

I decided in 2011 to use the same biblical studies tools in my approach to the study of Lewis and the Inklings. In my masters thesis I had studied the origins of antisemitism in biblical texts. One of the tools in my toolbelt was to look at how St. Paul wrote 1 Thessalonians. In writing this letter he created a “fictional world” much like fantasy writers do. He took the events of real history, and discussed them in a way that put certain emphases on particular points. This creation of a symbolic world is what Lewis did when he made the Ransom Cycle. The difference is that most of the events in Lewis’ fictional world never happened in space-time, whereas most of the events Paul references did happen.

I was primed to think about how we make the worlds we write about—whether it is in a letter to a friend, a sacred text, or a fantastic story. So when I opened up the file and saw a name from one fictional universe (Ransom of the Field of Arbol) connected with another fictional universe (Screwtape of the Lowerarchy of Hell), I immediately saw the implications.

Even then, I needed some confirmation. After staring at the material for an hour or two, puzzling things out in my head, I turned to the researcher sitting beside me. She happened to be Sørina Higgins, working on the important Charles Williams Thorn project. She agreed then that “this changes everything.” So I set to work on the Screwtape-Ransom work.

It could be that if Sørina or Charlie had been sitting with the Screwtape file at the Wade, asking questions of world-building, they would have immediately seen the significance that I saw. Or perhaps not, despite their great skills. I saw the Charles Williams Thorn manuscript, and still Sørina was able to make connection I hadn’t imagined. I too saw some of the manuscripts that Charlie talks about in Light—as had a few others. Yet it was only Charlie who pursued it to its end.

Each researcher is unique. Charlie, an English professor and fantasy writer, has become an expert in Lewis’ handwriting simply because it needed to be done, and he could do it. I would be a good person to test Charlie’s system, but not to create it. Sørina, an Inklings scholar, poet, and intellectual curator, has been working for years to make Charles Williams—the oddest and least accessible Inkling—just a little bit more approachable. I will add little bits to Williams’ scholarship, but she is one of its transformational features.

These are just three examples of academics working in connected fields. I know of dozens of others in Lewis & Inklings studies that are making these kinds of unique contributions. Think of the millions of people in thousands of fields who have dedicated their lives to using their own gifts, experiences, and research questions for the purpose of new discovery. It’s an amazing thought, and a key reason we need to encourage research even when financial times are tight.

My hope is that my background in biblical studies and theology, as well as my experience as a pastor, policy writer, teacher, novelist, and father, will help contribute to the world of Inklings studies. In any case, my individual approach allowed me to see in a flash the imaginative possibilities of a little bit of C.S. Lewis’ hen-scratching.

That is why I saw what others didn’t see. Not because of the clarity of my vision but because of the focus of my lenses.

The first reader of C.S. Lewis’ autobiography, Surprised by Joy, might be puzzled by the fact that WWI—the catastrophe that decided the fate of so many of Europe’s great thinkers and artists and inventors—makes up very little of Lewis’ narrative. “It is even in a way unimportant,” Lewis wrote in a longish paragraph that talks about the death of his mother, the realities of trench warfare, a shivering French mouse, environmental and other kinds of mental degradation, cold feet and heroes tales and

“horribly smashed men still moving like half-crushed beetles, the sitting or standing corpses, the landscape of sheer earth without a blade of grass, the boots worn day and night till they seemed to grow to your feet…”

As vivid as his narrative is, Lewis is not anxious to root his life to the Great War, even though it was fateful for him. Every day is fateful, I suppose. And though he spoke in letters of nostalgia and nightmares, Lewis emerged from WWI with a robust conscience, an invitation to Oxford, and a manuscript of poems (Spirits in Bondage, 1919).

His deepest thoughts about the war and the shrapnel embedded in his frame both accompanied him to his own grave 45 years later.

Although Lewis refused to give WWI a formative place in his life, WWII orients his writing in an unusual way.

After writing Out of the Silent Planet (1938) and a couple of academic books, Lewis was invited to use his unique literary gifts and his training in philosophy to write The Problem of Pain (1940)—a book that addresses the question, “if God is good, why do people suffer?” Though he wrote this popular theodicy in the first few months of the war, WWII does not shape the entire book. “War” is one of things that seemed to confirm Lewis’ youthful atheism, and is one of the parts of human pain that snaps us out of our self-serving Monday to Friday inattention to the real world around us.

The Problem of Pain led to the a few talks on the BBC, he assumes that war is the one thing everyone has in common. It becomes an image that orients the reader, giving us some measure against which to weigh the world. In The Screwtape Letters (1941-42), war is the backdrop to the “patient’s” temptation. In the end it is a bomb raid that takes the patient’s life, as is the threat in the last lines of the dream story, The Great Divorce (1944-45), which closes WWII. Miracles, though published in 1947, was mostly written during WWII, and reflects the war reality in some of its illustrations.

Although the Ransom Cycle begins before the war with Out of the Silent Planet, WWII haunts the series. The blackout of the opening chapters of Perelandra (1943) is doubtless because of the war, and That Hideous Strength (1945), though it follows the war, shows the kinds of tyrannies that were possible in the WWII-era.

Even when we move beyond wartime the war continues to inform Lewis’ writing. The late 1940s and early 1950s were dominated by two projects: the huge literary history of 16^th Century Poetry and Prose (OHEL, 1954), and Narnia (1950-56). OHEL is intentionally timeless, but do you remember how Narnia begins? In The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe (1950) the children are sent out of London because of the Blitzkrieg. I’ve always wondered if the serious railway accident that ends life for three of the Pevensies and brings them to Aslan’s country was an act of war, but Walter Hooper disagrees in Past Watchful Dragons. In any case, The Last Battle (1956) is the only Narnian tale to occur definitely after WWII (in Earth time), even though they were all written well after V-Day.

After Narnia was penned Lewis finished Surprised by Joy (1954), where WWI is played down and WWII is almost ignored—despite how the last world war roots more than a decade of Lewis’ work. Till We Have Faces (1955) treats war like a biblical or classical chronicle—“In the spring, at the time when kings go off to war…” (2 Samuel 11)—or like an Arthurian tale as imagined by a young King Henry VIII. In the same way that Lewis warned against pacifism in a talk in WWII, he warns against patriotism in The Four Loves (1959-60)—the two tensions that Screwtape plays with in Letter V of The Screwtape Letters.

And Reflections on the Psalms (1957), if you have not read it, approaches some of the most difficult moments of the Psalter as only someone who faced enemy weaponry could dare to face it.

I’m left, then, with two thoughts when thinking about Lewis and the war.

When I think about men like C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien who survived the war, my first thought is to wonder what great transformational writer didn’t survive. What story is missing from our bookshelves? What worlds are missing from our mental multiplex of universes?

And not just writers, but subcreators of all kinds. In the machinery of the two World Wars, have we lost that genius that would have cured cancer or made nuclear energy safe? Would the crises of global warming and ethnic cleansing have been stopped before they started? Would we have a political future better than a promise of entrenched ideologies—and not particularly good ideologies to begin with? Would we still have poetry and imagination and innovation in our classrooms?

We can never know. Working against the wars of the future is all that is in our power, such as it is.

The second thought is to you the reader: what has happened in your life to root you? As you go about your daily life, building the worlds you build, where do you root your work, your story, your love?

I don’t mean this in just a spiritual way. Lewis rooted himself in Christ; my PhD project is about how his conversion is the basis of his work. I think one’s religion or worldview will be the key root of which their art will grow. We shouldn’t be surprised that with all the skill and beauty we see around us today, there is a lack of depth and rootedness.

I think it is valuable to ask what events orient the work that we do. When I look at the last eight years of my life, with the exception of my children’s writing and some essays, my academic work and my fiction has had the theme of “death” at its core. It seems that I have been returning to the death of my father and brother 25 years ago. This event formed and transformed me, but I thought I had left it behind some time ago. Yet, as I grow as father, husband, Christian, writer, brother, friend, son, and teacher, I find myself returning to those fateful moments.

Although my life is marked by tragedy, I live with the luxury of peace. If I wonder that Lewis underestimated the impact of war on his life, it is a choice I have never had to face.

So we are left with two things that can transform our lives.

First, we are the writers and artists and inventors that did not die. It is up to us to apply ourselves to our work.

Second, we have the opportunity to be aware of the forces that shape us.

Today is Remembrance Day, when we set apart a day to remember those that have fallen in the wars of the 20^th century, and to promise to a future generation that we will never allow war to ravage the world again. Memory is not just about encapsulating the past, but is the engine that shapes the future.

A couple of weeks ago I had announced the publication of a surprising draft of a preface to The Screwtape Letters. This “Handwritten Preface” is a “Cosmic Find,” since it shows us that Lewis thought about including Screwtape in the same fictional world as the Ransom Cycle, C.S. Lewis’ WWII-era science fiction project. I am working out some of the intriguing possibilities of rereading Ransom-Screwtape for a paper that will be submitted next year. You can read about it here and here.

For those that are interested in manuscript and publication history, as well as C.S. Lewis’ biography, it is also intriguing in that we now have new complications in the manuscript history of Screwtape. The Handwritten Preface is different in key ways from the Published Preface (see here) in the first edition. And we are missing the typescript and galley proofs of the Handwritten Preface: we do not know the process of publishing the preface and why Dr. Ransom was left out of the story. Was it the publisher or Lewis who made the change?

We may never know.

List of Manscripts

At this point, though, we can list the various manuscripts of The Screwtape Letters:

1. The Berg MS: C.S. Lewis’s handwritten 31 letters on 93 leaves, sent to Sr. Penelope on Oct 9, 1941 and sold to the Berg Collection at the New York City Public Library. There are no additional copies of this manuscript elsewhere.
2. The Neylan MS: a typed manuscript on 82 leaves with publisher’s notes, sent to Mary Neylan on Oct 20, 1941 and housed at the Wade Center in Wheaton, IL. You can read more about Neylan here.
3. The Handwritten Preface MS: the handwritten preface on small pieces of paper, included in the Neylan MS and published in Notes & Queries in 2013.
4. Bles Galley Proofs: Lewis’s letter to Mary Neylan (proofs of the enclosed) and standard publication protocol suggests that there was also a typeset proof. We no longer have the Galley Proofs (which may or may not have had the preface included), and the correspondence with Bles was destroyed.^[1]
5. The Guardian Original Print Run: This was based off the handwritten Berg MS and available in several libraries. I read it at the General Theological Seminary in New York City.

A Proposed Timeline of The Screwtape Letters Manuscript History

Although there are gaps, and we do not know yet when the handwritten Berg MS was typed, we have enough now to offer a tentative timeline.

WWII-era Context

• Sep 2, 1937, Lewis completes Out of the Silent Planet. Published Sep 23, 1938.
• Sep 1, 1939, Hitler invades Poland, beginning WWII.
• Nov, 1939, Lewis was reading chapters of The Problem of Pain to the Inklings. Published Oct 18, 1940.
• Jul 19, 1940, Lewis listens to the Hitler speech to the Reichstag translated on the BBC at 6:00pm.
• Jul 21, 1940, Lewis receives inspiration for Screwtape at church. After church he finishes a letter to Warren describing the idea. You can read about that in detail here.
• Jul 1940-Apr 1941, Lewis wrote Screwtape by hand, perhaps writing a letter a week.^[2] In this period he submitted them to The Guardian, possibly with “Meditation on the Third Commandment.”
• Aug, 1940, Warren retires from the military to the Kilns and is available for typing,though our first typed letter we have is not until Nov 30, 1942.
• Apr 25, 1941, announcement in The Guardian about Screwtape.
• May 2 to Nov 28, 1941, The Screwtape Letters published serially in The Guardian.
• May-Jun 1941, editor Ashley Sampson reads the Letters and convinces Geoffrey Bles to publish them.
• Jun 8, Lewis delivers “The Weight of Glory” sermon at Oxford’s St. Mary the Virgin Church.
• Jul 5, 1941, Lewis writes the preface, which was edited in an unknown process (see below) and published in the Bles first edition.
  
• Aug 6, Lewis gives his first BBC talk in London. These talks later become Mere Christianity.
• Oct 9, 1941, Lewis sent a handwritten MS of 93 leaves to Sr. Penelope with a personal letter. Indicates that there is also a MS at the publisher (Bles).
• Oct 20, 1941, typed MS of 82 leaves with handwritten preface of 5 leaves sent to Mary Neylan with a personal letter. Indicates that the proofs are at the publisher (Bles).
• Nov 9, 1941, Lewis has gotten Ransom to Venus as the first few chapters of Perelandra are complete in draft form. He finishes Perelandra in Spring 1942; it was published Apr 20, 1943.
• Jul 1941-Feb 1942, Unknown preface proof correspondence and Galley Proof approval with Bles (see below).
• Feb 9, 1942, The Screwtape Letters was published by Geoffrey Bles of London with the edited preface. There are seventeen printings in total in Britain through WWII.
• Feb 16, 1943, American edition of The Screwtape Letters published
• Dec 1943, Lewis completes the final Ransom book, That Hideous Strength. It is not published until Aug 16, 1945, near the close of WWII.

Post-Publication History

• 1947, The Italian translation, Le Lettere di Berlicche; Screwtape and Wormwood were renamed Berlicche and Malacoda in Italian.[3] Translations followed in Spanish (1953), French (1956), Chinese (1958), Russian (1981), Afrikaans (1993), Korean (2000), and Indonesian (2006).[4]
• Sep 8, 1947, C.S. Lewis appears on the cover of Time magazine with the title, “Don v. Devil.”
• Jun 18, 1956, Lewis gave Sr. Penelope permission to sell the MS; the Berg collection purchased it at some later date.[5]
• Dec 15, 1959, Lewis has finished writing the “new preface” to what will become The Screwtape Letters and Screwtape Proposes a Toast; suggested he would send the manuscript to publisher Jocelyn Gibb when it was typed, and included suggestions for titles for the collection.^[6]
• Dec 19, 1959, Lewis publishes “Screwtape Proposes a Toast” in The Saturday Evening Post.
• Dec 20, 1959, Lewis sends the typescript of the Screwtape “new preface” to the publisher.^[7]
• Feb 27, 1961, Geoffrey Bles publishes The Screwtape Letters and Screwtape Proposes a Toast with the “new preface.”
• 1961-1963, Lewis writes a preface to a book called A Slip of the Tongue and Other Pieces that explains “Screwtape Proposes A Toast.” The book is released in 1965 as Screwtape Proposes a Toast and Other Pieces, but the preface, now at the Wade Center, is not included until 1982 revised edition.
• 1965, publication of Screwtape Proposes a Toast and Other Pieces.
• 1976, Lord & King edition of The Screwtape Letters published in the United States with a new foreword written by Walter Hooper and illustrations by Wayland Moore.
• c. 1979, the Wade Center acquires the Neylan MS with accompanying Handwritten Preface and personal letter.
• 1982, The Screwtape Letters: Revised Edition published with “Screwtape Proposes a Toast” and the early 1960s preface intended for A Slip of the Tongue.
• 1994, Marvel Comics adaptation.
• 1999, an audio edition with John Cleese as Screwtape is released on cassette; received a Grammy nomination.
• Jan 2006, first stage production of Screwtape opens in New York, written by Max McLean and Jeffrey Fiske.
• 2009, release of feature length audio dramatization of The Screwtape Letters by Focus on the Family Radio Theatre, staring Andy Serkis.
• 2009, The Screwtape Letters: Special Illustrated Edition released, followed by an enhanced edition in 2011.
• 2013, The Screwtape Letters: Annotated Edition, with annotations by Paul McCusker, who adapted Screwtape for audio drama in 2009.

This Timeline focusses on two periods: the conception and original publication of Screwtape, and then its explosion in popularity over the next 75 years. Perhaps you see something that should be included in the Timeline or an error. If so, let me know in the comments below.

Options for the Preface Editing Stage

Somewhere between July 1941 and February 1942, Lewis had correspondence and Galley Proof approval with the publisher, Bles. We have an end date of October, 1941, when Lewis sent a manuscript to Sr. Penelope and a typescript with Handwritten Preface to Mary Neylan. There are a couple of main options for the correspondence:

1. Lewis may have sent Bles the Neylan MS with the Handwritten Preface in the period of July-October, 1941, in which case Lewis would have approved the Galley Proofs of the Handwritten Preface.
2. It is possible that Lewis sent a now lost typed version of the Handwritten Preface before Oct 20, 1941 after the original Neylan MS was submitted, and either:
   1. Did not approve Galley Proofs of the MS; or
   2. Approved the preface Galley Proofs separately.

Nowhere that we know of does Lewis ever complain that Bles unjustly edit the Preface.

What is more interesting is this question: What happened to the Ransom feature in the Screwtape preface? With regards to the preface changes, we are left with four possibilities:

1. Lewis changed the preface himself before submitting it to Bles. This means that the Handwritten Preface that Lewis sent to Mary Neylan was a first draft.
2. Bles suggested changes to the preface in the Galley Proofs, and Lewis approved the changes (either by correspondence or in the Galley Proof stage).
3. Bles changed the manuscript without Galley Proofs. Lewis approved of the changes through correspondence.
4. Bles changed the manuscript without Galley Proofs, and Lewis did not formally approve of the changes.

Given the substantive nature of the changes and Lewis’s complete silence on the matter, “d” does not seem to be a strong option.

[1] Email from Walter Hooper, June 20, 2012.

[2] Sayer, Jack, 273. “Dangers of National Repentance” was published on p. 127 of The Guardian on Mar 29, 1940. Several weeks later Lewis published “Two Ways With The Self,” The Guardian (May 3, 1940), 215. It is possible that “The Screwtape Letters” were submitted with his January 1941 article, “Meditation on the Third Commandment,” The Guardian (Jan 10, 1941), 18. See the Mar 11, 1939 letter to Alec Vidler, editor of Theology, where Lewis provides a corrected proof for an article, but also includes a second piece for Vidler’s consideration, Hooper, Letters 2, 253.

[3] McGrath, C.S. Lewis, 420, n. 28.

[4] Source: Worldcat, http://www.worldcat.org/title/screwtape-letters/oclc/17453746/editions?cookie=&start_edition=1&sd=asc&se=yr&referer=di&qt=show_more_ln%3A&editionsView=true&fq=&fc=ln%3A_25.

[5] There is not date of acquisition on the Berg file.

[6] Dec 15, 1959 letter to publisher Jocelyn Gibb. See Walter Hooper, ed., The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis: Vol. 3: Narnia, Cambridge, and Joy 1950-1963 (New York: HarperSanFransisco, 2007), 1110-1111.

[7] Dec 20, 1959 letter to publisher Jocelyn Gibb. See Hooper, Letters 3, 1112.

Note: I have not referenced all of the more popularly known dates. I have gleaned them form Walter Hooper’s invaluable Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis in three volumes. You can also find them in Joel Heck’s excellent chronologies at http://www.JoelHeck.com. 

Last year I posted a bright year-end reading blog, talking about how I fail at all New Year’s resolutions, except for reading. “It was a cool year,” I wrote, “with rich reading from beginning to end.” I had set a 2014 reading goal of 150 books, essays, or lecture series. Because of a strong first half of the year, I hit that goal on June 30th, finishing the year with 225 pieces in total, including 108 books. It really was a great year.

I knew that 2015 was going to be a challenge going in, so I set the goal of 200 books, essays, and lecture series. If I only met that goal, it would be the first time I hadn’t grown as a reader (in quantity) for a decade. I wanted to read 100 books in total, knowing that if I went into a deep literature review the number of articles I read fully could really mount up.

One year ago, I couldn’t have anticipated how difficult 2015 was going to be. We began the year at the hospital bedside of a suddenly disabled parent, and have ended it preparing for the loss of another parent. I have lost teaching opportunities, faced simultaneous work pressures and financial strain, and saw a dream lurch suddenly over the horizon of possibility. While my writing has not gone dry, my hunt for an agent and publisher has. It has been a tremendously difficult year.

Yet, I am reading. As a PhD student it is my “job” to read. More than this, though, through the difficulties and disappointments of 2015, reading is a solace to me. Books are for me mental playgrounds, intellectual exercises, escapes not from something but into everything all at once.

In 2015 I met my goals and exceeded them a little. I read 109 books (Goodreads recognized 105 of them in the banner below), representing more than 30,000 pages of reading. I also listened to 5 lecture series and read 115 articles or essays. In total, not counting media, scans, quick reads and the like, I read more than 1,000,000 words in the stories, poetry, and nonfiction works that filled my year.

Essentially, I read just a little bit more in 2015 than in 2014. I’ll share the whole Goodreads infographic on Friday, but I’ve noticed an interesting pattern in my reading. While the number of articles and essays I might read goes up and down in my patterns of C.S. Lewis reading and academic writing. my book reading has a regular pattern. Here are my last two years of literature in graph form.

I did a literature review in spring 2015, so you can see how the essays count goes up. But watch what happens when I select out just the books.

Except for March 2015, a stronger beginning to 2014 and a stronger ending to 2015, the charts are identical. I begin the year strongly, read a lot in summer, and finish each year well. Despite the fact that I am starting new classes in January as well as September, it is the fall semester preparation and spring marking that are the greatest barriers to reading.

It has been an eclectic year of reading. In 2014 I explored the 1980s SF and Fantasy writers. In 2015, I went back to the 1950s and 1960s, reading authors like Arthur C. Clarke, Brian Aldiss, and James Blish as they published work that C.S. Lewis may have read in his last decade, as well as some that came later (like Frank Herbert’s Dune or Ursula K. Le Guin’s earlier work).

In fantasy, I am reading through Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett‘s work–up to the 15th Discworld novel–and was sad to hear that we lost Pratchett in 2015. I look forward to continuing on this path and rereading Harry Potter with my niece in 2016.

This classic SciFi and contemporary fantasy reading is a kind of canonical recovery for me–returning to books that have formed me whether or not I have actually read them. I also did this by reading Jane Austen and Charles Dickens, and classical Christian writers: Dante, Augustine, Athanasias, Chaucer, Milton, Chesterton, Calvin, Reinhold Niebuhr, Thomas à Kempis, Dallas Willard, and Watchman Nee.

These books contributed to a theologically strong year, adding to it work from emerging thinkers like Rachel Held Evans, Scot McKnight, and Anna Fisk’s groundbreaking Sex, Sin, and Our Selves. In 2016 I’ll continue moving toward a feminist theology reading path as part of my PhD work.

I finished a paper for the upcoming King Arthur and the Inklings collection, and spent a great deal of time in Charles Williams and literary criticism in the first half of the year. Williams continues to capture my imagination, and I will move deeper into his world by reading Grevel Lindop’s new biography. I also started working in Owen Barfield and reading more deeply in Dorothy Sayers and G.K. Chesterton.

And, of course, I have continued on in my project of reading C.S. Lewis chronologically. Half of the pieces I read in 2015 were by Lewis–though he is a brief writer, so that’s probably only 1/4 or 1/3 of the actual reading time. I began 2015 in Lewis’ 1945, and am now closing in on the end of his 1958. In that period of time:

• WWII ended but rationing continued in England
• Lewis finished his Ransom Cycle and never returned to long-form Science Fiction
• He lost his close friend Charles Williams, his step-mother, and a literary pen-friend, Dorothy L. Sayers
• He completed his magnum opus in 16th century literary history
• He began and completed Narnia, changing his literary destiny forever
• He changed his academic position, moving to a Chair in Cambridge from a support position in Oxford
• He wrote Till We Have Faces, which almost nobody read (at the time)
• He wrote his autobiography, Surprised by Joy, and fell in love with a dying woman

It was an absolutely transformational period for Lewis, and effected me as I read it. In my 2015 reading, Lewis began as a Christian public intellectual who dabbled in fiction, and ended as an eminent literary historian and globally recognized children’s author. He began as a bachelor and ended as a lover. He began as a young, fiery contender and ended as a quiet and witty professional writer in the twilight of his life.

Because of where Lewis was in his historical moment, I explored dystopian literature (like Aldous Huxley and George Orwell), and did a good amount of reading about the context of late war and post-war Britain. I spent a good deal of the year in the 16th century, because that is where Lewis’ work led. I think my 2015 bookshelf is darker than you might guess from my personality–not least because of Lewis’ context in the 1940s and 1950s.

What of 2016?

It is difficult for me to predict. I don’t know my teaching load past the winter, but this semester I am working with a team on an intro course at UPEI called, “Inquiry Studies.” I have a handful of graduate students with Regent College’s excellent distance program–a great Eugene Peterson course on Soulcraft–and I have been invited to be a preceptor for a course called “The Inklings and Science Fiction” at the Mythgard Academy. I look forward to Doug Anderson’s course, and putting “preceptor” on my resume should raise some eyebrows! I would encourage you to sign up for one of these great courses.

There are personal struggles ahead, I know. And my work in consultation is intense right now, and may be intensifying. I think 2016 is going to be a challenge. There is grace, I trust, in these times too.

Still, I would like to set my sights high. In 2016 I aim to hold steady, with 5 lectures series, 115 articles, and 110 books–230 pieces overall. We’ll see. But I would rather fail in actuality than in intention.

Here is my list of books in my 2015 reading. “CSL” below means “C.S. Lewis.” I’ve linked some of the blogs that connect with the things I’ve read. Are any of these books yours? If so, feel free to link my list. If you have your own year-end list or best-of blog, make sure you list it!

On Wednesday I posted an extensive write-up of my year of reading, including some pretty nerdy charts and numerous links to blogs that have come out of or gone into my reading. I thought it would be fun to include the Goodreads infographic that they make up for us. This was the first year I really took advantage of the feature.

Goodreads has some limits: it doesn’t automatically share reviews with Amazon, it is hard to include indie work, and you can’t just reblog this infographic. But it is pretty fun otherwise, and let me know some odd things. For example, my 100+ books is more than 32,500 pages of reading. Poetry by Wordsworth and C.S. Lewis were the shortest of books; my Jack Ryan fix, Calvin, and C.S. Lewis’ letters were the longest. My average book length is 313 pages, and I tend to read books I like.

Here’s the direct link, and I’d love to see your Goodreads “My Year in Books” if you have the link.

No. It’s not.

While tempted to leave it at that and produce the shortest blog of history, I think it is important to let the Narnian himself address the question. C.S. Lewis was, after all, a literary scholar who had written an entire academic book about the development of medieval allegory (The Allegory of Love). He knows what allegory is, when it works well, and how to use it when it is the best genre to use. He liked Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress and George Orwell‘s Animal Farm. He himself wrote an allegory, The Pilgrim’s Regress, and never chose to do so again.

When Lewis turned to writing for children and his earlier science fiction books, he could have easily chosen allegory. Instead, he wrote fairy tale and space romances. J.R.R. Tolkien hated allegory “in all its manifestations” (see his 2nd edition foreword to The Fellowship of the Ring).  Lewis did not dislike allegory, but he saw greater potential elsewhere. Here is a paraphrase of a note in a letter to Fr. Peter Milward on Sep 22nd, 1956:

Into an allegory a writer can put only what he already knows: in a myth he puts what he does not yet know and could not come to know in any other way.

This is the adventure of fantasy writing. There was far too much unknown in Narnia and in the Ransom books for Lewis to leave them in allegory.

Yet, again and again, from the letters he answered, through published reviews, to academic conversations today, people talk about the allegorical elements in Narnia, and sometimes even call them allegories. Lewis and Tolkien protested similar treatments of The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, publishing responses to critics who went astray. But if theses stories really aren’t allegories, how come so many think they are?

This is partly answered in Lewis’ rhetorical question to Wayland Hilton Young on Jan 31st, 1952: “is it possible for any man to write a fantastic story which another man can’t read as an allegory?” Readers experience a kind of gestalt effect: distinctions blur and new images emerge in our reading. It is part of what makes reading a dynamic, adventurous undertaking. It is why we reread books, over and over again.

The other part of the answer is probably equally hopeless to combat.

Clearly, we have no idea what we mean by the word “allegory.” If asked, doubtless educated readers would say something like, “stories where the characters or objects in the story have a one-to-one relationship with some idea or thing in the real world.” When we are pushed to say what this relationship is, it falls apart. The Ring of Power that Frodo must carry is what? Nuclear weaponry? Our dark tendency to dictatorship? Original sin? If we disregard what the author was doing and what his contextual conversations were like, then I suppose the ring could be anything.

Of course, then, we aren’t really saying anything about the text we are reading anyway.

Both Lewis and Tolkien denied this one-to-one relationship existed in their work. It isn’t that there isn’t symbollic value in saying, for example, that Frodo’s journey to Mount Doom is like Christ’s Passion. Or that the undragoning of Eustace in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is a good image of conversion. And it doesn’t mean that mythopoeic writers are speaking to real life conversations about power and faith and culture.

But calling them “allegory” tells us more about the reader than it does about the books themselves.

I thought it would be helpful to let Lewis himself explain. To Lucy Matthews on Sep 11th, 1958, he wrote:

You’ve got it exactly right. A strict allegory is like a puzzle with a solution: a great romance is like a flower whose smell reminds you of something you can’t quite place.

His most extensive response in letters, though, was to a Mrs. Hook on Dec 29th, 1958. It is such a helpful reading of Lewis’ own writing project that it is worth quoting at length:

Magdalen College,
Oxford.
29 Dec 1958
Dear Mrs Hook
By an allegory I mean a composition (whether pictorial or literary) in wh. immaterial realities are represented by feigned physical objects e.g. a pictured Cupid allegorically represents erotic love (which in reality is an experience, not an object occupying a given area of space) or, in Bunyan, a giant represents Despair.
If Aslan represented the immaterial Deity in the same way in which Giant Despair represents Despair, he would be an allegorical figure. In reality however he is an invention giving an imaginary answer to the question, ‘What might Christ become like if there really were a world like Narnia and He chose to be incarnate and die and rise again in that world as He actually has done in ours?’ This is not an allegory at all. So in ‘Perelandra’. This also works out a supposition. (‘Suppose, even now, in some other planet there were a first couple undergoing the same that Adam and Eve underwent here, but successfully.’)
Allegory and such supposals differ because they mix the real and the unreal in different ways. Bunyan’s picture of Giant Despair does not start from supposal at all. It is not a supposition but a fact that despair can capture and imprison a human soul. What is unreal (fictional) is the giant, the castle, and the dungeon. The Incarnation of Christ in another world is mere supposal: but granted the supposition, He would really have been a physical object in that world as He was in Palestine and His death on the Stone Table would have been a physical event no less than his death on Calvary.
Similarly, if the angels (who I believe to be real beings in the actual universe) have that relation to the Pagan gods which they are assumed to have in Perelandra, they might really manifest themselves in real form as they did to Ransom.
Again, Ransom (to some extent) plays the role of Christ not because he allegorically represents him (as Cupid represents falling in love) but because in reality every real Christian is really called upon in some measure to enact Christ. Of course Ransom does this rather more spectacularly than most. But that does not mean that he does it allegorically. It only means that fiction (at any rate my kind of fiction) chooses extreme cases….
Thank you for the kind things you say about my other works.
Yours sincerely
C. S. Lewis

Perhaps no figure has caused as much tension in the community of C.S. Lewis scholars and fans as Kathryn Lindskoog.

In 1978, shortly after the publication of C.S. Lewis’ The Dark Tower and Other Stories, Walter Hooper found his editorial work and his character under attack. The Dark Tower was the newest in a line of Lewis volumes that Hooper edited and wrote prefaces for. It included an unfinished science fiction tale, which he called “The Dark Tower.” This strange, incomplete time travel piece includes some of the characters and themes of the Ransom Cycle, but with a curious lack of interest and some strange psychosexual themes.

Not long after the release of The Dark Tower, Lewis scholar Kathryn Lindskoog wrote a scathing exposé of Walter Hooper as literary fraud artist in the popular and intelligent journal Christianity and Literature. In “Some Problems in C.S. Lewis Scholarship,” Lindskoog lists dozens of questions based upon a long series of discrepancies. She followed it up with a series of books with overlapping and evolving material: The C.S. Lewis Hoax (1988), Light in the Shadowlands: Protecting the Real C. S. Lewis (1994), and Sleuthing C.S. Lewis: More Light in the Shadowlands (2001).

As part of my early research, and with a kind of stunned fascination, I read through each of these books. Much of the material is repeated over and over again, and comes down to a series of key accusations:

• Walter Hooper overstated his qualifications as C.S. Lewis’ secretary
• Hooper’s claim to save a number of manuscripts from a legendary housecleaning bonfire “doesn’t hold water”
• Hooper made decisions that went against the will of C.S. Lewis’ brother, Warren
• Hooper made critical and editorial decisions that go against C.S. Lewis’ intentions, especially in the area of editing his poems
• There is a culture of secrecy around the C.S. Lewis estate
• There is a blending of C.S. Lewis’ features into Walter Hooper’s persona
• Hooper has made unusual assertions about C.S. Lewis’ biography, some of which were distributed through books, talks, and films
• After years of studying C.S. Lewis’ unique handwriting, Walter Hooper has forged a number of manuscripts, including “The Dark Tower”

The trilogy of Lindskoog’s literary mysteries have a Dan Brown quality to them. What makes them unique is the response to these books. The accusations galvanized frustration that some scholars and fans had about the protectionism of the C.S. Lewis estate and about the concerns they had over Hooper’s power in shaping the Lewis legend. Some scholars chaffed at the degree of control exhibited over manuscripts and Lewis material. Even for the skeptic of Lindskoog’s approach—and her accusations become phrenetic, so much so that their credibility suffers even in presentation—there is just enough of truth to draw in the honest reader.

While figures like John Beversluis, A.N. Wilson, and David Holbrook have raised the ire of Lewis followers—each of them anti-hagiographical in his own way—these men were intentionally outside the mainstream. Lindskoog, however, was a fully devoted follower of C.S. Lewis.

In fact, I would suggest that it was her commitment to protecting Lewis that led her to her accusations.

I have investigated Lindskoog’s claims as best as I can, giving the resources that I have (note: if you are offering grants, I would gladly take you up on that offer!). For my own part, my introduction to Walter Hooper was through his editorial work in collecting C.S. Lewis’ letters. The work is superb. The scholarship is tight, lacking any temptation to nostalgia and little protectionism. Indeed, my only concern is how little Hooper as editor inserts himself in the Letters. I could use more, rather than less, of Hooper in the Letters.

So, for me, turning to Lindskoog was a bit peculiar. After reading dozens of Hooper prefaces and spending enough time in the academic world to hear publishing war stories, I began to understand, at least from their perspective, why scores of respected scholars and institutions rallied around Lindskoog’s claims. For a period of time, this issue divided the community. It even dominated, for example, the pages of The Canadian C.S. Lewis Journal for much of the 1980s. That archive shows a series or pointed letters, calls to action, and even legal notes. It was a peculiar time.

Although we now have the luxury of critical distance to consider these kinds of claims, I still felt the ghost of the Lindskoog controversy haunting my most recent Mythcon visit, as well as recent publications by Drs. Charlie Starr and Edwin Brown. Samuel Joeckel, in chapter 13 of The C.S. Lewis Phenomenon: Christianity and the Public Sphere (2013), dedicates an entire section to Lindskoog and the entire C.S. Lewis industry. And I live in an area where dedicated Lewisians—including folks who have donated materials that I have been able to use in research—presume Walter Hooper’s guilt.

I decided I wanted to explore the issue openly, but all of us have some skin in the game. The truth is that I would be a fool as an emerging scholar to take the Lindskoog side on things. It would limit access to resources, publication possibilities, and mentors to lead my way. Yet, as a critical thinker, I have endeavoured to take the claims that can be weighed using evidence and consider them seriously. There might be a cost to that approach. After all, just because I can string fancy words together on a glowing screen doesn’t mean I’m not a fool.

When I went to Oxford in the fall of 2014, I intended to use my knowledge of Lewis’ handwriting to decide, as best as I could, whether he wrote the “Dark Tower” fragment. It was a project I never told anyone about, and wasn’t the only reason I went to the Bodleian library. But I needed to know for my work on the Ransom Cycle whether “The Dark Tower” should be included.

I looked at the manuscript and I knew in a flash: This is a work by C.S. Lewis.

It isn’t just the characteristic handwriting. Lewis forms his letters (like f, p, and s) in distinctive ways, as Charlie Starr is working out in his research. A forger could mimic distinctive features—and even copy a certain “era” of writing style. For me, it was the non-literary aspect of the manuscript that won me over: the weight of the pen, the pattern of dark and light lettering, the cluster of letters huddled here and there, the way he underlines or sets off text, and the way he makes corrections.

I have decided in my mind the chief accusation against Walter Hooper is false. While it isn’t a very good story, “The Dark Tower” was written by Lewis. Some of the other questions, like secrecy and a difficulty to get manuscripts, have taken care of themselves over time. There are twenty or more books of Lewis edited by Hooper, and scholars have been steadily publishing archived material, available at the Bod, at the Wade Centre, and at Taylor University and a handful of other archives.

Thinking back to the debate, I can see where it quickly went wrong–in my judgment, anyway. What began as a question of forgery, soon became a question of sheer character—not just a question of who told the truth or lied, but who would tell the truth or who is most likely to lie. I’m not sure how anyone can find a way out of that maze. As an historian, I can only deal with the evidence.

If I have any criticism of Walter Hooper’s work—and here I trust that his many friends will forgive me—it is that I find some of his prefaces and introductions a little too effusive. Although this trait is gone by the 1990s editorial work, a younger Walter Hooper was clearly enamoured by C.S. Lewis. Many people are taken in by Lewis, you know. As a literary secretary I have wondered whether he has sometimes lacked the critical distance needed–the kinds of critical steps back taken even by Christopher Tolkien of his father’s work.

My criticism might just be a matter of taste, though others have noted the feeling in Hooper’s work that his time at the Kilns represents itself as longer than it perhaps was. I suspect it was life-changing for Hooper, and I have coded weekend retreats (personal or religious) in my memory with more detail than many months or even years of my life. I understand how important a time like that might be.However, with due respect to critics, love of an author does not a forger make.

In fact, reading Walter Hooper’s introductions, he seems like the last person in the world to profane the C.S. Lewis script with his own hand. This is probably why Lindskoog turned to the question of Hooper’s sanity, arguing that he lost himself in the myth of C.S. Lewis, the way that lines between Sean Connery and James Bond blurred for a while.

It is not the kind of claim that I can even consider as a scholar. On the balance of what I have before me—manuscripts and letters and a hundred literary clues—there isn’t evidence that Hooper was a forger.

Walter Hooper has dedicated himself to protecting the character of C.S. Lewis, even going as far as to suggest that Lewis never consummated his marriage with Joy Davidman. But Hooper has remained an independent identity, leaving behind his Episcopalian credentials to revert to Roman Catholicism—a move that Lewis never made. And, as I have said, the Collected Letters and Hooper’s Companion and Guide are critically helpful resources.

Was Lindskoog, then, just out to cause damage?

I don’t think so. What many do not recognize is that Kathryn Lindskoog’s claims emerged out of her desire to protect Lewis—the same kind of impetus that Hooper has, actually. Though she is ignored by some, and treated as an enemy by others, Lindskoog attacked Walter Hooper and the C.S. Lewis Co. because she felt they were dishonouring the C.S. Lewis that she loved.

An example of this protective instinct is her attack of A.N. Wilson’s biography of Lewis, a biography that many Lewis followers thought was over-psychologized, reductionistic, and (frankly) too cute. Lindskoog’s bullet point list of errata is characteristic of her style (John Visser has archived it for us here). This extensive critique came from her desire to keep Lewis from being posthumously bent into someone else’s image. Doubtless, the whole thing came unhinged. But it began where most of us begin: trying to do honour in our work.

The Lindskoog affair offers some lessons in caution.

I think there is a danger whenever we try to protect a figure—especially a figure as dynamic and elusive as C.S. Lewis. His intellect or skill with the pen or ability to offer spiritual advice can sometimes cause readers to undervalue the flaws—or even to cover them up. For me, Abigail Santamaria in her biography of Joy Davidman captures the problematic features of an historic personality well without lusting after them. At the same time she manages to present the stunning intellect and rigorous courage of an evasive figure.

Any complex figure is going to create different interpretations. This has happened with C.S. Lewis. Perhaps we can recover A.N. Wilson’s value as an iconoclast for a moment—despite errors in his work. His comment here is a caution to what we do with people whom we think get it wrong:

“Lewis idolatry, like Christianity itself, has resorted to some ugly tactics as it breaks itself into factions. Hard words are used on both sides, and there is not much evidence of Christian charity when the war is at its hottest” (C.S. Lewis, xvi).

As C.S. Lewis readers, we should avoid investing in these factions. It can happen in subcultures. One lover of Tolkien questioned my essential human goodness because I didn’t think the Peter Jackson adaptations the worst things to ever happen. This sort of demonizing does nothing for scholarly discussion, and it certainly does not “protect” the integrity of the authors we love.

So, what do we do with Kathryn Lindskoog’s conspiracy theory?

Would it be cheeky of me to turn to C.S. Lewis himself for the answer?

Kathryn Stillwell-Lindskoog began corresponding with Lewis during her MA studies. She visited Lewis in Oxford in 1956, and sent him her completed MA Thesis in 1957. Lewis was not thrilled with “research” as a university discipline, and preferred the lens wasn’t focused on him. But note the response that he provides this young scholar:

Oct 29th 1957
Dear Miss Stillwell–
Your thesis arrived yesterday and I read it at once. You are in the centre of the target everywhere.
For one thing, you know my work better than anyone else I’ve met: certainly better than I do myself….
But secondly, you (alone of the critics I’ve met) realise the connection, or even the unity, of all the books–scholarly, fantastic, theological–and make me appear a single author not a man who impersonates half a dozen authors, which is what I seem to most. This wins really very high marks indeed.
There is one place (pp. 93, 94) where, tho’ I am sure you are not misunderstanding, you express yourself in a way wh. might make it seem to the reader that you were….
If you understand me so well, you will understand other authors too. I hope that we shall have some really useful critical works from your hand.
With thanks and good wishes.
Yours sincerely
C. S. Lewis

I’ve shown before how Lewis carefully guides his students, but I find it fascinating that Lewis recognizes something special in Lindskoog’s work. While he tolerated his friend, Chad Walsh’s, biography (C.S. Lewis: Apostle to the Skeptics, 1949), he was impatient with literary critics who took up his own works. Lindskoog, just an American grad student, “got” Lewis.

Whatever the value of her conspiracy trilogy, I am going to hunt down Lindskoog’s other work. Her thesis was published as The Lion of Judah in Never-Never Land: The Theology of C.S. Lewis Expressed in His Fantasies for Children (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1973), which was expanded into Journey Into Narnia (Pasadena: Hope Publishing House, 1998). I have the 2^nd edition of her C.S. Lewis: Mere Christian with InterVarsity Press, but it had at least four editions. It is an “ideas” book, laying out 16 topical essays on Lewis’ ideas in his work (some that overlap with the kind of work I have done on A Pilgrim in Narnia).

Though there are some who were very hurt during the two decades dominated by the Lindskoog affair, emerging scholars may be wise to follow Lewis’ lead in looking into his life. He did not point to the Pilgrim in Narnia blog, after all. And though Lindskoog did not turn out to be the broad-based critic that Lewis predicted she could be, there may still be something for us in those older books. Finally, there is a caution about how far our devotion should go. We can protect something to death, after all.

Last week I had the great thrill to post that I had finished reading through C.S. Lewis’ works chronologically–from his earliest childhood letters and stories to his last letters, essays, and books. On Thursday I will post some practical ways that you too can do this reading project–whether you take a year, or 3 years (like me), or the better part of a decade. Stay tuned–and make sure you check out our “Inklings Walk” tonight at 8pm EST. Check out the #InkWalk hashtag to hear Charles Williams, Owen Barfield, J.R.R. Tolkien, Hugo Dyson, and C.S. Lewis (me) as we wander through the overgrown paths of Twittervale. I’ll be tweeting as @PilgrimInNarnia. 

By my very rough count, most of Lewis’ published work is made up of 60 books worth of reading, or about 21,000 pages, 5,000,000-6,000,000 words. Considering this corpus is made up of some of the most important Christian literature in the 20th century, foundational work in literary history and criticism, classic SF and dystopian books, and a series of fairy tales that changed children’s literature forever–not to mention thousands of letters that shaped the spiritual lives of friends and strangers–it is not a bad legacy of the pen. There are, by my count, 3,274 letters in print, plus another dozen or so unpublished letters that have circulated. Though this probably isn’t even 1/3 of the letters Lewis sent in his his days, it is more than 3,500 pages of reading.

It is a lot of reading. To put it all in chronological order adds a layer of complexity to the project. Besides the sheer fun of it, why have I chosen to read C.S. Lewis chronologically? Here are some of my key reasons.

Bound by Honour

There is an important role for the blogger and social commentator these days. I write that way, working as a fan and critic, and thinking not just about books but about how stories work in our world. This is a faith, fiction, and fantasy blog, centering around the Inklings, their influences, and their emulators.

I have tried, though, to keep my work as a student and scholar of the Inklings just a few inches from my work as a blogger. Most won’t have noticed, but I have been very careful about making grand pronunciations about C.S. Lewis that aren’t confirmed by other scholars. I have made some hints here, a suggestion or two there. And I have made some mistakes. For the most part, though, I have worked to show new angles, not completely new interpretations. The papers I have published have been on teaching and the publication of manuscripts. It is only recently that I have published my own original work, like recent chapters on spiritual theology and Lewis’ critical approaches.

The reason I held back is because, as a scholar of C.S. Lewis, I am bound by honour to have read broadly and deeply in the man’s work. No matter how I approached reading Lewis, I needed to read just about everything I could get my hands on.

First Steps on a Well-Worn Road

Knowing that I was going to read everything that Lewis published, I had to begin somewhere. I had read Narnia, the Ransom Cycle, and Mere Christianity growing up. Many of us have, though I think the Ransom books are hidden SciFi/Dystopian early generation treasures. As I discuss here, it was The Screwtape Letters, The Great Divorce, and J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Mythopoeia” that drew me into Lewis studies–really a development from my teaching experience.

I found the mythmaking possibilities endless, but when I read Letters to an American Lady I knew I had to create a systematic approach to reading–and one that included letters, not just the published books and essays. I don’t know how other readers and scholars do it, but you could approach the material thematically (cultural criticism, spiritual direction, apologetics, writing themes, etc.). You could also come at Lewis and read him genre by genre, going little by little through his letters, poems, literary histories, book reviews, apologetics works, lectures, literary criticism pieces, anthologies and prefaces, SF books, short stories, children’s literature, and myth retellings. You could also read the books as they fall into your lap–a kind of serendipity approach guided by library catalogues, yard sales, bookstore specials, and friends foolish enough to loan out their books to you, a voracious reader.

I thought it made sense–and I still think it is the best way–to read chronologically. I knew enough about Lewis to know how to do this, and had an excellent library nearby. It meant beginning with juvenilia–my least favourite of his works–but it is a clear, systematic way to approach Lewis’ life and work.

The Man Behind the Mirror

We are reading because we enjoy the books: the stories, the words, the characters, the arguments, the particularly Lewisian way of looking at the world. You love Narnia, she loves classic Science Fiction, he is moved by the depth of the literary histories, they go to Lewis as an apologist and social critic, and I love the buried treasure in the reams of letters left behind. We read Lewis because we like his work.

But I was also reading because I wanted to get a sense of the man behind the letters and the images. Letter by letter, book by book, piece by piece I was building a picture in my mind of who C.S. Lewis was. I don’t ever intend to write a biography–at least not in the traditional sense. Before I could confidently speak to “Lewis’ Approaches to Spiritual Theology”–my PhD project in short form–I had to have a very clear idea of who Lewis was. Moving past the works left behind to the writer’s vocation is a dangerous project, but it is one I chose to undertake.

Reading chronologically allowed me to form my impression of the Narnian behind Narnia, the apologist behind the apologies, the man behind the myths.

Would the Real C.S. Lewis Please Step Forward?

As I was trying to form an image of who C.S. Lewis was, I wanted to avoid two crucial errors.

First, I didn’t want to fall into any one C.S. Lewis myth. Lewis has been taken up, for good and ill, by so many others. I have seen him identified by evangelicals, progressive Christians, Orthodox believers, Catholics sure he was close to returning to the fold, fantasy writers, animal rights activists, theistic evolutionists and young earth creationists, Tolkienists, Jungian psychologists, atheists with a grudge, atheists still hoping for an autograph, and the 22 people in the world certain that Lewis was right (or wrong) about Paradise Lost and know why.

I could not protect myself from all views of history and letters, but as much as I could I wanted to form my sense of Lewis for myself, without help from biographers, critics, fans, and historians. So I read C.S. Lewis work first, and then turned to what others said about him.

Second, I did not want to fall into the trap of imagining Lewis as a static character. It is a bare fact that the man who toyed with sadomasochism as a priggish undergrad wrote a layman’s commentary on the Psalms, lectured on Marxism, helped instigate a cultural return to Spenser, preached a return to Christ on the BBC, and wrote a series of children’s stories that created a framework of possibility for future fantasy writers. To freeze any one of these images into “The Real C.S. Lewis” is to reduce a complex figure into a cartoon.

I read chronologically so that as I grew to understand the heart of the man, I also saw how he changed and grew throughout the years. Finally, once I had a good image of Lewis in my mind (at about 1945), I started reading biographies and secondary literature. Even then, I was selective, weighting my reading heavily to Lewis’ own work and words.

The Dip of the Pen

Lewis once said–I can’t remember where right now–that he liked using a dip pen to write because it slowed him down. The pen paced his work as he paused every 5-10 words to sketch out the ideas in his mind. This is part of the reason why Lewis was able to create brief, tight work largely in a single draft.

Reading chronologically gave me the same sort of biographical experience. Going month by month, year by year, allowed me to explore areas that were uncertain to me. As they became relevant, I also did research into apologetics, epistolary fiction, the 16th century and the reign of the Tudors, WWI and WWII, the Oxbridge educational systems, literary theory, and etymology.

Reading Lewis caused me to discover or rediscover Jane Austen, Jonathan Swift, Milton, Dante, Homer, Samuel Richardson, H.G. Wells, G.K. Chesterton, George MacDonald, T.S. Eliot, F. Anstey, Arthur C. Clarke, Brian Aldiss, John Christopher, E.R. Eddison, George Orwell, Charles Williams, Owen Barfield, Dorothy L. Sayers, Virginia Woolf, as well as Arthurian traditions and the metaphysical poets. I also read much of Warren Lewis’ diary, and letters by Joy Davidman, Dorothy Sayers, and J.R.R. Tolkien–three great minds it was a privilege to creep.

Reading slowly enough to supplement that reading with other works has been a rich experience.

That, then, is why I chose to do a chronological reading of C.S. Lewis. I think it was worth it, and am excited to try this project on other writers of history.

Last week I was pleased to post that I had finished reading through C.S. Lewis’ works chronologically–from his earliest childhood letters and those precocious Boxen stories to his last letters, essays, poems, and books. On Tuesday I gave some of the rationale for doing something crazy like this. Reading Lewis from beginning to end gave me a way to read everything that Lewis ever wrote in a systematic way that helped me catch a sense of his inner workings–his personality, his weaknesses, his hopes and his dreams.

Over the last three years I have had a number of people ask me about this project of reading C.S. Lewis chronologically. Far from a definitive guide, I wanted to post some very practical ways that you too can do this reading project–whether you take a year (the professional approach), or 3 years (for students like me), or the better part of a decade (the bedside reading approach).

I won’t in this blog talk about the hard-to-find materials or the unpublished work, but will focus on the kinds of materials that the average reader can find. I may geekify this post a little bit in the future.

By the Numbers

First, what are you in for if you are if you take on this crazy C.S. Lewis project? Here are some of the numbers:

• 99% of his published works are in 60 volumes
• Joel Heck lists 463 individual things to read (i.e., books, essays, poems, public lectures, reviews, etc.)
• 215+ essays, sermons, and reviews in 13-20 books
• 3 edited volumes dedicated to literary friends (Charles Williams & George MacDonald)
• 2 volumes of published incomplete work (Boxen, Narrative Poems, The Dark Tower and Other Stories)
• 3 volumes of 3,274 letters exceeding 3,500 pages
• 11 books of complete fiction (3 SF, 7 Narnian tales, 1 myth retold)
• 2 conversion stories (Pilgrim’s Regress and Surprised by Joy)
• 3 books of apologetics (Problem of Pain, Mere Christianity, Miracles)
• 2 books of theological fiction (Screwtape Letters, Great Divorce)
• 4 other books that defy description (Letters to Malcolm, 4 Loves, Reflections on the Psalms, Abolition of Man)
• 12 volumes of literary criticism and history
• over 200 poems in 4 volumes
• 21,000+ pages
• 5,000,000-6,000,000 words

It’s quite a total, considering we have few of his lectures published, almost none of the incomplete manuscripts or drafts, and most of his letters are lost (or unfound).

The Tools You Will Need

Like me, you probably didn’t know where to start when you were ready to start. Fortunately, we live in an age of incredibly rich resources for at-home reading. I will list a few supplementary resources below, but here is the bare minimum:

1. A Publication List
2. The Collected Letters
3. The Collected Poems
4. The Books Themselves

1. A Publication List

You can find bibliographies of C.S. Lewis’ work most anywhere on the internet, and the Bulletin of the New York C.S. Lewis Society runs a comprehensive bibliography for subscribers. There were two primary resources I used for organizing my C.S. Lewis reading.

First, I used Joel Heck‘s “Chronologically Lewis” projects. Dr. Heck has initiated a mammoth undertaken to record everything that can be known about C.S. Lewis’ daily life. He has spent years gleaning letters, diaries, and other obscure literature to put together a daily accounting that exceeds 1,000 pages. And he gives it all away for free at http://www.joelheck.com.

Part of Joel’s work is to create a “Complete Works of C. S. Lewis in Chronological Order.” The version I have–now tattered and torn and filled with pencil scratches, stains, dates, omissions and additions–is much older than the new one you can find here. The new list has 463 books, essays, poems, public lectures, and reviews.

Second, I also used Arend Smilde’s plain and extremely useful http://www.Lewisiana.nl. Working in Dutch and English, Arend has a great eye for detail. He has also has written a chronological bibliography with the hot title, “C. S. Lewis’s essays, short stories and other short prose writings as published in collected editions, 1939–2013.” Arend organizes the material in 3 ways: 1) listing the different essay and story collections and giving their table of contents; 2) giving a chronology of essays in a short form (i.e., easy to make a checklist); and 3) alphabetizing Lewis’ essays and short pieces.

My interest was reading Lewis while he was writing something, not just in the order of publication dates. Much of Miracles, for example, was done in 1943-44, but not published until 1947. Then it was abridged in the late 1950s and revised in 1960. It meant (for me) coming at it a couple of times from different angles. On the other side, his Oxford History of 16th c. prose and poetry was written over a 15 year period, finished in 1952, then published in 1954. I read it little by little over a period of 3 months while I was doing late 1940s and early 1950s reading. There was not much more precision available to me.

Combining your letter reading (see below), with the lists from Joel Heck (baseline) and Arend Smilde (supplement), gives you a pretty good guide on what to read and when.

2. The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis (3 vols)

I was fortunate to begin my journey after Walter Hooper had completed the monumental task of collecting as many of Lewis’ letters as possible in 3 pretty thick volumes. I used these letters to pace my 3 years of reading. Sometimes I read a few letters a day; on occasion I sat and read a few months worth of correspondence on a single evening. Sometimes I had to slow down on the letters to finish up a book, but the timing was pretty good.

Volume 3 has some supplemental letters, so you need to have it on hand pretty early in the process. There is a Volume 4 in the works for letters left behind, but I wouldn’t expect it until 2020ish. Vol 3 is, unfortunately, very difficult to find in print. The cheapest copy on Amazon today is $506.66, and you can read here about my adventure in finding a copy. Vol 3 is available in eBook for pretty cheap, and each of the volumes go on sale for $4 USD. If you have a Vol 3 around you aren’t using, get it to a student who would use it.

I have done a statistical analysis of the letters (see here), and have blogged a few dozen of them over the last 5 years (e.g., here). This is one of my favourite parts of reading Lewis. Even in the midst of responding to fan letters and ordering stamps and doing college business, there are flashes of C.S. Lewis’ pithy brilliance and poignant spiritual direction.

There are other letter collections (see the listing here), but these 3 cover most of what you need.

3. The Collected Poems

Here I arrived too soon. This was the weakest part of my reading and something I will address next time. I have the Walter Hooper edited poetry volumes (Collected Poems and Narrative Poems), which has about 70% of Lewis’ poems–including his earliest books Spirits in Bondage and Dymer–and some unfinished work. Scouring letters, biographies, and some articles by Don W. King and others, I added another 3 dozen poems or so.

Now Don King has done the work for us in his The Collected Poems of C. S. Lewis A Critical Edition. Published recently, this edition of Lewis’ poetry represents years (decades?) of work. It is the closest thing we have to a complete poetry text of C.S. Lewis. While the cost of the volume is high ($75 USD), serious readers are grateful for the collection. And, of course, it is full of important critical analysis of the poetry itself from a leading critic.

If you can’t get this volume yourself, send me a note and I’ll help fill in some of the missing pieces. But go to your local library and tell them this is the “definitive work.” Who knows? That sort of crazy talk has worked for me before.

4. The Books Themselves

This is the trick, isn’t it? You can find C.S. Lewis’ books at local libraries, in church offices, in garage sale bins and library discard sales, on friends’ bookshelves, and–if worse comes to worse–relatively inexpensively at Abebooks, Amazon, or the bookseller down the road. Narnia and Mere Christianity are pretty easy to bump into; the rest falls into the special providence of book finding that I’m sure exists, but I can’t predict.

I have made a list on Goodreads (see here), and you have the Joel Heck list already. Let me add some book tips that don’t fit very elegantly together, but can be helpful in your journey:

• Essays and Short Pieces
  • Lesley Walmsley edited a volume called C.S.Lewis Essay Collection and Other Short Pieces (2000) which has most of the articles not in Hooper’s new Image and Imagination; it was not available in the U.S. and so is a bit hard to find
  • Transpositions = Weight of Glory (sermons)
  • The Seeing Eye = Christian Reflections (essays)
  • There are two versions of God in the Dock: 1) a longer one that is the same as Undeceptions; and 2) a short abridged God in the Dock of about 101 pages–ignore #2 and any other abridgements
  • Some essay books aren’t needed if you have the others: The Grand Miracle, Of Other Worlds, First and Second Things, Compelling Reason, and Timeless at Heart 
  • The only new essay in Christian Reunion is the “Christian Reunion” essay–is it available anywhere else? I have it in audio form, and in the Walmsley edition
  • Check Arend’s index for more details
• Poems
  • I have encouraged Don King’s Collected Poems, which have all the poems (with minor omissions)
  • Walter Hooper edited Narrative Poems has 4 unfinished longer poems, plus Dymer; add The Collected Poems for about 70% of Lewis’ corpus
  • The Collected Poems has a misprinted cover that simply says Poems–the same title as an earlier edited volume by Hooper (I know!)
• Literary Criticism & History
  • Except the Oxford History Sixteenth Century book, A Preface to Paradise Lost and The Personal Heresy, the other literary criticism and history books are reprinted in a new Canto series for $12-$20 USD ($20-$25 CDN), including Allegory of Love, The Discarded Image, An Experiment in Criticism, Studies in Words, Selected Literary Essays, Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature, Image and Imagination, and Spenser’s Images of Life (lectures put together by Alistair Fowley)
  • Rehabilitations is impossible to find but is replaced by 3 books: Selected Literary Essays, Image and Imagination, and Christian Reflections
  • Lewis’ commentary on Charles Williams’ strange and beautiful–and incomplete–Arthuriad is printed together with Williams’ poems and 5 chapters of a Williams Arthurian history in a “Williams & Lewis” one volume edition by Eerdmans in 1974
• Christian Books
  • Mere Christianity = Broadcast Talks (= Case for Christianity) + Beyond Personality + Christian Behaviour
  • Miracles was released in 1947; there is a hard-to-get abridgment in about 1958, but the 2nd edition of 1960 is what you will most easily find; in it ch. 3 has been rewritten (see Arend Smilde’s write up here)
  • A number of the Christian books are reprinted in an attractive Harvest Book series, including All My Road Before Me (the 1920s diaries), The World’s Last Night, Of Other Worlds, Present Concerns, Letters to Malcolm, Surprised by Joy, The Dark Tower and Other Stories, The Four Loves, and Poems (the one not needed)
  • I have ignored totally the anthologies of Lewis’ work and quotations–I’m not against them; they simply overlap
• Fiction
  • Watch out for an abridgment of That Hideous Strength called The Tortured Planet
  • Voyage to Venus = Perelandra
  • The Dark Tower has the incomplete Ransom tale (which I think authentically Lewis‘, but some doubt it) and some other stories published or unfinished; see also Charlie Starr’s Light
  • See William O’Flaherty’s great little guest blog for more: “Till We Have Confusing Book Titles“
• Digital Editions
  • Audio
    • I have audio editions of all the popular essays except “Rejoinder to Dr. Pittenger” and “Is Progress Possible?”
    • I have audio for all the Christian books–including The Abolition of Man–and all the fiction
    • Narnia comes in an unabridged version and a dramatized version (by Focus on the Family)–is there also a BBC version dramatized somewhere?
    • The Screwtape Letters has been read by Ralph Cosham (who reads 90% of Lewis’ work), as well as John Cleese from Monty Python; there is also a Focus on the Family dramatized version featuring Andy Serkis (the famous voice of Gollum in the Middle Earth films)
    • For those more visually oriented, the Youtube account “C.S. Lewis Doodle” has done some awesome animations in blackboard form of a dozen or so of Lewis’ chapters and essays
    • I don’t have audio for any of the literary criticism books
  • PDFs or Ebooks
    • I believe that I have a digital copy of every book except the Oxford History Sixteenth Century volume and The Personal Heresy–has anyone found these for sale?
    • All the published letters and Narnia are widely available in many forms (PDF, Kindle, Epub, etc.)
    • The Don King volume is not in Ebook or Audio form yet (is it?)
    • Lewis’ work is out of copyright in many countries (including Canada and Austrialia), so there are some digital copies online

I will leave some things for future blogs:

1. Other resources that come in handy
2. Ways to supplement your reading
3. Previously unpublished material that is now available here and there

Now, it is your turn. Tell me in the comments about how you have approached reading C.S. Lewis, and whether this is a project you would enjoy. Feel free to critique (to make this resource page better) and share.

I’m exciting to be presenting a paper next week at the 10th Frances White Ewbank Colloquium on C.S. Lewis & Friends at Taylor University, in Indiana (see more here). I am talking about my “Cosmic Find” that links The Screwtape Letters to Lewis’ science fiction. As I busily read and reread texts, edit papers, and prepare slides, I realize that I am going to be fairly brief about the whole “discovery” (really, it was a recovery). I will be focussing on Perelandra, and breezing through the background. So I wanted people at the conference and interested readers to have a place to get some of this exciting background. Here is my blog on “A Cosmic Find in The Screwtape Letters.” I’m also excited to be returning to the Wade at Wheaton once again–where all the magic began.

I am excited to share this intriguing research breakthrough with all my Pilgrim in Narnia readers.[1] As many of you know, I have been working on C.S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters for a few years now. It is time to invite you all into some of the things I have discovered.

After presenting a paper on teaching Screwtape in 2012, I traveled to the Marion E. Wade Center at Wheaton College near Chicago. I was working on background material for my PhD thesis and was excited to make this pilgrimage.

Honestly, it wasn’t going very well. I had gone to look at the marginalia in Lewis’ Bibles—to see if his notes and highlights could tell us anything about his Bible reading habits. All I really found was that the things Lewis underlined or marked seemed to be beautiful passages. Beyond that, I found very little.

After a day and a half of doing routine things and not getting very far, I asked the helpful staff for their typescript of The Screwtape Letters. This was Lewis’ first popular book, and it was a treat to spend some time with the file.

Though it was C.S. Lewis’s BBC talks that made his voice well known throughout Britain, his fame was begun with The Screwtape Letters. The Letters are a correspondence between Screwtape, a senior demon, and his nephew Wormwood, a junior tempter with his first field assignment. Each letter was printed serially May 2 through November 28, 1941 in the Anglican weekly, The Guardian. Readers clamoured for copies of the The Guardian, and the book that came out in 1942 was a bestseller in the U.K. and in America.

Intriguingly, the demonic letters were printed in the Christian newspaper with no preface. This inevitably led to some confusion among readers,^[2] so Lewis took the opportunity of the book publication to write a preface. Your edition of The Screwtape Letters most likely has a preface dated July 5, 1941. As is common with epistolary fiction, the preface introduces readers to the demonic dialogue to follow, but does so by pretending that the letters are nonfiction:

I have no intention of explaining how the correspondence which I now offer to the public fell into my hands.

Part of the fun of Screwtape is the idea that we are listening in on a conversation from another world.

I was thrilled to visit the famous handwritten manuscript of The Screwtape Letters at The Berg Collection of English and American Literature at The New York Public Library in 2012. The Berg file, though, does not include the preface.

Little known, seldom viewed by researchers,^[3] and not yet integrated into scholarship, the handwritten manuscript of the preface to The Screwtape Letters is still in existence. Included in the Wade’s typescript of the Letters is the handwritten preface dated July 5, 1941. What is surprising about the handwritten preface is that it is really quite different than the first edition preface or the one you see printed in your copy.

As it turns out, this is a find of cosmic significance.

Open up your copy of The Screwtape Letters (or look in the Google books preface here). You’ll see there are four paragraphs, including the one that I quoted above—just the single sentence drawing the reader in to the correspondence which “fell into my hands”—the “my” being C.S. Lewis, the undersigned. The second paragraph is about the kinds of errors we might fall into when treating with devils, while the third is a reminder that the author of the letters is not be trusted even on his own account: besides the tool of deception, a demon like Screwtape might be (and is no doubt often) self-deceived. The last paragraph deals with issues in aligning terrestrial and diabolical time. It is set in the war, but that is all we know.

This is the preface that has stood for nearly 75 years in all the major editions. This, however, was not the preface that C.S. Lewis first penned in 1941.

Or, at least, not precisely.

The handwritten preface comprises five paragraphs, not four. Except for a couple of points, it shares with the published preface three of its four paragraphs. The first paragraph, while similar in its core idea, is differently worded and introduces a new character; this character is also the subject of an entirely new paragraph and the single change in the final paragraph. Adding a paragraph changes the length of the preface pretty dramatically. The published preface is 281 words in total; the new paragraph in the handwritten preface nearly doubles the length. The new paragraph has 201 words, for a total of 485 in the handwritten preface.

While adding a new paragraph is certainly exciting, the most significant difference in the preface comes not from the length, but from a shift in content. In short, Dr. Ransom from the Cosmic Trilogy becomes a character in the Screwtape correspondence.

We all know Ransom as the main character of Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength—as well as the failed time travel piece, “The Dark Tower.” Although this WWII-era “Space Trilogy” is remembered only by SciFi fans and C.S. Lewis readers, I have focused a great deal on the Trilogy here on A Pilgrim in Narnia. Not only do I think they are important works on their own account, but my discovery at the Wade has made me realize how very important they are.

Remember now how the published preface begins:

I have no intention of explaining how the correspondence which I now offer to the public fell into my hands.

Now look at how the handwritten preface begins:

Nothing will induce me to reveal how my friend Dr. Ransom got hold of the script which is translated in the following pages.^[4]

Isn’t that amazing?!!

The two introductions do the same thing, but the effect is entirely different.

First, note that it is Dr. Ransom who discovers Screwtape’s letters, not C.S. Lewis.^[5] Lewis is still a character in this drama. Instead of the discover, he is the publisher—the same role that he played in Out of the Silent Planet, where he tells the story of Ransom’s trip to Malacandra in novel form as a way of getting the information out into the public. In Out of the Silent Planet, with the help of angelic Eldila, Ransom learned the Malacandrian language. He then discovers an interplanetary demonic conspiracy that is going to affect Earth. With Ransom as discoverer of these demonic letters, we are tempted to make the link between Screwtape’s approach and the conspiracy that Lewis and Ransom are trying to stop.

Second, we now see that Screwtape’s correspondence has been “translated.” Dr. Ransom is a linguist—a student of words—so it is no surprise that he can work as a translator. But what is the demonic language that Screwtape uses (if it isn’t English)? And if it is a special demonic language, how did Dr. Ransom learn it?

The fourth and final paragraph of the published preface always included a key detail about Screwtape’s fictional universe:

…in general the diabolical method of dating seems to bear no relation to terrestrial time…^[6]

We know that Lewis has thought about the questions that world-builders ask. He thought about time (diabolical), and the nature of the characters (deceivers and self-deceived). As it turns out, he also thought about language.

In 2013 I published the handwritten preface for the first time in the Oxford journal, Notes & Queries.[7] I will quote from that here, sharing with you all the discovery that explains the language of Screwtape’s world:

But it is, however, too late to make any mystery of the process whereby Dr. Ransom learned the language. ^[8] The original of these letters is written in what may be called Old Solar – the primitive speech of all rational creatures inhabiting the solar system. How Ransom came to learn it I have already related in a book called Out of the Silent Planet; but when I wrote that book he and I were both mistaken in supposing it to be the local speech of a single world – that world which its inhabitants call Malacandra. We now know better, but there is no time within this preface to discuss the problems of extra-terrestrial philology involved. But it should be added that the translation is necessarily very free. The capital letters used for pronouns when they refer to that Being whom Screwtape describes as the Enemy are, for example, a most ingenious device of Ransom’s for representing a quite different (and involuntary) phenomenon in the original. On the other hand many words mentioned where Screwtape is discussing what he calls “the Philological Arm” were already English, for naturally devils whose terrain is England are well skilled in the language of their proposed victims.[9]

No time for “extra-terrestrial philology” indeed! This paragraph is a tease. Still, we discover that Screwtape was not speaking a specifically demonic language. Dr. Ransom, the interstellar philologist, learned the Old Solar language on Malacandra. Old Solar is Hlab-Eribol-ef-Cordi, the language shared by all non-human ‘rational’ beings (Hnau) in the universe from the beginning of time (or near to it). Humans have long since lost the language after the fall of Adam and Eve, but it is spoken both by the terrestrial species of other worlds—Hnau, or rational, sapient beings of various shapes—as well as the celestial beings, trans- or multi-dimensional angel-like creatures called Eldila (singular ‘Eldil’) in the Ransom books.

What does this all mean?

I’m glad you asked. The implications are still being worked out. David Mark Purdy conducted a genre study of The Screwtape Letters that includes the implications of this handwritten preface. David and I have chapters that appear in a new book coming out in early 2016, called Both Sides of the Wardrobe. David will talk about his work in Screwtape here on A Pilgrim in Narnia next year.

The failed time travel novel, “The Dark Tower” is considered by some as a forgery. I became convinced that it was an authentic (though not very well written) Lewis story when I saw the manuscript at the Bodleian last year. Still, some language analysis using computer models found that it is doubtful that Lewis wrote “The Dark Tower.”[10] These studies compare “The Dark Tower” with the other Ransom books and decide, in one way or another, the data doesn’t fit. Now that we know that Screwtape is part of the same fictional universe, in the same series, written in the same period, I suspect that the kind of language used in Screwtape might create a better data set that we can compare to ”The Dark Tower.” In short, you need to run the tests again.

As you might guess, there are intriguing possibilities about how we reread Screwtape as part of the Ransom Universe. More immediately pressing, though, is the question of how we read the Ransom Trilogy with Screwtape. Indeed, we don’t really have a “Trilogy” anymore, though there are other 5-book trilogies that I enjoy. We now have a Ransom Cycle, with four published books in four different genres, and an incomplete story in a fifth genre.

I am working now on a paper called “A Cosmic Shift in the Ransom Cycle.” I presented my findings last year at Mythcon and received great comments back. In this paper I think about what Lewis was doing when he built a fictional world. Then I look at what it might mean to reread the Ransom Cycle with The Screwtape Letters. I look in detail at the first two chapters of Perelandra, using a Screwtapian lens to show how the books fit together.

I hope to have this paper ready for publication in early 2016. If you are a scholar interested in reading a draft and providing criticism, let me know. Meanwhile, I would encourage readers of A Pilgrim in Narnia to try the project for yourselves. Read Lewis’ WWII-era fantasy project in this order:

[1] This paper was made possible by generous access to materials and support by three American archives: The Marion E. Wade Center, Wheaton College, IL; The Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations., NY; and The Christoph R. Keller Library, General Theological Seminary, NY. Permission to quote is graciously provided by The CS Lewis Company Ltd., Poole, UK. Many thanks to UPEI for a research grant that supported my travel to the Wade centre.

[2] See C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters and Screwtape Proposes a Toast (London, 1961), 5. Here Lewis talks about a reader who apparently canceled his subscription because the Letters were positively diabolic. That letter to the editor was never published in The Guardian.

[3] I have only seen a single reference to the unpublished preface, and that quite recent and a footnote: Charlie Starr, Light: C.S. Lewis’s First and Final Short Story (Hamdon, CT, 2012), 118.

[4] C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (London, 1942) 9; manuscript excerpts: ‘The Screwtape Letters’ by C.S. Lewis, n.d., n.p. CSL/MS-107, The Marion E. Wade Center, Wheaton College, Wheaton, IL.

[5] Lewis describes the convention later as, ‘the imaginary C.S.L. who has somehow tapped a diabolical correspondence’; see 9 Oct 1960 letter to publisher Jocelyn Gibb in Walter Hooper, ed., The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis: Volume III: Narnia, Cambridge, and Joy 1950-1963 (New York, 2007), 1196.

[6] Lewis, Screwtape Letters, 10.

[7] Brenton D.G. Dickieson, “The Unpublished Preface to C. S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters,” Notes and Queries 60.2 (2013): 296-298. If you have trouble getting a copy, let me know.

[8] Italicized words were underlined in the original handwritten text. You can check the published article for words that were crossed out and rewritten.

[9] Dickieson, “The Unpublished Preface,” 297.

[10] A.Q. Morton, “Once. A Test of authorship Based on Words which are not Repeated in the Sample.” Literary and Linguistic Computing 1 (1986): 1-8; Jeffrey R. Thompson and John Rasp, “Did C. S. Lewis write The Dark Tower?: An Examination of the Small-Sample Properties of the Thisted-Efron Tests of Authorship,” Austrian Journal of Statistics 38.2 (2009): 71-82. See the original accusation of forgery most fully in Kathryn Lindskoog, The C.S. Lewis Hoax. Portland: Multnomah Press, 1988.

I have complained of the cover art of C.S. Lewis’ Out of the Silent Planet in my blog, “Worst Book Description Ever.” While I like some of the crazy science fiction art of the period, this cover of Perelandra on the right is painfully bad. Giant green bodied/pale faced naked aliens hovering above with wispy cloud right at their privates, while a nevernude Ransom stands defiantly against them in his superman pose. Really, super tight jean shorts? If these are the Adam and Eve of Perelandra, why does the Lord of that world have a spear? And look at Eve’s face: Does she look more like the innocent child-mother of a fresh new world, or the girl in high school who wouldn’t talk to you? If it is Mars and Venus, it explains the spear. But why is he green? And why Caucasian heads on green-hued bodies?

To their credit, they do keep in great shape. They must work out.

There is much to mock in this book cover, but it is challenging to imagine how we might capture the images of the Adam and Eve of Perelandra. They are green and naked, innocent and lordly, beautiful and yet not sexually alluring, implicated with their natural world yet gods in it. It was probably wise that, when they produced an opera of Perelandra, they used “The Birth of Venus” by Sandro Botticelli (late 15th c.) for their main image.

While not all attempts to capture Perelandra have been successful, there is one artist who has made an attempt that I think is worth applauding. In the first edition of Horizon journal (May 1959), within an article by Edmund Fuller called, “The Christian Spaceman: C.S. Lewis,” there is also a painting by James Lewicki.

It is very much a piece of the period, but you can tell that Lewicki had actually taken the time to read Perelandra. Though a tad too literal, Ransom is the Piebald Man, tanned on one side by his space voyage. He is naked and disoriented, caught on a floating island away from the only human he has yet seen. Lewicki has made an attempt to capture some of the vegetation, including the bubble trees–a “fruit” that provides refreshment and strength to Ransom in his visit to Venus. And there is the lady, a bit indistinct in the distance, but unashamed as she gathers flowers in her great, global garden.

If you still feel a little bit unsatisfied by the painting, you should know that Lewis predicted you would be.

She was standing a few yards away, motionless but not apparently disengaged—doing something with her mind, perhaps even with her muscles, that he did not understand. It was the first time he had looked steadily at her, himself unobserved, and she seemed more strange to him than before. There was no category in the terrestrial mind which would fit her. Opposites met in her and were fused in a fashion for which we have no images. One way of putting it would be to say that neither our sacred nor our profane art could make her portrait. Beautiful, naked, shameless, young—she was obviously a goddess: but then the face, the face so calm that it escaped insipidity by the very concentration of its mildness, the face that was like the sudden coldness and stillness of a church when we enter it from a hot street—that made her a Madonna. The alert, inner silence which looked out from those eyes overawed him; yet at any moment she might laugh like a child, or run like Artemis or dance like a Maenad. All this against the golden sky which looked as if it were only an arm’s length above her head (Perelandra ch. 5).

We see how it was, visually speaking, an impossible task. Still, I am grateful to James Lewicki for attempting–especially since so many have done it so badly.

Someone has recoloured and focussed the pieces, which I think enhances what we see–even if the colours are a bit brash (see the tiles below). As I have just finished rereading Perelandra, I found the painting helped me see the world of Perelandra in a subtly different way.

Thanks to the smooth voice and broadcasting know-how of C.S. Lewis kingmaker William O’Flaherty, I am able to share with you the audio of my recent talk at the C.S. Lewis and Friends Colloquium at Taylor University in Upland, IN. This is the second time I was able to attend the Taylor Conference. In 2012, I presented a paper called, “Teaching Screwtape for a New Generation” (you can read the full paper and hear the talk here). It was the place that truly launched my academic work in C.S. Lewis, and I was pleased to return in June 2016.

Overall, the quality of the papers at the conference was quite strong, and I was struck by the level of engagement by a number of the students. It was also an environment where senior and established academics and writers engaged critically with the younger and emerging scholars. As one of the latter party, it was an ideal environment to play with ideas and ask for feedback.

Here is the abstract of the paper I presented:

Recently, I had the opportunity to publish an archival piece that reconfigures our understanding of C.S. Lewis’ WWII-era fiction project. A previously unpublished handwritten preface to The Screwtape Letters shows that Lewis played with the idea of including Screwtape in the same “other world” as the science fiction books that feature Dr. Elwin Ransom. Using this manuscript evidence, it is important to test the critical limits of an extended Ransom fictional universe—to inquire of the usefulness of including Screwtape’s abysmal underworld in the mythic construct of the Field of Arbol. I will suggest a rereading of Perelandra in light of this speculative worldview re-orientation. If a Screwtapian reading of Perelandra confirms the value of considering these books as part of a Ransom Cycle—rather than merely a Space Trilogy—we can imagine the significance for future work in a number of areas, including Lewis’s invented language and angelology, as well the breadth of his mythmaking project.

It is a fun talk that feeds into the larger project of looking at C.S. Lewis’ WWII-era fiction as a whole. I cannot yet share the entire paper, but you can hear the talk on William’s “All About Jack” podcast (click here). You can follow along in the Prezi (click here), which is like an online slide show. I cannot provide the handout I used in the session, but you can see the full “Ransom Preface” if you click here, or find the original publication here.

You will also see William’s paper (in the same session of mine), “Battlefield of the Mind: Examining Screwtape’s Preferred Method.” There is a bit of interplay between the two paper–something I played up for fun in my talk. William is also pointing back to his book, C.S. Lewis Goes to Hell. William has interviewed me a number of times for All About Jack, so I was pleased to turn the tape recorder on to him when his book came out (check it out here).

Working on The Screwtape Letters, I have also created a Manuscript Timeline and wrote about How Screwtape Was Introduced to the World in its humble little fashion. I hope this contributes to the growing interest in considering Screwtape for its merits as a piece of speculative fiction and as a cultural artifact.

If you haven’t yet, it is time to head over to fellow Signum University faculty member David Russell Mosley’s blog on Patheos. I’ve been a long reader of his “Letters from Elfland,” which provides intelligent and accessible readings of J.R.R. Tolkien’s work, often in connection to C.S. Lewis and the fantastic tradition. There are a few of us trying to think about the matrices of theology and literature in the foundations of that fantastic tradition, and Mosley is one of them.

Prof. Mosley has been building toward something. While I’m sure it has been a long, slow build, a big move was his blog, “Are the Elves in C. S. Lewis?”  Now he has pulled back the curtain to reveal this blog, “The Atlantis Theory: The Numenorean Connection Between the Works of Lewis and Tolkien.”

Now, I know that when the average reader sees “Atlantis Theory,” they are going to think of the kind of documentary they show on the History channel. This is not the working of a conspiracy theorist looking to disintegrate the whole network. Instead, this is the outline of a reader of Tolkien and Lewis, attempting to take seriously the links that biographers and critics have drawn between their work and their lives. The result–which is filled out on my work in The Screwtape Letters and the Ransom Cycle–is worth a consideration.

I am in the midst of an excellent and exhausting research trip to the UK. In the morning I will return to the Bodleian library to continue the transcription of C.S. Lewis’ first attempt at long-form prose fiction (an Arthurian tale he wrote when he was 17). I don’t have time at this moment, but I want to test Mosley’s theory to see if it is capacious enough to allow for the integrity of these world builders. So many Tolkienist readers reduce C.S. Lewis to a jigsaw puzzle genius where all the pieces are blue squares, and wonder why Lewisian readers think the Narnian is so good at drawing skies. Mosely does not do this, but thinks critically–even in the brief form of a blog–about what the links can mean, suggesting the space for more work yet to come.

Since I can’t run these tests right now, I didn’t want readers of A Pilgrim in Narnia to miss out. Head on over to Letters from Elfland and dialogue with the letter-writer himself.

The first reader of C.S. Lewis’ autobiography, Surprised by Joy, might be puzzled by the fact that WWI—the catastrophe that decided the fate of so many of Europe’s great thinkers and artists and inventors—makes up very little of Lewis’ narrative. “It is even in a way unimportant,” Lewis wrote in a longish paragraph that talks about the death of his mother, the realities of trench warfare, a shivering French mouse, environmental and other kinds of mental degradation, cold feet and heroes tales and

“horribly smashed men still moving like half-crushed beetles, the sitting or standing corpses, the landscape of sheer earth without a blade of grass, the boots worn day and night till they seemed to grow to your feet…”

As vivid as his narrative is, Lewis is not anxious to root his life to the Great War, even though it was fateful for him. Every day is fateful, I suppose. And though he spoke in letters of nostalgia and nightmares, Lewis emerged from WWI with a robust conscience, an invitation to Oxford, and a manuscript of poems (Spirits in Bondage, 1919).

His deepest thoughts about the war and the shrapnel embedded in his frame both accompanied him to his own grave 45 years later.

Although Lewis refused to give WWI a formative place in his life, WWII orients his writing in an unusual way.

After writing Out of the Silent Planet (1938) and a couple of academic books, Lewis was invited to use his unique literary gifts and his training in philosophy to write The Problem of Pain (1940)—a book that addresses the question, “if God is good, why do people suffer?” Though he wrote this popular theodicy in the first few months of the war, WWII does not shape the entire book. “War” is one of things that seemed to confirm Lewis’ youthful atheism, and is one of the parts of human pain that snaps us out of our self-serving Monday to Friday inattention to the real world around us.

By the time The Problem of Pain led to a few talks on the BBC, he assumes that war is the one thing everyone has in common. It becomes an image that orients the reader, giving us some measure against which to weigh the world. In The Screwtape Letters (1941-42), war is the backdrop to the “patient’s” temptation. In the end, it is a bomb raid that takes the patient’s life, as is the threat in the last lines of the dream story, The Great Divorce (1944-45), which closes WWII. Miracles, though published in 1947, was mostly written during WWII, and reflects the war reality in some of its illustrations.

Although the Ransom Cycle begins before the war with Out of the Silent Planet, WWII haunts the series. The blackout of the opening chapters of Perelandra (1943) is doubtless because of the war, and That Hideous Strength (1945), though it follows the war, shows the kinds of tyrannies that were possible in the WWII-era.

Even when we move beyond wartime, the battlefield continues to inform Lewis’ writing. The late 1940s and early 1950s were dominated by two projects: his huge literary history of 16^th Century Poetry and Prose (OHEL, 1954), and Narnia (1950-56). OHEL is intentionally timeless, but do you remember how Narnia begins? In The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe (1950) the children are sent out of London because of the Blitzkrieg. I’ve always wondered if the serious railway accident that ends life for three of the Pevensies and brings them to Aslan’s country was an act of war, but Walter Hooper thinks otherwise in Past Watchful Dragons. In any case, The Last Battle (1956) is the only Narnian tale to occur definitely after WWII (in Earth time), even though they were all written well after V-Day.

After Narnia was penned Lewis finished Surprised by Joy (1954), where WWI is played down and WWII is almost ignored—despite how the last world war roots more than a decade of Lewis’ work. Till We Have Faces (1955) treats war like a biblical or classical chronicle—“In the spring, at the time when kings go off to war…” (2 Samuel 11)—or like an Arthurian tale as imagined by a young King Henry VIII. In the same way that Lewis warned against pacifism in a talk in WWII, he warns against patriotism in The Four Loves (1959-60)—the two tensions that Screwtape plays with in Letter V of The Screwtape Letters.

And Reflections on the Psalms (1957), if you have not read it, approaches some of the most difficult moments of the Psalter as only someone who faced enemy weaponry could dare to face it.

I’m left, then, with two thoughts when thinking about Lewis and the war.

When I think about men like C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien who survived the war, my first thought is to wonder what great transformational writer did not survive. What story is missing from our bookshelves? What worlds are missing from our mental multiplex of universes?

And not just writers, but subcreators of all kinds. In the machinery of the two World Wars, have we lost that genius that would have cured cancer or made nuclear energy safe? Would the crises of global warming and ethnic cleansing have been stopped before they started? Would we have a political future better than a promise of entrenched ideologies—and not particularly good ideologies to begin with? Would we still have poetry and imagination and innovation in our classrooms?

We can never know. Working against the wars of the future is all that is in our power, such as it is.

The second thought is to you the reader: what has happened in your life to root you? As you go about your daily life, building the worlds you build, where do you root your work, your story, your love?

I don’t mean this in just a spiritual way. Lewis rooted himself in Christ; my PhD project is about how his conversion is the basis of his work. I think one’s religion or worldview will be the key root of whether their art will grow. We shouldn’t be surprised that with all the skill and beauty we see around us today, there is a lack of depth and rootedness.

I think it is valuable to ask what events orient the work that we do. When I look at the last nine years of my life, with the exception of my children’s writing and some essays, my academic work and my fiction has had the theme of “death” at its core. It seems that I have been returning to the death of my father and brother 26 years ago. This event formed and transformed me, but I thought I had left it behind some time ago. Yet, as I grow as father, husband, Christian, writer, brother, friend, son, and teacher, I find myself returning to those fateful moments.

Although my life is marked by tragedy, I live with the luxury of peace. If I wonder that Lewis underestimated the impact of war on his life, it is a choice I have never had to face.

So we are left with two things that can transform our lives.

First, we are the writers and artists and inventors that did not die. It is up to us to apply ourselves to our work.

Second, we have the opportunity to be aware of the forces that shape us.

Today is Remembrance Day, when we set apart a day to remember those that have fallen in the wars of the 20^th century, and to promise to a future generation that we will never allow war to ravage the world again. Memory is not just about encapsulating the past, but is the engine that shapes the future.

Though at times hauntingly realistic, scattered throughout C.S. Lewis’ space trilogy are moments where reality slides away from us. In the midst of the mundane—a walk at night, a conversation in a parlor, a sleepy, sunny afternoon on a hillside, a stroll in woods—almost imperceptibly the threshold between this and other worlds begins to dissolve. And rather than be taken up into that other time and space—or a time and space beyond space-time—some element of that other world slips into our own. Again and again the reader experiences the strange foreignness of the fantastic invasion as the character struggles to realize its implications with all of its sensations but only a tiny part of how that fits into the whole story.

One collection of those moments where the trustworthy borders of Reality fall to dust is the invasion of the Medieval world into Modern Britain in That Hideous Strength. We talked about one of these scenes when I asked the question, “Why is Merlin in That Hideous Strength?” There the narrator–C.S. Lewis the character in his own fiction–takes a lonely and illicit walk into the ancient Bragdon Wood in a kind of pilgrimage to Merlin’s well. I argued there that Dr. Dimble’s scholarship blends the Arthurian past with the modern world of war and woe, and that those elements collapse into the figure of Merlin in THS ch. 1.III. “The sense of gradual penetration,” as the narrator describes it, is one of these threshold moments, a time of a slow-motion dissolution of all our protections from the unknown.

Perhaps the main book behind That Hideous Strength—and there are many—is George MacDonald’s Phantastes. Upon waking from sleep, Anodos transitions from his bedroom to Fairy Land almost seamlessly, and I have argued that this kind of transition is what happens in THS. This is one of the reasons for the peculiar subtitle: That Hideous Strength: A Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown Ups.

Is THS really a fairy-tale, though? On the face of it, we would reject the suggest outright. I don’t know if anyone has suggested this, but Lin Carter’s critique of MacDonald’s work causes us to wonder something about the genre of That Hideous Strength.

In the introduction to the Ballantine edition of William Morris’ The Well at the World’s End, Carter argues that Morris is the first modern fantasy writer, as the 19^th century fantasists used either an element of allegory or a dream cycle to create the link into the speculative world. J.R.R. Tolkien addressed these things in his own way in “On Fairy-Stories”—and we must recognize how influential Tolkien was to Lin Carter, both in his own fantasy writing and in his (most important) role as a curator of 20^th century imaginative literature. Neither Lillith nor Phantastes are allegories—though they have allegorical moments and symbolism at various levels. So Carter rejects these work as modern fantasy because MacDonald’s two great works have the suggestion of the dream to them.

There is some reason to be critical of Carter’s argument, but by that way of looking at things That Hideous Strength may not be modern fantasy, but may be best understood as a Fairy-Tale (as it claims of itself). In that intriguing walk to Merlin’s Well in That Hideous Strength, the Lewis character drifts off to sleep:

“The air was so still and the billows of foliage so heavy above me, that I fell asleep. I was wakened by my friend hallooing to me from a long way off” (1.III).

Is the rest of That Hideous Strength a mere dream—or a nightmare perhaps? Like Anodos in Phantastes, Lewis in THS transitions from real life into Fairy Land almost seamlessly, and both have the suggestion of a dream to them. Both books have dreams within them, though neither lays claim to a dream in absolute terms as the structure of that fantastic world. In the case of Phantastes, we have to reject Anodos’ initial waking as real if we accept the final awakening as a demonstration that it was all a dream–but that may be intentionally ambiguous. In the case of That Hideous Strength, we have none of the dream clues throughout the piece, though all the protections against the fantastic disappear in the set up to the ultimate scene—the wedding bed where the mythological erupts into a waking dream of the seer, Jane.

In any case, dystopia is a difficult genre to pin down. While Brave New World and 1984 are best viewed within the science fiction world rather than the categories of modern fantasy—remember, this is before urban fantasy emerged—it is hard to see THS as merely an SF book. It is true that the N.I.C.E. is constructed as a scientific enterprise to create a totalitarian, post-human world—which is the kind of thing that most dystopia of the period did. However, it turns out that all the scientific structures are a cover for two kinds of cruelty—1) the human leveraging of power against the weak; 2) backed by demonic forces—and two kinds of beauty—1) the strength of the Company of St. Anne’s; 2) backed by angelic and interplanetary powers. It is this crossover between SF and supernaturalism that George Orwell found so offensive in a book he otherwise admired.

Still, the dream-like tang of That Hideous Strength haunts me with its possibilities. Lewis was very much attuned to the genre of the book. He not only subtitled it a “Modern Fairy-Tale,” but defended that unlikely genre self-designation in a preface. He also gives a warning to the reader:

This story can be read by itself but is also a sequel to Out of the Silent Planet in which some account was given of Ransom’s adventures on Mars—or, as its inhabitants call it, Malacandra. All the human characters in this book are purely fictitious and none of them is allegorical.

If there is a Phantastes-like dream structure to THS, Lewis is pulling back from the allegorical layering of MacDonald’s work. This distinction is important: the characters are often caricatures because fairy tale uses and reuses familiarly molded characters. And some of the characters have sophisticated symbolic layering, so Dr. Ransom is Arthur reborn, prophetic master, and Christ figure, while Wither embodies a worldview option for Western people in a Faustian deal with an ideological devil of their time. But none of these is allegory, despite their suggestive possibilities.

So we see that Lewis excels in blurring of the lines between generic categories as he blurs the lines between fictional and realistic worlds. As Dr. Dimble reminds us,

“We are not living exactly in the twentieth century as long as [Merlin]’s here. We overlap a bit; the focus is blurred” (14.V)

The fictional world of That Hideous Strength is one that is neither merely this world or the world of the past. The fictional world of THS is almost like a wood between the worlds where both modern Britain and ancient England exist, but also our imagination of the Druidic past, Dr. Ransom’s Field of Arbol, J.R.R. Tolkien’s Númenor, Charles Williams’ Logres, the legendary Atlantis, the biblical Babel, and the heavens of classical and medieval thought. The time of the crisis at Edgestow is a pinch-point in history. And in this elbow-joint of time, a multidimensional breach allows access into all the worlds of history, myth, legend, scripture, fairy tale, and fantasy: all of these are available and each encroaches on the others.

The various instances of this encroachment is worth exploring but it is the effect I want to leave you with. Here is a typical example of that blurring of the distinction between worlds. Jane, Denniston, and Dimble are in the woods, in the dark, searching for evidence of an old man. It is a rainy night, pitch dark, and their flashlight does little to give them the big picture. Jane, the seer, is guiding them towards Merlin’s tomb. Watch how we leave the world of the contemporary fabrics of technology and culture—a flashlight, a gentlemanly gesture, the grit of the real world. And watch the invasion of other worlds into this one.

Jane, as guide, went first, and Denniston beside her, giving her his arm and showing an occasional gleam of his torch on the rough ground. Dimble brought up the rear. No one was inclined to speak.

The change from the road to the field was as if one had passed from a waking into a phantasmal world. Everything became darker, wetter, more incalculable. Each small descent felt as if you might be coming to the edge of a precipice. They were following a track beside a hedge; wet and prickly tentacles seemed to snatch at them as they went. Whenever Denniston used his torch, the things that appeared within the circle of its light—tufts of grass, ruts filled with water, draggled yellow leaves clinging to the wet blackness of many—angled twigs, and once the two greenish—yellow fires in the eyes of some small animal—had the air of being more commonplace than they ought to have been; as if, for that moment’s exposure they had assumed a disguise which they would shuffle off again the moment they were left alone. They looked curiously small, too; when the light vanished, the cold, noisy darkness seemed a huge thing.

The fear which Dimble had felt from the first began to trickle into the minds of the others as they proceeded—like water coming into a ship from a slow leak. They realized that they had not really believed in Merlin till now. They had thought they were believing the Director in the kitchen; but they had been mistaken. The shock was still to take. Out here with only the changing red light ahead and the black all round, one really began to accept as fact this tryst with something dead and yet not dead, something dug up, exhumed, from that dark pit of history which lies between the ancient Romans and the beginning of the English. “The Dark Ages,” thought Dimble; how lightly one had read and written those words. But now they were going to step right into that Darkness. It was an age, not a man, that awaited them in the horrible little dingle.

And suddenly all that Britain which had been so long familiar to him as a scholar rose up like a solid thing. He could see it all. Little dwindling cities where the light of Rome still rested—little Christian sites, Camalodunum, Kaerleon, Glastonbury—a church, a villa or two, a huddle of houses, an earthwork. And then, beginning scarcely a stone’s throw beyond the gates, the wet, tangled endless woods, silted with the accumulated decay of autumns that had been dropping leaves since before Britain was an island; wolves slinking, beavers building, wide shallow marshes, dim horns and drummings, eyes in the thickets, eyes of men not only Pre-Roman but Pre-British, ancient creatures, unhappy and dispossessed, who became the elves and ogres and wood-wooses of the later tradition. But worse than the forests, the clearings. Little strongholds with unheard-of kings. Little colleges and covines of Druids. Houses whose mortar had been ritually mixed with babies’ blood. They had tried to do that to Merlin. And now all that age, horribly dislocated, wrenched out of its place in the time series and forced to come back and go

through all its motions yet again with doubled monstrosity, was flowing towards them and would, in a few minutes, receive them into itself.

Then came a check. They had walked right into a hedge. They wasted a minute, with the aid of the torch disentangling Jane’s hair. They had come to the end of a field… (11.I).