This time last year I had a sense of the kind of season that 2016 would be, but I did not know the how deeply the experiences of bereavement, family responsibility, and overwork would impact me. While my work has been lean in quality, and our little family castle is in serious need of attention, I have had a relatively good reading year. As a PhD student it is my “job” to read. More than this, though, through the difficulties and disappointments of 2015-16, reading has been a solace to me. Books are for me mental playgrounds, intellectual exercises, escapes not from something but into everything all at once.

Despite a lot of challenges, I exceeded some of my reading goals this year. I averaged 10 books a month–making this the biggest year ever for me. It was also the least variable year for me in book reading. Comparing the years 2014-16, we see a shift to more regularity. In the previous two years, my book reading sank as I got to the end of the winter semester and to the middle of the fall semester. What is consistent in all three years is the strength of my summer reading. The undergraduate teaching that dominates my fall and winter does not allow for a lot of reading, while the graduate teaching I have been doing each summer requires (permits!) a high reading level.

Though I don’t tend to count blogs or most internet articles, books are not all of my reading. In 2016 I also increased my reading of articles I read thoroughly and the number of lectures I listened to. While the three-year stats on article reading are more variable, it is evident that this kind of reading is front-loaded. I expect this trend to be similar in 2017-18 as I have four literature reviews to complete.

While all the numbers are up, the trend is a bit deceptive. In 2016 I meant to slow down a tiny bit and read longer, more academic books. My average length (319 pages/book) is almost the same as last year (312 pages/book), meaning that this was not the year I intended.

There is a reason for this. Because of the kind of year it was, I missed a lot of my academic goals. I read widely, but I can see that I turned to reading as a kind of tonic. From the point that my father-in-law landed in hospital in January 2015, through my mother’s diagnosis and rapid descent last winter, until October of this year, I got very little academic writing done. For the first time I have missed real deadlines and let people down. It wasn’t until late-October that I felt the fog lift. I was clear for the first time in months. I still have days where the work comes with agonizing slowness–I am not anywhere near my old pace–but I can see where things are going for me.

Even more than this, a kind of neat academic miracle occurred in the midst of the fog. While I wrote very little of my dissertation in that period–and was on leave for half of it–the narrative of my PhD thesis emerged very clearly in my mind. I can now see very precisely how all of the pieces fit together, and what the next two years look like for me. I just need time to write it all down.

2017, then, is less about reading and more about writing. In 2017 I will need to slow down and spend more time in each book. I can no longer afford to use reading as a tonic; it now has to be sustenance in all kinds of ways. In 2017 I will need to slow down and spend more time in each book. I will read fewer books, but probably take in more articles and lectures.

If you check out the reading list below (or the 2016  Goodreads Infographic with a more detailed summary), you will see my reading year was organized around 6 main focal points:

1. The completion of my Reading C.S. Lewis Chronologically project on March 8th.
2. A summer class at SignumU on “Mythologies of Love & Sex,” which was partly a C.S. Lewis course. Even though I had read everything before I assigned the syllabus, I wanted to reread these books as students were reading so my lectures were fresh–and so I could determine if the reading list was too heavy (it was!). I also read some things twice, which shows some discrepancy between the Goodreads list and my own.
3. Research visits in the summer to the Wade Center (US) and the Bodleian (UK). archives, with conferences at Taylor University (in June) and the University of Glasgow (in September). This was why at the beginning of June I reread the Ransom Cycle and had a number of items that were part of a literature review, and in August my reading has the scent of interesting things found in a library. It is also why I have read C.S. Lewis’ The Quest of Bleheris and An Experiment in Criticism several times.
4. A class at SignumU in the fall on “Folkloric Transformations,” with lectures by folklorist Dr. Dimitra Fimi and a reading list that focused mostly on vampyre literature and some fairy tale retellings.
5. Each month I tried to read a theological book as a kind of devotional time. This included more classic works such as Dante’s Divine Comedy, Bonhoeffer’s Life Together and The Cost of Discipleship, George MacDonald’s Unspoken Sermons, Watchman Nee’s Normal Christian Life, and Thomas à Kempis’ The Imitation of Christ. I also read more modern treatments such as Alister McGrath’s work on Luther’s Theology of the Cross, Flannery O’Conner’s Prayer Journal, Ann Jervis’ At the Heart of the Gospel, Phyllis Tickle’s The Age of the Spirit, René Girard’s Sacrifice, Stanley Hauwerwas’ Cross-Shattered Christ, and Anna Fisk’s important book, Sex, Sin, and Our Selves.
6. Reading projects through the Harry Potter world (I am now reading the supplementary books), Terry Pratchett’s Discworld (six books this year, and am now reading #21, Jingo), and what I call the “Extended Inklings”–books by and about the Oxford Inklings, and some of their friends and influences (like G.K. Chesterton, George MacDonald, and Dorothy Sayers).

The Goodreads app is kind of limited. They have a thousand possibilities for creating infographics, and though I am grateful for the one they have given us, I like to track different things. For example, my book reading trends show that 74.4% of my authors are men. Although 1/4 of books from women might be a high count considering the kind of authors I am focussed on, and the kind of work I do, I would like it to be higher. If I take out the books by C.S. Lewis–my primary author–the number of women authors increases to almost 1/3. In 2017 I expect that to be about the same ratio, but I will see a shift in the 2017-18 school year.

I also have begun tracking books by genre. True, my metric here is odd, but it works for me. I use these categories; Theology; SF/Fantasy lit; books by or about C.S. Lewis; books by or about the Extended Inklings; Classic Literature (mostly fiction); Modern Literature (fiction); and other Nonfiction (a catch-all; next year I’ll separate out feminist studies). The largest single category is Fantasy and SciFi literature, and if we included the Inklings and C.S. Lewis, speculative fiction might make up half of my reading (I only count books in one category). Books by and about C.S. Lewis make up about 1/5th of my reading, down a little this year as I completed my chronological reading. I am pleased that the Classic lit and Theology categories are each about 1/6th of my reading as I try to fill in the blank spaces in my education and put my PhD research in context.

What of 2017? I would like to set my sights high, but recognize that to be successful in my PhD program I need to narrow and deepen my reading. In 2017 I aim to hold steady as a whole, but decrease my book reading to 100 books, increase lectures series and classes to 10, and increase to 125 articles (235 pieces overall).

Here is my list of books in my 2016 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!

Just a quick note. C.S. Lewis’ classical myth retold, Till We Have Faces, is the Audible.com “Daily Deal.” Most audiobooks run between $10 and $20, but Audible has a membership system. The gold level runs $15 a book, while the platinum level is $10 a book. However, when you are a member, you can take advantage of occasional sales (2 for 1 or 3 for 2, and some specialized 50% off deals from time to time). Americans can also take advantage of Kindle-Audible combo deals, often in self-help and class genres.

The one regular sale is the daily deal, where full price audiobooks are $2.95-$3.95. 80% of these are mysteries, romances, and books with Greek letters in the title, like The Omega Calendar and The Alpha Conspiracy. Occasionally, however, there are some gems, and today is one of them.

Till We Have Faces is a unique C.S. Lewis book for a number of reasons. While there are still fantastic elements in the book, it is set so solidly within the classical Greek world that it seems inaccurate to call it a fantasy. It is the story of Psyche and Cupid, recast in a fictional pre-Christian Greek colony. The story is Orual’s diary–but more than a diary, it is a passionate testimony against the gods for their cruelty by a woman who has lost everything and so has nothing to fear from them.

Most of Lewis’ fiction is first person, but Till We Have Faces has such a distinct voice and setting that it would be hard to connect it to Narnia and the Ransom Cycle if we didn’t know that C.S. Lewis had written it. Partly, I think, the flavour and sensibility is due to the fact that Joy Davidman was part of the process of writing the novel. Partly it is the form that frees Lewis to explore language, myth, and ideas in an entirely new way.

Nadia May is the reader of Till We Have Faces. She is exactly the right kind of reader, voicing the fierce pain, anger, and incredulity that Orual feels, while capturing the courtly world around her with a unique blend of sensitivity and stateliness.

If you are a member, you can now own this audiobook for $2.95. If you want to become a member, you can sign up for free and get one free audiobook. I would suggest buying an indie book, because the free book promotion is the highest paying feature to authors in the Audible framework.

In other news, Friday had the 3rd highest number of hits ever on http://www.aPilgrimInNarnia.com, and last week was the 2nd most active week ever. This was mostly due to some pretty nerdy analysis on C.S Lewis’ essays (see here), which has taken off for some reason. But I am guessing that someone Twitter famous tweeted my blog post on “Screwtape on Pleasure and Distraction,” an old post that has been hot again for the last month. This may also be the “Orwell Effect” that we are seeing: since the election of Donald Trump, sales of dystopian books like 1984 have skyrocketed. The Screwtape Letters fits well in that mood. I also suspect that there must be another awful 50 Shades movie in the works as my biggest post ever–50 Shades of Bad Writing–is getting new readership again.

Have an excellent week!

I encountered Jared Lobdell’s work because he was one of the few critics to make C.S. Lewis’ WWII-era science fiction–what I call the Ransom Cycle–a study of its own. His 2004 book,  The Scientifiction Novels of C.S. Lewis: Space and Time in the Ransom Stories, takes seriously Lewis’ literary context and looks intertextually at the Ransom Cycle in terms of genre and the books that shaped its form and content. Scientifiction Novels was interesting in that it tried to treat Lewis’ incomplete novel “The Dark Tower” as an integral part of the Ransom universe, struggling to decide what that meant. I would differ with Lobdell on the directions he sometimes took–and am wary about completing the novel (as he attempts to outline)–but it is an appreciative effort. 

Jared Lobdell has more work out and on the way. Here he describes a little bit of the process of trying to get Eight Children in Narnia to print after nearly 20 years from brainchild to bookstore.

Along about the time of the C S Lewis Centenary in 1998, I had the idea of writing two books on C.S. Lewis’ fiction: one on the Ransom novels and one on the Narnian stories (actually the book on the Ransom stories started a little earlier). The Ransom book duly appeared in 2004 from McFarland. Reviews were sparse and I remember Joe Christopher found it very curious that I had not only included “The Dark Tower” (Walter Hooper’s title) but had provisionally re-titled it and suggested how it might have come out had Lewis finished it.

The Narnia volume was ready for publication in 2006 and in fact accepted by Open Court, which had published three of my books on Tolkien. But after accepting it, and paying me half the agreed-upon advance on royalties, they found themselves unable to publish it for ten years. I revised it from time to time, but the approach remained essentially in place. I wanted to look at the creation of a Victorian (or Edwardian) children’s story by an author with whom (and with his friends) I corresponded, and whom I had read for close to sixty years (now close to seventy), who was a coeval (and favorite) of my parents, whose every book I read, and whose birthday, by the way, I shared (along with Madeleine L’Engle and Louisa May Alcott). I never did make it to study under him at Oxford, but to me he was of my world.

My approach in Eight Children in Narnia is straightforward, fundamentally an overview, a book at a time (with looks at their different kinds), then a conclusion. If I trace the original vision of the faun with the umbrella hurrying home to tea to Debussy’s l‘Apres-midi d’un faun or the “valiant” Lucy of Narnia to the “valiant” Lucia da Narni in Shellabarger’s 1947 novel Prince of Foxes (but not the film, which omits her) or the first description of the Professor to a combination of two of the Council of Days in The Man Who Was Thursday, that is because reading and listening (and living) as much as possible within Lewis’s world, these seem to me virtually self-evident.

When I started reading Lewis, his most recent novel was That Hideous Strength. and I read that and its two predecessors while I was in grade school. My reactions to Lewis were, as the pavement artist says, “all my own work,” pretty much — a few of them he confirmed in correspondence, a few Owen Barfield confirmed in conversation and correspondence, a couple by Ronald Tolkien in correspondence. They could still be “wrong,” I suppose, but like Lewis himself (if we believe him), where I fail as a critic I may be useful as a specimen. There may still be one dinosaur left.

Jared Lobdell is an historian, economist, and literary critic, as well as a friend and correspondent of several of the Inklings. Besides Eight Children in Narnia, his most recent publications are his self-published Poems 1957-2002, an exceedingly slim volume, and Tax Revision By Commission in Pennsylvania 1889-1949, presumably of minimal interest to anyone reading this. Currently, he is putting together a volume of his essays and studies on the Inklings, with long essays on Nevill Coghill and Lord David Cecil, (and Canon Fox), and his essay pointing out Hugo Dyson’s Jewish parentage (born Henry Victor Dyson Tannenbaum). He has the concluding essay in Laughter in Middle-Earth.

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

Inklings Audiophiles and readers of classic Christian theology will love the Cyber Monday bundles at ChristianAudio.com. They have $15 three-pack of unabridged audiobooks, including:

• The Lord of the Rings trilogy read by Rob Inglis
• C.S. Lewis’ Space Trilogy read by Geoffrey Howard (= Ralph Cosham)–note that http://www.ChristianBook.com has the trilogy omnibus edition for $8.99 on Cyber Monday
• A Reformed theology pack including Richard Baxter’s The Reformed Pastor read by Simon Vance, and Calvin’s Institutes and an edited The Legacy of Luther, both read by Bob Souer
• A Puritan bundle with John Owen’s Of the Mortification of Sin in Believers read by Tom Parks, Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress read by the brilliant Nadia May, and Jonathan Edwards’ The Religious Affections read by, again, Simon Vance
•  A Classic theology bundle with Foxe’s Book of Martyrs read by Nadia May–which I have listened to–and two books read by Simon Vance: Augustine’s Confessions and G.K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy
• A Devotional bundle with Bonhoeffer‘s Life Together read by Paul Michael, J.I. Packer’s Knowing God read by Simon Vance, and A.W. Tozer’s The Knowledge of the Holy, read by Scott Brick

All male authors, except a husband-wife combo in one of the other bundles, but this is to be expected by the way Christian Audio curates their materials. Still, the list of readers is impressive. Nadia May I have praised, Scott Brick has done dozens of the most important fantasy work, Simon Vance does dozens of theology books and, with Geoffrey Howard, is a critical reader of C.S. Lewis’ work, and Rob Inglis gives a classic LOTR reading.

I assume the sale ends Monday night, though they have a 50% off “Cyber Week Sale,” so take a look. All prices are American and shipping is limited outside the U.S. and Canada.

This is an honest question that I hope readers can help me with, and a proposal I would like to test out. C.S. Lewis’ second space travel adventure, Perelandra, begins like this: “As I left the railway station at Worchester….” It just occurred to me to find out where that station is (or was).

As far as I can tell, Worchester spelled thusly is not a place we would have found in WWII England. There is a Worcester College at Oxford, the alma mater of Emma Watson and Richard Adams—a fact that probably is more interesting to me than to Lewis. Lewis had a friend named Wyllie at Worcester while he was attending Oxford as a student. Lewis had once been given a pair of swans by the Provost of Worcester College, which he hated—the swans, not the Provost. Still, not a terribly strong link.

There is a Worcester in Worcestershire, England—a small city I passed by last year on my way from Birmingham to Cheltenham to visit friends. There are random historical events that are set in Worcester that Lewis might have found significant. Tyndale appeared for charges of heresy there in the early 1520s. Hugh Latimer was Bishop there 1535-39 when he resigned to take up being a heretic full time. Most significantly, the Battle of Worcester closed the English Civil War as Oliver Cromwell’s Parliamentarian army defeated King Charles II’s Royalist and Scottish army. Worcester was also plan B for the Parliament in WWII in case London had to be abandoned, though I doubt if Lewis knew that.

And, of course, there is the Lea & Perrins brand of Worcestershire sauce, an ill-used staple in our home and many others, I am sure.

Perhaps the link is more personal. Lewis and his brother Warren spent a good deal of time at the schools of Malvern College, which is in Worcestershire. It is where C.S. Lewis abandoned his Christian faith, as he describes in Surprised by Joy and therein calls his school Wyvern College. This was not a warm place in Lewis’ memories, though he had friends, and he would have gone to the city of Worcester for enjoyable outings (escapes) from school.

Of all these, the links to Ransom’s world are not terribly clear. The strongest one is the Battle—and that link might not be more than tangential. Let’s walk through them.

Great Malvern Railway Station

In Perelandra, Lewis the character-narrator gets off at the Worchester station to go to Dr. Ransom’s cottage in the first lines of Perelandra. Ransom is a Cambridge philologist at the fictional Leicester College. If Worchester is Worcester–the misspelling is made with frequency and my audiobook pronounces it like the latter spelling–then the commute from Worcester to Cambridge would be unusually long—at least four hours. The reason that Ransom isn’t home when Lewis gets there is because he had to slip up to Cambridge. There is now a West Chesterton district in the suburbs of Cambridge, but I doubt that is the fictional town in view. Lewis did end up commuting from Oxford to Cambridge, which might have been a three-hour trip, but this wasn’t until more than a decade after Perelandra was written.

Is Worchester meant to be the Worcester of Lewis’ youth? Most of the geographical set up of the Ransom Cycle is fictional. In Out of the Silent Planet, the hiking villages of Nadderby and Sterk are not (unfortunately) real places where a philologist could have walked in the 30s. St. Anne’s in That Hideous Strength is not the end of any line I know (though there is a St. Anne’s College not far from Worcester College in Oxford). Among early readers or the Inklings, there may have been conjecture that Lewis was veiling real places in THS. It seems some thought Lewis’ Town of Edgestow and Bracton College were related to Durham:

A very small university [in That Hideous Strength] is imagined because that has certain conveniences for fiction. Edgestow has no resemblance, save for its smallness, to Durham—a university with which the only connection I have ever had was entirely pleasant (Preface to That Hideous Strength).

Malvern College Chapel

The fiction of Edgestow is filled out with a number of scenes in the text and with a college that has a deep history that roots the story:

Though I am Oxford-bred and very fond of Cambridge, I think that Edgestow is more beautiful than either. For one thing it is so small. No maker of cars or sausages or marmalades has yet come to industrialize the country town which is the setting of the University, and the University itself is tiny. Apart from Bracton and from the nineteenth-century women’s college beyond the railway, there are only two colleges: Northumberland which stands below Bracton on the river Wynd, and Duke’s opposite the Abbey. Bracton takes no undergraduates. It was founded in 1300 for the support of ten learned men whose duties were to pray for the soul of Henry de Bracton and to study the laws of England (ch. 1).

The Holy Well of Malvern

If Edgestow is fictional, there are some real English reference points in THS. Oxford is added to Cambridge as real universities, and there is also London, Lancaster, and, as we see below, York in the north and Warwickshire, on the borders of Worcestershire. Belbury, which houses the evil N.I.C.E., is fictional. But Belbury and Edgestow must be within a difficult walking distance of Worcester, as N.I.C.E.’s forced exodus has driven “driven two thousand families from their homes to die of exposure in every ditch from here to Birmingham or Worcester.” We also find out that St. Anne’s is on the way to Birmingham when Jane is saved from a riot in ch. 8 and as Mark tries to stumble towards his wife in ch. 17.

Plaque at the Sidbury Gate, Worcester

As mentioned above, the clearest link to the historical area of Worcester is to the Battle of Worcester that ends the reign of Charles II. It is captured here in this dialogue with Jane and Miss Ironwood at St. Anne’s Manor, as Jane is slowly discovering she is a seer—a thing she doesn’t believe in:

“What was your maiden name?” asked Miss Ironwood.

“Tudor,” said Jane. At any other moment she would have said it rather self-consciously, for she was very anxious not to be supposed vain of her ancient ancestry.

“The Warwickshire branch of the family?”

“Yes.”

“Did you ever read a little book—it is only forty pages long—written by an ancestor of yours about the battle of Worcester?”

“No. Father had a copy—the only copy, I think he said. But I never read it. It was lost when the house was broken up after his death.”

“Your father was mistaken in thinking it the only copy. There are at least two others: one is in America, and the other is in this house.”

“Well?”

“Your ancestor gave a full and, on the whole, correct account of the battle, which he says he completed on the same day on which it was fought. But he was not at it. He was in York at the time” (ch. 3).

How do all these individual links connect?

Malvern College

My proposal is this: That Lewis’ fictional Edgestow is in a small town (2000 people or fewer) in the real Worcestershire, and that That Hideous Strength is likely set in a fictionalized campus like Lewis’ own Malvern College, which is about 10 miles southwest of Worcester in Worcestershire. I will explore a few connections which leads me to this idea.

Lewis loved the architecture of Malvern, and was delighted by the “great blue plain below us and, behind, those green, peaked hills, so mountainous in form and yet so manageably small in size” (Surprised by Joy ch. 4). THS is filled with small English villages, college buildings, large hills, open fields, and ancient woods. Great Malvern and Malvern Hills is a good fit for the novel, though many other places would do as well.

Pressing in on distances, if one was a N.I.C.E. exile pulling a farm cart or a wheelbarrow full of one’s possessions—”chests of drawers, bedsteads, mattresses, boxes, and a canary in a cage”—Great Malvern would be a long day’s walk to Worcester. Birmingham would be two or three days further at the pace of an exodus as one reads in H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds–the image doubtless at the back of Lewis’ exiles in THS. Moreover, a train from Edgestow to St. Anne’s would follow a Birmingham direction from Malvern (or any number of nearby places).

St. Ann’s Well, Great Malvern

Malvern, then, transformed into a late medieval university instead of a Victorian school (with its nostalgic architecture), could be the setting. Great Malvern, before its post-war renovations, would have had a lot of the features of the classic English village of Edgestow. Particularly intriguing is the St. Anne’s Manor in THS. Great Malvern–the town connected to Lewis’ boyhood schooling–is home to St. Ann’s Well, which has a cafe attached to its spring water well named after Saint Anne, mother of Mary. The inclusion of Merlin’s Well and St. Anne’s Manor in That Hideous Strength makes a pretty interesting connection to Great Malvern.

If Malvern is the site of Edgestow and Bracton College, and Worchester is Worcester, it also means that Ransom’s move to St. Anne’s Manor at his sister’s will would have been a relatively simple one. He would have merely moved from his cottage in Worcester city–which would be about a half hour walk from the main station–to an estate a few trains stops that side of Great Malvern.

Register Office, Great Malvern

If all of this geographical speculation is remotely plausible, the really critical question remains: Would Merlin’s resting place be in Worcestershire?

Merlin’s Tomb in Brittany in Paimpont Forest

That’s hard for me to answer. While Merlin is probably from Welsh origins—and Malvern isn’t far from the border of Wales—I would expect Merlin to be asleep in Broceliande.  Where would that be? Bookies would say to put your money on Brittany, and the French tradition of the Matter of Britain is critical.

Clearly, though, Brittany would not suit Lewis’ purposes in his modern English Arthurian tale. It is a peculiarly English apocalypse (as is H.G. Wells’ apocalypse fifty years before). Oxfordshire and Worcestershire are not far from the legendary downtown Logres, and almost any historic place of interest south of there has a claim of being Camelot. Wales is not that far away, and I have heard the area north of there called “Merlin’s Land” (though I don’t know why).

Could Malvern as Edgestow be where Merlin has been secretly asleep for centuries? It’s possible, and Merlin’s waking is distinctly Lewisian in THS, and pulls at the threads of the Arthurian garment in more ways than just geography.

Unfortunately, I cannot tell more from the details. Most of Lewis’ connections with the area are later. Lewis walked in Great Malvern at various times in his adult life, including a tour with J.R.R. Tolkien. George Sayer was a friend of Lewis’ and his biographer, and he was head of English at Malvern from 1944–Sayer got the post as Lewis was editing THS (the draft was complete the previous December). And, of course, we don’t know how clear in his own mind Lewis had the geography of the Ransom Cycle in place. Perhaps he was just making it up as he went along.

The use of Worcester does seem striking, though. The claim that the action of That Hideous Strength takes place around Malvern–the college, Great Malvern, the evocative hills, with train and exodus lines to Worcester and Birmingham–is a good one.

Still, now it’s your turn: What do you see in the tale? Is there a significance to Worc(h)ester? Or are the geographies drawn variously to obscure a non-location for the tale—or intentionally hidden, as per the conspiracy intimated at the end of Out of the Silent Planet or Michael Ward’s Planet Narnia thesis? I would love your thoughts.

Malvern Abbey Gateway

The Malvern Hills of England

As an afterthought, and certainly no link in C.S. Lewis’ mind, is the College Grace (which is the same as Christ Church’s long-form grace. It is always given in Latin, but here is the English translation I took from Wikipedia. You “unhappy” isn’t the right word, it strikes me as a good Ransom Cycle prayer, with its request for the heavenly food that brings true sustenance:

“We unhappy and unworthy men do give thee most reverent thanks, Almighty God, our heavenly Father, for the victuals which thou hast bestowed on us for the sustenance of the body, at the same time beseeching thee that we may use them soberly, modestly and gratefully. And above all we beseech thee to impart to us the food of angels, the true bread of heaven, the eternal Word of God, Jesus Christ our Lord, so that the mind of each of us may feed on him and that through his flesh and blood we may be sustained, nourished and strengthened. Amen.”

Worcester College, Oxford

“The object of a New Year is not that we should have a new year. It is that we should have a new soul and a new nose; new feet, a new backbone, new ears, and new eyes. Unless a particular man made New Year resolutions, he would make no resolutions. Unless a man starts afresh about things, he will certainly do nothing effective.” ~ G.K. Chesterton (thanks to Book Oblivion for the quote)

As a PhD student it is my “job” to read. And though I struggled with writing except in strong spurts in 2017, reading is the area where I have been the most successful and consistent. I had a few goals for 2017:

• Reduce my reading to 100 books, but read longer books (averaging 320 pages/book)
• 125 articles, shorts stories, essays, or other short pieces (not in collections)
• A 1:3 female:male ratio of authors
• Read C.S. Lewis’ essays in the winter, his poetry in the summer, and his fiction in the fall
• Increase the number of classes/lecture series to 10
• Increase my Canadian literature content
• Read one theological book a month
• Read one literary theory or writing text a week for my Research Methods class in the fall

My goals this year were really about:

• thickening up my reading and focussing it to match my thesis needs
• intentionally building up my CanLit knowledge (with the goal of presenting at a conference in 2018)
• reading for course prep (which overlaps with my PhD program)

80% of my books fit into one of those categories, and another 10% of my books and all the lectures were designed for increasing skills or devotional reading.

So, how did I do?

With due respect to the creepy encouragement from Goodreads–how would they know what I’m good at?–I muffed my first goal. For some reason, I put some omnibus editions in Goodreads, so it looks like 117 books at 36,000 words. When tracking individual books on my excel sheet (below), it was actually 127 books. In either case, the word length is the same, meaning I didn’t read longer books in 2017. This shows that I was a little soft on my thesis reading and filled it out with more fiction than normal. It also attests to how thin C.S. Lewis’ books are–the main character in my PhD dissertation. Lewis’ brevity is legendary, one of the reasons I would like to write essays like he does. Leaving out his journals and letters, Lewis averaged 221.8 pages per book. In 2017 I read 21 Lewis books, which will soften these averages considerably.

I met my learning goals this year, and except for being soft on Lewis’ poetry, I met my Lewis goals (including struggling with Charles Williams). I read 14 books by Canadian fiction writers. In 2018 I want to take that forward, reading a couple of more of Margaret Atwood, more of Lucy Maud Montgomery, and whatever I can fit in of Guy Gavriel Kay. And I fell just short of my 1:3 female:male ratio (though by the goodreads stats I came pretty close). 22% of the books I read were written by women. As a scholar of primarily male figures, that’s to be expected, but I am intent on broadening my experience. The ratio may shift in late 2018 or early 2019 as I come to a question about gender in my thesis.

Over the years of reading, my monthly averages have flattened out. As always, there is a drop in the early fall–I find the fall semester really difficult to get started. What has been consistent in all three previous years is the strength of my summer reading; 2017 was just below average, with a much stronger spring and late fall. Perhaps this might be a bit bent as my summer was taken up by longer books like The Name of the Wind, The Brothers Karamazov, and IT. 

Though I don’t tend to count blogs or most internet articles, books are not all of my reading. In 2017, I dropped pretty dramatically in my reading of articles as I found myself reading primary source material more than usual in research. I exceeded the goal with the number of lectures I listened to, going through 13 series in total.  In the chart below, gold is books, purple is articles, and green includes lecture series and classes.

My charts have better detail, but honestly, the Goodreads infographic is just so much nicer (see the entire infographic here).

If my reading had themes this past year, it was these:

• C.S. Lewis and books about him (21 and 11 books respectively); the book above where I was the only reader is the Revised Psalter, which Lewis helped edit
• Books by and about the Inklings (10 books), including a focus on Tolkien
• CanLit books (14), including a turn to L.M. Montgomery
• Theological works (24 books)
• SF and Fantasy books, other than Inklings (24 books), including some classic SF, some Stephen King, and my ongoing reading of Discworld
• Literary theory, literary criticism, and literary history (17 books and a couple of dozen articles), mostly in the fall, but I try to read a literary history book ever season

This coming year, my reading will be determined by season:

• Winter: Because I am precepting a course called Literature, Film, and Technoculture with Signum University, my winter and part of the spring will be dominated by SciFi (I think my SHANWAR read is SF, but I’m not sure yet)
• Spring: I will be finishing up the SciFi class reading and focussing on two areas for the rest of the spring: L.M. Montgomery’s work from 1908-1917, and C.S. Lewis’ teenage work (1914-1919)
• Summer: The summer is all about C.S. Lewis, especially secondary material; my reading will lighten as I have 6 weeks of dedicated writing time
• Fall: Continues the C.S. Lewis work with a supplement in theology; I will probably also reread Harry Potter, as I do every other autumn

And I will be going slowly through the catalogues that I love: Tolkien, Discworld, and a couple of the lists from this blog.

The Goodreads app is kind of limited, though you can check out my 2017 infographic. They have a thousand possibilities for creating infographics, yet they can’t figure out how to give us that power. Until then, I’ll stick with the classic excel sheet list. I wish I was infographically-inclined, but I do like lists! Here is my list of reading form 2017. “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 or papers yours? If so, feel free to link my list. If you have your own year-end list or best-of blog, make sure you link it in the comments.

This may very well be the worst book I have ever read.

According to my Goodreads ratings, I have only four other one-star reviews. I can’t remember why I so disliked Chrétien de Troyes’ Erec & Enide, but I remember the other three distinctly. It was not just the tang of the world in William Morris’ utopian News from Nowhere that I disliked, but his jagged style and his hope that the sexism of his age would be idealized. Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged was 1,500 pages of preaching, where the philosopher Rand beat her audience with a railway tie until we were well into submission. My lack of sympathy for Sidney’s Arcadia is, I’m sure, my own weakness. But the Arcadia tasted to me like sucralose drinks: artificial, and so sickly sweet that it threatens to overwhelm the artificiality.

Note that these are four of the more memorable and canonical authors of Western history. Chrétien de Troyes helps create our English Arthurian tradition, Sir. Phillip Sydney is one of the great poets of the period, William Morris inaugurated 20^th century fantasy (until Tolkien), and Ayn Rand’s philosophy still salinates certain streams of American politics—including an intriguing influence on conservative Christians in the US, despite Rand’s open anti-Christianity and Christ’s clear rejection of the principles behind Atlas Shrugged. Even David Lyndsay himself is influential. Michael Moorcock has called A Voyage to Arcturus a Nietzschean Pilgrim’s Progress with a struggle that becomes “the antithesis of the visionary brutalism embraced by Adolf Hitler.”

And C.S. Lewis loved this book. Lewis called A Voyage to Arcturus “that shattering, intolerable, and irresistible work” (“On Science Fiction”). “Intolerable” is a well-chosen adjective, I think, but I find it less than shattering and entirely resistible. Rather than have to suffer through the last pages of Arcturus, I would have paid William Shatner to come to my bedroom and read the book Shatneresquely while I slept. Because of intellectual honesty, I resisted the temptation. Besides, my wife vetoed the idea. She said it was because of money, but she might have found Shatner’s approach a bit off-putting at night.

Still, I am committed to trying to understand what Lewis saw in this work. So I felt duty bound to discover what was it that caught his imagination. His Oct 29, 1944 letter to Prof. Charles Brady, Lewis admitted that,

“The real father of my planet books is David Lindsay’s Voyage to Arcturus, which you also will revel in if you don’t know it. I had grown up on Well’s stories of that kind: it was Lindsay who first gave me the idea that the ‘scientifiction’ appeal could be combined with the ‘supernatural’ appeal–suggested the ‘Cross’ (in biological sense). His own spiritual outlook is detestable, almost diabolist I think, and his style crude: but he showed me what a bang you cd. get from mixing these two elements.”

(note: Can any reader help me with the syntax of Lewis’ “cross” comment? There is a lot about sacrifice in the book, but I don’t think that’s what Lewis meant here)

Despite the notes of Schopenhauer or the Manichaean dualism of A Voyage to Arcturus, Lewis consciously used it to shape his works. In a Jan 4, 1947 letter to poet Ruth Pitter, Lewis responded to her vision of the connection between the two pieces:

“Voyage to Arcturus is not the parody of Perelandra but its father. It was published, a dead failure, about 25 years ago. Now that the author is dead it is suddenly leaping into fame: but I’m one of the old guard who had a treasured second hand copy before anyone had heard of it. From Lyndsay I first learned what other planets in fiction are really good for: for spiritual adventures. Only they can satisfy the craving which sends our imaginations off the earth. Or putting it another way, in him I first saw the terrific results produced by the union of two kinds of fiction hitherto kept apart: the Novalis, G. Macdonald, James Stephens sort and the H. G. Wells, Jules Verne sort. My debt to him is very great: tho’ I’m a little alarmed to find it so obvious that the affinity came through to you even from a talk about Lyndsay!

“For the rest, Voyage to A is on the borderline of the diabolical: i.e. the philosophy expressed is so Manichaean as to be almost Satanic. Secondly, the style is often laughably crude. Thirdly, the proper names (Polecrab, Blodsombre, Wombflash, Tydomin, Sullenbode) are superb and perhaps Screwtape owes something to them. Fourthly, you must read it. You will have a disquieting but not-to-be-missed experience.”

The band of brothers Lewis’ places Lindsay within is a strong one, though enigmatic, leaving out as much as it takes in. Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra are patterned after A Voyage to Arcturus in at least three distinct ways.

First, they are all books of Platonic dialogue in space fiction. Second, they include stunning descriptions of landscape that are designed to de-Earth the reader, alienating them for the sake of recovery of something else. Third, in Arcturus and Perelandra especially, there is significant fluidity and play around the idea of gender. The foundation for this gender play is different in each: Lindsay entrenches himself in post-Victorian ideas of masculinity and femininity, while Lewis is playing with classical and medieval images of symbolized gender and sex. While I have argued that The Place of the Lion was one of the triggers of Lewis’ turn to SF, there is no doubt that when Lewis encountered Arcturus in the mid-30s, a vision for theological planetary science fiction began to grow in his mind.

What Lewis learned best from David Lindsay—what he said that planetary romances were good for—is that in taking the reader to an alien world, the return to Earth makes our own reading chairs and family rooms and studies look a little alien. To the degree that Lindsay influenced Lewis in this project of what Darko Suvin would later call “cognitive estrangement,” we should be grateful.

Still, there is the writing itself. Unlike Lewis, I was not impressed by the names, finding them clumsy and random, but I may well be wrong. Lindsay is also fairly good at painting a landscape, though he overplays his hand, pressing for some intricate symbolism that often escaped me. Despite some skill with a paintbrush, Lindsay creates monotonous dialogue from hateful characters who bark back and forth to each other like bad middle school actors reading recipes to one another as if it was romantic poetry. Though Lindsay can create a scene in landscape, in dialogue he a “tell” instead of “show” author, using adverbs to do the work instead of descriptive prose. Here are some examples of adverbial leaning when the nearby prose could have carried the moment or when description would have been better:

• he tranquilly studied him through half closed lids and the smoke of a cigar
• He spoke rather dryly
• “I will be delighted,” said Backhouse coldly
• She smiled rather absently
• his eyes were still disconcertingly bright
• She has decorated the old lounge hall upstairs most beautifully
• Backhouse was slightly acquainted with the latter
• their meeting had immediately acquired additional solemnity
• was most expensively attired
• The room was brilliantly lighted
• A fantastically carved wooden couch
• obliquely placed to the auditorium
• Jameson … watched them as only a deeply interested woman knows how to watch
• “you will immediately see for yourselves”
• It was evident that aesthetically she was by far the most important person present
• Through the gaps in his mind the inhabitants of the invisible, when he summoned them, passed for a moment timidly and awfully into the solid, coloured universe
• It hovered lightly in the air
• the pedestal of the statue was seen to become slightly blurred…. This slowly developed into a visible cloud, coiling hither and thither, and constantly changing shape
• Jameson quietly fainted in her chair, but she was unnoticed, and presently revived
• The figure was by this time unmistakably that of a man lying down
• “Aha-i, gentlemen!” he called out loudly. His voice was piercing, and oddly disagreeable to the ear
• asked Faull sullenly
• said Backhouse quickly
• The guests were unutterably shocked
• demanded Nightspore disdainfully

And so on. That’s just the more obvious ones in the opening scene. There are 300 pages of this. I have no way of counting, but it wouldn’t surprise me if there were 1000 unnecessary adverbs in 300 pages of text. There is some nice potential there for good prose, punctuated by the lazy turn to an adverb. Some of this is the overwrought prose of fantasy-writing in the 1920s–as imaginative as H.P. Lovecraft is, I wish he would describe the evil rather than telling my something is evil–but Lindsay is particularly good at bad prose.

And Lindsay’s fascination with people sitting in certain ways! There are dozens and dozens of references to sitting down—this in a book about walking. Here are some of them:

• he immediately settled himself in the most comfortable of many comfortable chairs
• they retained their seats with difficulty
• Her voice was retarded, scornful, viola-like. She sat down on the trunk of a fallen tree, and looked away
• she sat down on the ground, her legs gracefully thrust under her body, and pulled down the skirt of her robe. Maskull remained standing just behind her, with crossed arms.
• Oceaxe sat down carelessly
• He laughed again, but nevertheless sat down on the ground beside her
• Tydomin suggested to him to set down the corpse, and both sat down to rest in the shade
• He sat up and began to smile, without any especial reason; and then stood upright
• He sat up, blinking
• When I sat up, it was night and the others had vanished
• He sat up, but the fisherman did not stir
• He … strolled on to the sands, and sat down in the full sunlight
• The woman sat cross-legged in the stern, and seized the pole
• Without appearing to care about an answer, he sat up
• Then he sat down by the side of the lake, and, leaning on his side, placed his right hand, open palm downward, on the ground, at the same time stretching out his right leg, so that the foot was in contact with the water
• Maskull sat down by its edge, in imitation of Earthrid’s attitude
• And he sat down passively to rest
• While Maskull sat, Corpang walked restlessly to and fro, swinging his arms
• Going to the meat line, he took down a large double handful, and sat down on a pile of skins to eat at his ease
• Then he sat down, crossed his legs, and turned to Maskull
• Corpang now sat up suddenly
• He sat down moodily, but the next minute was up again
• When they had covered about half a mile, Maskull, who went second of the party, staggered, caught the cliff, and finally sat down
• She sat erect, on crossed legs, asleep
• He paced up and down, while the others sat
• Maskull and Sullenbode sat down on a boulder
• When he had reached the boulder overlooking the landslip, on which they had sat together, he lowered his burden, and, placing the dead girl on the stone, seated himself beside her for a time, gazing over toward Barey
• He sat up and yawned feebly
• From where he sat he was unable to see the pool
• Maskull sat down near the edge, and periodically splashed water over his head. Gangnet sat on his haunches next to him. Krag paced up and down with short, quick steps, like an animal in a cage

See my note above about middle school stage direction. Honestly, how do you sit down passively?  or moodily? That is something I’d like to have described to me so I can practice. And where I have been all this time that people have been yawning in a way that wasn’t feeble?

And, believe it or not, this codpiece prose is not the worst part of Arcturus. If you have been paying attention there is a lot of carrying around of corpses. This is because the characters are absolutely despicable. The hero of the tale lands in a beautiful other-world, and despite mentoring by a peace-loving couple, invests his life there in slaughtering the people of Tormance, taking their lives one by one because they are hideous or annoying or they make him feel sad. Honestly, the best part of the book was when the prophecy arrived that Maskill would die. His four days in Tormance are a millennium of drudgery. He doesn’t even like it, so why should the reader?

All of this, I know, is to tell us something of Lindsay’s philosophical approach. The worldview that Lewis called “diabolical” is a strange kind of dualism. God and Satan, pain and pleasure, self and other, male and female, lover and enemy, near and far, good and evil, death and life—these are all binaries that serve to illustrate a complex philosophical dualism. Lindsay’s skepticism—what Moorcock calls his “God-questioning genius”—is one of the more interesting parts of the book, especially when combined with passages that describe religious experience.

All of this rich questioning, however, is described in philosophical conversation that sounds like a dot matrix printer, spoken by characters who are like squeaky hinges to the reader’s spirit, all set against a backdrop of imaginative genius so mishandled that, in the end, would make Justin Bieber look like a lyrical savant.

So, perhaps I am wrong about this book. People have committed their lives to preserving this book. Colin Wilson called Arcturus “the greatest novel of the 20th century.” (see here). Philip Pullman thought it was a severely underrated book—and we know how good of a reader he is.

As painful as this book was to read, it was important to C.S. Lewis. In “Two Ways with the Self,” Lewis was concerned with the tendency to worship suffering in Lindsay’s novel, and he warned that “I shd. think twice before introducing it to the young” unless they are in “perfect psychological health” (Jan 31, 1960 letter to Alan Hindle). My psychological health was better before I picked it up–but then I’m not a child.

And though he never loved the writing, he held the opinion throughout his life that it was an important book. In a discussion with leading SF writers of the period, Lewis floated Lindsay’s masterpiece:

C.S. LEWIS: Well, the one you probably disapprove of because he’s so very unscientific is David Lindsay, in Voyage to Arcturus. It’s a remarkable thing, because scientifically it’s nonsense, the style is appalling, and yet this ghastly vision comes through.

BRIAN ALDISS: It didn’t come through to me.

KINGSLEY AMIS: Nor me. Still … Victor Gollancz told me a very interesting remark of Lindsay’s about Arcturus; he said, ‘I shall never appeal to a large public at all, but I think that as long as our civilisation lasts one person a year will read me.’ I respect that attitude.

C.S. LEWIS: Quite so. Modest and becoming (“Unreal Estates”).

Unfortunately, I was the one person to read Arcturus this year. The only thing that depresses me more than the idea of me having to read this book is that with more than 10 months left in the year there could be countless others who stumble upon it.

We will turn below to a passage that has some of the least worst prose in the book, but captures some of the hateful quality of the characters and the worldview. But before that, let’s look at Lewis’ published literary criticism of A Voyage to Arcturus with a few of my comments interspersed. In “On Stories,” Lewis is concerned with developing atmosphere, rather than stories driven by suspenseful plot devices:

“But perhaps the most remarkable achievement in this kind is that of Mr David Lindsay’s Voyage to Arcturus. The experienced reader, noting the threats and promises of the opening chapter, even while he gratefully enjoys them, feels sure that they cannot be carried out. He reflects that in stories of this kind the first chapter is nearly always the best and reconciles himself to disappointment; Tormance, when we reach it, he forbodes, will be less interesting than Tormance seen from the Earth. But never will he have been more mistaken.”

I am clearly not an experienced reader.

“Unaided by any special skill or even any sound taste in language, the author leads us up a stair of unpredictables.”

This is a precisely accurate statement. The book goes on and on through those winding, crumbling, meaningless stairways.

“In each chapter we think we have found his final position; each time we are utterly mistaken. He builds whole worlds of imagery and passion, any one of which would have served another writer for a whole book, only to pull each of them to pieces and pour scorn on it. The physical dangers, which are plentiful, here count for nothing; it is we ourselves and the author who walk through a world of spiritual dangers which makes them seem trivial. There is no recipe for writing of this kind.

That there is no recipe for this kind of writing is its own blessing.

“But part of the secret is that the author (like Kafka) is recording a lived dialectic. His Tormance is a region of the spirit. He is the first writer to discover what ‘other planets’ are really good for in fiction. No merely physical strangeness or merely spatial distance will realise that idea of otherness which is what we are always trying to grasp in a story about voyaging through space: you must go into another dimension. To construct plausible and moving ‘other worlds’ you must draw on the only real ‘other world’ we know, that of the spirit” (“On Stories”).

I don’t know that Lewis is right that the realm of the spirit is the only Adventureland left to us–and he may have considered the “heavens” a spiritual region–but that vision of transdimensional distance really does create marvellous opportunities for philosophical exploration—what other planets are really good for.

I have complained enough, and am very aware that I may have missed something entirely. If forced to choose from my one-star books for a reread, I would choose Chrétien and Sydney and learn to like them. Morris’ utopia I only found horrifying, so I could read that again. And pressed to the wall, I would rather reread the 561,996 pork-barrel words of Atlas Shrugged rather than return to a single chapter of dialogue in Arcturus. At least Ayn Rand can present her despicable characters with moral courage. And there are lots of pretty trains.

Now to one of the better scenes, this one with that elegant rhythm of a ceiling fan missing a blade.

From Chapter 19, Sullenbode

Corpang, who had been staring steadily along the ridge, here abruptly broke in. “The road is plain now, Maskull. If you wish it, I’ll go on alone.”

“No, we’ll go on together. Sullenbode will accompany us.”

“A little way,” said the woman, “but not to Adage, to pit my strength against unseen powers. That light is not for me. I know how to renounce love, but I will never be a traitor to it.”

“Who knows what we shall find on Adage, or what will happen? Corpang is as ignorant as myself.”

Corpang looked him full in the face. “Maskull, you are quite well aware that you never dare approach that awful fire in the society of a beautiful woman.”

Maskull gave an uneasy laugh. “What Corpang doesn’t tell you, Sullenbode, is that I am far better acquainted with Muspel-light than he, and that, but for a chance meeting with me, he would still be saying his prayers in Threal.”

“Still, what he says must be true,” she replied, looking from one to the other.

“And so I am not to be allowed to — ”

“So long as I am with you, I shall urge you onward, and not backward, Maskull.”

“We need not quarrel yet,” he remarked, with a forced smile. “No doubt things will straighten themselves out.”

Sullenbode began kicking the snow about with her foot. “I picked up another piece of wisdom in my sleep, Corpang.”

“Tell it to me, then.”

“Men who live by laws and rules are parasites. Others shed their strength to bring these laws out of nothing into the light of day, but the law-abiders live at their ease — they have conquered nothing for themselves.”

“It is given to some to discover, and to others to preserve and perfect. You cannot condemn me for wishing Maskull well.”

“No, but a child cannot lead a thunderstorm.”

They started walking again along the centre of the ridge. All three were abreast, Sullenbode in the middle.

The road descended by an easy gradient, and was for a long distance comparatively smooth. The freezing point seemed higher than on Earth, for the few inches of snow through which they trudged felt almost warm to their naked feet. Maskull’s soles were by now like tough hides. The moonlit snow was green and dazzling. Their slanting, abbreviated shadows were sharply defined, and red-black in colour. Maskull, who walked on Sullenbode’s right hand, looked constantly to the left, toward the galaxy of glorious distant peaks.

“You cannot belong to this world,” said the woman. “Men of your stamp are not to be looked for here.”

“No, I have come here from Earth.”

“Is that larger than our world?”

“Smaller, I think. Small, and overcrowded with men and women. With all those people, confusion would result but for orderly laws, and therefore the laws are of iron. As adventure would be impossible without encroaching on these laws, there is no longer any spirit of adventure among the Earthmen. Everything is safe, vulgar, and completed.”

“Do men hate women there, and women men?”

“No, the meeting of the sexes is sweet, though shameful. So poignant is the sweetness that the accompanying shame is ignored, with open eyes. There is no hatred, or only among a few eccentric persons.”

“That shame surely must be the rudiment of our Lichstorm passion. But now say — why did you come here?”

“To meet with new experiences, perhaps. The old ones no longer interested me.”

“How long have you been in this world?”

“This is the end of my fourth day.”

“Then tell me what you have seen and done during those four days. You cannot have been inactive.”

“Great misfortunes have happened to me.”

He proceeded briefly to relate everything that had taken place from the moment of his first awakening in the scarlet desert. Sullenbode listened, with half-closed eyes, nodding her head from time to time. only twice did she interrupt him. After his description of Tydomin’s death, she said, speaking in a low voice — “None of us women ought by right of nature to fall short of Tydomin in sacrifice. For that one act of hers, I almost love her, although she brought evil to your door.” Again, speaking of Gleameil, she remarked, “That grand-souled girl I admire the most of all. She listened to her inner voice, and to nothing else besides. Which of us others is strong enough for that?”

When his tale was quite over, Sullenbode said, “Does it not strike you, Maskull, that these women you have met have been far nobler than the men?”

“I recognise that. We men often sacrifice ourselves, but only for a substantial cause. For you women almost any cause will serve. You love the sacrifice for its own sake, and that is because you are naturally noble.”

Turning her head a little, she threw him a smile so proud, yet so sweet, that he was struck into silence.

They tramped on quietly for some distance, and then he said, “Now you understand the sort of man I am. Much brutality, more weakness, scant pity for anyone — Oh, it has been a bloody journey!”

She laid her hand on his arm. “I, for one, would not have it less rugged.”

“Nothing good can be said of my crimes.”

“To me you seem like a lonely giant, searching for you know not what. . . . The grandest that life holds. . . . You at least have no cause to look up to women.”

“Thanks, Sullenbode!” he responded, with a troubled smile.

“When Maskull passes, let people watch. Everyone is thrown out of your road. You go on, looking neither to right nor left.”

“Take care that you are not thrown as well,” said Corpang gravely.

“Maskull shall do with me whatever he pleases, old skull! And for whatever he does, I will thank him. . . . In place of a heart you have a bag of loose dust. Someone has described love to you. You have had it described to you. You have heard that it is a small, fearful, selfish joy. It is not that — it is wild, and scornful, and sportive, and bloody. . . . How should you know.”

“Selfishness has far too many disguises.”

“If a woman wills to give up all, what can there be selfish in that?”

“Only do not deceive yourself. Act decisively, or fate will be too swift for you both.”

Sullenbode studied him through her lashes. “Do you mean death — his death as well as mine?”

“You go too far, Corpang,” said Maskull, turning a shade darker. “I don’t accept you as the arbiter of our fortunes.”

“If honest counsel is disagreeable to you, let me go on ahead.”

The woman detained him with her slow, light fingers. “I wish you to stay with us.”

“Why?”

“I think you may know what you are talking about. I don’t wish to bring harm to Maskull. Presently I’ll leave you.”

“That will be best,” said Corpang.

Maskull looked angry. “I shall decide — Sullenbode, whether you go on, or back, I stay with you. My mind is made up.”

An expression of joyousness overspread her face, in spite of her efforts to conceal it. “Why do you scowl at me, Maskull?”

He returned no answer, but continued walking onward with puckered brows. After a dozen paces or so, he halted abruptly. “Wait, Sullenbode!”

The others came to a standstill. Corpang looked puzzled, but the woman smiled. Maskull, without a word, bent over and kissed her lips. Then he relinquished her body, and turned around to Corpang.

“How do you, in your great wisdom, interpret that kiss?”

“It requires no great wisdom to interpret kisses, Maskull.”

“Hereafter, never dare to come between us. Sullenbode belongs to me.”

“Then I say no more; but you are a fated man.”

From that time forward he spoke not another word to either of the others.

A heavy gleam appeared in the woman’s eyes. “Now things are changed, Maskull. Where are you taking me?”

“Choose, you.”

“The man I love must complete his journey. I won’t have it otherwise. You shall not stand lower than Corpang.”

“Where you go, I will go.”

“And I— as long as your love endures, I will accompany you even to Adage.”

“Do you doubt its lasting?”

“I wish not to. . . . Now I will tell you what I refused to tell you before. The term of your love is the term of my life. When you love me no longer, I must die.”

“And why?” asked Maskull slowly.

“Yes, that’s the responsibility you incurred when you kissed me for the first time. I never meant to tell you.”

“Do you mean that if I had gone on alone, you would have died?”

“I have no other life but what you give me.”

Many of you will know what a pleasure it is to hear Charles Huttar read a paper, to meet and converse with him – and how fruitful to your knowledge, understanding, and further thought. And many more who have been his students and daily colleagues over the years will probably say the same, if even more emphatically. But those who know him solely as a writer know they are not lacking such benefits, though mediated by another form. What T.S. Eliot said of Charles Williams, we may say of him: “no one who has known both the man and his works would have willingly foregone either experience.” Those who have already read his exhilarating, magnificent contribution to The Inklings and King Arthur, may find a deft, concentrated, thought-provoking complement to it in today’s post, while those who have not, yet, will find a spur to long to do so the sooner.

David Llewellyn Dodds, Guest Editor

Historians still debate the pros and cons of whether King Arthur actually existed.

In “The Figure of Arthur,” Charles Williams doesn’t take a position on the matter. He notes that no contemporary author mentions him by name; “Arthur” enters history more than three centuries later. But he also notes that recent discoveries lend some credibility to the earliest accounts of battles to which the name became attached, and to that extent they force reconsideration of what may have been a too-easy skepticism.[1] (Incidentally, R. G. Collingwood, the eminent historian and archeologist of the Romano-British era whom Williams cites, was Lewis’s colleague at Magdalen College.)

What interests Williams, instead, is “the myth of Arthur” as he calls it (in the very first line of the history of the Arthurian legends that he left unfinished—hence a “torso”—and elsewhere [3, 93-94]).

What interests us, mainly, is the rather different myths that Williams and other Inklings made of the Matter of Britain. On these Sørina Higgins’s new book[2] sheds light from a welcome variety of angles. But that theme is only one strand in a vaster tapestry woven by artists and historians alike, calling on their imaginations to fill the enormous gaps in the reliable evidence (not documentary alone) that is available for reconstructing and understanding the past.

In his 1950 essay “Historicism” C. S. Lewis describes the legitimate role of imagination in the historian’s scholarly work, but his main object is to refute those who step outside their discipline and try to extrapolate from pathetically inadequate data something they insist is “the meaning of history.”[3] I have summarized elsewhere Lewis’s catalog of the various ways all the data we could possibly amass must inevitably fall dismally short (“The Limitations of Historiography” 35-38).[4] For one thing, history is not yet complete, and only God knows the future. We may, by divine revelation, know some of God’s purposes in broad outline, but how any particular event fits into the plan remains God’s secret. Looking at the past “we see pictures in the fire,” Lewis writes, and “the more indeterminate the object, the more it excites our mythopoeic . . . faculties” (“Historicism” 105).

Vast reaches of history are “indeterminate.”

At the end of That Hideous Strength [5] the company at St. Anne’s learn that the seventy-ninth Pendragon will leave them and return to Venus, there to dwell in “Aphallin” with King Arthur and others. Whatever Lewis’s personal opinion about Arthur’s historicity, in Lewis’s myth the king not only once lived but did not die. As Dr. Dimble, a historian by profession, explains,

“We discovered that the Arthurian story is mostly true history” and, moreover, that “something we may call Britain is always haunted by something we may call Logres.”

In the sixth century Logres “nearly succeeded” in “break[ing] through. . . . A secret Logres” has continued “in the heart of Britain all these years” and was instrumental in the defeat of the N.I.C.E., “only just in time” (441-42). None of those at St. Anne’s will be named in the history books, but as Charles Williams once said (Dimble refers to him only as “one of the modern authors”), building an altar may be required here so that the fire can fall there (443).

Throughout this conversation at St. Anne’s, Lewis is greatly indebted to Williams. Other events in That Hideous Strength are spoken of as instances of divine action (see my “How Much . . .” 31-34, 44-46).  Williams shared that belief but did not feel obliged to veil it in a myth—see his The Descent of the Dove: A Short History of the Holy Spirit in the Church (1939). The audacious subtitle seems a contradiction in terms: what historian can discern the blowing of that divine Wind? Williams explicitly names the Holy Ghost. Lewis says only “the haunting,” but he means the same thing.

The mystery surrounding Arthur captivated J. R. R. Tolkien as well, in his middle years,[6] but that was only one of the gaps in our knowledge of history into which the Inklings were spurred to insert imagined possibilities. All three authors played with the idea of a mysterious linkage between different eras through the reappearance of objects of power (in Williams, the Holy Grail, the Stone and the Ship of Solomon)[7] or persons (for example, Merlin in That Hideous Strength) or the emergence of persons related in some fashion to others from a distant time. Tolkien’s interest in this last theme and how it could fit into his vast, developing mythology is evident from the posthumously published (and fragmentary) Book of Lost Tales and “Notion Club Papers.”[8]

The clairvoyance of Lewis’s Jane Studdock, which is central to the plot of his novel, she has inherited from her Tudor forebears. Similarly crucial is the sixteenth-century ancestral connection of Pauline Anstruther in Williams’s Descent into Hell (1937), but the doctrines of Coinherence and Substitution that undergird that myth render it much more complex. It involves a quadrilateral relationship of persons, spanning not just four centuries but twenty, and raises speculation about the nature of time.

When Pauline’s friend Peter Stanhope persuades her to let him carry her obsessive fear of meeting her doppelgänger, she is freed to cross back to the time of Queen Mary, meet and speak to her ancestor who agonizes in fear of being burnt at the stake, and in turn take up his burden of fear. But the voice that Pauline hears making him that offer, though it is “her own voice,” comes from a figure standing behind her, looking exactly like her (as she discovers when she turns, no longer in fear but willingly, to gaze). It is her Double, and it is also the “immortal” One, the Author of all Substitution, who, two millennia before, promised his followers that he would dwell within them. The voice said, “Give it to me, John Struther,” and when John accepts that offer his agonized cry—which was certainly real; Pauline had heard it—becomes a “roar of triumph, . . . ‘I have seen the salvation of my God.’”[9] These are the very words recorded in the sixteenth-century martyrology that Pauline had heard quoted as a part of her family lore (55-56), but not until a woman from the twentieth century visited him in prison had he been able to utter them. Thus Williams’s myth calls into question, or at least gets us thinking about, the fixity of the past itself and the puzzle of divine foreknowledge and human free will.

The farther back we go into history, the greater the “indetermina[cy],” the gaps that set the imagination to work, whether in the form of speculation—either by reasonable Inference or by sheer conjecture—or that of mythopoesis. Williams’s early play The Chapel of the Thorn explores Christian-Druid relationships on the Welsh border in the early Middle Ages, a topic that Suzanne Bray addressed briefly in the first post of this series. His late play Terror of Light, set at the very start of Church history, imagines acts and conversations of Christ’s most intimate followers, female as well as male, that Luke did not record in his second treatise, the Book of Acts. Lewis employed techniques of the historical novel to portray the culture of Glome, an imagined barbarian kingdom on the edge of civilization in a slightly earlier period.[10]

Before that, when written records give out, even those that merely codify oral traditions, the historian’s work is taken over by other “sciences”—a quite imprecise word, in this context—archeology, anthropology and its subdiscipline comparative religion, biology, and astronomy, in roughly that order. We label that period, billions of years, “pre-history,” a misleading term since, as Lewis says, history “may mean . . . the total content of the past . . . in all its teeming riches” (“Historicism” 105). There is also philology, a discipline pursued by both Lewis and (preeminently) Tolkien, which investigates words themselves to uncover facts about human history. Lewis’s Studies in Words used methods and theories laid down by Owen Barfield to trace through the centuries semantic changes that Lewis found many of his students—and prominent critics as well—failed to notice.[11]

Two of Lewis’s poems play with possibilities about human and animal life before Noah’s flood, surviving now only in legend.[12] His stories of an alternate Eden (Perelandra) and another Creation (The Magician’s Nephew) deserve a quick glance, though they don’t strictly fit into this account since neither serves to fill a gap in earthly history; Venus is a different planet, and Narnia is a universe to itself. But Lewis did question the received “scientific” accounts of early human consciousness and the origin of religion, because of their heavy reliance on conjecture based on naturalistic presuppositions. (The eminent biologist Stephen Jay Gould would later ridicule them as Kiplingesque “just-so stories.”)[13] In youth, having dipped into Frazer’s Golden Bough, Lewis had accepted them,[14] but in The Problem of Pain he offered his own alternate accounts, consonant with Christian belief.[15]

Existing myths from antiquity underlie Lewis’s Ransom trilogy: that which assigns planets to different gods to govern and that of Satan’s rebellion and continued warfare against God, so that not only divine but also diabolical forces work in history, truly a hideous strength. Lewis embellishes these myths with inventions of his own, the enemy’s attempt to destroy all life on a newly created Mars, which is thwarted by “gigantic feats of [angelic] engineering” that to an earthly viewer resemble canals, and the consequent protection of the other planets by confining the enemy to Earth and cutting off communication therefrom.[16]

Tolkien, refashioning the same ancient myth, had gone much farther back—indeed, to a time when the universe itself was only an idea in the mind of the One (as in Plato) and the rebel figure Melkor tried to corrupt the Creation according to his own designs. The tales go on from there, taking place within (but hardly filling) an enormous gap of countless years (scientists would read “billions”) and still not getting close to what we call the beginnings of “history.” Tolkien’s imagination could reach far beyond the scientists’ to envision the creation of sun and moon replacing, in their lesser way, the two Trees that Melkor ruined; massive changes in the maps of Middle-earth, whether wrought by ordinary geological process or, more likely, by demonic or angelic action (as, for example, the drowning of Númenor, explaining more fully in terms of divine action what Plato had sketched of Atlantis—possibly, it is now thought, from real folk memories of the breakthrough of ocean into the Mediterranean basin); the creation of a bright new object traversing the heavens; and, provoked by human hubris, the transformation of a flat earth to a globe.[17]

Another prominent theme in Tolkien, alongside such fantastic imaginings, is history itself: the awe-inspiring contemplation of vast reaches of time, the work of historians in the use of evidence and preservation of records, and the limits imposed on the historian by being embedded in a particular culture. Part of what attracted readers to The Lord of the Rings from the start was exposure to a much larger world than their familiar one—strange yet credible (disbelief being suspended), working by other physical laws yet subject to much the same psychological and moral laws across the ages. In place of Fred Flintstone-like caricatures, readers found in Tolkien a sense that there might be many things in heaven and earth undreamt of in their philosophy.

Similar realizations come to characters within the stories. To some, it was exciting to discover that “halflings” were real, not mere legends. The hobbits, drawn out of their secluded Shire, encounter elves, which Sam for one has longed to see, and other marvels unheard of—Ents, Woses (Ethan Campbell explained these in his Valentine’s Day post), Púkel-men, the Mines of Moria, Lórien, the eroded statues of Isildur and Anárion, the Dead Marshes. All are windows on a far-distant past. Some access to those years is found in ancient records like those studied by Gandalf, and in scraps of folklore too easily dismissed as old wives’ tales—resources similar to those that Tolkien himself and his university colleagues might comb through for historical evidence. More astounding to the hobbits might have been facts not handed down through centuries but stored up in the memory of still-living persons.  All such knowledge contributes to the Fellowship’s success, as when Aragorn reforges the broken sword, compels the Oathbreakers of old to help turn the tide of battle, and uses ancient herb-lore to revive Frodo and Faramir.

Moreover, Tolkien casts himself in a historian’s role, not a creator of fiction in a modern sense (except in the two works centering on hobbits and a few lesser stories) but a gatherer of and commentator on ancient documents—poetic tales, annals, linguistic and ethnic studies, and the work of great historians of ancient times, such as the elf Pengolodh who lived in the Second Age and was himself greatly dependent on the much earlier Rúmil.

Of course, all these pretended relics of past ages are in fact Tolkien’s own compositions. This is the master-fiction of his legendarium, that this great twentieth-century subcreator of an imagined world, which yet is our world, poses as only a collector of the mythology of an ancient and very advanced culture, of which our own age is a remote and greatly diminished successor. But there was a limit even to what those revered Elvish historians could know—thus, gaps impossible to fill. Especially, although in their thirst for knowledge they inquired diligently about the history and the destiny of humankind, these things remained hidden from them, held in secret in the mind of the One.

[1] C. S. Lewis, ed. Arthurian Torso: Containing the Posthumous Fragment of The Figure of Arthur by Charles Williams and a Commentary on the Arthurian Poems of Charles Williams by C. S. Lewis (Oxford UP, 1948).

[2] S. Higgins, ed. The Inklings and King Arthur (Apocryphile Press, 2018).

[3] In Christian Reflections, ed. W. Hooper (Cambridge UP, 1967), 100-13. (Legitimate role: 100, 110-11; try to extrapolate: 100-2, 104-12.)

[4] Section 3 of C. Huttar, “How Much Does That Hideous Strength Owe to Charles Williams?” Sehnsucht 9 (2015): 19-46.

[5] New York: Macmillan, 1946.

[6] J. R. R. Tolkien, The Fall of Arthur, ed. Christopher Tolkien (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013).

[7] In War in Heaven (1930); Many Dimensions (1931); and “The Last Voyage,” in Taliessin through Logres (1938; Oxford UP, 1950), 82-88.

[8] Respectively, volumes 1-2 of “The History of Middle Earth” (HME), ed. Christopher Tolkien (1984), and Part 2 in HME 9 (1992).

[9] Williams, Descent into Hell (1937; Eerdmans, 1965), 169-72.

[10] Williams, The Chapel of the Thorn, ed. S. Higgins (Apocryphile Press, 2015); Terror of Light, in Collected Plays (Oxford UP, 1963), 327-74; Lewis, Till We Have Faces (Bles, 1956).

[11] Lewis, Studies in Words (Cambridge UP, 1956); Barfield, History in English Words (Methuen, 1926), and Poetic Diction (Faber and Gwyer, 1928).  I still regularly use the paperback copy of Studies in Words, 2nd ed., that Barfield gave me in 1967 when it was just out.

[12] Lewis, “The Adam Unparadised” (original title “A Footnote to Pre-History”) and “The Late Passenger” (original title “The Sailing of the Ark”). In Poems, ed. W. Hooper. Bles, 1964. 43-44, 47-48.

[13] S. J. Gould, “Sociobiology: The Art of Storytelling.” New Scientist 80 (1978): 530-33.

[14] See Lewis, Collected Letters, ed. W. Hooper, 3 vols. (HarperSanFrancisco, 2004-7), 1:231.

[15] Lewis, The Problem of Pain (Centenary Press, 1940), chapters 1 and 5.

[16] Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (1938; Macmillan Paperback, 1970), 67, 95, 100, 110-11, 120-24, 142-43; for the quotation, 144.

[17] Tolkien, The Silmarillion (Houghton Mifflin, 1977), 15-22, 76, 97-102, 246-50, 259-82; The Lost Road and Other Writings (HME 5), 1987.

Charles A. Huttar (Ph.D., Northwestern University) is Professor of English Emeritus at Hope College. He has published extensively on Lewis, Williams, and Tolkien (as well as a variety of other subjects, especially in medieval and early modern literature and art). Before moving to Hope, he taught for eleven years at Gordon College. He is the editor of Imagination and the Spirit (1971) and co-editor of Word and Story in C. S. Lewis (1991, 2007) and The Rhetoric of Vision: Essays on Charles Williams (1996), both of which received the Mythopoeic Society’s Scholarship Award. His photographs of Lewis and Tolkien have also been published. His primary book project currently is a study of the mythography of metamorphosis in C. S. Lewis’s writings.

While I am looking forward to the biennial L.M. Montgomery Conference in June here in PEI, and while ISRLC in Europe is pretty cool (Uppsala, SE) and I can’t wait to get to my next Mythcon (2018 is Atlanta, GA) or attend my first Mythmoot (2018 in Leesburg, VA), my absolute favourite conference for building a community of scholarship is the C.S. Lewis & Friends Colloquium, also known as the “Taylor conference.” You should go–and if you are working in academics or applied pastoral work in the Inklings, you should consider submitting a paper proposal.

Granted, some of my love for this conference is that this is where I launched my work in Inklings studies. In 2012, I presented a paper on teaching The Screwtape Letters, and I wasn’t thrown out or shown to be the fraud I secretly am. In 2016 I presented my “Cosmic Find in The Screwtape Letters” work with a paper entitled, “When Screwtape Haunts in Eden” (and I’m preparing that paper for publication next year). This year we have some exciting work coming up on C.S. Lewis’ unfinished teen novel, The Quest of Bleheris. Stay tuned for more.

What makes the Taylor conference so worth attending is that it intentionally creates a space for the development of emerging scholars while retaining a place for senior academics to test out ideas. You can see that in past schedules, but perhaps the best barometer of this kind of culture is that the keynote speakers often stick around for the conference, and you can see senior scholars walking with the younger ones. No doubt there are cabals of experienced professors with heads titled together in dialogue about some new idea or concern. But the generosity of spirit of the veterans is such a critical feature at Taylor.

Plus, the stiff-chinned need to call these sorts of things “academic conferences” interferes not at all with the open space given to art, music, friendship, and worship.

This year’s theme is “The Faithful Imagination,” and includes a stellar cast of keynote speakers, including Stephen Prickett (student of C.S. Lewis and Geo. MacDonald scholar), Crystal Downing (new co-director of the Wade centre), Ron Reed (from Vancouver’s Pacific Theatre), D. S. Martin (a Canadian poet), Joe Christopher (Lewis veteran and occasional haunter of this site), Crystal Hurd (scholar of leadership and leading historian about Lewis’ parents and child life), and Charlie Starr (of Lewis Handwriting Chart fame). ‘Twill be awesome. And, by the way, because it is good to honour the past, the C.S. Lewis & Friends Colloquium is perhaps more officially called the 11th biennial Frances White Ewbank Colloquium of the Center for the Study of C. S. Lewis & Friends at Taylor University. Taylor also hosts one of the more important American archives for C.S. Lewis, George MacDonald, and others (see here for more on the Edwin Brown collection at Taylor).

Call for Paper Submissions (link here)

We invite paper proposals on any topic related to C. S. Lewis and Friends (broadly defined)–Owen Barfield, G. K. Chesterton, George MacDonald, Dorothy L. Sayers, J.R.R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, and others. We especially encourage papers and presentations that respond to the conference theme of “The Faithful Imagination,” that respond to papers from previous colloquiua, that expand the circle of “friends,” and that are the work of new scholars. Proposals should be 100-200 words in length and should anticipate a twenty-minute presentation time limit.

We also invite creative work—poetry, fiction, essay, drama, film, visual art, musical composition, etc. —that responds to or is influenced by these same authors.  Creative submissions should be a complete work, rather than a proposal. Please include your name, contact information, and a brief biography.

Deadline for proposals is March 31, 2018. Please submit proposals by email, directly to the Lewis Center at cslewiscenter@taylor.edu.

The best way to be aware of colloquium news and updates is to bookmark this site. Additional information, revisions, and updates will be posted regularly between now and May 31. You should also follow The Center for the Study of C. S. Lewis and Friends on Facebook.

Taylor Conference Podcast at All About Jack

This podcast here is an interview with Dr. Joseph Ricke, who heads up by The Center for the Study of C.S. Lewis & Friends at Taylor University. It is sponsoring the 11th Frances W. Ewbank Colloquium, May 31st – June 3rd, 2018. The C.S. Lewis and Inklings Society is joining in on this event.

This summer I introduced an occasional feature I call “Throwback Thursday.” This is where I find a blog post from the past–raiding either my own vault or someone else’s–and throw it back out into the digital world. This might be an idea or book that is now relevant again, or a concept I’d like to think about more, or even “an oldie but a goodie” that I think needs a bit of spin time.

This post comes from the second anniversary of my blog in August 2013. When I wrote it I was at August 1937 of my project of reading Lewis Chronologically. I had just finished reading The Allegory of Love (1935) and Out of the Silent Planet (1937), and I was nearly complete The Personal Heresy (1933-9) and the 1930s pieces that would become Rehabilitations and Other Essays (published in 1939). 

As I paced my chronological reading project to Lewis’ letters, I got to know them intimately. What I noticed then and still see in Lewis’ work is that he will often try out an idea for a book or line of argument while writing a letter. No doubt he did this in everyday conversations too, but we have the letters and so that is where our attention goes. I don’t know which comes first: Does Lewis use the letter to test an idea? Or does the correspondence trigger something that will eventually become a book or essay? I suspect both are true, and in this short post, we see some of these emergent ideas. At the end of this piece I talk about the trails that Lewis leaves for us. Intriguingly, on the winding path of a PhD project, these are the breadcrumbs that I am still following into the wood of Lewis’ imaginative work. 

One of the reasons I like reading C.S. Lewis’ letters is that I get to see hints of ideas that will one day become books. Except for some pretty boring entries in his 20s, we don’t have Lewis’ diaries and most of his notebooks aren’t published. So what we have most to go on are the little ideas that pop up in his letters to friends, colleagues, and fans.

One of the friends is Leo Baker, a teacher and Anthroposophist that Lewis had gone to Oxford with. In a 24 Jun 1936 letter talking about Lewis’ The Allegory of Love, Lewis offers a hilarious self-deprecating apology for the length of his new book. Then he turns to Baker’s personal issues:

I am greatly distressed to hear that you are still suffering….

I must confess I have not myself yet got beyond the stage of feeling physical pain as the worst of evils. I am the worst person in the world to help anyone else to support it. I don’t mean that it presents quite the intellectual difficulties it used to, but that my nerves even in imagination refuse to move with my philosophy. In my own limited experience the sufferer himself nearly always towers above those around him: in fact, nothing confirms the Christian view of this world so much as the treasures of patience and unselfishness one sees elicited from quite commonplace people when the trial really comes. Age, too–nearly everyone improves as he gets old, if this is a ‘vale of soul making’, it seems to, by round and by large, to be working pretty well. Of course I can’t hazard a guess why you should be picked out for this prolonged suffering.

I am told that the great thing is to surrender to physical pain–I mean not to do what’s commonly called ‘standing’ it, above all not to brace the soul (which usually braces the muscles as well) not to try to ignore it: to be like earth being ploughed not like marble being cut. But I have no right to discuss such things on the basis of my very limited experience.

In these words, we see the beginnings of Lewis first apologetics book, The Problem of Pain (1939-40). The book argues for a Christian response to thoughts about pain with Lewis’ own admission that thinking about pain as a philosophical problem is a lot different than actually living through it.

“when pain is to be born, a little courage helps more than much knowledge, a little human sympathy more than much courage, and the least tincture of the love of God more than all” (Preface to The Problem of Pain).

Perhaps it is conversations like those with Baker combined with the ill-health of people in his household and the looming prospect of war that turned Lewis to a book of apologetics that is surprisingly personal. Lewis’ works of nonfiction emerge in the letters, but the germ of some of Lewis’ characters also appear there. In a June 1937 letter to Dom Bede Griffiths–a student of Lewis’ who became a monk–we see the character of Weston from Out of the Silent Planet. Weston is a megalomaniacal genius who would sacrifice the environment or humans or the people of other worlds or “savage” societies in order to extend his particular idea of the human race. Here is what Lewis wrote to Griffiths about nine weeks before completing Out of the Silent Planet:

I was talking the other day to an intelligent infidel who said that he pinned all his hopes for any significance in the universe on the chance that the human race by adapting itself to changed conditions and first planet jumping, then star jumping, finally nebula jumping, could really last forever and subject matter wholly to mind.

When I said that it was overwhelmingly improbable, he said Yes, but one had to believe even in the 1000th chance or life was mockery. I of course asked why, feeling like that, he did not prefer to believe in the other and traditional ‘chance’ of a spiritual immortality. To that he replied–obviously not for effect but producing something that had long been in his mind–‘Oh I never can believe that: for if that were true our having a physical existence wd. be so pointless.’

Was this encounter the invention of Weston that became a mental trigger that finally gave the imaginative energy for Lewis to write Out of the Silent Planet (and fulfill his wager with Tolkien)? Or had Lewis been working on Out of the Silent Planet and Griffiths’ letter became an opportunity to think through his encounter with the planet-jumping infidel colleague?

We cannot know. But a study could be made of all the idea-seeds that appear in Lewis’ letters. He was a percolator, someone who would have an idea and let in roll around his brain for a while. He would jot notes down, make false starts on stories and lectures, and write poems in the margins. And, of course, he would test his ideas out on others.

Which, if we can insert ourselves into Lewis’ story as an imaginative correspondents, leaves a trail for all of us.

Inklings Audiophiles and readers of classic Christian theology will love the Cyber Monday bundles at ChristianAudio.com. They have $15 three-pack of unabridged audiobooks, including:

• The Lord of the Rings trilogy read by Rob Inglis
• C.S. Lewis’ Space Trilogy read by Geoffrey Howard (= Ralph Cosham)–note that http://www.ChristianBook.com has the trilogy omnibus edition for $11.99 on sale
• A three-pack Bible Bundle
• A Devotional bundle with Bonhoeffer‘s Life Together read by Paul Michael, J.I. Packer’s Knowing God read by Simon Vance, and A.W. Tozer’s The Knowledge of the Holy, read by Scott Brick
• Each month Christian Audio offers a free audiobook, and this month’s free book is Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, read by the rich voice of Nadia May
• If you follow this link, there are a number of Christian classics for sale:
  • John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, read by Nadia May
  • St. Augustine’ Confessions, read by Simon Vance
  • Andrew Murray’s Absolute Surrender, read by Simon Vance
  • Charles Spurgeon’s Morning and Evening, read by James Adams
  • John Owen’s Of the Mortification of Sin in Believers, read by Tom Parks
  • Jonathan Edwards’ The Religious Affections, read by Simon Vance

All male authors, except a husband-wife combo in one of the other bundles, but this is to be expected by the way Christian Audio curates their materials. Still, the list of readers is impressive. Nadia May I have praised, Scott Brick has done dozens of the most important fantasy work, Simon Vance does dozens of theology books and, with Geoffrey Howard, is a critical reader of C.S. Lewis’ work, and Rob Inglis gives a classic LOTR reading (which I have yet to listen through, but may next summer).

I assume the sale ends Monday night, though they have a 50% off “Cyber Week Sale,” so take a look. All prices are American and shipping is limited outside the U.S. and Canada.

Today is J.R.R. Tolkien’s birthday. Born on January 3, 1892, he would be 127 today if he had been a longliver or immortal. To celebrate the occasion I decided to reblog my most popular Tolkien post. Tolkien’s work has made many of our lives so much richer, but he was also a friend in everyday life. And as a friend to C.S. Lewis he made life-changing interventions that opened up his career as a popular SF&F writer. This is a part of that story. 

The Tolkien Letters that Changed C.S. Lewis’ Life

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 grown 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 a reluctant convert). Lewis hesitated to convert to Christianity, however. Among the reasons for this hesitation was 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. Lewis tells us the story in his conversion letters to his best friend:

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, but it also gave Lewis back the idea of “myth” that had slid away from him 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 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 1937. 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 care.” While Tolkien did not really get Narnia (Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, 32-3) or some of Lewis’ philosophical fiction, he thought 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.

Join us tomorrow, Thursday, March 14, at 6pm ET for a Thesis Theater with recent Signum University MA graduate Adam Mattern, who will present his thesis titled “An Image of the Discarded: C. S. Lewis’s Use of the Medieval Model in His Planetary Fiction.” The conversation will be facilitated by Brenton Dickieson (that’s me), and special guest Lewis scholar, Dr. David Downing, director of the Wade Center at Wheaton College, will join to interview Adam.

Sometime in late 1936 or early 1937, C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien agreed to write science fiction stories, since what was being published at the time included too little of what they enjoyed. Within Lewis’s science fiction series, he incorporated the Medieval Model (as described in his The Discarded Image) to construct the cosmos of his trilogy and populate his extraterrestrial worlds of Malacandra and Perelandra. With an eye on Lewis’s history with the genre and his approach to writing fiction, this paper explores why Lewis patterned his cosmos after the Medieval Model and how he used medieval literature to inspire a feeling of Sehnsucht or Joy, a critical component of his fiction. His personal experiences with Sehnsucht informed Lewis’s approach to creating a sense of Other by drawing on spiritual elements, which he believed to be an analog of the type of alien worlds that science fiction readers longed to visit. It was through the Medieval Model and the experience of other worlds that Lewis’s series critiqued and subverted what he saw as the growing misapplication of specific scientific principles to ethics, which had become popular in other science fiction stories of the time.

Adam Mattern works for Cisco Talos as a team lead for a group that conducts web traffic analysis for a web filtering product. He lives in Bloomington, Indiana, with his wife as she completes her Ph.D. in Medical Anthropology. He started with Signum University with the Tolkien and the Epic class and discovered Medieval Literature through reading about Tolkien and Lewis’s friendship and their fiction. Now finished with his M.A., he plans to get back into woodworking, writing, and attempting to surmount a reading list that has only been bolstered by his time at Signum.

To register, click here: https://signumuniversity.org/event/thesis-theater-adam-mattern/.

Last week we had an amazing Thesis Theater event, a great discussion about C.S. Lewis’ WWII-era science fiction trilogy. Recent Signum University MA graduate Adam Mattern was the central figure, presenting his thesis titled “An Image of the Discarded: C. S. Lewis’s Use of the Medieval Model in His Planetary Fiction.” I facilitated the conversation Adam, and we were pleased to have Lewis scholar, Dr. David Downing, join us by audio. David is director of the Wade Center at Wheaton College and has written one of the more important books on the Ransom Cycle, Planets in Peril: A Critical Study of C. S. Lewis’s Ransom Trilogy  (1992). David has also written an Inklings novel, Looking for the King (which I reviewed here), and an annotated version of C.S. Lewis’ The Pilgrim’s Regress–books mentioned in the discussion. The conversation went so well I decided to share it below.

Sometime in late 1936 or early 1937, C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien agreed to write science fiction stories, since what was being published at the time included too little of what they enjoyed. Within Lewis’s science fiction series, he incorporated the Medieval Model (as described in his The Discarded Image) to construct the cosmos of his trilogy and populate his extraterrestrial worlds of Malacandra and Perelandra. With an eye on Lewis’s history with the genre and his approach to writing fiction, this paper explores why Lewis patterned his cosmos after the Medieval Model and how he used medieval literature to inspire a feeling of Sehnsucht or Joy, a critical component of his fiction. His personal experiences with Sehnsucht informed Lewis’s approach to creating a sense of Other by drawing on spiritual elements, which he believed to be an analog of the type of alien worlds that science fiction readers longed to visit. It was through the Medieval Model and the experience of other worlds that Lewis’s series critiqued and subverted what he saw as the growing misapplication of specific scientific principles to ethics, which had become popular in other science fiction stories of the time.

Adam Mattern works for Cisco Talos as a team lead for a group that conducts web traffic analysis for a web filtering product. He lives in Bloomington, Indiana, with his wife as she completes her Ph.D. in Medical Anthropology. He started with Signum University with the Tolkien and the Epic class and discovered Medieval Literature through reading about Tolkien and Lewis’s friendship and their fiction. Now finished with his M.A., he plans to get back into woodworking, writing, and attempting to surmount a reading list that has only been bolstered by his time at Signum.

If you would like a copy of the thesis, send me an email at junkola [at] gmail [dot] com.

As part of an occasional feature I call “Throwback Thursday,” I want to roll back the calendar almost six years, to my early days as a blogger. “Throwback Thursday” is where I find a blog post from the past–raiding either my own vault or someone else’s–and throw it back out into the digital world. This might be an idea or book that is now relevant again, or a concept I’d like to think about more, or even “an oldie but a goodie” that I think needs a bit of spin time.

I am reprinting this piece, in part, for self-abuse. I have lost fewer pounds and published fewer globe-shattering pieces than I would have wished in the years between. But I think this piece, though humorous, has a kind of nice point worth repeating. I have had “fan letters” since then, I suppose. I’ve also had trolls and salesmen and, at least once, what must have been a late-night drunk text from a reader. Not everything leads to a life change, but there may be a serendipity of correspondence beyond what our immediate eyes can see.

I have received two fan letters in my writing life thus far (in 2013). I know! Impressive, isn’t it?

I had published a little piece called “On Being Fat and Running” in Geez, a socially-engaged Christian magazine in the tradition of Adbusters. Within a few months, the article got picked up by the Utne Reader, so that my awkward reflections were no longer in the niche Geez market, but were now available to the hundreds of thousands Utne readers. I hit the big time, though I wish it had happened with a less personal, more impressive piece.

The piece caught people’s attention, which was great. I often get personal notes on my writing–the “good job!” kind of digital pat on the back. But this time I got two letters from complete strangers. I’ve got fans! Two of them.

The first fan effused over my work, how personal and well-written and courageous it was. Then she asked me how I got my start in writing and what she might do to further her own writing career. I read the email, and then laughed out loud. What was I supposed to say to her? It was a fluke! I wrote this piece, sent it out on a whim, and then it spun out. What could I tell her?

I told her the truth, and we began a great email discussion about writing resources. She taught me more than I taught her, I am sure.

That was fan #1. Fan #2 told me how great my work was, how courageous I was, and then told me about an absolutely free program on how I can lose weight in only three months.

Well, that’s it, isn’t it?

The fan letters took me by surprise (moreso the first one than the second). I wasn’t expecting any real response, and have come to hate email so much that I certainly didn’t expect anything good to pop out of that inbox.

But fan letters can lead to great things. C.S. Lewis wrote one to Charles Williams over his book, The Place of the Lion, just as Williams was writing to Lewis to congratulate him for his Allegory of Love. The mutual fan letters nearly crossed in the mail and began a lifelong friendship of ideas and stories.

In 1938, Lewis shifted dramatically in his career track. He published a short Science Fiction book, Out of the Silent Planet. As I argue elsewhere, this simple, creative space fantasy is quite a complex theological fiction–a philosophical novel that became widely read and widely reviewed.

As it turns out, most of the reviewers missed the theological or philosophical elements. In response to a fan letter by Sr. Penelope–an Anglican nun who becomes important to Lewis’ career and spiritual life–Lewis jokes that out of sixty reviews, only two picked up some of the key elements which he laced within the pages.

The fan letters from Sr. Penelope and Charles Williams were not the only influential ones. Quickly after he published Out of the Silent Planet, he received two important fan letters.

The first is from Evelyn Underhill, an important British religious writer, whose 1911 book, Mysticism, was phenomenally popular. She read Out of the Silent Planet and sent Lewis a note of thanks, part of which Walter Hooper records in The Collected Letters, vol. 2:

‘May I thank you for the very great pleasure which your remarkable book “Out of the Silent Planet” has given me? It is so seldom that one comes across a writer of sufficient imaginative power to give one a new slant on reality: & this is just what you seem to me to have achieved. And what is more, you have not done it in a solemn & oppressive way but with a delightful combination of beauty, humour & deep seriousness. I enjoyed every bit of it, in spite of starting with a decided prejudice against “voyages to Mars”. I wish you had felt able to report the conversation in which Ransom explained the Christian mysteries to the eldil, but I suppose that would be too much to ask. We should be content with the fact that you have turned “empty space” into heaven!’ (Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. c. 6825, fol. 68)

Lewis was evidently pleased by the letter:

Oct 29th 1938
Dear Madam
Your letter is one of the most surprising and, in a way, alarming honours I have ever had. I have not been for very long a believer and have hitherto regarded the great mystical writers as a man in the foothills regards the glaciers and precipices: to find myself noticed from regions which I scarcely feel qualified to notice is really quite overwhelming. In trying to thank you, I find myself regretting that we have given such an ugly meaning to the word ‘Condescension’ which ought to have remained a beautiful name for a beautiful action.
I am glad you mentioned the substitution of heaven for space as that is my favourite idea in the book. Unhappily I have since learned that it is also the idea which most betrays my scientific ignorance: I have since learned that the rays in interplanetary space, so far from being beneficial, would be mortal to us. However, that, no doubt, is true of Heaven in other senses as well!
Again thanking you very much,
Yours very truly,
C.S. Lewis

This correspondence would be long remembered by Lewis. In response to a later letter by Underhill (Jan 16th, 1941), Lewis wrote:

“Your kind letter about the Silent Planet has not been forgotten and is not likely to be. It was one of the high lights of my literary life.”

Another lifelong friend was made through a fan letter, though the writer was a student at Oxford and sat in Lewis’ lectures. The letter-writer, Roger Lancelyn Green, had some good knowledge about SciFi lit, and sent Lewis a note looking for more background to Out of the Silent Planet. I do not have the young student’s letter, but Lewis’ response makes it easy to read the basics of what Green was asking:

Dec. 28th 1938
Thanks for kind letter. I don’t think letters to authors in praise of their works really require apology for they always give pleasure.
You are obviously much better informed than I about this type of literature and the only one I can add to your list is Voyage to Arcturus by David Lyndsay (Methuen) wh. is out of print but a good bookseller will prob. get you a copy for about 5 to 6 shillings. It is entirely on the imaginative and not at all on the scientific wing.
What immediately spurred me to write was Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men (Penguin Libr.) and an essay in J. B. S. Haldane’s Possible Worlds both of wh. seemed to take the idea of such travel seriously and to have the desperately immoral outlook wh. I try to pillory in Weston. I like the whole interplanetary idea as a mythology and simply wished to conquer for my own (Christian) pt. of view what has always hitherto been used by the opposite side. I think Wells’ 1st Men in the Moon the best of the sort I have read. I once tried a Burroughs in a magazine and disliked it. The more astronomy we know the less likely it seems that other planets are inhabited: even Mars has practically no oxygen.
I guessed who you were as soon as you mentioned the lecture. I did mention in it, I think, Kircher’s Iter Celestre, but there is no translation, and it is not v. interesting. There’s also Voltaire’s Micromégas but purely satiric.
Yrs.
C. S. Lewis

We see in these letters Lewis’ increasing humility on the real physics of astronomy. But this letter was important to Lewis for deeper reasons, both literary and personal. Roger Lancelyn Green went on to be an important writer, both as a biographer of important authors–I just found on a friend’s reading table a copy of his Teller of Tales–and as a reteller of great legends like Robin Hood and King Arthur. Green did two biographies of C.S. Lewis, and was perhaps a part of the Inklings gathering at Oxford on occasion.

This letter not only initiated this literary relationship, but began a personal friendship that grew throughout the years. Green was with Lewis near the end of his life. Green and his wife vacationed in Greece with Lewis and Joy Davidman, who had married Lewis as she was dying of cancer. It is a fan letter begun well, and ended in a journey no one could have expected.

It is hard to know what I am recommending to the reader–if anything! But it is, perhaps, a hint of what a fan letter can do in an author’s life. Meanwhile, I have to send my credit card number to that free weight loss program. He is a discerning reader, after all.

At A Pilgrim in Narnia we have an occasional feature called “Throwback Thursday.” This is where I find a blog post from the past–raiding either my own blog-hoard or someone else’s–and throw it back out into the digital world. This might be an idea or book that is now relevant again, or a concept I’d like to think about more, or even “an oldie but a goodie” that I think needs a bit of spin time.

For today’s Throwback Thursday I’m returning to a post I wrote from 2013 after I read C.S. Lewis’ poem, “The Planets,” in my chronological reading of Lewis’ work. Reading this poem began for me a long struggle with Michael Ward’s breathtaking thesis that the seven Narnian chronicles are patterned directly after the seven “stars” of medieval cosmology–a thesis suggested by Ward’s reading of “The Planets.”

I have been wanting to do a blog series follow-up of an article I did for An Unexpected Journal where I lay out what I think is the most substantial critique of Ward’s thesis to have yet emerged, including a more careful consideration of the argument and the testing of its limits–as well as a look at the “Planet Narnia Phenonemon” itself as Ward has won the day in popular and academic opinion (with some resistance). Part of that phenomenon is the relationality of Lewis studies. I have met Michael Ward. He’s a strong critical thinker who believes fully in his argument, and has worked for nearly fifteen years to refine it. Moreover, I like him, and want him to do well. This is an important feature of Lewis studies to think about. Alas, it seems that I will never get this series complete, though I have one or two pieces that may emerge.

I did want to rewrite this blog post, however, which has been viewed 15,000 times and remains the 2nd most popular C.S. Lewis post on A Pilgrim in Narnia. I have also created a resource–a “Planet Narnia Chart”–that I hope will be helpful to devoted fans of Narnia, classroom and college teachers, as well as people who are using Planet Narnia as a study tool. If I had any design capability I would have made it a great infographic; a chart will have to do for now. But I do like charts! (see here, and here, and here, and of course here and here). And I have added a good interpretation of the full suite Holst’s “Planets”–a clear, early influence for Lewis (and John Williams, as Star Wars fans know). And, as in the original, there is a full printing of Lewis’ original poem–published first as a metrical experiment, but clearly a poem of value to understanding Lewis’ love of medieval cosmology as it appears in his fiction.

Click Here for the PDF resource: A Planet Narnia Chart by Brenton Dickieson

It does not take long for a serious reader of C.S. Lewis to realize that he was in love with cosmology—the planets and the stars as they sit within the vast expanse of space. His first popular fiction was science fiction, with characters visiting the planets of Mars and Venus. References to the cosmos fill his poetry, and all the characters in Narnia look up to the heavens at one time or another.

Intriguingly, Lewis doesn’t draw our attention to a scientific understanding of the universe–the chemical composition of Neptune or the distance to the nearest star or the gravitational symmetry of planetary orbits. He would not be very interested in the debate about whether Pluto is a real planet or how to colonize Mars. Lewis’ interest was not in the real science of the skies, but in medieval cosmology—how Europeans in the middle ages understood the “seven heavens.”

In a series of books and lectures that have become quite famous, Michael Ward has suggested a winsome way of reading The Chronicle of Narnia that argues that each of the Narniad matches one of the seven “planets” of the medieval world. Here is how he describes the cosmology:

“The seven planets of the old cosmology included the Sun (Sol) and the Moon (Luna), which we now don’t regard as planets at all. The other five were Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter [Jove], and Saturn.”

While Lewis knew that the Earth wasn’t the centre of the universe and that the moon and the sun were not really “planets,” he thought the seven planets of the medieval worldview had important symbolic value. Our seven days of the week are named after the seven planets (e.g., Sunday, Monday, Saturday), and some of our English words still remember the spiritual or symbolic value of the planets as heavenly personalities. Jove (Jupiter) pops up as the word, “jovial,” and captures the nature of Jupiter as a character. Mars in mythology and art is properly “martial” (warlike), and Venus still retains elements of being the goddess of love in our poetry and literature.

It is certainly true that this medieval cosmology informed so much of Lewis’ work. His book, The Discarded Image, is a series of lectures introducing the old cosmology and how the medieval worldview influences literature. His Ransom books, in particular, play with the heavenly characters of the seven heavens, though taking them up in particular ways. In Out of the Silent Planet, it is Earth that is the martial planet, while Mars is the peaceful world. And in Perelandra, Venus is characterized as an Ave-Eva figure, a combination of the Virgin Mary and Eve, birthed in a watery world of beauty and love.

A Planet Narnia Chart by Brenton Dickieson

Put briefly, Planet Narnia argues that Lewis intentionally structured the seven Narnian chronicles around the seven planets of medieval cosmology, so that each ‘star’ influenced a particular book in character development, wordplay, symbolic layering, Christological imagery, biblical intertextuality, and central theme. Lewis used medieval cosmology not only for imagistic interest or narrative energy, but carefully structured the Narniad around the seven planets. Moreover, he kept that sophisticated design a secret for his entire life, intentionally cloaking the central organizing feature of the Narniad. My Planet Narnia Chart above is meant to capture that thesis in a brief visual form and work as a resource for reading.

It took me a number of years of thinking and research and reading, but I finally decided to take on Ward’s Narnian thesis. In a piece called “(Re)Considering the Planet Narnia Thesis” in An Unexpected Journal, I argued in two directions.

First, I argue that Ward’s thesis is flawed for a number of reasons. It is limited in that it is a circular argument and effectively non-falsifiable, bound up as it is in what Lewis has hidden from the world. Circularity is not a deadly problem, and if the evidence emerged that supported the theory, the secrecy argument could probably be parsed from the whole–though Michael Ward insists they are linked into the intertextual character of Lewis’ work (and Lewis is a deeply intertextual writer, as I argued in my chapter in Sørina Higgins award-winning volume, The Inklings and King Arthur).

Beyond these problems, however, based on the textual evidence, I argue that Ward has over-read the material. There are indeed links between Narnia and medieval cosmology–perhaps hundreds of them. Because The Chronicles of Narnia are so filled with planetary imagery, critically laid out so well, we can only accept that each book has its own guiding planetary intelligence by reducing that planetary influence in the other books. You can read the details in my article, but the evidence for a one-to-one link between medieval planets and Narnian chronicles is uneven: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is quite profitably read as a book about light (Sol), while The Magician’s Nephew is unconvincing as a venereal book (Venus). Moreover, there are jovial, martial, mercurial, saturnal, lunar, solar, and venereal elements in most of the books.

By pressing each planet into the frame of each book, however, Ward compresses the texts—the text of the medieval model and the text of Narnia—beyond what they can bear.

Second, while I don’t find Ward’s thesis of a secret one-to-one medieval-Narnian relationship to be convincing, I believe that Planet Narnia–bundled with the various lectures series, documentaries, interviews, and the popular book, The Narnia Code–is the single most important resource for reading Narnia that has emerged in our generation–perhaps even since Walter Hooper’s 1979 Past Watchful Dragons and Paul Ford’s 1980 Companion to Narnia (revised in 1994 and 2005). If I can use a pun that Ward would like, Planet Narnia is a “stellar book”: a detailed close reading of Narnia (and the Ransom Trilogy) that enriches our experience of the text.

Moreover, in pushing past Ward’s thesis and allowing all the seven planets to poetically permeate each of the seven chronicles, we will see that Ward is right in his approach: Narnia betrays more sophistication than we might suppose from a children’s book, adding layers of meaning that deepen our understanding of faith and life.

Beyond the particulars of Michael Ward’s thesis, his work really highlights how rooted Lewis was in medieval cosmology. As I was reading through Lewis’ work chronologically in 2013, I came across his 1935 poem, “The Planets.” It was this poem that first suggested Ward’s Narnia Code. He describes this process in his podcast with William O’Flaherty and Holly Ordway:

“I was lying in bed in 2003, I think it was, when I was halfway through my PhD on Lewis’ theological imagination. And I was reading a long poem that Lewis wrote about the seven heavens—it’s simply called “The Planets”—and when I got to the lines about Jupiter in this poem, I did a double take because the seven heavens, according to medieval thought, had a set of qualities and influences that were felt on Earth. And one of Jupiter’s influences was this, according to the poem, that Jupiter brought about “Winter past and guilt forgiven.” … That was the loose thread, you might say, that I tugged on, and which, when tugged upon, unravelled and revealed the whole tapestry, I believe, that Lewis was weaving in his construction of the Narnian chronicles.”

Whether or not Ward is correct about how specifically Lewis shaped the Narniad according to this system–I may be wrong, after all–the old cosmology certainly informed all of his work. For Narnian fans, I thought it would be helpful to post the entire poem that first stuck in Ward’s brain and created such a generative reading of Narnia. “The Planets” appears in several collections, but in the first publication, Lewis is trying to create a renaissance of a certain approach to writing poetry, namely the Alliterative Metre. The poem, which itself has no stanzas as other online editions suggest, and has each the seven planets capitalized, illustrates the power of the seven heavens in Lewis’ imagination. But Lewis’ introduction to the poem may also be helpful to us:

“In order to avoid misunderstanding I must say that the subject of the following poem was not chosen under the influence of any antiquarian fancy that a medieval metre demanded medieval matter, but because the characters of the planets, as conceived by medieval astrology, seem to me to have a permanent value as spiritual symbols…” (“The Alliterative Metre,” in Selected Literary Essays, ed. Walter Hooper. Cambridge University Press, 1969, 23-24).

It is that “permanent value as spiritual symbols” that interests me most and caused Michael Ward to dedicate his life to teaching us about the organic nature of Lewis’ work. Lewis’ claim to the “permanent value” of the planets “as spiritual symbols” drives us back to Lewis’ WWII-era Ransom Cycle to see how he used the old cosmology. But it also means that we must consider Ward’s thesis.

Whatever else is true, it is certain that Lewis was guided by a planetary understanding that science has long since rejected, but which we still feel even into our own age. Here is the entire poem, followed by an interpretation of Holst’s WWI-era suite, “The Planets.”

“The Planets”

Lady LUNA, in light canoe,
By friths and shallows of fretted cloudland
Cruises monthly; with chrism of dews
And drench of dream, a drizzling glamour,
Enchants us–the cheat! changing sometime
A mind to madness, melancholy pale,
Bleached with gazing on her blank count’nance
Orb’d and ageless. In earth’s bosom
The shower of her rays, sharp-feathered light
Reaching downward, ripens silver,
Forming and fashioning female brightness,
–Metal maidenlike. Her moist circle
Is nearest earth. Next beyond her
MERCURY marches;–madcap rover,
Patron of pilf’rers. Pert quicksilver
His gaze begets, goblin mineral,
Merry multitude of meeting selves,
Same but sundered. From the soul’s darkness,
With wreathed wand, words he marshals,
Guides and gathers them–gay bellwether
Of flocking fancies. His flint has struck
The spark of speech from spirit’s tinder,
Lord of language! He leads forever
The spangle and splendour, sport that mingles
Sound with senses, in subtle pattern,
Words in wedlock, and wedding also
Of thing with thought. In the third region
VENUS voyages…but my voice falters;
Rude rime-making wrongs her beauty,
Whose breasts and brow, and her breath’s sweetness
Bewitch the worlds. Wide-spread the reign
Of her secret sceptre, in the sea’s caverns,
In grass growing, and grain bursting,
Flower unfolding, and flesh longing,
And shower falling sharp in April.
The metal copper in the mine reddens
With muffled brightness, like muted gold,
By her fingers form’d. Far beyond her
The heaven’s highway hums and trembles,
Drums and dindles, to the driv’n thunder
Of SOL’s chariot, whose sword of light
Hurts and humbles; beheld only
Of eagle’s eye. When his arrow glances
Through mortal mind, mists are parted
And mild as morning the mellow wisdom
Breathes o’er the breast, broadening eastward
Clear and cloudless. In a clos’d garden
(Unbound her burden) his beams foster
Soul in secret, where the soil puts forth
Paradisal palm, and pure fountains
Turn and re-temper, touching coolly
The uncomely common to cordial gold;
Whose ore also, in earth’s matrix,
Is print and pressure of his proud signet
On the wax of the world. He is the worshipp’d male,
The earth’s husband, all-beholding,
Arch-chemic eye. But other country
Dark with discord dins beyond him,
With noise of nakers, neighing of horses,
Hammering of harness. A haughty god
MARS mercenary, makes there his camp
And flies his flag; flaunts laughingly
The graceless beauty, grey-eyed and keen,
Blond insolence – of his blithe visage
Which is hard and happy. He hews the act,
The indifferent deed with dint of his mallet
And his chisel of choice; achievement comes not
Unhelped by him – hired gladiator
Of evil and good. All’s one to Mars,
The wrong righted, rescued meekness,
Or trouble in trenches, with trees splintered
And birds banished, banks fill’d with gold
And the liar made lord. Like handiwork
He offers to all – earns his wages
And whistles the while. White-feathered dread
Mars has mastered. His metal’s iron
That was hammered through hands into holy cross,
Cruel carpentry. He is cold and strong,
Necessity’s song. Soft breathes the air
Mild, and meadowy, as we mount further
Where rippled radiance rolls about us
Moved with music – measureless the waves’
Joy and jubilee. It is JOVE’s orbit,
Filled and festal, faster turning
With arc ampler. From the Isles of Tin
Tyrian traders, in trouble steering
Came with his cargoes; the Cornish treasure
That his ray ripens. Of wrath ended
And woes mended, of winter passed
And guilt forgiven, and good fortune
Jove is master; and of jocund revel,
Laughter of ladies. The lion-hearted,
The myriad-minded, men like the gods,
Helps and heroes, helms of nations
Just and gentle, are Jove’s children,
Work his wonders. On his white forehead
Calm and kingly, no care darkens
Nor wrath wrinkles: but righteous power
And leisure and largess their loose splendours
Have wrapped around him – a rich mantle
Of ease and empire. Up far beyond
Goes SATURN silent in the seventh region,
The skirts of the sky. Scant grows the light,
Sickly, uncertain (the Sun’s finger
Daunted with darkness). Distance hurts us,
And the vault severe of vast silence;
Where fancy fails us, and fair language,
And love leaves us, and light fails us
And Mars fails us, and the mirth of Jove
Is as tin tinkling. In tattered garment,
Weak with winters, he walks forever
A weary way, wide round the heav’n,
Stoop’d and stumbling, with staff groping,
The lord of lead. He is the last planet
Old and ugly. His eye fathers
Pale pestilence, pain of envy,
Remorse and murder. Melancholy drink
(For bane or blessing) of bitter wisdom
He pours out for his people, a perilous draught
That the lip loves not. We leave all things
To reach the rim of the round welkin,
Heaven’s heritage, high and lonely.

C.S. Lewis, “The Planets”, in the essay “The Alliterative Metre,” Lysistrata 2 (May 1935). Reprinted in Poems and Selected Literary Essays, both edited by Walter Hooper, and C. S. Lewis Essay Collection and Other Short Pieces, edited by Lesley Walmsley and available in non-American settings.

The original has metrical notes and no stanzas, and capitalizes the planets as we first meet them (e.g., Lady LUNA, VENUS voyages, etc.).

At A Pilgrim in Narnia we have an occasional feature called “Throwback Thursday.” This is where I find a blog post from the past–raiding either my own blog-hoard or someone else’s–and throw it back out into the digital world. This might be an idea or book that is now relevant again, or a concept I’d like to think about more, or even “an oldie but a goodie” that I think needs a bit of spin time.

For today’s Throwback Thursday I am considering the 70th anniversary of the publication of That Hideous Strength (THS), in late-August 1945. 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 older 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–and, incidentally, the same week that Atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Setting aside the connection between the two authors (I discussed this a more here, but I would like to do more thinking about still), 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 three 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?
3. Is the answer to #2 different today than in 1945?

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

George Orwell’s Review of C.S. Lewis’ That Hideous Strength, from the Manchester Evening News, 16 August 1945

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.

I’m pleased to announce that I recently joined David Bates on the Pints with Jack podcast. I love doing this show–not just because I get to talk about great books, but because the hosts have managed to produce a great podcast. In a rushed age, Pints with Jack is luxuriously slow reading, taking an hour or so to review a chapter or two of Lewis’ writings. You can check them out on their website or on podcast apps everywhere, including Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

This time, I joined David for a “Skype Session”–a half-hour conversation where we go off script a little bit as we chat about the material. The topic this week was the “Cosmic Preface”–the handwritten archival discovery I was able to publish a few years back. This “Ransom Preface” shows a link that Lewis made in his mind between The Screwtape Letters and Dr. Ransom of the Space Trilogy. Together, they are what I call the Ransom Cycle (with the Dark Tower fragment). You can read more about my discovery here, and I hope you enjoy our conversation, and I hope it enriches your reading experience of Lewis’ WWII-era fiction. Below is the video of the Skype Session, as well as the PWJ podcast on the preface.