by C. S. Lewis
LEWIS: Isn’t that maddening!
AMIS: You can’t really like it.
LEWIS: You must be pretending to be a plain man or something. . . . I’ve met the attitude again and again. You’ve probably reached the stage too of having theses written on yourself. I received a letter from an American examiner asking, ‘Is it true that you meant this and this and this?’ A writer of a thesis was attributing to me views which I have explicitly contradicted in the plainest possible English. They’d be much wiser to write about the dead, who can’t answer.
ALDISS: In America, I think science fiction is accepted on a more responsible level.
AMIS: I’m not so sure about that, you know, Brian, because when our anthology Spectrum I came out in the States we had less friendly and less understanding treatment from reviewers than we did over here.
LEWIS: I’m surprised at that, because in general all American reviewing is more friendly and generous than in England.
AMIS: People were patting themselves on the back in the States for not understanding what we meant.
LEWIS: This extraordinary pride in being exempt from temptations that you have not yet risen to the level of! Eunuchs boasting of their chastity! [Laughter.]
AMIS: One of my pet theories is that serious writers as yet unborn or still at school will soon regard science fiction as a natural way of writing.
LEWIS: By the way, has any science-fiction writer yet succeeded in inventing a third sex? Apart from the third sex we all know.
AMIS: Clifford Simak invented a set-up where there were seven sexes.
LEWIS: How rare happy marriages must have been then!
ALDISS: Rather worth striving for perhaps.
LEWIS: Obviously when achieved they’d be wonderful. [Laughter.]
ALDISS: I find I would much rather write science fiction than anything else. The dead weight is so much less there than in the field of the ordinary novel. There’s a sense in which you’re conquering a fresh country.
AMIS: Speaking as a supposedly realistic novelist, I’ve written little bits of science fiction and this is such a tremendous liberation.
LEWIS: Well, you’re a very ill-used man; you wrote a farce and everyone thought it a damning indictment of Redbrick. I’ve always had great sympathy for you. They will not understand that a joke is a joke. Everything must be serious.
AMIS: ‘A fever chart of society.’
LEWIS: One thing in science fiction that weighs against us very heavily is the horrible shadow of the comics.
ALDISS: I don’t know about that. Titbits Romantic Library doesn’t really weigh against the serious writer.
LEWIS: That’s a fair analogy. All the novelettes didn’t kill the ordinary legitimate novel of courtship and love.
ALDISS: There might have been a time when science fiction and comics were weighed together and found wanting, but that at least we’ve got past.
AMIS: I see the comic books that my sons read, and you have there a terribly vulgar reworking of the themes that science fiction goes in for.
LEWIS: Quite harmless, mind you. This chatter about the moral danger of the comics is absolute nonsense. The real objection is against the appalling draughtsmanship. Yet you’ll find the same boy who reads them also reads Shakespeare or Spenser. Children are so terribly Catholic. That’s my experience with my stepchildren.
ALDISS: This is an English habit, to categorise: that if you read Shakespeare you can’t read comics, that if you read science fiction you can’t be serious.
AMIS: That’s the thing that annoys me.
LEWIS: Oughtn’t the word serious to have an embargo slapped on it? Serious ought to mean simply the opposite of comic, whereas now it means ‘good’ or ‘Literature’ with a capital L.
ALDISS: You can be serious without being earnest.
LEWIS: Leavis demands moral earnestness; I prefer morality.
AMIS: I’m with you every time on that one.
LEWIS: I mean I’d sooner live among people who don’t cheat at cards than among people who are earnest about not cheating at cards. [Laughter.]
AMIS: More Scotch?
LEWIS: Not for me, thank you, help yourself. [Liquid noises.]
AMIS: I think all this ought to stay in, you know—all these remarks about drink.
LEWIS: There’s no reason why we shouldn’t have a drink. Look, you want to borrow Abbott’s Flatland, don’t you? I must go to dinner, I’m afraid. [Hands over Flatland.] The original manuscript of the Iliad could not be more precious. It’s only the ungodly who borroweth and payeth not again.
AMIS (reading): By A. Square.
LEWIS: But of course the word square hadn’t the same sense then.
ALDISS: It’s like the poem by Francis Thompson that ends ‘She gave me tokens three, a look, a word of her winsome mouth, and a sweet wild raspberry’; there again the meaning has changed. It really was a wild raspberry in Thompson’s day. [Laughter.]
LEWIS: Or the lovely one about the Bishop of Exeter, who was giving the prizes at a girls’ school. They did a performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and the poor man stood up afterwards and made a speech and said [piping voice]: ‘I was very interested in your delightful performance, and among other things I was very interested in seeing for the first time in my life a female Bottom.’ [Guffaws.]
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
CLIVE STAPLES LEWIS (1898–1963) was one of the intellectual giants of the twentieth century and arguably one of the most influential writers of his day. He was a Fellow and Tutor in English Literature at Oxford University until 1954, when he was unanimously elected to the Chair of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge University, a position he held until his retirement. He wrote more than thirty books, allowing him to reach a vast audience, and his works continue to attract thousands of new readers every year. His most distinguished and popular accomplishments include Mere Christianity, Out of the Silent Planet, The Great Divorce, The Screwtape Letters, and the universally acknowledged classics The Chronicles of Narnia. To date, the Narnia books have sold over 100 million copies and have been transformed into three major motion pictures.
Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.
ALSO BY C. S. LEWIS
A Grief Observed
George MacDonald: An Anthology
Mere Christianity
Miracles
The Abolition of Man
The Great Divorce
The Problem of Pain
The Screwtape Letters (with “Screwtape Proposes a Toast”)
The Weight of Glory
The Four Loves
Till We Have Faces
Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life
Reflections on the Psalms
Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer
The Personal Heresy
The World’s Last Night: And Other Essays
Poems
The Dark Tower: And Other Stories
Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories
Narrative Poems
A Mind Awake: An Anthology of C. S. Lewis
Letters of C. S. Lewis
All My Road Before Me
The Business of Heaven: Daily Readings from C. S. Lewis
Present Concerns: Journalistic Essays
Spirits in Bondage: A Cycle of Lyrics
ALSO AVAILABLE FROM HARPERCOLLINS
The Chronicles of Narnia
The Magician’s Nephew
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
The Horse and His Boy
Prince Caspian
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
The Silver Chair
The Last Battle
CREDITS
Cover design and illustration: Kimberly Glyder
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COPYRIGHT
ON STORIES. Copyright © 1982, 1966 by C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been grante
d the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Originally published in the United Kingdom in 1966 by Harcourt Brace.
EPub Edition February 2017 ISBN 9780062565563
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Lewis, C. S. (Clive Staples), 1898-1963, author.
Title: On stories : and other essays on literature / C. S. Lewis.
Description: San Francisco : HarperOne, 2017.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016030646 | ISBN 9780062643605 (paperback) | ISBN 9780062565563 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: Fiction—History and criticism. | Narration (Rhetoric) | Criticism. | BISAC: RELIGION / Christianity / Literature & the Arts. | LITERARY CRITICISM / General. | RELIGION / Spirituality.
Classification: LCC PR6023.E926 O5 2017 | DDC 809.3—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016030646
* * *
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1‘Christianity and Culture,’ Christian Reflections, ed. Walter Hooper (1967).
2They Stand Together: The Letters of C. S. Lewis to Arthur Greeves (1914–1963), ed. Walter Hooper (1979).
3By Roger Lancelyn Green and Walter Hooper.
4Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life (1955), ch. XIII.
5Surprised by Joy, ch. XIII.
6Humphrey Carpenter, J. R. R. Tolkien: A Biography (1977), ch. IV.
7Edited by C. S. Barach and J. Wrobel, it was published in Innsbruck in 1876. After 102 years there has (finally) appeared a new edition of this same work, entitled Cosmographia, edited by Peter Dronke. It has been translated into English by Winthrop Wetherbee as The ‘Cosmographia’ of Bernardus Silvestris (1973).
8Humphrey Carpenter, The Inklings (1978), ch. IV.
1Letter to Macvey Napier of 16 November 1842 in The Letters of Thomas Babington Macaulay, ed. Thomas Pinney (1977).
2The Place of the Lion (1931), All Hallows’ Eve (1945), Descent into Hell (1937).
1J. R. R. Tolkien, ‘On Fairy-Stories’, Essays Presented to Charles Williams (1947), p. 66 ff.
1I think Lewis really meant Professor Tolkien’ss essay ‘On Fairy-Stories’ in Essays Presented to Charles Williams (1947), p. 58.
1Lewis is thinking, I believe, of Robert A. Heinlein’s ‘By His Bootstraps’ in Spectrum: A Science Fiction Anthology (1961).
1The Hobbit: or, There and Back Again (1937), ch. I.
2The Hobbit, ch. XV.
1The Fellowship of the Ring (1954), the first volume of the trilogy The Lord of the Rings. The other volumes, The Two Towers and The Return of the King, were published in 1955. Tolkien was later to revise the whole work for a hardback second edition (1966).
2‘One Ring to Bind Them’, New Statesman and Nation (18 September 1954).
3‘On Fairy-Stories’ in Essays Presented to Charles Williams (1947).
4‘Prologue’, The Fellowship of the Ring.
5‘Prologue’, The Fellowship of the Ring.
6The Fellowship of the Ring, Bk. I, ch. 2.
7The Two Towers, Bk. III, ch. 2.
8‘On Fairy-Stories’.
9The Two Towers, Bk. III, ch. 2.
10The Two Towers, Bk. III, ch. 4.
11The Two Towers, Bk. III, ch. 4.
12The Two Towers, Bk. III, ch. 4.
13The Two Towers, Bk. III, ch. 2.
1This expression, attributed to Benjamin Disraeli, was found to have a soothing effect upon Queen Victoria who in 1868 published her Leaves from a Journal of Our Life in the Highlands.
2The Man Born to Be King: A Play-Cycle on the Life of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ (1943).
3The Man Born to Be King.
4Miss Sayers’s translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy appeared in three volumes: The Comedy of Dante Alighieri the Florentine. Cantica I: Hell (1949); The Comedy of Dante Alighieri the Florentine. Cantica II: Purgatory (1955); The Comedy of Dante Alighieri the Florentine. Cantica III: Paradise, translation with Barbara Reynolds (1962).
5‘“. . . And Telling You a Story”: A Note on The Divine Comedy’, Essays Presented to Charles Williams (1947).
6The Vision: or, Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise of Dante Alighieri, translated by Henry Francis Cary (1910).
1J. K. Stephen, ‘To R.K.’, Lapsus Calami (1905).
1An adaptation of 1984 was televised by the BBC on 12 December 1954.
2‘Pornography and Obscenity’ in Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers of D. H. Laurence, ed. Edward D. MacDonald (1936).
1The Report, so called after its chairman, Sir Cyril Norwood, is entitled Curriculum and Examinations in Secondary Schools: Report of the Committee of the Secondary School Examinations Council Appointed by the President of the Board of Education in 1941.
1James Stephens, ‘The “Period Talent” of G. K. Chesterton’, The Listener (17 October 1946).
2James Stephens, The Crock of Gold (1912), The Demi-Gods (1914), Here Are Ladies (1913), Deirdre (1923).
3G. K. Chesterton, The Ballad of the White Horse (1911), The Man Who Was Thursday (1908), The Flying Inn (1914).
1Lewis, I am quite certain, is talking about the essay on William Morris in his Selected Literary Essays (1969).
