C. S. Lewis

by Roger Lancelyn Green

  Lewis’s ability to ferret out those sins which lie hidden, like tiny cancers, so close to a man’s heart probably owes a great deal to a decision made near the time he thought of writing The Screwtape Letters. Though Lewis’s theology was ‘high’ from the standpoint of being completely and utterly orthodox, he had not been brought up to make auricular confessions to a priest – except, that is, for the ‘general confessions’ contained in the services of Matins, Evensong and Holy Communion. The difficulty he found with these Prayer Book confessions is that one could be as specific or (as is usually the case) as ‘general’ as one liked. It was shortly after Lewis conceived the idea of Screwtape that he was attracted by the Exhortation in the service of Holy Communion which states that if any man ‘cannot quiet his own conscience’ he may go to a priest and ‘open his grief’ in order that he ‘may receive the benefit of absolution together with ghostly counsel and advice’.

  As Lewis was considering what he should do about ‘ghostly counsel’ he had a war-duty forced upon him. He was only forty-one, and it was expected that he would join the Home Guard. On 10 August 1940 he was issued with a rifle and uniform and began his weekly three-hour patrol on the outskirts of Oxford. Every Saturday he joined two other men at 1.30 a.m. and patrolled the area round the college sports grounds and pavilions till 4.30 a.m. – an experience he came to treasure as he was able to walk home in what he called the ‘empty, silent, dewy, cobwebby hours’51 of the morning.

  Meanwhile, Warnie’s health remained unsatisfactory and on 16 August 1940 he was transferred to the Reserve List and sent home. Lewis and his brother had been wrenched apart so many times that, with the war growing worse every day, they hardly dared hope that this time they were permanently united. But they were, for the rest of Lewis’s life. It was a help to have Warnie back at The Kilns because Maureen Moore, who had been living there while teaching music at Oxford High School, married on 27 August 1940. Her husband, Leonard Blake, was Director of Music at Worksop College in Nottinghamshire.

  Lewis’s mind was now made up about confession, and on 24 October 1940 he wrote to his friend, Sister Penelope of the Community of St Mary the Virgin, ‘I am going to make my first confession next week … The decision to do so was one of the hardest I have ever made … I begin to be afraid that I am merely indulging in an orgy of egoism.’52 Some years later he told Walter Hooper that a moment after he had dropped the letter into the pillar-box he got cold feet and tried to fish it out. As this turned out to be impossible he felt he had no course but to go through with the confession.

  Shortly before this Lewis had come to know the Anglican priests of the Society of St John the Evangelist in Cowley – popularly known as the ‘Cowley Fathers’ – where he was given a directeur, Father Walter Adams (1871–1952). Until Fr Adams died, he was thereafter Lewis’s regular confessor. Shortly after his first confession, Lewis reported back to Sister Penelope on 4 November 1940:

  Well – we have come through the wall of fire and find ourselves (somewhat to our surprise) still alive and even well. The suggestion about an orgy of egoism turns out, like all the enemy propaganda, to have just a grain of truth in it, but I have no doubt that the proper method of dealing with that is to continue the practice, as I intend to do. For after all, everything – even virtue, even prayer – has its dangers and if one heeds the grain of truth in the enemy propaganda one can never do anything at all.53

  Lewis had long given up what he considered a pernicious and time-wasting habit – that of following the news. The one paper, or weekly news-magazine, he did read, however, was The Guardian. It had been founded in 1846 to uphold Tractarian principles and ‘to show their relevance to the best secular thought of the day’ and ceased publication in 1951 when it was taken over by the Church Quarterly. Following his conversion, Lewis decided that any monies made from specifically religious writings should go to charities, for, as he told Walter Hooper, ‘I felt that God had been so gracious in having me that the least I could do was give back all the money made in His service.’ So, even before he was paid for his first contribution to The Guardian, an essay entitled ‘Dangers of National Repentance’ (15 March 1940),54 he arranged with the editor to have all monies owing to him to be sent to any charity he might name.

  The thirty-one Screwtape Letters were sent as a single manuscript to the editor of The Guardian who published them in weekly instalments from 2 May to 28 November 1941. Lewis was paid £2 per letter. He had already made a ‘preferential option’ for the ‘orphans and widows’ mentioned by St James (1:27) and he directed The Guardian to send all £62 into a fund for ‘Clergy Widows’.

  Lewis’s ‘discoverer’, Ashley Sampson, read the letters as they came out in The Guardian and, with his usual acumen for ‘spotting a winner’, had no trouble in persuading Geoffrey Bles to snap them up before Lewis had any other offers. Lewis sent Bles a fair copy of the manuscript in his own hand (he could not afford a typist) and, as there was yet no complete printed copy of all the letters, he sent the original manuscript to Sister Penelope on 9 October 1941 with the request that, ‘If it is not a trouble I should like you to keep it safe until the book is printed (in case the one the publisher has got blitzed) – after that it can be made into spills or used to stuff dolls or anything.’55

  Lewis was showered with praise even before all the letters had appeared in the columns of The Guardian. On 3 October 1941 a letter was published from one subscriber who, delighted with Lewis’s ironic mockery of the Lowerarchy, had written to suggest that, as Screwtape had no degree higher than a B.S., some ‘grateful university now welcome him in gradum Doctoris in Satanitate dishonoris causa’. There were, however, dissenting voices as well; one, that of a country clergyman who, Lewis learned with glee, wrote to the editor cancelling his subscription on the ground that ‘much of the advice given in these letters seemed to him not only erroneous but positively diabolical’.56 Lewis was beginning to feel that he had hit his target.

  He had indeed. The first 2,000 copies of Screwtape were published by Bles on 9 February 1942 and disappeared almost at once. The book was reprinted twice in March and, then, so great was the clamour for copies, six more times before the year was out. Lewis’s New York publishers, Macmillan & Co., brought out an American edition in 1943 which immediately became a best-seller. The Screwtape Letters has been translated into some twenty languages, and the paperback sales in England and America have long passed the million mark.

  Not a few of the hundreds who have reviewed Screwtape have adopted in their reviews Lewis’s idea of an ‘infernal correspondence’. One of the cleverest is that of Charles Williams who, in Time and Tide (21 March 1942), has one devil, ‘Snigsozzle’, write a letter to another, ‘Scorpuscle’, in which the former suggests that the best counter-irritant to the publication of Screwtape’s ‘cursedly clever’ letters is ‘to make the infernal text a primer in our own Training College’. As a postscript he adds, ‘You will send someone to see after Lewis? some very clever fiend?’

  One of the book’s most trenchant reviewers, Professor C.E.M. Joad, put his finger on what may be Lewis’s greatest gift. Writing in the New Statesman and Nation, 23 (16 May 1942), Professor Joad said: ‘Mr Lewis possesses the rare gift of being able to make righteousness readable.’

  Almost overnight, it seemed, Lewis was internationally famous. Money began to roll in and he, not understanding the difference between gross and net profit, celebrated his good fortune by a lavish scattering of cheques to societies and individual lame dogs. Before the situation got completely out of hand, Owen Barfield, who ran his own legal firm in London, intervened and helped him set up a charitable trust – generally referred to as the ‘Agape Fund’ – into which Lewis was thereafter to pay two-thirds of his royalties for the purpose of helping the poor.

  * * *

  * The Rev. Thomas Eric Bleiben (1903–47) was vicar of Holy Trinity Church, Headington Quarry, 1935–47.

  * Ashley Sampson (1900–47) began his own publishing firm, the Cente
nary Press, in the 1920s. He was always of a delicate constitution and in 1930 he sold it to Geoffrey Bles, who retained Sampson to run it. He gave talks on the radio, lectured to the Forces during the war, taught English to the naval cadets at Dartmouth, and was devoted to St Paul’s Cathedral. His books include a biography, Wolsey (1935), an anthology, Famous English Sermons (1940), a novel, The Ghost of Mrs Brown (1941) and From the Ashes: Poems (1942). He was elected a member of the Royal Society of Literature in 1941. An obituary by Walter de la Mare is found in The Report of the Royal Society of Literature (1947).

  * Geoffrey Bles (1886–1957) read Greats at Merton College, Oxford, and took his BA in 1906. He joined the Indian Civil Service in 1910 and was with the 7th Calvary in the Indian Army during the First World War. In 1923 he created his publishing firm in London, and in 1930 he began publishing religious books. Subsequently he bought Ashley Sampson’s Centenary Press; thus it was that he became Lewis’s publisher. He retired in 1954 and the controlling shares in his firm were bought by William Collins & Sons.

  NOTES

  1 Letters, letter of 10 September 1939, pp. 324–5.

  2 ‘Thou shalt have none other gods before me’, Deuteronomy 5:7.

  3 ‘Learning in War-Time’, Fern-seed and Elephants, p. 14.

  4 Ibid., p. 15.

  5 Ibid., p. 20.

  6 Letters, p. 331.

  7 ‘On the Reading of Old Books’, C.S. Lewis: Essay Collection and Other Short Pieces, ed. Lesley Walmsley (2000), p. 441.

  8 Letters, p. 327.

  9 ‘On Ethics’, Christian Reflections, p. 55.

  10 The Problem of Pain (1940; Fount, 1998), ch. 6, p. 70.

  11 Ibid., p. 74.

  12 Ibid., p. 85.

  13 Ibid., ch. 8, p. 99.

  14 Ibid., p. 105.

  15 Ibid., ch. 9, p. 106.

  16 Ibid., pp. 114–15.

  17 Lewis’s controversy with Professor C.E.M. Joad over this issue is found in Timeless at Heart: Essays on Theology, ed. Walter Hooper (1987).

  18 The Letters of Evelyn Underhill, ed. Charles Williams (1943), pp. 301–2.

  19 Magdalen College Archives.

  20 The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950), ch. 8.

  21 Letters, pp. 338–9.

  22 Ibid., p. 341.

  23 The English Poems of John Milton, ed. H.C. Beeching (Oxford University Press, 1940).

  24 A Preface to ‘Paradise Lost’ (1942), pp. v–vi.

  25 Martin Gilbert, The Second World War (1989; new edn, 2000), p. 64.

  26 Ibid., p. 73.

  27 Letters, p. 355.

  28 Ibid., pp. 355–6.

  29 The Screwtape Letters (1942; Fount, 1998), Letter 2, p. 6.

  30 Ibid., Letter 10, p. 37.

  31 Ibid., Letter 24, p. 94.

  32 The Screwtape Letters and Screwtape Proposes a Toast, with a new Preface (1961), p. 12.

  33 Ibid., p. 6.

  34 Ibid., p. 7.

  35 The Screwtape Letters, p. ix.

  36 Ibid., Letter 7, p. 26.

  37 A Preface to ‘Paradise Lost’, ch. 13, p. 92.

  38 Ibid., p. 94.

  39 Perelandra, ch. 10, p. 129.

  40 The Screwtape Letters, Letter 4, pp. 14–15.

  41 Ibid., Letter 8, p. 30.

  42 Ibid., Letter 9, p. 34.

  43 Ibid., Letter 19, p. 74.

  44 Ibid., Letter 12, pp. 47–8.

  45 Stephen McKenna, Confessions of a Well-Meaning Woman (1922), p. 158.

  46 The Screwtape Letters and Screwtape Proposes a Toast, p. 11.

  47 Ibid., p. 12. He is quoting Psalm 36:1.

  48 BF, p. 128.

  49 The Screwtape Letters, Letter 3, p. 11.

  50 Letters, pp. 462–3.

  51 From a letter to Mary Willis Shelburne of 30 September 1958 in Letters to an American Lady, ed. Clyde S. Kilby (1967).

  52 Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. lett. c. 220/1, fol. 5.

  53 Ibid., fol. 14.

  54 Reprinted in Christian Reunion and Other Essays, ed. Walter Hooper (Fount, 1990).

  55 Letters, p. 360.

  56 The Screwtape Letters and Screwtape Proposes a Toast, Preface, p. 5.

  9

  ‘MERE CHRISTIANITY’

  It is commonly supposed that Lewis came to prominence as a speaker on Christianity because of his immense popularity as the author of The Screwtape Letters. The truth is that the most important of his speaking engagements began a little further back. The Problem of Pain had been finding some grateful and influential admirers, one of whom was the Director of Religious Broadcasting for the BBC, Dr James W. Welch.* He wrote to Lewis on 7 February 1941 saying:

  Dear Mr Lewis,

  I address you by name because, although we have never met, you cannot be a stranger after allowing me – and many others – to know some of your thought and convictions which have been expressed in your book The Problem of Pain. I should like to take this opportunity of saying how grateful I am to you personally for the help this book has given me.

  I write to ask whether you would be willing to help us in our work of religious broadcasting. The microphone is a limiting, and often irritating, instrument, but the quality of thinking and depth of conviction which I find in your book ought surely to be shared with a great many other people; and for any talk we can be sure of a fairly intelligent audience of more than a million. Two ideas strike me:

  (1) You might be willing to speak about the Christian, or lack of Christian, assumptions underlying modern literature …

  (2) A series of talks on something like ‘The Christian Faith As I See It – by A Layman’: I am sure there is need of a positive restatement of Christian doctrine in lay language. But there may be other subjects on which you would rather speak.1

  Lewis had no interest whatsoever in the radio as such, a harsh contraption the sound of which he cringed at every time he heard it booming from Paxford’s bungalow. He cared even less for travelling up to London for, sharing his father’s provincialism to some extent, he regarded a trip to London in very much the same way another man might look upon a voyage to the moon. Nevertheless, the invitation interested him, for he had long regarded England as part of that vast ‘post-Christian’ world in need of a special missionary technique – one which must take into account the fact that many people were under the impression that they had rejected Christianity when, in truth, they had never had it. Could someone, he wondered, trouble the conscience of those who feel no guilt and then ‘translate’ the Gospel into language they could understand? On 10 February 1941 Lewis accepted Dr Welch’s invitation:

  Dear Mr Welch,

  Thanks for your kind remarks about my book. I would like to give a series of talks as you suggest, but it would have to be in the vacation. Modern literature would not suit me. I think what I mainly want to talk about is the Law of Nature, or objective right and wrong. It seems to me that the New Testament, by preaching repentance and forgiveness, always assumes an audience who already believe in the Law of Nature and know they have disobeyed it. In modern England we cannot at present assume this, and therefore most apologetic begins a stage too far on. The first step is to create, or recover, the sense of guilt. Hence if I give a series of talks I should mention Christianity only at the end, and would prefer not to unmask my battery till then. Some title like ‘The Art of being Shocked’ or ‘These Humans’ would suit me. Let me know what you think of this and how many talks and at what dates (roughly) you would like.2

  Lewis next heard from Eric Fenn, who joined the BBC in 1939 as assistant head of religious broadcasting.* Fenn was a Presbyterian, and he and Lewis were to get on extremely well. He wrote to Lewis on 14 February saying: ‘I wonder whether you would care to consider a series of four Wednesday evening talks (7.40–8.00 p.m.) in August, or alternatively, September?’3

  Lewis invited Fenn to lunch at Magdalen College shortly afterwards, and they arranged for a microphone rehearsal. It was the first time Lewis had heard a recording of his voice, and when he
wrote to Arthur Greeves on 25 May 1941, he said: ‘I was unprepared for the total unfamiliarity of the voice; not a trace, not a hint, of anything one could identify with oneself – one couldn’t possibly guess who it was.’4

  The talks that Lewis had now to prepare were not the first of what he called his ‘war-work’. Sometime near the beginning of the war the Dean of St Paul’s, the Very Reverend Walter Robert Matthews (1881–1973), wrote to the Reverend Maurice Edwards,† who was Chaplain-in-Chief of the Royal Air Force, saying he had a lectureship in his patronage which, in the unusual circumstances of the war, he could make into a sort of travelling lectureship. The Dean went on to suggest that, as C.S. Lewis was at a loose end at Magdalen, perhaps the Chaplain-in-Chief could make use of him. Early in the winter of 1941 the Chaplain-in-Chief wrote to Lewis asking if he would accept invitations to speak to members of the RAF. Shortly afterwards he and his assistant, the Reverend Charles Gilmore,‡ went to Oxford to call on him. ‘I well remember’, said Charles Gilmore, ‘going up to Oxford one winter’s day with Maurice Edwards and spending an evening in C.S. Lewis’s rooms to discuss details. Lewis was diffident of himself but keen to try. I remember that he mentioned that the whole project might well be aborted because the call-up age would reach him the following year. We fixed up details of expenses to be paid by the public purse, and the lectureship could provide his fees.’5

  Besides the fact that Lewis was still carrying in his body some shrapnel from the First World War, the Government decided that he was far too valuable as a teacher to go back into service. The Chaplain-in-Chief may have known this and, shortly after the meeting in Oxford, he informed his chaplains of the Royal Air Force that Lewis would be available at weekends to speak on the Christian faith.

  Before Lewis visited any of the many air force stations in England, he accepted an even more unusual request. At the prompting of Sister Penelope, the Mother Superior of the Community of St Mary the Virgin at Wantage invited him to come over and speak to the junior Sisters. ‘I will come,’ Lewis wrote to Sister Penelope on 10 April 1941, ‘though the Protestant in me has just a little suspicion of an oubliette or a chained skeleton … the doors do open outwards as well, I trust.’6 He travelled over on Monday, 20 April, and spoke to the Sisters on ‘The Gospel in our Generation’, and he was the first layman in the history of the convent to stay in their gate house. Unfortunately, the lectures he gave have not survived, but one nun remembered him saying that ‘whereas Zacchaeus “could not see Jesus for the press”,7 we today often cannot see Him for the Press with a capital P!’8