The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings (47 page)

All this is standard orthodox Christianity. The book’s success lies in its ability to present these traditional views with humor, down-to-earth metaphors, and no hint of condescension or pretension; it reads like a well-bred, well-educated, well-spoken friend laying out his views in the corner pub. Moreover, like any skilled barroom orator, Lewis has two or three surprises up his sleeve. Consider his reflections on animal pain. He suggests, inter alia, that animals may suffer less pain than we think, for while all undergo pain as raw sensation, they may lack the consciousness to be “standing above the sensations and organising them into an ‘experience’” (as Lewis suggests in
Out of the Silent Planet
, they have a sensitive, but not a rational, or
hnau
, soul); that the animal kingdom may have suffered corruption at the hands of Satan long before the Fall of humankind recounted in the Bible; and that, just as human beings go to heaven through their relationship to God, so animals may go to heaven through their relationship to human beings (and thereby to God). These are radical notions, pleasing neither to those who see animals as automatons nor to those who believe they possess immortal souls. Years later, when the philosopher and controversialist C.E.M. Joad (famous as “The Professor” on the BBC radio show
The Brains Trust
and a favorite sparring partner of Lewis’s) published a friendly critique in the Jesuit journal
The Month
, Lewis responded by stressing “how confessedly speculative” his chapter on animal pain had been. How could we presume to know what animals experience or what God has in store for them? Our assurance of God’s goodness is the only real guide; the rest is guesswork.

Equally provocative is Lewis’s assertion, early in the text, that Jesus’ claim of divinity “is so shocking … that only two views of this man are possible. Either he was a raving lunatic of an unusually abominable type, or else He was, and is, precisely what He said.” It was the first of many times he would resort to some version of the
aut deus, aut malus homo
(either God or bad man) argument, a familiar device of nineteenth-century apologetics with forerunners as far back as the church fathers.

Although largely ignored by the popular press,
The Problem of Pain
did receive warm reviews in
The Times Literary Supplement
and in several ecclesiastical journals, including
The
Church Times
,
The Guardian
, and
Blackfriars
. Charles Williams, assessing it for
Theology
, was predictably effusive, declaring that “Mr. Lewis’s … style is what style always is—goodness working on goodness, a lucid and sincere intellect at work on the facts of life or the great statements of other minds.” More unexpected was his remark to Lewis, delivered when the two were discussing Job and recalled by Lewis in
Essays Presented to Charles Williams
, that Job’s self-righteous comforters were “the sort of people who wrote books on the Problem of Pain.”

Two or three months after this first venture in Christian apologetics, Lewis dreamed up a book of considerably more popular appeal. The immediate context is significant. The Battle of Britain had just begun, on July 10—that battle between Britain and Germany for air supremacy, on which, as Churchill said in his “Finest Hour” speech, the survival of Christian civilization would depend. Lewis closed a July 16 letter to Bede Griffiths by saying, “Well: we are on the very brink of the abyss now. Perhaps we shan’t be meeting again in this world.” Warnie had been evacuated from Dunkirk and was safely stationed in Cardiff, but Lewis found that his closest friends were showing signs of frayed nerves. On July 14, Churchill had delivered his “War of the Unknown Warriors” speech: “now it has come to us to stand alone in the breach, and face the worst that the tyrant’s might and enmity can do.” On July 19, Lewis had been listening with Havard to a BBC broadcast of Hitler’s “Last Appeal to Great Britain” address before the Reichstag, a litany of threats and promises beginning and ending with a call “to reason and common sense.” Lewis was intrigued: “I don’t know if I’m weaker than other people,” he told Warnie, “but it is a positive revelation to me how
while the speech lasts
it is impossible not to waver just a little.”

Two days later, the idea for a “useful and entertaining” book came to him as he was (dutifully, but without much relish) attending Sunday communion service at his parish church, Holy Trinity Headington Quarry—a curious, but upon consideration wonderfully apposite birthplace for what he had in mind. As he told Warnie, “It wd. be called
As one Devil to Another
and would consist of letters from an elderly retired devil to a young devil who has just started work on his first ‘patient.’ The idea wd. be to give all the psychology of temptation from the other point of view.”

The result was
The Screwtape Letters
, dedicated “To J.R.R. Tolkien,” thirty-one letters from a senior devil named Screwtape to his apprentice, Wormwood, offering him guidance, encouragement, and spleen as he attempts to lead a young Englishman, known as the “patient,” into final damnation. Lewis wrote the book effortlessly but paid a price:

… though it was easy to twist one’s mind into the diabolical attitude, it was not fun, or not for long. The strain produced a sort of spiritual cramp. The world into which I had to project myself while I spoke through Screwtape was all dust, grit, thirst, and itch. Every trace of beauty, freshness, and geniality had to be excluded. It almost smothered me before I was done. It would have smothered my readers if I had prolonged it.

Despite Lewis’s qualms about the project, the book (which first appeared in weekly installments in
The Guardian
, beginning May 2, 1941) has freshness, charm, humor, and a certain cockeyed geniality. Screwtape’s inverted values, in which sin is admirable, purity damnable, and God’s love utterly incomprehensible, provide most of the satire; this experienced devil is a master psychologist, delivering during his analysis of human foibles many memorable aphorisms and devilish insights, along the lines of “men are not angered by mere misfortune but by misfortune conceived as injury” and “once you have made the World an end, and faith a means, you have almost won your man.” Screwtape’s own worldview is nicely detailed, including his insatiable hunger for human souls, whom he desires not out of some abstract wish to damn but simply in order to eat; his bag of poisonous tricks, designed to lead humans to perdition by taking advantage of the Law of Undulation, our propensity for oscillating between happiness and sorrow, energy and enervation; and the spite and fury bubbling within his breast, ready to erupt at any provocation, most memorably when a German bomb kills Wormwood’s patient before his soul can be claimed for Hell. For all the clever satire, however, the book does, as Lewis feared, begin to smother the reader by the end. It is a one-joke affair, however inventive the variations. The devils’ names—Screwtape, Slumtrimpet, Slubgob, Scabtree, Triptweeze, Toadpipe—and their use of inverted epithets—“Our Father Below” for Satan, “The Enemy” for God—delight and then grow tiresome; so, too, do Lewis’s repeated slaps at favorite targets, including psychoanalysis, proponents of the “Life Force,” and overly spiritualized conceptions of prayer (Coleridge’s “sense of supplication” takes a direct hit). It all comes off as terribly clever but a bit sophomoric.
The Screwtape Letters
is a good, short book; if it were half as long and half as clever, it might have been twice as good.

The public, however, roared its approval. The book sold very well upon release and remains one of Lewis’s most popular works.
The Manchester Guardian
(February 24, 1942), eager to canonize it, declared that it “should become a classic,” while
The Times Literary Supplement
(February 28, 1942) more temperately warned that “time alone can show whether it is or is not an enduring piece of satirical writing.” Endured it has; whether that makes it a classic, the next century or two will judge.

Pressed into Service

If the early deprivations of war disturbed Lewis’s complacency, the Blitz shook him to his core. “It’s like the end of the world,” he wrote to Arthur when Belfast was bombed. The Blitz began on September 7, 1940, when over a thousand Luftwaffe planes attacked London in the first wave of an all-out German effort to destroy the British war industry and sow panic among the civilian population. The British government, after some initial sluggishness, responded by opening the Underground as a massive bomb shelter (more than one hundred thousand people took refuge there every night during the height of the raids), with antiaircraft fire and airborne counterattacks by the RAF, and by establishing special programs to boost public morale. According to Charles Gilmore, who ran the RAF Chaplains’ School at Magdalene College, Cambridge, the Battle of Britain “had had an extraordinary effect on the nation and a quite miraculous effect on the status of the Royal Air Force … For quite a time, the RAF received into its ranks more than its fair share of the cream of the nation.” The dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral, hoping to inspire these new recruits, decided to fund an RAF chaplaincy lectureship and suggested that Lewis be given the post. On a rainy day in early 1941, Gilmore and the RAF chaplain in chief arrived at Magdalen College to set about convincing him that he was the right man to lecture airmen throughout the UK about the war effort and their place in it. Addressing raw troops, many of whom had not attended a university, was a new challenge for Lewis; after a bit of reasonable hesitation, he agreed, “promising to soar,” in Gilmore’s words.

The first lectures took place in Abingdon, right outside Oxford. Lewis thought them a “complete failure” and took solace in remembering “that God used an
ass
to convert the prophet,” but soon he did soar, providing his listeners, in Gilmore’s words, with “a sterling and direct purpose, where before they had found only the confusion of a whirlpool.” He traveled up and down the nation, on trips that usually lasted two or three days, followed by a short break at home and then another trip. He complained to Arthur Greeves that “I had never realized how tiring perpetual travelling is (specially in crowded trains),” and yet he rejoiced in the beauty of the landscape and, above all, “the chance in many places to see and smell the sea and hear the sound of gulls again, which otherwise I wd. have been pining for.” In Tolkien’s eyes, Lewis had shouldered the task
in imitatione Pauli
, “as a reparation; now the least of Christians (by special grace) but once an infidel … The acceptance of the RAF mission with its … lonely, cheerless, embarrassed journeys … all this was in its way an imitation of St. Paul.”

A second and more difficult phase of the lectures opened up when Lewis also agreed to address RAF chaplains—many of whom had been doctors, bankers, journalists, or professional ministers prior to the war—on a regular basis at the RAF Chaplains’ School. Facing a well-educated audience, Lewis chose as the topic for his first presentation “Linguistic Analysis in Pauline Soteriology”—a subject, as he should have realized, of no interest to men just back from battle or about to join the fray. Charles Gilmore, who attended the talk, recalled Lewis as “feeling for words. Clive Staples Lewis feeling for words! He hummed, and the ill-mannered coughed. A future bishop secretly got on with
The Times
’ crossword.” Thankfully, Lewis sensed his error before it was too late, dropped the philological analysis, “said something about prostitutes and pawnbrokers … and the rest of the morning was full of the clang of steel on steel and the laughter of good fellows, and answers that belonged to life … Jack had done his job.”

He had indeed, despite his belief that the RAF talks had been a failure. But greater tasks lay at hand. A few months before the first RAF address, he had been approached by James W. Welch, director of religious broadcasting for the BBC, about addressing an even larger audience than British flyboys. Welch, who had read
The Problem of Pain
and found it personally helpful, proposed that Lewis take up religious broadcasting, allowing him to address “a fairly intelligent audience of more than a million.” With cinemas, theaters, and the nascent BBC Television Service closed as an emergency measure, the BBC Home Service and its companion Overseas Service had to be the supplier of necessary information and equally necessary diversion. The broadcast talk, a short, lively, intimate, single-speaker presentation, was a new form invented to meet both needs; and considerably more than a million at home and at the front could be expected to tune in. Two thirds of them, Welch guessed, would be lapsed Christians, if not outright nonbelievers.

When Lewis accepted the assignment, Welch put him in the hands of a BBC staff member named Eric Fenn—a Presbyterian, active in the Student Christian Movement, who had served time in Wormwood Scrubs prison for his pacifist stance and who shared Welch’s desire to do something about the appallingly dreary state of religious programming. Fenn coached Lewis in the art of delivering a crisp, fifteen-minute colloquial radio talk, vetted his scripts and passed them on to the censors, worried about the timing (each talk had to fill its precise time slot, to prevent German programming from breaking in), and helped him arrange to have the earnings distributed as charity to various correspondents in need and to the Cowley Fathers.

Initially, Welch suggested two topics for broadcast: the lack of Christian influence in modern literature, or “The Christian Faith as I See It—by a Layman.” Lewis countered by proposing a series of talks on natural law, or “objective right and wrong”—a reality, he told Welch, that the Bible takes for granted but that is far from obvious to modern minds. He was convinced that “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.” Lewis thought of calling the first series “The Art of Being Shocked”; later on, he came up with “Inside Information.” Neither title satisfied Welch. Eventually, they agreed on “‘RIGHT AND WRONG’: A Clue to the Meaning of the Universe?” with the first installment, “Common Decency,” broadcast on August 6, 1941, at 7:45 p.m., immediately following “News in Norwegian.”