Over my lunch break on every Friday that I feel like doing so, I am going to read a random one of Lewis’ Collected Letters and riff on it for fun. You’re welcome (and I’m sorry).

Context: Whistler (a glass engraver and writer who had taken a degree at Oxford in 1934 and was later knighted in 2000) was apparently hatching a plan with Lewis and some others to start a Christian literary periodical, the details of which have been lost, if not to time, at least to this amateur.1 Lewis answered Whistler’s first letter by exclaiming the need for “a new, frankly high-brow, periodical not in the hands of the Left” and exchanged a couple letters with him about the possibilities.

One thing about Jack Lewis that I just like is his ability to display a sharpness and particularity that seems to be missing from so many other (less brazen, perhaps) minds. We have been trained by school and work and polite society to say so very little whenever we open our mouths. It becomes a sort of sieve that catches all our real thoughts and prevents them from going out into the world at all. Lewis points out several of these problems as they specifically interact with the life of the church — his brief aside on denominations is a profound and hilarious understatement. All too often, it is our connection to other Christians, and specifically our fear of what those people connected to us might think, that prevents us from the specific and tempts us to the vaguely useless.

Lewis's own plan of attack on the problem is fascinating. Many have tried the “Create a Christian media arm with the goal of reaching non-Christians through art” path, and his advice is both like and unlike to the strategies I’ve seen since. He formulates almost word for word the “not a Christian band, just some Christians in a band” strategy, hilariously. But I think he explains how that angle might be successful in the specific niche he considers. His goal with the publication is tactical success at reaching his audience, not preserving Christian cultural niceties. And I think that's what I appreciate most about his advice.

Lewis is specifically not worried about what other Christians are going to think and lays out several ideas "(like publishing non-Christian and even anti-Christian authors) that would certainly not fly with the Lifeway bookstore type audience. He seems to be describing a type of Christian media that I'm not sure really exists much anymore, and I would argue to our detriment — media that is neither produced by nor for the church proper. Instead, he wants to create a collection of art produced by Christians, not only for art's sake, but also with the specific goal of reaching the world for the gospel through good art. That's a difficult needle to thread, and Lewis' plan of attack is one that I've rarely, if ever, seen tried. Maybe it’s because when starting out on projects like this, we so often get caught up in concerns of appearance and fear of offense. And so we have to hedge and blunt any possible sharp edges.

Lewis was what I believe the kids these days call a “spiky” individual. He advocated and argued for particular truths, and made his living doing so in a way that was anything but universally accepted or even appealing. It’s a way of expression that I am seriously attempting to emulate for myself lately. Too many times, we catch ourselves saying things nobody could disagree with, rather than truths carefully seasoned for the ear of a specific hearer. Be brave enough, not only to know the truth and even to speak it, but to risk applying it to the frustratingly specific world God sent you to inhabit.

Class Notes:

• Lewis: Heiserhead Confirmed?

• Lewis was Sometimes Wrong, Actually

• No Sir, Transhumanism is Not Practical

• Technology Isn’t Sinful, You Are

• Space Nazis 3: Tokyo Drift

Intro and outro music is the song “Tolling Iron Bells” by DIM, from his album Steeped Sky, Stained Light, used by generous permission from the artist.

Class Notes:

• The Edenic Mindset

• Medieval Maxxing

• Certified Organic Free-Range Angels

• Have You Yearned By Balki, The Pool

• 2 Space 2 Nazis

Intro and outro music is the song “Tolling Iron Bells” by DIM, from his album Steeped Sky, Stained Light, used by generous permission from the artist.

Class Notes:

• Genesis Vibes

• Guns and Good Company

• Science and Other Silliness

• Buck Rogers’ Great Chain of Being

• Space Nazis

Intro and outro music is the song “Tolling Iron Bells” by DIM, from his album Steeped Sky, Stained Light, used by generous permission from the artist.

I'm concerned that some of us are under the misapprehension that we would have just loved C.S. Lewis if only we, too, could have haunted the hallowed halls of Oxford while he and his cronies rolled around like a tweedy academic crew of roadmen. This is unfortunate, but I totally get it. I want to believe, too, that I could hang with Jack. Every writer who is aware of the Inklings’ existence has probably yearned to set their personal time machine for the 1940s and read chapters of their period romance novel or whatever to the assortment of literary cronies ensconced at the Eagle and Child.1 Whom among us of even marginally bookish inclination has not dreamed of afternoons buried in the stacks of a library whose halls stretch back to medieval antiquity as drizzle rattles against the diamond-paned windows. How often have we finished up our imaginary day’s studies and found ourselves strolling down to “the local,” happening across various hallowed names of Oxford’s midcentury pantheon in the street as we go? It’s only natural that we wish for even a single chance to drift into that storied corner room, to hear a booming voice kindly exclaim “Why don’t you join us! I say, aren’t you working away at something too? Go on, get it out, we’re all just waiting for someone to read something!”

And yet, our beautiful daydream has a few problems. First off, the Inklings met in the morning, not at twilight. The second, deeper issue is this: although I have come to truly love the man since meeting him in the back corner of a used bookstore at the edge of Albuquerque…I’m not actually sure I would have liked Clive Staples Lewis all that much.2

And neither would you. Yes you, all you nice normal people reading this right now. How can I say this about the mascot of Very Nice Christians everywhere? Well, I promise it's nothing to do with you; you seem nice enough. It's Jack that’s the trouble. Where should we begin?

Let's start with personality issues. Before he accepted Christ, Lewis strikes me as the picture-perfect image of the Reddit Atheist, a blustering, preening, intellectually vain pomposity concealing a scared Sensitive Young Man beneath his brittle shell. He ridiculed the faith of his best friend, persisted in a show of Anglican conformity to avoid confrontation with his father, and through it all maintained a distinct attitude of superiority over pretty much everyone. A (legendarily reluctant) conversion experience in his thirties didn’t suddenly overwrite this personality anymore than it does for anyone else. Instead, Lewis just began the work that would last him for the rest of his life: painstakingly submitting himself to the process of the Holy Spirit’s sanctification.

And that kinda went just ok, if we’re honest. Jack remained something of an Acquired Taste throughout his adult life. Arrogant, loud, self-assured, and snobbish weren’t just accusations lobbed at Jack by students who couldn’t appreciate His Whole Schtick. They were self-assessments from Lewis’ own remarkably honest letters. Lewis fought frequent and enthusiastic conversational duels with his dearest friends, nevermind his (many) enemies. He seemed to be the kind of guy who would happily and boisterously dominate the conversation in most rooms just because he'd gotten started and liked where his own train of thought was going.

Yes, conversation was Lewis’ primary mode of friendship. But those conversations weren’t free from friendly fire. Lewis and his great friend Owen Barfield took to calling their long exchange of letters vociferously debating Anthroposophy “The Great War,” and the verbal shelling continued until they called a mutual cease-fire to preserve the relationship. Oh yes, we all want to go back because we think we would have been immediately accepted into the circle (we wouldn’t, they were pretty picky about their friends actually). But even if we were brought into the ring, we might not have the stomach for what happened when the bell rung. Patricia, can you really handle one of your beta readers rolling around in the bar booth and shouting “Not another f****** elf?!” Bruised egos and hurt feelings were kinda the stock in trade here.

Jack seemed to positively like the sort of conversational conflict that most of us in this current era of soft feelings and softer voices reserve for catastrophic, relationship-ending blowouts. Lewis felt this brought out the best in his friends and himself, exposed their thoughts where they could be argued over and sharpened. And, just incidentally, allowed him to exercise his personal enjoyment of being the room’s combined ringmaster, jester, and schoolmaster. Not for nothing was one of Jack’s favorite books Boswell’s Life of Johnson, a biography of a large and jolly Brit of whom it was said: “There is no arguing with Johnson; for when his pistol misses fire, he knocks you down with the butt end of it.” Sound familiar? Inklings meetings were many things, but they weren’t very what you might call Nice.

This habit of full contact conversation carried over into his work with students at Oxford as well. Students seemed to respect or loathe Lewis but he was nobody’s beaming avuncular uncle. He had been forged in the fearsome verbal skirmishing ground of W.T. Kirkpatrick’s3 bitterly logical one-on-one tutorials, and apparently carried the method into his rooms at Magdalen College. Lewis expected much out of his students, didn’t particularly enjoy critiquing their essays, and refused to treat them as anything other than professional colleagues in the deadly important battle against Ignorance. This resulted in a slew of hilarious anecdotes from students who found their professor to be slightly unimpressive, a bit perplexing, and (dare we say it) a bit Weird compared to his (already growing) reputation.

Of course, a lot of this has less to do with Lewis the man and can be directly traceable to Oxford the institution or even just midcentury culture in Britain and elsewhere. I grant you the point. But a pattern absolutely emerges across the public and private writing of this, undoubtedly, great man. He seemed to spend his whole life wrestling an inner circus of pride, selfishness and self-seriousness to the ground, and putting on something like a mask of good humor and conviviality every day. It is beyond my judgement or yours to say how much of this public persona was aspirational and how much was really Jack’s best nature gradually revealing itself as the Holy Spirit hacked away the encasing flesh. But I’m confident enough in his closest friends, who seemed to think it was something of both.4

So yes, of course Patricia, Jack Lewis was a deeply kind man. Far be it from me to sully a lifetime of charity, thoughtfulness and genuine love for others. Didn’t he help that one sweet lady that he definitely never had a strange relationship with?5 Wasn’t he known for bringing out the very best in his students, as long as they stayed survived his opening salvo? Didn’t his secret benevolence keep him financially pinched and his attendance to the needs of other people harry his time? I celebrate each one of these things, and they make the man even more precious to our memory.

I just don’t want us to forget what it cost him.

A good man (who wasn’t nice) might suffer his foolish pupils calmly because he thought it was his duty to do so. He might spend three decades serving the increasingly irascible whims of a surrogate mother as she gradually declined, setting aside time and again his own pressing work, even at the risk of losing the respect of his closest friends. He might go to elaborate lengths to create an anonymized charity trust which liquidated the majority of his considerable royalties on the needs of others, while he himself never escaped money troubles for long. He might live a life marked by Duty as a polestar virtue. The kind of man who could leave even the most tolerant of friends deeply wounded by verbal jousts might conceivably also bend his literary skills to an enduring explanation of Christian love, if only for his own personal reference.

Jack Lewis wasn't a great man despite his faults. He was driven to be a good man through his faults. He found the only possible way to overcome them was through daily personal submission to Christ. When we avoid the weakest sides of our greatest saints, we are choosing to ignore the very thing that made them great in the first place. The central struggle of every human life, the choice to remain as we are at our most vile and weak and evil or to choose the agonizing climb to holiness, calls to each of us just as it called to Jack. His public image of a jolly and unflappable chaotic good literary hedge wizard shouldn’t fool us.

The entire point I’m trying to make here isn’t just one long screed insisting that C.S. Lewis was an awkward, uncomfortable person to be around sometimes. Because even though he wasn’t always a nice man, he was absolutely according to Christian standards a good man. We are afraid of admitting the difference because in our hearts, we know that the possibility of our goodness carries immense spiritual responsibility. “No Christian is perfect” is a tragedy, not a promise from Jesus. And if Lewis’ life teaches us anything, it is that real striving towards the mark of the upward call of God doesn’t always look like we might think. In fact, many times it looks like swallowing who we really are and allowing God to beat us into the shape we were meant to be.

I’m sure I’m not the only one who has imagined what it will be like to finally meet Jack in paradise, I presume after I have spent my first million years doing more important things and need a short break. I always imagined his mansion will be more of a pleasantly crumbling country house where I’ll find him pottering around the front garden or something. I’ll recognize him immediately because you know glorified mind and everything, but also because he’ll look just like I always imagined. And he’ll relight that battered straight apple pipe of his and for a minute everything will smell like Bell’s Three Nuns and he’ll grin owlishly at me out of the smoke like a portly balding angel. And I won’t be able to say anything, because I’ll want to say thank you and ask him questions but I’m too busy frying in the heat of glory shimmering off that face. And he’ll just smile probably, and beckon me over to a puddle in the pebbled path (I’m pretty sure that aesthetically pleasing rain happens in heaven) and show me that my own face looks just like his.

“All this time, you thought it was me? Dear boy, look at us. Anything we ever wanted in our whole lives came from Him.”

And I’ll probably cry for a minute and then maybe he’ll let me read him some chapters from a very middling novel.

Over my lunch break on every Friday that I feel like doing so, I am going to read a random one of Lewis’ Collected Letters and riff on it for fun. You’re welcome (and I’m sorry).

Context: Lewis and Hayes were connected through their mutual enjoyment of the writing of E.R. Eddison, whose fantasy The Worm Ouroboros was one of Lewis’ favorites. This letter includes Lewis’ thought on the type of stories that led him to Eddison and some critique of the author’s heroines. Hayes was a civil service cartographer and musicologist who had created a fan art map for Eddison’s books that was so good, the author later asked him to provide official illustrations.

What a classic. This is just exactly the kind of letter you love to see. We’ve got everything. A little classic bit of Lewis Thought that gets snipped out and misinterpreted, a dense thicket of allusions that most of us aren’t going to get, humor, knights and castles stuff. It’s the whole nine yards.

The first thing to look at here is whatever he is on about with these proper names. I have got to be honest with you, I fed this sucker through Claude, and I’m still not sure I can follow his exact argument. Best I can decipher, Lewis is explaining some of his most-enjoyed pieces of Romance Literature. Now, remember, we’re not talking about Bridgerton. We’re talking about Romance in the sense of dramatic, adventurous tales from the Middle Ages. He name-drops a ton of these, in a very “You know all these books that we all know” kind of way, and then starts name-dropping individual characters from the books. I think he’s making some sort of case for how the romances that he enjoyed handle heroines better, and that’s basically all I’ve got. It’s just an incredible glimpse into the mind of somebody who was working on another level when it came to making literary connections.

Lewis was well known for being exceedingly well-read and having a near photographic memory to boot, and that obviously comes out here. Look, I don’t want to overstate it too much. Pretty much any scholar of a very specific field or genre can do this trick where they impress you with a dense list of names that they know and you don’t. But it is something to see Lewis do it over and over and over again in his personal letters, and do it across so many different fields of fire.

Now, let’s get to the part that drives me a little bit crazy. Lewis touches on a theme that you will typically see talked about constantly in connection to him, which is that Kids’ Books are Good, Actually. Except is that what he actually says here?

If you read carefully, Lewis is making a case that books like Spenser’s Faerie Queene and William Morris’ romances had become connected to children’s literature as “fairy tales” because they were old, not because they were childish. I love that illustration of putting the old furniture in the nursery, and I think this is really, really important to understand. Remember the kind of literature Lewis is talking about when he says things like, “When I became old, I stopped being afraid of being a kid and started reading kids’ books,”1 or whatever that quote is. He is talking about The Freaking Faerie Queene. He’s not talking about, and no shade intended because I absolutely love these books, Redwall or The Boxcar Children or [insert your nostalgic deep cuts here]. He specifically discusses in this letter books that written for a general audience, books which he thinks are good and therefore kids and adults should enjoy them.

That’s a really different claim than just “everybody should read children’s books,” and I think it’s really important to not miss that. It actually brings a different sense to your reading, even of something like the Chronicles of Narnia. When Lewis wrote for children, he wasn’t trying to write in a childish way. He was trying to write good books that a child might enjoy. He’s trying to do for modern children what was done for him when he picked up the Grail Romances, for example.

This is a hobby horse of mine, but (I think) for good reason. It makes me sad, if I’m very honest, to see grown adults retreating, not into good books from their childhood, but into childish books. And to make matters worse, we use Lewis to defend the decision when he actually argues that our taste in literature ought should be reaching a little higher on the shelf, both for us and our kids. Alright, moving on.

I’m going to try not to sound like a broken record with these letters, but of course, I find his humor in personal dialogue with people to be a real treat. I can’t claim that I understand these jokes because again, I’ve not read any of the books that he’s mentioning. Which will be a project for another time.

But there’s something about Lewis, and maybe this is where a little bit of the cozy myth even comes from, that brings a sense of jocularity, a bit of fun to anything he discussed. “But you see you have trod on my loud pedal by mistake” is one of the most Lewis things I’ve ever read, and quite relatable. He just like me for real, etc. He adds humor even with serious topics like his professional interests; remember, medieval literature for him was no hobby. Even to his spiritual literature contains enough humor to keep our heads un-swollen and our hearts joyful. I think our refusal to acknowledge that fun, laughter, and a bit of self-deprecation are all vitally important in our entire life often needlessly drives us away from the spiritual life. Take your religion seriously, but not yourself.

Over my lunch break on every Friday that I feel like doing so, I am going to read a random one of Lewis’ Collected Letters and riff on it for fun. You’re welcome (and I’m sorry).

Context: Lewis is corresponding with his contact at the BBC who was organizing the recording of a new set of radio talks, all of which would later be collected and adapted into Mere Christianity. In trying to coordinate the recording, Fenn was passing on the Jack the demands of “the powers that be” at the BBC for live transmissions only rather than recordings, meaning Lewis would have to travel to and from London to broadcast late evening episodes.

There are two reasons that I love this letter, and they both apply to most of Lewis’ collected letters as a total package. The first is how mundane the thing is. What we are talking about in modern terms is essentially the logistical arrangement of a livestreamed podcast. And anyone who has tried to do that sort of thing knows that they generate boring and slightly aggravated emails like children generate refrigerator drawings and snack wrappers. You see this kind of correspondence all over the Letters, so that for every spiritually uplifting two-liner sent to a dear friend, there are two to three banal logistical wrangles covering the finer points of publishing and university administration.

It’s a good reminder. Even behind the creation of such a (deservedly) legendary work as Mere Christianity there stands acres of tough plowing, annoyance, discouragement and ho-hum Tuesdays.

The second thing that I enjoy is how funny Jack Lewis was. Now, obviously some of this is going to be down to taste. My sense of humor hangs on exaggerated flights of witticism delivered deadpan, so it works for me just fine. But whether or not you chuckle, there’s something kind of adorable about how much the letter conveys Lewis’ as Something of A Character. You can almost hear the voice of a crotchety, habitual, particular older gentleman who is used to being the decisive speaker in the room, and dismisses any obstacle he can’t immediately overcome as just another symptom of society’s gradual degradation. The final line is hilariously self-deprecating (he’s obviously resigned to his fate and knows how silly he sounds), managing to make the whole thing into a joke at his own expense while still getting across his annoyance.

As an administrative functionary, I’ve received many of this sort of email written with far, far less good humor. I miss him so much.

Some of you guys are doing your best to ruin Clive Staples Lewis for future generations and it stops today.

Don’t give me that look of dramatically shocked piety, either. You know exactly what I mean.

It started out with the quotes. We all have our favorites, and there’s no real harm in that. The man’s life of thought produced a densely forested landscape of works begging to be commonplaced into oblivion. But you’re not quoting Lewis in detail. In fact, more and more of you aren’t quoting Lewis at all, but rather Pseudolewis of the Internet Age. And even when you stumble on the authentic article, it’s all so tiresome. One of the same rotating mini-canon of blandly inoffensive platitudes perfectly calculated to elicit sighs of chaste spiritual rapture from choruses of Your Moms and Your Aunts everywhere. That’s right, Patricia, you truly were meant for another world; That’s probably why your husband can’t stand you in this one.

But what do I know. I’m just a (not so) young man armed with the seething conviction that only I have fully grasped What Lewis Speaks Of.

And I am absolutely fed up watching the closest thing this Low Church Calvary Chapel Kid will ever have to a patron saint turned into a cartoon character by the collective will of legions of theater children, Bookish Types, and antiquarian softboys. I’ve begun to suspect that there is an actual spiritual campaign afoot to defang one of the greatest minds of the 20th or any century. I can only conclude that some of you people so fear the immense and cosmic truths embedded in the man’s work that you would prefer to reduce him to a bastardized Precious Moments Professor than confront him as he lived. Maybe that’s why there’s a distinct lack of Lewisiana floating around this genteel place dealing with his many less-reputable interests, like pagan literature, nicotine, Guinness, port wine, older women…and that list doesn’t even deal with his pre-conversion tastes. What’s wrong, Patricia? Not gonna restack a piquant quote from the Oxford Don on the manifold pleasures of *checks notes* peeing in a tavern after a long walk?

Ok, I need to calm down. That stuff is just aesthetics, after all. And despite how I sound right now, I’m not (only) on a mission to remind us all that C.S. Lewis wasn’t a modern-day Baptist Sunday School teacher. The deeper problem seems to be this:

C.S. Lewis was a weird man who loved Jesus passionately, and I think we’re all starting to lose the plot.

I’m afraid that Lewis the Icon is separating so far from Lewis the Man that we are in danger of creating a cargo cult where the least important elements of his life are turned into a costume for us to wear, totally neglecting the central engine that drove everything he did. When are we going to see past the Oxfordian cozy-maxxing and the romanticized Academia and recognize that Lewis himself threw most of that away to publicly embarrass himself in the name of Jesus, over and over again?

I guess it’s up to me, then. I alone can save the most well-read man of the 20th century, a unique achiever across multiple disciplines, the standard bearer of modern Christendom for better or worse, from this fate. And, for your sins, you’re going to have to watch me. You may not like it, but you’re going to at the very least confront the man as he was, to his students, friends, lovers and family. Or as much as my amateur biographic abilities will allow, anyway.

Am I qualified? Don’t make me laugh. Of course not! I mean sure, I’ve spent my life reading obsessively anything the man wrote. And I’m on a longterm campaign to assemble and tackle the Lewis Canon, a self-curated collection of all the works he discussed reading. However, I could never possibly finish this gargantuan task and have truly barely started. I have zero formalized study that applies to this subject. I’ve got more to learn than most of the real scholars on Lewis have forgotten. In fact, most of the material on this Substack will basically be me learning in public.

Will any of this stop me from opining on the man and his myths? Well, it isn’t stopping some of you.

To momentarily break this ironic schtick - Lewis’ life, his work, and his thought have been too important, to me and the rest of the Church, to watch him go out like this. I owe him too much. I’m not going to let you do this to the man who preserved my faith in my teenage years, who convinced generations that Christianity was “at least something important,”1 who stood athwart the tides of modernism and prophesied a future beyond the philosophical acid bath of post-modernism. Whether they realize it or no, the theologians and philosophers of the late 20th and early 21st century are all in conversation with Lewis. If he had his due, we would discuss him in the same sentence as The Greats, by any definition, in literature and scholarship.

And you lot are busy doing your best to label him as a children’s author. If I didn’t know better, I would smell conspiracy.

It ends today. I’m going to get to the bottom of it, I’m going to read more of and about Lewis than any of you, and you’re all coming with me. I’m going to counter the barrage of Faux-Lewis Kitsch with an answering barrage of Jack As He Was. His letters, his books (all of them), the memories of his colleagues and enemies, his life and times...I’m going to mine it all. You won’t be able to scroll without the genuine article springing to life if I’ve done my job.

Rest easy, Major Lewis. Another Verbose American is on watch.

I actually believe it’s my calling to impress on you the depth of your error before we, as a generation of Christian culture, lose touch with this great man forever. I hope you’re ready. We’re going to do it up right, with a podcast where I yell at people while they complete remedial Lewis reading, and essays where I wax pedantic about deep lore. I’m going to dig up the oddest bits of ephemera from his deepest archives and remind us all just how blessed we were that such a man lived and loved God with all his strange, wonderful, broken heart and mind. And whatever else I can come up with in my ongoing quest to make Lewis alive again in the minds and hearts of the Church. We’re going to punch straight through the trite and overplayed Lewis is So Over to a glorious and weird Lewis is So Back. And quotes. I’m going to be posting a lot of quotes.

Because, whatever you’re talking about, Lewis Speaks of This.