Writer Rod Bennett believes “[C.S.] Lewis was heavily influenced by his many early experiences with ‘trashy’ literature.” He calls him a pulp fiction writer and lays out his case in four posts, quoting from Lewis’ letters where he confesses his enjoyment or exposure to Amazing Stories and Astounding, both pulp sci-fi rags, and many other works considered “trashy” by critics. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, Bennett says. In fact, it was through Narnia that Bennett found interest in Mere Christianity.
[This series is no longer on Bennett’s blog. This is a recycled post from 2006].
If Bennett’s premise raises the eyebrows of any Lewis fans, I think the trouble may be in the words “pulp” and “trashy.” I don’t think Bennett thinks Lewis’ science trilogy is trashy, but influenced by mass market stories of his day which were thought to be trashy by those who claimed to know what good and bad literature should be. But calling Lewis’ stories “pulp” may be the same as calling them “trashy” for some. Pulp fiction is lurid, tantalizing material written for commercial gain or cheap entertainment–nothing of lasting value. Again, I don’t think Bennett is arguing that Narnia and The Space Trilogy are cheap little thrillers, but that may be what comes across in the word “pulp.”
Lewis observes somewhere (one of his essays, I think) that the concept of “story” has largely vanished from literary fiction in modern times, and that most of the good storytelling is now found in “trashy” genres like Science Fiction and mysteries. In writing Science Fiction, he felt he was carrying on the venerable tradition of storytelling.
One of the people who influenced C. S. Lewis was Chesterson. He approved of pulp fiction because of its moral contents.
That’s a good link, Ori. Thanks for point that out.
Lewis said he was influenced by fiction from the science fiction magazines.
The Great Divorce is indebted to “The Man Who Lived Backwards,” which may easily be read now in Douglas Anderson’s anthology Tales Before Narnia. The expansion-idea, as the bus leaves Hell, in Divorce, was derived from Donald Wandrei’s “Colossus,” which you will find in Asimov’s massive hardcover anthology Before the Golden Age. Both stories were published in magazines of the 1930s. (“Colossus” was the cover story for the Jan. 1934 issue of Astounding.)
Mr. Bennett was blogging in findings of mine, which have appeared in CSL: The Bulletin of the New York C. S. Lewis Society (they might be available at its online archives; you can get the bibliographical details at my page at Mayville State University, under “Publications”). There I have also argued that key concepts of Lewis’s Ransom trilogy may owe something to Edmond Hamilton’s “The Accursed Galaxy” (Astounding, July ’35, and reprinted in the Asimov anthology). An incidental passage in Lewis’s Perelandra may owe something to Jack Williamson’s “Born of the Sun” (Astounding, March ’34, rpt. in the Asimov collection).
It is judt possible that the Vitons in Eric Frank Russell’s very pulpish novel Sinister Barrier had something to contribute to the conception of the devils in The Screwtape Letters.
Tolkien too was influenced by popular fiction, and admitted it – – he acknowledged a debt to Rider Haggard’s novel She, in an interview which will be reprinted in Douglas Anderson’s collection of Tolkien interviews due out this August. In my entry on 19th- and 20th-century literary influences, in J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopedia (ed. Michael Drout) I find other instances of likely ifluence on Tolkien in Haggard, as well as in H. G. Wells, John Buchan, and others.
Fans of Lewis and Tolkien would enjoy a lot of this fiction, I think, even if they aren’t sure it influenced the two authors. But it is certain that Lewis followed American pulp sf magazines for many years; see his remark in the first paragraph of his essay “On Science Fiction.”
Yes, I think I remember his remarks in that essay. Dale, what do you do to know this much about these men?
Dale is a very smart dude who teaches English at Mayville State University in North Dakota. He’s also a friend of mine.
“Dale, what do you do to know this much about these men?”
Neglect a lot of other reading, for one thing. Not only have I never read yesterday’s all-the-buzz books (The World According to Garp, Ragtime, etc), but you could make an impressive library display of “canonical” books I haven’t read (Don Quixote, Ulysses, etc).
Actually the main thing is simply following up on the records of Tolkien’s and Lewis’s reading. You look in the Collected Letters of Lewis, for example, for his comments on books he read that may have been quite well-known in their day, but that hardly anybody reads now; give one of the books he had read a reading; and what do you know, you make a “discovery.” I don’t know if anyone reads Sir Walter Scott any more, not even Ivanhoe (not his best). But the other day I was reading Scott’s Guy Mannering and found therein a bit of rhyme that might have influenced the rhyme Mr. Beaver recites, about Aslan putting things right, in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.
In a way: biiiig deal. But it is fun. And one things that does become evident, is that neither Lewis nor Tolkien wrote their great fantasy in any kind of vacuum; their reading fed into their writing all over the place. Their imaginations were saturated by the things they read, some of which deserve to be better known.
Hey, I’ve read Ivanhoe. Slow start, but good overall. The end could have been better probably.
So does this mean Tolkein and Lewis probably read Robert E. Howard?
I believe there’s evidence that Tolkien read, and liked, some of Howard’s work.
The bottom line is that de Camp gave (I think, sent through the mail) a copy of a paperback swords-and-sorcery anthology to Tolkien. The anthology contained Howard’s “Shadows in the Moonlight,” a Conan story. Tolkien’s copy of the book came up for sale recently. He had jotted some notes about a different story, by Lord Dunsany, in the same book. Tolkien presumably did read all of the stories.
Lin Carter evidently much overstates what we have warrant for believing when, in his Tolkien: A Look Behind “The Lord of the Rings,” he states that Tolkien has read the Conan stories and liked them.
For further details, see J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopedia, ed. Michael Drout, the entry on Howard.