And now for your blunders. On your own showing you first of all allowed the patient to read a book he really enjoyed, because he enjoyed it and not in order to make clever remarks about it to his new friends.
I was in high school when I first read C. S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters. It had been recommended by a Sunday School teacher. The story of two devils consulting on a human’s damnation set off something like a series of small explosions in my brain. I’d never run across Christian thought anything like this before (pleasures weren’t necessarily sinful? Who knew?), and it dispensed a guilty thrill of possible heresy. It was for me the beginning of a lifelong grappling match with both Lewis himself and with orthodox Christian theology.
I’m not sure how many times I’ve read it in my life. The depressing part of revisiting it again is observing how little progress I’ve made in resisting my own personal Wormwood. To make it more uncomfortable, I understand the nature of sin and temptation better now than I did when I was in high school. The knives, therefore, are sharper.
I was also impressed, in reading the sequel essay, “Screwtape Proposes a Toast,” to note how prescient it is. Writing in the 1950s, Lewis observed trends in society and in education that have since metastasized in a way no one could have conceived of at the time.
The Screwtape Letters is a clever, masterfully written, insightful book about temptation that is actually extremely uncomfortable for anyone with any moral insight. And it gets more uncomfortable as you get older.
So I recommend it.
Of possible interest, a column I wrote many years ago for the New York C. S. Lewis Society:
Jack and the Bookshelf #2
Eric Frank Russell’s Sinister Barrier
—Zero hour had come, the fateful moment had arrived. He swung the great funnel, lined it upon the advancing orbs. . . . He let the power pour through. . . . ‘One for Mayo!’ he hollered, jigging on his seat. ‘One for Webb! One for Beach, you dirty stinking gobs of parasitic lousery!’”—
And so humans strike back at the Vitons, who are usually invisible to humans but perceptible to prepared eyes as “ultra-blue vampire” spheres. But now the Vitons have been exposed, these powers who have exploited humans for ages, promoting rumor and hysteria, inflaming race hatred and violence in the name of religion, subtly provoking humans to make war, so that the strong emotions that Vitons feed on will be stimulated. Many odd, unaccountable events, such as mysterious disappearances, sightings of fireballs, etc., turn out to have been due to Viton activity. At last, however, humans can rebel against these hidden masters.
Eric Frank Russell’s Sinister Barrier originally appeared in print in the first issue of the American magazine Unknown, dated March 1939. The author (1905-1978) was British, despite his “Yank” pulpster style. A British book version appeared in 1943 from the very obscure house of World’s Work. The American specialty house Fantasy Press released a version of the story in 1948. Sinister Barrier was issued as a British paperback, undated but probably published around 1952. A list of the books in Lewis’s personal library prepared in 1969 includes Sinister Barrier, but describes it as “n.d.” (no date). It’s possible that whichever edition Lewis owned had belonged to his wife, Joy Davidman Lewis. Lewis’s copy is not owned by Wheaton College. My guess is that the missing book was the British paper edition.
In a letter to I. O. Evans, dated 31 [sic] Sept. 1957, published in the third volume of Lewis’s Collected Letters, CSL says he’s read Sinister Barrier and finds it the “best of its kind.” What kind was that? Presumably, Lewis refers to science fiction stories in which human beings are secretly controlled or influenced by inhuman creatures.
Lewis’s own Screwtape Letters is, of course, something similar. In that book, Lewis writes from the point of view of the devils. They are invisible; they are aware of, and influence, the thoughts of human beings; they have subtly promoted conflict throughout the centuries; it’s generally in their interests to remain undetected – – all of which is true of the Vitons. Screwtape says, “We want cattle who can finally become food” (Letter 8); the Vitons feed on violent human emotion. The devils despise the “hairless bipeds” (Letter 14), while the Vitons are “‘cruel and callous sultans’” and humans their “‘half-witted slaves.’”
Is it possible that Lewis’s Screwtape Letters owes something to Sinister Barrier? Lewis did read American pulp magazines,* and it could be that copies of that issue of Unknown crossed the Atlantic soon after U. S. distribution occurred, and one of these copies came his way in time to suggest the Screwtape idea. In a letter to Warren Lewis that CSL began on 20 July 1940, Lewis describes the origin of what became The Screwtape Letters. He had been sitting in church that morning and his mind wandered. It occurred to him to write a book of supposed letters from a senior devil to a less experienced tempter. (See Lewis’s Collected Letters, Vol. 2.) The possibility of influence isn’t ruled out by this chronology.
Lewis acknowledged the stimulus of other science fiction authors, such as David Lindsay, but doesn’t seem to have admitted to conscious influence from Russell. Probably, then, it would not be true to say, “Screwtape was a Viton!” Perhaps one reason Lewis was impressed by Sinister Barrier whenever he did read it, was its thematic affinity, despite Barrier’s slam-bang pulp-mag style, with his own book, already written.
— Dale Nelson
*See my article “Is Lewis’ Ransom Trilogy Indebted to ‘Yank Magazine’ Science Fiction?” CSL: The Bulletin of the New York C. S. Lewis Society 37:4 (July-August 2006; Whole Number 414): 18-19.
Thanks for this very interesting Russell information!
Brenton Dickieson has presented the intriguing Screwtape-Ransom stories connection (Ransom entertained at one point as translator of the intercepted letters), and it occurs to me how interestingly differently angels and devils are included in Screwtape and the Ransom books – also in the context of Lewis pondering a guardian-angel companion-piece to The Screwtape Letters. Also interesting in this context is Douglas Anderson’s “Gerard F. Scriven” article in his “Lesser Known Writers” series. He writes that Scriven’s “first book, Wopsy: The Adventures of a Guardian Angel, came out in November 1943, though it began as a serial in 1940 in the children’s section of the magazine The White Fathers of Africa.” That’s the only one of what proved a series of four that I know so far, but it depicts devilish as well as gauardian-angelic activity. Is Lewis likely to have heard of, or known, the Wopsy stories at any point? They are obviously (younger) children’s stories in contrast to the Ransom books and Screwtape, but it is interesting in its degree to compare and contrast the decisions about how to tell stories involving both angels and devils.