Of Other Worlds

No one writer had quite an effect on twentieth century Christendom as C.S. Lewis, and his place seems secure in the twenty-first century, in view of the second of an unknown number of Narnia films set to release very soon, invariably followed by as many more as are cinematographically and/or financially feasible. The Chronicles of Narnia – the Narnia stories, as Lewis referred to them – is regarded as the master opus among the Lewis canon, followed closely by some of his non-fiction pieces including Mere Christianity, The Great Divorce, The Screwtape Letters, etc.

After Lewis’ death, his confidant Walter Hooper gradually released Lewis writings that had never yet seen the printer’s blocks. This collection contains some of these writings, as well as some previously-released but lesser-known pieces.  As Hooper remarks in the introduction, the special element in these pieces is Lewis’ frequent and rare references to his own fiction. If one were to consider this collection as representative of Lewis – which it is in some ways and not in others – one would be forced to conclude that Lewis had published personal reflections on his own pieces quite often. But this simply isn’t the case, which is why this collection is valuable for understanding Lewis the man and the writer.

Part I contains eight essays and one transcribed conversation of which Lewis was a part. Lewis’ main intent in most of these pieces seems to have been to correct misconceptions about his fiction and about literature in general. He goes about this in a patient but firm manner, folding in examples from his own stories, other writers’ stories, and sprinkling a dash of literary theory to keep it from being too subjective. While the essays were written – and in most cases published – as separate entities, the pieces in this section often echo one another. For example, more than once Lewis insists that stories originally came to him as a picture in the mind: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe began with a mental image of a lamppost in the middle of a snowy forest. At other points, Lewis argues from experience that the excitement caused by plot turns is not the single or primary pleasure to be derived from a story. Yet another common thread is the insistence upon the imagination as the driving force behind reading and writing stories, rather than realism or didacticism. Even his Space Trilogy, as Lewis reveals in the transcribed conversation and in a separate essay on the Science Fiction genre, began with a mental picture of a watery planet with floating landmasses and the question ‘What if?’ Neither the realism of modern space travel, nor science’s discovery of the true nature of the planets in this galaxy, nor a desire to teach a moral lesson played into Lewis’ writing process of the trilogy, and never really did in his writing in general.

Lewis also aims his substantial intellectual powers at literary critics in general. Pinpointing the critic’s task as informing readers on content and directing readers’ judgments, he castigates reviewers of his time for stepping beyond the bounds by creating elaborate scenarios of the reasons behind any given book’s composition. Lewis takes umbrage with the reviewer’s tendency to peek behind the scenes in order to foist motives upon the author that never existed in the first place. In reality, Lewis says, a critic should be a writer’s best friend in the sense that they can help show the writer where the book went right or wrong, for future writing reference. The tangible example Lewis provides is reading too much allegory into the Ring of Power in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Sometimes a ring is a ring is a ring.

The book suitably ends with a few of Lewis’ short stories, in which Lewis’ earlier theorizing materializes. To avoid spoiling the stories for potential readers, I will simply comment on the essence of some of the stories rather than the plots. What I didn’t expect to find were so many cliffhanger endings, and not simply because Lewis hadn’t yet completed the stories. I also didn’t expect Lewis’ interest in the opposite sex to be quite so much on view. Perhaps the selection process magnified these two aspects; I would rather not do Lewis an injustice by passing judgment on sensationalizing the endings of stories or being overly engrossed in the female sex.

“The Shoddy Lands” is an out-of-body excursion in the mind of a typical young lady, containing scenes recalling the wood between the worlds from The Magician’s Nephew. “Ministering Angels” is a space story with a disturbingly ironic title, which explores a potential new sexual ethicality that space colonization might produce. The final two stories, “Forms of Things Unknown” and “After Ten Years,” reveal Lewis’ literary debt to mythology, but turn certain elements of the original myths on their heads. While I didn’t enjoy each and every story, I could always appreciate Lewis’ artistry and breadth.

In this collection the voice of C.S. Lewis comes through unadulterated. Sometimes possibly too raw, since a few of the pieces were either not intended for publication, or were not fully edited by the author for publication. But as the cover itself suggests, any collection of C.S. Lewis will do well to include this book.