1939–1942
1939–1942
National Acclaim: The Wartime Apologist
On Sunday, 22 October 1939, the University Church of St. Mary the Virgin, Oxford, was packed with students and dons. The audience was large and attentive; the mood was subdued and sombre; the preacher’s topic was “None Other Gods: Culture in War Time”; the preacher was C. S. Lewis. By all accounts, it was a powerful defence of the academic life in the face of conflict, uncertainty, and confusion, which made a deep impression on its audience. The outbreak of war made clear the way things really were, Lewis argued, forcing us to abandon optimistic illusions about ourselves and the world. Realism had returned to its throne. “We see unmistakably the sort of universe in which we have all along been living, and must come to terms with it.”[425]
No one who had been at Oxford during the Great War of 1914–1918 could fail to recall the devastating impact of the conflict on the university. Student numbers collapsed; academics went to war; college and university buildings were put to wartime use. The same pattern was repeated, though not on the same scale, at the outbreak of the Second World War. Yet new challenges emerged. The threat of bombing raids by the Luftwaffe could not be ignored. The wartime blackout plunged the entire city into a stygian darkness it had not known since the Middle Ages. Paper shortages meant that students could no longer get copies of the books they needed for tutorials.
There were immediate changes at The Kilns, as well. On 2 September, the day after the German invasion of Poland, Warnie was recalled to active military service. (Warnie had remained a member of the Regular Army Reserve of Officers since retiring from military service on 21 December 1932). He was instructed to leave immediately for Catterick in Yorkshire. Two weeks later, he was sent to France to organise troop transport and military supplies for the British Expeditionary Force with the rank of acting major.
Within hours of Warnie’s departure, The Kilns had four new occupants—schoolgirls evacuated from London. The threat of bombing raids on London led to a constant stream of “evacuees” at The Kilns, who often stayed there for several months. Lewis’s correspondence during this time notes with amusement their constant complaints that they had nothing to do. Couldn’t they read something? Lewis wondered.
But Lewis had other, more weighty matters on his mind during the first weeks of the war. The National Service (Armed Forces) Act, which came into force on 3 September 1939, enforced full conscription on all males between eighteen and forty-one residing in the United Kingdom. Lewis, then aged forty, was clearly alarmed. Would he be called up? Surely he would not have to fight in a second war? On the day after the invasion of Poland, he arranged to see George Gordon, the president of Magdalen College, who dismissed his fears. Lewis would be forty-one on 29 November—in just over two months. He had nothing to worry about.[426]
As things turned out, Lewis would be a spectator to the conflict, not an active participant. He became a member of the Local Defence Volunteers—later renamed the “Home Guard”—in the summer of 1940, spending one night in nine “mooching about the most depressing and malodorous parts of Oxford.”[427] He felt somewhat ridiculous making his rounds from 1.30 to 4.30 in the morning with a rifle on his shoulder, comparing himself to constable Dogberry in Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing.[428] However, he came to value the peace and seclusion of patrolling Oxford’s cool and deserted streets in the early summer mornings.
8.1 The Oxford Home Guard on parade in 1940. The parade is crossing The Plain, from which it would pass over Magdalen Bridge on its way to the centre of Oxford.
Lewis’s correspondence of the early 1940s paints a picture familiar to all students of wartime Britain—the need for economy, shortages of food and essential goods, taking in displaced people, and deep anxiety about the future. Lewis’s own ways of dealing with these issues were occasionally comical—for example, his “war-time economy” of drinking tea rather than Madeira when discussing Dante with friends. With Warnie away, Lewis now worked in the smaller of his two sitting rooms at Magdalen College, as it was cheaper to heat, using up less coal.[429]
Lewis’s Friendship with Charles Williams
One result of the war was the flowering of what would be one of Lewis’s most significant friendships. On 7 September 1939, Oxford University Press evacuated its London offices for the duration of the war, and relocated its staff to Oxford. Charles Williams thus moved to Oxford, leaving his wife and son behind in Hampstead. With Lewis’s encouragement and support, Williams now became a part of the Oxford scene, and a regular member of the Inklings. The Faculty of English was short of lecturers, and was easily persuaded by Lewis that Williams was the answer to their prayers. In the end, Williams’s lectures were regarded as something of a sensation, attracting large audiences and high praise in about equal measure.
The Inklings were changed irreversibly within a year of Williams’s arrival. Up to that point, the dominant figures had been Lewis and Tolkien. Perhaps it was inevitable that Williams—already with a string of novels, poems, plays, and biographies to his credit—would come to play a role of no small prominence within the group, disturbing its slightly precarious equilibrium. Tolkien, who had counted Lewis as his closest friend from 1925–1940, realised that Williams had now come between them, and interpreted this as a sign of alienation between himself and Lewis.[430] Yet on balance, there is little doubt that Williams was good for the Inklings, and the Inklings good for Williams.
Things were also changing at The Kilns. Maureen married Leonard Blake, a music teacher at Worksop College, Nottinghamshire, in August 1940. Lewis disliked Blake, dismissing him as “a very small, dark, ugly, silent man who hardly ever utters a word.”[431] Yet Leonard and Maureen Blake would subsequently show considerable kindness to Lewis at critical points in his life, particularly during the final years of Mrs. Moore’s life, and in helping care for Joy Davidman’s two sons in the late 1950s.
8.2 The novelist and poet Charles Williams (1886–1945).
On 16 August 1940, Warnie—then based at the Supply Technical Training and Mobilization Centre, Wenvoe Camp, Cardiff—was taken off the active service list, and returned to the Regular Army Reserve of Officers. It is not clear precisely what happened to Warnie’s military career, which appears to have imploded at a time when the British army was trying to recover from the near catastrophe of Dunkirk, and needed experienced officers to help with its reconstruction. Warnie’s military record offers no explicit reason for his discharge, while leaving its readers wondering what is to be read into its terse statements. Inevitably, given his subsequent history, many will suspect that alcohol addiction played a part in it. Warnie returned to Oxford, where he joined the Oxford Home Guard, with the rank of private soldier. The two Lewis brothers were together again.
Other changes were taking place around Lewis. Oxford University terminated all arrangements for paying those who gave intercollegiate lectures “for the duration.” To his irritation, Lewis found that he would be £200 a year worse off. He would still give his usual lectures, of course, despite not being paid for them.
Magdalen College moved to a wartime economy, making savings wherever possible. The herd of deer in Magdalen Grove was culled. Fellows were offered haunches of venison for their private use. Mrs. Moore’s attempts to cook it “filled the whole house with the most intolerable stench”; yet Lewis pronounced the end product to be “excellent.”[432]
A letter to Warnie (at that point still in France) of November 1939 makes it clear that the Inklings were continuing to meet and discuss one another’s works. After dining together at the Eastgate Hotel (just across the street from Magdalen), they enjoyed “a really first-rate evening’s talk” about three works in progress from members:
The bill of fare afterwards consisted of a section of the new Hobbit book from Tolkien, a nativity play from Williams (unusually intelligible for him, and approved by all), and a chapter out of the book on the Problem of Pain from me.[433]
The first work mentioned is an early draft of a section of The Lord of the Rings; the second is Charles Williams’s play The House by the Stable; the third is Lewis’s work The Problem of Pain, which he had begun to draft around this time.
Lewis’s role in the writing of Tolkien’s “new Hobbit book” cannot be overlooked. Too often, Lewis is seen simply as an author in his own right. The story of the completion of this classic work of English literature allows us to see him in quite a different light—as a literary midwife, who encouraged others to produce their masterpieces. In this case, some critics suggest, Lewis helped bring about a classic that would be greater than anything he himself would write.
Lewis the Literary Midwife: Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings
Every writer needs encouragement to write, both in terms of discernment of possibilities and getting the job done. Charles Williams, for example, relied on his wife, Florence, to keep him focussed on his writing tasks. His evacuation to Oxford during the war removed this stimulus to write. In April 1945, Williams wrote to Florence, lamenting her absence from his Oxford exile: “Why are you not here to give me a cup of tea, & then make me do some work? An infinite distaste of writing is upon me.”[434] Like so many before and after him, Williams needed a mentor to help him write.
Tolkien had the same problem. He was a man of immense creativity who nevertheless needed someone to affirm him in what he was writing—and, more important, persuade him to finish it. Tolkien was inundated with responsibilities as an examiner, and found these intruded on his writing time. The early sections of Tolkien’s first novel, The Hobbit, were drafted quickly between 1930 and 1931, until he reached the section dealing with the death of Smaug the dragon. Then he ran out of creative steam—like Richard Wagner writing his Ring of the Nibelungs, who left his Siegfried under his Linden Tree, unable to work out where to take things next. Tolkien produced a rough draft of the ending, and left it there. As his relationship with Lewis developed, Tolkien finally plucked up the courage to ask Lewis to read it, and give him his opinion of it. Lewis declared that he liked it, while having some misgivings about its ending.
The eventual publication of The Hobbit was the result of a series of fortunate accidents. Tolkien had lent the typescript of The Hobbit to one of his students, Elaine Griffiths (1909–1996). Griffiths in turn drew the text to the attention of Susan Dagnall, a former Oxford student now working for the London publisher George Allen & Unwin. After securing a copy of the typescript, Dagnall passed it on to publisher Stanley Unwin for his evaluation. Unwin in turn asked his ten-year-old son, Rayner, to read it. Rayner gave it such an enthusiastic review that Unwin decided to publish it. The contract’s deadline for submission gave Tolkien the motivation he so badly needed to complete the writing. On 3 October 1936, the work was complete.
The Hobbit appeared on 21 September 1937. Its initial print run of 1,500 copies sold out quickly. Realising the potential of this new and unexpected market for hobbits, Allen & Unwin pressed Tolkien to write another “Hobbit-Book”—quickly. As Tolkien had no intention whatsoever of writing a sequel to his book, this demand proved to be something of a challenge.
After writing an opening chapter—“A Long-Expected Party”—with relative ease, Tolkien began to lose momentum and enthusiasm. The plot became more complex, and its tone darker. His ambition to write a more sophisticated mythological work kept intruding. In the end, the writing process stalled. Like his self-referential character Niggle, Tolkien found that he was better at painting leaves than trees. Fine detail delighted him, especially where it concerned the minting of new myths and strange words; broad narrative structure began not so much to weary him as to overwhelm him.
Tolkien simply could not sustain his enthusiasm for the project in the midst of a busy academic life. His perfectionism, the burden of family life and academic responsibilities, and his own preference for working on his invented languages rather than writing prose, all combined to delay and defer his new “Hobbit-Book.” Discouraged, he turned to other matters.
Only one other person seemed to be interested in the work: Lewis. After Lewis’s death, Tolkien emphasised the critical role that Lewis had played in keeping him working on The Lord of the Rings:
The unpayable debt that I owe to [Lewis] was not “influence” as it is ordinarily understood, but sheer encouragement. He was for long my only audience. Only from him did I ever get the idea that my “stuff” could be more than a private hobby. But for his interest and unceasing eagerness for more I should never have brought The L. of the R. to a conclusion.[435]
Lewis showed considerable personal commitment to encouraging Tolkien in his literary endeavours around this time. He made a nighttime visit in December 1939 to Tolkien’s home in North Oxford while Tolkien’s wife, Edith, was recovering from an operation in the Acland nursing home. The wartime blackout made this journey hazardous. Lewis walked north along Longwall Street and Holywell Street “almost as one does in a dark room,” struggling to find his bearings. When he passed Keble College, things got easier, and he eventually arrived at Tolkien’s home at 20 Northmoor Road. They spent the evening “drinking gin and lime juice,” discussing Tolkien’s “new Hobbit” and Lewis’s “Problem of Pain.”[436] By the time Lewis headed back to Magdalen at midnight, the moon had risen, making his homeward journey much easier than the outward.
By the beginning of 1944, Tolkien’s writing had stalled again. Like Niggle, he had become bogged down in details. He had lost confidence both in the project and in his own ability to complete it. The contrast with Lewis at this point is striking. Lewis was primarily a storyteller, who conceived images of Narnia which guided his pen. A fluent writer, Lewis did not unduly worry about resolving the inconsistencies that abound in the Chronicles of Narnia. Although Tolkien was also a storyteller, he took his role as a “subcreator” with great seriousness, devising complex histories and languages, and populating his novels with characters whose roots went deep into the story of Middle-earth.
Inevitably, Tolkien found himself overwhelmed with the need to maintain consistency, ensuring the proper correlation of his complicated and detailed backstory and the written narrative. Each leaf on the “tree of stories” had to be just right—a process which inevitably made the achievement of consistency triumph over imaginative subcreation. Tolkien became trapped in his own complex world, unable to complete it because of his anxieties about the coherence and consistency of what he had already written. His fussiness threatened to overwhelm his creativity.
A turning point was reached when Tolkien lunched with Lewis on 29 March 1944. Although Lewis does not mention or give any details of this meeting in his correspondence, it clearly gave Tolkien a new injection of energy and enthusiasm. Tolkien began to read chapters to Lewis at their private meetings on Monday mornings, and was encouraged by Lewis’s reactions—indeed, at points, Lewis was reduced to tears.[437] Sections of the work began to feature regularly at Inklings meetings, often generating high praise from some. But not all. Hugo Dyson took an intense dislike to the book, and regularly attempted to prevent its being read at the meetings. In the end, Lewis often had to intervene. “Shut up, Hugo! Come on, Tollers!”
If this book were mainly about Tolkien, there would be much more to be said about the genesis and development of the text of The Lord of the Rings. But it is not. The point to be made is that Lewis was a willing and dedicated supporter and encourager of others—just as others encouraged him. We have already noted how the Inklings discussed Lewis’s ideas about the “Problem of Pain.” This book is widely seen as marking the beginning of Lewis’s rise to fame as a Christian apologist. So what is this book, and how did it come to be written?
The Problem of Pain (1940)
The Problem of Pain was Lewis’s first published work of “Christian apologetics”—the business of identifying, understanding, and answering concerns and difficulties that ordinary people have about the Christian faith, and also demonstrating its power to explain things and satisfy the deepest longings of the human heart. The book’s best-known sentence perhaps fails to do justice to the overall argument: “God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”[438] Although this is a subsidiary point, it is often incorrectly presented as if it were the total sum of Lewis’s approach.
Lewis opens the book by recalling the period of his life when he was an atheist. As he later commented, if you are to “warn others against something,” you must “have loved it once” yourself.[439] There are hints everywhere in this opening chapter of the themes raised, but not answered, in Spirits in Bondage and Dymer—human suffering in the face of a seemingly deaf heaven and a silent God. Lewis sketches the universe he once believed in himself—a futile place of darkness and cold, of misery and suffering. He invokes the spectacle of civilizations pointlessly rising and passing away, of a human race that science condemns to a final extinction, and of a universe that is bound to die. Speaking as he once spoke twenty years earlier, he concludes that “either there is no spirit behind the universe, or else a spirit indifferent to good and evil, or else an evil spirit.”[440]
But is it really that straightforward, he muses? “If the universe is so bad, or even half so bad, how on earth did human beings ever come to attribute it to the activity of a wise and good Creator?” Having argued for the intrinsic reasonableness of faith, Lewis then turns to the problem that is posed by pain: “If God were good, He would wish to make His creatures perfectly happy, and if God were almighty He would be able to do what He wished. But the creatures are not happy. Therefore God lacks either goodness, or power, or both.”[441] Yet with his characteristic Socratic approach, Lewis then observes that the terms being used—such as good, almighty, and happy—need careful examination. If these words bear the meanings of everyday language, there is indeed a serious problem. But what if they do not? What if we have to learn their special meanings, and see things in their light?
For Lewis, people too easily confuse goodness with kindness, and so approach the problem of pain from a false perspective. The “goodness” of God means that we must see ourselves as true objects of his love, not as objects of an indifferent divine welfare project. There are, Lewis suggests, four ways of thinking about this love of God for us: the love of an artist for what has been created, the love of a human being for an animal, a father’s love for a son, and a man’s love for a woman. After exploring the notion of God’s love for humanity, Lewis expresses his wonder at “why any creatures, not to say creatures such as we, should have a value so prodigious in their Creator’s eyes.” Our problem is that we want to be left alone, not loved as passionately as this. “You asked for a loving God: you have one.”[442]
Lewis insists that these notions must be understood in terms of the Christian way of thinking—which for Lewis (as for Augustine and Milton before him) involves the recognition of human sinfulness and rebellion. Lewis’s own spiritual journey, in which the conquest of his fixation on independence is prominent, spills over into his analysis. Indeed, there are points at which everything fits together so well for Lewis that he does not quite see the need to explain them in more detail to his readers. This perhaps helps us understand the occasional stalling of the argument, its change of mood and pace, the logical shortcuts, and the imaginative leaps which are not fully bridged by argument.
Lewis then makes an essentially Christological move, hinted at in the epigram he chose to place at the beginning of his work: George MacDonald’s remark that “the Son of God suffered unto the death, not that men might not suffer, but that their sufferings might be like His.” The incarnation of God in Christ, for Lewis, must be the focus of a Christian answer to the problem of pain:
The world is a dance in which good, descending from God, is disturbed by evil arising from the creatures, and the resulting conflict is resolved by God’s own assumption of the suffering nature which evil produces. The doctrine of the free Fall asserts that the evil which thus makes the fuel or raw material for the second and more complex kind of good is not God’s contribution but man’s.[443]
In a later section of the book, Lewis considers what may be learned from suffering. This is not understood to be a defence of God in the face of suffering, but an attempt to ask how we can work with suffering. Suffering can show us when we take wrong turns, or do bad things. It can bring home to us the frailty and transience of our existence, and challenge our belief that we can get by on our own. Pain thus helps to shatter the illusion that “all is well,” allowing God to plant “the flag of truth within the fortress of a rebel soul.” And it can help us make good choices. This might be taken to imply that Lewis sees pain as some kind of “moral instrument” to make us better people (a slightly puzzling criticism later levelled against him by his Oxford colleague Austin Farrer). But the context suggests otherwise.
The book has many strengths, not least its elegant style, clear exposition, and Socratic analysis of the concepts that lead to the formulation of the “problem of pain.” Yet the reader is left wondering if there is a disconnection between the intellect and the emotions. In a letter to his brother, Warnie, written while working on the book, Lewis seems to suggest that the experience of pain in “actual life” has no bearing on the essentially intellectual issue under discussion:
N.B. If you are writing a book about pain and then get some actual pain . . . it does not either, as the cynic wd. expect, blow the doctrine to bits, nor, as a Christian wd. hope, turn into practice, but remains quite unconnected and irrelevant, just as any other bit of actual life does when you are reading or writing.[444]
Lewis here seems to suggest that the experience of pain is irrelevant to any discussion about its significance. Intellectual thought is presented as detached from the world of experience. It is a curious statement, reflecting an equally curious thought. Lewis’s highly intellectual approach to the problem of pain seems to be totally disconnected from the experience of pain. So what if Lewis were to experience suffering, either himself or in someone whom he loved, whose pain he felt as his own? There is a sense in which The Problem of Pain laid the groundwork for the emotional maelstrom of A Grief Observed. But we shall have more to say of this later in our narrative.
Dedicated to the Inklings, The Problem of Pain gradually became accepted as a classic Christian response to the problem of pain. Its faults are well known—its overstatements, simplifications, and omissions. Yet many of its readers found a voice that was sympathetic to their concerns, and reassuring in its responses. It won Lewis many admirers, but did not make Lewis famous. Yet it proved to be a critical link in the chain that soon led to the emergence of that fame. And Lewis was wise enough to know that fame could be destructive.
Did Lewis anticipate this development? More important, did he fear it? Would he be able to cope with his looming celebrity status—or would it destroy him in an “orgy of egoism”? An important development in Lewis’s personal life around this time is probably linked to this concern. In 1941, Lewis wrote to Father Walter Adams (1869–1952), an Anglican High Churchman with a reputation as an outstanding spiritual director and confessor, asking if he would be open to offering him some spiritual guidance and direction. Adams was based at the Society of St. John the Evangelist (often referred to as the “Cowley Fathers”), a ten-minute walk from Magdalen College.
In early 1930, Lewis had declared that Greeves was his “only real Father Confessor.”[445] This comment, possibly written before Lewis’s conversion, refers to Lewis’s long habit of disclosing personal confidences to Greeves, which he felt he could share with no one else. Yet as Christianity came to play a larger role in Lewis’s life, he may well have felt the need to have a more spiritually discerning confidant. Greeves, as far as I can see, never learned about Adams.[446]
Lewis made his first confession to Adams in the final week of October 1941, anxious about an “orgy of egoism.”[447] The two would meet every Friday thereafter. We know virtually nothing of their conversations, other than of Adams’s persistent emphasis on the “three patiences”—“patience with God, patience with my neighbour, with oneself.”[448]
Adams was a subtle and important influence in moving Lewis away from the Low Churchmanship he had inherited from the Church of Ireland, and helping him discover the importance of liturgy and the regular reading of the Psalter as an aid to personal devotion.[449] Lewis made it clear from the outset that he felt Adams was “much too close to Rome,” and that he “couldn’t follow him in certain directions.”[450] Yet Adams became a critical spiritual friend to Lewis, playing a low-profile role in helping Lewis cope, initially with fame, and then with its aftermath.
Lewis’s Wartime Broadcast Talks
The war brought changes to many British institutions, including the state broadcaster, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). It became clear by the middle of 1940 that the BBC would play a key role in maintaining national morale. A shortage of newsprint led to an increasing number of people relying on BBC radio transmissions for information and entertainment. On 1 September 1939, the BBC had ceased regional radio broadcasts,[451] and concentrated all its resources on a single domestic radio broadcasting service, now known as the “Home Service.” Religion was widely recognised to be an integral and important aspect of the national fabric, and the BBC saw itself as having a duty to offer both religious instruction and inspiration in the darker moments of the war.
The rise of radio led to certain “voices” becoming popular and highly recognisable during the war. C. H. Middleton (1886–1945) became the BBC’s “voice of gardening,” and authored the wartime bestseller Digging for Victory. Dr. Charles Hill (1904–1989), the “radio doctor,” became the “voice of medicine.” But there was no “voice of faith”—a sensible, engaging, and authoritative voice that commanded confidence and elicited affection.
And such a voice was sorely needed. Partly to solve a scheduling problem, the BBC Religious Programmes Department was launching a new series of “broadcast talks” on religious themes. But who could deliver them? Early in 1941, Dr. James Welch, a commissioning editor at the BBC, began to search for a voice that could speak to the spiritual anxieties and concerns of the British people during the war. It proved a difficult task.
One particular difficulty was the tensions that were then beginning to emerge between the BBC and the leadership of the various Christian churches.[452] The BBC saw itself as a national broadcaster, speaking to the people of Great Britain. It did not see itself as the voice of the established Church of England. The churches tended to be concerned with safeguarding their own interests, being preoccupied with congregational attendances and questions of their respective social status. While national church leaders—such as William Temple (1881–1944), Archbishop of Canterbury—were welcomed as speakers on the BBC, it became clear that the BBC began to prefer speakers who would not speak from any denominational agenda or platform, but would simply present a transdenominational vision of Christianity to the nation as a whole. But who could do this?
Then Welch came across a book by an Oxford don—reassuringly, a layman. He liked what he read. The book was The Problem of Pain. Lewis could not have known it, but the “mere Christianity” that he was increasingly advocating—though not then by that name—was precisely what the BBC was looking for.[453] Lewis was a layman, and would thus be seen as being outside the power structures (and power struggles) of the denominations. Welch noted that Lewis wrote well. But could he speak? What would he be like in front of a microphone? Would he end up being yet another ponderous and pretentious “churchy” voice, whose tone would disincline people to listen to its content?
There was only one way to find out. Welch had never met Lewis, but decided to take a risk. He wrote to Lewis, complimenting him on The Problem of Pain, and inviting him to speak for the BBC. Would Lewis consider speaking on a topic such as “The Christian Faith As I See It—by a Layman”? Lewis could be sure of a “fairly intelligent audience of more than a million.”[454]
Lewis replied cautiously. He would like to give such a series of talks, but would have to wait until the university vacation.[455] Welch then passed Lewis over to his colleague Eric Fenn (1899–1995), who would handle the arrangements from that point onwards.[456]
In the meantime, Lewis found himself becoming involved in another area of war work—speaking at Royal Air Force (RAF) stations. This suggestion came from W. R. Matthews, dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral, London, who had a fund at his disposal which he proposed to use to establish a visiting lectureship. The RAF was at this point attracting some of the finest of the country’s young men, and Matthews wanted to make sure that they had access to Christian teaching and encouragement. He had no doubt about whom he wanted to fill this role. He proposed that Lewis should be offered the position.
Maurice Edwards, chaplain in chief of the RAF, agreed to put this proposal to Lewis, and travelled to Oxford to discuss it with him. Edwards was not entirely sure that Lewis was the right person for this job. Lewis was used to teaching the best university students in Britain. How would he cope with “plodders”—young men who had left school at sixteen, and who had no intention of doing anything even remotely academic? Lewis probably had similar misgivings. Nevertheless, he accepted the offer. It would, he believed, be good for him, forcing him to translate his ideas into “uneducated language.”
Lewis’s first speaking engagement was at No. 10 Operational Training Unit, a Royal Air Force training base for the bomber command based at Abingdon, about a fifteen minute’s drive south of Oxford. Afterwards, Lewis took a gloomy view about his talks. “As far as I can judge they were a complete failure.”[457] But they weren’t, and the RAF asked for more. Gradually, Lewis learned how to adapt his style and vocabulary to meet the needs of an audience he had never encountered before.
Lewis’s reflections on how a speaker should “learn the language of the audience” are contained in an important lecture given to clergy and youth leaders in Wales in 1945. The lecture bristles with insights and wisdom, clearly learned the hard way—through experience. Lewis seemed to regard two points as especially important: discovering how ordinary people speak, and translating your ideas into their way of speaking.
We must learn the language of our audience. And let me say at the outset that it is no use at all laying down a priori what the “plain man” does or does not understand. You have to find out by experience.[458]
It is not hard to imagine Lewis engaged in discussion and debate with a hard-nosed, no-nonsense, tough-talking aircrew, learning how his academic style did not connect with them—and resolving to do something about it.
You must translate every bit of your Theology into the vernacular. This is very troublesome, and it means you can say very little in half an hour, but it is essential. It is also of the greatest service to your own thought. I have come to the conviction that if you cannot translate your thoughts into uneducated language, then your thoughts were confused. Power to translate is the test of having really understood one’s own meaning.[459]
Lewis would put into practice in his broadcast talks precisely the ideas he learned the hard way through lecturing for the RAF.
In the meantime, the arrangements for the broadcast talks were going ahead smoothly. As Lewis had requested, these would take place in August 1941, deep in the university vacation, when he could fully devote his thoughts and time to them.[460]
By the middle of May, Lewis had more or less worked out his approach. The talks would be apologetic, not evangelistic, preparing the ground for the gospel, rather than explicitly presenting it. Lewis decided he would offer a “praeparatio evangelica rather than evangelium” which would “attempt to convince people that there is a moral law, that we disobey it, and that the existence of a Lawgiver is at least very probable.”[461] But Lewis still had to face the ordeal of a microphone test. Would his voice come over well on the air?
In May 1941, Lewis sat down in front of a microphone to undertake a “voice test” at the BBC. It was, he remarked, a surprise to hear himself speak. “I was unprepared for the total unfamiliarity of the voice.”[462] But the BBC was satisfied. There would be no difficulty in understanding Lewis on air. In the end, some complained about his “Oxford accent,” and asked him to change it. Lewis retorted that he wasn’t aware of having any accent. Anyway, if he changed it, it would just end up being a different accent. Why make such a fuss about “simply accidental phenomena”?[463]
Yet changes continued to be made. Eric Fenn remarked that Lewis’s proposed title for the series of talks was “a little dull.”[464] An alternative title was eventually agreed upon: “Inside Information.” The dates and titles of the four talks were to be:
6 August: “Common Decency”
13 August: “Scientific Law and Moral Law”
20 August: “Materialism or Religion”
27 August: “What Can We Do about It?”[465]
However, two further changes had to be made. First, Leslie Stannard Hunter, bishop of Sheffield, who was due to give the next series of four talks following Lewis, asked if he could delay the series by a week, due to previous commitments. This left the BBC with a week without its regular religion talk. Fenn asked Lewis if he would fill this vacant slot by doing a fifth session. Realising that it was too late for Lewis to write an additional talk, Fenn suggested he might like to respond to questions raised by listeners.[466] Lewis agreed to this proposal.
The final change concerned the title of the talks. “Inside Information” was criticised in an internal BBC memorandum in July as “rather unseemly.”[467] After some hasty consultations, the title was revised to “Right and Wrong: A Clue to the Meaning of the Universe?”[468] In the view of many, this revised title was far better than any of its predecessors.
Although Lewis scripted all these talks himself, the final versions were developed in dialogue with his producer, Eric Fenn. At times, this seems to have led to a certain coolness between the two, particularly when Lewis felt that Fenn’s proposed changes were intrusive. However, Lewis eventually seems to have realised the value of Fenn’s experienced ear. What Lewis had not appreciated was that, unlike a book, a radio talk has to be understood the first time around.
The first talk was transmitted live from Broadcasting House in London at 7.45 on the evening of Wednesday, 6 August 1941, immediately following a fifteen-minute news broadcast at 7.30. Every broadcaster knows that the “slots” most likely to attract large audiences are those following popular items—and during wartime, news broadcasts attracted a considerable following. If Lewis had any hopes that his programme might benefit from the large audiences that news broadcasts traditionally attracted, he would have been disappointed. This particular news broadcast was aimed at listeners in Nazi-occupied Norway, who could pick up the BBC on 200 kHz long wave. It was in Norwegian.
Yet despite this far-from-ideal beginning, Lewis secured and retained a large audience. The rest, as they say, is history. Lewis became the “voice of faith” for the nation, and his broadcast talks achieved classic status. Fenn was delighted with their success. Although he commented that the second talk was somewhat “turgid,” Fenn wisely sugared this pill by inviting Lewis to contribute a second series, to be broadcast for the Home Service on Sundays in January and February 1942.[469]
Once more, these talks proved enormously successful. After reading the draft scripts in December 1941, Fenn declared them to be “first class,” especially praising the “clarity” of their expression and the “inexorableness” of their argument.[470] Lewis developed these talks in dialogue with four clergy colleagues, wishing to ensure that he spoke for Christianity as a whole, rather than simply from his own perspective. The clergy were Eric Fenn (Presbyterian); Dom Bede Griffiths (Roman Catholic); Joseph Dowell (Methodist); and an unknown clergyman of the Church of England, who may possibly have been Austin Farrer, by then an Oxford colleague of Lewis’s.
8.3 Broadcasting House, London, around 1950, from which Lewis’s wartime talks were transmitted. The church to the right of the picture is All Souls Church, Langham Place, which rose to fame through the ministry of John Stott (1921–2011).
We can see Lewis’s idea of “mere Christianity” being put into practice—a consensual, nonclerical, transdenominational vision of the Christian faith.[471] Yet even at this stage, it was clear that Lewis’s conception of the Christian faith was rather individualist, even solitary. There was little here about the church, the community of faith, or Christianity in relation to society. Lewis depicted Christianity as something that shapes the individual’s way of thinking, and hence, way of behaving. Yet there is little sense of Christianity being embedded in the life of communities. Lewis felt completely at home talking about sin, the natural law, or the Incarnation. But he had little to say about the institution of the church—a point noted with particular concern by some Roman Catholic listeners.[472]
In these talks, Lewis moved from a tentative exploration of the reasonableness of faith to a more committed statement of “What Christians Believe.” These generated a considerable correspondence from listeners, which Lewis found difficult to manage, not least because so many of his most gushing admirers and trenchant critics alike seemed to expect immediate and enormously detailed personal responses to their letters.
On 13 July 1942, Geoffrey Bles published the first two series of talks with the title Broadcast Talks. Lewis contributed a short preface, which is a shortened form of the introduction to the broadcast talk on 11 January 1942, in which Lewis reintroduces himself to his listeners.
I gave these talks, not because I am anyone in particular, but because I was asked to do so. I think they asked me chiefly for two reasons: firstly, because I am a layman, not a clergyman; and secondly, because I had been a non-Christian for many years. It was thought that both these facts might enable me to understand the difficulties that ordinary people feel about the subject.[473]
Lewis followed this with a further series of eight talks, this time to be broadcast over the BBC Forces’ Network.[474] Thanks to his experience with the RAF, Lewis was by now much more comfortable with pitching his talks at a suitable level for such an audience. Indeed, Lewis spent the week before the first talk speaking at an RAF station in Cornwall. These talks were delivered on the theme of “Christian Behaviour” on eight consecutive Sunday afternoons, from 20 September to 8 November 1942. But there was a problem. Lewis had assumed that each of the eight talks would last fifteen minutes, as in the previous series. After having drafted his talks accordingly, he then discovered that in fact he was only to be allowed ten minutes for each.[475] Drastic cuts proved necessary: 1,800 words got pared down to 1,200.
Finally, after frequent requests to broadcast again, Lewis agreed to give a fourth series of seven talks on the BBC Home Service from 22 February to 4 April 1944. On this occasion, Lewis was permitted to prerecord three of the talks, each of which was published two days later in the BBC’s weekly magazine, The Listener. Lewis had pleaded to be allowed to record some talks in advance, since the talks were scheduled for transmission at 10.20 p.m., which would not allow Lewis to get back to Oxford that same evening.
By the end of the series, Lewis was a national celebrity. It was clear that the reactions of listeners varied considerably, from near-adulation to total contempt. But as Lewis pointed out to Fenn, this was a reaction to his subject matter, not him as a speaker. “It is an old story, isn’t it. They love, or hate.”[476]
Lewis’s four series of broadcast talks would later be reworked into the classic Mere Christianity (1952), which retains much of the structure, content, and tone of the original radio scripts. Mere Christianity is now regarded as Lewis’s finest work of Christian apologetics. In view of its importance, we shall consider it in more detail in the next chapter. But first we must consider another popular work which gained Lewis an even wider readership in Great Britain, and which triumphantly introduced him to a North American audience—the satanic parody known as The Screwtape Letters.