In preparing for a paper on teaching The Screwtape Letters for the C.S. Lewis and the Inklings Colloquium at Taylor University this Spring, I thought I had discovered the first Screwtapian letter written by someone other than C.S. Lewis. A Dr. Frederic Lyman Wells of Harvard’s Department of Hygiene wrote a series of Screwtape-styled letters in 1948 for his Presidential address to the American Psychopathological Association. I was sure this was the first copycat, but I was wrong.

Lewis’ first Screwtape Letter was published in the Anglican periodical, The Guardian, on May 2, 1941, and was followed in print on February 9, 1942. Struck by the book, mystery author Dorothy L. Sayers began a conversation through letters with Lewis. A year later, this famous creator of the Lord Whimsey sleuth stories sent Lewis an advanced copy of her book, The Man Born to Be King, accompanied by a Screwtape-styled letter where Sluckdrib is the newly assigned demon, Screwtape the mentor, and Sayers herself the patient. In literary self-deprecation, Sluckdrib’s assessment of Sayers is a kind of epistolary confession:

The effect of writing these plays upon the character of my patient is wholly satisfactory. I have already had the honor to report intellectual and spiritual pride, vainglory, self-opinionated dogmatism, irreverence, blasphemous frivolity, frequentation of the company of theatricals, captiousness, impatience with correction, polemical fury, shortness of temper, neglect of domestic affairs, lack of charity, egotism, nostalgia for secular occupations, and a growing tendency to consider the Bible as Literature.[1]

Lewis evidently delighted in the letter, suggesting that “the Sluckdrib letter is obviously intended for human consumption,” commenting on its artfulness, and closing with a hope that their own epistolary conversation will last indefinitely.[2]

Sometimes it’s fun to be wrong. This letter, which I found in a book I bought almost accidentally just last week, is clever and brilliantly written–a real treasure.

Notes: