In my chronological reading of C.S. Lewis’ works, I have finally come to the letters where he describes how he thought of The Screwtape Letters. This letter to his brother has caused a lot of confusion over the years, and I thought it would be interesting to post a bit of a paper I am working toward publication. This is the nitty gritty of research, but still a lot of fun. How did C.S. Lewis conceive of Screwtape? Here’s the story.

Conception of The Screwtape Letters

We have some indication of how The Screwtape Letters emerged in Lewis’s imagination, but the timeline for this process is confused. According to a Saturday, July 20, 1940 letter to his brother, Major Warren Lewis (1895-1973), C.S. Lewis had listened to a speech of Hitler’s the previous night.[1] He writes to his brother that he might be weaker than some people, but “while the speech lasts it is impossible not to waver just a little.”^[2] A reader familiar with The Screwtape Letters under the threat of Nazi Germany or in the years since can see a Hitlerian haunting in the Screwtapian logic.

            While the connection makes sense to readers today, C.S. Lewis’s friend and biographer, George Sayer, never connected the Hitler speech with the birth of The Screwtape Letters. In his biography, Jack: A Life of C.S. Lewis—titled after Lewis’s nickname among his friends—Sayer records that on July 15, 1940, Lewis slept in and missed the 8:00 service at Holy Trinity Church, Headington Quarry. He had missed the previous few weeks due to fatigue and a hip injury and had hoped to get to the early service in order to avoid hymns, which he detested. Lewis went to the midday service instead and heard a sermon preached by Rev. T.E. Blieben. While Lewis found this clergyman boring, during that very sermon he was struck by an idea for the book.^[3] He wrote about the experience to his brother:

“Before the service was over—one cd. wish these things came more seasonably—I was struck by an idea for a book wh. I think might be both useful and entertaining. It wd. be called As one Devil to Another and would consist of letters from an elderly retired devil to a young devil who has just started work on his first “patient.” The idea wd. be to give all the psychology of temptation from the other point of view.”[4]

The upside-down pattern of spiritual direction—the “other point of view”—was born in that moment, and Lewis goes on to give some examples in a voice that would eventually develop Screwtape’s intellectual accent.[5]

           While both the inspiration of Hitler’s persuasive abilities and the book idea are contained within the same letter, there are some problems of basic chronology. First, George Sayer claims that Lewis attended this inspirational church service on July 15, 1940, which is actually a Monday. While this is probably a simple factual error by an author writing nearly half a century later (1988)—Lewis himself notes that it was a Sunday mass—the dating of the church service in question is variously attributed in the literature. The inaccurate July 15 date is recorded in the 1974 C.S. Lewis: A Biography  by Roger Lancelyn Green and Walter Hooper, which also states that inspiration came “following the 8 o’clock Communion,”[6] contradicting both Sayer’s and Lewis’s recollections. The above-quoted letter, which they use as a source, while not immediately clear about which Sunday he had the inspiration, is very specific that it was during an interminable church service, not after.

Writing in 2001, Kathryn Ann Lindskoog notes that, “The confusion that began with these inaccuracies persists into the 21^st century. Not one biography or study of Lewis includes the correct date; they vary from 14 July (Griffen), and 20 July (Glover) to autumn 1942 (Glaspey). In 2000 dramatist David Payne announced in conjunction with his Screwtape-based play that the idea came to Lewis in 1940 on 30 July.”[7] While trying to offer a critique of a poorly researched timeline, however, Lindskoog further confuses the historical question with this critique. 22 years before Lindskoog wrote Sleuthing C.S. Lewis, the Fount paperback of the Green-Hooper biography corrects the July 15 date to July 14, a Sunday.[8]

            Lindskoog does not give the “correct date” in Sleuthing C.S. Lewis (as she had in her previous work). We are left wondering, then, why Sunday, July 14 was a problematic date, since the letter is dated Saturday, July 20 and must, reasonably, be written after the inspiring moment. There remain problems with the July 14 date, however, as Lewis notes in his letters of that week that he has been ill around July 14, 1940.[9]

A careful reading of the July 20 letter to his brother confirms what Hooper records in his 1996 Companion and Guide: the Sunday in question is most likely July 21, 1940.[10] After Lewis describes his experience listening to Hitler as well as some of his war duties, the letter breaks off with: “Provided always that we don’t meet any Germans I anticipate some considerable enjoyment from this brotherhood in arms. –” The letter begins again with these words, “I resume at coffee-time on Sunday morning. I have been to Church for the first time for many weeks owing to the illness, and considering myself invalid enough to make a mid-day communion.”[11] Walter Hooper’s suggestion of July 21, 1940 comes from a reasonable reading of the letter as written over a two-day period, and actually follows Lindskoog’s suggestion of the same in 1988.[12] Lindskoog is incorrect, then, that “not one biography or study of Lewis includes the correct date,” since Hooper made the correction in 1996. From 1974 to 2001, then, there has been confusion over this simple aspect of the Screwtape timeline, but it appears that Sunday July 21, 1940 is indeed the best choice.

            Timing issues aside, the way this inspirational moment is used in the telling of Lewis’s story is intriguing. Hooper’s foreword, the Green and Hooper biography, and Sayer’s biography are each missing any connection to the Hitler speech.[13] Yet on their online description of the book, Harper Collins suggests that Screwtape is inspired solely by Hitler’s speech, placing the “impossible not to waver just a little” quotation immediately before “struck by an idea for a book.”^[14] It seems in the biographies, at least, that the authors will either tell an anecdote of Lewis’s inspiration while his mind wandered during a sermon (or after, as if inspired by the sermon), or point to the influence of Hitler’s speech, but not reference both. While it is easy to understand why Harper Collins publishers would make a link with Hitler on their digital book cover, how consciously the speech formed Lewis’s character of Screwtape is difficult to discern. Lewis himself never makes the link, Lewis’s friends do not recall Hitler as a key influence, and both the administrative context and character of Screwtape are markedly different. The actual influences on the content of The Screwtape Letters are varied and extensive, drawn in form and content out of the wealth of Lewis’s reading and study. Whether or not Hitler was a conscious inspiration for Screwtape, when it comes to the timeline of the Screwtape manuscript history, it is important simply to note that the idea came to Lewis on the weekend of July 19-21, 1940.[15]