Have I talked about this super cool bit of research and writing yet? As I look through the Pilgrim in Narnia archive, I see a couple of hints of the “Archangel Fragment,” but not much more. In a cultural moment of bad news and social media warfare, I think it is time to share this full-on, totally invested, super fun bit of nerd news.

Back in the previous decade, before pandemics like COVID, AI, and digital duels about the Rings of Power, Charlie W. Starr sent me a message. I am friends with Charlie, so it was not startling to get a message from him. For context, though, I have been following Dr. Starr’s work for almost as long as I have been blogging. I reviewed his ground-breaking book Light: C.S. Lewis’s First and Final Short Story, which launched his Lewis Handwriting System (LHC). Light and the LHC came at exactly the right time for me, and over the next few years, I tested out his handwriting analysis system in the archives. Prof. Starr is the author of a pair of intriguing books about C.S. Lewis and myth: The Faun’s Bookshelf and The Lion’s Country. He’s also a teacher, novelist, hilarious Facebook poster, and publisher of a ridiculous amount of scholarly work.

This message was in the “Famous Handwriting Expert Dr. Charlie W. Starr” mode–the kind of message that makes even a friend sit up a little straighter in their chair:

Hi Brenton,
Have you seen the angelic letter at the Bodleian, the one where Lewis attempts to write a letter from an archangel to a guardian angel (or some such)? It’s in one of the notebooks there.

As it turns out, I had seen this fragment in Lewis’s “Notebook V” (which I think of as the “Teastained Everything Book from the 1940s,” as pictured here). I had not honestly thought much about this bit of text and was not even certain if it was Lewis’s original composition or a quotation. As soon as Charlie pointed me in the right direction, though, I immediately saw what he was seeing:

C.S. Lewis once began an “Archangel Letter” as a response to The Screwtape Letters.

We need to back up a step or two–even for archive lovers, Lewis readers, and faithful visitors to A Pilgrim in Narnia.

While The Screwtape Letters was Lewis’s first bestselling book and provided him with a substantial audience for his writing, he sometimes minimized its value. He thought Perelandra was worth 20 Screwtapes and he found Screwtape painful to write. He even called it a literary “stunt.”

In the preface to a later addition to Screwtape’s archive of antispiritual advice, “Screwtape Proposes a Toast,” Lewis admitted that:

I had, moreover, a sort of grudge against my book [Screwtape] for not being a different book which no one could write. Ideally, Screwtape’s advice to Wormwood should have been balanced by archangelical advice to the patient’s guardian angel. Without this the picture of human life is lopsided.

To flaunt the deficits of one’s literary creation is a peculiar marketing device, but Lewis defends himself on his own challenge.

But who could supply the deficiency? Even if a man—and he would have to be a far better man than I—could scale the spiritual heights required, what “answerable style” could he use? For the style would really be part of the content. Mere advice would be no good; every sentence would have to smell of Heaven.

If he was bothered by the imbalance of Screwtape, why had Lewis not written The Michael Memos or Answer from an Archangel? His answer: How could a mere mortal write such a thing? Considering his own life–which was one of the uncomfortable aspects of writing Screwtape–Lewis felt that he lacked the moral and spiritual capacity to write at such a level.

Lewis died three or four years after writing these words. As far as anyone knew, he had never expected to publish anything like The Seraphim Scribbles or Gabbing with Gabriel. Even in choosing a title, we can see how un-heavenly such a collection might be–even if the advice was angelically good.

Just because it was impossible, though, doesn’t mean Lewis didn’t try.

On fol. 63v of Notebook V, Lewis writes a paragraph that begins like this:

For this, my dear, is the true delight. To take a creature whom, if the King permitted and our own will were so strangely perverted, we could with one touch of the little finger turn into nothingness, even as that creature could spoil the down on a butterfly’s wing. . . .

The first sentence of this paragraph is 8 words; the second sentence continues on to 231 words. In that second sentence, each phrase lifts the language a step closer to a heavenly diction. As the imagery tumbles out, the meaning intensifies until there is nowhere else to go–at least in the limited grammar of authors after Eden.

I have touched up the quotation a bit for clarity, and you can find references in the linked paper. And I should warn you that I am going to turn all of this upside down at some point. But I have only shared a little excerpt from the full Archangel Fragment. I want you to join us in the discovery!

After clarifying the significance of this passage, Charlie and I worked together when I was in the Bodleian. Actually, in the Bod: I was in the Reading Room checking details, confirming our transcription, and seeing this celestial experiment in its context. The paper that resulted is “The Archangel Fragment and C.S. Lewis’s World-Building Project,” published in the 2019 edition of Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal.

Blessedly, Sehnsucht journal is now open-source and available free to everyone. I provided the first few words of the Archangel Fragment as a teaser, but now you can read the entire fragment in the context of the argument Charlie and I made about C.S. Lewis as a writer about the spiritual life and creator of fictional worlds. I hope this is something you can enjoy and share–and respond to if you like–as Joe Ricke has done in his Sehnsucht piece, “The Archangel Fragment: Identifying and Interpreting C. S. Lewis’s ‘Cryptic Note.'”

“The Archangel Fragment and C.S. Lewis’s World-Building Project” (click here for the full paper)

Abstract

In this article, we argue that, from a few hints in the Bodleian archive and elsewhere, we have discovered C. S. Lewis’s singular attempt at an Archangelic sequel to The Screwtape Letters. By analyzing this small fragment and its contextual clues, we can hear the heaven-scented voice of this anti-Screwtape world. Through this discovery we can unlock hidden links among Lewis’s fiction project of the late 1930s and early 1940s and the ways he created the speculative worlds of those stories, including a spirit of playfulness and discovery, themes critical to his theological perspective, and potential links that draw his 1937–1945 work together into a cohesive whole. Finally, considering this fragment provides an opportunity to test the Lewis Handwriting Chart and open possibilities for further archival research.

https://digitalcommons.georgefox.edu/cslewisjournal/vol13/iss1/2

Right now (in October, 2024), I am teaching a Signum SPACE course on C.S. Lewis’s archival material and writing habits. Click below for more information or follow the direct link here. It may be a program that interests you in the future!

https://atomic-temporary-25985997.wpcomstaging.com/2024/09/11/ink-spots-space/