A Pilgrim in Narnia

Yatta! Chronological Reading of C.S. Lewis Complete

Posted on March 9, 2016 by Brenton Dickieson

It is not every day that I resort to an animated gif to describe my thought processes. But last night, as my 11 year old son, Nicolas, was perfecting his shi ho hai at karate, I finished reading everything that C.S. Lewis (or his literary executors) ever published, in the order it was written.

“Yatta” is a Japanese word I learned when I lived in Nagano. It means “I did it!”, and Hiro from Heroes is the best image I’ve ever seen of how it feels to complete the project. You can see the Japanese word for it on the right in the little dialogue bubble in the 9Wonders comic book.

This little accomplishment represents just over 3 years of going through Lewis’ letters, poems, stories, reviews, essays, sermons, and books one by one, from beginning to end. I begin with his precocious childhood letters to Papy and ended with his last letter (to a young Narnian fan) and the final essay he wrote, “We Have No Right to Happiness.” Last night, as I was watching 17 miniature samarai go through their katas, Lewis had a heart attack in bed, spilling his tea as he fell to the floor. His brother, Warren, found him and was with him when he breathed his last.

I will write a proper post about the project anon. I think it is a valuable project that you can do as well.

By my very rough count it is about 60 books worth of reading, or about 21,000 pages, 5,000,000-6,000,000 words. Considering this corpus is made up of some of the most important Christian literature in the 20th century, foundational work in literary history and criticism, classic SF and dystopian books, and a series of fairy tales that changed children’s literature forever–not to mention thousands of letters that shaped the spiritual lives of friends and strangers–it is not a bad legacy of the pen.

Lewis’ work ranges in difficulty from the wondrous ease of Narnia to the complex literary criticism and metrical analyses of Selected Literary Essays. In length, many of Lewis’ books are breezy novella-length pieces like The Great Divorce. His brevity was a real gift, but The Allegory of Love and the snappily titled English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama are weighty books. His longest books are actually the letters collected by Walter Hooper into three volumes (with a fourth in the works). There are by my count 3,274 letters in print, plus another dozen or so unpublished letters that have circulated. Though this probably isn’t even 1/3 of the letters Lewis sent in his his days, it is more than 3,500 pages of reading.

Alongside this reading I also did extra digging into apologetics, epistolary fiction, the 16th century and the reign of the Tudors, WWI and WWII, the Oxbridge educational systems, literary theory, and etymology. Reading Lewis caused me to discover or rediscover Jane Austen, Jonathan Swift, Milton, Dante, Virgil, Homer, Samuel Richardson, H.G. Wells, G.K. Chesterton, George MacDonald, T.S. Eliot, F. Anstey, Arthur C. Clarke, Brian Aldiss, John Christopher, E.R. Eddison, George Orwell, Charles Williams, Owen Barfield, Dorothy L. Sayers, Virginia Woolf, as well as Arthurian traditions and the metaphysical poets. I also read much of Warren Lewis’ diary, and letters by Joy Davidman, Dorothy Sayers, and J.R.R. Tolkien. Finally, once I had a good image of Lewis in my mind (at about 1945), a started reading biographies and secondary literature.

On top of the published work, I tried to get at the unpublished and incomplete materials. Scholars are steadily putting this in to print, often in journals, but I also had to get to libraries in the U.K. and the U.S. where manuscripts are housed. I wasn’t always able to do this at exactly the right time in the chronology, but I did my best. Fortunately, but the 2010s will be know in Lewis scholarship as the decade where Lewis’ hidden work came to light. Whatever I could find, I read it. What I could share, I have done so.

And now I am done.

Well, sort of. There’s a lot more to go. I won’t start again at day 1 right away. I have to read as much of George MacDonald as I can this year, and I am teaching a new class in May. I am also in a program of reading for my PhD. But I suspect I will re-start the “Reading C.S. Lewis Chronologically” project not too far into the future.

I’m actually a little bit sad. Still, I celebrated a bit last night. And I did some configuring on Goodreads last night so that others could give this project a go. I picked 60 of Lewis’ books that cover 99% of what is in print. I would encourage you to check it out!

Posted in Reflections | Tagged C.S. Lewis, Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, Heroes, Reading, Walter Hooper, writing | 32 Comments

The Art of Letter Writing in the Digital Age

Posted on March 7, 2016 by Brenton Dickieson

Lewis Writing I have always been fascinated with the art of letter writing. I have filled my reading these last few years with personal letters, especially those of C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Dorothy L. Sayers, James Thurber, E.B. White, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and St. Paul. Plus, I have learned to loved epistolary fiction, one of the rich sources that C.S. Lewis draw from in his work. I love the sense of peaking in–the voyeuristic guilty pleasure–and the “real life setting” that letter stories presumes.

Despite my love for reading letters, I have always failed at actually doing it. I yearn for rich, paper correspondence, where my ideas can be later—much later, I hope—dissected and the me I leave behind rediscovered in them. I yearn for the kind of rich correspondence that C.S. Lewis shared with friends and fans. His letters with Arthur Greeves, for example, span a lifetime, capturing as poignantly as Surprised by Joy did his spiritual journey. I am just about to finish reading Lewis’ letters. I am in July, 1963, and he does not know it yet, but he is about to die. Throughout the entire collection, despite most of the letters being quite brief, what Lewis’ letters lack in (some of) the poetic qualities of his books, they make up for in narrative joy, spiritual energy, and curiosity-driven ideas.

I have, at home in a box I treasure, some love letters from my wife in our early years. I also have some letters from a European friend, Emilie—meaningful expressions of teen spirituality and biblical faith from a good friend. I also have a few other momentos, such as graduation notes and sympathy cards.

But I have nothing I’ve written myself, partly because I never thought of keeping them, but mostly because I never actually wrote them. I intended to write—I really wanted to. I even wrote letters I never sent, which I may one day find between the pages of textbooks or a file somewhere.

Typically, though, didn’t write them at all. My correspondence continues today with social media and in-real-life visits with friends as we move throughout the world. Besides an interesting digital conversation I have with a friend that has extended for several years and consists mostly of brief notes making fun of the world around us, I am a failed letter-writer in an age when people don’t send letters anyway.

Instead of a great corpus of written letters, I have the burdensome responsibility of email—the mounting, pressing evil of digital sludge that fills my inbox with bold demands for my time. I hate email—and now facebook messaging, which is starting to replace it. There is always another note to read, another project to finish, another Nigerian investment program to send all my money to. Email, to me, is the used bathwater of my work: tepid, tainted, what’s left over when the meaningful work is done.

To the degree that I hate electronic mail, I love snail mail—what, I suppose, we used to just call “mail.” I still love going to the mailbox, even though it is typically filled with bills. Now that they have ceased home mail delivery and I have to walk through our community to get these letters, I find the receipt of a real letter a heightened sense of nostalgia. Even as an adult I still have this romantic notion of mail—fuelled, perhaps, by the central role “the post” plays in the Harry Potter series and my own work in letters—and I read this romance with mail back onto Lewis. Even as I explore his letters, I am reading them slow enough to allow the story to tread forward naturally, but quickly enough to keep the correspondence in my mind. In slowing down the experience, I imagine that I am reproducing the slow movement of the post in the last century, when the experience of letter writing was so different.

And in this romance I see Lewis sitting at his desk—beneath a window, perhaps—with soft morning light streaming into a dark room, scratching out replies on his Magdalene College stationary, pleasantly sharing his wit and wisdom with the precious few that were invited in.

But this serene image is nothing of what Lewis actually experienced in his letter writing. He received an unreal amount of letters, particularly after his Screwtape Letters—a demonic correspondence of the first order—was published. And Lewis felt honour-bound to respond to the letters he received. It was, for him, a great burden. In Surprised by Joy, Lewis said that

“it is an essential of the happy life that a man would have almost no mail and never dread the postman’s knock” (143).

Certainly, Lewis wrote letters that were a joy for him, like those to his oldest friend, Arthur Greeves. His Letters to Children are quite engaging and he had a genuine friendship develop with his Letters to an American Lady. He traded letters with authors like Arthur C. Clarke, J.R.R. Tolkien, Dorothy L. Sayers, and T.S. Eliot, seeming to have received as much as he had given with some of his correspondents. But as he describes Easter as a very dark time because “everyone writes to me at Easter” (Apr 17, 1954)–and his comments on Christmas letters are worse–I get the sense of grim resolution rather than quiet morning pleasure when it comes to Lewis and most of his letter writing.

It strikes me that the way Lewis feels about his unexplainable need to respond to the deep burden of his letter writing actually sounds very much like my own distaste for email. I wake up in the morning and obediently tackle the email I dread—yes, “dread” is the right word for it, dreading not the postman’s knock but the Windows doorbell of the same measure. By all accounts, it seems like Lewis did the same.

Perhaps the digital age hasn’t made that much difference after all.

Volumes of Lewis’ Letters:

Letters of C.S. Lewis: Edited with a Memoir. Ed. W.H. Lewis. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1966.

Letters To An American Lady. Ed. Clyde S. Kilby. Eerdmans, Grade Rapids, 1967.

Letters to Children. Ed. Lyle W. Dorsett and Marjorie E. Mead. Macmillan, NY, 1985.

They Stand Together: The Letters of C.S. Lewis to Arthur Greeves (1914-1963). Ed. Walter Hooper. Macmillan, NY, 1979.

Latin Letters of C.S. Lewis: C.S. Lewis and Don Giovanni Calabria. Trans. and Ed. Martin Moynihan. St. Augustine’s Press, South Bend, 1999.

Volume 1: The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis: Family Letters (1905-1931). Ed. Walter Hooper. HarperSanFrancisco, NY, 2004.

Volume 2: The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis: Books, Broadcasts, and the War (1931-1949). Ed. Walter Hooper. HarperSanFrancisco, NY, 2004.

Volume 3: The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis: Narnia, Cambridge, and Joy (1950-1963). Ed. Walter Hooper. HarperSanFrancisco, NY, 2007.

Yours Jack: Spiritual Direction from C.S. Lewis. Ed. Paul F. Ford. HarperSanFrancisco, NY, 2008.

Posted in Reflections | Tagged art of letter writing, Arthur C. Clarke, C.S. Lewis, Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Dorothy L. Sayers, E.B. White, J.R.R. Tolkien, james thurber, letter collections, T.S. Eliot | 23 Comments

ANNOUNCEMENT: C.S. Lewis and Friends Colloquium with special theme of FRIENDSHIP

Posted on March 4, 2016 by Brenton Dickieson

I am very much hoping to return to this great conference this year and present a bit of my work. Are you going?

Posted in Reflections | 2 Comments

A Quick Note to Readers

Posted on March 2, 2016 by Brenton Dickieson

Dear friends,

As you know I have recently had the experience of sitting at my mother’s bedside as she died of cancer. It has been a difficult, beautiful, and exhausting time. I have witnessed stubborn strength and heartbreaking generosity these last few weeks. So many of you have left kind notes here on A Pilgrim in Narnia, or on Facebook, Twitter, email, or in person. I know that these sorts of moments can be a challenge in and of themselves, but I have appreciated every one. Thank you.

My blogging this last month has been haphazard and sporadic. Yet it has connected with some people. February had the 1st and 3rd busiest days ever on the blog as my flailing responses to grief and loss were shared to thousands of people. The response has touched me deeply.

I am, though, woefully behind on my connections. I read every comment on this blog (or on social media), and respond to the vast majority of them. I have not been able to respond well this last month, but wanted to acknowledge your creative comments and ideas. I will get to them pretty soon, and didn’t want you to feel like your words went out into air.

That said, between of my work as a blogger and researcher and the half dozen different jobs I do, my email inbox is deluged. Even after flood waters recede, what is left is often encased in mud. If I owe you an email or a phone call, or have a bit of work I was supposed to do for you, please send it again. And if you have a very important blog comment, do re-post it. I would truly appreciate it.

I look forward to blogging over the next few weeks. I am nearly finished reading C.S. Lewis chronologically, and am moving into paper writing mode. I have scheduled an archive trip and am steadily reading through George MacDonald’s work. I hope to be teaching something exciting this spring that you all can connect with, and what doesn’t get into the classroom will find its way here. I’m also reading David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest as part of a kind of “Year of Long Books.” It’s quite disturbing (Infinite Jest, not the project in general), so that might affect my posts a bit!

Until then, thanks for all the great connections, as well as digital and personal support.

Best wishes,
Brenton

Posted in Reflections | 7 Comments

Jill Pole’s Road to Emmaus

Posted on February 29, 2016 by Brenton Dickieson

It is one of the more intriguing appearances of Jesus after the puzzling event of the empty tomb. Rather than grand appearances, Christ slowly slipped into the lives of his disciples, visiting two or three at a time while skirting Jerusalem after the heat of that holy weekend.

As can only happen in the days before social media made it possible, back when people lived their lives out of doors, rumours of the Nazarene filled every empty social space. “You must be the only person in Jerusalem who hasn’t heard about all the things that have happened there the last few days,” one of Jesus’ followers exclaim when a stranger joins them on the road. Certainly everyone else knows. It’s all everyone is talking about.

“What things?” the stranger on the road asks.

This was hardly an uncommon scene. Two men are traveling on the way, and another sidles up to them. There is a pattern for pilgrims ready for a talk on the road. They fall into step, leaning in just a little to find out if these are the kind of people and this the kind of conversation that would help the dusty miles slip away. There is strength in numbers on the road, and after a while one mile starts to look like the last. How many of our great stories start on the road?

For whatever reason, the stranger joined in with the two disciples and wonders about the rumours on their lips. So they told him about the things that happened to Jesus of Nazareth:

“He was a prophet who did powerful miracles, and he was a mighty teacher in the eyes of God and all the people. But our leading priests and other religious leaders handed him over to be condemned to death, and they crucified him. We had hoped he was the Messiah who had come to rescue Israel. This all happened three days ago.”

This is the news, but then there was the rumour:

“Then some women from our group of his followers were at his tomb early this morning, and they came back with an amazing report. They said his body was missing, and they had seen angels who told them Jesus is alive! Some of our men ran out to see, and sure enough, his body was gone, just as the women had said.”

In their sorrow and gloom, and in the scratch, scratch, scratch of shoes on sand, the stranger’s response must have startled them out of their daze.

“Isn’t it obvious?” he answered. “The whole story has led up to this point. Suffering had to precede fame for Messiah. The prophets said all this and more. How come you didn’t see it?”

We know as readers who the stranger is. He is this Jesus, the crucified one. Luke lets us in on the secret. But because of sun or sorrow or miles and miles of sand, these sad Christ-followers could not see it. So the stranger began to talk, then.

Then Jesus took them through the writings of Moses and all the prophets, explaining from all the Scriptures the things concerning himself.

Oh to be there on that road and hear those words! A lot of my work in biblical studies has been an attempt to fall into step behind the stranger and lean in just a little.

I’ve always been struck by how often children asked C.S. Lewis for more Narnia books in their letters to him. Some adults asked as well. But it was to the children that Lewis focused his responses. He never promised new Chronicles. After The Last Battle was published, Lewis never looked back. Instead, Lewis would answer like this:

“But why don’t you try writing some Narnian tales? I began to write when I was about your age, and it was the greatest fun. Do try!” (to Jonathan Muehl, Mar 29, 1961)

“And why not write stories yourself to fill up the gaps in Narnian history?” (to Denise Howes, Sep 8, 1962)

I don’t know if any of Lewis’ schoolchildren ever took him up on the challenge, but the patterns and possibilities of Narnia transformed children’s literature forever.

In this little note to Ms. Howes, Lewis points her to The Last Battle. “I’ve left you plenty of hints,” he wrote, “especially where Jill Pole and the Unicorn are talking….” And there in ch. 8 we see Jill’s own Road to Emmaus:

“Oh, this is nice!” said Jill [to Jewel the Unicorn]. “Just walking along like this. I wish there could be more of this sort of adventure. It’s a pity there’s always so much happening in Narnia.”

There is no stranger in the road this time, just a little girl and a unicorn. But Jewel takes a moment to fill in a bit of the open spaces of Narnia that we have all wondered about:

But the Unicorn explained to her that she was quite mistaken. He said that the Sons and Daughters of Adam and Eve were brought out of their own strange world into Narnia only at times when Narnia was stirred and upset, but she mustn’t think it was always like that. In between their visits there were hundreds and thousands of years when peaceful King followed peaceful King till you could hardly remember their names or count their numbers, and there was really hardly anything to put into the History Books. And he went on to talk of old Queens and heroes whom she had never heard of. He spoke of Swanwhite the Queen who had lived before the days of the White Witch and the Great Winter, who was so beautiful that when she looked into any forest pool the reflection of her face shone out of the water like a star by night for a year and a day afterwards. He spoke of Moonwood the Hare who had such ears that he could sit by Caldron Pool under the thunder of the great waterfall and hear what men spoke in whispers at Cair Paravel. He told how King Gale, who was ninth in descent from Frank the first of all Kings, had sailed far away into the Eastern seas and delivered the Lone Islanders from a dragon and how, in return, they had given him the Lone Islands to be part of the royal lands of Narnia for ever. He talked of whole centuries in which all Narnia was so happy that notable dances and feasts, or at most tournaments, were the only things that could be remembered, and every day and week had been better than the last.

I don’t know about you, but when I hear of these other stories, the unwritten ones, I can mimic the words of Jesus disciples on that dusty Roman road so long ago:

“Didn’t our hearts burn within us as he talked with us on the road….”

Something very much like that happened to Jill as well:

And as [Jewel] went on, the picture of all those happy years, all the thousands of them, piled up in Jill’s mind till it was rather like looking down from a high hill on to a rich, lovely plain full of woods and waters and cornfields, which spread away and away till it got thin and misty from distance.

The terrain is so very different: the lush forest road of Narnia and the bare desert road of Palestine. And the substance of our curiosity is fed in much different ways in each story. The rough grain of the cross is substantially different than the finished wood of the wardrobe. One story made the other one possible.

Yet in each the hearts of the disciples are lifted as there is news that the sorrow they are experience is not the end of all stories. More than that, there are many stories in between, each of them important to the road they find themselves on this day.