A Pilgrim in Narnia

A few years ago, I did a series called “The Words C.S. Lewis Made Up,” with such beauties as Bulverism, rebunker, and lowerarchy. My second sweep at the project is meant to include Disneyfication, Terreauty, Busbyism, mythonomy, atheological, P’daytism (invented with his brother, Warren, and featured in a recent Crystal Hurd publication), Hobbitry (most likely a Tolkien neologism but used by Lewis), and Blurbology. The sheer usefulness and good fun of Justin Keena’s efforts in the recently published C.S. Lewis, Blurbologist (2025) in the Journal of Inklings Studies supplement series is a whole book dedicated to the last word in that list–far more than I would have attempted but a welcome addition to Lewis studies.

Once we know what a “blurb” is, “blurbology” falls quickly into place for the nimble mind. According to the OED, “blurb” popped into American slang out of nowhere in the 1910s. The word quickly caught on to capture the peculiar project of summarizing a book’s value or contents in a snappy paragraph. By the time he was publishing in the 1930s, “blurb” was a working word for Lewis, one of the sometimes tedious tasks of bringing a book into publication.

If you learned cursive, you can perhaps discern bits of Lewis’ 1950 letter to Roger Lancelyn Green about a blurb, captured in this image that is also on the cover of Keena’s study (and transcribed below).

4/4/50

My dear Roger

Thanks v. much for the blurb [for The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe]: I shall send it to [publisher] Bles to-day. It seems excellent to me, but like you I don’t really understand Blurbology.

The man running this series of Lives is Milton Waldman c/o [publisher] Collins. I will write to him about you at once.

I look forward v. much to Castle in L.

I may (i.e. will if I can) look for you at the K.A. [King’s Arms pub] tomorrow (Wed) about 11.30.

Yours
Jack Lewis

I learn from Tolkien scholar Douglas A. Anderson that Castle in L is The Castle in Lyonesse, an unpublished children’s novel by Green. Doug donated a photocopy of the manuscript (among others) to the Wade Centre, making it more accessible to researchers (see the catalogue listing here). We have here an elliptical letter between friends, where Lewis has solicited Green’s help in getting his first Narnia chronicle to the public. It’s bound to have some lost trails for us interlopers decades later.

While Lewis claims not to know much about the art of Blurbology, Justin Keena’s careful study reveals Lewis’ principles of the craft:

1. Blurbs should be accurate
2. Quotations should rarely be used, and used only when they don’t misrepresent the book or interrupt its enjoyment (i.e., no spoilers)
3. Blurbs should capture the author’s intentions for the reading experience

In C.S. Lewis, Blurbologist, Justin Keena has conducted extensive archival work to gather together three types of Lewis-related blurbs:

• Lewis’ Blurbs for His Own Books (Part One, with 26 entries)
• Lewis’ Blurbs for Others’ Books (Part Two, with 26 entries)
• Blurbs for Lewis’ Books (Probably) Written by Others (Appendix, with 36 entries)

Each of these sections includes the blurb in question and Justin’s notes about the historical provenance and importance of the blurb, with longer discussions about what parts of the blurb are definitively or possibly Lewis’. These copiously footnoted studies are usually brief—though some are as long as 10 pages—and focused mostly on the UK and American first editions of Lewis’ novels. Beyond learning from Lewis as a blurbologist—with the added bonus of hearing some early mini-reviews of Lewis’ writing—the primary interest is to discern whether or not we have any of Lewis’ words that we can say add to the catalogue of primary materials.

I am approaching this book review in two ways. For the remainder of this first entry, I will share brief examples to provide a sense of what this project entails. In the second part (next week), I will talk about how I gamified the experience of reading C.S. Lewis, Blurbologist, and how that led to some fruitful confirmation of and pushback against the approach.

Here is how Keena organizes each entry for study in C.S. Lewis, Blurbologist: The book’s bibliographic details, followed by the blurb text, and then Keena’s commentary about why and how this blurb represents Lewis’ voice and contributes to studying his work (with footnotes that link entries within the volume or out to research sources). Here is a fictional example:

lxv. Awesome Lewis Title (Charlottetown, PE: Brentonio Dickvinci Press, 1964), dust jack front and back flap

Book Jacket Blurb: C.S. Lewis’ book titles are so awesome we should have a book just about his book titles. Meanwhile, read this well-titled new novel.

Keena’s Analysis and Commentary: This blurb by the press editor is nearly the worst thing ever written, but there are two or three even more horrid examples in Keena’s foundational study of Lewis as Blurbologist.

Here is an example of an entry early in the volume that makes a unique contribution to our archival bibliography of Lewis’ publications. This entry on The Pilgrim’s Regress is relatively short because it follows a note on the same book, covering a lot of background details. I’ve left out the footnotes, but it is noteworthy that the entry includes Lewis’ correspondence with his best friend, Arthur Greeves, and gives some new context to the letter:

ii. The Pilgrim’s Regress: An Allegorical Apology for Christianity Reason and Romanticism (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1935), dust jacket front flap.

The allegory obviously suggests Pilgrim’s Progress, but the Giants and Demons are of a sort that Bunyan never knew, and Mr. Lewis’s wit would probably seem to Bunyan sinful. Certainly his theology would.

The hero, brought up in Puritania (Mr. Lewis himself was born in Ulster), cannot abide the religion he finds there. With many digressions he follows the Straight Path that runs past the City of Claptrap, between the tableland of the High Anglicans and the far-off marsh of the Theosophists. A fundamental problem throughout is to find the relation between the sexual instinct and the religious; on this the conclusion is neither that of Freud nor that of D.H. Lawrence.

Many varieties of religious and æsthetic theorising come under the lash before the final chapters, in which the realm of controversy is altogether transcended.

This piece is an editorial rewrite by Sheed & Ward of the original English version published two years previously by J.M. Dent and Sons. The particular words from the original version that survived the rewrite have been underlined, and it is due to them that this blurb counts as a distinct entry in Lewis’s bibliography. But the way in which it was rewritten was a source of resentment for him [Lewis]. He complained about the changes, as we have already seen in section I, to Arthur Greeves on 7 December 1935. He wrote to Dom Bede Griffiths a month later on the same subject:

I fear Mr. Sheed is a rascal. That blurb on his jacket, insinuating that the book contains an attack on my own religious upbringing, was printed without my knowledge or authority, and he must have known it was a suggestio falsi: at least he took good care not to know!

Lewis even marked Sheed’s blurb on a copy now in the possession of the Wade Center, underlining the offending lines on the front flap of the jacket and writing below the blurb: ‘The suggestions are put in by the unspeakable Sheed with no authority of mine & without my knowledge.’ Lewis’s comments to Greeves, Griffiths, and on the jacket itself strongly imply that the original blurb had been published with his ‘knowledge’ and ‘authority’, most probably because he himself was its author.

His authorship would also explain why, for the 1943 revised edition of The Pilgrim’s Regress published by Geoffrey Bles, the original blurb was restored (with minor changes), instead of an entirely new one being composed. It would seem that Lewis took the opportunity to finally detach Sheed & Ward’s misleading blurb from the Regress, and still considered his original blurb sufficient to entice new readers coming to his work a decade after its initial appearance.

The last entry of Part One has a fairly sophisticated argument, but this excerpt captures what Keena is trying to do in restoring Lewis’ original words:

xxvi. The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964), dust jacket front and back flaps.

[Front flap] WHEN reading old literature we tend to turn to commentaries, histories and other helps, as Dr Lewis says, ‘only when the hard passages are manifestly hard. But there are treacherous passages which will not send us to the notes. They look easy and aren’t. Again, frequent researches ad hoc sadly impair receptive reading, so that sensitive people may even come to regard scholarship as a baleful thing which is always taking you out of the literature itself. My hope was that if a tolerable (though very incomplete) outfit were acquired beforehand and taken along with one, it might lead in. To be always looking at the map when there is a fine prospect before you shatters the “wise passiveness” in which landscape ought to be enjoyed. But to consult a map before we set out has no such ill effect. Indeed it will lead us to many prospects; including some we might never have found by following our noses.’

The Discarded Image is C.S. Lewis’s map for medieval and renaissance literature. His theme is the problem of world models and their influence on the mind. He is concerned with the classical concept

continued on back flap

[Back flap] or ‘image’ of the universe not merely as a curio or a series of footnotes to the hard passages which are essential to the understanding of the medieval concept, but also for its emotional and aesthetic impact. This leads him in the end to reflections on the character of all cosmic images, including our own, which he believes ought to be considered.

The long quotation in the first paragraph is lifted, with a small omission in the first sentence, directly from the preface of the book. What makes this piece count as a distinct blurb in Lewis’s bibliography, however, are the underlined portions of the second paragraph. Originally written by Lewis, they were later recast to be from the publisher’s perspective. According to Lewis’s letter to Colin Eccleshare of 28 December 1962,

The book hopes to have a triple appeal. The chapters on ‘Selected Materials’ may contain some things worth the attention of scholars. The main body of the book is more for students. But, thirdly, the general reader may perhaps find my treatment is of larger interest, for I am concerned with this old ‘image’ of the universe not merely as a curio, nor even merely as ‘notes’ to the literature, but also for its emotional and aesthetic impact. This leads me in the end to reflections on the character of all cosmic images, including our own, which I believe people ought to consider. Can you make a blurb out of all this?

The only notable change made by the publisher to the underlined portion of Lewis’s suggestions is narrowing the stated function of the book from being ‘“notes” to the literature’ of the Middle Ages and Renaissance in general to being, more specifically, ‘footnotes to the hard passages’ that had already been mentioned in the first paragraph of the published blurb.

And, thus, we can see the process Justin uses to narrow in on Lewis’ own words.

I will include only a brief peek into Lewis’ blurbs of others. Some of these have been published in volumes like Of Other Worlds. However, Justin Keena and editor Norbert Feinendegen bring some new moments to light of Lewis’ words published on books in America and England. Truly, I haven’t heard of many of these books.

Of John Custance’s 1951, Wisdom, Madness and Folly: The Philosophy of a Lunatic, Lewis wrote:

“I do not think I shall ever forget the experience of reading it.”

Of Nancy Wilson Ross’ 1953, Time’s Corner:

“I enjoyed it greatly. It keeps its secrets very well.”

Lewis is classically supportive of his friends’ work. Of Sr. Penelope’s The Coming of the Lord: A Study in the Creed (1953), he wrote:

“I am delighted with The Coming of the Lord; delighted, excited, and most grateful. I think it is the best book the author has yet done, and the best theological book by any one I have read for a long time. … A lovely little book.”

He is even more effusive about Owen Barfield, Austin Farrar, and J.R.R. Tolkien’s work in his desire to see them have the greatest impact possible.

Finally, I will end this first review with a bit of levity. Here is the entire 17^th entry of the Appendix—including Justin Keena’s full critical response.

xvii. The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1949), dust jacket front flap.

The publication of a new book by C.S. Lewis is always an important event. The Weight of Glory, made up of five addresses given recently before various groups, is written with the author’s well-known keenness and charm.

The first address, ‘The Weight of Glory,’ concerns heaven and man’s inborn longing for a future life. It is particularly interesting if read in connection with Lewis’s longer book, The Great Divorce. The second, ‘Transposition,’ concerns the similar reaction felt to both pleasure and pain. ‘Membership,’ the third address, emphasizes the value of the individual. It also contains an interesting study of the theory of democracy. The third, ‘Learning in War-Time,’ was given at Oxford during the Second World War. ‘The Inner Ring,’ the last address, warns the students of King’s College against trying to break into one charmed circle after another, thus destroying the joy of living.

The Weight of Glory sheds new light on many of the ideas expressed in Lewis’s longer books and is provocative and stimulating reading.

This book was published in England under the title ‘Transposition and Other Addresses.’

This piece has the distinction of containing the worst summary of the contents of ‘Transposition’ so far conceived by a rational being.

Note: I have replaced the ¶ symbol in the text with paragraphs and added materials in square brackets for clarity. I also added book covers for visual interest; they are not, unfortunately, the editions referenced.