C.S. Lewis Day: The Argument With Tolkien

Clive Staples Lewis was born in Belfast on November 29, 1898. He announced at the age of four that he’d be called Jack, after a dog that had been run over, and nobody successfully called him anything else for the rest of his life.

Lewis interests me less for Narnia than for the fight he had with his closest friend about how to build a world. Two giants of English fantasy read to each other in the same pub for years while disagreeing about the most basic question in the craft, and I think both of them were right.

His mother died when he was nine. He was sent to a series of English boarding schools he hated and fought in the trenches at nineteen. A British shell that fell short wounded him, and he came back an atheist.

He spent most of his career teaching medieval and Renaissance literature, at Oxford and then Cambridge.

His scholarly work on allegory and on sixteenth-century literature is still cited. He died on November 22, 1963, the same day as Aldous Huxley and the same day President Kennedy was shot. That erased his death from the news entirely.

The three careers rarely appear in the same account of him. He was a serious academic, publishing scholarship that specialists still cite.

He was a popular Christian apologist with an enormous general readership. And he wrote seven children’s books that have never gone out of print. Most readers know exactly one of those, and the others surprise them.

The trench experience is also usually skipped and probably shouldn’t be. He went to the Western Front at nineteen, where a shell wounded him and killed the men beside him, and came back an atheist who spent the next decade arguing himself out of it. The man who wrote the books about suffering had been in the middle of it at an age when most people are at university.

He also came to all of it late. He was in his forties before the broadcasts made him a public figure, and in his fifties before the first Narnia book appeared.

His mother’s death when he was nine is the event everything else sits on. She died of cancer, his father withdrew into grief, and Lewis and his brother were sent away to a school run by a man later certified insane. He described the period as the end of his childhood in a single stroke.

The education that took hold happened later and privately, under a tutor his father sent him to, an old-fashioned logician who taught him to argue and to read Greek. Lewis called those the happiest years of his life. The trenches came directly after. He arrived at the front on his nineteenth birthday, was wounded at Arras by a British shell falling short, and lost the friend whose mother he’d promised to look after. He kept that promise for more than thirty years, living with her in an arrangement he never fully explained to anyone.

He returned to Oxford, took three firsts, and became a fellow at twenty-six. He then spent nearly thirty years teaching there while being repeatedly passed over for a professorship, partly because his popular religious writing embarrassed some colleagues.

Cambridge eventually gave him the chair Oxford wouldn’t, in his fifties, and he commuted there for the rest of his career.

What was the C.S. Lewis and Tolkien argument about?

They met at Oxford, became close friends, and read each other’s drafts aloud in a pub for years. Tolkien was considerably responsible for Lewis’s return to Christianity. Lewis was considerably responsible for The Lord of the Rings existing, because Tolkien would have abandoned it without the encouragement.

Then the friendship cooled, and the reason was partly craft.

Tolkien disliked Narnia. His objection was that Lewis had assembled it out of incompatible parts: a Christian allegory containing Roman fauns, Norse giants, Father Christmas and a talking beaver, thrown together without regard for whether the mythology held. To Tolkien, who had spent decades constructing a single coherent world with its own languages and internal history, this was a scrapbook.

Lewis’s position, implicitly, was that the story came first and the machinery served it. If Father Christmas made the scene work, Father Christmas appeared.

Both positions are defensible and the disagreement is the most useful thing either of them left for working writers.

I lean closer to Lewis than most fantasy fans would expect. Father Christmas in Narnia makes no sense and I don’t care, because the scene works. Tolkien’s objection is fair, and I’ll still take a book with visible seams over a world nobody has the years to build.

Watch: Beyond Narnia: The Real Life Of C.S. Lewis | The Secret Lives and Loves of C.S. Lewis, Real History

Whose worldbuilding is better, Lewis’s or Tolkien’s?

It depends on what the book is for, and that’s the actual lesson.

Tolkien’s method produces a world that rewards obsessive attention, sustains a scholarly literature, and holds together under scrutiny that no reader was obliged to apply. The cost is enormous labor, a slow output, and a great deal of material that never reached print. Lewis’s method produces seven short books in seven years, each readable in an afternoon. They’ve never been out of print. The cost is that the seams show, and any reader who looks closely finds the joins.

Neither is the correct answer. The question a writer should ask is which kind of book they’re making, because the two methods are incompatible and picking neither produces the worst outcome: a world too inconsistent to reward attention and too laborious to move at pace.

My own Hobbit Day page covers the other side of that argument, and Le Guin’s method is a third position entirely: start from a question about people and build only what the question requires.

Why do readers split on Narnia?

Because the allegory isn’t consistently applied, and readers notice at different ages.

Some of the books map closely to Christian narrative. Others barely engage with it and are simply adventures. A reader who arrives expecting a systematic scheme finds it breaking down, and a reader who arrives expecting an adventure finds a sermon in the middle of book one.

Lewis said the story came first and the parallels emerged, which several scholars doubt and which is unfalsifiable either way. What’s observable is that the books are strongest where the allegory is loosest.

There’s also the ending, which some readers find beautiful and others find close to unforgivable, involving as it does a character excluded from the conclusion for reasons that haven’t aged well. It’s worth encountering that instead of being warned around it.

That ending is the one place where I think Lewis let his readers down. A children’s series that shuts one of its own characters out of the finale disappoints me, and no allegorical reading I’ve come across fixes it for me.

What did the Inklings do at their meetings?

The group that met in Lewis’s rooms and in an Oxford pub for close to two decades is the most cited writing group in English, and what it did is frequently misdescribed. It wasn’t a workshop with rules. Members read work aloud and the others responded immediately, often unkindly. There was no structure requiring balanced feedback, no turn-taking, and no obligation to be encouraging. Several members simply disliked what others were writing and said so at length. What made it work was that everyone present was seriously attempting something difficult and nobody was there to be flattered. Tolkien read chapters of a book he might never finish to a room that included a man who thought parts of it were tedious, and finished it anyway.

The reading aloud is the part worth stealing. Prose exposed to a live audience fails audibly in ways it never fails on a screen, and a listener’s attention wandering at a specific paragraph is more useful than a page of written notes. I wish more writing groups ran that way. Too many exist to protect feelings, and a room where nobody can say a chapter is boring can’t help anybody finish a book. The other observation is less comfortable. The group functioned because the members were competitive with each other, and the friendship between its two most famous figures didn’t survive the arrangement intact.

What did C.S. Lewis write as a scholar?

He was a professional medievalist first, and the academic books are still in print for people who need them. His study of allegory in medieval love poetry and his volume on sixteenth-century English literature are dense, argumentative, and were written for other scholars. He also wrote a short book explaining the medieval model of the universe to modern readers. That’s the accessible one and which explains a great deal about how he thought.

His argument in that book is that people in a period don’t experience their worldview as one option among several. They experience it as the way things are, and reconstructing that makes reading old literature possible instead of merely decoding it. I think it’s the most useful idea in his whole academic output.

That instinct shows up everywhere in his fiction. He was unusually good at making a strange system feel obvious from inside it. That’s a medievalist’s habit applied to invented worlds.

For a writer the transferable point is that a day job requiring you to reconstruct unfamiliar mentalities is excellent training. He spent his working life inhabiting the assumptions of people six centuries dead, and it made him fast at building a coherent interior for anything.

Why did C.S. Lewis publish A Grief Observed under a false name?

His wife Joy Davidman died of cancer in 1960, four years after they married. He wrote a short book about it and published it under a pseudonym.

The reason was that the book isn’t consoling. It records a man who had spent decades explaining suffering as a public Christian apologist discovering that his own explanations were useless to him, and it doesn’t resolve that. He compares his own earlier arguments unfavorably to what he’s now experiencing, and the tone is closer to anger than to faith.

It’s the best thing he wrote and it works because he didn’t manage it. There’s no shape imposed on the grief, no arrival at acceptance in the final chapter, just entries written as the thing happened. Friends reportedly recommended the book to him, not knowing he’d written it. For anyone writing about loss, that’s the model. The instinct is to write from the far side, having understood it. The stronger version is written from inside, before the understanding arrives, and it doesn’t pretend to a resolution that hasn’t happened.

That book moves me more than anything else he wrote, because he stopped performing. A public man admitting that his own answers failed him takes more courage than a dozen confident broadcasts, and I trust him more for it.

How did the BBC broadcasts shape C.S. Lewis’s prose?

During the war the BBC asked him to give a series of radio talks, and they made him famous outside the university. The talks were written for listeners with no theological training, delivered live, in fifteen-minute blocks, to an audience that could switch off. That set of constraints produced his clearest prose by a wide margin.

He used homely analogies, kept sentences short, and never assumed knowledge. The book assembled from those talks is the one most people have read, and it reads as speech because it was. The pattern repeats across this whole series: Adams from radio, Twain from the lecture circuit, and Lewis from a wartime microphone. A fixed slot and a live audience improve prose more reliably than any amount of solitude.

What can a writer take from Lewis?

Four things.

Choose your worldbuilding method deliberately. Tolkien’s coherence and Lewis’s opportunism are both valid, and the failure is picking neither. Write to a constraint. The broadcast talks are his best nonfiction because somebody imposed fifteen minutes and a general audience on him.

Write from inside the experience. A Grief Observed works because it refuses to arrive anywhere, and imposed resolution makes most writing about loss unreadable.

Publish the unmanaged version. He put it out under another name because it contradicted his public position. That’s exactly why it lasted longer than the position did.

How should you mark C.S. Lewis Day?

Read A Grief Observed. It takes an hour and is the book of his fewest people have read. If you want the fiction, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe reads very differently as an adult, and Till We Have Faces is the novel he considered his best and almost nobody knows.

If you write, do the exercise. Take something you’ve already understood and write it as though you hadn’t yet. Remove every sentence that arrives at a conclusion. What remains is closer to how the experience felt. That’s what a reader wants.

Lewis did his best work when something forced his hand, a fifteen-minute slot or a grief he couldn’t argue away, and I think he was at his weakest when nothing pressed on him. Read A Grief Observed before Narnia, because it shows what he could do once he quit defending a position and simply told the truth.

For other writers whose days are worth marking I’ve written about Terry Pratchett, Robert Louis Stevenson and Mark Twain.

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