C.S. Lewis: An Introduction
by Kathryn Lindskoog
In 2003 I suddenly
realized that I have been researching and producing Lewis materials
longer than anyone else alive, because I started so young. At
Kristin Carmody's suggestion, I decided to have her set up this
C. S. Lewis page on the Web offering a sample of the Lewis materials
I have on hand. I hope these
items will be a pleasure to casual browsers and an aid to serious
researchers.
I first discovered
C. S. Lewis in August 1954, when a college student named John
Lindskoog drove across Santa Ana to visit me at my parents' house.
On his way he stopped at the library and checked out a couple
of books he thought I might like. One of them was Lewis's Beyond
Personality, and I gobbled it down that night after he left.
(It is known now as part three of Mere Christianity.) The
Santa Ana library had one other book by Lewis, so I checked it
out and read it: The Screwtape Letters. Lewis was my favorite
writer from then on.
Back at the University
of Redlands, in October 1954 I was hailed down on campus by the
head of the English department and invited to choose a topic for
an Honors project. That would require gathering materials in the
first half of 1955, choosing an acceptable focus for my Honors
paper, then doing three units of independent study in each of
the 1955-1956 semesters. In the spring of 1956 I would submit
my Honors paper and defend it orally before a panel of examiners.
I said I preferred taking more literature classes rather than
narrowing my focus, but I would gladly focus on C. S. Lewis or
possibly William Blake.
"Who is C. S.
Lewis?" she asked.
"I don't know," I said. "I'll try to find out."
The University library
was no help, but in the Redlands public library I found my answer:
Lewis taught at Oxford University! With that news my topic was
immediately approved and I was on my way. In June 1956 I received
my BA from the University of Redlands in English, magna cum laude.
(The only way to graduate from that college with honors was to
be selected for an honors project and to complete it successfully.)
My account "Meeting
C. S. Lewis" explains how my impossible dream of going
to England came true in the summer of 1956 and what my delightful
hour-and-a-quarter visit with Lewis was like.
I published my first
article about Lewis, "C. S. Lewis: Modern Christian Writer," in
the January 1957 issue of HIS magazine (Inter-Varsity Christian
Fellowship), and it took me four months to get up the nerve to
send it to Lewis. In his third letter to me, on June 3, 1957,
he said "Thank you for your kind letter enclosing HIS
and for the article which I was vain enough to enjoy....."
In 1956-1957 I revised
and expanded my Honors paper as my thesis and received an MA in
English, California State University at Long Beach, 1957, magna
cum laude. In October I sent Lewis a bound carbon copy of my thesis,
The Lion of Judah in Never-Never Land.
and was thrilled by his response:
MAGDALENE COLLEGE,
CAMBRIDGE.
Oct 29th 1957
Dear Miss Stillwell__
Your thesis arrived yesterday and I read it at once. You are in
the centre of the target everywhere. For one thing, you know my
work better than anyone else I've met; certainly better than I
do myself. (I've no recollection whatever of The World's Last
Night and can't imagine what it was about!). But secondly, you
(alone of the critics I've met) realize the connection, or even
the unity, of all the books--scholarly, fantastic, theological--and
make me appear a single author, not a man who impersonates half
a dozen authors, which is what I seem to most. This wins really
very high marks indeed. There is one place (pp. 93, 94) where,
tho' I am sure you are not misunderstanding, you express yourself
in a way wh. might make it seem to the reader that you were. It
sounds as if you thought I was talking primarily about animals
in that poem, where as you know I'm using the animals to suggest
country humans like Johnson & Cobbett Of course it involves sympathy
for the animals, wh, is your point. But most readers will misunderstand
if you give them the slightest chance. (It's like driving cattle;
if there's an open getaway anywhere in the road, they'll go into
it!) If you understand me, so well you will understand other authors
too & I hope we shall have some really useful critical works from
your hand.
With thanks & good wishes,
Yours Sincerely
C. S. Lewis
I sent him only three
more brief letters because I didnÕt want to take up his valuable
time. In 1958 he answered the first two promptly and briefly,
telling me how much he liked Orwell's Animal Farm, expressing
gratification that I liked his "little book" (Reflections
on the Psalms), and saying his household included his wife, his
two stepsons, his unmarried brother, and himself. I didn't write
again until 1960, and his answer on May 16, 1960, thanked me for
my kind letter and explained that he had been away from home.
He told me his essay about outer space was now published in a
Harcourt Brace volume called The World's Last Night. Then
he said "I cannot write more for I have returned to an appalling
pile of correspondence and have already spent 14 hours driving
the pen across the paper! With kind regards, Yours Sincerely,
C. S. Lewis" I never wrote to him again, assuming that would
be the kindest course to take.I wish now that I had written at
least one more letter expressing my appreciation; in retrospect,
IÕm sure he would have enjoyed that. At the time I didnÕt realize
what seems obvious now: that he remembered me and took a friendly
interest. (Several years later I learned about his 1990 trip to
Greece with Joy and their friends the R. L. Greens, when Joy was
dying of cancer; then I knew the circumstances of his May 1960
letter.)
After that I went on
publishing articles and reviews of Lewis's new books, then reviews
of books about Lewis. It occurred to me that I could write a more
clear and accurate book about Lewis than some I was reviewing,
and so I wrote C. S. Lewis, Mere Christian.
Then it occurred to me to submit my thesis to a different publisher,
and it was accepted (The Lion of Judah in
Never-Never Land: The Theology of C. S. Lewis Expressed in His
Fantasies for Children) and published so fast that my first
two books came out together in 1973. Since then I have published
seven other books with the name C. S. Lewis (or Narnia) in the
titles or subtitles. Some of my other 13 books have references
to Lewis or sections about him, and one has an entire chapter
about him. I have published so many articles about Lewis that
I've lost track of them. (Many articles and my early books were
written and published before I had a computer, and some were written
and published before the advent of local commercial copy-machine
shops.) The technological developments of the past forty years
have done wonders for Lewis studies and made my newsletter, The
Lewis Legacy, possible. Unfortunately, only a few of its 92
issues are available on-line so far, and except for issue 70 those
are not complete. They include contributions by a variety of people.
In October 1954 I walked
to the Redlands city library, found out who Lewis was, and committed
myself to an independent research project that would dominate
my life for a year and a half. In fact, that independent research
has continued for the rest of my life.
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