Since writing “The Dark Tower: A Challenge to Lewis Scholars” (Legacy 84), I’ve noticed a few more echoes of That Hideous Strength in The Dark Tower. In That Hideous Strength, Mark Studdock is imprisoned in a room that is covered, wherever he looks, with decorations not explicitly demonic but having a subtle cumulative effect that is dehumanizing (ch. 13). According Read More ›
I just got the new Lewis Legacy, and as always it is fascinating. I like the “C.S. Lewis: Not On Their Side/Not On Our Side” articles — I was very surprised at first to meet “mere” Christians who held Lewis in disesteem, but now I’ve got used to it; as Thomas Howard notes, many of them can’t stomach his “Catholic” Read More ›
Well, no sooner do I write to you than I get a new Lewis Legacy. I had somehow not heard about “the announcement that there is post-1950 ink on the 1938 manuscript of the Dark Tower”! And so now, all of a sudden, the manuscript appears to have been written “circa 1958”! Beautiful. I suppose they have some evidence for Read More ›
When I first read Screwtape Letters, I was studying sociology in graduate school. But something was missing. I knew something was missing, but I didn’t know what it was. Then I read Screwtape, and bingo, here was more understanding of what it means to be human in one slim volume than in all the great sociological tomes I had been Read More ›
On a trip with Clyde Kilby once, we went through Little Lea, and I made slides of the attic where the mountains can be seen across the fields. Met Bessie Lewis on that trip, and of course Wolfie and Ruth Parker [a cousin of the Lewis brothers]. His real name was Desmond Parker, as I recall. We met Maureen Blake Read More ›
Books are big business. Stephen King commanded a $16 million advance from(British) Viking, then defected to Scribners for more money. Conflicts of interest: HarperCollins owner Murdoch spiked Hong Kong Governor Patten’s book because of his criticism of Beijing because Murdoch was lobbying to expand his STAR-TV satellite network in China. Four of the top seven US publishing houses are now Read More ›
I was shocked, to say the least, both at the scandal [set forth in Light in the Shadowlands] and the fact that nothing is being done about this by the publishers and media. Any number of evidences you adduce would, even if considered in isolation, be sufficient to make your case convincing; but when the evidence is considered as a Read More ›
In Samarkand recently I visited the old observatory built by Ulugh Beg in the 1420’s. In a museum there we saw copies of many paintings from that era depicting people of military life, their equipment, their clothing and uniforms, etc. They looked like they had just stepped out of Narnia and Tashbaan! Pauline Baynes’s illustrations of the Calormenes must have Read More ›
There’s a 1 June 1951 reference in Brothers and Friends to Warren visiting Gervase Mathew at Blackfriars in Oxford, admiring the chapel but not knowing that it was Dominican. He thought it was Benedictine. If Mathew had been in the Inklings since 1939 or 1940, as Hooper indicates in The Dark Tower, wouldn’t you think Warren would have realised which Read More ›
What a lot in Legary #70! I particularly enloyed the thumbnail summary of Lewis’s views on dreams. Your essay on the natural law hit me at an opportune time. I’d just read Abolition. What an amazlngly prescient book, worth more than all those sanctimonious money-makers from Bennett put together. Brenda Griffing, Lakeland, FL I called the Manuscripts Department of the Read More ›