Thank You!

And Screwtape Proposes a Toast

Hello all!

Thank you so much for reading along! It’s been a lot of fun putting this all together. I hope you enjoyed it as well.

If you are interested in reading more, C. S. Lewis also wrote Screwtape Proposes a Toast in 1959, more than 10 years after the original letters.

In 1961, it was published again, with this preface from Lewis:

I was often asked or advised to add to the original 'Screwtape Letters', but for many years I felt not the least inclination to do it. Though I had never written anything more easily, I never wrote with less enjoyment. The ease came, no doubt, from the fact that the device of diabolical letters, once you have thought of it, exploits itself spontaneously, like Swift's big and little men, or the medical and ethical philosophy of 'Erewhon', as Anstey's Garuda Stone. It would run away with you for a thousand pages if you gave it its head. But though it was easy to twist one's mind into the diabolical attitude, it was not fun, or not for long. The strain produced a sort of spiritual cramp. The world into which I had to project myself while I spoke through Screwtape was all dust, grit, thirst and itch. Every trace of beauty, freshness and geniality had to be excluded. It almost smothered me before I was done. It would have smothered my readers if I had prolonged it.

I had, moreover, a sort of grudge against my book for not being a different book which no one could write. Ideally, Screwtape's advice to Wormwood should have been balanced by archangelical advice to the patient's guardian angel. Without this the picture of human life is lop-sided. But who could supply the deficiency? Even if a man and he would have to be a far better man than I could scale the spiritual heights required, what 'answerable style' could he use? For the style would really be part of the content. Mere advice would be no good; every sentence would have to smell of Heaven. And nowadays even if you could write prose like Traherne's, you wouldn't be allowed to, for the canon of 'functionalism’ has disabled literature for half its functions. (At bottom, every ideal of style dictates not only how we should say things but what sort of things we may say.)

Then, as years went on and the stifling experience of writing the "Letters’ became a weaker memory, reflections on this and that which seemed somehow to demand Screwtapian treatment began to occur to me. I was resolved never to write another 'Letter'. The idea of something like a lecture or 'address' hovered vaguely in my mind, now forgotten, now re- called, never written. Then came an invitation from The Saturday Evening Post, and that pressed the trigger.

C.S.L.

You can read the toast here.

I guess I’m off to continue my quest to read all of Lewis’s fiction. Next up for me is The Great Divorce. What are you reading next?