The Screwtape Letters
as Epistolar y Fiction
Charles A. Huttar
Within the varied oeuvre of C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters is
usually classified as something other than fiction, and this bias
has stood in the way of a full appreciation of Lewis’s artistry.
It is often viewed as a work of moral or spiritual instruction,1
dressed in and made palatable by that special kind of ironic
1See, inter alia, Clyde S. Kilby, The Christian World of C. S. Lewis (Grand
Rapids: Eerdmans, 1964), 37–44; Graham Hough, ‘The Screwtape Letters’,
[London] Times, 10 February 1966, 15; Richard B. Cunningham, C. S. Lewis:
Defender of the Faith (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1967), 159–62; Thomas
Howard, The Achievement of C. S. Lewis: A Reading of His Fiction (Wheaton,
Ill.: Harold Shaw, 1980), 10; Margaret Patterson Hannay, C. S. Lewis (New
York: Frederick Ungar, 1981), 198–202 (in her chapter on ‘Apologetics’);
Joe R. Christopher, C. S. Lewis (Boston: Twayne, 1987), 78–82 (in his
chapter ‘The Christian Essayist’); George Watson, ed., Critical Essays on
C. S. Lewis (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1992), where the book is covered in
five words, ‘a work of popular theology’ (1); Walter Hooper, C. S. Lewis:
A Companion and Guide (New York: Harper, 1996), 268–76; Devin Brown,
‘The Screwtape Letters: Telling the Truth Upside Down,’ in C. S. Lewis: Life,
Works, and Legacy, ed. Bruce L. Edwards, 4 vols. (Westport, Conn.: Praeger,
2007), 2:175–208. Two notable exceptions are Chad Walsh, The Literary
Legacy of C. S. Lewis (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979), 21–33,
and the brief treatment by Mark Edward DeForrest, ‘The Screwtape Letters’,
in The C. S. Lewis Readers’ Encyclopedia, ed. Jeffrey D. Schultz and John G.
West, Jr. (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1998), 367–68. DeForrest describes
the book as the ‘story’ of a young man’s ‘faith journey’ together with a
‘subplot’ concerning the two infernal correspondents.
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mode that Lewis calls ‘diabolical ventriloquism’.2 The voice we
hear throughout the work (or pretend to be hearing—for we
are aware at the same time of the author behind that voice) is
that of an invented character, a devil named Screwtape, with
whose personality we become increasingly familiar as the work
unfolds. The unfolding, unlike that in Lewis’s other works
of instruction—The Problem of Pain or Mere Christianity, for
example—is not in the linear fashion of a developed argument.3
Instead, the book proceeds in what has struck some readers
as a rather rambling, even disorganised, fashion, so far as the
treatment of topics is concerned, with some major topics
recurring more than once. There is, to be sure, a more obviously
structured middle section dealing with temptations of the
2 Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, with Screwtape Proposes a Toast, rev. paperback
ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1982), 151. Later references to this edition will
appear parenthetically in the text, by page number unless otherwise noted.
The volume consists of the following sections: v–xv, Lewis’s preface,
dated 1960; 3–149, the 1942 text (including preface [3–4], epigraphs [5],
and thirty-one letters [7–149]); 153–72, ‘Screwtape Proposes a Toast’ (first
published in 1959), preceded by a two-page preface written by Lewis in
1962 but not published until this edition.
3 In this respect, Screwtape resembles Lewis’s last book, Letters to Malcolm:
Chiefly on Prayer (1964), which he also cast as one side of a fictional
correspondence; but otherwise they are very different. In the early 1950s
Lewis had spent several months trying to write an organized discourse on
prayer, as he had done before on such topics as miracles and pain. But in
this case he came to feel that the genre, with its implied stance of authority,
was unsatisfactory, so he gave up the project. Ten years later he found the
right form for the insights growing out of his personal experience of
prayer and his continuing reflections: a type of letter associated with the
Stoic philosopher Seneca, revived by Petrarch, and maintained as a literary
form even after Montaigne abandoned the epistolary pretence and labeled
his works essays (attempts); compare note 25 below. Thus Letters to Malcolm
reflects Lewis’s increasing reluctance to set his views up as definitive.
Lewis does ‘not claim to be teaching’ but only, as a layman, ‘discussing
the practical and speculative problems of prayer as these appear’ to him
(Lewis’s letter to the publisher, 28 June 1963, in Hooper, Companion, 380,
as part of an extended account of how the book developed [378–81]).
In the book itself he wrote, ‘For me to offer the world instruction about
prayer would be impudence’ (letter 12; p. 63 of the first edition).
Huttar, The Scr ewtape Letters as Epistolar y Fiction
89
World, the Flesh (gluttony and lust), and the Devil (letters 7–16,
17–20, and 23–25 respectively), an arrangement made explicit at
the start of letter 23: ‘The World and the Flesh have failed us; a
third Power remains’ (105). But Screwtape has already taken up
the pros and cons of belief in devils in letter 7, and he circles
back to the theme of worldliness in letter 28 (132–33). Other
themes, such as death, love, the relation of time and eternity,
the question of what is ‘real’, and the nature of Hell, weave their
way in and out as his subordinate, Wormwood, to whom the
letters are addressed, is perceived to need advice about them.
Such a seeming lack of organization, so uncharacteristic of
its author, might at first glance be explained by the work’s serial
publication,4 the installments perhaps reflecting ideas that were
uppermost in the author’s mind from week to week rather than
any overall scheme of linear exposition. Yet that approach not
only diminishes the artistry of Lewis’s achievement—though
abundant artistry remains on the rhetorical level—but also
runs counter to Roger Lancelyn Green’s and Walter Hooper’s
considered judgment that, once Lewis had got the idea for a
series of letters ‘from one Devil to Another’, in mid-1940, he
probably finished the entire series by Christmas and only then
released it for publication.5 Reading the book as a whole does
give a clear sense of beginning, middle, and end.
But the key to its structure is to be sought not in its
‘argument’, but in the recognition that Screwtape is a work of
fiction. It employs not only characterisation, of several other
4 In The Guardian, 2 May through 28 November 1941 (Hooper, Companion,
819–22). This weekly religious news-magazine, which was succeeded in
1951 by the Church Quarterly (Roger Lancelyn Green and Walter Hooper,
C. S. Lewis: A Biography [New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974],
198), is not to be confused with the national newspaper of the same
name. In preparing the book version, Lewis made some additions to the
Guardian text (see Lionel Adey, C. S. Lewis: Writer, Dreamer, and Mentor
[Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998], 146–47).
5 Green and Hooper 191–92, 199.
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characters as well as Screwtape, but also implied narrative.
There is in fact a double plot, involving what happens to the
‘Patient’—his spiritual journey, one might say—and, alongside
this, what happens to the tempter Wormwood—the progress of
his career. These stories are presented to us from a single point
of view, Screwtape’s, in the one-sided correspondence of which
the book consists. The letters and reports from Wormwood,
to which these letters are responding, are not included. But the
fact that a new letter often responds to a new development
in the plot—as is typical in epistolary novels, and in real-life
letter writing as well—imparts a kind of realism and explains
the author’s principle of organisation in what otherwise seems a
rambling and inartistic discourse.
The fiction begins in the preface. Lewis casts himself in the
role of editor; Screwtape is the author.6 The editor’s qualifications
include some expertise in demonology: knowledge of ‘the
diabolical method of dating’ (4) and of devils’ psychology, the
things that give them ‘delight’ (3) and their proneness to ‘wishful
thinking’ (4). He has even mastered the devilish style of writing,
but is disinclined to teach it to others—a sly allusion to the actual
authorship. He can offer his readers guidance: ‘remember that
the devil is a liar’ (4). As editor he is content simply to present
the discovered texts, not trying to ‘identify any of the human
beings mentioned in the letters’ or ‘clear up’ the ‘chronology’
(4). He refuses at the outset to explain how this part of the
correspondence ‘fell into my hands’ (3).
Lewis’s device harks back to the beginnings of the English
epistolary novel. Compare the full title of Samuel Richardson’s
third novel (1753): The History of Sir Charles Grandison, in a
Series of Letters, Published from the Originals by the Editor of Pamela
and Clarissa. In Richardson’s preface, ‘the Editor’ declines to
reveal ‘how such remarkable Collections of private Letters fell
6 A longer preface added in a new edition some two decades later was
written from his own point of view as author (v-xv).
Huttar, The Scr ewtape Letters as Epistolar y Fiction
91
into his hands’.7 It seems likely, then, that Lewis’s artistry in The
Screwtape Letters may be appreciated from a new angle through
a consideration of the book’s affinities with the epistolary
novel. This is not to deny its relationship to other genres as
well; satire comes to mind, and moral instruction, but these
too have connections to an epistolary tradition going back to
ancient times.8 The aim of this essay, however, is to indicate the
place of Lewis’s book in a tradition of fiction that runs from the
eighteenth century to the early twentieth (and continues today).
Lewis’s Generic Antecedents
The epistolary novel is associated most closely with the
eighteenth century. Scholars have already observed a kinship in
other respects between Lewis’s fictional work and that of the
eighteenth century: for example, Peter J. Schakel, with regard to
Jonathan Swift, and Jared C. Lobdell, who notes resemblances
to several of the novelists of that era. He observes, for example,
that Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet and Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas
have ‘much in common’: besides being relatively short works,
7 Samuel Richardson, The History of Sir Charles Grandison, ed. Jocelyn Harris,
3 vols. (London: Oxford UP, 1972), 1:3; emphasis added. The phrase
quoted from Lewis’s preface which imitates Richardson’s so closely was not
in his recently discovered prior draft, but the point is the same (‘Nothing
will induce me to reveal . . .’). Lewis at first had expanded the fiction to
include a brief discussion of the language used by devils, from which
‘my friend Ransom’ made the translation now presented. This additional
level of imagined provenance he pruned, for reasons not known, from
the published preface. See Brenton D. G. Dickieson, ‘The Unpublished
Preface to C. S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters,’ Notes and Queries 60.2 (2013):
296–98. Dickieson has narrated and commented on his discovery of
the manuscript containing the longer preface in ‘A Cosmic Find in The
Screwtape Letters,’ http://apilgriminnarnia.com/2015/10/28/a-cosmicfind/#_ftnref7 (posted 28 October 2015; accessed 2 November 2015).
8 Yet another older epistolary tradition is reflected in Lewis’s last book (see
note 3 above).
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both are ‘travels intermixed with philosophy, the story being
more in the philosophy than in the travels’.9 That description
would not need to be greatly altered to make room for The
Screwtape Letters as well. Lobdell goes further, considering
the eighteenth-century novel as typically ‘didactic’, not in the
narrow sense of inculcating moral precepts but, more broadly,
as ‘a novel of ideas’ in which much of the space is taken up by
the characters’ ‘discuss[ing] ideas’.10 That certainly fits Screwtape.
But the use of letters in fiction is part of a larger tradition of
the letter as a literary form, one that dates from antiquity, and
there is no doubt about Lewis’s familiarity with it. It is a richly
varied tradition;11 a brief survey will alert us to the range of its
characteristic elements, some of them also found in The Screwtape
Letters. From ancient times, the catalogue of literary forms has
9 Schakel, ‘Restoration and Eighteenth Century’, in Reading the Classics with
C. S. Lewis, ed. Thomas L. Martin (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2000),
191–92; Lobdell, ‘C. S. Lewis’s Ransom Stories and Their EighteenthCentury Ancestry’, in Word and Story in C. S. Lewis, ed. Peter J. Schakel
and Charles A. Huttar (Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1991), 218. Lobdell
goes on to describe Lewis’s 1943 novel Perelandra in much the same way,
‘a series of adventures interspersed with philosophical conversation’—
both features, however, becoming ‘overwhelm[ed]’ by descriptions of the
otherworldly setting (220).
10 Lobdell, 228.
11 Noteworthy in recent literary scholarship is an increasing interest in letters
in general, often but not exclusively with a focus on the letter as situated
in the ‘public’ sphere rather than the ‘private’, and sometimes placing the
fictional use of letters within this larger context. See, for example, Toon
van Houdt et al., eds., Self-Presentation and Social Identification: The Rhetoric and
Pragmatics of Letter Writing in Early Modern Times, Supplementa Humanistica
Lovaniensa 18 (Leuven: Leuven UP, 2002); Constance M. Furey, Erasmus,
Contarini, and the Religious Republic of Letters (Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
2006); Gary Schneider, The Culture of Epistolarity: Vernacular Letters and
Letter Writing in Early Modern England, 1500–1700 (Newark: U of Delaware
P, 2005); Karen Cherewatuk and Ulrike Wiethaus, eds., Dear Sister: Medieval
Women and the Epistolary Genre (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1993).
Other scholarship, including that appearing in periodicals, is reviewed by
James Daybell in ‘Recent Studies in Sixteenth Century Letters,’ English
Literary Renaissance 35 (2005): 331–62.
Huttar, The Scr ewtape Letters as Epistolar y Fiction
93
included the personal letter, whether actual (those of Cicero
and Pliny are examples) or fictional (like Ovid’s Heroides).12 All
these became standard classroom texts in the Middle Ages and
Renaissance. Petrarch and Erasmus wrote in the Ciceronian
tradition, and it was adapted to satirical purposes in the fictional
Epistolae Virorum Obscurorum (1515–17), one of the neo-Latin
works Lewis advised ‘students of this period [to] study’.13 As for
Ovid, his imagined letters between legendary lovers provided
models for correspondents in real-life relationships,14 and
although written in verse, they too influenced the development
of epistolary prose fiction. Some of them are in pairs: for
example, Paris writes to Helen, the wife of Menelaus, and she
replies in a way that advances the story. Thus Ovid pointed
toward the idea of a series of letters containing an implied
narrative, one that focuses on a love affair.15 His many imitators
in succeeding centuries were not much interested in the narrative
feature, however. Famous lovers from English history rather
than from classical myth are the characters of Michael Drayton’s
England’s Heroical Epistles (1597), to which Lewis would devote
a paragraph in his Oxford History volume.16 Drayton’s title
clearly alludes to Ovid, but his paired letters tend to be more
static, with the second verse letter in each case presenting the
respondent’s perspective, seemingly unchanged by the letter just
12 For a study of less well-known classical examples, see Patricia A.
Rosenmeyer, Ancient Epistolary Fictions: The Letter in Greek Literature
(Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001).
13Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century excluding Drama, Oxford
History of English Literature, 3 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954), 608.
14 See Peter Dronke, Women Writers of the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge
UP, 1984), 84–107, 126.
15 This point is developed, albeit briefly, by Janet Gurkin Altman, Epistolarity:
Approaches to a Form (Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1982), 15, and Rachel
Trickett, ‘The Heroides and the English Augustans,’ in Ovid Renewed: Ovidian
Influences on Literature and Art from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century, ed.
Charles Martindale (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988), 193.
16 English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, 533–34.
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received. What Drayton gives us instead is two versions of a
given situation from differing viewpoints, and this possibility
would also come to be exploited in epistolary fiction, though
there is no reason to credit Drayton with that.
It remained for writers for a more popular audience in
seventeenth-century France and England to begin developing
the narrative potential, putting together not two but several
letters to document, as it were, the progress of a love affair—
much as poets in Drayton’s time had done in inventing the
sonnet sequence. Such writings grew in popularity in the
eighteenth century until in 1740, towering above a great deal of
underbrush, came Samuel Richardson’s Pamela.17 From then until
the end of the century more than 350 epistolary novels poured
from the presses, the vast majority of them in the Sentimental
vein then in vogue.18
After Jane Austen abandoned epistolary form (apart from
satiric and parodic uses) in favor of third-person narration
with its more fluid handling of viewpoint, epistolarity lost
its dominance in the novel, but it never entirely disappeared
as a narrative device. G. F. Singer devotes forty-five pages to
chronicling its presence in English-language fiction in the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He mentions, among
many other novelists, Sir Walter Scott, Edward Bulwer-Lytton,
17 R. A. Day, Told in Letters: Epistolary Fiction before Richardson (Ann Arbor:
U of Michigan P, 1966), traces the early development of the form. He
lists about 200 examples in English between 1660 and 1740 (237–58).
Natascha Würzbach, ed., The Novel in Letters: Epistolary Fiction in the Early
English Novel, 1678–1740 (Coral Gables, Fla.: U of Miami P, 1969), reprints
nine of these texts, with an introduction. Looking beyond separate book
publications, Day also provides ‘A List of Letter Fiction in Periodicals’
(267–70), with 35 items (single letters or short groups, some published in
serial form) that appeared in the Tatler, Spectator, and such periodicals.
18 Notable exceptions are Tobias Smollett’s Humphrey Clinker (1771) and
Frances Burney’s Evelina (1778). For the statistics, see Godfrey Frank
Singer, The Epistolary Novel: Its Origin, Development, Decline, and Residuary
Influence (1933; New York: Russell & Russell, 1963), 99–100.
Huttar, The Scr ewtape Letters as Epistolar y Fiction
95
Thomas Hardy, William Dean Howells, and Jack London.19
Henry James also used the device in two short stories.20 Dorothy
L. Sayers reasonably complained that ‘modern realism—
often too closely wedded to externals—is prejudiced against
this device.’21 Even so, during C. S. Lewis’s lifetime up to the
publication of Screwtape, epistolary novels in English appeared,
on average, at least once a year.
Within this long tradition there is considerable variety in
both theme and technique. The past half-century has seen
considerable innovation, as will be noted below, but it is
important to be aware of the variety that already existed up to the
time when Lewis was writing. While love themes predominated
in the eighteenth century, other concerns were also frequently
present, such as the travelogue; commentary, sometimes comic,
on society and manners;22 and didactic inculcation of doctrine,
morality, and polite conduct.23 For the last of these, the tradition
19 Singer, chapters 7 and 9, especially pp. 164–65, 212, 205.
20 Altman, Epistolarity, 11n2.
21 Sayers, ‘Introduction,’ Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery and Horror. Part
I. Detection and Mystery, ed. Dorothy L. Sayers (London: Gollancz, 1928),
25.
22 One work in this vein is worth mentioning in a C. S. Lewis context: in
News from the Dead (1715) a devil ‘on business in London’ writes to a friend
about ‘how much the metropolis resembles home’ (Day, Told in Letters,
269). There is no reason, however, to think that Lewis knew this work.
23 A subgenre from this period has an interesting connection with C. S.
Lewis, though not, in my judgment, one strictly relevant to the present
inquiry; still, it needs to be mentioned since other Lewis scholars have
suggested it might be relevant. There was a vogue for ‘letters from the
dead to the living’, some of them describing Hell and warning readers
to amend their ways while they still have time (see Day, Told in Letters, 61,
77, 152, 254–55). In the nineteenth century a Danish author, Valdemar
Adolph Thisted, produced a full-blown novel along similar lines, Letters
from Hell. An English edition of this caught Lewis’s attention in his youth
because the foreword was by George MacDonald, and some scholars have
wondered whether it might have influenced Screwtape (Green and Hooper,
Lewis Biography, 45; Adey, Lewis: Writer, Dreamer, and Mentor, 141; Hooper in
Lewis, Collected Letters, ed. Walter Hooper, 3 vols. [London: Harper, 2004–
07], 1:215n). That seems to me unlikely (and Lewis’s Screwtape preface,
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owes something to conduct books and instructional manuals on
letter writing, two genres ordinarily having little if any belletristic
intention but sometimes enlivened by the creation of fictional
situations.24 Richardson himself was in the midst of writing
such a work when he got the idea for his novel; after finishing
Pamela he returned to that project and published Familiar Letters
on Important Occasions (1741).25 Later writers further expanded
the thematic possibilities, using the epistolary form for, inter
alia, mystery novels, character portrayal or caricature, thinly
fictionalised essays, and historical novels. An interesting use of
the form in the direction of comic fantasy, unparalleled so far as
I know, is Andrew Lang’s Old Friends: Essays in Epistolary Parody
(1890), in which characters from different works of classic
fiction, living in the same era and milieu, are imagined to have
encountered one another.26 The twenty-three chapters include
an exchange of letters between Christian (from Bunyan) and
Piscator (Walton); two letters in which Mrs. Proudie (Trollope)
relates how she made friends with Becky Sharp (Thackeray) but
was then cruelly undeceived; and a longer epistolary sequence
in which Inspector Bucket (Dickens) receives a request from
M. Lecoq (Gaboriau) to apprehend the criminal Count Fosco
(Collins) but mistakenly arrests Samuel Pickwick instead.
Since the time of Screwtape there has been further expansion
which names certain influences and denies others [xii–xiii], is silent on
Letters from Hell), though, of course, there can be no conclusive proof for
a negative. I have treated this question more fully in a yet unpublished
article, ‘C. S. Lewis and Thisted’s Letters from Hell,’ in which I suggest
instead a possible connection to The Great Divorce.
24 See W. Webster Newbold, ‘Traditional, Practical, Entertaining: Two Early
English Letter Writing Manuals,’ Rhetorica 26 (2008): 267–300.
25 See Singer, Epistolary Novel, 85ff. Singer also discusses the relation between
early epistolary fiction and the essay form (82) and notes that Samuel
Johnson valued Pamela more for the sentiments than for the story (91).
26 I hesitate to label Lang’s jeu d’esprit as an early example of the metafictional
impulse that came to be a more serious concern of novelists and critics in
the twentieth century (see Patricia Waugh, Metafiction: The Theory and Practice
of Self-Conscious Fiction [London: Methuen, 1984]).
Huttar, The Scr ewtape Letters as Epistolar y Fiction
97
of the genre in both its thematic and technical aspects, and
‘new fiction indebted to epistolarity continues to appear at a
prodigious pace’.27 Prominent examples—a few among many—
include Saul Bellow in Herzog (1964), John Barth in Letters
(1979), Alice Walker in The Color Purple (1982), and A. S. Byatt
in Possession (1990). Forms of communication that are not,
strictly speaking, letters—for example, audiotapes in Margaret
Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985)—have been adapted to
fictional uses so clearly analogous to those of the letter as to fall
within the scope of the genre.28 Recent criticism of the genre,
in addition to recognising these developments, took up themes
of particular interest in late twentieth-century culture but not
previously explored in depth in relation to the epistolary form:
for example, issues of narrative viewpoint, self-consciousness,
and liberation from social convention, especially as they relate to
female authorship, as well as typically ‘postmodernist’ questions
about the nature of texts, of writing, and of reading.29 These
welcome explorations of important aspects of epistolarity have
come, however, at the expense of a more balanced continued
attention to the entire tradition. The work of Robert Adams Day
and Natascha Würzbach in the 1960s added considerably to our
knowledge of the form’s prototypes and its early development,
27 Linda S. Kauffman, Special Delivery: Epistolary Modes in Modern Fiction
(Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992), xxv. See also Joe Bray, The Epistolary
Novel: Representations of Consciousness (London: Routledge, 2003), chapter 6,
and Linda S. Kauffman, ‘Not a Love Story: Retrospective and Prospective
Epistolary Directions,’ in Epistolary Histories: Letters, Fiction, Culture, ed.
Amanda Gilroy and W. M. Verhoeven (Charlottesville: UP of Virginia,
2000), 199–216.
28 There is a suggestive (albeit brief) attempt to account for this resurgence
of interest in epistolarity in Thomas O. Beebee, Epistolary Fiction in Europe,
1500–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999), 199–205.
29 See especially Gilroy and Verhoeven, Epistolary Histories, 10–14, and the
other works cited in note 27; Altman (above, note 15); Linda S. Kauffman,
Discourses of Desire: Gender, Genre, and Epistolary Fictions (Ithaca: Cornell UP,
1986); and Elizabeth C. Goldsmith, ed., Writing the Female Voice: Essays on
Epistolary Literature (Boston: Northeastern UP, 1989).
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but not since G. F. Singer’s book in 1933 has a full survey of the
field been provided.30 One aim of this essay is to bring back into
the critical discourse features of the epistolary tradition that
have received little notice in recent years—features that some
may indeed find less compelling than those that most often
engage critics today, but that nevertheless deserve attention
for a balanced understanding of the genre. Moreover, The
Screwtape Letters, whose relation to the genre has not so far been
considered in any depth, will be seen to embody a surprisingly
forward-looking critique of modern thought and of the role of
language in self-fashioning.
As to technique, a working definition of epistolary fiction
might be: that which consists, exclusively or primarily, of
documents supposed to have been written by one or more
persons other than the author, for one or more audiences other
than the reader.31 Part of the fiction, stated or implied, is that the
author is acting as editor and the reader as uninvolved observer,
both imposing their presence on material that has a prior
existence in its own right. The narrative element may appear
in two ways: directly, as the letters themselves relate events, or
implied by the sequence in which the letters are arranged, as in
the final example cited from Lang’s Old Friends.
A novel might contain other kinds of documents than
letters, as well as bridges of narrative connecting the documents,
and still qualify as epistolary. Most of the letters in Pamela are
30 Citations in notes 17 and 18. Beebee’s 1999 study is of more limited scope
than Singer’s both chronologically and geographically (dealing mainly
with the Continent and omitting developments in the late nineteenth and
twentieth centuries), but it usefully provides a ‘Select Bibliography of
European Epistolary Fiction to 1850’ (231–58).
31 Central to epistolary discourse, as Janet Altman has pointed out, are the
pronouns ‘I’ and ‘you’ (Epistolarity, 117). Considerable latitude exists in
defining the audience, which might be merely oneself (not limited to the
case of diaries—see page 115 below); and sometimes, as in Pamela, the plot
is complicated by having the documents read by persons for whom they
were not intended (Altman, 104–5).
Huttar, The Scr ewtape Letters as Epistolar y Fiction
99
by the heroine, and there is also an extensive journal—one,
moreover, into which letters, her own and others, have been
copied. The same combination of letters and journal appears
in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). In The Moonstone (1868) Wilkie
Collins combined letters, extracts from a journal, and several
‘statements’ commissioned in the assembling of an investigative
dossier. Collins’s work was the acknowledged model for Dorothy
L. Sayers in The Documents in the Case (1930),32 which, like other
examples from that era, further stretches the boundaries to
include technologically more advanced forms like the telegram.33
It is even possible for the ‘documents’ to be oral, a series of
separate monologues, with the reader’s position in relation to
them analogous to that assumed in the ‘fourth wall’ convention
in theatre. An example is Stephen McKenna’s The Confessions of
a Well-Meaning Woman (1922), of which more must be said in a
moment.
The documents that make up an epistolary novel might be
all or nearly all from one character or might represent multiple
viewpoints, each reflecting the writer’s limited experiences,
and possibly interpretive biases as well. The latter approach
32 Sayers regarded The Moonstone very highly (see The Letters of Dorothy L.
Sayers, 1899–1936, ed. Barbara Reynolds [first of 4 vols.] [New York: St.
Martin’s, 1995], 240, 279n1, 288, 361–62). Another significant point of
contact between Sayers and the mainstream novelistic tradition is her
vision of detective stories that are ‘link[ed] more closely to the novel of
manners’ than to that ‘of adventure’ (‘Introduction’ [above, note 21],
44). In her own work in the genre she sought ‘serious “criticism of life” ’
(‘Gaudy Night,’ in Titles to Fame, ed. Denys Kilham Roberts [London:
Thomas Nelson, 1937], 209). Lewis of course knew and corresponded
with Sayers, but it seems unlikely that he read The Documents in the Case. He
reports having tried Gaudy Night, which he ‘didn’t like at all. But then . . .
detective stories aren’t my taste’ (Lewis, Collected Letters, 2:505).
33 Since 1940, epistolary fiction has continued such developments. As noted
above, in The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) Margaret Atwood uses audio tapes.
The computer files in Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum (1988) may also
be noted; these are quantitatively only a minor part of the novel, however.
See also Kauffman, ‘Not a Love Story,’ 213.
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enabled both Collins and Sayers to have different characters give
competing accounts of what happened, thus mingling scraps
of information and misinformation in classic detective-story
fashion. But even if the letters are all from a single writer, that
person may not be entirely reliable. The prevailing convention in
much of the epistolary fiction of Richardson’s time ignored this
possibility and considered the letter to be, in Singer’s words, ‘the
best medium for the revelation of the soul’.34 But many authors
have chosen to use characters who write to deceive, or who
write with honest intent but in a way that betrays imperfect selfknowledge, less than full awareness of facts, and questionable
judgement.
Voice, Setting, Plot, and Characterisation
C. S. Lewis is well known for his belief in the significance of an
author’s choice of genre and for his careful attention, in both
his criticism and his own fiction, to generic conventions. The
fictions of his 1941 preface, an integral part of the original
work,35 signal its generic affiliation within the long tradition I
have just described. Out of the array of technical possibilities
34 Singer, Epistolary Novel, 88. Catherine Gubernatis’s 2007 dissertation
examines in detail how modern novelists ‘use letters in their works precisely
to reject the [18th-century] conventions’ and, in ‘modern and postmodern’
vein, ‘use the epistolary form to investigate the ways language complicates
representations of the subjective experience.’ Thus—as I am hoping to
demonstrate here from a different angle of approach—such recent use of
the letter in fiction ‘automatically puts novels in conversation with texts
from previous literary eras.’ ‘The Epistolary Form in Twentieth-Century
Fiction,’ Dissertation Abstracts International, Section A: The Humanities and
Social Sciences 68.7 (January 2008): 2938.
35 In a letter to the publisher concerning his preferred layout for the ‘new
edition’ of 1961 (Collected Letters, 3:1195–96), Lewis is colorfully explicit
on this point. That preface, or ‘prologue,’ is ‘spoken by the imaginary
C.S.L.’ as ‘part of the . . . convention.’
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for epistolary fiction, Lewis chose what might be called a purist
approach, using letters only, no other documents or other
narration, and limiting them to those of a single writer.36 He
also chose to employ a level of irony that forbids taking things
at face value but requires the reader to weigh judiciously what
that writer is saying. And, like Andrew Lang, he chose to tell
his story through business, not personal, correspondence:
Screwtape writes to Wormwood not in the role of uncle but
in that of job supervisor. This is relatively rare, for a genre that
began with the idea of letters as the vehicle of intimate selfdisclosure and self-exploration. I know of no other book-length
example.37 The significance of this distinctive form will appear
in our discussion of characterisation.
In a preface to the second edition (1961) Lewis explains
some of his other choices. The new preface stands apart (v–xv)
and is a mixture of literary criticism and autobiography. I will
quote from it even though, in many cases, what Lewis tells us
is already evident from a careful reading of the work itself. He
does provide, however, this important new information: ‘I gladly
acknowledge my debt to Stephen McKenna’s The Confessions
of a Well-Meaning Woman,’ in which ‘you will find . . . the same
moral inversion—the blacks all white and the whites all black—
and the humour which comes of speaking through a totally
humourless personna [sic]’ (xii–xiii). McKenna’s novel consists
of twelve conversations between Lady Ann Spenworth and
‘a friend of proved discretion’, with the friend’s part in the
conversation implied by ellipsis marks, so that the effect is that
36 He did at one point consider including a second voice but decided against
doing so. See the further discussion on p. 116 below.
37 Well-known examples in shorter compass, and in a comic vein, are the
Earthworm Tractor stories of William Hazlett Upson, featuring the
salesman Alexander Botts, published irregularly in the Saturday Evening
Post beginning in the 1920s (see Stephen C. Holder, ‘That Botts Business:
Earthworm Tractors and Much More,’ Journal of Popular Culture 36 [2002]:
135).
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of a series of monologues. Lady Ann is a woman of birth and
breeding, married to the younger son of an earl, constantly
trying to use others to her advantage or to engineer their lives,
and possessively devoted to her son Will, a feckless, spoiled
boy of thirty. Her seemingly endless talk is filled with clichés,
platitudes, (mis)quotations, and indignation at other people’s
behaviour. She is pretentious and totally lacking in humour or
self-knowledge. She explicitly denies being a snob, when it is
obvious that she is; she despises her sisters-in-law who are of
mercantile origins and brought to their marriages merely wealth.
She does win our respect at two points, when she conceives and
carries out a bold plan to save her marriage and, toward the end,
when she accepts with good grace Will’s marriage to a poor
Lancashire clergyman’s daughter whom he loves. But evidently
those are not the parts that caught Lewis’s interest.
We often find in Lewis’s nonfictional writing a flair for
small-scale fictional creation: Mrs. Fidget in chapter 3 of The
Four Loves is an example that comes readily to mind.38 Similar
mini-narratives are also embedded in Screwtape’s letters of
instruction: the ‘narrow escape’ of the atheist in the British
Museum (9) and the party-line account of the interview between
God and Lucifer (86–87). But our concern now is with larger
matters of setting, plot, and characterisation. Under the third of
these headings we will glance again at Stephen McKenna’s book.
One of Lewis’s strengths as a writer of fiction is his ability
to bring to life in the reader’s imagination a world unlike that
of our daily experience. Examples abound of otherworld
settings, whether reached by magical means, by traveling in
space, or by dying.39 The setting of The Screwtape Letters is a
palimpsest that includes both the ordinary mundane world of
38Lewis, The Four Loves (London: Bles, 1960), 60–62.
39 I refer of course to the Chronicles of Narnia; Out of the Silent Planet and
Perelandra; and The Great Divorce and The Last Battle.
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103
London, presumably during World War II,40 and a different
kind of otherworld: that same ordinary world, in its invisible
aspect. Lewis’s premise is that alongside our world of sensory
experience exists an invisible realm filled with spirits—devils
and angels, and God also—impinging on us mentally but
usually unrecognised. The idea of course is not original with
Lewis. Screwtape’s account of the British Museum episode is
reminiscent of the verbal duel of Good and Bad Angels made
visible onstage by Christopher Marlowe.41
One day, as he [the ‘sound atheist’] sat reading, I saw a
train of thought in his mind beginning to go the wrong
way. The Enemy [i.e., God], of course, was at his elbow
in a moment. . . . If I had . . . begun to attempt a defence
by argument, I should have been undone. But . . . I struck
instantly at the part of the man which I had best under my
control, and suggested . . . lunch. The Enemy presumably
made the counter-suggestion (you know how one can
never quite overhear what He says to them?) that this was
more important than lunch. At least I think that must
have been His line, for when I said, ‘Quite. In fact much
too important to tackle at the end of a morning,’ the
40 Lewis, casting himself in the role of editor, calls it ‘the European War’.
Given the dates of composition and publication, we may conjecture that
the events of the story cover a little over a year, from August 1939—
shortly before the war—to sometime during the Blitz in the autumn of
1940. But references to news events are only general, not specific. David
Hein, however, briefly studies The Screwtape Letters to rebut the frequently
stated idea that Lewis had no interest in current events (‘A Note on
C. S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters,’ The Anglican Digest 49.2 [Easter 2007]:
55–58). A similar rebuttal, of course, could be made using references in
Lewis’s broadcast talks that began in 1941.
41 Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, ed. Sylvan Barnet (New York: Signet, 1969), 26
(1.1.67–74), 38 (2.1.15–22), 45 (2.2.12–17), 97–99 (5.2.106–39). On the
invisible spirit world, see Lewis, The Discarded Image (Cambridge: Cambridge
UP, 1964), 72–73, 117–18. That Marlowe in the sixteenth century could
make its denizens visible agrees with Screwtape’s observation that the
present policy ‘to conceal ourselves . . . has not always been’ the devils’
strategy (32).
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patient brightened up considerably; and by the time I had
added ‘Much better come back after lunch and go into it
with a fresh mind’, he was already halfway to the door.
Once he was in the street . . . I showed him a newsboy . .
. and . . . (9, emphasis in original)
Screwtape’s tale of inner promptings continues. It is necessary
to remember that the setting thus described, the invisible
spirit world, belongs to the machinery of the fiction. It is not
meant to convey, and is not dependent on, theological doctrine.
Some readers, Lewis tells us, will see in his devils ‘symbols of a
concrete reality’, while for others they are ‘personifications of
abstractions’, and ‘it makes little difference which way you read
it’ (xii). The invisible world becomes visible at death: ‘There was
a sudden clearing of his eyes . . . as he saw you [Wormwood] for
the first time. . . . He also saw Them’, the angels who ‘had played
[their part] at many an hour in his life when he had supposed
himself alone’ (146–47). What did he see? Not necessarily either
devils or angels as they appear in traditional iconography, for
those depictions are ‘only symbolical’ (viii); but in whatever form,
they were immediately recognisable. Screwtape is imagined,
in Lewis’s fiction, to have some physical form, capable at any
rate of producing distinctive handwriting, but subject to radical
alteration in one dramatic episode (103).
Lewis’s setting also includes a depiction of demonic society,
a totalitarian bureaucratic state with an extensive administrative
structure. Besides field workers such as Wormwood and their
supervisors such as the undersecretary Screwtape, there are an
intelligence agency, departments of research, propaganda (with
its important Philological Arm [70]), and record-keeping—
Screwtape mentions having consulted the files on the Patient’s
girlfriend (101) and on the two churches near his home (73)—a
Training College, and a Secret Police (100; distinct perhaps from
the Infernal Police [140]), all answerable to ‘the High Command’
whose ‘orders’ ‘we must obey’ (32–33). There is abundant
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provision for internal communication and consultation, and
‘colleagues’ may sometimes cooperate on a project (15). In
his 1961 preface Lewis explains the appropriateness, in this
‘Managerial Age’, of such a ‘bureaucracy’ as his ‘symbol for
Hell’ (x). That last word does not often cross Screwtape’s lips
or pen, but speaking in his own voice Lewis freely uses it to
name the invisible society that the devils inhabit. Again we may
be reminded of Marlowe, whose Mephistopheles, when Faustus
asks where Hell is, declares himself to be in Hell right there in
Wittenberg (34 [1.3.75]). However, even though the setting of
Lewis’s story is this world and thus he avoids the popular image
of Hell as underground,42 he draws on that image in giving
Screwtape an inverted spatial orientation: he speaks of his ‘great
masters’ as ‘spirits far deeper down in the Lowerarchy than you
and I’ (91) and refers to the supreme authority of the realm as
‘Our Father Below’ (12).
Plot and characterisation must be considered together. The
main turning points in the unnamed Patient’s journey are easily
discerned from the openings of letters, in which Screwtape is
responding to his subordinate’s latest reports.43 From them we
can glimpse changes in both his outward circumstances and his
inner life, psychological and spiritual. Between the first letter
and the second, the Patient ‘has become a Christian’ (11) and
begun to form regular habits of church attendance and prayer.
Less definite, at first, is any impact his conversion may have
on his day-to-day behaviour at home (15). The next narrative
development is the outbreak of war (24: letter 5), the immediate
effect of which on the Patient is uncertainty whether he will
be conscripted into military service (28: letter 6). After the
42 An exception is the line ‘I could show you a pretty cageful down here’ (35;
emphasis added).
43 Not every letter provides such hints. Sometimes there are several letters of
instruction to Wormwood before a new development in the Patient’s state
is recorded.
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conversion, Screwtape predicted feelings of ‘disappointment or
anticlimax’ within the ‘first few weeks’ (13), and by the time
of letter 8 this development has occurred (36). By letter 10 he
has begun to take up with a new set of friends who have no
interest in spiritual things (45, 49), and there is a hint that his
relations with his mother are likely to become more strained
(48). He continues to attend church and receive communion,
however, at some point44 experiencing ‘repentance and renewal
of . . . “grace” . . . a second conversion . . . on a deeper level
than the first’ (57: letter 13). Now, his more realistic expectations
indicate a degree of spiritual maturation (62: letter 14), sufficient
to keep him faithful to his parish church even though ‘he is not
wholly pleased with it’ (72: letter 16). Meanwhile, a lull in the
war having reduced his anxiety (67: letter 15), the devils assault
him with repeated temptations to sins of the flesh. These he
successfully resists (90: letter 20). Then he falls in love, with
a thoroughly committed Christian (100–01: letter 22), and is
brought under the healthy influence of her family and friends
(102, 105, 115). This, however, if we are to believe Screwtape’s
analysis (112–13: letter 24), lays him open to the sin of pride.
But he has learned to recognise temptations and make them
the urgent subject of his prayers (125: letter 27). In short, the
demonic assaults continue to be ‘unsuccessful’ (131). These
developments occur against the backdrop of war, with ‘people
in England [being] killed by bombs’ (114), and the Patient
has some responsibility (unspecified) in ‘defence work’ (131).
Eventually air raids on his own town become imminent (130,
135). In the first raid he acquits himself well, attending to duty
despite fear and fatigue (140–41: letter 30). In the second raid,
44 It is only two letters farther, but there is no way to tell how frequently
the exchanges between Screwtape and Wormwood take place. If my
conjecture about the duration of the story (see note 40) is correct, the
letters would average out to about a fortnight apart. Between letter 2 and
letter 10 ‘months’ have passed; by letter 12, another ‘six weeks’ (54). Lewis
warns against trying to track the chronology (4).
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107
he is killed.
That is not quite the end of the story. It is an ‘easy’ death:
‘no gradual misgivings, no doctor’s sentence, no nursing home,
no operating theatre, no false hopes of life: sheer, instantaneous
liberation’ (146: letter 31). And in that moment ‘a sudden
clearing of his eyes’ makes him aware of Wormwood’s presence
in his life over the past months or more—but no longer (146)—
and also aware of other Presences, guardian angels, and he
recognises their countervailing role in his life ‘from infancy’
onward (147–48). Even more, he meets his Saviour, ‘wear[ing]
the form of a Man’ (148), and begins the endless afterlife.
But a sequence of events does not in itself make a novel,
and the Patient, who is given no name (unlike the colourfully
named devils), also is curiously lacking in distinctive traits of
personality. He is an abstraction—not even a character type,
after the fashion of a certain style of storytelling that preceded
the Age of Realism. Some critics have faulted the book on
this account, and it is one reason I refrain from calling it an
epistolary ‘novel’. But that lack of vividness in the Patient’s
characterisation results inevitably from Lewis’s choice of the
viewpoint character. We know the Patient only through the
speculations of Screwtape, who, having digested the field
reports submitted by his subordinate, draws on his general
knowledge of human nature to theorise about how the Patient
might behave, or might by Wormwood’s guidance be drawn to
behave. If only he could be made to think the worst of the
people he meets in church, and therefore of the church itself
(12–14); to live with his mother in an atmosphere of ‘mutual
annoyance’ (15); to be confused by ‘contradictory pictures of
the future’ (28) rather than focusing on the present; to find
‘desires of the flesh’ especially attractive when one’s ‘inner world
is drab and cold and empty’ (41); to embrace worldly values
that gradually, imperceptibly draw one away from a life of faith
(54–56); to defer putting good intentions into action (60); to let
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humility itself become a source of pride or other vices (63–64);
to become ‘a taster or connoisseur of churches’ (72); to make a
god of the belly (77–78); to feel anger when deprived of things
to which one has no proper claim (95–98); to use Christianity’
as a means’ to some lesser end (108); to pride oneself on being
an ‘initiate’ into deep religious mysteries beyond the scope of
ordinary mortals (113) and to chase after theological fashions
(117); to substitute a parade of unselfishness for genuine charity
(121–24); to hate one’s enemies (136) and let natural fear be
rationalised into cowardice (138–39, 142)—these are all sinister
possibilities inherent in the human condition, but they all
remain theoretical as regards this particular person, the Patient.
Often Screwtape’s speculations take a binary form: patriotism
or pacifism? (25, 35); despair or false hope? (42–43); ‘tortured
fear’ or ‘stupid confidence’? (67); sexual sin or ‘overweening
asceticism’? (88). His purpose is to devise possible scenarios for
the future and advise Wormwood how to make them happen.
Whether they do happen or not we aren’t told, so the Patient
remains a rather shadowy figure. His ‘relations with his mother’
(15) may be less than ideal, but we are given no details to flesh
out this generalization. In fact, her personality comes into focus,
in the scene describing her eating habits (77–78), more vividly
than his ever does. In the flat, unrounded characterisation of
the Patient, then, the full narrative potential of Lewis’s germ
idea is left unrealised; but given the author’s choice to omit
Wormwood’s side of the correspondence, in which the tempter
might (though unlikely) have displayed a novelist’s gift—but
which would have made a book rivaling one of Richardson’s
in length—it is hard to see how he could have done differently.
In contrast, on the other side of the double plot, that
involving the devils, we have a more rudimentary story line but
fuller and more interesting characterisation, beginning with the
names. This device is in the tradition of Fielding’s Allworthy,
Swift’s Gulliver, and Richardson’s Lovelace. Lewis has denied any
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109
semantic intent in his invention of names, saying that he aimed
only at making them sound ‘nasty’ (xiii), but regardless of intent
the names do have semantic overtones, especially Wormwood
(cf. Revelation 8:11).45 Not much else about Wormwood can
be discerned. He appears to be a novice tempter—this may be
his first assignment after college—and he frequently has to be
reprimanded by his supervisor for mistakes in both practise and
theory. The latter, of course, give rise to some of Screwtape’s
best passages of instruction (while other epistolary lectures
spring from the need to devise strategies to meet changing
circumstances in the Patient’s condition). Only rarely is
Wormwood commended for some success (53) or even a good
idea (95, 120 [‘Yes’]). Having absorbed the ethos of the infernal
bureaucracy, in which all relationships finally come down to the
desire to possess the other (145), he makes crude attempts to
gain some leverage over Screwtape with accusations of heresy,
but he is easily outmanoeuvred by the more experienced devil.
Eventually his missteps (combined with divine grace) lead to
failure in his mission—the Patient is saved—and Wormwood, it
seems, will soon become the prey of his ‘ravenous’ uncle (149).
So much for Wormwood. Lewis’s real achievement in
characterisation in this story is the figure of Screwtape.46 But
45 ‘Once a name was invented’, he says, ‘I might speculate like anyone else’ on
such overtones (xiii). Lewis had used ‘Wormwood’ as a name for Satan in
The Pilgrim’s Regress (1933); the passage is reprinted in his Poems, ed. Walter
Hooper (London: Bles, 1964), 87. The archaic sense of worm ‘dragon’ may
also be in play.
46 The relative vagueness in characterising both the Patient and Wormwood
accounts in part for the fact that the long-running stage adaptation of The
Screwtape Letters (in New York January-April 2006, November 2007, and
January 2016 [see http://www.newyorker.com/goings-on-about-town/
theatre/the-screwtape-letters-3 (accessed 9 March 2016)], and on tour in
at least ten other cities) was virtually a monologue by Screwtape, with
mainly choreographic assistance from his secretary Toadpipe (played by a
woman). See John J. Miller, ‘Wicked Good,’ National Review Online, 20 April
2006 (www.nationalreview.com/miller/miller200604200601.asp [accessed
11 February 2008]); Jennifer Farrar (Associated Press), ‘ “Screwtape
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here our approach must be different. The entire text is in
Screwtape’s words, and we have already had to take into account,
in inferring both character and plot, possible distortions due to
that subjective viewpoint. All the more must he be regarded as
an unreliable narrator when it comes to our efforts to discern
his character. So far as the story line is concerned, the figure
of Screwtape is relatively static. He claims to have successfully
defended himself against Wormwood’s efforts to incriminate
him (100), and at one point he is temporarily metamorphosed
into a centipede, not for the first time (103). But his attitude
toward all the other devils, a combination of fear and predatory
desire, never changes, though most of the time, in his letters, he
manages to conceal it.
Already we have moved from plot to characterisation. One
of the advantages of the epistolary form—mainly a postRichardson development—is the opportunity that it gives to
use the device of the unreliable narrator for ironic effect, either
through inadvertent self-revelation (to the reader of the novel,
at least, if not also to the addressee of the letter) or through
falsity in the account given or the opinions expressed. The
falsity may have several causes: deliberate lying or posturing, or
mistakes due to a lack of knowledge or of understanding, such
mistakes ranging from the relatively innocent to those arising
from a settled habit of self-deception or the sheer incapacity
to grasp realities outside a person’s own experience. We will
examine each of these possibilities in turn.
In his preface Lewis reminds us that ‘the devil is a liar’ (4,
quoting John 8:44), and we must accept this as an aspect of
Screwtape’s character as well, although, perhaps surprisingly, it
Letters” Haunts Broadway’ (jam.canoe.ca/Theatre/2007/12/12/pf4721244.html [posted 12 December 2007, accessed 21 January 2008]).
According to Paul Cozby, communications director at Fellowship for
Performing Arts, total attendance is over 500,000 (private email 9 March
2016).
Huttar, The Scr ewtape Letters as Epistolar y Fiction
111
is not much in evidence in the letters. ‘You can trust me to look
after your interests’ (86) is clearly a lie. The odds may be against
his having ‘the highest regard’ for Slubgob (86), and we can’t be
sure whether he managed to smooth over Wormwood’s charges
of heresy (100) or just wants Wormwood to think so, but most
of the time he tells the truth. His purpose, to give Wormwood
useful guidance on human psychology and other matters,
could hardly be accomplished by deliberately misleading him.
For us as readers the inversion—the irony—comes not on the
cognitive level, taking whatever Screwtape says as untrue, but
on the affective. What he finds ‘disgusting’ we are to appreciate.
His approval of something, such as church-shopping (72–73)
or partisan divisions within the Church (75), should raise a red
flag for us, but if he disapproves something, that is a signal that
it deserves our approval. The ‘Enemy’ is in reality on our side.
Among Screwtape’s intellectual abilities, his linguistic
aptitude is noteworthy. We learn from the recently discovered
manuscript preface intended for the first edition that the
original letters here translated contain some English words, ‘for
naturally devils whose terrain is England are well . . . skilled in
the language of their proposed victims.’47 Screwtape also has
a keen insight into human psychology—not from a scientific
angle, of course, but in a practical way through his observations
as a tempter and perhaps his study at the Training College
(where, presumably, the ‘law of Undulation’ [36–37, 40–41]
was taught)48—and he discusses many other matters that Lewis
would deal with elsewhere in his own persona, such as the
mechanisms of domestic friction (16–18), the power of habit
(11, 31, 55, 60–61), the tendency to focus on other people’s
47 Manuscript preface (Marion E. Wade Center, CSL/MS 107), quoted in
Dickieson, ‘Unpublished Preface’ (above, note 7), accessed 9 November
2015 at http://0-nq.oxfordjournals.org.lib.hope.edu/content/60/2/296.full
48 A ‘law’ that Lewis himself knew from observation: see his comments on
the new convert’s loss of initial ‘fervour’ in Letters to Malcolm, 26–27 (letter
5).
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faults and overlook one’s own (14), the attraction of the ‘inner
ring’ (113),49 the intimate interconnection of soul and body (20),
and the cumulative effect of bad choices upon character (53–54,
56, 61). He also has a sound understanding of philosophical
issues. He apparently has read Boethius (128) and Kant (whom
he quotes on p. 133), among others. His explanations about time
and eternity (67ff., 127), war (26), death (26–27, 114, 131–34),
the different springs of laughter (50–52), the value of suffering
(27), and how prayer works (19–23, 27, 125–27), to select a few
topics, contain as much positive instruction for the reader as
for Wormwood. Lewis’s affiliation here is with that branch of
the epistolary novel—influenced by letter-writing manuals and
the conduct books of the sixteenth century, or even by ancient
epistolers such as Seneca—which has room for moral essays.
Lewis adapts to his rhetoric of inversion many ideas that would
find their way into his more directly expository works.
Even as he gives Wormwood true instruction, Screwtape’s
letters reveal him to be an enemy of truth. When Wormwood
perceives the Patient beginning to think cogently, he is to
distract his attention, as in the British Museum episode, or
‘wrap a darkness’ around his unexamined false assumptions
(97). Not only does Screwtape repeatedly warn Wormwood
against allowing the Patient to use his reason—which Lewis
considered ‘the natural organ of truth’50—but he has high
praise for his colleagues’ work in the Propaganda Department.
Lewis’s emphasis on this point must have struck a responsive
chord in many readers, at a time when they viewed Adolf
Hitler’s propaganda machine as an integral part of his warmaking.51 Screwtape makes it clear that these officials have the
49 See also p. 46, and Lewis’s essay ‘The Inner Ring’, in The Weight of Glory and
Other Addresses (New York: Macmillan, 1949), 55–66.
50 Lewis, ‘Bluspels and Flalansferes’, in Selected Literary Essays, ed. Walter
Hooper (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1969), 265.
51 An early review of the book, for example, observes that the infernal
program of ‘bewilderment and obfuscation’ is ‘quite in the best manner
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job of twisting the meanings of words, both denotative and
connotative, for the purpose of obfuscation.52 He exults that ‘we
have got them [humans] completely fogged about the meaning
of the word “real” ’ (142; cf. 8–9). ‘It is jargon, not reason, you
must rely on’, he advises Wormwood, offering as examples the
word ‘phase’ and ‘hazy ideas of Progress and Development
and the Historical Point of View’ (43; see 118 and 128–29 for
further development of these points). Words like ‘adolescent’
(44), ‘Puritanism’ and ‘Puritanical’ (47, 48, 52), ‘humility’ (63),
‘complacency’ (70), and ‘stagnant’ (119) have become so heavily
freighted emotionally as to be useless, in fact misleading, for
clear thinking—and that is exactly what Screwtape wants. Even
a word like ‘my’ can be useful: though himself fully aware of
the ‘finely graded differences’ in its meanings, what he desires in
the Patient’s mind is mere ‘confusion’ (98). ‘True’ and ‘False’ are
words to avoid (44). ‘Fashions in thought’ are to be cultivated
instead (117). In all of this, Screwtape is perfectly clear and
accurate regarding what has happened to these words: he is
telling the truth about the undermining of truth.
There is, however (if we may believe the preface that Lewis
wrote but left unpublished), one way in which even Screwtape
cannot bend language to his control. The capitalisation of the
word ‘Enemy’ (as he calls God) is ‘involuntary.’ Though the
devil may radically alter the Name, he is still forced in some
fashion to hallow it.
Of particular interest are Screwtape’s observations in a long
passage in letter 25, which I here condense:
The horror of the Same Old Thing is one of the most
valuable passions we have produced in the human heart.
. . . The desire for novelty is indispensable if we are to
of Doctor Goebbels’ (Leonard Bacon, ‘Critique of Pure Diabolism’,
Saturday Review of Literature 26.20 [17 April 1943]: 20).
52 ‘Devils are unmaking language’, writes Lewis (metaphorically, I presume)
in ‘Re-Adjustment’ (Poems, 102).
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produce Fashions or Vogues . . . [and thereby] distract
the attention of men from their real dangers. . . . The
greatest triumph of all is to elevate this horror of the
Same Old Thing into a philosophy so that nonsense in
the intellect may reinforce corruption in the will. It is
here that the general Evolutionary or Historical character
of modern European thought (partly our work) comes in
so usefully.53 . . . If we can keep men asking: ‘Is it in
accordance with the general movement of our time? Is
it progressive or reactionary? Is this the way that History
is going?’ they will neglect the relevant questions. And
the questions they do ask are, of course, unanswerable.
(116–18, first emphasis supplied)
It may seem surprising that Lewis has Screwtape point out the role
of constructed metanarratives in the obfuscation of thought, a
theme that only decades later would gain prominence in AngloAmerican critical discourse. He has already, at the beginning of
letter 7 (32), touched on the idea of shifting fashions in thought
and their obscuring effect. But it should not be a surprise: there
is much in Lewis’s writings that aligns with the postmodernist
project of dismantling the legacy of the Enlightenment, and
indeed of the new Humanism that had paved the way for the
Enlightenment.54 The philosophical grounds for this outlook
may, to be sure, differ radically from those out of which the
more recent movement has sprung. By whimsically, in a famous
lecture, casting himself in the role of ‘dinosaur’—a carrier of
first-hand information about a world now known only through
painstaking and necessarily conjectural reconstruction from
53 Writing in his own voice, Lewis would develop this thought in a piece
written in 1946 for a study group on evangelism, ‘Modern Man and His
Categories of Thought’, in Present Concerns, ed. Walter Hooper (San Diego:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987), 63–64.
54 See the chapter ‘New Learning and New Ignorance’ in his English
Literature in the Sixteenth Century (1–65). For a fuller discussion of the
prescience of Lewis’s critical work see David C. Downing, ‘From Pillar
to Postmodernism: C.S. Lewis and Current Critical Discourse,’ Christianity
and Literature 46 (1997): 169–78.
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outside—Lewis more explicitly aligns himself with a way
of looking at the world which the modern age considered
outmoded, but which a recent analyst of contemporary thought
has characterised by the arresting oxymoron ‘the avant-garde
premodern’. Bruce Holsinger has shown how deeply indebted
the French theorists of the sixties and after were to the ‘legacy’
of mediaeval thought ‘as a foundation for [their] own intellectual
work’.55 It was a legacy in the transmission of which C. S. Lewis
had earlier, for nearly a quarter-century, played a leading role.
Lewis’s appreciation of that older outlook was not uncritical,
however;56 resistance to any Zeitgeist, whether of his own or any
other age, was a principle to which he regularly appealed.
Often, Screwtape departs from the truth in ways so frequently
encountered in our own experience that the mendacity is hardly
noticeable. In real life, letters may vary considerably in their
sincerity. The eighteenth-century idea that a letter is inherently
sincere is itself, of course, a literary convention: one that has its
positive uses still today, as illustrated by Alice Walker’s The Color
Purple. As with the secret diary, there seems to be no reason
for concealment or disingenuousness in letters not intended
by the writer to be read (in this case, addressed to God). Saul
Bellow’s Herzog is another example; here, letters are obsessively
written—some to addressees who are dead—but never mailed.
Over against this convention, it is well to keep in mind Theodor
Adorno’s observation that ‘the “I” in the letter is always
something of a mirage’.57 Lewis takes this suspicion of authorial
reliability even farther, if we may infer from something that in
the Letters he left unsaid. I mentioned earlier (note 36) that he
had considered juxtaposing another epistolary voice alongside
55 Bruce Holsinger, The Premodern Condition: Medievalism and the Making
of Theory (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2005), 1 (chapter heading) and 4.
‘Dinosaur’: Lewis, ‘ “De Descriptione Temporum” ’ (1955), in Selected
Literary Essays, 13–14.
56 Downing, ‘From Pillar’, 172–73.
57 Qtd. by Beebee, Epistolary Fiction in Europe, 200.
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Screwtape’s—that of an archangel advising the Patient’s guardian
angel. But he realized what a ‘desperately difficult job’ it would
be to ventriloquise a being of such exalted rank and holiness:
‘Whether . . . anyone [could capture] the beauty of charity shining
through the hardness, is doubtful.’58 Lewis doubted his ability to
command an ‘answerable style’, even more than did Milton, who
made it a matter of prayer to his Muse and then went ahead (PL
9.20–21). It is not language ability alone that deterred him, but
also a sense of inadequate knowledge—what David Downing
calls Lewis’s ‘epistemological humility’.59 We may note in this
connection the recent tendency in studies of Jacques Derrida to
‘associate the deconstructive project with apophatic theology’.60
In this instance also, then, Lewis anticipates themes that would
become critical commonplaces later in the century.
That letters vary in their sincerity is true especially of business
letters, where the writer and the addressee tend to be defined by
their functional roles rather than as persons. All the more is it
the case in this fiction by Lewis. Thus when Screwtape habitually
signs himself ‘Your affectionate uncle’, we take it simply as a
conventional formula, meaning about as much as ‘Sincerely
yours’ or, in an older convention (often clearly a pretence), ‘Your
obedient servant’. Only gradually—when he briefly drops the
mask in letter 22 (‘anxious to . . . unite you to myself in an
indissoluble embrace’ [104]), but perhaps not fully until the final
letter—do we, and Wormwood as well, understand the sinister
implications.61 But it is not a lie, only artful concealment: in Hell,
58Lewis, Collected Letters, 3:440–41 (letter to Harry Blamires, 14 March 1954).
A still stronger denial of the power of human speakers to achieve total
integrity, when dealing with the ineffable, may be seen in ‘The Apologist’s
Evening Prayer’ and ‘Footnote to All Prayers’ (Poems, 129). Ideas expressed
in the latter, first published in 1933, are reworked in Screwtape’s letter 4
(22).
59 Downing, ‘From Pillar,’ 178, developing a point begun on 177.
60 Holsinger, Premodern Condition, 115.
61 ‘I have always desired you’, Screwtape writes, and now that Wormwood
has failed in his assignment ‘they will give you to me . . . as dainty a morsel
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all kinds of love, including that which in The Four Loves Lewis
calls affection, are radically possessive in nature. Even when
Screwtape expresses sympathetic understanding (24–25) or great
satisfaction (15, 28, 45, 49), no reader is likely to see in this more
than the venial practises all too common in correspondence.62
Deception is not the only reason Screwtape is unreliable.
Despite his command of an impressive array of facts, there are
great gaps in his knowledge and understanding. To be sure, he
appears quite well educated. One imagines him as having access
not only to the bureaucracy’s files but to a substantial library. He
knows, or at least knows about, Coleridge, Byron, Goethe, and
the Romantic poets and novelists in general (20, 58, 81); modern
biographies (43); Shakespeare, Milton, and Shaw (136, 103,
33).63 He is familiar with contemporary intellectual movements
such as Creative Evolution, Communism, and Psychoanalysis
(68, 33). He keeps up on current events and theological fashions
(34, 67, 106–8); he is familiar with the Anglican marriage service
(101) and can quote from the Book of Common Prayer and the
Bible (38, 56, 84). We are reminded that the Devil can quote
Scripture for his purpose: Screwtape alludes to the parable of
the prodigal son (18), Pontius Pilate (138), the epistles of Paul
(34, 75, 82–83), and Jesus’ cry of dereliction on the cross (39).64
He knows about the Incarnation as a fact of history (8, 148). He
understands, better than the Patient does, the true nature of the
Church, the dependency of humans upon God, and the ultimate
reality of the spiritual warfare (12, 65, 96–98). That the pains
as ever I grew fat on’ (145).
62 Cf. Lewis’s preface: ‘On the surface, manners are normally suave.’ But
such ‘expressions . . . form a thin crust’ that ‘every now and then . . . gets
punctured’ (x–xi).
63 I have not yet been able to identify Screwtape’s quotations on pp. 60–61,
109, and 123. It is conceivable that Lewis may have made up at least one
of these for the occasion.
64 On the last compare Lewis, Perelandra (1943; New York: Collier, 1962),
153, where the spirit indwelling the Un-man utters, out of his memory,
that same cry in Aramaic.
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of Purgatory might be welcomed above ‘any earthly pleasure’—
Lewis may here be echoing Dante (Purg. 21.61–69)—is a fact
Screwtape recognises though he finds it ‘inexplicable’ (148). He
has a ‘direct perception’ of God that humans lack, and to him it
is painful but unavoidable (21).
He places no value on knowledge for its own sake; it is ‘hateful
and mawkish . . . yet . . . necessary for Power’ (149). All the more
frustrating, then, is the fact that there is much he simply does
not and cannot know. One reason is that he is sometimes the
unwitting victim of his own, and his whole culture’s, disregard
for truth. He may not actually ‘see [the Patient’s] position as it
really is,’ as he claims (53). The information in the files that he
consults may not be entirely reliable; ‘there is wishful thinking in
Hell as well as on Earth,’ Lewis warns in the preface (4). Lewis
carries that idea further in another piece of writing on which he
was working even while Screwtape’s letters were appearing in The
Guardian week by week. In March of 1941 he was invited to give a
series of lectures at the university in Bangor, Wales, and he chose
as his topic Milton’s Paradise Lost. He devotes a few paragraphs
to the figure of Satan in that poem, beginning with the revolt
in Heaven, for which the rebel offers reasons that Lewis shows
are patently ‘entangled in contradictions’. After his expulsion
from Heaven, Satan makes up his own alternative version of
that event, and Lewis as a reader of Paradise Lost finds it difficult
to ‘distinguish his conscious lies from the blindness which he
has almost willingly imposed on himself. . . . It is possible that
he now believes his own propaganda’65—just as Screwtape
apparently believes the story he has heard of the expulsion, that
it was Satan who suddenly in ‘disgust . . . remove[d] himself an
infinite distance from the [divine] Presence’; Milton’s alternative
account, ‘that he was forcibly thrown out,’ Screwtape calls a
‘ridiculous enemy story’ (87).
A more serious defect that the letters reveal in Screwtape’s
65Lewis, A Preface to Paradise Lost (London: Oxford UP, 1942), 94, 95.
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character is an incapacity, shared with all the devils, to grasp
certain concepts. He is frustrated at the research department’s
inability to ‘produce any virtue’, though he insists that ‘success is
hourly expected’ (135, emphasis original). As for pleasure, God
is ‘a hedonist at heart’ (116) and pleasure ‘is His invention’; the
most the devils can do is pervert it (41, 116–17). Laughter born
of joy he finds merely ‘disgusting’, and music, which he admits
is ‘quite opaque to us’, is therefore ‘detestable’ and ‘meaningless’
(50). ‘Music and silence—how I detest them both!’ (102);66 noise
is his proper milieu, and ‘we will make the whole universe a noise
in the end’ (thus symbolically undoing the creation that brought
order out of chaos). Here again, the ‘research’ to accomplish this
is only ‘in progress’, though he is encouraged by the prevalence
of noise in contemporary culture (103). ‘Incalculable’, within
the infernal philosophy, are the ‘winds of fantasy and music and
poetry—the mere face of a girl, the song of a bird, or the sight
of a horizon—[which] are always blowing . . . away’ the devils’
efforts to screen humans off from the transcendent (133).67 The
ways human beings can experience God’s presence directly are
‘not yet fully classified’, Screwtape says; the devils know it only
as an ‘asphyxiating cloud’ (57–58), a ‘deadly odour’ which to
them signals an ‘impenetrable mystery’ (102).
That mystery, in a word, is love; and Lewis’s treatment
of the subject, ironically by way of Screwtape’s inversions, is
profound. It is grounded in the classic theological doctrine of
coinherence (though that word does not appear). That ‘the
good of one self is to be the good of another’ Screwtape
dismisses as ‘a contradiction’, an ‘impossibility’, in the light
66 Lewis gave credit to George MacDonald for this idea (Collected Letters,
2:639).
67 This passage reflects Lewis’s concept of ‘Joy’ (see Surprised by Joy: The Shape
of My Early Life [New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1955], 166) but
also, I believe, owes something to the thought of Lewis’s friend Charles
Williams (see John Heath-Stubbs, Charles Williams, Writers and Their
Work 63 [London: Longmans, Green, 1955], 18).
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of his own thoroughly egoistic philosophy that one being can
thrive only at the expense of another (81). Across the whole
range of life, from ‘that obscene invention the organism’ with
its interdependent parts, to the God who ‘claims to be three
as well as one’,68 he finds that same principle which to him is
‘nonsense’ (82). Love, could he understand it, would be the clue
to solve all that baffles Screwtape and his world: the very idea
of marriage and the family, the very idea of human free will,
grounded as it is in God’s wanting other selves to exist, different
from yet in harmony with himself (59). Ruling out love from
the start as inconceivable, Screwtape is left to search futilely
for some other explanation. He confesses ‘our utter failure’ so
far and finds the question ‘insoluble’ (86); yet he persists in the
hope of success—another instance of the ‘wishful thinking’ we
have noted—making the ‘task’ ever ‘more complicated’ (87) to
find something which, ironically, the reader of his letters can
perceive to be quite simple.
Lewis leaves open, I think, the possible interpretation that
Screwtape’s insistence on making a mystery of it is not so
68 Lewis here alludes to the logical connections, explained by Augustine in
book 6 of De Trinitate, among love as a divine attribute, God’s eternality,
and God’s triune nature (Augustine, The Trinity, with intro., trans. and notes
by Edmund Hill, ed. John E. Rotelle, Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation
for the 21st Century pt. 1 vol. 5 [Brooklyn, N.Y.: New City Press, 1991],
210, 213, 215n16). Lewis surely knew Augustine’s work, and he would
also have recalled Dante’s use of the idea (Par. 33.112–26) and that in
a recent book by his friend Charles Williams, The Descent of the Dove: A
Short History of the Holy Spirit in the Church (London: Longmans, 1939): ‘If
there had been no creation, would Love have practiced love? and would
Love have had an adequate object to love? Nicaea answered yes. . . . The
Godhead itself was in Co-inherence’ (52). Lewis would later elaborate this
theme, in a manner related to Augustine’s argument, in his commentary
on Williams’s Arthurian poems (‘Williams and the Arthuriad,’ in Arthurian
Torso, ed. C. S. Lewis [London: Oxford UP, 1948], 143). On the organism
as a manifestation of coinherence compare C. S. Lewis, ‘Membership’, in
Transposition and Other Addresses (London: 1949), 37, and St. Paul’s use of
that concept as an image for the Church as Christ’s body (1 Cor. 12:12–27).
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much a matter of mental incapacity as of refusal. Sometimes
Screwtape follows the party line in speaking of God’s ‘cock-andbull story about disinterested Love’ (86) and of human freedom
as a ‘curious fantasy’ (13), but when he slips into ‘the appearance
of heresy’ (85) by saying, in three different letters (38, 59, 65),
that God ‘really’ loves human beings and desires their fullest
free realisation as distinct selves, does that mean that deep
down Screwtape does know? Do those statements result from
‘mere carelessness’, as Screwtape in his urgent backpedaling
claims (86), or has an inner core of knowledge here surfaced,
which he is usually able to repress? Behind Lewis’s portrayal
we may glimpse the soliloquy of Satan in Milton’s epic upon
reaching Earth (PL 4.32–113). In Hell he has fed his followers
and himself speeches grounded in falsehood, but now a degree
of honesty has returned as he recalls the divine goodness and
love and the unworthy motives that led him to reject them. The
end result of such honest reflection is a reaffirmation of his
choice. What he chooses is inversion—‘Evil be thou my good’
(line 110)—and what that entails for his intellectual activity is
immediately evident as he returns to the self-deception that
marked his earlier appearances.69 Never again in the epic is he
able to speak truth.
Screwtape cannot understand love because he shares with
Satan a ‘complete inability to conceive any state of mind but the
infernal’.70 There is no Thou in Screwtape’s world, only an I. All
others are mere objects, of either his desire or his fear.71 This
radical egoism means that his own experiences and categories
of thought must be for him the measure of all things. He is
incapable of imagining that any other being could hold principles
69 ‘Evil be thou my good’, in Lewis’s view, ‘includes “Nonsense be thou my
sense.” ’ The result is the ‘horrible co-existence of a subtle and unceasing
intellectual activity with an incapacity to understand anything’ (Preface to
Paradise Lost, 96).
70 Loc. cit.
71 Cf. Lewis’s preface (xi).
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or values different from his own. Such a mindset accounts for
Screwtape’s endlessly circular search for God’s ‘true motive’,
love having been ruled out as ‘impossible’ (86).
Deception, including self-deception, and consequent
intellectual blindness are not the only elements of Screwtape’s
character revealed in his letters. His self-importance plays a large
part in making him a comic figure.72 He is proud of the title ‘His
Abysmal Sublimity’ (104) and chides Wormwood for ‘insolen[ce]’
(102): ‘That is not the sort of thing that a nephew should write
to his uncle—nor a junior tempter to the undersecretary of a
department’ (19). His rhetoric reaches an emotional peak as he
tries to describe the Patient’s girlfriend, for he is deeply offended
by her ‘satirical wit. The sort of creature who’d find ME funny!’
(101, emphasis in original), and he is very anxious that her ‘sense
of the ridiculous’ should be ‘undermin[ed]’ (124). He does not
mind being imagined as a ‘comic figure . . . in red tights’, because
that encourages the Patient to deny that devils exist (33), but to
be believed in and laughed at is unbearable. We recall Lewis’s
description of his epistoler as ‘totally humourless’ (xiii), like the
persona in McKenna’s novel. How central this particular bit
of inadvertent self-disclosure is to the scheme of The Screwtape
Letters may be gauged by the book’s two epigraphs, in which
those adversaries Martin Luther and Thomas More agree on
this: that to deal with the Devil it is best ‘to jeer and flout him’,
for that ‘prowde spirite . . . cannot endure to be mocked’ (5;
ellipsis Lewis’s). Spiritual pride—for Screwtape the ‘most
beautiful of the vices’ (111)—is evident in his own character.
His ‘disgust’ at the ‘little human vermin’, ‘half spirit and half
animal’, a ‘revolting hybrid’ (13, 36), reveals his low valuation
of matter. Being pure spirit gives him, he thinks, a more exalted
status.
Finally, love is absent not only from his philosophy but
72 Cf. Lewis’s preface (ix).
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from his character as well.73 Humans Screwtape desires, and
encourages Wormwood to desire, first of all, for amusement.
There is no inadvertence about this bit of self-revelation: it is
a matter he boasts of, and part of his enjoyment seems to be
in the open anticipation of such pleasures. Even before their
death, he has ‘fun’ in seeing someone ‘yield [to temptation] just
when (had he but known it) relief was almost in sight’ (142).
There is also the ‘enjoyment of human suffering’ in wartime
(131; see also 25), like ‘the first course of a rich banquet’ (26).
More sure, however, for ‘all eternity,’ is being ‘amuse[d]’ by
their mental torment when spiritual blindness gives way to the
‘clarity which Hell affords’ (13), to ‘despair and horror and
astonishment’ (25). Likewise entertaining after they have died
are persons with ‘virtues painted in the fantasy or approved by
the intellect’ but never put into action by the will (31), and ones
who used Christianity to further their favoured causes (35).
But the desire for humans goes beyond entertainment. ‘To
us’, advises Screwtape, ‘a human is primarily food’ (37). This
is, of course, a metaphor. Food, literally, is something physical,
and the devils are spiritual beings. Lewis will later explain, from
outside the story, that it is ‘human souls’ the devils desire; he will
also plainly identify this idea of ‘hunger’ as fiction, twice using
the phrase ‘I feign’ and adding that it is ‘only myth and symbol’
(xii). What does it symbolise? ‘Our aim’, Screwtape explains, ‘is
the absorption of its will into ours, the increase of our own
area of selfhood at its expense’ (37). And since this is to take
place after the death of the body, these humans are in some
sense to be eaten alive. ‘If . . . you can finally secure his soul,’
he tells Wormwood, ‘he will then be yours forever—a brim-full
living chalice . . . which you can raise to your lips as often as you
please’ (25).
There is, given Screwtape’s radical egoism, one further
73 McKenna’s character, in contrast, is ‘well-meaning’; her love, though
twisted, has some remnant of goodness.
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step. The satisfying of his hunger will go beyond zoophagy to
vivicannibalism, the eating alive of his own kind. ‘Bring us back
food or be food yourself ’; this is ‘the justice of Hell’ (141).74
At the end of the story, it is Wormwood’s impending fate.
Already his uncle has hinted as much. ‘In my present form’—
we must visualise this as being dictated by a centipede—’I
feel . . . anxious . . . to unite you to myself in an indissoluble
embrace’ (104).75
And what will happen to Screwtape? This is not part of
the story itself, but his fear of the Secret Police points to the
possibility that he too can meet with such ‘justice’. Nor is it
even a matter of justice; rather, of power, the stronger feeding
on the weaker (81), ‘permanently gorg[ing] its own being on
the weaker’s outraged individuality’ (xi). Screwtape seems to
know this, saying at one point that Satan ‘hopes in the end to
say ‘mine’ of all things’ (99). But most of his letters give us a
portrait of one who is repressing this knowledge as it applies to
his own destiny.
The alternative to that scenario is that God ‘will say “mine” ’
(98), but in a completely different sense. Screwtape in one of
his ‘heretical’ moments recognises this. ‘We want cattle who can
finally become food; He wants servants who can finally become
sons. We want to suck in, He wants to give out. We are empty
and would be filled; He is full and flows over.76 Our war aim is
a world in which Our Father Below has drawn all beings into
himself: the Enemy wants a world full of beings united to Him
but still distinct’ (38).77
74 Justice in the heavenly sense he scorns (141), though elsewhere he is quick
to cry ‘unfair’ if he feels disadvantaged (8, 26).
75 This may echo Satan’s soliloquy upon seeing the happy pair in Eden:
‘League with you I seek, / And mutual amity so strait, so close, . . .’
(Milton, PL 4:375–76).
76 Lewis seems to be echoing here John 4:14 and 7:38–39.
77 This idea Lewis would develop in 1943, speaking on the BBC (Mere
Christianity [1952; New York: Touchstone/Simon & Schuster, 1996], 155–
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Screwtape’s inability either to love or to empathise with
the human ‘patients’ keeps Lewis’s work from the Sentimental
mode which has usually been identified as a primary mark of
the epistolary novel. Nor is there in these letters any of the
introspective self-examination that contemporary criticism on
the genre finds to be a theme especially worth exploring and
deconstructing. How could there be? In his prideful avoidance
of any inclinations in that direction, Screwtape displays an
essential facet of his character. The whole conception shaping
this book prevents Lewis from employing certain important
features of the epistolary tradition. But by adroitly drawing on
other features that are typical of the tradition in its more didactic
mode, and adding the pervasive irony that comes of using an
unreliable and intellectually challenged speaking voice, Lewis
was able to capture a much larger audience than if he had cast
his ideas in the usual form of moral and theological discourse.
At the same time, playfully adopting a Richardsonian pose as
the ‘editor’ of letters recently come to light—the one who takes
it on himself to issue them for the public good—Lewis earned
a place in the roster of twentieth-century authors who have
demonstrated the vitality and flexibility of the epistolary form.
67).