A History of C. S.
Lewis’s Collected Shorter Writings, 1939-2000
by Arend Smilde
Journal of Inklings Studies Vol. 2, No. 2, October 2012, pp. 91-100
original page numbers inserted in
subscript | after vertical line
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|91 One hundred
and sixty-three of C. S. Lewis’s shorter writings were published in collected
editions in the period 1939-2000. The uncollected rest of them may one day
yield yet another volume of newly collected pieces, perhaps book reviews; but
nothing of the sort has happened for well over a decade after 2000. As for real
additions, i.e. pieces never printed anywhere before, none seem to have been
made since 1990 when a small volume of reprints featured one new piece.
The
publication history of collected editions so far can be divided into two
periods of roughly three decades each. The first (1939-1971) was a period of
progress with some confusion; the second (1971-2000) one of confusion with some
progress. The end has not been happy.
The
individual pieces also are divisible into two categories. There is an
‘academic’ category of 38 items, and a ‘popular’ one of 125 items. The smaller,
‘academic’ category is here defined as all the pieces published by Cambridge
University Press in two volumes of 1966 and 1969, plus two early pieces only
published in an Oxford U.P. volume of 1939. Although twelve of these ‘academic’
pieces and one ‘popular’ piece from the Oxford volume have appeared in more
than one collection, the publication history of this group is fairly simple and
poses no real problems of the sort infesting much of the ‘popular’ rest – varying titles, gaps and overlaps,
and shifting range of compilation, resulting in an ongoing waste |92 of readers’ time, money and mental energy.
The present survey is therefore confined to the larger, ‘popular’ category,
simply defined as comprising all the rest.
There
is much to be said against the crude distinction between ‘popular’ and
‘academic’, and some of it will be said at the end.
In
the following account each volume title at its first mention appears in bold
type if it has been used1 only in the
USA, underlined if used only in the UK, and in underlined
bold type if used on both sides of the Atlantic. Subtitles have normally been omitted;
each volume’s full title, table of contents, and precise relation to all other volumes are detailed at www.lewisiana.nl/cslessays.
This publication history began with
an early volume, already referred to, of nine essays published by Oxford
University Press: Rehabilitations
(1939). Lewis’s academic reputation had recently been established by his book The Allegory
of Love and further confirmed by the Gollancz Memorial Prize 1937, and he
was soon to set off on his unplanned public career as a Christian apologist and
lay preacher. Six of these pieces were later reprinted in the ‘academic’
Cambridge volume of 1969; two of them2 were very specifically addressed to a
scholarly Oxford audience of the 1930s and never reprinted. On the other hand,
one of the pieces reprinted thirty years later at Cambridge was, after another
three decades, found popular enough to be included as the one ‘academic’ item
in the large collection published in
2000 which marks the end of this
history. The last piece in Rehabilitations,
‘Christianity and Literature’, foreshadowed Lewis’s imminent emergence as a
Christian writer, speaker, apologist and polemicist. |93
Ten
years later, with Lewis’s Christian reputation firmly established on both sides
of the Atlantic, there followed the first British-American joint enterprise:
five pieces selected by the author and published as Transposition (1949) in the UK and as The Weight of Glory
(1949) in the USA. The American publisher was Macmillan, New York.
The
next collection to appear was an exclusively American affair: The
World’s Last Night and other essays (1960),
with seven pieces, published by Harcourt, Brace & World, New York. For British
readers, these pieces were to appear over the next fifteen years, distributed3 among three different volumes: They Asked for a Paper (1962), Screwtape Proposes a Toast
(1965), and Fern-seed and Elephants
(1975). The first and second of these British volumes were the last to be
compiled by the author himself, who died in 1963. The three British volumes
between them also contained three pieces4 which had not yet appeared in the USA.
After
these somewhat disorganized beginnings, the process gathered speed and efficiency as Walter Hooper entered
the scene. The late 1960s saw three other British-American joint publications
with a total of seventy-six pieces: Of Other Worlds: Essays
and Stories (1966) with thirteen pieces and published by
Harcourt, New York; Christian Reflections (1967) with fourteen pieces,
published by Eerdmans, Grand Rapids; and God in the Dock (1970)
with forty-nine pieces, again from Eerdmans. None of their contents (with one exception5)
had been previously published in a collection. Of Other Worlds and Christian Reflections were published
each under a single title and in the same year in the UK and the USA; but the volume published as God in the Dock in the |94 USA in 1970 was published as Undeceptions (1971) in the UK,
with some minor differences in annotation.6
At
this point in time – after the first three decades of this history – nearly all
of Lewis’s ‘popular’ shorter writings had been made available in collected
editions on both sides of the Atlantic, with one small gap for American
readers: the three pieces published only in the UK in the period 1962-1975.
This gap was filled by The Weight of Glory, revised and expanded
edition (1980), from the original publisher, Macmillan. In addition to
its original 1949 contents and the three items just referred to, this volume
contained one newly discovered piece which was not published in the UK until
seven years later.7
In the later 1970s confusion began
to creep in with two new volumes, one British-American, the other British only:
1.
The ‘Stories’ section in Of Other Worlds
(1966), comprising four items, was re-published along with two new narrative
pieces as The Dark Tower and other stories (1977). This volume
appeared under that title both in the UK and the USA.
2.
A selection of thirteen pieces from the large volume God in the Dock / Undeceptions (1970-1971) was republished for the
British market under the American title of the parent volume. The result was a
British God in the Dock (1979)
which contained only a quarter of the contents of the American volume of that
title. While the two volumes called God
in the Dock have, technically, never been offered on the same market,
confusion about them has been rife ever since.
After
1980 more confusion was added. At the same time there were three real
additions: |95
1.
The remaining contents of the 1966 volume Of
Other Worlds, after its narrative
pieces had been reprinted in The Dark
Tower, reappeared in a new collection called On Stories and other essays on
literature (1982), along with eleven new pieces, making a total of twenty.
The British edition was published in 1984 with a title which, like its
contents, reflected a good deal of its original: Of This and Other Worlds.
2. In 1986, nineteen newly collected short pieces
appeared in a British volume called Present
Concerns. This collection does not seem to have found its way to the
USA. A new gap thus appeared for American readers, which has never been filled
except for those who later acquired the comprehensive British collection
published in 2000.
3.
Another new, small and unfilled gap for Americans was one short piece,
‘Christian Reunion’, discovered after Lewis’s death and published as the title
essay of a small British volume of 1990.
What
further followed for Americans after 1980 were two volumes published by
Ballantine, New York. They contained what the publisher called ‘selected
essays’: first a selection from the American God in the Dock (1970) called The Grand Miracle (1982) and containing twenty-six of the
original forty-nine pieces; then one from Christian
Reflections (1967) called The Seeing Eye (1986). The latter volume is a reprint rather than a selection,
since only one8 of
the original fourteen items was
left out. Luckily for American readers, both parent volumes, God in the Dock (1970) and Christian Reflections, were later
reprinted by Eerdmans. The two Ballantine volumes, therefore, may be regarded
as two major factors of confusion on the American scene.
Two
things remain to be noted about developments on the UK side until 2000.
1.
After the British God in the Dock of
1977, three more selections from the same parent volume appeared in the later
1980s: First and Second Things
(1985), Timeless at Heart
(1987), |96 and Christian
Reunion (1990). Between them, the four selections offered the full
contents of the large parent volume, God
in the Dock / Undeceptions of 1970-1971, plus two additional pieces
discovered in the meantime.9
2.
The second and third of these four selections went out of print and were used,
along with the 1986 collection Present
Concerns, as a fund to draw upon for a new volume of reprints called Compelling Reason (1996).
All
the volumes from Of Other Worlds
(1966) up to and including Christian
Reunion (1990), both British and American, and including the two ‘academic’
Cambridge volumes, were edited and prefaced by Walter Hooper. Compelling Reason was compiled by Murray
White of HarperCollins on the basis of Hooper’s work, with a brief foreword by
Douglas Gresham. The title is a clear indication that Hooper had ceased to have
a hand in the matter, if only because the tradition of naming each volume after
one of its essays was dropped. Also, as compared with earlier essay titles and
volume titles (many of which were of Hooper’s invention), this new title
imposed an unusually specific and arguably misguided or simplistic
interpretation on Lewis’s spiritual legacy.
A huge collection of what appeared
to be all of Lewis’s ‘popular’ shorter writings was at last published in 2000
by HarperCollins, London. The title was Essay
Collection and other short pieces and the total number of items was
124. This 888-page volume was edited and briefly introduced by the otherwise
unidentified Lesley Walmsley on the basis of all
previous collections. Two years later a paperback edition was produced in two
unnumbered volumes, one subtitled Faith,
Christianity and the Church; the other, Literature,
Philosophy and Short Stories. |97
The
opportunity to bring this publication story to a happy end was wasted in the
following ways.
1.
The volume claims to bring together for the first time ‘all’ of Lewis’s ‘essays
on many subjects to do with faith and life’ which ‘have been published in various
collections over the years’. The reader is left to guess whether there is in
fact any further or larger category of essays; if so, whether it might also possibly include items related to ‘faith and life’; and if
so, precisely on what grounds they have been excluded.
2.
Each piece is introduced by a note mentioning both its original publication and
subsequent collections in which it appeared; but the latter detail refers only
to the latest reprints of collections
and to collections ‘now’ available – a useless frame of reference even without the confusion obtaining in the late
1990s.
3.
Original publication dates of the earlier collections are stated in a list of
‘Books mentioned in this volume’ or ‘mentioned as sources’. Obviously, these
original dates should have swapped places with those in the introductory notes
to individual essays. That aside, the list features several unhelpfully vague
remarks, and is moreover inconsistent and confused, including, for example,
three books which are not volumes of essays.
4.
While the reader is referred in a general way to Walter Hooper’s comprehensive
80-page bibliography (1996) of Lewis’s writings, the editor has not made any
use of it.
5.
While the impression is given that the collection includes all the
125 ‘popular’ pieces as defined above, two of them are silently omitted. One is
the brilliant and uniquely valuable ‘Reply to Professor Haldane’, the other is
the ‘Rejoinder to Dr Pittenger’.
6.
In the 2002 paperback edition yet another piece is silently omitted: ‘Screwtape Proposes a Toast’.
7.
Surprisingly, one ‘academic’ piece is included: ‘High and Low Brows’. |98
8.
The adjustment of page references in Walter Hooper’s original notes is
occasionally bungled. Although the total number of instances is small, the
reader who has noticed one of them must lose confidence in the rest.10
9.
No index is provided, though such a collection clearly requires one.
Regrettably, this Essay
Collection, a big and untidy product of hasty publishing, may now be
blocking the way to a properly edited comprehensive edition of Lewis’s shorter writings.11
The
distinction between ‘academic’ and ‘popular’ pieces and its relation to the
2000 Essay Collection is given
numerical expression in the table on page 99.
|99
C. S. LEWIS’S SHORTER WRITINGS published in collections, 1939-2000 125 Popular* +
38 Academic* 163 total
of pieces published in collections, 1939-2000 |
CONTENTS
OF ESSAY COLLECTION (2000)** All reprinted from earlier collections 125 Popular, total –
2 Popular, not in EC (or –3 in paperback ed. 2002) 123 Popular, in EC +
1 Academic, in EC 124 total of pieces in EC (or 123 in paperback ed. 2002) |
NOT
INCLUDED IN ESSAY COLLECTION (2000) ...though published in earlier collections 2 Popular, not in EC (3 in paperback ed. 2002) +
37 Academic, not in EC 39 total of pieces not in EC (40 in pbk.
2002) |
* DEFINITIONS Academic:
14 + 22 pieces included in two
Cambridge volumes of 1966 and 1969 respectively + two pieces only published
in 1939 Popular: All the rest of Lewis’s shorter writings published in collections,
1939-2000 |
** NOTE EC’s table of contents suggests a total of 135 (or
134) rather than 124 (or 123) items. This is due to a different treatment of
the ‘Letters’ section: a single item in previous editions, it appears as
twelve separately numbered small pieces in EC. |
|98 cont.
Useful distinctions could be made
within the large ‘popular’ category. However, what remains to be noted is that
the line separating ‘academic’ pieces from the rest is, of course, not always
neat or important. On two occasions (out of four) C. S. Lewis himself was
happy to bring together the ‘academic’ and the ‘popular’ in a single volume.
Transposition (1949) and the posthumous Screwtape Proposes a Toast (1965) seem
to be straightforward cases of ‘popular’ work, although it should be remembered
that most of the pieces were originally read to academic audiences.
The
other two volumes are different. As noted before, Rehabilitations (1939) appeared before Lewis’s debut as a Christian
apologist and lay preacher. The volume was a sampling of his work | 99 table |100 as an Oxford don and literary critic,
published by his local University Press. He nevertheless included one paper12
which was originally “read to a religious society in Oxford” (not further
specified) and later reprinted in Christian
Reflections.
Finally,
there is They Asked for a Paper
(1962). In Lewis’s Collected Letters there
is some correspondence with his publisher, Jocelyn Gibb, about the preparations
for this volume. On 16 April 1961 Lewis wrote,
The book
begins to shape in my mind ... with a progression from lit. thro’ ethics to
theology
and on 3 June
1961, discussing ideas for the book’s title:
If you want
to emphasise the theme ‘Jekyll meets Hyde’, I suppose
one cd. have something like On Two Fronts
or Janus. Or Essays from Bletchley [i.e. a train stop halfway between Oxford
and Cambridge], with a little prefatory note explaining that as I oscillate
physically between Oxford and Cambridge so I oscillate mentally between the
literary & the religious themes.
Interestingly, Lewis seems to admit, perhaps indeed to
endorse, a notion of his own public role as a case of Jekyll and Hyde. He does
not specify which part of him was which: literary Jekyll and religious Hyde, or
the other way round. Nor, perhaps, would he have been pleased with a general
distinction between ‘popular’ and ‘academic’ work. The distinction he makes
here is between ‘literary’ and ‘religious’. This, however, would hardly make a
better criterion for what is and what is not worth keeping in print.
The
conclusion to draw from these and other distinctions is perhaps that the
categories really should all be united. I still hope that C. S. Lewis’s shorter
writings will one day receive the definitive, comprehensive and lovingly
attentive treatment they deserve.
Postscript (2015)
A late and perhaps final addition to the canon of collected shorter
writings by C. S. Lewis appeared in 2013. Under the title Image and Imagination: Essays and Reviews,
Cambridge University Press published a collection of 53 pieces ranging in
length from less than a page to 8,500 words, edited by Walter Hooper. Most of
these pieces had not been published in any earlier collection of Lewis’s
shorter writings, and two of them (‘Lucretius’ and ‘Image and Imagination’) had
not been previously published at all. The exceptions were four book reviews
(three on J. R. R. Tolkien and one on Rider Haggard) published in Of This and Other Worlds (1982), and two
essays first published in Rehabilitations
(1939), mentioned in note 2, below. A review of Image and Imagination including a fuller account of the contents
is available at
www.inklings-studies.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/hooper_csl_image_smilde.pdf
Notes
1.^ As will appear from what follows, a ‘title
used’ on either side of the Atlantic may,
but need not, be a ‘volume published’ on that side only. A volume may be
published on both sides but with different titles; and a title may be used on
both sides but refer to different collections.
2.^ ‘The Idea of an “English School”’ and ‘Our
English Syllabus’, in Rehabilitations
(1939).
3.^ One of them (‘On obstinacy in belief’)
appeared both in the 1962 and the 1965 volumes.
4.^ ‘Is Theology Poetry?’ (AP and SPT), ‘A Slip of
the Tongue’ (SPT) and ‘On
Forgiveness’ (FSE). Abbreviations as
used at www.lewisiana.nl/cslessays.
5.^ ‘Christianity and Literature’, in CRf, previously
published in Reh.
6.^ Another small difference is the omission, in Undeceptions, of the original final
paragraph of ‘On the Reading of Old Books’.
7.^ ‘Why I Am Not a Pacifist’.
9.^ ‘Why I Am Not a Pacifist’, mentioned in note 7
and already published in an American collection; and ‘Christian Reunion’, in
the 1990 volume in which it appeared as the title essay.
10.^ For
example, compare Walmsley’s footnote 7 and the final
note in ‘Religion Without Dogma?,’ as well as Walmsley’s
footnote 1 in ‘The Pains of Animals’, with Hooper’s original notes in Timeless at Heart.
11.^ For anyone wondering why Walter Hooper was not available
in the 1990s to provide this story with a happy ending, the answer came almost
simultaneously with the Essay Collection.
In the same year, 2000, the first of three volumes of C. S. Lewis’s Collected Letters appeared, followed by
the second and third in 2002 and 2006 – Hooper’s magnum opus with a total of 4,000 pages, many hundreds of notes and
150 pages of index.
12.^ ‘Christianity and Literature’.
The first edition of this web page was posted on 11 March 2015. Changes
will be noted here.