Review, Reflections and Ramblings in Relation to a Stage Production of The Screwtape Letters

This weekend I had the pleasure of seeing a stage production of C.S. Lewis' Screwtape Letters. As you might exspect from the fact that the book is a collection of letters from the demon Screwtape advising his nephew Wormwood on how to tempt his victim, the play was one long monologue. It was however, engaging and the silent roll of Screwtape's secretary demon, very similar in role to Prospero's Ariel, helped him mime much of the content of the letters to the audience. The letters were, for obvious reasons, condensed and my favorite line, "Now is the closest time to eternity", was cut, but if you enjoyed the book at all this dramatization didn't have any major changes.

Disclaimer:
I admit my favorable reception to the show might have been enhanced by the bright lights and the saxophonist playing outside the theatre, the warm San Diego January night, the ornate historic character of the building, and the incredilous fact that there was a giant pillow fight in front of Horton Plaza (No really. We drove by at the tail end of it. Feathers everywhere.)

Two observations:

1 --Aparantly there is talk of taking down the city library and building a newer, fancier one. This is blasphamy. First, because there are libraries all over the county being closed down due to budgets and second, becuase one of the things I love about visiting Down Town San Diego is the historic character of the buildings. Shiekh scyscrapers and penhouses and modern oficial buildings are all very well for New York or LA but I prefer standing in a place filled with the legacy of the past as well as the busy bustling of the present. Having the two alongside each other gives me a feeling of timlessness. A transendence of place and time and trends into simply experiencing the sensations of being aline. Something very similar to the experience of reading a book from the perspective of someone who is nothing like me in any tangible particular and yet who I can undersand and emphasise with perfectly.

2--There was a Q and A at the end of the performance that I didn't stay for. Screwtape had done such a lovely job of taking the audience into the bureaucracy of hell that I didn't fancy having the illustion shattered with an "explanation" of the play. The performance, like any piece of fiction, is better left to speak for itself.

A Study in Ink: "Jack" Lewis

Aparantly when Clive Staples Lewis was a boy he woke up one day and told his family to call him Jack. It stuck and after that anyone who knew him socially called him Jack. Names are odd like that. Oficially they can be one thing but you are really known by what you are called. I think I would prefer Jack too if my given name were Clive.

I'll begin our discussion of Lewis' work with the most well known and the first ones I read. The Chronocles. I like to call Narnia my first love in literature. It has that sort of sweet, outgrown, nostalgia for me. At the time they were perfect, full of adventure and magic, metaphysical truths and a certain brand of university humor that is in most of Lewis' books. The first concious observation I made on writing style was Lewis' tendancy to point out small details the reader is likely to have experienced like waking up on the hard ground, how thirsty eating toffee for dinner will make you or how much more frusterating it is to wait for something when you have no idea how long you will have to wait, in order to relate them to the story.

My second brush with Lewis was his space trylogy. I have very strong memories of reading Out of the Silent Planet during a tedius pep rally in high school and Perelandra while camping. I think more than anything else Perelandra whet my apitite for thought and discussions about life. I mean what better paradise can you imagine than a planet with land waves and perfect fruit to eat while sit around throwing ideas back and forth at each other?

The more I read of Lewis' works and his life the more I realize that he wrote mostly about himself. Professor Kirk was the name of one of his own proffesors and has a very similar personality as does Digory to Lewis as a boy. Pilgrim's Regress, even though he insisted he was seeking to generalize a logical series of beliefs, more or less chronicalizes his own intelectual/spiritual journey and even Ransom from the space trylogy is arguable a version of his friend Tolkien.

I have read Screwtape Letters three times I believe and written a research paper on it. It was, Lewis admitted, one of the easiest pieces for him to write because it was so easy for him to get into the head of the diabolical. Being nasty is never very difficult. It is interesting to be shown the life of a completely unremarkable man through the eyes of a creature who is contemptous of everything we tend to admire. Screwtape is witty and entertaining, and even makes some excelent points but Lewis always makes it clear when he is disagreeing with the demon. The quote that sticks with me the strongest is "Now is the closest time to eternity."

A Grief Observed is interesting because it was written after most of his books of philosophy (my favorite of which are The Abolition of Man and Discarded Images) and theology were already published and yet chronolizes all his carefully laid thoughts falling appart after the death of his wife. A testiment that a true thinker's thoughts are never done. Their conclusions are as fragile as anybody else's.

The C.S. Lewis book that surprised me the most was Till We Have Faces. It doesn't take place in an imagined land of metaphysical exploration like The Great Divorce, Pilgrim's Regress or Narnia or a university (the only profession he knew well enough to feel confident writing about) like Screwtape or his space trylogy. It is a retelling a myth narated by a woman set in ancient Greece and yet it is full of the same logic mixed with romantic longing that all of his books are held together with.

So what did Lewis teach me about writing? To long for the unknown. To think long and hard about what the little thing represent. To choose my details wisely. To not be afraid to write about the things closest to me. To read so that I am not alone. That now is the closest time to eternity.

Study In Ink: An Invitation

When I when thirteen I wanted to be a dragon slayer and save the world from inevitable destruction but since Peter Pan only visited the Darings' window and the white rabbits I ever had the pleasure of seeing were locked in a cage with a conspicuose lack of wastecoat and watch I decided on the next best thing. I would write about dragon slayers.
If I couldn't be Sir George himself I would be his jongular and come along for the ride. Still something in the mind of a thirteen year old desires heroes they can emulate.
Enter the Inklings.
C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Roger Lancelyn Green, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams. They were the round table of fantasists. The inventors of the genre. I liked to imagine them sitting around the table in the back of The Eagle and The Child (or The Bird and The Baby as the locals called it) on Tuesday morning smoking their pipes, eating eggs and mushrooms and reading their work to each other. While most girls my age were obsessing over posters of N Sync and The Backstreet Boys I was hunting down as many books as I could find by these gifted authors, memorizing odd facts about their lives and --yes --learning elvish.
My Reasons for writing are different now, though perhaps not as different as I might imagine. Still, I feel a little flutter of hero worship when I hear the names of these, my first writing teachers. I would like to spend the next month or two discussing these authors, their works, and what they taught me. Please join me for this series of discussions entitled A Study In Ink.

Quotation is a serviceable substitute for wit --Oscar Wilde

"I am an artist . . . and therefore a liar. Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth."
--Ursula LeGuiun

"He taught me the difference between everything and nothing"
"Which is?" Vevey prompted, looking baffled
"Words."
---Patricia McKillup, Alphapet of Thorn

"The wrong words. They were true a hundred times over, yet they sounded like a lie. Hadn't he always know it? Words were useless. At times they might sound wonderful, but they let you down the moment you needed them. You could never find the right words. Never, and where would you look for them? The heart is as silent as a fish, however much the tongue tries to give it a voice."
--Cornelia Funke, Inkspell

"A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world."
--Oscar Wilde

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.
--Ray Bradbury

All that I desire to point out is the general principle that life imitates art far more than art imitates life.
--Oscar Wilde

You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.
--Ray Bradbury

If the writing is honest it cannot be separated from the man who wrote it.
--Tennessee Williams

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.
--Ernest Hemingway

Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.
--C. S. Lewis

"For while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new it always must be heard. There isn't any other tale to tell, its the only light we got in this darkness."
--James Baldwin

It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations.
--Winston Churchill