Author: C.S. Lewis
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C.S. Lewis didn't write a great number of short stories, nor did he write a great number of essays about short stories. He did not anticipate this collection being printed. His secretary packed up what was left, unpublished, after his death, and rushed it into print.
That's obvious as you read this slim collection of the stories and essays-about-stories that he did write. Two of the essays and one of the stories are unfinished; three or four of them make the same points in almost identical words; three cite one source. And if Lewis had anticipated his four good independent short stories printed together, one after another, I'm sure he would have Done Something About the way they seem to make a point that Lewis did not try, or admit intending, to make.
I think Of Other Worlds does appeal, and should appeal, to serious fans, collectors, and students of Lewis, and/or science fiction, and/or Christian fiction. I doubt that it ever was or will be anybody's favorite of Lewis's books. If you can't afford a complete collection, this is probably the volume you can most easily get along without. I've read it more than once and enjoyed it, but not in the way I enjoyed The Screwtape Letters or The Allegory of Love.
What is to be liked in Of Other Worlds, given that it's not nearly as solid as any of the books Lewis finished, nor the collections of short articles he intended to put together into books?
1. First there is, pre-Bettelheim, a spirited, ringing, and soundly logical defense of imaginative fiction. Lewis read stories about our world as it is, whether presented as factual or as fictional, and liked them, and quoted them, and taught them to students. He wrote stories about any kind of world except our "real" one. He didn't think much of his narrative exercise, the diary printed as All My Road Before Me after the lives of the people mentioned in it had ended. He did better with the future world he knew wasn't going to be the real future in his Space Trilogy, the past he knew wasn't real in Till We Have Faces, and the alternative dimensions in The Screwtape Letters and Narnia. Because he was unable to gratify his emotional "needs" in the real world and was retreating into fantasy to compensate? What needs, the well paid, securely employed, world-famous, and more or less happily married, professor might have asked, did the psychological school of literary criticism imagine those to be? He began with unusual, interesting dream images and let his beliefs about the real world guide those images to say things about the real world. Most of what was being written about fiction and "creativity" in the early twentieth century was so discouraging and (thank Heaven) so wrong that in the 1960s even Of Other Worlds must have come to some people like rain in a killing drought. Lewis felt the need to make the same points about speculative fiction to several different audiences. If they become repetitious in a single book, that is because they were points that badly needed to be made.
2. There's a memorable discussion of science fiction with Kingsley Amis and Brian Aldiss, produced by tape recording rather than writing. Although the sound of these three voices together was undoubtedly a treat for millions of fans around the world, none of the three is really at his best. Whisky is mentioned several times in the discussion and, although the three writers don't get drunk, they do seem to lose the thread of whatever they might have planned to say for publication. The jokes they exchange at the end may conceivably have been fresh and funny in the 1950s, and may even have been retired for so long by my generation that they might seem fresh and funny to the young. Of such jokes, surely, Lewis was thinking when he wrote about "some pretext in the way of Jokes" being dragged into conversations where the real cause of smiling and laughter is the pleasure people take in being together.
3. And then there are Lewis's four short speculative-fiction stories.
Lewis was not, in fact, a woman-hater, nor was he more of a sexist than most men of his generation; in some ways he was less of one. He was a shy, "neurotic," unattractive man who married late, but apparently quite happily. More than most of his contemporaries he denounced the "femi-ninny-ty" that became fashionable in the early twentieth century, where women apparently got away with all kinds of things by appealing to the sexist stereotype that it was "feminine" to be scatterbrained and vaguely mannish to be logical, reasonable, or right. To the careful reader his few comments on the fate of Susan in the Narnia books, on the way real women scholars encourage poor Jane in That Hideous Strength to "have no more dreams. Have children instead," and on the young lady in "The Shoddy Lands," are rather clearly and carefully saying something more like, "Girls, please don't play dumb and fashionable if your goal is to impress men--that act does not impress this man!" rather than "I don'tlike young women." For a man who grew up in a period that frowned on any opportunity for writers to observe more than a few individuals of the opposite sex, Lewis managed to delineate several types of women he found likable and attractive, and several types he didn't.
This being the case, it's unfortunate that in the four short stories we find:
1. The image of the "world" in Peggy's shallow, narrow, self-centered mind, in "The Shoddy Lands," intended as a warning to writers of all kinds but using a female fashion victim as bad example;
2. The self-selection for undesirable women, in "Ministering Angels," where just one young astronaut briefly imagines that sharing interplanetary travel with prostitutes might be fun until he gets a look at the two hopeless cases the older astronauts could have warned him they'd get. One is a gender-confused "crank" who appeals somewhat to a "gay" astronaut, but frustrates even him by preaching that sex should be as "separate from pleasure" as "any other injection." The other is a broken-down, diseased, old drunk nobody wants to touch. For of course no prostitute with a viable career on Earth would volunteer to ply her trade on Mars...
3. The painful metaphor in "Unimagined Things" where rejection by a real woman "turns a man to stone" and sends him to the moon, where he meets a Gorgon.
4. And then there's "After Ten Years," the never finished short story that seems likely to have grown into a long story, about Menelaus and Helen of Troy. Lewis was fascinated by the Greek and Roman writers who hint that Helen was desired for her beauty and pedigree alone, that her personality and character were somewhere between tiresome and horrible. She was supposed to have been half human and half swan; swans are not the most lovable birds.
Here is no shimmering alien image of what femininity might mean if separated from womanhood, as in Perelandra; none of the wiser women, scholars or just old wives, as in That Hideous Strength; none of the smart, lovable girls--Lucy, Jill, Polly, even Susan when she was being Lucy's big sister rather than a debutante--from Narnia; none of the "ugly," "mannish," profoundly sister-lovable femininity of Orual in Till We Have Faces, surely among the best female characters ever written by a male author; none of the praiseworthy types of women briefly discussed in the poems and religious writings, and certainly nothing like the favorite cousin Lewis always wished his "gay" friend would fall in love with, who haunts, if she doesn't stalk, the autobiographical writings. Here are none, in short, of the kinds of women Lewis did respect and admire.
Here is the kind of thing that happens to writers. You write a short study about one kind of person you find obnoxious or ridiculous, another, and another, and then if you allow these pieces to be published someone exclaims "You just don't like that kind of person...'women' or 'men' or 'old people' or 'young people' or..." In fact you do like some of that kind of people very much. If you notice and correct for this in time, you and perhaps your readers are in for a treat as you set out to write about a son, daughter, parent, lover, or friend whom your other characters might love, who is recognizably not your own, not even your own as you want him or her to be. Lewis, not having planned to publish his short stories together, unfortunately had not written a short story with a nice female character in it, and the result...Peggy, the Thin Crank, the Fat Drunk, the Gorgon, and Helen of Troy. Oy.
I think even Walter Hooper would have thought better of publishing that if he had thought longer. He tried later to bind the same unsatisfactory collection of stories together with a draft for a novel Lewis himself had discarded as unsalvageable, with even more dismal results.
If you've read enough of Lewis's books to read the four short stories, together, as making the statement "Short stories are not exactly this writer's metier" rather than any combined statement about people, the three finished ones are satisfactory short stories. All aspiring writers should, perhaps especially, profit from "The Shoddy Lands."
So...perhaps Of Other Worlds shouldn't even have been published in the form it was, but it's been published, and, now that it is...I've never felt sorry that I bought a copy. I'm sorry, if anything, that Lewis didn't live longer and write more short stories or essays about short stories.
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