Screwtiny

Having recommended it to other people several times, how it can have happened that I had never actually read for myself CS Lewis's classic The Screwtape Letters I can't imagine. A couple of weeks ago I visited the local 'community amenity site' (that which once upon a time was called a tip) which, like others of its kind, has a little junk shop now attached to it and where I found an old Fontana edition of the book. 

I've never warmed to Lewis. For me, notwithstanding the insightful, vivid and creative ways he illustrates the traditional formulas of Christianity such that you think about them in new forms, there is a vein of smugness threaded through almost everything he wrote, including the great Narnia sequence. The exception is A Grief Observed, his slim 1961 volume written in the aftermath of the death of his unexpected wife Joy and whose visceral rage against God is a sober corrective to that level, imperturbable faith.

Smugness isn't absent from Screwtape. Behind its description of the pitfalls of the spiritual life, expressed via the imaginary pen of the devil Screwtape, there is the sense that its author does not find himself very deflected by them: they are matters he has got sorted, done-and-dusted sins. Of course this cannot be the case. To describe such disturbances you must have experienced them, and still understand their power. The great surprise to me in Screwtape was the book's psychological acuity, and you don't get that by mere observation, unless observation includes your own reactions. I especially rated Letter 26 on the spiritual dangers of 'Unselfishness' - an aim far removed from the Christian notion of sacrifice and which, Screwtape points out, is capable of producing all sorts of worthwhile mischief in the lives of human beings. 

The true nastiness of the story only pokes through towards the end, as the senior devil's warning to his nephew 'bring us food or be food' becomes horribly prescient. Lewis apparently disliked writing the book and found it a great strain thinking his way into the common mind of Hell. The pleasure that comes with it is the dry one of the appreciation of bare wit and brutal sense, and which you cannot but admire, even while you may not love.