The Undiscovered C.S. Lewis Conference

Much of a week's gap in my posting here was due to my attendance at a conference of this title, held at George Fox University, a Quaker institution in Newberg, Oregon, a town between Portland and Salem. The Cascade Moot in Seattle of which I'd previously written having been the previous weekend, a combination trip by car seemed feasible.

I was one of a few Tolkienists among the 250 Lewisians at this conference, and probably (I didn't ask) the only non-Christian in the entire number, so what was I doing there? Well, you don't have to be a Christian to enjoy the work of C.S. Lewis. I find his to be a mind of intense interest that I enjoy engaging with. Lewis's Christianity was a substrate that underlay everything he did, as was also the case for Tolkien; it was more prominent in Lewis mostly because he wrote theology and apologetics, and it's also more detectable in his fiction, but it doesn't shake the reader as some other Christian novelists do. And in so much of his other work, particularly literary history and criticism, his intellectual curiosity is primary and while his religion remains present, it's that substrate which informs his work.

The presenters at this conference were the same way. Intellectual curiosity about Lewis, even his openly religious works, was the constant theme. There was little preaching and no berating, if only because they are secure in their beliefs and assumed that everyone agrees with them. I accepted the context for the purposes of attending the conference, same as I did when I attended gatherings of Peter Jackson movie fans. In other words, it was totally unlike a typical Christian radio station.

The conference lasted three days spread across four calendar days, and it was busy. Meals were included for those who cared to pay the fee, and plenary sessions, including six keynote speakers, were held in the same large private dining room in the cafeteria building where we took meals, except for two theatrical presentations in the evenings. Between plenaries, we scattered to classrooms across campus - this was during term, so on Thursday and Friday things had to be squeezed in - for any of usually five paper sessions going on at once.

The main theme of the conference, perhaps the reason it was dubbed "Undiscovered," was the description of an immense number of unpublished, and generally unknown, Lewis works in manuscript. I'd been aware of the unpublished section of the preface to The Screwtape Letters tying it into the world of the Ransom trilogy, but I didn't know of the trove of sarcastic poems that Lewis wrote in his own copies of books by a philologist whom he found particularly irritating (you can read the full article by the presenting scholar), or of the report of his year as Vice-President of his Oxford college, an administrative job for which he was totally unsuited, which he put in the form of a facetious verse play, handwritten in a book of such reports, where nobody but succeeding Vice-Presidents was ever likely to see it. It was titled "The Tragi-Comicall Briefe Reigne of Lewis the Bald." There were also discussions of other annotations Lewis wrote in books he owned, and the attempt to date them according to his changing handwriting; and a collection of the publishing blurbs he wrote for his own and others' books.

But the best keynote presentations were two detailed scholarly analyses, based on divergent scholarly principles. Holly Ordway, the only Tolkienist among the keynoters, did a stunningly careful source analysis of exactly what evidence survives of Tolkien's opinion of Lewis's Narnian stories. It turns out that every negative comment Tolkien is credited with are all responses to Lewis having read him drafts of the first two chapters of the first book, so depictions of this as a sweeping condemnation are unwarranted. It's true that, later on, he didn't care for Narnia as a whole, but he framed that as a matter of personal taste, it did not affect his friendship with Lewis, and he was happy to recommend the books and give copies to his grandchildren.

Then Michael Ward, author of Planet Narnia, explored the origins of the name "Narnia" in Lewis's mind. We have two writings by Lewis giving different sources; one the name of a Roman town and the other derived from the Latin word inane, which differs both in pronunciation and meaning from the English word. The two are not necessarily incompatible. But that's all we know, so Ward proceeded to speculate on the implications of these, but unlike most speculating scholars he had his feet firmly planted in the known facts.

And there was much more. There were only about four other people there I knew, but it was easy to strike up conversations, because we were all there for the same purpose. I was staying at a hotel in the next town down the road, and there wasn't much time between conference session to do much other than ablutions and sleep, so that's why you didn't hear from me. I was engrossed in Lewis.