Lewis received many requests to write more material found in The Screwtape Letters but he always refused. It was almost twenty years between the time he wrote his first letter to Wormwood and something new from Screwtape would appear. However, on the 19th in 1959 readers of The Saturday Evening Post discovered the senior demon had more to say. “Screwtape Proposes a Toast” has the esteemed devil giving a speech “at the annual dinner of the Tempters’ Training College for young Devils.” After commenting on the poor quality of damned souls they had feasted upon he notes that the quantity of humans destined for Hell was not lacking. However the greater part of the talk focuses on how democracy (it’s mentioned a dozen times) can be used in a “diabolical sense” to advance the efforts of “our Father Below.”
Those who have read this series are very aware of Lewis being on the radio many times in the 1940’s. Few know that he stood before the microphone less than fourteen months before his death in 1962. He recorded a talk about John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress on October 16, 1962 and it aired less than a month later on November 11th. Then on the 13th of December it was published in The Listener (where his last radio talks for what became a part of Mere Christianity had been printed). It is now found in the recently reprinted Selected Literary Essays book (or eBook) as “The Vision of John Bunyan.” The actual recording is also available as part of a larger collection of recordings that includes his radio series that became The Four Loves.
If you were of the book reading age in the 1960’s and a fan of Lewis then you were treated to a wide variety of books by him (though most were edited by others). One that came out this month after his death was a collection of letters written to a single person. Letters to an American Lady was released on the 19th in 1967 and at that time it was not public knowledge they were addressed to Mrs. Mary Willis Shelburne. While that book (edited by Clyde S. Kilby) is still in print, all the letters can be found in the third volume of Collected Letters (which is out of print in book form, but obtainable as an eBook). At the time it was released it was only the second collection of letters; the first was Letters of C.S. Lewis from Lewis’s brother, Warren (“Warnie”) that included a memoir.