Extract

“I use speaker throughout to cover writer as well.”1

- C. S. Lewis

“Now the great and I think all but unique essential in C. S. Lewis’s makeup was a remarkable combination of two qualities normally supposed to be opposites. I mean on the one hand a deep and vivid imagination and on the other hand a profoundly analytical mind.”2

- Clyde Kilby

“There is no antithesis, indeed no distinction, between Rhetoric and Poetry.”3

- C. S. Lewis

What would it have been like to be Reepicheep, the mythical mouse from Voyage of the Dawn Treader, hiding in a corner to watch C. S. Lewis prepare his first Broadcast Talk for the BBC in August 1941? Unfortunately, Reepicheep left no description of this historic moment—historic because eleven years later, the words would become part of Mere Christianity, a book heralded by Christianity Today readers as the best Christian book written in the 20th century.4 One can only guess what Reepicheep would have seen if he had indeed been in Lewis’s room at Magdalen College or Lewis’s study at The Kilns, while Lewis wrote the scripts ←101 | 102→that survived and are now housed in the BBC archives in Reading, England. But Lewis himself did leave clues.

If Lewis followed his usual routine, he would have dipped his nibbed pen in the ink, paused, pondered, and pronounced the words (sometimes silently, at other...