It's 50 years since CS Lewis died. His legacy encompasses far more than just Narnia – Rowan Williams, AS Byatt, Philip Pullman and others give their thoughts on his body of work
'I did have the feeling that he was a clever schoolboy who had never grown up … AS Byatt on CS Lewis, pictured in Oxford in 1946. Photograph: Hans Wild/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Image
"Aslan is on the move." That phrase, three decades after I first read The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, still has the power to tickle the hairs on my neck. It testifies to the enduring power of CS Lewis's recasting of the Christian myth that I'm far from alone. If this were all there were to him, it would still be pretty remarkable that, 50 years after his death, this tweedy old Oxford don should occupy such an exalted place in our cultural life.
All this week on Radio 4, Simon Russell Beale has been reading The Screwtape Letters – Lewis's perceptive inquiry into temptation cast as a series of witty letters between a demon and his apprentice. This Friday, his reputation will be crowned with a plaque in his honour, between John Betjeman and William Blake, in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey.
The tribute might have pleased him, but it's an odd one: as a poet, Lewis is usually regarded as pretty useless. "He hated all poets because he was a failed poet," says his biographer AN Wilson. "He hated TS Eliot. He hated Louis MacNeice. There's a very bad 'poem' by Lewis about reading The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock, and it just shows how stupid he was about modern poetry."Lewis has much more than poetry to offer, though. Almost too much: his posthumous reputation is disconcertingly various. As well as a children's writer, he was novelist, memoirist, essayist, critic, broadcaster and apologist. But the two Lewises that command the biggest followings are the author of the Narnia stories, and (in something of an overlap) the writer of Christian apologetics.
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All this week on Radio 4, Simon Russell Beale has been reading The Screwtape Letters – Lewis's perceptive inquiry into temptation cast as a series of witty letters between a demon and his apprentice. This Friday, his reputation will be crowned with a plaque in his honour, between John Betjeman and William Blake, in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey.
The tribute might have pleased him, but it's an odd one: as a poet, Lewis is usually regarded as pretty useless. "He hated all poets because he was a failed poet," says his biographer AN Wilson. "He hated TS Eliot. He hated Louis MacNeice. There's a very bad 'poem' by Lewis about reading The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock, and it just shows how stupid he was about modern poetry."Lewis has much more than poetry to offer, though. Almost too much: his posthumous reputation is disconcertingly various. As well as a children's writer, he was novelist, memoirist, essayist, critic, broadcaster and apologist. But the two Lewises that command the biggest followings are the author of the Narnia stories, and (in something of an overlap) the writer of Christian apologetics.
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