C. S. Lewis complained for years how readers and reviewers panned his favorite book to write.

Perelandra was “miles and away my own favourite among my books and has had a very bad reception from reviewers,” Lewis told the German-born painter Delmar Banner on January 7, 1944. While not an allegory, this second installment in Lewis’s Space or Ransom Trilogy still vexed readers who expected Lewis to explain the allegory.

More than four years later he was complaining that his least favorite book to write was The Screwtape Letters. But readers seemed to prefer that book to Perelandra, Lewis vented to a Wisconsin pastor on January 19, 1948.

No wonder the two books were linked in the mind of Lewis and his readers. Uncle Screwtape emerged from Lewis’s fertile imagination in 1940 and 1941 during the darkest days of the Blitz, when Great Britain stood alone against Nazi aggression. Soon afterward Lewis turned from demons to angels from the heavenly Perelandra (Venus) in its Edenic state.

“I’m engaged on a sequel to The Silent Planet in wh. the same man goes to Venus,” Lewis summarized on December 23, 1941. He first mentioned the book in a letter to his friend, the Anglican nun Sister Penelope, on November 9, 1941. He dedicated the book to “Some Ladies at Wantage,” her order, the Community of St. Mary the Virgin. “The idea is that Venus is at the Adam-and-Eve stage: i.e. the first two rational creatures have just appeared and are still innocent. My hero arrives in time to prevent their ‘falling’ as our first pair did.”

Lewis may have offered the key to understanding the problem for readers when he delivered the Ballard Matthews Lectures at the University College of North Wales in 1941. Teaching on John Milton’s epic 17th-century poem Paradise Lost, Lewis discussed why writing about evil is so much easier than writing about good. Milton himself famously turned Satan into the most compelling character of Paradise Lost. Lewis explained:

In all but a few writers the “good” characters are the least successful, and every one who has ever tried to make even the humblest story ought to know why. To make a character worse than oneself it is only necessary to release imaginatively from control some of the bad passions which, in real life, are always straining at the leash; the Satan, the Iago, the Becky Sharp, within each of us, is always there and only too ready, the moment the leash is slipped, to come out and have in our books that holiday we try to deny them in our lives. But if you try to draw a character better than yourself, all you can do is to take the best moments you have had and to imagine them prolonged and more consistently embodied in action. But the real high virtues which we do not possess at all, we cannot depict except in a purely external fashion. We do not really know what it feels like to be a man much better than ourselves. His whole inner landscape is one we have never seen, and when we guess it we blunder.

Screwtape peers into the dark corners of our soul. Perelandra’s Tinidril strikes us as unfamiliar in her naïve goodness.

Not every reader struggled with Perelandra and Lewis’s Eve, however. As the Second World War concluded in 1945, Lewis heard from an admirer who credited the book with transforming his faith:

I was struck first of all by the shear beauty of the book. It transported me into a kind of Elysian Fields—or better yet unspoiled Eden, inhabited by the innocent and unfallen. . . . Here at last was science fiction at its fullest development should be. . . . In Perelandra I got the taste and the smell of Christian truth. My senses as well as my soul were baptized. It was as though an intellectual abstraction or speculation had become flesh and dwelt in its solid glory among us.

Chad Walsh earned his PhD in English literature in 1943 and served the U.S. War Department until 1945, when he wrote the letter. He went on to teach English at Beloit College in Wisconsin and also became an Episcopal priest in 1949. He became one of the first writers to make Lewis more widely known in the United States when he published “C. S. Lewis: Apostle to the Skeptics” for the September 1946 issue of The Atlantic Monthly. Walsh published a book by the same title—the first ever written about Lewis—in 1948.

Walsh had his own admirers who wrote to share their love for Lewis. One of them Walsh encouraged to take the bold step of sending a letter to Lewis. His response was unforgettable, in the eyes of his correspondent:

Just got a letter from Lewis in the mail. I think I told you I’d raised an argument or two on some points? Lord, he knocked my props out from under me unerringly; one shot to a pigeon. I haven’t a scrap of my case left.

It was Joy Davidman. She became Lewis’s wife on April 23, 1956, a little more than six years after his first return letter.

Next week on Unseen Things

Our crisis of narration, Lewis’s Great Divorce, and America’s fraught history with Iran.