“It’s Almost As If We’d Lost the War”
That Hideous Strength & the Negative World
In a letter to an American correspondent in 1952, C. S. Lewis provides an answer to a question about the final novel in his “Space Trilogy”:
Oh, I just ‘made up’ all those things in That Hideous Strength: i.e. I took existing evil tendencies and ‘produced’ them (in the geometrical sense —‘Produce the line AB to the point X’) to show how dreadful they might become if we didn’t take care. And you, apparently, have been living in a world where they had in real life got a good deal nearer to my point X than I knew. Well, that is the trouble about satirizing the modern world. What you put in your story as fantastically horrid possibilities becomes fact before your story is printed. The reality outstrips the satire!
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R. V. Young is Professor of English Emeritus at North Carolina State University, a former editor of Modern Age: A Quarterly Review, and the author of Shakespeare and the Idea of Western Civilization (Catholic University of America Press, 2022). He and his wife are parishioners at St. Ignatius of Antioch Church in Tarpon Springs, Florida. They have five grown children, fifteen grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren. He is a senior editor of Touchstone.
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