Voice of Lewis

Recordings of CS Lewis reading from his own works in 1960 were discovered in a surprising way: a researcher from the University of Colorado was exploring materials by and about Joy Davidman Gresham Lewis, CS Lewis's wife, at the Wade Center at Wheaton College outside of Chicago in the 1980s. Joy had previously been married to Bill Gresham, who had remarried. (Her son Douglas Gresham describes a fascinating story about that.  On another day, perhaps.) This second wife, Renee, was still living in Florida and he went to interview her. She had many of Bill's literary effects. These included some reel-to-reel tapes Bill had made in 1960. After Joy's death he went to visit his sons in Oxford, who were living at the Kilns with Lewis at the time. He wanted to interview Lewis, who declined but offered to read aloud from some of his works, including Perelandra, as below.

The voice of Lewis kicks in at 34.40. I like his reading voice, and the podcasters note that the cadence and rhythm of the prose is more poetic than they expected, strongly suggesting that the sound was part of Lewis's writing, even if we don't notice it.

People tend to know Lewis either for his imaginative work, his logical apologetic work, or his academic work, and even those familiar with all tend to prefer one category over the other two. Yet it is quickly obvious how much imagination goes into his reasoning, how much tight reasoning is present (in both plain and disguised forms) in his fiction, and how much academic knowledge lies behind both. 

For Lewis, Reason revealed Truth, and Imagination provided Meaning.