Playing by the Rules: Kipling's "Great Game" Vs. "the Great Dance" in C.S. Lewis's Space Trilogy (Rudyard Kipling) (Critical Essay‪)‬

From his young adulthood until his old age, C. S. Lewis had a deep appreciation of Kipling's work. His letters as a young university student occasionally revealed this passion: "W. [Warren Lewis] had just been reading Puck of Pook's Hill [...] he praised it highly and I agreed with him" (Letters 195). Four decades later, shortly before his death, he wrote to Magdalene college concerning his honorary fellowship that "If I loved you all less I should think much of being thus placed ('so were I equall'd with them in renown') beside Kipling and Eliot" (Letters 509). Lewis often shared his appreciation of Kipling with others, and even appropriated Kipling's style in some of his own work. He once wrote to his brother Warren, "I know hardly any poet who can deliver such a hammer stroke. The stories [...] are, I suppose, even now admitted to be good by all except a handful of Left idiots ... "(Letters 332). He also may have taken the name of his skeptic MacPhee from Kipling's short story, "Bread Upon the Waters": in that narrative, an incredulous ship operator (MacPhee) has to suspend his own judgment and blindly follow a fool's course in order to see justice done. Kipling's influence upon his writings also extends into the Space Trilogy. In his 1948 address, "Kipling's World," Lewis called Kipling "first and foremost the poet of work" ("Kipling's World" [KW] 235); when trying to capture the language and feel of the work of Bracton College and Belbury, Lewis appears to use Kipling as a model. Ransom's kidnappers in Out of the Silent Planet, Weston and Devine, both speak in cliches culled from Kipling's stories. (1) Martin Green also places Lewis in context with several other authors who "rediscovered" Kipling at about the same time, including T.S. Eliot, Desmond McCarthy, and George Orwell (Green 281-82). (2)