What Jackie did after JFK was assassinated

A surfeit of anniversaries this week reminded us that on the day of President Kennedy’s assassination, C.S. Lewis (born 1898) and Aldous Huxley (born 1894) also died. Three such different figures are hard to imagine — Kennedy, the wily politician, Lewis, the tortured academic, Huxley the cool intellectual. Lewis is the one whose image and personality don’t fit; a man who appears cast from a different age from Kennedy and also from Huxley, who you can well imagine wielding an iPod and Twitter account. Yet it’s the pipe-smoking, tweed-suited Lewis who has been given the celebrity treatment this week, while the coolly cynical Huxley has been silenced, with not a feature or reading to be heard.

Lewis, of course, was connected with Tolkien and still scores highly because of the current fad for fantasy worlds and mock-epic battles between good and evil. Book of the Week, though, did not give us, as you might have expected, something from Narnia but rather Lewis’s spoof conversations between Lucifer and one of his minions —  The Screwtape Letters. Screwtape, aka the Devil, is trying to teach Wormwood, his inept nephew, the arts of tempting. The tone, the subject, the style take us straight back to the 1940s and 1950s when words like ‘milksop’, ‘liturgy’ and ‘flippancy’ were in common use, Christian worship on Sunday was commonplace, and real temptation in the form of Walnut Whips and Jimmy Choos had not yet arrived.

It’s an old-fashioned read, rather dated and stylised. But, given voice by Simon Russell Beale, Screwtape becomes insidiously normal, seducing us with his honeyed insights before turning on the spite when we least expect it. Before long, I found myself squirming with discomfort as Screwtape mercilessly details his techniques for bringing us down, based on his incisive knowledge of, and contempt for, human frailty.