Towards the end of Miracles, that ambitious if flawed attempt to defend the Christian faith by rational argument, Lewis hints in a footnote at quite another way of presenting the truth he believed in. Dismissing reductionist views which see Myth as either ‘misunderstood history’, ‘diabolical illusion’, or ‘priestly lying’, Lewis says that Myth is, ‘at its best, a real though unfocused gleam of divine truth falling on human imagination’ (M. 161; M.2 138). As we have already seen, for Lewis Myth offers a ‘taste’ of truth, and invites an ‘imaginative embrace’, rather than any merely cognitive assent. Sometimes what an author seeks to communicate is too subtle, too elusive, too close, to be caught in rational concepts. As Lewis puts it in his essay ‘On Stories’, sometimes only the net of narrative can get near to catching the bird, in this case, of paradise (cf. OTOW 45). The footnote in Miracles concludes in a vein which anticipates Lewis's later and more successful attempt to talk about miracles, and indeed ‘the Grand Miracle’ of the Incarnation itself, in the form of stories: ‘The story of Christ demands from us, and repays, not only a religious and historical but also an imaginative response. It is directed to the child, the poet, and the savage in us as well as to the conscience and to the intellect. One of its functions is to break down dividing walls.’ (M. 161; M.2 138, emphasis added).

However traumatic the Anscombe affair of 1948 may, or may not, have been for Lewis, there is in the late 1940s and early 1950s a decisive shift away from apologetic writing, and an immersion in the quite different genre of the fairy tale. Indeed, there was much in Lewis's life during these years to drive him to seek the ‘recovery, escape and consolation’ which Tolkien said were characteristic of the fairy story. Not the least of Lewis's worries in this period was, ironically, the cooling of his friendship with Tolkien. Other ‘stress factors’ (to use a phrase which might have drawn comment from Lewis) were: the increasing senility of ‘Minto’ (Mrs Moore) and the unknown expense of keeping her in residential care until her death (in fact she died in 1951); the painfully regular alcoholic ‘benders’ of his brother; a very heavy workload; and a sense of malaise and deprivation in what seemed to Lewis a bleak post-war Britain.