Читать книгу Collected Letters Volume Three: Narnia, Cambridge and Joy 1950–1963 - Клайв Льюис, Клайв Стейплз Льюис, Walter Hooper - Страница 10

TO J. KEITH KYLE (BBC):¹ TS

REF.3/53.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

1st January 1953.

Dear Mr. Kyle,

I wish the series every success, but am snowed under with work at present, and cannot assist: anyway, if the public does’nt by now know what I believe I should’nt enlighten them much in 3 1/2 minutes more!

Yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO RUTH PITTER(BOD):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

Jan 2nd 1953

Dear Miss Pitter–

The year, which I had not thought much of so far, begins to mend with a letter and a prime article from you. And then, as you say, the skies.

It was beautiful, on two or three successive nights about the Holy Time, to see Venus and Jove blazing at one another, once with the Moon right between them: Majesty and Love linked by Virginity—what could be more appropriate?

The Return to Poetic Law is a noble piece and would do good if any of those who most need it were at all likely to take any notice.² But they are all in Groups and Parties. What matters to them is not what is said but who says it: one of the Party or an outsider. ‘A minor specialist’s subject’, as you say. Yet some one or two may heed you: you are right to testify.

I do most heartily agree with you about having had too much shame. (Do you, by the way, remember the character-study of Shame in the Pilgrims Progress, all in a conversation between Christian and Hopeful?³ It is superb fun). It is v. sinister that ‘embarrassing’ or ‘embarrassingly bad’ has become an ordinary term of criticism: this, you see, is a direct appeal away from the reader’s consciousness of the poem to his social self-consciousness. While he reads he must be aware that the set are watching him reading.

That is a bad business, losing your country home. I have lost mine while remaining in it, i.e. it has ceased to be country. Not that I’d quite say ‘All things are taken from us and become Parcels and portions of the dreadful past’. Dreadful isn’t the word at all. But it’s thrilling to hear of your ‘closing in on’ Oxford.⁴ It wd. be lovely if you became a neighbour.

My brother joins me in best wishes for the year. How many—and how few—of these here years there seem to be!

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

During her weeks at The Kilns Joy Gresham received a letter from her husband, Bill, saying that while he knew Joy would never be anything but a writer, ‘Renée has a different orientation: her only interest is in taking care of her husband and children and making a home for them.’ The ‘optimum solution, as he saw it, ‘would be for you to be married to some swell guy, Rene and I to be married, both families to live in easy calling distance so that the Gresham kids could have Mommy and Daddy on hand.’⁵

Joy showed this letter to Lewis and she told Chad Walsh that she asked him for advice. ‘He strongly advised me to divorce Bill,’ she said.⁶ After a fortnight at The Kilns, Joy returned to the United States on 3 January

TO DON GIOVANNI CALABRIA (V): ⁷

Collegium Stae Mariae Magdalenae

apud Oxonienses

Vig. fest. Trium Regum

MCMLIII [5 January 1953]

Dilectissime Pater

Grato animo, ut semper, paternas tuas benedictiones accepi. Sit tibi, precor, suavissima gustatio omnium hujus temporis gaudiorum et inter curas et Dolores consolatio. Tractatum Responsabilità apud Amicum (Dec.) invenire nequeo. Latet aliquis error. Orationes tuas peto de opera quod nunc in manibus est dum conor componere libellum de precibus privatis in usum laicorum praesertim eorum qui nuper in fidem Christianam conversi sunt et longo stabilitoque habitu orandi adhuc carent. Laborem aggressus sum quia videbam multos quidem pulcherrimosque libros de hac re scriptos esse in usum religiosorum, paucos tamen qui tirones et adhuc (ut ita dicam) infantes in fide instruunt. Multas difficultates invenio nee certe scio utrum Dominus velit me hoc opus perficere an non. Ora, mi pater, ne aut nimia audacitate in re mihi non concessâ persistam aut nimia timiditate a labore debito recedam: aeque enim damnati et ille qui Arcam sine mandato tetigit et ille qui manum semel aratro impositam abstrahit.

Et tu et congregatio tua in diurnis orationibus meis. Haec sola, dum in via sumus, conversatio: liceat nobis, precor, olim in Patria facie ad faciem congredi. Vale.

C. S. Lewis

Adhuc spero tractatum Responsabilità accipere.

*

The College of St Mary Magdalen, Oxford

n Vigil of the Feast of the Three Kings, 1953

[5 January 1953]

Dearest Father

Thank you, as always, for your fatherly blessings.

May you, I pray, have the sweetest relish of all the joys of this life and consolation amid cares and griefs.

I am unable to find the article ‘Responsibility’ in the December issue of Friend. There is some unexplained mistake here.⁸

I invite your prayers about a work which I now have in hand. I am trying to write a book about private prayers for the use of the laity, especially for those who have been recently converted to the Christian faith and so far are without any sustained and regular habit of prayer. I tackled the job because I saw many no doubt very beautiful books written on this subject of prayer for the religious but few which instruct tiros and those still babes (so to say) in the Faith. I find many difficulties nor do I definitely know whether God wishes me to complete this task or not.⁹

Pray for me, my Father, that I neither persist, through over-boldness, in what is not permitted to me nor withdraw, through too great timidity, from due effort: for he who touches the Ark without authorization¹⁰ and he who, having once put his hand to the plough, draws it back are both lost.¹¹

Both you and your Congregation are in my daily prayers. While we are in the Way, this is our only intercourse: be it granted to us, I pray, hereafter, to meet in our True Country face to face.

C. S. Lewis

I still hope to receive the article ‘Responsibility’.

TO DON GIOVANNI CALABRIA (V):

e Coll. Stae Mariae Magdalenae

apud Oxonienses

Jan. vii. MCMLIII

Tandem, pater dilectissime, venit in manus exemplar Amid (Oct.) quod continent tractatum tuum de clade illa Serica. De illa natione quum ibi per multos annos evangelistae haud infeliciter laboravissent, equidem multa sperabam: nunc omnia retro fluere, ut scribis, manifestum est. Et mihi multa atrocia multi de illa re epistolis renuntiaverunt ñeque aberat ista miseria a cogitationibus et precibus nostris. Neque tamen sine peccatis nostris evenit: nos enim justitiam illam, curam illam pauperum quas (mendacissime) communistae praeferunt debueramus jam ante multa saecula rê verâ effecisse. Sed longe hoc aberat: nos occidentales Christum ore praedicavimus, factis Mammoni servitium tulimus. Magis culpabiles nos quam infideles: scientibus enim volunta-tem Dei et non facientibus major poena. Nunc unicum refugium in contritione et oratione. Diu erravimus. In legendo Europae historiam, seriem exitiabilem bellorum, avaritiae, fratricidarum Christianorum a Christianis persecutionum, luxuriae, gulae, superbiae, quis discerneret rarissima Sancti Spiritus vestigia? Oremus semper. Vale.

C. S. Lewis

*

from The College of St. Mary Magdalen

Oxford

Jan 7th 1953

At last, dearest Father, there has come to hand that copy of Friend (Oct.) which contains your article on that Chinese disaster. I used myself to entertain many hopes for that nation, since the missionaries have served there for many years not unsuccessfully: now it is clear, as you write, that all is on the ebb. Many have reported to me too, in letters on this subject, many atrocities, nor was this misery absent from our thoughts and prayers.¹²

But it did not happen, however, without sins on our part: for that justice and that care for the poor which (most mendaciously) the Communists advertise, we in reality ought to have brought about ages ago. But far from it: we Westerners preached Christ with our lips, with our actions we brought the slavery of Mammon. We are more guilty than the infidels: for to those that know the will of God and do it not, the greater the punishment.

Now the only refuge lies in contrition and prayer. Long have we erred. In reading the history of Europe, its destructive succession of wars, of avarice, of fratricidal persecutions of Christians by Christians, of luxury, of gluttony, of pride, who could detect any but the rarest traces of the Holy Spirit?

Let us pray always. Farewell,

C. S. Lewis

TO SISTER PENELOPE CSMV(BOD):

Coll Magd.

Jan 9th 1953

Dear Sister Penelope

As usual, your letter is full of interest, and I shall chew it over very thoroughly. That is, I shall go on wondering whether ooa can mean quite the same as ¹³ and whether it is or is not an objection that your interpretation involves the assumption that what is being prayed for is something internal. One couldn’t (or could one?) believe that a dead man had risen before you saw him rise. I don’t know. You might believe the prayer had been answered before he did. By the way, what are Aramaic tenses like? Does it have futures and preterits?

The poor old soul in Holloway is a famous confidence trickster, Mrs. Hooker, against whom I had to appear as a witness because she had borrowed money by pretending to be my wife! I am sure you will pray for her. It was nice to meet the other day.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO J. O. REED (P): TS

REF.34/53.

Magdalen College,

9th January 1953.

Dear Reed,

Can you meet me for a pot of beer in the Eastgate at 12.30 tomorrow, Saturday 10th?

Yours,

C. S. Lewis

TO DON GIOVANNI CALABRIA (V):

E Coll. Stae Mariae Magdalenae

apud Oxonienses

Jan. xiv LIII

Pater dilectissime

Multo gaudio accepi epistolam tuam die ix Jan. datam: credo jampridem te meam accepisse quam de tractatu Responsabilità scripsi. Et vides me per errorem putavisse te auctorem esse et Sac. P. Mannam esse id quod Galli vocant nomen plumae. At minime refert quum liber De Imitatione nos doceat ‘Attende quid dicatur, non quis dixerit’. Multas ex corde gratias refero, quia tanta caritate ob libellum meum propositum meditare et orare voluisti. Sententiam tuam pro signo accipio. Et nunc, carissime, audi de quâ difficultate máximo haesito. Duo paradigmata orationis videntur nobis in Novo Testamento expósita esse quae inter se concillare haud facile est. Alterum est ipsa Domini oratio in horto Gethsemane (‘si possibile est…nihilominus non quod ego volo sed quod tu vis’). Alterum vero apud Marc XI, v. 24 ‘Quidquid petieritis credentes quod accipietis, habebitis’. (Et nota, loco quo versio latina accipietis habet et nostra vernacula similiter futurum tempus shall receive, graecus textus tempus praeteritum έλάβετε, accepistis, id quod difficillimum est). Nunc quaestio: quomodo potest homo uno eod-emque momento temporis et credere plenissime se accepturum et voluntati Dei fortasse negantis se submittere? Quomodo potest dicere simul ‘Credo firmiter te hoc daturum esse’ et ‘si hoc negaveris, fiat voluntas tua’. Quomodo potest unus actus mentis et possibilem negationem excludere et tractare? Rem a nullo doctorum tractatam invenio.

Nota bene: nullam difficultatem mihi facit quod Deus interdum non vult faceré ea quae fidèles petunt. Necesse est quippe ille sapiens et nos stulti sed cur apud Marc. XI 24 pollicetur se omnia (quidquid) facere quas plena fide petimus? Ambo loci Dominici, ambo inter credenda. Quid faciam? Vale. Et pro te et pro congregatione tua oro et semper orabo.

C. S. Lewis

*

from The College of St Mary Magdalen

Oxford

14th January 1953

Dearest Father

I received your letter dated 9th Jan. with much joy. I trust that long since you have received my letter on the tract Responsabilità. And you see that I mistakenly thought that you yourself were the author and that ‘Sac. P. Mannam’¹⁴ was what the French call a nom de plume.

But it is of no consequence since the De Imitatione teaches us to ‘Mark what is said, not who said it.’¹⁵

I send you many heartfelt thanks for your charity in being willing to meditate on my proposed little book¹⁶ and pray for it. I take your opinion as a good sign.

And now, my dearest friend, hear what difficulty leaves me in most doubt. Two models of prayer seem to be put before us in the New Testament which are not easy to reconcile with each other.

One is the actual prayer of the Lord in the Garden of Gethsemane (‘if it be possible¹⁷…nevertheless, not as I will but as Thou wilt’).¹⁸

The other, though, is in Mark XI v. 24. ‘Whatsoever you ask believing that you shall receive you shall obtain’ (and observe that in the place where the version has, in Latin, accipietis-and our vernacular translation, similarly, has the future tense, ‘shall receive’-the Greek text has the past tense έλάετε = accepistis-which is very difficult).

Now the question: How is it possible for a man, at one and the same moment of time, both to believe most fully that he will receive and to submit himself to the Will of God–Who perhaps is refusing him?

How is it possible to say, simultaneously, ‘I firmly believe that Thou wilt give me this’, and, ‘If Thou shalt deny me it, Thy will be done’? How can one mental act both exclude possible refusal and consider it? I find this discussed by none of the Doctors.

Please note: it creates no difficulty for me that God sometimes does not will to do what the faithful request. This is necessary because He is wise and we are foolish: but why in Mark XI 24, does He promise to do everything (whatsoever) we ask in full faith? Both statements are the Lord’s; both are among what we are required to believe. What should I do?¹⁹

Farewell. And for you and for your Congregation I pray and shall ever pray.

C. S. Lewis

TO WILLIAM L. KINTER(BOD): TS

REF.51/53.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

17th January 1953.

Dear Mr. Kinter,

Yes. Eustace, Edmund, Jane, and Mark²⁰ are all meant to be recipients of Grace.

All good wishes.

Yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE (W):

Magdalen College

Oxford

Jan. 19th 1953

Dear Mrs. Shelburne

Thank you for your kind letter of Dec. 29th which arrived today. I am afraid I have no idea what the first editions of Screwtape or the Divorce sell at: I haven’t even got a first of the former myself. But you would be foolish to spend a cent more on them than the published price: both belong to the worst war-period and are scrubby little things on rotten paper–your American editions are far nicer.

Your letter was most cheering and I am full of agreements. Of course we’ll help each other in our prayers. God bless you.

Yours most sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO BELLE ALLEN (L, WHL):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

19 January 1953

I don’t wonder that you got fogged in Pilgrim’s Regress. It was my first religious book and I didn’t then know how to make things easy. I was not even trying to very much, because in those days I never dreamed I would become a ‘popular’ author and hoped for no readers outside a small ‘highbrow’ circle. Don’t waste your time over it any more. The poetry is my own…We all feel ashamed of receiving so much from you and are not even sure-now-whether our scarcities are any worse than your high prices. Don’t you think you ought to stop?…

TO MARG’RIETTE MONTGOMERY (W): TS

REF.65/53.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

21st January 1953

Dear Miss Montgomery,

This is a splendid poem of Edna Millay’s and the last two lines put the whole of one’s experience in a nut-shell.²¹ You were right not to send me the R.S.²² books: I have several Anthroposophical friends here who would readily supply me with all his works. And by the way, the point about a musician is surely her music, not her advice about reading! Keep your independence.

All good wishes.

Yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO NELL BERKERS’PRICE (W): TS

REE67/53.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

21st January 1953.

Dear Nell,

Your letter is tantalisingly cryptic, but as I have to go to Holloway next Sunday, no doubt I shall see for myself!

Love to all.

Yours,

Jack

TO CHAD WALSH (W): TS

RER73/53.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

24th January 1953.

Dear Chad,

I wonder if I may trouble you to do me a service? You will already guess what it is when you have read the enclosed note, which was an answer to Revd. Iones B. Shannon,²³ who kindly invited me to lecture at his College. The only address he gave was:–

St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church,

State College,

Pennsylvania

and the U.S. mail has returned the letter, stamped ‘No Post Office named’. You presumably have his full address, and I would take it kindly if you would send my note to him. Thank you.

Joy Gresham left here on the first of the month for New York; and I think really enjoyed her English adventures. She visited Oxford twice, and I saw quite a lot of her. She certainly got well off the beaten tourist track, her adventures including attendance at a wedding in the East End of London, where she and the other guests were invited to spend the night on the kitchen floor. It was pleasant news that she is about to join the church, and will shortly be confirmed.²⁴

How goes it with you? We got a little news of you from Joy, but would have liked more.

With all blessings,

yours,

lack Lewis

TO SARAH NEYIAN (T): PC

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

Ian 26/53

Thanks for most interesting letter and congratulations on the good time you seem to be having. lust as you are going back to old experiences in liking parties again, so I am by pulling out one of my teeth with fingers the other day, wh. I can’t have done for many a year!*

I liked Mrs. Masham’s Repose²⁵ far the best of White’s books myself. Our Christmas was conditioned by having a visitor for nearly 3 weeks: very nice one but one can’t feel quite free. Love to all.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO MARY VAN DEUSEN (W):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

Jan. 26th 1953

Dear Mrs. Van Deusen

Thank you for your letter of the 17th and the wholly delightful photographs. I am glad things are still Fine. I’ve never thought of becoming an Associate of anything myself and feel difficulty about advising. You mention externals–what Associates have to do and that they have asked you to become one–but say nothing about the motives in your own mind either for or against it.²⁶ They are the real point, aren’t they? I don’t think one ought to join an Order, however much one might like it or however nice the people who have asked you-unless one thinks that God especially presses one to do so as the only, or the best, way of doing some good to others or receiving some good oneself. And if one does think that, then I suppose one must join however much one disliked it & however nasty the particular inviters were! It is not as if it were a club! Why not try living according to their Rule for a bit without joining them and seeing what it is like for a person such as you in circumstances such as yours?

Confession, of course, you can have without joining anything. I think it is a good thing for most of us and use it myself.

That is v. good news about really good people beginning to go into government jobs, and at a sacrifice. I have always thought of how that the greatest of all dangers to your country is the fear that politics were not in the hands of your best types and that this, in the long run, might prove ruinous. A change in that, the beginning of what might be called a volunteer aristocracy, might have incalculable effects. More power to your myriad elbows!

M. James is wrong.²⁷ It is my brother, not I, who is or was a vestryman.²⁸

With love to all.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO EDWARD A. ALLEN (W): TS

REF.53/53.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

26th January 1953.

My dear Edward,

Many thanks for your letter of the 21st: and for the welcome news that a ‘guided missile’ is even now winging its way from Highland Avenue to Magdalen College. Yes, anticipation v. realization is a very old problem, is’nt it? Certainly there is a time when realization always falls flat, as compared with anticipation; but one of the advantages of old age–naturally a stripling of 45 like you won’t appreciate this–is that anticipation comes to be pitched so low that realization generally exceeds it.

The G.B.S.²⁹ remark was new to me; and is a typical example of what he thought funny and others would think merely ill-bred. A silly man I feel, in spite of his great ability; for you must have noticed that while a fool cannot be clever, a clever man can often be silly. Do you know the story of how this same G.B.S. once got more than he bargained for? He had been asked to stay with Lady Londonderry, a great society hostess in the old days, and sent her a letter warning her that it was not his habit to eat the bodies of dead and often putrefying animals and birds and so on, in typical Shaw style; he got his answer by telegram-‘Know nothing of your habits: trust they are better than your manners.’

We will certainly take you at your word and let you have a critical review of the contents of package 204; but as I cannot at the moment remember ever having had a useless article in an Allen parcel, I don’t think there will be much to say except ‘very many thanks’. Yes, things seem to be looking up a bit in the ration world here; there is even talk of de-rationing meat in 1954-a pretty safe thing though to say, for by that time the politicians will have found some excellent excuse for not doing so. Meat, butter, and sugar are still on rations over here: meat and sugar because we can’t afford to buy them, and butter because there is a world shortage–or so our papers say. Though how this can be so, I don’t quite see. Are you short of it in U.S.A.?

I am ungallant enough to suspect that perhaps R. L. Stevenson said the last word on the marrying or not marrying question: ‘marriage is terrible, but so is a lonely old age’.³⁰ Not a very consoling remark, but there it is. My brother and I can both sympathize with you over rheumatism: having had it for several years, and it being a family heirloom. We often talk ruefully of the days when we used to think it a comic disease, and laugh at our elder’s complaints about it!

It is heartening and rebuking to think of your father rising superior to his sufferings and producing champion dahlias; and is, as you say, a sermon on the value of work as an alternative to worry. May he long be spared to continue at his gardening.

With anticipatory thanks for the parcel, and with all best wishes to you and your mother from both of us.

Yours

Jack Lewis

TO NATHAN COMFORT STARR (W):

Magdalen College,

Oxford

Feb 3rd 1953

Dear Starr

Thanks for your immensely interesting letter from antipodean Po’Lu.³¹ I shall be v. intrigued to hear more of the Arthurian story as told there, tho’ more so to hear what their own chivalric stories are like.

I have no adventures to tell you in return–unless it is an adventure that I have at last finished, and am now reading proofs of, my volume on 16th Century literature. It is an adventure to me to be free of that 12-15 year labour. I know now how Ariel felt,³² or how a balloon feels when the sandbags are thrown out.

Your F. H. Heard sounds worth following up. I have just read two books by an American ‘scientifiction’ author called Ray Bradbury. Most of that genre is abysmally bad, a mere transference of ordinary gangster or pirate fiction to the sidereal stage, and a transference which does harm not good. Bigness in itself is of no imaginative value: the defence of a ‘galactic’ empire is less interesting than the defence of a little walled town like Troy. But Bradbury has real invention and even knows something about prose. I recommend his Silver Locusts.³³

When do you revisit Europe? Don’t stay out yonder till you grow yellow. And try to correct your young friend’s idea of what it wd. be like meeting someone who’d been to Heaven! All good wishes for this (so far not v. attractive) year.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

P.S. (By the other Lewis). I too greatly enjoyed the letter. Remember seeing the tomb of the 47 Ronin when I was in Japan, but no one cd. tell me who they were or what they did.³⁴ This is Tuesday, Bird and Baby day, and I’m off to drink good luck to you.

W.H.L

TO ANTHONY BOUCHER (P): ³⁵

Magdalen College

Oxford

5/ii/53

Dear Mr. Boucher

This is a delightful meeting. I did indeed value St. Aquin very highly and I have also greatly enjoyed Star-Dummy in its different way.³⁶ This wd. go for nothing if I were the real out-and-out S F reader who is, within that field, omnivorous. In reality I’m extremely hard to please. Most of the modern work in this genre seems to me atrocious: written by people who just take an ordinary spy-story or ship-wreck story or gangster story and think it can be improved by a sidereal or galactic setting. In reality the setting, so long as it is a mere setting, does harm: the wreck of a schooner is more interesting than that of a space-ship and the fate of a walled village like Troy moves us more than that of a galactic empire. You, and (in a different way) Ray Bradbury, are the real thing.

All my imagination at present is going into children’s stories. When that is done, I may try another fantasy for adults, but it wd. be too quiet and leisurely for your magazine.

I don’t belong to a press-cutting agency and so miss, along with many brickbats, some bouquets intended for me. I must thank you in the dark, therefore, for kind things you have apparently said about my work. (I found that neither the favourable nor the unfavourable reviews helped one at all: they merely either soothed or wounded one’s vanity-neither a very beneficial experience. They v. often hadn’t even read the book with any accuracy).

The ‘Antiparody’ (a word we need) of the Lord’s Prayer in Star Dummy was very fine.

Thank you v. much for the year of F & S F. I hope there will be plenty of your work in it.

If you are ever in England or I in U.S.A. we must most certainly meet and split a CH³ CH² OH together. Urendi Maleldil.³⁷

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO MARY VAN DEUSEN (W): TS

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

5th February 1953.

Dear Mrs. Van Deusen,

I am writing to Genia, and you have my deepest sympathy. Of course you all have my prayers. No doubt by this time you have had my answer to your last letter.

Yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO GEOFFREY BLES (BOD): TS

REF.28/53.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

6th February 1953.

My dear Bles,

Thanks for the highly satisfactory statement and the cheque for £793-12-3.1 would like very much to come up to lunch and go through the new illustrations when they arrive.

We are both pretty well thanks: I had no more of the ‘flu than could be settled by a week-end of aspirin and early hours. I hope you have both been equally fortunate. How many more false springs are we to have before the real one?

Yours,

C. S. Lewis

TO EDWARD A. ALLEN (W): TS

REF.53/53.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

7th February 1953.

My dear Edward,

Many thanks for your letter of the 2nd. Your point about the internal combustion engine and the lady-bird is both true and interesting. Yes, ‘gentleman’ is a word which has ceased to have any particular meaning; with us it now means ‘male’ and lady ‘female’.^* There are of course many more, e.g. any boat in which it is possible to spend the night, and which is privately owned is ‘luxury-yacht’, every cinema is ‘Super-cinema’ and so on. Please give our belated congratulations to your mother on her birthday, with our wishes for many more happy ones.

This is indeed good of you about the tea and sugar, and I think you have just about hit the right proportions; the business of payment on delivery is rather erratic, sometimes one is charged, sometimes not. But I’ll let you know what happens.

Please excuse such a short and scrappy note, but I am snowed under with a vast stack of examination papers for correction.

All the best.

Yours,

C. S. Lewis

TO RHONA BODLE (BOD): ³⁸

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

Feb 9th 1953

Dear Miss Bodle

Thanks for your interesting letter of Feb 1st wh. arrived today. It is difficult to one, who, like me, has no experience, to give an opinion of these problems, which, I see, are v. intricate. The story about the girl who had reached the age of 16 under Christian teachers without hearing of the Incarnation is an eye-opener. For ordinary children (I don’t know about the Deaf) I don’t see any advantage in presenting the Gospels without some doctrinal comment. After all, they weren’t written for people who did not know the doctrine, but for converts, already instructed, who now wanted to know a bit more about the life and sayings of the Master. No ancient sacred books were intended to be read without a teacher: hence the Ethiopian eunuch in the Acts says to St. Philip ‘How can I understand unless someone tells me?’³⁹

Could the bit–and I think there must be something-about people I don’t like come in as a comment on the Forgive clause in the Lord’s Prayer?⁴⁰

It is freezing hard here and one takes ones life in one’s hand every time one walks.

What an excellent work you are doing! All blessings.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO ARTHUR C. CLARKE (BOD):⁴¹

Magdalen College

Oxford

Feb. 14th [?] 1953

Dear Mr. Clarke

I hope I shd. not be deterred by the danger!⁴² The fatal objection is that I should be covering ground I have already covered in print and on which I have nothing to add. I know that is how many lectures are made, but I never do it. I might at a pinch show great fortitude about the boredom of the audience, but then there’s my own. But thank your society very much for the invitation and convey my good wishes to them as regards everything but interplanetary travel.

Yours very sincerely

C. S. Lewis

Probably the whole thing is only a plan for kidnapping me and marooning me on an asteroid! I know the sort of thing.

TO ROBIN OAKLEY-HILL (M): ⁴³

Magdalen College

Oxford

Feb 16th 1953

Dear Oakley-Hill

It came over me like a thunderclap about 30 seconds after I had left you in the Lodge this afternoon that I must seem to you to have committed, in one very short conversation, all the most unprovoked and indeed inexplicable kinds of rudeness there are.⁴⁴ I implore you to try to understand–and believe–how it came about with no such intention.

The starting point was the fact that I have never noticed the slightest inequality in your gait. Seeing it for the first time when I was waiting behind you to cross the street I therefore immediately assumed some temporary mishap to be the cause: no alternative explanation entered my head. My evil genius then led me to ask you about it-largely because two people who see each other once a week can’t very well meet on an ‘island’ and say just nothing. After your answer I ought of course to have apologised and dropped the subject at once: but by that time I had completely lost my head.

You are not the first to suffer this kind of thing from me: I am subject to a kind of black-out in conversation which every now and then leads me to ask and say the utterly wrong thing–the Brobdingnagianly tactless thing.⁴⁵ I have (quite against my will) made many enemies this way. I hope very much you will not become one of them: give me a fool’s pardon.

If I raised a subject which may be painful to you, I am now punished by having to deal with one that is equally painful for me. It is an old sore: it began in my almost nursery days: and if we could find a suitable magician I think I’d gladly swop my Tendency to the Faux Pas for your leg. Please accept my sincere, and greatly embarrassed, apology.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO EDWARD A. ALLEN (W):

REF.53/53.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

21st February 1953.

My dear Ed,

Just a note whilst overwhelmed with one thing and another, to let you know that nineteen pounds twelve ounces of comfort, posted on the 20th of January, arrived in the usual excellent condition this morning. And very many thanks indeed for it. Much needed, though I really do begin to believe that this government intends to deal with the question seriously; tea is now ‘off the ration’, so are sweets, and they’re beginning to put pork in the sausages. This I should think will probably turn the younger generation into lifelong dispeptics, for it has grown up to think of a sausage as an ounce of soya bean flour fried in a skin! But anyway, we have got rid of the suspicion of rationing for rationing’s sake which one felt under the late administration, whose slogan was supposed to be ‘jobs for the boys’.

I am somehow or other in the middle of a very heavy term–examining, seeing a big book through the press and other odd jobs, besides of course the regular grind. But I hope to get away for a day or two over Easter, which will freshen me up until the summer vacation looms up on the horizon.

I’m sorry to cut you so short, but ‘it’s one of those mornings’ as we say. Do you know the expression? It means that everything that can go wrong has gone wrong, and I’m in need of two brains and four hands, to say nothing of a day of forty eight hours.

With all best wishes to you both,

Yours,

Jack Lewis

TO CHAD WALSH (W): TS

REF.73/53.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

21st February 1953.

Dear Chad,

It’s disappointing to hear that your English visit is postponed, but nice to hear from you at all: and thrilling to find that you also are doing a (odious word) ‘juvenile’.⁴⁶ I’m an examiner for three years now, so I certainly shan’t be able to embark on any American lectures: exciting and attractive tho’ the idea may be.

The book on Prayer comes on very slowly. The simplest questions about it seem to be the ones no one has ever dealt with.

Sorry I cut you so short: infinite other letters to answer, if possible, before my first pupil comes.

My brother joins me in cordial greetings.

Yours,

lack Lewis

TO MARY VAN DEUSEN (W):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

Feb 21st 1953

Dear Mrs. Van Deusen

No, I don’t think the motives you describe are too emotional: I think they are good ones. Obviously, where one is ‘more sure that God wants one to be’ is the place one must go: and even if the surety shd. in fact be mistaken I expect we may rely on God to bring it about that good will come of it. I presume, anyway, that you have to take no irrevocable vows! It looks to me as if you should go on and enter.⁴⁷ I hope it will be a great blessing to you.

I traced in Genia’s letter a growing concern for you, and was v. pleased. She is obviously fighting against the temptation to self-centredness wh. comes with ill health. It is all most cheering.

Your question about Communists-in-government really raises the whole problem of Democracy. If one accepts the basic principle of Govt. by majorities, how can one consistently try to suppress those problems of public propaganda and getting-into-govt, by which majorities are formed. If the Communists in this country can persuade the majority to sell in to Russia, or even to set up devil-worship and human sacrifice, what is the democratic reply? When we said ‘Govt. by the people’ did we only mean ‘as long as we don’t disagree with the people too much’? And is it much good talking about ‘loyalty’? For on strictly democratic principles I suppose loyalty is obligatory (or even lawful) only so long as the majority want it. I don’t know the answer.

Of course there is no question of its being our duty (the minority’s duty) to obey an anti-God govt. if the majority sets it up. We shall have to disobey and be martyred. Perhaps pure democracy is really a false ideal.

God bless you all. In great haste.

Yours ever

C. S. Lewis

TO ROGER LANCELYN GREEN (BOD):

[Magdalen College]

[25] Feb. 1953

My dear Roger

My brother and I have now both finished Armadale⁴⁸ and we enjoyed it very much. One can see, no doubt, why it is so much less popular than the famous two.⁴⁹ The ‘common reader’ is right. It has no characters to compare with Fosco⁵⁰ and it involves some excessive improbabilities. But it has the true Collins atmosphere and no dull parts. Thank you very much.

I am having mild flu’ at present and solaced myself yesterday with re-reading From the World’s End. I was more surprised than ever at my own insensibility to this story when I first read it, and I believe it is now going to be one of my regular books. The feeling of summer-evenings-miles-from-anywhere-and-much-later-than-one-intended-to-be is really very well caught in chapter I. And there are some jewels I hadn’t noticed before such as ‘Peeping Tom boasting because he was not Tarquín’⁵¹ (p. 30-a smashing blow from the shoulder, that!) or ‘supreme surrender and a supreme assumption of responsibility’ (p. 83).⁵² That I believe is entirely new and of immense importance.

Since you can write like that, then, though of course exactly the same type wouldn’t do, you must introduce the same precision into your factual works.

We’ve never talked about Aylwin⁵³ have we? I don’t know it.

Something funny has happened to the spelling of Danae and Pasiphae on p. 79.⁵⁴ I suppose you assumed that [because] Lat. æ (dipthong) = Gr αι in some places, it therefore does in all. But in those two fem. names the ē (η) is the ordinary fem. ending as in Phoebē and the preceding a has nothing to do with the matter.

Give my love and duty to June.

I’ve nearly finished the last chronicle.⁵⁵

Yours ever

Jack

Dănăe but Mōīrāī

TO CLIFFORD W. STONE (BOD): ⁵⁶

Magdalen College

Oxford, England

Feb. 27. 1953

Dear Mr. Stone

Thank you very much for Report from Paradise which turned up a few days ago.⁵⁷ I read it always with amusement and at times with deep interest. Of course one mustn’t expect from it the edge and force of a story on the same subject either by a real believer or a real militant sceptic like Anatole France: but within its limits it is good. How v. unexpected that Mark Twain of all people shd. tell us at such length that Heaven is not egalitarian. That raised my opinion of his insight. And what a light it casts on his religious upbringing that all the great ones of his Heaven are from the Old Testament–prophets and patriarchs, not a word about apostles and martyrs!

I met his work first in a very funny way-reading the Yankee at the Court of K. Arthur⁵⁸ as a small boy simply and solely for the sake of the Arthurian stuff in it and ignoring the satiric or burlesque elements. Only years later did I come to know & love the great work–by wh. I mean Huckleberry Finn.

With v. many thanks and all good wishes.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO ARTHUR GREEVFS (BOD):

Magdalen College

Oxford

Feb 27. 53

My dear Arthur

I wd. love to come away with you this year again but it couldn’t be earlier than last year. I have been put on to examine this year which will keep me busy at Oxford into the first week of August. My jaunt with W. could be made to come after my jaunt with you instead of before it if you wish, I expect. I hope this doesn’t spoil things for you?

Someone has given me Armadale. It is clearly not so good as the famous two but well worth reading.

I’m in such pain with sinusitis today I can’t think straight: so if any of this letter doesn’t make sense you’ll understand! I’m not lecturing at Queen’s.

Yours

Jack

TO GEOFFREY BLES (BOD):

Magdalen College

Oxford

ii/iii/53

My dear Bles

I return the drawings⁵⁹ which I think the best set Miss Baynes has done for us yet. There is, as always, exquisite delicacy: and I think the faces (human faces) are greatly improved. It is difficult to find 10 that one wd. willingly reject. The ones I suggest for omission are:

6. ‘She found she could lie on her back.’ No real sense of wind in it. Her hair ought to be blowing straight forward. 8. ‘Leaning one hand’ etc.

10. The poet. Not our idea of a blind bard at all!

17. The stone-throwing giants. Has its merits, but the travellers ought to be carrying packs, not parcels in their hands like trippers!

36. The gnome. I think better of this than you do but he is too like a human brat out of Dickens’s London, and since we must cut some, this is a good candidate.

39. The Dance. Her dances are usually lovely, but this is not one of her best.

42. The Centaurs.

43. Ruined by the utterly un-numinous, foreshortened Asian in the background. (I wish you, who live in town, wd. take an afternoon off and conduct Miss Baynes round the Zoo! In quadrupeds claudicat.)⁶⁰

That’s as many as I can find it in my heart to turn down.

In 19, could the shield be painted out in Chinese White & then obliterated? Knights didn’t wear shields on the right arm.

2 wd. be lovely in colour if it cd. be afforded.

You will hear with mixed feelings that I have just finished the seventh & really last of the Narnian stories. That means there are 3 more. Are you still game? If so, tell me when to send you the next.

The Book of Prayer makes some progress: and will, I hope, make more when term and ill-health are over. As some deaf people suffer from head-noises, I, who cannot now smell anything in the outer world, suffer from nose-smells. I live in a stench: like one of the nastier circles in Dante. Phew! Good apothecary, an ounce of Civet to sweeten my imagination.⁶¹ No doubt it is an allegory. My kindest regards to both of you.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO HERBERT PALMER (TEX):

Magdalen College,

Oxford

3/iii/53

My dear Palmer

Alas, I wd. be perfectly useless.⁶² When I first began to sell I had the idea that this would give my opinion about other people’s books some weight with publishers. I was soon undeceived. Never once in my whole career has any publisher taken my advice about a book–except, of course, when he had asked for it. I suspect it is a principle with them. ‘Do not let your Authors act as volunteer Readers.’ It is even possible that such volunteered recommendations do harm. I do sympathise deeply with you.

And there’s no sign yet of the present dark dynasty weakening. Not that the modern kind of poet is read except by a coterie: but he somehow keeps the rest of you out. With much regret & affection.

Yours always

C. S. Lewis

TO ROGER LANCELYN GREEN (BOD): TS

REF.162/53.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

3rd March 1953.

Dear Roger,

Alas, I shall be at Malvern in Easter week. Did you know that slithy was a word long before Lewis Carroll?⁶³ I found it in Bunyan:⁶⁴ but see N.E.D.⁶⁵

Love to both of you.

Yours,

Jack

TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE (W):

Magdalen College

Oxford

4/iii/53

Dear Mrs. Shelburne

Thank you for your letter of Feb. 26 wh. arrived today. I think the poem succeeds and has both the lightness and massiveness you wanted. I’m not quite sure about his in 1. 7. It gives the effect of being put in only to fill the line. In so far as you pass from God simply to ‘our God’ I think you’re weakening the very effect you want at that moment. But I don’t know how to mend it: diagnosis is often easier than cure. ‘Majestic shapes more formidably fair’ is a most august line. (Old Solar grammar a bit weak. Eldila is the true plural: but you can Anglicise it as eldils?)⁶⁶

I am delighted that yr. lecturer approved my angels. I was v. definitely trying to smash the 19th century female angel. I believe no angel ever appears in Scripture without exciting terror: they always have to begin by saying ‘Fear not’.⁶⁷ On the other hand the Risen Lord excites terror only when mistaken for a ghost, i.e. when not recognised as risen. For we are in one most blessed sense nearer to Him than to them: partly of course because He has deigned to share our humanity, but partly, I take it, because every creature is nearer to its creator than it can be to superior creatures. By the way, none of my Eldila wd. be anything like so high up the scale as Cherubim & Seraphim. Those orders are engaged wholly in contemplation, not with the ruling the lower creatures. Even the Annunciation was done by–if I may so put it!-a ‘mere archangel’. Did your lecturer point out my heavy debt to Ezekiel?⁶⁸

Of course I knew you weren’t asking for a copy of a ‘First’: but I wanted to explain why I was not offering one–quite a different matter!

I also am having a kind of flu’ that seems never to get beyond early convalescence, tho’ nothing like so acute as yours. For that, and also else, deepest sympathy. Let us continue to pray for each other.

Yours most sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO GEOFFREY BLES (BOD): TS

REF.28/53.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

4th March 1953.

My dear Bles,

This is awkward. I am struggling along at present with sinusitis and the kind of ‘walking’ ‘flu by dint of getting up late and going to bed early and doing as little as I possibly can.

A day in London, even tho’ soothed by your Apician**⁶⁹hospitality, would knock me up. How long can you afford to wait without serious inconvenience? Or would it be safe to send them by registered post. Sorry to be a nuisance, but I’m the ghost of a man at present. And thanks, and love to both,

yours,

C. S. Lewis

TO W. K. SCUDAMORE (W): ⁷⁰

Magdalen College

Oxford

lO/iii/53

Dear Mr. Gardamole⁷¹

Thank you for your most interesting letter. Your explanation produced–I was going to say ‘complete conviction’, but as you rightly say, one can never be certain that any interpretation of an image in C.W. is complete. But I shall be v. surprised if the Druidical sacrifice is not the master key. I now think I was rather stupid not to have seen it before. My copy of Taliessin is out of the house and I am in College to the end of the week, so I can’t look up any of the passages, and therefore can’t help about the worshipped Duke. Could it be Aeneas? With many thanks.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO W. K. SCUDAMORE (W):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

13/iii/53

There are few names I wd. so regret having mangled!⁷² But when a man rides (or writes) with his beaver down-! C.S.L.

On 16 March Warnie wrote to Arthur Greeves: ⁷³

Magdalen College, Oxford. 16th March 1953.

My dear Arthur,

What between sinus and examinations, poor Jack is sunk fathoms deep this morning. However, we talked over your letter of the 11th last night, and he has asked me to ask you whether Saturday 29th August to Saturday 12th September would suit you for the jaunt: to which he is very eagerly looking forward. These dates are tentative, so if you don’t like them, please say so. But let us know as soon as possible, as it is part of a ‘master plan and we have all kinds of other things to make fit in with it.

Incidentally, if the dates suit, I hope to be with J. at Craw-fordsburn for a few days before you and he set out, and am looking forward to more than one meeting with you. I daresay amongst other things, we may be having a supper with our Jane,⁷⁴ and a drive home across the Holywood hills.

Love to Lily, Janie, and any others of my old friends you meet; and kindest regards to those good Samaritans, your neighbours and relations, who gave us drinks that Sunday morning.

Can you forsee any end to this winter?

Yours ever,

Warren

TO GEOFFREY BLES (BOD):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

17/iii/53

My dear Bles

I don’t feel as you do about the alteration of it and he, but I will be guided by your advice.⁷⁵ That is, I will try to normalise on he throughout (tho’ a few it’s are sure to slip through by infirmity). Don’t blame me if this means heavier corrections than usual!

I see I must write a treatise on the aesthetics of gender!⁷⁶

I’m a bit better, thanks. At least, the smell is.

Yours,

C. S. Lewis

TO DON GIOVANNI CALABRIA (V):

Magdalen College

Oxford

Mart, xvii MCMLIII

Dilectissime Pater

Gavisus sum, ut semper, de epistola tua. Res mira est et corrobora-tio fidei duas animas loco, natione, lingua, oboedentiâ, aetate diversas sic in dulcem familiaritatem adductas esse; adeo ordo spirituum ordinem materialem superat. Reddit faciliorem illam necessariam doctrinam, nos arctissime conjungi et cum peccatore Adamo et cum justo lesu quamquam (secundum carnem, tempus et locum) tam diversi ab ambobus viximus. Haec unitas totius humani generis extat: utinam extaret praestantior illa unio de quo scribis. Nullum diem sine oratione pro illo opiato fine praetereo. Quae dicis de praesenti statu hominum vera sunt: immo deterior est quam dicis. Non enim Christi modo legem sed etiam legem Naturae Paganis cognitam neglegunt. Nunc enim non erubescunt de adulterio, proditione, perjurio, furto, ceterisque flagitiis quae non dico Christianos doctores, sed ipsi pagani et barbari reprobav-erunt. Falluntur qui dicunt ‘Mundus iterum Paganus fit.’ Utinam fieret! Re vera in statum multo pejorem cadimus. Homo post-Christianus non similis homini prae-Christiano. Tantum distant ut vidua a virgine: nihil commune est nisi absentia sponsi: sed magna differentia intra absentiam sponsi venturi et sponsi amissi! Adhuc laboro in libro de oratione. De hac quaestione quam tibi subjeci, omnes theologos interrogo: adhuc frustra.

Oremus semper pro invicem, mi pater. Vale,

C. S. Lewis

*

Magdalen College

Oxford

17 March 1953

My dearest Father

I was delighted, as always, by your letter.

It is a wonderful thing and a strengthening of faith that two souls differing from each other in place, nationality, language, obedience and age should have been thus led into a delightful friendship; so far does the order of spiritual beings transcend the material order.

It makes easier that necessary doctrine that we are most closely joined together alike with the sinner Adam and with the lust One, Jesus, even though as to body, time and place we have lived so differently from both. This unity of the whole human race exists: would that there existed that nobler union of which you write. No day do I let pass without my praying for that longed-for consummation.

What you say about the present state of mankind is true: indeed, it is even worse than you say.

For they neglect not only the law of Christ but even the Law of Nature as known by the Pagans.⁷⁷ For now they do not blush at adultery, treachery, perjury, theft and the other crimes which I will not say Christian Doctors, but the Pagans and the Barbarians have themselves denounced.

They err who say ‘the world is turning pagan again’. Would that it were! The truth is that we are falling into a much worse state.

‘Post-Christian man’ is not the same as ‘pre-Christian man’. He is as far removed as virgin is from widow: there is nothing in common except want of a spouse: but there is a great difference between a spouse-to-come and a spouse lost.⁷⁸

I am still working on my book on Prayer.

About this question which I submitted to you, I am asking all theologians: so far in vain.

Let us ever pray for each other, my Father.

Farewell,

C. S. Lewis

TO GEOFFREY BLES (BOD):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

20/3/53

My dear Bles

Here is the next tale.⁷⁹

My view about He and It was that the semi-humanity cd. be kept before the imagination by an unobtrusive mixture of the two. Your re-action, however, shows that either such a mixture cd. not be unobtrusive or else that I, at any rate, could not make it so. Of course I cherish a secret hope that you are merely playing the ‘normalising scribe’, well known to textual critics: see the Preface to the Oxford Virgil (Hirtzel) on those who corrígere studentes, floríbus Musarum delicatis-simis saepius insultaverint.,⁸⁰ That is my hope: but my sober fear is that you are right.

Your friend thinks I am ‘smelling things’ in the same sense in which the D.T.⁸¹ patient ‘sees things’. But it’s not quite as bad as that. My smell (ambiguous phrase) is subjective only in the sense that it does not come from the outer world. There is a real physical stimulus within the body–a sinus discharging its corrupt humours just under the olfactory nerves. So don’t be alarmed lest in my next letter I tell you that a marsh-wiggle called on me or something of that sort. ‘My pulse with yours doth temperately keep time.’⁸²

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO NELL BERNERS-PRICE (W):

Magdalen College

Oxford

20/3/53

Dear Nell

I am indeed sorry to hear about your Mother. In a way you were most fortunate to have had her so long (mine died when I was a little boy), yet in another way it probably makes it worse, for you have lived into the period when the relationship is really reversed and you were mothering her: and of course, the more we have had to do for people the more we miss them–loving goes deeper than being loved. But it must be nice for her. Getting out of an old body into the new life–like stripping off tiresome old clothes and getting into a bath–must be a most wonderful experience.

I return Mrs. Hooker’s letter. I think ‘both sincere and insincere’ is about right. She certainly sounds more sensible in the letter than she did when I saw her.

Ugh! Holloway does give one the creeps, doesn’t it? But I see it doesn’t give them to you. It does me. If ever I go to jail (which may happen to anyone now-a-days) I do hope my cell will be white-washed and not that ghastly green!

I’ve been having a rather thin time with Sinusitis for about 4 weeks. In case you don’t know this complaint, it feels like toothache but since it is not a tooth you can’t have it out.

It’s nice to think of you and Alan working away in that delightful garden. I expect you are further on down there than we are in the midlands. Our daffodils are out and the catkins are all pussy and strokable, but the weather remains wretchedly cold.

I trust the nasty-taste of the Hooker crisis has now all gone away. The far more serious sorrow about your Mother will presumably have put paid to that. Remember me to Alan & God bless you all.

Yours ever

lack Lewis

By the way, Mrs. H’s letter is curiously uneducated. All that about her learning must have been imaginary too. Poor creature–there’s not much of her when one takes away the fantasies.

TO ARTHUR GREEVES (BOD):

Magdalen College

Oxford

21/3/53

My dear Arthur

I hope you weren’t shocked at getting an answer from W. instead of me the other day. On Monday I was both rather ill and also engaged in viva-voce examinations from 9.15 a.m. to 5.30 p.m., so I couldn’t well write, and I thought you wd. like to have all those dates at the earliest moment.

Yours

Jack

TO MICHAEL (W): ⁸³

Magdalen College

Oxford

21/3/53

Dear Michael

I see I have thanked your Father for a kind present which really came from you. Let me now say Thank you, very much indeed. I think it was wonderful of you. At least I know that when I was a boy, though I liked lots of authors, I never sent them anything. The reason there is so much boiled food here is, of course, that we have so little cooking-fat for roasting or frying.

The new book is The Silver CHAIR, not CHAIN. Don’t look forward to it too much or you are sure to be disappointed. With 100,000 thanks and lots of love.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO VERA GEBBERT (W):

Magdalen College

Oxford

23/iii/53

Dear Mrs. Gebbert

Your first story (about mistaking it for sea-sickness) is one of the funniest I ever heard.⁸⁴ In our country there are usually alterations of shape wh. wd. throw grave doubts on the sea-sick hypothesis!…but no doubt you manage things better in America. Any way, congratulations and encouragements. As to wishing it had not happened, one can’t help momentary wishes: guilt begins only when one embraces them. You can’t help their knocking at the door, but one mustn’t ask them in to lunch. And no doubt you have many feelings on the other side. I am sure you felt as I did when I heard my first bullet, ‘This is War: this is what Homer wrote about.’⁸⁵ For, all said and done, a woman who has never had a baby and a man who has never been either in a battle or a storm at sea, are, in a sense, rather outside-haven’t really ‘seen life’-haven’t served. We will indeed have you in our prayers.

Now as to your other story, about Isaiah 66?⁸⁶ It doesn’t really matter whether the Bible was open at that page thru’ a miracle or through some (unobserved) natural cause. We think it matters because we tend to call the second alternative ‘chance.’ But when you come to think of [it] there can be no such thing as chance from God’s point of view. Since He is omniscient His acts have no consequences which He has not foreseen and taken into account and intended. Suppose it was the draught from the window that blew your Bible open at Isaiah 66. Well, that current of air was linked up with the whole history of weather from the beginning of the world and you may be quite sure that the result it had for you at that moment (like all its other results) was intended and allowed for in the act of creation. ‘Not one sparrow,’⁸⁷ you know the rest. So of course the message was addressed to you. To suggest that your eye fell on it without this intention, is to suggest that you could take Him by surprise. Fiddle-de-dee! This is not Predestination: your will is perfectly free: but all physical events are adapted to fit in as God sees best with the free actions He knows we are going to do. There’s something about this in Screwtape.⁸⁸

Meanwhile, courage! Your moments of nervousness are not your real self, only medical phenomena. All blessings.

Yours ever,

C. S. Lewis

TO HSIN’CHANG CHANG (BOD):

Magdalen College

Oxford

March 24th 53

Dear Mr. Chang

The humble one, having burned the appropriate charms, has emerged from the Tenacious Mud Formation (Delay) and read the chapters, and the introduction, with very great interest.⁸⁹ It would be no mere ceremonial modesty to describe my opinion on it as ‘foolish’. I have not enough cultural background to know whether the effects produced on me are at all like those intended by the author. Thus I do not know which parts are comic and which are not. The giant who smashed a hole in the mountain with his head, I can take as (rather grotesquely) serious: the angry man whose beard knocked the table over is to me funny. What would be their effect on the Chinese reader? Some images are quite baffling to a foreigner. I cannot imagine a ‘fairy nun’ whether Taoist or otherwise! But this may be due to the fact that neither fairy nor nun is a really exact translation: though no doubt (for your English is not only correct but sensitive and elegant) both are the best a European language affords. Perhaps ‘goddess priestess’ (which I can just imagine) would be an alternative. But I found it all interesting, except the long scene about the slaves’ names in the Copper Formation: this inevitably loses its force in any language except the original. What moved and affected me most–a real, poetic experience–was the stripping-away of the man’s whole life in riches. I am wondering if a larger selection (but with frequent omissions) from the whole romance wd. possibly be published in England.

My brother, who is interested in everything Chinese because he spent some v. happy years in Shanghai, wd. like to read the MS. May I keep it for this purpose a week or two longer?

There are only two places where I think your English cd. be criticised. On p. 10 you use immune as a verb. It should be ‘to make immune’: or perhaps even ‘to protect’ would do. On p. 22 ‘them five’ should be either ‘those five’ or ‘these five’-unless you intend to represent the speaker as uneducated.

With very many thanks. Be sure to come and see me if you are in Oxford again.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO ARTHUR GREEVES (BOD): TS

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

25th March 1953.

My dear Arthur

On looking into the matter further, it would suit me better to prolong our jaunt for another 48 hours, i.e. for me to cross on Monday 14th September instead of Saturday 12th. The Sunday train service on the English side is practically useless–one train, and no restaurant car. Will 14th suit you?

Yours,

Jack

TO WILLIAM L. KINTER(BOD):

Magdalen College

Oxford

28/3/53

Dear Mr Kinter

I think Ransom is a figura Christi⁹⁰ only in the same sense (‘only’-my hat!) in wh. every Christian is or should be. But the bus-driver in the Divorce is certainly, and consciously, modelled on the angel at the gates of Dis,⁹¹ just as the meeting of the ‘Tragedian’ with his wife is consciously modelled on that of Dante & Beatrice at the end of the Purgatorio:⁹² i.e. it is the same predicament, only going wrong. I intended readers to spot these resemblances: so you may go to the top of the class!

‘By the Furioso⁹³ out of the Commedia’ is not far wrong. My real model was David Lyndsay’s Voyage to Arcturus wh. first suggested to me that the form of ‘science fiction’ cd. be filled by spiritual experiences.⁹⁴ And as the Furioso was in some ways the science-fiction of its age, your analogy works. But mind you, there is already a science-fiction element in the Commedia: e.g. Inferno xxxiv 85-114.

It’s fun laying out all my books as a cathedral. Personally I’d make Miracles and the other ‘treatises’ the cathedral school: my children’s stories are the real side-chapels, each with its own little altar.

No, I never read Perceforest.⁹⁵ The only O.R⁹⁶ prose romance I’ve read is Balain.⁹⁷ How lovely, how like water–or Grace–that limpid O.E prose is. Damn the Renaissance.

I return cordially your wishes for a blessed Easter.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO JOHN GILFEDDER(W): ⁹⁸

Magdalen College

Oxford

30/iii/53

Dear Gilfedder

(I wish you’d call me Lewis not Sir) Thanks both for card of Florence and for your letter of the 15th.

I think a glossarial Index (I call it that because your specimens are partly index as well as glossary) wd. be a most useful addition to C.W.’s cycle.⁹⁹ But the chances of the O.U.P. ever re-printing Taliessin, let alone adding any matter to the volume, are infinitesimal. They wd. only do that if it showed signs of becoming a popular success: which of course it doesn’t.

I am glad you are settled down and hope you are enjoying your work. Please remember me to your wife; all good wishes to both for a happy Easter.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE (W):

Magdalen College

Oxford

31/3/53

Dear Mrs. Shelburne

I’ve no time for a proper letter today but this is just a scrape of the pen to thank you for yours of the 27th and to wish you a v. blessed Easter. I expect Jeannie will grow up the most devoted grand-daughter ever. Your silly son-in-law doesn’t realise the charm of forbidden fruit: a grandmother one is forbidden to see rises almost into the status of a fairy godmother!

Apropos of horrid little fat baby ‘cherubs’, did I mention that Heb. Kherub is from the same root as Gryphon? That shows what they’re really like!

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO SISTER PENELOPE CSMV(BOD):

Magdalen

1/4/53

Dear Sister Penelope

I am simply delighted with The Coming of the Lord;¹⁰⁰ delighted, excited, and most grateful. I think it is the best book you have yet done, and the best theological book by anyone I have read for a long time. (You are, among other things, the only person I ever meet who gives me real light on the Old Testament). Chap VIII now convinces me completely.

I was talking nonsense when we last discussed this matter: I hadn’t really grasped the point that Man is the true Temple. That is a splendid bit on p. 76¹⁰¹ about the true sense of ‘it is finished’-the sword ‘finished’ when its life as a sword can begin)¹⁰² How did you think of it? Why did all the rest of us non And the explanation on p. 26 of why the Bride is never mentioned, is brilliant.¹⁰³ Indeed, I’ll say it is clever-why should we acquiesce in that word’s sliding into a contemptuous meaning. And many, many thanks for St. Bernard’s conception of the Palm Sunday procession.¹⁰⁴ And the daring use of larval at the bottom of p. 45 is a complete success: I wanted to clap my hands when I came to it.¹⁰⁵

Now for a few tiny flaws, or what I think to be such.

P. 3. ‘Expectation, therefore, is a specifically human exercise.’¹⁰⁶ Yes, in the peculiar sense you give it of ex-spectation. But you haven’t explained that yet, have you? Won’t the reader take it in the current sense of ¹⁰⁷ and say that ‘expectation’, far from being specifically human, is seen at its v. maximum in a dog waiting to be taken for a walk or to have a ball thrown for it?

P. 5. at top. Basis or foundation wd. for many reasons be a better word than fundament.¹⁰⁸

P 5 later. Oh, oh why should an attitude almost impossible to a Pagan be called ‘neo-Paganism’?¹⁰⁹ You know that no Pagan, bless him, wd. ever have dreamed of thinking the sky belonged to Man. They had their faults, but that is just the sort of sin they never committed. They had too much αίδώσ,¹¹⁰ and δειδαιμονα,¹¹¹ and all that. You are falling into the common error of equating the post-Christian with the pre-Christian. They are as different as an unmarried girl is from a woman who has deserted her husband.

P. 44. Here I’m not sure, but, as the barristers say, I ‘put it to you.’ Can we take χóσμον¹¹² to mean Universe (as dist. from Earth) in view of other Johannine uses of it? But you are so often right that I dare say you will convince me on this point too.

Anyway, it is a lovely little book. I am very much in your debt. All blessings.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO CORBIN SCOTT CARNELL (W):¹¹³

Magdalen College

Oxford

5/4/53

Dear Mr. Carnell

I am myself a little uneasy about the question you raise:¹¹⁴ there seems to be almost equal objection to the position taken up in my footnote and to the alternative of attributing the same kind and degree of historicity to all the books of the Bible. You see, the question about Jonah and the great fish does not turn simply on intrinsic probability. The point is that the whole Book of Jonah has to me the air of being a moral romance, a quite different kind of thing from, say, the account of K. David or the N.T. narratives, not pegged, like them, into any historical situation.

In what sense does the Bible ‘present’ this story ‘as historical’? Of course it doesn’t say ‘This is fiction’: but then neither does Our Lord say that His Unjust Judge, Good Samaritan, or Prodigal Son are fiction. (I wd. put Esther in the same category as Jonah for the same reason). How does a denial, or doubt, of their historicity lead logically to a similar denial of N.T. miracles?

Supposing (as I think is the case) that sound critical reading reveals different kinds of narrative in the Bible, surely it wd. be illogical to conclude that these different kinds shd. all be read in the same way? This is not a ‘rationalistic approach’ to miracles. Where I doubt the historicity of an O.T narrative I never do so on the ground that the miraculous as such is incredible. Nor does it deny ‘a unique sort of inspiration’: allegory, parable, romance, and lyric might be inspired as well as chronicle. I wish I could direct you to a good book on the subject, but I don’t know one. With all good wishes.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO MARY VAN DEUSEN (W):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

6/4/53

Dear Mrs. Van Deusen

I think our official view of confession can be seen in the form for the Visitation of the Sick where it says ‘Then shall the sick person be moved (i.e. advised, prompted) to make a…Confession…if he feel his conscience troubled with any weighty matter.’ That is, where Rome makes Confession compulsory for all, we make it permissible for any: not ‘generally necessary’ but profitable. We do not doubt that there can be forgiveness without it. But, as your own experience shows, many people do not feel forgiven, i.e. do not effectively ‘believe in the forgiveness of sins’, without it. The quite enormous advantage of coming really to believe in forgiveness is well worth the horrors (I agree, they are horrors) of a first confession.¹¹⁵

Also, there is the gain in self-knowledge: most of [us] have never really faced the facts about ourselves until we uttered them aloud in plain words, calling a spade a spade. I certainly feel I have profited enormously by the practice. At the same time I think we are quite right not to make it generally obligatory, which wd. force it on some who are not ready for it and might do harm.

As for conduct of services, surely a wide latitude is reasonable. Has not each kind–the v. ‘low’ & the v. ‘high’-its own value?

I don’t think I owe Genia a letter, and I think advice is best kept till it is asked for. Of course she, and you, are always in my prayers. I think she is of the impulsive type, but one must beware of meddling.

Yours, with all blessings,

C. S. Lewis

TO MARY VAN DEUSEN (W):

Magdalen College

Oxford

7/4/53

Dear Mrs. Van Deusen

I don’t think gratitude is a relevant motive for joining an Order. Gratitude might create a state of mind in which one became aware of a vocation: but the vocation would be the proper reason for joining. They themselves wd. surely not wish you to join without it? You can show your gratitude in lots of other ways.

Is there in this Order, even for lay members such as you wd. be, not something like a noviciate or experimental period? If so, that wd. be the thing, wouldn’t it? If not, I think I can only repeat my previous suggestion of undergoing a sort of unofficial noviciate by living according to the Rule for 6 months or so and seeing how it works. Most of it is the things you probably do anyway and are things we ought to do. (The only one I’m doubtful about is the ‘special intention’ clause in No. 3. I’m not quite sure what the theological implications are.) The question is whether the fact of being compelled to it by a vow wd. act as a useful support or be a snare and a source of scruples: I don’t think I can tell you the answer to that. Is the vow irrevocable or can you contract out again?

About putting one’s Christian point of view to doctors and other unpromising subjects I’m in great doubt myself. All I’m clear about is that one sins if one’s real reason for silence is simply the fear of looking a fool. I suppose one is right if one’s reason is the probability that the other party will be repelled still further & only confirmed in his belief that Christians are troublesome & embarrassing people to be avoided whenever possible. But I find it a dreadfully worrying problem. (I am quite sure that an importunate bit of evangelisation from a comparative stranger would not have done me any good when I was an unbeliever.)

I hope it’s all true about the President.¹¹⁶ But let us hope he will not pursue the line of ‘Godliness for the sake of national strength’. We can’t use God as a means to any end.

About Democracy and all that. Surely we stand by equality before the Law? If no law disqualifies a man from office, and if he has broken no law, are we entitled to exclude him because we dislike his views? But I don’t really know the facts of your situation well enough to apply this.

Thanks for the charming photos of Genia. Yes, I do hope & pray she’ll be in smooth water now. Blessings on you all.

Yours ever

C. S. Lewis

TO GEOFFREY BLES (BOD):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

13/4/53

My dear Bles

Thanks for your letter of the 8th.

I’m glad you like the new story. The title needs a little thinking of as this tale is sung or recited after dinner in Chap III of the Silver Chair and we must harmonise. What are your reactions to any of the following? The Horse and the Boy (wh. might allure the ‘pony-book’ public)-The Desert Road to Narnia–Cor of Archenland–The Horse stole the Boy–Over the Border–The Horse Bree. Suggestions will be welcomed.

Please dedicate The Silver Chair to Nicholas Hardie. Thanks for reminding me.

As to realism in the new one, Miss Baynes may base her ideas of Calormene culture either on the picture of the Arabian Nights world, or on her picture of Babylon and Persepolis (all the Herodotus and Old Testament orient) or any mixture of the two. But their swords must be curved because it says so in the text. And we want her to try v. hard to make Bree look like a war-horse–big fetlocks etc.

I’ve had a nice time walking in the Malvern area & feel much better. I hope you are both in good form.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE (W):

Magdalen College

Oxford

17/4/53

Dear Mrs. Shelburne

I’m not quite so shocked as you by the story of Charles and Mary. If even adult and educated Christians in trying to think of the Blessed Trinity have to guard constantly against falling into the heresy of Tri-theism, what can we expect of children. And ‘another of whom he was not quite sure’ is perhaps no bad beginning for a knowledge about the Holy Ghost.

About my fairy-tales, there are three published by Macmillan, New York (The Lion, the Witch & the Wardrobe, Prince Caspian, and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader). Local bookshops are often very unhelpful. If your friend wants these books she shd., of course, write to the publisher at New York.

I expect there is a photo of me somewhere, but my brother, who knows where things are, is away and I couldn’t find it today. Ask me again at a more favourable hour!-if you still have the fancy for this v. undecorative object.

I’d sooner pray for God’s mercy than for His justice on my friends, my enemies, and myself. With all good wishes.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO MARGARET DENEKE (BOD):

Magdalen College

Oxford

18/4/53

Dear Miss Deneke

I do not see what I could put in a preface except a dilution of what I have already sent you: and that wd. be no good.¹¹⁷

The next step is to try the old device of publishing by subscription. We’ll all subscribe of course and it will go hard but we’ll raise over £48. A List of subscribers gives a fine 18th. century air to a book, too. What wd. Mr. Johnson (whose advice is much more valuable than mine) say to this.

My brother would join me in good wishes if he were not away.

Yours very sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO GEOFFREY BLES (BOD):

Magdalen College

Oxford

22/4/53

My dear Bles

A priori I shd. have thought that a series which doesn’t sell too well once a year wd. sell worse if the tempo was speeded up: but I presume you think otherwise and of course your opinion on such a point is much more informed than mine. Of course, then, do exactly as you think fit. No author, on general grounds, ever thinks his book appears too soon!

Was it and his Boy or and its Boy?. I’m completely neutral on the point: print which you prefer.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

Your correspondence has contained no Latin verse for a long time!

TO SHELDON VANAUKEN (BOD):

Magdalen College

Oxford

22/4/53

Dear Mr. Van Auken

It was very nice to hear from you. I hope my interest in you both is something less blasphemous than that of a Creator in a creature (it wd. anyway be begetting not creating, see Philemon 10).¹¹⁸ My feeling about people in whose conversion I have been allowed to play a part is always mixed with awe and even fear: such as a boy might feel on first being allowed to fire a rifle. The disproportion between his puny finger on the trigger and the thunder & lightning wh. follow is alarming. And the seriousness with which the other party takes my words always raises the doubt whether I have taken them seriously enough myself. By writing the things I write, you see, one especially qualifies for being hereafter ‘condemned out of one’s mouth’.¹¹⁹ Think of me as a fellow-patient in the same hospital who, having been admitted a little earlier, cd. give some advice.

The semi-Christians (in dog-collars) that you speak of are a great trial. Our College chaplain is rather of that kind. I’m glad you have something better in your own church.

I feel an amused recognition when you describe those moments at wh. one feels ‘How cd. I–I, of all people–ever have come to believe this cock & bull story’ I think they will do us no harm. Aren’t they just the reverse side of one’s just recognition that the truth is amazing? Our fathers were more familiar with the opposite danger of taking it all for granted: which is probably just as bad.

God bless you both: you are always in my prayers. I hope we may meet again one day.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO NATHAN COMFORT STARR (W): TS

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

25th April 1953.

Dear Starr,

By all means give Masato Hori an introduction,¹²⁰ but don’t give him the illusion that I’m a mystic or an authority on mysticism. Dozens of things in your letter are exciting, but this is the first day of term. In haste. We both send greetings.

Yours,

C. S. Lewis

TO I. O. EVANS (W):

Magdalen College

Oxford

27/4/53

Dear Evans

I am really very sorry. The Devil you Say¹²¹ got put on a pile of ‘books received’-most of them (I don’t include yours) a major plague of my life–and I forgot all about it. I have now read a few pages: there was nothing to tempt one to go on. It certainly seems to be a gross plagiarism: I am writing to New York Macmillan to draw their attention to it. Thanks v. much for sending it. With all good wishes, and thanks also to your American friend.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE (W): TS

54/53.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

9th May 1953.

Dear Mrs. Shelburne,

There’s very little time today, so I must be short. I am afraid it is certainly true in England that Christians are in the minority. But remember, the change from, say, thirty years ago, consists largely in the fact that nominal Christianity has died out, so that only those who really believe now profess. The old conventional church-going of semi-believers or almost total unbelievers is a thing of the past. Whether the real thing is rarer than it was would be hard to say. Fewer children are brought up to it: but adult conversions are very frequent.

I’m so glad to hear you have had a more satisfactory talk with your daughter.

I enclose a copy of the only photo which I have at the moment; it’s only a passport one I’m afraid.

Yours most sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO GEOFFREY BLES (BOD): TS

28/53.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

9th May 1953.

My dear Bles,

Cunning man, you don’t say how long the MS is! If it can be read in a week-end and put up in a large envelope (I’m no good at parcels), I’ll read it. But I have honestly neither health nor leisure at present for more than very slight extra jobs.

All sympathy to Madame. I return Stewart’s letter.

Yours,

C. S. Lewis

TO RUTH PITTER(BOD):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

May 12th 1953

Dear Miss Pitter

Or (to speak more accurately)

Bright Angel!

I’m in a sea of glory! Of course I haven’t had time to read it properly, and there’ll be another, more sober, letter presently. This is just a line to be going on with, and to assure you at once that the new volume is an absolute Corker.¹²² I had feared that you might be one of those who, like poor Wordsworth, leave their talent behind at conversion:¹²³ and now–oh glory–you came up shining out of the font far better than you were before. ‘Man’s despair is like the Arabian sun’¹²⁴-I seriously doubt if there’s any religious lyric between that one and Herbert on the same level. And then my eye strays to the opposite page and gets the ‘dying-dolphin green’.¹²⁵ And ‘What we merit–A silence like a sword’.¹²⁶

I wonder have you yourself any notion how good some of these are?

But, as you see, I’m drunk on them at this present. Glory be! Blessings on you! As sweet as sin and as innocent as milk. Thanks forever.

Yours in great excitement

C. S. Lewis

TO GEOFFREY BLES (BOD): TS

Magdalen College

Oxford

12th May 1953.

My dear Bles,

MS duly received: and end leaf returned with thanks. I had seen it, but forgot that end leaves naturally are’nt included in the paper-back proof, and thence foolishly wondered if it had somehow miscarried. Authors with book, like expectant mothers, have their wayward fancies.

Yours,

C. S. Lewis

TO RUTH PITTER(BOD):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

May 15th 1953

Dear Miss Pitter

The brightness does not fade: appealing from Lewis drunk to Lewis sober, I still find this an exquisite collection. When I start picking out my favourites, I find I am picking out nearly all. Tree at Dawn is full of delight for eye and ear. Great Winter is extremely new and delightful in rhythm: and ‘storm of suns’¹²⁷ is wonderful. The Other has, I think, a few flaws (the second stanza on p. 15 seems to use words that precious poets have sucked all the juice out of) but also v. great virtues. The noises all through Herding Lambs-not only at ‘rainlike rustle of feet’,¹²⁸ tho’ that is the most striking single aural image–are wonderfully conveyed. Captive Bird is pure gold all through: so lovely fair my ‘sense aches with it’: and I still think as I did about World is Hollow (A v. tough undergraduate to whom I showed it thinks the same as I). Cedar is, I expect, extremely good in imagery, but I’d need a real cedar before me by which to judge. That’s the trouble about very visual writing. On the other hand the colours in Hill & Valley came through really well. Penitence is taut & accurate as a Yeats poem. Narrow but Deep & Aged Man to Y.M.¹²⁹ show you in a v. different vein: not the one I like best, but v. good. May is a fine meaty, yet not heavy, meditation. The Five Dreams do, I don’t know how, build up to a whole greater than the parts. The only one in the book I don’t much like is Father Questioned. I think Rostrevor Hamilton (see The Tell-Tale Article) wd. justly have something to say about the stanza at the top of p. 24.¹³⁰

I do congratulate you again and again. I hope you are as happy about the poems as you ought to be.

Yours most sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO JOHN H. MCCALLUM (P):¹³¹ TS

218/53.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

18th May 1953.

Dear Mr. McCallum,

I am greatly shocked at your news. My correspondence with Borst was so pleasant and even so intimate that I feel his death as, in some sort, a personal loss. I am sure it will be deeply felt by all of you in many ways. I will try not to give Miss Boxill as much trouble as I gave her predecessor.

Yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO ELSIE SNICKERS (P):

Magdalen College,

Oxford

May 18th 1953

Dear Mrs Snickers

No. I don’t think sin is completely accounted for by faulty reasoning nor that it can be completely cured by re-education. That view has, indeed, been put forward: by Socrates and, in the early 19th Century, by Godwin. But I think it overlooked the (to me) obviously central fact that our will is not necessarily determined by our reason. If it were, then, as you say, what are called ‘sins’ wd. not be sins at all but only mistakes, and would require not repentances but merely correction.

But surely daily experience shows that it is just not so. A man’s reason sees perfectly clearly that the resulting discomfort and inconvenience will far outweigh the pleasure of the ten minutes in bed. Yet he stays in bed: not at all because his reason is deceived but because desire is stronger than reason. A woman knows that the sharp ‘last word’ in an argument will produce a serious quarrel which was the very thing she had intended to avoid when that argument began and which may permanently destroy her happiness. Yet she says it: not at all because her reason is deceived but because the desire to score a point is at the moment stronger than her reason. People–you and I among them-constantly choose between two courses of action the one which we know to be the worse: because, at the moment, we prefer the gratification of our anger, lust, sloth, greed, vanity, curiosity or cowardice, not only to the known will of God but even to what we know will make for our own real comfort and security. If you don’t recognise this, then I must solemnly assure you that either [you] are an angel, or else are still living in ‘a fool’s paradise’: a world of illusion.

Of course it is true that many people are so mis-educated or so psychopathic that their freedom of action is v. much curtailed & their responsibility therefore v. small. We cannot remember that too much when we are tempted to judge harshly the acts of other people whose difficulties we don’t know. But we know that some of our own acts have sprung from evil will (proud, resentful, cowardly, envious, lascivious or spiteful will) although we knew better, and that what we need is not-or not only-re-education but repentance, God’s forgiveness, and His Grace to help us to do better next time. Until one has faced this fact one is a child.

And it is not the function of psychotherapy to make us face this. Its work is the non-moral aspects of conduct. You must not go to the psychologists for spiritual guidance. (One goes to the dentist to cure one’s toothache, not to teach one in what spirit to bear it if it cannot be cured: for that you must go to God and God’s spokesmen).

For this reason I am rather sorry that you have taken Psychology as a subject for your academic course. A continued interest in it on the part of those who have had psychotherapeutic treatment is usually, I think, not a good thing. At least, not until a long interval has elapsed and their personal interest in it, the interest connected with their own case, has quite died away. At least that is how it seems to me. All blessings.

Yours most sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO NELL BERNERS-PRICE (W): TS

REF.67/53.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

20th May 1953.

Dear Nell,

By all means rope me in as a reference to ‘the integrity of the family’: a subject on which I feel I can speak with conviction. I return the form. Court Stairs must be looking lovely now. Love to Alan and yourself. I’d write more, but there is the devil of a mail this morning.

Yours ever,

C. S. Lewis

TO RHONA BODLE (BOD):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

May 20th 1953

Dear Miss Bodle

Your letter written on Good Friday reached me today. I was a little shocked at first to hear of a child who found The Pilgrims Progress boring:¹³² but then I remembered that the dialogue, of which there is a good deal, does interrupt the story with matter no child cd. be expected to enjoy.

The restraints imposed on you by ‘secular education’ are, no doubt, very galling.¹³³ But I wonder whether secular education will do us all the harm the secularists hope. Secular teachers will. But Christian teachers in secular schools may, I sometimes think, do more good precisely because they are not allowed to give religious instruction in class. At least I think that, as a child, I shd. have been very allured and impressed by the discovery–which must be made when questions are asked–that the teacher believed firmly in a whole mass of things he wasn’t allowed to teach! Let them give us the charm of mystery if they please.

It was v. nice to hear from you again. All blessings on you and your work.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO ROGER LANCELYN GREEN (BOD):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

May 21st 1953

Dear Roger

A good many disturbances made me postpone reading the new story¹³⁴ and then (for much longer) writing about it. I enjoyed it thoroughly. It is best after they have left the Castle–the night in the cave is the high light of the whole story–but all enjoyable. My brother read it with such gusto that he was moved to go back & read The Luck of the Lynns and then the Lewis Carroll, all with great satisfaction.

It is a very odd fact that I enjoy a story no more, and perhaps even a little less, for having been at the scene of operations. It certainly isn’t your fault, for I have had the same experience with other authors: but certainly the memory of the real Beaumaris did not help me. I thought the way in which the malapropisms were slightly toned down in this book–appropriately, as the malapropist gets older–was v. skilful.

I’m not in the best of health at present but perhaps better than I was. The last Narnian story is complete & shall go to you when typed: my present leisure, such as it is, goes mainly on proofs and bibliography for the OHEL volume.

Love to all of you and many thanks for the book.

Yours

Jack

TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE (W):

Magdalen College

Oxford

May 30th 1953

Dear Mrs. Shelburne

Thank you for your letter of the 26th. I am particularly glad to hear that you had a ‘fairly pleasant’ talk with your daughter

Yes, we are always told that the present wide-spread apostasy must be the fault of the clergy, not of the laity. If I were a parson I shd. always try to dwell on the faults of the clergy: being a layman, I think it more wholesome to concentrate on those of the laity. I am rather sick of the modern assumption that, for all events, ‘WE’, the people, are never responsible: it is always our rulers, or ancestors, or parents, or education, or anybody but precious ‘US’, WE are apparently perfect & blameless. Don’t you believe it. Nor do I think the Ch. of England holds out many attractions to the worldly. There is more real poverty, even actual want, in English vicarages than there is in the homes of casual labourers.

I look forward to Martin’s¹³⁵ ‘appreciations’. Yes, we have the word ‘dither’-and the thing too. And our offices are in a dither too. This is so common that I suspect there must be something in the very structure of a modern office which creates Dither. Otherwise why does our ‘College Office’ find full time work for a crowd of people in doing what the President of the College, 100 years ago, did in his spare time without a secretary and without a typewriter? (The more noise, heat, & smell a machine produces the more power is being wasted!)

I’d rather like to see one of your hail storms: our climate is in comparison, v. tame. Have you read S. V. Benét’s Western Stan¹³⁶ Excellent, I think.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

The Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II took place in Westminster Abbey on 2 June 1953.

TO HELEN D. CALKINS (W):¹³⁷

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

June 3rd 1953

Dear Miss Calkins

Your yesterday’s cable was a gracious and cheering surprise. I can only reply, God bless Miss Calkin: God bless California! The weather was not what one wd. have wished for a Coronation, but it was lovely getting the news about Everest on the same day.¹³⁸ With heartiest good wishes.

Yours most sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO HILA NEWMAN (W): ¹³⁹

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

June 3rd 1953

Dear Hida (is that right) Newman

Thank you so much for your lovely letter and pictures. I realised at once that the coloured one was not a particular scene but a sort of line-up like what you would have at the very end if it was a play instead of stories. The Dawn Treader is not to be the last: There are to be 4 more, 7 in all. Didn’t you notice that Asian said nothing about Eustace not going back? I thought the best of your pictures was the one of Mr. Tumnus at the bottom of the letter.

As to Asian’s other name, well I want you to guess. Has there never been anyone in this world who (1.) Arrived at the same time as Father Christmas. (2.) Said he was the son of the Great Emperor. (3.) Gave himself up for someone else’s fault to be jeered at and killed by wicked people. (4.) Came to life again. (5.) Is sometimes spoken of as a Lamb (see the end of the Dawn Treader). Don’t you really know His name in this world. Think it over and let me know your answer!

Reepicheep in your coloured picture has just the right perky, cheeky expression. I love real mice. There are lots in my rooms in College but I have never set a trap. When I sit up late working they poke their heads out from behind the curtains just as if they were saying, ‘Hi! Time for you to go to bed. We want to come out and play’

All good wishes,

Yours ever

C. S. Lewis

TO MARY VAN DEUSEN (W):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

June 8th 1953

Dear Mrs Van Deusen

Yes, I think your position is the right one. If one is asked for advice, then, and then only, one has to have an opinion about the exact rule of life which wd. suit some other Christian. Otherwise, I think the rule is to mind one’s own business.

St. Paul goes further than this: it may even be proper at times to adopt practices which you yourself think unnecessary, and which are unnecessary to you, if your difference on such points is a stumbling-block to the Christians you find yourself among. Hence, you see, other Christians’ practices concern us, when at all, as a ground for concessions on our part, not for interference or complacent assertion that our way is best. This is in Romans chap XIV:¹⁴⁰ read the chapter and meditate on it. I am very glad you have seen the real point.

My ‘troubles’, thanks, are in abeyance, except that I am suffering from Sinusitis: but that too is better than it was.

Don’t doubt that you and Genia are in my daily prayers. Hasn’t what you are kind enough to say about our Coronation a wider relevance?—that nothing stirs us if it has the sole purpose of stirring us: i.e. the stirring must be a by-product.

God bless you.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO ROGER LANCELYN GREEN (BOD): TS

REF.162.53.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

11th June 1953.

My dear Roger,

You have been having a time, have’nt you? I’m glad you are now in calmer waters. I shall be away on July 2nd, but am good for July 1st. Will you dine then? You can sleep too,* if that helps.

Yours,

Jack

TO MILDRED BOXILL (P): ¹⁴¹

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

June 14th 1953

Dear Miss Boxill

Thank you for yours of the 11th. I am sending off to you to day by registered post the corrected galleys, but retaining the carbon of the footnotes (for which many thanks) for later use. In the meantime I send you some corrections of the footnotes on the chance that they might reach you in time to be of use. If they do not I should [be] glad to have this list back again. Like an ass I have in it italicised all that is meant to be printed, which of course I ought not to have done: perhaps someone in the office can re-type it or you can explain to the printer.

In the general list of Contents (for which, again, thanks) I think the words ‘Books I-VI’ after Faerie Queene shd. be deleted. They are not, as you see from the Mutability section, quite accurate, and we are selecting from the whole poem: i.e. the Books of P.L.¹⁴² in Bush’s Milton section are not a parallel.¹⁴³

I put in references to Book and Canto at the head of each selection before the proofs of the notes arrived and showed me that it had been done thus. I suppose you will delete whichever is more easily deleted on technical grounds.

I have added a Headnote to the Epithalamion.

I have put in such cross-references as occurred to me in the margin of the galleys: not knowing where or in what form they will appear in the book. Some (not most) of their re-duplicate parallels appear already in the notes.

Accents, being given in the text, need not be repeated in the note: if this occurs anywhere, it shd. be deleted. I’m glad you agreed about having them all restored. Lor bless you, metre doesn’t guide the modern student, on either side of the Atlantic. He wholly ignores it. It is not a question of metre guiding him to the pronunciation: we are giving him pronunciation to guide him (‘tis a faint hope) to metre. Of course it’s a losing battle: but let’s fight for the ship till she goes down under us.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO HARRY BLAMIRES (BOD): TS

REF.307/53.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

15th June 1953.

Dear Blamires,

Heartiest congratulations.¹⁴⁴ This is a most important turning-point: on the other line you would have been in danger of writing what was substantially the same book over and over again. Lloyd is a good man, and we have every reason to believe he is right.¹⁴⁵

How right you are to put the house first in your budget: it is ‘the bread and tea of life’ that really matter.

All good wishes.

Yours,

C. S. Lewis

TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE (W):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

June 16th 1953

Dear Mrs. Shelburne

It was a kind thought on your part to send on these two little items. Whether it’s good for me to hear them is another matter! One of the things that make it easier to believe in Providence is the fact that in all trains, hotels, restaurants and other public places I have only once seen a stranger reading a book of mine, tho’ my friends encounter this phenomenon fairly often. Things are really very well arranged. I hope you keep well? With all blessings.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO VERA GEBBERT (W):

Magdalen College

Oxford

June 20th 53

Dear Mrs. Gebbert

The young gentleman looks already, as he should, fathomlessly American: not so much the current model as the heavy millionaire of earlier fiction and film (you’d hardly remember) who was always bringing his clenched fist down on the desk and saying ‘We gotta smash the Medicine Hat toothbrush combine.’ He clearly has a will of his own. From the height of your new technical expertise you will despise me when I say that the score of 6 lbs 14 oz. means nothing to me. I have no idea what a baby ought to weigh: you will not object to my assuming that he breaks all records within the memory of man! Yes, it must be strange and new for you: and for Charles Marion too of course: one is perhaps tempted to forget that side of it. You’ll bring him up v. badly if you start his reading with The Lion? Peter Rabbit & Benjamin Bunny¹⁴⁶ ought to come a long way before it.

Mal-de-Mère¹⁴⁷ is surely rather a good pun.

Blessings and congratulations to you all.

Yours ever,

C. S. Lewis

TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE (W):

Magdalen College,

Oxford

June 22nd 1953

Dear Mrs. Shelburne

Thank you for your letter of the 18th. I am very sorry to hear of your fall (that sounds sinister, doesn’t it!). They are very nasty things: even worse than the subsequent pain, I think, is the dreadful split second in which one knows one is falling and it’s too late to do anything about it. It always brings back to one vividly one’s childish days when a fall was one of the commonest catastrophes, and I think it really hurt then more than it does now: one of the many things that people forget when they wish they were children again! You and I who still enjoy fairy tales have less reason to wish actual childhood back. We have kept its pleasures and added some grown-up ones as well. One hasn’t kept the senses, though. What a comparatively tasteless thing an egg or a strawberry is now! Yes: I think the palate is the only part of me that need regret the early years

I am so glad you saw your daughter. I can’t understand that whole business. One is always told over here that America is a country where Women are on top: but the real evidence I have (and I’ve had a good deal by now) suggests a degree of male tyranny that is quite unknown here.

By the way did the reviewers mean ‘writes like a woman’ to be dispraise? Are the poems of Sappho¹⁴⁸ or, if it comes to that, the Magnificat,¹⁴⁹ to be belittled on the same ground.

You are quite right, I didn’t go to the Coronation. I approve of all that sort of thing immensely and I was deeply moved by all I heard of it; but I’m not a man for crowds and Best Clothes. The weather was frightful.

As you had forgotten what called for my remarks about WE, THE PEOPLE, so I have now quite forgotten what the said remarks were! That is one way correspondence differs from conversation. On the other hand neither party can interrupt! Oh–I’m often in a dither: usually when I’ve made two engagements for the same time in different places.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO HILA NEWMAN (W):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

23/6/53

Dear Hila

(I never met this name before. What language?) You have got it right. No: the three stories you know are the only three that have yet come out. The fourth will be out this Fall (as you say: we say ‘this Autumn’). I am so glad your friends like the books. It’s funny they all began with the second one.

All good wishes,

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO CLYDE S. KILBY (W): TS

REF.325/53.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

26th June 1953.

Dear Mr. Kilby,

Thanks for your letter of the 24th. I should be happy to see you at noon on Wednesday 1st July in my rooms here, if that would fit in with your plans.¹⁵⁰

Yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO WARHELD M. FIROR(BOD):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

June 27th 53

Dear Firor–

I was reminded of my sins (to you and to many other correspondents) the day before yesterday on receiving a visit from a coal-king called Hishop of (I think) Ohio, who turned out to be an old patient of yours. Apparently you ‘carved him as a dish fit for the gods’, and even proceeded, while his wounds were yet green, to the more drastic operation of lending him the Screwtape Letters. In spite of that he is your v. warm admirer.

I have been neglecting everything except the bare minimum of routine duties for many months, being worn to a ravelling by continued sinusitis in all its varying phases of much catarrh and little pain, much pain and little catarrh, and (sometimes) much of both. I have rejected the operation because I keep on meeting people who have had it and been no better afterwards. It now begins to clear. This disease has, however, one excellent quality: its pain, unlike all other pains I have known, always gets better at night. But I mustn’t spread myself on the symptoms since hearing symptoms is rather ‘a busman’s holiday’ (have you that phrase?) for you. One may perhaps add that the internal smell (‘bad smell in the nose’ like ‘bad taste in the mouth’) is rather allegorical: the world seems to stink, but (as often) the real corruption is in the observer.

I’ve just read S. V. Benét’s Western Star which I thought, as far as it went, even better than John Browns Body.¹⁵¹ Certainly more interesting and of more real value (so far as any comparison is possible) than any of the ‘modern’ poetry produced on this side of the Atlantic. I wish your bad poets weren’t so exportable! You sent us Eliot in the flesh and Pound in the spirit.

My brother and I are both ‘with book’ at present and read proofs all day.¹⁵² Mine is a big and (to the taste) dull, academic work.

I always hope to hear that you are coming to Oxford again. All blessings.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO MARY VAN DEUSEN (W):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

June [2] 9th 53

Dear Mrs. Van Deusen

I never know what to say in cases like that of the sick child’s mother whom you mention. There seems plenty of evidence that God does sometimes, in answer to prayer, heal in miraculous fashion: sometimes, it wd. appear, not. No doubt there are very good reasons for both.

I wouldn’t quite say that ‘religious Practices help the search for truth’ for that might imply that they have no further use when the Truth has been found. I think about the practices what a wise old priest said to me about a ‘rule of life’ in general-‘It is not a stair but a bannister’ (or rail or balustrade–I don’t know what you call it in America), i.e. it is, not the thing you ascend by but it is a protective against falling off and a help-up. I think thus we ascend. The stair is God’s grace. One’s climb from step to step is obedience. Many different kinds of bannisters exist, all legitimate. It is possible to get up without any bannisters, if need be: but no one wd. willingly build a staircase without them because it would be less safe, more laborious, and a little lacking in beauty. Give my love to Genia. I am so glad all goes well.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE (W):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

July 10th 1953

Dear Mrs. Shelburne

Thanks for your letter of June 30th. I found the poem interesting–especially metrically interesting. From that point of view 1. 3 is the important one: notice how it keeps the five beats because one is forced to give full value to the two long monosyllables-‘one goal’–

‘Remémber the ónly, the óne góal of lífe’

L.2 where you collapse into a 4 beat-rhythm is not, I think, nearly so good. ‘God speed’ at the end is a trifle weak isn’t it? And if one puts it into God’s mouth–as the context invites one to do–a little comic: like in the old miracle play where God, in a moment of excitement, is made to exclaim ‘By God!’

You know, over here people did not get that fairy-tale feeling about the coronation. What impressed most who saw it was the fact that the Queen herself appeared to be quite overwhelmed by the sacramental side of it. Hence, in the spectators, a feeling of (one hardly knows how to describe it)-awe–pity–pathos–mystery. The pressing of that huge, heavy crown on that small, young head becomes a sort of symbol of the situation of humanity itself: humanity called by God to be His vice-regent and high priest on earth, yet feeling so inadequate. As if He said ‘In my inexorable love I shall lay upon the dust that you are glories and dangers and responsibilities beyond your understanding.’ Do you see what I mean? One has missed the whole point unless one feels that we have all been crowned and that coronation is somehow, if splendid, a tragic splendour.

I am so glad about your short but precious conversation with your granddaughter. The whole unnatural situation is v. hard for me to understand. Perhaps it will end. We must both pray.

By the way isn’t a motor-car the safest place to be in a thunderstorm: isolated from the earth by rubber tyres wh. are non-conductors? Or do I only display my ignorance?

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO ROGER IANCELYN GREEN (BOD):

Magdalen

July 10th 1953

My dear Roger

Thank you very much for The Mahatma & the Hare.¹⁵³ (But you must stop doing this sort of thing: I didn’t forbid roofers in order to get presents instead!). The narrative of the hare is almost unbearable, as it was meant to be, yet unfairly, for it depends on giving poor Wat a human mind. If he had that he would perhaps have guns too. The book is impressive, and shows much more restraint than R.H. usually does in vision literature.

But far more important is your K. Arthur.¹⁵⁴ I read every word and think you have done, in general, a v. good job. The non-Malory parts are just as good as the Malory parts. You have managed the events, such as the begetting of Galahad, which present difficulties in a children’s book, with wonderful skill. The style is exactly right: no unwelcome modernity, so that only close inspection reveals the absence of archaisms. The only place where, I think, you go wrong is on pp. 275-6 where you use the word mysterious four times. It wouldn’t be a good adjective if used only once. I forget whether I have said before–and anyway I am going to say now-that Adjectives which are a direct command to the reader to feel a certain emotion are no use. In vain do we tell him that a thing was horrible, beautiful, or mysterious. We must so present it that he exclaims horrible! beautiful! or mysterious! There are exceptions but we must talk of that another time. Despite this blot, it’s a grand book: many, many thanks.

Love to all.

Yours

Jack

TO ARTHUR GREEVES (BOD):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

July 13/53

My dear Arthur

We have both of us been a little flustered, it seems. First you wrote a letter of wh. you sent me only part: at least, so I conclude from the fact that it had no signature and broke off in the middle of a sentence. Then I got it on a day when I was just going for a journey and lost it. So sorry. The facts are these.

Aug. 20th W. and I arrive Crawfordsburn.

Aug. 28th W. departs by L’pool boat.

Sept. 14th I depart

I hope this fits in with you?

R. L. Green has written a v. good Arthurian book for children in the Puffin series–not merely a re-telling of Malory, something much better than that, wh. he explains in the preface. I am sending you a copy when it comes out: if you want to refresh your memory of that cycle, you can get it all here with the ‘brasting’ left out.¹⁵⁵

Yours

Jack

TO VERA GEBBERT (W):

Magdalen College

Oxford

16 July 53

Dear Mrs. Gebbert

Pounds and ounces don’t need translating, for we use the same tables (plagues they were at school, too) over here. It’s babies need translating. Tho’ indeed, now that I come to think of it, I’m not much better on adult weights. I’ve no idea of my own, and can’t understand the interest of the question. I can understand people, and especially women, being interested in their shape (tho’ those who can mistake mal de mère for mal de mer¹⁵⁶ must be an exception) but there seems to be a non sequitur in relating shape to weight quite so directly as is commonly done.

Screwtape as a ‘stunt’ idea (like Swift’s Lilliput and Brobdingnag) is only good for a short use. I never showed more discretion, I believe, than in cutting that book short and never writing a sequel. The very fact that people ask for more proves it was the right length.

As to the reward for printed work (apart from money) one’s first good reviews are v. sweet-perhaps dangerously so–and fame has one really solid good about it in so far as it makes some strangers approach you with a friendliness they would not have felt otherwise. It may even win you their prayers (as I hope I have yours: you certainly have mine). The rest is all in the order of those things wh. it is painful to miss but not really v. nice to get. (It is painful not to be able to scratch a place in the middle of one’s back, yet scratching doesn’t rank v. high among our pleasures).

We are both well, thanks and go to Ireland in August. It is on the whole a cold and wet summer here. This last week it has been more like what we usually get in April: alternate sun and showers with high winds. As the man rightly said, ‘All weathers have their own beauty: if only people wd. enjoy that instead of always comparing it with some other weather.’ I hope Charles (and the play) will grow in goodness, intelligence, wit, and kindness.

All blessings. Love from both.

C. S. Lewis

TO ROGER LANCELYN GREEN (BOD):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

July 16/53

My dear Roger

Hail to the young Richard.¹⁵⁷ Give June my warmest love and congratulations.

Look: I think I must abandon the idea of an expedition on my way back from Ireland, for this year. It is becoming clear that I shan’t finish the proofs and horrible bibliography of my OHEL volume before we sail on Aug. 11th. That being so, every day between our return and the beginning of Michaelmas term becomes precious as gold: for if the job once drags on into another term, I don’t know what will become of me. Anyway, the jus trium liberorum¹⁵⁸ will be keeping you pretty busy. Do you know why liberi means both ‘freemen’ & ‘children’? Think it over and see if your historical imagination can solve the problem.

Yours

Jack

TO GEORGE SAYER(W):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

July 17/53

My dear George

It is I who shd. be shamed for I wrote asking you both to come & see Comus at Ludlow: but as I sent the letter to an address in U.S.A. you naturally never answered!

Thanks, George, for your prayers: I never doubted that I had them, as you both have mine. The catarrh phase of the sinus is quite gone: the pain remains, but never at night (which is a great mercy) and for a decreasing number of hours daily. And thanks also for the invitation. But we’ll be in Ireland in Aug. We were hoping you’d come to us for some days after Sept 15. Can this be managed: any time between then and your term?

I’m damned with doing Bibliographies for my OHEL vol. How goes The Isle of the Undead?¹⁵⁹ All love.

Yours ever

Jack

TO MRS JOHNSON (W):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

July 17/53

Dear Mrs. Johnson

There are many interesting points in your letter of June 8. I’m v. glad you’ve seen that Christianity is as hard as nails: i.e. hard and tender at the same time. It’s the blend that does it: neither quality wd. be any good without the other. You needn’t worry about not feeling brave. Our Lord didn’t–see the scene in Gethsemane.

How thankful I am that when God became Man He did not choose to become a man of iron nerves: that wd. not have helped weaklings like you and me nearly so much. Especially don’t worry (you may of course pray) about being brave over merely possible evils in the future. In the old battles it was usually the reserve, who had to watch the carnage, not the troops who were in it, whose nerve broke first. Similarly I think you in America feel much more anxiety about atomic bombs than we do: because you are further from the danger. If and when a horror turns up, you will then be given Grace to help you. I don’t think one is usually given it in advance. ‘Give us our daily bread’¹⁶⁰ (not an annuity for life) applies to spiritual gifts too: the little daily support for the daily trial. Life has to be taken day by day & hour by hour.

The writer you quote (‘in all those turning lights’) was very good at the stage at wh. you met him: now, as is plain, you’ve got beyond him. Poor boob!-he thought his mind was his own! Never his own until he makes it Christ’s: up till then merely a result of heredity, environment, and the state of his digestion. I become my own only when I give myself to Another.

‘Does God seem real to me?’ It varies: just as lots of other things I firmly believe in (my own death, the solar system) feel more or less real at different times. I have dreamed dreams but not seen visions:¹⁶¹ but don’t think all that matters a hoot. And the saints say that visions are unimportant.¹⁶² If Our Lord did seem to appear to you at your prayer (bodily) what, after all, could you do but go on with your prayers? How cd. you know that it was not an hallucination?

You’ve got the Coronation right too: especially a sacrificial, even a tragic rite. And a symbol: for we (Man) have had laid on us the heavy crown of being lords of this planet, and the same contract between the frail, tiny person–the huge ritual goes for us all.

Did England, collectively, spend much on it? I shd. have thought most of the money was spent in England, transferred from one pocket to another. (Never forget that these personifications ‘England does this’ ‘America does that’ are only figures of speech: one has to figure out what they really mean).

No, no, I’m not committed to a real belief in Arthur, Merlin etc: all that comes in a story.¹⁶³ I haven’t the faintest idea whether there was a real Grail or not. Of course I believe that people are still healed by faith: whether this has happened in any particular case, one can’t of course say without getting a real-Doctor-who-is-also-a-real-Christian to go through the whole case-history.

All you say about your little girl is delightful. Bless her and all of you.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO MRS FRANK JONES (W): TS

REF.18/53.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

17th July 1953.

My dear Mrs. Jones,

Many thanks for your interesting letter. To us, the high light naturally is the news that you plan to visit this benighted country; and you shall indeed have two words with my brother and myself–and a lot more than two I hope; indeed we are optimistic enough to imagine that you might come and stay with us for a day or two in our suburban residence, and see how bachelors live. It would make a little break from the routine of hotels, and especially of English hotels. We shall be interested to hear your plans when the time draws nearer.

Oddly enough, we too have been seeing a college reunion, and mainly American at that, here in Oxford. The University had the bright idea of celebrating the Cecil Rhodes centenary by inviting all old Rhodes Scholars to visit Oxford, live in their old College rooms, and attend sundry dinner parties and so forth; there was a large gathering, and they all seemed to enjoy it.¹⁶⁴

I am glad the film interested you; my brother saw the actual coronation on the television, and was very much impressed with it: especially with the real devout piety shown by the Queen, who obviously took her vows very seriously. Like you, we have’nt got a set, and don’t propose to get one; it is I think a very bad habit to develop. People who have sets seem to do nothing but go into a huddle over them every evening of their lives, instead of being out walking, or in their gardens. And of course, like all things which begin as luxuries, they end up by being necessities; an unofficial cost of living survey was recently held in our midland manufacturing districts, and quite a large percentage of the working class interviewed complained that if prices did’nt come down, or wages go up, they would not be able to maintain their payments on their television sets–which have now become part of the worker’s basic standard of living. Just think of men drawing perhaps $40 a week, considering an article costing–cash down–perhaps $250, a necessity!

I wish next time you send me a parcel, you would fill it with some of your summer weather; here for the past week and more, it has been just like April–patches of sunshine between heavy showers, and the morning temperature 54-58. No sign of any improvement today, and I have to go up to town this afternoon for a garden party. You would think I would have more sense at my time of life, would’nt you?

With all best wishes to you both, and to Freiherr von und zu Brock von Grabenbruch,

yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis¹⁶⁵

TO MARY VAN DEUSEN (W):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

July 23rd 53

Dear Mrs. Van Deusen

I think your decision ‘a rule of life, without membership’ is a good one. It is a great joy to be able to ‘feel’ God’s love as a reality, and one must give thanks for it and use it. But you must be prepared for the feeling dying away again, for feelings are by nature impermanent. The great thing is to continue to believe when the feeling is absent: & these periods do quite as much for one as those when the feeling is present.

It sounds to me as if Genia had a pretty good husband on the whole. So much matrimonial misery comes to me in my mail that I feel those whose partner has no worse fault than being stupider than themselves may be said to have drawn a prize! It hardly amounts to a Problem. I take it that in every marriage natural love sooner or later, in a high or a low degree, comes up against difficulties (if only the difficulty that the original state of ‘being in love’ dies a natural death) which force it either to turn into dislike or else to turn into Christian charity. For all our natural feelings are, not resting places, but points d’appui, springboards. One has to go on from there, or fall back from there. The merely human pleasure in being loved must either go bad or become the divine joy of loving. But no doubt Genia knows all this. It’s all quite in the ordinary run of Christian life. See I Peter iv, 12 ‘Think it not strange etc.’¹⁶⁶

I don’t remember any question of Genia’s to wh. the answer wd. have been ‘Read my children’s books’! I have to guard against making my letters into advertisements, you know!

The sinusitis is much better, if not quite gone. You are all in my prayers: and now I must go to my work.

Yours ever

C. S. Lewis

TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE (W):

Magdalen etc.

Aug. 1st [1953]

Dear Mrs. Shelburne–

Thanks for yours of the 16th. Our climatic troubles are just the opposite of yours; one of the coldest and wettest summers I remember. But I’d dislike your heat v. much more than our cold.

I am so glad you gave me an account of the lovely priest. How little people know who think that holiness is dull. When one meets the real thing (and perhaps, like you, I have met it only once) it is irresistible.¹⁶⁷

If even 10% of the world’s population had it, would not the whole world be converted and happy before a year’s end?

Yes, I too think there is lots to be said for being no longer young: and I do most heartily agree that it is just as well to be past the age when one expects or desires to attract the other sex. It’s natural enough in our species, as in others, that the young birds shd. show off their plumage–in the mating season. But the trouble in the modern world is that there’s a tendency to rush all the birds on to that age as soon as possible and then keep them there as late as possible, thus losing all the real value of the other parts of life in a senseless, pitiful attempt to prolong what, after all, is neither its wisest, its happiest, or most innocent period. I suspect merely commercial motives are behind it all: for it is at the showing-off age that birds of both sexes have least sales-resistance!

Naturally I can have no views on a choice between Richmond and Washington any more than on one between Omsk and Teheran! But of course you shall have my prayers.

Sorry to hear about the fall: they’re nasty things. I must stop now, for I’m dead tired from standing at catalogue-shelves in a library all morning verifying titles of books & editions. I think, like the Irishman in the story ‘I’d sooner walk 10 miles than stand one’. I go to Ireland on the 11th so don’t be surprised if you don’t hear from me again till the end of September. All blessings.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO LAURENCE HARWOOD (BOD):

Magdalen

Aug 2nd 53

My dear Lawrence–

I was sorry to hear from Owen Barfield that you have taken a nasty knock over History Prelim.¹⁶⁸ Sorry, because I know it can’t be much fun for you: not because I think the thing is necessarily a major disaster. We are now so used to the examination system that we hardly remember how very recent it is and how hotly it was opposed by some quite sincere people. Trollope (no fool) was utterly sceptical about its value: and I myself, tho’ a don, sometimes wonder how many of the useful, or even the great, men of the past wd. have survived it. It doesn’t test all qualities by any means: not even all qualities needed in an academic life. And anyway, what a small part of life that is. And if you are not suited for that, it is well to have been pushed forcibly out of it at an earlier rather than a later stage. It is much worse to waste three or more years getting a Fourth or a Pass. You can now cut your losses and start on something else.

At the moment, I can well imagine, everything seems in ruins. That is an illusion. The world is full of capable and useful people who began life by ploughing in exams. You will laugh at this contre temps¹⁶⁹ some day. Of course it wd. be disastrous to go to the other extreme and conclude that one was a genius because one had failed in a prelim-as if a horse imagined it must be a Derby winner because it couldn’t be taught to pull a four-wheeler!-but I don’t expect that is the extreme to which you are temperamentally inclined.

Are you in any danger of seeking consolation in Resentment? I have no reason to suppose you are, but it is a favourite desire of the human mind (certainly of my mind!) and one wants to be on one’s guard against it. And that is about the only way in which an early failure like this can become a real permanent injury. A belief that one has been misused, a tendency ever after to snap and snarl at ‘the system’-that, I think, makes a man always a bore, usually an ass, sometimes a villain. So don’t think either that you are no good or that you are a Victim. Write the whole thing off and get on.

You may reply ‘It’s easy talking.’ I shan’t blame you if you do. I remember only too well what a hopeless oyster to be opened the world seemed at your age. I would have given a good deal to anyone who cd. have assured me that I ever wd. be able to persuade anyone to pay me a living wage for anything I cd. do. Life consisted of applying for jobs which other people got, writing books that no one wd. publish, and giving lectures wh. no one attended. It all looks perfectly hopeless. Yet the vast majority of us manage to get in somewhere and shake down somehow in the end.

You are now going through what most people (at any rate most of the people I know) find in retrospect to have been the most unpleasant period of their lives. But it won’t last: the road usually improves later. I think life is rather like a lumpy bed in a bad hotel. At first you can’t imagine how you can lie on it, much less sleep in it. But presently one finds the right position and finally one is snoring away. By the time one is called it seems a v. good bed and one is loth to leave it.

This is a devilish stodgy letter. There’s no need to bother answering it. I go to Ireland on the 11th. Give my love to all & thank Sylvia for my bathing suit.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO MRS EMILY MCLAY (W): ¹⁷⁰

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

Aug 3rd 1953

Dear Mrs. McLay

I take it as a first principle that we must not interpret any one part of Scripture so that it contradicts other parts: and specially we must not use an Apostle’s teaching to contradict that of Our Lord. Whatever St Paul may have meant, we must not reject the parable of the sheep and the goats (Matt. XXV. 30-46). There, you see there is nothing about Predestination or even about Faith–all depends on works. But how this is to be reconciled with St Paul’s teaching, or with other sayings of Our Lord, I frankly confess I don’t know. Even St Peter you know admits that he was stumped by the Pauline epistles (II Peter III. 16-17).¹⁷¹

What I think is this. Everyone looking back on his own conversion must feel–and I am sure the feeling is in some sense true-‘It is not 7 who have done this. I did not choose Christ: He chose me. It is all free grace, wh. I have done nothing to earn.’ That is the Pauline account: and I am sure it is the only true account of every conversion from the inside. Very well. It then seems to us logical & natural to turn this personal experience into a general rule ‘All conversions depend on God’s choice’.

But this I believe is exactly what we must not do: for generalisations are legitimate only when we are dealing with matters to which our faculties are adequate. Here, we are not. How our individual experiences are in reality consistent with (a) Our idea of Divine justice, (b) The parable I’ve just quoted & lots of other passages, we don’t & can’t know: what is clear is that we can’t find a consistent formula. I think we must take a leaf out of the scientists’ book. They are quite familiar with the fact that, for example, Light has to be regarded both as a wave in the ether and as a stream of particles. No one can make these two views consistent. Of course reality must be self-consistent: but till (if ever) we can see the consistency it is better to hold two inconsistent views than to ignore one side of the evidence.

The real inter-relation between God’s omnipotence and Man’s freedom is something we can’t find out. Looking at the Sheep & the Goats every man can be quite sure that every kind act he does will be accepted by Christ. Yet, equally, we all do feel sure that all the good in us comes from Grace. We have to leave it at that. I find the best plan is to take the Calvinist view of my own virtues and other people’s vices: and the other view of my own vices and other people’s virtues.¹⁷² But tho’ there is much to be puzzled about, there is nothing to be worried about. It is plain from Scripture that, in whatever sense the Pauline doctrine is true, it is not true in any sense which excludes its (apparent) opposite.

You know what Luther said: ‘Do you doubt if you are chosen? Then say your prayers and you may conclude that you are.’¹⁷³

Yrs. Sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO GEOFFREY BLES (BOD): TS

365/53.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

5th August 1953.

My dear Bles,

I know naught of these people: but perhaps it will do if I ask you to send them Mere Christianity and Miracles. A Portuguese American Presbyterian must be a most fearful wildfowl!-or am I mistranslating.¹⁷⁴

Kind regards to both.

Yours,¹⁷⁵

TO MRS EMILY MCIAY (W):

Magdalen

Aug 8th 1953

Dear Mrs. McLay

Your experience in listening to those philosophers gives you the technique one needs for dealing with the dark places in the Bible. When one of the philosophers, one whom you know on other grounds to be a sane and decent man, said something you didn’t understand, you did not at once conclude that he had gone off his head. You assumed you’d missed the point. Same here. The two things one must NOT do are (a) To believe, on the strength of Scripture or on any other evidence, that God is in any way evil. (In Him is no darkness at all.)¹⁷⁶ (b) To wipe off the slate any passage which seems to show that He is.¹⁷⁷ Behind that apparently shocking passage, be sure, there lurks some great truth which you don’t understand. If one ever does come to understand it, one will see that [He] is good and just and gracious in ways we never dreamed of. Till then, it must be just left on one side.

But why are baffling passages left in at all? Oh, because God speaks not only for us little ones but for the great sages and mystics who experience what we only read about, and to whom all the words have therefore different (richer) contents. Would not a revelation which contained nothing that you and I did not understand, be for that v. reason rather suspect? To a child it wd. seem a contradiction to say both that his parents made him and that God made him, yet we see both can be true.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO DON GIOVANNI CALABRIA (V):

Collegium Stae Mariae

Magdalenae apud

Oxonienses

Aug. x. MCMLIII

Dilectissime Pater–

Accepi litteras tuas V^to Augusti datas. Expecto cum gratiarum actione opuscula, specimen artis vestrae typographicae: quae tamen non videbo nisi post V hebdomadas quia pertransibo eras (si Deo placuerit) in Hiberniam; incunabula mea et dulcissimum refugium, quoad amoenitatem locorum et caeli temperiem quamquam rixis et odiis et saepe civilibus armis dissentientium religionum atrocissimam. Ibi sane et vestri et nostri ‘ignorant quo spiritu ducantur’: carentiam caritatis pro zelo accipiunt et reciprocam ignorantiam pro orthodoxia. Puto, fere omnia facinora quae invicem perpetraverunt Christiani ex illo evenerunt quod religio miscetur cum re politica. Diabolus enim supra omnes ceteras humanas vitae partes rem politicam sibi quasi propriam–quasi arcem suae potestatis–vindicat. Nos tamen pro viribus (sc. quisque) suis mutuis orationibus incessanter laboremus pro caritate quae ‘multitudinem peccatorum tegit.’ Vale, sodes et pater.

C. S. Lewis

*

The College of St Mary Magdalen

Oxford

Aug. 10 1953

Dearest Father–

I have received your letter dated the 5th August. I await with gratitude the pamphlets–a specimen of your people’s printing skill: which however I shall not see for 5 weeks because tomorrow I am crossing over (if God so have pleased) to Ireland: my birthplace and dearest refuge so far as charm of landscape goes, and temperate climate, although most dreadful because of the strife, hatred and often civil war between dissenting faiths.

There indeed both yours and ours ‘know not by what Spirit they are led’.¹⁷⁸ They take lack of charity for zeal and mutual ignorance for orthodoxy.

I think almost all the crimes which Christians have perpetrated against each other arise from this, that religion is confused with politics. For, above all other spheres of human life, the Devil claims politics for his own, as almost the citadel of his power. Let us, however, with mutual prayers pray with all our power for that charity which ‘covers a multitude of sins’.¹⁷⁹ Farewell, comrade and father.

C. S. Lewis

TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE (W):

Magdalen

Aug. 10th 53

Dear Mrs. Shelburne

I have just got your letter of the 6th. Oh I do so sympathise with you: job-hunting, even in youth, is a heartbreaking affair and to have to go back to it now must be simply–I was going to say ‘simply Hell’, but no one who is engaged in prayer and humility, as you are, can be there, so I’d better say ‘Purgatory’. (We have as a matter of fact good authorities for calling it something other than Purgatory. We are told that even those tribulations wh. fall upon us by necessity, if embraced for Christ’s sake, become as meritorious as voluntary sufferings and every missed meal can be converted into a fast if taken in the right way).¹⁸⁰

I suppose–tho’ the person who is not suffering feels shy about saying it to the person who is-that it is good for us to be cured of the illusion of ‘independence’. For of course independence, the state of being indebted to no one, is eternally impossible. Who, after all, is more totally dependent than what we call the man ‘of independent means’. Every shirt he wears is made by other people out of other organisms and the only difference between him and us is that even the money whereby he pays for it was earned by other people. Of course you ought to be dependent on your daughter and son-in-law. Support of parents is a most ancient & universally acknowledged duty. And if you come to find yourself dependent on anyone else you mustn’t mind. But I am very, very sorry. I’m a panic-y person about money myself (which is a most shameful confession and a thing dead against Our Lord’s words)¹⁸¹ and poverty frightens me more than anything else except large spiders and the tops of cliffs: one is sometimes even tempted to say that if God wanted us to live like the lilies of the field He might have given us an organism more like theirs! But of course He is right. And when you meet anyone who does live like the lilies, one sees that He is.

God keep you and encourage you. I am just about to go off to Ireland where I shall be moving about, so I shan’t hear from you for several weeks. All blessings and deepest sympathy.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

The Silver Chair was published by Geoffrey Bles of London on 7 September 1953.

On 8 September Warnie wrote to Geoffrey Bles:

REF.28/53.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

8th September 1953.

Dear Mr. Bles,

My brother will be in Eire until the 14th and I have just returned from that delectable land to find a heavy accumulation of mail. From you, I have to acknowledge on his behalf,

(1). Spanish Screwtape.

(2). Proofs of The horse and his boy, and

(3). Statement and cheque for £886-16-1. He will no doubt be writing to you himself after his return.

With all good wishes,

yours sincerely,

Mycroft

TO MARY VAN DEUSEN (W):

Magdalen College

Oxford

14/9/53

Dear Mrs. Van Deusen

I am just back from Donegal (wh. was heavenly) and find as usual a ghastly pile of unanswered letters, so I must be brief. The important idea of a Christian sanatorium is worth a whole letter, but I want to use this one for another subject. I hope you won’t be angry at what I’m going to say–

I think that idea of Genia’s job being to concentrate on ‘bringing out the best of Eddie’ is really rather dangerous. Wouldn’t you yourself think it sounded–well, to put it bluntly, a bit priggish, if applied to any other couple? It sounds as if the poor chap were somehow infinitely inferior.

Are you giving full weight to the very raw deal he has had in marrying a girl who has nearly always been ill? Men haven’t got your maternal instinct, you know. To find a patient where one hoped for a helpmeet is much more frustrating for the husband than for the wife. And by all I hear he has come through the test v. well. But if just as she is ceasing to be a patient she were to become the self-appointed Governess or Improver–well, wd. any camel’s back stand that last straw? I don’t think Genia is at present inclined (or not much) to start ‘educating’ her husband. I am sure you will take care not to influence her in that direction. Because, really, you know, it wd. be so easy, without in the least intending it, to glide into the rôle (I shudder to write it) of the traditional home-breaking mother-in-law. All those old jokes have something behind them.

I do hope I haven’t made you an enemy for life. If I have taken too great a liberty, you have rather lured me into it. And I did feel signs of danger. And don’t you think in general that a girl who has a faithful, kind, sober husband (there are so many of the other kind) whom she has promised to love, honour, & obey, had better just get on with the job? Do forgive me if I misunderstand and put the point too crudely. At any rate, my prayers will not cease.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO PHYLLIDA (W):

Magdalen College

Oxford

14th Sept 1953

Dear Phyllida

Although your letter was written a month ago I only got it today, for I have been away in Donegal (which is glorious). Thanks v. much: it is so interesting to hear exactly what people do like and don’t like, which is just what grown-up readers never really tell.

Now about Kids. I also hate the word. But if you mean the place in P. Caspian chap 8, the point is that Edmund hated it too.¹⁸² He was using the rottenest word just because it was the rottenest word, running himself down as much as possible, because he was making a fool of the Dwarf–as you might say ‘Of course I can only strum when you really knew you could play the piano quite as well as the other person. But if I have used Kids anywhere else (I hope I haven’t) then I’m sorry: you are quite right in objecting to it. And you are also right about the party turned into stone in the woods. I thought people would take it for granted that Asian would put it all right. But I see now I should have said so.

By the way, do you think the Dark Island is too frightening for small children? Did it give your brother the horrors? I was nervous about that, but I left it in because I thought one can never be sure what will or will not frighten people.

There are to be 7 Narnian stories altogether. I am sorry they are so dear: it is the publisher, not me, who fixes the price. Here is the new one.¹⁸³

As I say, I think you are right about the other points but I feel sure I’m right to make them grow up in Narnia. Of course they will grow up in this world too. You’ll see. You see, I don’t think age matters so much as people think. Parts of me are still 12 and I think other parts were already 50 when I was 12: so I don’t feel it v. odd that they grow up in Narnia while they are children in England.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO RHONA BODLE (BOD):

Magdalen College

Oxford

14/9/53

Dear Miss Boddle

I have had ‘Miss Boddle’s colleague’ in my daily prayers for a long time now: is that the same young man you mention in your letter of July 3rd, or do I now say ‘colleagues’? Yes: don’t bother him with my books if an aunt (it somehow would be an aunt-tho’ I must add that most of my aunts were delightful) has been ramming them down his throat.

You know, P. Progress is not, I find (to my surprise) everyone’s book. I know several people who are both Christians and lovers of literature who can’t bear it. I doubt if they were made to read it as children. Indeed, I rather wonder whether that ‘being made to read it’ has spoiled so many books as is supposed. I suspect that all the people who tell me they were ‘put off Scott by having Ivanhoe¹⁸⁴ as a holiday task are people who wd. never have liked Scott anyway.

I don’t believe anything will keep the right reader & the right book apart. But our literary loves are as diverse as our human! You couldn’t make me like Henry James or dislike Jane Austen whatever you did. By the bye did Chesterton’s Everlasting Man (I’m sure I advised you to read it) succeed or fail with you?¹⁸⁵ And how wd. it be likely to succeed with D. Dale?

All blessings.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO ROGER LANCELYN GREEN (BOD):

Magdalen College

Oxford

15/9/53

Just back from Donegal (wh. was as near heaven as you can get in Thulcandra)¹⁸⁶ and of course piles of letters to plough through. Thanks v. much indeed for the revised T. of T¹⁸⁷ and the nice things you say about me.

Here’s the latest Narnian book. Love to all.

J.

TO DON GIOVANNI CALABRIA (V):

Magdalen College

Oxford

XV. Sept. MCMLIII

Pater dilectissime

Gratias ago pro epístola tua, data iii Sept., necnon pro exemplari libri cui nomen Instaurare Omnia in Christo.

De statu morali nostri temporis (cum me jusseris garrire) haec sentio. Seniores, ut nos ambo sumus, semper sunt laudatores temporis acti, semper cogitant mundum pejorem esse quam fuerit in suis juvenilibus annis. Ergo cavendum est ne fallamur. Hôc tamen proposito, certe sentio gravissima pericula nobis incumbere. Haec eveniunt quia maxima pars Europae apostasiam fecit de fide Christiana. Hinc status pejor quam illum statum quem habuimus ante fidem receptam. Nemo enim ex Christianismo redit in statum quem habuit ante Christianismum, sed in pejorem: tantum distat inter paganum et apostatam quantum innuptam et adulteram. Nam fides perficit naturam sed fides amissa corrumpit naturam. Ergo plerique homines nostri temporis amiserunt non modo lumen supernaturale sed etiam lumen illud naturale quod pagani habuerunt. Sed Deus qui Deus misericordiarum est etiam nunc non omnino demisit genus humanum. In junioribus licet videamus multam crudelitatem et libidinem, nonne simul videmus plurimas virtutum scintillas quibus fortasse nostra generatio caruit. Quantam fortitudinem, quantam curam de pauperibus aspicimus! Non desperandum. Et haud spernendus numerus (apud nos) iam redeunt in fidem.

Haec de statu praesenti: de remediis difficilior quaestio. Equidem credo laborandum esse non modo in evangelizando (hoc certe) sed etiam in quâdam praeparatione evangelica. Necesse est multos ad legem naturalem revocare antequam de Deo loquamur. Christus enim promittit remissionem peccatorum: sed quid hoc ad eos qui, quum legem naturalem ignorent, nesciunt se peccavisse. Quis medicamentum accipiet nisi se morbo teneri sciât? Relativismus moralis hostis est quem debemus vincere antequam Atheismum aggrediamur. Fere auserim dicere ‘Primo faciamus juniores bonos Paganos et postea faciamus Christianos’. Deliramenta haec? Sed habes quod petisti. Semper et tu et congregatio tua in orationibus meis.

Vale,

C. S. Lewis

*

Magdalen College

Oxford

15 September 1953

Dearest Father

Thank you for your letter dated 3rd September¹⁸⁸ and also for the copy of the book entitled The Renewal of All Things in Christ.¹⁸⁹

Regarding the moral condition of our times (since you bid me prattle on) I think this. Older people, as we both are, are always ‘praisers of times past’.¹⁹⁰ They always think the world is worse than it was in their young days. Therefore we ought to take care lest we go wrong. But, with this proviso, certainly I feel that very grave dangers hang over us. This results from the apostasy of the great part of Europe from the Christian faith. Hence a worse state than the one we were in before we received the Faith. For no one returns from Christianity to the same state he was in before Christianity but into a worse state: the difference between a pagan and an apostate is the difference between an unmarried woman and an adulteress. For faith perfects nature but faith lost corrupts nature. Therefore many men of our time have lost not only the supernatural light but also the natural light which pagans possessed.

But God, who is the God of mercies,¹⁹¹ even now has not altogether cast off the human race. In younger people, although we may see much cruelty and lust, yet at the same time do we not see very many sparks of virtues which perhaps our own generation lacked? How much courage, how much concern for the poor do we see! We must not despair. And (among us) a not inconsiderable number are now returning to the Faith.

So much for the present situation. About remedies the question is more difficult. For my part I believe we ought to work not only at spreading the Gospel (that certainly) but also at a certain preparation for the Gospel. It is necessary to recall many to the law of nature before we talk about God.¹⁹² For Christ promises forgiveness of sins: but what is that to those who, since they do not know the law of nature, do not know that they have sinned? Who will take medicine unless he knows he is in the grip of disease? Moral relativity is the enemy we have to overcome before we tackle Atheism. I would almost dare to say ‘First let us make the younger generation good pagans and afterwards let us make them Christians.’

These are ravings? But you have what you requested.

Always you and your Congregation are in my prayers.

Farewell,

C. S. Lewis

TO WILLIAM L. KINTER(BOD):

Magdalen etc.

15/9/53

Dear Mr. Kinter

I have been away in Donegal (which is glorious beyond all my dreams) and have only just got your letter of Aug 23d. It was nice to hear from you again. Yes: it is great watching these images of the Mountain, the Wood, the Island etc. as they pass from one man’s work to another’s. I don’t know Read’s Green Child,¹⁹³ but have no difficulty in believing what you say of it. There is a deal of really Hellish literature going about at present. I am also interested in what you say about Messiaen (an odd name, by the way).¹⁹⁴ But if I heard the works they wd. only probably be quite beyond me. Please remember me to your wife and accept my kindest regards.

Yours,

C. S. Lewis

P. S. Harding is exciting, isn’t he?¹⁹⁵

TO GEOFFREY BLES (BOD): TS 28/53.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

17th September 1953.

My dear Bles,

Thanks for yours of the 16th. I am glad you pointed out that passage.¹⁹⁶ No: it won’t do. Of course the children (except Aravis when telling her story in the grand manner)¹⁹⁷ don’t talk Arabian Nights style anywhere: but they must’nt, I agree, go so far in the other direction as ‘rot’. I’ll mend it.

I hope you both had as good a holiday as I.

Yours,

C. S. Lewis

TO PHYLLIDA (W):

Magdalen College

Oxford

19/9/53

Dear Phyllida

I feel as one does when after ‘showing up’ one’s work one realises one has made the very same mistake one got into a row for last week! I mean, after sending off the book, I read it myself and found ‘Kids’ again twice. I really will take care not to do it again. The earlier part of Rilian’s story, told by the owl, was meant to sound further-off and more like an ordinary fairy-tale so as to keep it different from the part where I get on to telling it myself. I think the idea of making some difference is right: but of course what matters in books is not so much the ideas as how you actually carry them out.

All good wishes and love to both.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO RUTH PITTER(BOD):

Magdalen College

Oxford

Oct 1st 1953

Dear Ruth,

Rachel has been ready for a long time: you know I am of the generation who was brought up to hold that the initiative must come from you.¹⁹⁸

Long Crendon–long since endeared to me because Owen Barfield used to live there–will now have a second good association. I shall be among the first etc–but this sounds rather like Mr. Collins!¹⁹⁹ Warnie joins me in our duties and warm welcome to these parts. It is, as you have seen, a lovely village.

Yours in all service

Jack Lewis

TO NELL BERNERS-PRICE (W):

Magdalen College

Oxford

Oct 3. 53

Dear Nell

My correspondence has lately been in much the same state as yours: that is, on coming back from a holiday in Ireland I found about 60 letters to deal with.

I had a lovely time over there: the best part in Donegal, all Atlantic breakers & golden sand and peat and heather and donkeys and mountains and (what is most unusual there) a heat wave and cloudless skies. Walks were much interrupted by blackberries: so big and juicy, and sweet that you just couldn’t pass without picking them. Some funny hotels, though. One has often found bathrooms with no hot water but I found one with no cold! You’ve no idea how tired one gets waiting for a bath to cool. In fact, with all the steam round you, it really means having a Turkish bath before the ordinary one!

I’m delighted to learn of your good year: how cosmopolitan you have become! Also thanks for telling me about Penelope and the books: give her my love.

You were a shrew to come so near without looking me up–and then, God bless my soul, to expect me to go to you! I’ll try one of these days all the same: it’s too nice to miss. I agree about prison–at least for Mrs. Hooker. She has so often been there, for similar offences, that it ought to be quite clear the treatment doesn’t work. Have you been having, like us, the most exquisite autumn? Love to Alan & yourself.

Yours

Jack

TO MARY VAN DEUSEN (W):

Magdalen College

Oxford

3/10/53

Dear Mrs Van Deusen

I was extremely glad to get your letter. I was beginning to feel that my own had been presumptuous and intolerable and had been praying not that it might do good but that it might not do harm. Whether I was right or wrong, you came out of it with flying colours: if few can give good advice, fewer still can hear with patience advice either good or bad.

About your Project (it was, wasn’t it, for the founding of a sort of rest-home where people in psychological difficulties could get Christian advice, sympathy, and, if necessary, treatment?), the whole thing–as with most conceptions either practical or literary–turns on the execution. All depends on the quality of the individual helpers. I suspect you will find them only by what seems chance but is really an answer to prayer. No ‘machinery’ of committees and selection & references, however well devised, will do it, I imagine. And perhaps it is just by your discovering, or failing to discover, the right people, that God will show you whether He wishes you to do this or not (Beware here of my unsanguine temper, more tempted to sloth than to precipitance, and ready to despond: take my advice always with a grain of salt).

It is hard, when difficulties arise to know whether one is meant to overcome them or whether they are signs that one is on the wrong track. I suppose the deeper one’s own life of prayer and sacraments the more trustworthy one’s judgement will be.

You ‘get me where I live’ about Van’s Aunt. I have been in v. close contact with a case like that. It is harrowing. My doctor (a v. serious Christian) kept on reminding me that 50 much of an old person’s speech & behaviour must really be treated as a medical not a spiritual fact: that, as the organism decays, the true state of the soul can less and less express itself thro’ it. So that things may be neither so miserable (nor so wicked, we must sometimes add) as they seem. I sometimes wonder whether the incarnation of the soul is not gradual at both ends?-i.e. not fully there yet in infancy and no longer fully there in old age.

The first syllable of Donegal rhymes with FUN, the last with ALL, there are 3, and the accent is on the last-Dun-i-Gaúl. Blessings on all of you.

Yours (most relieved)

C. S. Lewis

TO ARTHUR GREEVES (BOD):

Magdalen College

Oxford

Oct 6/53

My dear Arthur

I have ordered Blackwells to send you a copy of Barfield’s (‘G. A. L. Burgeon’s’) book.²⁰⁰

I enclose one wh. I found worth reading but don’t want to keep. If you don’t like it, pass it on to someone else. You’ll agree with the author about Noise! I think you’ll find in him an approach to Christianity wh. you haven’t v. much met yet & wh. is worth knowing about; it is fairly widely spread here. Of course parts of it are too explicitly R.C. for us but a lot of common ground remains.

Here are some C. M. Yonge titles, all good books: The Daisy Chain and its sequel The Trial; The Pillars of the House; The Three Brides; The Two Sides of the Shield; Dynevor Terrace. Not so good (but W. differs from me) is Nutty’s Father.²⁰¹

I wish you had enjoyed our holiday as much as I did! But I expect you’re enjoying yourself all the more now. All blessings.

Yours

Jack