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TO JOHN RICHARDS (BOD):²⁰² TS

449/53.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

13th October 1953.

Dear Mr. Richards,

Thank you for your kind and encouraging letter of the 11th. Tolkien’s great romance, The Lord of the Rings, of which the first volume will soon be published, just skirts the theme of the True West. You’ll find it immensely worth reading on other accounts as well.

Yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO MRS D. JESSUP (W):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

Oct 15/1953

Dear Mrs. Jessup

It is a very long time since any letters passed between us. I am in fact in your debt, counting it strict ‘turn-about’, but I regarded your last letter as an answer–certainly not a question, for I think it contained none!

But you have not all this time been absent from my daily prayers. I have been very heavily worked, except for a holiday in Ireland, and I have not been very well: nothing serious, only the harmless complaint which is called sinusitis, which gives pain and rather ‘gets you down’, but nothing worse. I hope you are well and happy (as happiness goes with mortals like us–I know you are on earth, not in heaven!). Some time, where you have nothing urgent to do, write me a line to say how you go on. This of mine of course calls for no answer: it is only a little wave of the flag to show you I’m still here and never unmindful even when I’m silent.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO ARTHUR GREEVES (BOD):

Magdalen College

Oxford

Oct 17/53

My dear Arthur

I wonder are you allowing for the fact that in the Heir²⁰³ one of the main characters is, and is meant to be, a horrible prig, and the other a man who believes himself to be under (almost) a hereditary curse? This justifies dramatically in both a degree of introspection which may not at all be C. M. Yonge’s idea of normal Christian life. Mrs Edmonstone (clearly a good woman) does not show the same trait, nor does Amy.

I shall of course be perfectly happy to spend our joint holiday in the Inn at C’burn this year, if it so falls out. If you are in England I think you might find a few nights in the College guest room not unendurable and I’d try to give you breakfast as late as the servants cd. be expected to bear. (There are, however, clocks that chime the quarters all over Oxford; perhaps that wd. be fatal.)

I’ll send you W’s book²⁰⁴ as soon as it is out. I think you’ll like it. V. difficult to write to Gundred about J.F.’s death, wasn’t it.²⁰⁵

This has been the most exquisitely beautiful autumn I can remember.

Yours

Jack

TO GEOFFREY BLES (BOD):

Magdalen College

Oxford

Oct 20th 53

My dear Bles

How stupid of me not to see that our old friend ‘out of the frying pan into the fire’ becomes nonsense when converted into ‘better the frying pan than the fire’. I’m glad you pointed it out. And I can’t think of any good substitute wh. cd. be fitted into the same number of spaces. So dele.²⁰⁶

The Phillips one is v. curious, because surely the argument at that point in Hebrews does precisely identify ‘man’ in the psalms with ‘the Man’, Our Lord.²⁰⁷

I am of course delighted at all you tell me about M.C. Very over-driven at present. We’re both well: kindest regards to both of you.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO I. O. EVANS (W):

Magdalen

Oct 25th 53

Dear Evans

I return the cuttings. I enjoyed them all, but the phrase-book items were the cream. And not only because you had good raw material: the showmanship was just right. I quite agree that when it comes to absurdity nature beats art: there’s nothing in the lists of imaginary ‘howlers’ as funny as things I have really seen when examining. You will hardly believe the following but we had it offered in the college entrance exam: ‘In any controversy half the people generally side with the majority and half with the minority’

I have no brief against co-education. I am, in principle, inclined (having no school-mastering experience I wd. not go further than an inclination either way) to approve it. But just as fine printing (in itself a delightful thing) has in fact got itself mixed up with pornography, so co-education has in fact got itself mixed up with crank schools, take Dartington Hall.²⁰⁸ I didn’t make Experiment House²⁰⁹ cranky because it was co-ed: I made it co-ed because it was cranky.

I must look up A. G. Pym:²¹⁰ can’t remember if I’ve read it or not. With all good wishes.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO MARY NEYLAN (T):

Magdalen College

Oxford

Nov 5/53

Alas, it couldn’t come at a worse time. I’m at it all day trying to finish the Bibliography (odious job) of my big OHEL book against time, in between tutorials: usually my day allows no leisure between 8.30 a.m. & 9.45 p.m. So I must hope to meet Sarah another time. Thanks pro orationibus.²¹¹ The sinus is not yet anything like so bad as it was last winter. Blessings on all—

C.S.L.

TO MARY VAN DEUSEN (W):

Magdalen College

Oxford

Nov 5/53

Dear Mrs. Van Deusen

This must be a hasty scrawl as I’m working against time at present & usually have no free moment between 8.30 a.m. & 9.45 p.m.

So glad to hear all your good news. About CSR²¹² I’m the last person to give an opinion. I am so much the reverse of the type that ‘joins things’ or ‘gets things up’ that I’d be no fair judge even if I knew the parish and the people. Of course it all depends what the latter are really like! On that turns whether it is (a.) A holy, beneficent & sensible activity (b.) A harmless, if rather fussy, hobby (c.) A pestilent coven of snoopers & busybodies (d) A mixture of all three. It might be anything almost! I’m afraid you’ll have to find out! Praying for ‘a right judgement in all things’.²¹³

I hope in a few weeks I’ll be through my present furore of work & able to correspond properly again. Bless you all

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE (W):

Magdalen College

Oxford

Nov. 6/53

Dear Mrs. Shelburne

Oh I am glad, I am glad. And here’s a thing worth recording. Of course I have been praying for you daily, as always, but latterly have found myself doing so with much more concern and especially about 2 nights ago, with such a strong feeling how very nice it would be, if God willed, to get a letter from you with good news. And then, as if by magic (indeed it is the whitest magic in the world) the letter comes today. Not (lest I should indulge in folly) that your relief had not in fact occurred before my prayer, but as if, in tenderness for my puny faith, God moved me to pray with especial earnestness just before He was going to give me the thing. How true that our prayers are really His prayers: He speaks to Himself through us.

I am also most moved at hearing how you were supported thro’ the period of anxiety. For one is sometimes tempted to think that if He wanted us to be as un-anxious as the lilies of the field He really might have given us a constitution more like theirs! But then when the need cornes He carries out in us His otherwise impossible instructions. In fact He always has to do all the things–all the prayers, all the virtues. No new doctrine, but newly come home to me. Forgive a short letter, quite inadequate to the subject: I am at present just so busy (tho’ not unhappily so) that I don’t know if I’m on my head or my heels. God bless you.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

During the first week of November Joy Gresham arrived in London, this time with her two sons, David and Douglas. They took rooms in the Avoca House Hotel, 43 Belsize Park, Hampstead. A few days later they moved into a flat at 14 Belsize Park, in the hotel annexe.

TO VERA GEBBERT (W):

Magdalen College

Oxford

Nov 7th 53

Dear Mrs. Gebbert

This will have to be an inadequate scrawl for my brother, who drives the typewriter, is away and I’ve so much to do that I can hardly write–in the double sense that I’ve hardly time and that my right hand is stiff and tired with compulsory scribbling! Yes, babies (tho’ I know yours is quite unlike all other babies!) do look like Sir W.²¹⁴ I wonder why? ‘Trailing clouds of glory’ I suppose.²¹⁵

I’d love to have seen that shop window and hope they have done the same with all the Lions successors: there are 3 of these now, I hope you know.

Mrs. Williams²¹⁶ lives at 23 ANTRIM MANSIONS, LONDON, N.W.3. I think life is pretty hard for her and am very glad to hear of your friend’s wish to write to her. You shd. warn her that Mrs. W is not at all intellectual.

How wrong you are when you think that streamlined planes and trains wd. attract me to America. What I want to see there is yourself and 3 or 4 other good friends, after New England, the Rip Van Winkle Mts., Nantucket, the Huckleberry Finn country, the Rockies, Yellowstone Park, and a sub-Artie winter. And I shd. never come if I couldn’t manage to come by sea instead of air: preferably on a cargo boat that took weeks on the voyage. I’m a rustic animal and a maritime animal: no good at great cities, big hotels, or all that. But this is becoming egotistical. And here comes my first pupil of the morning. All blessings, and love to all.

Yours,

C. S. Lewis

I’d love to see a bear, a snow-shoe, and a real forest

TO GEOFFREY BLES (BOD):

Magdalen College

Oxford

Nov 12th 53

My dear Bles

Right-oh. I’ll take the £17-0-0 and expect to have £8-10-0 Royalties deducted.

I can’t tell you how glad I am that you spotted that howler about the frying pan and the fire. I wonder no hostile reviewer seized on it.²¹⁷

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE (W):

Magdalen College

Oxford

27/xi/53

Dear Mrs. Shelburne

Thank you for your letter of Nov. 23rd. We have a good many things in common at the moment, for I also am dead tired (cab-horse tired) and I also have sinusitis. I don’t think we exactly ‘call it catarrh’ over here. Intense catarrh is one symptom of sinusitis, and as none of us have heard of s. till quite lately I suppose cases of it used to be wrongly diagnosed as mere catarrh. I find myself that when it produces most catarrh it produces least pain and vice versa.

About sleep: do you find that the great secret (if one can do it) is not to care whether you sleep? Sleep is a jade who scorns her suitors but woos her scorners.

I feel exactly as you do about the horrid commercial racket they have made out of Christmas. I send no cards and give no presents except to children.

It is fun to see you agreeing with what you believe to be my views on prayer: well you may, for they are not mine but scriptural. Our prayers are God talking to Himself’ is only Romans, VII, 26-27.²¹⁸ And ‘praying to the end’ is of course our old acquaintance, the parable of the Unjust Judge.²¹⁹

I am sure you will be glad to hear that your recent adventures have been a great support and ‘corroboration’ to me. I am also v. conscious (and was especially so while praying for you during your workless time) that anxiety is not only a pain wh. we must ask God to assuage but also a weakness we must ask Him to pardon–for He’s told us take no care for the morrow. The news that you had been almost miraculously guarded from that sin and spared that pain and hence the good hope that we shall all find the like mercy when our bad times come, has strengthened me much. God bless you.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO MARY VAN DEUSEN (W):

Magdalen College

Oxford

Nov 28th 1953

Dear Mrs. Van Deusen–

Your letter links onto something I’ve been thinking of lately. There are two patterns of prayer in the N.T. (a) That in Gethsemane, ‘Not my will but thine’²²⁰ (b) That in Mark xi, 24.²²¹

In the one the pray-er sees that what is asked may not be God’s will: in the other he has complete faith not only ‘in God’ but in God’s giving him the particular thing asked for. If both are taken as universal rules we get a contradiction for no one (so far as I can see) cd. follow both in the same prayer.

I can only suppose that neither is a universal rule, that each has its place, and that when-and-if God demands faith of the B type, He also gives it, & we shall know that we have to pray in the b manner, and that this is what happens to miracle workers.

If your Rector is such a person then he is right in praying that way himself, tho’ presumably wrong in demanding that everyone shd. do the same. If he is a presumptuous person who thinks he is in the A [B?] class and isn’t–well, that is not for us to judge.

As to whether God ever wills suffering, I think he is confused. We must distinguish in God, and even in ourselves, absolute will from relative will. No one absolutely wills to have a tooth out, but many will to have a tooth out rather than to go on with toothache. Surely in the same way God never absolutely wills the least suffering for any creature, but may will it rather than some alternative: e.g. He willed the crucifixion rather than that Man shd. go unredeemed (and so it was not, in all senses, His will that the cup shd. pass from His Son).

That’s how I see the theoretical side of the thing. As for the practical-oh dear, oh dear! I certainly can’t conceive any less suitable preparation for Holy Communion than a Discussion or any grosser abuse of language than to call a Discussion a ‘meditation’. I think you and you only can decide whether it’s your job to ‘lead’ a study group or not.

As for the ‘blasting’ sermon no doubt the type blasted is an evil one. Is there good evidence that the preacher meant you to be included in that type? It does sometimes happen that utterances intended to be general are given particular application by the hearers. If it really was addressed to you, then no doubt you must just try to forgive it (as you have done) and otherwise do nothing about it.

The Bishop sounds a good one and I don’t see how you can go wrong in following his orders. He will know much better than I cd. at what point the frustrations and the risk of loss of charity (in oneself or others) occasioned by your parochial activities begin to outweigh the probabilities of usefulness. What a coil it all is: so much so that (as in graver matters) only by putting the will of God first & other considerations nowhere can one have peace. So glad to hear that all goes well with the young people. Love to all.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO MRS D. JESSUP (W):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

Dec 1st 1953

Dear Mrs. Jessup

I am so glad to hear that certain mountains have shrunk to molehills. As to the problem of Thomas Merton versus C.W, E.U., G.M.,²²² and C.S.L.:–

A. There are two meanings of World in N.T. (i) In ‘God so loved the World’²²³ it means the Creation–stars, trees, beasts, men, and angels, (ii) In ‘Love not the World’²²⁴ it means the ‘worldly’ life, i.e. the life built up by men in disregard of God, the life of money-making, ambition, snobbery, social success and ‘greatness’.

B. Most spiritual writers distinguish two vocations for Christians (i.) The monastic or contemplative life, (ii) The secular or active life. All Christians are called to abandon the ‘World’ (sense ii) in spirit, i.e. to reject as strongly as they possibly can its standards, motives, and prizes. But some are called to ‘come out of it’²²⁵ as far as possible by renouncing private property, marriage, their professions etc: others have to remain ‘in it’ but not ‘of it’.

I of course am in the second class and write for those who are also in it. This isn’t to say that I may not be (you may be sure I am) far too much ‘of it’. You, and your friend, must help me against that with your prayers. In so far as she accuses me of ‘worldliness’ she is right: but if by ‘earthiness’ she means my tendency to ‘come down to brass tacks’ and try to deal with the ordinary petty sins & virtues of secular & domestic life, she is wrong. That is a thing that ought to be done and has not yet been done enough.

About avoiding amusements & noise, it depends a bit who one is. Is the temptation to be absorbed by them? Then avoid. Is the temptation to avoid them thro’ distaste when charity bids one to participate? Then participate. At least that’s how I see it.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO VERA GEBBERT (W): TS 192/53.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

1st December 1953.

Dear Mrs. Gebbert,

Many thanks for your kind letter of the 20th. November, which should have been answered sooner, but I am very behindhand, owing to the illness of my brother (nothing serious, and now happily over); but of course his absence always delays matters. He sends you all good wishes, and promises you a letter as soon as he has got himself ‘sorted out’. We both look forward with that schoolboy greediness which distinguishes the post-war Englishman, to the arrival of the little parcel, which we are sure will be of the standard which we have learnt to associate with the House of Gebbert. You shall indeed have a copy of the CHAIR, suitably autographed,²²⁶ and I only wish I could make you some better return for all your kindness to us.

I look forward to seeing the snapshot of the son and heir. So ignorant am I of all these matters, that I had always understood that all children were born with hair on their heads; apparently this is not the case? And that CM. beat fourteen other arrivals?

Life here flows on much as usual, with one important exception; we are having the most extraordinary ‘fall’ within living memory; believe it or not, last Sunday, 29th. November, down at Brighton, they had to dig the deck chairs out of winter storage to meet the demands of the crowds which wanted to sit and bask on the beach. Tell that to your millionaires who go to Florida at this time of the year! Your (I mean American) stock is high here at the moment, over your behaviour about the Bermuda conference; some journalist of genius sent over an excerpt from the American Press which said, that whilst entirely disbelieving in the utility of the performance, it must be held ‘because we must’nt run out on old Winnie’.²²⁷ We don’t think, any more than you, that the circus will accomplish anything, but this is the sort of small touch that counts in international relations.

Apropos of which, it seems a pity that our Queen could’nt have dropped in on America in the course of her tour; but I suppose international etiquette demands that, if she went there at all, it must be a full-dress state visit to Washington. Anyway I suppose a visit to the Republic of Panama is to all intents and purposes a visit to U.S.A.²²⁸

I am in the final agonies of producing a learned work for the Oxford Press, and very, very busy: so I hope you will excuse such a scanty letter.

With all best wishes to all three of you from us two,

yours ever,²²⁹

TO SIR STANLEY UNWIN (BOD): ²³⁰

Magdalen College

Oxford

Dec 4th 1953

Dear Mr. Unwin

I would willingly do all in my power to secure for Tolkien’s great book the recognition it deserves. Wd. the enclosed be any use? If not, tell me, and I will try again. I can’t tell you how much we think of your House for publishing it.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

It would be almost safe to say that no book like this has ever been written. If Ariosto rivalled it in invention (in fact he does not) he would still Jack its heroic seriousness. No imaginary world has been projected which is at once so multifarious and so true to its own inner laws; none so seemingly objective, so disinfected from the taint of an author’s merely individual psychology; none so relevant to the actual human situation yet so free from allegory. And what fine shading there is in the variations of style to meet the almost endless diversity of scenes and characters–comic, homely, epic, monstrous, or diabolic!

TO KATHARINE FARRER(BOD):

Magdalen College

Oxford

Dec. 4th 1953

Dear Mrs. Farrer

Yes, I know. That issue about the leonine form divides people sharply and you and I are on opposite sides of a fence.²³¹

I too have got The Fellowship of the Ring and have gluttonously read two chapters instead of saving it all for the week-end. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if it really succeeded (in selling, I mean)? It would inaugurate a new age. Dare we hope?

Yours sincerely

Jack Lewis

TO J. R R TOLKIEN (P):

[The Kilns]

Dec 7th 1953

Dear Tollers

I have been trying–like a boy with a bit of toffee–to take Vol. I slowly, to make it last, but appetite overmastered me and it’s now finished: far too short for me. The spell does not break. The love of Gimli²³² and the departure from Lothlórien is still almost unbearable.²³³ What came out stronger at this reading than on any previous one was the gradual coming of the shadow–step by step–over Boromir.²³⁴

I wrote what I could to Unwin.²³⁵ Even if he and you approve my words, think twice before using them: I am certainly a much, and perhaps an increasingly, hated man whose name might do you more harm than good. In festina lente.²³⁶ All the best.

Yours

Jack

TO EDNA GREENE WATSON (BOD): TS 504/53.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

7th December 1953.

Dear Mrs. Watson,

How very kind indeed of you to send me such a nice Xmas present; for, though things are improving over here under Winston, we are still not exactly living in a land of milk and honey–cake in particular remaining something of a luxury. So your parcel comes in very apropos to ‘mend our cheer’ as the older writers would have put it.

In one way we are exceptionally lucky this year, and that is in having so far a freak winter. I am writing in an unwarmed room, temperature 60, though it is a dull, sunless day; and the Sunday before last, the crowds were out sun-bathing on Brighton beach! Yesterday it was reported on the wireless that the butter-cups are out in Switzerland, the tulips in Holland, and that wild strawberries are being gathered in Norway; whilst in Petrograd they are having what I suppose seems to them like a heat wave–temperature in the open, 41. I hope you too in America are benefiting by this postponement of winter; not that I, personally, think it very healthy, but no doubt the real winter is lurking not far away.

Weather apart, there is not much to report here. Term is just over, and I have finished a troublesome academic book, and look forward to my vacation. But, alas, at my time of life, vacations get shorter and shorter: though to be sure, so do terms. With all best wishes for a happy Christmas, and many thanks,

yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO R. B. GRIBBON (W):

Magdalen College

Oxford

Dec. 10th 1953

Dear Mr. Gribbon

Thanks for your letter of the 7th, and all good wishes to the readers of Lucretius.²³⁷

Harding has fought his way towards genuinely Christian Theism, but whether he has yet quite reached it is another matter.²³⁸ I think his ‘God’ could be said to ‘transcend’. Isn’t each being in his hierarchy related to the one below it rather as my consciousness is related to any obscure consciousness there may be in my particles. And ‘I’ am not related to them (I think) simply as a Pantheistic god is to finite beings: for I am something v. much more than their sum or even their organising principle. Of course H’s God is immanent in all things: but it is not the affirmation of immanence, but the denial of transcendence that constitutes Pantheism. In fact my main objection to Harding’s system wd. be a v. different one: that we are in it completely cut off from God. There can be no I-Thou relation between Him and us any more than between me and my particles. Memo: I said in the preface that I wasn’t at all sure whether his method of trying to restore reality to the universe wd. work. It was the mere attempt to do so which seemed to me so important and welcome.²³⁹

You’ll have fun with Lucretius. I looked into him the other day & came to the melancholy conclusion that I didn’t know so much Latin as I had done 30 years ago. With all good wishes.

Yours very sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO DOROTHY L. SAYERS (W): ²⁴⁰

Magdalen College

Oxford

Dec 16th. 1953

Dear Miss Sayers,

Thank you for a really august card. I have spent several minutes doing the Paper Pilgrimage with the aid of the pen-knife point–dig- and it shall be opened. Not all the doors in my copy do actually open: but that admits (only too easily) of an allegorical interpretation.²⁴¹

I see we have been in the pillory together along with company which I enjoy less than yours. Have you read Miss Nott yet?²⁴² And should I? I had hoped she might send us all (as someone said) UN complimentary copies: for I’m an Ulster Scot and don’t like spending good siller²⁴³ on the lady. As for answering her (if one can) the trouble is that the people who read answers have hardly ever read the attack.

When may we expect the Purgatorio?²⁴⁴ It is perhaps my favourite part of the Comedy and I look forward very much to going up and round the terraces with your guidance. (By the way some of the paths on the Malvern hills are exactly like them.

I hope you are reading my brother’s Splendid Century. It is his first book, tho’ he is three years my senior, but he has been at the court of Louis XIV pretty well all his life. It seems to be going down well. I have got my huge 16th. c volume for the Oxford History of English Literature nearly off my chest now, and feel inclined never to do any work again as long as I live.

It seems very long since we met. Are you at all likely to be here in 1954? I hope so. In the meantime, all good wishes, all my duty,

yours ever

C. S. Lewis

Lewis invited Joy and her sons to The Kilns for a three-day visit, from 17 to 20 December. Renée Pierce had now divorced her husband, Claude, preparatory to marrying Bill Gresham.

TO PHYLLIDA (W):

Magdalen College

Oxford

Dec 18th 53

Dear Phyllida

Thanks for your most interesting cards. How do you get the gold so good? Whenever I tried to use it, however golden it looked on the shell, it always looked only like rough brown on the paper. Is it that you have some trick with the brush that I never learned, or that gold paint is better now than when I was a boy? The ‘conversation-piece’ (I think that is what the art critics wd. call your group) is excellent and most interesting. If you hadn’t told me your Father was mixing putty I shd. have thought he was mixing colours on a palette, but otherwise everything explains itself. I never saw a family who all had such a likeness to their Mother.

I’m not quite sure what you meant about ‘silly adventure stories without any point’. If they are silly, then having a point won’t save them. But if they are good in themselves, and if by a ‘point’ you mean some truth about the real world wh. one can take out of the story, I’m not sure that I agree. At least, I think that looking for a ‘point’ in that sense may prevent one from getting the real effect of the story in itself–like listening too hard for the words in singing which isn’t meant to be listened to that way (like an anthem in a chorus). I’m not at all sure about all this, mind you: only thinking as I go along.

We have two American boys in the house at present, aged 8 and 61/2.²⁴⁵ Very nice. They seem to use much longer words than English boys of that age would: not showing off but just because they don’t seem to know the short words. But they haven’t as good table manners as English boys of the same sort would.

Well–all good wishes to you all for Christmas, and very many thanks.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

PS. Of course you’re right about the Narnian books being better than the tracts: at least, in the way a picture is better than a map.

TO LAURENCE HARWOOD (BOD):

Magdalen College

Oxford

Dec 21st 1953

My dear Lawrence,

What luck now? I enclose a trifle for current expenses. Please tell your father how sorry I was I couldn’t have him for either of the two days he mentioned: we have had an American lady staying in the house with her two sons, eldest 91/2 Whew! But you have younger brothers, so you know what it is like. We didn’t: we do now. Very pleasant, but like surf bathing, leaves one rather breathless. Love to yourself and Sylvia and all.

Yours ever

C. S. Lewis

Millions of letters to write.

TO RUTH PITTER(BOD):

Magdalen College

Oxford

Dec 21st 53

My dear Ruth

Welcome to what Tolkien calls the Little Kingdom, at least to the marches of it. Its centre lies about Worminghall: see his Farmer Giles of Ham.²⁴⁶ I hope much happiness awaits you there. It will be interesting to see how soon you rusticate–grow slow-witted like us and believe that the streets of Thame (now your metropolis) are paved with gold and shiver delightfully at the thought of its mingled wickedness and splendour.

Warnie (short for Warren, for my mother’s mother was of that stock so we have ¼ of gentle blood in us the rest being peasant and bourgeois) and I are dazed: we have had an American lady staying in the house with her two sons aged 91/2 and 8. I now know what we celibates are shielded from. I will never laugh at parents again. Not that the boys weren’t a delight: but a delight like surf-bathing which leaves one breathless and aching. The energy, the tempo, is what kills. I have now perceived (what I always suspected from memories of our childhood) that the way to a child’s heart is quite simple: treat them with seriousness & ordinary civility–they ask no more. What they can’t stand (quite rightly) is the common adult assumption that everything they say shd. be twisted into a kind of jocularity. The mother (Mrs. Gresham) had rather a boom in USA in the entre-guerre as the poetess Joy Davidman: do you know her works?

This Vac. is pretty chock-a-block so far (oh if we could have Christmas without Xmas!) so that I rather hope than expect to knock on your door. Meanwhile, all greetings to you both. God bless the house, as we say in Ireland.

Yours

Jack

TO JOY GRESHAM (BOD):

Dec 22/53

Dear Joy–

As far as I can remember you were non-committal about Childhood’s End:²⁴⁷ I suppose you were afraid that you might raise my expectations too high and lead to disappointment. If that was your aim, it has succeeded, for I came to it expecting nothing in particular and have been thoroughly bowled over. It is quite out of range of the common space-and-time writers; away up near Lindsay’s Voyage to Arcturus and Wells’s First Men in the Moon.²⁴⁸ It is better than any of Stapleton’s.²⁴⁹ It hasn’t got Ray Bradbury’s delicacy, but then it has ten times his emotional power, and far more mythopoeia.

There is one bit of bad execution, I think: caps 7 and 8, where the author doesn’t seem to be at home. I mean, as a social picture it is flat and stiff, and all the gadgetry (for me) is a bore. But what there is on the credit side! It is rather like the effect of the Ring²⁵⁰–a self-riching work, harmony piling up on harmony, grandeur on grandeur, pity on pity. The first section, merely on the mystery of the Overlords, wd. be enough for most authors. Then you find this is only the background, and when you have worked up to the climax in chap 21, you find what seems to be an anti-climax and it slowly lifts itself to the utter climax. The first climax, pp 165-185 brought tears to my eyes. There has been nothing like it for years: partly for the actual writing–’She has left her toys behind but ours go hence with us’,²⁵¹ or ‘The island rose to meet the dawn’,²⁵² but partly (still more, in fact) because here we meet a modern author who understands that there may be things that have a higher claim than the survival or happiness of humanity: a man who cd. almost understand ‘He that hateth not father and mother’²⁵³ and certainly wd. understand the situation in Aeneid III between those who go on to Latium & those who stay in Sicily.²⁵⁴

We are almost brought up out of psyche into pneuma.²⁵⁵ I mean, his myth does that to us imaginatively. Of course his own thoughts about what that higher level might be are not, in our eyes, very new or very profound: but that doesn’t really make so much difference. (Though, by the way, it wd. have been better, even on purely literary grounds, to leave it in its mystery, to philosophise less.) After all, few authors’ glosses on their own myths are as good as the myths: unless, like Dante, they take the glosses from other men, real thinkers. The second climax, the long (not too long) drawn-out close is magnificent.

There is only one change (in conception) that I wd. want to make. It is a pity that he suggests a jealousy and a possible future revolt on the part of the Overlords. The motive is so ordinary that it cannot excite interest in itself, and as it is never going to be worked out the handling cannot compensate for the banality. How much better, how much more in tune with Clarke’s own imagined universe, if the Overlords were totally resigned, submissive yet erect in an eternal melancholy–like the great heroes and poets in Dante’s Limbo who live forever ‘in desire but not in hope’.²⁵⁶ But now one is starting to re-write the book…

Many minor dissatisfactions, of course. The women are all made up out of a few abstract ideas of jealousy, vanity, maternity etc. But it really matters v. little: the thing is great enough to carry far more faults than it commits. It is a strange comment on our age that such a book lies hid in a hideous paper-backed edition, wholly unnoticed by the cognoscenti, while any ‘realistic’ drivel about some neurotic in a London flat–something that needs no real invention at all, something that any educated man could write if he chose, may get seriously reviewed and mentioned in serious books–as if it really mattered. I wonder how long this tyranny will last? Twenty years ago I felt no doubt that I should live to see it all break up and great literature return: but here I am, losing teeth and hair, and still no break in the clouds.

And now, what do you think? Do you agree that it is AN ABSOLUTE CORKER?²⁵⁷

TO PHYLLIS ELINOR SANDEMAN (W):

Magdalen College

Oxford

Dec 22d 1953

Dear Mrs. Sandeman–

First, you may be quite sure that I realise (I’d be a fool if I didn’t) that there is something in a loss like yours which no unmarried person can understand. Secondly, that nothing I or anyone can say will remove the pain. There are no anaesthetics. About the bewilderment and about the right and wrong ways of using the pain, something may perhaps be done: but one can’t stop it hurting. The worst way of using the pain, you have already avoided: i.e. resentment.

Now about not wanting to pray, surely there is one person you v. much want to pray for: your husband himself.²⁵⁸ You ask, can he help you, but isn’t this probably the time for you to help him. In one way, you see, you are further on than he: you had begun to know God. He couldn’t help you in that way: it seems to me quite possible that you can now help more than while he was alive. So get on with that right away. Our Lord said that man & wife were one flesh and forbade any man to put them asunder:²⁵⁹ and we maybe sure He doesn’t do Himself what He forbade us to do. Your present prayers for yr. husband are still part of the married life.

Then as for your own shock in discovering that you hadn’t got nearly as far as you thought towards loving the God who made your husband & gave him to you more than the gift. Well, no. One keeps on thinking one has crossed that bridge before one has. And God knows that it has to be crossed sooner or later, in this life or in another. And the first step is to discover that one has not crossed it yet. I wonder could He have really shown you this in any other way? Or even if we can’t answer that, can’t we trust Him to know when and how best the terrible operation can be done? Of course it is easy (I know) for the person who isn’t feeling the pain to say all these things. You yourself wd. have been able to say them of anyone else’s loss. Whatever rational grounds there are for doubt, you knew them all before: can it be rational (of course, it is natural) to weight them so differently simply because, this time, oneself is the sufferer? Doesn’t that make it obvious that the doubts come not from the reason but from the shrinking nerves? At any rate, don’t try to argue with them: not now, while you are crippled. Ignore them: go on. Be regular in all your religious duties. Remember it is not being loved but loving wh. is the high & holy thing. You are now practising the second without the full comfort of the first. It was certain from the beginning that you wd. some day have to do this, for no human love passes onto the eternal level in any other way. God knows, many wives have had to learn it by a path harder than even bereavement: having to love unfaithful, drunken, or childish husbands. And have succeeded too: as God succeeds in loving us. May He help you.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO VERA GEBBERT (W): TS

192/53.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

23rd December 1953.

Dear Mrs. Gebbert,

‘Thank heavens’ said my brother, knee deep in Christmas cards and packing paper, ‘here’s something like a real present at last!’ And of course, he was right, though we have so far merely got down to the package: for, like good little boys, we would not for worlds open the box until the morning of the 25th. Thank you very much for your kindness in remembering us. Though the calendar says it is Christmas week, there is nothing about the weather to indicate the fact: still mild, indeed at times warm, and no signs of snow; and I gather that conditions are just the same in eastern America.

My brother was much interested in your recommendation of the Panama Canal route in your last letter, and has often told me of it: he having come by cargo boat from Shanghai to Boston in his army days. He adds that if you ever take a vacation in the Eastern States, you would find it great fun to join the ship at San Pedro, Cal, and go via Panama and the West Indies.

We have not much news here; the chief event has been that last week we entertained a lady from New York for four days, with her boys, aged nine and seven respectively. Can you imagine two crusted old batchelors in such a situation? It however went swimmingly, though it was very, very exhausting; the energy of the American small boy is astonishing. This pair thought nothing of a four mile hike across broken country as an incident in a day of ceaseless activity, and when we took them up Magdalen tower, they said as soon as they got back to the ground, ‘Let’s do it again!’ Without being in the least priggish, they struck us as being amazingly adult by our standards and one could talk to them as one would to ‘grown-ups’–though the next moment they would be wrestling like puppies on the sitting room floor. The highlights of England for them are (a), open coal fires, especially if they can get hold of the bellows and blow it up, and (b), English policemen for whom they keep a smart look-out. The latter they seemed to find even more thrilling than what they call the ‘toy soldiers’, i.e. the Guards in scarlet outside Buckingham Palace. But I am forgetting that to you there is nothing exotic about American small boys, and no doubt at present your interest is concentrated on one American small boy–who I hope is in the best of health and spirits.

Do you know the admirable French word Tohu-bohu? In Scots, a ‘kerfuffle’? Meaning a domestic upsidedownedness which overtakes us all at this season? When it has subsided, I plan to go down to Malvern for a couple of days to prepare myself for the ordeal of the oncoming term with a few walks over the hills.

With all best wishes to you and both the Mr. Gebberts for a happy and a prosperous 1954,

yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO NELL BERNERS-PRICE (W):

Magdalen College

Oxford

Dec 26. 53

Dear Nell

What a lovely card! Please give Penelope my very great thanks. Indeed ‘card’ is the wrong word. You, or she, also included a piece of blotting paper: is this a subtle way of suggesting that some previous letter of mine looked as if I were rather short of that commodity-? Well, anyway, I usually am, and welcome a new piece. I am delighted to hear that Peter is doing so well at school: how proud you must be of him.

My brother and I have just had the experience (a v. rum one for two hardened old bachelors) of an American lady to stay with us accompanied by her two sons, aged 91/2 and 8. Whew! Lovely creatures-couldn’t meet nicer children–but the pace! I realise I have never respected you married people enough and never dreamed of the Sabbath calm wh. descends on the house when the little cyclones have gone to bed and all the grown-ups fling themselves into chairs and the silence of exhaustion.

Christmas is now catching me up too: so far as I can see I have several thousands of letters to answer. Please give my love to all, and best wishes for a good 1954.

Yours

Jack Lewis

TO RHONA BODLE (BOD): ²⁶⁰

Magdalen College

Oxford

Dec 26/53

Dear Miss Bodle

Thanks for yr. most interesting letter. I am delighted to hear of your success in getting some Christian knowledge across to these children. It is wicked that they shd. be so deprived. Even an agnostic who does not believe the stories to be true ought to see that they are, at the very least, part of our common heritage, like Homer and the Arthurian stories.

About re-reading books: I find like you that those read in my earlier ‘teens often have no appeal, but this is not nearly so often true of those read in earlier childhood. Girls may develop differently, but for me, looking back, it seems that the glories of childhood and the glories of adolescence are separated by a howling desert during which one was simply a greedy, cruel, spiteful little animal and imagination, in all but the lowest form, was asleep.

I hope your new house will be very blessed. It was Charles Williams from whom I got the words ‘holy luck’. And now for piles of Christmas letters: many of them, unlike yours, from people I don’t want to write to at all. Every blessing.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO NATHAN COMFORT STARR (W): PC, TS

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

26th December 1953.

Dear Starr,

Yes, Hori did call: an interesting man. Glad you’re home again, and no doubt so are you.

All good wishes from us both for a happy and prosperous New Year.

Yours,

C. S. Lewis

TO MARY VAN DEUSEN (W):

Magdalen College

Oxford

Dec 28th 53

Dear Mrs. Van Deusen

Thanks for yr. letter of the 20th: my congratulations to yr. husband on his interesting work. About Paul, I believe (having been a sickly child myself) that there are compensations. I think that from many minor illnesses in the first 12 years one develops sometimes a certain amount of immunity later on: ones system has had so much practice in dealing with bacilli. It also probably helps to make one a reader: not that there isn’t a danger of falling or sinking too far into the life of the imagination, but a habit of reading is a great source of happiness.

I think someone ought to write a book on ‘Christian life for Laymen under a bad Parish Priest’ for the problem is bound to occur in the best churches. The motto wd. be of course Herbert’s lines about the sermon ‘If all Jack sense, God takes a text and preaches patience’.²⁶¹

Like you, we suffer (but under a v. good priest) from the virtual extinction of Morning Prayer in favour of an 11 o’clock Celebration.²⁶² But I suppose there is something to be said for it. This is the only ritual act Our Lord commanded Himself. It is the one we can have only thro’ a priest, whereas we can all read Matins to ourselves or our families at home whenever we please. So here I have no difficulty in submission.

Is there not something especially good (and even, in the end, joyful) about mere obedience (in lawful things) to him who bears our Master’s authority, however unworthy he be–perhaps all the more, if he is unworthy? Perhaps we are put under tiresome priests chiefly to give us the opportunity of learning this beautiful & happy virtue: so that if we use the situation well we can profit more, perhaps, than we shd. have done under a better man. I have seen lovely children under not v. nice parents, & good troops under bad officers: and a good dog with a bad master is a lesson to us all. I mean, of course, as long as the bad orders are not in themselves wrong: and attendance at Holy Communion can’t be that!

Yes, we must both go on thinking about the two kinds of prayer. I think the one in Mark xi is for very advanced people: and you point out it was said to the disciples, not to the crowds. All blessings.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO PHYLLIS ELINOR SANDEMAN (W):

Magdalen College

Oxford

Dec 31/53

Dear Mrs Sandeman–

You have of course been much in my prayers since your first letter and today’s seems like an answer to them. I was afraid of some real crack in the structure! Now it is clear that you have to deal only with what we may call a ‘clean pain’.

I can well understand how in addition to, and mingling with, the void and loneliness, there is a great feeling of unprotectedness and a horror of coping with all the things–the harsh, outer world–from which you have hitherto been shielded. I first met this ‘cold blast on the naked heath’²⁶³ at about 9, when my Mother died, and there has never really been any sense of security and snugness since. That is, I’ve not quite succeeded in growing up on that point: there is still too much of ‘Mammy’s little lost boy’ about me. Your position is of course v. different, both because dependence on a husband is more legitimate than dependence (after a certain age) on one’s Mother, and also because, at your age, tho’ it will feel just as bad, it is not so likely to go down into the unconscious and produce a trauma. And one sees too (tho’ it sounds brutal to say it) how this miserable necessity of fending for oneself might be an essential part of your spiritual education. I suppose God wants a bit of Imogen and Portia in you, having worked in the Miranda and Perdita part enough²⁶⁴ (it is sometimes helpful to think of oneself as a picture wh. He is painting).

By the way, I share to the full–no words can say how strongly I share–that distaste for everything communal and collective wh. you describe in your husband. I really believe I wd. have come to Christianity much less reluctantly if it had not involved the Church. And I don’t wonder you failed to convince him that that community is perfectly right. It is holy and commanded: not at present (I think) perfect! No doubt he is learning ‘togetherness’ now as you, alas, are learning ‘aloneness’. Both painful lessons: it can so seldom happen that what we need is what we like (for if we liked it we’d have helped ourselves to it already & wouldn’t need it–aren’t children made to eat fat wh. they hate?). You will be all right, Mrs. Sandeman. All will be well in the end, tho’ by hard ways. All earthly loves go thro’ some fire before they can inherit the Kingdom. If it weren’t this, it wd. be some other fire. God bless you. Let us pray for one another.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

P.S. Of course, I’m not obeying your request, ‘Help me to find some comfort in faith again.’ We shan’t find faith by looking for comfort. That’s why, even brutally, I can’t help talking in terms of a work to be done. You are, on my view, being moved into a higher form of the great school and set harder work to do. Comfort will come as you master that work, as you learn more & more to be a channel of God’s grace to your husband (and perhaps to others): not for trying to get back the conditions you had in the lower form.

Keep clear of Psychical Researchers.

1 J. Keith Kyle of the North American Service of the BBC wrote to Lewis on 31 December 1952: ‘The Columbia Broadcasting System with whom the North American Service of the BBC often co-operates…has invited us to assist them with a series called “This I Believe”…It is designed to put on the air a number of statements of personal conviction from “men and women in all stations of life, who have been successful in their chosen profession.” The CBS emphasizes that the contributions should be extremely personal in approach and as they are to be only 3 1/4 minutes in length, complete simplicity is obviously essential.’

2 Pitter gave a lecture entitled ‘A Return to Poetic Law’ to the Royal Institution of Great Britain on 22 February 1952. A copy can be found in the Pitter Papers, Temporary Box, Bodleian Library.

3 Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, First Part, pp. 73-4: ‘I thought again, this Shame tells me what men are; but it tells me nothing what God or the Word of God is. And I thought moreover, That at the day of doom, we shall not be doomed to death or life according to the hectoring spirits of the world, but according to the Wisdom and Law of the Highest. Therefore thought I, what God says, is best, though all the men in the world are against it…But indeed this Shame was a bold villain; I could scarce shake him out of my company; yea, he would be haunting of me, and continually whispering me in the ear, with some one or other of the infirmities that attend Religion; but at last I told him, Twas but in vain to attempt further in this business; for those things that he disdained, in those did I see most glory; And so at last I got past this importunate one.’

4 Since 1930 the Pitter family had owned a cottage in Felsted, Essex, where Ruth taught herself viticulture. The cottage, however, had to be left behind when Ruth and her companion of many years, Kathleen O’Hara, decided to buy a house in the village of Long Crendon, Buckinghamshire. ‘The Hawthorns’ in Chilton Road was set in several acres of garden and orchard, and was within reach of Oxford and London. They moved in shortly before Christmas 1953. Pitter noted: ‘In coming to the neighbourhood of Oxford, of course I had hoped to see a little more of Lewis, of David Cecil, and others, and to attend open lectures, plays, etc. But we could not find anything near enough to make this at all easy’ (Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. lett. c. 220/3, fol. 113).

5 Dorsett, And God Came In, ch. 3, pp. 90-1.

6 ibid., p. 91.

7 This is a reply to a letter from Don Giovanni of 9 January 1953 (?), which appears in Letters: C. S. Lewis-Don Giovanni Calabria, pp. 76-7.

8 There had been a mistake. The article, ‘Responsabilité’–which was not by Don Giovanni Calabria but by Padre Paolo Manna—was published in L’Amico, 8 (Sep.-Oct. 1952), pp. 122-4. The article is reproduced in Una Gioia Insolita, pp. 283-5.

9 Lewis had only recently begun writing the book on prayer mentioned here. He mentioned it to Don Giovanni again in a letter of 17 March 1953, but had abandoned it by the following year (see the letter to Sister Penelope of 15 February 1954). He could not think how to go on with the book until, in the spring of 1963, he found the form for what he wanted to say. The result was Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer (London: Bles, 1964; Fount, 1998).

10 1 Chronicles 13:9-10: ‘And when they came unto the threshingfloor of Chidon, Uzza put forth his hand to hold the ark; for the oxen stumbled. And the anger of the Lord was kindled against Uzza, and he smote him, because he put his hand to the ark: and there he died before God.’

11 Luke 9:62: ‘And Jesus said unto him, No man, having put his hand to the plough, and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God.’

12 In ‘Responsabilità’ Fr Manna pleads for greater recognition of the gravity of Communist persecution of Christians (hospital workers as well as missionaries) in China. He argues that if a Communist (e.g., French Communist Party leader Jacques Duelos) is arrested in the West, the Communists rise in protest. There should be no less an outcry on behalf of victimized missionaries.

13 ‘so far as’; ‘whenever’.

14 i.e., Paolo Manna.

15 Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, Bk. I, ch. 5.

16 i.e., the book on prayer.

17 Matthew 26:39; Mark 14:35.

18 Luke 22:42.

19 Lewis read a paper on this same problem to the Oxford Clerical Society on 8 December 1953. It was published as ‘Petitionary Prayer: A Problem Without an Answer’ in Christian Reflections, ed. Walter Hooper (London: Bles, 1967; Fount, 1998).

20 Eustace and Edmund are characters in the Narnian stories; Jane and Mark Studdock are the married couple in That Hideous Strength.

21 Lewis probably had in mind the last two lines of the title poem of Edna St Vincent Millay’s Renascence, and Other Poems (1925): ‘Ah, awful weight! Infinity/Pressed down upon the finite Me!’

22 Rudolf Steiner.

23 The Rev. Jones B. Shannon was executive director of the Church Society of College Work, Washington, DC.

24 In February 1953 Joy became a member of the Episcopal Church and was confirmed in the Cathedral of St John the Divine, New York.

* This is the beginning of Act V, I suppose?

25 T. H. White, Mistress Masham’s Repose (1946).

26 Mrs Van Deusen, an Episcopalian, was in touch with the Order of the Holy Cross, a Benedictine Anglican monastic order in West Park, New York. The order had suggested she become one of the Associates of Holy Cross. These lay associates lived under a modified form of the Benedictine rule suitable to laymen.

27 James was probably a clergyman Mrs Van Deusen knew.

28 Warnie served for a number of years on the vestry of Holy Trinity Church, Headington Quarry, Oxford. Vestrymen help the churchwardens deal with the temporal affairs of a parish church.

29 George Bernard Shaw.

30 Robert Louis Stevenson, Virginibus Puerisque and Other Papers (1901), ch. 1, ‘Virginibus Puerisque’: ‘Marriage is terrifying, but so is a cold and forlorn old age.’

31 In Charles Williams’s Region of the Summer Stars, ‘P’o-l’u’ is in the Antipodean Ocean. Starr was spending the academic year at Kansai University, Osaka, Japan as a Fulbright Scholar. He was then offered a professorship at the University of Florida in Gainesville, where he stayed until his retirement.

32 William Shakespeare, The Tempest (1623), I, ii, 250-93. Ariel, a spirit of the air, was once the servant of Sycorax, a wicked sorceress who imprisoned him in a ‘cloven pine’ for refusing to fulfil her commands. He was trapped inside the tree for twelve years until Prospero arrived on the island, released him, and bound him to his service.

33 Ray Bradbury, The Silver Locusts (1951).

34 The forty-seven Ronin were Samurai retainers who in 1701 avenged their master’s death by killing his enemy, and then awaiting the death sentence to be passed on them by the government. The act of defying the government, and following instead the way of the Samurai to be faithful to their lord unto death, won them everlasting fame. Every year on 14 December people gather at their graves at Sengakuji Temple in Tokyo.

35 Anthony Boucher was the pseudonym of William Anthony Parker White (1911-68), critic and author. He wrote a column on mystery stories, ‘Criminal at Large’, for the New York Times, 1951-68, and was the editor of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, 1949-58. He is the author of many works of mystery and science fiction, and it was at his suggestion that Lewis contributed two short stories, ‘The Shoddy Lands’ and ‘Ministering Angels’-reprinted in The Dark Tower and Other Stories- to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.

Boucher’s short story, ‘The Quest for St. Aquin’ was first published in New Tales of Space and Time, ed. Raymond J. Healy (New York: Holt, 1951), and ‘The Star Dummy’ was published in Fantastic (Fall 1952). They are reprinted in The Compleat Boucher: The Complete Short Science Fiction and Fantasy of Anthony Boucher (1998).

37 Old Solar for ‘God bless you.’ It is found several times in the last chapter of That Hideous Strength when Ransom blesses those who have fought with him at St Anne’s on the Hill.

* The porter at Holloway Jail told me it was ‘a ladies’ prison’

38 Bodle said of this letter: ‘I had spoken of a girl in my class at Manchester who was intelligent and had a great deal of language as she had acquired it before being deafened. In answer to her anxieties about the remoteness of God I had tried to explain who Christ is and why He had come. Then she herself said with unusual relief “Then Jesus is God”-a conception entirely new to her. I think that I must have been wondering how much of the teaching about Christ I could present with the Gospel story–a problem which I still find very difficult’ (Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. lett. c. 220/4, fols. 248-9).

39 Acts 8:31.

40 Matthew 6:12.

41 See Sir Arthur Charles Clarke in the Biographical Appendix to CX II, pp. 1024-5.

42 Clarke, in his capacity as chairman of the British Interplanetary Society, wrote to Lewis on 13 February 1953: ‘I am now trying to arrange this Society’s lecture programme for October ’53-April ’54, and the suggestion has been put forward that you might care to propose a notion that interplanetary travel is a bad thing!…It would be only fair to point out that your position might be somehow analogous to that of a Christian martyr in the arena, but I trust that consideration would not deter you’ (Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. lett. c. 220/4, fol. 16).

43 Robin Oakley-Hill (1932-) was born on 30 May 1932, the son of Dayrell R. Oakley-Hill. He went up to Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1950 where he read English under Lewis. After taking his BA in 1953 he worked as an administrative officer in the Architects’ Department of the London City Council.

44 In a note dated August 2003 Oakley-Hill said of this letter: ‘I was walking from the boathouse back to college on an unpleasantly raw winter afternoon after an unsatisfactory session of coxing when I was joined by CS Lewis waiting to cross the High. He said something like “You’re limping–did you hurt yourself?” I said no, I’d had polio, in a fairly unfriendly manner, because I was fed up with the weather, the unsatisfactory rowing and the tedious unfinished work I was going back to. He looked embarrassed and said “Oh, poor chap,” and we went our separate ways. I was astounded to get the letter next day, and was inclined to reply that it didn’t signify, but a confidant warned me to take the apology in a serious manner because otherwise it would seem that I did not appreciate the trouble he had taken in writing the letter, and I did so.’

45 In the country of Brobdingnag in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) the people are as tall as steeples, and everything else is in proportion.

46 Chad Walsh, Nellie and her Flying Crocodile, illus. Marc Simont (New York: Harper, 1956).

47 That is, become an Associate of Holy Cross.

48 Wilkie Collins, Armadale (1866).

49 Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White (1860); The Moonstone (1868).

50 In The Woman in White.

51 Green, From the World’s End, ch. 5, p. 70. In Roman legend Tarquín raped Lucrece.

52 ibid., p. 83: ‘a supreme surrender and a supreme assumption of responsibility.

53 Theodore Watts-Dunton, Aylwin (1898).

54 Green spelled the names ‘Danai’ and ‘Pasiphai’.

55 i.e., The Last Battle (1956).

56 Clifford W. Stone was writing from PO Box 528, El Dorado, Kansas.

57 Mark Twain, Report from Paradise, with drawings by Charles Locke (New York: Harper & Bros., 1952). For many years Twain played with the idea of writing an account of heaven that would debunk Christian revelation. In 1909 he published ‘Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven’, a fragment of his manuscript. Report from Paradise contains ‘Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven’ as well as the other surviving chapters of Twain’s unfinished work.

58 Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889).

59 For The Silver Chair.

60 ‘he is limping’.

61 Shakespeare, King Lear, IV, vi, 133-4: ‘Give me an ounce of civet, good apothecary, to sweeten my imagination.’

62 Palmer wanted Lewis to recommend one of his books to a publisher.

63 Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass, ch. 6: ‘’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves/Did gyre and gimble in the wabe’.

64 John Bunyan, The Life and Death of Mr. Badman (1680), ch. 8: ‘For they are a shame to religion, I say, these slithy, rob-shop, pick-pocket men, they are a shame to religion, and religious men should be ashamed of them.’

65 The New English Dictionary, the precursor of the Oxford English Dictionary.

66 See the reference to the eldila in the letter to Douglas Harding of 25 March 1951.

67 e.g., Luke 1:30: ‘And the angel said unto her, Fear not, Mary: for thou hast found favour with God.’ See also Genesis 15:1; Luke 2:10.

68 In Perelandra, ch. 16, p. 202, during the attempt to make themselves visible to Ransom, the eldila or Oyéresu of Mars and Venus appear as ‘concentric wheels moving with a rather sickening slowness one inside the other’. This imagery was inspired by the appearance of angels in Ezekiel 1:16: ‘Their appearance and their work was as it were a wheel in the middle of a wheel.’ We should notice too Miracles, ch. 14, pp. 120-1: ‘[Jahweh’s] appearance to Ezekiel is attended with imagery that does not borrow from Nature, but (it is a mystery too seldom noticed) from those machines which men were to make centuries after Ezekiel’s death. The prophet saw something suspiciously like a dynamo’

* This is not an afterthought. Mycroft funked it!

69 ‘Apiciarí had been added in Lewis’s hand.

70 W. K. Scudamore was writing from 3 Maurice Road, Seaford, Sussex.

71 This was Lewis’s ‘mangling’ of Scudamore’s name.

72 Sir Scudamour is the lover of Amoret in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, as well as the name of Lewis’s hero in The Dark Tower.

73 Bodleian Library.

74 Jane (‘Janie’) Agnes McNeill (1889-1959) was a close friend from Strandtown. See her biography in CL I, p. 117n.

75 In his letter of 16 March 1953 Bles said: ‘With some trepidation I venture to address you again on the gender of mythological creatures…On returning to the galleys of “The Silver Chair”…I find the same thing has happened again, not only with the Dwarf but with that curious creature, the Marsh-wiggle…It looks to me as though the discrepancies are due to the fact that, although, for some philological reason, you try to keep Dwarf and Marsh-wiggle neuter, you naturally think of them as persons–as indeed most readers would. If I may say so, this neuter business seems strained and artificial, and in places reminds me of Mark Twain’s joke about the German language, “The girl took the spoon and fork. It laid him and her on the table’” (Bodleian Library, Dep. c. 771, fol. 20).

76 Bles replied on 18 March 1953: ‘I am so glad that you agree to a “he” for the Dwarf and the Marshwiggle. I would suggest this Rule: when mythological creatures speak like human beings, masculine/feminine gender; when they are personae mutai [silent characters] neuter’ (ibid., fol. 22).

77 Lewis probably had in mind the following three statements regarding natural law. The classical definition is found in St Thomas Aquinas: ‘The natural law is nothing other than the light of understanding placed in us by God; through it we know what we must do and what we must avoid. God has given this light or law at the creation’ (Collationes in decent praeceptis, 1). Cicero (51 BC) said in De Republica, 11:33: ‘There is in fact a true law–namely, right reason–which is in accordance with nature, applies to all men and is unchangeable and eternal.’ The chief New Testament text on which natural law is based is Romans 2:14-15: ‘When Gentiles who have not the law do by nature what the law requires, they are a law to themselves, even though they do not have the law. They show that what the law requires is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness.’ Lewis’s writings on natural law include the first book of Mere Christianity, The Abolition of Man, and ‘The Poison of Subjectivism’ and ‘On Ethics’ in Christian Reflections.

78 These reflections were to be repeated the following year in Lewis’s inaugural lecture at Cambridge, ‘De Descriptione Temporum: ‘It is hard to have patience with those Jeremiahs, in Press or pulpit, who warn us that we are “relapsing into Paganism”. It might be rather fun if we were. It would be pleasant to see some future Prime Minister trying to kill a large and lively milk-white bull in Westminster Hall. But we shan’t. What lurks behind such idle prophecies, if they are anything but careless language, is the false idea that the historical process allows mere reversal; that Europe can come out of Christianity “by the same door as in she went” and find herself back where she was. It is not what happens. A post-Christian man is not a Pagan; you might as well think that a married woman recovers her virginity by divorce. The post-Christian is cut off from the Christian past and therefore doubly from the Pagan past’ (SLE, p. 10). See ‘A Cliché Came Out of Its Cage’, CP, p. 17, which begins: ‘You said “The world is going back to Paganism”. Oh bright Vision!’

79 i.e., the tale which was eventually to be titled The Horse and His Boy.

80 P. Vergili Maronis: Opera, ed. Frederick Arthur Hirtzel (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1900), p. [iii]: ‘Eager to correct what they consider errors, they more often trample upon the most delicate flowers of the Muses.’

81 Delirium tremens.

82 Shakespeare, Hamlet, III, iv, 140: ‘My pulse, as yours, doth temperately keep time.’

83 Michael was an American schoolboy.

84 In her letter to Lewis of 18 March, Gebbert wrote: ‘A physical condition…caused my mind to wander and speculate for too long now, and recently drove me to a doctor. He told me in no uncertain terms that my husband and I can expect an heir or heiress in a month or two! And all along I had been blaming everything on seasickness!’ (Bodleian Library, MS. Facs. c. 47, fol. 238).

85 Lewis ends SBJ, ch. 12, ‘Guns and Good Company’ with these same words.

86 In her letter of 18 March Gebbert continued: ‘I was so dismayed at the doctor’s diagnosis that, for a moment, I wished it had not happened–that I was not going to have a child. I know I was guilty of the lowest form of ignorance: fear, and that night, as I was dining alone in my library, my eyes fell upon the Bible I keep open on the table. It had been open to Psalms for several days-1 had been reading them off and on and had not turned or disturbed the pages in any way. Nor had anyone else. This night, then, as I glanced from the food to the Book, I saw and read the verse: “Shall I bring to the birth, and not cause to bring forth? saith the Lord: shall I cause to bring forth, and shut the womb? saith thy God.” Isaiah, Chap. 66, Verse 9. How did the pages get turned from Psalms? And by whom? In such ways, at times, do we receive the miracle of His rebuke, His admonition, His comfort, and the workings of His plan? Am I wrong to take the words I read as a rebuke? Am I wrong in assuming my eye fell on the chapter and verse it was supposed to?’ (Bodleian Library, MS. Facs. c. 47, fol. 238).

87 Matthew 10:29: Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? And one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father.’

88 The Screwtape Letters (London: Bles, 1942; Fount, 1998), Letter 27, pp. 106-7: ‘If you tried to explain to [the Patient] that men’s prayers today are one of the innumerable co-ordinates with which the Enemy [God] harmonizes the weather of tomorrow, he would reply that then the Enemy always knew men were going to make those prayers and, if so, they did not pray freely but were predestined to do so…What he ought to say, of course, is obvious to us; that the problem of adapting the particular weather to the particular prayers is merely the appearance, at two points in his temporal mode of perception, of the total problem of adapting the whole spiritual universe to the whole corporeal universe; that creation in its entirety operates at every point of space and time, or rather that their kind of consciousness forces them to encounter the whole, self-consistent creative act as a series of successive events.’

89 Chang had sent Lewis his translation of a Chinese allegory to read.

90 ‘model of Christ’.

91 The Great Divorce, Preface, p. 5: ‘It was a wonderful vehicle, blazing with golden light, heraldically coloured. The Driver himself seemed full of light and he used only one hand to drive with. The other he waved before his face as if to fan away the greasy steam of the rain.’ Cf. The Comedy of Dante Alighieri the Florentine: Cántica I Hell L’Inferno, trans. Dorothy L. Sayers (London: Penguin, 1949), IX, 82: ‘His left hand, moving, fanned away the gross/Air from his face, nor elsewise did he seem/At all to find the way laborious.’

92 The Great Divorce, ch. 12, cf. Dante, Purgatorio, XXX.

93 i.e., Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando Furioso.

94 See the discussion of David Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus (1920) in CL II, pp. 440, 541, 630, 753.

95 A vast French prose romance of the fourteenth century, in which the anonymous author sought to link the legends of Alexander the Great and King Arthur.

96 Old French.

97 The story of Balin, or Balain, is recounted in the Old French Suite du Merlin and in Malory’s Morte dArthur. Balin and Balan are tragic brothers who, despite their nobility, wind up killing each other.

98 John Francis Gilfedder (1925-), musician, was born in Melbourne, Australia, on 27 January 1925. After studying medicine, he began composing music in 1948. In 1951-2 he studied composition with Benjamin Frankel and Raymond Jones in England, and it was in 1952 that he met Lewis. On returning to Australia, he studied at the University of Melbourne and graduated with a Bachelor of Music degree in 1958. This was followed by a Dip. Ed. in 1959, and a B. Ed. in 1962, also from the University of Melbourne. Gilfedder was employed by the Victorian Education Department, 1953-69, before taking up a position at the Queensland Conservatorium of Music in 1970. His works include The Timeless Land Symphony, which had its premiere in 2002.

99 Gilfedder suggested Lewis provide a glossary of obscure terms to go with the Arthurian poems of Charles Williams, Taliessin Through Logres and The Region of the Summer Stars.

100 A Religious of CSMV (Sister Penelope), The Coming of the Lord: A Study in the Creed (London: Mowbray, 1953; 2nd impression, 1954).

101 Lewis was reading the typescript of the book; the page numbers of the typescript differ from those in the published book which are the ones given below.

102 ibid., ch. 8, p. 48: ‘When a smith says of a sword, “It is finished,” he means that it is ready to be used. Only when it has served its purpose and has no longer any raison d’être, does the end of a thing mean its ceasing to exist. The two Ends that our Lord is seeing in St. Mark xiii exactly illustrate this difference. The End of the Temple was the destruction of the Temple, because the type was no longer needed when the thing typified, the New Humanity, had come. But when Man comes to his End, he will be finished in the sense of being ready, at last, for the purpose for which he was made.’

103 ibid., ch. 6, pp. 34-5: ‘Except for the saying of John the Baptist, “He that hath the bride is the bridegroom,” the bride is never mentioned in the Gospels. Why? Surely because she did not yet exist, because the New Eve had yet to be created, as the Fathers loved to say, out of the pierced side of the Second Adam on the Cross. Later in the New Testament St. Paul, in Ephesians v.22 ff., uses the husband and wife analogy for the relation between Christ and His Church, but does not expressly name her either wife or bride. In the Apocalypse, however, right to the end she is only the bride, the wife to be. For the Church is not yet wholly one with Christ, as man was one with God before the Fall; and the consummation of “the marriage of the Lamb” with the bride of His own redeeming and remaking is itself the consummation for which the whole creation waits.’

104 ibid., pp. 37-8: ‘There is so much that is obvious about Palm Sunday, our Lord’s deliberate and literal fulfilment of Zechariah’s prophecy about the peaceful king, the bitter contrast between that triumph and the Passion following, that other things no less significant often get overlooked…That impromptu procession of the Passover pilgrims on the first Palm Sunday combined the themes and types of both those two great Feasts. But over and above all that, the festal coming of Christ to Jerusalem was a symbol of His final, finished Coming to the Father as the Son of Man. That, at least, is how St. Bernard sees it. The liturgical palm procession, he says, which re-enacts that entry, represents the glory of our heavenly fatherland.’

105 ibid., ch. 9, pp. 58-9: ‘The Greek says, “He was metamorphosed before them,” He changed His form. Metamorphosis, change of form at different stages on the way to perfection, is common in the natural world, the most familiar instance being that of the creature which ends up as a butterfly, after being successively an egg, a caterpillar, and a chrysalis. The Transfiguration of Christ suggests that Man also is a metamorphic creature…After death [Christ] passed again to His perfection, this time finally. In that perfected body, that yet bore the marks of what its larval form had borne on Calvary, He was touched and handled, as well as seen and heard, by many of His friends during the Great Forty Days.’

106 ibid., ch. 2, p. 9.

107 ‘waiting for’.

108 Sister Penelope removed this word from the book.

109 The word ‘neo-Paganism’ was also removed from the book.

110 ‘respect’.

111 ‘fear of the gods’.

112 ‘world’ as in John 9:39: ‘For judgement I am come into this world.’

113 Corbin Scott Carnell (1929-) was born in Ormond, Florida, on 7 July 1929, the son of Stanley and Doris (Scott) Carnell. He received a BA from Wheaton College, Wheaton, Illinois, 1952, and an MA from Columbia University in New York, 1953. He received his Ph.D. in English from the University of Florida in 1960 where his dissertation topic was ‘The Dialectic of Desire: C. S. Lewis’ Interpretation of “Sehnsucht” ‘. Carnell was, successively, Teaching Associate, Associate Professor, and Assistant Professor of English at Bethany College, West Virginia, 1953-76. He served as Professor of English at the University of Florida, 1976-2000. His thesis was published as Bright Shadow of Reality: C. S. Lewis and the Reeling Intellect (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1974).

114 Carnell said of this letter: ‘I inquired about the lengthy footnote in Miracles which asserts that some Biblical miracles are to be understood rather literally, others not.’ The footnote he was inquiring about is a reference to the book of Jonah in Miracles, ch. 15, note 1: ‘A consideration of the Old Testament miracles is beyond the scope of this book and would require many kinds of knowledge which I do not possess. My present view…would be that just as, on the factual side, a long preparation culminates in God’s becoming incarnate as Man, so, on the documentary side, the truth first appears in mythical form and then by a long process of condensing or focusing finally becomes incarnate as History…The Hebrews, like other people, had mythology: but as they were the chosen people so their mythology was the chosen mythology–the mythology chosen by God to be the vehicle of the earliest sacred truths, the first step in that process which ends in the New Testament where truth has become completely historical…I take it that the Memoirs of David’s court come at one end of the scale and are scarcely less historical than St Mark or Acts; and that the Book of Jonah is at the opposite end.’

115 On Lewis’s first confession see his letters to Sister Penelope of 24 October and 4 November 1942 (CL II, pp. 450-2, 453-4).

116 President Dwight D. Eisenhower said in a speech of 16 April 1953, reported in The Times (17 April 1953), p. 8, under the title ‘President Eisenhower’s Appeal to Russia’: ‘Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. The world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children…This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.’

117 See the biography of Margaret Deneke attached to letter of 3 October 1944 in supplement. Deneke was making plans to produce a volume of reminiscences about her kinsman, P. V. M. Benecke. The book was published as Paul Victor Mendelssohn Benecke (1868-1944) (Oxford: A. T. Broome & Son, 1954), and Lewis’s contributions are found on pp. 3, 31-4.

118 Philemon 10: ‘I beseech thee for my son Onesimus, whom I have begotten in my bonds.’

119 Matthew 12:37.

120 Professor Masato Hori was a teacher at Kansai University, Osaka, Japan.

121 Joseph A. Breig, The Devil You Say: Report from Hell (Milwaukee: Bruce Pub. Co, 1952).

122 Ruth Pitter, The Ermine: Poems 1942-1952 (1953).

123 This was Pitter’s first book after becoming a Christian.

124 Pitter, The Ermine, p. 19, ‘The World is Hollow’, III, 1.

125 ibid., p. 18, ‘The Captive Bird of Paradise’, II, 4.

126 ibid., p. 15, ‘The Other’, X, 3-4.

127 ibid., p. 9, ‘Great Winter’, III, 3.

128 ibid., ‘Herding Lambs’, p. 16, I, 3-4.

129 ibid., p. 38, ‘Aged Man to Young Mother’.

130 See Lewis’s letter to George Rostrevor Hamilton of 14 August 1949 on The Tell-Tale Article (CL II, pp. 966-7).

131 John H. McCallum, head of the trade department at Harcourt, Brace & World, was Lewis’s American editor at the time.

132 Bodle had sent her own simplified version of John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress to the deaf daughter of a friend.

133 Bodle said of this letter: ‘I had explained that in N.Z. government schools religious instruction cannot be given by teachers. I was feeling frustrated. The principal did, however, allow me to take classes after school for any children who wanted to come’ (Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. lett. c. 220/4, fol. 249).

134 Roger Lancelyn Green, The Secret of Rusticoker (1953).

135 Martin Kilmer was a member of the ‘Kilmer family’ to whom The Magicians Nephew was dedicated.

136 Stephen Vincent Benêt (1898-1943), Western Star (1943).

137 Calkins wrote on this letter; ‘Reply to my cable at the time Elizabeth II was crowned.’

138 News reached the British public on the eve of the Coronation that Edmund Hillary and the Nepalese Sherpa, Tenzing Norgay, had set foot on the summit of the world’s highest mountain, Mount Everest, on 29 May.

139 Hila Newman was an eleven-year-old girl from New York who sent Lewis some drawings of the characters in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

140 Romans 14:13-17: ‘Let us not therefore judge one another any more: but judge this rather, that no man put a stumblingblock or an occasion to fall in his brother’s way. I know, and am persuaded by the Lord Jesus, that there is nothing unclean of itself: but to him that esteemeth any thing to be unclean, to him it is unclean. But if thy brother be grieved with thy meat, now walkest thou not charitably. Destroy not him with thy meat, for whom Christ died. Let not then your good be evil spoken of. For the kingdom of God is not meat and drink: but righteousness, and peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost.’

* Later: not, I hope, concurrently. We may then discuss further plans

141 Mildred Boxill was an editor in the Harcourt Brace college department in New York.

142 John Milton, Paradise Lost (1667).

143 Douglas Bush was the editor of the section on John Milton in Major British Writers. See his biography in CL II, p. 22 In.

144 Blamires had found a publisher for his book, The Devil’s Hunting-grounds: A Fantasy (London: Longmans, 1954).

145 The Rev. Canon Roger Bradshaigh Lloyd (1901-66) was educated at St John’s College, Cambridge and ordained in 1924. He served as residentiary canon of Winchester Cathedral, 1937-66. During the 1950s he was a reader for Longmans Green. He recommended The Devil’s Hunting-grounds to Longmans and was in contact with Blamires about the book. His own works include The Mastery of Evil (1941) and The Borderland: An Exploration of Theology in English Literature (1960). Lloyd was also a keen railway enthusiast, and his books on that subject include Farewell to Steam (1956).

146 Beatrix Potter, The Tale of Peter Rabbit (1901); The Tale of Benjamin Bunny (1904).

147 ‘mother-sickness’. The pun consists in substituting ‘mal de mere for the familiar ‘mal de mer’ (sea-sickness). See the letter to Gebbert of 16 July 1953.

148 A poet born at Mitylene, Lesbos, about the middle of the seventh century BC.

149 The song of praise (Luke 1:46-55) sung by the Blessed Virgin Mary when her cousin Elizabeth greeted her as Mother of the Lord.

150 See Kilby’s account of this meeting, ‘Visit with C. S. Lewis’, in the Wheaton College literary magazine, Kodon, 8 (December 1953), pp. 11, 28, 30.

151 Stephen Vincent Benét, John Brown’s Body (1928), a narrative poem of the Civil War.

152 Warnie was correcting the proofs of his first book, The Splendid Century: Some Aspects of Life in the Reign of Louis XLV (1953), and his brother was correcting those of English Literature in the Sixteenth Century.

153 H. Rider Haggard, The Mahatma and the Hare (1911).

154 Roger Lancelyn Green, King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table (1953).

155 See the reference to ‘brasting and fighting’ in the letter to Greeves of 20 June 1916 (CL I, pp. 196-7).

156 See the letter to Gebbert of 20 June 1953.

157 Richard Lancelyn Green (1953-2004) was born at Poulton Hall on 10 July 1953, the second son, and third child, of Roger and June Lancelyn Green.

158 According to the Roman law of Jus Trium Liberorum, every man who had been a father of three children had particular honours and privileges.

159 A story Sayer was writing, which has never been published.

160 Matthew 6:11; Luke 11:3.

161 Joel 2:28: ‘Your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions.’ Acts 2:17: ‘And it shall come to pass in the last days, saith God, I will pour out of my Spirit upon all flesh; and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams.’

162 Lewis may have had in mind the two great Carmelite doctors of the Church, St Teresa of Avila and St John of the Cross. St Teresa felt visions were unimportant because of their ‘sensual nature’. St John of the Cross, in the Ascent of Mount Carmel, is blunt and states that visions should be ignored.

163 In That Hideous Strength.

164 Cecil John Rhodes (1853-1902), British financier and colonizer, left the greater part of his fortune for the establishing of a scholarship fund. The Rhodes Scholarships to Oxford University were intended to reward applicants who exhibited qualities of character and physical ability, with the aim of promoting cross-cultural understanding and peace between nations. The scholarships have been awarded annually since 1903 by the Rhodes Trust in Oxford, where centenary celebrations were held in June 1953.

165 p.p.

166 1 Peter 4:12: ‘Beloved, think it not strange concerning the fiery trial which is to try you, as though some strange thing happened to you.’

167 See the description of his confessor, Fr Walter Adams SSJE, in the letter to Mary Neylan of 30 April 1941 (CL II, p. 482): ‘If I have ever met a holy man, he is one.’

168 Laurence Harwood matriculated at Christ Church, Oxford in 1952 and began reading modern history. Unfortunately, in June 1953 he failed the preliminary examination which is designed to ensure that students are sufficiently prepared to proceed to the honours degree in the second or third year. As a result he had to leave Oxford.

169 ‘mishap’.

170 Mrs Emily McLay was writing from 4 Denham Avenue, Fulwell, Sunderland, County Durham.

171 2 Peter 3:16-17: ‘As also in all his epistles, speaking in them of these things; in which are some things hard to be understood, which they that are unlearned and unstable wrest, as they do also the other scriptures, unto their own destruction. Ye therefore, beloved, seeing ye know these things before, beware lest ye also, being led away with the error of the wicked, fall from your own steadfastness.’

172 John Calvin (1509-64) maintained in his Institutes of Christian Religion (1536), Bk. II, ch. 1, section 8, that: Our nature is not only utterly devoid of goodness, but so prolific in all kinds of evil, that it can never be idle…everything which is in man, from the intellect to the will, from the soul even to the flesh, is defiled.’ The ‘other view’ was that of the Arminians, after Jacobus Arminius (1560-1609). They insisted that the divine sovereignty was compatible with a real human free will; that Jesus Christ died for all and not just for the elect.

173 English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Introduction, p. 34: ‘In a single sentence of the Tischreden [Table Talk] Luther tosses the question aside for ever. Do you doubt whether you are elected to salvation? Then say your prayers, man, and you may conclude that you are.’

174 Lewis had received a letter dated 23 June 1953 from the Seminario Presbiteriano Do Sul, Campinas, Est. de S. Paulo, Brazil, in which the Librarian of the Seminary wrote: ‘We have a deep regard for your wonderful books on Christianity and its stand today. Of course, for quite a long time we have been eager to acquire them. However, we have no funds available for this purpose. Hence, we felt that perhaps you might be willing to offer them, as well as any other works you might think it fitting, to our library, at this Seminary’ (Bodleian Library, Dep. c. 771, fol. 30).

175 The letter is unsigned.

176 1 John 1:5: ‘God is light, and in him is no darkness at all.’

177 Lewis probably had in mind the ‘hard sayings’ of Jesus, among them Matthew 7:13: ‘Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat’; Matthew 13:49-50: ‘So shall it be at the end of the world: the angels shall come forth, and sever the wicked from among the just, And shall cast them into the furnace of fire: there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth’; Matthew 25:41: ‘Then shall he say…unto them on the left hand, Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels’.

178 Luke 9:55.

179 1 Peter 4:8.

180 Lewis probably had in mind Colossians 1:24: ‘I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I complete what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church’ (RSV).

181 Matthew 6:25-6: ‘“Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you shall eat or what you shall drink, nor about your body, what you shall put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?…’” (RSV).

182 Prince Caspian, ch. 8: ‘When they came out into the daylight Edmund turned to the Dwarf very politely and said, “I’ve got something to ask you. Kids like us don’t often have the chance of meeting a great warrior like you. Would you have a little fencing match with me? It would be frightfully decent.” ‘

183 The Silver Chair.

184 Sir Walter Scott, Ivanhoe (1819).

185 See the letter to Bodle of 31 December 1947 (CL II, p. 823).

186 The name given to the planet Earth in Lewis’s interplanetary trilogy.

187 Roger Lancelyn Green, Tellers of Tales: An Account of Children’s Favourite Authors from 1839 to the Present Day (1946; new edn, 1953).

188 For Don Giovanni Calabria’s letter of 3 September 1953 see Letters: C. S. Lewis-Don Giovanni Calabria, pp. 84-7.

189 Giovanni Calabria, Instaurare Omnia in Christo (Verona: Vescovile Casa Buoni Fanciulli, 1952).

190 Horace, Ars Poetica, 169-74: ‘Multa senem circumveniunt incommoda, vel quod quaerit et inventis miser abstinet ac timet uti,/vel quod res omnis timide gelideque ministrat,/dilator, spe longus, iners, avidusque futuri,/difficilis, querulus, laudator temporis acti/se puero, castigator censorque minorum’: ‘Many troubles assail an old man, whether because he seeks gain, and then wretchedly abstains from what he possesses and is afraid to use it, or because he attends to all his affairs feebly and timidly; a procrastinator, he is apathetic in his hopes and expectations, sluggish and fearful of the future, obstinate, always complaining; he devotes himself to praising times past, when he was a boy, and to being the castigator and moral censor of the young.’

191 2 Corinthians 1:3.

192 This had been Lewis’s chief intention in The Abolition of Man.

193 Herbert Read, The Green Child (1935).

194 The French composer, Olivier Messiaen (1908-92).

195 Probably Douglas Edison Harding, author of The Hierarchy of Heaven and Earth.

196 In The Hone and His Boy.

197 ibid., ch. 7.

198 Lewis was referring to Rachel, son of Laban. According to Genesis 29:20: ‘Jacob served seven years for Rachel.’ In her note to his letter Pitter said: ‘I had now known Lewis for seven years, and thought perhaps he would not mind if we now used Xtian names…I had asked “if I might now have Rachel”, alluding to Jacob’s seven-year service’ (Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. lett. c. 220/3, fol. 119).

199 The foolish clergyman in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813), who is excessively obsequious to persons of high rank.

200 G. A. L. Burgeon (Owen Barfield), This Ever Diverse Pair, introduction by Walter de la Mare (London: Gollancz, 1950). See the description of this book in CL II, p. 937n.

201 Charlotte M. Yonge, The Daisy Chain (1856); The Trial (1864); The Pillars of the House (1873); The Three Brides (1876); The Two Sides of the Shield (1885); Dynevor Terrace (1857); Nutty’s Father (1886).

202 John Richards (1918-95) was born in London on 23 June 1918. He went to Brockley County School in Forest Hill, after which he read English at King’s College, London. Before he could complete his degree the Second World War intervened and he spent most of the war years working in an anti-aircraft battery in Northern Ireland. After VE Day Richards was transferred to the Foreign Office. He soon left, returning to King’s College to complete his degree. In 1949 he realized his long-time ambition and began work in the Ministry of Education, where he served as Under-Secretary, 1973-7. A convert to Roman Catholicism in 1940, he afterwards contributed to many Catholic periodicals. See Lewis’s letter to Richards of 5 March 1945 in the Supplement.

203 Charlotte M. Yonge, The Heir of Redclyffe (1853).

204 i.e., The Splendid Century.

205 John Forrest, who had just died, was the husband of Lewis’s cousin, Gundreda Ewart Forrest. See The Ewart Family in the Biographical Appendix to CL I.

206 The words ‘better the frying pan than the fire’ were removed from The Silver Chair before the book was published.

207 Lewis had probably been asked to examine J. B. Phillips’s translation of Acts, The Young Church in Action: The Acts of the Apostles, published by Geoffrey Bles in 1955. The reference is to Phillips’s translation of Acts 2:22-4.

208 The fourteenth-century manor Dartington Hall was bought in 1925 by Leonard and Dorothy Elmhirst, who opened it in 1926 as an experiment in co-education. From the first one of its purposes was to renovate the large Dartington Hall estate. The school featured a ‘pupil-defined curriculum’ based upon the individual. There were few rules for older students, no uniforms, no religious education, and no church services. Emphasis was placed on ‘co-operation rather than competition’. Lewis’s pupil, Mary Neylan, taught there for a number of years. See Mary Neylan in the Biographical Appendix to CL II, pp. 1054-5.

209 The school in The Silver Chair.

210 Edgar Allan Poe, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1850).

211 ‘for the prayers’.

212 Congregation of Sisters of the Holy Redeemer, a lay order within the Order of the Holy Cross.

213 Book of Common Prayer, Collect for Whitsunday.

214 The story is told of a friend saying to Sir Winston Churchill, ‘How wonderfully your new grandson looks like you.’ ‘All babies look like me,’ replied Sir Winston. ‘But then, I look like all babies.’

215 William Wordsworth, ‘Ode, Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood’ (1807), 63-6: ‘Not in entire forgetfulness,/And not in utter nakedness,/ But trailing clouds of glory do we come/From God, who is our home.’

216 i.e., Florence ‘Michal’ Williams, the widow of Charles Williams.

217 Lewis forgot he had asked Bles, in his letter of 20 October, to remove the words from The Sliver Chair.

218 Romans 8:26-7: ‘We know not what we should pray for as we ought: but the Spirit itself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered. And he that searcheth the hearts knoweth what is the mind of the Spirit, because he maketh intercession for the saints according to the will of God.’

219 Luke 18:2: ‘And he spake a parable unto them to this end, that men ought always to pray, and not to faint.’

220 Luke 22:42.

221 Mark 11:24: ‘Therefore I say unto you, What things soever ye desire, when ye pray, believe that ye receive them and ye shall have them.’

222 Charles Williams, Evelyn Underhill, George MacDonald.

223 John 3:16.

224 1 John 2:15.

225 Revelation 18:4.

226 Mrs Gebbert had asked if Lewis would autograph a copy of The Stiver Chair for her son, Charles Marion Gebbert.

227 The Bermuda Summit, 4-8 December 1953, was held at the initiative of Sir Winston Churchill and included Britain, the United States, France and the USSR. In the aftermath of loseph Stalin’s death and the Soviet development of a hydrogen bomb, Churchill hoped to gain President Eisenhower’s support for a top-level dialogue with the new Soviet leadership. He was motivated primarily by a wish to break the stalemate of the Cold War and avert a possible nuclear conflict.

228 Panama was Queen Elizabeth II’s and Prince Philip’s first port of call (29 November 1953) on their visit to Australia, which was part of the Queen’s first Commonwealth tour.

229 The letter is unsigned.

230 Sir Stanley Unwin (1884-1968), publisher, was the son of Edward Unwin, a London printer. In 1904 he joined his lather’s stepbrother, T. Fisher Unwin, in his publishing firm. At 28 he began his own firm and soon afterwards bought George Allen & Sons. With the new company, George Allen & Unwin, he quickly built a formidable list of authors. In 1926 Unwin published The Truth about Publishing, which became the authoritative textbook on the subject. He was a tireless worker, but spared time for his other passion–tennis, which he played every weekend throughout the year. In 1937, acting on the recommendation of his ten-year-old son, Rayner, he published Tolkien’s The Hobbit. Again at the recommendation of Rayner, he published The Lord of the Rings. Because that book was so difficult to describe, Unwin asked Lewis if he would write something to serve as a ‘blurb’ for its cover. Lewis included such a piece with this letter. Unwin was knighted in 1946.

231 Mrs Farrer took exception to Lewis’s portrayal of God as, not male, but masculine. In That Hideous Strength, ch. 14, part V, p. 350, Ransom tells Jane Studdock: ‘You are offended by the masculine itself: the loud, irruptive, possessive thing–the gold lion, the bearded bull–which breaks through hedges and scatters the carefully made bed. The male you could have escaped, for it exists only on the biological level. But the masculine none of us can escape. What is above and beyond all things is so masculine that we are all feminine in relation to it.’ that he was born blind? Jesus answered, Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents: but that the works of God should be made manifest in him.’

232 Lewis was referring to the love of the dwarf, Gimli, for Galadriel, Queen of the Elves, in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, Bk. II, ch. 7: ‘The Dwarf, hearing the names given in his own ancient tongue, looked up and met her eyes, and it seemed to him that he looked suddenly into the heart of an enemy and saw there love and understanding.’

233 In The Fellowship of the Ring, Bk. II, ch. 8, ‘Farewell to Lórien’, the Fellowship takes leave of the security of Lothlórien to destroy the Ring.

234 In the final chapter of The Fellowship of the Ring, the noble Boromir covets the Ring so badly he tries to take it from Frodo: ‘“It is by our own folly that our Enemy will defeat us,” cried Boromir. “How it angers me! Fool! Obstinate fool! Running wilfully to death and ruining our cause. If any mortals have claim to the Ring, it is the men of Númenor, and not Halflings. It is not yours save by unhappy chance. It might have been mine. It should be mine. Give it to me!”’

235 See the letter to Sir Stanley Unwin of 4 December 1953.

236 ‘make haste slowly’.

237 The Roman poet Lucretius (c. 99-c. 55 BC).

238 Lewis was referring to D. E. Harding’s The Hierarchy of Heaven and Earth.

239 ibid., Preface, p. 12: ‘It would be affectation to pretend that I know whether Mr. Harding’s attempt, in its present form, will work. Very possibly not. One hardly expects the first, or the twenty-first, rocket to the Moon to make a good landing. But it is a beginning.’

240 See Dorothy L. Sayers in the Biographical Appendix to CL II, pp. 1065-72.

241 Lewis had received one of Sayers’ Christmas cards. The text, ‘The Days of Christ’s Coming’, was by Sayers, with a painting by Fritz Wegner, and the card was printed by Hamish Hamilton. The picture had 27 numbered doors to be opened from 14 December to 7 January

242 Kathleen Nott had just published The Emperor’s Clothes (London: Heinemann, 1953), described on the jacket as ‘An attack on the dogmatic orthodoxy of T. S. Eliot, Graham Greene, Dorothy Sayers, C. S. Lewis, and others.’

243 A Scots word for money or silver.

244 Sayers’ first part of Dante’s Divine Comedy had been published in 1949. She was now working on her translation of the Purgatorio.

245 David Gresham was in fact nine and a half years old and Douglas eight.

246 The ‘Little Kingdom’ of J. R. R. Tolkien’s Farmer Giles of Ham (1949) is set in that pleasant area east of Oxford which includes Thame, Long Crendon and Worminghall.

247 Arthur C. Clarke, Childhood’s End (New York: Ballantine, 1953).

248 H. G. Wells, The First Men in the Moon (1901).

249 Olaf Stapledon (1886-1950), whose Last and First Men (1930) and Star Maker (1937) are mentioned in CL II, pp. 236, 594.

250 i.e., Richard Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung, one of Lewis’s oldest loves. See the references to it in CL I, pp. 29, 139n, 381-2.

251 Clarke, Childhood’s End, ch. 21, p. 163.

252 ibid., p. 164.

253 Luke 14:26.

254 But in Book V when they have returned to Sicily, the women try to burn the ships so they need not go to Latium. See CL 11, p. 750, N. 148. In Virgil, Aeneid, Book III Aeneas and his companions build a fleet and set off in search of the land that first bore the Trojan race (Italy). They have many strange adventures along the way, but eventually reach Libya.

255 That is, from matters of the soul (psyche) to those of the spirit (pneuma).

256 Dante, Inferno, IV, 42.

257 The letter was unsigned.

258 Her husband, Henry Gerard Walter Sandeman, died on 19 January 1953.

259 Matthew 19:5-6; Mark 10:8-9.

260 Titirangi School for the Deaf had now merged with the Kelston Deaf Education Centre, New Lynn, Auckland, and Bodle had moved to New Lynn to continue her teaching.

261 Herbert, The Temple, ‘The Church-porch’, Stanza 72, 5-6: ‘If all want sense, God takes a text, and preacheth Patience.’

262 The Rev. Canon Ronald Edwin Head (1919-91) was appointed Curate of Holy Trinity, Headington Quarry, in 1952, and Vicar in 1956. When he arrived in the parish Holy Communion was celebrated at 8 a.m. and Morning Prayer at 11 a.m. He was responsible for reversing the times of these services.

263 Lewis may have been remembering Joanna Baillie (1762-1851), ‘The Storm-Beat Maid’ (1790), XL, 1: ‘I’ll share the cold blast on the heath.’

264 The four women are characters in the works of William Shakespeare. Imogen is the heroine of Cymbeltne (1623), Portia the heroine of The Merchant of Venice (1600). Miranda is a character in The Tempest, and Perdita appears in The Winter’s Tale (1623). While Miranda and Perdita grew up in sheltered circumstances and made happy marriages, Imogen and Portia had complicated and eventful lives which nevertheless turned out well in the end.