Читать книгу Collected Letters Volume Three: Narnia, Cambridge and Joy 1950–1963 - Клайв Льюис, Клайв Стейплз Льюис, Walter Hooper - Страница 12

At the beginning of the year Lewis resigned from the presidency of the. Oxford University Socratic Club. With his help, its founder Stella Aldwinckle had built it into one of the most exciting and best-attended clubs in Oxford. But Lewis was now tired. He had been working since 1938 on his massive English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, and he was in the middle of writing the last Chronicle of Narnia. The Narnian stories were being published at a rate of one per year, and there were three more to go. Yet in resigning as president of the Socratic Club to give himself more leisure, Lewis was unaware of an invitation he would receive from Cambridge University in May 1954. Meanwhile, Stella Aldwinckle met with others of the Socratic Club to decide who should be their new president.

TO STELLA ALDWINCKLE (W):

Magdalen College

Oxford

Jan 1st 1954

Dear Stella

Thank you for your kind card. And I must ask your pardon for not (I think) having yet ‘placed in your hands’ my resignation from the Presidency of the Socratic. I do so now, wishing you a better and more active man as my successor.

The moment seems a good one for saying how very much I have admired the great work you have been doing in Oxford all these years; a work which, I expect, no one else could have done, and v. few others would have done. I have worked with some who had your energy and with some who had your good temper, but I am not sure that I have worked with any who had both. It has been a great privilege and I have at all times appreciated it more than (I fear) my behaviour showed. May you long continue the work.

Oremus pro invicem.

Yours

Jack

TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE (W):

Magdalen College

Oxford

Jan 1st 1954

Dear Mrs. Shelburne

Thanks for your letter of the 28th, to which I’m afraid I can only manage a v. small answer, for Christmas mails have ‘got me down’. This season is to me mainly hard, gruelling work–write, write, write, till I wickedly say that if there were less good will (going through the post) there would be more peace on earth.

By Jove, I do sympathise with you about the sinus (I am warned by everyone who has ever had it not at any price to have the operation. One doctor said that he wd. like to prosecute any surgeon who did it. This concerns you too!). I am sure that when God allows some cause like illness or a ‘bus-strike or a broken alarm clock to keep us from Mass, He has His own good reasons for not wishing us to go to it on that occasion. He who took care lest the 5000 should ‘faint’ going home on an empty stomach¹ may be trusted to know when we need bed even more than Mass.

I don’t think there is anything superstitious in your story about the Voice. These visions or ‘auditions’ at the moment of death are all v. well attested: quite in a different category from ordinary ghost stories. I am so glad people liked your poem, which deserved it, and that you liked mine² of which (a v. unusual thing for me) I can’t now remember a single word.

Then I must stop: wishing and praying for you ‘a happy issue out of all your afflictions’³ and better days in 1954.

Yours

C. S Lewis

TO DANIEL DAVIN (OUP): ⁴

Magdalen College

Oxford

Jan 1st 1954

Dear Davin

By all means make the Norman Davis⁵ corrections;⁶ or rather, that selection of them (about 85%) which I accepted in the list I sent you some time ago. I have not, myself, found any other misprints. I added to the Davis list one correction of my own–the omission of the word first before printed in the Bibliographical account of’The Court of Love’ under Anonyma. I can’t tell you the page for all my books are now packed.⁷

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO RUTH PITTER(BOD):

Magdalen College

Oxford

Jan 4th 54

Dear Ruth–

Yes, but wouldn’t Evelyn⁸ and Bp. King⁹ and all our ancestors and many contemporary foreigners be equally astonished at the amazing retardation wh. the English Nineteenth Century methods imposed on human growth. In my brother’s period (I trust you are reading his Splendid Century) boys of 15 successfully commanded cavalry regiments in action. Juliet¹⁰ was dying in the tomb at an age when our girls are thinking only of Lacrosse. I never really understood Shakespeare’s Berownes¹¹ and Mer cutios¹² till I realised that they were, in age, Fifth Form boys let loose with ducats in their pockets and swords at their sides.

I’m not saying which is best: only that one mustn’t assume our tempo to be ‘nature’ and all the others to be artificial. I remember two or three of us at my prep-school discussing v. eagerly whether the future was like a line wh. one can’t see or like a line not yet drawn. We didn’t think we were doing anything ‘grown-up’–the subject just arose like any other. We probably thought we were more grown up when reading Pickwick¹³ than when discussing metaphysics. I suspect that, tho’ we have merriment from infancy we learn triviality as an adult accomplishment.

I can go to Crendon with v. little main-road, but at the moment I have (dooced¹⁴ gentlemanly complaint, what?) gout! There’s glory for you!¹⁵ If that’s not grown up (I beg their pardon, adult is the word, now) I’d like to know what is. You’re sure to have to come to Oxford one day, aren’t you? Dentist? Bookshop? Bodleian? Let me know and let us lunch together. On provenance, I always thought the Pitters (diespiter¹⁶ and all that) descended from love, probably through Aeneas¹⁷ and Brute.¹⁸ My doctor’s wife, who died a few years ago,¹⁹ came in right line from Cerdic,²⁰ hence from Odin. So of course does H.M.²¹ ‘In every way we are sprung of earth’s best blood, have titles manifold’.²² Have you read Vincent Benét’s (inspired) Western Star? Better than John Browns Body which I thought good.

A very happy New Year,

Yours

Jack

TO MRS D. JESSUP (W):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

Jan 5th 1954

Dear Mrs. Jessup

Oh I am sorry. How dreadful. I don’t know to which of you my sympathy goes out most. Your share is, however, easier to imagine, for I know what it’s like to have to be the comforter when one most needs comforting, and the competent arranger at the v. moment when one feels most disabled.

I don’t know whether anything an outsider can say is much use; and you know already the things we have been taught–that suffering can (but oh!, with what difficulty) be offered to God as our part in the whole redemptive suffering of the world beginning with Christ’s own suffering: that suffering by itself does not fester or poison, but resentment does; that sufferings which (heaven knows) fell on us without and against our will can be so taken that they are as saving and purifying as the voluntary sufferings of martyrs & ascetics.

And it is all true, and it is so hard to go on believing it. Especially as the dark time in which you are now entering (I’ve tried it; my own life really begins with my Mother’s illness & death from cancer when I was about 9) is split up into so many minor horrors and fears and upsets, some of them trivial & prosaic.

May God support you. Keep a firm hold of the Cross. And try to keep clear of the modern fancy that all this is abnormal & that you have been singled out for something outrageous. For no one escapes. We are all driven into the front line to be sorted sooner or later. With all blessings & with deep sorrow.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO GEORGE AND MOIRA SAYER(W):

Magdalen College

Oxford

Jan 8, 1954

My dear George and Moira

What a lifeline you both are–’bless’d pair of Sirenes’.²³ It was a very minor operation, done under gas, the lancing of an inflamed ‘sebaceous cyst’, tho’ there might be a slightly bigger one (excision of said cyst) later. But I have to have daily dressings, and the penicillin with which they’ve filled me up with leaves me never really quite awake. Distinguish sebaceous from Herbacious, lest the latter lead you to think there has been a revolt of my Vegetable Soul. (Why does one feel less shame at surrendering to the Vegetable in oneself than to the Animal?). Sebum appears to be the source of Fat, the Vis pinguifica. I suppose I am now so fat in the ordinary way that the V.P. has to seek fresh outlets. Staying with you wd. hardly be the right treatment: not that I wouldn’t come (and a plague on treatment) if I was mobile. But only thanks and longings can go.

Talking of new romances have you both read Arthur Clark’s Childhood’s End?. A great tragic myth. And has Tolkien sent you proofs of The Fellowship of the Ring? And is The Isle of the Undead finished?

Congratulations on your new H.M.²⁴ It is nice to find that the Enemy sometimes commits blunders too.

A thousand thanks & blessings from

Yours

Aeterno devinctus amore ²⁵

Jack

TO BELLE ALLEN (L):

[Magdalen College]

Jan 9th ’54

Dear Mrs Allen.

Thank you for your nice woody and earthy (almost like Thoreau or Dorothy Wordsworth) letter of the 6th. I think I go with you in preferring trees to flowers in the sense that if I had to live in a world without one or the other I’d choose to keep the trees. I certainly prefer tree-like people to flower-like people–the staunch and knotty and storm-enduring to the frilly and fragrant and easily withered…

I think what makes even beautiful country (in the long run) so unsatisfactory when seen from a train or a car is that it whirls each tree, brook, or haystack close up into the foreground, soliciting individual attention but vanishing before you can give it…Didn’t someone give a similar explanation of the weariness we feel in a crowd where we can’t help seeing individual faces but can do no more than see them so that (he said) ‘it is like being forced to read the first page, but no more, of a hundred books in succession’?…

TO SARAH NEYIAN (T):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

16/i/54

My dear Sarah

Thanks for your most interesting letter. It sounds as if you were having a much nicer time at school than most of us remember having, and if you reply ‘I should hope so too’, well, I can’t agree with you more. I particularly envy you having half a pony and learning to ride. I can’t, but I love the sight and sound and smell and feel of a horse and v. much wish that I could. I’d sooner have a nice, thickset, steady-going cob that knew me & that I knew how to ride than all the cars and private planes in the world.

I’ve been reading Pride and Prejudice²⁶ on and off all my life and it doesn’t wear out a bit. Lamb, too. You’ll find his letters²⁷ as good as his essays: indeed they are almost exactly the same, only more of it.

I don’t believe anyone is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ at languages. If you ever want really badly to read something which you can’t get in English, you’ll find you can learn a foreign language alright.

I liked the account of yr. XII Night Party, a ceremony I knew nothing about. Where I grew up the great thing was Halloween (eve of All Saints’ Day). There was always a slightly eerie, spooky feeling mixed with games, events, and various kinds of fortune telling–not a good night on which to walk through a churchyard. (Tho’ in fact Irish people, believing in both, are much more afraid of fairies than of ghosts).

I’ve been having a sebacious (no, not Herbacious) cyst lanced on the back of my neck: the most serious result is that I can never at present get my whole head & shoulders under water in my bath. (I like getting down like a Hippo with only my nostrils out). Give my love to all and I hope you’ll have a grand year in 1954.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO DOM BEDE GRIFFITHS OSB (W):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

16/i/54

My dear Dom Bede

Thanks for interesting articles: I couldn’t agree with you more.²⁸ I suspect that a great going-to-meet-them is needed not only on the level of thought but in method. A man who had lived all his life in India said ‘That country might be Christian now if there had been no Missions in our sense but many single missionaries walking the roads with their begging bowls. For that is the sort of Holy Man India believes in and she will never believe in any other.’ Of course we must beware of thinking of ‘the East’ as if it were homogeneous. I suppose the Indian and the Chinese ethos are as alien to each other as either is to us.

The article on Tolerance in that same issue made my flesh creep.²⁹ What do they mean by ‘Error has no rights?’ Of course Error has no rights, because it is not a person: in the same sense Truth has no rights. But if they mean ‘Erroneous persons have no rights’, surely this is as contrary to the plain dictates of Natural Law as any proposition could be?

Quite a different question. Has any one composed prayers for children NOT in the sense of special prayers supposed suitable for their age (which easily leads to wish-wash) BUT simply in the sense of translations of ordinary prayers into the easiest language? And wd. it be worth doing?

Yours

Jack Lewis

TO VERA GEBBERT (W):

Magdalen College

Oxford

18/i/54

Dear Mrs. Gebbert,

Charles is changing, and for the better! There is less of the Tycoon. He smiles. He is learning to relax. ‘Years have brought the philosophic mind.’³⁰ Did you know that your upbringing of perpetual rocking & teetering had the authority of Plato? I couldn’t find the place but I’m almost sure he says that continual rhythmic motion is the thing for children and a ship at sea wd. be the best nursery.³¹ (This wd. re-introduce yr. old confusion between mal-de-mer and mal de mere with a vengeance!)³²

Yes–great volleys of New Thought and Higher Thought (new enough to be raw, and ‘high’ enough to be as full of maggots as gorgonzola, but why call it thought?) do reach us even here from your shores. It solves all problems by declaring that there never were any problems to solve.

Of course one cd. say that the Incarnation was God’s ‘weak moment’: when Omnipotence becomes a baby in a manger it has ‘weakened’ itself. That’s the great joke and pathos of our faith. But I’m afraid your friend didn’t mean anything of the sort. N.B. The temptation (can’t she see it?) is precisely a temptation to evade the self-imposed weaknesses, to be strong, omnipotent, again–to make stones into bread,³³ to be emperor of the world,³⁴ to do ‘lévitations’.³⁵ The weakness was the strength.

We had a v. odd few days this Vacation: a lady & two sons (aged 91/2, 8) staying with us. A tough ‘assignment’–I talk American like a native, don’t I?–for two old bachelors. Phew! We never respected married people enough before. We had led a sheltered life & just didn’t know! Not that the boys weren’t absolute charmers: but I had no conception of the tempo- nor of the Sabbath calm³⁶ wh. descends when the little whirlwinds have gone to bed. Longfellow was quite wrong: he shd. have written ‘A pause in the day’s occupations wh. is known as the grown-ups hour’.³⁷ You’ll know all about it in a few years’ time. My brother joins me in affectionate good wishes to all there.

Yours,

C. S. Lewis

TO ARTHUR C. CLARKE (BOD):

Magdalen College

Oxford

Jan. 20/54

Dear Clarke (let us not Mister one another)

Thanks v. much for yr. letter and for the E to A.,³⁸ wh. I look forward to with pleasure. I meant the English cognoscenti of course: I don’t see American papers.

If you will let me know which bits of my letter your people want to use,³⁹ I am sure I shall have no objection–as you know one doesn’t like to give a free hand for selection. It is sometimes so done as to credit one with ungrammatical or even nonsensical sentences. Are you ever in this city? If so, be sure to let me know and we will make a tryst. I know where the best beer & the best cider and the only draught stout are.

It was a grand book and I shall be interested to see where you go from there. Not, I devoutly hope, into the kind where we leap forward to a date at wh. space-travel has become as common & dull as tramways and within that framework we get an ordinary spy-story, or wreck-story, or love-story wh. might as well, or better, be located in present-day Hampstead. With all good wishes.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO ARTHUR C. CLARKE (BOD):

Great Western Royal Hotel

Paddington,

London, W.2

Jan 20/54

Dear Clarke–

This is about 2 hours later, having read If (I.2)⁴⁰ in the train, and feeling how well it illustrates what is to me a bad tendency in modern S-F Your Jupiter 5⁴¹ is good: but–forgive me–even there, what a pity that the lost reptilian culture (a glorious idea) which is what you really want to tell us about and we really want to hear about is almost thrust into a corner by the little drama about a theft and a hoax. Similarly in M. Clifton’s⁴² The Kenzie Report the really interesting thing, & well worth the whole story, is the ants. Why, in heaven’s name, shd. [it] be pushed out of the centre & the centre taken up by an unutterably banal little laboratory intrigue?

With K Neville’s⁴³ She knew he was coming we touch rock-bottom. The old theme of the sentimentalised brothel & the whore-with-a-heart-of-Gold is mawkish anyway, but tolerable; but what, in heaven’s name, is the point of locating it on Mars! Surely in a work of art all the material should be used. If a theme is introduced into a symphony, something must be made of that theme. If a poem is written in a certain metre, the particular qualities of that metre must be exploited. If you write a historical novel, the period must be essential to the effect. For whatever in art is not doing good is doing harm: no room for passengers (In a good black and white drawing the areas of white paper are essential to the whole design, just as much as the lines. It is only in a child’s drawing that they’re merely blank paper). What’s the excuse for locating one’s story on Mars unless ‘Martianity’ is through & through used*

Stockham’s⁴⁴ Circle of Flight, tho’ not at all well executed, is the real thing: i.e. the thing he professes to be doing is the thing he is really doing. And there, for once, the love interest is relevant. By the way do readers of S-F really want a ‘heart-interest’ as they call it (‘crutch-interest’ wd. be more accurate) always dragged in? Am I missing some relevant point? I’d be glad to know your views on the whole subject of this letter.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO PAULINE BAYNES (BOD):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

21/i/54

Dear Miss Baynes

I lunched with Bles yesterday to see the drawings of The Horse and feel I must write to tell you how very much we both enjoyed them. It is delightful to find (and not only for selfish reasons) that you do each book a little bit better than the last–it is nice to see an artist growing. (If only you cd. take 6 months off and devote them to anatomy, there’s no limit to your possibilities).

Both the drawings of Lasaraleen in her litter⁴⁵ were a rich feast of line & of fantastic-satiric imagination: my only regret was that we couldn’t have both. Shasta among the tombs (in the new technique, wh. is lovely)⁴⁶ was exactly what I wanted. The pictures of Rabadash hanging on the hook and just turning into an ass⁴⁷ were the best comedy you’ve done yet. The Tisroc was superb:⁴⁸ far beyond anything you were doing 5 years ago. K. Lune etc.–were, this time, really good.⁴⁹ The crowds are beautiful, realistic yet also lovely wavy compositions:⁵⁰ but your crowds always were. How did you do Tashbaan?⁵¹ We only got the full wealth by using a magnifying glass! The result is exactly right. Thanks enormously for all the intense work you have put into them all. And more power to your elbow: congratulations.

What are you and I and the firm going to do now that Bles is retiring? Shall we seek a Literary Agent or just go to whoever buys his business? I shd. be interested in your views.

I hope you’ll have a nice 1954. I did acknowledge your v. beautiful card, didn’t I? If not, I’m a Pig, for I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Yours ever

C. S. Lewis

TO DOM BEDE GRIFFITHS OSB (W): PC

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

23/i/54

I have a taste for Dickens but don’t think it a low one. He is the great author on mere affection :⁵² only he & Tolstoi (another great favourite of mine) really deal with it. Of course his error lies in thinking it will do instead of Agape.⁵³ Scott, as D. Cecil said, has, not the civilised mind, but the civilised heart. Unforced nobility, generosity, liberality, flow from him.⁵⁴

But Thackeray I positively dislike. He is the voice of ‘the World’. And his supposedly ‘good’ women are revolting: jealous pharisiennes. The publicans and sinners will go in before Mrs Pendennis and La. Castle-wood.⁵⁵ In haste.

C.S.L.

TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE (W):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

24/i/54

Dear Mrs. Shelburne

Thanks for the lovely bundle of letters and pictures from the Kilmer family which, as you anticipated, I revelled in: I have written them a joint letter⁵⁶–not mentioning the poem as I gather you are not supposed to have a copy. They sound a delightful family.

But surely you are not going to put the whole trilogy in their hands? I shd. have thought That Hideous Strength both unsuitable and unintelligible to children, and even Perelandra rather doubtful.

I hope you have got rid of that cold. There seems no way of guarding against them, does there? One part of me almost envies you that deep snow: real snow. This is v. late at night and my writing is dreadful, so I must stop. All blessings.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO THE KILMER CHILDREN (W): ⁵⁷

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

Jan 24th 1954

Dear Hugh, Anne, Noelie (there’s a name I never heard before: what language is it, and does it rhyme with oily or mealy or Kelly or early or truly?,) Nicholas, Martin, Rosamund, Matthew, and Miriam–

Thank you very much for all the lovely letters and pictures. You don’t say who did the coloured one of Ransom being paddled by the Hross.⁵⁸ Hugh? I liked it. That’s very much what a Hross is like but a bit too fat. And I don’t know who did the one of the Prince fighting the Serpent: but it’s a fine snaky snake. (I was born in Holy Ireland where there are no snakes because, as you know, St. Patrick sent them all away.) And I think Nicholas’s picture of the Prince and Jill and the Chair very good–especially the Prince’s legs, for legs aren’t too easy to draw, are they? Noelie’s White Witch is superb!–just as proud and wicked as I meant her to be. And Nicholas’s other one of the L., the W, and the W (I can’t write it all out!) is a nice deep picture, going away into the distance. Thank you all.

I have done lots of dish-washing in my time and I have often been read to, but I never thought of your very sensible idea of doing both together. How many plates do you smash in a month?

There is no snow here yet and it is so warm that the foolish snowdrops and celandines (little yellow flowers; I don’t know if you have them or not) are coming up as if it was spring. And squirrels (we have hundreds and thousands about this college) have never gone to bed for their winter sleep at all. I keep on warning them that they really ought to and that they’ll be dreadfully sleepy (yawning their heads off) by June if they don’t, but they take no notice.

You are a fine big family! I shd. think your mother sometimes feels like the Old-Woman-who-lived-in-a-shoe (you know that rhyme?). I’m so glad you like the books. The next one, The Horse and His Boy will be out quite soon. There are to be 7 altogether. Lots of love.

Yours ever

C. S. Lewis

TO MARY VAN DEUSEN (W): TS 54/70.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

25th January 1954.

Dear Mrs. Van Deusen,

All presents–or nearly all presents–are welcome, but how rarely does it happen that just exactly the right one arrives at the right moment. Stationary is an article of which there is a constant and acute shortage in these rooms, and you have plugged the gap which would have occurred tomorrow morning. Thank you very much.

Winter has at last come to these islands, and an encouraging observation from the weather people that conditions now are identical with those in late January 1947, when we began the new year with fifty five days of continuous frost, burst pipes, fuel famine, and all the rest of it. It’s a queer thing that nothing will convince us English that we have extremes of weather, like other people; our whole set-up is based on the assumption that the weather will be mild and wet for most of the year, and either a hot or a cold spell always takes us by surprise.

I hope all goes well with you. With best wishes,

yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO HERBERT PALMER (TEX): PC

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

25/i/54

Your presence was one of my reasons for coming to the Do on March 2nd.⁵⁹ Yes, do spend the night here. But I can’t ask you to dine for I’m committed to dining with Thwaite.⁶⁰ Surely they have asked you to dinner too?

The poetical situation seems to me still without one spark of hope. And the cunning devils are now translating Virgil & Sophocles into the modern style so as [to] make people believe that poetry always was the same sort of muck it is now.⁶¹ And some of the worst are schoolmasters & boys [who] are being brought up on the muck: so that it won’t be ‘all the same 100 years hence’.

C.S.L.

TO RUTH PITTER(BOD):

Magdalen College

Oxford

26/i/54

Bravissima! Unless I hear to the contrary I shall assume that you will meet me in the lounge of the Eastgate Hotel (nearly opposite College) at 1 o’clock on Monday Feb 1st.

J. ⁶²

TO DOROTHY L. SAYERS (W): ⁶³

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

Jan 26/54

Dear Miss Sayers

But how good! Will you come and lunch at 1.15 on Thurs Feb 18th?

Yours very sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO ARTHUR C. CLARKE (BOD):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

Jan 26/54

Dear Clarke,

Human interest, yes. But that is inevitably present if the fears and hopes and wonders of the astronauts are vividly realised–e.g. as in Bedford & Cavor on the Moon⁶⁴ or even Crusoe on the island.⁶⁵ And an author who can’t do that won’t mend matters by dragging in Crooks, Crutches, or Conspiracies: for the sort of story he drags in will be just as lacking in Human interest as his space story.

About ‘escapism’, never let that flea stick in your ear. I was liberated from it once & for all when a friend said ‘These critics are v. sensitive to the least hint of Escape. Now what class of men wd. one expect to be thus worked-up about Escape?–Jailers! Turn-key critics: people who want to keep the world in some ideological prison because a glimpse at any remote prospect wd. make their stuff seem less exclusively important.

Fantasy & S-F. is by miles the best.⁶⁶ Some of the most serious satire of our age appears in it. What is called ‘serious’ literature now–Dylan Thomas & Pound and all that–is really the most frivolous. All the best.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO MARY VAN DEUSEN (W):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

26/i/54

Dear Mrs. Van Deusen

Thanks for your letter of Jan 20 and also (v. much) for the most useful stationary: the thing I needed most.

I quite agree that God ‘takes a text’ much more forcibly in the general behaviour of a bad priest than in a bad sermon, wh. is, in comparison, a trifle. You seem, if I may say so, to be taking the treatment well! Finding (as Shakespeare ought to have said) ‘sermons in prigs, books in the cross-grained toughs’ etc.⁶⁷

I suppose I thought the B type of prayer⁶⁸ higher because of the portentous promises attached to it and because it seems the type used by Elijah when he calls down fire on the altar⁶⁹ or the Apostles when they heal the sick and raise the dead. But I think we are both coming to the right practical conclusion: not struggling, but always saying, as the disciples did, ‘Lord, teach us how to pray.’⁷⁰

That’s all modern pseudo-democratic nonsense, isn’t it, about obedience being ‘weak’. One doesn’t think nurses, sailors, & soldiers weak: and when we believe spiritual things to be as important as operations, storms at sea, and ‘last stands’ we shall see obedience as a strong thing there too. Surely one of the marks of the disobedient child is that it is feebler than the obedient, and can’t do dozens of things that the other can?

I’m not qualified to comment on the Goelz move to California. Unless a doctor ordered it I shd. never, myself, think of choosing my home primarily for the sake of the climate. I wd. if I were a vegetable: being a human I think the first thing about a place to live in is the people one meets, and the second thing is the beauty of the landscape. But of course others think differently. They are so lucky to be able to make the choice at all (999 out of a 1000 have no choice about where they’ll live) that I don’t expect it will matter much which they do–bless ‘em! I hope for your sake they’ll stay put.

Bitter cold here to-night. But we need it: it will kill the slugs in my garden which, thanks to the unusually mild autumn, have now pretty nearly qualified for the Old Age Pension. Five years, is it? Well, God bless you.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE (W):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

26/i/54

Dear Mrs. Shelburne

Thanks for yours of the 23rd and for copy of my verses, which I had almost totally forgotten. ‘Pon my word, they’re not so bad as I feared. I’m very sorry about your cold. We mustn’t let these modern doctors get us down by calling a cold a virus and a sore throat a streptococcus, you know! (Do you ever read Montaigne? He says ‘The peasants make everything easier by the names they use. To them a consumption is only a cough and a cancer only a stomach ache’).⁷¹ You shd. have stayed tucked up in a warm bed all that day instead of trying to write and walking up and down the room.

We wouldn’t call Alfred and Egbert and all those the ‘British’ line. They are the ‘English’ line, the Angles, who come from Angel in South Denmark. By the British line, we’d mean the Celtic line that goes back through the Tudors to Cadwallader and thence to Arthur, Uther, Cassibelan, Lear, Lud, Brut, Aeneas, Jupiter. The present royal family can claim descent from both the British and the English lines. So, I suppose, can most of us: for since one has 2 parents, 4 grandparents, 16 great grandparents, and so on, one is presumably descended from nearly everyone who was alive in this island in the year 600 A.D. In the long run one is related to everyone on the planet: in that quite literal sense we are all ‘one flesh’.⁷²

Of course I don’t mean to ignore (in fact I find it nice) the distinction between a peasant’s grandson like myself and those of noble blood. I only observe that the nobility lies not in the ancient descent (wh. is common to us all) but in having been for so many generations illustrious that more of the steps are recorded. I do hope you’ll be better by the time this reaches you.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO PAUL PIEHLER(W): ⁷³

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

28/i/54

Dear Piehler

Blurb enclosed. Never again throw out the old water before you’ve got new on tap! Good hunting.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

*

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

I have much pleasure in recommending my friend and former pupil Mr. P. Piehler. Mr. Piehler is a sound and sensitive scholar whose interest in his subject is widening and deepening as he grows and from whom we may reasonably expect valuable contributions. He has the clarity of voice and language which a lecturer requires. His manners and personality are attractive; he was generally liked here and bore a thoroughly good character. I should be very glad to have him as a colleague in any English Faculty of which I was a member myself. I understand that he already knows Swedish.

C. S. Lewis

Fellow & Tutor

Jan 28th 1954

TO DOM BEDE GRIFFITHS OSB (W):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

30/i/54

Dear Dom Bede

Yes, I’d certainly rule out Little Emily and Little Nell and all the ‘littles’. The Marchioness is the real thing.⁷⁴

The trouble with Thackeray, is that he can hardly envisage goodness except as a kind of ⁷⁵ all his ‘good’ people are not only simple, but simpletons. That is a subtle poison wh. comes in with the Renaissance: the Machiavellian (intelligent) villain presently producing the idiot hero. The Middle Ages didn’t make Herod clever and knew the devil was an ass. There is really an un-faith about Thackeray’s ethics: as if goodness were somehow charming, & ‘seelie’ & infantile. No conception that the purification of the will (ceteris paribus)⁷⁶ leads to the enlightenment of the intelligence.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO HILA NEWMAN (W):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

Jan 30/54

Dear Hila

Upon my word, a statue of Reepicheep.⁷⁷ He stares at me from my mantelpiece with just the right mixture of courtesy and readiness to fight. Thank you very much.

It is very cold here now–not so cold as in N.Y, I expect, but then we have no central heating in College, so my fingers are hardly able to write. I am so glad you liked the Chair. With all good wishes.

Yours ever

C. S. Lewis

TO KATHARINE FARRER(BOD):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

Feb 3/54

Dear Mrs Farrer

Sternly suppressing my conscience (in George Herbert’s style, you know ‘Peace, prattler, do not lour’)⁷⁸ I have allowed no duties to interfere with my reading The Cretan Counterfeit.⁷⁹ I admire very much the thick-woven texture: it doesn’t easily come apart. Janet and Shrubsole are very well done and Janet wins my heart. Two scenes that especially engaged me were that where Richard is hunting for Shrubsole in Janet’s house and the final scene. The tragic-heroic twist at the very end is good technique as well as being moving in itself. Georgios is, in his smaller way, a wonderful little horror.

Would Clare have giggled (p. 201)? Or even if she had, isn’t the word ‘giggled’ too damaging? (I’m always reminding people that nothing can get into literature save by becoming a word, and that things may be O.K. where the words are not. The bearings of this are wide, as you’ll see if you reflect on the difference between drawing a nude and verbally describing it,⁸⁰ or the impossibility of mentioning Cheko-Slovakia (is that how you spell it) at the apex of a lyric however deeply one may feel about that country).

I am outraged on p. 96 when you describe the moon ‘like the white face of an idiot lost in a wood’. Dear lady, this is simply Eliotic:⁸¹ for (a.) It illustrates what we’ve all seen by what most of us have not seen (b.) It denigrates, in the leering modern mode, the high creation of God. If I were your directeur you’d learn Psalm 136 by heart.⁸² Not safe, either, to be rude to goddesses–Artemis still owes Aphrodite a come-back for the Hippolytus affair and we shd. hate you to be the target.⁸³

I labour this because in general the actual writing is so good. But of course the great thing is the invention–a fine prodigality of characters, far beyond what a Tekky⁸⁴ needs but by no means beyond what it can carry and be all the better for. Thank you very much indeed. Can you read a word of this? It is so cold I can’t write any better, not if I tried ever so.