Читать книгу Collected Letters Volume Three: Narnia, Cambridge and Joy 1950–1963 - Клайв Льюис, Клайв Стейплз Льюис, Walter Hooper - Страница 6

During the spring of 1949 Lewis began dreaming of lions and by May 1949 he had written the first of the Chronicles of Narnia–The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. This was hardly finished when he had the idea for the next story, Prince Caspian–or ‘A Horn in Narnia’ as it was first called. By the time this volume of letters opens Lewis was at work on yet another Narnian story, The Voyage of the ‘Dawn Treader’, the manuscript of which would be ready for Roger Lancelyn Green¹ to read when he visited Lewis at the end of February 1950.²

TO JONATHAN FRANCIS ‘FRANK’ GOODRIDGE (P): ³

Magdalen College

Oxford

[1 January 1950]

There have been very few pupils in my 26 years’ experience as a tutor for whom I can speak so confidently as I can for Mr. Frank Goodrich.⁴ As a scholar he has quality which his actual degree did not at all represent. The year in which he sat for his Final was one of strange surprises for many tutors about many pupils: but apart from that, his failure to do himself justice can be explained by two factors.

(1.) He is really too conscientious a student, too determined to get to the bottom of every question, to make an ideal examinee: good at probing and not at all good at advertising: incapable of ‘bluff’.

(2.) He gave rather more time than he could afford to his duties as secretary of a philosophical club.⁵ I saw a good deal of him in that capacity and it was his Minutes which first convinced me that he had attributes quite out of the ordinary. He could condense, and slightly popularise, the arguments of speakers (often very erudite) with less loss than any man I have ever known.

This satisfies me that he will be a good teacher: he might very well turn out to be one of the great teachers. His personal character won my respect from the beginning and this respect steadily increased during the time he was with me. He is one of the most disinterested—I think I could say one of the most selfless—men I have ever met: and, in spite of his good humour and patience, which are unfailing, I should not like to be the boy who tried to ‘rag’ him. If I had a son of my own there is no one to whom I would entrust him so gladly as to Mr. Goodrich.

C. S. Lewis

Fellow & Tutor of Magdalen

TO GEORGE ROSTREVOR HAMILTON (BOD): ⁶

Magdalen College

Oxford

Jan 3./50

Dear Hamilton

O nodes cenaeque deum!,⁷ it was a glorious evening, and the underworld of that Hotel can claim as well as Pluto sunt altera nobis sideral.⁸ And now, to sweeten memory, firstly I find that Virgil does use planta⁹ and Owen¹⁰ accordingly owes me 2/6, and secondly the Masque.

They really were asses not to play it, for it is a lovely thing in a genre now infinitely difficult. For we have mostly lost the power (taken for granted by our ancestors) of fitting works of art into ceremonial occasions. In this you have succeeded and what I admire more than any particular moments, tho’ I admire many of those too, is the combination throughout of what is extremely local and English and fresh with what is classical or timeless. One loses a lot (as one should) by not seeing it actually performed, for then it would be a real ,¹¹ a death & resurrection rite with a most powerful effect. It is full of niceties: the three feminine endings that give the droning effect after ‘What does he say?’ on p. 5.–the ‘small change’ in your paraphrase of Aeschylus—the rhyme scheme on p. 7–the use of the ‘Voices’. But I think you were wrong to use lines (tho’ good) from Masefield¹² where you might have made as good of your own.

I’m not liking the new year much so far, but wish you very well in it. With many thanks.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO NATHAN COMFORT STARR (W):¹³ TS

REF.50/23.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

7th January 1950.

Dear Professor Starr,

We both thank you for your kind card, and wish you every happiness in 1950.

On Tuesday morning we hope to drink your health at the ‘Bird and Baby’: pity you can’t be there to join us!¹⁴

Yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis¹⁵

TO SARAH NEYIAN (T): ¹⁶

Magdalen College,

Oxford

9/1/50

My dear Sarah

Yes, I did indeed get the mats and was only waiting to be sure of the right address before acknowledging them. They were so like lino-cuts that if I weren’t such an unhandy and messy person I wd. have been tempted to ink them and try making a few prints. Thanks very much indeed.

I’m glad you like the Ballet lessons. I’m just back from a week end at Malvern and found an awful pile of letters awaiting me—so I am scribbling in haste. But I must tell you what I saw in a field—one young pig cross the field with a great big bundle of hay in its mouth and deliberately lay it down at the feet of an old pig. I could hardly believe my eyes. I’m sorry to say the old pig didn’t take the slightest notice. Perhaps it couldn’t believe its eyes either. Love to yourself and all,

Your affectionate

Godfather

C. S. Lewis

TO RHONA BODLE (BOD): ¹⁷

Magdalen

9/1/50

Dear Miss Bodle,

Yes. Charles Williams often used the words ‘holy luck’.¹⁸ Compare Spenser ‘It chanced, Almighty God that chance did guide’.¹⁹ Bless you.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO SISTER PENELOPE CSMV(BOD): ²⁰

Magdalen College

Oxford

12/1/50

Dear Sister Penelope

The name of the graduate looks like KNIONAN, but this can hardly be right! It is embarrassing that as my own hand gets worse I also get worse at reading everyone else’s.

I am very sorry you have had no luck yet with the M.G.²¹ But many a book that afterwards succeeded has been rejected by several publishers.

I read Butterfield and gave it exactly the same mark as you; and am glad of your support, for most even of my Christian friends think it bad.²² All good wishes for St Bernard.²³

My book with Professor Tolkien—any book in collaboration with that great but dilatory and unmethodical man—is dated, I fear, to appear on the Greek Kalends!²⁴

I don’t quite know about those American veterans. Nearly all the books we shd. want to send are published in U.S.A. and there is a bad book famine in England.

Term begins on Sat. and there is a cruel mail today, so I am suffering incessant temptation to uncharitable thoughts at present: one of those black moods in which nearly all one’s friends seem to be selfish or even false. And how terrible that there shd. be even a kind of pleasure in thinking evil. A ‘mixed pleasure’ as Plato wd. say, like scratching?

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

Britain had been so weakened by the effects of the Second World War (1939-1945) that, despite American assistance, rationing was still in effect when Queen Elizabeth II came to the throne in 1952. Clothes rationing ended in 1949, but food continued to be rationed until 1954. For this reason many of Lewis’s friends in the United States, such as Edward A. Allen, were still sending him food parcels.

TO EDWARD A. ALLEN (W):²⁵ TS

REF.50/19.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

24th January 1950.

My dear Mr. Allen,

This is something like a New Year’s greeting! And I am most grateful to you for it. I had to look closely at the label to make sure that the gift was from you, for we are so bemused at the moment with high pressure election literature that I thought it might be from our own Mr. Strachey.²⁶ I don’t know whether it has appeared in your Press, but he has opened the government campaign here by saying how grateful he is to the public for their thanks for the ‘best Christmas in living memory’. The odd thing is that I can’t find anyone who told him that this was how we felt about the extra ounce of bacon or whatever it was that he gave us!

I hope your mother keeps well, and you also. Thanks to the photos you sent me. I picture you both always on a sea beach. But presumably you are now travelling on snow shoes.

With all best wishes and thanks

Yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO VERA MATHEWS (W):²⁷ TS

RER50/81.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

30th January 1950.

Dear Miss Mathews,

I was very sorry to hear about the miserable fiasco of your New York holiday. ‘Flu itself I don’t mind so much, especially in its later stages when the temperature has gone down, but the getting back to normality afterwards is beastly. I hope that by this time you are over the ‘wet rag’ stage, and feeling yourself once more.

Need I say how much we look forward to the parcel which you so kindly promise? It sounds most exciting, and will be very welcome: because, whether it blows fair and warm politically or not, it is anything but fair and warm in the literal sense. I suspect that in California you are exempt from such a day as we are having here—frost, followed by rain, followed by frost—every side walk converted by delighted small boys into an improvised skating rink—splendid opportunities of giving the passers by a good laugh every time you venture out!

With all best wishes for your health, and many thanks,

Yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO EDWARD T. DELL (P):²⁸ TS

REF.50/79

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

30th January 1950.

Dear Mr. Dell,

I think we mean very nearly the same.²⁹ Evil is certainly not a ‘Thing’. But many states of affairs, or relations between things, are regrettable, ought not to have occurred, and ought to be removed. And ‘Evil’ is an elliptical symbol for this fact.

Yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO SISTER MARYROSE (L): ³⁰

[January 1950]

I am sorry if I misunderstood your letter: and I think that you misunderstood mine. What I meant was that if I replied to your original question (why I am not a member of the Roman Church) I shd. have to write a v. long letter. It would of course be answerable: and your answer would be answerable by me…and so on. The resulting correspondence would certainly not, of course, be in excess of the importance of the subject: but haven’t you and I both probably more pressing duties? For a real correspondence on such a subject wd. be nearly a wholetime job. I thought we cd. both discuss the matter more usefully with people nearer at hand. Even the two letters which we have exchanged have already revealed the pitfalls of argument by letter. With all good wishes.

TO NICOLAS ZERNOV(BOD): ³¹

[Magdalen College]

3/2/50

Dear Zernov

Your news is a great shock to me. I will write to Spalding.³² It was a great pleasure to meet your wife the other night and altogether a splendid evening, as yours always are. Cd. you come & dine with me on Thurs. March 9? Do.

Yours

C.S.L.

TO MRS FRANK L. JONES (W):³³ TS

REE 50/18.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

7th February 1950.

My dear Mrs. Jones,

Many thanks for your long and interesting letter of the 24th of January. (‘And’ says my secretary-brother, ‘don’t forget to give her my grateful thanks for being one of the few people who quotes the number on your letter when she writes’).

Your husband may well be proud of his school chapel, a beautiful building, which–to pay a typically English compliment—would rank high amongst school chapels over here!

No indeed, there is no question of my not wanting you to send anything, though there are times when I am more than a little ashamed at the amount you do send. And I note with great pleasure what you say about the tea: also about specially marked parcels.

I stand appalled at the list of your activities. I thought myself a busy man, but…

Now for an attempt at answering some of your questions:–

(1) Why was Christ always talking over people’s heads?

Since all we know of his teachings is derived from the disciples and St. Paul, we are not in a position to say that they did finally misunderstand Him. With what other account of His teaching can we check theirs? That He was often temporarily over their heads, I agree. That is the way to get a class on, as every teacher knows.

(2) About God being Truth and Justice, and nevertheless creating this world.

I’m afraid I can’t add to what I said about this in the Problem of Pain.³⁴

(3) Why did God make most people stupid?

Have you any evidence that He did? Some people are stupid through their own choice–laziness, and even fear of the truth—so have made themselves stupid. Others, through bad education etc., which is the fault of other humans, not of God.

(4) Neurotic.

My dictionary defines neurotic as one ‘having disordered nerves’. This would often mean in effect that the patient, with little or no moral guilt, does as the result of his disease the same things which would imply great guilt if a person in health did them—e.g. acts of cowardice, ill temper etc. (We all make the distinction in ordinary life when we excuse someone for being peevish because he is very tired, and therefore temporarily in bad nervous health). But no doubt f[r]iends and even doctors often flatter healthy but wicked people by attributing to neurosis what is really just wickedness. There is a great temptation to excuse oneself on the same grounds!

(5) What is a soul?

I am. (This is the only possible answer: or expanded, ‘A soul is that which can say I am’).

With best wishes.

Yours sincerely.

C. S. Lewis

TO MR LAKE (T):

Magdalen College

Oxford

8/2/50

Dear Mr Lake

I think the process is: Planets are gods in ancient poetry—and Intelligences in Aristotle—angels are ‘gods’ in O.T.³⁵ and Milton–Cambridge Platonists (and Florentine Platonists) identify both Platonic daemons & ancient gods with Christian angels—why not accept the identification?³⁶–and incidentally try to rescue the Angels from the feminine & sentimental associations that have grown round them. See the learned note from the (non existent) Natvilcius in Cap I of Perelandra.³⁷

Yrs. sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO DAPHNE HARWOOD (BOD): ³⁸

Magdalen College

Oxford

20/2/50

Dear Daphne

You must have been bad if you thought last Wednesday was Ash Wednesday—or else you hold some Columban and pre-Augustinian view on the date of Easter. (Your Gudeman³⁹ will at a moment’s notice point out to you the passages in Bede which clear the whole thing up.)⁴⁰ I hope you’re well now? Bronchitis is nasty enough.

Fry is shattering. I’ve seen none and only read The Lady’s not for Burning.⁴¹ The funny parts were funny enough to make me laugh; as for the poetry–the wealth of real genius in the imagery is beyond hope. Almost too much, and sometimes rather splashed about than used. But, by gum, it’s a good fault and one we’d almost despaired of ever seeing again. Can it be—dare we hope—that the ghastly mumbling and whining period in which you and I have lived nearly all our lives, is really coming to an end? Shall we see gold and scarlet and flutes and trumpets come back?

John is doing more this term.⁴² How is Sylvia?⁴³ Give my love to Lawrence and all, including dear Woff.⁴⁴ And take care of yourself: let the young people work!

Yours sincerely

Jack L.

TO ROGER LANCELYN GREEN (BOD): ⁴⁵

Magdalen College

Oxford

21/2/50

Dear Green

Cd. you dine with me (7 p.m. smoking room) on Wed March 8th? I have several books to return and the typed MS of the Horn story⁴⁶ & MS of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

Ever since June 1947 when Warnie, suffering from acute alcoholic poisoning, was hospitalized in Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital, Drogheda, County Louth (see CL II, p. 787), his binges had become more frequent. When the brothers were younger Warnie was gregarious and Jack something of a recluse. As time went on Jack’s fame as a Christian apologist drove him to mingle with all kinds of people; Warnie, on the other hand, withdrew more and more into the company of books and a few friends. Alcohol gave him back, temporarily, the old gregariousness that was draining away. He was a binge-drinker, and if Jack could get him into either the Acland Nursing Home, Banbury Road, or Restholme, a private nursing home at 230 Woodstock Road run by Dorothy Watson, the bout was fairly short-lived. If, however, he slipped past his brother and reached Ireland, he usually ended up in the hospital at Drogheda, and he might be away for as long as six months. Despite Warnie’s efforts to overcome the problem, Jack was not successful in persuading him to join Alcoholics Anonymous. As time went on Warnie’s binges were of longer duration, and Jack was left to cope as best he could.

TO JILL FLEWETT (T): ⁴⁷

Magdalen College

Oxford

29/2/50

My dear June

W. is in a nursing home⁴⁸ at present—nothing serious, indeed he ought to be out now only the nurses have made such a domestic pet of him he can’t tear himself away—so I’ve been pretty busy letter writing. So sorry about yr. mother: please give her my duty.

Minto has at last allowed Bruce⁴⁹ to be euthanised. Don’t mention it if writing to her. She seems to miss him surprisingly little so there’s no good stirring the matter up. This has made an enormous difference to our lives–we feel like a balloon that has dropped half its ballast—the music room is clean! R.I.P. We’d both like to see you again. All the best.

Yours (in haste)

Jack

TO THE EDITOR OF THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT?⁵⁰

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

Sir,—

It cannot often happen that a scholar, writing to expose the corruption of a text, should himself at that very moment suffer inadvertently a corruption of the same sort; but it really looks as if something like this had happened to Professor Dover Wilson in his edition of Two Gentlemen (Cambridge, 1921).⁵¹ Here on page 103 (note on V iv 89-90) he rightly points out that which out of my neglect was never done⁵² is a ‘line of verse’, and adds: ‘The adapter is caught—in the act.’⁵³

But surely, on this principle, the evidence for an adapter in Professor Wilson’s own Notes is even stronger? Without turning a page we find:—

(1) On page 102.—‘Not free from “cuts”, is in the simple end-stopped verse which we associate with the youthful Shakespeare.’

(2) ibid.–‘This section is in quite another style.’

(3) ibid.–‘Strong medial pauses and—strange combinations!’ (The exclamation so obviously added for the metre, makes this example especially flagrant.)

(4) ibid.–‘In one of which we find a fossil line.’

(5) ibid.–‘Silence of Silvia, while events so vital’

(6) ibid.–‘Is virtually his own composition.’

(7) ibid.–‘The entry of the Duke and Thurio.’

(8) ibid.–‘May have been taken from a later portion.’

(9) ibid.–‘It may have been located in Verona.’ ‘We cannot tell. One of the minor problems.’

(10) ibid.–Page 103. ‘Clearly corrupt. Daniel proposed “discandied.”‘

(11) ibid.–‘The repetition in 1. 59.’

(12) ibid.–‘Through careless copying of the adapter.’

(13) ibid.–‘To mend the metre of these lines. The sense needs mending also.’ ‘73. short line.’ (Note here the omission of the article before short, clearly for the metre.)

C. S. Lewis

TO VERA MATHEWS (W): TS

RER50/81.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

9th March 1950.

My dear Miss Mathews,

You will no doubt be wondering—not angrily I’m sure, but sympathetically—why your two excellent parcels have gone unacknowledged.

The fact is that my secretary-brother chose the most inconvenient time of the term to retire to his bed and has only just ‘come to the surface’ again. While he was away I found my self very rushed, and my correspondence suffered accordingly.

I have so often tried to tell you how grateful I am for all your kindness that I find myself reduced to a simple ‘thank you’: but if the words are stale, the sentiment which prompts them is as fresh as ever.

Here we are enjoying the dubious delights of early English spring, and I often wonder what visiting Americans make of it: for they are already arriving in surprisingly large numbers considering the time of year. I can only suppose that they all come from Northern Alaska, and find our climate a nice change! If you have any friends who think of coming over, tell them that the English summer generally falls in the third week in June.

With many thanks and all my best wishes,

yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO WARHELD M. FIROR(BOD): ⁵⁴

Magdalen etc.

12/3/50

Dear Firor–

Well, term is over. And the election is over too, but you don’t want to hear about that:⁵⁵ except (which is the really remarkable thing) that despite the heavy poll I never knew an election pass with less apparent excitement. Perhaps this is because it was felt to be so important: it is not in the front line that War forms the incessant subject of conversation!

As for term, the last bit of it has been heavy for me with Scholarship Examinations. One answer is so puzzling that I wd. like to hand it on. Commenting on Hamlet’s words

Sure he that made us with such large discourse, Looking before and after, gave us not That capability and god-like reason To fust in us unus’d,⁵⁶

one boy explained the first line as meaning ‘He who made the creation of man seem important by talking about it.’ Since this youth, needless to say, has no chance of a scholarship and therefore will not be summoned for an interview, we shall all go to our graves without knowing what he meant. What, do you think, is the Theology implied? My own vein of Irreverence (still, I fear, inexhausted) cannot help building up a picture: the Almighty feeling (and is one surprised?–) that Homo Sapiens could hardly be reckoned among His chefs d’oeuvre,⁵⁷ and wondering if a publicity campaign could mend matters.

Not, of course, that all the young men we have to examine are like this. At the other end of the scale comes the candidate for a mathematical Fellowship who said–and was understood by the other mathematician who was examining him, but by no one else in the room—‘I assume that All Stars are Trivially Embedded.’ Can you do that one? (Stars does not mean the things in the night sky, I’m told: nor even, which wd. make sense of another sort, film-stars).

But there is something about this endless examining, quite apart from the labour, which bothers me. It sets me wondering about the whole system under which you, as well as we, now live. Behind all these closely written sheets which I have to read every year, even behind the worst of them, lie hours of hard, long work. Even the bad candidates are doing their best and have been trained up to this ever since they went to school. And naturally enough: for in the Democracies now, as formerly in China under the mandarin system, success in competitive examinations is the only moyen de parvenir,⁵⁸ the road from elementary school to the better schools, and thence to college, and thence to the professions. (You still have a flourishing alternative route to desirable jobs through business which is largely disappearing with us: but it is at least equally competitive).

This of course is what Democratic education means—give them all an equal start and let the winners show their form. Hence Equality of Opportunity in practice means ruthless Competition during those very years which, I can’t help feeling, nature meant to be free and frolicsome. Can it be good, from the age of 10 to the age of 23, to be always preparing for an exam, and always knowing that your whole worldly future depends on it: and not only knowing it, but perpetually reminded of it by your parents and masters? Is this the way to breed a nation of people in psychological, moral, and spiritual health? (N.B. Boys are now taught to regard Ambition as a virtue. I think we shall find that up to the XVIIIth Century, and back into Pagan times, all moralists regarded it as a vice and dealt with it accordingly).

The old Inegalitarian societies had at least this in their favour, that at least some of their members (the eldest sons of gentlemen living on inherited land, and the agricultural labourers with no chance to rise and therefore no thought of rising) were often really outside the competitive struggle. I have an uneasy feeling that much of the manliness and toughness of the community depended on them. I’m not idealising such societies. The gentry were often bad, the peasantry often (perhaps nearly always) ill treated. I mean only that we haven’t solved the problem. Or, generalising this, I find the social problem insoluble. It is ‘How to extend to all the good life which unequal societies have (sometimes) produced for the few.’

For the good life as (I suppose) you and I conceive it—independence, calling one’s house one’s castle, saying ‘Mind your own business’ to impertinent people, resisting bribes and threats as a matter of course, culture, honour, courtesy, un-assertiveness, the ease and elbow-room of the mind—all this is no natural endowment of the animal Man, but the fine flower of a privileged class. And because it is so fine a flower it breeds, within the privileged class itself, a desire to equalise, a guilty conscience about their privileges. (At least I don’t think the revolt from below has often succeeded, or even got going, without this help from above).

But then, the moment you try to spread this good life you find yourself removing the very conditions of it both from the few and from the many, in other words for all. (The simplest case of all is when you say ‘Here is a beautiful solitude—let us bring charabanc-loads of the poor townsmen to enjoy it’: i.e. let it cease to be a beautiful solitude). The many, merely by being the many, annihilate the goals as soon as they reach them: as in this case of education that I started with.

Don’t imagine that I am constructing a concealed argument in favour of a return to the old order. I know that is not the solution. But what is? Or are we assuming that there must be a solution? Perhaps in a fallen world the social problem can in fact never be solved and we must take more seriously—what all Christians admit in theory–that our home is elsewhere.

Writing to you, as I do, quite irregularly and dealing with whatever happens to be uppermost in my mind at the moment, I feel I am in great danger of repeating myself. Does the same thing always ‘happen to be uppermost’? In other words, have I written this identical letter before? I hope not.

Crocus, primrose, daffodil have all appeared now: almond blossom and catkins too: but no leaves on trees yet. And there’s a Firor Ham in the refrigerator—I’ve never spelled that word before and have my doubts. God bless you.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO ROGER IANCELYN GREEN (BOD):

4/4/50

My dear Roger

Thanks v. much for the blurb:⁵⁹ I shall send it to Bles⁶⁰ today. It seems excellent to me, but like you I don’t really understand Blurbology.

The man running this series of Lives is Milton Waldman c/o Collins.⁶¹ I will write to him about you at once.

I look forward v. much to Castle in L.

I may (i.e. will if I can) look for you at the K.A.⁶² tomorrow (Wed) about 11.30.

Yours

Jack Lewis

TO GEORGE SAYER(W): ⁶³

Magdalen College,

Oxford

6/4/50

My dear George

What ho? Any time between now and April 21st cd. you come up for two (= 2 = II = B) nights? I’ll stand myself two nights in College if you can and we can make of it two evenings and one day’s walking. Week-days of course. Do. Love to Moira.

Yours

Jack L.

TO EDWARD T. DELL (P):

Magdalen College

Oxford

6/4/50

Dear Mr. Dell

I had not thought of it before but it might be, as you say, that the decay of serious male friendship has results unfavourable to male religion.⁶⁴ One can’t be sure, though, because, if more women than men respond to religion, after all more women than men seem to respond to everything. Aren’t they much more easily stirred up than we in all directions? Isn’t it always easier to get female members for anything you are getting up?

I don’t know enough about the Ecumenical Movement to give an opinion.

Yes.⁶⁵ If (as I hope) the new earth contains beasts they will not be a mere continuation of (the present) biological life but a resurrection, a participation (to their appropriate degree) in Zoe.⁶⁶ See my remarks on this in Problem of Pain.⁶⁷ Nature will rise again now fully digested & assimilated by Spirit.

Bother!–I’ve no copy of the trans, of Athanasius at present. The theory you suggest seems to me sensible but I can’t say without the text (or perhaps with it) whether St. A. actually held it.⁶⁸

With all good wishes.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO MRS FRANK L. JONES (W):

Magdalen College

Oxford

6/4/50

Dear Mrs. Jones

No, I don’t agree that loyalty to an institution is simply loyalty to the personnel and their policy. If I join a ship because I like the captain I am not justified in deserting the moment he dies, nor because I dislike his successor. There might come a point (e.g. if the new captain were using the ship for piracy) at which it wd. be my right, and my duty, to leave: not because I simply disliked him and his polity, but because the particular duty (keep your contracts) wd. now conflict with, and yield to, the higher and more universal duty (Don’t be a pirate).

I don’t see how there could be institutions at all if loyalty was abrogated the moment you didn’t like the personnel. Of course in the case of temporary and voluntary institutions (say, this College) there is no very acute problem. One is entitled to resign, and resignation of course ends all the duties (and all the privileges) I had as a fellow of it.

It is much more difficult with an institution like a nation. I am sure you don’t in fact regard all your duties to the U.S.A. as null and void the moment a party or a President you don’t like is in power. At what point the policy of one’s own country becomes so manifestly wicked that all one’s duties to it cease, I don’t know. But surely mere disapproval is not enough? One must be able to say, ‘What the State now demands of me is contrary to my plain moral duty.’

Do you know I doubt if your dog has the consciousness of ‘I’ (by that of course I meant, not saying the words—otherwise some parrots wd. have souls!). Even young children don’t seem to have it, and speak of themselves as he. Not that they haven’t souls, but their souls are not fully on the spot yet. Your dog may have a rudimentary soul for all I know—I said what I could about this in the chap, on Animal Pain in the Problem of Pain. And if you call learning by experience ‘reasoning’ then he does reason. But I doubt if he is aware of himself as something distinct from all other things. My dog if shut in a room and calling for his walk never dreams of barking to tell me where he is: which looks v. much as if all his tail wagging etc, however much it may be a language to me, is not language to him and he has no idea of using it as a sign. It is spontaneous, unreflective expression of emotion. His bark tells me he is excited, but he doesn’t bark in order to tell me: just as my sneeze may tell you I have a cold, but I didn’t sneeze in order to tell you.

Thanks, and thanks, and thanks again. I don’t think we have ever spoiled anything thru’ not opening a parcel promptly! With our good wishes.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO DOM BEDE GRIFFITHS OSB (W): ⁶⁹

Easter Eve [9 April] 1950

My dear Dom Bede

Thank you v. much for yr. kind letter and for sending me yr. article.⁷⁰ Isn’t Havard a beautiful creature?⁷¹ anima candida.⁷²

I was much interested in the article with a great deal of which I agree. The bit I’m least happy about is ‘we are all alike saved by Christ whether His grace comes to us by way of the Natural Law etc’.⁷³ All saved by Christ or not at all, I agree. But I wonder ought you to make clearer what you mean by His Grace coming ‘by the way of the Natural Law’–or any other Law.

We are absolutely at one about the universality of the Nat. Law, and its objectivity, and its Divine origin.⁷⁴ But can one just leave out the whole endless Pauline reiteration of the doctrine that Law, as such, cannot be kept and serves in fact to make sin exceedingly sinful?⁷⁵

I’m not here labouring a point which I think we have retained and you have lost, because I don’t think we (in the C. of E., whatever may be true of some Lutherans) have really retained it.⁷⁶ Nor do I in the least want to see it again swollen and inflamed (as it was by the original Protestants) into a hypertrophy wh. destroys all the other truths of Christianity. But it must be got in. I never meet anyone, of whatever communion or school, who shows that Pauline sense of liberation from the Law: but I have an idea, from things you once said, that you have some qualifications for helping us all on this point. Perhaps it is not the main need at the moment—I don’t know.

As I may have said before, I don’t know much about the Existentialists.⁷⁷ I have read Sartre’s L’Existentialisme est un Humanisme:⁷⁸ that seemed, if pressed, to be the Berkleyan metaphysic⁷⁹ in the mind of an atheist with a bad liver!⁸⁰ I’ve both heard of and met Marcel.⁸¹ To see him is to love him: but it appeared to me that his thesis⁸² if taken seriously, shd. reduce him and us to perfect silence—as the philosophy of Heraclitus did his disciples. The same holds of Buber. What they mean by calling Aquinas and Augustine Existentialists I can’t understand: nor do I much like such labels. I’m sorry about my handwriting wh. seems to have completely collapsed in the last few years. God bless you, my old friend. Pray for me,

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO RHONA BODLE (BOD):

Magdalen College

Oxford

11/4/50

Dear Miss Bodle

God bless you and send you many happy Easters. As for my part in it, remember that anybody (or any thing) may be used by the Holy Spirit as a conductor. I say this not so much from modesty as to guard against any danger of your feeling, when the shine goes out of my books (as it will) that the real thing is in any way involved. It mustn’t fade when I do.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO RHONA BODLE (BOD):

Magdalen College

Oxford

12/4/50

Dear Miss Bodle

I will indeed pray for you.⁸³ So often after a period of exaltation and comfort (such as, I think, you were having at Easter) round the very next corner something horrid lies in wait for us, either in ourselves or outside. I suppose the preceding comfort was sent, partly, to prepare us for the other: like (to use a crude simile) the rum-issue before the battle. Courage!

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO WARHELD M. FIROR(BOD):

Magdalen etc

14/4/50

My dear Firor

What a vision!⁸⁴ Not that my attempts to ride and fish wd. give pleasure to anyone except the spectators (I don’t know, though. Perhaps the horse and the fish wd. find them mildly amusing) but I’d love walking in the sort of places where better men do ride and fish.

But it’s all visionary. I’ve told you what chains bind me to England.⁸⁵ If I can succeed in getting just over a fortnight away this summer (as I was prevented from doing last year)⁸⁶ I shall have realised more freedom than I have had since 1929. But I do get a real and strange pleasure out of the invitation. You are a fairy-tale character: your bounty (as Cleopatra says) is an autumn that grows the more by reaping.⁸⁷ (Autumn here, rather oddly, means harvest not the fall of the leaf). And I can’t understand why I should be selected for it all. However, this verges on a subject you have forbidden me.

Romanes has hitherto been to me more the name of a lecture than a man, by which I see I have done him a grave injustice.⁸⁸ (Odd that things left as the memorial of a man often in fact obliterate him like this). Have I confessed to you that an inability to read biography is one of my defects? Except Boswell, of course.

I’ve a pile of letters this afternoon, and this is just a note of thanks and regrets. We’re all well, and frequently asking when that next visit of yours is to be looked for.

All blessings.

Yours,

C. S. Lewis

TO MARY MARGARET MCCASLIN (W):⁸⁹ TS

REF.50/188.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

20th April 1950.

Dear Mrs. McCaslin,

Many thanks for your most kind and encouraging letter of the 17th. It gives me great pleasure to know that my books have been of some service to you.

With all best wishes for the success of your work,

yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO VERA MATHEWS (W): TS

REF.50/81

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

22nd April 1950.

My dear Miss Mathews,

Your delightful parcel and the English spring arrived together this morning to supply badly needed cheer on the first day of Term: always a somewhat gloomy moment. From what I know of my native climate, the contents of the parcel will last longer than the fine weather.

Our latest food news is that fish has been ‘decontrolled’ as official English has it: which means that one’s fishmonger can select what he wants instead of having to take what our rulers think is good for his customers. The immediate result was a huge increase in the price of the better kinds of fish, but things have since settled down, and now the prices are in many cases below pre-war.

With many thanks for the huge parcel and all best wishes,

yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO ROGER IANCELYN GREEN (BOD):

Magdalen College

Oxford

29/4/50

Dear Roger–

I like it very much indeed: less haunting than the Wood that Time Forgot⁹⁰ but richer. There are about four alterations I will try to persuade you to make, three of them quite easy.

Can you come & dine Thurs. May 11th to talk of that & other things?

Yours

Jack Lewis

Lewis’s friend, Mrs Janie King Moore–‘Minto’–was now 78. She had been bed-ridden for several years, and it had become impossible for Lewis to look after her. On 29 April 1950 she was moved to Restholme, the Oxford nursing home run by Dorothy Watson. Warnie wrote about Mrs Moore’s first day there, ‘The first news from Restholme is…[Minto’s] “very strong language”: and M wants to know how soon she will be able to escape from this hell on earth in which she is imprisoned. On the whole the outlook is as black as it well can be.’ ⁹¹

But there Mrs Moore was to remain for the rest of her life, visited almost every day by Lewis.

TO ARTHUR GREEVES (BOD): ⁹²

Magdalen College

Oxford

2/5/50

My dear Arthur

Once again the axe has fallen. Minto was removed to a Nursing Home last Saturday and her Doctor thinks this arrangement will probably have to be permanent. In one way it will be an enormous liberation for me.

The other side of the picture is the crushing expense—ten guineas a week wh. is well over £500 a year. (What on earth I shall do if poor Minto is still alive nine years hence when I have to retire, I can’t imagine.) The order of the day thus becomes for me stringent economy and such things as a holiday in Ireland are fantastically out of the question. So cancel all. I hardly know how I feel—relief, pity, hope, terror, & bewilderment have me in a whirl. I have the jitters! God bless you. Pray for me.

Yours

Jack

TO ARTHUR GREEVES (BOD):

[Magdalen College]

May 6/50

My dear Arthur

Thanks for your wise and kind letter. Of course you’re perfectly right and I do try to ‘consider the lilies of the field’.⁹³ Nor do I doubt (with my reason: my nerves do not always obey it!) that all is sent in love and will be for all our goods if we have grace to use it aright. And thanks too for your immensely generous offer. I can’t accept it. She is miserable enough without being deprived of my daily visits. When you and I are meant to meet we shall.

God bless you.

Yours

Jack

TO CECIL HARWOOD (BOD): ⁹⁴

[The Kins]

22/5/50

My dear Cecil

I had taken it for granted that you wd. hardly be able to come with Owen: and also that you wd. come if, after all, it shd. be possible. In utrumque paratus.⁹⁵

It is the apparent strength of my craft and the apparent lightness of yours that make me so vividly aware of the stout captain in the one⁹⁶ and the mere Bellman (see Hunting of Snark) in the other.⁹⁷ One of the bye-products of your news⁹⁸ was to fill me with shame at the rattled condition in which I then was about troubles quite nugatory compared with yours.

My hand (such as it is and for so far as it can be) is always in yours and Daphne’s. It is terrible to think (and yet how did we ever forget it) that unless in rare cases of simultaneous accident, every marriage ends in something like this.

God bless you all.

Yours

Jack

TO HAROLD GILES DIXEY (BOD):

Magdalen College

Oxford

23/5/50

Dear Mr. Dixey

Thanks for the trouble you took to tell me you liked the Alcaics.⁹⁹ In a like case I am afraid I shd. have said: ‘I’ll write to that fellow’ and wouldn’t have done it!

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis (= N.W.)

Sheppard’s pictures of paperchases etc. were not at all like my memories of joy in youth!¹⁰⁰

TO CECIL HARWOOD (BOD):

Magdalen College

Oxford

June 5/50

My dear Cecil

You know about that Trust of mine wh. Owen calls the Agapargyro-meter?¹⁰¹ If not, v. [ide] the Ramsden chapter in This Ever Diverse Pair.¹⁰² You must be incurring a good many unusual expenses at present: and there may be other—alleviations—wh. you wd. like to incur for Daphne. Will you please write to Owen (he signs the cheques, not I) for any sums you want? The fund is in a most flourishing condition and there is no reason to stint yourself. You understand that nothing you draw impoverishes me, for all the money in that fund is already given away from me, tho’ the question ‘To whom?’ is answered at my direction from time to time.

We have so ruined the language that it wd. mean nothing if I said it ‘would be a pleasure’. But reverse the positions and yr. imagination will show you how very truly you wd. say, in my place, ‘it wd. be a relief. God bless you both: you are not often out of my mind.

Yours

Jack

TO CECIL HARWOOD (BOD):

Magdalen College

Oxford

9/6/50

My dear Cecil

Good. Dip and spare not.¹⁰³ I can indeed imagine the heart-rending pathos of this increasing hope: and have often wondered whether our preference (in art) for the tragic over the pathetic is not partly due to cowardice—that the pathetic is unbearable. Still, one’s past agonies of pity and tenderness don’t fester and corrode in memory as their opposites would.

Still love to both: I wish it were of better quality—I am a hard, cold, black man inside and in my life have not wept enough.

Yours

Jack

TO EDWARD A. ALLEN (W): TS

REF.50/19.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

10th June 1950.

My dear Mr. Allen,

The precious parcel which your mother mentioned in her last letter has come in safely, and has turned us into capitalists of the richest type. I don’t suppose there is another home in Oxford which contains this fabulous quantity of sugar. Why there should be a shortage of sugar in England is to me a complete mystery: we grow it within the Empire, and at the moment are actually refusing sugar from the West Indies (or so at least the papers say). But who can understand the methods of a government?

I don’t remember ever noticing before, the words Brightwood Sta. on your mailing stamp, and have been idly wondering what they mean. With us Sta. is the usual abbreviation for Railway Station, and I thought it might stand for that: but my travelled brother assures me that Depot is the American for railway station.

Your blue suit, looking uncommonly smart, is sauntering round Oxford on the person of the aforesaid brother, and meets with much admiration in its walks. It also visited Ireland last year, where it tramped several scores of miles and very nearly went bathing one rough day: so you may also consider yourself as having had a good look round these islands by proxy.

We are just emerging from a heat wave, and very unpleasant it was: sent us by you I think, and the first American gift for which I have not been grateful. I am not and never will be a hot weather man—having been reared in the north of Ireland, by the sea, where fifty degrees is a cold day, and seventy a very hot one. Part of the trouble is that we have no apparatus over here for dealing with hot weather—fans, plentiful ice etc. Lecturing and tutoring with the thermometer high in the eighties is ‘not my cup of tea’.

With all best wishes to you both for a happy summer,

Yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO STELLA ALDWINCKLE (W): ¹⁰⁴

Magdalen College

Oxford

12/6/50

Dear Miss Aldwinckle

If I had carte blanche I should put up the following programme for next term¹⁰⁵–

1. The Concept of Mind by Ryle¹⁰⁶ or a disciple: answered by H. H. Price.¹⁰⁷

2. The Concept of Man by a Sartrian:¹⁰⁸ answered by Sheed¹⁰⁹ or Christopher Dawson.¹¹⁰

3. The Mystical Approach by someone of the Heard¹¹¹ or Huxley type:¹¹² ans. by Fr. Gleason?¹¹³

4. Why I believe in God by Miss Anscombe (is that how you spell it?):¹¹⁴ ans. by?

5. Pagan Christs by an Anthropologist: ans. by C. Hardie.¹¹⁵

6. The Historical value of the N.T.¹¹⁶ by Dr. Farrer:¹¹⁷ ans. by?

7. Faith & Experience by Mr. Mitchell:¹¹⁸ ans. by?

8. Religious Language by Prof. Ayer:¹¹⁹ ans. by Owen Barfield.

I shd. press hard for No. 4. The lady is quite right to refute what she thinks bad theistic arguments, but does this not almost oblige her as a Christian to find good ones in their place: having obliterated me as an Apologist ought she not to succeed me?¹²⁰

I am v. sorry I can’t attend the meeting. The point I shd. make if I were there is that we must not be pre-occupied with novelty. Each generation of undergraduates needs to hear a fair number of the arguments we’ve had already.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

P.S. Does Dorothy Emmet ever read papers? ¹²¹

TO VERA MATHEWS (W): TS

REF.50/81

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

12th June 1950.

My dear Miss Mathews,

Parcels from Beverly Hills seem to arrive with the same regularity as the demands of the Income Tax Commissioner, but differ considerably from them in the reception with which they meet. Here is yet another admirable assortment, posted on the 10th. of May, which I found waiting for me this morning, in excellent condition. I have so often had the pleasant task of thanking you for your kindness that I am ‘gravelled for matter’ in which to express my gratitude for its continuance. Many thanks.

We are just emerging from a heat wave, always a very trying thing in this island, where we never make any preparations for hot weather, and never learn from past experience; when the thermometer gets above 85, this is one of the most uncomfortable countries in the world. No doubt a Californian will smile at the idea of calling this hot weather, but with us, such temperatures are ‘news’ in the front page sense of the word. This is when one appreciates living on a river; I was bathing yesterday afternoon and the water was at seventy. But how greatly I would prefer the sea!

With many thanks and all best wishes,

yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO JILL FLEWETT (T): TS

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

15th June 1950

My dear June,

We both enjoyed your visit immensely, and such was its tonic effect on Warnie that he was able to leave Restholme the following day: with however many regrets that he had not been discharged twenty four hours earlier.

Lucky you, in spite of the railway journey which must have been an unpleasant ordeal; but, as you say, you have your reward, and I envy you, though it is not a southern sea for which I pine. I want to see and hear Ulster waves breaking on an Ulster beach. I, alas, can’t get away, but Warnie has managed to squeeze out ten days in August at Vera’s bungalow in Co. Louth, by the sea: an ideal place for an economical holiday. For, as he points out, the nearest pub. is three miles away, and there is no form of transport other than his own feet!

We can’t imagine you getting engaged to anyone who is not very nice indeed, and look forward eagerly to meeting Clay;¹²² the only catch about the whole thing is I suppose the ‘somewhere to live’? It will have to be in or near London I take it. We wish you good hunting.

We hope you are having a really good holiday, and that you come back to fresh triumphs and increased happiness.

yours ever,

Jack

I love my diptych more every day.¹²³ It is in my bedroom, facing me as I wake. Funny they shd. make St. John Baptist grown up when Our Lord is a baby, when they were really almost the same age. But oh the blue & the gold!

TO ARTHUR GREEVES (BOD):

Magdalen College

Oxford

15/6/50

My dear Arthur

Warnie is now quite restored again. My daily visits to Minto are v. grievous to me, but I don’t think things are too bad for her. On her (medically) ‘best’ days she grouches a good deal and talks about going home, but more often she is childish and incoherent. I don’t think she is any more discontented than she was at home. Remember that if you can get over to England the Kilns is now a house less horrible to stay in than I know it was before and except for an hour in the afternoon when I go to the Nursing Home we cd. have all our time to ourselves. I’d love to have you of course.

I’m fine, as I now get much more exercise. I have spent a good deal of this last fortnight in the river. I’m glad you still see dear old Lee. Remember me to him. Did I tell you that a children’s story by me is coming out this year?

We have (thank goodness) no dog now, so there’d be no objection to your bringing Peter¹²⁴ if you come. Do consider it. God bless you.

Yours

Jack

TO MRS D. JESSUP (W):¹²⁵ TS

REF.50/243

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

16th June 1950.

Dear Mrs. Jessup,

Thank you very much for your most moving and interesting letter. Don’t attribute too much to me: any one may be privileged to be of use in this way at any time.

With all good wishes,

Yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO MARY VAN DEUSEN (W): TS

REF.50/250.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

19th June 1950.

Dear Mrs. Van Deusen,

I rarely get such a happy letter as yours of June 10th, and the photos help us to share the joy. God bless you all.

Yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO GEORGE SAYER(W):

Magdalen College

Oxford

21/6/50

My dear George

I shall be completely alone at the Kilns (but for an ancilla)¹²⁶ from Aug 11 to Aug 19th and am like to fall into a whoreson melancholy. Can you come and spend all or any of this time with me?

We shall have our days to ourselves except for my calling at the Nursing Home each afternoon: and we can cut that one or two days for all day walks. We cd. read the whole Aeneid¹²⁷ together. Do if you can. Love to Moira.

Yours

Jack

When Roger Lancelyn Green met Lewis and the other Inklings in the ‘Bird and Baby’ pub for drinks on 22 June, he found proofs of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe being passed around and discussed.¹²⁸

TO DOM BEDE GRIFFITHS OSB (W): TS

REF.50/258.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

24th June 1950.

My dear Dom Bede,

Hurrah!¹²⁹ Come and lunch here on Monday, July 3rd, and let’s talk at length afterwards.

Yours,

C. S. Lewis

The Korean War began on 25 June 1950 when the army of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea) opened fire on that of the Republic of Korea (South Korea) south of the 38th Parallel, the line serving as the border between the two countries. This act of aggression was caused by North Korea’s concern for security. The Chinese leader, Mao Zedong, was afraid that if he did not take the initiative US forces would put pressure on China along the Yalu River, causing China’s north-eastern defence force to be pinned down. At the same time Southern Manchuria’s power supply (generated from hydroelectric plants in North Korea) would he controlled by hostile forces. This same day–25 June—the United Nations Security Council passed a resolution calling for the immediate cessation of hostilities and the withdrawal of North Korean forces to north of the 38th Parallel. On 26 June the city of Uijongbu fell to North Korean forces, and the South Korean government left Seoul for Taejon.

TO VERA MATHEWS (W): TS

REF.50/81

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

29th June 1950.

Dear Miss Mathews,

Many thanks for your note of the 24th., and the cheering news which it contains; it is kind of you to send parcels, and a refinement of kindness to keep an eye on our erratic supply markets. We look forward eagerly to the meat, but that is not to say that we shan’t welcome the fruit: for fresh fruit is an absurd price this year.

For once, the all absorbing topic of food has been swept into the background by the dreadful news from the Far East. The only gleam of satisfaction is that all of us feel that your prompt action may still save us from a third war; it has at least saved us from a second Munich, and there are hints in our papers today that Russia will very likely back down—but start probing for a ‘soft spot’ elsewhere: Burma, Cochin-China, or even Europe. One can but pray.

The first two syllables of Taliessin¹³⁰ are pronounced like the Tally in Tally-Ho: and the last two rhyme with guessin or blessin. Broceliande is four syllables with the main accent on the third—Bross-elly-and.

My children’s story will be out this Christmas.

With best thanks and all good wishes,

yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO EDWARD A. ALLEN (W): TS

REF.50/19.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

1st July 1950.

My dear Mr. Allen,

Many thanks for your amusing letter of the 19th:–

And for the parcel. Westfield seems to specialize in the export of dress suits, and good quality articles too. My brother asks me to say that yours has been much admired, after he had had it altered to conform to English custom by having the turned up cuffs removed. Will you be good enough to thank Mr. Percival for his kindness?

No cocoa thanks; it is about the only thing we have been able to get in any amount we needed, ever since the beginning of the war. Why this should be so, with tea so short, has always been a great mystery to us, for we raise both these commodities within our own ring fence so to speak.

Pilgrim’s Regress and Silent Planet cost 8/6 over here, which, on the devalued £, should make them very cheap books in America.

Glad to hear you defeated Wormwood about even so trivial a matter as buying a car.

You must all be even more worried than we are by the news from the Far East—which does not bear thinking about. My brother—always an optimist—guesses that the Korean war is a large scale diversion to draw all available American and British forces to that theatre as a preliminary for a southward drive through Persia to the Middle East oilfields in 1951: which in its turn is a preliminary to a Russian ‘liberation’ of Western Europe in 1952.

But to return to Tea. We are actually in the proud position at the moment of having enough to see us through for I reckon the next three months: a position we have never been in before. But when our stock is exhausted, I shall most unblushingly remind you of your kind offer.

With all best wishes to your Mother and yourself,

yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO GEORGE SAYER(W):

Magdalen College

Oxford

10/7/50

My dear George

Warnie is back in the Nursing Home again, alas. I’ve ventured to open yr. letter: he cd. read it but wd. forget it, and he certainly won’t be fit to go to you on Fri. I’ll get him to write to you when he’s cured.

A thousand thanks to you & Moira for yr. perpetual kindnesss. Ora pro nobis.¹³¹

Yours

Jack

TO EDWARD A. ALLEN (W): TS

REF.50/19.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

21st July 1950.

My dear Mr. Allen,

Attaboy! (Though I believe that expression is now completely old fashioned, or ‘classical’ American). Twenty one pounds four ounces of solid satisfaction, posted by you on the 19th of June, arrived here in the usual perfect condition this morning. How do you do it? I don’t refer so much to your kindness, remarkable though that is, as to the skill and labour which you put into the actual packing. Most of us I fear in your position would have been the seed on stony ground¹³²–would have packed enthusiastically for three months or so, and then said ‘Oh bother it’ or some less parliamentary expression! Whereas you keep on keeping on.

Does your government give you any information about the world situation? Ours steadily refuses to part with any, and consequently we live in a world of rumours and astonishing stories from the man who has a friend in the Navy or the Foreign Office or what have you. All that has become obvious is that your country is committed to what may be called a major-minor war, and you have our heartiest sympathy; what we are to do to help is not at the moment very obvious. If we move troops or ships from Singapore or Hong Kong, China would no doubt be ordered to stage a large scale attack on our depleted garrisons. I see the latest Russian move is to lay claim to Alaska, but I can hardly believe this is a serious threat: designed don’t you think to panic the American staff into refusing to reinforce the Far East? But what a state the world has got into! One can but hope and pray.

With best thanks and all good wishes to yourself and your mother,

Yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO VERA MATHEWS (W): TS

REF.50/81

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

21st July 1950.

My dear Miss Mathews,

Once more I have the pleasant job of thanking you for your kindness; your welcome gift, posted on the 20th. of last month, arrived here in good order this morning—and will perform its accustomed, or rather I should say the accustomed function of spreading satisfaction throughout the household. Such satisfaction looks like being about the only material one to which we have to look forward.

I see in one of the papers this morning that our government’s reaction to the Korean tragedy is to look forward to ‘an early return to a full austerity’. They may not be able to find money, or troops, or ships, but trust them not to neglect that side of the international effort!

Seriously though, we all sympathize with you in the position into which you have been forced; it’s all very well to call it a UNO war, but so far as I can gather, it is a USA war. Have you noticed the French contribution? One gunboat!

With all best wishes,

yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO WARHELD M. FIROR(BOD):

Magdalen

26th July 1950

My dear Firor

Well, the sky darkens again. We feel rather ashamed here that you should this time be in it before us; and still more ashamed by anticipation of what our government may do and not do. You will perhaps have read already in the papers that their only move so far has been a lot of gas about ‘civil defence’ (all v. well as far as it goes, but they ought to be arming) and a resolution to seize this golden opportunity of stealing a few more of our liberties from us. Try not to judge us by our rulers. There is another side to the picture.

The other day I was listening to some working men talking in a pub. They were all of such ages as to have seen two wars and fought in one. One would have expected (and indeed excused) the attitude ‘Oh, not a third time! Three times in my life is too much.’ But there was not a trace of it. Merely a unanimous, and quite unemotional, view that ‘I’ reckon these—Russians are going the same—way as ‘Itler did’ and ‘We don’t want no bloody Appeasement this time’ and ‘The sooner they’re taught a lesson the better.’ Of course it is partly ignorance: they don’t know anything about the resources of the Russians. But then it was equally ignorance last time; they had no conception of Germany’s strength. But anyway, they’re obviously perfectly game.

Do you think ‘wishful thinking’ is as dangerous as people make out now-a-days? All our people (I don’t know about yours?) got through the miseries of the last war by a series of wishful delusions. They always thought it was going to be over next month or next spring or next year. Did this do harm? I am inclined to think it helped them to get through bit by bit what they couldn’t have faced at all if they had formed any true estimate of its extent. And I think I remember something like that as a boy—successfully completing a walk far too long for one and feeling ‘If I’d known it was that length I could never have done it at all.’ I suspect that modern psychology—at least, modern semi-popular psychology—plays about with the reserves of the soul very dangerously.

I am spending most of my time at present ploughing through back numbers of learned periodicals less in the hope of fresh knowledge than in the fear I’ve missed something.¹³³ In your subject, which is experimental, I suppose one doesn’t have to poke back so far, because everything before a certain date wd. be definitely superseded. With us literary blokes of course this absolutely decisive ‘supersession’ occurs only very rarely—say, as the result of a windfall like the discovery of a new MS., and views often disappear not because someone has proved them false but merely because they have gone out of fashion. In any forgotten article the really illuminating thing might lie hid: tho’ about 90 to 10 against. So that I mainly pass the hours reading rubbish. The worst rubbish being the pseudo-scientific—the attempt to apply, or the pretence of applying, the methods of your disciplines to ours.

The old lady whom I call my mother is now permanently in a Nursing Home, and I visit her daily. It is my first experience of this stage of paralysis; and, do you know, I am rather cheered by it. It does look so like childhood, only working backwards: the mind gradually withdrawing from the body in the last years as it was gradually settling in during the first. She was for many years of a worrying and, to speak frankly, a jealous, exacting, and angry disposition. She now gets gentler—I dare to hope not only through weakness. Certainly, I think she is a little happier, or a little less unhappy, than she usually was in health. You’d know more about all this than I do. My brother also has been ill (his old trouble) but is now better.

Is there any chance of your visiting England this year? If you want to meet plenty of fellow countrymen Oxford is the place! Indeed, not only Americans at present, but all nations—Medes (or at any rate Swedes) Parthians and Elamites.¹³⁴ Also, torrential rain.

God bless you My dear friend. Have us all in your prayers.

Yours ever

C. S. Lewis

And thanks (which you forbid) for the hams (which I mustn’t mention). No two are quite alike and each has its individual beauties.

TO RALPH E. HONE (W):¹³⁵ TS

REF.50/287.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

29th July 1950.

Dear Mr. Hone,

I am sorry, but it so happens that you could hardly have struck a worse time. I am working at high pressure, and in the intervals have a Conference to attend, an invalid to look after, and several visitors. I’m afraid in the circumstances a meeting is hardly possible.

With thanks, good wishes, and regrets,

yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO CHAD WALSH (W): ¹³⁶

Magdalen College

Oxford

5/8/50

My dear Walsh

Thank you for your letter of July 20th. I’m glad to hear about the ‘revolution’ in poetry, but I moderate my hopes. I think what really separates me from all the modern poets I try to read is not the technique, with all its difficulties, but the fact that their experience is so very unlike my own. They seem to be so constantly writing about the same sort of things that articles are written about: e.g. ‘the present world situation’. That means, for me, that they can only write for the top level of the mind, the level on which generalities operate. But even this may be a mistake. At any rate I am sure I never have the sort of experiences they express: and I feel them most alien where I come nearest to understanding them.

I am just back from attending a Russian Orthodox Eucharist. The congregation walk about a lot!

My brother joins me in all best wishes to you and yours.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO CECIL HARWOOD (BOD): ¹³⁷

Magdalen College

Oxford

8/8/50

My dear Cecil

Thank you for your letter which is one of the most useful I have ever received. It brings home to me that aspect of Death which is now most neglected—Death as a Rite or Initiation Ceremony. And certainly something does come through into this world, among the survivors, at the time and for a little while after.

I am sorry about John’s Class¹³⁸–and also that I feel I failed him badly at our last meeting. I had been wondering for about 24 hours whether the lightness of head and extreme lassitude that I was feeling were the beginning of an illness. After a day in which I had had no leisure at all and which had ended with a visit to the Nursing Home I had got back to College feeling ‘all in’. At that moment came his knock. It was the moment of all others (midway between his mother’s funeral and his own viva) at which a chap might expect some moral support from an older man even if that older man were not his tutor and a family friend. But I could make no response at all. I’m sorry.

A week end here, after your travels, can be arranged almost whenever you like. Of course you will be thrice welcome.

Yours ever

Jack

TO DON GIOVANNI CALABRIA (V): ¹³⁹

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

xxv. Aug. 1950

Dilectissime Pater,

venerunt mihi nuper in manus exemplaria quaedam libri mei De Aenigmate Doloris francogallice versi. Illam linguam, puto, bene intellegis. Quocirca, si tibi placuerit, mittam ad te exemplaria tria, primum tibi, alterum Dom. Lodettio, tertium Dom. Arnaboldio. Fac me certiorem si hoc tibi cordi fuerit. Isagogem satis doctam et elegantem addidit quidam Mauritius Nédoncelle.

Omnia omina nunc infausta; placeat Deo haec in melius verti, spectanti haud nostra sed Christi merita. Vale, mi Pater, et semper habe in orationibus tuis

C. S. Lewis

*

Magdalen College,

Oxford

25th August 1950

Dearest Father,

Some copies of my book The Problem of Pain translated into French have lately reached me.¹⁴⁰ I think you know that language well. Therefore, if you so wish, I will send you three copies, one for you, another for Mr. Lodetti, and the third for Mr. Arnaboldi.¹⁴¹ Just let me know if it is of interest to you. A rather learned and elegant introduction has been added to it by one Maurice Nédoncelle.¹⁴²

All the omens are, at present, unfavourable;¹⁴³ may it please God to change these for the better, looking not at our, but at Christ’s merits. Farewell, my father, and keep me always in your prayers.

C. S. Lewis

TO VERA MATHEWS (W): TS

REF.50/81

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

28th August 1950.

Dear Miss Mathews,

Many thanks for your letter of the 16th. August, and for the parcel of 17th. July, which ‘dead heated’ as the racing people say: and both are very welcome. No indeed, I can’t think of any item which I would like altered; I was going to say that we don’t want fruit, having plenty, but of course our fruit season will soon be over, and there is the winter to consider.

Eggs are off the ration, but the egg situation leaves us unmoved, as we, thank goodness, have our own fowls. According to what I read in the papers, their being off the ration does’nt help things much; by the time the innumerable hordes of inspectors have weighed and graded and stamped and sorted and packed them, they seem to be always stale and often bad by the time they reach the consumer.

I am glad you like the memoir on Charles Williams.¹⁴⁴ Most certainly you shall have a signed copy of the book as soon as it appears.¹⁴⁵ Are there any other of my books you have’nt got, and would care to have? If so, I might be able to get them for you.

I have been away for a few days in the Welsh mountains, and my brother—lucky man–is just back from a fortnight in Ireland, or Eire as they prefer to be called. He tells me that over there they are still living in a fool’s paradise; whilst the English—and no doubt American–papers were full of anxious discussion of the Korean war, the leading Irish paper carried banner headlines, WHAT IS WRONG WITH IRISH LUMPING? (It was Horse Show week). What is wrong with Irish THINKING would be more to the point.

With all best wishes,

yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

Jill Flewett and Clement Freud were married in St James Church, Spanish Place, on 4 September 1950. Jack was unable to attend the wedding, but Warnie was there. ¹⁴⁶

TO BELLE ALLEN (W): TS

REF.50/19.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

5th September 1950.

Dear Mrs. Allen,

How nice to hear from you again! No wonder you feel disinclined for letter writing, with so many more attractive occupations out of doors. Your river sounds delicious, and I would much like to see it. I wonder is your King bird what we call over here a Kingfisher? Ours is a smallish bird of a very beautiful vivid blue, which flies low over the water, and at a great speed. Our bitterns are I think extinct, but I have often read of the ‘booming’ of the bittern. Do yours boom, and what sort of noise is meant?

I envy you your visit to Madison beach. No, I did’nt get away to the sea this year, alas, but I did manage a few days down in the Welsh mountains, which are very lovely, and where I got some fine walking: came across an inn, miles from anywhere where the guests are fed in the kitchen, as was common practice a hundred and fifty years ago. This was not a show piece for tourists, but is still the way they live in the heart of Wales.

My brother, more lucky than I, took Edward’s suit for a treat to an Irish beach for a fortnight in August; when he came back he informed me that he had had thirteen wet days, ‘and on the fourteenth we had a shower’. He was astonished at the unreality of life in Ireland today. Current events are never referred to, and Ireland is quite happy about the future: she is to be neutral, and her defence is to be a first charge on American and English resources: and that’s that, and now lets talk about horses. (On one of the most critical days in the Korean fighting, the leading Irish newspaper carried banner headlines on the front page, WHAT IS WRONG WITH IRISH JUMPING?). They are certainly an odd people.

All that you have to say about those little churches is very interesting and charming, and I am amused at your both being the same colour as the negro congregation; it’s a great testimony to Madison Beach. Though it is possible, by devoting all your time to it, to do the same thing even in England. There has been a man at the Oxford bathing place this summer, who would have passed, if not for a negro, at least for a Malay: though how he acquired this tan in such a wet summer, I don’t know. They tell me you can now buy sunburn in a bottle, which is perhaps the answer. By the way, yes, the Thames is bathed in, and I use it regularly in good weather; but its not the same thing as the sea, though very pleasant.

Many thanks for all the too kind things you say about my books–and the hardship of authors.

My mother died in 1908, when I was nine and my brother thirteen; we have no sisters, and are a couple of confirmed old batchelors, sharing a rather nice house with an eight acre garden in the suburbs.

And now I really must stop, with all good wishes to you and Edward,

Yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO RHONA BODLE (BOD): ¹⁴⁷

Magdalen College

Oxford

Sept 7th 50

Dear Miss Bodle

The question ‘Is it better to live in cramped quarters with sister and Aunt-step-mother and bad prospects or to be uprooted and begin a new life elsewhere?’ immediately provokes the other question ‘Better for whom?‘

In other words it all turns on the actual character of, and relations between, Gertrude and Franzel. One can imagine a sort of home life wh. was worth clinging to at all costs, or one wh. was worth escaping from at all costs: and (troublesomely) the chances are that this home-life is between the two extremes. Now you hardly know enough to decide, and of course I know nothing. Mustn’t Franzel and Gertrude make the decision? Especially Franzel.

My own immediate feeling is that the uprooting wd. on the whole be the best thing for now. After all, what with jobs and marriage and one thing and another, most boys get pretty well uprooted anyway. But I think you can only offer, pray, and wait for their decision. Of course I can’t ‘see F’s point of view’. Boys are no more like one another than anyone else! With all good wishes.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO DON LUIGI PEDROLLO (V): ¹⁴⁸

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

Sept. 12, 1950

Reverende Pater

Contristatus sum audita dilecti D. J. Calabriae valetudine. Placeat Domino nostro diutius servare nobis ‘tam carum caput’. De nugis meis, mi crede, non scripsissem si putavissem virum aegritudine teneri: quo fit ut importunior esse viderer. Attamen quodcumque est libelli mitto. Saluta pro me D. J. Calabria: quem, cum tota domo vestra, benedicat benedictus Jesus Christus. Vale

C. S. Lewis

*

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

Sept. 12, 1950

Reverend Father,

I am very sorry to hear of dear Fr. G. Calabria’s illness.¹⁴⁹ May it please our Lord to preserve ‘tam carum caput’¹⁵⁰ longer. Believe me, had I known he was unwell, I would not have written about my trifles, which may have seemed rather untimely. Anyway, I am sending the book, just in case. Give my regards to Fr. G. Calabria: may the blessed Christ bless him, and all of your house. Farewell

C. S. Lewis

TO VERA MATHEWS (W): TS

REF.50/81

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

20th September 1950.

Dear Miss Mathews,

To receive one of your kind gifts produces a perceptible lightening of the gloom which descends on an elderly tutor when he realizes that he is on the verge of beginning yet another term. Many thanks for your unwearying attentions. The parcel which has just arrived is that numbered 2999, posted at Beverly Hills on 14th. August.

This however is perhaps not the time to be gloomy, for if our domestic news has little in it to cheer us, at least the world situation is distinctly better. We are all following anxiously the despatches from Korea; they are not very informative, but it does seem as if the tide had really turned in your favour at last. (One should I suppose, to be pedantic, say in U.N.O.’s favour, but it seems rather absurd to call a ninety per cent American army the ‘UNO Army’). What surprises me most about the whole war is the extraordinary fighting qualities of the Koreans; I’d never heard of them as soldiers before the outbreak of this trouble, and my brother tells me that in his time in the East, they were regarded as primitive agricultural nonentitites. Even allowing for their immensely superior number, they appear to be putting up a remarkable show.

Of home politics the less said the better; you may have seen that we have chosen this period of rearmament of all possible periods to nationalize the steel industry–apparently against the wishes of the Steel masters, and of the Trades Union leaders concerned. But enough of this.

After one of the worst summers on record, we are entering upon what looks like a wet autumn, and one either carries a raincoat on hot, fine days, or goes out without it and gets soaked. Still, the country is looking lovely, and autumn is my favourite season. My brother and I took a day off last week, put sandwiches in our pockets, and tramped sixteen miles or more along the old Roman road–now a mere track–which runs from Dorchester Abbey to Oxford. Foreigners are apt to think of this island, I find, as just one huge factory site. But you would be surprised if you could see the unspoilt beauty and charm which can still be found, even in the purely industrial areas: and here, within a few miles of Morris Motors, there are plenty of villages off the main highways, where nothing seems to have happened for the last two hundred years or so.

I hope to send you the autographed children’s book by Christmas, but will probably know more about its progress this afternoon, as I am going out to lunch with my publisher¹⁵¹ in the Cotswold village of Burford, where he is on holiday.

With many thanks, and all good wishes to you and your father,

yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO ANNE RIDLER(BOD): ¹⁵²

Magdalen College

Oxford

25/9/50

Dear Miss Ridler–

5 minutes after yr. departure I was kicking myself to having let you go without getting either yr. real name or yr. address. Well, I now have at any rate the address. No, no, I never confused you with R.P.¹⁵³ And don’t you go looking down your nose at her poetry neither. The earlier vols (not the late, comic ones wh. are not to my taste) contain surely v. choice work. Do try them again in a favourable hour.

Thanks for the C.W.¹⁵⁴ sonnet which, I agree, is good & characteristic in thought. Not bad in expression either, except for thrall. (Tho’ whether, in the long run the banishment of Poetic Diction & Archaism, wh. reduces us from the freedom of Greek, Anglo-Saxon & Skaldic verse, to the straight-waistcoast of classical French, may not shend us all, I’m not sure.) My duty remembered.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO JILL FREUD (T): TS

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

29th September 1950.

Dearest June,

Hurrah! A book I’ve always wanted. I shall devour it. Thank Clay enormously.

(Here concludes the manuscript of C.S.L., and as he has left to week-end with Barfield at Abingdon, I can’t challenge his spelling of Clay—surely Clé: to whom all greetings. How delightful of you to send this excellent book; I remember from our lunch at the Royal Oxford that Clé is an expert in this sort of thing, and no gift could have pleased us better.

As for coming to see you, it is, in the jargon of the day, a priority programme: but I fear nothing can be done about it until this term is over; you remember what term is like for poor J.

I hope Mrs. Freud is very happy in her new life; I don’t send the same wishes to Cle, for if he is’nt happy, what would make him so?).

No news here. Minto continues much the same, some days recognizing us, some days not. It sounds horribly unChristian and callous, but I can’t help wishing she would die. Can you imagine anything more horrible than lingering on in this state? However, she seems fairly contented.

All love to you both.

Yours,

Warnie

P.S. Many thanks for the wedding cake. Pushkin is up to a bit of no good in the neighbour’s gardens, but will be made to sleep on his portion as soon as he comes back.

TO MARTYN SKINNER (BOD): ¹⁵⁵

Magdalen College

Oxford

11/10/50

Dear Skinner

Great Heavens, what must you think of me by now! I see it is almost exactly a year since you so kindly sent me a copy of Two Colloquies:¹⁵⁶ and all that time not even a word of acknowledgement. I reject a momentary temptation to tell you that the year has been spent in a continuous, intensive study of the text. The truth is, I didn’t want to write until I had given them a sympathetic reading and somehow I never was in the mood for them till tonight. (Reading collection papers,¹⁵⁷ like marking School Cert.,¹⁵⁸ I have always found a great whetter of appetite for poetry. Fact! I don’t know why). The right mood for a new poem doesn’t come so often now as it used to. There is so little leisure, and when one comes to that leisure untried—well, you know, Ink is a deadly drug. One wants to write. I cannot shake off the addiction.

They’re good. The puns may be a bit too frequent for my taste, but most of them excellent in quality. (I mean, I couldn’t make them myself!)–especially ‘Lies is for me a realistic word.’¹⁵⁹ And other Wit too, and wit that involves wisdom, like ‘Doesn’t a cap still fit turned inside out.’¹⁶⁰ ‘Shelley-shalley’¹⁶¹ is a verb in a thousand. But ‘me rather all that bowery etc,’¹⁶² I mean the bits (in the good, obvious, old fashioned sense of the word) more ‘poetical’. Everyone has had a try at dewy cobwebs: few better than yours on p. 7. And I liked ‘A branch’s beauty in a waggon’s curve’,¹⁶³ and all p. 14 about the honey coloured ham and the white mines of pork inside the crackling made my mouth water.¹⁶⁴ ‘Simple, sensuous, and passionate’¹⁶⁵ egad! So too the whole bit beginning ‘This scene describes the hermit.’¹⁶⁶ But what’s much the best of all, what gave me the authentic thrill (an ‘uncovenanted’ thrill for your metre and manner don’t, so to speak, contract to provide such, they are not on the menu) is the passage beginning at the bottom of p. 35 on the worlds in the skull. Which retrospectively enriches the close of the first ‘drink to the Utopia within’.¹⁶⁷ Congratulations.

I expect this comes like last night’s joint appearing at breakfast, for of course you’re now writing something else and don’t particularly want to learn about the Colloquies. Can you forgive me? I assure you there are days when I could say with honest King George ‘I hate Bainting and Boetry’,¹⁶⁸ and I wouldn’t like to have gulped you down in one of those. Last time you wrote to me didn’t you say you were contemplating a narrative poem? Has anything come of it?

I must go to bed. Once more thanks v. much for this very distinguished little book, and add to the kindness by forgetting my incivility.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO VERA MATHEWS (W): TS

REF.50/81

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

16th October 1950.

Dear Miss Mathews,

Your parcels arrive at such frequent intervals that I am quite perplexed how to acknowledge them! Here is yet another, full of good things, which has just reached me, and for which I can, as usual, do no more than offer a simple thank you: and you know it is no empty form of words.

The international sky seems a trifle better than when I wrote last, and you must all be very proud of McArthur and your army: for, though called a UNO army, I fear the rest of us played a very small part in the victory. Let us hope that the whole sad affair will cause Stalin to change his policy, even at the eleventh hour: tho’ the boiling up of the trouble in French Indo-China does not look as if he was very repentant.

I am beginning the second week of a new term, and the harness still galls a little: but ‘the old horse for the hard road’ as we say. I expect I shall soon be trotting contentedly enough.

With many thanks and good wishes to yourself and your father,

Yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe: A Story for Children was published by Geoffrey Bles of London on 16 October 1950.

TO HARRY BLAMIRES (BOD):¹⁶⁹ TS

REF.50/362.

Magdalen College

Oxford.

18th October 1950.

Dear Blamires,

I wanted nothing altered except the things I noted: certainly I did not want what I should call a ‘re-writing’.¹⁷⁰ But that is such a vague word, and we can only guess what it covers in Bles’s mind. I should advise you (if you are going to pursue the Bles avenue instead of trying another publisher) to make exactly the corrections you think proper–no more and no less—and then re-submit it. He will probably (entr nous)¹⁷¹ not remember the original text well enough to know how drastic the changes are! I can’t advise about other publishers: you’d know better than I. I hope it will find a home: I thought it a useful book.

In haste, with all good wishes,

yours,

C. S. Lewis

TO CHAD WALSH (W):

Magdalen College

Oxford

20/10/50

Dear Walsh

Of course they feel passion about politics but no passion enough for poetry: especially passions that have no commerce with the senses. Sexual passion, you see, has a concrete object before it, and is linked with fundamental impulses.

The real parallel to much modern political poetry is not religious poetry concerned with God or the Passion or Heaven but merely pious poetry concerned with (ugh!) ‘religion’. The religion of politics is a religion without sacraments: for the human sacrifices wh. it practices are mere murder, not even ritual murder. Wordsworth compensated for the (poetically) ghost-like nature of politics by using a strict form, the sonnet. But that matter, with vers libre as the form, is to me quite unpardonable: a noisy vacuity.

My brother is now quite well, thanks. I’ll note the B.P.J.¹⁷² If you get some verse from me you’ve brought it on yourself: wéan ahsode¹⁷³ All the best.

Yours¹⁷⁴

TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE (W): ¹⁷⁵

Magdalen College

Oxford

26/10/50

Dear Mrs. Shelburne–

Thank you for your most kind and encouraging letter. I should need to be either of angelic humility or diabolical pride not to be pleased at all the things you say about my books. (I think, by the way, you have all the ones that wd. matter to you). May I assure you of my deep sympathy in all the very grievous troubles that you have had. May God continue to support you: that He has done so till now, is apparent from the fact that you are not warped or embittered. I will have you in my prayers. With all good wishes.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO MARY VAN DEUSEN (W): TS

REF.50/250.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

2nd November 1950.

Dear Mrs. Van Deusen,

Many thanks for the post card. What a perfectly lovely place, and how I envy you the enjoyment of it! You may be sure that when (and if) it is ever my good fortune to visit the United States, I shall include the Smoky Mountains in my itinerary: preferably at a time when you are in residence.

With all good wishes,

yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO BELLE ALLEN (WHL):

Magdalen etc.

2nd November 1950.

Dear Mrs. Allen,

…I was deeply interested in your sketch of your life, which certainly did not begin easily. Ours was very different; for there was always plenty of money, on the modest scale of provincial comfort in those far-off days; but we really hadn’t anyone to raise us, and ran wild; like Topsy, we just growed¹⁷⁶…

TO VERA MATHEWS (W): TS

REF.50/81

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

8th November 1950.

Dear Miss Mathews,

I think ‘gracious’ is the word I want. There is a graciousness about your continued kindness which quite floors me: the immediate reference being to the excellent parcel posted on 16th. October, which has just arrived, and whose contents will be stored against the literal and metaphorical rainy day which is rapidly drawing nearer. Very many thanks.

We are all a good deal depressed—and doubtless you are much more so—over the very unpleasant news from Korea. It is horrible to think of the distress of wives and mothers who had thought the fighting over, only to discover that what is virtually a new war has to be faced. And how is it going to end? Of the ultimate end there can of course be no doubt, but I fear there is very little chance now of a decision being reached before the northern winter clamps down on the country. We can but hope and pray for some speedy success.

Here, we have just recovered from the periodical nuisance of a by-election for parliament: our sitting member having been elevated to the House of Lords, much to the poor man’s disgust, for he is a keen party politician. The Socialist vote is down by three thousand on a poll of some 69,000, and the Conservative was returned with a majority of nearly double that polled by his Conservative predecessor at the General Election. It does not do to take by-elections too seriously, but there is a certain significance about this one, since we are now largely an industrial constituency.

Winter is beginning with grey sky and north east winds, and I find myself envying you in comfortable California, where I suppose you are still in summer clothes? You should buy yourself an enormous fur coat, fill the pockets with brandy and aspirin, and come over here and see how the poor live, on the fringes of civilization!

Again many thanks,

yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

P. S. I enclose the fairy tale, and hope you will like it.

TO DOM BEDE GRIFFITHS OSB (W):

Magdalen College

Oxford

13/11/50

My dear Dom Bede

Good. I think we are in entire agreement on this point. One cd. put it this way. The bad (natural) tree cannot produce good fruit. But oddly, it can produce fruits that by all external tests are indistinguishable from the good ones: the act done from one’s own separate and unredeemed, tho’ ‘moral’ will, looks exactly like the act done by Christ in us. And oddly enough it is the tree’s real duty to go on producing these imitation fruits till it recognises this futility and despairs and is made a new (spiritual) tree. The trouble in the XVIth century was that Luther—who intuited the truth—was fundamentally an uneducated man, a peasant type: and really let the whole question get immediately entangled with political and ecclesiological questions wh. were really quite irrelevant to it. But the whole question must now be raised again. What most people who talk about Reunion don’t realise is that continental Protestantism regards the C. of E. as still theologically ‘uniformed’ and the Lutheran-Anglican gap is really at present at least as wide as the Anglican-Roman. It is thus a three cornered affair.

How very much superior the Imitation¹⁷⁷ is to the Scale of Perfection¹⁷⁸–yet I’d have said just the opposite once.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO VERA MATHEWS (W): TS

REF.50/81

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

20th November 1950.

My dear Miss Mathews,

The nine pounds fourteen ounces of comfort and cheer, whose arrival was heralded by your last letter, has this morning arrived in good condition, and will be very welcome for what the papers still describe rather pathetically as ‘the festive season’. Which, as I told you, threatens to be even leaner than usual this year; there are amongst other things, cheerful prognostications of turkey at 7/6 per pound. My board will not ‘groan under coarse plenty’ at any such price, especially as we shall be in a position to sacrifice a couple of chickens.

I never read the papers, and would not have known anything about it except for my brother, who kindly reads me out the more cheerful extracts at breakfast. However, I am grateful to him for one excerpt from yesterday’s paper—a delicious printer’s error in a description of a revivalist meeting in the Midlands:–‘At the conclusion of the exercises, a large CROW remained in the hall, singing Abide with Me’. With renewed thanks and all good wishes,

Yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO VERA MATHEWS (W): TS

REF.50/81

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

25th November 1950.

Dear Miss Mathews,

Many thanks for your letter of the 20th, and especially for the quotation from R Giovanni;¹⁷⁹ it is good, is’nt it?

I don’t think I should like the climate of Beverly Hills for a permanency; do you never feel the need to get away up north for a holiday and see snow on the ground? My idle brother on the other hand, with nostalgic memories of long lazy days in the tropics—at the taxpayer’s expense—feels it would suit him down to the ground: and talks still at times, generally at dinner times, of a steak and mushrooms which he once ate in San Francisco.

I note, with the usual gratitude—and embarrassment—that the usual stream of gifts is making its way steadily along the pipeline which you have laid from Alpine Drive to Magdalen College. Many, many thanks. Will you despise my pedestrian taste if I say I prefer envelopes to butter Scotch? I fear there is a sort of echo of Goering’s ‘guns before butter’ about this,¹⁸⁰ but stationary is for some reason, absurdly hard to get over here, and very dear when got. Probably now that I come to think of it, because we have recently broken off our paper contract with Canada; not unnaturally to the great annoyance of the Canadians.

If a magic carpet could transport you to Oxford this morning, it would work a very rapid cure on your lethargy. The floods are out, and now it is freezing, with a heavy fog; I can’t see across the quadrangle.

With all best wishes,

yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO BELLE ALLEN (WHL):

Magdalen etc.

25 November 1950.

Dear Mrs Allen,

I too am an admirer of Bernard Shaw’s work, and could love him for his attack on the vivisectionists. That in the preface to the Doctor’s Dilemma is just devastating.¹⁸¹ Many before and since have attacked them for their cruelty, but Shaw was, I think, the first man to attack them for their stupidity; which I’m sure gets them on the raw whilst an attack on their cruelty would most likely leave their withers unwrung. No one who has ever read Shaw is able afterwards to think of vivisectionists without remembering the imbecile who spent his time cutting the tails off generations of mice to see if presently one would be born without a tail…

TO RUTH PITTER(BOD): ¹⁸²

REF.50/4.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

28th November 1950.

Dear Miss Pitter,

What a delightful surprise! You cheer me up no end, and provide a makeweight to letters from a headmistress which tell me the book will cause confusion and terror, and that many people are much ‘distressed’ at my having written it. But I get nice letters from actual children and parents.^* I noted, of course, the lion image in your previous letter and rejoiced darkly.

But next time you write, don’t write all about me: what are you doing, and how are you? Well, I hope. With very many thanks,

yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO MRS HALMBACHER (L):

Magdalen College

Oxford

28 November 1950

I avoided the word ‘Grace’ because I thought it didn’t carry much clear meaning to the uninstructed readers I had in view. I think the thing is dealt with in a rough and ready way in Case for Christianity¹⁸³ and Beyond Personality.¹⁸⁴ Any advanced or technical theology of Grace was quite beyond my scope. Naturally that does not mean that I thought the subject unimportant.

The other question, about the limits of faith and superstition, is also important. But my own mind is v. far from clear on it. I think you must seek counsel (if it is a practical problem for you) from a real theologian, not from an amateur like me. I am sorry to disappoint you: but it is better to refuse than to mislead.

TO WARFIELD M. FIROR(BOD):

Magdalen College

Oxford

Dec 6/50

My dear Firor

It is always a pleasure to hear from you: doubled in this case by finding that you owed (or think you owed) me a letter when I feared the shoe was on the other foot.

The old lady’s retirement to a Nursing Home has made me a good deal freer in a small way. I can plan my days and count on some domestic leisure as I have not been able to do these last fifteen years. But it has hardly made me free on such a large scale as you suppose. I visit her pretty nearly every day, and I shd. certainly like to be at hand when the end comes. Also, I naturally have to be a good deal more frugal than before, since the Nursing Home makes a pretty big hole in my income.

The patient is nearly always perfectly placid now and does not seem to suffer at all. Very interested, for the first time in her life, in food. These bedside experiences have much allayed my fear of paralysis. I had not realised that it could be such a quiet return to infancy, or even animality. I suppose one need not be surprised that the evening twilight sometimes is exactly like the morning twilight. But, I fear, no chance of your ranches yet. ‘Ever more thanks.’

I am sometimes much worried about the News, sometimes ashamed that I am not worried more. I suppose it comes from one’s total power-lessness. Our emotions all have a strongly practical side and don’t work much when it is obvious that one can’t do anything. Hence a small noise at night in one’s house, which one can stop, keeps one awake till one has got up and done so: the most notable exception (for me) is when one is being driven in a car by a driver one doesn’t trust along a dangerous road. I do find it v. hard to surrender myself to my fate then. I suppose because one can’t get rid of the idiotic illusion that one could do something.

My great hope is that whenever in the past people have feared a German outbreak, their fears have proved right: but when they have feared a Russian outbreak, they have often, perhaps usually, been pleasantly disappointed. The Russian is not, like the German, a congenital invader. But this is slender. The thought of such a war as that wd. be bad enough in itself: but the thought of entering it with such a government as England now has, is sheer nightmare. Have you any parallel to their imbecility? All rulers lie: but did you ever meet such bad liars?

While you have been reading Letters to Young Churches (a good book, I thought)¹⁸⁵1 have been regaling myself on Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn.¹⁸⁶1 wonder why that man never wrote anything else on the same level? The scene in which Huck decides to be ‘good’ by betraying Jim, and then finds he can’t and concludes that he is a reprobate, is really unparalleled in humour, pathos, & tenderness. And it goes down to the very depth of all moral problems.

We still eat hams (or give ‘em to the hard up) with much joy and gratitude, and your name is ‘in our flowing cups freshly remembered’.¹⁸⁷ I thought you were running over to this side some time soon again? I wd. dearly like another pow-wow. With all thanks & blessings.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO MARY VAN DEUSEN (W):

Magdalen College

Oxford

7/12/50

Dear Mrs. Van Deusen,

(1.) To the best of my knowledge the Episcopalian Church in America is exactly the same as the Anglican Church.

(2.) The only rite which we know to have been instituted by Our Lord Himself is the Holy Communion (‘Do this in remembrance of me’¹⁸⁸–‘If you do not eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, ye have no life in you’¹⁸⁹). This is an order and must be obeyed. The other services¹⁹⁰ are, I take it, traditional and might lawfully be altered. But the New Testament does not envisage solitary religion: some kind of regular assembly for worship and instruction is everywhere taken for granted in the Epistles. So we must be regular practising members of the Church.

Of course we differ in temperament. Some (like you—and me) find it more natural to approach God in solitude: but we must go to church as well. Others find it easier to approach Him thro’ the services: but they must practice private prayer & reading as well. For the Church is not a human society of people united by their natural affinities but the Body of Christ in which all members however different (and He rejoices in their differences & by no means wishes to iron them out) must share the common life, complementing and helping and receiving one another precisely by their differences. (Re-read 1st Corinthians cap 12 and meditate on it. The word translated members wd perhaps be better translated organs).¹⁹¹

If people like you and me find much that we don’t naturally like in the public & corporate side of Christianity all the better for us: it will teach us humility and charity towards simple low-brow people who may be better Christians than ourselves. I naturally loathe nearly all hymns: the face, and life, of the charwoman in the next pew who revels in them, teach me that good taste in poetry or music are not necessary to salvation.

(3.) I am not clear what question you are asking me about spiritual healing. That this gift was promised to the Church is certain from Scripture.¹⁹² Whether any instance of it is a real instance, or chance, or even (as might happen in this wicked world) fraud, is a question only to be decided by the evidence in that particular case. And unless one is a doctor one is not likely to be able to judge the evidence. V. often, I expect, one is not called upon to do so. Anything like a sudden furore about it in one district, especially if accompanied by a publicity campaign on modern commercial lines, wd. be to me suspect: but even then I might be wrong. On the whole, my attitude wd. be that any claim may be true, and that it is not my duty to decide whether it is.

‘Regular but cool’ in Church attendance is no bad symptom. Obedience is the key to all doors: feelings come (or don’t come) and go as God pleases. We can’t produce them at will and mustn’t try.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

Sheldon Vanauken’s¹⁹³ autobiographical A Severe Mercy (1977) is the heartrending story of his marriage to Jean ‘Davy’ Davis. They first met at the outbreak of the Second World War when Vanauken was in his second year at Wabash College in Indiana. They fell in love and married a few months later. From the first they devised what they called ‘The Shining Barrier’ which was meant to act as a ‘defence against creeping separ-ateness’.¹⁹⁴ Vanauken joined the Navy in March 1941 and was sent as a US naval lieutenant commander to Pearl Harbor, where he was stationed when it was bombed by the Japanese on 7 December 1941.

On leaving the Navy in November 1945 he went to Yale University with Davy where he took an MA degree in History. In the Michaelmas Term 1949 they moved to Oxford where Vanauken began work on a B. Litt. degree at Jesus College. At this time Vanauken spelt his name ‘Van Auken. Neither was a believer, but it was not long before they began to see things differently. They read a number of Lewis’s books and in December 1950 Vanauken wrote to Lewis:

Having felt the aesthetic and historical appeal of Christianity, having begun to study it, I have come to awareness of the strength and ‘possibleness’ of the Christian answer. I should like to believe it. I want to know God…But I cannot pray with any conviction that Someone hears. I can’t believe.

Very simply, it seems to me that some intelligent power made this universe and that all men must know it, axiomatically, and must feel awe at the power’s infiniteness. It seems to me natural that men, knowing and feeling so, should attempt to elaborate on the simplicity—the prophets, the Prince Buddha, the Lord Jesus, Mohammed, the Brahmins—and so arose the world’s religions. But how can just one of them be singled out as true?¹⁹⁵

TO SHELDON VANAUKEN (BOD):

Magdalen College

Oxford

14/12/50

Dear Mr. Van Awten

My own position at the threshold of Xtianity was exactly the opposite of yours. You wish it were true: I strongly hoped it was not. At least, that was my conscious wish: you may suspect that I had unconscious wishes of quite a different sort and that it was these which finally shoved me in. True: but then I may equally suspect that under your conscious wish that it were true, there lurks a strong unconscious wish that it were not. What this works out to is that all that modern stuff about concealed wishes and wishful thinking, however useful it maybe for explaining the origin of an error which you already know to be an error, is perfectly useless in deciding which of two beliefs is the error and which is the truth. For (a.) One never knows all one’s wishes, and (b.) In very big questions, such as this, even one’s conscious wishes are nearly always engaged on both sides.

What I think you can say with certainty is this: the notion that everyone would like Xtianity to be true, and that therefore all atheists are brave men who have accepted the defeat of all their deepest desires, is simply impudent nonsense. Do you think people like Stalin, Hitler, Haldane, Stapledon (a corking good writer, by the way) wd. be pleased on waking up one morning to find that they were not their own masters, that they had a Master and a Judge, that there was nothing ever in the deepest recesses of their thoughts about which they cd. say to Him ‘Keep out. Private. This is my business’? Do you? Rats! Their first reaction wd. be (as mine was) rage and terror. And I v. much doubt whether even you wd. find it simply pleasant. Isn’t the truth this: that it wd. gratify some of our desires (ones we feel in fact pretty seldom) and outrage a great many others? So let’s wash out all the Wish business. It never helped anyone to solve any problem yet.

I don’t agree with your picture of the history of religion—Christ, Buddha, Mohammed and others elaborating an original simplicity. I believe Buddhism to be a simplification of Hinduism and Islam to be a simplification of Xtianity. Clear, lucid, transparent, simple religion (Tao plus a shadowy, ethical god in the background) is a late development, usually arising among highly educated people in great cities. What you really start with is ritual, myth, and mystery, the death & return of Balder or Osiris, the dances, the initiations, the sacrifices, the divine kings. Over against that are the Philosophers, Aristotle or Confucius, hardly religious at all.

The only two systems in which the mysteries and the philosophies come together are Hinduism & Xtianity: there you get both Metaphysics and Cult (continuous with the primeval cults). That is why my first step was to be sure that one or other of these had the answer. For the reality can’t be one that appeals either only to savages or only to high brows. Real things are like that (e.g. matter is the first most obvious thing you meet—milk, chocolates, apples, and also the object of quantum physics).

There is no question of just a crowd of disconnected religions. The choice is between (a.) The materialist world picture: wh. I can’t believe, (b.) The real archaic primitive religions: wh. are not moral enough (c.) The (claimed) fulfilment of these in Hinduism, (d.) The claimed fulfilment of these in Xtianity. But the weakness of Hinduism is that it doesn’t really join the two strands. Unredeemably savage religion goes on in the village: the Hermit philosophises in the forest: and neither really interferes with the other. It is only Xtianity wh. compels a high brow like me to partake in a ritual blood feast, and also compels a central African convert to attempt an enlightened universal code of ethics.

Have you tried Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man?¹⁹⁶ The best popular apologetic I know.

Meanwhile, the attempt to practice the Tao is certainly the right line.¹⁹⁷ Have you read the Analects of Confucius? He ends up by saying ‘This is the Tao. I do not know if any one has ever kept it.’ That’s significant: one can really go direct from there to the Epistle to the Romans.

I don’t know if any of this is the least use. Be sure to write again, or call, if you think I can be of any help.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO R B. GRIBBON (W):¹⁹⁸ TS

REF. 50/185.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

19th December 1950.

Dear Mr. Gribbon,

It is also a far cry from December in Oxford to mid-Iune in Oxford! Thanks for your kind greetings, and the same to you. I too hope that we may meet again, either here or, better still, in Co. Down.

Yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO VERA MATHEWS (W): TS

REF.50/81

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

19th December 1950.

Dear Miss Mathews,

Many thanks for all the kind and encouraging things you say about the new book.¹⁹⁹ I’m glad you enjoyed it.

The cutting is a treasure; you had better invest in a stock of these collars quick. For I doubt if your President will consider their manufacture really essential to America’s geared up emergency programme!

My brother joins me in sending you all best wishes.

Yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO MRS FRANK L. JONES (W): TS

REF.50/18.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

21st December 1950

Dear Mrs. Jones,

What, again!! Really two large and handsome food parcels in the same month is spoiling us completely. Here is a beauty from CARE just come in, in nice time for Christmas, and we are all very grateful indeed to you for it. On your bounty we shall ride comfortably into the New Year. Let us hope that it will be a better one than 1950, though I’m afraid there is not a very bright prospect before any of us.

I must also thank you and Mr. Jones for the two beautiful engagement books; I have had a preliminary look through them, and though California must be a very attractive state, I confess I prefer New England. It is more my sort of country. My brother, who is really more concerned with my engagements than I am, asks me to send his thanks too.

The weather forecast promises us Christmas weather over the holiday, and it is a prospect which I regard with very mixed feelings; I’m getting too old for ice and snow, and now share the views of Kipling’s MacAndrew:—

Hail ice and snow which praise the Lord, I’ve met you at your work And wished that we’d another route Or you another Kirk.²⁰⁰

All blessings on you both.

Yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO VERA MATHEWS (W): TS

REF.50/81

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

21st December 1950.

Dear Miss Mathews,

Hard on the heels of your last letter comes yet another of your excellent parcels. If you go on at this rate, the Customs people will begin to suspect that what you are really doing is to run a black market shop in Oxford, with me as your distributing agent! But seriously, you spoil us—and very many thanks for doing so.

You will understand if I cut you off with the shortest of notes: I am knee deep in the hideous task of dealing with my Christmas mail. All blessings.

yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO SHELDON VANAUKEN (BOD): ²⁰¹

Magdalen College

Oxford

23 Dec. 1950

Dear Mr. Van Auken

The contradiction ‘We must have faith to believe and must believe to have faith’ belongs to the same class as those by which the Eliatic philosophers proved that all motion was impossible.²⁰² And there are many others. You can’t swim unless you can support yourself in water & you can’t support yourself in water unless you can swim. Or again, in any act of volition (e.g. getting up in the morning) is the very beginning of the act itself voluntary or involuntary? If voluntary then you must have willed it, you were willing already, it was not really the beginning. If involuntary, then the continuation of the act (being determined by the first moment) is involuntary too. But in spite of this we do swim, & we do get out of bed.

I do not think there is a demonstrative proof (like Euclid) of Christianity, nor of the existence of matter, nor of the good will & honesty of my best & oldest friends. I think all three are (except perhaps the second) far more probable than the alternatives. The case for Xtianity in general is well given by Chesterton: and I tried to do something in my Broadcast Talks.

As to why God doesn’t make it demonstratively clear: are we sure that He is even interested in the kind of Theism which wd. be a compelled logical assent to a conclusive argument? Are we interested in it in personal matters? I demand from my friend a trust in my good faith which is certain without demonstrative proof. It wouldn’t be confidence at all if he waited for rigorous proof. Hang it all, the very fairy-tales embody the truth. Othello believed in Desdemona’s innocence when it was proved: but that was too late.²⁰³ Lear believed in Cordelia’s love when it was proved: but that was too late.²⁰⁴ ‘His praise is lost who stays till all commend.’²⁰⁵ The magnanimity, the generosity wh. will trust on a reasonable probability, is required of us. But supposing one believed and was wrong after all? Why, then you wd. have paid the universe a compliment it doesn’t deserve. Your error wd. even so be more interesting & important than the reality. And yet how cd. that be? How cd. an idiotic universe have produced creatures whose mere dreams are so much stronger, better, subtler than itself?

Note that life after death, which still seems to you the essential thing, was itself a late revelation. God trained the Hebrews for centuries to believe in Him without promising them an after-life: and, blessings on Him, he trained me in the same way for about a year. It is like the disguised prince in a fairy tale who wins the heroine’s love before she knows he is anything more than a woodcutter. What wd. be a bribe if it came first had better come last.

It is quite clear from what you say that you have conscious wishes on both sides. And now, another point about wishes. A wish may lead to false beliefs, granted. But what does the existence of the wish suggest? At one time I was much impressed by Arnold’s line ‘Nor does the being hungry prove that we have bread.’ But, surely, tho’ it doesn’t prove that one particular man will get food, it does prove that there is such a thing as food? i.e. if we were a species that didn’t normally eat, wasn’t designed to eat, wd. one feel hungry?

You say the Materialist universe is ‘ugly’. I wonder how you discovered that? If you are really a product of a materialistic universe, how is it you don’t feel at home there? Do fish complain of the sea for being wet? Or if they did, would that fact itself not strongly suggest that they had not always been, or wd. not always be, purely aquatic creatures? Notice how we are perpetually surprised at Time. (‘How time flies! Fancy John being grown-up & married? I can hardly believe it!’) In heaven’s name, why? Unless, indeed, there is something in us which is not temporal.

Total Humility is not in the Tao because the Tao (as such) says nothing about the object to which it wd. be the right response: just as there is no law about railways in the acts of Q. Elizabeth. But from the degree of respect wh. the Tao demands for ancestors, parents, elders, & teachers, it is quite clear what the Tao wd. prescribe towards an object such as God.

But I think you are already in the meshes of the net! The Holy Spirit is after you. I doubt if you’ll get away!

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO BELLE ALLEN (W): TS

REF.50/19.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

28th December 1950.

Dear Mrs. Allen,

Many thanks for your interesting letter of the 12th, which gave me much pleasure. Some words do tend to look queer when they are put on paper: but ‘offing’ is a perfectly good nautical word, dating from 1627, defined by the Oxford Dictionary as ‘the part of the visible sea distant from the shore or beyond the anchoring ground’.

But don’t talk to me of your snow, for we are all shivering here in the hardest winter we have had since 1946, and with a fuel crisis to add to our troubles. Much recrimination too as to who is responsible for the latter, and wide publicity is being given to a piece of ineptitude which is going on in Cardiff Docks; in one berth is a Norwegian ship discharging American coal for the British Railways—in the next one to it, a Spanish ship loading Welsh coal for the Argentine Railways! There certainly seems something very wrong there.

With us too, the steady rise in retail prices is a constant nightmare to all except the weekly wage earners, who can remedy their position by striking. Only yesterday a lady told me that now the material to make a pair of man’s socks costs ten shillings: and everything else is up in proportion. Except the basic items of the ration, and these of course are heavily subsidized, so in the long run we pay for them too, through the taxes. But we have a most excellent housekeeper, who is a marvel at ‘making do’, and there are five of us in the house.

The people who are really hard hit are the single ones, or the childless married couples: for naturally the more of you in the house, the easier it is to get enough meat for stews and suchlike. In term time I have my meals in College, including a free dinner, which has from time immemorial been part of the stipend of a tutor. My brother takes a snack in town in the middle of the day—usually something he has bought on the way in—and has the rest of his meals out at the house; he keeps a very sharp eye on my, or perhaps I should say your parcels, and abstracts anything likely to be useful for his lunches, justifying his peculations by quoting that ‘the labourer is worthy of his hire’.²⁰⁶

It is very odd about the envelopes; we certainly received them, and they were all used up in due course. Why one never went back to it’s home, neither of us can understand. Of course I write to twenty English folk for one American, and therefore the odds against your getting one back would be considerable. Our very small envelopes are due, I understand, to the fact that we are very seriously short of paper—having broken our contract with Canada, for some reason I have never followed. I don’t think there is any mail restriction.

The whole question of the atomic bomb is a very difficult one: the Sunday after the news of the dropping of the first one came through, our minister asked us all to join in prayer for forgiveness for the great crime of using it. But, if fwhat we have since heard is true, i.e. that the first item on the Japanese anti-invasion programme was the killing of every European in Japan, the answer did not, to me, seem so simple as all that.

I read with interest and indignation your story of the experiment on the monkeys; there seems no end to the folly and wickedness of this world. Dogs are jealous; perhaps the besetting sin they inherited at the Fall.^*

I see that in rambling along I have nearly forgotten to thank you for the impending gifts. I hope, indeed if I may so put it, insist that you give up spoiling me in this way if prices rise still more against you.

With all good wishes from us both to you both for 1951,

yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

* On second thoughts, I don’t think it is a sin in them, tho’ it is in us.²⁰⁷

TO SISTER PENELOPE CSMV(BOD):

Magdalen College

Oxford

Dec 30/50

Dear Sister Penelope

Yours was a cheering letter which warmed my heart (I wish it wd. have warmed my fingers too: as it is they will hardly form the letters!).

I can’t offer any comments on the re-planning of the novel, not now having all the problems clearly enough in my head. I feel like saying it wd. be a pity to lose Adam, but then one has really no business to compare a work with its own pre-history.

I’m delighted about the Biblical plays which I remember doing me a lot of good when I read them. They may be, in a way, your most important work.

Our state is thus: my ‘mother’ has had to retire permanently into a Nursing Home. She is in no pain but her mind has almost completely gone. What traces of it remain seem gentler and more placid than I have known it for years. Her appetite is, oddly, enormous. I visit her, normally, every day, and am divided between a (rational?) feeling that this process of gradual withdrawal is merciful and even beautiful, and a quite different feeling (it comes out in my dreams) of horror.

There is no denying—and I don’t know why I should deny to you—that our domestic life is both more physically comfortable and more psychologically harmonious for her absence. The expence is of course v. severe and I have worries about that. But it wd. be v. dangerous to have no worries—or rather no occasions of worry. I have been feeling that v. much lately: that cheerful insecurity is what Our Lord asks of us. Thus one comes, late & surprised, to the simplest & earliest Christian lessons!

Rê pseudo- or deutero Screwtapes. My own feeling is that a literary idea ought to belong to anyone who can use it and that literary property is a sort of Simony. But you might find my publisher taking a different view. I don’t know, though: perhaps not, if it was published with proper acknowledgements. Let me know if it reaches the stage of a practical decision. I am glad to hear your inner news. Mine, too, is I think (but who am I to judge?) fairly good. Oremus pro invicem,²⁰⁸

Yours most sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO RUTH PITTER(BOD):

Magdalen College

Oxford

Dec 30/50

Dear Miss Pitter—

I don’t know if I can write, my fingers are so cold. (Almost the only pleasure of which age has yet deprived me—I mean the only good one—is the power of enjoying hard frost. Otherwise youth’s a stuff that’s over-rated).

What helps you in Theocritus hinders me, and in the Georgics too: i.e. when I’ve looked up the vegetables in the Lexicon, I don’t know the English any better than the Greek. The equation ‘γλώε,’²⁰⁹ the lesser mud-wort, fangoleum paludis’, is to me a = b where both are unknown. Not that I don’t enjoy the vegetables when I meet them in the cool, green flesh: but each individual is new to me each time. Heroic books–is this yours? And for a ‘work in progress’? It is obviously some poet’s prose, sweet on the tongue. I feel that about the poet being a Parthian too: but am not quite sure whether it doesn’t come from living in an un-poetical age when the poet is perilously near being ‘vestigial’. Did people feel that way about Virgil or Firdausi?²¹⁰ (Here have been interrupted for an hour by an elderly lady asking moral advice!).

I hope you had a nice time with the Duchess.²¹¹ Shd. I like her poetry? I don’t know it. My brother joins me in all good wishes and I must go to lunch. My humble duty, Ma’am

Yours very sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO GEORGE SAYER (W):

Magdalen College

Oxford

Dec 30. 50

My dear George

What dears you both are: but a ruddy fellowship exam will keep me immobilised right up till term. Thanks all the same. Can you come up for a night any time after our term begins (Jan 13)?

MS rec’d safely. Yes, la belle Baynes²¹² will do the lot: Magnae virtutes nee minora vítía.²¹³ Her Mouse is one of her best beasts, however.

No, I don’t wish a cheque! You have both been much in oratíoníbus nostris. Name your night & do come.

Jack

1 See Roger Lancelyn Green in the Biographical Appendix to CL II, pp. 1039-43. Green was the primary reader and critic of Lewis’s Narnian stories.

2 For information about the writing of the Narnian stories see Roger Lancelyn Green and Walter Hooper, C. S. Lewis: A Biography (London: Bles, 1974; rev. edn HarperCollins, 2002), ch. 11.

3 This is a letter of reference for Lewis’s former pupil, lonathan Francis ‘Frank’ Goodridge, whose biography appears in CL II, p. 936n. Goodridge was applying for the position of Senior Lecturer in English at St Mary’s College, Strawberry Hill, Twickenham, London. He taught at St Mary’s College, 1950-65. See Goodridge’s comments on this testimonial in CSL: The Bulletin of the New York C. S. Lewis Society, Whole No. 75 (Ian. 1976), p. 13.

4 This is one of those occasions on which Lewis misspelled his pupil’s name.

5 This was the Oxford University Socratic Club, founded in 1941 by Stella Aldwinckle with Lewis as its first president. See Stella Aldwinckle in the Biographical Appendix. The club’s purpose was to discuss the pros and cons of Christianity, and it met weekly during term-time. Goodridge was secretary of the Socratic Club, 1947-8. For a history of the club see Walter Hooper, ‘Oxford’s Bonny Fighter’ in Remembering C. S. Lewis: Recollections of Those Who Knew Him, ed. James T. Como (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2005). This book was previously published as C. S. Lewis at the Breakfast Table (1979; new edn, 1992).

6 See the biography of George Rostrevor Hamilton in CL II, p. 707n.

7 Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus), Satires, II, vi, 65: ‘O nights and suppers of gods!’ Horace (65-8 BC) was one of the greatest of the Roman poets.

8 Claudian, De Raptu Proserpinae, II, 282-3: ‘There are other stars for us.’ Pluto speaks the phrase, attempting to calm Persephone’s weeping, telling her that he is a person of importance and that there is an upside to being in the underworld.

9 The word planta– ‘a young tree’–appears in Virgil, Georgia, II, 23.

10 See Owen Barfield in the Biographical Appendix to CL I, pp. 979-82. Barfield was one of Lewis’s oldest friends and also his lawyer.

11 ‘ritual’.

12 John Masefield (1878-1967), Poet Laureate 1930-67.

13 See the biography of Nathan Comfort Starr, Professor of English at the University of Florida in Gainesville, in CL II, p. 809n. His essay on Lewis, ‘Good Cheer and Sustenance’, appears in Remembering C. S. Lewis.

14 Lewis’s group of friends, the Inklings, met regularly every Tuesday morning in the Eagle and Child (‘Bird and Baby’) pub in St Giles.

15 p.p. See Abbreviations.

16 Sarah Neylan (later Tisdall) was Lewis’s eleven-year-old goddaughter. See Mary Neylan in the Biographical Appendix to CL II, pp. 1054-5.

17 Rhona Bodle, from New Zealand, arrived in England in 1947 to study the education of deaf children. That same year she began teaching at Oakdene School for girls in Burgess Hill, Sussex. In December 1947 she began reading Lewis’s Broadcast Talks (London: Bles, 1942) and this led her to write to him. She became a Christian in 1949. See her biography in CL II, p. 823n. Her notes to Lewis’s letters are in the Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. lett. c. 200/4.

18 See Charles Walter Stansby Williams (1886-1945) in the Biographical Appendix to CL II, pp. 1081-6.

19 Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene (1590, 1596), I, xi, 45, 6: ‘It chaunst (eternal God that chaunce did guide)’.

20 See Sister Penelope CSMV in the Biographical Appendix to CL II, pp. 1055-9.

21 In 1948 Sister Penelope began asking Lewis’s advice about a story she was writing, to be called ‘The Morning Gift’. She was never able to find a publisher. It is first mentioned in Lewis’s letter to Sister Penelope of 8 April 1948 (CL II, p. 848).

22 This was probably a reference to Sir Herbert Butterfield’s Christianity and History (London: Bell, 1949).

23 Sister Penelope’s St Bernard on the Love of God, De Diligendo Deo, newly translated by A Religious of C.S.M.V. (London: Mowbray, 1950).

24 In a letter of 29 November 1944 to his son Christopher, Professor J. R. R. Tolkien said that he and Lewis ‘begin to consider writing a book in collaboration on “Language” (Nature, Origins, Functions)’ (The Letters of]. R. R. Tolkien, ed. Humphrey Carpenter (1981), p. 105). By 1948 it had got as far as being called Language and Human Nature in an announcement of forthcoming books from the Student Christian Movement, who expected it to be published in 1949. In the end, it was never written. Emperor Augustus used ‘on the Greek Kalends’ for ‘Never’.

25 Edward A. Allen and his mother, Mrs Belle Allen, lived at 173 Highland Avenue, Westfield, Massachusetts. They were very generous to the Lewis brothers, and sent them numerous parcels of food over the years. For the beginning of the correspondence see Lewis’s letter to Allen of 3 January 1948 (CL II, p. 827).

26 John Strachey (1901-63), a British Socialist writer and Labour politician, who served as Minister of Food, 1946-50.

27 Vera Mathews (later Gebbert) was living at this time at 510 North Alpine Drive, Beverly Hills, California. She supplied the Lewis brothers with vast quantities of food during the lean years following the war.

28 See Edward Thomas Dell, Jr in the Biographical Appendix to CL II, p. 1025. At this time Dell was a student at Eastern Nazarene College, Wollaston, Massachusetts.

29 In a letter of 12 December 1949 Dell had asked whether ‘evil is an illusion’. Lewis replied on 19 December 1949: ‘I don’t think the idea that evil is an illusion helps. Because surely it is a (real) evil that the illusion of evil shd. exist. When I am pursued in a nightmare by a crocodile the pursuit and the crocodile are illusions: but it is a real nightmare, and that seems a real evil’ (CL II, p. 1010). Continuing the discussion, Dell asked in a letter of 26 January 1950: ‘If the illusion of the crocodile is evil isn’t it so because of man’s sin rather than a basic relationship set up either by an evil or uncontrolled by a finite God?’ (Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. lett. c. 220/4, fols. 89-90).

30 Nothing is known of this American nun who, it appears, wanted to know why Lewis was not a Roman Catholic.

31 See Nicolas Zernov, Spalding Lecturer in Eastern Orthodox Culture in the University of Oxford, in the Biographical Appendix.

32 Henry Norman Spalding (1877-1953), philanthropist. In his early life Spalding came across a book about the history of India which kindled in him an interest in the Far East. He settled in Oxford and devoted himself to the attempt to cultivate better relations between the West and the East by fostering scholarly approaches to the history, art, religion and philosophy of Oriental countries. He was so impressed by the work of Nicolas Zernov that in 1965 he founded the Spalding Lectureship in Eastern Orthodox Culture, with Zernov as its first holder.

33 Mrs Frank Iones, who was still sending food parcels to Lewis, wrote from 320 Brookside Road, Darien, Connecticut.

34 The Problem of Pain (London: Bles, 1940; HarperCollins, 2002).

35 The Old Testament.

36 Mr Lake had presumably asked Lewis about the association of planetary intelligences and eldila with angels in his interplanetary trilogy, Out of the Silent Planet (London: John Lane, 1938), Perelandra (London: John Lane, 1943) and That Hideous Strength (London: John Lane, 1945). Lewis was later to write about these angels or daemons in The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964), ch. 3, pp. 40-2.

37 For years Lewis had been publishing some of his poems under the pseudonym Nat Whilk (or N.W.)–Anglo-Saxon for ‘I know not whom’. In Perelandra (1943; HarperCollins, 2000), ch. 1, p. 13, he quotes a note on the eldila or angels by one ‘Natvilcius’, which is Latin for ‘Nat Whilk’.

38 See Daphne Harwood in the Biographical Appendix to CL II, pp. 1050-1. Mrs Harwood, the wife of Cecil Harwood, had not been well.

39 i.e., her husband.

40 Bede (c. 673-735) established the date of Easter in his De Temporum Ratione (written in 725).

41 Christopher Fry, The Lady’s Not For Burning (1949).

42 John, the Harwoods’ eldest son, was Lewis’s pupil at Magdalen College. See his biography in CL II, p. 300n.

43 Sylvia was one of the Harwoods’ daughters.

44 See the biography of Walter Ogilvie ‘Woff Field in CL II, p. 572n. Field, like Cecil Harwood, was a teacher at Michael Hall School, Kidbrooke Park, Forest Row, Sussex.

45 See Roger Lancelyn Green in the Biographical Appendix to CL II, pp. 1039-43. At this time Green was living at 119 Woodstock Road, Oxford,

46 Lewis’s original title for what became Prince Caspian: The Return to Narnia (1951) was ‘A Horn in Narnia’ (since it was Queen Susan’s magic horn which drew the children back to the rescue of Prince Caspian).

47 See Lady Freud in the Biographical Appendix to CL II, pp. 1033-6. June Flewett (known familiarly as ‘Jill’) had been evacuated to Oxford at the beginning of the Second World War, and ended up living at The Kilns during 1943-5, helping Mrs Moore and the Lewis brothers. After graduating from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, London, in 1947, she became an actress, using the screen name Jill Raymond.

48 Warnie was in Restholme on this occasion.

49 Bruce was Mrs Moore’s elderly dog.

50 This letter was published in The Times Literary Supplement (3 March 1950), p. 137, under the title ‘Text Corruptions’.

51 William Shakespeare, Two Gentlemen of Verona, ed. John Dover Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1921).

52 William Shakespeare, Two Gentlemen of Verona (1594), V, iv, 90. References to Shakespeare in the present volume are to William Shakespeare, Complete Works, ed. W J. Craig, Oxford Standard Authors (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1905).

53 Shakespeare, Two Gentlemen of Verona, ed. Dover Wilson, p. 103.

54 See Dr Warfield M. Firor in the Biographical Appendix to CL II, pp. 1031-2.

55 On 24 February 1950 the British Labour Party won the general election, with Clement Attlee (1883-1967) returning as Prime Minister.

56 William Shakespeare, Hamlet (1603), IV, iv, 36-9.

57 ‘masterpiece’.

58 ‘way to arrive’.

59 Green had written a blurb for the cover of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (London: Bles, 1950), but in the end it was not used.

60 See the biography of Geoffrey Bles in CL II, p. 554n. Bles, Lewis’s publisher, was the owner of Geoffrey Bles Ltd, London.

61 Milton Waldman (1895-1976) was born in the United States and educated at Yale University. After serving with the US Army, 1917-19, he moved to England where he spent his life in publishing. He was assistant editor of The London Mercury, 1924-7, before becoming a literary advisor to the publishers Longmans Green, 1929-34, and then William Collins, 1939-52. He was joint managing director of Rupert Hart-Davis Ltd, 1952-3, and literary advisor to Collins, 1955-69. During his years with Collins he edited the Golden Hind and Brief Lives series. Waldman was the author of Americana (1925), Elizabeth of England (1933), and The Lady Mary: A Biography of Queen Mary L (1972).

62 The King’s Arms public house on the corner of Holywell Street and Parks Road.

63 See George and Moira Sayer in the Biographical Appendix.

64 In a letter of 3 April 1950 Dell said: ‘I have been reading your Allegory of Love with great interest. It has occurred to me to wonder whether the present-day lack…of a depth of love between men so often seen in the middle ages could be part of the cause for the male lack of interest in God’ (Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. lett. c. 220/4, fol. 91).

65 In the same letter Dell asked: ‘I am a bit confused on a point. You say in “Membership”…that “all biological life (will be)…extinct”…But nonetheless I remember that your view of immortality in Miracles includes animals…Now, will only part of Nature then be redeemed when we, please God, “ride those greater mounts…with the King” and what we know as Bios be gone and Zoe reign in the “more organic” Nature?’ (ibid., fols. 91-2).

66 ‘existence’.

67 The Problem of Pain, ch. 9, pp. 145-6: ‘Supposing, as I do, that the personality of the tame animals is largely the gift of man—that their mere sentience is reborn to soulhood in us as our mere soulhood is reborn to spirituality in Christ—I naturally suppose that very few animals indeed, in their wild state, attain to a “self “or ego. But if any do, and if it is agreeable to the goodness of God that they should live again, their immortality would also be related to man—not, this time, to individual masters, but to humanity.’

68 Dell asked: ‘In reading the new translation of St. Athanasius’ Incarnation of the Word of God by your friend at “Wantage” [Sister Penelope]…I have wondered about an intimation on p. 28…that Athanasius may have assumed that God superimposed the Word or His image on the animal form of man. Do you think St. Athanasius was merely using a convenient way of speaking to describe a difference between man and animals or that he saw man as a progressively developed animal that was finally “made in the image” of the Word?’ (Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. lett. c. 220/4, fol. 92). Dell was referring to The Incarnation of the Word of God, Being the Treatise of St. Athanasius ‘De Incarnatione Verbi Dei’, trans. ‘A Religious of C.S.M.V.’ (London: Bles, 1944). In Against the Heathen, 33, St Athanasius distinguishes between humans, who have immortal souls, and animals, who do not: ‘These things simply prove that the rational soul presides over the body. For the body is not even constituted to drive itself, but it is driven by another’s will, just as a horse does not harness himself, but is driven by his master. Hence laws for human beings to practise what is good and to abstain from evil-doing, while for animals evil remains unthought of and undiscerned, because they lie outside rationality and the process of understanding. I think then that the existence of a rational soul in man is proved by what we have said…O God, You have given us an immortal soul which distinguishes us from irrational creatures. Help us all to safeguard it from evil influences and everything that tarnishes it and turns it away from You.’

69 See Dom Bede Griffiths OSB in the Biographical Appendix to CL II, pp. 1043-9. Griffiths, Lewis’s former pupil, had been prior of the Benedictine abbey at Farnborough since 1947.

70 Dom Bede Griffiths, ‘Catholicism today’, Pax: The Quarterly Review of the Benedictines of Prinknash, XL, no. 254 (Spring 1950), pp. 11-16.

71 See the biography of Dr Robert Emlyn ‘Humphrey’ Havard in CL II, p. 182n. Havard was Lewis’s doctor and an Inkling. As an oblate of Ampleforth—a lay member of the Benedictine order—he probably met Griffiths while visiting Farnborough Abbey.

72 ‘[He is] pure spirit’.

73 Griffiths, ‘Catholicism today’, p. 13.

74 The classical definition of natural law 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). 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’ (RSV). Lewis devoted the first book of Mere Christianity (London: Bles, 1952) to natural law, and in The Abolition of Man (London: Oxford University Press, 1943; Fount, 1999), ch. 1, pp. 11-12, he defines it as ‘the doctrine of objective value, the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others really false, to the kind of thing the universe is, and the kind of things we are’. See the section on natural law in CG, pp. 586-96.

75 Romans 7:12-13: ‘The law is holy, and the commandment holy, and just and good. Was then that which is good made death unto me? God forbid. But sin, that it might appear sin, working death in me by that which is good; that sin by the commandment might become exceeding sinful’

76 Lewis was referring to the belief in ‘salvation by faith and faith alone’, as understood by the Protestant Reformers, and St Paul’s statement in Galatians 2:16: ‘Knowing that a man is not justified by the works of the law, but by the faith of Jesus Christ, even we have believed in Jesus Christ, that we might be justified by the faith of Christ, and not by the works of the law: for by the works of the law shall no flesh be justified.’

77 As president of the Oxford University Socratic Club, Lewis was present at its meeting on 10 November 1947 when Ronald Grimsley read a paper on ‘Existentialism’, later published in the Socratic Digest, no. 4 [1948], pp. 66-77.

78 Jean-Paul Sartre, L’Existentialisme est un Humanisme [Existentialism Is a Humanism] (1945).

79 On the philosophical theory of Bishop George Berkeley, see CL II, p. 703, n. 21.

80 On 3 November 1947 Lewis read a paper to the Socratic Club entitled ‘A First Glance at Sartre’. A brief summary of the paper, which was a critique of Sartre’s L’Existentialisme est un Humanisme, is found in Walter Hooper, ‘Oxford’s Bonny Fighter’, Remembering C. S. Lewis, pp. 160-1.

81 In his letter to Dom Bede Griffiths of 5 July 1949 (CL II, pp. 953-4), Lewis mentions hearing the French Catholic philosopher Gabriel Marcel (1889-1973) give a lecture to the Oxford University Socratic Club on 18 February 1948. ‘It is definitely not my philosophy,’ commented Lewis.

82 See Marcel’s ‘theism and personal relationships’ in Socratic Digest, No. 4, pp. 78-9.

83 In her note to this letter Bodle said: ‘I had received bad and completely unexpected news from home’ (Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. lett. c. 220/4, fol. 247).

84 Dr Firor had invited Lewis to spend a holiday with him at his cabin in the Rocky Mountains.

85 i.e., his responsibility for taking care of Mrs Moore.

86 While Lewis was preparing to spend a fortnight in Ireland with Arthur Greeves during the summer of 1949, Warnie went on a binge and the holiday was cancelled. See the letter to Greeves of 2 July 1949 (CL II, pp. 952-3).

87 William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra (1623), V, ii, 87-8.

88 George John Romanes (1848-94) was born in Canada and moved with his family to London in 1850. After reading Medicine and Physiology at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, he decided to devote his life to scientific research. This led to a lifelong friendship with Charles Darwin. Romanes was, at the same time, a man of strong religious convictions. In 1891 he provided for the Romanes Lectureship, the oldest and most famous of Oxford’s lectures. It is delivered once a year on a subject relating to science, art or literature. See Ethel Romanes, The Life and Letters of George John Romanes (1896). Lewis was asked to deliver the Romanes Lecture at the end of his life.

89 Mrs Maude M. McCaslin, wife of Alston Jones McCaslin, was writing from Europa, Mississippi.

90 ‘The Wood that Time Forgot’ is a novel by Roger Lancelyn Green. Although it was written before The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe it remains unpublished because it would seem to owe too much to Lewis’s Lion.

91 BF, p. 233.

92 See Arthur Greeves in the Biographical Appendix to CL I, pp. 993-6.

93 Matthew 6:28-30; Luke 12:27-8: ‘Consider the lilies how they grow: they toil not, they spin not; and yet I say unto you, that Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. If then God so clothe the grass, which is to day in the field, and tomorrow is cast into the oven; how much more will he clothe you, O ye of little faith?’

94 See Cecil Harwood in the Biographical Appendix to CL I (pp. 998-1000).

Harwood, one of Lewis’s oldest friends, was an anthroposophist and a teacher at Michael Hall School, Kidbrooke, Forest Row, East Sussex.

95 Virgil, Aeneid, II, 61: ‘prepared for either thing’.

96 In SB], ch. 13, p. 155, Harwood is described as ‘a pillar of Michael Hall’.

97 The Bellman was the captain of the ship in Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark (1876). In Fit the Second, stanzas 5-8, the Bellman persuades his crew that a blank sheet of paper makes an ideal chart of the open sea. ‘This was charming, no doubt: but they shortly found out/That the Captain they trusted so well/Had only one notion for crossing the ocean,/And that was to tingle his bell./…And the Bellman, perplexed and distressed,/Said he had hoped, at least, when the wind blew due East,/That the ship would not travel due West!’

98 Harwood had written to tell Lewis that his wife, Daphne, was dying of cancer.

99 Lewis had published a poem, ‘As One Oldster to Another’ under the pseudonym ‘N.W.’ in Punch, CCXVLII (15 March 1950), p. 295. Mr Dixey wrote to compliment him on his use of Alcaics, a four-line stanza using a predominantly dactylic metre named after the Greek poet, Alcaeus. A slightly revised version of the poem appears in Poems (1974) and CP.

100 Ernest H. Shepard (1879-1976), a cartoonist for Punch, illustrated ‘As One Oldster to Another’ and other of Lewis’s poems. Shepard also illustrated all A. A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh books.

101 In 1942 Lewis had Owen Barfield set up a charitable trust into which Lewis directed all his royalties. It was named ‘Agapony’ ‘or ‘Agapargyry’ or ‘The Agapargyrometer’ = love + money. The money was available for whoever might be in need, with preference given to widows and orphans. For details see CL II, p. 483.

102 While protecting Lewis’s confidentiality, Barfield devoted a chapter to the Agapony in his book This Ever Diverse Pair (1950).

103 Harwood had written to say that he had received some money from the Agapony fund.

104 See Stella Aldwinckle, founder of the Socratic Club, in the Biographical Appendix.

105 As president of the Oxford University Socratic Club, Lewis was suggesting in his letter to Aldwinckle a list of people she might ask to speak at the club, along with possible topics.

106 Gilbert Ryle (1900-76), philosopher, was Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy and Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, 1945-68.

107 Henry Habberley Price (1899-1984), philosopher, was educated at Winchester College and New College, Oxford, where he took a First in Classics in 1921. In 1924 he was elected a Fellow and lecturer in Philosophy at Trinity College, Oxford, where he remained until 1935. In that year he was elected Wykeham Professor of Logic and moved to New College where he remained until his retirement in 1959. He was a frequent speaker at the Socratic Club. See his biography in the Oxford DNB.

108 i.e., an admirer of Jean-Paul Sartre.

109 Francis Joseph ‘Frank’ Sheed (1897-1981), publisher and author, was born in Sydney, Australia, and read law at Sydney University, taking his BA in 1917. In 1920 he went to London where he came across the recently formed Catholic Evidence Guild, devoted to out-of-doors speaking to explain the teaching of the Roman Catholic Church. He was bowled over by the excitement of the Guild’s task, and he joined. There he met Mary ‘Maisie’ Josephine Ward (1889-1975), and they were married in 1926. That same year Frank and Maisie founded a publishing firm, Sheed and Ward. In 1933 they opened an office in New York, through which Sheed and Ward became the most influential Catholic publisher in the English-speaking world. Maisie died on 28 January 1975 and Frank on 20 November 1981.

110 Christopher Dawson (1889-1970), cultural historian, was born at Hay, Brecknockshire, on 12 October 1889 and educated at Winchester College and Trinity College, Oxford, taking his degree in 1911. He had sufficient means to be able to follow his own highly original path of historical research and reflection. His first book, The Age of the Gods (1928), was the result of fourteeen years of research. His second, Progress and Religion (1929), articulated the major theme of his subsequent writings, that religion is the dynamic of all social culture. The Making of Europe (1932) discussed a specific case of this, showing that the ‘dark ages’ were in fact the most creative period in the culture of the Western world. Dawson developed the topic further in his Gifford Lectures for Edinburgh University, Religion and Culture (1948), about which Lewis wrote to him on 27 September 1948 (see Supplement). Dawson became a Roman Catholic shortly after going down from Oxford and was an influential member of the group of writers which formed around the Catholic publishing house of Sheed and Ward. Dawson’s achievements were mainly overlooked by the academic world. He was eventually offered a chair in the United States at Harvard where he was Professor of Roman Catholic Studies, 1958-62. He died on 25 May 1970.

111 Henry Fitzgerald Heard (1889-1971), science writer and philosopher, was educated at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, after which he lectured for Oxford University’s extra-mural studies programme, 1926-9. He took a strong interest in developments in the sciences and his The Ascent of Humanity (1929) marked his first foray into public acclaim. He served as a science and current affairs commentator for the BBC, 1930-4. In 1937 he moved to the United States, accompanied by Aldous Huxley, to accept the chair of Historical Anthropology at Duke University. His most famous book, The Five Ages of Man, was published in 1963. He died on 14 August 1971.

112 Aldous Leonard Huxley (1894-1963), English novelist, won a scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford where in 1916 he took a First in English. His first novel, Crome Yellow (1921), was followed by others satirizing contemporary society through characters who flout convention. While in Italy he wrote Brave New World (1932). His move to California in 1937 coincided with a move away from his ‘philosophy of meaninglessness’ to something more transcendental and mystical. The books that followed, such as Brave New World Revisited (1958), spelt out the temptations presented by life in the modern world with its materialist values and dangerous technological advances. Huxley died on the same day as John F. Kennedy and Lewis–22 November 1963.

113 This was probably Fr John Philip Gleeson, who took a B. Litt. from Campion Hall in 1951.

114 Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe (1919-2001), philosopher, was born on 18 March 1919 at Glanmire, North Strand, Limerick. Her conversion to Catholicism as a teenager led to a lifelong interest in philosophy. She was educated at St Hugh’s College, Oxford, where she took a First in Greats in 1941. The following year she moved to Cambridge where, as a research student, she became the pupil of Ludwig Wittgenstein. In 1936 she returned to Oxford as a Research Fellow at Somerville College. She was a Fellow of Somerville, 1964-70, and Professor of Philosophy, Cambridge University, 1970-86. She died on 5 January 2001. On her debate with Lewis about Miracles: A Preliminary Study (London: Bles, 1947) see her biography in CG.

115 Colin Hardie, one of the Inklings, was Classical Tutor at Magdalen College, Oxford. See Colin and Christian Hardie in the Biographical Appendix.

116 New Testament.

117 The Rev. Dr Austin Farrer was Chaplain and Tutor of Trinity College, Oxford. See Austin and Katherine Farrer in the Biographical Appendix.

118 Basil Mitchell (1917–), philosopher, was educated at the Queen’s College, Oxford, where he took a BA in 1939. He was Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy at Keble College, Oxford, 1947-67, and Nolloth Professor of Philosophy of the Christian Religion, Oxford University, 1968-84. An active member of the Socratic Club, he followed Lewis as its president in 1955.

119 Alfred Jules Ayer (1910-89), Wykeham Professor of Logic at Oxford, 1959-78, was a proponent of logical positivism, and the author of Language, Truth and Logic (1936).

120 On 2 February 1948 Elizabeth Anscombe gave a paper to the Socratic Club on Lewis’s Miracles entitled ‘A Reply to Mr C. S. Lewis’s Argument that “Naturalism” is Self-Refuting’. It was published in the Socratic Digest, no. 4 (1948) and is reprinted in her Collected Philosophical Papers, Vol. II, Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Mind (1981). Anscombe’s argument concerned the nature of causation, one of its crucial points being that Lewis should have distinguished in chapter 3 of Miracles between ‘irrational causes’ and ‘non-rational causes’. Lewis accepted that he might have made his argument clearer and this he attempted to do by revising chapter 3 for the Fontana paperback of Miracles. See the letters to Jocelyn Gibb of 11 July and 8 August 1959.

121 Professor Dorothy Emmet (1904-2000), philosopher, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Manchester, 1946-66.

122 lili had become engaged to the writer Clement Freud, and their engagement was announced in The Timer. ‘Clement Raphael third son of Ernst and Lucie Freud of St Johns Wood London to June Beatrice second daughter of H. W. Flewett M.A. and Mrs Flewett of Gipsy Lane London SW15.’

123 This note was added later in Lewis’s hand, lili sent him a copy of the Wilton Diptych, the full title of which is Richard II Presented to the Virgin and Child by his Patron Saint John the Baptist and Saints Edward and Edmund. The diptych was painted between 1395 and 1399, and is in the National Gallery, London. It is called the Wilton Diptych because it came from Wilton House in Wiltshire, the seat of the Earls of Pembroke. Lewis treasured this gift all his life, and had it with him in Magdalene College, Cambridge, during his years there.

124 Arthur’s cocker spaniel.

125 Mrs D. Jessup was writing from 66 Milton Road, Rye, New York.

126 A house-maid.

127 Virgil (70-19 BC), Aeneid. Lewis probably read the Aeneid more often than he did any other book.

128 Green and Hooper, C. S. Lewis: A Biography, ch. 11, p. 310.

129 Griffiths was planning to visit Oxford.

130 Mathews wrote to Lewis on 24 June 1950: ‘I’m in the midst of ARTHURIAN TORSO at the moment, but am having trouble with the pronunciation. How does one pronounce TALIESSIN and BROCELIANDE? Did you ever complete the idea for a children’s story you wrote me about?’ (Bodleian Library, MS. Facs. c. 47, fol. 191), Lewis, presumably, meant the second, not third, syllable of Brocelliande.

While Lewis was referring to the imminent publication of The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, Mathews was probably remembering a comment in his letter of 17 September 1949: ‘A good idea for a (children’s) story…arrived this morning’ (CL II, p. 980), this being the second Narnian story, Prince Caspian.

131 ‘Pray for us’.

132 Mark 4:5-6: ‘There went out a sower to sow. And it came to pass, as he sowed, some fell by the wayside, and the fowls of the air came and devoured it up. And some fell on stony ground, where it had not much earth; and immediately it sprang up, because it had no depth of earth. But when the sun was up, it was scorched; and because it had no root, it withered away’

133 When in 1935 Oxford University Press conceived the idea of the mammoth Oxford History of English Literature (OHEL), Lewis was asked to contribute a volume covering the sixteenth century. He had been working on what was to be English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama (1954) since 1936 and he was spending every available minute in the Bodleian Library trying to complete it. He called it his ‘O Hell!’ volume.

134 Acts 2:1-9: ‘And when the day of Pentecost was fully come, they were all with one accord in one place. And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting…They were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance. And there were dwelling at Jerusalem Jews, devout men, out of every nation under heaven. Now when this was noised abroad, the multitude came together, and were confounded, because that every man heard them speak in his own language…Parthians, and Medes, and Elamites, and the dwellers in Mesopotamia, and in Judea, and Cappadocia, in Pontus, and Asia.’

135 Ralph E. Hone was writing from 39 Leicester Square, London.

136 See Chad Walsh in the Biographical Appendix to CL II, pp. 1078-81.

137 Daphne Harwood died on 14 July 1950.

138 Lewis was John Harwood’s tutor at Magdalen College, and John had just taken a fourth-class degree in Schools.

139 See St Giovanni Calabria in the Biographical Appendix to CL II, pp. 1036-9. Don Giovanni Calabria was the founder of the Congregation of Poor Servants of Divine Providence in Verona. In 1947 he read The Screwtape Letters in Italian. Wishing to write to Lewis about his books and about Christian unity, but not understanding English, he began corresponding in Latin. Most of the correspondence between Lewis and Don Calabria was published as Letters: C. S. Lewis-Don Giovanni Calabria: A Study in Friendship, trans, and ed. Martin Moynihan (London: Collins, 1989). Unless otherwise stated, the letters were translated into English by Moynihan (see his biography in CL II, p. 615n). There is also an Italian edition of the correspondence, with some additional letters between Lewis, St Giovanni Calabria and Don Luigi Pedrollo, entitled Una Gioia Lnsolita: Lettere tra un prete cattolico e un laico anglicano, ed. Luciano Squizzato, trans. Patrizia Morelli (Milan: Jaca Book SpA, 1995). Those additional letters appear in the present volume.

140 Le Problème de la Souffrance, trans. Marguerite Faguer, with an introduction by Maurice Nédoncelle (Bruges: Desclées de Brouwer, 1950).

141 In Una Gioia Insolita Luciano Squizzato (p. 156, n. 92) notes that both Lodetti and Arnaboldi denied ever having received this volume, and that no copies can be found in St Giovanni Calabria’s private library. Calabria was at this time seriously ill; Fr Pedrollo, who answered this missive, was deeply concerned for his friend’s health, and may have simply been vague about the books; apparently, Lewis just sent one to him (see Lewis’s letter of 12 September 1950). For biographical information on Dr Romolo Lodetti see CLII, pp. 821-2. Fr Paolo Arnaboldi (1914-98) was the founder of FAC, a Catholic movement in part inspired by Calabria’s books Apostolica vivendi and Amare (see Squizzato, pp. 262-3); incidentally, these were the books Calabria sent to Lewis in the autumn of 1947 (see CL II, p. 807).

142 Maurice Nédoncelle (1905-1976), philosopher and lecturer in Theology at the Faculty of Theology in Strasburg.

143 Probably a reference to Mrs Moore’s continued decline.

144 He was referring to his Preface in Essays Presented to Charles Williams (1947).

145 i.e., of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

146 For an account of the wedding see Clement Freud, Freud Ego (2001), pp. 99-100.

147 In her note to this letter, written on 4 October 1972, Bodle explained that she was wondering whether to take a German boy, Franzel, to New Zealand. ‘He didn’t go,’ she said. ‘He now has a doctorate & is on the staff of a German university’ (Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. lett. c. 220/4, fol, 247).

148 See Don Luigi Pedrollo in the Biographical Appendix. Fr Pedrollo, a member of the Congregation of Poor Servants of Divine Providence in Verona, was answering on behalf of Don Giovanni Calabria. This letter first appeared in Una Gtota Insolita and was translated by Dr C. M. Bajetta.

149 Towards the end of his life (after 1949) St Giovanni Calabria was affected by a mysterious illness, which underwent a particularly acute phase in 1950. After a period of relief, following the Pentecost of 1951, his infirmity worsened and he died in 1954.

150 Horace, Carmina, I, 24, 1-2: ‘Quis desiderio sit pudor aut modus/tam cari capitis?’: ‘Why blush to let our tears unmeasured fall/For one so dear?’.

151 i.e., Geoffrey Bles.

152 See the biography of Anne Ridler, friend of Charles Williams, in CL II, p. 658n, and Anne Ridler’s Memoirs (2004).

153 Ruth Pitter.

154 Charles Williams. Ridler criticised Williams’s use of ‘shend’ in a Taliessin poem.

155 See Martyn Skinner in the Biographical Appendix to CL II, pp. 1072-3.

156 Martyn Skinner, Two Colloquies (1949).

157 ‘Collections’ are examination papers set by college tutors for their pupils. They take place either at the end of term (in which case students are tested on their work during the term) or at the beginning of term (on work set for the preceding vacation). In Magdalen, in Lewis’s day, Collections usually took place in Hall.

158 School Certificate examinations; for a definition see CL I, p. 612.

159 Skinner, Two Colloquies, ‘The Lobster and the Thatch’, 49.

160 ibid., 332.

161 ibid., ‘The Recluse, Part I, 13.

162 Alfred, Lord Tennyson, ‘Milton’, 9.

163 Skinner, Two Colloquies, ‘The Lobster and the Thatch’, 220.

164 ibid., 239-43: ‘The sudden clatter of cutlery and crockery/As sliding through the ham the knife’s thin edge/Turns half to rose its honey-coloured wedge;/Or where the bronze pork sizzles still with heat/Clicks through the crackling to white mines of meat.’

165 John Milton, Works, vol. IV (New York: Columbia University Press, 1931), Of Education, p. 286.

166 Skinner, Two Colloquies, ‘The Recluse’, Part II, 28.

167 ibid., ‘The Lobster and the Thatch’, 433.

168 King George I’s comment, ‘I hate all Boets and Bainters’ is found in John Campbell, Lives of the Chief Justices (1949), ‘Lord Mansfield’.

169 See Harry Blamires in the Biographical Appendix to CL II, p. 1024. Blamires had been head of the English Department at King Alfred’s College, Winchester, since 1948.

170 Blamires had asked Lewis, his old tutor, to read and criticize his book English in Education (London: Bles, 1951).

171 ‘between ourselves’.

172 ‘Best professional judgement’.

173 Beowulf, I, xviii, 1206: ‘He was asking for trouble’.

174 The letter was unsigned.

175 See Mary Willis Shelburne in the Biographical Appendix. She is the author of Broken Pattern: Poems (Richmond: Dietz Press, 1951).

176 Harriet Elizabeth Beecher Stowe. Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1851-2), ch. 21: ‘“Do you know who made you?” “Nobody, as I knows on,” said the child, with a short laugh. The idea appeared to amuse her considerably, for her eyes twinkled, and she added–“I ‘sped I growed. Don’t think nobody never made me.” ‘

177 The Imitation of Christ is a manual of spiritual devotion first circulated in 1418 and traditionally ascribed to Thomas à Kempis (c. 1380-1471). Lewis nearly always read this work in Latin, and when quoting it in English, he used his own translation.

178 The edition of this work used by Lewis was The Scale of Perfection by Walter Hilton, Augustinian canon of Thurgarton Priory, Nottinghamshire, modernized from the first printed edition of Wynkyn de Worde, London, 1494, by an oblate of Solesmes; with an introduction from the French of Dom M. Noetinger (London: Burns, Oates and Washbourne Ltd [1927]).

179 In her letter of 20 November 1950 Mathews wrote: ‘I came upon such a beautiful message today by Era Giovanni (an extract from a letter, Anno Domini 1513) that I simply must pass it on to you’ (Bodleian Library, MS. Facs. c. 47, fol. 199). She went on to quote from Era Giovanni Giocondo (c. 1435-1515), A Letter to the Most Illustrious the Contesstna Allagta Delà Aldobrandeschi, Written Christmas Eve Anno Domini 1513 (193?). In 1970 the British Museum stated that it was impossible to identify Era Giovanni. The letter was published, probably in the 1930s, ‘with Christmas greetings’ from Greville MacDonald, son of George MacDonald, and his wife Mary. It is reprinted in various dictionaries of quotations.

180 Hermann Wilhelm Goering (1893-1946), German Nazi military leader, creator of the Luftwaffe, the German Air Force, directed the German wartime economy. In 1939 he was named Hitler’s successor, but he later lost favour and in 1943 he was stripped of his command. ‘Guns will make us powerful,’ Goering said in a radio broadcast in 1936, ‘butter will only make us fat.’

181 George Bernard Shaw, The Doctor’s Dilemma (1906).

182 See Ruth Pitter in the Biographical Appendix to CL II, pp. 1060-4.

* But fan mail from children is delightful. They don’t gas. They want to know whether Asian repaired Tumnus’s furniture for him. They take no interest in oneself and all in the story. Lovely

183 The Case for Christianity (New York: Macmillan, 1943) was the American edition of Broadcast Talks.

184 Beyond Personality (London: Bles, 1944; New York: Macmillan, 1945).

185 J. B. Phillips, Letters to Young Churches: A Translation of the New Testament Epistles (1947). See Lewis’s letter to Phillips of 3 August 1943 (CL II, pp. 585-6).

186 Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876); The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884).

187 William Shakespeare, King Henry V (1600), IV, iii, 55.

188 Luke 22:19; 1 Corinthians 11:24.

189 John 6:53.

190 i.e., in the Book of Common Prayer.

191 1 Corinthians 12:12: ‘For as the body is one, and hath many members, and all the members of that one body, being many, are one body: so also is Christ.’

192 Mark 16:17-18: ‘These signs shall follow them that believe; In my name…they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover.’

193 See Sheldon Vanauken in the Biographical Appendix. Vanauken’s ‘Notes on the Letters’ are in the Bodleian Library (MS. Eng. lett. c. 220/2, fols. 152b-c).

194 Sheldon Vanauken, A Severe Mercy (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1977), ch. 2, p. 38.

195 ibid., ch. 4, pp. 87-8.

196 G. K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man (1925).

197 Lewis uses the Chinese word ‘Tao’ in The Abolition of Man to mean natural law or morality.

198 The Rev. R. B. Gribbon, a relative of Arthur Greeves, was writing from Ballinderry Road, Easton, Maryland, USA.

199 i.e., The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

200 Rudyard Kipling, The Seven Seas (1896), ‘McAndrew’s Hymn’, II, 17-18: ‘Hail, snow an’ ice that praise the Lord: I’ve met them at their work,/An’ wished we had anither route or they anither kirk.’

201 In his second letter to Lewis, Vanauken said: ‘My fundamental dilemma is this: I can’t believe in Christ unless I have faith, but I can’t have faith unless I believe in Christ…Everyone seems to say: “You must have faith to believe.” Where do I get it? Or will you tell me something different? Is there a proof? Can Reason carry me over the gulf…without faith? Why does God expect so much of us?…If He made it clear that He is—as clear as a sunrise or a rock or a baby’s cry—wouldn’t we be right joyous to choose Him and His Law?’ (Vanauken, A Severe Mercy, ch. 4, pp. 90-1)

202 The Eleatic school of philosophers was founded by the Greek poet Xenophanes (born c. 570 BC), whose main teaching was that the universe is singular, eternal and unchanging. According to this view, as developed by later members of the Eleatic school, the appearances of multiplicity, change and motion are mere illusions.

203 William Shakespeare, Othello, The Moor of Venice (1622).

204 William Shakespeare, King Lear (1608).

205 Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism (1711), II, 2.

206 Luke 10:7.

207 This note was added in Lewis’s hand.

208 ‘Let us pray for one another’.

209 ‘the beard of corn’.

210 Abul Kasim Mansur Firdausi (c. 950-1020), Persian poet, is the author of Shah-natneh. Considered the greatest national epic in world literature, the poem consists of 60,000 couplets. When the work was presented to the Sultan, he rewarded Firdausi with a pitiful amount of money. The disappointed Firdausi gave the money to a bath attendant and left for Afghanistan. Lewis regretted he could not read Persian, but in his poem ‘The Prodigality of Firdausi’, published in Punch, 215 (1 December 1948), p. 510, and reprinted in Poems and CP, he extols ‘Firdausi the strong Lion among poets’ and tells how handsomely he behaved at the hands of the Sultan.

211 Dorothy Wellesley, Duchess of Wellington (1889-1956), whose collected poems were published as Early Light (1955).

212 Sayer had asked if Pauline Baynes should illustrate all the Narnian stories. See Pauline Diana Baynes in the Biographical Appendix to CL II, pp. 1018-22.

213 Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici (1643), II, x: ‘Great virtues and vices no less great’.