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TO EDNA GREEN WATSON (BOD): TS

REF.52/9

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

2nd January 1952.

Dear Mrs. Watson,

Very many thanks for your kind present of the cake, which has just arrived in good condition; good external condition that is, for it will not be opened until I get it out to my house this evening, where it will be received with enthusiasm. I often hear laments about the difficulty of getting cake making materials, so you can imagine how much pleasure it will give.

It will also help to distract attention from all the news in the papers about the shortages which are expected in 1952: news which is not rendered any the more palatable by Churchill’s assurance that when he gets back from your country,¹ and meets Parliament, he will have several proposals to make which ‘will be very unpleasant for all of us.’ But we are in hopes that his treatment will differ from Atlee’s in being like the pain after you have had a tooth out–getting less every day—whereas under the late government we were shirking going to the dentist and the pain was getting worse every day.²

With many thanks, and all good wishes for the New Year,

yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO RUTH PITTER(BOD):

Magdalen etc

Jan 8th. 1952

Dear Miss Pitter

May Maleldil send you a good year.³ Of course use those Spenserian stanzas as you wish.⁴ I think your idea of the sheepdog-trial for readers is excellent.

The poem of yours which I didn’t like was the one about the enamoured earwig and the lady:⁵ and it all comes of mere idiosyncrasies of mine, (a.) My imagination goes easily to humanised mammals but stops dead at humanised insects, (b.) I can’t bear the least suggestion (however sportive) of love affairs between different species or even between children. That is one of the many things which for me sinks Tom Sawyer so immeasurably below the divine Huckleberry. But as I can’t give any reason for the second—I think I could for the first–this doesn’t help you v. much. I suspect it originates with the mingled embarrassment and nausea evoked in oneself as a child by grown-up jokes of an arch character at childrens’ parties.

Isn’t Herbert–?⁶ well: one can only say well. I am glad you are swimming in poetry and cannot help hoping great things.

Yours most sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO EDWARD A. ALLEN (W): TS

REF. 52/28

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

8th January 1951 [1952].

My dear Mr. Allen,

A very happy new year to you both, and many thanks for your amusing letter of the 2nd. As you will observe, you were very nearly in time to call up on the old wave length, but not quite; my brother makes a clear sweep of all the old numbers every 31st December. I don’t know why, and I dare’nt ask him, in case he should insist on explaining it to me. He by the way asks to send greetings to both of you, and asks me to tell you that your thin blue summer suit is still going strong: and adds, that in view of the amount of summer we get in this country, he reckons on it figuring amongst the assets of his estate when the Landlord terminates his lease.

I doubt if there is a man in America besides yourself who would have seriously contemplated sending a private gift of coal to this country: I believe if I said ‘thanks very much, and while you are about it, make me a present of the ship that brings it’, you would do your best to comply! But I’m glad to be able to report that your prayers for mild weather have been answered; I got up this morning to find the thermometer standing at 52 in my unheated bedroom, in which the window had been wide open all night. Your weather is the sort I hate—or at least like least, for we should’nt hate even the weather. But I confess I don’t enjoy wet snow.

Talking of ships, the epic of the ‘Flying Enterprise’ has played even the Truman-Winston conference off the front page of our diminished dailies: and rightly so.⁷ The American merchantile marine, and indeed the whole nation must be very proud of their Captain Carlsen. I wonder is a flair for journalism inborn in your people? You must have noticed how good are the reports from the commanders of the U.S.N. destroyers which have been standing by; no professional journalist could have done the thing better. A British naval officer in the same circumstances would be transmitting reports in what we call ‘Whitehall English’ which would make even the ‘Flying Enterprise’ story sound dull.

I like the name of your car; over here we are more aristocratic. My brother’s old Colonel has a car which has been raised to the Peerage under the title of Victor, Viscount Vauxhall, but he is called Vic for short; on the other hand he had an American friend in Shanghai whose car rejoiced in the name of ‘Puddlejumper’.

If you send a letter to Lieutenant-Colonel R. K. Wilson, Royal Artillery, c/o the War Office, Whitehall, London, S.W.I., it should reach him wherever he is, but of course if he is in Korea or some such place, it will take some time to reach him; it would be as well to endorse the envelope ‘Please Forward’ anyway. I’m sorry I can’t be more helpful, but our army is very scattered these days; I saw in the Sunday paper that at any given moment, we have ninety thousand trained troops on board ship, going to or coming from somewhere. As you say, what a muddle. Is this ghastly Korean war never going to end: or are we to spend the rest of our lives running round the Iron Curtain stopping leaks in it?

Yours ever.

C. S. Lewis⁸

TO SISTER PENELOPE CSMV(BOD):

Magdalen etc.

10/1/52

Dear Sister Penelope

It was, as always, a great pleasure to hear from you. Hearty good wishes and prayers for the new year.

I was very intrigued by the Snow Men last time the story came up (about 15 years ago, was it?) but had hardly noticed its re-occurrence: certainly I am not well enough equipped to write to the Times.⁹

I have, if not thought, yet imagined, a good deal about the other kinds of Men. My own idea was based on the old problem ‘Who was Cain’s wife?’ If we follow Scripture it wd. seem that she must have been no daughter of Adam’s. I pictured the True Men descending from Seth, then meeting Cain’s not perfectly human descendants (in Genesis vi. 1-4, where I agree with you), interbreeding and thus producing the wicked Antediluvians.¹⁰

Oddly enough I, like you, had pictured Adam as being, physically, the son of two anthropoids, on whom, after birth, God worked the miracle which made him Man: said, in fact, ‘Come out—and forget thine own people and thy father’s house’¹¹–the Call of Abraham wd. be a far smaller instance of the same sort of thing, and regeneration in each one of us wd. be an instance too, tho’ not a smaller one. That all seems to me to fit in both historically and spiritually.

I don’t quite feel we shd. gain anything by the doctrine that Adam was a hermaphrodite. As for the (rudimentary) presence in each sex of organs proper to the other, does that not occur in other mammals as well as in humans? Surely pseudo-organs of lactation are externally visible in the male dog? If so there wd. be no more ground for making men (I mean, humans) hermaphroditic than any other mammal. (By the way, what an inconvenience it is in English to have the same word for Homo and Vir).¹² No doubt these rudimentary organs have a spiritual significance: there ought spiritually to be a man in every woman and a woman in every man. And how horrid the ones who haven’t got it are: I can’t bear a ‘man’s man’ or a ‘woman’s woman’.

I haven’t read any of the books you mention except Farrer’s Glass of Vision (if that is the Bamptons)¹³ which I found v. good.¹⁴ Have you read Simone Weil’s Waiting on God?¹⁵ Erroneous in many ways, but I have rather fallen in love with it. The fragment at the end, about the sons of Noah, wd. interest you especially.

I will order They Shall be My People¹⁶ and look forward to it. Congratulations. For my own part, I have been given a year’s leave from all teaching duties to enable me to finish my book on XVIth century literature, so I am plugging away at that as hard as I can. My hope is to kill some popular mythology about that fabulous monster called ‘the Renaissance’. There are five fairy tales already written, of which the second has now appeared.

‘lane’ died almost a year ago, after a long but, thank God, painless illness. I beg you will often pray for her. She was an unbeliever and, in later years, very jealous, exacting, and irascible, but always tender to the poor and to animals.

Your hand is better than mine (to read, I mean—it may hurt more).

Yes, oremus, oremus.

Yours very sincerely.

C. S. Lewis

TO I. O. EVANS (W):

Magdalen etc

10/1/52

Dear Evans–

Thanks for the play,¹⁷ and for the other chap’s stories.¹⁸ I liked the play very much. You made the astrology of the Magi v. convincing and Simeon was quite a character. I hope the performance pleased you?

As for the stories—the author writes a great deal better than most of the ‘science fiction’ lot, and is pretty learned. But oh, if only he didn’t try to be comic! The Norse story¹⁹ was far the best, for in its atmosphere rough horse-play did no harm. But the attempts at humour in the other two ruined them for me. I can’t bear Britomart getting drunk and maudlin. In Ariosto’s world there is, of course, plenty of comedy: but not of the kind this author puts in! Perhaps I expected too much. With all good wishes for the new year.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO HARRY BIAMIRES (BOD):

Magdalen.

19/1/52

Dear Blamires (I wish you’d call me Lewis instead of Dr. Lewis)

I have read through the revised passages.²⁰ They all seem to me v. sound now. A few minor points remain: p. 1. animal kind. Just a slight danger of anbiguity between kind = sort (i.e. are animalic) and kind = species (animal-kind or mankind). P. 24. para 3 especially brutal. I’d prefer cruel. Brutal is unfortunate because the use of brutal to mean cruel is itself an instance of the same figure that leads to inhuman meaning cruel. P. 72 End of footnote. Wd. common dependence be better than communal. The latter might mean that we don’t have in common a personal dependence but only a corporate dependence. P. 73 para 2. I’m not quite happy about ‘authority of service’. P. 74. Isn’t the quotation ‘come full circle’ not gone. (I haven’t looked this up).

About your kind compliment to me in the Preface, I like it of course. The real question is whether it will do you good or harm. I am much hated as well as much loved and the connection with me will damn you with certain reviewers. I’d advise you to omit it, but you must do exactly as you please.

They were wrong in saying I was away that Friday and I’m sorry they did, because I had staying with me a man whom I wd. like you to have met. He has read your previous books & likes them, and has in common with you the qualities of being (a.) A Christian—R. C. (b.) A schoolmaster (c.) An old pupil of mine. Not that you are exactly a schoolmaster. His name is G. Sayer (The College, Malvern)

Of course you were right to send me the MS. All best wishes: you are doing a most valuable work.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO CAROL JENKINS (W): ²¹

REF.52/60

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

22nd January 1952.

Dear Miss Jenkins,

It is a pleasure to answer your question. I found the name²² in the notes to Lane’s Arabian Nights:²³ it is the Turkish for Lion. I pronounce it Ass-Ian myself. And of course I meant the Lion of ludah. I am so glad you liked the book.²⁴ I hope you will like the sequel (Prince Caspian) which came out in November.

Yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO WILLIAM L. KINTER(BOD): TS

REF.52/64.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

22nd January 1952.

Dear Mr. Kinter,

By an odd coincidence your very handsome and acceptable gift arrived by the same post as the enclosed letter: which I send to you as a proof that I was not so rude as to ignore your very interesting and welcome letter of last year. Wise after the event, I now see that you were merely on a visit to New York, and had not changed your permanent address.

You cannot imagine what the arrival of a ham means to the average British household these days: it would be untrue to say that we are short of food, but our sufficiency is a very monotonous one, and such luxuries as you have sent me have a very cheering effect.

With very many thanks, and all best wishes for 1952,

yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO WAYLAND HILTON YOUNG (P): ²⁵

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

Jan 31st 1952

Dear Mr. Hilton Young

Lanes²⁶ have sent me a copy of your paper on my novels, and suggested that we shd. meet. If you could run down and lunch with me in college on any day next month except the 7th and 12th (Sundays are bad, but possible) I’d be delighted to have a talk afterwards. But—would it be a risk? I have an idea that a critic and a book are company, but that the author is de trop.²⁷ Wd. my Milton book have been improved or ruined by a meeting with Milton? Because, you see, there is hardly any limit to our disagreements about my trilogy.

But ought you to take any notice of the fact? When I’ve said that there is no allegory in it, and that there’s nothing at all about the Second Coming in T.H.S.,²⁸ you may reply ‘Well, that is what the books mean to an intelligent reader and what does it matter what you meant them to mean?’–a point of view I wholly agree with. Still, I hope you’ll come: we shd. probably have several other authors to discuss.

You could hardly conceive how different my approach was from yours. The germ of Perelandra was simply the picture of the floating islands themselves, with no location, no story, and no [?]²⁹ The way you allegorise the 3 species on Mars is masterly: and those three, because—well, however one does invent things: presumably because I’m human and therefore can’t invent things except by splicing up human nature. Query—is it possible for any man to write a fantastic story which another man can’t read as an allegory? (The history of medieval criticism makes it clear that the answer is No).

Do come, and name your day: 1 o’ clock at the college lodge, and ask to be shown to the Smoking Room.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO MARY VAN DEUSEN (W):

Magdalen

31/1/52

Dear Mrs. Van Deusen–

How singular! In the last year my life also became much ‘better’ and, just like you, I often feel a little frightened. We must both distinguish (a.) The bad Pagan feeling that the gods don’t like us to be happy and that it excites Nemesis: see Browning’s Caliban upon Setebos³⁰ (b.) The good Christian caution lest we become soft and self indulgent and cease to recognise one’s dependence on God.

That suffering is not always sent as a punishment is clearly established for believers by the book of Job and by John IX. 1-4. That it sometimes is, is suggested by parts of the Old Testament and Revelation. It wd. certainly be most dangerous to assume that any given pain was penal. I believe that all pain is contrary to God’s will, absolutely but not relatively. When I am taking a thorn out of my finger (or a child’s finger) the pain is ‘absolutely’ contrary to my will: i.e. if I could have chosen a situation without pain I would have done so. But I do will what caused pain, relatively to the given situation: i.e. granted the thorn I prefer the pain to leaving the thorn where it is. A mother smacking a child wd. be in the same position: she wd. rather cause it this pain than let it go on pulling the cat’s tail, but she wd. like it better if no situation which demands a smack had arisen.

On the heathen, see I Tim. IV. 10.³¹ Also in Matt. XXV. 31-46 the people don’t sound as if they were believers. Also the doctrine of Christ’s descending into Hell^* and preaching to the dead: wd. that would be outside time, and include those who died long after Him as well as those who died before He was born as Man. I don’t think we know the details: we must just stick to the view that (a.) All justice & mercy will be done, (b) But that nevertheless it is our duty to do all we can to convert unbelievers. All blessings.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO THE EDITOR OF THE CHURCH TIMES (EC)?³²

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

Sir,–

I welcome the letter from the Rural Dean of Gravesend,³³ though I am sorry that anyone should have regarded it necessary to describe the Bishop of Birmingham as an Evangelical. To a layman, it seems obvious that what unites the Evangelical and the Anglo-Catholic against the ‘Liberal’ or ‘Modernist’ is something very clear and momentous, namely, the fact that both are thoroughgoing supernaturalists, who believe in the Creation, the Fall, the Incarnation, the Resurrection, the Second Coming, and the Four Last Things. This unites them not only with one another, but with the Christian religion as understood ubique et ab omnibus.³⁴

The point of view from which this agreement seems less important than their divisions, or than the gulf which separates both from any non-miraculous version of Christianity, is to me unintelligible. Perhaps the trouble is that as supernaturalists, whether ‘Low’ or ‘High’ Church, thus taken together, they lack a name. May I suggest ‘Deep Church’; or, if that fails in humility, Baxter’s ‘mere Christians’?³⁵

C. S. Lewis

TO JILL FREUD (T):

Magdalen College

Oxford

15/2/52

It lies on my mind that I talked some nonsense about a ‘tread mill’ in my note yesterday. Pretty good rot for a man who is being given full pay for doing what most people do in their spare time. Wash it out. I only meant the engine is happily doing N revs, per second!

J

TO VERA MATHEWS (W):

Magdalen College,

Magdalen

17/2/52

Dear Miss Mathews

You will think I have taken a terribly long time over the Nabob,³⁶ but the only time I have for such things is the week ends and the last two have been fully occupied by going through proofs of a new translation (someone else’s) of the gospels.³⁷ And now, before I say anything, remember that—as I think I said, the short story is not my Form at all, so that my criticism will be amateurish.

I think the general narrative manner is good, and, with certain reservations, the character of the wife. I don’t find Cobham so good: but my reasons will best come out as we go along. These are my notes;

P. 2. Having worked…everything seemed. Am I pedantic to object to the syntax? If everything is the subject of the sentence then it ought to be everything, not Hermione, who had ‘once worked’ etc

P. 3. just that. I don’t understand what these words mean. But perhaps it’s an American idiom that I don’t know. If so, O.K.

righteously felt sincerely? genuinely? I don’t know what ‘righteously feeling’ wd. mean

P. 4. his bent was military etc. This is the first of many passages in wh. you refer to C. as a soldier. But wouldn’t the governor of a province in India be in the I.C.S. (Indian Civil Service) not in the Army?

enlisted. Do you mean went in as a private soldier? (wh. is what enlist means to us). If so this is infinitely improbable for a young man of C’s social position at that time. You mean, don’t you, that he ‘went into the army’ i.e. got a commission?

P 5. to never yield, ‘never to yield’?

P. 6. What are the drafts?.

P. 9. para 3. v. good P. 20. How those vicars. But they wouldn’t, you know. They might have v. likely 100 or so years earlier. In Cs time they’d all have been talking about a God of love. I don’t mean that our Englishman in India, bitten with Oriental wisdom, might not say what C. does, but then he wd. be a fool, which you don’t mean C. to be.

savant. Doesn’t this suggest something academic and even scientific? Perhaps ‘sage’ wd. do.

P. 24. What are physical virtues? It ought to mean good muscles, good digestion, sound teeth etc, but I don’t think that’s what you do mean.

P. 25. better stayed. No English speaker wd. omit the have.

P. 26. She might even laugh…wd. not have. Oh but surely—surely—a man so near renunciation and enlightenment as you mean C. to be wd. have got beyond the stage of minding whether people laughed at him or not ages ago. You might as well introduce a great pianist who has difficulty about five finger exercises!

visit the Tower. More what schoolboys, foreigners, or very country cousins wd. do—not an ‘Indian Civilian’ and his bride. They’re not like that.

P 28. Period is purely American. The English is ‘full stop’. But of course you may be entitled to translate, just as you’d make ancient Egyptians talk modern American if you were writing a story about them. Still, it raises awkward problems when the two languages are almost identical.

P 29. I’m kind. Wouldn’t anyone say ‘I am kind’?

P. 30. would they laugh…military man. See notes on pp. 26 and 4.

P. 36. I’m not quite clear what is meant by putting God ‘primarily’ above everything.

P. 34. beg apology. Surely one begs a pardon or makes an apology?

P. 36. soldier etc. see on pp. 4, and 30.

I’m like you…bloody Mary. This sounds to me like the language of an utterly commonplace old grumbler, not one far advanced in the mystic path.

I will pay you the compliment (for it is one: the naked truth is not for fools) of giving you a perfectly honest criticism. I don’t think the story, as it stands, will do. But its partial failure does not prove (this is what you most want to know) an absence of literary talent. That, I think, you probably have. What is wrong with this story is due to inexperience. You have set yourself two handicaps, either one of which wd. be enough to wreck most authors. (1.) You are writing about a society you don’t know. I don’t know much about Anglo-Indian life myself, but your picture somehow smells all wrong. (2.) You have tried to put across a marvel (the lévitation. Whether Swamiji wd. have let us call it a ‘miracle’ or not doesn’t concern us as literary critics).

Now there were only two ways to make us accept it. One was by making the whole story fantastic—like a fairy tale—from the word go. That, of course I see, wd. have been quite inconsistent with the mood you wanted to create. The other was so to build up the spirituality of Cobham or Swamiji or (better) both, that we could believe anything of them. And that’s where you come down. We see v. little of Swamiji and what we do see has no aura of grandeur or mystery, nothing numinous, about it. As for Cobham, he is incredible as a mystic. There’s no trace of serenity or love, and his numerous speeches to Hermione are in a vein both of censoriousness and of slangy bullying which is not only unlike a budding sage but quite untrue to the social group he wd. belong to. In other words the difficulties of the theme have, on this occasion, defeated you. I await with interest a story with a better chosen scene and subject. There is nothing amateurish about the actual writing and you have, I think, the gift for ordonnance.³⁸

Are we still friends? I hope so,

yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO WAYLAND HILTON YOUNG (P):

Magdalen

24/2/52

Dear Hilton-Young–

I think I muffled the point I was trying to make yesterday about the significance-unknown-to-the-artist in a work of art. I certainly didn’t intend to treat ‘Either Inspiration or the Unconscious’ as an exhaustive alternative for its source.

It’s more like this. Every fiction, realistic or fantastic, uses forms taken from the real world: a woman, a ship, a gun, a horse etc. Now the total significance of these in the real world (call it T) is known to nobody. And the fraction of it known to each is slightly (or, it may be) widely different. The fraction in the artist’s mind (both conscious and unconscious) is T/A: in the reader’s T/R. An extreme case of difference wd. be, say, if a child who didn’t yet know the facts of generation put a marriage into a story. His ignorance might make that bit of his story simply comic & absurd to the adult reader: but it might also make that bit to the adult reader far more significant than the child had ever intended it to be.

Now I hope no individual reader of my work is to me as adult to child. But the aggregate experiences of my readers, contributing to each from T/Rl + T/R2 etc, presumably are. At any rate a classic, wh. has been read by great minds for 1000 years, and discussed, will have all its forms interpreted by a composite mind, which ought to see in them more than the artist intended. This is not a complete substitution of a new work for his original one, for it is his particular grouping of forms which evoke the whole response. (As if successive generations learned better and better dances to one original tune: a certain formal element in it remaining constant but being more richly & subtly filled).

All this is only an elaboration of the old maxim that what you get out of work depends on what you bring to it. Humanity as a whole brings to the Aeneid more than Virgil could: therefore it must get more out. After all, you as an Atheist have to believe that in admiring natural beauty we are getting out of it what no-one put in: why shd. we not equally get out of verbal compositions what the composer didn’t put in?

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO WAYLAND HILTON YOUNG (P): PC

Magdalen College

Oxford

27/2/52

Yes. T/Rn is only an aggregate unless either (A.) [?]³⁹ are real, as Plato & Hegel, in a different way, thought or (B.) Each educated T/R is, through tradition & critical discussion modified by the other T/Rs. Now I think A is probably and B is certainly true. Thanks for kind offer of hospitality: I’ll try to make it one of these days.

C.S.L.

TO GENIA GOELZ (Z/P):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

29 Feb 1952

Dear Mrs. Goelz (or may I, being old, and bold, and avuncular, say dear Genia?

I learn from Mrs. Van Deusen that you are ‘taking the plunge’.⁴⁰ As you have been now for so long in my prayers, I hope it will not seem intrusive to send my congratulations. Or I might say condolences and congratulations. For whatever people who have never undergone an adult conversion may say, it is a process not without its distresses. Indeed, they are the very sign that it is a true initiation. Like learning to swim or to skate, or getting married, or taking up a profession. There are cold shudderings about all these processes. When one finds oneself learning to fly without trouble one soon discovers (usually. There are blessed exceptions where we are allowed to take a real step without that difficulty), by waking up, that it was only a dream.

All blessings and good wishes.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO MARY VAN DEUSEN (W):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

29/2/52

Dear Mrs. Van Deusen

How odd and delightful that you should meet James! Give him my kind regards.

He has perhaps not given you quite the right idea about our ‘Long Vacation’.⁴¹ It is precisely that part of the year on which both dons and serious students rely for their real work: the term for lectures & discussion, the Vacations, and especially the ‘Long’ for steady reading. I think your universities suffer from not having it. Mine, this year, will be v. busy indeed, and no question of holidays to America.

But don’t think I am the less touched or grateful for your most kind offer of hospitality. I am speaking of the ‘Long’ as it has now come to be: of course originally this prolonged summer gap in all our English institutions–Parliament, Law courts, etc—dates, no doubt, from the days when we were an agricultural community and no one cd., at that time of the year, be spared from the land.

I have written to Genia. Your news is v. good. In a way it is [a] good sign, isn’t it?, that the Rector shd. not be a person she particularly likes. I will indeed continue my prayers for her. With love to all.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO HELEN D. CALKINS (W):⁴² TS

REE 52/123.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

1st March 1952.

Dear Mrs. Calkins,

I will read it with pleasure,⁴³ but I must’nt write a foreword. I have done far too many of them. It begins to make both the authors and me ridiculous, and also I run dry. I wish the book all success.

Yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO THE ROYAL LITERARY FUND (BOD):

Magdalen College,

Oxford

7/3/52

Sir

I write in support of an application which, I understand, my very deeply respected friend Mr. J. A. Chapman⁴⁴ is making to your Committee. Mr. Chapman has in his old age a serious devotion both to his art and to humanity which we usually meet only in the young; if he has spent on the publication of his poem⁴⁵ a sum very serious to him, though not large, I trust, by the standards of the R.L.E, I am sure he has been moved to do so not by an author’s vanity but by a sense of his mission. A grant to him would be a proper recognition of a long and arduous life devoted to letters and learning in a spirit of self-dedication.

I am, Sir,

Yours faithfully

C. S. Lewis

TO ARTHUR G REEVE S (W):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

8/3/52

My dear Arthur

I hope to arrive at Crawfordsburn with W.⁴⁶ on Aug. Wed. 20th. He will leave on Aug. Sat. 23rd. If agreeable I wd. like to stay on at the Hotel⁴⁷ for a fortnight of your society, i.e. sail again on Mon. Sept 8th. Will that suit you? I can’t manage the Easter as well.

In the Last Chronide⁴⁸ I think all the London parts (the ‘Bayswater Romance’) a bore and now always skip them. But I think the Crawley parts splendid.

I am wondering how your date with Tchainie went? Give her my love. Blessings.

Yours

Jack

TO SHELDON VANAUKEN (BOD): PC

Magdalen College

Oxford

15/3/52

Excellent. I’ll be (D.V.) in the Eastgate about 12 noon on Sat. March 22 d.

C.S.L.

TO GENIA GOELZ (L/P):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

18 March 1952

Dear Genia

Don’t bother at all about that question of a person being ‘made a Christian’ by baptism. It is only the usual trouble about words being used in more than one sense. Thus we might say a man ‘became a soldier’ the moment that he joined the army. But his instructors might say six months later ‘I think we have made a soldier of him’. Both usages are quite definable, only one wants to know which is being used in a given sentence. The Bible itself gives us one short prayer which is suitable for all who are struggling with the beliefs and doctrines. It is: ‘Lord I believe, help Thou my unbelief.’⁴⁹ Would something of this sort be any good?: Almighty God, who art the father of lights and who hast promised by thy dear Son that all who do thy will shall know thy doctrine:⁵⁰ give me grace so to live that by daily obedience I daily increase in faith and in the understanding of thy Holy Word, through lesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO VERA MATHEWS (W):

Magdalen etc.

22/3/52

Dear Miss Mathews

I was glad to get your letter. I seem to be as ignorant of America as you are of India. I had no idea your parsons preached Hell-fire: indeed I thought the ordinary presentation of Christianity with you was quite as milk-and-watery as with us, if not more so. We could do with a bit more Hell fire over here.

Clearly I misunderstood Cobham. I hadn’t thought of a wholly unregenerate man being levitated simply by someone else’s sanctity—tho’ of course we all hope this will happen to ourselves. Thanks for a picture of two charming creatures. I am glad to have one of them among my correspondents and wish Andy would write too: but I suppose that’s not much in his line. They sound as if they were animals with a sense of humour. Shall we see some more literary works by you? I hope you’ll go on. With very good wishes from us both.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO ROGER LANCELYN GREEN (BOD):

Magdalen College

Oxford

24/3/52

My dear Roger–

I have re-read The Luck⁵¹ and liked it very much. I felt, as I had felt at the first reading, that tho’ it could not have the quality you and I most prize in a story, yet it had a freshness, a real feel of wet wood & spring days wh. make it more than a mere treasure hunt. It is also extremely exciting. As luck wd. have it I met a lady who was looking for things to ‘read to the children’ & the Luck is now on her list. I think she’s a buyer too, not a library addict.

Now for Logistics. I see that the Beaumaris jaunt must be on my backward journey as, on the outward, it wd. be in the midst of the Aug. bank-holiday period.⁵²1 propose to sail from Belfast to L’pool⁵³ on the night of Sept. Mon. 8th. Can we meet, say at Woodside ferry landing stage on the morning of the 9th & lie that night at Beaumaris. I shall be alone and, if quite convenient wd. gladly accept a night’s lodging chez vous on Wed. 10th, setting out for Oxford the first convenient train on Thurs. 11th. But I trust you to tell me if this is in the least a nuisance, for I can be perfectly well housed in Woodside Hotel. My duty to June. Good hunting.

Yours

Jack

TO SHELDON VANAUKEN:⁵⁴ PC

Magdalen College

Oxford

24 March 1952

Porcus sum, I am a pig, porcissimus, the piggest of pigs. I looked at my diary at about 3 o’clock on Sat. afternoon and found to my horror that I had failed a tryst with you at 12. Please forgive a nit-wit. Will you prove your charity by meeting me at the Eastgate 12 o’clock next Saturday? Even I seldom make exactly the same howler twice! I really am very sorry: I had been much looking forward to it.

C.S.L.

TO MICHAEL IRWIN (P): ⁵⁵

Magdalen College,

Oxford

25th March 1952

Dear Michael

Thank you very much for your nice letter. I am very glad you liked the Narnian books. Yes–there is another one already written but you won’t be able to get it till next November: they are printing it at present, and printing takes a long time, especially for a book that has pictures in it.

Lucy and Edmund and Caspian and Reepicheep (but not Peter and Susan, who are now getting a bit too old) all come into the new one. They get into the Narnian world and all go to sea and have a long voyage: it is called The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.

I wonder what other books you like. Do you like E. Nesbitt’s The Phoenix and the Carpet, and The Amulet,⁵⁶ and Tolkien’s The Hobbit,⁵⁷ and MacDonald’s The Princess and the Goblins and Curdy and the Princess?.⁵⁸ I think all these are very good. Please thank your father for writing to me. Love to all.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO ROGER IANCELYN GREEN (BOD):

Magdalen College

Oxford

29/3/52

Hearken, Little Brother, to the wisdom of Baloo.⁵⁹ Neither you nor I will write to the Bulkeley Arms⁶⁰ for rooms for us both, for the modern hotel keeper wd. then be v. likely to put us both in one room without warning or remedy.

But you will write for your room & I will write (today) for mine. And then, by the permission of Allah, he will think he has to do with a Mr. Green of Bebington & a Mr. Lewis of Oxford who have no connection.

High Wind in Jamaica⁶¹ wh. I’ve just read is better than I expected. Tho’ none of them speak about the brother’s death we are told that the eldest girl ‘missed him badly’: her silence was not due to indifference but to a kind of taboo wh. I think quite possible. As to her evidence wh. hanged the pirates, I suppose some children, as some adults, wd. do that and others not. She was in a tight place: and as a certain type of woman wd. play her sex, a certain type of child wd. play its childishness. A grim book but good in its way.

Love to all.

J.

TO HELEN D. CALKINS (W):

Magdalen College,

Oxford

March 29th 1952

Dear Miss Calkins

I’ve read India Looks with as much interest as if it were an adventure story: especially the parts about ancient Indian history which were absolutely new. That’s one of the reasons why I won’t do a preface: I am not qualified to sponsor a book on this subject. For all I know it might be (tho’ I’m sure it is not) a mass of errors! The other is that you are kind to me and quote me, and after that a preface from me wd. make us both look silly—a mutual admiration society.

It’s v. well done. Here are a few notes wh. you may or may not find worth considering.

P. 3. para 4. Trojan heroes etc. Does it matter that of those you mention only Hector was on the Trojan side? Or that many people think the Trojans were not Aryans! Wd. Homeric for Trojan be safer?

P 4. Leaf’s poem, dazzle and the stress. Are you sure it isn’t dazzle and stress*.

P. 23 Quotation from me. I’m afraid people may think (despite the quotation marks) that the view expressed is mine! Could you without too much labour find another motto for this chapter?

‘I am the doubter and the doubt’–is it from Emerson or Henley?–might do by itself.⁶²

P. 36 Para 1. Its connotation…receptivity. This clause conveys no meaning whatever to my mind! This migh the because all the words had different shades of meaning in America. But a knot of abstract nouns, all rather hard to define, is usually a danger signal. (Beware of aspect, framework, connotation, and all their family!)

P 41. Quotation from Hooker. For intensive read intentive.

P 41. last line but one. of separated. Something must have dropped here.

P 42. Para 3. Surely the correct construction is ‘enamoured of ‘not ‘enamoured with’?

And above, Para 3, for Origin read Origen.

P. 45 First sentence. Again, conveys no clear meaning to me. Simplify! Simplify!

P 49 Footnote. You quote as if it was mine what I (as I told you) was quoting from Whitehead.⁶³ Return it to him. I haven’t got a copy to hand but it’ll do you no harm to read his Chapter II! (By the way in a serious book like yours all other books shd. be mentioned with place and date of the edition you are using. Otherwise it will look amateurish to publishers’ readers.

P. 51 Para 1. Christ-centric. Surely the usual word is Christocentric?. (I’m not quite clear at what date the processes described are meant to be happening.)

P 52. Para 1. The reason for his reluctance was because. You’re saying it twice over! Either The reason…was that or Dr. H. was reluctant because he (The second is better. Always prefer concrete to abstract nouns when you can get them: it avoids Gobbledegook.)

P 53. Was there really no effort to do all these works till modern times? Jesuits in Paraguay? Evangelicals attacking slavery?

P 59. Para 2. The assumption etc. Ambiguous. Does it mean ‘We can’t bear it when others assume that we are naif ‘or ‘when others assume that they are naif ‘?

P. 67. It is not…estimate of God. Good. Very good. That’s how to write.

Very good wishes; and thanks for an interesting bit of reading.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO MARY NEYLAN (T):⁶⁴

Magdalen College

Oxford

1/4/52

Dear Mrs. Neylan–

Yes, I do miss him.⁶⁵ But what strikes me even more is the sense that he is already helping me more from where he is than he would do on earth. It was v. nice to meet you all and especially Sarah, now at last old enough to talk to! I liked her and cd. have done with less of Mingo! She wants fattening, though! Bless you all.

Yours

Jack Lewis

TO MARY VAN DEUSEN (W):

Magdalen etc

April 1st 1952

Dear Mrs. Van Deusen

The advantage of a fixed form of service is that we know what is coming. Ex tempore public prayer has this difficulty: we don’t know whether we can mentally join in it until we’ve heard it—it might be phoney or heretical. We are therefore called upon to carry on a critical and a devotional activity at the same moment: two things hardly compatible. In a fixed form we ought to have ‘gone through the motions’ before in our private prayers: the rigid form really sets our devotions free.

I also find the more rigid it is, the easier it is to keep one’s thoughts from straying. Also it prevents any service getting too completely eaten up by whatever happens to be the pre-occupation of the moment (a war, an election, or what not). The permanent shape of Christianity shows through. I don’t see how the ex tempore method can help becoming provincial & I think it has a great tendency to direct attention to the minister rather than to God.

Quakers…well I’ve been unlucky in mine. The ones I know are atrocious bigots whose religion seems to consist almost entirely in attacking other people’s religions. But I’m sure there are good ones as well.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO EDWARD A. ALLEN (W):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

April 3rd 1952

My dear Mr. Allen

Sugar and tea! Hurrah. They are just what we need most, tea being our most powerful addiction-drug, and we thank you v. heartily.

I’m not quite sure whether we are playing into Uncle loe’s⁶⁶ hand by messing about in Korea and elsewhere. If the enemy were the Germans I’d agree with you. He has always been a big fighter and it’s no good doing anything about him short of a full-dress war. The Russian, so far (whether Tsarist or pseudo-Communist makes no odds, I expect) has not been like that. He grabs things here and grabs things there when he finds them unguarded. I think there’s a real chance that by rearmament and resistance at minor points we just might prevent it coming to a real show-down. But heaven knows I am as ill qualified as anyone in the world to have an opinion. At any rate both your country and mine have twice in our lifetime tried the recipe of appeasing an aggressor and it didn’t work on either occasion: so that it seems sense to try the other way this time.

I’m all with you about Orion. It’s nice to live in the Northern Hemisphere because the winter stars are much better than the summer ones and of course one sees more of them when the nights are longest. The whole combination Sirius—Orion–Aldebaran—Pleiades is magnificent. I wonder what constellation our Sun forms part of as seen from the planets (if any) of Sirius?

Spring has been arrested here by a sudden cold snap, snow & frost and all the crocuses are in a bad way: but the birds, bless them, keep on talking as if it were real April weather. I suffer from your inability to remember what I have to buy. In my case it happens chiefly about razor-blades. One remembers it during the five minutes painful scrape each morning but never when one is among the shops. With many thanks & v. good wishes.

Yours ever

C. S. Lewis

For some time now a woman calling herself ‘Mrs C. S. Lewis’ had been living on her ‘husband’s’ credit at the Courtstairs Hotel, Thanet, Kent. The lady had a history of living cheaply by pretending to be married to some well-known person who would soon be joining her. In this instance she told the owners of Courtstairs Hotel, Alan and Nell Berners-Price, that Lewis would soon be arriving and would pay the bill. However, by April 1952 she had been living at Court Stairs for over a year, and Mrs Berners-Price went up to Oxford to confront Lewis with a mass of unpaid bills.

On being admitted to Lewis’s rooms in Magdalen College, Mrs Berners-Price said, ‘I’ve come to ask about your wife.’ ‘But I’m not married,’ replied Lewis. Mrs Berners-Price was as surprised by this as Lewis was on learning he had a ‘wife’. Following the advice of his solicitor, Owen Barfield, Lewis took out an injunction of jactitation of marriage against the woman.

The woman, Mrs Nella Victoria Hooker, had been in jail a number of times for similar offences. She was arrested in April and her trial set for 8 May in the court at Canterbury. While in jail she wrote letters to Lewis, as he mentions in the letter to Christian Hardie below.

TO CHRISTIAN HARDIE (P):

Palm Sunday [6 April] 1952

Dear Christian

I romped through The Power and the Glory.⁶⁷ Its theme makes it suitable enough as a preface to Holy Week but if you intended it as a penance you have bowled a wide. It is a most moving and (in its proper mode) enjoyable book.

As far as I am concerned there is no common measure between it and Waugh.⁶⁸ In Waugh’s book the supposedly good end of the old rake had simply to be taken on trust: but one lives through the whole experience of Greene’s hunted priest, filled from the first with interest, soon with compassion, and finally with love. Also Greene seems to know things. All that about the ‘pious woman’ in the cell (few laymen perhaps get letters from her so often as I) is excellent: also the bit about forgiveness of sins being easier to believe than forgiveness of the ‘habit of piety’. Greene loves and understands his most repulsive characters–the lieutenant and the half-caste—better than Waugh does his favourites.

I think he has a fault. The central tragic theme is not made more effective by filling up all the chinks with other, irrelevant, miseries, like those of the Fellows family. The great tragic artists didn’t do that. Macbeth⁶⁹ wd. not have been improved by making the drunken porter get cancer: nor the Iliad by making the domestic life of Hector and Andromache squalid and miserable. That is the modern nimiety. But it is a very good book all the same.

Thanks very much for the loan of it. (It wd. be unkind to discuss my views on tragedy with Colin just at present. He seems to be a little tired of that subject). A happy Easter to you both.

Yours

Jack

TO DON GIOVANNI CALABRIA (V):

[Magdalen College,

Oxford.]

April 14th 1952

Pater dilectissime

Multum eras et es in orationibus meis et grato animo litteras tuas accepi. Et ora tu pro me, nunc praesertim, dum me admodum orphanum esse sentio quia grandaevus meus confessor et carissimus pater in Christo nuper mortem obiit. Dum ad altare celebraret, subito, post acerrimum sed (Deo gratias) brevissimum dolorem, expiravit, et novissima verba erant venio, Domine Jesu. Vir erat maturâ spirituali sapientiâ sed ingenuitate et innocentiâ fere puerili–buono fanciullo, ut ita dicam.

Potesne, mi pater, quaestionem resolvere? Quis sanctorum scriptorum scripsit ‘Amor est ignis jugiter ardens’? Credidi haec verba esse in libro De Imitatione Christi sed non possum ibi invenire.

‘Ut omnes unum sint’ est petitio numquam in meis precibus praetermissa. Dum optabilis unitas doctrinae et ordinis abest, eo acrius conemur caritatis unionem tenere: quod, eheu, et vestri in Hispania et nostri in Hibernia Septentrionali non faciunt. Vale, mi pater,

C. S. Lewis

*

[Magdalen College,

Oxford.]

April 14th 1952

Dearest Father,

You were and are much in my prayers and thank you for your letters. And do you pray for me, especially at present when I feel very much an orphan because my aged confessor and most loving father in Christ has just died. While he was celebrating at the altar, suddenly, after a most sharp but (thanks be to God) very brief attack of pain, he expired; and his last words were, ‘I come, Lord Jesus.’ He was a man of ripe spiritual wisdom—noble minded but of an almost childlike simplicity and innocence: ‘buono fandullo’ if I may put it so.⁷⁰

Can you, my Father, resolve a question? Which of the holy writers wrote ‘Amor est ignis jugiter ardens’? I thought these words were in The Imitation of Christ but I cannot find them there.⁷¹

‘That they all may be one’⁷² is a petition which in my prayers I never omit. While the wished-for unity of doctrine and order is missing, all the more eagerly let us try to keep the bond of charity: which, alas, your people in Spain and ours in Northern Ireland do not.

Farewell, my Father.

C. S. Lewis

TO RUTH PITTER(BOD):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

April 16th 1952

Dear Miss Pitter

It always seems a bit of cheek to send anyone (especially the likes of you) a ticket for one’s lecture, unless one could do it in the Chinese style ‘In the inconceivably unlikely event of honourable poetess wishing to attend this person’s illiterate and erroneous lecture…’⁷³ Oh dear, to think of that immemorial urbanity, that remote, fantastic world being in the hands of the Bolshevists!

Hero & Leander⁷⁴ has no Original in the strict sense. The Greek poem on the subject is late, rather charmingly precious, and was falsely attributed to the primeval and mythical Musaeus: the real author is unknown—some Alexandrian, I think. But neither the Marlovian nor the Chapmanic part is anything like a translation—not so close to pseudo-Musaeus as Tennyson is to Malory.

Have you read Andrew Young’s Into Hades,⁷⁵ and what do you think of it. I found the content absorbing and the images like all his, simply enchanting (There’s a bit about reflected water-drops from a raised oar rushing up to meet the real water drops—lovely!) but my ear was a bit unsatisfied. I believe ‘Blank Verse’, unrhymed five footers, is not a metre to be written loosely. I think the unrhymed Alexandrine, written without a break at the 6th syllable wd. be far better: e.g.

I know far less of spiders than that poetess Who (like the lady in Comus in the perilous wood) Can study nature’s infamies with secure heart…

The third line is here the best: one wants plenty of trisyllables to leap across the threatened medial pause. Try a few. Commending me to you in the lowliest wise that I can or may.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO EDWARD A. ALLEN (W): TS

REF.52/28.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

19th April 1952.

My dear Allen,

I got back today from a delightful three days break in the country, just a little dissatisfied to be at my desk again, and therefore just in the mood for the welcome fillip which your admirable parcel administered. You must by this time be as tired of hearing C.S.L. on the English food situation as I am tired of enduring it: so I will say no more than that all these good things will be a wonderful help at the house, and thank you once again for your kindness.

I have been stopping with an ex-pupil, now a master at my old school, Malvern:⁷⁶ a pleasant little town, about sixty miles from here, lying under the foot of a four miles range of hills, two thousand feet high, in the Severn valley. Of course this is nothing much in the way of height, but they rise so abruptly from the level that one gets the effect of miniature mountains; and there is splendid air and exercise to be had in tramping them. To add to the joy, our curious climate has suddenly decided to give us an advance instalment of summer—at least one hopes it is only an instalment and not the summer. It was 75 degrees yesterday, and as hot today; all the women in summer frocks and so forth. Malvern town is a perfect and melancholy example of the change which has come over this country since my schooldays; then, it was a town of large ugly, comfortable Victorian houses, designed to be run by four or five servants apiece. The same houses are still there, but at least seven out of every ten are now either schools, offices, or boarding houses.

I occasionally glance at the news of your Presidential elections with that respectful bewilderment with which one regards another nation’s domestic affairs. To us, the question naturally presents itself from the viewpoint of which candidate will be most sympathetic to our troubles. Most people here seem to hope for Eisenhower, and are most afraid of Taft: who, rightly or wrongly, seems to have the reputation of being the old style Isolationist.⁷⁷ It is being said that if he is returned, his foreign policy will be that America should be defended in America, and not in Europe. But I suspect that this must be a crude exaggeration.

I hope Mrs. Allen keeps well: please remember me very kindly to her. Do you both propose to go to the seaside this year? If all goes well, I shall be in Eire for a fortnight in August, with daily bathing: not the best sort of bathing, but a sight better than none at all. For, being on a bay, there are practically no waves; and where the sea is perpetually calm, I would just as soon, indeed sooner, bathe in a river.

With all best wishes and many thanks to you both, from us both,

yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO DELMAR BANNER (W):⁷⁸ TS

REF.52/196

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

29th April 1952.

My dear Banner,

Thanks for yours of yesterday. But in the words of the immortal Jeeves to Bertie Wooster, ‘I fear, Sir, I am unable to recede from my position.’⁷⁹

Yes indeed, I hope to visit your country before I die;⁸⁰ but I have many calls upon my time, and my own Ireland generally lures me to it when I can take a holiday.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

The knowledge that I could (liceret mihi)⁸¹ advise is no use because I know I couldn’t (non possem).⁸²

With the growing fame of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Lewis was invited to address the Library Association during their Bournemouth conference, held between 29 April and 2 May. On 29 April he read a paper entitled ‘On Three Ways of Writing for Children’.⁸³

TO ROGER IANCELYN GREEN (BOD):

Magdalen College

Oxford

May 1/52

I think the Bournemouth Lecture was a success. One librarian said I had almost converted him to fairy-tales, he having hitherto taken the ‘real life’ stuff for granted.

Two librariennes said The Luck of the Lynns was in much demand and one praised The Wonderful Stranger.⁸⁴ I added that some of your unpublished & more ‘faerian’ books were even better. You were spoken of with much respect.

J.

TO MARY VAN DEUSEN (W):

Magdalen College,

Oxford

May 5th 1952

Dear Mrs. Van Deusen

Thank you for your cheery letter and the delightful enclosures. I’ve seldom seen better photos of children. And the landscape lures one into it. I long to be tramping over those wooded—or, what is better, half wooded hills. I’m as sensitive as a German to the spell of das Feme⁸⁵ and all that.

About the high-low quarrels in the Church, whatever the merits of the dispute are, the ‘heat’ is simply and solely Sin, and I think parsons ought to preach on it from that angle.

By the way, the ‘conversation-piece’ by Paul & Mini is really excellent. I hope you will all go on having a lovely time. God bless you all.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO NELL BERNERS-PRICE (W): TS

REF.52/205.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

6th May 1952.

Dear Mrs. Berners-Price,

Many thanks for your letter of the 4th. This is most kind of you, and I will very gladly accept your hospitality for the night of Wednesday 7th, tomorrow;⁸⁶ I should like to stop over Thursday too, but I fear that will be impossible. Indeed nothing but the Majesty of the Law would have got me out of Oxford for one night at the present moment. I come by a train which reaches Ramsgate at 6.8 p.m.

Yours gratefully,

C. S. Lewis

(modern blotting paper!)⁸⁷

TO THE EDITOR OF THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT:⁸⁸

Sir,–

The authorship of The Sheepheards Slumber (No. 133 in Englands Helicon, beginning ‘In Pescod time, when Hound to Home’) is not stated in any edition that I have been able to consult. The poem will be found in A pleasaunte Laborinth called Churchyardes Chance etc. London. Ihon Kyngston 1580. It is there entitled A matter of fonde Cupid, and vain Venus.

C. S. Lewis

TO NELL BERNERS-PRICE (W):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

May 9th 1952

Dear Mrs Berners Price

Thanks to you and your husband the trial now looms so small in the total adventure that I feel more like a man back from a holiday than a witness released from the box: not that it was a box, neither, being more like a nursery fender.

The actual scene in court was horrid. I never saw Justice at work before, and it is not a pretty sight. Any creature, even an animal, at bay, surrounded by its enemies, is a dreadful thing to see: one felt one was committing a sort of indecency by being present. What did impress me was the absence of any resentment or vindictiveness on the part of the witnesses: you two victims especially were, I thought, getting v. high marks. But, as I say, what I really remember most is a delightful visit to very nice people in a charming house. I am sorry I left my kind host without even a hand-shake: but my doom was upon me.

May I now book a room at Courtstairs (in the ordinary way) for the night of May 18th? I think Walsh said he wd. drive us to Canterbury on the morning of the 19th. I expect I can get on from Canterbury on the afternoon of the 19th.

I enclose ‘PC’⁸⁹ for Penelope.⁹⁰ And once again many, many thanks. I don’t really know why you should have been so kind to a stranger, whose very name must have rather sinister associations in both your minds by now!

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO ‘MRS LOCKLEY (L):

[Magdalen College]

13/5/52

Dear ‘Mrs Lockley’

In Bp. Gore’s ‘Sermon on the mount’…I find the view that Christ forbade ‘divorce in such a sense as allowed re-marriage’.⁹¹ The question is whether He made an exception by allowing divorce in such a sense as allowed re-marriage when the divorce was for adultery. In the Eastern Church re-marriage of the innocent party is allowed: not in the Roman. The Anglican Bps. at Lambeth in 1888 denied re-marriage to the guilty party, and added that ‘there has always been a difference of opinion in the Ch. as to whether Our Lord meant to forbid re-marriage of the innocent party in a divorce’.⁹²

It wd. seem then that the only question is whether you can divorce your husband in such a sense as wd. make you free to re-marry. I imagine that nothing is further from your thoughts. I believe that you are free as a Christian woman to divorce him especially since the refusal to do so does harm to the innocent children of his mistress: but that you must (or should) regard yourself as no more free to marry another man than if you had not divorced him. But remember I’m no authority on such matters, and I hope you will ask the advice of one or two sensible clergymen of our own Church.

Our own Vicar whom I have just rung up, says that there are Anglican theologians who say that you must not divorce him. His own view was that in doubtful cases the Law of Charity shd. always be the over-riding consideration, and in a case such as yours charity directs you to divorce him…

TO NELL BERNERS-PRICE (W):

Magdalen College,

Oxford

May 14th 1952

Dear Mrs. Berners-Price

Those plaguey police (they seem to live on my telephone at present: it might be less trouble to be the prisoner than to be a witness!) have just rung to say that the trial will probably not be on May 19th after all and I’m to wait till I get a notice. So may I cancel my room at Courtstairs for the 18th? You’ll let me know if I’ve involved you in any loss, won’t you? And I shall probably be wiring for a room some other night when I’ve got the notice. Heigh-ho!

All the best to both of you, and Penelope. I wish the dog cd. be put in the witness box.

Yours ever

C. S. Lewis

TO WAYLAND HILTON YOUNG (W): TS

REF.52/219.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

15th May 1952.

Dear Hilton-Young,

I’ve no car and no wireless. You might try Professor G. Driver (this College) for a reading list on the Judith period.⁹³ But do take care: a story already very well told in an ancient text, is a bad thing to work on. The only hope is that the Babylonian stuff might start interesting you for its own sake, and lead to a quite new story in that setting. Otherwise…is there a single success in re-telling an ancient story with modern novelistic technique? It is stark ruin.

Thanks very much for the kind suggestion, but no can do. I am tangled up (only as witness) in a trial, and can make no plans. All good wishes,

Yours,

C. S. Lewis

TO GENIA GOELZ (L/P):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

15 May 1952

Dear Genia

Thanks for your letter of the 9th. All our prayers are being answered and I thank God for it. The only (possibly, not necessarily) unfavourable symptom is that you are just a trifle too excited.⁹⁴ It is quite right that you should feel that ‘something terrific’ has happened to you (it has) and be ‘all glowy’. Accept these sensations with thankfulness as birthday cards from God, but remember that they are only greetings, not the real gift. I mean, it is not the sensations that are the real thing. The real thing is the gift of the Holy Spirit which can’t usually be—perhaps not ever—experienced as a sensation or emotion. The sensations are merely the response of your nervous system. Don’t depend on them. Otherwise when they go and you are once more emotionally flat (as you certainly will be quite soon), you might think that the real thing had gone too. But it won’t. It will be there when you can’t feel it. May even be most operative when you can feel it least.

Don’t imagine it is all ‘going to be an exciting adventure from now on’. It won’t. Excitement, of whatever sort, never lasts. This is the push to start you off on your first bicycle: you’ll be left to [do] lots of dogged pedalling later on. And no need to be depressed about it either. It will be good for your spiritual leg muscles. So enjoy the push while it lasts, but enjoy it as a treat, not as something normal.

Of course, none of us have ‘any right’ at the altar. You might as well talk of a non-existent person ‘having a right’ to be created. It is not our right but God’s free bounty. An English peer said, ‘I like the order of the Garter because it has no dam’ nonsense about merit!⁹⁵ Nor has Grace. And we must keep on remembering that as a cure for Pride.

Yes, pride is a perpetual nagging temptation. Keep on knocking it on the head but don’t be too worried about it. As long as one knows one is proud one is safe from the worst form of pride.

If Hoyle⁹⁶ answers your letter, then let the correspondence drop. He is not a great philosopher (and none of my scientific colleagues think much of him as a scientist), but he is strong enough to do some harm. You’re not David and no one has told you to fight Goliath! You’ve only just enlisted. Don’t go off challenging enemy champions. Learn your drill. I hope this doesn’t sound all like cold water! I can’t tell you how pleased I was with your letter.

God bless you.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO SHELDON VANAUKEN (BOD): TS

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

16th May 1952.

Thank you both very much. It will give me great pleasure to dine with you at 7.30 on May 29th. I shall presume ordinary clothes, unless I hear from you to the contrary.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

In May 1952 John H. McCallum of Harcourt, Brace & World, New York, invited Lewis to contribute an article on Edmund Spenser to Volume I of Major British Writers, under the general editorship of G. B. Harrison. Lewis accepted, and his extant correspondence with Harcourt, Brace & World begins with the following letter:

TO JOHN H. MCCALLUM (P):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

May 21st 1952

Dear Mr. McCallum,

Thank you for yours of the 16th. I think I shall be able to keep all your ‘suggested rules’ except the first. The proportion 15, 45, 20 for Life, General Essay, Particular Analysis wd. not really be suitable for Spenser. The materials for his life do not really add up to a ‘character’: I don’t mean that I couldn’t write one, but if I did I should be contributing to historical fiction. Nor is his kind of poetry one which would yield much under detailed analysis of short passages. The chief thing we must do, indeed, is to encourage readers to remember that he is a romancier, à long haleine.⁹⁷ I cd. accept your suggested proportions alright if I were doing Milton: but they’d ruin an Introduction to Spenser.

My selections will be all from Faerie Queene and Epíthalamíon:⁹⁸ there’s no room for anything else. The bits from EQ. will be often arranged so as to yield something like continuous narrative: as soon as I looked into the matter I saw that a mere conglomeration of the best single stanzas wd. give no idea of his quality and wd., indeed, be almost unreadable. I hope this meets with your approval.

Yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO JOAN PILE (W):

Magdalen College,

Oxford

May 21st 1952

Dear Mrs. Pile

What a horrible business! Of course neither I nor anyone who knows you could believe the allegations for a moment. I don’t think I cd. do much good by writing to Ld. Nuffield, though I am prepared to try it if nothing better can be done. Have you tried your M.P. I mean, not about the expenses of the case but about the injustice of being forced to answer questions on oath and then accused of slander for answering them? In the meantime I am writing to a legal friend of my own for advice. I can’t tell you how sorry I am for you in this trouble. I will write again as soon as I have anything to report.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO VERA GEBBERT (W):

Magdalen etc.

May 23rd 1952

Dear Vera Gebbert

Well, well, what next? Very hearty congratulations.⁹⁹ Everything in the photos is lovely except the goggles: and they, I suppose, are a Necessary Evil, like civilisation, government, medicine, education, law, and nearly everything else. You’ll have to watch those very depraved antelopes. If they are already addicted to gum and tobacco, they will soon develop a taste for cocktails. (Our college herd of deer used to be v. fond of bread soaked in port–in the days when wine was cheaper. They don’t get the chance now). I shall think, in all the extenuating circumstances, you might be excused for ‘neglecting your writing’. I don’t know that I’d really like to marry a girl who wrote fiction all the time on the honeymoon. (Of course if 7 did, that wd. be quite different and it wd. be most unreasonable of her to object.)

Nor can I quite believe that an avid expectation of my next book makes a very large part of your present experience. Anyway, it won’t be fulfilled. I’m busy at present finishing the heavy, academic work on 16th. Century literature wh. has occupied me (it has been the top tune—all the other books were only its little twiddly bits) for the last 15 years. When it is actually done I expect my whole moral character will collapse. I shall go up like a balloon that has chucked out the last sandbag.

My brother is away for a few days but wd. certainly join in all my felicitations if he were here. I hope you will both live happily ever afterwards and tell stories to your great-grandchildren, travelling in donkey carriages along the mountain roads with hair as white as the snows. God bless you both.

Yours ever

C. S. Lewis

TO DOM BEDE GRIFFITHS OSB (W):¹⁰⁰

[Magdalen College]

28/5/52

My dear Dom Bede–

It isn’t chiefly men I am kept in touch with by my huge mail: it is women. The female, happy or unhappy, agreeing or disagreeing, is by nature a much more epistolary animal than the male.

Yes, Pascal does directly contradict several passages in Scripture and must be wrong. What I ought to have said was that the Cosmological argument is, for some people at some times, ineffective. It always has been for me. (By the way do read K. Z. Lorenz King Solomons Ring on animal—especially bird—behaviour.¹⁰¹ There are instincts I had never dreamed of: big with a promise of real morality. The wolf is a v. different creature from what we imagine.)

The stories you tell about two perverts belong to a terribly familiar pattern: the man of good will, saddled with an abnormal desire wh. he never chose, fighting hard and time after time defeated. But I question whether in such a life the successful operation of Grace is so tiny as we think. Is not this continued avoidance either of presumption or despair, this ever renewed struggle, itself a great triumph of Grace? Perhaps more so than (to human eyes) equable virtue of some who are psychologically sound.

I am glad you think J. Austen a sound moralist. I agree. And not platitudinous, but subtle as well as firm.

I’ll write to Skinner. Merlin was excellent. I haven’t written yet because someone has had my copy, till a day or two ago, almost ever since my first reading.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

P. S. Is the Elgin address going to be permanent?

TO SHELDON VANAUKEN (BOD): TS

[June? 1952]¹⁰²

Thank you for a letter which I prize very much. The sonnets, though in a manner which will win few hearers at the moment (drat all fashions) are really very remarkable.¹⁰³ The test is that I found myself at once forgetting all the personal biographical interest and reading them as poetry.

The image of sand is real imagination. I thought this was the better of the two at first: but now I don’t know. The second quatrain of The Gap is tip-top argument—and then the ground sinking behind.¹⁰⁴ Excellent.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO KATHARINE FARRER(BOD):¹⁰⁵

As from Magdalen

June 10th 1952

Dear Mrs. Farrer–

I brought home both The Missing Link¹⁰⁶ and Merlin¹⁰⁷ yesterday evening, intending to regale myself on light fiction for a bit before tackling poetry. But—well, you foresee what I am leading up to with elephantine delicacy. It happens, however, to be true. I never reached Merlin and sat up later than I intended to finish the M.L.

I thought it very well constructed, and it thoroughly excited me. That, of course, is not of much value because I’m such an inexperienced reader of Whodunnits. But there were a great many sources of pleasure besides the mystery. You do the atmosphere of the Wychwood country and of Liverpool docks (both of which I know) very well—though, by the way, on p. 141 ‘the familiar devil of the stairs’ completely defeated me. Is the text corrupt?¹⁰⁸ The description of Syd on pp. 24-25 is an excellent bit of writing. The Spanish captain is good. And, of course, there’s wit everywhere, and often with weight of thought behind the sting–‘Notice how he uses down (p. 50), and the bit about families ><¹⁰⁹ family allowances and houses >< housing bit on p. 127. Richard’s (delightfully preluded) remarks at the bottom of p. 104 and the top of 105 needed making. (Mrs. Luke, by the way, convinces me completely).

About your dialogue I’m not so happy. Mrs. Harman talks well. But if I were a spiteful reviewer I’d say that the advice ‘Don’t talk like a C.W. character’¹¹⁰ ought to have been given to Richard (and obeyed!) earlier. Not that C.W. isn’t a v. great man but one must not imitate the droop of Alexander’s shoulders. Richard is talking like a C.W. character at his worst on the top of p. 85. He (Richard, not C.W.) would have better manners than to quote poetry to Plummer who wd. certainly think he was being somehow made a fool of and be hurt.

I think dialogue is frightfully tricky: partly because it is so hard to stop writing it (characters will talk: at least so I find) and partly because so much that wd. be alright in real conversation looks different when it gets into print. Andrew’s clipped G’s for instance. It’s a v. small thing in real life: but ‘in” in print usually suggests huntin at once and all the odious literature written by people who admire those who say huntin and the yet more odious literature by those who dislike them. I dare say we’d be wise to re-read all our dialogue as it might be read by a dull, or vulgar, or hostile reader. And of course it’s the light dialogue (banter between lovers, small talk at a party) that is dangerous. But I don’t know what right I have to talk like this, especially without being asked!

It was a good idea to make the Links so silly that their trouble never really affects us. (Oh—by the way–does any ship carry her own gangways and pull them on board when she casts off? In my experience they always belong to the harbour and are pulled onto the quay.) Indeed you have done the Links so well that one wonders if it is a happy ending or whether the baby wouldn’t have had a better time being brought up by Pyng Pong ♀.

Anyway, I thoroughly enjoyed the book ‘yet had I rather if I were to choose Thy service in some graver subject use’¹¹¹–I’d like to see your remarkable powers of rendering atmosphere and swift action given their head in a good whacking heroical romance. But no doubt, in the present state of the publishing market, it wd. be crazy to advise you to do so.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

P.S. I’ve an uneasy feeling this is the sort of letter Dr. Field might have written—wh. raises another really dreadful idea.

TO MARG-RIETTE MONTGOMERY (W): ¹¹²

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

June 10th 1952

Dear Miss Montgomery,

(1.) My relations to Anthroposophy¹¹³ were these. When I was a student, all my friends and I were ordinary modern Atheists. Then two of my friends got caught up by Steiner.¹¹⁴ I loathed this and it led to frightful arguments for several years. During these arguments I heard nothing that would convert me to Anthroposophy: but the negative side of Steiner, his case against the common modern pseudo-scientific attitude, proved to be unanswerable. That is, I didn’t think what he affirmed was true, but I did think all his denials were right.

His shattering of the ordinary attitude left the way open for Christianity, so far as I was concerned. Since then I have always had a kindly feeling towards his system: and certainly the effect of it upon some anthroposophists I know appears to have been good. There is, however, an element of polytheism in it which I utterly reject. Steinerism is a species of Paganism (using that word in its proper sense, to mean the ancient pre-Christian religions). That is why it is (a.) Incompatible with Christianity: but (b.) Far nearer to Christianity than the ordinary modern materialism. For the Pagans knew more than the modern Ph.D’s. The right thing to say to your Ph.D. friends is ‘Yes. Steiner is nonsense: but nothing like such nonsense as the things you believe.’ There is more truth in his nonsense than in their sense. We are free to take out of Anthroposophy anything that suits us, provided it does not contradict the Nicene Creed.

(2.) Oh, I just ‘made up’ all those things in That Hideous Strength: i.e. I took existing evil tendencies and ‘produced’ them (in the geometrical sense–‘Produce the line AB to the point X’) to show how dreadful they might become if we didn’t take care. And you, apparently, have been living in a world where they had already in real life got a good deal nearer to my point X than I knew. Well, that is the trouble about satirising the modern world. What you put into your story as fantastically horrid possibilities becomes fact before your story is printed. The reality outstrips the satire!

With all good wishes. You can trust Steiner about fertilisers but not about the nature of Jesus Christ. (I think his architecture horrid, but that’s a matter of taste)

Yours very sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO MARY VAN DEUSEN (W):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

10/6/52

Dear Mrs. Van Deusen

The new photos raise extreme Sehnsucht:¹¹⁵ each a landscape as fulfils my dreams. That is the America I wd. like to see, not the great cities, which, except superficially, are really much the same all over the earth.

I think psychiatry is like surgery: i.e. the thing is in itself essentially an infliction of wounds but may, in good hands, be necessary to avoid some greater evil. But it is more tricky than surgery because the personal philosophy & character of the operator come more into play. In setting a broken ankle all surgeons wd. agree as to the proper position to wh. the bones shd. be restored, because anatomy is an exact science. But all psychiatrists are not agreed as to the proper shape of the soul: where their ideas of that proper shape are based on a heathen or materialistic philosophy, they may be aiming at a shape we shd. strongly disapprove. One wants a Christian psychiatrist. There are a few of these, but nothing like enough.

If I can successfully say to Genia what you have often said in vain, that is not because of any quality in me but depends on a general (and at first sight cruel) law: we can all ‘take’ from a stranger what we can’t ‘take’ from our own parents. I listen with profit to elderly friends saying the very same things which I neglected or even resented when my father said them. Nay more: I can obey advice from others wh. I have often given myself in vain. I suppose this is one aspect of the vicariousness of the universe: Charles Williams’s view that every one can help to paddle every one else’s canoe better than his own. We must bear one another’s burdens because that is the only way the burdens can get borne: and ‘He saved others, himself He cannot save’¹¹⁶ is a fundamental law.¹¹⁷

Yes: ‘things’ continue almost alarmingly ‘better’ with me. God bless you all

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO WILLIAM BORST (P):¹¹⁸

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

June 11th 1952

Dear Mr. Borst–

It takes so long to get anything typed now-a-days that I thought you wd. prefer the lesser nuisance of reading the specimen (asked for in your letter of June 4th) in my own hand. I think it raises all the problems wh. are likely to occur in Spenser–who will not need such heavy glossing as Shakespeare. The only one I was doubtful about was remembrance = memento in line ll.¹¹⁹ Wd. they need that explained? (We don’t want to spoon-feed them more than is necessary.)

I am terrified by all the instructions about typing and doubt if I can master them. (You showed great discretion in not producing them at an earlier stage, as I shd. certainly not have touched the job had I known it involved all that!). I suppose # means ‘one-space’ and is not a challenge to a game of noughts and crosses. And what is meant by the typist ‘using’ the double right hand margin? In the specimen given she does precisely not use it but types straight on across it to the ultimate right hand margin. Do you mean ‘Let her draw a vertical line 8 spaces to the left of her actual right hand margin and then ignore this line in typing?’ As you begin to see, I have picked up none of the technique of a professional author. Sorry.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

P.S. You might let me have the specimen back.

TO HSIN’CHANG CHANG (BOD):¹²⁰ TS

REF.52/252.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

12th June 1952.

Dear Mr. Chang,

If you would care to call on me here at 12 o’c. on Friday 20th, it would give me great pleasure.

Yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO ROBERT LONGACRE (W):

Magdalen College,

Oxford

June 19th 1952

Dear Mr. Longacre–

All opinions on new poetry are uncertain: especially on poetry read because one has been asked to read it and with the knowledge (which freezes up all the faculties) that one must express a view on it to the author.

You must therefore not attach too much importance to my ‘re-action’. The truth is, these poems don’t work—with me: they might with other readers, and, I dare say, better readers than I. The poetic species to which they belong—which might be called the Rhapsodical—is one to which I am very insensitive: I can’t bear Walt Whitman.

My feeling is that the more vast and supersensible a poem’s subject is, the more it needs to be fixed, founded, incarnated in regular metre and concrete images. Thus I is, for me, the worst. Ill is better: the line about the candle in God’s window, the best thing in it. But they are not my sort of poetry. You won’t take this too seriously: they might well suit some other reader. I can’t tell you how I wish I could write something more encouraging: but between Christians the truth must be spoken.

With all good wishes.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO MONSIGNOR FERDINAND VANDRY (WHL): ¹²¹

[Magdalen College

? June 1952]

Dear Monsignor Vandry,

Please accept my sincere thanks for the great and unexpected honour offered me in your letter. I do not know whether in order to receive it, I must be present before the Special Convocation on September 22nd. If that is necessary then I am compelled, with great regret and undiminished gratitude, to refuse the Doctorate since my other engagements make it quite impossible for me to visit Quebec in September.

Even if it is possible for me to receive the degree in absence, the question remains whether that would be held to imply any disrespect for Convocation or any insensibility to the great favour you are showing me. Naturally I would rather lose it than receive it under conditions which the University might consider as ungracious on my part.

I await your kind advice on these points.

Whatever the decision may be, I shall retain a vivid sense of the University’s kindness.

Please convey to all concerned my most respectful and obliged greetings.

TO GENIA GOELZ (L/P):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

20 June 1952

Dear Genia

Thanks for yours of the 10th. I would prefer to combat the ‘I’m special’ feeling not by the thought ‘I’m no more special than anyone else’ but by the feeling ‘Everyone is as special as me.’ In one way there is no difference, I grant, for both remove the speciality. But there is a difference in another way. The first might lead you to think, ‘I’m only one of the crowd like anyone else’. But the second leads to the truth that there isn’t any crowd. No one is like anyone else. All are ‘members’ (organs) in the Body of Christ.¹²² All different and all necessary to the whole and to one another: each loved by God individually, as if it were the only creature in existence. Otherwise you might get the idea that God is like the government which can only deal with the people in the mass.

About confession, I take it that the view of our Church is that everyone may use it but none is obliged to. I don’t doubt that the Holy Spirit guides your decisions from within when you make them with the intention of pleasing God. The error wd. be to think that He speaks only within whereas, in reality, He speaks also through Scripture, the Church, Christian friends, books etc.

I haven’t written more than two nonsense poems¹²³ (I enclose the other) but I know my Just So stories.¹²⁴

God bless you.

C. S. Lewis

Travellers! In months without an R Beware the woods of Wongomar, For then the resident bumble-bear Booms all day through the thicket there. Its face is round, as is its rump, Its tail is a preposterous stump. Its eyes are shut, its whiskers dense, It lives on butterscotch and bats And lines its nest with bowler hats (Arranged in a volmonic¹²⁵ plan). It cannot talk, but thinks it can, And there it bumbles, there it hums, It knocks you down: it rubs its eyes Intending to apologise. But when it sees it’s laid you flat It takes offence and steals your hat.

TO ARTHUR GREEVES (BOD):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

June 22nd 1952

My dear Arthur

I shall be free to be with you from Sat. Aug. 23rd till Mon. Sept. 8th when I sail for L’pool. These dates cannot be changed but if you like to spend all or any of this time motoring me about Ireland, I shd. like it v. much and will fall in with any dates (between those two) or any itinerary you choose. Just us two, of course: I wouldn’t face any third.^* You and I know the worst about each other by now! I look forward to it immensely.

Yours

Jack

P.S. But I’d forgotten. My room at the C’burn Inn is already booked for that period. I’m afraid I couldn’t manage to pay it and other ones as well. Can you decide on your dates at once & then see if the Inn will cancel my room for the period of our tour without charging? If not, then I’d better stick to my original plan & you take your motor trip after I’ve gone. But I hope not. I shall be a little anxious till I hear from you again.

P.P.S. No sharing a room: but you’d hate it as much as I, so I’m safe!

TO WILLIAM BORST (P):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

June 22nd 1952

Dear Mr. Borst (or shall we stop mistering one another? Let’s)

Dear Borst,

Thanks for your most indulgent letter of the 17th which lifts a load from my mind. It occurs to me that the typist may understand perfectly easily the instructions that baffled me: if so, you shall get the MS. in the form you want. If she is as stupid as I (a pessimistic hypothesis) I shall avail myself of your concession.

I’ve finished the introduction wh. seemed to write itself, so that I could hardly keep up with it. If it is as good as it seems to me at the moment it’s a corker: but of course things never are. You will find one or two allusions in it that your students will not quite understand, but these have been left in on purpose. If they are too carefully shielded from the rumour of worlds they have not yet broken into, what will ever drive them on. Now I shall get on with the scissors and paste work. At the end of the first day everything in the room (except the bits of Spenser, perhaps) will be pasted to everything else. All will be in the most literal sense CO-HERENT. But no palm without paste.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

Interim Report¹²⁶

I merveill much that critiques doe complaine

Of bookes with scisers and with past compyld;

Certes who weenes this is a lesser payne

Then free invention is sore beguyld!

Witness myself who with sic labour vyld

Am oft so dased that I half repent

This great emprise, my fingers all defyld

With slimie stickphast foule and feculent

And deeme Dan Spenser self an easier journie went.

C. S. Lewis

TO RHONA BODLE (BOD):¹²⁷

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

June 22nd 1952

Dear Miss Bodle

It was a great joy to hear from you again. You have been daily in my prayers for a long time and, needless to say, will remain. I shall be grateful for a place in yours.

The work you are engaged in is a magnificent one (much in my mind because, as it falls out, I’ve just been reading Helen Keller’s book):¹²⁸ hard, no doubt, but you can never be attacked by the suspicion that it is not worth doing. There are jolly few professions of which we can say that. The translation of great stories into a limited vocabulary will, incidentally, be a wonderful discipline: you will learn a lot about thought and language in general before you are done. I hope you will sometimes let me know how you get on. God bless you.

Yours most sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO ROGER IANCELYN GREEN (BOD):

As from Magdalen

June 23rd 1952

My dear Roger

Shortly after you left me I took up From the World’s End¹²⁹ one night and re-read it: finding it so much better than I had remembered, or perhaps, perceived, that I think I ought to tell you so. The original reading must have caught me in an imperceptive mood. There are, as you yourself wd. now feel, one or two places where one can ‘see the works’, perceive you deliberately concocting an atmosphere—but they are few and once the main story (which hangs together v. well) takes hold they vanish.

The snatches of ‘modern’ poetry on p. 62 are exactly like it: you might have been reading Rostrevor Hamilton’s The Tell-Tale Article, but it was not published then.¹³⁰ The Voice is excellently managed. The most important thing is that (this time) I was really interested in the crisis it depicts throughout, wh. is significant because it never was my crisis.

Craigie’s Dark Atlantis¹³¹ has come and is an almost total disappointment. I don’t think he has much real imagination: and he certainly can’t write at all. The good reviews and the high praise from Grahame Greene (who certainly can write himself, whether one likes his books or not) alarm me. We here catch the critics on the sort of book we do understand, and that shows them to be without any standards at all. (Craigie thinks rights means rites and that the Atlanteans had a metal called ORICHALEUM!¹³² We are in the post-literate age

Yours

Jack

TO HARRY BIAMIRES (BOD):

Coll. Magd.

24/6/52

Dear Blamires

Yes, of course. I am sorry the book has not yet found a home. All the best.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO MARY VAN DEUSEN (W):

Magdalen College,

Oxford. 26/6/52

Dear Mrs. Van Deusen–

Incense and Hail Marys are in quite different categories. The one is merely a question of ritual: some find it helpful and others don’t, and each must put up with its absence or presence in the church they are attending with cheerful and charitably humility.

But Hail Marys raise a doctrinal question: whether it is lawful to address devotions to any creature, however holy. My own view would be that a salute to any saint (or angel) cannot in itself be wrong any more than taking off one’s hat to a friend: but that there is always some danger lest such practices start one on the road to a state (sometimes found in R.C.’s) where the B.V.M.¹³³ is treated really as a deity and even becomes the centre of the religion. I therefore think that such salutes are better avoided. And if the Blessed Virgin is as good as the best mothers I have known, she does not want any of the attention which might have gone to her Son diverted to herself.

It seems, nevertheless, quite clear that the Spirit of God is, or is more strongly with Kemper Hall than with P. A. Wolfe. In him you describe a type I know. I think we may except [accept] it as a rule that whenever a person’s religious conversation dwells chiefly, or even frequently, on the faults of other people’s religions, he is in a bad condition. The fact that he shakes your faith is significant. Pray for him but not, I shd. say, with him. If he insists on talking religion to you ask him for positive things: ask him to tell you what he knows of God.

All blessings. My ‘new trouble’ is still there: but I have much to be thankful for.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO MISS REIDY (P): TS

REF.52/265.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

28th June 1952.

Dear Miss Reidy,

The point¹³⁴ was that as foolish people on a walk, when by their own errors they are off the course, think the map was wrong, so, when we do not find in ourselves the fruits of the Spirit which all our teachers promise, it is not that the promise was false, but that we have failed to use the Grace we have been given. The ‘map’ can be found in almost any Christian teaching.

C. S. Lewis

TO ARTHUR GREEVES (BOD):

Magdalen College.

28th June 52

My dear Arthur

Splendid. The manageress is right: Aug 21st is my first night at Crawfordsburn. Setting off with you on Mon. 25th will do fine. And of course I don’t want all day & every day in the car: we think just the same on that subject. I look forward to the trip immensely: the first time you and I have been away together since Portsalon in about 1916!¹³⁵ This time we shall at least not quarrel about Hair-Oil!

Yours

Jack

TO GEOFFREY BLES (BOD): ¹³⁶

Coll. Magd.

28/6/52

My dear Bles,

Mycroft has been ill,¹³⁷ but is now better. I don’t foresee many occasions for copies of Le Lion,¹³⁸ but if you will kindly send me 2, they might come in useful. The translator deserves to be congratulated of course—French is a v. powerful language—the children become perfect little Frenchmen, but that is all to the good. What pleased and surprised me is the passage at the end where I made them talk like characters in Malory, and he has really got some of the quality of the French 13th century prose romances: grande honte en aurions¹³⁹– is exactly right.

May I have 10 copies of M.C.?¹⁴⁰ I had my first bathe at Parsons’ Pleasure yesterday: 68°.¹⁴¹

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO WAYLAND HILTON YOUNG (W):

[Magdalen College]

1/7/52

Dear Hilton Young,

(Shall we drop the honorifics on both sides?) Thanks very much for two copies of the C.J.¹⁴² As I said before, it is almost impossible to make an objective judgement on criticism of oneself, especially when it does one so very proud. But I suspect that your essay is a good one. Certainly the alterations have been made with great skill–invisible mending.

I’m glad Driver played up. I suppose he told you, as he told me, that Judith is already a novel.¹⁴³ I still hope that as you poke about among the realien they will blaze up and a new story will arise relegating Judith to the background.

What do you think of Hesse’s Glasperlenspiel, which I’ve just read in a v. bad translation?¹⁴⁴ Heavy, humourless. But has one merit wh. sets it apart from all other stories about the future. Unobtrusively, without any new machines or new forms of government, it really does give you the illusion of a society in which the general quality of thought is different from ours. I don’t think Wells or Aldous Huxley did that: nor Orwell, except in the epilogue on Newspeak.¹⁴⁵

All the best, and many thanks.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO VERA GEBBERT (W): TS

REF.52/103.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

3rd July 1952.

Dear Mrs. Gebbert,

We both enjoyed your very interesting letters, and are glad to know that you are so happy. Pity about the antelopes, but inevitable. And we look forward greedily to the promised food parcel. Sun Valley Lodge looks a lovely place, and I hope that I may have the good fortune to see it some day. Here is the translation of the Latin:–Many things will be re-born which have now fallen (into disfavour), and many will fall (into disfavour) which are now fashionable.¹⁴⁶

With all best wishes to you both,

yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

Mere Christianity: A Revised and Amplified Edition, with a New Introduction of the Three Books, ‘Broadcast Talks’, ‘Christian Behaviour’ and ‘Beyond Personality’ was published by Geoffrey Bles of London on 7 July 1952.

TO MARG-RIETTE MONTGOMERY (W): TS

REF.52/248.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

8th July 1952.

Dear Miss Montgomery,

Of course they¹⁴⁷ are right in making the Resurrection a cosmic event: what I am not so sure is whether they really regard Christ as the only-begotten Son of the only God.

Yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO DON GIOVANNI CALABRIA (V):

e Coll. Stae Mariae Magdalenae

Jul. XIV. MCMLII

Gratias ago, dilectissime pater, et pro opusculis Congregationis vestrae et pro hac epistolâ Jul vii datâ. Hora nostra, ut dicis, gravis est: utrum gravis ‘prae omnibus humanae historiae’ nescio. Sed semper malum quod proximum et gravissimum videtur esse; est enim, ut oculis, sic cordibus, sua ‘perspettiva’. Si tamen nostra tempestas rê verá pessima est, si rê vera Dies Illa nunc imminet, quid restât nisi ut gaudeamus quia redemptio nostra iam proprior est et dicamus cum Sancto Joanne ‘Amen; cito venias, domine Iesu.’ Interim sola securitas est ut Dies nos inveniat laborantes quemque in suo officio et praecipue (dissensionibus relictis) illud supremum mandatum ut invicem diligamus implentes. Oremus semper pro invicem. Vale: et sit tecum et mecum pax illa quam nemo potest auferre.

C. S. Lewis

*

from the College of St Mary Magdalen

July 14th 1952

Thank you, dearest Father, both for the tracts of your Congregation and for your letter dated July 7th.

The times we live in are, as you say, grave: whether ‘graver than all others in history’ I do not know. But the evil that is closest always seems to be the most serious: for as with the eye so with the heart, it is a matter of one’s own perspective. However, if our times are indeed the worst, if That Day¹⁴⁸ is indeed now approaching, what remains but that we should rejoice because our redemption is now nearer and say with St John: ‘Amen; come quickly, Lord Jesus.’¹⁴⁹

Meanwhile our only security is that The Day may find us working each one in his own station and especially (giving up dissensions) fulfilling that supreme command that we love one another.¹⁵⁰

Let us ever pray for each other.

Farewell: and may there abide with you and me that peace which no one can take from us.¹⁵¹

C. S. Lewis

TO RHONA BODLE (BOD): TS

REF.52/294.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

16th July 1952.

Dear Miss Bodle,

Thanks for what you tell me.¹⁵² I will indeed. All good wishes to yourself. In great haste,

Yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO WILLIAM BORST (P):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

July 21st 52

Dear Borst

I return the copy (signed) of your official letter. I am flattered that Mr. Dunn¹⁵³ should suppose me capable of making any useful comment. But he probably knows much more about Chaucer than I do and certainly knows more about the audience we are addressing.

Also, I must have a holiday from English poetry!¹⁵⁴ (I’m doing an orgy of the classics at present: feeling that, all said and done, the really delightful thing about any bit of ancient poetry is that it’s not English and doesn’t rhyme).^* So I shall probably be able to do v. little about the Chaucer Reader. But give Mr. Dunn my compliments and don’t let him misunderstand my motives.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO GEORGE SAYER(W):

Coll. Magd.

July 22nd 1952

My dear George

Hurrah! We look forward v. much to seeing you at the Kilns for such time as you choose from Sept 15 to 22nd. I hope you will choose the whole.

Tolkien does usually answer letters in the end. At present I can only plead for him that he is in the middle of Vivas.¹⁵⁵ I know he appreciated Moira’s letter v. much: he said he meant to run down to Malvern if you wd. have him for a night, and deliver you the next chunk of The Lord. I will jog him if I see him but I shan’t till Vivas are over. V. glad to hear you have better news. Love to Moira. I’d ask you to bring Sir Henry¹⁵⁶ with you only neither he or Pushkin like that sort of thing.

Yours

Jack

TO I. O. EVANS (W): TS

Magdalen Coll.

23/7/52.

Dear Evans,

Many thanks for the loan of the magazines; which my brother and I however found rather above our heads. It seems to me that we are reaching a stage at which scientifiction has far too much science and too little fiction to make an agreeable brew.

Yours,

C. S. Lewis

TO ANNE SCOTT (BOD): ¹⁵⁷

Magdalen

July 28th 1952

Dear Mrs. Scott–

Thanks very much for your most rich and interesting letter which has brought Charles back to me v. vividly so that I shall feel for an hour or so as if I had met him again. It will also be a valuable permanent addition to my Caroline documents.¹⁵⁸

About your (1.), I think my view of ‘canonical Gawaine’ had some basis in something C.W. said,¹⁵⁹ but yours sounds likely too—in view of the parallel from the Meditation.¹⁶⁰ (2.) (‘Women in the world’s base’),¹⁶¹ I think you must be right. I can’t imagine why I didn’t see this.¹⁶² (3.) Clearly I was wrong about the date of composition of Prayers of the Pope.¹⁶³ But your words ‘points in the poem had coincided with points in the war’ implies I take it, that the images existed in some shape prior to the events: wh. was my main point.¹⁶⁴ (4.) I find your interpretation of Proofs, Roofs etc. v. hard. Even Mercury—Language–Proofs is to me v. strained, & after that I love the planets altogether. At least if that is what he meant it must be the worst passage in the whole cycle!¹⁶⁵

By the way ‘The time on my hands has gone to my head’ is a phrase you must make something of: it cries out for literary use.

Thanks v. much again. I’ve enjoyed this bit of the morning.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO VERA GEBBERT (W): TS

REF.52/103.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

28th July 1952.

Dear Mrs. Gebbert,

(My brother remarks that ‘the new name is’nt properly run in yet, and does’nt slip easily off the typewriter’). Many thanks indeed for the grand parcel, which arrived this morning, and which we are putting aside as a consolation for the end of our holidays. If at the beginning I had known for how long and how generously you were going to provision us, I would have kept a record of what you have sent; it must run into the hundredweights by this time! To say nothing of the imponderable benefit of having made a good friend.

We both leave here on Wednesday morning, and if all goes well, slip through the Iron Curtain about noon on Thursday; it is quite a dramatic performance. You go chugging along in the Dublin express through rocks and heather (‘The Gate of the North’), and presently pass an enormous Union lack on the side of the track. As soon as you are past the flag, prices for drinks in the dining car drop about fifty per cent: you are through and out of the clutches of the Welfare State (now known by the way as ‘The Farewell State’). By tea time we shall be sitting on a bungalow verandah, three miles from anywhere, looking across Dundalk Bay at a range of blue mountains.

The weather has of course played its usual practical joke; we had a blistering month until Saturday night: during which the temperature dropped about twenty degrees without the slightest warning, and now the question is not how many white linen suits to take away with one, but how to pack a winter overcoat for the ‘summer’ evenings.

Does anyone in America understand American politics? Certainly no one over here can make out what is happening, in spite of numerous inspired articles by so called experts; people who pretend to know all about it—on the strength of a lecturing tour in the States–assure me that a Taft victory would have been a disaster and an Eisenhower one would be grand. Which, as they belong to the same party, seems odd to me; others tell me that as the Democrats are sure to get in anyhow, the Taft-Eisenhower battle was of no importance.¹⁶⁶ I thought I was going to learn something from an old lady in Connecticut the other day,¹⁶⁷ but at the end of eight pages so hot that they nearly burnt my fingers, all I could gather was that the ‘Dumbocrats’ as she called them, are a sort of mixture of Hitler, the Russian secret police, and the inmates of the village lunatic asylum: but no doubt this view is a little prejudiced.

I suppose by this time you have got Mr. Gebbert broken in, and trotting nicely in harness? Please give him my kind regards. I hope to hear from you soon again, as we are both eager to know how you are settling down amongst the elks, auks, reindeer, silver miners and so forth.

With all good wishes.

yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO ROGER LANCELYN GREEN (BOD):

Derryherk House Hotel,

Lough Melvin,

Ballyshannon,

Co. Donegal,

Ireland

Aug 31/52

My dear Roger

Good. I shall, D.V., breakfast in Woodside Hotel on the 9th and expect you there at about 10.¹⁶⁸

South Donegal is a terrifying country: I have much to tell, but you see what the pen is like. Have read Virgin of the Sun¹⁶⁹ & think it one of the 3 or 4 best books Haggard ever wrote. My duty to June.

Yours

Jack

TO JUNE LANCELYN GREEN (BOD):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

Sept 11th 1952

Dear June

‘Roofers’¹⁷⁰ traditionally begin, I think, with the assurance that the writer arrived safely home—though it is not very easy to see why one’s hostess should be supposed to doubt this once she has got the letter. At any rate, I am not now writing from the other world. (Perhaps the idea is to assure the hostess that the guest has really gone: arrival at one place being the strongest evidence of departure from another.)

Well, thank you both very much. Last night was among the great nights (‘devilish’ or ‘famously snug’ as the last century said) and led through a flawless tunnel of sleep to a typically beautiful morning. I see one can’t blame Roger for always writing about his own house. By the way, tell him I finished his Lewis Carol¹⁷¹ (a word I don’t know how to spell) all but two pages in the train. It cd. hardly be better. If he ever has a chance he shd. take out 9 of every 10 exclamation marks, though. I feel about them as the Red Queen felt when she said ‘You needn’t say exactually, I can believe you without that.’¹⁷²

If this letter contains anything insane, take it all for the best and remember I have been writing for hours: mostly dull ones. But I really did love my sojourn, and am v. grateful. Blessings on you all.

Yours ever

Jack Lewis

TO FLORENCE (MICHAL) WILLIAMS (W):¹⁷³

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

Sept 12/52

Dear Michal

What day are you coming? Wd. you and Michael¹⁷⁴ care to lunch? or (if you want more tête-à-tête, as well you may) can you meet me for a drink anywhere? Joy Gresham is an old & valued pen-friend of mine: I’m so glad you like her.¹⁷⁵ Prod her to say when she is coming to us.¹⁷⁶

Yours ever

Jack

TO MARG-RIETTE MONTGOMERY (W):

Magdalen College,

Oxford

Sept 12th 1952

Dear Miss Montgomery

Thanks for your letter of July 24th. That’s right: keep on holding the life-line, like someone going down broken stairs into a dark cellar, anxious not to miss any treasure it may contain but even more determined not to make any step wh. can’t be retraced.

I think the Anthros¹⁷⁷ suffer not so much from heresies about the Son as from heresies—or total vagueness—about the Father. God keep you.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO MARY VAN DEUSEN (W):

Magdalen etc.

Sept 12/52

Dear Mrs. Van Deusen

I’ve just got back from Ireland & found your 2 letters among the mountain of mail. I’ve written to Genia. No time for a proper letter to you—I’ve had 9 hours’ letter-writing already! Blessings.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

The Voyage of the ‘Dawn Treader’ was published by Geoffrey Bles of London on 15 September 1952.

TO GEOFFREY BLES (BOD):

Magdalen

15/9/52

My dear Bles

Achtung! Here’s an imperfect copy omitting the Preface but (comble de malheurl)¹⁷⁸ wearing the jacket wh. advertises the Preface. This is the only imperfect copy among those you sent me: but how many more are there? What on earth can be done?

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO FLORENCE (MICFLAL) WILLIAMS (W): PC

Magdalen College

Oxford

15/9/52

Good. Mitre Hotel. 12. noon. Wed. Sept 24th. Shall assume this unless I hear to the contrary.

C.S.L.

TO WILLIAM BORST (P):

Magdalen College,

Oxford

15/9/52

Dear Borst

I enclose

Introduction (2 copies)

Footnotes (2 copies)

Text of Selections (1 copy)

If the Introduction is too long I cd. excise some bits. As I shall be working from the MS. (where the pagination is of course different) if you want to refer to a particular paragraph in writing to me, I am afraid you must quote the opening words—as if it were a Papal Bull!

If the Selections are too long, my first choice wd. be to omit in toto No. XXI (Britomart in the House of Isis): my second, much more reluctant, to omit in toto No XIX (Scudamour in the House of Care). I have also noted some individual stanzas for possible omission, but they matter only if I’ve been very slightly too long.

I’ve only just come back from the West of Ireland. I hope you get on well with Horace. There are easier authors!

All the best.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO GEOFFREY BLES (BOD):

Coll. Magd.

17/9/52

My dear Bles

The fact that I happened to get an imperfect copy didn’t matter two hoots. What worried me (for I never knew that a percentage of such things was normal) was the fear that half the edition might be like that! You have set my mind at ease.

I often smile when I compare my ignorance with the knowingness of some people who, on the strength of having published one book, seem to have the whole mystery of publishing, printing, & binding by heart. I’ll write to Miss Baynes.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

P. S. I suppose there’ll be no difficulty about changing the title of the new one in galley. I want to call it Night Under Narnia

TO VERA GEBBERT (W):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

20/9/52

Dear Mrs. Gebbert,

This is indeed most joyous news and as unexpected as if a favourite character out of history or fiction came to England in the flesh! Now look. Shall we book for you at a hotel or will you come and stay with us? It is only fair to tell you that (tho’ we have an excellent hot water system) we have so little coal that there are no hot baths in our house, only hot water in jugs (This doesn’t mean that we never have baths: but then we bath in College, where ladies can’t). Otherwise, we hope the hardships wd. not be too great.

Now don’t start asking yourselves the Question which (I confess) this letter invites: viz ‘Does this mean that they’ll be hurt if we go to a hotel or that they’ll be bothered if we go to them? Which do they want?’. Because in fact it doesn’t mean either. We do really want you to do whichever you’ll like but: and we have enough imagination to understand either point of view–(A.) Oh, for the Lord’s sake, let’s be free and on our own in a hotel, or (B.) We shall have enough of hotels before we’re done, do let’s get a chance of an ordinary house.

The usual oriental formula ‘Everything in our house is yours’ acquires a new sense: so many things in our house in these last (how many years?) have been literally yours! It is outrageous generosity about the liquor and the mufflers. What can I say, except murmur ‘whiskey’! If we fight about the mufflers you shall look on and be the ‘store of ladies whose bright eyes rain influence and (once more literally) award the prize.’¹⁷⁹ Send us a wire with your decision. We are so excited.

TO ARTHUR G REEVE S (W):

Magdalen

20/9/52

My dear Arthur

No, please don’t send H.J.’s Letters.¹⁸⁰ The idea of your returning a present was applicable only on the assumption that it was useless to you. And anyway, if they’re not much about the books, they wd. be useless to me.

A retired naval captain whom you may have sometimes heard of in the papers (Bernard Acworth) tells me he was at Derryherk¹⁸¹ shortly before us and says the fishing was just as bad as the food. I wonder what the Magic Major is really up to.

I’ve got a 100 Horsepower cold but feel mentally & spiritually much the better from our holiday. It—and you—have done me lots of good. All blessings.

Yours

Jack

TO JONATHAN FRANCIS ‘FRANK GOODRIDGE (P): ¹⁸²

Coll. Magd.

22/9/52

My dear Goodridge

I’m going to give those lectures next term and cd. hardly separate myself from the notes at the moment.¹⁸³ But for the moment:–the trichotomy is not Hesperian, Aerial, or Celestial, but Terrestrial (Men), Aerial (Aerial Genii or daemons), Aetherial (Angels). At death Man goes from 1 to 2: from which, if they make the grade, they go on to 3, but if ploughed relapse into 1. 1 and 2 are mortal, 3 immortal. It’s at one’s second death (or an Aerial) that one either goes up or falls back.

Hence 11. 459-472¹⁸⁴ really mean (I believe) ‘Chastity carries us safely from terrestrial thro’ aerial up to aetherial, but sensuality draws us back to terrestrial. Ghosts are “ploughed” aerial longing to get back to their terrestrial state.’

The Attendant Spirit¹⁸⁵ is an aerial (i.e. a native aerial not an ex-human who has been promoted). For he lives not in the highest heaven but only ‘before’ its ‘threshold’ (l.)¹⁸⁶ among ‘aerial spirits’ (3.)¹⁸⁷ in ‘serene air’ (4.)¹⁸⁸ is called ‘daemon’ in Trinity MS., & returns to ‘suck the liquid air’ (980)¹⁸⁹ wh. Aerials live on, in a region still subject to mutability where Venus mourns Adonis (999-1002) and it is ‘far above’ (1003) his realm that Celestial Love consummates His marriage with human soul (1004-1011). That ought to keep them going for a bit! I am so glad you have a happy job.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO MARGARET SACKVILLE HAMILTON (BOD):¹⁹⁰

Magdalen College,

Oxford

23/9/52

Dear Mrs. Hamilton

The ancient books which put this view best are Plato’s Timaeus and Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy, Book V. (The Loeb Library edition of the latter has a nice 17th century English translation on the right hand pages).¹⁹¹ There is, however, no need to go back to the original sources. Modern statements will be found in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason: (in the part called ‘Transcendental Aesthetic’)¹⁹² and in Von Hügel’s Eternal Life¹⁹³– the latter, I think, far easier. From the scientific angle try Eddington’s Nature of the Physical Universe.¹⁹⁴, There are what maybe regarded as evidences for the theory in Dunne’s Experiment with Time,¹⁹⁵ tho’ he (wrongly I believe) treats them as evidence for a different and unnecessarily complicated theory of what he calls Serialism.¹⁹⁶

The nearest we get to scriptural support is II. Peter 8-9 where St. Peter transforms the simple Old Testament saying that 1000 years are only one day to God (which in itself might mean only that God is permanent in time) by adding the new and important point that to God one day is like 1000 years.¹⁹⁷

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

Joy Gresham at this time was a 37-year-old New Yorker who had begun a correspondence with Lewis in 1950.¹⁹⁸ Her marriage to the novelist, William Lindsay Gresham, was under strain, and in August she had left their two children, David (b. 1944)¹⁹⁹ and Douglas (b. 1945),²⁰⁰ with their father and a cousin, Renée Pierce, to go to London for a few months, hoping during that time to meet Lewis.

During August and September she stayed in London with her old friend, Phyllis Williams. They invited Lewis to have lunch with them in Oxford, and on 24 September Lewis met Joy and Phyllis at the Eastgate Hotel, across the road from Magdalen College. A few days later Lewis invited them to lunch in his College rooms. Warnie was invited too, but when he withdrew George Sayer took his place. Sayer recalled the luncheon in Magdalen in his biography of Lewis:

The party was a decided success. Joy was of medium height, with a good figure, dark hair, and rather sharp features. She was an amusingly abrasive New Yorker, and Jack was delighted by her bluntness and her anti-American views. Everything she saw in England seemed to her far better than what she had left behind. Thus, of the single glass of sherry we had before the meal, she said: ‘I call this civilized. In the States, they give you so much hard stuff that you start the meal drunk and end with a hangover.’ She was anti-urban and talked vividly about the inhumanity of the skyscraper and of the new technology and of life in New York City…She attacked modern American literature…‘Mind you, I wrote that sort of bunk myself when I was young.’ Small farm life was the only good life, she said. Jack spoke up then, saying that, on his father’s wise, he came from farming stock. ‘I felt that,’ she said. ‘Where else could you get the vitality?’²⁰¹

TO ROGER IANCELYN GREEN (BOD):

Coll. Magd.

26/9/52

My dear Roger–

I find Miss Graham’s criticism rather hard to understand. ‘Tone’ might conceivably refer to the emphasis on poaching or the poacher’s religious hypocrisy, but quite possibly masks some objection which she herself cannot understand. I don’t know what to advise, for the books you fail to publish seem to me sometimes better than, and sometimes no different from, your published ones. I shouldn’t be surprised if it all depends on the time of the month at which Miss G. reads the MS. I am old enough now to realise that one always has to reckon with that.

We also have had visitors. For heaven’s sake don’t let June increase her toils by bothering to write to me. But let me have her and your advice on my immediate problem wh. is the title of the new story. Bles, like you, thinks The Wild Waste Lands bad, but he says Night Under Narnia is ‘gloomy’. George Sayer & my brother say Gnomes Under N wd. be equally gloomy, but News under Narnia wd do. On the other hand my brother & the American writer Joy Davidman (who has been staying with us & is a great reader of fantasy and children’s books) both say that The Wild Waste Lands is a splendid title. What’s a chap to do?

Yours

Jack

TO MICHAEL IRWIN (P): TS

REF.52/373.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

26th September 1952.

Dear Michael,

Thank you for writing. I am so glad you liked the Voyage. Your idea of a story about Asian in England is a good one, but I think it would be too hard for me to write—it would have to be so different. Perhaps you will write it yourself when you are grown up,

Love from

C. S. Lewis

TO PATRICK IRWIN (P):²⁰² TS

REF.52/373.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

26th September 1952.

Dear Mr. Irwin,

I have written to Michael approving the idea, but saying it would be too difficult for me to do. I did’nt add that the story of Asian in this world (if not in England) has been written already. His letter gave me great pleasure, and so does yours.

Yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO VERA GEBBERT (W): TS

REF.52/103.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

30th September 1952.

Dear Mrs. Gebbert,

We are both delighted to hear that it is Proposition B, and are looking forward eagerly to your visit; and we note that, as one would expect from you, you come laden with gifts: which however you will have the novel experience of sharing with the recipients!

Yes, the dates suit excellently; I hope you will come down on one of the morning trains, in time for us all to have lunch here in my rooms before we go out to the house. Let me know in due course.

Is Andy the Antelope with you? Does he like iced water for breakfast? What brand of hay does he use?

With all best wishes to you both,

yours anticipatorily,

C. S. Lewis

TO CHARLES MOORMAN (L): ²⁰³

Magdalen

2/10/52

Dear Mr Moorman,

I am sure you are on a false scent.²⁰⁴ Certainly most, perhaps all the poems in Williams’s Taliessin volume were written before the last novel, All Hallows Eve, was even conceived,²⁰⁵ and there had been Arthurian poems (not of much value) in his earlier manner long before. I can’t tell you when he first became interested in the Arthurian story, but the overwhelming probability is that, like so many English boys, he got via Tennyson into Malory in his ‘teens. The whole way in which he talked of it implied a life-long familiarity. Much later (but even so, before I met him) came the link-up between his long-standing interest in Arthuriana and a new interest in Byzantium.

Everything he ever said implied that his prose fiction, his ‘pot boilers’, and his poetry all went on concurrently: there was no ‘turning from’ one to the other. He never said anything to suggest that he felt his themes ‘would not fit with ease into tales of modern life’. What would have expressed the real chronological relation between the novels would have been the words (tho’ I don’t think he ever actually said them) ‘I haven’t got much further with my Arthurian poems this week because I’ve been temporarily occupied with the idea for a new story’

The question when did he first come across the doctrine of ‘Caritas’ puzzled me. What doctrine do you mean? If you mean the ordinary Christian doctrine that there are three theological virtues and ‘the greatest of these is charity’²⁰⁶ of course he would never remember a time when he had not known it. If you mean the doctrine of Coinherence and Substitution, then I don’t know when he first met these.²⁰⁷ Nor do I know when he began the Figure of A.²⁰⁸ His knowledge of the earlier Arthurian documents was not that of a real scholar: he knew none of the relevant languages except (a little) Latin.

The VII Bears and the Atlantean Circle (in That Hideous Strength) are pure inventions of my own, filling the same purpose in the narrative that ‘noises off wd in a stage play.²⁰⁹ Numinor is a mis-spelling of Numenor which, like the ‘true West’, is a fragment from a vast private mythology invented by Professor J. R. R. Tolkien.²¹⁰ At the time we all hoped that a good deal of that mythology would soon become public through a romance which the Professor was then contemplating. Since then the hope has receded…²¹¹

TO PHOEBE HESKETH (W):²¹²

Magdalen College,

Oxford

Oct 4th 1952

Dear Miss Hesketh–

You will have given up expecting any acknowledgement of No Time for Cowards²¹³ which you so kindly sent me, and must think me no end of a curmudgeon. But you know what the alternative is—either to write a wholly perfunctory letter at once, or else to wait for that rare day and hour (it’s rarer as I get older) when one is receptive of a new book of poems. I now can really say Thank you, for I’ve got many real delights. You are a superb phrase-maker: ‘the bell-noised streams’²¹⁴ and ‘infant fists of fern’²¹⁵ on p. 8–‘Shack-Age’²¹⁶ on p. 9–‘caged in comic bars of camouflage’²¹⁷ on 39–and the really unbearable two lines about Time’s finger & the evening train on p. 81.²¹⁸Ugh! The ones I liked best as wholes (wh. aren’t necessarily the ones from which I shall remember bits to quote) are Lion’s Eye–it has a perfect shape, couldn’t be either longer or shorter–The White Roe–the extra rhyming line added to some stanzas is delightful–I Am Not Resigned (I’d love to have thought of ‘greener centuries’)²¹⁹–Strange Country, and (perhaps best of all) Second Birth. A painful book—I understand R. Church’s fears²²⁰–but then most good poetry (tho’ not the very topmost best of all like parts of Dante) is.

I really am very glad you sent it. Remember me most kindly to dear old Herbert Palmer and accept my very best thanks, good wishes, and congratulations. Perhaps if you are ever in these parts you will come and see me.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W):

Magdalen

11/10/52

My dear Arthur

James’s Letters vol. I arrived yesterday. I don’t know if I really ought to accept it, lames being so much more your kind of author than mine. On the other hand it is too big for an envelope and putting up parcels is one of the many things I can’t do. And there seems to be a good deal about books in it after all. Well, thanks very much indeed. Yes, I love my Father’s underlinings: the pencil (can’t you see him, with his spectacles far down on his nose, getting out the little stump?) so heavily used that, as W said, he didn’t so much draw a line as dig a line.

Term began yesterday, so I have now returned to harness after what has been perhaps the happiest year of my life. I began, appropriately, by cutting myself when I shaved, breaking my lace when I put on my shoes, and coming into College without my keys.

There have been some most perfect autumn days here lately and this is a well timbered country which they suit.

Love to l’Incroyable²²¹ and your good self and all blessings.

Yours

Jack

TO VERA GEBBERT (W): TS

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

11th October 1952.

Dear Mrs. Gebbert,

But hang it all, if you come on the 18th and 19th I shall see so little of you—being engaged to dine out on Saturday; and I can’t put it off because it is with people I’ve had to refuse on several other occasions. Would you think us Pigs if we adhered to the original date? Not if it means you’ll have to sleep on the Embankment of course!

Yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO HERBERT PALMER (TEX):

Coll. Magd.

16/10/52

My dear Palmer

I wrote a letter to Miss Hesketh²²² (I mean, a real one, not the mere acknowledgement) about the book²²³ some weeks ago. As Heinemann is one of those accursed firms that don’t put their address on the title page I sent it c/o their old address and it came back as a dead letter. I then sent it c/o my own publisher. Has Miss Hesketh not had it yet?

I liked many of the poems v. much, especially the phrasing. Do let me know if the letter has ever arrived. As for helping the book, what can one do against the massive rampart of false taste in our times? That is the ‘railway line’: you and Miss Hesketh are the real unmacadamised road or immemorial Right of Way across the field. But they are stopping the Right of Way. How are you these days? It was nice to hear from you again.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO JOHN ROWLAND (TEX):²²⁴ PC

Magdalen College

Oxford

16/10/52

Good. My Mon. evgs. are, unhappily, always filled up by the Socratic Club. The safest thing (for an unspecified week) is Lunch on Monday and as much talk as you can spare me afterwards. If you can fix which Monday I will book it. I much look forward to meeting.

C. S. Lewis

TO ARTHUR GREEVES (BOD):

Magdalen College

Oxford

17/10/52

My dear Arthur

I’ve finished vol. I of the Letters of HJ. I announce this not to hurry you but to show that I have enjoyed yr. gift. I’m afraid he was a dreadful Prig, but he is by no means a bore and has lots of interesting things to say about books. Was it you sent me the Northern ‘Whig’?²²⁵ If so thanks.

Yours

Jack

TO VERA GEBBERT (W): TS 52/103.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

18th October 1952.

Dear Mrs. Gebbert,

What a misfortune for you, and what a disappointment for us! ‘Flu is a horrid thing at the best of times, but to contract it when on holiday, and in a strange city, is to have it under the most wretched conditions.

We hope that this does not mean a final cancellation of your visit: but I am making no alternative suggestion until I see what is in the letter you are writing me.

With deepest sympathy to you both and best wishes for a short illness and speedy recovery,

Yours,

C. S. Lewis

TO MARY VAN DEUSEN (W):

Magdalen etc.

Oct 20th 1952

Dear Mrs. Van Deusen

I think you are perfectly right to change your manner of prayer from time to time and I shd. suppose that all who pray seriously do thus change it. One’s needs and capacities change and also, for creatures like us, excellent prayers may ‘go dead’ if we use them too long. Whether one shd. use written prayers composed by other people, or one’s own words or own wordless prayer, or in what proportion one shd. mix all three, seems to me entirely a question for each individual to answer from his own experience.

I myself find prayers without words the best, when I can manage it, but I can do so only when least distracted and in best spiritual and bodily health (or what I think best). But another person might find it quite otherwise.

Your question about old friendships where there is no longer spiritual communion is a hard one. Obviously it depends v. much on what the other party wants. The great thing in friendship as in all other forms of love is, as you know, to turn from the demand to be loved (or helped or answered) to the wish to love (or help or answer). Perhaps in so far as one does this one also discovers how much love one shd. spend on the sort of friends you mention. I don’t think a decay in one’s desire for mere ‘society’ or ‘acquaintance’ or ‘the crowd’ is a bad sign. (We mustn’t take it as a sign of one’s increasing spirituality of course: isn’t it merely a natural, neutral, development as one grows older?).

All that Calvinist question—Free-Will & Predestination, is to my mind undiscussable, insoluble. Of course (say us) if a man repents God will accept him. Ah yes, (say they) but the fact of his repenting shows that God has already moved him to do so. This at any rate leaves us with the fact that in any concrete case the question never arrives as a practical one. But I suspect it is really a meaningless question. The difference between Freedom & Necessity is fairly clear on the bodily level: we know the difference between making our teeth chatter on purpose & just finding them chattering with cold. It begins to be less clear when we talk of human love (leaving out the erotic kind). ‘Do I like him because I choose or because I must?’–there are cases where this has an answer, but others where it seems to me to mean nothing. When we carry it up to relations between God & Man, has the distinction perhaps become nonsensical? After all, when we are most free, it is only with a freedom God has given us: and when our will is most influenced by Grace, it is still our will. And if what our will does is not ‘voluntary’, and if ‘voluntary’ does not mean ‘free’, what are we talking about? I’d leave it all alone. Blessings.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO VERA GEBBERT (W):

Magdalen etc.

Oct 20th 1952

Poor dear Gebberts

I am sorry. Whatever may be said for foreign travel, it is horrid when one is ill: the wounded animal wants to creep away to its own den. But the total situation, you must now learn, is quite other than you supposed when you wrote on Saturday evening. That same evening our housekeeper (the only stay of our house and the nearest thing you wd. have had to a hostess) also went down with flu’. So if she had gone down 24 hours earlier we shd. have been wiring to put you off: and if you’d gone down 24 hours later our house wd. now be an amateur Nursing Home staffed by two elderly and incompetent bachelors–themselves liable at any moment to become two more patients. So all has not, perhaps, been quite so much for the worst as you supposed.

At any rate you have nothing to apologise for except what we should have had to apologise for if you hadn’t. (Don’t try to work this sentence out until your temperature is now normal). We had hoped that, tho’ we can’t now offer hospitality, you might have got down here for lunch some day, but I quite see how you can’t. Don’t feel in the least bad about the contre-temps: if you, and our Miss Henry, were to have flu’ the times couldn’t have fitted in better!²²⁶ And you keep that whiskey and drink it all yourselves: you’ll need it—and you won’t get any fit to drink over here. Thanks—blessings–sympathies—and all good wishes for a speedy recovery.

Yours,

W. H. Lewis

C. S. Lewis

TO ROGER LANCELYN GREEN (BOD):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

21/10/52

My dear Roger

Your letter was more than usually welcome: for tho’ reason assured me that so busy a man might have 100 motives for not writing, I had also a lurking fear that you might be offended. Forgive me the suspicion. It arose not at all because I judge you to be that kind of ass, or any kind, but because, we being ‘of one blood’, the loss of you wd. be a very raw gash in my life.

I had a letter from G. Greene’s secretary to say that he was abroad but wd. be shown my letter as soon as he returned. I fear that will make it too late for him to act on it even if he has justice enough to wish to. I have just finished Vol. I of Henry James’s letters. An interesting man, tho’ a dreadful prig: but he did appreciate Stevenson. A phantasmal man, who had never known God, or earth, or war, never done a day’s compelled work, never had to earn a living, had no home & no duties.

My brother is reading A.E.W.M.²²⁷ with great enjoyment. You seem to be getting a pretty good Press: congratulations.

Love to lune. I look forward to seeing you next month.

Yours

Jack