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

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

21st October 1952.

My dear Mr. and Mrs. Gebbert,

I am sure you will not misunderstand me when I say that the opening of your wonderful parcel this morning was a melancholy rather than joyful ceremony; we had both looked forward so much to its happening under very different circumstances—your presentation, our (for the first time verbal) thanks, the popping of a cork in front of the log fire in our sitting room—well, well, ‘man never is, but always to be blessed’. Once more it is a case of ‘thank you very, very much’ on the typewriter, instead of in person. By the way, it was very naughty of you to send the whisky, unless, as I hope, you had some more with you: for there is no better tonic after ‘flu–experto crede.²²⁸

We both hope that the second part of your holiday will be less unfortunate than its beginning, and that by this time you are really over your troubles; if you find time to send a post card letting us know how you fare, it would be very welcome. In any case I feel that climatically Munich must be a change for the better, and no doubt also financially.

Our Vera, Vera Henry does’nt look like escaping as well as you have done; she was removed to a nursing home yesterday, and the doctor talks in the roundabout way that doctors do, about a possible risk of pneumonia. But we shan’t know anything definite for a day or two.

While you are leaving a trail of golden dollars across Europe is perhaps hardly a tactful moment to talk about another holiday; but we do both hope that meeting you is but a pleasure postponed, and that another year you will venture to England again, and this time penetrate as far as Oxford.

With all best wishes to you both from us both,

yours,

W. H. Lewis

C. S. Lewis^*

TO JOHN ROWLAND (TEX): TS

52/213.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

23rd October 1952.

Dear Rowland,

(Let’s drop the honorifics on both sides). November 3rd. would be best. I’ll wait for you in the College lodge about 1.10.

Yours,

C. S. Lewis

TO THE EDITOR OF THE CHURCH TIMES (EC): ²²⁹

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

Sir,–

I am, like Mr Eric Pitt,²³⁰ a layman, and would like to be instructed on several points before the proposal to set up a ‘system’ of Anglican canonization is even discussed. According to the Catholic Encyclopaedia, ‘saints’ are dead people whose virtues have made them ‘worthy’ of God’s ‘special’ love.²³¹ Canonization makes dulia²³² ‘universal and obligatory’; and, whatever else it asserts, it certainly asserts that the person concerned ‘is in heaven’.

Unless, then, the word ‘canonization’ is being used in a sense distinct from the Roman (and, if so, some other word would be much more convenient), the proposal to set up a ‘system’ of canonization means that someone (say, the Archbishops) shall be appointed

(a.) To tell us that certain named people are (i) ‘in heaven’, and (ii) are ‘worthy’ of God’s ‘special’ love.

(b.) To lay upon us (under pain of excommunication?) the duty of dulia towards those they have named.

Now it is very clear that no one ought to tell us what he does not know to be true. Is it, then, held that God has promised (and, if so, when and where?) to the Church universal a knowledge of the state of certain departed souls? If so, is it clear that this knowledge will discern varying degrees of kinds of salvation such as are, I suppose, implicit in the word ‘special’? And if it does, will the promulgation of such knowledge help to save souls now in viâ?. For it might well lead to a consideration of ‘rival claims’, such as we read of in the Imitation of Christ (Bk. Ill, ch. lvii), where we are warned, ‘Ask not which is greater in the kingdom of heaven…the search into such things brings no profit, but rather offends the saints themselves.’

Finally, there is the practical issue: by which I do not mean the Catholic Encyclopaedia’s neat little account of ‘the ordinary actual expenses of canonization’ (though that too can be read with profit), but the danger of schism. Thousands of members of the Church of England doubt whether dulia is lawful. Does anyone maintain that it is necessary to salvation? If not, whence comes our obligation to run such frightful risks?

C. S. Lewis

TO J. O. REED (P): ²³³

[Magdalen College

27 October 1952]

Dear Reed

Wd. this interest you?²³⁴ Mastership at W. would, I think, be a pretty good springboard for any academic job that turned up, and, I know, a very good springboard for any other schoolmastering job. It is just possible you might increase your academic chances by sticking to research & not flirting with school jobs–I’m not sure. On the other hand, the W. job wd. be a safety device in case no academic job is attained. The President might have good advice to give on the question of policy.²³⁵

Yours

C. S. Lewis

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

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

28th October 1952.

Dear Gebberts,

Yes indeed, the whole parcel arrived intact, and I’m sorry that I did not make it clear that we had got your beautiful scarves (and the cigarettes) as well as the whiskey; and when the two latter gifts are, alas, nothing but a fragrant memory, we shall still be enjoying the scarves–which can be used with comfort for about nine months in the English year, as you can well imagine, after your disastrous experience. It is very welcome news that you are through your troubles, and are enjoying yourselves in Munich; it must be a great treat for Mr. Gebbert to have such a reunion after so many years. What you have to say about the re-building is very interesting: but I hope there is not going to be a political rebuild. Our papers are carrying an unpleasant story of a get together party of old concentration guards, anti-allied speeches, shouts of ‘Swinehound Eisenhower’ etc.

I’m sorry to say our Vera–may I say our other Vera?–so far from being better, has developed pneumonia, and is now in a nursing home; she is going along satisfactorily, but we are still not without anxiety about her. Largely her own fault, for she has since confessed that she had been feeling ill for at least a week before she took to her bed. Like all people who normally have perfect health, she is not a good patient, which I fear will retard her recovery.

We shall think of you next week on your way back to your own land, with, I hope, happy memories of the trip: and taking with you our hopes that you will repeat it in the not too distant future.

All good luck.

Yours sincerely,

W. H. Lewis

C. S. Lewis

TO PHOEBE HESKETH (W):

Magdalen College,

Oxford

Oct 29th 1952

Dear Mrs. Hesketh

Surely I didn’t say that ‘really good’ poetry was not painful (which wd. make Lear not really good), but that the very best and certainly rarest kind of all was not painful?²³⁶

I hope very much you will come and see me when you are in Oxford. I have just given The Quenchless Flame a first reading. I predict it will grow either shorter or longer before it reaches its final form, but it is full of good things. The leaf escaping from the bondage of the tree at the v. beginning wins one’s good will for the whole poem. The six lines beginning ‘Consider beauty’ are particularly good.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO MARG-RIETTE MONTGOMERY (W): TS

REF.52/248.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

1st November 1952.

Dear Miss Montgomery,

It would be a bit hard to believe in Our Lord without believing in the Father, seeing that Our Lord spent most of his time talking about the Father. Also God.

Yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO JOHN ROWLAND (TEX): TS

52/213.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

6th November 1952.

My dear Rowland,

There was no need at all to write, but it was nice of you to do so. I don’t forsee being in Brighton, but will certainly look you up if I am. No addresses to Literary Groups though!

Yours,

C. S. Lewis

TO MRS JOHNSON (W):²³⁷

Magdalen etc,

Oxford.

Nov. 8 1952

Dear Mrs. Johnson

I am returning your letter with the questions in it numbered so that you’ll know wh. I am answering.

(1.)²³⁸ Some call me Mr. and some Dr. and I not only don’t care but usually don’t know which.

(2.)²³⁹ Distinguish (A) A second chance in the strict sense, i.e. a new earthly life in which you cd. attempt afresh all the problems you failed at in the present one (as in religions of Re-Incarnation). (B) Purgatory: a process by which the work of redemption continues, and first perhaps begins to be noticeable after death. I think Charles Williams depicts B, not A.

(3.)²⁴⁰ We are never given any knowledge of ‘What would have happened if…’

(4.)²⁴¹ I think that every prayer which is sincerely made even to a false god or to a v. imperfectly conceived true God, is accepted by the true God and that Christ saves many who do not think they know Him. For He is (dimly) present in the good side of the inferior teachers they follow.

In the parable of the Sheep & Goats (Matt. XXV. 31 and following) those who are saved do not seem to know that they have served Christ. But of course our anxiety about unbelievers is most usefully employed when it leads us not to speculation but to earnest prayer for them and the attempt to be in our own lives such good advertisements for Christianity as will make it attractive.

(5.)²⁴² It is Christ Himself, not the Bible, who is the true word of God. The Bible, read in the right spirit and with the guidance of good teachers will bring us to Him. When it becomes really necessary (i.e. for our spiritual life, not for controversy or curiosity) to know whether a particular passage is rightly translated or is Myth (but of course Myth specially chosen by God from among countless Myths to carry a spiritual truth) or history, we shall no doubt be guided to the right answer. But we must not use the Bible (our fathers too often did) as a sort of Encyclopedia out of which texts (isolated from their context and not read without attention²⁴³ to the whole nature & purport of the books in which they occur) can be taken for use as weapons.

(6.) Kill means murder. I don’t know Hebrew: but when Our Lord quotes this commandment he uses Gk phoneuseis (murder)²⁴⁴ not apokteinein (kill)²⁴⁵

[(7.)]²⁴⁶ The question of what you wd. ‘want’ is off the point. Capital punishment might be wrong tho’ the relations of the murdered man wanted him killed: it might be right tho’ they did not want this. The question is whether a Xtian nation ought or ought not to put murderers to death: not what passions interested individuals may feel.

(8.)²⁴⁷ There is no doubt at all that the natural impulse to ‘hit back’ must be fought against by the Xtian whenever it arises. If one I love is tortured or murdered my desire to avenge him must be given no quarter. So far as nothing but this question of retaliation comes in ‘turn the other cheek’ is the Christian law. It is, however, quite another matter when the neutral, public authority (not the aggrieved person) may order killing of either private murderers or public enemies in mass. It is quite clear that our earliest Christian writer, St Paul, approved of capital punishment—he says the ‘magistrate’ bears & should bear ‘the sword’.²⁴⁸ It is recorded that the soldiers who came to St John Baptist asking, ‘What shall we do?’²⁴⁹ were not told to leave the army. When Our Lord Himself praised the Centurion²⁵⁰ He never hinted that the military profession was in itself sinful. This has been the general view of Christendom. Pacifism is a v. recent & local variation. We must of course respect & tolerate Pacifists, but I think their view erroneous.

(9.)²⁵¹ The symbols under which Heaven is presented to us are (a) a dinner party,²⁵² (b) a wedding,²⁵³ (c) a city,²⁵⁴ and (d) a concert.²⁵⁵ It wd. be grotesque to suppose that the guests or citizens or members of the choir didn’t know one another. And how can love of one another be commanded in this life if it is to be cut short at death?

(10.)²⁵⁶ Whatever the answer is, I’m sure it is not that (‘erased from the brain’). When I have learnt to love God better than my earthly dearest, I shall love my earthly dearest better than I do now. In so far as I learn to love my earthly dearest at the expense of God and instead of God, I shall be moving towards the state in which I shall not love my earthly dearest at all. When first things are put first, second things are not suppressed but increased. If you and I ever come to love God perfectly, the answer to this tormenting question will then become clear, and will be far more beautiful than we cd. ever imagine. We can’t have it now.

(11.)²⁵⁷ Thanks v. much: but I haven’t a sweet tooth.

(12.)²⁵⁸ Not that I know of: but I’m the last person who wd. know.

(13.)²⁵⁹ There is a poor barber whom my brother and I sometimes help. I got up one day intending to go to him for a hair-cut preparatory to going to London. Got a message putting off London engagement and decided to postpone hair-cut. Something, however, kept on nagging me to stick to it–‘Get your hair cut.’ In the end, said ‘Oh damn it, I’ll go.’

All good wishes.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO GEOFFREY BLES (BOD): TS 52/42.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

10th November 1952.

My dear Bles

I return Mr. Dell’s letter.²⁶⁰ I don’t think there’d be any point in republishing Spirits in Bondage. I don’t remember the ‘sermon in the midlands’,²⁶¹ but it was probably made from notes, and is now irrecoverable. There are, of course, several short pieces in prose and verse (from Spectator, Punch, Time and Tide etc.) which might be used some day.

I’m glad to hear the Dawn Treader goes on well.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE (W):

Magdalen College,

Oxford

Nov. 10th 1952

Dear Mrs. Shelburne

It is a little difficult to explain how I feel that tho’ you have taken a way which is not for me²⁶² I nevertheless can congratulate you—I suppose because your faith and joy are so obviously increased. Naturally, I do not draw from that the same conclusions as you—but there is no need for us to start a controversial correspondence!

I believe we are very near to one another, but not because I am at all on the Rome-ward frontier of my own communion. I believe that, in the present divided state of Christendom, those who are at the heart of each division are all closer to one another than those who are at the fringes. I wd. even carry this beyond the borders of Christianity: how much more one has in common with a real Jew or Muslim than with a wretched liberalising, occidentalised specimen of the same categories.

Let us by all means pray for one another: it is perhaps the only form of ‘work for re-union’ which never does anything but good. God bless you.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO J. R. R. TOLKIEN (P): ²⁶³

[Magdalen College]

Nov 13/52

My dear Tollers

Just a note to tell you with what agreeable warmth and weight your yesterday’s good news lies on my mind—with an inward chuckle of deep content.²⁶⁴ Foremost of course is the sheer pleasure of looking forward to having the book to read and re-read. But a lot of other things come in. So much of your whole life, so much of our joint life, so much of the war, so much that seemed to be slipping away quite spurlos²⁶⁵ into the past, is now, in a sort made permanent.

And I am of course very glad on your account too. I think the very prolonged pregnancy has drained a little vitality from you: there’ll be a new ripeness and freedom when the book’s out. And how pleased Priscilla²⁶⁶ and Mrs. Farrer will be.²⁶⁷ God bless you.

J.

TO MRS D. JESSUP (W):

Magdalen College,

Oxford

Nov. 13th 1952

Dear Mrs. Jessup

Yes, of course I will—for all six of you. I am very sorry to hear that your (temporal) news is so grim. Your spiritual news is perhaps better than you think. You seem to have been dealing with the dryness (or ‘the wall’ as you well name it) in the right way. Everyone has experienced it or will.

It is clearly what G.M. meant when he said ‘Have pity on us for the look of things, When desolation stares us in the face. Although the serpent-mask have lied before, It fascinates the bird.’²⁶⁸

It is v. important to remember that Our Lord experienced it to the full, twice—in Gethsemane when He sweated blood, and next day when he said ‘Why hast thou forsaken me?’²⁶⁹ We are not asked to go anywhere where he has not gone before us. The shining quality may come back when we least expect it, and in circumstances which wd. seem to an outside observer (or to ourselves) to make it most impossible. (We must not reject it, as there is an impulse to do, on the ground that we ought, in the conditions, to be miserable).

What is most re-assuring to me, and most moving, is your sane and charitable recognition that others have as great, or worse, trials: one of those things wh. no one else can decently say to the sufferer but wh. are invaluable when he says them to himself. And of course there was no ‘conceit’ or ‘selfishness’ in your writing to me: are we not all ‘members of one another’.²⁷⁰ (I can’t reply about Eisenhower. I am no politician. I shd. suppose that the diverse views of his election taken in England depend entirely on the different ways in which our own political parties think they can make capital out of it. As you know public affairs seem to me much less important than private—in fact important only in so far as they affect private affairs.)

You are quite right (tho’ not in the way you meant) when you say I needn’t ‘work up’ sympathy with you! No, I needn’t. I have had enough experiences of the crises of family life, the terrors, despondencies, hopes deferred, and wearinesses. The trouble is that things go on 50 long, isn’t it? and one gets so tired of trying! No doubt it will all seem short when looked at from eternity. But I needn’t preach to you. You’re doing well: scoring pretty good marks! Keep on. Take it hour by hour, don’t add the past & the future to the present load more than you can help. God bless you all.

Yours ever

C. S. Lewis

TO MRS D. JESSUP (W):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

Nov. 17th 1952

Dear Mrs. Jessup

Thanks be to God for your good news. There is a comic, but also charming, contrast between the temperance with which you bore a great fear and the wild excess of your apologies for a wholly imaginary offence in writing that letter. You did perfectly right and there is nothing whatever for me to forgive. And I shd. be v. sorry if you carried out your threat (made, I know, from the best motives) of never writing to me again. You are not the kind of correspondent who is a ‘nuisance’: if you were you wd. not be now thinking you are one—That kind never does.

But don’t send me any newspaper cuttings. I never believe a word said in the papers. The real history of a period (as we always discover a few years later) has v. little to do with all that, and private people like you and me are never allowed to know it while it is going on. Of course you will all remain in my prayers. I think it v. wrong to pray for people while they are in distress and then not to continue praying, now with thanksgiving, when they are relieved.

Many people think their prayers are never answered because it is the answered ones that they forget. Like the others who find proof for a superstition by recording all the cases in wh. bad luck has followed a dinner with 13 at table and forget all the others where it hasn’t. God bless you. Write freely whenever you please.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO ARTHUR GREEVES (BOD):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

Nov 18/52

My dear Arthur

Thanks v. much for the 2nd vol. of HJ. which arrived in good order a few days ago. It is really most generous of you. The Letters, even if they had no other interest, wd. be useful as an anthology of all the possible ways of apologising for not having written before—it sometimes goes on for 2 whole pages!

I really feel much as you do about big formal functions, and though I attend many more of them than you, I skip all I can. As I get older I become more impatient of being kept sitting on or hanging about after the meal is over.

I shan’t begin the Letters for a few days for I am at present re-reading Montaigne. Sharp frost here this morning: I wish we could have a walk to enjoy it together.

Love to both of you.

Yours

Jack

TO MARY VAN DEUSEN (W):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

25. xi. 1952

Dear Mrs. Van Deusen

No, by wordless prayer I didn’t mean the practice of the Presence of God. I meant the same mental act as in verbal prayer only without the words. The Practice of the Presence is a much higher activity. I don’t think it matters much whether an absolutely uninterrupted recollection of God’s presence for a whole lifetime is possible or not. A much more frequent & prolonged recollection than we have yet reached certainly is possible. Isn’t that enough to work on? A child learning to walk doesn’t need to know whether it will ever be able to walk 40 miles in a day: the important thing is that it can walk tomorrow a little further and more steadily than it did today.

I don’t think we are likely to give too much love and care to those we love. We might put in active care in the form of assistance when it wd. be better for them to act on their own: i.e. we might be busybodies. Or we might have too much ‘care’ for them in the sense of anxiety. But we never love anyone too much: the trouble is always that we love God, or perhaps some other created being, too little.

As to the ‘state of the world’ if we have time to hope and fear about it, we certainly have time to pray. I agree it is v. hard to keep one’s eyes on God amid all the daily claims & problems. I think it wise, if possible, to move one’s main prayers from the last-thing-at-night position to some earlier time: give them a better chance to infiltrate one’s other thoughts.

Thanks v. much for the stationery. I’m afraid I can’t find a W. Chambers book.²⁷¹ It’s better not to send the book. They all get lost in the pile on my table.

Yours sincerely, with love to all,

C. S. Lewis

TO HARRY BLAMIRES (BOD):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

26 xi 52

Dear Blamires

Yes, I did of course write to Edinburgh and did my best.²⁷² I was much hampered by the fact that my questioner laid great stress on practical ability as a teacher, and of course I could not pretend to have any first hand evidence to give on that. I am sorry the Philistines have won: but am sure you will not allow yourself to be too set down about it. All good wishes,

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO GEOFFREY BLES (BOD):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

26. xi. 1952

My dear Bles

Thanks for American M.C.²⁷³ and for reviews of D.T.²⁷⁴ No, I shan’t need any more copies of the former, so pray dispose of them as you think fit. No one, not even the artist, liked the Church Times picture.²⁷⁵ The Torso is not at all imminent:²⁷⁶ I’m very busy with ordinary work these days. All greetings.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO WILLIAM BORST (P):

Magdalen College,

Oxford

28.xi.52

Dear Borst–

The copy has not yet come to hand but I have your letter of the 19th and I’m afraid the position is this. You can have a little more headnote (but not a statement what each passage ‘illustrates’–it is 50 bad for the students) and as many more glosses as you like: but you can’t have from me any drastic revision of the Selections. For one thing I have not now the leisure: but for another, I can’t have what is really Mr. Harrison’s Selections going under my name.

If you press for such a revision then I will make what seems to me a handsome offer. I will be content with 500 dollars for my introduction and for giving you my selections & glosses as a basis for someone else’s work. You will save money, for you needn’t get an expensive man to do you the kind of Selections you now want. It is work for any intelligent student. For my Selections were quite a different thing. With labour of which you have no conception I quarried a little F.Q. out of the great F.Q.: reproducing its real characteristics. Of course this involved omitting (within individual selections) stanzas that could be spared: and leaving the first appearances of characters as unprepared as S. leaves them: and being ‘tantalising’ as S. is tantalising: and omitting some (v. few) of the dear old Show-pieces. You have almost sensed what I was at: I don’t think Mr. Harrison has. And the result on you is v. significant. You now want more Spenser than you allowed me at first. Why? if not that the thing is acting on you as I hoped it wd. act on the students? If I’d simply chucked all the dear old favourites together in the old way you’d have taken them without a murmur and never asked for more.

As I say, you are quite free to get someone else (and, between ourselves, you need get only a hack). Yet I can’t help hoping you’ll keep my Selections: not for my sake (I shd. not be piqued and I can manage without the other 500 dollars) but for Spenser’s. Arrogant tho’ it may sound I can’t help saying ‘Borst, you know not what you do: let well alone. You’ve got here a new thing, a thing which will whet the students’ appetite as it whets yours. Think twice before throwing it away in favour of one more “specimens of Spenser” such as everyone has done, and no one enjoyed.’

Mr. Harrison is mistaken in thinking that Serena was a foundling of noble birth.²⁷⁷ S. does (emphatically) identify RCK²⁷⁸ and St George (I x. lxi.).²⁷⁹

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO I. O. EVANS (W):

Magdalen College

Oxford

28. xi. 52

Dear Evans

Thank you for The Space Serpent which I have read and return.²⁸⁰ Most interesting idea—and I fear I wd. never have noticed your ‘howler’ if you hadn’t warned me. But then, as you know, my interest in ‘science-fiction’ puts the emphasis entirely on the fiction end. I must re-read that excellent book Kipps,²⁸¹ and thanks you for reminding me of it. How tragically Wells decayed in his later work! With all good wishes.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO ALAN AND NELL BERNERS-PRICE (W):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

Dec 2nd 1952

Dear Alan and Nell

I was going to write to you shortly (I mean ‘in a short time’, how difficult the English language is!) when your card came. I am sending off under separate cover my last story to your little girl. At least I hope that’s what the neat packet contains: I daren’t open it to see because I’m so bad at parcels that I’d never get it put up again nicely if I did. I’m afraid it is a poor gift compared with the chinchilla (is that how you spell it?) coat.

I’m afraid I haven’t a chance to get down to dear Court Stairs this vacation, though it is just the weather for the South Coast and I shd. love to join your merry circle round the fire. Is the old gentleman with the strong views still there? Your garden must look lovely in the snow.

I hope Nell has quite got over the impact of ‘my wife’ by now and that it is all sinking away from both of you, as it is for me, into the status of a dream—even a funny dream. All the same, however she may deserve it, I don’t enjoy remembering every now & then that she is still in jail. Well, dear friends, a merry Christmas and a happy New Year to you both.

Yours

Jack

TO NELL BERNERS-PRICE (W): TS

REF.52/206.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

3rd December 1952.

Dear Nell,

Despite your kindness I can’t promise myself any definite date for coming down: there are so few ‘odd times’ in my life. I sometimes have to go into Sussex, and when that happens I’ll try to run over to Courtstairs.

I say—I suppose the Baron and the Countess are O.K. are they? I’m afraid if I’d had your experience I’d suspect every guest!

Greetings to all.

Yours,

Jack

TO I. O. EVANS (W): TS

REF.52/38.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

6th December 1952.

Dear Evans,

Your discourse on Nauthorship is a most interesting document, and tells us at least as much about writing as many theoretical high-brow articles. How right you are about getting the ‘wave-length’.

What I object to most in Wells is his everlasting Gallicism ‘figure to yourself’. ²⁸²

All the best.

Yours,

C. S. Lewis

TO VERA GEBBERT (W): TS

REF.52/103.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

9th December 1952.

Dear Mrs. Gebbert,

Many thanks for your letter of the 4th. The more I think of it the more I regret that our intercourse should have been that of heavenly bodies rather than human beings: that your orbit should have swung within thirty miles of ours without our making contact. And now you are back in your normal track, five thousand or more miles from Oxford. And, what is worse, the tone of your letter suggests that it will be a very long time before you risk the European adventure again. But take courage. One can visit London without getting influenza, and one can travel by Pan-American Airways without the agonies of sea-sickness. (Incidentally, why does everyone regard this frightful illness as a joke? With us, and I suppose with you too, it is like drunkenness or mothers-in-law, sure of getting what the actors call ‘a hand’ in any radio or stage performance.

I was surprised and impressed by what you had to say about Paris; I did’nt know that at this time of the day one could still hear the tumbrils rolling along to the place of the guillotine. Nor did I realize the shabbiness of present day Paris. The business and travel advertisements still hold up Paris to us as a little oasis of gaiety in a drab world. I’m very much afraid that the answer is that France is an extinct volcano; and can one wonder? For the last four hundred years France has been losing the best stuff in the nation in war after war, and no people can stand up to that indefinitely. Portugal, Spain, Holland, England, we’ve all had our innings: and now it is up to your country to go in and bat. If one looks far enough ahead, I’m inclined to think that—after our time thank goodness—China is going to come out on top: for she has unlimited manpower, unlimited grit, and a capacity for hard work on nothing a year paid quarterly which none of the white peoples possess.

I’m sorry to say that ‘the other Vera’ is not picking up as we had hoped. Of course she is a very bad patient, as are all these women who have been as strong as horses until they get into the ‘fifties, and then have a serious illness. The real trouble is that nothing will persuade her that she does’nt know better than the doctors; she has had specialists, X rays, and what have you, all assuring her that there is no organic defect, but she knows that they are just leading her up the garden path. What can one do with such a patient. However, she is out of the nursing home, and in a week or so we hope that she will be well enough to travel to Ireland, where we trust her own family will fatten her up and restore her to us in real good health.

I was interested in your account of Germany. Under the last government, things were much the same here—acute shortage of building materials, but plenty available for children’s swimming pools, community centres etc. It is I think part of the modern totalitarian pattern of life—neglect the home, but let the community be luxurious.

I envy Mr. Gebbert his garden, which contains luxuries unknown to us. ‘Winter peas’ indeed! We look forward to the arrival of the book.

With love to both of you from both of us,

yours ever,

C. S. Lewis

TO BELLE ALLEN (W): TS

REF.52/28.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

9th December 1952.

Dear Mrs. Allen,

How very nice it is to hear from you again, and I indeed have a sense of ‘pleasing satisfaction’ at hearing that in Westfield at any rate, my books are being read and enjoyed. Especially do I purr at the story of the minister withdrawing Xtian Behaviour²⁸³ from the sale. But this is the sin of pride, and must be suppressed.

I am so sorry to hear about Ed’s cold, and can sympathize with him, for I am a chronic sufferer from colds myself; though so far this winter I have been very lucky. Snow indeed! You should have been in Oxford for the last ten days, where we have had what is for us, very severe weather: and of course the usual fuel shortage. All very unexpected (except the fuel shortage), for we generally don’t get our cold weather until well after Christmas. Like you, we have our roads and footwalks practically impassible, and very annoying it is. As my brother says, ‘I hate having to go out when you have no chance of thinking, but must concentrate all your attention on the art of walking.’

At the moment, after a fortnight of it, we are having a thaw, but there is of course the chance of its freezing tonight, and ‘the last state of that road will be worse than the first’,²⁸⁴ to paraphrase the Bible. I used to run a car, but gave it up before the war; first, because our roads are now so crowded that there is no longer any pleasure motoring, and secondly because I find it much cheaper and just as convenient to use the bus service.

As you say, we shall no doubt have large numbers of Americans in England for the Coronation, and some of them may not be a good advertisement for your country; but it is an odd thing that I have noticed, that since the war, the type of American visitor we have had is much nicer on the whole than that which came to us between the wars. I suppose it is that, owing to the drop in sterling, we are now getting the Americans of modest means. And it has been my experience that the rich of any country are usually the least attractive specimens of the nation.^*

Talking of Americans, we have just had a ‘pen friend’ of long standing, from New York (state not city) stopping with us;²⁸⁵ she belongs to the small income group, and is delightful—a rolling stone, authoress, journalist, housewife and mother, and has been ‘doing’ England in a way which few Americans must have done before. Last time I heard from her, she had been at a Cockney wedding in the East End of London, where the guests slept on the kitchen floor after the festivities! She comes back to us next week before sailing for America, and we look forward to hearing her experiences. She ran out of money a little while ago, but has apparently supported herself quite comfortably by giving treatment in ‘dianetics’²⁸⁶ (whatever that maybe).

You say with your usual kindness ‘speak up’. But how or why? We have never had a gift from you which did not give great pleasure and satisfaction; so what am I to say? A tin of peacock’s brains? Some frozen lark’s tongues by air mail? Whatever you like to send us, you may be sure will be very welcome. With love and all Christmas blessings to both of you,

Yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO PHYLLIS ELINOR SANDEMAN (W): ²⁸⁷

As from Magdalen College,

Oxford

10.xii.52

Dear Mrs.^* Sandeman,

I have read Treasure on Earth and I don’t believe you have any notion how good it is.²⁸⁸ You have done a most difficult thing: the only parallel (for I won’t admit that odious work Brideshead Revisited) is Lubbock’s Earlham.²⁸⁹ I’ve never seen the hushed internal excitement of a child on Christmas Eve better done. That is something we can all recognise. For the rest, nous autres²⁹⁰ who grew up in villas or ‘mansions’ on the outskirts of industrial towns, might seem ill-qualified to judge: yet perhaps not. ‘Nothing is great or small except by position’ and the house one grows up in has always a certain immemorial grandeur in one’s mind. At least, everywhere else, all one’s life, is new, raw, colonial. The big difference is that your houses are given to the Nation while ours simply disappear, pulled down, and the new ‘estates’ rise over them. It is like the difference between a Mummy and a burial at sea!

I don’t know how you could bear to revisit your house: the Epilogue almost made me cry. And it isn’t only Houses: the very earth is being destroyed, the shapes of the hills disappear, the rabbits are gassed–‘All things are taken from us and become Portions and parcels of the dreadful past.’²⁹¹ Of course they survive somewhere–1910 can’t be any less (or more) real in eternity than 1952.1 wonder whose they are? Do those panels belong to the Vaynes or to Grinling Gibbons?²⁹²

Oh, by the way, thank you for telling me (I had always suspected it) that knives and forks grate unpleasantly on silver, and therefore presumably on gold: it might add a realistic detail to some high banquet in Narnia.²⁹³

The only page that I can’t enter into at all is p. 83. I can’t conceive not being afraid, as a child, of those unseen presences.²⁹⁴ I shd. have behaved like little Jane Eyre in the Red Room when she dried her tears for fear a ghostly voice should awake to comfort her.²⁹⁵ One wd. rather be scolded by a mortal than comforted by a ghost.

You will notice when you re-read your book in a different mood that it doesn’t really give the impression of a very happy childhood. Ecstatic, yes: shot through with raptures and tingling delights, but not very secure, not very consoled. And that, I believe, is absolutely true: I fancy happy childhoods are usually forgotten. It is not settled comfort and heartsease but momentary joy that transfigures the past and lets the eternal quality show through. (I sometimes eat parsnips because their taste, which I dislike, reminds me of my prep-school, which I disliked: but those two dislikes don’t in the least impair the strange joy of ‘being reminded’.)

One could go on meditating on these things indefinitely—Very many thanks for the book: it is that rare thing (rare at our age) a present one really likes. The illustrations are good too, as much of them as the coarse printing and paper has not murdered, but don’t believe anyone who says you draw better than you write. The reverse is true. With much gratitude and all good wishes.

Yours very sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO PHYLLIS ELINOR SANDEMAN (W):

Magdalen College,

Oxford

Dec 11th 1952

Dear Mrs Sandeman

You were perfectly right to put in the bit about the friendly ghosts. I think the absence of fear is, as far as it goes, probable evidence that the experience was not merely imaginary. Everyone fears lest he should meet a ghost, but there seems to be some ground for supposing that those who really meet them are often quite unafraid. Notice that angels, on the other hand, seem in Scripture to be nearly always terrifying & have to begin by saying ‘Fear not’.²⁹⁷

In Ireland I stayed at a lonely bungalow last summer which the peasants avoided not because a ghost had been seen near it (they didn’t mind ghosts) but because the Good People, the Faerie, frequented that bit of coast. So apparently ghosts are the least alarming kind of spirit.

With all good wishes and thanks. You’ll enjoy Earlham I’m sure. And congratulations, it’s nice to be reprinting.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO ROGER LANCELYN GREEN (BOD):

Dec. 13. 52

My dear Roger

You’ll be wondering why I haven’t acknowledged the Searching Satyrs.²⁹⁸ After reading it I wanted to compare it with the original, but the Fragments aren’t in my Sophocles, and I’ve never done it. Your version reads v. crisp & pleasant, almost Gilbertian in places. And what a lovely book? It must be nice to have anything of one’s own printed so beautifully. Very many thanks.

Love and Christmas wishes to all of you.

Yours

Jack

TO I. O. EVANS (W):

Magdalen etc

Dec 13. 52

Dear Evans

Thank you for your kind letter. I am so glad you liked the story. What is one to do with illustrators—especially if, like mine, they are (a far surer defence than obstinacy) timid, shrinking young women who, when criticised, look as if you’d pulled their hair or given them a black eye? My resolution was exhausted by the time I’d convinced her that rowers face aft not (as she thinks) forward.²⁹⁹

All that about the earlier text of the “War of the Worlds is most interesting. With all good wishes.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO RHONA BODLE (BOD): ³⁰⁰

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

Dec 15th 1952

Dear Miss Bodle

I think the little book quite excellent. The ‘baldness & flatness’ as you call them—I shd. say ‘economy & simplicity’ are its great merit. I want only one change: in the prayer beginning ‘bless mother & father’ there should be some indication that we are to pray for particular people by name: a child might think that ‘all the people I like’ was a rigid formula and that one oughtn’t to individualise. And the same with all the clauses of the prayer. You have the rare happiness of being engaged on a work of real & undoubted value: more power to your elbow!

I can quite understand that your brief English life will sometimes seem a mere entracte in your N.Z. life. But it doesn’t matter what it seems (emotionally & imaginatively) so long as what happened to you in England is operative in your will, both at work and elsewhere. But of course you know this. All good wishes. You (and that unnamed colleague of yours) are always in my prayers.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO MARG-RIETTE MONTGOMERY (W): TS

REF.52/248.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

16th December 1952.

Dear Miss Montgomery,

Thanks for the cutting, and for the picture of the charming little church. But you ought to know more about the Father than the Galaxy! Our Lord said ‘He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father’,³⁰¹ but also ‘My Father is greater than I’,³⁰² and St. Paul said ‘He is not far from any one of us’.³⁰³ Don’t let the Anthros turn it all into a fog for you. You know better. All good wishes.

Yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO CLYDE S. KILBY (W):³⁰⁴ TS

REF52/509.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

17th December 1952.

Dear Mr. Kilby,

Thank you for your very kind and encouraging letter of the 10th. It would give me pleasure to meet you during your visit to Oxford, and I shall expect to hear from you more definitely when your plans are settled. So far as can be foreseen at the moment, I shall probably be out of Oxford for August and the earlier part of September. With all best wishes.

Yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

Joy Gresham had arrived at The Kilns during the second week of December to visit the Lewis brothers. As indicated by Lewis’s letter to his godson, Laurence Harwood, of 19 December, there appears to have been a misunderstanding about the length of her stay.

TO VERA GEBBERT (W): TS

52/103.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

18th December 1952.

Dear Mrs. Gebbert,

Many thanks for the book which has just arrived, and which judging from a hasty dip, I am going to enjoy. It is kind of you to send it. I hope that by this time your journey across the Atlantic is a fast fading memory, and that it has not given you both a determination never to cross it again. Courage! Next time (I much hope there will be a ‘next time’), try crossing over it rather than on it.

We have an American visitor with us at the moment, who is starting for home on the 3rd. of next month, and is not much cheered by the fact that we are now having a succession of gales. Is’nt it an astonishing thing that whenever one has a guest in the home, the weather turns freakish? And the host always feels that he is somehow to blame for it. We are now getting the weather which normally we never have until after Christmas—ice, snow, bitter wind etc. However, either out of native politeness or because it is true, the lady assures us that the worst English winter weather is not to be compared for general beastliness with that of New York state. What she does criticise is the heating of the English home: not so much of the rooms, but of the passages and so forth.

As your last letter was dated from Alpine Drive, I send this note there; though of course by the time it gets to California, you may be enjoying the society of Andy on his native heath once more. In whichever spot you are, you may congratulate yourselves on having fled homewards when you did. You would like England even less now than when you visited it!

With warmest good wishes to you both from us both for a happy and prosperous New Year,

yours as ever,

C. S. Lewis

TO LAURENCE HARWOOD (BOD): ³⁰⁵

Coll. Magd.

Dec 19th 1952

Dear Laurence

Here’s something for usual expenses. I am completely ‘circumvented’ by a guest, asked for one week but staying for three, who talks from morning till night. I hope you’ll all have a nicer Christmas than I. I can’t write (write? I can hardly think or breathe. I can’t believe it’s all real).

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO MRS JOHNSON (W): TS

REF.52/183

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

19th December 1952.

Dear Mrs. Johnson,

Though it is true that I have not a sweet tooth, I must confess that I eat notepaper and envelopes, so your very kind gift may be described as being of that edible variety that is customary at this season of the year. And I am most grateful to you for it: for paper here is of a miserable quality, and it is not always easy to get hold of. (To say nothing of the fact that one so often runs out at some inconvenient moment, and has to sally out to the shops).

Apropos of shops, one could hardly have a worse time to run out of essentials than this; we—like you no doubt—are in the climax of the ‘Christmas rush’, a time which I always regard with horror. I hope I am not a Scrooge, but with every year that passes I find myself more and more in revolt against the commercialized racket of ‘Xmas’. With us, it now begins about the third week in November, and by now, one is urged—with holly leaves—to buy anything from boots to bathing trunks because they are the perfect expression of the Christmas spirit. If I seem a little peevish about the whole spiritual atmosphere, it is perhaps because the material one is so disagreeable; we have been having snow, ice, sleet, hurricanes and all the kind of treats in fact which we do not expect until well on into the new year. A freak season in fact. But I should be chastened by the fact that a visiting American friend tells me that unless we have seen winter in New England, we don’t know what winter is: and that what we are grumbling about is just nice mild seasonable weather. (But this expression of opinion doesn’t make it seem any warmer)!

With many thanks, and all best wishes for a happy Christmas and a prosperous New Year,

yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO MRS D. JESSUP (W):

Magdalen etc.

Dec. 20th 52

Dear Mrs. Jessup

Yes: you are very blessed: and I take the communication as a high compliment—though there are a good many words I can’t read, for your hand is almost as illegible as mine tho’ a great deal neater!

You won’t expect me to reply at length when I tell you that we have a visitor, that our usual domestic help is ill, and there are mountains of mail. How wretchedly the Christian festival of Christmas has got snowed under by all the fuss and racket of commercialised ‘Xmas’. Blessings to all.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO EDNA GREEN WATSON (BOD): TS

REE52/9

Magdalen College,

Oxford, [p]

22nd December 1952.

Dear Mrs. Watson,

How very kind indeed of you to sweeten my Christmas with the cake, which arrived this morning: externally in good condition, and before the day is out I shall be examining the internal condition of the parcel. It arrives very apropos, as my brother and I are without our housekeeper, who is convalescing after an illness, and in consequence we two batchelors are having to maintain a ‘skeleton service’ out at the house—one which does not provide for such luxuries as cakes, and in which the can opener is very much in evidence!³⁰⁶

This is the season when I envy you, living in what is I am told called ‘The Deep South’; I suppose you are hardly aware that it is winter? Here we are having a most unpleasant freak season—ice, snow, blizzard, all the joys which we don’t generally get until well after Christmas. However, though we have been pitying ourselves an American visitor from New York told me recently that we don’t know what winter is: and that this is mild weather! So whatever else is in short supply on this unhappy planet, at least it is’nt weather.

I returned to work in the autumn from a year’s academic leave: which was not as attractive as it sounds, for it was granted me for the express purpose of finishing a considerable literary task, and my nose was kept pretty close to the grindstone. But my brother and I managed to get the best part of a month’s real holiday in Eire, ‘on the other side of the iron curtain’ as we call it, and came back much the better for it.

It is I’m afraid too late to wish you a happy Christmas but I do send you my very best wishes for a happy and prosperous 1953.

With many thanks,

yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO WILLIAM L. KINTER(BOD): TS

REF.52/519.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

23rd December 1952.

Dear Mr. Kinter,

Thanks for your kind card. I am so glad you liked The Dawn Treader. Who am I to say whether Grace works in my own stories? One can only be sure on a much humbler level, that if anything is well done, we must say Non nobís.³⁰⁷

All good wishes.

Yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO GEORGE SAYER(W):

Coll. Magd.

Dec 23rd 1952

Dear George and Moira

Happy Christmas! I hope what I have to say will not make it happier, though. I’m booked to visit your enchanted house on Jan 1st. But it’s all No Go. We have a visitor (U.S.A.) who will last till then³⁰⁸ and beyond her looms a fellowship examination.

The whole Vac. is in fact a shambles. Perpetual conversation is a most exhausting thing. I begin to wonder if I have a vocation for La Trappe. I am sick at these numbers. But I love you both: it is one of my most frequent and tonic activities. Blessings upon you.

Yours

(what is left of) Jack

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

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

26th December 1952.

My dear Mrs. Gebbert,

Many thanks. Doubtless a reproduction of a fresco of the early Middle Ages from a Narnian catacomb?

With all blessings to you both for the New Year,

yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO BONAMY DOBRÉE (W):³⁰⁹ PC

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

Dec. 30/52

No, no. The context and, a literal translation, will put Wanderer 12 in a different light: ‘There is now no one alive to whom I dare clearly declare my mind: I know for a truth that it is an excellent quality in a man that he should firmly bind in what his heart contains—let him think what he pleases.’³¹⁰

The poet is not talking about tears at all but about keeping one’s own counsel, holding one’s tongue among strangers. Also I think ‘the high brow’ a mistranslation. Earl means that in prose, but in verse is the heroic word for Man (ANMP).³¹¹ All good wishes.

C.S.L.

1 Winston Churchill was re-elected Prime Minister in 1951, and on 5 January 1952 he went to Washington, DC, to renew Britain’s ‘special relationship’ with the United States.

2 Clement Attlee (1883-1967) was the Labour Prime Minster, 1945-51.

3 ‘Maleldil’ is the ‘Old Solar’ name given in Lewis’s interplanetary novels to God the Son.

4 Pitter had been trying since 1949 to transcribe a passage from Lewis’s Perelandra into Spenserian stanzas. She said in a note to Lewis’s letter of 17 November 1949 (CL II, p. 997): ‘The passage…was to have been included in one of my books, but I think John Hayward…finally decided that (copy-right trouble, apart) it didn’t do anything that the original hadn’t done a lot better’ (Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. lett. c. 220/3, fol. 84).

5 He was referring to the poem ‘The Earwig’s Complaint’ in Pitter’s A Mad Lady’s Garland (1934). Pitter said of this poem: ‘The earwig is imagined as a sort of little fiery Elizabethan soldier of fortune—he gets by chance into a lady’s bed, is much struck by her beauty, has the misfortune to tickle, and of course she throws him out—he laments the episode in what I thought a fine heroic tragical strain, but reflects finally that he has wings, after all, she not! It is an image, I suppose, of the scruffy neglected poet, a failure too in love, consoling himself (MS. Eng. lett. c. 220/3, fol. 107).

6 i.e., the poet George Herbert (1593-1633).

7 The Flying Enterprise was a 6,711-ton cargo ship. Built during the Second World War, it became a commercial cargo vessel after the war. On Christmas Day 1951 it left England and headed into the Atlantic Ocean on route for the United States through a turbulent sea. By the next day the Atlantic was hit by one of the worst storms in history, winds rising to hurricane force. On the bridge was Captain Henrik Kurt Carlsen, a Dane of extraordinary courage who remained aboard his ship for almost two weeks as efforts were made to tow her to port. He was finally forced to abandon ship when her list increased to a fatal degree on 10 January 1952, only about 40 miles away from Falmouth, England. The ordeal of the Flying Enterprise and Captain Carlsen was worldwide news at the time and remains one of the great stories of endurance and courage at sea. See Gordon Holman, Carlsen of the Flying Enterprise (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1952). On 22 June 2001 a team of divers discovered the lost ship resting on her side in a depth of 280 feet on the seabed of the western approaches to the English Channel.

8 p.p.

9 Sister Penelope’s imagination had been fired by an article in The Times (6 December 1951), p. 5, entitled ‘A Mystery of Everest: Footprints of the “Abominable Snowman” ‘. The British mountaineer Eric Shipton wrote about a discovery his team made on Mount Everest on 8 November 1951: ‘At 4 o’clock we came upon some strange tracks in the snow. [Our guide] immediately announced them to be the tracks of “yetis” or “Abominable Snowmen”…The tracks were mostly distorted by melting into oval impressions, slightly longer and a good deal broader than those made by our large mountain boots. But here and there, where the snow covering the ice was thin, we came upon a well preserved impression of the creature’s foot. It showed three broad “toes” and a broad “thumb” to the side. What was particularly interesting was that where the tracks crossed a crevice one could see quite clearly where the creature had jumped and used its toes to secure purchase on the snow on the other side.’ The first reliable report of the Yeti appeared in 1925 but the best tracks ever seen were photographed by Shipton and published in The Times (7 December 1951), p. 13.

10 Genesis 6:1-4: ‘And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born unto them, That the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair: and they took them wives of all which they chose. And the Lord said, My spirit shall not always strive with man, for that he also is flesh: yet his days shall be an hundred and twenty years. There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown.’

11 Cf. Psalm 45:11.

12 He means the confusion between the Latin homo, ‘human being’, and vir, ‘(adult male) man’.

13 Austin Farrer, The Glass of Vision, The Bampton Lectures for 1948 (1948).

14 See CL II, p. 961.

15 Simone Weil, Waiting on God, trans. Emma Craufurd (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1951).

16 ‘A Religious of CSMV (Sister Penelope), They Shall Be My People: The Bible Traversed in a Course of Reading Plays, 2 vols. (London: Oxford University Press, 1951).

17 I. O. Evans, Led By the Star: A Christmas Play (London: Rylee, 1952).

18 L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt, The Roaring Trumpet (1940); The Mathematics of Magic (1940); The Incomplete Enchanter (New York: Pyramid Books, 1941).

19 i.e., The Incomplete Enchanter.

20 These notes relate to Blamires’s unpublished book on the Christian philosophy of education.

21 Carol Jenkins was writing from Westmead, 35 Flushcombe Lane, Bath.

22 i.e., the name Asian.

23 The Thousand and One Nights: Commonly Called, in England, The Arabian Nights’ Entertainments, trans. Edward William Lane (1838-40).

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

25 Wayland Hilton Young (1923-), who became the 2nd Baron Kennet in 1960, is the son of Edward Hilton Young, 1st Baron Kennet (1879-1960) and Lady Edith Agnes Kathleen Bruce (1878-1947). He was born in London on 2 August 1923, and educated at Stowe School. He served in the Royal Navy, 1942-5. Following the war he went to Trinity College, Cambridge, taking his BA in 1946. Young entered the Foreign Office in 1946 and was Parliamentary Secretary for the Ministry of Housing and Local Government, 1966-70, Opposition spokesman on foreign affairs and science policy, 1971-4, a Member of the European Parliament, 1978-9, and SDP spokesman in the House of Lords on foreign affairs and defence, 1981-90. In 1948 he married Elizabeth Adams, daughter of Captain Bryan Fullerton Adams, and they had six children. His many published books and pamphlets, on subjects such as defence, disarmament, the environment and architecture, include Deadweight (1952), Now or Never (1953), The Monten Scandal (1957), Still Alive Tomorrow (1958), Strategy for Survival (1959), The Futures of Europe (1976), The Rebirth of Britain (1982) and Northern Lazio (1990).

26 i.e., John Lane The Bodley Head, the publishers of Lewis’s interplanetary trilogy.

27 ‘excessive’ or ‘in the way’.

28 That Hideous Strength.

29 A word is missing from the text.

30 A poem by Robert Browning included in his Dramatis Personae (1864).

31 1 Timothy 4:10: ‘We both labour and suffer reproach, because we trust in the living God, who is the Saviour of all men, specially of those that believe.’

* i.e. Hades, the land of the dead: not Gehenna, the land of the lost.

32 This letter was first published in the Church Times, CXXXV (8 February 1952), p. 95, under the title ‘Mere Christians’.

33 R. D. Daunton-Fear, ‘Evangelical Churchmanship’, Church Times, CXXXV (1 February 1952), p. 77.

34 An abbreviated form of the quotation from St Vincent of Lerins, Commonitorium, IV, section 3: ‘Id teneamus, quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus creditum est’: ‘Let us hold on to that which has been believed everywhere, always, by everyone.’

35 Richard Baxter, Church-history of the Government of Bishops and their Councils (1680), ‘What History is Credible, and What Not’, p. xv: ‘You know not of what Party I am of, nor what to call me; I am sorrier for you in this than for my self; if you know not, I will tell you, I am a CHRISTIAN, a MERE CHRISTIAN, of no other Religion; and the Church that I am of is the Christian Church, and hath been visible where ever the Christian Religion and Church hath been visible.’

36 This was a short story Mathews had written.

37 The Gospels, trans, into modern English by ]. B. Phillips (London: Bles, 1952).

38 ‘general presentation’.

39 One or two words are missing from the facsimile copy.

40 Genia Goelz was being baptized.

41 The twelve-week period between the end of Trinity Term, which ends on 6 July, and the beginning of Michaelmas Term, which starts on 1 October.

42 Helen D. Calkins, who first wrote to Lewis from India, had returned to the United States and was now writing from 915 Taylor Street, Albany, California.

43 Calkins’s unpublished work, ‘India Looks’, mentioned in the letter of 29 March 1952.

44 See the biography of John Alexander Chapman (1875-1968) in CL II, p. 954n.

45 J. A. Chapman, War (Windsor: Savile Press, 1951).

46 Warnie.

47 Lewis usually stayed at the Old Inn in Crawfordsburn when visiting Greeves.

48 Anthony Trollope, The Last Chronicle of Barset (1867).

49 Mark 9:24.

50 John 7:17.

51 Roger Lancelyn Green, The Luck of the Lynns: A Story of Hidden Treasure (1952).

52 For some time Lewis had been planning a holiday with Arthur Greeves in Northern Ireland. He expected to arrive at Greeves’s house on 21 August, and leave on the night of 8 September. Lewis and Green had long wanted to visit the ruined castles of North Wales, beginning with Beaumaris Castle, Anglesey.

53 Liverpool.

54 This letter is found only in Vanauken, A Severe Mercy, ch. 5, p. 110.

55 Michael Kevin Irwin (1944-), a schoolboy who wrote to Lewis about the Narnian stories, was born on 2 December 1944. He was educated at St Edward’s School, Oxford, and was the son of the Rev. Patrick Irwin, to whom Lewis wrote on 26 September 1952.

56 E. Nesbit, The Phoenix and the Carpet (1904); The Story of the Amulet (1906).

57 J. R. R. Tolkien, The Hobbit: or There and Back Again (1937).

58 George MacDonald, The Princess and the Goblin (1872); The Princess and Curdie (1883).

59 Baloo is the sleepy brown bear in Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book.

60 Bulkeley Arms Hotel, Beaumaris.

61 Richard Hughes, A High Wind in Jamaica (1929).

62 Ralph Waldo Emerson, May-day and Other Pieces (1867), ‘Brahma’, 11.

63 In Miracles: A Preliminary Study (London: Bles, 1947; Fount, 1998), pp. 90, 110, Lewis quotes from Alfred North Whitehead’s Science and the Modern World (1925).

64 See Mary Neylan, mother of Sarah Neylan, in the Biographical Appendix to CL II, pp. 1054-5.

65 i.e., Charles Williams.

66 Joseph Stalin.

67 Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory (1940). This novel, usually regarded as Greene’s best, is set in Mexico during a time of religious persecution. It describes the desperate last wanderings of a priest, the central character in the book, who is never given a name. The priest, who ‘carried a wound, as though a whole world had died’, commits the moral sin of fornication with the peasant woman Maria, after falling into the worst sin of ‘despair’. The only priest left in the state who has not either escaped or died, or conformed to the atheistic government, he returns to the village where Maria lives with their illegitimate daughter. Despite the fact that he believes himself to be condemned by God, he knows he can nevertheless bring salvation to others. In the end he achieves holiness and eventually martyrdom by virtue of, rather than in spite of, his sins.

68 Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. See the letter to Christian Hardie of 22 March 1951.

69 William Shakespeare, Macbeth (1623).

70 Lewis’s confessor was Father Walter Adams SSJE of Cowley, Oxford. He had been Lewis’s confessor since Lewis began going to confession in 1940. Father Adams died on 3 March 1952, but Lewis is curiously wrong about his dying at the altar. He died peacefully at the home of friends in Headington. See Father Walter Adams SSJE in the Biographical Appendix to CL II, pp. 1015-16.

71 The words quoted seem to be a conflation of two very similar passages. The first is Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, Book IV, Ch. 4, 3: ‘et tu fons es semper plenus et super abundans, ignis semper ardens et numquam deficiens’: ‘and you are a fountain ever full and over abundant, a flame always burning and never failing’. This passage has a textual problem: sometimes ‘ignis semper ardens’ is read as ‘ignis iugiter ardens’, ‘a flame continually burning’. Lewis’s text presumably read ‘ignis iugiter ardens’. Then there is the passage from Book IV, Ch. 16, 3: ‘cum tu sis ignis semper ardens et numquam deficiens, amor corda purificans et intellectum illuminans’: ‘since you are a flame always burning and never failing, a love that purifies the heart and illuminates the intellect’. Lewis seems to have conflated the two passages in his memory, creating something like this: ‘cum tu sis ignis iugiter ardens et numquam deficiens, amor corda…’

72 John 17:21.

73 Lewis had sent Pitter a ticket to his lecture on ‘Hero and Leander’, given to the British Academy on 20 February 1952. The lecture is reprinted in SLE.

74 Christopher Marlowe and George Chapman, Hero and Leander (1598). Marlowe wrote the first two books of this poem, and Chapman (? 1559-1634) the remaining four. See English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Pt. III, Ch. 3, Sect. 3.

75 Andrew Young, Into Hades (1952).

76 i.e., George Sayer.

77 The incumbent President, Harry S. Truman, decided against seeking re-election in 1952. He threw his support behind Illinois Governor Adlai Stevenson—not Robert A. Taft—who was drafted in as the Democratic nominee. Stevenson proved no match for General Dwight D. Eisenhower who won a landslide victory.

78 See the biography of Delmar Banner, artist, in CL II, p. 537n.

79 P. G. Wodehouse, Thank You, Jeeves (1934), ch. 1: ‘I fear I cannot recede from my position.’

80 Banner had invited Lewis to his home at The Bield, Little Langdale, in the Lake District.

81 ‘I could’.

82 ‘I couldn’t’.

83 Library Association Proceedings, Papers and Summaries of Discussion at the Bournemouth Conference on 29 April to 2 May 1952 (1952), pp. 22-8, and reprinted in Of This and Other Worlds, ed. Walter Hooper (London: Collins, 1982; HarperCollins, 2000); published in the United States as On Stories: and Other Essays on Literature (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982).

84 Roger Lancelyn Green, The Wonderful Stranger (1950).

85 ‘the far country’.

86 See Nell Berners-Price in the Biographical Appendix. Lewis had to be present as a witness at Mrs Hooker’s trial in Canterbury on 8 May. Nell Berners-Price had invited him to spend the night before the trial at Courtstairs Hotel, so that he would be near Canterbury. Following the trial Mrs Hooker was sent to Holloway Prison in London.

87 Lewis had smudged his signature when using a piece of blotting paper.

88 This letter was published in The Times Literary Supplement (9 May 1952), p. 313, under the title ‘The Sheepheard’s Slumber’.

89 Prince Caspian.

90 Penelope was the seven-year-old daughter of Mr and Mrs Berners-Price.

91 Charles Gore, The Sermon on the Mount (1896), Appendix III, p. 215: ‘Christ, by a distinct act of legislation, prohibited divorce among His disciples in such sense as allows of remarriage, except in the case of adultery of one of the parties.’

92 Conference of Bishops of the Anglican Communion, Holden at Lambeth Palace in July 1888 (London: SPCK, 1888), pp. 43-4: ‘No. 3.–Divorce…a. That, inasmuch as our Lord’s words expressly forbid divorce, except in the case of fornication or adultery, the Christian Church cannot recognize divorce in any other than the excepted case, or give any sanction to the marriage of any person who has been divorced contrary to this law, during the life of the other party.

‘b. That under no circumstances ought the guilty party, in the case of a divorce for fornication or adultery, to be regarded, during the lifetime of the innocent party, as a fit recipient of the blessing of the Church on marriage.

‘c. That, recognizing the fact that there always has been a difference of opinion in the Church on the question whether our Lord meant to forbid marriage to the innocent party in a divorce for adultery, the Conference recommends that the clergy should not be instructed to refuse the sacraments or other privileges of the Church to those who, under civil sanction, are thus married.’

93 Sir Godfrey Rolles Driver (1892-1975), Old Testament scholar and Semitic philologist, was elected a Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1919 and was Professor of Semitic Philology, 1938-62. He was intimately concerned with the New English Bible, and his works include The Judaean Scrolls (1965). Young was interested in writing a novel based on the Book of Judith from the Old Testament Apocrypha.

94 Mrs Goelz was being confirmed in the Episcopal Church.

95 David Cecil, Lord M.: or The Later Life of Lord Melbourne (London: Constable, 1954), p. 6: ‘[Lord Melbourne] loved to defend the indefensible. “What I like about the Order of the Garter,” he once remarked, “is that there is no damned merit about it.”‘

96 Sir Fred Hoyle (1915-2001) was Plumian Professor of Astronomy at Cambridge University, and the founder of the Institute of Theoretical Astronomy.

97 ‘writer of extended romances’.

98 Edmund Spenser, Epíthalamíon (1595).

99 Vera Mathews had married K. H. Gebbert, and they were now living at Sun Valley Lodge, Sun Valley, Idaho, where Mr Gebbert had was working.

100 Since 21 December 1951 Griffiths had been at the Benedictine priory at Pluscarden, Elgin, Moray, Scotland, where he was novice master.

101 Konrad Z. Lorenz, King Solomon’s Ring: New Light on Animal Ways (1952).

102 The top of this letter was torn off, and with it the date and salutation.

103 During the Summer Term 1952 Vanauken sent Lewis copies of his ‘Oxford Sonnets’: ‘I sent round the whole six sonnets, though he had seen two of them, to C. S. Lewis, and he replied, in part: “I think all the sonnets really good. The Sands is v. good, indeed. So is Advent, perhaps it is best. (L. 5 is a corker)” ‘(Vanauken, A Severe Mercy, ch. 5, p. 123). All six sonnets are included in A Severe Mercy.

104 ibid., ch. 4, p. 100, ‘The Gap’, iii, 1-4: ‘Between the probable and proved there yawns/A gap. Afraid to jump, we stand absurd,/Then see behind us sink the ground and, worse,/Our very standpoint crumbling.’

105 See Austin and Katharine Farrer in the Biographical Appendix.

106 Katharine Farrer, The Missing Link (London: Collins, 1952). This was the first of Farrer’s detective novels.

107 i.e., Martyn Skinner’s The Return of Arthur: Merlin.

108 Farrer, The Missing Link, ch. 11, p. 141: ‘He moodily watched Plummer and Thomas go into the watchman’s hut and turned towards the darkness and the familiar devil of the stairs.’ This sentence was changed in the Penguin paperback of 1955 to read: ‘He moodily watched Plummer and Thomas go into the watchman’s hut and turned towards the darkness to wrestle with his hopes and despairs.’

109 Ibid., p. 127: ‘not families, family-allowances’ etc.

110 i.e., a character in one of the novels of Charles Williams.

111 John Milton, At a Vacation Exercise in the College, part Latin, part English (1673), ‘The Latin Speeches ended, the English thus began’, 29-30: ‘Yet I had rather, if I were to choose,/Thy service in some graver subject use.’

112 Miss Marg-riette Montgomery was writing from San Antonio, Texas.

113 See the biography of Rudolf Steiner, founder of Anthroposophy, in CL I, p. 671n.

114 i.e., Owen Barfield and Cecil Harwood.

115 Lewis used this German word in SBJ, ch. 1, to mean the ‘intense longing’ or ‘Joy’ which played a large part in his conversion.

116 Mark 15:31.

117 Charles Williams, He Came Down from Heaven (1938), ‘The Practice of Substituted Love’.

118 William Borst, an editor in the college department of Harcourt, Brace & World, was handling Lewis’s essay on Spenser for Major British Writers.

119 Spenser, The Faerie Queene, I, i, 2, 1-2: ‘But on his brest a bloudie Crosse he bore/ The deare remembrance of his dying Lord.’

120 Hsin-Chang Chang was born in China. He attended the University of Shanghai before taking a D. Phil, in English from Edinburgh University. For some years he was a lecturer in English at the University of Malaya in Singapore. In 1959 he returned to England to become University Lecturer in Chinese. He later became University Lecturer in Chinese Studies and Fellow of Wolfson College, Cambridge. He is the author of Allegory and Courtesy in Spenser: A Chinese View (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1955) and Chinese Literature, 3 vols (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1973-83). In ‘Memories’, In Search of C. S. Lewis, ed. Stephen Schofield (South Plainfield, New Jersey: Bridge Publishing Co., 1983), Chang said (p. 104): ‘I did not then realize, as I have since come to think…that we had much in common. For his hero was Sir Philip Sidney…and Sidney, too, was mine. And indeed Sidney had embodied in his life both chivalry and courtesy. My ingrained belief that a definite code ought to govern the tone of one’s writing as well as one’s conduct—which in essence is Confucian but not uninfluenced by European chivalry—must have appealed to Lewis and made him readier, in later years, to accept me as a friend. Certainly a vein of chivalry underlies all his own writings, and this explains for me the style and verve of his literary criticism.’

121 Monsignor Ferdinand Vandry (1887-1967), Rector of Université Laval, Quebec, wrote to Lewis on 6 June 1952 to say the University wanted to confer on him an Honorary Doctorate of Literature. No difficulties were put in the way of Lewis receiving the degree in absentia, and it was duly conferred upon him on 22 September 1952.

122 1 Corinthians 12:27.

123 The two nonsense poems referred to are the one reproduced above, and ‘Awake, My Lute!’, published in The Atlantic Monthly, CLXXII (November 1943), pp. 113, 115, and reprinted in Poems and CR

124 Rudyard Kipling, Just So Stories (1902).

125 A vol is a heraldic symbol consisting of a pair of outstretched wings, connected together at the shoulders without any bird’s body in the middle.

* Except the Unbelievable, of course: he has more sense than we have!

126 It is not known which of the letters to Borst this undated poem, in the style of Spenser’s Faerie Queene, accompanied. It seems likely that it was sent with the letter of 22 June 1952.

127 In 1950-1 Bodle trained at the Department of Education of the Deaf at Manchester University, and at this time she was teaching at the Manchester Royal School for the Deaf.

128 Helen Keller, The Story of My Life (New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1903). Born blind and deaf, Helen Keller (1880-1968) learned to read, write and speak from her teacher, Anne Sullivan. She graduated from Radcliffe College, and lectured widely on behalf of deaf people.

129 Roger Lancelyn Green, From the World’s End: A Fantasy (Leicester: E. Ward, [1948]).

130 See Lewis’s comments on George Rostrevor Hamilton’s The Tell-Tale Article: A Critical Approach to Modern Poetry (1949) in the letter to Hamilton of 14 August 1949 (CL II, pp. 966-7).

131 David Craigie, Dark Atlantis (1951).

132 ‘Orichalcum’ is golden copper.

133 Blessed Virgin Mary.

134 Of his poem, ‘The Pilgrim’s Problem’, first published in The Month, VII (May 1952), p. 275, and reprinted in Poems and CP.

135 See the letter to Greeves of 18 September 1916 (CL I, pp. 221-3).

136 See the biography of Geoffrey Bles in CL II, p. 554n.

137 ‘Mycroft’ was Bles’s name for Warnie, a joke the Lewis brothers greatly enjoyed. Mycroft is the name Sir Arthur Conan Doyle gave the mysterious elder brother of Sherlock Holmes. He is first mentioned in ‘The Adventure of the Greek Interpreter’ in Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (1894), in which Holmes says: ‘My brother would be the greatest criminal agent that ever lived. But he has no ambition and no energy. He would not even go out of his way to verify his own solutions, and would rather be considered wrong than take the trouble to prove himself right.’ The mysterious brother is also mentioned in ‘The Adventure of the Bruce–Partington Plans’ in His Last Bow (1917). In that story Holmes says Mycroft ‘has the tidiest and most orderly brain, with the greatest capacity for storing facts, of any man living’.

138 Lewis was referring to Le Lion et la Sorcière Blanche, trans. Émile-R. Blanchet (Paris: Librairie Hachette, 1952), the French translation of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

139 Le Lion et la Sorcière Blanche, ch. 17, p. 185: ‘great shame would we have’.

140 Mere Christianity.

141 On ‘Parson’s Pleasure’ see CL I, p. 304n.

142 Young published his essay on Lewis’s trilogy as ‘The Contented Christian’ in the Cambridge Journal, V (July 1952), pp. 603-12.

143 Driver probably had in mind Richard Capper’s Judith: An Historical Drama (1867).

144 Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game, trans. Mervyn Savill (London: Aldus, 1949).

145 In George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949).

146 Horace, Ars Poética, 70-1: ‘Multa renascentur quae iam cecidere, cadentque/quae nunc surit in honore.’ (The next word in the poem, vocabula, refers not to ‘many things’ but ‘many words’–words that go in and out of favour in literary language.)

147 i.e., Anthroposophists. See the letter to Montgomery of 10 June 1952.

148 Lewis was referring to the Latin poem, ‘Dies Irae, dies ilia’ (‘Day of wrath’) by Thomas of Celano (c. 1200-1260), companion and biographer of St Francis of Assisi. The poem forms a part of the requiem Masses in the Roman Missal.

149 Revelation 22:20.

150 John 13:34.

151 John 16:22.

152 Bodle was returning to New Zealand to teach at the School for the Deaf, Titirangi, Auckland, and she had asked for Lewis’s prayers.

153 Charles Williams Dunn (1915–) was one of the editors of Major British Writers. He was also editing at this time A Chaucer Reader: Selections from the Canterbury Tales (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1952). Dunn was the editor (with E. T. Byres) of Middle English Literature (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1973) and many other works.

154 Lewis had just finished his mammoth English Literature in the Sixteenth Century.

* And also has real grammar, not like Middle English!

155 One part of the examination system at Oxford University consists in a spoken or viva voce (‘by the living voice’) examination.

156 George Sayer’s cat.

157 See Anne Barbara Scott in the Biographical Appendix. She had attended Charles Williams’s lectures when an undergraduate, and she and Williams became close friends.

158 The draft of Scott’s letter of 26 July 1952 referred to here by Lewis is preserved in the Bodleian Library (MS. Eng. lett. c. 220/7, fols. 10-14).

159 In his Commentary in Arthurian Torso, Containing the Posthumous Fragment of The Figure of Arthur by Charles Williams and A Commentary on The Arthurian Poems of Charles Williams (London: Oxford University Press, 1948), Lewis wrote: ‘Between this poem and the Last Voyage we should probably place The Meditation of Mordred. The doom of Logres is almost accomplished. Gawaine, the king’s nephew, son of Morgause and Lot, whom Williams calls “the canonical Gawaine” because the canon or code of earthly honour is his only principle, urged on by his half-brother Mordred, has revealed to Arthur the loves of Guinivere and Lancelot’ (ch. 5, p. 177).

160 ‘The Meditation of Mordred’ in Charles Williams, The Region of the Summer Stars (1944). Scott said in her letter: ‘(1) “Canonical G.” is surely the ecclesiastical equivalent of “legitimate G.”–his birth was approved by the laws of both Church & State, as that of Mordred was forbidden by both. Thus, in the Meditation, M. refers to the K. as “my uncanonical father” ‘(Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. lett. c. 220/7, fol. 13).

161 Williams, Taliessin Through Logres, ‘The Departure of Merlin’, XIII, 4.

162 Scott asked in her letter: ‘(2) Is not “the world’s base” Caucasia, & “the worm in the world’s base” the Caucasian women, all loving naturally as opposed to arch-naturally? Guinevere’s vocation was to “exhibit the glory” so clearly & resplendently to the women of Logres that they should not be able to help being “brought to a flash of seeing” (or as my husband more forcibly puts it “her job was to make the silly ones sit up & take notice”)’ (Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. lett. c. 220/7, fol. 13).

163 Williams, The Region of the Summer Stars, ‘The Prayers of the Pope’, pp. 46-55.

164 Arthurian Torso, ‘The Grail and the Morte’, p. 180: ‘In The Prayers of the Pope we are invited to study more fully this extinguishing of lights. The situation which “the young Pope Deodatus, Egyptian-born” contemplates is of course very like that which Williams contemplated in 1944 and which we still contemplate in 1946. But the poem is not simply a tract for the time. We are seeing, partly, the real present; partly the imaginary world of the poem; partly the real past, the division of Christendom which culminated with the breach between Pope and Patriarch in 1054 and the great retreat of Christendom before Islam which had preceded it.’ In her letter of 26 July 1952 Scott observed: ‘(3) About the “women of Burma” in The Prayers of the Pope, there was an explanation on the level you reject as well as the other, & far more important, meanings. Towards the end of my time at Oxford I went to walk, on most afternoons…with Charles Williams…& at one such time when he was working on that poem, he was speaking of the difficulty of devising some method of defeat for the octopus & saying, of course playfully but seriously in the game, that points in the Taliessin poems had coincided with points in the war so often that he must hurry up and do it, or the Japanese would have taken India before he had thought how to stop them’ (Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. lett. c. 220/7, fol. 13).

165 Williams, Taliessin Through Logres, ‘The Coming of Galahad’: XIII, 1-3: ‘But he: “Proofs were; roofs were: 1/ what more? Creeds were; songs were. Four/zones divide the empire from the Throne’s firmament.” ‘Scott commented: ‘I am sure that he said the “proofs”, “roofs”, “creeds” & “songs” were connected forwards with the four planetary Zones, & not backwards with the five Houses…“Proofs” I suppose might appropriately be connected with Mercury, the Lord of Language. Could “roofs”, as providing shelter which you can make use of if you choose, be connected with preferences? “Creeds” seem to fit “irony & defeated irony”, the irony being in the absurdity of saying, as creeds must, this is Thou about Him of whom we must instantly add neither is this Thou, & the defeated irony in the absolute necessity of doing just that. And Saturn, beyond the rest & nearest to, though still utterly divided from, “the Throne’s firmament” might fitly represent poetry which Charles certainly held to be able to express truth in a way which the prose of creeds could not’ (Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. lett. c. 220/7, fol. 14).

166 Before the presidential election of 1952 Robert A. Taft (1889-1953) ran against Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890-1969) as candidate for the Republican Party. Eisenhower was chosen, and in the election, held on 4 November, he defeated the Democratic candidate, Adlai Stevenson.

167 i.e., Mrs Frank Jones.

168 Green met Lewis at the Woodside Hotel, Liverpool, on 9 September. They visited Beaumaris Castle and spent that night at the Bulkeley Arms Hotel. Lewis spent the following night as the guest of Roger and June Lancelyn Green at Poulton Hall, Bebington, returning to Oxford on 11 September.

169 H. Rider Haggard, The Virgin of the Sun (1922).

170 Thank-you notes addressed to one’s hostess.

171 Roger Lancelyn Green, The Story of Lewis Carroll (London: Methuen, 1949).

172 Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass, ch. 5. Asked by the White Queen how old she is, Alice answers, ‘I’m seven and a half, exactly’ ‘“You needn’t say ‘exactually’,” the Queen remarked. “I can believe it without that.” ‘

173 For the biography of Florence (Michal) Williams, wife of Charles Williams, see Charles Walter Stansby Williams in the Biographical Appendix to CL II, pp. 1081-6.

174 Michael Williams (1922-2000) was the son of Charles and Michal Williams.

175 In his diary entry for 5 November 1956 Warnie wrote of the correspondence between Joy Gresham and his brother: ‘Until 10th January 1950 neither of us had ever heard of her; then she appeared in the mail as just another American fan, Mrs. W. L. Gresham from the neighbourhood of New York. With however the difference that she stood out from the ruck by her amusing and well-written letters, and soon J and she had become “pen-friends.” ‘(BF, p. 244). Unfortunately, none of Joy’s letters to Lewis has come to light, and the only letters from Lewis to Joy that survive are those in this volume of 22 December 1953, 11 March and 19 November 1959.

176 See the passage on Joy Gresham following the letter to Margaret Sackville Hamilton of 23 September 1952.

177 i.e., Anthroposophists. See the letter to Montgomery of 10 June 1952.

178 ‘To cap it all!’ He was referring to Mere Christianity.

179 John Milton, L’Allegro (1645), 121-2: ‘With store of ladies, whose bright eyes/Rain influence, and judge the prize.’

180 Henry James, Letters, ed. Percy Lubbock, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1920). The copy referred to here had once belonged to Albert Lewis, and it had been given to Arthur.

181 The hotel where they had been staying: see the heading of the letter on p. 220.

182 This letter is a reply to a question Goodridge asked Lewis about John Milton’s Cornus (1637).

183 Lewis was planning to give his course of lectures on the ‘Prolegomena to Renaissance Poetry’ during Hilary Term, 1953.

184 Milton, Comus, 459-72.

185 ibid., opening stage direction: ‘The first Scene discovers a wild wood./The Attendant Spirit descends or enters.’

186 ibid., 1.

187 ibid., 3.

188 ibid., 4.

189 ibid., 980:.

190 Mrs Margaret Sackville Hamilton wrote to Walter Hooper from 4 Pagoda Avenue, Richmond, Surrey, on 31 May 1968: ‘I am a housewife, mother & grandmother of no academic qualification at all. However, being a lover of T. S. Eliot I wrote & asked C. S. Lewis after reading “Beyond Personality” Chapter III for more information re Ever Present Time & by return of post, in his own handwriting, I received the enclosed’ (Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. lett. c. 220/2, fol. 1).

191 Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, with the English translations of’ ‘I.T.’ (1690), rev. H. F. Stewart (London: Heinemann, Loeb Classical Library, 1918).

192 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (1781).

193 Friedrich von Hügel, Eternal Life: A Study of its Implications and Applications (1912).

194 Arthur Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World (1928).

195 John William Dunne, An Experiment with Time (1927).

196 John William Dunne, The Serial Universe (London: Faber & Faber, 1934).

197 2 Peter 2:8: ‘One day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day’

198 See Joy Gresham Lewis in the Biographical Appendix.

199 See David Lindsay Gresham in the Biographical Appendix.

200 See Douglas Howard Gresham in the Biographical Appendix.

201 George Sayer, Jack: C. S. Lewis and His Times (London: Macmillan, 1988; 2nd ed. Hodder & Stoughton, 1997), ch. 19, pp. 214-15.

202 The Rev. Patrick Kevin Irwin (1907-65) was born on 2 October 1907 and read Modern History at Brasenose College, Oxford, graduating in 1929. He read Theology at Ely Theological College in 1930, and was ordained in 1931. He served as Curate of Helmsley, Yorkshire, 1930-3, and of Goldthorpe, 1934-8. He was Vicar of Sawston, 1941-2, Vicar of St Augustine, Wisbech, 1947-58, Rural Dean of Wisbech, 1954-8, and Rector of Fletton, Ely, 1958-65.

203 Charles Wickliffe Moorman (1925-96) was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, on 24 May 1925. After serving in the Second World War, he graduated from Kenyon College, Ohio, in 1949. He earned Master’s and Doctoral degrees from Tulane University, New Orleans, Louisiana, in 1951 and 1954. He joined the English Department at the University of Southern Mississippi (then Mississippi Southern College), Hattiesburg, Mississippi, in 1954 and became department head in 1956, a position he held for twelve years. Moorman served as Dean of the Graduate School for two years, and as Academic Vice-president for twelve years. He stepped down in 1980 to resume full-time teaching and research, retiring in 1990. An expert in both Middle English and modern English literature, over the years he taught a wide variety of undergraduate and graduate courses. He died on 3 May 1996. His works include Myth and Medieval Literature: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (1956), The Precincts of Felicity: The Augustinian City of the Oxford Christians (1966) and A Knyght There Was: The Evolution of the Knight in Literature (1967).

204 Moorman was collecting material for a work published as Arthurian Triptych: Myth Materials in Charles Williams, C. S. Lewis, and T. S. Eliot (1960).

205 Charles Williams, All Hallows’ Eve (1945).

206 1 Corinthians 13:13.

207 The three principles which Williams set great store by, and which run through his works, were Co-inherence, Exchange and Substitution. They are summarized in ‘Williams and the Arthuriad’, ch. 3, p. 123 of Arthurian Torso.

208 The Figure of Arthur, Arthurian Torso, pp. 5-90.

209 That Hideous Strength, ch. 13, part V, p. 316: ‘None hears us save the last of the seven bears of Logres’; ch. 12, vi, p. 290: ‘Who knows what the technique of the Atlantean Circle was really like?’

210 ibid., Preface, p. xii: ‘Those who would like to learn further about Numinor and the True West must (alas!) await the publication of much that still exists only in the MSS of my friend, Professor J. R. R. Tolkien.’ Lewis had in mind that work of Tolkien’s published as The Silmarillion, ed. Christopher Tolkien (London: Allen & Unwin, 1977), ‘Akallabêth: The Downfall of Numenor’, pp. 259-82. In a letter to Roger Lancelyn Green of 17 July 1971, in Green and Hooper, C. S. Lewis: A Biography, p. 210, Tolkien said: ‘With regard to “Numinor”, in the early days of our association Jack used to come to my house and I read aloud to him The Silmarillion so far as it had then gone…Numinor was his version of a name he had never seen written (Numenor) and no doubt was influenced by numinous.’

211 The ‘romance’ was of course Tolkien’s trilogy, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (1954), The Two Towers (1954) and The Return of the King (1955).

212 See Phoebe Hesketh in the Biographical Appendix.

213 Phoebe Hesketh, No Time for Cowards: Poems, Preface by Herbert Palmer (London: Heinemann, 1952).

214 ibid., p. 8, ‘The Secret in the Stone’, 5.

215 ibid., 10.

216 ibid., p. 9, 49.

217 ibid., ‘Zebras’, p. 39, 10-11.

218 ibid., p. 81, ‘Retrospection’, 4-5: ‘Where half-hearts join while Time’s black finger races/Towards the evening train.’

219 ibid., p. 72, ‘I Am Not Resigned’, 18.

220 Richard Thomas Church (1893-1972), poet, critic and novelist, author of Over the Bridge (1955).

221 Greeves’s dog.

222 See the letter to Phoebe Hesketh of 4 October 1952.

223 i.e., No Time for Cowards.

224 The Rev. John Rowland, B. Sc, was writing from 115 Mackie Avenue, Brighton.

225 The Northern Whig was a Belfast newspaper which began in 1824, and continued as Northern Whig and Belfast Post from 1919 until 1963 when it ceased publication.

226 Vera Henry, Mrs Moore’s goddaughter, sometimes acted as housekeeper for the Lewis brothers.

227 Roger Lancelyn Green, A. E. W. Mason, 1865-1948 (London: M. Parrish, 1952).

228 ‘trust one who has experience’.

* who has a suspicious headache himself at the moment. Who knows!…

229 This letter was published in the Church Times, CXXXV (24 October 1952), p. 763, under the title ‘Canonization’.

230 See Eric Pitt, ‘Canonization, Church Times, CXXXV (17 October 1952), p. 743.

231 The Catholic Encyclopedia: An International Work of Reference on the Constitution, Doctrine, Discipline, and History of the Catholic Church, 15 vols, ed. Charles G. Herbermann, etc. (New York: Robert Appleton Co., 1907-12).

232 A theological term signifying the honour paid to the saints.

233 John Oliver Reed (1929-) was born on 16 December 1929 in London, the son of E O. Reed. In 1941 he was awarded, on the result of the Junior County Scholarship Examination, a Foundation Scholarship to Bancroft’s School, Woodford. In December 1946 he was elected on examination to a Demyship at Magdalen College, Oxford. Before going up to Oxford he did his National Service, arriving at Magdalen in 1949. There he read English under Lewis, taking his BA in 1952. Reed was briefly an assistant master at Winchester College, after which he held assistant lectureships at the University of Edinburgh and at Kings College, London. From 1957 until he retired in 1996 he taught at universities in Africa and the Far East. See the letter to Reed of 8 July 1947 in the Supplement.

234 This letter to Reed is written on a letter Lewis received from A. R. Woolley, Educational Secretary of the Oxford University Appointments Committee, dated 24 October 1952. Woolley said: ‘The Headmaster of Winchester tells me that he will need to appoint either in 1953 or 1954 a man with a good degree in English…If there is anyone among your pupils who you think might be interested in this opening I wonder if you would kindly suggest to him that he make an appointment to come and see me.’

235 At this time Reed was in Oxford beginning a B. Litt. degree. Following Lewis’s suggestion, he sought the advice of the President of Magdalen College, Thomas Sherrer Ross Boase (1898-1974). In the end Reed was advised to give up work on his B. Litt. and take the job at Winchester College which began in January 1953. By mid 1953 he had accepted an appointment at the University of Edinburgh.

236 See the letter to Hesketh of 4 October 1952.

237 Mrs Johnson was given the pseudonym ‘Mrs Ashtorï in L.

238 Mrs Johnson asked ‘What is your correct title?’ The following notes indicate the questions she asked (the original of her list is in the Wade Center).

239 ‘Do people get another chance after death? I refer to Charles Williams.’

240 ‘What would happen if I had died an atheist?’

241 ‘What happens to Jews who are still waiting for the Messiah?’

242 ‘Is the Bible infallible?’

243 Lewis originally wrote ‘not read with attention’, but altered this to ‘without’, presumably overlooking that he had written ‘not read’. But his meaning is ‘isolated from their context and read without attention…’

244 фονχεύσετς as in Matthew 19:18.

245 άποχτεíναι as in John 8:37.

246 ‘If a thief killed Eileen would I be wrong to want him to die?’

247 ‘Is killing in self defense all right?’

248 Romans 13:4.

249 Luke 3:14.

250 Matthew 8:10.

251 ‘Will we recognize our loved ones in Heaven?’

252 Matthew 22:4.

253 Matthew 22:2-12; Luke 12:36.

254 Hebrews 11:16; 12:22.

255 Revelation 5:8-14.

256 ‘If Wayne didn’t go to Heaven I wouldn’t want to either. Would his name be erased from my brain?’

257 ‘Do you like sweets?’

258 ‘Are you handsome?’

259 ‘Tell me the story about the barber.’

260 Edward T. Dell Jr had written to Bles on 30 October 1952 that those essays by Lewis ‘chiefly found in pamphlet form or as articles in the “Spectator” might, with an appropriate preface, make an interesting book of essays…There is also a sermon that might be included as well. It was delivered in a church in the midlands on Apr. 7, 1946…I imagine Dr Lewis would scoff at the idea of a reprinting of his first book Spirits in Bondage but to me the book seems to merit it just as much as did Dymer’ (Bodleian Library, Dep. c. 771, fol. 9).

261 On 7 April 1946 Lewis preached a sermon entitled ‘Miserable Offenders’ in St Matthew’s Church, Northampton. It was included in a booklet, Five Sermons by Laymen (April-May 1946), and is reprinted in EC.

262 Mrs Shelburne, formerly an Anglican or Episcopalian, in 1951 converted to the Catholic Church.

263 See J. R. R. Tolkien in the Biographical Appendix to CL I, pp. 1022-4.

264 Lewis had read the typescript of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings in October 1949, and he wrote to his friend about it on 27 October 1949 (CL II, pp. 990-1). Since then Tolkien had been trying to get it published, hoping whoever published it would also publish the unfinished Silmarillion. Rayner Unwin, the son of the publisher Sir Stanley Unwin (1884-1968) of Allen & Unwin publishers, believed it to be a very great work and his father left it to him to decide whether the firm should accept it. After calculations and discussions with others in Allen & Unwin, Rayner wrote to Tolkien on 10 November 1952 saying the firm would like to publish the book under a profit-sharing agreement, under which Tolkien would receive nothing until the sales of the book had covered its publishing costs, but would afterwards share equally with the publishers any profits that might accrue. Tolkien was delighted The Lord of the Rings had been accepted, and he wrote at once to tell Lewis what had happened. Lewis replied with this letter.

265 ‘without trace’.

266 Priscilla was Tolkien’s daughter.

267 Katharine Farrer had been corresponding with Tolkien about The Lord of the Rings.

268 MacDonald, Diary of an Old Soul, November 3: ‘Have pity on us for the look of things,/Where blank denial stares us in the face./Although the serpent mask have lied before/It fascinates the bird.’

269 Matthew 27:46; Mark 15:34.

270 Romans 12:5.

271 Mrs Van Deusen may have suggested sending Lewis the autobiography of the American political writer Whittaker Chambers (1901-61), best known for his accusation and testimony against Alger Hiss (1904-96), the architect of the Yalta Conference and Secretary General of the San Francisco conference that created the United Nations. Chambers’ autobiography, Witness, was published in 1952.

272 Blamires had applied for a job in Edinburgh.

273 The US edition of Mere Christianity was published by Macmillan of New York on 11 November 1952.

274 The Voyage of the ‘Dawn Treader’.

275 During the autumn of 1952 the Church Times featured a number of pencil drawings of ‘Portraits of Personalities’; that of Lewis, by Stanley Parker, appeared in the Church Times, CXXXV (21 November 1952), p. 844.

276 This was possibly the working title for an intended collection of Lewis’s essays.

277 Serena is a young lady whose adventures are recounted in Spenser, The Faerie Queene, Book VI.

278 The Red Cross Knight.

279 Spenser, The Faerie Queene, I, x, 61, 8: ‘Thou Saint George shalt called bee.’

280 There is no evidence that this story was ever published.

281 H. G. Wells, Kipps (1905).

282 e.g. H. G. Wells, The War of the Worlds (1898), ch. 6: ‘You may figure to yourself the hum of voices along the road in the gloaming.’

283 Christian Behaviour (New York: Macmillan, 1943).

284 ‘Luke 11:26: the last state of that man is worse than the first’ Matthew 12:45.

* There are v. important exceptions. Also, on further thought, I don’t believe much in ‘French, American, or English people.’ There are only individuals really.

285 i.e., Joy Gresham.

286 For a while Joy and Bill Gresham dabbled in Ron Hubbard’s philosophy of Dianetics or spiritual healing. See Lyle Dorsett, And God Came In: The Extraordinary Story of Joy Davidman, Her Life and Marriage to C. S. Lewis (New York: Macmillan, 1983), ch. 3, p. 71.

287 See the biography of the Honourable Phyllis Elinor Sandeman (1895-1986) in CL II, p. 788n. Mrs Sandeman was brought up in Lyme Park, one of the most magnificent houses in Cheshire. Home to the Legh family for 600 years, the original Tudor house was transformed by the Venetian architect, Giacomo Leoni, into an Italianate palace. In 1946 Mrs Sandeman’s brother, the 3rd Baron Newton, Richard Legh, gave Lyme Park to the National Trust.

296 Lewis had put his finger on ‘Mrs’ while the ink was still wet.

288 Phyllis Sandeman, Treasure on Earth: A Country House at Christmas, illustrated by the author (London: Herbert Jenkins, 1952), an account of a Christmas spent at Lyme Park during her childhood.

289 Percy Lubbock, Earlham (1922).

290 ‘we others’.

291 Alfred, Lord Tennyson, The Lady of Shalott, And Other Poems (1833), ‘The Lotus Eaters’, IV, 8-9: ‘All things are taken from us, and become/Portions and parcels of the dreadful Past.’

292 Sandeman, Treasure on Earth, p. 26: ‘It was a large lofty room with walls of darkly gloomy cedar-wood, Corinthian pilasters arranged in pairs dividing the long panels and each of these adorned down its centre with swags of elaborate wood-carvings. From looped garlands and palm leaves and cupids’ heads hung a host of diverse objects, bunches of fruit and flowers, musical instruments, trophies, fish and birds, all carved to the life in soft yellow pear-wood by the hand of the master—the one and only Grinling Gibbons.’ In Mrs Sandeman’s book the owners of the house–the Newtons–are given the pseudonym ‘Vayne’. Grinling Gibbons (1648-1721) was the most famous English woodcarver of all time.

293 ibid., p. 62: ‘They would begin with Grace said by the Canon and then the meal would proceed eaten off silver plates, not so pleasant as the china service because scratchy under the knife and fork.’

294 ibid., p. 83: ‘The Long Gallery…could be a little frightening at night, and generally Phyllis avoided going there alone after dark. One night after summer holidays, however, resentful and unhappy from what she considered an unjust rebuke by her parents, she had run there, and flinging herself on one of the deep window seats, burst into tears of self-pity But almost at once, breaking in upon her grief with a gentle but increasing pressure, she seemed to detect a sympathy in the surrounding atmosphere as if unseen presences thronging about her were offering their love and consolation.’

295 Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (1847), ch. 2.

297 Genesis 15:1; Luke 2:10.

298 The Ichneutai of Sophocles: The Searching Satyrs, the Fragment Freely Translated into English Rhyming Verse and Restored by Roger Lancelyn Green (Leicester: E. Ward, 1946).

299 Lewis had sent Evans a copy of Prince Caspian, and he was here referring to the first illustration in Chapter 3. Pauline Baynes wrote to Walter Hooper on 15 August 1967: ‘[Lewis] only once asked for an alteration–& then with many apologies—when I (with my little knowledge) had drawn one of the characters rowing a boat facing the wrong direction’ (CL II, p. 1020).

300 Having returned to New Zealand, Bodle sent Lewis a little book of prayers for deaf children that she had written.

301 John 14:9.

302 John 14:28.

303 Acts 17:27.

304 See Clyde S. Kilby in the Biographical Appendix.

305 Laurence was the second son of Cecil Harwood and Lewis’s godson. See Laurence Harwood in the Biographical Appendix to CL II, pp. 1051-2.

306 At this time Vera Henry was back in her native Ireland. She never recovered from her illness and died in April 1953. The only person at The Kilns who could help with the cooking was the gardener, Fred Paxford (see his biography in CL II, p. 213n). When it was clear that Vera would not be returning, Lewis hired as his housekeeper Mrs Molly Miller, who lived close by in Kiln Lane. There are photographs of Fred Paxford and Molly Miller in Douglas Gilbert and Clyde S. Kilby, C. S. Lewis: Images of His World (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1973), pp. 67, 69.

307 ‘Not to us.’ Psalm 115 (Vulgate): ‘Non nobis, Domine, non nobis; Sed nomini tuo da gloriam’: ‘Not to us, O Lord, not to us, but to your Name give glory.’

308 It is known Joy Gresham left for the United States on 3 January 1953.

309 Bonamy Dobrée (1891-1974) was born in London on 2 February 1891 and educated at Haileybury College and the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich. He served with the Royal Horse Artillery and Royal Field Artillery during the First World War. After the war he went to Christ’s College, Cambridge (1920-1). In the following years he published many scholarly books. In 1936 he was appointed to the Chair of English Literature at the University of Leeds, where he remained until his retirement in 1955. Dobrée was one of the General Editors of the Oxford History of English Literature, and his contribution to the series was English Literature in the Eighteenth Century, 1700-1740 (1959). He died on 3 September 1974.

310 The Wanderer is an Anglo-Saxon poem of 115 lines. This is Lewis’s translation of lines 9-14.

311 Lewis probably meant by this ‘A Normal Male Person’.

* Please forgive. The smudge has a long and complicated history, if you but knew. First I always was a clumsy brute: ten thumbs and not a finger among them.²⁹⁶