Читать книгу Collected Letters Volume Two: Books, Broadcasts and War, 1931–1949 - Клайв Льюис, Клайв Стейплз Льюис, Walter Hooper - Страница 11

TO JANET SPENS (BOD):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry.

Jan 8th 1935

Dear Miss Spens

You will have begun to wonder if your Agape & Eros¹ was lost forever! It is an intensely interesting book. I am inclined to think I disagree with him. His central contrast—that Agape is selfless and Eros self-regarding—seems at first unanswerable: but I wonder if he is not trying to force on the conception of love an antithesis which it is the precise nature of love, in all its forms, to overcome.

Then again, is the contrast between Agape (God active coming to man passive) and Eros (man by desire ascending to God quâ passive object of desire) really so sharp? He might accuse me of a mere play upon words if I pointed out that in Aristotle’s ‘He moves as the beloved’ () there is, after all, an active verb, .² But is this merely a grammatical accident—is it not perhaps the real answer? Can the thing really be conceived in one way or the other? In real life it feels like both, and both, I suspect, are the same. Even on the human level does any one feel that the passive voice of the word beloved is really exclusive—that to attract is a—what do you call it—the opposite of a deponent? However, I must tackle him again. He has shaken me up extremely.³

I was one of a party of four some weeks ago who discussed your parallel between those passages from F.Q. and the Prelude,⁴ and divided—two agreeing with you in finding an important similarity-in-dissimilarity between them, and the other two failing to find any reason why you had brought them together at all. Now for the interesting point. We all gave analyses of the effect which both passages had on us, which disclosed the fact that the opposition were attending exclusively to the things mentioned in the passages, and had apparently no sensation of the immediate all pervading imaginative flavour-and no idea that they ought to look for it, or that there was such a thing. I was astonished and was led on to wonder whether many people read poetry in the same way. If so, no wonder we hear such odd judgements.

Yes—the passage about Genius in the Bower of Blisse⁵ is more difficult than I had remembered. I will tell you sometime how I was trying to take it (I haven’t the book handy)—but I now think my way involves almost impossible syntax. And what on earth does he mean by ‘good Agdistes’⁶-the only Agdistes story I can find is a long nightmare of meaningless cruelties and obscenities. Why ‘good’? I shall have to work at this rather hard. My own work is a book on medieval allegory which will end with a chapter on Spenser, and it is towards that that you have helped me so much. By the bye, one of my party of four (the one who sided with us) maintains that Spenser’s great fault is his prosaic style, but that his stories are so good that they save him. This is not such nonsense as it sounds!

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO CECIL HARWOOD (BOD):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

Feb 5th 1935.

My dear Harwood,

The poem is very good-perfect except for the rather clumsy end of stanza one.

I note your position about the walk you and Beckett are about equally problematical, but for different dates. A pretty tangle!

Yours

C.S.L.

TO OWEN BARFIELD (W):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

[March 1935]

My dear Barfield

What a glorious relief—I thought I was done for. No, I don’t transfer non philosophical letters straight to the W.P.B.:⁷ contrariwise, as soon as [I] see that they deal with contingent, empirical matter of fact, I transfer them to my pocket to note and deal with later: but sometimes (specially if I change my coat) the second part of the plan does not get carried out. I know I am a guiter.⁸

Yes- I would love to go with Beckett & you on the Tuesday and return on Sunday night. Where is the Venue?

I don’t think I can come and stay this Vac. If I find I can I shall just ask myself and you can refuse me if

The Christmas poem is a complete success. The other is perfectly satisfactory stuff but too uncoloured to stand alone: in a context it would come out alright.

Why don’t you send Tertium Quid⁹ to a publisher? Now that P.R.¹⁰ has gone through so easily, I am sure T.Q. would—and they’d make a pretty pair.

I have done about 200 lines of the Aeneid into riming alexandrines: it goes like fun into that metre, and you can reproduce the effect of the hexameter, getting nearly a prose rhythm in the middle and pulling itself together at the end.

Harwood was down for the week end. He gets better and better-not to talk to, you know (in (that respect he gets worse) but just better.

Apparently Sparrow is a great man in military circles.¹¹ My brother is quite impressed at our venturing to walk with him. We are devils of fellows aren’t we?

Did you ever read Jeckyll & Hyde?¹² It is a .¹³

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO PAUL ELMER MORE (PRIN):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford.

April 5th 1935

My dear Mr. More

Your letter gave me a great deal of pleasure. I had thought of sending you that essay as some return for the books you have sent me: but then again I thought that what was kind from you to me would be merely ‘pushing’ from me to you.¹⁴ But I always regretted my decision for I really wanted to know whether we were of one mind on this subject. I am ‘continuing the work’ as best I can. The Criterion (the only likely periodical on other grounds) is closed to me,¹⁵ so I am coming back to the lecture for its original purpose, i.e. a method of publication, I give two or three a year on this kind of subject and get a very good audience-sometimes am even applauded, wh. is rare here.

I mention this, partly no doubt from vanity, but partly because it proves that there is a demand for some literary theory not based, like the prevailing ones, on materialism. (You rightly fixed on that as the real point). In a few years I hope to collect these and publish them: I shall call it a ‘Realistic’ theory of literature, explaining of course that I mean the word in the sense of Plato not of Zola. I wish I knew how many of us there are. Sometimes I suspect that we are more numerous than each of [us] supposes, and that if we can only get together we may blow the whole composite fog (French Symbolism cum Croce cum Eliot with, oddly enough Karl Marx and Neo-Scholasticism somewhere in the background) away by 1950.

I am not ready yet to say anything about your book on Plato’s religion.¹⁶ The immediate reaction is an irrelevant one—a groan at discovering how much less Plato I remember than I thought I did. The main point at issue doubtless is this: are we to continue the Bosanquet¹⁷ and Archer Hind¹⁸ tradition of subtilising the Ancients, or embrace your view that the great thing is to leave uncontaminated their ‘invaluable naïvety’. On the whole I am with you: at least I’m with you as against Archer Hind. But I’m dreadfully muddled, just as I am about the ‘Absolute’ kind of God and your kind. I remain like Boethius in the song ‘stupens de hac lite’.¹⁹ The view I am not holding for the moment always seems unanswerable. Have you read Nygren’s Bros and Agape? It is a closely related problem and leaves me equally puzzled. With many thanks,

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO OWEN BARFIELD (W):

[The Kilns]

April 5th 1935

I hope to arrive at Rudyard (wh. on nearer acquaintance with guidebooks turns out to be Rudyard Lake) at 3.13 on Monday.²⁰

Where reservoys ripple And sun-shadows stipple The beard of the corn. We’ll meet and we’ll kipple We’ll camp and then kipple At Rudyard we’ll kipple From evening to morn.

And then we’ll set off, yes!, Discussing your Orpheus²¹ His meaning and myth, Till fettered by Morpheus, The leaden maced Morpheus, Inaccurate Morpheus At Chapel-en-le Frith.

Good about Field. Find out in Manchester how to pronounce Chapel-en-le Frith and Edale. I have got all necessary maps. I shall be in fine form for yr poem as I am just examining the Newdigate!²²

Can it really come off?

Yrs

C. S. Lewis

TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford.

April 23d 1935

My dear Arthur

It is a weary time since I heard from you and I ought to have answered you before: but though I am in your debt I doubt if my silences are longer than yours. The immediate object of this letter is to ask if I can come and stay a week with you this summer, please. As at present advised any date between July 1st and Oct. 5th will suit me. Now if you could within the next few weeks fix on any date between these two (preferably quand tu seras seul!)²³ it would be a great advantage: for though all that period is at present free I do not know when engagements may begin to creep in. Of course it may not be convenient to have me at all, but I am assuming you would have no scruple about telling me if that were so. I am only anxious that if you are able and willing to have me we shd. not let the thing slip through our fingers as we did last year. If you can’t arrange so far ahead, of course you can’t (what it is to have a brain!) and there we are: but no doubt you see the advantage of so doing if it is possible.

I had seen the reviews of the Powys book²⁴ and also heard (by an accident) what you hint about its contents: therefore I shall not read it. I do not always win even when the enemy attack me in my own lines,²⁵ but the one thing I can do is to make sure that at least I never go out of my way to seek him. What an extraordinary profile Powys has—I suppose you saw the pictures in several papers. I take it he is almost a lunatic? The most interesting story I have read recently is Land Under England by one O’Neill:²⁶ you should try it.

I am just back from my Easter walking tour with Barfield and co., this year in Derbyshire.²⁷ Have you been there? It is appreciably more like my ideal country than any I have yet been [to]. It is limestone mountains: which means, from the practical point of view, that it has the jagg’d sky lines and deep values of ordinary mountainous country, but with this important difference, that owing to the paleness of the rock and the extreme clarity of the rivers, it is light instead of sombre—sublime yet smiling—like the delectable mountains.²⁸ It gives you something the same sensation as Blake’s songs.²⁹

This place is being ruined by building and what was Kiln Lane is turning into a street of council houses.³⁰ Where will it end? If we live to be old there will hardly be any real country left in the South of England.

Give my love to your mother and any other of my friends whom you may meet: and let me have an answer as soon as possible to my question.

Yours

Jack

TO LEO BAKER (BOD):³¹

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

April 28th 1935

My dear Baker

I was very distressed on meeting Barfield this year for a walk (a ghost of its old self for he and I were the only participants) to hear of your illness. It stimulated an impulse that has been hovering in my mind for some time to write to you and to try and pick up some of the old links. That they were ever dropped was, I imagine, chiefly my fault-at least even self-love on my part cannot find any substantial respect in which it could have been yours. Will you forgive me? I think I have learned a little since those days and can promise not to serve you so again.

You must not bother yourself with letter writing while you are unwell, nor need you: for I trust that any news of your state will trickle to me in the end by one channel or another. The last I heard from Barfield was a little more encouraging. Beyond wishing you well, I cannot enlarge on the subject: almost anything said from a well man to a sick man seems an impertinence.

My father is dead and my brother has retired from the army and now lives with us. I have deep regrets about all my relations with my father (but thank God they were best at the end). I am going bald. I am a Christian. Professionally I am chiefly a medievalist. I think that is all my news up to date.

I suppose you have heard from, or at least of, the others fairly regularly. I don’t know if you met the new addition to our party before you left—namely Hanbury Sparrow, a Lt. Colonel and all that. Barfield picked him up somewhere on the continent: he has written a good book called ‘The Landlocked Gate’ and a bad one called ‘Gilt-Edged Insecurity’.³² I mention him to boast of our power of assimilation, for tho’ an Anthroposophist and an author he remains very much a colonel and a man of the world—so that when on the last walk but one we heard him and Beckett agreeing that ‘you could now get quite a decent suit for fifteen guineas’, the rest of us felt this element in the firm was at last adequately represented.

Beckett, by the way, I am a little nervous about: he is becoming a real bureaucrat—but I trust his very delightful family (whom I recently met for the first time) will save him. But you can imagine the whole scene of him and Sparrow together: and how that bursts on the unconscious pin-point of Field or passes unobserved over the rustic, almost parochial, solidity of Cecil.

Barfield is writing a play—or a masque or a ballet rather—on Orpheus and Eurydice. You shd. get him to send it to you if you are well enough to care for such things. It is excellent and ultra poetical in matter (poetry itself), plain to baldness in style. A funny change from the Barfield of the Tower. But how archaic that sounds now! I hardly write anything these days except things proper to a don. I suppose we have all lived to discover that we are not great men, and not to mind: there are better things than that in the world, and out of it.

All this may be silly chat—as letters from home so often were to a man in the front line, which, I know, is where you are at present. We have so spoiled language that I cannot even say God bless you without pausing to try and explain that I mean the words in their literal sense.

Don’t attempt to reply unless some day you feel quite up to it and apt for it.

Yours,

C. S. Lewis

TO PAUL ELMER MORE (PRIN):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

May 23rd 1935

Dear Mr. More

Very many thanks for the American Review.³³ It contains only one of the articles you mention, the other, I suppose, having been postponed. I am pretty sure I should agree with you about Joyce if I had read him, but I never have, and would as soon choose a treadmill for my recreation.

There may be many reasons why you do not share my dislike of Eliot, but I hardly know why you should be surprised at it. On p. 154 of the article on Joyce you yourself refer to him as ‘a great genius expending itself on the propagation of irresponsibility’. To me the ‘great genius’ is not apparent: the other thing is. Surely it is natural that I should regard Eliot’s work as a very great evil. He is the very spear head of that attack on ³⁴ which you deplore. His constant profession of humanism and his claim to be a ‘classicist’ may not be consciously insincere, but they are erroneous. The plea that his poems of disintegration are all satiric, are intended as awful warnings, is the common plea of all these literary traitors to humanity. So Juvenal, Wycherley, Byron excuse their pornography: so Eliot himself excuses Joyce. His intention only God knows. I must be content to judge his work by its fruits, and I contend that no man is fortified against chaos by reading the Waste Land,³⁵ but that most men are by it infected with chaos.

The opposite plea rests on a very elementary confusion between poetry that represents disintegration and disintegrated poetry. The Inferno is not infernal poetry: the Waste Land is. His criticism tells the same tale. He may say he is a classicist, but his sympathy with depraved poets (Marlowe, Jonson, Webster) is apparent: but he shows no real love of any disciplined, and magnanimous writer save Dante. Of Homer, Sophocles, Virgil, Milton, Racine he has nothing to say. Assuredly he is one of the enemy: and all the more dangerous because he is sometimes disguised as a friend.

And this offence is aggravated by attendant circumstances, such as his arrogance. And (you will forgive me) it is further aggravated for an Englishman by the recollection that Eliot stole upon us, a foreigner and a neutral, while we were at war—obtained, I have my wonders how, a job in the Bank of England—and became (am I wrong) the advance guard of the invasion since carried out by his natural friends and allies, the Steins and Pounds and hoc genus Omne,³⁶ the Parisian riff-raff of denationalised Irishmen and Americans who have perhaps given Western Europe her death wound.

Enough. You see my views; and may answer them as bluntly as I have put them. Of the man himself I know nothing and will do my best to believe any good that I may hear from you or other authorised sources.

As for your story—it is an amusing comment on human vanity that other peoples’ conversation about oneself always pleases if it is not directly insulting: and so did this.³⁷

Of Nygrens, another time. I don’t fully agree—Protestant is not for me a dyslogistic term.³⁸

A Mr. Shafer has sent me a long book,³⁹ nominally about you but actually de omnibus rebus,⁴⁰ which I am enjoying.

Yours very sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

June 17th. 1935

My dear Arthur,

‘Will you come Sunday or Monday?’ says the host. ‘No, I’ll come Saturday,’ says the guest. ‘Oh Lord,’ says the host (as it might be my father) or ‘Why do you do these things?’ (as it might be another). On second thoughts I am booking a berth for Monday night, July 1st by Liverpool—leaving you Mon 8th.

There is just one cloud on the horizon. Minto’s sister is seriously ill (in Dublin) and if Minto has to go over for a funeral she may want me to stay and run the house. Let us hope this won’t happen. If it does, I suppose we shall be able to fix on a week that will suit both you and me later. In the meantime I thought it better to let the arrangement stand, and hope for the best—I hate putting off anything so nice.

Give my love to your mother and many, many thanks.

Yours,

Jack

TO EUGÈNE VINAVER (W):⁴¹

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

Sept 19th. 1935

Dear Vinaver

Thank you very much for the copy of your lecture.⁴² Ever since I heard it at the Arthurian⁴³ I have wished for more of it than memory could carry—as it is now a sine quâ non for any reading of Malory.

About holes in VI vi, it may interest you to note that my own MS. note on the passage gives ‘Hole = fenestra’ (Catholicon Anglicum 1483)⁴⁴-a reference I probably got from the N. E. D.⁴⁵ But can you throw any light on ‘hole of the tree’ in VI ii? Your knowledge of ‘F’ will enable you to say at once whether this is merely an error for ‘bole’, or whether we must consider further. (Tolkien showed me O. E. Health = angulus > fork (of a tree) but this is difficult phonologically.)

Thanks also for your very kind reference in a footnote to my somewhat pert review.⁴⁶

I do wish you could see your way to give us a commentary as well as a text when you bring out the W. MS.—it is badly needed for all aspects of the work and whose business is it if not yours?

With many thanks.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

In the winter of 1935 the Delegates of the Oxford University Press conceived the idea of the Oxford History of English Literature, and in March 1935 they appointed as general editors the distinguished scholars, F. P. Wilson⁴⁷ and Bonamy Dobrée.⁴⁸ They were to work in close co-operation with Kenneth Sham (1887–1971), who was assistant secretary to the Delegates of the Oxford University Press at this time.

In October 1935 the Press announced that it had undertaken the production of this daunting task, which was to consist of twelve volumes, each volume the work of a single author. While each volume would, in the main, begin and end at a definite date, there would have to be a certain degree of dovetailing and authors were expected to consult with those writing the volumes on either side of them so as to avoid overlapping.

Shortly before making this announcement, F. P. Wilson wrote to Lewis, explaining who had been invited to write which volume, and asking if he would write the one on the sixteenth century.⁴⁹ There followed this reply from Lewis:

TO FRANK PERCY WILSON (OUP):

Magdalen College,

Sept. 23rd 1935

My dear Wilson

Really, really! In other words you have missed the chance of Tolkien on O.E.⁵⁰ and R. W. Chambers⁵¹ on the XVIth century. For heaven’s sake, if it is still possible, do that, and either check me out or give me the XVth.

The Allegory book is done and I am now in communication with Sisam about it.

But, really–

Yours ever

C. S. Lewis

No answer, forsooth! Marry, come up!⁵²

The planning of the Oxford History of English Literature—‘O Hell!’ as Lewis called it—continued. The task of writing a volume in this series was so onerous that a number of those who originally agreed to write for the series either opted out of the programme or died before the work was done. F. P. Wilson continued firm in his belief that the sixteenth-century volume was right for Lewis, and Lewis agreed to write it. However, Lewis did not want to include drama in his work, and Wilson agreed to write a separate volume entitled English Drama 1485–1585 (1969).

TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W):

[The Kilns]

Dec 7th 1935

My dear Arthur,

I am sorry you have had to haul this letter out of me by the scruff of its neck. It’s not that I have nothing to say to you and don’t want to hear what you have to say. I believe I could still make a fair attempt at a regular correspondence, but you yourself vetoed that, and odd letters, like odd bills, I do find it hard to meet when I’m busy.

Minto told you about our present bother. The guests are still here, and will be, so far as I can see, until the end of January.⁵³ Oh Arthur, what a snag it is that the people who are pitiable are not necessarily likeable. Molly Askins is emphatically one of those people of whom old Foord-Kelsie said ‘We must learn to love those whom we can’t like.’ She’s what you would call an encroaching person—do you know the type of small, dark woman with big gentle eyes and soft voice, who just gently and softly and even pathetically gets her own way in everything and really treats the house as a hotel? However, the thing’s a duty and there’s an end of it: tho’, by the bye, as W. and I were saving the other day, the New Testament tells us to visit the widows, not to let them visit us!⁵⁴

I have finished my book, which is called The Allegorical Love Poem, and is dedicated to Barfield. The Clarendon Press have accepted it and hope to have it out by May.⁵⁵ As I am to get 12 free copies (Dents only give one 6) you and Tchanie shall each have one and save your silver: and whatever you think of the matter, I hope, from experience of the Clarendon Press, that binding, paper etc will be-in our old formula—excellent, exquisite, and admirable. In other words, if you can’t read it, you will enjoy looking at it, smelling it, and stroking it. If not a good book, it will be a good pet! It will be about 400 pp, they say. (It will be very funny, after this, if they do it in double columns and a paper cover.)

My other bit of literary news is that Sheed and Ward have bought the Regress from Dent. I didn’t much like having a book of mine, and specially a religious book, brought out by a Papist publisher: but as they seemed to think they could sell it, and Dents clearly couldn’t, I gave in. I have been well punished: for Sheed, without any authority from me, has put a blurb on the inside of the jacket which says ‘This story begins in Puritania (Mr Lewis was brought up in Ulster)’-thus implying that the book is an attack on my own country and my own religion.⁵⁶ If you ever come across any one who might be interested, explain as loudly as you can that I was not consulted & that the blurb is a damnable lie told to try and make Dublin riff-raff buy the book. I didn’t mean to spend so much of this letter on egoism.

I have tried in vain to buy Voyage to Arcturus but it is out of print. For reading, lately, I have re-read the Faerie Queene with enormous enjoyment. It must be a really great book because one can read it as a boy in one way, and then re-read it in middle life and get something very different out of it—and that to my mind is one of the best tests. I am at present engaged with Sir Thomas More’s English works⁵⁷ (i.e. everything except the Utopia)⁵⁸ which are necessary to a job I’m doing. They are quite interesting, and sometimes really helpful in religious aspects, but not so good as they have lately been made out to be.

The worst of these letters at long intervals is that I can never remember how much has happened since I wrote last. e.g. did I tell you how much I was moved by seeing A Winter’s Tale?⁵⁹ I can’t have told you about the magnificent philharmonic performance of me Ninth Symphony we were at a few weeks ago.⁶⁰ You know I used to dislike the choral part of it. I was completely converted and have seldom enjoyed anything more. How tonic Beethoven is, and how festal—one has the feeling of having taken part in the revelry of giants. By the way, the Siegfried Idyll,⁶¹ which we had in the same programme seems to me the dullest thing Wagner ever wrote: do you agree? The only successor to Wagner (since we’ve got onto that subject), the only man who has exercised the same enchantment over me since the old days, is Sibelius. This bent to ‘Northern’ things is quite real and one can’t get over it-not that I ever thought of trying!

You would like this day. Behind the hill there is yellow early morning light and small clouds racing. Then, the bit of wood, bare and brown, and furiously agitated. Then, the pond half skinned with ice—the swans both ashore. And round the house a terrific wind is roaring-‘Arthur O’Bower has broken his band.’⁶² In fact I have enjoyed the whole of this winter—especially after the really tropical summers.

The only member of the visiting family whose society we like is the boy, Michael, about 5. You will be interested to hear that W. gets on with him much better than I do. That is, I theoretically hold that one ought to like children, but am shy with them in practice: he theoretically dislikes them, but is actually the best of friends. (So many new sides to his character have appeared in the last few years.)

Minto reads him the Peter Rabbit books every evening, and it is a lovely sight. She reads very slowly and he gazes up into her eyes which look enormous through her spectacles—what a pity she has no grandchildren. Would you believe it, that child had never been read to nor told a story by his mother in his life? Not that he is neglected. He has a whole time Nurse (an insufferable semi-lady scientific woman with a diploma from some Tom-fool nursing college), a hundred patent foods, is spoiled, and far too expensively dressed: but his poor imagination has been left without any natural food at all. I often wonder what the present generation of children will grow up like (how many middle aged men in all generations have said this). They have been treated with so much indulgence yet so little affection, with so much science and so little mother-wit. Not a fairy tale nor a nursery rhyme.

Please thank your mother for her kind and forgiving letter; I was very rude to her. I should like to be at home in these gales. I am sure there are waves in the Lough, and the firs are lifting the earth in our old wood. I must stop now and do a little work. A happy Christmas to you all, and from all.

Yours,

Jack

TO OWEN BARFIELD (W):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

[9? December 1935]

In the crescendo of horror at the end of the myth you have done what v. few people could now do.⁶³ About the greatness and truth of that part I have no doubts. In the earlier parts of the myth I had not been prepared for so large a satiric element and therefore had to make rapid re-adjustments: but of course the ordinary reader will not be in that position. There are lovely things all about the place—the honest Caliban, Ariel, Bottom, the luring voice that all old civilisations hear. (By the bye, you have been re-imbursing yourself pretty freely for ‘sheep dotted downs’!—or else Dymer and English People have a common source).⁶⁴

The Diary of an Old Soul is magnificent.⁶⁵ You placed the moment of giving it to me admirably. I remember with horror the absurdity of my last criticism of it, and with shame the vulgarity of the form in which I expressed it. He knows all about the interplay between the religious and metaphysical aspects of the One. I see now (since I began this letter) that these two are opposite only with the fruitful opposition of male & female (how deep the old erotic metaphor of the proelia veneris is) and what they beget is the solution.

Incidentally, since I have begun to pray, I find my extreme view of personality changing. My own empirical self is becoming more important and this is exactly the opposite of self love. You don’t teach a seed how to die into treehood by throwing it into the fire: and it has to become a good seed before its worth burying.

As to my own book—the question whether notes shd. come at the end of the chapter or the bottom of the page is partly for publisher & printer.⁶⁶ Personally I loathe a book where they come at the end—and I am writing mainly for people who will want to know where they must look to verify my facts. Your other criticism about the two classes of readers whom I conflate, I don’t understand. I meant this to be only a note.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO OWEN BARFIELD (W):

[Magdalen College 12?

December 1935]

My dear Barfield

What a drivelling letter I wrote you a few days ago. A day in bed has given me the chance to re-read Pt IV and my opinions are revised. In every way the merits are far greater than I had seen, specially the myth of wh. the ‘crescendo of horror’ tho’ perfectly adequate is, as I now perceive, the least excellence. You have done what you wanted-how you could get so much good tenderness & so much good sensuousness into prose is a mystery. There is of course a lot I don’t follow-has the extraordinary jumble of Hindu with Mohameddan accessories any significance? But the whole thing is a real evocation.

Yrs

CSL

P.S. The ‘Ah woe…kiss…ah woe’ is astonishing. It’s not like a passage in a book at all: it’s a thing.

TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W):

[The Kilns]

29th. Dec. 1935

My dear Arthur,

I am staying at home from Church this morning with a cold on the chest, so it seems a good occasion to answer your letter.

As regards your news—sympathy and congratulations. Sympathy on the wrench of parting and the gap it will leave: congratulations on having done the right thing and made a sacrifice. The chief consolation at such times, I think, is that the result, however unpleasant, must be a kind of relief after the period of saying ‘Shall I really have to-no I won’t—and yet perhaps I’d better.’ There is always some peace in having submitted to the right. Don’t spoil it by worrying about the results, if you can help it. It is not your business to succeed (no one can be sure of that) but to do right: when you have done so, the rest lies with God—and Will!

I don’t think you exaggerate at all in your account of how it feels. After all—tho’ our novels now ignore it-friendship is the greatest of worldly goods. Certainly to me it is the chief happiness of life. If I had to give a piece of advice to a young man about a place to live, I think I shd. say, ‘sacrifice almost everything to live where you can be near your friends.’ I know I am v. fortunate in that respect, and you much less so. But even for me, it wd. make a great difference if you (and one or two others) lived in Oxford.

I am correcting the first bunch of proofs for my book and am (as we wd. have said in the old days) tearing my hair because it doesn’t look at all the size of page I expected. It will not be as tall a book as I had pictured—and what is the good of a scholarly work if it does not rise like a tower at the end of a shelf?! I fear it may even be thickish and stumpy. Mon Dieu! quel douleur, o rage, o desespoir! (What on earth would we have done if either of us had succeeded in publishing a book in the old days—I imagine we might have gone literally out of our minds with horrors and ecstasies.)

I’m sorry you didn’t have our weather. We had about a week of snow with frost on top of it—and then rime coming out of the air and making thick woolly formations on every branch. The little wood was indescribably beautiful. I used to go and crunch about on the crusted snow in it every evening—for the snow kept it light long after sunset. It was a labyrinth of white—the smallest twigs looking thick as seaweed and building up a kind of cathedral vault overhead. One thing the snow showed me was the amazingly high population of rabbits-usually concealed among the greens and greys. On the snow one cd. see them scuttling. W. and I have been much puzzled by some of the footprints. There seem to be a great many more and larger animals than we had supposed. Bears, Arthur, bears—at least it looks like it. I wish you cd. have had a couple of strolls with me round this place in the snow: it would have charmed away all your sorrows.

No, no, I never meant that Sibelius had the tonic quality of Beethoven. Do you remember our once talking about B. and Wagner & agreeing that B. was Olympian, W. titanic—B spiritual, W. natural? Well Sibelius is definitely like W. not like B. in that respect. He is not noble like Beethoven: he is inarticulate, intimate, enthralling, and close to one, like Nature itself. Very, very Northern: he makes me think of birch forests & moss and salt-marshes and cranes and gulls. I mean the symphonies. You needn’t be busied for music while you have a gramophone. Set aside a portion of your money for buying big works (symphonies etc): never play them except in their entirety—but perhaps I’ve given you all this good advice before.

I never finished Gape Row. But the descriptions of our own walks & hills were v. interesting. I thinkk yourr neww methodd of sspellingg bby ddoubbllingg alll cconnssonnanntts ssavvess a ggreatt ddeall off ttroubblle!

Please give my love to Mrs Greeves and remember me to all our friends.

Yours,

Jack

When I said you had vetoed the idea of regular correspondence, I meant that you had vetoed the idea of your taking part in it. I didn’t mean you had actually forbidden me to write to you!!

1 Nygren, Agape and Eros.

2 Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1072b. means ‘moves’. In The Discarded Image (1964), Lewis mentioned Aristotle’s teachings about God as Unmoved Mover: ‘We must not imagine Him moving things by any positive action, for that would be to attribute some kind of motion to Himself and we should then not have reached an utterly unmoving Mover. How then does He move things? Aristotle answers, , “He moves as beloved”. He moves other things, that is, as an object of desire moves those who desire it’ (ch. 5, p. 113).

3 Lewis went on considering the relation of Agape and Eros for years, and in The Four loves (London, 1960; Fount, 1998) he discusses them under the names ‘gift-love’ and ‘need-love’ (using ‘Eros’ to mean sexual love).

4 In Spens, Spenser’s Faerie Queene, pp. 57–9.

5 Spenser, The Faerie Queene. II, xii, 46–9.

6 ibid., II, xii, 48.

7 i.e. the waste paper basket,

8 Barfield, Harwood and Lewis planned a walking-tour for April 1936, but at the last minute Lewis was unable to go. As a joke Barfield and Harwood decided Lewis must sit for a re-examination—based on the old School Certificate—before he could be readmitted to their ‘College of Cretaceous Perambulators’. The questions and answers were published as Owen Barfield and C. S. Lewis, A Cretaceous Perambulator (The Re-examination of) ed. Waller Hooper (Oxford: The Oxford University C. S. Lewis Society, 1983, limited to 100 copies). One of the questions was ‘Give the (long) semantic history of the word “Guiting”.’ Lewis did not attempt this question, but the editor supplied the following explanation (p. 14): ‘The semantic history of the word “Guiting” is, that it became for the perambulators a convenient expletive for anything they didn’t like. A “guiter” was, for instance, a bad person. It may have been suggested by the inconveniences caused them on the 1928 walk when they passed the villages of Temple Guiting and Guiting Power in Gloucestershire.’

9 This was probably one of Barfield’s poems. It has not been published.

10 The Pilgrim’s Regress.

11 i.e. Lieutenant-Colonel Arthur Alan Hanbury-Sparrow, author of The Land-Locked Lake.

12 Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886).

13 ‘catharsis’.

14 Lewis was probably referring to his essay ‘The Personal Heresy in Criticism’ in which he argued that the ‘concealed major premise’ in E. M. W. Tillyard’s Milton (1930) was ‘plainly the proposition that all poetry is about the poet’s state of mind’. ‘The Personal Heresy in Criticism’ was eventually published in Essays and Studies by Members of the English Association, XIX (1934). It then became the first chapter of a joint work between Lewis and Tïllyard, The Personal Heresy. A Controversy, published in 1939.

15 In November 1930 Lewis sent ‘The Personal Heresy in Criticism’ to The Criterion, an influential literary periodical edited by T, S. Eliot. Six months later, in May 1931. Eliot turned it down. Lewis wrote to Eliot again on 2 June 1931 with the proposal that Eliot publish not only ‘The Personal Heresy in Criticism’ but four other essays. It is proposed to publish that important letter, not included in CL I, in the Addendum to CL III. See Thomas Steams Eliot in the Biographical Appendix.

16 Paul Elmer More, Platonism (1931).

17 Bernard Bosanquet (1848–1923), Fellow of Philosophy at University College, Oxford, 1870–81, whose works include Knowledge and Reality (1885) and A History of Aesthetic (1892).

18 Richard Dacre Archer-Hind (1849–1910), Greek scholar and Platonist, who was a Fellow of Trinity College. Cambridge. He published editions of Plato’s Phaedo (1883) and Timaeus (1888).

19 ‘Assidet Boetius stupens de hac lite’- ‘Boethius sits nearby bewildered by this dispute,’

20 In the end Lewis and Barfield, who met at Rudyard, Derbyshire, were the only ones on this Easter walk which began on 8 April.

21 This suggests that Barfield, even if he had not written any part of his poetic drama, Orpheus, was thinking and talking about it. See Lewis’s criticism of the finished work in his letter to Barfield of 28 March 1938.

22 Lewis was one of the examiners for the Newdigate Prize. This annual prize for English verse, founded in 1806 by Sir Roger Newdigate, is the most widely known of university prizes.

23 ‘when you are alone’.

24 Llewelyn Powys, Damnable Opinions (1935).

25 Powys did not mention Lewis by name in Damnable Opinions, but he attacked orthodox Christianity, especially as practised and written about at Oxford. On p. 5 he said: ‘True religion is simple—it is to worship life, to bow down before life, beating our heads upon the grass in jubilant acquiescence.’

26 Joseph O’Neill, Land Under England (1935).

27 After retracing the walk with Owen Barfield, Walter Hooper gave the following account in Through joy and Beyond: A Pictorial Biography of C. S. Lewis (1982), pp. 76–7: ‘They entered (Derbyshire) from Staffordshire by Rudyard Lake. Then after lunch down the Goyt Valley to Chapel-en-le-Frith and so next day to Kinder Downfall, where the shallow river Kinder plunges off the edge of the peaty moor. Here on windy days when the sun warms the moorside the water is blown into myriad droplets of rainbowed light. Crossing the Kinder Scout and down Grindsbrook they came to Edale and at last stopped the night in Castleton. Next day they walked up the Winnat Pass and across Tideswell Moor to Wardlow and Monsal Dale. It’s just a short way now to Ashford in the Water and Bakewell and on again the fourth day to Ashbourne and Dovedale.’

28 John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress from this World to That which is to Come, ed. James Blanton Wharey, 2nd edn rev. Roger Sharrock (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960), First Part, p. 119: ‘They went then, till they came to the delectable Mountains, which Mountains belong to the Lord of that Hill…so they went up to the Mountains, to behold the Gardens, and Orchards, the Vineyards, and Fountains of water, where also they drank, and washed themselves, and did freely eat of the Vineyards.’

29 William Blake, Songs of Innocence (1789).

30 This was due to the expansion of Morris Motors Ltd. In 1912 William Richard Morris (1877–1963), created 1st Baron Nuffield in 1934 and 1st Viscount Nuffield in 1938, opened his first car factory at Cowley, halfway between Oxford and Headington Quarry. In 1926 he started the Pressed Steel Company, employing more than 10,000 people, alongside the car factory. Morris Motors is only about a mile from The Kilns, and by 1935 it had expanded so much that, whereas The Kilns had been one of only a few houses for miles around, a rash of small houses now almost surrounded it.

31 See Leo Baker in the Biographical Appendix to CL I. Leo Baker was for a long time in an Austrian clinic with suspected cancer. It later proved to be a false alarm.

32 Arthur Alan Hanbury-Sparrow, Gilt-Edged Insecurity (1934).

33 In his letter to Lewis of 26 April 1935 More wrote: ‘I have directed the publisher of the American Review to send you a copy of the May Issue, which contains an article of mine on James Joyce. I hope and believe, that you will approve of my treatment of that gentleman, though you may perhaps think I have credited him with too much native genius. In the June issue I shall have an article on the modernist movement in French poetry’.

34 ‘limit’. More had been arguing for a return to Christian humanism as exemplified by limit and order—an idea which Eliot’s Waste Land explodes by its repeated emphasis on chaos.

35 T. S. Eliot. The Waste Land (1922). This complex poem, praised for its sense of depression and futility, was the epitome of what lewis hated in modern poetry.

36 ‘and all that sort’. Horace, Satires, I. ii, 2.

37 In his letter of 26 April 1935 More wrote: ‘Eliot is a dear friend of mine, and on the whole I do not like to see him placed among the enemies. He started out wrong, under the influence of the French notion of “pure art”, but he has been…moving away from that nasty heresy. Naming him, I am tempted to tell you a story—I hope not committing an indiscretion. It was after I had first met you and had read The Pilgrim’s Regress. Eliot was visiting me at Oxford, and [John Wolfenden (1906–85), Magdalen’s Tutor in Philosophy] invited us to luncheon at Magdalen, I asked W, about you, and particularly what you meant by return to “Mother Kirk”, whether you had turned Roman Catholic, or Anglo Catholic, or Scotch Presbyterian, or what. W. avowed that he didn’t know, but was pretty sure you had not become R.C. And then he added: “The other day several of us were together when X (I don’t recall the name) burst into the room in a state of great excitement. ‘Do you know,’ he shouted, ‘what that man Lewis is up to? Y (another forgotten name) says he saw him in the College chapel, and that on inquiry he finds the fellow has been going to chapel for weeks unbeknownst to any of us. What’s it all mean?’” So Wolfenden. And then Eliot with that sly smile of his: “Why, it’s quite evident that if a man wishes to escape detection at Oxford, the one place for him to go is the college chapel”’ (Princeton University Library).

38 ibid.: ‘Yes, I have read Agape and Eros, and I don’t like it at all, indeed I very heartily dislike it. It seems to me the last word of the most abominable form of Protestantism in a straight line from Luther through Barth.’

39 Robert Shafer, Paul Elmer More and American Criticism (1935).

40 ‘about all matters’.

41 Professor Eugène Vinaver (1899–1979) was born in St Petersburg, and was educated in Paris and Oxford. He was a lecturer in French Language and Literature at Lincoln College, Oxford, 1924–8, and lecturer in French, 1928–31. He was appointed a Reader in French Language and Literature at Oxford in 1931, and was Professor of French Language and Literature at the University of Manchester, 1933–66. His many works include Malory (1929), The Works of Sir Thomas Malory, 3 vols. (1947), The Tale of the Death of King Arthur (1955) and The Rise of Romance (1971).

42 Eugène Vinaver, ‘Malory’s Morte d’Arthur in the Light of a Recent Discovery’ (1935). The ‘discovery’ referred to here is that of a manuscript of Malory’s Arthurian romances roughly contemporary with Caxton’s edition and independent of it, found in Winchester College in 1934. See the passage from Lewis’s review of Professor Vinaver’s edition of the Works of Sir Thomas Malory (1947) that follows the letter to Ruth Pitter of 6 June 1947.

43 The Arthurian Society.

44 Catholicon Anglicum: An English-Latin Wordbook, dated 1483, introduction and notes by Sidney J. H. Heritage (Early English Text Society, 1881).

45 The New English Dictionary.

46 In his review of E. K. Chambers’ Sir Thomas Wyatt and Some Collected Studies (1933) in Medium Aevum, III, No. 3 (October 1934), pp. 237–40, Lewis criticized Vinaver for the importance he attached to ‘sources’. ‘It is possible for our reading of an author to become what we may call ‘source-ridden’, so that we no longer see his book as it is in itself, but only as it contrasts with its sources. This is clearly an injustice to the author, for we are preserving in their original form elements which he has transmuted, and even elements which he rejected. It is as though we ate all the ingredients of a pudding along with the pudding itself; such an eating is emphatically not the pudding’s proof’(p. 238).

In note 1 of ‘Malory’s Morte d’Arthur in the Light of a Recent Discovery’, Vinaver responded: ‘I do not feel with Mr Lewis that those who see too much of Malory’s sources are apt to overlook the book “as it is in itself”. We must obviously avoid eating “all the raw ingredients of a pudding along with the pudding itself” for “such eating is emphatically not the pudding’s proof”…but literature is one of the few things to which the metaphor of the pudding does not apply. Knowledge of the recipe may spoil the caste of a pudding but it need not distort our immediate impression from a literary work. It is of course possible to read Malory “as if we knew nothing about his sources”, but our understanding of him will be deepened, not spoilt, by the knowledge of what is peculiar and unique in his work.’

47 Frank Percy Wilson (1889–1963), who had been Lewis’s tutor in English, took a B. Litt. from Lincoln College, Oxford. After serving in the First World War, he returned to Oxford as a university lecturer. He was Professor of English at the University of Leeds, 1929–36, and Merton Professor of English at Oxford, 1947–57. Wilson contributed the volume on English Drama 1485–1585 (1969), ed. G. K. Hunter, to the Oxford History of English Literature.

48 Bonamy Dobrée (1891–1974), distinguished scholar and lecturer, went to Christ’s College, Cambridge, after serving in the First World War. In 1936 he was appointed to the Chair of English Literature at the University of Leeds, a post he held until his retirement in 1955. His books include the volume on The Early Eighteenth Century (1959) in the Oxford History of English Literature.

49 See the ‘Background’ to English Literature in the Sixteenth Century in CG, pp. 474–82.

50 J. R. R. Tolkien had too many other commitments to write a volume on Old English literature, and in the end the series began with Middle English literature.

51 Raymond Wilson Chambers (1874–1942) graduated in English from University College, London, in 1894 and spent his entire professional life at University College. He became a Fellow of English in 1900, Assistant Professor in 1904, and Professor of English, 1922–41. His works include Beowulf (1914) and Thomas More (1935).

52 William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet (1597), II, v, 64: ‘Are you so hot? Many, come up, I trow.’

53 The guests were Molly Askins and her son Michael. Molly was the widowed daughter-in-law of Mrs Moore’s brother, Dr Robert Askins (1880–1935) who, while practising medicine in Southern Rhodesia died at sea on I September 1935.

54 James 1:27: ‘Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world.’

55 In the end Lewis was persuaded to call his book The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition.

56 Sheed and Ward of London published their edition of The Pilgrim’s Regress in October 1935. Lewis had been worried about obscurity in the work, and this edition differs from the first in having a short ‘Argument’ at the beginning of each of the ten books.

57 The Workes of Sir Thomas More Knyght, sometyme Lorde Chauncellour of England, wrytten by him in the Englysh tonge, ed. William Rastell (1557).

58 Utopia (1516), in Latin, is the principal literary work of Sir Thomas More.

59 William Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale (1623).

60 This concert, conducted by Malcolm Sargent, was given by the London Philharmonic Orchestra in the Sheldonian Theatre on 28 November 1935, For details see The Oxford Magazine, LIV (5 December 1935), pp. 244, 246.

61 Richard Wagner, Siegfried Idyll, first performed in 1870.

62 Beatrix Potter, Squirrel Nutkin (1903): ‘Arthur O’Bower has broken his band,/He comes roaring up the land.’

63 Barfield had sent Lewis a copy of a verse-drama he had written, and which remains unpublished.

64 The words ‘sheep-dotted downs’ are found in Canto V, stanza 32 of Lewis’s poem. Dymer (1926), and he discovered them in Barfield’s unpublished novel, ‘English People’.

65 Barfield gave Lewis a copy of George MacDonald’s The Diary of an Old Soul (1885).

66 As Lewis mentions in the letter to Arthur Greeves of 29 December 1935, he was correcting the proofs of The Allegory of Love.