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TO JOAN BENNETT (L):¹

[Magdalen College]

13 January 1937

A foul copy of an essay (which now that I re-read it doesn’t seem as good as I had hoped) is a poor return for the delightful, the champagne holiday you gave me. But you asked for it and here it is.²

What splendid talk goes on in your house!—and what a wonderful thing…your English Faculty is. If only we and you could combine into a single teaching body (leaving out your freaks and nonentities) we could make ‘English’ into an education that would not have to fear any rivalries. In the meantime we have lots to exchange. I am sure you practise more ‘judgement’; I suspect we have more ‘blood’. What we want is to be well commingled.

The Lucas book proves disappointing as you go on.³ His attack on Richards⁴ for splitting up poetic effects which we receive as a unity, is silly; that is what analysis means and R. never suggested that the products of analysis were the same as the living unity. Again, he doesn’t seem to see that Richards is on his side in bringing poetry to an ethical test in the long run; and his own ethical standard is so half-hearted—he’s so afraid of being thought a moralist that he tries to blunt it by gas about ‘health’ and ‘survival’. As if survival can have any value apart from the prior value of what survives. To me especially it is an annoying book; he attacks my enemies in the wrong way…and a good deal of mere ‘superiority’ too…

TO JOAN BENNETT (L):

[Magdalen College

February 1937]

I also have been having ’flu or you should have heard from me sooner. I enclose the article: pray make whatever use you please of it⁵…It is a question (for your sake and that of the Festschrift, not mine) whether a general pro-Donne paper called Donne and his critics—a glance at Dryden and Johnson and then some contemporaries including me—wouldn’t be better than a direct answer. C.S.L. as professional controversialist and itinerant prize-fighter is, I suspect, becoming already rather a bore to our small public, and might in that way infect you.⁶ Also, if you really refute me, you raise for the editor the awkward question, ‘Then why print the other article?’ However, do just as you like…and good luck with it whatever you do.

I’ve had a grand week in bed—Northanger Abbey, The Moonstone,⁷ The Vision of judgement,⁸ Modern Painters (Vol. 3),⁹ Our Mutual Friend, ¹⁰ and The Egoist.¹¹ Of the latter I decided this time that it’s a rare instance of the conception being so good that even the fantastic faults can’t kill it. There’s a good deal of the ass about Meredith—that dreadful first chapter—Carlyle in icing sugar. And isn’t the supposedly witty conversation much poorer than much we have heard in real life? Mrs Mounstuart is a greater bore than Miss Bates¹²—only he didn’t mean her to be. The Byron was not so good as I remembered: the Ruskin, despite much nonsense, glorious.

TO MARY NEYLAN (T):¹³

Magdalen College

Oxford

March 8th 1937

Dear Mrs. Neylan

What a nice letter! To be read is nice enough: but to have led anyone back to the poets themselves is more what critics dream of than what usually happens.

I ought to be able to reward you with a good list of books, as desired, but you know bibliographies are my Waterloo: in my own reading I always sacrifice critics to the poets, which is unkind to my own trade. However, let’s try.

I haven’t yet got Grierson’s new book Milton and Wordsworth,¹⁴ but I’m going to: it ought to kill two of your birds with one stone. Have you read F. L. Lucas’ Decline and Fall of the Romantic Ideal? Hideously over-written in parts, but well worth reading: he has grasped what seems to be a hard idea to modern minds, that a certain degree of a thing might be good and a further degree of the same thing bad. Elementary, you will say—yet a realisation of it would have forbidden the writing of many books. These are new.

A few years old—but you may not have read it—is E. K. Chambers’ Sir Thomas Wyatt and other studies.¹⁵ Some of the essays are medieval, but most of it is 16th century. I can’t think of anything much on ‘general tendencies of the 17th century’ since one you almost certainly read when you were up, Grierson’s Cross Currents of XVIIth c. Lit, ¹⁶ very good indeed. By the bye a festschrift to Grierson shortly appearing (Tillyard, Nichol Smith, Joan Bennett and myself are among the contributors) might contain something of what you want. The book on the 17th c. by Willy¹⁷ (I have forgotten the title) is more on the thought background than the poets, rather doing for that century what my Prolegomena tried to do for the middle ages. I don’t know of anything general on the 18th century. Sherburn’s Early Life of Pope¹⁸ tho’ good is hardly what you want.

You don’t say how you or your husband are: I hope all is well.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W):

The Kilns

Easter Sunday

[28 March] 1937

My dear Arthur,

I have been meaning to write to you for some time, and had partly excused myself because I was waiting to send you a story of Tolkien’s which is to be published soon and which I think you may like:¹⁹ but Uncle Gussie²⁰ turned up on Thursday (the coolest and most characteristic visit—merely a wire to announce his arrival!) and jogged my conscience with a message from you.

Thanks for your letter. I suppose I shall hear more from you about America when we meet. Am I right in concluding from your mere list of towns that on the aesthetic side—as regards mountains, rivers and woods etc.—it made no impression?²¹ I am glad to hear that you think of risking another visit to us and will do my best to make you less uncomfortable than you usually are. I suppose it must be in the summer term? I have often told you that this is an injudicious (lovely adjective!) time to choose, but I know you are not entirely free. By the bye, I should warn you that you will find the Kilns changed much for the worse—which you might have thought impossible—by a horrible rash of small houses which has sprung up all round us. All thanks to Lord Nuffield, I suppose: it would take a good deal more than a million pounds to undo the harm he has done to Oxford.²²

We have had rather an unfortunate spring. First of all a maid got flu’ just before she was leaving and had to be kept on as a patient for several weeks. Then I got flu’. Then as I was getting better Paxford (that is our indespensable fac-totum, like your Lea, you know) got flu’.²³ Then I had a grand week end doing as much as I could of his work and the maid’s until I got flu’ again. Then Minto’s varicose ankles broke down. Then Warnie got flu’ and was rather bad. However, we have come through it all and seem pretty cheery now. The ‘dreadful weather’ I have been rather enjoying: I quite like seeing the primroses one day and the snow the next.

I have not read anything you would be likely to care for lately except a Vie de Jésus by a Frenchman called Mauriac,²⁴ which I strongly recommend: it is papist, of course, and contains what English and Protestant taste would call lapses, but it is very good in spite of them. I suppose you noticed about Christmas time that someone has republished the complete Adventures of Tim Pippin by Roland Quiz.²⁵ I half thought of getting it, but have satisfied myself with assuming that you have done so. I hope you have not satisfied yourself with a similar assumption about me!

I have been progressing all this lent through the first volume of a v. nice edition of St Augustine’s City of God only to find that the other volume has been so wrongly bound that it begins and ends in the middle of sentences. What a tragedy this would once have been!

We have got (vice Mr. Papworth, now gathered to his fathers) a golden retriever puppy who is about the size of a calf and as strong as a horse: has the appetite of a lion, the manners of a hurricane, the morals of a gangster, and an over salivated mouth.

Please give my love to your mother, and remember me to Reid. I saw Bryson about a fortnight ago and I think he said he was going home this Vac. Will you be able to have me this summer? It is a very bright spot in the year, but don’t hesitate to say if it is inconvenient.

Yours

Jack

TO DANIEL NEYLAN (T): ²⁶

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

May 5th 1937

Dear Neylan,

I am sorry your wife has been ill—give her my sympathy. Your offer is attractive to the hot-gospeller in me, but after a lot of thought I feel I must refuse. I have no notion how to handle such an audience nor what to say to them: but many thanks.

I am in the middle of a scholarship exam, or I shd. write more.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO JOAN BENNETT (WHL):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

May 7th 1937.

Dear Mrs Bennett

Will this do?²⁷ Don’t hesitate to let me know if there is an expression in it which you think unfortunate or obscure, or any emphasis in dangerous directions.

About the imaginary chronology (by which I mean the sorting out of the love poems into cynical and idealistic periods), I find it nearly so embedded in everyone’s mind that I am haunted by the fear that there may be some real evidence for it which I don’t know; my jibe was made in the hope of eliciting this.

All I meant about the book was that it is not nearly so exciting as a book by you ought to be. Of course I disagree with the phonetic criticism, but very respectable people agree with you…

TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W):

Magdalen College.

Oxford.

June 10th 1937

My dear Arthur,

In my diary I have down ‘cross to Arthur’ for July 12th not July 5th and as I have arranged everything on this basis I trust it will be alright.

Your suspicion that I was fuming with wrath during the lunch is a sad commentary on my previous character, and coming from one who knows me so well, it must (I fear) be correct. This time, however, tho’ of course I would have preferred to see you alone, I quite liked it. Stamps…I can’t understand the attraction: but I send all I have.*

Yours

Jack

TO CECIL HARWOOD (BOD):

Magdalen College

Oxford

June 19th 1937

My dear Harwood

I had a quite unexpected windfall the other day as a result of which I am able to make Lawrence a present. My idea is that you should lodge it in a deposit account and let the trifle of interest accumulate, the whole to be used for or by him when he reaches the costly age (18–20). But you probably understand such matters better than I—at least a professional Bursar ought to—so dispose it for Godson’s future use as you think best. Is there any chance of seeing you this summer? Give my love to Daphne.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO DOM BEDE GRIFFITHS (W):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

[27] June 1937

Dear Griffiths

Your reply about the body leaves all my questions unanswered. I’d better tell you how it arose. I was talking the other day to an intelligent infidel who said that he pinned all his hopes for any significance in the universe on the chance that the human race by adapting itself to changed conditions and first planet jumping, then star jumping, finally nebula jumping, could really last forever and subject matter wholly to mind.

When I said that it was overwhelmingly improbable, he said Yes, but one had to believe even in the 1000th chance or life was mockery. I of course asked why, feeling like that, he did not prefer to believe in the other and traditional ‘chance’ of a spiritual immortality. To that he replied—obviously not for effect but producing something that had long been in his mind—‘Oh I never can believe that: for if that were true our having a physical existence wd. be so pointless.’ He’s a nice, honest chap, and I have no doubt at all that this is one of the things standing between him and Christianity.

Your remarks seem to me to leave the question much where they found it. Whatever you hold about the blessed in the state of separation, the resurrection either makes some change in it or none. If none, why does it occur? If change, then either for the worse or for the better. For the worse?—nefas credere.²⁸ If for the better…well there the question stands.

As to the rest of your letter—the question of Divine Presence was introduced rather for example: but, of course, I have no wish to discuss with you anything you don’t want to discuss with me. I received your statement that you do not think I am acting ‘in bad faith’ with some puzzlement: as if, in a conversation that had no apparent connection with money, you suddenly remarked ‘I am not saying you are bribed’. One is of course glad to be acquitted: but quite in the dark as to how one came to be on trial.

I also am doing a lot of rustic work at present but more with a scythe than a spade.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO OWEN BARFIELD (W):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford.

Sept 2nd 1937

Instrument approved with the exception of ‘were reduced to’ which hardly seems the right style

Malory—Morris—are you preparing a chapter on Quellen for a book about me.

‘Curiously comfortless stuff in the background’ is the criticism of a sensible man just emerging from the popular errors about Morris. Not so curiously, nor quite in the background—that particular discomfort is the main theme of all his best work, the thing he was born to say. The formula is ‘Returning to what seems an ideal world to find yourself all the more face to face with gravest reality without ever drawing a pessimistic conclusion but fully maintaining that heroic action in, or amelioration of, a temporal life is an absolute duty though the disease of temporality is incurable.’²⁹

Not quite what you expected, but just what the essential Morris is. ‘Defeat and victory are the same in the sense that victory will open your eyes only to a deeper defeat: so fight on.’³⁰ In fact he is the final statement of good Paganism: a faithful account of what things are and always must be to the natural man. Cf. what are in comparison the ravings of Hardy on the one hand and optimistic Communists on t’other. But the Earthly Paradise after that first story is inferior work. Try Jason, House of the Wolfings, Roots of the Mts, Well at the World’s End.³¹

The thriller is finished and called ‘Out of the Silent Planet.’

Yes, another next term, certainly.

Yrs

C.S.L.

If you want my sonnets, I’ve a very good one beginning ‘The Bible says Sennacherib’s campaign was spoiled.’³²

TO CHARLES WILLIAMS (W):

[Magdalen College]

Sept. 23rd, 1937

[Dear Williams]

Many thanks for the book;³³ fortunately I had seen it announced and ordered a copy before it arrived, so that both of us have it both ways. I think this is much the best book you have given us yet.

In the first place I find the form of evil that you are dealing with much more real than the Evil (with a big E) that appears in the other books and which, though I enjoy it, (like pantomime red fire) in a story, I do not believe in. But your Gomorrah is the real thing, and Wentworth a truly tragic study. Of course he can’t in the nature of things be as good fun as Sir Giles Tumulty,³⁴ but he’s more important. And Mrs Sammile is excellent too.

In the second place I’m glad to have got off the amulet or ‘sacred object’ theme.

Thirdly—I hope this doesn’t sound patronising—in sheer writing I think you have gone up, as we examiners say, a whole class. Chapter II is in my opinion your high water mark so far. Your have completely overcome a certain flamboyance which I always thought your chief danger: this is crisp as grape nuts, hard as a hammer, clear as glass. I am a little worried in the Wentworth part by the tendency to Gertrude Steinisms (eaves eves, guard card, etc.).³⁵ I agree, of course, that if there is any place for this kind of writing, the descent into Hell is the place.

But I believe this representative style, this literary programme music in which the writer writes as if he were in the predicament he describes, to be a false trail. I would rather see you becoming or remaining rigidly sober and classic as you describe chaos, your limit emphasizing nearly all good, except in the conversations between Stanhope and Pauline.

I fancy the rift between us is here pretty wide. I know you would talk that way when most serious and most sincere: but most people wouldn’t. I’m afraid that the interchange of formulae like ‘Under the Mercy’³⁶ may sound like a game to people who don’t know you. The L.C.M.³⁷ between Dante and P. G. Wodehouse is a difficult thing to hit and I’m not sure if it’s a good thing to aim at. The worst of trying to explain one’s minor objections to a book one has very much liked is that they don’t sound minor enough when the inevitably lengthy explanation has been made.

This is a thundering good book and a real purgation to read. I shall come back to it again and again. A thousand thanks for writing it—without prejudice to thanks on a different level for the presentation copy.

I want you to be at the next Inklings probably on 20 or 27 October. Can you keep yourself fairly free about the time? This sounds a large order, but the others are not get-at-able yet. I have written a thriller about a journey to Mars on which I urgently want your opinion: also you’d be able to take your revenge!

[C. S. Lewis]

TO E. F. CARRITT (P):³⁸

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

Oct. 29th [1937]

Dear Carritt

Alas—I have no Saturdays now! The B. Litt work which I do involves correcting of transcripts which can be done only when Bodley is open, so that Saturday afternoon has become one of my busiest times.³⁹ I should have loved to come.

If any time in the Vac. you feel you have a free afternoon and a permit for Wytham eating their heads off, I’m your man.

Where are the walks? Where are the woods? Where is Wytham gone? Leisure and literature are lost under The night’s helmet as tho never they had been! ⁴⁰

Yrs

C.S.L.

* Of course there are many more in number, but only duplicating what I enclose

1 Joan Bennett (1896–1986) was born in London, the daughter of novelist Arthur Frankau who wrote under the pseudonym Frank Danby. In 1920 she married Stanley Bennett (1889–1972), Librarian of Emmanuel College, Cambridge. Mrs Bennett was a Fellow of Girton College, Cambridge, and a lecturer in English at Cambridge University, 1936–64, Her books include Sir Thomas Browne (1962) and Five Metaphysical Poets: Donne, Herbert, Vaughan, Crashaw, Marvell (1965). Lewis was a frequent visitor to the home of Stanley and loan Bennett, and his Studies in Words (1960) was dedicated to them. The original letters to Bennett have disappeared, and the only copies that survive are found in L.

2 Bennett was helping to edit a Festschriftt—a collection of writings—entitled Seventeenth Century Studies Presented to Sir Herbert Grierson (1937), to which Lewis contributed ‘Donne and Love Poetry in the Seventeenth Century’.

3 Frank Laurence Lucas, The Decline and Fall of the Romantic Ideal (1936).

4 I. A. Richards (1893–1979), literary critic, and Fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge. His works include Principles of Literary Criticism (1925) and Practical Criticism (1929). It was the former of these that Lucas was criticizing.

5 i.e. ‘Donne and Love Poetry in the Seventeenth Century’.

6 He and E. M. W. Tillyard were halfway through their debate over ‘The Personal Heresy’. Lewis’s most recent contribution, an ‘Open Letter to Dr Tillyard’, was published in Essays and Studies by Members of the English Association, XXI (1936).

7 Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone (1868).

8 George Gordon, Lord Byron, The Vision of Judgement (1822).

9 John Ruskin, Modern Painters, vol. III (1856).

10 Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend (1864–5).

11 George Meredith, The Egoist (1879).

12 A character in Jane Austen, Emma (1816).

13 i.e. the former Mary Shelley, who had married Daniel Neylan in 1934. See Mary Neylan in the Biographical Appendix.

14 Sir Herbert Grierson, Milton and Wordsworth, Poets and Prophets: A Study of the Reactions to Political Events (1937).

15 E. K. Chambers, Sir Thomas Wyatt and Some Collected Studies (1933).

16 Sir Herbert Grierson, Cross Currents in English Literature of the XVIIth Century: or, The World, the Flesh and the Spirit, Their Actions and Reactions (1929).

17 Basil Willey, The Seventeenth Century Background: Studies in the Thought of the Age in Relation to Poetry and Religion (1934).

18 George Sherburn, The Early Career of Alexander Pope (1934).

19 J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit was published on 21 September 1937.

20 Lewis’s mother’s brother, Augustus Warren ‘Gus’ Hamilton (1886–1945). See The Hamilton Family in the Biographical Appendix to CL I.

21 Arthur’s trip to the United States was at the invitation of William Moncrief McClurg (1907-) of Belfast. The two young men met in the 1920s and, though unlike in many ways, they delighted in one another’s company and took a number of trips together. Arthur’s visit to America, presumably in the summer of 1936, was described by Dr McClurg in a letter to Walter Hooper of 25 April 1978: ‘We drove up to the Adirondack Mountains in New York state and stayed in Hurricane Lodge, a delightful place—chalets with balcony and main building and dining room: the air was so fresh after the City…We drove through Vermont state and visited some friends there, then we started on our trip to Cape Cod…There is quite an artists colony there and of interest to Arthur to see some paintings by local artists.’

22 He was referring to William Richard Morris, later Lord Nuffield, who had built Morris Motors about a mile from The Kilns. See note 30 to the letter to Arthur Greeves of 23 April 1935.

23 Frederick William Calcutt Paxford (1898–1979), gardener and handyman at The Kilns. Mrs Moore hired him shortly after they moved into The Kilns and he remained there until after Lewis’s death in 1963. Over the years he became an indispensable member of the family, lending the nine acres of ground, growing vegetables, managing an orchard, driving a car and often serving as cook. He never married. This inwardly optimistic, outwardly pessimistic man became the model for Puddleglum in The Silver Chair (1953). See his biography in CG.

24 François Mauriac, Vie de Jésus (1936).

25 Richard M. H. Quittenton, ‘Roland Quiz’ (1833–1914), Giant-land: or the Wonderful Adventures of Tim Pippin (London: [1874]; new edn, 1936).

26 Daniel Neylan (1905–69) was the husband of Lewis’s former pupil, Mary (Shelley) neylan.

27 Mrs Bennett had applied for a lectureship in Cambridge University and Lewis was supplying a letter of reference. The rest of the letter refers to her book, Four Metaphysical Poets: Donne, Herbert, Vaughan, Crashaw (1934).

28 ‘It is forbidden to believe this.’

29 These thoughts echo those found in Lewis’s essay ‘William Morris’ in SLE.

30 Bhagavad-Gita, ch. 2.

31 William Morris, The Earthly Paradise (1868–70); The House of the Wolfings (1889); The Well at the World’s End (1896).

32 This poem, entitled ‘Sonnet’, was published in The Oxford Magazine, vol. LIV (14 May 1936) under the pseudonym, ‘Nat Whilk’. It is reprinted in Poems and CP.

33 Charles Williams’s new supernatural thriller, Descent into Hell (1937).

34 A character in one of Williams’s other supernatural thrillers, War in Heaven (1930).

35 Gertrude Stein (1874–1946), American author who lived in Paris and turned her home into a salon for the avant-garde. Lewis disliked her idiosyncratic poems such as Tender Sultans (1914) which carried fragmentation and abstraction to the point of idiocy.

36 ‘Under the Mercy’ was perhaps Williams’s favourite formula. It appeared in ch. 10 of Descent into Hell, at the end of many of his letters, and even on his gravestone.

37 i.e. lowest common multiple.

38 Edgar Frederick Carritt (1876–1964), Lewis’s tutor in Philosophy, was Fellow of Philosophy at University College, 1898–1941. See his biography attached to the letter to Albert Lewis of 1 May 1920 (CL I, pp. 485–6).

39 During this time the Bodleian Library was open every day from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m., but on 1 July 1938 it began closing at 1 p.m. on Saturdays and all day Sunday.

40 Lewis was imitating lines 92 and 95–6 of the Anglo-Saxon poem, The Wanderer, which may be translated:

Where went the horse, where went the hero? Where went the hoard-giver? ……How the time has gone, Has darkened under night’s helmet as if never had been!