Читать книгу Collected Letters Volume Two: Books, Broadcasts and War, 1931–1949 - Клайв Льюис, Клайв Стейплз Льюис, Walter Hooper - Страница 9
1933
ОглавлениеTO GUY POCOCK (W): 1
Magdalen College,
Oxford.
Jan 17th 1933
Dear Pocock
I have written a new book and should like to know whether it is worth my while sending it to you. After our experiences over Dymer I can hardly suppose that you will be very eager! The new one, however, is in prose. It is called The Pilgrim’s Regress: an allegorical apology for Christianity, Reason, and Romanticism, and is a kind of Bunyan up to date. It is serious in intention but has a good many more comic passages than I originally intended, and also a fair controversial interest (the things chiefly ridiculed are Anglo Catholicism, Materialism, Sitwellism, Psychoanalysis, and T. S. Elliot.) If published, it would be under my own name.
Perhaps you could let me know whether, if I sent it, I could rely on its having a fair and moderately early consideration.
Yours sincerely
C. S. Lewis
On 19 January Pocock answered: ‘Yes, indeed…the Firm would be glad to have an opportunity of considering your new book for publication.’2 After reading the manuscript Pocock wrote again on 2 February:
I am writing now to say that we shall be very pleased to publish it for you…I look upon it as an important and penetrating book. Now there are one or two important points we want to discuss with you. First, we all feel that it is a little long for complete success…Secondly, something would have to be done about the Latin in the text. Will you make a suggestion, or shall we? Thirdly, we feel that the book ought to be illustrated. I suggest landscape and figures in the Nosh style. Mr Dent has in mind woodcut figures. What are your views? Lastly, we feel that the present title won’t do. ‘Pilgrim’ or ‘Pilgrimage’ by all means, but not the other part3.
TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W):
The Kilns.
Feb 4th 1933
My dear Arthur,
I am really penitent for having left you so long without a letter. The reasons are the usual ones—term and its demands, coupled this time with a good deal of laziness for I have been rather less busy than usual and have been in excellent health and form.
Warnie has been home since before Christmas and is now retired (Read Lamb’s Essay on The Superannuated Man).4 He has become a permanent member of our household and I hope we shall pass the rest of our lives together. He has settled down as easily as a man settles into a chair, and what between his reading and working in the garden finds himself busy from morning till night. He and I are making a path through the lower wood—first along the shore of the pond and then turning away from it up through the birch trees and rejoining at the top the ordinary track up the hill. It is very odd and delightful to be engaged on this sort of thing together: the last time we tried to make a path together was in the field at Little Lea when he was at Malvern and I was at Cherbourg. We both have a feeling that ‘the wheel has come full circuit’, that the period of wanderings is over, and that everything which has happened between 1914 and 1932 was an interruption: tho’ not without a consciousness that it is dangerous for mere mortals to expect anything of the future with confidence. We make a very contented family together.
I have had some fine solitary moments too when we have been working in different parts of the wood. You know how intensely silent it is in a thicket on a warm winter afternoon: and how if you are digging sooner or later a robin comes up and hops about for worms—both his eye and his breast looking unnaturally bright among the prevailing greys and greyish greens. I say warm days, for the warm weather has just arrived with a rush: but we had the frost alright. The pond was frozen and we had two days skating. You can imagine how lovely the smooth flow of ice looked as the sun came down onto it through the steep little wood.
In the way of reading Lockhart kept me going through the whole vac. and I am still only at Vol. 8. What an excellent book it is, isn’t it?—and what a nice addition. I think Scott is the one of all my favourite authors whom I admire most as a man—though of course there is a side of him that you and I would not have got on with, the rather insolent Tory country-gentleman side with the coursing, hard riding and hard drinking. Also perhaps as a father he was a little heavy—how sententious (and how unlike all his other letters) the letters to young Walter are.
Since term began I have had a delightful time reading a children’s story which Tolkien has just written.5 I have told of him before: the one man absolutely fitted, if fate had allowed, to be a third in our friendship in the old days, for he also grew up on W. Morris and George Macdonald. Reading his fairy tale has been uncanny—it is so exactly like what we wd. both have longed to write (or read) in 1916: so that one feels he is not making it up but merely describing the same world into which all three of us have the entry. Whether it is really good (I think it is until the end) is of course another question: still more, whether it will succeed with modern children.
And, talking of this sort of thing, would you believe it—I am actually officially supervising a young woman who is writing a thesis on G. Macdonald.6 It is very odd—and curiously difficult—to approach as work something so old and intimate. The girl is, unfortunately, quite unworthy of her subject: apart from everything else, she is an American.
Dent’s has accepted the Pilgrim’s Regress with a number of conditions—shortening, alteration of title etc—which I intend to make some resistance to.7 I have no right to expect a letter after my long silence, but of course I shd. like one. How does the detective story go? It will soon be getting suitable weather for your cottage again: although, as you see, I am having a good time, the memory of the Mournes is still very poignant. Give my love to Mrs Greeves, and to the McNeills8 (all three— the one on the hill included) if you see them.
Yours,
Jack
Warnie sends you his greetings and hopes we shall see you this year.
TO GUY POCOCK(W):
Magdalen College,
Oxford.
Tuesday [14 February 1933]
Dear Pocock
I am sending you tomorrow the revised MS. The quotations are translated (I am glad you thought of that—it was great fun) and all the cuts that I can make. I should like you to glance at Bk I. chap. 4 (pp. 15–17). I have cut practically the whole chapter because it is such an easy cut: on the other hand some people like it and the gain in space is not great. I don’t much care myself whether it stays or goes, so I leave you to do what you please with it. I have scored it only in pencil, so that you can remove the scorings if you think fit. After that, the book has had all done to it that I can do and may go straight to the printer as soon as we have signed an agreement.
I am still strongly in favour of publication in June if it is still possible, but of course the final decision on that, and on price, rests with you. I have enclosed a map with the MS. A surprising number of people independently asked for one. Ought there to be one?—certainly not, in my view, if it is expensive. (Of course the one I enclose would not do anyway—but with help I could concoct a better one)
Yours sincerely
C. S. Lewis
TO GUY POCOCK(W):
The Kilns,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford.
Feb. 27th 1933
Dear Pocock
It is most unfortunate at this moment that I should be laid up with flu’ and practically an idiot. However, some points won’t wait.
1. Could you get the Firm to agree to some wording of the ‘next book’ clause which will leave me free to offer to the Clarendon Press a work now in hand on Allegory from Prudentius to Spenser.9 This is a purely academic work wh. I don’t think you would consider—at least I don’t remember your producing anything of the kind—and it seems rather the duty of a young scholar to give his own university press the first refusal of his first scholarly work. If they will agree (Dents, I mean) they probably have a suitable form of words, or can invent one more easily than I. (‘Next novel, poem, play, or other imaginative work’ or ‘Next work of a popular character’) I don’t much mind, but I fancy they will make no objection.
2. I enclose two alternative ‘blurbs’ for the catalogue as asked. I am so ill that they are probably both hopeless. Hash up anything you can out of the two: if neither any use you’ll have to get a new one done in the office—I can no more at the moment.
3. No objection to picture on jacket—you know, from correspondence about the Dymer decoration what kind of drawing I don’t like!
4. Yes—end leaves a good place for map. I take it no one wd. be such a fool as to work out literally the distances on that map I sent you—they are probably all wrong.
5. Just occurs to me—in the revised MS chapter numberings have not all been corrected since omissions. I suppose printers look after that sort of thing for themselves. By the bye—I suppose these very short chapters will not be given a fresh page each: it wd. be very bothering to the eye apart from waste of paper. If not, what about headings in the margin as in Temple Classics?
Very glad to hear you will run down. Let me know in time to collect Coghill10 and we’ll make a feast of it.
I hope this is not so incoherent as it feels to me
Yours
C. S. Lewis
P.S. The above address for the next few days
PP.S. The blurbs shd. have gone to Department C.
TO GUY POCOCK (W):
The Kilns,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford.
March 23rd 1933
Dear Pocock
The map has just arrived and is excellent. There is one correction—for TALE MEN read PALE MEN. Am I to send it back (I rather distrust my powers of putting up such an odd parcel) or will you convey this single correction to the cartographer—with my congratulations.
I hope you have not abandoned the idea of paying me a visit,
Yours sincerely
C. S. Lewis
TO J. M. DENT PUBLISHERS (W):
Dept. B
Pilgrim’s Regress
The Kilns
Headington Quarry,
Oxford
March 24th 1933
Dear Sir
I enclose one correction for Map and suggestion for title etc. on a separate sheet,
Yours faithfully
C. S. Lewis
P.S. I am at this address till May 1st.
TO J. M. DENT PUBLISHERS (W):
Department B.
Correction
For TALE MEN read PALE MEN.
If a title is wanted I wd. suggest MAPPA MUNDI or MIDDLE-EARTH (The artist may decide between these on decorative grounds). If you merely want something to fill up the corner a [compass drawn in, basically a cross with N, E, S and W around clockwise from the top] might do.
C. S. Lewis
TO J. M. DENT PUBLISHERS (W):
Dept B
(Pilgrim’s Regress)
The Kilns,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford.
March 25th 1933
Dear Sir
I have your letter of the 24th about stippling the sea parts of the map. After the very strong and pleasing contour lines with wh. the artist has emphasised the coast line, stippling is certainly not needed for clarity. Whether it would be an improvement decoratively is a question I would leave to the artist. Does it not partly depend on factors which are not before me: e.g. the type of paper, the colour of the cover (of which a rim will probably show) and the size?
Yours faithfully
C. S. Lewis
TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W):
The Kilns,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford.
March 25th. 1933.
My dear Arthur,
I wonder how you have been getting on this many a day. I am certain I was the last to write, but whoever began it we have both been wrong to keep such a silence. We ought to be ashamed when we remember the weekly letters of the Bookham period. Fortunately each feels sure that the cause of this decline, whatever else it may be, is no diminution of the friendship. I think you pointed out to me once that it was natural we should write more easily in the old days, when everything was new and our correspondence was really like two explorers signalling to one another in a new country. Also—neither of us had any other outlet: we still thought that we were the only two people in the world who were interested in the right kind of things in the right kind of way.
I think I mentioned the skating in my last letter. Since then life has gone on in a pretty smooth way. Warnie sinks deeper and deeper into the family life: it is hard to believe he was not always here. What a mercy that the change in his views (I mean as regards religion) should have happened in time to meet mine—it would be awkward if one of us were still in the old state of mind. He has an excellent gramophone and is building up a complete set of the Beethoven symphonies, one of which (complete) he often plays us on a Sunday evening. I have quite foresworn the old method of hearing one’s favourite bits played separately, and I am sure one gains enormously by always hearing one symphony as a whole and nothing else. By the way which is the one that contains the beautiful slow movement you played me—the one whose quality you defined as ‘compassion’? I have been waiting for it eagerly but so far W. has not produced it. I am getting back more of my old pleasure in music all the time.
I saw Bryson last night.11 We were having a little supper for some of the English tutors, at the ‘Golden Cross’, which Bryson ought to have attended and as we knew he was in Oxford we went round to his digs to root him out. We found him sitting nursing a terrific black eye (the result of a very mild motor accident—better not mention this at home) and refusing to join us. I suspect that these little suppers are not really much to his taste: the fare is fried fish, ham and eggs, bread and cheese, and beer, and the whole thing is too homely, too rowdy, and too unluxurious for Bryson. This sounds like malice, but it isn’t. Between ourselves, Bryson’s beautiful clothes and general daintiness are a perfectly friendly and well established joke among some of his colleagues. There must be some real good in him; for though many laugh at his foppery and grumble at his laziness, I have never met any one, even in this hotbed of squabbles, who seriously dislikes him.
I had to abandon Lockhart at the beginning of last term and have not yet resumed it. It is most annoying when the last few volumes of a long book have to be left over like that. One somehow feels a disinclination to begin them again and to find how many names and facts one has forgotten: yet it is uncomfortable not to polish the book off. You will have the laugh of me this time.
While having a few days in bed recently I tried, at W’s earnest recommendation, to read the Three Musketeers,12 but not only got tired of it but also found it disgusting. All these swaggering bullies, living on the money of their mistresses—faugh! One never knows how good Scott is till one tries to read Dumas. Have you noticed how completely Dumas Jacks any background? in Scott, behind the adventures of the hero, you have the whole society of the age, with all the interplay of town and country, Puritan and Cavalier, Saxon and Norman, or what not, and all the racy humour of the minor characters: and behind that again you have the eternal things—the actual countryside, the mountains, the weather, the very feel of travelling. In Dumas, if you try to look even an inch behind the immediate intrigue, you find just nothing at all. You are in an abstract world of gallantry and adventure which has no roots—no connection with human nature or mother earth. When the scene shifts from Paris to London there is no sense that you have reached a new country, no change of atmosphere. And I don’t think there is a single passage to show that Dumas had ever seen a cloud, a road, or a tree. In a word, if you were asked to explain what you and I meant by ‘the homely’ in literature, you could almost reply, ‘It means the opposite of The Three Musketeers.’ But perhaps I am being too hard on what after all was written only for amusement. I suppose there must be a merit in the speed and verve of the plot, even if I don’t like that kind of thing.
I was talking about this to Tolkien who, you know, grew up on Morris and Macdonald and shares my taste in literature to a fault. We remarked how odd it was that the word romance should be used to cover things so different as Morris on the one hand and Dumas or Rafael Sabatini on the other—things not only different but so different that it is hard to imagine the same person liking both. We agreed that for what we meant by romance there must be at least the hint of another world—one must ‘hear the horns of elfland’.13
For fear you shd. think I am going too much off the deep end, let me add that I have just read a real modern thriller (Buchan’s Three Hostages)14 and enjoyed it thoroughly. So perhaps I shall be able to enjoy yours. Is it finished, by the way, and am I to see it? I have also read a war book (Landlocked Lake by Hanbury Sparrow)15—but that was because Barfield is introducing him as a new member of our Easter walking party. A ‘regular’ colonel seems an odd fish to come on a walk with my friends and me—I wonder if I shall quarrel with him!
Do try to write me a long letter soon. You are constantly in my mind even when I don’t write, and to lose touch with you would be like losing a limb.
Dents say they will have Pilgrim’s Regress out by the end of May. I have successfully resisted a foolish idea they had of an illustrated edition—whose price wd. of course have killed any sale it might hope for. But it is going to be decorated by a map on the end leaf which I had great fun in drawing the sketch for. I suppose you have no objection to my dedicating the book to you? It is yours by every right—written in your house, read to you as it was written, and celebrating (at least in the most important parts) an experience which I have more in common with you than anyone else. By the bye, you will be interested to hear that in finally revising the MS I did adopt many of your corrections, or at least made alterations where you objected. So if the book is a ghastly failure I shall always say ‘Ah it’s this Arthur business’16
Do write. W. in bed with flu’ (mild) but otherwise all well here
Yours
Jack
Give my love to your mother: I hope she is well.
TO OWEN BARFIELD (W):
[The Kilns],
March 28th 1933
My dear Barfield—
Thanks for sending me the book.17 Any war-book that is any good at all stirs up my 18 so much that I find it difficult—through the din—to discover what it is really like. But this is, of course, much more than a war book. My chief complaint is that it stops too soon, without pulling the threads (the philosophical ones) together. Is it, by any chance, the first of a trilogy? As that, it would be capital. There are, as it stands, several things I want to know more about, e.g.
1. Courage used to be less conscious, more in the blood: that is why our ancestors did not have to exhaust on keeping brave all the conscious energy needed for the fighting. Good! But does the author’s solution by discipline mean that nature was simply wrong in transferring courage from the blood to the mind? For this discipline (sharply distinguished from regimental spirit etc) is just a method of putting the courage-problem back on the unconscious: i.e. he says to nature ‘I don’t want this freedom. All you have done is to put me to the trouble of inventing an elaborate machinery for making myself again un-free in this matter—freedom in this matter having turned out to be such a job that if I attend to it I have no time to attend to anything else.’ Is this what H-S’s position comes to? And does he know that it does?
2. One wants emphatically to know more about those Australians and Canadians. We are told that they were braver than the English. If, as I surmise, they were not subjected to the martinettery, then they cast doubt on the whole thesis. If they were, then still, since it did not produce the same effect on them and on the English, why then, (by the ‘method of difference’) discipline can’t be the whole secret.
3. How much weight does he give to the discovery made at the end of the book that martinettery can be applied by anyone who has learned the trick i.e. it depends on no spiritual quality in the applier?19 Wd. he admit that this is the same as saying it is mechanical. When I got to the end, where this discovery is made, I at once connected it with the early passage ‘Spirit wept…’ (that bit is splendid)20 and saw discipline related to courage precisely as the mechanical battle of heavy guns is related (by H-S) to ‘the noble end of war.’
In fact, all my three points come to one—an uncertainty how far the author has faced his own growing discovery of the bad element in discipline and how far he has seen the resulting problem. For the position he leaves us in is this. Discipline is the only way of making it at all probable that your men will win battles: and therefore without discipline the cause of freedom and virtue, so far as it lies with you, will be lost. On the other hand, discipline is unfree, can be applied mechanically like a trick, there is no warrant that it will fall justly etc etc: so that it looks as if discipline itself may be just as fatal to the cause as defeat. This is where one would like the next book to take up the problem. (It is the old damnable fix—efficiency at the cost of the values for whose sake only you wish to be effective, or justice, liberty, and equality preserved only to be knocked on the head by your efficient neighbour. All this bears acutely on the problem of the college junto—of wh. we must discuss).
There were places in the book where one felt the old hatred. .21 Still, he seems to share them himself. On the purely literary side, I think it good: vivid without the journalese that usually accompanies these vivid war books. Some of the battles are not v. easy to visualise, but that is almost unavoidable: they are certainly easier than Blunden’s.22 One really glorious bit is the description of the gusto he feels even for the filthy air and Stygian landscape of the front when expecting death: the preciousness of matter as such. I don’t think that’s been done before.
I am a good deal worried by my inability to understand some of your article on Coleridge.23 It is all exciting, but I can’t really find much to correspond with the diagrams, except the first. Things I do get are a. The explanation of C’s apparent incoherence.24 b. The privileged position of the vb. to be25 (By the bye, Sadism and Masochism are both over-emphases of the Difference element, but the first as verb and the second as Noun. Will that do?)26 c. The insect as externalised consciousness.27 All the rest you must explain on the walk.
Both poems improve on re-reading, but the first one still remains the better, for the reasons given before. The selection of imagery in it is almost perfect and the effect all one like a taste.
HAVE YOU BOOKED THOSE SEATS FOR THE RHEINGOLD?
Have the venue where you like: but with such a large party—and in Easter week—some room-booking shd. be done at once
Yours
C. S. Lewis
Last Saturday was the anniversary of the Creation of the World!
TO DAPHNE HARWOOD (BOD): 28
Magdalen College,
Oxford.
March 28th 1933
Dear Mrs. Harwood,
I hope it was not only literary vanity that made me enjoy so much your very kind and very discriminating letter. Thank you very much indeed.
I was much interested in the account of your journey. I was never myself up against anything quite so bad as I take Ogden to be, but I can quite imagine him on the St. Theresa theme.29
I am glad you never read my Summa,30 for all that is dead as mutton to me now. and the points chiefly at issue between the Anthroposophists and me then were precisely the points on which anthroposophy is certainly right—i.e. the claim that it is possible for man, here and now, in the phenomenal world, to have commerce with the world beyond—which is what I was denying. The present difference between us is quite other. The only thing that I now wd. object eagerly to [in] anthroposophy is that I don’t think it can say ‘I believe in one God the Father Almighty.’ My feeling is that even if there are a thousand orders of beneficent being above us, still, the universe is a cheat unless at the back of them all there is the one God of Christianity. But I did not mean to raise controversial points: there is certainly quite a lot for us to agree on as against nearly the whole contemporary world! I would quite agree, for instance, with your discovery that it is Will wh. lets the cat out of the bag—and also with your refusal to rest in Croce.31 His is the kind of idealism that for all practical purposes is indistinguishable from materialism. What a ghastly pun that his name should mean ‘Blessed Cross’!
I don’t understand the part about the eternal feminine (and masculine) in your letter, and look forward to hearing more about it when next we meet. Cecil was looking grand when he came down to us—he is the most-un-ageing of my friends.
We are all disappointed that your father has abandoned the idea of buying Tewsfield.32 With very many thanks,
yours sincerely,
C. S. Lewis
TO GUY POCOCK (W):
The Kilns
Headington Quarry,
Oxford
March 31st 1933
Dear Pocock
This is unfortunate! Since I last wrote family arrangements have been maturing which will take me out of Oxford from the 6th onwards—so that Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday of next week are the only days (until the 23rd and after). I don’t want to be a nuisance: on the other hand I should very much like to see you. So just do as you would like. If you want to get me at short notice my Telephone number is 6963 Oxford—preferably after dinner. So sorry.
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO J. M. DENT PUBLISHERS (W):
Department B
Flint Hall
Hambledon,
Bucks
April 12th 1933
Dear Sir
I return corrected proof of the Pilgrim’s Regress. Would you kindly direct the special attention of the printer to the following points
1. Greek quotations pp 101–107. Make quite sure of the correction in several places: i.e. read Δ (= ‘Delta,’ 4th letter of the Gk. alphabet) for ó.
2. On p. 228 my note may not be perfectly clear. I want the poem to be spaced like this: [series of eight lines close together, the final one separated by a line or two]
3. Quotations on pp 11, 31 etc. Ought these to have stops after them? And if so, ought the dashes to be removed? I have put in the stops and not removed the dashes, but am ready to be guided by the printer’s decision as to what is usual in such cases.
Yours faithfully
C. S. Lewis
Address after Monday next,
Magdalen College,
Oxford.
TO GUY POCOCK (W):
Magdalen College.
Oxford.
May 4th 1933
Dear Pocock
Yes—I heartily approve Derrick’s jacket: but should prefer to see the legend ‘Reason set…up’ omitted, Photo will be sent as soon as taken.
In haste,
Yours
C. S. Lewis
It really is good: quite beyond my hopes. The legend under it however must be omitted, because nothing less like a spurring rider could well be imagined. Anyway it is not needed.
The Pilgrim’s Regress: An Allegorical Apology for Christianity, Reason and Romanticism was published by J. M. Dent on 25 May 1933.
TO GUY POCOCK (W):
MAGDALEN COLLEGE.
Oxford.
June 9th 1933
Dear Pocock
Could you let me have 4 more copies of P. R. and tell me what I owe you for them?
I recommend the underlined passage in the enclosed for advertisement use as soon as we get anything on the other side to set beside it,
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W):
Magdalen College,
Oxford.
June 13th. 1933
My dear Arthur,
You ought to have had a copy of Pilgrim’s Regress from me before now and a letter long before. My six complementary copies turned out to have so many unexpected claimants that I had exhausted them before I knew where I was: some new ones are now on order and I will send you one as soon as they arrive.
As for letters, they have been rather out of the question. I have never had a busier term—9 to 1 and 5 to 7 every week day and two Sundays completely filled with extra work in the middle of the term: not to mention exams which have now set in and which will keep my nose to the grindstone till the end of July. However I have kept very well and have therefore nothing to complain of—except that I am rather hungry for reading and don’t know when I shall get a few uninterrupted hours again.
‘Invigilating’ in exams last week I did manage to read one novel (I find that anything harder than novels is too much for me in the Schools) which I can recommend—Tom’s a-cold by John Collier.33 The theme is one not uncommon now-a-days: that of a barbaric ‘heroic’ society growing up on the ruins of the present civilisation. But it has two great advantages over most such books. 1. It doesn’t waste time telling you how civilisation collapsed but starts a 100 years on. 2. It lays the scene in the South of England and is very topographical, so that you can actually see the Berkshire downs and Savernake Forest turning into the fortresses, the greenwoods, and the valley communities of a world at about the same stage of development as that in The Roots of the Mountains.34 One gets v. well the idea of how much larger England would seem under those conditions.
I must announce with regret that I shall not be paying you a visit this summer (Perhaps this is premature as I have not yet been asked!) I have come to the decision with considerable doubt, but I think on the whole I am right. Warnie and I want to go and see the Scotch uncles35 and as they are getting on it ought to be done this year. This will sound an odd programme to you. It is not all ‘duty’—curiosity, desire to revive childish memories, and the anticipation of an amused yet affectionate pleasure in seeing our father in them, all come in to it. We shall then go back from Glasgow by the Clyde Shipping Company boat—and I admit I shall be such a rag by the time exams are over that I rather look forward to some lazy days at sea as the best, if not the only, holiday I shall be capable of. I am sorry to disappoint you (if I may flatter myself that it is a disappointment). At any rate don’t think that this is a precedent or that it means the end of my appearances at Belfast!
I was up to London for the Rheingold, which I enjoyed less than Siegfried—chiefly I think because we had very bad seats (We is Barfield and I).36 MacFarlane—who has had a nervous breakdown since, poor chap—says he saw you* at one of the other operas: what a pity we hadn’t known and gone together.
I had an extremely kind letter from Reid about the book. I think it is going to be at least as big a failure as Dymer, and am consequently trying to take to heart all the things I wrote you when you were bowled over by Reid’s decision on your first novel—not entirely without success. How goes the detective story?
I hardly deserve a letter, but hope you will treat me better than my deserts
Yours
Jack
TO T. R. HENN (P): 37
Magdalen College,
Oxford.
July 2nd 1933.
Dear Henn
If you like this,38 accept it as a peace offering. If you think it worth disliking heartily, then have at me in print or private—dismount your tuck, be yare in your preparing.39 If it is simply a bore, then pass it on to your second hand bookseller.
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO MARY SHELLEY (T): 40
Magdalen
July 21st [1933]
Dear Miss Shelley,
If you are not, at the moment, too sick of me and all my kind to read further, it may be worth saying that you must not run away with the idea that you are a Fourth Class mind. What really ruined you was an NS and a Δ on language, which would of course have spoiled even very good work elsewhere.41 In the Lit. your highest mark was Β+ (XIXth century).
Why your literature papers were not better I do not understand. I blame myself for not having exhorted more essays from you—but I doubt if that was the whole cause. You were very short and general. But I am quite clear in my own mind that you have not done yourself justice and that your real quality is far beyond the work you did in Schools.
This is cold comfort to you with the world to face!—but at least it is said quite sincerely and not merely for the sake of consoling you.
Try to forgive me both as an examiner and as a tutor. If there should at any time be any way in which I can be of use to you, let me know at once. Till then, good-bye and good luck.
Yours very sincerely
C. S. Lewis
TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W):
The Kilns,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford.
Aug. 17th. 1933.
My dear Arthur,
I have been silent for a terribly long time, I know, but it has not really been my fault. I had a solid month’s examining after term ended, and then I went away for my sea holiday. I had pictured myself writing to you on the boat, but this turned out to be practically impossible: so that I am really writing if not on the first possible day, at any rate on the second or third. Before I go on to anything else I must answer one point in your last letter:—you comment on my saying nothing about your having come so near me without visiting me. The fact is I deliberately said nothing about it because I feared that, if I did, it might seem that my intention of not visiting you this year was a kind of tit-for-tat—that I was offended and was thus taking my revenge, or, at least, was excusing my intention by your action. I would have liked you to come and see me, of course: but I never thought that England ought to be forbidden ground to you if you were not seeing me for any reason. I have no wish to reduce you to stealing past Oxford with a false beard on—like you and me stealing past Leeborough from Bernagh in the old days.
I did not enjoy the Rheingold this year nearly as much as I enjoyed Siegfried last year—neither at the time nor in memory. Oddly enough the hammer passage which you mention I actually disliked. I had enjoyed it on your gramophone, but at Covent Garden it seemed to me so much cruder and, before it ended (and I thought it would never end) nearly ridiculous. You must not think that my loyalty to the Ring is wavering. The main causes of my disliking the Rheingold were (a) Our having very bad seats (b) My not liking the man who sang Alberich.42 I admit that Alberich must sometimes shout instead of singing—but that man seemed to shout unnecessarily. Next year I hope to go to the Valkyrie.
While I am on these things, I might add that I have actually been to the films today!—to see Cavalcade!!43 This is one of the most disgraceful confessions I have ever made to you. I thought it would be interesting historically, and so I suppose it was: and certainly very clever. But there is not an idea in the whole thing from beginning to end: it is a mere brutal assault on one’s emotions, using material which one can’t help feeling intensely. It appeals entirely to that part of you which lives in the throat and chest, leaving the spirit untouched. I have come away feeling as if I had been at a debauch.
The sea holiday was a success. We went first by train to Arrochar where we slept a night44 and had one glorious day’s walking on the shores of Loch Long and Loch Lomond and across the mountains between them. I forget if you have been in those parts. They seemed to me to excell all other mountains in one respect—the curiously fantastic, yet heavy shapes of rock into which the summits are formed. They realise one’s idea of mountains as the fastnesses of the giants. The actual beach of Loch Lomond also pleased me very much—an ordinary pebbly beach such as you might find at the sea with the unusual addition that it had trees on it and that you could drink the water. Up in the mountains we had a glorious hour at a stream—a golden brown stream, with cataracts and deep pools. We spread out all our clothes (sweat-sodden) to dry on the flat stones, and lay down in a pool just under a little waterfall, and let the foam come down the back of our heads and round our necks. Then when we were cool, we came out and sat naked to eat our sandwiches, with our feet still in the rushing water. Why have you and I never done this? (Answer—because we never came to a suitable stream at a suitable time)
This glorious day was followed by a very tiring and trying, but extremely interesting, week end chez l’oncle at Helensburgh. It was uncannily like being at home again—specially when Uncle Bill announced on the Sunday evening ‘I won’t be going into town tomorrow’, and we with well-feigned enthusiasm replied ‘Good!’. But to describe the whole thing would take a book. On the Monday afternoon45 we sailed from Glasgow. The journey down the Clyde was beautiful, despite some rain, and tho’ there were more passengers on board than I would have chosen, there was usually a quiet corner to read in. I liked—you would probably not—the homely feeling on these boats, with dinner at 1 and ‘High Tea’ at 6. It was very strange coming into Belfast next morning.
I had made up my mind that it was no good trying to arrange a meeting with you. The time—we were sailing again at one o’clock—was much too long for a three-handed talk of you and W. and me, and too short for sending him off anywhere so that I could have you tete-à-tete. Our programme was simple. We trammed to Campbell and thence walked up the hills round the Shepherd’s hut. The sight of all those woods and fields made me regret very much that I was not having an Irish holiday with you: and the new house (near Kelsie’s new house) made me wonder how much more might be altered by next year. We walked down by the ordinary, poignantly familiar, route, stopped to look at Leeborough—how the trees are growing!—and then went down the Circular Rd. to St Marks to see the window which W. had never yet seen.46 He was delighted with it. Here we had a conversation with the verger—who referred to Gordon47 as ‘Gordon’! Then, after a drink in the reformed pub at Gelson’s corner, we got back into town.
The rest of the tour I shall not describe in detail. The bit I should most like to have shared with you was the departure from Waterford. The sail down the river, peppered with v. early Norman castles, was good, but what was better was the next three hours out to sea. Imagine a flat French grey sea, and a sky of almost the same colour: between these a long fish-shaped streak of pure crimson, about 20 miles long, and lasting, unchanged or changing imperceptibly, for hours. Then add three or four perfectly transparent mountains, so extraordinarily spiritualised that they absolutely realised the old idea of Ireland as the ‘isle of the saints’. Like this—I do not remember that I have ever seen anything more calm and spacious and celestial. Not but what we had some wonderful sunsets at other times in the voyage. You with your dislike of the sea will hardly admit it, but from a boat out of sight of land one does get effects hardly to be got elsewhere. For one thing the sky is so huge and the horizon is uninterrupted in every direction, so that the mere scale of the sky-scenery is beyond anything you get ashore: and for another, the extreme simplicity of the design—flat disk and arched dome and nothing else—produces a kind of concentration. And then again to turn suddenly from these huge sublimities as one passes a staircase head and hear the sound of plates being laid or the laugh of a boy coming up on the warmer air from below, gives that delicious contrast of the homely and familiar in the midst of the remote, which is the master-stroke of the whole thing.
I am re-reading Malory, and am astonished to find how much more connected, more of a unity, it is man we used to see. I no longer lose myself in the ‘brasting’. There is still too much of it, to be sure, but I am sustained by the beauty of the sentiment, and also the actual turns of phrase. How could one miss ‘He commanded his trumpets to blow that all the earth trembled and dindled of the sound.’48 Clearly one must read every good book at least once every ten years. It now seems to me that my Bookham reading of Malory was almost worthless. Did you ever realise that it is full of pathos? I never did until a pupil pointed it out to me a few months ago—wh. is what set me re-reading it.
I hope I shall be able to be a fairly regular correspondent again for the rest of the summer. Bad luck about the book!
Yours,
Jack
TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W):
[The Kilns]
Sept 1st. 1933
My dear Arthur,
I have no right to complain that I have not yet heard from you. Nor have I much to say on my own account: but I think I will write a little just to feel that we are keeping the channel open.
W. and I are heartily sick of the summer, the others not. The pond is sinking lower and lower and all sorts of stones and roots that ought to be covered are projecting—it seems almost an indecency. The water is getting dirtier and warmer and bathing has been abandoned. Flowers and vegetables are withering and the ground is so hard that a short walk leaves you footsore as if you had been walking on pavements. This morning we woke to coolness and thick mist and spangled cobwebs. I thought it was the first day of autumn and felt the old excitement. But it was all a cheat and by the time we came out of church it was another blazing day—pitiless blue sky, sun hammering bleached white grass, wasps buzzing, dragon flies darting, and Mr Papworth panting in the shade with his tongue out.
Which reminds me—I am so sorry to hear about your Paddy. I couldn’t lay my hands on your letter when I was writing last—I knew there was something in it I hadn’t dealt with but couldn’t remember what. How heartless you must have thought me. I now have your letter and can fully sympathise. It is always hard luck when you feel that other people have hidden facts from you till it is too late. I don’t now agree—how heartily I once would have—with any idea of ‘trying to forget’ things and people we have lost, or indeed with trying always and on principle to exclude any kind of distressing thought from one’s mind. I don’t mean one ought to sentimentalize a sorrow, or (often) scratch a shame till it is raw. But I had better not go on with the subject as I find my ideas are all in disorder. I know I feel very strongly that when in a wakeful night some idea which one ‘can’t stand’—some painful memory or mean act of ones own or vivid image of physical pain—thrusts itself upon you, that you ought not to thrust it away but look it squarely in the face for some appreciable time: giving it of course an explicitly devotional context. But I don’t fully know why and am not prepared to work the thing out. Anyway, this only very faintly arises out of what you said—and it won’t bring the poor beast back to life!
I have just re-read Lilith49 and am much clearer about the meaning. The first thing to get out of the way is all Greville Macdonald’s nonsense about ‘dimensions’ and ‘elements’—if you have his preface in your edition.50 That is just the sort of mechanical ‘mysticism’ which is worlds away from Geo. Macdonald. The main lesson of the book is against secular philanthropy—against the belief that you can effectively obey the 2nd command about loving your neighbour without first trying to love God.
The story runs like this. The human soul exploring its own house (the Mind) finds itself on the verge of unexpected worlds which at first dismay it (Chap. I-V). The first utterance of these worlds is an unconditional demand for absolute surrender of the Soul to the will of God, or, if you like, for Death (Chap. VI). To this demand the soul cannot at first face up (VI). But attempting to return to normal consciousness finds by education that its experiences are not abnormal or trivial but are vouched for by all the great poets and philosophers (VII My Father’s MS). It repents and tries to face the demand, but its original refusal has now rendered real submission temporarily impossible (IX). It has to face instead the impulses of the subconscious (X) and the slightly spurious loyalties to purely human ‘causes’—political, theological etc (XI). It now becomes conscious of its fellow men: and finds them divided into ‘Lovers’ (= ‘Hearts’ in our old classification) and ‘Bags’ or ‘Giants’ (= ‘Spades’). But because it is an unconverted soul, has not yet died, it cannot really help the Lovers and becomes the slave of the Bags. In other words the young man, however amiably disposed towards the sweet and simple people of the world, gets a job or draws a dividend, and becomes in fact the servant of the economic machine (XII—XIII). But he is too good to go on like this, and so becomes a ‘Reformer’, a ‘friend of humanity’—a Shelley, Ruskin, Lenin (XIV). Here follows a digression on Purgatory (XV-XVII).
With the next section we enter on the deepest part of the book which I still only v. dimly understand. Why do so many purely secular reformers and philanthropists fail and in the end leave men more wretched and wicked than they found them? Apparently the unconverted soul, doing its very best for the Lovers, only succeeds first in waking (at the price of its own blood) and then in becoming the tool of, Lilith. Lilith is still quite beyond me. One can trace in her specially the Will to Power—which here fits in quite well—but there is a great deal more than that. She is also the real ideal somehow spoiled: she is not primarily a sexual symbol, but includes the characteristic female abuse of sex, which is love of Power, as the characteristic male abuse is sensuality (XVIII-XXIX). After a long and stormy attempt to do God’s work in Lilith’s way or Lilith’s work in God’s way, the soul comes to itself again, realises that its previous proceedings are ‘cracked absolutely’ and in fact has a sort of half-conversion. But the new powers of will and imagination which even this half conversion inspires (symbolised in the horse) are so exhilarating that the soul thinks these will do instead of ‘death’ and again shoots off on its own. This passage is v. true and important. Macdonald is aware how religion itself supplies new temptations (XXX-XXXI). This again leads to another attempt to help the Lovers in his own way, with consequent partial disaster in the death of Lona (XXXII-XXXVII). He finds himself the jailer of Lilith: i.e. he is now living in the state of tension with the evil thing inside him only just held down, and at a terrible cost—until he (or Lilith—the Lilith-part of him) at last repents (Mara) and consents to die (XXXVIII-end)
I hope this has not bored you. I am so excited about it myself that for the moment I can hardly imagine anyone else being bored: but probably I have done it so badly that in the result nothing survives to be excited about. For one thing, I have emphasised the external side too much. Correct everything above by remembering that it is not only helping the Lovers outside against the Bags, but equally the Lover in himself against the Bag in himself.
You will be surprised to hear that I have been at the Cinema again! Don’t be alarmed, it will not become a habit. I was persuaded into going to King Kong51 because it sounded the sort of Rider Haggardish thing that has always exercised a spell over me. What else I have done I hardly know. Read Plato’s Gorgias, and am reading a long Histoire de la Science Politique (!!) by Janet52—surprisingly interesting. Almost everything is, I find, as one goes on.
You say nothing about Harrogate—was it nice? I have missed our annual meeting a good deal. I remember you at least once a day whatever happens and often in between, and wish we could see more of one another. I wonder if the time will ever come when we shall? And would it work if we did? I often feel that you are the one who has changed. This seems absurd when I have changed from atheism to Christianity and from The Crock of Gold53 to, say, the history of political science! But I feel all my changes to be natural developments of the original thing we had in common, and forget that of course they seem natural to me because they are mine, while yours, doubtless equally natural, can never seem so to me to the same extent. I don’t know how I come to be writing about this and writing it so badly. I had better stop.
Any news of your MS yet? I have tried to keep myself this time from getting too wrapped up in my own book’s success and think I have partially succeeded—just as well, too!
Yours
Jack
TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W):
Hotel Victoria,
Milford-on-Sea,
Hants.
Sept 12 1933
My dear Arthur,
It was a delightful surprise to get your long and interesting letter: certainly the longest and one of the most interesting letters I have ever had from you.
I have been thinking all morning over your question about God and evil which is very far from being ‘elementary’ to me—or for that matter, I suppose, to the angels. If I understand you rightly you are not primarily concerned with the sort of logical problem as to how the All-Good can produce evil, or produce a world in which there is evil, but with a more personal, practical, and intimate problem as to how far God can sympathise with our evil will as well as with our good—or, to draw it milder, whether he does.
I should begin, I think, by objecting to an expression you use: ‘God must have a potentiality of His opposite—evil.’ For this I would substitute the idea which someone had in the Middle Ages who defined God as ‘That which has no opposite’ i.e. we live in a world of clashes, good and evil, true and false, pleasant and painful, body and spirit, time and eternity etc, but God is not simply (so to speak) one of the two clashes but the ultimate thing beyond them all—just as in our constitution the King is neither the Prime Minister nor the Leader of the Opposition, but the thing behind them which alone enables these to be a lawful government and an opposition—or just as space is neither bigness or smallness but that in which the distinctions of big and small arise. This then is my first point. That Evil is not something outside and ‘over against’ God, but in some way included under Him.
My second point seems to be in direct contradiction to this first one, and is (in scriptural language) as follows: that God ‘is the Father of Lights and in Him is no darkness at all’.54 In some way there is no evil whatever in God. He is pure Light. All the heat that in us is lust or anger in Him is cool light—eternal morning, eternal freshness, eternal springtime: never disturbed, never strained. Go out on any perfect morning in early summer before the world is awake and see, not the thing itself, but the material symbol of it.
Well, these are our two starting points. In one way (our old phrase!) God includes evil, in another way he does not. What are we to do next? My beginning of the ‘next’ will be to deny another remark of yours—where you say ‘no good without evil’. This on my view is absolutely untrue: but the opposite ‘no evil without good’ is absolutely true. I will try to explain what I mean by an analogy.
Supposing you are taking a dog on a lead through a turnstile or past a post. You know what happens (apart from his usual ceremonies in passing a post!). He tries to go the wrong side and gets his lead looped round the post. You see that he can’t do it, and therefore pull him back. You pull him back because you want to enable him to go forward. He wants exactly the same thing—namely to go forward: for that very reason he resists your pull back, or, if he is an obedient dog, yields to it reluctantly as a matter of duty which seems to him to be quite in opposition to his own will: tho’ in fact it is only by yielding to you that he will ever succeed in getting where he wants.
Now if the dog were a theologian he would regard his own will as a sin to which he was tempted, and therefore an evil: and he might go on to ask whether you understand and ‘contained’ his evil. If he did you cd. only reply ‘My dear dog, if by your will you mean what you really want to do, viz. to get forward along the road, I not only understand this desire but share it. Forward is exactly where I want you to go. If by your will, on the other hand, you mean your will to pull against the collar and try to force yourself forward in a direction which is no use—why I understand it of course: but just because I understand it (and the whole situation, which you don’t understand) I cannot possibly share it. In fact the more I sympathise with your real wish—that is, the wish to get on—the less can I sympathise (in the sense of ‘share’ or ‘agree with’) your resistance to the collar: for I see that this is actually rendering the attainment of your real wish impossible.’
I don’t know if you will agree at once that this is a parallel to the situation between God and man: but I will work it out on the assumption that you do. Let us go back to the original question—whether and, if so in what sense God contains, say, my evil will—or ‘understands’ it. The answer is God not only understands but shares the desire which is at the root of all my evil—the desire for complete and ecstatic happiness. He made me for no other purpose than to enjoy it. But He knows, and I do not, how it can be really and permanently attained. He knows that most of my personal attempts to reach it are actually putting it further and further out of my reach. With these therefore He cannot sympathise or ‘agree’: His sympathy with my real will makes that impossible. (He may pity my misdirected struggles, but that is another matter.) The practical results seem to be two.
1. I may always feel looking back on any past sin that in the very heart of my evil passion there was something that God approves and wants me to feel not less but more. Take a sin of Lust. The overwhelming thirst for rapture was good and even divine: it has not got to be unsaid (so to speak) and recanted. But it will never be quenched as I tried to quench it. If I refrain—if I submit to the collar and come round the right side of the lamp-post—God will be guiding me as quickly as He can to where I shall get what I really wanted all the time. It will not be very like what I now think I want: but it will be more like it than some suppose. In any case it will be the real thing, not a consolation prize or substitute. If I had it I should not need to fight against sensuality as something impure: rather I should spontaneously turn away from it as something dull, cold, abstract, and artificial. This, I think, is how the doctrine applies to past sins.
2. On the other hand, when we are thinking of a sin in the future, i.e. when we are tempted, we must remember that just because God wants for us what we really want and knows the only way to get it, therefore He must, in a sense, be quite ruthless towards sin. He is not like a human authority who can be begged off or caught in an indulgent mood. The more He loves you the more determined He must be to pull you back from your way which leads nowhere into His way which leads where you want to go. Hence Macdonald’s words ‘The all-punishing, all-pardoning Father’. You may go the wrong way again, and again He may forgive you: as the dog’s master may extricate the dog after he has tied the whole lead round the lamp-post. But there is no hope in the end of getting where you want to go except by going God’s way. And what does ‘in the end’ mean? This is a terrible question. If endless time will really help us to go the right way, I believe we shall be given endless time. But perhaps God knows that time makes no difference. Perhaps He knows that if you can’t learn the way in 60 or 70 years on this planet (a place probably constructed by Divine skill for the very purpose of teaching you) then you will never learn it anywhere. There may be nothing left for Him but to destroy you (the kindest thing): if He can.
I think one may be quite rid of the old haunting suspicion—which raises its head in every temptation—that there is something else than God—some other country (Mary Rose…Mary Rose)55 into which He forbids us to trespass—some kind of delight wh. He ‘doesn’t appreciate’ or just chooses to forbid, but which wd. be real delight if only we were allowed to get it. The thing just isn’t there. Whatever we desire is either what God is trying to give us as quickly as He can, or else a false picture of what He is trying to give us—a false picture wh. would not attract us for a moment if we saw the real thing. Therefore God does really in a sense contain evil—i.e. contains what is the real motive power behind all our evil desires. He knows what we want, even in our vilest acts: He is longing to give it to us. He is not looking on from the outside at some new ‘taste’ or ‘separate desire of our own’. Only because he has laid up real goods for us to desire are we able to go wrong by snatching at them in greedy, misdirected ways. The truth is that evil is not a real thing at all, like God. It is simply good spoiled. That is why I say there can be good without evil, but no evil without good. You know what the biologists mean by a parasite—an animal that lives on another animal. Evil is a parasite. It is there only because good is there for it to spoil and confuse.
Thus you may well feel that God understands our temptations—understands them a great deal more than we do. But don’t forget Macdonald again—‘Only God understands evil and hates it.’56 Only the dog’s master knows how useless it is to try to get on with the lead knotted round the lamp-post. This is why we must be prepared to find God implacably and immovably forbidding what may seem to us very small and trivial things. But He knows whether they are really small and trivial. How small some of the things that doctors forbid would seem to an ignoramus.
I expect I have said all these things before: if so, I hope they have not wasted a letter. Alas! they are so (comparatively) easy to say: so hard, so all but impossible to go on feeling when the strain comes.
I have not time left for the rest of your letter. It was bad luck getting ill at the cottage: an illness at home has its pleasures, but on a holiday it is—well ‘disconsolate’ is the word that best fits my feeling about it. We have had a spate of unwanted and mostly uninvited visitors all summer and have (all four of us) come down here to give Minto a rest. It is opposite the Isle of Wight, and quite pleasant. We went to Beaulieu Abbey this afternoon—which would well deserve a letter in itself. I have since I came down read Voltaire’s Candide,57 and Gore’s Jesus of Nazareth (Home University Library)58 which I most strongly advise you to get at once. It is perhaps the best book about religion I have yet read—I mean of the theological kind—not counting books like Lilith. I am particularly pleased at having at last found out what Sadducees and Pharisees really were: tho’ it is an alarming bit of knowledge because most of the religious people I know are either one or the other. (Warnie is a bit of a Sadducee, and I am a good bit of a Pharisee.) I am now going to tackle a John Buchan.
When I suggested that you had changed, I didn’t mean that you had changed towards me. I meant that I thought the centre of your interests might have shifted more than mine. This leads on to what you say about being a mere mirror for other people on which each friend can cast his reflection in turn. That certainly is what you might become, just as a hardened bigot shouting every one down till he had no friends left is what I am in danger of becoming. In other words sympathy is your strong point, as stability is mine—if I have a strong point at all, which is doubtful: or weakness is your danger, as Pride is mine. (You have no idea how much of my time I spend just hating people whom I disagree with—tho’ I know them only from their books—and inventing conversations in which I score off them.) In other words, we all have our own burdens, and must do the best we can. I do not know which is the worse, nor do we need to: if each of us could imitate the other.
The woods are just beginning to turn here—the drive was exquisite this afternoon. Love from all.
Yours,
Jack
TO GUY POCOCK (W):
The Kilns,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford
Sept. 18th 1933.
Dear Pocock
Would you kindly tell the right department to send a copy of the Regress to A. Griffiths, Prinknash Priory, Gloucester, and debit me accordingly,
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO J. M. DENT PUBLISHERS (W):
Magdalen College,
Oxford.
Oct. 16th 1933
Dear Sir
Please forward a copy of my Pilgrim’s Regress to Miss Whitty, 7 Cherlsey Rd, Bristol 6. I enclose cheque for 8/2 to cover this and previous copies.
Yours faithfully
C. S. Lewis
TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W):
[The Kilns]
Nov 5th 1933
My dear Arthur,
I was glad to see your hand again. In spite of the remarks at the beginning of your letter, which tempt me to further discussion I must try to prevent this also from becoming an essay in amateur Theology.
I am glad to hear that Tchainie59 is once more sufficiently my friend to ask about my mediaeval book.60 You can tell her that it is not finished yet, though it might have been if I had not been made English Examiner which has devoured a good deal of my last two long Vacs. As one holds the job only for two years I am now free again and hope to get on with it. By the way has she read the Regress— I don’t mean ‘Ask her if she has read the Regress’!
To answer the next point in your letter, MacFarlane is back at work again and seems alright: but that perhaps does not count for much as he seemed alright to me up to the moment when he went sick. I have no eye for health. ‘How much better he is looking’—‘How ill he is looking’ people say to me as a visitor leaves the room, and I have never noticed any difference. I hope mere selfishness is not the cause.
The news of your learning to ride was surprising, amusing (as you foresaw!) and on the whole good. Perhaps you will be a ‘huntin’ man’ when I next meet you, slapping your leggings with a crop, and drinking whiskies with the county families’ fast daughters and hard-riding sons. What a fine sight it would be to see Bob, Janie, and you, altogether and all in full hunting kit (Janie wd. look fine in a tall hat and breeches) taking a fence together. What would attract me most about riding, viz. the unity of man and beast, is, I suppose, largely spoiled by having to use hired horses. But if you find you like it I suppose you could easily afford a horse of your own, if Lea knows anything about the care of a horse. Certainly I should enjoy very much strolling round with you to visit it in its stable.
I haven’t read the new De La Mare,61 but probably shall. Galsworthy, though I fully acknowledge his merits, I somehow never feel any desire to return to. Warnie feels quite differently and the original Saga62 is one of his old favourites which he can always read again. I forget whether I mentioned to you Collier’s Poor Tom’s A-cold63 as the new book I have enjoyed most for a long time.
Did I (also) tell you that Warnie has complete sets of all the Beethoven symphonies, and that we have a whole symphony each Sunday evening? This is one of the best hours of the week. Maureen who is (to be frank) the difficult one of the household has by then returned to Monmouth from her week end at home: the rush and crowd of visitors and continual flurry of the week end subsides and after a quiet supper Minto, Warnie, Mr Papworth and myself sit down in the study and have our music. In this way we have worked through the first Seven, and it was my recollections of the Seventh (last Sunday) which made me mention the matter—just to let you know that I had once more been enjoying what I still think the best slow movement there is, and, of course, enjoying it all the more because of the associations. I don’t however think the Seventh quite satisfactory as a whole: the final movement is by no means one of the best, and still less is it fit to follow the other. So far I think the Fifth quite easily the best, thus agreeing with the orthodox view: tho’ I differ from it in finding the Eroica the poorest of the lot.64 The Eroica (the connection is Napoleon) leads me to what you say about Germany.
I might agree that the Allies are partly to blame, but nothing can fully excuse the iniquity of Hitler’s persecution of the Jews, or the absurdity of his theoretical position. Did you see that he said ‘The Jews have made no contribution to human culture and in crushing them I am doing the will of the Lord.’ Now as the whole idea of the ‘Will of the Lord’ is precisely what the world owes to the Jews, the blaspheming tyrant has just fixed his absurdity for all to see in a single sentence, and shown that he is as contemptible for his stupidity as he is detestable for his cruelty. For the German people as a whole we ought to have charity: but for dictators, ‘Nordic’ tyrants and so on—well, read the chapter about Mr Savage in the Regress65 and you have my views.
I wish you didn’t always choose summer for your visits here. The place is to day at its best: the pond a smooth almost black sheet, sprinkled, or rather paved with bright leaves: the little birch wood flaming on the far side, and the hill and fir wood beyond fading into mist. Yes—the weather is alright now and I am getting all those fine feelings of revival—beginning to take longer walks again, remembering how much mere branch and sky and hedge ought to mean to one, and noticing suddenly for how long one has been only half awake.
Write again soon. Love to Mrs Greeves.
Yours,
Jack
TO DAPHNE HARWOOD (BOD):
Magdalen College,
Oxford.
Dec 28th 1933
Dear Mrs Harwood
I don’t know when I have been so rude to anyone as I have been to you after my long silence since I stayed with you. The truth is that if Cecil had not lent me Popelbaum’s book,66 I should have behaved better. I followed the ignis fatuus67 of postponing my letter until I could include some remarks on reading the book—then the time for reading the book did’nt come as soon as I expected—and so here we are.
I have now read it and am very much impressed. A good deal of it, of course, is difficult to one so ignorant of science as I am, but it is all interesting and, I expect, deserves most serious consideration. Has any notice been taken of it in ‘orthodox’ scientific circles? What particularly stuck in my mind—more as a tragedy than as a theorem—is the illustrated ‘rake’s progress’ of the Chimpanzee. What a subject for a poem! By the bye I have met a young philosophical tutor at New College (Crossland)68 who seems—which is rare at Oxford—to be well informed about Anthroposophy, and sympathetic tho’ not converted. I think that is really more important for you than an out and out convert would be: it is a great point gained when a movement begins to be treated with respect by those who are not members of it. Incidentally, he is in several ways the most intelligent new acquaintance I have made for several years.
I hope you have not misinterpreted my long silence. I have the most grateful memories of my last week end with you and value the novel honour of my God-sibbe69 very much. How is my godson? I hope his laughing all through the service does not mean that he is going to grow up an esprit fort: but as soon as he is old enough I shall try to collaborate with you in preventing this.
How is Stein?—a man I would like to meet again. And how is yourself and the guideman70 and the children? We are all pretty well, though Mrs. Moore is almost worn out with the Christmas charities, which ‘an autumn ’twas that grew the more by reaping.’71 We would all very much like to see you at the Kilns again when you can manage it. I have been disgustingly busy for a long long time: each year jobs seem to increase on one—as no doubt you find. Please give Cecil my love and accept all our best wishes for the new year.
Yours (penitent)
C. S. Lewis
1 See Guy Noel Pocock in the Biographical Appendix. Pocock was the editor for J. M. Dent of The Pilgrim’s Regress.
2 Bodleian Library, MS. Facs. d. 297, fol. 27.
3 ibid., fol. 28. Lewis’s original title, which appeared on the proofs, was The Pilgrim’s Regress, or Pseudo-Bunyan’s Periplus: An Allegorical Apology for Christianity, Reason and Romanticism.
4 In Charles Lamb, Essays of Elia (1823). ‘Elia’ was a name Lamb adopted for himself.
5 This was J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit: or There and Back Again, parts of which were probably rewritten before it was published in 1937.
6 Mary McQueen McEldowney, ‘The Fairy Tales and Fantasies of George MacDonald’ (1934). A copy is in the Bodleian Library, MSS B. Litt. d. 257.
7 The title was shortened to The Pilgrim’s Regress: An Allegorical Apology for Christianity, Reason and Romanticism.
8 James Adams McNeill (1853–1907), who had been Lewis’s mother’s leather at the Methodist College, Belfast, was Headmaster of Campbell College, 1890–1907. He and his wife, Margaret Cunningham McNeill, lived in Strandtown with their daughter Jane (‘Tchainie’) McNeill, a close friend of Lewis and Arthur Greeves.
9 Lewis is referring to the book eventually published as The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition (1936).
10 See Nevill Coghill (1899–1980) in the Biographical Appendix to CL I. Coghill, a member of the Inklings, was Fellow of English at Exeter College, Oxford, 1924–57, and Merton Professor of English Literature, 1957–66.
11 John Norman Bryson (1896–1976) was born in Portadown, Co. Armagh, and educated at the Queen’s University, Belfast, and at Merton College, Oxford, taking his BA from Oxford in 1922. He was a lecturer in English at Balliol, Merton and Oriel College, 1923–1940, and Fellow and Tutor in English Literature at Balliol College, 1940–63.
12 Alexandre Dumas, The Three Musketeers (1844).
13 Alfred, Lord Tennyson, The Princess (1847), part 4, song (added 1850): ‘The horns of elfland faintly blowing!’
14 John Buchan, The Three Hostages [1924].
15 Arthur Alan Hanbury-Sparrow, The Land-Locked Lake [1932].
16 He is imagining a comment his father might make.
17 He is referring to Hanbury-Sparrow’s The Land-Locked Lake, mentioned in the letter to Arthur Greeves of 25 March 1933.
18 There is no true English equivalent. Essentially Lewis meant ‘sympathy for the living’ (more literally is a desire to encourage growth or nourishment).
19 Hanbury-Sparrow, The Land-locked Lake, Part I, ch. 3, p. 287: ‘Sometimes it frightened you, this terrific power that discipline held over modern men. We’d get our drafts of reluctant but sensible conscripts, and of returned wounded undergoing God alone knew what agonies of fear, and in a few weeks we’d turn them into troops as brave, if not as skilful, as any the battalion had ever had. Once an officer knew the trick of it, it was all so terribly easy.’
20 ibid., Part I, ch. 5, p. 60: ‘Spirit wept, for it knew that the reign of materialism, of metal against flesh, would henceforth have to rule.’
21 ‘a commander hateful to the gods’. Aristophanes Peace, line 1172.
22 Edmund Blunden, Undertones of War (1928).
23 Owen Barfield, ‘The Philosophy of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’, Anthroposophy, 7 (Christmas 1932), pp. 385–404. Reprinted in Owen Barfield, Romanticism Comes of Age (1944).
24 Barfield, Romanticism Comes of Age, p. 149: ‘His extraordinarily unifying mind was too painfully aware that you cannot really say one thing correctly without saying everything. He was rightly afraid that there would not be time to say everything before going on to say the next thing, or that he would forget to do so afterwards. His incoherence of expression arose from the coherence of what he wanted to express. It was a sort of intellectual stammer.’
25 ibid., pp. 155–6. In his Treatise on Logic, says Barfield, Coleridge ‘points out how the world of grammar subsists between the two poles of verb and noun, the one expressing activity and the other passivity, the one an action and the other a state… We may think of grammar as a sort of world revolving about an axis. Only in the axis itself do the two poles coincide. And what is this axis? It is the verb “to be” itself.’
26 ibid., p. 57: ‘Sameness and Difference are the positive and negative aspects—of what? Of Likeness.’
27 ibid., p. 162: ‘Coleridge points out the startling metamorphosis of outward form which characterizes nature’s transition to the next stage of animal existence. The exuberant complexity of structure typical of the insect disappears altogether from the surface, having been withdrawn to the interior parts of the body…Nature sinks back exhausted from the line which she has hitherto been following and in her repose gathers strength for her newest creation—consciousness.’
28 See Daphne Harwood in the Biographical Appendix.
29 This was Charles Kay Ogden (1889–1957), whose works include (with I. A. Richards) The Meaning of Meaning (1923), Basic English (1930) and The Basic Words (1932). Lewis disliked The Meaning of Meaning for reasons given in his essay ‘Bluspels and Flalansferes’ in SLE.
30 Lewis is referring to his ‘Great War’ with Owen Barfield over Anthroposophy, and the document into which Lewis put many of his arguments, known as the ‘Summa’. See footnote 35 to the letter to Barfield of 16 March 1932.
31 Benedetto Croce (1866–1952), Italian philosopher and critic, whose aesthetics were profoundly influential in Italy before the Second World War. Lewis was probably referring to Croce’s most important work. Aesthetics as the Science of Expression and General Linguistics (1902).
32 Daphne Harwood’s father had thought of buying the house, Tewsfield, which almost adjoined The Kilns. The house was bought shortly after this by Mrs Alice Griggs. See note 123 to the letter to Warnie of 2 October 1939.
33 John Collier, Tom’s A-Cold: A Tale (1933).
34 William Morris, The Roots of the Mountains (1890).
35 The ‘Scotch uncles’ were the two brothers of Albert Lewis, William Lewis (1859–1946) and Richard Lewis (b. 1861). After William lost his job with the Belfast Ropeworks, in 1883 he and his brother went to Glasgow where they entered into partnership as W. & R. Lewis, Rope and Twine Manufacturers. The two brothers lived close together in the coastal town of Helensburgh, north-west of Glasgow. See The Lewis Family in the Biographical Appendix to CL I.
36 They saw Wagner’s Das Rheingold at Covent Garden on 2 May. There is an account of the performance in The Times (3 May 1933), p. 12.
* Sounds as if this were the cause of the breakdown!
37 Thomas Rice Henn (1901–74) was educated at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, where he took a BA in 1922. He was Fellow of English at St Catharine’s College, 1926–69 and Reader in Anglo-Irish Literature. His books include Longinus and English Criticism (1934) and The Bible as Literature (1970).
38 A copy of The Pilgrim’s Regress. Professor Henn kept this letter inside the cover of that book.
39 William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night (1623), III, iv, 247–9: ‘Dismount thy tuck, be yare in thy preparation, for thy assailant is quick, skilful, and deadly.’
40 See Mary Neylan in the Biographical Appendix. Lewis was her tutor in English although Mary Shelley was a member of St Hugh’s College. This letter of 21 July 1933 was written after she had taken a Fourth in English.
41 The language paper was on Anglo-Saxon which was marked with an ‘NS’ (‘non satis’ meaning ‘not satisfactory’ and a Δ (D) which is the lowest grade that can be given. Clearly, Anglo-Saxon was her undoing.
42 Eduard Habich.
43 The stage play, Cavalcade, about contemporary British history, was written by Noël Coward and first performed in 1932. It was made into a film by Frank Lloyd in 1933, and was so popular that a command performance was given at Windsor Castle before King George V and Queen Mary on 2 May 1933.
44 4 August.
45 7 August.
46 The stained-glass window designed for St Mark’s, Dundela, which Jack and Warnie had erected in memory of their parents. See note 60 to the letter to Warnie of 22 November 1931.
47 i.e. Charles Gordon Ewart (1885–1936) who married Lily Greeves, sister of Arthur Greeves. He was the second son of Lewis’s mother’s cousins. Sir William Quartus Ewart (1844–1919) and Lady Ewart (1849–1929) who lived near Little Lea in a house named Glenmachan. They are referred to in SBJ, ch. 3 and elsewhere as ‘Cousin Quartus’ and ‘Lady E’. They had four other children: Robert Heard ‘Bob’ Ewart (1879–1939); Hope Ewart (1882–1934); Kelso ‘Kelsie’ Ewart (1886–1966); and Gundreda ‘Gunny’ Ewart (1888–1978). See The Ewart Family in the Biographical Appendix to CL I.
48 Sir Thomas Malory, Le Morte D’Arthur, book V, ‘Arthur’s War with Lucius’.
49 George MacDonald, Lilith: A Romance (1895).
50 MacDonald, Lilith: A Romance, with introductory key, a paraphrase of an earlier manuscript version, and explanation of notes by Greville MacDonald (1924).
51 King Kong (1933), in which a film producer goes on safari and brings back a giant ape which causes terror to New York.
52 Paul-Alexandre Janet, Histoire de la Science Politique dans ses Rapports avec la Morale (1872).
53 James Stephens, The Crock of Gold (1912).
54 John 1:5.
55 In J. M. Barrie’s play, Mary Rose (1920), Mary Rose while visiting the Hebrides is spirited away by Elvish voices calling her name, although angel voices try to counteract them.
56 MacDonald, Lilith, ch. 39.
57 Voltaire, Candide (1759).
58 Charles Gore, Jesus of Nazareth, Home University Library (1929).
59 Jane (‘Janie’ or ‘Tchainie’) McNeill (1889–1959), the daughter of James and Margaret McNeill, would have liked to go to university, but remained at home to look after her widowed mother. See the biography of Jane McNeill in CG.
60 Lewis had been working on The Allegory of Love since 1928. See the letter to Albert Lewis of 10 July 1928 (CL I, pp. 766–7).
61 Walter de la Mare, The Fleeting, and Other Poems (1933).
62 John Galsworthy, The Forsyte Saga (1922).
63 i.e. Collier, Tom’s A-Cold.
64 Of the nine symphonies of Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827), the ‘Eroica’, composed to celebrate the memory of Napoleon, is No. 3.
65 The Pilgrim’s Regress, book VI, ch. 6.
66 Hermann Poppelbaum, Man and Animal: Their Essential Difference, trans. Edith Rigby and Owen Barfield (1931).
67 ‘will-o’-the-wisp’, lit. ‘the foolish fire’.
68 Richard Howard Stafford Crossman (1907–74), who took a double First in Classics at New College, Oxford, was Fellow and Tutor of Philosophy at New College, 1930–7. He became the assistant editor of the New Statesman and Nation in 1938 but in 1940 was drafted into the Ministry of Economic Warfare to organize the British propaganda effort against Hitler’s Germany. He was elected MP for Coventry East in 1945, holding the seat until 1974, and was appointed Minister for Housing and Local Government by Harold Wilson in 1964. His three-volume Diaries of a Cabinet Minister (1975–7), the first of which was published shortly after his death, were followed by The Backbench Diaries of Richard Crossman (1981).
69 His position as godfather to the Harwoods’ son, Laurence. See Laurence Hardy Harwood in the Biographical Appendix.
70 The ‘guideman’, ‘gudeman’ or ‘goodman’ means husband or head of the house.
71 William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra (1606–7), V, ii, 87–8.
