1959

TO MARY VAN DEUSEN (W):

The Kilns

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

Jan. 1st 1959

Dear Mrs. Van Deusen

I am rejoiced to hear that your grand-daughter’s eye trouble is well cleared up. Of course Genia is always in my prayers. And how wise you are to make prayers your mode of helping: for parents and in-laws and neighbours who try to help in other ways so often do harm! I am no unconditional believer in the popular theory that ‘to talk things over’ invariably mends matters. I have known it do so, and I have known it do the reverse.

Yes, I replied to Pittenger and enclose my article (I don’t need it back). I hope I have not been uncharitable. The temptation was strong for (a.) the poor old goof is such a very bad boxer who lays himself open to such shattering blows, and (b.) While one can respect a straightforward atheist, it is hard not to hate a man who takes money for defending Christianity and spends his time attacking it. But pity comes to one’s aid. Such a man cannot be happy. I think there is a good deal of anguish in his rudeness.

We are all well. It is almost as if we had died and were in a new life. A very happy new year to you and yours.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO MARTIN KILMER (W):

The Kilns,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford
Jan 3, 1959

Dear Martin

I say, I had no idea what a distinguished lot you Kilmers are: ‘a nest of singing birds’.¹ More power to your elbows!

The plan of the pentameter is

In Ovid the last—U always is one word. That is, you cd. end up grts /rm or tcs /bst, but not ndqe/nnc or cntc/t. Here’s one in English–

Christopher eats grill’d steaks gloomily; fried he prefers.

Yes, understanding without translating is the thing for private reading: it won’t do in exams. But translating can be fun: seeing how to sound perfectly natural English and keep close to the Latin at the same time.

Please thank Miriam for her lively picture.

Surprised by J may get dull (I of course wouldn’t know) after Wyvern,² but certainly not because I had lost interest. Remember this if you ever become a critic: say what the work is like, but if you start explaining how it came to be like that (in other words, inventing the history of the composition) you will nearly always be wrong.

Love to all.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO MARY NEYLAN (T):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

Jan 8th 1959

Dear Mary,

To be sure. They do, you know. It doesn’t sound as if you had any reason to be dissatisfied. To have a prospective son-in-law with a job,³ as the world now goes, is to be one parent out of a thousand–at least, I understand the modern method is more usually just to join the ration-strength of the girl’s family! Give Sarah my warm congratulations and good wishes.

I’m already going to a party on Sat. 10th, so I can’t come to hers, tho’ fully realising it is ‘rather special’ this year. We are all well and send good wishes for the New Year.

Yours

Jack

TO CECIL HARWOOD (BOD): PC

The Kilns

Jan 16/59

I go up to-morrow late (after flu’) and will make it my first care to book a guest room for Owen (Thurs. 25) and one for you (Wd 24–Fri 26). If by Friday morning you (I mean you) have had too much, you can blank well blank off and blank it blank.

J

TO EDWARD LOFSTROM (P):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

Jan 16, 59

Dear Mr. Lofstrom

1. I am afraid I don’t know the answer to your question about books of Christian instruction for children. Most of those I have seen–but I haven’t seen many–seem to me namby-pamby and ‘sissie’ and calculated to nauseate any child worth his salt. Of course I have tried to do what I can for children–in a mythical and fantastic form–by my seven ‘Narnian’ fairy tales. They work well with some children but not with others. Sorry this looks like salesmanship: but honestly if I knew anything else I’d mention it.

2. Of course. ‘Gentle Jesus’, my elbow! The most striking thing about Our Lord is the union of great ferocity with extreme tenderness. (Remember Pascal? ‘I do not admire the extreme of one virtue unless you show me at the same time the extreme of the opposite virtue. One shows one’s greatness not by being at an extremity but by being simultaneously at two extremities and filling all the space between’).⁴

Add to this that He is also a supreme ironist, dialectician, and (occasionally) humourist. So go on! You are on the right track now: getting to the real Man behind all the plaster dolls that have been substituted for Him. This is the appearance in Human form of the God who made the Tiger and the Lamb, the avalanche and the rose. He’ll frighten and puzzle you: but the real Christ can be loved and admired as the doll can’t.

3. ‘For him who is haunted by the smell of invisible roses the cure is work’ (MacDonald).⁵ If we feel we have talents that don’t find expression in our ordinary duties and recreations, I think we must just go on doing the ordinary things as well as we can. If God wants to use these suspected talents, He will: in His own time and way. At all costs one must keep clear of all the witch-doctors and their patent cures–as you say yourself.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO MARY VAN DEUSEN (W):

As from Magdalene College,

Cambridge

Jan. 16/59

Dear Mrs. Van Deusen–

I have never read Tillich, but everything I have heard of him seemed to place him clearly side by side with Pittenger (tho’ of course far superior in talent) as one of those sincere semi-Christians who are now a greater danger to the Faith than the open unbeliever. It is not horrible that you shd. grant him his ideas: it wd. be horrible if you did not. What puzzles me is why thousands of believers, like yourself, continue to expose yourselves to the temptations against faith which such men will present to you, and swell their fame by attending their lectures!

What ‘existentially’ means–unless it means ‘melodramatically’ or ‘ostentatiously’ or ‘making no end of a fuss about it’–I have never been able to find out. But I think I do see a distinction between my ‘sin’ (or general fallen-ness) and my particular ‘sins’. When I yield to or indulge in the pleasures of malicious thinking that is a sin, because it is an act of will. But the permanent element in me which renders me liable to find such thoughts not unpleasant is my sinfulness or sin: not an act of will but a state, not something I do but part of what I am.

I am sure ‘demythologising’ the N.T. always really means re-mythologising it: i.e. clothing it in the popular scientific and historical theories of your own period which are in fact transitory and will soon seem as mythological as those of the first century. Have I recommended to you Edwyn Bevan’s Symbolism and Belief?⁶ I think it helps more than any book I know to keep one right on all ‘modernism’.

Joy thanks you very much for the little book so delightful to hand and eye and asks pardon for not having done so before. We have been, to tell the truth, a little overwhelmed with Christmas mails and sometimes a little muddled as to who sent what.

I am delightful to hear that tension has relaxed in the Goelz family.

With every good wish from us all,

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO DON LUIGI PEDROLLO (V):

Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

Jan. 19th 1959

Bene fecisti, reverende pater, mittendo mihi pulcherrimum librum de carissimi Patris Joanni vita. Gratias ago. Spero me ex lectione hujus libri certiorem fieri de multis quae adhuc latebant; saepe enim vir ille sanctus in suis epistolis insinuabat se nescioquo secreto dolore laborare, occultis Dei consiliis qui flagellat omnem filium quem accipit.

Feliciter evenit ad te ut scribam hac hebdomade quo omnes qui profitentur fidem Christi tenentur orationes facere pro redintegratione Ecclesiae nunc, eheu laceratae et divisae.

Vale

C. S. Lewis

 

Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

Jan 19th 1959

It was good of you, reverend Father, to send me this most beautiful book about the life of dearest Father John.⁷ I thank you. I hope that from reading this book I shall become better informed about many things which till now have remained obscure; for often this holy man in his letters implied that he laboured under I know not what secret grief, in the hidden counsels of God who chastises everyone whom He receives as a son.

Happily it occurs that I write to you in this Week when all who profess themselves Christians are bound to offer prayers for the reunion of the Church, now, alas, torn and divided. Farewell.

C. S. Lewis

TO CLYDE S. KILBY (W):

Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

Jan. 20/59

Dear Mr. Kilby

As to Professor Van Til’s point⁸ it is certainly scriptural to say that ‘to as many as believed He gave power to become sons of God’⁹ and the bold statement ‘God became Man that men might become gods’ is Patristic.¹⁰ Of course Van Til’s wording ‘that man must seek to ascend in the scale of life’ with its suggestions (a) That we cd. do this by our own efforts (b) That the difference between God and Man is a difference of position on a ‘scale of life’ like the difference between a (biologically) ‘higher’ and a (biologically) ‘lower’ creature, is wholly foreign to my thought.

I think an anthology of extracts from a living writer wd. make both him and the collector look rather ridiculous and I’m sure publishers would not agree to the plan. I am sorry to reply so ungraciously to a proposal which does me so much honour. But I’m convinced it would not do.¹¹

With all good wishes.

Yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO MRS THEODORE ROHRS (W):

Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

Jan 22d 59

Dear Mrs. Rohrs

Thank you for your kind and encouraging letter. There was no novel between Perelandra and That Hideous Strength but there was one (Out of the Silent Planet) before P. P., however, is the best of the three. You have got a good way on the problem of Free Will. All you need to add is that God is not in Time and therefore does not foresee your future actions but sees them. He is already in tomorrow and still in yesterday. There’s a letter on this in my Screwtape Letters.

With all good wishes.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

 

On 22 January 1959 Lewis presented himself at Lambeth Palace, home of the Archbishop of Canterbury, for the first meeting of the Commission to Revise the Psalter. The other members of the Commission were Archbishop Geoffrey Fisher, Bishop Donald Coggan,¹² Bishop G. A. Chase,¹³ J. Dykes Bower,¹⁴ Gerald H. Knight,¹⁵ D. Winton Thomas¹⁶ and T. S. Eliot.

TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE (W):

As from Magdalene

Jan 26th 59

Dear Mary Willis–

Thanks for letter of the 26th. Your Grant Ulysses Smith sounds delightful. Did you know that when your army was here in the last war your coloured troops were more popular than the white ones?

A letter from Cuba with no mention of the revolution is rather surprising at first sight. But it might not even be due to caution. I am often struck in reading the records of the past (e.g. letters written during our Civil War in the 17th Century) how unimportant the things the historians make so much of seem to have been to ordinary people who were alive at the time. Does not what we call ‘history’ in fact leave out nearly the whole of real life?

Of course the cure mentioned in my article on prayer was Joy: the ‘good man’ an old pupil of mine who was a Communist when I first knew him–one of the completest and most beautiful conversions I have witnessed.¹⁷

By the way, I mentioned to a distinguished theologian that I had been attacked by ‘a man called Pittenger’, and he replied ‘Oh! old Norman Pittenger! What does he believe this week?’–so apparently he changes his views pretty often. Perhaps one day he may give Christianity a trial. I have put him in my prayers.

I am sorry to hear about the teeth: always a horrid business. We are having beautiful winter weather at present: bright, pale sunshine (paler than you ever see–Joy calls it the ‘arctic light’), still air, and just that sprinkling of hoar-frost which makes everything sparkle like sugar. All well. Good wishes.

Yours

Jack

TO ROGER LANCELYN GREEN (BOD):

As from Magdalene

Feb 1st 59

My dear Roger

We have, alas, reckoned without our host. I didn’t know, but apparently ought to have known, that Feb. 23rd is the night of our great domestic binge, the Pepys dinner: and to make it impossible for me to play truant, I have to make the Panegyric.¹⁸ This, I’m afraid, puts the boots on all our arrangements: I can’t even offer you a bed! I hope this is not too serious a nuisance: it is certainly to me, a serious disappointment. If you cd. come any later date, let me know.

If you will still be coming to Cambridge on the original date, the B & B and joint journey of course can still stand. I am very sorry. Love to all of you.

Yours

Jack

TO DELMAR BANNER (W):

[The Kilns]

Feb 2nd 1959

Dear Banner

Of course I remember you: and your pictures. My own story, since you ask it, you shall have. In the spring of 1957 I married one Joy Davidman (whose Smoke on the Mountain you may have read) at her bedside in hospital, where she was to all appearances dying of cancer of the bone. A good man laid his hands on her and prayed: to-day–except that she is lame, for they managed to leave her with one leg shorter than the other–she is in as good health as ever she was in her life. In April 57 the nurses thought she wd. live only a few weeks.

I am so glad you liked my amateurish little book on the Psalms. With all good wishes.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO CECIL HARWOOD (BOD):

Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

Feb 3rd 59

My dear Cecil

Bembreakfast for Wed, Thurs, and Fri (Feb 25–7) stand firm as a rock. But something that ought not is happening on Monday and something that ought is not happening on Tuesday, so some of my map of the week is now haywire.

On Thur & Fri. evgs. I shall be at your disposal. But on Wed. Joy is here and we shall both be going to the Greek play (Antigone).¹⁹ If you wd. like to dine with us at her hotel before the play it wd. be a great pleasure. If you wd. also like to go with us to it, let me know at once and I’ll try to get you a ticket. If on the other hand you care to polish off that evg. some of the other fish you had to fry, so. But the Antigone will be lovely. There’s a man here called Tranchel²⁰ who writes music for Greek choruses, which (in the Bacchae²¹ some years ago) put us both ²² in a bar or two. RSVP.

Yours

Jack

TO ROGER LANCELYN GREEN (BOD):

Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

Feb 3rd 59

My dear Roger

This grows dreamlike.

1. All seats for the Tue. 24 matinée of the A. are sold out.

2. I have a guest already for Wed, Thurs. & Fri. night of that week.

3. I have got 3 seats for the Wed. night. I’m deserting my guest (an old enough friend to use as badly as I use you!) for the evg. but of course asking him to dine with Joy and me at the hotel.

4. If you can find lodging elsewhere will you also dine with me and go on to the play? (The friend is A. C. Harwood–don’t know if you’ve met him.) RSVP 5. By ‘some later date’ I meant in March–between the 2nd and 13th. This still holds.

6. In a changing world I shall still (D.V.) be at the B & B on the morning of Mon. 22d. Sorry about all this.

Yours

J.

TO ROGER LANCELYN GREEN (BOD):

Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

Feb 3rd 59

My dear Roger

You will have had a letter from me explaining how our plans have been frustrated. But:–

The present arrangement is that Joy accompanies me back to Cambridge on the afternoon of Mon. 23: sleeps & dines alone at The Lion while I’m making a fool of myself at the Pepys Dinner:²³ goes with me to the matinée of Antigone on Tue: and goes back to Oxford on Wed. We have a dinner engagement on Tue. night. Shall I book a third seat for you at the matinee? RSVP at once. And of course we can all three travel together on the Mon. and lunch together somewhere on Tue.

I feel sure they want you to spoil the Castle in Lyonesse. Fight hard!

Yours

Jack

TO JOCELYN GIBB (BOD):

Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

Feb 4th 1959

Dear Gibb

Hearty congratulations on getting through the hands of the carver.²⁴ It is a nice change when such a thing is no longer nearer but further away each morning.

I returned the enclosure with a few v. small corrections, ENNOBLE (for enable) on p. 34 is the most important.²⁵

Good wishes for a quick recovery.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO ROGER LANCELYN GREEN (BOD):

Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

Feb 5/59

My dear Roger

Your card of the 4th arrived. I hope you now have my last letter, explaining that no seats can be had for the Tue. matinée but that I have 3 for Wed night’s performance. I can dispose of the third ticket if you can’t use it, but of course the sooner the better. What a tangle!

Yours

Jack

TO A. E. WATTS (W):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

15/2/59.

Dear Mr. Watts–

Oh thank goodness.²⁶ I was afraid of vers libre and modernity and Poundian nonsense. It is delightful to recognise longo post tempore visum²⁷ someone who can still turn and polish a heroic couplet. There is grace and music everywhere. There is possibly even too much neatness. Too much, I mean, for Propertius. Is there some danger that where one doesn’t remember the original one might suspect that this was a version not of him but of Ovid? But, you may reply, what’s a man to do? Your manner does very well for a great deal of Propertius: for maxima de nihilo nascitur historia,²⁸ and for all his nequitiae.²⁹ If it doesn’t do equally well for sunt apud infernos tot milia formosarum,³⁰ perhaps this is inevitable: for what in Popian verse, or in any English metre, can really give the feeling of that overwhelming spondee in the fifth!

It is rather important that in (I think) every single case where you have emended your text your afterthought seems to me a clear improvement. This very seldom happens to one in reading someone else’s MS or even–a-few months later–one’s own.

You realise, of course, that tho’ this translation pleases you and me, it will not, in the present condition of taste, please the reviewers? Abandon hope. You will be blackguarded or ignored by barbarians who can hardly scan an English, much less a Latin, verse, and despise the intelligible.

My Propertius is at Cambridge and I am here, so I’m doing this unseen. This prevents me going through it and picking out a phrase here and a phrase there and cavilling about the exact force of a word. But that’s no loss. The man who is not doing the work often hits on something which, tho’ it might seem better for the particular passage, really invokes a style which couldn’t and oughtn’t to be used for the whole work. And your unity of tone is one of your great merits. You will send me back to the original once I can get at it: which is one of the things translation ought to do. Well, congratulations and condolences.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO CECIL HARWOOD (BOD):

Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

17/2/59

Dear Cecil

Joy, now long disciplined in English cars, wd. love a trip to Ely either on the Wed. or the Thur. morning. But we don’t want you to come by car solely on that account, if you prefer trains.

I’ve just finished Captain Cooke’s Voyages.³¹ Do you know who wrote these two couplets?

Slices the natives brought of ham and tongue,

Where on each tree the ready breadfruit hung:

Pleased with the scene, the Navigator smiles,

And names that happy clime the Sandwich Isles.³²

Yours

Jack

TO DON HOLMES (W):³³

Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

17/2/59

Dear Mr. Holmes

Thank you for your kind and encouraging letter. As to your questions:

1. I think one probably shd., when one decently can, avoid meeting–when they are en masse, as a group–thoroughly bad people whether they profess Christianity or not. Meeting them singly is another matter. And of course one may have particular duties (pastoral, family, pedagogic etc. etc.) which oblige one to meet them. But there’s no universal rule. One has to decide in each case whether one is more likely to do good or to receive harm.

2. If my books are sometimes permitted by God to deliver to particular readers a more perceptible challenge than Scripture itself, I think this is because, in a sense, they catch people unprepared. We approach the Bible with reverence and with readiness to be edified. But by a curious and unhappy psychological law these attitudes often inhibit the very thing they are intended to facilitate. You see this in other things: many a couple never felt less in love than on their wedding day, many a man never felt less merry than at Christmas dinner, and when at a lecture we say ‘I must attend’, attention instantly vanishes.

3. If you think I can help you about any particular problem, of course write. But general correspondence–what is called ‘having a pen-friend’–is quite impossible for me. The daily letter writing is the chief burden of my life. I hope this doesn’t sound unpleasant? There are only 24 hours in a day!

With all good wishes.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO EDWARD LOFSTROM (P):

Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

18/2/59

Dear Mr. Lofstrom

I certainly had not realised from your previous letter how distressing the problem was. My allusion to the psychotherapists was a fling at the increasing modern habit of seeing all personal difficulties in terms of disease and cure, and so reducing things that are really moral or intellectual or both to the pathological level. In your own case there certainly does seem to be a pathological element. And of course it is ‘proper’ to make all efforts after relief. I wrote under the false impression that, like a good many people, you were regarding as a peculiar medical condition of your own things which were in fact the common infirmities of us all. Now I know better. I need not say you have my sympathy.

But I dare not advise. Amateur advice in such cases is unlikely to do good and may do harm. You must go to the professionals. All you can get from me is my prayers, and these you shall have.

Yours most sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO BASIL WILLEY (BOD):

Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

19 Feb 1959

Dear Basil

I have been very rude and beg you to make the best apology you can for me to your wife. I was out of sorts last Friday and fit for nothing but to sit over the fire. I ought to have written excusing myself from my engagement with you, but somehow the whole day dozed and fuddled^* itself through without this getting done. Mea culpa. Of course this demands no reply,

Yours

Jack

 

* This sounds as if I were drunk! I wasn’t, but might as well have been for all the good I was.

TO JOCELYN GIBB (BOD):

Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

Feb 19th 59³⁴

Dear Gibb

I am sure your people will ‘check for literals’ more efficiently than I ever do.³⁵ It is nice to hear that you are mending apace.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO STEPHEN SCHOFIELD (W): TS

28/59

The Kilns, Kiln Lane,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford.

26th February 1959.

Dear Mr Schofield,

Thanks for your letter, and I am so glad that you find some comfort in Mere Christianity.

The reference you want is second Thessalonians, Chapter III.

With all good wishes, yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis³⁶

TO CLYDE S. KILBY (W): TS

148/59

The Kilns, Kiln Lane,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford.

4th March 1959.

Dear Professor Kilby,

I am very glad to hear of the proposed edition of Phantastes, but I’m afraid I have already said–indeed more than once–what I have to say about it.³⁷ Wishing you every success, yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis³⁸

TO MARTIN HOOTON (BOD):³⁹

Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

March 4th 59

Dear Hooton

You must by now think me the most pigly of all pigs that go on two legs. First of all, I put aside your kind gift of the Box of Delights⁴⁰ in order to read it before I acknowledged it. I then took it up in a bad mood–I was not quite well–and not only could not read it but couldn’t understand it. Since then I’ve been in and out of a series of small illnesses ever since, and only got to the book this week.

It is, as I now see, a unique work and will often be re-read. A bit too full for me–I mean, too many things happen and too quickly–but the beauties, all the ‘delights’ that keep on emerging from the box–are so exquisite, and quite unlike anything I have seen elsewhere. Thank you very much indeed.

I am sorry that, entirely by my fault, we have let a term pass without meeting. I hope we can remedy this next term: at present I am still v. imperfectly convalescent from my second go of flu’. Till then, all good wishes–and apologies.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO MICHAEL EDWARDS (BOD):

Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

6/3/59

Dear Mr. Edwards

Oxford, Sat. March 21, wd. be best for me. My house is some way out of Oxford and very hard to find, so I will meet you at the Eastgate Hotel, High St., opposite (v. nearly) Magdalen, at 4.50, or as near that as you can manage.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO EDWARD LOFSTROM (P):

Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

8/3/59

Dear Mr. Lofstrom–

I very much doubt if any book, least of all a book by me, would much help anyone in the condition you describe. For a book can offer only thoughts and thoughts are not what such a person, perhaps, needs most. One can argue against egoism, but then egoism is not his trouble. If he were a real egoist he wd. be either blissfully unconscious of the fact or else fully convinced that egoism was the rational attitude. You, on the other hand, suffer from a more than ordinary horror of egoism which you share with us all. And therefore, as you will see, the thing you need is not to think more or better about it but to think less: to act unselfishly–that is, charitably and justly–and leave the state of your feelings for God to deal with in His own way and His own time. And this of course you know better than I do.

But how to do it? For the very effort to forget something is itself a remembering of that something! I think, if I were in your shoes I shd. try to regard this sense of self-imprisonment not at all as a sin but as a mere tribulation, like rheumatism, to be endured in the same way. It has no doubt its medical side: diet, exercise, and recreations might all be considered. And, though this is a hard saying, your early upbringing may have something to do with it. Great piety in the parents can produce in the child a mistaken sense of guilt: may lead him to regard as sin what is really not sin at all but merely the fact that he is a boy and not a mature Christian. At any rate, remember ‘I cannot turn one hair black or white: but I can brush my hair daily and go to the barber at regular intervals.’ In other words we must divert our efforts from our general condition or frame of mind (wh. we can’t alter by direct action of the will) to what is in our power–our words and acts. Try to remember that the ‘bottomless sea’ can’t hurt us as long as we keep on swimming. You will be in my prayers.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO JOY LEWIS (BOD):

Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

11/3/59

Well, darling? I hope I shall get a letter tomorrow saying that all those aches have chased themselves off. Mine (as has happened before) arrived a few days later: knees on Monday night, chest, belly, back, and hips yesterday.

And that horrid dog George completely made a fool of me at the B & B. John Walsh⁴¹ had been absent the previous Monday, so I said ‘Now watch! Ever see anything like this before?’–poured out the beer–and summoned the dog. The brute never touched it!

You made a mistake in not persevering with Cavendish’s Wolsey:⁴² it contains very gripping and moving scenes.

Love

J

TO VERA GEBBERT (W): TS

The Kilns, Kiln Lane,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford.

11th March 1959.

Dear Mrs Gebbert,

Many thanks for your letter of the 7th, and for the review enclosed⁴³ –to say nothing of the more interesting enclosures from the Tycoon’s sketch book. I fear though he is going to be a ‘modern’ there is that unconventional approach, that breakaway from pictorialism, etc. etc. He has my profound sympathy in his attitude to mathematics, a science of which I have to this day not succeeded in mastering the elements; and like him, there are times when I would be grateful for a sixteen hour day. Whether it is that one’s pace slows down with increasing age I don’t know, but personally I seem to have less and less time in which to try to do more and more.

My brother and I differ about your weather; he envies you your all the year round summer, whilst I should hate it. Like you I am a winter lover. Though to be sure, one can have too much of a good thing; last year we had no summer at all, except for a fortnight in June, when my wife and I were lucky enough to be in Ireland. And, after no summer, we had no autumn and then entered on a long dreary winter which still continues.

I hope the literary efforts will be crowned with success, and don’t despair; the effort to get the first book published is practically always a long and tedious one. And my brother had his first book refused by nearly everyone in London. Anyway, if the book is never published, and the Tycoon grows up as we hope he does, you will still be able to look back on life with the feeling that you have done your bit in the world.

We are all well here, Joy surprisingly so; she now goes out pigeon shooting for the pot; and though the pot is not noticeably fuller, it is wonderful that she should be able to make such a strenuous attempt to fill it. This spring she is getting great amusement out of the study of our English birds; which she tells me are nothing like as beautiful as the American ones, but make far better music.

With love to you all from us all.

Yours ever,

C. S. Lewis

TO SISTER MADELEVA CSC (W):

Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

13/3/59

Dear Sister Madeleva

I am really most indebted to you for sending me My First Seventy Years.⁴⁴ You can hardly have anticipated how much pleasure I got out of it. No! not chiefly for pp. 75–6, though of course I read them with a purr.⁴⁵

What I really love is the early chapters. These set an old string vibrating–all the stories which a specially loved aunt used to tell me of her Canadian childhood.⁴⁶ That lake, that Indian village. You give me a delicious nostalgia for places I have never seen. And all that smell of leather and wood. You do it, if I may say so, extremely well. And what a lucky girl you were. You are good on walking sticks too.

I believe that when they told you long ago of my refusal to take women pupils, the true statement wd. have been ‘He has a full time-table and refuses any more pupils.’

Why is Tolkien not on those shelves that you describe?

Well: all blessings, and great thanks.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO MARY VAN DEUSEN (W):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry

Oxford

16/3/59

Dear Mrs. Van Deusen

Oh, I am sorry. Operations are horrid things. I will indeed have you all in my prayers. May the time seem as short as possible till the blessed time when the event is a day further away each morning instead of a day nearer. ‘Time and the hour ride through the roughest day.’⁴⁷ God bless and strengthen both of you. We are all well,

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO BARBARA REYNOLDS (W):⁴⁸

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

19/3/59

Dear Miss Reynolds

C.W. was not a trained scholar and on all subjects could make mistakes. His view of Dante was also highly idiosyncratic. But my own opinion, for what it’s worth, is that the Figure of B⁴⁹ is a book every student of Dante must reckon with–the sort of book which may offend narrow experts as much by its merits as by its faults. If he knows less than they about Florentine politics and the history of the language, he knew a good deal more about poetry and love–possibly about Heaven and Hell. He was, after all, a member of the Dante Society at Oxford⁵⁰ and scholars like Colin Hardie, Dawkins,⁵¹ and Sumner⁵² thought him well worth their attention.

How far would Dorothy have reached the same views without C.W.? Hasn’t it been said that if prophecy is our most gratuitous error, prophecy is the pluperfect subjunctive in its most gratuitous form?⁵³ I at any rate don’t know. And, as it happens, tho’ I knew both, I only once met them both together.

It sometimes happens that a scholar, dealing with work by an amateur of genius, can present its real strength freed from the flaws his imperfect knowledge imposed on it. That is what I hope you may do with the Figure!

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO MARY VAN DEUSEN (W):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

23/3/59

Dear Mrs. Van Deusen

Deo gratias. It’s horrid–how well I know–waiting for ‘good news so far as it goes’ to become ‘All clear’ but I hope and trust it will have done so by the time you get this letter.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W):

The Kilns

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

25/3/59

My dear Arthur–

When you wrote you had not heard the news about Janie.⁵⁴ Actually, at the moment, I am feeling very little (this is often the way) but I know that you and I have had a huge bit of our past hacked away. And even while I write this comic ideas come into my head. She seems to have had the nicest possible death.

Now. We have just been financially knocked flat by a huge surtax on royalties earned 2 years ago, which was a bumper year, long since forgotten and of course spent. I think we shall weather it alright, but we shall have to go very carefully–not perhaps for always but certainly for 18 months or so. Joy and I were talking it over only yesterday and agreed that the Irish holiday will almost certainly have to be given up this year. A great loss! This ‘Janie business’ makes me feel it worse, as it will you too. Now don’t you go dying or anything silly!

Has the old lady⁵⁵ met her?–the slow head-shake and ‘Oh Tchanie, Tchanie’

All well. We ramble about the woods like anything.

I’d give anything for a few hours with you just now.

Yours

Jack

MRS KENNETH POBO (W): TS

182.59

The Kilns, Kiln Lane,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford.

26th March 1959.

Dear Mrs. Pobo,

Many thanks for your most kind and encouraging letter of the 5th. With all good wishes,

yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO MARTIN KILMER (W):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

27/3/59

Dear Martin

Thanks for your letter of the 15th. You don’t tell me how your sister is; be sure to mention this the next time you write. I think your proposed metre is far too rollicking and comic for any original in so solemn a metre as the Virgilian hexameter.⁵⁶ To such a rime as yours I would put only words like

‘A pound of that cheese and an ounce of the butter,’

Aeneas replied with his usual stutter.

I’d like to do the Aeneid into rhyming Alexandrines (——————) but without a regular break in the middle as classical French has. This wd. give them the v. Virgilian quality of sounding almost like prose in the middle while the end of each line keeps them in order–e.g. I 32–3

Leading them far, for-wandered, over alien foam

–So mighty was the labour of the birth of Rome.⁵⁷

I can’t give you the low-down on St. Michael’s of Toronto.⁵⁸ Lovely spring weather to-day (Good Friday) as it is nearly every year. Love to all.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO DON LUIGI PEDROLLO (V):

Collegium Stae Mariae Magdalenae

apud Cantabrigienses

xxviii Mart. 1959

Reverendissime Pater

Grato animo te tuosque hoc die solemni et severo quo Dominus noster animabus incarceratis praedicavit salutem. Ego meique valemus. Nunc scribo libellum De IV Amoribus i.e. Graece Storge, Philia, Eros, Agape–quibus vocabulis utor quia Latina nomina desunt. Ora pro me ut Deus mihi concedat aut salutaria aut saltem haud nocitura dicere. Nam ‘periculosae plenum opus aleae’ ut Flaccus scripsit. Casa vestra semper in orationibus meis. Valete in Salvatore nostro

C. S. Lewis

 

The College of St Mary Magdalene

Cambridge

28 March 1959 [Holy Saturday]

Most Reverend Father

With a grateful heart I salute you and yours on this solemn and serious day on which the Lord preached to the souls in prison.⁵⁹ I and mine are well.

Now I am writing a little book on The Four Loves, i.e., in Greek: Storgé, Philia, Eros, and Agapé–I use these words because there are no names for them in Latin.

Pray for me that God grant me to say things helpful to salvation, or at least not harmful. For this is a work ‘full of dangerous hazard’ as Flaccus wrote.⁶⁰

Your House is ever in my prayers,

Farewell in our Saviour,

C. S. Lewis

TO MARY VAN DEUSEN (W): TS

54/59

The Kilns, Kiln Lane,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford.

1st April 1959.

My dear Mrs van Deusen,

Congratulations. I hope all will soon be completely well. I would write more, but there is a ghastly mail this morning!

Yours ever,

C. S. Lewis

 

P.S. My brother asks me to say how pleased he is to hear the good news, and that he hopes for even better shortly.

TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

1/4/59

My dear Arthur–

I’m already doing something about J. for Campbell, impelled by a man called Armour⁶¹ who makes the shattering statement ‘I always felt that J.M. was a mystic and more deeply soaked in the mystic point of view than anyone I have known’ (!!?-$$$$-1÷d!). Well! If so, we missed a good deal. I am shaking with laughter while I write, and I hope you are while you read. Having heard Armour on J. how I wish I could hear J. on Armour.

Are you and I a pair of humbugs? We now miss her dreadfully: while she was alive what a lot of time we spent evading her!

W. says ‘I must be like a cat who loves places more than people. What really hurts is the idea of never being in that house again.’

God bless you.

J.

TO JOHN H. MCCALLUM (P):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

1/4/59

Dear Mac

(Why don’t you stop mistering me?) If you think Efficacy,⁶² Obstinacy,⁶³ Outer Space,⁶⁴ and Christian Hope⁶⁵ (which I have forgotten) would make a book, by all means proceed.⁶⁶ Lilies that Fester⁶⁷ might go in–the little one from the Spectator⁶⁸ wd. not suit. There is also one on Work due to appear in the (American) Catholic Art Quarterly.⁶⁹

The talks for Episcopal TV will, I hope, become a substantive book in due course and should certainly not–anyway they are not ready–go into this miscellany.

I shd. like the title ‘Will we lose God etc’ (it was never my choice) changed to Religion and Rocketry, if you approve the latter.

You will of course remove all the sub divisions and silly little sub-headings which editors introduce and print each essay as continuous prose?

There is one on Children’s Stories in a Librarian’s magazine which I think I could dig out.⁷⁰ How about it?

Would Essays in Re-action be a possible title?

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W):

The Kilns

April 3/59

My dear Arthur

Our prospects have suddenly cleared up. We are going to get a fair amount of refund for erroneously paid tax and also have found means of keeping more of my own royalties.

This is probably unintelligible, but the upshot is that we CAN come to Ireland this summer after all. Are you still available? We cd. take our fortnight any time between June 20 and July 15. Rathmullan, I suppose? Or have you any other ideas? I can’t tell you how pleased I am. Joy sends love

Yours

Jack

TO MARY VAN DEUSEN (W):

The Kilns etc.

April 10. 59

Dear Mrs. Van Deusen–

I have just had Sister Hildegarde’s letter. My heart goes out to you. You are now just where I was a little over two years ago–they wrongly diagnosed Joy’s condition as Uremia before they discovered cancer of the bone.

I know all the different ways in which it gets one: wild hopes, bitter nostalgia for lost happiness, mere physical terror turning one sick, agonised pity and self-pity. In fact, Gethsemane. I had one (paradoxical) support which you lack–that of being in severe pain myself. Apart from that what helped Joy and me through it was 1. That she was always told the whole truth about her own state. There was no miserable pretence. That means that both can face it side-by-side, instead of becoming something like adversaries in a battle-of-wits. 2. Take it day by day and hour by hour (as we took the front line). It is quite astonishing how many happy–even gay–moments we had together when there was no hope. 3. Don’t think of it as something sent by God. Death and disease are the work of the Devil. It is permitted by God: i.e. our General has put you in a fort exposed to enemy fire. 4. Remember other sufferers. It’s fatal to start thinking ‘Why should this happen to us when everyone else is so happy.’ You are (I was and may be again) one of a huge company. Of course we shall pray for you all we know how. God bless you both,

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO MARY VAN DEUSEN (W): TS

54/59

The Kilns, Kiln Lane,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford.

18th April 1959.

My dear Mrs van Deusen,

I am most thankful to hear of the improvement, though I hardly know enough physiology to follow the details. I continue my prayers. God bless you all.

Yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

 

P.S. My brother bids me tell you how pleased he is too.

TO JOAN LANCASTER (BOD):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

20/4/59

Dear Joan

Hurrah! The essay on Easter is a promising bit of work; the sentences are clear and taut and don’t sprawl. You’ll be able to write prose alright. As for what you are saying, I think you are exaggerating a bit at the end. Everything I need is in my soul? The Heck it is! Or if so, it must contain a great many virtues and a great deal of wisdom which neither I nor anyone else could ever find there. Very little of what I need is at present in my soul. I mean, even things of the soul’s own sort, like humility or truthfulness. And it certainly does not in any obvious sense contain a number of other things which I need at the moment: e.g. a stamp for this letter. Never exaggerate. Never say more than you really mean.

The Dream is the better of the two poems, chiefly because of the line ‘But Mechta shall orbit the sun.’ I don’t, honestly, think the other gains anything by being printed as verse. You know, my dear, it’s only doing you harm to write vers libre. After you have been writing strict, rhyming verse for about 10 years it will be time to venture on the free sort. At present it only encourages you to write prose not so good as your ordinary prose and type it like verse. Sorry to be a pig!

I am so glad you like Till We Have Faces, because so few people do. It is my biggest ‘flop’ for years, and so of course I think it my best book.

I envy you your tour. It must be a wonderful car to climb a fire-tower!–or have I misunderstood. Nor do I know what a fire tower is. But as we have water-towers here, I suppose other countries may have fire-, earth-, and air-, towers.

We are having a very cold, wet spring, but are all well.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO NATHAN COMFORT STARR (W):

Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

22/4/59

Dear Starr

Whenever you come you will both be very welcome. Your belief that I live in Oxford during the Vacations is right: my wife, my brother (who lives with us) and I will be glad to see you.

There is still a weekly meeting at the Bird and Baby: but whether you can call it the Old Group when there is a new landlord and Charles Williams is dead and Tolkien never comes is almost a metaphysical question, and one you will discuss much better on the spot.⁷¹

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO JOCELYN GIBB (BOD):

Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

24/4/59

Dear Gibb

Thanks for cheque (1350–0–1) received to-day. Not a hope for May 12th, I’m afraid: I have to go to Manchester.⁷²

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO SISTER MADELEVA CSC (W):

Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

27/4/59

Dear Sister Madeleva

But of course you must call! But make it at Oxford, not Cambridge, for I spend the vacation at the former.

Thank you for your kind words about my wife. She was given a few weeks to live. A good man laid his hands on her and prayed. Now, two years later, she is walking about our wood pigeon shooting. At her last X-Ray check the doctor used the word ‘miraculous’–tho’ I don’t suppose he meant it quite as you or I would. Unde hoc mihi?⁷³

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO MARY VAN DEUSEN (W):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

27/4/59

Dear Mrs. Van Deusen

I am glad to hear that progress continues. Of course you are very much in my prayers at present.

No, I won’t comment on what you say! Where one has never met the people concerned, where one has heard only one side, and where all the terms used are indefinable, it is so easy to go wrong.

God bless you both

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO DOM BEDE GRIFFITHS OSB (W):

Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

30/4/59

My dear Dom Bede

First, in answer to your question. My wife has continuously gone on from strength to strength. Except that one leg will always be shorter than the other so that she walks with a stick and a limp, she now leads a normal, and active, life. My own bone-trouble, tho’ not completely cured, is so much better as to be now merely a trivial inconvenience.

Thanks for Christ and India.⁷⁴ It confirms what I had, less clearly, thought already–that the difficulty of preaching Christ in India is that there is no difficulty. One is up against true Paganism–the best sort of it as well as the worst–hospitable to all gods, naturally ‘religious’, ready to take any shape but able to retain none. ⁷⁵ is harder to convert than materialism as a fog is harder to remove than a tree.

About the Semitic genius, my wife, who is a Jewess by blood, holds two views which wd interest you.

1. That the only living Judaism is Christianity. Where her own people still have any religion it is archaic, pedantic, and–so to speak–sectarian, so that being a devout Jew is rather like being a Plymouth Brother

2. That we Goyim misread much of the O.T. because we start with the assumption that its sacred character excludes humour. That no one who knew the Jewish ethos from inside could fail to see the fully accepted comic element in Abraham’s dialogue with God (Genesis XVIII) or in Jonah.

While we are on exegesis, am I right in thinking that the key to the parable of the Unjust Steward⁷⁶ is to grasp that the Master in it is The World? (= this Aion). The dismissal is the notice–apparently now being served on you and long since served on me–that our present tabernacle will soon be taken down. The moral is ‘Cheat your master.’ If he gives us wealth, talent, beauty, power etc. use them for your own (eternal) purposes–spoil the Egyptian! If you can’t do that with his kind of property, who will trust you with the true kind? Of course? ⁷⁷ who praised the Steward is not the Master in the parable but Our Lord, the Master who is telling the story. And telling it not without paradoxical humour.

It would be very nice to meet when you are in Europe, if this should be at all possible.

The man (Peter Bide) who laid his hands on my wife and she recovered, writes to me that his own wife is now struck down with the same disease. Would you mention him in your prayers?

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE (W):

Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

6/5/59

Dear Mary Willis

I am sorry you have been worried. Actually I was quite unaware that we owed you a letter. But never assume that anything is wrong if I shd. make the same mistake again. Remember, I don’t type. Also, man-like, I am not naturally a correspondent at all. The daily letter-writing I have to do is very laborious to me.

We are all well. Indeed Joy and I both dig–a thing neither of us expected ever to do again.

We also have a Siamese cat. In my heart of hearts I really prefer the great, grey bullet-headed native cat, but the Siamese are delicate and fascinating creatures. Ours adores me because I lift her up by her tail–an operation which I can’t imagine I should like if I were a cat, but she comes back for more and more, purring all the time.

The young priest after whose laying-on-of-hands Joy began so miraculously to mend now writes to tell me that his own wife is suffering from cancer. His name is Peter. Will you, of your charity, have him in your prayers?

Joy, if she were here, wd. join me in all greetings and good wishes.

Yours

Jack

TO CLYDE S. KILBY (W):⁷⁸

Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

7/5/59

Dear Mr. Kilby

Thank you for your kind letter. I enclose what, at such short notice, I feel able to say on this question. If it is at all likely to upset anyone, throw it in the waste paper basket. Remember too that it is pretty tentative, much less an attempt to establish a view than a statement of the views on which, whether rightly or wrongly, I have come to work.

To me the curious thing is that neither in my own Bible-reading nor in my religious life as a whole does the question in fact even assume that importance which it always gets in theological controversy. The difference between reading the story of Ruth⁷⁹ and that of Antigone–both first class as literature–is to me unmistakable and even overwhelming. But the question ‘Is Ruth historical?’ (I’ve no reason to suppose it is not) doesn’t really seem to arise till afterwards. It wd. still act on me as the Word of God if it weren’t, so far as I can see. All Holy Scripture is written for our learning.⁸⁰ But learning of what? I should have thought the value of some things (e.g. the Resurrection) depended on whether they really happened: but the value of others (e.g. the fate of Lot’s wife)⁸¹ hardly at all. And the ones whose historicity matters are, as God’s will, those where it is plain.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

 

Whatever view we hold on the divine authority of Scripture must make room for the following facts

1. The distinction which St Paul makes in I Cor vii between (v.10) and (v.12).⁸²

2. The apparent inconsistencies between the genealogies in Matt i and Luke iii: between the accounts of the death of Judas in Matt xxvii 5⁸³ and Acts i 18–19.⁸⁴

3. St. Luke’s own account of how he obtained his matter (i 1–4).⁸⁵

4. The universally admitted unhistoricity (I do not say, of course, falsity) of at least some narratives in Scripture (the parables), which may well extend also to Jonah and Job.

5. If every good and perfect gift comes from the Father of Lights⁸⁶ then all true and edifying writings, whether in Scripture or not, must be in some sense inspired.

6. John xi 49–52.⁸⁷ Inspiration may operate in a wicked man without his knowing it, and he can then utter the untruth he intends (propriety of making an innocent man a political scapegoat) as well as the truth he does not intend (the divine sacrifice).

It seems to me that 2 and 4 rule out the view that every statement in Scripture must be historical truth. And 1, 3, 5, and 6 rule out the view that inspiration is a single thing in the sense that, if present at all, it is always present in the same mode and the same degree. Therefore, I think, rule out the view that any one passage taken in isolation can be assumed to be inerrant in exactly the same sense as any other: e.g. that the numbers of O.T. armies (which in view of the size of the country, if true, involves continuous miracle) are statistically correct because the story of the Resurrection is historically correct. That the over-all operation of Scripture is to convey God’s Word to the reader (he also needs His inspiration) who reads it in the right spirit, I fully believe. That it also gives true answers to all the questions (often religiously irrelevant) which he might ask, I don’t. The very kind of truth we are often demanding was, in my opinion, never even envisaged by the Ancients.

TO VERA GEBBERT (W): TS

The Kilns, Kiln Lane,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford.

8th May 1959.

Dear Mrs. Gebbert,

Many thanks for your letter of the 1st and for the interesting enclosure; the Tycoon certainly shows a remarkable quickness of apprehension. Those clouds for instance; when I was older than he is, I’m sure I never drew anything which showed that I was in the least aware of the existence of clouds–or indeed any features of nature.

Well yes of course the Cross is a sad thing, but are we not to be reminded that there is in it a sad significance as well as a symbol of a victory?⁸⁸

We look forward to hearing more of the morality,⁸⁹ and my brother, who has read your letter, is purring all over at your compliment to his ‘command of English’. On the whole you might I think have come worse out of the educational gamble than you did; very few of us get a really good education, whether in England or America, and I feel pretty sure that if fate had sent you to one of our ‘good’ girl’s schools, you would have found quite a few holes in your stock of learning when you had finished. I was at four schools, and learnt nothing at three of them; but on the other hand I was lucky in having a first class tutor⁹⁰ after my father had given up the school experiment in despair.

We too would be very glad to see you settled in England, but I’m afraid that in a brief visit you did not see the many snags about living over here; first and foremost of course that one is in the front row–or any way the second row–of the stalls if the European theatre of war should open again. And too we live under the constant threat of a Socialist government, which would finish us off completely.

With love from us all, yours ever,

C. S. Lewis

TO ROGER LANCELYN GREEN (BOD):

Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

12/5/59

My dear Roger

I am not going to America. Your letter of the 10 May wh. you describe as ‘this second letter’ is the only one I’ve had. June 2nd wd. be no good for me as I already have a guest for that night. June 9th O.K. Shall I book you for it?

Yours

Jack

 

On 12 May 1959 Joy wrote to Arthur Greeves:⁹¹

The Kilns, Kiln Lane,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford
May 12, 1959

Dear Arthur

Yes, make it a week at Rathmullan if they can take us. I think we tried last year and they managed it, so I’m hopeful. On checking our dates I see we can manage any time between June 20th & July 19th–we’ll pick a fortnight, more or less to suit you. I suppose we’d better have several days at Crawfordsburn before Rathmullan, as before.

September wouldn’t do, I’m afraid, because the boys are home from school then. We daren’t leave the helpless housekeeper at their mercy, and we’re planning to take them to Wales.

I’ll be a surprise to you this year–I can walk a mile without tiring, now! I hope you feel as well as I do.

Yours
Joy

On 13 May Lewis was awarded a Doctorate of Letters by Manchester University. While in Manchester he was the guest of Professor and Mrs Eugéne Vinaver.

TO JOCELYN GIBB (BOD):

Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

May 14th 59

Dear Gibb

Sieveking sent me his script.⁹² There were very few places where I wanted it changed and those he did change without demur. In one he defended his own words and succeeded in convincing me that they were, for this purpose, right. Of course if they now change it again, behind my back, they’ll be villains.

Thanks for copies of paper-backed SBJ.⁹³

Yours

C. S. Lewis

 

P.S. How do you go on? Quite restored, I hope

TO CHARLES MOORMAN (L):

Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

15 May 1959

Dear Mr Moorman

I don’t think your project at all ‘presumptuous’, but I do think you may be chasing after a fox that isn’t there.⁹⁴ Charles Williams certainly influenced me, and I perhaps influenced him. But after that I think you would draw a blank. No one ever influenced Tolkien–you might as well try to influence a bandersnatch. We listened to his work, but could affect it only by encouragement. He has only two reactions to criticism: either he begins the whole work over again from the beginning or else takes no notice at all.

Dorothy Sayers was not living in Oxford at the time and I don’t think she ever in her life met Tolkien. She knew Charles Williams well, and me much later. I am sure she neither exerted nor underwent any literary influence at all. Of course it may be that, just because I was in it myself, I don’t see (objectively) what was really going on. But I give my honest impression for what it is worth.

To be sure, we had a common point of view, but we had it before we met. It was the cause rather than the result of our friendship.

I hope I don’t seem to be ‘putting you off’. My real anxiety is lest you shd waste time on what might prove a barren field.

TO ELIZABETH VINAVER (W):⁹⁵

Magdalene College,

Cambridge

May 19th. 1959

Dear Mrs. Vinaver

I have to thank you both for a present, as well as for a past, pleasure: for I find already that my visit begins to mature very nicely in the cellars of my memory and bids fair to be a great wine for many years. That, you know, is the real test. It was a delightful epilogue to what had been a somewhat arduous day–just what I was needing.

Your husband is a dangerous man, though. Far from impressing on me the fact that he is a very learned man and a brilliant talker, he gave me the illusion that I was both! Courtesy and skill cannot go further–and it feels grand–but I can’t believe it is good for me. How does he do it? I wish this lyric close to my trip had not been crossed by the tragic matter of poor Mrs. Gordon and her son; yet I was very glad to meet her too.⁹⁶

Letters of real thanks, like letters of real condolence, suffer from the fact that one has written–and the recipient has read–so many false ones. Can I make you both believe that I really do feel rather as if I had had a night in Joyous Gard?⁹⁷

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO EUGÈNE VINAVER (W):

Magdalene

May 19th 59

Dear Vinaver–

You could not, if you had thought for a year, have given me a more acceptable ⁹⁸ than that offprint. ⁹⁹ You carried me back in a flash to 1915 when I bought Bédier’s Roman de T. et I. renouvelé.¹⁰⁰ It was the first book I ever took to a binder’s and had bound–oh those golden years (you must have known them too) when one’s medieval reading, far from being meritorious, was all a truancy from one’s classics and mathematics!

Your character of Bédier is most impressive. His thought is extremely attractive to me and it made me wish for a moment that the truth, at least about many medieval texts, did not seem to me the exact opposite. Or perhaps not the exact opposite. I certainly don’t believe in the work crééd’un coup par le génie populaire.¹⁰¹ But the typical activity of the medieval author, at any rate the English medieval author, seems to me to be that of ‘touching up’ something that was there already–Wace touching up Geoffrey¹⁰² and Layamon touching up Wace,¹⁰³ or Chaucer touching up Boccaccio.¹⁰⁴ The text before one must of course always be taken just as it stands and not dissolved into its known or supposed ingredients:¹⁰⁵ must in that sense be taken ‘like the Cid or Tartuffe’. But one can’t always find any single author who stands to it as Corneille¹⁰⁶ or Moliére¹⁰⁷ did to them. And the last author is sometimes most original just where he is most indebted to his predecessor–it is where the ‘French Book’ has most kindled Malory’s imagination,¹⁰⁸ or Wace has most kindled Layamon’s, that they are inspired to their finest additions.

I agree delightedly with the second part of your paper. How v. odd it is that the absurd equation (le beau = le primitif)¹⁰⁹ should flourish in a period whose general thought is steeped in the idea of ‘evolution’! And of course you are right in what you say about le lyrisme courtois.¹¹⁰ Certainly no song is, save accidentally, a confession. I tried to make the point (about the Elizabethan sonneteers) by saying that their work was not a series of love stories but rather an erotic liturgy to which we, all the lovers in the world, can join.¹¹¹ The subjective and romantic way of reading them is as if we sought in the words of the Mass for biographical details about its compilers!

I will send the fat volume containing my Spenser essay under a separate cover.¹¹² It was intended for American students who are on the level of our schoolboys and is v. little worth your attention, and really says nothing about interwoven narrative which you have not said, and better, yourself. All I add is that the technique began before the Middle Ages and survived them. Some younger man might well write a whole book on the subject.

A thousand thanks for both corporal and intellectual hospitality,

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE (W):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

May 19th 1959

Dear Mary Willis

I am sorry to hear you have lost an old friend. Curiously enough the same thing has just happened to my brother and me–[an] old lady (at least I suppose she must have been old, tho’ she was always a girl to us) whom we have known since before we can remember. And, just like you, we keep on hearing jokes for which she would have been exactly the right recipient. There is no way out of it: either one must die fairly young or else outlive many friends.

We are now told by the learned that Siamese are not royal cats at all, but the common jungle cat of those parts and quite ‘without honour’ in their own country! Another disillusion!

In haste–all blessings.

Yours

Jack

TO JOHN H. MCCALLUM (P):

As from Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

25th May 1959

Dear Mac,

Thanks for your letter of the 18th.

I don’t care for Dangers of Belief. I would like The World’s Last Night and other Essays. The and other essays would appear on the title page only–not on spine, back, or jacket.

For No. IV I should prefer Good Work and Good Works.

As soon as I can get it typed I shall send you a long correction for Lilies that Fester. It will replace the bit which in the Twentieth Century article begins ‘About Culture as’ (para 3, p 332) and ends ‘to extraneous ends’, (para 2, l. 3, p. 334). This is necessary because E. M. Forster has said in print that he really meant the alternative ‘b’ which I offered him in a footnote to p 333.¹¹³ Most of the passage I want to alter is therefore now irrelevant. And anyway I think that what I want to substitute for it is better and of less ephemeral interest.

O.K.?¹¹⁴

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO JOAN BOCKELMANN (P):¹¹⁵

Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

May 29th 1959

Dear Miss Bockelman

Thank you for your most kind and encouraging letter. Of course authors like those ‘tid-bits’ (why is it tid-bits in America and tit-bits in England?) and even if they make us vain, it is better to be vain than proud. I was a very inexperienced writer when I wrote The P’s Regress and that is why it is so difficult. I could make it easier now.

With all good wishes.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO RICHARD LADBOROUGH (BOD):¹¹⁶

Magdalene College,

Oxford.

June 3rd 1959

My dear Dick–

Remembering that (spoken) words are winged, I thought it might be useful to repeat in writing what I said, or think I said, or would now wish to have said, to you about P.W.¹¹⁷ this evening.

1. I think well of him. He has given us good service without counting the cost and he seems to me to be a friendly, decent, straightforward sort of person.

2. I have come to feel–I did not feel at first–that he is a very great Bore. I am not sure that I know anyone whose conversation fatigues and dejects me more.

3. In view of the services we have already accepted from him, I think it would be ungrateful or even dishonourable–in view of the services he may still do us in the future I think it would be foolish–to allow any decisions we make about him to be at all influenced by his boringness. It would be useful to retain him. If we do, it would be proper to increase his dining rights.

I feel v. strongly that to suffer bores patiently–‘gladly’ may be impossible–is a plain duty, and that it is even plainer when we owe them some gratitude.

Anyway, it really comes under the Golden Rule. Each of us, no doubt, is a bore to some people. I should like those whom I bore to treat me kindly and justly and therefore I must be kind and just to those who bore me.

He is, so far as I am concerned, the only Bore at our High Table.^* Can one expect to have less than one? We are being let off very lightly.

Yours

Jack

 

* I see of course who the other might be and why I shd. not recognise him if he were!

TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE (W):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

June 7th 1959

Dear Mary Willis

I am sorry to hear that so many troubles crowd upon you but glad to hear that, by God’s grace, you are so untroubled. So often, whether for good or ill, one’s inner state seems to have so little connection with the circumstances. I can now hardly bear to look back on the summer before last when Joy was apparently dying and I was often screaming with the pain of osteoporosis: yet at the time we were in reality far from unhappy. May the peace of God continue to infold you.

Your elderly neighbour would be comic if the matters at issue were not so serious. She has an odd idea of how to cheer people up! Like having a visit from a ghoul. People in real life are often so preposterous that one would not dare to put them in a novel.

I gather you are having a heat-wave in America, and I hope this won’t make things harder for you. We have had a lot of (for us) hot weather: now, though the heat has gone, the drought continues and the soil in our garden is like dust.

What a state we have got into when we can’t say ‘I’ll be happy when God calls me’ without being afraid one will be thought ‘morbid’. After all, St. Paul said just the same.¹¹⁸ If we really believe what we say we believe–if we really think that home is elsewhere and that this life is a ‘wandering to find home’, why should we not look forward to the arrival. There are, aren’t there, only three things we can do about death: to desire it, to fear it, or to ignore it. The third alternative, which is the one the modern world calls ‘healthy’ is surely the most uneasy and precarious of all. We are well here. God bless you.

Yours

Jack

TO DONOVAN AYLARD (W):

Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

June 9th 1959

Dear Mr. Aylard

Thank you for your most kind and encouraging letter.

I’m no good at all as what the women call a ‘pen-friend’ but I always try to answer letters that ask me any specific question.

With all good wishes.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO MR KNIGHT (W):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

15th June 1959

Dear Mr. Knight

Thank you for your most kind and encouraging letter. But you must learn to read books in general–I don’t mind especially about mine!–more carefully. I did not say that God did not always ‘answer’ prayers, but that He did not always grant the thing asked for.¹¹⁹ May God bless you and give you perseverance to the end.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO VERA GEBBERT (W):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

June 16th, 1959

Dear Mrs. Gebbert

Thank you for your letter of June 12th. There is not, to my commonplace eye, very much difference between the Tycoon’s masterpieces and some modernistic works that are hung and sold. You have no doubt noticed that ‘pictures’ by a chimpanzee have lately fetched 30 guineas each?¹²⁰

I hope the school will prove good. I don’t doubt that the tables, windows, kitchens, etc. are superb, as they are here in our free schools. Indeed, nothing in English education is more striking than the contrast between the palatial conditions under which the young proletarians are amused and flattered at the public expense, and the sordid pokiness in which the Collegers at Winchester live and work. But en revanche¹²¹ the latter are really educated and the former are not. I wish our ministry of education would realise that a school with good teachers is a good school even if it meets in a tin shed, and a school with bad teachers is a bad one even if it meets in a palace.

My brother, my wife, and I will do what we can about the Morality Play.¹²²

We are all well and the summer is one of the most beautiful we have ever had–except to the gardener in one–for we are suffering one of our rare droughts. England is usually such a wet country that all the land is drained to an extent you can hardly imagine: consequently there is hardly any surface water and when a drought does occur, soil turns to dust very quickly.

With all good wishes.

Yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO T. S. ELIOT (P):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

June 19th 59

My dear Eliot

I think Fr. Gervase Mathew OP (Blackfriars, Oxford) is the person who would best combine the Theological and Middle English scholarship necessary for judging a version of Lady Julian.¹²³ Failing him, Mrs Zeeman of Girton would be quite good. I certainly don’t feel qualified for the job myself.

On quite another matter–I can’t find the name and address of the secretary of our Commission on the Psalms. As you are in London could you kindly let her know that I have rescued the use of the inner library at Magdalene for our July session? It would be convenient if she told me–for the benefit of the servants–what our daily hours of sitting are likely to be

I also look forward to it.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO KATHLEEN RAINE (BOD):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

June 19th 1959

Dear Kathleen

One must (and will) write poetry if one can. That one must therefore return to the place where the Muse once appeared, as if she were bound to appear there again, is quite a different proposition. The gods will not be met by appointment. They never give us their addresses. And tho’ the Faculty has not been able to give you what you, reasonably, want, it does not follow that they don’t want you. At any rate postpone.

There will never be a time when you can’t leave Cambridge: there could easily be one when you couldn’t return.¹²⁴

Yours

Jack

TO MERVYN PEAKE (UCL):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

June 20th 1959

Dear Mervyn Peake–

We have been terribly rude, but it came by negligence and the negligence came from ‘the weight of the superincumbent hour’.¹²⁵ The book came, you see, while I was still at Cambridge.¹²⁶ I only got home last week and then my wife and I got engulfed by a whirlpool of business correspondence. It wd. have been no compliment to reckon you among the agenda–I shd. hate to be an agendum myself–of the continual committee into which our life seemed to have resolved itself. Nor indeed did we think of anything pleasant or (in itself) interesting. Now we draw breath. And the first use of the breath must be apology; the second, very warm thanks.

Ignorant thanks, mostly. Of your writing I can speak as one in the same trade; of your drawing, only as a member of the public. As such, I find the pictures very satisfactorily ‘horrid’–using the word in Miss Morland’s sense.¹²⁷ The Mariner himself (facing p. 6) has just the triple chord I have sometimes met in nightmares–that disquieting blend of the venerable, the pitiable, and the frightful. But at the same time–thanks, I suppose, mainly to the position of the arms–the horrid representation is a graceful thing (I give no praise to picture or story which does not fulfil both demands. What the, so to speak, ‘plot’ requires representationally must coincide with what the ‘thing’ requires in order to be a delightful object).

And that of course explains (it took me a few minutes to see this) why you represent almost exclusively the terror–what corresponds to S.T.C.’s ‘brook In the leafy month of June’¹²⁸ being done by your line. Thus while few things could be nastier (in what it represents) than the picture facing p. 70, the composition of it is a harmonious tranquillity. The very lines which make the Mariner a hideous and rigid man simultaneously make him a shape as charming as a beech-tree. Another beautiful example is that facing p. 24, to the imagination, all ruin, despair and monstrosity, but to the eye as relaxed and liquid and gentle as a willow hanging over a pool. ‘Abstract’ and ‘photographic’ art (with their literary equivalents) are simply two alternative refusals of the real problem. (I see it of course mainly in terms of my own craft–to make sure that the logical sequence of events demands episode X at exactly the moment where the symphonic structure of moods etc also demands it).

Well, a thousand thanks, both from me and from my wife who has equally enjoyed the book. We go to Ireland for 3 weeks on Monday. If there were any chance of your both being in Oxford after that it would be a great pleasure to meet you.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis¹²⁹

 

Lewis and Joy were in Ireland from 21 June to 10 July, the first two weeks of which were spent with Arthur Greeves. During the third week Lewis gave a number of dinners and teas so Joy could meet members of his family and old friends. They spent part of their time at The Old Inn, Crawfordsburn, Co. Down,¹³⁰ and the rest at the Fort Royal Hotel, Rathmullan, Co. Donegal.

TO JOCELYN GIBB (BOD):

The Old Inn,

Crawfordsburn,

Co. Down,

Northern Ireland

June 26th 1959

Dear Gibb

I gather you have heard about the collection of old articles by me which Harcourt, Brace and Co. are going to bring out. You may have wondered why I have done nothing about arranging for an edition by yourself. These are the reasons 1. My real ‘new book’, The Four Loves, is ready to go to the typist and will no doubt reach you through Curtis Brown in a month or so. This is the one I want you to get on with, and the collection would only be a hindrance.

2. The idea of the collection was initiated by H. & B. If they think they can sell such a book I have no objection to their project. But I doubt if the English prospects–as opposed to the American–are at all good. Our public, as you know, does not much buy collections of essays on different subjects.

3. They are old work and would, I think, be more perceptibly so here than in U.S.A. There might come a time for publishing them, or some of them with others, in England. I don’t particularly want to do so now.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO T. S. ELIOT (P):

The Port Royal Hotel,

Rathmullan,

Co. Donegal,

Eire

June 29th 1959

My dear Eliot

Your kind letter has, as you see, followed me to the world’s end–or one of its ends. My wife and I would like nothing better than to dine with Mrs Eliot and yourself, and since you leave us a choice of dates, we prefer Tue 21st. Thank you very much.

I will write to Miss Allan.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO ROSAMOND CRUIKSHANK (HAR):¹³¹

As from Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

[2 July 1959]

Dear Miss Cruikshank

Thank you for your kind letter. Personally, I liked nearly all my books less than Screwtape,¹³² and the Ransom trilogy or the children’s stories are, from my own point of view, quite as ‘serious’ as it.

Yes: I do wish we would get some more heroic romances out of Tolkien. But he is over 65–I’m over 60–and a very slow worker.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE (W):

The Old Inn,

Crawfordsburn,

Co. Down,

Northern Ireland

July 7th 1959

Dear Mary Willis

Your letter of the 20th has followed us here. You seem to have had a very nasty experience. I can see why you describe it as ‘looking into the face of death’: but who knows whether that face, when we really look at it, will be at all like that? Let us hope better things. I had a tooth out the other day, and came away wondering whether we dare hope that the moment of death may be very like that delicious moment when one realises that the tooth is really out and a voice says ‘Rinse your mouth out with this.’ ‘This’ of course will be Purgatory.¹³³ What you have gone through begins to reconcile me to our Welfare State of which I have said so many hard things. ‘National Health Service’ with free treatment for all has its drawbacks–one being that Doctors are incessantly pestered by people who have nothing wrong with them. But it is better than leaving people to sink or swim on their own resources.

You surely don’t mean ‘feeling that we are not worthy to be forgiven’? For of course we aren’t. Forgiveness by its nature is for the unworthy. You mean ‘Feeling that we are not forgiven.’ I have known that. I ‘believed’ theoretically in the divine forgiveness for years before it really came home to me. It is a wonderful moment when it does.

I am sorry this is so illegible but we are away on holiday and I have only Joy’s biro¹³⁴ to write with. Odious thing! We have been having a nice time, tho’ not very good weather. Love and sympathy from both.

Yours

Jack

TO MARY VAN DEUSEN (W):

The Old Inn,

Crawfordsburn,

Co. Donegal,

Northern Ireland

July 7th 1959

Dear Mrs. Van Deusen

I am glad to hear that the news is at any rate ‘so far, so good’. As my wife and I discovered during our terrible time two years ago, the great thing, both for the patient and for the lover of the patient, is to live it day by day, in the present endurance and the present case, giving as little of one’s mind as possible to fears or hopes (hopes beget fears)–as animals live, and soldiers, and, I expect, saints.

I am always puzzled by what seem to me vulgar–or idiotic–calls to ‘religion’. But we must remember Balaam’s ass!¹³⁵ God can use the queerest instruments. I suppose we are all pretty queer, vulgar, and clumsy ones by angelic standards?

You and yours will of course still be in my prayers. Naturally, knowing none of the factors or people at first hand, I can have no opinion of my own about most of the issues.

I am so glad you liked Edwin Bevan’s book. It does clear things up, doesn’t it. My wife and I are having a lovely holiday,

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO FRANCIS WARNER (P):¹³⁶ PC

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

11 July ’59

I got your letter late last night on return from Ireland. I am afraid I know very little about Agrippa and nothing at all about the relation to modern English literature. His relation to Elizabethan lit. wd. be a very jejune and unrewarding subject, I think–and is not, I take it, your aim? So I suggest you tell Mr. Henn¹³⁷ that I shd. be a quite unsuitable supervisor. I shall be in Cambridge from July 20 to 22nd but on a conference all day each day. I cd. see you at about 9 p.m. on July 20th if you looked in. But I believe it wd. be a waste of your time.

C. S. Lewis

TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE (W):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

11 July 1959

Dear Mary Willis

We got back from Ireland last night, when I found an infinite pile of letters awaiting me, so this can be only a hurried scrawl. Your doctor sounds delightful and I am glad you have that comfort. Not that I know what a pediatrician is any more than a boojum! All our good wishes go with you.

Yours

Jack

 

The intended publication of a paperback edition of Miracles gave Lewis the opportunity to correct the flaw in his argument pointed out by Elizabeth Anscombe in her 1948 paper ‘A Reply to Mr C. S. Lewis’s Argument that “Naturalism” is Self-Refuting’.¹³⁸ Besides rewriting part of Chapter 3 he changed its title from ‘The Self-Contradiction of the Naturalist’ to ‘The Cardinal Difficulty of Naturalism’.

TO JOCELYN GIBB (BOD): PC

The Kilns etc.

11 July [1959]

Yes, there is one chapter of Miracles that needs revision. The result of the revision will, I think, make it shorter rather than longer. I’ll get onto this job as soon as I can.

C.S.L.

TO FRANCIS WARNER (P):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

15th July 1959

Dear Mr. Warner,

No, no, I am not (simpliciter) ‘agin Agrippa’. It was your reference to Yeats which, by suggesting that his influence on modern literature was to be your whole purpose, that made me feel I had nothing to do in your galley. An edition of the De Occ. Phil. is a wholly different thing. This is very badly needed and I wd. v. much approve of your doing it, if only for the selfish reason that I might then have a copy on my own shelves. (The only one I have ever had access to is that in the library of University College, Oxford).¹³⁹ What you say about its relation to Musicology is new to me and greatly increases its importance.

I shd. have thought myself that a new edn. of the Latin text–especially if it had the old translation on the opposite page–wd. by itself be sufficient for the D.Phil. and twenty times more worth doing than a thesis. It wd. even probably have quite a decent sale; for scholars wd. have to buy it and a good many ‘phonies’ (believing occultists) wd. want it too. Consult Mr. Henn on this.

 

There are expressions I wd. like you to reconsider in the Typescript you sent me.

P 1. para 1. l. 4. Apotheosis. Do you mean more than ‘consummation’? P. 1. para 2. ll. 1–2. Omit ‘the medieval attitude to’. A. no doubt takes up an attitude, but surely he is writing not about an attitude but about Physics etc.?

Ibid. l. 8. ‘By Theology A. means’ etc. Nonsense! He no more ‘means’ daemons etc by ‘Theology’ than you ‘mean’ cats by ‘Zoology’. Read ‘Under Theology A. includes the study of angels etc’ or ‘By Theology A. means Pneumatology. Not only God but all angels etc are its subject matter’ P 1. last line. Inevitably. You can only mean ‘invariably’ or ‘always’.

P 2. para 1. l. 16. Benefits of God. Unless you mean this to be funny (and if so, it is not quite funny enough) I’d alter it! (‘For the glory of God’ or ‘to please God’?)

Ibid l. 27. attitude. I’d prefer ‘practice’ or ‘principle’. And the clause ‘even if’ etc seems to me to be doing harm rather than good.

P 3. para 2. l. 4. a source for. Better ‘a source used by’. A. is the source of passages and ideas in Yeats not of Yeats himself: his sources, as you know, were Deus, Sol, et parentes!¹⁴⁰

P. 3. para 3 l. 8. The second Arden etc. This surely shd. begin a new para. And even then the connection of thought is not perfectly clear.

Para 4 l. 1. Part of…to Agrippa. This actually is sense but it sounds rather rum to include what you don’t do as ‘part of your method’. Why not simply ‘I shall limit my study to authors who specifically mention A’?

Ibid l. 2. But achtung! Even this is not conclusive proof. Many profess to quote authors they never really read.

P. 4. para 2. Take your Saurat very critically.¹⁴¹ He is liable to give the obscurest sources for things in Milton which Milton cd. have got from well known passages in the Bible.

Ibid. l. 3. valid. I’ve no idea what a valid field may be. Don’t you mean ‘fruitful’ or ‘useful’?

Para. 4 l. 1. ‘It remains to demonstrate the reason why.’ Surely a ‘wearisome pomp of circumlocution’?¹⁴² (Why not ‘This debt needs examination, for if we ignore it we cannot understand’ etc?)

Ibid. l. 5. depends etc. You don’t mean ‘depends on its source’ but ‘depends on our knowledge of its source’. And you don’t mean ‘its understanding’ but our understanding of it. Read ‘cannot be understood unless we know its source’.

P. 5. l. 10. act. Read ‘action’. Act might mean a dramatic ‘Actus’.

P 6, l. 2. The Dionysiac. Or possibly ‘the Dionysus’?

P 8 ll. 5–16. The quotation is much too long for the sentence ‘In the third verse we see’ to tuck it in. Try reading this para. aloud and you’ll see the difficulty. Better ‘The third verse runs: (quotation). Here we see etc’

Para 2. l. 3. depend. On what?

I hope this doesn’t all sound too pedantic. But the matter is important. So many people, when they begin ‘research’, lose all desire, and presently all power, of writing clear, sharp, and unambiguous English. Hold onto your finite transitive verb, your concrete nouns, and the muscles of language (but, though, for, because etc.). The more abstract the subject the more our language shd. avoid all unnecessary abstraction. Write mysteriously and elusively about a drawing room if you please: but write about mysteries as like Cobbett¹⁴³ (or Hume)¹⁴⁴ as you can!

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO T. S. ELIOT (P):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

17th July 1959

My dear Eliot

Your letter of the 8th, after following me from one Irish hotel to another, reached me to-day. The programme of the conference is fiercer than I expected, and I agree with you that we shall have to dine at Selwyn every night, almost certainly.¹⁴⁵ We shall be happy to lunch with you on Thursday 23rd, if (as is probable) that proves the better time. With many thanks.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO MICHAEL EDWARDS (BOD): PC

[The Kilns,

20 July 1959]

[Tel.] 62963 Oxford

I shd. much like another meeting but I am not sure of my movement. If you are in Oxford anyway, try me by ringing me up.

C. S. Lewis

TO GERTRUDE E. DIGGLE (BOD):¹⁴⁶

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

25th July 1959

Dear Mrs. Diggle

Thank you for your extremely kind offer.¹⁴⁷ But I don’t think I am the proper owner of this rare book. I also am ‘by no means young’ and, if it came into my possession, it would soon have to find a new home once more. If I were you I would leave it to the library of MacDonald’s old college at Aberdeen.¹⁴⁸ I forget which college it was but Greville’s Life¹⁴⁹ will no doubt tell you.

With much gratitude and all good wishes,

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO NICOLE R. F. ROBINSON (W):

The Kilns

Headington Quarry

Oxford

1 Aug 1959

Dear Miss Robinson

I suppose our moral responsibility for the results of our behaviour on other people’s lives varies, doesn’t it? Zero when these results were quite impossible for us to foresee: 100% where we both foresaw and intended them: and then all sorts of degrees in between these two. Often we could foresee it if we cared enough about other people to try. The passage in my book is an encouragement to do so.¹⁵⁰ I am not thinking of a sort of legal standard of responsibility. If there were no Judge and no punishment, I should not like to know that my nastiness to a man, tho’ repented by me, still went on degrading his character.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO GEORGE SAYER (W):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

3 Aug. 1959

My dear George–

Lor’ bless you, I was sent this book when it came out, and the main use of your packet was to remind me that I’ve lent my copy to Christopher Tolkien and it is high time he returned it.

About the scheme, I’m afraid we’re off to Wales at that time and what between Wales ahead and Ireland behind (‘the deep before, the foe behind’!)¹⁵¹ the Vac. is devilish tight for the work I have to do in it. So nothing doing, I fear. But I can’t have you for a night in College next term? I am suffering from ‘George-starvation’. Love to Moira.

Yours

Jack

TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE (W):

The Kilns etc

Aug 3/59

Dear Mary Willis

I have your letter of 30 July. It has puzzled me. I understood that you were going to the doctors for heart trouble. How and why do the psychiatrists come into the picture? But since they have come, I am glad to hear they are nice.

I sympathise most deeply with you on the loss of Fr. Louis. But for good as well as for ill one never knows what is coming next. You remember the Imitation says ‘Bear your cross, for if you try to get rid of it you will probably find another and worse one.’¹⁵² But there is a brighter side to the same principle. When we lose one blessing, another is often most unexpectedly given in its place.

We are all well here though I am frantically busy: and though I get no more tired now than I did when I was younger, I take much longer to get un-tired afterwards. All blessings and sympathy.

Yours

Jack

TO JOCELYN GIBB (BOD):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

8 Aug 59

Dear Gibb

Courage! Revisions of second (not first) chapter in Miracles go to the typist to-day.¹⁵³ I was by no means in the vein and the job was itself v. ticklish and the weather v. hot–so you’re lucky it took no longer.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO JOAN LANCASTER (BOD):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

11 Aug. 1959

Dear Joan

Congratulations on your 98% in Latin. What a droll idea in Florida, to give credits not for what you know but for hours spent in a classroom! Rather like judging the condition of an animal not by its weight or shape but by the amount of food that had been offered it!

A story about Caesar in Gaul sounds very promising. Have you read Naomi Mitchison’s The Conquered?¹⁵⁴ And if not, I wonder should you? It might be too strong an influence if you did (at any rate until your own book is nearly finished). On the other hand, you may need to read it in order to avoid being at any point too like it without knowing you are doing so. I don’t know what one shd. read on Gaul. Apart from archaeological finds (Torques and all that)¹⁵⁵ I suppose Caesar himself is our chief evidence?¹⁵⁶ He will be great fun and I hope you will enjoy yourself thoroughly. Which side will you be on? I’m all for the Gauls myself and I hate all conquerors. But I never knew a woman who was not all for Caesar–just as they were in his life-time.

One of our rare really hot English summers this year.

Sorry the previous page is such a mess. I mistook a piece of ordinary paper for blotting paper!

With all good wishes.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO MARTIN KILMER (W):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

18 Aug 1959

Dear Martin

Don’t bother about Alanus.¹⁵⁷ The prophecies of Merlin are much the least interesting thing about him. The fullest source for the Merlin story is the prose Merlin.¹⁵⁸ The medieval English translation of this (several volumes) was published by the Early English Text Society.¹⁵⁹ You are not likely to find it except in a university library. You have Geoffrey.¹⁶⁰ A v. good source, if you can get hold of it, is Arthurian Chronicles from Wace and Layamon by Eugene Mason, published by Dents of London many years ago in the series called the Everyman Library. The Layamon part is the part worth reading. The full text of Layamon was also done in 3 vols. by Sir Charles Madder and had a trans. into modern English at the bottom of the page–but it is now a very rare book.¹⁶¹ The big 3 vol. Works of Sir Thomas Malory edited by E. Vinaver¹⁶² wd. be easier to come by, and perhaps by assiduously going through his notes wherever Merlin is mentioned (begin from the index of course) you might find some helpful facts.

I am so very glad to hear of your sister’s recovery.

All the best.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO ALLAN C. EMERY (W):

As from Magdalene College,

Cambridge

18 Aug. 1959

Dear Mr. Emery–

Thank you for your kind letter of the 13th. The fairy-tale version of the Passion in The Lion etc. works in the way you describe because–tho’ this sounds odd–it bye-passes one’s reverence and piety. We approach the real story in the Gospels with the knowledge that we ought to feel certain things about it. And this, by a familiar psychological law, can hinder us from doing so. The dutiful effort prevents the spontaneous feeling; just as if you say to an old friend during a brief reunion ‘Now let’s have a good talk’ both suddenly find themselves with nothing to say. Make it a fairy-tale and the reader is taken off his guard. (Unless ye become as little children…)¹⁶³

If I may say so, you are the sanest and fairest tee-totaller I have met for a long time. I think that if I lived in certain American or Scotch circles I might feel it my duty to be one too. The point is that the association between T.T.-ism and Christianity is almost strictly confined to the English-speaking world–i.e. to those parts of the world where there is no tradition of civilised drinking. In France or Germany, where the most pious people, and even children, normally drink wine at table it wd. be unintelligible. And societies which do that have far less drunkenness than you or we.

With cordial good wishes.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

 

I suppose wine was almost a necessity for the Ancients, wasn’t it? Because (a) Owing to insanitary conditions much of the water was dangerous (b) Fermentation was their only preservative–no frigidaires. Even in my time it was suicidal to drink water in an Italian village!

TO MICHAEL EDWARDS (BOD):¹⁶⁴

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

20 Aug 59

Dear Edwards

You offer so much and ask so little that I feel rather a cad to say No. But there are two reasons. The one (particular and temporary) is that we are shortly off for a holiday. The other (general and permanent) is this. If you were here on the terms you suggest I should feel uncomfortable unless I could give you a fair amount of my time–and indeed your purpose in coming wd. be frustrated if I didn’t.

But I have so little time. The claims of my work, my wife, my (resident) brother, the daily post (that utterly galley-slave hour or so every day), already leave me hardly time to pray, to think, or to rest. My plate is too full. Everyone’s and everything’s share of me is already too small. This isn’t excuses–nor at all disinclination for your society, which I find v. good value–but plain mathematics. Like packing a suitcase. If you put in the spare pair of boots you must leave out the spare pair of trousers, and that’s all there is to it.

I hope this won’t deter you from coming again whenever it’s convenient. I like, and can manage, occasional meetings. But no additions ‘on the strength’.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO CHAD WALSH (W):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

21 Aug 59

My dear Chad–

I have no changes to suggest in your ‘Brief Life’, unless possibly you delete ‘Arras and’ in l. 6. Lillers is a day’s-long drive from Arras.

I’ve now made a book out of those talks I gave for Episcopal T.V. and the MS went to my library agent yesterday. I have taken the liberty of dedicating it, without permission, to you. O.K.?¹⁶⁵

If Joy were awake–I breakfast at unearthly hours and tackle my post in the day’s cool and silent hours–she wd. join me in love to you all.

Yours

Jack

TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE (W):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

21 Aug 59

Dear Mary Willis

Yes, six snacks instead of three meals must be a frightful nuisance. One must be always washing up! And I know how, when one is on one’s own, even a nice meal and a good appetite can hardly make the whole time-wasting business of getting it and clearing it away seem worth the few minutes of actual eating.

You will be surprised to hear that our temperatures are, for once, not very much lower than yours. Yesterday at 11.30 a.m. on our lawn the thermometer read 94°. A big tree and a still bigger branch off another came crashing down in the wood yesterday, in windless calm–purely for lack of internal moisture. The early mornings and late evenings are lovely, but not the blistering hours in between.

A ‘move’ is a beastly thing at the best of times. One’s things have a sort of whining pathos (do you know what I mean) about them once they are winkled out of their old native haunts.

I wish you had better news to send me and I more comfort to send you. Of course you are always in my prayers.

The house is still asleep–I get up early and try to dispose of my mail in the day’s cool and silent hours, so I can send you only my love and sympathy. Joy would add hers if she were awake!

Yours

Jack

TO EUGÈNE VINAVER (W):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

22 Aug 59

My dear Vinaver

I have read the MS with great interest and often with delight.¹⁶⁶ I shall, however, be a less useful critic than you hoped. This is because your book is so much concerned with relating medieval narratives to the whole history of fiction and, especially, the French novel–a very legitimate and important theme but not one on which I am well qualified to speak.

It is significant that the part I am best able to judge is the part I like best. This raises a presumption that the places where I am a little ‘at sea’ are equally sound. The part I refer to is cap iii, of which your late Medium Aevum article was a foretaste.¹⁶⁷ I think you here settle for good and all the most important question. I, at any rate, do not see any possible answer. You have killed the anthropological giant and those who think all lost stories ipso facto better than all extant stories ought to be silenced.

I am less happy–perhaps because I understand less–about cap i. The contrast between narrative which merely states (like the Chansons de Geste or the Ballads) and that which interprets, which anticipates the question why?–I of course admit. (I wd. even add that I find the former technique still dominant among country-people in any village pub. If, at the end of their narrative you ask them ‘But why did he say that? Was he joking? Or angry? etc’, you get no answer. Or rather, their answer is to repeat the fact).

What I am not quite convinced of is the view that the sen¹⁶⁸ is related to the events of the story as the spiritual senses are related to the events of the story in Scriptural exegesis. For all the spiritual senses (as enumerated in Pseudo-Dante to Can Grande)¹⁶⁹ are after all allegorical. But the event of, say, Achilles loving Polyxena, is not related to his love-speech in that way at all. To say that ‘Israel came out of Egypt’¹⁷⁰ means (in addition to the historical sense) ‘the soul turns from sin’ is quite different from putting a speech about it into the mouth of Pharaoh.

I am doubtful about your explanation of the poet’s motives¹⁷¹ (p. 29. para 1) for giving Achilles a speech. Can it not be fully explained (we have both read Auerbach) as part of the increasing demand for mimesis?¹⁷² Once it was enough to say what happened. Then you add what people looked like–with similes as in Homer. Then what they felt and said. Of course A’s speech contributes little to our knowledge of the human heart. We are blasé by now. But would not the original audience have been enabled by that speech to imagine his love more vividly?

I am similarly uneasy about your treatment of Soredamors and Alexandre (pp 34 sq).¹⁷³ These speeches may be, as you say (p. 36A) ‘unnecessary to the action’. But your view, unless I mistake your point, leaves them inconsistent with the action. How can it be an ‘interpretation’ of the factual story to make your protagonists say things for which that factual story gives no pretext? I am assuming–this may be where I’m wrong–that you reject Paris’s objection as irrelevant but accept his view that in fact there was no reason why S. and A. shd. not get married. But is this so? Their rank makes a marriage not impossible. Does it not also make it inconceivable that they shd. take the initiatives about their own marriages? The King and the Emperor will have their own plans. Even now princes are not v. free in such matters.

In all this I may seem to you–and you may be right–to be naively clinging to a modern idea of story telling. To some extent I am. The Scylla of our approach to old texts is of course this naïf modernity: we go into the past as the most regrettable type of English tourist goes abroad, carrying his ‘Englishry’ with him and meaning by a ‘good hotel’ in Picardy that which is more like a hotel in Brighton. But there is Charybdis too–a tendency to forget that these foreigners, or these medievals, are after all human, to explain everything by dead disciplines (e.g. Rhetoric) even if this involves attributing to them strictly unimaginable states of mind. I think you and I are both in more danger from Charybdis than from Scylla. Hence, I am rather on my guard.

In the Erec-Mabonagrin episode (pp 50 sq.)¹⁷⁴ I myself can feel no tension, and hardly even a conjointure¹⁷⁵ between the fairy and the country element, and I wonder whether something simpler than conjointure is at work. In a savage story if the hero finds the home of the dead or of the gods it will be a Kraal with huts just like the Kraals of the poet and the audience. So Valhalla is a ring-giver’s hall just like Cerdic’s or Alfred’s. Ovid’s Olympus is v. like Rome. Nearly every Christian representation of Heaven makes it a court. The naif negro representation in Green Pastures significantly substitutes an office and gives a God a roller-top desk instead of a throne.¹⁷⁶ This is not conjointure. It is, on whatever level of crudity or sophistication, seriousness or playfulness, the changeless and unavoidable procedure of human imagination. Is it not possible that the (to coin a word) curialisation¹⁷⁷ of the fairy element in Erec is in the same way inevitable? Once you make your fée a lady–and you must do that if she is to be a proper mistress for a knight–I suspect that a good deal more curialisation follows of itself.

A few marginalia:

 

P.23 para 2.l.1. exposition. Wd. ‘exegesis’ leave less room for misunderstanding?

P. 29 para 2. l. 6. bound by…the literal sense. Wd. it be better to say ‘limited to’ or ‘confined to’. You mean, don’t you, that he could go beyond it? It sounds as if you meant he could contradict or throw it over.

P. 41l9 speaks of love. Surely not of love (the passion) but of Love (the personification)?

P. 109 para 2 This, if I may say so, seems to me excellently said. P. 120 para 2. l 13 irrational. Yes, but how terribly familiar in our actual experience!

P. 146 ad fin. When Ross lectured us on Aristotle he forbade us to translate dojei! by ‘seems’. He said it always means ‘is (popularly or universally) thought’.

 

I admired your ordonnance. In so many books I find myself saying ‘Yes: I understand that sentence in itself, but why is he saying this just here?’ You never once made me do so.

Now something quite different. I hear from J. A. W. Bennett that you think of withdrawing your essay from the collection he is editing on Malory.¹⁷⁸ I implore you to reconsider this. If you don’t care to put in the one you originally intended, can you not let us have something else? A book on Malory without an essay by you will be so emphatically ‘Hamlet without the Prince’ that the rest of us wd. be embarrassed to appear in it. It will also be misinterpreted. Too many people in our profession look on scholarship as if it were a kind of politics. The book (without you) will be taken to mark the cleavage between a Vinaverian and an anti-Vinaverian ‘school’, or some such nonsense. The fact that Brewer argues against your decision and that my essay¹⁷⁹ (based on that old T.L.S. review)¹⁸⁰ dissents from you will be seized on. I shd. find this very distressing. Could you not let us have as your contribution a v. slightly modified re-print of the Medium Aevum article? I know that it’s all in cap iii of the Perspective, but it is very well able to stand alone.

It has been a great privilege to read your MS. With kindest regards to Mrs. Vinaver and yourself.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

 

P. S. How about getting the TS of my essay from J.A.W.B. (or from me if you can wait till term and I am re-united to the carbons, which are at Cambridge) and writing an answer to it–or, if in any places you agree with me, a development from it? This wd. give the book a symposiastic quality. At any rate we cd. show our juniors–what they increasingly need to be shown–that disputation is not the same as quarrelling.

TO ROBERT M. METCALF JR (P):¹⁸¹

As from Magdalene College

Cambridge

25 Aug 59

Dear Mr. Metcalf

I don’t feel at all qualified to contribute to a ‘master’ list of writings. The languages I don’t know are of course very much more numerous than those I know; and even in the languages I do know there are a great many books I have not read. And I rather doubt whether a list of masterpieces picked from all over the world–mostly, I presume to be read in translations?–is a v. useful thing.

I would rather see young men beginning from where they are and being led on from one thing to another: e.g. that Milton shd. lead them either to Virgil and Homer (and therefore to a really serious study of Latin or Greek) or to Dante (and therefore to a whole course of Medieval and Italian studies). That, after all, is how every educated person’s development has actually come about.

The sort of culture one can get from the 100 or 1000 Best Books read in isolation from the societies and literatures that begot them seems to me like the sort of knowledge of Europe I shd. get from staying at big hotels in Paris, Berlin, Rome, etc. It wd. be far better to know intimately one little district, going from village to village, getting to know the local politics, jokes, wines, and cheeses. Or so it seems to me.

But here I go offering you advice, which you didn’t ask for, and refusing that which you did! Forgive me, and believe me

Yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO EUGÈNE VINAVER (W):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

26 Aug 59

My dear Vinaver–

You make far too much of something that was more of an honour than a task and more of a pleasure than either.

One thing I ought to have said in my last letter. Some of my difficulty in fully understanding parts of your argument may be neither your fault nor (in a way) mine. It may be due to ‘un-shared background’. You come to the subject, obviously, from a whole literature on the novel, especially ‘Form’ in the novel, of which I know hardly anything. It is therefore v. possible that many words, including ‘Form’, have overtones for you which they lack for me.

I am very, very glad that you are disposed to reconsider your decision about the J.A.W.B. collection. My own essay exists (a) In the TS which he, as editor, now has; (b) In two carbons and one illegible MS now at Cambridge. I can’t go over to Cambridge at present. You can therefore, if you follow the symposiastic idea, either ask J.A.W.B. to lend you his copy, now, or wait till term begins when I can send you one of the Cambridge carbons.

Have you read Tolkien’s lecture on Fairy Tales in the volume Essays presented to Charles Williams? Part of my case against the Celticists wd. be his maxim that ‘motifs are products of analysis’–not bricks out of which stories are put together but entia rationis¹⁸² into which we analyse them–rather like metrical feet or grammatical conjugations and declensions.

Does it ever occur to you that the procedure of the Celticists is really a response proving how well the ‘ferlies’¹⁸³ in the Romances work?¹⁸⁴ For the Celticist is saying ‘Hush! Stop! Here is something hidden. Behind this lies something far older, mistier, more barbaric, more momentous than you might suppose.’ ^* Is not this just the response the romancers intended? But when v. unimaginative people are thus, for once, trapped into a healthy and naif response, they mistake it for a scientific theory! Their quest for the hidden Pagan ritual is itself another romantic quest and gives just the same sort of pleasures as the romances they think they are explaining. The same holds for the Jungians.

None of this expects an answer–I’m ‘just talking’.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

 

* Or more briefly and far better, numen inest.¹⁸⁵

TO JOCELYN GIBB (BOD): PC

The Kilns etc

Aug 26 [1959]

One more correction to Miracles.

P. 209 para 2. l 6 for precious read previous

C.S.L.

TO MARY VAN DEUSEN (W):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

6 Sept 1959

Dear Mrs. Van Deusen–

Your italic typewriter is very pleasant to the eye. I have prayed for Paul and his Headmaster. Do not attach too much importance to the latter! I think H.Ms’ influence on–and even knowledge of–their own schools is greatly exaggerated by a kind of romanticism. What really matters, for learning, is of course the immediate teacher. What matters for happiness and morals is the other boys.

My reason for not mentioning E. Underhill’s Worship¹⁸⁶ was the silliest and most cogent in the world: I have not read it. You have no idea how many books written in this century are unknown to me. I believe she is a good author.

With all best wishes,

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO MICHAEL EDWARDS (BOD):¹⁸⁷

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry

Oxford

6 Sept 59

Dear Edwards

Thanks 1000 times and also for the admirable illustration. You are a chap! Anything from feeding a pet crocodile to entertaining a lunatic’s cousin! I’ll bear it in mind. Who would not?

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO MARY VAN DEUSEN (W):

The Kilns etc.

8 Sept 59

Dear Mrs. Van Deusen–

In answering Genia’s letter I was concerned only with the questions she asked. That she described her problems as arising out of opinions she attributed to you was not relevant. I mean, it did not matter (for that purpose) whether she was giving a correct account of your vicar or not.

No one, I presume, can imagine life in the Glorified Body. On this, and on the distinction (in general) between belief and imagination, I have said all I can in Miracles.¹⁸⁸ Lor’ bless me, I can picture v. few of the things I believe in–I can’t picture will, thought, time, atoms, astronomical distances, New York, nor even (at the moment) my mother’s face.

Your whole worry about the word Christian comes from ignoring the fact that words have different meanings in different contexts. The best parallel is the word poet. We can argue till the cows come home whether ‘Pope is a poet.’ On the other hand, a librarian, putting ‘poets’ in one shelf and prose writers in another, after a single glance at one page of Pope, classifies him as a ‘poet’. In other words, the word has a deep, ambiguous, disputable, and (for many purposes) useless, sense: also a shallow, clear, useful sense. So has the word ‘Christian’. It is not for me to say who is a Christian in the first sense. In the second sense it seems to me more useful not to classify Quakers as Christian. But this is a linguistic, not a religious, question.

By the way, is it necessary to salvation, to charity, or to affection, that you and Genia should achieve precise verbal agreement on these points? If not, why worry? Live and let live. ‘Take life easy as the leaves grow in the tree.’¹⁸⁹ There is, if you will forgive me for saying so, a self-tormenting and a mutually tormenting element in both of you.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

 

The first radio performance of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, dramatized by Lance Sieveking, was broadcast during the BBC Home Service’s ‘Children’s Hour’ in six 40-minute parts between 5.15 and 5.55 p.m. on successive Friday evenings from 18 September to 23 October 1959.

TO BERNARD ACWORTH (W):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

18 Sept 59

Dear Acworth–

It was a great pleasure to hear from you again. I don’t see any clear grounds on which the drawing of the D.A.P.¹⁹⁰ can be pronounced immoral. I think one may be right in opposing a scheme and yet also right in enjoying some benefit it produces for oneself. On active service one might surely oppose a strategy which put one’s own ship or unit in a ‘cushy’ job, and yet enjoy the cushiness? One wd. have more scruple about enjoying it if one had argued for the scheme.

I am most interested to hear of your young biologist; and his experience impresses one again with the suspicious disingenuousness of orthodox biologists.

By the way I saw last week the Hell scene from Shaw’s Man and Superman.¹⁹¹ What awful thin stuff all the Life Force worship is when you hear it on the real stage. The Devil stole the whole scene. At first I thought this was because he was the best actor and was inclined to criticise the producer for distributing the parts badly. But later on I suspected that Shaw himself has made the result inevitable by (unintentionally) giving his devil sense to talk while his Don Juan talks gas.¹⁹²

About my (very happy) marriage, do you know the story? I married my wife at her bedside in hospital when she was to all appearances certainly dying of cancer in the bones. The young priest who married us (I knew that strange things had been done through him before) laid his hands on her and said the prayers for the sick. Then–it was unbelievable–nature went into reverse. The totally disintegrated femur slowly rebuilt itself. Now (2 years later) except that she limps, she is living a normal life, gardening, shooting, shopping, and walking. The doctors themselves used–tho’ not so seriously as we would, perhaps–the word ‘miraculous’. May we have your prayers? For of course the sword of Damocles always hangs over our heads.

My brother, who still lives with us, is at present away in Ireland. He remembers you very warmly and wd. join me in greetings if he were at home.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO EDWARD LOFSTROM (P):

As from Magdalene College,

Cambridge

20 Sept 59

Dear Mr. Lofstrom

I think your comparison between the self and the telescope is singularly accurate. The instrument vanishes from consciousness just in so far it is perfected. But until then we must attend to it: otherwise we shall be like the man who mistakes a smudge on the glass for a gigantic animal on the Moon. You are still in my prayers.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO ROGER LANCELYN GREEN (BOD): PC

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

21 Sept. [1959]

1. Athens–Rhodes–Crete 3–14 April best for us: 11–22 impossible.

2. Can you come and dine here on Sat. Oct 3rd.

Love,

J.

TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE (W):

The Kilns etc 21 Sept [1959]

Dear Mary Willis–

In great haste–indeed no more than a scrape of the pen to express my sympathy. House-hunting is gruelling and heart-breaking work at the best of times. I’m sorry I missed Fr. Louis. How pleased you must be about selling that article! All well here. If I got a crocodile skin I’d sell it! Blessings.

Yours

Jack

TO FATHER PETER MILWARD SJ (W):

As from Magdalene College,

Cambridge

24 September 1959

Dear Father Milward

Don’t give that book another thought.¹⁹³ It isn’t an allegory. I was trying to tell a story. The main themes are 1. Natural affection, if left to mere nature, easily becomes a special kind of hatred. 2. God is, to our natural affections, the ultimate object of jealousy.

I don’t think, you know, that our two minds communicate at all easily. We always misunderstand one another. You are in my prayers and I hope I am in yours. That is much better than postal correspondence!

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO K. C. THOMPSON (W):¹⁹⁴

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

11 Oct. 1959

Dear Mr. Thompson

Thank you for kindly sending us a copy of I Paul.¹⁹⁵ You were set a difficult job to do and so far as I can see you have done it very skilfully. Your commission was in one way a compliment from the R.C.’s tho’ rather the same sort of compliment the Israelites paid their Egyptian neighbours over all that jewelry!¹⁹⁶

I’m not quite happy about para 2 on p. 63. Anyone cd take A.V. ‘in high places’¹⁹⁷ to mean ‘in the highest (social or political) positions’. But I suppose, your St. Paul was talking Greek. Could any one so take Or could he even take ¹⁹⁸ to mean human wickedness at all? The soldier would have heard lots about aerial daemons all his life.

I hope the book will have a great success.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO JOCELYN GIBB (BOD):¹⁹⁹

Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

[14 October 1959]

The four loves are of course Affection, Friendship, Eros, and Charity. They have often been dealt with separately by authors so different as Ovid, St Bernard, and Stendhal, and usually, one or other of them is treated as the only love worth much consideration. Dr. Lewis is more a map-maker than a partisan. He marks frontiers and trade-routes and tries to do justice to all.

Three quotations used by the author indicate the principles that govern his survey: from St John, ‘God is Love’,²⁰⁰ from Donne ‘That our affections kill us not nor die’,²⁰¹ and from Denis de Rougemont ‘Love ceases to be a demon when he ceases to be a god.’²⁰²

On the three natural loves much demolition and reconstruction has proved necessary. Affection had to be disentangled from a suffocating overgrowth of sentimentality, and Eros from some misplaced solemnities. Friendship needed defence against modern neglect and even suspicion.

Dr. Lewis’s power of expressing easily thoughts not very easy in themselves has never been more fully exhibited.

TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE (W):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

18 Oct. 59

Dear Mary Willis

Well, thank goodness your move is now over.²⁰³ A ‘bed-sitter’, as we call them over here, has certainly its drawbacks. In England, where most houses have no central heating, it has one compensation–that of going to bed and getting up in a warm room. But that, I suppose, would be so anyway in America. I am very glad to hear of Lorraine’s being kind and helpful.

Will you redouble your prayers for us? Apparently the wonderful recovery Joy made in 1957 was only a reprieve, not a pardon. The last X Ray check reveals cancerous spots returning in many of her bones. There seems to be some hope of a few years life still and there are still things the doctors can do. But they are all in the nature of ‘rearguard actions’. We are in retreat. The tide has turned. Of course God can do again what He did before. The sky is not now so dark as it was when I married her in hospital. Her courage is wonderful and she gives me more support than I can give her.

The dreadful thing, as you know, is the waking each morning–the moment at which it all flows back on one.

Yours

Jack

TO EUGÈNE VINAVER (W):

Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

21 Oct. 1959

Dear Vinaver

I think this open letter is one of the very best things you have ever done–and to have occasioned it is perhaps the most useful thing I ever did.²⁰⁴ There is really no difference left between us about Malory. Further discussion would lead us into a different field. If we disagreed–and I am not quite sure whether we should–it would be about the meaning of words like Art and Nature. It’s amusing, by the way, that you and Proust move the idea of ‘genius’ back much nearer to the Medieval and Renaissance meaning–something about other than the man.²⁰⁵ I’m not at all sure you are wrong. Though we shd. have to inquire whether the otherness between the moi profond and the common moi is a constant. The gap may be greater in some writers than in others.²⁰⁶ Of course I am completely with you in opposing the identification of the two taken for granted by many critics. I made my critical enfances by opposing it in The Personal Heresy.²⁰⁷

It is v. appropriate that a book on a medieval author shd. contain an estrif or débat.²⁰⁸

When you write to J.A.W.B. will you be so kind as to tell him (with my authority–which is really your authority gratefully accepted) to substitute ‘accused of’ for ‘convicted’ on p. 6 of my essay.²⁰⁹

My duty to Mrs. Vinaver.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO JOCELYN GIBB (BOD):²¹⁰

Magdalene College,

Oxford.

22 Oct. 1959

Dear Gibb

Sunt bona, sunt etiam mediocria, sunt mala plura.²¹¹ I think Milton and you were being rather bat’s eyed in some places but to the point in others. I enclose my emendations, concessions, and resistances. I also return your letter of reference. You read my notes as footnotes to yours, hence the numerals.

Now as regards my emendations, will you be so kind as to type them and send them to Harcourt Brace for the American edition. Otherwise we shall create a ‘textual problem’.

Please thank Milton for sending me de Chardin’s book,²¹² which I want to read.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

 

(1)²¹³ There is no suggestion on pp. 83 sq that friend and ally are synonyms. The whole point is that, tho’ a Friend will at need be also an Ally, such services are ‘not the stuff of friendship’ (p. 80). What can you and Milton have been dreaming of? Still we can make it easier. For the existing last 3 lines of p. 87 read–

[‘]closer than a brother’. But when we speak thus we are using friend to mean ‘ally’. In ordinary usage friend means, or should mean, more than that. A Friend will, to be sure, prove himself to be also an ally when alliance becomes necessary, will lend or give when we are in²¹⁴

(2)²¹⁵ Of course we cd. have community of interest without Friendship. What has this to do with my statement that we can’t have Friendship without community of interest. You can often have A without B where you can’t have B without A: fire without smoke but not smoke without fire: a ground floor without a first floor but not vice-versa.

(3)²¹⁶ Already dealt with on p. 80 para 3 ‘no Friendship can arise–though Appreciation of course may.²¹⁷

(4)²¹⁸ I don’t understand this.

(5)²¹⁹ No

(6)²²⁰ Disagree. There can be real F. between thieves, Teddy Boys, and bullies.

(7)²²¹ Well of course it could be. It needn’t.

(8)²²² V. well, we’ll put it in. On p. 81 para 1, l 7 between or later. And But this inset And, conversely, erotic love may lead to Friendship between the lovers.²²³

(9)²²⁴ No, no, no. Falling in love does not create but transforms our sexuality. The sexuality (a ‘need’ par excellence) was there before. We weren’t eunuchs.²²⁵

(10)²²⁶ Let ’em ‘doubt’. All this needs to be said.

(11)²²⁷ Thanks. You have a real point here. Between paras 1 and 2 on p. 128 inset (as a short, separate para) the following:

To say this is not to say that there is any virtue or wisdom in making a marriage that involves such misery. There is no wisdom or virtue in seeking unnecessary martyrdom or deliberately courting persecution, yet it is, none the less, the persecuted or martyred Christian in whom the pattern of the Master is most unambiguously realised. So, in these terrible marriages, once they have come about, the ‘Headship’ of the husband, if only he can sustain it, is most Christ-like.²²⁸

(12)²²⁹ Tut-tut!

(13)²³⁰ No matter

(14)²³¹ Do anything you like (in reason) to the punctuation.

TO CHAD WALSH (W):

Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

22 Oct. 1959

Dear Chad

Do exactly as you choose about Mrs. R’s request. The talks have now been made into a book (The Four Loves) which is already in the hands of Harcourt Brace for the American edition. Wd. it be a good thing if you get their advice?

The blow has fallen. Joy’s last x-ray check reveals that cancer has returned in several parts of the skeleton. There are still measures that can be taken: but they are in the nature of rear-guard actions. Of course the prospect is no darker than it was in 1957. But dare one hope for a second resurrection? Pray for us.

Yours

Jack

TO RHONA BODLE (BOD):

Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

27 Oct. 1959

Dear Miss Bodle,

It was nice to hear from you again. Of course you will have my friend’s prayers–you always have–in the extremely delicate and important work you are doing. God-children are a terrible problem. One seems to have promised what, if the parents are the wrong sort, one cannot perform.

Will you also pray for me. My wife (I married in 1957) has cancer.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO JOCELYN GIBB (BOD):

Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

29 Oct 59

Dear Gibb

Thanks. I await further protests from Milton.²³² Did I ask you to put in the dedication TO CHAD WALSH? If not, I hope it is not too late to do so. As to the Brace collection, it was their idea, not mine!

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO JOCELYN GIBB (BOD):

As from Magdalene College,

Cambridge

8 Nov 59

Dear Gibb

Fri. 20th wd. suit me. We could lunch in Combination Room and talk afterwards, if that fits in for you. What to do with Screwtape’s after-dinner speech is a question that needs some thought.²³³ I suppose a new edn. of the original papers, adding this, and entitled The Whole Screwtape might kill the sale of the old book?

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO JOHN H. MCCALLUM (P): TS

74/59

The Kilns, Kiln Lane,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford.

9th November 1959.

Dear Mac,

One or other of us (far more probably me) is muddled. I intended The Four Loves to be dedicated to C. Walsh, not the World’s L.N.

Yours

TO DEREK BREWER (P):

Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

16 Nov 1959

Clive Dear Derek

1. Yes. A Jonsonian masque with a good introd, packing tight all we now know about masques, wd. be an excellent choice.

2. No. Haven’t you discovered yet that I’m not a Scholar but only a Learned Man. ^*

Lor’ bless you, I can’t edit any more than I can audit. I’m not accurate. Sorry.

It was lovely to see you and I hope you’ll come again, some night when I’m fully free.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

 

* A Cambridge don asked me the other day whether the last syllables of polymath and aftermath were derived from the same word!

TO HUGH KILMER (W):

Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

18 Nov 1959

Dear Kilmer

I meant only to deal with that particular argument, which, as you rightly say, has been used by Fundamentalists (and Calvinists) as well as by Rome. I was not proposing a discussion on the Roman position in general. Indeed if Faith (proprement dite) in the Church of Rome only comes by supernatural gift, there is not much room for discussion.

All the best.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO JOY LEWIS (BOD):

Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

19 Nov. [1959]

Joan and Stanley can come,²³⁴ so if only G. Watson²³⁵ will play we’re now fixed.²³⁶

I was kept up late last night by a fool of a former chaplain to the College who brought some hobble-de-hoys of schoolboys to see me. As they had nothing to say to me and I had nothing to say to them, this meant our all listening to the said chaplain. His name, believe me or believe me not, is TIBBATTS.²³⁷ Sounds like a character out of the Peter Rabbit books.

Cold much better in general, but left ear, tonsil, and gland all v. sore. I want to be fussed over, in fact. And ‘want must be my master’.

A warm day. Guest-night to night which I wish it weren’t. Do you know, I find I really do want to see the new dresses! Love J.

TO ROGER LANCELYN GREEN (BOD):

Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

25 Nov 59

My dear Roger

In a sense it might be said that Joy ‘is’ not ill at present. But the last X ray check revealed that the cancer in the bones is awake again. This last check is the only one we approached without dread–her health seemed so complete. It is like being recaptured by the giant when you have passed every gate and are almost out of sight of his castle. Whether a second miracle will be vouchsafed us, or, if not, when the sentence will be inflicted, remains uncertain. It is quite possible she may be able to do the Greek trip next spring. Pray for us.

I have always wanted to have the Fifth Book of Odes, having seen it years ago. The preface, with its Grosspaniandrumpinacotheca and Tomirotius is an absolute delight. What men there were in those days! Even in a university it wd. now be hard to collect a dozen people who can even appreciate this book.²³⁸ Very, very many thanks.

Yours

Jack

TO SIR HENRY WILLINK (L):

Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

3 December 1959

Dear Master,

I have learned now that while those who speak about one’s miseries usually hurt one, those who keep silence hurt more.²³⁹ They help to increase the sense of general isolation which makes a sort of fringe to the sorrow itself. You know what cogent reason I have to feel with you: but I can feel for you too. I know that what you are facing must be worse than what I must shortly face myself, because your happiness has lasted so much longer and is therefore so much more intertwined with your whole life. As Scott said in like case ‘What am I to do with that daily portion of my thoughts which has for so many years been hers?’²⁴⁰ People talk as if grief were just a feeling–as if it weren’t the continually renewed shock of setting out again and again on familiar roads and being brought up short by the grim frontier post that now blocks them. I, to be sure, believe there is something beyond it: but the moment one tries to use that as a consolation (that is not its function) the belief crumbles. It is quite useless knocking at the door of Heaven for earthly comfort: it’s not the sort of comfort they supply there.

You are probably very exhausted physically. Hug that and all the little indulgences to which it entitles you. I think it is tiny little things which (next to the very greatest things) help most at such a time.

I have myself twice known, after a loss, a strange excited (but utterly un-spooky) sense of the person’s presence all about me. It may be a pure hallucination. But the fact that it always goes off after a few weeks proves nothing either way.

I wish I had known your wife better. But she has a bright place in my memory. It was so reassuring to the Oxford deserter to meet someone from L.M.H.²⁴¹ and be able to talk about ‘the Hippo’.²⁴² She will be very greatly missed–on her own account, quite apart from any sympathy with you–by every fellow of this College.

And poor Horace²⁴³ too–‘the single talent well employed’.²⁴⁴ I shall not be at the funeral. You can understand and forgive my desire, now, to spend every possible moment at home. Forgive me if I have said anything amiss in this letter. I am too much involved myself to practise any skill.

TO JOCELYN GIBB (BOD):

Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

4 Dec 1959

Dear Gibb

1. All clear. Fire ahead about Screwtape. I ought to be able to let you have MS. of new preface before the end of the coming vacation.²⁴⁵ How long do you want it? I feel inclined to spread myself a bit.

2. Please send the proofs of the 4 Loves to my Oxford address. It wd. be best if they did not arrive there till Monday next, so as to make sure they are not forwarded here by mistake.

3. Mea culpa. I forgot all about the paperback Miracles and have lost your letter. I suggest:

This is neither an abridgement nor a reprint but a new edition. The author has re-written a large part of Chapter? and corrected all errors that he could find elsewhere.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO JOCELYN GIBB (BOD): PC

Magdalene

4 Dec [1959]

Addendum–You will of course let me have proofs of the paper-back

Miracles

C.S.L.

TO DAN TUCKER (BOD):²⁴⁶

As from Magdalene College,

Cambridge

8 Dec 1959

Dear Mr. Tucker–

Thank you for your most interesting letter of the 3d. The devil about trying to write satire now-a-days is that reality constantly outstrips you. Ought we to be surprised at the approach of ‘scientocracy’? In every age those who wish to be our masters, if they have any sense, secure our obedience by offering deliverance from our dominant fear. When we fear wizards the Medicine Man can rule the whole tribe. When we fear a stronger tribe our best warrior becomes King. When all the world fears Hell the Church becomes a theocracy. ‘Give up your freedom and I will make you safe’ is, age after age, the terrible offer. In England the omnipotent Welfare State has triumphed because it promised to free us from the fear of poverty.

Mind you, the bargain is sometimes, for a while, kept. A warrior king may really save a tribe from extinction: the Welfare State, at a cost, has come nearer than any society ever did before to giving every man a square meal and a good house to eat it in. The fears from which scientocracy offers to free us are rational ones. We shall fairly soon hopelessly overpopulate this planet and that population will be as defective in quality as excessive in quantity. But we cannot trust these New Masters any more than their predecessors. Do you see any solution?

A hundred years ago we all thought that Democracy was it. Neither you nor I probably think so now. It neither allows the ordinary man to control legislation nor qualifies him to do so. The real questions are settled in secret and the newspapers keep us occupied with largely imaginary issues. And this is all the easier because democracy always in the end destroys education. It did so for you sometime ago and is now doing so for us (see a speech of Screwtape’s wh. will soon appear in the Sat. Evening Post). I am, you see, at my wit’s end on such matters. Only a power higher than man’s can really find a way out. Odd to compare humanity’s political inefficiency with its wonderful success in the arts.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

 

P.S. Has a book called The Phenomenon of Man by a more or less renegade Jesuit (de Chardin) come your way yet? Sir J. Huxley gives it a preface as if it was an absolute new Gospel. It seems to me both commonplace and horrifying.

TO MARY VAN DEUSEN (W):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

8 Dec 1959

Dear Mrs. Van Deusen–

I am very glad to hear all your good–indeed excellent–news. So is my brother, who has read your letter.

My news is very difficult. The last X-ray check-up which Joy had was the first which we approached without dread: she seemed so obviously in complete health. The photographs told a different tale. The disease is returning. Not in one place but in many. It is true that the situation is not (yet) as bad as it was in the spring of ’57 when her life was not worth six weeks’ purchase. But her recovery then was seemingly miraculous. Dare one hope again? Have we ever heard of a miracle repeated? At present she is to all appearance quite well: we shouldn’t know she had cancer if we didn’t know. The condemned cell looks like an ordinary and comfortable sitting room. I know we shall have your prayers. Forgive me for writing so egotistical a letter. One of the drawbacks about living in a tragedy is that one can’t very well see out of the windows. Pray particularly that our faith may grow stronger and stronger.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO ALASTAIR FOWLER (BERG):

Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

10 Dec 1959

Dear Fowler

Thanks, greatly. The Spenser article²⁴⁷ confirms the impression increasingly made on me while writing lectures on F.Q. last term:²⁴⁸ that of its amazing close-wovenness. Damme, you can’t pick up a line anywhere but it starts another line wriggling ten cantos away.

Most of what you say seems to me true. Somehow I don’t believe in Paridell or Helen-whore.²⁴⁹ On Noctante (p. 589), more relevant perhaps than noctare wd. be the pernoctare wh. must, I suppose, lie behind our Oxford ‘pernoctate’, which does mean ‘to spend the night’.²⁵⁰ I think I remember that in appropriate contexts (Ovid & Propertius) nox itself means ‘night spent by two lovers in one bed’. Hence, of the mistress fallere promissam noctem.²⁵¹ This is all from memory, so it may be wrong. Of course I’m only seeking authorities: the fact that Noctante is what you say is surely quite certain? The only impropriety I see in your article is on p. 597–reductium for reductio. A slip of course, your pen anticipated the –um of absurdum. But how did either you or the editor let it through?

By the way isn’t S’s attitude to the Courtly Love mystique, not rejecting but purging, beautifully focussed by the touch that the very reason why Britomart wd. be deceived by Malecasta’s feigned love-pain²⁵² was that she herself so well knew the real one!

Sorry my OHEL is such a nuisance.²⁵³ I only once detected a pupil offering me some one else (Elton)²⁵⁴ as his own work. I told him I was not a detective nor even a schoolmaster, nor a nurse, and that I absolutely refused to take any precaution against this puerile trick: that I’d as soon think it my business to see that he washed behind his ears or wiped his bottom. He went down of his own accord the next week and I never saw him again. I think you ought to make a general announcement of that sort.

You must not waste your time constantly reading me & Dowden & Churton Collins as a sort of police measure. It is bad for them to think this is ‘up to you’. Flay them alive if you happen to detect them: but don’t let them feel that you are a safeguard against the effects of their own idleness.

What staggers me is how any man can prefer the galley-slave labour of transcription to the freeman’s work of attempting an essay on his own.

You asked me before about II. i.57–8 and I did not know. I still don’t.

Nor can I explain Hudibras.²⁵⁵ I don’t think that many Spenserian names are to be explained by syllabic analysis of the HudiBRAS type.

Good hunting!

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO THOMASINE (L/WHL):²⁵⁶

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

14 Dec. 1959

Dear Thomasine,

It is very hard to give any general advice about writing. Here’s my attempt.

(1) Turn off the Radio.

(2) Read all the good books you can, and avoid nearly all magazines.

(3) Always write (and read) with the ear, not the eye. You shd. hear every sentence you write as if it was being read aloud or spoken. If it does not sound nice, try again.

(4) Write about what really interests you, whether it is real things or imaginary things, and nothing else. (Notice this means that if you are interested only in writing you will never be a writer, because you will have nothing to write about…)

(5) Take great pains to be clear. Remember that though you start by knowing what you mean, the reader doesn’t, and a single ill-chosen word may lead him to a total misunderstanding. In a story it is terribly easy just to forget that you have not told the reader something that he needs to know–the whole picture is so clear in your own mind that you forget that it isn’t the same in his.

(6) When you give up a bit of work don’t (unless it is hopelessly bad) throw it away. Put it in a drawer. It may come in useful later. Much of my best work, or what I think my best, is the re-writing of things begun and abandoned years earlier.

(7) Don’t use a typewriter. The noise will destroy your sense of rhythm, which still needs years of training.

(8) Be sure you know the meaning (or meanings) of every word you use.

TO DON LUIGI PEDROLLO (V):

E Collegio Stae Mariae Magdalenae

apud Cantabrigienses

xv Dec. mcmlix

Reverende Pater

Gratias cordialiter ago pro benevolis tuis litteris. Scito domum vestram quotidie in orationibus meis nominari. Et tu orationibus pro nobis insta. Nunc enim, post biennium remissionis redit uxoris meae letalis morbus. Placeat Domino, ut quodcunque de corpore voluerit, integri maneant animi amborum; ut fides intacta nos corroboret, contritio emolliat, pax laetificat. Et hoc usque ad nunc fit; neque faciliter crederes quanta gaudia inter medias aerumnas nonnumquam sentiamus. Quid mirum? Nonne consolationem lugentibus pollicitus est? Vale.

C. S. Lewis

 

The College of St Mary Magdalene

Cambridge

15th December 1959

Reverend Father

I send you my cordial thanks for your kind letter.

Be assured that your House is daily named in my prayers. And do you persevere in prayers for us. For now, after two years’ remission, my wife’s mortal illness has returned. May it please the Lord that, whatever is His will for the body, the minds of both of us may remain unharmed; that faith unimpaired may strengthen us, contrition soften us and peace make us joyful.

And that, up till now, has happened; nor would you readily believe what joys we sometimes experience in the midst of troubles. What wonder? For has He not promised comfort to those who mourn?²⁵⁷

Farewell.

C. S. Lewis

TO JOCELYN GIBB (BOD):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

15 Dec. 1959

My dear Gibb

I return to-day, under separate cover, the dejecta membra²⁵⁸ (relax!–I know it doesn’t scan in that form) of the original edition of Miracles.²⁵⁹ I have finished the preface to the new Screwtape and will send it you as soon as I can get it typed. And now, about the new Screwtape itself.

I consider The Screwtape Letters, whatever addition follows those words, to be a fatal title. How accurate customers are likely to be in such matters may be gauged by your amusing story of the Screwed-up letters.²⁶⁰ All except bibliographers will think it to be simply the old book: the rest will never even notice the sub-titular matter. Even many editors will make the same mistake and give it no reviews, regarding it as a mere reprint. Thus the real novelties of this edition will be deprived of all selling power. I suggest

Screwtape proposes a Toast

with

The Screwtape Letters–

thus making the new part the title and the old the sub-title. Then, list of contents:

Preface

Preface to the Screwtape Letters

The S. Letters

S. proposes a Toast

This seems to me vital. A few years ago Dent reissued an old poem of mine with a new preface.²⁶¹ It was reviewed nowhere and sold, I think, well under 100 copies.

I await your views.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

 

Sorry if I seem to be trying to teach you your own business, but you know what authors say–that whatever else publishers may be right about they are never right about titles!

TO LANCE SIEVEKING (P):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

18 Dec. 1959

Dear Sieveking

(Why do you ‘Dr.’ me? Had we not dropped the honorifics?) As things worked out, I wasn’t free to hear a single instalment of our serial except the first. What I did hear, I approved. I shd. be glad for the series to be given abroad.

But I am absolutely opposed–adamant isn’t in it!–to a TV. version. Anthropomorphic animals, when taken out of narrative into actual visibility, always turn into buffoonery or nightmare. At least, with photography.²⁶² Cartoons (if only Disney did not combine so much vulgarity with his genius!) wd. be another matter.²⁶³ A human, pantomime, Aslan wd. be to me blasphemy. All the best.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO JOCELYN GIBB (BOD):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

20 Dec. 59

Dear Gibb

I enclose corrected proof of The Four Loves and TS of the Screwtape Preface.

I’m still thinking about the title. If you don’t like my last suggestion, how about THE WHOLE SCREWTAPE/CONTAINING/THE SCREWTAPE LETTERS (date)/SCREWTAPE PROPOSES A TOAST (date)? Only the first line wd. appear on the spine.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

 

We shall pledge you when we uncork that bottle a few days hence.

TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE (W):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

22 Dec 1959

Dear Mary Willis

I have got your note. It finds me with as clear a conscience about correspondence as a not very methodical, nor leisured, man ever has. I am pretty sure I have written to you since I last heard from you. Let us, however, make a compact that, if we are both alive next year, whenever we write to one another it shall not be at Christmas time. That period is becoming a sort of nightmare to me–it means endless quill-driving!

Despite the terrible news of which I told you, we hobble along wonderfully well. I am ashamed (yet in a way pleased) to tell you that it is Joy who supports me rather than I her. I do not forget your prayers and am most grateful for them.

I hope you are now fully settled into your new quarters and find them tolerable? Also that ‘Brother Ass’ is behaving better.²⁶⁴

Christmas will be over by the time you get this, but you know you will have been (as always) in my thoughts and prayers. Let us hope that both of us will have been given Grace, amidst all this ghastly commercial racket of ‘Xmas’, to enter into the feast of the Nativity: the racket has nearly smothered it!

Yours

Jack

TO SOPHIA STORR (L):²⁶⁵

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

24 Dec. 1959

No, of course it was not unconscious. So far as I can remember it was not at first intentional either. That is, when I started The Lion, Witch and Wardrobe I don’t think I foresaw what Aslan was going to do and suffer. I think He just insisted on behaving in His own way. This of course I did understand and the whole series became Christian.

But it is not, as some people think, an allegory. That is, I don’t say ‘Let us represent Christ as Aslan.’ I say, ‘Supposing there was a world like Narnia, and supposing, like ours, it needed redemption, let us imagine what sort of Incarnation and Passion and Resurrection Christ would have there.’ See?

I think this is pretty obvious if you take all the seven Narnian books as a whole. In The Magician’s Nephew Aslan creates Narnia. In Prince Caspian the old stories about Him are beginning to be disbelieved. At the end of the Dawn Treader He appears as the Lamb. His three replies to Shasta suggest the Trinity.²⁶⁶ In The Silver Chair the old king is raised from the dead by a drop of Aslan’s blood. Finally in the Last Battle we have the reign of anti-Christ (the ape), the end of the world, and the Last Judgement.

TO DONOVAN AYLARD (W): TS

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

24 Dec. 1959.

Dear Mr. Aylard

Yes! my handwriting is awful. It used to be nice but my muscles have stiffened up and the strokes no longer come out as I intend.

I give ‘this generation’ all I can in the way of books and articles. Particular articles by request are not usually the good ones: and, you know, I should reach more readers through other organs than your paper. I hope this doesn’t sound stand-offish or conceited, for it is not meant to be. It is really common sense to speak where one can be most widely heard.

I agree that drama is a good medium for our purpose. In this country Dorothy Sayers’ broadcast set of plays on the life and death of Our Lord (The Man Born to be King) did a great deal of good. I don’t attempt this form myself because any talent I may have is narrative, not dramatic.

With all good wishes.

Yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO JOAN LANCASTER (BOD): TS

The Kilns, Kiln Lane,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

25th December 1959

Dear Joan Lancaster,

Many thanks for your card; I wish you all possible happiness in the coming year.

Yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis²⁶⁷

TO JOCELYN GIBB (BOD):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

Christmas Day [25 December, 1959]

Dear Gibb

Now that you put it to me, I accept your objection to my first proposal about the title.²⁶⁸ My intention was–or I hope it was–not to produce a deception in our favour but to avoid a deception of the opposite sort. Still, it wd. certainly have been censured on the grounds you mention.

I am glad you approve The Whole S. Omne tulit punctum,²⁶⁹ I think: for whole implies both that you have had some already and that you are now getting more. Also has a pleasant echo of Elizabethan titles like The Whole Contention of York & Lancaster.²⁷⁰

I don’t think the finality matters: for (a) I am v. unlikely to use S. again, and (b) If I do, it only means a future problem about titles which, I have no doubt, we could solve between us. (We’d point out in the preface to that very hypothetical work that devils are notoriously liars).

Perhaps my view about publishers’ titles is biased by the absurd stunt titles wh. Eyre and Spottiswoode force my brother to give to his French historical books. I’ve also an old grudge against the Clarendon Press for making me call my first book The Allegory of Love when I wanted a sober academic title like The Allegorical Love Poem.

I have no objection to being ‘lectured on morals’. Hang it all I’ve done that v. thing to others on a pretty large scale and it wd. be hard if I resented the opposite process! In a few hours I shall drink either to Gibbs and Godliness or Jocelyn and Justice in a glass of your own wine.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO JESSIE M. WATT (W): PC

Christmas 1959

Thanks v. much, and herewith our greetings. We never needed the prayers of our friends more. The tide has turned and the latest X-ray check reveals that my wife’s trouble is all coming back. The cat had let the mouse run so far away that it thought it had escaped…

C. S. Lewis

TO FATHER PETER MILWARD SJ (W):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

Christmas Day 1959

Dear Milwood

I hope my last letter to you did not sound chilling: still less (heaven help us!) as if I were offended by criticism. I think the chief reason why I am less disposed than you for large-scale discussion by letter is the difference of our ages. In youth we conduct (at least I did) long and deep disputations through the post. It is indeed a most valuable part of our education. We put into it quite as much thought and labour as wd. go to writing a book. But later, when one has become a writer of books, it is hard to keep it up. One can’t fill one’s leisure with the v. same activity which is one’s main work. And in my case not only the mind but the hand needs rest. Penmanship is increasingly laborious, and the results (as you see) increasingly illegible!

If you sometimes read into my books what I did not know I had put there, neither of us need be surprised, for greater readers have doubtless done the same to far greater authors. Shakespeare wd., I suspect, read with astonishment what Goethe, Coleridge, Bradley and Wilson Knight have found in him! Perhaps a book ought to have more meanings than the writer intends? But then the writer will not necessarily be the best person with whom to discuss them.

You are in my daily prayers. Will you pray much for me at present? The cancer from which my wife was (as I believe, miraculously) delivered 2½ years ago, when death in a few weeks was predicted, is returning. Can one without presumption ever ask for a second miracle? The prophet turned back the shadow for Hezekiah once:²⁷¹ not twice. Lazarus, raised from the dead,²⁷² presently died again.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

 

P.S. I never thought of it before, but how Lazarus was sacrificed. To have it all to do over again–bis Stygios innare lacus!²⁷³

TO MARTYN SKINNER (BOD):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

31 Dec 1959

My dear Skinner–

You must have had hard thoughts of me by now. But it was harder than you could have guessed to qualify myself for writing you a letter about the Return Pt II. For the story is closely enough knit to make II unintelligible without I, and though I had II at Cambridge, I was here. And when I had got home I had a good many priorities (reviews articles etc) to get through before I cd. read I and II through continuously–the only kind of reading that would be any good.

In Pt II²⁷⁴ two passages stand out as perhaps your highwater mark. One is the snow-scape in I 2–25 (the wings and stage image is especially admirable), and the other, of course, the wood-carving in VI 59–67 (last line of that stanza, a corker. Also, that of 65).

As one expected there are minor felicities all over the place: ‘life-till-death’ (I, 32), ‘craters on the Somme or on the moon’ (I 39), the whole of II, 38, and 67, the ‘barbed months’ (III, 68), ‘pins and needles etc’ (III 79), ‘lively’ and ‘deadly earnest’ (IV 2: bravissimo), ‘off-female face’ (IV, 35: why did no one ever think of that before?), the two stanzas on Siberia (V 30, 31), Merlin’s ‘eye-beards’ (62), the bit about modern poetry (VI, 11)–and many more. Does the expression trompe l’oeil²⁷⁵ occur a bit too often, or have I imagined this?

The episodes which make up Pt II are all, in themselves, good, and you manage the Ovidian or Ariostovian switch-over well. The old substitution trick of Leo for Mary works. The appearance and impact of Mary at Arthur’s HQ. is v. impressive. Morgana and Martha are always good fun.

But it wd. be dishonest not to add that after a continuous reading of both Parts I have a grumble. Is it not high time that the people on the right side did something? Their actions so far are all dictated by the enemy. Of course, I speak in ignorance of what yet may come. It is just possible that when our friends take the initiative you may make it so splendid that we shall feel it was worth waiting for. But you haven’t a moment (that is to say, a stanza) to lose.

In characterisation you do better. Mary and George are alive and lovable; so in a less degree is Leo. But Merlin is to me less vivid than Martha, Morgana, and even Hengist. And Arthur? You haven’t made him anything yet. The canto (Pt I, vii)²⁷⁶ where you allow him to speak is the weakest in the whole poem. This you must re-cast. What demon persuaded you to make him talk like a leading article? And what demon led you merely to tell us about Matthew Bennet instead of presenting him in speech and action?

I’m going to make a guess what the demon was. The Don Juan element²⁷⁷ in your style works admirably for your own satiric comments and also for dialogue between vulgar and depraved characters. And there is a second style (your own) into which you can rise at any moment; usually for ethical gnomae or descriptions of nature (your sense of natural lighting is your great gift). But what you haven’t so far got is a style in which great and wise and almost numinous persons can speak.

Thus all the good dialogue goes to the enemies. You must not keep your high poetry for yourself. Merlin must speak like one whose father was an aerial daemon, and A.²⁷⁸ like one who has been in Avalon. I won’t believe you are incapable of this. I don’t think you have faced up to the necessity. You tell us (and very well) in Pt I, v, 50–53²⁷⁹ how your A. affected George. But mustn’t you make him affect us in the same way?

Or have I quite misunderstood your air?

Remember me, with my duty, to your wife. And may we have your prayers? The last X-rays show that the cancer of the bone from which Joy was (as it seemed, miraculously) recovered in 1957 is returning.

Yours

C. S. Lewis