1960

TO THE EDITOR OF THE TIMES EDUCATIONAL SUPPLEMENT:¹

Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

Sir,–

Nearly everything I have ever read about spelling reform assumes from the outset that it is necessary for us all to spell alike. Why?

We got on for centuries without an agreed common orthography. Most men of my age remember censoring the letters of soldiers and know that even the wildest idiosyncrasies of spelling hardly ever made them unintelligible. Printing houses will always have, as they have now, their own rules, whether authors like them or not. Scholars, who know the ancestry of the words they use, will generally spell them accordingly. A few hard words will still have to be learned by everyone. But for the rest, who would be a penny the worse if though and tho, existence and existance, sieze, seize and seeze were all equally tolerated?

If our spelling were either genuinely phonetic or genuinely etymological, or if any reform that made it either the one or the other were worth the trouble, it would be another matter. As things are, surely Liberty is the simple and inexpensive ‘Reform’ we need? This would save children and teachers thousands of hours’ work. It would also force those to whom applications for jobs are made to exercise their critical faculties on the logic and vocabulary of the candidate instead of tossing his letter aside with the words ‘can’t even spell.’

C. S. Lewis

TO RICHARD WILLIAM DAVID (CAM):²

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

4 Jan 1960

Dear Mr David

I am sorry to refuse so reasonable a request³ but I have, by agreeing to do one thing and another, of which each seemed small and reasonable–piled up too many commitments just at present.

With regret.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis⁴

TO MARTYN SKINNER (BOD):⁵ PC

As from Magdalene

6 Jan. 1960

Stuff and nonsense. If we have got to a place in which English makes high speakers almost inarticulate you must make yours speak accordingly–short, groping for words–earthy–the inarticulation of child or peasant rather than that of chaps like us. Grandeur can be felt struggling thro’ such language. It needn’t be Plato cum Charlemagne. It can be Bunyan cum the old thatcher. At any rate, have a try. Don’t make per vilta il gran rifiuto.⁶

C.S.L.

TO CHAD WALSH (W):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

9 Jan 60

Dear Chad

Thanks for your letter of the 3d. I’ve sent it on to my agent who will write direct to you or McCorkle.

Joy is still almost quite well except for the lassitude and nausea produced by radiotherapy. Her courage and contentment are, most of the time, incredible.

Love to all,

Yours

Jack

TO JANE DOUGLASS (W):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

12 Jan. 1960

Dear Miss Douglas

Sorry. I am afraid I know nothing at all about the history of Emmanuel.

With all good wishes.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO VERA GEBBERT (W):

Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

17 Jan 1960

Dear Vera Gebbert

Yes, mea culpa. I am a poor correspondent. That is to say, the ghastly, daily grind of unavoidable letters leaves me a brain and hand very ill disposed to pleasanter and friendlier correspondence. For example, it is now 9.50. a.m. and I’ve already been writing letters as hard as I can drive the pen across the paper for an hour and half; and when on earth I shall get a chance to begin my own day’s work, I don’t know.

I suppose my brother told you that the bone cancer from which my wife seemed to be almost miraculously delivered three years ago has returned. The doctors hold out no hope. And perhaps that too makes me neglect my ‘pen-friends’ a bit. When one lives in a tragedy one does not always see very clearly out of the windows (so to speak) into the rest of the world.

I am glad to hear that the Tycoon develops and prospers. I quite realise that it wd. be difficult to emulate H. B. Stowe’s⁷ writing in the kitchen. But–we know what the books were like–do we know what the cooking was like? It may have been horrid.

I am pretty well, though always very tired. The weather is mostly fog, but that is normal for England at this time of year. We have so far escaped snow.

Very good wishes to the Tycoon and yourself.

Yours,

C. S. Lewis

 

Around this time, Lewis received a letter from Sister Mary Celestine Kearns, a member of the Sisters of Providence, Seaford, Sussex. She told Lewis that one of the English texts used in their school was the poem ‘Non Nobis’ by Henry Cust (1861–1917):

Not unto us, O Lord,

Not unto us the rapture of the day,

The peace of night, or love’s divine surprise,

High heart, high speech, high deeds ’mid honouring eyes;

For at Thy word

All these are taken away.

Not unto us, O Lord:

To us thou givest the scorn, the scourge, the scar,

The ache of life, the loneliness of death,

The insufferable sufficiency of breath;

And with Thy sword

Thou piercest very far.

Not unto us, O Lord;

Nay, Lord, but unto her be all things given–

My light and life and earth and sky be blasted–

But let not all that wealth of loss be wasted:

Let Hell afford

The pavement of her Heaven!

TO SISTER MARY CELESTINE KEIRNS (W):

Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

17 Jan 1960

Dear Madam

Please, I’m a professor of Medieval and Renaissance English. That is, my job concerns that happy age when poets wrote poems instead of puzzles.

The sense seems to be ‘We don’t get (stanza 1, 2) and don’t ask (st. 3) a good time, but I hope our sufferings are not wasted but will somehow contribute to her happiness’. That is, I think Hell and Heaven in the last stanza are just rhetorical hyperboles for unhappiness and happiness. And pavement of just means ‘conducive to’. I.e. the poem is an attempt to apply the general idea that one’s sufferings may somehow or other help others.

I think she must be either his lady love or the Blessed Virgin Mary. Neither interpretation will make it a good poem, but I can’t think of a better. And what is the ‘insufferable sufficiency of breath’?

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO JOHN WARWICK MONTGOMERY (P):⁸

Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

21 Jan 1960

Dear Mr. Montgomery

Thank you for your kind letter of the 14th and the enclosure.⁹ I need not say that your article on the Narnian books gave me much pleasure. I had thought of children rather than adolescents as my readers, but have found (wh. confirms your view) that they are read also by schoolboys. But the truth is that my fan mail makes hay of the (too popular) classification by Age-Groups. It is types of people, at whatever age, that really matters. By the bye, children of 6 or 7, if brought up in Christian homes, usually know who Aslan is quite as quickly as their elders.

Now for your questions. Shadows of Ecstasy¹⁰ and Essays presented to C.W. are both extremely hard to get. But there are better 2nd hand booksellers than Blackwell. I recommend Rogers, Booksellers, Newcastle on Tyne (that is sufficient address). He takes a great deal of trouble to find copies and his charges are v. honest. As for other fiction of the ‘Williams–Lewis’ brand, I don’t know that any is now being produced–unless you wd. include Tolkien’s huge (and magnificent) 3 vol. romance The Lord of the Rings. Going back to the Victorians, you probably know already G. MacDonald’s Lilith and Phantastes?

Under the Mercy

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO JOHN M. GORDON (BOD):¹¹

Magdalene College,

Cambridge

25 Jan 1960

Dear Mr. Gordon

Forgive me for saying that I do not think you have read that passage with complete attention. Wishing to upbraid Phariseeism (self-righteousness and externality) I tried to show impartiality by selecting the most opposite examples of it–the religion which is ‘all rules and relics and rosaries’ and that which is ‘all long faces–and petty traditional abstinences’.¹² Of course all is the operative word. There is no slightest suggestion that a saintly person cannot either use rosaries or be a total abstainer. How could you think so?

To be sure, the person who thinks either the use of the rosary or the abstinence from liquor an essential to Christianity will be, in my opinion, holding an unscriptural and erroneous doctrine. If, in addition, his passionate adherence to this ¹³ leads him to denigrate and misrepresent those who do not share it, he will be sinning against the plainest commands we have received. But that is quite another matter. One doesn’t blame the Pharisee for washing his hands before food (indeed I do myself) but for neglecting ‘the weightier matters of the law’.¹⁴

May I add that a great deal of shame, terror and misery has been caused in my own life by the drunkenness of a relative? I do not ‘jest at scars’ without ever having ‘felt a wound’.¹⁵

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

Horrid thought!–If you have misunderstood all my books as badly as you have misunderstood this bit, I must have no title to the admiration you so kindly mention. Have you read all my blacks as whites?

TO SISTER MARY CELESTINE KEIRNS (W):

Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

31 Jan 1960

Dear Madam

Oh, of course.¹⁶ I never suggested that by assuming the Blessed Virgin to be the addressee we could make it a good poem, let alone good Theology. But the other candidates for this position don’t make it good either!

If you ever do find out what it is all about, I’d be interested to hear.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO ALAN HINDLE (BOD):¹⁷

Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

31 Jan 1960

Dear Mr. Hindle

Voyage to Arcturus was reprinted by Messrs Faber and Faber within the last 20 years.¹⁸ The original edition (I forget who published it) is still sometimes obtainable. Rogers of Newcastle on Tyne is quite as good a bookseller for hunting out old books as any London or Oxford firm, and usually charges less. The author, David Lindsay, is dead. If you get the book, I shd. think twice before introducing it to the young. It is very strong meat indeed and the philosophy behind it is that of Schopenhauer¹⁹ or the Manichaeans. A youngster unless in perfect psychological health (and what youngster is?) cd. damage himself with it a good deal.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO STEPHEN SCHOFIELD (W):

As from Magdalene College,

Cambridge

31 Jan ’60

Dear Mr. Schofield

Your parcel arrived on Saturday. You could not have chosen a better present. My wife (who is American) loves maple syrup and, as it is a pretty rare commodity, her heart leaped up, as yours or mine would at the sight of white man’s food in the depth of China. And we all like honey. It is really extraordinarily kind of you not only to buy us these dainties but to think of it and go through all the Red Tape. Hearty thanks. It is like spring here to-day and the first snowdrops and crocuses are already coming up.

With all grateful greetings–the alliteration came unasked.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

 

Sister Mary Celestine Keirns wrote to Lewis again, probably at about this time, sending him two further poems and asking him for his comments. Lewis returned the poems with his annotations:

TO SISTER MARY CELESTINE KEIRNS (W):²⁰

As from Magdalene College,

Cambridge

[1 February 1960?]

Dear Sister Mary Celestine

The Rose of the World

By W. B. Yeats

Who dreamed that beauty passes like a dream?

For these red lips, with all their mournful pride,

Mournful that no wonder may betide,

Troy passed away in one high funeral gleam,

And Usna’s children died.^*

We and the labouring world are passing by:

Amid men’s souls, that waver and give place^**

Like the pale waters in their wintry race,

Under the passing stars, foam of the sky,

Lives on this lonely face.^***

Bow down, archangels, in your dim abode:

Before you were, or any hearts to beat,

Weary and kind one lingered by His seat;^****

He made the world to be a grassy road

Before her wandering feet.

W. B. Yeats

* In Irish legend, Usna was the father of Naisi, Ainlé and Ardan. Naisi loved and abducted Deidre, wife of the High King Conchobar mac Nessa. She and Naisi, and N’s two brothers lived long together in Alba (= Scotland). Finally they were lured back to Conchobar’s court under a promise of forgiveness. But C. killed all three brothers and D. killed herself. The stanza therefore means ‘You were Helen & you were Deidre.’

 

*** Lonely because all her lovers are merely transitory beings.

 

** I think he means ‘We common mortals are transitory, but the archetypal beauty, which appears now as Helen and now as Deidre and now as you is eternal.’ The you is probably Maude Gonne.²¹

 

**** Weary and kind. A. qualities Yeats saw (perhaps erroneously) in the real woman to whom the poem is addressed. B. Qualities attributed to the archetypal beauty manifested in all the great beloveds of legend. The profane hyperbole is that God created the universe as a sphere or field for this (pre-existent) Beauty to haunt. Memo: Yeats was a Rosicrucian, an Occultist, and (in intention anyway) a magician. The idea of a pre-cosmic weibliches–‘the world’s desire’–may have been to him serious. This is the best I can do.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

Near Dover, September 1802

By William Wordsworth

Inland, within a hollow vale, I stood;

And saw, while sea was calm and air was clear,

The coast of France–the coast of France how near!

Drawn almost into frightful neighbourhood.

I shrunk; for verily the barrier flood

Was like a lake, or river bright and fair,

A span of waters; yet what power is there!

What mightiness for evil and for good!

Even so doth God protect us if we be virtuous and wise^*

[Sister Mary Celestine said of the poem by Wordsworth:

 

(This is another line and a half that rather baffles me–not as far as interpreting it goes, but because I think it denotes a most peculiar way of looking at God’s Providence. Must we conclude that every time a nation is victorious over its enemies it is ‘virtuous and wise’? Anyway, can a Nation as a whole be said to be ‘virtuous and wise’? Exactly what is the ‘Even so’ linked up with?

(Virtuous and wise) WINDS BLOW, AND WATERS ROLL,

STRENGTH TO THE BRAVE, AND POWER, AND DEITY;^**

Yet in themselves are nothing! One decree

Spake laws to them, and said that by the soul

Only, the Nations shall be great and free.]

* The way in which the Channel, properly used, can protect England, is analogous to–is an allegory of–the way in which God furnishes individual souls with assets (e.g. circumstances & talents) which, if they use them virtuously & wisely (but not otherwise) will protect them.

 

** (The comma after roll must be a mistake). Inanimate & a-moral factors become means of grace to ‘the brave’ and lend them God-like powers. But they are only means. It is God’s changeless decree that nations and individuals can be great & free only by the quality of soul wh. enables them to accept and use these gifts rightly. But for that, all natural advantages will be ‘nothing’ i.e. worthless. Roll is transitive = waft, convey.

This is the best guess I can offer.

C.S.L.

TO SUSAN SALZBERG (W):

Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

5 Feb. 1960

Dear Susan Salzberg

All I can tell you is that pictures come into my head and I write stories about them. I don’t know how or why the pictures come. I don’t think I could write a play to save my life. I am so glad you like the Narnian books. Remember me to David Davies.²² Yours

C. S. Lewis

 

The World’s Last Night, And Other Essays was published by Harcourt, Brace & World of New York on 10 February 1960.

TO JOCELYN GIBB (BOD):²³

Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

11 Feb 1960

Dear Gibb

Thank you very much. Yes, Chad Walsh and Austin Farrer certainly. Then

Librarian, Magdalen College, Oxford

Librarian, Magdalene College, Cambridge.

Miss Margaret Radcliffe, The Nook, Beacon Close, Ditchling Rd., Brighton 6

A. O. Barfield, Danes Inn House, 265 Strand, London W.C. 2A. C. Harwood c/o the above.

There may be one or two others later.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO MICHAEL EDWARDS (BOD):²⁴

As from Magdalene College

Cambridge

11/2/59 [1960]

Dear Mr. Edwards

As regards the ‘interdenominational’ question, I have never said anything in print except that I am not offering guidance on it (this comes in the preface to Mere Christianity).²⁵ Whatever utility I have as a defender of ‘mere’ Christianity would be lost if I did, and I should become only one more participant in the dog-fight. And I have an idea that the more people there are preaching ‘mere’ Christianity, the more chance there is of some day ending that dog-fight. I should therefore probably be of very little use to you in your own decision. Of course come and see me if, after consideration, you think it worth doing: my own idea is that you would be wasting your time.

As to your other question, I wonder whether you are on the right track in expecting ‘stable sentiments’ and ‘successful adjustment to life’. This is the language of modern psychology rather than of religion or even of common experience, and I sometimes think that when the psychologists speak of adjustment to life they really mean perfect happiness and unbroken good fortune! Not to get–or, worse still, to be–what one wants is not a disease that can be cured, but the normal condition of man. To feel guilty, when one is guilty, and to realise, not without pain, one’s moral and intellectual inadequacy, is not a disease, but commonsense. To find that one’s emotions do not ‘come to heel’ and line up as stable sentiments in permanent conformity with one’s convictions is simply the facts of being a fallen, and still imperfectly redeemed, man. We may be thankful if, by continual prayer and self-discipline, we can, over years, make some approach to that stability. After all, St. Paul who was a good deal further along the road than you and I, could still write Romans, chapter 7, verses 21–23.²⁶

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE (W):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

13 Feb 1960

Dear Mary Willis

I am sorry to hear, from your letter of 8 Feb, about the ‘Asian flu’. Either we haven’t yet got it here or our doctors call it by some other name. I very much hope that by the time this reaches you, you will be really on the mend.

Many thanks for the pretty card and poem you sent Joy–it was a kind thought. She remains so far amazingly well and strong to all appearances, thank God. It looks as if we shall after all be able to manage a lightning air-trip to Greece which was arranged in happier times. It wd. mean a great deal to both of us to have stood even once on the Acropolis.

I am suffering from a strange condition which makes it impossible ever to stay asleep (I can go to sleep easily enough) for more than about 70 min. continuously at night, or to stay awake in the day time if I relax at all! Premature senility perhaps.

God keep us all.

Yours

Jack

TO JOCELYN GIBB (BOD):

Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

18 Feb 60

Dear Gibb

This is a v. nice point. Of course ‘will be used’ is the traditional joke. That wd. not prevent some editor from getting the book reviewed by a police officer who wd. make ‘this hackneyed inaccuracy’ the main subject of the review!²⁷ On the other hand, to substitute ‘may’ rather spoils the point. I know it’s a frightful nuisance putting in a correction at this stage: but if we want to be quite safe read ‘disprove our religion. We treat God as the policeman in the story treated the suspect: whatever He does “will be used in evidence against Him”.’²⁸ If this involves too much re-setting, then stick to ‘will’.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO PAULINE BANNISTER (W):²⁹

Magdalene College,

Cambridge

19 Feb. 1960

Dear Pauline Bannister

I could not write that story myself.³⁰ Not that I have no hope of Susan’s ever getting to Aslan’s country, but because I have a feeling that the story of her journey would be longer and more like a grown-up novel than I wanted to write. But I may be mistaken. Why not try it yourself?

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO MRS ROBERT MANLY (W):

As from Magdalene College,

Cambridge

25/2/60

Dear Mrs. Manly

Yours is a v. difficult question and I only give my own guess at the answer. The simplest instance of the distressing phenomenon you mention occurs during the temporary irrationality produced by anaesthetics. I am told that during an operation patients of the greatest virtue and modesty often shout out extreme profanities and blasphemies. As one surgeon said ‘You wd. wonder where an old lady of that type and upbringing could ever have learned the words she brought out.’

I take it [that] the point at which Rational Soul has purchase on the body–the starting platform from which she controls the whole engine–is the brain. When this is temporarily or permanently disordered Rational Soul loses control. What then takes over? I shd. have thought, a mere random rubble of emotions, associations, sensations, impulses. But why such nasty ones? Perhaps because in a good or even a sensible, person they are always being held back by Rational Soul–to that extent Freud is right.

But we must not strictly call them (morally) evil. Moral evil occurs when Rational Soul, able to control these things, refuses to do so. When the control is impossible what happens is mere events, neither morally good or evil–i.e. loving and pious expressions produced under these conditions are no sign of virtue, nor are the opposite ones signs of vice. (When the locomotive is hopelessly out of control, the speed at wh. it travels is not an instance either of good or of bad driving, because it is not an instance of driving at all). Whether, at such a time, the Rational Soul is (so to speak) asleep, or whether it is behaving well or ill, we can’t find out because the body is no longer obeying it. One often gets apparently rational answers from a man talking in his sleep, but when he wakes he has no recollection of making them. In fact he didn’t make them: motor habits lodged in his speech organs made them in response to a familiar stimulus.

To be sure, the mass of filth, rage, and nonsense which come up does show what a lot of potential evil exists in the best soul. But it is actual evil only when willed. Till then, it is ‘rubbish’ rather than sin. At least, that’s as far as I can see at the moment.

Yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO BERNARD ACWORTH (W):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

5th March 1960

Dear Acworth–

Did you know that your theory of a catastrophic shift in the angle between our axis and the ecliptic is closely paralleled in Milton? P. Lost Bk X–or possibly IX. This on his view is one of the ways in which the change of conditions after the Fall cd. have been produced.

Have you read this book by the Jesuit de Chardin (The Phenomenon of Man) wh. is being praised to the skies? This is evolution run mad. He saves ‘continuity’ by saying that before there was life there was in matter what he calls ‘pre-life’. Can you see any possible use in such language? Before you switched on the lights in the cellar there was (if you like to call it so) ‘pre-light’: but the English for that is ‘darkness’. Then he goes on to the future and seems to me to be repeating Bergson (without the eloquence) and Shaw (without the wit). It ends up of course in something uncomfortably like Pantheism: his own Jesuits were quite right in forbidding him to publish any more books on the subject. This prohibition probably explains the succés fou he is having among our scientists–on the same principle whereby Pasternak’s (really, v. second rate) novel owes its world-fame to the condemnation of the Russian government.³¹

My wife’s condition is v. like that of a battalion which is almost daily fired on from a new direction. It silences these fires, but new ones always break out till it becomes evident that one is in fact surrounded. I know you will not cease your prayers.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO FATHER PETER MILWARD SJ (W):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry

Oxford, England

7th March 1960

Dear Father Milward

As an old lecturer may I give a bit of advice about preaching? The joints (we have finished point A: now for B or Here the digression ends) cannot be made too clear. Unless you seem to yourself to be exaggerating them almost absurdly they will escape 9/₁₀ of your hearers. Also, slow, slow. If you want people to weep by the end, make them laugh in the beginning. I hope your priesthood will be blessed.³² I really agree with your maxim ‘the greater the author the less he understands his own work’. In haste.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE (W):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

7th March ’60

Dear Mary Willis

Thanks for your most kind letter of the 4th. I sent you a signed copy of The World’s Last Night weeks ago and am distressed to note that it has not arrived. Love from both.

Yours

Jack

TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

12 March 1960

My dear Arthur

I am afraid it is rather an understatement to say that Joy is ‘not so well’. The last x-ray test revealed that cancer is returning in almost every part of her skeleton. They do something with radiotherapy, but as soon as they have silenced an ache in one place one breaks out in another. The doctors hold out no hope of a cure; it is only a question of how soon the end comes and how painful it will be. She is still, however, mostly free from pain and able to get about and unbelievably cheerful. We hope to do a lightning trip to Greece by air this vacation. We hardly dare to look as far ahead as next summer.

I am sorry for your sake that my old friend Peter is going but glad for his. Life is not much use to an animal when it can no longer enjoy its body. They can’t, like us, make up for it by reading and talking.

W. is v. well. I have had flu’ and am discovered to be suffering from high blood pressure. I have in consequence been put on a very rigid diet!

I think a dentist who, having pulled your tooth out, complains about how it affects his lumbago, has either no sense of humour or a v. mischievous one!

God bless you. I hope you and I at least will be spared to one another.

Yours

Jack

 

P.S. Get a cat. They’re more suitable to us old people than dogs, and a cat makes a house into a home.

TO HUGH A. HARKER (BOD):³³

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

21 March 1960

Dear Mr. Harker

‘Rather like vegetables’ is fortunately a pretty vague expression.³⁴ I was certainly not referring to anything so definite as structure.

I think I meant that the foetus at one stage is the kind of thing which, if they encountered it, ordinary people wd. hesitate whether to call a vegetable or an animal; as distinct from a later stage at which they wd. almost certainly call it the latter, but cd. hardly recognise it as a human animal. But it was a bad illustration and creates, rather than solves, difficulties.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO ROGER LANCELYN GREEN (BOD):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

23 March 1960

My dear Roger

Thanks–I shall get my teeth into the monograph³⁵ with great zest. Joy and I are joining at the Airport. Love from both to both.

Yours

Jack

TO JAMES AULT (W): TS

60/197

The Kilns, Kiln Lane,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford.

25th March 1960.

Dear Mr Ault,

Many thanks for your most kind and encouraging letter of the 9th, which naturally has given me much pleasure.

With all good wishes, yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE (W):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

26 March 1960

Dear Mary Willis–

Do you know, I shd. have more hope for the young cad described in Fr Louis’s letter than for many people in a quiet, cultured state of unbelief who wd. always speak of Christianity with reverence? His very rudeness shows that he is not quite free from the fear that there ‘might be something in it after all’. I bet that if he were talking to Hindoos or Buddhists he wd. speak more politely of their religion.

You must be having the same flu’ bug that has visited us. Its visits are not always very severe, but it is a wonderful stayer.

Things are not, or not much, worse with us, but life is very terrible. I sometimes feel I am mad to be taking Joy to Greece in her present condition, but her heart is set upon it. They give the condemned man what he likes for his last breakfast, I am told.

Ihope your news will soon be better.

Yours

Jack

TO JOCELYN GIBB (BOD): TS

60/59

The Kilns, Kiln Lane,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford.

31st March 1960.

Dear Gibb,

Thanks for the copies.³⁶ Yes, of course send Milton a copy, with kind regards from my brother and myself. I need no more myself at present, but will remember your kind offer.

Yours,

C. S. Lewis

 

Lewis and Joy spent 3 to 14 April with Roger and June Lancelyn Green in Greece on a ‘Wings Tour’. They climbed the Acropolis to the Parthenon (4 April) before visiting Mycenae (5 April), the Gulf of Corinth (6 April), the Island of Rhodes (7–10 April), Crete (11–13 April) and Pisa, Italy (14 April).³⁷

Warnie wrote to Jocelyn Gibb on 4 April:³⁸

60/59

The Kilns, Kiln Lane,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford.
4th April 1960.

Dear Mr Gibb,

C.S.L. went off to Greece yesterday morning, leaving me to hold the fort. So I write to acknowledge with thanks your cheque for £1,714–3–9 which arrived today.

With good wishes.

Yours sincerely,

W. H. Lewis

TO AUDREY CLEOBURY (BOD): TS

60/247

The Kilns, Kiln Lane,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford.

7th April 1960.

Dear Miss Cleobury,

Many thanks for your kind and encouraging note of the 5th. It is always a real pleasure to me to be told that anything I have written has been of use to a reader.

With all good wishes,

yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis³⁹

TO SHERIDAN BAKER (W):⁴⁰ TS

60/253

The Kilns, Kiln Lane,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford.

8th April 1960.

Dear Professor Baker,

Many thanks for your kindness in sending me the Meter article, which I look forward to reading.

With all good wishes,

yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis⁴¹

TO JANE DOUGLASS (W):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

15 April 1960

Dear Miss Douglass

We would indeed have been delighted to dine with you in New York if there were any truth in the rumour that I was going there at all! There is none, and I can’t understand how your friend got such an idea into his head. But a mistake which brings a kind letter has not been made in vain!

With kindest remembrances.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

 

On 30 March 1960 the American author Basil Davenport wrote to Lewis via Cambridge University Press concerning a passage in Studies in Words:⁴²

Having read with great pleasure and admiration Studies in Words, I am writing to suggest a passage for your consideration. Let me begin by acknowledging that I have always had a vague idea that in eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century literature conscious somehow meant self-conscious. I found your discussion of its use in Jane Austen extremely illuminating. Even so, I should like to put forward Crashaw’s epigram on the miracle at Cana:

Nympha pudica Deum vidit, et erubuit,

with his own translation:

The conscious water saw its Lord, and blushed.

I cannot here find any meaning in conscious beyond that of pudica. And with great diffidence I should like to suggest that the same thing may be true of the line you cite from Windsor Forest…I retain a perhaps mistaken impression that it was full of conscious nymphs and conscious swains and that the point meant no more by the words than the pudor which used to be considered an attractive quality in youth. You of course know much more about this than I; but I do think the Crashaw is worth your attention.

The following letter is Lewis’s reply:

TO BASIL DAVENPORT (BOD):⁴³

As from Magdalene College,

Cambridge

15/4/60

Dear Mr Davenport

The Press has sent me on your letter of March 30 about conscious.⁴⁴ In Crashaw’s English version⁴⁵ the classical conscia makes admirable sense: the water was ‘privy to’ the secret of Christ’s Divinity. But I wd. agree that the fact of its being used to render pudica is v. odd. Don’t you think C. has changed the idea: substituting for the rather weak ‘bashful, modest nymph’ the ‘water wh. was privy to the great secret’? Once it ceases to be nymph and becomes water would pudica or any simple English equivalent (e.g. shamefast) be v. appropriate? But I’m not at all sure you’re not right.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO DON LUIGI PEDROLLO (V):

quasi e Collegio Stae Mariae

Magdalenae apud

Cantabrigienses

Pascha 1960

Reverende Pater

Gratias ago pro benevolis litteris vestris. Gaudeo me locum adhuc tenere in memoria vestra; et vos et vestri quotidie in orationibus meis.

Equidem hoc tempore in magnà aerumnà sum. Nihilominus sursum corda: Christus enim resurrexit. Vale.

C. S. Lewis

 

as from The College of St Mary Magdalene

Cambridge

Easter 1960

[16 April 1960]

Reverend Father

I thank you for your kind letter. I rejoice that I still hold a place in your memory; both you and yours are daily in my prayers.

As for me, I am at this time in great trouble.

None the less, let us lift up our hearts: for Christ is risen. Farewell,

C. S. Lewis

TO SHELDON VANAUKEN (BOD):⁴⁶

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

16 May [April] 60

Dear Vanauken

I was glad to hear from you again after your mysterious secession. I very much hope we may some day meet again.

You must pray for me now. Joy’s cancer has returned and the doctors hold out no hope. Of course this is irrelevant to the question whether the previous recovery was miraculous. There can be miraculous reprieve as well as miraculous pardon, and Lazarus was raised from the dead to die again. I can’t write much else; you can well imagine why. God bless you.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO NATHAN COMFORT STARR (W):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

16/4/60

Dear Starr

Very good news. So far as I can foresee I shall be here on July 21st and you will be very welcome. In great haste.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

Air Mail

TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE (W):

As from Magdalene,

Cambridge

19/4/60

Dear Mary Willis

We did get to Greece, and it was a wonderful success. Joy performed prodigies, climbing to the top of the Acropolis and getting as far as the Lion gate of Mycenae. She has (no wonder) come back v. exhausted and full of aches. But I wd. not have had her denied it. The condemned man is allowed his favourite breakfast even if it is indigestible. She was absolutely enraptured by what she saw. But pray for us: the sky grows v. dark.

I can’t begin to describe Greece. Attica is hauntingly beautiful and Rhodes is an earthly paradise–all orange and lemon orchards and wild flowers and vines and olives, and the mountains of Asia on the horizon. And lovely, cheap wines. I’ve eaten squid and octopus!

Yours

Jack

TO AUDREY SUTHERLAND (P):

Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

28 April 1960

Dear Mrs. Sutherland

Thank you for your most kind letter of the 24th. Oddly enough, all my copies of the Psalms book⁴⁷ are at my house in Oxford, so I can’t at the moment look up the place on p. 6. I will do so when I am next at home–I am glad you drew my attention to it.

I believe you are right in thinking that most ancient peoples had no hope of heaven, tho’ of course selected and exceptional individuals might be made gods and go to Olympus. That was as much out of the common course in their scheme as Elijah’s being caught up in the fiery chariot⁴⁸ is in ours. I won’t answer for the Egyptians: nor for the Greek ‘mystery’ religions.

What is v. much more important is that the ancients may have been right. The N. T. always speaks of Christ not as one who taught, or demonstrated, the possibility of a glorious after life but as one who first created that possibility–the Pioneer, the First Fruits,⁴⁹ the Man who forced the door. This of course links up with Peter 1. III 20 about preaching to the spirits in prison⁵⁰ and explains why Our Lord ‘descended into Hell’⁵¹ (= Sheol or Hades). It looks v. much as if, till His resurrection, the fate of the dead actually was a shadowy half-life–mere ghosthood. The medieval authors delighted to picture what they called ‘the harrowing of Hell’,⁵² Christ descending and knocking on those eternal doors and bringing out those whom He chose. I believe in something like this. It wd. explain how what Christ did can save those who lived long before the Incarnation.

What pleased me enormously in your letter was the bit about Till We Have Faces, for I think it far and away my best book but it has, with the critics and the public, been my one great failure: an absolute ‘flop’. No one seems to have the slightest idea what I’m getting at in it.

With cordial greetings.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO JANE DOUGLASS (BERG):

Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

3 May 1960

Dear Miss Douglass

You take this matter too hard. It is indeed an occasion for disgust, but nothing to worry about. The ‘smut-hounds’ have done this to author after author, but the libels are soon forgotten and the authors remain where they were. Also ‘blessed are ye when men shall revile you’⁵³ etc. Leave the gamin⁵⁴ to make his mud pies and pass on.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO MR SEARLES (MC):⁵⁵

As from Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

7 May 1960

Dear Mr. Searles

1. ‘Eternal death’ was a bit vague. I meant final ruin, or rejection–the scrap-heap.⁵⁶ Whether that scrap-heap is annihilation or some kind of decayed consciousness is a point I won’t dogmatise on. Our Lord’s words usually stress the negative side of it, not what the lost souls get but what they miss. Perhaps we had best leave it at that.

2. About the Deity of Christ:

a. ‘The Word was with God and the Word was God’

Jn. I.i.

b. ‘Philip said, Show us the Father. Jesus said, “Have I been with you all this time and you haven’t recognised me? He who has seen me has seen the Father”.’

Jn. XIV.9–10.⁵⁷

3. ‘The only-begotten’ (Jn. I. 14.) Then Lucifer wd. not be, in the same sense, the son of God.

4. ‘In him all things were created.’ (Col. I. 16.) How, then, cd. He himself be a created thing?

Of course how He can both ‘be God’ and be ‘with God’ is a mystery. But that is what the Bible teaches. I’ve tried to say something about it later on in the part called ‘Beyond Personality’.

All good wishes.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

 

On 9 May 1960 Fontana Books of London published the paperback of Miracles: A Preliminary Study containing the revised amd retitled Chapter 3.⁵⁸

TO JOCELYN GIBB (BOD):⁵⁹

Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

9 May 1960

Dear Gibb

(1.) I am afraid I can’t agree to a Japanese version of Miracles with those expurgations. Small though they are, their aim clearly is that I should be disguised as a fundamentalist and a non-smoker. I shd. be trying to attract a particular public under false pretences. I have hitherto been acceptable to a good many different ‘Denominations’ without such camouflage, and I won’t resort to it now. The Baptist translator may, if he pleases, add notes of his own, warning readers that the book is at these points, in his opinion, pernicious. But he must not remove them. Perhaps you had best transmit to Mr Cole exactly what I say here.

(2.) About the next Screwtape, I suggest that you arrange the business side with Curtis Brown. Of course the original Screwtape was not under the C.B. regime, but this is a new work, more or less.

(3.) I’m glad the IV L’s is selling. I’ve seen hardly any reviews and shd. be glad if you wd. send me any you have done with. I didn’t see Miss Nott’s and therefore don’t get your point about her.⁶⁰

Greece was wonderful. We badly need a word meaning ‘the-exact-opposite-of-a-disappointment’. Appointment won’t do!

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO JOCELYN GIBB (BOD): PC

Magdalene

12/5/60

Thanks for cuttings. It is pretty clear in what way the book touched that lively lady on the raw.⁶¹ But she is not without wit. I am glad we both feel the same about the Japanese Bowdler.

C.S.L.

TO CECIL HARWOOD (BOD): PC

Magdalene

13 May [1960]

Thanks. I am v. glad you liked it. As for the parts where you find me too confidently doing a ‘profile’ of the ⁶² I hope I am usually reproducing the doctrines of ‘my ain folk’ or admittedly offering, as I say, ‘one man’s myth’.⁶³

We were not in Athens at the same time as Owen. Attica, even more than Athens, overwhelmed us both. But Rhodes is the real earthly paradise. In its beautiful crusader city⁶⁴ we drank Malvoisie vel Malmsey and did not fail to toast the D. of Clarence. And every where peasants who are ’⁶⁵ and refuse tips. Love to Marguerite. J.

MRS JOHN D. PETERSON (W):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

14 May 1960

Dear Mrs. Peterson

Thank you very much for writing to me. I doubt if I can produce any more fairy-tales. One is in a certain vein for a few years and then, later, one is not. If one then tries to go on, the result sounds, as it is, forced.

Accept my sympathy for your great sorrow. My deeply loved, and only lately married, wife is apparently dying of the same disease. She was much touched by your letter, and so was I.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO KATHRYN LINDSKOOG (P):⁶⁶

As from Magdalene College,

Cambridge

16 May 1960

Dear Mrs. Lindskoog

Thank you for your kind letter. I could not answer it before, as I have been away from home.

The essay about Outer Space⁶⁷ is now published (by Harcourt Brace) in a volume called The World’s Last Night.

I cannot write more for I have returned to an appalling pile of correspondence and have already spent 14 hours driving the pen across the paper!

With kind regards.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis.

TO CHAD WALSH (W):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford.

23 May 1960

Dear Chad

Thanks for your letter of the 18th. It looked very doubtful if Joy and I would be able to do our trip to Greece, but we did. From one point of view it was madness, but neither of us regrets it. She performed prodigies of strength, limping to the top of the Acropolis and up through the Lion Gate of Mycenae and all about the medieval city of Rhodes (Rhodes is simply the Earthly Paradise). It was as if she was divinely supported. She came back in a nunc dimittis⁶⁸ frame of mind, having realised, beyond hope, her greatest lifelong, this-worldly, desire.

There was a heavy price to pay in increased lameness and leg-pains: not that the exertions had or could have any effect on the course of the cancers, but that the muscles etc had been overtaxed. Since then there has been a recrudescence of the original growth in her right breast which started the whole trouble. It had to be removed last Friday–or, as she characteristically put it, she was ‘made an Amazon’. This operation went through, thank God, with greater ease than we had dared to hope.

By the evening of the same day she was free from all severe pain and from nausea, and cheerfully talkative. Yesterday she was able to sit up in a chair for 15 minutes or so.

Love and greetings to you all, in which Warnie (who is fine) joins me. Thank you for your prayers.

I had some ado to prevent Joy (and myself) from relapsing into Paganism in Attica! At Daphni it was hard not to pray to Apollo the Healer. But somehow one didn’t feel it wd. have been very wrong–wd. have only been addressing Christ sub specie Apollinis.⁶⁹ We witnessed a beautiful Christian village ceremony in Rhodes and hardly felt a discrepancy. Greek priests impress one very favourably at sight–much more so than most Protestant or R. C. clergy. And the peasants all refuse tips.

Yours

Jack

TO DELMAR BANNER (W):

Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

27 May 1960

My dear Banner

Thanks. I’m glad you liked the book.⁷⁰ I quite agree with you about Homosexuals: to make the thing criminal cures nothing and only creates a blackmailers’ paradise. Anyway, what business is it of the State? But I couldn’t well have had a digression on that.⁷¹ One is fighting on two fronts: a. For the persecuted Homo. against snoopers and busybodies. b. For ordinary people against the widespread freemasonry of the highbrow Homos who dominate so much of the world of criticism and won’t bev. nice to you unless you are in their set.

Remember me to your wife. If I’m ever in London at the right time I’ll look out for her ‘Nativity’.⁷²

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO T. S. GREGORY (BBC):⁷³ TS

60/263

The Kilns, Kiln Lane,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford.

28th May 1960.

Dear Mr Gregory,

Thanks for your letter of the 24th, 04/HT/TSG.

As it happens I was prevented by illness from delivering this paper. I have no MS of it suitable for Broadcasting, and I’m afraid I could not work it up at present.⁷⁴

Yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis⁷⁵

TO MARY NEYLAN (T):

Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

30 May 1960.

Dear Mary

I am very sorry to hear of Sarah’s misfortune. I have no idea what I wrote to you to make you ‘cross’, nor when, nor about what. You may be sure the offence was unintentional. I can’t write more, for I am marking Tripos papers 14 hours a day.

I am sure you will forgive my mysterious offence enough to give us your prayers when I tell you that the cancer from which my wife so miraculously rallied 3 years ago has come back.

Yours

Jack

TO JOHN H. MCCALLUM (P):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford.

2 June 1960.

Dear Mac–

Your cable has just been phoned to me. As regards rights to the Time photo, settle direct with Time. Who the Murray (?) mentioned in your cable is, I don’t know. As far as my own feelings are concerned, I loathe the Time photo.⁷⁶ The one of me lighting a pipe,⁷⁷ or the one on your S. by J.⁷⁸ are both better.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO JOCELYN GIBB (BOD):

As from Magdalene College,

Cambridge

3 June 1960

Dear Gibb

Thanks for the Robertson talk.⁷⁹ It is (between ourselves) a prime instance of the favourable review which exasperates an author more than the most spiteful censure could do. He misunderstands so deeply. But not a word of this.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO JOCELYN GIBB (BOD): TS

60/59

The Kilns, Kiln Lane,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford.

4th June 1960.

Dear Gibb,

Thanks for sending me the Japanese SCREWTAPE–the second copy I have had. Yesterday one arrived from the translator.

Yours,

C. S. Lewis

TO MRS H. H. WALKER LEWIS (W): TS

60/318

The Kilns, Kiln Lane,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford.

4th June 1960.

Dear Mrs. Lewis,

Many thanks for your kind and encouraging letter of 19th May and the enclosure, ^* and it is a pleasure to know that you have enjoyed the books.

With all good wishes.

Yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

 

* Very good (and deserved) satire indeed

TO PATRICIA MACKEY (P):⁸⁰

Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

8 June 1960

Dear Miss Mackey

All your points are in a sense right. But I’m not exactly ‘representing’ the real (Christian) story in symbols. I’m more saying ‘Suppose there were a world like Narnia and it needed rescuing and the Son of God (or the “Great Emperor oversea”) went to redeem it, as He came to redeem ours, what might it, in that world, all have been like?’ Perhaps it comes to much the same thing as you thought, but not quite.

1. The creation of Narnia is the Son of God creating a world (not specially our world).

2. Jadis plucking the apple is, like Adam’s sin, an act of disobedience, but it doesn’t fill the same place in her life as his plucking did in his. She was already fallen (very much so) before she ate it.

3. The stone table is meant to remind one of Moses’ table.

4. The Passion and Resurrection of Aslan are the Passion and Resurrection Christ might be supposed to have had in that world–like those in our world but not exactly like.

5. Edmund is like Judas a sneak and traitor. But unlike Judas he repents and is forgiven (as Judas no doubt wd. have been if he’d repented.)

6. Yes. At the v. edge of the Narnian world Aslan begins to appear more like Christ as He is known in this world. Hence, the Lamb. Hence, the breakfast–like at the end of St. John’s Gospel.⁸¹ Does not He say ‘You have been allowed to know me in this world (Narnia) so that you may know me better when you get back to your own’?⁸²

7. And of course the Ape and Puzzle, just before the last Judgement (in the Last Battle) are like the coming of Antichrist before the end of our world.

All clear?

I’m so glad you like the books.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO VERA GEBBERT (W): TS

The Kilns, Kiln Lane,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford.

8th June 1960.

Dear Mrs. Gebbert,

Yes, I’m afraid that I’ve been remiss in writing to you, but, in addition to domestic circumstances I can plead examining in extenuation–a task which comes towards the end of the summer term, and which leaves no time to attend to anything else. Then of course when I am at home there are other things to make letter writing difficult.

Many thanks for your prayers and good wishes. All I can say is that on the short term view Joy is better than could be expected; last month she had another operation, and made a wonderful recovery–was back home just a fortnight to the day after the operation, and the surgeon said that he was ‘very satisfied’ with the result.

My brother tells me that he wrote to you ‘quite recently’ but declines to be more definite, so I hope you have had at least one Lewis letter since you moved to the East. Your new home sounds delightful, and I feel it would be much more my sort of place than California.⁸³ After the newness of the West coast, such things as schoolrooms a hundred years old must give a deep satisfaction; and the old-fashioned bell too.

I’m so sorry to hear that the LAST NIGHT has gone astray, and cannot imagine what has happened to it; however I have written today to the publishers to send you another one.

We are having the usual varieties of weather which islanders expect. Last Sunday, Whitsunday, was the hottest there has been since records were first established, and tropical clothes were welcome; today, 72 hours later, I have the electric light on at 9.15 a.m., and am wearing a woolly waistcoat. But I have no patience with those who, in your language, ‘knock’ the British climate; its variety is to me its charm. Perhaps its worst feature is the lack of water. We had a warmish May, and a few hot days this month, and already in more than one district of England, water is rationed. An annoyance which remains vividly in my mind, for in the great drought of 1921 I was living in a village whose sole source of supply was one well.⁸⁴

I’m very glad that the Tycoon has taken the emigration from West to East in his stride, and that he does not miss the luxury of motor travel to school. I don’t know what the local children would say if asked to walk to school; on our building estate a bus–paid for of course by the rate-payer–calls for the kids from door to door, and brings them back in the evening. No wonder they are discontented and unsettled.

I have not entirely given up hope that a day may come when I shall be able to sample your guestroom, but not yet, or in the foreseeable future.

With all love and blessings, in which wish my brother joins me,

yours ever,

C. S. Lewis

TO MRS R. E. HERMAN (W):⁸⁵ TS

60/334

The Kilns, Kiln Lane,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford.

10th June 1960.

Dear Mrs. Herman,

Many thanks for your most kind and encouraging letter of May 22nd. Naturally it is a great pleasure to me to hear that you enjoyed Screwtape, and I hope you will get equal pleasure from some of the others.

With kindest regards,

yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO THE REV. PETER BIDE (BOD):

Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

14 June 1960

My dear Peter

I hear so much of other people’s sorrows at present–the knowledge of one’s own elicits them–that I read your news with a sort of ghastly lack of surprise.⁸⁶ Yet it was in a way unexpected. I know your faith will stand firm.

Joy says (do you agree?) that we needn’t be too afraid of questionings and expostulations: it was the impatience of Job⁸⁷ not the theodicies of Elihu⁸⁸ that were pleasing to God. Does He like us to ‘stand up to Him’ a bit? Certainly He cannot like mere flattery–resentment masquerading as submission thru’ fear.

How impossible it wd. be now to face it without rage if God Himself had not shared the horrors of the world He made! I know this is Patripassianism.⁸⁹ But the other way of putting it, however theologically defensible, lets in (psychologically) perhaps a more serious error.

Joy had her right breast removed about 10 days ago, or–as she characteristically put it–became an Amazon

Nor sometime forgets

Those other two equalled with her in fate,

Penthesilea and Hippolyta⁹⁰

Thus we can still play the fool…you will not misunderstand it. I wish we could meet. Till we do, be sure of our prayers.

Thanks for the enclosure. Even now such things give me pleasure: I can still play with my toys. Don’t be ashamed to play with yours if you have any. The less miserable we succeed in being the more we can do for them

Eating is a great stand-by! But, drat it, they’ve put me on a diet.

Yours

Jack

TO PHOEBE HESKETH (W):

Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

14 June 1960

Dear Mrs. Hesketh

How cd. such a story as you tell me be an ‘affront’? It did me good. The most mischievous–and painful–by-product of any sorrow is the illusion that it isolates one, that one is kicked out alone for this from an otherwise cheerful, bustling, ‘normal’ world. How much better to realise that one is just doing one’s turn in the line like all the rest of the ragged and tired human regiment! Yours is a very terrible bit of it. But I’d sooner be you than that housemaster–or than the Doctor (one of the closest friends) who could and should have diagnosed Joy’s trouble when she went to him about the symptoms years ago before we were married. The real trouble about the duty of forgiveness is that you do it with all your might on Monday and then find on Wednesday that it hasn’t stayed put and all has to be done over again.

Yes, we will pray for one another.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO KEITH MASSON (W):⁹¹

Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

15 June 1960

Dear Mr. Masson

Yes. The questions which Tyndale leaves unanswered are those which St. Augustine and St. Paul leave unanswered. I am quite sure that none of them wd. have abandoned his position however fully he had reflected on the difficulties; for each, experientially and existentially, knew his account of Grace and conversion to be true.

My criticism of Tyndale was that he restates (with incomparable clarity and grandeur) the Pauline conception without any mention of the difficulties it raises. See the long paragraph on my pp. 33, 34.⁹² The only person who seems to me to do this is Coleridge (in his Aids to Reflection).⁹³

Thank you for your kind words about the book.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO SIR HENRY WILLINK (MC):

Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

17 June 1960

Dear Master

Francis⁹⁴ flatters me with the idea that, if there is a division as to printing those ‘curious’ passages in our new Pepys, my opinion might be asked for.⁹⁵ Since I can’t be sure of coming to the next meeting of the Governing Body, I have decided to let you have it in writing.

A prudential and a moral problem are both involved.

The prudential one is concerned, (a) with the chances of a prosecution, and (b.) with the chances of disrepute and ridicule. On (a.) it wd. be ridiculous for me to express any opinion in your presence and Mickey’s.⁹⁶ As to (b.), a spiteful or merely jocular journalist could certainly make us for a week or two very malodorous in the public nostril. But a few weeks, or years, are nothing in the life [of] the College. I think it wd. be pusillanimous and unscholarly to delete a syllable on that score.

The moral problem comes down to the question ‘Is it probable that the inclusion of these passages will lead anyone to commit an immoral act which he would not have committed if we had suppressed them?’ Now of course this question is strictly unanswerable. No one can foresee the odd result that any words may have on this or that individual. We ourselves in youth have been both corrupted and edified by books in which our elders could have foreseen neither edification nor corruption. But to suggest that in a society where the most potent aphrodisiacs are daily put forward by the advertisers, the newspapers, and the films, any perceptible increment of lechery will be caused by printing a few, obscure, and widely separated passages in a very long and expensive book, seems to me unrealistic or even hypocritical.

A very severe moralist might argue that it is not enough to be unable to foresee harm; that we ought, before we act, to be able to foresee with certainty an absence of harm. But this, as you see, would prove too much. It is really an argument against doing, or not doing, any action whatsoever. For they all go on having consequences, mostly unforeseeable, to the world’s end.

I am therefore in favour of printing the whole, unexpurgated, Pepys.

Yours

Jack

TO JOCELYN GIBB (BOD):

Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

17 June 1960

Dear Gibb

1. No, no! The Toast must certainly not be included in the Letters. The Title Page for the volume must be

The Screwtape Letters and Screwtape Proposes a Toast

 

The List of Contents must be

The S. Letters_____________________________ p n.

S. proposes a Toast_____________________________p n 2

 

After the Letters (perhaps with a blank page in between) there must be a sub-titlepage bearing the words S. proposes a Toast.

2. I am afraid I must retain the para. you object to on pp. 7–8, of the Preface.⁹⁷

3. Have I already given you the following corrections to the Preface?

P.5 1. 1 For sit read sink (SINK) P. 7 para 2, 1 12. For fellows read fellow (FELLOW)

P. 10 para 218 For Erewhose read Erewhon

4. Apparently I forgot to ask for a copy of The Four Loves to be sent to this college library. I’d be glad if you’d kindly rectify this.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO CHARLES MOORMAN (WHL):

[Magdalene College]

23 June 1960

Dear Mr Moorman

Thank you for kindly sending me a copy of your ‘Arthurian Triptych’. It is of course impossible to criticise objectively a book in wh. oneself and one’s greatest friend⁹⁸ play so large a part. I am inclined to think that your method works better for Charles Williams than for me, and better for me than for Mr Eliot. But I may be mistaken. The whole is beautifully intelligible and free from jargon–rare merits now-a-days–and the initial discussion on Myth seems to me very well done. I have enjoyed it and hope it will have every success.

 

Joy was now very ill. She went into the Acland Nursing Home on 20 May to have her right breast removed. After returning to The Kilns for a few weeks she was rushed back to the nursing home. Warnie wrote in his diary on 21 June:

Joy is dying in the Acland. Of course ever since the cancer reappeared last autumn she has been under sentence of death, but her courage and vitality were such that one was able to forget the grim fact for hours and even days at a time. I can see now that the beginning of the end was when she had her right breast removed on Friday 20th May; though she emerged from the ordeal radiant, and the surgeon spoke enthusiastically of her condition. She was home just a fortnight later, apparently with health much improved, and in great spirits…

On the following Tuesday [14 June] which was a glorious day, I pushed her to the library,⁹⁹ and afterwards up as far as the pond, with stops for her to inspect her favourite flower bed; and from there we went to the green house where she got out and looked at her plants.¹⁰⁰

It was expected to be Joy’s last outing. Her condition deteriorated, and Warnie continues:

When I got downstairs on Monday morning J told me that he had been up with her all night, and, poor thing, she had been vomiting or at least trying to vomit all the time. About 10 a.m. she said to Hibbie, ‘Nurse, this is the end. I know I’m dying. Telegraph for Doug.’ But even then the old courage was still there; almost the last thing she said before falling into a drug-induced coma was, ‘I’ve got enough cancers now to form a Trades Union of the darned things.’ And to the doctor she said, ‘Finish me off quick. I won’t have another operation’…¹⁰¹

David returned home from Magdalen College School and Douglas was driven by his headmaster all the way back from Lapley Grange School in Machynlleth, Montgomeryshire. ‘The first thing she said,’ Douglas wrote, ‘was “Doug, congratulations on passing your Common Entrance examinations.” I held her in my arms and merely wept. I was now taller than she would have been had she been able to stand, but as usual it was she who comforted me.’¹⁰²

‘Once again,’ wrote Warnie on 8 July, ‘Joy has made fools of the doctors and nurses.’¹⁰³ Joy returned home from the Radcliffe Infirmary on Monday 27 June feeling quite well. By Sunday she felt well enough to go to Studley Priory for dinner, and the following day she went for a drive in the Cotswolds. But the reprieve was brief. At 6 a.m. on 13 July the household was awakened by Joy’s screaming. During what Warnie called ‘a nightmare morning of planning, improvisation, and errands’¹⁰⁴ Jack managed to get a private room for her in the Radcliffe Infirmary, and he was able to dictate a letter to Jocelyn Gibb and get Warnie to cancel an appointment with Roger Lancelyn Green.

TO JOCELYN GIBB (BOD): TS

60/59

The Kilns, Kiln Lane,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford.

13th July 1960.

Dear Gibb,

Right, I agree to all those suggestions.¹⁰⁵

Yours,

W. H. Lewis

(dictated by C.S.L.).

 

On 13 July 1960 Warnie wrote to Roger Lancelyn Green:¹⁰⁶

60/289

The Kilns, Kiln Lane,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford.
13th July 1960.

Dear Green, I’m sorry to say that Jack’s wife is desperately ill, and he is in continuous attendance on her; so you will understand that it is out of the question for him to see you on Saturday. He asks to send his regrets.

An ambulance took Joy to the hospital during the morning of 13 July. Lewis spent the day with her. Later that night he was collected from the Radcliffe by his friend Clifford Morris who drove him home.¹⁰⁷ At 11.40 p.m., wrote Warnie,

I heard J come into the house and went out to meet him. Self: ‘What news?’ J: ‘She died about twenty minutes ago.’ She was, he tells me, conscious up to the last, just before Till called J out of the room to say she was dying rapidly. J went back and told Joy, who agreed with him that it was the best news they could now get. During the afternoon and evening she dozed from time to time, but was fully sensible whenever she was awake. Asked during these final hours that she should be cremated, left her fur coat as a parting gift to K. Farrer, and was able to receive Absolution from Austin, whom she asked to read the funeral service over her at the crematorium. Once during the afternoon she said to J, ‘Don’t get me a posh coffin, posh coffins are all rot.’ God rest her soul, I miss her to a degree which I would not have imagined possible.¹⁰⁸

TO THE REV. PETER BIDE (BOD):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford 14 July 1960

Dear Peter

Joy died at 10 o’clock last night in the Radcliffe. I was alone with her at the moment, but she was not conscious. I had never seen the moment of natural death before. It was far less dreadful than I had expected–indeed there’s nothing to it. Pray for her soul. I have prayed twice daily of late for us four together–you and Margy and me and Joy. I shall continue for you two.

I can’t understand my loss yet and hardly (except for brief but terrible moments) feel more than a kind of bewilderment, almost a psychological paralysis. A bit like the first moments after being hit by a shell.

I’d like to meet. Perhaps I cd. come up to town some day when you are in town and take you to lunch at the Athenaeum. For I am–oh God that I were not–very free now. One doesn’t realise in early life that the price of freedom is loneliness. To be happy one must be tied. God bless all three of us.

Yours

Jack

TO WILLIAM GRESHAM (W): TS

60/363

The Kilns, Kiln Lane,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford.

15th July 1960.

Dear Bill,

Joy died on the 13th July. This need involve no change in your plans, but I thought you should arrive knowing it.

Yours,

Jack

TO K. C. THOMPSON (W): TS

60/337

The Kilns, Kiln Lane,

15th July 1960.

Dear Mr Thompson,

Thanks for your kind letter.¹⁰⁹ You won’t think I value it the less if I say no more than that–as you can imagine, I have much on hand. I wrote to the Vicar yesterday asking him to ask the prayers of our congregation for the repose of the soul of Helen Joy Lewis, and have just heard that you are for the moment in charge of the parish; might I ask you to do this, and of your charity add your own prayers.

Yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO VERA GEBBERT (W): TS

60/77

The Kilns, Kiln Lane,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford.

15th July 1960.

Dear Mrs Gebbert,

Alas, you will never send anything ‘for the three of us’ again, for my dear Joy is dead. Until within ten days of the end we hoped, although noticing her increasing weakness, that she was going to hold her own, but it was not to be.

Last week she had been complaining of muscular pains in her shoulders, but by Monday 11th seemed much better, and on Tuesday, though keeping her bed, said she felt a great improvement; on that day she was in good spirits, did her ‘crossword puzzle’ with me, and in the evening played a game of Scrabble. At quarter past six on Wednesday morning, the 13th, my brother, who slept over her, was wakened by her screaming and ran down to her. I got the doctor, who fortunately was at home, and he arrived before seven and gave her a heavy shot. At half past one I took her into hospital in an ambulance. She was conscious for the short remainder of her life, and in very little pain, thanks to drugs; and died peacefully in my company about 10.15 the same night.

I could not wish that she had lived, for the cancer had attacked the spine, which might have meant several days of suffering, and that she was mercifully spared. You will understand that I have no heart to write more, but I hope when next I send a letter it will be a less depressing one.

My love to the Tycoon, who is growing into a fine looking lad.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis¹¹⁰

TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE (W):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

15 July 1960

15 July 1960

Dear Mary Willis

I’ve just got your letter of the 12th. Joy died on the 13th. I can’t describe the apparent unreality of my life since then. She received absolution and died at peace with God. I will try to write again when I have more command of myself. I’m like a sleep-walker at the moment.

God bless.

Yours

Jack

 

Joy had wanted her body to be cremated, and on 18 July 1960 Jack, Warnie, David and Douglas Gresham went to the Oxford Crematorium for her funeral, which was conducted by Dr Austin Farrer. Afterwards Lewis had a plaque erected at the crematorium near where Joy’s ashes were scattered. On it is inscribed a poem he wrote for his wife:

 

Remember

Helen Joy

Davidman D. July 1960

Loved wife of C. S. Lewis

 

Here the whole world (stars, water, air,

And field, and forest, as they were

Reflected in a single mind)

Like cast-off clothes was left behind

In ashes yet with hope that she,

Re-born from holy poverty,

In Lenten lands, hereafter may

Resume them on her Easter Day.¹¹¹

David and Douglas returned to school after their mother’s death. Lewis accepted responsibility for them, but he was fortunate in having the help of Joy’s friend, Jean Wakeman. The boys knew her well by this time, and she made it clear that they could always regard her house, a few miles away at Horton-cum-Studley, as their home.

TO GRACIA FAY BOUWMAN (W):¹¹²

As from Magdalene College,

Cambridge

19 July 1960 Dear Miss Bouwman

I haven’t a copy of the P. of P.¹¹³ to hand and I can’t remember the exact words I used. What I wd. now say wd. be something like this.

We have A. The Scriptural representation of God–a god not only of love but of ¹¹⁴ whose ‘bowels are moved’¹¹⁵ with compassion and who also can fall into ‘fury’.¹¹⁶

B. A philosophical concept of the Absolute Being to which (one can hardly say ‘to whom’) all these human characteristics are inapplicable.

We have a tendency to regard B as the literal truth and A either as poetical decoration or as a concession to the ‘primitive’ mind of the ancient Jews.

We are right in thinking that A cannot be literally true. But no more can B. B is an abstract construction of our own minds. It represents to us as an abstraction, a mere concept, what must in reality be the most concrete of all Facts. B can make no claim to be a revelation: we have made it. A does make this claim.

If we accept A literally we shall remain on the mythological level. But it is no improvement to take B literally. Both are only shadows or hints of the reality. A cannot really imagine, and B cannot really conceptualise, God as He is in Himself. To prefer B is to think that the symbol we have made is better than the symbol He has made. I think we are right to use B as a corrective wherever A, taken literally, threatens to become absurd: but we must instantly plunge back into A. Only God Himself knows in what sense He is ‘like’ a father or king, capable of love and anger. But since He has given us that picture of Himself we may be sure that it is more importantly ‘like’ than any concept we might try to substitute for it. You’ll find this dealt with more fully in chapter XI of my Miracles.

We can get no further than this in knowledge about (savoir) God: but we are vouchsafed some knowledge-by-acquaintance (connaître) of Him in our devotional and sacramental life. This, if it clothes itself in words and images at all, always borrows them from the A view. But these are not the real point, are they? It is as the moment of personal contact fades that they press upon the mind. We cry ‘Father’ without attending to all those implications wh. wd. become more mythological the further we pursued them. As Buber might say God is most fully real to us as Thou, less so as He, least so as It. We must worship the Thou, not the He in our own minds, which is just as much an image (therefore a possible idol) as a figure of wood or stone.

Yrs. sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO KATHARINE AND AUSTIN FARRER (BOD):

The Kilns

21 July [1960]

My dear K. and Austin

Shortly before her death Joy said ‘Give my fur coat to K. I know it’s far too big for her, but she could use it as a present for someone else.’ So perhaps when the car has returned to its duties you could come up and collect it?

She loved you both very much. And getting to know you both better is one of the many permanent gains I have got from my short married life.

There are a lot of things about sorrow which no one (least of all the tragedians) had told me. I never dreamed that, in between the moments of acute suffering, it wd. be so like somnambulism or like being slightly drunk. Nor, physically, often so like fear.

Douglas and Warnie have both been absolute Bricks. The latter, alas, goes to Ireland on Monday

Yours

Jack

TO THE EDITOR OF THE LISTENER:¹¹⁷

Cambridge

Sir,–

Professor Empson is mistaken when he says (The Listener, July 7) I have argued that Milton’s Satan ‘must be meant to be funny’.¹¹⁸ I took Paradise Lost as a tragic, and The Egoist as a comic, treatment of ‘the Satanic predicament’.¹¹⁹ I said that Milton had subordinated the absurdity of Satan to his misery; but that, just as Meredith cannot exclude all pathos from Sir Willoughby, so Milton cannot exclude all that is ridiculous from Satan.¹²⁰ Surely the distinction between saying this and saying that Satan is ‘meant to be funny’ is not imperceptibly fine?

C. S. Lewis

TO JOCELYN GIBB (BOD): TS

60/59

The Kilns, Kiln Lane,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford.

22nd July 1960.

My dear Gibb,

Thank you for your very kind letter. You won’t think I value it the less if I say no more than that–as you can imagine, I have much on my hands.

Yours,

C. S. Lewis

TO KATHARINE FARRER (BOD):

The Kilns

25 July [1960]

Dear K

Come up any day that suits. Not seeing you two wd. never be a ‘rest’. Nor am I sure that rest is what I need. I’m learning a good many things about grief wh. the novelists and poets never told me. It has as many different facets as love or anger or any other passion. In the lulls–between the peaks–there is something in it v. like fidgety boredom: like just ‘hanging about waiting’–tho’ what the deuce one thinks one is waiting for I don’t know.

Yours

Jack

TO JOCELYN GIBB (BOD):

The Kilns etc 25 July [1960]

Dear Gibb

Will you please order 1 copy of S by J to be sent to Dr Richards, 59 Banbury Road, Oxford?¹²¹

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO MRS H. V. M. MCGEHIE (P):¹²²

As from Magdalene College,

Cambridge

26 July 1960 Dear Mrs McGehie

Nearly every big bookshop in this country has a second-hand department, but some specialise in finding particular out-of-print books for their customers. The best I know is Rogers, Booksellers, Newcastle on Tyne (That is sufficient address). He will take a lot of trouble and will not charge more than an honest price.

But don’t assume that a book is really out of print just because the local bookshop tells you it is. Booksellers dislike orders for single copies, for the profit is hardly worth the trouble to them, and they try to choke you off. The first step always is to write direct to the book’s publishers (if you can discover who they were) whether in New York or London. Only after that has failed need you turn to the second-hand market.

Thanks for the kind things you say about my work. I am not likely to be in America in the near future.

With all good wishes.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO VICTOR HAYWARD HALL (BOD):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

3 Aug 1960

Dear Mr. Hall

Thanks for all the kind things you say about my work. I am afraid I couldn’t come and visit your people. One reason is that I have for a long time given up that sort of work. I am much more use with the pen than with the tongue, and of use to more people. Every man to his own trade!

With all good wishes.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO VERA GEBBERT (W):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

5 Aug 1960

Dear Mrs. Gebbert

Thanks for your kind letter. I believe in the resurrection, and also (rather less confidently) in the natural immortality of the soul. But the state of the dead till the resurrection is unimaginable. Are they in the same time that we live in at all. And if not, is there any sense in asking what they are ‘now’?

Thanks also for your very moving offer of hospitality. There’s no chance of travel at present, though.

I can’t write more. One of the indirect results of Joy’s death is that I have thousands of things to do which I didn’t do before. And, to make matters worse, my brother is away on his holidays so I miss his secretarial help. Perhaps being maddeningly busy is the best thing for me–anyway I am. This is one of those things which make the tragedies of real life so very unlike those of the stage.

With warm regards.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO HELMUT KUHN (WHL):

16 August 1960

My Out of the Silent Planet has no factual basis and is a critique of our own age only as any Christian work is implicitly a critique of any age. I was trying to redeem for genuinely imaginative purposes the form popularly known in this country as ‘science-fiction’–I think you call it ‘future-romanz’ just as (si parva licet componere magnis)¹²³ Hamlet redeemed the popular revenge play.

TO FATHER RICHARD GINDER (P):¹²⁴

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

18 Aug 1960

Dear Father Ginder

Thanks for your kind letter. I wonder do we blame T.V. and the Comics too much? Was not a certain sort of boy in a certain sort of home wasting his time just as badly in other ways before they were invented? It annoys me when parents who read nothing but the newspapers themselves–i.e. nothing but lies, libels, poppycock, propaganda, and pornography–complain of their children reading the Comics! Upon my soul I think the children’s diet is healthier than their parents’.

My wife died last month. Of your charity mention us both sometimes in your prayers.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO JOHN H. MCCALLUM (P):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

19 Aug 1960 Dear Mac,

Thanks for the reviews¹²⁵–not a single stinker among them. I have not written a book called Greatest Problems and think it most unlikely I ever shall.

Studies in Words is the first academic work I’ve written since they gave me a Chair at Cambridge, so I felt it almost an obligation to let C.U.P.¹²⁶ do it–especially as it is so very far from ‘popular’. Do you want to do an American edn. of it? It hadn’t occurred to me that you would, but if you do, let me know.

All the best.

Yours

Clive

TO ROGER LANCELYN GREEN (BOD):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

20 Aug 1960

My dear Roger

Yes. On July 13. As we announced it only in the Daily Telegraph, v. few people seem to have heard.¹²⁷ Of course I knew you wd. write when you did. I am very glad we all shared that wonderful time in Greece. It is a close and lasting bond between the three survivors.

Warnie is away till mid Sept. and there is a spare bedroom here if you cd. come for a few days. It wd. be a great time for me if you would.

I’ve read Cohen’s book on Haggard¹²⁸ (good, I thought) and written an article arising out of it for Time & Tide.¹²⁹

Love to June.

Yours

Jack

TO ROGER LANCELYN GREEN (BOD):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

24 Aug 1960

My dear Roger

Good. Wed. Aug 31 it is. If you’ll tell me the train I’ll meet it in a car–the Oxford bus service has become almost purely theoretical.

Yours

Jack

TO HELMUT KUHN (W):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

26 Aug 1960

Dear Kuhn

It was a pleasure to hear from you again. Hegner’s first step shd. be a letter to my literary agent, S. Curtis Brown, 13 King Street, Covent Garden, London W.C. 2.¹³⁰ The business side will be a little complicated since some of the Narnian books are published by John Lane and others by G. Bles.

If any of the seven are omitted I wd. make it an absolute condition that the omission shd. be mentioned on, or opposite to, the title-page. Naturally I don’t like (what author would?) the idea of any omissions!

I am delighted that you shd. have enjoyed these books and value your good opinion highly.

Is there any hope of seeing you in this country again?

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO ANNE SCOTT (BOD):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

26 Aug 1960

Dear Mrs Scott

Thank you very much for your most kind and encouraging letter. You gave me great pleasure by what you said about Till We Have Faces, for that book, which I consider far and away the best I have written, has been my one big failure both with the critics and with the public.

My small stepson entirely agrees with your children about the present wicked misdirection of my talents, and asks ‘When are you going to stop writing all that bilge and write interesting books again?’

Cookery books are not such bad reading. Have you Mrs Beeton with the original preface?¹³¹ It is delicious.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

30 Aug 1960

My dear Arthur

It is nice to hear from you. It might have been worse. Joy got away easier than many who die of cancer. There were a couple of hours of atrocious pain on her last morning, but the rest of the day mostly asleep, tho’ rational whenever she was conscious. Two of her last remarks were ‘You have made me happy’ and ‘I am at peace with God.’ She died at 10 that evening. I’d seen violent death but never seen natural death before. There’s really nothing to it, is there?

One thing I’ve been glad about is that in the Easter Vac she realised her life long dream of seeing Greece. We had a wonderful time there. And many happy moments even after that. The night before she died we had a long, quiet, nourishing, and tranquil talk.

W. is away on his Irish holiday and has, as usual, drunk himself into hospital. Douglas–the younger boy–is, as always, an absolute brick, and a very bright spot in my life. I’m quite well myself. In fact, by judicious diet and exercise, I’ve brought myself down from 13 stone to just under 11.

Yours

Jack

 

Since Joy’s death a number of Lewis’s letters had contained reflections on the nature of his grief. As so often, he followed the advice he had given Arthur Greeves many years ago: ‘Start writing: ink is the great cure for all human ills.’¹³² Sometime during August he wrote a short work to which he gave the name A Grief Observed.¹³³ When Roger Lancelyn Green visited Lewis at The Kilns from 31 August to 2 September Lewis showed him the work under a pledge of secrecy.

TO ROGER LANCELYN GREEN (BOD):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

9 Sept. 1960

My dear Roger

Thanks for the MSS. Douglas started on them on last night and we await his first review!¹³⁴ Alas! When we talked of your Apician banquet I assumed it wd. be in Vacation. In term-time it will be impossible for me to mensis accumbere divom.¹³⁵ I shall have to content myself with a sight of the menu and your account of the scene.

Love to all. Your visit was a v. bright spot in our lives.

Yours

Jack

 

Studies in Words was published by Cambridge University Press on 9 September 1960. For help in promoting the book, they asked Lewis to ‘Give a short description of your book in simple non-technical language which will be understood by salesmen and booksellers in all countries–who need to know about it in sufficient detail to direct it towards the right buyers.’ Lewis wrote the following reply:

In how many different senses do you use the word wit or nature (or sense itself)? How many more senses of them have you found in old authors? How did such multiplicity of meanings come about? Do you always know which sense you are using yourself? These are the questions to which this book attempts an answer as regards seven words. They have been selected mainly for the light they throw on the history of thought and sentiment. But it is hoped that the study of them will have for the reader (as it has had for the author) a more than historical interest in increasing his awareness of what we are doing when we talk. It belongs on the same shelf as Pearsall Smith’s Four Words,¹³⁶ Owen Barfield’s Poetic Diction,¹³⁷ and Professor Empson’s Structure of Complex Words.¹³⁸

TO MRS RAY GARRETT (P):

12 Sept 1960

Dear Mrs. Garrett

As you see from the book the whole lesson of my life has been that no ‘methods of stimulation’ are of any lasting use.¹³⁹ They are indeed like drugs–a stronger dose is needed each time and soon no possible dose is effective. We must not bother about thrills at all. Do the present duty–bear the present pain–enjoy the present pleasure–and leave emotions and ‘experiences’ to look after themselves. That’s the programme, isn’t it?

With all good wishes.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO ROGER LANCELYN GREEN (BOD):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

15 Sept. 1960

My dear Roger

Oh Hell! What a trial I am to you both! If Warnie really came home on the 23rd–and if he did not come home so drunk as to have to be put straight into a nursing home–I could and wd. with delight come to you on the 24th. But neither is really at all probable. And of course I can’t leave this house with no grown-up in charge. What it comes to is that you must count me out. I am very sorry. Don’t make any further efforts to accommodate such an entangled man as me–it wd. only for me add to the loss of a great pleasure the embarrassment of knowing I was a nuisance.

Have you seen Allan Garner’s The Wierdstone of Brisingamen?¹⁴⁰ Not bad, tho’ too indebted to Tolkien. He seems to be a fairly near neighbour of yours–Alderley, Cheshire.

Thanks, evermore thanks, and love

Yours

Jack

TO FATHER QUINLAN (W):

As from Magdalene College,

Cambridge

16 Sept. 1960

Dear Father Quinlan

Thank you for your kind and encouraging letter. Since you so generously acknowledge a debt,¹⁴¹ I will tell you how you can repay it.

My wife died in July. I should be grateful if you would sometimes mention both her and me in your prayers.

Would you believe it?–one reviewer has complained that the book ‘makes no mention of conjugal love’.

With cordial greetings,

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO THE REV. PETER BIDE (BOD):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

20 Sept 1960

My dear Peter

I have just come in from saying my morning prayers in the wood, including as always one for ‘Peter and Margy and Joy and me’, and found your letter.¹⁴² I hope they are allowed to meet and help one another. You and I at any rate can. I shall be here on Wed. next. If you could let me have a card mentioning the probable time of your arrival, all the better. If not, I shall just ‘stand by’.

Yes–at first one is sort of concussed and ‘life has no taste and no direction’. One soon discovers, however, that grief is not a state but a process–like a walk in a winding valley with a new prospect at every bend

God bless all four of us.

Yours

Jack

TO JOCELYN GIBB (BOD):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

20 Sept. 1960

Dear Gibb

I have no copy of the English edn. of the Reflections here. If you can lend me one for the purpose, or let me have a set of the galley proofs for the Fontana edn., I’ll go through for misprints. There were some, I believe.

I’m glad the Loves thrive.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO FATHER FREDERICK JOSEPH ADELMANN SJ (P):¹⁴³

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

21 Sept. 1960

Dear Father Adelman

Your invitation–to a Protestant and a layman–is a great compliment and I fully appreciate it. But I must refuse. I am now a widower with two (most fascinating) stepsons to bring up, and I don’t allow myself distant adventures!

There is even a deeper objection. I don’t know exactly what I shd. say in those lectures. When one accepts a lectureship because one has, at that moment, something to say for wh. those lectures wd. be the suitable form, the result is good: but when one has to think up something to say because one has accepted the lectureship–why, then the creak of the pump-handle becomes audible. You see what I mean? I can’t be fruitful when I’m not pregnant. An invitation like yours can be a good mid wife, but not a good father!

With thanks and regrets.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

 

P.S. How right your Society was to shut up de Chardin! Can you explain the enormous boosts now being given to all that Bergsonian-Shavian-pantheistic-biolatrous waffle?

 

Having shown the manuscript of A Grief Observed to Roger Lancelyn Green, Lewis contacted his literary agent, Spencer Curtis Brown, and over

lunch on 21 September they discussed publication. Because Lewis did not want it to appear under his own name, nor from his usual publisher, Curtis Brown offered it to Faber & Faber, of which T. S. Eliot was a director. Lewis had chosen as a pseudonym ‘Dimidius’–meaning ‘Halved’ or ‘divided in two’.

TO SHELDON VANAUKEN (BOD):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

23 Sept 60

Dear Van Auken–

You have convinced me that my comment was crude & facile.¹⁴⁴ The puzzle is more intricate than I thought. The truth is that no one can comment usefully on an experience he can’t imagine. I don’t say ‘an experience he hasn’t had’, for that is quite different. We are, on the other hand, much at one in our reaction to grief and I find much wisdom in your poem.

My great recent discovery is that when I mourn Joy least I feel nearest to her. Passionate sorrow cuts us off from the dead (there are ballads & folk-tales wh. hint this). Do you think that much of the traditional ritual of mourning had, unconsciously, that very purpose? For of course the primitive mind is v. anxious to keep them away.

Like you, I can’t imagine real Eros coming twice. I still feel married to Joy.

God bless you,

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO MARY NEYLAN (T): PC

The Kilns

Sept 23 [1960]

Thanks for your kind note. Love to all. Orate pro nobis.

J.

TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE (W):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

24 Sept. 1960

Dear Mary Willis

Thanks for your letter of the 21st. I hope from what you say that the end of this bad patch is now in sight. Meantime, you seem in fine spiritual health.

As to how I take sorrow, the answer is ‘In nearly all the possible ways.’ Because, as you probably know, it isn’t a state but a process. It keeps on changing–like a winding road with quite a new landscape at each bend. Two curious discoveries I have made. The moments at which you call most desperately and clamorously to God for help are precisely those when you seem to get none. And the moments at which I feel nearest to Joy are precisely those when I mourn her least. Very queer. In both cases a clamorous need seems to shut one off from the thing needed. No one ever told me this. It is almost like ‘Don’t knock and it shall be opened to you.’¹⁴⁵ I must think it over.

My youngest stepson is the greatest comfort to me. My brother is still away in Ireland.

God bless us all.

Yours

Jack

TO JOCELYN GIBB (BOD):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

25 Sept. 1960

Dear Gibb

Thanks for the extra copy of the old edn,¹⁴⁶ which I will gladly retain.

1. Yes (p. 2–galley 10) for 1 Sam read 2 Sam

No (p. 92 29) I meant TONE DEAF (or TONE-DEAF, if you prefer).

Yes (galley 101) for 28 read 22

2. I am glad to say that the most troublesome changes I have indicated are necessitated by your printer’s error on galleys 30, 65, and 95, where he has made nonsense.

3. My own second thoughts are mainly due to the discovery that I had used OF COURSE with intolerable frequency.

4. If you are using again any of the puffs quoted on the jacket of the first edn, notice that the first line of the bit from The Scotsman must be corrupt. Insert OF after OUT?

5. I have not vetted the psalms printed in Appendix I.

All the best.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO FATHER PETER MILWARD SJ (W):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

26 Sept. 1960

Dear Father Milward

First, about the Grail. I think it important to keep on remembering that a question can be v. interesting without being answerable and one of my main efforts as a teacher has been to train people to say those (apparently difficult) words ‘We don’t know.’ We haven’t even got anything that can be quite accurately called ‘the Grail legend’. We have a number of romances which introduce the Grail and are not consistent with one another. No theory as to the ultimate origin is more than speculation. The desire to make that origin either Pagan or (less commonly) heretical is clearly widespread, but I think it springs from psychological causes not from any evidence.

I do not myself doubt that it represents in a general way an imaginative and literary response to the doctrine of Transubstantiation and the visible act of the elevation.¹⁴⁷ But we must be on our guard against abstraction. A story does not grow like a tree nor breed other stories as a mouse begets other mice. Each story is told by an individual, voluntarily, with a unique artistic purpose. Hence the germination goes on where historical, theological, or anthropological studies can never reach it–in the mind of some man of genius, like Chretien or Wolfram.¹⁴⁸ Those who have written stories themselves will come nearer to understanding it than those who have ‘studied the Grail legend’ all their lives.

The whole (unconscious) effort of the orthodox scholars is to remove the individual author and individual romance and substitute the picture of something diffusing itself like an infectious disease or a fashion in clothes. Hence the (really senseless) question ‘What is the Grail?’ The Grail is in each romance just what that romance exhibits it to be. There is no ‘Grail’ over and above these ‘Grails’. Hence, again, the assumption that the mystery in each romance could be cleared up if we knew more about the Celtic Cauldron of Plenty, or the Cathari or what you will.¹⁴⁹ It never occurs to the scholars that this mysteriousness may be a calculated and wholly effective literary technique.

I am entirely on the side of your Society for shutting de Chardin up. The enormous boosts he is getting from scientists who are very hostile to you seems to me v. like the immense popularity of Pasternak among anti-Communists. I can’t for the life of me see his merit. The cause of Man against men never needed championing less than now. There seems to me a dangerous (but also commonplace) tendency to Monism or even Pantheism in his thought. And what in Heaven’s name is the sense of saying that before there was a life there was ‘pre-life’? If you choose to say that before you switched on the light in the cellar there was ‘pre-light’, of course you may. But the ordinary English word for ‘pre-light’ is darkness. What do you gain by such nick-names?

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO JOCELYN GIBB (BOD):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

29 Sept. 1960

Dear Gibb

1. I agree that the top one is the best design.

2. don’t object to the colours, but neither wd. I object to your dark red.

3. If it can be managed I shd. like a design wh. made it clearer that The S. Letters and S. proposes a T. is the title of this publication. Having The S. Letters at all (instead of my proposed The Whole S.) is already a grave disadvantage and is going to lead to endless confusion–ambiguous orders to booksellers and cross-purposes in those conversations about books wh. are the most valuable medium of lasting publicity. But if you insist on this form we must palliate its faults as much as we can. The new title, all 8 words, must by their type and arrangement make a unit for the eye. A man in a bookshop, seeing this present design from a few feet away, will simply notice the words on the black cartouches and think ‘The S.L.…I’ve got a copy of that already.’ This, I think, is what you are suggesting yourself. Wd. something like this be possible

L. 1 THE S. LETTERS…………………………………caps

2 AND…………………………………………caps

3 S. PROPOSES A T……………………v. slightly largercaps

4 with a new preface………………………………different type

5 C. S. L………………………………………caps

The essential is that L. 3 shd. be what first catches the attention.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO JOHN H. MCCALLUM (P):

As from Magdalene College,

Cambridge

30 Sept. 1960

Dear Mac

‘Why the heck can’t C. S. L. have the civility to answer a letter?’ I don’t blame you, but it wasn’t exactly my fault. Like a fool, I dealt direct with C.U.P. for Studies in Words instead of working through Curtis Brown: chiefly because I regarded this book as too academic to be of any serious commercial value. And like a double fool I’ve let them take it up so that I’m not free to arrange for an American edn. with anyone else.

The delay in answering you is due to the fact that I’ve been all this time trying to get out of them whether this is exactly what my contract with them means. It is. But of all the impenetrable block heads! Their answer–the correspondence was long and infuriating–dealt with every question under the sun except the one I had asked (besides being unintelligible and contradictory). I am sorry about all this.

How well Chaucer advised us ‘Flee fro the Presse’!¹⁵⁰

Yours

Clive

TO JOCELYN GIBB (BOD): PC

The Kilns

1 Oct. [1960]

Agree about title, wrapper etc. Am standing by for proofs.

C.S.L.

TO JOCELYN GIBB (BOD):

I go on Wed. to Magdalene College,

Cambridge

3 Oct [1960]

Dear Gibb

Thanks for the proofs, which I send under separate cover. Don’t be hurt if so ham-handed a man as I fails to manipulate your beautiful packaging materials and has to fall back on my old squashy envelopes after all. I can’t tie knots.

1. Title page. I agree with your proposed change.

2. Verso of title page. This should read

The Screwtape Letters are reprinted by kind permission of The Guardian, and Screwtape proposes a Toast by that of The Saturday Evening Post, with some changes.

(rom. for the rest and itals. for the titles)

3. pp. 7–8. Yes, transpose: but now for a far more serious matter.

4. The Prefaces come in the wrong order! By all ordinary rules the preface to this whole volume ought to come first. This wd. lead to a new list of contents, as follows:

 

Preface	i.e. the new preface
The S. Letters	including its preface, the old one, wh. need not appear in the list of contents.
S. proposes a Toast

 

After the general preface of course your present p. 21 just as it is, and after that the original preface. Is all this possible? The existing arrangement is one I v. strongly deprecate–one more effort to make the Toast like part of the Letters.

5. You are right about pp. 121, 141, 152, 153. Do as you think best about p. 157. Larger type as at the beginning seems to me rather a good idea.

6. On p. 10 should we add Oxford and on p. 19 Cambridge? Otherwise those who don’t know any better will think that we haven’t made up our minds how we spell the same college’s name.

7. On p. 25 l. 1. I’ve had dozens of letters telling me that you wouldn’t see a No 73 bus in the street outside the B.M.!¹⁵¹ Will you and your fellow-Londoners substitute some bus you could see? Preferably a number of two digits!¹⁵²

8. The words I have deleted on p. 139 were put in for the benefit of those who wd. meet the name for the first time in the Sat. Evg. Post. They do no good now.

9. I’ve also removed some Americanisms from the Toast–put in for the American reader.

My handwriting is worse than usual to-day. Sorry–I can’t help it.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO BASIL WILLEY (BOD):

Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

5 Oct. 1960

Dear Basil

This stuff¹⁵³ arrived addressed jointly to you and me: only my name came first because of the way the alphabet is arranged. I hope you’ll enjoy it. I didn’t much. Perhaps Dorothy W. is the proper recipient.¹⁵⁴ I suppose these paynim knights, jousting in Christian armour, shd. be treated with courtesy. If Dorothy won’t play, you and I must concoct a letter. But I hope she will.

Yours

Jack

(= C.S.L.)

TO FATHER QUINLAN (W):

Magdalene College,

Cambridge

9 Oct. 1960

Dear Father Quinlan

I am most grateful. Both your letters strangely warmed my heart. I am sorry we are so unlikely to meet in the flesh: let us hope to do so in a better place.

Yes–‘little Flower’ is a dreadful name to inflict on any decent girl, let alone a saint.¹⁵⁵ What harm we have done ourselves by all this saccharine sentiment! The worst of all is those feminine angels in 19th. century stained glass: as if creatures stronger and more ancient than man were consumptive schoolgirls!

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO JOCELYN GIBB (BOD):

As from Magdalene College,

Cambridge

9 Oct 1960

Dear Gibb

1. Yes, the bits from Luther and More will do very well facing the first Letter.

2. I am glad you agree about transposing the prefaces. But the arrangement is still not exactly what I should like. I want, if I can have it, this order:

1960 Preface

Page containing the title The Screwtape Letters

1941 Preface

Text of the Letters.

This arrangement is surely truer to the facts? The 1941 Preface is not a preface to this present volume as a whole: it is part and parcel of the new edn. of the S. Letters which is only one of the two items that make up this new book, and it ought to appear along with the text of the Letters as a single unit. It is, you see, quite a different sort of preface.

The 1960 Preface is me speaking in my own person and giving literal autobiographical facts. The 1941 one is part of the fantasy or convention which the Letters employ–spoken by the imaginary C.S.L. who has somehow tapped a diabolical correspondence. In the 1960 Preface I come before the curtain in my ordinary clothes and address the audience. Then the lights go down and the curtain goes up and there I am in grease paint and fancy-dress speaking a prologue which is part of the play. See what I mean? For similar reasons I wd. like the dedication to Tolkien so placed that it clearly dedicates not this whole book (wh. T. never saw) but only the S. Letters. You cd. put it either to face p. 23, along with the Luther and More, or on the verso of that same leaf, below the title S. Letters.

3. Drat that omnibus.¹⁵⁶ It need not be visible from the B.M.: it need be visible only in some neighbouring street which the patient might see on his way to or from lunch. If you can provide the number of any bus that might be seen in some such neighbouring street, and then emend street to streets in the last line of p. 24, we shall have saved our bacon. If this is impossible, then take your choice of green coach, jeep, fire engine, Rolles, police car, or ambulance. The moral (that country cousins shouldn’t try to pretend they are Londoners) is sadly clear!

4. For heading on p. 11 wd. just Preface or General Preface do? This ‘new edn.’ somehow sounds to me a little childish.

I can’t spot any more corrigenda.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

MRS R. E. HERMAN (W):

Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

10 Oct. 1960

Dear Mrs. Herman

Thank you for your kind and encouraging letter. Somebody certainly ought to write a book on the subject you mention: but it could not be written well except by one who had some experience at first hand both of children in general and of retarded children. I haven’t either.

The queer thing is that this horror of the deficient is quite modern. Our ancestors don’t seem to have felt it at all. On this, as on many other subjects, we have grown odiously and wickedly ‘refined’.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO I. O. EVANS (W): PC

Magdalene,

Cambridge

12 Oct. ’60

Thanks very much. It is a fascinating subject, isn’t it? I had not heard ‘so-called gangsters’. Your explanation wd. never have occurred to me, but it seems very probable. If true, it is an interesting example of the way in which fuller knowledge of the total linguistic situation may reveal sense in what, by itself, looks sheer nonsense.

All good wishes.

C.S.L.

TO JOCELYN GIBB (BOD):

Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

12 Oct. 1960

Dear Gibb

I do believe we’ve got it right at last.¹⁵⁷ I accept the order given in your letter (11 Oct) and also your kind emendation for the bit at the bottom of p. 24 and the top of p. 25. Thanks very much. Whew! If place and time agreed I shd. suggest we had long drinks together at once.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO VERA GEBBERT (W):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

16 Oct. 1960

Dear Mrs. Gebbert

Thank you for your kind letter and announcement of good things to come.

I wasn’t at all questioning the life after death, you know: only saying that its character is for us unimaginable. The things you tell me about it are all outside my knowledge and most of them outside my powers of conception. To say ‘They are now as they were then’ and add next moment ‘unhampered of course by the body’¹⁵⁸ is to me like saying ‘They are exactly the same but of course unimaginably different.’

But don’t let us trouble one another about it. We shall know when we are dead ourselves. The Bible seems scrupulously to avoid any descriptions of the other world, or worlds, except in terms of parable or allegory.

My brother is away in Ireland but is expected home next week. If he were here he would join me in warmest regards.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO CHAD WALSH (W):

Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

18 Oct. 1960

Dear Chad

I knew without being told how you would both feel about Joy’s death. What I did not know was the touching fact that our joint happiness had added something to your own. It was a wonderful marriage. Even after all hope was gone, even on the last night before her death, there were ‘patins of bright gold’.¹⁵⁹ Two of the last things she said were ‘You have made me happy’ and ‘I am at peace with God.’

Grief is quite unlike what I imagined. I thought of it as a state, but it is really a process. At each bend of the valley there is a new landscape.

I look forward to meeting you when you are in England. Love to both.

Yours

Jack

TO JOCELYN GIBB (BOD): PC

Magdalene

20 Oct. [1960]

Nov. 30 is a good day for me. What time? Let me know. All hours that day are free at present.

C.S.L.

TO NICHOLAS ZERNOV (BOD):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

24 Oct. 1960

My dear Nicholas

Thank Militza very much for the negatives¹⁶⁰ and thank you both very much for your prayers. I will try to arrange about coming with the boys–they’re getting nice, aren’t they!?–as soon as term is over. We are all starting our winter colds at present.

Yours

Jack

TO ALASTAIR FOWLER (BERG):

Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

24 Oct. 1960

Dear Fowler

I think the right way to ‘anticipate anticipation’ is to bring out as many of your chapters, or equivalents to them, as you can in periodicals. Warburg, for example sounds the right place.¹⁶¹ I am sure the wrong way is to try to rush the complete book through any sooner than its size and nature demands.

Have you read Robert Ellrodt’s NeoPlatonism in the Poetry of Spenser (Librairie E. Droz, 8 Rue Verdaine, Geneva)?¹⁶² Almost certainly you have.

Reading your account of the book, I am divided between a great greed to see it and the little haunting fear ‘Is he beginning to see pictures in the fire?’–as, you know, all critics of P. Plowman or F.Q (except oneself) end by doing.

I didn’t know you knew Harding’s book.¹⁶³ It’s time I read it again too. What I am revelling in at present is Emily Dickinson.¹⁶⁴ Odd, the way bits quite [like] Housman¹⁶⁵ and other bits quite like De la Mare¹⁶⁶ keep on coming in, yet the totality is so different from either.

I’m not much good at advising about publishers. Is it relevant to say that if you offered it to C.U.P. they’d almost certainly send it to me for an opinion? I don’t like acting in this capacity when the author is a personal friend, and it’s on the cards I shall be leaning over backwards in my attempt not to be biased in your favour, which wd. be bad luck on you. But at least you’d get a careful reading.

Thanks for your sympathy. I hope we both have your prayers (or don’t you pray for the dead?).

More power to your elbow. The unintelligible review of me in T.L.S. was by Empson: not at all nasty, but about as opaque a bit of writing as I’ve seen this year.¹⁶⁷

Yours

C. S. Lewis

 

On 24 October Curtis Brown wrote to Lewis: ‘I know that the enclosed copy of the letter from T. S. Eliot will give you pleasure.’ On 20 October Eliot had written:

I and two other Directors have read A Grief Observed. My wife has read it also, and we have all been deeply moved by it. We do in fact want to publish it…We are of the opinion that we have guessed the name of the author. If, as you intimate and as I should expect from the man I think it is, he does sincerely want anonymity, we agree that a plausible English pseudonym would hold off enquirers better than Dimidius. The latter is sure to arouse curiosity and there must be plenty of people amongst those who know him, and perhaps even among the readers of his work who do not know him, who may be able to penetrate the disguise once they set their minds working.¹⁶⁸

Seeing the force of Eliot’s argument, Lewis devised a new pseudonym. He had used the name and initials ‘Nat Whilk’ and ‘N.W.’–Anglo-Saxon for ‘I know not whom’–on many occasions, and by combining them with ‘Clerk’, which in medieval usage meant ‘scholar’, he came up with the pseudonym he would use on the book, ‘N. W. Clerk’.

TO JOCELYN GIBB (BOD):

Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

25 Oct. 1960

Dear Gibb

Will you kindly send a copy of my Transposition etc,¹⁶⁹ with my compliments, to this correspondent?¹⁷⁰ Thanks for v. satisfactory cheque received the other day. You haven’t fixed our ‘Date’ in Cambridge yet.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO ELIZABETH BREWER (BBC):¹⁷¹

Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

26 Oct 1960

Dear Miss Brewer

I’m afraid not. As you probably know, a short talk (for some of us) takes longer to prepare than an ordinary lecture, and I couldn’t do it except by stealing time and energy from jobs I ought to do.

With thanks and regret.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO JILL BLACK (P):¹⁷²

Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

27 Oct. 1960

Dear Mrs. Black

I shall be happy to see you both. In term I spend my weeks here and my week-ends in Oxford: in Vacation I am in Oxford pretty well all the time. Perhaps you will suggest a date.

If I can do the monograph on G.M. at all, I can do it before the end of February.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE (W):

Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

28 Oct. 1960

Dear Mary Willis

Dear, dear, this is very distressing news. How many things have come upon you at once! As Coleridge says

–to be wroth with one we love

Doth work like madness in the brain.¹⁷³

It’s the mixture, or alternation, of resentment and affection that is so very uneasy, isn’t it? For the indulgence of either immediately comes slap up against the other, which then, a few seconds later comes slap up against it, so that the mind does a diabolical ‘shuttle-service’ to and fro between them. We’ve all at some time in our lives, I expect, had this experience. Except possibly anxiety nothing is more hostile to sleep. One must try, I suppose, to keep on remembering that the love part of the suffering is good and purgatorial while the anger part is bad and infernal. Yet how madly one cherishes that base part as if it were one’s dearest possession–dwells on everything that can aggravate the offence–and keeps on thinking of things one wd. like to say to the other party! I suppose all one can do is to keep on meditating on the petition ‘Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those that trespass against us’.¹⁷⁴

I find Fear a great help–the fear that my own unforgivingness will exclude me from all the promises. Fear tames wrath. And this fear (we have Our Lord’s word for it) is wholly well-grounded. The human heart (mine anyway) is ‘desperately wicked’.¹⁷⁵ Joy often quoted this in connection with the great difficulty she found in forgiving a v. near and v. nasty relative of her own. One has to keep on doing it over again, doesn’t one?

God send you help of every sort.

Yours

Jack

 

P.S.–It’s also useful to think ‘Either X [is or] is not so bad as, in my present anger, I think. If not, how unjust I must be. If so, how terribly X needs my prayers’

TO JOCELYN GIBB (BOD):

Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

28 Oct. 1960

Dear Gibb

Thanks v. much. I’ll expect you at 2:30 on Wed Nov 30.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO CECIL HARWOOD (BOD): PC

Magdalene

30 Oct [1960]

Thank you with all my heart. These reminders that we are not alone do, I find, do some good.

J.

TO NINA HOWELL STARR (W):¹⁷⁶

Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

1 Nov. 1960

Dear Nina

Thank you very much for the photos. I can’t judge the likeness to myself of course, but if I’ve come out as well as Nathan it must be very good. Your own absence from the group is much to be regretted. The consolation is that it makes it a Problem Picture. WHOSE WAS THE THIRD GLASS? might well be engineered into a Research question!¹⁷⁷ I may some day accept your most kind offer of a duplicate or so.

It was a delightful meeting and I hope there may be others. Love to both.

Yours

Jack

TO ROBIN ANSTEY (P):¹⁷⁸

Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

2 Nov. 1960

Dear Vice Principal

I am afraid I had no idea what of mine Clarke quoted on the jacket of Childhood’s End. Probably a bit written for that very purpose at his publisher’s request, I should say.¹⁷⁹

I hope you’ll write that survey. S.F.–however bad most of it is–is now the chief vehicle for ‘thoughts that wander up and down eternity’.¹⁸⁰ How trivial, by comparison, are most of the issues presented by our ‘serious’ novelists!

You probably know David Lindsay’s Voyage to Arcturus (Faber)? If not, don’t overlook it. This is the fullest example of what I mean–tho’ the message he is putting over is a v. horrible one–Schopenhauer if not Manes himself.

Thank you very much for your prayers for my wife. Add some for me.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO ALASTAIR FOWLER (BERG):

Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

4 Nov. 1960

Dear Fowler

Thanks for the offprints. The only one I’ve read is ‘Emblems of Temperance’¹⁸¹ but I had to do it in much haste. I shall be glad to have them all.

I don’t agree with Berger¹⁸² in the main but he did get into my head the truism (which I had never fully attended to before) that the characters in an allegory don’t know they’re in an allegory. They live in a wholly literal adventure. Obvious, but v. far-reaching. To Guyon the Mammon episode is just one more ‘strange adventure.’¹⁸³

I’ve read Hieatt in page-proof.¹⁸⁴ I can’t help suspecting it’s a mare’s nest.

The real philosophy of prayer is, I think, to be found in 2 Cor, all over it, where you [are] presented with a positive carnival of vicariousness. I’ll try to work this out some day but I haven’t time now.

What is the correct translation of ‘Venus selfe doth soly couples seeme’ in Colin Clouts Come Home Again (801)?¹⁸⁵

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO HSIN-CHANG CHANG (BOD):

As from Magdalene

6 Nov ’60

Dear Chang

Thank you very much. Mondays are always impossible for me. Would Thursday Nov 24th at 4.30 suit you? If so, it will give me great pleasure to come there.¹⁸⁶

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO ALASTAIR FOWLER (BERG):

As from Magdalene

6 Nov. 1960

Dear Fowler

I’m bothered about your interpretation of Brigador.¹⁸⁷ A horse may well symbolise passion. If Brigador bolted while being ridden by Guyon, and Guyon, after advice from the Palmer, learned how to manage him better, this wd. be a clear allegory. But what can be meant by having your passions stolen by someone else and then having to get on without them (symbolised by travelling on foot)? If Braggadochio’s main trouble were an inability to ride Brigador, we cd. still make out some sort of allegory: one man can manage Passion and another can’t. But is anything made of that except in XII. 53?–a point surely sufficiently accounted for by (a) the Ariosto passage–and (b) common observation of real saddle horses with unfamiliar riders.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO JILL BLACK (P):

As from Magdalene College,

Cambridge

6 Nov 1960

Dear Mrs. Black

I am ashamed of myself! I want to cry off. Please don’t imagine this has anything to do with the terms, which would fully have satisfied me. I have been looking through the other monographs and also thinking about my old preface to my G.M. Anthology. No good (even apart from copyright) in repeating that! And a new one of the sort you (quite rightly) want is, I find, not up my street at all. It needs a sort of quiet competence and reliability which I couldn’t achieve without more work than quite a big book would cost me. Sorry, but I must ask to be excused.

Yours (with his tail between his legs) C. S. Lewis

TO JANE DOUGLASS (W): TS

60/272

The Kilns, Kiln Lane,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford.

14th November 1960.

Dear Miss Douglass,

Many thanks for your letter of the 11th, and for your kind interest in my doings. I’m glad you enjoyed yourself in Boston, and would like to see those pictures; but I’m afraid a visit to America is at the moment an impossible pleasure.

I should think Wolff’s book will be frightful.¹⁸⁸

Yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis¹⁸⁹

TO JOCELYN GIBB (BOD):

As from Magdalene

Nov. 1960

Dear Gibb

Here is the portrait.¹⁹⁰ As long as the lines are preserved, I suppose the treatment can be different. I think bold black or red lines on a white or grey surface wd. be better than the present white on weak red.

Is there a copyright question? If so, no doubt you have already settled it with American Macmillans.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

 

In the legend I don’t care for Mr. after Excellency.¹⁹¹ If this can be altered without technical difficulties, wd. ‘His Infernal Excellency Under Secretary S’ be better? Or ‘Abysmal Sublimity’ etc as at the end of Letter XXII?¹⁹²

TO SARAH NEYLAN (W):

Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

21 Nov. 1960

My dear Sarah

A hundred thousand congratulations and blessings. I hope you will be very happy indeed.¹⁹³ The Lieutenant sounds all he ought to be–tho’ I rather regret the evolutionary process which has turned sea-dogs into salt horses!

I couldn’t come to the wedding, my dear. I haven’t the pluck. Any wedding, for the reason you know, would turn me inside out now–I send a little present. All blessings, and love to your mother and father.

Yours ever

C. S. Lewis

TO ALASTAIR FOWLER (BOD):

Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

22 Nov. 1960

Dear Fowler,

1. They have now sent me a copy of Hieatt’s book,¹⁹⁴ so it is no longer a breach of confidence to pass these page proofs on to you. I don’t want them back

2. I’ve been familiar all my life with that proverb in the form ‘Set a beggar on horseback’ etc.¹⁹⁵

3. F.Q. V.iii 22–4. Your interpretation wd. surely make things worse. Taking the scene literally, Guyon can perhaps be excused for standing by while his claim to ownership of the horse is put to the test. What else could he do? It would be much worse if the Knight of Self-Control stood and watched while his own unmastered passions broke other people’s ribs.

3. [4.] CCCHA 801¹⁹⁶ I was worried as to how solely acquired the form solly, and why, if S. meant ‘Venus is a couple’ he should say ‘Venus seems to be couples’. I suspect there is corruption. As for Venus’ hermaphroditism:

a. HHL 29–30¹⁹⁷ The generation of the Son is conceived as a kind of hermaphrodite self-fertilisation within the First Fair (the Father)

b. Nicolas Cusanus, De Docta Ignorantia I. xxv (Trans. not v. reliably by G. Heron. Routledge & K. Paul, 1954,¹⁹⁸ p. 57):

The Ancients called God both ‘Venus’ and ‘Nature’

God contains in Himself both sexes

Valerius Romanus (whoever he may be) calls God Jupiter pater and Jupiter mater¹⁹⁹

c. Origen. In Genesim I. 15 Ad imaginem Dei homo factus masculus et femina est.²⁰⁰

d. Apuleius Met xi. 2. Tu caelestis Venus quae primis rerum exordiis sexuum diversitatem generato Amore sociasti²⁰¹hellip;she must have produced Amor himself hermaphroditically

I’m not doing this only to show off, but also because I think you are in some danger of

a. Of assuming that all the figures are ethical, or at least psychological, allegories, so that you seek in Venus an image of how we feel or act when we are in love. I don’t think that is the right line here. V. is cosmic or metaphysical allegory.

b. Of refining on the allegory of the particular story at each moment to the neglect of the general iconographical, emblematic, and philosophical elements.

4. [5.] I’ve just finished a long notice of Ellrodt’s book for the Revue Anglaise.²⁰² As it may be ages before they print it, I’ll send you a carbon as soon as it’s typed, if you think it would be any use to you.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE (W):

Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

24 Nov 1960

Dear Mary Willis

Thanks for your letter of the 20th. About forgetting things, Dr. Johnson said ‘If, on leaving the company, a young man cannot remember where he has left his hat, it is nothing. But when an old man forgets, everyone says, Ah, his memory is going.’²⁰³ So with ourselves. We have always been forgetting things: but now, when we do so, we attribute it to our age. Why, it was years ago that, on finishing my work before lunch, I stopped myself only just in time from putting my cigarette-end into my spectacle case and throwing my spectacles into the fire!

What I was writing about last time was the pain and resentment you were feeling about some thing your daughter had said or done. I wasn’t trying to lecture. Rather, to compare notes about temptation we all have to contend with.

There, by the way, is a sentence ending with a preposition. The silly ‘rule’ against it was invented by Dryden.²⁰⁴ I think he disliked it only because you can’t do it in either French or Latin which he thought more ‘polite’ languages than English.

As for the bug-bear of Old Peoples’ Homes, remember that our ignorance works both ways. Just as some of the things we have longed & hoped for turn out to be dust and ashes when we get them, so the things we have most dreaded sometimes turn out to be quite nice. If you ever do have to go to a Home, Christ will be there just as much as in any other place.

The bit of conversation with your daughter which you quoted sounds as if there were nothing much wrong on either side but nerves. But I admit I don’t know the cure. Slowing down the speed of the conversation (so far as this depends on oneself) is sometimes helpful. Also sitting down. I think we all talk more excitedly when standing (Notice how often the actors in a comedy sit whereas those in a tragedy usually stand)

All blessings,

Yours

Jack

TO MEREDITH LEE (W):

As from Magdalene College,

Cambridge

6 Dec. 1960

Dear Miss Lee, 1. Why did I become a writer? Chiefly, I think, because my clumsiness of fingers prevented me from making things in any other way. See my Surprised by Joy, chapter I.²⁰⁵

2. What ‘inspires’ my books? Really, I don’t know. Does anyone know where, exactly, an idea comes from? With me all fiction begins with pictures in my head. But where the pictures come from I couldn’t say.

3. Which of my books do I think most ‘representational’? Do you mean (a.) Most representative, most typical, most characteristic? Or (b.) Most full of ‘representations’ i.e. images. But whichever you mean, surely this is a question not for me but for my readers to decide. Or do you mean simply which do I like best? If so, the answer wd. be Till We Have Faces and Perelandra.

4. I have, as usual, dozens of ‘plans’ for books, but I don’t know which, if any, of these will come off. Very often a book of mine gets written when I’m tidying a drawer and come across notes for a plan rejected by me years ago, and now suddenly realise I can do it after all. This, you see, makes predictions rather difficult!

5. I enjoy writing fiction more than writing anything else. Wouldn’t anyone?

Good luck with your ‘project’.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO JOCELYN GIBB (BOD): TS

60/59

The Kilns, Kiln Lane,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford.

8th December 1960.

Dear Jock,

Right. But I did’nt write the Milton article in the T.L.S.²⁰⁶ It would be hard to prevent Mr Skill from just being Screwtape in reverse.²⁰⁷ But I’ll chew the idea again.

Yours,

Jack

TO ROGER LANCELYN GREEN (BOD):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

10 Dec. 1960

My dear Roger

No. I never heard that rhyme in my life. I enjoyed Winy ille Pooh.²⁰⁸ Could anyone but an Englishman have conceived a Latin version of a children’s book in such extremely advanced Latin that only an adult could possibly read it? I like that absurdity.

Happy Christmas to all.

Yours

Jack

TO BELLE AND EDWARD A. ALLEN (W): TS

The Kilns, Kiln Lane,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford. 10th December 1960.

Dear Allens both,

Very shabbily, we are about to fob you off with one answer for two letters–that which Belle sent to Warren a few days since, and Ed’s to Jack dated 5th. But it is not so unfair as it sounds, for not only are we both ‘snowed under’ at this time of year, but also there is nothing to say to one of you which can’t be said to the other.

Yes, it is always sad to see places like your blackberry hunting grounds turned into building estates, and it depresses us more and more every time we revisit our native Ulster; for example, the quiet semi-rural suburb in which our grandparents used to live on the shores of Belfast Lough is now having the foreshore dredged out as a preliminary to turning it into a deep water harbour with an oil refinery back of it. And I remember it as an area of big solid Victorian houses, each standing in 2–3 acres of garden.²⁰⁹

I liked the holiday photos and envied you your sunshine; we alas had not any at all here, and we are not being compensated in the autumn. Unless you call it compensation to be living through an all-time record. Our county has had the wettest and dullest autumn for 145 years–since Waterloo in fact–and we are by no means the worst off district; down in Devon and Cornwall, also on the Welsh border, the unfortunate people have been flooded out twice in five weeks, losing of course most of their clothes and furniture twice over. True, they will get government compensation, but when? And anyway many must have lost things of sentimental value which no compensation can make good.

So you too have the Christmas racket do you? Well you have all our sympathies, for here it has got to such a point that by the time the real festival takes place one is often too jaded to enjoy it. We were in hopes that we would escape much of it this year, because the postmen had decided to hold up the country by putting on a strike ten days before the 25th Decr. But this now seems to be off. We could’nt agree more with you about the madness of the atomic bomb, but what can one do? The Labour folk over here claim that ‘unilateral disarmament’ is the solution, but this seems to me simply an invitation to the Russians to go ahead with world conquest. What the answer may be, no one knows, but Warren says that the best guarantee of peace is what happened at the end of the last war–we established the precedent that the winners put the leaders of the losing powers to death, after making retrospective laws of which no one had previously heard. He says that any group of statesmen will think twice about making the first move when the stakes are their own necks. There may be something in this. Apropos, I should like to have heard what the Japanese Warren had to say.

With all blessings for a happy celebration of the real Christmas, and good wishes for 1961,

yours ever to both,

Warren & Jack Lewis

TO MABEL DREW (BOD):

As from Magdalene College,

Cambridge

16 Dec 1960

Dear Miss Drew

Thanks for your kind and encouraging letter. I think I know exactly what you mean.²¹⁰ Fewer things are more exciting than the discovery that there are, after all, other people in the world who have met what we ourselves have met. I am gradually finding out, largely through letters from people I’ve never seen, that there are really quite a lot of us! It is not only fun: it also heads one off from feeling either ashamed or conceited about the thing we have in common. We’re not, either for better or for worse, so exceptional as we supposed. Thank God!

With all good wishes.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO JILL FREUD (T): TS

The Kilns, Kilns Lane,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford.

22nd December 1960.

My dear June,

How very nice to hear from you again, and in the form of such a welcome present–one to which can really be applied the much abused word seasonable, which meets me at every turn in this regrettable season of the year. (I’m not of course referring to Christmas, but to the commercial racket which Warnie and I call Xmas to distinguish it from the Christian festival). Indeed we shall not put the bottles away and forget them, probably not until next July at any rate.

What a man of parts Clé is! That he should write cooking articles, and also the odd story does not surprise me, but I confess I had’nt seen him in the role of ‘our Sports Correspondent’. Warnie and I are such old fogies now that neither of us is clear as to what a ‘commercial’ is; are you one of the people who interrupts the programme to explain that all sensible house-wives use FOAM, DAZ or whatnot?

Yes indeed, we could do more than ‘stand’ a Freud invasion, we could and will welcome it; and as for who you bring, that is rather a matter for you than for us. My term begins on 17th January, so don’t come on Sunday 22nd; but any Sunday after that you would be more than welcome. Let us know what Sunday you select, in time for Mrs Miller to order a fatted calf.

With love and best wishes to you all,

yours ever,

Jack

TO FATHER PETER MILWARD SJ (W):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

24 Dec. 60

Dear Father Milward

Greetings and good wishes, but I’m afraid I can’t touch the question of the Grail, or anything else, at the moment. This is the worst possible time of year for getting a letter out of me. The ruthless, almost unbroken rain of letters, cards, and presents, destroying all leisure, and all work, almost obliterates the Christian festival. I dread this vast (and largely commercialised) nuisance more every year. Ugh!

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO JOAN LANCASTER (BOD): TS

The Kilns, Kiln Lane,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford.

26th December 1960.

Dear Joan,

How very nice to hear from you again; and though I’m too late to wish you a merry Christmas, I can at least hope that you will have a happy 1961. Glad to know you’ve managed to get hold of a copy of The Conquered.²¹¹

I suppose down in Florida you are living under almost summer conditions; here it is dull, wet, and warm–worst fall for 145 years in this part of the world!

With all best wishes,

yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis