1961 

The paperback edition of Reflections on the Psalms was published by Fontana Books of London on 2 January 1961.

TO DON LUIGI PEDROLLO (V):

Collegium Stae Mariae Magdalensis

apud Cantabrigienses

Anglia

iii Jan. MCMLXI

Gratias tibi ago, mi pater, pro amicabili epistola et te tuosque in his beatissimis festis saluto.

Vellem me posse ad te mittere exemplaria epistolarum quas scripsit Ven. Pater D. Ioannes Calabria. Sed neque ipsas epistolas neque exemplaria habeo. Moris est mei omnes epistolas post biduum ignibus dare. Non, mi crede, quia nullo pretio illas aestimo; immo quia res saepe sacro dignas silentio posteris legendas relinquere nolo. Nunc enim curiosi scrutatores omnia nostra effodiunt et veneno ‘publicitatis’ (ut rem barbaram verbo barbaro nominem) aspergunt. Quod fieri minime vellem de Patris Joannis epistolis. Admirabilis ille vir, aliis mitissimus idemque sibi severissimus vel saevissimus, humilitate et quadam sancta imprudentià multa scripsit quae tacenda puto. Hanc meam apologiam vellem curialibus verbis Patri Mondrone patefacias.

Multo gaudemus de recenti colloquio inter Sanctum Patrem et nostrum Archiepiscopum. Dominus corroboret bonum omen.

Uxor mea mense Jul. mortem obiit. Pro illa et me orationes reduplica. Tu et domus tua semper in meis sunt. Vale

C. S. Lewis

 

The College of St Mary Magdalene

Cambridge

England

3 January 1961

I thank you, my Father, for your friendly letter, and I greet you and yours on this most blessed festival.

I wish I could send you copies of the letters which the Venerable Father Don John Calabria wrote. But I have neither the letters themselves nor copies of them. It is my practice to consign to the flames all letters after two days–not, believe me, because I esteem them of no value, rather because I do not wish to relinquish things often worthy of sacred silence to subsequent reading by posterity.

For nowadays inquisitive researchers dig out all our affairs and besmirch them with the poison of ‘publicity’ (as a barbarous thing I am giving it a barbarous name).

This is the last thing I would wish to happen to the letters of Father John.

That admirable man, to others most lenient but to himself most severe, not to say savage, out of humility and with a certain holy imprudence wrote many things which I think should be kept quiet. If you would politely convey this explanation of mine to Father Mondrone,¹ I would be grateful.

We greatly rejoice at the recent meeting between the Holy Father and our Archbishop.² May the Lord confirm this happy omen.

My wife died in the month of July. For her and for me redouble your prayers. You and your House are ever in mine.

Farewell

C. S. Lewis

TO K. C. THOMPSON (W):

The Kilns.

5 Jan. 1961

Dear Mr. Thompson

Thank you very much for so handsome a gift as the Penna–Thompson St. Paul.³ It is intriguing to meet a real ‘recension’,⁴ I mean a work which has actually had the sort of history which higher critics attribute to nearly all ancient texts! I didn’t believe it ever happened in real life. I have already begun it and believe I shall get a great deal out of it. All that on p. 20 about St. Paul’s cool use of O.T. language to say almost the opposite of what O.T. really said is most illuminating.

I expect you were wise to use the knife–the Italian type of piety is often very uncongenial to us Northerners, isn’t it? The R.C. clinging to archaic mispellings of names is rather absurd. No more absurd, though, than what I’m fighting against on the Commission for revising the Coverdale Psalter–I mean, the impulse to retain what we know to be mere howlers because they are ‘so beautiful’.

I seldom notice misprints in other people’s books and never in my own.

My brother joins me in all good wishes for 1961 to Mrs. Thompson and yourself.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO ANNE THOMAS (W):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

5 Jan 1961

Dear Miss Thomas

I agree with you. The boy and young man depicted in Surprised by Joy was a very self-centred PRIG. I had thought there were indications in the book of some Love: for my mother, my nurse, my brother, the Mountbracken family, the Matron at Chartres, Arthur, Kirk, Johnson, Jenkin, Barfield and Harwood.⁵ Not even these? Well, more’s the pity. Let’s hope I’m better now.

The great love of my life, and my marriage, are not mentioned in the book because they happened after it was written, and long after the period it dealt with. The real explanations of things are often as simple as that!

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO ALASTAIR FOWLER (BERG):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

7 Jan 61

Dear Fowler

I don’t think there’s anything ‘presumptuous’ in applying for a chair: the question is whether it is prudent. I think it is possible to do oneself harm by a series of unsuccessful applications–by getting oneself known as, so to speak, a ‘chronic candidate’. But this need not be the first of a series and it might be successful.

Most boards of electors are conventional and will be guided by ‘experience’, seniority, and bulk of published work. An exceptionally bold board might, however, be guided by the support you will clearly be getting from Kinsley⁶ and me. I wonder who they are. If Leavisites, of course K. and I wd. be your undoing! Even if not, I have an uneasy suspicion that I have the reputation of being one whose geese are all swans. Possibly K. knows whether this is so or not. Net result: my advice comes to zero. There are arguments for both courses.

I haven’t enough books here to give you the loci classici⁷ for the 2 fortunae,⁸ but will try to do so next term.

There’s no doubt about Sol providing calor.⁹ The question is whether a figure lying in a dark grove, hidden from the Sun, can be Sol. Keep the carbon as long as it is convenient.

Perhaps I shd. add that in my opinion you wd. fill the Exeter Chair v. well, and I’ll tell ’em so if I’m asked.

In confidence. If you were asked to nominate a candidate for the Nobel Prize (literature) who wd. be your choice? Mauriac has had it.¹⁰ Frost? Eliot? Tolkien? E. M. Forster? Do you know the ideological slant (if any) of the Swedish Academy?¹¹ Keep this all under your hat.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE (W):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

9 Jan ’61

Dear Mary Willis

I don’t feel at all ‘wise’ and the only bit of advice I can give you with perfect confidence is–don’t sit up writing long letters either to me or to anyone else when you are tired! It is very bad for you. Now as to the main issue.

Whatever you decide to do, get your own attitude right. They are behaving as if they were penitent and wished to make restitution. Their penitence may no doubt be v. imperfect and their motives v. mixed. But so are all our repentances and all our motives. Accept theirs as you hope God will accept yours. Remember that He has promised to forgive you as, and only as, you forgive them.

The decision, however, remains, I agree, a terrible one to make, and only someone who really knew you and Don and Lorraine–I have met none of the three–is really qualified to give you advice. Is it not possible to give their plan a trial run, with the understanding on both sides that after 6 months or a year it can be continued or discontinued and ‘no offence’? Of course this wd. involve giving up a great deal, including your cat. But I’m afraid as we grow older life consists more and more in either giving up things or waiting for them to be taken from us.

As you rightly see, to become a member of their household wd. involve a severe and continual self-suppression. You wd. have to be silent about many things when you longed to speak. But the alternative is also bad.

Is it not impossible to predict which way will give you less unhappiness? Isn’t one therefore thrown back on asking which will be best for the others? But how to decide that I don’t know.

The only certain thing is that your acceptance (if you accept) or your refusal (if you refuse) must be made with perfect charity and courtesy. May God’s grace give you the necessary humility. Try not to think–much less, speak–of their sins. One’s own are a much more profitable theme! And if, on consideration, one can find no faults on one’s own side, then cry for mercy: for this must be a most dangerous delusion. Incidentally, I can’t help feeling that you shd. take L’s account of D. with a grain of salt. On your own showing she can’t be an easy woman to live with and there is usually something to be said on both sides.

Well, I’m afraid all this comes to precious little. But I don’t, and can’t know enough. I can only pray that you may be guided to the right choice. It is (no disguising it) only a choice between Crosses. The more one can accept that fact, the less one can think about happiness on earth, the less, I believe, one suffers. Or at any rate the suffering becomes more purgatorial and less infernal.

Yours

Jack

TO JOCELYN GIBB (BOD): TS

65/61

The Kilns, Kiln Lane,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford.

10th January 1961.

Dear Jock,

Many thanks for the two copies of Reflections on the Psalms which arrived this morning.

All the best.

Yours,

Jack

TO DONOVAN AYLARD (W):

As from Magdalene College,

Cambridge

10 Jan. 1960 [1961]

Dear Mr. Aylard

My wife died in July, so my married life was very short; it surpassed in happiness all the rest of my life. You’ll find anything I have to say about marriage in my The Four Loves.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO CLYDE S. KILBY (W):

As from Magdalene College,

Cambridge

11 Jan 1961

Dear Mr. Kilby

My critic follows the utterly illogical principle that what a man does not say, he denies.¹² If I had any hesitation in saying that God ‘made’ the Tao¹³ it wd. only be because that might suggest that it was an arbitrary creation (sic volo sic jubeo):¹⁴ whereas I believe it to be the necessary expression, in terms of temporal existence, of what God by His own righteous nature necessarily is. One cd. indeed say of it genitum, non factum:¹⁵ for is not the Tao the Word Himself, considered from a particular point of view? I abstained from all this in the Abolition because I was there trying to write ethics, not theology.

Thank you for your sympathy and still more for your prayers.

Yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

 

P.S.

1. In other words, I think (with Hooker)¹⁶ not that certain things are right because God commanded them, but that God commanded them because they are right.¹⁷

2. If you care to use this letter as the basis for a letter to the W.T.J., you are very welcome to do so.

TO K. C. THOMPSON (W):¹⁸ PC

11 Jan [1961]

I dare say even a howler may be inspired and blessed. But surely a howler made in good faith? I don’t think a commission, appointed by the Arch b. to correct Coverdale, and preserving what they knew to be a mistranslation, cd. claim that inspiration or expect that blessing. Wd. this not be ‘to offer unto the Author of truth the unclean sacrifice of a lie’?

C.S.L.

TO HELEN ADOLF (W):¹⁹ TS

75/61

The Kilns, Kiln Lane,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford.

12th January 1961.

Dear Miss Adolf,

Many thanks for so kindly sending me your VISIO PACIS,²⁰ which I look forward to reading.

With all good wishes,

yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO JOHN GAWSWORTH (TEX):²¹

Magdalene College,

Cambridge

17 Jan. 1960 [1961]

Dear Sir

I am sorry, and perhaps I ought to be ashamed, to say that I am not familiar with the work of Philip Lindsay.²² That being so, I feel that to sign your appeal would be to make a suggestio falsi.²³ It might be kind but it would not be quite honest. I am sorry to be in this position.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO JILL FREUD (P): TS

The Kilns,

Kiln Lane,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford.

18th January 1961.

My dear June,

Many thanks for your letter, and we are both delighted to hear that a Freud descent on the Kilns may be anticipated. Of the two dates you offer, 29 Jan would be most suitable for me.

I hope you all had a good time in Suffolk.

Yours ever,

Jack

TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W):

Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

25/1/61

My dear Arthur

Thanks for noting misprint–I’m v. bad at spotting them.²⁴

I do hope you’ll risk a few days with us when you are in England. We do now have a decent spare room with a double bed nearly as broad as it’s long. Or, if it is in term time, this college has a good guest suite, sitting room as well as bedroom (with TV) and you can have breakfast in it by yourself unshaved at any hour you like. Do.

Yours

Jack

 

Lewis had contributed the following short article to the mimeographed Cambridge Broadsheet of 9 March 1960:

The faults I find in contemporary undergraduate criticism are these: (1) In adverse criticism their tone is that of personal resentment. They are more anxious to wound the author than to inform the reader. Adverse criticism should diagnose and exhibit faults, not abuse them. (2) They are far too ready to advance or accept radical reinterpretations of works which have already been before the world for several generations. The prima facie improbability that those have never till now been understood is ignored. (3) Most European literature was composed for adult readers who knew the Bible and the Classics. It is not the modern student’s fault that he lacks this background; but he is insufficiently aware of his lack and of the necessity for extreme caution which it imposes on him. He should think twice before discovering ‘irony’ in passages which everyone has hitherto taken ‘straight’. (4) He approaches literature with the wrong kind of seriousness. He uses as a substitute for religion or philosophy or psychotherapy works which were intended as divertissements. The nature of the comic is a subject for serious consideration; but one needs to have seen the joke and taken it as a joke first. Of course none of these critical vices are peculiar to undergraduates. They imitate that which, in their elders, has far less excuse.

A long article entitled ‘Professor C. S. Lewis and the English Faculty’ subsequently appeared in the student publication, Delta: The Cambridge Literary Magazine.²⁵ It was followed by this letter from Lewis:

TO THE EDITORS OF DELTA: THE CAMBRIDGE LITERARY MAGAZINE:²⁶

Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

Sirs,

You have invited me to comment on your article in No. 22. I am hampered by the fact that I have kept no copy of my own article in Broadsheet and do not remember it very well, so that I have to rely chiefly on your quotations from it; but I will do what I can.

1. ‘Radical interpretation’, I agree, is bosh.²⁷ But the text is corrupt. It is either my slip of the pen or a printer’s error for ‘radical reinterpretations’. My objection to them is not that they are ‘impertinent’ but that they are, in my opinion, immensely improbable.

2. The complaint that many modern undergraduates know the Bible and the Classics so little that they miss many allusions and conscious echoes is a very old one. I have seldom, if ever, heard it contested among those who have had a wide experience of undergraduate work over the last thirty years. I said, apparently, that ‘most’ European literature presupposed the Biblical and Classical background. There are, as you justly claim, some works and parts of works that do not. What is this in the purpose?²⁸

3. From what premises you draw the ‘conclusion’ that I am ‘also insisting on a background of feeling and attitude’²⁹ you don’t tell me. I am curious to hear them.

4. I am glad you ask ‘what is the wrong kind of seriousness’.³⁰ The word serious has two meanings. It can mean something like ‘grave’ or ‘solemn’, as when we say ‘Mr. Twiddle is a very serious young man.’ It may also mean ‘thoroughgoing’ or ‘wholehearted’, as when we say ‘Mr. Thews is a serious student.’ Mr. Twiddle, far from being a serious student, may be an idler and a smatterer; Mr. Thews, far from being a solemn young man, may be gay and jocund. Seriousness in the second sense seems to me proper in our approach to all literature; seriousness in the first sense, only to some. I heard lately a paper on Jane Austen by an undergraduate from which nobody, unless he knew it already, could possibly have suspected that there was any element of comedy in her books. That is what I mean by the wrong sort of seriousness.

5. I freely admit that when I wrote for Broadsheet it never entered my head that I ought to attend exclusively, or even especially, to such undergraduate criticisms as have appeared in print. I assumed I was to draw on my experience as a teacher, an examiner, and one who meets undergraduates. I still do not see what advantage there would have been in the other course. If what gets into undergraduate periodicals were strikingly better or worse, or strikingly different in any way, from what is offered in weekly essays and examinations, it ought, no doubt, to be treated separately, though not exclusively. But I am not convinced that it does. Certainly I cannot remember having often seen work in any such periodical which I thought equal to the best that is done by first class candidates in the examination room.

6. Drawing thus on my total experience of the undergraduate as critic, I did not support my censure with quotation. But on one point, fortunately, your article provides me with the very thing. I complained that the tone of undergraduate criticism was too often ‘that of passionate resentment’. You illustrate this admirably by accusing me of ‘Pecksniffian disingenuousness’, ‘shabby bluff’ and ‘self-righteousness’.³¹ Do not misunderstand. I am not in the least deprecating your insults; I have enjoyed these twenty years l’honneur d’etre une cible³² and am now pachydermatous. I am not even rebuking your bad manners; I am not Mr. Turveydrop and ‘gentlemanly deportment’³³ is not a subject I am paid to teach. What shocks me is that students, academics, men of letters, should display what I had thought was an essentially uneducated inability to differentiate between a disputation and a quarrel. The real objection to this sort of thing is that it is all a distraction from the issue. You waste on calling me liar and hypocrite time you ought to have spent on refuting my position. Even if your main purpose was to gratify resentment, you have gone about it the wrong way. Any man would much rather be called names than proved wrong.

7. I do not understand why you think it so improper of me to say that you have learned some of your faults from your elders. This rather condones than aggravates your offence. Do you yourself not admit, in a cool hour, that you have been influenced by them? Will you not admit, even as a theoretical possibility, that you may have imitated those elements in their work which least deserve imitation? Alexander’s courtiers, you remember, imitated the droop of his shoulder rather than his strategy.³⁴ It was easier. It is not difficult, least of all when you are angry, to write as harshly as Dr. Leavis. But don’t think that will ever make you of the same importance.

8. You accuse me of contempt for undergraduates.³⁵ Why? I have used of them no such opprobrious terms as you lavish on me. I gave an unfavourable opinion of their critical work. To tell a young man that his work is in many ways bad is not contempt; especially when one’s opinion has been asked for. It is often a plain duty. If I had been given to understand when I was asked for an opinion that I was really expected to produce a eulogy, I would have refused the job.

If you think that your work has no faults, ‘I entreat you to believe that you may be mistaken’.³⁶ If you think it has any you must learn to listen with patience to those who attempt their diagnosis. If you don’t learn to do that, you can never learn anything else.

No doubt the diagnostician may be in error; so may the patient. But there are reasons (which you at any rate should meditate) for thinking that error in the patient is a priori more probable. Self-love is involved on both sides, for each cherishes his own opinion. But it is doubly involved on the patient’s side. To believe that you have such and such faults does not flatter my vanity; to believe that you have them not, flatters yours. I have another advantage over you. For thirty-six years at two different universities I have had to read a great deal of undergraduate criticism. I thus inevitably have a standard of comparison which you, no less inevitably, lack. You may overestimate the value of your own work not through conceit but because you have seen so little really good work on the undergraduate level. A man who reckons himself tall in Japan might change his view if he visited Patagonia or even Norway.

The anger my article so clearly aroused in you is a symptom which both you and your teachers will do well to note. There was, I believe, little or no novelty in my strictures. These things are often said about you; it seems they have too seldom been said to you. You appear to be young people who have been so long shielded and softened by flattery that they can no longer bear unexpurgated criticism.

9. The syllabus has been under continual discussion by the Faculty ever since I joined it. And not only by the Faculty; advice (not always foolish) from our pupils as to what we should teach them and how, has never been lacking. It is not, however, likely that the advice of any particular undergraduate group will make so much difference as that group would wish. You, I feel sure, will attribute our disobedience to ‘contempt’, or even to some more sinister motive. You will be mistaken.

The Faculty is a democracy. The most diverse conceptions of English meet and contend there. Almost every undergraduate conception is already represented on it. Because it is a democracy, no one conception is likely to secure a complete victory. Compromise is inevitable.

If (which heaven forbid) we were a dictatorship you could have a consistent scheme expressing a single conception. But this would be something narrower than a school of English. It would once have been a school of Q-ism;³⁷ it might now be one of Leavisism or Willeyism, or even Lewisism. None of these would please all. Each of them would inflict far more serious hardships and frustrations on some students than are inflicted on any now.

Those very conceptions of English studies which you now cherish were able to emerge and colour the syllabus just because the school has been a free-for-all. You inherit a freedom which you would deny to your successors.

For you are not the only kind of undergraduates. From the very nature of our job we know more about undergraduates in general than you do. Your intercourse with your fellow-students is mainly voluntary; you therefore, naturally and properly, meet mostly men of your own kidney. But we have to meet whoever comes. We know, and must take into account, the sort of students you never heard of. Their needs and desires often differ from yours; so do their talents; not always, by any means, for the worse.

10. For Research as practised at this and other universities to-day I make no defence. I detest it.³⁸

Yours, etc.,

C. S. Lewis

 

P.S.–On p. 8, para. 3, l. 5, Delta 22, for these critical views read these critical vices.

TO ROGER LANCELYN GREEN (BOD):

Magdalene

1 Feb 1961

My dear Roger

Thanks for the dream. It is the only one in real life I’ve ever met which is really like the ones in the books on psychology! An absolute stunner. I suppose you had never read Freud when you dreamed it?

Thanks also to both of you for your kind suggestions about a holiday and your offer to facilitate it.³⁹ As usual, I’ve asked other people too and must try to find out how far they’ve taken the matter before I can close with any one. I’ll try to get this fixed next week-end and let you know.

Love and gratitude.

Yours

Jack

TO JOCELYN GIBB (BOD):

Magdalene College,

Cambridge

2 Feb. 1961

Dear Jock

I’ve not additions to make, but one subtraction. Delete Cambridge Review.⁴⁰ It’s mainly in the hands of Leavisites⁴¹ who will blackguard any book of mine, and I don’t know why we should let them have a free copy for their sport!

I met a friend of yours the other night–Lord Delisle.⁴² There’s a chap if you like it!

Yours

Jack

TO THOMAS MCALINDON (W):⁴³

Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

5 Feb. 1961

Dear McAlindon

Deo gratias. As you are the first D.Phil student I’ve had at Cambridge (except one wh. dropped off!) my pleasure and relief are probably not much less than yours. I’d certainly like to see that last chapter, at your convenience. Now you can breathe.

I also look forward to the real book. I still think ‘the Marvellous’ is a better category than ‘the Supernatural’. It is already sanctioned by Neo-Classical criticism–indeed ever since Tasso’s Discourse⁴⁴–and it evades theological complications about super–and preter.

I can’t tell you how glad I am not only that you have succeeded but also that you feel it has been worth while. I was frequently haunted by the fear that I had seduced you into the subject because it is a favourite of my own–possibly to your undoing. Well, good-bye to that worry.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO MARY VAN DEUSEN (W):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

13 Feb 1961

Dear Mrs. Van Deusen

I am very glad to hear you are all so well.

There are, as you know, two schools of Existentialists, one anti-religious and one religious. I know the anti-religious school only through one work: Sartre’s L’Existentialisme est un Humanisme. I learned from it one important thing–that S. as an artist in French prose has a sort of wintry grandeur which partly explains his immense influence. I couldn’t see that he was a real philosopher: but he is a great rhetorician.

The religious school I know only from having heard a lecture by Gabriel Marcel⁴⁵ and reading (in English) Martin Buber’s I and Thou. They both say almost exactly the same things, though I believe they reached their common position quite independently. (As a man, Marcel was a perfect old dear). And what they are saying is impressive–as a mood, an aperue, a subject for a poem. But I didn’t feel it really worked out as a philosophy.

I had been classifying Tillich more as an interpreter of the Bible than as a philosopher. I dare say you are right in thinking that, for some people at some moments, what I call semi-Christians may be useful. After all, the road in to the city and the road out of it are usually the same road: it depends which direction one travels in!

At the back of the religious Existentialists lies Kierkegaard. They all revere him as their pioneer. Have you read him? I haven’t, or hardly at all.

Thanks for all your news. We get along fairly well. Blessings to everyone,

Yours most sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO HUGH KILMER (W):

Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

15 Feb. 1961

Dear Kilmer

If I had time to re-read my own book (by now a pretty old one) I’d be able to answer you better, meanwhile:

1. Can we assume that whatever is true of the glorified body of our Lord is equally true of the glorified body of each Christian?⁴⁶ I doubt it. His natural body did not undergo dissolution.

2. I don’t quite accept the implication of your phrase ‘restricted by external quantity’, for restriction suggests imperfection. But to be in one place (or therefore not in another) seems to me possibly part of the perfection of a finite creature–as it belongs to the perfection of a statue to end where it does or of a musical note to be just so loud (neither more or less) or of a metrical verse.

3. I am not at all sure that blessed souls have a strictly timeless being (a totum simul)⁴⁷ like God. Don’t some theologians interpose aevum⁴⁸ as a half-way house between tempus & aeternitas.⁴⁹

In general, I incline to think that tho’ the blessed will participate in the Divine Nature, they will do so always in a mode which does not simply annihilate their humanity. Otherwise it is difficult to see why the species was created at all.

Of course I’m only guessing.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO HUGH KILMER (W):

As from Magdalene College,

Cambridge

17 Feb. 1961

Dear Kilmer

I was so interested in the questions your last letter raised that I forgot two things I meant to say in my answer.

1. Deep sympathy on the diabetes, and thank God for insulin.

2. An appeal for your charity.⁵⁰ Mrs. M. W. Shelburne, 1851 Columbia Rd., N.W., Apt. 104, Washington 9 D.C., is a lame duck with whom I have corresponded for many years. She is a R.C.–and, I fear from her letters, a very silly, tiresome, and probably disagreeable woman. But she is old, poor, sick, lonely, and miserable. I have done, and am doing, what I can for her with advice and a little money. But a little help and friendship from co-religionists on the spot is badly needed. Could you, or anyone in your circle–perhaps a really nice Nun–get in touch with her and lend a hand?

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO ERIC ROUTLEY (W):⁵¹

Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

17 Feb. 1961

Dear Mr. Routley

Thank you for your extremely interesting letter. The word I am working on at present is World,⁵² wh. the A.V. uses impartially for aion, ge, kosmos and oikoumene–so I was already concerned with A.V. It was slightly archaic English when it first appeared, for it retained a good deal of Tyndale. It was also influenced by Vulgate, Ximenes, Erasmus, Rheims etc.⁵³ and (for O.T.) by LXX.⁵⁴

I Cor XI 14⁵⁵ is frightful in every way. The difficulty about N.T. language is that the authors are all linguistically living from hand to mouth. The koine,⁵⁶ I take it, was a language in which no one prayed, joked, made love, or thought–a neutralised, internationalised language for business and government: cut off equally from the fireside and the library. St Paul wd. have meant by phusis⁵⁷ whatever shopkeepers, soldiers, and minor officials meant by it in Antioch or Damascus: or else, possibly, what the synagogues in the diaspora⁵⁸ made it mean as a rough equivalent for some Semitic word. Isn’t it quite possible that ‘Doesn’t even phusis tell you’ means little more than ‘Hang it, don’t we all spontaneously feel?’

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO MRS MORLEY (P): TS

165/61

The Kilns, Kiln Lane,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford.

18th February 1961.

Dear Mrs Morley,

Many thanks for your kind and encouraging letter of the 6th. I need hardly say that it gives me real pleasure to hear that anything I have written has been of some service to you.

With all good wishes.

yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis⁵⁹

TO ALFRED R. PAASHAUS (P):⁶⁰ TS

168/6

The Kilns, Kiln Lane,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford.

23 February 1961.

Dear Mr Paashaus,

Thank you for your letter of the 15th. The answer is Freud in The Future of an Illusion.⁶¹ See B. G. Saunders’ Christianity after Freud, Bles, London, 1949.⁶²

Yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE (W):

Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

24 Feb. 1961

Dear Mary Willis

I am very glad you have made the decision and I believe it is the right one. I realise that you are taking on a very different life, which will involve much frustration, self-effacement, and patience. There will be every opportunity and necessity of mortifying the ‘highly developed pride’ diagnosed by the grapho-analyst! There will have to be plenty of ‘turning back’ and ‘change of purpose’–except, to be sure, the constant and prayerful purpose of continual sacrifice. The great thing is that you realise all that, and as the comic beatitude says ‘Blessed are they that expect little for they shall not be disappointed.’ I hope and pray you will be able to do them some good, but probably if you do, it will not be by any voluntary and conscious actions. Your prayers for them will be more use. Probably the safe rule will be ‘When in doubt what to do or say, do or say nothing.’ I feel this very much with my stepsons. I so easily meddle and gas: when all the time what will really influence them, for good or ill, is not anything I do or say but what I am. And this unfortunately one can’t know and can’t much alter, though God can. Two rules from Wm. Law must be always in our minds.

1. ‘There can be no surer proof of a confirmed pride than a belief that one is sufficiently humble.’⁶³

2. ‘I earnestly beseech all who conceive they have suffered an affront to believe that it is very much less than they suppose.’

I hope your vet is not a charlatan? Psychological diagnoses even about human patients seem to me pretty phoney. They must be even phonier when applied to animals. You can’t put a cat on a couch and make it tell you its dreams or produce words by ‘free association’. Also–I have a great respect for cats–they are very shrewd people and wd. probably see through the analyst a good deal better than he’d see through them.

Remember me kindly to Fr. D’Arcy.

Jobs bunch oddly in my profession and for the last fortnight I have been so busy as hardly to know whether I’m on my head or my heels and am very tired. Otherwise well enough. We keep on having spring and winter alternately, and however few or many blankets one starts the night with one will wake up either sweating or shivering before morning.

Well–God speed the new arrangement. You will all be much in my prayers.

Yours

Jack

 

The Screwtape Letters and Screwtape Proposes a Toast, with a new Preface, was published by Geoffrey Bles of London on 27 February 1961.

TO FRANCIS WARNER (P):

Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

28 Feb [1961]

Dear Warner

I forgot to tell you that I have to go to London to-day and shall not be able to see you to-morrow. Next week as usual. If you are looking for any of the things you left here, you’ll find them on a chair in the corner of the room we usually work in.

Yours

C. S. L.

TO ANNE JENKINS (QUEEN’S UNIVERSITY, BELFAST):⁶⁴

As from Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

5 March 1961

Dear Anne–

What Aslan meant when he said he had died is, in one sense, plain enough. Read the earlier book in the series called The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, and you will find the full story of how he was killed by the White Witch and came to life again. When you have read that, I think you will probably see that there is deeper meaning behind it.

The whole Narnian story is about Christ. That is to say, I asked myself ‘Supposing there really were a world like Narnia, and supposing it had (like our world) gone wrong, and supposing Christ wanted to go into that world and save it (as He did ours) what might have happened?’

The stories are my answer. Since Narnia is a world of Talking Beasts, I thought He would become a Talking Beast there, as he became a Man here. I pictured Him becoming a lion there because (a) The lion is supposed to be the King of beasts: (b) Christ is called ‘The Lion of Judah’ in the Bible:⁶⁵ (c) I’d been having strange dreams about lions when I began writing the books. The whole series works out like this:

The Magician’s Nephew tells the creation and how evil entered Narnia.

The Lion ______ etc the Crucifixion and Resurrection

Prince Caspian ______ restoration of the true religion after a corruption

The Horse and his Boy ______ the calling and conversion of a heathen.

The Voyage of the Dawn Treader ______ the spiritual life (specially in Reepicheep)

The Silver Chair ______ the continued war against the powers of darkness

The Last Battle ______ the coming of Antichrist (the Ape). The end of the world, and the Last Judgement

All clear?

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO EDWARD T. DELL (P):⁶⁶

As from Magdalene College,

Cambridge

5 March 1961

Dear Mr. Dell

Thanks for your kind letter. A book on death is a pretty tough proposition, but I’ll think about it. The view that death is a hideous enemy is not unscriptural, you know: much less so than all the blab about there ‘being no death’ or ‘death not mattering’. But there–you see, I’m starting to write the book already!

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO ROGER LANCELYN GREEN (BOD):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

12 March 1961

My dear Roger

Thanks very much for the L. of T.⁶⁷ Just the thing for the train to-morrow. The beatnik in running shorts⁶⁸ is unfortunate!

I’ve treated you badly about Windermere, but for a time the alternative arranger neither succeeded nor could be shaken off.⁶⁹ We’re now fixed for somewhere in Scotland, to which we can get a lift the whole way by car. Also perhaps less populous than the Lakes in summer? But thanks very much for your labours.

You needn’t have bought the supplemented Screwtape. I’d have sent you a copy. Is one any use to you now? I mean, you might get rid of the one you bought if you owe any one a small present.

I look forward to seeing you in May. Meanwhile, love to the Pert Baggage⁷⁰ and to yourself.

Yours

Jack

TO HUGH KILMER (W):

Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

13 March 1961

Dear Hugh

Of course I’d quite forgotten that your family first put Mrs. S. in touch with me (and how!–the poor old soul is the lengthiest letter writer, barring the lunatics–on my list). I wd. not have mentioned her to you if I’d had the fact before me. You’ve done your bit. But your account raises my opinion of her; she never mentioned the old Virginian blood to me. That silence is a point in her favour.

I can’t possibly pursue the theological question just now, but I think the disagreement between us is less than I had supposed.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO DARREN MELDRUM (P):

Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

14 March 1961

Dear Mr. Meldrum

I remember your visit with pleasure. But I’m not at present in a position to help you. I have just undertaken to read a MS for someone else–I wish your request had come first!–and this will tear as big a hole as I can afford in the very scanty leisure which the forthcoming vacation wd. in any case have allowed me–for there is, after all, a great deal of my own work which I am longing to do.

With all good wishes.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

 

On learning that Lewis was allowing the publication of The World’s Last Night by Harcourt Brace of New York, Jocelyn Gibb had begun thinking of a collection of essays he might publish. He discussed the idea with Lewis, and during a meeting in Cambridge Lewis gave him copies of various essays to look over. Gibb would make proposals about what might go in it, to be answered by counter-proposals from Lewis.

TO JOCELYN GIBB (BOD):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

21 March 1961

Dear Jock

I shall not be away from home this vacation except perhaps for an odd night or so. I think the best plan wd. be for you to send me back the whole pile⁷¹ with your comments and proposals. I’ll send you my counter-plans and counter-proposals if I have any. If you think of using any poems, my selection there might be fairly drastic. I’d also do a certain amount of prefaces and such gas. Then we cd. meet at Cambridge next term and hammer things out! I shd. suppose Kenya to be ghastly!⁷²

Yours

Jack

TO EVELYN TACKETT (W):⁷³ TS

202/61

The Kilns, Kiln Lane,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford.

24th March 1961.

Dear Mrs Tackett,

Many thanks for your most kind and encouraging letter of 5th March; and I hope I need not tell you how much pleasure it has given me to hear that anything I have written has been of use to you. The novel which you mention has not come my way, but it is an interesting idea.

With all good wishes,

yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis⁷⁴

TO MICHAEL EDWARDS (BOD): PC

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

28 March 1961

Except on April 10 and 11, I shall be here till April 17 and happy to see you. Let me know what day and hour.

C.S.L.

TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE (W):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

28 March 1961

Dear Mary Willis–

The unexpected crisis wh. hurried you into that house has all the air of an act of God:⁷⁵ it looks as if He meant you to be there. While you were still debating whether the move was to your interest, He suddenly made it your duty. A pretty clear call, I take it. As to the ‘sincerity’ of D’s behaviour, remember (let us look in our own hearts for the truth!) humans are v. seldom either totally sincere or totally hypocritical. Their moods change, their motives are mixed, and they are often themselves quite mistaken as to what their motives are. There is probably some real repentance and desire for amendment on D’s part: it won’t necessarily be permanent any more than our own countless repentances and good resolutions are. There is also probably a desire, whether conscious or unconscious, to make a party with you against L.⁷⁶ There is also perhaps a desire to make L. feel ‘If he is so nice to Mother, perhaps it may be my fault that he is not nice to me.’ Also, a desire to make you feel ‘Since he really behaves like this, perhaps most of L’s complaints about his treatment are untrue or exaggerated.’ But all these mixed up together: the good motives partly poisoned by the bad ones and the bad ones partly modified by the good ones. At any rate, ‘charity hopeth all things, believeth all things.’⁷⁷ The rule is to give every one ‘the benefit of the doubt’ about sincerity yet at the same time to be on one’s guard. Above all, be guarded when either complains to you about the other. They may, at that moment, be quite sincere. But when they are next reunited to each other (and of course sex probably insures reconciliation from time to time) they will infallibly repeat to each other all you have said. Here, as usual, the Imitation is a good guide: ‘I have often repented of speech but hardly ever of silence.’⁷⁸ And don’t believe 1/4 of what they say. Without any intention of lying, people so arrogant as D. and so obviously unstable as L. can hardly tell anything without misrepresentation. Notice this even when they are talking on quite neutral matters.

‘My own life as a person seems definitely at an end.’ I know it’s easy for me to give good advice to others in situations which I probably could not face myself. But that can’t be helped: I must say what I think true. Surely the main purpose of our life is to reach the point at which ‘one’s own life as a person’ is at an end. One must in this sense ‘die’, become ‘naught’, relinquish one’s freedom and independence. ‘Not I, but Christ that dwelleth in me’⁷⁹–‘He must grow greater and I must grow less’⁸⁰–‘He that loseth his life shall find it.’⁸¹ But you know all this quite as well as I do. It may well involve eating white bread instead of brown! How many millions at this moment have no bread at all.

All blessings.

Yours

Jack

 

P.S. Of course the little addition to your income can continue.

TO JONATHAN MUEHL (W):⁸² TS

229/61

The Kilns, Kiln Lane,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford.

29th March 1961.

Dear Jonathan Muehl,

Yours is one of the nicest letters I have had about the Narnian books, and it was very good of you to write it. But I’m afraid there will be no more of these stories. But why don’t you try writing some Narnian tales? I began to write when I was about your age, and it was the greatest fun. Do try!

With all best wishes,

yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis⁸³

TO T. S. ELIOT (P):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

3 April 1961

My dear Eliot

Your letter followed me here. Our session at Lambeth is from 12 noon on Mon 10 April to 4. p.m. on Tue. April 11, so there will certainly be dinner at Lambeth on the Monday 10, and almost certainly work after dinner.

This knocks out the very attractive idea of dining with you and your wife, but very many thanks to you both. It would have been fun: especially as you and I share the distinction of (a.) Having educated Betjeman,⁸⁴ (b.) Not having given evidence about Lady C.⁸⁵

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO MICHAEL EDWARDS (BOD):⁸⁶ TS

216/61

The Kilns, Kiln Lane,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford.

4th April 1961.

Dear Mr Edwards,

This is most kind of you, but really you should’nt have done it you know. However, I’m very grateful, and wish you a happy Eastertide in your turn.

I don’t understand your good wishes for ‘my brother’s speedy recovery’: I’m the person who has been ill, not my brother. If you were told over the phone that I could’nt see you because my brother was ill, you must have thought him very ill indeed!

Yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

 

i.e. it was my brother who spoke to you. His voice is v. like mine on the phone.

TO HUGH KILMER (W):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

5 April 1961

Dear Kilmer

Yes. I’d heard about M.W.S’s being more or less kidnapped and am praying that this arrangement (since with God all things are possible!) may prove a success. I notice that Loraine’s iniquities are always directly reported by M.W.S. while those of Don are nearly always reported on the testimony of Loraine. Is L. the real villain of the piece–a poisonous woman–and Don a sorely tried, tho’ no doubt imperfect, husband? It sounds like that to me from the letters, but I’d welcome your own opinion.

Your definition of gaiety is v. much to the point. Perhaps one can carry it further. A creature can never be a perfect being, but may be a perfect creature–e.g. a good angel or a good apple-tree. Gaiety at its highest may be an (intellectual) creature’s delighted recognition that its imperfection as a being may constitute part of its perfection as an element in the whole hierarchical order of creation. I mean, while it is a pity there shd. be bad men or bad dogs, part of the excellence of a good man is that he is not an angel, and of a good dog that it is not a man. This is an extension of what St. Paul says about the body & the members. A good toe-nail is not an unsuccessful attempt at a brain: and if it were conscious it wd. delight in being simply a good toe-nail.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO DON LUIGI PEDROLLO (V):

Collegium Stae Mariae Magdalenae

apud Cantabrigienses

viii Apr. MCMLXI salv. nostrae

Dilecte Pater

Grato animo accepi litteras vestras. Dies festos, eheu, equidem in lectulo degi, febre laborans; nunc admodum sanatus, Deo gratias, salutationes vestras reddo et vota pro vobis et domo vestra facio. Scio vos preces effundere et pro desideratissima uxore mea et pro me qui jam orbatus et quasi dimidiatus solus hanc vallem lacrimarum peragro. Valete.

C. S. Lewis

 

The College of St Mary Magdalene

Cambridge

8th April in the year of our Salvation 1961

Dear Father

I was glad to receive your letter. The Feast Days for my part, alas, I spent in bed suffering from a fever; now I am somewhat restored to health, God be thanked. I return your greetings and I offer prayers for you and your House.

I know that you pour forth your prayers both for my most dearly-longed-for wife and also for me who–now bereaved and as it were halved–journey on, through this Vale of Tears,⁸⁷ alone.

Farewell.

C. S. Lewis

TO JOCELYN GIBB (BOD):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

8 April 1961

Dear Jock

Don’t apologise! I positively like a letter that encloses £1981–5–3. And thanks also for Davies’ autobiography which I expect to find very interesting.⁸⁸

The ‘juveniles’⁸⁹ keep their end up nicely, don’t they?

Yours

Jack

TO JOCELYN GIBB (BOD):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

12 April 1961

Dear Jock

I thought my counter-proposals wd. come most conveniently as scholia⁹⁰ for your document, and you will accordingly find them on its p. B. The two addenda which I set against my excisions are, I think, valuable. I press strongly for the title-essay from Transposition and wd. prefer it, if there is competition, to any of your choices for that volume.

Wd. May 16 do for your visit? I put it fairly late so as to give me time for revision and general mending. But if you’d like a preliminary call, just to get the Kipling essay,⁹¹ come May 3d as well. Let me know.

Yours

Jack

TO JOCELYN GIBB (BOD):

Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

16 April 1961

Dear Jock

First, and by the way, I’ve now read the Davies book. It interested me extremely. It showed me how little I had known of the period in which we both lived. But also, in another way, how little he knew. Fancy having reached the Spanish War without knowing, and discovering there for the first time, what humanity is really like! Most of us learned this during the First German War. Thanks v. much for the present.

I enclose

1. Copy of Transposition etc. You told me not to send it back but I do so because I hope you will agree to include the title essay in the new volume plus the addendum. It shd. follow the first para. of the existing essay with a short space.⁹² There is one comma to be put in to the copy at p. 20. The addendum covers all I can preserve from the ‘sermon on Hebrews’.⁹³

2. TS. Of ‘Mr. R.’⁹⁴

3. Socratic Digest containing ‘Is Theology Poetry?’⁹⁵ with many excisions plus addendum A which incorporates into it a good deal of the ‘Funeral of a Myth’.⁹⁶

I shall give you the Kipling essay when you come. There is also the London University Lecture on A.V.⁹⁷ Also my presidential speech on Scott to the Walter Scott Club at Edinburgh.⁹⁸ We cd. also dig out of Essays and Studies a thing on Psychoanalysis and Literature Criticism.⁹⁹ The book begins to shape in my mind something like this–with a progression from lit. thro’ ethics to theology:

Hamlet¹⁰⁰

Kipling

Lit. Impact of A.V.

De Descriptione¹⁰¹

Psychoanalysis & Lit. Criticism

Lilies That Fester

(Good Work?)¹⁰²

Inner Ring¹⁰³

Is Theology Poetry?

Obstinacy¹⁰⁴

Reply to Mr. R.

Transposition

Weight of Glory.¹⁰⁵

I think the bulk anyway is quite sufficient.

Yours

Jack

TO ALASTAIR FOWLER (BERG):

As from Magdalene

17 April 1961

Dear Fowler

Thanks for the review, which I return.¹⁰⁶ You get a great deal in, and I’ll tackle Hieatt again as soon as I get a moment. I expect you are right about him and I was wrong. (When you speak of his ‘methodology’ on p. 7, I think you mean only his ‘method’)

I have given one reading to de Chardin and don’t, on that, like him as much as you do. I’m nervous of Pantheism and biolatry. And don’t see how anything is clarified by saying that before life there was pre-life. Of course you can if you want say there was pre-light in the cellar before you switched on the electric light: but the word ‘darkness’ seems clearer. Yes Gagarin is exciting.¹⁰⁷ Any chance of seeing you in Cambridge?

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO ALASTAIR FOWLER (BERG):

Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

17 April 1961

Dear Fowler

I don’t think you are ‘overvaluing limited particular existences.’ 0 × 00 = 0, and if the individual life has no value of course the aggregate of all lives has no value either.

What you commend de Chardin for (‘view of evolution as fumbling but with an impulse of its own’) is surely just a restatement of Bergson, a. without B’s incomparable literary power, b. embarrassed by a Theism wh. is hardly consistent with it. If you haven’t read L’volution Créatrice,¹⁰⁸ you shd.

Yes, use my name of course.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO JOCELYN GIBB (BOD):

Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

20 April 1961

Dear Jock

I felt an unconquerable repugnance to re-opening that ghastly envelope of snippets. ‘Look on’t again I dare not.’¹⁰⁹ But I send

1. Copy of F and SF containing a short story.¹¹⁰ You wd. need to reprint their headnote to make it fairly intelligible.

2 & 3. Two articles on punishment. The Churchman’s text is a reprint from the Australian periodical Res Judicatae.¹¹¹

4. Literary Impact.

5. (Reprint from Medium Aevum: but this is probably too professional.)¹¹²

I also have, but don’t send because they are in MS:

A paper on Dante’s imagery¹¹³

——on Ethics¹¹⁴

This ought to keep you going for a bit.

Yours

Jack

TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE (W):

Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

21 April 1961

Dear Mary Willis

I have your letter of the 16th. You were (very naturally) distraught when you wrote it, and you don’t even make clear to me exactly what Jeanne¹¹⁵ did! Did she get, as they say, ‘into trouble’ those two nights? If nothing worse happened than being out and alone in wet weather, I should have thought a girl in reasonable health wd. get over it alright, and so, I hope, will you all. Don seems to be doing his best now, whatever he did in the past: and with such a wife and such a daughter his home life can’t be a bed of roses. It is a pity he ‘gets on your nerves’ but you are, rightly, controlling your reactions. I know well how a person’s very voice, looks, and mannerisms may grate on one! I always try to remember that mine probably do the same to him–and of course I never hear or see myself.

Thanks for the poem. I’ve got some sort of virus into me which has kept me from being quite well all this spring, never quite awake by day and never quite asleep by night (and never without unpleasant dreams), so don’t expect much from me. Blessings on you all.

Yours

Jack

TO ROGER SHARROCK (BOD):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

22 April 1961

Dear Sharrock,

Thanks, and condolences. Your time in France was clearly very rewarding. I shall be glad to see you again when you are here, if I’m not still in Cambridge marking Tripos papers.

With all good wishes.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO CECIL HARWOOD (BOD):

Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

25 April 1961

My dear Cecil–

I got your letter alright, but it arrived after Owen. If I hadn’t, what wd. it matter? It’s a bit late in the day for you and me to start caring about punctilios. Of course we both regretted missing a Cecil who could only listen but not speak. It wd. have been a golden opportunity. When this summer will you be free? Might not the three of us foregather for a few days in some village? I am a (moderate) walker again now.

As for my own state, isn’t it rather like after an amputation? The stump is not always equally painful but one is always equally a one-legged man!

Yours

Jack

 

Laurence makes an excellent impression on every one he meets. You have every right to be proud of him.

TO JOCELYN GIBB (BOD): TS

Magdalene,

Cambridge.

26 April 1961

Dear Jock

Yes. I was hoping you wd. lunch here on May 16. Come to my rooms just before one o’clock.

Yours

Jack

TO JOCELYN GIBB (BOD): TS

Magdalene

28th April 1961.

Dear Jock,

Have you already filled Don Wiskerando’s order? If not, better send the book to me and I will autograph it and send it on to him.¹¹⁶

Yours,

Jack

TO ALASTAIR FOWLER (BERG):

Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

4 May 1961

Dear Fowler

You talk of Evolution as if it were a substance (like individual organisms) and even a rational substance or person. I had thought it was an abstract noun. So far as I know it is not impossible that in addition to God and the individual organisms there might be a sort of daemon, or created spirit, in the evolutionary process. But that view must surely be argued to on its own merits? I mean, we mustn’t, unconsciously and without evidence, step into the habit of hypostatising a noun. (If there is such a daemon it wd., I suppose, be our old friend Genius).

Thanks for the bit from the Hermetica.¹¹⁷

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO JOCELYN GIBB (BOD):

Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

4 May 1961

Dear Jock

I wasn’t able to lay the affair of the Kipling MSS before the College till yesterday.¹¹⁸ They much appreciate your good offices. Their desire to have the collection is certain, but balanced

a. By a wish not to appear grasping. That is, they wd. like to be sure that Mrs Bambridge has considered the University Library and nevertheless preferred us.¹¹⁹

b. By a doubt about the bulk of the collection. It might, for all we know, require more space than we can afford.

If you can get any data for settling these two scruples we shall gratefully accept the offer.

Yours

Jack

 

On 6 May 1961 Arthur Greeves wrote to Lewis:¹²⁰

Silver Hill,
21 Ballymullan Rd
Crawfordsburn,
Co. Down.
6. 5. 61

My dear Jack,

I am hoping to fly to London on the 21st June (Wednesday), staying with my friend Will McClurg at 109 Park St. W. 1 till Monday 26th; then on to Rege at Plymouth for a week or two.

I thought I might, if suitable, get down to see you for a day or a night at Oxford between 21st & 26th before I go to Plymouth. If I remember right, Paddington is the station for Oxford. This would be much simpler than Cambridge: besides, I’ll only have a dark grey suit (no dinner jacket) &, as you know, am rather shy of all the people one meets in college.

I presume this would have to be the Friday or Saturday? as you will be at Cambridge earlier. This is only tentative. Especially as I’ve had a little heart grogginess–not serious, the doctor says, but please God I’ll be free of it when I leave.

Don’t hesitate to say at once if any of those dates don’t suit.

Everything is changing. Lismachan (where we saw the ‘hedge pig’–do you remember?) is being sold.¹²¹ The four aunts nearly all over 90, have gone elsewhere. I’ve been re-reading ‘Lilith’. This man has a fascination.

Let me know what you think. I suppose there are good trains about 11 AM. Or earlier. I suppose you wouldn’t be up in London?

Hope you are all keeping well.

Love
Arthur

TO JOCELYN GIBB (BOD):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

7 May 1961

Dear Jock

P. 72, 5 ll. from bottom: the correct reading is He does not want men

2. 84. para 3 l. 5 the correct reading is stronger

Thank your correspondent.¹²²

Yours

Jack

TO ARTHUR GREEVES (BOD):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

8 May 1961

My dear Arthur

Your letter has brightened my whole sky. I shall, by June 21, be here, not at Cambridge. Can you come on Thurs 22, and stay at least till the morning of Sat 24?–longer if possible. But if you can manage only two nights, make them the Thurs. and Fri., for our ‘daily’ doesn’t come on week-ends and it will not be so comfortable. Also roads are more crowded. This matters because (D.V.) I’ll run up to London in a hired car and we’ll drive^* back here together–the run down thro’ the Chilterns and Thames valley is a pleasant one. By the way, this time you shall have a double-bed nearly as broad as it is long.

I am concerned to hear your medical news. Unfortunately it is just at that point that your letter turns illegible. It looks as if you had HUNT POGGINES. I suppose the first word is HEART, but I can’t make out the second.

Yes, all changes. The party gets thinner and I suppose you and I shall be leaving it soon.

A-propos of Geo. MacDonald, some American has written a ghastly psychological study of him, trying to prove that he had an incestuous love for his mother, couldn’t bear his father, hated the human race, and delighted in cruelty. I only hope I shall be asked to review it!¹²³

Yours

Jack

 

* (Don’t worry. I mean we shall be driven! Not me at the wheel)

TO MARGARET GRAY (BOD):

Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

9 May 1961

Dear Mrs. Gray–

How right you are when you say ‘Christianity is a terrible thing for a lifelong atheist to have to face’! In people like us–adult converts in the 20th century–I take this feeling to be a good symptom. By the way, you have had in most respects a tougher life than I, but there’s one thing I envy you. I lost my wife last summer after a very late, very short, and intensely happy married life, but I have not been vouchsafed (and why the deuce shd. I be?) a visit like yours–or certainly not except for one split second. Now about reading.

For a good (‘popular’) defence of our position against modern waffle, to fall back on, I know nothing better than G. K. Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man. Harder reading, but very protective, is Edwyn Bevan’s Symbolism & Belief. Charles Williams’ He Came Down from Heaven doesn’t suit everyone, but try it.

For meditative and devotional reading (a little bit at a time, more like sucking a lozenge than eating a slice of bread) I suggest the Imitation of Christ (astringent) and Traherne’s Centuries of Meditations (joyous). Also my selection from MacDonald, Geo. MacDonald: an Anthology. I can’t read Kierkegaard myself, but some people find him helpful.

For Christian morals I suggest my wife’s (Joy Davidman) Smoke on the Mountain: Gore’s The Sermon on the Mount and (perhaps) his Philosophy of the Good Life.¹²⁴ And possibly (but with a grain of salt, for he is too puritanical) Wm. Law’s Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life. I know the v. title makes me shudder, but we have both got a lot of shuddering to get through before we’re done!

You’ll want a mouth-wash for the imagination. I’m told that Mauriac’s novels (all excellently translated, if your French is rusty) are good, tho’ very severe.¹²⁵ Dorothy Sayers’ Man Born to be King (those broadcast plays) certainly is. So, to me, but not to everyone, are Charles Williams’s fantastic novels. Pilgrim’s Progress, if you ignore some straw-splitting dialogues in Calvinist theology and concentrate on the story, is first class.

St. Augustine’s Confessions will give you the record of an earlier adult convert, with many v. great devotional passages intermixed.

Do you read poetry? George Herbert at his best is extremely nutritious.

I don’t mention the Bible because I take that for granted. A modern translation is for most purposes far more useful than Authorised Version.

As regards my own books, you might (or might not) care for Transposition, The Great Divorce, or The Four Loves.

Yes–‘being done good to’–grrr! I never asked ever to be.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO FUMIO OCHI (W): PC

Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

May 10, 1960 [1961]

Dear Mr. Ochi

I shall be happy to see you if you can call on me here at 12 noon on Friday May 12.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

 

On 12 May 1961 Arthur Greeves again wrote to Lewis:

Silver Hill,
21 Ballymullan Rd
Crawfordsburn
Co. Down
12/5/61

My dear Jack,

How wonderful of you to make it so easy for me by taking me by car! I’ve just written to Will to tell him of the arrangement. Thank you so much–D.V. I’ll hope to stay with you from the Thursday June 22nd till Saturday June 24th as you suggest. I’m delighted so much [it] has been settled. I can hardly believe it.

In case I forget when writing again, Will’s address is William McClurg, Flat 1. 109 Park Street London W.1 (Phone May fair 3889). I’ll go there in taxi. If it would be easier for you if I met you elsewhere, let me know.

The correct translation is: HEART GROGGINESS! In other words, Palpitations–breathlessness etc. But I am much better & had a longer walk this morning. Yes, I wonder how much longer?

Aren’t I four years older?

The American must be ‘knuts’ himself. But it might have the effect of drawing attention to G.M. A good thing.

As ever,
Arthur

TO ARTHUR GREEVES (BOD):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

14 May 1961

My dear Arthur

About our journey from London to Oxford on Thurs. June 22. My Jehu and I might waste a good deal of time finding 109 Park St. W.1, so I suggest, if convenient, you shd. meet us at some station nearer the outskirts. Ealing Broadway at about 12 noon wd. do well. Let me know (at Magdalene, Cambridge) as soon as possible. I am excited at the prospect of meeting again. Heaven send that nothing goes wrong!

Yours

Jack

TO I. O. EVANS (W):

Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

16 May 1961

Dear Evans

Your line comes from Ovid’s Metamorphoses Bk I where he says that Prometheus, fashioning Man,

Finxit in effigiem moderantum cuncta deorum, Pronaque cum spectent animalia cetera terram, Os homini sublime dedit caelumque videre Jussit et erectos ad sidera tollere vultus (I 83–86)

(…formed him in the image of the gods who govern all, and, whereas other animals look earthwards, he gave to man a lofty countenance and ordered him to contemplate the sky and to raise his erected face to the stars).

Thanks, I shall have no time for weeks to do anything but read exam papers, so don’t bother about the Verne,¹²⁶ nor the article about Ezekiel’s vision. I doubt whether it is possible to reconstruct it: certainly not till we the new translators have come to that passage.

All good wishes.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

 

On 17 May 1961 Greeves once more wrote to Lewis:

Silver Hill,
21 Ballymullan Rd.
Crawfordsburn,
Co. Down.
17. 5. 61

My dear Jack,

Yes certainly–D.V. I’ll meet you at Ealing Broadway Tube Station–or wherever the bus from Marble Arch lets me down at that terminal on 22nd June at noon–(not midnight–or AM or PM–or any other M).

I shall just bring a handbag, two steamer trunks & a portmanteau (a little shabby) The latter can go in the boot so we’ll have plenty of room to stretch our legs!! Without joking–just the handbag (& what I stand up in of course) And please God all will be well.

I’m looking forward to it all tremendously & I’ll try & not be a damned nuisance.

Arthur

P.S. Do you think Warren can bear it!!

TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE (W):

Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

17 May 1961

Dear Mary Willis

I am sorry to hear of the heart attack, and astonished that any doctor should advise a patient in your condition to live alone. Lorraine’s behaviour was surely only the occasion, not the cause, of the fit. It might have occurred if you were in a flat of your own and who wd. have picked you up?

Like you, I am not attracted by the tropics, but I dare say Florida will be quite good for you.

I think your presence in that household is doing Don some good: perhaps undoing some of the harm that Lorraine has so obviously done to him. Obviously, from your narrative, every one, including Jeanne, is saner and wholesomer than Lorraine! Jeanne appears to have been most providentially protected in a very perilous situation: how you must thank God for that!

Your standard of living is v. different from ours. Hardly any one here wd. dream of having a telephone extension in his bedroom! And are there no cheap watches?

My inside is still thoroughly upset, but as I’ve lived over 60 years without indigestion I suppose I’m luckier than most. Our weather continues miserably cold.

All blessings.

Yours

Jack¹²⁷

TO ALASTAIR FOWLER (BERG): PC

[21 May 1961]

Thanks for cutting. As I don’t know any of the authors I can’t make any comment.

If Evolution is an abstract H.C.F.¹²⁸ of all biological chances (as sphericity of all spherical objects) of course it is not an entity in addition to particular organisms. That is the view I’d take. My point was that Butler, Bergson, Shaw, D. H. Lawrence etc. keep on talking as if it were a thing (a Platonic ¹²⁹ or a daemon)! They call it Life. But life (H.C.F.) can’t be alive any more than speed can move quickly!

C.S.L.

TO ARTHUR GREEVES (BOD):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford 21 May 1961

My dear Arthur

Good. 12 Noon Thurs. June 22d, Ealing Broadway Station. This is not, by the way, exactly a tube station. It is on the Metropolitan which has become a surface railway by the time it reaches there, so that the E. Broadway Metropolitan station and the ordinary G.W.R.¹³⁰ station are one and the same station. Whichever of us gets there first must await the other on the ‘down’ platform. (There is probably a refreshment room) I shall bring sandwiches for lunch on the drive.

This is not because I have lost my old preference for hotels, but my usual driver, who is almost a family friend, is unable to come, and his substitute is not a man we could very comfortably take into a dining room. (He is also, by the way, one of the most vociferous bores in England.)

Warnie will be away while you are here. He’s not (honestly) running away on your account–it had all been fixed before we knew you were coming.

Yours

Jack

TO FATHER PETER MILWARD SJ (W):

Magdalene etc

23/5/61

Dear Father Milward

I saw nothing rude in your manner, tho’ I thought you were misunderstanding me. I, you see, come to the matter from fighting on another front, against Atheists, who say (I have seen it in print) ‘Christians believe in a God who committed adultery with a carpenter’s wife.’ You used language which cd. have been interpreted as an agreement with them. Naturally there is no disagreement between us on that point. And I wd. agree that the supernatural begetting of Our Lord is the archtype, and human marriage the ectype: not the perversion (that wd. seem to me Manichean). All these arguments are perfectly consistent with a disagreement between us on the Immaculate Conception of Mary and your general Marian theology.

Of course when one has decided that A is the Archtype and B the ectype one has not said A = B: i.e. whichever way you work it, it remains true that Mary was not the Bride of the Holy Ghost in the same sense in which the words are used of ordinary marriage: whereas she was the Mother of Jesus in exactly the same sense in wh. my mother was my mother–as Gervase Mathew said.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

 

Greeves replied to Lewis on 31 May 1961:

Silver Hill,
21 Ballymullan Rd
Crawfordsburn,
Co. Down.
31st May ’61

My dear Jack,

Yes, I understand about the metropolitan station. I’ll hope to be there E. Broadway G.W.R. on the down platform on Thursday June 22nd 12 noon. I haven’t been away since last May when I saw you, so am looking forward to everything.

Esther is leaving definitely for good when I go.¹³¹ There are snags of course–but it is all for the best.

I’m sorry I won’t see Warren & I hope I’m not being a nuisance. It will be interesting to see all the old haunts again. I can hardly believe that I will.

In case you’ve lost my London address:–c/o W. M. McClurg–Flat 1. 109 Park St (Quite close to Marble Arch) W.1 Phone 3889 Mayfair. I’ll be there on the night of 21st.

As ever

Arthur

TO JOCELYN GIBB (BOD):

Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

3 June 1961

Dear Jock

As to your first letter (24 May): Yes, the Kipling does overlap, rather badly, with The Inner Ring. It is the better of the two. Let’s jettison The Inner Ring altogether. The Scott is after all an oration, not an essay, and there is no need to disguise the fact. Marks of origin such as ‘here in Edinburgh’ are not in the same position as colloquialisms of phrase. I’d print it as it stands. It hasn’t got the chatty straight-talkism which the B.B.C. stuff had. Same with Hamlet.

Examining and indigestion have reduced my mind to a state in which it is hard to invent a title. I’m not sure that something absolutely straight like Collected Papers wd. not be best. If you want to emphasise the theme ‘Jekyll meets Hyde’, I suppose one cd. have something like On Two Fronts or Janus. Or Essays from Bletchley,¹³² with a little prefatory note explaining that as I oscillate physically between Oxford and Cambridge so I oscillate mentally between the literary & the religious themes. Anyway, I can’t think of anything better at the moment.

As to your second (1 June)–De Descriptione shd. be printed as it stands, on the same grounds as the Scott.

I’m afraid I’ve lost (after making notes on it, too!) the letter from the Japanese lunatic about washing behind the years! Sorry.¹³³

Yours

Jack

TO GEORGE SAYER (W):

Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

5 June 1961

My dear George

Thanks so much. I’ll come, D.V., on July 7th. I may be on the water-wagon and capable of v. little walking, but let us hope better things. Vocal organs in good order. Love to both

Yours

Jack

TO MARY VAN DEUSEN (W):

Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

5 June 1961.

Dear Mrs. Van Deusen

My brother has sent on to me your letter of May 29, and I am very glad to hear that things are so good. The very name of the Smokies is attractive!¹³⁴

Kierkegaard can certainly wait. I can’t read him myself, which I am sure is my own fault, for I hear him well spoken of by many whose opinion I value. I’ve been shut up here for weeks, for this is now the examining period and I can’t afford my week-ends at home–indeed it is only by working 10 hours a day all marking exam. papers that I can get the job done in time. As I already had indigestion and sinusitis when this programme began, I am now in a very chastened frame of mind. This is a strange year–I think we have had only one day of real sunshine since March. (it was yesterday).

Congratulations on Paul’s success–I mean the Science prize. I have even less idea than you what an ‘Achievement Test’ can be. I shd. have supposed that achievement was what all school awards tested–merits etc. being left over for consideration at the Day of Judgement.

Yes ‘day to day’ is the thing. But some days are darn long, I find!

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE (W):

Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

5 June 1961

Dear Mary Willis

It certainly is a terrible story. But it shows very clearly how useless all comments are in such a case when made by an outside person who never knows and can never possibly know all the facts. He is sure to blunder. So indeed I have nothing to say but things you know already quite as well as I do.

We must beware of the Past, mustn’t we? I mean that any fixing of the mind on old evils beyond what is absolutely necessary for repenting our own sins and forgiving those of others is certainly useless and usually bad for us. Notice in Dante that the lost souls are entirely concerned with their past. Not so the saved. This is one of the dangers of being, like you and me, old. There’s so much past, now, isn’t there? And so little else. But we must try very hard not to keep on endlessly chewing the cud. We must look forward more eagerly to sloughing that old skin off forever–metaphors getting a bit mixed here, but you know what I mean.

I almost dare to believe my digestion is coming right again, but I am so tired out with it and with marking exam papers that there isn’t much left of me at the moment! God bless us all.

Yours

Jack

TO JILL BLACK (P):¹³⁵

Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

8 June 1961

Dear Mrs. Black

Thank you for French’s Grettir.¹³⁶ I am not ‘with book’ at present myself! By the way, Green himself has, you know, done about as good a re-telling of the Arthurian stories as anyone.¹³⁷ The big gap in this sort of literature is the Persian cycle–Jamshid and Rustum and all that:¹³⁸ but I’ve no idea who wd. be able to do it for you.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO JOCELYN GIBB (BOD):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

13 June 1961

Dear Jock–

A work of mine will have to be posthumous indeed before the word culture appears in its title or sub-title!¹³⁹ I can’t abide it. I really think we shall have to give this volume a quite non-descriptive name–Vacation Exercises, or Shotover Essays¹⁴⁰ or Holiday Tasks or They Asked for a Paper, or Essays in Truancy.

Yours

Jack

TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE (W):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

13 June 1961

Dear Mary Willis

This is dreadful. It comes home to me a bit more than you might expect, because dear Joy went through something not quite unlike it from her first husband (only, with him there was a clearer cause–alcoholism). The sooner you are all out of that man’s reach the better. The curse of modern city life is that people in your situation are so alone, like in a desert. In a village the neighbours would interfere and someone wd. offer you a refuge and someone else wd. do the same for the children and someone else wd. duck D. in the horse-pond. Couldn’t, or wouldn’t the Kilmers or some religious house do anything? Or the police? At any rate it becomes obvious why you were led by God to join the household. L’s situation wd. be a good deal more desolate if you were not there.

I am sure that however inadequate you feel, you will be given day by day and hour by hour the strength and wisdom that are needed (‘I can do all things through Christ who empowers me’)¹⁴¹ Legally D. seems to have put himself in a quite hopeless position: and I may be able to make some contribution to the lawyer’s bill. As for shame, what have you to be ashamed of? What, if anything, is D’s job? Has he bosses or colleagues whose good opinion matters to him?

Courage! People have weathered storms as bad as this and smiled again. Take it bit by bit, like an illness. I’m a bit better myself (since you ask) and haven’t vomited for three days, so perhaps I’m going to weather my little storm too!

Yours

Jack

TO JOCELYN GIBB (BOD):

Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

19 June 1961

Dear Jock

All right–let it be They Asked for a Paper.¹⁴²

Yours

Jack

 

Lewis and Arthur Greeves spent 22–24 June together at The Kilns. It was a poignantly satisfying meeting of old friends, the last time they were to see each other. Greeves scribbled on the margin of his next letter from Lewis that, when they met in Oxford, ‘He was looking very ill.’

TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE (W):

The Kilns etc

24 June 1961

Dear Mary Willis

I was, before, a little afraid that a volte face of this sort might possibly occur, but I hadn’t envisaged it taking such an extreme form. J. does seem to be next door to a lunatic: perhaps almost hypnotised by this man. Was she unbalanced from her earliest years? For the moment, can’t you seek refuge in some convent? Surely there are charitable orders that will do something for the destitute and oppressed? My heart is sore for you.

In great haste.

Yours

Jack

TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

27 June 1961

My dear Arthur

My trouble has been diagnosed as one v. common at our time of life, namely an enlarged prostate gland. I shall soon be in a nursing home for the necessary operation.

How I did enjoy our two days together!

Yours

Jack

TO JOHN H. MCCALLUM (P):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

27 June 1961

Dear Mac

I shall soon be in the doctor’s (and, what’s worse, the surgeon’s) hands having my prostate gland whipped out, so my immediate future is all question marks. If I shd. be in London in July I’d love to meet, but I don’t think I shall. Thanks for the cuttings.

Yours

Clive

TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W):

The Kilns

30 June ’61

My dear Arthur

The trouble turns out to be (what’s v. common to our age and sex) a distended prostate gland. I go into the Acland Nursing Home on Sunday for the operation.

Our little re-union was one of the happiest times I’d had for many a long day. I hope the cool of the moor-lands will soon set you up.

Yours

Jack

TO MRS BRIAN SARRE (P):¹⁴³ TS

398/61

The Kilns, Kiln Lane,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford.

30th June 1961.

Dear Mrs Sarre,

Many thanks for your most kind and encouraging letter of the 23rd; and I hope I need not tell you how great satisfaction it gives me to learn that anything I have written has been of service to you.

With all good wishes,

yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO K. C. THOMPSON (W):¹⁴⁴

The Kilns

1 July 1961

Dear Mr. Thompson

Under the stress of examining I’m afraid I quite forgot to send you this at Whitsun.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

 

Lewis went into the Acland Nursing Home on 2 July 1961 to be operated on for a distended prostate gland. This would normally have been fairly straightforward. It was complicated, however, by the fact that Lewis also had a kidney infection. Meanwhile, the doctors refrained from surgery because they feared his heart was not strong enough. To prepare him for a possible operation they put him on a low-protein diet. While Lewis waited to see how the matter would turn out, Warnie helped him with his correspondence.

On 12 July 1961 Warnie wrote to Mary Willis Shelburne:¹⁴⁵

49/61

The Kilns, Kiln Lane,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford.
12th July 1961.

Dear Mrs Shelburne,

I’ve opened your letter of 6th addressed to my brother, who is, I’m sorry to say at present in hospital and unable to deal with his own mail. I saw him yesterday and mentioned that a letter had arrived from you, and he asked me to explain why there will be no answer to it for quite a time.

With kind regards.

yours sincerely,

W. H. Lewis

TO JOCELYN GIBB (BOD):

The Acland Nursing Home

[Oxford

18? July 1961]

Dear Jock

I’m in here awaiting an operation wh. can’t be done till my kidneys are fit for it, and no one knows when that will be. You must abandon all hope of any copy from me and get on with your volume on what you already have. Sorry.

Yours

Jack

TO JOCELYN GIBB (BOD):

The Acland Nursing Home

[Oxford]

23 July [1961]

Dear Jock

The question is whether in my study at home–now as inaccessible to me as the Moon–my long-suffering brother can find the stuff. I’ll ask him to try. Sorry about all this.

Yours

Jack

 

On 24 July Warnie wrote to Jocelyn Gibb:¹⁴⁶

65/61

The Kilns, Kiln Lane,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford.
24th July 1961.

Dear Gibb,

I saw Jack this morning, and also his doctor; the latter was of course as cagey as these chaps always are, but I did dig out of him that they are pleased with Jack’s progress. Which is good so far as it goes.

Jack asked me to send you a packet which I would find, ‘enclosed under elastic’ on his desk. I hope this is it.

Yours,
Mycroft
W.H.L.

Lewis was unable to do much more work on They Asked for a Paper, and in the end he did not ‘merge’ parts of ‘The Funeral of a Great Myth’ or any other essay into ‘Is Theology Poetry?’. As a result ‘Is Theology Poetry?’ appears in They Asked for a Paper exactly as it did in The Socratic Digest.

Finally the doctors decided an operation was too risky, and Lewis was allowed to go home on 4 August.

TO MRS ROY E. KIEPER (W): TS

498/61

The Kilns, Kiln Lane,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford.

5th August 1961

Dear Mrs. Kieper,

Many thanks for your kind and encouraging letter of 29th July, and I am so glad that you have enjoyed my books–and that you saw the underlying significance of the Narnian series. No, the background has no hidden meaning.

It is a very odd thing that you are one of the few ‘grown-ups’ who has really understood Narnia–yet I have had literally scores of letters from children, all of whom saw who Aslan was.

With every good wish,

yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO KATHLEEN RAINE (BOD):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

8th Aug 1961

Dear Kathleen

What a lovely letter! It came at an appropriate moment, for I am ill, undergoing blood transfusions & no-protein diet and all sorts of things which are merely preparatory to an operation (must be cooked before I’m carved!)

Yes, we are members of a really pretty widely diffused secret society, who can usually recognise one another–but one must beware of the pleasure of esotericism. I am very glad you like Narnia. But v. sorry you don’t like Cambridge.

Yours

Jack

 

On 20 August Warnie wrote to Mary Willis Shelburne:¹⁴⁷

The Kilns, Kiln Lane,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford.
20th August 1961.

Dear Mrs Shelburne,

Many thanks for yours of the 14th, which I answer because you ask me to do so. This sounds a little ungracious, but what I mean is that I really have no news to give you. What there is, is good though, thank God. The kidney condition which has been holding everything up is improving rapidly and the doctor is very satisfied with him. His last blood test was excellent. He is, so far as a sick man can be, in the best of spirits, eating well, hungry and what we all take to be a splendid sign, is beginning to complain of being bored–which is very different from even a fortnight ago when he was quite content to doze away each day.

On his and my own behalf I send you grateful thanks for your prayers.

Yours sincerely,
W. H. Lewis

TO ROGER LANCELYN GREEN (BOD):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

6 Sept 1961

My dear Roger

It’s a bit tricky. I am awaiting an operation on my prostate, but as this trouble upset my kidneys and my heart, these have to be set right before the surgeon can get to work. Meanwhile, I live on a no-protein diet, wear a catheter, sleep in a chair, and have to stay on the ground floor. I’m quite capable of having a guest, but the trouble is that the date for the operation remains unfixed–it depends on how the weekly blood-tests go. This means that, for all I know, it might come just when you want to be here. So I think you’d better make alternative arrangements, wh. cd. be abandoned in favour of coming to the Kilns if, when the time comes, I shd. be here and not in the Acland. I’d hate to miss the chance of a visit from you if it turns out to be feasible. Is this all too bothersome?

You needn’t pity me too much. I am in no pain and I quite enjoy the hours of uninterrupted reading which I now get.

Love to June.

Yours

Jack

TO KATHARINE FARRER (BOD): PC

Tuesday [19 September 1961]

Thank you both for delightful letters. I have to go back into the Acland for observations and some more blood transfusions, and wd. welcome a visit any time

J.

 

On 20 September Warnie wrote to Jocelyn Gibb:¹⁴⁸

The Kilns, Kiln Lane,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford.
20th October 1961.

Dear Gibb

Many thanks for your letter of yesterday:–

Jack’s position is that there is a slow–very slow–improvement in the condition of the kidneys, and until they are in a satisfactory state there can be no question of an operation. On the whole, so far as I can make out anything from the verbiage with which doctors put you off in these conditions, they are satisfied with his progress. But I confess to be in great anxiety. The really good feature of the case is that Jack is in no pain, and keeps surprisingly cheerful. He is at the moment back in hospital for some blood The Kilns, Kiln Lane, Headington Quarry, Oxford. 20th September 1961. transfusions and I’ve just got back from seeing him, and he promptly sent me out to bring him a bottle of whiskey and complained bitterly of the price! These symptoms did more to encourage me than all the medical jargon.

It was good of you to write.

Yours sincerely,
W. H. Lewis

On 29 September 1961 Faber and Faber of London published Lewis’s A Grief Observed under the pseudonym N. W. Clerk.

On 7 October Warnie wrote to Mary Willis Shelburne:¹⁴⁹

49/61

The Kilns, Kiln Lane,
Headington Quarry, Oxford.
7th October 1961.

Dear Mrs Shelburne

I have your letter of the 5th addressed to Jack, but I’m sure you will understand why you are not getting a personal reply to it. Not that he is’nt really making a recovery, but the process is very slow, he does get so tired, and so easily, and consequently we don’t give him any of his letters to answer unless they are on quite unavoidable business. But he is grateful for yours, and for your kind anxiety.

The position at the moment is this. Jack has had a series of blood transfusions in hospital and the result was that he came home a week ago most definitely improved; with not only the permission but the encouragement of his doctors, he now gets up in the morning and cooks his own breakfast, and every day he goes out for half an hours walk. Better still, he has been put on a more generous diet and enjoys his meals. But perhaps the best sign is that he tells me he is getting very bored with invalid life and is itching to get back to work. As for the impending operation, the surgeon now talks of it as a thing quite in the future–six, or even twelve months ahead he says. Which naturally is an enormous relief to me, for if they are taking this view there cannot be anything very urgent the matter. In fact on the whole I’m a much happier man than I was when I last wrote to you.

With kindest regards,

Yours sincerely,
W. H. Lewis

An Experiment in Criticism was published by Cambridge University Press on 13 October 1961.

TO HARVEY KARLSEN (BOD):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

13 Oct. 1961

Dear Mr. Karlsen–

Your letter did not reach me till to-day. Of course I have had and still have plenty of temptations. Frequent and regular prayer, and frequent and regular Communions, are a great help, whether they feel at the time as if they were doing you good or whether they don’t. I also found great help in monthly confession to a wise old clergyman.¹⁵⁰

Perhaps, however, the most important thing is to keep on: not to be discouraged however often one yields to the temptation, but always to pick yourself up again and ask forgiveness. In reviewing your sins don’t either exaggerate them or minimise them. Call them by their ordinary names and try to see them as you wd. see the same faults in somebody else–no special blackening or whitewashing. Remember the condition on which we are promised forgiveness: we shall always be forgiven provided that we forgive all who sin against us. If we do that we have nothing to fear: if we don’t, all else will be in vain. Of course there are other helps which are mere commonsense. We must learn by experience to avoid either trains of thought or social situations which for us (not necessarily for everyone) lead to temptations. Like motoring–don’t wait till the last moment before you put on the brakes but put them on, gently and quietly, while the danger is still a good way off. I wd. write at more length, but I am ill. God bless you.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO MURIEL BRADBROOK (W):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

15 Oct. 1961

Dear Muriel

What a nice thing for a man half drowned in compulsory leisure is an un-birthday present!¹⁵¹ It has set me a problem. I find I get a good deal of pleasure out of many of these poems, but am at a loss to say why. One is not getting the ‘numbers’–and so far as I can judge from the notes the metres of the originals wd. not much please me. Nor am I much in sympathy with many of the poets’ moods. The pleasure is like–at least rather like–what I get out of most translations of Chinese lyric. But that isn’t a solution, but merely another problem of the same sort. Anyway, thanks very much indeed.

Another book I’ve just read is Empson on Milton’s God.¹⁵² We must congratulate him on making it quite clear that what he objects to is M’s theology, not his art.¹⁵³ Most anti-Miltonists are, I believe, in exactly the same predicament but don’t admit–or realise–it: so that their criticism is as silly as (salva reverentia)¹⁵⁴ Plato’s criticism of Homer.

I have hopes of being allowed to come up in January. I won’t try to tell you about my complication of maladies–not because it is too dreadful (it isn’t) but because it is too boring. Indeed one of the things I resent in an illness is that, like a war, it compels one to attend to such intrinsically uninteresting things.

With many thanks. My love and duty to yourself, and K. Raine, and Joan Bennett.

Yours

Jack

TO CHAD WALSH (W): PC

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

Oct 16 [1961]

I have to be cooked before I am carved–i.e. my kidnies, heart, & blood have to be set right and then I have to have an operation (prostate). Meanwhile I live on one floor & a low-protein diet. I’d like v. much to see you all but can hardly make any arrangements as I keep on being sent back to the Nursing Home for blood transfusions. All loves!

J.

TO ROGER POOLE (P):¹⁵⁵ PC

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry

Oxford

19 [18] Oct. [1961]

I am delighted to hear that you approved the Experiment: all the more because I anticipate great unpopularity for it–unless the tide is just on the turn already. I may then rank as a deliverer and be really only a symptom.

I am still (painlessly but obstinately) ill and do not improve: but not too ill to have a talk with you if you are in Oxford. English followed by Moral Sciences (a reversal of my own Greats followed by English) is a fine recipe & I think you are v. wise to take it.

C.S.L.

TO JOCELYN GIBB (BOD):¹⁵⁶

[The Kilns

20? October [1961]

Dear Jock–

I have already told this man that my Kipling essay is coming out in your volume and therefore is not available for his. If you agree with me–as I expect you do–will you save me (you can say I’m ill) from further importunity by writing to him with a certain civil finality.

Yours

Jack

TO KATHLEEN RAINE (BOD): PC

21 Oct. [1961]

Thanks for lovely letter–(if it was from you, for the signature is in one way v. like the peace of God!). I doubt if anything so palatable as praise (from the judicious) can also be medicinal.

My Experiment has elicited fan mail from a few Cambridge undergraduates. This was a hopeful surprise–can it be the tide is turning at last? I’d write more but I’ve just had a blood transfusion and am feeling drowsy. Dracula must have led a horrid life!

Yours

Jack

TO CHAD WALSH (W):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry

Oxford

[October? 1961]

Dear Chad,

It does sound as if you had fallen on your feet. Good luck to you. My blood counts showed a marked improvement and there was a short period during which the doctors hoped no more transfusions might be needed. But it didn’t last. The only gain is that the blood took longer to slip back than it has done yet.

Thanks for The Rough Years.¹⁵⁷ I read it with great interest but with a sort of interest that almost excludes judgement, and that for a reason you probably didn’t anticipate. The school life depicted is so unlike anything in my experience that it was, for me, rather like a book about Martians. Yet I perceive that adolescence is a pretty horrid thing whatever the sex, age, or nationality of the patients! (As the Rev. Bowman is aware on p. 161).¹⁵⁸ Also that the arguments against both day-schools and boarding schools are equal and unanswerable.

Bowman is a type we have here, with his naif conviction of ‘the spiritual advantages of meeting in a parish house’ (p. 224) and his certainty that once you get the gangster there ‘the situation’ will ‘take care of itself’(p. 168). It almost sounds as if he thought the Church existed for the sake of ‘togetherness’: not for the knowledge and worship of God, from which togetherness would inevitably result. You do satirise him a bit, but (I fancy) not enough. Many of your readers will think you wholly approve. I was also v. surprised at his idea of services in Spanish. I’d have expected the Spanish-speaking people to be all–it’s the Latin way–either foursquare R.C.’s or foursquare anti-clerical atheists.

Your story is quite capable of standing on its own merits, so that the preface which makes it appear a glorified text-book seemed to me to do it an injustice.

Yours

Jack

 

Give my most affectionate remembrances to your wife.

TO VERA GEBBERT (W):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry

Oxford

25 Oct. 1961

Dear Mrs. Gebbert

I am sorry and ashamed at the letter I have to write. The truth is I can’t at present give you any firm date for a visit.¹⁵⁹ I am just back from 24 hours in a Nursing home having a blood transfusion and am liable to be imprisoned for another at any moment. But that date can’t be made firm either for it depends on two unknowns–(a.) My condition, (b.) An empty bed in the Home. And to tell the truth, while this sort of thing is going on I am in such a drowsy, muzzy state that you’d find a visit to me quite worthless.

Don’t mention all this to my brother. He has been doing nurse and secretary to me all summer and must have his holiday in peace.¹⁶⁰ I will write again when the prospect is clearer and hope I shall then be able to ask you here. I am very, very sorry about all this.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

 

Dear Charles

Thank you for all the exciting pictures of space ships. I expect they will look very like that. It is a pity they will never look as nice as sea-ships at their best do, isn’t it? I wonder will you some day travel in space yourself? I’m sure I never shall.

Yours ever

C. S. Lewis

TO FRANCIS WARNER (P):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

27 Oct. 61

Dear Warner–

I like Perennia v. much better than your satire. Much of the descriptive element is promising. The general danger at present is that of becoming (like early Keats) ‘too damn poetical’. You know what I mean? Too much about berries looking like glow-worms¹⁶¹ and ‘tiny sounds’ etc. Hence the earthier passages (e.g. the creatures in XXII) come as a relief. Pure sugar cloys. Of the metrical irregularities I like some and dislike others. I like those in the body of III, but not its alexandrine: nor the alexandrine in II where the trisyllabic meandered comes in v. oddly. Now for details

You mean Perennia and Salacia as fem. singulars. But remember how perennis and salax are declined! Your forms cd. only be neuter plurals. This simply must be altered.¹⁶²

IV 6. the sights. A shade vulgar to my ear¹⁶³

V5. Why not with instead of of?¹⁶⁴

8. mystic No, no. In that extremely vague sense the word is utterly worn out.¹⁶⁵

9. balm. One feels this is chosen purely for the sake of rhyme.¹⁶⁶

VII 5: savage. Surely a gross exaggeration? The sort of river you’ve been describing couldn’t have got savage except in a flood and yours has had only one summer shower.¹⁶⁷

X 3. I presume a cricket has 6 legs. Wd. it ever crouch on only 4 of them?¹⁶⁸

XII Hespera. Any authority for this?¹⁶⁹

XIII 9. shoals & schools are merely different forms of the same word and are still, surely, synonymous?¹⁷⁰

XV 5. high cries. Repetition of this vowel (never a v. nice one) is ugly.¹⁷¹

XVII. 5–6. to belong in such etc. I don’t get the syntax.¹⁷²

XIX 6. Why not to gaze safely. Or better to look safely (avoiding the repetition of the vowel).¹⁷³

XLIII 7 stark. Creaks a bit!¹⁷⁴

XLV 4. while away. The syntax v. obscure. While who was away from where?¹⁷⁵

LXVI 4. Same vowel repeated 3 times! What a cacophony¹⁷⁶

All the same, there is promise in this.

I am still an invalid and have no one to send out for a large enough envelope to hold your MS, so you can’t have it back till you send me one. Why will none of you poets get things typed on ordinary quarto-size sheets?

I’ve told the Board to appoint you a new supervisor, but if I’m well enough to come up in January I’ll be happy to resume on C. Agrippa.

With all good wishes. I’m glad you liked the chapter on Myth.¹⁷⁷

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO MARY VAN DEUSEN (W):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

28 Oct. 1961

Dear Mrs. Van Deusen,

I’m not well enough to answer your letter properly–and W., after having done Nurse and Secretary for me all summer is now away for a well earned holiday, so I have endless letter-writing to do.

The nearest I can put up as a scriptural warrant for prayers for the dead is the place in one of the epistles about people being ‘baptised for the dead’.¹⁷⁸ If we can be baptised for them, then surely we can pray for them. I’d like to give you the reference but my concordance is upstairs and–my heart being one of the things that is wrong with me–I’m not allowed to go upstairs.

All good wishes.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO LAURENCE WHISTLER (BOD):¹⁷⁹

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

30 Oct 61

Dear Mr Whistler–

I am ill, and one reason for regretting this is that it prevents me from writing such a letter as your kind gift deserves.¹⁸⁰ I was deeply–almost unbearably–moved by much of Pt I. True, I am an unanaesthetised widower and therefore vulnerable, but I don’t think we need discount much of my reaction on that score. It might even make one more fastidious on such a theme.

And anyway, there’s lots to enjoy in a more sensuous way–the ‘music paused on its own carved wind’,¹⁸¹ the ‘punctual puffs and roofs,’¹⁸² ‘the arches of her dolphins danced’.¹⁸³ Life is a Rembrandt, Veteran Wishes & Clinical Note are absolute corkers. ‘Home was now a room’¹⁸⁴ is wonderful.

The unrhymed lyrics in short lines (like The Choice) I liked least. Too close to the Tum-tum-tiddle-tum of Rugby Chapel¹⁸⁵ and too Eliotically gnomic. I liked The Failures.

I spotted your ‘fore-rhymes’ at once but I bet half your readers won’t. I think this technique has possibilities. Perhaps, for weak ears, the rhymes shd. be louder, supported by plenty of consonance. I mean nuptial rhyming with something like upshot or language with anguish or rang with. Obviously what immediately follows the rhyming syllable is going to have grave importance once rhymes cease to be terminal.

With very many thanks and all good wishes.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

 

A Form of Epitaph is also good.

TO CHAD WALSH (W): PC

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

30 Oct [1961]

Good. I look forward to being rung up from the Eastgate and hope we’ll be able to meet.¹⁸⁶ I know little modern poetry. Names I do approve are Kathleen Raine, Ruth Pitter, Edwin Muir, Laurence Whisler. People in Oxford who might help are J. Bryson (Balliol)¹⁸⁷ & Prof. N. Coghill (Merton).¹⁸⁸ All the best.

J.

TO JOHN H. MCCALLUM (P):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry

Oxford

30 Oct. 61

Dear Mac

I don’t know whether Fontana Books are likely ever to re-print their paper-back of my Miracles: but on the off chance–and not having their address–I’d be grateful if you’d send them these corrections:

P. 20: para 5. l. 6. For original read logical

P. 65: para 2. l. 13. For material read metrical

P. 144: para 1. l. 19 For itself, The read itself. The¹⁸⁹

I’m still an invalid but in no pain, reading plenty and sleeping pretty well.

Yours

Clive

TO FRANCIS WARNER (P):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry

Oxford

1 Nov 61

Dear Warner

You bowl me middle stump about Salacia & Perennia! I just don’t know this

‘In Apuleius V.¹⁹⁰ is the mother of Psyche.’ Surely you mean the mother of Cupid? The story begins erant olim rex et regina¹⁹¹ doesn’t it, and P. is their daughter? I quite agree about avoiding the (now odious) name of Cupid.

Of course Hesperus = Venus astronomically. I didn’t feel sure that ‘Hespera’ ever occurred for Venus, though. ‘Tunes’ in II wd. make a better verse, but the word is rather commonplace (especially for some obscure reason, in the plural). I’d rather alter ‘meandered’ to a disyllable.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W):

[The Kilns]

12 Nov. 61

My dear Arthur

Yes. The Imitation is very severe; useful at times when one is tempted to be too easily satisfied with one’s progress, but certainly not at times of discouragement. And of course it is written for monks, not for people living in the world like us.

A good book to balance it is Traherne’s Centuries of Meditations, wh. I expect you know (Not to be confused with his poems, which I don’t recommend.) There is all the gold & fragrance!

Midway between the two I’d put the anonymous Theologia Germanica (Macmillan’s in the little blue Golden Treasury series).¹⁹² This is curiously like the sort of letters we used to write 45 years ago!

Yours

Jack

 

P.S. I never read St John of the Cross.

TO JOHN H. MCCALLUM (P):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry

Oxford

16 Nov. 1961

Dear Mac

I refused the proposal to S.C.B.¹⁹³ and I think I’d better abide by his decision (about Miss Hopkins, I mean).¹⁹⁴ I think it makes a living author rather ridiculous to publish selections from him.

Sorry.

Yours in haste

Clive

TO CLYDE S. KILBY (W):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

18 Nov 61

Dear Mr Kilby

Thank you for all the kind things you say.

I don’t see how I can help you. My future is too uncertain for me to make any engagements so that it wd. be no use your crossing the Atlantic to see me. Nor have I any material of the sort you are looking for. Of course I’ve had plenty both of bouquets and brickbats in private letters, but I’ve preserved neither.

I am sorry to be so unhelpful. With all good wishes.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W): PC

[The Kilns]

24 Nov [1961]

Thanks for review. I always thought Herbert R. an ass, so I don’t know whether to conclude that my book is bilge or to revise my opinion of H.R.¹⁹⁵

I don’t think the author of the Imitation was ever aware of the beauty of nature as we understand it.

Hope you’ll soon be better

J.

TO MARY MARGARET WARD (W):¹⁹⁶

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

Nov 24. 61

Dear Mrs. Ward

Thanks for the kind thought, but don’t send me a present. There are so very few things I want that presents embarrass me, because I know I can’t enjoy them as the donors intended.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

 

P.S. Also, they entail one more letter to write, and correspondence is the bane of my life!

TO LAURENCE WHISTLER (BOD):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

27 Nov 61

I’m nearly always well enough to be visited, but always liable to be whisked off into a nursing home for a blood transfusion. Therefore your best plan will be to let me know of your visit to Oxford about 48 hours ahead and I’ll write back if I shan’t be in circulation. If I don’t write, you can assume I am expecting you. I shd. much like a meeting. Re ‘forerhymes’, what can be the value of modern criticism when it betrays again and again that the critics read poetry in a way that has nothing to do with the ear?

C.S.L.

TO EDWARD A. ALLEN (W):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

30 Nov 61

Dear Edward W. had to give up his usual summer holidays to do nurse and secretary for me, so he is now having a v. well earned rest in Ireland. As for me, the operation is not the real issue. The state of my kidneys and heart which the prostatic trouble had set up has to be put right before they can operate and it is not right yet. It looks as if they can’t cure it except by doing what can’t be done till it is cured! So I’m in a vicious circle–or, as a Cambridge undergraduate said in his Tripos paper, by a happy slip of the pen, ‘a viscous circle’. But I’ve no pain and am seldom either bored or depressed.

All good wishes.

Yours

C.S.L.

TO THE EDITOR OF THE CHURCH TIMES:¹⁹⁷

Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

Sir,–

I do not know whether capital punishment should or should not be abolished, for neither the natural light, nor scripture, nor ecclesiastical authority seems to tell me. But I am concerned about the grounds on which its abolition is being sought.

To say that by hanging a man we presumptuously judge him to be irredeemable is, I submit, simply untrue. My Prayer Book includes an exhortation to those under sentence of death which throughout implies the exact opposite. The real question is whether a murderer is more likely to repent and make a good end three weeks hence in the execution shed or, say, thirty years later in the prison infirmary. No mortal can know. But those who have most right to an opinion are those who know most by experience about the effect of prolonged prison life. I wish some prison chaplains, governors and warders would contribute to the discussion.

The suggestion of compensation for the relatives of the murdered man is in itself reasonable, but it ought not to be even remotely connected with the case for or against capital punishment. If it is, we shall be giving countenance to the archaic, and surely erroneous view that murder is primarily an offence not against society but against individuals.

Hanging is not a more irrevocable act than any other. You can’t bring an innocent man to life: but neither can you give him back the years which wrongful imprisonment has eaten.

Other correspondents have pointed out that a theory of punishment which is purely exemplary or purely reformatory, or both, is shockingly immoral. Only the concept of desert connects punishment with morality at all. If deterrence is all that matters, the execution of an innocent man, provided the public think him guilty, would be fully justified. If reformation alone is in question, then there is nothing against painful and compulsory reform for all our defects, and a Government which believes Christianity to be a neurosis will have a perfectly good right to hand us all over to their straighteners for ‘cure’ to-morrow.

C. S. Lewis

TO DOM BEDE GRIFFITHS OSB (W):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

3 Dec 1961

My dear Dom Bede

Thank you for your letter of the 27th Nov. Your hand, though not yet nearly so bad as mine, deteriorates! But the bits I could read were very interesting.

The difficulty about Hinduism, and indeed about all the higher Paganisms, seem to me to be our double task of reconciling and converting. The activities are almost opposites, yet must go hand in hand. We have to hurl down false gods and also elicit the peculiar truth preserved in the worship of each. I had just heard of Vinota: but what is an ashram or astram? Like the man in The Hunting of the Snark you ‘wholly forget that English is what I speak’!¹⁹⁸

Try to time your next letter so that it does not arrive near Christmas. Every year the merciless spate of correspondence makes this season more penitential and less festal for me.

I forget whether you know that my wife died in July. Pray for us both. I am learning a great deal. Grief is not, as I thought, a state but a process: like a walk in a winding valley which gives you a new landscape every few miles.

All blessings. I am tired, and slightly ill, at the moment, or I wd. answer your letter more as it deserves.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO JOCELYN GIBB (BOD):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

6 Dec 1960 [1961]

Dear Jock

Drat it, I can’t find a single copy of WLN¹⁹⁹ either here or at Magdalene. Someone, but I’ve no idea who, has our only surviving copy on loan. Sorry.

As I have little idea what exactly the two packets I lent you contain, I can’t of course make any comment on your preliminary ideas. When they are sufficiently ‘choate’ (as Churchill wd. say)²⁰⁰ send them back with the packets and I’ll apply my mind to the question.

If you and Spencer favour the idea of any poems I’ll make a choice. It might or might not include any of those you’ve got.

Thanks for lovely lunch & that appetising bottle–not yet opened.

Yours

Jack (= C.S.L.)

TO FRANCIS WARNER (P):²⁰¹

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

6 Dec 61

Dear Warner

I’ve written to the Master of Christ’s and sent a copy of my letter to Tom Henn, and I wish you good luck.

Since you ask about myself, the position is that they can’t operate on my prostate till they’ve got my heart and kidneys right, and it begins to look as if they can’t get my heart & kidneys right till they operate on my prostate. So we’re in what an examinee, by a happy slip of the pen, called ‘a viscous circle’. Still it is not quite closed. Meanwhile, I have no pain and am neither depressed nor bored.

Who is supervising you now? I told them to put someone on in my place.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO THE EDITOR OF THE CHURCH TIMES:²⁰²

Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

Sir,–

Dr Davis rightly reproves me for using the word society as I did.²⁰³ This hypostatised abstraction has already done harm enough. But I only meant ‘all of us’. The absurdity of the view which treats murder as an offence against a single family is best illustrated by a case in the private speeches of Demosthenes (I can’t turn it up at the moment, but your more scholarly readers no doubt can).²⁰⁴

A man, A, set free a female slave, B, his old nurse. B married. Her husband died without issue. Someone then murdered B. But under Athenian law no one could prosecute because there was no injured party. A could not act because B, when murdered, was no longer his property. There was no widower, and there were no orphans.

I am on neither side in the present controversy. But I still think the abolitionists conduct their case very ill. They seem incapable of stating it without imputing vile motives to their opponents. If unbelievers often look at your correspondence column, I am afraid they may carry away a bad impression of our logic, manners and charity.

C. S. Lewis

TO DOM BEDE GRIFFITHS OSB (W):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

20 Dec. 1961

My dear Dom Bede–

Thanks. I could read every word of it, and I hope you will be able to say the same of this.

To lose one’s wife after a very short married life may, I suspect, be less miserable than after a long one. You see, I had not grown accustomed to happiness. It was all a ‘treat’, I was like a child at a party. But prolonged earthly happiness, even of the most innocent sort, is, I suspect, addictive. The whole being gets geared to it. The withdrawal must be more like lacking bread than lacking cake.

One thing is perhaps worth recording. I prayed that when I buried my wife my whole sexual nature shd. be buried with her, and it seems to have happened. Thus one recurrent trial has vanished from my life–an enormous liberty. Of course this may only be old age–we must not, as Bunyan says, ‘mistake the decays of nature for the advances of grace.’²⁰⁵ But the liberty is a fact. It is wonderful to be able to think unrestrainedly and gratefully of the act of love without the least reawakening of concupiscence.

About Nature–you are apparently meeting, at an unusually late age, that difficulty wh. I met in adolescence and which was for years my stock against Theism. Romantic Pantheism has in this matter led us all up the garden path. It has taught us to regard Nature as divine. But she is a creature, and surely a creature lower than ourselves. And a fallen creature–not an evil creature but a good creature corrupted: retaining many beauties, but all tainted. And certainly not a creature made for our benefit (think of the spiral nebulae). The devil cd. make nothing, but has infected everything. I have always gone as near Dualism as Christianity allows–and the N.T. allows one to go v. near. The devil is the (usurping) Lord of this .²⁰⁶ It was he, not God, who ‘bound this daughter of Abraham’.²⁰⁷

Even more disturbing, as you say, is the ghastly record of Christian persecution. It had begun in Our Lord’s time–‘Ye know not what spirit ye are of’ (John of all people!).²⁰⁸ I think we must fully face the fact that when Christianity does not make a man v. much better, it makes him v. much worse. It is, paradoxically, dangerous to draw nearer to God. Doesn’t one find in one’s own experience that every advance (if one ever has advanced!) in the spiritual life opens to one the possibility of blacker sins as well as of brighter virtues? Conversion may make of one who was, if no better, no worse than an animal, something like a devil. Satan is an angel.

I wonder have any of us taken seriously enough the prohibition of casting pearls before swine?²⁰⁹ This is the point of Our Lord’s remarks after the parable of the Unjust Steward.²¹⁰ We are denied many graces we ask for because they wd. be our ruin. If we can’t be trusted even with the perishable wealth of the world, who will trust us with the real wealth? (The ‘Lord’ in this parable is of course not God but the world, and the Lord who praised the steward is Jesus, who is often called ²¹¹ in St Luke).²¹²

I am rather seriously ill. Prostate trouble, by the time it was diagnosed had already damaged my kidneys, blood, and heart, so that I’m now in a vicious circle. They can’t operate till my bio-chemistry gets right and it looks as if that can’t get right till they operate. I am in some danger–not sentenced but on trial for my life. I know I shall have your prayers. My temptation is not to impatience. Rather, I am far too inclined to snuggle down in the enforced idleness and other privileges of an invalid.

Have you read anything by an American Trappist called Thomas Merton? I’m at present on his No Man is an Island.²¹³ It is the best new spiritual reading I’ve met for a long time.

God bless you.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO MARY VAN DEUSEN (W): TS

The Kilns, Kiln Lane,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford.

22nd December 1961

Dear Mrs van Deusen,

Very many thanks for your kind enquiries and for the photo; from the letter I draw the deduction that you both are flourishing.

As regards myself, though I still have an operation hanging over me, I am very greatly improved in the last couple of months, and am now leading an almost normal life; though I still have to keep to a rather irksome diet. But I feel stronger and more alive than I did in the summer, and am eating and sleeping well.

My brother joins me in sending you our very best wishes for a happy 1962.

yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO KAPALI VISWANATHAN (W):²¹⁴ TS

645/61

The Kilns, Kiln Lane,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford.

22nd December 1961.

Dear Mr Viswanathan,

Your delightful present of the paper cutter reached me only this morning, forwarded by Mr Ramana who explains that the Anchor Line lost or rather mislaid the package. Hence the delay in acknowledging your kindness. The knife has already found a permanent home on my writing table where it will serve as a perpetual reminder of its donor.

With all best wishes for your prosperity in 1962,

yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO JESSIE M. WATT (W): TS

414/61

The Kilns, Kiln Lane,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford.

22nd December 1961.

Dear Mrs Watt,

Many thanks for your kind letter of 13th December. But, alas, you have been misinformed; I did not have an operation in the summer, but have an operation impending, for which I am being built up–or if you prefer it, being cooked before I am carved. However, my general health is far better than it was in the summer, and my doctors are pleased with me, though I still have to have blood transfusions. I am leading a normal, if somewhat invalidish life.

Many thanks for the charming calendar, and for your thoughtfulness in adding the information that the birds are kittiwakes; I in my gross ignorance would have assumed that they were seagulls. What a fascinating story about your friend who used to collect an appreciative audience of seals by playing his violin on the sea shore!

With all good wishes to you all for 1962,

yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO FRANCIS WARNER (P):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

23 Dec. 61

Dear Warner

I’ve written to the Master of Caius.²¹⁵ Good luck.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE (W):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

23 Dec. 1961

Dear Mary Willis

We both seem to be having a sticky time at present? I am much the same: that is, I keep on looking and feeling better but each new blood count shows that I have made no real progress.

I’ve been greatly impressed by the work of an American Trappist called Thomas Merton–No Man Is An Island. You probably know it?

I can’t write much at present. All blessings.

Yours

Jack

TO MARY VAN DEUSEN (W):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

28 Dec. 61

Dear Mrs. Van Deusen,

I’ve found the passage–1 Cor. XV, 20.²¹⁶ Also 1 Pet. III 19, 20,²¹⁷ bears indirectly on the subject. It implies that something can be done for the dead. If so, why shd. we not pray for them?²¹⁸

Beware of the argument ‘the Church gave the Bible (and therefore the Bible can never give us grounds for criticising the Church)’. It is perfectly possible to accept B on the authority of A and yet regard B as a higher authority than A. It happens when I recommend a book to a pupil. I first sent him to the book, but, having gone to it, he knows (for I’ve told him) that the author knows more about that subject than I.

Thanks for charming photos. Good wishes from both,

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO AUSTIN FARRER (L):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

29th Dec. 61

Dear Austin,

I’ve read your book²¹⁹ with great enjoyment. You once said that you wrote with difficulty, but no one would guess it: this is full of felicities that sound as unsought as wildflowers…

Of course admiration is not always agreement. I stick at the diagnosis, ‘Emotional reaction rather than rational conviction.’²²⁰hellip;How do people decide what is an emotion and what is a value judgement? Not presumably just by introspection wh. will certainly be hard put to it to find a value judgement chemically pure from emotion…I find however that the problem of animal pain is just as tough when I concentrate on creatures I dislike as on ones I cd. make pets of. Conversely, if I removed all emotion from, say my view of Hitler’s treatment of Jews, I don’t know how much value judgement would remain. I loathe hens. But my conscience would say the same things if I forgot to feed them as if I forgot to feed the cat…