1963

TO THE EDITOR OF ENCOUNTER:¹

Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

I have been reading John Wain’s Sprightly Running,² and find there a good many references to myself. Many of them are extremely kind, and all are inoffensive: but there is one passage which I must contradict on merely factual grounds. Whether the matter it deals with is at all worth recording, is doubtful: but if it is to be recorded, let us get it right.

On page 183 Mr. Wain is talking about a very informal club that used to meet in my rooms,³ and says he was ‘surprised by the alliances it was capable of forming.’ He thinks Dorothy Sayers was an ally ‘because she was a Christian and liked Dante’ Roger L. Green, ‘because he was an authority on fairy-tales’ and Roy Campbell, ‘because he was a Roman Catholic’ and ‘anti-socialist.’⁴

The truth is:

1. Dorothy Sayers, so far as I know, was not even acquainted with any of us except Charles Williams and me. We two had got to know her at different times and in different ways. In my case, the initiative came from her. She was the first person of importance who ever wrote me a fan-letter. I liked her, originally, because she liked me; later, for the extraordinary zest and edge of her conversation–as I like a high wind. She was a friend, not an ally. Needless to say, she never met our own club, and probably never knew of its existence.

2. Mr. Green was never more than a casual acquaintance to any one of us except me. In the friendship between him and me, he took the initiative. It was at first a wholly bookish friendship; and to the present day, religion has seldom been mentioned between us, and politics never. He was, and is, a friend, not an ally. We meet solely because we like one another.

3. I loathed and loath Roy Campbell’s particular blend of Catholicism and Fascism, and told him so. I got to know him before I knew who he was. He was for some weeks a mysterious stranger in a pub whose skyscraping and hair-raising stories made me feel as if I had blundered into a picaresque novel. My appreciation of a human flavour quite new to my social palate had nothing to do with approval or agreement or even belief. Mr. Wain might as well think that Alcinous and his court were inspired by diplomatic considerations when they listened with delight to the amazing yarn that Odysseus spun them.⁵ And when at last the stranger let out that his name was Campbell, and I (at a long shot) said ‘Not Roy Campbell?’ I thought it right, before taking his hand, to ask whether he knew that hand had already lampooned him in print.⁶ He said he did. There is here no question of alliance. Nor did he ever become a friend in any deep sense: not as Mr. Green, or Mr. Wain himself, are my friends. Campbell was more like a tumble in the ring.

The whole picture of myself as one forming a cabinet, or cell, or coven, is erroneous. Mr. Wain has mistaken purely personal relationships for alliances. He was surprised that these friends were ‘so different from one another.’⁷ But were they more different from one another than he is from all of them? Aren’t we always surprised at our friends’ other friendships? As at all his tastes? One may even discover (not without horror) that one’s friend prefers bottled beer to beer or processed cheese to cheese. We have to face it.⁸

C. S. Lewis

TO MRS LEON EMMERT (W):⁹

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

2 Jan 63

Dear Mrs. Emmert

Thank you for your kind and most interesting letter. Yes–how one’s view of one’s parents begins to change when one has discovered the beam in one’s own eye!¹⁰ I have had that experience too. And when one has grasped the right view of marriage, how all the current gabble about ‘sexual morality’ is reduced!–as if it did not consist almost entirely in applying to sexual behaviour the same principles of good faith and unselfishness which have to be applied to all behaviour.

A good many of my books might not interest you. Write for the list^* to J. Gibb, 52 Doughty St., London W.C. 1. MacDonald is nearly all out of print.

You are all facing a terrible situation out there; may God support and protect you.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

 

* But note which ones are already included in Mere Christianity or you might buy the same book twice!

TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE (W):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford.

2 Jan 63

Dear Mary Willis

I was glad to get your favourable account of Casey. The age and behaviour sound right. Doesn’t Shakespeare say ‘Let still the woman take an elder than herself’?¹¹ In Jane Austen the usual marriage seems to be between a man of 27 and a girl of 19 or 20. (What a huge population of widows there must have been!) As for looks–do most women value beauty in a man at all? My experience is that they rather distrust & dislike it.

We are having something more like an American winter than we’ve had for nearly a century, and as we are not prepared for it (v. little central heating, no snow-ploughs, etc) it hits us v. hard. There will be real famine conditions in a week or so if a thaw doesn’t come. This, with the ghastly drudgery of Christmas mails–they get heavier every year–has left us in a v. chastened and un-festive frame of mind! Let’s hope 63 will be a better year for us all!

Yours

Jack

TO LAURENCE HARWOOD (BOD):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

4 January 63

Dear Lawrence

What a pest I am! Ces péres de famille sont capables de tout.¹² There now does seem a chance–tho’ drat it, not a certainty–that the grinder we have in view will be able to take Douglas in the second week of this month (it depends on the grinder’s last G.C.E.¹³ results which are not in till then). When I wrote to you I was trying to insure against a whole wasted term. Which, you see, may still be necessary, and which, anyway, will not amount to the 4 months you specify. So there seems after all nothing you can do just at the moment. I may have to pester you again some time. His preference is for dairy farming and my preference is for him to live en famille.

Are you enjoying 1963 so far? We are not!

A thousand thanks, and apologies.

Yours

Jack

TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE (W):

The Kilns

8 Jan 63

Dear Mary Willis

I don’t mind betting that the things which ‘had to be done’ in your room didn’t really have to be done at all. Very few things really do. After one bad night with my heart–not so bad as yours, for it was only suffocation, not pain–my doctor strictly rationed me on stairs, and I have obeyed him. Of course it is hideously inconvenient: but that can be put up with and must. What worse than inconvenience wd. have resulted if you had left those ‘things’ undone? Do take more care of yourself and less of ‘things’!

Still snow-bound.

Yours

Jack

TO GEORGE SAYER (W): PC

The Kilns

9 Jan 63

Achtung! On Sat leave your car in the road & walk (or wade) up the drive. It took 40 minutes to dig a car out of that drive the other day

Jack

TO DONOVAN AYLARD (W): TS 74/63

The Kilns, Kiln Lane,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford.

11th January 1963.

Dear Mr. Aylard,

Many thanks for your card which only reached me this morning. My stock of cards is long since exhausted, so I send you this line of good wishes as a substitute.

A happy 1963 to you.

Yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO REV. R. D. BOWDEN (W): TS

78/63

The Kilns, Kiln Lane,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford.

12th January 1963.

Dear Mr. Bowden,

Many thanks for your most kind and stimulating letter. Need I say that I am pleased that you yourself should have liked the books, and proud that they should have given pleasure–through your instrumentality–to a wider circle. Letters such as yours are very gratifying.

With all best wishes for 1963,

yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO T. S. GREGORY (BBC):¹⁴

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

17 Jan 63

Dear Mr. Gregory

I am afraid I am not well enough to undertake a talk at present. With thanks and regrets.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO MERRILL ROGERS (P):¹⁵

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

20 Jan. 63

Dear Mr (?) Rogers

I am not a good enough Grailologist (to coin a dreadful word) for your purpose, for though I am very interested in the Arthurian romances as extant works of art, I have never been much concerned with what we may call the ‘pre-history’ of their various ingredients. I am therefore unable to tell you whether you have been anticipated in the Hermetic and alchemical hypothesis to which Jung has led you. If not–and someone like Loomis will be able to tell you–I think your theory is well worth putting forward. But I wd. advise you not, at first anyway, to advance on too wide a front. By linking your theory up with the Graves-Podro axis¹⁶ you raise v. much larger issues. These will produce support and opposition on irrelevant grounds and your original point will be obscured.

Speculations about the Grail have a strange way of causing people who have found something to claim that they have found everything! Take warning by Lady Flavia Anderson whose The Ancient Secret begins by being a theory of the Grail and ends by finding pretty nearly a key to the whole universe in a cave in Somersetshire.¹⁷

Good hunting! You will have great fun.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO JOHN H. MCCALLUM (P):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry

Oxford

21/1/63

Dear Mac,

Thanks for enclosure and kind words. There are no literary essays straining at the leash just now. All good wishes for the new year–a pretty bloody one so far!

Yours

Clive

TO ROGER LANCELYN GREEN (BOD): PC

The Kilns

24/1/63

I’ve been flu’ bound and snow bound, but hope to reach Cambridge next Monday. Are you going to have one of our (now happily, usual) journeys, dinners & nights this term? And have you a date in mind? Love to all

Jack

TO JAMES MORE (P):¹⁸ TS

141/63

The Kilns, Kiln Lane,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford.

24th January 1963.

Dear James,

Many thanks for your letter. I’m so glad to hear that you like the Narnian books, and it was very good of you to take the trouble to write to tell me that you did.

No, I’m afraid there will be no more stories of Narnia. If you want any more you will have to try your hand at writing one yourself!

With all best wishes to you and your brother,

yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis¹⁹

TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE (W):

The Kilns

26/1/63

Dear Mary Willis

That wedding party wd. have half killed me! And I am afraid it was very bad for you. I too am having bad nights. I find the best sedative if one is wakeful in the middle of the night is–simply FOOD. Have a few biscuits on the table by your bed.

I’d a queer night a week ago. Something (not dangerous but a little painful) went wrong at about 1.30 a.m. and needed the surgeon so rang up for ambulance.²⁰ But as our drive is impassable to wheeled traffic with the snow drifts I had to go out & wait for said ambulance in the road: from about 2 to 2.20. Nice to look at: full moon on snow. But I thought my ears wd. have dropped off with the cold! Got back to bed about 6 o’clock.

Your young friend can get the P. of Pain in a paper-back in America. Mails perfectly frightful just now. I suppose the snow keeps people indoors and that encourages them to write letters! In haste

Yours

Jack

TO LAURENCE HARWOOD (BOD):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

26/1/63

Dear Lawrence

Yes, thank all good stars, we’ve got Douglas with a grinder at Godalming.²¹ I like the man’s letters and he seems to think that D. now at last means business. But he has meant it so often before! Thanks very much for all your pains–you’re more like a godfather (fairy type) than a godson. I may bother you about vacational work later on: we don’t know any dates yet.

We struggle on. Not all pipes have stood up to it. Do you find it begins to make you very comatose–as if man were meant to be a hibernating animal? All the best for the New Year.

Yours

Jack

TO ROGER LANCELYN GREEN (BOD): PC

as from Magdalene College,

28th January 1963.

Good. Mon 11 March it is. But note that our causeries de lundi²² are now permanently transferred to the Lamb & Flag.²³ We were sorry to break with tradition, but the B & B had become too intolerably cold, dark, noisy, and child-pestered. I hope you got a cutting from Encounter?²⁴ Love to all

J.

TO KATHLEEN ANDREWS (BOD): TS

172/63

The Kilns, Kiln Lane,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford.

1st February 1963.

Dear Miss Andrews,

It was indeed most kind of you to send the copy of Annals of a quiet neighbourhood,²⁵ and I appreciate it greatly; not many people would have taken so much trouble. As it happens I already have a copy of this book, but do not think therefore that your kindness has been wasted. Macdonalds are, in the jargon of the day, in very short supply, and I have a friend who will welcome the Annals and treasure it.

With all best wishes, and again thanks,

yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis²⁶

TO JANE DOUGLASS (W):²⁷ TS

183/63

The Kilns, Kiln Lane,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford.

6th February 1963.

Dear Miss Douglass,

Many thanks for your very kind and sympathetic note of the 2nd, in which you offer me the only consolation which is to be found in such a loss as mine. It was good of you to write, and I assure you that your message is greatly appreciated.

We are now on the 42nd day of our Arctic spell, and this morning it has begun to snow again.²⁸ No doubt the papers have told you the state we are in and when one is beginning to get on in years it is very, very trying. But ‘even the weariest river winds somewhere to the sea’²⁹ and I suppose we shall see the end of this in God’s good time.

With all greetings,

yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis³⁰

TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE (W):

Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

8 Feb. 63

Dear Mary Willis

I’m not surprised at Son Suez’s reaction.³¹ She couldn’t possibly know that this inexplicable arrest, exile, and imprisonment had a kind intention. It suggests the comforting thought that the strange and terrifying things which happen to us are really for our benefit. That’s an old platitude of course: but seeing it the other way round, in relation to the cat, somehow brings it to life.

Still snow!

Yours

Jack

TO BLANCHARD MARSHALL (W):

Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

16 Feb 63

Dear Mr. Marshall, thank you for your interesting letter,

I liked your kind remarks to me and liked your verses better.

You caught a glimpse of England and you counted it into rhyme.

But I regret to tell you that you caught it just in time

For day by day it vanishes–the woods are going down,

A horrible suburbia is linking town to town.

The narrow, winding roads grow broad and straight, the kindly earth

With contraceptive tarmac is forbidden to give birth;

The sorcerers of chemistry are poisoning the soil,

The bays and rivers are defiled with refuse and with oil,

And every day some liberty the subject once enjoyed

By order of the government is stealthily destroyed.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO WILLIAM L. KINTER (P):

Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

19 Feb 63

Dear Mr. Kinter

Thanks for your kind and encouraging letter. I have no recollection of an article by me in the N.Y. Times, so I suppose it has not been reprinted.³² Mr Battaglia, if and when he decides on coming here, had best work through the ordinary ‘channels’ by writing to the Secretary of the Board of the Faculty of English, enclosing copies of any of his works he thinks advisable. In that case, I might be one of the people chosen to give an opinion on them. An opinion volunteered to the Board by me in my private capacity might not do much good. They’d feel they were being ‘got at’.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO WILLIAM I. ELLIOTT (P):

Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

22 Feb. 63

Dear Mr Elliott

Thanks for your very kind letter. I am glad to hear that I shall have such an excellent translator.³³ My natural reaction to your suggested preface to Miracles was to ask myself ‘What should I say if I wrote it?’ But I couldn’t think of anything I wanted to say. A new audience might well justify a preface, but not from me–who knows nothing about that new audience. So I ask to be excused. If I tried, you wd. hear the creak of the pump-handle.

My compliments to Mr N. Yagyu and warn him to use the paper-back (Fontana) edn. of Miracles which supersedes the hard-backed first edn. One chapter has been almost entirely re-written.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W):

The Kilns,

Kiln Lane,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

3 March 63

My dear Arthur

On July 28 W, Douglas, and I will be at the Glenmachan Towers Hotel, and on the 29th W. will go to Eire. Can Doug and you and I go off somewhere for a week or two beginning on that date? If you don’t feel up to driving us to wherever we go, I’ll hire a car & driver for the journey. Wd. Castlerock or Glens of Antrim be any good? Portrush only as a last resource. But we want to be pretty quick about booking 3 rooms (it must be 3) and about berths for Doug & me on our return journey to England.

I saw snowdrops for the first time last week.

Yours

Jack

TO JOCELYN GIBB (BOD):³⁴

Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

7 March 63

Dear Jock

Thanks for cheque (£1625-2-0). It did occur to me that perhaps I have already got all the plums out of those sermons.

If you are going to do any poems of mine, I’d like two of wh. I have no MS. Both in Punch. One is a set of Sapphics beginning ‘All the world’s wiseacres’, and the other is ‘The Country of the Blind’.³⁵

Yours

Jack

 

I’d want a preface: chiefly on metrics.

TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W):

The Kilns,

Kiln Lane,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

10 March 63

My dear Arthur,

Good man! There are 3 hotels at Port B³⁶–the other two being Ballintrae House and Beach Hotel. If you can’t get 3 rooms in Bayview you must locate 2 of us in one hotel and 1 in another or even (as a last resource) one in each of the three. Doug & I will aim at sailing on Mon Aug 12. The times, as you point out, are by no means ideal, but we can’t manage Sept.

Keep our fingers crossed & keep on saying D.V.

Yours

Jack

TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W):

Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

15 March 63

My dear Arthur

I don’t see how to change, for berths, which now a days need fixing as far ahead as hotels, are all fixed, and also all the hotels in the Eire part of our holiday. I can manage stairs now, provided I take them in bottom gear. So do try again. Your letter, forwarded by W., has only just reached me. How difficult it is to do anything.

Yours

Jack

TO SHERWOOD E. WIRT (P):³⁷

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

18 March 63

Dear Mr. Wirt

I shall be happy to answer any questions if I know the answers, and I’d much rather do it by word of mouth than by pen.

From April 16 I shall be at Magdalene College, Cambridge.

Thanks, I shd. value the new Smoke on the Mountain.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE (W):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

19 March 63

Dear Mary Willis

I’m sorry they threaten you with a painful disease. ‘Dangerous’ matters much less, doesn’t it? What have you and I got to do but make our exit? When they told me I was in danger several months ago, I don’t remember feeling distressed.

I am talking, of course, about dying, not about being killed. If shells started falling about this house I shd. feel quite differently. An external, visible, and (still worse) audible threat at once wakes the instinct of self-preservation into fierce activity. I don’t think natural death has any similar terrors.

I am thrilled to hear that Son Suez has a sweater! Is this part of the démarche³⁸ (it’s in all our papers) which a body of American women are making to the President to get animals properly clothed ‘in the interests of decency’? Can it be true? If so, not only what insanity, but also (as in all super-refinements) what fundamental foul-mindedness! But also, what fun! The elephant looks as if he wore trousers already, but terribly baggy ones. What he needs is braces. The Rhino seems to wear a suit much too big for him: can it be ‘taken in’? What sort of collars will giraffes wear? Will seals and otters have ordinary clothes or bathing suits? The hedgehog will wear his shirts out terribly quickly, I shd. think.

The reason I stood out waiting for the ambulance was that the 200 yards of avenue wh. lead up to this house were under such deep snow-drifts that wheeled traffic couldn’t reach the house. You get arctic winters much more often than we, but you have no idea what they are like when they do fall in a country where no-one is prepared for them. But it didn’t do me the slightest harm. In my experience colds and coughs come from infection far more often than from exposure.

Yes, private communions (I shared many during Joy’s last days) are extraordinarily moving. I am in danger of preferring them to those in church.

Blessings & prayers.

Yours

Jack

 

The religious world of Britain was suddenly caught up in a mood of heady novelty. On Sunday, 17 March 1963, the Observer newspaper published a special article extracted from a book entitled Honest to God by the radical Bishop of Woolwich, John Arthur Thomas Robinson.³⁹ It was a media sensation, and almost a million people bought a copy of the Observer to read the extract–‘Our Image of God Must Go’. Adrian Hastings commented on it in his History of English Christianity 1920–1990:

It went through four impressions that March and nearly a million copies were sold within three years. Only the Bible could rival it. English religion of the 1960s will always remain more associated with Honest to God than any other book…Robinson had sensed quite correctly that the 1950s religious revival…had really not got through to the ordinary modern pagan at all…His intention was a missionary one. Christianity, if it is to mean anything in the future to more than ‘a tiny religious remnant’, has got to change its style radically, and learn a new language in which ‘the most fundamental categories of our theology–of God, of the supernatural, and of religion itself–must go into the melting’. Perhaps we are even called to a ‘Copernican Revolution’ in which ‘the God of traditional theology’ must be given up ‘in any form’.⁴⁰

Seizing what seemed to him a good opportunity, Edward Dell, editor of The Episcopalian, wrote to Lewis on 16 April 1963:

Bishop J. A. T. Robinson’s book Honest to God is about to break upon the American scene. I believe it is an important book. It will certainly be a storm center among laymen who are ill prepared to receive or understand it. It cannot and will not go unnoticed, however. Since its subject is really the semantics, images and the mythology of the language of Christians I wonder whether you would care to undertake a 1500–2000 word introduction to and critique of the Bishop’s book for this magazine.⁴¹

TO JANE DOUGLASS (W): TS

183/63 The Kilns, Kiln Lane,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford.

21st March 1963.

Dear Miss Douglass,

Many thanks for the leaflet and its intriguing pictures. My favourite is No 8, the very primitive tank!

Weather has been almost a dirty word over here lately–sixty-six days of frozen snow without a break! Sorry to hear yours is bad too.

With all greetings,

yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis⁴²

TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

22 March 63

My dear Arthur,

Bravo! As you say, not ideal, but the main object is to have some days together.⁴³ We’re both too old to let our remaining chances slip!

Yours

Jack

TO HUGH KILMER (W):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

26 March 63

Dear Hugh

I didn’t say ‘it is wiser never to day-dream’. I said we needn’t discuss whether it was. The whole passage is much more ironical than you allow for. The brutal plain English is ‘Your Academic literary Pharisees make demands on humanity wh. neither you nor anyone else has ever met or can.’⁴⁴

The Sacred Heart ikons can’t ever be beautiful, can they? For their v. essence is to take heart (metaphorical) and equate it with heart (anatomical).⁴⁵ Isn’t this as if you drew a picture of Our Lady as literally an ivory tower with battlements etc.? Of course I come as near this as possible when I make ‘the Lion of Judah’ into Aslan. But I’m working in words, and you can do all sorts of things with them which can’t be done with pictures.

Don’t get any more girls to write to me, though, unless they really need any help I might be able to give. I have too many letters already. Remember me to the family.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO PATRICIA MACKEY (W):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

26 March 63

Dear Miss Mackey

Your letter was cheering, for Till We Have Faces has attracted less attention than any book I ever wrote. The name was just ‘made up’. I expect some Jungianisms do come in, but the main conscious framework is Christian, not Jungian. Divine Love gradually conquers, first, a Pagan (and almost savage) soul’s misconception of the Divine (as Ungit), then, shallow ‘enlightenment’ (the Fox), and, most of all, her jealousy of the real God, whom she hates till near the end because she wants Psyche to be entirely hers.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO JOAN LANCASTER (BOD):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

27 March 63

Dear Joan

I see you’ve grown into a pretty woman. It must be a nice thing to be. The first poem is too rhapsodical–too much in the Whitman tradition–for me, but then I’m a square. The best are ‘Do I the weak’ and ‘And all is fair.’ So you are, like me, in love with syllables? Good. Sheldar is a boss word. So are Tolkien’s Tinuviel and Silmaril. And David Lindsay’s Tormance in Voyage to Arcturus. And Northumberland is glorious; but best of all, if only it meant something more interesting, is silver salver.

Nietzsche was a better poet than a philosopher. I give Plato better marks on both papers.

All the best.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO MRS DUNN (P):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

3 April 63

Dear Mrs. Dunn

Yes, a very puzzling passage.⁴⁶ I think it is a moral allegory enforced by an actual miracle. It wd. be shocking if a man, or even a beast, were destroyed just to point a moral. But a vegetable? After all, every tree that dies (and they all die) anywhere in the world does so by God’s will. ‘Not a sparrow falls to the ground etc’.⁴⁷ Mustn’t we face the fact that He wills deaths as well as lives? He has made the natural world to depend partly on death–‘unless a seed die’.⁴⁸ At least, that is how I look at it.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO MICHAEL EDWARDS (BOD):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

5 April 63

Dear Mr Edwards

By all means. But I leave for Cambridge on Easter Tuesday and it wd. be v. difficult to fit in. Unless, then, you happened to be in Cambridge next term, it wd. be easier to postpone your visit till the first week of the Long Vac.

Till then.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO MICHAEL EDWARDS (BOD):⁴⁹ PC

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

13 April 63

Will 2.15 Sat. June 8 suit you? The house is hard to find, and I add map.

TO SHERWOOD E. WIRT (P):

As from Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

13 April 63

Dear Mr. Wirt

Monday mornings happen to be always occupied. Wd. Tue. May 7 suit you? If so I shd. be happy to see [you] at 1 o’clock. Thanks for the copy of Decision.⁵⁰

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO EDWARD T. DELL (P):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

22 April 63

Dear Dell

I’d rather keep off Bishop Robinson’s book. I should find it hard to write of such a man with charity, nor do I want to increase his publicity. But thanks for the offer.

Yours ever

C. S. Lewis

 

Lewis had begun writing a book on prayer in 1952. However, as we know from his letter to Sister Penelope of 15 February 1954, he had found himself unable to finish it. Now, in March 1963, he found the form–a series of imaginary letters–for what he had to say and Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer was completed in April. Shortly before mentioning the book in the following letter to Mary Willis Shelburne, he sent the manuscript to his agent, Spencer Curtis Brown.

TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE (W):

The Kilns, 22 April 63

Dear Mary Willis

What in Heaven’s name is ‘distressing’ about an old man saying to an old woman that they haven’t much more to do here? I wasn’t in the least expressing resentment or despondency. I was referring to an obvious fact and one which I don’t find either distressing or embarrassing. Do you?

Didn’t the flowers all say ‘Good morning, Lawd!’ in the (excellent) film of Green Pastures.⁵¹

I’ve finished a book on Prayer. Don’t know if it is any good.

I’m glad you can still enjoy a new dress. I can still dislike a new suit.

In haste.

Yours

Jack

TO KATHY KRISTY (W):

Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

23 April 63

Dear Kathy

Congratulations on keeping house!

By the way I also wd. say ‘I got a book.’ But your teacher and I are not ‘English teachers’ in the same sense. She has to put across an idea of what the English Language ought to be: I’m concerned entirely with what it is and how it came to be what it is. In fact she is a gardener distinguishing ‘flowers’ from ‘weeds’: I am a botanist and am interested in both as vegetable organisms.

All good wishes.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO DANIEL STONE (P):⁵²

Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

26 April 63

Dear Daniel,

I am delighted to hear that you like the Narnian books, and it was nice of you to write and tell me. It sounds as if you had all of them except the very first one (The Magician’s Nephew). I shall not write any more of them: seven are enough. I am amused you should think ‘my hand must be good at making things’. In reality I’m the clumsiest and most ham-handed person in the world! I can’t make anything–words are the only tools I am any good at.

Good wishes.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO EDWARD T. DELL (P):⁵³

As from Magdalene College,

Cambridge

29 April [1963]

My dear Dell

I’m afraid I must stick to my position. Even if I wanted to abandon it–and I don’t–I could hardly do so now that you have mentioned the fee! What would you yourself think of me if I did? There will be implicit answers to some of Robinson’s nonsense in parts of a book on prayer which I’ve just finished, and I can ‘do my bit’ much better that way.⁵⁴

A great deal of my utility has depended on my having kept out of all dog-fights between professing schools of ‘Christian’ thought. I’d sooner preserve that abstinence to the end. I wd. like to oblige you personally, if I could, but I don’t feel this is a way in which I can. Forgive me.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO FATHER PETER MILWARD SJ (W):

As from Magdalene College,

Cambridge

6 May 63

Dear Padre

You ask me in effect why I am not an R.C. If it comes to that, why am I not–and why are you not–a Presbyterian, a Quaker, a Mohammedan, a Hindoo, or a Confucianist? After how prolonged and sympathetic study and on what grounds have we rejected these religions? I think those who press a man to desert the religion in which he has been bred and in which he believes he has found the means of Grace ought to produce positive reasons for the change–not demand from him reasons against all other religions. It wd. have to be all, wouldn’t it?

Our Lord prayed that we all might be one ‘as He and His father are one’.⁵⁵ But He and His Father are not one in virtue of both accepting a (third) monarchical sovereign.

That unity of rule, or even of credenda,⁵⁶ does not necessarily produce unity of charity is apparent from the history of every Church, every religious order, and every parish.

Schism is a v. great evil. But if reunion is ever to come, it will in my opinion come from increasing charity. And this, under pressure from the increasing strength & hostility of unbelief, is perhaps beginning: we no longer, thank God, speak of one another as we did even 100 years ago. A single act of even such limited co-operation as is now possible does more towards ultimate reunion than any amount of discussion.

The historical causes of the ‘Reformation’ that actually occurred were (1.) The cruelties and commercialism of the Papacy (2.) The lust and greed of Hen. 8.⁵⁷ (3.) The exploitation of both by politicians. (4.) The fatal insouciance of the mere rabble on both sides. The spiritual drive behind the Reformation that ought to have occurred was a deep re-experience of the Pauline experience.

Memo: a great many of my closest friends are your co-religionists, some of them priests. If I am to embark on a disputation–wh. could not be a short one, I wd. much sooner do it with them than by correspondence.

We can do much more to heal the schism by our prayers than by a controversy. It is a daily subject of mine.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO ROGER LANCELYN GREEN (BOD): PC

The Kilns

11 May [1963]

Full Term ends on June 7. Either, then, dine & sleep here (after meeting as usual in Lamb & Flag) or come to me some earlier Monday. Either plan wd. suit me excellently.

J.

TO HSIN-CHANG CHANG (BOD): PC

Magdalene

16 May [1963]

Dear Chang

I’ve just received 2 copies of a Japanese translation of one of my children’s stories. They are, naturally, mere curiosities for me. Do you know any one to whom they cd. be of any use?⁵⁸

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO JOCELYN GIBB (BOD):

Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

16 May 63

Dear Jock

I took C.U.P. proofs to C.U.P. only yesterday.⁵⁹ Next week-end I hope to start on the copy for the paper-back. MS. of Letters to M. is now with the typist. I’m very bad at estimating length of books, but I think it is about equal to The Four L. One letter⁶⁰ will have to be re-written when I get the TS. back, so you won’t get copy just yet. Sorry all this is so inconvenient for you, but I couldn’t help it.

Yours

Jack

TO JOHN H. MCCALLUM (P):

As from Magdalene College,

Cambridge

19 May 63

Dear Mac,

My old pensioner Mrs. M. W. Shelburne (103 6th St. N.E. Washington 2, D.C.) is in a spot of extra trouble. Will you please send her 150 dollars and debit it against my next royalties? Thanks.

Yours

Clive

TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE (W):

The Kilns

19 May 63

Dear Mary Willis

Sorry to hear of all your expenses. I have directed Harcourt Brace to send you a little extra. No time to write: my brother is ill and of course the mails have chosen that moment to be unusually heavy.

Yours

Jack

TO EVELYN TACKETT (W):⁶¹

Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

23 May 63

Dear Miss Tackett

I shall be giving a course on medieval literature (Tuesdays and Thursdays at 12 noon–or 11, I’m not yet sure which) next term, and next term begins on Oct 8. First lecture Oct 10. If you are still in England then and think it worth while to come to any of these lectures, I shall be happy to give permission to you both. In fact, this letter is the permission.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO NATHAN COMFORT STARR (P):

Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

28 May 63

Dear Starr

Good! I shall also be in Ireland in July, and the idea of a meeting there is tempting, but my movements are uncertain and, it will probably be easier for me to meet after Aug 12, when I shall be at The Kilns, Headington Quarry, Oxford (Te. Oxford 62963)

Glad to hear you are over a nasty bout. No, I’m not at all like Antaeus.⁶² Much more like Anchises⁶³ or Teiresias⁶⁴ or one of those old ditherers.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

 

Lewis arrived home from Cambridge on Friday, 7 June, and that afternoon he gave tea to Walter Hooper, who taught English Literature at the University of Kentucky, and who was in Oxford for the summer. Lewis invited Hooper to a meeting of the Inklings at the Lamb and Flag on Monday, 10 June. After that the two men generally met three times a week, Mondays at the Lamb and Flag, Wednesdays at The Kilns with a pint afterwards in The Six Bells pub, and Sundays at The Kilns when Hooper accompanied Lewis to church.

TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE (W):

Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

10 June 63

Dear Mary Willis

I am sorry to hear of the acute pain and the various other troubles. It makes me unsay all I have ever said against our English ‘welfare state’, which at least provides free medical treatment for all.

God’s purposes are terribly obscure. I am thinking both of your sufferings and of the removal of such a Pope at such a moment.⁶⁵ And the horrid conclusions which some bigots on both sides will probably draw from it.⁶⁶

My brother is away in Ireland recovering (I hope) from one of his bouts. This throws a lot of extra work on me, besides condemning me to–what I hate–solitude. God help us all.

Yours

Jack

TO MISS H. COFFEY (P): PC

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

11 June 63

Sorry, but I’m out of photos. Which is perhaps just as well, for I look awful. Imagine a marsh-wiggle gone fat and red in the face. And deaf and bald. I talk far too loud. I’m so glad you liked the Narnian series. All good wishes to both.

C. S. Lewis

TO JAMES BURLESON (W):

Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

11 June 63

Dear Mr. Burleson

I never knew any of Dorothy S’s relatives, and our chief common friend, Charles Williams, is now dead. One of her friends whom I have got to know since her death is Miss Barbara Reynolds, who finished her version of Dante. I don’t know this lady’s address. Possibly ‘c/o the Faculty of Modern Languages, Cambridge’ might find her.

I expect one or other of D.S’s publishers wd. be able to tell you who her literary executor is, and he might help. I never had a photo of her. Sorry to be so unhelpful.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE (W):⁶⁷

Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

17 June 63

Dear Mary Willis

This is terrible news. The doctor who refused to come wd., I think, be liable to criminal prosecution in this country.

Pain is terrible, but surely you need not have fear as well? Can you not see death as the friend and deliverer? It means stripping off that body which is tormenting you: like taking off a hair-shirt or getting out of a dungeon. What is there to be afraid of? You have long attempted (and none of us does more) a Christian life. Your sins are confessed and absolved. Has this world been so kind to you that you should leave it with regret? There are better things ahead than any we leave behind.

Remember, tho’ we struggle against things because we are afraid of them, it is often the other way round–we get afraid because we struggle. Are you struggling, resisting? Don’t you think Our Lord says to you ‘Peace, child, peace. Relax. Let go. Underneath are the everlasting arms. Let go, I will catch you. Do you trust me so little?’

Of course, this may not be the end. Then make it a good rehearsal.

Yours (and like you a tired traveller near the journey’s end)

Jack

TO MARY VAN DEUSEN (W):

The Kilns

20 June 63

Dear Mrs. Van Deusen

Warren is on a holiday in Ireland and at the moment ill in hospital there. This means I have all my own secretarial work to do single handed, so I’m sure you will forgive [me] for cutting this letter short. It is the fifth since breakfast and there are lots more in the pile. The boys are both well and far away, so I am alone in the house–a thing I loathe.

Blamires–not Blamise, as you spell him!–is an old pupil of mine.⁶⁸ I was very pleased with his work.⁶⁹ It was badly needed. You’d think, wouldn’t you, his name rhymed with ‘aspires’, but he pronounces it Blamers (rhyme with TAMERS).

I am glad all goes well. My love to Genia.

Yours most sincerely

C.S. Lewis

TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE (W):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

25 June 63

Dear Mary Willis–

Tho’ horrified at your sufferings, I am overjoyed at the blessed change in your attitude to death. This is a bigger stride forward than perhaps you yourself yet know. For you were rather badly wrong on that subject. Only a few months ago when I said that we old people hadn’t much more to do than to make a good exit, you were almost angry with me for what you called such a ‘bitter’ remark. Thank God, you now see it wasn’t bitter: only plain common sense.

Yes: I do wonder why the doctors inflict such torture to delay what cannot in any case be v. long delayed. Or why God does! Unless there is still something for you to do. As far as weakness allows I hope, now that you know you are forgiven, you will spend most of your remaining strength in forgiving. Lay all the old resentments down at the wounded feet of Christ. I have had dozens of blood transfusions in the last two years and know only too well the horrid–and long–moments during which they are poking about to find the vein. And then you think they’ve really got in at last and it turns out that they haven’t. (Is there an allegory here? The approaches of Grace often hurt because the spiritual vein in us hides itself from the celestial surgeon?). But oh, I do pity you for waking up and finding yourself still on the wrong side of the door! How awful it must have been for poor Lazarus who had actually died, got it all over, and then was brought back–to go through it all, I suppose, a few years later. I think he, not St. Stephen, ought really to be celebrated as the first martyr.

You say too much of the very little I have been able to do for you. Perhaps you will very soon be able to repay me a thousandfold. For if this is Good-bye, I am sure you will not forget me when you are in a better place. You’ll put in a good word for me now and then, won’t you?

It will be fun when we at last meet.

Yours

Jack

TO FATHER PETER MILWARD SJ (W):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

27 June 63

Dear Father Milward

Come, come! You show yourself lacking in the spiritual tact which is so conspicuous among my Jesuit friends in Oxford. Trying to goad a man into controversy when he has already declined it is not the way to convert him. Leave that to the Tee-Totallers and Pacifists who honour me with frequent letters. Don’t you realise that if I were anxious for a disputatio I have among my friends many learned and delightful masters of your Church and even of your order, with whom the matter could be discussed at any length in comfort over a pot of tea or a pot of beer. It is not likely I shd. prefer the manual labour (half my life is spent answering letters anyway) of a vast correspondence with a man at the other end of the world. Don’t you realise that my friends here wd. know the mollia tempora fandi⁷⁰ a great deal better than you.

My stories were not influenced by any of the authors you mention. The first impulse came, I believe, from H. G. Wells. More important was David Lindsay’s Voyage to Arcturus.⁷¹ To Chesterton I am much indebted as a controversialist, but not to fiction, tho’ I like his fiction. I don’t share the widespread admiration of Berdyaev. Surely he says the same thing over & over in different words. Orwell I read much later. I give Animal Farm full marks: 1984 is far below it.

Ransom is so called because of the sacrificial role he plays in Perelandra–his incurable wound to the heel.⁷² I don’t know that I ever thought about the relation between my S.F. and my Narnian books. Of course they are alike, for both are fantasies and both by the same man.

I don’t know Guardini.⁷³ Dawson I know only as a historian.⁷⁴ I’ve a love-hate relation to Belloc.⁷⁵ I love his humour: but all that Pan-Latinism seems to me too like Hitler’s dream of a Herrenfolk.⁷⁶

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE (W):

The Kilns

Fri. 28 June 63

Dear Mary Willis

It was anaemia that endangered my life the winter before last, but of course trifling compared with yours. I think the best way to cope with the mental debility and total inertia is to submit to it entirely. Don’t try to concentrate. Pretend you are a dormouse or even a turnip.

But of course I know the acceptance of inertia is much easier for men than for women. We are the lazy sex. Think of yourself just as a seed patiently waiting in the earth: waiting to come up a flower in the Gardener’s good time, up into the real world, the real waking. I suppose that our whole present life, looked back on from there, will seem only a drowsy half-waking. We are here in the land of dreams. But cock-crow is coming. It is nearer now than when I began this letter.

Yours

Jack

TO JOCELYN GIBB (BOD):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

28 June 63

Dear Jock

I’ve thought and thought about the blurb⁷⁷ but find I just can’t write it–apparently I can hardly write the words either! I’d like you to make the point that the reader is merely being allowed to listen to two v. ordinary laymen discussing the practical & speculative problems of prayer as these appear to them: i.e. the author does not claim to be teaching.

Wd. it be good to say ‘Some passages are controversial but this is almost an accident. The wayfaring Christian cannot quite ignore recent Anglican theology when it has been built as a barricade across the high road’

I wouldn’t stress your point about my not having given tongue v. recently. It can’t feel like that to the public. They must get the impression that I bring out a book once a fortnight. And your denial, however true in fact, will, like the sculptor’s fig-leaf, only draw attention to what it wd. fain conceal

I enclose a new passage for the last letter. This will make that letter unusually long but that’s legitimate in a finale. Anyway, I like the new bit.

Yours

Jack

TO HUGH MONTEFIORE (WHL):⁷⁸

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

2 July 1963

Dear Mr Montefiore

I’m afraid I’m not up to it.⁷⁹ I am pretty well an invalid now and professional lectures are all I can manage. But indeed I had other reasons for giving up preaching, even before my illness. I write better than I talk, and reach more people and at a less cost of nervous energy. Also, at less moral danger. I was beginning to be histrionic: an unmistakable red light.

The need in Cambridge is indeed frightful. But what little I can do to meet it can, I am convinced, be better done in other ways.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

 

P.S. I am very glad to hear you are going to the University Church.

TO JOHN BEVERSLUIS (T):⁸⁰

As from Magdalene College,

Cambridge

3 July 1963

Dear Mr. Beversluis

Yes. On my view one must apply something of the same sort of explanation to, say, the atrocities (and treacheries) of Joshua.⁸¹ I see the grave danger we run by doing so; but the danger of believing in a God whom we cannot but regard as evil, and then, in mere terrified flattery calling Him ‘good’ and worshipping Him, is a still greater danger. The ultimate question is whether the doctrine of the goodness of God or that of the inerrancy of Scripture is to prevail when they conflict. I think the doctrine of the goodness of God is the more certain of the two. Indeed only that doctrine renders this worship of Him obligatory or even permissible.

To this some will reply ‘Ah, but we are fallen and don’t recognise good when we see it.’ But God Himself does not say we are as fallen as all that. He constantly, in scripture, appeals to our conscience: ‘Why do ye not of yourselves judge what is right?’⁸²–‘What fault hath my people found in Me?’⁸³ And soon.

Socrates’ answer to Euthyphro is used in Christian form by Hooker. Things are not good because God commands them; God commands certain things because He sees them to be good. (In other words, the Divine will is the obedient servant of the Divine reason). The opposite view (Ockham’s & Paley’s)⁸⁴ leads to the absurdity, if ‘good’ means simply ‘what God wills’ then to say ‘God is good’ can mean only ‘God wills what He wills.’ Which is equally true of you or me or Judas or Satan.

But of course having said all this, we must apply it with fear and trembling. Some things which seem to us bad may be good. But we must not corrupt our consciences by trying to feel a thing as good when it seems to us totally evil. We can only pray that if there is an invisible goodness hidden in such things, God, in His own good time will enable us to see it. If we need to. For perhaps sometimes God’s answer might be ‘What is that to thee?’⁸⁵ The passage may not be ‘addressed to our (your or my) condition’ at all.⁸⁶

I think we are v. much in agreement, aren’t we?

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE (W):⁸⁷

The Kilns

6 July 63

Dear Mary Willis

All one can say about Lorraine is that if she is really so brainwashed as you think, she is then no more morally responsible than a lunatic. I fully admit that as regards her husband you have been set as difficult a job in the forgiving line as can well be imagined.

Do you know, only a few weeks ago I realised suddenly that I at last had forgiven the cruel schoolmaster who so darkened my childhood.⁸⁸ I’d been trying to do it for years: and like you, each time I thought I’d done it, I found, after a week or so it all had to be attempted over again. But this time I feel sure it is the real thing. And (like learning to swim or to ride a bicycle) the moment it does happen it seems so easy and you wonder why on earth you didn’t do it years ago. So the parable of the unjust judge comes true, and what has been vainly asked for years can suddenly be granted.⁸⁹ I also get a quite new feeling about ‘If you forgive you will be forgiven.’⁹⁰ I don’t believe it is, as it sounds, a bargain. The forgiving and the being forgiven are really the v. same thing. But one is safe as long as one keeps on trying.

How terribly long these days and hours are for you. Even I, who am in a bed of roses now compared with you, feel it a bit. I live in almost total solitude, never properly asleep by night (all loathsome dreams) and constantly falling asleep by day. I sometimes feel as if my mind were decaying. Yet, in another mood, how short our whole past life begins to seem!

It is a pouring wet summer here, and cold. I can hardly remember when we last saw the sun.

Well, we shall get out of it all sooner or later, for

even the weariest river

Winds somewhere safe to sea.⁹¹

Let us pray much for one another.

Yours

Jack

TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE (W):

The Kilns

9 July 63

Dear Mary Willis

I can well understand with what mixed feelings you received what is obviously, in the ordinary medical sense, very ‘good’ news. Aren’t you a trifle fierce about the Doctor? It can’t be much fun attempting to explain the details to 100 bio-chemical patients who have no knowledge of bio-chemistry and who, one knows, won’t really understand, however hard one tries. I was always only too glad to let mine off with the merest skeleton account of my own state–I found it such a boring subject. Also, aren’t your doctors (like ours) hideously overworked? I know my specialist, when I was in hospital, had a working day which had begun at 8.30 a.m. and was still going on at 9.45 p.m. Doesn’t leave much elbow room Our hearts, by the way, must be different. When yours is worst you have to lie flat. When mine was worst I had to sit up–night and day for months.

By the way, as you come out I may possibly go in. Swollen ankles–the Red Light for me–have returned. I see the doctor about this to-morrow. My fear is that he will forbid me to go to Ireland on Monday as I had arranged, and put me back in hospital.

Our friends might really get up a sweepstake as to whose train really will go first! Blessings.

Yours

Jack

TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W): PC

The Kilns.

11 July 63

Alas! I have had a collapse as regards the heart trouble and the holiday has to be cancelled. Let me know how much you are out of pocket for our cancelled bookings at Port Stewart and, as is only fair, I will send you a cheque for that amount.

I don’t mind–or not much–missing the jaunt, but it is a blow missing you. Bless you.

Jack

TO JOAN LANCASTER (BOD):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry

Oxford

11 July 63

Dear Joan

You are having a time! I think the poetry is developing alright. You’ll be enchanted with imaginary names for a bit and probably go too far, but that will do you no harm. Like having had measles. I don’t think Joyce is as good at them as David Lindsay (Voyage to Arcturus) or E. R. Eddison in The Worm Ouroboros. His silvamoonlake⁹² is spoiled for me by the spelling which links it up with an advertisement slogan that we’re all sick of here ‘Drinkapintamilkaday.’ For spelling counts as well as sound. I was astonished when someone first showed that by writing ‘cellar door’ as Selladore one produces an enchanting proper name. Conversely, I can’t enjoy velvet as a sound, lovely though it is, because I hate the stuff.

Zoroastrianism is one of the finest of the Pagan religions. Do you depend entirely on Nietzsche for your idea of it? I expect you wd. find it well worth time to look at the old sources.

Thanks for the photo. I hoped you were the centre one, it wd. have been horrid if you were Morna Glaney.

I’d write a better letter if I had not got a splitting headache.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO KAREN HOUSEL (W):⁹³

The Kilns,

Kiln Lane,

Headington Quarry

Oxford

13 July 63

Dear Miss Housel

I can give you no assurance as to what I shall be doing by the end of August. After a long illness I am now suffering a relapse and at present waiting to be admitted to hospital as soon as there is a vacancy. One of my complaints is anaemia. This, tho’ painless, has a most debilitating effect on the mind: so that even if I were technically ‘well’ again, you would find yourself confronted with, almost, an imbecile. Thanks for the kind things you say, but look for no help from me. I am but a fossil dinosaur now.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

 

For some weeks Walter Hooper had been accompanying Lewis to Holy Trinity Church on Sunday mornings. However, when he arrived at The Kilns on Sunday morning, 14 July, he found Lewis in his dressing gown and looking ill. He said he had cancelled his trip to Ireland, and that he would be going to the Acland Nursing Home the next day for a blood transfusion. He needed help with his post, which grew larger by the day, and he asked Hooper if he would resign his job at the University of Kentucky and become his private secretary, beginning immediately. Hooper accepted the offer on condition that he should return to the United States at the end of the summer to teach one final term, and come back to Oxford in January 1964.

TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE (W):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

15th July 63

Dear Mary Willis

I go into hospital this afternoon. Think any sudden change in my state is v. improbable. Last time, the repeated blood-transfusions got me past the danger point, tho’ they took much longer to do it than the doctors expected. This time they will either take even longer, or else they will fail to do it at all. I’m so sleepy and tired that I feel v. little concerned. The loss of all mental concentration is what I dislike most. I fell asleep 3 times during your letter and found it v. hard to understand! Don’t expect to hear much from me. You might as well expect a Lecture on Hegel from a drunk man.

Yours

Jack

 

At 5 p.m. on Monday, 15 July, a few hours after writing the above letter, Lewis arrived at the Acland Nursing Home. Minutes afterwards he had a heart attack and went into a coma. The doctors informed Austin and Katharine Farrer that he was dying, and they contacted Douglas Gresham and Walter Hooper.

At 2 p.m. on 16 July the Rev. Michael Watts of the Church of St Mary Magdalen gave Lewis extreme unction, the Church’s practice of anointing with oil when a person is thought to be dying. An hour later Austin Farrer and Walter Hooper were told by the staff of the nursing home that Lewis had come out of the coma ‘and asked for his tea’. They hurried to see him.

‘Noticing our worried looks,’ Hooper recorded in his dairy, ‘he said “Why do you look so anxious?” “You’ve been asleep for quite a long time,” replied Dr Farrer, “We were concerned about you.” “I do not think,” said Lewis, “that it could be argued that I am a very well man!”’⁹⁴

Realizing he might be there for some time, Lewis arranged for Dr Farrer to bring him the Sacrament the next day, and he sent Hooper out for writing supplies. From 17 July Hooper would appear at the Acland every morning with Lewis’s letters, and Lewis would dictate his answers. George Sayer visited Lewis on 18 July and reported:

Lewis asked me if I had met Walter Hooper. ‘I’ve engaged him as my secretary,’ he said. ‘I want you to like him. I want all my friends to like him. He is a young American. Very devoted and charming. He is almost too anxious to please, but no fool. Certainly not a fool. I must have someone in the house when I go home. Warnie has deserted me and David and Douglas have gone away. There will be hundreds of letters. I must have a secretary.’⁹⁵

A few days later Sayer went to Ireland in search of Warnie, who since the middle of June had been a patient at Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital in Drogheda. The nuns told Sayer that Warnie, who was free to do as he liked during the day, was in Dublin. Warnie knew nothing about what was happening to his brother. ‘They undertook,’ said Sayer, ‘to break it to him gently, so that, by the time he was fit to travel, he would know about Jack’s coma.’⁹⁶

Many old friends visited Lewis during the three weeks he was to stay in the Acland. They included Douglas and David Gresham, Professor Tolkien, John Walsh, Alastair Fowler, and Lady Dunbar. Some of them saw Lewis during a brief period in which he suffered from hallucinations. At other times he could not recognize anyone.

On 27 July Walter Hooper wrote to Mary Willis Shelburne:⁹⁷

As from the Acland Nursing Home
Oxford
27 July 1963

Dear Mary Willis

Jack asked me to tell you that letter writing is physically impossible, his fingers jerk and twitch so. His physical crisis has greatly disordered his intelligence and he is vividly aware of living in a world of hallucinations. I am afraid it seems very difficult to communicate to one another the high comforts. One strange and beautiful reason is that I myself suffer so little by their withdrawal. I have no physical pain–only extreme lethargy and some sense of absurdity.

God bless you.

Yours

Jack⁹⁸

The following day Hooper wrote to Karen Housel:⁹⁹

As from the Acland Nursing Home
Oxford
28 July 1963

Dear Miss Housel,

Professor C. S. Lewis was very pleased to receive your cheering letter. However, Professor Lewis is seriously ill and unable to write you himself. He sends you his warmest regards.

I am,

Yours sincerely,
Walter Hooper

On 1 August Hooper wrote to Roger Lancelyn Green:¹⁰⁰

c/o Prof. C. S. Lewis,
The Kilns,
Kiln Lane,
Headington Quarry,
1 August 1963

Dear Roger,

As you probably know, Jack has been seriously ill for almost three weeks. He had a relapse a few days before he intended to go to Ireland. On 15 July he entered the Acland Nursing Home. As soon as nurses are found he will return to the Kilns. There have been good days as well as bad ones.

Major Lewis is expected home in a fortnight. Until that time I have been handling Jack’s correspondence.

When I was with Jack yesterday he brought up the subject of ‘Lewisiana’, knowing that both you and I are collecting his works. Even though the thought never occurred to me, Jack felt that I should write you in order to determine whether, as he says, we are ‘competitors or collaborators’. I can only say for myself that I have been collecting Jack’s works because (1) I greatly enjoy everything he writes; (2) I admire Jack immensely; and (3) Because I thoroughly enjoy collecting.

It has been in the back of my mind to someday, perhaps, turn my collection over to the University of North Carolina. These, really, are all the ‘cards’ I have to put on the table. I trust Jack’s judgement (as well as yours) and it is at his suggestion that I write you.

Let me say again how very much I have relished your books and what an honour it was to meet you at the Lamb and Flag (17 June).

With every good wish, I am

Yours faithfully,
Walter Hooper

Hooper wrote to Green again on 5 August:¹⁰¹

c/o Prof. C. S. Lewis,
The Kilns,
Kiln Lane,
Headington Quarry,
5 August 1963

Dear Roger,

I appreciate so much your very kind letter. You were probably as puzzled as I was over the bit in my letter about collecting but Jack asked me to write. He is satisfied now and I will of course let you know all I can about Jack’s publications in America.

Please believe how dreadfully sorry I am that you did not hear of Jack’s illness sooner. I assumed that others had written you. This is how it happened.

Jack began to lose his strength due to what we thought to be anaemia, about the 12 of July. He went to the Acland Nursing Home on 15 July at 5.00 p.m. and immediately had a heart attack. On the morning of the 16th Austin and Katharine Farrer came to tell me that he was dying. He lay under an oxygen mask most of the day. At 2.00 p.m. Austin Farrer, a priest as you know, gave him Extreme Unction. Then at 3.00 p.m., much to the amazement of the doctors and nurses, Jack woke from his coma and asked for his tea. For the next two days he brightened and then slipped into what he calls his ‘black period’–a nightmare of dreams, illusions and some clear moments. This lasted for about a week. The entire week (past) has shown an enormous recovery.

In fact, tomorrow he is coming home, bringing a night nurse with him. So he does seem to be out of danger’s way.

I’m certain Jack would like a letter from you. Meanwhile I will remind him of your offer of a visit and write you his response.

Again, let me say how sorry I am not to have written sooner. You may be certain that I shall keep you informed about Jack’s health.

Major Lewis is returning from Ireland on the 14th of August. With kindest regards, I am

Yours faithfully,
Walter Hooper

In preparation for his return to The Kilns on 6 August, the doctors forbade Lewis using the stairs, and a bed was placed in the common room downstairs for him. Once he knew what plans were being made, Lewis asked Hooper to move to The Kilns. Hooper was trickily placed as he was taking part in the International Summer School at Exeter College. The Director of the Summer School thought it appropriate that he leave the course to help Lewis, and on 26 July Hooper moved to The Kilns, where he occupied the upstairs bedroom that had been Lewis’s. The Acland hired a male nurse, the Scotsman, Alec Ross, to accompany Lewis when he returned home. Ross’s job was primarily to be on hand in case Lewis was taken ill during the night, and this could best be done if he were in the ‘music room’, across the hall from the common room. This had been Douglas’s bedroom, but Douglas moved into the bedroom beyond the kitchen. Ross was to remain at The Kilns for about six weeks.

TO MISS HARLAN (P):¹⁰²

The Kilns,

Kiln Lane,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford.

8 August 1963.

Dear Miss Harlan,

I am not quite clear what your question is. Except for I John 2:3¹⁰³ all your passages lay down ‘confession’ of previous sins as the first step in reconciliation. But whether confession here means auricular confession to a priest or pastor or confession to the human parties whom one has offended or simply confession before God in the heart is, I suppose, one of those points on which Christian authority has given different answers in different times and places.

The other passage (‘He who has not the Son’)¹⁰⁴ must mean, I think, he who wholly lacks the Spirit of the Son. Those who do not recognize Him as the Son of God may nevertheless ‘have’ Him in a saving sense–as the ‘Sheep’ had in the parable of the sheep and goats.¹⁰⁵

I would write you a better letter if I were not ill.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

 

On 10 August Hooper wrote to Mary Willis Shelburne:¹⁰⁶

The Kilns,
Kiln Lane,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford,
10 August 1963

Dear Mrs. Shelburne,

I am Professor C. S. Lewis’s secretary writing to tell you some of the facts of Professor Lewis’s present state of health. He felt that you were entitled to this history. I trust that you will not mind it coming from my hand; but so it must.

Professor Lewis had a relapse the second week in July. On the 15th of July he entered the Acland Nursing Home. During the last hours of the night he had a heart attack from which it was not expected by his doctors that he would emerge. He lay in a coma for nearly 24 hours breathing only because of an oxygen mask. As the Professor was incapable of receiving the Sacrament his priest administered Extreme Unction (2:00 p.m., 16th July). Contrary to the expectations of the medical staff, [the] Professor regained consciousness at 3:00 p.m. (16th July) and asked for his tea. His state was still critical even though he revived somewhat during the next two days. Then followed a ‘black period’ of dreams, illusions, and some moments of tangled reason. I hope it is clear to you that he was incapable of the normal exertions of correspondence.

During the third week in the Nursing Home, Professor Lewis regained, very slowly, his rational faculties and, even slower, his strength. Last Tuesday (6 August) he was allowed to come home, accompanied, of course, by a nurse. Even though he is enjoying more ease and comfort at the Kilns Professor Lewis is, by no means, capable of writing letters or receiving visitors. He has with regret, but love for his College, resigned his Chair and Fellowship at Cambridge.

Professor Lewis regrets that he is unable at this time (and probably for a long time) to answer your letters. He is much concerned for you and prays that you may have courage for whatever may be yours both in the present and future.

I am, with prayers and affection,

Yours faithfully,
Walter Hooper

TO ROGER LANCELYN GREEN (BOD):¹⁰⁷

The Kilns,

Kiln Lane,

Headington Quarry,

11 August 1963

Dear Roger,

I can’t blame you for [not] knowing I had been so ill, seeing how I didn’t know myself until it was all over. I am now unofficially [officially?] an extinct volcano, i.e., I have resigned the Chair and the Fellowship. I hope very much you can come and dine and sleep here on the 26th of September. If Geronimo is mad again by then (I was for a bit) someone will warn you in time.¹⁰⁸ Love to June.

Walter, who is staying with me and behaving like an angel, sends his regards.

Yours

Jack

TO JOCK BURNET (MC):¹⁰⁹

12 August 1963.

Dear Jock and/or Dick¹¹⁰

The bearer, Walter Hooper, will leave on the shelves in my room all the books that I want sold. You, Jock, had better have a look and remove the College furniture before my own furniture is sold. As you are both expert bookmen, would you very kindly have a look at the books and get in touch with what you would think very likely booksellers. (If either of you sees anything he would like as a keepsake let him pocket it.) And when the books are disposed of suppose you whistle in furniture dealers. I am ashamed to ask all this of you but Walter has to return to America almost at once and my brother is still away, so I am at my wits end what to do.

Yours

Jack

TO JOCK BURNET (MC):

The Kilns,

Kiln Lane,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

13 August 1963

Dear Jock,

I am afraid I must accept your offer of help and that to a degree I am ashamed of. My temporary secretary can stay in Cambridge only a few days and I dare not send my brother because of his infirmity. (1) My secretary will stack on the floor of my south room (the dark-panelled one) the books I want sent to Oxford. (2) The books I want sold will be left on the shelves. Could you see about the selling?

If you or Dick see anything either would like for a keep-sake please take it. (3) The furniture is all to be sold except, of course, a bathroom chair and carpet which belong to College. And also the oil painting of an old gentleman¹¹¹ which has to be packed and sent to the

Parish Hall,

Dundela,

Belfast.

This is, I’m afraid, a dreadful amount of trouble but my situation is rather desperate.

Tell all my colleagues I am fit to be visited and should welcome it.

Yours

Jack

 

On 14 August Walter Hooper and Douglas Gresham went to Cambridge to clear out Lewis’s college rooms and to sort out his books and papers. Lewis wanted Hooper to occupy his bedroom in Magdalene College, but they arrived to find that the floor had fallen in. This necessitated their crossing from one part of Lewis’s suite of rooms to the other via a plank. They stayed at the Blue Boar Hotel during their three days in Cambridge. There was much to do, Lewis having given Hooper seven pages of instructions about the care and disposal of every book in his library. The only order respecting his manuscripts and books was ‘All my own books W.P.B. or apply to your own use.’ Lewis was keen that no ‘relics’ be discovered in those rooms, and Douglas spent hours tearing into small pieces old examination papers.

Lewis had suggested the college choose a ‘keep-sake’ from his belongings and they chose Lewis’s Complete Works of Shakespeare, which can be seen today in Magdalene College Library. The thousands of books Lewis chose to keep were put in a lorry and Hooper and Douglas went with them to Oxford on 16 August.

TO JEANNETTE HOPKINS (P):¹¹²

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford.

16 Aug. 63

Dear Miss Hopkins

I think Beyond the Bright Blur (certainly not The Bright Blur by itself) wd. be best.¹¹³ I don’t return the TS for I have [not] been very well and am not fit for proof-reading, but I could see no mistakes in it.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO PAUL PIEHLER (W):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

27 Aug 63

Dear Piehler

Both your projects are very desirable, but of course of v. different weight. The allegories I hope you will get on with at once.¹¹⁴ The encyclopedia, I take it, will need a v. large team and may hardly be completed in your own life-time. No matter for that: ‘leave time to dogs & apes’¹¹⁵ I fear experiment is the only way to find out what publishers can be interested.

I wd. once, I hope, have written you a more useful letter, but I’m now an extinct volcano. In July I was not expected to live and I am now an invalid, retired from all my jobs. Quite cheerful & comfortable, but not much of me here!

All the best possible wishes.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

 

P.S. They’ll soon be thinking of a successor to my Chair at Cambridge. So watch the announcements if you think of applying. It might be worth a try.

TO CECIL HARWOOD (BOD): PC

The Kiln

29 Aug [1963]

Thanks. But there was no operation and the whole experience (the Nurses took it for granted I wd. die) was very gentle. It seems almost a pity, having reached the gate so easily, not to be allowed through–I shd. welcome a visit whenever it is convenient.

Jack

TO JOHN WARWICK MONTGOMERY (P):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

29 Aug 63

Dear Mr. Montgomery

I am afraid the days of my lecturing and travelling are over. Last July my death was hourly expected, and tho’ I didn’t get through the gate I have had to resign all my posts and settle down (not unhappily) to the life of an invalid Your two lectures did me good and I shall constantly find them useful.¹¹⁶ Congratulations. The only criticism I’d venture wd. be that you have possibly a little bit over-called your hand about Kyrios. Admittedly, like Lat. Dominus and English Lord, it may represent JHVH: but like them it can also mean a human superior. The vocative often needs to be translated ‘Sir’ rather than ‘Lord’. Otherwise I don’t think it could be bettered.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE (W):

The Kilns etc

30 Aug 63

Dear Mary Willis

Thanks for yours of the 27. I am quite comfortable but v. easily tired. B.B.¹¹⁷ is still away so I have all the mail to do. So you must expect my letters to be very few and very short. More a wave of the hand than a letter.

Yours

Jack

TO WALTER HOOPER (UNC):

The Kilns

3 Sept 63

Dear Walter

Thanks, all goes well, and my mind seems to be recovering–I did a review for the Sunday Telegraph the other day,¹¹⁸ so there’s life in the old dog yet. Warnie is behaving very badly and is still in Eire, but we manage pretty well without him. I’ve got Paxford to come and sleep in the house in case I was ‘taken bad’ in the night.

I have had a visit from Dick Ladborough who sang your praises as loud as you sang his: in fact you have won ‘golden opinions from all sorts of people’.¹¹⁹ The books are all on shelves now but not yet sorted. I need not say you are missed. If I could forget you Mrs. M.¹²⁰ wouldn’t let me!

Yours

Jack

TO NATHAN COMFORT STARR (W): PC

The Kilns etc.

4 Sept 63

Term will never again begin for me. Last July I was thought to be dying, oxygen-tent and Last Unction and everything en régle. I am now retired and immobilised on one floor of this house. But glad to be visited (an hour or so) if such an extinct volcano as I now am is worth visiting. Almost any date will do. The early afternoon is the best time. This house is hard to find. Tell the driver that my entry is a gateless opening under trees off Kiln Lane immediately beyond Netherwoods Rd.

C.S.L.

TO JOAN LANCASTER (BOD):

The Kilns

7 Sept 63

Dear Joan

Your letter is full of things that I’d like to reply to properly, but I’m not up to it. Last July I was thought to be dying. I am now an invalid, retired from all my jobs, and not allowed upstairs. My brother is away and I have to cope with all the mail. Forgive me.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO MICHAEL P. PERROTT (P):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

8 Sept 63

Thank you very much. To know that one has been so used always gives pleasure–pleasure of a rather awe struck kind. I remind myself frequently that any one, or any thing, may be used: e.g. Balaam’s donkey! With all good wishes.

C. S. Lewis

TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W):

The Kilns,

Kiln Lane,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford.

11 Sept 63

My dear Arthur

Last July I had a ‘coma’ of about 24 hours and was believed to be dying. When I recovered consciousness my mind was disordered for many days and I had all sorts of delusions. Very quaint ones some of them, but none painful or terrifying.

I have had to resign my Chair and Fellowship at Cambridge and now live here as an invalid; not allowed upstairs. But quite comfortable and cheerful.

The only real snag is that it looks as if you and I shall never meet again in this life. This often saddens me v. much.

W., meanwhile, has completely deserted me. He has been in Ireland since June and doesn’t even write, and is, I suppose, drinking himself to death. He has of course been fully informed of my condition and more than one friend or more has written him strong appeals but without the slightest result. But Paxford and Mrs Miller look after me v. well and if it weren’t for the horrid amount of letter writing I now have to do, we could really get on v. well without him.

Tho’ I am by no means unhappy I can’t help feeling it was rather a pity I did revive in July. I mean, having been glided so painlessly up to the Gate it seems hard to have it shut in one’s face and know that the whole process must some day be gone thro’ again, and perhaps far less pleasantly! Poor Lazarus! But God knows best.

I am glad you are fairly well and have a housekeeper. But oh Arthur, never to see you again!…

Yours

Jack

TO MRS FRANK L. JONES (W):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

19 Sept 63

Dear Mrs. Jones

Thank you for your most undeserved kindness in sending me a book. I shall try it soon, but I’m now a feeble reader and a still feebler letter writer. In July I was thought to be dying–not at all an unpleasant experience, but I have had to resign from all my jobs and live on a diet and not even go upstairs. In a word, I’m rather an extinct volcano, but quite cheerful. Forgive me this short and inadequate scrawl–I can’t really manage more.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO FATHER PETER MILWARD SJ (W):

[The Kilns

September? 1963]

Dear Father Milward

A few months ago I was not expected to live and received supreme unction. My mind was also disordered for a week or so. It is doubtful whether I shall ever again write any more of a letter than this.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

 

While Hooper was staying at The Kilns, Lewis told him in various conversations of his greatest worry: that, if he died first, Warnie would have nothing to live on. This led to a friendly argument between Lewis and Hooper. In short, Lewis believed his royalties would dwindle to almost nothing three years after his death; Hooper believed that on the contrary, ‘because his books were so good’ and ‘because his readers were not stupid’, his books would increase in popularity. On receiving the letter that follows, Hooper reminded Lewis of this argument.

TO WALTER HOOPER (UNC):

[The Kilns]

20 Sept 63

My dear Walter

We get on reasonably well, tho’ we all greatly miss, not only your utility, but your companionship. No one has ever so endeared himself to the whole household.

The noble Arthurian volumes continue to arrive,¹²¹ but are not yet on the shelves. The work of arranging all my books in their new homes, tho’ delightful, goes on v. slowly, for I am not strong enough to do more than a little each day.

Now, about the future.

It is entirely reasonable that you shd have a salary and a darn good one, and I feel I have been rather sponging on your kindness. But what it may be proper for you to ask may also be impossible for me to do. I dare not at present increase my expenses. In this country one is taxed each year on the income of the previous year. One’s first year in retirement is therefore very alarming. And if, on top of the drop in income, there are the expenses of an illness, and some rather heavy and unexpected expenses for David–well you see. I am v. ashamed, not of confessing the situation, but of refusing the wholly just demand from a man to whom I already owe more than any money could repay. But you see, having you as a paid secretary wd. be a luxury, and I’ve no right to imperil those who depend on me for the sake of a luxury to myself.

On other grounds, I couldn’t recommend you to come in January. Mrs Miller and I talked it over and both concluded that an English house in an English winter wd. be misery for you. Our central-heating apparatus is v. primitive (nothing like yours) and we can afford to use it only during very cold snaps.

If you can afford to come in June, you will be thrice welcome. W. is still away. I fear he’ll kill himself if this goes on much longer.

Our plums are splendid this year.

With all our loves.

Yours

Jack

TO FRANCIS ANDERSON (P):¹²²

Magdalene College,

Cambridge.

23 Sept 63

Dear Mr. Anderson

I don’t think Tolkien influenced me,¹²³ and I am certain I didn’t influence him. That is, didn’t influence what he wrote. My continual encouragement, carried to the point of nagging, influenced him v. much to write at all with that gravity and at that length. In other words I acted as a midwife not as a father. The similarities between his work and mine are due, I think, (a) To nature–temperament. (b) To common sources. We are both soaked in Norse mythology, Geo. MacDonald’s fairy-tales, Homer, Beowulf, and medieval romance. Also, of course, we are both Christians (he, an R.C.).

The relevance of your problem to ‘Higher Criticism’ is extremely important.¹²⁴ Reviewers of his books and mine, both friendly & hostile, constantly put forward imaginary histories of their composition. I do not think any one of these has ever borne the slightest resemblance to the real history. (e.g. they think his deadly Ring is a symbol of the atom-bomb. Actually his myth was developed long before the atom bomb had been heard of).

You see the moral. These critics, in dealing with us, have every advantage which modern scholars lack in dealing with Scripture. They are dealing with authors who have the same mother tongue, the same education, and inhabit the same social & political world as their own, and inherit the same literary traditions. In spite of this, when they tell us how the books were written they are all wildly wrong! After that, what chance can there be that any modern scholar can determine how Isaiah or the Fourth Gospel–and I’d add Piers Plowman–came into existence? I shd. put the odds at 10,000 to 1 against you all. (Especially when, as I am sure is not your case, many have become Higher Critics without first learning to be critics. They don’t know by the smell, as a real critic does, the difference in myth, in legend, and a bit of primitive reportage). I suspect that a few centuries hence the whole art of Higher Criticism will seem as strange an aberration of the human mind as Astrology.

You may well be right about my parentheses.¹²⁵ Parenthesis is such a common feature of conversation (including children’s conversation) that I had thought a reader aloud could easily represent it by his voice–in fact that the visible brackets or dashes were a road-sign meaning ‘To be said a little lower and quicker.’ But I fully admit that the proof of the pudding is in the eating and ‘What the cook thought’ is no defence. He’s ‘not paid to think’

The Narnian series is not exactly allegory. I’m not saying ‘Let us represent in terms of märchen the actual story of this world.’ Rather ‘Supposing the Narnian world, let us guess what form the activities of the Second Person or Creator, Redeemer, and Judge might take there.’ This, you see, overlaps with allegory but is not quite the same.

I don’t think a marsh-wiggle is like a hobbit. The hobbit is essentially a cheerful, complacent, sanguine little creature. If Puddleglum is like any of Tolkien’s characters, I’d call him ‘a good Gollum’

Thanks for all the kind things you say.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO JANE DOUGLASS (W):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry

Oxford

31 [30] Sept 63

Dear Miss Douglass,

Thanks for your kind note. Yes, autumn is really the best of the seasons: and I’m not sure that old age isn’t the best part of life. But of course, like Autumn, it doesn’t last!

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO SISTER MADELEVA CSC (P):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

3 Oct 63

Dear Sister Madeleva

Thank you for your most kind letter. I will direct Fabers to send you a copy of the little book, but it may shock your pupils. It is ‘A Grief Observed’ from day to day in all its rawness and sinful reactions and follies. It ends with faith but raises all the blackest doubts en route.

Since my wife’s death I have been very ill myself and last July I was, while unconscious given extreme unction. It wd. have been such an easy death that one almost regrets having had the door shut in one’s face–but nella sua voluntade è nostra pace.¹²⁶

I am now retired from my work and live as an invalid, but am quite contented and cheerful. I am afraid laziness has more to do with this than sanctity! All blessings.

Yours most sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO DEREK BREWER (P): PC

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

8 Oct. [1963]

Yes, certainly.¹²⁷ All good wishes. I had to retire (they thought I was dying last July) but I’m quite comfortable and cheery.

C.S.L.

TO WALTER HOOPER (UNC):

The Kilns

11 Oct 63

Dear Walter

No, you don’t seem ‘cool and calculating’ in any save an entirely honourable and creditable sense.

I don’t see how getting into a College–presumably as a Research Student–wd. help either your pocket or mine. This simply adds to ordinary living expenses those of fees etc.

Of course I can provide board, lodging, washing and (v. inadequate) heating. W. is now home. This means that you and I can write off the study with its stove.¹²⁸ I don’t think we can manage a fire in the middle room upstairs.¹²⁹ It is a v. old fashioned and uneconomical grate wh. we have never used. There is an electric heater for that room, but that will do only for autumn & spring: not for winter. This means that you and I wd. have to share the Common room fire. No objection to that. But there’s only one table. This means if we both want to work, we must do so by the dining room fire, which of course has to be cleared every lunch-and dinner-time.

Now about money. It’s not so much that I can do nothing as that I am ashamed to offer to a scholar and a gentleman what a servant wd. reject as an insult. I could go (forgive me–I can hardly bear to write it down) to £5 a week.

Well, there it is. And I still think you’d be much wiser not to come till, say, April at the earliest. Not only the heating problem. There’s always the chance W. might resent your presence (if he did, you wd. never know. He is the politest of men). Also, that he might welcome it as finally excusing him from all responsibilities to me, and so go more often on the binge.

All this my prudence says. Don’t ever doubt that the day of your return, whenever and on whatever conditions, will be one of rejoicing to me. Your absence makes a cavity like a drawn tooth!

Yours

Jack

TO JEANNETTE HOPKINS (P):¹³⁰

The Kilns etc

12 Oct 63

Dear Miss Hopkins

Thanks for your letter. The statement that I hold the Chair at Cambridge is a mistake. I had to retire from it, on grounds of health, last July.

I think that to keep people guessing about Malcolm is better publicity than any answer wd. be!

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO LORNA WIGNEY (P):¹³¹ PC

[The Kilns]

15 Oct. 63

I think, don’t you?, the Pevensey children picked up the rather old-fashioned way of talking from living with old Professor Kirk, who was of course a Square: perhaps even a Cube?

C. S. Lewis

TO JANE DOUGLASS (W):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry

Oxford.

15 Oct. 63

Dear Miss Douglass,

Thanks for the delightful Horn-Book–where I find some old friends in pleasant surroundings.¹³² I’d write more, only I’m not very well at present.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE (W):¹³³

The Kilns

17 Oct 63

Dear Mary Willis

Perhaps I might be able to make up what is lacking of your hospital coverage. How much wd. it be?

In great haste. The papers, drat ’em, have all published a bit about my illness & retirement with the result that I have countless letters of sympathy (some from total strangers) to answer. As if hours of loathsome letter-writing every day were a good rest-cure for a sick man. How can people indulge their sentimental ‘kindness’ by such actual cruelty?

Yours

Jack

TO THOMAS CONGDON (P):¹³⁴

The Kilns

Headington Quarry

Oxford

17 Oct 63

Dear Mr. Congdon:

1. I nearly died last July and am just crawling back to life. I’d like to have a try at that article but I must warn you I may fail.¹³⁵ Is this any good to you, or is it for practical purposes no better than a refusal?

2. It wd. be impossible to discuss the ‘right to happiness’ without discussing a formula that is rather sacred to Americans about the ‘right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’.¹³⁶ I’d do so with respect. But I’d have to point out that it can only mean ‘the right to pursue happiness by legitimate means’, i.e., ‘people have a right to do only whatever they have a right to do.’ Would your publisher like this?

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO JEANNETTE HOPKINS (P):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

18 Oct. 63

Dear Miss Hopkins

Thank you for the letter in which you kindly undertook to pay an allowance out of my royalties to my stepson (DAVID L. GRESHAM, MESIVTA RABBI CHAIM BERLIN, 350 STONE (or STOBE?) AVE, BROOKLYN 12, NEW YORK).¹³⁷ I have now had two successive letters from him explaining that he has received nothing: the second quite frantic, as is not unnatural in a youngster who finds himself increasingly piling up debts in a wholly strange city. I am nearly out of my mind about the business myself.

May I implore you to send him 67 dollars at once and to let me know at once that you have done so? And after that, 37 dollars on the 1st of every calendar month till further notice.

I am sorry to be importunate. Invalids, you know, are fussy.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO JOCELYN GIBB (BOD):

The Kilns

18 Oct. 63

Dear Jock

The Letters to C.¹³⁸ will not be dedicated to anyone. HB¹³⁹ had no business to assume that they would.

If any of my corrections in the page-proofs contradict those in the HB text, disregard HB. Some future Research Beetle can then write a thesis on the textual problems. And if you destroy this correspondence as soon as it has served its turn he can have all the more fun with it!

I hope I have committed no enormity in correcting the HB proofs–they were only galleys–as soon as they arrived? Neither your rights, nor theirs, nor Spencer’s, seemed to me to be involved. Mac’s successor at HB (Miss Hopkins) is perhaps rather a fuss-bag and I just let her have her head.

Yours

Jack

TO NAN DUNBAR (BOD):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

18 Oct 63

Dear Nan–

Of course I remember you. And rejoice to find you still the same. With formidabilior fera Camilla¹⁴⁰ and ¹⁴¹ You wd. not be easy to forget. For when you invited me I was not the only ‘fruity’ person present. And still impenetrably wrong about Statius? And still unaware that the objection to the form Scotch is a modern fact, quite unknown to Sir Walter?¹⁴²

If you’re ever in these parts come and see me and we shall go at all things hammer and tongs in the old style. My mind has not, I trust, decayed so badly as my handwriting. I’ve just re-read the Iliad and never enjoyed it so much. All one’s doubts about its unity came, I now see, from reading it too slowly.

God bless you. You are the liveliest and learnedest of my daughters.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO PAUL PIEHLER (W):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

18 Oct 63

Dear Piehler

No, I don’t now feel up to being a sponsor.¹⁴³ I nearly died in July and am now retired and living as an extinct volcano. In particular, my memory is very much impaired. I couldn’t now go beyond vague eulogy, couldn’t characterise your work in the way that really works. I would be most glad to if I could–but better not to do this at all if I can’t do it well. Solve senescentem.¹⁴⁴ You’ll do better without me,

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO COLIN BAILEY (W):¹⁴⁵

The Kilns,

Oxford

18 Oct. 63

Thanks for your kind words. Perelandra is my favourite too.

C. S. Lewis

TO CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS (CAM):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

19 Oct 63

Dear Sir

A few days ago I discovered your cheque of April 30 for £112-10-0, which had been mislaid during the general disorganisation occasioned by my illness. It will be lodged in Barclay’s Bank this morning.

With thanks and apologies.

Yours faithfully

C. S. Lewis

TO NAN DUNBAR (BOD): PC

21 Oct [1963]

Yes, I’d welcome a visit whenever you are in or near Oxford. But for the present I will ‘allow Gomme to rejoice’.¹⁴⁶ Have you tried E. Nesbit on your young Hector?

C.S.L.

TO BASIL WILLEY (BOD):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

22 Oct 63

My dear Basil

Yes, I would like to have seen much more of you than I did. But at our age terms flash past like telegraph posts seen from an express.

I am finding retirement full of compensation. It was lovely to reflect that I am under no obligation to read Rowse on the Sonnets.¹⁴⁷ I have re-read the Iliad instead. Even the Bishop of Woolworth’s I needn’t read.¹⁴⁸ I am like the dead man in Henry More’s poem–

Horse-hoofs that knock upon his grassie door

He answers not.¹⁴⁹

I have an idea that Cambridge ten years’ hence might suit us both [better] than the Cambridge we have known. Some of the younger men express great dissatisfaction at the rule of Downing.¹⁵⁰

I hope your success will follow you, in giving lectures that support the Moralists paper.¹⁵¹ That, though a theoretical absurdity, has always seemed to me in practice the great sheet-anchor. If it goes, then our English school, with its neglect of language, becomes purely a school of literary criticism. And criticism, thus isolated, seems to me a positively mischievous instrument of education.

I delight to be visited–the sooner, and oftener, the better.

Yours

Jack

TO WALTER HOOPER (UNC):

The Kilns,

Kiln Lane,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

23 Oct. 63

Dear Walter

Prudence having had her say, honour is now satisfied and I can settle down to enjoy the result which was the one I always hoped for.¹⁵² We look forward to seeing you on Jan 3rd or 4th.

The d____d newspapers have all published paragraphs about my illness and retirement, as a result of which I am inundated with letters of condolence. Otherwise all well

Yours

Jack

TO ELIZABETH MCCULLOUGH (P):¹⁵³ TS

414/63

The Kilns, Kiln Lane,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford.

23rd October 1963.

Dear Miss McCullough,

It is always gratifying to be remembered by old pupils, and especially when they write in such warm terms as you do. It gives me much pleasure that you should have taken the trouble to write, and I’m glad to say that the doctor tells me I’m getting on satisfactorily.

With all good wishes.

yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis¹⁵⁴

TO THE MASTER AND FELLOWS OF MAGDALENE COLLEGE (MC):

The Kilns

25 Oct. 63

Dear Master and Colleagues,

The ghosts of the wicked old women in Pope ‘haunt the places where their honour died’.¹⁵⁵ I am more fortunate, for I shall haunt the place whence the most valued of my honours came.¹⁵⁶

I am constantly with you in imagination. If in some twilit hour anyone sees a bald and bulky spectre in the Combination Room or the garden, don’t get Simon to exorcise it,¹⁵⁷ for it is a harmless wraith and means nothing but good.

If I loved you all less I shd. think much of being thus placed (‘so were I equall’d with them in renown’)¹⁵⁸ beside Kipling and Eliot. But the closer and more domestic bond with Magdalene makes that side of it seem unimportant.

Thank everyone.

Yours always,

Jack

TO PAULINE BANNISTER (W): PC

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry, Oxford

25 Oct 63

Thank you for your kind and interesting letter. My troubles have been the merest trivialities compared with yours, and when, last July, the doctors expected my death at any moment, the experience, so far as I was concerned, was entirely painless: even pleasant. Retirement, too, has its consolations. I very much hope better times are now in store for you.

C. S. Lewis

TO NANCY WARNER (P):¹⁵⁹

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

26 Oct. 63

Dear Mrs. Warner

Thank you for your most kind letter. I feel like purring!

Please remember me to your third son. I was very sorry the course of events separated us. He is not only a very promising scholar but the best mannered man of his generation I have ever met.

I suppose your philosopher son¹⁶⁰–what a family you have been privileged to bring into the world!–means the chapter in which Puddle-glum puts out the fire with his foot. He must thank Anselm and Descartes for it, not me. I have simply put the ‘Ontological Proof’ in a form suitable for children. And even that is not so remarkable a feat as you might think.¹⁶¹ You can get into children’s heads a good deal which is quite beyond the Bishop of Woolwich.

I don’t know how you discovered that I am N. W. Clerk. If it was from internal evidence, you must be a good critic.¹⁶² Please don’t tell people. I mean, in general. A confidential whisper in any particular case where you think it wd. do good, is another matter.

No. Francis told me nothing of your story. A nice girl might possibly tell her tutor a thing like that: a nice boy wouldn’t, you know.

With most cordial good wishes.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO JANE DOUGLASS (W): TS

The Kilns, Kiln Lane,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford.

26th October 1963

Dear Miss Douglass,

Many thanks for your kind letter of the 23rd. I too hope that moderate health will remain to me so that I shall be able to go on writing and do all the things I’ve wanted to do, but been too busy to tackle. So far however since my retirement almost my whole day has been occupied in answering letters of condolence!

I’m encouraged by my doctor’s latest report; he tells me that he is quite satisfied with my condition.

With all best wishes.

Yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis¹⁶³

TO RUTH BROADY (W): TS

The Kilns, Kiln Lane,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

26th October 1963.

Dear Ruth Broady,

Many thanks for your kind letter, and it was very good of you to write and tell me that you like my books; and what a very good letter you write for your age!

If you continue to love Jesus, nothing much can go wrong with you, and I hope you may always do so. I’m so thankful that you realized to [the] ‘hidden story’ in the Narnian books. It is odd, children nearly always do, grown ups hardly ever.

I’m afraid the Narnian series has come to an end, and am sorry to tell you that you can expect no more.

God bless you.

Yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis¹⁶⁴

TO DELMAR BANNER (W):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry

Oxford

29 Oct. 63

My dear Banner

Thanks for your kind letter. Perhaps you and I were nearly dying at the same time? My adventure was in July–a long coma from which I was not expected to emerge. If your experience was anything like so gentle as mine you possibly share with me the feeling that, having reached the gates as sweetly as those who travelled by the ships of Phaeacia,¹⁶⁵ it is rather a pity to have found them shut and have the job all to do over again some day, and some not very distant day, and perhaps (who knows?) far less agreeably.

This sounds as if I were unhappy, but I’m not. I live the life of lotus-eater with, for once, a clear conscience. I doubt whether I can ever leave this house again and I am not even allowed upstairs. What then? I’ve just re-read the Iliad and never enjoyed it more, and have enjoyed to the full some beautiful autumn weather. I hope you are as comfortable as I.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO KATHY KRISTY (W): TS

The Kilns, Kiln Lane,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford.

29th October 1963.

Dear Miss Kristy,

Many thanks for your kind letter of the 23rd, and I’m sorry that the one you wrote me in the summer miscarried. How am I? I’m pretty well for a man who has become a permanent invalid, and if I cannot make much use of my legs I can still use my head, and am able to continue to write.

I hope you are enjoying your work on the newspaper, and that the savings programme will continue; there is no holiday so good as the one you have to save up for.

With all good wishes,

yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis¹⁶⁶

TO JOCELYN GIBB (BOD): PC

The Kilns

30 Oct. 63

Crisis! Did I make on p. 155 (para 4. 7) the indispensable correction–?

for mirage even on a power

read mirage even, of a power

If not, save us before it is too late.¹⁶⁷ With apologies

J.

TO MR YOUNG (W):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

31 Oct. 63

Dear Mr. Young

1. I believe in the Virgin Birth in the fullest and most literal sense: that is, I deny that copulation with a man was the cause of the Virgin’s pregnancy.

2. It is not easy to define what we mean by an ‘essentially human body’. The records show that Our Lord’s Risen Body could pass through closed doors, which human bodies can’t: but also that it could eat. We shall know what a glorified body is when we have one ourselves: till then, I think we must acquiesce in mystery.

3. When Scripture says that Christ died ‘for’ us,¹⁶⁸ I think the word is usually (on behalf of), not (instead of). I think the ideas of sacrifice, Ransom, Championship (over Death), Substitution etc. are all images to suggest the reality (not otherwise comprehensible to us) of the Atonement. To fix on any one of them as if it contained and limited the truth like a scientific definition wd. in my opinion be a mistake.

4. All ascriptions of human passions to God are analogical. The wrath of God: ‘something in God of which the best image in the created world is righteous indignation’. I think it quite a mistake to try to soften the idea of anger by substituting something like disapproval or regret. Even with men real anger is far more likely than cold disapproval to lead to full reconciliation. Hot love, hot wrath.

5. I never heard of the IVF movement. I know of the SCM but have made no study of it which wd. justify me in passing judgement on it.¹⁶⁹ Your questions are not in the least offensive.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO JEANNETTE HOPKINS (P):

The Kilns etc

4 Nov 63

Dear Miss Hopkins

Thanks very much for your kindness. He is rather a corker, isn’t he?¹⁷⁰ Give him a reminder about acknowledging each payment the moment he gets it. He is not dishonest but he can be rude! I am, and shall continue to be, most grateful for any countenance you can show him.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO KATHLEEN RAINE (BOD):

The Kilns,

Kiln Lane,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford.

7 Nov. 63

Dear Kathleen

Yes. Once one goes in for Blake (or Milton or Kipling) one meets, disguised as literary critics, a great many dissentients of quite a different sort. But you’ll knock ’em all down like a second Camilla. Plenty of fact, reasoning as brief and clear as English sunshine, and no personal comment at all.

P. Caspian, was it? Sales show that it is longo intervallo¹⁷¹ the least popular of the Narnian books.

I am, as you say, house-bound–even floor-bound: but no reason why you shouldn’t come and see me whenever you are in these parts With my duty,

Yours

Jack

TO BONAMY DOBRÉ (W):

The Kilns,

Kiln Lane,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

7 Nov. 63

Dear Dobrée

Thanks. I am, as you say, being ‘very good’. But so far I rather like it. It was lovely to feel that I need not read Rowse on the Sonnets! Instead I re-read The Iliad, the Daisy Chain, Bleak House and In Memoriam: a good balanced diet. I hope you are now quite out of the woods?

Thank you for your kind words about my OHEL volume. Poor Wilson had a far more difficult assignment, and I’m afraid it weighed on him.¹⁷²

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO KATHY KRISTY (W): TS

The Kilns, Kiln Lane,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford.

11th November 1963.

Dear Miss Kristy,

Thanks for your note of the 5th, and I hope you will enjoy the Screwtape Letters which has been the most popular of all my books.

I sympathize with your ‘maddening experience’, but I can assure you that this is one of the occupational risks of authorship; the same sort of thing has happened to me more than once. There is nothing to be done about it!

With all best wishes,

yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis¹⁷³

TO MARY VAN DEUSEN (W): TS

The Kilns, Kiln Lane,

Headington Quarry

Oxford.

16th November 1963.

Dear Mary,

Many thanks for your letter of the 9th, but I don’t understand how it comes about that you have’nt heard from us since August. Warren tells me that he had a letter from you on 20th October which he answered on the 24th of the same month. So there now, what do you say to that? He I’m glad to say is completely recovered, and as regards myself, I am thank God, very much better; but I had a bad time in the summer. I’m afraid I’m condemned to an invalid life for the rest of my days–not allowed to go upstairs for one thing, and on a strict diet for another–but when I look around me and see how much worse off many other people are, I am grateful for my condition. I am able to write, and my friends are very good about coming to see me.

I was glad to hear about Paul, though from your account he is like the curate’s egg–good in parts;¹⁷⁴ but let us hope that as he grows older he will become less of a problem. I can sympathize with you, for in this house we too have to try to cope with the problem of adolescence; the elder of the boys is now at a Jewish college in New York, and is writing me much more maturely than he did a year ago, so I have hopes for him. The younger is passing through an unsettled stage at a crammers, where he is trying to get his ‘O Level’ certificate–a thing without which there is no entry into the white collar class. Sometimes I doubt if he is even ambitious to do so, and I fear that he was attracted by the idea of getting into the big money on the assembly line at the motor factory, where pay packets of £25 or £30 a week are quite common.¹⁷⁵ However after all, it is his life, not mine which trembles in the balance.

Like you, we have not much news. Indeed I think I have told you all I can. It becomes more and more evident every day that we are certain to have a Labour government in a few months time, which I suppose means back to the old scheme of austerity for everyone and extravagance for the government. Worse still, we expect them to get in with a majority which will take at least ten years to break down.¹⁷⁶ So it looks as if Warren and I had seen our last Conservative government.

I am glad you are still in love with Hendersonville, and envy you your autumnal colouring. Ours is I think poor this year, and those who have been to your country in the fall tell me that ours, even at its best, is not to be compared with that of America. Near here they are about to demolish part of a lovely beechwood in order to straighten the main London Rd, drat them. There are times when I wonder if the invention of the internal combustion engine was not an even greater disaster than that of the hydrogen bomb!

With love from both of us,

yours ever,

Clive

TO MRS FRANK L. JONES (W): TS

The Kilns, Kiln Lane,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford.

16th November 1963.

Dear Mrs Jones,

Many thanks for your card. There was certainly nothing unpleasant, that is to say, painful, about my spell in hospital this summer, but I learnt afterwards that it was touch and go whether I survived. But thank God I pulled through, and can now say I’m as well as I ever shall be again. I must resign myself to an invalid life for the future, coupled with a strict diet; but when I look around me and see how many worse troubles afflict others I have great cause for gratitude. I can still write, and my friends are very good about visiting me; in short, things might be very much worse.

It is like your usual kindness to offer to send me some luxuries, but if you did, they would probably turn out to be forbidden fruit; for I am allowed no meat of any kind–flesh, fowl, or good red herring! But though I am unable to take advantage of your offer, I am none the less grateful to you for making it.

From a man in my condition, what news can you expect? I rarely venture further afield than a stroll in the garden. Once a week I attend a reunion of old friends at one of the Oxford taverns.¹⁷⁷ (Beer thank goodness is not on the list of things denied me). Sometimes some kind person takes me out for a run in a car.¹⁷⁸ Otherwise I write, read, and answer letters; one day is like another. But you are not to think of me as unhappy or bored.

Our papers at the moment are filled with nothing but politics, a subject in which I cannot take any great interest. My brother tells me gloomily that it is an absolute certainty that we shall have a Labour government within a few months, with all the regimentation, austerity, and meddling which they so enjoy. Perhaps however it will not be so bad this time, for Sir Stafford Cripps, the late nursery governess of England is dead.¹⁷⁹ But if they get in with a big majority, it will take ten years to break it down–which means that both of us have in all probability seen our last Conservative government.

One of my stepsons is now in New York, a student at a Talmudical College there. The younger one is at a crammers where he is trying to pass ‘O Level’ and if you fail to get this certificate, the ranks of the white collar class are closed to you. A fact which does not seem to worry him in the least. However that is his affair; it is his own life he has to live, not mine!

With all best wishes to you both, from us both,

yours ever,

C. S. Lewis

TO MURIEL BRADBROOK (W):

The Kilns,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford

18 Nov. 63

Dear Muriel

That’ll be fine. Sat. 8th Dec. wd. do me excellently. If you come about 4 o’clock you shall have tea and scones in the kitchen: if you prefer it, it’s sherry or whiskey in the study.

I’m ashamed to tell you that I don’t mind being retired. It is lovely to see ghastly new books announced and know one needn’t read them. You of all people live where the shelling is heaviest. But I liked your account of Tom’s MS, all tarry, misty, and heathery.¹⁸⁰ Robbinism must be pretty horrid–I got out at the right moment.¹⁸¹

Yours

Jack

TO NAN DUNBAR (BOD):

The Kilns,

Kiln Lane,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford.

21 Nov 63

Dear Nan

Your territory (H. QUARRY, in postal language but not in conversation) is bounded on the W. by Windmill Rd, on the North by the London Rd, and on the E. by the Southern By-Pass wh. runs S. from Cowley.

When you have crossed this (with much caution) you will face a row of villas called Green Rd. Turn right (= E) up Kiln Lane. First Netherwoods Rd on your right (= S) and continue about 10 yds. along Kiln Lane. You will then see on your right a tiny library and, immediately beyond it an entry under trees (with no gate) turning due S.–labelled The Kilns and Tewsfield. Then you will be here. Thurs. Dec. 14 at about 11. a.m. wd. suit me well.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO PHILIP THOMPSON (BOD): TS

The Kilns, Kiln Lane,

Headington Quarry,

Oxford.

21st November 1963.

Dear Philip Thompson,

To begin with, may I congratulate you on writing such a remarkably good letter; I certainly could not have written it at your age. And to go on with, thank you for telling me that you like my books, a thing an author is always pleased to hear. It is a funny thing that all the children who have written to me see at once who Aslan is, and grown ups never do!

I have’nt myself read the Puffin reprint you refer to,¹⁸² so of course missed the fault; but I will call the publisher’s attention to it.

Please tell your father and mother how glad I am to hear that they find my serious books of some value.

With all best wishes to you and to them,

yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis¹⁸³

 

Lewis’s beloved brother, Warnie, now picks up the story:

Once again,–as in the earliest days–we could turn for comfort only to each other. The wheel had come full circle: once again we were together in the little end room at home, shutting out from our talk the ever-present knowledge that the holidays were ending, that a new term fraught with unknown possibilities awaited us both.

Jack faced the prospect bravely and calmly. ‘I have done all I wanted to do, and I’m ready to go,’ he said to me one evening. Only once did he show any regret or reluctance: this was when I told him that the morning’s mail included an invitation to deliver the Romanes lecture.¹⁸⁴ An expression of sadness passed over his face, and there was a moment’s silence: then ‘Send them a very polite refusal.’

Friday, 22 November 1963, began much as other days: there was breakfast, then letters and the crossword puzzle. After lunch he fell asleep in his chair: I suggested that he would be more comfortable in bed, and he went there. At four I took in his tea and found him drowsy but comfortable. Our few words then were the last: at five-thirty I heard a crash and ran in, to find him lying unconscious at the foot of the bed. He ceased to breathe some three or four minutes later.¹⁸⁵

It was inevitable that news of Lewis’s death would be somewhat overshadowed by the death the same day of President John F. Kennedy. He would not have minded at all: it was his hidden friendship with God he treasured most. His funeral took place in Holy Trinity Church, Headington Quarry, on 26 November–three days short of his sixty-fifth birthday–and was conducted by Father Ronald Head, with a lesson read by Austin Farrer. Following the service Lewis was buried in the churchyard of Holy Trinity Church.

Too devastated to attend the funeral, Warnie nevertheless had a stone made for his brother’s grave, inscribed with a treasured family quotation from King Lear.¹⁸⁶ The stone, which would cover not only his brother’s grave but–ten years later–his own as well, reads:

 

In Loving Memory of

My Brother

CLIVE STAPLES LEWIS

Born Belfast 29th November 1898

Died in this Parish

22nd November 1963

 

Men Must Endure Their Going Hence

 

WARREN HAMILTON LEWIS

Major Royal Army Service Corps

Born Belfast 16th June 1895

Died in this Parish

9th April 1973