1954

At the beginning of the year Lewis resigned from the presidency of the Oxford University Socratic Club. With his help, its founder Stella Aldwinckle had built it into one of the most exciting and best-attended clubs in Oxford. But Lewis was now tired. He had been working since 1938 on his massive English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, and he was in the middle of writing the last Chronicle of Narnia. The Narnian stories were being published at a rate of one per year, and there were three more to go. Yet in resigning as president of the Socratic Club to give himself more leisure, Lewis was unaware of an invitation he would receive from Cambridge University in May 1954. Meanwhile, Stella Aldwinckle met with others of the Socratic Club to decide who should be their new president.

TO STELLA ALDWINCKLE (W):

Magdalen College
Oxford
Jan 1st 1954

Dear Stella

Thank you for your kind card. And I must ask your pardon for not (I think) having yet ‘placed in your hands’ my resignation from the Presidency of the Socratic. I do so now, wishing you a better and more active man as my successor.

The moment seems a good one for saying how very much I have admired the great work you have been doing in Oxford all these years; a work which, I expect, no one else could have done, and v. few others would have done. I have worked with some who had your energy and with some who had your good temper, but I am not sure that I have worked with any who had both. It has been a great privilege and I have at all times appreciated it more than (I fear) my behaviour showed. May you long continue the work.

Oremus pro invicem.

Yours

Jack

TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE (W):

Magdalen College
Oxford
Jan 1st 1954

Dear Mrs. Shelburne

Thanks for your letter of the 28th, to which I’m afraid I can only manage a v. small answer, for Christmas mails have ‘got me down’. This season is to me mainly hard, gruelling work–write, write, write, till I wickedly say that if there were less good will (going through the post) there would be more peace on earth.

By Jove, I do sympathise with you about the sinus (I am warned by everyone who has ever had it not at any price to have the operation. One doctor said that he wd. like to prosecute any surgeon who did it. This concerns you too!). I am sure that when God allows some cause like illness or a ’bus-strike or a broken alarm clock to keep us from Mass, He has His own good reasons for not wishing us to go to it on that occasion. He who took care lest the 5000 should ‘faint’ going home on an empty stomach¹ may be trusted to know when we need bed even more than Mass.

I don’t think there is anything superstitious in your story about the Voice. These visions or ‘auditions’ at the moment of death are all v. well attested: quite in a different category from ordinary ghost stories. I am so glad people liked your poem, which deserved it, and that you liked mine² of which (a v. unusual thing for me) I can’t now remember a single word.

Then I must stop: wishing and praying for you ‘a happy issue out of all your afflictions’³ and better days in 1954.

Yours

C. S Lewis

TO DANIEL DAVIN (OUP):⁴

Magdalen College
Oxford
Jan 1st 1954

Dear Davin

By all means make the Norman Davis⁵ corrections;⁶ or rather, that selection of them (about 85%) which I accepted in the list I sent you some time ago. I have not, myself, found any other misprints. I added to the Davis list one correction of my own–the omission of the word first before printed in the Bibliographical account of ‘The Court of Love’ under Anonyma. I can’t tell you the page for all my books are now packed.⁷

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO RUTH PITTER (BOD):

Magdalen College
Oxford
Jan 4th 54

Dear Ruth–

Yes, but wouldn’t Evelyn⁸ and Bp. King⁹ and all our ancestors and many contemporary foreigners be equally astonished at the amazing retardation wh. the English Nineteenth Century methods imposed on human growth. In my brother’s period (I trust you are reading his Splendid Century!) boys of 15 successfully commanded cavalry regiments in action. Juliet¹⁰ was dying in the tomb at an age when our girls are thinking only of Lacrosse. I never really understood Shakespeare’s Berownes¹¹ and Mercutios¹² till I realised that they were, in age, Fifth Form boys let loose with ducats in their pockets and swords at their sides.

I’m not saying which is best: only that one mustn’t assume our tempo to be ‘nature’ and all the others to be artificial. I remember two or three of us at my prep-school discussing v. eagerly whether the future was like a line wh. one can’t see or like a line not yet drawn. We didn’t think we were doing anything ‘grown-up’–the subject just arose like any other. We probably thought we were more grown up when reading Pickwick¹³ than when discussing metaphysics. I suspect that, tho’ we have merriment from infancy we learn triviality as an adult accomplishment.

I can go to Crendon with v. little main-road, but at the moment I have (dooced¹⁴ gentlemanly complaint, what?) gout! There’s glory for you!¹⁵ If that’s not grown up (I beg their pardon, adult is the word, now) I’d like to know what is. You’re sure to have to come to Oxford one day, aren’t you? Dentist? Bookshop? Bodleian? Let me know and let us lunch together. On provenance, I always thought the Pitters (diespiter¹⁶ and all that) descended from Jove, probably through Aeneas¹⁷ and Brute.¹⁸ My doctor’s wife, who died a few years ago,¹⁹ came in right line from Cerdic,²⁰ hence from Odin. So of course does H.M.²¹ ‘In every way we are sprung of earth’s best blood, have titles manifold’.²² Have you read Vincent Benét’s (inspired) Western Star? Better than John Brown’s Body which I thought good.

A very happy New Year,

Yours

Jack

TO MRS D. JESSUP (W):

Magdalen College,
Oxford.
Jan 5th 1954

Dear Mrs. Jessup

Oh I am sorry. How dreadful. I don’t know to which of you my sympathy goes out most. Your share is, however, easier to imagine, for I know what it’s like to have to be the comforter when one most needs comforting, and the competent arranger at the v. moment when one feels most disabled.

I don’t know whether anything an outsider can say is much use; and you know already the things we have been taught–that suffering can (but oh!, with what difficulty) be offered to God as our part in the whole redemptive suffering of the world beginning with Christ’s own suffering: that suffering by itself does not fester or poison, but resentment does; that sufferings which (heaven knows) fell on us without and against our will can be so taken that they are as saving and purifying as the voluntary sufferings of martyrs & ascetics.

And it is all true, and it is so hard to go on believing it. Especially as the dark time in which you are now entering (I’ve tried it; my own life really begins with my Mother’s illness & death from cancer when I was about 9) is split up into so many minor horrors and fears and upsets, some of them trivial & prosaic.

May God support you. Keep a firm hold of the Cross. And try to keep clear of the modern fancy that all this is abnormal & that you have been singled out for something outrageous. For no one escapes. We are all driven into the front line to be sorted sooner or later. With all blessings & with deep sorrow.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO GEORGE AND MOIRA SAYER (W):

Magdalen College
Oxford
Jan 8, 1954

My dear George and Moira

What a lifeline you both are–‘bless’d pair of Sirenes’.²³ It was a very minor operation, done under gas, the lancing of an inflamed ‘sebaceous cyst’, tho’ there might be a slightly bigger one (excision of said cyst) later. But I have to have daily dressings, and the penicillin with which they’ve filled me up with leaves me never really quite awake. Distinguish sebaceous from Herbacious, lest the latter lead you to think there has been a revolt of my Vegetable Soul. (Why does one feel less shame at surrendering to the Vegetable in oneself than to the Animal?). Sebum appears to be the source of Fat, the Vis pinguifica. I suppose I am now so fat in the ordinary way that the V.P. has to seek fresh outlets. Staying with you wd. hardly be the right treatment: not that I wouldn’t come (and a plague on treatment) if I was mobile. But only thanks and longings can go.

Talking of new romances have you both read Arthur Clark’s Childhood’s End? A great tragic myth. And has Tolkien sent you proofs of The Fellowship of the Ring? And is The Isle of the Undead finished?

Congratulations on your new H.M.²⁴ It is nice to find that the Enemy sometimes commits blunders too.

A thousand thanks & blessings from

Yours

Aeterno devinctus amore²⁵

Jack

TO BELLE ALLEN (L):

[Magdalen College]
Jan 9th ’54

Dear Mrs Allen.

Thank you for your nice woody and earthy (almost like Thoreau or Dorothy Wordsworth) letter of the 6th. I think I go with you in preferring trees to flowers in the sense that if I had to live in a world without one or the other I’d choose to keep the trees. I certainly prefer tree-like people to flower-like people–the staunch and knotty and storm-enduring to the frilly and fragrant and easily withered….

I think what makes even beautiful country (in the long run) so unsatisfactory when seen from a train or a car is that it whirls each tree, brook, or haystack close up into the foreground, soliciting individual attention but vanishing before you can give it…Didn’t someone give a similar explanation of the weariness we feel in a crowd where we can’t help seeing individual faces but can do no more than see them so that (he said) ‘it is like being forced to read the first page, but no more, of a hundred books in succession’?….

TO SARAH NEYLAN (T):

Magdalen College,
Oxford.
16/i/54

My dear Sarah

Thanks for your most interesting letter. It sounds as if you were having a much nicer time at school than most of us remember having, and if you reply ‘I should hope so too’, well, I can’t agree with you more. I particularly envy you having half a pony and learning to ride. I can’t, but I love the sight and sound and smell and feel of a horse and v. much wish that I could. I’d sooner have a nice, thickset, steady-going cob that knew me & that I knew how to ride than all the cars and private planes in the world.

I’ve been reading Pride and Prejudice²⁶ on and off all my life and it doesn’t wear out a bit. Lamb, too. You’ll find his letters²⁷ as good as his essays: indeed they are almost exactly the same, only more of it.

I don’t believe anyone is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ at languages. If you ever want really badly to read something which you can’t get in English, you’ll find you can learn a foreign language alright.

I liked the account of yr. XII Night Party, a ceremony I knew nothing about. Where I grew up the great thing was Halloween (eve of All Saints’ Day). There was always a slightly eerie, spooky feeling mixed with games, events, and various kinds of fortune telling–not a good night on which to walk through a churchyard. (Tho’ in fact Irish people, believing in both, are much more afraid of fairies than of ghosts).

I’ve been having a sebacious (no, not Herbacious) cyst lanced on the back of my neck: the most serious result is that I can never at present get my whole head & shoulders under water in my bath. (I like getting down like a Hippo with only my nostrils out). Give my love to all and I hope you’ll have a grand year in 1954.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO DOM BEDE GRIFFITHS OSB (W):

Magdalen College,
Oxford.
16/i/54

My dear Dom Bede

Thanks for interesting articles: I couldn’t agree with you more.²⁸ I suspect that a great going-to-meet-them is needed not only on the level of thought but in method. A man who had lived all his life in India said ‘That country might be Christian now if there had been no Missions in our sense but many single missionaries walking the roads with their begging bowls. For that is the sort of Holy Man India believes in and she will never believe in any other.’ Of course we must beware of thinking of ‘the East’ as if it were homogeneous. I suppose the Indian and the Chinese ethos are as alien to each other as either is to us.

The article on Tolerance in that same issue made my flesh creep.²⁹ What do they mean by ‘Error has no rights?’ Of course Error has no rights, because it is not a person: in the same sense Truth has no rights. But if they mean ‘Erroneous persons have no rights’, surely this is as contrary to the plain dictates of Natural Law as any proposition could be?

Quite a different question. Has any one composed prayers for children NOT in the sense of special prayers supposed suitable for their age (which easily leads to wish-wash) BUT simply in the sense of translations of ordinary prayers into the easiest language? And wd. it be worth doing?

Yours

Jack Lewis

TO VERA GEBBERT (W):

Magdalen College
Oxford
18/i/54

Dear Mrs. Gebbert,

Charles is changing, and for the better! There is less of the Tycoon. He smiles. He is learning to relax. ‘Years have brought the philosophic mind.’³⁰ Did you know that your upbringing of perpetual rocking & teetering had the authority of Plato? I couldn’t find the place but I’m almost sure he says that continual rhythmic motion is the thing for children and a ship at sea wd. be the best nursery.³¹ (This wd. reintroduce yr. old confusion between mal-de-mer and mal de mère with a vengeance!)³² Yes–great volleys of New Thought and Higher Thought (new enough to be raw, and ‘high’ enough to be as full of maggots as gorgonzola, but why call it thought?) do reach us even here from your shores. It solves all problems by declaring that there never were any problems to solve.

Of course one cd. say that the Incarnation was God’s ‘weak moment’: when Omnipotence becomes a baby in a manger it has ‘weakened’ itself. That’s the great joke and pathos of our faith. But I’m afraid your friend didn’t mean anything of the sort. N.B. The temptation (can’t she see it?) is precisely a temptation to evade the self-imposed weaknesses, to be strong, omnipotent, again–to make stones into bread,³³ to be emperor of the world,³⁴ to do ‘levitations’.³⁵ The weakness was the strength.

We had a v. odd few days this Vacation: a lady & two sons (aged 91/2,8) staying with us. A tough ‘assignment’–I talk American like a native, don’t I?–for two old bachelors. Phew! We never respected married people enough before. We had led a sheltered life & just didn’t know! Not that the boys weren’t absolute charmers: but I had no conception of the tempo–nor of the Sabbath calm³⁶ wh. descends when the little whirlwinds have gone to bed. Longfellow was quite wrong: he shd. have written ‘A pause in the day’s occupations wh. is known as the grown-ups hour’.³⁷ You’ll know all about it in a few years’ time. My brother joins me in affectionate good wishes to all there.

Yours,

C. S. Lewis

TO ARTHUR C. CLARKE (BOD):

Magdalen College
Oxford
Jan. 20/54

Dear Clarke (let us not Mister one another)

Thanks v. much for yr. letter and for the E to A.,³⁸ wh. I look forward to with pleasure. I meant the English cognoscenti of course: I don’t see American papers.

If you will let me know which bits of my letter your people want to use,³⁹ I am sure I shall have no objection–as you know one doesn’t like to give a free hand for selection. It is sometimes so done as to credit one with ungrammatical or even nonsensical sentences. Are you ever in this city? If so, be sure to let me know and we will make a tryst. I know where the best beer & the best cider and the only draught stout are.

It was a grand book and I shall be interested to see where you go from there. Not, I devoutly hope, into the kind where we leap forward to a date at wh. space-travel has become as common & dull as tramways and within that framework we get an ordinary spy-story, or wreck-story, or love-story wh. might as well, or better, be located in present-day Hampstead. With all good wishes.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO ARTHUR C. CLARKE (BOD):

Great Western Royal Hotel
Paddington,
London, W.2
Jan 20/54

Dear Clarke–

This is about 2 hours later, having read If (I.2)⁴⁰ in the train, and feeling how well it illustrates what is to me a bad tendency in modern S-F. Your Jupiter 5⁴¹ is good: but–forgive me–even there, what a pity that the lost reptilian culture (a glorious idea) which is what you really want to tell us about and we really want to hear about is almost thrust into a corner by the little drama about a theft and a hoax. Similarly in M. Clifton’s⁴² The Kenzie Report the really interesting thing, & well worth the whole story, is the ants. Why, in heaven’s name, shd. [it] be pushed out of the centre & the centre taken up by an unutterably banal little laboratory intrigue?

With K Neville’s⁴³ She knew he was coming we touch rock-bottom. The old theme of the sentimentalised brothel & the whore-with-a-heart-of-Gold is mawkish anyway, but tolerable; but what, in heaven’s name, is the point of locating it on Mars! Surely in a work of art all the material should be used. If a theme is introduced into a symphony, something must be made of that theme. If a poem is written in a certain metre, the particular qualities of that metre must be exploited. If you write a historical novel, the period must be essential to the effect. For whatever in art is not doing good is doing harm: no room for passengers (In a good black and white drawing the areas of white paper are essential to the whole design, just as much as the lines. It is only in a child’s drawing that they’re merely blank paper). What’s the excuse for locating one’s story on Mars unless ‘Martianity’ is through & through used.^*

Stockham’s⁴⁴ Circle of Flight, tho’ not at all well executed, is the real thing: i.e. the thing he professes to be doing is the thing he is really doing. And there, for once, the love interest is relevant. By the way do readers of S-F. really want a ‘heart-interest’ as they call it (‘crutch-interest’ wd. be more accurate) always dragged in? Am I missing some relevant point? I’d be glad to know your views on the whole subject of this letter.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

 

* Emotionally & atmospherically as well as logically.

TO PAULINE BAYNES (BOD):

Magdalen College,
Oxford.
21/i/54

Dear Miss Baynes

I lunched with Bles yesterday to see the drawings of The Horse and feel I must write to tell you how very much we both enjoyed them. It is delightful to find (and not only for selfish reasons) that you do each book a little bit better than the last–it is nice to see an artist growing. (If only you cd. take 6 months off and devote them to anatomy, there’s no limit to your possibilities).

Both the drawings of Lasaraleen in her litter⁴⁵ were a rich feast of line & of fantastic-satiric imagination: my only regret was that we couldn’t have both. Shasta among the tombs (in the new technique, wh. is lovely)⁴⁶ was exactly what I wanted. The pictures of Rabadash hanging on the hook and just turning into an ass⁴⁷ were the best comedy you’ve done yet. The Tisroc was superb:⁴⁸ far beyond anything you were doing 5 years ago. K. Lune etc.–were, this time, really good.⁴⁹ The crowds are beautiful, realistic yet also lovely wavy compositions:⁵⁰ but your crowds always were. How did you do Tashbaan?⁵¹ We only got the full wealth by using a magnifying glass! The result is exactly right. Thanks enormously for all the intense work you have put into them all. And more power to your elbow: congratulations.

What are you and I and the firm going to do now that Bles is retiring? Shall we seek a Literary Agent or just go to whoever buys his business? I shd. be interested in your views.

I hope you’ll have a nice 1954. I did acknowledge your v. beautiful card, didn’t I? If not, I’m a Pig, for I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Yours ever

C. S. Lewis

TO DOM BEDE GRIFFITHS OSB (W): PC

Magdalen College,
Oxford.
23/i/54

I have a taste for Dickens but don’t think it a low one. He is the great author on mere affection :⁵² only he & Tolstoi (another great favourite of mine) really deal with it. Of course his error lies in thinking it will do instead of Agape.⁵³ Scott, as D. Cecil said, has, not the civilised mind, but the civilised heart. Unforced nobility, generosity, liberality, flow from him.⁵⁴

But Thackeray I positively dislike. He is the voice of ‘the World’. And his supposedly ‘good’ women are revolting: jealous pharisiennes. The publicans and sinners will go in before Mrs Pendennis and La. Castlewood.⁵⁵ In haste.

C.S.L.

TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE (W):

Magdalen College,
Oxford.
24/i/54

Dear Mrs. Shelburne

Thanks for the lovely bundle of letters and pictures from the Kilmer family which, as you anticipated, I revelled in: I have written them a joint letter⁵⁶–not mentioning the poem as I gather you are not supposed to have a copy. They sound a delightful family.

But surely you are not going to put the whole trilogy in their hands? I shd. have thought That Hideous Strength both unsuitable and unintelligible to children, and even Perelandra rather doubtful.

I hope you have got rid of that cold. There seems no way of guarding against them, does there? One part of me almost envies you that deep snow: real snow. This is v. late at night and my writing is dreadful, so I must stop. All blessings.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO THE KILMER CHILDREN (W):⁵⁷

Magdalen College,
Oxford.
Jan 24th 1954

Dear Hugh, Anne, Noelie (there’s a name I never heard before: what language is it, and does it rhyme with oily or mealy or Kelly or early or truly?), Nicholas, Martin, Rosamund, Matthew, and Miriam–

Thank you very much for all the lovely letters and pictures. You don’t say who did the coloured one of Ransom being paddled by the Hross.⁵⁸ Hugh? I liked it. That’s very much what a Hross is like but a bit too fat. And I don’t know who did the one of the Prince fighting the Serpent: but it’s a fine snaky snake. (I was born in Holy Ireland where there are no snakes because, as you know, St. Patrick sent them all away.) And I think Nicholas’s picture of the Prince and Jill and the Chair very good–especially the Prince’s legs, for legs aren’t too easy to draw, are they? Noelie’s White Witch is superb!–just as proud and wicked as I meant her to be. And Nicholas’s other one of the L., the W, and the W (I can’t write it all out!) is a nice deep picture, going away into the distance. Thank you all.

I have done lots of dish-washing in my time and I have often been read to, but I never thought of your very sensible idea of doing both together. How many plates do you smash in a month?

There is no snow here yet and it is so warm that the foolish snowdrops and celandines (little yellow flowers; I don’t know if you have them or not) are coming up as if it was spring. And squirrels (we have hundreds and thousands about this college) have never gone to bed for their winter sleep at all. I keep on warning them that they really ought to and that they’ll be dreadfully sleepy (yawning their heads off) by June if they don’t, but they take no notice.

You are a fine big family! I shd. think your mother sometimes feels like the Old-Woman-who-lived-in-a-shoe (you know that rhyme?). I’m so glad you like the books. The next one, The Horse and His Boy will be out quite soon. There are to be 7 altogether. Lots of love.

Yours ever

C. S. Lewis

TO MARY VAN DEUSEN (W): TS

54/70.

Magdalen College,
Oxford.
25th January 1954.

Dear Mrs. Van Deusen,

All presents–or nearly all presents–are welcome, but how rarely does it happen that just exactly the right one arrives at the right moment. Stationary is an article of which there is a constant and acute shortage in these rooms, and you have plugged the gap which would have occurred tomorrow morning. Thank you very much.

Winter has at last come to these islands, and an encouraging observation from the weather people that conditions now are identical with those in late January 1947, when we began the new year with fifty five days of continuous frost, burst pipes, fuel famine, and all the rest of it. It’s a queer thing that nothing will convince us English that we have extremes of weather, like other people; our whole set-up is based on the assumption that the weather will be mild and wet for most of the year, and either a hot or a cold spell always takes us by surprise.

I hope all goes well with you. With best wishes,

Yours sincerely,

C. S.

Lewis

TO HERBERT PALMER (TEX): PC

Magdalen College,
Oxford.
25/i/54

Your presence was one of my reasons for coming to the Do on March 2nd.⁵⁹ Yes, do spend the night here. But I can’t ask you to dine for I’m committed to dining with Thwaite.⁶⁰ Surely they have asked you to dinner too?

The poetical situation seems to me still without one spark of hope. And the cunning devils are now translating Virgil & Sophocles into the modern style so as [to] make people believe that poetry always was the same sort of muck it is now.⁶¹ And some of the worst are schoolmasters & boys [who] are being brought up on the muck: so that it won’t be ‘all the same 100 years hence’.

C.S.L.

TO RUTH PITTER (BOD):

Magdalen College
Oxford
26/i/54

Bravissima! Unless I hear to the contrary I shall assume that you will meet me in the lounge of the Eastgate Hotel (nearly opposite College) at 1 o’clock on Monday Feb 1st.

J.⁶²

TO DOROTHY L. SAYERS (W):⁶³

Magdalen College,
Oxford.
Jan 26/54

Dear Miss Sayers

But how good! Will you come and lunch at 1.15 on Thurs Feb 18th?

Yours very sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO ARTHUR C. CLARKE (BOD):

Magdalen College,
Oxford.
Jan 26/54

Dear Clarke,

Human interest, yes. But that is inevitably present if the fears and hopes and wonders of the astronauts are vividly realised–e.g. as in Bedford & Cavor on the Moon⁶⁴ or even Crusoe on the island.⁶⁵ And an author who can’t do that won’t mend matters by dragging in Crooks, Crutches, or Conspiracies: for the sort of story he drags in will be just as lacking in Human interest as his space story.

About ‘escapism’, never let that flea stick in your ear. I was liberated from it once & for all when a friend said ‘These critics are v. sensitive to the least hint of Escape. Now what class of men wd. one expect to be thus worked-up about Escape?–Jailers.’ Turn-key critics: people who want to keep the world in some ideological prison because a glimpse at any remote prospect wd. make their stuff seem less exclusively important.

Fantasy & S-F. is by miles the best.⁶⁶ Some of the most serious satire of our age appears in it. What is called ‘serious’ literature now–Dylan Thomas & Pound and all that–is really the most frivolous. All the best.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO MARY VAN DEUSEN (W):

Magdalen College,
Oxford.
26/i/54

Dear Mrs. Van Deusen

Thanks for your letter of Jan 20 and also (v. much) for the most useful stationary: the thing I needed most.

I quite agree that God ‘takes a text’ much more forcibly in the general behaviour of a bad priest than in a bad sermon, wh. is, in comparison, a trifle. You seem, if I may say so, to be taking the treatment well! Finding (as Shakespeare ought to have said) ‘sermons in prigs, books in the cross-grained toughs’ etc.⁶⁷

I suppose I thought the B type of prayer⁶⁸ higher because of the portentous promises attached to it and because it seems the type used by Elijah when he calls down fire on the altar⁶⁹ or the Apostles when they heal the sick and raise the dead. But I think we are both coming to the right practical conclusion: not struggling, but always saying, as the disciples did, ‘Lord, teach us how to pray.’⁷⁰

That’s all modern pseudo-democratic nonsense, isn’t it, about obedience being ‘weak’. One doesn’t think nurses, sailors, & soldiers weak: and when we believe spiritual things to be as important as operations, storms at sea, and ‘last stands’ we shall see obedience as a strong thing there too. Surely one of the marks of the disobedient child is that it is feebler than the obedient, and can’t do dozens of things that the other can?

I’m not qualified to comment on the Goelz move to California. Unless a doctor ordered it I shd. never, myself, think of choosing my home primarily for the sake of the climate. I wd. if I were a vegetable: being a human I think the first thing about a place to live in is the people one meets, and the second thing is the beauty of the landscape. But of course others think differently. They are so lucky to be able to make the choice at all (999 out of a 1000 have no choice about where they’ll live) that I don’t expect it will matter much which they do–bless ’em! I hope for your sake they’ll stay put.

Bitter cold here to-night. But we need it: it will kill the slugs in my garden which, thanks to the unusually mild autumn, have now pretty nearly qualified for the Old Age Pension. Five years, is it? Well, God bless you.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE (W):

Magdalen College,
Oxford.
26/i/54

Dear Mrs. Shelburne

Thanks for yours of the 23rd and for copy of my verses, which I had almost totally forgotten. ’Pon my word, they’re not so bad as I feared. I’m very sorry about your cold. We mustn’t let these modern doctors get us down by calling a cold a virus and a sore throat a streptococcus, you know! (Do you ever read Montaigne? He says ‘The peasants make everything easier by the names they use. To them a consumption is only a cough and a cancer only a stomach ache’).⁷¹ You shd. have stayed tucked up in a warm bed all that day instead of trying to write and walking up and down the room.

We wouldn’t call Alfred and Egbert and all those the ‘British’ line. They are the ‘English’ line, the Angles, who come from Angel in South Denmark. By the British line, we’d mean the Celtic line that goes back through the Tudors to Cadwallader and thence to Arthur, Uther, Cassibelan, Lear, Lud, Brut, Aeneas, Jupiter. The present royal family can claim descent from both the British and the English lines. So, I suppose, can most of us: for since one has 2 parents, 4 grandparents, 16 great grandparents, and so on, one is presumably descended from nearly everyone who was alive in this island in the year 600 A.D. In the long run one is related to everyone on the planet: in that quite literal sense we are all ‘one flesh’.⁷²

Of course I don’t mean to ignore (in fact I find it nice) the distinction between a peasant’s grandson like myself and those of noble blood. I only observe that the nobility lies not in the ancient descent (wh. is common to us all) but in having been for so many generations illustrious that more of the steps are recorded. I do hope you’ll be better by the time this reaches you.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO PAUL PIEHLER (W):⁷³

Magdalen College,
Oxford.
28/i/54

Dear Piehler

Blurb enclosed. Never again throw out the old water before you’ve got new on tap! Good hunting.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

 

Magdalen College,
Oxford.

I have much pleasure in recommending my friend and former pupil Mr. P. Piehler. Mr. Piehler is a sound and sensitive scholar whose interest in his subject is widening and deepening as he grows and from whom we may reasonably expect valuable contributions. He has the clarity of voice and language which a lecturer requires. His manners and personality are attractive; he was generally liked here and bore a thoroughly good character. I should be very glad to have him as a colleague in any English Faculty of which I was a member myself. I understand that he already knows Swedish.

C. S. Lewis

Fellow & Tutor

Jan 28th 1954

TO DOM BEDE GRIFFITHS OSB (W):

Magdalen College,
Oxford.
30/i/54

Dear Dom Bede

Yes, I’d certainly rule out Little Emily and Little Nell and all the ‘littles’. The Marchioness is the real thing.⁷⁴ The trouble with Thackeray, is that he can hardly envisage goodness except as a kind of :⁷⁵ all his ‘good’ people are not only simple, but simpletons. That is a subtle poison wh. comes in with the Renaissance: the Machiavellian (intelligent) villain presently producing the idiot hero. The Middle Ages didn’t make Herod clever and knew the devil was an ass. There is really an un-faith about Thackeray’s ethics: as if goodness were somehow charming, & ‘seelie’ & infantile. No conception that the purification of the will (ceteris paribus)⁷⁶ leads to the enlightenment of the intelligence.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO HILA NEWMAN (W):

Magdalen College,
Oxford.
Jan 30/54

Dear Hila

Upon my word, a statue of Reepicheep.⁷⁷ He stares at me from my mantelpiece with just the right mixture of courtesy and readiness to fight. Thank you very much.

It is very cold here now–not so cold as in N.Y., I expect, but then we have no central heating in College, so my fingers are hardly able to write. I am so glad you liked the Chair. With all good wishes.

Yours ever

C. S. Lewis

TO KATHARINE FARRER (BOD):

Magdalen College,
Oxford.
Feb 3/54

Dear Mrs Farrer

Sternly suppressing my conscience (in George Herbert’s style, you know ‘Peace, prattler, do not lour’)⁷⁸ I have allowed no duties to interfere with my reading The Cretan Counterfeit.⁷⁹ I admire very much the thick-woven texture: it doesn’t easily come apart. Janet and Shrubsole are very well done and Janet wins my heart. Two scenes that especially engaged me were that where Richard is hunting for Shrubsole in Janet’s house and the final scene. The tragic-heroic twist at the very end is good technique as well as being moving in itself. Georgios is, in his smaller way, a wonderful little horror.

Would Clare have giggled (p. 201)? Or even if she had, isn’t the word ‘giggled’ too damaging? (I’m always reminding people that nothing can get into literature save by becoming a word, and that things may be O.K. where the words are not. The bearings of this are wide, as you’ll see if you reflect on the difference between drawing a nude and verbally describing it,⁸⁰ or the impossibility of mentioning Cheko-Slovakia (is that how you spell it) at the apex of a lyric however deeply one may feel about that country).

I am outraged on p. 96 when you describe the moon ‘like the white face of an idiot lost in a wood’. Dear lady, this is simply Eliotic:⁸¹ for (a.) It illustrates what we’ve all seen by what most of us have not seen (b.) It denigrates, in the leering modern mode, the high creation of God. If I were your directeur you’d learn Psalm 136 by heart.⁸² Not safe, either, to be rude to goddesses–Artemis still owes Aphrodite a come-back for the Hippolytus affair and we shd. hate you to be the target.⁸³

I labour this because in general the actual writing is so good. But of course the great thing is the invention–a fine prodigality of characters, far beyond what a Tekky⁸⁴ needs but by no means beyond what it can carry and be all the better for. Thank you very much indeed. Can you read a word of this? It is so cold I can’t write any better, not if I tried ever so.

If you come across Arthur Clarke’s Childhood’s End, I recommend it.

Yours gratefully

C. S. Lewis

TO O. T. BRYANT (P):⁸⁵

Magdalen College,
Oxford.
Feb 5/54

Dear Mr. Bryant

Thanks for your kind & encouraging letter.⁸⁶ The idea of voluntary ignorance (like your man refusing a secret) is v. interesting. One has often wished for ignorance oneself. I expect there are logical difficulties about Omniscience voluntarily annihilating its own knowledge, but there may be ways out of this. The terrible text ‘Depart from me, ye wicked, I never knew you’,⁸⁷ comes in here: also St Paul’s promise not (as we shd. expect) that the Christian knows God but ‘is known of God.’⁸⁸

Thanks for a fruitful idea. Genia (trans. ‘generation’) might mean race–i.e. the Jews will not disappear till all is accomplished. And they have certainly outlived nearly all the races of that time.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO MRS D. JESSUP (W):

Magdalen College,
Oxford.
Feb 5/54

Dear Mrs. Jessup

I fully agree with you about the difference between a doctrine merely accepted by the intellect and one (as Keats says) ‘proved in the pulses’⁸⁹ so that [it] is solid and palpable. You have clearly progressed from the one stage to the other as regards those sins by which (there again you’re right) we daily fashion the Nails. About 2 years ago I made a similar progress from mere intellectual acceptance of, to realisation of, the doctrine that our sins are forgiven. That is perhaps the most blessed thing that ever happened to me. How little they know of Christianity who think that the story ends with conversion: novelties we never dreamed of may await us at every turn of the road.

About the question of abandoning the ‘World’ or fighting right inside it, don’t you think that both may be right for different people? Some are called to the one and some to the other. Hence Our Lord, after pointing the contrast between the hermit and ascetic John the Baptist, and Himself who drank wine & went to dinner parties and jostled with every kind of man, concluded ‘But Wisdom is justified of all her children’:⁹⁰ meaning, I take it, both these kinds. I fancy we are all too ready, once we are converted ourselves, to assume that God will deal with everyone exactly as He does with us. But He is no mass-producer and treats no two quite alike.

I’m so glad your news is a little better. In great haste.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO ‘MRS LOCKLEY’ (WHL):

[Magdalen College]
Feb 8/54

Dear Mrs Lockley

You behaved like an angel in not writing at Christmas or the New Year: that whole period is to me simply one long ‘imposition’ (in the schoolboys’ sense) so that I often say, ‘If there were less goodwill there would be more peace on earth’. But I was very glad to hear from you now. How nice it is to hear of the wound healing–things getting ‘ordinary’ again….

TO KATHARINE FARRER (BOD):

Magdalen College,
Oxford.
Feb 9th 54

Dear Mrs. Farrer

I must admit that I was mounting too high a horse about the ‘idiot-moon’.⁹¹ And I do fully allow the pathetic fallacy.⁹² I’m afraid you came in for the backwash of my feeling about a widespread tendency in modern literature which strikes me as horrid: I mean, the readiness to admit extreme uses of the pathetic fallacy in contexts where there is nothing to justify them and always of a kind that belittles or ‘sordidises’ (‘sordidifies’) nature. Eliot’s evening ‘like a patient etherised upon a table’⁹³ is the locus classicus.⁹⁴ I don’t believe one person in a million, under any emotional stress, wd. see evening like that. And even if they did, I believe that anything but the most sparing admission of such images is a v. dangerous game. To invite them, to recur willingly to them, to come to regard them as normal, surely, poisons us?

I don’t mean you do this: I think a lot of moderns do. The real (human) idiot is another matter. I suppose him to be like ‘this daughter of Abraham whom Satan hath bound’.⁹⁵ Of course, higher than the Moon or all the Galaxies. But a transitory reference (‘like an idiot’) carries my mind only to the binding. If I said (in the cheery modern way) ‘dawn reddened like a chilblain on the horizon’, it wouldn’t be quite a defence to say that people with chilblains are immortal souls. Or would it? Perhaps I’m over-sensitive on this point. All that Eliotic world is so unlike anything I’ve ever seen–and perhaps I’m only making a peculiarity into a Norm. Of course to me, as to others, Nature may look dreadful, hostile, sinister, etc: but never just dingy or silly.

‘A man, not the Moon’, by the way, is splendid: I wish that was what you had said. She wd. look to me like Idiocy–like a power threatening me with idiocy–rather than an idiot. But I’m wasting your time. Don’t bother to reply.

I am so sorry to hear of your father-in-law’s illness.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

 

P.S. By the bye idiot itself is one of those words wh. has power different from the thing.

TO SISTER PENELOPE CSMV (BOD):

Magdalen College,
Oxford.
15/ii/54

Dear Sister Penelope

‘What a life,’ indeed. I mean, how rich, how enviable: we who have waiting lists of things to do hardly realise the involuntary (and felt) vacancy of some lives. Though here too, I sometimes think ‘how hardly shall the rich enter’⁹⁶–I mean, the very work God gives us to do seems at times to separate us from God–

Oh that my Lord wd. give me power to be

Mary and Martha simultaneously!

I am v. glad all goes so well, and look forward with great pleasure to reading the MS of Alma Mater.⁹⁷ I will try to read Grimble⁹⁸ if it comes my way.

I have had to abandon the book on prayer: it was clearly not for me. Have you read Miss Nott’s Emperor’s New Clothes where I am pilloried along with some of my betters? All blessings.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO MRS JOHNSON (W):

Magdalen College,
Oxford.
Feb. 18. 1954

Dear Mrs. Johnson–

My word, you are getting on! A printed author (and a well written, well organised article too) and a T.V. star! I congratulate you. It must have been all great fun.

Of course taking in the poor illegitimate child is ‘charity’. Charity means love. It is called Agapë in the N.T.⁹⁹ to distinguish it from Eros (sexual love), Storgë (family affection) and Philia (friendship).¹⁰⁰ So there are 4 kinds of ‘love’, all good in their proper place, but Agapë is the best because it is the kind God has for us and is good in all circumstances. (There are people I mustn’t feel Eros towards, and people I can’t feel Storge or Philia for: but I can practise Agape to God, Angels, Man & Beast, to the good & the bad, the old & the young, the far and the near.)

You see Agape is all giving, not getting. Read what St Paul says about it in First Corinthians Chap. 13. Then look at a picture of Charity (or Agape) in action in St Luke, chap 10 vv. 30–35. And then, better still, look at Matthew chap 25 vv. 31–46: from which you see that Christ counts all that you do for this baby exactly as if you had done it for Him when He was a baby in the manger at Bethlehem: you are in a sense sharing in the things His mother did for Him. Giving money is only one way of showing charity: to give time & toil is far better and (for most of us) harder. And notice, tho’ it is all giving–you needn’t expect any reward–how you do gets rewarded almost at once.

Yes, I know one doesn’t even want to be cured of one’s pride because it gives pleasure. But the pleasure of pride is like the pleasure of scratching. If there is an itch one does want to scratch: but it is much nicer to have neither the itch nor the scratch. As long as we have the itch of self-regard we shall want the pleasure of self-approval: but the happiest moments are those when we forget our precious selves and have neither, but have everything else (God, our fellow-humans, animals, the garden & the sky) instead.

Yes, I do believe people are still healed by miracles by faith: but of course whether this has happened in any one particular case, is not so easy to find out.

God bless you, you are always in my prayers.

Yours ever

C. S. Lewis

TO HERBERT PALMER (TEX):

Magdalen College
Oxford
Feb 19/54

Dear Palmer–

As far as I know the history is roughly thus. Soul (Psyche) is the ordinary Gk. for ‘life’ of a plant, beast, or man. In Aristotle a man has vegetable Psyche (shared with plants), sensitive Psyche (shared with beasts) and intellectual Psyche.¹⁰¹ In St. Paul there comes in a different distinction, between Psyche and Spirit (Pneuma). There are 2 kinds of man the Psychic (A.V. ‘natural’) man and the Pneumatic (A.V. ‘spiritual’) man.¹⁰²

God is Pneuma, not Psyche: and ‘evil spirits’ are Pneumata. The tripartite division of Man into Body (Sarx or Sôma, Psyche, and Pneuma) was, I’m told (but I don’t know) ecclesiastically condemned in the Middle Ages. But none of this comes through intact into any modern language, so far as I know.

Lat. Spiritus is no doubt the normal trans. of Gk. Pneuma, but the derivatives, Fr. esprit and It. spirito have taken on quite different meanings such as ‘intellect’, ‘wit’ etc. Where the native Eng. sawol (‘soul’) and gâst (ghost) fit into the jigsaw I really don’t know. I don’t know any scheme wh. wd. separate consciousness from both spirit and soul as you do. For mind, by the way, no real equivalent seems to exist in any modern language.

I suppose you will find your room in College and get ‘dug in’ before going to the dinner?¹⁰³ What is the time of the said dinner, and place? I’ve no note of either. Will you call in my room about 1/2 hour before the zero hour & we’ll go together?

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO ROGER LANCELYN GREEN (BOD):

Magdalen College
Oxford
Feb 22/54

My dear Roger–

Oh angel! What a lovely present,¹⁰⁴ and all the more valuable for being the copy from that enchanted place your own library. I re-read it at once. It is perhaps the most complete of his books: as funny, or v. nearly as funny, as Vice Versa¹⁰⁵ but with a beauty wh. V.V. did not attempt. The ogre is somehow a v. real character. Very, very many thanks.

I’ve read The Buzzard¹⁰⁶ with total approval. I rather think it is the best of your realistic stories. It is certainly a masterpiece of construction. You set yourself a difficult problem in interlocking all the different interests, and you have solved it, for they all seem to get their turn naturally and inevitably. The characters are all alive, and Diana is maturing nicely. I like her better than in any of the previous books.

There is a bad sentence on p. 81. ‘After making a brew of tea, the fire was etc.’ Better, ‘They stamped’.

All the scenes, mountaineering, etc. is v. real.

The MS. is just too big to fit into the biggest strong envelope I can get. Do you want it back, or will it do if you called [for] it at your next visit?

I was relieved that P&D¹⁰⁷ got your nihil obstat. I was afraid you might object to Uncle Andrew as a character more amusing to adults than to children. You can always feel a paternal interest in this tale, for it owes more than half its merit to your shrewdness in discerning, and honesty in pointing out, the fatal ‘sag’ in the original draft.

Love to all.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO MARY VAN DEUSEN (W):

Magdalen College
Oxford
Feb 22/54

Dear Mrs Van Deusen–

Thanks for yr. letter of Jan 13th. I don’t think one gains anything from calling Genia’s fears ‘Hypochondria’ and regarding them as something pathological. They are, like the fears of a soldier under fire, rational and natural fears of a real evil, so that her problem, like the soldier’s, is moral, not medical. They must be faced on the conscious level and overcome by the Grace of God.

If only people (including myself: I also have fears) were still brought up with the idea that life is a battle where death and wounds await us at every moment, so that courage is the first and most necessary of virtues, things wd. be easier. As it is, fears are all the harder to combat because they disappoint expectations bred on modern poppycock in which unbroken security is regarded as somehow ‘normal’ and the touch of reality as anomalous. Notice, too, how our bad habit of lying to those who are really ill renders vain our true assurances to those who are not!

I’ve had an exchange of letters with Genia on this very subject. I hope she won’t go to a psychiatrist. How cd. a psychiatrist help her except by saying ‘It is perfectly certain that you will never get any painful or dangerous disease’–and do you want her to be fool enough to believe that?

I feel some of the same qualm as you about the Ecumenical Movement. In great haste. (I’ll be examining this summer, alas, not going for trips![)] All blessings.

Yours ever

C. S. Lewis

TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE (W):

Magdalen College
Oxford
Feb 22/54

Dear Mrs. Shelburne–

I am very sorry indeed to hear that anxieties again assail you. (By the way, don’t ‘weep inwardly’ and get a sore throat. If you must weep, weep: a good honest howl! I suspect we–and especially, my sex–don’t cry enough nowadays. Aeneas & Hector & Beowulf & Roland & Lancelot blubbered like school-girls, so why shouldn’t we?).¹⁰⁸ You were wonderfully supported in your worries last time: I shall indeed pray that it may be so again.

Wd. the Kilmer family like to have the next story but one dedicated to them? Let me know: the site is still vacant.

I didn’t object to the family reading the trilogy¹⁰⁹ on the ground that it wd. be too difficult–that wd. do no harm–but because in the last one there is so much evil, in a form not, I think, suitable for their age, and many specifically sexual problems which it wd. do them no good to think of at present. I daresay the Silent Planet is alright: Perelandra, little less so: T.H.S. most unsuitable.

I don’t think that an appreciation of ancient & noble blood is ‘snobbery’ at all. What is snobbery is a greedy desire to know those who have it, or a mean desire to flatter them, or a conceited desire to boast of their acquaintance. I think it quite legitimate to feel that such things give an added interest to a person who is nice on other grounds, just as a hotel wh. was nice on other grounds wd. have an added charm for me if it was also a building with ‘historic interest’.

I write in great haste–I can’t, like you, do it in working hours! But you’re nothing to Lamb: as far as I can make out all his letters, which now fill two volumes, were written in the office. Happy days those.

Well I hope I shall have better news in your next. God bless you.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO JILL FREUD (T): TS

Magdalen College,
Oxford.
2nd March 1954.

My dear June,

This is most kind of you, and we are both very grateful; the book shall certainly circulate amongst those worthy to read it.

Glad to hear you are well; I’m rather run down, having had a very strenuous term which is now working up to its finale, with everything playing fortissimo–including an examination. But the sinus has so far behaved itself.

Warnie has spoken to Paxford about the generous offer of the puppy, and I hear that Paxford replied (at great length, and about three times over), that he would like to know what the father was. If Polly made a misalliance I think he’ll take one, but if she married an aristocrat of her own race, no; because what he wants is a mongrel, having no faith in well-bred dogs. I don’t blame him after several years of Bruce, a gentleman if ever there was one, but as Dickens says, ‘with a head three hundred years thick’.¹¹⁰ From your remark that some of the pups are chocolate coloured, I presume they are mongrels?

Love to you and Mr. and Miss Freud (and Polly) from both of us; and we’re very glad indeed to hear that the night club flourishes.

Yours ever,

Jack

 

P.S. Belated Christmas box herewith.

J.

TO DOROTHY L. SAYERS (W):

Magdalen College
Oxford
March 4th 1954

Dear Miss Sayers–

Whole seas of scholarship papers and other interruptions already flow salt and estranging between me and your delightful visit, so that I have only in the last few days begun to study polarity.¹¹¹ The Me Meum is the best of all:¹¹² so good, and so diabolical, that it is hardly funny and has its own infernal poetry. The hymns are more for ‘pure delight’. ‘We are but lower age groups’ is perhaps my favourite–or else Alimony. But none is without its charm and I look forward to more.

I doubt (frankly) whether my enclosed effort is quite on the right lines. It is not a sufficiently close parody of the real hymn, and it is perhaps too much of an argument (even if one by reductio ad absurdum).¹¹³ What matters more is that it is not really an attack on Polarity proprement dite, but on a false philosophy which must be allowed to be not individualistic nor self centred and indeed has some generosity tho’ in a phoney way. However, you will judge.

I had the young Williams¹¹⁴ to dine the other night, and thought him not a bad chap (certainly not dull) tho’ rather alarmingly young for his age.

If my brother had not gone home for the night he wd. join me in our ‘duty’. We both hope you will be in these parts soon again (it grows late, you know!). He has been re-reading Gaudy Night¹¹⁵–to prolong (in some sort) your visit.

Yours ever

C. S. Lewis

 

Libellous? Or too nasty?

C.S.L.

Lead us, Evolution, lead us

Up the future’s endless stair,

Chop us, change us, clip us, weed us,

For stagnation is despair:

Groping, guessing, yet progressing,

Lead us nobody-knows-where.

To whatever variation

Our posterity may turn,

Hairy, squashy, or crustacean,

Bulbous-eyed or square of stern,

Bland or ruthless, tusked or toothless,

Towards that unknown god we yearn.

Ask not ‘Is he god or devil?’

Brethren, lest your words imply

Static norms of good or evil

Throned immutable on high;

Such a dated, antiquated

Mode of thought we must defy.

Since the goal of our endeavour

Has no content, form, or name,

No position, we can never

(Happy warriors!) miss our aim;

Since improvement means just movement,

All directions are the same.

But unnatural selection

Must bring aid to Nature’s plan;

Sterilise each backward section

Of the family of Man:

Gas the creatures, change the features

Of the planet if you can!

Mercy, justice, in the present,

Beauty, wisdom, what are they,

So our offspring (though unpleasant

By the standards of to-day)

With no rival by survival

Value rules the Milky Way?¹¹⁶

D. H. Lawrence, Dr Stopes,¹¹⁷

Taught by you we fix our hopes

On that balmiest of dopes,

Wholly earthly Luv.

Money-making calls for brains,

And of all our hard-won gains

After taxes what remains?

No one taxes Luv.

Whiskey, port, or gin-and-It

Harm the liver, sap the wit;

We can take (and yet keep fit)

Lots and lots of Luv.

All the outdoor games we play

Fail us as years pass away:

Even the very old, they say,

Still can manage Luv.

Even when toothless, blind, and hoar,

Able to perform no more,

Still in thought we fumble o’er

Dreams and drams of Luv.

Therefore let each film and book,

Every dinner that we cook,

Every tonic, garment, look,

Nudge us onto Luv.¹¹⁸

TO DOROTHY L. SAYERS (W): TS

54/76

Magdalen College,
Oxford.
9th March 1954.

Dear Miss Sayers,

Yes, of course Dr. Stopes is fatal. Would it go ‘D. H. Laurence, Sigmund Freud, Taught by you we now avoid, All restraints that once destroyed, Wholly earthly Lerv’–accepting your spelling, which is better than mine.¹¹⁹

Yes: I felt that M.W.¹²⁰ was somewhat over-mothered. His only other trouble is that he is in a badly paid job, and probably has really no claims on a better one.

My brother is delighted that you are enjoying the book.¹²¹ We both read the proofs: it does’nt seem to make any difference when it’s we who do it! We must try to meet in London.

Yours ever,

C. S. Lewis

TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE (W):

Magdalen College,
Oxford.
March 10/54

Dear Mrs. Shelburne

I am sorry things are not better. I am v. puzzled by people like your Committee Secretary, people who are just nasty. I find it easier to understand the great crimes, for the raw material of them exists in us all: the mere disagreeableness which seems to spring from no recognisable passion is mysterious. (Like the total stranger in a train of whom I once asked ‘Do you know when we get to Liverpool’ and who replied ‘I’m not paid to answer your questions: ask the guard’). I have found it more among Boys than anyone else. That makes me think it really comes from inner insecurity–a dim sense that one is Nobody, a strong determination to be Somebody, and a belief that this can be achieved by arrogance. Probably you, who can’t hit back, come in for a good deal of resentful arrogance aroused by others on whom she doesn’t vent it, because they can. (A bully in an Elizabethan play, having been sat on by a man he dare not fight, says ‘I’ll go home and beat all my servants’). But I mustn’t encourage you to go on thinking about her: that, after all, is almost the greatest evil nasty people can do us–to become an obsession, to haunt our minds. A brief prayer for them, and then away to other subjects, is the thing, if one can only stick to it. I hope the other job will materialise.

I thought the poem by that woman was very good Christianity, but not a v. good poem: no rhythmic vitality, no reason why the lines should end where they do, & no vocalic melody. But then I’m old fashioned. I think vers libre succeeds only in a few exceptional poems and its prevalence has really ruined the art.

I too had mumps after I was grown up. I didn’t mind it as long as I had the temperature: but when one came to convalescence and a convalescent appetite and even thinking of food started the salivation and the pain–ugh! I never realised ‘the disobedience in our members’¹²² so clearly before. Verily ‘He that but looketh on a plate of ham and eggs to lust after it, hath already committed breakfast with it in his heart’ (or in his glands).¹²³

I shall wait anxiously for all your news, always praying not only for a happy issue but that you may be supported in all interim anxieties.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO HELMUT KUHN (W):¹²⁴TS

54/175

Magdalen College,
Oxford.
11th March 1954.

Dear Mr. Kuhn,

It was most kind of you to write. I look forward to reading the book (when the translation arrives!¹²⁵ My German is wretched, and what there is of it belongs chiefly to the libretto of the Ring and Grimm’s Märchen–works whose style and vocabulary you very possibly do not closely follow).

I am glad you are happy at Munich: especially as I hope you will visit England more often from there than you could from America.

With all good wishes,

Yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO HARRY BLAMIRES (BOD):

As from Magdalen College.
March 14th. 54.

Dear Blamires–

I started your book¹²⁶ as soon as it arrived and was interrupted (shortly after the transition from Helicon to Fordshaw)¹²⁷ first by scholarship papers and then by proofs, so that I was able to finish it only to day. This was of course the worst way to read it, for the first part was then still too fresh for a genuine re-reading and yet not quite fresh enough to give me a single impression as a whole. So I shall probably be able to give you a more reliable account of it about a year hence than I can now.

In the meantime, however, I have no hesitation in saying that it is the best thing you have done yet. It is very good moral theology and (this is what you most want to know) caused me uneasiness, as intended. The earlier chapters–the examinations–are so good that I wanted them to go on longer. Their theme is necessarily larger (quidquid agunt homines)¹²⁸ than in the two cities: in that way, they are possibly a slight structural error–a promise of a different book. But this is not v. serious, and the cities themselves are good.

In Lamiel you tackle a desperately difficult job. (I had thought of having letters to the guardian angel from an archangel side by side with those from Screwtape to Wormwood in my Letters but funked it). As a corrective of the feminine soothing angel dear to XIXth. Century fancy, he is a success. Whether you quite get (but could anyone?) the beauty of charity shining through the hardness, is doubtful. And he is at times in danger of being not only severe (wh. he should be) but rude: as if he disagreed with Bacon’s principle that rebukes to inferiors shd. be ‘grave and weighty, not taunting’.¹²⁹ Perhaps I am demanding impossibilities. How to show that he can pity, without letting in the least idea of indulgence? Especially when, not being human, he cannot, like Our Lord, weep. I’ve an idea that his most devastating remarks shd. have the air of devastating by accident, in a sort of innocent objectivity. (Have you noticed, by the way, that we devastate our pupils never when we intended to wound or snub but just when we [are] dealing dispassionately with the facts and had no intention of severity? A blessed paradox. Men need to be humiliated, but the intention to humiliate, being wicked, is always frustrated).

That’s the only serious criticism. I look forward to the next book with v. great interest. And thank you for this.

I am so glad you ‘all’ liked The Silver Chair. I am often surprised by the extreme youth of some of my child readers. I get lovely letters, and sometimes dare to hope that the Narnian infiltration may bear a little fruit. those who underwent in childhood grow up and begin to do things.¹³⁰

You know there is always dinner, bed & breakfast to be had here!

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO THE KILMER CHILDREN (W):

Magdalen College,
Oxford.
March 19th 1954

Dear Kilmers

You have sent me such a lot of treasures I don’t know where to begin. Your story, Martin, is good and keeps one right to the end guessing what is really happening. I am a little bit surprised that the Policeman did not feel afraid of such a strange hostess. Or did he, and you didn’t tell us? I think just a word about how he felt, and a name for him, are the only improvements I can suggest. The one place where you do tell us what it felt like for him (‘He thought a moment’) does a bit of good to the story.

In Hugh’s picture of the Dufflepuds what I like best (though the D’s themselves are quite good) is the ship, just the right sort of ship, and the shadow of the ship, and the windiness of the sky. I mean, I like a picture of out-of-doors things to look as if it was really out of doors–as this does. But you all seem able to do that. Nicky’s Reepicheep shows the sunlight splendidly by the shadows of the trees. But what I like best of all is the ‘spirit of a tree’. It is so beautifully wavy and graceful and is moving so. Bravo!

The typescript of your book went off to the publisher last week, though it will not be out till next year. It is called The Magician’s Nephew.¹³¹ You must have often wondered how the old Professor in The Lion, Witch & W could have believed all the children told him about Narnia. The reason was that he had been there himself as a little boy. This book tells you how he went there, and (of course that was ages and ages ago by Narnian time) how he saw Aslan creating Narnia, and how the White Witch first got into that world and why there was a lamp-post in the middle of that forest. The one before yours (The Horse and his Boy) is also dedicated to two Americans¹³² and will be out ‘this Autumn’ (Fall, as you say). It is still cold here but the snowdrops, crocuses, primroses and daffodils are up and the thrushes are building nests. Love to all.

Yours ever

C. S. Lewis

TO HERBERT PALMER (TEX): PC

Magdalen College,
Oxford.
19/iii/54

Yes, what a fatuous waste of time that evening was, except that it gave us a chance to meet. I thought the poet K. (tho’ not nasty) almost an imbecile.¹³³ Yes, do come next term. In haste.

C.S.L.

TO GEOFFREY BLES (BOD):

Magdalen College,
Oxford.
March 20th 54.

My dear Bles

The resourceful Bank seems to have found a solution, which their letter (enclosed) will, I hope, make clear. I send you the cheque, and await a smaller cheque from you in return: after the proper date you will send me the residue. All right? It is, indeed, the v. expedient you thought of: I shd. never have had the wit myself.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO JILL FREUD (T): TS

Magdalen College,
Oxford.
22nd March 1954.

My dear June,

Many thanks for your letter of the 18th. To my surprise and pleasure, Paxford has come round about the puppy, though I was quite honest and told him he was getting an aristocrat. Like everyone else, he would of course like a dog, if there is one going, but will take a bitch: and I need hardly tell you that Polly’s daughter or son can look forward to a happy home.

With love to all, yours ever,

Jack

Warnie

 

P.S. I take it that the puppy arrives in about 6 weeks?

TO RHONA BODLE (BOD):¹³⁴

Magdalen College,
Oxford.
March 24/54

Dear Miss Bodle

Oh how you touch my conscience! I treated my own father abominably and no sin in my whole life now seems to be so serious. It is not likely you are equally guilty.

Feelings of affection are not at the command of the will and perhaps the very attempt to produce them has the opposite effect. I have been astonished at the ease (and even the affection) with which I have been able to treat in other old men the very same characteristics I was so impatient with in my Father. I wonder can something be done along those lines?–by remembering how merely funny, how endearing in a whimsical way, the things that divide you from your Father wd. seem if he were a casual acquaintance. By voluntarily standing further off might one in effect come closer? Part of the difficulty, I fancy, is heredity–a deep awareness that what one likes least in our parents has been bequeathed to oneself and, in oneself, needs to be resisted. While my Father was alive I was shocked when I caught myself acting or speaking like him: now I am amused, and not hostilely. At any rate, work now for the night cometh.¹³⁵

I am delighted to hear how well your Sunday School goes on. I have come to like Hans Anderson better since I grew up than I did in childhood. I think both the pathos and the satire–both v. delicate, penetrating and ever-present in his work–disquieted me then. I agree about The Little Mermaid: I’d add The Storks, the VII Swans and (best of all satires) The Emperor’s New Clothes.¹³⁶

He was, you know, a friend of Kierkegaard’s¹³⁷ and a v. disappointed novelist, for it was by his novels, not his fairy tales that he wished to be known. I wonder if the story of the Shadow is connected with that–the shadow outgrowing the man as a fairy-tale-writer outgrew the novelist. But I’m glad he did! All blessings.

Yours ever

C. S. Lewis

TO MARY VAN DEUSEN (W):

Magdalen College,
Oxford.
March 25/54

Dear Mrs. Van Deusen

I must be short for I have had a run of absolutely full days and there are endless things waiting to be done. You ask ‘for what’ God wants you. Isn’t the primary answer that He wants you. We’re not told that the lost sheep was sought out for anything except itself.¹³⁸ Of course, He may have a special job for you: and the certain job is that of becoming more and more His. Yes, isn’t Law¹³⁹ good?

Yours in haste,

C. S. Lewis

TO ARTHUR GREEVES (BOD):

Magdalen College,
Oxford.
March 25/54

My dear Arthur

W. will be crossing back to England on Aug 30th and I shall then be at your disposal. I couldn’t come earlier in the year as I shall be examining till the v. end of July. As for place I shall be perfectly content either to repeat last year’s excellent menu of Inver and Rathmullan or to try any new experiment if one occurs to you. To me the pleasures of returning to the same place (wh. begins to acquire homeliness) and those of adventuring to a new, tho’ different in kind, are about equal in degree. It wd. be wise if you pointed out to both managers that I am an unseasonably early riser and you a light sleeper so that you wd. be greatly obliged if we could be put in rooms not adjacent. (This is not meant as a joke!).

If it is convenient for you not to start till Wed. Sept. 1st I have no objection to sleeping at the Crawfordsburn inn on the 30th & 31st.

I happen to have 2 copies of this ugly book¹⁴⁰ in wh. you may find some of the articles worth reading. Joy Davidman’s is the best, I think.

I am suffering from a number of small diseases one of which entails daily visits to hospital for ‘dressings’, but none of them are dangerous.¹⁴¹

No author minds having to answer letters in praise of his own book: not even Warnie.

Blessings.

Yours

Jack

TO I. O. EVANS (W): TS

54/204

Magdalen College,
Oxford.
26th March 1954.

Dear Evans,

No thanks. I live among these modern linguistic birds, and have quite enough of them. I expect that Shipman¹⁴² really means that Martians talk like Professors Ayer and Ryle. If so, why go to Mars?–‘see your own planet first’. I look forward to the Great Persian War.¹⁴³ With all good wishes.

Yours,

C. S. Lewis

TO MRS D. JESSUP (W):

Magdalen College,
Oxford.
March 26/54

Dear Mrs. Jessup–

I quite understand about closing your correspondence (with me; not with God, I trust). All congratulations on your good news and sympathy on your bad, and thanks for the merry photo. One last word, about getting rid of fear.

Two men had to cross a dangerous bridge. The first convinced himself that it wd. bear them, and called this conviction Faith. The second said ‘Whether it breaks or holds, whether I die here or somewhere else, I am equally in God’s good hands.’ And the bridge did break and they were both killed: and the second man’s Faith was not disappointed and the first man’s was.

God bless you.

Yours ever

C. S. Lewis

TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE (W):

Magdalen College,
Oxford.
March 31st 54

Dear Mary–

(I return the compliment by telling you that my friends call me Jack). I am sorry the persecution still goes on. I had that sort of thing at school, and in the army, and here too when I was a junior fellow, and it does v. much darken life. I suppose (tho’ it seems a hard saying) we should mind humiliation less if [we] were humbler. It is, at any rate, a form of suffering which we can try to offer, in our small way, along with the supreme humiliation of Christ Himself. There is, if you notice it, a very great deal in the N.T. about His humiliations as distinct from His sufferings in general. And it is the humble and meek who have all the blessings in the Magnificat.¹⁴⁴ So your position is, spiritually, far safer than the opposite one. But don’t think I don’t know how much easier it is to preach than practice.

Yes, I have read Martin Kilmer’s story, with much interest. I don’t think the nonchalance of the policeman was one of its merits, though: I think it only means that Martin (v. naturally) is still at the stage of imagining an event but not yet at the stage of imagining the reactions. Of course this has a whimsically comic effect for a grown-up reader, but that is accidental.

How right you are to see that anger (even when directed against oneself) ‘worketh not the righteousness of God’.¹⁴⁵ One must never be either content with, or impatient with, oneself. My old confessor (now dead)¹⁴⁶ used to impress on me the need for the 3 Patiences: patience with God, with my neighbour, with oneself.

Need one ever be anxious about mumps in a woman? It sometimes is serious in men if they get it as adults. Yes, I’m sick of our Abracadabrist poets.¹⁴⁷ What gives the show away is that their professed admirers give quite contradictory interpretations of the same poem–I’m prepared to believe that an unintelligible picture is really a v. good horse if all its admirers tell me so: but when one says it’s a horse, and the next that it’s a ship, and the third that it’s an orange, and the fourth that it’s Mt. Everest, I give it up.¹⁴⁸ All blessings.

Yours

Jack

 

P.S.–You speak of the ‘cult of the OBSTUSE’. Do you mean ABSTRUSE, OBTUSE or OBSCURE? Ld. Dunsany is a glorious writer in prose: try The Charwoman’s Shadow.¹⁴⁹

TO MARTIN LINGS (BOD):¹⁵⁰

Magdalen College,
Oxford.
April 2nd 54

Dear Martin

Driver told me you were in for that job and I did what I could for you in our brief conversation. It is nice to see a poem from your hand again–and, I think, a good one. The downwards leaning branches as an image of the Mercy are v. moving. I’m sorry you told me the garden was partly imaginary: credulous stay-at-home that I am, I should have believed it all. This is probably the first Islamic poem in alliterative metre?

All good wishes.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO GEORGE AND MOIRA SAYER (W):

Magdalen College,
Oxford.
April 2nd 1954.

My dear George and Moira

It was very nice to hear from you: for I sometimes wonder when I think of you (which, for a reason you know, happens at least once a day) how long your amazing friendliness can be expected to stand the strain of my frequent unavailability. I’m glad it does: there are no two people I’d be sorrier to lose.

Now, look. By bad luck Mrs. Gresham (our queer, Jewish, ex-Communist, American convert) and her two boys will be here all next week. So we can’t come and dine. But cd. you both come in on the Tue. or Wed and meet at the Eastgate at 11 for an hour or more’s talk? She’s a queer fish and I’m not at all sure that she is either yours or Moira’s cup of tea (she is, at any rate, not a Bore). But it wd. be a v. bright spot for W. and me. Do.

Yours

Jack

 

On 2 April Warnie wrote to Arthur Greeves:¹⁵¹

Magdalen College,
Oxford.
2nd April 1954.

My dear Arthur,

Hurray, I’m so glad you enjoyed the book, and it was good of you to write. I must re-read that chapter on the army, for you are by no means the first person who has spoken of it as you do. Whether there is to be any more book-making depends on how this book goes; the latest London report is that ‘sales are steady, not sensational’, which is as good as a beginner can hope for I think. The New York edition came out on the 17th, and of it I have as yet no news–beyond a positively rapturous review in the N.Y. Times, which is all to the good, as far as it goes.

Yes, I too look forward to another meeting. Jack and I plan to come to the north first this year, and then go on to the south–arriving at Crawfordsburn about the 7th August. I’ve given Jack your message.

Yours ever,

Warren

TO VERA GEBBERT (W):

Magdalen College
Oxford
April 10/54

Dear Mrs. Gebbert–

Oddly enough I read Peter Ibbetson¹⁵² for the first time some months ago. It is a v. painful book and, I think, painful in a rather unjustifiable way, for it is not realistic in the ordinary sense, nor is there any element either of heroic resistance or Christian resignation–just sheer unrelieved pathos. Parva¹⁵³ doesn’t necessarily mean a little girl any more than petite in French, which might be short for petite fille but also for petite maison or petite souris¹⁵⁴ or dozens of other things. Both parva and apta must be either Feminine Singular or Neuter Plural. I don’t know what the quotation is from but I suspect the full phrase was Parva sed apta domus which a. Makes sense; ‘a small but fit house (or home)’ b. Makes grammar, for domus is feminine c. makes poetry, for a hexameter line might begin like that.

God bless my soul, how out-of-date your Narnian news is! After the Dawn Treader, The Silver Chair came out last autumn, and The Horse and his Boy ought to be out this summer. After that there will be two more, which makes seven, and then the whole cycle is complete.

I hope your son is as adorable as the baby bears we saw in Whipsnade Zoo yesterday:¹⁵⁵ two mothers in the ecstasies of lactation and three beautiful woolly little cubs which seemed to use the mothers indiscriminately. Though the cage or pit was about half an acre in area the mothers were doing all this right against the bars, doubtless in order that the public might admire their beautiful families, in which they succeeded. Such happiness!

Love to all, in which my brother joins me,

Yours,

C. S. Lewis

TO SISTER MADELEVA CSC (W):

Magdalen College
Oxford
April 12th 1954

Dear Sister Madeleva,

Thank you for your letter of the 8th and your kind assurances about Miss Deneke. I am very greatly obliged to you and I am sure her visit will give pleasure to both sides.

I am afraid I shall not be able to visit America in the near future; I have recently had a year’s leave from College and it would be unreasonable to ask for more just at present. Please remember me to Fr. D’Arcy and tell him that he is still missed at the Dante Society:¹⁵⁶ what a fine mind, both rich and sharp, he has!

I hope you are well yourself and that your work prospers. With kindest regards.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE (W):

Magdalen College
Oxford
April 13th 54

Dear Mary Willis

Thanks for your letter of the 10th and hearty congratulations both on the new job (which I hope will be blessed) and on your painful but hopeful meeting with your daughter. I have no time for anything but briefest Easter wishes as we have had visitors for a week and are all behind hand.

Yours

Jack

TO ARTHUR GREEVES (BOD):

Magdalen College
Oxford
April 13/54

Dear Arthur

No, I have no suggestions; I lack knowledge. For one’s own peace of mind I think it is best to set a time limit for one’s decisions (I mean, decisions of mere pleasure where duty & necessity don’t come in)–e.g., that if you haven’t thought of a new plan instead of Rathmullan by noon on a certain day, about a week hence, you will at once write to Rathmullan. Also, we might find rooms all booked if we delayed too long. I suppose Sept. 15 is the night for which I shd. book my berth to L’pool? Of course I quite understand that it wd. be hard on Esther¹⁵⁷ if you put me up–and perhaps on you!

Yours

Jack

 

During the spring of 1954 Geoffrey Bles retired from the firm he founded in 1923. The controlling shares in his business were sold to the publisher (Sir) William Collins (1900–76) of William Collins, Sons & Co., Ltd. Two of Bles’s colleagues, J. G. Lockhart¹⁵⁸ and Jocelyn Gibb, remained on the board of the company, the latter becoming managing director of Geoffrey Bles Ltd. The change was to have great significance for Lewis. His books passed from a small publisher to a large one, and a few years later Collins’s remarkable wife, Priscilla Collins (1901–90), enabled the books to enjoy greater popularity than ever before by publishing them in her Fontana Paperback series, beginning in 1955.¹⁵⁹ Meanwhile, the new managing director of Geoffrey Bles Ltd, Jocelyn Gibb, wrote to Lewis on 14 April 1954:

I send you an invitation to attend the opening of the ‘Christianity in Books’ Exhibition on 3rd May…Of course we would be delighted if you could attend and you would see all your books well displayed. As you know Mr. Bles has now retired from business. He has not been well lately and I am hoping the rest will restore him to full health…I hope to have the privilege of meeting you before long. The new board here comprises Mr. W. A. R. Collins as Chairman and myself as Managing Director…Perhaps I could call on you in Oxford or we could meet here…on 3rd May.¹⁶⁰

TO JOCELYN GIBB (BOD):¹⁶¹TS

54/63

Magdalen College,
Oxford.
15th April 1954.

Dear Mr. Gibb,

I am quite vain enough to enjoy a display of my own books but, alas, I shall be starting off to the tutorial engine for term on May 3rd. I shall be delighted to see you here, either for lunch, or for dinner, bed, and breakfast.

Yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO JOAN LANCASTER (BOD):¹⁶²

Magdalen College
Oxford
April 15th 1954

Dear Joan Lancaster

Thank you very much for your kind letter with beautiful painting and interesting photo which reached me to-day.

I am so glad you like the Narnian books, and it was nice of you to tell me. There are to be seven stories altogether. The ones which have already come out are

1. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe

2. Prince Caspian

3. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

4. The Silver Chair.

Some time this year, Number 5, The Horse and his Boy, will be out: and the 6th, The Magician’s Nephew has already gone to the printer (you have no idea how long it takes getting a book printed). The 7th is already written, but still only in pen-and-ink, and I have not quite decided yet what to call it. Sometimes I think of calling it The Last King of Narnia, and sometimes, Night Falls on Narnia. Which do you think sounds best?

I was at a Zoo last week and saw the real lions: also some perfectly lovely bears nursing their cubs.

How lucky you are to have a pool.

With love to your brother and yourself.

Yours ever

C. S. Lewis

TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE (W): TS

54/28.

Magdalen College,
Oxford.
17th April 1954.

Dear Mary

Only a scrap, for everyone writes to me at Easter, so that what ought to be a bright spot in the year threatens to become for me a very dark one. Will you, please, always avoid ‘holiday’ periods in writing to me?

All blessings, and I hope the new job will go nicely.

Yours

Jack

TO HARRY BLAMIRES (BOD): TS

54/178.

Magdalen College,
Oxford.
19th April 1954

Dear Blamires,

Come on Thursday 22nd. Meet me in the Smoking Room at seven sharp. We don’t dress. Most welcome

Yours,

C. S. Lewis

TO MARGARET POLLARD (P):¹⁶³

Magdalen College,
Oxford.
April 20th 1954

Dear Mrs. Pollard

I was extremely glad to hear from you again for I had lost your address and I believe that I was therefore unable to acknowledge your fine water colour study of the altruistic ungulate.

But she no longer stands alone. Did you see in the paper the account of that dog who after a lifetime of honesty began to steal food daily? The change coincided with the disappearance of the two other dogs kept in the same house; and on investigation it was found that they were at the bottom of a small mine shaft, alive, and that their noble colleague had been dropping food down it for them every day?

I really begin to wonder if we have been quite wrong about the beasts all these centuries.¹⁶⁴ Or have they changed? Perhaps St. Francis has put through some little business on their behalf.¹⁶⁵

Thanks for the kind things you say (my own work frightens me: I expect to be asked, if you knew all this why didn’t you do it?) and for writing. I value your prayers very much. With all best wishes for Easter.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO NATHAN COMFORT STARR (W): TS

54/240.

Magdalen College,
Oxford.
20th April 1954.

Dear Starr,

Poor Day Lewis, this will be a trial to him.¹⁶⁶ With what sweet cunning you glide thence into Narnia; many thanks. When may we look to see you again? I shall await the Arthurian book¹⁶⁷ with interest.

Yours,

C. S. Lewis

TO PHOEBE HESKETH (W):

Magdalen College
Oxford
April 21st 1954.

Dear Mrs. Hesketh

Ordinary life (that rare visitant) returns & I have now read Out of the Dark,¹⁶⁸ now that my ‘silent room’¹⁶⁹ once more ‘extends a friendship’¹⁷⁰ etc. That by the way is to me the most completely satisfying poem in the book–tho’ a quieter name, or name that promises less than ‘Vision’ wd. have set it off to more advantage. In itself it is perfect, and very new: the ‘finite frame’¹⁷¹ and the way the furniture & leaves work together to the last quatrain are really admirable.

All through the volume I find again the fine phrasing that pleased me in its predecessor: the sunlight ‘fingering’ the bulbs,¹⁷² the ‘trodden’ springs¹⁷³ (you’re v. good on moss and humus throughout), the ‘broomstick’ memory,¹⁷⁴ the lake ‘sacred to those in love’,¹⁷⁵ the moors ‘furred’ with snow¹⁷⁶ and the stoat as ‘foul-furred lightning’,¹⁷⁷ the deer walking ‘on twigs of fear’¹⁷⁸ and (brilliant variation on the older phrase) ‘fleshed with the strength of grass’.¹⁷⁹

What I can’t make up my mind about is whether the strong Wordsworthian influence is now doing, or is likely to do in the long run, good or harm. It seems to me to do both in ‘The Quenchless Flame’. The actual description of the birdsnesting & ‘collecting’¹⁸⁰ is, I think, good Wordsworthian. But the passage on p. 61 beginning ‘and think when flesh shall rot’¹⁸¹ seems to me a bad infection from Wordsworth in his pseudo-Miltonic vein–I mean the inversion in ‘sore’ and the Latinised syntax of ‘who selfless bore’.¹⁸² But then on the next page the quatrain beginning ‘Man feeds’¹⁸³ wh. perhaps (I’m not sure) owes something to the W. of Laodamia,¹⁸⁴ the W. who had been reading Daniel, is v. good. And I keep on changing my mind about ‘Behind the Cloud’. There are such good things in it, but it is so v. close to the style & metre of W. at his most namby-pamby. Can you risk that association?

I think the single poems that I like best on the whole are the Bell Ringer,¹⁸⁵ Four Aspects¹⁸⁶ (an absolute corker) Snowdrops (how big and strong they, legitimately, become in your treatment!) Wild Deer, No Escape, and of course Vision.

The only two I really did not like at all are Resurrection & Full Circle. In the first, I dislike swerve as a transitive verb & I think it phonetically bad to have it so close to serve.¹⁸⁷ And throughout aren’t you merely diluting & weakening the original narrative? Do compare the 16 words beginning ‘the spirit wills’ with the words Christ said!¹⁸⁸ You wd. better have left ’em alone. Full Circle is too rhapsodical. Don’t you think that the more infinite the theme, the harder, tighter, severer the poem ought to be? That’s where Patmore was so right. Eternity & infinity shd. always be dealt with either in v. strict form (like Dante) or in v. homely symbols (like Herbert).

I’m reading much modern poetry & am hampered by the alien character of the experience expressed. If I’m ever doubtful what to think of you it is for the opposite reason: afraid that I’m being, as it were, bribed by my strong sympathy. The Lonely Heart is so exactly like many walks in my own youth! And Mountain Purpose. And dozens. The only place where my experience differs sharply from yours is in Breath of all the World. I don’t (or not yet) find Age the surest ally of Head.¹⁸⁹ In youth my head was harder & more tyrannous and my heart colder than now.

Well, thanks very much. I have had a most enjoyable time in this book and look forward with a good appetite to more. Remember me to Palmer.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO RUTH PITTER (BOD):

Magdalen College
Oxford
April 22nd 1954

Dear Ruth

This flamboyant notepaper is a gift from an American, and I’m so papyrophagous I feel I mustn’t waste it: but I wouldn’t like you to think I’ve become a tycoon or to feel that it needs only INC. after my name to be complete.

I hadn’t heard of ‘David’s mishap’¹⁹⁰ but I quite understand that guests mustn’t see a new house till it has all its ‘bravery on and tackle trim’.¹⁹¹

Have you read Phoebe Hesketh’s poems and do you like them? I had the increasingly pathetic Herbert Palmer here last term: now an old man in a rage like Oedipus or Lear. I’d give a lot to be able to tell him he was a great poet. But the sheer vigour of his rage is sometimes exhilarating (and, I hope, at least a momentary comfort to himself) as when he called Dylan Thomas ‘a drunken, illiterate, leg-pulling, Welsh foghorn’.¹⁹²

I think poetry thrives more, is less of an Alexandrian coterie in America than he[re]. I’ve read lately Master’s Spoon River Anthology¹⁹³ and all Robinson Jeffers:¹⁹⁴ much to criticise in both but not that boredom which you spoke out about in your lecture.

Go to Whipsnade. I was there with some children a fortnight ago. There were two mother bears with cubs lying in the ecstasies of lactation with heads close together as if they were sharing maternal confidences, and all close up to the bars for fear the public would not see the beautiful children (so like their dear father). And there was an amiable tigress shut up away from the others–enforced celibacy, I fear–who nearly cried when we left her. Oh, and the gay happiness of the sea-lions, curvicervicum pecus.¹⁹⁵

There’s lots to be said for a dumb choir. I wish ours were. All Easter blessings.

Yours

Jack

TO DOM BEDE GRIFFITHS OSB (W):

Magdalen College
Oxford
22/4/54

Dear Dom Bede–

I write in haste at the end of a morning of letter writing. I feel as you do about modern English poetry. American is better. Lee Masters, Frost,¹⁹⁶ and Robinson Jeffers all really have something to say and some real art.

Don’t imagine that the Logical Positivist menace is over. To me it seems that the apologetic position has never in my life been worse than it is now. At the Socratic the enemy often wipe the floor with us.¹⁹⁷ Quousque domine?¹⁹⁸

Of course I look forward v. much to your Confession¹⁹⁹ and will take all that’s coming to me about myself.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO MARY VAN DEUSEN (W):

Magdalen College
Oxford
April 22nd 54

Dear Mrs. Van Deusen

It is a pity, isn’t it, that the great feasts wh. shd. be times of joy are so often marred in one way or another. (We have a very trying curate in our parish).²⁰⁰ Some say ‘the devil lives v. near the altar’, anxious to cut us off from Grace by instilling sinful thoughts, or, if that fails, at least to deprive us of the sensible comforts of Grace by instilling worry, fears, and inconveniences.

I take it your Rector is just an instance of the brother one has to forgive unto seventy times seven.²⁰¹ I don’t think the recurrence of uncharitable thoughts is v. serious provided one knocks them on the head each time, tho’ of course it is an unhappiness and a proper ground for self-humiliation. But the real serious sin wd. lie in yielding to them. And I think you are free to take a spiritual holiday: i.e. when it is v. hard to think kindly of someone, one may take a spell of not thinking about him at all. Of course it is hard to be closely connected with something and remain ‘detached’. But does not God want us to reach, is He not helping us to reach, a sort of detachment from things (after all) a good deal closer than a parish: from our very selves, from all our hopes and fears? If they have a bad priest they need good laity all the more. And when one comes to think of it, the place where one is most wanted can hardly ever be the place where one wd. have chosen for one’s own comfort. (The part of the line which needs troops is not the part where troops will have the best time). But don’t omit those ‘holidays’. One has to act as if everything depended on one’s own exertions and then, as soon as the moment of action is over, ‘cast all your care’²⁰² upon God and realise that in some deeper sense, you don’t matter in the least and it is only for your sake He uses you to do what He cd. do v. much more easily Himself.

All parents are apt to treat their grown up sons & daughters at times as if they were still children: and perhaps all children are apt to think that this is happening even when it is not. I’m sure myself that respect–or let us say frankly reverence–is the disinfectant without wh. no affection will work properly.

All good wishes.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO HUGH KILMER (W): TS

54/141.

Magdalen College,
Oxford.
28th April 1954.

Dear Hugh,

Oh, very good. Eustace as a dragon is your best picture yet. Really awesome! Love to all.

Yours,

C. S. Lewis

TO MARTYN SKINNER (BOD):

Magdalen College
Oxford
April 29/54

Dear Skinner

I don’t know much about publishers.²⁰³ The one most likely to take risks over what they think a good work is Allen & Unwin: witness their heroic venture of publishing Tolkien’s new huge heroic romance in 3 vols at about £1 each! The O.U.P. will take no risks.

My own advice is the obvious advice: don’t dream of publishing at your own charge till you’ve tried every single firm in the country–and perhaps in U.S.A. too. (By the way poetry over there seems to be in a far better state than here. Instead of a funny little Alexandrian coterie they have poets really writing to be read–big works with invention & architectonics in them: e.g. Masters, Robinson,²⁰⁴ Jeffers, Vincent Benet, & P. Warren.)²⁰⁵

I’d sooner read Merlin II in print than in typescript: if (absit omen)²⁰⁶ it is denied print, then I’d greatly value a typed copy. Cancel your order for that book of mine: why waste your money on that sort of thing?²⁰⁷

With deep sympathy: it’s horrid to be ‘with book’ and Lucina²⁰⁸ not on her job.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO TONY POLLOCK (P):

Magdalen College
Oxford
May 3rd 54

Dear Pollock (if I may make old neighbourhood an excuse for dropping the Mr.)

Thanks for your letter. What ‘facts’ there may or may not be behind C.W.’s novels I don’t know: except that I believe he had had actual experience of something like the practice of ‘Substitution’ or ‘exchange’.²⁰⁹

Behind my own stories there are no ‘facts’ at all, tho’ I hope there are truths. That is, they may be regarded as imaginative hypotheses illustrating what I believe to be theological truths. Silent Planet is in part an answer to the popular unbeliever’s objection: ‘In the light of modern astronomy how can you go on believing that God was incarnate on one petty little planet of a minor star?’ Ans: perhaps it was the only one that needed redemption, the one lost sheep whom He went seeking, leaving the 99.²¹⁰

Perelandra answers the view ‘By a Fall, don’t you really mean only the inevitable finiteness & incompletion of Man?’ Ans: no, I don’t. I believe it resulted from a free act of sin & cd. have been avoided. If God created any other rational animals in some other part of the universe, perhaps they did not fall. One may imagine….

THS paints, under wholly fictional conditions, what I really believe about a certain type of modern scientific humanist planner. I don’t mean that such a man does obey devils and practices magic. I do say ‘Your ethics is such that if you cd. get diabolical aid you wd. have no scruples about using it.’

I don’t of course mean that I started with these abstract ‘morals’ & then invented yarns to illustrate them. I could not work like that: stories begin, for me, simply with pictures coming into my head. But these are the thoughts that accompanied the writing.

About Logres–I do think there is a ‘better England’ always getting lost in, but always showing through, the actual one.

I hope this is fairly clear.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO ARTHUR GREEVES (BOD): PC

Magdalen College
Oxford
4/5/54

Splendid. Do I sleep the night of the 15th at Rathmullan & cross to L’pool on the 16th, or leave R. on morning of the 15th & cross that night? All the best.

J.

I have more copies of a huge 2 vol. American collection of Eng. poets (preface to Spenser by me) than I know what to do with.²¹¹ Wd. you care for one?

TO JOAN LANCASTER (BOD):

Magdalen College
Oxford
May 7th 1954

Dear Joan Lancaster

Thanks for letter and pictures. I say, you are lucky to have armour: I would have loved it when I was a boy but it never came my way. The kind you have would be even better for Vikings etc. than for Arthurian knights.

As for doing more Narnian books than 7, isn’t it better to stop when people are still asking for more than to go on till they are tired?

Love from,

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO ROBERT PENN WARREN (P):²¹²

Magdalen College,
Oxford
May 8th 1954

Dear Mr. Warren

May a stranger (with the slight excuse that we are both in the same profession) write to offer you very serious congratulations on your Brother to Dragons?²¹³ It might sound to some like damning with faint praise to say that I am almost inclined to call it a great poem: but you are a critic as well as a poet and will understand that this is about as far as one could sanely go about a work which one has read only once. But I have good hopes that my first impression will turn out to have been correct.

For one thing, the long poem is rather my special subject–I’d trust my own criticism on that Form more than on any other. For another, my admiration is certainly not dependant on any agreement with your view of life, so that I’m not ideologically bribed in your favour. I think the Form (in the largest sense) is a wonderful invention: I mean, having the story told thro’ the actors, still chewing it over. I suppose this might be called an adaptation of the Ring and the Book technique. But having it told in Sheol adds a particular sense of unchangeableness–the eternity of the past. And how do you manage to use this device without for one moment raising (even in so theological an imagination as mine) the least interest in anyone’s beliefs about the actual status of the dead? which of course wd. be a ruinous distraction.

Another most brilliant success is the utterly unexpected addition of rhyme on p. 121, which, coming against the vast metrical background of unrhymed verse, is as if a Bell began to toll. And another is the intrusion of yourself among the speakers (you have noticed how, on a tiny scale and with predominantly comic effect, this is anticipated by Henryson in some of the Fables?).²¹⁴ I see from the dust-jacket that someone is already picking out delectable favourite bits. Inevitable, but what a pity! These may prove in the end as big an obstacle to real appreciation as all the other nuisance-passages (Aeneid II, IV and VI, or P.L. I and II²¹⁵ or ‘To be or not to be’):²¹⁶ for most emphatically this is a real whole and not a cake with plums in it. One or two bits seemed to have a certain (purely verbal) suggestion of our Charles Williams. Is there any influence?

The next English edtn. shd. have a Glossary. Only one of my colleagues knew what a ‘painter’ means in American. I got it right myself, but it was by guessing.

I think America is going through rather a good poetical period at present, while we’re going into a metrical coterie alexandrianism. Not that it wasn’t you, drat you, who wished on us both Pound & Eliot! But you wisely kept them for export. With us, in any periodical the dullest article seems to me to beat the best poem in all the v. qualities poetry shd. have–structure, invention, freshness, humanity. Jeffers overcalls his hand and strains his voice into a scream sometimes; Benet can be commonplace for 100 lines together; Frost can be tame. But they never give me the feeling I so often get from modern English verse–‘No hour in my life has proved to be more interesting than this man’s whole life seems to have been.’ But I begin to ramble….

With many thanks for a profoundly moving and (without this, to be ‘moved’ is nothing) satisfying experience.

Yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

 

On 18 January 1954 the Council of the Senate of Cambridge University recommended ‘That there be established in the University on 1 October 1954 a Professorship of Medieval and Renaissance English, and that…the Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English shall treat the subject on literary and critical rather than on philological and linguistic lines.’²¹⁷ On 31 March a new Chair of Medieval and Renaissance English was announced, with application to be made by 30 April 1954.²¹⁸ Lewis’s friends, such as J. R. R. Tolkien, knew the change of jobs would make a huge difference to him. Besides the fact that his salary would treble–from £600 per annum to £1,950, including rooms and meals in College–it would mean the end of the tutorials that had exhausted him after thirty years.

The Electors for the new Chair, all of whom were very friendly towards Lewis, included Tolkien, Henry Stanley Bennett (University Reader in English and the Librarian of Emmanuel College, Cambridge),²¹⁹ David Knowles (Regius Professor of Modern History in Cambridge),²²⁰ F. P. Wilson (Merton Professor of English at Oxford),²²¹ Basil Willey,²²² and E. M. W. Tillyard (Master of Jesus College, Cambridge).²²³ The meeting of the Electors was presided over by Sir Henry Willink, Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge, and Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge University. On 11 May 1954 Willink wrote to offer Lewis the Chair:

I was asked by my colleagues [the Electors], who were unanimous with a warmth and sincerity which could not have been exceeded, to invite you to become the first holder of what we feel will be a Chair of great value to the University. Throughout the discussion stress was laid on the fact that we were electing to a first tenure, a moment of critical importance.²²⁴

TO SIR HENRY WILLINK (MC):²²⁵

Magdalen College
Oxford
May 12th 1954

Dear Mr. Vice-Chancellor

I feel more pleased and honoured than I can express at your invitation: and the prospect (socially and academically considered) of migrating from Oxford to Cambridge would be more an incentive than a deterrent.

The very regretful and very grateful refusal which I have to make is based on different grounds. Domestic necessities govern all our lives at present, and by moving I should lose an invaluable servant.²²⁶ I have, moreover, led another possible candidate to believe that I was not in the field.²²⁷ Thirdly, I come of a stock that grows early old and I already know myself to have lost a good deal of energy and vigour which the first holder of this important chair most certainly ought to have.

It is very difficult to say that the decision I have based on these reasons is now quite fixed without seeming to suppose, like a coxcomb, that you might press me. You will understand that my only motive is a wish to save you from any waste of your time.

With renewed thanks and with the most cordial good wishes to the new Chair, I am

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO SHELDON VANAUKEN (BOD):

Magdalen College
Oxford
May 14/54

My dear Van Auken–

I have seen less than you but more than I wanted of this terrible problem.²²⁸ I will discuss your letter with those whom I think wise in Christ. This is only an interim report.

First, to map out the boundaries within which all discussion must go on, I take it for certain that the physical satisfaction of homosexual desires is sin. This leaves the homo. no worse off than any normal person who is, for whatever reason, prevented from marrying. Second, our speculations on the cause of the abnormality are not what matters and we must be content with ignorance. The disciples were not told why (in terms of efficient cause) the man was born blind (Jn. IX 1–3): only the final cause, that the works of God shd. be made manifest in him.²²⁹

This suggests that in homosexuality, as in every other tribulation, those works can be made manifest: i.e. that every disability conceals a vocation, if only we can find it, wh. will ‘turn the necessity to glorious gain.’²³⁰ Of course, the first step must be to accept any privations wh., if so disabled, we can’t lawfully get. The homo. has to accept sexual abstinence just as the poor man has to forego otherwise lawful pleasures because he wd. be unjust to his wife and children if he took them. That is merely a negative condition.

What shd. the positive life of the homo. be? I wish I had a letter wh. a pious male homo., now dead, once wrote to me–but of course it was the sort of letter one takes care to destroy. He believed that his necessity could be turned to spiritual gain: that there were certain kinds of sympathy and understanding, a certain social rôle which mere men and mere women cd. not give. But it is all horribly vague–too long ago. Perhaps any homo. who humbly accepts his cross and puts himself under Divine guidance will, however, be shown the way. I am sure that any attempt to evade it (e.g., by mock-or quasi-marriage with a member of one’s own sex even if this does not lead to any carnal act) is the wrong way. Jealousy (this another homo. admitted to me) is far more rampant and deadly among them than among us. And I don’t think little concessions like wearing the clothes of the other sex in private is the right line either. It is the duties, the burdens, the characteristic virtues of the other sex, I expect, which the patient must try to cultivate.

I have mentioned humility because male homos. (I don’t know about women) are rather apt, the moment they find you don’t treat them with horror and contempt, to rush to the opposite pole and start implying that they are somehow superior to the normal type. I wish I cd. be more definite. All I have really said is that, like all other tribulations, it must be offered to God and His guidance how to use it must be sought.

I heard you had been troubled with the old spine again. I hope the silence on this topic in your letter does not merely result from selflessness but means that you are now well. Remember me to your very nice wife. You both keep your place in my daily prayers. It is a sweet duty, praying for our friends. I always feel as if I had had a brief meeting with you when I do so: perhaps it is a meeting, and the best kind. Pray for me to be made more charitable: we’re in the middle of a Faculty crisis wh. tempts me to hatred many times a day.²³¹

Yours

C. S. Lewis

 

P.S. I’d nearly forgotten your other point. I presume God grants prayers when granting wd. be good for the petitioner & others and denies them when it wd. not. Might there be cases where a. The worthiness of the p. made it bad for him to have his prayers granted: i.e. might lead him to think there was an element of bargain about it.

b. The unworthiness made it bad: i.e. might lead him to think that God did not demand righteousness.

c. The worthiness made it good: i.e. might free him from scruples, show him that his conduct had been right after all.

d. The unworthiness made it good: i.e. produced humbled compunction–unde hoc mihi?²³²

All v. crude. The point is that worthiness might easily be taken into account tho’ not in the way of direct earning and reward

C.S.L.

 

In encouraging the philologist G. V. Smithers to apply for the Chair Lewis was ignorant of the fact that, under the terms of the appointment (‘That the Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English treat the subject on literary and critical rather than on philological and linguistic lines’), Smithers was ineligible.

The Electors’ second choice was Helen Gardner,²³³ at that time Fellow of English at St Hilda’s College, Oxford. On 14 May Sir Henry Willink wrote to tell Lewis that he would not inform their second choice until June, and urged him to accept the Chair. Lewis replied the next day:

TO SIR HENRY WILLINK (MC):

Magdalen College
Oxford
May 15th 1954

Dear Vice-Chancellor

I am most moved by your extremely kind letter. But you offer persuasion to one who needs liberation. You knock at my door but I can’t unlock it because I haven’t the key. The more I look at it the less possible it seems to transport the peculiar domestic set-up of my brother, our man, and myself. There is a whole network of conveniences and life-lines slowly built up here (my brother, in your ear, is not always in perfect psychological health) which I really dare not abandon. I am assuming, of course, that your Chair involves residence at Cambridge, at any rate in term (and it certainly ought to).

It is delightful to salute a Williamsite,²³⁴ or, as I have heard it called, a ‘Caroline Divine’. I look forward to meeting you when I next visit Magdalene; I greatly enjoyed my week end there last Vacation.

With thanks, and again thanks.

Yours most sincerely

C. S. Lewis

 

After this there seemed nothing the Electors could do, and Willink wrote to Lewis on 18 May: ‘It is abundantly clear that you have cogent reasons for not making the move which we had so much hoped would be possible.’²³⁵

Professor Tolkien was, however, determined that Lewis should have the Chair and in a conversation with him on 17 May he convinced him that he would not let down Warnie, Paxford or Smithers by going to Cambridge. Tolkien wrote to Willink on 18 May:

Besides being the precise man for the job, Lewis would probably be happy there, and actually be reinvigorated by a change of air. Oxford has not, I think, treated him very well, and though he is incapable of ‘dudgeon’, or of showing resentment, he has been a little dispirited. After our talk he said he would accept! It was as I thought: the chief obstacle is domestic. He has a house and some dependants–including his brother. He will not contemplate closing that establishment. But if he could be assured that Cambridge would provide him with the equivalent (more or less) of his rooms in Magdalen (which he will lose), in which to live during term and house a lot of his books–then I think you can have him.²³⁶

Tolkien’s great news arrived too late. Willink had already invited Helen Gardner to accept the Chair. Lewis, unaware of this, wrote to him reopening the matter.

TO SIR HENRY WILLINK (MC):

Magdalen College
Oxford
May 19th 1954

Dear Vice Chancellor

It is I who should apologise as the cause of multiplied letter writing, the more so since I am now writing again, and in a strain which may make me rather ridiculous. Since my last letter to you I have had a conversation with Tolkien which has considerably changed my view.

He told me, first, that the electors would in no case elect a philologist. This is to me important, for it sets me free (in honour)–I have thought myself bound to refuse it by certain words I have already said to another candidate. If, as now appears, he is not effectively eligible, then I am not bound.

He told me, in the second place, that full residence, with an ‘establishment’ at Cambridge, was not thought necessary: that four days a week in term time (less or more–there wd. of course be periods of pressure when I might be there for a fortnight or so) would fit the bill. Tolkien’s lively mind sometimes leads him (with perfectly innocent intentions) to overstate things. Is his view correct? If so, it would remove my difficulty. As long as my normal housekeeping can be at Oxford, and that the life-lines I told you of are intact, and it is a question of rooms in Cambridge (could any College supply me with these?) I cd. manage well. I can both work and sleep in trains so that the prospect of spending much of my life on the Bletchley route does not alarm me. I have no right to assume these conditions–they seem too good to be true–but if they are the real condition I shd. like nothing better.

I feel a fool in saying all this. But you know how it is when a man has a possible change before him. It is impossible not to toy with the idea of what you would do, or would have done, if you accepted. I have begun composing imaginary lectures and this has had a good deal to do with it: you know what good lectures those ones always are!

Tolkien also said all the Oxford members of the committee had warned you that I was not a great exponent of ‘Research’.

It wd. not be honest not to add that if I were an elector I shd. prefer a fully resident Professor to a semi-resident one even if he were slightly less desirable in other respects.

Whatever your conclusion, I shall always be grateful for your kindness and rather ashamed of the trouble I have given.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO MARY VAN DEUSEN (W):

Magdalen College
Oxford
May 20th 54

Dear Mrs. Van Deusen

Well, well–so that struggle is over. Perhaps God uses this reverend Mar-all as a hair shirt for the faithful and thinks you have worn (or borne) him long enough (‘Deliver me from the ungodly who is a sword of thine’).²³⁷ It doesn’t surprise me in the least that one who can’t do a job himself shd. be set to teach others. Failed schoolmasters become inspectors of schools and failed authors become critics. It’s the normal thing.

When we speak of Detachment (from worldly interests) we mean it of course only as a preliminary for Attachment to spiritual things: as St. Paul wishes to be rid of the earthly body only in order to put on the heavenly (2 Cor. V.1–4). All the Christian demands are in the end positive–to receive, take, embrace something (‘Open thy mouth wide and I will fill it’)²³⁸–and negative (‘Love not the World’)²³⁹ only as means to that. As one might say to a slum-child ‘Stop making that mud pie & come for a holiday to the sea.’

About Reverence, you know, I believe all people like us, all who come from a Western, decayed-Protestant, liberal, commercial background, have a lot of lee-way to make up. We have our own advantages over those who come from a Latin, Catholic, decayed-feudal background: our veracity, manliness, energy. But we are spiritually ill-bred: raw & harsh & crude like yokels in a drawing room. How much even of what we take for democratic feeling is really gaucherie? i.e. we disapprove of ‘bowings & scraping’ partly because, not having had good dancing-masters, we don’t know how to bow gracefully. What a pity that the progress of democracy in this country has meant that certain people who used to call me Sir now don’t: it ought to have meant that I began calling them Sir. And we carry the same boorishness into spiritual matters.

The sinus is behaving much better this year than last. Oh yes, my examining will leave me some summer holiday, but a v. contracted one.

All blessing.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO MARGARET POLLARD (P):

Magdalen College
Oxford
May 22d 54

Dear Mrs. Pollard

Thank you very much for the cream; I ought to have thanked you before, but we are having a political crisis in our Faculty and life has been a whirl.

I shd. jolly well hope there were uncovenanted mercies²⁴⁰–after all Dante put Rhipeus and Trajan in heaven²⁴¹–and I daresay Greene is getting it all right.²⁴² Non-existent saints are a problem (for you! not for hum-drum little Prots like me) which I never thought of.²⁴³ But after all non-existent Gods, if appealed to with good heart, probably have done quite a lot to[o]: I mean, the real God, of His infinite courtesy, re-addresses the letters to Himself and they are dealt with like the rest of the mail.²⁴⁴

Balaam’s ass, along with the ass of the flight into Egypt²⁴⁵ and the ass of the entry into Jerusalem,²⁴⁶ all have a paddock and stable (prob. the Stable of the Nativity, ‘assumed’ for that purpose) just outside the walls of the celestial city and he-haw ad majorem.²⁴⁷ St. Francis often looks in with some glorified thistles. They are famously snug.²⁴⁸ Only up there their braying is more melodious than the song of a nightingale. I hope we may meet them. Perhaps you won’t know me, though. Perhaps people like me, who hardly make the grade for human heaven are turned into celestial donkeys. This wd. fit your definition of Limbo, you see: a state of perfect natural happiness.²⁴⁹

I’ll give you a ride willingly if all comes off.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO A FIFTH GRADE CLASS IN MARYLAND (W):²⁵⁰

Magdalen College,
Oxford.
May 24th 1954

Dear Fifth Graders

I am so glad you liked the Narnian books and it was very kind of you to write and tell me. There are to be 7 of them altogether and you are already one behind. No. 4, The Silver Chair, is already out.

You are mistaken when you think that everything in the book ‘represents’ something in this world. Things do that in The Pilgrim’s Progress but I’m not writing in that way. I did not say to myself ‘Let us represent Jesus as He really is in our world by a Lion in Narnia’: I said ‘Let us suppose that there were a land like Narnia and that the Son of God, as He became a Man in our world, became a Lion there, and then imagine what would happen.’ If you think about it, you will see that it is quite a different thing.

So the answer to your first two questions is that Reepicheep and Nick-a-brick don’t, in that sense, represent anyone. But of course anyone in our world who devotes his whole life to seeking Heaven will be like R., and anyone who wants some worldly thing so badly that he is ready to use wicked means to get it will be likely to behave like N.

Yes, Reepicheep did get to Aslan’s country. And Caspian did return safely: it says so on the last page of the Dawn Treader. Eustace did get back to Narnia, as you will find when you read The Silver Chair. As for who reigns in Narnia to-day, you won’t know till you have had the seventh and last book.

I’m tall, fat, rather bald, red-faced, double-chinned, black-haired, have a deep voice, and wear glasses for reading.

The only way for us to Aslan’s country is through death, as far as I know: perhaps some very good people get just a tiny glimpse before then.

Best love to you all. When you say your prayers sometimes ask God to bless me.

Yours ever,

C. S. Lewis

 

Sir Henry Willink had written to Helen Gardner on 16 May offering her the Chair of Medieval and Renaissance English. Unlike Lewis, she took some time to consider the offer. While waiting for her to respond, Willink wrote to Lewis on 24 May telling him that the offer had gone out to ‘No. 2’ but asking him to hold on because the regulations about residence were not inflexible: ‘A Professor can be absent as much as he wishes outside Full Term provided that he is not habitually absent from a residence within 5 miles of Great St Mary’s Church (e.g. rooms in College) more than two nights in the week during Full Term…Oh that my letter to Choice No. 2 had not gone on its way.’²⁵¹

TO SIR HENRY WILLINK (MC):

Magdalen College
Oxford
May 26th 54

My dear Master

(if I may thus follow your lead) Thank you for your letter. Whatever the upshot (and unless No 2 is as trickily placed as myself, I can’t quite see him turning down the offer) I shall long remember your inexhaustible kindness, and if I don’t reach Cambridge as a Professor I shall come to Magdalene as a week-ender at the first opportunity in the hopes of making your acquaintance

Yours

In utrumque paratus²⁵²

C. S. Lewis

TO THE KILMER CHILDREN (W): TS

Magdalen College,
Oxford.
26th May 1954.

Dear Kilmers

Thank both Martin and Micky for their nice letters. Do you mean Miriam fell into the stove? ‘was put on’ sounds as if you did it on purpose–were you thinking of having her for dinner? I do hope she will soon be better. Burns are horrid.

Yours ever,

C. S. Lewis

TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE (W):

Magdalen College
Oxford
May 27th 1954

Dear Mary Willis

Thanks for yours of the 24th, I am glad to hear you have moved into pleasanter quarters and hope there will be a great blessing both upon them and on the new job. The saving of time and money on bus travel is a great point: or rather, if your experience is at all like mine, the time spent not in travelling but in waiting at ’bus stops, often in v. cold or v. hot weather.

I’ve no idea what a ‘pent-house apartment’ may be! I’m sorry to disappoint you with such a scrap of a letter, but the rush is still on (I foresee no end to it before August) and the mails have been above the average for weeks now: I don’t know why. It’s a cold backward spring here but there are some lovely days. Sunshine just flirts with us and then disappears. You are always in my prayers.

Yours ever

Jack

TO NELL BERNERS-PRICE (W): PC

Magdalen College,
Oxford.
29/5/54

Of course call in with the young people if you are in Oxford. I shall be away a good deal this summer, but if you don’t mind taking a chance, give me a try. Can’t quite join in ‘admiration’ of anything about Mrs. H.²⁵³ except her cheek! All the best.

J.

 

On 3 June Sir Henry Willink received a letter from Helen Gardner, declining the Chair. She did not divulge her reasons at the time, but years later, in Lewis’s obituary for the British Academy, she wrote:

In the same year as he published [English Literature in the Sixteenth Century] Lewis moved to Cambridge to be the first holder of the Chair in English Medieval and Renaissance Literature. When first approached he was unwilling to leave Oxford and the Chair was indeed offered to someone else. Fortunately, the ‘second string’ declined, partly on account of having heard that Lewis was changing his mind, for it was obvious that this ought to be Lewis’s chair.²⁵⁴

Willink wrote to Lewis on 3 June: ‘No. 2 has declined, and I am filled with hope that after all Cambridge will obtain the acceptance of No. 1.’²⁵⁵ As it happened, Willink was both Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge University and Master of Magdalene College, and as Vice-Chancellor he advised Lewis to write to the Master of Magdalene to inquire about the possibility of making his ‘Cambridge home within its wall’.²⁵⁶ So on 4 June Lewis sent Willink two letters–one as Vice-Chancellor and one as the Master of Magdalene.

TO SIR HENRY WILLINK (MC):

Magdalen College
Oxford
June 4th 1954

Dear Vice Chancellor

Thank you for your letter of the 3rd. I feel much pleasure and gratitude in accepting the Chair of Medieval and Renaissance English. As regards the beginning of the tenure I will be guided by the wishes of the electors: but two factors make me prefer January to October. One is that I am examining in our Final Honour School which means, as you know, that I shall be able to do hardly any of my own work this Long Vacation: and I hope it is not only vanity that makes me reluctant to begin my new duties with old lectures hastily refurbished or new ones inadequately prepared. The other is that (through my own fault) it is now so late that my own College might feel they were being allowed insufficient time for choosing my successor.

I should much like to come over and see you, but from next week until almost August I shall have to average 20 scripts a day, so I dare not play truant even for 24 hours

I enclose a letter to the Master of Magdalene.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO SIR HENRY WILLINK (MC):

Magdalen College
Oxford
June 4th 1954

My dear Master

The Vice Chancellor–with whom, in obedience to the Delphic precept, you are no doubt intimately acquainted, has suggested my doing something which, but for his authority, would seem to me pert and immodest. The proposal is nothing less than that I should ask if there is a possibility of my making my Cambridge home in Magdalene when I take up the new Chair of Medieval and Renaissance English. The attractions of such a privilege for me are so clear–and its attractions for Magdalene, I cannot help feeling, so very obscure–that I do not think I can add anything. If the arrangement is possible I should value it most highly on every ground: if it is not, my gratitude for the mere suggestion will not be the less. Unde hoc mihi?²⁵⁷

Yours most sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO SIR HENRY WILLINK (MC): TS

Magdalen College,
Oxford.
7th June 1954.

Dear Vice-Chancellor,

The formula of election from October 1st 1954 with dispensation until January 1st 1955 is most obliging, and would of course suit me admirably. If I can get away earlier than January 1st then, since a dispensation is presumably permissive and a man need not avail himself of it longer than he wishes, no new legislation would, I suppose, be necessary.

With very many thanks,

Yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO SIR HENRY WILLINK (MC): TS
CONFIDENTIAL.

Magdalen College,
Oxford.
7th June 1954.

Dear Master,

Thanks very much indeed to you and the College. I am sure the piano will be nobile enough for me. Inches of bookshelf space is the important factor. What exactly ought I to reply to any other College which was kind enough to offer me a Fellowship? I mean, having regard to the confidential nature of the present correspondence. You’ll find me a child in all such matters.

Yours,

C. S. Lewis

TO RICHARD SELIG (HAR):²⁵⁸

Magdalen College
Oxford
7/6/54

Dear Selig

Far the best of these poems,²⁵⁹ I think, is the first,²⁶⁰ which I find v. good. I’ve always wanted the possibilities of the alexandrine-without-a-medial-break further explored. Two flaws, I think. Ll. 10, 11 seem to me a conventionally violent image wh. doesn’t really fit in with the general wind-like, evasive quality of your island. Lunch & snapping twigs belong, for me, to some other poem.²⁶¹ And in 13, 14 I think the 3-syll rhymes–what the Italians call sdruccioli–are coarse. 24–27 and all the Italianised coda are excellent. Next best I liked Marriage Song. ‘He sleeps in a new flesh’²⁶² is good. I’m baffled by your use of ‘be’ in Way up 4. l. 1²⁶³ and Song for a T l. 2.²⁶⁴ Is it some idiom I don’t know? Many thanks.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO JOAN LANCASTER (BOD):

Magdalen College
Oxford
June 7th 1954

Dear Joan Lancaster

Thank you for your nice letter of May 25th. I, too, like opening my eyes under water, both in the sea and in my bath, but one must not do it in a bath if it is very hot because it is bad for them.

All seven Narnian books are now written and the fifth might be out any day now. As for poems, I don’t think I could do them. Some poems I did like (or would have liked) at your age are: Longfellow’s Saga of King Olaf,²⁶⁵ Matthew Arnold’s Sohrab and Rustum,²⁶⁶ Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome,²⁶⁷ and G. K. Chesterton’s Ballad of the White Horse.²⁶⁸ I wonder do you like any of these.

I used to use fountain pens but somehow I don’t like them now.²⁶⁹

It is dreadfully cold, wet summer here. The cuckoo (do you have cuckoos?) only speaks about once a day and even the squirrels are depressed.

With love,

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO DELMAR BANNER (W):

Magdalen College
Oxford
June 8th. 54

Dear Banner

It was nice to hear from you again. I’m on the eve of a great adventure, having accepted the new Chair of Medieval and Renaissance English at Cambridge. I’m already half frightened of what I’ve done: but 29 years of pupils’ essays is enough, bless ’em. There have been many nice pupils: even many nice essays. I haven’t noticed that College is anxious to have my portrait painted before I go! Otherwise we might hope to see your egg. (The metaphor of sitting in it is intriguing!)

But this summer is quite full! First, examining in the Final Honour School (20 scripts a day including Sundays) and, when that’s over, Ireland. But many thanks. My duty to Mrs. Banner.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO THE KILMER CHILDREN (W): TS

54/141. Magdalen College,
Oxford.
9th June 1954.

Dear Kilmers,

Congratulations on Deborah²⁷⁰ to you all. I like red hair. I never saw a picture of a shower before. I had to put up my umbrella to look at it. The picture of the lamp-post is good too. Tell Nicky I don’t smoke cigars. Love to all.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO SIR HENRY WILLINK (MC): TS CONFIDENTIAL.

Magdalen College,
Oxford.
10th June 1954.

Dear Master,

Thank you very much for the formula, which I will certainly use. A professorial fellowship at Magdalene is exactly what I would like best. I should like (among other things) to remain under the same Patroness.²⁷¹ Why should one trouble the celestial civil service with unnecessary change? Thanks again for all your kindness.

Yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO DOROTHY L. SAYERS (W):

Magdalen College
Oxford
12/6/54

Dear Miss Sayers,

Thanks very much. I’m not sure whether I really am the Professor at the moment. If you wd. call me Jack as others do, the difficulty wd. not arise. (I believe such suggestions ought to come from the lady, but years pass and the lady doesn’t move!). I shall still live in Oxford in the Vac and on most term-time week ends.

I’ll try to come and look on at the Nicking of Nott. Is it wise? Shall we be shent? She’s a pretty good mistress of her weapon. Uncle Tom,²⁷² I’m told, isn’t: nor am I, now. You’ll have to do all the fighting.²⁷³

You couldn’t embalm a body till Sunday, surely, because embalming is works & wd. be a breach of the Sabbath!

In great haste. Thousands of letters from mere acquaintances plus schools papers to mark.

Yours ever

Jack Lewis

TO HARRY BLAMIRES (BOD): TS

54/178.

Magdalen College,
Oxford.
12th June 1954.

Dear Blamires,

Many thanks. Snowed under with letters and Schools papers.

Yours in haste,

C. S. Lewis

TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE (W): TS

54/28. Magdalen College,
Oxford.
14th June 1954.

Dear Mary Willis,

Yes, I’m through the Easter letters, and now examining. I have averaged 20 scripts a day (including Sundays) for six weeks–the viva voce examinations will take eight hours a day. I shall become human again at about the end of September. Meanwhile, love and good wishes.

Yours,

Jack.