TO JILL FREUD (P): TS
56/29.
The Kilns,
Kiln Lane,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford.
10th January 1956.
My dear June,
We are delighted to hear that you will be with us by lunch time on Saturday, and Warnie has given orders to have the sandwiches unpacked and dusted against your arrival. I note what you say about Nicola, and we will put you in the two downstairs rooms. Perhaps better not bring Polly, though we should like to renew our acquaintance;1 but our small kitten, Mervyn, is terrified at the sight of Susie, and I think two of these strange monsters in the house might give him a nervous breakdown.
Yours ever,
Warnie & Jack
TO MURIEL BRADBROOK (W):2
Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
20/1/56
Dear Miss Bradbrook
The devil’s in it. I got your kind invitation and replied, accepting it, by return of post.3 I’m looking forward to it with high glee. I’m afraid this contre-temps must have put you to a good deal of trouble, but I remain adamant. Indulge no hope of my absence! I shall be there unless ‘I be sickle outher in prisoun.’4
Yours in bewildered sincerity
C. S. Lewis
TO JOCELYN GIBB (BOD):
56/635
As from Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
23/1/56
Dear Gibb
I suppose it comes too late for you to use, but someone has just pointed out a bad error in S. by J. On p. 203, line 3, for ‘meditating it through’ read ‘mediating it through’.
Less important, but more mysterious, is p. 222, l. 16 ‘too blind’. For ‘too’ read ‘so’.6
I’ve a feeling I ought to have answered some letter of yours but didn’t: if so, apologies.
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO CHAD WALSH (W):
Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
26/1/56
My dear Chad–
Joy’s address is 10, Old High Street, Headington, Oxford.
I’ve long thought that if I ever wrote a play in verse I shd. use the relaxed and subtler form of the Hiawatha metre. For when I heard Peer Gynt,7 in this metre, it seemed to work admirably. It is intolerable in Longfellow of course. But modern actors will always disguise metre as much as they can: this can’t be wholly disguised: and therefore just the right amount comes through. I wd. strongly dissuade you from a relaxed form of the O.E.8 line. Once it is at all relaxed (and abandons the quantitative element in classical O.E. verse) it degenerates into a mere tumble. Even in Gawain and the Green Knight this danger is felt: in Piers Plowman9 it is sometimes disastrous. I agree that Blank Verse (whatever the reason may be) is now hopeless. Something might be done with rhymeless alexandrines with no medial break: lines like ‘I think we hardly recognized him till he died’.
I look forward to B the G.10 My story will be collected by my agent this week end.
My brother joins me in all greetings. Remember me to your ladies (One usually says after a visit ‘I was glad to see X again. It was a pity his wife had to come along.’ With you it is ‘I hope he’ll come again and bring his wife.’)
Yours
Jack
Muriel Bradbrook invited Lewis to a dinner at Girton College so he could meet Nan Dunbar. On being introduced to her Lewis said: ‘Ah! Miss Dunbar! I’m glad to find you actually exist–I’d thought perhaps you were only the personification of my conscience!’11
Dunbar sat next to Lewis at dinner, and she passed on a remark by the Regius Professor of Greek, Sir Denys Page (1908–78), about a little-known poem by Aristotle, the ‘Ode to Arete’, which Page called frigid. ‘Frigid!’ exclaimed Lewis, ‘I find the poem quite moving in its imagery.’12 Shortly afterwards Lewis defended this position in the letter that follows.
TO NAN DUNBAR (P):
Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
26/1/56
C. S. Lewis doctissimae Annae Dunbar, S[acrae]. T[heologiae]. D[octor].
De loco Vergiliano omnes tenebras clarissimo luce dissipasti. De carmine Aristotelis longe, ut dicam quod sentio, aberras a veritate. De numeris non contendo, sed quantis luminibus ingenii illa prosopopoeia illustratur. Translaticium fuisset imaginem virtutis aut quasi amicam aut quasi laborem fingere, sed haec duo conjuncta quanto magis capiunt! Tunc, super hoc, imagine de pietate erga parentes sumpta, reducit illam Venerem eandemque Junonem labores imponentem, ad Lares et focum et pueriles annos. Nec hoc satis: deinde, quasi altius foderet, quasi formam virtutis etiam vegetabili nostrae animae insereret, ipsi somno praeponit. His versibus, multo divinius quam Menander, totam vitae imaginem expressit. Vale.
C. S. Lewis to the most learned Nan Dunbar, Doctor of Sacred Theology
On the Virgil passage you have dissipated all the darkness with a very clear light. On the poem of Aristotle13 you are–to speak frankly–a long way from the truth. On the metre, I don’t argue; but with what great intellectual brilliance that personification is illustrated. It would have been conventional to imagine the image of Virtue either as a mistress or as a task, but these two joined together–how much more flavour they have! Then, moreover, taking an image from duty to one’s parents, he brings her in again, as Venus and at the same time as Juno imposing labour, to the heart and home and childhood years. Nor is this all; then, as if digging deeper, as if inserting the form of Virtue also into our physical nature, he has preferred her before sleep itself. In these verses, much more divinely than Menander,14 he has moulded an entire image of life. Farewell.15
TO JOCELYN GIBB (BOD):
Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
27/1/56
Dear Gibb
Yes, that must have been it. How v. rude of me not to have thanked you for the elegantly bound copy of S. by J. I do so now: it was much appreciated.
I agree that errata slips are no good. I doubt if anyone looks at them.
Seewald is excellent–indeed the whole volume is delightful.16
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO PHILINDA KRIEG (P):17
Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
28/1/56
Dear Mrs. Krieg
About an hour after posting my last letter to Laurence I realised that I had attributed to The Silver Chair what really comes in The Horse. I thought Laurence would enjoy catching me out on my own books and should have been much disappointed if he had not!
One is sorry the Sunday Schools should be so dull.18 Yet I wonder. In this all important subject, as in every other, the youngsters must meet, if not exactly the dull, at any rate the hard and the dry, sooner or later. The modern attempt is to keep it as late as possible: but does that do any good? They’ve got to cut their teeth. Aren’t many parts of the Bible itself, read at home, quite simple enough and interesting enough to be a counterpoise to the dull teaching?
Anyway, there is no use trying to keep the first thrill. It will come to life again and again only on one condition: that we turn our backs on it and get to work and go through all the dullness. But I’ve said all this in the P. of P., now I come to think of it.19
I don’t think any book I could write wd. help. You can help: but in the main there is something at this stage which Laurence can (and need we doubt, he will) do for himself.
Love to both.
Yours sincerely
C. S. Lewis
Of course he must pray to God to keep his interest alive. He knows God is not really dull. He must still remember that and trust in Him even when God doesn’t show him any of the interestingnesses. He is there alright behind the dull work.
TO RUTH PITTER (BOD):
The Kilns,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford
31/1/56
Dear Ruth–
Never heard of Scott’s ‘Old Play’?20 The passage is, so far as I know, my own invention, influenced, I think, by Coventry Patmore. I am not now sure that it is very relevant in its place.
And while we are on Quellenforschung,21 were you aware how closely you were reproducing Dr. Johnson’s ‘I find it does a man good to talk to his Sovereign. For in the first place–’ and then, to our endless loss, someone interrupted him.22
It’s also amusing that a few nights before getting your letter23 I dreamed that I was presented [to] the Queen, and found to my horror, half way through the audience, that I was wearing my hat. At the same moment a lady in waiting approached me from behind with the speed of a roller-skater and snatched it off my head with the words ‘Don’t be a fool.’ I left the presence, pensive (as may be supposed) and on my way through a great gallery, finding, without surprise, a photograph of myself on an occasional table, tore it to pieces and went on. I’ve never had the dream of appearing in public insufficiently dressed: but I suppose too much means pretty well the same as too little. So you beat me both by the difference between reality and dream and that between success and failure. And Schweitzer too! Well, you deserve it all.
And have you read Mary Norton’s The Borrowers and The Borrowers Afield?24 And K.M. Brigg’s Hobberdy Dick?25–the latter good, but either Kipling or De la Mare, if they had had the idea, wd. have made a heavenly book of it, and hers is not quite good enough. And (now an old book) Margaret Kennedy’s The Feast?26 This is most remarkable: a wholly successful allegory on the Seven Deadly Sins.
Of course it will be a good spring. They all are. You are hoping it will be one of the great springs.
Warnie and I both send our loves to both. I shall come and beat up your quarters next Vacation, I trust.
Yours
Jack
TO MARY VAN DEUSEN (W):
The Kilns etc
5/2/56
Dear Mrs. Van Deusen
Thank you for your letter of Jan. 31st. I agree with you about the early Church and find the Acts one of the most exciting parts of the Bible. I don’t know whether your ‘harmony’ is my ‘joy’27 or not, tho’ I suspect they have in common at any rate one thing: that both are already ‘shattered’ when one first observes them. I suppose this is partly due to the nature of time–there being no real present, every moment already past however quickly you try to grab it. How rich we shall be when we get off this single railway-line into the rich green country left and right.
Yes, I think you would see through ‘a mere fad’. But Coué-ism28 was, wasn’t it, simply the most popular form of something that was not a mere fad but, more subtly, an exaggerated truth. And probably the current reaction against it in medical circles here is an exaggeration in the opposite direction.
I am so glad you took to Psalm XXXVI. My other great favourite is XIX.29 First, the mere glory of nature (between the Psalms and Wordsworth–a long gap in history–you get nothing equal to either on this theme). Then the disinfectant, inexorable sun beating down on the desert and ‘nothing hid from the heat thereof’.30 Then–implied, not stated–the imaginative identification of that heat and light with the ‘undefiled’ law, the ‘clean’ fear of the Lord, searching every cranny. Then the characteristically Jewish feeling that the Law is not only obligatory but beautiful, ravishing: delighting the heart, better than gold, sweeter than honey. Only after that, the (more Christian like) self examination and humble petition. Nearly all that could be said before the Incarnation is said in this Psalm. It is so much better Paganism than the real Pagans ever did! And in one way more glorious, more soaring and triumphant, than Christian poetry. For as God humbled Himself to become Man, so religion humbled itself to become Christianity.
All good wishes from us both–
Yours sincerely
C. S. Lewis
TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE (W):
Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
8/2/56
Dear Mary Willis
Thanks for your letter of the 2nd and for the Time cutting. My brother says the photo of me is the best ever, but another friend says it is unrecognisable. What’s most impressive is the smoke from the match, which looks like the explosion of a miniature shell.31 The review is of course a tissue of muddles and direct falsehoods–I don’t say ‘lies’ because the people who write such things are not really capable of lying. I mean, to lie = to say what you know to be untrue. But to know this, and to have the very ideas of truth & falsehood in your head, presupposes a clarity of mind wh. they haven’t got. To call them liars wd. be as undeserved a compliment as to say that a dog was bad at arithmetic.
I am delighted to hear that the new job continues to give satisfaction. What a difference it makes to work with nice people and to do work that you can believe in.
We have just come through a spell of what we call hard frost. It would be nothing by American standards: but here all the pipes burst and electricity and gas go down to low pressure, so one is comfortless enough.
You are still always in my prayers.
Yours
Jack Lewis
TO DOM BEDE GRIFFITHS OSB (W):
Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
8/2/56
My dear Dom Bede–
I have just got yr. letter of Jan. 1st, wh. is full of interest. I am having a copy of the book32 sent you and wd. have done so long ago, but I had lost your address.
Yes, I do feel the old Magdalen years to have been a v. important period in both our lives. More generally, I feel the whole of one’s youth to be immensely important and even of immense length. The gradual reading of one’s own life, seeing the pattern emerge, is a great illumination at our age. And partly, I hope, getting freed from the past as past by apprehending it as structure. If ever I write a story about someone like She33 or the Wandering Jew who lived for millenia, I shd. make a great point of this: he wd., after 10,000 years, still feel his first 50 years to be the biggest part of his life. I am glad you found a Chestertonian quality in the book. Actually, it seems to me that one can hardly say anything either bad enough or good enough about life.
The one picture that is utterly false is the supposedly realistic fiction of the XIX century where all the real horrors & heavens are excluded. The reality is a queer mixture of idyll, tragedy, farce, hymn, melodrama: and the characters (even the same characters) far better and worse than one ever imagined.
I wd. have preferred yr. book on Mysticism to be a Penguin, for I think they reach a larger audience than anything else. I look forward to it v. much. I think it is just the thing for you to do.34
You are (as you well know) on dangerous ground about Hinduism, but someone must go to dangerous places. One often wonders how different the content of our faith will look when we see it in the total context. Might it be as if one were living on an infinite earth? Further knowledge wd. leave our map of, say, the Atlantic quite correct, but if it turned out to be the estuary of a great river–and the continent thro’ wh. that river flowed turned out to be itself an island–off the shores of a still greater continent–and so on! You see what I mean? Not one jot of Revelation will be proved false: but so many new truths might be added.
By the way, that business of having to look up the same word ten times in one evening is no proof of failing powers. You have simply forgotten that it was exactly like that when we began Latin or even French.
Your Hindus certainly sound delightful. But what do they deny? That’s always been my trouble with Indians–to find any proposition they wd. pronounce false. But truth must surely involve exclusions?
I’m reading Runciman’s Hist. of the Crusades:35 a terrible revelation–the old civilisation of the E. Mediterranean destroyed by Turkish barbarians from the East & Frankish barbarians from the West.
Oremus pro invicem.
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO I. O. EVANS (W):
Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
9/2/56
Dear Evans
Good heavens, I’ve done a most frightful thing. I went on to your story (of course) before properly reading the letter–assumed it was spare galleys–and have torn it up. I never dreamed of anyone keeping galleys. I’m dreadfully sorry. I think the story will hit the audience you have in view v. well indeed. And I wonder why we have never heard of ice-meteorites before. Of course every particle of water that gets into space must become ice. There may be difficulties I don’t see.
I think Verne worst when he is nearest to science-fiction. What is best & most amusing is the Frenchman’s dream of the typical Englishman in Round the World.36 I can never forgive him for showing us a Subterranean in the Voyage to the Centre and then not introducing us.37 The opening of that book is the only one that has for me the authentic thrill.
I tried Fort,38 I think, and couldn’t read him.
Well, I’m v. penitent. My gas fire makes no ashes but I can order a little sackcloth.
Yours abjectly
C. S. Lewis
Warnie wrote to Jocelyn Gibb on 9 February 1956:39
56/101.
The Kilns, Kiln Lane,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford
9th February 1956.
Dear Mr Gibb,
My brother asks me to ask you to send a copy of Surprised by Joy to:–
Dom Bede Griffiths O.S.B.,
Nirmalashram,
Kengeri,
Bangalore, Dt.,
India
With all good wishes
yours sincerely,
W. H. Lewis
BROTHER MYCROFT.
On 8 February 1956 Lewis’s literary agent, Spencer Curtis Brown, sent a copy of his new novel, which he was calling ‘Bareface’, to Jocelyn Gibb. Gibb found aspects of it difficult to understand, and he asked Milton Waldman, literary advisor to Collins Publishers, to read it. Waldman reported to Gibb on 13 February 1956:
I have now finished reading Bareface…and I agree with you that it is excellent. But much more important than this, the whole long episode of the heroine’s love for Bardia seems to come as an irrelevant surprise. There is really nothing in the novel to prepare for it and it seems to me to lead to nothing in the latter stages. As a result of it, moreover, a character called Bardia’s wife, Ansit, is introduced, and the interview between the two women I find of minor interest and an impediment to the story.40
On 15 February 1956 Gibb wrote to Lewis regarding his worries about the book:
First the title. This is a real teaser. ‘Bareface’ is good in that it puts the weight on the right character and does not give too much to Psyche. I imagine that is why you changed it from ‘Psyche’ but it’s not a good selling title–‘C. S. Lewis has now turned to Westerns. I wondered which way he would go and it was not far from children’s stories to Red Indians’ et cetera…
Secondly, the scene towards the end between Orual and Ansit, Bardia’s widow, has been criticized as too much of an anti-climax. It certainly comes as a surprise, but maybe if the surprise were removed the suggestion of anti-climax might go too. I don’t see how you can do that without suggesting earlier that the Queen had an earthly love for Bardia, even though unrealized at the time. This would mean too much rewriting. The scene definitely has its place in Orual’s spiritual progress and it provides an essential prologue to the ‘revelation’ at the end. Perhaps it could be shorter…I think maybe the criticism, which was largely Waldman’s was prompted by the slowing down of interest after Orual donned the crown.
I should like to talk with you about the wrapper…What I had in mind was a sparse use of line as Seewald used it but in reverse, not back to front but with a background of colour and the lines coming through it in white and cream. Ungit with a skyline of the Grey Mountain behind?41
TO JOCELYN GIBB (BOD):
Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
16/2/56
Dear Gibb
Adamant on both points, I fear. I don’t see why people (I mean, people who were interested in what I do next) wd. be deterred from buying it if they did think it a Western. Actually, I think the title cryptic enough to be intriguing. (The point, of course, is that O. after going literally bareface in her youth, is made really & spiritually bareface, to herself and all the dead, at the end).
As to the other point: am I to understand that you and/or Waldman got as far as O’s scene with Bardia’s widow without having yet realised that O was, in a most perfectly ordinary, jealous, ravenous, biological fashion, in love with Bardia? If so, you’re the first readers to do so.
The fact (p. 138) that when lying back to back with B she had ‘another thing’42 than Psyche to think of: her instant hatred of B’s wife (pp. 153, 160):43 her anger when the Fox belittles B, but not when B. belittles the Fox (pp. 153, 206):44 para 2 on p. 193;45 the bitter frustration when B. wishes she was a man (para 1, p. 207):46 bottom of p. 219; and her tears when B. kisses her hand47–did all this go for nothing? Well, if they did, cd. anyone in their senses read pp. 233–6 without seeing it?48 And even if all that fails, you have the thing explicitly stated on pp. 243–4.49
Did even Peggy W. not see?50 Every woman reader so far has. Certainly no re-writing wd. help. If your reaction is that of most readers, we must tear the book up. Do, if you can spare the time, re-read the passages I have mentioned.
I’d approve some such jacket as you suggest, but wd. like to see a rough sketch first. Perhaps the shapeless Ungit stone (with faint suggestion of a horrible, old-woman’s face in it) and beside it the new statue of Aphrodite (v. stiff & doll-like–like early Aeginetan sculpture)51 and mountain line in the back?
Tell Milton I’m ashamed of him!
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO EDWARD FREDERICK YORKE (W):52
Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
16/2/56
Dear Mr. Yorke
And I too am sorry–sorry my dilatory habits as a correspondent made it seem I was waiting to have my postage paid!
I don’t feel I can do a preface:53 not because I disagree with what you say but because I have written too many prefaces, and of course they thus lose whatever value they might have had.
With many apologies.
Yours sincerely
C. S. Lewis
TO PHILINDA KRIEG (P):
Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
16/2/56
Dear Mrs. Krieg
You and Miss Wood seem to have the right idea!54 I should even be surprised if the children themselves saw more difficulty in the second question about Isaiah than in the first. Probably they wrote down ‘Because he was a man of unclean lips etc’.55 After all, that is why he said he was undone. (V. likely some of them, having been scolded for not washing their teeth, think Isaiah was repenting the same sin? Which, in its simple situation, may be closer to certain aspects of O.T. conscience than all the comments of ‘a bench of bishops’).
What to do about adolescence, I’ve no idea: except a recurrent bachelor’s wonder how any one has the nerve to produce and bring up a child at all–yet quite ordinary people seem to do it quite well. Perhaps the uneducated do it best v. often. I suppose they don’t attempt to replace Providence as to the Destiny, but just carry on from day to day on ordinary principles of affection, justice, veracity, and humour.
By the way, my Xtian Behaviour, if suited for anyone (of which I’m no judge) is quite as suitable for 16 year-olds as for anyone else. Of course one does at that age believe anyone rather than one’s parents. The hard thing is that (after childhood) parents seem usually to be most appreciated when they’re dead. I find so many terms of expression etc of my father’s coming out in me and like it now–I’d have fought against it as long as he was alive.
Give my love to Laurence.
Yours most sincerely
C. S. Lewis
TO ARTHUR GREEVES (BOD):
Magdalene,
Cambridge.
19/2/56
My dear Arthur–
‘Revelations’ about you in S. by J.! What if I’d made a few more?
I didn’t know Ramsay. I think the evidence for suicide pretty weak.56 King’s Chapel is under repairs. He might easily have gone up to look at the work–squeezed half his body out thro’ that hole to see one particular place–lost his head–and slipped through. If one can get one’s shoulders thro’ an opening, the rest of one will follow easily.
W. was pleased with yr. remarks about his book.57
Where you will, next summer. All love.
Yours
Jack
TO JOCELYN GIBB (BOD):
Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
21/2/56
Dear Gibb
I can’t do it in 50 words but the enclosed (about 120) is exactly what I shd. like. Wd. it serve your purpose?58
If Milton wants to look at the MS. again, let him. By the way, I suppose you have looked at the page-numbers to make sure you have the MS. complete? It occurred to me after writing my last letter that possibly a whole chapter was missing. (Bles was on the point of sending an incomplete MS. of The Lion to press when I detected the fact!)
I suppose we are not committed to a title till we reach the page-proof stage? I might still think of one that wd. please us both
Yours
C. S. Lewis
P.S. I hope Milton is not hurt by my last letter. The P.S.’s were only intended as badinage–but it struck me afterwards that perhaps they were too much in a gout anglais.59 He’s a man I greatly like and wouldn’t for the world offend him.
In one sense the author has worked on this book most of his life, for this re-interpretation of an old story (readers need not know which when they begin) had lived with him and pestered him to make it ever since he was an undergraduate. Suddenly, last spring, the form presented itself. All came into focus, and had drawn into it many sympathies that had found no vehicle in earlier books–for the ugly woman, the barbarous idolater, the humane sceptic, and (above all) the friends and lovers of those who have a vocation or even a faith.
TO ROGER LANCELYN GREEN (BOD):
Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
23/2/56
My dear Roger
On May 28th I’ll be (D.V.) at B & B as usual about 11.30 and catch the 2.28 back to here. Can you accompany me back, lie here (after dining, of course!) and breakfast?
Bacchae at the Arts last night simply overwhelming.60
Yours
Jack
TO JOHN H. MCCALLUM (P):
Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
24/2/56
Dear McCallum
Thanks for the cuttings61–none v. sour, as you say, but some v. silly. Yes, thanks: continue sending. I’d better see them than not.
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO CHAD WALSH (W):
Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
28/2/56
My dear Chad
Behold the Glory is miles and away the best book you have yet given us. It both gave me pleasure and did me good.62 The bit I needed most (though not the best bit in itself) was the defence of politicians, carefully distinguished from their betters but acknowledged on their own day-to-day level.63 I also thought, if I may say so without impertinence, that the actual writing showed a great advance in individuality, rhythm, and precision. I think you have come a long way since you wrote the book about me (though, to be sure, you now have a better subject!). You are, as always, kind to me in the note at the end:64 I rejoice (not solely, I believe, thro’ vanity) to have had a finger in the pie and to recognise also the finger of Buber and (am I right) Charles W. I like to feel we’re all ‘in a tale…’
Joy G. is very down on her luck at having just been given notice to quit her house: more depressed than I have ever known her–as a comparatively small knock does sometimes have a surprisingly severe effect when it comes after many harder ones and a period of what looked like being settled weather has intervened. You know the feeling. So a cheery letter wd. be a charitable act.
We are emerging (at least I hope we are) from the extreme discomforts wh. always arise when this country gets a taste of real winter. My brother is well and joins me in greetings. Remember me to your wife and the girls, and bring them all here again soon.
Why, bless me, the purpose of this letter was to thank you for the book, which I see I’ve quite forgotten to do. Well, thank you very much. I hope it will have a succes fou.
Yours
Jack Lewis
TO ALASTAIR FOWLER (BERG):
Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
29/2/56
Dear Fowler–
I couldn’t understand Park65–I don’t mean the Inhalt66 or anything so ambitious as that but simply what the characters were talking about from moment to moment nor (often) which of them was talking. I shan’t be in Oxford till Sat-week, so if there is any hurry about Islandia67 you’d better recover it.68
Auden is a Christian and a Tolkienian,69 and so far good; but he is rather a pansy. About his abilities as a lecturer I’ve no information. I didn’t vote myself, not being v. attracted by any of the candidates. I wd. have been for Coghill if the Starkey hadn’t v. cleverly forestalled that plan.70
Is Research at Redbrick any worse than at Oxford? You don’t mention (what I want to hear of most) your own story.71
I go to Edinburgh to-morrow to give the Scott oration.72
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO JOCELYN GIBB (BOD):
Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
29/2/56
Dear Gibb
One other possible title has occurred to me: Till we have Faces. (My heroine says in one passage ‘How can the gods meet us face to face till we have faces’).73 I must, however, warn you that no one on whom I’ve tried it thinks it an improvement on Bareface.74
What about having ‘A Myth re-told’ in the running headline? A page without one looks a little utilitarian & niggardly.
I’m not quite happy about that blurb of mine. Does it have to be ‘firm’ at once?
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO JOCELYN GIBB (BOD):
[Magdalene College,
Cambridge.]
29/2/56
Dear Gibb–
I think this is better than the form you have. Unless you strongly disagree, substitute it.75
This re-interpretation of an old story has lived in the author’s mind, thickening and hardening with the years, ever since he was an undergraduate. That way, he could be said to have worked at it most of his life. Last spring what seemed to be the right form presented itself and themes suddenly interlocked: the straight tale of barbarism, the mind of an ugly woman, dark idolatry and thin enlightenment at war with each other and with vision, and the havoc which a vocation, or even a faith, works on human life.
TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE (W):
Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
4/3/56
Dear Mary Willis
I thought the boot was on the other foot and that I had in fact written to you since you wrote to me–congratulating you on the new job which seemed such an answer to your prayers and those of your friends.
Well, what is my news? A good deal of it is probably not interesting. I was v. excited by seeing a performance of the Bacchae, but Greek plays aren’t up your street. I’ve just been in Edinburgh to speak at the annual dinner of the Walter Scott Club: but unless you happen to be a reader of Scott there’s no point in telling you that the Provost of Edinburgh76 (who sat next to me) was exactly like Bailie Nichol Jarvie out of Rob Roy. The Scotch run awfully true to type and never change. Edinburgh is a wonderful city, with a castle on a crag and mountains beyond it all visible from the main street. (I imagine Quebec being a bit like it, but I may be all wrong).
We’ve lived thro’ 3 weeks (for us) v. severe frost, but to day is the first of spring: warm sunshine, pure blue sky, and all the birds singing like mad.
My new book went to press last week. It is the story of Cupid & Psyche told by one of the sisters–so that I believe I’ve done what no mere male author has done before, talked thro’ the mouth of, & lived in the mind of, an ugly woman for a whole book. All female readers so far have approved the feminine psychology of it: i.e. no masculine note intrudes. I think that’s about all that has happened to me. This is the eighth letter this (Sunday) morning. What Sabbath-breach!
I hope all continues to go well.
Yours sincerely
Jack Lewis
TO JOCELYN GIBB (BOD):
Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
4/3/56
Dear Gibb
No, we won’t put in and clever: reviewers might say they didn’t see the cleverness. And we can’t have sophistry because it isn’t true. The Fox wasn’t sophistical. You can have pale instead of thin if you like: otherwise stet.
Oddly enough I believe I know the exact man for that BBC [job]77–Goodridge (I’ve forgotten the initials) who was a pupil of mine at Magdalen.78 (You can get his address from the College Office, Magdalen: tell them you mean the one who read English, for fear of homonyms). He was the very best secretary of the Socratic Club we ever had and the amount of work he put into it, arranging speakers and writing précis of papers for the Minutes (wh. were often far better than the papers themselves) was the reason why he got only a 4th in English. I’m not trying to sell you the man through friendship: it is simply that his whole undergraduate career was the unconscious preparation for exactly this job. Who’s doing what in contemporary theology, the whole patchwork from RC’s to Salvation Army, is the v. air he breathes. He may be a bit younger than your friend wants, but he is, and always was, as mature as the South Downs. Quite easy to get on with, but a massive man. Also, however little he may like his present job (I don’t know what it is) you may be quite sure that he wouldn’t accept this unless he thought it was a real vocation. There’s not a grain of careerism about him.
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO BARBARA HALPERN (BBC):79
Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
4/3/56
Dear Mrs Halpern
Thank you for the invitation but I can’t contribute to ‘Your Living Thoughts’. No doubt others have told you that the shorter the talk the longer and harder it is to prepare.
With regards.
Yours sincerely
C. S. Lewis
TO NAN DUNBAR (BOD):80
Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
7/3/56
Dear Miss Dunbar–
It is magnanimous of you to supply me with all the ammunition I lacked. I think we can now agree that the text is ‘patient’ both of your interpretation and of mine. We know from Dante that Statius got to heaven: if we ever get there we can ask him which he meant.81 Ihope my (till you intervened) untroubled certainty about my own view will now appear to you, not more justified but more natural & venial, as a result of coming to the passage in situ and already full of Statius, who, as you have taught me, is rather fond of the meton. use of this word. I might have been unconsciously influenced by the earlier instances.
I passed your eponymous town82 on my way back from Edinburgh last week.
With very many thanks–your vigilance is just what I need.
Yours sincerely
C. S. Lewis
P.S. You cd. have had this sooner if I had not inadvertently addressed it to Oxford!–and got it back through the dead letter office on Saturday.
TO MRS JOHNSON (P):
Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
13/3/56
Dear Mrs Johnson–
You’ll find my views about drinks in Christian Behaviour.83 Our Lord wd. not have made miraculous wine at Cana84 if the Lord meant us to be tee-totallers. See also Matt xi. 19.85 Smoking is much harder to justify. I’d like to give it up but I’d find this v. hard, i.e. I can abstain, but I can’t concentrate on anything else while abstaining–not-smoking is a whole time job.
Birth control I won’t give a view on: I’m certainly not prepared to say that it is always wrong. The doctrines about the Blessed Virgin which you mention are R.C. doctrines aren’t they? And as I’m not an R.C. I don’t see that I need bother about them. But the habit (of various Protestant sects) of plastering the landscape with religious slogans about the Blood of the Lamb etc. is a different matter. There is no question here of doctrinal difference: we agree with the doctrines they are advertising. What we disagree with is their taste. Well, let’s go on disagreeing but don’t let’s judge. What doesn’t suit us may suit possible converts of a different type.
My model here is the behaviour of the congregation at a ‘Russian Orthodox’ service, where some sit, some stand, some kneel, some lie on their faces, some walk about, and no one takes the slightest notice of what anyone else is doing. That is good sense, good manners, and good Christianity. ‘Mind one’s own business’ is a good rule in religion as in other things.
Don’t bother sending me any reviews. I get them all. The photo of me lighting a pipe86 is (as usual) said by some of my friends to be exactly like me, but by others to be wholly unrecognisable. The reason we don’t heat our houses is that you can’t get much fuel even if you can afford it. All your news is v. good and I give thanks for you many times a day. Keep on, keep on: ‘To him that overcometh I will give the Morning Star.’87 All blessings.
Yours very sincerely
C. S. Lewis
The final Narnian story, The Last Battle: A Story for Children, was published by The Bodley Head of London on 19 March 1956.
TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE (W):
The Kilns,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford
19/3/56
Dear Mary Willis
A line in haste about the bits underlined in your letter (wh. I enclose for reference). Don’t be too easily convinced that God really wants you to do all sorts of work you needn’t do. Each must do his duty ‘in that state of life to which God has called him’. Remember that a belief in the virtues of doing for doing’s sake is characteristically feminine, characteristically American, and characteristically modern: so that three veils may divide you from the correct view!
There can be intemperance in work just as in drink. What feels like zeal may be only fidgets or even the flattering of one’s self-importance. As MacDonald says ‘In holy things may be unholy greed.’88 And by doing what ‘one’s station and its duties’ does not demand, one can make oneself less fit for the duties it does demand, and so commit some injustice. Just you give Mary a little chance as well as Martha!
Yours
Jack
TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE (W):
The Kilns,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford
20/3/56
Dear Mary Willis
I don’t know what ‘high-hatting’ means, but it is in this country a safe bet that 999 out of a 1000 people have no use for Scott:89 and the more high-brow they are, the safer. He is despised by everyone (except a few old fogies like myself) in England.
I didn’t say ‘great plays’, I said GREEK plays (this is the trouble about my handwriting).90 It is not offensive to assume that a lady doesn’t read Greek–not even in a University town! And I have no ‘cultural activities’. I like the Bacchae because it’s exciting, not because it is–loathsome word!–‘cultured’. In fact, you misunderstood my letter.
All the best.
Yours
Jack
TO JOCELYN GIBB (BOD):
The Kilns,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford
22/3/56
Dear Gibb
I think you are clearly right in not centre-ing the headlines.91 The distinction between Roman on the left and itals.92 on the right has one merit–it in some sort serves instead of the colon (which, I agree wd. have got tiresome) and prevents one from reading both headlines as a continuous phrase. But there’s no doubt that on purely visual grounds itals. for both might be better.
There is a third alternative: itals. for both, no colon, and each on the outside of the page (too far apart to look like a phrase)–in which case of course you’d put page numbers at the bottom93
I leave the final decision to you: but at the moment rather fancy this third suggestion.
I’ll go through G.D.94 and let you have it back in a few days.
Thanks for the Roger Lloyd article which I had not seen.95
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO JOCELYN GIBB (BOD):
The Kilns
24/3/56
Dear Gibb
The corrections are on the final end-leaf.
I share your growing dislike of BAREFACE in rom., but don’t see any point in large itals. I may feel different when I see it, though.
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO CHAD WALSH (W):
The Kilns,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford
[March 1956]
Dear Chad–
Right. I’ll do what I can about W. Lea.
I have an idea that Nellie and the F.C.96 has not reached Joy yet, but I’ll ask her when next we meet.
I shd. think your decision to begin Saul in prose is right. If an idea doesn’t demand a particular metre–if the tune is not in one’s head as soon as–or even before–the myth, is this not a sign one shd. use prose? For metre (as distinct from the perfecting of the given metre) ‘cometh not by observation’.97 I am glad to hear you contemplate another visit to England.
Love to all.
Yours
Jack
TO MARTIN KILMER (W):
The Kilns,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford
26/3/56
Dear Martin Kilmer
It was nice to hear from you, and I know very well what it’s like when there’s always something to do! The funny thing is that I was far worse about writing letters when I had far fewer to write: now that I have such a lot to write I’ve just got to do them all at once, first thing every morning.
I am sorry for you having been bandaged all those months. Did it itch dreadfully under the bandage where one can’t get at it? I know I did when I was bandaged for ages after my wound in the first war. But it’s lovely when at last you do get it off: seeing your own skin again is almost like meeting an old friend!
I suppose your exam is all over by now. I hope you did v. well in it and that you will like the new school.
Give my love to all the others. We are all well. We’re bringing up a (ginger) kitten at present and it behaves very like your Deborah.
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO OWEN BARFIELD (W):
Kilns
27/3/56
Dear Owen
I now propose myself for lunch on Wed. April 4th, Athenaeum at 1 o’clock. Alright?
I enclose notes on your v. exciting book.98 It is full (of course) of sap and strength, and v. much yours: no one else could have done it. The criticism I think you must fear is that you argue much more to prove the merely idolic nature of our ‘world’ as now envisaged than to prove that the unrepresented is what you claim it to be. It might not be all you say it isn’t without being what you say it is. You will also see from the notes that in one place I want much more documentation.
But its worst fault is being clothed up in a ruddy great container wh. prevents me putting it in an envelope. Drat you! If you were a girl with her first book ’twould be pardonable.
Yours
Jack
Scholia in lib. de Idololatria99
P. 6, para 3, l. 3 creatures. Why not men or people? Also to…for whom is rather clumsy.100
P. 8. para 1, last l. but three. willing. Read will? P. 9 penult. l. through the senses101 Does this do justice to the account of ‘hearing a thrush sing’102 on p. 8?
P. 11, l. 6. solidity. One thinks of a jdgmt. like ‘This is solid ice now, so à fortiori it must have been solid 3 hours ago before the sun got on it.’ No doubt this can be coped with, but oughtn’t you to cope? perhaps in a footnote.103
P. 14, para 2, l. 9. metaphysics. Hardly in the Aristotelian sense. Suggest of some part of philosophy or of epistemology
PP. 15–17. Excellent.
P. 27, l. 2. But are we (except in ß-thinking) conscious of contact thro’ the senses? I think I’m usually conscious simply of the representation (this pen). Cf. P. 33.104
Para 3. l2 begins. Suggest it began before language. Do you mean this?
P. 25. para 2, l. 7. thought. Perhaps being thought.
P. 27. A v. helpful summary.
P. 30. end of para 2. You don’t seem to me to have said anything up to date wh. wd. give the words ‘faithful’ and ‘unfaithful’ any meaning as applied to the relation between the unrepresented and anyone’s experience. (And I begin to wonder whether the terminology is sound. Does a ‘representation’ represent anything? If so, what? If it represents 105 why are they ‘unrepresented’.106
P. 33 para 2, l.5. We in our case. Blush for shame and read we
P. 38. last line. that is participated. To make the syntax less ambiguous, read i.e. participated. (By the bye, there are far too many rhymes all over the place: often easily avoidable).107
P. 39 l. 9 the contrary view. What is that? Are you identifying or contrasting ‘ancient Gk’ with ‘early a’? The whole para. is difficult & cd. bear re-writing.
P. 44, l. 12. Glibly. Provocative, usé, and bad tactics. [Delete]
P. 46, l. 6. presumed. A tricky word. It might be said that the 108 were pre-sumed (for purposes of that inquiry) to be true. Wd ‘not claimed’ or ‘not necessarily accepted’ be clearer?
1. 10. Did A. mean participation, or just ‘v. good a thinking’?
P. 47. You may be right but I don’t know that you are, never having myself read any passage by a med. author wh. makes it clear that he regarded Ptolemaic astronomy as a mere hypothesis. (Of course Copernicus did so regard his theory). Nor do you advance any evidence.109 Perhaps it’s all in Duhem. If so, quote it. I mean quote his evidence, not merely his conclusion. We simply must have proof-texts here. Otherwise it might be the point at which a serious reader ceased reading.110
P. 51 para 1. penult l. essential Cd. we have some more illuminating adjective?
P. 54. l. 3 et passim. Technology. This usually means not the kind of knowledge Bacon sought but the operations & practical devices for operation based on that kind of knowledge. Your wider use cd. be justified, but does it promote clarity?111
P. 55. para 2, l. 12. nature. The reader’s mind will at once fly to the arch-idol. Tho’ not logically obliged, you wd. be didactically well advised, to put ‘nature’ and (a) perhaps add a footnote sending him back to earlier passages.112
P. 56. 2. l. 2. foundation. character? bias? status? function?
P. 62. l. 3. which has…since. Text wrong?
P. 63. l. 10. the phenomenon. Since asses use the word as a synonym for ‘fact’, someone will think you mean the ‘phenomenon’ (fact) just referred to. Cd. be avoided by writing phenomena and keeping the whole sentence thereafter in the plural.113
P. 65. V. good.
P. 74. l. 7. it follows. Does it? Ought you to help us a bit?
P. 76. para. 2. Only fair to add that most Med. people did not share Erigena’s view on this (or on a lot of things)?114
P. 82. para. 2. This cd. be cavilled at. Bring in the IV contraries?115
P. 84. But Med. people did speak of the soul as imprisoned in the body, didn’t they? (This whole chapter seems to me too slight and too little documented).
P. 86. l. 5. cor: homo: homo: mundus. Where do you get this from? Tellus can be the ‘suburbs’ of the cosmos. I v. much doubt if you’re right.
P. 91. l. 11. Summa. An incomplete reference. Quota pars?116
P. 92. ll. 8–10. but it…got them. Omit. Will be used against you.
ll. 14–16. After this…compounded. Omit.
P. 94. l. 11. strange Persephone. Omit. Will rouse suspicions. Anyway, in many works N. is not made at all like Persephone.117 More like the Wyf of Bath!118
P. 95. l. 6. this. Which?
l. 13. the allegorical. But is not this name used both (a.) for all the non-literal senses (b.) and for one of them?
P. 96. penult. l. Being. Too vague in Eng. Ens? Essentia? Substantia?
P. 97. actualises…the being of God. But if God is actus purus119 how can creatures actualise Him?120
End of para. 1. Has species 2 senses in Aquinas–a. Medium genus. b. Appearance (species visibiles etc). And is this the second?
P. 102. That’s me, I warrant you.121
P. 109. So some can steal horses while others mayn’t look over a gate.
P. 126. para 3. l. 2. centred round. Fie! Centred on or revolving round.
P. 147. l. 11. high or even eschatological. I suspect you cd. find some more informative adjectives.
P. 150. l. 5. poets are. Text right? I thought it was poesie is.122
P. 153. (et passim) para. 2. l. 9. directionally creator relation.123 And you used to be connected with S.P.A.!124 Do find something less barbarous. (It is not even v. clear).
P. 157. V. good.
P. 165. para 2. l. 4. not a…existence. Perhaps this needs expansion. For of course your opponents wd. not claim there was any transition from not-being to being, and wd. (in their own sense) admit that whatever becomes actual was previously potential.125
P. 168. l. 4. earth. From here onwards you begin to use earth in contexts where you have taught us to expect nature. This will arouse suspicion or at least bewilderment: and the wholly unexpected appearance of Sol (p. 210) will aggravate both. Is there any reason for the transition from nature to earth? If so, then…you must explain.
P. 169. By the way, ought it somewhere to be explained how it comes about that idolised phenomena are so useful in operation?
P. 174. para. 2. l. 7. going forward. In itself a legitimate synonym for taking place, happening etc. But here you’re already talking about ‘going forward’ (in time) and ‘reverting’, so it helps to muddle one.
P. 177. l. 16. Splendid definition of space!
P. 188. para. 2. Splendid. How beautifully you hold the balance.
Pp. 190–1. Good on Fundamentalism.
P. 191. 7 ll. After quotation. that, to read that to.
Tragedy of progress. V. good.
P. 209. para. 2, last l. [Delete] the! (looks childish or skittish). P. 212. Have you made sure of the dates? I rather think the Psalm may be later than the Isaiah passage (Of course it makes no difference to the argument, but one may as well get it right).
P. 222. para. 3. l. 3. not turned off at the tap when. You realise that all R.C.’s will reply ‘That’s just what we’ve been saying for centuries’?126
TO GEORGE SAYER (W):
The Kilns,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford
29/3/56
Dear George–
I have kept you waiting for a day or so, I’m afraid, trying to see if I cd. see how things wd. pan out. The truth is that I’ve a number of things to be done between now and term none of which can be quite definitely fixed yet, so I must deny myself the very great pleasure which you and Moira once more offer me. You’re both inexhaustible in hospitality.
I hope to be available in certain parts of the Long. For next term–the only other guest I’m expecting will be on Mon. May 28th. So take your choice. Come on a Monto B&B and drive us to Cambridge, or better still come on a Sat, spend week end here, and then we’ll go to C. on the Monday. (There shall be a new mattress for the spare bed–Joy Gresham told us the truth about it, which your courtesy concealed!) Don’t bother posting the books, bring ’em when you come.
I wish you cd. have seen the Bacchae last term. T & Cressida was superbly done but is a rotten play–Shakespeare at his worst can defeat any actors and any producer.
Love to both–and Schwanda.
Yours
Jack
TO MRS R. E. HALVORSON (L, WHL):
Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
March 1956
Dear Mrs. Halvorson
I am glad to hear that you are still numbered among my enthusiastic readers. Concerning hymn singing and organ playing: if they have been helpful and edified anyone, then the fact that they set my teeth on edge is infinitely unimportant.
One must first distinguish the effect which music has on people like me who are musically illiterate and get only the emotional effect, and that which it has on real musical scholars who perceive the structure and get an intellectual satisfaction as well.
Either of these effects is, I think, ambivalent from the religious point of view: i.e. each can be a preparation for or even a medium for meeting God but can also be a distraction and impediment. In that respect music is not different from a good many other things, human relations, landscape, poetry, philosophy. The most relevant one is wine which can be used sacramentally or for getting drunk or neutrally.
I think every natural thing which is not in itself sinful can become the servant of the spiritual life, but none is automatically so. When it is not, it becomes either just trivial (as music is to millions of people) or a dangerous idol. The emotional effect of music may be not only a distraction (to some people at some times) but a delusion: i.e. feeling certain emotions in church they mistake them for religious emotions when they may be wholly natural. That means that even genuinely religious emotion is only a servant. No soul is saved by having it or damned by lacking it. The love we are commanded to have for God and our neighbour is a state of the will, not of the affections (though if they ever also play their part so much the better). So that the test of music or religion or even visions if one has them is always the same–do they make one more obedient, more God-centred, and neighbour-centred and less self-centred? ‘Though I speak with the tongues of Bach and Palestrina and have not charity etc.’!127
TO JULIE HALVORSON (WHL):128
[March 1956]
Dear Julie Halvorson
Thank you for the most charming letter I have received in a long time. It made me very happy.
I am also glad that your class has been enjoying the Narnian stories. But especially am I happy that you know who Aslan is. Never forget Him.
TO MARY VAN DEUSEN (W):
The Kilns,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford
2/4/56
Dear Mrs. Van Deusen–
Thanks for your letter of the 17th. I don’t know that we do differ in principle about the connection between mental & bodily health. Everyone wd. admit it in general. Each particular case, however, must be taken on its own merits.
I am so glad that all goes well with Genia and her family. And I’ve no doubt she will send me a photo of the new baby. Sweet innocent!–no mother will ever understand that all babies look identical (and all hideous!) to an elderly bachelor. But don’t tell her I said so.
Yes, certainly the thing is always to be seeking God’s way–and I wish I lived up to this. As the author of the Imitation says ‘If you seek Jesus in all things you will find Him in all things: and if you seek yourself in all things you will find yourself, to your undoing.’129
I thought there was an influence from me (and from Charles Williams) in C. Walsh’s last book,130 but there was plenty of himself too. It is much his best so far, don’t you think?
I’m a little, not unamusedly, surprised that my S. by J. causes you envy. I doubt if you wd. really have enjoyed my life much more than your own. And the whole modern world ludicrously over-values books and learning and what (I loathe the word) they call ‘culture’. And of course ‘culture’ itself is the greatest sufferer by this error: for second things are always corrupted when they are put first.131 Never forget this: souls are immortal, and your children & grandchildren will still be alive when my books have, like the Galaxy and Nature herself, passed away.
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO MURIEL BRADBROOK (W): TS
The Kilns, Kiln Lane,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford.
4th April 1956.
Dear Dr Bradbrook,
Would you (you certainly could) do anything for this ‘poor Indian’? Elizabethan tragedy etc is up your street, and not at all up mine. Of course he has no claim on me, and makes none on you, so if it is a bother, just return his letter. Oh Research, Research.
Mrs Madge132 writes some very good poetry, does’nt she?
Yours sincerely,
C. S. Lewis
TO GEORGE SAYER (W): TS
The Kilns, Kiln Lane,
9th April 1956.
Dear George,
Grand. I expect you on April the 28th, and then all as you say.
Yours,
Jack (pro per Warnie)
(I’ve taken steps to get a new mattress for the spare room! Love to you both.)
TO KATHLEEN RAINE (BOD):133
As from Magdalene College
11/4/56
Dear Mrs. Madge
I’ve been reading your poems.134 They are like a combined bathe and drink (you know–all pores and mouth open at once) that I once had on a walk in the Highlands: cold, bright, and yet with a dash of the dark earth-taste in them. I congratulate you. Philosophically (as you will guess) I am in much disagreement, which I’ve twisted into the enclosed–an exercise in asprezza135–you know, Della Scala in Thing-ummy’s book on Milton’s sonnets,136 and all that.
Yours sincerely
C. S. Lewis
(LEWIS–my signature isn’t usually so illegible. Perhaps I am drunk with the poems!)
Who knows if the isolation, the compact, firm-shaped
Dividual selving and peculiam of blood and breath
(Oh skull-roofed thought, oh rib-caged love!) can be escaped
By such an old, simple expedient as death?
How if this were the arena, not the prison? If here,
Focus’d at last, hence conquerable, hand to hand
That Retiarius137 meets us with his net and spear,
And now’s our chance to kill him, on this hot, dry sand?
Here he takes form: elsewhere he’s a pervasive poison,
Masses compete: each flower is militant: the trees,
Lacking eyes, cannot cool their souls on the horizon:
Sap is dark will that works and neither loves nor sees,
And the grave, though not a fine, is a most private, place;
Two bodies can’t (all souls could) occupy all space.138
TO JOCELYN GIBB (BOD):
The Kilns,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford
11/4/56
Dear Gibb–
Thanks for cheque (£378–11–6). Like you I dazzle at all the specimen pages and distrust my own judgement. Not surprisingly (for an old proverb says ‘The crow thinks her own chicks white’) I prefer F. And I’m afraid I like E least. But I’m no judge, so give me a vote (but no more) in your council.
I’m afraid both the wrapper designs are, from my point of view, fatal. I have great sympathy with the artist in such a predicament, for he is asked to express essentially literary or philosophical (not pictorial) ideas by authors ignorant of design. He might be a v. good artist and fail, or refuse. If so, let’s have no pictorial wrapper at all.
In both his draughts Ungit is shown with feet, hopping about, rather like a bear. But the text says she (or it) was a stone thrust up from underground–an outcropping. Immobility is essential.139 And the Aphrodite doesn’t look nearly enough like a statue: and she is far too sexy and primitive to contrast with Ungit.
She ought to look like a v. glib, bright, doll-like stone image: inferior work in the late-ish Greek tradition. Very few curves: her rigidity must contrast with the billowy, bread-like curves of the Ungit stone. And fully draped, the drapery done in stiff, highly conventional folds–at most like flutings (it’s v. doubtful if the nude statues of goddesses were ever seen nude by anyone except their priestesses–don’t you remember a robe being presented to Pallas in the Iliad?)140 If it’s not too costly a colour (or at least tone) contrast wd. help–the Ungit-stone dark, the statue white or off-white, perhaps with a doll-like blob of red on each cheek. Oh if only I cd. draw! But I send my idea. The hands & forearms held out as if carrying an invisible tray (palms upward) do occur in Aeginetan statues141–but I don’t insist on them. Do you begin to see what I’m after?
I suppose Biggs isn’t a Classic by any chance?142 If he is, tell him he is being asked to do contrasted portraits of 143 and .144 Anyway, here are the qualities (and dash it, they are plastic as well as literary)–
The Stone |
The Statue |
---|---|
Billowy |
Rigid |
Indefinite |
Definite |
Ugly |
Pretty-pretty |
Suggestive of life |
Dead as a Dutch doll |
Dark |
Light |
Sexy |
Only in the sense of trying to be pretty |
Old |
New |
Barbarous |
Thinks itself v. civilised and up-to-date |
Rising out of the Earth |
On a pedestal |
Living rock. |
Cut stone. |
Finally couldn’t we–oh, please, couldn’t we–have the letters across the spine so that you don’t have to rubber-neck to read it when it is standing in a shelf? I know you’ll say there isn’t room, but there always was room on the thinnest book till a few years ago and this new horror is only a fashion–
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO A LADY (P):145
As from Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
13/4/56
Dear Madam
I have read your thesis and (so far as the subject of it can judge) it seems to me a very good piece of work indeed. You understand the books better than anyone else who has written about them. I have pencilled a few things in the margin. Some of them corrections of your (rare and minor) slips in English, which, in general, you write very well. The curious, recurrent intimates, where you must mean initiates is probably the typist’s error.
You wisely avoid ‘sources’ and ‘influences’. But, for your own pleasure, I hope you will read the novels of Charles Williams, J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, and Geo. MacDonald’s fantasies and fairy tales.
With all good wishes.
Yours sincerely
C. S. Lewis
TO CECIL HARWOOD (BOD):
The Kilns,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford
15/4/56
A visit this morning, quotha, and term to begin next week! I am not, as you are, Retired Leisure taking his pleasure in Trim Gardens.146 Less easy sits the rump that holds a Chair.147
But I should have told you this at once instead of waiting ten days. Last week was a blaze of small jobs: all the engagements that ought to have been distributed over the Vac. crowded into the last week–and a letter, once put aside masquerades as being ‘a day or two’ old till you sit down to answer it and are astonished at its date. Apologies to both, and commend me heartily to your good Lady. I hope to see you and Owen at Magdalene this term. Perhaps by then Spring will no longer exist only to the eye
Nicholas Nicholby148 really is the most frightful nonsense–but I’m enjoying it at the moment.
Yours
Jack
TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE (W):
The Kilns,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford
15/4/56
Dear Mary Willis
Thank you for your letter of the 31st and for the enclosed poem, which I enjoyed. I think it brings all the threads together well. The complexity–the close texture–of all the great events in the Christian year impresses me more and more. Each is a window opening on the total mystery.
I sympathise with you for the unnamed shock you speak of, without the least inquisitiveness as to its nature: being sure your own decision (not to tell it) was right. Except when speaking to one’s Confessor, Doctor, or Lawyer (where the opposite holds) I suppose the rule is ‘When in doubt, don’t tell.’ At least I have nearly always regretted doing the opposite and never once regretted holding my tongue. (Talking too much is one of my vices, by the way).
About prayer (for others) and suffering for others there’s a lot scattered through 2d Corinthians which is well worth meditation.
The reviews of S. by J (Don’t bother sending them–I get them) are funny. The sheer errors of fact–not to go into misunderstandings–wd. ruin a candidate in the most elementary exam I know!
The spring looks lovely thru’ windows here but remains bitterly cold. I go back to Cambridge the day after to-morrow.
All blessings.
Yours
Jack
Lewis began the Easter Term of 1956 with a series of twice-weekly lectures entitled ‘Some Difficult Words’. His first lecture on 19 April was on the word ‘Nature’, and during the rest of the 1956 term and the Easter Terms of the next three years he covered the words ‘Sad’, ‘Wit’, ‘Free’, ‘Sense’, Simple’, ‘Conscious’ and ‘Conscience’. It seems to have been his intention almost from the first to publish the lectures, and they eventually came out under the title Studies in Words.
TO NAN DUNBAR (BOD):149
Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
20/4/56
Dear Miss Dunbar–
I think you’ll find in Sappho alright.150 The people who wonder if 151 is really from 152 are worried about the quantity of the? I believe. I mentioned the sens. obsc.153 of the English word ‘nature’, and said that 154 was the (ordinary) Gk. for sex. I don’t think this contradicts any of the things you have told me. So whisht with your clavers–
Nan est doctior omnibus puellis,
Formidabilior fera Camilla,
Xanthippe magis impotens loquelae
Audax, garrula, pertinax, proterva,
Trux, torva, Eumenidum comes sororum,
Momi filia Zoilique mater,
Scribens horrida,
Per quam non licet esse neglegentem.
[Nan is more learned than all the girls,
More formidable than fierce Camilla;155
More unable to shut up than Xanthippe,156
Bold, garrulous, obstinate, aggressive,
Fierce, grim comrade of the sister Furies,157
Momus’s daughter,158 Zoilus’ mother,159
Writing alarmingly, with watercress-sharp glare,
She does not allow you to be careless.]160
Yours sincerely
C. S. Lewis
TO JOCELYN GIBB (BOD):
Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
20/4/56
Dear Gibb
Yes, this is much better but I agree that Ungit does not stand out enough. I don’t want her to be white, though. Wd. it increase costs to give her a lurid red outline with perhaps a lop-sided patch of red on her top and dribbles of blood running down from it? That wd. be ideal. But if that is too expensive–either
a. White outline, but no white surface or
b. Simply soft-pedal (even, if necessary, delete) the mountain background and make the lines–by whatever means–bolder
I still feel no objection to Bareface. But McCallum liked (you don’t) Till We Have Faces. Settle it between you. All I insist is that the book must have the same title in England & America.
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO NAN DUNBAR (P): PC
Magdalene
23/4/56
I will certainly come–did you think I was afraid.161 Will Fri. May 4th suit you? Don’t bother replying if it will. About 4 o’clock. And many thanks– was a plain howler.
C.S.L.
TO JOCELYN GIBB (BOD):
Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
23/4/56
Dear Gibb
Something v. queer in the textual history of The Great Divorce. In my copy (Bles, 1945) p. 9, l. 6 read (correctly) FOUND.162 What text reads ROUND? You can’t be working from the American edn? Anyway FOUND is right. But all the Shakespearian scholars in the world have never faced so mysterious a crux as this.163
Yes. Certainly A Myth Re-told as sub-title whichever title you fix on.
Yours
C. S. Lewis
Your letter did find me at Oxford, but as the G.D. is here, not there, no time was gained.
The Home Office continued to refuse Joy Gresham permission to live and work in England. After talking it over with George Sayer and Warnie, Lewis decided on a register office marriage, after which he would continue to live in his house and she in hers. Lewis and Joy were married in the register office, St Giles, Oxford, on 23 April 1956. Dr Robert ‘Humphrey’ Havard and Dr Austin Farrer were present as witnesses.
TO KATHRYN STILLWELL (P):164
Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
24/4/56
Dear Mr. (or Miss? or Mrs?) Stillwell
How nice to hear anyone who still believes in adjectives and calls them the ‘Narnian’ not the ‘Narnia’ series.
For most of July I shall be at the Kilns, Headington Quarry,* Oxford, and happy to arrange a meeting if you are there.
Yours sincerely
C. S. Lewis
* THE KILNS, HEADINGTON QUARRY.
TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE (W):
Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
26/4/56
Dear Mary Willis
I am most sorry to hear about your recent experiences. Though I am not doctor enough nor psychologist enough to understand them, I can see that they must have been very unpleasant indeed. You may be very sure of my continued, and increased, prayers. One of the many reasons for wishing to be a better Christian is that, if one were, one’s prayers for others might be more effectual. Things do come all together and so quickly in life, don’t they?
Of course we have all been taught what to do with suffering–offer it in Christ to God as our little, little share of Christ’s sufferings–but it is so hard to do. I am afraid I can better imagine, than really enter into, this. I suppose that if one loves a person enough one would actually wish to share every part of his life: and I suppose the great saints thus really want to share the divine sufferings and that is how they can actually desire pain. But this is far beyond me. To grin and bear it and (in some feeble, desperate way) to trust is the utmost most of us can manage. One tries to take a lesson not only from the saints but from the beasts: how well a sick dog trusts one if one has to do things that hurt it! And this, I know, in some measure you will be able to do.
Well, I hope your next news will be better. Meanwhile, may Our Lord support you as only He can.
Yours
Jack
TO JOCELYN GIBB (BOD):
Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
26/4/56
Dear Gibb–
Thanks for 2 letters and copy of G.D. etc. A skilled bibliographer to whom I mentioned the found-ound-round crux had already, à priori, suggested something v. like the actual history.
I’m delighted to hear that jolly old Ungit is to have a spot of rouge. I note that Till We Have Faces has won.165 I believe it is more in the prevailing mode and a better selling title for the man i.s.166 (tho’ Bareface was better per se).
Hebraists are so few that you are unlikely to find one for that job, but I’ll keep my ears open.167
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO LAURENCE KRIEG (P):
Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
27/4/56
Dear Laurence
Thanks for your nice letter and the photograph. I am so glad you like The Last Battle. As to whether they knew their Creed, I suppose Professor Kirke and the Lady Polly and the Pevensies did, but probably Eustace and Pole, who had been brought up at that rotten school did not.168
Your mother tells me you have all been having chicken pox. I had it long after I was grown up and it’s much worse if you are a man for of course you can’t shave with the spots on your face. So I grew a beard and though my hair is black the beard was half yellow and half red! You should have seen me.
Yes, people do find it hard to keep on feeling as if you believed in the next life: but then it is just as hard to keep on feeling as if you believed you were going to be nothing after death. I know this because in the old days before I was a Christian I used to try.
Last night a young thrush flew into my sitting room and spent the whole night there. I didn’t know what to do, but in the morning one of the college servants very cleverly caught it and put it out without hurting it. Its mother was waiting for it outside and was very glad to meet it again. (By the way, I always forget which birds you have in America. Have you thrushes? They have lovely songs and speckled chests).
Good-bye for the present and love to you all.
Yours sincerely
C. S. Lewis
TO JOCELYN GIBB (BOD):
Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
27/4/56
Dear Gibb
McCallum wanted an appenditical note on the original story.169 As I have no English address for him I am sending it to you. Will you kindly convey it to him? And if you wd. like it to go in the English edn. too (a point on which I have no views either way) of course take a copy and use it. Either for the American edn. or for yours it must come at the end, not (like a preface) at the beginning.
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO MISS WILSON (P):
As from Magdalene College
Cambridge
28/4/56
Dear Miss Wilson
Thank you for cheque (£656–15–10) received to-day. I doubt whether you will see any more children’s stories from me: I took the form up because it seemed suited to something I had to say, and having said that, I lay it down. But of course it is nice to be pressed!
I could find time to read Prisoners of the Ring, but the real question is whether it is ‘up my street’. If it is ‘of faerie’, if it plays on awe and wonder and beauty, let me see it. But if it is juvenile science-fiction, or straight adventures, or about machines or ponies, or mainly comic, or about real child-life, don’t. My verdict wd., in that case, be of no value to you.
Yours sincerely
C. S. Lewis
TO I. O. EVANS (W):
The Kilns
Headington Quarry
Oxford, England
29/4/56
Dear Evans
Thanks for the cutting. I have been noticed in Fantasy & S.F. before now but never, I think, in Galaxy. It is always nice to be praised: but even more interesting that the S.F. public so clearly overlaps with the public which reads fantasies of another kind.
I had often wondered about Verne’s names. Passepartout and Nemo,170 and possibly Pertinax,171 were fairly obvious. I never thought of trying them in the Erewhonian way!172
I hope all goes well with you.
Yours sincerely
C. S. Lewis
TO THE EDITOR OF ESSAYS IN CRITICISM:173
Magdalene College,
Cambridge
One passage in Mr. Maud’s kind review (Essays in Criticism, October 1955)174 of my inaugural suggests, if I am not misunderstanding him, that he has misunderstood me. He describes my words ‘If we sit down to Rainoldus for a whole morning’ as ‘good fun’ meaning, I take it, that I jokingly pretended to regard a morning with Rainoldus as a natural entertainment for any educated reader. In reality, I was assuming, seriously, that at least a morning’s reading was the minimal, preliminary experiment for those who wanted to get an idea of Rainoldus’s style. No translation can give an author’s style with perfect fidelity. No reading of very short extracts from the original can do it justice; for style depends not only on the occurrence of this or that feature but on its frequency. If we are to talk of Rainoldus’s style at all, what, then, can we do but begin by reading a good many pages of him?
C. S. Lewis
TO JOCELYN GIBB (BOD):
Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
2/5/56
Dear Gibb
Thanks for cheque (£821–13–7) received to-day. I leave it entirely to your judgement where the quotation ‘Love is too young’175 shd. come, provided (a point that has only just occurred to me) it comes as far as possible from the dedication.176 Otherwise, though the lady would not, the public might, think they had some highly embarrassing relation to each other!
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO VERA GEBBERT (W):
Magdalene College,
Cambridge
9/5/56
Dear Mrs. Gebbert,
You shall indeed, as always, have my prayers. I can’t quite imagine anyone preferring an apartment in New York to a house in California, but then, as I know nothing about either, that is not v. important.177 Don’t get rid of more books than you must. I’ve hardly ever sold a book in my life without finding in the next few weeks that I needed it v. badly and that a new copy (if obtainable at all) cost thrice as much as the old one–and 50 times as much as I sold the old one for.
I am sorry you have had a grim time this last winter. Ours was mild (in weather till February) and pretty kind as regards our private fortunes. My brother is now not well, and away from home, but I think he will soon be restored.
The Tycoon may count himself lucky to have got chickenpox before he reaches the age of shaving brushes and razors. I had it in my late 20’s and grew a beard wh. was part yellow and part red though my hair is black–a v. striking colour scheme. Apart from that, though, I think it a v. good sort of illness on the whole. A nice long quarantine wh. by sentencing one to solitary confinement secures one against pupils, committees etc. But no doubt it had no such charms for you.
All very good wishes (even to the frog)
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO FATHER PETER MILWARD SJ (W):
Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
9/5/56
Dear Father Milward–
You need not be afraid of telling me ‘only what I know already’ about the Grail legend, for indeed I know v. little. If you think otherwise, you are perhaps confusing my interest in C.W. with C.W.’s interest in the legend.
For my own part, I am v. puzzled as to what exactly we are doing when we study–not this or that work of art–but a myth in abstract. Supposing (positionis causa)178 that what people mean when they say ‘The Grail is the Caldron of the Dead’ is true, what do they mean? More briefly, what does is mean in such a sentence? It is not the is of equality (2 x 6 is 3 x 4) nor of classification (a horse is a mammal) nor of allegory (this Rock is Christ). How can an imagined object in one story ‘be’ an imagined object in another story?
About my Inaugural–aren’t you rather forgetting that I was trying to fix merely the cultural change? From my angle even the original conversion of Europe, you remember, had to be ranked as a minor change. After that, you cd. hardly expect the Reformation to be v. prominent. To be sure, if my point of view had been different, it wd. have become fundamental and you and I wd. of course differ v. widely about its character.
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO ARTHUR GREEVES (BOD):
As from Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
13/5/56
My dear Arthur–
After 9 months of perfect tee-totalism (we flattered ourselves it was a real cure) W. has started drinking again and the elaborate joint holidays he had planned for us in the summer will probably have to be cancelled.
But I want to make your and my jaunt sure. May we leave C’burn on Monday Sept 3rd and return to B’fast (I to the boat) on Mon. Sept 17th? If all goes wrong with W., I shall be arriving at the Inn on Fri. Aug 31: if by any chance he should be well enough to carry out the original plan (or, more probably, think himself well enough to drag me thro’ that hell) then it will be different, to the extent that I shan’t reach C’burn till Aug 1st. But this won’t affect our (your and my) dates.
You always say (truly enough) that I’m a bad proof-reader. I may be getting proofs of my new Cupid & Psyche story in June. If there’s time to send you one copy wd. you care to do me a kindness by going through it? Don’t, if it is in the least a bother. You’d have about 10 days probably to do it in, and the book is a little longer than S. by J.
My Doctor friend says that the latter leaves out too much and he is going to supplement it by a book called Suppressed by Jack! God bless you. A chat with you wd. cheer me up no end this minute Yours
Jack
TO MARTIN KILMER (W):
The Kilns,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford
14/5/56
Dear Martin
How fine you must be feeling. Bandage off and scholarship won! Hearty congratulations on both. I hope the scholarship will be only the first of many successes.
I should jolly well think Mervin (the young cat) has grown up: he chases quite large dogs out of the garden now.
Thanks for photo and love to all
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO MARY VAN DEUSEN (W):
The Kilns,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford
14/5/56
Dear Mrs. Van Deusen–
(Despite your prohibition I must explain my adherence to the old style. I am against the modern spread of the Christian name habit on purely practical grounds, as a nuisance. Christian names are far less numerous than surnames and therefore in fact much less distinctive: even less personal. I may be introduced to half a dozen Maries at a sherry party without ever finding out who they are or whose daughters or wives or sisters they are. It becomes like that Chinese Emperor who, having 50 sons, named them all Huang ‘to avoid confusion’).
Almost exactly the same thing that happened to you about the Incarnation happened to me a few years ago about the Forgiveness of Sins. Like you, I had assented to the doctrine years earlier and would have said I believed it. Then, one blessed day, it suddenly became real to me and made what I had previously called ‘belief’ look absolutely unreal. It is a wonderful thing. But not, on inferior matters, so v. uncommon. We all in one sense ‘believe’ we are mortal: but until one’s forties does one really believe one is going to die? On the edge of a cliff can’t one believe, and yet not really believe, that there’s no danger? But certainly this real belief in the truths of our religion is a great gift from God. When in Hebrews ‘faith’ is defined as ‘the substance of things hoped for’,179 I wd. translate ‘substance’ as ‘substantialness’ or ‘solidity’ or (almost) ‘palpableness’.
Thanks for photos and cutting–I’m not sure that I really understand the latter. There’s obviously a big and rather tangled context behind it. And I did get the photo of Judy and (to tell you the truth) I still do think all babies are indistinguishable. My brother has not been well and is away at present. It sounds as if you were going to have a lovely holiday. Lobsters are lovely!
Envy (invidia) certainly did mean ‘grief at another’s good’180 but as the word is now used I don’t think it means anything at all wrong. If I say I envy you those lobsters I hardly mean more than ‘congratulations’.
Yours very sincerely
C. S. Lewis
TO ARTHUR GREEVES (BOD):
Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
17/5/56
My dear Arthur–
The crucial date, from your point of view, is Sept. 3d (third, IIId). My arrival at the inn will, as you say, depend on circumstances. Our letters crossed. Thanks for yours of the 15th. Yes, Bro. Lawrence181 is of course right.
Yours
Jack
TO VALERIE PITT (BOD):
Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
17/5/56
Dear Valerie
A great deal of what you say is v. helpful. I fully agree that ‘Thy will be done’182 should principally be taken in the sense ‘God’s will has blank well got to be done even if I have to go and do it myself’: I doubt if the submissive aspect of it can be entirely extruded. It sometimes is ‘nasty’, and may in a sense be so to God Himself–i.e. what He wills in the situations sin has created is not what He wd. will simpliciter183 (‘I would have gathered you as a hen gathers her chicks–but now’).184
Whether the invocation of saints helps one’s devotions or not (it wouldn’t, I believe, help mine) I don’t see how it helps the theoretical problem.
Yours sincerely
C. S. Lewis
TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W):
Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
18/5/56
My dear A–
I was so busy with a big mail yesterday that I forgot to thank you for saying you’d vet. my proofs. Scrawl your notes (in pencil if you like) on their margins.
Yours
Jack
TO ROGER LANCELYN GREEN (BOD):
Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
18/5/56
My dear Roger
Meet B&B circ 11.30 a.m. Mon May 28th & dine & lie at Magdalene. Right. All booked.
I don’t think I cd. manage June 2nd, much as I’d like to. The situation on the Home Front is too ticklish. Love to both.
Yours
Jack
TO JOHN H. MCCALLUM (P):
Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
19/5/56
Dear McCallum
No, no, Love is too Young wd. not have done at all.185 People wd. have expected a v. different book for such a title. Thanks for the reviews.186 It was nice to see you again.
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO KATHARINE FARRER (BOD):
Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
Whitsunday [20 May]1956
Dear K–
In st. 2 ‘pollen-golden’ must be retained at all costs.187 I’m not sure whether ‘Quick’ is the word you want. But the real trouble is the two last lines, which don’t do very much. You’ll probably have to find a new set of rhymes. St. 6. Can we now use ‘conceit’ to mean (in any sense) ‘conception’? And what does ‘from your prime’ etc. mean. (a.) ‘They were conceived when I was in the prime you now enjoy’? or (b.) ‘Your prime each year is the father of my crystal brood’? Or am I being stupid. The last line of this stanza is good. Otherwise I don’t see anything wrong, and like the poem v. much.
I’ve just been wildly excited by the preface to Austin’s Short Bible.188 I don’t know that I ever got so much from so few pages before: deepest problems disarmed with a turn of the wrist. If only real theologians like him had started doing oeuvres de vulgarisation189 a little earlier, the world wd. have been spared C.S.L.
Yours
Jack
‘Summer’s Term’
by
Katharine Farrer
Summer comes, and comes farewell
Hard upon the cuckoo’s cry.
Brown the lawn, and dumb the bell;
Here I sit, nor change, nor die.
Quick, be gone, my summer-dears!
Pollen-golden girls and boys
Come with fresher mirth and tears,
New-year pains and new-year toys,
Till the cuckoo’s broken tune
Breaks the timeless holiday,
And the last elapsing June
Changes all their gold to grey.
Saplings callous into trees,
Flowers fall to ripen seed,
Youth wears out to have increase:
Here I sit, nor wear, nor breed.
While your lusty flesh and blood
Toils and spoils and drops to earth,
Here I nurse a crystal brood
Heart-conceived of tears and mirth.
Pricking from conceit to birth
Those unkindly children come
From your prime of tears and mirth;
Fret the heart and cheat the womb.
Quick then! Change your gold for grey.
Leave me in my crystal cave.
Feet that wear the soil, they say,
Lie more quiet in the grave.
TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE (W):
Magdalene College,
Cambridge
21/5/56
Dear Mary Willis
What a horrid adventure. To meet unrestrained anger in any human being is in itself always very shocking. I think the effect may be partly physical. Have you noticed how one angry man bursts out (say, in a crowded ’bus) and a tension comes over everyone? Indeed one nearly becomes equally angry oneself. When one gets this shock along with injustice of course there is a compound reaction.
It is at first sight so easy to forgive (especially when one knows that the anger was pathological) but then one sort of wakes up five minutes later and finds one hasn’t really forgiven at all–the resentment is still tingling thro’ one’s veins. And how one has to watch that ‘feeling hurt’–so seldom (as one wd. like to believe) mere sorrow, so nearly always mixed with wounded pride, self-justification, fright, even (hiding in the corners) desire for retaliation. But obviously you know all this and have fought your best.
But there remains the quite separate trouble of having lost your job. Oh dear. I am sorry. Surely all these Church people will find some way to provide for you. I will indeed pray–oh, what a business life is. Well, both you and I have most of it behind, not ahead. There will come a moment that will change all this. Nightmares don’t last.
Yours
Jack
TO ROGER LANCELYN GREEN (BOD):
Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
24/5/56
My dear Roger
No, this is not to cancel our tryst (which I look forward to with much pleasure) but to ask you to do me a service. Say freely if it is an intolerable nuisance.
I wrote to the Belfast Boat (Coastlines Ltd., Landing Stage, L’pool) well over a week ago but have had no reply. Could you, next time you have to go over to L’pool extract from them–
and–
and send me these, telling me how much I owe you? They’ll make you pay cash, no doubt. I’d be v. greatly obliged. It seems odd to book so far in advance but single berth rooms get v. quickly into short supply. Love to all.
Yours
Jack
TO GEORGE SAYER (W):
Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
24/5/56
Dear George–
I’ve only just got your Whitsunday letter. Good. Call for me at the Kilns 12.30 next Sunday. No chance of W., I fear.
Yours
Jack
TO JOHN CROW (P):190
Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
28/5/56
Dear Mr. Crow
I return Miss Adam’s list with a few addenda.191 I can’t remember anything else which she has omitted, and if I don’t, it’s not likely anyone else will. If the lady really thinks it worth her while to come & see an author who is no v. accurate scholar in his own works, of course she is welcome to do so. I shall be here till June 8th, after that at The Kilns, Headington Quarry, Oxford.
Yours sincerely
C. S. Lewis
TO DABNEY ADAMS (P):192
Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
1/6/56
Dear Miss Adams
I think it wd. be more use to come here, for it is here that I have two fat envelopes full of old articles etc. which you cd. go through to see if you’ve missed anything (wh. you most likely have not). I have two sitting rooms, so you can have one to yourself and do the job in peace and comfort. Wednesday wd. be the best day. Shall I expect you at about 2 o’clock?
Yours sincerely
C. S. Lewis
TO KEITH MASSON (W):193
As from Magdalene College,
Cambridge
3/6/56
Dear Mr Masson–
There is, first, a difference of approach. You rather take the line that a traditional moral principle must produce a proof of its validity before it is accepted: I rather, that it must be accepted until someone produces a conclusive refutation of it.
But apart from that:–I agree that the stuff about ‘wastage of vital fluids’ is rubbish. For me the real evil of masturbation wd. be that it takes an appetite which, in lawful use, leads the individual out of himself to complete (and correct) his own personality in that of another (and finally in children and even grandchildren) and turns it back: sends the man back into the prison of himself, there to keep a harem of imaginary brides. And this harem, once admitted, works against his ever getting out and really uniting with a real woman. For the harem is always accessible, always subservient, calls for no sacrifices or adjustments, and can be endowed with erotic and psychological attractions which no real woman can rival. Among those shadowy brides he is always adored, always the perfect lover: no demand is made on his unselfishness, no mortification ever imposed on his vanity. In the end, they become merely the medium through which he increasingly adores himself. Do read Charles Williams’ Descent into Hell194 and study the character of Mr. Wentworth. And it is not only the faculty of love which is thus sterilized, forced back on itself, but also the faculty of imagination.
The true exercise of imagination, in my view, is (a) To help us to understand other people (b) To respond to, and, some of us, to produce, art. But it has also a bad use: to provide for us, in shadowy form, a substitute for virtues, successes, distinctions etc. which ought to be sought outside in the real world–e.g. picturing all I’d do if I were rich instead of earning and saving. Masturbation involves this abuse of imagination in erotic matters (which I think bad in itself) and thereby encourages a similar abuse of it in all spheres. After all, almost the main work of life is to come out of our selves, out of the little, dark prison we are all born in. Masturbation is to be avoided as all things are to be avoided wh. retard this process. The danger is that of coming to love the prison.
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO GEORGE SAYER (W):
Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
5/6/56
Dear George & Moira
May I come on Aug Wed 8th and leave on Sat 11th? Tell me at once if any neighbouring dates are more suitable. It was nice, v. nice, to see you both. I hope you found, Moira, the promise of the earlier chapters of The Phoenix195 was kept?
W. is much better and (I dare to hope) more soberly purposed and less airily confident than on previous occasions. Orate pro nobis.
Yours
Jack
TO MRS HAROLD STEED (P):196
Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
6/6/56
Dear Mrs. Steed
The most generally useful of G.M.’s work is the 3 vols of Unspoken Sermons.197 I fear it is long out of print. A good second-hand bookseller (say, Rogers of Newcastle on Tyne) might be able to get you a copy. Another good one (in verse) is The Diary of an Old Soul. These for works of direct teaching.
The imaginative works, which were of immense use to me, might not be so for all readers. The ones I wd. most recommend are Phantastes, Lilith,198 Curdy and the Goblins, The Princess and Curdy, and The Wise Woman.199
‘Bookseller Newcastle on Tyne’ wd. be a sufficient address for Rogers.
Thanks for the kind things you say about my own books.
Yours most sincerely C. S. Lewis
TO I. O. EVANS (W): PC
Eire
6/6/56
Letters, but not parcels, are being forwarded to me on my holiday, so I have not seen the Anthology yet. I look forward to doing so, with many thanks.
Now I wonder cd. Prospero create a living organism?200 And cd. an isle ‘peopled with Calibans’201 (even if Miranda were not their mother) have been v. pleasant? But I agree one is sorry for the poor fellow–as for many people in Shakespeare. He had a hard heart.
C.S.L.
TO NAN DUNBAR (BOD):
Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
7/6/56
Dear Miss Dunbar
I’ve kept this an unconscionable time, I’m afraid.202 Thank you very much for the loan–it is an excellent work.
All good wishes for the vacation.
Yours sincerely
C. S. Lewis
TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE (W):
The Kilns,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford
14/6/56
Dear Mary Willis
I have your letter of the 11th–along with a letter from another lady in almost exactly the same position. Oh dear, what a hard, frightening world it is! And yet not wholly: I am rejoiced to hear that you have some true friends who will not let you sink. And why should there be any (let alone ‘too much’) ‘cringing inside’? We are all members of one another and must all learn to receive as well as to give. I am only sorry that the laws prevent me from giving you any lessons in the art.203 Isn’t the spiritual value of having to accept money just this, that it makes palpable the total dependence in which we always live anyway? For if you were what is called ‘independent’ (i.e. living on inherited wealth) every bit you put into your mouth and every stitch on your back wd. still be coming from the sweat and skill of others while you (as a person) wd. not really be doing anything in return. It took me a long time to see this–tho’, heaven knows, with the Cross before our eyes we have little excuse to forget our insolvency.
The great thing with unhappy times is to take them bit by bit, hour by hour, like an illness. It is seldom the present, the exact present, that is unbearable.
I shall pray for you whenever I wake in the night, and hope for better news.
Yours
Jack Lewis
TO MARY VAN DEUSEN (W):
The Kilns
Oxford
18/6/56
Dear Mrs. Van Deusen–
Thanks for your letter of the 13th. I don’t envy you the flight to New York but I do envy you those lobsters–clams I don’t know. My brother is back and v. well and we are both busy and happy, he on a new book and I on lectures. We’d be happier still if there were any summer, but this year is England at its worst: temperature 48° and skies so dark that one breakfasts by electric light. And the cuckoo (who usually at this time of year makes his own remark every third minute all day long) is almost silent.
I envy you not having to think any more about Christian apologetics. My correspondents force the subject on me again and again. It is very wearing, and not v. good for one’s own faith. A Christian doctrine never seems less real to me than when I have just (even if successfully) been defending it. It is particularly tormenting when those who were converted by my books begin to relapse and raise new difficulties. I know you pray for me: bear all these harrassings in mind.
I had a short, nice note from Genia protesting (oh you peached, you betrayed me!–wicked woman) that babies are not hideous. Tell her to forgive me for not answering. Also that I meant, of course, all babies except hers.
It is the decay of my handwriting that chiefly irks me in letter-writing. I used to have a nice hand and I can’t bear to be making strokes like this, yet I can’t help it.
With all blessings.
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO JOCELYN GIBB (BOD): PC
The Kilns etc.
19/6/56
Parcel of proofs204 reached me only yesterday, by an afternoon post! So you can’t possibly have them back in 2 weeks from the 11th which is when you sent them. But I’ll push on.
C.S.L.
TO ARTHUR GREEVES (BOD):
The Kilns,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford
19/6/56
My dear Arthur–
Here’s the proof. I’d like it back in 10 days, but don’t on any account let it be a nuisance to you. If you can’t finish it without pressing yourself, just send it back unfinished, but put a X at the bottom of the last page you have done.
Yours
Jack
TO HSIN-CHANG CHANG (BOD):
The Kilns,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford
22/6/56
Dear Mr. Chang
It was pleasant to hear from you again.205 I am amused at the theory that philosophy thrives on mist: what foggy places ancient Athens and medieval Paris must have been if that were so, and how much philosophy ought to have emanated from the Western Highlands of Scotland!
It is refreshing to know any man who, like myself, cannot drive a car.
To teach English to such a very heterogeneous class must be extremely difficult, for the problems of each student are, no doubt, determined by the nature of his own language. But for the same reason it is, I suppose, highly interesting. You have more opportunities than most of us for becoming aware of the nature of Language simply as such. I feel that I lose much by knowing no languages that are not closely related to one another.
Make my compliments to your family and believe me
Yours sincerely
C. S. Lewis
TO JOCELYN GIBB (BOD):
The Kilns,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford.
25/5[6]/56
Dear Gibb,
Proofs herewith. The TS. will go either by this or the next post.
The quotation206 would, I agree, look better on a page to itself, but (what is more important) I am very strongly opposed to the idea of dividing it. I agree that it ‘looks wrong as it is’ but I think it will look equally [wrong] with any division whatever. I do not see why it need be printed ‘absurdly small’ to fit in as one line: unless I am mistaken it is exactly the same (counting letters and spaces) length as l. 2 of para. 2 on p. 13. Now a line of that length on a page to itself wd. I believe, look ugly if it came anywhere near the middle of a page–because it wd. then seem to divide the page into two halves. But would it not look quite nice if put near the top? It wd. then have the properties of a frieze or dado with plain wall under it. And we may perfectly well omit the word ‘Shakespeare’ if we think that makes a better design. But I’d prefer even a bad design to a division of the verse.
Yes: on pp. 119 and 191, stet. On p. 129 I’ve changed the word altogether, and also on p. 293, feeling tiring a touch too archaic–the critics suffer from archaiophobia at present and I am throughout as near the edge as one dares go. (Damn their chronological prudery: they wd. banish every meaty or sappy word from the language).
Yes, of course, ‘till’ on p. 305.207 I had meant to make this change from the moment we fixed the present title.
I certainly hope to have a proof of the ‘Note’ for the American edn. Jog Mc C. about this when forwarding the proof of the text if you think there’s any danger of his neglecting it.
My own last thoughts, tho’ more numerous than usual, are not the sole, nor perhaps the chief, cause of heavier corrections than in S. by J. There were more literals than usual as well.
About BBC and LWW.208 Provided I can vet and veto the script I can of course have no objection to their attempting a dramatised version. But I believe they wd. do, and always do do, better with this or any other narrative work, by simply reading aloud and dramatised dialogue than by full dramatisation.
Sorry I missed you in Magdalene.
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO JOAN LANCASTER (BOD):
The Kilns,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford
26/6/56
Dear Joan–
Thanks for your letter of the 3rd. You describe your Wonderful Night v. well. That is, you describe the place & the people and the night and the feeling of it all, very well–but not the thing itself–the setting but not the jewel. And no wonder! Wordsworth often does just the same. His Prelude (you’re bound to read it about ten years’ hence. Don’t try it now, or you’ll only spoil it for later reading) is full of moments in which everything except the thing itself is described. If you become a writer you’ll be trying to describe the thing all your life: and lucky if, out of dozens of books, one or two sentences, just for a moment, come near to getting it across.
About amn’t I, aren’t I, and am I not, of course there are no right and wrong answers about language in the sense in which there are right and wrong answers in Arithmetic. ‘Good English’ is whatever educated people talk: so that what is good in one place or time wd. not be so in another. Amn’t was good fifty years ago in the North of Ireland where I was brought up, but bad in Southern England. Aren’t I wd. have been hideously bad in Ireland but was good in England. And of course I just don’t know which (if either) is good in modern Florida. Don’t take any notice of teachers and text-books on such matters. Nor of logic. It is good to say ‘More than one passenger was hurt’ although more than one equals at least two and therefore logically the verb ought to be plural were not singular was! What really matters is:–
1. Always try to use the language so as to make quite clear what you mean and make sure yr. sentence couldn’t mean anything else.
2. Always prefer the plain direct word to the long, vague one. Don’t implement promises, but keep them.
3. Never use abstract nouns when concrete ones will do. If you mean ‘more people died’ don’t say ‘mortality rose’
4. In writing. Don’t use adjectives which merely tell us how you want us to feel about the thing you are describing. I mean, instead of telling us a thing was ‘terrible’, describe it so that we’ll be terrified. Don’t say it was ‘delightful’: make us say ‘delightful’ when we’ve read the description. You see, all those words, (horrifying, wonderful, hideous, exquisite) are only like saying to your readers ‘Please will you do my job for me.’
5. Don’t use words too big for the subject. Don’t say ‘infinitely’ when you mean ‘very’: otherwise you’ll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.
Thanks for the photos. You and Aslan both look v. well. I hope you like your new home.
With love.
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO JOCELYN GIBB (BOD):
The Kilns
29/6/56
Dear Gibb
Here are some late corrections just sent in by my Irish reader. Any chance to use them even now?
The ones in brackets are those I think I did correct, but am not sure.
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO ROGER LANCELYN GREEN (BOD): PC
[The Kilns]
29/6/56
Can’t be helped–and it was v. uncertain on my side too. I’m afraid I’d better cry off any later engagements as–‘my hasting days fly on with full career’209 and I’ll have my work cut out to finish my lectures by next term.
Love
J.
TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE (W):
The Kilns,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford
5/7/56
Dear Mary Willis–
Thank you for your letter of June 30th. Yes, what your Franciscan author says is very true. As some one says ‘The Devil used to try to prevent people from doing good works, but he has now learned a trick worth two of that: he organises ’em instead.’
I am very, very glad that God has sent you good friends who won’t let you sink, and that you have turned the corner about that bad feeling that one must not take help even when one needs it. If it were really true that to receive money or money’s worth degraded the recipient, then every act of alms we have done in our lives wd. be wicked! Dives was quite right to leave Lazarus lying at his gate!210 Or else (which might be even worse) we shd. have to hold that to receive was good enough for those we call ‘the poor’ but not for our precious selves however poor we become!
How difficult it is to avoid having a special standard for oneself! De Quincey says somewhere that probably no murderer mentally describes his own act by the word murder:211 and how many people in the whole world believe themselves to be snobs, prigs, bores, bullies or tale-bearers? Talking of murder, do you see we’re abolishing capital punishment in this country? Do you think we’re wise or foolish?212
There’s one phrase in your letter I don’t understand: when you speak of Johnny ‘feeling his oats’.213 What do you mean? Unfortunately I understand only too well most of what you say about Lorraine and her life. How horrid it all is! We have no resources but our prayers.
I’m very busy with preparing lectures. This is the most sunless summer I ever remember.
Yours
Jack
TO RUTH PITTER (BOD):
The Kilns,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford
9/7/56
Dear Ruth
Thank you for the Voyage214 returned. I felt pretty sure you couldn’t think it vulgar once you read it: diabolical, mad, childishly ill-written in places–almost anything you like rather than vulgar.
Do you play croquet with the Queen on Thursday.215 (Croquet is not mentioned in the invitation but I am well-read enough to know that a royal garden party will involve hedgehogs, flamingos, soldiers, Heads-man, and the grin of a Cheshire cat).216 If so are you coming via Oxford? I was thinking of going up by 1.58 and returning by the 6.45 or 7.35 on either of which we cd. dine. You are an experienced courtier and it would give me great moral support to arrive in your company!
Yours
Jack
TO JOCELYN GIBB (BOD):
The Kilns etc.
13/7/56
Dear Gibb–
Here are the proofs for H.B. with a letter for McCallum. I don’t resent their marginalia but thought it a bit Gilbertian217 that where the printer has spaced things too wide the author shd. be asked if he’d like to interpolate a word or so to make it look cosier!
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO JOHN H. MCCALLUM (P):
The Kilns,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford
13/7/56
Dear Mac–
I return the proofs.218 I’m afraid my scrawled rejection of many proposals made by your corrector may (to the eye) have a contemptuous look, but that doesn’t represent my attitude. I liked some of his readings quite well, even if I liked my own better! There is some little wavering between American and English spelling, but I don’t give a fig for that myself. I leave you the final decision about the bit wh. I meant for a Blurb and you print as a preface.219 There’s no real need to have it as either, if you prefer not.
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO KATHRYN STILLWELL (P):
The Kilns,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford
13/7/56
Dear Miss Stillwell
Friday 20th is the only day that is possible. Will you meet me for tea at the Royal Oxford Hotel (just outside the railway station) at 4 o’clock? I do not ask you to this house because you wd. never be able to find it, or, even if you did, it is so far out that most of your time wd. be taken up en route.
Yours sincerely,
C. S. Lewis
TO RUTH PITTER (BOD):
The Kilns,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford
14/7/56
Dear Ruth
You were well out of it. I learn from the papers that I was one of 8000 guests and also that the Queen was present, a fact of which I had no evidence from my own experience. One could not even get a cup of tea for the crowd round the refreshment tables was reminiscent of Liverpool Street station on an August bank holiday. Most people didn’t know one another. One saw many married couples pathetically keeping up between themselves a dialogue which was obviously wearing very thin. If I hadn’t run across Archbishop Matthew220 I’d have been in a vast solitude. There are flamingoes: metal silhouettes of them round the lake–a tasteful device which we perhaps owe to Prince Albert. In a word, it was simply ghastly. Two pints at the little pub on Praed St. were necessary afterwards.
I am thrilled to hear that you were lecturing on my trilogy.
Is there any day (not next week) in which you wd. both be at all likely to come into Oxford? If so it would be a great delight if you would both come and lunch with me somewhere in Oxford.
Yours in all duty
Jack
TO ARTHUR GREEVES (BOD):
The Kilns,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford
19/7/56
My dear A–
I have a letter from Kelsie saying she had heard from Janie that I am going to Donegal in Sept and that she (K.) is also going there in Sept. with her nephew Adrian and (heaven help us) my cousin John Hamilton221 and heaven knows who else and hopes we shall meet.
I have replied that I go with you and that we shall not be in one place all the time and that you know all the dates and addresses and that she’d better find them out from you. Don’t swear at me too much! I can’t remember the addresses & if I’d settled anything with K. on my own I might have done against your wishes. Her destination seems to be Port Noo.222 I think we shall have to sacrifice one day to going to see her (by the way, Cherrie Robins223 is in the party too but hope there will be no trouble beyond that. Incidentally I shd. like to see Cherrie. John is, I think, a bore). It will be v. like old times: most of our holidays will be spent in dodging! I can already hear our conversations!
Some day, when you’re not rushed, you might write me the Inver and Rathmullan addresses and dates on a P.C.
W. still well, thank God.
Yours
J.
TO MARTIN KILMER (W): TS
56/159 The Kilns, Kiln Lane,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford.
23rd July 1956.
Dear Martin
Thank you for your letter of the 18th, it was nice to hear all your news. I hope Nicky and Noelie will enjoy Canada. We have been bringing up a new kitten (marmalade coloured) and he seems to be starting in life well; at least he has already chased a strange dog out of the garden. It has been a rotten summer here so far–temperatures down to 50, and so dark it might be December.
Love and good wishes to all.
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO FRANCIS KNIGHT (P):224
The Kilns
Headington Quarry
Oxford
26/7/56
Dear Knight
I have now finished Uranie225 which I return with many thanks. By Jove, what a book this would have been to have met at a certain age! I can well understand how it would have bowled me over. One does not often meet a real Astronomer who feels like that about the stars. It is also interesting historically. He has obviously read Anastatius Kircher’s Iter Exstaticum226 and helps to fill in the gap between it and H. G. Wells. And I enjoy that unabashed French eloquence.
Of course there is much that a Christian regrets: for one thing his simple assumption that immortality is reserved for intellectuals. Well, he knows better now. Let’s hope he has got through the gate where all depends on becoming like a little child, not on being a savant…but he must have had some shocks.
It was very nice meeting you again, and I much enjoyed our talk. My brother joins me in kindest regards.
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO CHRISTOPHER DERRICK (L):227
The Kilns,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford
2/8/56
Dear Derrick,
(I’d sooner you called me Lewis tout court, both for old acquaintance sake and because, as Brightman–was he before your time?–used to say, ‘When I was a young man no one was called professor except conjurors.’)228
All universities are now N.I.C.E.s229 when it comes to buildings: tho’ I met a civilised American don once who claimed that his own university (I forgot which) had got over that malady and, looking at the Parks with their new laboratories…observed, ‘I see you are still in the Stone Age’.
You ought to have been spending (if you haven’t already done so) on Tolkien’s 3 vol. Lord of the Rings the time you spent on OHEL. The Lord is the book we have all been waiting for. And it shows too, which cheers, that there are thousands left in Israel who have not bowed the knee to Leavis…230
TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE (W):
The Kilns,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford
3/8/56
Dear Mary Willis
I have your letter of July 30th and am very sorry to hear that you are still in difficulties. Your ‘pleasures’ (i.e. social engagements) seem to be almost as much of an affliction as anything else!–but I can understand that. About Lorraine, I think what one has to remember when people ‘hurt’ one is that in 99 cases out of 100 they intended to hurt v. much less, or not at all, and are often quite unconscious of the whole thing. I’ve learned this from the cases in which I was the ‘hurter’. When I have been really wicked & angry, and meant to be nasty, the other party never cared or even didn’t notice. On the other hand, when I have found out afterwards that I had deeply hurt someone, it had nearly always been quite unconscious on my part. (I loathe ‘sensitive’ people who are ‘easily hurt’ by the way, don’t you? They are a social pest. Vanity is usually the real trouble).
I read Don Camillo some years ago, but can’t imagine how it could be made into a film.231 I suppose they will drag some love story into it? (But then I’m, as you know, rather allergic to films).
I have known nice (and nasty) Hindoos. I should have thought the nice ones were precisely ‘Pagans’, if one uses Pagan not in the popular modern sense–which means pretty nearly ‘irreligious’,–but strictly. I.e., I think all that extreme refinement and that spirituality which takes the form of despising matter, is v. like Pythagoras and Plato and Marcus Aurelius. Poor dears: they don’t know about the Sacraments nor the resurrection of the body.
Yes, I know how terrible that doubt is ‘Perhaps He will not.’ But it is so seldom the present & the actual that is intolerable. Remember one is given strength to bear what happens to one, but not the 100 and 1 different things that might happen. And don’t say God has proved that He can make you fear poverty, illness, etc. I am sure God never teaches us the fear of anything but Himself. As the only two good lines in one of our bad hymns says ‘Fear Him ye saints and you will then have nothing else to fear.’232 (Racine, no doubt independently has the same thing in Athalie–je crains Dieu et n’ai pas d’autre crainte).233 Not all the things you fear can happen to you: the one (if any) that does will perhaps turn out v. different from what you think. Of course I know this is easier to say to another than to realise oneself. And always remember that poverty & every other ill, lovingly accepted, has all the spiritual value of voluntary poverty or penance. God bless you: you are always in my prayers.
Yours
Jack
TO CHRISTOPHER DERRICK (WHL):
The Kilns,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford
4/8/56
Dear Derrick…You are far too profound about S.F. I think. The adventure story and wonder story are perennial and anyone could have foreseen that as our own planet got too fully explored they would be pushed off it into space in order to find the unknown (and therefore plastic) which a medieval author cd. find in the next forest, Defoe in Juan Fernandez,234 and R. Haggard in unexplored Africa and Tibet–like a man moving further and further out as the town spreads…
TO MRS FRANK JONES (W):
The Kilns,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford
4/8/56
Dear Mrs. Jones
I don’t know when or where you are, for your letter which arrived this morning has (like many of mine) neither date nor address. But I’m glad you are having a nice holiday, swimming and ‘burning’, i.e. sun-burning yourselves, I trust, not a general campaign of arson. Since I’ve got bald I take a low view of sun burning, for it burns the top of my head and then when I draw a comb across it in the morning, I scream. We are having, after an unusually cold & late spring, what seems by English standards an intense and prolonged heatwave. You wd. probably find it quite cool.
My brother is away at present but I will forward your information about O. Prescott. We are all v. interested in your space-footballs and wondering what the results will be. It is funny how quickly things get exaggerated: a man told me the other day that they were to go millions of miles into space.
I quite agree with you about Time which I always thought a rather horrid paper: but then most papers, in all countries, are rather horrid. The comfort is that they are mostly not true!
Please remember me to your husband. If my brother were here, he wd. join me in blessings to both.
Yours sincerely
C. S. Lewis
TO MRS JOHNSON (P):
The Kilns,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford
7/8/56
Dear Mrs. Johnson–
Would you believe it!–I had recently felt anxious as to how you were getting on and in praying for you (as of course I do for all who correspond with me on religious matters) I had added a prayer that I might soon hear some good news of you. And all at once your letter of (hullo! you forgot to date it) arrived.
All you tell me is good and very good. Your Mother in Law has done good to the whole circle by the way she died. And where she has gone I don’t doubt she will do you more still. For I believe that what was true of Our Lord Himself (‘It is expedient for you that I go, for then the Comforter will come to you’)235 is true in its degree (of course, an infinitesimal degree in comparison, but still true) of all His followers. I think they do something for us by dying and shortly after they have died which they couldn’t do before–and sometimes one can almost feel it happening. (You are right by the way: there is a lot to be said for dying–and being born–at home).
No, I don’t wish I knew Heaven was like the picture in my Great Divorce, because, if we knew that, we should know it was no better. The good things even of this world are far too good ever to be reached by imagination. Even the common orange, you know: no one cd. have imagined it before he tasted it. How much less Heaven.
I go on my holidays to Ireland to-morrow. God bless you all again and again.
Yours sincerely
C. S. Lewis
TO GEORGE SAYER (W):
Magdalen College
Oxford
8/8/56
My dear George
What train may I expect you by on Mon. 14th? I’ll bring a ‘powerful auto’ to meet it. Wot larx!236
Yours
Jack
TO MRS BEEBEE (P): TS
56/339
The Kilns, Kiln Lane,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford.
8th August 1956.
Dear Mrs Beebee,
Many thanks for your most kind and encouraging letter of the 5th. With all good wishes, yours sincerely, C. S. Lewis237
TO JOHN H. MCCALLUM (P):
The Kilns,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford
11/8/56
Dear McCallum
I don’t mind much about interpretation or re-interpretation, but the latter wd. be slightly better.238 A good many people between me and Apuleius have told the story and I have very drastically altered the accepted motivation. But I don’t insist.
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO JOHN LANE PUBLISHERS (P): PC
The Kilns,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford
11/8/56
Dutch contract for OSP239 received with thanks. C. S. Lewis
TO MOIRA SAYER (W):
The Kilns,
Headington Quarry
Oxford
14/8/56
Dear Moira
Oh dear! Have I done it again?–and according to one of the poets it is the worst offence (almost) a guest can commit. Freud however says it shows a sub-conscious wish to return. Not that this much mends matters. A sub-conscious wish (repressed along with all one’s patricidal and other unspeakable wishes) wd. be no great compliment. Anyway, my wish to return is fully conscious. Days at Hamewith are always gold. Thanks for all, and for putting up a parcel too.
We’re off to Ireland to-day. Love to both and to His Eminence.
Yours
Jack
Jack and Warnie left on 14 August for a stay in the Republic of Ireland. Jack later joined Arthur Greeves for a holiday in County Donegal, returning to Oxford on 17 September.
TO MARY VAN DEUSEN (W):
Golden Arrow [Cottage]?240
Annagassan,
Co. Louth, Eire
Aug. 17/56
Dear Mrs. Van Deusen–
Yr. letter of Aug. 2 followed me to this place of unearthly beauty. I hear the waves breaking on the beach as I write and look across the bay at the most fairy-tale mountains you cd. ask for–almost ‘Smoky’ mountains at the moment, for the last thunderstorm is just packing away beyond them.
I cd. never make much of Existentialism. The book that helped me most was Encounter with Nothingness (or some such title) by a German-American called Kuhn.241 But even it did not help v. much. I understood (I think) Sartre’s L’Existentialisme est un Humanisme, but didn’t think it true.242 Perhaps, with Christianity, we shall be able to get along even if we don’t know about Existentialism!
Do you think one’s vocation wh. looks so cryptic as a whole, is usually fairly clear from day to day and moment to moment? One usually has an idea what to do next. Need one know any more? It wd. be a pity if when He came He found me thinking about my vocation at a moment when I wd. have been better employed writing a letter, making a bed, entertaining a bore–or something quite dull and obvious.
Tell me something about the Smoky Mountains–the v. sound is a romance.
My brother joins me in warm greetings to you all.
Yours sincerely
C. S. Lewis
TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE (W):
Somewhere in Eire
18/8/56
Dear Mary Willis–
It’s no good giving you an address for I am moving about. Your letter of Aug. 12th reached me today. I am delighted to hear about the job. It sounds exactly the thing, sent by God, at your most need. I will never laugh at anyone for grieving over a loved beast.243 I think God wants us to love Him more, not to love creatures (even animals) less. We love everything in one way too much (i.e. at the expense of our love for Him) but in another way we love everything too little.
No person, animal, flower, or even pebble, has ever been loved too much–i.e. more than every one of God’s works deserves. But you need not feel ‘like a murderer’. Rather rejoice that God’s law allows you to extend to Fanda that last mercy which (no doubt, quite rightly) we are forbidden to extend to suffering humans. You’ll get over this. I will rejoice in the job.
I’m writing on a dressing table in a small, dark hotel bedroom, v. sleepy, so I’ll close. God bless you–and Fanda!
Yours
Jack Lewis
TO STEPHEN SCHOFIELD (W):244
On Tour in Eire
Aug 23/56
Dear Mr. Schofield–
One must distinguish ‘approving absolutely’ from ‘approving as the lesser evil under certain conditions.’ All war, like all lawsuits, results from greed, selfishness, or ill faith on one side or both. Therefore God disapproves of them. But granted that someone’s greed, selfishness or ill faith, has started the thing, does God think the work of a good soldier or a good lawyer a less evil than letting the aggressor have his way?
From the fact that neither St. John the Baptist nor Christ disapproved of soldiers as such, I conclude the answer is Yes. By the Christian ideal of the Christian at arms in a just cause I mean the Knight as he is pictured in all the romances of the Middle Ages.
Yours sincerely,
C. S. Lewis
TO I. O. EVANS (W):
From a momentary address in Eire
Aug 25/56
My dear Evans–
Thanks for the cutting wh. I return. I haven’t read the story and am, indeed, growing sick of modern science-fiction!
Before leaving home I saw the film of The Forbidden Planet, a post-civilisation version of the Tempest245 with a Robot for Caliban, a bitch for Miranda, and all sympathy for Alonso against Prospero. The contrast between the magnificent technical power and the deplorable level of ethics and imagination in the story was what struck me most. But the modern ‘serious fiction’–E. Waugh246 and all that–seems to me equally deplorable. I am so glad you liked the Last Battle. And so, good bye to Narnia.
Vaughan-Wilkins’ Valley Beyond Time is good, though.247 Very good, tho’ not faultless.
All the best.
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO SHELDON VANAUKEN (BOD):
As from The Kilns,
Headington Quarry
Oxford
Aug 27/56
My dear Van Auken
I am v. glad to hear of the righted wrong and still more to hear that you are re-visiting England. We must have some good & long talks together and perhaps we shall both get high.
At the moment the really important thing seems to be that you were brought to realise the impossibility (strict sense) of rejecting Christ.248 Of course He must often seem to us to be playing fast and loose with us. The adult must seem to mislead the child, and the master the dog. They misread the signs. Their ignorance and their wishes twist everything. You are so sure you know what the promise promised! And the danger is that when what He means by ‘Win’ appears you will ignore it because it is not what you thought it wd. be–as He Himself was rejected because He was not like the Messiah the Jews had in mind. But I am, I fancy, repeating things I said before. I look forward very much to our meeting again. God bless you.
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO J. A. CHAPMAN (BOD):
Golden Arrow,
Annagassen,
Co. Louth,
Eire
Aug 29th/56
Dear Chapman–
Your letter followed me to this lonely place where I look across Dundalk Bay at the Carlingford Mts and, beyond them, the Mournes and strange nocturnal birds 249 lament under the eye of baleful Mars–v. visible these nights.
I have not heard about your brother and am alarmed & distressed by your cryptic words about him.250 I must try to find out when I get back.
Thank you v. much for Critical Papers.251 They have themselves some of the sunshine quality they describe. They are sappy, full of relish: a relief after so much modern criticism, in which the Muses seem to be confused with the Furies. I am re-reading both the Odyssey and The Lord of the Rings. I can hardly pay your essays a higher compliment than to say that they ‘fitted in’, could appear in such company without making one feel that the words of Mercury are harsh after the songs of Apollo.
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO CHAD WALSH (W):
Drumbeg Hotel,
Inver,
Co. Donegal
Eire
8th Sept/56
Dear Chad
By all means use me as a reference if you can’t find anyone better. I don’t really know anything about you either as a historical theologian (I’m none myself) nor as a historian of art, so I’ll be reduced to generalities. You’d much better get someone who knows something about the subject or about you in connection with them. But of course I’ll play if I’m wanted.
Remember me to your wife. Both Joy and my brother wd. send messages if they were here, but, you see, they ain’t!
Yours
Jack
TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE (W):
Drumbeg Hotel,
Inver,
Co. Donegal
Sept. 8/56
Dear Mary Willis–
I can’t quite understand all the affair about the Bank, being intensely stupid about everything that might be called Business–but perhaps for that very reason all the more able to enter into your dismay. All that side of life is to me simply a terrifying mystery. But I hope I am right in thinking that it all turned out well in the end. It certainly looks as if God were looking after you financially. I expect that the instruments He uses are kind human beings: and all the better if so, for then it is good for them as well as for you.
How charming about your young friend and her present!
I used to meet Fr. D’Arcy pretty often when he was Master of Campion Hall, for we were both members of the Dante Society. Remember me to him if you happen to meet him.
I think what I must have said about Hindus (but can I write it any more legibly this time?) was that, if you use Pagan in the proper sense, i.e. to mean Polytheist, then they are Pagans, but not of course if you use that word in the journalists’ sense, to mean ‘irreligious’ or even ‘debauched’ (that journalists can be saved is a doctrine, if not contrary to, yet certainly above, reason!).
I am glad you liked my stories. They are the part of my work I like best.
It continues cold (you wd. think it Arctic) here and wet, but with lovely gleams at times in which far-off mountains show three times their real height and with a radiance that suggests Bunyan’s ‘delectable mountains’.252
I hope your health will soon improve.
Yours
Jack Lewis
P.S.–I doubt if you’ll find any Leprechauns in Eire now. The Radio has driven them away.
Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold was published by Geoffrey Bles of London on 10 September 1956.
TO JOCELYN GIBB (BOD): PC
Fort Royal Hotel,
Rathmullan,
Co. Donegal,
Eire
11/9/56
Thanks for your letter of 6th wh. followed me here this morning, and still more for the v. handsome ‘compliment’ of 16 free copies. Wd. that all compliments were so solid! Atticus would defend–and anyone cd. attack–his description, the word novel being so equivocal.253
Well, here’s to us both (but one does, in this land) get sick of always stout or whisky but never Beer.
C.S.L.
TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE (W): PC
Royal Port Hotel,
Rathmullan
Co. Donegal,
EIRE
Sept. 14 [1956]
Thanks for cutting containing yourself & Sister Mary Frances and Mr. Birch on me: both interesting. Problem: why are nuns nicer than monks and schoolgirls nicer than schoolboys, when women are not in general nicer than men? But perhaps you deny all three statements!
All blessings.
J
TO JOCELYN GIBB (BOD): TS
56/357.
The Kilns, Kiln Lane,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford.
14th Sept. 1956.
Dear Mr Gibb
On the 17th November 1945 one Dr Martin S. Allwood of Marston Hill, Mullsjo, Sweden–but then so far as I can make out, of Goteborg–apparently secured the agreement of Bles and my brother to the publication of his Swedish translation of The Abolition of Man free of royalty.
After the infuriating manner of his kind, he has now lost the authorization and wants ‘a brief word to the publisher’. According to my secretarial records the whole thing is bona fide, but I thought that I had better consult you before taking any steps.
I have not only survived my summer holiday, but have escaped from it with nothing worse than a bad cold.
Yours sincerely
pro per C.S.L.
Brother Mycroft
WHL
TO JOCELYN GIBB (BOD):
The Kilns,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford
Sept 19th 1956
Dear Gibb
Thanks for letter (to Mycroft) of Sept 17. The Swedish publisher is Natur & Kultur, Torsgatan 31, Stockholm.254 Why the heck I ever agreed to such a procedure I can’t now conceive.
I had, like you, a glorious holiday and am finding, like you, that leisure is an addiction drug which one’s system aches at discontinuing!
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO CHRISTOPHER DERRICK (WHL):
The Kilns,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford
Sept 21/56
Dear Derrick
No, not a word wrong–and the only review I’ve yet seen (but I’ve seen only one) that really gets the point. Thanks very much. Speaking, not as the author of the book, but as a critic of the review, I should say that the reference to ‘Pilgrim’s Regress’ might be deleted as that book is very little known and might only make your meaning darker…255
TO FATHER PETER MILWARD SJ (W):
The Kilns
Headington Quarry
Oxford
Sept 22/56
Dear Father Milward–
Tolkien’s book is not an allegory256–a form he dislikes.257 You’ll get nearest to his mind on such subjects by studying his essay on Fairy Tales in the Essays presented to Charles Williams. His root idea of narrative art is ‘sub-creation’–the making of a secondary world. What you wd. call ‘a pleasant story for the children’ wd. be to him more serious than an allegory. But for his views, read the essay, wh. is indispensable. My view wd. be that a good myth (i.e. a story out of which ever varying meanings will grow for different readers and in different ages) is a higher thing than an allegory (into which one meaning has been put). Into an allegory a man can put only what he already knows: in a myth he puts what he does not yet know and cd. not come to know in any other way.
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO ROGER LANCELYN GREEN (BOD):
The Kilns
Kiln Lane
Headington Quarry
Oxford
Sept 23/56
My dear Roger–
I have to thank you both for a Book of Nonsense and for R. Hood.258 The former is a most valuable collection and contains lots that I couldn’t easily find anywhere else. With poor Robin I think you have done the best that cd. be done, and the dovetailing seems a success. You and I both feel, I think, an aggressive heartiness in the legend wh. nothing will disguise. Friar Tuck is the epitome of all humour I dislike. But you’ve wrestled like a man. When shall I see the Land Beyond the North?259 I am so pleased with what you say about Till we have Faces–no reviews yet that show much understanding.
Can we lunch together on Sat. Oct 6th? Unless I hear to the contrary I’ll call at 12 Ship St.260 at 12 noon and then, if fine, we cd. go to the Trout.261 Love to June & the infants.
Yours
Jack
TO JOHN LAWLOR (P):262 TS
56/383
The Kilns, Kiln Lane,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford.
1st October 1956.
Dear John,
Hang it, I’ve about shot my bolt on Milton and don’t really want to deal with the recent critics. My finger grows weary of hornet’s nests. Also I’m trying to learn a little about the Middle Ages. There are so many things one handed over to the Language people at Oxford which I have to talk about at Cambridge.
My brother joins me in good wishes. Letters between you and I have crossed, have’nt they?
Yours,
Jack
TO JOHN H. MCCALLUM (P):
The Kilns,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford
Oct 1/56
Dear Mac,
I return the list. I query the three entries that I’ve put a ring round on the ground that they are all contained in Mere Christianity.263 If anyone is led by this list to buy one of them when he already has it, he’ll say (with some reason) that he has been stung, and both your house and I may ‘lose face’. If no one does, then the inclusion of these titles is a waste of time.
Chronologically (if that matters) Mere C. should come just before S. by J.
The new (and last) children’s book may be illegible on that horrid paper! It is THE LAST BATTLE All the best.
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO RHONA BODLE (BOD):
The Kilns
Headington Quarry
Oxford
Oct 3/56
Dear Miss Bodle–
It was nice to hear from you again and (of course) to hear that you liked the book.264
I do most emphatically agree with what you say about the field-mouse and the sound of streams:265 especially those invisible streams that one hears tinkling far beneath the turf. The real trouble about motoring, however, is not that you don’t see little things close up. You do: and too many. Nature allows us to see either a few things close up (when we walk) or many things far off (when we look down from a hill-top). But trains and cars give you many things, each close up in its turn and therefore each soliciting the attention wh. the speed does not allow you to give. I believe that may be why a drive thro’ even the loveliest country soon leaves one both satiated and frustrated. Like bolting ones food. Or like walking in a crowd where you see face after face: which as someone said is like being forced to read the first page, and no more, of 100 books in rapid succession.
I am most interested in what you tell me about your work in general and about Judy.266 It is nice to be engaged on what is so indisputably worth doing. I admit I’ve been lucky, in another way, by always having people to discuss with, and I don’t wonder you feel the lack of it.
I’ve been in Ireland this summer–but I don’t expect I shall persuade you that Donegal is a better country than Devon! With all good wishes, and blessings.
Yours sincerely
C. S. Lewis
TO J. B. PHILLIPS (P): TS267
56/359
The Kilns, Kiln Lane,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford.
3rd October 1956.
Dear Mr Phillips,
Many thanks for your kind and encouraging letter. It gives me much pleasure to hear that Mrs Phillips and you have enjoyed my books.
With all good wishes, yours sincerely, C. S. Lewis
TO JOHN LAWLOR (P):
The Kilns
Headington Quarry
Oxford
Oct 4/56
Dear John–
Thanks very much. The Thos. A. passage is a gem of purest ray. I haven’t the sermons: I meet them in the spare room of a house I sometimes stay at.268
By the way, my medieval mission at Cambridge is, so far, a flop d’estime.269 A few dons come to my lectures but far fewer undergrads. I’ve never had such small audiences before. Must be frightfully good for me.
But your problem about texts is already under weigh–see the enclosed. Brewer, as you probably know, was a Magdalen man (much junior to you).270 My brother joins me in greetings and in thanks for your almost Homeric offer271 of hospitality. Can we bring dog, cat, secretary, chaplain, concubines, two valets, and a gentleman usher? (Of course you have adequate stabling for the horses?) But do come to Magdalene.
Yours
Jack
TO KATHLEEN RAINE (BOD):
The Kilns
Headington Quarry
Oxford
Oct 5th 1956
Dear Miss Raine–
What a nice letter, and how well you understand what I was up to. I think what makes Orual different from the ‘warrior maiden’ Archtype is that she is ugly, represents virginity not [in] its high poetic state but as mere misfortune, and of course, masculine activities as the pis aller, the thing she is driven into because nothing else is left her. (A bit of ambivalence too. Bardia’s attempt to treat her as man is agony, yet also to be as much of a man as possible and share his masculine activities is the only thing that links her with him at all and is, in that way, precious to her). Even so, she does feel on killing her first man that she has somehow been debauched.
As for the others, Camilla, Penthesileia,272 Bradamante273 and Clorinda274 (and I hear there’s a fine one in the Shah Nameh–don’t you wish you knew Persian? There seems to be about 1/5 of all the best poetry in the world locked up there), the figure is too recurrent to be anything but true Archtype. I haven’t fathomed it, though. The veil comes in–they are all cryptic in their armour. Is it that enemy and bride are somehow very close together? Both ways (a.) My bride will devour me: all wives are, so far, spiders! (b.) The foe I kill in battle is recognized at the moment of my killing as (souls are all feminine) ‘my sister my spouse’?275 One can’t give up the story of Achilles weeping over Penthesileia when he has killed her and being laughed at for it by Thersites.276
Yours sincerely
C. S. Lewis
TO MARY VAN DEUSEN (W):
The Kilns
Headington Quarry
Oxford
Oct 8/56
Dear Mrs. Van Deusen
The cards make me ‘envy’ you your Smoky Mts–tho’ I daresay they wd. be too warm for me. I’m a Polar Bear, you know.
About Envy, the question (as so often) is one of language. In modern English ‘I envy you’ is used to mean ‘I’d like to be doing what you’re doing’ or even ‘I congratulate you.’ What the moral Theologians meant by the ‘sin of Envy’ (Invidia) was grudging the other things one hadn’t got oneself and hating the others for having them–wanting to scratch another girl’s face because she was prettier than you, hoping another man’s business wd. crash because he was richer than you–and so forth.
One is almost relieved to hear that your poor ex-Rector was not (as he seemed) wicked but only desperately ill. We know so little: ‘judge not.’277
My brother joins me in all greetings.
Yours sincerely
C. S. Lewis
TO MARTIN HOOTON (BOD):278
Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
Oct 9th. 1956
Dear Mr. Hooton
Thanks for your most kind and encouraging letter. It will be a pleasure to meet whenever you are in Cambridge.
Yours sincerely
C. S. Lewis
TO STEPHEN SCHOFIELD (W): TS
56/128
The Kilns, Kiln Lane,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford.
10th October 1956.
Dear Schofield,
Thanks for your letter of the 7th, which did not reach me until this morning. Sorry to have missed you, but Cambridge term began yesterday, so I fear there is no chance of a meeting. Congratulations on your marriage, and with best wishes for your happiness,
yours sincerely,
C. S. Lewis
TO MARTIN HOOTON (BOD):
Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
Oct 13th 1956
Dear Mr Hooton
3.45 on Tue Oct 23 wd. do me v. well.
Yours sincerely
C. S. Lewis
TO VERA GEBBERT (W):
Magdalene College,
Cambridge
Oct 18th. 1956
Dear Mrs. Gebbert
I was greatly pleased to hear that your move, with all its nuisance and anxiety, is over–and now you can start living again!279 I’ve never lived in a flat. I shouldn’t mind the smallness, but I shd. hate to be a long way from mother earth. But I suppose you may get fine roofscapes and views of the sky.
My brother and I were together in Ireland for a time in a bungalow divided from the sea only by a cart-track and the sound of the waves all night.280 Also a magnificent view of mountains across the bay. After that, I was with a friend in Donegal which is a v. fine, wild country with green mountains, rich secretive valleys, and Atlantic breakers on innumerable desolate sands. But alas!, they get less desolate every year and it will soon be just a holiday resort like so many other places. (One always disapproves of all holiday-makers except oneself!)
My brother, who wd. join me in greetings if he were here, is busy on a new book. I’ve written nothing but lectures this summer.
After a v. wet July and August (cold, too) we are now enjoying what they call in England (do you?) a ‘St. Luke’s summer’: which means autumn at its very best–warm, coloured days, but cold nights, and usually misty mornings, every cobweb on the hedge turned into a necklace by the heavy dew.
How is the Tycoon?
With all blessings,
Yours very sincerely,
C. S. Lewis
For some time Joy Gresham had been troubled with pains in her left leg which were diagnosed by the doctor as rheumatism and fibrositis, an inflammation of the tissues surrounding the muscles. On the evening of 18 October she was in her house at 10 Old High Street when Katharine Farrer, in Trinity College, suddenly knew something was wrong with her. ‘I must ring her!’ she said to her husband. Katharine dialled the number, but before it could ring Joy tripped over the wire of her telephone, bringing the telephone down as she fell on the floor. The fall caused her left femur to snap like a twig. Accompanying the pain was Farrer’s voice, asking if she could help. Joy was admitted later that evening to the Wingfield-Morris Orthopaedic Hospital, where X-rays showed that the femur, broken when she fell, was almost eaten through by cancer. Examination also revealed a malignant tumour in her left breast, as well as secondary sites in her right leg and shoulder. In the following month she underwent three operations.
TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE (W):
The Kilns
Headington Quarry
Oxford
20 Oct/56
Dear Mary Willis–
I can’t answer yours of the 14th as it deserves for it comes to me on a day when I am all embroiled with affairs arising out of a friend’s sudden illness, and v. much distressed. Alas, troubles everywhere.
I think ‘brain washed’ is a real inspiration of L’s281 behaviour. And the fact that she talked next time as if she had forgotten it all confirmed that view–as if she had ‘said the lesson’ and got it off her chest.
I am very, very sorry to hear about your health. ‘Hives on the eyes’ must be horrid and go all through one’s head. And the anxiety too. May God comfort you. I’m thankful He has at any rate given you some good friends.
In great haste.
Yours
Jack
TO JOCELYN GIBB (BOD):
The Kilns
Headington Quarry
Oxford
Oct 20/56
Dear Gibb
Thanks for cheque. Glad to hear TWHF sells: we don’t get much help from the reviewers! I shan’t be in Cambridge on Mon 19 till after 6 p.m. Will you be there in the evening? I’d like to see you if so.
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO MICHAEL EDWARDS (BOD):282
The Kilns
Headington Quarry
Oxford
Oct 20/56
Dear Mr. Edwards–
Most of your questions about unfallen man can’t, as you see, be answered. I suppose there are 3 conditions: unfallen, fallen, & redeemed. The third is not usually thought to be a mere reproduction of the first. In it the whole travail produced by the Fall will be turned to account and many things that wd. not have been without the Fall will be redeemed, become the occasions of good. The Cross itself is the supreme instance.
Our job is not to try to recover the unfallen stage but to go on to the redeemed one. In our use of the various things that have come in since the Fall, hadn’t we better be guided by the solitary plain moral rules–namely, kindness, courage, chastity etc–rather than by speculation?
Of course enjoying equipment or motoring is not a sin. The point I wanted to make is that excessive excitement about gadgetry and the belief (Weston’s belief) that the possession of, say, wireless & aeroplanes, somehow makes one superior to those who lack them & even justifies one in conquering such people, is bosh. My motto wd. be ‘Have your toys, have your conveniences, but for heaven’s sake don’t start talking as if those things really mattered as, say, charity matters.’
As for ‘giving up’ things–well, when we’ve given up all our sins (the things everyone knows to be sins), we can think again! The problem will not be immediate. The devil is fond of distracting us from our plain daily duties by suggesting vague & rather faddy ones, you know.
With all good wishes.
Yours sincerely
C. S. Lewis
TO JOCELYN GIBB (BOD):
Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
Oct 24th 1956
Dear Gibb
Will you please send one copy of TWHF to Sir Ernest Barker, 17 Cranmer Rd., Cambridge?283 By the way, I shall not be free on Monday evening next. I suppose Tue. morning is no good? Not very good for me, since I lecture at 12.
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO JOCELYN GIBB (BOD):
Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
Oct 25/56
Dear Gibb
I look forward to seeing you if we can find a date. Yes–the modern German books are beautifully done.284 With thanks.
Yours
C. S. Lewis
P.S. Please send a copy of TWHF to Mrs. Hough, 7 Chesterton Hall Crescent, Cambridge.285
TO KATHARINE FARRER (BOD):
Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
Oct 25th 1956
Dear K.–
Fervet opus!286 and just the sort of opus I am so very incompetent at and dislike so much.287 ‘Ever-more thanks, the exchequer of the poor.’288 I’m so glad W. is playing up. Make free use of our excellent Paxford (if you have time to hear his replies!).
I suppose Joy told you that one of the bookcases is hers, not Mrs. Geddes’s? I’m glad to hear the budgaries289 are quartered. By the way, Joy thought it wd. be as well if Colin and Christian knew our innocent little secret, so pass it on to them at some convenient time.290 The cat problem is acute. And two-fold. There’s Joy’s own lawful cat, black Sambo, and also the volunteer cat, Marmaduke. Since the former has practically deserted No. 10 already, and the latter must have arrived there after deserting somewhere else, I believe each is in fact quite able to face the world–but the RSPCA291 cd. never understand that!
Bless you both again and again. I am votre homme, sworn vassal, forever.
Yours
Jack
TO BASIL WILLEY (BOD):292
Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
Oct. 26th 1956
My dear Willey
No.293 It would never do. People so often deny their own capacity for business either through mock-modesty or through laziness that when the denial happens to be merely true, it is difficult to make it convincing. But I have been tried at this kind of job; and none of those who experienced me in office ever wanted to repeat the experiment. I am both meddlesome and forgetful. Quite objectively, I’d be a disaster. But thank you for your suggestion.
My own thoughts hover between the (certainly safe) Hough294 and the wild idea of Leavis. Is it just possible that if his nose were once rubbed in the actual working of the Faculty, if he were once the target of criticism instead of the critic, he might be cured? Of course we should suffer: but then we suffer already. I know it’s risky: but ‘malecontents’ have before now been tamed by office. What do you think?
Yours ever
C. S. Lewis
TO EDWARD A. ALLEN (W):
Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
Oct 31st 1956
Dear Allen (We might both drop the honorifics, mightn’t we?)–
I’m partly horrified and partly amused to find myself supplying ‘great thoughts’ to a Ladies Journal! (I’m pretty sure the Johnson quotation is inaccurate).
Lor’ bless you, I’m no pacifist. A really modern weapon, a machine which a skill-less man can work by pressing a button, to the destruction of thousands, himself in safety, is disgusting. But a bow or pistol or sword, a thing used face to face–that is a different matter. Indeed I have a respect not unmixed with envy for people who can hit anything. (The only man I ever had a pot shot [at] in the first war didn’t appear to know he was being fired on at all)
It was the ancient Persians, as Herodotus tells us, who taught their boys to ride, to shoot, and to tell the truth.295 Those horrid Turks did not appear in Asia Minor till the time of the Crusades. An ancient, respectable, comparatively harmless on-and-off war between the civilised Emperor of Byzantium and the civilised Caliph of Baghdad was all messed up when Norman barbarians came to the one side and Turkish barbarians on the other. That was what finally smashed up the immemorial civilisation of the near East and made it the mess it has been ever since.
I hope you do succeed in coming to England. My friends wd. tell you, with some warmth, that silences are the last thing to be feared. They say Monologue is the real danger.
Tools is the point. A tool is a thing a man uses with his own skill and loves. Machines, wh. work themselves, are quite different. Compare a pickaxe (the lovely stroke, the significant shape) with the stinking, thudding road drill, wh. finally shatters the whole nervous & muscular system of the operator. All good wishes to your mother and yourself.
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO WALTER HOOPER (UNC):296
Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
Nov 2nd 1956
Dear Friends
Thank you for so kindly writing to tell me you like the Narnian books. Of course I didn’t mind you dramatising one, and I only wish I could have seen it.
I would never allow a public commercial performance because you know what theatrical managers are like! They’d make it awful. I am sure yours was quite different.
With all good wishes.
Yours ever
C. S. Lewis
TO CHAD WALSH (W):
Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
Nov 9th. 56
Dear Chad
Yes. I have heard from the Guggenheim people and done my darndest in reply.297 I have bad news of Joy. What had been supposed to be rheumatism became so bad that she had to go into hospital and it has now been diagnosed as cancer. She has still ‘a fighting chance’ and fights very bravely. I’m sure a letter from you wd. be a support. (Address: Mayfair Ward, Wingfield Morris Hospital, Headington, Oxford).
So the private world is for me as dark as the public world is at the moment for us all.298 Give us your prayers. All love & blessings to your wife and yourself Yours
Jack
TO MARY NEYLAN (T):
Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
Nov 14th 1956
Dear Mary
Thanks for letting me see Sophie’s poem.299 A remarkable production for her age! And she is beginning at the right end, with invention and sound metre. That’s the first step I wish you and Dan wd. pray hard for a lady called Joy Gresham and me–I am likely v. shortly to be both a bridegroom and a widower, for she has cancer. You needn’t mention this till the marriage (wh. will be at a hospital bedside if it occurs) is announced. I’ll tell you the whole story someday. Love to Sarah. I’m not much in the way of visiting anyone at present Yours
Jack Lewis
TO ELSIE CHAMBERLAIN (BBC):300
04/R/EDC
Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
Nov 15/56
Dear Mrs Chamberlain
No, I’m afraid not. I should only be repeating myself, and that, however new it may be to most of the audience, deprives me of all power.
Yours sincerely
C. S. Lewis
TO MARY MARGARET MCCASLIN (W):301
Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
Nov. 15th 1956 Dear Mrs. McCaslin
Thank you for your letter of Nov. 9th. I will indeed pray for you: I did so already, but will do so more. You have made a great sacrifice for conscience’ sake. Such things, we may be sure, enrich one: but God knows it doesn’t feel like it at the time. It did not, even for Our Lord Himself, in Gethsemane. I always try to remember what MacDonald said ‘The Son of God died not that we might not suffer but that our sufferings might become like His.’302 But of course the real difficulty is not in rising to this point of view but in staying there. One does it–and ten minutes later it all has to be done over again. And one gets so tired, doesn’t one? Well, thousands of others are going through the same: one might be a Hungarian.303
May God strengthen you, as only He can.
Yours sincerely
C. S. Lewis
TO CHARLES A. BRADY (W):304
Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
Nov 16th 1956
Dear Mr. Brady
I must thank you for your most kind article on my Narnian books in the copy of America which someone has sent me.305 Naturally, I of all people can least judge whether you are right: but it is certainly fine work in the sense that you express exactly what you think, and I hope the books are like.
I get lovely, and often most moving, letters from my child readers. I had expected that they wd. get the theology more or less unconsciously, but the truth is that they all see it perfectly clearly, bless ’em, and much more clearly than some grown-ups.
It might amuse you that the whole thing took its rise from nightmares about lions which I suddenly started having.
Let us meet if you are ever in England.
Yours sincerely
C. S. Lewis
TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE (W):
Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
Nov 16/56
Dear Mary Willis
Very sorry to hear all your bad news: the only cheering bit being that your hitting back at Lorraine has obviously done good not harm. It is much better for both her and you that she should ‘break your heart’ with her own sorrows than with anger and insult. Children ought to take these troubles to their mothers. It hurts you, but surely with a better kind of pain.
You may as well know (but don’t talk of it, for all is still uncertain) that I may soon be, in rapid succession, a bridegroom and a widower. There may, in fact, be a deathbed marriage. I can hardly describe to you the state of mind I live in at present–except that all emotion, with me, is periodically drowned in sheer tiredness, deep lakes of stupor. Perhaps a v. heavy cold in the head helps this. So you won’t expect me to write long or many letters. Let us always pray for one another.
Yours
Jack
TO JOCELYN GIBB (BOD):
Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
Nov 16. 56
Dear Gibb
Please send 1 copy of my Miracles to Dr. Hans J. Madera, Facharzt für Nervenkrankheiten, Innsbruck, Kirschentalgazze, Austria.
Did you finally fix on any day for your Cambridge jaunt? I don’t seem to have anything noted.
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO JOHN GILFEDDER (W):
The Kilns
Headington Quarry
Oxford
Nov 18/56
Dear Gilfedder
It is always nice to get a letter from you and it is always nice to get a letter in praise of one’s last book.306 The combination is irresistible: especially since that book has had a worse reception from the English reviewers than any I ever wrote. I don’t however, despair. The children’s stories were very ill received at first and now begin to worm themselves into favour: better that than to be the rage for 12 months and then forgotten forever.
You kindly talk so much about me in your letter that you find room to tell me very little about yourself. But what you do tell is all good. Give my blessings to the children and my duty to your wife. It will be a great pleasure to see you in England whenever you can come. With all good wishes.
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO MARY VAN DEUSEN (W):
The Kilns
Headington Quarry
Oxford
Nov 18/56
Dear Mrs. Van Deusen
I don’t think it is altogether a bad thing for Paul to be a nuisance at school and good at home. At least it wd. be far worse, for him and you and as a symptom, if it were the other way round. Perhaps it only means that he has a good home and a bad school!
It was nice of you to write about Till We Have Faces (I originally called it Bareface, but the publishers vetoed that because they said people would think it was a ‘Western’!), and a most needed encouragement to me, for it has so far had a more hostile reception from the critics than any book I ever wrote. Not that critics really matter very much. The real question is how the book goes 10 or 15 years after publication.
I met Dom Gregory only at a meeting of some society–a fine, old man and very highly thought of by those who are entitled to have an opinion on his subject (I’m not). I haven’t read The Shape:307 when you have finished your arduous, but obviously pleasant, reconnaissance, you must give me a report on it.
Yes: The Last Battle ends Narnia–very much ‘ends’ as you will see.
I have a hope we shall get away without World War III this time. I fancy Russia wd. be more likely to make a second Spanish Civil War out of Suez than to strike openly in the West. But who knows.308
My brother, who is well, joins me in all greetings.
Yours sincerely
C. S. Lewis
TO JOCELYN GIBB (BOD):
Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
Nov 19/1956
Dear Gibb
I shall be free (and here) on Tue. 27th almost any time between lunch and dinner. Let me know your probable hour?
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO JOHN H. MCCALLUM (P): TS
56/33
The Kilns, Kiln Lane,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford.
19th November 1956.
Dear Mac,
Thanks for your letters of November 12th, with enclosure, and of the 14th. The brutes gave me no proof, and have foisted a gross error of fact about Tolkien onto me!309
Yours,
C. S. Lewis
TO JOCELYN GIBB (BOD): PC
Magdalene
Nov 22 [1956]
Frightfully sorry but they have put on a Committee on Nov 27 which I can’t possibly skip. I’d probably (almost certainly) be free by 5 p.m.
C.S.L.
TO J. O. REED (P):
The Kilns
Headington Quarry
Oxford
Nov. 24/56
Dear Reed
I think less of this island for not having found you a job good enough to keep you from trying barbarous lands, but all my hearty good wishes go with you to Rhodesia. Of course you were thrice welcome to the little I have been able to do.
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W):
The Kilns,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford
Nov. 25th 1956
My dear Arthur–
Joy is in hospital, suffering from cancer. The prospects are 1. A tiny 100th chance of ultimate cure. 2. A reasonable probability of some years more of (tolerable) life. 3. A real danger that she may die in a few months.
It will be a great tragedy for me to lose her. In the meantime, if she gets over this bout and emerges from hospital she will no longer be fit to live alone so she must come and live here. That means (in order to avoid scandal) that our marriage must shortly be published. W. has written to Janie and the Ewarts to tell them I am getting married, and I didn’t want the news to take you by surprise. I know you will pray for her and for me: and for W., to whom also, the loss if we lose her, will be great.
Yours ever
Jack
TO I. O. EVANS (W):
Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
Nov 27th 1956
Dear Evans
Your cheering letter about Orual came very à propos, for that book has had a worse reception from the critics than any I ever wrote. I am delighted that you, at any rate, like it. Brady’s article310 contains as much jam as the greediest author could demand: and good quality jam too.
I think the World History is just the thing for you and you will do it very well.311 It is also eminently worth doing. It might easily be your best work, and I’m glad the idea came to you. With v. many thanks.
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO JOCELYN GIBB (BOD):
Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
Nov 30/56
Dear Gibb
I have squeezed the stuff into the cardboard Tube (for so I emend cube, the MS. reading) and will post it this morning.312 Many thanks. The reviews en masse were much less depressing than the chance selection I had seen.
The honey is perhaps the best I’ve ever eaten. Tell the bees I said so.
Yours sticky but grateful
C. S. Lewis
TO KENNETH RECKFORD (BOD):313
Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
Dec 3/56
Dear Mr. Reckford
It was most kind of you to write and tell me that you liked the Narnian stories. I felt some sadness in ending that world myself: but those old enough to read the books are also old enough to be told that all countries, except Aslan’s country, are transitory With warm regards to Mrs. Reckford and yourself.
Yours sincerely
C. S. Lewis
TO MRS JOHNSON (P):
Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
Dec 3/1956
Dear Mrs. Johnson
I am glad you’ve got onto Lilith and I quite agree with what you say about it. The only thing I don’t like is the baby-language of the children. The best short fairy tale is The Golden Key.314 Your mountains (how lovely to live in a country that still has beavers! We lost ours about 700 years ago) sound heavenly. I doubt if my namesake C. D. Lewis does write tekkies.315 In great haste.
Yours sincerely
C. S. Lewis
TO JOCELYN GIBB (BOD):
The Kilns
Headington Quarry
Oxford
Dec. 3rd 1956
My dear Gibb
Will you please ask them to send 1 copy of Problem of Pain and 1 of Mere Christianity ‘with compliments from Mrs. Gresham’ to Mrs. Croxford, Mayfair I, Wingfield Hospital, Headington, Oxford?
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO MR LUCAS (L):
Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
Dec. 6th 1956
Dear Mr Lucas
(1) I think there may be some humour.316 Matt. IX.12317 (People who are well don’t need doctors) could well be said in a way that wd be v. funny to everyone present except the Pharisees. So might Matt. XVII. 25.318 And in Mark X.30–quickly slipping in ‘tribulations’ among all the assets–that cd. be funny too.319 And of course the Parable of the Unjust Steward320 (its comic element is well brought out in Dorothy Sayers’ excellent Man born to be King).
(2) If there were more humour, should we (modern Occidentals) see it? I’ve been much struck in conversation with a Jewess321 by the extent to which Jews see humour in the O.T. where we don’t. Humour varies so much from culture to culture.
(3) How much wd. be recorded? We know (John XXI. 25)322 that we have only a tiny fraction of what Our Lord said. Wd. the Evangelists, anxious to get across what was vitally necessary, include it? They told us nothing about His appearance, clothes, physical habits–none of what a modern biographer would put in.
TO FATHER PETER MILWARD SJ (W):
The Kilns
Headington Quarry
Oxford
Dec 10th 1956
Dear Father Milward
Thanks for your letter of Nov 5. One historical point first. There cd. not have been an allegory about the atomic bomb when Tolkien began his romance for he did so before it was invented.323 That, however, has little to do with the theoretical question: tho’ it has much to do with the extreme danger, in individual cases, of applying allegorical interpretations. We shd. probably find that many particular allegories critics read into Langland or Spenser are impossible for just that sort of reason, if we knew all the facts. I am also convinced that the wit of man cannot devise a story in wh. the wit of some other man cannot find an allegory.
For the rest, I wd. agree that the word can be used in wider or narrower senses. Indeed, in so far as the things unseen are manifested by the things seen, one might from one point of view call the whole material universe an allegory. The truth is it’s one of those words which needs defining in each context where one uses it. It wd. be disastrous if anyone took your statement that the Nativity is the greatest of all allegories to mean that the physical event was merely feigned!324
Who is the man on your stamp? Looks like a tough to me.325 Thanks for pleasant card, and all good wishes.
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO VERA GEBBERT (W):
The Kilns,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford
Dec 10th 1956
Dear Mrs. Gebbert–
Oh I’m sure you do the Tycoon a grave injustice in saying his oeuvre (it seems the latest thing to put this word in the singular) makes as much sense as Picasso’s. No more than that? If it’s really true you must have him analyzed. But I’ll not believe it.
Your present had the charm of being quite unguessable from the shape of the parcel. Even when I’d got down to the cardboard box I still had no idea…(It can’t be a box of soldiers?) Well, the ties are resplendent. We’ll have to get new clothes to wear with them. A thousand thanks. But look: you must stop. We never send any one any presents, so why shd. we get any. Our real name is Scrooge. We’ve contracted out of all that. So for this time, very real thanks; but no more.
My brother is away for a day or two. I got back for my Cambridge term to-day–a great College feast last night with all the good wines and good foods in the world, and no hang-over this morning. Never is if you stick to what you drink at table: it’s that silly messing about with spirits afterwards that does the trouble. I had a nice term. I continue slimming. There’s no sun in our sky but it’s very warm. Hot and dark like you-know-where! Very best wishes to you and the Tycoon. God bless you.
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE (W):
The Kilns
Headington Quarry
Oxford
Dec. 12th 1956
Dear Mary Willis
I am sorry to hear that your news is still no better: but I don’t somehow think that all your friends will leave you in the lurch if things come to the worst.
Why shd. I make a mystery of my own affairs? (but don’t mention it till it becomes public). I am likely to be in the near future, both a husband and a widower. That is, I am marrying a very sick, and perhaps a dying, woman. That’s all.
We will keep one another in our prayers.
Yours
Jack
TO CECIL HARWOOD (BOD):
The Kilns
Headington Quarry
Oxford
Dec 13th 1956
Dear Cecil
(1.) I assumed that all Laurence’s terms wd. be paid out of Agapony. Will you just write to Owen and he’ll send you a cheque. And in the name of all reason don’t come down on John (who’s at the beginning of life and founding a family and all) for anything my fund can supply. It was devised for such purposes and the money in it is no longer mine: and if it were, isn’t that part of what Godparents are for?
(2.) I couldn’t get away this Vac–I am, you know, a daily visitant at a hospital and also have two schoolboy stepsons in the house! I like them both. No doubt I’ll have had enough of ‘fresh, young life’ before their holidays are over. But anything (almost) is better than the dark solitude during W’s frequent absences. But I’d like to have met the if only in order to address him as 326 Still more, to have been with you and Marguerite.327 Love to both, and all.
Yours
Jack
From suicide to book collecting is a huge step up for poor Eric.328 Dare one hope this is a real beginning of any permanent improvement?
The following announcement appeared in The Times on 24 December 1956, p. 8: ‘A marriage has taken place between Professor C. S. Lewis, of Magdalene College, Cambridge, and Mrs Joy Gresham, now a patient in the Churchill Hospital, Oxford. It is requested that no letters be sent.’
TO DOROTHY L. SAYERS (W):
The Kilns
Headington Quarry
Oxford
Dec 24th 1956
Dear Dorothy
Thanks for your kind card. You may see in the Times a notice of my marriage to Joy Gresham. She is in hospital (cancer) and not likely to live; but if she gets over this go she must be given a home here. You will not think that anything wrong is going to happen. Certain problems do not arise between a dying woman and an elderly man. What I am mainly acquiring is two (nice) stepsons. Pray for us all, and God bless you.
Yours
Jack
TO JOAN LANCASTER (BOD):
The Kilns
Headington Quarry
Oxford
Dec 28th 1956
Dear Joan
Thank you very much for your beautiful picture. Unfortunately that sentence (the one I’ve just written) is what I should have had to say, out of politeness, even if it had been a horrid picture! That’s the worst (even of ‘white’) lies; when you really mean that a present is beautiful, there is nothing left to say. But this picture really is very good; the design good and the colour even better. What is it done in? It doesn’t look either like oils or like water colours. The effect is wonderfully deep, rich, and attractive.
We have had a snowy Christmas here, which is unusual in England, but to-day it is all washed away by rain; horrid under-foot.
All good wishes for the New Year.
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO SARAH NEYLAN (T):
The Kilns
Headington Quarry
Oxford
Dec 30th 1956
My dear Sarah
Thank you for the beautiful little jar. I am trying to think of some treasure choice enough to put in it. I am also v. ashamed of not having sent you a word this Christmas. But I’ve been really snowed under. All domestic help was away for its holidays. I have a sick (v. sick) wife to visit daily in hospital. At home I had to look after a sick* brother, 2 schoolboy stepsons, one dog, one cat, four geese, umpteen hens, two stoves, three pipes in danger of freezing: so I was pretty busy and pretty tired. Well, all good wishes to all of you and here’s a new-year’s gift.
With Love
C. S. Lewis
* SICK. It looks like RICH (he isn’t!)
TO WILLIAM GRESHAM (W):
The Kilns
Headington Quarry
Oxford
Dec. 30/56
Dear Bill
Thanks for your kind letter. Joy is in plaster now (the blasted growth had nearly eaten thro’ her thigh-bone, so she is really a fracture case at present), much better than she was 10 days ago.
The boys are of course with me and I’m learning a lot! They’re a nice pair and easy to get on with–if only they got on better with one another: but of course they are v. different types and have no tastes or interests in common. According to school reports both have brains (David more) and are both disinclined to work hard. (Who isn’t?)
All the best.
Yours
Jack
I’d write more and better only the Christmas period with all domestic help away for its holidays, the boys to look after, Warnie ill upstairs, and a daily visit to poor Joy, and dog & cat & geese & hens, and eternal, merciless letter-writing, have left me tired–almost like front-line tiredness.
TO VERA GEBBERT (W): TS
56/89
The Kilns, Kiln Lane,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford.
31st December 1956.
Dear Mrs. Gebbert,
Many thanks for your long and interesting letter of the 28th. (Surely not? Even by jet plane I don’t see how it could have reached me this morning!)
I’m so glad that you liked the books329 as much as we did the ties; yes, it seems odd they should be cheap, unless the explanation is that they are an English export, and thus would naturally undersell the native article. It is naughty, but kind of you to promise some more, and we shall go about the town mighty fine in consequence.
This is bad news about the Tycoon; flu is unpleasant, but flu plus bronchitis is intolerable; to say nothing of missing his Xmas, which means so much at his age. I hope by the time that this reaches you, you will both be as giants refreshed.330 My own Christmas was hardly more pleasant; I had my brother in bed, two boys in the house, no domestic help, all the chores to do in fact for four people, four geese, ten hens, a cat, and a dog. Whew, but it has left me tired! My overriding feeling is profound gratitude that next Xmas is 11 ¾ months away.
I am much intrigued by the news of the novel,331 of which the theme sounds most promising; it is the sort of book which should go down well over here, where all American novels are booming; and your own country is so big that there must be an enormous number of people to whom the life of Carmel, Cal. is as alien as it would be to us. Do peg away at it, and good luck to the venture. Apropos of books, my brother has one which he describes as ‘the mixture as before’ which Harcourt, Brace are bringing out in the spring; and wants to warn you not to buy it, as your name tops his list for complimentary copies when the time comes.
You tell us little or nothing about your milieu. How does New York as a home strike a Californian? How will you like the extremes of heat and cold? Whenever the American weather makes the news in our papers, I notice that New York is either immobilized by a blizzard, or else the shade temperature is away up in the hundreds. Personally, having been reared in the North of Ireland, I feel that nearly all this planet has far too much ‘weather’. What I like is unnoticeable weather–neither hot nor cold nor windy nor calm or wet or dry. But this luxury I have’nt had since I was a boy.
My brother joins me in sending you (and the Tycoon) our warmest good wishes for 1957.
Yours affectionately,
C. S. Lewis