TO JOCELYN GIBB (BOD):
The Kilns,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford
2/1/58
Dear Gibb–
(1.) If my book dies soon the memory of Pilgrim will outlive it and [no] note will be needed:1 if, on t’other hand, it prove aere perennius,2 school edtns. will explain him and we shall have done our bit towards eternising the infamy of his persecutors.
(3.)3 Do Arabic if you like. But the Psalm number must be in different type from the verse number. Otherwise it is hard to distinguish III, 3 from ‘3,3’ in some Psalms mentioned a few lines before. But I hope the difference will not be achieved by making the Psalm number heavier (i.e. blacker). That looks so dreadfully text-booky. Different sizes wd. be better: or the traditional ‘5 3–6’.4
(4.) Yes, we can have a list of Psalms mentioned and pp. on which they’re mentioned: and we can have the Latin first words as well as the English: and we can have one or two Psalms (certainly xix) printed in full. Of course I can’t do this for you till we’re in page-proof.
Your words imply that I ate the whole pot of honey at one breakfast! This is erroneous.
You still haven’t got the hymn right!5 ‘Pay the price of sin’ = ‘redeem’: not ‘pay the price of redemption’!
Yours
C. S. Lewis
My wife goes on wonderfully.
TO DON LUIGI PEDROLLO (V):
Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
Jan. 8 MCML VIII
Dilectissime Pater
Grato animo accepi salutationes vestras. Vos, si placuerit, intra orationes quas pro me ex caritate vestra facitis, nunc pro me gratias agite; facit enim mihi magna qui potens est. Ante x menses uxorem duxi, ut omnes tunc augurabantur, moribundam. Matrimonium junctum est et missa nuptialis celebrata juxta lectum. Nullam spem medici praetendebant; nam os femoris fere totum atrocissimo morbo consumptum.
Attamen, contra omnia omina, sanatum et (ut ita dicam) reaedificatum est. Jam convalescit mulier; immo ambulat, claudicans sane, sed ambulat. Sive hoc (certe mirabile) miraculum fuerit, nescio; non enim sine orationibus Ecclesiae et sancti sacerdotis manuum impositione evenit. Quid dicam nisi Unde hoc mihi, qui nil tale merui?
Quotidie orationem fundo pro anima Patris Johannis Calabria et Congregatione. Valete.
C. S. Lewis
Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
Jan. 8 1958
Dearest Father
Thank you for your greetings. If you will, in the prayers which you say for me out of charity, now give thanks to the Lord; for He that is mighty does to me great things.6 Ten months ago I married a woman who, everybody then thought, was about to die. The marriage rite and service were held next to her bed. The doctors did not give us the illusion of any hope; the thigh-bone was in fact almost totally devastated by a most atrocious disease.
Yet, against all odds, it was cured and (so to say) rebuilt. My wife is now convalescent, or better, she walks–she limps, but walks. I do not know if this (clearly extraordinary) fact was a miracle; in any event, it was not without the prayers of the Church and the imposition of the hands of a holy priest that it took place. What can I say unless Whence is this to me,7 who did not deserve anything of this sort?
I pray every day for the soul of Father Giovanni Calabria and for the Congregation. Farewell
C. S. Lewis
TO KATHRYN STILLWELL (P):
Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
14/1/58
Dear Miss Stillwell
No. The story about my coming to teach at Cornell is quite untrue.
Yes, I read Animal Farm.8 I can’t understand why so few mention it while everyone talks about 1984–surely a far inferior work.
Yours sincerely
C. S. Lewis
TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE (W):
Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
14/1/58
Dear Mary Willis
Your letter reached me before I left home this morning on my way back to college, this being the first day of term. I came by car (hired) and Joy came with me for the drive & went home after lunch. It sounds a small thing, but it would have been incredible even a month ago.
I am sorry you have been having trouble with your cat. We (have) had a rather ‘animallic’ time for our old bitch (we thought she knew better) made us an unexpected Christmas present of 10 puppies! We are tired of hearing neighbours say ‘Oh, thank you–we’d love a puppy, but–’
The worst of all economies is on necessary medicines, tho’ I quite understand how you are tempted to it. What a pity you haven’t got our National Health system in America. I wish I could help. I can only continue my prayers. My bones, by the way, are quite quiescent, so I don’t need to be pitied. God has been wonderfully good to us in every way.
Forgive my awful hand and short letters–both have the same cause. This is the 8th letter (all by hand) and the end is not yet! God bless you, and guard you from all danger.
Yours sincerely
C. S. Lewis
After the death of Dorothy L. Sayers, Lewis was invited to compose a panegyric to be read at her memorial service, to be held at St Margaret’s Church, London, on 15 January 1958. Lewis was unable to attend, but his composition was read by the Lord Bishop of Chichester, George Bell. Shortly afterwards, Sayers’ son, Anthony Fleming,9 wrote to thank him for the panegyric.10 The following is Lewis’s reply.
TO ANTHONY FLEMING (W):
Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
21/1/58
Dear Mr. Fleming
Thank you for your most kind letter. I am relieved to find that the little speech has pleased those whose approval at such a time matters most–it is so easy to go wrong in a thing of that kind and so to give offence.
I am perfectly willing that it should be printed, but please ask whoever sees to it to be sure and let me see a proof. Even if printers made no mistakes, my villainous writing nearly always leads to some.
‘Affliction’ is too strong a word for my bone trouble. ‘Nuisance’ is about all I can claim for it. Your loss is a real affliction, on which I offer my sympathy,
Yours sincerely
C. S. Lewis
TO JOCELYN GIBB (BOD):
Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
24/1/58
Dear Gibb
The number of Psalms I shall want listed (with opening words both Latin and English as you suggested) is 65.11
I don’t think that bunching them under ‘chapters where mentioned’ is a good plan. For (a) several are mentioned in more than one chapter, so that there wd. have to be either repetitions or misleading omissions. (b.) When I’m reading a book where notes are bunched by chapters I find I always look up the notes before I’ve mentally noted the number or title of the chapter I’m in and then have to turn back to find it. (So do you, you know)
The Psalms I shd. like reproduced in full are Numbers 8, 19, 45, 104, and 110. (104 is long but the book will look thin enough at 12/6 anyway!)
In the Blurb the sentence I have underlined is hardly true.12 I say precious little here (I said lots in my OHEL vol.) about the time of Coverdale.13 Cd. you say* –‘He relates the Psalms to this triple background: to the ancient Judaic religion which produced them, to the age of Christ when they took on new meanings, and to our own daily experience in the modern world’
I think your latest idea about typography (for Psalm and verse-number) is probably the right one.
Your P.C. suggested a glorious holiday.14
Yours
C. S. Lewis
* If you do, the ‘simple approach’ (wh. I don’t greatly fancy in any case!) must go out.
TO ROGER LANCELYN GREEN (BOD):
As from Magdalene
25/1/58
My dear Roger–
Joy and I are both overwhelmed at your shocking news. Poor, poor boy–but I’m sorrier for you and June. If the worst happens, he, when grown up, will never know his loss. I am particularly sorry you had first the minor blow & then, when you thought you knew the worst, the major. It seems a refinement to suffering.15
I suppose we nearly all have our turn of tragedy, like troops going into the line to be blooded. It is not a consolation to think thus. It may be a stiffener–‘this also is one of the things man is born to’. You will all be much in my prayers and thoughts.
I’m sorry about Monday. A 2.15 meeting at Cambridge forced me for once to take the morning train and I quite forgot to notify you of the change. Oh hell–it’s a trifle, but I could wish I had not chosen this of all moments at which to inflict on you even so small a frustration. (Little things, I know, can add even to great ones: makes you feel ‘Even this is taken from me.’)
I think May 19th will be alright. If so, I’ll book it when I get back to College.
God comfort you.
Yours
Jack We are both well.
TO JOCELYN GIBB (BOD):
Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
6/2/58
Dear Gibb
‘Let the field be joyful etc’ is xcvi, 12.
I don’t think the abridgement of Miracles is too bad. Various annexes and substituted passages which I want are now in the typist’s hands. As soon as they are done I will write to you.16
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO JOAN LANCASTER (BOD):
As from Magdalene College
Cambridge
Feb 9th 1958
Dear Joan
Thank you for the poems. I thought them very nice and quite agree with what they say. I liked the one called Hope best.
I shall be glad when people begin talking about other things than Sputniks, won’t you? One gets quite sick of the whole subject. The pity is that some cosmic rays didn’t produce a mutation in the dog which would have made it super-rational: then it might have found its way back alive and started taking revenge on the humans!17
Happy New Year.
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO MERVYN PEAKE (UCL):18
Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
10. 2. 58
Dear Sir,
May I make so free as to tell you what a profound impression your Titus Groan and Gormenghast19 are making on me. ‘Are making’, because thank goodness, I have not yet finished the second: Titus is just playing marbles in the Lichen Fort at the moment.20
I suppose they must have been talked about a good deal (they wouldn’t otherwise have reached me who, for all I know about what’s going on, might as well be always asleep among the Bright Images)21 but I can see they are not rated at their true worth. People now all seem to want ‘a slice of life’ (the flaccid, tepid, grey-to-brown shapeless object is a better image than they know) or a ‘comment on life’. To me those who merely comment on experience seem far less valuable than those who add to it, who make me experience what I never experienced before.
I would not for anything have missed Gormenghast. It has the hallmark of a true myth: i.e. you have seen nothing like it before you read the book, but after that you see things like it everywhere. What one may call ‘the Gormenghastly’ has given me a New Universal: particulars to put inside it are never in short supply. That is why fools (I bet) tried to ‘interpret’ it as an allegory. They see one of the innumerable ‘meanings’ which are always coming out of it (because it is alive and fertile) and conclude that you began and ended by putting in that, and no more.
If they tell you it’s deuced leisurely, and the story takes a long time to develop, don’t listen to them. It ought to be, and must be, slow. That endless, tragic, farcical, unnecessary, ineluctable sorrow can’t be abridged. I love the length. I like things long–drinks, love-passages, walks, silences, and, above all, books. Give me a good square meal like The Faerie Queene or The Lord of the Rings. The Odyssey is a mere lunch, after all. (If only one knew classical Persian! I’m told Firdausi is a good cut-and-come-again poet.)
Thank you for adding to a class of literature in which the attempts are few and the successes very few indeed.
Yours truly,
C. S. Lewis
TO MR PITMAN (P):
Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
13/2/58
Dear Mr. Pitman
I am not quite clear whether you are talking of this problem as it applies to the married or the unmarried.22 The idea of permanent sexual abstinence within marriage (if that is what you mean at one point in your letter) wd. seem to be vetoed by St Paul’s advice, or even command, in I Cor vii, 5–6.23
The metamorphosis of the lizard into the stallion was meant to symbolise perfect sublimation, after painful struggle and agonising surrender, not by ordinary psychological law but by supernatural Grace.24 The evidence seems to be that God sometimes works such a complete metamorphosis and sometimes not. We don’t know why: God forbid we shd. presume it went by merit.
He never in my unmarried days did it for me. He gave me–at least and after many ups and downs, the power to resist the temptation so far as the act was concerned. He never stopped the recurrent temptations, nor was I guarded from the sin of mental consent. I don’t mean I wasn’t given sufficient Grace. I mean that I sometimes fell into it, Graceorno.
One may, I suppose, regard this as partly penal. One is paying for the physical (and still more the imaginative) sins of ones earlier life. One may also regard it as a tribulation, like any other. The great discovery for me was that the attack does not last forever. It is the devil’s lie that the only escape from the tension is through yielding. After prolonged resistance it will go away: what seemed yesterday impossible to turn one’s mind from will to-day be utterly unenchanted, insipid, tedious.
Do you know St. François de Sales’ chapter De la douceur:25 meekness to God, to one’s neighbour, and (surprisingly and importantly) to oneself? Disgust, self-contempt, self-hatred–rhetoric against the sin and (still more) vilification of sexuality or the body in themselves–are emphatically not the weapons for this warfare. We must be relieved, not horrified, by the fact that the whole thing is humiliating, undignified, ridiculous; the lofty vices wd. be far worse. Nor must we exaggerate our suffering. We talk of ‘torture’: five minutes of really acute toothache wd. restore our sense of proportion! In a word, no melodrama. The sin, if we fall into it, must be repented, like all our others. God will forgive. The temptation is a darn nuisance, to be borne with patience as long as God wills. On the purely physical side (but people no doubt differ) I’ve always found that tea and bodily weariness are the two great disposing factors, and therefore the great dangers. Sadness is also a danger: lust in my experience follows disgruntlement nearly always. Love of every sort is a guard against lust, even, by a divine paradox, sexual love is a guard against lust. No woman is more easily and painlessly abstained from, if need be, than the woman one loves. And I’m sure purely male society is an enemy to chastity. I don’t mean a temptation to homosexuality: I mean that the absence of ordinary female society provokes the normal appetite.
Yours sincerely
C. S. Lewis
TO JOHN H. MCCALLUM (P):
As from Magdalene,
Cambridge.
17/2/58
Dear McCallum
The Christian Herald printer had made absolute nonsense of one sentence in that article, so you’re a clever man if you understood it!26 I don’t think I’ll do any more Spacemanship. Science-fiction has become too scientific and my old windjammer is no longer spaceworthy.
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO JOCELYN GIBB (BOD):
Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
20/2/58
Dear Gibb
(1.) It is the most ticklish thing in the world to decide just when we gain more than we lose by going into a cheap edition.27 I presume you have weighed the pro’s and con’s. I have no objection to the format. If you are satisfied that it is a prudent change, I must accept your view.
(2.) I return Miracles with my modifications. I thought rather better of the abridgement than you.
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE (W):
As from Magdalene College,
Cambridge
22/2/58
Dear Mary Willis
Joy (who thanks you for your most kind message) tells me I am writing to you on George Washington’s birthday, so ‘there’s glory for you’28 as Humpty Dumpty would say. God is very good to us and we go on happily at present. We kept one of the puppies, and call him Guppy (out of Bleak House)29 and he is a lively youngster. I notice, as I have done before in similar circumstances, the common age is a bond stronger than common species: i.e. Guppy is friends with the kitten and Guppy’s mother is friends with the old cat–a huge Tom called Ginger. I’m glad my angels should be thought more correct than those of the ‘Repository Artists’, but what the dickens are Repository Artists?30 I never heard of them.
I am sorry you had such a bad time at the dentist’s but hope that the total result is an improvement. Your mention of ‘Valentines’ carried me back many years: I have not seen one since I was a small boy, as they have almost died out in this country.
Yes, we must not fret about not doing God those supposed services which He in fact does not allow us to do. Very often I expect, the service He really demands is that of not being (apparently) used, or not in the way we expected, or not in a way we can perceive.
I’ve written an article for an American magazine called The Christian Herald.
With all good wishes and love from us both.
Yours
Jack
TO JOCELYN GIBB (BOD):
As from Magdalene College
Cambridge
22/2/58
Dear Gibb
(1.) On the Psalms, I approve all the typographical solutions, but I shall stick to my capital H for pronouns referring to God. Your B.C.P.31 resembles all others in not having them. But they often get one beautifully out of ambiguities which the use of pronouns normally begets. I won’t throw away the convenience.
(2.) By Jove, of course there must be a note showing that the paperback Miracles is the abridgement. I’m glad you thought of this and I enclose one.
By the way, it would be better if you addressed letters to College: otherwise they add to the week-end accumulation here.
Yours
C. S. Lewis
This is an abridgement, approved and corrected by me, of a book which appeared more than ten years ago under the same title and is still available. I am satisfied that this abridgement preserves without distortion or falsification as much of the original as will fit into a paper-back edition.
C.S.L.32
TO JOCELYN GIBB (BOD):
Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
7/3/58
Dear Gibb
1. I suggest as titles for the abridged Miracles, in order of preference
The Problem of Miracles
The Christian Miracles
What to think about Miracles33
2. I’d quite forgotten about the Puffin LWW. If you think we should both gain more than we lose by this publication, go ahead. The format of the specimen you sent me is quite inoffensive.
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO HERBERT PALMER (TEX):
Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
15/3/58
My dear Palmer
Thank you very much for The Ride from Hell which it is nice to meet now properly clothed. I hope it will have all the success it deserves–though I very much doubt my power of assisting this. I often advise people to read various books but only very few take in advice. Either the young man you mention never turned up or I have forgotten it.
The proper title for my book was Bareface, but the publishers wouldn’t have that because they said people wd. think it promised a book about Red Indians! (Tolkien’s title for The Lord of the Rings was objected to on the ground that it suggested prizefighting!).
The world gets madder every day. Here in Cambridge especially the things they say about English Literature wd. drive one to despair. Well, we must endure. Thank heavens we both can at least remember civilisation and
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO ROGER LANCELYN GREEN (BOD):
The Kilns,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford
17/3/58
My dear Roger
Thank God. You have been much in our minds and hopes and fears and prayers. Of course the worst of the brunt has fallen on you and June: even if Richard had lost both eyes, you would have felt it far more in the long run. We’ll be delighted to see you. I suggest Thurs 27th as a day and dinner here (6.45) as a meeting. Can do?
Yours
Jack
TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W):
The Kilns,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford
26/3/58
My dear Arthur–
Nice to hear from you. I don’t think I can make any plans for the summer. Joy (how unlike poor Minto) wd. not breathe a word against my going. But, though all goes splendidly, the sword of Damocles hangs over us. How shd. I feel if it descended quite soon and I then felt ‘I did not even stay with her while I had her.’ If, by God’s mercy, all continued to go well for a couple of years it wd. be a different matter.
I suppose it is idle to speak of your coming to England? There’s a proper spare room here now, and central heating–and Magdalene is much nicer to stay at than Magdalen. You cd. have breakfast when you pleased in your own sitting room.
Things are wonderful at present. Joy is up all day, can get in and out of cars and go up and down stairs, keeps all the staff in good form, and is (of course) re-decorating the house. You have no idea how lovely it is to have no nurses about.
But I’ve been meaning to write to you about the last of all the nurses, because her conversation was so exactly that of Miss F’s Aunt.35 Here is a specimen: ‘I once nursed a lady on Boar’s Hill. When I was taking my patient out in her bath chair we used to meet dear Mr Pilkington. He was looking for bees in the woods. With his binoculars. He always stopped his car to tell my patient. The reason he told her about the bees was that she was a Scotchwoman. You see, she was a whiskey lady.’
I’m correcting the proofs of that book on the Psalms at present.
God bless you, and thank you for your prayers, which I know you will continue.
Yours
Jack
TO JOCELYN GIBB (BOD):
The Kilns,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford
27/3/58
Dear Gibb–
Here are the proofs of Reflections. I have followed your correction on p. 31 but stuck to my guns on pp. 79, 121. Please make sure on p. 35 they get my correction: v. (abbreviation for ‘verse’), not v (= 5). I have added a dedication: you will see that on p. vii.36
I want two entries added. First ‘Appendix’ containing full text, from Prayer Book version, of the Psalms mentioned: then, ‘List of Psalms discussed or mentioned in this book.’ Actually, we ought to have had footnotes directing people to this Appendix at the point where those Psalms are dealt with in the text, but I take it it is now too late. The next big thing is to put the Appendix first after the text where it will catch more attention. I think ‘List’ is more accurate for the next item than ‘Index’. This list is now with the typist, who can’t get it done before Monday.37
About the Dust Cover, I like the colour scheme and wouldn’t object. If you have it, I should go for the best design, and archaeology be damned. But I don’t like the letters. We have very nice plain Roman Capitals now (even those one sees over every H. W. Smith’s shop)38 and I think it a bad fashion to substitute printed mimicry of ugly handwriting. I wish all publishers wd. stop it. Even if the handwriting were a beautiful script, which this is not, the whole idea that decoration consists in making everything masquerade as something else, is surely wrong. Do you like smoking-rooms on ships made up to look like Scotch baronial halls?39 I’ll try to send the TS back tomorrow, and also that of the abridged Miracles in which I find no fault. I’m sorry this is a day late, but you haven’t given me much time! All the best.
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO JOCELYN GIBB (BOD): TS
58/64
The Kilns, Kiln Lane,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford.
27th March 1958.
Dear Gibb,
I liked Sieveking’s script, as far as he had gone, very much indeed and told him to go ahead, on the understanding (which he had no objection to) that I could have a look at each episode as he finished it and suggest modifications if need be.
Yours,
C. S. Lewis
C.S.L. Reflections on the Psalms Late corrections
p. 3, l. 7 for literaure read literature
p. 25, l. 3 from end of para 1 for perfects read prefects
p. 38, l. 23 for Thee ( read Thee’ (
p. 118, l. 1 for disciple read disciples
TO WILLIAM P. WYLIE (BOD):
As from Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
28/3/58
Dear Mr. Wylie–
I don’t know enough to give a very useful opinion on the most important question you have asked me.40 I certainly don’t think we have to do with the mere fictions or delusions of individual charlatans or lunatics. Something very constant does appear again and again in Oriental religion and in its Western adaptations (ancient Gnosticism and modern Theosophy). It is one of the three perennial views of the universe, which are, in my opinion:
1. Materialism (from Democritus to Marx) 2. Amalgamated High Paganism (from Iamblichus to Steiner) 3. Christianity (from the Apostles to the child who was confirmed this year).
Of course for people like you and me the only live issue is between 2. and 3. We’re under no obligation, are we?, to say that everything in 2. is pure falsehood. May it not contain (a.) Truths about the spiritual world omitted by Revelation because they are irrelevant to our redemption. (b.) Truths omitted because they are positively dangerous and noxious to us in our present condition (c.) Real psychic facts of no particular importance (d.) Semi-rationalised–or philosophised–mythology (e.) Diabolical delusions. (f.) Straight quackery for catching flats. And all these mixed in various degrees and modes. What stamps it as an over-all false way–which is not the same as a set of totally false propositions–is, for me, the fact that it is all for people of a particular type. If all Christians were people like Origen or Henry More or Wm. Law in his last phase (but we have Aquinas, Pascal & Dr. Johnson), or people like Italian peasants & Irish nuns (but we have Hooker or Pasteur), we’d be in the same position.
Do come and see me when you are next in Cambridge.
Yours sincerely
C. S. Lewis
TO JOCELYN GIBB (BOD):
The Kilns,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford
28/3/58
Dear Gibb
a. Yes. On p. 81, middle, and in all similar places, read 5, 6 instead of 5–6.
b. Yes. On p. 35 read 17, 13. I’m unhappy, though, about either 17, 14 or more italicised 14 in the next line. You are specially trained to notice type. The general reader hardly perceives the difference between roman and italicised numbers except when they are juxtaposed and so contrasted. If we put merely italicised 14 he may think we mean Psalm XIV. On the other hand to repeat 17 so soon looks odd. I think in this passage we must either retain ‘v.’ or (if there’s room) substitute for the numeral(s) ‘in the next verse’. You cd. save a tiny bit of space by omitting ‘Yes’ in the next line.
(c.) Normalise names of books of the Bible as you please, all rom, or all itals.
(d.) It wd. be a great improvement if you would ‘juggle’ so as to get footnotes (‘see p. n’) to the psalms we are printing in full. If so, the entries shd. be as follows
|
Psalms 8. Footnote to |
p. 132, para 2, l. 1. |
|
19 |
p. 63, para 1, last l. |
|
36 |
|
|
45 |
p. 127, para 2, l. 4. |
|
68 |
p. 125, para 2, l. 1. |
|
104 |
p. 84, l. 2. |
|
110 |
122, l. 4.41 |
(e.) TS of Reflections and abridged Miracles went to you yesterday.
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE (W):
The Kilns,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford
31/3/58
Dear Mary Willis–
Thank you for your letter of the 16th. I am v. sorry to hear about the earache. It is a horrid thing, much worse than toothache.
We all go through periods of dryness in our prayers, don’t we? I doubt (but ask your directeur) whether they are necessarily a bad symptom. I sometimes suspect that what we feel to be our best prayers are really our worst: that what we are enjoying is the satisfaction of apparent success, as in executing a dance or reciting a poem. Do our prayers sometimes go wrong because we insist on trying to talk to God when He wants to talk to us.
Joy tells me that once, years ago, she was haunted one morning by a feeling that God wanted something of her, a persistent pressure like the nag of a neglected duty. And till mid-morning she kept on wondering what it was. But the moment she stopped worrying, the answer came through as plain as a spoken voice. It was ‘I don’t want you to do anything, I want to give you something’: and immediately her heart was full of peace and delight. St. Augustine says ‘God gives where He finds empty hands.’42
A man whose hands are full of parcels can’t receive a gift. Perhaps these parcels are not always sins or earthly cares, but sometimes our own fussy attempts to worship Him in our way. Incidentally, what most often interrupts my own prayers is not great distractions but tiny ones–things one will have to do or avoid in the course of the next hour.
We are all well, but tired of the refusal of spring to arrive. I’ve never known a colder, wetter, darker March. This is pretty early in the morning and Joy is still asleep: otherwise she would join me in our love to you.
Yours
Jack
TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W):
The Kilns,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford
2/4/58
My dear A–
Yes, yes, of course. If we ever dare to make any plans more than a month or so ahead, I certainly want to bring Joy to Co. Down, and the occasional hospitality of your car wd. be most welcome. As for who is going to do the talking–Joy has the extraordinary delusion that I do most of it anyway. Actually, against you and her I shd. have no chance.
I agree. One has long since come to regard Mr Woodhouse43 as the most sensible character in the book.
God bless you
Yours
Jack
TO JOCELYN GIBB (BOD):
The Kilns,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford
5/4/58
Dear Gibb
[1.] On p. 126 (glad you spotted my error) I mean Ephesians (IV) 4–7. About brackets or no brackets on, say, pp. 133 and 137, regularise whichever way, and as far as, you please.
2. Glad you agree about p. 35. By all means have verse and verses instead of v. and vv. everywhere. I am surprised there should always be room for it, but pleased
3. I hoped, rather than expected, you wd. be able to fit in Ps. 68.44 We can do without it, but if you can manage it, it wd. be nice–the book being v. short for the price anyway.
4. Ps. 14 was to have its footnote on p. 63 because it is there discussed as a whole and the discussion will make a sensible reader want to see the text as a whole: not on p. 54 where a single verse is quoted as evidence or illustration. There is the same reason for giving 104 its footnote on p. 84 instead of 77: and for Ps. 45 on p. 127 not p. 124. I think the principle will become plain if you imagine the points at which, if you were a reader who had no Prayer Book (or were too lazy to go and get it) you wd. want to have the psalm before you. As to where in the line we shd. have the superior number, I have no views. Your judgement on such a point is worth more than mine.
5. Let’s have Appendix I (sub-title ‘Selected Psalms’?) and then ‘Appendix II. Other Psalms discussed or mentioned.’ I have tried to list all the pp. where each Psalm is mentioned (tho’ doubtless many have evaded me), so it is to that extent an index. But if we used that word modern readers wd. expect it to be alphabetical. Please retain all the p. references. I don’t attach the importance you do to first mention. The first mention may be the least important.
6. Yes, Roman numerals for numbering of paragraphs if you prefer.
7. P. 126 again. Right: follow Coverdale’s punctuation.
8. You did get my last minute corrections (prefects for perfects on p. 25 l. 20 etc) didn’t you?45
9. I like the Harp jacket and agree to the itals. for title. Not sure that on the shd. not also be in itals, retaining the difference of style and colour.
All well here–tho’ now that both my stepsons are at home I sometimes think of re-writing the life of David Copperfield from the point of view of that falsely maligned and long-suffering gentleman Mr. Murdstone. By the way is Squeers still in business?46
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO WARFIELD M. FIROR (BOD):
The Kilns,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford
Easter Monday [7 April] 1958
Dear Firor
It is always nice to hear from you again and this time it was better than ever. My brother and I were both delighted with your paper on prayer. It wd. be presumption of me to say that it was entirely ‘addressed to my condition’. I am afraid most of my praying is on a lower level. But you are dead right. What you describe is what we must all wish to do. Meanwhile (on most occasions) I can only pray to pray better. You will probably [have] spotted a literal error on p. 4., para 2: for actitity read activity.
My life has greatly changed. In March 1957 I married, in hospital at her bedside, a woman apparently rapidly dying of cancer. The femur was eaten through, the hip partly destroyed, a metastasis in the shoulder and another on the other leg.
When they sent her home to die in April 57, the experienced nurses thought her life wd. be a matter of weeks. Yet the bad spots in the bones first ceased to increase and then began to heal. The pathological fracture in the femur healed. She is now up and about and walks with a limp only because the net result has been to leave one leg shorter than the other. Whether this is all due to radiotherapy, or to testosterone, or to the prayers of the good man (they seem to have prevailed in other cases) who came & laid his hands on her, is not for me to say. Of course she and I know (and you know better) by how fine a hair the sword still overhangs her head.
I am sure we shall have your prayers. My wife was the Joy Davidman whose Smoke on the Mountain (an essay on the Commandments) you have perhaps read.
All last summer I was having a pretty bad time with osteoporosis, often screaming when the muscles went into spasm and living on a rich diet of kodis and chloral. It is now quite painless: whether by vis medicatrix naturae47 or by wearing a surgical belt, I don’t know. To write such a medical letter to a great pathologist is to give him rather ‘a busman’s holiday’! But I thought you wd. like to know–it astonished me–how much gaiety and happiness there was between us during all those months when she was in such immediate danger (not pain by then) and I in such pain.
You are daily in my prayers (such as they are). God bless you.
Yours
C. S. Lewis
P.S. About publication of your essay. I don’t know the American periodical market at all. An article of mine has just appeared in The Christian Herald but it was on a subject chosen by the editor. On the whole, I think the least troublesome and least time-wasting thing is to put yourself in the hands of a Literary Agent.* They’ll charge a commission, of course, but they do know how to place things and often make better terms than the inexperienced author wd. make for himself. No doubt for you an essay on Cancer wd. be more easily placed. If you have anything ‘popular’ to say about it, it might be a good way of ‘putting yourself on the carpet’ and getting a hearing, later, for what you have to say on a greater matter.
* My wife says Brandt and Brandt, 101 Park Avenue, New York 17 are, or lately were, a good firm.48
TO JOCELYN GIBB (BOD):
The Kilns
12/4/58
Dear Gibb
I enclose MS. of Appendix II. Yes, i.e. emeth at top of p. 83.49
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE (W):
The Kilns,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford
15/4/58
Dear Mary Willis–
What lovely news you have to tell. I do thank God on your behalf most heartily. What strange tricks our minds play!–that we should think it presumption to believe what we [are] forbidden not to believe. About past, long past, sins: I had been a Christian for many years before I really believed in the forgiveness of sins, or more strictly, before my theoretical belief became a reality to me. I fancy this may not be so uncommon.
Joy sends her love. We were away at a v. nice country hotel last week having at last, what we never had before, a honeymoon! Here’s another absurdity of the mind: I’m such a confirmed old bachelor that I couldn’t help feeling I was being rather naughty (‘Staying with a woman at a hotel!’ Just like people in the newspapers!) I can’t write more, for I’m travelling back to Cambridge to day and the Vicar is coming in a few minutes to give Joy her Easter Communion (she still can’t manage church).
God bless you & more.
Yours
Jack
P.S.–By the way, you are one of the minority of my numerous female correspondents who didn’t gradually fade away as soon as they heard I was married!
TO JOCELYN GIBB (BOD):
Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
17/4/58
Dear Gibb
1. I wd. prefer the seven selected Psalms to be retained in Appendix I and the word ‘other’ to be omitted from its heading. Can you, please, even now make it so? The method you suggest will, I believe, be a nuisance to some readers, especially, as it involves the disappearance of the page references for those seven. A reader may well want to have before him all mentions of a particular Psalm–and that particular Psalm may be one of the Seven. Sorry to be troublesome, but I shd. v. much deplore the other plan.
2. Yes, I suppose we must let Miracles go ahead without my seeing the proofs again.
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO ROGER LANCELYN GREEN (BOD):
Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
17/4/58
My dear Roger–
May 19th it is quoad dinner and bed, but no B & B, for I have a Board in Cambridge that afternoon and must go by the morning train. I leave it entirely to you whether you prefer to accompany me and use a spare afternoon in Cambridge, or to follow by the 2.20.
I say–the Sailing of the Ark is not (humiliating explanation!) meant to be funny.50 The Unicorn, as often in medieval symbolism, is Christ, rejected. The ‘stable and manger’ to wh. He will come long after are those at Bethlehem.
We’re all well and hope you are. All loves.
Yours
Jack
TO MURIEL BRADBROOK (W):
Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
18/4/58
Dear Muriel–
I am glad you raised this question. I was maintaining yesterday that when a bifurcation of meaning is sufficiently old and wide, the resulting senses often enter the linguistic consciousness of each new generation as mere homophones, and their reunion has the explosion of a pun.51
But on the other hand, when the bifurcation is less wide there may be a period during which the speakers really do not know in which sense they are using the word. When we speak of a ‘simple meal’ do we always know whether we mean (a) Not complicated (b) Modest, not ‘posh’, or (c) Easy to prepare? (Of course they needn’t coincide. A haunch of venison is more ‘posh’ than a shepherd’s pie, but less complicated, and helpings of caviar out of a jar are easier to prepare than either).
In the passage you quote, almost all of the senses of ‘sad’ (including that which would yield a tautology) seem to me possible, and I suggest that Webster may not have made up his mind between them.52 Cf. the passage in Boswell where Goldsmith lets Johnson tell him what he meant by ‘slow’ in the first line of the Traveller!53
Yours
Jack
TO JANE DOUGLASS (W):
Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
19/4/58
Dear Miss Douglass–
I am sorry to have been so long returning your script. I can’t judge it myself (I think I told you how un-film-minded I was).
There are, to be frank, things I don’t like about it. I don’t think there’s any point in Lucy’s feeling ‘creepy’ in the study: it was the long, empty passages upstairs that did that. And I don’t like committing myself to exact ages for the children. But all these objections may only show my ignorance of the medium. A friend, better qualified than I to judge, read it and pronounced it ‘un-cinematic’: said there was too much static dialogue.
I’m sorry this is so discouraging: but if, as I suspect, you are embarked on an unpromising proposition (our lives are littered with false starts! at least mine is) the sooner you discover it the better. But of course you’ll take other advice as well. All I am anxious for is that, if the thing is not going to work in the end, I shall not have it on my conscience that I lured you into wasting a moment longer than necessary.
I hope you are quite recovered and that your tour has, on the whole, done good.
Yours sincerely
C. S. Lewis
TO GEORGE SAYER (W):
As from Magdalene
20/4/58
Dear George
You and Moira must dine with me this time, in my rooms here. And why make it fishy?54 Let us make it Thurs. 1st so as to doon our observance to May Day and
celebrate the names
Of St. Philip and St. James55
7.15 for 7.30? O.K.?
We live among mercies and marvels, don’t we? Love to both.
Jack
TO JOAN LANCASTER (BOD):
As from Magdalene College,
Cambridge
20/4/58
Dear Joan
Thanks for your nice letter of the–hullo, you haven’t dated it! And we simple souls always think of you Americans (I’m married to one now, did you know?) as being so business like. Anyway, you can drive a typewriter, which I cd. no more drive than a locomotive (I’d sooner drive the locomotive too).
The bad spring seems to be all over the world. Ours has been worse than yours in a way. Not colder of course–we never have real cold like yours–but cold for us and dry. The ground is parched and heaven knows when we can get anything started in the garden.
I was much interested in your account of the new school. It is nice to like anything but especially nice–almost a kind of victory–to learn to like what at first seemed hateful. I am glad you can do it, for not everybody can. I know a man who never forgives a thing, tho’ he can forgive people. I mean, if he once had bad weather in a particular place, however nice it was in itself, he’d never go there again: and if he stubbed his toe on the threshold of Heaven itself, it wd. never, never be heaven to him again!
How I remember the pleasures of sleeping late. But they’ve all gone now. After having to get up at 7.15 for many years, I now find it almost impossible to lie in bed any later and quite impossible to sleep.
I keep on getting nice letters from young readers in America: the number of loyal Narnians seems to be increasing.
With all good wishes.
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO MARTIN KILMER (W):
Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
24/4/58
Dear Martin
It is always nice to hear of anyone really enjoying Perelandra. I don’t think the pleasure on my part is merely vanity. I enjoyed that imaginary world so much myself that I’m glad to find anyone who has been there and liked it as much as I did–just like meeting someone who has been to a place one knows and likes in the real world.
96% is a terrific average. Keep it up.
There’s no news at all about Cambridge cats. I never see one. No news and no mews. But the spring has come at last and the daffodils and primroses are out and the birds are singing. I have not heard a cuckoo yet.
Love to all.
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO SHELDON VANAUKEN (BOD):
26/4/58
My dear Van Auken–
A letter from you is always a refreshment. First as to your question. Joy’s improvement continues. Indeed except that she is a cripple with a limp (the doctors, rather than the disease, shortened one leg) she is in full health. She had an X-ray examination last week wh. shows that the bones have re-built themselves ‘firm as rock’. The Doctor, doubtless without what a Christian wd. regard as true seriousness, used the word miraculous. I am also, by the way, nearly quite restored myself. I sometimes tremble when I think how good Joy and I ought to be: how good we would have promised to be if God had offered us these mercies at that price.
How you read my mind! That paragraph about the ‘drastic act of considerable finality’ did at once suggest suicide–but I ought to have thought better of you than to suspect it–and I was relieved to read your postscript.56 Now of course you will have my prayers. Whatever the act is we may be sure the results will be quite different from those you expect, and that will not prevent God from bringing good out of them in His own way. More and more I see how useless it is to try to play Providence either to oneself or to another. All we can do is to try to follow the plain rules of charity, justice and commonsense and leave the issue to God.
All blessings. I wish we lived nearer.
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO HENRY I. LOUTTIT (P):57
Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
1/5/58
My dear Lord Bishop
I think I can undertake what you suggest58–tape-recording the talks here in England. I am not quite clear how many of such 15-minute periods are wanted. Ten?
The subject I want to say something about in the near future, in some form or other, is the four Loves–Storge, Philia, Eros, and Agape. This seems to bring in nearly the whole of Christian ethics. Wd. this be suitable for your purpose? Of course I shd. do it on the ‘popular’ level–not (as the four words perhaps suggest) philologically.
I shall be glad to hear from you on the further details.
Yours sincerely
C. S. Lewis
TO JOCELYN GIBB (BOD):
Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
5/5/58
Dear Gibb
Thanks for cheque (£1499–0–4) received to day. Gosh! What a flop Till We Have Faces has been! Glad you discovered the catch about Eyre and Spottiswoode: though it is rum that a Papist firm shd. have an eternal property in the C. of E. prayer book.59
Don’t say a word against Icelandic: you don’t know what you’re missing.
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO JEAN THOMSON:60
Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
7/5/58
Dear Miss Thomson
Thank you very much for your most kind letter of May 2nd. It was a great treat for me. Children’s criticisms are delightfully unlike most modern adult criticism because they talk about the work itself instead of parading themselves. C. Palumbo will possibly go far: in his bit about ‘the sad parts’ he is already on the verge of the distinction between tragic, and merely depressing, experience.
I am glad you collect children’s remarks on lots of older books. They might provide you with material for an interesting study of the whole subject some day.
With very many thanks.
Yours sincerely
C. S. Lewis
TO KATHLEEN RAINE (BOD):
Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
12/5/58
Dear Kathleen Raine
There is a certain monotony in commenting on your Blakiana,61 for the best fact, namely that you are quite clearly right, makes the dullest proposition. Your case about Tiriel62 is really quite unanswerable.63 The point on p. 2 about putting actual events in the margin is very helpful.64
So is your point about Freud on p. 5.65 And of course I, at any rate, am with you about the radically un-classical character of the ‘classics’66–and pretty nearly with Blake in his view of ‘Public RECORDS’.67
I’m writing at Oxford and away from my books, but is there not just a hint at the end of the prose Edda that Har and his two colleagues have been pulling Gangleri’s leg? See your p. 21, at the top.68
Colona? Is Colonus not the usual form?69 But no doubt you have good reasons.
With very many thanks,
Yours sincerely
Jack Lewis
TO NATHAN COMFORT STARR (W):
Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
12/5/58
Dear Starr–
It was nice to hear from you and B. Sibylla, whom I never heard of before, sounds good.70 But he falls for me into the less interesting of the sorts of pneumatologists because he apparently divides all the superhuman rationals into good and bad angels.
I, as you see, get more fun out of those who leave us a few neutrals.71 Your idea of Wither’s little tune–the last protest of the man in him, no longer conscious, against the macrobes, is excellent. I wish I’d thought of it.72
The story of my wife is much more than one of fears not realised. It is one of an apparently certain death sentence reprieved or, dare I hope?, a free pardon. When she came home from hospital in April ’57 she was expected to live a few weeks. Then, after (but long after) the prayers for the sick and the laying on of hands, the unpredictable began to happen. Bones rebuilt themselves in a way the doctors themselves described as ‘miraculous’. Now, though she will always walk with a limp, she is in full health and living a normal, crowded, and happy life. ‘Believe as you list.’ One’s gratitude to God need not depend on deciding whether this is, in some strict sense, a miracle or not.
My brother is away at the moment (he still lives with us) but wd. join me in hearty greetings if he were at home.
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO HELMUT KUHN (W):
Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
16/5/58
Dear Kuhn
Your letter has obeyed the Horatian precept Nonum prematur in annum.73 You need not have sent it, but thank you all the same. I can only renew my penitence for having believed evil of you on such very insufficient evidence. And thank you also for the article. I read German laboriously (what a pity we do not all still use Latin) so I have only skimmed it so far, but with very pleasant anticipations of a fuller study. When will you be in England again? I should much like to renew our friendship.74
With cordial greetings.
Yours sincerely
C. S. Lewis
TO BUTCH BANTON (P):75
Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
16/5/58
Dear Butch Banton
Magic is a rum thing and does not always work out as we would expect. I can only suggest two possible reasons why they saw the plates but not the weapons.76
1. A Weapon is much more connected with a warrior than a plate is with a waiter. A sword or spear may have a name. It is a trusty old friend–fits the hand–has stories told about it etc. But a plate is passed from hand to hand, and one plate is as good as another. Do you think if one was invisible oneself one’s invisibility would be more likely to flow over into the weapon one grasped than into the plates one was merely carrying?
2. Perhaps it was not true that the spears were really invisible till they left the hand.77 A spear pointed at me would not be easy to see in any case. I would need to be looking in exactly the right place at exactly the right moment. And of course if my enemy were invisible I would not know where to look.
Of course we can’t trust what the Dufflepuds themselves say, because they are so stupid!
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO MARTIN HOOTON (BOD):
Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
23 May ’58
Dear Hooton
Alas! From now till after the end of term my life consists of marking exam scripts against time 7 days a week from morn till night. Hope we may meet next term.
Yours
C. S. Lewis
On 23 May 1958 Joy wrote to Roger Lancelyn Green:78
The Kilns,
May 23 [1958]
Dear Roger,
Please forgive me for typing this–I’m doing all Jack’s letters at the moment and being madly businesslike.
Of course Doug will be delighted to convey Scirard; he thinks the world of him. (Did you know your son is a very determined fighter and discourager of bullies?) As it happens I’m calling at the school tomorrow to take Doug out, and I’ll make arrangements with him then. If you are not going to visit tomorrow, I’ll see if I can manage to take Scirard out too, and debauch them both with scones and jam.
I usually send Doug L1 (that means a pound, this is an American typewriter) for the journey; it covers fares, FOOOD, and emergencies like missing the train and having to telephone. I think the actual fares both ways come to a bit less, but somehow I never get any change.
I’ll make whatever arrangements are necessary with Peter Bayley.79 By the way, the Kilns is now a real home, with paint on the walls, ceiling properly repaired, clean sheets on the beds…we can receive and put up several guests, and could have Scirard here another time, not to mention you and June! I’ve even got a fence round the woods and all the trespassers chased away; I shoot a starting-pistol at them and they run like anything! We’d love a visit.
Poor Jack comes up for air and blows a few feeble bubbles now and then, but is sinking in waves of Tripos.
Yours,
Joy
TO ARTHUR GREEVES (BOD):
Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
May 30th 1958
My dear Arthur–
Here’s a copy of W’s last book,80 with my compliments. It has elicited a furious letter from the present representative of the family, The Duc de Guiche: so furious I was relieved to find it did not end in a challenge!81
And now–wd. you believe it?–Joy is so well that she and I are proposing to visit Ireland and shd. be in Crawfordsburn for 10 days in the first half of July. I need not say how I hope you’ll be in residence. Will you?
Yours
Jack
TO VERA GEBBERT (W): TS
58/21
The Kilns, Kiln Lane,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford.
30th May 1958.
Dear Mrs. Gebbert,
Many thanks for your interesting letter of the 25th; and for the photo of the Tycoon, who seems to be growing at an amazing rate. Can I already detect in his face the rudiments of the future captain of industry whose successful smile beams upon one from the pages of the shinier magazines? He certainly looks an intelligent boy.
We both look forward to our tins of ‘Virginny’, and to the fruit cake; to get intoxicated on cake will indeed be a novel experience.82 And I am most grateful to you for your very kind offer to send some stockings; but I’m given to understand that Nylons can now be got over here without any difficulty. But my wife none the less appreciates your thoughtfulness. She, thank God, continues to go from strength to strength; indeed is so much better that we plan to go over to Ireland for a holiday in July. I shall of course have to take her by air, as she cannot risk the chance of a fall by the jolting of the train or the rolling of the steamer. But that she can face a three hundred mile journey at all is wonderful, when one reflects that this time last year we did not expect that she would ever leave her bed again.
With best love to you, your mother, and the Tycoon, from all of us,
yours ever,
C. S. Lewis
I have reserved St Thomas for the postscript. I would translate the passage83 thus:–
Creator inexpressible who from the treasures of thy wisdom hast into perfect fitness ordered the parts of the universe; thou (I say) who art called the true fountain of light and wisdom and the transcendently-exalted Beginning; deign to pour the two fold beams* of thy brightness over the darknesses of my understanding, removing the darknesses to which I was born, to wit, sin and ignorance. Thou who dost make the tongues of babes to be eloquent, teach my tongue and infuse in my lips the grace of thy blessing. Give me the sharpness to understand, the capacity to retain, the subtlety to explain, the facility to learn, and the plentiful grace of expression. Order my first steps, guide my progress, consummate my conclusion.
* If duplicem is right. But I can’t help thinking it ought to be duplices. In wh. case the meaning is ‘the beams of thy brightness, removing the two darknesses to which I was born.’
TO HSIN-CHANG CHANG (BOD):
Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
30/5/58
Dear Mr. Chang
I have been away for 2 days and only now got your letter. I should be delighted to see you if you called at about 2 o’clock to-morrow (Saturday)
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO CLYDE S. KILBY (W): TS
[Magdalene College,
Cambridge]
June 6, 1958
Dear Mr. Kilby,
Thank you very much for your invitation to speak at Wheaton College. I hope to visit the United States some day: but my duties at Cambridge will make it impossible for several years to come.
My wife and I appreciate your good wishes about her illness. I’m glad to say she has made an almost miraculous recovery and is at present very well indeed.
Yours sincerely,
C. S. Lewis
On 6 June Joy wrote to Mary Willis Shelburne from The Kilns:84
June 6th
Dear Mary Shelburne,
Perhaps you won’t mind a letter from me this time, instead of Jack? He is having his first go at examining for the Cambridge tripos, and is fairly drowning in examination papers–apparently very silly ones! He comes up for air now and then, blows a few pathetic bubbles, then submerges again. He can’t even get home for the next fortnight; our longest separation since our marriage, and we’re both feeling it badly!
I am sorry you’ve been having that nasty time in the hospital. I know only too well what even the nicest hospital is like; how the nurses all vanish at the one moment of the day when you really need them, how the televisions and wirelesses all around make night hideous, how the night nurse wakes you from the first really refreshing sleep you’ve had in a month, at midnight, to give you your sleeping pill…And you, I suppose, have been the subject of demonstrations to medical students as well! In Oxford they give students their examinations at some poor patient’s bedside; examiners and student alike all done up in their mortar-boards and gowns, and scaring the patient half to death. But I’m told that experienced patients have been known to whisper the correct diagnosis to the student if he gets stuck…
Well, I hope you’re home again now, and that it wasn’t too bad and they found the right answers. I can share too in your thwarted desire to be useful. We women feel that more than men, I think. There are a million things that need doing around this house. Once I would have pitched in and helped my housekeeper–but now, because I have to walk with a stick and have only one hand free, I’m more nuisance than help and can only sit on the sidelines and give advice and be a pest. It is difficult having to accept all the time! But unless we did, how could the others have the pleasure, and the spiritual growth of giving? And–I don’t know about you, but I was very proud; I liked the superior feeling of helping others, and for me it is much harder to receive than to give but, I think, much more blessed.
Then, too, it’s only since I’ve been ill and helpless that I’ve realised just how good people in general are, when they have a chance. So many people have taken trouble over me, and gone out of their way to give me pleasure or help! It’s very heart-warming–and humbling, for I remember how cynical I used to be about humanity and feel a salutary shame.
Is your pet a cat or dog? I’ve found that cats stand these changes and separations pretty well–one of mine, when I was ill, took possession of a new home and mistress and had them completely under his thumb in a week. (If one can speak of a cat’s thumb?)
Can you do any sort of work? I’ve found that making crocheted rugs and tablecloths, or knitting socks, was an amazing help with my spiritual difficulties when I was feeling low. One can work off so many frustrations by stabbing away with a knitting needle! It’s better to make pretty things, I find, than just useful ones.
Of course we’re both praying for you–and don’t be too afraid, even if you turn out to need an operation. I’ve had three, and they were nothing like so bad as my fears.
Blessings,
Yours,
Joy Lewis
Lewis was one of those who signed a letter that appeared in the Church Times of 6 June under the title ‘Mgr. R. A. Knox’:85
Sir,–
It is proposed to establish a memorial to Mgr. Ronald Knox86 at Trinity College, Oxford, where he was Chaplain-Fellow from 1910 to 1917, and Honorary Fellow from 1941 to his death. This will commemorate his life and scholarship, and will be independent of any other memorial which the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church may decide to raise. It is felt that as Mgr. Knox had friends of every denomination, the memorial should be inter-confessional and might take the form of something the College needs. The College has been approached in the matter, and has given its approval.
Subscriptions are invited for a sum to be given to the President and Fellows, for the endowment of a prize or scholarship, connected with biblical or classical studies, which might take the form of a grant named after Mgr. Knox to enable a senior or junior member of the College to travel abroad.
The College would also welcome a visible memorial, and for this an existing bust of Mgr. Knox by Mr Arthur Pollen will be purchased out of the fund.
Cheques should be made payable to the honorary treasurer, Mrs Elizabeth Wanbrough, Broughton Poggs, Lechlade, Gloucestershire.
Eric Hamilton87
Gilbert Laithwaite88C. S. Lewis
Harold Macmillan89
J. C. Masterman90
Norfolk91
Oxford and Asquith92
S. C. Roberts93
Evelyn Waugh
Following this appeal a group of Knox’s friends opened a fund to endow a memorial at Trinity College. Part was used to purchase the bronze bust of Knox by Arthur Pollen, which was placed in the War Memorial Library and unveiled on 18 April 1959 by Evelyn Waugh. The rest of the fund has been used to endow an annual undergraduate prize for the ‘Best First-Class Performance in Finals’.
TO FRANCIS TURNER (MC):94
Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
10/6/58
Dear Francis
1. I enclose that book of my brother’s which I mentioned to you the other night.
2. A challenge is a challenge, so here comes my (Easter) hymn. It aims at little more than to be mouth-filling. If the numbers are unpleasing, the sentiments, since they are scriptural, must surely be just.
Yours
Jack
Lords coëval with creation,
Seraph, Cherub, Throne and Power,
Princedom, Virtue, Domination,
Hail the long-awaited hour!
Bruised in head, with broken pinion,
Trembling for his old dominion,
See the ancient dragon cower!
For the Prince of Heaven has risen,
Victor, from his shattered prison.
Loudly roaring from the regions
Where no sunbeam e’er was shed,
Rise and dance, ye ransomed legions
Of the cold and countless dead!
Gates of adamant are broken,
Words of conquering power are spoken
Through the God who died and bled:
Hell lies vacant, spoiled and cheated,
By the Lord of life defeated.
Bear, behemoth, bustard, camel,
Warthog, wombat, kangaroo,
Insect, reptile, fish and mammal,
Tree, flower, grass, and lichen too,
Rise and romp and ramp, awaking,
For the age-old curse is breaking.
All things shall be made anew;
Nature’s rich rejuvenation
Follows on Man’s liberation.
Eve’s and Adam’s son and daughter,
Sinful, weary, twisted, mired,
Pale with terror, thinned with slaughter,
Robbed of all your hearts desired,
Look! Rejoice! One born of woman,
Flesh and blood and bones all human,
One who wept and could be tired,
Risen from vilest death, has given
All who will the hope of Heaven.
TO JOCELYN GIBB (BOD):
Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
11/6/58
Dear Gibb
I’m still here, alas, reading Tripos papers. I return the proofs with one correction on each. (‘Overcrow’ on 5 was a quotation from Hamlet95 not a toss shot at ‘overcrowd’!)96
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO JOCELYN GIBB (BOD):
Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
June 15th 1958
Dear Gibb
I’ve just had a letter from Curtis Brown which has given me great delight. You will guess the subject of it. He justly says what a ‘delightful and fair minded person’ you are: tells me he had hardly begun to put his case before you anticipated him (multa parantem dicere)97 with your full agreement: and emphasises ‘not only the fact but the manner’ of it.
Frank Churchill could not have written a handsomer letter than he,98 nor Amadis acted more generously than you.99 It must be a bit of a bore for you as these lurid bits of dear old Geoffrey’s past keep on coming home to roost in your nest–for I cannot suppose I am the only author whom he has treated so.100 Thank you very much.
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO I. O. EVANS (W):
Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
19/6/58
Dear Evans
Thanks for the interesting article on Piskies–I didn’t know about that rocket. As regards publication, I hardly know what to answer. I have never succeeded in being of any use to any author in this matter and no publisher has ever taken my advice! In general, I understand the public are more reluctant to buy, and therefore publishers are more reluctant to publish, a collection than a book which consists of a single work. Wd. you think of consulting a Literary Agent? (I am like the man in Lamb who, on being asked for his advice advised the questioner ‘to take advice’)
We are all well and I hope you are. I return the article.
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO I. O. EVANS (W):
The Kilns,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford
June 24th 58
Dear Evans
I like the poem very much, except for the first two lines of the last stanza, which are a bit trite and not v. neat.101 By the way, I picked up a false trail at the beginning, taking the construction to be ‘some cats, like ponies etc’: and oddly enough this is followed by 3 nouns which might be verbs (pace, walk, trot) so that the error was not immediately evident.102 But probably no one else will be so stupid. (If you put stanza 5 as the first, perhaps nobody could)
I have heard Moggs for a cat, but never thought of your explanation.103 I think it quite possible. The name Grimalkin wd. have been pronounced Grimaukin in many times & places. I only just remember Ben-Hur104 from boyhood
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO MICHAEL EDWARDS (BOD):105
Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
27/6/58
Dear Mr. Edwards
About Books: the Malacandrians were without written books but not without literature. I had a fancy that this might be healthiest when in its oral condition, like Homer and the Ballads–see in my Preface to Paradise Lost.106 Bookless people have enormous memories.
Also, I wanted to show ‘civilisation’ in the sense in which I value it (i.e. justice, courtesy, wisdom etc) as distinct as possible from, and independent of, ‘civilisation’ in the material sense (printing, transport etc). No moral point involved.
A bit the same about clothes. I thought clothes bred physical modesty or bashfulness and that this has a good deal to do with the bad kinds (there is a good kind) of sexual excitement. But of course what results from the Fall is not bad–e.g. the Redemption results from it. So I don’t think clothes are evil now and I think Nudists are cranks. No doubt I am influenced by the fact that to me personally the buying, preserving, putting on and off of clothes is a great bore. But that’s of no importance.
I’m afraid I have no photos to spare.
With all good wishes.
Yours sincerely
C. S. Lewis
TO JOCELYN GIBB (BOD): TS
58/64
The Kilns, Kiln Lane,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford.
3rd July 1958.
Dear Gibb,
Thanks for the book, a very nice bit of work. I’ll try to re-read Miracles for mis-prints while I’m in Ireland,107 where my wife and I go tomorrow. When is deadline for your Fifty-Two? Not that I’m sure I can pump anything up anyway.108
Yours,
C. S. Lewis
TO LEE TURNER (W):
The Kilns,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford
19 July 1958
Dear Mr. Turner–
The main difficulty seems to me not the question whether the Bible is ‘inspired’, but what exactly we mean by this. Our ancestors, I take it, believed that the Holy Spirit either just replaced the minds of the authors (like the supposed ‘control’ in automatic writing) or at least dictated to them as to secretaries.
Scripture itself refutes these ideas. S. Paul distinguishes between what ‘the Lord’ says and what he says ‘of himself’109–yet both are ‘Scripture’. Similarly the passages in which the prophets describe Theophanies and their own reactions to them wd. be absurd if they were not writing for themselves.110 Thus, without any modern scholarship, we are driven a long way from the extreme view of inspiration.
I myself think of it as analogous to the Incarnation–that, as in Christ a human soul-and-body are taken up and made the vehicle of Deity, so in Scripture, a mass of human legend, history, moral teaching etc. are taken up and made the vehicle of God’s Word. Errors of minor fact are permitted to remain. (Was Our Lord Himself incapable, qua Man, of such errors? Wd. it be a real human incarnation if He was?) One must remember of course that our modern & western attention to dates, numbers, etc. simply did not exist in the ancient world. No one was looking for that sort of truth. (You’d find something of my views about all this in my forthcoming book on the Psalms.) As for translations, even if one doesn’t know Greek (and I know no Hebrew myself) we have now so many different translations that by using & comparing them all one can usually see what is happening. The blessed and significant thing is that none of all this has bothered your personal faith in Our Lord. Do you see a clear reason why it need bother anyone else’s?
Yours sincerely
C. S. Lewis
TO MARTIN KILMER (W): TS
58/191
The Kilns, Kiln Lane,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford.
21st July 1958.
Dear Martin,
You certainly are having a full life! I think all the translations of Russian novels I have read must be pretty bad. Yes–the Christian Herald is pretty frightful, and so apparently are its readers. I have had the stupidest letters about that article.
Love to all.
Yours, in great haste,
C. S. Lewis
TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE (W):
The Kilns,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford
July 21st 1958
Dear Mary Willis–
(1.) Remember what St. John says ‘If our heart condemn us, God is stronger than our heart.’111 The feeling of being, or not being, forgiven & loved, is not what matters. One must come down to brass tacks. If there is a particular sin on your conscience, repent & confess it. If there isn’t, tell the despondent devil not to be silly. You can’t help hearing his voice (the odious inner radio) but you must treat it merely like a buzzing in your ears or any other irrational nuisance.
(2). Remember the story in the Imitation, how the Christ on the crucifix suddenly spoke to the monk who was so anxious about his salvation and said ‘If you knew that all was well, what wd. you, to-day, do, or stop doing?’112 When you have found the answer, do it or stop doing it. You see, one must always get back to the practical and definite. What the devil loves is that vague cloud of unspecified guilt feeling or unspecified virtue by which he lures us into despair or presumption. ‘Details, please!’ is the answer.
(3.) The sense of dereliction cannot be a bad symptom for Our Lord Himself experienced it in its depth–‘Why hast thou forsaken me?’113
Of course we will continue to pray for you.
A tripos at Cambridge is an examination: so called for the tripos (compare tripod) or 3-legged stool on which the candidate used to sit when the exam. was still, not written work, but a disputation.
Joy and I have just been for a lovely fortnight in Ireland. She, and my brother, are both well. We send our loves and blessings.
Yours
Jack
TO JOCELYN GIBB (BOD):
[The Kilns
26 July 1958]
Dear Gibb–
Excuse this penurious mode of reply114–I’ve let myself run short of notepaper. My wife and I wish we had been invisible as the dog: do I look so like a dyspeptic orangutan?115
The German illustrations of HB are ghastly.116 I have no names of reviewers to suggest (amusing to see Lloyd marked with a u!).117 I’ll stand for the Japanese Lady’s stunt since you approve it. Give her my compliments etc. when you write.118
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO CAROLINE RAKESTRAW (BOD):119
The Kilns,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford
Aug. 8th 1958
Dear Miss Rakestraw
I am afraid it is quite impossible to have even one typed copy of the talks for you. I work by hand. The MS is not yet finished. Even if it were and I took it to a typing office, they wd. not get it done for weeks.
My address in London, to which I shall go on the evening of Aug. 18th will be the Athenaeum Club.
Yours sincerely
C. S. Lewis
TO MARY VAN DEUSEN (W):
As from Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
Aug 14th 1958
Dear Mrs Van Deusen
Thanks for your letter of Aug 10th. In connexion with the séance I’d like to tell you my wife’s experience. She once or twice did admittedly faked thought-reading at Church bazaars. The public were told it was all a trick, all done for fun. In spite of that several of those who came to her sideshow were believing in it and refusing to disbelieve in it by the end of a 20 minutes’ consultation! It’s perfectly easy, she says. You see (from face & ring) that your patient is a worried middle aged married woman. Is it her own health–or husband’s infidelities–or the young people? Throw out suggestions about all three: you’ll see at once which she responds to. All you do is tell her back what she has unconsciously told you. Of course she wouldn’t have done it if she had dreamed it was going to deceive people: but apparently it always will–even when they’ve been plainly told in advance that it is a trick.
I know nothing about a TV programme in U.S.A. I am tape-recording 10 talks for an American organisation called ‘Episcopal TV’ but I don’t think there’s any TV about it.
Of course Genia and you are always in my prayers. It’s quite on the cards that that early glimpse of death will have no effect on Paul. These things are incalculable.
Love to all. We all continue v. well.
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO GEORGE SAYER (W):
As from The Kilns
Headington Quarry
Oxford
Aug 19th 1958
My dear George
From about Aug 30th to Sept 6–W. in Ireland and Joy taking the boys away for a jaunt–I shall be a grass widow, grass stepfather, and grass brother. Any chance of your coming up for a couple of nights or so? Humphrey120 also will be very ‘grass’ etc. and you can have your choice of several bedrooms, all now with new mattresses! Do.
Anyway, love to both.
Yours
Jack
Lewis met Caroline Rakestraw in London on 19 August and during that day and the next he taped ten talks on the ‘four loves’– Storge or Affection, Philia or Friendship, Eros, and Agape or Charity. It was these talks which gave Lewis the idea of writing a book on the same subject, the book published as The Four Loves.121
TO GEORGE SAYER (W):
The Kilns
Headington Quarry,
Oxford
Aug. 23rd 58
My dear George
You are both, as ever, fountains of hospitality: but now that I am no longer a walker you’d find a week of me a bit much. Let us adopt a middle way.
Mon. Sept 1st. You arrive here for lunch time.
Sept. 2nd. We drive to Malvern.
Sept. 3. At Malvern.
Sept. 4th. Drive back to here
Sept. 5th. You drive home
Arrange for lunch at Studley122 with Humphrey and Tolkien either on 1st or 4th or 5th. OK?
Yours
Jack
TO JESSIE M. WATT (W):
The Kilns,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford
Aug 28th 1958
Dear Mrs. Watt–
How lovely it all sounds! I can well believe you are loth to return, though for my own part I never found a holiday so good that there was not some pleasure in the homecoming too.
All goes amazing well with us. My wife walks up the wooded hill behind our house and shoots–or more strictly shoots at–pigeons, picks peas and beans, and heaven knows what.
We had a holiday–you might call it a belated honeymoon–in Ireland and were lucky enough to get that perfect fortnight at the beginning of July. We visited Louth, Down, and Donegal, and returned drunk with blue mountains, yellow beaches, dark fuchsia, breaking waves, braying donkeys, peat-smell, and the heather just then beginning to bloom.
We flew to Ireland, for, tho’ both of us would prefer ship to plane, her bones, and even mine, could not risk a sudden lurch. It was the first flight either of us had ever experienced and we found it, after one initial moment of terror, enchanting. The cloud-scape seen from above is a new world of beauty–and then the rifts in the clouds through which one sees (like Tennyson’s Tithonus) ‘a glimpse of that world where I was born’.123 We had clear weather over the Irish Sea and the first Irish headland, brightly sunlit, stood out from the dark sea (it’s very dark when you’re looking directly down on it) like a bit of enamel.
As for the picture in The Observer, even our most ribald friends don’t pretend it has any resemblance to either of us.124 As a spiritualist picture of the ectoplasms of a dyspeptic orangutan and an immature Sorn125 it may have merits, but not as a picture of us.
All good wishes to John and yourself.
Yours sincerely
C. S. Lewis
TO ROGER LANCELYN GREEN (BOD):
The Kilns,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford
Aug 29th 1958
My dear Roger
Thanks very much for the Old Greek Fairy Tales.126 I was not quite in my märchen mood–you know how one’s literary weather changes–at the moment, but I believe you have done the job very well. A great deal of the matter is new to me. The end of the Terrible Head127 is absolutely stunning. Bellerophon128 is v. different from the picture always given me by Homer’s sinister hints. The one I like least is Cupid and Psyche:129 no fault of yours, but the second part of it–indeed all after Psyche’s disobedience–has never really pleased me. I’ve the feeling Apuleius has spoiled something. I hope the book will go well and get past the guard of those readers who, like June, but unlike me, don’t like too many names.130 I love ’em–Launcelot and Pelleas and Pellinore,131 Aragorn132 and Owlswick,133 Arbol134 and Tormance,135 the more the merrier.
Dinner here on Mon. Sept 29th wd. suit us best. Alright for you?–turn up about 6.40. I shall assume this unless I hear to the contrary.
The lecture on translation was great fun, tho’ I felt a bit shamefaced in unexpectedly meeting Rieu a few days later: all the more so when the dear old man behaved like an angel.136 Love from both to both.
Yours
Jack
TO DEREK BREWER (P):137
The Kilns,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford
August 30th 1958
Dear Brewer
–‘Trusteth wel I am not textual’,138 so I won’t meddle with your text at all.139 I enclose some comments on your introduction and notes. They are mostly merely stylistic, but not all. When I ask to be reassured about matters of fact, this does not mean that I know your statements to be false but only that I don’t know them to be true (the only howler I confidently detect is where you make the De Planctu a poem).140 Such discomforts are chiefly bunched between pp. 11 and 32, where I rather got the impression–let’s mix our metaphors well–that you are skating on thin ice over various hornets’ nests that might at any moment burst into flame. You have authority for all these statements have you? If the authority is at all doubtful–and all secondary authorities are–the next question is, do you need to make them at all…By the way, I have known you write better than you do in this introduction.
That was a delightful reunion at Jack B’s.141 I wish you and I met more often.
I’ll return the text when I’ve got a large enough envelope. (If only you scholars wd. use ordinary quarto sheets and not enclose your MSS in great flapping containers…)
Yours
Jack Lewis
(P. 21) Does this imply in C’s mind the same clear distinction between the plant and the goddess142 that there is in ours? If so, I wonder are you right?
(P. 24) Very well put.
(P. 26) The two more’s comparison within comparison, a bit awkward. This whole page–forgive me–is hardly a favourable specimen of your style. Para 3 line 4 is v. uncomfortable!
(P. 31) necessarily existing. Are you right? Was not Creation itself unnecessary? And wasn’t the sublunary world anyway the home of contingence?
(P. 46) religia–Great Snakes, you can’t do that with a noun whose nominative is already in io! Theologica–if you must do it (at all). But I’d prefer ‘religious and scientific concepts.’
(P. 47) (Rum chaps, those medievals…they actually thought temptations ought to be tempting).
TO JOAN LANCASTER (BOD):
The Kilns,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford
Aug 31/58
Dear Joan
I am sure you had fun writing the stories. The main fault of the animal one is that you don’t mix the reality and the fantasy quite in the right way. One way is Beatrix Potter’s or Brer Rabbit’s.143 By fantasy the animals are allowed to talk and behave in many ways like humans. But their relations to one another and to us remain the real ones. Rabbits are in danger from foxes and men.
The other way is mine: you go right out of this world into a different creation, where there are a different sort of animals. Yours are all in the real world, with a real eclipse.144 But they don’t have the real relations to one another–real small animals wd. not be friends with an owl, nor wd. it know more astronomy than they!
The spy story is better but you are trying to get too much into the space. One feels crowded. And wouldn’t the police be rather silly if they thought a man who sang the part of Wotan145 (how I love it, by the way) well couldn’t be a spy?
I hope you don’t mind me telling you all this? One can learn only by seeing one’s mistakes. We’ve had a terrible dark, wet summer here but it looks as if we are now beginning a nice autumn.
Yours
C. S. Lewis
P.S. The content of the poem is good but the verse ‘creaks’ a bit!
Reflections on the Psalms was published by Geoffrey Bles of London on 8 September 1958.
TO LUCY MATTHEWS (W):
The Kilns,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford
Sept 11th 1958
Dear Miss Matthews
You’ve got it exactly right. A strict allegory is like a puzzle with a solution: a great romance is like a flower whose smell reminds you of something you can’t quite place. I think the something is ‘the whole quality of life as we actually experience it’. You can have a realistic story in which all the things & people are exactly like those we meet in real life, but the quality, the feel or texture or smell, of it is not.
In a great romance146 it is just the opposite. I’ve never met Orcs or Ents or Elves–but the feel of it, the sense of a huge past, of lowering danger, of heroic tasks achieved by the most apparently unheroic people, of distance, vastness, strangeness, homeliness (all blended together) is so exactly what living feels like to me. Particularly the heart-breaking quality in the most beautiful places, like Lothlorien. And it is so like the real history of the world: ‘Then, as now, there was a growing darkness and great deeds were done that were not wholly in vain.’147 Neither optimism (this is the last war and after it all will be lovely forever) nor pessimism (this is the last war and all civilisation will end), you notice. No. The darkness comes again and again and is never wholly triumphant nor wholly defeated.
Yours sincerely,
C. S. Lewis
TO JOCELYN GIBB (BOD):
The Kilns,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford
Sept 13th 1958
Dear Gibb–
Not knowing that your parcel contained a letter, I did not open it till last night. 11000 is a fine start.148 I’ve seen no reviews yet except the TLS149 and Lord B’s. I seem to have got him on the raw!150
Wd. you please send copies to 1. The Rev. A. Farrer, Trinity, Oxford. 2. Librarian, Magdalen, Oxford. 3. Librarian, Magdalene, Cambridge? All the best.
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W):
The Kilns
Sept 15th 1958
My dear Arthur–
(1.) The picture gets better every week.151 You have embodied in it the whole feel of the North of Ireland. I can almost feel the damp (not that I need a picture of that to-day, for it’s pouring!) and hear the shushing of that wind. I don’t in general like titles (fancy ones) for pictures, but this does again and again remind me of the line from Wordsworth ‘The Winds come to me from the fields of sleep.’152
(2.) After carefully keeping a petrol account with you, did I ever actually remember to pay? Let me know.
(3.) Book enclosed.153 (4.) W’s in Ireland. Joy is grand. Both our loves.
Yours
Jack
TO MR LANGTON (P):
The Kilns,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford
Sept 22nd 1958
Dear Mr Langton–
Thank you for your kind letter. I am glad you liked the book.
I think fascinate and bewitch will do if one takes them in the weakened modern sense. But when one is reading great poetry, one never takes words at their colloquial minimum: mala fascinatio154 and witchcraft will be present to the mind. Possibly ‘Oh Lord, strong coil of grace’ (not Grace)–see Antony & Cleopatra–might do.155 But it were free.
Yours sincerely
C. S. Lewis
TO VERA GEBBERT (W):
The Kilns,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford
Sept 23rd. 1958
Dear Vera Gebbert
‘Oh Boy’ as I believe you say in America. Yes, the rich treasure has arrived. As my brother is in Ireland, his tin of tobacco and the cake, in its imperial casket, remain inviolate against his return. His tie too of course. For my own tie (which like the Parsee’s hat in Just So Stories reflects the rays of the Sun ‘with more than Oriental splendour’)156 and for the tobacco, which I was enjoying a pipeful of a moment ago, many, many thanks. You shower us with blessings.
Yes, my wife and I had a glorious trip to Ireland. For one thing, we flew and it was for both of us a new experience. I can quite believe that for really long journies it can be dull and monotonous. But one’s first sight of the cloud-scape from above–then, when the clouds cleared, the coastlines looking (as I’d never really quite believed) just as they do on maps–the first bit of Ireland shining out on the dark sea like enamel work–all this was indescribably beautiful.
As for Ireland, we caught it in one of its very rare heat-waves and Joy has come away with the quite erroneous impression (impression, not opinion: she knows better) that it is the land of golden sunshine. But different from your sunshine: she calls it ‘arctic’. As for beauty, it has the ugliest towns in the world–as bad, Joy said, as the worst parts of her native New York–but we saw mountains, heather just beginning to bloom, loughs (= fjords), yellow sand, fuchsia, seas Mediterraneanly blue, gulls, peat, ruins, and waterfalls as many as we could digest.
I can only reply to ‘Hello, Dr. Lewis’ with ‘Hello Tycoon’–hello being a remark which demands an echo for an answer. Love to both, and much gratitude.
Yours sincerely,
C. S. Lewis
TO MARTIN KILMER (W):
The Kilns,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford
Sept 29th 1958
Dear Martin
Thanks for your letter, and fortissimo congratulations on Miriam’s recovery. Also on escaping Cicero,157 who, to my mind, is the greatest bore (except possibly Ben Jonson,158 Launcelot Andrewes,159 and Mrs Humphrey Ward)160 of all authors whether ancient or modern.
You seem to be doing a pretty wide curriculum; too wide in my opinion. All schools, both here and in America, ought to teach far fewer subjects and teach them far better. We’re all well. Love to everyone.
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE (W):
The Kilns,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford
Sept. 30th 1958
Dear Mary Willis–
Thanks for your letter of 26th. The Time review was ill-timed, for the American edition of the book will not be published until November.161 I have told Harcourt Brace to send you a copy when it appears.
I also have been in the hands of the dentist but much less unpleasantly than you: I know a ‘dry socket’ after an extraction can be the very devil and all. We must both, I’m afraid, recognise that, as we grow older, we become like old cars–more and more repairs and replacements are necessary. We must just look forward to the fine new machines (latest Resurrection model) which are waiting for us, we hope, in the Divine garage!
Thank you for the enclosure: I don’t think it contradicts anything I’ve said. Joy continues well, thank God, and wd. send her love if she were awake, which at the moment she’s not, for I’m a barbarously early riser and have usually got my breakfast and dealt with my letters before the rest of the house is astir. One result is that I often enjoy the only fine hours of the day–at this time of the year lovely, still, cool sunshine from 7 till 10, followed by rain from then on, is common. I love the empty, silent, dewy, cobwebby hours. I hope your mouth is now comfortable again.
Yours
Jack
There is an old Scots version of Psalm 136 (137) 8ff which goes:
O blessed may that trooper be
Who, riding on his naggie,
Wull tak thy wee bairns by the taes
And ding them on the craggie
Jocelyn Gibb wrote to Lewis on 1 October 1958:
As I am sure you know, PILGRIM’S REGRESS is the only book of yours which has not been published in America. A firm called William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company in Grand Rapids now want to do an edition…As the book was first published here so long ago as 1933 the publishers ask if you could be persuaded to write a new Foreword or Introduction.162
TO JOCELYN GIBB (BOD):
[The Kilns
2 October 1958]
The nearest I could come to this wd. be to allow them to shorten the existing preface by stopping at the end of para 2 on p. 10 (at ‘Reason and Christianity’). Any good.163
(Excuse unconventional method of reply: it has conveniences for us both.)164
C.S.L.
TO MISS GARDENER (BOD):165
The Kilns,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford
Oct 4th 1958
Dear Miss Gardener
Thank you for your letter. Will you kindly direct your people to send one copy of the Reflections to Miss M. Radcliffe, The Nook, 11 Beacon Close, Brighton 6?
Yours sincerely
C. S. Lewis
TO DANIEL DAVIN (OUP):
As from Magdalen College,
Oxford
Oct 7th 1958
Dear Davin
Here is my list (doubtless very incomplete) of corrections for my OHEL volume166
p. 77 para 2 l. 2. For or read of
p. 99 n. 2 [delete] and substitute ‘Our het, too hot.’
p. 507 last l. but one. For fourth read third
p. 509 l. 7 For propior read proprior
p. 544 para 2 l. 1 For–94) read–95)
p. 597 para 1 l. 7 [delete] first
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO CORBIN SCOTT CARNELL (W):
As from Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
Oct 13th 1958
Dear Mr. Carnell–
You pay a wholly undeserved compliment to my erudition by supposing that my debts to modern theologians might be too complicated to sort out! There are hardly any such debts at all; I am not sufficiently well read. Christendom, you see, reached me at first almost entirely through books I took up not because they were Christian, but because they were famous as literature. Hence Dante, Spenser, Milton, the poems of George Herbert and of Coventry Patmore, were incomparably more important than any professed theologians. Later, when I had become interested in Christianity–been caught by truth in places where I sought only pleasure–came St. Augustine, Hooker, Traherne, Wm. Law, The Imitation, the Theologia Germanica.167 As for moderns, Tillich168 and Brunner169 I don’t know at all. Maritain I tried but did not admire.170 He seems to say in 10 pages of pollysyllabic abstraction what Scripture or the old writers wd. say in a couple of sentences. Kierkegaard still means almost nothing to me.171 I read one book of Niebuhr’s–I can’t remember the title–and, on the whole, reacted against it.172 I tried Berdyaev,173 but he seemed to me terribly repetitive; one paragraph wd. do for what he spins out into a book. I thought Buber made one point well, but with some exaggeration.174 I never read Marcel but I met him and felt him to be very venerable;175 but his message the same as Buber’s. Barth I have never read, or not that I remember.176 Otto’s Das Heilige177 I have been deeply influenced by. Nygren’s Eros & Agape gave me a good ‘load of thought’, a useful classification instrument, tho’ I don’t think his own use of that instrument v. profitable.178 I liked, but cd. make no use of, Aulen’s Christus Victor.179 I think this is about all. You could hardly, among literate people, find a man who is less ‘in the swim’ or ‘up to date’ than I am. Existentialism, so far as I can at all make out what the word means, does not appeal to me.
One false track I shd. warn you against. You will find people who say I am much influenced by Thomism. I do (now) use the Summa a good deal, mainly as a sort of dictionary of medieval belief. But the appearance of influence is really due to the fact that I am often (especially on ethics) following Aristotle where Aquinas is also following Aristotle; Aquinas and I were, in fact, at the same school–I don’t say in the same class! And I had read Ethics180 long before I ever looked at the Summa.
Write again if I have failed to be clear. With all good wishes,
Yours sincerely
C. S. Lewis
TO THOMAS HOWARD (P):181
Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
Oct 14th 1958
Dear Mr. Howard
Oh but, believe me, you are still only paddling in the glorious sea of Tolkien. Go on from The Hobbit at once to The Lord of the Rings: 3 volumes and nearly as long as the Bible and not a word too long (except for the first chapter which is a botch–don’t be put off by it). The Hobbit is merely a fragment of his myth, detached, and adapted for children, and losing much by the adaptation. The Lord of the R is the real stuff. Thanks for all the nice things you say about my own little efforts.
Yours sincerely
C. S. Lewis
TO JOCELYN GIBB (BOD):
Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
Oct 15/58
Dear Gibb
Will you please send a copy of the Reflections to F. Henry Esq.,182 Tobberdony House, Dunleer,183 Co. Louth, Eire?
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO JOCELYN GIBB (BOD):
Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
Oct 22nd 1958
Dear Gibb
Thanks for your letter containing cheque (£1820–7–2) and other enclosures. I hope you will by now have had a polite formal refusal of your kind invitation to the Phillips beano.184 If I forgot to send it, I cry you mercy.
I am glad to hear about the new Peacock’s Feathers.185 If I remember rightly it was in this that I criticised a howler. Didn’t he reproduce the common misunderstanding of Descartes’ cogito ergo sum? i.e. he took it to mean ‘I exist because I think’, whereas of course it really means ‘The fact that I am now thinking is evidence that I exist.’186 If so, get him to emend it. My kind regards both to Phillips and to him.
Our joint affairs, I agree, are going nicely,
I have seen hardly any reviews of Reflections, being either too proud or too mean or too lazy (probably all three) to join a Press cutting agency!
All the best.
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO MARY VAN DEUSEN (W):
As from Magdalene.
Oct 27th 1958
Dear Mrs. Van Deusen
My late correspondence with Genia was, I believe, entirely theological and I don’t think it contained anything that would give you cause for anxiety.
The postcards are most attractive, and you must both have had a delightful time.
What you say about books turning up at what seems to be just the right moment is well supported from my own experience. So much so that now, if I lose or forget something I’ve read that seems important, I do not much bother, for I feel a confidence that if I really need it it will be given to me again, and just in time–in a book on some quite different subject I shall find it quoted or a man I didn’t much want to talk to will mention it in conversation.
It is hardly possible, at such a distance from the scene of action, to have an opinion as to how you shd. cope with Dr. Higgins. I think, urgently, that it is false wisdom to have any ‘Denomination’ represented for Ecumenical purposes by those who are on its fringe. People (perhaps naturally) think this will help re-union, whereas in fact it invalidates the whole discussion. Each body should rather be represented by its centre. Only then will any agreements that are achieved be of real value.
Love to both. Joy thanks you in advance for the book and my brother sends his warm regards.
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO J. R. R. TOLKIEN (P):
Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
Oct 28th 1958
My dear Tollers
As an elector to your Chair I’ve had stuff from the Registrar about this forthcoming and deplorable vacancy.187 I suppose it is quite in order to take the views of the outgoing professor into account. If so, I’d be glad of yours.
It’s nice to see Christopher again regularly on Mon. mornings.188 It wd. be nicer still if he were accompanied by his Aged P.189
Yours
Jack
TO JESSIE M. WATT (W): TS
58/95
The Kilns, Kiln Lane,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford.
30th October 1958.
Dear Mrs Watt,
It was very pleasant to hear from you again and to know that all is well with you; and thank you for your kind enquiries. I’m thankful to say that my wife’s health continues to amaze me, and she gets stronger and more active every day. In fact she is now completely ‘self-supporting’, except that the nurse has to help her to take a bath.
I was much interested to hear of the ‘Eye on research’ programme on TV. Myself, I’m glad to say I don’t often see television, but my brother, who sometimes looks in on a friend’s set, says he can well understand your feelings of ‘horror and terror’. He adds that to him the most terrible part of the business is the implicit assumption that progress is an inevitable process like decay, and that the only important thing in life is to increase the comfort of homo sapiens, at whatever cost to posterity and to the other inhabitants of the planet. I can well imagine how a ‘scientific’ programme would jar after watching a stately ceremony as the opening of Parliament.
After no summer we are at last being paid a trifle of compensation in some lovely autumn weather–my favourite season by the way. All this week has been glorious.
With all best wishes to you and Heather,
yours sincerely,
C. S. Lewis
TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE (W):
Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
Oct 30. 1958
Dear Mary Willis
That is very good news about your daughter and family. Also these last minute mercies which keep on turning up in your financial crises.
I suppose living from day to day (‘take no thought for the morrow’)190 is precisely what we have to learn–though the Old Adam in me sometimes murmurs that if God wanted me to live like the lilies of the field,191 I wonder He didn’t give me the same lack of nerves and imagination as they enjoy! Or is that just the point, the precise purpose of this Divine paradox and audacity called Man–to do with a mind what other organisms do without it?
As for wrinkles–pshaw! Why shouldn’t we have wrinkles? Honorable insignia of long service in this warfare. All well with us, in haste, with love.
Yours
Jack
TO CLYDE S. KILBY (W): TS
58/241
The Kilns, Kiln Lane,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford.
2nd November 1958.
Dear Mr Kilby,
The editor sent me Pittenger’s article and offered to print my reply.192 I hope you will like it as much as I liked yours. Thank you both for writing and for sending it. We don’t overlap much, and I hope they will both be printed.193 But alas, we may merely be putting up the sales of what seems a pretty nasty periodical!
Yours sincerely,
C. S. Lewis
TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W):
Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
Nov. 3rd 1958
My dear Arthur–
They gave me calcium tablets and little tablets which (for some reason) contain female hormones. I think there was Vitamin-something mixed with the calcium. Also a surgical belt. The pains gradually became less frequent and less severe. I say pains not pain because so far as I can make out the bone-condition is not itself painful. What hurts is the spasms the muscles go into in order to protect the bones, when you make any unusual movement.
I am now almost entirely well again and walked about 2 to 3 miles last week. I still wear the belt till about 3 p.m. But I had a whole week without it lately when it was being mended and this produced a little aching. Whether the belt or the calcium or the hormones or nature is responsible for my improvement, of course I don’t know. It feels as if it were the belt. No one suggested injections.
We are all well and v. happy. W. as sober as a judge.
Yours
Jack In haste–just off the train from my week end at home. Blessings.
TO ROGER LANCELYN GREEN (BOD):
Magdalene
Nov. 4th 58
My dear Roger–
I should have written long ago both to send you my book194 and to thank you for your own.195 I enjoyed the Hyperborean story196 better than any of yours (except your real favourites and mine, the utterly romantic ones).197 I can’t remember the first version quite well enough to be sure where the changes come. I think most of the escape from Asgard and the whole of Atalanta’s share in it198 is new, isn’t it? Anyway, my general impression is that you have really improved the book. Your conception of Colchis199 is a real addition to my imagination and I believe one that will stick. Don’t forget to read Mary Renault’s The King must Die.200 All well with us and love to both.
Yours
Jack
TO JOCELYN GIBB (BOD):
Magdalene
Nov 6th/58
Dear Gibb
Good. Wed 26th will suit me well. It will have to be lunch in Combination Room (no Apician banquet I assure you) for my rooms are all messed up by the builders, but if you come to them at 1 o’clock we can have a glass of sherry first, shouting to each other among the blows of the hammers.
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO J. R. R. TOLKIEN (P):
The Kilns
Headington Quarry
Nov. 10th [1958]
Dear Tollers
I am glad to hear of the book though I do not know which of many possible bricks it comes to kick away.
Next week-end I shall not be back from Tabland201 till the evening and we have two engagements on Sunday. Probably–there’s no great hurry–we can meet more easily as soon as term is over.
You know there is a new E. R. Eddison out?202 Christopher has my copy at present.
Some of your most important doctrines will soon be having a wider circulation just where they are most needed (you’ll be a Boot exactly fitting a grievous Bate),203 for–cd. you believe it?–they’ve made Perrault’s Contes des Fées204 a set book to Pt. I of the Mod. Languages Tripos,205 and our French tutor (Dick Ladborough, a good Christian)206 is having new worlds opened to him by your essay in the C.W. volume.207
Thanks, all is better than well here. Warnie, for the first time this many years, came back from his Irish holiday sober: and when I compare my wife’s condition or even (parva licet componere magnis)208 my own with what we were in last year, I feel that resurrection is almost a more accurate word than recovery.
Yours
Jack
Lewis received a letter from the Archbishop of Canterbury, Geoffrey Fisher,209 inviting him to become a member of the Commission to Revise the Psalter. The Commission’s terms of reference were:
To produce for the consideration of the Convocations a revision of the text of the Psalter designed to remove obscurities and serious errors of translation yet such as to retain, as far as possible, the general character in style and rhythm of Coverdale’s version and its suitability for congregational use.210
TO ARCHBISHOP GEOFFREY FISHER:211
Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
Nov. 14th 1958
My dear Lord Archbishop
I have thought over your Grace’s letter and come to the conclusion that I cannot refuse to serve on this Commission if I am wanted. I wish I were better qualified, but there is no use in multiplying words about that.
Yours sincerely
C. S. Lewis
TO KATHRYN STILLWELL (P):
Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
Nov 17th 1958
Dear Miss Stillwell
I am gratified that you liked my little book.212 My wife, my two step sons, my unmarried brother, and myself make up our household.
Yours sincerely
C. S. Lewis
TO CECIL HARWOOD (BOD):
Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
Nov. 19th 1958
My dear Cecil–
Many thanks for the book,213 which I have read, everywhere with interest and nearly everywhere with pleasure: more often than you might expect, with agreement. Some of the pleasure was due to the fact that you are one of the decreasing number who still write real English–no clichés, no jargon, and a live rhythm. It is also full of good wisecracks. That on p. 36 about the wise adult avoiding controversy etc. comes home to my ‘bosom & business’!214 P. 44 for Luciferus read Luciferum? Very good first para on p. 73–and on not teaching best what one knows best, p. 85–child sub specie hominis215 p. 135. On p. 165, para 2, for even read event? I do agree with that about the critical faculty on p. 171216–and that about the 2 poles of adolescence on p. 181 is superb.217
Love to Marguerite and, once more, thanks.
Yours
Jack
TO MARY VAN DEUSEN (W):
Magdalene
Cambridge
Nov. 21 [1958]
Dear Mrs. Van Deusen
I will indeed mention Genia’s daughter. How horrid for you all. In great haste–huge mail.
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO MARTIN KILMER (W):
Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
Nov. 23/58
Dear Martin
I am so sorry to hear about Miriam’s nephritis. Please give her and everyone else my sympathy.
It sounds to me as if all had a good time with that Latin master, leading him on to talk of everything under the sun–especially when you don’t want him to ask awkward questions, eh? It’s a fine old game and we have all played it. But beware of the Maths master who over-marks the work. Generous marking is nice for the moment, but it can lead to disappointments when, later, one comes up against the real thing. American university teachers have told me that most of their freshmen come from schools where the standard was far too low and therefore think themselves far better than they really are. This means that they lose heart (and their tempers too) when told, as they have to be told, their real level.
Yours,
C. S. Lewis
TO JOCELYN GIBB (BOD):
Magdalene
Nov. 28th 1958
Dear Gibb
The list of errors in Reflections turned out to be here, not at home.
I enclose it. I am making a beast of myself with the honey every morning and find it delicious. So was our chat.
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO THE EDITOR OF THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT:218
Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
Sir,–
A review of Mr R. L. Green’s Land of the Lord High Tiger in your issue of 21 November spoke of myself (in passing) with so much kindness that I am reluctant to cavil at anything it contained: but in justice to Mr Green I must.219 The critic suggested that Mr Green’s Tiger owed something to my fairy-tales. In reality this is not so and is chronologically impossible. The Tiger was an old inhabitant, and his land a familiar haunt, of Mr Green’s imagination long before I began writing. There is a moral here for all of us as critics. I wonder how much Quellenforschung in our studies of older literature seems solid only because those who knew the facts are dead and cannot contradict it?
C. S. Lewis
TO CARL HENRY (W): TS
58/224
Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
1st December 1958.
Dear Mr Henry,
Thanks for Mr Kilby’s article.220 I have sent mine to Christian Century but had no acknowledgement yet.221 If you care to write to them and say that in the event of their not using it, you would like it, and I approve of your publishing it, by all means do. It is, I agree, a pity to swell their sales!
Yours sincerely,
C. S. Lewis
TO JOCELYN GIBB (BOD):
Dec. 2. [1958]
Dear Gibb
Right. I’ll be awaiting you at 5 on Thursday next. Thanks for enclosure.
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO ROGER LANCELYN GREEN (BOD):
Magdalene
Dec 3rd 1958
My dear Roger–
Of course I knew you weren’t playing Puzzle, for I read The Tiger, or an earlier draught of it, long ago. But I am much distressed over the whole thing. The reviewer cd. not have made a worse mistake:222 as you say, anyone reading your book under that misapprehension would inevitably be blind to every merit it possesses. I do wish they wd. criticise the books before them a little more and spend less time in constructing imaginary histories of how they came to be written (e.g. that the ring in Tolkien ‘is’ the Hydrogen Bomb!). Histories which in my experience are almost invariably quite wrong.
I have provisionally put you in my diary for ‘Dinner-bembreakfast’ on night of Mon. Feb 23.
Yours
Jack
TO KATHLEEN RAINE (BOD):
Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
Dec 5, 1958
Dear Kathleen Raine
No, no. But thanks for asking me. I’ve several papers and articles and other incubi223 at present and can’t take on another. Will you convey all this as kindly and regretfully (regretfully on my part, I mean) as possible I’ve been possibly rude in letting the whole term slip past without ever acknowledging The Sea of Space and Time.224 This was not because it did not interest me. On the contrary, I plunged into it at once. It seemed to me so important that I wanted to ‘do’ it really thoroughly, like a ‘set text’ and write a long, long commentary which might be of some use to you. But it is so packed and involves so many texts I don’t know–obviously I must read Porphyry–that I can’t, or can’t yet, get anywhere near that.225
But you carry conviction everywhere. When the Big Book226 finally appears I think all pre-Raine views of Blake will be obsolete forever. Unlike most of the revaluations and new critical interpretations which our kind produce, this is really worth doing. A good commentator is to me worth a wilderness of ‘evaluative’ critics.227 More power to your elbow.
Yours sincerely
Jack Lewis
TO CORBIN SCOTT CARNELL (W):
The Kilns,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford
Dec 10th 1958
Dear Mr. Carnell
1. P. E. More was the only distinguished American of that generation whom I ever actually met.228 We had two long evenings together and he was extremely kind and full of wisdom and humour.229 (Old men, by the way, are one of the things America does very well). I know only some of his books. Good, but not a patch on the man himself. I don’t think they influenced me: I was a new convert when we met and had not read him before then. Yes, Chesterton can be, in the bad sense, rhetorical, but v. seldom is. As a man once said to me ‘G.K.C. has the same quality of becoming more eloquent the more exactly he means what he says.’
2. As I perhaps said before, a great many people think I’m being Thomistic where I’m really being Aristotelian. He’s a top form boy, and I a bottom form boy, in the same school: what we share we get from Teacher. I am certainly not anti Thomist. He is one of the great philosophers. On points at issue between Christian Platonism and Christian Aristotelianism I have not got a clear line.
3. I think I took over the expression Arch-Nature230 because it was C.W.’s own. The implication is, I suppose, the Platonic one & that the Real is not ganz anderes231 but the archetype of the Phenomenal.
4. First appearance of Sehnsucht? I don’t know. I think it is there in bits of the Odyssey, in Pindar, in some of the choruses of Euripides, in Lucretius’ bit about the home of the gods, in the Anglo-Saxon Seafarer. Poets have said more about it than philosophers.
5. No. I can’t date the ride to Whipsnade.232
I am glad to hear Christian Century has printed my Rejoinder. But they have not sent me a copy of the number it appears in. If you could without trouble send me one I shd. be very much obliged indeed.
Yours sincerely
C. S. Lewis
TO JOCELYN GIBB (BOD): TS
58/64
The Kilns, Kiln Lane,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford.
11th December 1958.
Dear Gibb,
Stet is the answer. But if you think it still obscure, read ‘hitting on’.
Yours,
C. S. Lewis
TO MARY VAN DEUSEN (W):
Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
14/12/58
Dear Mrs. Van Deusen
Rhein’s experiments on extra-sensory perception are taken seriously and not generally suspected of containing any fraud, but the question of what they prove is still highly controversial.233 They are of course based on predictions of which card from a pack will be turned up etc. Estimating the real significance of the results involves the theory of chances and one needs to be a pretty good mathematician for that.
I don’t see anything sinful in speculating about the perceptions of the apostles, tho’ I doubt if we have evidence enough to make it very useful. But spiritualistic practices are a very different thing. First, the record of proved fraud in such matters is surely very big and black: there’s money in mediumship! Second, it very often has extremely bad effects on those who dabble in it; even insanity. And thirdly, most supposed communications through mediums are the silliest, sentimental, or even incoherent, twaddle. Why go to spirits to hear bosh when you can hear sense from quite a lot of your neighbours?
But I think the practice is a sin as well as folly. Necromancy (commerce with the dead) is strictly forbidden in the Old Testament, isn’t it?234 The New frowns on any excessive and irregular interest even in angels.235 And the whole tradition of Christendom is dead against it. I wd. be shocked at any Christian’s being, or consulting, a medium.
It is Resurrection, not ‘survival’ that we think of, and the spirit that concerns us is the Holy Spirit! I’d give Mr. A. Ford a wide berth myself.236
We are all well, God be praised, almost by miracle, and you and Genia are in my daily prayers always.
Yours sincerely
C. S. Lewis
On 15 December 1958 Warnie wrote to Edward A. Allen:237
The Kilns, Kiln Lane,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford.
15th December 1958.
Dear Edward,
Many thanks for your kind letter card, which was very welcome; though you say nothing about your own health, and the bad time you have been through, which I only learnt from your mother’s letter to C.S. and Joy. I should have liked to hear how you were making out, but have to fall back on the old theory that no news is good news. Hope it is true in this case.
I know well the religious experience you get from your ‘lower meadow’ though personally it more often comes to me on high ground. As the friend who was motoring me in Ireland this year said one fine day when we were on top of a mountain, ‘Up here one understands better the point of going up into a mountain to pray, as they do in the Bible.’ And I’ve also felt it very early in the morning at sea.
I’d like to see both the marimba and the pistol; the former is something I’ve never heard of before, and consequently cannot picture. Is this very ignorant of me? And congratulations on evolving the pistol; as you hint, it is pleasant in these days to hear of any invention which has no military future.
I am very busy just now trying to keep pace with the cost of living by turning out another book;238 good fun, even if it does’nt bring home the bacon. Though I rather think I’m wasting my time in not joining the ranks of what we call in our quaint old-fashioned way, ‘working men’. I was out along the railway track the other day and came upon a little squad of them ‘working’. Got into talk with a young fellow whose job was to pull up weeds out of the ballast, which he was doing at the rate of about one weed every six minutes. I asked him what he got for that? Answer, £520 a year–say $1560. Even at 63 I think it would not be beyond my powers, physical or mental, to do this. But I could’nt help admiring this lad; after he’d taken a 15 minute rest with me, he got ready to pick another weed–saying, ‘And then they wonder why the railways don’t pay’! And as no doubt our factories run on much the same lines, one might add, ‘and then we wonder why we are losing export markets’.
I hear you are under snow, and almost wish we were too; for weeks now we’ve hardly had an hour’s sunshine a day, and it gets very depressing to live by electric light.
Well Edward, here is where I’m going to ‘pack in’ as we say, for I hear the soup going on the table up in the dining room, and believe me one needs it on this sort of evening.
With all best wishes to you both for a prosperous and happy 1959.
Yours ever,
Warren Lewis
TO SHELDON VANAUKEN (BOD):
The Kilns,
Headington Quarry
Oxford
Dec 15th 1958
My dear Van Auken–
Thank you for extorting the editor’s permission to reply to Pittenger.239 I hope I have been trenchant without any breach of charity. I find it v. hard to approach such a Mr. Facing Both Ways240 with the respect I can easily give to an honest unbeliever. By now, you will have read my Rejoinder.
My wife’s recovery is really more like resurrection. We have been to Ireland together. She walks (with a stick and a limp) about the wood shooting–or anyway shooting at–pigeons; we walk together to the Ampleforth Arms.241 My brother is also well, and my own bone disease is as good as cured–anyway, quiescent.
If Puckishness were part of your nature I shd. think you meant to tantalise me with your references to the great irrevocable step you will never name. Neither monk nor felo de se.242 What then?243 (As if I meant Massachusetts!)244
I’ve often puzzled over the question of the obligatory lie245–for I am sure wherever it is permissible it is obligatory. The case I am clear about is where an impertinent question forces you either to lie or to betray a friend’s secret (for to say ‘I won’t tell you’ is often tantamount to answering ‘Yes’). The two you suggest, pretending to a medical degree or to negro blood, seem to me doubtful. It is hardly possible ever to predict with certainty that a lie will not be discovered some day to have been a lie. I shd. be afraid lest that discovery might undo all the good it had done and even aggravate the evil it was designed to remove.
I have lately passed my 60th. birthday. I pray for you nightly and wd. much like to meet. Very good wishes, and warm love from us all.
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO PHOEBE HESKETH (W):
The Kilns,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford
Dec 20th 1958
Dear Miss Hesketh–
I have treated you badly. There was another book before this which I never even acknowledged. But it came when my life was as swift and narrow as the race from a weir.
I married my wife–she, it was she at that dinner–in March 57, in hospital when she was apparently dying of cancer in the bone. When they sent her home in April 57 the nurses gave her a few weeks to live. At the same time I had developed a harmless but excruciating bone-disease on my own accord. A good man, thro whom (I had reason to believe) strange things had been done before, came & laid his hands on her and prayed. We lingered on much the same for a month or so–she groaning in bed, I sometimes screaming in my chair. And yet, you know, with a strange terrible happiness, even gaiety, mixed in. Then, unbelievably she began to get better. Now, the latest X-rays show bone which was merely a sort of porridge fully restored. Except for a limp (they left one leg shorter than the other) she is now in normal health–walks about shooting at pigeons in the wood–walks to our local pub, and we have been to Ireland together last summer. My own bones also have recovered. So you see there was not much room for poetry.
Thanks v. much for B’cup Children.246 I like the early poems about childhood. Like the longer ones like ‘Teddy Boy’ and ‘No Pause for Death’ a good deal less: and the religious one at the end best of all. That’s a corker of a line on p. 62 ‘My built-up world fades out before the dream.’247 ‘Becalmed’ I liked very much. ‘Safety-slime’ is good.248 I’ve been exactly there. Also ‘To an Artist.’ And one v. good bit on p. 73 ‘I know him thro’ your absence.’249 I also like (without yet fully understanding) ‘Three Deaths’. So for the moment. But what does one know about poems at the first reading.
My wife joins me in warmest thanks and good wishes. And please remember us both to heroic old Herbert Palmer. Shall we all ever meet again?
Yours sincerely
C. S. Lewis
TO JESSIE M. WATT (W):
The Kilns,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford
Dec 20th 1958
Dear Mrs. Watt
Thank you once more for a charming picture which, like all yours, brings the smell of heather and the sound of gulls. I have put it on–not hung it above–the mantle piece in front of my desk so that its calendrical portion is invisible from where I sit.
Everyone continues well and wonderful with us.
With thanks and warm good wishes.
Yours sincerely
C. S. Lewis
TO PHILINDA KRIEG (P):250
he Kilns,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford.
Dec 22nd 1958
Dear Mrs. Krieg
Thank you for your kind card. I am sorry to hear of Philinda’s trouble.251 Laurence has long been in my prayers, and I will of course mention her too. I wonder how much Laurence is changed.
I expect there are wonderful things to be seen in Chile. I’d never want to go to a place for the sake of its climate (not being a vegetable!) but landscapes, birds, beaches, smells, foods, wines, and people are another matter.
We are both well. With me it has been recovery: with my wife it has been more like resurrection.
With all blessings.
Yours sincerely
C. S. Lewis
TO JOHN H. MCCALLUM (P):
The Kilns,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford
Dec 23rd 1958
Dear Mac
Thanks for your dollop of reviews (Dec 18).252
As for the Episcopal TV. talks:–an author’s airy ‘I might write a book on that’ is apt to be as much misunderstood by publishers as any man’s airy ‘Of course I might get married someday’ is misunderstood by prospective mothers in law!
Compliments of the season to Jovanovich253 and yourself from us. We’re fine.
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE (W):
The Kilns
Headington Quarry,
Oxford
Dec 25th 1958
Dear Mary Willis
I have let our correspondence get rather disgracefully behind on my side, not from ceasing to think of you, but from being very busy finishing a book254 (a dull, academic, technical one, tho’ exciting to me) and from the usual daily post–drat it!
Thanks for your nice review. And I am glad our law now allows me to send you a little (I gather you and Barfield have it all in train).255 We are all well–Joy wonderful–but live in perpetual sunlessness. Never knew so long a spell of fogs. One pines for lights and, scarcely less, shadows, which make up so much of the beauty of the world. Accept the warmest love and Christmas greetings from us both.
Yours
Jack
TO MRS HOOK (W):
Magdalen College,
Oxford.
29 Dec 1958
Dear Mrs Hook
By an allegory I mean a composition (whether pictorial or literary) in wh. immaterial realities are represented by feigned physical objects e.g. a pictured Cupid allegorically represents erotic love (which in reality is an experience, not an object occupying a given area of space) or, in Bunyan, a giant represents Despair.256
If Aslan represented the immaterial Deity in the same way in which Giant Despair represents Despair, he would be an allegorical figure. In reality however he is an invention giving an imaginary answer to the question, ‘What might Christ become like if there really were a world like Narnia and He chose to be incarnate and die and rise again in that world as He actually has done in ours?’ This is not an allegory at all. So in ‘Perelandra’. This also works out a supposition. (‘Suppose, even now, in some other planet there were a first couple undergoing the same that Adam and Eve underwent here, but successfully.’)
Allegory and such supposals differ because they mix the real and the unreal in different ways. Bunyan’s picture of Giant Despair does not start from supposal at all. It is not a supposition but a fact that despair can capture and imprison a human soul. What is unreal (fictional) is the giant, the castle, and the dungeon. The Incarnation of Christ in another world is mere supposal: but granted the supposition, He would really have been a physical object in that world as He was in Palestine and His death on the Stone Table would have been a physical event no less than his death on Calvary.
Similarly, if the angels (who I believe to be real beings in the actual universe) have that relation to the Pagan gods which they are assumed to have in Perelandra, they might really manifest themselves in real form as they did to Ransom.
Again, Ransom (to some extent) plays the role of Christ not because he allegorically represents him (as Cupid represents falling in love) but because in reality every real Christian is really called upon in some measure to enact Christ. Of course Ransom does this rather more spectacularly than most. But that does not mean that he does it allegorically. It only means that fiction (at any rate my kind of fiction) chooses extreme cases.
There is no conscious connection between any of the phonetic elements in my ‘Old Solar’ words and those of any actual language. I am always playing with syllables and fitting them together (purely by ear) to see if I can hatch up new words that please me. I want them to have an emotional, not intellectual, suggestiveness: the heaviness of glund for as huge a planet as Jupiter, the vibrating, tintillating quality of viritrilbia for the subtlety of Mercury, the liquidity (as I thought) of Maleldil. The only exception I am aware of is hnau257 which may (but I don’t know) have been influenced by Greek nous.
Thank you for the kind things you say about my other works.
Yours sincerely
C. S. Lewis
Nous: The intellectual faculty of the natural man…employed in practical judgement, capable of being good or evil, and of being regenerated, the mind, the reason, the reasoning faculty.
TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE (W):
The Kilns,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford
Dec 29/58
Dear Mary Willis
Just a very hurried line–
(1.). To condole with you on the loss of Fr. Louis.258 (2.) To tell a story which puts the contrast between our feast of the Nativity and all this ghastly ‘Xmas’ racket at its lowest. My brother heard a woman on a ’bus say, as the ’bus passed a church with a Crib outside it, ‘Oh Lor! They bring religion into everything. Look–they’re dragging it even into Christmas now!’
Love and sympathy from us both.
Yours
Jack
TO THE EDITOR OF THE CHRISTIAN CENTURY:259
Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
Sir:
Thank you for publishing my ‘Rejoinder to Dr. Pittenger.’ (Nov. 26). Now would you, please, complete your kindness by publishing the statement that ‘populam’ (p. 1360) is either my typist’s or your printer’s error for ‘populum’?
An article on ‘translation’ such as Dr. Pittenger suggests in his letter in the Dec. 24 issue certainly needs doing, but I could not usefully do it for Americans. The vernacular into which they would have to translate is not quite the same as that into which I have translated. Small differences, in addressing proletarians, may be all-important.
In both countries an essential part of the ordination exam ought to be a passage from some recognized theological work set for translation into vulgar English–just like doing Latin prose. Failure on this exam should mean failure on the whole exam. It is absolutely disgraceful that we expect missionaries to the Bantus to learn Bantu but never ask whether our missionaries to the Americans or English can speak American or English. Any fool can write learned language. The vernacular is the real test. If you can’t turn your faith into it, then either you don’t understand it or you don’t believe it.
C. S. Lewis
TO HENRY B. CHAPIN (P):260
As from Magdalene College,
Cambridge.
Dec 31st 1958
Dear Mr. Chapin
Thank you for sending me your Carols.261 They are interesting work. I believe there may be much to be done with that technique of ending on two stressed (and long) syllables, like waves broke and strange night. If you have not read Charles Williams’ Taliessin through Logres you will find it–metrically anyway–‘just up your street’
Thank you for the kind things you say about my own work. I hope I don’t resent on my own account anything Pittenger said. But I do find it hard to stomach the fact that, while contradicting nearly every article of the Creed, he continues to receive money as a professor of Christian Apologetics. You and I can respect the honest atheist. But how can a man endure to be what he is? No doubt he finds it uncomfortable, and his resentment of my books has in it both anguish and envy. God help him.
With all good wishes.
Yours sincerely
C. S. Lewis