¹ CL I, p. viii.

² Lewis wrote of this in detail in AMR, pp. 201–8.

³ SBJ, ch. 13, p. 157.

⁴ ibid.

⁵ Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey (1818), ch. 25.

⁶ SBJ, ch. 13, p. 156.

⁷ ibid., p. 160.

⁸ CL II, pp. 905–6.

⁹ Of This and Other Worlds, ed. Walter Hooper (London: Fount, 1984; HarperCollins, 2000), ‘It All Began with a Picture…’, p.64.

¹⁰ CL II, p. 221, letter of 25 January 1938.

¹¹ ibid., p. xi.

¹² Of This and Other Worlds, p.64.

¹³ ibid., ‘Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What’s to be Said’, pp. 57–8.

¹⁴ Mrs Moore died at Restholme on 12 December 1951.

¹⁵ See p. 66.

¹⁶ See p. 150.

¹⁷ Many of these letters are preserved in the Bodleian Library (MS. Eng. c. 5369).

¹⁸ The Spectator, 193 (1 October 1954), p. 405.

¹⁹ Helen Gardner, ‘Clive Staples Lewis 1898–1963’, Proceedings of the British Academy, LI (1965), p. 425.

²⁰ ibid.

²¹ Roger Lancelyn Green and Walter Hooper, C. S. Lewis: A Biography (London: Bles, 1974; rev. edn, HarperCollins, 2002), ch. 12, p. 340.

²² See p. 268.

²³ See p. 1464.

²⁴ See p. 1429.

²⁵ The Horse and His Boy (1954), ch. 11.

²⁶ See p. 834.

¹ See Roger Lancelyn Green in the Biographical Appendix to CL II, pp. 1039–43. Green was the primary reader and critic of Lewis’s Narnian stories.

² For information about the writing of the Narnian stories see Roger Lancelyn Green and Walter Hooper, C. S. Lewis: A Biography (London: Bles, 1974; rev. edn HarperCollins, 2002), ch. 11.

³ This is a letter of reference for Lewis’s former pupil, Jonathan Francis ‘Frank’ Goodridge, whose biography appears in CL II, p. 936n. Goodridge was applying for the position of Senior Lecturer in English at St Mary’s College, Strawberry Hill, Twickenham, London. He taught at St Mary’s College, 1950–65. See Goodridge’s comments on this testimonial in CSL: The Bulletin of the New York C. S. Lewis Society, Whole No. 75 ( Jan. 1976), p. 13.

⁴ This is one of those occasions on which Lewis misspelled his pupil’s name.

⁵ This was the Oxford University Socratic Club, founded in 1941 by Stella Aldwinckle with Lewis as its first president. See Stella Aldwinckle in the Biographical Appendix. The club’s purpose was to discuss the pros and cons of Christianity, and it met weekly during term-time. Goodridge was secretary of the Socratic Club, 1947–8. For a history of the club see Walter Hooper, ‘Oxford’s Bonny Fighter’ in Remembering C. S. Lewis: Recollections of Those Who Knew Him, ed. James T. Como (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2005). This book was previously published as C. S. Lewis at the Breakfast Table (1979; new edn, 1992).

⁶ See the biography of George Rostrevor Hamilton in CL II, p. 707n.

⁷ Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus), Satires, II, vi, 65: ‘O nights and suppers of gods!’ Horace (65–8 BC) was one of the greatest of the Roman poets.

⁸ Claudian, De Raptu Proserpinae, II, 282–3: ‘There are other stars for us.’ Pluto speaks the phrase, attempting to calm Persephone’s weeping, telling her that he is a person of importance and that there is an upside to being in the underworld.

⁹ The word planta–‘a young tree’–appears in Virgil, Georgics, II, 23.

¹⁰ See Owen Barfield in the Biographical Appendix to CL I, pp. 979–82. Barfield was one of Lewis’s oldest friends and also his lawyer.

¹¹ ‘ritual’.

¹² John Masefield (1878–1967), Poet Laureate 1930–67.

¹³ See the biography of Nathan Comfort Starr, Professor of English at the University of Florida in Gainesville, in CL II, p. 809n. His essay on Lewis, ‘Good Cheer and Sustenance’, appears in Remembering C. S. Lewis.

¹⁴ Lewis’s group of friends, the Inklings, met regularly every Tuesday morning in the Eagle and Child (‘Bird and Baby’) pub in St Giles.

¹⁵ p.p. See Abbreviations.

¹⁶ Sarah Neylan (later Tisdall) was Lewis’s eleven-year-old goddaughter. See Mary Neylan in the Biographical Appendix to CL II, pp. 1054–5.

¹⁷ Rhona Bodle, from New Zealand, arrived in England in 1947 to study the education of deaf children. That same year she began teaching at Oakdene School for girls in Burgess Hill, Sussex. In December 1947 she began reading Lewis’s Broadcast Talks (London: Bles, 1942) and this led her to write to him. She became a Christian in 1949. See her biography in CL II, p. 823n. Her notes to Lewis’s letters are in the Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. lett. c. 200/4.

¹⁸ See Charles Walter Stansby Williams (1886–1945) in the Biographical Appendix to CL II, pp. 1081–6.

¹⁹ Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene (1590, 1596), I, xi, 45, 6: ‘It chaunst (eternal God that chaunce did guide)’.

²⁰ See Sister Penelope CSMV in the Biographical Appendix to CL II, pp. 1055–9.

²¹ In 1948 Sister Penelope began asking Lewis’s advice about a story she was writing, to be called ‘The Morning Gift’. She was never able to find a publisher. It is first mentioned in Lewis’s letter to Sister Penelope of 8 April 1948 (CLII, p. 848).

²² This was probably a reference to Sir Herbert Butterfield’s Christianity and History (London: Bell, 1949).

²³ Sister Penelope’s St Bernard on the Love of God, De Diligendo Deo, newly translated by A Religious of C.S.M.V. (London: Mowbray, 1950).

²⁴ In a letter of 29 November 1944 to his son Christopher, Professor J. R. R. Tolkien said that he and Lewis ‘begin to consider writing a book in collaboration on “Language” (Nature, Origins, Functions)’ (The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, ed. Humphrey Carpenter (1981), p. 105). By 1948 it had got as far as being called Language and Human Nature in an announcement of forthcoming books from the Student Christian Movement, who expected it to be published in 1949. In the end, it was never written. Emperor Augustus used ‘on the Greek Kalends’ for ‘Never’.

²⁵ Edward A. Allen and his mother, Mrs Belle Allen, lived at 173 Highland Avenue, Westfield, Massachusetts. They were very generous to the Lewis brothers, and sent them numerous parcels of food over the years. For the beginning of the correspondence see Lewis’s letter to Allen of 3 January 1948 (CL II, p. 827).

²⁶ John Strachey (1901–63), a British Socialist writer and Labour politician, who served as Minister of Food, 1946–50.

²⁷ Vera Mathews (later Gebbert) was living at this time at 510 North Alpine Drive, Beverly Hills, California. She supplied the Lewis brothers with vast quantities of food during the lean years following the war.

²⁸ See Edward Thomas Dell, Jr in the Biographical Appendix to CL II, p. 1025. At this time Dell was a student at Eastern Nazarene College, Wollaston, Massachusetts.

²⁹ In a letter of 12 December 1949 Dell had asked whether ‘evil is an illusion’. Lewis replied on 19 December 1949: ‘I don’t think the idea that evil is an illusion helps. Because surely it is a (real) evil that the illusion of evil shd. exist. When I am pursued in a nightmare by a crocodile the pursuit and the crocodile are illusions: but it is a real nightmare, and that seems a real evil’ (CL II, p. 1010). Continuing the discussion, Dell asked in a letter of 26 January 1950: ‘If the illusion of the crocodile is evil isn’t it so because of man’s sin rather than a basic relationship set up either by an evil or uncontrolled by a finite God?’ (Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. lett. c. 220/4, fols. 89–90).

³⁰ Nothing is known of this American nun who, it appears, wanted to know why Lewis was not a Roman Catholic.

³¹ See Nicolas Zernov, Spalding Lecturer in Eastern Orthodox Culture in the University of Oxford, in the Biographical Appendix.

³² Henry Norman Spalding (1877–1953), philanthropist. In his early life Spalding came across a book about the history of India which kindled in him an interest in the Far East. He settled in Oxford and devoted himself to the attempt to cultivate better relations between the West and the East by fostering scholarly approaches to the history, art, religion and philosophy of Oriental countries. He was so impressed by the work of Nicolas Zernov that in 1965 he founded the Spalding Lectureship in Eastern Orthodox Culture, with Zernov as its first holder.

³³ Mrs Frank Jones, who was still sending food parcels to Lewis, wrote from 320 Brookside Road, Darien, Connecticut.

³⁴ The Problem of Pain (London: Bles, 1940; HarperCollins, 2002).

³⁵ The Old Testament.

³⁶ Mr Lake had presumably asked Lewis about the association of planetary intelligences and eldila with angels in his interplanetary trilogy, Out of the Silent Planet (London: John Lane, 1938), Perelandra (London: John Lane, 1943) and That Hideous Strength (London: John Lane, 1945). Lewis was later to write about these angels or daemons in The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964), ch. 3, pp. 40–2.

³⁷ For years Lewis had been publishing some of his poems under the pseudonym Nat Whilk (or N.W.)–Anglo-Saxon for ‘I know not whom’. In Perelandra (1943; HarperCollins, 2000), ch. 1, p. 13, he quotes a note on the eldila or angels by one ‘Natvilcius’, which is Latin for ‘Nat Whilk’.

³⁸ See Daphne Harwood in the Biographical Appendix to CL II, pp. 1050–1. Mrs Harwood, the wife of Cecil Harwood, had not been well.

³⁹ i.e., her husband.

⁴⁰ Bede (c. 673–735) established the date of Easter in his De Temporum Ratione (written in 725).

⁴¹ Christopher Fry, The Lady’s Not For Burning (1949).

⁴² John, the Harwoods’ eldest son, was Lewis’s pupil at Magdalen College. See his biography in CL II, p. 300n.

⁴³ Sylvia was one of the Harwoods’ daughters.

⁴⁴ See the biography of Walter Ogilvie ‘Woff’ Field in CL II, p. 572n. Field, like Cecil Harwood, was a teacher at Michael Hall School, Kidbrooke Park, Forest Row, Sussex.

⁴⁵ See Roger Lancelyn Green in the Biographical Appendix to CL II, pp. 1039–43. At this time Green was living at 119 Woodstock Road, Oxford,

⁴⁶ Lewis’s original title for what became Prince Caspian: The Return to Narnia (1951) was ‘A Horn in Narnia’ (since it was Queen Susan’s magic horn which drew the children back to the rescue of Prince Caspian).

⁴⁷ See Lady Freud in the Biographical Appendix to CL II, pp. 1033–6. June Flewett (known familiarly as ‘Jill’) had been evacuated to Oxford at the beginning of the Second World War, and ended up living at The Kilns during 1943–5, helping Mrs Moore and the Lewis brothers. After graduating from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, London, in 1947, she became an actress, using the screen name Jill Raymond.

⁴⁸ Warnie was in Restholme on this occasion.

⁴⁹ Bruce was Mrs Moore’s elderly dog.

⁵⁰ This letter was published in The Times Literary Supplement (3 March 1950), p. 137, under the title ‘Text Corruptions’.

⁵¹ William Shakespeare, Two Gentlemen of Verona, ed. John Dover Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1921).

⁵² William Shakespeare, Two Gentlemen of Verona (1594), V, iv, 90. References to Shakespeare in the present volume are to William Shakespeare, Complete Works, ed. W. J. Craig, Oxford Standard Authors (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1905).

⁵³ Shakespeare, Two Gentlemen of Verona, ed. Dover Wilson, p. 103.

⁵⁴ See Dr Warfield M. Firor in the Biographical Appendix to CL II, pp. 1031–2.

⁵⁵ On 24 February 1950 the British Labour Party won the general election, with Clement Attlee (1883–1967) returning as Prime Minister.

⁵⁶ William Shakespeare, Hamlet (1603), IV, iv, 36–9.

⁵⁷ ‘masterpiece’.

⁵⁸ ‘way to arrive’.

⁵⁹ Green had written a blurb for the cover of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (London: Bles, 1950), but in the end it was not used.

⁶⁰ See the biography of Geoffrey Bles in CL II, p. 554n. Bles, Lewis’s publisher, was the owner of Geoffrey Bles Ltd, London.

⁶¹ Milton Waldman (1895–1976) was born in the United States and educated at Yale University. After serving with the US Army, 1917–19, he moved to England where he spent his life in publishing. He was assistant editor of The London Mercury, 1924–7, before becoming a literary advisor to the publishers Longmans Green, 1929–34, and then William Collins, 1939–52. He was joint managing director of Rupert Hart-Davis Ltd, 1952–3, and literary advisor to Collins, 1955–69. During his years with Collins he edited the Golden Hind and Brief Lives series. Waldman was the author of Americana (1925), Elizabeth of England (1933), and The Lady Mary: A Biography of Queen Mary I (1972).

⁶² The King’s Arms public house on the corner of Holywell Street and Parks Road.

⁶³ See George and Moira Sayer in the Biographical Appendix.

⁶⁴ In a letter of 3 April 1950 Dell said: ‘I have been reading your Allegory of Love with great interest. It has occurred to me to wonder whether the present-day lack…of a depth of love between men so often seen in the middle ages could be part of the cause for the male lack of interest in God’ (Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. lett. c. 220/4, fol. 91).

⁶⁵ In the same letter Dell asked: ‘I am a bit confused on a point. You say in “Membership”…that “all biological life (will be)…extinct”…But nonetheless I remember that your view of immortality in Miracles includes animals…Now, will only part of Nature then be redeemed when we, please God, “ride those greater mounts…with the King” and what we know as Bios be gone and Zoe reign in the “more organic” Nature?’ (ibid., fols. 91–2).

⁶⁶ ‘existence’.

⁶⁷ The Problem of Pain, ch. 9, pp. 145–6: ‘Supposing, as I do, that the personality of the tame animals is largely the gift of man–that their mere sentience is reborn to soulhood in us as our mere soulhood is reborn to spirituality in Christ–I naturally suppose that very few animals indeed, in their wild state, attain to a “self ” or ego. But if any do, and if it is agreeable to the goodness of God that they should live again, their immortality would also be related to man–not, this time, to individual masters, but to humanity.’

⁶⁸ Dell asked: ‘In reading the new translation of St. Athanasius’ Incarnation of the Word of God by your friend at “Wantage” [Sister Penelope]…I have wondered about an intimation on p. 28…that Athanasius may have assumed that God superimposed the Word or His image on the animal form of man. Do you think St. Athanasius was merely using a convenient way of speaking to describe a difference between man and animals or that he saw man as a progressively developed animal that was finally “made in the image” of the Word?’ (Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. lett. c. 220/4, fol. 92). Dell was referring to The Incarnation of the Word of God, Being the Treatise of St. Athanasius ‘De Incarnatione Verbi Dei’, trans. ‘A Religious of C.S.M.V.’ (London: Bles, 1944).
In Against the Heathen, 33, St Athanasius distinguishes between humans, who have immortal souls, and animals, who do not: ‘These things simply prove that the rational soul presides over the body. For the body is not even constituted to drive itself, but it is driven by another’s will, just as a horse does not harness himself, but is driven by his master. Hence laws for human beings to practise what is good and to abstain from evil-doing, while for animals evil remains unthought of and undiscerned, because they lie outside rationality and the process of understanding. I think then that the existence of a rational soul in man is proved by what we have said…O God, You have given us an immortal soul which distinguishes us from irrational creatures. Help us all to safeguard it from evil influences and everything that tarnishes it and turns it away from You.’

⁶⁹ See Dom Bede Griffiths OSB in the Biographical Appendix to CL II, pp. 1043–9. Griffiths, Lewis’s former pupil, had been prior of the Benedictine abbey at Farnborough since 1947.

⁷⁰ Dom Bede Griffiths, ‘Catholicism To-day’, Pax: The Quarterly Review of the Benedictines of Prinknash, XL, no. 254 (Spring 1950), pp. 11–16.

⁷¹ See the biography of Dr Robert Emlyn ‘Humphrey’ Havard in CL II, p. 182n. Havard was Lewis’s doctor and an Inkling. As an oblate of Ampleforth–a lay member of the Benedictine order–he probably met Griffiths while visiting Farnborough Abbey.

⁷² ‘[He is] pure spirit’.

⁷³ Griffiths, ‘Catholicism To-day’, p. 13.

⁷⁴ The classical definition of natural law is found in St Thomas Aquinas: ‘The natural law is nothing other than the light of understanding placed in us by God; through it we know what we must do and what we must avoid. God has given this light or law at the creation’ (Collationes in decem praeceptis, 1). The chief New Testament text on which natural law is based is Romans 2:14–15: ‘When Gentiles who have not the law do by nature what the law requires, they are a law to themselves, even though they do not have the law. They show that what the law requires is written on their hearts’ (RSV). Lewis devoted the first book of Mere Christianity (London: Bles, 1952) to natural law, and in The Abolition of Man (London: Oxford University Press, 1943; Fount, 1999), ch. 1, pp. 11–12, he defines it as ‘the doctrine of objective value, the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others really false, to the kind of thing the universe is, and the kind of things we are’. See the section on natural law in CG, pp. 586–96.

⁷⁵ Romans 7:12–13: ‘The law is holy, and the commandment holy, and just and good. Was then that which is good made death unto me? God forbid. But sin, that it might appear sin, working death in me by that which is good; that sin by the commandment might become exceeding sinful.’

⁷⁶ Lewis was referring to the belief in ‘salvation by faith and faith alone’, as understood by the Protestant Reformers, and St Paul’s statement in Galatians 2:16: ‘Knowing that a man is not justified by the works of the law, but by the faith of Jesus Christ, even we have believed in Jesus Christ, that we might be justified by the faith of Christ, and not by the works of the law: for by the works of the law shall no flesh be justified.’

⁷⁷ As president of the Oxford University Socratic Club, Lewis was present at its meeting on 10 November 1947 when Ronald Grimsley read a paper on ‘Existentialism’, later published in the Socratic Digest, no. 4 [1948], pp. 66–77.

⁷⁸ Jean-Paul Sartre, L’Existentialisme est un Humanisme [Existentialism Is a Humanism] (1945).

⁷⁹ On the philosophical theory of Bishop George Berkeley, see CL II, p. 703, n. 21.

⁸⁰ On 3 November 1947 Lewis read a paper to the Socratic Club entitled ‘A First Glance at Sartre’. A brief summary of the paper, which was a critique of Sartre’s L’Existentialisme est un Humanisme, is found in Walter Hooper, ‘Oxford’s Bonny Fighter’, Remembering C. S. Lewis, pp. 160–1.

⁸¹ In his letter to Dom Bede Griffiths of 5 July 1949 (CL II, pp. 953–4), Lewis mentions hearing the French Catholic philosopher Gabriel Marcel (1889–1973) give a lecture to the Oxford University Socratic Club on 18 February 1948. ‘It is definitely not my philosophy,’ commented Lewis.

⁸² See Marcel’s ‘theism and personal relationships’ in Socratic Digest, No. 4, pp. 78–9.

⁸³ In her note to this letter Bodle said: ‘I had received bad and completely unexpected news from home’ (Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. lett. c. 220/4, fol. 247).

⁸⁴ Dr Firor had invited Lewis to spend a holiday with him at his cabin in the Rocky Mountains.

⁸⁵ i.e., his responsibility for taking care of Mrs Moore.

⁸⁶ While Lewis was preparing to spend a fortnight in Ireland with Arthur Greeves during the summer of 1949, Warnie went on a binge and the holiday was cancelled. See the letter to Greeves of 2 July 1949 (CL II, pp. 952–3).

⁸⁷ William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra (1623), V, ii, 87–8.

⁸⁸ George John Romanes (1848–94) was born in Canada and moved with his family to London in 1850. After reading Medicine and Physiology at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, he decided to devote his life to scientific research. This led to a lifelong friendship with Charles Darwin. Romanes was, at the same time, a man of strong religious convictions. In 1891 he provided for the Romanes Lectureship, the oldest and most famous of Oxford’s lectures. It is delivered once a year on a subject relating to science, art or literature. See Ethel Romanes, The Life and Letters of George John Romanes (1896). Lewis was asked to deliver the Romanes Lecture at the end of his life.

⁸⁹ Mrs Maude M. McCaslin, wife of Alston Jones McCaslin, was writing from Europa, Mississippi.

⁹⁰ ‘The Wood that Time Forgot’ is a novel by Roger Lancelyn Green. Although it was written before The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe it remains unpublished because it would seem to owe too much to Lewis’s Lion.

⁹¹ BF, p. 233.

⁹² See Arthur Greeves in the Biographical Appendix to CL I, pp. 993–6.

⁹³ Matthew 6:28–30; Luke 12:27–8: ‘Consider the lilies how they grow: they toil not, they spin not; and yet I say unto you, that Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. If then God so clothe the grass, which is to day in the field, and tomorrow is cast into the oven; how much more will he clothe you, O ye of little faith?’

⁹⁴ See Cecil Harwood in the Biographical Appendix to CL I (pp. 998–1000). Harwood, one of Lewis’s oldest friends, was an anthroposophist and a teacher at Michael Hall School, Kidbrooke, Forest Row, East Sussex.

⁹⁵ Virgil, Aeneid, II, 61: ‘prepared for either thing’.

⁹⁶ In SBJ, ch. 13, p. 155, Harwood is described as ‘a pillar of Michael Hall’.

⁹⁷ The Bellman was the captain of the ship in Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark (1876). In Fit the Second, stanzas 5–8, the Bellman persuades his crew that a blank sheet of paper makes an ideal chart of the open sea. ‘This was charming, no doubt: but they shortly found out/That the Captain they trusted so well/Had only one notion for crossing the ocean,/And that was to tingle his bell./…And the Bellman, perplexed and distressed,/Said he had hoped, at least, when the wind blew due East,/That the ship would not travel due West!’

⁹⁸ Harwood had written to tell Lewis that his wife, Daphne, was dying of cancer.

⁹⁹ Lewis had published a poem, ‘As One Oldster to Another’ under the pseudonym ‘N.W.’ in Punch, CCXVIII (15 March 1950), p. 295. Mr Dixey wrote to compliment him on his use of Alcaics, a four-line stanza using a predominantly dactylic metre named after the Greek poet, Alcaeus. A slightly revised version of the poem appears in Poems (1974) and CP.

¹⁰⁰ Ernest H. Shepard (1879–1976), a cartoonist for Punch, illustrated ‘As One Oldster to Another’ and other of Lewis’s poems. Shepard also illustrated all A. A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh books.

¹⁰¹ In 1942 Lewis had Owen Barfield set up a charitable trust into which Lewis directed all his royalties. It was named ‘Agapony’ ‘or ‘Agapargyry’ or ‘The Agapargyrometer’ = love + money. The money was available for whoever might be in need, with preference given to widows and orphans. For details see CL II, p. 483.

¹⁰² While protecting Lewis’s confidentiality, Barfield devoted a chapter to the Agapony in his book This Ever Diverse Pair (1950).

¹⁰³ Harwood had written to say that he had received some money from the Agapony fund.

¹⁰⁴ See Stella Aldwinckle, founder of the Socratic Club, in the Biographical Appendix.

¹⁰⁵ As president of the Oxford University Socratic Club, Lewis was suggesting in his letter to Aldwinckle a list of people she might ask to speak at the club, along with possible topics.

¹⁰⁶ Gilbert Ryle (1900–76), philosopher, was Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy and Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, 1945–68.

¹⁰⁷ Henry Habberley Price (1899–1984), philosopher, was educated at Winchester College and New College, Oxford, where he took a First in Classics in 1921. In 1924 he was elected a Fellow and lecturer in Philosophy at Trinity College, Oxford, where he remained until 1935. In that year he was elected Wykeham Professor of Logic and moved to New College where he remained until his retirement in 1959. He was a frequent speaker at the Socratic Club. See his biography in the Oxford DNB.

¹⁰⁸ i.e., an admirer of Jean-Paul Sartre.

¹⁰⁹ Francis Joseph ‘Frank’ Sheed (1897–1981), publisher and author, was born in Sydney, Australia, and read law at Sydney University, taking his BA in 1917. In 1920 he went to London where he came across the recently formed Catholic Evidence Guild, devoted to out-of-doors speaking to explain the teaching of the Roman Catholic Church. He was bowled over by the excitement of the Guild’s task, and he joined. There he met Mary ‘Maisie’ Josephine Ward (1889–1975), and they were married in 1926. That same year Frank and Maisie founded a publishing firm, Sheed and Ward. In 1933 they opened an office in New York, through which Sheed and Ward became the most influential Catholic publisher in the English-speaking world. Maisie died on 28 January 1975 and Frank on 20 November 1981.

¹¹⁰ Christopher Dawson (1889–1970), cultural historian, was born at Hay, Brecknockshire, on 12 October 1889 and educated at Winchester College and Trinity College, Oxford, taking his degree in 1911. He had sufficient means to be able to follow his own highly original path of historical research and reflection. His first book, The Age of the Gods (1928), was the result of fourteeen years of research. His second, Progress and Religion (1929), articulated the major theme of his subsequent writings, that religion is the dynamic of all social culture. The Making of Europe (1932) discussed a specific case of this, showing that the ‘dark ages’ were in fact the most creative period in the culture of the Western world. Dawson developed the topic further in his Gifford Lectures for Edinburgh University, Religion and Culture (1948), about which Lewis wrote to him on 27 September 1948 (see Supplement). Dawson became a Roman Catholic shortly after going down from Oxford and was an influential member of the group of writers which formed around the Catholic publishing house of Sheed and Ward. Dawson’s achievements were mainly overlooked by the academic world. He was eventually offered a chair in the United States at Harvard where he was Professor of Roman Catholic Studies, 1958–62. He died on 25 May 1970.

¹¹¹ Henry Fitzgerald Heard (1889–1971), science writer and philosopher, was educated at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, after which he lectured for Oxford University’s extra-mural studies programme, 1926–9. He took a strong interest in developments in the sciences and his The Ascent of Humanity (1929) marked his first foray into public acclaim. He served as a science and current affairs commentator for the BBC, 1930–4. In 1937 he moved to the United States, accompanied by Aldous Huxley, to accept the chair of Historical Anthropology at Duke University. His most famous book, The Five Ages of Man, was published in 1963. He died on 14 August 1971.

¹¹² Aldous Leonard Huxley (1894–1963), English novelist, won a scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford where in 1916 he took a First in English. His first novel, Crome Yellow (1921), was followed by others satirizing contemporary society through characters who flout convention. While in Italy he wrote Brave New World (1932). His move to California in 1937 coincided with a move away from his ‘philosophy of meaninglessness’ to something more transcendental and mystical. The books that followed, such as Brave New World Revisited (1958), spelt out the temptations presented by life in the modern world with its materialist values and dangerous technological advances. Huxley died on the same day as John F. Kennedy and Lewis–22 November 1963.

¹¹³ This was probably Fr John Philip Gleeson, who took a B. Litt. from Campion Hall in 1951.

¹¹⁴ Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe (1919–2001), philosopher, was born on 18 March 1919 at Glanmire, North Strand, Limerick. Her conversion to Catholicism as a teenager led to a lifelong interest in philosophy. She was educated at St Hugh’s College, Oxford, where she took a First in Greats in 1941. The following year she moved to Cambridge where, as a research student, she became the pupil of Ludwig Wittgenstein. In 1936 she returned to Oxford as a Research Fellow at Somerville College. She was a Fellow of Somerville, 1964–70, and Professor of Philosophy, Cambridge University, 1970–86. She died on 5 January 2001. On her debate with Lewis about Miracles: A Preliminary Study (London: Bles, 1947) see her biography in CG.

¹¹⁵ Colin Hardie, one of the Inklings, was Classical Tutor at Magdalen College, Oxford. See Colin and Christian Hardie in the Biographical Appendix.

¹¹⁶ New Testament.

¹¹⁷ The Rev. Dr Austin Farrer was Chaplain and Tutor of Trinity College, Oxford. See Austin and Katherine Farrer in the Biographical Appendix.

¹¹⁸ Basil Mitchell (1917–), philosopher, was educated at the Queen’s College, Oxford, where he took a BA in 1939. He was Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy at Keble College, Oxford, 1947–67, and Nolloth Professor of Philosophy of the Christian Religion, Oxford University, 1968–84. An active member of the Socratic Club, he followed Lewis as its president in 1955.

¹¹⁹ Alfred Jules Ayer (1910–89), Wykeham Professor of Logic at Oxford, 1959–78, was a proponent of logical positivism, and the author of Language, Truth and Logic (1936).

¹²⁰ On 2 February 1948 Elizabeth Anscombe gave a paper to the Socratic Club on Lewis’s Miracles entitled ‘A Reply to Mr C. S. Lewis’s Argument that “Naturalism” is Self-Refuting’. It was published in the Socratic Digest, no. 4 (1948) and is reprinted in her Collected Philosophical Papers, Vol. II, Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Mind (1981). Anscombe’s argument concerned the nature of causation, one of its crucial points being that Lewis should have distinguished in chapter 3 of Miracles between ‘irrational causes’ and ‘non-rational causes’. Lewis accepted that he might have made his argument clearer and this he attempted to do by revising chapter 3 for the Fontana paperback of Miracles. See the letters to Jocelyn Gibb of 11 July and 8 August 1959.

¹²¹ Professor Dorothy Emmet (1904–2000), philosopher, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Manchester, 1946–66.

¹²² Jill had become engaged to the writer Clement Freud, and their engagement was announced in The Times: ‘Clement Raphael third son of Ernst and Lucie Freud of St Johns Wood London to June Beatrice second daughter of H. W. Flewett M.A. and Mrs Flewett of Gipsy Lane London SW15.’

¹²³ This note was added later in Lewis’s hand. Jill sent him a copy of the Wilton Diptych, the full title of which is Richard II Presented to the Virgin and Child by his Patron Saint John the Baptist and Saints Edward and Edmund. The diptych was painted between 1395 and 1399, and is in the National Gallery, London. It is called the Wilton Diptych because it came from Wilton House in Wiltshire, the seat of the Earls of Pembroke. Lewis treasured this gift all his life, and had it with him in Magdalene College, Cambridge, during his years there.

¹²⁴ Arthur’s cocker spaniel.

¹²⁵ Mrs D. Jessup was writing from 66 Milton Road, Rye, New York.

¹²⁶ A house-maid.

¹²⁷ Virgil (70–19 BC), Aeneid. Lewis probably read the Aeneid more often than he did any other book.

¹²⁸ Green and Hooper, C. S. Lewis: A Biography, ch. 11, p. 310.

¹²⁹ Griffiths was planning to visit Oxford.

¹³⁰ Mathews wrote to Lewis on 24 June 1950: ‘I’m in the midst of ARTHURIAN TORSO at the moment, but am having trouble with the pronunciation. How does one pronounce TALIESSIN and BROCELIANDE? Did you ever complete the idea for a children’s story you wrote me about?’ (Bodleian Library, MS. Facs. c. 47, fol. 191), Lewis, presumably, meant the second, not third, syllable of Brocelliande.
While Lewis was referring to the imminent publication of The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, Mathews was probably remembering a comment in his letter of 17 September 1949: ‘A good idea for a (children’s) story…arrived this morning’ (CL II, p. 980), this being the second Narnian story, Prince Caspian.

¹³¹ ‘Pray for us’.

¹³² Mark 4:5–6: ‘There went out a sower to sow. And it came to pass, as he sowed, some fell by the wayside, and the fowls of the air came and devoured it up. And some fell on stony ground, where it had not much earth; and immediately it sprang up, because it had no depth of earth. But when the sun was up, it was scorched; and because it had no root, it withered away.’

¹³³ When in 1935 Oxford University Press conceived the idea of the mammoth Oxford History of English Literature (OHEL), Lewis was asked to contribute a volume covering the sixteenth century. He had been working on what was to be English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama (1954) since 1936 and he was spending every available minute in the Bodleian Library trying to complete it. He called it his ‘O Hell!’ volume.

¹³⁴ Acts 2:1–9: ‘And when the day of Pentecost was fully come, they were all with one accord in one place. And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting…They were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance. And there were dwelling at Jerusalem Jews, devout men, out of every nation under heaven. Now when this was noised abroad, the multitude came together, and were confounded, because that every man heard them speak in his own language…Parthians, and Medes, and Elamites, and the dwellers in Mesopotamia, and in Judea, and Cappadocia, in Pontus, and Asia.’

¹³⁵ Ralph E. Hone was writing from 39 Leicester Square, London.

¹³⁶ See Chad Walsh in the Biographical Appendix to CL II, pp. 1078–81.

¹³⁷ Daphne Harwood died on 14 July 1950.

¹³⁸ Lewis was John Harwood’s tutor at Magdalen College, and John had just taken a fourth-class degree in Schools.

¹³⁹ See St Giovanni Calabria in the Biographical Appendix to CL II, pp. 1036–9. Don Giovanni Calabria was the founder of the Congregation of Poor Servants of Divine Providence in Verona. In 1947 he read The Screwtape Letters in Italian. Wishing to write to Lewis about his books and about Christian unity, but not understanding English, he began corresponding in Latin. Most of the correspondence between Lewis and Don Calabria was published as Letters: C. S. Lewis–Don Giovanni Calabria: A Study in Friendship, trans. and ed. Martin Moynihan (London: Collins, 1989). Unless otherwise stated, the letters were translated into English by Moynihan (see his biography in CL II, p. 615n). There is also an Italian edition of the correspondence, with some additional letters between Lewis, St Giovanni Calabria and Don Luigi Pedrollo, entitled Una Gioia Insolita: Lettere tra un prete cattolico e un laico anglicano, ed. Luciano Squizzato, trans. Patrizia Morelli (Milan: Jaca Book SpA, 1995). Those additional letters appear in the present volume.

¹⁴⁰ Le Problème de la Souffrance, trans. Marguerite Faguer, with an introduction by Maurice Nédoncelle (Bruges: Desclées de Brouwer, 1950).

¹⁴¹ In Una Gioia Insolita Luciano Squizzato (p. 156, n. 92) notes that both Lodetti and Arnaboldi denied ever having received this volume, and that no copies can be found in St Giovanni Calabria’s private library. Calabria was at this time seriously ill; Fr Pedrollo, who answered this missive, was deeply concerned for his friend’s health, and may have simply been vague about the books; apparently, Lewis just sent one to him (see Lewis’s letter of 12 September 1950). For biographical information on Dr Romolo Lodetti see CL II, pp. 821–2. Fr Paolo Arnaboldi (1914–98) was the founder of FAC, a Catholic movement in part inspired by Calabria’s books Apostolica vivendi and Amare (see Squizzato, pp. 262–3); incidentally, these were the books Calabria sent to Lewis in the autumn of 1947 (see CL II, p. 807).

¹⁴² Maurice Nédoncelle (1905–1976), philosopher and lecturer in Theology at the Faculty of Theology in Strasburg.

¹⁴³ Probably a reference to Mrs Moore’s continued decline.

¹⁴⁴ He was referring to his Preface in Essays Presented to Charles Williams (1947).

¹⁴⁵ i.e., of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

¹⁴⁶ For an account of the wedding see Clement Freud, Freud Ego (2001), pp. 99–100.

¹⁴⁷ In her note to this letter, written on 4 October 1972, Bodle explained that she was wondering whether to take a German boy, Franzel, to New Zealand. ‘He didn’t go,’ she said. ‘He now has a doctorate & is on the staff of a German university’ (Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. lett. c. 220/4, fol, 247).

¹⁴⁸ See Don Luigi Pedrollo in the Biographical Appendix. Fr Pedrollo, a member of the Congregation of Poor Servants of Divine Providence in Verona, was answering on behalf of Don Giovanni Calabria. This letter first appeared in Una Gioia Insolita and was translated by Dr C. M. Bajetta.

¹⁴⁹ Towards the end of his life (after 1949) St Giovanni Calabria was affected by a mysterious illness, which underwent a particularly acute phase in 1950. After a period of relief, following the Pentecost of 1951, his infirmity worsened and he died in 1954.

¹⁵⁰ Horace, Carmina, I, 24, 1–2: ‘Quis desiderio sit pudor aut modus/tam cari capitis?’: ‘Why blush to let our tears unmeasured fall/For one so dear?’.

¹⁵¹ i.e., Geoffrey Bles.

¹⁵² See the biography of Anne Ridler, friend of Charles Williams, in CL II, p. 658n, and Anne Ridler’s Memoirs (2004).

¹⁵³ Ruth Pitter.

¹⁵⁴ Charles Williams. Ridler criticised Williams’s use of ‘shend’ in a Taliessin poem.

¹⁵⁵ See Martyn Skinner in the Biographical Appendix to CL II, pp. 1072–3.

¹⁵⁶ Martyn Skinner, Two Colloquies (1949).

¹⁵⁷ ‘Collections’ are examination papers set by college tutors for their pupils. They take place either at the end of term (in which case students are tested on their work during the term) or at the beginning of term (on work set for the preceding vacation). In Magdalen, in Lewis’s day, Collections usually took place in Hall.

¹⁵⁸ School Certificate examinations; for a definition see CL I, p. 612.

¹⁵⁹ Skinner, Two Colloquies, ‘The Lobster and the Thatch’, 49.

¹⁶⁰ ibid., 332.

¹⁶¹ ibid., ‘The Recluse’, Part I, 13.

¹⁶² Alfred, Lord Tennyson, ‘Milton’, 9.

¹⁶³ Skinner, Two Colloquies, ‘The Lobster and the Thatch’, 220.

¹⁶⁴ ibid., 239–43: ‘The sudden clatter of cutlery and crockery/As sliding through the ham the knife’s thin edge/Turns half to rose its honey-coloured wedge;/Or where the bronze pork sizzles still with heat/Clicks through the crackling to white mines of meat.’

¹⁶⁵ John Milton, Works, vol. IV (New York: Columbia University Press, 1931), Of Education, p. 286.

¹⁶⁶ Skinner, Two Colloquies, ‘The Recluse’, Part II, 28.

¹⁶⁷ ibid., ‘The Lobster and the Thatch’, 433.

¹⁶⁸ King George I’s comment, ‘I hate all Boets and Bainters’ is found in John Campbell, Lives of the Chief Justices (1949), ‘Lord Mansfield’.

¹⁶⁹ See Harry Blamires in the Biographical Appendix to CL II, p. 1024. Blamires had been head of the English Department at King Alfred’s College, Winchester, since 1948.

¹⁷⁰ Blamires had asked Lewis, his old tutor, to read and criticize his book English in Education (London: Bles, 1951).

¹⁷¹ ‘between ourselves’.

¹⁷² ‘Best professional judgement’.

¹⁷³ Beowulf, I, xviii, 1206: ‘He was asking for trouble’.

¹⁷⁴ The letter was unsigned.

¹⁷⁵ See Mary Willis Shelburne in the Biographical Appendix. She is the author of Broken Pattern: Poems (Richmond: Dietz Press, 1951).

¹⁷⁶ Harriet Elizabeth Beecher Stowe. Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1851–2), ch. 21: “‘Do you know who made you?” “Nobody, as I knows on,” said the child, with a short laugh. The idea appeared to amuse her considerably, for her eyes twinkled, and she added–“I ’spect I growed. Don’t think nobody never made me.”’

¹⁷⁷ The Imitation of Christ is a manual of spiritual devotion first circulated in 1418 and traditionally ascribed to Thomas à Kempis (c. 1380–1471). Lewis nearly always read this work in Latin, and when quoting it in English, he used his own translation.

¹⁷⁸ The edition of this work used by Lewis was The Scale of Perfection by Walter Hilton, Augustinian canon of Thurgarton Priory, Nottinghamshire, modernized from the first printed edition of Wynkyn de Worde, London, 1494, by an oblate of Solesmes; with an introduction from the French of Dom M. Noetinger (London: Burns, Oates and Washbourne Ltd [1927]).

¹⁷⁹ In her letter of 20 November 1950 Mathews wrote: ‘I came upon such a beautiful message today by Fra Giovanni (an extract from a letter, Anno Domini 1513) that I simply must pass it on to you’ (Bodleian Library, MS. Facs. c. 47, fol. 199). She went on to quote from Fra Giovanni Giocondo (c. 1435–1515), A Letter to the Most Illustrious the Contessina Allagia Dela Aldobrandeschi, Written Christmas Eve Anno Domini 1513 (193?). In 1970 the British Museum stated that it was impossible to identify Fra Giovanni. The letter was published, probably in the 1930s, ‘with Christmas greetings’ from Greville MacDonald, son of George MacDonald, and his wife Mary. It is reprinted in various dictionaries of quotations.

¹⁸⁰ Hermann Wilhelm Goering (1893–1946), German Nazi military leader, creator of the Luftwaffe, the German Air Force, directed the German wartime economy. In 1939 he was named Hitler’s successor, but he later lost favour and in 1943 he was stripped of his command. ‘Guns will make us powerful,’ Goering said in a radio broadcast in 1936, ‘butter will only make us fat.’

¹⁸¹ George Bernard Shaw, The Doctor’s Dilemma (1906).

¹⁸² See Ruth Pitter in the Biographical Appendix to CL II, pp. 1060–4.

¹⁸³ The Case for Christianity (New York: Macmillan, 1943) was the American edition of Broadcast Talks.

¹⁸⁴ Beyond Personality (London: Bles, 1944; New York: Macmillan, 1945).

¹⁸⁵ J. B. Phillips, Letters to Young Churches: A Translation of the New Testament Epistles (1947). See Lewis’s letter to Phillips of 3 August 1943 (CL II, pp. 585–6).

¹⁸⁶ Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876); The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884).

¹⁸⁷ William Shakespeare, King Henry V (1600), IV, iii, 55.

¹⁸⁸ Luke 22:19; 1 Corinthians 11:24.

¹⁸⁹ John 6:53.

¹⁹⁰ i.e., in the Book of Common Prayer.

¹⁹¹ 1 Corinthians 12:12: ‘For as the body is one, and hath many members, and all the members of that one body, being many, are one body: so also is Christ.’

¹⁹² Mark 16:17–18: ‘These signs shall follow them that believe; In my name…they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover.’

¹⁹³ See Sheldon Vanauken in the Biographical Appendix. Vanauken’s ‘Notes on the Letters’ are in the Bodleian Library (MS. Eng. lett. c. 220/2, fols. 152b–c).

¹⁹⁴ Sheldon Vanauken, A Severe Mercy (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1977), ch. 2, p. 38.

¹⁹⁵ ibid., ch. 4, pp. 87–8.

¹⁹⁶ G. K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man (1925).

¹⁹⁷ Lewis uses the Chinese word ‘Tao’ in The Abolition of Man to mean natural law or morality.

¹⁹⁸ The Rev. R. B. Gribbon, a relative of Arthur Greeves, was writing from Ballinderry Road, Easton, Maryland, USA.

¹⁹⁹ i.e., The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

²⁰⁰ Rudyard Kipling, The Seven Seas (1896), ‘McAndrew’s Hymn’, II, 17–18: ‘Hail, snow an’ ice that praise the Lord: I’ve met them at their work,/An’ wished we had anither route or they anither kirk.’

²⁰¹ In his second letter to Lewis, Vanauken said: ‘My fundamental dilemma is this: I can’t believe in Christ unless I have faith, but I can’t have faith unless I believe in Christ…Everyone seems to say: “You must have faith to believe.” Where do I get it? Or will you tell me something different? Is there a proof? Can Reason carry me over the gulf…without faith? Why does God expect so much of us?…If He made it clear that He is–as clear as a sunrise or a rock or a baby’s cry–wouldn’t we be right joyous to choose Him and His Law?’ (Vanauken, A Severe Mercy, ch. 4, pp. 90–1)

²⁰² The Eleatic school of philosophers was founded by the Greek poet Xenophanes (born c. 570 BC), whose main teaching was that the universe is singular, eternal and unchanging. According to this view, as developed by later members of the Eleatic school, the appearances of multiplicity, change and motion are mere illusions.

²⁰³ William Shakespeare, Othello, The Moor of Venice (1622).

²⁰⁴ William Shakespeare, King Lear (1608).

²⁰⁵ Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism (1711), II, 2.

²⁰⁶ Luke 10:7.

²⁰⁷ This note was added in Lewis’s hand.

²⁰⁸ ‘Let us pray for one another’.

²⁰⁹ ‘the beard of corn’.

²¹⁰ Abul Kasim Mansur Firdausi (c. 950–1020), Persian poet, is the author of Shahnameh. Considered the greatest national epic in world literature, the poem consists of 60,000 couplets. When the work was presented to the Sultan, he rewarded Firdausi with a pitiful amount of money. The disappointed Firdausi gave the money to a bath attendant and left for Afghanistan. Lewis regretted he could not read Persian, but in his poem ‘The Prodigality of Firdausi’, published in Punch, 215 (1 December 1948), p. 510, and reprinted in Poems and CP, he extols ‘Firdausi the strong Lion among poets’ and tells how handsomely he behaved at the hands of the Sultan.

²¹¹ Dorothy Wellesley, Duchess of Wellington (1889–1956), whose collected poems were published as Early Light (1955).

²¹² Sayer had asked if Pauline Baynes should illustrate all the Narnian stories. See Pauline Diana Baynes in the Biographical Appendix to CL II, pp. 1018–22.

²¹³ Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici (1643), II, x: ‘Great virtues and vices no less great’.

¹ Timothy 2:1: ‘I exhort therefore, that, first of all, supplications, prayers, intercessions, and giving of thanks, be made for all men.’

² Many of these thoughts were later to go into Lewis’s essay, ‘The Efficacy of Prayer’, published in Fern-seed and Elephants and Other Essays on Christianity, ed. Walter Hooper (London: Collins, 1975; Fount, 1998).

³ Vanauken had asked Lewis his opinion as to whether he should continue with his postgraduate work in history or study theology.

⁴ Francis Bacon, Essays (1625), ‘Of Atheism’: ‘The great atheists, indeed are hypocrites; which are ever handling holy things, but without feeling; so as they must needs be cauterized in the end.’

⁵ Pauline Baynes was illustrating the Narnian books.

⁶ At a meeting with Geoffrey Bles in London on 1 January 1951 Lewis gave Pauline Baynes a map he had drawn of Narnia bordered on the north by the ‘Wild Lands of the North’ as well as his drawing of a Monopod. In this letter he refers to that map which is in the Bodleian Library. (MS. Eng. lett. c. 220/1, fol. 160), and is reproduced by the Bodleian as a postcard. Baynes used Lewis’s original map to draw (1) ‘A Map of Narnian and Adjoining Lands’ which appeared on the endpapers of Prince Caspian; (2) a map of the Bight of Calormen and the Lone Islands of the Great Eastern Ocean which appeared on the endpapers of The Voyage of the ‘Dawn Treader’ (1952); (3) A Map of the Wild Lands of the North’ which appeared on the endpapers of The Silver Chair (1953); and (4) a map on the endpapers of The Horse and His Boy (1954) showing the position of Tashbaan, the Desert and Archenland.

⁷ George MacDonald, Unspoken Sermons, 2nd series (1885), ‘The Fear of God’, p. 163.

⁸ See Percy Howard Newby, writer and broadcasting administrator, in the Biographical Appendix.

⁹ Newby, Organizer of Third Programme Talks for the BBC, had written to Lewis on 9 February 1951: ‘From time to time we broadcast in the Third Programme talks under the general title of “Work in Progress”, the general idea being that scholars and critics should discuss the nature and scope of a particular book they are engaged upon. We should be very happy if you would talk in this way about the volume you are preparing for the Oxford History of English Literature.’

¹⁰ William Lewis Kinter (1915–) was born in St Thomas, Pennsylvania, on 21 October 1915. He took a BA in English from Lafayette College, Easton, Pennsylvania, in 1938, another BA from Yale University in 1940, and a PhD from Columbia University, New York, in 1958. He taught Latin and English at Westminster School, Hartford, Connecticut, 1944–6, was Assistant Professor of English at Muhlenberg College, Allentown, Pennsylvania, 1946–62, and Associate Professor of English at Loyola College, Baltimore, Maryland, 1962–78. From there he became Chairman of the Department of Language and Literature at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. He is the author, with Joseph R. Keller, of The Sibyl: Prophetess of Antiquity and Medieval Fay (Philadelphia: Dorrance 1967).

¹¹ Spirits in Bondage: A Cycle of Lyrics (1919), Lewis’s first book, was published under the pseudonym ‘Clive Hamilton’. See CL I, p. 443n.

¹² Dymer, with a preface by the author (London: Dent; New York: Macmillan, 1950).

¹³ i.e. Lewis’s interplanetary trilogy, Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra and That Hideous Strength.

¹⁴ Ludovico Ariosto (1474–1535) was the author of Orlando Furioso (1532). See The Allegory of Love, Ch 7, Sect. 1, pp. 312–13).

¹⁵ Bernardus Silvestris, De Mundi Universitate, ed. Carl Sigmund Barach and Johann Wrobel (Innsbruck: Verlag der Wagner’schen Universitäts-Buchhandlung, 1876).

¹⁶ Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890–69), American general and President of the United States, 1953–61, who launched the invasion of Normandy on 6 June 1944 and oversaw the final defeat of Germany. In 1950 President Truman asked Eisenhower to become supreme commander of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and in 1951 he flew to Paris to assume his new position. For the next fifteen months he devoted himself to the task of creating a united military organization in western Europe to be a defence against the possibility of Communist aggression.

¹⁷ On Mrs Alice Hamilton Moore (1853–1939), see CL II, p. 281n.

¹⁸ Rider Haggard, She (1887); Ayesha (1905); She and Allan (1921); Wisdom’s Daughter (1923).

¹⁹ After Greeves’s mother died in 1949 he moved from the family home, ‘Bernagh’ in Belfast, to a cottage at Silver Hill, Crawfordsburn, Co. Down, about twelve miles from Belfast. When he visited Arthur there, Lewis always stayed at the Old Inn, Crawfordsburn.

²⁰ When Roger Lancelyn Green’s father died in 1947, Roger, his eldest son, became the 31st Lord of Poulton, and in August 1950 he moved with his wife and son from Oxford to the family home, Poulton Hall, Poulton-Lancelyn, Bebington, Wirral, Cheshire.

²¹ The Festival of Britain was opened by King George VI in London on 3 May 1951, six years after the end of the Second World War. It was designed to celebrate the best of British art, design and industry, and raise the nation’s spirits after the austerity of the war years. More than eight million people visited the exhibition over a period of five months.

²² Frederick James Eugene Woodbridge, An Essay on Nature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1940).

²³ See Cecil Day-Lewis in the Biographical Appendix.

²⁴ BF, p. 239.

²⁵ See Dr Seymour Jamie Gerald Spencer in the Biographical Appendix.

²⁶ Eric Fromm (1900–80), German-born American psychoanalyst who studied the role of social conditioning in human behaviour.

²⁷ This was Lewis’s essay, ‘The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment’, in 20th Century: An Australian Quarterly Review, vol. III, no. 3 (1949), pp. 5–12 and subsequently in Res Judicatae, VI (June 1953), pp. 224–30, and The Churchman, LXXIII (April-June 1959), pp. 55–60. It was reprinted in First and Second Things, ed. Walter Hooper (London: Fount, 1985) and EC.

²⁸ ‘Mrs Lockley’ is the pseudonym Warnie Lewis gave this correspondent in L and WHL. See CLII, p. 975n. The woman is yet to be identified.

²⁹ Green had been reading the manuscript of what became The Silver Chair, and he had questioned whether the wood fire Puddleglum tramples on in Chapter 12 would go out. In the end, Lewis did not specify what kind of fire it was, and he simply let Puddleglum ‘stamp on the fire, grinding a large part of it into ashes on the flat hearth’.

³⁰ Paul Capon, The Other Side of the Sun (1950).

³¹ Period of two days.

³² Ruth Pitter, Urania (1950). This volume of poems was a selection from Pitter’s A Trophy of Arms: Poems 1926–35 (1936), The Spirit Watches (1939) and The Bridge (1945).

³³ Urania contains an engraving by Joan Hassall. At the feet of the Muse there is a vine branch based on those at Pitter’s farm in Essex.

³⁴ Thomas Traherne (c. 1636–74), Centuries of Meditation (1908), First Century, 27.

³⁵ See Colin and Christian Hardie in the Biographical Appendix. In ‘Three Letters from C. S. Lewis’, The Chesterton Review, XVII, nos. 3 and 4 (August/November 1991), p. 393, Christian Hardie commented: ‘The three letters…relate to the two novels which I lent to C. S. Lewis. He had revealed one day at lunch with us, that he had read no book by Evelyn Waugh or Graham Greene. I said that he should try to catch up with the contemporary scene, and that I would lend him some books which were currently read and admired. The first, in March 1951, was Brideshead Revisited. Treating this as a Lenten penance, a year later he asked for another and got The Power and the Glory. He could easily have returned the books with only a verbal message; characteristically, he took the trouble to write a letter.’

³⁶ Lewis took Hardie’s advice and read Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (1945). The novel is told in the first person by Charles Ryder, a fellow-student at Oxford of Lord Sebastian Flyte, a member of an ancient Roman Catholic family. Sebastian takes Charles to the home of his family, Brideshead Castle, where he meets the rest of the Flyte family. Sebastian has an elder brother, Lord Brideshead, and two sisters, Julia and Cordelia. His mother, the devout Lady Marchmain, refuses to divorce Lord Marchmain, who is living in Venice with his mistress. Lady Marchmain attempts to enlist Charles’s help in preventing Sebastian’s drinking, but Sebastian escapes to North Africa where, after his mother’s death, he becomes a saintly down-and-out. Charles falls in love with Lady Julia, but in the end the power of the Church reclaims her and they part for ever.

³⁷ Samuel Butler, Erewhon (1872).

³⁸ Sir Walter Scott, Rob Roy (1817).

³⁹ James Hogg, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824).

⁴⁰ Stephen McKenna, The Confessions of a Well-Meaning Woman (1922).

⁴¹ G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (1909), ch. 2: ‘You can make a story out of a hero among dragons; but not out of a dragon among dragons.’

⁴² When Charles Ryder is stationed near Brideshead Castle near the end of the war, one of his platoon commanders is named Hooper. The man epitomizes everything Ryder–and Waugh–hate. ‘In the weeks that we were together,’ says Charles in the Prologue to Brideshead Revisited, ‘Hooper became a symbol to me of Young England, so that whenever I read some public utterance proclaiming what Youth demanded in the Future and what the world owed to Youth, I would test these general statements by substituting “Hooper” and seeing if they still seemed as plausible.’

⁴³ Constantin Levin is a character in Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (1873–82).

⁴⁴ Characters in Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace (1863–9).

⁴⁵ Archdeacon Grantly is a prominent character in the ‘Barsetshire’ novels of Anthony Trollope.

⁴⁶ Benjamin Disraeli, Coningsby (1844).

⁴⁷ Edward Frederic Benson (1871–1914), whose novels include Dodo (1893).

⁴⁸ Railway.

⁴⁹ Lewis was planning to travel the (roughly) twelve miles from Oxford Street, Belfast, to Helen’s Bay, near Crawfordsburn.

⁵⁰ Douglas Edison Harding (1909–) was born in Lowestoft, Suffolk, on 12 February 1909 and educated at Lowestoft Grammar School and University College, London. In a letter to Walter Hooper of 11 August 2005, he said: ‘My parents were Exclusive Plymouth Brethren. I apostacised from them at the ripe age of 21. Though I earned my living as an architect, my real job and passion has been the Perennial Philosophy and research into my True Identity, plus sharing my discoveries with as many people as possible worldwide by means of workshops and books.’ Harding is the author of many books, including The Hierarchy of Heaven and Earth: A New Diagram of Man in the Universe (1952), The Little Book of Life and Death (1988), Religions of the World (1966), The Trial of the Man Who Said He Was God (1992), and the best known of all his books, On Having No Head: A Contribution to Zen in the West (1961).

⁵¹ Lewis was reading the manuscript of what was published as D. E. Harding, The Hierarchy of Heaven and Earth: A New Diagram of Man in the Universe, with a preface by C. S. Lewis (London: Faber, 1952). Lewis’s preface was reprinted as ‘The Empty Universe’ in Present Concerns, ed. Walter Hoope (London: Fount, 1986) and EC.

⁵² ibid., ch. 9, ix, pp. 95–6: ‘Only beings who consider the possibility of breaking laws can comply with them. Earth does both. To determine her orbit, the scientist supposes that, disobeying for a while the law of gravity and obeying the law of inertia, she flies off at a tangent; and that then, reversing her disobedience, she falls towards the sun; and he adds that these illegalities are in practice so brief that her ratchet-shaped path is smoothed out into the compromise of a curve, which respects both laws alike. Now I take this mathematics more seriously than the scientist himself; for (a) I link Earth, not merely with the original data and the final result of the calculation, but with the intermediate stages as well, and (b) I say that all three are her function.’

⁵³ ibid., ch. 18, vii, p. 188.

⁵⁴ In Lewis’s interplanetary trilogy, eldila (singular, eldil) are angels who inhabit ‘Deep Heaven’. Their bodies are as swift as light, and hence they are usually invisible to human beings. They are first mentioned in Out of the Silent Planet, ch. 13. See the letter to Mary Willis Shelburne of 4 March 1953.

⁵⁵ Perelandra (London: Bodley Head, 1943; HarperCollins, 2000), ch. 17, p. 223.

⁵⁶ ‘The “ferly”’, wrote Pitter, ‘is a sort of vision in the engraving by Joan Hassall…the figure of the Muse stands with flowers & vine-leaves in her arms, in the calm twilight landscape full of symbols: she points downward to a kind of visionary sphere containing images of violence: it is this that someone thought was like a concrete-mixer’ (Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. lett. c. 220/3, fol. 100).

⁵⁷ Pitter said of this: ‘I had expressed mild pain at the idea of the spectacle-case lurking so long undiscovered in the crease of the armchair. Never cleaned–didn’t know they had to be?!!!’ (MS. Eng. lett. c. 220/3, fol. 100).

⁵⁸ Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass (1872), ch. 4, ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter’: “‘The time has come,” the Walrus said,/“To talk of many things:/Of shoes–and ships–and sealing wax–/Of cabbages–and kings…”’

⁵⁹ Cardinal Schwanda was the Sayers’ cat.

⁶⁰ Homer (fl. 8th century BC) is the author of the Greek epics, The Odyssey and The Iliad.

⁶¹ ‘The same rule applies to things that do not exist and to things that are not apparent.’ This is a standard legal maxim.

⁶² Anthony Trollope, Barchester Towers (1857), ch. 40: ‘The painter put a veil over Agamemnon’s face when called on to depict the father’s grief at the early doom of his devoted daughter.’

⁶³ Nicholas Hardie (b. 12 November 1945), to whom The Silver Chair is dedicated, is the eldest son of Colin and Christian Hardie. Nicholas was educated at Magdalen College School and Balliol College, Oxford. After taking his BA in 1970, he took an MBA from Lancaster University.

⁶⁴ Victor Drew ran the little barber’s shop now called High St Barbers at 38 High Street, Oxford.

⁶⁵ John 16:22: ‘Ye now therefore have sorrow: but I will see you again, and your heart shall rejoice, and your joy no man taketh from you.’

⁶⁶ George Herbert, The Temple (1633), ‘The Tempter’, I, 3–4: ‘If what my soul doth feel sometimes,/My soul might ever feel!’

⁶⁷ See the biography of Robert William Chapman in CL II, p. 203n.

⁶⁸ Legend relates that Stesichorus (c. 640–c. 555 BC), a Greek lyrical poet, was struck blind for having censured Helen in one of his poems. His sight was restored after he had written his Palinodia or recantation, in which he claims that it was not Helen, but her phantom, that accompanied Paris to Troy. This version of events was adopted by Euripides who used it in his play, Helen. Lewis was later to use this theme in his unfinished ‘After Ten Years’, published in The Dark Tower and Other Stories, ed. Walter Hooper (London: Collins, 1977; Fount, 1983).

⁶⁹ Horace, Odes, I, ix, 21–4: ‘nunc et latentis proditor intimo/gratus puellae risus ab angulo/pignusque dereptum lacertis/aut digito male pertinaci’: ‘Now too the lovely laugh betraying the girl hiding in the secret corner, and the token snatched from her arm or her scarcely resisting finger.’

⁷⁰ Chad Walsh, C. S. Lewis: Apostle to the Skeptics (1949).

⁷¹ i.e., Warnie’s drinking.

⁷² Sister Madeleva CSC was a teacher of English at St Mary’s College, Notre Dame, Indiana, who had attended some of Lewis’s lectures in 1934. See her biography in CL II, p. 140n.

⁷³ Sister Madeleva, A Lost Language (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1951), p. 17: ‘This practice of prayer was something of a habit with Chaucer…It was, of course, one of the writer’s conventions of his day. Had it not been, there is a probability that he would have practiced it. But, as a convention, the devotional sincerity of his prayers is frequently questioned. Conventions are a badly libelled lot. One knows they are devices; one concludes that they are deceits with an immediacy to be recommended rather for speed than for logic. Particularly is this true of the conventional medieval writing. Without going into digression on this matter, it may be volunteered that the fourteenth century writer probably used the convention to say what he meant rather than to say the exact opposite of what he meant.’

⁷⁴ Mrs Lisbeth Greeves (1897–1982), née Lizzie Snowden Demaine, was the wife of Arthur’s cousin, Lt.-Col. John Ronald Howard Greeves (1900–). She was a devout and enthusiastic member of the Bahai faith, and was keen to discuss it with Lewis through the post.

⁷⁵ One of Greeves’s dogs.

⁷⁶ ‘No ham yet.’ See the letter to Greeves of 23 April 1951.

⁷⁷ Cardinal Henri de Lubac (1896–1991), French Jesuit theologian, was a professor of theology at Lyon for many years. He was one of the thinkers who created the intellectual climate of the Second Vatican Council (1962–5), his major contribution being to open up the vast spiritual resources of the Catholic tradition. De Lubac was one of the founders of the collection ‘Sources Chrétiennes’, an important series of patristic and medieval texts. Griffiths probably sent Lewis a copy of de Lubac’s Catholicism: A Study of Dogma in Relation to the Corporate Destiny of Mankind (London: Burns & Oates, 1950).

⁷⁸ William Wordsworth, The Prelude: or, Growth of a Poet’s Mind (1850).

⁷⁹ Matthew 5:29: ‘If thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell.’ See also Mark 9:47.

⁸⁰ Lewis had already devoted an essay to this principle entitled ‘First and Second Things’, published in First and Second Things and EC.

⁸¹ The Festival of Britain.

⁸² See Colin and Christian Hardie in the Biographical Appendix.

⁸³ Hardie had asked Lewis to read an essay he had written on ‘The Myth of Paris’. It has never been published.

⁸⁴ ‘delete’.

⁸⁵ Maurice Roy Ridley (1890–1969) was Tutor in English Literature at Balliol College, Oxford, 1920–45. See his biography in CL II, p. 306n.

⁸⁶ Reginald Walter Macan (1848–1941) was Master of University College, Oxford, 1906–23. See his biography in CL I, p. 263n.

⁸⁷ This letter was published in Essays in Criticism, I ( July 1951), p. 313, under the title ‘Robinson Crusoe as a Myth’.

⁸⁸ Ian Watt, ‘Robinson Crusoe as a Myth’, Essays in Criticism, I (April 1951), pp. 95–119.

⁸⁹ Watt’s reply appears on the same page as Lewis’s letter.

⁹⁰ See Valerie Pitt in the Biographical Appendix to CL II, pp. 1059–60. Pitt, who was writing a B. Litt. thesis for St Hugh’s College, Oxford, was secretary of the Socratic Club.

⁹¹ Austin Farrer was a member of the Socratic Club. See Austin and Katharine Farrer in the Biographical Appendix.

⁹² John Flavell (baptized 1630, d. 1691), Presbyterian minister and religious writer, was educated at University College, Oxford. He was the minister at Dartmouth, Devon, 1656–62. Following Charles II’s declaration of indulgence in 1672, Flavell returned to Dartmouth, licensed as a Congregationalist minister. His works include A Token for Mourners (1674), The Seaman’s Companion (1676), Divine Conduct (1678), Sea Deliverances (c. 1679), The Touchstone of Sincerity (1679), The Method of Grace (1681), A Saint Indeed (1684) and Treatise on the Soul of Man (1685). See the article on Flavell in the Oxford DNB.

⁹³ E. R. Eddison, The Worm Ouroboros (1922). See Eric Rcker Eddison in the Biographical Appendix to CL II, pp. 1025–8. Hamilton had been a close friend of Eddison, and he was trying to arrange for The Worm Ouroboros to be reprinted, with an introduction by Lewis. He was not successful.

⁹⁴ James Stephens (1882–1950) wrote an introduction to Eddison’s A Fish Dinner in Memison (1941). See CL II, p. 558, n. 53.

⁹⁵ ‘The other Eddison’ was Colin Eddison, brother of E. R. Eddison.

⁹⁶ See the letter to Andrew Young of 18 May 1951.

⁹⁷ See the Rev. Andrew John Young in the Biographical Appendix.

⁹⁸ Andrew Young, Collected Poems (1936), ‘The Slow Race’, IV, 2.

⁹⁹ George MacDonald, Unspoken Sermons, 1st series (1867), ‘Love thy Neighbour’, p. 202: ‘No one loves because he sees why, but because he loves.’

¹⁰⁰ This was probably Edward John Gough, author of Simple Thoughts on the Holy Eucharist (1893).

¹⁰¹ An article entitled ‘The Id and the Fall’ which was not, finally, published in The Month.

¹⁰² St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Part I, Question 98: ‘In the state of innocence there would have been generation of offspring for the multiplication of the human race; otherwise man’s sin would have been very necessary, for such a great blessing to be its result.’

¹⁰³ ‘increase and multiply’.

¹⁰⁴ Genesis 1:21–2: ‘And God created great whales, and every living creature…And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let fowl multiply in the earth.’

¹⁰⁵ Starr had been teaching at Rollins College Winter Park, Florida, since 1941. In March 1951, its 33-year-old president, Paul Wagner, announced that almost a third of its faculty members (one of whom was Starr) were to be dismissed for ‘financial reasons’. Members of the board suspected that the progressive educator had fired these members because they refused to conform to his campaign for visual education, as opposed to the old reading and lecture method: Wagner boasted that after a number of years people wouldn’t know how to read. The firing was reported in ‘Squeeze at Rollins’, Life, 30, no. 13 (26 March 1951), p. 115. After months of wrangling, the faculty members were reinstated and Wagner was removed from office. He was replaced by Hugh F. McKean (1908–95), a member of the art faculty. Professor Starr chose to resign at the end of the academic year 1951–2, and he spent the next academic year at Kansai University, Osaka, Japan as a Fulbright Scholar. See the letter to Starr of 3 February 1953.

¹⁰⁶ George MacDonald, The Diary of an Old Soul (1885).

¹⁰⁷ Virgil, Georgics, IV, 169; Aeneid, I, 436: ‘the work grows feverish’.

¹⁰⁸ John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress from this World to That which is to Come, ed. James Blanton Wharey, 2nd edn rev. Roger Sharrock (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960), First Part, p. 106: ‘Then Christian and Hopeful outwent them again, and went till they came at a delicate Plain, called Ease, where they went with much content.’

¹⁰⁹ Springfield St Mary’s was a youth hostel at 122 Banbury Road, Oxford, run by the Community of St Mary the Virgin.

¹¹⁰ Lewis was reading Skinner’s The Return of Arthur: Merlin (London: Frederick Muller, 1951), the first part of a four-part work. The second part was entitled The Return of Arthur: Part I (London: Chapman and Hall, 1955); the third was entitled The Return of Arthur: Part II (London: Chapman and Hall, 1959). The complete edition, containing the three earlier volumes as well as The Return of Arthur, Part III, was published under the title The Return of Arthur: A Poem of the Future (London: Chapman and Hall, 1966). Because of the rarity of the individual parts, all references are to the 1966 edition.

¹¹¹ ‘to think alike about political affairs’. From Henry St John Bolingbroke (1678–1751), Dissertation Upon Parties, Letter 1.

¹¹² Skinner, The Return of Arthur: Merlin, II, ii, 5.

¹¹³ ibid., xxxvii.

¹¹⁴ Stanza.

¹¹⁵ ibid., III, ix. ‘Lasciate etc’ refers to Dante, Inferno, III, 9.

¹¹⁶ Sir Desmond MacCarthy (1877–1952), literary journalist, was known for his theatre criticism and for his reviews and other writing in the Sunday Times.

¹¹⁷ In C. S. Lewis: Apostle to the Skeptics, ch. 20, p. 161, Walsh stated: ‘I mention what Lewis has not done, not as a reproach to him, but to suggest to his overardent admirers that an exclusive diet of his works is not wholesome.’

¹¹⁸ Genia Goelz–Mrs E. L. Goelz–was the daughter of Mrs Mary Van Deusen. She is referred to as ‘Mrs Sonia Graham’ in L. She was writing from 2756 Reese Avenue, Evanston, Illinois. Although abbreviated copies of the letters to Mrs Goelz appeared in L, complete copies were made by Walter Hooper in 1965.

¹¹⁹ Mary Elizabeth ‘Lily’ Ewart was Greeves’s sister. See her biography in CL I, p. 98n.

¹²⁰ Dr Firor had a ranch in Wyoming, and he was constantly urging Lewis to join him there.

¹²¹ In The Great Divorce: A Dream (London: Bles, 1945 [1946]; Fount, 1997), ch. 11, one of the Ghosts has on his shoulder a Red Lizard who represents Lust.

¹²² Robert C. Walton, head of the BBC’s School Broadcasting Department, wrote to Lewis on 9 July 1951 announcing plans for six half-hour programmes on ‘the nature of evidence’: ‘We shall begin by stating as clearly as possible the Christian belief that God is to be understood in personal terms, and then two speakers will discuss with the “interrogator” how they have come to accept the Christian conception of God’s nature. Our main purpose is not to argue whether or not the Christian belief is true, but to explain the nature of the evidence which leads Christians to this conclusion. We should be very glad if you would take part in this programme.’

¹²³ The old white cobra in ‘The King’s Ankus’ in Kipling’s Second Jungle Book (1895).

¹²⁴ Sir David Lyndsay, The Monarchie (Ane Dialog Betwix Experience and ane Courteour) (1554), 1293–4.

¹²⁵ This letter was first published in the Church Times, CXXXIV (10 August 1951), p. 541, under the title ‘The Holy Name’.

¹²⁶ Leslie E. T. Bradbury, ‘The Holy Name’, Church Times, CXXXIV (3 August 1951), p. 525.

¹²⁷ See the biography of Idrisyn Oliver Evans in CL II, p. 584n.

¹²⁸ I. O. Evans, The Coming of a King: A Story of the Stone Age (1950).

¹²⁹ Mrs Vulliamy was writing from Park College, Parksville, Missouri.

¹³⁰ Lewis’s doctor, Robert Emlyn ‘Humphrey’ Havard.

¹³¹ Acts 9:4–5: ‘And he fell to the earth, and heard a voice saying unto him, Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me? And he said, Who are thou, Lord? And the Lord said, I am Jesus whom thou persecutest.’

¹³² Colossians 1:23–4: ‘I Paul…now rejoice in my sufferings for you, and fill up that which is behind of the afflictions of Christ in my flesh for his body’s sake, which is the church.’

¹³³ Romans 12:5: ‘So we, being many, are one body in Christ, and every one members one of another.’

¹³⁴ Lewis was referring to a problem that sometimes arises when, in a family of non-Christians, one of them becomes a Christian. It is one of the themes in Lewis’s novel, Till We Have Faces. See the letter to Clyde Kilby of 10 February 1957.

¹³⁵ Lewis meant ‘The Coming of Galahad’ in Charles Williams’s Taliessin Through Logres (1938).

¹³⁶ Luke 12:49–53: Suppose ye that I am come to give peace on earth? I tell you, Nay; but rather division: For from henceforth there shall be five in one house divided, three against two, and two against three. The father shall be divided against the son, and the son against the father; the mother against the daughter, and the daughter against the mother; the mother in law against her daughter in law, and the daughter in law against her mother in law.’

¹³⁷ Francis of Assisi: Early Documents, 3 vols., ed. Regis J. Armstrong OFM Cap., J. A. Wayne Hellmann OFM, Conv., William J. Short OFM (New York: New City Press, 2000), Vol. II: The Founder, ‘The Legends and Sermons about Saint Francis by Bonaventure of Bagnoregio (1255–1267)’, p. 564: ‘[Francis of Assisi] taught his brothers…that they should master their rebellious and lazy flesh by constant discipline and useful work. Therefore he used to call his body Brother Ass, for he felt it should be subjected to heavy labor, beaten frequently with whips, and fed with the poorest food.’

¹³⁸ This was the Italian translation of Out of the Silent Planet, published as Lontano dal Pianeta Silenzioso, trans. Franca Degli Espinosa (Milan and Verona: Mandadori, 1951).

¹³⁹ See the biography of Bernard Acworth in CL II, p. 632n. Acworth was founder and president emeritus of the Evolution Protest Movement.

¹⁴⁰ Bernard Acworth, This Progress: The Tragedy of Evolution (London: Rich & Cowan, 1934).

¹⁴¹ The tomb of Boethius (AD 480–524) is in the Church of S. Pietro Ciel d’Oro at Pavia.

¹⁴² The edition Lewis used was The Consolation of Philosophy, with the English Translation of ‘I.T.’ (1609), rev. H. F. Stewart (London: Heinemann, Loeb Classical Library, 1918).

¹⁴³ Kinter had asked about a sentence in the preface of Lewis’s That Hideous Strength: A Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-Ups (London: John Lane, 1945; HarperCollins, 2000), p. xii: ‘Those who would like to learn further about Numinor and the True West must (alas!) await the publication of much that still exists only in the MSS. of my friend, Professor J. R. R. Tolkien.’

¹⁴⁴ Max Muller, The Science of Language, 2 vols. (London: Longmans, 1891), Vol. II, p. 454.

¹⁴⁵ George MacDonald, Sir Gibbie (1879), ch. 47: ‘the time for speaking comes rarely, the time for being never departs.’

¹⁴⁶ Wendell W. Watters, MD, a Canadian psychiatrist, was Professor of Psychiatry at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. He was the author of Deadly Doctrine: Health, Illness, and Christian God-talk (1992).

¹⁴⁷ This letter first appeared in L as ‘To A CRITICAL BUT CHARITABLE READER’, and was incorrectly dated 12 September 1951.

¹⁴⁸ Dr Watters’s objection to Christ’s ‘unfair advantage’ was occasioned by Lewis’s Broadcast Talks, Bk. II, ch. 4. When revising the talks for Mere Christianity (London: Bles, 1952; HarperCollins, 2002), Lewis added two paragraphs to the end of Book II, Chapter 4, in which he used the example given here: ‘I have heard some people complain that if Jesus was God as well as man, then His sufferings and death lose all value in their eyes, “because it must have been so easy for him”…If I am drowning in a rapid river, a man who still has one foot on the bank may give me a hand which saves my life. Ought I to shout back (between my gasps) “No, it’s not fair! You have an advantage! You’re keeping one foot on the bank”? That advantage–call it “unfair” if you like–is the only reason why he can be of any use to me. To what will you look for help if you will not look to that which is stronger than yourself?’ (pp. 58–9)

¹⁴⁹ Geoffrey Bles was pressing Blamires to persuade Lewis to write a preface for Blamires’s English in Education (London: Bles, 1951).

¹⁵⁰ i.e., the preface he was writing for D. E. Harding’s The Hierarchy of Heaven and Earth.

¹⁵¹ See the biography of Herbert Palmer, poet and literary critic, in CL II, p. 678n.

¹⁵² John Milton, Prose Works, with preliminary remarks and notes by J. A. St John, 5 vols. (London: Bohn’s Standard Library, 1948–53).

¹⁵³ Herbert Palmer, ‘English Poetry: 1938–1950–I’, The Fortnightly, CLXX (September 1951), pp. 624–8; ‘English Poetry: 1938–1950–II’, ibid. (October 1951), pp. 695–700; ‘English Poetry: 1938–1950–III’, ibid. (October 1951), pp. 768–74.

¹⁵⁴ Kinter had asked about Lewis’s interplanetary trilogy, of which the first book is Out of the Silent Planet.

¹⁵⁵ i.e., The Problem of Pain.

¹⁵⁶ Ashley Sampson of Geoffrey Bles, The Centenary Press, had asked Lewis to contribute a book on pain to the Christian Challenge series. See CL II, p. 289n.

¹⁵⁷ The Problem of Pain, ch. 1, p. 15: ‘The Christian faith…has the master touch–the rough, male taste of reality.’

¹⁵⁸ ‘C. S. Lewis: 1898–1963’, Bodleian Library, MS. Facs. d. 290.

¹⁵⁹ Since the thirteenth century there have been many versions of the legend of the Wandering Jew. In essence the legend recounts how a Jew chided Christ as he bore the cross to Calvary and was thereafter condemned to wander about the world until Christ’s Second Coming.

¹⁶⁰ Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, Part I, pp. 55–6.

¹⁶¹ United Nations Organization.

¹⁶² 25 April.

¹⁶³ Hebrews 11:1: ‘Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.’

¹⁶⁴ Psalm 8:2; Matthew 21:16.

¹⁶⁵ Numbers 22:24–31.

¹⁶⁶ Philippians 4:4.

¹⁶⁷ Colossians 2:14–5.

¹ Winston Churchill was re-elected Prime Minister in 1951, and on 5 January 1952 he went to Washington, DC, to renew Britain’s ‘special relationship’ with the United States.

² Clement Attlee (1883–1967) was the Labour Prime Minster, 1945–51.

³ ‘Maleldil’ is the ‘Old Solar’ name given in Lewis’s interplanetary novels to God the Son.

⁴ Pitter had been trying since 1949 to transcribe a passage from Lewis’s Perelandra into Spenserian stanzas. She said in a note to Lewis’s letter of 17 November 1949 (CL II, p. 997): ‘The passage…was to have been included in one of my books, but I think John Hayward…finally decided that (copyright trouble, apart) it didn’t do anything that the original hadn’t done a lot better’ (Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. lett. c. 220/3, fol. 84).

⁵ He was referring to the poem ‘The Earwig’s Complaint’ in Pitter’s A Mad Lady’s Garland (1934). Pitter said of this poem: ‘The earwig is imagined as a sort of little fiery Elizabethan soldier of fortune–he gets by chance into a lady’s bed, is much struck by her beauty, has the misfortune to tickle, and of course she throws him out–he laments the episode in what I thought a fine heroic tragical strain, but reflects finally that he has wings, after all, she not! It is an image, I suppose, of the scruffy neglected poet, a failure too in love, consoling himself’ (MS. Eng. lett. c. 220/3, fol. 107).

⁶ i.e., the poet George Herbert (1593–1633).

⁷ The Flying Enterprise was a 6,711-ton cargo ship. Built during the Second World War, it became a commercial cargo vessel after the war. On Christmas Day 1951 it left England and headed into the Atlantic Ocean on route for the United States through a turbulent sea. By the next day the Atlantic was hit by one of the worst storms in history, winds rising to hurricane force. On the bridge was Captain Henrik Kurt Carlsen, a Dane of extraordinary courage who remained aboard his ship for almost two weeks as efforts were made to tow her to port. He was finally forced to abandon ship when her list increased to a fatal degree on 10 January 1952, only about 40 miles away from Falmouth, England. The ordeal of the Flying Enterprise and Captain Carlsen was world-wide news at the time and remains one of the great stories of endurance and courage at sea. See Gordon Holman, Carlsen of the Flying Enterprise (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1952). On 22 June 2001 a team of divers discovered the lost ship resting on her side in a depth of 280 feet on the seabed of the western approaches to the English Channel.

⁸ p. p.

⁹ Sister Penelope’s imagination had been fired by an article in The Times (6 December 1951), p. 5, entitled ‘A Mystery of Everest: Footprints of the “Abominable Snowman”’. The British mountaineer Eric Shipton wrote about a discovery his team made on Mount Everest on 8 November 1951: ‘At 4 o’clock we came upon some strange tracks in the snow. [Our guide] immediately announced them to be the tracks of “yetis” or “Abominable Snowmen”…The tracks were mostly distorted by melting into oval impressions, slightly longer and a good deal broader than those made by our large mountain boots. But here and there, where the snow covering the ice was thin, we came upon a well preserved impression of the creature’s foot. It showed three broad “toes” and a broad “thumb” to the side. What was particularly interesting was that where the tracks crossed a crevice one could see quite clearly where the creature had jumped and used its toes to secure purchase on the snow on the other side.’ The first reliable report of the Yeti appeared in 1925 but the best tracks ever seen were photographed by Shipton and published in The Times (7 December 1951), p. 13.

¹⁰ Genesis 6:1–4: ‘And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born unto them, That the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair: and they took them wives of all which they chose. And the Lord said, My spirit shall not always strive with man, for that he also is flesh: yet his days shall be an hundred and twenty years. There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown.’

¹¹ Cf. Psalm 45:11.

¹² He means the confusion between the Latin homo, ‘human being’, and VIR, ‘(adult male) man’.

¹³ Austin Farrer, The Glass of Vision, The Bampton Lectures for 1948 (1948).

¹⁴ See CL II, p. 961.

¹⁵ Simone Weil, Waiting on God, trans. Emma Craufurd (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1951).

¹⁶ ‘A Religious of CSMV’ (Sister Penelope), They Shall Be My People: The Bible Traversed in a Course of Reading Plays, 2 vols. (London: Oxford University Press, 1951).

¹⁷ I. O. Evans, Led By the Star: A Christmas Play (London: Rylee, 1952).

¹⁸ L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt, The Roaring Trumpet (1940); The Mathematics of Magic (1940); The Incomplete Enchanter (New York: Pyramid Books, 1941).

¹⁹ i.e., The Incomplete Enchanter..

²⁰ These notes relate to Blamires’s unpublished book on the Christian philosophy of education.

²¹ Carol Jenkins was writing from Westmead, 35 Flushcombe Lane, Bath.

²² i.e., the name Aslan.

²³ The Thousand and One Nights: Commonly Called, in England, The Arabian Nights’ Entertainments, trans. Edward William Lane (1838–40).

²⁴ i.e., The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

²⁵ Wayland Hilton Young (1923–), who became the 2nd Baron Kennet in 1960, is the son of Edward Hilton Young, 1st Baron Kennet (1879–1960) and Lady Edith Agnes Kathleen Bruce (1878–1947). He was born in London on 2 August 1923, and educated at Stowe School. He served in the Royal Navy, 1942–5. Following the war he went to Trinity College, Cambridge, taking his BA in 1946. Young entered the Foreign Office in 1946 and was Parliamentary Secretary for the Ministry of Housing and Local Government, 1966–70, Opposition spokesman on foreign affairs and science policy, 1971–4, a Member of the European Parliament, 1978–9, and SDP spokesman in the House of Lords on foreign affairs and defence, 1981–90. In 1948 he married Elizabeth Adams, daughter of Captain Bryan Fullerton Adams, and they had six children. His many published books and pamphlets, on subjects such as defence, disarmament, the environment and architecture, include Deadweight (1952), Now or Never (1953), The Montesi Scandal (1957), Still Alive Tomorrow (1958), Strategy for Survival (1959), The Futures of Europe (1976), The Rebirth of Britain (1982) and Northern Lazio (1990).

²⁶ i.e., John Lane The Bodley Head, the publishers of Lewis’s interplanetary trilogy.

²⁷ ‘excessive’ or ‘in the way’.

²⁸ That Hideous Strength.

²⁹ A word is missing from the text.

³⁰ A poem by Robert Browning included in his Dramatis Personae (1864).

³¹ 1 Timothy 4:10: ‘We both labour and suffer reproach, because we trust in the living God, who is the Saviour of all men, specially of those that believe.’

³² This letter was first published in the Church Times, CXXXV (8 February 1952), p. 95, under the title ‘Mere Christians’.

³³ R. D. Daunton-Fear, ‘Evangelical Churchmanship’, Church Times, CXXXV (1 February 1952), p. 77.

³⁴ An abbreviated form of the quotation from St Vincent of Lerins, Commonitorium, IV, section 3: ‘Id teneamus, quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus creditum est’: ‘Let us hold on to that which has been believed everywhere, always, by everyone.’

³⁵ Richard Baxter, Church-history of the Government of Bishops and their Councils (1680), ‘What History is Credible, and What Not’, p. xv: ‘You know not of what Party I am of, nor what to call me; I am sorrier for you in this than for my self; if you know not, I will tell you, I am a CHRISTIAN, a MERE CHRISTIAN, of no other Religion; and the Church that I am of is the Christian Church, and hath been visible where ever the Christian Religion and Church hath been visible.’

³⁶ This was a short story Mathews had written.

³⁷ The Gospels, trans. into modern English by J. B. Phillips (London: Bles, 1952).

³⁸ ‘general presentation’.

³⁹ One or two words are missing from the facsimile copy.

⁴⁰ Genia Goelz was being baptized.

⁴¹ The twelve-week period between the end of Trinity Term, which ends on 6 July, and the beginning of Michaelmas Term, which starts on 1 October.

⁴² Helen D. Calkins, who first wrote to Lewis from India, had returned to the United States and was now writing from 915 Taylor Street, Albany, California.

⁴³ Calkins’s unpublished work, ‘India Looks’, mentioned in the letter of 29 March 1952.

⁴⁴ See the biography of John Alexander Chapman (1875–1968) in CL II, p. 954n.

⁴⁵ J. A. Chapman, War (Windsor: Savile Press, 1951).

⁴⁶ Warnie.

⁴⁷ Lewis usually stayed at the Old Inn in Crawfordsburn when visiting Greeves.

⁴⁸ Anthony Trollope, The Last Chronicle of Barset (1867).

⁴⁹ Mark 9:24.

⁵⁰ John 7:17.

⁵¹ Roger Lancelyn Green, The Luck of the Lynns: A Story of Hidden Treasure (1952).

⁵² For some time Lewis had been planning a holiday with Arthur Greeves in Northern Ireland. He expected to arrive at Greeves’s house on 21 August, and leave on the night of 8 September. Lewis and Green had long wanted to visit the ruined castles of North Wales, beginning with Beaumaris Castle, Anglesey.

⁵³ Liverpool.

⁵⁴ This letter is found only in Vanauken, A Severe Mercy, ch. 5, p. 110.

⁵⁵ Michael Kevin Irwin (1944–), a schoolboy who wrote to Lewis about the Narnian stories, was born on 2 December 1944. He was educated at St Edward’s School, Oxford, and was the son of the Rev. Patrick Irwin, to whom Lewis wrote on 26 September 1952.

⁵⁶ E. Nesbit, The Phoenix and the Carpet (1904); The Story of the Amulet (1906).

⁵⁷ J. R. R. Tolkien, The Hobbit: or There and Back Again (1937).

⁵⁸ George MacDonald, The Princess and the Goblin (1872); The Princess and Curdie (1883).

⁵⁹ Baloo is the sleepy brown bear in Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book..

⁶⁰ Bulkeley Arms Hotel, Beaumaris.

⁶¹ Richard Hughes, A High Wind in Jamaica (1929).

⁶² Ralph Waldo Emerson, May-day and Other Pieces (1867), ‘Brahma’, 11.

⁶³ In Miracles: A Preliminary Study (London: Bles, 1947; Fount, 1998), pp. 90, 110, Lewis quotes from Alfred North Whitehead’s Science and the Modern World (1925).

⁶⁴ See Mary Neylan, mother of Sarah Neylan, in the Biographical Appendix to CL II, pp. 1054–5.

⁶⁵ i.e., Charles Williams.

⁶⁶ Joseph Stalin.

⁶⁷ Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory (1940). This novel, usually regarded as Greene’s best, is set in Mexico during a time of religious persecution. It describes the desperate last wanderings of a priest, the central character in the book, who is never given a name. The priest, who ‘carried a wound, as though a whole world had died’, commits the moral sin of fornication with the peasant woman Maria, after falling into the worst sin of ‘despair’. The only priest left in the state who has not either escaped or died, or conformed to the atheistic government, he returns to the village where Maria lives with their illegitimate daughter. Despite the fact that he believes himself to be condemned by God, he knows he can nevertheless bring salvation to others. In the end he achieves holiness and eventually martyrdom by virtue of, rather than in spite of, his sins.

⁶⁸ Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. See the letter to Christian Hardie of 22 March 1951.

⁶⁹ William Shakespeare, Macbeth (1623).

⁷⁰ Lewis’s confessor was Father Walter Adams SSJE of Cowley, Oxford. He had been Lewis’s confessor since Lewis began going to confession in 1940. Father Adams died on 3 March 1952, but Lewis is curiously wrong about his dying at the altar. He died peacefully at the home of friends in Headington. See Father Walter Adams SSJE in the Biographical Appendix to CL II, pp. 1015–16.

⁷¹ The words quoted seem to be a conflation of two very similar passages. The first is Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, Book IV, Ch. 4, 3: ‘et tu fons es semper plenus et super abundans, ignis semper ardens et numquam deficiens’: ‘and you are a fountain ever full and over abundant, a flame always burning and never failing’. This passage has a textual problem: sometimes ‘ignis semper ardens’ is read as ‘ignis iugiter ardens’, ‘a flame continually burning’. Lewis’s text presumably read ‘ignis iugiter ardens’. Then there is the passage from Book IV, Ch. 16, 3: ‘cum tu sis ignis semper ardens et numquam deficiens, amor corda purificans et intellectum illuminans’: ‘since you are a flame always burning and never failing, a love that purifies the heart and illuminates the intellect’. Lewis seems to have conflated the two passages in his memory, creating something like this: ‘cum tu sis ignis iugiter ardens et numquam deficiens, amor corda…’

⁷² John 17:21.

⁷³ Lewis had sent Pitter a ticket to his lecture on ‘Hero and Leander’, given to the British Academy on 20 February 1952. The lecture is reprinted in SLE.

⁷⁴ Christopher Marlowe and George Chapman, Hero and Leander (1598). Marlowe wrote the first two books of this poem, and Chapman (1559–1634) the remaining four. See English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Pt. III, Ch. 3, Sect. 3.

⁷⁵ Andrew Young, Into Hades (1952).

⁷⁶ i.e., George Sayer.

⁷⁷ The incumbent President, Harry S. Truman, decided against seeking re-election in 1952. He threw his support behind Illinois Governor Adlai Stevenson–not Robert A. Taft–who was drafted in as the Democratic nominee. Stevenson proved no match for General Dwight D. Eisenhower who won a landslide victory.

⁷⁸ See the biography of Delmar Banner, artist, in CL II, p. 537n.

⁷⁹ P. G. Wodehouse, Thank You, Jeeves (1934), ch. 1: ‘I fear I cannot recede from my position.’

⁸⁰ Banner had invited Lewis to his home at The Bield, Little Langdale, in the Lake District.

⁸¹ ‘I could’.

⁸² ‘I couldn’t’.

⁸³ Library Association Proceedings, Papers and Summaries of Discussion at the Bournemouth Conference on 29 April to 2 May 1952 (1952), pp. 22–8, and reprinted in Of This and Other Worlds, ed. Walter Hooper (London: Collins, 1982; HarperCollins, 2000); published in the United States as On Stories: and Other Essays on Literature (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982).

⁸⁴ Roger Lancelyn Green, The Wonderful Stranger (1950).

⁸⁵ ‘the far country’.

⁸⁶ See Nell Berners-Price in the Biographical Appendix. Lewis had to be present as a witness at Mrs Hooker’s trial in Canterbury on 8 May. Nell Berners-Price had invited him to spend the night before the trial at Courtstairs Hotel, so that he would be near Canterbury. Following the trial Mrs Hooker was sent to Holloway Prison in London.

⁸⁷ Lewis had smudged his signature when using a piece of blotting paper.

⁸⁸ This letter was published in The Times Literary Supplement (9 May 1952), p. 313, under the title ‘The Sheepheard’s Slumber’.

⁸⁹ Prince Caspian.

⁹⁰ Penelope was the seven-year-old daughter of Mr and Mrs Berners-Price.

⁹¹ Charles Gore, The Sermon on the Mount (1896), Appendix III, p. 215: ‘Christ, by a distinct act of legislation, prohibited divorce among His disciples in such sense as allows of remarriage, except in the case of adultery of one of the parties.’

⁹² Conference of Bishops of the Anglican Communion, Holden at Lambeth Palace in July 1888 (London: SPCK, 1888), pp. 43–4: ‘No. 3.–Divorce…a. That, inasmuch as our Lord’s words expressly forbid divorce, except in the case of fornication or adultery, the Christian Church cannot recognize divorce in any other than the excepted case, or give any sanction to the marriage of any person who has been divorced contrary to this law, during the life of the other party. ‘b. That under no circumstances ought the guilty party, in the case of a divorce for fornication or adultery, to be regarded, during the lifetime of the innocent party, as a fit recipient of the blessing of the Church on marriage. ‘c. That, recognizing the fact that there always has been a difference of opinion in the Church on the question whether our Lord meant to forbid marriage to the innocent party in a divorce for adultery, the Conference recommends that the clergy should not be instructed to refuse the sacraments or other privileges of the Church to those who, under civil sanction, are thus married.’

⁹³ Sir Godfrey Rolles Driver (1892–1975), Old Testament scholar and Semitic philologist, was elected a Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1919 and was Professor of Semitic Philology, 1938–62. He was intimately concerned with the New English Bible, and his works include The Judaean Scrolls (1965). Young was interested in writing a novel based on the Book of Judith from the Old Testament Apocrypha.

⁹⁴ Mrs Goelz was being confirmed in the Episcopal Church.

⁹⁵ David Cecil, Lord M.: or The Later Life of Lord Melbourne (London: Constable, 1954), p. 6: ‘[Lord Melbourne] loved to defend the indefensible. “What I like about the Order of the Garter,” he once remarked, “is that there is no damned merit about it.”’

⁹⁶ Sir Fred Hoyle (1915–2001) was Plumian Professor of Astronomy at Cambridge University, and the founder of the Institute of Theoretical Astronomy.

⁹⁷ ‘writer of extended romances’.

⁹⁸ Edmund Spenser, Epithalamion (1595).

⁹⁹ Vera Mathews had married K. H. Gebbert, and they were now living at Sun Valley Lodge, Sun Valley, Idaho, where Mr Gebbert had was working.

¹⁰⁰ Since 21 December 1951 Griffiths had been at the Benedictine priory at Pluscarden, Elgin, Moray, Scotland, where he was novice master.

¹⁰¹ Konrad Z. Lorenz, King Solomon’s Ring: New Light on Animal Ways (1952).

¹⁰² The top of this letter was torn off, and with it the date and salutation.