¹⁸⁴ Sir Walter Scott, Ivanhoe (1819).

¹⁸⁵ See the letter to Bodle of 31 December 1947 (CL II, p. 823).

¹⁸⁶ The name given to the planet Earth in Lewis’s interplanetary trilogy.

¹⁸⁷ Roger Lancelyn Green, Tellers of Tales: An Account of Children’s Favourite Authors from 1839 to the Present Day (1946; new edn, 1953).

¹⁸⁸ For Don Giovanni Calabria’s letter of 3 September 1953 see Letters: C. S. Lewis–Don Giovanni Calabria, pp. 84–7.

¹⁸⁹ Giovanni Calabria, Instaurare Omnia in Christo (Verona: Vescovile Casa Buoni Fanciulli, 1952).

¹⁹⁰ Horace, Ars Poetica, 169–74: ‘Multa senem circumveniunt incommoda, vel quod quaerit et inventis miser abstinet ac timet uti,/vel quod res omnis timide gelideque ministrat,/dilator, spe longus, iners, avidusque futuri,/difficilis, querulus, laudator temporis acti/se puero, castigator censorque minorum’: ‘Many troubles assail an old man, whether because he seeks gain, and then wretchedly abstains from what he possesses and is afraid to use it, or because he attends to all his affairs feebly and timidly; a procrastinator, he is apathetic in his hopes and expectations, sluggish and fearful of the future, obstinate, always complaining; he devotes himself to praising times past, when he was a boy, and to being the castigator and moral censor of the young.’

¹⁹¹ 2 Corinthians 1:3.

¹⁹² This had been Lewis’s chief intention in The Abolition of Man.

¹⁹³ Herbert Read, The Green Child (1935).

¹⁹⁴ The French composer, Olivier Messiaen (1908–92).

¹⁹⁵ Probably Douglas Edison Harding, author of The Hierarchy of Heaven and Earth.

¹⁹⁶ In The Horse and His Boy.

¹⁹⁷ ibid., ch. 7.

¹⁹⁸ Lewis was referring to Rachel, son of Laban. According to Genesis 29:20: ‘Jacob served seven years for Rachel.’ In her note to his letter Pitter said: ‘I had now known Lewis for seven years, and thought perhaps he would not mind if we now used Xtian names…I had asked “if I might now have Rachel”, alluding to Jacob’s seven-year service’ (Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. lett. c. 220/3, fol. 119).

¹⁹⁹ The foolish clergyman in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813), who is excessively obsequious to persons of high rank.

²⁰⁰ G. A. L. Burgeon (Owen Barfield), This Ever Diverse Pair, introduction by Walter de la Mare (London: Gollancz, 1950). See the description of this book in CL II, p. 937n.

²⁰¹ Charlotte M. Yonge, The Daisy Chain (1856); The Trial (1864); The Pillars of the House (1873); The Three Brides (1876); The Two Sides of the Shield (1885); Dynevor Terrace (1857); Nutty’s Father (1886).

²⁰² John Richards (1918–95) was born in London on 23 June 1918. He went to Brockley County School in Forest Hill, after which he read English at King’s College, London. Before he could complete his degree the Second World War intervened and he spent most of the war years working in an anti-aircraft battery in Northern Ireland. After VE Day Richards was transferred to the Foreign Office. He soon left, returning to King’s College to complete his degree. In 1949 he realized his long-time ambition and began work in the Ministry of Education, where he served as Under-Secretary, 1973–7. A convert to Roman Catholicism in 1940, he afterwards contributed to many Catholic periodicals. See Lewis’s letter to Richards of 5 March 1945 in the Supplement.

²⁰³ Charlotte M. Yonge, The Heir of Redclyffe (1853).

²⁰⁴ i.e., The Splendid Century.

²⁰⁵ John Forrest, who had just died, was the husband of Lewis’s cousin, Gundreda Ewart Forrest. See The Ewart Family in the Biographical Appendix to CL I.

²⁰⁶ The words ‘better the frying pan than the fire’ were removed from The Silver Chair before the book was published.

²⁰⁷ Lewis had probably been asked to examine J. B. Phillips’s translation of Acts, The Young Church in Action: The Acts of the Apostles, published by Geoffrey Bles in 1955. The reference is to Phillips’s translation of Acts 2:22–4.

²⁰⁸ The fourteenth-century manor Dartington Hall was bought in 1925 by Leonard and Dorothy Elmhirst, who opened it in 1926 as an experiment in co-education. From the first one of its purposes was to renovate the large Dartington Hall estate. The school featured a ‘pupil-defined curriculum’ based upon the individual. There were few rules for older students, no uniforms, no religious education, and no church services. Emphasis was placed on ‘co-operation rather than competition’. Lewis’s pupil, Mary Neylan, taught there for a number of years. See Mary Neylan in the Biographical Appendix to CL II, pp. 1054–5.

²⁰⁹ The school in The Silver Chair.

²¹⁰ Edgar Allan Poe, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1850).

²¹¹ ‘for the prayers’.

²¹² Congregation of Sisters of the Holy Redeemer, a lay order within the Order of the Holy Cross.

²¹³ Book of Common Prayer, Collect for Whitsunday.

²¹⁴ The story is told of a friend saying to Sir Winston Churchill, ‘How wonderfully your new grandson looks like you.’ ‘All babies look like me,’ replied Sir Winston. ‘But then, I look like all babies.’

²¹⁵ William Wordsworth, ‘Ode, Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood’ (1807), 63–6: ‘Not in entire forgetfulness,/And not in utter nakedness,/But trailing clouds of glory do we come/From God, who is our home.’

²¹⁶ i.e., Florence ‘Michal’ Williams, the widow of Charles Williams.

²¹⁷ Lewis forgot he had asked Bles, in his letter of 20 October, to remove the words from The Silver Chair.

²¹⁸ Romans 8:26–7: ‘We know not what we should pray for as we ought: but the Spirit itself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered. And he that searcheth the hearts knoweth what is the mind of the Spirit, because he maketh intercession for the saints according to the will of God.’

²¹⁹ Luke 18:2: ‘And he spake a parable unto them to this end, that men ought always to pray, and not to faint.’

²²⁰ Luke 22:42.

²²¹ Mark 11:24: ‘Therefore I say unto you, What things soever ye desire, when ye pray, believe that ye receive them and ye shall have them.’

²²² Charles Williams, Evelyn Underhill, George MacDonald.

²²³ John 3:16.

²²⁴ 1 John 2:15.

²²⁵ Revelation 18:4.

²²⁶ Mrs Gebbert had asked if Lewis would autograph a copy of The Silver Chair for her son, Charles Marion Gebbert.

²²⁷ The Bermuda Summit, 4–8 December 1953, was held at the initiative of Sir Winston Churchill and included Britain, the United States, France and the USSR. In the aftermath of Joseph Stalin’s death and the Soviet development of a hydrogen bomb, Churchill hoped to gain President Eisenhower’s support for a top-level dialogue with the new Soviet leadership. He was motivated primarily by a wish to break the stalemate of the Cold War and avert a possible nuclear conflict.

²²⁸ Panama was Queen Elizabeth II’s and Prince Philip’s first port of call (29 November 1953) on their visit to Australia, which was part of the Queen’s first Commonwealth tour.

²²⁹ The letter is unsigned.

²³⁰ Sir Stanley Unwin (1884–1968), publisher, was the son of Edward Unwin, a London printer. In 1904 he joined his father’s stepbrother, T. Fisher Unwin, in his publishing firm. At 28 he began his own firm and soon afterwards bought George Allen & Sons. With the new company, George Allen & Unwin, he quickly built a formidable list of authors. In 1926 Unwin published The Truth about Publishing, which became the authoritative textbook on the subject. He was a tireless worker, but spared time for his other passion–tennis, which he played every weekend throughout the year. In 1937, acting on the recommendation of his ten-year-old son, Rayner, he published Tolkien’s The Hobbit. Again at the recommendation of Rayner, he published The Lord of the Rings. Because that book was so difficult to describe, Unwin asked Lewis if he would write something to serve as a ‘blurb’ for its cover. Lewis included such a piece with this letter. Unwin was knighted in 1946.

²³¹ Mrs Farrer took exception to Lewis’s portrayal of God as, not male, but masculine. In That Hideous Strength, ch. 14, part V, p. 350, Ransom tells Jane Studdock: ‘You are offended by the masculine itself: the loud, irruptive, possessive thing–the gold lion, the bearded bull–which breaks through hedges and scatters the carefully made bed. The male you could have escaped, for it exists only on the biological level. But the masculine none of us can escape. What is above and beyond all things is so masculine that we are all feminine in relation to it.’

²³² Lewis was referring to the love of the dwarf, Gimli, for Galadriel, Queen of the Elves, in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, Bk. II, ch. 7: ‘The Dwarf, hearing the names given in his own ancient tongue, looked up and met her eyes, and it seemed to him that he looked suddenly into the heart of an enemy and saw there love and understanding.’

²³³ In The Fellowship of the Ring, Bk. II, ch. 8, ‘Farewell to Lórien’, the Fellowship takes leave of the security of Lothlórien to destroy the Ring.

²³⁴ In the final chapter of The Fellowship of the Ring, the noble Boromir covets the Ring so badly he tries to take it from Frodo: “‘It is by our own folly that our Enemy will defeat us,” cried Boromir. “How it angers me! Fool! Obstinate fool! Running wilfully to death and ruining our cause. If any mortals have claim to the Ring, it is the men of Nmenor, and not Halflings. It is not yours save by unhappy chance. It might have been mine. It should be mine. Give it to me!”’

²³⁵ See the letter to Sir Stanley Unwin of 4 December 1953.

²³⁶ ‘make haste slowly’.

²³⁷ The Roman poet Lucretius (c. 99–c. 55 BC).

²³⁸ Lewis was referring to D. E. Harding’s The Hierarchy of Heaven and Earth.

²³⁹ ibid., Preface, p. 12: ‘It would be affectation to pretend that I know whether Mr. Harding’s attempt, in its present form, will work. Very possibly not. One hardly expects the first, or the twenty-first, rocket to the Moon to make a good landing. But it is a beginning.’

²⁴⁰ See Dorothy L. Sayers in the Biographical Appendix to CL II, pp. 1065–72.

²⁴¹ Lewis had received one of Sayers’ Christmas cards. The text, ‘The Days of Christ’s Coming’, was by Sayers, with a painting by Fritz Wegner, and the card was printed by Hamish Hamilton. The picture had 27 numbered doors to be opened from 14 December to 7 January.

²⁴² Kathleen Nott had just published The Emperor’s Clothes (London: Heinemann, 1953), described on the jacket as ‘An attack on the dogmatic orthodoxy of T. S. Eliot, Graham Greene, Dorothy Sayers, C. S. Lewis, and others.’

²⁴³ A Scots word for money or silver.

²⁴⁴ Sayers’ first part of Dante’s Divine Comedy had been published in 1949. She was now working on her translation of the Purgatorio.

²⁴⁵ David Gresham was in fact nine and a half years old and Douglas eight.

²⁴⁶ The ‘Little Kingdom’ of J. R. R. Tolkien’s Farmer Giles of Ham (1949) is set in that pleasant area east of Oxford which includes Thame, Long Crendon and Worminghall.

²⁴⁷ Arthur C. Clarke, Childhood’s End (New York: Ballantine, 1953).

²⁴⁸ H. G. Wells, The First Men in the Moon (1901).

²⁴⁹ Olaf Stapledon (1886–1950), whose Last and First Men (1930) and Star Maker (1937) are mentioned in CL II, pp. 236, 594.

²⁵⁰ i.e., Richard Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung, one of Lewis’s oldest loves. See the references to it in CL I, pp. 29, 139n, 381–2.

²⁵¹ Clarke, Childhood’s End, ch. 21, p. 163.

²⁵² ibid., p. 164.

²⁵³ Luke 14:26.

²⁵⁴ But in Book V when they have returned to Sicily, the women try to burn the ships so they need not go to Latium. See CL 11, p. 750, N. 148. In Virgil, Aeneid, Book III Aeneas and his companions build a fleet and set off in search of the land that first bore the Trojan race (Italy). They have many strange adventures along the way, but eventually reach Libya.

²⁵⁵ That is, from matters of the soul (psyche) to those of the spirit (pneuma).

²⁵⁶ Dante, Inferno, IV, 42.

²⁵⁷ The letter was unsigned.

²⁵⁸ Her husband, Henry Gerard Walter Sandeman, died on 19 January 1953.

²⁵⁹ Matthew 19:5–6; Mark 10:8–9.

²⁶⁰ Titirangi School for the Deaf had now merged with the Kelston Deaf Education Centre, New Lynn, Auckland, and Bodle had moved to New Lynn to continue her teaching.

²⁶¹ Herbert, The Temple, ‘The Church-porch’, Stanza 72, 5–6: ‘If all want sense, God takes a text, and preacheth Patience.’

²⁶² The Rev. Canon Ronald Edwin Head (1919–91) was appointed Curate of Holy Trinity, Headington Quarry, in 1952, and Vicar in 1956. When he arrived in the parish Holy Communion was celebrated at 8 a.m. and Morning Prayer at 11 a.m. He was responsible for reversing the times of these services.

²⁶³ Lewis may have been remembering Joanna Baillie (1762–1851), ‘The Storm-Beat Maid’ (1790), XL, 1: ‘I’ll share the cold blast on the heath.’

²⁶⁴ The four women are characters in the works of William Shakespeare. Imogen is the heroine of Cymbeline (1623), Portia the heroine of The Merchant of Venice (1600). Miranda is a character in The Tempest, and Perdita appears in The Winter’s Tale (1623). While Miranda and Perdita grew up in sheltered circumstances and made happy marriages, Imogen and Portia had complicated and eventful lives which nevertheless turned out well in the end.

¹ Matthew 15:32; Mark 8:3.

² Lewis had sent her a copy of his poem ‘The Nativity’, which appears in CP, p. 136.

³ Book of Common Prayer, ‘A Collect or Prayer for all Conditions of Men’.

⁴ Daniel Marcus ‘Dan’ Davin (1913–90), Oxford academic publisher, and Deputy Secretary to Delegates of the Oxford University Press, 1974–8, was born on 1 September 1913 in Invercargill, New Zealand. After taking a first class MA in English (1934) and another in Latin (1935) from the University of Otago, he won a Rhodes Scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford, where he took a First in Classics in 1939. Davin served with the Royal Warwickshire Regiment, 1939–40, and with the New Zealand Expeditionary Force, 1940–5. When the war ended he was invited to take a job at the Oxford University Press. He spent the rest of his working life (1945–78) there, rising from editor to academic publisher. Davin, the author of many books, died on 28 September 1990.

⁵ Norman Davis (1913–89) was, like Daniel Davin, from New Zealand. On taking an MA from the University of Otago in 1933, he was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship to Merton College, Oxford, where he studied English literature. After taking his degree in 1936 he was a lecturer in English at the University of London, and then at Oxford University. He was Professor of English at Glasgow University, 1949–59, and Merton Professor of English Language and Literature, Oxford, 1959–80.

⁶ Lewis was making final corrections to his English Literature in the Sixteenth Century.

⁷ English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, p. 597.

⁸ John Evelyn (1620–1706) published a number of books on gardening and related interests, among which were Fumifugium or The Inconvenience of the Air and Smoke of London Dissipated (1661).

⁹ Henry King (1592–1669), Bishop of Chichester, and a friend of John Donne (1572–1631) and Izaak Walton (1593–1683), is best known for his ‘Exequy on his Wife’, which appears in The Oxford Book of English Verse: 1250–1900, ed. Arthur Quiller-Couch (1919).

¹⁰ In William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet (1597).

¹¹ Berowne was one of the lords attending the King of France in William Shakespeare, Love’s Labour’s Lost (1598).

¹² Mercutio, in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, was the lively friend of Romeo who was killed in a brawl by Juliet’s cousin.

¹³ Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers (1836–7).

¹⁴ i.e., ‘deuced’.

¹⁵ Humpty Dumpty in Carroll, Through the Looking Glass, ch. 6.

¹⁶ Latin for ‘Jupiter’.

¹⁷ Aeneas’ mother was Venus, daughter of Jupiter. After the fall of Troy, he led a band of Trojan refugees to Italy and became the founder of Roman culture.

¹⁸ Brut or Brutus, the legendary founder of Britain, great-grandson of Aeneas. An account of the founding of Britain is found in Geoffrey of Monmouth (d. 1155), Historia Regum Britanniae (Paris, 1508); translated as Histories of the Kings of Britain by Sebastian Evans (London: Dent, Temple Classics, 1904).

¹⁹ See the biographies of Lewis’s doctor, Robert Emlyn Havard, in CL II, p. 182n and CG. Dr Havard was married to the former Grace Mary Middleton, who died in 1950.

²⁰ Cerdic (d. 534) was founder of the Saxon kingdom of Wessex.

²¹ i.e., Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.

²² William Wordsworth, ‘England, 1802’, IV, 13–14: ‘In everything we are sprung/Of Earth’s first blood, have titles manifold.’

²³ John Milton, ‘At a Solemn Music’ (1645), 1: ‘Blest pair of Sirens, pledges of Heaven’s joy.’

²⁴ The new headmaster of Malvern College was Donald Lindsay (1910–2003), who held the post until 1971.

²⁵ ‘Bound by eternal love.’ CF. Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, Book I, Prologue, 34: ‘aeterno devictus vulnere amorisí’: ‘Conquered by the eternal wound of love.’

²⁶ Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813).

²⁷ Charles Lamb, Letters, to which are added those of his sister, Mary Lamb, ed. E. V. Lucas, 3 vols. (Dent, 1935).

²⁸ Dom Bede Griffiths, ‘The Incarnation and the East’, The Commonweal, LIX (25 December 1953), pp. 300–1: ‘Christ has to become incarnate in the East, not as a Western teacher come to destroy what they have learned from tradition, but as He came to the Jews, as the fulfilment of all their hopes and desires. Doubtless this will present the same test for the East as it presented to the Jews. There will be the temptation to cling to the old forms and refuse to allow them to grow into the new life which Christ brings. But there must be nothing done on our part, as far as we are able, to alienate Christ from them. We have to remember that Christ belongs neither to the West nor to the East…Our religion…transcends the division of East and West, and offers the one ground on which the two can be united.’

²⁹ ‘The Pope and Religious Tolerance’, ibid., p. 299: ‘Pope Pius XII recently enunciated two principles…Speaking before an audience from the fifth national convention of the Union of Italian Catholic Jurists, the Holy Father dealt with the problems of religious liberty in the community of nations. The two principles he laid down are: “First, what does not correspond to truth and the moral norm objectively has no right either to existence, to propaganda, or to action. Second, nevertheless, in the interest of a higher and broader good, it is justifiable not to impede this error by state laws and coercive measures.”’

³⁰ Wordsworth, ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’, 191: ‘In years that bring the philosophic mind.’

³¹ Plato, Laws, trans. Benjamin Jowett, Book VII: ‘Let us assume, then, as a first principle in relation both to the body and soul of very young creatures, that nursing and moving about by day and night is good for them all, and that the younger they are, the more they will need it; infants should live, if that were possible, as if they were always rocking at sea.’

³² See the letter to Gebbert of 16 July 1953.

³³ Matthew 4:3.

³⁴ ibid., 4:8–9.

³⁵ ibid., 4:6.

³⁶ Thomas T. Lynch, ‘Lord, On Thy Returning Day’ (1855), II, 5–6: ‘Hearts that hasty time has grieved/Are by Sabbath calm relieved.’

³⁷ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, ‘The Children’s Hour’ (1863), 1–4: ‘Between the dark and the daylight,/When the night is beginning to lower,/Comes a pause in the day’s occupations, that is knowing the children’s hour.’

³⁸ Arthur C. Clarke, Expedition to Earth (1954).

³⁹ Joy Gresham showed Clarke the letter she received from Lewis about Childhood’s End (22 December 1953), and on 17 January 1954 Clarke wrote to Lewis: ‘Joy Gresham showed me your letter…which naturally pleased me a great deal…Sidgwick and Jackson are publishing the book here in the Spring…I wonder if it would be asking too much of you if you would give us permission to quote some of the passages from your letter?’ (MS. Eng. lett. c. 220/4, fol. 21). When Childhood’s End was published in paperback in the UK by Pan Books of London in 1956 Lewis was quoted on the back: ‘There has been nothing like it for years…an author who understands there may be things that have a higher claim on humanity than its own survival.’

⁴⁰ If: Worlds of Science Fiction, I, no. 2 (May 1953).

⁴¹ Clarke’s story ‘Jupiter Five’ was reprinted in his Reach for Tomorrow (1956).

⁴² Mark Clifton.

⁴³ Kris Neville.

⁴⁴ Richard E. Stockham.

⁴⁵ In The Horse and His Boy, ch. 7.

⁴⁶ ibid., ch. 6.

⁴⁷ ibid., ch. 13.

⁴⁸ ibid., ch. 8.

⁴⁹ ibid., ch. 11.

⁵⁰ ibid., frontispiece.

⁵¹ ibid., ch. 4.

⁵² Affection or Storge is one of the loves dealt with in Lewis’s The Four Loves (1960).

⁵³ Agape or Charity is also treated in The Four Loves.

⁵⁴ It appears that Lord David Cecil (1902–86), a member of the Inklings, made this comment about Sir Walter Scott to Lewis in private. Cecil is the author of Sir Walter Scott (1933). See the biography of Cecil in CL II, p. 182n.

⁵⁵ Arthur Pendennis is the main character in William Makepeace Thackeray’s The History of Pendennis (1848–50); Lady Castlewood is a character in Thackeray’s The History of Henry Esmond (1852). Pharisiennes would be female Pharisees.

⁵⁶ See the letter to the Kilmer children below.

⁵⁷ These eight children, all brothers and sisters, lived with their parents in Washington, DC. They were friends of Mary Willis Shelburne whom they knew as ‘Aunt Mary Willis’.

⁵⁸ The Hrossa are one of the species of beings in Out of the Silent Planet.

⁵⁹ Palmer was giving a talk to the Oxford University Poetry Society on 2 March 1954.

⁶⁰ Anthony Thwaite (1930–), poet, was an undergraduate at Christ Church, and President of the Oxford University Poetry Society. After taking his degree he was a visiting lecturer in English Literature at Tokyo University, a BBC radio producer, and co-editor of Encounter, 1975–85. In 1990 he was awarded the OBE for his services to poetry. His works include Poetry Today 1960–1973 (London: Longman, 1985) and Selected Poems 1956–1996 (London: Enitharmon Press, 1997).

⁶¹ Lewis doubtless had in mind Cecil Day-Lewis, translator of the Aeneid (1952) and Edward Fairchild Watling, who translated Antigone (1954).

⁶² Lewis had arranged for Joy Gresham to lunch with him and Pitter at the Eastgate Hotel. Pitter said in a note to this postcard: ‘It was at this luncheon that I met Mrs. Gresham for the first and last time’ (Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. lett. c. 220/3, fol. 123).

⁶³ Lewis was replying to Sayers’ letter of 21 December 1953. See Dorothy L. Sayers, Letters, vol. IV, 1951–1957: In the Midst of Life,, ed. Barbara Reynolds (2000), pp. 116–18.

⁶⁴ Bedford and Cavor are the first men to travel to the Moon in H. G. Wells’s The First Men in the Moon.

⁶⁵ i.e., the hero of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719).

⁶⁶ The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, founded in 1949, has published many important stories.

⁶⁷ William Shakespeare, As You Like It (1623), I, ii, 16–17: ‘tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,/Sermons in stones, and good in every thing.’

⁶⁸ See the letter to Van Deusen of 28 November 1953.

⁶⁹ 1 Kings 18:36–8.

⁷⁰ Luke 11:1.

⁷¹ Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, Essays (1580–1595), XVII: ‘That to Study Philosophy is to Learn to Die’.

⁷² Genesis 2:24.

⁷³ Paul Piehler (1929–) was born on 26 June 1929, the son of H. A. Piehler. He was educated at King William’s College, Isle of Man, and Magdalen College, Oxford, where he read English with Lewis. Taking his BA in 1953, he taught English at Helsinki University, 1952–4, at Columbia University, New York City, 1955–60, and at Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, 1960–1. Piehler was Assistant Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, 1961–8, and Associate Professor of English at McGill University, Montreal, 1968. Following his retirement in 1993 he founded the Atlantis Project, which encourages university faculties to participate in a project using the tutorial system that has worked so well at Oxford and Cambridge. He is the author of The Visionary Landscape: A Study in Medieval Allegory (1971), and ‘Milton’s Iconoclasm’ in Evolution of Consciousness: Studies in Polarity, ed. Shirley Sugerman (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1976).

⁷⁴ Little Emily is a character in Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (1849–50); Little Nell and the Marchioness are characters in Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop (1841).

⁷⁵ ‘good-heartedness’.

⁷⁶ ‘other things being equal’.

⁷⁷ In a letter Newman later described the statue of Reepicheep as ‘a rather primitive effort stitched out of felt’ (Wade Center).

⁷⁸ Herbert, The Temple, ‘Conscience’, 1.

⁷⁹ Katharine Farrer, The Cretan Counterfeit (London: Collins, 1954).

⁸⁰ Lewis devoted an essay to this idea. ‘Prudery and Philology’ was first published in The Spectator, CXCIV (21 January 1955), pp. 63–4, and is reprinted in Compelling Reason, ed. Walter Hooper (London: Fount, 1998) and EC.

⁸¹ See the letter to Katharine Farrer of 9 February 1954.

⁸² Psalm 136:1–9: ‘O give thanks unto the Lord, for he is gracious: and his mercy endureth for ever…The moon and the stars to govern the night: for his mercy endureth for ever.’

⁸³ In Euripides’s Hippolytus (429 BC), Aphrodite, Goddess of Love, is angry with Hippolytus, son of Theseus, for preferring Artemis, Goddess of Chastity, above her. She makes Theseus’ young wife Phaedra fall in love with Hippolytus; but when he scorns her she hangs herself, first having written a letter denouncing him as a seducer. Hippolytus is banished by his father, and dies when he is thrown from his chariot. Theseus learns the truth about Phaedra too late.

⁸⁴ i.e. a detective novel.

⁸⁵ O. T. Bryant was writing from Fillmore, California.

⁸⁶ In his letter of 19 January 1954 Bryant mentioned having read Lewis’s essay, ‘The Return of Christ: Let’s Face the Difficulties’. This was a reprint of ‘Christian Hope–Its Meaning for Today’, Religion in Life, 21 (Winter 1951–2), pp. 20–32 (see note 155 to the letter to Kathryn Stillwell of 24 October 1957), itself reprinted as ‘The World’s Last Night’ in The World’s Last Night and Other Essays (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1960). ‘While agreeing with you,’ he said, ‘I would like to qualify one or two points. Wiser men than myself have pointed out that when Christ said, “this generation shall not pass away till all these things be done” [Matthew 24:34; Mark 13:30; Luke 21:32] He was not referring to the day in which He was living, but to the End-time when these events should transpire…With regard to our Lord’s human ignorance of the time of His Return–is there not such a thing as a man accepting ignorance for the sake of one whom he dearly loved? I have heard of a case where a fellow refused to be entrusted with a secret because his wife was to be “out of it”. A man has to be greatly in love to take a stand like that. But can we exaggerate the devotion of Christ to His Bride, His Church?’

⁸⁷ Matthew 7:23.

⁸⁸ I Corinthians 13:12: ‘Then shall I know even as also I am known.’

⁸⁹ John Keats, Letters, ed. Maurice Buxton Forman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952), Letter 64 to J. H. Reynolds of 3 May 1818, p. 141: ‘axioms in philosophy are not axioms until they are proved upon our pulses’.

⁹⁰ Luke 7:31–5.

⁹¹ In Farrer’s The Cretan Counterfeit, p. 96. See Lewis’s letter to Farrer of 3 February 1954.

⁹² The ‘pathetic fallacy’ is a phrase coined by John Ruskin in Modern Painters (1856), Vol. III, Pt. 4, to mean the tendency of writers and artists to ascribe human emotions and sympathies to Nature.

⁹³ T. S. Eliot, Prufrock and Other Observations (1917), ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, 1–2: ‘Let us go then, you and I,/When the evening is spread out against the sky/Like a patient etherised upon a table.’

⁹⁴ ‘classic example’.

⁹⁵ Luke 13:16.

⁹⁶ Mark 10:23: ‘And Jesus looked round about, and saith unto his disciples, How hardly shall they that have riches enter into the kingdom of God!’

⁹⁷ It is not known if Alma Mater was ever published.

⁹⁸ Sir Arthur Grimble, A Pattern of Islands (1952).

⁹⁹ e.g., 1 John 4:9.

¹⁰⁰ These were to be the subject of The Four Loves.

¹⁰¹ Aristotle, De Anima (On the Soul), II, 413a23.

¹⁰² 1 Corinthians 15:35–50.

¹⁰³ Palmer had been invited to dinner by the Oxford University Poetry Society before his talk on 2 March.

¹⁰⁴ F. Anstey, In Brief Authority (1915).

¹⁰⁵ F. Anstey, Vice Versa: A Lesson to Fathers (1882). See the reference to this in CL II, p. 342n.

¹⁰⁶ Green’s The Buzzard, a novel for children, was in the end never published.

¹⁰⁷ Polly and Digory was the original title of the Narnian story eventually published as The Magician’s Nephew.

¹⁰⁸ See the letter to Herbert Palmer of 8 November 1945 (CL II, p. 678).

¹⁰⁹ i.e., Lewis’s interplanetary trilogy.

¹¹⁰ Charles Dickens, Bleak House (1852–3), ch. 9: ‘Lady Dedlock is the most accomplished lady in the world, to whom I would do any homage that a plain gentleman, and no baronet with a head seven hundred years thick, may.’

¹¹¹ Polarity is a philosophical concept developed by Owen Barfield. It is mentioned in a number of his books, but the most complete expression is found in Speaker’s Meaning (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1967), ch. 1. Most readers will find it easier to understand the definition given by Barfield’s friend, G. B. Tennyson, who in A Barfield Reader, ed. G. B. Tennyson (Hanover, New Hampshire: Wesleyan University Press, 1999), defined polarity as ‘The interdependent and mutually fructifying forces of objective being and consciousness. The two can be distinguished in thought but not divided one from the other. They are necessary sides of the same coin. The one force is poetic and expansive, the other prosaic and specifying; one is the world of objects, the other the world of the self. They “exist by virtue of each other as well as at each other’s expense.” On their interaction depends the evolution of consciousness’ (p. xxxiii).

¹¹² ’Me Meum’ is one of Sayers’ unpublished poems.

¹¹³ A method of disproving a proposition by showing the absurdity of its conclusion. It is referred to as proof by contradiction.

¹¹⁴ i.e., Michael Williams, the son of Charles Williams.

¹¹⁵ Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night (1935), one of the Lord Peter Wimsey detective novels.

¹¹⁶ This poem was published in a slightly revised form as ‘Evolutionary Hymn’ in The Cambridge Review, LXXIX (30 November 1957), p. 227, and it was revised again before it was published in Poems and CP.

¹¹⁷ Marie Stopes (1880–1958) was a pioneer birth control campaigner and the author of Married Love (1918).

¹¹⁸ This poem was published in Don W. King, C. S. Lewis, Poet (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2001), p. 296.

¹¹⁹ Lewis changed the first line of his poem to read: ‘D. H. Lawrence, Sigmund Freud’. Sayers probably convinced him to make this change because Marie Stopes was still alive.

¹²⁰ Charles Williams’s son, Michael, who was working in the London bookshop, Bumpus of Oxford Street.

¹²¹ Warnie’s The Splendid Century.

¹²² Romans 7:5.

¹²³ Matthew 5:28: ‘Whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.’

¹²⁴ Helmut Kuhn (1899–1991), professor of philosophy, was born in Lüben, Silesia, Germany, on 22 March 1899. He studied philosophy at the University of Breslau, taking a PhD. in 1930. His experience of the Third Reich caused him to convert to Roman Catholicism, and in 1937 he immigrated to the United States after being denounced as anti-Nazi. He taught philosophy at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 1938–47, but returned to Germany in 1948 as Professor of Philosophy at the University of Erlangen. He was Professor of Philosophy in the University of Munich, 1953–67. In 1953 he and Hans-Georg Godamer founded the influential Philosophische Rundschau (Philosophical Review). He is the author of Encounter with Nothingness: An Essay on Existentialism (1949), mentioned in the letters to Dorothy L. Sayers of 9 November and 21 November 1949 (CL II, pp. 995, 999).

¹²⁵ Kuhn was translating The Great Divorce into German.

¹²⁶ i.e. Blamires’s The Devil’s Hunting-grounds. The story is about a sojourn in Purgatory.

¹²⁷ There are two great cities in Blamires’s Purgatory, Helicon for Gnostics and Fordshaw for ‘Backward Believers’.

¹²⁸ ‘Juvenal, Satires, I, 85–6: Quicquid agunt Homines, votum timor ira voluptas/gaudia discursus: ‘All the doings of mankind, their wishes, fears, anger, pleasures, joys, and varied pursuits.

¹²⁹ Francis Bacon, Essays or Counsels, Civil and Moral (1625), XI, ‘Of Great Place’: ‘Even reproofs from authority ought to be grave, and not taunting.’

¹³⁰ Lewis appears to have failed to get down the complete sentence he had in mind.

¹³¹ The Magician’s Nephew is dedicated ‘To The Kilmer Family’.

¹³² David and Douglas Gresham.

¹³³ On 2 March 1954 the Oxford University Poetry Society invited Palmer to take part in an experimental ‘Brains Trust’ programme. The panel included Kingsley Amis, G. S. Fraser, Herbert Palmer and James Kirkup, and those in the audience were invited to ask questions. Lewis was persuaded to act as chairman. A brief account is found in Alan Denson, Herbert Palmer (1880–1961): A Biographical Survey and Calendar of Recordings, foreword by Phoebe Hesketh (New Deer, Aberdeenshire: Oliver Alden, 1994). Anthony Thwaite wrote of the occasion (p. 196): ‘It was an extremely entertaining, funny, slightly chaotic occasion, with Palmer fulminating against “the moderns”, Kirkup being extremely “camp”…and Amis wonderfully witty: Lewis benignly chairing.’
Kingsley Amis (1922–95), writer, went up to St John’s College, Oxford, in 1941 to read English. At Oxford he became a Communist, his ambitions purely poetical. His education was interrupted by the Second World War and he joined the Royal Signals in 1943, returning to Oxford in 1945. He was awarded a First in 1947. He published volumes of poetry, Bright November (1947) and A Frame of Mind (1953), but he achieved popular success with his first novel, Lucky Jim (1954), which caused him to be hailed as an ‘angry young man’. His later work is known for its satiric comedy. He is the father of the novelist, Martin Amis. See the conversation about science fiction between Lewis, Amis and Brian Aldiss, recorded as ‘Unreal Estates’, in Of This and Other Worlds and EC.
George Sutherland Fraser (1915–80), Scottish poet and literary critic, was a lecturer at the University of Leicester, 1959–79. His first major critical work was The Modern Writer and his World (1953).
James Kirkup (1918–) poet, novelist and playwright, took his degree from Durham University. He taught at Leeds University, 1950–2, after which he became Professor of English at Kyoto University, Japan. His works include The Poet and His Lice (1952), The Dustbin (1954) and Sorrows, Passions and Alarms: An Autobiography of Childhood (1959). In 1977 his poem about a Roman centurion’s love for Christ, ‘The love that dares to speak its name’, was the subject of a blasphemy action when it was published in Gay News.

¹³⁴ Bodle said of this letter: ‘I had spoken of problems in my relationship with my father’ (Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. lett. c. 220/4, fol. 249).

¹³⁵ John 9:4: ‘I must work the works of him that sent me, while it is day: the night cometh, when no man can work.’

¹³⁶ These stories by Hans Christian Andersen (1805–75) appear in numerous collections of his work.

¹³⁷ Søren Aabye Kierkegaard (1813–55), Danish philosopher.

¹³⁸ Matthew 18:12–14; Luke 15:3–7.

¹³⁹ William Law (1686–1761), author of A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life (1728).

¹⁴⁰ These Found the Way: Thirteen Converts to Protestant Christianity, ed. David Wesley Soper (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1951).

¹⁴¹ See the letter to George and Moira Sayer of 8 January 1954.

¹⁴² Barry Shipman (1912–94) was the author of a number of film scripts, including that of Commando Cody: Sky Marshal of the Universe (1953).

¹⁴³ I. O. Evans, Olympic Runner: A Story of the Great Days of Ancient Greece (1955).

¹⁴⁴ The Magnificat is the title given to the Canticle of Mary. It is the opening word of the Vulgate text of Luke 1:46–55: ‘Magnificat anima mea, Dominum’, etc.

¹⁴⁵ James 1:20.

¹⁴⁶ i.e., Fr Walter Adams SSJE.

¹⁴⁷ i.e. modern poets who utter incomprehensible words and phrases or ‘abracadabras’.

¹⁴⁸ In ‘De Descriptione Temporum’, Lewis said that in a collection of essays on T. S. Eliot’s ‘A Cooking Egg’ ‘we find seven adults (two of them Cambridge men) whose lives have been specially devoted to the study of poetry discussing a very short poem which has been before the world for thirty-odd years; and there is not the slightest agreement among them as to what, in any sense of the word, it means’ (SLE, p. 9).

¹⁴⁹ Lord Dunsany (Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett), The Charwoman’s Shadow (1926).

¹⁵⁰ Martin Lings had been Lewis’s pupil. He was a lecturer in English at Cairo University, 1940–51, and in 1952 he returned to England and took a degree in Arabic from the University of London. See Martin Lings in the Biographical Appendix to CL II, pp. 1052–3.

¹⁵¹ Bodleian Library.

¹⁵² George Du Maurier, Peter Ibbetson (1891).

¹⁵³ Du Maurier used the phrase ‘Parva sed Apta’ in the Introduction to Part I of Peter Ibbetson.

¹⁵⁴ little girl’ ‘little house’ ‘little mouse’.

¹⁵⁵ Whipsnade Zoo, now Whipsnade Wild Animal Park, in Dunstable, Bedfordshire. On Lewis’s previous, memorable visit to Whipsnade see SBJ, ch. 15, and CL I, p. 972.

¹⁵⁶ Fr Martin Cyril D’Arcy SJ (1888–1976) was a distinguished Jesuit scholar. After reading Classics at Campion Hall, Oxford, 1912–14, he taught at Stonyhurst College. He returned to Oxford in 1927 to teach philosophy at Campion Hall and the University. During this period he became the foremost apologist for Roman Catholicism and received into the Church a number of distinguished converts, including Evelyn Waugh. In 1933 he became Master of Campion Hall. It was during his years in Oxford that Lewis came to know him, partly through their joint membership of the Dante Society. D’Arcy left Oxford in 1945 to become Provincial of the English Jesuit Province. His many books include The Nature of Belief (1931) and The Mind and Heart of Love (1945). During his visits to the United States he lectured at Georgetown, Fordham, Boston College, and Notre Dame.

¹⁵⁷ Esther Smith of Newry, Co. Down, was Greeves’s housekeeper.

¹⁵⁸ John Gilbert Lockhart (1891–1960), author and publisher, was educated at Marlborough College and Trinity College, Oxford. He served in the First World War with the Wiltshire Regiment, 1914–18. Lockhart worked with the publishers Philip Allan & Co, Ltd., 1922–39. He joined Geoffrey Bles Ltd in 1939, working principally on the religious side of the list, and remained with Bles until his death in 1960. Lockhart was descended collaterally from John Gibson Lockhart (1794–1854), son-in-law of Sir Walter Scott. His best-known work is a biography of the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Cosmo Gordon Lang (1949).

¹⁵⁹ See the biography of Sir William and Lady Collins in CG.

¹⁶⁰ Bodleian Library, Dep. c. 771, fol. 43.

¹⁶¹ See Jocelyn Gibb in the Biographical Appendix.

¹⁶² Joan Lancaster was a little girl who when she first wrote to Lewis was staying with her family at 5929 Bayshore Road, Sarasota, Florida.

¹⁶³ See Dr Margaret ‘Peggy’ Pollard, Cornish poet and linguist, in the Biographical Appendix.

¹⁶⁴ See The Problem of Pain, ch. 9, p. 106: ‘So far as we know beasts are incapable either of sin or virtue.’

¹⁶⁵ St Francis of Assisi (1181–1226) is the patron saint of animals.

¹⁶⁶ On 15 May 1954 Queen Elizabeth II was returning from a six-month tour of the Commonwealth, and for the occasion of her arrival back in England her new Master of Music, Sir Arthur Bliss, wrote a cantata called ‘A Song of Welcome’. Cecil Day-Lewis, Oxford’s Professor of Poetry, was expected, despite his leftish stance, to provide words for the cantata. For details of ‘A Song of Welcome’ see ‘Master of the Queen’s Music’, The Times (17 May 1954), p. 4.

¹⁶⁷ Nathan Comfort Starr, King Arthur Today: The Arthurian Legend in English and American Literature, 1901–1953 (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1954).

¹⁶⁸ Phoebe Hesketh, Out of the Dark: New Poems (London: Heinemann, 1954).

¹⁶⁹ ibid., p. 80, ‘Vision’, 1.

¹⁷⁰ ibid., 2.

¹⁷¹ ibid., 7.

¹⁷² ibid., p. 4, ‘The Old Bell-Ringer’, 1.

¹⁷³ ibid., 4.

¹⁷⁴ ibid., p. 10, ‘The Lonely Heart’, 7.

¹⁷⁵ ibid., p. 21, ‘Four Aspects of Love’, I, 4.

¹⁷⁶ ibid., p. 28, ‘Snow’, 8.

¹⁷⁷ ibid., p. 33, ‘The Stoat’, 20.

¹⁷⁸ ibid., p. 36, ‘Wild Deer’, 9.

¹⁷⁹ ibid., p. 60, ‘The Quenchless Flame’, 55.

¹⁸⁰ ibid., p. 59, 18.

¹⁸¹ ibid., p. 60, 65.

¹⁸² ibid., 65–7: ‘Spirit must cease–renunciation sore/Aimed at the heart of him who selfless bore/Our sorrows with a biting crown of thorns.’

¹⁸³ ibid., p. 61, 85.

¹⁸⁴ William Wordsworth, Laodamia (1815).

¹⁸⁵ Hesketh, Out of the Dark, ‘The Old Bell-Ringer’, p. 4.

¹⁸⁶ ibid., pp. 21–2, ‘Four Aspects of Love’.

¹⁸⁷ ibid., pp. 67–9, ‘Resurrection’, 7–9: ‘Then Judas went forth darkly from the house;/Not all the sad prophetic words had served/To swerve him from a traitor’s cold intent.’

¹⁸⁸ ibid., pp. 67–8, 22–30: ‘The Spirit wills/And gets its strength dragged down by weakness, faints/In feather-bed indulgence./He woke the three and turned away again/And prayed alone, grasping the quickened thorn–/Prophetic point of truth that starred His brain/With undesired accepted sacrifice:/O Father, if this cup pass not away/Except I drink it, Thy will be done!’ Cf. Matthew 26:42.

¹⁸⁹ ibid., p. 23, ‘The Breath of all the World’, 1–4: ‘This is the war of Head against the Heart–/And Age, the surest ally, fights for Head/With knowledge and experience outspread/To overwhelm the foe before the start.’

¹⁹⁰ Lord David Cecil had fallen and hurt himself.

¹⁹¹ John Milton, Samson Agonistes (1671), 717.

¹⁹² Pitter said of this reference to Herbert Palmer: ‘Phoebe Hesketh: Palmer would have spoken of her poetry, which he worked hard to promote. She has a real gift, but started late, and Palmer tried to force the pace so that she could catch up. His rage with writers, critics, editors and publishers was hard to bear; he had no mercy on his hearers. More than once I have sat and watched the fire go out while he raved…But he had the gift…I shall always maintain that he was a shrewd and just critic of minor work: great reputations maddened him & distorted his view, perhaps owing to the neglect (as he felt) of his own work’ (Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. lett. c. 220/3, fol. 125).

¹⁹³ Edgar Lee Masters (1868–1950), Spoon River Anthology (1915).

¹⁹⁴ Robinson Jeffers (1887–1962), American poet, author of Tamar and Other Poems (1924).

¹⁹⁵ ‘A crook-necked herd’.

¹⁹⁶ Robert Frost (1874–1963), whose works include North of Boston (1914) and Mountain Interval (1916).

¹⁹⁷ i.e., at the Socratic Club. Lewis was referring to logical positivism, a trend in philosophy antithetical towards Christianity. Logical positivism appealed to the meaning of words and the grammatical structures that constitute them. If the sentences under examination could not pass their verifiability test, they labelled such utterances meaningless.
One of the members of the Socratic Club at this time was Basil Mitchell, then Tutor in Philosophy at Keble College. In an essay, ‘Modern Philosophy and Theology’, in The Socratic, no. 5 (1952), he explained what Lewis meant by the ‘Logical Positivist menace’: ‘The dominant tendency in modern philosophy…may be roughly called Empiricism…The empirical challenge to religious belief has had two…main phases–The first was directed principally against Natural or Rational Theology, the attempt to demonstrate the existence of God by means of the traditional arguments…All this meant was that the Christian could not claim to prove his Faith…But the next phase of Empiricism challenged even this…It first became central and explicit in the thought of the Logical Positivists. They declared that it was not the function of philosophy to distinguish true assertions from false ones, but to discriminate between the meaningful and the meaningless–or what, for them, amounted to the same thing, between science and metaphysics…It will be clear at once, that on such a criterion all statements about a transcendent God must be judged meaningless…what was now being assailed was not the arguments by which these beliefs were supported, but their claim to significance’ (pp. 3–5).

¹⁹⁸ ‘How long, O Lord?’ Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici (1642), First Part, V, xlvi: ‘That general opinion that the World grows near its end, hath possessed all ages past as nearly as ours. I am afraid that the Souls that now depart, cannot escape that lingering expostulation of the Saints under the Altar, Quousque, Domine? How long, O Lord? and groan in the expectation of that great Jubilee.’ The Vulgate at Psalm 12 (13): 1 and Revelation 6:10 has Usquequo Domine? with the same meaning.

¹⁹⁹ Griffiths’ autobiography, The Golden String (1954). See Dom Bede Griffiths in the Biographical Appendix to CL II, pp. 1043–9.

²⁰⁰ i.e., Fr Ronald Head.

²⁰¹ Matthew 18:21–2.

²⁰² 1 Peter 5:7.

²⁰³ Skinner was trying to find a publisher for the second part of his epic poem.

²⁰⁴ Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869–1935), whose works include an Arthurian trilogy, Merlin (1917), Lancelot (1920), Tristram (1927).

²⁰⁵ Robert Penn Warren (1905–89). See the letter to Warren of 8 May 1954.

²⁰⁶ ‘heaven forbid’, lit. ‘may the omen be absent’.

²⁰⁷ He was probably referring to English Literature in the Sixteenth Century.

²⁰⁸ The Roman goddess of childbirth.

²⁰⁹ Because Lewis later experienced what Charles Williams called the ‘Way of Exchange or Substitution’ it will be useful to have it defined. Williams wrote about it in He Came Down from Heaven but the best summary comes in Arthurian Torso, ‘Williams and the Arthuriad’, p. 123: ‘The doctrine, which he called that of Exchange or Substitution, may be summed up in three propositions. (1) The Atonement was a Substitution, just as Anselm said. But that Substitution, far from being a mere legal fiction irrelevant to the normal workings of the universe, was simply the supreme instance of a universal law. “He saved others, himself he cannot save” [Matthew 27:42] is a definition of the Kingdom. All salvation, everywhere and at all times, in great things or in little, is vicarious…(2) We can and should “bear one another’s burdens” [Galatians 6:2] in a sense much more nearly literal than is usually dreamed of. Any two souls can…make an agreement to do so: the one can offer to take another’s shame or anxiety or grief and the burden will actually be transferred…(3) Such “exchanges”, however, are not only made by mutual compact. We can be their beneficiaries without our own knowledge or consent, as when our god-parents become our substitutes at the font. Such is the coinherence of all souls that they are not even limited by Time.’ See the letter to Sheldon Vanauken of 27 November 1957.

²¹⁰ Luke 15:4: ‘What man of you, having an hundred sheep, if he lose one of them, doth not leave the ninety and nine in the wilderness, and go after that which is lost, until he find it?’

²¹¹ Major British Writers, ed. G. B. Harrison, vol. I (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1954). Lewis’s preface to Spenser is reprinted as ‘Edmund Spenser, 1552–99’ in Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature, ed. Walter Hooper (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966).

²¹² Robert Penn Warren (1905–89), American poet, was born in Guthrie, Kentucky and took a BA from Vanderbilt University in 1924. He studied at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, returning to the United States in 1930. He taught at Vanderbilt, Louisiana State, the University of Minnesota, and Yale University. While Warren was regarded as one of the best poets of his generation, he was better known as a novelist. His All the King’s Men (1946) won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1947. His southern background was later exchanged for a life in New England. His poems include Sacred Poems 1923–43 (1944), Promises: Poems, 1954–1956 (1957) and Now and Then: Poems, 1976–1978 (1979). Among his critical works are Understanding Poetry (1938). He was appointed the first US Poet Laureate in 1985.

²¹³ Robert Penn Warren, Brother to Dragons: A Tale in Verse and Voices (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1953).

²¹⁴ Robert Henryson, The Moral Fabillis of Esope (1570).

²¹⁵ i.e., Milton, Paradise Lost, Books I and II.

²¹⁶ Shakespeare, Hamlet, III, i, 56.

²¹⁷ Cambridge University Record, LXXXIV, no. 19 (20 January 1954), p. 663.

²¹⁸ ibid., no. 30 (31 March 1954), p. 986.

²¹⁹ See the biography of Henry Stanley Bennett in CL II, p. 435 n.

²²⁰ Dom David Knowles (1896–1974), Benedictine monk and monastic historian, was Regius Professor of Modern History, Cambridge University, 1954–63. See his biography in the Oxford DNB.

²²¹ See the biography of Frank Percy Wilson in CL II, p. 167 n.

²²² See Basil Willey in the Biographical Appendix.

²²³ See E. M. W. Tillyard in the Biographical Appendix to CL II, pp. 1073–4.

²²⁴ Magdalene College Archives, Group F, Private Papers, F/CSL.

²²⁵ See Sir Henry Willink in the Biographical Appendix.

²²⁶ Fred Paxford, his gardener and handyman.

²²⁷ This was Geoffrey Victor Smithers (1909–2000), who came to Oxford in 1930 as a Rhodes Scholar from Natal and took a First in English from Hertford College, Oxford. He was assistant lecturer in English at King’s College, London, 1936, and a lecturer in English language at University College, London, 1938–54. In 1954 he became Reader in Medieval English at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Merton College. Smithers was Professor of English at the University of Durham, 1960–74. His publications include Kyng Alisaunder, Vol. I (1952), Vol. II (1957), (with J. A. W. Bennett and Norman Davis) Early English Verse and Prose (1966), and Havelok (1987).

²²⁸ In his ‘Notes on the Letters’ Vanauken, now teaching at Lynchburg College, said of this letter: ‘V & Jean counselling some Xtian homos; V asked CSL for advice. CSL speaks of this letter as “an interim report” and he did send a further letter, which was lent to a homo & lost’ (Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. lett. c. 220/2, fol. 152 b).

²²⁹ John 9:1–3: ‘And as Jesus passed by, he saw a man which was blind from his birth. And his disciples asked him, saying, Master, who did sin, this man, or his parents, that he was born blind? Jesus answered, Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents: but that the works of God should be made manifest in him.’

²³⁰ William Wordsworth, ‘Character of the Happy Warrior’ (1807), 1–14: ‘Who is the happy Warrior?…/It is the generous Spirit…/Who, doomed to go in company with Pain,/And Fear, and Bloodshed, miserable train!/Turns his necessity to glorious gain.’

²³¹ The ‘crisis’ probably turned on appointments within the English faculty; there was no crisis about Lewis’s replacement at Magdalen College, Oxford. He was succeeded by his fellow Inkling, Jack Arthur Walter Bennett (1911–81), a distinguished medievalist, who was born in New Zealand, and matriculated at Merton College, Oxford, in 1933. Bennett took a First in English in 1935 and received his D.Phil. in 1938. During the Second World War he spent five years in the British Information Services, and in 1945 he was elected to a Fellowship at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he took over the teaching of Anglo-Saxon from Lewis. He was given the pupils Lewis would have had after the latter left to go to Cambridge. In 1964 Bennett succeeded Lewis as Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English at Cambridge. He was the editor of Medium Aevum, 1956–80.

²³² Luke 1:43: ‘And whence is this to me?’

²³³ Dame Helen Louise Gardner (1908–1986), literary scholar and university teacher, was educated at North London Collegiate School for Girls and St Hilda’s College, Oxford, where in 1929 she took a First in English Language and Literature. She taught at the University of Birmingham, 1931–41. In 1941 she returned to St Hilda’s to become a tutor (1941–54), and later Fellow (1942–66). In 1954 she was made Reader in Renaissance Studies and after one setback was elected in 1966 Merton Professor of English Language and Literature, with a Fellowship at Lady Margaret Hall. She is chiefly associated with the poets John Donne and T. S. Eliot. Her masterly edition of John Donne’s Divine Poems (1952) was followed by other editions of Donne, while she paid tribute to Eliot’s genius in The Art of T. S. Eliot (1949). Gardner was a devout Anglican in the tradition of the seventeenth-century divines. See her obituary of Lewis, ‘Clive Staples Lewis 1898–1963’, The Proceedings of the British Academy, LI (1965), pp. 417–28.

²³⁴ Sir Henry stated in his letter of 14 May how much he enjoyed Lewis’s writings on Charles Williams.

²³⁵ Magdalene College Archives, Group F, Private Papers, F/CSL.

²³⁶ ibid.

²³⁷ Psalm 17:13.

²³⁸ Psalm 81:10.

²³⁹ 1 John 2:15.

²⁴⁰ The expression comes from the title of Rudyard Kipling’s story, ‘The Uncovenanted Mercies’, in Limits and Renewals (1932).

²⁴¹ Dante Alighieri, Paradiso, XX, 67–72. Rhipeus was a Trojan hero slain during the sack of Troy (see Virgil, Aeneid II, 339). Dante put the Emperor Trajan in Heaven (ibid., 44–5) because according to legend, Pope Gregory the Great through his prayers brought Trajan back from Hell and baptized him to salvation. On Lewis’s interest in the salvation of the virtuous infidels see CL II, p. 135 n.

²⁴² There is much about divine mercy in the novels of Graham Greene, particularly in Brighton Rock (1938), Part II, xi, where the priest at the end says ‘no-one can conceive the strangeness of the mercy of God’.

²⁴³ Mrs Pollard had probably mentioned what are called the ‘legendary saints’ of the Catholic Church. An example is St Ursula, a fourth-century virgin and martyr. She was extremely popular in the Middle Ages, but her cult was finally suppressed in the reform of 1969 because there is no evidence that she ever existed.

²⁴⁴ Lewis probably had in mind his notable contribution to this idea. In The Last Battle, ch. 15, Emeth the Calormene, who believes he has worshipped the false god, Tash, all his life, meets Aslan: “‘The Glorious One”, he said, “bent down his golden head and touched my forehead with his tongue and said, Son, thou art welcome. But I said, Alas, Lord, I am no son of thine but the servant of Tash. He answered, Child, all the service thou has done to Tash, I account as service done to me…If any man swear by Tash and keep his oath for the oath’s sake, it is by me that he has truly sworn, though he know it not, and it is I who reward him. And if any man do a cruelty in my name, then, though he says the name Aslan, it is Tash whom he serves and by Tash his deed is accepted.”’ See also the letter to Chad Walsh of 23 May 1960.

²⁴⁵ Matthew 2:14.

²⁴⁶ ibid., 21:1–9.

²⁴⁷ ‘Ad majorem Dei gloriam’: ‘For the greater glory of God’–the motto of the Society of Jesus.

²⁴⁸ Jane Austen, The Watsons (1871), Part I.

²⁴⁹ In Catholic theology, Limbo designates the place or condition of those who have died without the conditions necessary for entrance into Heaven, but also without the guilt necessary for condemnation to Hell. See CL II, p. 256 n.

²⁵⁰ In the United States fifth grade children would be about ten years old.

²⁵¹ Magdalene College Archives, Group F, Private Papers, F/CSL.

²⁵² Matthew Arnold, In Utrumque Paratus (1849): ‘prepared for either’. Also, Aeneid 2, 61. See note 95 on p. 29.

²⁵³ i.e., Mrs Hooker, who had pretended to be Lewis’s wife.

²⁵⁴ Helen Gardner, ‘Clive Staples Lewis 1898–1963’, The Proceedings of the British Academy, Vol. LI (1965), pp. 427–8.

²⁵⁵ Magdalene College Archives, Group F, Private Papers, F/CSL.

²⁵⁶ ibid.

²⁵⁷ Luke 1:43: ‘Et unde hoc mihi ut veniat mater Domini mei ad me?’ (Vulgate): ‘And whence is this to me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me?’

²⁵⁸ Richard Selig (1929–57) was born in New York City on 29 October 1929, the son of Ambrose Selig. He graduated from McKinley High School in Washington, DC, in 1952. He was a Rhodes Scholar at Magdalen College, Oxford, 1953–6, where Lewis was his tutor. After Lewis left for Cambridge in 1955, Selig’s tutor was another member of the Inklings, J. A. W. Bennett. While at Oxford he met Mary O’Hara, the Irish singer and harpist, and they were married on 24 July 1956, returning to the USA shortly afterwards. Selig took a job in New York with the Western Electric Company, although his ambition was to write poetry. In September 1957 he was admitted to hospital, where he was treated for Hodgkin’s disease. He died on 14 October 1957. See Selig’s Poems (Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1962) and The Unicorn (1983). The story of his marriage is told in O’Hara’s The Scent of the Roses (1980). A good study of his poetry is John Kirkpatrick, ‘A Lewis Pupil: Richard Selig, 1929–57’ in CSL: The Bulletin of the New York C. S. Lewis Society, Vol. 15, No. 12 (October 1984), pp. 1–7.

²⁵⁹ Richard Selig, The Fantasy Poets, No. 23 (Eynsham, Oxford: Oxford University Poetry Society, 1954).

²⁶⁰ ibid., p. 1, ‘The Island’.

²⁶¹ ibid., 10–11: ‘Its gnarled tendons snap like twigs and the mild-/mannered worms lunch on its rageless spleen.’

²⁶² ibid., p. 4, ‘Marriage Song’, 5–6.

²⁶³ ibid., ‘The Way Up’, IV, 1: ‘That each form be proper to its home.’

²⁶⁴ ibid., p. 5, ‘Song for a Tempest’, 2: ‘Be permanent as bone.’

²⁶⁵ ‘The Saga of King Olaf’ is one of the poems in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Tales of a Wayside Inn (1863).

²⁶⁶ Matthew Arnold, Sohrab and Rustum (1853).

²⁶⁷ Thomas Babington Macaulay, Lays of Ancient Rome (1842).

²⁶⁸ G. K. Chesterton, The Ballad of the White Horse (1911).

²⁶⁹ Lewis learned to write with a nib pen, dipped into an inkwell every four or five words. When he was an undergraduate at Oxford he began using fountain pens, but he gave them up after several years and resumed writing with a nib pen, a practice he carried on for the rest of his life. See CL I, p. x.

²⁷⁰ Their new baby sister.

²⁷¹ i.e., St Mary Magdalen.

²⁷² i.e., T. S. Eliot.

²⁷³ See the letter to Dorothy L. Sayers of 16 December 1953. The debate was held at St Anne’s Church, Soho, London, on 24 October 1954. A first-hand account by John Wren-Lewis, ‘The Chester-Lewis’, was published in The Chesterton Review, XVII, nos. 3, 4 (August, November 1991): ‘A leading humanist theoretician and literary critic named Kathleen Nott published a book called The Emperor’s Clothes (London: Heinemann, 1953) which was a swinging attack on the group of fashionable literati who urged a return to Christian orthodoxy as the only solid basis for real culture: she focused in particular on Eliot, Sayers, Lewis and Graham Greene. Dorothy Sayers felt that her case should be answered, and that it might even be answered collectively by some of its main “victims” at St Anne’s in public debate…[Nott’s] first response was that she did not enjoy platform debates, and felt that such an unevenly numbered encounter on the enemy’s turf was hardly fair. I eventually persuaded her to a conditional agreement, the condition being that Eliot should appear, since her book was mainly concerned with her disagreements and her substantial agreements with him on the nature of poetry…Just before the day, word came from Eliot that he was not well enough to appear, and Miss Nott accordingly pulled out too, but since it was too late to cancel the evening completely, her friend, G. S. Frazer, stood in and faced Sayers and Lewis before a packed and lively audience’ (p. 564).

²⁷⁴ Bodleian Library, Dep. c. 771, fol. 46.

²⁷⁵ Douglass wrote a memoir of her correspondence and meeting with Lewis, ‘An Enduring Friendship’, published in Remembering C. S. Lewis.

²⁷⁶ i.e., the request from Jane Douglass.

²⁷⁷ Bodleian Library, Dep. c. 771, fol. 50.

²⁷⁸ Sir Allen Lane (1902–70), publisher, joined the firm of John Lane The Bodley Head in 1919. He failed, however, to persuade the firm that cheap paperback reprints might be their salvation, and in 1935 he struck out on his own. In July 1935 he published the first ten Penguins at 6d. each. The public took these paperbacks to their heart, and they are one of the most successful paperback series in publishing history.

²⁷⁹ Bodleian Library, Dep. c. 771, fol. 52.

²⁸⁰ These were the alterations Lewis wanted to make in response to ‘A Reply to Mr C. S. Lewis’s Argument that “Naturalism” is Self-Refuting’, Elizabeth Anscombe’s paper on Miracles. See the letter to Stella Aldwinckle of 12 June 1950, n. 120, and that to Jocelyn Gibb of 11 July 1959.

²⁸¹ On 9 July 1954 Gibb wrote: ‘I have heard from Lane about their taking either THE GREAT DIVORCE or MIRACLES in Penguins. He is not very keen to take either of these but would do THE PROBLEM OF PAIN, which I did not suggest to him although I mentioned it in conversation as being the first book. What do you think about it? Sales are still better than with either of the other two and are fairly steady, although they have dropped more proportionately than in the case of THE SCREWTAPE LETTERS since increased production costs compelled us to raise the price to 7s. 6 d. In asking whether you would consider the question I think it right to say that undoubtedly it would help the other books, both past and future, if a new public could be gained through Penguins’ (Bodleian Library, Dep. c. 771, fol. 58).

²⁸² Joan wrote this letter from Chautauqua, New York, where her family lived.

²⁸³ Bodleian Library.

²⁸⁴ In That Hideous Strength.

²⁸⁵ i.e., the White Witch in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

²⁸⁶ The witch in Homer’s Odyssey.

²⁸⁷ Alcina is the witch in Matteomaria Boiardo (1441–94), Orlando Innamorato (1487), and in Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso. She was mistress of an enchanted garden and changed her lovers into beasts, stones or trees.

²⁸⁸ The Stone Table in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

²⁸⁹ Mr Sensible is a character in The Pilgrim’s Regress (1933), Bk. 5, ch. 4 who represents, it says in that chapter, ‘cultured worldliness’.

²⁹⁰ Philip Dormer Stanhope Chesterfield, Lord Chesterfield (1694–1773), who is chiefly remembered for his ‘Letters’ to his son Philip Stanhope (1732–68).

²⁹¹ Walter Pater (1839–94), whose Marius the Epicurean (1885) Lewis discussed in his letter to Arthur Greeves of 10 January 1932 (CL II, pp. 34–5).

²⁹² Matthew Arnold (1822–88), poet and critic. In his youth Arnold published many poems, including Poems, Second Series (1855) which contained many of which Lewis was very fond. In his later years Arnold turned increasingly to prose, and work such as Essays in Criticism (1865–88) established him as an influential literary critic. It was, however, as a critic that Lewis thought Arnold dangerous: in his essay ‘Christianity and Culture’, published in Theology (June 1940) and reprinted in Christian Reflections, Lewis blamed Arnold for the present ‘inordinate esteem of culture’ (p. 15).

²⁹³ George Edward Bateman Saintsbury (1845–1933), author of A Short History of English Literature (1898), mentioned in the letter to Arthur Greeves of 4 August 1917 (CL I, p. 332).

²⁹⁴ Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh (1861–1922) was the first Professor of English Literature at Oxford. See the discussion of his Letters in the letter to Albert Lewis of 5 June 1926 (CL I, pp. 665–7).

²⁹⁵ See the biography of George Gordon (1881–1942) in CL I, p. 643 n.

²⁹⁶ On the influence of Dante on The Great Divorce see the letter to Kinter of 28 March 1953.

²⁹⁷ Politian (or Poliziano) (1454–94) was an Italian humanist and a friend of Lorenzo the Magnificent. Roger Ascham (1515–68), English humanist, was the author of The Schoolmaster (1570). On Ascham see English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, pp. 279–83.

²⁹⁸ English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Introduction, pp. 18–19: ‘The humanists did two things, for one of which we are their endless debtors. They recovered, edited, and expounded a great many ancient texts in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew…If this had been all, their name would have been a blessing. But they also initiated that temper and those critical principles which have since come to be called “classicism”…The neo-classics are the humanists’ lawful heirs. The worst of all neo-classical errors, that which turned Aristotle’s observations on Greek tragedy into arbitrary “rules” and even foisted on him “rules” for which his text furnishes no pretext at all, began…in 1570 with Castelvetro (Poetica d’aristotele, IV, ii).’

²⁹⁹ In King Arthur Today Starr praises the work of Nennius (fl. c. 830). In his Historia Brittonum Nennius gives an account of an historical Arthur who, as dux bellorum, after Hengist’s death led the Britons against the Saxons in twelve battles.

³⁰⁰ i.e., the ‘Bird and Baby’–or Eagle and Child–the pub in St Giles, Oxford, where the Inklings met.

³⁰¹ They planned to meet in Liverpool on Lewis’s return from a holiday in Ireland.

³⁰² Dr F. Morgan Roberts (1928–), Presbyterian pastor, has served in churches in Birmingham, Michigan, Louisville, Kentucky, and Mount Vernon and Newburgh, New York. When serving as Pastor of Shadyside Presbyterian Church, Pittsburgh, 1985–94, he published Are There Horses in Heaven? And Other Thoughts: Sermons Preached in the Shadyside Presbyterian Church, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (Pittsburgh: Lighthouse Point Press, 1996). In a letter of 2 February 1966 to Clyde S. Kilby, Roberts said: ‘I had written [to Lewis] following a study of “Perelandra” and I asked several questions concerning his view of the devotional life’ (Wade Center). In L this letter was attributed to Ursula Roberts, although in WHL it was addressed to ‘Mr Roberts’.

³⁰³ Mrs McCaslin was now writing from 101 South 21st Avenue, Hattiesburg, Mississippi.

³⁰⁴ Lewis confused Rosencrantz with Guildenstern. When Hamlet invites Guildenstern to play the recorder he replies: ‘But these cannot I command to any utterance of harmony; I have not the skill’ (Shakespeare, Hamlet, III, ii, 384–5).

³⁰⁵ This letter was first published in CSL: The Bulletin of the New York C. S. Lewis society, 16, no. 5, whole no. 185 (March 1985), p. 7.

³⁰⁶ Mere Christianity, Bk. III, ch. 1, p. 74: ‘Perhaps my bad temper or my jealousy are gradually getting worse–so gradually that the increase in seventy years will not be very noticeable. But it might be absolute hell in a million years: in fact, if Christianity is true, Hell is the precisely correct technical term for what it would be.’

³⁰⁷ Aida, an opera by Giuseppe Verdi, was first performed in 1871.

³⁰⁸ p.p.

³⁰⁹ Romans 10:14: ‘How then shall they call on him in whom they have not believed? and how shall they believe in him of whom they have not heard? and how shall they hear without a preacher?’

³¹⁰ 1 Corinthians 1:12–14: ‘Now this I say, that every one of you saith, I am of Paul; and I of Apollos; and I of Cephas; and I of Christ. Is Christ divided? was Paul crucified for you? or were ye baptized in the name of Paul?’

³¹¹ George MacDonald: An Anthology (London: Bles, 1946).

³¹² Miss Margaret Radcliffe was a one-legged nurse who wrote to Lewis constantly. It was her ambition to live at The Kilns and look after him, and he had constantly to tell her that he did not need her help. Neither his letters nor hers survive. When Lewis died, she turned her attention to Warnie whom she also wanted to look after. He let it be known that if she moved to Oxford he would emigrate to Ireland.

³¹³ The Horse and His Boy.

³¹⁴ In Sayers’ Gaudy Night, ch. 11, Harriet Vane is sitting on Shotover Hill–which overlooks The Kilns–when ‘A detached pentameter, echoing out of nowhere, was beating in her ears–seven marching feet–a pentameter and a half:–To that still centre where the spinning world/Sleeps on its axis.’ Lewis suggested it derived from Milton, Paradise Lost, VIII, 164–5: ‘With inoffensive pace that spinning sleeps/On her soft axle.’

³¹⁵ The Splendid Century.

³¹⁶ Gebbert was getting a divorce.

³¹⁷ i.e., her son, Charles Marion.

³¹⁸ The name of this correspondent has been withheld.

³¹⁹ Geoffrey Bles.

³²⁰ ‘Strawberry’ in The Magician’s Nephew (1955).

³²¹ ibid., ch. 7.

³²² ibid., ch. 12.

³²³ ibid.

³²⁴ ibid., ch. 10.

³²⁵ ibid., ch. 4.

³²⁶ Ibid., chs. 10 and 14.

³²⁷ This illustration, perhaps redrawn, appears in The Magician’s Nephew, ch. 7.

³²⁸ The letter was signed by Warnie.

³²⁹ Ruth Starr Rose (1887–1965), painter, was Starr’s elder sister. She was born in Wisconsin and educated at National Cathedral School, Washington, DC, and Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York. Rose studied at the New York Art Students League, and under George Miller, master printer. She is noted for her work as a lithographer and silk screen printmaker. The Library of Congress has permanent exhibits of her work in both media. She was married to Searles Rose.

³³⁰ i.e., Florence ‘Michal’ Williams, the widow of Charles Williams.

³³¹ Blamires wanted to dedicate the second of his trilogy of novels, Cold War in Hell (London: Longmans, 1955), to Lewis. In the end he dedicated it to his wife.

³³² ‘was there any….’

³³³ i.e., Le Lion et la Sorcière Blanche, trans. Émile-R. Blanchet.

³³⁴ Donald A. Roberts, a member of the Milton Society of America.

³³⁵ The original of this letter is in the archives of the Milton Society of America.

³³⁶ William B. Hunter, Jr, was secretary of the Milton Society of America in 1954.

³³⁷ In her letter of 23 October 1954 Gebbert said: ‘Once my divorce court ordeal is over in November, I hope and pray I’ll be able to return to normal. The nightmare has been long, and one I know I shan’t ever forget, but the waking up is looked forward to’ (Bodleian Library, MS. Facs. c. 47, fol. 261).

³³⁸ Gebbert said in her letter of 23 October: ‘A bottle of Gilbey’s Scotch is on its gurgling way to you both from Marshall Ellis, Ltd., Canada’ (Bodleian Library, MS. Facs. c. 47, fol. 261).

³³⁹ Mark Twain mentions the Holy Grail in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, ch. 9.

³⁴⁰ In Charles Williams’s War in Heaven (1930), Archdeacon Davenant discovers that his chalice is the Holy Grail.

³⁴¹ The horse Bree in The Horse and His Boy.

³⁴² In Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, Part IV, the horses, or Houyhnhnms, are endowed with reason and theirs is a rational, clean and simple society–in contrast to the Yahoos, who are beasts in human shape.

³⁴³ Of English Literature in the Sixteenth Century.

³⁴⁴ Luke 13:15–16: ‘The Lord then answered him…And ought not this woman, being a daughter of Abraham, whom Satan hath bound, lo, these eighteen years, be loosed from this bond on the sabbath day?’

³⁴⁵ Hebrews 2:10.

³⁴⁶ Mrs Shelburne had possibly asked Lewis if he had heard of Etienne Charlier’s Aperu sur la Formation Historique de la Nation Haitienne (Port-au-Prince: Presses Libres, 1954).

³⁴⁷ Luke 7:37–8: ‘A woman in the city, which was a sinner, when she knew that Jesus sat at meat in the Pharisee’s house, brought an alabaster box of ointment, And stood at his feet behind him weeping, and began to wash his feet with tears, and did wipe them with the hairs of her head, and kissed his feet, and anointed them with the ointment.’

³⁴⁸ Newby had asked in a letter of 2 November 1954: ‘We are fast approaching the four-hundredth anniversary of the birth of Sir Philip Sidney and the Third Programme would be very glad if you cared to broadcast a twenty-minute talk to mark the occasion.’

³⁴⁹ On 11 November 1954 Gibb wrote to Lewis: ‘The Associated Examining Board for the General Certificate of Education (Advanced Level) has adopted THE SCREWTAPE LETTERS as one of the set books in their English syllabus for the year 1955–56. I am sure you will agree that this is an excellent thing, not only for the sales of the book which will follow, but because of the places where the book will be used…I think you will be interested to hear that the company you keep with the other books on the syllabus is as follows: Erewhon–Samuel Butler, Decade of Decision–F. Hoyle, Literature and Science–B. Ifor Evans’ (Bodleian Library, Dep. c. 771, fol. 68).

³⁵⁰ Dorothy L. Sayers, Introductory Papers on Dante (1954).

³⁵¹ ibid., “‘If I could in-thee myself as thou dost in-me thyself,” says Dante, courageously coining new words for the unknown.’

³⁵² ‘I haven’t seen one, and I don’t think I can.’ See Inferno XX, 18.

³⁵³ Introductory Papers on Dante, p. 20: ‘All truth is shadow except the last truth. But all truth is substance in its own place, though it be best shadows in another place. And the shadow is a true shadow, as the substance is a true substance.’ Isaac Penington (1616–79) was a Quaker mystic.

³⁵⁴ ibid., p. 27: ‘There is the crash and roar as of a great wind, shaking the banks, and then [the angel] comes looming through the mist, with the lost souls fleeing before him like frightened frogs. He comes, not like brightness, but like “glory obscur’d”–not like joy, but like judgement.’

³⁵⁵ ibid., p. 33: ‘Here is another picture–Ugolino nailed up in the Tower of Famine, watching his sons drop dead of hunger.
’Already I
Was Blind; I took to fumbling on them; two
Long days I groped there, calling on the dead; Then famine did what sorrow could not do.
“‘Already I was blind–già cieco” “with grief”, say the nineteenth-century commentators, sitting in their snug libraries after dinner. But we who have seen the pictures of Belsen and Buchenwald know better–we know now, as Dante knew, that starved men lose their eyesight.’

³⁵⁶ Inferno, I, 60: Dove’l sol tace: ‘Where the sun is silent’.

³⁵⁷ Percy Bysshe Shelley, Prometheus Unbound (1820), IV, 415.

³⁵⁸ Sayers, Introductory Papers on Dante, p. 44–5: ‘If the reader will take his Bible…and turn to the ninth chapter of St Mark, the 43rd and following verses, he will find this passage:
‘Jesus said: If thy hand offend thee, cut it off: it is better for thee to enter into life maimed, than having two hands to go into hell, into the fire that never shall be quenched….
‘There seems to be a kind of conspiracy, especially among middle-aged writers of vaguely liberal tendency, to forget, or to conceal, where the doctrine of Hell comes from. One finds frequent references to “the cruel and abominable Mediaeval doctrine of hell”, or “the childish and grotesque Mediaeval imagery of physical fire and worms”. People who write about Dante are often concerned to sneer at him, or alternatively to pity him, for being compelled by “the crude superstition of his age” to believe in these things under menace of excommunication and torture…But the case is otherwise; let us face the facts. The doctrine of Hell is not “mediaeval”: it is Christ’s. It is not a device of “mediaeval priestcraft” for frightening people into giving money to the Church: it is Christ’s deliberate judgement on sin.’

³⁵⁹ ibid., p. 47: ‘[God] did not want to gain anything for Himself: that is impossible; for all things come from Him, and He could no more add anything to Himself by making a universe than a poet can add anything to himself by writing a poem.’

³⁶⁰ ibid., pp. 58–9: ‘There is an interesting difference between Dante’s conception and that of the Moslem writer Ibn Arabi…In Ibn Arabi’s Heaven, envy is excluded, apparently, only by ignorance and lack of imagination. But in Dante’s Christian Heaven, it is excluded by love. The lower know that the higher exist, and “it is a joy to the whole realm”: they look up the ranks of the great ones soaring above them, and are filled with rapture and love. They envy them no more than you or I envy Dante or Shakespeare for being great and glorious. Why should they envy, or why should we? We are thrilled with delight to know that beings so noble can exist.’

³⁶¹ The reference on p. 58 is to George Santayana, Three Philosophic Poems (1910).

³⁶² Sayers, Introductory Papers on Dante, pp. 63–4: ‘We need not now examine the Adam-and-Eve myth with the intention of arguing about how far it is pure parable and how far it may represent something that historically happened…We may in passing note three things: first, that the fashionable habit of calling the prohibition of the Fruit of Knowledge an “arbitrary taboo” is a quite unjustifiable travesty of the Bible story. There, God is represented as saying to Adam and Eve: “Do not eat: if you do, it will kill you”–and I do not know what else one could reasonably say to anybody when begging him to refrain from taking strychnine or prussic acid. The second thing is a consideration that naturally would not occur to Dante, with his limited knowledge of the cosmos, but is bound to occur to us; namely, that if there are, in the universe, other rational material beings besides Man, there is no need to suppose that they have fallen into the same error. Thirdly: since Man is, of his nature, a being susceptible of development, it is possible in his case for God (with man’s own assent and cooperation) to undo the consequences of the Fall–or rather, not to undo, but to redeem them.’

³⁶³ Lewis probably had in mind the concluding chapter of von Hügel, Eternal Life (1912; 2nd rev. edn 1913), p. 383: ‘Eternal Life precludes space and clock-time because of the very intensity of its life. The Simultaneity is here the fullest expression of the Supreme Richness, the unspeakable Concreteness, the overwhelming Aliveness of God; and is at the opposite pole from all empty unity, all mere being–any or all abstractions whatsoever.’

³⁶⁴ Gigadibs is a fashion-conscious literary man who first appeared in Robert Browning, Bishop Blougram’s Apology (1882), I, 13. He was to appear again as ‘Master Gigadibs’ in Rudyard Kipling’s Stalky & Co. (1899), ‘Slaves of the Lamp’, Part I.

³⁶⁵ i.e., in the style of The Vision or Hell, Purgatory and Paradise of Dante Alighieri, trans. Henry Francis Cary (1814).

³⁶⁶ Shakespeare, Hamlet, II, ii, 346–7.

³⁶⁷ Sayers, Introductory Papers on Dante, p. 109.

³⁶⁸ Jill’s eldest daughter, three-year-old Nicola.

³⁶⁹ Susie was the dog Jill gave Jack and Warnie.

³⁷⁰ ‘poem’.

³⁷¹ Joseph McCarthy (1908–57), an American politician who was senator for Wisconsin, 1947–57. During his years as chairman of the Government Committee on Operations of the Senate he held public hearings in which he accused army officials, film stars, and various public figures of being Communists. He was censured by the Senate in December 1954.

³⁷² Dante.

³⁷³ The Kinds of literature known to Dante would have included Epic, Romance, Lyric, Allegory and Comedy.

³⁷⁴ ‘in which common women also communicate’. Dante, Section 11 of his Letter to Can Grande della Scalla (1291–1329), to whom he sent a fair copy of Paradiso.

³⁷⁵ His inaugural lecture at Cambridge.

³⁷⁶ These corrections to the original printing of English Literature in the Sixteenth Century were made in subsequent reprints.

³⁷⁷ In A SEVERE MERCY, ch. 6, ‘The Barrier Breached’, pp. 155–7, Vanauken wrote that his wife Davy had been admitted to the University Hospital at Charlottesville, Virginia: ‘It was mid-July [1954] when I went up in the MG with Flurry, and I thought I would see the doctor first. He said: “She’s a very sick girl. I’d say no more than one chance in ten. Maybe six months.”…The world had changed for ever by the time I replied, an instant later. Quietly I asked him–so quietly that perhaps he thought I didn’t care–what it was. It was her liver, he said: it had passed the point of no return. They did not know why. She would die in coma…I began to act. Telegrams and telephone calls went forth to friends, particularly Christian friends, including C. S. Lewis.’

³⁷⁸ p.p.

³⁷⁹ The name in this and the following letter was typed.

³⁸⁰ See Alastair Fowler in the Biographical Appendix. Fowler had completed a degree at the University of Edinburgh, and he was at this time a member of Pembroke College, Oxford, pursuing a doctorate under Lewis.

³⁸¹ Fowler’s wife Jenny gave birth to a daughter, Alison, on 18 November 1954.

³⁸² Walter Hooper (1931–) was born in Reidsville, North Carolina, on 27 March 1931, the son of Arch Boyd Hooper and Madge (Kemp) Hooper. He attended Reidsville High School, and read English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, taking his BA in 1953. During his service in the US Army, 1954–6, he began corresponding with Lewis. He taught at the Chapel Hill Elementary School, Chapel Hill, 1956–8, while working on a master’s degree at the University of North Carolina. He was a student at the Virginia Theological Seminary, 1958–60, head of the English Department at Christ School, Arden, North Carolina, 1960–1, and instructor in English at the University of Kentucky, Lexington, Kentucky, 1961–3. He met Lewis on 7 June 1963, and spent the summer as his secretary. While Hooper was in the US teaching one final term, Lewis died. Hooper returned to Oxford where Warnie Lewis invited him to edit his brother’s literary remains. He is the co-author with Roger Lancelyn Green of C. S. Lewis: A Biography, the author of C. S. Lewis: A Companion & Guide (1996), and the editor of The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis.

³⁸³ Hooper was in the US Army and was stationed at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. He wrote to thank Lewis for his books, and to say that although he was a Christian when he read them, they had made the faith clear.

³⁸⁴ See the biography of the Rev. Canon John Bertram Phillips (1906–82), writer, translator and broadcaster, in CL II, p. 585 n.

³⁸⁵ Phillips, who was vicar of St John’s, Redhill, Surrey, had asked Lewis to come down and give a talk to the young people in his parish.

³⁸⁶ BF, p. 242.

³⁸⁷ Lewis sent Arthur a copy of his article ‘A Note on Jane Austen’, which appeared in Essays in Criticism, IV (October 1954), p. 43–4, and is reprinted in SLE.

³⁸⁸ This was a copy of his article ‘The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment’, and ‘A Reply to C. S. Lewis’ by Norval Morris and Donald Buckle, both published in Res Judicatae, VI ( June 1953), pp. 224–30, 231–7. The first of these is reprinted in First and Second Things and EC.

³⁸⁹ i.e., This Ever Diverse Pair.

³⁹⁰ Gibb wrote in a letter of 3 December 1954: ‘The reviews of THE HORSE AND HIS BOY have come through from the Macmillan Company in New York and I am sending a copy to you…In sending on these reviews Macmillan’s say that the Book has been more widely reviewed than children’s books usually are over there and has excited tremendous enthusiasm’ (Bodleian Library, Dep. c. 771, fol. 70).

³⁹¹ Anders Nygren, Agape and Eros: A Study of the Christian Idea of Love, authorized trans. A. G. Hebert (London: SPCK, 1932–9; rev. edn, Agape and Eros, authorized trans. Philip S. Watson, London: SPCK, 1953).

³⁹² Some of Lewis’s first thoughts on Nygren’s book are found in his letter to Janet Spens of 8 January 1935 (CL II, pp. 153–4). Lewis was still thinking his way towards the conclusions he reached regarding the various natural loves and their relation to Agape in The Four Loves.

³⁹³ On the Logical Positivists see the letter to Dom Bede Griffiths of 22 April 1954.

³⁹⁴ Concerning Gifts was a short essay on Christmas published privately by Mary Margaret McCaslin in 1954.

³⁹⁵ Douglass had written to Lewis from Basil Street Hotel, Knightsbridge, London.

³⁹⁶ Following the death of Don Giovanni Calabria, Lewis continued the correspondence in Latin with Don Luigi Pedrollo, with whom he had corresponded in 1950. See Don Luigi Pedrollo in the Biographical Appendix.

³⁹⁷ John Frederick Charles Fuller (1876–1966), British general, military historian and strategist, was educated at Malvern College and the Royal Military College, Sandhurst. In the First World War, he recognized the importance of mechanized warfare and planned the stunning tank attack at Cambrai in 1917. His remarkable ideas are expressed in his numerous books, which include Tanks in the Great War (1920) and On Future Warfare (1928). He established himself as a leading military commentator of the day.

³⁹⁸ Michel Gordey, Visa to Moscow, trans. Katherine Woods (London: Gollancz, 1953).

³⁹⁹ Gibb had sent Lewis specially bound copies of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and The Horse and His Boy.

⁴⁰⁰ Jane Austen, Emma (1816), ch. 2: ‘Mr Woodhouse saw the letter, and he says he never saw such a handsome letter in his life.’

⁴⁰¹ In Rudyard Kipling, Debts and Credits (1926).

⁴⁰² After Lewis sent Sayers a notice of his change of address from Magdalen, Oxford, to Magdalene, Cambridge, Sayers sent Lewis an allegorical card.

⁴⁰³ Sayers replied in verse, dated 29 December 1954, in which she explained the meaning of her card. This reply is reproduced in Sayers, Letters, vol. IV, pp. 197–8.

¹ Lewis made the original George MacDonald a character in The Great Divorce.

² Helmut Kuhn, ‘C. S. Lewis: Der Romancier der Unerbittlichen Liebe’ [‘The Novelist of Inexorable Love’], Wort und Wahrheit, Freiberg (10 January 1955), pp. 113–26.

³ After leaving Oxford Pitt had taught English for a while at the University College of South Wales. She was a Fellow of Newnham College, Cambridge, 1953–8. She sent Lewis a letter welcoming him to their new university.

⁴ See the entry on Magdalene College, Cambridge, in CG, pp. 773–4.

⁵ Lewis was describing the village of Headington Quarry, in which Holy Trinity Church stands. The Kilns was not in Headington Quarry but half a mile away on the Risinghurst Estate.

⁶ There is a photograph of the brick kilns in Walter Hooper, Through Joy and Beyond: A Pictorial Biography of C. S. Lewis (New York: Macmillan, 1982), p. 54. The brick kilns were destroyed in 1968 when houses were built on land attached to The Kilns.

⁷ Trehern had obviously read Lewis’s The Allegory of Love (1936), and perhaps asked why Lewis did not cite Thomas Speght, the Elizabethan schoolmaster who edited Chaucer.

⁸ Thomas Speght (fl. 1566–1602) edited The Works of Our Ancient and Learned English Poet, Geoffrey Chaucer (1598). Speght’s notes and introductory material are more elaborate than in any previous edition of Chaucer, and he was the first to provide a substantial glossary.

⁹ Luke 6:33.

¹⁰ Colin Eccleshare (1916–89), publisher, was educated at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, taking his BA in 1938. He joined the staff of Cambridge University Press in 1939, but left to serve in the Second World War. Returning to Cambridge University Press he was assistant London manager, 1946–63, and London manager, 1963–72. He was director of group projects, 1972–7, and director of Educational Associates Ltd. (Hong Kong), John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 1979–85.

¹¹ See Henry Victor Dyson ‘Hugo’ Dyson in the Biographical Appendix to CL I, pp. 988–90.

¹² See the biography of Thomas Dewar Weldon, Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy at Magdalen College, Oxford, in CL I, p. 763n.

¹³ Psalm 22:6.

¹⁴ See Fr Peter Milward SJ in the Biographical Appendix.

¹⁵ Peter Milward, ‘The Angels in Theology’, The Irish Theological Quarterly, XXXI, no. 3 (July 1954), pp. 213–25. Fr Milward sent Lewis a copy of this article from Japan, in pursuance of their discussion of angels in his rooms at Magdalen earlier in the year.

¹⁶ Revelations of Divine Love Recorded by Julian, Anchoress at Norwich Anno Domini 1373, A Version from the MS. In the British Museum, ed. Grace Warrack (London: Methuen, 1901). See the references to this book in CL II.

¹⁷ Gilfedder suggested Lewis had become sick of the gossip at Magdalen College about his Christianity.

¹⁸ Vanauken, A Severe Mercy, ch. 8, ‘The Way of Grief’, pp. 155–7.

¹⁹ St Stephen’s Episcopal Church, Culpeper, Virginia.

²⁰ The church of St Margaret of Antioch, which stands half a mile from the village of Binsey. It was built in about 730, and belonged originally to Godstow Priory which was destroyed during the Reformation. The church is looked after by Christ Church, Oxford.

²¹ Mrs Jessup’s letters to Lewis have not survived. However, it is possible that she had become a lay member of one of the religious orders for women in the Anglo-Catholic branch of the Episcopal Church.

²² Loge, the god of fire, is a character in Richard Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung.

²³ Lewis wrote about those treasured volumes in SBJ, ch. 5. They were The Rhinegold & The Valkyrie, by Richard Wagner, illus. Arthur Rackham, trans. Margaret Armour (London: William Heinemann, 1910) and Siegfried & The Twilight of the Gods, by Richard Wagner, illus. Arthur Rackham, trans. Margaret Armour (London: William Heinemann, 1911).

²⁴ See Spencer Curtis Brown in the Biographical Appendix.

²⁵ Gibb wrote to Lewis on 18 February 1955: ‘I did enjoy our talk yesterday. I was perhaps a little saddened that we should have disappointed you to the extent of your giving your new book to Curtis Brown. It is not so much the loss of the serial rights that worries me as the possibility that we may not have the United States rights either’ (Bodleian Library, MS. Facs. b. 90., fol. 2).

²⁶ Gibb wanted Lewis to edit an illustrated edition of John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress for Geoffrey Bles, but in the end Lewis refused.

²⁷ According to Vanauken, A Severe Mercy, ch. 8, p. 186: ‘I [mentioned] to Lewis…the change in my once-famous “luck”. Long before, friends had thought me lucky: my First Honours in college (because I had been lucky enough to get the right questions), my happy marriage (because I had been lucky enough to find the right girl). But, since Christianity, several things had not been so fortunate, culminating in Davy’s death.’

²⁸ The Letters of Saint Teresa, A Complete Edition Translated from the Spanish and Annotated by the Benedictines of Stanbrook, Introduction by Cardinal Gasquet, 4 vols. (London: Thomas Baker, 1924), vol. IV, p. 288. Letter CCCCXXVIII, Prefatory Note: ‘St. Teresa reached Burgos on Jan. 26 [1582], after a terrible journey over the Castilian plains, through violent storms of rain, snow and hurricanes of wind. The rivers had overflowed and the roads were hidden beneath the water. [Francisco de Ribera (1537–91)] says that on one occasion the Saint saw the waggon containing her daughters swerve over a precipice as though about to fall into the river, but a lad who was with them seized the wheel and held up the cart in a manner that seemed miraculous…The nuns made their confessions before starting, asked the Mother for her blessing, and recited the Credo. She was not in the least disturbed, but said calmly: “Well, my daughters, what better fate could you wish for than to die here as martyrs…for love of our Lord? Stay where you are, for I want to go first, and if I am drowned, I beg of you not to cross but to return to the inn.” She reached the other side as our Lord promised her she should. She hurt her leg in crossing and was heard to say on the opposite bank: “O Lord, after so many trials , this happens!” “Teresa, this is the way I treat My friends,” was the reply. “Ah, My God, that is why you have so few!” she answered.’

²⁹ 2 Corinthians 1:21–2: ‘Now he which stablisheth us with you in Christ, and hath anointed us, is God. Who hath also sealed us, and given the earnest of the Spirit in our hearts.’ Ibid., 5:5: ‘Now he that hath wrought us for the selfsame thing is God, who also hath given unto us the earnest of the Spirit.’

³⁰ Vanauken had sent him a photograph of Jean.

³¹ Coventry Patmore, The Angel in the House (1863); The Victories of Love (1877).

³² At the time Lewis was writing, the Catholic Church opposed cremation because it seemed to deny the resurrection of the body. In 1963 it was decided to allow cremation in certain circumstances provided the reasons for choosing it did not counter Christian belief. The Catechism of the Catholic Church (1992) states (No. 2301): ‘The Church permits cremation, provided that it does not demonstrate a denial of faith in the resurrection of the body.’

³³ Brother Lawrence (c. 1614–91), The Practice of the Presence of God (London: W. Walker, 1907), Letter 11: ‘But those who consider sickness as coming from the hand of God, as the effects of His mercy, and the means which He employs for their salvation, commonly find in it great sweetness and sensible consolation.’

³⁴ Psalm 22:1; Matthew 27:46; Mark 15:34.

³⁵ i.e., Dom Bede Griffiths’s autobiography, The Golden String.

³⁶ Mrs Shelburne’s cat.

³⁷ While still at Magdalen, Oxford, Lewis had been supervising Fowler’s doctoral dissertation. When he was appointed a professor at Cambridge, he had to pass Fowler on to someone else.

³⁸ ‘The Rest of Time’ was a science-fiction story Fowler was writing.

³⁹ ‘wife and child’, ‘family’.

⁴⁰ Lewis began writing his autobiography in 1948, but his long-standing commitment to write English Literature in the Sixteenth Century and the burst of inspiration which led to the Chronicles of Narnia caused him to work on it only intermittently for seven years. It was now finally complete, and he handed it over to Curtis Brown Ltd with the understanding that they would negotiate a contract with Geoffrey Bles Ltd. Gibb wrote to Lewis on 22 February 1955: ‘Yes, I quite realise that you have committed the typescript to Curtis Brown in advance; but I am not quite clear as to whether they are to handle the American rights for you’ (Bodleian Library, MS. Facs. b. 90, fol. 6).

⁴¹ Lewis was reading a typescript of Skinner’s The Return of Arthur, Part I. As before, references are to the complete edition, The Return of Arthur: A Poem of the Future.

⁴² i.e, the blurb for The Lord of the Rings accompanying the letter to Sir Stanley Unwin of 4 December 1953.

⁴³ Skinner, The Return of Arthur, Part II, III, xxvi, 7: ‘I guess it had to do with Mr. Blaise.’

⁴⁴ ibid., xlvii, 1: ‘Blaise-Merlin–heard all this with close attention.’

⁴⁵ In his Biographia Literaria (1817), ch. 1, Samuel Taylor Coleridge describes the headmaster of his school, the Rev. James Bowyer.

⁴⁶ Richard Mulcaster (c. 1530–1611) was the headmaster of Merchant Taylors’ School when Edmund Spenser was a pupil.

⁴⁷ i.e., the general public.

⁴⁸ Skinner, The Return of Arthur, Part II, I, i, 4–5: ‘Though nowadays it isn’t by the last/But coming centuries we feel outclassed.’

⁴⁹ ibid., xxii, l7.

⁵⁰ ibid., xxxi: ‘And total–from which direst of perditions, he/Was saved by war, and human inefficiency.’

⁵¹ ibid., xliii, 1.

⁵² ibid., II, ii.

⁵³ ibid., xi, 2: ‘The poles, for instance, long since stripped of wiring.’

⁵⁴ ibid., xxxviiii, 5: ‘See Helen’s beauty in a brow of Girton.’

⁵⁵ ibid., IV, xx, 4.

⁵⁶ ibid., III, xviii, 1–2: ‘For like a wind across their woolly ocean/Of backs, a sudden agitation passed.’

⁵⁷ ibid., xxii, 1–2: ‘And like a torrent that has breached its dykes/Engulfed the whole lane in a tide of mutton.’

⁵⁸ ibid., xxix, 1: ‘They went indoors together. She was glad.’

⁵⁹ ibid., xxxii, 4.

⁶⁰ ibid., IV, x, 5–6: ‘That she was fond of him might be implied./But love–the desert feeling, when apart.’

⁶¹ ibid., xxii.

⁶² ibid., xxxii.

⁶³ ibid., xl.

⁶⁴ ibid., xlv, 3.

⁶⁵ ibid., xlix, 7: ‘Magus ex machina and so avert it.’

⁶⁶ ibid., V, iii, 1.

⁶⁷ ibid., x.

⁶⁸ ibid., xviii, 6.

⁶⁹ ibid., xxiv, 5.

⁷⁰ ibid., xxix, 3.

⁷¹ ibid., xliii; V, xlii.

⁷² ibid., VI, i.

⁷³ ibid., v. Line 5 was altered to read: ‘The lives of beasts, too, centred round their dens.’

⁷⁴ ibid., xi: ‘And as a schoolboy, by his Sunday self,/Haunting the library (Limbo of his hell)/Takes down by chance a Shelley from the shelf.’

⁷⁵ ibid., xxxii–xxxv.

⁷⁶ ibid., xliii, 5.

⁷⁷ ibid., VII, i, 7: ‘From the horizon’s highlands, silver-white.’

⁷⁸ ibid., xvi, 4: ‘Of the sheer cliff spectacularly spirted.’

⁷⁹ ibid., xxxiv.

⁸⁰ ibid., lxvii, 1–2: ‘…There’s no doubt that what he said/In our ears would have sounded stale and trite.’

⁸¹ ibid., VIII, li, 7.

⁸² ibid., IX, xx, 2: ‘That is, in men and Russians.’

⁸³ ibid., xlviii, xlix.

⁸⁴ ibid., lii, 7.

⁸⁵ ibid., lix.

⁸⁶ ibid., X, iv, 6.

⁸⁷ ibid., lxxi.

⁸⁸ ibid., XII, ii.

⁸⁹ ibid., xxxvii, 3.

⁹⁰ ibid., lxi, 3: ‘The floodlit Marxmast, solemn, monolithic.’

⁹¹ ibid., lxiii, 7: ‘Of trompe l’oeil, all the merchandise profuse.’

⁹² Skinner, The Return of Arthur, Part II, II, xxiii ff.

⁹³ See the biography of Jonathan Francis Goodridge in CL II, p. 936n. He had been Lewis’s pupil and was looking for a teaching job.

⁹⁴ Sir David Lyndsay, The Complaynt of Sir David Lindsay (1559), 471–2: ‘Quen kirkmen yairnis no dignitie,/Nor wyffis no soveranitie.’

⁹⁵ Appleyard was a clergyman known to Mrs Jessup.

⁹⁶ Ransom, the hero of Out of the Silent Planet.

⁹⁷ The pfifltriggi are one of the species of beings in Out of the Silent Planet.

⁹⁸ Cf. the letter to Mrs Jessup of 15 October 1951.

⁹⁹ The Hesperides were nymphs who lived far away in the West guarding a tree that produced golden apples. The Hyperboreans were a legendary people believed to live ‘beyond the north wind’, at the edge of the world, in a land of unbroken sunshine.

¹⁰⁰ Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island (1883), ch. 8: ‘a face as big as a ham’.

¹⁰¹ The Twentieth Century, CLVII, no. 936 (February 1955). Herbert Butterfield (1900–79) was Professor of Modern History, University of Cambridge, 1944–68, and Master of Peterhouse, Cambridge, 1955–68. Fr Michael Clive Knowles, OSB (1896–1974) was Professor of Medieval History in the University of Cambridge, 1947–54, and Regius Professor of Modern History, 1954–63.

¹⁰² E. M. Forster, ‘A Letter’, The Twentieth Century, CLVII, no. 936 (February 1955), pp. 99–101: ‘[Humanism] expresses more nearly what I feel about myself, and it is Humanism that has been most precisely threatened during the past ten years. Humanism covers my main belief and my main disbelief. My belief in the individual and in his duty to create and to understand and to contact other individuals…In the present rise of obscurantism among intellectuals, Humanism is seldom directly attacked. Perhaps they do not consider it sufficiently important. “Elbowed out” would be the better phrase. Its stronghold in history, the Renaissance, is alleged not to have existed. Its conception of human nature and its hopes for it are implicitly denied by emphasizing the arbitrary theory of Original Sin. It is regarded, at most, as a weakness in the wall of western defence, through which a rival ideology might percolate. I have found it something more positive than this, something life-giving, something which has made the world of the past fifty years exciting and valuable and sometimes comprehensible.’

¹⁰³ i.e., English Literature in the Sixteenth Century.

¹⁰⁴ Henry Best, Personal and Literary Memorials (1829), ch. 15, p. 68: ‘The Duke of Gloucester, brother of King George III, permitted Mr. Gibbon to present to him the first volume of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. When the second volume of that work appeared, it was quite in order that it should be presented to His Royal Highness in like manner. The prince received the author with much good nature and affability, saying to him, as he laid the quarto on the table, “Another dmn’d thick, square book! Always scribble, scribble, scribble! Eh! Mr. Gibbon?”’

¹⁰⁵ Kathleen O’Hara (1885–1973) was Pitter’s colleague in the business they ran together, and they shared the house at Long Crendon. See the biography of Ruth Pitter in CL II, pp. 1060–4.

¹⁰⁶ Newby wrote to Lewis on 8 March 1955: ‘We have read your inaugural lecture De Descriptione Temporum and would like you to broadcast it in the Third Programme. A number of modifications and omissions will be necessary to remove it from the special occasion for which it was designed, but the lecture can be broadcast substantially as it is written.’

¹⁰⁷ The Rambler, ed. W. J. Bate and Albrecht B. Strauss, Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, vol. III (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969), no. 68 (10 November 1750), p. 360: ‘To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition, the end to which every enterprise and labour tends, and of which every desire prompts the prosecution.’