18 In a letter to Lewis of 23 January 1956, Krieg said: ‘I’ve been helping Laurence with his Sunday School lessons recently, and I’m sorry to say that while they aren’t too easy, they are extremely dull. As you know, my son is genuinely interested in Christianity, and willing to work at learning about it. So it pains me to see his very real interest being nearly killed by uninspired lessons. Surely it would be possible to write a series of lessons more clearly and catchingly!’

19 Lewis was remembering, not The Problem of Pain, but Mere Christianity, Bk. III, ch. 6, pp. 108–9: ‘No feeling can be relied on to last in its full intensity, or even to last at all. Knowledge can last, principles can last, habits can last; but feelings come and go.’

20 Pitter said of this letter: ‘This was apropos of some “quotation” I suspected Lewis of having invented, and I instanced Sir W. Scott’s fondness for false authorities in his picturesque sub-headings’ (Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. lett. c. 220/3, fol. 136). At the top of Sir Walter’s Scott’s The Antiquary (1816), ch. 9, is a poem said to be quoted from ‘Old Play’.

21 The scholarly enterprise of hunting for sources.

22 Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, February 1767, vol. II, pp. 41–2: ‘At Sir Joshua Reynolds’s, where a circle of Johnson’s friends was collected round him to hear his account of this memorable conversation [with King George III], Dr. Joseph Warton…was very active in pressing him to mention the particulars…He told them, “I found his Majesty wished I should talk, and I made it my business to talk. I find it does a man good to be talked to by his Sovereign. In the first place, a man cannot be in a passion–.” Here some question interrupted him, which is to be regretted, as he certainly would have pointed out and illustrated many circumstances of advantage, from being in a situation, where the powers of the mind are at once excited to vigorous exertion, and tempered by reverential awe.’

23 Pitter wrote about this: ‘I had been received by the Queen (in October of this year) to present her Gold Medal for Poetry, and I felt that it did me good. One plugs away for half a century, getting little praise and less cash, then suddenly one is summoned to the Palace and given a medal. All is now well: if the highest in the land approves one, we can do without those in between. Besides, it was an Adventure: and to crown all, as I left the Queen, there outside the drawing-room door stood Albert Schweitzer, waiting to be received in his turn!’ (Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. lett. c. 220/3, fol. 136).

24 Mary Norton, The Borrowers (1952); The Borrowers Afield (1955).

25 Katharine Mary Briggs, Hobberdy Dick (1955).

26 Margaret Kennedy, The Feast (1950).

27 As defined in Surprised by Joy.

28 See the letter to Van Deusen of 16 December 1955.

29 See Lewis’s treatment of Psalms 19 and 36 in Reflections on the Psalms (London: Bles, 1958; Fount, 1998).

30 Psalm 19:6.

31 There was a review of Surprised by Joy in Time, LXVII, no. 6 (6 February 1956), p. 54, entitled ‘The Reluctant Convert’. Accompanying the review is a photo of Lewis in his Cambridge rooms lighting his pipe. While the photograph was ascribed to Barrington Brown, it was actually the work of John S. Murray. There is a copy of it in Hooper, Through Joy and Beyond, p. 131.

32 Surprised by Joy is dedicated to Griffiths.

33 The main character in Rider Haggard’s She.

34 Lewis was probably referring to Griffiths’ Christian Ashram: Essays towards a Christian–Hindu Dialogue (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1966), published in the USA as Christ in India (1966).

35 Sir Steven Runciman, A History of the Crusades, 3 vols (London: Cambridge University Press, 1951–4).

36 Jules Verne, Around the World in Eighty Days (1873).

37 Jules Verne, A Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1864).

38 Charles Fort (1874–1932), author of The Book of the Damned (1919). Fort’s main purpose in this book seems to have been to embarrass scientists by collecting stories on ‘the borderland between fact and fantasy’ which science could not explain or explain away. He had no interest in the accuracy of his data, nor was he concerned to make sense of his collection of weird stories.

39 Bodleian Library.

40 Bodleian Library, Dep. c. 771, fol. 134.

41 ibid., fol. 136.

42 Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold (London: Bles, 1956), ch. 12, p. 141.

43 ibid., ch. 13, pp. 155, 162.

44 ibid., p. 155; ch. 17, p. 206.

45 ibid., ch. 16, p. 193: ‘My aim was to build up more and more that strength, hard and joyless, which had come to me when I heard the god’s sentence; by learning, fighting, and labouring, to drive all the woman out of me.’

46 ibid., ch. 17, p. 206.

47 ibid., ch. 19, p. 229.

48 ibid., pp. 233–4: ‘Would Bardia–? then back came my loneliness…’

49 ibid., ch. 20, p. 242: ‘Sometimes I would say to myself, “[Ansit] has lain in his bed, and that’s bad. She has borne his children, and that’s worse. But, has she ever crouched beside him in the ambush? Ever ridden knee to knee with him in the charge?…She’s his toy, his recreation, his leisure, his solace. I’m in his man’s life.”’

50 Peggy Waldman, the wife of Milton Waldman, often read books for Geoffrey Bles.

51 Lewis probably had in mind the sculptures from the Temple of Aphaia on the island of Aegina. See John Boardman, Greek Sculpture: The Archaic Period (1978), especially the statue of Athena from the west pediment, fig. 206. 1.

52 The Rev. Edward Frederick Yorke (1906–97) was born on 14 November 1906, and educated at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, taking his BA in 1928. He read Theology at the Bible Churchman’s College, Bristol, and was ordained in 1932. After serving in a number of parishes in the Bristol Diocese, he was attached to the Diocese of London from 1950–66. During his time in London he was Home Secretary to the Church Missions to the Jews. He was Rector of Denver, Diocese of Ely, 1966–71. He retired to Poole in 1971 and died there on 19 May 1997.

53 In a letter of 2 February 1956 Yorke asked if Lewis would write a preface to his booklet, One Church, One Faith, One Lord: A Study in the Relationship between the Old and the New Israel (London: Church Missions to the Jews, 1956).

54 In a letter to Lewis of 12 February 1956 Krieg said: ‘I’m one at heart with Laurence’s stern and rockbound teacher, Miss Wood, and between the two of us we keep the poor boy thoroughly occupied with his studies…As for reading the Bible, Laurence does so. He is far more familiar with the early history of the Hebrews than I am…and enjoys asking me such embarrassing questions as “How many soldiers did Gideon have?” or “What was the name of the king in Elijah’s day?”…Miss Wood is having her pupils learn the books of the Bible, the names of the apostles, and some of the more complicated details of Hebrew history…What I was complaining about was bad writing in Sunday School lessons. Laurence’s lessons are ill-phrased and spotty. One question was: In which kingdom did Isaiah live? Question two was: Why do you suppose Isaiah’s vision in the Temple led him to cry, “Woe is me, for I am undone?”’

55 Isaiah 6:5.

56 The obituary of the Rev. Ivor Erskine St Clair Ramsay (1902–56), Dean of King’s College, Cambridge, appeared in The Times (23 January 1956), p. 6. Ramsay’s body was discovered near the walls of the college chapel on 22 January, and while the coroner recorded a verdict (The Times, 26 January, p. 5) of suicide ‘while the balance of his mind was disturbed and that he died from injuries compatible with a fall from a height’, Lewis was not convinced.

57 Warnie’s second book, The Sunset of the Splendid Century: The Life and Times of Louis Auguste de Bourbon Duc du Maine, 1670–1736 (1955).

58 Gibb had asked Lewis to produce a blurb describing the new novel, but it was the piece accompanying the letter to Gibb of 29 February 1956 which was finally used on the jacket of Till We Have Faces.

59 ‘English taste’.

60 ‘The Bacchae of Euripides’ was produced by the Triennial Production of Greek Play Committee and performed in Greek in the Arts Theatre, Cambridge, on 21, 22, 24 and 25 February 1956. The music for the Chorus was written by Peter Tranchell of Gonville and Caius College. See the review of Bacchae by B. R. O’G. Anderson in The Cambridge Review, LXXVII, no. 1878 (25 February 1956), pp. 389–90. Tranchell’s production of Sophocles’ Antigone is mentioned in the letter to Cecil Harwood of 3 February 1959.

61 Reviews of the American edition of Surprised by Joy.

62 The passage that gives the best overview of Walsh’s Behold the Glory appears in ch. 15, pp. 123–4: ‘I see now that I was making God too small. I believe today, more profoundly than I did then, that the Apostles’ Creed and the Nicene Creed, as summaries of Christian belief, are true in the same way that the multiplication table is true…The fact that the Creeds are true is no reason for assuming that God can and will work only through those who believe them to be true. God roams; He breaks; He enters; He is not above using an alias; He chooses and stations His witnesses where He will.’

63 ibid., ch. 8, pp. 60–6: ‘A good politician is like a good physician. The physician is a trained and dedicated man, who fights a running battle against disease, accident, and death. He does not create the human body, nor is he the inventor of that amazing well of life within, but he coöperates with what is already there…The politician is like the physician in his perceptive cooperation with the health that already exists…As I observe the majors, governors, assemblymen, Congressmen, Cabinet members and other politicians about me, I do not admire all of them. Some seem seriously mistaken in their ideas; some are stupid; a few have the evil of demons in their hearts. All this is merely to say that they are human beings, and vary as other mortals do. But in the majority of politicians I now discern, to a varying degree, an awareness of the hovering ideal, and some recognition of the city of man as a groping toward the City of God.’

64 ibid., Appendix, pp. 155–6: ‘It is difficult for me to name the literary influences that have gone into the shaping of my book…But one name is of seminal importance: C. S. Lewis. His preface to the third edition of The Pilgrim’s Regress…was the key I needed to make sense of those moments when the door opens and as quickly closes. He treats the same matter elsewhere, in the final chapter of The Problem of Pain…Most recently, and in much greater detail, he has carried his exploration further with Surprised by Joy…Other books that come to mind are: Martin Buber, I and Thou…Charles Williams, The Figure of Beatrice…Descent into Hell…All Hallows’ Eve…All these books, in their very different fashions, illuminate “the Way of the Affirmation of Images”, and that is the subject of the present work.’ ‘The Way of the Affirmation of Images’ is one of the themes of Charles Williams’s The Figure of Beatrice: A Study in Dante (1943).

65 Ronald Syme, I, Mungo Park (London: Burke, 1951).

66 ‘meaning’.

67 Austin Tappan Wright (1883–1931), Islandia (New York; Toronto: Farrar & Rinehart, 1941).

68 Alastair Fowler, ‘C. S. Lewis: Supervisor’, The Yale Review, 91, no. 4 (October 2003), p. 76: ‘Lewis always remembered to pass on new scholarship…We also exchanged less academic books: he made me aware of David Lindsay’s Voyage to Arcturus, and I responded, less successfully, with Austin Wright’s Islandia.’

69 Wystan Hugh Auden (1907–73), poet, was educated at Christ Church, Oxford. By 1956, when nominated for the position of Oxford’s Professor of Poetry, he had published many volumes of poetry, including The Orators (1932), The Dog Beneath the Skin (1935), The Age of Anxiety (1947) and The Shield of Achilles (1955). See Humphrey Carpenter, W. H. Auden: A Biography (1981).

70 Enid Starkie (1897–1970), Fellow of Somerville College, Oxford, persuaded Auden to become a candidate for the position of Professor of Poetry in 1956. Lewis would have supported Nevill Coghill for the position, but Starkie persuaded Coghill to support Auden. The other candidates were Harold Nicolson and the Shakespeare scholar, G. Wilson Knight. Auden won the election and served as Professor of Poetry from 1956 to 1961. See Carpenter, W. H. Auden: A Biography, pp. 380–2.

71 ‘The Rest of Time’, mentioned in the letter to Fowler of 22 February 1955.

72 Lewis delivered the annual toast and read an oration, ‘Sir Walter Scott’, to the Edinburgh Sir Walter Scott Club at their annual meeting on 2 March 1956. It is published in SLE.

73 Till We Have Faces, Part II, ch. 4, p. 305.

74 Gibb replied on 2 March 1956: ‘I prefer BAREFACE to TILL WE HAVE FACES. The new suggestion does not roll off the tongue very well, or rather off the lips’ (Bodleian Library, Dep. c. 771, fol. 138).

75 This was the blurb eventually used on the jacket of Till We Have Faces.

76 Sir John Garnett Banks (1889–1974) was born and brought up in Edinburgh. He became a member of Edinburgh town council in 1936 and served it as treasurer, 1950–3, and Lord Provost, 1954–7.

77 Gibb wrote to Lewis on 2 March 1956: ‘John Green, who has been a very close friend since we were up at Cambridge and who is now Director of Talks at the B.B.C., wants us to find a fellow of about 40…to come in as a layman on the religious talks side of the B.B.C. He must have broad views and be the sort of chap who could design programmes as well as cope with the various sects from Roman Catholicism to Wee Frees. Do you happen to know of anyone’ (Bodleian Library, Dep. c. 771, fol. 148).

78 He was referring to Jonathan Francis Goodridge, whose biography appears in CL II, p. 936n.

79 Barbara Halpern, a producer at the North American Service of the BBC, wrote to Lewis on 1 March 1956: ‘I am writing to invite you to record a talk forming part of the BBC contribution to an American series called “Your Living Thoughts”…This series aims at putting on the air short statements, by men and women well known in their own walk of life, on what they have learnt from life and what they would like to pass on…These statements are only 3 1/2 to four minutes long.’

80 Dunbar reopened the discussion on Statius by giving Lewis references in favour of his position. She had discovered two places in the Thebaid where Statius used conubia to mean ‘spouse’ rather than ‘marriage’. Lewis was, therefore, correct in reading the word poetically to mean ‘spouse’ (Cuneo, ‘Selected Literary Letters of C. S. Lewis’, p. 90).

81 This did not satisfy Dunbar, who replied that Lewis–being older–was likely to meet Statius in Paradise–or Purgatory–before she could get there. By that time Lewis would have argued Statius into a corner (ibid., p. 91).

82 i.e., Dunbar, on the Scottish coast to the east of Edinburgh.

83 Mere Christianity, Bk. III, ch. 2, ‘The “Cardinal Virtues”’, p. 78: ‘In the days when the second Cardinal virtue was christened “Temperance”, it…referred not specially to drink, but to all pleasures; and it meant not abstaining, but going the right length and no further. It is a mistake to think that Christians ought all to be tee-totallers; Mohammedanism, not Christianity, is the teetotal religion. Of course it may be the duty of a particular Christian, or of any Christian, at a particular time, to abstain from strong drink, either because he is the sort of man who cannot drink at all without drinking too much, or because he is with people who are inclined to drunkenness and must not encourage them by drinking himself. But the whole point is that he is abstaining, for a good reason, from something which he does not condemn and which he likes to see other people enjoying.’

84 John 2:1–11.

85 Matthew 11:19: ‘The Son of man came eating and drinking, and they say, Behold a man gluttonous, and a winebibber, a friend of publicans and sinners. But wisdom is justified of her children.’

86 This photo is mentioned in the letter to Mary Willis Shelburne of 8 February 1956.

87 Revelation 2:26–8.

88 MacDonald, Diary of an Old Soul, August, vii, 1.

89 Sir Walter Scott. See the letter to Shelburne of 4 March 1956.

90 See the letter of 4 March 1956.

91 On the pages of what was to be Till We Have Faces.

92 i.e., between upright type on the left and italics on the right.

93 Lewis included here a drawing of an open book. His intention was that ‘Bareface’ would serve as the running headline on the left side of the left-hand pages, while ‘A Myth Retold’ would appear on the right side of all right-hand pages. This plan was used in the published work.

94 Geoffrey Bles were planning a new impression of The Great Divorce.

95 Canon Roger Lloyd, ‘Love and Charity and Shakespeare’, The Manchester Guardian Weekly, 74, no. 7 (16 February 1956), p. 6: ‘I worked out the formula, “Christian love is the steady and settled disposition of the will to seek the good of the beloved” and expanded that ad lib. But I was never completely happy about it. It was not until I read Dr C. S. Lewis’s [ English Literature in the Sixteenth Century ]that I saw a new light. In it Dr Lewis discourses on the meaning of Shakespeare’s sonnets, treating them as a kind of record of Shakespeare’s own progress from love to charity. At one time it seemed to be no more than lust, at another possessiveness, an insistence on exclusive rights. But he ended in a region “in which love abandons all claims and flowers into charity: after that it makes little odds what the root was like.” Thus the sonnets chart the course which leads from “extreme particularity to the highest universality”, and in that Shakespeare is “not so much our best as our only love poet”.’

96 i.e. Walsh’s Nellie and her Flying Crocodile.

97 Luke 17:20.

98 Barfield had sent Lewis the manuscript of his Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry (London: Faber and Faber, 1957).

99 ‘Notes Toward a Study in Idolatry’.

100 Barfield, Saving the Appearances, ch. 2, p. 19: ‘It is…not necessary to maintain that collectivity is the only test for distinguishing between a representation and a collective representation (though, to creatures for whom insanity is round the corner, it is often likely to be the crucial one).’

101 ibid., p. 20. The sentence in question was changed to: ‘The familiar world–that is, the world which is apprehended, not through instruments and inference, but simply–is for the most part dependent upon the percipient.’

102 ibid.: ‘I may say…that I “hear a thrush singing”. But in strict truth all that I ever merely “hear”–all that I ever hear simply by virtue of having ears–is sound. When I “hear a thrush singing”, I am hearing, not with my ears alone, but with all sort of other things like mental habits, memory, imagination, feeling and…will.’

103 ibid., ch. 3, pp. 22–3: ‘It is almost impossible to keep in mind, that there is no such thing as unfelt solidity.’ The point Lewis made is found in a footnote on p. 23.

104 In Chapter 3, ‘Figuration and Thinking’, Barfield distinguishes between ‘Figuration’, ‘Alpha-thinking’ and ‘Beta-thinking’. (1) The physical world, a world made up of particles, is independent of our sensations and perception. However, when our sense-organs are related to the particles in some way the ‘percipient mind’ recognizes these particles as ‘things’. Barfield calls this ‘figuration’. (2) When we think about these ‘things’ or ‘representations’, and speculate about their relations with each other, this is ‘alpha-thinking’. (3) When we think about these ‘things’ and ‘representations’ and their relation to our own minds, this is ‘beta-thinking’.

105 ‘real things’.

106 Barfield, Saving the Appearances, ch. 6, p. 41: ‘Hitherto we have spoken of representations and of the unrepresented; but we have said nothing of any “represented”. This raises the question whether representation was the proper word to use at all, or whether it is merely misleading. If an appearance can properly be called a representation, it will certainly be a representation of something.’

107 ibid., p. 45: ‘They were the only sort of atoms which alpha-thinking about participated phenomena could present to itself for the purpose of speculation.’

108 ‘hypotheses’.

109 Barfield, Saving the Appearances, ch. 7, pp. 50–1: ‘When the ordinary man hears that the Church told Galileo that he might teach Copernicanism as a hypothesis which saved all the celestial phenomena satisfactorily, but “not as being the truth”, he laughs. But this was really how Ptolemaic astronomy had been taught!’

110 Barfield attached a note to the end of ch. 7 which begins: ‘The reader who wishes to verify, or investigate further, the argument of this Chapter, should consult P. Duhem’s Le Systéme du Monde, Histoire des doctrines cosmologiques de Platon à Copernic. Paris 1913–17.’

111 Barfield, Saving the Appearances, ch. 7, pp. 55–6: ‘Not only did [Francis Bacon] maintain that knowledge was to be valued for the power it gives man over nature; but he practically made success in this aim a part of his definition of knowledge. The key words he uses to distinguish the knowledge he exalts from the knowledge pursued by the Schoolmen are “fruit” and “operation”. In other words, not only “science” but knowledge itself, that is, the only knowledge that is not mere trifling, is, for him–technology.’

112 ibid., pp. 56–7: ‘We could not limit the new and more hypothetical way of thinking to nuclear, or recent physics. The laws of gravity, for example, and of inertia, must go the same way as the electrons, as far as any ultimate validity is concerned. Secondly, you cannot really isolate one science from others in this way, nor is it the practice to do so. One has only to think of the effects of physical theory, treated as fact, on the sciences of medicine and astronomy as exemplified in radiotherapy and astrophysics. Thirdly, and most important of all for my purposes, the hypotheses do in fact, get into the collective representations; many of them are, and others soon may be, implicit in the very “nature” which surrounds us.’

113 ibid., ch. 10, pp. 65–6: ‘By treating the phenomena of nature as objects wholly extrinsic to man, with an origin and evolution of their own independent of man’s evolution and origin, and then by endeavouring to deal with these objects as astronomy deals with the celestial appearances or physics with the particles, nineteenth-century science, and nineteenth-century speculation, succeeded in imprinting on the minds and imaginations of men their picture of an evolution of idols.’

114 ibid., ch. 11, p. 74: ‘Exceptional men did sometimes distinguish between the literal and the symbolical use of words and images before the scientific revolution. On the question of hell, for instance, John Scotus Erigena distinguished in the seventh century between the symbol and the symbolized.’

115 ibid., p. 77: ‘We turn our eyes on the sea–and at once we are aware that we are looking at one of the four elements, of which all things on earth are composed…Earth, Water, Air and Fire are part of ourselves, and we of them.’

116 ‘which part?’ ibid., ch. 13, p. 85. At Lewis’s prompting Barfield supplied a complete reference to St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Part I, Question 34, Article 3.

117 ibid., p. 86: ‘One may reflect…on the frequent appearances made by Grammar and the other liberal arts, as persons, in medieval allegory, and how easily and naturally they mingle there with the strange figure of the Goddess Natura–at once so like and so unlike the Persephone of Greek mythology.’

118 The Wife of Bath is one of the characters in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.

119 ‘pure actuality’.

120 Barfield, Saving the Appearances, ch. 13, p. 88: ‘The being of God is wholly actual, and is at the same time His existence; but, for creatures, it is only their existence which actualizes–actualizes not their own being, but the being of God, in which they participate.’

121 Because Lewis dismissed ‘Historicism’, as explained in his essay of that name, Barfield probably was thinking of him in ch. 14, p. 92: ‘We need not pay too much attention to those historians who cautiously refuse to detect any process in history, because it is difficult to divide into periods, or because the periods are difficult to date precisely…We should rather remind them that, if there is no process, there is in fact no such thing as history at all, so that they themselves must be regarded as mere chroniclers and antiquarians–a limitation which I cannot fancy they would relish.’

122 In the typescript of ch. 19, Barfield probably quoted Sir Philip Sidney, who said in The Defence of Poetry (1595), 24: ‘Poesie…is an Art of Imitation.’ However, he changed his mind; the published text reads: ‘For Scaliger…the poet is one who (quoting English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Bk. III, ch. 1, p. 302) “maketh a new Nature and so maketh himself as it were a new God”’ (p. 128).

123 Barfield, Saving the Appearances, ch. 19, pp. 131–2: ‘In the case of nature there is no danger of my fancying that she exists to express my personality. I know in that case that what is meant, when I say she is my representation, is, that I stand, whether I like it or not, in (I do not love the expression, but I can find no defter one in English) a “directionally creator” relation to her.’

124 Possibly a fanciful Society for the Protection of Adjectives.

125 Barfield, Saving the Appearances, ch. 20, p. 140: ‘Cancer is a process of generation, and once we admit the concept of the potentially phenomenal, we must see that generation is not a transition from not-being to being, but a transition from potential to phenomenal existence.’

126 ibid., ch. 25, pp. 184–5: ‘It will not be easy for the [Church] to accept the possibility that her charge has grown to need additional nourishment; or that revelation of the mystery of the kingdom was not turned off at the tap when the New Testament canon was closed, but is the work of an earth-time.’

127 A play on 1 Corinthians 13:1.

128 This letter follows in WHL immediately after that to Mrs Halvorson. It is possible that Julie was Mrs Halvorson’s daughter.

129 Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, Bk. II, ch. 7.

130 Behold the Glory.

131 See Lewis’s essay ‘First and Second Things’ in First and Second Things, and reprinted in EC.

132 i.e., the poet Kathleen Raine. See Kathleen Raine in the Biographical Appendix.

133 See Kathleen Raine in the Biographical Appendix. Raine had been married since 1938 to the poet Charles Madge (1912–96), and Lewis presumably thought she preferred to be called by her married name.

134 Kathleen Raine, Collected Poems (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1956).

135 ‘roughness’.

136 Frank Templeton Prince, The Italian Element in Milton’s Verse (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954). The second chapter, ‘Della Casa and the Heroic Sonnet’, is devoted to the Italian poet, Giovanni Della Casa (1503–56).

137 A Roman gladiator who fought with a net, trident and dagger.

138 This poem is published in King, C. S. Lewis, Poet, pp. 295–6.

139 Till We Have Faces, Part II, ch. 2, p. 281: ‘Then I looked at Ungit herself…The story was that, at the very beginning, she had pushed her way up out of the earth; a foretaste of, or an ambassador from, whatever things may live and work down there, one below the other, all the way down, under the dark and weight and heat.’

140 Homer, Iliad, VI, 400.

141 i.e. from the island of Aegina.

142 John Reginald Biggs (1909–88), who illustrated the cover of Till We Have Faces, was at this time head of the graphic design department at Brighton Polytechnic. See his biography in Alan Horne, The Dictionary of 20th Century British Book Illustrators (1994).

143 ‘limit’ (Aphrodite, the statue).

144 ‘boundlessness’ (Ungit, the stone).

145 The identity of the recipient of this letter remains unknown.

146 John Milton, Il Penseroso (1645), 49–50: ‘And add to these retired Leisure,/That in trim gardens takes his pleasure.’

147 William Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part 2 (1600), III, i, 31: ‘Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.’

148 Charles Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby (1838–9).

149 Dunbar had been attending Lewis’s lectures on ‘Some Difficult Words’, and she questioned what Lewis had said about the word ‘Nature’.

150 Sappho, fragment 156: ‘more golden than gold’. Lewis misremembered the Greek. See the letter of 23 April 1956.

151 ‘origin, nature, kind’.

152 ‘bring forth, grow’.

153 sensus obscenus: ‘indecent’.

154 ‘offspring’.

155 Camilla was the legendary warrior maiden of early Italy. Her story is told by Virgil in Aeneid, Book 11. See also the letter to Nan Dunbar of 18 October 1963.

156 The proverbially shrewish wife of Socrates.

157 Powers of retribution and judgement.

158 The personification of ‘fault-finding’.

159 A notably censorious Greek cynic philosopher of the fourth century BC.

160 Translation by Nan Dunbar from Cuneo, ‘Selected Literary Letters of C. S. Lewis’, p. 92. The final line (‘Per quam non licet esse negligentem’) is a direct quotation of Catullus, Poem 10, 34. For the Greek phrase, see p. 1466, n. 141.

161 Dunbar had invited him to a college dinner.

162 The Great Divorce: A Dream (London: Bles, 1945), Preface, p. ix: ‘His hero travelled into the past: and there, very properly, found raindrops that would pierce him like bullets…’ The sentence also appears correctly in the 1997 Fount edition.

163 Lewis was confused about the publication date of The Great Divorce and why ‘found raindrops’ changed from time to time. Gibb looked into the matter and sent this account of the book’s history in a letter of 25 April 1956: ‘Curiouser and curiouser. This is what happened. THE GREAT DIVORCE was all printed for publication in November 1945 and indeed the bibliographical note stated “First Published November 1945.” But it wasn’t. Probably the binder failed to keep to his promises and in fact publication took place on the 14th January 1946. So in reprints we have always had “First Published January 1946.”
‘So much for the apparent discrepancy in the date of publication. As to the shape of raindrops this is what we have: (1) Original edition (as in your bookshelf) “found”–as it should be. (2) Second printing (June 1946) “ound” (sic). The “f” had disappeared altogether. (3) Third printing (October 1952) exit “ound” and back comes “f” but in such a poor condition that it looks like an “r”…(4) Fourth printing (May 1956) Ounds and Rounds put to flight and at last the correct word is restored’ (Bodleian Library, Dep. c. 771, fol. 166).

164 See Kathryn Stillwell in the Biographical Appendix.

165 The publishers, liking neither Bareface nor Till We Have Faces as a title, but having to choose between them, decided on the latter.

166 in the street.

167 In his letter of 25 April 1956 Gibb said: ‘I wonder if you know of anyone who might take this one on? I gathered from a meeting of school inspectors and others in the educational world yesterday that there is a great need for a new translation of the [Old Testament] Prophets’ (Bodleian Library, Dep. c. 771, fol. 165).

168 In a letter from Philinda Krieg to Lewis of 21 April 1956 was a note from Laurence: ‘The part that I think shows facts of life best, is the part when the children wondered what would happen if they were killed in Narnia, but thought it would be better to die there than in a dull way in their own world. Whether they knew the Apostles’ Creed or not, I don’t know…When [our] pastor talked about the Apostles’ Creed, I only believed the part about life after death for a short time. But since I read the Last Battle I believe it all the time.’

169 He was referring to the ‘Note’ about his reinterpretation of the Cupid and Psyche myth. Harcourt Brace published it at the end of their edition of Till We Have Faces. It did not appear in the English edition.

170 Passepartout is a character in Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days, and Nemo a character in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870).

171 Pertinax is a character in Verne’s short story, ‘Le Mariage de Monsieur Anselme des Tilleuls’ (1850s).

172 In Samuel Butler’s satirical novel, Erewhon, names are created by spelling words backwards, an example being ‘Erewhon’ itself which is (approximately) ‘Nowhere’ spelled backwards.

173 This letter was first published in Essays in Criticism, VI (April 1956), p. 247, under the title ‘De Descriptione Temporum’.

174 Ralph Maud, ‘C. S. Lewis’s Inaugural’, Essays in Criticism, V, no. 4 (October 1955), pp. 390–3. In his article Maud criticizes Lewis’s inaugural lecture, ‘De Descriptione Temporum’, as well as English Literature in the Sixteenth Century. He maintains that in the latter work Lewis’s treatment of the Latin orations of Joannes Rainoldus is typical of his ‘relaxed expression of a personal and contradictory opinion: “But if we sit down to Rainoldus for a whole morning we shall be disappointed,”…“But if we sit down to Rainoldus for a whole morning”!–this urbane assurance is tantalizing, not dampening. One is not being domineered or distanced. Rather, Professor Lewis makes it seem fairly easy to contradict him’ (p. 392).

175 William Shakespeare, Sonnet 151, 1: ‘Love is too young to know what conscience is.’ The quotation appears on the title page of Till We Have Faces.

176 Till We Have Faces is dedicated ‘To Joy Davidman’.

177 Gebbert had decided to move to New York City.

178 ‘for the sake of argument’.

179 Hebrews 11:1.

180 St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Part II, ii, Question 36, Article 1, ‘Whether Envy is a Kind of Sorrow?’, Objection 4: ‘Damascene (De Fide Orthodoxa, ii, 14) calls envy a species of sorrow, and says that “envy is sorrow for another’s good.”’

181 Brother Lawrence, author of The Practice of the Presence of God.

182 Matthew 6:10.

183 ‘naturally’.

184 Matthew 23:37.

185 McCallum had suggested ‘Love is too Young’ as a possible title for Till We Have Faces.

186 Of Surprised by Joy.

187 Farrer had asked Lewis to criticize her poem ‘Summer’s Term’. On receiving his comments, she revised the poem and attached it to his letter. The revised poem is reproduced here following the letter.

188 A Short Bible, Arranged by Austin Farrer, D. D. (London: Collins, 1956).

189 ‘popular works’.

190 John Crow (1904–69) was educated at Charterhouse and Worcester College, Oxford, where he took his BA in 1928. Crow distinguished himself as a lay theologian and he spent a good deal of time helping at the Wellington Mission in Walworth. He was declared unfit for service in the Second World War, and so he joined the staff of Wellington College. In 1945 he went to King’s College, London, beginning his academic career at the age of forty-one as a temporary lecturer. It was seventeen years before he was promoted to Reader. He was, however, a man of wide-ranging erudition and a distinguished scholar in the field of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama. From 1968–9 Crow was Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh.

191 The American student Dabney Adams was spending a year at London University doing research on the literary theory underlying Lewis’s work. Crow, her supervisor, sent a copy of her bibliography to Lewis for him to check for omissions. See Lewis’s letter to Adams of 1 June 1956.

192 Dabney Adams (later Hart) (1926–) was born in Nashville, Tennessee, and received her BA in English from Agnes Scott College, Decatur, Georgia, in 1948, her MA in English from Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee, and her Ph.D. in English from the University of Wisconsin. She taught at Florida State University, the University of Wisconsin and at Georgia State University as associate professor of English until she retired in 1993. She is the author of Through the Open Door: A New Look at C.S. Lewis (1984).

193 Masson, an American correspondent, said in his annotation to this letter: ‘The following letter from C. S. Lewis replies to the questions on a point of sexual ethics to which he refers in several of his books without saying anything very specific. It seemed to me that masturbation, being a very pressing concern for very many young people (if no others), should be dealt with more frankly. Probably since the time when this letter was written, masturbation, along with all other matters sexual, has been frequently dealt with from the Christian and every other point of view; but in those days, so far as I could find out, popular moralists either ignored the matter or said things that seemed silly’ (Wade Center).

194 Charles Williams, Descent into Hell (1937).

195 Nothing more is known of this unfinished story by Lewis.

196 Mrs Steed wrote from Canada.

197 George MacDonald, Unspoken Sermons, 3 vols. (1867, 1885, 1889).

198 George MacDonald, Phantastes: A Faerie Romance (1858); Lilith: A Romance (1895).

199 George MacDonald, The Lost Princess or, The Wise Woman (1895).

200 In Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Prospero is the usurped duke of Milan, and father of Miranda. On the island with Prospero and his daughter is the savage and deformed slave, Caliban.

201 Shakespeare, The Tempest, I, ii, 350–1: ‘I had peopled else/This isle with Calibans.’

202 Dunbar attended the same performance of the Bacchae that Lewis saw on 22 February 1956, and afterwards she lent him Euripides’ Bacchae, ed. E. R. Dodds (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1944).

203 i.e. the Laws of England prevented him from sending her money.

204 The proofs of Till We Have Faces.

205 Chang was teaching in Singapore at this time.

206 i.e.. the quotation from Shakespeare which was to appear on the title page of Till We Have Faces.

207 Till We Have Faces, Pt. II, ch. 4, p. 305: ‘Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean?’

208 In a letter to Lewis of 11 June 1956 Gibb said: ‘I have had a letter from the B.B.C. asking if you would be agreeable to a dramatized version of T.L.T.W. [ The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe ] to be put on Children’s Hour. I had a long talk with the lady who deals with such matters…and explained that this was too general a question to which a definite answer could be given. We don’t want to be in the position that they go and make a mess of it but on the other hand I expect you would be willing to consider the idea if you could first have a chance to talk with the man who would be writing the script. This is Lance Sieveking and they say they would not dream of even starting on the thing at all before or unless he had a word with you’ (Bodleian Library, Dep. c. 771, fol. 179).

209 John Milton, Sonnet VII, ‘On Being Arrived at Twenty-Three Years of Age’ (1645), 3.

210 Luke 16:19–22.

211 Thomas De Quincey, Works, vol. XI, ed. Julian North (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2003), ‘Second Paper on Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts’, p. 400.

212 In April 1948 the House of Commons had voted to suspend capital punishment for five years, but this was overturned by the House of Lords. Lewis might have read an article, ‘Total Abolition of Death Penalty’, The Times (29 June 1956), pp. 3–4, in which it was announced that the House of Commons had again voted to suspend capital punishment for five years. A few days after this letter was written, it was announced in The Times (11 July 1956), p. 6, that the House of Lords had once more rejected abolition. Capital punishment was finally abolished in Britain in 1964 by the Labour government.
Notions prevalent by the middle of the twentieth century that the only legitimate motives for punishment were the desire to deter others by example and to mend the criminal had led Lewis to criticise what he called the ‘humanitarian theory of punishment’, first ventilated in That Hideous Strength: ‘If it were even whispered that the NICE wanted powers to experiment on criminals, you’d have all the old women of both sexes up in arms and yapping about humanity. Call it re-education of the mal-adjusted, and you have them all slobbering with delight that the brutal era of retributive punishment has at last come to an end’ (ch. 2, part I, p. 36). Lewis enlarged on his views in the essay ‘The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment’: ‘According to the Humanitarian theory, to punish a man because he deserves it…is mere revenge…When this theory is combined, as frequently happens, with the belief that all crime is more or less pathological, the idea of mending tails off into that of healing or curing and punishment becomes therapeutic. Thus it appears at first sight that we have passed from the harsh and self-righteous notion of giving the wicked their deserts to the charitable and enlightened one of tending the psychologically sick…My contention is that this doctrine, merciful though it appears, really means that each one of us, from the moment he breaks the law, is deprived of the rights of a human being’ (EC, pp. 698–9).

213 i.e. being energetic and playful.

214 David Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus.

215 Lewis attended Queen’s Elizabeth II’s garden party at Buckingham Palace on 12 July 1956.

216 A reference to the royal garden party in Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), ch. 9, ‘The Queen’s Croquet Ground’.

217 Absurd, as situations often are in the operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan.

218 To the Harcourt Brace edition of Till We Have Faces.

219 i.e., the ‘Note’ on Apuleius’s version of the myth of Cupid and Psyche which is printed in the US edition.

220 David Mathew (1902–75), Archbishop of Apamea in Bithynia, was the brother of Lewis’s fellow Inkling, Fr Gervase Mathew (see his biography in CG). After serving in the First World War, David Mathew went up to Balliol College where he took his BA in 1923. Shortly afterwards he and his brother wrote The Reformation and the Contemplative Life (1934). Following his ordination in 1929 Mathew served in Cardiff, and he was Chaplain to Roman Catholics in the University of London, 1934–44. He was Auxiliary Bishop of Westminster, 1938–45, and while apostolic delegate to the British colonies of Africa, 1946–53, he was made Archbishop of Apamea. His numerous books include Catholicism in England 1535–1935 (1936), as well as a number of novels and biographies.

221 John Borlase Hamilton (b. 1905) was Lewis’s first cousin on his mother’s side. He was one of the sons of Augustus Warren Hamilton (1866–1945) and worked in his father’s firm, Hamilton & McMaster, Marine Boilermakers and Engineers, Belfast.

222 A fishing harbour in Gweebarra Bay on the west coast of County Donegal.

223 Cherrie Robbins, a distant cousin, was the daughter of Colonel Herbert E. Robbins and Kitty Robbins, sister of Lady Ewart. During the First World War Cherrie worked as a member of the Voluntary Aid Detachment at a military hospital in Oxford. She was now in Belfast. There are a number of references to her in CL I.

224 Francis H. P. Knight was writing from 7 Goscote Place, Walsall, Staffordshire.

225 Nicholas Camille Flammarion (1842–1925), Uranie, trans. Mary J. Serrano (New York: Cassell, c. 1896). The novel was translated as Urania by Augusta Rice Stetson (London: Chatto & Windus, 1891).

226 Athanasius Kircher, Iter Exstaticum Coelestre (1656). See the reference to this work in CL II, p. 237.

227 Christopher Derrick (1921–), Catholic author and journalist, was born on 12 June 1921, the son of Thomas Derrick and Katherine Helen (Sharratt) Derrick. He matriculated at Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1940 and began reading English with Lewis. He served in the Royal Air Force, 1940–5, but returned to Oxford in 1945 and took his BA in 1947. He has been literary adviser to several London publishers, and his many books include The Moral and Social Teaching of the Church (1964), Church Authority and Intellectual Freedom (1981), C. S. Lewis and the Church of Rome (1981) and That Strange Divine Sea: Reflections on Being a Catholic (1983).

228 See the biography of the Rev. Frank Edward Brightman in CL I, p. 658n. Brightman, a distinguished ecclesiastical historian, was a Fellow of Magdalen, 1902–32.

229 The National Institute of Co-ordinated Experiments in That Hideous Strength is a conspiracy which, disguised as a scientific, humanitarian institute, plans to take over England.

230 1 Kings 19:18: ‘Yet I have left me seven thousand in Israel, all the knees which have not bowed unto Baal.’
F(rank) R(aymond) Leavis (1895–1978) was Cambridge born, bred and educated. He read English at Emmanuel College and was a probationary lecturer at Emmanuel, 1927–31. In 1932 he became Director of Studies in English and a Fellow. Appointed a college lecturer at Downing College in 1935, he established over the years an ‘English School’ that in some ways rivalled the official English Faculty, developing over time a new critical approach to literature that largely superseded the historical and narrative approach favoured by Lewis. Leavis was finally invited to join the English faculty board in 1954. He retired in 1962.
From 1932–53 Leavis was chief editor of Scrutiny, a periodical that expressed a belief in ‘a necessary relationship between the quality of the individual’s response to art and his general fitness for a humane existence’. Lewis attacked this ‘inordinate esteem of culture’ in his essay ‘Christianity and Culture’, published in Theology, XL (March 1940), p. 177, and reprinted in Christian Reflections. He later said in A Preface to Paradise Lost (1942), ch. 19: ‘It is not that [Dr Leavis] and I see different things when we look at Paradise Lost. He sees and hates the very same that I see and love. Hence the disagreement between us tends to escape from the realm of literary criticism. We differ not about the nature of Milton’s poetry, but about the nature of man, or even the nature of joy itself.’

231 Don Camillo is a lovable Italian priest created by Giovanni Guareschi (1908–68). The stories of Don Camillo fill six volumes, and by this time Lewis had probably read The Little World of Don Camillo (1951) and Don Camillo and the Prodigal Son (1952). Three Don Camillo books had already been made into Italian films.

232 The words are found in the hymn ‘Through all the changing scenes of life’, no. 502 in The English Hymnal (1906).

233 Jean Racine, Athalie (1691), I, i, 65: ‘I fear God…and I have no other fear.’

234 Daniel Defoe set the adventures recorded in Robinson Crusoe (1719) in the Juan Fernández Islands off the west coast of South America.

235 John 16:7.

236 Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (1860–1), ch. 27.

237 p. p.

238 Harcourt Brace planned to use the blurb Lewis sent to Jocelyn Gibb on 29 February 1956 on the jacket of their edition of Till We Have Faces, and McCallum wanted to know whether it should begin ‘This interpretation of an old story’ or ‘This re-interpretation of an old story’.

239 Presumably a contract for the Dutch translation of Out of the Silent Planet.

240 This was the home of Frank and Vera Henry.

241 See Lewis’s comments about Kuhn’s Encounter with Nothingness in CL II, p. 999.

242 See his comments on this book in the letter to Dom Bede Griffiths of 9 April 1950.

243 Shelburne’s cat, Fanda, had just died.

244 See Stephen Schofield in the Biographical Appendix.

245 Forbidden Planet (1956), story by Irving Block and Allen Adler, directed by Fred M. Wilcox.

246 i.e., Evelyn Waugh.

247 William Vaughan Wilkins, Valley Beyond Time (London: Cape, 1955). In this story an American senator, Purvis, finds his way into a wood that mysteriously appears on the coast of Pembrokeshire. An English boy, Midge, heir to a title and estate, and a duke’s daughter, also find their way into the wood. The three live in this timeless land until the boy emerges at last, together with a lovely girl who is a princess of the country, to find that the outer world has moved on ten years. They find it impossible to adjust to the change.

248 In his ‘Notes on the Letters’, Vanauken said of this letter: ‘V had fallen into discouragement at the remoteness of God and had determined to reject Christ but found he could not do so’ (Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. lett. c. 220/2, fol. 152b).

249 Homer, Odyssey, V, 67: ‘to whom, as well, activity on the seas was a concern’.

250 His brother was Robert William Chapman (1881–1960), whose biography appears in CL II, p. 203n.

251 John Alexander Chapman, Critical Papers, 4 vols. (1956–7).

252 Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, First Part, p. 119.

253 ‘Atticus’ was the pseudonymous author of a column in the Sunday Times. At this time ‘Atticus’ was Ian Fleming (1908–64), journalist and thriller writer best known for Casino Royale (1953), Live and Let Die (1954) and other novels featuring his hero, James Bond.

254 The Swedish translation of The Abolition of Man was called Människans Avskaffanden, trans. Martin S. Allwood (Stockholm: Natur o. Kultur, 1957).

255 Derrick sent Lewis a copy of his review of Till We Have Faces before it was published. The review appeared in The Tablet, 208, no. 6072 (6 October 1956), p. 278, and Derrick does not appear to have taken his former tutor’s advice: ‘Dr. Lewis always tells a good story and this is a splendid vehement one, full of stone and wind and spears in an old country, wet mist on the hills: in the centre, an unhappy ugly woman growing painfully above the eternal fight between the South and the North of the Pilgrim’s Regress, between spirit and letter, heat and light, blood and judgement…The practical problem…is the arduous training and developing of flesh to “take it” and it doesn’t help to talk as though “spiritual” meant frail and flimsy, or as though a lustful man lost heaven by being too uncontrollably strong and tough, or as though a human love…could ever be excessive. Delusions such as these lie behind the bitter complaint made by Psyche’s sister (and by us from time to time) against the gods; and this story, which seems to sum up most of what Dr. Lewis has been telling us in one way or another for years, would be great if only because of the majesty and absoluteness of their reply.’

256 The best definition of allegory, as understood by Lewis and Tolkien, is found in Lewis’s Allegory of Love, ch. 3: ‘It is of the very nature of thought and language to represent what is immaterial in picturable terms…You…start with an immaterial fact, such as the passions which you actually experience, and can then invent visibilia [visible things] to express them. If you are hesitating between an angry retort and a soft answer, you can express your state of mind by inventing a person called Ira [Anger] with a torch and letting her contend with another invented person called Patientia [Patience]. This is allegory.’

257 Readers found so many ‘allegories’ in The Lord of the Rings that, on the publication of the second edition in 1966, Tolkien said in the foreword to The Fellowship of the Ring: ‘I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. I much prefer history, true or feigned, with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers. I think that many confuse “applicability” with “allegory” but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author’ (p. 7).

258 Roger Lancelyn Green, A Book of Nonsense, by many authors (London: Dent, 1956); Robin Hood and His Merry Men (London: Thames, 1956).

259 Roger Lancelyn Green, The Land Beyond the North (1958).

260 When he had an occasion to be in Oxford overnight, Green nearly always stayed with a family friend, Mary Stanley-Smith, who lived at 12 Ship Street.

261 The Trout Inn, one of Lewis’s favourite places, is a few miles outside Oxford on Godstow Road and faces the Thames. It was built in the sixteenth century and by 1625 it was serving as an inn. The two-storey building was rebuilt in 1757. Its interior is very cosy with flagstone floors, beamed ceilings and log fires. The Inklings went there often in the summer when they could have their drinks outside by the river. The Trout has for some years been used entirely as a restaurant. A photo of Lewis with James Dundas-Grant, Colin Hardie, R. E. Havard and Peter Havard at the Trout is found in Hooper, Through Joy and Beyond, p. 86.

262 See John Lawlor in the Biographical Appendix. One of Lewis’s former pupils, Lawlor was Professor of English at the University of Keele, 1950–80.

263 The list of the author’s books contained in the Harcourt Brace edition of Surprised by Joy included Broadcast Talks, Beyond Personality and Christian Behaviour as well as Mere Christianity. The list was about to be repeated in Till We Have Faces, and Lewis felt it wrong to repeat the three books that make up Mere Christianity.

264 This was Surprised by Joy.

265 Bodle said of her letter to Lewis: ‘I spoke of some of my own experiences in the English countryside when I spent many of my holidays wandering alone in silence with my bicycle carrying tent, sleeping-bag, food & water. I pitied the coach parties who couldn’t hear or see the little, quiet things’ (Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. lett. c. 220/4, fol. 250).

266 In the same letter to Lewis, Bodle said: ‘I also described problems in trying to make a deaf–almost blind girl aware that there was such a thing as communication between two people’ (ibid.).

267 This letter was taped into Canon Phillips’s copy of Surprised by Joy.

268 Lewis had probably asked Lawlor if he could supply him with a passage from the works of the educationalist, Thomas Arnold (1795–1842). It appears there was a copy of Thomas Arnold’s Sermons (1930) at George Sayer’s home.

269 Lewis’s lectures on medieval and Renaissance literature, so popular at Oxford, were largely ignored by the students at Cambridge.

270 See Derek Brewer in the Biographical Appendix.

271 An invitation to stay with Lawlor at Keele.

272 Penthesilea, an Amazon queen, was one of the greatest warriors of the Trojan War. In Greek myth, fighting on the Trojan side, she was killed by Achilles. Mourning for her beauty, Achilles was mocked by Thersites, famous for his love of argument, and Achilles killed him in a rage.

273 Bradamante is a maiden warrior in Boiardo’s Orlando Innamorato.

274 Clorinda is the leader of the pagan forces in Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso.

275 Song of Songs 4:10.

276 Arctinus of Miletus (c. 750 BC), Aethiopis.

277 Matthew 7:1.

278 Martin Hooton (1901–74) took his BA from Queen’s College, Cambridge, in 1921. He taught at the Felsted Preparatory School, 1936–45, and at the senior school from 1945 until his retirement in 1961. In an explanatory note on his letters from Lewis, Hooton said: ‘I first met C. S. Lewis in 1956. I had written to thank him for the Narnia series of books, the last of which I had just read, and he invited me to come and see him in Magdalene. This meeting took place on October 13th of that year in his rooms in the first court, and he put me at my ease by saying that he could not give me tea there, as his bottle of milk had fallen out of the window: so we went out to the Old Schools’ (Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. lett. c. 220/2, fol. 95).

279 Gebbert had now moved with her mother and son to 715 Park Avenue, Apartment 8-C, New York 21, NY.

280 This was Golden Arrow Cottage at Annagassan. See the letter to Van Deusen of 17 August 1956.

281 Lorraine Nostadt.

282 Michael Edwards (1936–), a chiropodist, was writing to Lewis from c/o 3 Bodley Road, New Malden, Surrey. His notes to the letters he received from Lewis are found in the Bodleian Library (Dep. c. 765, fols. 12–16). Edwards wrote about this first letter from Lewis: ‘This was in response to a 50 odd page letter from me. I was intellectually and emotionally confused as to how Christianity in general and Lewis in particular regarded various aspects of our life and world–especially aspects I had hitherto enjoyed. My puzzlement vis à vis Lewis had been sharpened after reading his scientifiction trilogy, and most of my questions had centred round this. For me the problem was intrinsically practical, not dryly academic’ (ibid., fol. 12).

283 Sir Ernest Barker (1874–1960), political theorist, who held the Chair of Political Science at Cambridge University, 1927–38, and who still lived in Cambridge.

284 Gibb had sent Lewis some copies of Christentum Schlechthin, trans. Brigitte Bernard-Salin (Kln: Helner, 1956), the German translation of Mere Christianity.

285 Ingeborg Hough was the wife of Graham Hough. See the letter to Basil Willey of 26 October 1956.

286 ‘All aglow is the work!’ Virgil, Georgics, IV, 169: ‘Fervet opus, redolentque thymo fragrantia mella’: ‘All aglow is the work, and the fragrant honey is sweet with thyme.’ Virgil also uses the phrase in Aeneid I, 436.

287 Austin and Katharine Farrer were helping Joy to move to The Kilns.

288 William Shakespeare, King Richard II (1597), II, iii, 65.

289 i.e., budgerigars.

290 i.e. their register office marriage on 23 April 1956.

291 The Royal Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

292 See Basil Willey in the Biographical Appendix.

293 Writing to Walter Hooper on 25 September 1970, Willey said that this letter from Lewis ‘answers a suggestion of mine that he might consider being Chairman of the Faculty Board of English’ (Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. lett. c. 200/6, fol. 11).

294 Graham Hough (1908–90) was born on 14 February 1908, the son of Joseph and Clara Hough. He was educated at the University of Liverpool and Queen’s College, Cambridge. Having served in the Scond World War, 1939–45, Hough returned to Cambridge as Fellow of Christ’s College in 1950, and Tutor, 1955–60. Hough was Praelector and Fellow of Darwin College, and Professor of English in the University of Cambridge, 1966–75.

295 Herodotus, Histories, Bk. I, 136.

296 While teaching ten-year-old children in the sixth grade at Chapel Hill Elementary School, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, Hooper had his class write and perform a dramatization of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe on 24 October 1956. They wrote to Lewis about it afterwards.

297 Walsh had applied for a Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, which have been awarded since 1925 to advanced professionals in all fields. He did not receive one.

298 See the note on the Hungarian uprising in the letter to Mary Margaret McCaslin of 15 November 1956.

299 He probably meant to write ‘Sarah’s’.

300 The Rev. Elsie Chamberlain, of the Religious Broadcasting Department of the BBC, wrote to Lewis on 14 November 1956 inviting him to take part in the Lift Up Your Hearts programme: ‘Normally one speaker takes a week in the series. Occasionally we have all six different speakers on a set theme…We purpose such an occasion in February (11th–16th) on the theme “I was an atheist”. I would be very grateful if you would agree to take part.’

301 Mrs McCaslin wrote this letter from Nix Drive, Lake Shore Heights, Gainesville, Georgia.

302 MacDonald, Unspoken Sermons, First Series, ‘The Consuming Fire’, p. 41: ‘The Son of God…suffered unto the death, not that men might not suffer, but that their suffering might be like his.’

303 From 1945 Hungary had been under the control of the USSR. After the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953, the new Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev suggested that the people of Eastern Europe might be offered greater freedom. However, by late 1956 the Hungarians’ problems were exacerbated by a bad harvest, fuel shortages, and a cold and wet autumn. On 23 October, 50,000 students and workers took to the streets of Budapest and issued their ‘Sixteen Points’, which included personal freedom, more food, and the removal of the secret police. This pushed the USSR too far; on 4 November Soviet tanks entered Budapest to restore order, acting with extreme brutality and even killing people. Tanks dragged bodies through the streets of Budapest as a warning to others who continued to protest. The suppression of the uprising was a watershed for Communists in western countries, many of the erstwhile supporters of the USSR now becoming critical of it.

304 Charles Andrew Brady (1912–) was Professor of English at Canisius College, Buffalo, New York. See CL II, p. 629n.

305 In his article, ‘Finding God in Narnia’, America, 96 (27 October 1956), pp. 103–5, Brady stated that the books were ‘The greatest addition to the imperishable deposit of children’s literature since the Jungle Books. Narnia takes its place forever now beside the jasper-lucent landscapes of Carroll, Andersen, MacDonald and Kipling…The child will not respond to these values at once, though they will awaken in his memory when the time comes for full realization. He will respond immediately, however, to the narrative sweep; to the evocation of the heroic mood; to the constant eliciting of the numinous. Very possibly this latter service is the most startling one Lewis renders contemporary childhood, contemporary Catholic childhood not least. He touches the nerve of religious awe on almost every page. He evangelizes through the imagination.’

306 i.e., Till We Have Faces.

307 Dom Gregory Dix, The Shape of the Liturgy (Westminster: Dacre Press, [1945]). Dix (1901–52) was an Anglican Benedictine monk, and this book did much to popularize liturgical studies in the Church of England.

308 The Suez crisis overshadowed even the events in Hungary. The strategically vital Suez Canal ran through Egyptian territory but was jointly owned by Britain and France, and very little of the huge profits made by the canal benefited the Egyptian economy. When in 1956 the Egyptian leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser, nationalized the canal, greatly angering the British and the French, the leaders of Britain, France and Israel colluded secretly to get rid of him. On 29 October 1956, Israeli troops invaded Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula and raced for Suez. The next day, Britain and France offered to temporarily occupy the Canal Zone, suggesting a ten-mile buffer on either side which would separate the Egyptian forces from the Israelis. Nasser refused, and on 31 October Egypt was attacked and invaded by the military forces of Britain and France. In response, the USSR threatened to intervene on Egypt’s behalf. President Eisenhower was greatly concerned and, although facing presidential elections in November, he opposed the actions of Britain, France and Israel, using every power at his command to compel them to stop their bombardment and invasion of Egypt, and to withdraw without profiting from their misadventure. As a result, Nasser’s prestige soared in the Arab world as the leader who had faced down Israel and the West.

309 Lewis was probably referring to his essay ‘Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What’s to be Said’, published in The New York Times Book Review (18 November 1956), p. 3. In that essay, reprinted in Of This and Other Worlds, Lewis said: ‘Professor J. R. R. Tolkien in The Lord of the Rings has shown that the connection between fairy tales and children is not nearly as close as publishers and educationalists think. Many children don’t like them and many adults do. The truth is, as he says, that they are now associated with children because they are out of fashion with adults’ (pp. 59–60). What he meant to say is that ‘the connection between fairy tales and children’ was not made in The Lord of the Rings, but in Tolkien’s essay ‘On Fairy Stories’, reprinted in Tree and Leaf, including the poem Mythopoeia, 2nd edn with an introduction by Christopher Tolkien (1988).

310 ‘Finding God in Narnia’. See the letter to Charles Brady of 16 November 1956.

311 I. O. Evans, The Story of Our World (London: Hutchinson, 1957).

312 When Gibb visited Lewis in Cambridge on 27 November he brought a good many reviews of Till We Have Faces, which Lewis was now returning.

313 Professor Kenneth Reckford (1933–), Classical scholar, was born in New York on 26 May 1933. He took a BA from Harvard University in 1954 and a Ph.D. in 1957. He was an instructor in Classics and General Education at Harvard, 1957–60, and an assistant and then an associate professor of Classics at Harvard, 1960–8. He has been Professor of Classics at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, since 1968.

314 George MacDonald, Short Stories (‘The Light Princess’, ‘The Giant’s Heart’, ‘The Golden Key’) (1928).

315 Lewis was wrong. Cecil Day-Lewis wrote detective stories under the pseudonym ‘Nicholas Blake’.

316 The words of Jesus.

317 Matthew 9:12: ‘They that be whole need not a physician, but they that are sick.’

318 Matthew 17:24–5: ‘And when they were come to Capernaum, they that received tribute money came to Peter, and said, Doth not your master pay tribute? He said, Yes. And when he was come into the house, Jesus prevented him, saying, What thinkest thou, Simon? of whom do the kings of the earth take custom or tribute? Of their own children, or of strangers?’

319 Mark 10:29–30: ‘And Jesus answered and said, Verily I say unto you, There is no man that hath left house, or brethren, or sisters, or father, or mother, or wife, or children, or lands, for my sake, and the gospel’s, But he shall receive an hundredfold now in this time, houses, and brethren, and sisters, and mothers, and children, and lands, with persecutions; and in the world to come eternal life.’

320 Luke 16:1–8.

321 i.e., Joy Gresham.

322 John 21:25: ‘And there are also many other things which Jesus did, the which, if they should be written every one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written.’

323 In the foreword to the second edition of The Lord of the Rings (1966) Tolkien said: ‘As for any inner meaning or “messages”, it has in the intention of the author none. It is neither allegory nor topical…Its main theme was settled from the outset by the inevitable choice of the Ring as the link between it and The Hobbit. The crucial chapter, “The Shadow of the Past”, is one of the oldest parts of the tale. It was written long before the foreshadow of 1939 had yet become a threat of inevitable disaster, and from that point the story would have developed along essentially the same lines, if that disaster had been averted’ (pp. 6–7).

324 Fr Milward devoted a chapter to ‘Allegory’ in A Challenge to C. S. Lewis (Madison, New Jersey: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1995).

325 The Japanese stamp was possibly one of a series of ukiyo-e prints, in which the faces are oddly elongated.

326 ‘painter’ (it is not known who Lewis was referring to); ‘You wonderful fellow’.

327 Harwood’s first wife, Daphne, had died in 1950, and on 1 November 1954 he married Marguerite Lundgren, founder of the London School of Eurythmy.

328 See the biography of Sir Eric Beckett in CL I, p. 686n. He was suffering mental problems.

329 Gebbert had been sent copies of Till We Have Faces and The Last Battle.

330 Psalm 78:66 (Coverdale): ‘So the Lord awaked as one out of sleep: and like a giant refreshed with wine.’

331 In her letter of 28 December Gebbert said: ‘I [have] started yet another creative venture, this time a novel…After penning fifteen plays I thought it was time to try my hand at something else. Half of the novel is completed, but how does one get to the end?…The theme is a minor exposé of our last dwelling place, Carmel, California. I found it so bigoted a community, and with so many strange folk living there, I felt compelled to parody it. It was moving into another planet–a most undesirable one!’ (Bodleian Library, MS. Facs. c. 47, fol. 287).

1 Gilbert Highet (1906–78), Scottish-American classicist, had written a blurb about Till We Have Faces. He had earlier written a piece on Lewis’s interplanetary novels, ‘From World to World’, in People, Places, and Books (1953).

2 John 19:30.

3 This is Lewis’s misquotation of Hugo Dyson. See the letter to Warnie of 3 March 1940 (CL II, pp. 360–1).

4 Lewis was almost certainly remembering Brady’s two-part article, ‘Introduction to Lewis’ and ‘C. S. Lewis II’ in America, 71 (27 May and 10 June 1944). See the letter to Brady of 29 October 1944 (CL II, pp. 529–31).

5 Lewis had in mind Brady’s ‘Unicorns at Oxford’, Books on Trial, 15 (October 1956), pp. 59–60, in which he wrote about Charles Williams, Dorothy L. Sayers, J. R. R. Tolkien, Lewis and the ‘Oxford Circle’.

6 Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass, ch. 7: ‘You might as well try to stop a Bandersnatch!’

7 See David Gresham in the Biographical Appendix.

8 Because Joy was very ill Maureen Blake, Mrs Moore’s daughter, volunteered to look after David and Douglas Gresham at her house in Malvern during the holidays. See Dame Maureen Dunbar of Hempriggs in the Biographical Appendix to CL I, pp. 986–8.

9 Susan Pevensie. See The Last Battle, ch. 12.

10 Dennis William Babbage, OBE (1909–91) matriculated at Magdalene College, Cambridge, in 1924. After taking a First in all parts of the Mathematical Tripos, he served as chief cryptographer at Bletchley Park during the Second World War; the outstanding skill and inventiveness of Babbage and his team is acknowledged in Michael Smith, Station X: The Codebreakers of Bletchley Park (2000). Babbage was a Bye-Fellow of Magdalene, 1931–3, Fellow, 1933–91, Director of Studies in Mathematics, 1934–77, Tutor, 1946, Senior Tutor, 1964–73, and President, 1973–9. He was also University Lecturer, 1936–76, and Senior Proctor, 1953–4. See Codebreakers: The Inside Story of Bletchley Park, ed. F. H. Hinsley and Alan Stripp (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 101–10.

11 Ralph Francis Bennett (1911–2002) matriculated at Magdalene College, Cambridge, in 1929. After taking his BA in History in 1934 he served as Bye-Fellow, 1935–6, College Lecturer in History, 1936–82, Official Fellow, 1938, Tutor, 1932–80, and President, 1979–82. He was also University Lecturer, 1947–79, and Senior Proctor, 1963–4. During the Second World War he served at Bletchley Park as an intelligence analyst, translating and evaluating the Ultra decrypts of the German Enigma cipher. As a historian he achieved eminence in two unrelated fields: medieval ecclesiastical history and modern military history. His books include The Early Dominicans (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1937) and Ultra in the West: The Normandy Campaign of 1944–45 (London: Hutchinson, 1979).

12 From the Greek, meaning ‘of gifts to the needy’.

13 i.e. the Agapony Fund.

14 Mary Cornish, a schoolgirl, was writing from Royal William Yard, Plymouth.

15 Kilby attached a note to this letter saying: ‘Written after I had sent CSL a two-page statement of what I thought TWHF was about and asked for his check.’

16 Tertullian (c. AD 160–c. 225), Apology 17.6: ‘soul by nature Christian’.

17 Luke 2:49: ‘And he said unto them, How is it that ye sought me? Wist ye not that I must be about my Father’s business?’

18 Roger Ian Sharrock (1919–90), John Bunyan scholar, read English at St John’s College, Oxford, and took a BA in 1943. After serving with the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry, 1939–41, he was an assistant master at Rugby College, 1944–6. He taught English at the University of Southampton, 1946–62, and was Professor of English at the University of Durham, 1963–8, and Professor of English Language and Literature at King’s College, University of London, 1968–81. He was general editor of The Miscellaneous Works of John Bunyan, 13 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976–94).

19 In her letter of 7 February 1957 Gebbert said: ‘The Tycoon has been removed from nursery school and we did it with regret plus necessity. First, the tariff was too steep and he was bringing home every germ in Manhattan. Now they tell me any age under five is just too tender for exposure amongst so many children and in such close quarters. If we can keep him occupied until he is five he can attend, for no cost at all, a public school here. Do you know anyone who is associated with Hunter College? They have, I am told, an elementary school (free!) and for children passing specialized tests…The building, by the way, is in the next block from us, so you can understand my eagerness to get the Tycoon in’ (Bodleian Library, MS. Facs. c. 47, fol. 291). In the second line of the letter Lewis presumably meant to write ‘under 5’ rather than ‘under 12’.

20 i.e., Till We Have Faces.

21 A copy of Till We Have Faces.

22 Lewis was writing one of the examination papers for those taking the English Tripos at Cambridge.

23 A Religious of C.S.M.V. [Sister Penelope], The Communicant’s Pocket Book (London: Faith Press, 1960).

24 Encheiridion, the Greek and Latin ‘handbook’ as in Heinrich Joseph Dominicus Denzinger’s Enchiridion Symbolorum et Definitionum (1854), a handbook containing a collection of the chief decrees and definitions of councils, list of condemned propositions, etc., beginning with the oldest forms of the Apostles’ Creed.

25 Tuesday Lobsang Rampa, The Third Eye: The Autobiography of a Tibetan Lama (London: Secker & Warburg, 1956).

26 Kathryn Stillwell, ‘C. S. Lewis: Modern Christian Writer’, His: Magazine of Christian Living, 17 (January 1957), pp. 12–14.

27 Lewis’s essay, ‘Donne and Love Poetry in the Seventeenth Century’, was published in Seventeenth Century Studies Presented to Sir Herbert Grierson, preface by J. Dover Wilson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1938), pp. 64–84. The essay is reprinted in SLE.

28 Vanauken spent several months in Oxford at this time. Referring to this letter, he said in A Severe Mercy, ch. 10, p. 225: ‘We did so meet, and he told me of marrying Joy in a civil ceremony, simply as an act of friendship to prevent the Government deporting her to America as a communist, despite her being a lapsed communist and, in fact, a Jewish Christian. He and she had even drawn up a paper stating that the marriage was not a real one. But in less than a fortnight from our luncheon Lewis was to marry her sacramentally with a priest at the hospital bedside. Lewis told me that he had come to love her, and he wanted to take her home to die.’

29 i.e., the MS of Milward’s poem published as A Poem of The New Creation (Tokyo: The Hokuseido Press, 1970).

30 Dunbar had written to Lewis about various textual questions, at the same time expressing sympathy for Joy’s illness.

31 ‘Dante’s Statius’, Medium Aevum, XXV, no. 3 (1957), pp. 133–9. The essay is reprinted in Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature.

32 Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, Book II, 92, 4–5 in which both the Athenians and the Peloponnesians set up trophies claiming victory in a battle.

33 For an account of Lewis’s visit to Bishop Carpenter see CG, p.80.

34 See the Reverend Peter Bide in the Biographical Appendix.

35 A full account of the marriage is found in the biography of Peter Bide in CG, pp. 631–5.

36 BF, pp. 245–6.

37 Mabel Drew (1918–) was born in Philadelphia, the daughter of Charles and Laura Crabb, members of the Church of the Brethren. She was educated at Ellis College, and attended classes at Temple University, Philadelphia. After the initial excitement of Mere Christianity she went on to read nearly all Lewis’s books, including his literary criticism. She has lived for many years in Kingston, Ontario, Canada, where she does volunteer work at St Mary’s of the Lake Hospital and in several libraries. She is the author of A Way of Seeing, introduction by Roger Bainbridge (Kingston, Ontario: Quarry Press, [1993]).

38 In a letter to Walter Hooper of 26 August 1994 Drew said: ‘At the time of my first letter to [Lewis] I had read some sceptical criticism about the authenticity of the Dead Sea Scrolls. And I knew Lewis would put me right. I completely trust his honesty and integrity. Regretfully, I can’t remember the name of the book I quoted.’

39 John Allegro, The Dead Sea Scrolls (1956). Shortly after publishing his book Allegro claimed that Christianity had borrowed the story of a worshipped and crucified Messiah. But when challenged, he admitted this was based on his interpretation rather than on the actual text of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

40 Matthew 5:17.

41 p.p.

42 Pitter wrote on the envelope of this letter: ‘Not knowing his circumstances as regards money, I had offered a small gift’ (Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. lett. c. 220/3, fol. 143).

43 Mrs Krieg believed the Narnian books should be read in the order in which they were published, while Lewis agreed with Laurence that they be read chronologically according to Narnian time. In the summer of 1963 Lewis had Walter Hooper write down the order in which he preferred the stories to be read: The Magician’s Nephew; The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe; The Horse and His Boy; Prince Caspian; The Voyage of the ‘Dawn Treader’; The Silver Chair; and The Last Battle. Regarding the order in which the stories were written, see CG, ‘The Writing of the Narnias’, pp. 401–5.

44 Bayreuth, Germany, is the site of the music festival where the operas of Richard Wagner are performed.

45 The Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, London.

46 Richard Wagner’s opera, The Flying Dutchman, was first performed on 2 January 1843.

47 p.p.

48 The term ‘noble savage’ expressed a romantic concept of mankind unencumbered by civilization. The concept has particular associations with Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78), but the phrase ‘noble savage’ first appeared in John Dryden, The Conquest of Granada (1670), Part One, I, i: ‘I am as free as Nature first made man,/Ere the base laws of servitude began,/When wild in woods the noble savage ran.’

49 The Carnegie Medal, established by the Library Association in 1936 in memory of the great Scottish-born philanthropist Andrew Carnegie (1835–1919), is awarded annually by children’s librarians for an outstanding book for children and young people. In 1957 it was awarded to Lewis for The Last Battle.

50 Roger Lancelyn Green, Mystery at Mycenae: An Adventure Story of Ancient Greece (London: John Lane, 1957).

51 Roger Lancelyn Green, The Land of the Lord High Tiger (London: G. Bell, 1958).

52 Bice Crichton-Miller (1909–91) was educated at Girton College, Cambridge, taking her BA in 1930. The following year she joined the staff of Sherborne School for Girls, Sherborne, Dorset. She left in 1935 to become head of the history department at Notting Hill and Ealing High School, but returned to Sherborne School in 1948. She was housemistress of Wingfield from 1949 until 1970 when she retired, remaining a part-time member of staff and librarian until July 1978.

53 In a letter to Walter Hooper of 27 April 1983 Crichton-Miller said: ‘I had written to ask if he would preach at a School Service which my House was arranging’ (Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. lett. c. 220/7, fol. 8).

54 Dunbar had suggested they meet to discuss the connection between the classical and Anglo-Saxon worlds.

55 A comedy by Aristophanes produced in 414 BC.

56 Lewis was an Honorary Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, with dining rights.

57 Owen Barfield, Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry (1957).

58 Possibly a reference to a scholarship for some African students being paid by the Agapony Fund.

59 The South African poet Roy Campbell died on 23 April 1957 (see his biography in CL II, p. 736n) and Newby wrote to Lewis on 20 May: ‘Knowing how reluctant you are to broadcast, I hesitate to write and ask whether you would care to speak about Roy Campbell for us. I very well remember, some years ago, sharing a ’bus with Roy in Oxford; he was on his way to see you at Magdalen and spoke of you with great warmth. Anything like a formal obituary talk would, one feels, be inappropriate for Roy Campbell. Would you care to give a talk that would make him alive again for those who did not know him?’

60 The American poet Robert Frost was giving a lecture in Cambridge, and Professor Willey was giving a sherry party for him afterwards. During his trip to England Frost was awarded honorary Doctorates of Letters by Oxford University on 4 June 1957 and by the University of Cambridge on 13 June.

61 Mrs Johnson had come across ‘Numinor’ in the preface to That Hideous Strength. See the letter to William L. Kinter of 24 September 1951. Tolkien’s name was John Ronald Reuel Tolkien.

62 Hebrews 4:9.

63 In the two Catechisms (‘Larger’ and ‘Shorter’) of the Presbyterian Church, Question One is: ‘What is the chief and highest end of man?’ The Answer: ‘Man’s chief and highest end is to glorify God, and fully to enjoy him forever.’

64 Dante, Paradiso, XXVII, 3–6: ‘It intoxicated me…it seemed a universal laugh.’

65 Wade Center.

66 Wade Center.

67 John Keats, The Fall of Hyperion (1856), I, 24.

68 Virgil, Aeneid, I, 209: ‘He presents the semblance of hope in his expression and holds his sorrows deep within his heart.’

69 i.e. Sayers’ Further Papers on Dante.

70 ‘rightly said’.

71 ‘Bravo’: Martial, Epigrams, I. iii, 7.

72 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, vol. I, ch. 13.

73 Sayers, Introductory Papers on Dante.

74 Sir James Jeans (1877–1946) developed an interest in mathematics, physics and astronomy at Cambridge University, and became an authority on specific heats of gases and the mechanism of radiation. Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington (1882–1944), for many years Plumian Professor of Astronomy at Cambridge, was an early exponent of relativity. In Further Papers on Dante, the dialogue between Dante and Eddington is found in the chapter, ‘Dante’s Cosmos’, pp. 78–85.

75 George Morrow (1869–1955), cartoonist, began contributing to Punch magazine in 1906. He joined the staff in 1924 and later became art editor. He regularly drew historical or legendary characters in slightly absurd situations. Lewis probably did not have a particular cartoon in mind.

76 ibid., ‘Dante and Milton’, pp. 148–82.

77 ibid., ‘The Cornice of Sloth’, pp. 119–47.

78 The Greek God of death.

79 Lewis’s address, entitled ‘Kipling’s World’ and given to the English Association on 24 November 1944, is reprinted in SLE.

80 For more on astrology in the Middle Ages see The Discarded Image, ch. 5, ‘The Heavens’, pp. 103–4.

81 Rosamund Tuve, Elizabethan and Metaphysical Imagery (1947).

82 ‘light and sweetness’.

83 The expression ‘sweetness and light’ appears in St Hugo of Victor (d. 1142), Didascalion, Bk. III, ch. 1. Jonathan Swift later used it in The Battle of the Books (1704), 14: ‘Whatever we have got, has been by infinite Labor, and search, and ranging thro’ every Corner of Nature: The Difference is, that instead of Dirt and Poison, we have rather chose to till our Hives with Honey and Wax, thus furnishing Mankind with the two Noblest of Things, which are Sweetness and Light.’

84 Lewis employed a number of nurses, and it is not known what their names were. His gardener, Fred Paxford, and his housekeeper, Molly Miller, were still his ‘servants’.

85 Sayers wanted to give them a kitten.

86 Psalm 85:6.

87 St Albertus Magnus (d. 1280), theologian, philosopher and scientist, was a Dominican monk of enormous influence. St Thomas Aquinas was his pupil when he was teaching in Paris, 1245–8. In Germany he lectured on the new translation of Aristotle’s works, and he made the complete Aristotelian corpus intelligible to the Latins.

88 Ptolemy (c. AD 85–c. 165), Centiloquium, proposition 5: ‘The wise man will master the stars.’

89 St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Part I, Question 115, Article 4: ‘The majority of men follow their passions, which are movements of the sensitive appetite, in which movements of heavenly bodies can co-operate: but few are wise enough to resist these passions. Consequently astrologers are able to foretell the truth in the majority of cases, especially in a general way. But not in particular cases; for nothing prevents man resisting his passions by his free-will. Wherefore the astrologers themselves are wont to say that the wise man is stronger than the stars, forasmuch as, to wit, he conquers his passions.’

90 Pietro Pomponazzi (1462–1525), philosopher and founder of the Aristotelian-Averroistic School. See his De Naturalium Effectuum Causis (1556).

91 Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–94) discussed magic in his Conclusiones Magicae (1486).

92 Paracelsus (1493–1541), The Archidoxies of Magic (1589).

93 Richard Henry Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926). The only other reference to Tawney in Lewis’s writings is English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Bibliography, p. 618: ‘Among other works not easily classified are those of R. H. Tawney.’

94 John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion (1536).

95 Lord (Howard) Florey (1898–1968), pathologist, was born in Adelaide on 24 September 1898. He read medicine at Adelaide University, and in 1921 won a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford. He took a First in physiology at Magdalen College in 1923, and was Professor of Pathology at Sheffield University, 1932–4, and at Oxford University, 1935–62. In 1945 he, Alexander Fleming and Ernst Boris Chain shared the Nobel Prize for the discovery of penicillin and its curative effects in various infectious diseases. He was Provost of the Queen’s College, Oxford, 1962–6.

96 H. A. Schulze was writing from c/o The Muellers, Hemelinger Werder 9, Bremen, Germany.

97 In Out of the Silent Planet. See the reference to the eldila in the letter to Douglas Harding of 25 March 1951.

98 The Old Solar name for God, or the Lord. See the letter to Victor Hamm of 11 August 1945 (CL II, pp. 666–7).

99 Kilmer had asked a question about something which has puzzled many readers. The reference is to Out of the Silent Planet (London: Bodley Head, 1938; HarperCollins, 2000), ch. 12. Ransom explains to the hross that ‘If a thing is a pleasure, a [man] wants it again. He might want the pleasure more often than the number of young that could be fed.’ The hross replies that they enjoy sexual intercourse ‘only in one or two years’ of their lives. ‘It takes his whole life,’ he explains. ‘When he is young he has to look for his mate; and then he has to court her; then he begets young; then he rears them; then he remembers all this, and boils it inside him and makes it into poems and wisdom…A pleasure is full grown only when it is remembered’ (pp. 73–4).

100 Bodleian Library, Dep. c. 771, fol. 218.

101 Gibb had sent Lewis some copies of De Wonderreis van het Drakeschip, trans. Pieter Nierop (West-Friesland: Hoorn, 1957), the Dutch edition of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.

102 John Milton, Apology for Smectymnuus (1642), Colasterion (1645). Lewis was having a joke with Gibb, pretending that the ‘Milton’ who was to do a pen portrait of him was the Puritan poet who wrote these morally austere works, rather than Milton Waldman.

103 ‘out of respect’.

104 Roger Lancelyn Green, ‘A Neglected Novelist: “F. Anstey”’, English, XI, no. 65 (Summer 1957), pp. 178–81.

105 Gibb wrote on 11 October 1957: ‘Would you stand fire from Waldman instead of the blind poet, whom it was churlish of me to stir in his grave?’ (Bodleian Library, Dep. c. 771, fol. 220).

106 Lewis was now working to turn his lectures on ‘Some Difficult Words’ into the book Cambridge University Press had agreed to publish as Studies in Words.

107 See the letter to Lewis’s father of 25 January 1926 (CL I, p. 660).

108 Torquato Tasso (1544–95), the author of Gerusalemme Liberata (1581).

109 Gibb asked if Lewis would review Anthony Armstrong’s Saying Your Prayers: An Approach to Christian Prayer (London: Bles, 1958) in the Sunday Times (23 September 1957).

110 The Kilmers were Roman Catholics.

111 Albertus Magnus writes about angels in his Commentary on the Sentences of Peter the Lombard. Aquinas stated in Summa Theologica, Part I, Question 50, Article 2: ‘Although there is no composition of matter and form in an angel, yet there is act and potentiality. And this can be made evident if we consider the nature of material things, which contain a twofold composition. The first is that of form and matter, whereby the nature is constituted. Such a composite nature is not its own existence; but existence is its act. Hence the nature itself is related to its own existence as potentiality to act. Therefore if there be no matter, and supposing that the form itself subsists without matter, there nevertheless still remains the relation of the form to its very existence, as of potentiality to act. And such a kind of composition is understood to be in the angels.’

112 Marsilio Ficino (1433–99), Italian philosopher, was an ardent admirer of Plato and a propagator of neo-Platonism. He discussed angels in his Theologia Platonica (Florence, 1482).

113 Plutarch (c. AD 50–c. 125), Greek biographer and moralist. See the reference to his Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans in CL II, p. 243.

114 In Till We Have Faces.

115 Michael Paffard (1928–2000) read English at Bristol University, and was senior lecturer in the Department of Education at Keele University, 1953–83. He is the author of Inglorious Wordsworths: A Study of the Transcendental Experiences of Childhood and Adolescences (1973) and The Unattended Moment: Excerpts from Autobiographies with Hints and Guesses (1976).

116 Michael Paffard, ‘Some Indications of Literary Interest Among Sixth-Formers and Undergraduates’, Researches and Studies, No. 20 (October 1959), pp. 30–9.

117 A. L. Rowse in A Cornish Childhood (1942) and Forrest Reid in Apostate (1926) described experiences similar to those named as ‘Joy’ by Lewis in Surprised by Joy.

118 Kenneth Clark, Baron Clark (1903–83), patron of the arts eventually published two volumes of autobiography, Another Part of the Wood (1974) and The Other Half (1977). It is possible Paffard had in mind the descriptions of various works of art, and their effect on the author, that appear in such of Clark’s works as The Nude: A Study of Ideal Art (1956).

119 June Lancelyn Green had been knocked unconscious when she fell down the stairs. Other than bruising and a slight concussion she was unharmed.

120 The reader at John Lane The Bodley Head had forced Green to make unnecessary changes in his Mystery at Mycenae.

121 Spenser, The Faerie Queene.

122 The general scheme of The Faerie Queene is proposed in Spenser’s introductory letter to Sir Walter Ralegh: ‘In that Faery Queene I meane glory in my generall intention, but in my particular I conceiue the most excellent and glorious person of our soueraine the Queene, and her kingdome in Faery land. And yet in some places els I do otherwise shadow her. For considering she beareth two persons, the one of a most royall Queene or Empresse, the other of a most vertuous and beautifull Lady, this latter part in some places I doe expresse in Belphoebe, fashioning her name according to your owne excellent conceipt of Cynthia (Phoebe and Cynthia being both names of Diana).’

123 Sir Scudamour in The Faerie Queene, Book IV is the lover of Amoret, who is reft from him on his wedding day by the enchanter Busirane.

124 Lewis’s point appears to be that, as all the names in Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress are allegorical, it would be out of place to find the name of a real man, e.g. Judge Jeffreys, rather than an abstract title such as Despair. To understand why he is called Giant Despair see Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, First Part, pp. 114–15.

125 Spenser, The Faerie Queene, V, xi, 49, 1: ‘My name is Burbon hight.’ The real Burbon was Henry IV of France (1553–1610), first of the Bourbon kings of France.

126 Warnie was hospitalized at Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital, Drogheda, Eire. See the reference to the hospital and Mother Mary Martin in CL II, pp. 786–7.

127 Greeves’s housekeeper.

128 Greeves’s dog.

129 Jane Gaskell (1941–), journalist and novelist, was born in Grange-over-Sands, Lancashire on 7 July 1941, the daughter of Andrew Gaskell (a watercolour painter) and Edith (Hackett) Gaskell. She was educated at home by her parents. She was a columnist on the staff of the Daily Express, 1961–5, the Daily Sketch, 1965–71, and the Daily Mail, 1971–84. Her books include Strange Evil (1957), King’s Daughter (1958), Attic Summer (1963), The Shiny Narrow Grin (1964), Atlan (1965), The Fabulous Heroine (1965), All Neat in Black Stockings (1966), A Sweet, Sweet Summer (1969), Summer Coming (1972), The Serpent (1975), The Dragon (1975), The City (1976), Some Summer Lands (1977), The Atlan Saga (1985) and Sun Bubble: A Novel (1990). The letter from Lewis is stained in places for, as Gaskell explained in a letter to Walter Hooper of 10 July 1968: ‘Herewith my C. S. Lewis letter, tearstains & all (I was so excited when I received it, out of the blue, when I was 15)’ (Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. lett. c. 220/2, fol. 26).

130 Jane Gaskell, Strange Evil (London: Hutchinson, 1957). The publishers point out in a preface that the novel was written in 1955 when Gaskell was only fourteen, and that ‘She expresses her ideas less by means of her own experience…than by the use of a creative imagination of exceptional range, stimulated by her varied reading. Carlyle, C. S. Lewis, James Branch Cabell and Joan Grant are among the authors who have particularly impressed her.’ The reviewer in The Times Literary Supplement (6 September 1957), p. 529, said: ‘Sustained imaginative effort is the most remarkable quality of Strange Evil, a fantasy of macabre and gorgeous nonsense written by fourteen-year-old Miss Jane Gaskell. Judith, who poses nude for a living, is carried off to a C. S. Lewis-ish land where a monster called Baby conducts his reign of terror and where one extravagantly gory battle follows another. Miss Gaskell is eloquently fascinated by words, the longer and more lush the better, and her book reveals an undoubted talent for fanciful description.’

131 Gaskell, Strange Evil, ch. 21, pp. 242–3: ‘They led [Judith] up to the Baby who was surrounded by its devoted priests. They ran hither and thither, obviously trying to seek for ways to placate it, and it crouched in the middle of them and yelled and cried and raged, and spread the foetid smell. It was laughably unterrible, unlike a god or even a demon, to Judith…About ten feet high, but smaller when it sat as it did now, it was one colossal shape of a Baby, with fat shaking upon its obscene form as it yelled. Gobbets of fat hung upon it everywhere, and made of it a gigantic quivering mass. The most obese caricature of Gargantua as a child she had ever seen, its huge puffed cheeks pendulated as it sobbed and roared and hiccupped…The nastiest, fattest, most repellent brat, and of course the hugest, she had ever seen. So this was their ideal of the Life Force–ridiculing laughter struggled in her. She had no fear of this grotesque, spoilt, unbelievable deity.’

132 ibid., pp. 81–2: ‘They picked up their cases, and began to walk down the [moving] bar, to where it really seemed more like an aircraft without any roof. It was furnished on either side with comfortable upholstered seats, leaving a wide aisle down the middle…Here the bar was equipped with every convenience, even bath-houses…There was a sort of stall where food could be purchased.’

133 ibid., ch. 9, p. 93: ‘They began to climb, Judith thankful for the loss of her case in that at least it left her freer for this dreadful slippery climbing where the rain seemed determined to force them down again into the tree-grown gully. [The half-fairy] Dorinda, on the other hand, seemed to manage with remarkable ease, although hampered by a quite heavy case. It contained so many of the beautiful things, the hats and lingerie, that she had set eyes on since coming to London.’

134 ibid., ch. 18, p. 191: ‘Now she met caverns of unutterable splendour: caverns ablaze with the emotional glitter and sparkle of many jewels.’

135 ibid., ch. 15, pp. 168–9: ‘Now she put on her tangerine skirt and white blouse quickly, and slipped into her shoes…She wore low sandals which held her ankles with thongs and gaily coloured ribbons.’

136 Numbers 22:21–41.

137 Roger and June Lancelyn Green were taking their elder son, Scirard, to Dane Court School near Woking, Surrey, for the first time on 24 September, and they were coming by The Kilns to pick up Douglas Gresham who was also a pupil there.

138 Walter Ogilvie ‘Wof’ Field, a close friend of Harwood and Owen Barfield, had just died. See his biography in CL II, p. 572n.

139 The Song of Roland, trans. Dorothy L. Sayers (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1957).

140 The phrase does not appear in Sayers’ translation of The Song of Roland, but is given as an example of the kind of modern colloquialism Lewis and Sayers would have thought inappropriate for such a translation.

141 Raymond Mortimer (1895–1980), critic and author of Duncan Grant (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1944).

142 I. O. Evans, The Story of Our World (1957).

143 Paulus Orosius (early 5th century) undertook, at the request of St Augustine of Hippo, Historia Adversus Paganos (‘History of the Pagans’).

144 Sir Walter Ralegh (1554–1618), The History of the World (1614).

145 H. G. Wells, The Outline of History (1920); A Short History of the World (1922).

146 i.e., by writing a blurb.

147 Evans had already published Geology by the Wayside (1940). If he was now thinking of writing a book about astronomy and geology, in the end he did not write it.

148 Eric Frank Russell, Sinister Barrier (1939).

149 Alan Hindle (1932–), teacher, was born in Rochdale, Lancashire, on 12 May 1932. He was educated at the local high school and New College, Oxford, where in 1956 he received a First in English Language and Literature. He was Second English Master at Todmorden Grammar School, Yorkshire, 1956–8, and at Rochdale Grammar School, 1959–61, and Lecturer in English at Mander College, Bedford, 1961–4. As a boy in Lancashire roaming the moors he had developed a love for the Pennine landscape and he settled in the Pennines. He was principal lecturer in English at Bingley College, 1964–78, and Ilkley College, 1978–95, a post he combined with teaching part-time at Bradford College. Since his retirement in 1995, Hindle has run a literary class in Ilkley and given lectures at Bradford University. He is the author of Literary Visitors to Yorkshire (Ormskirk: Hesketh, 1981).

150 Hindle wrote to Walter Hooper on 29 April 1969: ‘I knew Professor Lewis when I was an undergraduate at Oxford (1953–56) & before he moved to Cambridge I attended his lectures, met him informally & conversed with him on several occasions. [His] letters were both simply answers to queries. The first was when I was doing some work on the “Song of Songs” & trying to reconcile this with Professor Lewis’s ideas concerning the origins of romantic love as developed in “The Allegory of Love”’ (Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. lett. c. 220/3, fols. 202–3).

151 Song of Songs 6:4.

152 Gibb wrote on 11 October 1957: ‘I…send on to you a copy of the German edition of THE LION THE WITCH AND THE WARDROBE. What do you think of the illustrations? I’ll bet you like them better than Pauline Baynes’s’ (Bodleian Library, Dep. c. 771, fol. 226). The German edition of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was called Die Abenteuer im Wandschrank Oder: Der Löwe und die Hexe, trans. Lisa Tetzner, illus. Richard Seewald (Freiburg: Herder, 1957).

153 Matthew 6:34: ‘sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.’

154 See the biography of Richard Thornton Hewitt in CL II, p. 277n.

155 Stillwell’s MA thesis, ‘A Lion of Judah in Never-Never Land: The Theology and Philosophy of C. S. Lewis Expressed in His Fantasies for Children’ was submitted to California State University, Long Beach. It was published a few years later under her married name, Kathryn Lindskoog, as The Lion of Judah in Never-Never Land: The Theology of C. S. Lewis Expressed in His Fantasies for Children (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1973).

156 Lewis was referring to Stillwell’s bibliography. The editor of HIS magazine had, without Lewis’s knowledge, taken his essay ‘Christian Hope–Its Meaning for Today’ from Religion in Life, XXI (Winter 1951–2) and reprinted it as ‘The World’s Last Night’ in HIS, XV (May 1955), pp. 1–4, 22–4. Lindskoog was apparently unaware that they were the same, for she listed the two titles as separate items in the bibliography of The Lion of Judah in Never-Never Land, pp. 135, 138.

157 ‘The Condemned’, 5–8: ‘Do not blame us too much if we are hedgerow folk/Cannot swell the rejoicings at this new world you make–We, hedge-hoggèd as Johnson or Borrow, strange to the yoke/As Landor, surly as Cobbett (that badger), birdlike as Blake.’ Those mentioned in the poem are Dr Samuel Johnson (1709–84), George Henry Borrow (1803–81), Walter Savage Landor (1775–1864), William Cobbett (1763–1835) and William Blake (1757–1827). The poem is reprinted in CP.

158 He was referring to Raine’s essay ‘The Little Girl Lost and Found and the Lapsed Soul’ in The Divine Vision: Studies in the Poetry and Art of William Blake, ed. Vivian de Sola Pinto (London: Gollancz, 1957). On pp. 24–8, Raine explained that ‘The story of Lyca, in the two poems The Little Girl Lost and Found, is…Blake’s version of the myth celebrated in the Mysteries of Eleusis, the story of the descent of Persephone into Hades, and the search of the Mother for her lost child…Lyca is in some sense the individual soul descending into generation, and also, at the same time, the soul of the world. Her story is of a wandering and a return, a sleep and an awakening; for such, Plotinus taught, and Blake believed, is the story of man’s incarnation.’

159 Bernardus Silvestris, De Mundi Universitate, Libri Duo sive Megacosmus et Microcosmus, p. 37. See The ‘Cosmographia’ of Bernardus Silvestris, trans. Winthrop Wetherbee (New York: Columbia University Press, 1973), ‘Microcosmos’, ch. 3, pp. 95–6: ‘Following the Milky Way like a highway, [Nature] encountered that radiance which its mass of stars produces through sheer multiplicity at the point where the Zodiac meets with the two tropics in its circular journey. Here she saw a numberless throng of souls clustered about the abode of Cancer. All these, it appeared, wore expressions fit for a funeral, and were shaken by weeping. Yes, they who were destined to descend, pure as they were, and simple, from splendour into shadow, from heaven to the kingdom of Pluto, from eternal life to that of the body, grew terrified at the clumsy and blind fleshly habitation which they saw prepared for them.’

160 Edwin Muir, One Foot in Eden (1956). This was Muir’s final collection of poems.

161 De Zilveren Stoel, trans. Peter Nierop (West-Friesland: Hoorn, 1957).

162 Proverbs 13:12.

163 Queen Elizabeth II visited the United Nations General Assembly in New York on 21 October 1957.

164 On 4 October 1957 the Russians launched the first man-made satellite, Sputnik I. The United States was preparing to launch its first satellite, Explorer I, from Cape Canaveral, Florida on 31 January 1958.