45 See the letter to Dom Bede Griffiths of 5 July 1949 (CL II, p. 954).
46 Kilmer had probably asked about the resurrected body of Christ as described in Lewis’s Miracles, ch. 16.
47 ‘all at once’.
48 ‘age’.
49 ‘time and eternity’.
50 Lewis had forgotten that it was Kilmer’s family who had suggested that Shelburne get in touch with him. See Lewis’s letter to Kilmer of 13 March 1961.
51 See the biography of Eric Routley, Congregational minister, in CL II, p. 719n.
52 See the treatment of ‘World’ in Studies in Words.
53 On the influence of William Tyndale (1494?–1536), the Vulgate, Cardinal Francisco Ximenes de Cisneros (1436?–1517), Erasmus, and Rheims on the Authorized Version see English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Bk. II, ch. 1, ‘Religious Controversy and Translation’.
54 The Septuagint, commonly designated LXX, is the oldest Greek version of the Old Testament of the Bible.
55 1 Corinthians 11:14: ‘Doth not even nature itself teach you, that, if a man have long hair, it is a shame unto him.’ What Lewis thought ‘frightful’ was the difficulty of understanding the use of the word ‘nature’ (phusis) in this context.
56 The Common Greek in which the New Testament was written.
57 See the treatment of ‘Nature’ in Studies in Words.
58 Diaspora–‘wide scattering’–is a term used to describe the widespread settlement of the Jews outside Israel and Judah. Scholars believe it began in 586 BC, with the exile to Babylon, and included the later periods of Persian, Greek and Roman control.
59 p.p.
60 The Rev. Alfred R. Paashaus was writing from the Bible Presbyterian Church, Firth, Nebraska. He was at that time manager of the 20th Century Reformation Center. In his letter of 15 February 1961 Paashaus said he had read a review of Lewis’s ‘The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment’ in which Lewis said ‘We know one school of psychology which regards religion as a neurosis.’ Which ‘school’ was that? asked Paashaus.
61 Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion (1928).
62 B. G. Saunders, Christianity after Freud: An Interpretation of the Christian Experience in the Light of Psycho-analytic Theory (1949).
63 Law, A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life, ch. 16: ‘For you can have no greater sign of a more confirmed pride, than when you think that you are humble enough.’
64 Anne Jenkins (1950–) was born Anne Waller in Halesworth, East Suffolk, on 11 April 1950. She is the daughter of Jack Waller, a farmer, and his wife Lorna Pamela (White) Waller. The family moved to Lavenham, Suffolk, when she was three years old. She attended Bury St Edmunds County Grammar School. Anne studied applied biology at the North East London Polytechnical College, and she met her husband, Steve Jenkins, while they were working in the Microbiology Research Department at Allbright Wilson Ltd, of Blackhorse Lane, Walthamstow, a firm dealing with flavours and fragrances. They were married in 1979 and have three children.
In a letter to Walter Hooper of 27 December 2004 she explained why she wrote to Lewis: ‘I had been reading The Silver Chair and at the end when the dead Prince Caspian has come alive, Eustace says “Hasn’t he–er–died?” “Yes,” said the Lion…“He has died. Most people have, you know. Even I have. There are very few who haven’t.” What I wanted to know was what Aslan meant by saying that most people had died. I already knew about Aslan’s death. I asked my parents first, and they suggested that I write and ask the author. I can only think that he meant that most people who have lived since the time of Adam have died. I thought that he was referring to the ones who are still alive now. Even so, I was thrilled to receive a letter from C. S. Lewis and although he hadn’t answered my question, he had answered many others!’
65 Revelation 5:5.
66 Since he last wrote to Lewis in 1950 Dell had been ordained in the Episcopal Church, and from 1961 to 1973 he was editor of The Episcopalian. He wrote to Lewis on 25 February 1961: ‘The topic I would like to suggest is Christian Death. If there is any area where Christians have lost more of their heritage, I do not know of it. Easter and funerals are alien in the minds of churchmen. Death is either: 1. unmentionable and faced stoically or 2. a hideous enemy against whom we frantically pray and wage unreasonable medical battles…I should be more than pleased to see an article or book on this subject from your pen’ (Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. lett. c. 220/4, fols. 95–6).
67 i.e. Green’s The Luck of Troy.
68 On the cover of the book.
69 Jean Wakeman had proposed taking Lewis and the boys to Scotland for a holiday in September.
70 i.e. June Lancelyn Green.
71 Of the essays Lewis had lent Gibb.
72 Gibb had just returned from business in Africa.
73 Evelyn Tackett (1934–) was born in Jackson, Mississippi on 25 August 1934. She took a BA in English Literature from Belhaven College, Jackson, Mississippi, and a MLS in Library Science from Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia. She has worked most of her adult life as a librarian. She was Field Representative for the Mississippi Library Commission, Jackson, Mississippi, 1959–64, and Associate Librarian, Library Director, Acquisitions and Cataloguing Librarian, Belhaven College, 1965–98. She retired as Professor Emeritus in 1998.
74 p.p.
75 Shelburne had now moved into the house of her daughter and son-in-law, Lorraine and Don Nostadt, at 9307 Saybrook Avenue, Silver Spring, Maryland.
76 Lorraine.
77 1 Corinthians 13:7.
78 Thomas Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, Bk. III, ch. 45.
79 Romans 8:9–10.
80 John 3:30.
81 Matthew 10:39.
82 Jonathan Muehl, who was eight years old, wrote to Lewis from Connecticut that he had enjoyed all seven of the Narnian books, but said: ‘I hope…you are going to write another one soon. If you don’t, what am I going to read when I am nine, ten, eleven and twelve?’ (A copy of Muehl’s letter to Lewis is in the Wade Center.)
83 p.p.
84 John Betjeman was Eliot’s pupil when he taught at Highgate Junior School, London, in 1916. Lewis had Betjeman as his pupil at Magdalen College, 1925–8.
85 The publication of D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover by Penguin Books in 1960 was the subject of the case Regina v. Penguin Books Limited at the Old Bailey, 20 October–2 November 1960. Various literary persons were invited to give evidence, but Lewis and Eliot were not among them. Lewis mentions the trial in ‘Sex in Literature’, published in The Sunday Telegraph, no. 87 (30 September 1962), p. 8, and reprinted in Present Concerns and EC.
86 Edwards said in his note to this letter: ‘I had gone camping in the Oxford area with the intention of visiting Lewis…I phoned Lewis for final confirmation before descending upon him and a voice I took to be Lewis’ said that he was glad I’d phoned as his brother was ill and so could I please put off the visit. So I posted the box of 50 or 100 Gold Flake cigarettes I had brought as a gift for Lewis and returned to camp.’
87 ‘Vale of tears’ comes from one of the oldest prayers to the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Salve Regina, which contains the words ‘In hac lacrimarum valle’: ‘In this vale of tears’.
88 David Richard Davies, In Search of Myself: The Autobiography of D. R. Davies (London: Bles, 1961).
89 The Narnian stories.
90 ‘explanatory remarks’.
91 i.e. ‘Kipling’s World’.
92 Lewis had constructed a ‘fable’ to illustrate what he meant by transposition, but this new part was not attached to the end of the essay as suggested in this letter. After the first nineteen paragraphs, which end ‘the quickest road to presumption or despair’, he inserts a new section comprising seven paragraphs and beginning, ‘I believe that this doctrine of Transposition provides for most of us a background very much needed for the theological virtue of Hope.’ This addition is followed by the rest of the original essay.
93 The ‘sermon on Hebrews’ had been published as ‘Religion: Reality or Substitute?’ in World Dominion, XIX (September–October 1941), pp. 277–81, and is reprinted in Christian Reflections.
94 Lewis decided against using ‘A Reply to Mr. R.’, a paper he had originally read to the Socratic Club. While the copy he sent Gibb still carried the title ‘A Reply to Mr. R.’ he had rewritten the paper and published it as ‘Myth Became Fact’ in World Dominion, II (September–October 1944), pp. 267–70. It is reprinted in Undeceptions ( 1971) and EC.
95 ‘Is Theology Poetry?’, The Socratic Digest, no. 3 (1945), pp. 25–35.
96 ‘The Funeral of a Great Myth.’ This essay had not been published at the time.
97 ‘The Literary Impact of the Authorized Version’, The Ethel M. Wood Lecture delivered before the University of London on 20 March 1950 (London: Athlone Press, 1950). It is reprinted in SLE.
98 i.e. the toast to the Edinburgh Sir Walter Scott Club made by Lewis on 2 March 1956 and published as ‘The Memory of Sir Walter Scott’. See the letter to Mary Willis Shelburne of 4 March 1956.
99 ‘Psycho-analysis and Literary Criticism’, Essays and Studies by Members of the English Association, XXVII (1942), pp. 7–21. See the letter to his brother of 3 February 1940 (CL II, p. 342).
100 ‘Hamlet: The Prince or the Poem?’, Annual Shakespeare Lecture, 1942, The Proceedings of the British Academy, XXVIII (London: Oxford University Press, 1942). See the letter to Sister Penelope of 11 May 1942 (CL II, p. 520).
101 i.e. De Descriptione Temporum.
102 i.e. ‘Good Work and Good Works’.
103 Previously published in Transposition and Other Addresses.
104 i.e. ‘On Obstinacy in Belief’.
105 Previously published in Transposition and Other Addresses.
106 Fowler’s review of Kent Hieatt’s Short Time’s Monument appeared in Review of English Studies, XII, No. 48 (November 1961), pp. 417–19.
107 On 12 April 1961 Yuri Gagarin, a Russian cosmonaut, made history by being the first human being to orbit the earth.
108 See the discussion of Bergson’s L’Évolution créatrice in the letter to Owen Barfield of 19 August 1948 (CL II, pp. 870–2).
109 Shakespeare, Macbeth, II, ii, 53.
110 ‘Ministering Angels’, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, XIII (January 1958), pp. 5–14, reprinted in The Dark Tower and Other Stories.
111 The two articles were ‘The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment’, and ‘On Punishment: A Reply’, Res Judicatae, VI (June 1953), pp. 231–7, reprinted in First and Second Things and EC.
112 i.e. ‘Dante’s Statius’ .
113 ‘Imagery in the Last Eleven Cantos of Dante’s Comedy’ was published in Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature.
114 ‘On Ethics’ was published in Christian Reflections and EC.
115 Mrs Shelburne’s granddaughter.
116 Gibb had several requests from Francisco Osorio de Calheiros of Lisbon, Portugal, requesting a signed copy of Surprised by Joy. Don Whiskerandos is the Spanish prisoner in the burlesque drama in Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s play The Critic (1779).
117 The forty-two sacred books of wisdom allegedly written by Hermes Trismegistus or ‘thrice great Hermes’. The books combine the mythological wisdom and attributes attributed to the Egyptian god Thoth and the Greek god Hermes.
118 On 27 April 1961 Gibb wrote to Lewis: ‘There are a number of papers, and presumably manuscripts which [Rudyard Kipling] left his daughter and she is now wondering where to bequeath them when she dies. She does not want to have them pushed away on the British Museum but my suspicions are that she is casting her eye at Magdalene, with which I gather Kipling had associations. I believe he was an honorary fellow or something like that. Now, I am wondering what the reaction of your library would be to such a proposal’ (Bodleian Library, Dep. c. 772, fol. 56).
119 Mrs Elsie Bambridge (1896–1976) was the surviving daughter of Rudyard Kipling. In 1924 she married Captain George Bambridge, an ex-Irish Guard, and they made their home at Wimpole Hall in Royston, Cambridgeshire. Over the years, Kipling, his wife Caroline, and Elsie amassed a huge archive of ‘Kipling Papers’–those mentioned by Jocelyn Gibb in his letter of 27 April 1961. After her mother’s death in 1939, Elsie Bambridge took the ‘Kipling Papers’ to Wimpole Hall, where they were sorted and additional material added. At her death on 23 May 1976, Mrs Bambridge, a widow and childless, bequeathed Wimpole Hall and the ‘Kipling Papers’ to the National Trust. The papers were deposited at Sussex University by the Trust in 1978.
120 This and the letters of 12, 17 and 31 May are the only letters from Greeves to Lewis that survive. The originals are in the Wade Center.
121 Lismachan, in Strandtown, was built by Arthur’s uncle, John Greeves (1831–1917), and had been the home of that branch of the family until it was sold.
122 The correspondent had spotted two errors in Screwtape Letters and Screwtape Proposes a Toast, pp. 72, 84. These were corrected in subsequent editions; see e.g. The Screwtape Letters (London: Fount, 1998), pp. 59, 70.
123 In the end, Lewis was not asked to review Robert Lee Wolff’s The Golden Key. See the letter to Jane Douglass of 14 November 1960.
124 Charles Gore, The Sermon on the Mount (1896); The Philosophy of the Good Life (1930).
125 The novels of François Mauriac include The Kiss to the Leper (1923), Thérése (1927), Viper’s Tangle (1933) and The Desert of Love (1949).
126 Evans had undertaken to edit the works of Jules Verne in the Fitzroy Edition, consisting of sixty-three volumes, and which began publication in 1958. Evans had possibly offered to send Lewis copies of those volumes published up to 1961.
127 Shelburne wrote on the envelope of this letter: ‘I suppose I never told Dr. Lewis the full story of the tragedy of my daughter’s marriage and her life since. Upon receipt of this letter from him, I immediately wrote him the full account, because, sorrowful and difficult as she makes my life, I feel it is not really her fault. I just make a good “whipping boy” for her tension, grief and troubles, and she dare not “take it out” on others. Probably pride kept me from telling Jack Lewis years back.’
128 highest common factor.
129 ‘form’.
130 Great Western Railway.
131 Esther Smith, Greeves’s housekeeper, had decided to retire.
132 In his train journeys to Cambridge Lewis passed through Bletchley, Buckinghamshire, which was about halfway between Oxford and Cambridge.
133 Lewis had received a letter of 21 April 1961 from Toshio Hirunuma of Osaka, Japan. As translator of The Four Loves into Japanese, he needed Lewis’s help with unfamiliar expressions, one of which–‘wash behind her ears’–occurred in ch. 5, p. 122: ‘He is a King Cophetua who after twenty years still hopes that the beggar-girl will one day learn to speak the truth and wash behind her ears.’ Hirunuma had translated this ‘wash behind the years’. Toshio Hirunuma’s letters are in the Bodleian Library (Dep. c. 772, vol. 48).
134 Van Deusen’s home in Hendersonville, North Carolina, was in the Smoky Mountains.
135 Jill Black, of Bodley Head, wrote to Lewis on 2 June 1961: ‘Just now we are building up a library of hero re-tellings, of which GRETTIR THE STRONG by Allen French is the second title to appear…I am hoping very much to include a retelling of Malory’s MORTE D’ARTHUR in the library, and wondering whether there would be any possibility of persuading you to do this for us, or indeed, any other heroic legend or body of literature that you may happen to be particularly interested in?’
136 Allen French, Grettir the Strong (London: Bodley Head, 1961).
137 i.e. Green’s King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. See the letter to Green of 10 July 1953.
138 Jamshid and Rustum appear as characters in Firdausi’s Shah-nameh.
139 Gibb had suggested in a letter of 9 June 1961 that whatever main title they gave the book, as a subtitle, ‘Perhaps we had better have it “Literary Criticism through Ethics and Culture to Theology”’ (Bodleian Library, Dep. c. 772, fol. 75).
140 The Kilns lay at the foot of Shotover Hill.
141 Philippians 4:13.
142 This was the title Lewis and Gibb settled on for the collection of essays.
143 Mrs Sarre was writing from 6 Tayly Terrace, Rossyln Park, South Australia.
144 Thompson said of this letter: ‘Dr Lewis always sent a Whitsun Offering as a personal gift (so that the parson didn’t have to declare it as earnings for Income Tax!) to the assistant Priest of his Parish Church, poorly paid of course, even for those non-inflationary times’ (Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. lett. c. 220/6, fol. 80).
145 Wade Center. Shelburne had now moved to Apartment 313, Clifton Terrace Apartments, 1308 Clifton Street, NW, East Washington, DC.
146 Bodleian Library. Gibb realized that, with Lewis in hospital, he needed Warnie’s help in getting the material that was to go into They Asked for a Paper. He wrote to Warnie on 21 July 1961: ‘I’m here awaiting those…Three pieces which he had merged into one. But, after discussion in May, he decided to tackle them though still to be merged, in a different way. One of the articles is called THEOLOGY POETRY? and it appeared originally in the Socratic Digest…Now that the second process of merging is impossible I think it best not to revert to the first but to publish THEOLOGY POETRY? in its original form. If you can find that piece, do you think you could send it to me?’ (Bodleian Library, Dep. c. 772, fol. 92).
147 Wade Center.
148 Bodleian Library.
149 Wade Center.
150 See Father Walter Frederick Adams, SSJE in the Biographical Appendix to CL II, pp. 1015–16.
151 Bradbrook had sent him a volume of translations of Modern Greek poetry.
152 William Empson, Milton’s God (London: Chatto & Windus, 1961).
153 In other words, rather than an attack on Milton’s poetry, Empson’s book was a sustained assault on Christianity and the Puritan ethos.
154 ‘all due reverence being paid’.
155 Roger Poole (1939–2003), literary theorist, was born in Cambridge on 22 February 1939. Educated at the Perse School, he won an exhibition to Trinity College, Cambridge, taking a First in English Literature in 1958. He attended many of Lewis’s lectures and came to know him during his undergraduate years. From Cambridge Poole went to Paris where he was a lecturer in English at the Sorbonne, 1959–68. On returning to England he spent the rest of his working life at Nottingham University where he was Lecturer, then Senior Lecturer in English Literature, 1969–89, and Reader in Literary Theory 1989–96. He died on 21 November 2003. His books include Towards Deep Subjectivity (1972) and The Unknown Virginia Woolf (1978). See his article, ‘Lewis Lecturing’, in The Canadian C. S. Lewis Journal, no. 75 (Summer 1991), pp. 1–6.
156 This reply is written at the foot of a letter from Andrew Rutherford (Bodleian Library, Dep. c. 772, fol. 149), asking permission to include ‘Kipling’s World’ in a volume of essays, Kipling’s Mind and Art: Selected Critical Essays (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1964).
157 Chad Walsh, The Rough Years (New York: Morehouse-Barlow Co., 1960).
158 Mr Bowman is a character in The Rough Years.
159 Gebbert and her son Charles were living temporarily at 12 Harrow Lodge, St. John’s Wood Road, London NW8.
160 Warnie did indeed take a holiday in Ireland, leaving Fred Paxford, the gardener, on hand if Lewis should need help.
161 Francis Warner, Perennia (Cambridge: Golden Head Press, 1962), I, 8. Lewis read this poem in typescript, and many of his suggestions were adopted in the published version.
162 See the letter to Warner of 1 November 1961.
163 Perennia, IV, 8: ‘Of things remote from Piccadilly sights.’
164 ibid., V, 5: ‘The clover buzzing with the busy bees.’
165 ibid., 8: ‘Soothing my mind like some old mystic charm’.
166 ibid., 9: ‘Begged me unpack my flute to join their harmless balm.’
167 ibid., VII, 5: ‘Were hurled to where the savage water curls’.
168 ibid., X, 2–3: ‘But from an acorn hedge a cricket hopped/And, waiting for a while crouched on all fours’.
169 ibid., XII, 3: ‘For Hespera, the jealous Goddess Queen.’
170 ibid., XIII, 9: ‘Her feet while shoals of fishes swam by in a school.’
171 ibid., XV, 5: ‘Fluttering to and fro, while high birds’ cries.’
172 ibid., XVII, 5–6: ‘Was mortal or a goddess, to belong/In such tranquil surroundings; if some freak…’
173 ibid., XIX, 6: ‘Unable to look safely on a god.’
174 ibid., XLIII, 7–8: ‘And she collapsed in sorrow for her stark/Betrayal of his love…’
175 ibid., XLV, 4–5: ‘…she saw that while away/Her son had saved her victim…’
176 ibid., LXVI, 4: ‘Upon her cheeks, for sleep had brought release.’
177 In An Experiment in Criticism.
178 On being ‘baptised for the dead’ see the letter to Mary Van Deusen of 28 December 1961.
179 See Sir Laurence Whistler, poet and glass engraver, in the Biographical Appendix to CL II, p. 1081.
180 Laurence Whistler, Audible Silence (London: Hart-Davis, 1961).
181 ibid., p. 18, ‘Something Was Wrong’, I, 9–10.
182 ibid., p. 23, ‘A Triptych of Pure Moments, I. The Café on the Bridge’, II, 3.
183 ibid., p. 25, ‘A Triptych of Pure Moments, II. The Green Beard’, IV, 4.
184 ibid., p. 33, ‘The Nine-Day City’, XX, 1.
185 Matthew Arnold, ‘Rugby Chapel’ (1867).
186 While Walsh and his wife were staying at the Eastgate Hotel in November 1961 they visited Lewis for the last time.
187 John Norman Bryson (1896–1976) was a Fellow of English at Balliol College. See his biography in CL I, p. 644.
188 See Nevill Coghill in the Biographical Appendix to CL I, pp. 984–6.
189 These corrections were made in subsequent Fontana editions of Miracles, as well as the Fount paperback of 1974.
190 Venus.
191 Apuleius, Metamorphoses, IV, xxviii, 1: ‘Erant in quadam civitate rex et regina’: ‘Once upon a time in a certain state there lived a king and queen.’
192 i.e. the edition of Theologia Germanica mentioned in the letter to Corbin Scott Carnell of 13 October 1958.
193 Spencer Curtis Brown.
194 Jeannette Hopkins was an editor with Harcourt, Brace & World, who later worked for Harper & Row publishers, New York. She wanted to edit a selection of Lewis’s writings for Harper & Row, but Curtis Brown advised against it.
195 Sir Herbert Read’s generous review of An Experiment in Criticism is found in The Listener, LXVI (16 November 1961), pp. 828, 831.
196 The former Mrs Mary Margaret McCaslin was now Mrs Mary Margaret Ward.
197 This letter was originally published in the Church Times, CXLIV (1 December 1961), p. 7, under the title ‘Capital Punishment’.
198 Lewis Carroll, The Hunting of the Snark (1876), IV, 248: ‘That English is what you speak!’
199 The World’s Last Night.
200 ‘Choate’ is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as ‘An erroneous word, framed to mean “finished”, “complete”, as if the in- of inchoate were the L. negative.’ Winston Churchill, who delighted in being incorrect, was quoted in The Times (13 February 1916), p. 1, as saying: ‘How could the peoples know?…What choate and integral conviction could they form?’
201 Because of his ill-health Lewis was unable to get to Cambridge for Michaelmas Term 1961, and he had to give up supervising Warner’s work on Agrippa. Dr T. R. Henn supervised Warner for three months from 1 October 1961 until Dr Frederick James Edward Raby (1888–1966), Fellow and Lecturer, Jesus College, Cambridge, 1948–55, took over on 5 January 1962.
202 This letter was originally published in the Church Times, CXLIV (15 December 1961), p. 12, under the title ‘Death Penalty’.
203 Claude Davis, ‘Death Penalty’, Church Times, CXLIV (8 December 1961), p. 14.
204 Demosthenes Speech 47, ‘Against Evergus’, sections 71–73.
205 Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, Second Part, Section VIII, p. 265: ‘I have observed that old men have blessed themselves with this mistake; Namely, taking the decays of Nature for a gracious Conquest over Corruptions.’
206 ‘age’.
207 Luke 13:16.
208 Luke 9:54–5: ‘And when his disciples James and John saw this, they said, Lord, wilt thou that we command fire to come down from heaven, and consume them, even as Elias did? But he turned, and rebuked them, and said, Ye know not what manner of spirit ye are of.’
209 Matthew 7:6.
210 Luke 16:10–12: ‘He that is faithful in that which is least is faithful also in much: and he that is unjust in the least is unjust also in much. If therefore ye have not been faithful in the unrighteous mammon, who will commit to your trust the true riches? And if ye have not been faithful in that which is another man’s, who shall give you that which is your own?’
211 ‘Lord’. See Luke 9:54.
212 See the letter to Griffiths of 30 April 1959.
213 Thomas Merton, No Man is an Island (1955).
214 Dr Viswanathan was a teacher at Queensland University of Technology, Australia.
215 Warner had applied for a fellowship at Gonville and Caius College.
216 The passage Lewis seems to have had in mind is 1 Corinthians 15:28–9 (RSV): ‘When all things are subjected to him, then the Son himself will also be subjected to him who put all things under him, that God may be everything to every one. Otherwise, what do people mean by being baptized on behalf of the dead? If the dead are not raised at all, why are people baptized on their behalf?’
217 1 Peter 3:19–20 (RSV): ‘He went and preached to the spirits in prison, who formerly did not obey, when God’s patience waited in the days of Noah, during the building of the ark, in which a few, that is, eight persons, were saved through water.’
218 In his letter to Mrs Van Deusen of 28 October 1961 Lewis mentioned trying to find ‘one of the epistles about people being “baptised for the dead”’. He returned to that question in this letter.
219 Austin Farrer, Love Almighty and Ills Unlimited (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1961).
220 ibid., ch. 5, ‘Animal Pain’, p. 76.
1 The Poems of Sextus Propertius, trans. A. E. Watts (Chichester: Centaur Press, 1961).
2 In the end Watts did not use a quotation from George Herbert in the book.
3 George Gordon, Lord Byron, Don Juan (1819–20), III, lxv, 8.
4 Miss Andrews, whose first letter from Lewis appears in CL II, p. 934, was writing from Box 79, Bloemfontein, OFS, South Africa.
5 George MacDonald, The Marquis of Lossie, 3 vols. (1877); Donal Grant, 3 vols. (1883); Malcolm, 3 vols. (1875).
6 Martha Allen was writing from 1108 West Maple, Birmingham, Michigan.
7 Hooton said of this letter: ‘The type-written note of 26 January 1962 must refer to my having retired from Felsted School in 1961’ (Bodleian Library, MS. lett. c. 220/2, fol. 95).
8 p.p.
9 Mrs Loris E. Wiles was writing from 5824 NW 25th Street, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.
10 p.p.
11 i.e. They Asked for a Paper. The blurb on the inside cover read: ‘In this present collection of essays and papers, which is arranged to show how C. S. Lewis’s particular gift can transcend the categories which usually separate “Literary Criticism” from “Theology”, few readers will find that they agree with everything he says in every paper. But who would wish them to do so? Certainly not C. S. Lewis, who, unlike so many equally penetrating and original thinkers, never brooks at provoking points of disagreement.’
12 See the biography of Joan Bennett, lecturer in English at Cambridge University, in CL II, p. 209n.
13 See the biography of John Wain in CL II, p. 888n.
14 ‘teetotal’.
15 Oxo cubes for gravy, and Wincarnis tonic wine both contained meat extract.
16 James Forsyth, Screwtape, A Play (Chicago: Dramatic Publishing Co., 1972).
17 K. C. Thompson, Once For All: A Study of the Christian Doctrine of Atonement and Salvation (London: Faith Press, 1962).
18 ‘You fall upon the rock Scylla desiring to avoid the whirlpool Charybdis.’ The Latin is from Philippe Gualtier, Alexandreis, V, 301.
19 p.p.
20 Chad Walsh, From Utopia to Nightmare (London: Bles, 1962).
21 p.p.
22 The Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, was built in 1932, and Shakespeare’s plays are regularly performed there.
23 Mrs Louise Raynor was writing from 260 Spear Street, South Burlington, Vermont.
24 In A Grief Observed, a copy of which he had sent Whistler.
25 This was the debate Lewis and Dorothy L. Sayers were to have with Kathleen Nott on 24 October 1954, but which Nott was unable to attend. See the letter to Sayers of 12 June 1954.
26 Alastair Cooke, ‘Mr. Anthony at Oxford’, New Republic, 110 (24 April 1944), pp. 578–80, was an unfavourable review of the American editions of Christian Behaviour (1944) and Perelandra (1944).
27 Gibb wrote to Lewis on 12 March 1962: ‘A friend of Chad’s, another American, wants to write what he calls a “modified biography” of yourself. He is called Ed Dell…Has he your approval of this idea?’ (Bodleian Library, Dep. c. 772, fol. 199).
28 Of They Asked for a Paper.
29 The Rev. Meredith Stevens was writing from 112 South Dellner, Visalia, California.
30 p.p.
31 Muhammad Kamel Hussein, City of Wrong: A Friday in Jerusalem, trans. from Arabic by Kenneth Cragg (London: Bles, 1960). This was the first book written in the Islamic world to make a study of Christ’s crucifixion and to show its significance for a devout Muslim. The story is set in Jerusalem on Good Friday and explores the actions and states of mind of the Apostles, Jews and Romans, shepherds and shopkeepers, participants and bystanders.
32 Cecil Roth (1899–1970), Jewish historian and educator, was born in London on 5 March 1899 and educated at Oxford. Taking his Ph.D. in 1924, he was Reader in Jewish Studies, 1939–64. Thereafter he was visiting professor at Bar-Ilan University, Israel, 1964–5, and at the City University of New York, 1966–9. He was editor of Encyclopedia Judaica from 1965 until his death in Jerusalem on 21 June 1970. He wrote a great many books, including A History of the Marranos (3rd edn, 1966), The Jews in the Renaissance (1959), Jewish Art (1961) and The Dead Sea Scrolls (1965).
33 David Gresham had loved Judaism since he was eleven, and with his mother’s death his interest had grown. He disliked learning Latin so much at Magdalen College School that Lewis arranged for him to take private tuition in Hebrew during 1961–2. David had also started attending the Oxford Synagogue, where he had come to know Cecil Roth. Irene Roth, in Cecil Roth: Historian Without Tears: A Memoir (1982) tells how her husband held ‘At Homes’ for undergraduates and other Jewish visitors on Saturday afternoons. After talking with David at one of these gatherings, ‘Cecil advised C. S. Lewis to remove David from Magdalen College School…[and] suggested that David be sent to an Orthodox Talmudical Academy’ (pp. 152–3). As a result, Lewis allowed David to visit Carmel College, a Jewish yeshiva or Talmudic college, near Wallingford, on 10 April 1962.
34 This is the Seven Arches Hotel, Mount of Olives Plaza, Mount of Olives, Jerusalem.
35 Francine Smithline, a schoolgirl, was writing from 114 Joseph Street, New Hyde Park, New York.
36 This refers to Green’s unpublished novel, ‘The Wood that Time Forgot’. Lewis read it first in 1945, made various suggestions, and read a revised version in 1947. For his criticism see CL II, pp. 670–2, 949–50. In March 1962 Green proposed that he and Lewis collaborate on a revision of ‘The Wood’, and this letter is Lewis’s reply to that suggestion. The plot of the story is given in Green and Hooper, C. S. Lewis: A Biography, ch. 11, p. 305.
37 Andrew Lang, Prince Prigio and Prince Ricardo (London: Dent; New York: Dutton, 1961).
38 Thackeray, The Rose and the Ring.
39 Owen Barfield, Worlds Apart (A Dialogue of the 1960’s) (London: Faber & Faber, 1963; Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1971). The book is written in the form of a semi-Socratic dialogue among scientists (Ranger, Brodie and Upwater), a philosopher (Dunn), a psychiatrist (Burrows), a theologian (Hunter), and a lawyer (Burgeon). The dialogue touches on the duality between mind and matter, the new knowledge of genetics, physics and astronomy, and the difference between perception and reality.
40 Charles Adolph Huttar (1932–) was born in Austin, Texas, on 8 July 1932. He received a BA in English from Wheaton College, Wheaton, Illinois in 1952. From there he went to Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, where he was awarded a MA in 1953 and a Ph.D. in 1956. He was assistant professor and then associate professor of English at Gordon College, Wenham, Massachusetts, 1955–66, and was Chairman of the Department of English, 1971–6. He has been Professor of English at Hope College, Holland, Michigan, since 1966. He has written extensively on the Inklings, and his works include Imagination and the Spirit: Essays in Literature and the Christian Faith presented to Clyde S. Kilby, ed. Charles A Huttar (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1971), Word and Story in C.S. Lewis, ed. Peter J. Schakel and Charles A. Huttar (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1991), and The Rhetoric of Vision: Essays on Charles Williams, ed. Charles A. Huttar and Peter J. Schakel (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1996).
41 Middle English.
42 Pusey House is an Anglican establishment in St Giles, Oxford. Fr Gervase Mathew OP was a member of the Dominican Order located in Blackfriars, next door to Pusey House.
43 Francis Warner, ‘A Legend’s Carol’, IV, 9–12: ‘While hard across the frozen ground/Jolted old Joseph’s form,/Both riding and sliding/Along the hardened track.’ This poem was included in Warner’s Early Poems (London: Fortune Press, 1964).
44 The ‘charming reminder’ was a copy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin announcing the purchase of Rembrandt’s painting Aristotle with a Bust of Homer. Douglass said in a note on this letter: ‘I had sent this thinking it might remind Joy of happy days in New York.’
45 Mrs Shelburne had now moved to an apartment at 103 6th Street, NE, Washington, DC.
46 Victor Gollancz (1893–1967), publisher, was born in London and educated at New College, Oxford, where he took a First in Honour Moderations in 1914. He went into publishing in 1920 and by 1928 he had formed the firm of Victor Gollancz Ltd. In 1936 he founded the Left Book Club, his aim being to spread socialist ideas. The club’s most important book was George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier (1937). Another speciality of his firm was the crime novel, and his crime writers included Dorothy L. Sayers. In 1989 his firm was sold to Houghton Mifflin of Boston, and in 1999 it was bought by the publisher, Cassell plc.
47 In March 1962 Gollancz received Lewis’s permission to include a shortened version of his preface to George MacDonald: An Anthology in George MacDonald, Phantastes and Lilith (London: Gollancz, 1962). On 3 April Gollancz wrote to Robert Knittel of Collins asking formal permission to use Lewis’s work. However, this letter, beginning ‘My dear Bob’, was sent to Lewis by mistake (Bodleian Library, Dep. c. 772, fol. 191).
48 John Beversluis (1934–), who was born in Hawthorne, New York, on 11 October 1934, received his BA from Calvin College, Grand Rapids, Michigan in 1956 and a Ph.D. from Indiana University in 1972. He has taught philosophy at a number of institutions, including Grand Valley State College, Allendale, Michigan, 1965–7, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, 1967–71, the University of Athens, Athens, Georgia, 1971–2, the University of the South, Sewanee, Tennessee, 1972–3, and Butler University, Indianapolis, Indiana, 1973–94, where he was Professor of Philosophy and head of the philosophy department. He currently teaches at Cabrillo College, Aptos, California. He is the author of C. S. Lewis and the Search for Rational Religion (Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1985) and Cross-Examining Socrates: A Defense of the Interlocutors in Plato’s Early Dialogues (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
49 Dr Beversluis had asked whether the rise of distortion in modern and contemporary art was traceable to the loss of belief in God and the decline of Christianity.
50 ‘the art of being a grandfather’. From Victor Hugo, L’art d’être grand-pére (Poems, 1877).
51 p.p.
52 Richard N. Ringler (1934–) was born in Milwaukee on 21 January 1934. He took his BA and Ph.D. from Harvard in 1955 and 1961. Since 1961 he has been teaching at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, first as Professor of English, 1961–5, and then as Professor of Scandinavian Studies. He is the author of Bard of Iceland: Jónas Hallgrïmsson, Poet and Scientist (2002).
53 The ‘Mutabilitie Cantos’ is the name given to the fragmentary Book VII of Spenser’s Faerie Queene. They consist of only two cantos, published with the folio edition of The Faerie Queene in 1609.
54 Lewis was the general editor of a series of texts published by Thomas Nelson as Nelson’s Medieval and Renaissance Library.
55 Philippians 4:4.
56 Matthew 6:34.
57 Stuart Robertson was writing from 209 North Biaman Avenue, Villa Park, Illinois.
58 1 Corinthians 9:27: ‘But I keep under my body, and bring it into subjection lest that by any means, when I have preached to others, I myself should be a castaway.’
59 Matthew 25:31–3.
60 Philippians 2:12.
61 ibid., 2:13.
62 Dr Kenneth Ronald Walter Brewer (1931–), statistical survey consultant, was born in Hackney, London on 4 March 1931. He received a BSc in Physics from Imperial College, London, 1951, and an MSc in Astronomy from the University of London Observatory in 1952. In July 1952 he went to Australia where he was a student at the Australian National University’s Department of Astronomy, 1952–4. In 1954 he became a statistician, joining the Commonwealth Bureau of Census and Statistics, now the Australian Bureau of Census and Statistics. He took a BA from the University of Melbourne in 1960, and an M.Ec. and Ph.D. from the Australian National University in 1973 and 1997. From 1998 he has been a Visiting Fellow at the Australian National University. His publications include, with Muhammad Hanif, Sampling with Unequal Probabilities (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1983); and Combined Survey Sampling Inference: Weighing Basu’s Elephants (London: Arnold, 2002). He is an active layman in the Liberal Catholic Church (Province of Australia). In a letter to Walter Hooper of 13 April 2005 he stated that he ‘has never lost his deep respect for and delight in the writings of C. S. Lewis. Nevertheless…he would now count himself as being more in the school of Ken Wilber, the author of The Marriage of Sense and Soul [1998] and of many other books on matters of ultimate concern.’
63 ‘delirium tremens’. Lewis forgot that he did not mention this in the 1960 edition of Miracles.
64 Miracles (1940; Fontana, 1960), ch. 1, pp. 4, 5–6: ‘Some people believe that nothing exists except Nature; I call these people Naturalists. Others think that, besides Nature, there exists something else: I call them Supernaturalists…What the Naturalist believes is that the ultimate Fact, the thing you can’t go behind, is a vast process in space and time which is going on of its own accord. Inside that total system every particular event…happens because some other event has happened; in the long run, because the Total Event is happening. Each particular thing…is what it is because other things are what they are; and so, eventually, because the whole system is what it is. All the things and events are so completely interlocked that no one of them can claim the slightest independence from “the whole show”.’
65 Matthew 12:31–2: ‘All manner of sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto men: but the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost shall not be forgiven unto men. And whosoever speaketh a word against the Son of man, it shall be forgiven him: but whosoever speaketh against the Holy Ghost, it shall not be forgiven him.’
See John Bunyan, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, ed. Roger Sharrock (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), p. 33: ‘In these days, when I have heard others talk of what was the sin against the Holy Ghost, then would the tempter so provoke me to desire to sin that sin, that I was as if I could not, must not, neither should be quiet until I had committed that; now, no sin would serve but that; if it were to be committed by speaking of such a word, then I have been as if my mouth would have spoken that word, whether I would or no; and in so strong a measure was this temptation upon me, that often I have been ready to clap my hand under my chin, to hold my mouth from opening; and to that end also I have had thoughts at other times, to leap with my head downward, into some muck-hill hole or other, to keep my mouth from speaking…’ Bunyan went on for many pages describing the misery he endured as a result of believing he had committed the unforgivable sin.
66 For the biography of George Watson, see note 233 to the letter to Joy Lewis of 18 Nov 1959.
67 George Watson, The Literary Critics: A Study in English Descriptive Criticism (1962).
68 ibid., ch. 1, p. 12.
69 William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads, With a Few Other Poems (1798), Preface [by Wordsworth], paragraphs 24–5.
70 Watson, The Literary Critics, p. 202: ‘If we peer closer, two strands seem visible in the complex pattern of largely academic historiography as it has been practised on both sides of the Atlantic. The one is largely Christian, the other largely Marxist and ex-Marxist. The Christian tradition is essentially British–Anglican, indeed–and has powerful medieval affinities, emerging from the ruck of late Victorian editing of medieval texts into an astonishingly clear light with such good academic critics as W. P. Ker (1855–1923) in his Epic and Romance (1896) and The Dark Ages (1904).’ For Lewis’s encounter with Ker see CL I, p. 554.
71 i.e. The Allegory of Love.
72 William Wordsworth, Poems (1815), ‘Laodamia’. See the Preface to William Wordsworth, Poems, ed. Matthew Arnold (London: Macmillan, 1879), p. xxiv: ‘I have a warm admiration for Laodamia and for the great Ode; but if I am to tell the very truth, I find Laodamia not wholly free from something artificial, and the great Ode not wholly free from something declamatory.’
73 Mrs Rolston had written from Baton Rouge, Louisiana to ‘N. W. Clerk’, author of A Grief Observed, not knowing ‘Clerk’ was Lewis. Lewis continued the disguise by writing as from Faber & Faber, publishers of the book.
74 Lewis had written ‘C. S.’ and then struck it out to be replaced by ‘N. W.’
75 A mistake for Tuesday.
76 In a letter to Walter Hooper of 1 March 1968, Watson said that Lewis’s letter of 15 May 1962 ‘is a reply to one of mine in which, perhaps rashly, I suggested that litotes is often a mark of intellectual snobbery (“I.S”).’
77 SBJ, chs. 14–15, pp. 178–9: ‘In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God…It must be understood that the conversion recorded in the last chapter was only to Theism, pure and simple, not to Christianity.’
78 See CL I, p. 96.
79 Blaise Pascal, Pensées, trans. W. F. Trotter (1996–7), Section VII, Morality and Doctrine, no. 553: ‘Console thyself, thou would not seek Me, if thou hadst not found Me.’
80 i.e. They Asked for a Paper.
81 There was a meeting of the Commission to Revise the Psalter at the home of the Archbishop of York, Bishopthorpe Palace, Bishopthorpe, Yorkshire, on 29 May 1962.
82 In Samuel Butler, Erewhon (1872), ch. 10, criminals go to ‘straighteners’ to be cured, whereas sick and poor people are sent to prison until they get better.
83 The New English Bible. The New Testament was published in 1961, and the whole Bible in 1970.
84 i.e. David Winton Thomas.
85 Possibly a reference to two Cambridge dons, Richard Leighton Greene, author of The Early English Carols (1935) and A Selection of English Carols (1962), and James Winny, author of Elizabethan Prose Translation (1960).
86 Margaret E. Rose of the School Broadcasting Department of the BBC wrote to Lewis on 28 May 1962: ‘We are doing a series for Sixth Forms in the Autumn of 1962 called “Knowledge, Imagination and Truth” in which we hope to demonstrate the separate functions and the interplay of “reason” and “imagination” as means of knowledge. I…wonder whether you would be interested in doing the two talks on J. R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings”.’
87 p.p.
88 Antonio de Oliveira Salazar (1889–1970), dictator of Portugal, 1932–68, who in 1933 introduced a constitution that contained similarities to the fascist governments of Germany and Italy. His policies made the ruling oligarchy rich, and Portugal the poorest country in Europe.
89 Psalm 74:21 (Coverdale).
90 Lewis sent this note of congratulation to Sharrock on learning he had been elected Professor of English at the University of Durham.
91 Virgil, Aeneid, III, 495: ‘Your rest is won.’
92 ‘congratulations’.
93 Lewis is here, in effect, repeating what he said in Miracles, ch. 3, pp. 14–15.
94 Greeves had suffered from heart trouble all his life.
95 i.e. Bunyan’s Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners.
96 In the letter to Green of 18 June 1962.
97 As Lewis did in The Four Loves.
98 The Four Loves, ch. 3, ‘Affection’, p. 33: ‘As gin is not only a drink in itself but also a base for many mixed drinks, so Affection, besides being a love itself, can enter into the other loves and colour them all through and become the very medium in which from day to day they operate. They would not perhaps wear very well without it.’
99 ibid., ch. 2, ‘Likings and Love for the Sub-Human’, p. 16: ‘When [Appreciative love] is offered to a woman we call it admiration; when to a man, hero-worship; when to God, worship simply.’
100 William Wordsworth, Complete Poetical Works (1888), ‘The Tables Turned’, 26–8: ‘Our meddling intellect/Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things–/We murder to dissect.’
101 Hooper had agreed to write a book on Lewis for Twayne’s English Authors Series. In the end Lewis persuaded him to abandon it.
102 This letter was originally published in the Church Times, CXLV (20 July 1962), p. 12, under the title ‘And Less Greek’.
103 Walter Van Der Kamp (1913–98) was born in the Netherlands, but emigrated to Canada in 1955. He founded the Tychonian Society, the purpose of which was to disseminate information about the central place occupied by the earth in the universe. In 1971 Van Der Kamp began to publish the Bulletin of the Tychonian Society. In 1991 the society changed its name to the Association for Biblical Astronomy, and the publication to The Biblical Astronomer. See the obituary by his son Conrad Van Der Kamp in The Biblical Astronomer, 8, no. 84 (Spring 1998), pp. 7–9.
104 Arthur Darby Nock (1902–63), the author of Conversion (1933), Saint Paul (1938), and many articles on ancient religion. It is not known which article Lewis was referring to.
105 1 Corinthians 14:8: ‘If the trumpet give an uncertain sound, who shall prepare himself to the battle?’
106 ‘Free Kirk’ is another name for members of the Free Church of Scotland, formed at the Disruption in 1843 by the separation of nearly a third of the ministers and members of the established Church of Scotland. In 1900 it joined with the United Presbyterian Church to form the United Free Church.
107 In 1959 Charles Percy Snow (1905–80), a scientific administrator and novelist, gave the Rede lectures in Cambridge on The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (1959). His theme was that ignorance by humanists of modern science was as barbaric as ignorance of the arts by scientists. F. R. Leavis attacked the thesis with passion in his Two Cultures? The Significance of C. P. Snow (1962), in which he asserted that his own interpretation of culture, as a knowledge of what great artists said of life, was in direct conflict with Snow’s. It is Two Cultures? which Lewis regarded as the ‘pillory’ constructed by Leavis for Snow.
108 Howard Pyle (1853–1911), American illustrator, wrote and illustrated many books, including The Story of King Arthur and his Knights (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1903).
109 Warwick Deeping (1877–1950), English novelist, was the author of Uther and Igraine (1903) and many other novels, including Sorrell and Son (1925).
110 During Jane Studdock’s first visit to St Anne’s, as recounted in That Hideous Strength, ch. 3, part IV, p. 59, she reads in a book lying on the table: ‘The beauty of the female is the root of joy to the female as well as to the male, and it is no accident that the goddess of Love is older and stronger than the god. To desire the desiring of her own beauty is the vanity of Lilith, but to desire the enjoying of her own beauty is the obedience of Eve, and to both it is in the lover that the beloved tastes her own delightfulness. As obedience is the stairway of pleasure, so humility is the–’
111 Margaret Clark, colleague of Jill Black at Bodley Head, wrote to Lewis on 1 August 1962: ‘About eighteen months ago my colleague Mrs Black wrote to you about George MacDonald. She hoped to persuade you then to write a study of him and his work for the Bodley Head Monograph Series, but, unfortunately for us, you were very busy with other things. Now I am writing to ask if you would be willing to write a short note about MacDonald for a quite different purpose.’
112 On the envelope of Lewis’s letter, Pitter wrote: ‘I went to see him on Aug. 15, 1962: this was the last time I saw him.–Owen Barfield had brought him to see me on the 12th July previous’ (Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. lett. c. 220/3, fol. 145).
113 E. H. Gombrich, The Story of Art (1950).
114 Jean Seznec, La Survivance des Dieux Antiques (1940); trans. B. F. Sessions, The Survival of the Pagan Gods (1953).