TO OWEN BARFIELD: from Magdalen College

[April? 1932]

As regards our argument about Gethsemane, I quite see that it sounds odd to attribute to perfect man a fear which imperfect men have often overcome. But one must beware of interpreting ‘perfect man’ in a sense which would nullify the temptation in the wilderness: a scene on which, at first, one would be tempted to comment (a) As regards the stone and bread ‘Imperfect men have voluntarily starved’ (b) As regards Satan’s demand for worship ‘Most men have never sunk so low as to feel this temptation at all’.

If we are to accept the Gospels however, we must interpret Christ’s perfection in a sense which admits of his feeling both the commonest and most animal temptations (hunger and the fear of death) and those temptations which usually occur only to the worst of men (devil worship for the sake of power). I am assuming that the stones and bread represents hunger: but if you prefer to regard it as primarily a temptation to thaumaturgy (‘If thou be the Son of God, command these stones’) then it falls into my second class.

The consideration of this second class at once raises the question ‘Are there not temptations proper to the very best and the very worst, which the middle sort of men do not feel?’: or, again ‘Do not common temptations attack most fiercely the best and the worst?’ I should answer Yes, and say that fear of death was one of these: and in respect of that fear I wd divide men into three classes.

A. The very bad to whom death represents the final defeat of the systematic self-regarding caution and egoism which has been the sole occupation of life. (False freedom defeated)

B. The virtuous. These in fact do not conquer fear of death without the support of any or all of the following

     (1) Pride . . .

     (2) Fear (Charge, charge, ’tis too late to retreat!)

     (3) Taedium vitae (My baby at my breast, that lulls the nurse asleep.)

     (4) Abandonment of the exhausting attempt at real freedom wh. makes the Necessary appear as a relief (The ship glides under the green arch of peace).

C. The Perfect. He cannot resort to any of the aids wh. class B. have, for they all depend on defect. His position is thus closely parallel to class A: death for Him also is the final defeat, but the time of real Freedom. (I am taking it for granted that the spiritual essence of death is ‘the opposite of Freedom’: hence the most mortal images are rigidity, suffocation etc.)

No doubt, He also knows the answer—that voluntary death (really voluntary, not the anodynes and dutch courages) makes unfreedom itself the assertion of freedom. But voluntary submission does not mean that there is nothing to submit to.

What is it to an ordinary man to die, if once he can set his teeth to bear the merely animal fear? To give in—he has been doing that nine times out of ten all his life. To see the lower in him conquer the higher, his animal body turning into lower animals and these finally into the mineral—he has been letting this happen since he was born. To relinquish control—easy for him as slipping on a well worn shoe. But in Gethsemane it is essential Freedom that is asked to be bound, unwearied control to throw up the sponge, Life itself to die. Ordinary men have not been so much in love with life as is usually supposed: small as their share of it is they have found it too much to bear without reducing a large portion of it as nearly to non-life as they can: we have drugs, sleep, irresponsibility, amusement, are more than half in love with easeful death—if only we could be sure it wouldn’t hurt! Only He who really lived a human life (and I presume that only one did) can fully taste the horror of death. I am sure that if the thing were presented to you in a myth you wd be the first to cry out upon the prosaic critic who complained that the Sun was discredited because it fled from the Wolves.

Your idea of Christ as suffering from the mere fact of being in the body, and therefore tempted, if at all, to hasten rather than postpone his death, seems to imply that he was not (as the Christian mystery runs) ‘perfect God and perfect man’ but a kind of composite being, a δαιμωυ or archangel imprisoned in a vehicle unsuitable to it (like Ariel in the oak) and in constant revolt against that vehicle. This is mythological in the bad sense. The Son was certainly not incarnated in such a sense as not also to remain God (if He had been, the universe wd have disappeared).

I don’t pretend to have an explanation: but I take it that the precise differentia of the Christian doctrine is that ‘Something wh. eternally is in the Noumenal world (and is impassible, blessed, omniscient, omnipotent etc) nevertheless once was in the phenomenal world (and was suffering etc).’ You can’t regard the earthly life of Jesus as an episode in the eternal life of the Son: as the slavery to Admetus was an episode in the immortal life of Apollo.

I need not say that on my view, the doctrine (do you hold it) that what was incarnated was ‘One of the hierarchies’ (or ‘one of’ the ‘anythings’) appears to me quite incompatible with the position given to Christ by his own words and by his followers. Aut deus aut malus angelus is as true as the old aut deus aut malus homo.

TO HIS BROTHER: from Schools (where he was invigilating)

14 June 1932

I have just read your letter of May 15th, but not as you supposed in College. ‘Schools’ has arrived and I am invigilating and although your letter arrived before lunch I deliberately brought it here unopened so that the reading it might occupy at least part of the arid waste of talk-less, smoke-less, exercise-less time between 2 P.M. and 5 P.M. Theoretically of course there ought to be no greater blessing than three hours absolutely safe from interruption and free from reading: but somehow or other—everyone has made the discovery—reading is quite impossible in the Schools. There is a sort of atmosphere at once restless and soporific which always ends in that stage which (for me) is a signal to stop reading:—the stage I mean at which you blink and ask yourself ‘Now what was the last page about’ . . .

I have read, or rather re-read, one novel namely Pendennis. How pleased the Pdaitabird would have been—why hadn’t I the grace to read it a few years ago. Why I re-read it now I don’t quite know—I suppose some vague idea that it was time I gave Thackeray another trial. The experiment, on the whole, has been a failure. I can just see, mind you, why they use words like ‘great’ and ‘genius’ in talking of him which we don’t use of Trollope. There are indications, or breakings in, all the time of something beyond Trollope’s range. The scenery for one thing (tho’ to be sure there is only one scene in Thackeray—always summer evening—English garden—rooks cawing) has a sort of depth (I mean in the painting sense) wh. Trollope hasn’t got. Still more there are the sudden ‘depths’ in a very different sense in Thackeray. There is one v. subordinate scene in Pendennis where you meet the Marquis of Steyne and a few of his led captains and pimps in a box at a theatre. It only lasts a page or so—but the sort of rank, salt, urinous stench from the nether pit nearly knocks you down and clearly has a kind of power that is quite out of Trollope’s range. I don’t think these bits really improve Thackeray’s books: they do, I suppose, indicate whatever we mean by ‘genius’. And if you are the kind of reader who values genius you rate Thackeray highly.

My own secret is—let rude ears be absent—that to tell you the truth, brother, I don’t like genius. I like enormously some things that only genius can do: such as Paradise Lost and the Divine Comedy. But it is the results I like. What I don’t care twopence about is the sense (apparently dear to so many) of being in the hands of ‘a great man’—you know: his dazzling personality, his lightening energy, the strange force of his mind—and all that. So that I quite definitely prefer Trollope—or rather this re-reading of Pen. confirms my long standing preference. No doubt Thackeray was the genius: but Trollope wrote the better books. All the old things I objected to in Thackeray I object to still.

Do you remember saying of Thomas Browne in one of your letters ‘Was there anything he didn’t love?’ One can ask just the opposite of Thackeray. He is wrongly accused of making his virtuous women too virtuous: the truth is he does not make them virtuous enough. If he makes a character what he wd call ‘good’ he always gets his own back by making her (its always a female character) a bigot and a blockhead. Do you think Sir, pray, that there are many slum parishes which could not produce half a dozen old women quite as chaste and affectionate as Helen Pendennis and ten times more charitable and more sensible? Now Phippy is a much better woman than most of Thackeray’s ‘good’ women. Still—the Major deserves his place in ones memory. So does Foker—surely the most balanced picture of the kindly vulgar young fop that there is. I’m not sure about Costigan. There’s a good deal too much of Thackeray’s habit of laughing at things like poverty and mispronunciation in the Costigan parts. Then, of course theres ‘the style’—Who the deuce wd begin talking about the style in a novel till all else was given up.

I have had another visit to Whipsnade [Zoo]—Foord Kelcie motored Arthur and me over on a fine Monday when Arthur was staying here. This was not the best company in the world with whom to revisit Whipsnade as F. K. combines extreme speed of tongue with a very slow walk, which is reduced to a stop when he has a good thing to say . . . Perhaps however it was just as well that A. drew me out of my course, for the place has been so increased and altered that I should have missed a good deal. The novelties include lions, tigers, polar bears, beavers etc. Bultitude [a bear] was still in his old place. Wallaby wood, owing to the different season, was improved by masses of bluebells: the graceful faun-like creatures hopping out of one pool of sunshine into another over English wildflowers—and so much tamer now than when you saw them that it is really no difficulty to stroke them—and English wildbirds singing deafeningly all round, came nearer to ones idea of the world before the Fall than anything I ever hoped to see . . .

TO HIS BROTHER: from The Kilns

12 December 1932

A thousand welcomes to Harve (of hated memory.) We have had so many alarms about you that I shall hardly believe it till I see you with my own eyes. But on that score, and on all your last six months’ adventures there is so much to be said that it is absurd to begin. You would be amused to hear the various hypotheses that were entertained during your long summer silence—that you had been captured by bandits—were in jail—had gone mad—had married—had married a Chinese woman. My own view of course was ‘Indeed he’s such a fellow etc’, but I found it hard to maintain this against the riot of rival theories . . .

It all seems too good to be true. I can hardly believe that when you take your shoes off a week or so hence, please God, you will be able to say ‘This will do me—for life’ . . .

[In July 1932 Warren applied to be placed on retired pay. He left Shanghai by cargo ship on 22 October and reached Liverpool on 14 December. Upon reaching The Kilns he was delighted to find that the new wing of the house, containing a study and bedroom, had been built specially for him. His retirement from the Royal Army Service Corps after eighteen years became official on 21 December 1932.

The letter which follows reveals something of the interests which led Jack to write The Allegory of Love and to begin his ‘Prolegomena’ lectures which led ultimately to his book The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature (1964). These twice-weekly lectures began on 18 January 1932 and were entitled ‘Prolegomena to Medieval Poetry’. They were continued during Trinity Term of 1932 and the final two lectures, devoted to Chaucer, were given in Trinity Term of 1933—24 and 26 April. These lectures were repeated a number of times. In Trinity Term of 1937 he began his other well-known series entitled ‘Prolegomena to Renaissance Poetry’.]

TO SISTER MADELEVA C. S. C. of Notre Dame, Indiana: from Magdalen College (Sister Madeleva was living in Oxford at the time and attending the ‘Prolegomena’ lectures.)

7 June 1934

In answer to your first question, there are probably such printed bibliographies as you mention, but I have no knowledge of them. The history of my lecture is this. After having worked for some years on my own subject (which is the medieval allegory) I found that I had accumulated a certain amount of general information which, tho’ far from being very recondite, was more than the ordinary student in the school could gather for himself. I then conceived the idea of my ‘prolegomena’. There were however several gaps in the general knowledge which I had accidentally got. To fill these up I adopted the simple method of going through Skeats notes on Chaucer and Langland, and other similar things, and following these up to their sources when they touched on matters that seemed to me important. This led me sometimes to books I already knew, often to new ones. This process explains why I inevitably appear more learned than I am. E.g. my quotations from Vincent of Beauvais don’t mean that I turned from a long reading of Vincent to illustrate Chaucer, but that I turned from Chaucer to find explanations in Vincent. In fine, the process is inductive for the most part of my lecture: tho’ on allegory, courtly love, and (sometimes) on philosophy, it is deductive—i.e. I start from the authors I quote. I elaborate this point because, if you are thinking of doing the same kind of thing (i.e. telling people what they ought to know as the prius of a study of medieval vernacular poetry) I think you would be wise to work in the same way—starting from the texts you want to explain. You will soon find of course that you are working the other way at the same time, that you can correct current explanations, or see things to explain where the ordinary editors see nothing. I suppose I need not remind you to cultivate the wisdom of the serpent: there will be misquotations, and misunderstood quotations in the best books, and you must always hunt up all quotations for yourself and find what they are really like in situ.

But, of course, I do not know what it is you propose to do. I have therefore mentioned all the more important ‘sources’ in my note-book without any attempt at selection. You will see at once that this is the bibliography of a man who was following a particular subject (the love-allegory), and this doubtless renders the list much less useful to you, who are hardly likely to be after the same quarry. In the second part, texts, I have been more selective, and have omitted a certain amount of low or low-ish Latin love poetry which is useful only for my own special purpose. You will observe that I begin with classical authors. This is a point I would press on anyone dealing with the middle ages, that the first essential is to read the relevant classics over and over: the key to everything—allegory, courtly love etc—is there. After that the two things to know really well are the Divine Comedy and the Romance of the Rose. The student who has really digested these (I don’t claim to be such a person myself!), with good commentaries, and who also knows the Classics and the Bible (including the apocryphal New Testament) has the game in his hands, and can defeat over and over again those who have simply burrowed in obscure parts of the actual middle ages.

Of scholastic philosophy and theology you probably know much more than I do. If by any chance you don’t, stick to Gilson as a guide and beware of the people (Maritain in your Church, and T. S. Eliot in mine) who are at present running what they call ‘neo-scholasticism’ as a fad.

Of periodicals you will find Romania, Speculum, and Medium Aevum useful.

Remember (this has been all important to me) that what you want to know about the Middle Ages will often not be in a book on the Middle Ages, but in the early chapters of some history of general philosophy or science. The accounts of your period in such books will, of course, usually be patronising and ill-informed, but it will mention dates and authors whom you can follow up and thus put you in the way of writing a true account for yourself.

If there is any way in which I can assist you, or if you would care to call and discuss anything with me, do not hesitate to let me know . . .

P. S. I shd warn you that I am very bad at German and this has doubtless influenced my choice of reading.

I suppose you will have access to a complete Aristotle wherever you are working? He is often useful.

TO OWEN BARFIELD: from Magdalen College (while reading the proofs of The Allegory of Love which was published on 21 May 1936)

[December 1935]

The Diary of an Old Soul is magnificent. You placed the moment of giving it to me admirably. I remember with horror the absurdity of my last criticism on it, and with shame the vulgarity of the form in which I expressed it. He knows all about the interplay between the religious and metaphysical aspects of the One. I see now (since I began this letter) that these two are opposite only with the fruitful opposition of male & female (how deep the old erotic metaphor of the proelia Veneris is) and what they beget is the solution.

Incidentally, since I have begun to pray, I find my extreme view of personality changing. My own empirical self is becoming more important and this is exactly the opposite of self love. You don’t teach a seed how to die into treehood by throwing it into the fire: and it has to become a good seed before its worth burying.

As to my own book—the question whether notes shd come at the end of the chapter or the bottom of the page is partly for publisher & printer. Personally I loathe a book where they come at the end—and I am writing mainly for people who will want to know where they must look to verify my facts . . .

TO MRS JOAN BENNETT (of Cambridge): from Magdalen College

13 January 1937

A foul copy of an essay (which now that I re-read it doesn’t seem as good as I had hoped) is a poor return for the delightful, the champagne holiday you gave me. But you asked for it and here it is.

What splendid talk goes on in your house!—and what a wonderful thing . . . your English Faculty is. If only we and you could combine into a single teaching body (leaving out your freaks and our nonentities) we could make ‘English’ into an education that would not have to fear any rivalries. In the meantime we have lots to exchange. I am sure you practise more ‘judgement’; I suspect we have more ‘blood’. What we want is to be well commingled.

The Lucas book proves disappointing as you go on. His attack on [I. A.] Richards for splitting up poetic effects which we receive as a unity, is silly; that is what analysis means and R. never suggested that the products of analysis were the same as the living unity. Again, he doesn’t seem to see that Richards is on his side in bringing poetry to an ethical test in the long run; and his own ethical standard is so half-hearted—he’s so afraid of being thought a moralist that he tries to blunt it by gas about ‘health’ and ‘survival’. As if survival can have any value apart from the prior value of what survives. To me especially it is an annoying book; he attacks my enemies in the wrong way . . . and a good deal of mere ‘superiority’ too . . .

TO MRS JOAN BENNETT: from Magdalen College

[February? 1937]

I also have been having ’flu or you should have heard from me sooner. I enclose the article; pray make whatever use you please of it¹⁴⁸ . . . It is a question (for your sake and that of the Festschrift, not mine) whether a general pro-Donne paper called Donne and his critics—a glance at Dryden and Johnson and then some contemporaries including me—wouldn’t be better than a direct answer. C.S.L. as professional controversialist and itinerant prize-fighter is, I suspect, becoming already rather a bore to our small public, and might in that way infect you.¹⁴⁹ Also, if you really refute me, you raise for the editor the awkward question, ‘Then why print the other article?’ However, do just as you like . . . and good luck with it whatever you do.

I’ve had a grand week in bed—Northanger Abbey, The Moonstone, The Vision of Judgement, Modern Painters (Vol. 3), Our Mutual Friend, and The Egoist. Of the latter I decided this time that it’s a rare instance of the conception being so good that even the fantastic faults can’t kill it. There’s a good deal of the ass about Meredith—that dreadful first chapter—Carlyle in icing sugar. And isn’t the supposedly witty conversation much poorer than much we have heard in real life? Mrs Mountstuart is a greater bore than Miss Bates—only he didn’t mean her to be. The Byron was not so good as I remembered; the Ruskin, despite much nonsense, glorious.

TO A FORMER PUPIL: from Magdalen College

8 March 1937

I haven’t yet got Grierson’s new book Milton and Wordsworth, but I’m going to: it ought to kill two of your birds with one stone. Have you read F. L. Lucas’ Decline and Fall of the Romantic Ideal? Hideously over-written in parts, but well worth reading: he has grasped what seems to be a hard idea to modern minds, that a certain degree of a thing might be good and a further degree of the same thing bad. Elementary, you will say—yet a realisation of it would have forbidden the writing of many books.

These are new. A few years old—but you may not have read it—is E. K. Chambers’ Sir Thomas Wyatt and Other Studies. Some of the essays are medieval, but most of it is 16th century. I can’t think of anything much on ‘general tendencies of the 17th century’ since one you almost certainly read when you were up, Grierson’s Cross Currents of XVIIth c. Lit, very good indeed. By the bye a festschrift to Grierson shortly appearing (Tillyard, Nichol Smith, Joan Bennett and myself are among the contributors) might contain something of what you want. The book on the 17th c. by Willey (I have forgotten the title) is more on the thought background than the poets, rather doing for that century, what my Prolegomena tried to do for the middle ages. I don’t know of anything general on the 18th century. Sherburn’s Early Life of Pope tho’ good is hardly what you want . . .

TO OWEN BARFIELD: from The Kilns

2 September 1937

‘Curiously comfortless stuff in the background’ is the criticism of a sensible man just emerging from the popular errors about Morris. Not so curiously, not quite in the background—that particular discomfort is the main theme of all his best work, the thing he was born to say. The formula is ‘Returning to what seems an ideal world to find yourself all the more face to face with gravest reality without ever drawing a pessimistic conclusion but fully maintaining that heroic action in, or amelioration of, a temporal life is an absolute duty though the disease of temporality is incurable.’

Not quite what you expected, but just what the essential Morris is. ‘Defeat and victory are the same in the sense that victory will open your eyes only to a deeper defeat: so fight on.’ In fact he is the final statement of good Paganism: a faithful account of what things are and always must be to the natural man. Cf. what are in comparison the ravings of Hardy on the one hand and optimistic Communists on t’other.

But the Earthly Paradise after that first story is inferior work. Try Jason, House of the Wolfings, Roots of the Mts, Well at the World’s End.

The thriller is finished and called Out of the Silent Planet¹⁵⁰ . . .

TO OWEN BARFIELD: from Magdalen College

10 June 1938

Think not the doom of man reversed for thee. Apropos of Johnson, isn’t this good, from the Rambler, from a man who decided not to marry a blue-stocking on finding her an atheist and a determinist: ‘It was not difficult to discover the danger of committing myself forever to one who might at any time mistake the dictates of passion, or the calls of appetite, for the decree of fate; or consider cuckoldom as necessary to the general system, as a link in the everlasting chain of successive causes.’

And, in another way, isn’t this splendid ‘Whenever, after the shortest relaxation of vigilance, reason and caution return to their charge, they find hope again in possession.’

What is the betting I forget to put that lyric in after all?—They keep sheep in Magdalen grove now and I hear the fleecy care bleating all day long; I am shocked to find that none of my pupils, though they are all acquainted with pastoral poetry, regards them as anything but a nuisance: and one of my colleagues has been heard to ask why sheep have their wool cut off. (Fact)

It frightens me almost. And so it did the other night when I heard two undergrads. giving a list of pleasures which were (a) Nazi. (b) Leading to homosexuality. They were, feeling the wind in your hair, walking with bare feet in the grass, and bathing in the rain. Think it over: it gets worse the longer you look at it.

More cheering is the true report from Cambridge of a conversation:

A. What is this Ablaut that K. keeps on talking about in his lectures?

B. Oh don’t you know, he was in love with Eloise . . .

TO OWEN BARFIELD: from Magdalen College (at the time of Munich and the approach of the next war)

12 September 1938

What awful quantities of this sort of thing seem necessary to break us in, or, more correctly, to break us off. One thinks one has made some progress towards detachment, some , and begin to realise, and to acquiesce in, the rightly precarious hold we have on all our natural loves, interests, and comforts: then when they are really shaken, at the very first breath of that wind, it turns out to have been all a sham, a field-day, blank cartridges.

This is how I was thinking last night about the war danger. I had so often told myself that my friends and books and even brains were not given me to keep: that I must teach myself at bottom to care for something else more (and also of course to care for them more, but in a different way), and I was horrified to find how cold the idea of really losing them struck.

An awful symptom is that part of oneself still regards troubles as ‘interruptions’—as if (ludicrous idea) the happy bustle of our personal interests was our real e’´πυον, instead of the opposite. I did in the end see (I dare not say ‘feel’) that since nothing but these forcible shakings will cure us of our worldliness, we might have at bottom reason to be thankful for them. We force God to surgical treatment: we won’t (mentally) diet . . .

Of course, our whole joint world may be blown up before the end of the week. I can’t feel in my bones that it will, but my bones know damn-all about it. If we are separated, God bless you, and thanks for a hundred good things I owe to you, more than I can count or weigh. In some ways we’ve had a corking time these twenty years.

Be thankful you have nothing to reproach yourself about in your relations with your father (I had lots) and that it is not some worse disease. The horror of a stroke must be felt almost entirely by the spectators . . .

TO OWEN BARFIELD: from Magdalen College

8 February [1939]

Two week ends of Feb. fall in term: the 5th–8th and the 12th–15th. If you choose the former you will be able to hear Tillyard and me finishing our controversy viva voce, but as I have to give him a bed perhaps the 12th wd be better. No doubt I shall be defeated in the controversy.¹⁵¹

I don’t know if Plato did write the Phaedo: the canon of these ancient writers, under the surface, is still quite chaotic. It is also a very corrupt text. Bring it along by all means, but don’t pitch your hopes too high. We are both getting so rusty that we shall make very little of it—and my distrust of all lexicons and translations is increasing. Also of Plato—and of the human mind.

I suppose for the sake of the others we must do something about arranging a walk. Those maps are so unrealiable by now that it is rather a farce—but still ‘Try lad, try! No harm in trying’. Of course hardly any districts in England are unspoiled enough to make walking worth while: and with two new members—I have very little doubt it will be a ghastly failure.

I haven’t seen C. W.’s play: it is not like to be at all good.¹⁵²

As for Orpheus—again it’s no harm trying. If you can’t write it console yourself by reflecting that if you did you wd have been v. unlikely to get a publisher.¹⁵³ I am more and more convinced that there is no future for poetry.

Nearly everyone has been ill here: I try to prevent them all croaking and grumbling but it is hard being the only optimist. Let me know which week end: whichever you choose something will doubtless prevent it. I hear the income-tax is going up again. The weather is bad and looks like getting worse. I suppose war is certain now. I don’t believe language is a perpetual Orphic song . . .

P.S. Even my braces are in a frightful condition. ‘Damn braces’ said Blake.

TO MRS JOAN BENNETT: from Magdalen College (Mrs Bennett had probably taken exception to the chapter entitled ‘Limbo’ in Lewis’s book The Pilgrim’s Regress [1933].)

5 April 1939

I’m sorry about the Athanasian Creed—the passage illustrates how important it is in writing to say what you mean and not to say anything you don’t mean. As the context suggests, I was thinking purely of the Trinitarian doctrine and had quite forgotten the damnatory clauses. There are however several palliatives. Residence in Limbo I am told is compatible with ‘perishing everlastingly’ and you’ll find it quite jolly, for whereas Heaven is an acquired taste, Limbo is a place of ‘perfect natural happiness’. In fact you may be able to realise your wish ‘of attending with one’s whole mind to the history of the human spirit’. There are grand libraries in Limbo, endless discussions, and no colds. There will be a faint melancholy because you’ll all know that you have missed the bus, but that will provide a subject for poetry. The scenery is pleasant though tame. The climate endless autumn.

Seriously, I don’t pretend to have any information on the fate of the virtuous unbeliever. I don’t suppose this question provided the solitary exception to the principle that actions on a false hypothesis lead to some less satisfactory result than actions on a true. That’s as far as I would go—beyond feeling that the believer is playing for higher stakes and incurring danger of something really nasty . . .

TO DOM BEDE GRIFFITHS, O.S B.: from Magdalen College

8 May 1939

It was nice to hear from you again. I think I said before that I have no contribution to make about re-union. It was never more needed. A united Christendom should be the answer to the new Paganism. But how reconciliation of the Churches, as opposed to conversions of individuals from a church to another, is to come about, I confess I cannot see. I am inclined to think that the immediate task is vigorous co-operation on the basis of what even now is common—combined, of course, with full admission of the differences. An experienced unity on some things might then prove the prelude to a confessional unity on all things. Nothing wd give such strong support to the Papal claims as the spectacle of a Pope actually functioning as head of Christendom. But it is not, I feel sure, my vocation to discuss reunion.

Yes, I do like George Eliot. Romola is a most purgative work on the facilis descensus, because the final state of the character is so different from his original state and yet all the transitions are so dreadfully natural. Mind you, I think George Eliot labours her morality a bit: it has something of the ungraceful ponderousness of all heathen ethics. (I recently read all Seneca’s epistles and think I like the Stoics better than George Eliot.) The best of all her books as far as I have read is Middlemarch. It shows such an extraordinary understanding of different kinds of life—different classes, ages, and sexes. Her humour is nearly always admirable.

I thought we had talked of Patmore. I think him really great within his own limited sphere. To be sure he pushes the parallel between Divine and human love as far as it can sanely or decently go, and perhaps at times a little further. One can imagine his work being most pernicious to a devout person who read it at the wrong age. But a superb poet. Do you remember the comparison of the naturally virtuous person who receives grace at conversion to a man walking along and suddenly hearing a band playing, and then ‘His step unchanged, he steps in time’. Or on the poignancy of spring, ‘With it the blackbird breaks the young day’s heart’. Or the lightening during a storm at sea which reveals ‘The deeps/ Standing about in stony heaps’. That is sheer genius. And the tightness (if you know what I mean) of all his work. The prose one (Rod, Root & Flower) contains much you might like.

No, I haven’t joined the Territorials. I am too old. It wd be hypocrisy to say that I regret this. My memories of the last war haunted my dreams for years. Military service, to be plain, includes the threat of every temporal evil; pain and death wh. is what we fear from sickness: isolation from those we love wh. is what we fear from exile: toil under arbitrary masters, injustices and humiliation, wh. is what we fear from slavery: hunger, thirst, cold and exposure wh. is what we fear from poverty. I’m not a pacifist. If its got to be, its got to be. But the flesh is weak and selfish and I think death wd be much better than to live through another war.

Thank God, He has not allowed my faith to be greatly tempted by the present horrors. I do not doubt that whatever misery He permits will be for our ultimate good unless, by rebellious will, we convert it to evil. But I get no further than Gethsemane: and am daily thankful that that scene, of all others in Our Lord’s life, did not go unrecorded. But what state of affairs in this world can we view with satisfaction?

If we are unhappy, then we are unhappy. If we are happy, then we remember than the crown is not promised without the cross and tremble. In fact, one comes to realize, what one always admitted theoretically, that there is nothing here that will do us good: the sooner we are safely out of this world the better. But ‘would it were evening, Hal, and all well’. I have even, I’m afraid, caught myself wishing that I have never been born, wh. is sinful. Also, meaningless if you try to think it out.

The process of living seems to consist in coming to realize truths so ancient and simple that, if stated, they sound like barren platitudes. They cannot sound otherwise to those who have not had the relevant experience: that is why there is no real teaching of such truths possible and every generation starts from scratch . . .

TO SISTER PENELOPE, C.S.M.V. (who had written to him about Out of the Silent Planet): from Magdalen College

9 July [August] 1939

The letter at the end is pure fiction and the ‘circumstances wh. put the book out of date’ are merely a way of preparing for a sequel. But the danger of ‘Westonism’ I meant to be real.

What set me about writing the book was the discovery that a pupil of mine took all that dream of interplanetary colonisation quite seriously, and the realisation that thousands of people, in one form or another depend on some hope of perpetuating and improving the human species for the whole meaning of the universe—that a ‘scientific’ hope of defeating death is a real rival to Christianity. At present, of course, the prospect of a war has rather damped them: which shows that whatever evil Satan sets on foot God will always do some good or other by it. I don’t think even ‘for believers only’ I could describe Ransom’s revelation to Oyarsa: the fact that you want me to really proves how well advised I was merely to suggest it.

You will be both grieved and amused to learn that out of about sixty reviews, only two showed any knowledge that my idea of the fall of the Bent One was anything but a private invention of my own! But if only there were someone with a richer talent and more leisure, I believe this great ignorance might be a help to the evangelization of England: any amount of theology can now be smuggled into people’s minds under cover of romance without their knowing it.

I have given your God Persists a first reading with great pleasure. I value it particularly for its frank emphasis on those elements in the faith which too many modern apologists try to keep out of sight for fear they will be called mythical. I am sure this weakens our case. I like very much your treatment of Heathenism (my own debts to it are enormous—it was through almost believing in the gods that I came to believe in God) on p. 31. Also p. 33 on the seedling for special culture and the danger of reverting to ‘common’ weed. That continual narrowing out, selecting from a selection, does seem to be so very characteristic of God’s method. Can you tell me anything more about the ‘crossing’ of the nomadic and agricultural religions on p. 36? On p. 43 ‘God sat again for His portrait’ is a most successful audacity.

I think your task of finding suitable fiction for the convalescents must be interesting. Do you know George Macdonald’s fantasies for grown-ups (his tales for children you probably know already): Phantastes & Lilith I found endlessly attractive, and full of what I felt to be holiness before I really knew that it was. One of his novels, Sir Gibbie (Everyman), though often, like all his novels, amateurish, is worth reading. And do you know the works of Charles Williams? Rather wild, but full of love and excelling in the creation of convincing good characters. (The reason these are rare in fiction is that to imagine a man worse than yourself you’ve only got to stop doing something, while to imagine one better you’ve got to do something.)

Though I’m forty years old as a man I’m only about twelve as a Christian, so it would be a maternal act if you found time sometimes to mention me in your prayers.

[Following Germany’s invasion of Czechoslovakia in March 1939 Neville Chamberlain announced that England would support Poland should it be invaded. It was clear that war was inevitable. Warren, who was on the Army Reserve List, learned that he would be called back into active service. Men between the ages of eighteen and forty-one were liable for military service and for a while it looked as if Jack might have to go back into the Army as he would not be forty-two until 29 November. It had been announced that New Building would be required for government use and, as it seemed there would be no one to teach in any case, Jack and Warren had to move all their books into the cellar. Unfortunately, Jack had to lecture on Shakespeare at Stratford on 31 August and 1 September, and he arrived back home on 1 September to find that Warren had just left for an Army base at Catterick in Yorkshire. That same day Germany invaded Poland, and on 3 September England declared war on Germany. Children were being evacuated from London and, like many families, Jack and the Moores offered to look after those sent to them.]

TO HIS BROTHER: from Magdalen College

2 September 1939

Apparently I arrived at Oxford station yesterday very shortly before you left from it—however, this is perhaps a good thing for though a farewell tankard can just be carried off, a farewell cup of camp coffee is almost unbearable.

Our schoolgirls have arrived and all seem to me—and, what’s more important, to Minto—to be very nice, unaffected creatures and all most flatteringly delighted with their new surroundings. They’re fond of animals which is a good thing (for them as well as for us) . . .

My second lecture at Stratford was cancelled and my first went down very well. It was fully reported (the irony!) in the Times yesterday. I had a pretty ghastly time—a smart, nearly empty hotel in a strange town with a wireless blaring away all the time and hours and hours to get through without work compose perhaps the worst possible background to a crisis . . . The brightest spot was Right-Ho Jeeves which, in opposition to you, I think one of the funniest books I’ve ever read. Fink-Nottle’s speech at the speech-day made me laugh aloud in an empty lounge.

I’ve just been to see the President who laughs to scorn the alarms raised in my breast by the announcement of liability to service up to 41. I hope he’s right . . .

Did you see that the enemy planes retreated from Warsaw(?) before Polish fighters & went to bomb a holiday resort in the neighbourhood instead!

God save you, brother.

TO HIS BROTHER: from The Kilns

10 September 1939

One of the most reminiscent features of the last war has already appeared—i.e. the information which always comes too late to prevent you doing an unnecessary job. We have just been informed that New Building will not be used by Govt. and that fellows’ rooms in particular will be inviolable: also that we are going to have a term and quite a lot of undergraduates up. So you see—I had pictured myself either never seeing those books again or else, with you, and in great joy, unearthing them after the war. To-morrow, I suppose, I must start on the never envisaged task of bringing them up single-handed during a war. I daresay it’s the sort of thing you’d think funny!

Another quite unexpected blow is Bleiben’s announcement this morning that though ‘some of us would know’ he had been intending to leave the Parish, ‘in the present circumstances he feels it his duty’ to stay on.¹⁵⁴ A non sequitur in my opinion. In the Litany this morning we had some extra petitions, one of which was ‘Prosper, oh Lord, our righteous cause’. Assuming that it was the work of the Bishop or someone higher up, when I met Bleiben in the porch, I ventured to protest against the audacity of informing God that our cause was righteous—a point on which He may have His own view.* But it turned out to be Bleiben’s own. However, he took the criticism very well.

Along with these not very pleasant indirect results of the war, there is one pure gift—the London branch of the University Press has moved to Oxford so that Charles Williams is living here.¹⁵⁵ I lunched with him on Thursday and hope to do so again on Monday.

Life at The Kilns is going on at least as well as I expected. We had our first air raid warning at 7.45 the other morning when I expect you had yours too. Everyone got to the dugout quite quickly and I must say they all behaved well, and though v. hungry and thirsty before the all clear went, we quite enjoyed the most perfect late summer morning I have ever seen. The main trouble of life at present is the blacking out which is done (as you may imagine) with a most complicated Arthur Rackham system of odd rags—quite effectively but at the cost of much labour. Luckily I do most of the rooms myself, so it doesn’t take me nearly so long as if I were assisted . . .

* I hope it’s quite like ours, of course: but you never know with Him.

TO HIS BROTHER: from The Kilns

18 September 1939

For the moment dons are a reserved occupation: and as long as they stick to their present plans of not calling up boys between 18 and 20 there will, of course, be a full generation of freshmen each year who must do something between leaving school and joining the army . . .

I am about two-thirds of the way through the job of restoring the books to the shelves [in Magdalen]. Your bookcase by the window is now almost full again and looks, to my unskilled eye, very nearly its old self, though you will doubtless perceive a most perverse disorder, suggesting a positive determination to separate natural neighbours . . .

I have said that the [evacuated] children are ‘nice’, and so they are. But modern children are poor creatures. They keep on coming to Maureen and asking ‘What shall we do now?’ She tells them to play tennis, or mend their stockings, or write home: and when that is done they come and ask again. Shades of our own childhood! . . .

I quite agree that one of the worst features of this war is the spectral feeling of all having happened before. As Dyson said ‘When you read the headlines (French advance—British steamship sunk) you feel as if you’d had a delightful dream during the last war and woken up to find it still going on.’ But perhaps the better view is the Frenchman’s ‘Well, that was a good armistice!’ If one could only hibernate. More and more sleep seems to me the best thing—short of waking up and finding yourself safely dead and not quite damned . . .

TO HIS BROTHER: from The Kilns (In October Warren was posted to the Base Supply Depot at Le Havre.)

5 November 1939

I was glad to hear that your journey had proved so much pleasanter than we both expected. The account of the moonlight ride in [the] black-out train was, for some reason, curiously vivid and I almost have the sense of having done it myself. I suppose I shall hear a definite address from you soon . . .

I had a pleasant evening on Thursday with Williams, Tolkien, and Wrenn, during which Wrenn almost seriously expressed a strong wish to burn Williams, or at least maintained that conversation with Williams enabled him to understand how inquisitors had felt it right to burn people.¹⁵⁶ Tolkien and I agreed afterwards that we just knew what he meant: that as some people . . . are eminently kickable, so Williams is eminently combustible.

The occasion was a discussion of the most distressing text in the Bible (‘narrow is the way and few they be that find it’) and whether one really could believe in a universe where the majority were damned and also in the goodness of God. Wrenn, of course, took the view that it mattered precisely nothing whether it conformed to your ideas of goodness or not, and it was at that stage that the combustible possibilities of Williams revealed themselves to him in an attractive light. The general sense of the meeting was in favour of a view on the lines taken in Pastor Pastorum—that Our Lord’s replies are never straight answers and never gratify curiosity, and that whatever this one meant its purpose was certainly not statistical . . .

TO SISTER PENELOPE, C.S.M.V.: from Magdalen College

8 November 1939

The Tableland [in The Pilgrim’s Regress] represents all high and dry states of mind, of which High Anglicanism then seemed to me to be one—most of the representatives of it whom I had then met being v. harsh people who called themselves scholastics and appeared to be inspired more by hatred of their fathers’ religion than anything else. I wd modify that view now: but I’m still not what you’d call high. To me the real distinction is not between high and low but between religion with real supernaturalism & salvationism on the one hand and all watered-down and modernist versions on the other. I think St Paul has really told us what to do about the divisions within the Ch. of England: i.e. I don’t care twopence what I eat on Friday but when I am at table with High Anglicans I abstain in order not ‘to offend my weak brother’ . . .

TO HIS BROTHER: from The Kilns

11 November [1939]

On Thursday we had a meeting of the Inklings—you and Coghill both absented unfortunately. We dined at the Eastgate. I have never in my life seen Dyson so exuberant—‘a roaring cataract of nonsense’. The bill of fare afterwards consisted of a section of the new Hobbit book from Tolkien, a nativity play from Williams (unusually intelligible for him, and approved by all) and a chapter out of the book on The Problem of Pain from me. It so happened—it would take too long to explain why—that the subject matter of the three readings formed almost a logical sequence, and produced a really first rate evening’s talk of the usual wide-ranging kind—‘from grave to gay, from lively to severe’. I wished very much we could have had you with us . . .

Yes—I too enjoyed our short time together in College enormously, until the shadow of the end began to fall over it: not that one has lost the art (our boyhood was well trained in it) of dealing with such shadows, but that one so resents having to start putting it into practice again after so many years. Pox on the whole business.

TO HIS BROTHER: from The Kilns

24 November 1939

I am almost ashamed to describe my leisurely days to one leading such a gruelling life as you—by the way, there is a curious irony about your present job, because, thirty years ago, bustling about between ships and trains would have seemed to you the ideal occupation. Do you remember what a triumph a bit of ‘unforced traffic’ was in the attic days? Well, my son, you have it now! No, I hadn’t thought of it’s being a crime to keep an engine waiting, though it’s fairly obvious when you come to think of it: I had known already, I suppose from notices half consciously read in goods stations that ‘an engine in steam’ is a venerable object, almost like a mare in foal.

A few hours ago while waiting for the bus outside Magdalen I saw a sight I bet you’ve never seen—an undergraduate whom I know approaching with what I took to be a dead pheasant in his hand but what turned out to be a live falcon on his wrist. It was hooded with a little leather hood and is quite a gaily coloured bird, provided on the lower leg with natural spots of a kind of yellow varnish. Blessings on the man who while waiting to be called up for a first class European war is exclusively intent on restoring the ancient sport of hawking . . .

I suppose a French novel is the very last thing you want to read at present, but I can’t refrain from telling you that in the French library (where the exam was held) I picked up Balzac’s Curé de Tours quite carelessly and was immediately enchanted—just as I was by his Père Goriot in 1917. It is so very unlike most French things—the Cure and the whole cathedral surroundings in Tours are almost Trollopian: so provincial, loveable, prosaic, unobstrusive . . .

The day is wet—an outside world of dripping branches and hens in the mud and cold which I am glad to have shut out (tea is just finished) but which, no doubt, is very much pleasanter than your sugar-floored sheds. How nasty the sugar cottage in Hansel and Grettel must have been in wet weather. I gave your greetings to those of the Inklings who were present on Thursday which were received with gratification.

TO HIS BROTHER: from The Kilns

3 December 1939

This has been a beautiful week. It began to clear up last Sunday (you remember my letter was written on Saturday) and that afternoon I had the first really enjoyable walk I’ve had this many a day . . . Later, I had the odd experience of leaving home for college at about 6, as Harwood had announced his intention of coming for the night. The journey in by bus was delightful because it was now bright moonlight and the lights inside the bus were so dimmed as to make no difference, so that I had the quite unusual experience of seeing Magdalen bridge and tower by moonlight from the height and speed of a bus-top: a short thing compared with the train journey you described, but of course the elevation gave it an advantage.

Harwood, owing to train difficulties, didn’t turn up till about 10.30, but we sat up lateish and had a good talk. I may have mentioned to you that he has evacuated to Minehead—nicely placed for country but with bad prospects financially, as the splitting up of their pupils’ London homes has led to their losing a good many. His son John is not with them but billeted in the neighbourhood—with the local M.F.H. [Master of Foxhounds]! and already has acquired a new language and says that his father ought to get his hair cut!

I hardly know which to pity more—a father like Harwood who watches his son being thus ‘translated’ or a son in process of such translation who has the embarrassment of a father like Harwood. I think, the son: for as some author whom I’ve forgotten says the anxiety that parents have about children ‘being a credit to them’ is a mere milk and water affair beside the anxiety of children that their parents should not be an absolute disgrace. Certainly it wd not be pleasant to have to explain to a M.F.H. that one’s father was an Anthroposophist—except that the only impression left on the M.F.H.’s mind wd probably be that your father was some kind of chemist. (If the M.F.H. was a P’daita it might, of course, lead to almost anything—‘Sort of fellow who comes to the door offering to feel your bumps’.) . . .

Talking of books, I have been looking rapidly through St François de Sales this week end to find a passage I wanted to quote, and have derived much ‘social pleasure’ from your pencillings: as I have experienced before, to read a book marked by you in your absence is almost the nearest thing to a conversation. When I read that hares turn white in winter because they eat nothing but snow (used as an argument for frequent communion) and see your mark it is almost as if one of us was pointing the passage out to the other here in the study . . .

The usual Thursday evening party did not meet as Williams & Hopkins were both away,¹⁵⁷ so I went up to Tolkien’s . . . We had a very pleasant evening drinking gin and lime juice (wh. sounds chilly, but I was quite in a sweat by the time I got to Northmoor Rd) and reading our recent chapters to each other—his from the new Hobbit and mine from The Problem of Pain. (N.B. If you are writing a book about pain and then get some actual pain as I did from my rib, it does not either, as the cynic wd expect, blow the doctrine to bits, nor, as a Christian wd hope, turn into practice, but remains quite unconnected and irrelevant, just as any other bit of actual life does when you are reading or writing) . . .

TO HIS BROTHER: from The Kilns

18 December 1939

Yes, I know well what you mean by the materialistic gains of being a Christian. It more often presents itself to me the other way round—how on earth did we manage to enjoy all these books so much as we did in the days when we had really no conception of what was at the centre of them? Sir, he who embraces the Christian revelation rejoins the main tide of human existence! And I quite agree about Johnson. If one had not experienced it, it wd be hard to understand how a dead man out of a book can be almost a member of one’s family circle—still harder to realise, even now, that you and I have a chance of someday really meeting him . . .

We had a very pleasant ‘cave’ in Balliol last Wednesday. Everyone remarked that it was more frolic and youthful than any we have had for years—quite one of the old caves in fact—a curious result, if it is a result, of war conditions. During the evening Ridley read to us a Swinburne ballad and, immediately after it, that ballad of Kipling’s which ends up ‘You’ve finished with the flesh, my Lord’.¹⁵⁸ Nobody except me knew who the second one was by, and everyone agreed that it just killed the Swinburne as a real thing kills a sham. I then made him read ‘Iron, cold iron’ with the same result and later he drifted into McAndrew’s Hymn. Surely Kipling must come back? When people have had time to forget ‘If’ and the inferior Barrack Room Ballads, all this other stuff must come into its own. I know hardly any poet who can deliver such a hammer stroke. The stories, of course, are another matter and are, I suppose, even now admitted to be good by all except a handful of Left idiots . . .

TO HIS BROTHER: from The Kilns

31 December 1939

Minto has probably told you of the ‘ludicrous edisode’ on the Wednesday in which Havard had to come up with a hack-saw and saw my ring off my finger.¹⁵⁹ To you, I expect, the most interesting feature of this event will be the extreme P’daytaishness of my act in forcing the damned thing into such a position originally: it being a marked trait in the character of a P’dayta that tho’ being physically rather feeble for any useful purpose such as cranking a car or lifting a log, he is subject to fits of demoniac strength when it is a question of jamming, twisting, bursting or crushing anything into ruin—e.g. a lobster or a door. Havard performed his operation with great skill and delicacy, beguiling the time with interesting and edifying conversation.

I couldn’t help contrasting him with B. E. C. Davies, a professor of London, whom I went on to see in Old Headington the same morning. Here is a man of my own age, who knew Barfield when he was up: of my own profession, who has written on Spenser. You’d have thought these were all the materials for a good meeting. But no. One got through all the preliminary stuff about how his London she-students were getting on in Oxford, thinking that the real conversation would then begin. But every single time I tried to turn it to books, or life, or friends (as such) I was completely frustrated. i.e. about friends, he’d talk of their jobs, marriages, houses, incomes, arrangements, but not of them. Books—oh yes, editions, prices, suitability for exams—not their contents. In fact hardly since the days of ‘How are things at the yard, Gussie?’ have I had to endure so much irredeemably ‘grown-up conversation’. Unless I misjudge him, he is one of those dreadful fellows who never refers to literature except during the hours he’s paid for talking about it. Just as one meets clergymen—indeed we are told the Archdeacon was one of them—who resent the intrusion of Christianity into the conversation. How small a nucleus there is in each liberal profession of people who care about the thing they are supposed to be doing: yet I suppose the percentage of garage-hands and motor-touts who are really interested in motoring is about 95! . . .