Collected Letters Volume Three: Narnia, Cambridge and Joy 1950–1963

I was glad to get your letter. I seem to be as ignorant of America as you are of India. I had no idea your parsons preached Hell-fire: indeed I thought the ordinary presentation of Christianity with you was quite as milk-and-watery as with us, if not more so. We could do with a bit more Hell fire over here.

Clearly I misunderstood Cobham. I hadn’t thought of a wholly unregenerate man being levitated simply by someone else’s sanctity—tho’ of course we all hope this will happen to ourselves. Thanks for a picture of two charming creatures. I am glad to have one of them among my correspondents and wish Andy would write too: but I suppose that’s not much in his line. They sound as if they were animals with a sense of humour. Shall we see some more literary works by you? I hope you’ll go on. With very good wishes from us both.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO ROGER LANCELYN GREEN (BOD):

Magdalen College

Oxford

24/3/52

My dear Roger–

I have re-read The Luck51 and liked it very much. I felt, as I had felt at the first reading, that tho’ it could not have the quality you and I most prize in a story, yet it had a freshness, a real feel of wet wood & spring days wh. make it more than a mere treasure hunt. It is also extremely exciting. As luck wd. have it I met a lady who was looking for things to ‘read to the children’ & the Luck is now on her list. I think she’s a buyer too, not a library addict.

Now for Logistics. I see that the Beaumaris jaunt must be on my backward journey as, on the outward, it wd. be in the midst of the Aug. bank-holiday period.521 propose to sail from Belfast to L’pool53 on the night of Sept. Mon. 8th. Can we meet, say at Woodside ferry landing stage on the morning of the 9th & lie that night at Beaumaris. I shall be alone and, if quite convenient wd. gladly accept a night’s lodging chez vous on Wed. 10th, setting out for Oxford the first convenient train on Thurs. 11th. But I trust you to tell me if this is in the least a nuisance, for I can be perfectly well housed in Woodside Hotel. My duty to June. Good hunting.

Yours

Jack

TO SHELDON VANAUKEN:54 PC

Magdalen College

Oxford

24 March 1952

Porcus sum, I am a pig, porcissimus, the piggest of pigs. I looked at my diary at about 3 o’clock on Sat. afternoon and found to my horror that I had failed a tryst with you at 12. Please forgive a nit-wit. Will you prove your charity by meeting me at the Eastgate 12 o’clock next Saturday? Even I seldom make exactly the same howler twice! I really am very sorry: I had been much looking forward to it.

C.S.L.

TO MICHAEL IRWIN (P): 55

Magdalen College,

Oxford

25th March 1952

Dear Michael

Thank you very much for your nice letter. I am very glad you liked the Narnian books. Yes–there is another one already written but you won’t be able to get it till next November: they are printing it at present, and printing takes a long time, especially for a book that has pictures in it.

Lucy and Edmund and Caspian and Reepicheep (but not Peter and Susan, who are now getting a bit too old) all come into the new one. They get into the Narnian world and all go to sea and have a long voyage: it is called The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.

I wonder what other books you like. Do you like E. Nesbitt’s The Phoenix and the Carpet, and The Amulet,56 and Tolkien’s The Hobbit,57 and MacDonald’s The Princess and the Goblins and Curdy and the Princess?.58 I think all these are very good. Please thank your father for writing to me. Love to all.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO ROGER IANCELYN GREEN (BOD):

Magdalen College

Oxford

29/3/52

Hearken, Little Brother, to the wisdom of Baloo.59 Neither you nor I will write to the Bulkeley Arms60 for rooms for us both, for the modern hotel keeper wd. then be v. likely to put us both in one room without warning or remedy.

But you will write for your room & I will write (today) for mine. And then, by the permission of Allah, he will think he has to do with a Mr. Green of Bebington & a Mr. Lewis of Oxford who have no connection.

High Wind in Jamaica61 wh. I’ve just read is better than I expected. Tho’ none of them speak about the brother’s death we are told that the eldest girl ‘missed him badly’: her silence was not due to indifference but to a kind of taboo wh. I think quite possible. As to her evidence wh. hanged the pirates, I suppose some children, as some adults, wd. do that and others not. She was in a tight place: and as a certain type of woman wd. play her sex, a certain type of child wd. play its childishness. A grim book but good in its way.

Love to all.

J.

TO HELEN D. CALKINS (W):

Magdalen College,

Oxford

March 29th 1952

Dear Miss Calkins

I’ve read India Looks with as much interest as if it were an adventure story: especially the parts about ancient Indian history which were absolutely new. That’s one of the reasons why I won’t do a preface: I am not qualified to sponsor a book on this subject. For all I know it might be (tho’ I’m sure it is not) a mass of errors! The other is that you are kind to me and quote me, and after that a preface from me wd. make us both look silly—a mutual admiration society.

It’s v. well done. Here are a few notes wh. you may or may not find worth considering.

P. 3. para 4. Trojan heroes etc. Does it matter that of those you mention only Hector was on the Trojan side? Or that many people think the Trojans were not Aryans! Wd. Homeric for Trojan be safer?

P 4. Leaf’s poem, dazzle and the stress. Are you sure it isn’t dazzle and stress*.

P. 23 Quotation from me. I’m afraid people may think (despite the quotation marks) that the view expressed is mine! Could you without too much labour find another motto for this chapter?

‘I am the doubter and the doubt’–is it from Emerson or Henley?–might do by itself.62

P. 36 Para 1. Its connotation…receptivity. This clause conveys no meaning whatever to my mind! This migh the because all the words had different shades of meaning in America. But a knot of abstract nouns, all rather hard to define, is usually a danger signal. (Beware of aspect, framework, connotation, and all their family!)

P 41. Quotation from Hooker. For intensive read intentive.

P 41. last line but one. of separated. Something must have dropped here.

P 42. Para 3. Surely the correct construction is ‘enamoured of ‘not ‘enamoured with’?

And above, Para 3, for Origin read Origen.

P. 45 First sentence. Again, conveys no clear meaning to me. Simplify! Simplify!

P 49 Footnote. You quote as if it was mine what I (as I told you) was quoting from Whitehead.63 Return it to him. I haven’t got a copy to hand but it’ll do you no harm to read his Chapter II! (By the way in a serious book like yours all other books shd. be mentioned with place and date of the edition you are using. Otherwise it will look amateurish to publishers’ readers.

P. 51 Para 1. Christ-centric. Surely the usual word is Christocentric?. (I’m not quite clear at what date the processes described are meant to be happening.)

P 52. Para 1. The reason for his reluctance was because. You’re saying it twice over! Either The reason…was that or Dr. H. was reluctant because he (The second is better. Always prefer concrete to abstract nouns when you can get them: it avoids Gobbledegook.)

P 53. Was there really no effort to do all these works till modern times? Jesuits in Paraguay? Evangelicals attacking slavery?

P 59. Para 2. The assumption etc. Ambiguous. Does it mean ‘We can’t bear it when others assume that we are naif ‘or ‘when others assume that they are naif ‘?

P. 67. It is not…estimate of God. Good. Very good. That’s how to write.

Very good wishes; and thanks for an interesting bit of reading.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO MARY NEYLAN (T):64

Magdalen College

Oxford

1/4/52

Dear Mrs. Neylan–

Yes, I do miss him.65 But what strikes me even more is the sense that he is already helping me more from where he is than he would do on earth. It was v. nice to meet you all and especially Sarah, now at last old enough to talk to! I liked her and cd. have done with less of Mingo! She wants fattening, though! Bless you all.

Yours

Jack Lewis

TO MARY VAN DEUSEN (W):

Magdalen etc

April 1st 1952

Dear Mrs. Van Deusen

The advantage of a fixed form of service is that we know what is coming. Ex tempore public prayer has this difficulty: we don’t know whether we can mentally join in it until we’ve heard it—it might be phoney or heretical. We are therefore called upon to carry on a critical and a devotional activity at the same moment: two things hardly compatible. In a fixed form we ought to have ‘gone through the motions’ before in our private prayers: the rigid form really sets our devotions free.

I also find the more rigid it is, the easier it is to keep one’s thoughts from straying. Also it prevents any service getting too completely eaten up by whatever happens to be the pre-occupation of the moment (a war, an election, or what not). The permanent shape of Christianity shows through. I don’t see how the ex tempore method can help becoming provincial & I think it has a great tendency to direct attention to the minister rather than to God.

Quakers…well I’ve been unlucky in mine. The ones I know are atrocious bigots whose religion seems to consist almost entirely in attacking other people’s religions. But I’m sure there are good ones as well.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO EDWARD A. ALLEN (W):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

April 3rd 1952

My dear Mr. Allen

Sugar and tea! Hurrah. They are just what we need most, tea being our most powerful addiction-drug, and we thank you v. heartily.

I’m not quite sure whether we are playing into Uncle loe’s66 hand by messing about in Korea and elsewhere. If the enemy were the Germans I’d agree with you. He has always been a big fighter and it’s no good doing anything about him short of a full-dress war. The Russian, so far (whether Tsarist or pseudo-Communist makes no odds, I expect) has not been like that. He grabs things here and grabs things there when he finds them unguarded. I think there’s a real chance that by rearmament and resistance at minor points we just might prevent it coming to a real show-down. But heaven knows I am as ill qualified as anyone in the world to have an opinion. At any rate both your country and mine have twice in our lifetime tried the recipe of appeasing an aggressor and it didn’t work on either occasion: so that it seems sense to try the other way this time.

I’m all with you about Orion. It’s nice to live in the Northern Hemisphere because the winter stars are much better than the summer ones and of course one sees more of them when the nights are longest. The whole combination Sirius—Orion–Aldebaran—Pleiades is magnificent. I wonder what constellation our Sun forms part of as seen from the planets (if any) of Sirius?

Spring has been arrested here by a sudden cold snap, snow & frost and all the crocuses are in a bad way: but the birds, bless them, keep on talking as if it were real April weather. I suffer from your inability to remember what I have to buy. In my case it happens chiefly about razor-blades. One remembers it during the five minutes painful scrape each morning but never when one is among the shops. With many thanks & v. good wishes.

Yours ever

C. S. Lewis

For some time now a woman calling herself ‘Mrs C. S. Lewis’ had been living on her ‘husband’s’ credit at the Courtstairs Hotel, Thanet, Kent. The lady had a history of living cheaply by pretending to be married to some well-known person who would soon be joining her. In this instance she told the owners of Courtstairs Hotel, Alan and Nell Berners-Price, that Lewis would soon be arriving and would pay the bill. However, by April 1952 she had been living at Court Stairs for over a year, and Mrs Berners-Price went up to Oxford to confront Lewis with a mass of unpaid bills.

On being admitted to Lewis’s rooms in Magdalen College, Mrs Berners-Price said, ‘I’ve come to ask about your wife.’ ‘But I’m not married,’ replied Lewis. Mrs Berners-Price was as surprised by this as Lewis was on learning he had a ‘wife’. Following the advice of his solicitor, Owen Barfield, Lewis took out an injunction of jactitation of marriage against the woman.

The woman, Mrs Nella Victoria Hooker, had been in jail a number of times for similar offences. She was arrested in April and her trial set for 8 May in the court at Canterbury. While in jail she wrote letters to Lewis, as he mentions in the letter to Christian Hardie below.

TO CHRISTIAN HARDIE (P):

Palm Sunday [6 April] 1952

Dear Christian

I romped through The Power and the Glory.67 Its theme makes it suitable enough as a preface to Holy Week but if you intended it as a penance you have bowled a wide. It is a most moving and (in its proper mode) enjoyable book.

As far as I am concerned there is no common measure between it and Waugh.68 In Waugh’s book the supposedly good end of the old rake had simply to be taken on trust: but one lives through the whole experience of Greene’s hunted priest, filled from the first with interest, soon with compassion, and finally with love. Also Greene seems to know things. All that about the ‘pious woman’ in the cell (few laymen perhaps get letters from her so often as I) is excellent: also the bit about forgiveness of sins being easier to believe than forgiveness of the ‘habit of piety’. Greene loves and understands his most repulsive characters–the lieutenant and the half-caste—better than Waugh does his favourites.

I think he has a fault. The central tragic theme is not made more effective by filling up all the chinks with other, irrelevant, miseries, like those of the Fellows family. The great tragic artists didn’t do that. Macbeth69 wd. not have been improved by making the drunken porter get cancer: nor the Iliad by making the domestic life of Hector and Andromache squalid and miserable. That is the modern nimiety. But it is a very good book all the same.

Thanks very much for the loan of it. (It wd. be unkind to discuss my views on tragedy with Colin just at present. He seems to be a little tired of that subject). A happy Easter to you both.

Yours

Jack

TO DON GIOVANNI CALABRIA (V):

[Magdalen College,

Oxford.]

April 14th 1952

Pater dilectissime

Multum eras et es in orationibus meis et grato animo litteras tuas accepi. Et ora tu pro me, nunc praesertim, dum me admodum orphanum esse sentio quia grandaevus meus confessor et carissimus pater in Christo nuper mortem obiit. Dum ad altare celebraret, subito, post acerrimum sed (Deo gratias) brevissimum dolorem, expiravit, et novissima verba erant venio, Domine Jesu. Vir erat maturâ spirituali sapientiâ sed ingenuitate et innocentiâ fere puerili–buono fanciullo, ut ita dicam.

Potesne, mi pater, quaestionem resolvere? Quis sanctorum scriptorum scripsit ‘Amor est ignis jugiter ardens’? Credidi haec verba esse in libro De Imitatione Christi sed non possum ibi invenire.

‘Ut omnes unum sint’ est petitio numquam in meis precibus praetermissa. Dum optabilis unitas doctrinae et ordinis abest, eo acrius conemur caritatis unionem tenere: quod, eheu, et vestri in Hispania et nostri in Hibernia Septentrionali non faciunt. Vale, mi pater,

C. S. Lewis

*

[Magdalen College,

Oxford.]

April 14th 1952

Dearest Father,

You were and are much in my prayers and thank you for your letters. And do you pray for me, especially at present when I feel very much an orphan because my aged confessor and most loving father in Christ has just died. While he was celebrating at the altar, suddenly, after a most sharp but (thanks be to God) very brief attack of pain, he expired; and his last words were, ‘I come, Lord Jesus.’ He was a man of ripe spiritual wisdom—noble minded but of an almost childlike simplicity and innocence: ‘buono fandullo’ if I may put it so.70

Can you, my Father, resolve a question? Which of the holy writers wrote ‘Amor est ignis jugiter ardens’? I thought these words were in The Imitation of Christ but I cannot find them there.71

‘That they all may be one’72 is a petition which in my prayers I never omit. While the wished-for unity of doctrine and order is missing, all the more eagerly let us try to keep the bond of charity: which, alas, your people in Spain and ours in Northern Ireland do not.

Farewell, my Father.

C. S. Lewis

TO RUTH PITTER(BOD):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

April 16th 1952

Dear Miss Pitter

It always seems a bit of cheek to send anyone (especially the likes of you) a ticket for one’s lecture, unless one could do it in the Chinese style ‘In the inconceivably unlikely event of honourable poetess wishing to attend this person’s illiterate and erroneous lecture…’73 Oh dear, to think of that immemorial urbanity, that remote, fantastic world being in the hands of the Bolshevists!

Hero & Leander74 has no Original in the strict sense. The Greek poem on the subject is late, rather charmingly precious, and was falsely attributed to the primeval and mythical Musaeus: the real author is unknown—some Alexandrian, I think. But neither the Marlovian nor the Chapmanic part is anything like a translation—not so close to pseudo-Musaeus as Tennyson is to Malory.

Have you read Andrew Young’s Into Hades,75 and what do you think of it. I found the content absorbing and the images like all his, simply enchanting (There’s a bit about reflected water-drops from a raised oar rushing up to meet the real water drops—lovely!) but my ear was a bit unsatisfied. I believe ‘Blank Verse’, unrhymed five footers, is not a metre to be written loosely. I think the unrhymed Alexandrine, written without a break at the 6th syllable wd. be far better: e.g.

I know far less of spiders than that poetess Who (like the lady in Comus in the perilous wood) Can study nature’s infamies with secure heart…

The third line is here the best: one wants plenty of trisyllables to leap across the threatened medial pause. Try a few. Commending me to you in the lowliest wise that I can or may.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO EDWARD A. ALLEN (W): TS

REF.52/28.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

19th April 1952.

My dear Allen,

I got back today from a delightful three days break in the country, just a little dissatisfied to be at my desk again, and therefore just in the mood for the welcome fillip which your admirable parcel administered. You must by this time be as tired of hearing C.S.L. on the English food situation as I am tired of enduring it: so I will say no more than that all these good things will be a wonderful help at the house, and thank you once again for your kindness.

I have been stopping with an ex-pupil, now a master at my old school, Malvern:76 a pleasant little town, about sixty miles from here, lying under the foot of a four miles range of hills, two thousand feet high, in the Severn valley. Of course this is nothing much in the way of height, but they rise so abruptly from the level that one gets the effect of miniature mountains; and there is splendid air and exercise to be had in tramping them. To add to the joy, our curious climate has suddenly decided to give us an advance instalment of summer—at least one hopes it is only an instalment and not the summer. It was 75 degrees yesterday, and as hot today; all the women in summer frocks and so forth. Malvern town is a perfect and melancholy example of the change which has come over this country since my schooldays; then, it was a town of large ugly, comfortable Victorian houses, designed to be run by four or five servants apiece. The same houses are still there, but at least seven out of every ten are now either schools, offices, or boarding houses.

I occasionally glance at the news of your Presidential elections with that respectful bewilderment with which one regards another nation’s domestic affairs. To us, the question naturally presents itself from the viewpoint of which candidate will be most sympathetic to our troubles. Most people here seem to hope for Eisenhower, and are most afraid of Taft: who, rightly or wrongly, seems to have the reputation of being the old style Isolationist.77 It is being said that if he is returned, his foreign policy will be that America should be defended in America, and not in Europe. But I suspect that this must be a crude exaggeration.

I hope Mrs. Allen keeps well: please remember me very kindly to her. Do you both propose to go to the seaside this year? If all goes well, I shall be in Eire for a fortnight in August, with daily bathing: not the best sort of bathing, but a sight better than none at all. For, being on a bay, there are practically no waves; and where the sea is perpetually calm, I would just as soon, indeed sooner, bathe in a river.

With all best wishes and many thanks to you both, from us both,

yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO DELMAR BANNER (W):78 TS

REF.52/196

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

29th April 1952.

My dear Banner,

Thanks for yours of yesterday. But in the words of the immortal Jeeves to Bertie Wooster, ‘I fear, Sir, I am unable to recede from my position.’79

Yes indeed, I hope to visit your country before I die;80 but I have many calls upon my time, and my own Ireland generally lures me to it when I can take a holiday.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

The knowledge that I could (liceret mihi)81 advise is no use because I know I couldn’t (non possem).82

With the growing fame of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Lewis was invited to address the Library Association during their Bournemouth conference, held between 29 April and 2 May. On 29 April he read a paper entitled ‘On Three Ways of Writing for Children’.83

TO ROGER IANCELYN GREEN (BOD):

Magdalen College

Oxford

May 1/52

I think the Bournemouth Lecture was a success. One librarian said I had almost converted him to fairy-tales, he having hitherto taken the ‘real life’ stuff for granted.

Two librariennes said The Luck of the Lynns was in much demand and one praised The Wonderful Stranger.84 I added that some of your unpublished & more ‘faerian’ books were even better. You were spoken of with much respect.

J.

TO MARY VAN DEUSEN (W):

Magdalen College,

Oxford

May 5th 1952

Dear Mrs. Van Deusen

Thank you for your cheery letter and the delightful enclosures. I’ve seldom seen better photos of children. And the landscape lures one into it. I long to be tramping over those wooded—or, what is better, half wooded hills. I’m as sensitive as a German to the spell of das Feme85 and all that.