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

Yours very sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO PHYLLIS ELINOR SANDEMAN (W):

Magdalen College,

Oxford

Dec 11th 1952

Dear Mrs Sandeman

You were perfectly right to put in the bit about the friendly ghosts. I think the absence of fear is, as far as it goes, probable evidence that the experience was not merely imaginary. Everyone fears lest he should meet a ghost, but there seems to be some ground for supposing that those who really meet them are often quite unafraid. Notice that angels, on the other hand, seem in Scripture to be nearly always terrifying & have to begin by saying ‘Fear not’.297

In Ireland I stayed at a lonely bungalow last summer which the peasants avoided not because a ghost had been seen near it (they didn’t mind ghosts) but because the Good People, the Faerie, frequented that bit of coast. So apparently ghosts are the least alarming kind of spirit.

With all good wishes and thanks. You’ll enjoy Earlham I’m sure. And congratulations, it’s nice to be reprinting.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO ROGER LANCELYN GREEN (BOD):

Dec. 13. 52

My dear Roger

You’ll be wondering why I haven’t acknowledged the Searching Satyrs.298 After reading it I wanted to compare it with the original, but the Fragments aren’t in my Sophocles, and I’ve never done it. Your version reads v. crisp & pleasant, almost Gilbertian in places. And what a lovely book? It must be nice to have anything of one’s own printed so beautifully. Very many thanks.

Love and Christmas wishes to all of you.

Yours

Jack

TO I. O. EVANS (W):

Magdalen etc

Dec 13. 52

Dear Evans

Thank you for your kind letter. I am so glad you liked the story. What is one to do with illustrators—especially if, like mine, they are (a far surer defence than obstinacy) timid, shrinking young women who, when criticised, look as if you’d pulled their hair or given them a black eye? My resolution was exhausted by the time I’d convinced her that rowers face aft not (as she thinks) forward.299

All that about the earlier text of the “War of the Worlds is most interesting. With all good wishes.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO RHONA BODLE (BOD): 300

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

Dec 15th 1952

Dear Miss Bodle

I think the little book quite excellent. The ‘baldness & flatness’ as you call them—I shd. say ‘economy & simplicity’ are its great merit. I want only one change: in the prayer beginning ‘bless mother & father’ there should be some indication that we are to pray for particular people by name: a child might think that ‘all the people I like’ was a rigid formula and that one oughtn’t to individualise. And the same with all the clauses of the prayer. You have the rare happiness of being engaged on a work of real & undoubted value: more power to your elbow!

I can quite understand that your brief English life will sometimes seem a mere entracte in your N.Z. life. But it doesn’t matter what it seems (emotionally & imaginatively) so long as what happened to you in England is operative in your will, both at work and elsewhere. But of course you know this. All good wishes. You (and that unnamed colleague of yours) are always in my prayers.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO MARG-RIETTE MONTGOMERY (W): TS

REF.52/248.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

16th December 1952.

Dear Miss Montgomery,

Thanks for the cutting, and for the picture of the charming little church. But you ought to know more about the Father than the Galaxy! Our Lord said ‘He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father’,301 but also ‘My Father is greater than I’,302 and St. Paul said ‘He is not far from any one of us’.303 Don’t let the Anthros turn it all into a fog for you. You know better. All good wishes.

Yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO CLYDE S. KILBY (W):304 TS

REF52/509.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

17th December 1952.

Dear Mr. Kilby,

Thank you for your very kind and encouraging letter of the 10th. It would give me pleasure to meet you during your visit to Oxford, and I shall expect to hear from you more definitely when your plans are settled. So far as can be foreseen at the moment, I shall probably be out of Oxford for August and the earlier part of September. With all best wishes.

Yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

Joy Gresham had arrived at The Kilns during the second week of December to visit the Lewis brothers. As indicated by Lewis’s letter to his godson, Laurence Harwood, of 19 December, there appears to have been a misunderstanding about the length of her stay.

TO VERA GEBBERT (W): TS

52/103.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

18th December 1952.

Dear Mrs. Gebbert,

Many thanks for the book which has just arrived, and which judging from a hasty dip, I am going to enjoy. It is kind of you to send it. I hope that by this time your journey across the Atlantic is a fast fading memory, and that it has not given you both a determination never to cross it again. Courage! Next time (I much hope there will be a ‘next time’), try crossing over it rather than on it.

We have an American visitor with us at the moment, who is starting for home on the 3rd. of next month, and is not much cheered by the fact that we are now having a succession of gales. Is’nt it an astonishing thing that whenever one has a guest in the home, the weather turns freakish? And the host always feels that he is somehow to blame for it. We are now getting the weather which normally we never have until after Christmas—ice, snow, bitter wind etc. However, either out of native politeness or because it is true, the lady assures us that the worst English winter weather is not to be compared for general beastliness with that of New York state. What she does criticise is the heating of the English home: not so much of the rooms, but of the passages and so forth.

As your last letter was dated from Alpine Drive, I send this note there; though of course by the time it gets to California, you may be enjoying the society of Andy on his native heath once more. In whichever spot you are, you may congratulate yourselves on having fled homewards when you did. You would like England even less now than when you visited it!

With warmest good wishes to you both from us both for a happy and prosperous New Year,

yours as ever,

C. S. Lewis

TO LAURENCE HARWOOD (BOD): 305

Coll. Magd.

Dec 19th 1952

Dear Laurence

Here’s something for usual expenses. I am completely ‘circumvented’ by a guest, asked for one week but staying for three, who talks from morning till night. I hope you’ll all have a nicer Christmas than I. I can’t write (write? I can hardly think or breathe. I can’t believe it’s all real).

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO MRS JOHNSON (W): TS

REF.52/183

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

19th December 1952.

Dear Mrs. Johnson,

Though it is true that I have not a sweet tooth, I must confess that I eat notepaper and envelopes, so your very kind gift may be described as being of that edible variety that is customary at this season of the year. And I am most grateful to you for it: for paper here is of a miserable quality, and it is not always easy to get hold of. (To say nothing of the fact that one so often runs out at some inconvenient moment, and has to sally out to the shops).

Apropos of shops, one could hardly have a worse time to run out of essentials than this; we—like you no doubt—are in the climax of the ‘Christmas rush’, a time which I always regard with horror. I hope I am not a Scrooge, but with every year that passes I find myself more and more in revolt against the commercialized racket of ‘Xmas’. With us, it now begins about the third week in November, and by now, one is urged—with holly leaves—to buy anything from boots to bathing trunks because they are the perfect expression of the Christmas spirit. If I seem a little peevish about the whole spiritual atmosphere, it is perhaps because the material one is so disagreeable; we have been having snow, ice, sleet, hurricanes and all the kind of treats in fact which we do not expect until well on into the new year. A freak season in fact. But I should be chastened by the fact that a visiting American friend tells me that unless we have seen winter in New England, we don’t know what winter is: and that what we are grumbling about is just nice mild seasonable weather. (But this expression of opinion doesn’t make it seem any warmer)!

With many thanks, and all best wishes for a happy Christmas and a prosperous New Year,

yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO MRS D. JESSUP (W):

Magdalen etc.

Dec. 20th 52

Dear Mrs. Jessup

Yes: you are very blessed: and I take the communication as a high compliment—though there are a good many words I can’t read, for your hand is almost as illegible as mine tho’ a great deal neater!

You won’t expect me to reply at length when I tell you that we have a visitor, that our usual domestic help is ill, and there are mountains of mail. How wretchedly the Christian festival of Christmas has got snowed under by all the fuss and racket of commercialised ‘Xmas’. Blessings to all.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO EDNA GREEN WATSON (BOD): TS

REE52/9

Magdalen College,

Oxford, [p]

22nd December 1952.

Dear Mrs. Watson,

How very kind indeed of you to sweeten my Christmas with the cake, which arrived this morning: externally in good condition, and before the day is out I shall be examining the internal condition of the parcel. It arrives very apropos, as my brother and I are without our housekeeper, who is convalescing after an illness, and in consequence we two batchelors are having to maintain a ‘skeleton service’ out at the house—one which does not provide for such luxuries as cakes, and in which the can opener is very much in evidence!306

This is the season when I envy you, living in what is I am told called ‘The Deep South’; I suppose you are hardly aware that it is winter? Here we are having a most unpleasant freak season—ice, snow, blizzard, all the joys which we don’t generally get until well after Christmas. However, though we have been pitying ourselves an American visitor from New York told me recently that we don’t know what winter is: and that this is mild weather! So whatever else is in short supply on this unhappy planet, at least it is’nt weather.

I returned to work in the autumn from a year’s academic leave: which was not as attractive as it sounds, for it was granted me for the express purpose of finishing a considerable literary task, and my nose was kept pretty close to the grindstone. But my brother and I managed to get the best part of a month’s real holiday in Eire, ‘on the other side of the iron curtain’ as we call it, and came back much the better for it.

It is I’m afraid too late to wish you a happy Christmas but I do send you my very best wishes for a happy and prosperous 1953.

With many thanks,

yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO WILLIAM L. KINTER(BOD): TS

REF.52/519.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

23rd December 1952.

Dear Mr. Kinter,

Thanks for your kind card. I am so glad you liked The Dawn Treader. Who am I to say whether Grace works in my own stories? One can only be sure on a much humbler level, that if anything is well done, we must say Non nobís.307

All good wishes.

Yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO GEORGE SAYER(W):

Coll. Magd.

Dec 23rd 1952

Dear George and Moira

Happy Christmas! I hope what I have to say will not make it happier, though. I’m booked to visit your enchanted house on Jan 1st. But it’s all No Go. We have a visitor (U.S.A.) who will last till then308 and beyond her looms a fellowship examination.

The whole Vac. is in fact a shambles. Perpetual conversation is a most exhausting thing. I begin to wonder if I have a vocation for La Trappe. I am sick at these numbers. But I love you both: it is one of my most frequent and tonic activities. Blessings upon you.

Yours

(what is left of) Jack

TO VERA GEBBERT (W): TS 52/103.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

26th December 1952.

My dear Mrs. Gebbert,

Many thanks. Doubtless a reproduction of a fresco of the early Middle Ages from a Narnian catacomb?

With all blessings to you both for the New Year,

yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO BONAMY DOBRÉE (W):309 PC

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

Dec. 30/52

No, no. The context and, a literal translation, will put Wanderer 12 in a different light: ‘There is now no one alive to whom I dare clearly declare my mind: I know for a truth that it is an excellent quality in a man that he should firmly bind in what his heart contains—let him think what he pleases.’310

The poet is not talking about tears at all but about keeping one’s own counsel, holding one’s tongue among strangers. Also I think ‘the high brow’ a mistranslation. Earl means that in prose, but in verse is the heroic word for Man (ANMP).311 All good wishes.

C.S.L.

1 Winston Churchill was re-elected Prime Minister in 1951, and on 5 January 1952 he went to Washington, DC, to renew Britain’s ‘special relationship’ with the United States.

2 Clement Attlee (1883-1967) was the Labour Prime Minster, 1945-51.

3 ‘Maleldil’ is the ‘Old Solar’ name given in Lewis’s interplanetary novels to God the Son.

4 Pitter had been trying since 1949 to transcribe a passage from Lewis’s Perelandra into Spenserian stanzas. She said in a note to Lewis’s letter of 17 November 1949 (CL II, p. 997): ‘The passage…was to have been included in one of my books, but I think John Hayward…finally decided that (copy-right trouble, apart) it didn’t do anything that the original hadn’t done a lot better’ (Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. lett. c. 220/3, fol. 84).

5 He was referring to the poem ‘The Earwig’s Complaint’ in Pitter’s A Mad Lady’s Garland (1934). Pitter said of this poem: ‘The earwig is imagined as a sort of little fiery Elizabethan soldier of fortune—he gets by chance into a lady’s bed, is much struck by her beauty, has the misfortune to tickle, and of course she throws him out—he laments the episode in what I thought a fine heroic tragical strain, but reflects finally that he has wings, after all, she not! It is an image, I suppose, of the scruffy neglected poet, a failure too in love, consoling himself (MS. Eng. lett. c. 220/3, fol. 107).

6 i.e., the poet George Herbert (1593-1633).

7 The Flying Enterprise was a 6,711-ton cargo ship. Built during the Second World War, it became a commercial cargo vessel after the war. On Christmas Day 1951 it left England and headed into the Atlantic Ocean on route for the United States through a turbulent sea. By the next day the Atlantic was hit by one of the worst storms in history, winds rising to hurricane force. On the bridge was Captain Henrik Kurt Carlsen, a Dane of extraordinary courage who remained aboard his ship for almost two weeks as efforts were made to tow her to port. He was finally forced to abandon ship when her list increased to a fatal degree on 10 January 1952, only about 40 miles away from Falmouth, England. The ordeal of the Flying Enterprise and Captain Carlsen was worldwide news at the time and remains one of the great stories of endurance and courage at sea. See Gordon Holman, Carlsen of the Flying Enterprise (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1952). On 22 June 2001 a team of divers discovered the lost ship resting on her side in a depth of 280 feet on the seabed of the western approaches to the English Channel.

8 p.p.

9 Sister Penelope’s imagination had been fired by an article in The Times (6 December 1951), p. 5, entitled ‘A Mystery of Everest: Footprints of the “Abominable Snowman” ‘. The British mountaineer Eric Shipton wrote about a discovery his team made on Mount Everest on 8 November 1951: ‘At 4 o’clock we came upon some strange tracks in the snow. [Our guide] immediately announced them to be the tracks of “yetis” or “Abominable Snowmen”…The tracks were mostly distorted by melting into oval impressions, slightly longer and a good deal broader than those made by our large mountain boots. But here and there, where the snow covering the ice was thin, we came upon a well preserved impression of the creature’s foot. It showed three broad “toes” and a broad “thumb” to the side. What was particularly interesting was that where the tracks crossed a crevice one could see quite clearly where the creature had jumped and used its toes to secure purchase on the snow on the other side.’ The first reliable report of the Yeti appeared in 1925 but the best tracks ever seen were photographed by Shipton and published in The Times (7 December 1951), p. 13.

10 Genesis 6:1-4: ‘And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born unto them, That the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair: and they took them wives of all which they chose. And the Lord said, My spirit shall not always strive with man, for that he also is flesh: yet his days shall be an hundred and twenty years. There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown.’

11 Cf. Psalm 45:11.

12 He means the confusion between the Latin homo, ‘human being’, and vir, ‘(adult male) man’.

13 Austin Farrer, The Glass of Vision, The Bampton Lectures for 1948 (1948).

14 See CL II, p. 961.

15 Simone Weil, Waiting on God, trans. Emma Craufurd (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1951).

16 ‘A Religious of CSMV (Sister Penelope), They Shall Be My People: The Bible Traversed in a Course of Reading Plays, 2 vols. (London: Oxford University Press, 1951).

17 I. O. Evans, Led By the Star: A Christmas Play (London: Rylee, 1952).

18 L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt, The Roaring Trumpet (1940); The Mathematics of Magic (1940); The Incomplete Enchanter (New York: Pyramid Books, 1941).

19 i.e., The Incomplete Enchanter.

20 These notes relate to Blamires’s unpublished book on the Christian philosophy of education.

21 Carol Jenkins was writing from Westmead, 35 Flushcombe Lane, Bath.

22 i.e., the name Asian.

23 The Thousand and One Nights: Commonly Called, in England, The Arabian Nights’ Entertainments, trans. Edward William Lane (1838-40).

24 i.e., The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

25 Wayland Hilton Young (1923-), who became the 2nd Baron Kennet in 1960, is the son of Edward Hilton Young, 1st Baron Kennet (1879-1960) and Lady Edith Agnes Kathleen Bruce (1878-1947). He was born in London on 2 August 1923, and educated at Stowe School. He served in the Royal Navy, 1942-5. Following the war he went to Trinity College, Cambridge, taking his BA in 1946. Young entered the Foreign Office in 1946 and was Parliamentary Secretary for the Ministry of Housing and Local Government, 1966-70, Opposition spokesman on foreign affairs and science policy, 1971-4, a Member of the European Parliament, 1978-9, and SDP spokesman in the House of Lords on foreign affairs and defence, 1981-90. In 1948 he married Elizabeth Adams, daughter of Captain Bryan Fullerton Adams, and they had six children. His many published books and pamphlets, on subjects such as defence, disarmament, the environment and architecture, include Deadweight (1952), Now or Never (1953), The Monten Scandal (1957), Still Alive Tomorrow (1958), Strategy for Survival (1959), The Futures of Europe (1976), The Rebirth of Britain (1982) and Northern Lazio (1990).

26 i.e., John Lane The Bodley Head, the publishers of Lewis’s interplanetary trilogy.

27 ‘excessive’ or ‘in the way’.

28 That Hideous Strength.

29 A word is missing from the text.

30 A poem by Robert Browning included in his Dramatis Personae (1864).

31 1 Timothy 4:10: ‘We both labour and suffer reproach, because we trust in the living God, who is the Saviour of all men, specially of those that believe.’

* i.e. Hades, the land of the dead: not Gehenna, the land of the lost.

32 This letter was first published in the Church Times, CXXXV (8 February 1952), p. 95, under the title ‘Mere Christians’.

33 R. D. Daunton-Fear, ‘Evangelical Churchmanship’, Church Times, CXXXV (1 February 1952), p. 77.

34 An abbreviated form of the quotation from St Vincent of Lerins, Commonitorium, IV, section 3: ‘Id teneamus, quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus creditum est’: ‘Let us hold on to that which has been believed everywhere, always, by everyone.’

35 Richard Baxter, Church-history of the Government of Bishops and their Councils (1680), ‘What History is Credible, and What Not’, p. xv: ‘You know not of what Party I am of, nor what to call me; I am sorrier for you in this than for my self; if you know not, I will tell you, I am a CHRISTIAN, a MERE CHRISTIAN, of no other Religion; and the Church that I am of is the Christian Church, and hath been visible where ever the Christian Religion and Church hath been visible.’

36 This was a short story Mathews had written.

37 The Gospels, trans, into modern English by ]. B. Phillips (London: Bles, 1952).

38 ‘general presentation’.

39 One or two words are missing from the facsimile copy.

40 Genia Goelz was being baptized.

41 The twelve-week period between the end of Trinity Term, which ends on 6 July, and the beginning of Michaelmas Term, which starts on 1 October.

42 Helen D. Calkins, who first wrote to Lewis from India, had returned to the United States and was now writing from 915 Taylor Street, Albany, California.

43 Calkins’s unpublished work, ‘India Looks’, mentioned in the letter of 29 March 1952.

44 See the biography of John Alexander Chapman (1875-1968) in CL II, p. 954n.

45 J. A. Chapman, War (Windsor: Savile Press, 1951).

46 Warnie.

47 Lewis usually stayed at the Old Inn in Crawfordsburn when visiting Greeves.

48 Anthony Trollope, The Last Chronicle of Barset (1867).

49 Mark 9:24.

50 John 7:17.

51 Roger Lancelyn Green, The Luck of the Lynns: A Story of Hidden Treasure (1952).

52 For some time Lewis had been planning a holiday with Arthur Greeves in Northern Ireland. He expected to arrive at Greeves’s house on 21 August, and leave on the night of 8 September. Lewis and Green had long wanted to visit the ruined castles of North Wales, beginning with Beaumaris Castle, Anglesey.

53 Liverpool.

54 This letter is found only in Vanauken, A Severe Mercy, ch. 5, p. 110.

55 Michael Kevin Irwin (1944-), a schoolboy who wrote to Lewis about the Narnian stories, was born on 2 December 1944. He was educated at St Edward’s School, Oxford, and was the son of the Rev. Patrick Irwin, to whom Lewis wrote on 26 September 1952.