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

146 Beatrix Potter, The Tale of Peter Rabbit (1901); The Tale of Benjamin Bunny (1904).

147 ‘mother-sickness’. The pun consists in substituting ‘mal de mere for the familiar ‘mal de mer’ (sea-sickness). See the letter to Gebbert of 16 July 1953.

148 A poet born at Mitylene, Lesbos, about the middle of the seventh century BC.

149 The song of praise (Luke 1:46-55) sung by the Blessed Virgin Mary when her cousin Elizabeth greeted her as Mother of the Lord.

150 See Kilby’s account of this meeting, ‘Visit with C. S. Lewis’, in the Wheaton College literary magazine, Kodon, 8 (December 1953), pp. 11, 28, 30.

151 Stephen Vincent Benét, John Brown’s Body (1928), a narrative poem of the Civil War.

152 Warnie was correcting the proofs of his first book, The Splendid Century: Some Aspects of Life in the Reign of Louis XLV (1953), and his brother was correcting those of English Literature in the Sixteenth Century.

153 H. Rider Haggard, The Mahatma and the Hare (1911).

154 Roger Lancelyn Green, King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table (1953).

155 See the reference to ‘brasting and fighting’ in the letter to Greeves of 20 June 1916 (CL I, pp. 196-7).

156 See the letter to Gebbert of 20 June 1953.

157 Richard Lancelyn Green (1953-2004) was born at Poulton Hall on 10 July 1953, the second son, and third child, of Roger and June Lancelyn Green.

158 According to the Roman law of Jus Trium Liberorum, every man who had been a father of three children had particular honours and privileges.

159 A story Sayer was writing, which has never been published.

160 Matthew 6:11; Luke 11:3.

161 Joel 2:28: ‘Your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions.’ Acts 2:17: ‘And it shall come to pass in the last days, saith God, I will pour out of my Spirit upon all flesh; and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams.’

162 Lewis may have had in mind the two great Carmelite doctors of the Church, St Teresa of Avila and St John of the Cross. St Teresa felt visions were unimportant because of their ‘sensual nature’. St John of the Cross, in the Ascent of Mount Carmel, is blunt and states that visions should be ignored.

163 In That Hideous Strength.

164 Cecil John Rhodes (1853-1902), British financier and colonizer, left the greater part of his fortune for the establishing of a scholarship fund. The Rhodes Scholarships to Oxford University were intended to reward applicants who exhibited qualities of character and physical ability, with the aim of promoting cross-cultural understanding and peace between nations. The scholarships have been awarded annually since 1903 by the Rhodes Trust in Oxford, where centenary celebrations were held in June 1953.

165 p.p.

166 1 Peter 4:12: ‘Beloved, think it not strange concerning the fiery trial which is to try you, as though some strange thing happened to you.’

167 See the description of his confessor, Fr Walter Adams SSJE, in the letter to Mary Neylan of 30 April 1941 (CL II, p. 482): ‘If I have ever met a holy man, he is one.’

168 Laurence Harwood matriculated at Christ Church, Oxford in 1952 and began reading modern history. Unfortunately, in June 1953 he failed the preliminary examination which is designed to ensure that students are sufficiently prepared to proceed to the honours degree in the second or third year. As a result he had to leave Oxford.

169 ‘mishap’.

170 Mrs Emily McLay was writing from 4 Denham Avenue, Fulwell, Sunderland, County Durham.

171 2 Peter 3:16-17: ‘As also in all his epistles, speaking in them of these things; in which are some things hard to be understood, which they that are unlearned and unstable wrest, as they do also the other scriptures, unto their own destruction. Ye therefore, beloved, seeing ye know these things before, beware lest ye also, being led away with the error of the wicked, fall from your own steadfastness.’

172 John Calvin (1509-64) maintained in his Institutes of Christian Religion (1536), Bk. II, ch. 1, section 8, that: Our nature is not only utterly devoid of goodness, but so prolific in all kinds of evil, that it can never be idle…everything which is in man, from the intellect to the will, from the soul even to the flesh, is defiled.’ The ‘other view’ was that of the Arminians, after Jacobus Arminius (1560-1609). They insisted that the divine sovereignty was compatible with a real human free will; that Jesus Christ died for all and not just for the elect.

173 English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Introduction, p. 34: ‘In a single sentence of the Tischreden [Table Talk] Luther tosses the question aside for ever. Do you doubt whether you are elected to salvation? Then say your prayers, man, and you may conclude that you are.’

174 Lewis had received a letter dated 23 June 1953 from the Seminario Presbiteriano Do Sul, Campinas, Est. de S. Paulo, Brazil, in which the Librarian of the Seminary wrote: ‘We have a deep regard for your wonderful books on Christianity and its stand today. Of course, for quite a long time we have been eager to acquire them. However, we have no funds available for this purpose. Hence, we felt that perhaps you might be willing to offer them, as well as any other works you might think it fitting, to our library, at this Seminary’ (Bodleian Library, Dep. c. 771, fol. 30).

175 The letter is unsigned.

176 1 John 1:5: ‘God is light, and in him is no darkness at all.’

177 Lewis probably had in mind the ‘hard sayings’ of Jesus, among them Matthew 7:13: ‘Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat’; Matthew 13:49-50: ‘So shall it be at the end of the world: the angels shall come forth, and sever the wicked from among the just, And shall cast them into the furnace of fire: there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth’; Matthew 25:41: ‘Then shall he say…unto them on the left hand, Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels’.

178 Luke 9:55.

179 1 Peter 4:8.

180 Lewis probably had in mind Colossians 1:24: ‘I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I complete what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church’ (RSV).

181 Matthew 6:25-6: ‘“Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you shall eat or what you shall drink, nor about your body, what you shall put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?…’” (RSV).

182 Prince Caspian, ch. 8: ‘When they came out into the daylight Edmund turned to the Dwarf very politely and said, “I’ve got something to ask you. Kids like us don’t often have the chance of meeting a great warrior like you. Would you have a little fencing match with me? It would be frightfully decent.” ‘

183 The Silver Chair.

184 Sir Walter Scott, Ivanhoe (1819).

185 See the letter to Bodle of 31 December 1947 (CL II, p. 823).

186 The name given to the planet Earth in Lewis’s interplanetary trilogy.

187 Roger Lancelyn Green, Tellers of Tales: An Account of Children’s Favourite Authors from 1839 to the Present Day (1946; new edn, 1953).

188 For Don Giovanni Calabria’s letter of 3 September 1953 see Letters: C. S. Lewis-Don Giovanni Calabria, pp. 84-7.

189 Giovanni Calabria, Instaurare Omnia in Christo (Verona: Vescovile Casa Buoni Fanciulli, 1952).

190 Horace, Ars Poetica, 169-74: ‘Multa senem circumveniunt incommoda, vel quod quaerit et inventis miser abstinet ac timet uti,/vel quod res omnis timide gelideque ministrat,/dilator, spe longus, iners, avidusque futuri,/difficilis, querulus, laudator temporis acti/se puero, castigator censorque minorum’: ‘Many troubles assail an old man, whether because he seeks gain, and then wretchedly abstains from what he possesses and is afraid to use it, or because he attends to all his affairs feebly and timidly; a procrastinator, he is apathetic in his hopes and expectations, sluggish and fearful of the future, obstinate, always complaining; he devotes himself to praising times past, when he was a boy, and to being the castigator and moral censor of the young.’

191 2 Corinthians 1:3.

192 This had been Lewis’s chief intention in The Abolition of Man.

193 Herbert Read, The Green Child (1935).

194 The French composer, Olivier Messiaen (1908-92).

195 Probably Douglas Edison Harding, author of The Hierarchy of Heaven and Earth.

196 In The Hone and His Boy.

197 ibid., ch. 7.

198 Lewis was referring to Rachel, son of Laban. According to Genesis 29:20: ‘Jacob served seven years for Rachel.’ In her note to his letter Pitter said: ‘I had now known Lewis for seven years, and thought perhaps he would not mind if we now used Xtian names…I had asked “if I might now have Rachel”, alluding to Jacob’s seven-year service’ (Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. lett. c. 220/3, fol. 119).

199 The foolish clergyman in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813), who is excessively obsequious to persons of high rank.

200 G. A. L. Burgeon (Owen Barfield), This Ever Diverse Pair, introduction by Walter de la Mare (London: Gollancz, 1950). See the description of this book in CL II, p. 937n.

201 Charlotte M. Yonge, The Daisy Chain (1856); The Trial (1864); The Pillars of the House (1873); The Three Brides (1876); The Two Sides of the Shield (1885); Dynevor Terrace (1857); Nutty’s Father (1886).

202 John Richards (1918-95) was born in London on 23 June 1918. He went to Brockley County School in Forest Hill, after which he read English at King’s College, London. Before he could complete his degree the Second World War intervened and he spent most of the war years working in an anti-aircraft battery in Northern Ireland. After VE Day Richards was transferred to the Foreign Office. He soon left, returning to King’s College to complete his degree. In 1949 he realized his long-time ambition and began work in the Ministry of Education, where he served as Under-Secretary, 1973-7. A convert to Roman Catholicism in 1940, he afterwards contributed to many Catholic periodicals. See Lewis’s letter to Richards of 5 March 1945 in the Supplement.

203 Charlotte M. Yonge, The Heir of Redclyffe (1853).

204 i.e., The Splendid Century.

205 John Forrest, who had just died, was the husband of Lewis’s cousin, Gundreda Ewart Forrest. See The Ewart Family in the Biographical Appendix to CL I.

206 The words ‘better the frying pan than the fire’ were removed from The Silver Chair before the book was published.

207 Lewis had probably been asked to examine J. B. Phillips’s translation of Acts, The Young Church in Action: The Acts of the Apostles, published by Geoffrey Bles in 1955. The reference is to Phillips’s translation of Acts 2:22-4.

208 The fourteenth-century manor Dartington Hall was bought in 1925 by Leonard and Dorothy Elmhirst, who opened it in 1926 as an experiment in co-education. From the first one of its purposes was to renovate the large Dartington Hall estate. The school featured a ‘pupil-defined curriculum’ based upon the individual. There were few rules for older students, no uniforms, no religious education, and no church services. Emphasis was placed on ‘co-operation rather than competition’. Lewis’s pupil, Mary Neylan, taught there for a number of years. See Mary Neylan in the Biographical Appendix to CL II, pp. 1054-5.

209 The school in The Silver Chair.

210 Edgar Allan Poe, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1850).

211 ‘for the prayers’.

212 Congregation of Sisters of the Holy Redeemer, a lay order within the Order of the Holy Cross.

213 Book of Common Prayer, Collect for Whitsunday.

214 The story is told of a friend saying to Sir Winston Churchill, ‘How wonderfully your new grandson looks like you.’ ‘All babies look like me,’ replied Sir Winston. ‘But then, I look like all babies.’

215 William Wordsworth, ‘Ode, Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood’ (1807), 63-6: ‘Not in entire forgetfulness,/And not in utter nakedness,/ But trailing clouds of glory do we come/From God, who is our home.’

216 i.e., Florence ‘Michal’ Williams, the widow of Charles Williams.

217 Lewis forgot he had asked Bles, in his letter of 20 October, to remove the words from The Sliver Chair.

218 Romans 8:26-7: ‘We know not what we should pray for as we ought: but the Spirit itself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered. And he that searcheth the hearts knoweth what is the mind of the Spirit, because he maketh intercession for the saints according to the will of God.’

219 Luke 18:2: ‘And he spake a parable unto them to this end, that men ought always to pray, and not to faint.’

220 Luke 22:42.

221 Mark 11:24: ‘Therefore I say unto you, What things soever ye desire, when ye pray, believe that ye receive them and ye shall have them.’

222 Charles Williams, Evelyn Underhill, George MacDonald.

223 John 3:16.

224 1 John 2:15.

225 Revelation 18:4.

226 Mrs Gebbert had asked if Lewis would autograph a copy of The Stiver Chair for her son, Charles Marion Gebbert.

227 The Bermuda Summit, 4-8 December 1953, was held at the initiative of Sir Winston Churchill and included Britain, the United States, France and the USSR. In the aftermath of loseph Stalin’s death and the Soviet development of a hydrogen bomb, Churchill hoped to gain President Eisenhower’s support for a top-level dialogue with the new Soviet leadership. He was motivated primarily by a wish to break the stalemate of the Cold War and avert a possible nuclear conflict.

228 Panama was Queen Elizabeth II’s and Prince Philip’s first port of call (29 November 1953) on their visit to Australia, which was part of the Queen’s first Commonwealth tour.

229 The letter is unsigned.

230 Sir Stanley Unwin (1884-1968), publisher, was the son of Edward Unwin, a London printer. In 1904 he joined his lather’s stepbrother, T. Fisher Unwin, in his publishing firm. At 28 he began his own firm and soon afterwards bought George Allen & Sons. With the new company, George Allen & Unwin, he quickly built a formidable list of authors. In 1926 Unwin published The Truth about Publishing, which became the authoritative textbook on the subject. He was a tireless worker, but spared time for his other passion–tennis, which he played every weekend throughout the year. In 1937, acting on the recommendation of his ten-year-old son, Rayner, he published Tolkien’s The Hobbit. Again at the recommendation of Rayner, he published The Lord of the Rings. Because that book was so difficult to describe, Unwin asked Lewis if he would write something to serve as a ‘blurb’ for its cover. Lewis included such a piece with this letter. Unwin was knighted in 1946.

231 Mrs Farrer took exception to Lewis’s portrayal of God as, not male, but masculine. In That Hideous Strength, ch. 14, part V, p. 350, Ransom tells Jane Studdock: ‘You are offended by the masculine itself: the loud, irruptive, possessive thing–the gold lion, the bearded bull–which breaks through hedges and scatters the carefully made bed. The male you could have escaped, for it exists only on the biological level. But the masculine none of us can escape. What is above and beyond all things is so masculine that we are all feminine in relation to it.’ that he was born blind? Jesus answered, Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents: but that the works of God should be made manifest in him.’

232 Lewis was referring to the love of the dwarf, Gimli, for Galadriel, Queen of the Elves, in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, Bk. II, ch. 7: ‘The Dwarf, hearing the names given in his own ancient tongue, looked up and met her eyes, and it seemed to him that he looked suddenly into the heart of an enemy and saw there love and understanding.’

233 In The Fellowship of the Ring, Bk. II, ch. 8, ‘Farewell to Lórien’, the Fellowship takes leave of the security of Lothlórien to destroy the Ring.

234 In the final chapter of The Fellowship of the Ring, the noble Boromir covets the Ring so badly he tries to take it from Frodo: ‘“It is by our own folly that our Enemy will defeat us,” cried Boromir. “How it angers me! Fool! Obstinate fool! Running wilfully to death and ruining our cause. If any mortals have claim to the Ring, it is the men of Númenor, and not Halflings. It is not yours save by unhappy chance. It might have been mine. It should be mine. Give it to me!”’

235 See the letter to Sir Stanley Unwin of 4 December 1953.

236 ‘make haste slowly’.

237 The Roman poet Lucretius (c. 99-c. 55 BC).

238 Lewis was referring to D. E. Harding’s The Hierarchy of Heaven and Earth.

239 ibid., Preface, p. 12: ‘It would be affectation to pretend that I know whether Mr. Harding’s attempt, in its present form, will work. Very possibly not. One hardly expects the first, or the twenty-first, rocket to the Moon to make a good landing. But it is a beginning.’

240 See Dorothy L. Sayers in the Biographical Appendix to CL II, pp. 1065-72.

241 Lewis had received one of Sayers’ Christmas cards. The text, ‘The Days of Christ’s Coming’, was by Sayers, with a painting by Fritz Wegner, and the card was printed by Hamish Hamilton. The picture had 27 numbered doors to be opened from 14 December to 7 January

242 Kathleen Nott had just published The Emperor’s Clothes (London: Heinemann, 1953), described on the jacket as ‘An attack on the dogmatic orthodoxy of T. S. Eliot, Graham Greene, Dorothy Sayers, C. S. Lewis, and others.’

243 A Scots word for money or silver.

244 Sayers’ first part of Dante’s Divine Comedy had been published in 1949. She was now working on her translation of the Purgatorio.

245 David Gresham was in fact nine and a half years old and Douglas eight.

246 The ‘Little Kingdom’ of J. R. R. Tolkien’s Farmer Giles of Ham (1949) is set in that pleasant area east of Oxford which includes Thame, Long Crendon and Worminghall.

247 Arthur C. Clarke, Childhood’s End (New York: Ballantine, 1953).

248 H. G. Wells, The First Men in the Moon (1901).

249 Olaf Stapledon (1886-1950), whose Last and First Men (1930) and Star Maker (1937) are mentioned in CL II, pp. 236, 594.

250 i.e., Richard Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung, one of Lewis’s oldest loves. See the references to it in CL I, pp. 29, 139n, 381-2.

251 Clarke, Childhood’s End, ch. 21, p. 163.

252 ibid., p. 164.

253 Luke 14:26.

254 But in Book V when they have returned to Sicily, the women try to burn the ships so they need not go to Latium. See CL 11, p. 750, N. 148. In Virgil, Aeneid, Book III Aeneas and his companions build a fleet and set off in search of the land that first bore the Trojan race (Italy). They have many strange adventures along the way, but eventually reach Libya.

255 That is, from matters of the soul (psyche) to those of the spirit (pneuma).

256 Dante, Inferno, IV, 42.

257 The letter was unsigned.

258 Her husband, Henry Gerard Walter Sandeman, died on 19 January 1953.

259 Matthew 19:5-6; Mark 10:8-9.

260 Titirangi School for the Deaf had now merged with the Kelston Deaf Education Centre, New Lynn, Auckland, and Bodle had moved to New Lynn to continue her teaching.

261 Herbert, The Temple, ‘The Church-porch’, Stanza 72, 5-6: ‘If all want sense, God takes a text, and preacheth Patience.’

262 The Rev. Canon Ronald Edwin Head (1919-91) was appointed Curate of Holy Trinity, Headington Quarry, in 1952, and Vicar in 1956. When he arrived in the parish Holy Communion was celebrated at 8 a.m. and Morning Prayer at 11 a.m. He was responsible for reversing the times of these services.

263 Lewis may have been remembering Joanna Baillie (1762-1851), ‘The Storm-Beat Maid’ (1790), XL, 1: ‘I’ll share the cold blast on the heath.’

264 The four women are characters in the works of William Shakespeare. Imogen is the heroine of Cymbeltne (1623), Portia the heroine of The Merchant of Venice (1600). Miranda is a character in The Tempest, and Perdita appears in The Winter’s Tale (1623). While Miranda and Perdita grew up in sheltered circumstances and made happy marriages, Imogen and Portia had complicated and eventful lives which nevertheless turned out well in the end.

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