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

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO R B. GRIBBON (W):198 TS

REF. 50/185.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

19th December 1950.

Dear Mr. Gribbon,

It is also a far cry from December in Oxford to mid-Iune in Oxford! Thanks for your kind greetings, and the same to you. I too hope that we may meet again, either here or, better still, in Co. Down.

Yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO VERA MATHEWS (W): TS

REF.50/81

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

19th December 1950.

Dear Miss Mathews,

Many thanks for all the kind and encouraging things you say about the new book.199 I’m glad you enjoyed it.

The cutting is a treasure; you had better invest in a stock of these collars quick. For I doubt if your President will consider their manufacture really essential to America’s geared up emergency programme!

My brother joins me in sending you all best wishes.

Yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO MRS FRANK L. JONES (W): TS

REF.50/18.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

21st December 1950

Dear Mrs. Jones,

What, again!! Really two large and handsome food parcels in the same month is spoiling us completely. Here is a beauty from CARE just come in, in nice time for Christmas, and we are all very grateful indeed to you for it. On your bounty we shall ride comfortably into the New Year. Let us hope that it will be a better one than 1950, though I’m afraid there is not a very bright prospect before any of us.

I must also thank you and Mr. Jones for the two beautiful engagement books; I have had a preliminary look through them, and though California must be a very attractive state, I confess I prefer New England. It is more my sort of country. My brother, who is really more concerned with my engagements than I am, asks me to send his thanks too.

The weather forecast promises us Christmas weather over the holiday, and it is a prospect which I regard with very mixed feelings; I’m getting too old for ice and snow, and now share the views of Kipling’s MacAndrew:—

Hail ice and snow which praise the Lord, I’ve met you at your work And wished that we’d another route Or you another Kirk.200

All blessings on you both.

Yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO VERA MATHEWS (W): TS

REF.50/81

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

21st December 1950.

Dear Miss Mathews,

Hard on the heels of your last letter comes yet another of your excellent parcels. If you go on at this rate, the Customs people will begin to suspect that what you are really doing is to run a black market shop in Oxford, with me as your distributing agent! But seriously, you spoil us—and very many thanks for doing so.

You will understand if I cut you off with the shortest of notes: I am knee deep in the hideous task of dealing with my Christmas mail. All blessings.

yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO SHELDON VANAUKEN (BOD): 201

Magdalen College

Oxford

23 Dec. 1950

Dear Mr. Van Auken

The contradiction ‘We must have faith to believe and must believe to have faith’ belongs to the same class as those by which the Eliatic philosophers proved that all motion was impossible.202 And there are many others. You can’t swim unless you can support yourself in water & you can’t support yourself in water unless you can swim. Or again, in any act of volition (e.g. getting up in the morning) is the very beginning of the act itself voluntary or involuntary? If voluntary then you must have willed it, you were willing already, it was not really the beginning. If involuntary, then the continuation of the act (being determined by the first moment) is involuntary too. But in spite of this we do swim, & we do get out of bed.

I do not think there is a demonstrative proof (like Euclid) of Christianity, nor of the existence of matter, nor of the good will & honesty of my best & oldest friends. I think all three are (except perhaps the second) far more probable than the alternatives. The case for Xtianity in general is well given by Chesterton: and I tried to do something in my Broadcast Talks.

As to why God doesn’t make it demonstratively clear: are we sure that He is even interested in the kind of Theism which wd. be a compelled logical assent to a conclusive argument? Are we interested in it in personal matters? I demand from my friend a trust in my good faith which is certain without demonstrative proof. It wouldn’t be confidence at all if he waited for rigorous proof. Hang it all, the very fairy-tales embody the truth. Othello believed in Desdemona’s innocence when it was proved: but that was too late.203 Lear believed in Cordelia’s love when it was proved: but that was too late.204 ‘His praise is lost who stays till all commend.’205 The magnanimity, the generosity wh. will trust on a reasonable probability, is required of us. But supposing one believed and was wrong after all? Why, then you wd. have paid the universe a compliment it doesn’t deserve. Your error wd. even so be more interesting & important than the reality. And yet how cd. that be? How cd. an idiotic universe have produced creatures whose mere dreams are so much stronger, better, subtler than itself?

Note that life after death, which still seems to you the essential thing, was itself a late revelation. God trained the Hebrews for centuries to believe in Him without promising them an after-life: and, blessings on Him, he trained me in the same way for about a year. It is like the disguised prince in a fairy tale who wins the heroine’s love before she knows he is anything more than a woodcutter. What wd. be a bribe if it came first had better come last.

It is quite clear from what you say that you have conscious wishes on both sides. And now, another point about wishes. A wish may lead to false beliefs, granted. But what does the existence of the wish suggest? At one time I was much impressed by Arnold’s line ‘Nor does the being hungry prove that we have bread.’ But, surely, tho’ it doesn’t prove that one particular man will get food, it does prove that there is such a thing as food? i.e. if we were a species that didn’t normally eat, wasn’t designed to eat, wd. one feel hungry?

You say the Materialist universe is ‘ugly’. I wonder how you discovered that? If you are really a product of a materialistic universe, how is it you don’t feel at home there? Do fish complain of the sea for being wet? Or if they did, would that fact itself not strongly suggest that they had not always been, or wd. not always be, purely aquatic creatures? Notice how we are perpetually surprised at Time. (‘How time flies! Fancy John being grown-up & married? I can hardly believe it!’) In heaven’s name, why? Unless, indeed, there is something in us which is not temporal.

Total Humility is not in the Tao because the Tao (as such) says nothing about the object to which it wd. be the right response: just as there is no law about railways in the acts of Q. Elizabeth. But from the degree of respect wh. the Tao demands for ancestors, parents, elders, & teachers, it is quite clear what the Tao wd. prescribe towards an object such as God.

But I think you are already in the meshes of the net! The Holy Spirit is after you. I doubt if you’ll get away!

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO BELLE ALLEN (W): TS

REF.50/19.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

28th December 1950.

Dear Mrs. Allen,

Many thanks for your interesting letter of the 12th, which gave me much pleasure. Some words do tend to look queer when they are put on paper: but ‘offing’ is a perfectly good nautical word, dating from 1627, defined by the Oxford Dictionary as ‘the part of the visible sea distant from the shore or beyond the anchoring ground’.

But don’t talk to me of your snow, for we are all shivering here in the hardest winter we have had since 1946, and with a fuel crisis to add to our troubles. Much recrimination too as to who is responsible for the latter, and wide publicity is being given to a piece of ineptitude which is going on in Cardiff Docks; in one berth is a Norwegian ship discharging American coal for the British Railways—in the next one to it, a Spanish ship loading Welsh coal for the Argentine Railways! There certainly seems something very wrong there.

With us too, the steady rise in retail prices is a constant nightmare to all except the weekly wage earners, who can remedy their position by striking. Only yesterday a lady told me that now the material to make a pair of man’s socks costs ten shillings: and everything else is up in proportion. Except the basic items of the ration, and these of course are heavily subsidized, so in the long run we pay for them too, through the taxes. But we have a most excellent housekeeper, who is a marvel at ‘making do’, and there are five of us in the house.

The people who are really hard hit are the single ones, or the childless married couples: for naturally the more of you in the house, the easier it is to get enough meat for stews and suchlike. In term time I have my meals in College, including a free dinner, which has from time immemorial been part of the stipend of a tutor. My brother takes a snack in town in the middle of the day—usually something he has bought on the way in—and has the rest of his meals out at the house; he keeps a very sharp eye on my, or perhaps I should say your parcels, and abstracts anything likely to be useful for his lunches, justifying his peculations by quoting that ‘the labourer is worthy of his hire’.206

It is very odd about the envelopes; we certainly received them, and they were all used up in due course. Why one never went back to it’s home, neither of us can understand. Of course I write to twenty English folk for one American, and therefore the odds against your getting one back would be considerable. Our very small envelopes are due, I understand, to the fact that we are very seriously short of paper—having broken our contract with Canada, for some reason I have never followed. I don’t think there is any mail restriction.

The whole question of the atomic bomb is a very difficult one: the Sunday after the news of the dropping of the first one came through, our minister asked us all to join in prayer for forgiveness for the great crime of using it. But, if fwhat we have since heard is true, i.e. that the first item on the Japanese anti-invasion programme was the killing of every European in Japan, the answer did not, to me, seem so simple as all that.

I read with interest and indignation your story of the experiment on the monkeys; there seems no end to the folly and wickedness of this world. Dogs are jealous; perhaps the besetting sin they inherited at the Fall.*

I see that in rambling along I have nearly forgotten to thank you for the impending gifts. I hope, indeed if I may so put it, insist that you give up spoiling me in this way if prices rise still more against you.

With all good wishes from us both to you both for 1951,

yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

* On second thoughts, I don’t think it is a sin in them, tho’ it is in us.207

TO SISTER PENELOPE CSMV(BOD):

Magdalen College

Oxford

Dec 30/50

Dear Sister Penelope

Yours was a cheering letter which warmed my heart (I wish it wd. have warmed my fingers too: as it is they will hardly form the letters!).

I can’t offer any comments on the re-planning of the novel, not now having all the problems clearly enough in my head. I feel like saying it wd. be a pity to lose Adam, but then one has really no business to compare a work with its own pre-history.

I’m delighted about the Biblical plays which I remember doing me a lot of good when I read them. They may be, in a way, your most important work.

Our state is thus: my ‘mother’ has had to retire permanently into a Nursing Home. She is in no pain but her mind has almost completely gone. What traces of it remain seem gentler and more placid than I have known it for years. Her appetite is, oddly, enormous. I visit her, normally, every day, and am divided between a (rational?) feeling that this process of gradual withdrawal is merciful and even beautiful, and a quite different feeling (it comes out in my dreams) of horror.

There is no denying—and I don’t know why I should deny to you—that our domestic life is both more physically comfortable and more psychologically harmonious for her absence. The expence is of course v. severe and I have worries about that. But it wd. be v. dangerous to have no worries—or rather no occasions of worry. I have been feeling that v. much lately: that cheerful insecurity is what Our Lord asks of us. Thus one comes, late & surprised, to the simplest & earliest Christian lessons!

Rê pseudo- or deutero Screwtapes. My own feeling is that a literary idea ought to belong to anyone who can use it and that literary property is a sort of Simony. But you might find my publisher taking a different view. I don’t know, though: perhaps not, if it was published with proper acknowledgements. Let me know if it reaches the stage of a practical decision. I am glad to hear your inner news. Mine, too, is I think (but who am I to judge?) fairly good. Oremus pro invicem,208

Yours most sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO RUTH PITTER(BOD):

Magdalen College

Oxford

Dec 30/50

Dear Miss Pitter—

I don’t know if I can write, my fingers are so cold. (Almost the only pleasure of which age has yet deprived me—I mean the only good one—is the power of enjoying hard frost. Otherwise youth’s a stuff that’s over-rated).

What helps you in Theocritus hinders me, and in the Georgics too: i.e. when I’ve looked up the vegetables in the Lexicon, I don’t know the English any better than the Greek. The equation ‘γλώε,’209 the lesser mud-wort, fangoleum paludis’, is to me a = b where both are unknown. Not that I don’t enjoy the vegetables when I meet them in the cool, green flesh: but each individual is new to me each time. Heroic books–is this yours? And for a ‘work in progress’? It is obviously some poet’s prose, sweet on the tongue. I feel that about the poet being a Parthian too: but am not quite sure whether it doesn’t come from living in an un-poetical age when the poet is perilously near being ‘vestigial’. Did people feel that way about Virgil or Firdausi?210 (Here have been interrupted for an hour by an elderly lady asking moral advice!).

I hope you had a nice time with the Duchess.211 Shd. I like her poetry? I don’t know it. My brother joins me in all good wishes and I must go to lunch. My humble duty, Ma’am

Yours very sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO GEORGE SAYER (W):

Magdalen College

Oxford

Dec 30. 50

My dear George

What dears you both are: but a ruddy fellowship exam will keep me immobilised right up till term. Thanks all the same. Can you come up for a night any time after our term begins (Jan 13)?

MS rec’d safely. Yes, la belle Baynes212 will do the lot: Magnae virtutes nee minora vítía.213 Her Mouse is one of her best beasts, however.

No, I don’t wish a cheque! You have both been much in oratíoníbus nostris. Name your night & do come.

Jack

1 See Roger Lancelyn Green in the Biographical Appendix to CL II, pp. 1039-43. Green was the primary reader and critic of Lewis’s Narnian stories.

2 For information about the writing of the Narnian stories see Roger Lancelyn Green and Walter Hooper, C. S. Lewis: A Biography (London: Bles, 1974; rev. edn HarperCollins, 2002), ch. 11.

3 This is a letter of reference for Lewis’s former pupil, lonathan Francis ‘Frank’ Goodridge, whose biography appears in CL II, p. 936n. Goodridge was applying for the position of Senior Lecturer in English at St Mary’s College, Strawberry Hill, Twickenham, London. He taught at St Mary’s College, 1950-65. See Goodridge’s comments on this testimonial in CSL: The Bulletin of the New York C. S. Lewis Society, Whole No. 75 (Ian. 1976), p. 13.

4 This is one of those occasions on which Lewis misspelled his pupil’s name.

5 This was the Oxford University Socratic Club, founded in 1941 by Stella Aldwinckle with Lewis as its first president. See Stella Aldwinckle in the Biographical Appendix. The club’s purpose was to discuss the pros and cons of Christianity, and it met weekly during term-time. Goodridge was secretary of the Socratic Club, 1947-8. For a history of the club see Walter Hooper, ‘Oxford’s Bonny Fighter’ in Remembering C. S. Lewis: Recollections of Those Who Knew Him, ed. James T. Como (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2005). This book was previously published as C. S. Lewis at the Breakfast Table (1979; new edn, 1992).

6 See the biography of George Rostrevor Hamilton in CL II, p. 707n.

7 Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus), Satires, II, vi, 65: ‘O nights and suppers of gods!’ Horace (65-8 BC) was one of the greatest of the Roman poets.

8 Claudian, De Raptu Proserpinae, II, 282-3: ‘There are other stars for us.’ Pluto speaks the phrase, attempting to calm Persephone’s weeping, telling her that he is a person of importance and that there is an upside to being in the underworld.

9 The word planta– ‘a young tree’–appears in Virgil, Georgia, II, 23.

10 See Owen Barfield in the Biographical Appendix to CL I, pp. 979-82. Barfield was one of Lewis’s oldest friends and also his lawyer.

11 ‘ritual’.

12 John Masefield (1878-1967), Poet Laureate 1930-67.

13 See the biography of Nathan Comfort Starr, Professor of English at the University of Florida in Gainesville, in CL II, p. 809n. His essay on Lewis, ‘Good Cheer and Sustenance’, appears in Remembering C. S. Lewis.

14 Lewis’s group of friends, the Inklings, met regularly every Tuesday morning in the Eagle and Child (‘Bird and Baby’) pub in St Giles.

15 p.p. See Abbreviations.

16 Sarah Neylan (later Tisdall) was Lewis’s eleven-year-old goddaughter. See Mary Neylan in the Biographical Appendix to CL II, pp. 1054-5.

17 Rhona Bodle, from New Zealand, arrived in England in 1947 to study the education of deaf children. That same year she began teaching at Oakdene School for girls in Burgess Hill, Sussex. In December 1947 she began reading Lewis’s Broadcast Talks (London: Bles, 1942) and this led her to write to him. She became a Christian in 1949. See her biography in CL II, p. 823n. Her notes to Lewis’s letters are in the Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. lett. c. 200/4.

18 See Charles Walter Stansby Williams (1886-1945) in the Biographical Appendix to CL II, pp. 1081-6.

19 Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene (1590, 1596), I, xi, 45, 6: ‘It chaunst (eternal God that chaunce did guide)’.

20 See Sister Penelope CSMV in the Biographical Appendix to CL II, pp. 1055-9.

21 In 1948 Sister Penelope began asking Lewis’s advice about a story she was writing, to be called ‘The Morning Gift’. She was never able to find a publisher. It is first mentioned in Lewis’s letter to Sister Penelope of 8 April 1948 (CL II, p. 848).

22 This was probably a reference to Sir Herbert Butterfield’s Christianity and History (London: Bell, 1949).

23 Sister Penelope’s St Bernard on the Love of God, De Diligendo Deo, newly translated by A Religious of C.S.M.V. (London: Mowbray, 1950).

24 In a letter of 29 November 1944 to his son Christopher, Professor J. R. R. Tolkien said that he and Lewis ‘begin to consider writing a book in collaboration on “Language” (Nature, Origins, Functions)’ (The Letters of]. R. R. Tolkien, ed. Humphrey Carpenter (1981), p. 105). By 1948 it had got as far as being called Language and Human Nature in an announcement of forthcoming books from the Student Christian Movement, who expected it to be published in 1949. In the end, it was never written. Emperor Augustus used ‘on the Greek Kalends’ for ‘Never’.

25 Edward A. Allen and his mother, Mrs Belle Allen, lived at 173 Highland Avenue, Westfield, Massachusetts. They were very generous to the Lewis brothers, and sent them numerous parcels of food over the years. For the beginning of the correspondence see Lewis’s letter to Allen of 3 January 1948 (CL II, p. 827).

26 John Strachey (1901-63), a British Socialist writer and Labour politician, who served as Minister of Food, 1946-50.

27 Vera Mathews (later Gebbert) was living at this time at 510 North Alpine Drive, Beverly Hills, California. She supplied the Lewis brothers with vast quantities of food during the lean years following the war.

28 See Edward Thomas Dell, Jr in the Biographical Appendix to CL II, p. 1025. At this time Dell was a student at Eastern Nazarene College, Wollaston, Massachusetts.

29 In a letter of 12 December 1949 Dell had asked whether ‘evil is an illusion’. Lewis replied on 19 December 1949: ‘I don’t think the idea that evil is an illusion helps. Because surely it is a (real) evil that the illusion of evil shd. exist. When I am pursued in a nightmare by a crocodile the pursuit and the crocodile are illusions: but it is a real nightmare, and that seems a real evil’ (CL II, p. 1010). Continuing the discussion, Dell asked in a letter of 26 January 1950: ‘If the illusion of the crocodile is evil isn’t it so because of man’s sin rather than a basic relationship set up either by an evil or uncontrolled by a finite God?’ (Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. lett. c. 220/4, fols. 89-90).

30 Nothing is known of this American nun who, it appears, wanted to know why Lewis was not a Roman Catholic.

31 See Nicolas Zernov, Spalding Lecturer in Eastern Orthodox Culture in the University of Oxford, in the Biographical Appendix.

32 Henry Norman Spalding (1877-1953), philanthropist. In his early life Spalding came across a book about the history of India which kindled in him an interest in the Far East. He settled in Oxford and devoted himself to the attempt to cultivate better relations between the West and the East by fostering scholarly approaches to the history, art, religion and philosophy of Oriental countries. He was so impressed by the work of Nicolas Zernov that in 1965 he founded the Spalding Lectureship in Eastern Orthodox Culture, with Zernov as its first holder.

33 Mrs Frank Iones, who was still sending food parcels to Lewis, wrote from 320 Brookside Road, Darien, Connecticut.

34 The Problem of Pain (London: Bles, 1940; HarperCollins, 2002).

35 The Old Testament.

36 Mr Lake had presumably asked Lewis about the association of planetary intelligences and eldila with angels in his interplanetary trilogy, Out of the Silent Planet (London: John Lane, 1938), Perelandra (London: John Lane, 1943) and That Hideous Strength (London: John Lane, 1945). Lewis was later to write about these angels or daemons in The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964), ch. 3, pp. 40-2.

37 For years Lewis had been publishing some of his poems under the pseudonym Nat Whilk (or N.W.)–Anglo-Saxon for ‘I know not whom’. In Perelandra (1943; HarperCollins, 2000), ch. 1, p. 13, he quotes a note on the eldila or angels by one ‘Natvilcius’, which is Latin for ‘Nat Whilk’.