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Magdalen College
Oxford
31/1/51
My dear Roger
What two nights can you come to me? I prefer not a week end if you can possibly manage it. I suggest Feb 28 & 29th. (Feb 13, 20 & March 2nd no good). I miss you v. much. Love & duty to all of you.
Yours
Jack
TO MRS HALMBACHER(WHL):
Magdalen College,
January 1951
Dear Mrs Halmbacher
How very kind of you. This is absolutely the present I wanted, for the nuisance and waste of time of finding that one has’nt got an envelope at a critical moment is serious…
We are all chuckling over a certain West of England resort which is I’m told circulating the American tourist agencies to this effect–‘When you come to England come straight to—. We guarantee that we are taking absolutely no part in the Festival of Britain.’
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TO MARY VAN DEUSEN (W):
Magdalen College
Oxford
7/2/51
Dear Mrs. Van Deusen
First, I must apologise for not having acknowledged Woodbridge on Nature.
(#ulink_07c25ef5-ac33-5852-bded-551a6bb14aca) It arrived safely: many thanks. I have not read it yet but it is on the waiting list. (You will understand that I am never in the position of looking for a book to read, but nearly always looking for time in which to read books!)
If ‘planning’ is taken in the literal sense of thinking before one acts and acting on what one has thought out to the best of one’s ability, then of course planning is simply the traditional virtue of Prudence and not only compatible with, but demanded by, Christian ethics. But if the word is used (as I think you use it) to mean some particular politico-social programme, such as that of the present British Govt, then one cd. only say after examining that programme in detail. I don’t think I have studied it enough to do that. As for the ‘planning’ involved in your social work I am of course even less qualified.
It is certainly not wrong to try to remove the natural consequences of sin provided the means by which you remove them are not in themselves another sin. (E.g. it is merciful and Christian to remove the natural consequences of fornication by giving the girl a bed in a maternity ward and providing for the child’s keep and education, but wrong to remove them by abortion or infanticide). Perhaps the enclosed article (I don’t want it back) will make the point clearer.
Where benevolent planning, armed with political or economic power, can become wicked is when it tramples on people’s rights for the sake of their good.
Your letter gave me great pleasure: you are apparently on the right road. With all blessings.
Yours sincerely
C. S. Lewis
On 8 February 1951 there was a vote for the Professor of Poetry by the MAs of Oxford University. C. S. Lewis was running against Cecil Day-Lewis.
(#ulink_ad0eff90-5c8a-58de-8e81-43f621b68487) Warnie Lewis wrote in his diary that evening: ‘While we were waiting to dine at the Royal Oxford…came the bad news that [Jack] had been defeated by C. Day Lewis for the Poetry Chair, by 194 votes to 173.J took it astonishingly well, much better than his backers.’
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TO SEYMOUR SPENCER (P):
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Magdalen etc.
28/2/51
Dear Doctor Spencer
Thanks v. much for the bit from Fromm.
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I enclose an offprint (I don’t want it back) from the Australian Twentieth Century wh. I hope makes my point clear.
(#ulink_75066010-53db-5dba-ba5e-ed780de5c0e8) Quote directly or indirectly from this at pleasure. I look forward to seeing yr. paper in the Month and wd. be happy to read the typescript if you think I can be of any help.
Yours sincerely
C. S. Lewis
TO ‘MRS LOCKLEY (L):
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[Magdalen College]
5 March 1951
How right you are: the great thing is to stop thinking about happiness. Indeed the best thing about happiness itself is that it liberates you from thinking about happiness—as the greatest pleasure that money can give us is to make it unnecessary to think about money. And one sees why we have to be taught the ‘not thinking’ when we lack as well as when we have. And I’m sure that, as you say, you will ‘get through somehow in the end’.
Here is one of the fruits of unhappiness: that it forces us to think of life as something to go through. And out at the other end. If only we could steadfastly do that while we are happy, I suppose we shd. need no misfortunes. It is hard on God really. To how few of us He dare send happiness because He knows we will forget Him if He gave us any sort of nice things for the moment…
I do get that sudden feeling that the whole thing is hocus pocus and it now worries me hardly at all. Surely the mechanism is quite simple? Sceptical, incredulous, materialistic ruts have been deeply engraved in our thought, perhaps even in our physical brains by all our earlier lives. At the slightest jerk our thought will flow down those old ruts. And notice when the jerks come. Usually at the precise moment when we might receive Grace. And if you were a devil would you not give the jerk just at those moments? I think that all Christians have found that he is v. active near the altar or on the eve of conversion: worldly anxieties, physical discomforts, lascivious fancies, doubt, are often poured in at such junctures…But the Grace is not frustrated. One gets more by pressing steadily on through these interruptions than on occasions when all goes smoothly…
I am glad you all liked ‘The Lion’. A number of mothers, and still more, schoolmistresses, have decided that it is likely to frighten children, so it is not selling very well. But the real children like it, and I am astonished how some very young ones seem to understand it. I think it frightens some adults, but very few children…
TO ROGER IANCELYN GREEN (BOD):
6/3/51
My dear Roger
(Of course, yes: I thought I had asked you to do so). You are quite right about a wood fire.
(#ulink_e4b4f8d2-9504-545c-a969-a507fa8c379c) Wood keeps on glowing red again in the places you have already extinguished—phoenix-like. Even the large webbed feet of a marsh-wiggle couldn’t do it. Yet it must be a flat hearth, I think. Does peat go out easily by treading? As an Irishman I ought to know, but don’t. I think it will have to [be] a coal fire on a flat hearth. After all, Underland might well use coal, whereas wood or charcoal wd. have to be imported.
I finished the Antigeos book.
(#ulink_9e471167-1cf4-5546-81bf-2916685fa694) There are two and only two, good ideas in it: the (supposed) ‘fog’ on the voyage and the great tidal waves on the Antigosian sea. All else is as dull as ditchwater: a flat, featureless, landscape and deadly municipal restaurants. The inhabitants are less interesting than any other-worlders I have yet met.
I enjoyed our biduum
(#ulink_b9b174b1-566b-5768-92aa-10dd351365e8) or pair-o’-days v. much. Love to both.
Yours
Jack
TO RUTH PITTER (BOD):
Magdalen College,
Oxford
17/3/51
Dear Miss Pitter
I hope you haven’t thought I was being such a brute beast as to obey your ‘Don’t write’. I was more innocently employed in having my third dose of influenza this year–or rather, now that I look at the date of your letter, it must have been my second and third, for the flash of daylight between the two tunnels was almost too short to notice.
The book is most beautiful,
(#ulink_46b27f51-2a95-549e-b4a1-ba7841ad855d) yet not with any fussy and intrusive beauty that reduces the poems to parts of a pattern. My old friends look better in their new site—for I’m no Manichean, and think the beautiful soul should have a beautiful body. But one reason why they look better is that they are better than I remembered. I find that my very favourite, The Sparrow’s Skull, had in memory preserved only its poignancy and lost a great deal of its delicacy and poetic breeding. More shame to me when it was on my shelves and memory—apparently a vulgarising memory—could have been corrected. I say, Sinking, which I hadn’t properly noticed before, is a corker. So indeed are dozens. It is a good time for re-reading: I have the precious vulnerability of the convalescent. Why do they call it ‘depression’? I like it.
The engraving is perfect except for (possibly) the Muses’ profile where I think the heavy, moustache-like shadow on the upper lip is a pity:
(#ulink_32460d24-e835-577d-a972-6c52eda6de17) but probably not so in the original. Yes. I have good reason to remember your vine and ‘to consider it’ (as in this picture) ‘is to taste it spiritually’–so Traherne says in his Centuries of Meditations,
(#ulink_7e4399b5-cd72-529d-b420-f0665e83bc36) which I expect you know and am sure, if you know, you love.
When next term cd. you come down and lunch? There’s an extra reason: you have property to reclaim. Groping in the inn’ards of an old arm chair lately (a place which rivals the sea bed for lost treasure) I fished out a spectacle case which, being opened, revealed your golden name wrapped in your silver address. So come in May or June: preferably not a Tuesday. Let me know your ideas on this.
I’m off to Northern Ireland after Easter to try my native air—half frightened at the thought. Very many thanks for the book: it has given me great pleasure already.
Yours sincerely
C. S. Lewis
TO MARY VAN DEUSEN (W):
Magdalen College
Oxford
17/3/51
Dear Mrs. Van Deusen
No. Unless it attracts you as an amusement I wouldn’t advise you to start attending ‘classes’. My idea is that unless one has to qualify oneself for a job (which you haven’t) the only sensible reason for studying anything is that one has a strong curiosity about it. And if one has, one can’t help studying it. I don’t see any point in attending lectures etc with some general notion of ‘self-improvement’–unless, as I say, one finds it fun.
I never see why we should do anything unless it is either a duty or a pleasure! Life’s short enough without filling up hours unnecessarily. And I think one usually learns more from a book than from a lecture.
With all good wishes.
Yours sincerely
C. S. Lewis
TO CHRISTIAN HARDIE (P):
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Magdalen etc
22/3/51
Dear Christian
Your commands have been obeyed.
(#ulink_eee86ebe-4dd8-5f78-acc9-b95ebbfa8369) About half way through, not having yet met a single scene or character that thoroughly engaged my interest, I nearly gave up: but perseverance was rewarded, for the second half is better. One forgives Julia quite a lot for her outburst on p 255 about Charles’s ‘damned bounderish way’.
Waugh is a writer, certainly. Many descriptions, phrases, and long-tailed similes pleased me: but not the novel, as a novel. If one’s going to tell the story through one of the characters then, surely, either that character ought to be a fairly sane and straightforward one (as in Erewhon
(#ulink_bfa5b34e-24b6-552a-989a-5388e2686ab5) or Rob Roy),
(#ulink_0fa9fbde-62ae-5ab3-bcf1-182558de10eb) or else, if he’s a monstrosity, then the other characters ought to be normal (as in Hogg’s Justified Sinner
(#ulink_0ae29fab-72d6-5147-8a33-dc1b3060e724) or McKenna’s Well Meaning Woman).
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As Chesterton said, you can have a story about a knight among dragons, but not about a dragon among dragons.
(#ulink_67a89c55-f481-5580-ac57-b9716992052a) Or, to come nearer, I can manage humans seen in a distorting mirror or goblins seen in an ordinary mirror: but goblins in a distorting mirror is too much. In spite of clear distinctions, the narrator is so very much ‘the same kind of thing’ as Blanche & Sebastian and his own father & Ld. M, and all the others—the tiresome seen through the eyes of the tiresome. And Sebastian would be a terrible bore on any terms. The narrator’s spontaneous dislike [of] all nice people (e.g. old Lady M. or Ld. Brideshead) has, I suppose, a theological significance?
