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My dear Firor
How the years flick past at our time of life: don’t they: like telegraph posts seen from an express train: and how they crawled once, when the gulf between one Christmas and another was too wide almost for a child’s eye to see across. If ever I write a story about a long-liver, like Haggard’s She or the Wandering Jew
(#ulink_a8f9b9cd-4e2e-583c-9b29-100e59c412e7) (and I might) I shall make that point. The first century of his life will, to the end, seem to him longer than all that have followed it: the Norman Conquest, the discovery of America and the French Revolution are all muddled up in his mind as recent events.
My year ‘off’ has been, as it was meant to be, so far a year of very hard work, but mostly congenial. The book really begins to look as if it might be finished in 1952 and I am, between ourselves, pleased with the manner of it—but afraid of hidden errors. In that way I rather envy you for being engaged in empirical inquiry where, I suppose, mistakes rise up in the laboratory and proclaim themselves. But a mistake in a history of literature walks in silence till the day it turns irrevocable in a printed book and the book goes for review to the only man in England who wd. have known it was a mistake. This, I suppose, is good for one’s soul: and the kind of good I must learn to digest. I am going to be (if I live long enough) one of those men who was a famous writer in his forties and dies unknown—like Christian going down into the green valley of humiliation.
(#ulink_07bb47ad-5893-5a0b-99ae-6fd98eb97daf) Which is the most beautiful thing in Bunyan and can be the most beautiful thing in life if a man takes it quite rightly–a matter I think and pray about a good deal. One thing is certain: much better to begin (at least) learning humility on this side of the grave than to have it all as a fresh problem on the other. Anyway, the desire wh. has to be mortified is such a vulgar and silly one.
Most of us are v. much cheered by having got rid of the Labour government and at finding that we have done so without yet plunging into a period of strikes and sedition and ‘cold’ revolution, which we feared. There are some, not Labour, who feel quite differently. Have you ever heard of Captain Bernard Acworth R. N., a distinguished submarine commander in World War I and v. good Christian of the Evangelical type—but his head absolutely buzzing with Bees? He was with me the other day explaining that the whole American-English-UNO
(#ulink_e61e6c0d-d88c-59af-b4fd-683756829e31) set up is absolutely fatal and part of a plot engineered (so far as I cd. make out) by the Kremlin, the Vatican, and Jews, the Freemasons and–subtlest foe of all—the Darwinians. So I suppose you must be in it too. But there was a core of rationality in it. He thinks our strategy ought to be purely naval, that we can ruin ourselves by trying to keep up an army in Europe and, even so, cannot succeed on those lines.
Have you given up visiting these parts? I (and others) have a very warm memory of your one descent upon Oxford and would greatly welcome another. You are a naturally mobile organism, you know, unlike me. Whether you come or not, all very best wishes and, as always, hearty thanks. I’m sorry for the handwriting: the harder I try, the worse it gets now-a-days.
Yours ever
C. S. Lewis
TO DON GIOVANNI CALABRIA (V):
E Collegio S. Mariae Magdalenae
apud Oxonienses
Die S. Stephani MCMLI[26 December 1951]
Dilectissime Pater
Grato animo epistulam tuam hodie accepi et omnia bona spir-itualia et temporalia tibi in Domino invoco. Mihi in praeterito anno accidit magnum gaudium quod quamquam difficile est verbis exprimere conabor.
Mirum est quod interdum credimus nos credere quae re verâ ex corde non credimus. Diu credebam me credere in remissionem peccatorum. Ac subito (in die S. Marci) haec veritas in mente mea tam manifesto lumine apparuit ut perciperem me numquam antea (etiam post multas confessiones et absolutiones) toto corde hoc credidisse. Tantum distat inter intellectûs mera affirmatio et illa fides medullitus infixa et quasi palpabilis quam apostolus scripsit esse substantiam.
Fortasse haec liberatio concessa est tuis pro me intercessionibus! Confortat me ad dicendum tibi quod vix débet laicus ad sacerdotem, junior ad seniorem, dicere. (Attamen ex ore infantium: immo olim ad Balaam ex ore asini!). Hoc est: multum scribes de tuis peccatis. Cave (liceat mihi, dilectissime pater, dicere cave) ne humilitas in anxietatem aut tristitiam transeat. Mandatum est gaude et semper gaude. Jesus abolevit chirographiam quae contra nos erat. Sursum corda! Indulge mihi, precor, has balbutiones. Semper in meis orationibus et es et eris. Vale.
C. S. Lewis
*
from the College of St Mary Magdalen
Oxford
St Stephen’s Day [26 December] 1951
Dearest Father
Thank you for the letter which I have received from you today and I invoke upon you all spiritual and temporal blessings in the Lord.
As for myself, during the past year a great joy has befallen me. Difficult though it is, I shall try to explain this in words. It is astonishing that sometimes we believe that we believe what, really, in our heart, we do not believe.
For a long time I believed that I believed in the forgiveness of sins. But suddenly (on St Mark’s day)
(#ulink_3b16bbf7-76eb-54be-b0cf-378a6a0f75f3) this truth appeared in my mind in so clear a light that I perceived that never before (and that after many confessions and absolutions) had I believed it with my whole heart.
So great is the difference between mere affirmation by the intellect and that faith, fixed in the very marrow and as it were palpable, which the Apostle wrote was substance.
(#ulink_0ed604fc-cc40-5f4b-ac66-bc8d6a428156)
Perhaps I was granted this deliverance in response to your intercessions on my behalf!
This emboldens me to say to you something that a layman ought scarcely to say to a priest nor a junior to a senior. (On the other hand, out of the mouths of babes:
(#ulink_c9c90b19-02b0-5d5a-a8ef-24a466cb78ae) indeed, as once to Balaam, out of the mouth of an ass!)
(#ulink_968bc2b5-1816-567e-8b4e-1c19a771b449) It is this: you write much about your own sins. Beware (permit me, my dearest Father, to say beware) lest humility should pass over into anxiety or sadness. It is bidden us to ‘rejoice and always rejoice’.
(#ulink_79e2a171-32d9-5f62-87c0-47ed3ad5f6bd) lesus has cancelled the handwriting which was against us.
(#ulink_d08f7843-ded0-5c51-9c2c-b46ccc18d9f4) Lift up our hearts!
Permit me, I pray you, these stammerings. You are ever in my prayers and ever will be.
Farewell.
C. S. Lewis
1 (#ulink_dad5e8c7-3534-5c75-8bf8-a966e0104b5c) 1 Timothy 2:1: ‘I exhort therefore, that, first of all, supplications, prayers, intercessions, and giving of thanks, be made for all men.’
2 (#ulink_92ce2597-a9ac-5f4e-898e-545d817b53e0) Many of these thoughts were later to go into Lewis’s essay, ‘The Efficacy of Prayer’, published in Fern-seed and Elephants and Other Essays on Christianity, ed. Walter Hooper (London: Collins, 1975; Fount, 1998).
3 (#ulink_48b3909d-3de6-51e4-b844-d8cbaf4f15b8) Vanauken had asked Lewis his opinion as to whether he should continue with his postgraduate work in history or study theology.
4 (#ulink_e4b3b9f5-bf37-55a7-a17e-b3eb46f3d19a) Francis Bacon, Essays (1625), ‘Of Atheism’: ‘The great atheists, indeed are hypocrites; which are ever handling holy things, but without feeling; so as they must needs be cauterized in the end.’
5 (#ulink_09970bce-d372-5262-9830-4b37e95bde91) Pauline Baynes was illustrating the Narnian books.
6 (#ulink_24a69295-6482-5bda-be7a-86bb2565c9a7) At a meeting with Geoffrey Bles in London on 1 January 1951 Lewis gave Pauline Baynes a map he had drawn of Narnia bordered on the north by the ‘Wild Lands of the North’ as well as his drawing of a Monopod. In this letter he refers to that map which is in the Bodleian Library. (MS. Eng. lett. c. 220/1, fol. 160), and is reproduced by the Bodleian as a postcard. Baynes used Lewis’s original map to draw (1) ‘A Map of Narnian and Adjoining Lands’ which appeared on the endpapers of Prince Caspian; (2) a map of the Bight of Calormen and the Lone Islands of the Great Eastern Ocean which appeared on the endpapers of The Voyage of the ‘Dawn Treader’ (1952); (3) ‘A Map of the Wild Lands of the North’ which appeared on the endpapers of The Silver Chair (1953); and (4) a map on the endpapers of The Horse and His Boy (1954) showing the position of Tashbaan, the Desert and Archenland.
7 (#ulink_a9779837-88c0-571f-a430-64f79ce0e29d) George MacDonald, Unspoken Sermons, 2nd series (1885), ‘The Fear of God’, p. 163.
8 (#ulink_33470893-0ee8-5378-a1e1-b69699e25771) See Percy Howard Newby, writer and broadcasting administrator, in the Biographical Appendix.
9 (#ulink_0fa84a80-eaf5-5b4c-b31f-8fb63fc74ccc) Newby, Organizer of Third Programme Talks for the BBC, had written to Lewis on 9 February 1951: ‘From time to time we broadcast in the Third Programme talks under the general title of “Work in Progress”, the general idea being that scholars and critics should discuss the nature and scope of a particular book they are engaged upon. We should be very happy if you would talk in this way about the volume you are preparing for the Oxford History of English Literature.’
10 (#ulink_d8f3c76e-0919-5d70-af04-beffb5444178) William Lewis Kinter (1915–) was born in St Thomas, Pennsylvania, on 21 October 1915. He took a BA in English from Lafayette College, Easton, Pennsylvania, in 1938, another BA from Yale University in 1940, and a PhD from Columbia University, New York, in 1958. He taught Latin and English at Westminster School, Hartford, Connecticut, 1944-6, was Assistant Professor of English at Muhlenberg College, Allentown, Pennsylvania, 1946-62, and Associate Professor of English at Loyola College, Baltimore, Maryland, 1962-78. From there he became Chairman of the Department of Language and Literature at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. He is the author, with loseph R. Keller, of The Sibyl: Prophetess of Antiquity and Medieval Fay (Philadelphia: Dorrance, 1967).
11 (#ulink_b34940ea-7f29-5103-97ca-b7182543f23e)Spirits in Bondage: A Cycle of Lyrics (1919), Lewis’s first book, was published under the pseudonym ‘Clive Hamilton’. See CL I, p. 443n.
12 (#ulink_b34940ea-7f29-5103-97ca-b7182543f23e)Dymer, with a preface by the author (London: Dent; New York: Macmillan, 1950).
13 (#ulink_49f62fce-81c4-55a9-8706-d763bb409050) i.e. Lewis’s interplanetary trilogy, Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra and That Hideous Strength.
14 (#ulink_49f62fce-81c4-55a9-8706-d763bb409050) Ludovico Ariosto (1474-1535) was the author of Orlando Furioso (1532). See The Allegory of Love, Ch 7, Sect. 1, pp. 312-13).
15 (#ulink_82a1af13-2ba6-5ba2-95e5-2ec74e417b88) Bernardus Silvestris, De Mundi Universitate, ed. Carl Sigmund Barach and lohann Wrobel (Innsbruck: Verlag der Wagner’schen Universitats-Buchhandlung, 1876).
16 (#ulink_39c60c9d-1950-5b86-8ed9-95b930423a72) Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890-69), American general and President of the United States, 1953-61, who launched the invasion of Normandy on 6 June 1944 and oversaw the final defeat of Germany. In 1950 President Truman asked Eisenhower to become supreme commander of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and in 1951 he flew to Paris to assume his new position. For the next fifteen months he devoted himself to the task of creating a united military organization in western Europe to be a defence against the possibility of Communist aggression.
17 (#ulink_41ccd86d-942c-5aae-8d5f-a562294dfbad) On Mrs Alice Hamilton Moore (1853-1939), see CL II, p. 281n.
18 (#ulink_84e065e0-3e6d-5e0f-91da-e14306898614) Rider Haggard, She (1887); Ayesha (1905); She and Allan (1921); Wisdom’s Daughter (1923).
19 (#ulink_ffd7e1b6-586e-5b18-a5b2-9e29844003d1) After Greeves’s mother died in 1949 he moved from the family home, ‘Bernagh’ in Belfast, to a cottage at Silver Hill, Crawfordsburn, Co. Down, about twelve miles from Belfast. When he visited Arthur there, Lewis always stayed at the Old Inn, Crawfordsburn.
20 (#ulink_5064ec38-0e68-5f55-b216-972f6701be70) When Roger Lancelyn Green’s father died in 1947, Roger, his eldest son, became the 31st Lord of Poulton, and in August 1950 he moved with his wife and son from Oxford to the family home, Poulton Hall, Poulton-Lancelyn, Bebington, Wirral, Cheshire.
21 (#ulink_debecf4f-ab4f-51f5-9202-3aa70ff59127) The Festival of Britain was opened by King George VI in London on 3 May 1951, six years after the end of the Second World War. It was designed to celebrate the best of British art, design and industry, and raise the nation’s spirits after the austerity of the war years. More than eight million people visited the exhibition over a period of five months.
22 (#ulink_123cb32a-379c-538c-9587-ad7b261d1a07) Frederick lames Eugene Woodbridge, An Essay on Nature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1940).
23 (#ulink_7ba30d13-9060-56ff-b9a9-6e411d290297) See Cecil Day-Lewis in the Biographical Appendix.
24 (#ulink_7ba30d13-9060-56ff-b9a9-6e411d290297)BF, p. 239.
25 (#ulink_9262e79c-736b-59fe-98a2-d436f2d9772d) See Dr Seymour Jamie Gerald Spencer in the Biographical Appendix.
26 (#ulink_5b838ea4-c14a-5660-a2f8-fc1ab0187f3b) Eric Fromm (1900-80), German-born American psychoanalyst who studied the role of social conditioning in human behaviour.
27 (#ulink_f65c6fcb-5fa9-590b-946e-e3275fd49037) This was Lewis’s essay, ‘The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment’, in 20th Century: An Australian Quarterly Review, vol. Ill, no. 3 (1949), pp. 5-12 and subsequently in Res Judicatae, VI (June 1953), pp. 224-30, and The Churchman, LXXIII (April-June 1959), pp. 55-60. It was reprinted in First and Second Things, ed. Walter Hooper (London: Fount, 1985) and EC.
28 (#ulink_654e38c3-9fdb-5fe0-9233-15a4d4c52d5f) ‘Mrs Lockley’ is the pseudonym Warnie Lewis gave this correspondent in L and WHL. See CL II, p. 975n. The woman is yet to be identified.
29 (#ulink_876b873e-8792-5a03-aa40-3c2d92d8e133) Green had been reading the manuscript of what became The Silver Chair, and he had questioned whether the wood fire Puddleglum tramples on in Chapter 12 would go out. In the end, Lewis did not specify what kind of fire it was, and he simply let Puddleglum ‘stamp on the fire, grinding a large part of it into ashes on the flat hearth’.
30 (#ulink_8dd082c3-8a16-58a7-a301-6fd194839850) Paul Capon, The Other Side of the Sun (1950).
31 (#ulink_0491b755-8fe8-5eb6-ba59-163e248b10fb) Period of two days.
32 (#ulink_80b2964e-723d-50c9-a4f6-691d6856be76) Ruth Pitter, Urania (1950). This volume of poems was a selection from Pitter’s A Trophy of Arms: Poems 1926-35 (1936), The Spirit Watches (1939) and The Bridge (1945).
33 (#ulink_7225b9a4-bd29-500b-a2d2-c3898d01b229)Urania contains an engraving by Joan Hassall. At the feet of the Muse there is a vine branch based on those at Pitter’s farm in Essex.
34 (#ulink_7225b9a4-bd29-500b-a2d2-c3898d01b229) Thomas Traherne (c. 1636-74), Centuries of Meditation (1908), First Century, 27.
35 (#ulink_c2d32de4-ec9b-544b-b5d2-ad8eba8ca6bd) See Colin and Christian Hardie in the Biographical Appendix. In ‘Three Letters from C. S. Lewis’, The Chesterton Review, XVII, nos. 3 and 4 (August/November 1991), p. 393, Christian Hardie commented: ‘The three letters…relate to the two novels which I lent to C. S. Lewis. He had revealed one day at lunch with us, that he had read no book by Evelyn Waugh or Graham Greene. I said that he should try to catch up with the contemporary scene, and that I would lend him some books which were currently read and admired. The first, in March 1951, was Brideshead Revisited. Treating this as a Lenten penance, a year later he asked for another and got The Power and the Glory. He could easily have returned the books with only a verbal message; characteristically, he took the trouble to write a letter.’
36 (#ulink_187b63b7-e672-5335-8079-31f9e8b9d3ca) Lewis took Hardie’s advice and read Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (1945). The novel is told in the first person by Charles Ryder, a fellow-student at Oxford of Lord Sebastian Flyte, a member of an ancient Roman Catholic family. Sebastian takes Charles to the home of his family, Brideshead Castle, where he meets the rest of the Flyte family. Sebastian has an elder brother, Lord Brideshead, and two sisters, Julia and Cordelia. His mother, the devout Lady Marchmain, refuses to divorce Lord Marchmain, who is living in Venice with his mistress. Lady Marchmain attempts to enlist Charles’s help in preventing Sebastian’s drinking, but Sebastian escapes to North Africa where, after his mother’s death, he becomes a saintly down-and-out. Charles falls in love with Lady lulia, but in the end the power of the Church reclaims her and they part for ever.
37 (#ulink_346ecbac-c104-5577-96fe-83b13a72aa56) Samuel Butler, Erewhon (1872).
38 (#ulink_346ecbac-c104-5577-96fe-83b13a72aa56) Sir Walter Scott, Rob Roy (1817).
39 (#ulink_346ecbac-c104-5577-96fe-83b13a72aa56) James Hogg, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824).
40 (#ulink_346ecbac-c104-5577-96fe-83b13a72aa56) Stephen McKenna, The Confessions of a Well-Meaning Woman (1922).
41 (#ulink_a59518f4-e22e-5f10-b98d-c1613768618f) G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (1909), ch. 2: ‘You can make a story out of a hero among dragons; but not out of a dragon among dragons.’
42 (#ulink_e3d2e3a8-61a5-5129-b3d6-4b548d479d0f) When Charles Ryder is stationed near Brideshead Castle near the end of the war, one of his platoon commanders is named Hooper. The man epitomizes everything Ryder—and Waugh—hate. ‘In the weeks that we were together,’ says Charles in the Prologue to Brideshead Revisited, ‘Hooper became a symbol to me of Young England, so that whenever I read some public utterance proclaiming what Youth demanded in the Future and what the world owed to Youth, I would test these general statements by substituting “Hooper” and seeing if they still seemed as plausible.’
43 (#ulink_e3d2e3a8-61a5-5129-b3d6-4b548d479d0f) Constantin Levin is a character in Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (1873-82).
44 (#ulink_e3d2e3a8-61a5-5129-b3d6-4b548d479d0f) Characters in Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace (1863-9).
45 (#ulink_e3d2e3a8-61a5-5129-b3d6-4b548d479d0f) Archdeacon Grantly is a prominent character in the ‘Barsetshire’ novels of Anthony Trollope.
46 (#ulink_e3d2e3a8-61a5-5129-b3d6-4b548d479d0f) Benjamin Disraeli, Coningsby (1844).
47 (#ulink_a03c0492-d7b3-5438-bc1d-5fd862de1534) Edward Frederic Benson (1871-1914), whose novels include Dodo (1893).
48 (#ulink_867cbe84-3900-5550-b302-17655fae7a04) Railway.
49 (#ulink_867cbe84-3900-5550-b302-17655fae7a04) Lewis was planning to travel the (roughly) twelve miles from Oxford Street, Belfast, to Helen’s Bay, near Crawfordsburn.
50 (#ulink_720a6d9a-2f24-5352-82b7-ace47094a534) Douglas Edison Harding (1909–) was born in Lowestoft, Suffolk, on 12 February 1909 and educated at Lowestoft Grammar School and University College, London. In a letter to Walter Hooper of 11 August 2005, he said: ‘My parents were Exclusive Plymouth Brethren. I apostacised from them at the ripe age of 21. Though I earned my living as an architect, my real job and passion has been the Perennial Philosophy and research into my True Identity, plus sharing my discoveries with as many people as possible worldwide by means of workshops and books.’ Harding is the author of many books, including The Hierarchy of Heaven and Earth: A New Diagram of Man in the Universe (1952), The Little Book of Life and Death (1988), Religions of the World (1966), The Trial of the Man Who Said He Was God (1992), and the best known of all his books, On Having No Head: A Contribution to Zen in the West (1961).
51 (#ulink_437dfc05-ab9c-585b-8fd9-649070328659) Lewis was reading the manuscript of what was published as D. E. Harding, The Hierarchy of Heaven and Earth: A New Diagram of Man in the Universe, with a preface by C. S. Lewis (London: Faber, 1952). Lewis’s preface was reprinted as ‘The Empty Universe’ in Present Concerns, ed. Walter Hooper (London: Fount, 1986) and EC.
52 (#ulink_b3efc175-e9bd-574a-b73c-7edb5c8f2bcf) ibid., ch. 9, ix, pp. 95-6: ‘Only beings who consider the possibility of breaking laws can comply with them. Earth does both. To determine her orbit, the scientist supposes that, disobeying for a while the law of gravity and obeying the law of inertia, she flies off at a tangent; and that then, reversing her disobedience, she falls towards the sun; and he adds that these illegalities are in practice so brief that her ratchet-shaped path is smoothed out into the compromise of a curve, which respects both laws alike. Now I take this mathematics more seriously than the scientist himself; for (a) I link Earth, not merely with the original data and the final result of the calculation, but with the intermediate stages as well, and (b) I say that all three are her function.’
53 (#ulink_9670fdce-dd0a-54a3-ad9c-4100029a238e) ibid., ch. 18, vii, p. 188.
54 (#ulink_569e960c-1d39-57e8-96f0-39958c687312) In Lewis’s interplanetary trilogy, eldila (singular, eldil) are angels who inhabit ‘Deep Heaven’. Their bodies are as swift as light, and hence they are usually invisible to human beings. They are first mentioned in Out of the Silent Planet, ch. 13. See the letter to Mary Willis Shelburne of 4 March 1953.
55 (#ulink_569e960c-1d39-57e8-96f0-39958c687312)Perelandra (London: Bodley Head, 1943; HarperCollins, 2000), ch. 17, p. 223.
56 (#ulink_f0effb69-7742-5e51-8517-903498993105) ‘The “ferly” ‘, wrote Pitter, ‘is a sort of vision in the engraving by Joan Hassall…the figure of the Muse stands with flowers & vine-leaves in her arms, in the calm twilight landscape full of symbols: she points downward to a kind of visionary sphere containing images of violence: it is this that someone thought was like a concrete-mixer’ (Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. lett. c. 220/3, fol. 100).
57 (#ulink_8d476adc-0d15-524d-b74a-73117a7f38f2) Pitter said of this: ‘I had expressed mild pain at the idea of the spectacle-case lurking so long undiscovered in the crease of the armchair. Never cleaned—didn’t know they had to be?!!!’ (MS. Eng. lett. c. 220/3, fol. 100).
58 (#ulink_490667af-ec73-5f2c-9e4c-0bab48561879) Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass (1872), ch. 4, ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter’: ‘“The time has come,” the Walrus said,/”To talk of many things:/Of shoes—and ships—and sealing wax–/Of cabbages—and kings
59 (#ulink_11543542-c205-5171-9389-6c8f5e35c166) Cardinal Schwanda was the Sayers’ cat.
60 (#ulink_b032dbba-6bfc-5248-a0ba-020de4559197) Homer (fl. 8th century BC) is the author of the Greek epics, The Odyssey and The Iliad.
61 (#ulink_3b207ae0-c498-58f5-b001-fffbc70afd34) ‘The same rule applies to things that do not exist and to things that are not apparent.’ This is a standard legal maxim.
