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24/2/52
Dear Hilton-Young–
I think I muffled the point I was trying to make yesterday about the significance-unknown-to-the-artist in a work of art. I certainly didn’t intend to treat ‘Either Inspiration or the Unconscious’ as an exhaustive alternative for its source.
It’s more like this. Every fiction, realistic or fantastic, uses forms taken from the real world: a woman, a ship, a gun, a horse etc. Now the total significance of these in the real world (call it T) is known to nobody. And the fraction of it known to each is slightly (or, it may be) widely different. The fraction in the artist’s mind (both conscious and unconscious) is T/A: in the reader’s T/R. An extreme case of difference wd. be, say, if a child who didn’t yet know the facts of generation put a marriage into a story. His ignorance might make that bit of his story simply comic & absurd to the adult reader: but it might also make that bit to the adult reader far more significant than the child had ever intended it to be.
Now I hope no individual reader of my work is to me as adult to child. But the aggregate experiences of my readers, contributing to each from T/Rl + T/R2 etc, presumably are. At any rate a classic, wh. has been read by great minds for 1000 years, and discussed, will have all its forms interpreted by a composite mind, which ought to see in them more than the artist intended. This is not a complete substitution of a new work for his original one, for it is his particular grouping of forms which evoke the whole response. (As if successive generations learned better and better dances to one original tune: a certain formal element in it remaining constant but being more richly & subtly filled).
All this is only an elaboration of the old maxim that what you get out of work depends on what you bring to it. Humanity as a whole brings to the Aeneid more than Virgil could: therefore it must get more out. After all, you as an Atheist have to believe that in admiring natural beauty we are getting out of it what no-one put in: why shd. we not equally get out of verbal compositions what the composer didn’t put in?
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO WAYLAND HILTON YOUNG (P): PC
Magdalen College
Oxford
27/2/52
Yes. T/Rn is only an aggregate unless either (A.) [?]
(#ulink_fe9e0e09-e291-55ff-ab40-a185516f7093) are real, as Plato & Hegel, in a different way, thought or (B.) Each educated T/R is, through tradition & critical discussion modified by the other T/Rs. Now I think A is probably and B is certainly true. Thanks for kind offer of hospitality: I’ll try to make it one of these days.
C.S.L.
TO GENIA GOELZ (Z/P):
Magdalen College,
Oxford.
29 Feb 1952
Dear Mrs. Goelz (or may I, being old, and bold, and avuncular, say dear Genia?
I learn from Mrs. Van Deusen that you are ‘taking the plunge’.
(#ulink_30ded821-6a5a-59eb-8830-eabbd4c44cc2) As you have been now for so long in my prayers, I hope it will not seem intrusive to send my congratulations. Or I might say condolences and congratulations. For whatever people who have never undergone an adult conversion may say, it is a process not without its distresses. Indeed, they are the very sign that it is a true initiation. Like learning to swim or to skate, or getting married, or taking up a profession. There are cold shudderings about all these processes. When one finds oneself learning to fly without trouble one soon discovers (usually. There are blessed exceptions where we are allowed to take a real step without that difficulty), by waking up, that it was only a dream.
All blessings and good wishes.
Yours sincerely
C. S. Lewis
TO MARY VAN DEUSEN (W):
Magdalen College,
Oxford.
29/2/52
Dear Mrs. Van Deusen
How odd and delightful that you should meet James! Give him my kind regards.
He has perhaps not given you quite the right idea about our ‘Long Vacation’.
(#ulink_3eb6909b-8d30-5c6a-99b5-2a76264df173) It is precisely that part of the year on which both dons and serious students rely for their real work: the term for lectures & discussion, the Vacations, and especially the ‘Long’ for steady reading. I think your universities suffer from not having it. Mine, this year, will be v. busy indeed, and no question of holidays to America.
But don’t think I am the less touched or grateful for your most kind offer of hospitality. I am speaking of the ‘Long’ as it has now come to be: of course originally this prolonged summer gap in all our English institutions–Parliament, Law courts, etc—dates, no doubt, from the days when we were an agricultural community and no one cd., at that time of the year, be spared from the land.
I have written to Genia. Your news is v. good. In a way it is [a] good sign, isn’t it?, that the Rector shd. not be a person she particularly likes. I will indeed continue my prayers for her. With love to all.
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO HELEN D. CALKINS (W):
(#ulink_c44804a3-04b2-5849-8c7a-fbc6c5fee753) TS
REE 52/123.
Magdalen College,
Oxford.
1st March 1952.
Dear Mrs. Calkins,
I will read it with pleasure,
(#ulink_fd7f0d17-2ba2-5d79-aaf2-8f63af04ac4c) but I must’nt write a foreword. I have done far too many of them. It begins to make both the authors and me ridiculous, and also I run dry. I wish the book all success.
Yours sincerely,
C. S. Lewis
TO THE ROYAL LITERARY FUND (BOD):
Magdalen College,
Oxford
7/3/52
Sir
I write in support of an application which, I understand, my very deeply respected friend Mr. J. A. Chapman
(#ulink_59c22521-f575-5c43-b683-3922e3b72b88) is making to your Committee. Mr. Chapman has in his old age a serious devotion both to his art and to humanity which we usually meet only in the young; if he has spent on the publication of his poem
(#ulink_f339e16f-efec-54ad-b1c7-8f453809e39c) a sum very serious to him, though not large, I trust, by the standards of the R.L.E, I am sure he has been moved to do so not by an author’s vanity but by a sense of his mission. A grant to him would be a proper recognition of a long and arduous life devoted to letters and learning in a spirit of self-dedication.
I am, Sir,
Yours faithfully
C. S. Lewis
TO ARTHUR G REEVE S (W):
Magdalen College,
Oxford.
8/3/52
My dear Arthur
I hope to arrive at Crawfordsburn with W.
(#ulink_9e8157c4-9d06-5378-be3f-c045aa044bc6) on Aug. Wed. 20th. He will leave on Aug. Sat. 23rd. If agreeable I wd. like to stay on at the Hotel
(#ulink_c9e8c120-c537-52dd-8fb1-1207098b83b3) for a fortnight of your society, i.e. sail again on Mon. Sept 8th. Will that suit you? I can’t manage the Easter as well.
In the Last Chronide
(#ulink_344048bb-6bdf-527a-b0e1-18864cbaf84e) I think all the London parts (the ‘Bayswater Romance’) a bore and now always skip them. But I think the Crawley parts splendid.
I am wondering how your date with Tchainie went? Give her my love. Blessings.
Yours
Jack
TO SHELDON VANAUKEN (BOD): PC
Magdalen College
Oxford
15/3/52
Excellent. I’ll be (D.V.) in the Eastgate about 12 noon on Sat. March 22 d.
C.S.L.
TO GENIA GOELZ (L/P):
Magdalen College,
Oxford.
18 March 1952
Dear Genia
Don’t bother at all about that question of a person being ‘made a Christian’ by baptism. It is only the usual trouble about words being used in more than one sense. Thus we might say a man ‘became a soldier’ the moment that he joined the army. But his instructors might say six months later ‘I think we have made a soldier of him’. Both usages are quite definable, only one wants to know which is being used in a given sentence. The Bible itself gives us one short prayer which is suitable for all who are struggling with the beliefs and doctrines. It is: ‘Lord I believe, help Thou my unbelief.’
(#ulink_fe88baaf-2faf-5339-b34f-599e6b00f304) Would something of this sort be any good?: Almighty God, who art the father of lights and who hast promised by thy dear Son that all who do thy will shall know thy doctrine:
(#ulink_23d00767-4dab-5d25-b7f7-57acddd44a2f) give me grace so to live that by daily obedience I daily increase in faith and in the understanding of thy Holy Word, through lesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO VERA MATHEWS (W):
Magdalen etc.
22/3/52
Dear Miss Mathews
I was glad to get your letter. I seem to be as ignorant of America as you are of India. I had no idea your parsons preached Hell-fire: indeed I thought the ordinary presentation of Christianity with you was quite as milk-and-watery as with us, if not more so. We could do with a bit more Hell fire over here.
Clearly I misunderstood Cobham. I hadn’t thought of a wholly unregenerate man being levitated simply by someone else’s sanctity—tho’ of course we all hope this will happen to ourselves. Thanks for a picture of two charming creatures. I am glad to have one of them among my correspondents and wish Andy would write too: but I suppose that’s not much in his line. They sound as if they were animals with a sense of humour. Shall we see some more literary works by you? I hope you’ll go on. With very good wishes from us both.
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO ROGER LANCELYN GREEN (BOD):
Magdalen College
Oxford
24/3/52
