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For some time now a woman calling herself ‘Mrs C. S. Lewis’ had been living on her ‘husband’s’ credit at the Courtstairs Hotel, Thanet, Kent. The lady had a history of living cheaply by pretending to be married to some well-known person who would soon be joining her. In this instance she told the owners of Courtstairs Hotel, Alan and Nell Berners-Price, that Lewis would soon be arriving and would pay the bill. However, by April 1952 she had been living at Court Stairs for over a year, and Mrs Berners-Price went up to Oxford to confront Lewis with a mass of unpaid bills.
On being admitted to Lewis’s rooms in Magdalen College, Mrs Berners-Price said, ‘I’ve come to ask about your wife.’ ‘But I’m not married,’ replied Lewis. Mrs Berners-Price was as surprised by this as Lewis was on learning he had a ‘wife’. Following the advice of his solicitor, Owen Barfield, Lewis took out an injunction of jactitation of marriage against the woman.
The woman, Mrs Nella Victoria Hooker, had been in jail a number of times for similar offences. She was arrested in April and her trial set for 8 May in the court at Canterbury. While in jail she wrote letters to Lewis, as he mentions in the letter to Christian Hardie below.
TO CHRISTIAN HARDIE (P):
Palm Sunday [6 April] 1952
Dear Christian
I romped through The Power and the Glory.
(#ulink_f44c0c9b-4306-5991-a74f-4ad4680a2623) Its theme makes it suitable enough as a preface to Holy Week but if you intended it as a penance you have bowled a wide. It is a most moving and (in its proper mode) enjoyable book.
As far as I am concerned there is no common measure between it and Waugh.
(#ulink_2f86219a-a15e-5fa5-b4e5-8f47d6d78640) In Waugh’s book the supposedly good end of the old rake had simply to be taken on trust: but one lives through the whole experience of Greene’s hunted priest, filled from the first with interest, soon with compassion, and finally with love. Also Greene seems to know things. All that about the ‘pious woman’ in the cell (few laymen perhaps get letters from her so often as I) is excellent: also the bit about forgiveness of sins being easier to believe than forgiveness of the ‘habit of piety’. Greene loves and understands his most repulsive characters–the lieutenant and the half-caste—better than Waugh does his favourites.
I think he has a fault. The central tragic theme is not made more effective by filling up all the chinks with other, irrelevant, miseries, like those of the Fellows family. The great tragic artists didn’t do that. Macbeth
(#ulink_722d6556-183a-582d-9a7d-2a5eee3d6454) wd. not have been improved by making the drunken porter get cancer: nor the Iliad by making the domestic life of Hector and Andromache squalid and miserable. That is the modern nimiety. But it is a very good book all the same.
Thanks very much for the loan of it. (It wd. be unkind to discuss my views on tragedy with Colin just at present. He seems to be a little tired of that subject). A happy Easter to you both.
Yours
Jack
TO DON GIOVANNI CALABRIA (V):
[Magdalen College,
Oxford.]
April 14th 1952
Pater dilectissime
Multum eras et es in orationibus meis et grato animo litteras tuas accepi. Et ora tu pro me, nunc praesertim, dum me admodum orphanum esse sentio quia grandaevus meus confessor et carissimus pater in Christo nuper mortem obiit. Dum ad altare celebraret, subito, post acerrimum sed (Deo gratias) brevissimum dolorem, expiravit, et novissima verba erant venio, Domine Jesu. Vir erat maturâ spirituali sapientiâ sed ingenuitate et innocentiâ fere puerili–buono fanciullo, ut ita dicam.
Potesne, mi pater, quaestionem resolvere? Quis sanctorum scriptorum scripsit ‘Amor est ignis jugiter ardens’? Credidi haec verba esse in libro De Imitatione Christi sed non possum ibi invenire.
‘Ut omnes unum sint’ est petitio numquam in meis precibus praetermissa. Dum optabilis unitas doctrinae et ordinis abest, eo acrius conemur caritatis unionem tenere: quod, eheu, et vestri in Hispania et nostri in Hibernia Septentrionali non faciunt. Vale, mi pater,
C. S. Lewis
*
[Magdalen College,
Oxford.]
April 14th 1952
Dearest Father,
You were and are much in my prayers and thank you for your letters. And do you pray for me, especially at present when I feel very much an orphan because my aged confessor and most loving father in Christ has just died. While he was celebrating at the altar, suddenly, after a most sharp but (thanks be to God) very brief attack of pain, he expired; and his last words were, ‘I come, Lord Jesus.’ He was a man of ripe spiritual wisdom—noble minded but of an almost childlike simplicity and innocence: ‘buono fandullo’ if I may put it so.
(#ulink_d0405b3c-bc4e-57ec-a074-3a23acef52ba)
Can you, my Father, resolve a question? Which of the holy writers wrote ‘Amor est ignis jugiter ardens’? I thought these words were in The Imitation of Christ but I cannot find them there.
(#ulink_c45e67df-8cca-5649-9e00-be0634f4f71e)
‘That they all may be one’
(#ulink_5d3f677a-e6ae-5fa9-90f1-40cd1583d3b1) is a petition which in my prayers I never omit. While the wished-for unity of doctrine and order is missing, all the more eagerly let us try to keep the bond of charity: which, alas, your people in Spain and ours in Northern Ireland do not.
Farewell, my Father.
C. S. Lewis
TO RUTH PITTER(BOD):
Magdalen College,
Oxford.
April 16th 1952
Dear Miss Pitter
It always seems a bit of cheek to send anyone (especially the likes of you) a ticket for one’s lecture, unless one could do it in the Chinese style ‘In the inconceivably unlikely event of honourable poetess wishing to attend this person’s illiterate and erroneous lecture…’
(#ulink_205c2b35-74cf-577f-ac40-4dbc764b9276) Oh dear, to think of that immemorial urbanity, that remote, fantastic world being in the hands of the Bolshevists!
Hero & Leander
(#ulink_3d888ec6-67f3-50b1-943e-d32a78f5df50) has no Original in the strict sense. The Greek poem on the subject is late, rather charmingly precious, and was falsely attributed to the primeval and mythical Musaeus: the real author is unknown—some Alexandrian, I think. But neither the Marlovian nor the Chapmanic part is anything like a translation—not so close to pseudo-Musaeus as Tennyson is to Malory.
Have you read Andrew Young’s Into Hades,
(#ulink_8a0ba0a7-a488-532c-bd61-358df1f0fd68) and what do you think of it. I found the content absorbing and the images like all his, simply enchanting (There’s a bit about reflected water-drops from a raised oar rushing up to meet the real water drops—lovely!) but my ear was a bit unsatisfied. I believe ‘Blank Verse’, unrhymed five footers, is not a metre to be written loosely. I think the unrhymed Alexandrine, written without a break at the 6th syllable wd. be far better: e.g.
I know far less of spiders than that poetessWho (like the lady in Comus in the perilous wood)Can study nature’s infamies with secure heart…
The third line is here the best: one wants plenty of trisyllables to leap across the threatened medial pause. Try a few. Commending me to you in the lowliest wise that I can or may.
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO EDWARD A. ALLEN (W): TS
REF.52/28.
Magdalen College,
Oxford.
19th April 1952.
My dear Allen,
I got back today from a delightful three days break in the country, just a little dissatisfied to be at my desk again, and therefore just in the mood for the welcome fillip which your admirable parcel administered. You must by this time be as tired of hearing C.S.L. on the English food situation as I am tired of enduring it: so I will say no more than that all these good things will be a wonderful help at the house, and thank you once again for your kindness.
I have been stopping with an ex-pupil, now a master at my old school, Malvern:
(#ulink_d41f044a-95ed-5edb-bf14-249d4cc57fcd) a pleasant little town, about sixty miles from here, lying under the foot of a four miles range of hills, two thousand feet high, in the Severn valley. Of course this is nothing much in the way of height, but they rise so abruptly from the level that one gets the effect of miniature mountains; and there is splendid air and exercise to be had in tramping them. To add to the joy, our curious climate has suddenly decided to give us an advance instalment of summer—at least one hopes it is only an instalment and not the summer. It was 75 degrees yesterday, and as hot today; all the women in summer frocks and so forth. Malvern town is a perfect and melancholy example of the change which has come over this country since my schooldays; then, it was a town of large ugly, comfortable Victorian houses, designed to be run by four or five servants apiece. The same houses are still there, but at least seven out of every ten are now either schools, offices, or boarding houses.
I occasionally glance at the news of your Presidential elections with that respectful bewilderment with which one regards another nation’s domestic affairs. To us, the question naturally presents itself from the viewpoint of which candidate will be most sympathetic to our troubles. Most people here seem to hope for Eisenhower, and are most afraid of Taft: who, rightly or wrongly, seems to have the reputation of being the old style Isolationist.
(#ulink_cee52e23-4816-5955-9d8d-a329002b9eca) It is being said that if he is returned, his foreign policy will be that America should be defended in America, and not in Europe. But I suspect that this must be a crude exaggeration.
I hope Mrs. Allen keeps well: please remember me very kindly to her. Do you both propose to go to the seaside this year? If all goes well, I shall be in Eire for a fortnight in August, with daily bathing: not the best sort of bathing, but a sight better than none at all. For, being on a bay, there are practically no waves; and where the sea is perpetually calm, I would just as soon, indeed sooner, bathe in a river.
With all best wishes and many thanks to you both, from us both,
yours sincerely,
C. S. Lewis
TO DELMAR BANNER (W):
(#ulink_70b98f35-0980-58fa-acb6-189b9e0899d1) TS
REF.52/196
Magdalen College,
Oxford.
29th April 1952.
My dear Banner,
Thanks for yours of yesterday. But in the words of the immortal Jeeves to Bertie Wooster, ‘I fear, Sir, I am unable to recede from my position.’
(#ulink_093bb128-3c4c-5f77-89f2-c9edbcdbae06)
Yes indeed, I hope to visit your country before I die;
(#ulink_75643721-e9f6-5090-a8c0-983b4ad4a759) but I have many calls upon my time, and my own Ireland generally lures me to it when I can take a holiday.
Yours
C. S. Lewis
The knowledge that I could (liceret mihi)
(#ulink_9bde71a5-906f-5220-9040-abd6813ac5a9) advise is no use because I know I couldn’t (non possem).
(#ulink_4ca8c635-9f94-5928-bfff-8f6b9d1e0f7a)
With the growing fame of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Lewis was invited to address the Library Association during their Bournemouth conference, held between 29 April and 2 May. On 29 April he read a paper entitled ‘On Three Ways of Writing for Children’.
(#ulink_60a0c24b-31fb-5e5a-ac55-71f7fc273d44)
TO ROGER IANCELYN GREEN (BOD):
Magdalen College
Oxford
May 1/52
I think the Bournemouth Lecture was a success. One librarian said I had almost converted him to fairy-tales, he having hitherto taken the ‘real life’ stuff for granted.
Two librariennes said The Luck of the Lynns was in much demand and one praised The Wonderful Stranger.
(#ulink_4dfe226d-3b58-57e2-a412-1cd39ae929c1) I added that some of your unpublished & more ‘faerian’ books were even better. You were spoken of with much respect.
J.
TO MARY VAN DEUSEN (W):
Magdalen College,
Oxford
May 5th 1952
Dear Mrs. Van Deusen
Thank you for your cheery letter and the delightful enclosures. I’ve seldom seen better photos of children. And the landscape lures one into it. I long to be tramping over those wooded—or, what is better, half wooded hills. I’m as sensitive as a German to the spell of das Feme
(#ulink_2a215370-25e2-505c-bc0d-fd4fd2d996c2) and all that.
