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Oxford
May 21st 1952
Dear Mrs. Pile
What a horrible business! Of course neither I nor anyone who knows you could believe the allegations for a moment. I don’t think I cd. do much good by writing to Ld. Nuffield, though I am prepared to try it if nothing better can be done. Have you tried your M.P. I mean, not about the expenses of the case but about the injustice of being forced to answer questions on oath and then accused of slander for answering them? In the meantime I am writing to a legal friend of my own for advice. I can’t tell you how sorry I am for you in this trouble. I will write again as soon as I have anything to report.
Yours sincerely
C. S. Lewis
TO VERA GEBBERT (W):
Magdalen etc.
May 23rd 1952
Dear Vera Gebbert
Well, well, what next? Very hearty congratulations.
(#ulink_cf7d38a8-3411-5f2d-b657-80b446274b2c) Everything in the photos is lovely except the goggles: and they, I suppose, are a Necessary Evil, like civilisation, government, medicine, education, law, and nearly everything else. You’ll have to watch those very depraved antelopes. If they are already addicted to gum and tobacco, they will soon develop a taste for cocktails. (Our college herd of deer used to be v. fond of bread soaked in port–in the days when wine was cheaper. They don’t get the chance now). I shall think, in all the extenuating circumstances, you might be excused for ‘neglecting your writing’. I don’t know that I’d really like to marry a girl who wrote fiction all the time on the honeymoon. (Of course if 7 did, that wd. be quite different and it wd. be most unreasonable of her to object.)
Nor can I quite believe that an avid expectation of my next book makes a very large part of your present experience. Anyway, it won’t be fulfilled. I’m busy at present finishing the heavy, academic work on 16th. Century literature wh. has occupied me (it has been the top tune—all the other books were only its little twiddly bits) for the last 15 years. When it is actually done I expect my whole moral character will collapse. I shall go up like a balloon that has chucked out the last sandbag.
My brother is away for a few days but wd. certainly join in all my felicitations if he were here. I hope you will both live happily ever afterwards and tell stories to your great-grandchildren, travelling in donkey carriages along the mountain roads with hair as white as the snows. God bless you both.
Yours ever
C. S. Lewis
TO DOM BEDE GRIFFITHS OSB (W):
(#ulink_4858ac86-627a-59c8-bb27-a6890ccde357)
[Magdalen College]
28/5/52
My dear Dom Bede–
It isn’t chiefly men I am kept in touch with by my huge mail: it is women. The female, happy or unhappy, agreeing or disagreeing, is by nature a much more epistolary animal than the male.
Yes, Pascal does directly contradict several passages in Scripture and must be wrong. What I ought to have said was that the Cosmological argument is, for some people at some times, ineffective. It always has been for me. (By the way do read K. Z. Lorenz King Solomons Ring on animal—especially bird—behaviour.
(#ulink_7aff53ce-fa5c-56cd-a7a5-6d8a4a1c3209) There are instincts I had never dreamed of: big with a promise of real morality. The wolf is a v. different creature from what we imagine.)
The stories you tell about two perverts belong to a terribly familiar pattern: the man of good will, saddled with an abnormal desire wh. he never chose, fighting hard and time after time defeated. But I question whether in such a life the successful operation of Grace is so tiny as we think. Is not this continued avoidance either of presumption or despair, this ever renewed struggle, itself a great triumph of Grace? Perhaps more so than (to human eyes) equable virtue of some who are psychologically sound.
I am glad you think J. Austen a sound moralist. I agree. And not platitudinous, but subtle as well as firm.
I’ll write to Skinner. Merlin was excellent. I haven’t written yet because someone has had my copy, till a day or two ago, almost ever since my first reading.
Yours
C. S. Lewis
P. S. Is the Elgin address going to be permanent?
TO SHELDON VANAUKEN (BOD): TS
[June? 1952]
(#ulink_3cc741b6-cad5-503b-b924-42e57c6eef46)
Thank you for a letter which I prize very much. The sonnets, though in a manner which will win few hearers at the moment (drat all fashions) are really very remarkable.
(#ulink_17afc145-f9a5-5fec-8196-7df6b4ee98e6) The test is that I found myself at once forgetting all the personal biographical interest and reading them as poetry.
The image of sand is real imagination. I thought this was the better of the two at first: but now I don’t know. The second quatrain of The Gap is tip-top argument—and then the ground sinking behind.
(#ulink_5d9905a3-9aa5-5c62-8d2f-4f508293c056) Excellent.
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO KATHARINE FARRER(BOD):
(#ulink_33506d4e-6d07-5a0e-b996-bc6c1c83b80c)
As from Magdalen
June 10th 1952
Dear Mrs. Farrer–
I brought home both The Missing Link
(#ulink_4e9b7413-726c-5320-b3cd-f8f091bff89b) and Merlin
(#ulink_81956d90-ddb3-53bf-b90a-f709ed8ee119) yesterday evening, intending to regale myself on light fiction for a bit before tackling poetry. But—well, you foresee what I am leading up to with elephantine delicacy. It happens, however, to be true. I never reached Merlin and sat up later than I intended to finish the M.L.
I thought it very well constructed, and it thoroughly excited me. That, of course, is not of much value because I’m such an inexperienced reader of Whodunnits. But there were a great many sources of pleasure besides the mystery. You do the atmosphere of the Wychwood country and of Liverpool docks (both of which I know) very well—though, by the way, on p. 141 ‘the familiar devil of the stairs’ completely defeated me. Is the text corrupt?
(#ulink_23e5aa37-f18d-54d1-a3b8-2bd21181f132) The description of Syd on pp. 24-25 is an excellent bit of writing. The Spanish captain is good. And, of course, there’s wit everywhere, and often with weight of thought behind the sting–‘Notice how he uses down (p. 50), and the bit about families ><
(#ulink_324d03a3-26a1-580b-b4fa-551af60d13c1) family allowances and houses >< housing bit on p. 127. Richard’s (delightfully preluded) remarks at the bottom of p. 104 and the top of 105 needed making. (Mrs. Luke, by the way, convinces me completely).
About your dialogue I’m not so happy. Mrs. Harman talks well. But if I were a spiteful reviewer I’d say that the advice ‘Don’t talk like a C.W. character’
(#ulink_dadd8042-c578-57ac-929f-3d1d059a261f) ought to have been given to Richard (and obeyed!) earlier. Not that C.W. isn’t a v. great man but one must not imitate the droop of Alexander’s shoulders. Richard is talking like a C.W. character at his worst on the top of p. 85. He (Richard, not C.W.) would have better manners than to quote poetry to Plummer who wd. certainly think he was being somehow made a fool of and be hurt.
I think dialogue is frightfully tricky: partly because it is so hard to stop writing it (characters will talk: at least so I find) and partly because so much that wd. be alright in real conversation looks different when it gets into print. Andrew’s clipped G’s for instance. It’s a v. small thing in real life: but ‘in” in print usually suggests huntin at once and all the odious literature written by people who admire those who say huntin and the yet more odious literature by those who dislike them. I dare say we’d be wise to re-read all our dialogue as it might be read by a dull, or vulgar, or hostile reader. And of course it’s the light dialogue (banter between lovers, small talk at a party) that is dangerous. But I don’t know what right I have to talk like this, especially without being asked!
It was a good idea to make the Links so silly that their trouble never really affects us. (Oh—by the way–does any ship carry her own gangways and pull them on board when she casts off? In my experience they always belong to the harbour and are pulled onto the quay.) Indeed you have done the Links so well that one wonders if it is a happy ending or whether the baby wouldn’t have had a better time being brought up by Pyng Pong ♀.
Anyway, I thoroughly enjoyed the book ‘yet had I rather if I were to choose Thy service in some graver subject use’
(#ulink_d0cad7c5-3139-56db-8d44-923668892421)–I’d like to see your remarkable powers of rendering atmosphere and swift action given their head in a good whacking heroical romance. But no doubt, in the present state of the publishing market, it wd. be crazy to advise you to do so.
Yours sincerely
C. S. Lewis
P.S. I’ve an uneasy feeling this is the sort of letter Dr. Field might have written—wh. raises another really dreadful idea.
TO MARG-RIETTE MONTGOMERY (W):
(#ulink_de97741d-2792-5466-9936-d13f474dbb91)
Magdalen College,
Oxford.
June 10th 1952
Dear Miss Montgomery,
(1.) My relations to Anthroposophy
(#ulink_b56cbd94-c5c0-5f72-85ce-afb072ef2e55) were these. When I was a student, all my friends and I were ordinary modern Atheists. Then two of my friends got caught up by Steiner.
(#ulink_5882499f-17db-574d-a427-9c048bf3ee84) I loathed this and it led to frightful arguments for several years. During these arguments I heard nothing that would convert me to Anthroposophy: but the negative side of Steiner, his case against the common modern pseudo-scientific attitude, proved to be unanswerable. That is, I didn’t think what he affirmed was true, but I did think all his denials were right.
His shattering of the ordinary attitude left the way open for Christianity, so far as I was concerned. Since then I have always had a kindly feeling towards his system: and certainly the effect of it upon some anthroposophists I know appears to have been good. There is, however, an element of polytheism in it which I utterly reject. Steinerism is a species of Paganism (using that word in its proper sense, to mean the ancient pre-Christian religions). That is why it is (a.) Incompatible with Christianity: but (b.) Far nearer to Christianity than the ordinary modern materialism. For the Pagans knew more than the modern Ph.D’s. The right thing to say to your Ph.D. friends is ‘Yes. Steiner is nonsense: but nothing like such nonsense as the things you believe.’ There is more truth in his nonsense than in their sense. We are free to take out of Anthroposophy anything that suits us, provided it does not contradict the Nicene Creed.
(2.) Oh, I just ‘made up’ all those things in That Hideous Strength: i.e. I took existing evil tendencies and ‘produced’ them (in the geometrical sense–‘Produce the line AB to the point X’) to show how dreadful they might become if we didn’t take care. And you, apparently, have been living in a world where they had already in real life got a good deal nearer to my point X than I knew. Well, that is the trouble about satirising the modern world. What you put into your story as fantastically horrid possibilities becomes fact before your story is printed. The reality outstrips the satire!
With all good wishes. You can trust Steiner about fertilisers but not about the nature of Jesus Christ. (I think his architecture horrid, but that’s a matter of taste)
Yours very sincerely
C. S. Lewis
TO MARY VAN DEUSEN (W):
Magdalen College,
Oxford.
10/6/52
Dear Mrs. Van Deusen
The new photos raise extreme Sehnsucht:
(#ulink_6e6b1adf-601d-53a3-a4cf-9c2d3ce47607) each a landscape as fulfils my dreams. That is the America I wd. like to see, not the great cities, which, except superficially, are really much the same all over the earth.
I think psychiatry is like surgery: i.e. the thing is in itself essentially an infliction of wounds but may, in good hands, be necessary to avoid some greater evil. But it is more tricky than surgery because the personal philosophy & character of the operator come more into play. In setting a broken ankle all surgeons wd. agree as to the proper position to wh. the bones shd. be restored, because anatomy is an exact science. But all psychiatrists are not agreed as to the proper shape of the soul: where their ideas of that proper shape are based on a heathen or materialistic philosophy, they may be aiming at a shape we shd. strongly disapprove. One wants a Christian psychiatrist. There are a few of these, but nothing like enough.
If I can successfully say to Genia what you have often said in vain, that is not because of any quality in me but depends on a general (and at first sight cruel) law: we can all ‘take’ from a stranger what we can’t ‘take’ from our own parents. I listen with profit to elderly friends saying the very same things which I neglected or even resented when my father said them. Nay more: I can obey advice from others wh. I have often given myself in vain. I suppose this is one aspect of the vicariousness of the universe: Charles Williams’s view that every one can help to paddle every one else’s canoe better than his own. We must bear one another’s burdens because that is the only way the burdens can get borne: and ‘He saved others, himself He cannot save’
(#ulink_6250f3af-1d31-5837-8920-c66c457cba55) is a fundamental law.
(#ulink_6f3958a2-3c88-5001-9c4b-a84f328d1156)
Yes: ‘things’ continue almost alarmingly ‘better’ with me. God bless you all
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO WILLIAM BORST (P):
(#ulink_87d7cc89-acd5-5f46-8167-aa76f60042c0)
Magdalen College,
Oxford.
June 11th 1952
Dear Mr. Borst–
It takes so long to get anything typed now-a-days that I thought you wd. prefer the lesser nuisance of reading the specimen (asked for in your letter of June 4th) in my own hand. I think it raises all the problems wh. are likely to occur in Spenser–who will not need such heavy glossing as Shakespeare. The only one I was doubtful about was remembrance = memento in line ll.
(#ulink_0ea7774e-821f-51cb-afdd-d9b1e472ce5b) Wd. they need that explained? (We don’t want to spoon-feed them more than is necessary.)
I am terrified by all the instructions about typing and doubt if I can master them. (You showed great discretion in not producing them at an earlier stage, as I shd. certainly not have touched the job had I known it involved all that!). I suppose # means ‘one-space’ and is not a challenge to a game of noughts and crosses. And what is meant by the typist ‘using’ the double right hand margin? In the specimen given she does precisely not use it but types straight on across it to the ultimate right hand margin. Do you mean ‘Let her draw a vertical line 8 spaces to the left of her actual right hand margin and then ignore this line in typing?’ As you begin to see, I have picked up none of the technique of a professional author. Sorry.
Yours sincerely
C. S. Lewis
P.S. You might let me have the specimen back.
TO HSIN’CHANG CHANG (BOD):
