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Magdalen College,
Oxford.
17th December 1952.
Dear Mr. Kilby,
Thank you for your very kind and encouraging letter of the 10th. It would give me pleasure to meet you during your visit to Oxford, and I shall expect to hear from you more definitely when your plans are settled. So far as can be foreseen at the moment, I shall probably be out of Oxford for August and the earlier part of September. With all best wishes.
Yours sincerely,
C. S. Lewis
Joy Gresham had arrived at The Kilns during the second week of December to visit the Lewis brothers. As indicated by Lewis’s letter to his godson, Laurence Harwood, of 19 December, there appears to have been a misunderstanding about the length of her stay.
TO VERA GEBBERT (W): TS
52/103.
Magdalen College,
Oxford.
18th December 1952.
Dear Mrs. Gebbert,
Many thanks for the book which has just arrived, and which judging from a hasty dip, I am going to enjoy. It is kind of you to send it. I hope that by this time your journey across the Atlantic is a fast fading memory, and that it has not given you both a determination never to cross it again. Courage! Next time (I much hope there will be a ‘next time’), try crossing over it rather than on it.
We have an American visitor with us at the moment, who is starting for home on the 3rd. of next month, and is not much cheered by the fact that we are now having a succession of gales. Is’nt it an astonishing thing that whenever one has a guest in the home, the weather turns freakish? And the host always feels that he is somehow to blame for it. We are now getting the weather which normally we never have until after Christmas—ice, snow, bitter wind etc. However, either out of native politeness or because it is true, the lady assures us that the worst English winter weather is not to be compared for general beastliness with that of New York state. What she does criticise is the heating of the English home: not so much of the rooms, but of the passages and so forth.
As your last letter was dated from Alpine Drive, I send this note there; though of course by the time it gets to California, you may be enjoying the society of Andy on his native heath once more. In whichever spot you are, you may congratulate yourselves on having fled homewards when you did. You would like England even less now than when you visited it!
With warmest good wishes to you both from us both for a happy and prosperous New Year,
yours as ever,
C. S. Lewis
TO LAURENCE HARWOOD (BOD):
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Coll. Magd.
Dec 19th 1952
Dear Laurence
Here’s something for usual expenses. I am completely ‘circumvented’ by a guest, asked for one week but staying for three, who talks from morning till night. I hope you’ll all have a nicer Christmas than I. I can’t write (write? I can hardly think or breathe. I can’t believe it’s all real).
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO MRS JOHNSON (W): TS
REF.52/183
Magdalen College,
Oxford.
19th December 1952.
Dear Mrs. Johnson,
Though it is true that I have not a sweet tooth, I must confess that I eat notepaper and envelopes, so your very kind gift may be described as being of that edible variety that is customary at this season of the year. And I am most grateful to you for it: for paper here is of a miserable quality, and it is not always easy to get hold of. (To say nothing of the fact that one so often runs out at some inconvenient moment, and has to sally out to the shops).
Apropos of shops, one could hardly have a worse time to run out of essentials than this; we—like you no doubt—are in the climax of the ‘Christmas rush’, a time which I always regard with horror. I hope I am not a Scrooge, but with every year that passes I find myself more and more in revolt against the commercialized racket of ‘Xmas’. With us, it now begins about the third week in November, and by now, one is urged—with holly leaves—to buy anything from boots to bathing trunks because they are the perfect expression of the Christmas spirit. If I seem a little peevish about the whole spiritual atmosphere, it is perhaps because the material one is so disagreeable; we have been having snow, ice, sleet, hurricanes and all the kind of treats in fact which we do not expect until well on into the new year. A freak season in fact. But I should be chastened by the fact that a visiting American friend tells me that unless we have seen winter in New England, we don’t know what winter is: and that what we are grumbling about is just nice mild seasonable weather. (But this expression of opinion doesn’t make it seem any warmer)!
With many thanks, and all best wishes for a happy Christmas and a prosperous New Year,
yours sincerely,
C. S. Lewis
TO MRS D. JESSUP (W):
Magdalen etc.
Dec. 20th 52
Dear Mrs. Jessup
Yes: you are very blessed: and I take the communication as a high compliment—though there are a good many words I can’t read, for your hand is almost as illegible as mine tho’ a great deal neater!
You won’t expect me to reply at length when I tell you that we have a visitor, that our usual domestic help is ill, and there are mountains of mail. How wretchedly the Christian festival of Christmas has got snowed under by all the fuss and racket of commercialised ‘Xmas’. Blessings to all.
Yours sincerely
C. S. Lewis
TO EDNA GREEN WATSON (BOD): TS
REE52/9
Magdalen College,
Oxford, [p]
22nd December 1952.
Dear Mrs. Watson,
How very kind indeed of you to sweeten my Christmas with the cake, which arrived this morning: externally in good condition, and before the day is out I shall be examining the internal condition of the parcel. It arrives very apropos, as my brother and I are without our housekeeper, who is convalescing after an illness, and in consequence we two batchelors are having to maintain a ‘skeleton service’ out at the house—one which does not provide for such luxuries as cakes, and in which the can opener is very much in evidence!
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This is the season when I envy you, living in what is I am told called ‘The Deep South’; I suppose you are hardly aware that it is winter? Here we are having a most unpleasant freak season—ice, snow, blizzard, all the joys which we don’t generally get until well after Christmas. However, though we have been pitying ourselves an American visitor from New York told me recently that we don’t know what winter is: and that this is mild weather! So whatever else is in short supply on this unhappy planet, at least it is’nt weather.
I returned to work in the autumn from a year’s academic leave: which was not as attractive as it sounds, for it was granted me for the express purpose of finishing a considerable literary task, and my nose was kept pretty close to the grindstone. But my brother and I managed to get the best part of a month’s real holiday in Eire, ‘on the other side of the iron curtain’ as we call it, and came back much the better for it.
It is I’m afraid too late to wish you a happy Christmas but I do send you my very best wishes for a happy and prosperous 1953.
With many thanks,
yours sincerely,
C. S. Lewis
TO WILLIAM L. KINTER(BOD): TS
REF.52/519.
Magdalen College,
Oxford.
23rd December 1952.
Dear Mr. Kinter,
Thanks for your kind card. I am so glad you liked The Dawn Treader. Who am I to say whether Grace works in my own stories? One can only be sure on a much humbler level, that if anything is well done, we must say Non nobís.
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All good wishes.
Yours sincerely,
C. S. Lewis
TO GEORGE SAYER(W):
Coll. Magd.
Dec 23rd 1952
Dear George and Moira
Happy Christmas! I hope what I have to say will not make it happier, though. I’m booked to visit your enchanted house on Jan 1st. But it’s all No Go. We have a visitor (U.S.A.) who will last till then
(#ulink_27892109-366c-5ad3-95f3-918130858466) and beyond her looms a fellowship examination.
The whole Vac. is in fact a shambles. Perpetual conversation is a most exhausting thing. I begin to wonder if I have a vocation for La Trappe. I am sick at these numbers. But I love you both: it is one of my most frequent and tonic activities. Blessings upon you.
Yours
(what is left of) Jack
TO VERA GEBBERT (W): TS 52/103.
Magdalen College,
Oxford.
26th December 1952.
My dear Mrs. Gebbert,
Many thanks. Doubtless a reproduction of a fresco of the early Middle Ages from a Narnian catacomb?
With all blessings to you both for the New Year,
yours sincerely,
C. S. Lewis
TO BONAMY DOBRÉE (W):
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Magdalen College,
Oxford.
Dec. 30/52
No, no. The context and, a literal translation, will put Wanderer 12 in a different light: ‘There is now no one alive to whom I dare clearly declare my mind: I know for a truth that it is an excellent quality in a man that he should firmly bind in what his heart contains—let him think what he pleases.’
(#ulink_755d98c0-05c5-51a0-bb9f-87c94af6de6c)
The poet is not talking about tears at all but about keeping one’s own counsel, holding one’s tongue among strangers. Also I think ‘the high brow’ a mistranslation. Earl means that in prose, but in verse is the heroic word for Man (ANMP).
(#ulink_d198bd6b-ca00-5178-900f-60de7101fbc8) All good wishes.
C.S.L.
