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TO EDWARD A. ALLEN (W): TS
REF.53/53.
Magdalen College,
Oxford.
7th February 1953.
My dear Edward,
Many thanks for your letter of the 2nd. Your point about the internal combustion engine and the lady-bird is both true and interesting. Yes, ‘gentleman’ is a word which has ceased to have any particular meaning; with us it now means ‘male’ and lady ‘female’.
(#ulink_fbdb81ec-946c-5aec-988d-7c8bb192f7f1) There are of course many more, e.g. any boat in which it is possible to spend the night, and which is privately owned is ‘luxury-yacht’, every cinema is ‘Super-cinema’ and so on. Please give our belated congratulations to your mother on her birthday, with our wishes for many more happy ones.
This is indeed good of you about the tea and sugar, and I think you have just about hit the right proportions; the business of payment on delivery is rather erratic, sometimes one is charged, sometimes not. But I’ll let you know what happens.
Please excuse such a short and scrappy note, but I am snowed under with a vast stack of examination papers for correction.
All the best.
Yours,
C. S. Lewis
TO RHONA BODLE (BOD):
(#ulink_4ade5411-abab-5045-ab39-b9300cbdf030)
Magdalen College,
Oxford.
Feb 9th 1953
Dear Miss Bodle
Thanks for your interesting letter of Feb 1st wh. arrived today. It is difficult to one, who, like me, has no experience, to give an opinion of these problems, which, I see, are v. intricate. The story about the girl who had reached the age of 16 under Christian teachers without hearing of the Incarnation is an eye-opener. For ordinary children (I don’t know about the Deaf) I don’t see any advantage in presenting the Gospels without some doctrinal comment. After all, they weren’t written for people who did not know the doctrine, but for converts, already instructed, who now wanted to know a bit more about the life and sayings of the Master. No ancient sacred books were intended to be read without a teacher: hence the Ethiopian eunuch in the Acts says to St. Philip ‘How can I understand unless someone tells me?’
(#ulink_de91d222-e2ff-5f60-9e37-376c75ba653b)
Could the bit–and I think there must be something-about people I don’t like come in as a comment on the Forgive clause in the Lord’s Prayer?
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It is freezing hard here and one takes ones life in one’s hand every time one walks.
What an excellent work you are doing! All blessings.
Yours sincerely
C. S. Lewis
TO ARTHUR C. CLARKE (BOD):
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Magdalen College
Oxford
Feb. 14th [?] 1953
Dear Mr. Clarke
I hope I shd. not be deterred by the danger!
(#ulink_90102421-854c-50e5-b415-5d1d3b33f137) The fatal objection is that I should be covering ground I have already covered in print and on which I have nothing to add. I know that is how many lectures are made, but I never do it. I might at a pinch show great fortitude about the boredom of the audience, but then there’s my own. But thank your society very much for the invitation and convey my good wishes to them as regards everything but interplanetary travel.
Yours very sincerely
C. S. Lewis
Probably the whole thing is only a plan for kidnapping me and marooning me on an asteroid! I know the sort of thing.
TO ROBIN OAKLEY-HILL (M):
(#ulink_a154489c-d46b-531e-961c-32dbe1a7b4d6)
Magdalen College
Oxford
Feb 16th 1953
Dear Oakley-Hill
It came over me like a thunderclap about 30 seconds after I had left you in the Lodge this afternoon that I must seem to you to have committed, in one very short conversation, all the most unprovoked and indeed inexplicable kinds of rudeness there are.
(#ulink_447996c7-901d-563d-9320-5fabdc3a0062) I implore you to try to understand–and believe–how it came about with no such intention.
The starting point was the fact that I have never noticed the slightest inequality in your gait. Seeing it for the first time when I was waiting behind you to cross the street I therefore immediately assumed some temporary mishap to be the cause: no alternative explanation entered my head. My evil genius then led me to ask you about it-largely because two people who see each other once a week can’t very well meet on an ‘island’ and say just nothing. After your answer I ought of course to have apologised and dropped the subject at once: but by that time I had completely lost my head.
You are not the first to suffer this kind of thing from me: I am subject to a kind of black-out in conversation which every now and then leads me to ask and say the utterly wrong thing–the Brobdingnagianly tactless thing.
(#ulink_d40dc049-811a-5cc6-bfea-7cbce41ef8db) I have (quite against my will) made many enemies this way. I hope very much you will not become one of them: give me a fool’s pardon.
If I raised a subject which may be painful to you, I am now punished by having to deal with one that is equally painful for me. It is an old sore: it began in my almost nursery days: and if we could find a suitable magician I think I’d gladly swop my Tendency to the Faux Pas for your leg. Please accept my sincere, and greatly embarrassed, apology.
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO EDWARD A. ALLEN (W):
REF.53/53.
Magdalen College,
Oxford.
21st February 1953.
My dear Ed,
Just a note whilst overwhelmed with one thing and another, to let you know that nineteen pounds twelve ounces of comfort, posted on the 20th of January, arrived in the usual excellent condition this morning. And very many thanks indeed for it. Much needed, though I really do begin to believe that this government intends to deal with the question seriously; tea is now ‘off the ration’, so are sweets, and they’re beginning to put pork in the sausages. This I should think will probably turn the younger generation into lifelong dispeptics, for it has grown up to think of a sausage as an ounce of soya bean flour fried in a skin! But anyway, we have got rid of the suspicion of rationing for rationing’s sake which one felt under the late administration, whose slogan was supposed to be ‘jobs for the boys’.
I am somehow or other in the middle of a very heavy term–examining, seeing a big book through the press and other odd jobs, besides of course the regular grind. But I hope to get away for a day or two over Easter, which will freshen me up until the summer vacation looms up on the horizon.
I’m sorry to cut you so short, but ‘it’s one of those mornings’ as we say. Do you know the expression? It means that everything that can go wrong has gone wrong, and I’m in need of two brains and four hands, to say nothing of a day of forty eight hours.
With all best wishes to you both,
Yours,
Jack Lewis
TO CHAD WALSH (W): TS
REF.73/53.
Magdalen College,
Oxford.
21st February 1953.
Dear Chad,
It’s disappointing to hear that your English visit is postponed, but nice to hear from you at all: and thrilling to find that you also are doing a (odious word) ‘juvenile’.
(#ulink_16256755-0267-5abd-a7b6-a95e3f58e60b) I’m an examiner for three years now, so I certainly shan’t be able to embark on any American lectures: exciting and attractive tho’ the idea may be.
The book on Prayer comes on very slowly. The simplest questions about it seem to be the ones no one has ever dealt with.
Sorry I cut you so short: infinite other letters to answer, if possible, before my first pupil comes.
My brother joins me in cordial greetings.
Yours,
lack Lewis
TO MARY VAN DEUSEN (W):
Magdalen College,
Oxford.
Feb 21st 1953
Dear Mrs. Van Deusen
No, I don’t think the motives you describe are too emotional: I think they are good ones. Obviously, where one is ‘more sure that God wants one to be’ is the place one must go: and even if the surety shd. in fact be mistaken I expect we may rely on God to bring it about that good will come of it. I presume, anyway, that you have to take no irrevocable vows! It looks to me as if you should go on and enter.
(#ulink_ea7596ae-92d7-5a97-85c6-783ce6d78424) I hope it will be a great blessing to you.
I traced in Genia’s letter a growing concern for you, and was v. pleased. She is obviously fighting against the temptation to self-centredness wh. comes with ill health. It is all most cheering.
Your question about Communists-in-government really raises the whole problem of Democracy. If one accepts the basic principle of Govt. by majorities, how can one consistently try to suppress those problems of public propaganda and getting-into-govt, by which majorities are formed. If the Communists in this country can persuade the majority to sell in to Russia, or even to set up devil-worship and human sacrifice, what is the democratic reply? When we said ‘Govt. by the people’ did we only mean ‘as long as we don’t disagree with the people too much’? And is it much good talking about ‘loyalty’? For on strictly democratic principles I suppose loyalty is obligatory (or even lawful) only so long as the majority want it. I don’t know the answer.
Of course there is no question of its being our duty (the minority’s duty) to obey an anti-God govt. if the majority sets it up. We shall have to disobey and be martyred. Perhaps pure democracy is really a false ideal.
God bless you all. In great haste.
Yours ever
C. S. Lewis
TO ROGER LANCELYN GREEN (BOD):
[Magdalen College]
[25] Feb. 1953
My dear Roger
My brother and I have now both finished Armadale
(#ulink_0dfc511d-cce2-5d73-a6ec-23926eb79a9b) and we enjoyed it very much. One can see, no doubt, why it is so much less popular than the famous two.
(#ulink_b2d82527-87a2-5acb-9a63-8b0e75b28bb4) The ‘common reader’ is right. It has no characters to compare with Fosco
(#ulink_c6be9678-27f0-5ede-9c17-6924da730eb9) and it involves some excessive improbabilities. But it has the true Collins atmosphere and no dull parts. Thank you very much.
I am having mild flu’ at present and solaced myself yesterday with re-reading From the World’s End. I was more surprised than ever at my own insensibility to this story when I first read it, and I believe it is now going to be one of my regular books. The feeling of summer-evenings-miles-from-anywhere-and-much-later-than-one-intended-to-be is really very well caught in chapter I. And there are some jewels I hadn’t noticed before such as ‘Peeping Tom boasting because he was not Tarquín’
(#ulink_806caf7e-7f75-5c5b-af72-f17743d06da4) (p. 30-a smashing blow from the shoulder, that!) or ‘supreme surrender and a supreme assumption of responsibility’ (p. 83).
