Collected Letters Volume One: Family Letters 1905–1931

Yes: the Kirk arrangement is absolutely it. The war is mainly interesting to him as illustrating some remark he made to ‘Mr. Dods’ fifty years ago. The only trouble about Bookham is our dear Mrs. Crutwell. I don’t know if it was the same in your time, but she has lately developed a mania for ‘seeing young people enjoying themselves’–and you know what that means. Write some time.

Yours, Jack

P.S. Did you ever get the letter I wrote from Larne?

1 William Eyre Hamilton Quennel (1898-?) entered School House the same term as Jack, and left Malvern in 1916. From there he went to Sandhurst, and in 1917 was gazetted into the 7th Dragoon Guards. He was promoted to lieutenant the same year. After the war he trained to be a doctor at St Bartholomew’s Hospital, London. During World War II he served as medical officer in the Essex Yeomanry

2 ‘The good matron’ was Miss Backhurst, of whom Warnie wrote: ‘She was better known and abominated by many generations of School House boys under her usual appellation of “The Old Bitch”. She was a weak, spiteful, fussy, prying old woman, absurdly sensitive on the point of dignity, and like so many stupid women, always seeing ridicule where none was intended’ (LP IV: 131).

3 Sir Arnold Lunn, The Harrovians (1913).

4 James Craig, first Viscount Craigavon (1871-1940), statesman. He was born in Belfast and was the MP for East Down 1906-18; MP for Mid-Down 1918-21; parliamentary secretary to the Ministry of Pensions 1919-20 and to the Admiralty 1920-1. He was chief secretary to Sir Edward Carson in opposing home rule, and was active in organizing means of resistance in Ulster. He was the first prime minister of Northern Ireland 1921-40. Captain Craig, as he was in 1914, was a very popular figure in the North of Ireland, and his house was about a hundred yards from Little Lea.

5 H.M.A. Guerber, Myths of the Norsemen from the Eddas and Sagas (1908).

6 Gerard Parker (1896-?) was in School House 1910-14, and was school prefect. After leaving Malvern he went to Sandhurst, passing from there in 1915 into the Devon Regiment. He was promoted to lieutenant in 1917 and during the war he was mentioned in despatches. He made captain in 1926, and retired in 1931.

7 Canon James had been succeeded as headmaster by Frank Sansome Preston (1875-1970) who had been educated at Marlborough College and Pembroke College, Cambridge. He was an assistant master at Marlborough 1899-1914, and headmaster of Malvern 1914-37.

8 In SBJ VII Lewis said that while ‘Smewgy’ was the major blessing of Malvern, the other ‘undisguised blessing of the Coll was “the Gurney”, the school library; not because it was a library, but because it was a sanctuary As the negro used to become free on touching English soil, so the meanest boy was “unfaggable” once he was inside the Gurney.’

9 Robert Bridges (1844-1930), Poet Laureate from 1913. His poetry appeared in a single volume in 1912, and this was probably what Lewis was reading.

10 Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (1847).

11 Annie Strahan was the cook-housekeeper at Little Lea, 1911-17.

12 The tragedy, Norse in subject and Greek in form, which Lewis was writing.

13 The Greeves’s home in Circular Road was directly across from Little Lea.

14 Joel 1:4.

15 Arthur Christopher Benson, The Upton Letters (1905).

16 The Times (2 June 1914), p. 9.

17 Sir Edward Elgar (1857-1934), composer, who rose to international fame about 1900 through his choral and orchestral music. He was living in Worcester at this time.

18 John Henry Newman, Verses on Various Occasions (1868).

19 Newman’s Dream of Gerontius depicts the journey of the soul to God at the hour of death. In 1900 it was set to music by Elgar, who regarded the work as his masterpiece. Lewis came to like the Dream very much in later life and in a discussion of Purgatory in chapter 20 of Letters to Malcolm (1964) he said ‘the right view returns magnificently in Newman’s Dream.

20 Cedric Edwin Hamley (1899-1997) was an exact contemporary of Jack Lewis in School House, having arrived in the third term of 1913. He left in 1915 and served in the war with the London Rifle Brigade. He was afterwards a 2nd lieutenant in the RAF, and a captain in the 3rd London Fusiliers from 1922-28. He worked in the family business, C. Hamley Ltd. in London.

21 It is reproduced in LP IV: 198-200.

22 William Shakespeare, As You Like It (1623).

23 Oliver Goldsmith, The Vicar of Wakefield (1766).

24 George Louis Kirkpatrick (1882-1943) was the only child of Mr and Mrs Kirkpatrick. He was born 23 May 1882 when his father was still headmaster of Lurgan College, and educated in England at Charterhouse 1896-99. From there he went to work for the electrical engineers, Browett, Lindley & Co., English Makers of Patricroft, Manchester. When Mr Kirkpatrick retired from Lurgan he and Mrs Kirkpatrick moved to Manchester to be near him. Now Louis was in a camp near Great Bookham. He was general manager of Bruce Peebles & Co. (Engineers) in Edinburgh from 1932 until his death in 1943.

25 Arthur had given him H.G. Wells’ The Country of the Blind, and Other Stories [1911].

26 In Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility (1811).

27 Homer, the Greek poet generally believed to have lived in about the eighth century BC, is famous for his two epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey. Mr Kirkpatrick wasted no time preparing Lewis to undertake these Greek masterpieces. ‘We opened our books at Iliad, Book I,’ Lewis wrote in SBJ IX. ‘Without a word of introduction Knock read aloud the first twenty lines or so in the “new” pronunciation, which I had never heard before…He then translated, with a few, a very few explanations, about a hundred lines. I had never seen a classical author taken in such large gulps before. When he had finished he handed me over Crusius’ Lexicon and, having told me to go through again as much as I could of what he had done, left the room. It seems an odd method of teaching, but it worked. At first I could travel only a very short way along the trail he had blazed, but every day I could travel further…I was beginning to think in Greek. That is the great Rubicon to cross in learning any language.’ Lewis was using Gottlieb Christian Crusius, A Complete Greek and English Lexicon for the Poems of Homer and the Homeridae: Illustrating the Domestic, Religious, Political, and Military Condition of the Heroic Age, and Explaining the Most Difficult Passages. Translated with corrections and additions by Henry Smith. New Edition revised and edited by Thomas Kerchever Arnold (1862).

28 Eric Robertson Dodds (1893-1979), classical scholar, was from Banbridge, County Down. He was educated at Campbell College, and University College, Oxford. At this time he was reading Literae Humaniores at University College. He took his BA in 1917. Dodds was Lecturer in Classics at University College, Reading 1919-24, Professor of Greek at the University of Birmingham 1924-36 and Regius Professor of Greek in the University of Oxford, 1936-60. See his autobiography, Missing Persons (1977).

29 Martin Gilbert, First World War (1994), p. 25.

30 St Nicolas Church, the earliest parts of which were built in the 11th century, is mentioned in the Domesday Book. The Reverend George Shepheard Bird was rector 1905-26. Jane Austen went to St Nicolas often when her godfather was vicar.

31 ‘The Nietzschean Way’, The Times Literary Supplement (1 October 1914), p. 442.

32 i.e. Mr Kirkpatrick.

33 H.T. Buckle, History of Civilization in England (1857; 1861).

34 The Ewart family who lived in nearby Glenmachan House. See The Ewart Family in the Biographical Appendix.

35 For some weeks the Germans had been intent on reaching the Belgian and French coastline. In an attempt to prolong the defence of their port city, Antwerp, the Belgian government appealed to Britain for troops. Thousands of British troops rushed to the aid of Antwerp, but by 10 October it was impossible to hold it against the Germans. By this time tens of thousands of Belgian refugees had arrived in England.

36 A nickname given Warnie by his father and brother.

37 Virgil (70-19 BC), the greatest Roman poet, wrote four ‘Georgics’, which are didactic poems in hexameters on Italy and traditional ways of rural life.

38 T.W. Rolleston, Myths and Legends of the Celtic Race (1912).

39 Whether Arthur Greeves ever attempted any part of his share in the musical drama is not known, but Lewis’s lyric text of ‘Loki Bound’ filled 32 pages of a notebook. The only part of this which has survived consists of 819 lines reproduced in LP IV: 218-20.

40 Pyotr Il’yich Tchaikovsky’s Chanson Triste was first performed in 1878.

41 The nickname of Ludwig van Beethoven’s piano sonata No. 14 in C sharp, Opus 27, No. 2 (1802).

42 Frédéric Chopin’s Marche Funêbre was first performed in 1827.

43 Edvard Grieg’s piano solo, the Peer Gynt Suite No. 2 (1893).

44 The female Fates of Norse mythology.

45 The ‘Honeymooners’ were probably Arthur’s brother, Thomas Greeves, and Winifred Lynas, who were married on 22 September 1914.

46 Matthew 6:28: ‘Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin.’

47 This was Arthur’s mother, Mrs Mary Margretta (Gribbon) Greeves. See Arthur Greeves in the Biographical Appendix.

48 The rumour that Germany would invade England persisted for a long time and worried Albert greatly. It may have started with an article in The Times (15 October 1914) entitled ‘Will Invasion be Tried?’ in which the war correspondent said: ‘Now that the war is reaching the climax of its violence we must anticipate that all the living forces of Germany will be thrown into the conflict, and that the German navy will no longer remain inert. We must expect to be attacked at home, and must not rest under any comforting illusions that we shall not be assailed. As an attack upon us can have no serious object, unless the intention is to land an expedition in England for the purposes of compelling us to sign a disastrous peace, it is well that we should look the situation calmly in the face, and reckon up not only Germany’s power to do us harm, but also our power of resistance and means for improving it’ (p. 4).

49 ‘Seize the day’. Horace, Odes, Book I, Ode 11,l.8, in which the poet urges Leuconoe to take thought for the present and not to worry inordinately about the future.

50 In a letter of 12 October, in which Warnie asked his father for a loan, he explained that he was owed money by Sandhurst and that ‘I have communicated with my bankers’ (LP IV: 229).

51 Their cousin, Hope Ewart (1882-1934), married Captain George Harding (1877-1957) in 1911 and they went to live in Dublin. Harding joined the army in 1900 and had been a member of the Army Service Corps since 1901. He was promoted to major in October 1914. He gained the DSO during the war and retired in 1928 with the rank of colonel.

52 The programme at the London Coliseum between 19 and 24 October included the Imperial Russian Ballet’s performance of Fleurs d’Orange and G.P. Huntley acting in Eric Blore’s A Burlington Arcadian.

53 Ludwig van Beethoven, Sonata No. 8, ‘Pathétique’ (1799).

54 Robert Bagehot Porch (1875-1962) was a pupil at Malvern College 1888-94. From there he went to Trinity College, Oxford, receiving his BA in 1898. He joined the staff of Malvern College in 1904 and taught there most of his life.

55 Prince Louis of Battenburg (1854-1921) was born in Austria. He moved to England when he was a boy and had risen through the ranks of the Royal Navy to become First Sea Lord. Despite all that Winston Churchill could do, as first lord of the Admiralty, Prince Louis was forced to resign. He relinquished his German titles and the family name was changed to Mountbatten.

56 ‘The voice of the people is the voice of the Devil’.

57 W.B. Yeats had published many Celtic plays. Lewis may have been thinking of his Plays for an Irish Theatre (1911).

58 Warnie crossed to France with the Army Service Corps on 4 November. They were part of the British Expeditionary Force stationed at Le Havre.

59 Guy Nicholas Palmes (1894-1915) entered Malvern in 1908, and left in 1911 for the Royal Military College at Sandhurst. He joined the Yorkshire Light Infantry at the beginning of the war and was promoted to lieutenant in 1915. He was killed in action near Ypres on 9 May 1915.

60 He meant William Morris’s The Well at the World’s End (1896).

61 William Morris, Sigurd the Volsung (1876).

62 William Harrison Ainsworth, Old St Paul’s (1841).

63 Le Morte D’Arthur is the title generally given to the cycle of Arthurian legends by Sir Thomas Malory, finished in 1470 and printed by Caxton in 1485. The version Lewis began with was Le Morte d’Arthur by Sir Thomas Malory, with an introduction by Professor Rhys, 2 vols., Everyman’s Edition [1906].

64 John Milton, Paradise Lost (1667).

65 This was probably Mrs Kirkpatrick’s ‘theatrical’ friend, Miss MacMullen, whom Lewis mentioned to his father on 13 October.

66 Mr Russell was a harmless, but terrifying, lunatic who was for many years a well-known figure in and around St Mark’s.

67 ‘O dearest brother, I am sorry not to have written.’

68 An opera by Charles Gounod, based on the Faust of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and first produced in 1859.

69 Il Trovatore, an opera by Giuseppe Verdi, was first performed in 1853.

70 Samson et Dalila, an opera by Camille Saint-Saëns, was first performed in 1877.

71 Daniel Auber’s opera Fra Diavolo was first performed in 1830.

72 W.S. Gilbert (1836-1911), playwright and librettist, and Arthur Sullivan (1842-1900), composer, together wrote many very popular operettas. They include The Pirates of Penzance performed in 1879, The Mikado performed in 1885, and The Yeoman of the Guard performed in 1888.

73 ‘Bright Star of Eve’ is from Charles Gounod’s New Part Songs (1872 or 1873).

74 Camille Saint-Saëns’s orchestral work Danse Macabre was first performed in 1872.

75 ‘March of the Dwarfs’ is a piano piece in Edvard Grieg’s Lyriske Stykker (1891).

76 Their mother’s sister, Mrs Lilian ‘Lily’ Suffern (1860-1934), wrote to Warnie on 3 February 1915 about the book party. ‘On 21st Dec.,’ she said, ‘Kelsie gave a book party which was very amusing… Some of the books were very good–too good for me, for I couldn’t guess them. Your father’s was Edged Tools, a fan and a knife. Clive’s was The Three Musketeers– a bit of paper with “Soldier’s Three” on it, it made us all mad because it was so plain, and we did not (many) guess it. Miss Murray’s was a cutting from that day’s Newsletter of the birthdays–The Newcomes. Another cutting from the Newsletter won the prize–Advt. of rise in the price of coals–The Sorrows of Satan. No one hardly guessed Hugh McCreddy’s–yet it was very good–a picture of a man with his mouth wide open in a laugh–L’’Homme Qui Rit. I had a picture of the Kaiser, nicely framed in ribbon–The Egoist (Meredith). Everyone guessed it The Lunatic at Large. Three old ladys sitting talking (picture of), tied with green ribbon was Gossips Green. Willie Jaffe’s was bad–a black African with a white line down it–Across the Dark Continent’ (LP IV: 289-90).

(Henry Seton Merriman wrote With Edged Tools (1894); Alexandre Dumas wrote The Three Musketeers (1844-5); William Makepeace Thackeray wrote The Newcomes (1853-4); Marie Corelli wrote The Sorrows of Satan (1895); Victor Hugo wrote L’’Homme Qui Rit (1869); George Meredith wrote The Egoist (1879); Joseph Storer Clouston wrote The Lunatic at Large (1899); Alice Dudeney wrote Gossips Green (1906); and Sir Henry Morton Stanley wrote Through the Dark Continent (1878).)

Kelso Ewart (1886-1966) was the fourth child of Lady Ewart, the cousin of Flora Lewis, and her husband Sir William. See The Ewart Family in the Biographical Appendix.

77 Mary Elizabeth ‘Lily’ Greeves (1888-1976) was Arthur Greeves’s sister. She married Lewis’s cousin Charles Gordon Ewart (1885-1936) on 15 December 1915. See The Ewart Family in the Biographical Appendix.

78 This was Arthur’s brother, William Edward Greeves (1890-1960).

79 Robert Heard Ewart (1879-1939). See The Ewart Family in the Biographical Appendix.

80 Carrie Tubb (1876-1976) was an English soprano much in demand as an oratorio singer. She was a favourite singer of operatic excepts, notably the final scene of Richard Wagner’s Götterdämmerung.

1915

TO HIS FATHER (LP IV: 285-6):

[Gastons

24? January 1915]1

My dear Papy,

I have arrived and settled down here in due course, and everything progresses favourably, including the German. We had it snowing hard all day on Thursday, beautiful snow and bright frosty sun until Saturday, and are now enduring the thaw. (Yes; I did change my socks. No; there are no holes in my shoes. Yes, thanks, I have plenty of warm underclothing.) I hope you have by this time got rid of your cough, and, did I not know the utter futility of so doing, I should advise you to be careful. However, as you will doubtless reply, my playing the anxious adviser of a patient who will not obey orders, is rather like Satan rebuking sin.2 But all joking apart, do take any care of yourself that you reasonably can, and don’t refuse harmless precautions for no reason.

That Smythe boy, the brother of the one who lost his arm, was home for a few days and lunched at Gastons on Wednesday: he tells us that his brother is going out again as soon as he is better–so hard are we pressed that even cripples whose worth is known will be taken in some departments! What this argues as to the paucity of our troops in general, and the old officer’s contempt for the new volunteers who are to come, you will readily imagine. Smythe also directly contradicts the reports of the newspapers about the Indian troops whom he declares to be worthless, and absolutely unfitted for trench fighting: they have too, an unpleasant habit of not burying their dead, which contributes a good deal to the discomfort of European men anywhere near. But of course this is only one man’s story, and the longer this war goes on the less credulous we become. Kirk has many amusing reflections, as usual, on the present crisis, especially when the curate came in yesterday at afternoon tea and told a number of patriotic lies about Germany and the Germans. Kirk then proceeded with great deliberation to prove step by step that his statements were fallacious, impossible, and ridiculous. The rest of the party including Mrs. K., Louis, and myself enjoyed it hugeously.

Thanks for my Classical Library which I have received. In the course of the week I shall return Munro’s Iliad I-XII3 which was not asked for: after which fact has been explained gently to Carson you will tell his remains to give you in exchange Merry’s Odyssey I-XII,4 which was asked for. Kirk also tells me to ask for ‘Tacitus’s Agricola’,5 any edition except Macmillan’s.

your loving son,

Jack

TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W/LP IV: 286-7):

[Gastons

26 January 1915]

My dear Arthur,

I wonder would hunting be good sport? The matter ocurred to me, not because I am really interested in it, but because I have just returned from a compulsory chase–trying to find out where the bit at the top of page 2 of your letter was meant to come in. Now, faint & perspiring, I am enjoying the fruits of my labours.

By this time you will probably have finished ‘Villette’.6 What do you think of the ending? I can just hear you saying, ‘Cracked–absolutely!’. It certainly is most unsatisfactory, but yet a touch of genius. I fancy it is the only novel in existence that leaves you in a like uncertainty. Merriman is a far cry from the Brontes. Both of course are good, but while they should be sipped with luxurious slowness in the winter evening, he may be read in a cheap copy on top of a tram. And yet I don’t know: of course his novels are melodrama, but then they are the best melodrama ever written, while passages like the ‘Storm’ or the ‘Wreck’ in the Grey Lady, or the Reconciliation between the hero and his father in ‘Edged Tools’, are as good things as English prose contains.7

The remark about the Maiden Islands was really quite smart for you. You might have it framed? Also such gems of orthography as ‘simpathise’ and ‘phisically’ which appeared in your last correspondance, tho’ of course I, being almost as bad, have no right to complain.

The weather here is perfectly damnable, there having been scarcely a couple of hours’ sunshine since I left home. Now that my friends have gone, there is nothing to do but sit & read or write when it rains, and consequently I have nearly finished The Morte D’arthur. I am more pleased at having bought it every day, as it has opened up a new world to me. I had no idea that the Arthurian legends were so fine (The name is against them, isn’t it??) Malory is really not a great author, but he has two excellent gifts, (1) that of lively narrative and (2) the power of getting you to know characters by gradual association. What I mean is, that, although he never sits down–as the moderns do–to describe a man’s character, yet, by the end of the first volume Launcelot & Tristan, Balin & Pellinore, Morgan Le Fay & Isoud are all just as much real, live people as Paul Emanuel or Mme Beck.8 The very names of the chapters, as they spring to meet the eye, bear with them a fresh, sweet breath from the old-time, faery world, wherein the author moves. Who can read ‘How Launcelot in the Chapel Perilous gat a cloth from a Dead corpse’ or ‘How Pellinore found a damosel by a Fountain, and of the Jousts in the Castle of Four Stones’, and not hasten to find out what it’s all about?

To obey my own theory that a letter should tell of doings, readings, thinkings, I will conclude by saying that I am trying to find some suitable theme for my Celtic narrative Poem: there are heaps of stories but mostly too long. Fare-thee-well.

yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

N.B. This was written on the same day as I got your letter, but I forgot to post it. Mille pardons. J.

TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W):

[Gastons

2 February 1915]

Dear Arthur,

The first essential point for a letter writer to master is that of making himself intelligable to his reader. Or, to come down from my high horse, what was the (it?) in brackets meant for? A thousand pardons for my dulness, only I utterly failed to follow your wheeze: please explain in your next epistle.

I am deep in Morte D’Arthur by this time, and it is really the greatest thing I’ve ever read. It is strangely different from William Morris, although by subject & language they challenge comparison. One is genuine, and the other, tho’ delightful, must, of course, be only an artificial reproduction. You really ought to read your copy of it, or at any rate parts of it, as the connecting chain between book and book is not very tightly drawn. I don’t think it can be the Library Edition, that those people have sent me, as it does not agree with your description at all, being bound in plum-coloured leather, with pale-blue marker attached. However, partly through my keenness to read the book & partly because it was a very handsome binding, I did not send it back.