Collected Letters Volume Three: Narnia, Cambridge and Joy 1950–1963

I have had flu’ three times but am better now and am going for a holiday on Friday. As to beef—it’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good: I expect the bulls enjoy roaming the Argentine plains & really like that better than being eaten in England!

Yrs. Sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO WARHELD M. FIROR(BOD):

Magdalen College,

Oxford

27/3/51

My dear Firor

Your letter came to cheer a rather grim day. I have never known a spring like this: the sun has hardly appeared since last October and this morning a thin mixture of rain & snow is falling. My own household is lucky because we have a wood, and therefore wood (what a valuable idiom) for fires: there is hardly any coal in England. The worst of a wood fire—delightful to eye and nose—is that it demands continual attention. But this is a trifle: many people have to spend most of their leisure at the cinema because it is the only warm place. (I hardly ever go myself. Do you? It seems to me an astonishingly ugly art. I don’t mean ‘ugly’ in any high flying moral or spiritual sense, but just disagreeable to the eye–crowded, unrestful, inharmonious)

There has been a great change in my life owing to the death of the old lady I called my mother. She died without apparent pain after many months of semi conscious existence, and it wd. be hypocritical to pretend that it was a grief to us.

Of your three rules I heartily agree with the first and the third. The second (‘keep rested’) sounds at first as if our obedience to it must v. often depend on many factors outside our control. I can think of some in whose ears it would sound like a cruel mockery. But I suspect that you have a reply. Do you mean that there is a kind of rest which ‘no man taketh from us’65 and which can be preserved even in the life of a soldier on active service or of a woman who works behind a counter all day and then goes home to work and mend and wash? And no doubt there is: but it doesn’t always include rest for the legs.

‘His plan for the day’–yes, that is all important. And I keep losing sight of it: in days of leisure and happiness perhaps even more than in what we call ‘bad’ days.

The whole difficulty with me is to keep control of the mind and I wish one’s earliest education had given one more training in that. There seems to be a disproportion between the vastness of the soul in one respect (i.e. as a mass of ideas and emotions) and its smallness in another (i.e. as central, controlling ego). The whole inner weather changes so completely in less than a minute. Do you read George Herbert—

If what soul doth feel sometimes My soul might always feel—66

He’s a good poet and one who helped to bring me back to the Faith.

My brother and all other ham-eating beneficiaries (shd. I call us Hamsters?) join me in good wishes. All blessings.

Yours ever

C. S. Lewis

TO MRS HALMBACHER(L):

[Magdalen College

March 1951]

The question for me (naturally) is not ‘Why should I not be a Roman Catholic?’ but ‘Why should I?’ But I don’t like discussing such matters, because it emphasises differences and endangers charity. By the time I had really explained my objection to certain doctrines which differentiate you from us (and also in my opinion from the Apostolic and even the Medieval Church), you would like me less.

TO SHELDON VANAUKEN (BOD):

17/4/51

Dear Van Auken

My prayers are answered. No: a glimpse is not a vision. But to a man on a mountain road by night, a glimpse of the next three feet of road may matter more than a vision of the horizon. And there must perhaps always be just enough lack of demonstrative certainty to make free choice possible: for what could we do but accept if the faith were like the multiplication table?

There will be a counter attack on you, you know, so don’t be too alarmed when it comes. The enemy will not see you vanish into God’s company without an effort to reclaim you. Be busy learning to pray and (if you have made up yr. mind on the denominational question) get confirmed.

Blessings on you and a hundred thousand welcomes. Make use of me in any way you please: and let us pray for each other always.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO R. W. CHAPMAN (BOD): 67

Magdalen

17/4/51

Dear Chapman

Did I ever denigrate Horace? If so, I deserve to be struck blind like Stesichorus (was it?) for insulting Helen.68 But I dare say I did: I wouldn’t now. The truth is I am just returning to him after a period of idolatrous admiration for him in boyhood and a long intervening alienation. The risus ab angulo stanza69 alone is proof enough.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO MARY VAN DEUSEN (W):

Magdalen College

Oxford

18/4/51

Dear Mrs. Van Deusen

Thanks for your letter of the 7th. I have just returned from a holiday and the time since has been spent in writing about 40 letters with my own hand: so much for Ivory Towers.

I also find your question v. difficult in my own life. What is right we usually know, or it is our own fault if we don’t: but what is prudent or sensible we often do not. Is it part of the scheme that we shd. ordinarily be left to make the best we can of our own v. limited and merely probable reasonings? I don’t know. Or wd. guidance even on these points be more largely given if we had early enough acquired the regular habit of seeking it?

How terrible your anxiety about your daughter must have been. She shall have her place in my prayers, such as they are.

Walsh didn’t know much about my private life.70 Strictly between ourselves, I have lived most of it (that is now over) in a house wh. was hardly ever at peace for 24 hours, amidst senseless wranglings, lyings, backbitings, follies, and scares. I never went home without a feeling of terror as to what appalling situation might have developed in my absence. Only now that it is over (tho’ a different trouble has taken its place)71 do I begin to realise quite how bad it was.

God bless you all.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO SISTER MADELEVA CSC (W): 72

Magdalen College,

Oxford

18/4/51

Dear Sister Madeleva

I don’t know whether I shd. thank you or your publishers for so kindly sending me a copy of your wholly delightful Lost Language.73 At any rate I have to thank you for writing it. There has been nothing v. like it before and it emphasises a side of Chaucer too often neglected. I am glad you say a word on behalf of ‘conventions’ on p. 17. I always tell my pupils that a ‘convention’ appears to be such only when it has ended.

With all good wishes.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO MISS BRECKENRIDGE (I):

Magdalen etc

19 April 1951

I think that if God forgives us we must forgive ourselves. Otherwise it is almost like setting up ourselves as a higher tribunal than Him.

Many religious people, I’m told, have physical symptoms like the ‘prickles’ in the shoulder. But the best mystics set no value on that sort of thing, and do not set much on visions either. What they seek and get is, I believe, a kind of direct experience of God, immediate as a taste or colour. There is no reasoning in it, but many would say that it is an experience of the intellect—the reason resting in its enjoyment of its object…

TO ARTHUR GREEVES (BOD):

[The Kilns]

22/4/51

My dear Arthur

You were quite right to leave me when you did. A farewell meal is a doleful business: it was much better for me to get my luggage dumped and my berth found & for you to be back at home as soon as possible.

Thank Elizabeth for her letter.74 She will understand, I am sure, why I don’t want to continue the discussion by post: my correspondence involves a great number of theological letters already which can’t be neglected because they are answers to people in great need of help & often in great misery.

I have hardly ever had so much happiness as during our late holiday. God bless you–and the Unbelievable.75 Pas de jambon encore.76

Yours

Jack

TO ROGER IANCELYN GREEN (BOD):

Magdalen College

Oxford

22/4/51

My dear Roger—

May 31st & June 1st will do me nicely. May I book you a room for those two nights?

I doubt if you’ll find me both in and without a pupil on April 26th except between lunch & tea, when I suppose June will be in the Sheldonian. Cd. you ring me up if convenient?

Love to all three.

Yours

Jack

TO ARTHUR GREEVES (BOD):

[The Kins]

23/4/51

My dear Arthur

 (1.) A Ham has been posted to you today.

 (2.) My plans, if they fit with Yours, for the summer are as follows.

 (a.) Short visit to C’fordsburn with W. Aug. 10 (arrive llth)-Aug. 14

 (b.) Stay with W. in S’thern Ireland Aug. 14-28.

 (c.) Longer visit to C’fordsburn alone Aug. 28-Sept. 11th. Can you be in residence at Silver Hill Aug. 28th-Sept. 11th?

Blessings,

Jack

TO DOM BEDE GRIFFITHS OSB (W):

Magdalen etc.

23/4/51

Dear Dom Bede—

A succession of illnesses and a holiday in Ireland have so far kept me from tackling Lubac.77 The Prelude78 has accompanied me through all the stages of my pilgrimage: it and the Aeneid (which I never feel you value sufficiently) are the two long poems to wh. I most often return.

The tension you speak of (if it is a tension) between doing full & generous justice to the Natural while also paying unconditional & humble obedience to the Supernatural is to me an absolute key position. I have no use for mere either-or people (except, of course, in that last resort, when the choice, the plucking out the right eye, is upon us: as it is in some mode, every day.79 But even then a man needn’t abuse & blackguard his right eye. It was a good creature: it is my fault, not its, that I have got myself into a state wh. necessitates jettisoning it).

The reason I doubt whether it is, in principle, even a tension is that, as it seems to me, the subordination of Nature is demanded if only in the interests of Nature herself. All the beauty of nature withers when we try to make it absolute. Put first things first and we get second things thrown in: put second things first & we lose both first and second things.80 We never get, say, even the sensual pleasure of food at its best when we are being greedy.

As to Man being in ‘evolution’, I agree, tho’ I wd. rather say ‘in process of being created’.

I am no nearer to your Church than I was but don’t feel v. inclined to re-open a discussion. I think it only widens & sharpens differences. Also, I’ve had enough of it on the opposite flank lately, having fallen among—a new type to me—bigoted & proselytising Quakers! I really think that in our days it is the ‘undogmatic’ & ‘liberal’ people who call themselves Christians that are most arrogant & intolerant. I expect justice & even courtesy from many Atheists and, much more, from your people: from Modernists, I have come to take bitterness and rancour as a matter of course.

I might get down to see you some time this year. No chance of your visiting Oxford?

Yours always

C. S. Lewis

TO WARHELD M. FIROR(BOD):

Magdalen etc.

23/4/51

Dear Firor

I guessed what response my news would elicit from your friendly heart and awaited it with mixed pleasure and pain: pleasure because your amazing good will (I am still puzzled as to how I acquired it) is always as cheering as a bright fire on a winter day, pain because I cannot respond as you wd. wish. I have seized my new freedom to get that infernal book on the XVIth Century done, or as nearly done as I can. The College is giving me a year off to do it, but the work can be done only in England, and much less ambitious holidays than a jaunt to America will serve my turn.

I am not naturally mobile. But you are. Is there no chance of seeing you in England? (Not, of course, in connection with this idiotic ‘Festival’81 of which I and some others are heartily ashamed—such untimely nonsense!)

And now to business…I feel twice the man I have been for the last ten years. God bless you.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO COLIN HARDIE (P): 82

24/4/51

Dear Colin—

This is even more exciting than Oedipus.83 The excessive length comes from the intrusion of matter relevant & interesting for the history of Greek religion but not, or not so much, for the Christian interpretation of reviving Gk. Myths. Unfortunately you are so concatenated & sagacious that v. few of the bits I want removed come away quite clean. Amputation, especially in another man’s work, is v. dangerous, so the following lists of delenda must be treated as tentative, and if you accept all or any of them you must then go carefully through what is left to remove ‘fossils’. They are

Dele84 on p3 from It is the presupposition to Trojans raw from At this point (5a) to types of character (5e) from who formed a guild (9) to and unity (10) from Groups of three (11) to or under earth (12) from Professor Rose, thinking (12) to human history (15) from We have seen (16) to of sacrifice (17) from To the Aegean peoples to where they could (19) Then go to ‘The Greeks, unlike the Aegean peoples, allowed the idea’ etc. from The Greek idea (2) to always disbelieved (21) from In popular theology (24) to from matter (25)

Most, if not all, of these I shall be sorry to lose. But, as Ridley sagely remarks, the business of a cutter is to cut.85 You cd. expect from me only one of three things: a refusal to cut, a recommendation to cut passages because they were bad, or a recommendation to cut passages although they were good. You’ve got the third wh. is presumably what you’d prefer.

I do long to see all this out in book form where you have elbow room, for I really think it is some of the most important work that is being done in our time. I think I told you before of the advice wh. old Macan86 gave me long ago ‘Don’t put off writing until you know everything or you’ll be too old to write decently’

It must be fun being you.

Yours

Jack

TO MARY VAN DEUSEN (W):

Magdalen College

Oxford

30/4/51

Dear Mrs. Van Deusen—

No, the ‘different trouble’ is not an illness, or not an illness of mine. I could hardly tell you of it without a breach of confidence.

My holiday was only in a hotel, but in my old country & near the house of an old friend.

My prayer for Genia (an interesting name, by the way) cd. not naturally take the form you suggest. A little too schematic for my habits: and, to tell you the truth, a little bit like giving God a lecture on Theology!

As to MacArthur, I don’t feel in a position to have clear opinions about anyone I know only from newspapers. You see, whenever they deal with anyone (or anything) I know myself, I find they’re always a mass of lies & misunderstandings: so I conclude they’re no better in the places where I don’t know.

Nations being ‘friends’ is only a metaphor: they’re not people, and their co-operation depends, alas, on professional politicians & journalists whom you & I can’t control.

In fact, as you see, I’m a terrible sceptic about all public affairs. I am inclined to think that your Mac A and our Montgomery are specimens of a new, dangerous, & useful type thrown up by the modern situation–but it’s only a guess.

In haste. God bless you all.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO THE EDITOR OF ESSAYS IN CRITICISM 87

Magdalen College,

Oxford,

May 3rd, 1951.

Dear Sir,

I have read Mr. Watt’s essay on Robinson Crusoe88 with great interest and almost complete agreement. But what does he mean when he says that the myths of Midas and the Rheingold are ‘inspired by the prospect of never having to work again’ (p. 104)? Surely the point of the first story is that Midas’s golden touch brought starvation: and the point of the second that the gold carried a curse. If the gold in either story has an economic signification at all (which might be questioned) the meaning must be less banal than Mr. Watt suggests.89

Yours truly,

C. S. Lewis

TO GEORGE SAYER(W):

Magdalen College

Oxford

5/5/51

I had no notion of all this oriental background to you–barbaric pearl & gold.

Glad to hear the illness was not serious. Any chance of a night or week-end later? I needn’t say how welcome you’d be.

J.

Love to both from both.

TO AN ANONYMOUS GENTLEMAN (P): TS

REF.236/51

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

12th May 1951.

Dear Sir,

If I knew a little more about the subject I should have been very glad to introduce your edition of the Psalms. But whatever I tried to say, I should come up against my ignorance. The right person to do it would be Sister Penelope, C.S.M.V., St Mary’s Convent, Wantage, who understands both their religious use, and something of their history.

With all good wishes,

yours faithfully,

C. S. Lewis

TO VALERIE PITT (BOD): 90

Magdalen College

Oxford

15/5/51

Dear Miss Pitt—

It seemed to me after I’d got to bed that in my anxiety to prod a silent meeting into some semblance of debate I may have given the impression that I overlooked what Farrer91 rightly called the richness of yr. paper. The parts of it we wd. really like to have discussed were those least suitable for the Socratic. I hope you will continue to pursue the subject. All good wishes

C.S.L.

TO MARY MARGARET MCCASLIN (W): TS

REF.238/51.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

15th May 1951.

Dear Mrs. McCaslin,

Thank you for your kind letter of the 11th.

A book of reference tells me that John Flavel came from Dartmouth and kept a private school.92 I have never heard of him before nor seen his books. But I have no difficulty in believing that he may be excellent. The past is full of good authors whom the general literary tradition has ignored and whom one only finds by chance. There is a great element of chance in fame. With all good wishes,

yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO GEORGE ROSTREVOR HAMILTON (BOD):

Magdalen

17/5/51

My dear Hamilton

Of course I’ll write an introduction to Ouroboros.93 I’d deserve to be hanged if I wouldn’t. Mind you, one doesn’t always write best on what one most keenly and spontaneously enjoys. One writes best on the authors who are one’s acquired tastes (as happy love produces fewer great poems than mess and fuss like Donne’s or obsession like Catullus!) But I’ll do my damdest. When the matter is fixed (and I leave you to go on into that) can you come down for a night and talk it over? I shall want to pick your brains: especially for testimonies which I can quote from other admirers, yourself, and lames Stephens etc.94 I remember the other Eddison v. well: give him my duty.95

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO RUTH PITTER(BOD): TS

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

18th May 1951.

Dear Miss Pitter,

It is I who have to thank you for making my little party a success. You supplied the fire and air. I wrote down Young’s96 address, and will write: many thanks. My own MS will go to you as soon as it is typed. Don’t let it be a bother: what I want is only a Yes or a No or Doubtful. It is very kind of you to undertake the job, for a job of course it is. Kindest regards to Miss O’Hara and yourself.

Yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO ANDREW YOUNG (BOD):97 TS

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

18th May 1951

Dear Canon Young,

May a stranger take the liberty of offering his thanks for your poems? You appear to me a modern Marvell and a modern marvel: there has been nothing so choice, so delicate, and so controlled in this century. Every weir I see in this town of rivers now ‘combs the river’s silver hair’.98 Thank you very much indeed.

Yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO MARY VAN DEUSEN (W):

Magdalen College

Oxford

25/5/51

Dear Mrs. Van Deusen

About yr. idea that error in upbringing might be partly responsible for Genia’s trouble, does any trained psychologist agree with you? From what I hear such people say I shd. v. much doubt whether it cd. have had any ‘depth’ effect. Do not burden yourself with any unnecessary cares: I suspect you are not at all to blame. I pray for Genia every night.

About loving one’s country, you raise two different questions. About one, about there seeming to be (now) no reason for loving it, I’m not at all bothered. As Macdonald says ‘No one loves because he sees reason, but because he loves.’99 Or say there are two kinds of love: we love wise & kind & beautiful people because we need them, but we love (or try to love) stupid & disagreeable people because they need us. This second kind is the more divine, because that is how God loves us: not because we are lovable but because He is love, not because He needs to receive but because He delights to give.

But the other question (what one is loving in loving a country) I do find v. difficult. What I feel sure of is that the personifications used by journalists and politicians have v. little reality. A treaty between the Govts. of two countries is not at all like a friendship between two people: more like a transaction between two people’s lawyers.

I think love for one’s country means chiefly love for people who have a good deal in common with oneself (language, clothes, institutions) and is in that way like love of one’s family or school: or like love (in a strange place) for anyone who once lived in one’s home town. The familiar is in itself a ground for affection. And it is good: because any natural help towards our spiritual duty of loving is good and God seems to build our higher loves round our merely natural impulses—sex, maternity, kinship, old acquaintance, etc. And in a less degree there are similar grounds for loving other nations—historical links & debts for literature etc (hence we all reverence the ancient Greeks). But I wd. distinguish this from the talk in the papers. Mind you, I’m in considerable doubt about the whole thing. My mind tends to move in a world of individuals not of societies.

I’m afraid I have not read E. Gough’s book.100 With all blessings.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO SEYMOUR SPENCER (P):

Magdalen College.

29/5/51

Dear Dr. Spencer

Thank you v. much for letting me see the MS. of your article.101 My reading confirms the view I formed on hearing the earlier form of it read, that it is a most interesting and important piece of work.