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

80 Lewis had already devoted an essay to this principle entitled ‘First and Second Things’, published in First and Second Things and EC.

81 The Festival of Britain.

82 See Colin and Christian Hardie in the Biographical Appendix.

83 Hardie had asked Lewis to read an essay he had written on ‘The Myth of Paris’. It has never been published.

84 ‘delete’.

85 Maurice Roy Ridley (1890-1969) was Tutor in English Literature at Balliol College, Oxford, 1920-45. See his biography in CL II, p. 306n.

86 Reginald Walter Macan (1848-1941) was Master of University College, Oxford, 1906-23. See his biography in CL I, p. 263n.

87 This letter was published in Essays in Criticism, I (July 1951), p. 313, under the title ‘Robinson Crusoe as a Myth’.

88 Ian Watt, ‘Robinson Crusoe as a Myth’, Essays in Criticism, I (April 1951), pp. 95-119.

89 Watt’s reply appears on the same page as Lewis’s letter.

90 See Valerie Pitt in the Biographical Appendix to CL II, pp. 1059-60. Pitt, who was writing a B. Litt. thesis for St Hugh’s College, Oxford, was secretary of the Socratic Club.

91 Austin Farrer was a member of the Socratic Club. See Austin and Katharine Farrer in the Biographical Appendix.

92 John Flavell (baptized 1630, d. 1691), Presbyterian minister and religious writer, was educated at University College, Oxford. He was the minister at Dartmouth, Devon, 1656-62. Following Charles II’s declaration of indulgence in 1672, Flavell returned to Dartmouth, licensed as a Congregationalist minister. His works include A Token for Mourners (1674), The Seaman’s Companion (1676), Divine Conduct (1678), Sea Deliverances (c. 1679), The Touchstone of Sincerity (1679), The Method of Grace (1681), A Saint Indeed (1684) and Treatise on the Soul of Man (1685). See the article on Flavell in the Oxford DNB.

93 E. R. Eddison, The Worm Ouroboros (1922). See Eric R”ucker Eddison in the Biographical Appendix to CL II, pp. 1025-8. Hamilton had been a close friend of Eddison, and he was trying to arrange for The Worm Ouroboros to be reprinted, with an introduction by Lewis. He was not successful.

94 James Stephens (1882-1950) wrote an introduction to Eddison’s A Fish Dinner in Memison (1941). See CL II, p. 558, n. 53.

95 ‘The other Eddison’ was Colin Eddison, brother of E. R. Eddison.

96 See the letter to Andrew Young of 18 May 1951.

97 See the Rev. Andrew John Young in the Biographical Appendix.

98 Andrew Young, Collected Poems (1936), ‘The Slow Race’, IV, 2.

99 George MacDonald, Unspoken Sermons, 1st series (1867), ‘Love thy Neighbour’, p. 202: ‘No one loves because he sees why, but because he loves.’

100 This was probably Edward John Gough, author of Simple Thoughts on the Holy Eucharist (1893).

101 An article entitled ‘The Id and the Fall’ which was not, finally, published in The Month.

102 St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Part I, Question 98: ‘In the state of innocence there would have been generation of offspring for the multiplication of the human race; otherwise man’s sin would have been very necessary, for such a great blessing to be its result.’

103 ‘increase and multiply’.

104 Genesis 1:21-2: ‘And God created great whales, and every living creature…And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let fowl multiply in the earth.’

105 Starr had been teaching at Rollins College Winter Park, Florida, since 1941. In March 1951, its 33-year-old president, Paul Wagner, announced that almost a third of its laculty members (one of whom was Starr) were to be dismissed for ‘financial reasons’. Members of the board suspected that the progressive educator had fired these members because they refused to conform to his campaign for visual education, as opposed to the old reading and lecture method: Wagner boasted that after a number of years people wouldn’t know how to read. The firing was reported in ‘Squeeze at Rollins’, Life, 30, no. 13 (26 March 1951), p. 115. After months of wrangling, the faculty members were reinstated and Wagner was removed from office. He was replaced by Hugh F. McKean (1908-95), a member of the art faculty. Professor Starr chose to resign at the end of the academic year 1951-2, and he spent the next academic year at Kansai University, Osaka, Japan as a Fulbright Scholar. See the letter to Starr of 3 February 1953.

106 George MacDonald, The Diary of an Old Soul (1885).

107 Virgil, Georgia, IV, 169; Aeneid, I, 436: ‘the work grows leverish’.

108 John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress from this World to That which is to Come, ed. lames Blanton Wharey, 2nd edn rev. Roger Sharrock (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960), First Part, p. 106: ‘Then Christian and Hopeful outwent them again, and went till they came at a delicate Plain, called Ease, where they went with much content.’

109 Springfield St Mary’s was a youth hostel at 122 Banbury Road, Oxford, run by the Community of St Mary the Virgin.

110 Lewis was reading Skinner’s The Return of Arthur: Merlin (London: Frederick Muller, 1951), the first part of a four-part work. The second part was entitled The Return of Arthur: Parti (London: Chapman and Hall, 1955); the third was entitled The Return of Arthur: Part II (London: Chapman and Hall, 1959). The complete edition, containing the three earlier volumes as well as The Return of Arthur, Part III, was published under the title The Return of Arthur: A Poem of the Future (London: Chapman and Hall, 1966). Because of the rarity of the individual parts, all references are to the 1966 edition.

111 ‘to think alike about political affairs’. From Henry St John Bolingbroke (1678-1751), Dissertation Upon Parties, Letter 1.

112 Skinner, The Return of Arthur: Merlin, II, ii, 5.

113 ibid., xxxvii.

114 Stanza.

115 ibid., Ill, ix. ‘Lasciate etc’ refers to Dante, Inferno, III, 9.

116 Sir Desmond MacCarthy (1877-1952), literary journalist, was known for his theatre criticism and for his reviews and other writing in the Sunday Times.

117 In C. S. Lewis: Apostle to the Skeptics, ch. 20, p. 161, Walsh stated: ‘I mention what Lewis has not done, not as a reproach to him, but to suggest to his overardent admirers that an exclusive diet of his works is not wholesome.’

118 Genia Goelz—Mrs E. L. Goelz—was the daughter of Mrs Mary Van Deusen. She is referred to as ‘Mrs Sonia Graham’ in L. She was writing from 2756 Reese Avenue, Evanston, Illinois. Although abbreviated copies of the letters to Mrs Goelz appeared in L, complete copies were made by Walter Hooper in 1965.

119 Mary Elizabeth ‘Lily Ewart was Greeves’s sister. See her biography in CL I, p. 98n.

120 Dr Firor had a ranch in Wyoming, and he was constantly urging Lewis to join him there.

121 In The Great Divorce: A Dream (London: Bles, 1945 [1946]; Fount, 1997), ch. 11, one of the Ghosts has on his shoulder a Red Lizard who represents Lust.

122 Robert C. Walton, head of the BBC’s School Broadcasting Department, wrote to Lewis on 9 July 1951 announcing plans for six half-hour programmes on ‘the nature of evidence’: ‘We shall begin by stating as clearly as possible the Christian belief that God is to be understood in personal terms, and then two speakers will discuss with the “interrogator” how they have come to accept the Christian conception of God’s nature. Our main purpose is not to argue whether or not the Christian belief is true, but to explain the nature of the evidence which leads Christians to this conclusion. We should be very glad if you would take part in this programme.’

123 The old white cobra in ‘The King’s Ankus’ in Kipling’s Second Jungle Book (1895).

124 Sir David Lyndsay, The Monarchie (Ane Dialog Betwix Experience and ane Courteour) (1554), 1293-4.

125 This letter was first published in the Church Times, CXXXIV (10 August 1951), p. 541, under the title ‘The Holy Name’.

126 Leslie E. T. Bradbury, ‘The Holy Name’, Church Times, CXXXIV (3 August 1951), p. 525.

127 See the biography of Idrisyn Oliver Evans in CL II, p. 584n.

128 I. O. Evans, The Coming of a King: A Story of the Stone Age (1950).

129 Mrs Vulliamy was writing from Park College, Parksville, Missouri.

130 Lewis’s doctor, Robert Emlyn ‘Humphrey Havard.

131 Acts 9:4-5: ‘And he fell to the earth, and heard a voice saying unto him, Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me? And he said, Who are thou, Lord? And the Lord said, I am Jesus whom thou persecutes’

132 Colossians 1:23-4: ‘I Paul…now rejoice in my sufferings for you, and fill up that which is behind of the afflictions of Christ in my flesh for his body’s sake, which is the church.’

133 Romans 12:5: ‘So we, being many, are one body in Christ, and every one members one of another.’

134 Lewis was referring to a problem that sometimes arises when, in a family of non-Christians, one of them becomes a Christian. It is one of the themes in Lewis’s novel, Till We Have Faces. See the letter to Clyde Kilby of 10 February 1957.

135 Lewis meant ‘The Coming of Galahad’ in Charles Williams’s Taliessin Through Logres (1938).

136 Luke 12:49-53: Suppose ye that I am come to give peace on earth? I tell you, Nay; but rather division: For from henceforth there shall be five in one house divided, three against two, and two against three. The father shall be divided against the son, and the son against the father; the mother against the daughter, and the daughter against the mother; the mother in law against her daughter in law, and the daughter in law against her mother in law.’

* Yet oh! How I sympathise with him! God is such an Intruder! We must deal with them v. tenderly.

137 Francis of Assist: Early Documents, 3 vols., ed. Regis J. Armstrong OFM Cap., J. A. Wayne Hellmann OFM, Conv., William J. Short OFM (New York: New City Press, 2000), Vol. II: The Founder, ‘The Legends and Sermons about Saint Francis by Bonaventure of Bagnoregio (1255-1267)’, p. 564: ‘[Francis of Assisi] taught his brothers…that they should master their rebellious and lazy flesh by constant discipline and useful work. Therefore he used to call his body Brother Ass, for he felt it should be subjected to heavy labor, beaten frequently with whips, and fed with the poorest food.’

138 This was the Italian translation of Out of the Silent Planet, published as Lontano dal Pianeta Silenzioso, trans. Franca Degli Espinosa (Milan and Verona: Mandadori, 1951).

139 See the biography of Bernard Acworth in CL II, p. 632n. Acworth was founder and president emeritus of the Evolution Protest Movement.

140 Bernard Acworth, This Progress: The Tragedy of Evolution (London: Rich & Cowan, 1934).

141 The tomb of Boethius (AD 480-524) is in the Church of S. Pietro Ciel d’Oro at Pavia.

142 The edition Lewis used was The Consolation of Philosophy, with the English Translation of ‘I.T.’ (1609), rev. H. E Stewart (London: Heinemann, Loeb Classical Library, 1918).

143 Kinter had asked about a sentence in the preface of Lewis’s That Hideous Strength: A Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-Ups (London: John Lane, 1945; HarperCollins, 2000), p. xii: ‘Those who would like to learn further about Numinor and the True West must (alas!) await the publication of much that still exists only in the MSS. of my friend, Professor J. R. R. Tolkien.’

144 Max M”uller, The Science of Language, 2 vols. (London: Longmans, 1891), Vol. II, p. 454.

145 George MacDonald, Sir Gibbie (1879), ch. 47: ‘the time for speaking comes rarely, the time for being never departs.’

146 Wendell W. Watters, MD, a Canadian psychiatrist, was Professor of Psychiatry at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. He was the author of Deadly Doctrine: Health, Illness, and Christian God-talk (1992).

147 This letter first appeared in L as ‘To A CRITICAL BUT CHARITABLE READER’, and was incorrectly dated 12 September 1951.

148 Dr Watters’s objection to Christ’s ‘unfair advantage’ was occasioned by Lewis’s Broadcast Talks, Bk. II, ch. 4. When revising the talks for Mere Christianity (London: Bles, 1952; HarperCollins, 2002), Lewis added two paragraphs to the end of Book II, Chapter 4, in which he used the example given here: ‘I have heard some people complain that if lesus was God as well as man, then His sufferings and death lose all value in their eyes, “because it must have been so easy for him”…If I am drowning in a rapid river, a man who still has one foot on the bank may give me a hand which saves my life. Ought I to shout back (between my gasps) “No, it’s not fair! You have an advantage! You’re keeping one foot on the bank”? That advantage—call it “unfair” if you like—is the only reason why he can be of any use to me. To what will you look for help if you will not look to that which is stronger than yourself?’ (pp. 58-9)

149 Geoffrey Bles was pressing Blamires to persuade Lewis to write a preface for Blamires’s English in Education (London: Bles, 1951).

150 i.e., the preface he was writing for D. E. Harding’s The Hierarchy of Heaven and Earth.

151 See the biography of Herbert Palmer, poet and literary critic, in CL II, p. 678n.

152 John Milton, Prose Works, with preliminary remarks and notes by J. A. St John, 5 vols. (London: Bohn’s Standard Library, 1948-53).

153 Herbert Palmer, ‘English Poetry: 1938-1950–I’, The Fortnightly, CLXX (September 1951), pp. 624-8; ‘English Poetry: 1938-1950–II’, ibid. (October 1951), pp. 695-700; ‘English Poetry: 1938-1950–III’, ibid. (October 1951), pp. 768-74.

155 i.e., The Problem of Pain.

156 Ashley Sampson of Geoffrey Bles, The Centenary Press, had asked Lewis to contribute a book on pain to the Christian Challenge series. See CL II, p. 289n.

157 The Problem of Pain, ch. 1, p. 15: ‘The Christian faith…has the master touch–the rough, male taste of reality’

158 ‘C. S. Lewis: 1898-1963’, Bodleian Library, MS. Facs. d. 290.

159 Since the thirteenth century there have been many versions of the legend of the Wandering Jew. In essence the legend recounts how a Jew chided Christ as he bore the cross to Calvary and was thereafter condemned to wander about the world until Christ’s Second Coming.

160 Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, Part I, pp. 55-6.

161 United Nations Organization.

162 25 April.

163 Hebrews 11:1: ‘Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.’

164 Psalm 8:2; Matthew 21:16.

165 Numbers 22:24-31.

166 Philippians 4:4.

167 Colossians 2:14-5.

1952

TO EDNA GREEN WATSON (BOD): TS

REF.52/9

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

2nd January 1952.

Dear Mrs. Watson,

Very many thanks for your kind present of the cake, which has just arrived in good condition; good external condition that is, for it will not be opened until I get it out to my house this evening, where it will be received with enthusiasm. I often hear laments about the difficulty of getting cake making materials, so you can imagine how much pleasure it will give.

It will also help to distract attention from all the news in the papers about the shortages which are expected in 1952: news which is not rendered any the more palatable by Churchill’s assurance that when he gets back from your country,1 and meets Parliament, he will have several proposals to make which ‘will be very unpleasant for all of us.’ But we are in hopes that his treatment will differ from Atlee’s in being like the pain after you have had a tooth out–getting less every day—whereas under the late government we were shirking going to the dentist and the pain was getting worse every day.2

With many thanks, and all good wishes for the New Year,

yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO RUTH PITTER(BOD):

Magdalen etc

Jan 8th. 1952

Dear Miss Pitter

May Maleldil send you a good year.3 Of course use those Spenserian stanzas as you wish.4 I think your idea of the sheepdog-trial for readers is excellent.

The poem of yours which I didn’t like was the one about the enamoured earwig and the lady:5 and it all comes of mere idiosyncrasies of mine, (a.) My imagination goes easily to humanised mammals but stops dead at humanised insects, (b.) I can’t bear the least suggestion (however sportive) of love affairs between different species or even between children. That is one of the many things which for me sinks Tom Sawyer so immeasurably below the divine Huckleberry. But as I can’t give any reason for the second—I think I could for the first–this doesn’t help you v. much. I suspect it originates with the mingled embarrassment and nausea evoked in oneself as a child by grown-up jokes of an arch character at childrens’ parties.

Isn’t Herbert–?6 well: one can only say well. I am glad you are swimming in poetry and cannot help hoping great things.

Yours most sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO EDWARD A. ALLEN (W): TS

REF. 52/28

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

8th January 1951 [1952].

My dear Mr. Allen,

A very happy new year to you both, and many thanks for your amusing letter of the 2nd. As you will observe, you were very nearly in time to call up on the old wave length, but not quite; my brother makes a clear sweep of all the old numbers every 31st December. I don’t know why, and I dare’nt ask him, in case he should insist on explaining it to me. He by the way asks to send greetings to both of you, and asks me to tell you that your thin blue summer suit is still going strong: and adds, that in view of the amount of summer we get in this country, he reckons on it figuring amongst the assets of his estate when the Landlord terminates his lease.

I doubt if there is a man in America besides yourself who would have seriously contemplated sending a private gift of coal to this country: I believe if I said ‘thanks very much, and while you are about it, make me a present of the ship that brings it’, you would do your best to comply! But I’m glad to be able to report that your prayers for mild weather have been answered; I got up this morning to find the thermometer standing at 52 in my unheated bedroom, in which the window had been wide open all night. Your weather is the sort I hate—or at least like least, for we should’nt hate even the weather. But I confess I don’t enjoy wet snow.

Talking of ships, the epic of the ‘Flying Enterprise’ has played even the Truman-Winston conference off the front page of our diminished dailies: and rightly so.7 The American merchantile marine, and indeed the whole nation must be very proud of their Captain Carlsen. I wonder is a flair for journalism inborn in your people? You must have noticed how good are the reports from the commanders of the U.S.N. destroyers which have been standing by; no professional journalist could have done the thing better. A British naval officer in the same circumstances would be transmitting reports in what we call ‘Whitehall English’ which would make even the ‘Flying Enterprise’ story sound dull.

I like the name of your car; over here we are more aristocratic. My brother’s old Colonel has a car which has been raised to the Peerage under the title of Victor, Viscount Vauxhall, but he is called Vic for short; on the other hand he had an American friend in Shanghai whose car rejoiced in the name of ‘Puddlejumper’.

If you send a letter to Lieutenant-Colonel R. K. Wilson, Royal Artillery, c/o the War Office, Whitehall, London, S.W.I., it should reach him wherever he is, but of course if he is in Korea or some such place, it will take some time to reach him; it would be as well to endorse the envelope ‘Please Forward’ anyway. I’m sorry I can’t be more helpful, but our army is very scattered these days; I saw in the Sunday paper that at any given moment, we have ninety thousand trained troops on board ship, going to or coming from somewhere. As you say, what a muddle. Is this ghastly Korean war never going to end: or are we to spend the rest of our lives running round the Iron Curtain stopping leaks in it?

Yours ever.

C. S. Lewis8

TO SISTER PENELOPE CSMV(BOD):

Magdalen etc.

10/1/52

Dear Sister Penelope

It was, as always, a great pleasure to hear from you. Hearty good wishes and prayers for the new year.

I was very intrigued by the Snow Men last time the story came up (about 15 years ago, was it?) but had hardly noticed its re-occurrence: certainly I am not well enough equipped to write to the Times.9

I have, if not thought, yet imagined, a good deal about the other kinds of Men. My own idea was based on the old problem ‘Who was Cain’s wife?’ If we follow Scripture it wd. seem that she must have been no daughter of Adam’s. I pictured the True Men descending from Seth, then meeting Cain’s not perfectly human descendants (in Genesis vi. 1-4, where I agree with you), interbreeding and thus producing the wicked Antediluvians.10

Oddly enough I, like you, had pictured Adam as being, physically, the son of two anthropoids, on whom, after birth, God worked the miracle which made him Man: said, in fact, ‘Come out—and forget thine own people and thy father’s house’11–the Call of Abraham wd. be a far smaller instance of the same sort of thing, and regeneration in each one of us wd. be an instance too, tho’ not a smaller one. That all seems to me to fit in both historically and spiritually.

I don’t quite feel we shd. gain anything by the doctrine that Adam was a hermaphrodite. As for the (rudimentary) presence in each sex of organs proper to the other, does that not occur in other mammals as well as in humans? Surely pseudo-organs of lactation are externally visible in the male dog? If so there wd. be no more ground for making men (I mean, humans) hermaphroditic than any other mammal. (By the way, what an inconvenience it is in English to have the same word for Homo and Vir).12 No doubt these rudimentary organs have a spiritual significance: there ought spiritually to be a man in every woman and a woman in every man. And how horrid the ones who haven’t got it are: I can’t bear a ‘man’s man’ or a ‘woman’s woman’.

I haven’t read any of the books you mention except Farrer’s Glass of Vision (if that is the Bamptons)13 which I found v. good.14 Have you read Simone Weil’s Waiting on God?15 Erroneous in many ways, but I have rather fallen in love with it. The fragment at the end, about the sons of Noah, wd. interest you especially.

I will order They Shall be My People16 and look forward to it. Congratulations. For my own part, I have been given a year’s leave from all teaching duties to enable me to finish my book on XVIth century literature, so I am plugging away at that as hard as I can. My hope is to kill some popular mythology about that fabulous monster called ‘the Renaissance’. There are five fairy tales already written, of which the second has now appeared.

‘lane’ died almost a year ago, after a long but, thank God, painless illness. I beg you will often pray for her. She was an unbeliever and, in later years, very jealous, exacting, and irascible, but always tender to the poor and to animals.