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

The ‘Antiparody’ (a word we need) of the Lord’s Prayer in Star Dummy was very fine.

Thank you v. much for the year of F & S F. I hope there will be plenty of your work in it.

If you are ever in England or I in U.S.A. we must most certainly meet and split a CH3 CH2 OH together. Urendi Maleldil.37

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO MARY VAN DEUSEN (W): TS

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

5th February 1953.

Dear Mrs. Van Deusen,

I am writing to Genia, and you have my deepest sympathy. Of course you all have my prayers. No doubt by this time you have had my answer to your last letter.

Yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO GEOFFREY BLES (BOD): TS

REF.28/53.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

6th February 1953.

My dear Bles,

Thanks for the highly satisfactory statement and the cheque for £793-12-3.1 would like very much to come up to lunch and go through the new illustrations when they arrive.

We are both pretty well thanks: I had no more of the ‘flu than could be settled by a week-end of aspirin and early hours. I hope you have both been equally fortunate. How many more false springs are we to have before the real one?

Yours,

C. S. Lewis

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’.* 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): 38

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?’39

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?40

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):41

Magdalen College

Oxford

Feb. 14th [?] 1953

Dear Mr. Clarke

I hope I shd. not be deterred by the danger!42 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): 43

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.44 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.45 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’.46 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.47 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 Armadale48 and we enjoyed it very much. One can see, no doubt, why it is so much less popular than the famous two.49 The ‘common reader’ is right. It has no characters to compare with Fosco50 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’51 (p. 30-a smashing blow from the shoulder, that!) or ‘supreme surrender and a supreme assumption of responsibility’ (p. 83).52 That I believe is entirely new and of immense importance.

Since you can write like that, then, though of course exactly the same type wouldn’t do, you must introduce the same precision into your factual works.

We’ve never talked about Aylwin53 have we? I don’t know it.

Something funny has happened to the spelling of Danae and Pasiphae on p. 79.54 I suppose you assumed that [because] Lat. æ (dipthong) = Gr αι in some places, it therefore does in all. But in those two fem. names the ē (η) is the ordinary fem. ending as in Phoebē and the preceding a has nothing to do with the matter.

Give my love and duty to June.

I’ve nearly finished the last chronicle.55

Yours ever

Jack

Dănăe but Mōīrāī

TO CLIFFORD W. STONE (BOD): 56

Magdalen College

Oxford, England

Feb. 27. 1953

Dear Mr. Stone

Thank you very much for Report from Paradise which turned up a few days ago.57 I read it always with amusement and at times with deep interest. Of course one mustn’t expect from it the edge and force of a story on the same subject either by a real believer or a real militant sceptic like Anatole France: but within its limits it is good. How v. unexpected that Mark Twain of all people shd. tell us at such length that Heaven is not egalitarian. That raised my opinion of his insight. And what a light it casts on his religious upbringing that all the great ones of his Heaven are from the Old Testament–prophets and patriarchs, not a word about apostles and martyrs!

I met his work first in a very funny way-reading the Yankee at the Court of K. Arthur58 as a small boy simply and solely for the sake of the Arthurian stuff in it and ignoring the satiric or burlesque elements. Only years later did I come to know & love the great work–by wh. I mean Huckleberry Finn.

With v. many thanks and all good wishes.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO ARTHUR GREEVFS (BOD):

Magdalen College

Oxford

Feb 27. 53

My dear Arthur

I wd. love to come away with you this year again but it couldn’t be earlier than last year. I have been put on to examine this year which will keep me busy at Oxford into the first week of August. My jaunt with W. could be made to come after my jaunt with you instead of before it if you wish, I expect. I hope this doesn’t spoil things for you?

Someone has given me Armadale. It is clearly not so good as the famous two but well worth reading.

I’m in such pain with sinusitis today I can’t think straight: so if any of this letter doesn’t make sense you’ll understand! I’m not lecturing at Queen’s.

Yours

Jack

TO GEOFFREY BLES (BOD):

Magdalen College

Oxford

ii/iii/53

My dear Bles

I return the drawings59 which I think the best set Miss Baynes has done for us yet. There is, as always, exquisite delicacy: and I think the faces (human faces) are greatly improved. It is difficult to find 10 that one wd. willingly reject. The ones I suggest for omission are:

6. ‘She found she could lie on her back.’ No real sense of wind in it. Her hair ought to be blowing straight forward. 8. ‘Leaning one hand’ etc.

10. The poet. Not our idea of a blind bard at all!

17. The stone-throwing giants. Has its merits, but the travellers ought to be carrying packs, not parcels in their hands like trippers!

36. The gnome. I think better of this than you do but he is too like a human brat out of Dickens’s London, and since we must cut some, this is a good candidate.

39. The Dance. Her dances are usually lovely, but this is not one of her best.

42. The Centaurs.

43. Ruined by the utterly un-numinous, foreshortened Asian in the background. (I wish you, who live in town, wd. take an afternoon off and conduct Miss Baynes round the Zoo! In quadrupeds claudicat.)60

That’s as many as I can find it in my heart to turn down.

In 19, could the shield be painted out in Chinese White & then obliterated? Knights didn’t wear shields on the right arm.

2 wd. be lovely in colour if it cd. be afforded.

You will hear with mixed feelings that I have just finished the seventh & really last of the Narnian stories. That means there are 3 more. Are you still game? If so, tell me when to send you the next.

The Book of Prayer makes some progress: and will, I hope, make more when term and ill-health are over. As some deaf people suffer from head-noises, I, who cannot now smell anything in the outer world, suffer from nose-smells. I live in a stench: like one of the nastier circles in Dante. Phew! Good apothecary, an ounce of Civet to sweeten my imagination.61 No doubt it is an allegory. My kindest regards to both of you.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO HERBERT PALMER (TEX):

Magdalen College,

Oxford

3/iii/53

My dear Palmer

Alas, I wd. be perfectly useless.62 When I first began to sell I had the idea that this would give my opinion about other people’s books some weight with publishers. I was soon undeceived. Never once in my whole career has any publisher taken my advice about a book–except, of course, when he had asked for it. I suspect it is a principle with them. ‘Do not let your Authors act as volunteer Readers.’ It is even possible that such volunteered recommendations do harm. I do sympathise deeply with you.

And there’s no sign yet of the present dark dynasty weakening. Not that the modern kind of poet is read except by a coterie: but he somehow keeps the rest of you out. With much regret & affection.

Yours always

C. S. Lewis

TO ROGER LANCELYN GREEN (BOD): TS

REF.162/53.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

3rd March 1953.

Dear Roger,

Alas, I shall be at Malvern in Easter week. Did you know that slithy was a word long before Lewis Carroll?63 I found it in Bunyan:64 but see N.E.D.65

Love to both of you.

Yours,

Jack

TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE (W):

Magdalen College

Oxford

4/iii/53

Dear Mrs. Shelburne

Thank you for your letter of Feb. 26 wh. arrived today. I think the poem succeeds and has both the lightness and massiveness you wanted. I’m not quite sure about his in 1. 7. It gives the effect of being put in only to fill the line. In so far as you pass from God simply to ‘our God’ I think you’re weakening the very effect you want at that moment. But I don’t know how to mend it: diagnosis is often easier than cure. ‘Majestic shapes more formidably fair’ is a most august line. (Old Solar grammar a bit weak. Eldila is the true plural: but you can Anglicise it as eldils?)66

I am delighted that yr. lecturer approved my angels. I was v. definitely trying to smash the 19th century female angel. I believe no angel ever appears in Scripture without exciting terror: they always have to begin by saying ‘Fear not’.67 On the other hand the Risen Lord excites terror only when mistaken for a ghost, i.e. when not recognised as risen. For we are in one most blessed sense nearer to Him than to them: partly of course because He has deigned to share our humanity, but partly, I take it, because every creature is nearer to its creator than it can be to superior creatures. By the way, none of my Eldila wd. be anything like so high up the scale as Cherubim & Seraphim. Those orders are engaged wholly in contemplation, not with the ruling the lower creatures. Even the Annunciation was done by–if I may so put it!-a ‘mere archangel’. Did your lecturer point out my heavy debt to Ezekiel?68

Of course I knew you weren’t asking for a copy of a ‘First’: but I wanted to explain why I was not offering one–quite a different matter!

I also am having a kind of flu’ that seems never to get beyond early convalescence, tho’ nothing like so acute as yours. For that, and also else, deepest sympathy. Let us continue to pray for each other.

Yours most sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO GEOFFREY BLES (BOD): TS

REF.28/53.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

4th March 1953.

My dear Bles,

This is awkward. I am struggling along at present with sinusitis and the kind of ‘walking’ ‘flu by dint of getting up late and going to bed early and doing as little as I possibly can.

A day in London, even tho’ soothed by your Apician**69hospitality, would knock me up. How long can you afford to wait without serious inconvenience? Or would it be safe to send them by registered post. Sorry to be a nuisance, but I’m the ghost of a man at present. And thanks, and love to both,

yours,

C. S. Lewis

TO W. K. SCUDAMORE (W): 70

Magdalen College

Oxford

lO/iii/53

Dear Mr. Gardamole71

Thank you for your most interesting letter. Your explanation produced–I was going to say ‘complete conviction’, but as you rightly say, one can never be certain that any interpretation of an image in C.W. is complete. But I shall be v. surprised if the Druidical sacrifice is not the master key. I now think I was rather stupid not to have seen it before. My copy of Taliessin is out of the house and I am in College to the end of the week, so I can’t look up any of the passages, and therefore can’t help about the worshipped Duke. Could it be Aeneas? With many thanks.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO W. K. SCUDAMORE (W):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

13/iii/53

There are few names I wd. so regret having mangled!72 But when a man rides (or writes) with his beaver down-! C.S.L.

On 16 March Warnie wrote to Arthur Greeves: 73

Magdalen College, Oxford. 16th March 1953.

My dear Arthur,

What between sinus and examinations, poor Jack is sunk fathoms deep this morning. However, we talked over your letter of the 11th last night, and he has asked me to ask you whether Saturday 29th August to Saturday 12th September would suit you for the jaunt: to which he is very eagerly looking forward. These dates are tentative, so if you don’t like them, please say so. But let us know as soon as possible, as it is part of a ‘master plan and we have all kinds of other things to make fit in with it.

Incidentally, if the dates suit, I hope to be with J. at Craw-fordsburn for a few days before you and he set out, and am looking forward to more than one meeting with you. I daresay amongst other things, we may be having a supper with our Jane,74 and a drive home across the Holywood hills.

Love to Lily, Janie, and any others of my old friends you meet; and kindest regards to those good Samaritans, your neighbours and relations, who gave us drinks that Sunday morning.

Can you forsee any end to this winter?

Yours ever,

Warren

TO GEOFFREY BLES (BOD):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

17/iii/53

My dear Bles

I don’t feel as you do about the alteration of it and he, but I will be guided by your advice.75 That is, I will try to normalise on he throughout (tho’ a few it’s are sure to slip through by infirmity). Don’t blame me if this means heavier corrections than usual!

I see I must write a treatise on the aesthetics of gender!76

I’m a bit better, thanks. At least, the smell is.

Yours,

C. S. Lewis

TO DON GIOVANNI CALABRIA (V):

Magdalen College

Oxford

Mart, xvii MCMLIII