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

Many minor dissatisfactions, of course. The women are all made up out of a few abstract ideas of jealousy, vanity, maternity etc. But it really matters v. little: the thing is great enough to carry far more faults than it commits. It is a strange comment on our age that such a book lies hid in a hideous paper-backed edition, wholly unnoticed by the cognoscenti, while any ‘realistic’ drivel about some neurotic in a London flat–something that needs no real invention at all, something that any educated man could write if he chose, may get seriously reviewed and mentioned in serious books–as if it really mattered. I wonder how long this tyranny will last? Twenty years ago I felt no doubt that I should live to see it all break up and great literature return: but here I am, losing teeth and hair, and still no break in the clouds.

And now, what do you think? Do you agree that it is AN ABSOLUTE CORKER?257

TO PHYLLIS ELINOR SANDEMAN (W):

Magdalen College

Oxford

Dec 22d 1953

Dear Mrs. Sandeman–

First, you may be quite sure that I realise (I’d be a fool if I didn’t) that there is something in a loss like yours which no unmarried person can understand. Secondly, that nothing I or anyone can say will remove the pain. There are no anaesthetics. About the bewilderment and about the right and wrong ways of using the pain, something may perhaps be done: but one can’t stop it hurting. The worst way of using the pain, you have already avoided: i.e. resentment.

Now about not wanting to pray, surely there is one person you v. much want to pray for: your husband himself.258 You ask, can he help you, but isn’t this probably the time for you to help him. In one way, you see, you are further on than he: you had begun to know God. He couldn’t help you in that way: it seems to me quite possible that you can now help more than while he was alive. So get on with that right away. Our Lord said that man & wife were one flesh and forbade any man to put them asunder:259 and we maybe sure He doesn’t do Himself what He forbade us to do. Your present prayers for yr. husband are still part of the married life.

Then as for your own shock in discovering that you hadn’t got nearly as far as you thought towards loving the God who made your husband & gave him to you more than the gift. Well, no. One keeps on thinking one has crossed that bridge before one has. And God knows that it has to be crossed sooner or later, in this life or in another. And the first step is to discover that one has not crossed it yet. I wonder could He have really shown you this in any other way? Or even if we can’t answer that, can’t we trust Him to know when and how best the terrible operation can be done? Of course it is easy (I know) for the person who isn’t feeling the pain to say all these things. You yourself wd. have been able to say them of anyone else’s loss. Whatever rational grounds there are for doubt, you knew them all before: can it be rational (of course, it is natural) to weight them so differently simply because, this time, oneself is the sufferer? Doesn’t that make it obvious that the doubts come not from the reason but from the shrinking nerves? At any rate, don’t try to argue with them: not now, while you are crippled. Ignore them: go on. Be regular in all your religious duties. Remember it is not being loved but loving wh. is the high & holy thing. You are now practising the second without the full comfort of the first. It was certain from the beginning that you wd. some day have to do this, for no human love passes onto the eternal level in any other way. God knows, many wives have had to learn it by a path harder than even bereavement: having to love unfaithful, drunken, or childish husbands. And have succeeded too: as God succeeds in loving us. May He help you.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO VERA GEBBERT (W): TS

192/53.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

23rd December 1953.

Dear Mrs. Gebbert,

‘Thank heavens’ said my brother, knee deep in Christmas cards and packing paper, ‘here’s something like a real present at last!’ And of course, he was right, though we have so far merely got down to the package: for, like good little boys, we would not for worlds open the box until the morning of the 25th. Thank you very much for your kindness in remembering us. Though the calendar says it is Christmas week, there is nothing about the weather to indicate the fact: still mild, indeed at times warm, and no signs of snow; and I gather that conditions are just the same in eastern America.

My brother was much interested in your recommendation of the Panama Canal route in your last letter, and has often told me of it: he having come by cargo boat from Shanghai to Boston in his army days. He adds that if you ever take a vacation in the Eastern States, you would find it great fun to join the ship at San Pedro, Cal, and go via Panama and the West Indies.

We have not much news here; the chief event has been that last week we entertained a lady from New York for four days, with her boys, aged nine and seven respectively. Can you imagine two crusted old batchelors in such a situation? It however went swimmingly, though it was very, very exhausting; the energy of the American small boy is astonishing. This pair thought nothing of a four mile hike across broken country as an incident in a day of ceaseless activity, and when we took them up Magdalen tower, they said as soon as they got back to the ground, ‘Let’s do it again!’ Without being in the least priggish, they struck us as being amazingly adult by our standards and one could talk to them as one would to ‘grown-ups’–though the next moment they would be wrestling like puppies on the sitting room floor. The highlights of England for them are (a), open coal fires, especially if they can get hold of the bellows and blow it up, and (b), English policemen for whom they keep a smart look-out. The latter they seemed to find even more thrilling than what they call the ‘toy soldiers’, i.e. the Guards in scarlet outside Buckingham Palace. But I am forgetting that to you there is nothing exotic about American small boys, and no doubt at present your interest is concentrated on one American small boy–who I hope is in the best of health and spirits.

Do you know the admirable French word Tohu-bohu? In Scots, a ‘kerfuffle’? Meaning a domestic upsidedownedness which overtakes us all at this season? When it has subsided, I plan to go down to Malvern for a couple of days to prepare myself for the ordeal of the oncoming term with a few walks over the hills.

With all best wishes to you and both the Mr. Gebberts for a happy and a prosperous 1954,

yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO NELL BERNERS-PRICE (W):

Magdalen College

Oxford

Dec 26. 53

Dear Nell

What a lovely card! Please give Penelope my very great thanks. Indeed ‘card’ is the wrong word. You, or she, also included a piece of blotting paper: is this a subtle way of suggesting that some previous letter of mine looked as if I were rather short of that commodity-? Well, anyway, I usually am, and welcome a new piece. I am delighted to hear that Peter is doing so well at school: how proud you must be of him.

My brother and I have just had the experience (a v. rum one for two hardened old bachelors) of an American lady to stay with us accompanied by her two sons, aged 91/2 and 8. Whew! Lovely creatures-couldn’t meet nicer children–but the pace! I realise I have never respected you married people enough and never dreamed of the Sabbath calm wh. descends on the house when the little cyclones have gone to bed and all the grown-ups fling themselves into chairs and the silence of exhaustion.

Christmas is now catching me up too: so far as I can see I have several thousands of letters to answer. Please give my love to all, and best wishes for a good 1954.

Yours

Jack Lewis

TO RHONA BODLE (BOD): 260

Magdalen College

Oxford

Dec 26/53

Dear Miss Bodle

Thanks for yr. most interesting letter. I am delighted to hear of your success in getting some Christian knowledge across to these children. It is wicked that they shd. be so deprived. Even an agnostic who does not believe the stories to be true ought to see that they are, at the very least, part of our common heritage, like Homer and the Arthurian stories.

About re-reading books: I find like you that those read in my earlier ‘teens often have no appeal, but this is not nearly so often true of those read in earlier childhood. Girls may develop differently, but for me, looking back, it seems that the glories of childhood and the glories of adolescence are separated by a howling desert during which one was simply a greedy, cruel, spiteful little animal and imagination, in all but the lowest form, was asleep.

I hope your new house will be very blessed. It was Charles Williams from whom I got the words ‘holy luck’. And now for piles of Christmas letters: many of them, unlike yours, from people I don’t want to write to at all. Every blessing.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO NATHAN COMFORT STARR (W): PC, TS

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

26th December 1953.

Dear Starr,

Yes, Hori did call: an interesting man. Glad you’re home again, and no doubt so are you.

All good wishes from us both for a happy and prosperous New Year.

Yours,

C. S. Lewis

TO MARY VAN DEUSEN (W):

Magdalen College

Oxford

Dec 28th 53

Dear Mrs. Van Deusen

Thanks for yr. letter of the 20th: my congratulations to yr. husband on his interesting work. About Paul, I believe (having been a sickly child myself) that there are compensations. I think that from many minor illnesses in the first 12 years one develops sometimes a certain amount of immunity later on: ones system has had so much practice in dealing with bacilli. It also probably helps to make one a reader: not that there isn’t a danger of falling or sinking too far into the life of the imagination, but a habit of reading is a great source of happiness.

I think someone ought to write a book on ‘Christian life for Laymen under a bad Parish Priest’ for the problem is bound to occur in the best churches. The motto wd. be of course Herbert’s lines about the sermon ‘If all Jack sense, God takes a text and preaches patience’.261

Like you, we suffer (but under a v. good priest) from the virtual extinction of Morning Prayer in favour of an 11 o’clock Celebration.262 But I suppose there is something to be said for it. This is the only ritual act Our Lord commanded Himself. It is the one we can have only thro’ a priest, whereas we can all read Matins to ourselves or our families at home whenever we please. So here I have no difficulty in submission.

Is there not something especially good (and even, in the end, joyful) about mere obedience (in lawful things) to him who bears our Master’s authority, however unworthy he be–perhaps all the more, if he is unworthy? Perhaps we are put under tiresome priests chiefly to give us the opportunity of learning this beautiful & happy virtue: so that if we use the situation well we can profit more, perhaps, than we shd. have done under a better man. I have seen lovely children under not v. nice parents, & good troops under bad officers: and a good dog with a bad master is a lesson to us all. I mean, of course, as long as the bad orders are not in themselves wrong: and attendance at Holy Communion can’t be that!

Yes, we must both go on thinking about the two kinds of prayer. I think the one in Mark xi is for very advanced people: and you point out it was said to the disciples, not to the crowds. All blessings.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO PHYLLIS ELINOR SANDEMAN (W):

Magdalen College

Oxford

Dec 31/53

Dear Mrs Sandeman–

You have of course been much in my prayers since your first letter and today’s seems like an answer to them. I was afraid of some real crack in the structure! Now it is clear that you have to deal only with what we may call a ‘clean pain’.

I can well understand how in addition to, and mingling with, the void and loneliness, there is a great feeling of unprotectedness and a horror of coping with all the things–the harsh, outer world–from which you have hitherto been shielded. I first met this ‘cold blast on the naked heath’263 at about 9, when my Mother died, and there has never really been any sense of security and snugness since. That is, I’ve not quite succeeded in growing up on that point: there is still too much of ‘Mammy’s little lost boy’ about me. Your position is of course v. different, both because dependence on a husband is more legitimate than dependence (after a certain age) on one’s Mother, and also because, at your age, tho’ it will feel just as bad, it is not so likely to go down into the unconscious and produce a trauma. And one sees too (tho’ it sounds brutal to say it) how this miserable necessity of fending for oneself might be an essential part of your spiritual education. I suppose God wants a bit of Imogen and Portia in you, having worked in the Miranda and Perdita part enough264 (it is sometimes helpful to think of oneself as a picture wh. He is painting).

By the way, I share to the full–no words can say how strongly I share–that distaste for everything communal and collective wh. you describe in your husband. I really believe I wd. have come to Christianity much less reluctantly if it had not involved the Church. And I don’t wonder you failed to convince him that that community is perfectly right. It is holy and commanded: not at present (I think) perfect! No doubt he is learning ‘togetherness’ now as you, alas, are learning ‘aloneness’. Both painful lessons: it can so seldom happen that what we need is what we like (for if we liked it we’d have helped ourselves to it already & wouldn’t need it–aren’t children made to eat fat wh. they hate?). You will be all right, Mrs. Sandeman. All will be well in the end, tho’ by hard ways. All earthly loves go thro’ some fire before they can inherit the Kingdom. If it weren’t this, it wd. be some other fire. God bless you. Let us pray for one another.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

P.S. Of course, I’m not obeying your request, ‘Help me to find some comfort in faith again.’ We shan’t find faith by looking for comfort. That’s why, even brutally, I can’t help talking in terms of a work to be done. You are, on my view, being moved into a higher form of the great school and set harder work to do. Comfort will come as you master that work, as you learn more & more to be a channel of God’s grace to your husband (and perhaps to others): not for trying to get back the conditions you had in the lower form.

Keep clear of Psychical Researchers.

1 J. Keith Kyle of the North American Service of the BBC wrote to Lewis on 31 December 1952: ‘The Columbia Broadcasting System with whom the North American Service of the BBC often co-operates…has invited us to assist them with a series called “This I Believe”…It is designed to put on the air a number of statements of personal conviction from “men and women in all stations of life, who have been successful in their chosen profession.” The CBS emphasizes that the contributions should be extremely personal in approach and as they are to be only 3 1/4 minutes in length, complete simplicity is obviously essential.’

2 Pitter gave a lecture entitled ‘A Return to Poetic Law’ to the Royal Institution of Great Britain on 22 February 1952. A copy can be found in the Pitter Papers, Temporary Box, Bodleian Library.

3 Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, First Part, pp. 73-4: ‘I thought again, this Shame tells me what men are; but it tells me nothing what God or the Word of God is. And I thought moreover, That at the day of doom, we shall not be doomed to death or life according to the hectoring spirits of the world, but according to the Wisdom and Law of the Highest. Therefore thought I, what God says, is best, though all the men in the world are against it…But indeed this Shame was a bold villain; I could scarce shake him out of my company; yea, he would be haunting of me, and continually whispering me in the ear, with some one or other of the infirmities that attend Religion; but at last I told him, Twas but in vain to attempt further in this business; for those things that he disdained, in those did I see most glory; And so at last I got past this importunate one.’

4 Since 1930 the Pitter family had owned a cottage in Felsted, Essex, where Ruth taught herself viticulture. The cottage, however, had to be left behind when Ruth and her companion of many years, Kathleen O’Hara, decided to buy a house in the village of Long Crendon, Buckinghamshire. ‘The Hawthorns’ in Chilton Road was set in several acres of garden and orchard, and was within reach of Oxford and London. They moved in shortly before Christmas 1953. Pitter noted: ‘In coming to the neighbourhood of Oxford, of course I had hoped to see a little more of Lewis, of David Cecil, and others, and to attend open lectures, plays, etc. But we could not find anything near enough to make this at all easy’ (Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. lett. c. 220/3, fol. 113).

5 Dorsett, And God Came In, ch. 3, pp. 90-1.

6 ibid., p. 91.

7 This is a reply to a letter from Don Giovanni of 9 January 1953 (?), which appears in Letters: C. S. Lewis-Don Giovanni Calabria, pp. 76-7.

8 There had been a mistake. The article, ‘Responsabilité’–which was not by Don Giovanni Calabria but by Padre Paolo Manna—was published in L’Amico, 8 (Sep.-Oct. 1952), pp. 122-4. The article is reproduced in Una Gioia Insolita, pp. 283-5.

9 Lewis had only recently begun writing the book on prayer mentioned here. He mentioned it to Don Giovanni again in a letter of 17 March 1953, but had abandoned it by the following year (see the letter to Sister Penelope of 15 February 1954). He could not think how to go on with the book until, in the spring of 1963, he found the form for what he wanted to say. The result was Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer (London: Bles, 1964; Fount, 1998).

10 1 Chronicles 13:9-10: ‘And when they came unto the threshingfloor of Chidon, Uzza put forth his hand to hold the ark; for the oxen stumbled. And the anger of the Lord was kindled against Uzza, and he smote him, because he put his hand to the ark: and there he died before God.’

11 Luke 9:62: ‘And Jesus said unto him, No man, having put his hand to the plough, and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God.’

12 In ‘Responsabilità’ Fr Manna pleads for greater recognition of the gravity of Communist persecution of Christians (hospital workers as well as missionaries) in China. He argues that if a Communist (e.g., French Communist Party leader Jacques Duelos) is arrested in the West, the Communists rise in protest. There should be no less an outcry on behalf of victimized missionaries.

13 ‘so far as’; ‘whenever’.

14 i.e., Paolo Manna.

15 Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, Bk. I, ch. 5.

16 i.e., the book on prayer.

17 Matthew 26:39; Mark 14:35.

18 Luke 22:42.

19 Lewis read a paper on this same problem to the Oxford Clerical Society on 8 December 1953. It was published as ‘Petitionary Prayer: A Problem Without an Answer’ in Christian Reflections, ed. Walter Hooper (London: Bles, 1967; Fount, 1998).

20 Eustace and Edmund are characters in the Narnian stories; Jane and Mark Studdock are the married couple in That Hideous Strength.

21 Lewis probably had in mind the last two lines of the title poem of Edna St Vincent Millay’s Renascence, and Other Poems (1925): ‘Ah, awful weight! Infinity/Pressed down upon the finite Me!’

22 Rudolf Steiner.

23 The Rev. Jones B. Shannon was executive director of the Church Society of College Work, Washington, DC.

24 In February 1953 Joy became a member of the Episcopal Church and was confirmed in the Cathedral of St John the Divine, New York.

* This is the beginning of Act V, I suppose?

25 T. H. White, Mistress Masham’s Repose (1946).

26 Mrs Van Deusen, an Episcopalian, was in touch with the Order of the Holy Cross, a Benedictine Anglican monastic order in West Park, New York. The order had suggested she become one of the Associates of Holy Cross. These lay associates lived under a modified form of the Benedictine rule suitable to laymen.

27 James was probably a clergyman Mrs Van Deusen knew.

28 Warnie served for a number of years on the vestry of Holy Trinity Church, Headington Quarry, Oxford. Vestrymen help the churchwardens deal with the temporal affairs of a parish church.

29 George Bernard Shaw.

30 Robert Louis Stevenson, Virginibus Puerisque and Other Papers (1901), ch. 1, ‘Virginibus Puerisque’: ‘Marriage is terrifying, but so is a cold and forlorn old age.’

31 In Charles Williams’s Region of the Summer Stars, ‘P’o-l’u’ is in the Antipodean Ocean. Starr was spending the academic year at Kansai University, Osaka, Japan as a Fulbright Scholar. He was then offered a professorship at the University of Florida in Gainesville, where he stayed until his retirement.

32 William Shakespeare, The Tempest (1623), I, ii, 250-93. Ariel, a spirit of the air, was once the servant of Sycorax, a wicked sorceress who imprisoned him in a ‘cloven pine’ for refusing to fulfil her commands. He was trapped inside the tree for twelve years until Prospero arrived on the island, released him, and bound him to his service.

33 Ray Bradbury, The Silver Locusts (1951).

34 The forty-seven Ronin were Samurai retainers who in 1701 avenged their master’s death by killing his enemy, and then awaiting the death sentence to be passed on them by the government. The act of defying the government, and following instead the way of the Samurai to be faithful to their lord unto death, won them everlasting fame. Every year on 14 December people gather at their graves at Sengakuji Temple in Tokyo.

35 Anthony Boucher was the pseudonym of William Anthony Parker White (1911-68), critic and author. He wrote a column on mystery stories, ‘Criminal at Large’, for the New York Times, 1951-68, and was the editor of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, 1949-58. He is the author of many works of mystery and science fiction, and it was at his suggestion that Lewis contributed two short stories, ‘The Shoddy Lands’ and ‘Ministering Angels’-reprinted in The Dark Tower and Other Stories- to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.

Boucher’s short story, ‘The Quest for St. Aquin’ was first published in New Tales of Space and Time, ed. Raymond J. Healy (New York: Holt, 1951), and ‘The Star Dummy’ was published in Fantastic (Fall 1952). They are reprinted in The Compleat Boucher: The Complete Short Science Fiction and Fantasy of Anthony Boucher (1998).

37 Old Solar for ‘God bless you.’ It is found several times in the last chapter of That Hideous Strength when Ransom blesses those who have fought with him at St Anne’s on the Hill.

* The porter at Holloway Jail told me it was ‘a ladies’ prison’

38 Bodle said of this letter: ‘I had spoken of a girl in my class at Manchester who was intelligent and had a great deal of language as she had acquired it before being deafened. In answer to her anxieties about the remoteness of God I had tried to explain who Christ is and why He had come. Then she herself said with unusual relief “Then Jesus is God”-a conception entirely new to her. I think that I must have been wondering how much of the teaching about Christ I could present with the Gospel story–a problem which I still find very difficult’ (Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. lett. c. 220/4, fols. 248-9).