Collected Letters Volume Two: Books, Broadcasts and War, 1931–1949

THE COLLECTED LETTERS OF C. S. LEWIS

———VOLUME II——— Books, Broadcasts, and the War, 1931–1949 EDITED BY WALTER HOOPER

Copyright

William Collins

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

THE COLLECTED LETTERS OF C. S. LEWIS, VOLUME II: Books, Broadcasts, and the War, 1931–1949. Copyright © 2004 by C. S. Lewis Pte Ltd.

The right of C. S. Lewis to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780006281467

Ebook Edition © JUNE 2009 ISBN: 9780007332663

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CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Preface

Abbreviations

Letters:

Chapter 1 - 1931

Chapter 2 - 1932

Chapter 3 - 1933

Chapter 4 - 1934

Chapter 5 - 1935

Chapter 6 - 1936

Chapter 7 - 1937

Chapter 8 - 1938

Chapter 9 - 1939

Chapter 10 - 1940

Chapter 11 - 1941

Chapter 12 - 1942

Chapter 13 - 1943

Chapter 14 - 1944

Chapter 15 - 1945

Chapter 16 - 1946

Chapter 17 - 1947

Chapter 18 - 1948

Chapter 19 - 1949

Keep Reading

Biographical Appendix

Index

Books By C. S. Lewis

About the Publisher

PREFACE

‘I have just passed on from believing in God to definitely believing in Christ—in Christianity.’1 C. S. Lewis had been an atheist for twenty years, and this was news his boyhood friend Arthur Greeves longed to hear. Arthur pressed him for details, and in the letter of 18 October 1931 with which Volume I of the Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis closed, Lewis described his momentous evening on 19 September when J. R. R. Tolkien and Hugo Dyson dined with him at Magdalen. They strolled through Addison’s Walk and then sat in Lewis’s rooms until 4 a.m. talking about Christianity and its relation to myth. ‘The story of Christ,’ Lewis concluded, ‘is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened.’2

This second volume of letters begins at that point, and the reader soon discovers what a ‘tremendous difference’ conversion to Christianity made in Lewis. In the Family Letters Lewis was struggling to find his voice as a poet; in the letters included in this volume he had, it seems, found many voices. He writes on such a wide range of subjects that some readers will wonder if, perhaps, there was more than one C. S. Lewis.

Owen Barfield,3 the intimate friend whose letters from Lewis run through all three volumes, suggested that there was indeed more than one Lewis. In a piece entitled ‘The Five C. S. Lewises’ Barfield wrote:

A fairly unsophisticated person who had never had any personal contract with Lewis, but who…had read the whole or most of what has been written about him, might be pardoned for wondering if it were not one writer, but three, with whom he was becoming acquainted: three men who just happened to have the same name and the same peculiar vigor of thought and utterance. Such a reader (I will venture to put myself in his shoes) might, to avoid confusion, adopt the nomenclature L1, L2, and L3, L1 being a distinguished and original literary critic, L2 a highly successful author of fiction, and L3 the writer and broadcaster of popular Christian apologetics.4

Barfield went on to point out that one of the first things the ‘unsophisticated person’ would notice is that, while admirers of Lewis the Original Literary Critic usually have little interest in the Lewis the Christian Apologist, readers of both Lewis the Original Literary Critic and Lewis the Christian Apologist are interested in Lewis the Writer of Fiction. Another thing such a person would notice, said Barfield, is that Lewis the Original Literary Critic has received much less attention than the other two Lewises, and that it would hardly be too much to say that the Literary Critic has been ‘swamped’ by the Apologist and the Writer of Fiction.

The other two Lewises mentioned by Owen Barfield are ‘the one before and the other after his conversion’.5 Given that Lewis was now a Christian, how were these four remaining Lewises related? Again I turn to Owen Barfield who knew them longer and probably thought more about them than anyone:

The unity of all these Lewises is to my feeling as impressive, or even more impressive, than their diversity. Others, of course, have drawn attention to it, but I am not sure that anyone has succeeded in locating it. Some have pointed to his ‘style,’ but it goes deeper than that. ‘Consistency?’ Noticeable enough in spite of an occasional inconsistency here or there. His unswerving ‘sincerity’ then? That comes much nearer, but still does not satisfy me. Many other writers are sincere—but they are not Lewis. No. There was something in the whole quality and structure of his thinking, something for which the best label I can find is ‘presence of mind.’ If I were asked to expand on that, I could say only that somehow what he thought about everything was secretly present in what he said about anything.6

While all but the last three letters in Volume I were written by the unconverted Lewis, those in Volume II were written by the convert.

As it turns out, the neglected Original Literary Critic is the first C. S. Lewis to appear in this volume. Lewis would have considered it unconscionable to use his tutorials, lectures and letters as a pulpit for his Christian beliefs, but his conversion to the Faith certainly made a difference, not least to the book he began writing in 1928 and which was published in 1936 as The Allegory of Love: A Study of Medieval Tradition. ‘A believed idea,’ he said, ‘feels different from an idea that is not believed.’7 Or, as he observed in 29 January 1941 to Mary Neylan, once his pupil, ‘One of the minor rewards of conversion is to be able to see at last the real point of all the old literature which we are brought up to read with the point left out!’8

Shortly before The Allegory of Love was published, Oxford University Press had announced that it was undertaking the production of The Oxford History of English Literature in twelve volumes, each the work of a single author. Lewis was persuaded to write the volume on the sixteenth century and although English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama would not be published until 1954, he was labouring over this magisterial work during most of the years the letters in this volume were being written. ‘When they asked me to do that,’ he told one of his students, ‘I was tremendously flattered. It’s like a girl committing herself to marrying an elderly millionaire who’s also a duke. In the end she finally has to settle down with the chap, and it’s a hellish long time before he dies.’9

The next Lewis to appear is Barfield’s Highly Successful Author of Fiction. This volume contains many letters Lewis wrote in response to the wide appeal of his interplanetary trilogy, Out of the Silent Planet (1938), Perelandra (1943) and That Hideous Strength (1945). But just when the tone of the letters suggests that Lewis had written all the fiction he would write, the book concludes with an unexpected ‘twist’.

To understand the unexpectedness of the ‘twist’ it is necessary to summarize Lewis’s relationship to Mrs Janie King Moore up to the end of this book.10 Lewis met Mrs Moore in 1917, shortly after she arrived in Oxford with her eleven-year-old daughter, Maureen.11 Mrs Moore was in Oxford because her son, Edward ‘Paddy’ Moore, was a member of the Officers’ Training Corps billeted in Keble College.12 Lewis began his training with the Officers’ Training Corps at the same time, and he and Paddy shared a room in Keble. Lewis came to know Paddy’s family, and the young men promised each other that if either of them survived the war he would look after Lewis’s father and Paddy’s mother. When their training ended Paddy was sent to France with the Rifle Brigade, and Lewis soon followed with the Somerset Light Infantry. Paddy was killed at Pargny on 24 March 1918, and Lewis was wounded weeks later in the Battle of Arras.

When Lewis returned to Oxford in 1919 to continue his studies at University College, he was joined by Mrs Moore and Maureen who took accommodation in Headington. Mrs Moore, forty-seven at this time, had been separated from her husband since 1908. Thereafter, the ‘family’, as Lewis began to refer to himself and the Moores, lived in numerous rented properties until, in 1930, they bought The Kilns in Headington Quarry.

Roger Lancelyn Green and I pointed out in our biography of Lewis that while his relationship with Mrs Moore ‘may have started with that incomprehensible passion which middle-aged women seem occasionally able to inspire in susceptible youths…it soon turned from the desire for a mistress into the creation of a mother-substitute.’13 Indeed we come across what may be the first reference to Mrs Moore as ‘mother’ in a letter to Sister Penelope of 9 November 1941, in which Lewis asked her to ‘Pray for Jane…She is the old lady I call my mother and live with (she is really the mother of a friend)—an unbeliever, ill, old, frightened, full of charity in the sense of alms, but full of uncharity in several other senses. And I can do so little for her.’14

By the middle of the 1940s Mrs Moore, in her late seventies, was crippled, often in great pain, and in need of constant care. Lewis divided his time between his duties at Magdalen College and nursing his old friend. ‘My mother is old & infirm, we have little and uncertain help, and I never know when I can, even for a day, get away from my duties as a nurse and a domestic servant’,15 Lewis wrote to Lord Salisbury on 9 March 1947. It was not in Lewis’s nature to abandon anyone and by the spring of 1949 the situation was worse. Mrs Moore could hardly be left alone for a minute and Lewis was worn out.

But just when he feared that old age had crept up on him and that his literary impulses were drying up, he began dreaming of lions. Suddenly Aslan, the great royal beast of Narnia, bounded in. ‘Apart from that,’ Lewis said, ‘I don’t know where the Lion came from or why he came. But once He was there He pulled the whole story together, and soon He pulled the six other Narnian stories in after him.’16 This volume ends with Lewis writing to Owen Barfield and the illustrator of Narnia, Pauline Baynes, about one of the best-loved books in the world, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

There is still another C. S. Lewis—‘the writer and broadcaster of popular Christian apologetics’. Following the publication of The Problem of Pain (1940) the BBC’s Director of Religious Broadcasting, the Reverend James W. Welch, wrote to Lewis on 7 February 1941 asking if he would be willing to give a series of radio talks ‘on something like “The Christian Faith As I See It”’. From this came the four series of talks eventually published as Mere Christianity. There has never been anything like them. Of the many reasons for their success, one must be simply that Lewis believed the Gospel to be true. And because true, therefore important. ‘Christianity is a statement,’ said Lewis, ‘which, if false, is of no importance, and, if true, of infinite importance. The one thing it cannot be is moderately important.’17

Everything the three ‘Lewises’ wrote is immensely readable, but the BBC broadcasts taught him to translate complicated truths into the vernacular. ‘Any fool can write learned language,’ Lewis once observed, ‘The vernacular is the real test. If you can’t turn your faith into it, then either you don’t understand it or you don’t believe it.’18 But Lewis knew that no vernacular lasts forever, and one of the most valuable letters in this book is his reply to Canon John Beddow of 7 October 1945. Beddow, struck by the success of Lewis’s radio broadcasts, asked him to ‘translate’ some writings for the Christian Workers’ Union. ‘People praise me as a “translator”’, Lewis replied, ‘but what I want is to be the founder of a school of “translation”. I am nearly forty-seven. Where are my successors?’19

Where indeed? While we wait in hope for them to appear, we rejoice in Lewis’s theological legacy. It is breathtaking that during the war, when he had so much else to do, Lewis provided the Western world with its primary body of modern Christian apologetics—The Problem of Pain (1940), The Screwtape Letters (1942), The Abolition of Man (1943), Mere Christianity (1942–4), The Great Divorce (1946) and Miracles (finished in 1945, published in 1947).

We may now add to this list Lewis’s theological letters, most of which appear here for the first time, or at least for the first time in their entirety. Lewis was annoyed when he saw how many letters he received as a result of his first radio talks. On 25 February 1942 he complained to Eric Fenn, the director of his broadcasts, ‘I wrote 35 letters yesterday…It “gets one down”—not to mention postage.’ This fretfulness ended as quickly as it began: Lewis realized that if you publish a book you are responsible for its consequences. As more and more people turned to him for help he saw it as a clear duty to help them, and letter-writing thus became a valuable aspect of his apostolate. Thereafter Lewis answered nearly all letters by return of post. When one considers what a large part of the letters in this volume are replies to those who wrote to him about his books it must seem that Lewis spent more time replying to their letters than writing the books themselves.

In this he was given great help by his devoted brother, Warnie Lewis. Warnie had acquired a portable Royal typewriter many years before and, while he never advanced beyond the hunt-and-peck system with two fingers, he did it well. He came to the job of being his brother’s secretary well qualified; between 1933 and 1935 he had typed the 3,000-odd pages that make up the unpublished ‘Memoirs of the Lewis Family: 1850–1930’, or the ‘Lewis Papers’ as they are known. While we cannot be certain when Warnie began helping his brother, the first of his typed letters to appear in the Collected Letters is that to Eric Fenn of 30 November 1942.

C. S. Lewis—Jack—did not dictate his letters to Warnie, but using a kind of shorthand the brothers both knew—‘cd’ for ‘could’, ‘wd’ for ‘would’, ‘shd’ for ‘should’ etc.—he scribbled his reply on to whatever letter he was answering, after which Warnie typed it. Lewis used the same abbreviations in many of the letters written in his own hand, but with the difference that he could do it faster if Warnie was his only reader. In Lewis’s correspondence with Dorothy L. Sayers, for instance, a number of his replies are written on her letters. As an example, the typed letter to Sayers of 14 December 1945 is exactly as Lewis wrote it for Warnie to copy. Because Warnie looked after the posting of his brother’s letters, Jack could rely on him to add technical information. On 4 January 1946 Dorothy L. Sayers asked Lewis to return the copy of an essay she had sent him. In his draft reply of 7 February Lewis began, ‘I enclose the MS…’, which words Warnie altered to read: ‘I forward the MS as a registered packet by this post’. The remainder of the letter is exactly as Lewis dashed it off on the letter from Sayers. The typed letters to Sayers of 7 August 1946, 5 June 1947, and 1 January 1949 are exactly as Lewis scribbled them.

Warnie was especially useful in replying to some of the many people who sent parcels of food during and after the war. These generous folk had a special place in Warnie’s heart, not least because he and the other Inklings shared that food. Some of Jack’s replies to them, if not written entirely by Warnie, contained passages by him. A number of instances appear in the letters to Edward A. Allen and his mother of Westfield, Massachusetts. This passage in the letter to Mr Allen of 10 August 1948 was almost certainly written by Warnie; as Jack did not read newspapers it is unlikely he would have known that Paul Gray Hoffman was the administrator of the Marshall Plan:

I quite agree with you that Mr. Hoffman has a man size job in front of him; he has so far as I can judge, made a good impression so far, which is a big start. And I feel that the task is being tackled in the right way, i.e. insistance on Europe helping itself, not merely standing by to collect American money…20

This did not mean that Jack did not care what went into these letters, but his brother was able to make the replies more interesting and informative. After replying to people like the Allens over a period of years, C. S. Lewis let it be known that the letters were a joint production. On a few occasions Warnie even signed his brother’s name for him, although Jack himself signed all the letters to Edward A. Allen in this volume. Mr Allen was one of the American friends to whom Warnie continued to write after Jack died.

In 1944, Warnie began evolving a ‘system’ for dealing with the correspondence, although its workings are not easy to follow and it appears to have changed form more than once over the years. Beginning with the letter to J. S. A. Ensor of 26 February 1944, he gave most letters a reference number, ‘REF. 55/44’. The number probably means this was the 55th letter Warnie typed in 1944, and we later find that ‘55’ has become Mr Ensor’s reference number, one that appears on all correspondence to him. But this did not hold true for all Lewis’s correspondents. His first letters to Dorothy L. Sayers bear the reference number ‘231’, but thereafter the number changed every year.

The Lewis brothers were not good spellers. Warnie—who kept a diary for fifty years—joked that he was never sure whether he kept a ‘diary’ or a ‘dairy’. I should mention that his most characteristic error concerned contractions. He spelled, for instance, ‘can’t’ as ‘ca’nt’ and ‘couldn’t’ as ‘could’nt’, although at least he was consistent. His spelling, and that of his brother, has been retained throughout.

I mentioned in the Preface to Volume I that, following his brother’s death, Warnie set out to write a biography of Jack to be called ‘C. S. Lewis: 1898–1963’. However, instead of an account of his brother’s life containing occasional quotations from his letters, the book was mostly quotation. The publishers objected, and in the end most of Warnie’s narrative was gathered into a ‘Memoir’ attached to what became Letters of C. S. Lewis (1966; revised and enlarged edition, 1988). Warnie was very hurt, not least because the publishers failed to include the dedication—‘To Those Overseas Friends Who Helped Him In the Lean Years’—which was added to the edition of 1988.

Shortly after I came to know Warnie in January 1964 I began helping him copy the letters from his brother which people were sending back to him as he prepared his biography. If there was a method of photocopying in Oxford neither of us knew about it, and so we could not make exact copies. Since I feared we might never see the letters again, I copied every word of the letters Warnie assigned me. But because Warnie believed himself to be writing a biography of his brother, he typed only the parts he intended to include in his book, after which he returned the letters to their recipients.

It is impossible to imagine a more courteous man than Warnie, and when some female correspondents asked him to keep their identities secret, he more than complied. He provided them with fictitious names which even now, years after their deaths, cannot be penetrated. And with their identities went their addresses. The identities of a few of these correspondents have since been revealed: Mary Neylan let it be known that she was the recipient of some of the letters addressed ‘To a Lady’ in the Letters of 1966, and it has come to light that the late Mrs Mary Van Deusen was ‘Mrs Arnold’ of the 1966 Letters. But we still do not know who ‘Mrs Ashton’ is and cannot discover if her letters from Lewis have survived. The result is that in a few instances the only copy of a letter (or part of a letter) we have is the one found in Letters of C. S. Lewis or in Warnie’s typescript of ‘C. S. Lewis: 1898–1963’. When this happens the location of the original letter is given as given as ‘L’—Letters of C. S. Lewis—or ‘WHL’—the unpublished typescript of ‘C. S. Lewis: 1898–1963’, copies of which are held in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, and the Wade Center, Wheaton College, Wheaton, Illinois.

As with Volume I of the Collected Letters, I have provided the name of the person to whom a letter is addressed followed by the place where the reader can consult the original. The list of abbreviations reveals that ‘Bod’ means the Bodleian Library, ‘W’ the Wade Center, and so on. The Bodleian and the Wade Center have a reciprocal arrangement which means that each receives copies of what the other acquires. It was my intention to include in this volume all Lewis’s existing letters from the period 1931–49, but—inevitably-I learned of a few when it was too late for them to go in. However, HarperCollins are making provision for Volume III to include a supplement containing letters omitted from the first two volumes.

The letters in Volume I were addressed primarily to family members or close friends, and because most were very important in Lewis’s life I felt I should provide substantial biographies of them in a Biographical Appendix. During the period covered by Volume II Lewis was writing to a greatly enlarged circle of correspondents, and I have included substantial biographies of close friends, such as Sister Penelope, as well as shorter biographies of associates and various prominent or otherwise interesting people whose details were too long to be included merely as footnotes.

During the forty years I have been editing the writings of C. S. Lewis I have rarely needed so much help as I have with this volume. It is one thing to edit a single ‘C. S. Lewis’, quite another to edit three! I make the claim Lewis made in The Allegory of Love—that of standing on the shoulders of giants. The first is Dr Francis Warner who was Lewis’s last pupil, and whom Lewis described as ‘the best mannered man of his generation I have ever met’.21 Nothing could be truer, and no one has given me as much encouragement as he. Other giants are Professor Emrys Jones and Dr Barbara Everett who are responsible for identifying most of Lewis’s quotations from English literature.