Clive Lewis - Collected Letters Volume Three - Narnia, Cambridge and Joy 1950–1963

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO RUTH PITTER(BOD): TS

REF.23/51.

Magdalen College,

6th January 1951

Dear Miss Pitter,

No, don’t! I mean don’t waste a copy on me. Contemporary pictures be blowed! It sounds horrible: the Ugly Duchess with a vengeance.

Incidentally, what is the point of keeping in touch with the contemporary scene? Why should one read authors one does’nt like because they happen to be alive at the same time as oneself? One might as well read everyone who had the same job or the same coloured hair, or the same income, or the same chest measurements, as far as I can see. I whistle, and plunge into the tunnel of term.

Yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO PAULINE BAYNES (BOD): 5 TS

RER20/51.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

8th January 1951.

Dear Miss Baynes,

My idea was that the map should be more like a medieval map than an Ordnance Survey–mountains and castles drawn—perhaps winds blowing at the corners—and a few heraldic-looking ships, whales and dolphins in the sea. 6 Asian gazing at the moon would make an excellent cover design (to be repeated somewhere in the book; but do as you please about that.)

My brother once more joins me in all good wishes.

Yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

You didn’t keep me a bit too long and I shd. have been v. glad if you’d stayed longer. I was hurried (I hope, not rudely so) only because I didn’t want to be left with a long vacancy between your departure and the next train).

TO SHELDON VANAUKEN (BOD):

Magdalen College

Oxford

8/1/51

Dear Mr. Van Auken

Look: the question is not whether we should bring God into our work or not. We certainly should and must: as MacDonald says ‘All that is not God is death.’ 7 The question is whether we should simply (a.) Bring Him in in the dedication of our work to Him, in the integrity, diligence, & humility with which we do it or also (b.) Make His professed and explicit service our job. The A vocation rests on all men whether they know it or not: the B vocation only on those who are specially called to it. Each vocation has its peculiar dangers & peculiar rewards. Naturally, I can’t say which is yours.

When I spoke of danger to your academic career on a change of subject I was thinking chiefly of time . If you can get an extra year, it wd. be another matter. I was not at all meaning that ‘intellectual history’ involving Theology wd. in itself he academically a bad field of research.

I shall at any time be glad to see, or hear from you.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TOP. H. NEWBY(BBC): 8

C4/HT/PHN

Magdalen College

Oxford

11/1/51

Dear Mr. Newby

I don’t think I’d care to do a Work in Progress on my OHEL volume. 9 I am hoping to drop rather a bomb by that book and don’t want to give too many warnings. Thanks for asking me.

Yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO WILLIAM L. KINTER (BOD): 10

Magdalen College

Oxford

14/1/51

Dear Mr. (or Professor?) Kinter

The title of my children’s book (by the way, it is a single story not a collection) is The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and the American edition is by Macmillan N. Y The only printed verse of mine outside the Regress (and a very early volume wh. I don’t want remembered) 11 is a poem called Dymer , recently reprinted with a new preface by Dents. 12 It first appeared in 1926 (I think—I’m weak on dates): also in Punch , over the signature N.W. (= Nat. Whilk = O.E. nát hwylc) several short pieces wh. are chiefly experiments in internal rhyme and consonance—not to be read unless you have strong metrical interests.

An amusing question whether my trilogy 13 is an epic! Clearly, in virtue of its fantastic elements, it cd. only be an epic of the Ariosto type. 14 But I shd. call it a Romance myself: it lacks sufficient roots in legend and tradition to be what I’d call an epic. Isn’t it more the method of Apuleius, Lucian and Rabelais, but diverted from a comic to a serious purpose?

No, I certainly didn’t know about the dissertation on Bernardus. And I’ve lost my own copy of the text! 15

With many thanks & good wishes. Be sure and look me up if you’re ever rash enough to visit this conquered island.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO EDWARD A. ALLEN (W): TS

REF.25/51.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

18th January 1951.

My dear Mr. Allen,

If when you first began to keep us afloat I had known that your kindness was going to continue over a number of years, I would have kept a record of your parcels; the number must now run into scores, and the weight into hundredweights! How do you do it? As I said once before, it is not so much your generosity as your hard work which impressed me; if the case was reversed, I hope I should try to behave to you and Mrs. Allen as you have done to me. But I should draw the line at coming home from my job and settling down to packing! (Anyway, I could’nt do it, being one of those whose fingers are all thumbs). Both the 11th and 12th December parcels have come in, and we are both very grateful for them.

They have I’m afraid been here a few days, but it is the beginning of the term, and my brother has only just got up after an attack of ‘flu, which has put us all behindhand. This is one of the worst influenza years we have had for a long time, and is in fact a battle on two fronts; one ‘wave’ of the disease coming over from Norway, and the other working north across France from the Mediterranean. Different types too, which is not making the doctor’s work any easier. In the north it is so bad that work at the port of Liverpool is held up, and they are burying people by night, as in the plague days. This does nothing to dissipate the gloom with which we, and no doubt you too, regard the prospects for 1951.

The brightest spot so far in the year has been the tonic of Eisenhower’s arrival: 16 who is proving himself no mean diplomatist, and has won golden opinions wherever he has been. I see that even in Italy the hostile reception engineered for him by the Communists was a complete fiasco. He was made a freeman of the City of London at the end of the war, and there he made a big hit by talking of his ‘fellow Londoners’–and by recognizing and shaking hands with the chauffeur who had driven him during the war. Little things of course, but the little things count. I must say I don’t envy him his job though; not even Eisenhower can hold the Russians unless he is provided with an army, and the army still seems to be in the committee stage.

A small letter is a mighty poor return for two large parcels: but pupils are already knocking at the door, and I must get to work.

With many thanks and all the best wishes to you and your mother for 1951,

yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

Janie King Moore died at the Restholme Nursing Home, Oxford, on 12 January 1951. She was buried in the churchyard of Holy Trinity Church, Headington Quarry, in the same grave as her friend Alice Hamilton Moore. 17

TO SARAH NEYIAN (W): TS

RER60/51.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

26th January 1951.

My dear Sarah

I am 100% with you about Rider Haggard. You know he wrote a sequel to She told by Holly, and called Ayesha; She and Alan , told by A. Quartermain: and Wisdom’s Daughter told by She herself. 18 What comes out from reading all four is that She was (as Job assumed) a dreadful liar. A. Quartermain was the only man who wasn’t taken in by her. She is the best story of the four, though not the best written. A missionary told me that he had seen a little ruined Kxaal where the natives told him a white witch used to live who was called She-who-must-be-obeyed. Rider Haggard had no doubt heard this too, and that is the kernel of the story.