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

TO THE PRIME MINISTER’S SECRETARY (P):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

[4 December] 1951

I feel greatly obliged to the Prime Minister, and so far as my personal feelings are concerned this honour would be highly agreeable. There are always however knaves who say, and fools who believe, that my religious writings are all covert anti-Leftist propaganda, and my appearance in the Honours List would of course strengthen their hands. It is therefore better that I should not appear there. I am sure the Prime Minister will understand my reason, and that my gratitude is and will be none the less cordial.

TO EDWARD A. ALLEN (W): TS

REF.25/51.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

6th December 1951.

My dear Mr. Allen,

As I entered my rooms this morning I was cheered by the sight of a parcel, so admirably packed, that I did’nt have to look at the label to see who was the kind friend who had sent it. How do you do it? I’ve been trying for years to learn how to make up a package, and still have’nt progressed sufficiently in the art to produce one that I would trust to cross the street. I need hardly say how grateful I am to you for it, coming as it does at a moment when the new government—very rightly by the way—has refused to woo the electors by playing Father Christmas with a food bonus.

It appears from information given in Parliament that Labour’s food gifts to the country in December were really only available by cutting the rations in other months, and this Churchill does’nt propose to do. But what a mess the world is in, is’nt it? In some respects you must feel it even worse than we do; you are of course better off materially, but we at least have’nt a full-scale war on our hands. And one to which I can’t see any end, for I take it that if peace is made in Korea—which does’nt look very likely—it will merely be the prelude to an attack on France in Indo-China or ourselves in Malaya. But we can’t do anything about it except pray, so there is no use in grumbling.

After the wettest November on record, with floods all down the Thames valley, we have settled down into a crisp December, and are enjoying it. There is of course the usual coal shortage, but that does’nt worry us much, for we have a good deal of timber about the place, and my brother and I do our own coal mining with axe and saw. So do the neighbours, drat ‘em, but its impossible to patrol the place day and night; but as King Louis XV used to say, ‘things as they are will last out my time’.

With all best wishes to you and your mother for a happy Christmas from both of us, and with very many thanks,

yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO VERA MATHEWS (W): TS

RER64/51.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

12th December 1951.

Dear Miss Mathews,

Many thanks for your letter of the 8th:–

Texas certainly does’nt sound attractive, but you seem to have got some enjoyment out of it; my brother says he has an idea that this is the one which calls itself the Lone Star State , and that its inhabitants–like the Scots and the Jews—are always making up good stories against themselves, e.g. that when America entered the war, Texas wired the President ‘Texas joins with U.S.A. in fight for freedom’.

Yes, we have been exceedingly lucky (in more senses than one) over your parcels, and the customs took no notice of the things you mention; I think with all articles they take the view that as long as you are not making a business of it, a little of this that or the other thing may now be passed. But this is only a guess, I really don’t know.

Of course I’ll try my hand at commenting on a short story, but don’t attach much importance to what I say. I’ve never had any professional (i.e. academical) connection with modern literature, and the short story is a genre I’m particularly bad on. That is, I accept the job, not because I can do it, but because you have such high claim to anything we can even try to do.

With all best wishes from us both to you both for a happy Christmas and a prosperous New Year,

yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

P.S. My brother asks me to add that he too looks forward to seeing the story, and that unfortunately he does’nt know India at all; he was once under orders to go there for five years, but with his usual ingenuity, managed to persuade the War Office to send him to West Africa for twelve months instead.

TO WARHELD M. FIROR(BOD):

Magdalen College,

Oxford Dec.

20th 1951

My dear Firor

How the years flick past at our time of life: don’t they: like telegraph posts seen from an express train: and how they crawled once, when the gulf between one Christmas and another was too wide almost for a child’s eye to see across. If ever I write a story about a long-liver, like Haggard’s She or the Wandering Jew 159 (and I might) I shall make that point. The first century of his life will, to the end, seem to him longer than all that have followed it: the Norman Conquest, the discovery of America and the French Revolution are all muddled up in his mind as recent events.

My year ‘off’ has been, as it was meant to be, so far a year of very hard work, but mostly congenial. The book really begins to look as if it might be finished in 1952 and I am, between ourselves, pleased with the manner of it—but afraid of hidden errors. In that way I rather envy you for being engaged in empirical inquiry where, I suppose, mistakes rise up in the laboratory and proclaim themselves. But a mistake in a history of literature walks in silence till the day it turns irrevocable in a printed book and the book goes for review to the only man in England who wd. have known it was a mistake. This, I suppose, is good for one’s soul: and the kind of good I must learn to digest. I am going to be (if I live long enough) one of those men who was a famous writer in his forties and dies unknown—like Christian going down into the green valley of humiliation. 160 Which is the most beautiful thing in Bunyan and can be the most beautiful thing in life if a man takes it quite rightly–a matter I think and pray about a good deal. One thing is certain: much better to begin (at least) learning humility on this side of the grave than to have it all as a fresh problem on the other. Anyway, the desire wh. has to be mortified is such a vulgar and silly one.

Most of us are v. much cheered by having got rid of the Labour government and at finding that we have done so without yet plunging into a period of strikes and sedition and ‘cold’ revolution, which we feared. There are some, not Labour, who feel quite differently. Have you ever heard of Captain Bernard Acworth R. N., a distinguished submarine commander in World War I and v. good Christian of the Evangelical type—but his head absolutely buzzing with Bees? He was with me the other day explaining that the whole American-English-UNO 161 set up is absolutely fatal and part of a plot engineered (so far as I cd. make out) by the Kremlin, the Vatican, and Jews, the Freemasons and–subtlest foe of all—the Darwinians. So I suppose you must be in it too. But there was a core of rationality in it. He thinks our strategy ought to be purely naval, that we can ruin ourselves by trying to keep up an army in Europe and, even so, cannot succeed on those lines.

Have you given up visiting these parts? I (and others) have a very warm memory of your one descent upon Oxford and would greatly welcome another. You are a naturally mobile organism, you know, unlike me. Whether you come or not, all very best wishes and, as always, hearty thanks. I’m sorry for the handwriting: the harder I try, the worse it gets now-a-days.