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

I can quite understand that your brief English life will sometimes seem a mere entracte in your N.Z. life. But it doesn’t matter what it seems (emotionally & imaginatively) so long as what happened to you in England is operative in your will, both at work and elsewhere. But of course you know this. All good wishes. You (and that unnamed colleague of yours) are always in my prayers.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO MARG-RIETTE MONTGOMERY (W): TS

REF.52/248.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

16th December 1952.

Dear Miss Montgomery,

Thanks for the cutting, and for the picture of the charming little church. But you ought to know more about the Father than the Galaxy! Our Lord said ‘He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father’, 301 but also ‘My Father is greater than I’, 302 and St. Paul said ‘He is not far from any one of us’. 303 Don’t let the Anthros turn it all into a fog for you. You know better. All good wishes.

Yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO CLYDE S. KILBY (W): 304 TS

REF52/509.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

17th December 1952.

Dear Mr. Kilby,

Thank you for your very kind and encouraging letter of the 10th. It would give me pleasure to meet you during your visit to Oxford, and I shall expect to hear from you more definitely when your plans are settled. So far as can be foreseen at the moment, I shall probably be out of Oxford for August and the earlier part of September. With all best wishes.

Yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

Joy Gresham had arrived at The Kilns during the second week of December to visit the Lewis brothers. As indicated by Lewis’s letter to his godson, Laurence Harwood, of 19 December, there appears to have been a misunderstanding about the length of her stay .

TO VERA GEBBERT (W): TS

52/103.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

18th December 1952.

Dear Mrs. Gebbert,

Many thanks for the book which has just arrived, and which judging from a hasty dip, I am going to enjoy. It is kind of you to send it. I hope that by this time your journey across the Atlantic is a fast fading memory, and that it has not given you both a determination never to cross it again. Courage! Next time (I much hope there will be a ‘next time’), try crossing over it rather than on it.

We have an American visitor with us at the moment, who is starting for home on the 3rd. of next month, and is not much cheered by the fact that we are now having a succession of gales. Is’nt it an astonishing thing that whenever one has a guest in the home, the weather turns freakish? And the host always feels that he is somehow to blame for it. We are now getting the weather which normally we never have until after Christmas—ice, snow, bitter wind etc. However, either out of native politeness or because it is true, the lady assures us that the worst English winter weather is not to be compared for general beastliness with that of New York state. What she does criticise is the heating of the English home: not so much of the rooms, but of the passages and so forth.

As your last letter was dated from Alpine Drive, I send this note there; though of course by the time it gets to California, you may be enjoying the society of Andy on his native heath once more. In whichever spot you are, you may congratulate yourselves on having fled homewards when you did. You would like England even less now than when you visited it!

With warmest good wishes to you both from us both for a happy and prosperous New Year,

yours as ever,

C. S. Lewis

TO LAURENCE HARWOOD (BOD): 305

Coll. Magd.

Dec 19th 1952

Dear Laurence

Here’s something for usual expenses. I am completely ‘circumvented’ by a guest, asked for one week but staying for three, who talks from morning till night. I hope you’ll all have a nicer Christmas than I. I can’t write (write? I can hardly think or breathe. I can’t believe it’s all real).

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO MRS JOHNSON (W): TS

REF.52/183

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

19th December 1952.

Dear Mrs. Johnson,

Though it is true that I have not a sweet tooth, I must confess that I eat notepaper and envelopes, so your very kind gift may be described as being of that edible variety that is customary at this season of the year. And I am most grateful to you for it: for paper here is of a miserable quality, and it is not always easy to get hold of. (To say nothing of the fact that one so often runs out at some inconvenient moment, and has to sally out to the shops).

Apropos of shops, one could hardly have a worse time to run out of essentials than this; we—like you no doubt—are in the climax of the ‘Christmas rush’, a time which I always regard with horror. I hope I am not a Scrooge, but with every year that passes I find myself more and more in revolt against the commercialized racket of ‘Xmas’. With us, it now begins about the third week in November, and by now, one is urged—with holly leaves—to buy anything from boots to bathing trunks because they are the perfect expression of the Christmas spirit. If I seem a little peevish about the whole spiritual atmosphere, it is perhaps because the material one is so disagreeable; we have been having snow, ice, sleet, hurricanes and all the kind of treats in fact which we do not expect until well on into the new year. A freak season in fact. But I should be chastened by the fact that a visiting American friend tells me that unless we have seen winter in New England, we don’t know what winter is: and that what we are grumbling about is just nice mild seasonable weather. (But this expression of opinion doesn’t make it seem any warmer)!

With many thanks, and all best wishes for a happy Christmas and a prosperous New Year,

yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO MRS D. JESSUP (W):

Magdalen etc.

Dec. 20th 52

Dear Mrs. Jessup

Yes: you are very blessed: and I take the communication as a high compliment—though there are a good many words I can’t read, for your hand is almost as illegible as mine tho’ a great deal neater!

You won’t expect me to reply at length when I tell you that we have a visitor, that our usual domestic help is ill, and there are mountains of mail. How wretchedly the Christian festival of Christmas has got snowed under by all the fuss and racket of commercialised ‘Xmas’. Blessings to all.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO EDNA GREEN WATSON (BOD): TS

REE52/9

Magdalen College,

Oxford, [p]

22nd December 1952.

Dear Mrs. Watson,

How very kind indeed of you to sweeten my Christmas with the cake, which arrived this morning: externally in good condition, and before the day is out I shall be examining the internal condition of the parcel. It arrives very apropos, as my brother and I are without our housekeeper, who is convalescing after an illness, and in consequence we two batchelors are having to maintain a ‘skeleton service’ out at the house—one which does not provide for such luxuries as cakes, and in which the can opener is very much in evidence! 306

This is the season when I envy you, living in what is I am told called ‘The Deep South’; I suppose you are hardly aware that it is winter? Here we are having a most unpleasant freak season—ice, snow, blizzard, all the joys which we don’t generally get until well after Christmas. However, though we have been pitying ourselves an American visitor from New York told me recently that we don’t know what winter is: and that this is mild weather! So whatever else is in short supply on this unhappy planet, at least it is’nt weather .