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

72John 17:21.

73Lewis had sent Pitter a ticket to his lecture on ‘Hero and Leander’, given to the British Academy on 20 February 1952. The lecture is reprinted in SLE .

74Christopher Marlowe and George Chapman, Hero and Leander (1598). Marlowe wrote the first two books of this poem, and Chapman (? 1559-1634) the remaining four. See English Literature in the Sixteenth Century , Pt. III, Ch. 3, Sect. 3.

75Andrew Young, Into Hades (1952).

76i.e., George Sayer.

77The incumbent President, Harry S. Truman, decided against seeking re-election in 1952. He threw his support behind Illinois Governor Adlai Stevenson—not Robert A. Taft—who was drafted in as the Democratic nominee. Stevenson proved no match for General Dwight D. Eisenhower who won a landslide victory.

78See the biography of Delmar Banner, artist, in CL II, p. 537n.

79P. G. Wodehouse, Thank You, Jeeves (1934), ch. 1: ‘I fear I cannot recede from my position.’

80Banner had invited Lewis to his home at The Bield, Little Langdale, in the Lake District.

81‘I could’.

82‘I couldn’t’.

83 Library Association Proceedings, Papers and Summaries of Discussion at the Bournemouth Conference on 29 April to 2 May 1952 (1952), pp. 22-8, and reprinted in Of This and Other Worlds , ed. Walter Hooper (London: Collins, 1982; HarperCollins, 2000); published in the United States as On Stories: and Other Essays on Literature (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982).

84Roger Lancelyn Green, The Wonderful Stranger (1950).

85‘the far country’.

86See Nell Berners-Pricein the Biographical Appendix. Lewis had to be present as a witness at Mrs Hooker’s trial in Canterbury on 8 May. Nell Berners-Price had invited him to spend the night before the trial at Courtstairs Hotel, so that he would be near Canterbury. Following the trial Mrs Hooker was sent to Holloway Prison in London.

87Lewis had smudged his signature when using a piece of blotting paper.

88This letter was published in The Times Literary Supplement (9 May 1952), p. 313, under the title ‘The Sheepheard’s Slumber’.

89 Prince Caspian .

90Penelope was the seven-year-old daughter of Mr and Mrs Berners-Price.

91Charles Gore, The Sermon on the Mount (1896), Appendix III, p. 215: ‘Christ, by a distinct act of legislation, prohibited divorce among His disciples in such sense as allows of remarriage, except in the case of adultery of one of the parties.’

92 Conference of Bishops of the Anglican Communion, Holden at Lambeth Palace in July 1888 (London: SPCK, 1888), pp. 43-4: ‘No. 3.–Divorce…a. That, inasmuch as our Lord’s words expressly forbid divorce, except in the case of fornication or adultery, the Christian Church cannot recognize divorce in any other than the excepted case, or give any sanction to the marriage of any person who has been divorced contrary to this law, during the life of the other party.

‘b. That under no circumstances ought the guilty party, in the case of a divorce for fornication or adultery, to be regarded, during the lifetime of the innocent party, as a fit recipient of the blessing of the Church on marriage.

‘c. That, recognizing the fact that there always has been a difference of opinion in the Church on the question whether our Lord meant to forbid marriage to the innocent party in a divorce for adultery, the Conference recommends that the clergy should not be instructed to refuse the sacraments or other privileges of the Church to those who, under civil sanction, are thus married.’

93Sir Godfrey Rolles Driver (1892-1975), Old Testament scholar and Semitic philologist, was elected a Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1919 and was Professor of Semitic Philology, 1938-62. He was intimately concerned with the New English Bible, and his works include The Judaean Scrolls (1965). Young was interested in writing a novel based on the Book of Judith from the Old Testament Apocrypha.

94Mrs Goelz was being confirmed in the Episcopal Church.

95David Cecil, Lord M.: or The Later Life of Lord Melbourne (London: Constable, 1954), p. 6: ‘[Lord Melbourne] loved to defend the indefensible. “What I like about the Order of the Garter,” he once remarked, “is that there is no damned merit about it.”‘

96Sir Fred Hoyle (1915-2001) was Plumian Professor of Astronomy at Cambridge University, and the founder of the Institute of Theoretical Astronomy.

97‘writer of extended romances’.

98Edmund Spenser, Epíthalamíon (1595).

99Vera Mathews had married K. H. Gebbert, and they were now living at Sun Valley Lodge, Sun Valley, Idaho, where Mr Gebbert had was working.

100Since 21 December 1951 Griffiths had been at the Benedictine priory at Pluscarden, Elgin, Moray, Scotland, where he was novice master.

101Konrad Z. Lorenz, King Solomon’s Ring: New Light on Animal Ways (1952).

102The top of this letter was torn off, and with it the date and salutation.

103During the Summer Term 1952 Vanauken sent Lewis copies of his ‘Oxford Sonnets’: ‘I sent round the whole six sonnets, though he had seen two of them, to C. S. Lewis, and he replied, in part: “I think all the sonnets really good. The Sands is v. good, indeed. So is Advent , perhaps it is best. (L. 5 is a corker)” ‘(Vanauken, A Severe Mercy , ch. 5, p. 123). All six sonnets are included in A Severe Mercy .

104ibid., ch. 4, p. 100, ‘The Gap’, iii, 1-4: ‘Between the probable and proved there yawns/A gap. Afraid to jump, we stand absurd,/Then see behind us sink the ground and, worse,/Our very standpoint crumbling.’

105See Austin and Katharine Farrerin the Biographical Appendix.

106Katharine Farrer, The Missing Link (London: Collins, 1952). This was the first of Farrer’s detective novels.

107i.e., Martyn Skinner’s The Return of Arthur: Merlin .

108Farrer, The Missing Link , ch. 11, p. 141: ‘He moodily watched Plummer and Thomas go into the watchman’s hut and turned towards the darkness and the familiar devil of the stairs.’ This sentence was changed in the Penguin paperback of 1955 to read: ‘He moodily watched Plummer and Thomas go into the watchman’s hut and turned towards the darkness to wrestle with his hopes and despairs.’

109Ibid., p. 127: ‘not families, family-allowances’ etc.

110i.e., a character in one of the novels of Charles Williams.

111John Milton, At a Vacation Exercise in the College, part Latin, part English (1673), ‘The Latin Speeches ended, the English thus began’, 29-30: ‘Yet I had rather, if I were to choose,/Thy service in some graver subject use.’

112Miss Marg-riette Montgomery was writing from San Antonio, Texas.

113See the biography of Rudolf Steiner, founder of Anthroposophy, in CL I, p. 671n.

114i.e., Owen Barfield and Cecil Harwood.

115Lewis used this German word in SBJ , ch. 1, to mean the ‘intense longing’ or ‘Joy’ which played a large part in his conversion.

116Mark 15:31.

117Charles Williams, He Came Down from Heaven (1938), ‘The Practice of Substituted Love’.

118William Borst, an editor in the college department of Harcourt, Brace & World, was handling Lewis’s essay on Spenser for Major British Writers .

119Spenser, The Faerie Queene , I, i, 2, 1-2: ‘But on his brest a bloudie Crosse he bore/ The deare remembrance of his dying Lord.’

120Hsin-Chang Chang was born in China. He attended the University of Shanghai before taking a D. Phil, in English from Edinburgh University. For some years he was a lecturer in English at the University of Malaya in Singapore. In 1959 he returned to England to become University Lecturer in Chinese. He later became University Lecturer in Chinese Studies and Fellow of Wolfson College, Cambridge. He is the author of Allegory and Courtesy in Spenser: A Chinese View (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1955) and Chinese Literature , 3 vols (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1973-83). In ‘Memories’, In Search of C. S. Lewis , ed. Stephen Schofield (South Plainfield, New Jersey: Bridge Publishing Co., 1983), Chang said (p. 104): ‘I did not then realize, as I have since come to think…that we had much in common. For his hero was Sir Philip Sidney…and Sidney, too, was mine. And indeed Sidney had embodied in his life both chivalry and courtesy. My ingrained belief that a definite code ought to govern the tone of one’s writing as well as one’s conduct—which in essence is Confucian but not uninfluenced by European chivalry—must have appealed to Lewis and made him readier, in later years, to accept me as a friend. Certainly a vein of chivalry underlies all his own writings, and this explains for me the style and verve of his literary criticism.’