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

I have no adventures to tell you in return–unless it is an adventure that I have at last finished, and am now reading proofs of, my volume on 16th Century literature. It is an adventure to me to be free of that 12-15 year labour. I know now how Ariel felt, 32 or how a balloon feels when the sandbags are thrown out.

Your F. H. Heard sounds worth following up. I have just read two books by an American ‘scientifiction’ author called Ray Bradbury. Most of that genre is abysmally bad, a mere transference of ordinary gangster or pirate fiction to the sidereal stage, and a transference which does harm not good. Bigness in itself is of no imaginative value: the defence of a ‘galactic’ empire is less interesting than the defence of a little walled town like Troy. But Bradbury has real invention and even knows something about prose. I recommend his Silver Locusts. 33

When do you revisit Europe? Don’t stay out yonder till you grow yellow. And try to correct your young friend’s idea of what it wd. be like meeting someone who’d been to Heaven! All good wishes for this (so far not v. attractive) year.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

P.S. (By the other Lewis). I too greatly enjoyed the letter. Remember seeing the tomb of the 47 Ronin when I was in Japan, but no one cd. tell me who they were or what they did. 34 This is Tuesday, Bird and Baby day, and I’m off to drink good luck to you.

W.H.L

TO ANTHONY BOUCHER (P): 35

Magdalen College

Oxford

5/ii/53

Dear Mr. Boucher

This is a delightful meeting. I did indeed value St. Aquin very highly and I have also greatly enjoyed Star-Dummy in its different way. 36 This wd. go for nothing if I were the real out-and-out S F reader who is, within that field, omnivorous. In reality I’m extremely hard to please. Most of the modern work in this genre seems to me atrocious: written by people who just take an ordinary spy-story or ship-wreck story or gangster story and think it can be improved by a sidereal or galactic setting. In reality the setting, so long as it is a mere setting, does harm: the wreck of a schooner is more interesting than that of a space-ship and the fate of a walled village like Troy moves us more than that of a galactic empire. You, and (in a different way) Ray Bradbury, are the real thing.

All my imagination at present is going into children’s stories. When that is done, I may try another fantasy for adults, but it wd. be too quiet and leisurely for your magazine.

I don’t belong to a press-cutting agency and so miss, along with many brickbats, some bouquets intended for me. I must thank you in the dark, therefore, for kind things you have apparently said about my work. (I found that neither the favourable nor the unfavourable reviews helped one at all: they merely either soothed or wounded one’s vanity-neither a very beneficial experience. They v. often hadn’t even read the book with any accuracy).

The ‘Antiparody’ (a word we need) of the Lord’s Prayer in Star Dummy was very fine.

Thank you v. much for the year of F & S F. I hope there will be plenty of your work in it.

If you are ever in England or I in U.S.A. we must most certainly meet and split a CH 3CH 2OH together. Urendi Maleldil . 37

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO MARY VAN DEUSEN (W): TS

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

5th February 1953.

Dear Mrs. Van Deusen,

I am writing to Genia, and you have my deepest sympathy. Of course you all have my prayers. No doubt by this time you have had my answer to your last letter.

Yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO GEOFFREY BLES (BOD): TS

REF.28/53.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

6th February 1953.

My dear Bles,

Thanks for the highly satisfactory statement and the cheque for £793-12-3.1 would like very much to come up to lunch and go through the new illustrations when they arrive.

We are both pretty well thanks: I had no more of the ‘flu than could be settled by a week-end of aspirin and early hours. I hope you have both been equally fortunate. How many more false springs are we to have before the real one?

Yours,

C. S. Lewis

TO EDWARD A. ALLEN (W): TS

REF.53/53.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

7th February 1953.

My dear Edward,

Many thanks for your letter of the 2nd. Your point about the internal combustion engine and the lady-bird is both true and interesting. Yes, ‘gentleman’ is a word which has ceased to have any particular meaning; with us it now means ‘male’ and lady ‘female’. * There are of course many more, e.g. any boat in which it is possible to spend the night, and which is privately owned is ‘luxury-yacht’, every cinema is ‘Super-cinema’ and so on. Please give our belated congratulations to your mother on her birthday, with our wishes for many more happy ones.

This is indeed good of you about the tea and sugar, and I think you have just about hit the right proportions; the business of payment on delivery is rather erratic, sometimes one is charged, sometimes not. But I’ll let you know what happens.

Please excuse such a short and scrappy note, but I am snowed under with a vast stack of examination papers for correction.

All the best.

Yours,

C. S. Lewis

TO RHONA BODLE (BOD): 38

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

Feb 9th 1953

Dear Miss Bodle

Thanks for your interesting letter of Feb 1st wh. arrived today. It is difficult to one, who, like me, has no experience, to give an opinion of these problems, which, I see, are v. intricate. The story about the girl who had reached the age of 16 under Christian teachers without hearing of the Incarnation is an eye-opener. For ordinary children (I don’t know about the Deaf) I don’t see any advantage in presenting the Gospels without some doctrinal comment. After all, they weren’t written for people who did not know the doctrine, but for converts, already instructed, who now wanted to know a bit more about the life and sayings of the Master. No ancient sacred books were intended to be read without a teacher: hence the Ethiopian eunuch in the Acts says to St. Philip ‘How can I understand unless someone tells me?’ 39

Could the bit–and I think there must be something -about people I don’t like come in as a comment on the Forgive clause in the Lord’s Prayer? 40

It is freezing hard here and one takes ones life in one’s hand every time one walks.

What an excellent work you are doing! All blessings.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO ARTHUR C. CLARKE (BOD): 41

Magdalen College

Oxford

Feb. 14th [?] 1953

Dear Mr. Clarke

I hope I shd. not be deterred by the danger! 42 The fatal objection is that I should be covering ground I have already covered in print and on which I have nothing to add. I know that is how many lectures are made, but I never do it. I might at a pinch show great fortitude about the boredom of the audience, but then there’s my own. But thank your society very much for the invitation and convey my good wishes to them as regards everything but interplanetary travel.

Yours very sincerely

C. S. Lewis

Probably the whole thing is only a plan for kidnapping me and marooning me on an asteroid! I know the sort of thing.

TO ROBIN OAKLEY-HILL (M): 43

Magdalen College

Oxford

Feb 16th 1953

Dear Oakley-Hill

It came over me like a thunderclap about 30 seconds after I had left you in the Lodge this afternoon that I must seem to you to have committed, in one very short conversation, all the most unprovoked and indeed inexplicable kinds of rudeness there are. 44 I implore you to try to understand–and believe–how it came about with no such intention.