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

When may we expect the Purgatorio? 244 It is perhaps my favourite part of the Comedy and I look forward very much to going up and round the terraces with your guidance. (By the way some of the paths on the Malvern hills are exactly like them.

I hope you are reading my brother’s Splendid Century . It is his first book, tho’ he is three years my senior, but he has been at the court of Louis XIV pretty well all his life. It seems to be going down well. I have got my huge 16th. c volume for the Oxford History of English Literature nearly off my chest now, and feel inclined never to do any work again as long as I live.

It seems very long since we met. Are you at all likely to be here in 1954? I hope so. In the meantime, all good wishes, all my duty,

yours ever

C. S. Lewis

Lewis invited Joy and her sons to The Kilns for a three-day visit, from 17 to 20 December. Renée Pierce had now divorced her husband, Claude, preparatory to marrying Bill Gresham .

TO PHYLLIDA (W):

Magdalen College

Oxford

Dec 18th 53

Dear Phyllida

Thanks for your most interesting cards. How do you get the gold so good? Whenever I tried to use it, however golden it looked on the shell, it always looked only like rough brown on the paper. Is it that you have some trick with the brush that I never learned, or that gold paint is better now than when I was a boy? The ‘conversation-piece’ (I think that is what the art critics wd. call your group) is excellent and most interesting. If you hadn’t told me your Father was mixing putty I shd. have thought he was mixing colours on a palette, but otherwise everything explains itself. I never saw a family who all had such a likeness to their Mother.

I’m not quite sure what you meant about ‘silly adventure stories without any point’. If they are silly, then having a point won’t save them. But if they are good in themselves, and if by a ‘point’ you mean some truth about the real world wh. one can take out of the story, I’m not sure that I agree. At least, I think that looking for a ‘point’ in that sense may prevent one from getting the real effect of the story in itself–like listening too hard for the words in singing which isn’t meant to be listened to that way (like an anthem in a chorus). I’m not at all sure about all this, mind you: only thinking as I go along.

We have two American boys in the house at present, aged 8 and 61/2. 245 Very nice. They seem to use much longer words than English boys of that age would: not showing off but just because they don’t seem to know the short words. But they haven’t as good table manners as English boys of the same sort would.

Well–all good wishes to you all for Christmas, and very many thanks.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

PS. Of course you’re right about the Narnian books being better than the tracts: at least, in the way a picture is better than a map.

TO LAURENCE HARWOOD (BOD):

Magdalen College

Oxford

Dec 21st 1953

My dear Lawrence,

What luck now? I enclose a trifle for current expenses. Please tell your father how sorry I was I couldn’t have him for either of the two days he mentioned: we have had an American lady staying in the house with her two sons, eldest 91/2 Whew! But you have younger brothers, so you know what it is like. We didn’t: we do now. Very pleasant, but like surf bathing, leaves one rather breathless. Love to yourself and Sylvia and all.

Yours ever

C. S. Lewis

Millions of letters to write.

TO RUTH PITTER(BOD):

Magdalen College

Oxford

Dec 21st 53

My dear Ruth

Welcome to what Tolkien calls the Little Kingdom, at least to the marches of it. Its centre lies about Worminghall: see his Farmer Giles of Ham . 246 I hope much happiness awaits you there. It will be interesting to see how soon you rusticate–grow slow-witted like us and believe that the streets of Thame (now your metropolis) are paved with gold and shiver delightfully at the thought of its mingled wickedness and splendour.

Warnie (short for Warren, for my mother’s mother was of that stock so we have ¼ of gentle blood in us the rest being peasant and bourgeois) and I are dazed: we have had an American lady staying in the house with her two sons aged 91/2 and 8. I now know what we celibates are shielded from. I will never laugh at parents again. Not that the boys weren’t a delight: but a delight like surf-bathing which leaves one breathless and aching. The energy, the tempo , is what kills. I have now perceived (what I always suspected from memories of our childhood) that the way to a child’s heart is quite simple: treat them with seriousness & ordinary civility–they ask no more. What they can’t stand (quite rightly) is the common adult assumption that everything they say shd. be twisted into a kind of jocularity. The mother (Mrs. Gresham) had rather a boom in USA in the entre-guerre as the poetess Joy Davidman: do you know her works?

This Vac. is pretty chock-a-block so far (oh if we could have Christmas without Xmas!) so that I rather hope than expect to knock on your door. Meanwhile, all greetings to you both. God bless the house, as we say in Ireland.

Yours

Jack

TO JOY GRESHAM (BOD):

Dec 22/53

Dear Joy–

As far as I can remember you were non-committal about Childhood’s End: 247 I suppose you were afraid that you might raise my expectations too high and lead to disappointment. If that was your aim, it has succeeded, for I came to it expecting nothing in particular and have been thoroughly bowled over. It is quite out of range of the common space-and-time writers; away up near Lindsay’s Voyage to Arcturus and Wells’s First Men in the Moon . 248 It is better than any of Stapleton’s. 249 It hasn’t got Ray Bradbury’s delicacy, but then it has ten times his emotional power, and far more mythopoeia.

There is one bit of bad execution, I think: caps 7 and 8, where the author doesn’t seem to be at home. I mean, as a social picture it is flat and stiff, and all the gadgetry (for me) is a bore. But what there is on the credit side! It is rather like the effect of the Ring 250 –a self-riching work, harmony piling up on harmony, grandeur on grandeur, pity on pity. The first section, merely on the mystery of the Overlords, wd. be enough for most authors. Then you find this is only the background, and when you have worked up to the climax in chap 21, you find what seems to be an anti-climax and it slowly lifts itself to the utter climax. The first climax, pp 165-185 brought tears to my eyes. There has been nothing like it for years: partly for the actual writing–’She has left her toys behind but ours go hence with us’, 251 or ‘The island rose to meet the dawn’, 252 but partly (still more, in fact) because here we meet a modern author who understands that there may be things that have a higher claim than the survival or happiness of humanity: a man who cd. almost understand ‘He that hateth not father and mother’ 253 and certainly wd. understand the situation in Aeneid III between those who go on to Latium & those who stay in Sicily. 254

We are almost brought up out of psyche into pneuma . 255 I mean, his myth does that to us imaginatively. Of course his own thoughts about what that higher level might be are not, in our eyes, very new or very profound: but that doesn’t really make so much difference. (Though, by the way, it wd. have been better, even on purely literary grounds, to leave it in its mystery, to philosophise less.) After all, few authors’ glosses on their own myths are as good as the myths: unless, like Dante, they take the glosses from other men, real thinkers. The second climax, the long (not too long) drawn-out close is magnificent.