Letters of C. S. Lewis

by C. S. Lewis

  But all this is from the purpose. What I began on was the difficulties of letter writing. I fear

  The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars

  But in ourselves.131

  for the born letter writer is quite independent of material. Have you ever read the letters of the poet Cowper? He had nothing—literally nothing—to tell any one about: private life in a sleepy country town where Evangelical distrust of ‘the world’ denied him even such miserable society as the place would have afforded. And yet one reads a whole volume of his correspondence with unfailing interest. How his tooth came loose at dinner, how he made a hutch for a tame hare, what he is doing about his cucumbers—all this he makes one follow as if the fate of empires hung on it . . .

  TO HIS FATHER: from Magdalen College

  31 March [1928]

  My studies in the XVIth Century—you will remember my idea of a book about Erasmus—has carried me much further back than I anticipated. Indeed it is the curse and the fascination of literary history that there are no real beginnings. Take what point you will for the start of some new chapter in the mind and imagination of man, and you will invariably find that it has always begun a bit earlier: or rather, it branches so imperceptibly out of something else that you are forced to go back to the something else. The only satisfactory opening for any study is the first chapter of Genesis.

  The upshot of all this is that the book will be a very different one from what I imagined, and I hope to try a preliminary canter in a course of lectures sometime next year. In the mean time I spend all my mornings in the Bodleian: and the evenings in trying, for the hundredth time, to get a real working knowledge of the German language, since in my present occupation I find my ignorance of it up against me at every turn. For example, the only history of mediaeval Latin literature is in German. The authoritative edition of an old French poem I shall have to read is in German. And so on. But I am making progress.

  If only you could smoke, and if only there were upholstered chairs, the Bodleian would be one of the most delightful places in the world. I sit in ‘Duke Humphrey’s Library’, the oldest part, a Fifteenth-Century building with a very beautiful painted wooden ceiling above me and a little mullioned window at my left hand through which I look down on the garden of Exeter where, these mornings, I see the sudden squalls of wind and rain driving the first blossoms off the fruit trees and snowing the lawn with them. At the bottom of the room the gilt bust of Charles I presented by Laud, faces the gilt bust of Strafford—poor Strafford.

  The library itself—I mean the books—is mostly in a labyrinth of cellars under the neighbouring squares. This room however is full of books (duplicate copies I suppose, or overflows) which stand in little cases at right angles to the wall, so that between each pair there is a kind of little ‘box’—in the public house sense of the word—and in these boxes one sits and reads. By a merciful provision, however many books you may send for, they will all be left on your chosen table at night for you to resume work next morning: so that one gradually accumulates a pile as comfortably as in ones own room. There is not, as in modern libraries, a forbidding framed notice to shriek ‘Silence’: on the contrary a more moderate request ‘Talk little and tread lightly’. There is indeed always a faint murmur going on of semi-whispered conversations in neighbouring boxes. It disturbs no one. I rather like to hear the hum of the hive, and it is pleasant when someone steps into your box and says ‘Hello, are you here?’

  As you may imagine one sees many oddities among one’s fellow readers—people whom I have never met elsewhere and who look as if they were shut up with the other properties every night. Positively the only drawback to the place is that beauty, antiquity and over-heating weave a spell very much more suited to dreaming than to working. But I resist to the best of my abilities and trust in time to become innoculated. (The practice of opening the window in one’s box is not, I need hardly say, encouraged.) In such a life as this, what news should there be?

  By the time this reaches you, you will probably have heard the result of the boat race—with the same very moderated grief as myself. Perhaps you will also have heard that there is a religious revival going on among our undergraduates. Which is true. It is run by a German-American called Dr [Frank] Buchman. He gets a number of young men together (some reports say women too, but I believe not) and they confess their sins to one another. Jolly, ain’t it? But what can one do? If you try to supress it (I am assuming that you agree with me that the thing is unhealthy) you only make martyrs . . .

  TO HIS BROTHER: from ‘Hillsboro’

  1 April 1928

  My last letter, if I remember rightly, was ironically begun on the return from the summer visit to P’daytaheim and finished only on the eve of the Christmas visit. I have thus a new ‘holiday’ period to record, which is almost barren in events. The p’dayta crop was singularly poor. The only item worth remembering was his curious contribution to the problem of venereal disease, to the effect that obviously it must have begun with women and spread thence to men. Being asked why, he replied ‘Sure how could a man have given it to a woman if he hadn’t got it from a woman herself?’ This is unanswerable.

  Another illuminating remark was made in answer to some casual remark of mine as to the control of one’s imagination—I was talking, I think, about not letting one’s mind brood on grievances or fears. He replied ‘What on earth do you mean by controlling the imagination? One controls ones appetites.’ That is the whole psychology of his generation in a nutshell, isn’t it? A man sits thinking of negus and making ‘iron rules’ not to drink any, with much contortion of the face and muttered ‘Oh Lords’ until the inevitable moment when he finds some excellent reason for breaking the iron rules. The idea of a simpler method—that of applying his mind to something else and using a little concentration—would never occur.

  The discussion ended (of course) with the infuriating statement that we were not ‘ad idem’ on the ‘connotation’ of the word control. Which reminds me of the splendid definition of an egoist which he read to me out of Punch in happy unconsciousness of its application. ‘An egoist is a man who thinks that all the words he doesn’t understand are misprints’ . . .

  Apart from these there is little to record. We had the usual regrets that you were in the army and the usual astonishment that you didn’t appear to be nearly as unhappy as a man of your income ought by all reason to be. We had the usual discussions on theology, drifting off into something else as soon as one had cleared one’s ground to begin. His health was tolerable, I thought . . .

  TO OWEN BARFIELD: from Magdalen College

  [7? June 1928]

  Come on Tuesday next and let your lady wife come and lie at Headington while you stay in College, for both will be very welcome. I haven’t read Aeschylus this long time but I don’t mind having a shot. The Prometheus is a bit easier than the Agamemnon.

  You cd hardly expect the man in the T.L.S. to know the esoteric doctrine of myths.132

  By the bye, we now need a new word for the ‘science of the nature of myths’ since ‘mythology’ has been appropriated to the myths themselves. Would ‘mythonomy’ do? I am quite serious. If your views are not a complete error this subject will become more important and it’s worth while trying to get a good word before they invent a beastly one. ‘Mytho-logic’ (noun) wouldn’t be bad, but people wd read it as an adjective. I have also thought of ‘mythopoeics’ (cf. ‘Metaphysics’) but that leads to ‘a mythopoeician’ wh. is frightful: whereas ‘a mythonomer’ (better still ‘The Mythonomer Royal’) is nice. Or shall we just invent a new word—like ‘gas’. (Nay Sir, I meant nothing.)

  I am writing a great new poem—also a Mnemonic rime on English sound changes in octosyllabic verse

  (Thus Æ to Ĕ they soon were fetchin’,

  Cf. such forms as ÞÆC and ÞECCEAN.)

  which will be about as long as the Cursor Mundi, & great fun.

  Arrive about 3 o’clock on Tuesday, if that suits you.


  P.S. Wd ‘Mythologics’ do?

  TO HIS FATHER: from Magdalen College (with an early reference to the book which became The Allegory of Love)

  10 July [1928]

  I have actually begun the first chapter of my book. This perhaps sounds rather odd since I was working on it all last vac., but you will understand that in a thing of this sort the collection of the material is three quarters of the battle. Of course, like a child who wants to get to the painting before it has really finished drawing the outline, I have been itching to do some actual writing for a long time. Indeed—you can imagine it as well as I—the most delightful sentences would come into one’s head: and now half of them can’t be used because, knowing a little more about the subject, I find they aren’t true. That’s the worst of facts—they do cramp a fellow’s style. If I can get it—the first chapter—to the stage of being typed, I shall bring a copy home for your amusement.

  I should warn you, by the by, that Erasmus and all that has had to be postponed to a later book. The actual book is going to be about mediaeval love poetry and the mediaeval idea of love which is a very paradoxical business indeed when you go into it: for on the one hand it is extremely super-sensual and refined and on the other it is an absolute point of honour that the lady should be some one else’s wife, as Dante and Beatrice, Lancelot and Guinevere etc. The best introduction is the passage in Burke about ‘the unbought grace of life’.

  I am intending by the way to pay you my summer visit in August this year instead of at the usual time. This is because the whole of the later part of the Long [Vacation] will be occupied with the preliminary stages of the Presidential election, specially the informal conversations which matter most. I am particularly anxious to be there, with one or two others, at the early parts and see what is going on: for—I am almost ashamed to tell you—I am beginning to be rather disillusioned about my colleagues. There is a good deal more intrigue and mutual back-scratching and even direct lying than I ever supposed possible: and what worries me most of all, I have good reason to believe that it is not the same in other colleges.

  Of course it may simply be that, being rather an innocent in practical matters myself, and having been deceived once or twice, I have rushed too hastily to conclusions: as they say a simple man becomes too knowing by half when he once becomes knowing at all. Let us hope so. But the bad thing is that the decent men seem to me to be all the old ones (who will die) and the rotters seem to be all the young ones (who will last my time) . . .

  TO HIS BROTHER: from ‘Hillsboro’

  ‘Begun Aug. 2nd’ [1928]

  I am glad you like the Lives of the Poets. There is no subject on which more nonsense has been talked than the style of Johnson. For me his best sentences in writing have the same feeling as his best conversation—‘pop! it was so sudden’. I don’t know anyone who can settle a thing so well in half a dozen words. I have read a good deal of the Rambler last term, which is supposed to be more Johnsonian than the Lives. But he does the dagger business—or no, it’s more like a mace, but a mace properly used is not a cumbersome weapon—what is there clumsy about choosing an infinitesimal point of time in which quietly to break a man’s head with a perfectly directed tap of a sledge hammer?—he does it again and again.

  You know that the Rambler is a mass of moral platitudes—and infuriates the French critics who say that they haven’t come to their time of life to be told that life is short and that wasted time can never be recovered. Johnson, anticipating that kind of objection, simply remarks ‘People more frequently require to be reminded, than to be instructed’. What more is there to say? or again ‘The natural process of the mind is not from enjoyment to enjoyment but from hope to hope’. That would be a page of whining and snivelling in Thackery—ah, which of us, dear reader, has his hearts desire etc., etc.

  Better still, this on marriage: ‘Marriage is not otherwise unhappy than as life is unhappy.’ I can’t say that would be a whole novel with the moderns because the whole novel would not get as far as that. The author would make a great fuss about how Pamela got on Alan’s nerves and how in the end they decided that life was a failure, and would be praised for his fearless criticism of the institution of marriage, without ever getting one glimpse of the fact that he was merely describing the general irritatingness of daily life, as it happens in the case of married people. Johnson just knocks a whole silly literature aside. He has been through all that (Ibsen and Wells and such) before it was written. But the Lives are the best—specially Savage, Dryden and Pope. I can imagine that the atmosphere, the Englishness, is specially delightful to you in ‘furrin parts’. To me, the queerest thing about Johnson is that he is by no means an enthusiastic critic and yet he always makes me want to read the people he talks of even when I know that I shall dislike them . . .

  Earlier in the year—just before term began—I had a delightful week end at a farm house in the Forest of Dean. As you know, I have walked in those parts before, but never stayed there. It is, I think, the most glorious inland place I know . . . almost untouched by trippers, and excellently solitary: almost uncannily so on an all day walk if one gets into the fir districts where birds don’t sing and happens to be for a moment out of the sound of a stream (Mr Papworth by the way decided at once that the whole forest was a dangerous place, and always kept close to heel). Here and there in the wood you come on a little old farm house with a few acres of clearing, surrounded by a hedge and approached by a road so desolate that it is hardly different from the green ‘rides’ that pierce the wood in every direction. In these ‘islands’ of farms—in one of which we stayed—there is the most comfortable sense of being tucked away miles deep from the world, of being snugged down in a blanket, of having found a lee shore. We lived in a world of country butter and fresh eggs and boiled fowl, of early hours and hens lazily squawking (not crowing, just making that long drawling sound that they make). The nights were noisy with the sounds that keep no right thinking man awake—owls, a very good nightingale, and once the barking of a fox. ‘A pleasant land of drowsy-head it was . . .’ But as a matter of fact it isn’t the drowsiness that really counts, its the sense of being ‘well away’ . . .

  It sounds astonishing but English poetry is one of the things that you can come to the end of. I don’t mean of course that I shall ever have read everything worth reading that was ever said in verse in the English language. But I do mean that there is no longer any chance of discovering a new long poem in English which will turn out to be just what I want and which can be added to the Faerie Queene, The Prelude, Paradise Lost, The Ring and the Book, the Earthly Paradise, and a few others—because they aren’t any more. I mean, in the case of poems one hasn’t read, one knows now pretty well what they’re like, and knows too that tho’ they may be worth reading, they will not become part of ones permanent stock. In that sense I have come to the end of English poetry—as you may be said to have come to the end of a wood, not where you have actually walked every inch of it, but when you have walked about in it enough to know where all the boundaries are and to feel the end near even when you can’t see it: when there is no longer any hope (as there was for the first few days) that the next turn of the path might bring you to an unsuspected lake or cave or clearing on the edge of a new valley—when it can no longer conceal anything . . .

  TO HIS FATHER: from Magdalen College (as the College prepared to elect a new President)

  [3 November 1928]

  Thank heavens our electioneering troubles are nearly over. This day fortnight we shall all be locked into chapel like so many Cardinals and proceed to make a President and then goodbye to the endless talk and agreements and disagreements and personalities that I have lived in since term began. A subject of this sort hanging in the air manifests itself chiefly by a plethora of informal meetings which naturally spring up on those few hours and days when the ordinary routine has left one a little freedom. As I have anyway a rather heavy time table this term—chiefly, alas, those philosophy pupils whom I sha
re with Weldon and whom he regards as his if they turn out well and mine if they turn out ill—I am now heartily sick of the whole business.133

  At the same time I have added to my occupations in other and I hope more hopeful ways. Two or three of us who are agreed as to what a College ought to be, have been endeavouring to stimulate the undergraduates into forming some sort of literary society. In any other Colleges the idea that undergraduates should require, or endure, stimulus in that direction from the dons, would be laughable. But this is a very curious place. All College societies whatever were forbidden early in the reign of the late President—an act which was then necessitated by the savagely exclusive clubs of rich dipsomaniacs which really dominated the whole life of the place. This prohibition succeeded in producing decency, but at the cost of all intellectual life. When I came I found that any Magdalen undergraduate who had interests beyond rowing, drinking, motoring and fornication, sought his friends outside the College, and indeed kept out of the place as much as he could. They certainly seldom discovered one another, and never collaborated so as to resist the prevailing tone. This is what we wish to remedy: but it had to be done with endless delicacy, which means, as you know, endless waste of time.

  First of all we had to make sure that our colleagues would agree to the relaxation of the rule against societies. Then we had to pick our men amongst the undergraduates very carefully. Luckily I had been endeavouring already for a term or two to get a few intelligent men to meet one another in my rooms under the pretext of play reading or what not, and that gave us a lead. Then we had to try to push those chosen men v. gently so that the scheme should not appear too obviously to be managed by the dons. At present we are at the stage of holding a preparatory meeting ‘at which to discuss the foundation of a society’ next Monday—so the whole show may yet be a dismal failure. I hope not: for I am quite sure that this College will never be anything more than a country club for all the idlest ‘bloods’ of Eton and Charterhouse as long as undergraduates retain the schoolboy’s idea that it would be bad form to discuss among themselves the sort of subjects on which they write essays for their tutors. Ours at present are all absolute babies and terrific men of the world—the two characters I think nearly always go together. Old hearts and young heads, as Henry James says: the cynicism of forty and the mental crudeness and confusion of fourteen.