Letters of C. S. Lewis

by C. S. Lewis

  Limpopo—and even Limpopo came as a relief in such an atmosphere—put an end to this vulgarity by saying in his deepest bass ‘What’s been used before, huh? There must be some tradition about the thing. What has the custom been in the family, eh?’ And then I suddenly saw, what I’d never seen before: that to them family traditions—the square sheet, the two thirty dinner, the gigantic overcoat—were what school traditions and college traditions are, I don’t say to me, but to most of our generation. It is so simple once you know it. How could it be otherwise in those large Victorian families with their intense vitality, when they had not been to public schools and when the family was actually the solidest institution they experienced? It puts a great many things in a more sympathetic light than I ever saw them in before.

  But apart from these two lights, what I carried away from those few days was the feeling (perhaps I mentioned it before) that all the other members of that family were only fragments of our own P’daitabird. Uncle Dick has the wheezes, but only the crudest of them and none of the culture. In Joey you see the wheeze side of the character gone to seed—the man whose conversation is nothing but giggles. In Limpopo, of course you see simply all the bad points without any of the good: with the additional property of being an outrageous bore, which is the one thing P. never was at any time.

  His idea of conversation is almost unbelievable. On the evening of the day of his arrival, after dinner, having been supplied with whiskey, he drew up the little wooden seated study chair to the fire, and having placed his little tubby body in it and crossed his flaccid hands on his belly, proceeded to enunciate the following propositions. ‘I usually leave town about quarter to six, huh, and then I get out to Helensburgh about quarter past and walk up to me house, eh, and then I (Jacks I’ll have another drop of that whiskey) put on an old coat, huh, then I come down and have something to drink and a bit of a chat with your Aunt Minnie, huh, and then . . .’ Without any exaggeration, he kept me up till 1.30 with this drivel. The last night, when the Hamiltonians were there, was much better. Limpopo explained that he had given up dealing with Hogg. ‘The last suit he sent me . . . the trousers came up to my chin (gesture) . . . I was very nearly going to law with him.’ Uncle Gussie: ‘I think you should. You should have gone into court wearing that suit.’ Limpopo (with profound gravity): ‘Oh, I wouldn’t like to have done that, huh’ . . .

  1930–1939

  TO HIS BROTHER: from ‘Hillsboro’

  12 January 1930

  Do you find that the present state of affairs produces a permanent condition of—so to speak—comfortless excitement? Every thing is unsettled: all the old structure of things has collapsed and the complete liberty of making plans exactly as we choose, which one would once have sighed for, turns out to be in practice merely a bewildering impossibility of envisaging the future at all.

  For the moment however, you will be most anxious to hear about the present, or, as it will be for you, the past. Well up to date Leeboro has not been sold. It will become very anxious as the time draws nearer your return. If a really good offer, plus a demand for immediate possession turns up, say, a fortnight before you are due at Liverpool, I really think I shall go out of my mind . . . It is not ‘Can we afford to keep it three—or ten—months longer before selling it’ but ‘Can we afford to refuse any good offer for a thing that may turn out to be unsaleable?’ Can we afford to gamble on the off chance of there being a second good offer at all? (Remember, there hasn’t been one yet.) That is, we are not in the position of an impoverished Victorian Colonel wondering whether he can afford to go on hunting for one season more, but rather in that of a middle aged Victorian spinster wondering if she can safely refuse any proposal.

  This infernal ‘two presents’ system—which began by being a joke and has ended by being an incubus—has naturally reduced most of your logical divisions and subdivisions of alternative possibilities to matchwood. To take the points that survive . . .

  The trunk in the attic [containing the Boxen toys]. I entirely agree with you. Our only model for dealing with our world is the heavenly P’daita’s method of dealing with this: and as he has long since announced his intention of ending the universe with a general conflagration, we will follow suit . . . I should not like to make an exception even in favour of Benjamin. After all these characters (like all others) can, in the long run, live only in ‘the literature of the period’: and I fancy that when we look at the actual toys again (a process from which I anticipate no pleasure at all), we shall find the discrepancy between the symbol (remember the outwards and visible form of Hedges, the Beetle—or Bar or even Hawki) and the character, rather acute. No, Brother. The toys in the trunk are quite plainly corpses. We will resolve them into their elements, as nature will do to us . . .

  The New little end room. The most jarring comment on this proposal reached me before the proposal itself, in the form of a rather offensive letter from that old harridan Aunt Mary, to the following effect—that she had heard that ‘Little Lea’ was going to be sold: that she supposed I knew about the two book cases of Uncle Joe’s that P. has ‘stored’ for him: that she very much wanted to have them: could she send and have them taken away at once: she had expected to see me at Christmas etc. etc. The minute I read it I knew in my bones that it was our little end room bookcases . . . Well that is the first and great comment on your plan of a new little end room.

  The second is that to my mind the question largely turns on another: if we can succeed in getting another and larger house than Hillsboro, and you (as I hope—but this comes in a later paragraph) are with us, should such a room be there or in College. Thirdly, apart from these questions, your proposal is one that I partly agree with and partly disagree with. It runs in your letter ‘A place where we can always meet on the common ground of the past and ipso facto a museum of the Leeborough we want to preserve.’ Now my view would run ‘A place where we can always meet on the common ground of the past and present and ipso facto a continuation and development of the Leeborough etc.’ You see, Pigiebuddie, a museum is preciously like a mausoleum. An attempt at exact reconstruction (supposing it could succeed—wh. it can’t in a room of quite different size and shape—) would fix the externals of a certain period for ever. But if you and I had gone home and lived at Leeborough, that is precisely what wouldn’t have happened. Sooner or later we should have substituted good prints for the groups. As our library grew, new bookcases would have come. In the mere course of time the long thin table would have finished the process which it had already made a good start on, of falling to pieces. A thing fixed in imitation of the little end room as it is, can only be a perpetual reminder that that whole life is not going on. If it were going on, it would gradually change . . . I [think] that an attempt to imitate the little end room in detail would be a mistake. A mistake in sentiment, for it could only mean that we were embalming the corpse of something that isn’t really dead, and needn’t die at all. An aesthetic mistake—because we don’t really want to have the taste of our schooldays established as a boundary for our whole lives . . .

  What I am chiefly talking against in all this is the faint implication that the past is the only ‘common ground’ on which we can meet. I think, perhaps this is an occasion for frankness—a virtue which should be very sparingly used, but not never. I have no doubt that there have been times when you have felt that, shall we call it, Pigiebotianism was in danger of being swallowed up by, shall we say, Hillsborovianism: at such moments you may even have felt that the past was the only common ground—that wearing the national costume had become, as in Wales, an archaic revival. I am very sorry to have been the cause of such a period (this is not an apology but a statement)—but isn’t that period itself passed? We have both changed since the real old days, but, on the whole, we have changed in the same direction. We are really much nearer together now than in the days when I was writing ridiculous epic poems at Cherbourg and you were wearing scarcely less ridiculous patent leathers at the Coll.

&
nbsp; Now, as to your own plans. If you decide to become a full and permanent member of the household, you will be very welcome to all of us: and I must confess that it doesn’t seem good enough that the two Piggiebudda should spend so much of their life divided by the whole breadth of the planet. Having laid this down as a starting pont, you won’t I hope think that I am trying to dissuade you if I put up certain signposts. e.g. I suppose you do realize that to exchange an institutional for a domestic life is a pretty big change. (I take it for granted obviously that as a permanent member you neither could nor would wish to have, even remotely, the guest status.) Both kinds of life have their discomforts: and all discomforts are in a sense intolerable. The great thing is to choose with one’s eyes open. Can you stand as a permanency our cuisine—Maureen’s practising—Maureen’s sulks—Minto’s burnettodesmondism—Minto’s mare’s nests—the perpetual interruptions of family life—the partial loss of liberty? This sounds as if I were either sick of it myself or else trying to make you sick of it: but neither is the case. I have definitely chosen and don’t regret the choice. What I hope—very much hope—is that you, after consideration, may make the same choice, and not regret it: what I can’t risk is your just floating in on the swell of a mood and then feeling trapped and fed up. Of course to weigh it fairly one must compare the best of this sort of life with the best of the other, and the worst of this with the worst of the other. What one is tempted to do is just the opposite—when one is exasperated in a home, to compare it with one of those splendid evenings one had in a mess or common room. Of course what one ought to do is to weigh it against the evening with the mess bore. On the whole my judgement would be that domestic life denies me a great many pleasures and saves me a great many pains.

  There is also this further point. I spoke above of Pigiebotianism and Hillsborovianism. I presume that if you join us you are prepared for a certain amount of compromise in this matter. I shall never be prepared to abandon Pigiebotianism to Hillsborovianism. On the other hand there are the others to whom I have given the right to expect that I shall not abandon Hillsborovianism to Pigiebotianism. Whether I was right or wrong, wise or foolish, to have done so originally, is now only an historical question: once having created expectations, one naturally fulfills them . . .

  TO OWEN BARFIELD: from Magdalen College

  [3? February 1930]

  Terrible things are happening to me. The ‘Spirit’ or ‘Real I’ is showing an alarming tendency to become much more personal and is taking the offensive, and behaving just like God. You’d better come on Monday at the latest or I may have entered a monastery . . .

  [Warren arrived back in England on 16 April 1930, having been away a little over three years. On the 17th he met Jack in London and they took a holiday with Mrs Moore and Maureen in Southbourne, Dorset. On 22 April the brothers set off for Belfast, arriving there on the 23rd. After visiting their father’s grave they went to ‘Little Lea’ for their last stay there together. On the afternoon of the 23rd they carried the tin trunk containing the Boxen toys into the garden and, by mutual consent, buried it unopened. On 24 April they returned to Oxford and Warren stayed at ‘Hillsboro’ until he reported for duty at Bulford in Wiltshire on 15 May. Warren paid one last visit to ‘Little Lea’, 1–3 June, before it was sold.]

  TO OWEN BARFIELD: from Magdalen College

  10 June 1930

  I have just finished the Angel in the House. Amazing poet!138 How all of a piece it is—how the rivetted metre both expresses and illustrates his almost fanatical love of incarnation. What particularly impressed me was his taking—what one expects to find mentioned only in anti-feminists—the Lilithian desire to be admired and making it his chief point—the lover as primarily the mechanism by wh. the woman’s beauty apprehends itself.

  I see now why Janet saw female breasts on the dog collars, and have at last brought into consciousness the important truth: Venus is a female deity, not ‘because men invented the mythology’ but because she is. The idea of female beauty is the erotic stimulus for women as well as men . . . i.e. a lascivious man thinks about women’s bodies, a lascivious woman thinks about her own. What a world we live in! . . .

  TO A PUPIL: from Magdalen College (This is an early example of the innumerable painstaking and courteous letters Jack wrote to pupils and ex-pupils.)

  18 June 1931

  Now as to work. If you are staying up over the week-end and could call on me on Saturday morning we could discuss this. If this is impossible, my present advice is this:

  Doing Chaucer and Shakespeare in the same term seems to me a hazardous experiment, unless there is some special reason which I don’t know yet. Our usual plan here is to spend a term on Chaucer and his contemporaries. As regards reading for the Vac., my general view is that the Vac. should be given chiefly to reading the actual literary texts, without much attention to problems, getting thoroughly familiar with stories, situation, and style, and so having all the data for aesthetic judgement ready; then the term can be kept for more scholarly reading. Thus, if you were doing Chaucer and contemporaries next term, I shd advise you to read Chaucer himself, Langland (if you can get Skeat’s edtn, the selection is not much good), Gower (again Macaulay’s big edtn if possible, not so that you may read every word of the Confessio but so that you may select yourself—not forgetting the end which is one of the best bits), Gawain (Tolkien and Gordon’s edtn), Sisam’s XIV century prose and verse (all the pieces of any literary significance). If you can borrow Ritson’s Metrical Romance so much the better.

  But perhaps you have read all these before. If so, and if there are other special circumstances, we must try to meet. If Saturday is impossible, ring me up on Friday and I will squeeze in a time somehow or other.

  [Warren discovered almost as soon as he arrived back in England that Jack and Mrs Moore were thinking of building their own home. On 25 May 1930 he covered in his diary the reasons why he chose to become a member of their household. Then, on 6 June they went to see a house called The Kilns in Headington Quarry which was coming up for sale. They liked the house, with its eight acres of woodlands, so much that in the end Jack, Warren and Mrs Moore bought it together. They moved there on 11 October 1930.

  The following Autumn Warren was posted for the second time to Shanghai. He sailed from Southampton on 9 October 1931.]

  TO ARTHUR GREEVES: from The Kilns, Kiln Lane, Headington Quarry

  22 September 1931

  I couldn’t write to you last Sunday because I had a week-end guest—a man called Dyson who teaches English at Reading University.139 I meet him I suppose about four or five times a year and am beginning to regard him as one of my friends of the 2nd class—i.e. Not in the same rank as yourself or Barfield, but on a level with Tolkien140 or Macfarlane.141

  He stayed the night with me in College—I sleeping in in order to be able to talk far into the night as one cd hardly do out here. Tolkien came too, and did not leave till 3 in the morning: and after seeing him out by the little postern on Magdalen bridge Dyson and I found still more to say to one another, strolling up and down the cloister of New Building, so that we did not get to bed till 4. It was really a memorable talk. We began (in Addison’s walk just after dinner) on metaphor and myth—interrupted by a rush of wind which came so suddenly on the still, warm evening and sent so many leaves pattering down that we thought it was raining. We all held our breath, the other two appreciating the ecstasy of such a thing almost as you would. We continued (in my room) on Christianity: a good long satisfying talk in which I learned a lot . . .

  I am so glad you have really enjoyed a Morris again. I had the same feeling about it as you, in a way, with this proviso—that I don’t think Morris was conscious of the meaning either here or in any of his works, except Love Is Enough where the flame actually breaks through the smoke so to speak. I feel more and more that Morris has taught me things he did not understand himself. These hauntingly beautiful lands which somehow never satisfy—this passion to escape from death plus the
certainty that life owes all its charm to mortality—these push you on to the real thing because they fill you with desire and yet prove absolutely clearly that in Morris’s world that desire cannot be satisfied.

  The Macdonald conception of death—or, to speak more correctly, St Paul’s—is really the answer to Morris: but I don’t think I should have understood it without going through Morris. He is an unwilling witness to the truth. He shows you just how far you can go without knowing God, and that is far enough to force you (tho’ not poor Morris himself) to go further. If ever you feel inclined to relapse into the mundane point of view—to feel that your book and pipe and chair are enough for happiness—it only needs a page or two of Morris to sting you wide awake into uncontrollable longing and to make you feel that everything is worthless except the hope of finding one of his countries. But if you read any of his romances through you will find the country dull before the end. All he has done is to rouse the desire: but so strongly that you must find the real satisfaction. And then you realise that death is at the root of the whole matter, and why he chose the subject of the Earthly Paradise, and how the true solution is one he never saw . . .