Letters of C. S. Lewis

by C. S. Lewis

  Mr Hunter informs me that your society has done me an honour above my deserts. I am deeply grateful to be chosen for it and also delighted by the very existence of such a society as yours. May it have a long and distinguished history!

  The list of my books which I send in answer to Mr Hunter’s request will, I fear, strike you as a very mixed bag. Since he encourages me to ‘make a statement’ about them, I may point out that there is a guiding thread. The imaginative man in me is older, more continuously operative, and in that sense more basic than either the religious writer or the critic. It was he who made me first attempt (with little success) to be a poet. It was he who, in response to the poetry of others, made me a critic, and, in defence of that response, sometimes a critical controversialist. It was he who, after my conversion led me to embody my religious belief in symbolical or mythopoeic forms, ranging from Screwtape to a kind of theologised science-fiction. And it was, of course, he who has brought me, in the last few years to write the series of Narnian stories for children; not asking what children want and then endeavouring to adapt myself (this was not needed) but because the fairy-tale was the genre best fitted for what I wanted to say. But you see already that it is dangerous to ask an author to talk about his own work. The difficulty is to make him stop: and I should ill repay your kindness if I did not sternly draw rein . . .

  TO ‘MRS ASHTON’: from Magdalene College, Cambridge

  1 January 1955

  Few presents can ever have arrived so opportunely as this notepaper of yours . . .

  This will be my first night in my new home and there is lots of work to do before I go to bed. The books are all on the shelves, but must be put in the right order. I can’t bear to look at them till they are . . .

  TO MRS EDWARD A. ALLEN: from The Kilns

  17 January 1955

  No, my change of address does not imply retirement—or at least retirement from academic life; what has happened is that Cambridge has given me a Professorship. In many ways I regretted leaving Magdalen, but after nearly thirty years of the tutorial grind, I shall appreciate the less strenuous life of a ‘Chair’ at Cambridge. I am now settling in there, and think I shall be happy: many of my colleagues are Christians, more than was the case in my old College: my rooms are comfortable, and Cambridge, unlike Oxford, is still a country town, with a farming atmosphere about it. I plan to come back here at intervals during the term, and of course to stop here all the vacations. My brother will live here, so the break with the old life is not as violent as you have pictured it . . .

  TO ‘MRS ASHTON’: from Magdalene College

  2 February 1955

  Thanks for your letter. The day before I got a letter from someone else asking me if the ‘Silent Planet’ was a true story. It’s not the first I’ve had. So I’m beginning to think that some people (and if you don’t look out I’ll have to include you!) just don’t understand what fiction is. When you say what is natural with the intention of making people believe it, that’s lying. When you say it with no such intention, that’s fiction. But it may be perfectly serious in the sense that people often express their deepest thoughts, speculations, desires etc in a story. Of course it would have been wrong for R. [ansom] to talk bout the land of the Pf. [ifltriggi] when he hadn’t really been there, as if he had: because inside the book R. is supposed (or pretended) to be telling his story as true. Surely we can have a character in a story telling a lie, and distinguish it from what he ought to have said, although the v. things he is lying about are themselves (from our point of view who live outside the story) imaginary?

  As for ‘writing stories about God’, it would be rather a tall order to have a story strictly about God (beginning ‘One day God decided’ . . .). But to imagine what God might be supposed to have done in other worlds does not seem to be wrong: and a story is only imagining out loud.

  It is right and inevitable that we shd be much concerned about the salvation of those we love. But we must be careful not to expect or demand that their salvation shd conform to some ready-made pattern of our own. Some Protestant sects have gone very wrong about this. They have a whole programme of conversion etc. marked out, the same for everyone, and will not believe that anyone can be saved who doesn’t go through it ‘just so’. But (see the last chapter of my Problem of Pain) God has His own way with each soul. There is no evidence that St John underwent the same kind of ‘conversion’ as St Paul.

  It’s not essential to believe in the Devil: and I’m sure a man can get to Heaven without being accurate about Methuselah’s age. Also, as Macdonald says ‘the time for saying comes seldom, the time for being is always here’. What we practise, not (save at rare intervals) what we preach is usually our great contribution to the conversion of others . . .

  TO MISS RUTHER PITTER: from Magdalene College

  5 March 1955

  I await the marmalade with the sweet-sharp anticipation proper to it. Might it be Hesperian rather than Hyperborean? The word comes thro’ Portuguese from Meli-mela, ‘honey-apples’ which was what the benighted Greeks called oranges, and oranges might be the golden apples of the Western Garden. The maker of elder-flower wine is G. Sayer, Hamewith, Alexandra Rd., Malvern, a Roman Catholic, a master at Malvern, a former pupil of mine and the most unselfish man I have ever gone about with. Like Long John Silver he has ‘a face as large as a ham’.

  It is lovely here (even tho’ I have had burst pipes four times this term): unlike Oxford, it still shows the country town just an inch beneath the academic surface. I am having an ‘impact’, whether ‘joyous’ or not. If you have seen the ‘Cambridge Number’ of The XXth Century you’ll see that the Orthodox Atheists are v. alarmed at this influx of Christians (Butterfield, Knowles, and C.S.L.). They don’t call themselves atheists, though, but ‘Humanists’, tho’ I doubt if they cd write very good Latin and I am sure that E. M. Forster (who is the silliest of the lot: disappointing, for I liked his novels) wd not really enjoy a meeting with Poggio or Scaliger.

  Thanks for all the lovely things you say about my Great Fat Book (always scribble, scribble, scribble, Mr Gibbon!).176 It is glorious not to be doing it any longer . . .

  TO ‘MRS ASHTON’: from Magdalene College

  16 March 1955

  I am afraid I am not going to be much help about all the religious bodies mentioned in your letter of March 2nd. I have always in my books been concerned simply to put forward ‘mere’ Christianity, and am no guide on these (most regrettable) ‘interdenominational’ questions. I do however strongly object to the tyrannic and unscriptural insolence of anything that calls itself a Church and makes teetotalism a condition of membership. Apart from the more serious objection (that Our Lord Himself turned water into wine and made wine the medium of the only rite He imposed on all His followers) it is so provincial (what I believe you people call ‘small town’). Don’t they realise that Christianity arose in the Mediterranean world where, then as now, wine was as much part of the normal diet as bread? It was the 17th Century Puritans who first made the universal into a rich man’s luxury . . .

  I think I can understand that feeling about a housewife’s work being like that of Sisyphus (who was the stone rolling gentleman). But it is surely in reality the most important work in the world. What do ships, railways, mines, cars, government etc. exist for except that people may be fed, warmed, and safe in their own homes? As Dr Johnson said, ‘To be happy at home is the end of all human endeavour’. (1st to be happy to prepare for being happy in our own real home hereafter: 2nd in the meantime to be happy in our houses.) We wage war in order to have peace, we work in order to have leisure, we produce food in order to eat it. So your job is the one for which all others exist . . .

  TO ‘MRS ASHTON’: from The Kilns

  14 May 1955

  My own view about Elisha and the bears177 (not that I haven’t known small boys who’d be much improved by the same treatment!) and other such episodes is something like this. If you take the Bible as a whole, you see a process in whi
ch something which, in its eccentric levels (these aren’t necessarily the ones that come first in the Book as now arranged) was hardly moral at all, and was in some ways not unlike the Pagan religions, is gradually purged and enlightened till it becomes the religion of the great prophets, and of Our Lord Himself. That whole process is the greatest revelation of God’s true nature. At first hardly anything comes through except mere power. Then (v. imperfect) the truth that He is One and there is no other God. Then justice, then mercy, last wisdom.

  Of course Our Lord never drank spirits (they had no distilled liquors) but of course the wine of the Bible was real fermented wine and alcoholic. The repeated references to the sin of drunkenness in the Bible, from Noah’s first discovery of wine down to the warnings in St Paul’s epistles, make this perfectly plain. The other theory could be (honestly) held only by a v. ignorant person. One can understand the bitterness of some temperance fanatics if one had ever lived with a drunkard: what one finds it harder to excuse is any educated person telling such lies about history.

  I think myself that the shocking reply to the Syrophenician woman178 (it came alright in the end) is to remind all us Gentile Christians—who forget it easily enough and even flirt with anti-Semitism—that the Hebrews are spiritually senior to us, that God did entrust the descendants of Abraham with the first revelation of Himself . . .

  TO MRS VERA GEBBERT: from The Kilns

  25 June 1955

  I’m all for a planet without aches or pains or financial worries, but I doubt if I’d care for one of pure intelligence. No senses (no relish of smells, tastes), no affection, no nonsense. I must have a little fooling. I want to tickle a cat’s ears and sometimes have a slugging match with an impertinent squirrel . . .

  My lecture has proved a best seller and I’ve no copies left.179 . . . You’ve got it nearly right: the only error being that instead of saying the Great Divide came between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, I said at great length and emphatically that it didn’t. But of course ‘not’ is a very small word and one can’t get every fine shade just right!

  TO FATHER PETER MILWARD: from The Kilns

  22 September 1955

  What Malory meant, I have no idea. I doubt if he had any clear intention. To use an image I have used before, I think his work is like one of our old English cathedrals to which many generations have contributed in many different styles, so that the total effect was foreseen by no-one and must be regarded as something midway between a work of art and a work of nature. I therefore give up asking what M. meant: we can ask only what his book in fact means. And to me it means primarily neither the Grail story nor the Lancelot story but precisely the tension and interlocking between the two.

  I know v. little about the Albigensians (except that Denis de Rougemont talks manifest nonsense!). If I undertook a study of the Grail, I shd begin by making up (you perhaps know it already) the history—with v. exact chronology—of the doctrine of Transubstantiation and of contemporary controversies and reactions. I suspect the story is closely connected with these.

  It is certainly a remarkable fact (I hadn’t noticed it before) that the post-medieval interest in Arthur has been almost exclusively Protestant. But one must beware of seeking causes too deep. Might it not be simply that the only nation wh. cd regard Arthur as a national hero was a Protestant nation.

  No, I never read St Ignatius. I must do so one of these days.

  This is a short, dry letter, but not thro’ lack of interest: I have nearly three weeks’ mail to get through, having returned from Ireland to day . . .

  TO JOAN LANCASTER (a child in America): from Magdalene College

  16 October 1955

  In this country we hardly ever have any snow worth talking about till January, or later. Once we had it at Easter after all the trees had their spring leaves on. So the snow could lie on the trees far heavier than if they had been bare, and there was great destruction in the way of broken branches. We had our first frost last night—this morning the lawns are all grey, with a pale, bright sunshine on them: wonderfully beautiful. And somehow exciting. The first beginning of the winter always excites me: it makes me want adventures. I expect our autumn has gentler colours than your fall and it goes far slower. The trees, especially beeches, keep their leaves for weeks & weeks after they have begun to change colour, turning from yellow to gold & from gold to flame-colour.

  I never knew a guinea-pig that took any notice of humans (they take plenty of one another). Of those small animals I think Hamsters are the most amusing—and, to tell you the truth, I’m still fond of mice. But the guinea-pigs go well with your learning German. If they talked, I’m sure that is the language they’d speak.

  TO EDWARD A. ALLEN: from The Kilns

  5 December 1955

  I now pronounce the move to Cambridge a great success. However it may be with my new university, my new college is a smaller, softer, more gracious place than my old. The mental and social atmosphere is like the sunny side of a wall in an old garden. The only danger is less I grow too comfortable and over-ripe. The town, after Nuffield-ruined and industrialised Oxford, is delightfully small and I can get a real country walk whenever I want. All my friends say I look younger.

  Oddly enough the week-end journies are no trouble at all. I find myself perfectly content in a slow train that crawls thro’ green fields stopping at every station. Just because the service is so slow and therefore, in most people’s eyes bad, these trains are almost empty and I have the compartment (you know the funny little boxes into which an English train is divided?) to myself, where I get through a lot of reading and sometimes say my prayers. A solitary railway journey is, I find, quite excellent for this purpose . . .

  TO FATHER PETER MILWARD: from The Kilns

  17 December 1955

  Thank you for yr letter of Nov. 17. The enclosed card was one of the v. few I have been pleased at getting. Christmas cards in general and the whole vast commercial drive called ‘Xmas’ are one of my pet abominations: I wish they could die away and leave the Christian feast unentangled. Not of course that even secular festivities are, on their own level, an evil: but the laboured and organised jollity of this—the spurious childlikeness—the half-hearted and sometimes rather profane attempts to keep up some superficial connection with the Nativity—are disgusting. But yr card is most interesting as an application of Japanese style to a Christian subject: and, me judice, extremely successful.

  Albigensianism, and ancient Celtic Paganism, are both increasingly popular ‘sources’ for medieval story: but, I fear, they are an asylum ignorantiae, chosen because we know so v. little about either. The facts I’d try to hold onto are (1) The name Galahad (Gilead). (2) The resemblance of the Grail to Manna (see, I think, Wisdom: the reference is at Cambridge). (3) The (I think proved) Cistercian provenance.

  Enthusiasm is Ronny Knox’s worst book. And of course you won’t be misled by de Rougement’s nonsense in L’Amour et l’Occident. (Not that the ethics of the last chapter—l’amour cesse d’etre un demon quand il cesse d’etre un dieu—aren’t excellent; but the historical parts are mildly speculative.)

  One quite sees the chilvalric idea in St Ignatius, but of course the chivalry of Amadis (an excellent romance, by the way) is pretty different from that of Arthuriana in general, let alone Sangrealiana in particular.

  Oremus pro invicem:180 Give thanks for me, for a great family anxiety has been lifted and perhaps forever removed. No doubt you have found, like me, that if one regularly transfers people from one’s urgent-petition-list to one’s thanksgiving list, the mere statistics of the two lists are some corroboration of faith. (Not of course that the efficacy of prayer cd strictly be either proved or disproved by empirical evidence.)

  [Dom Bede, who was now in India, had published his autobiography, The Golden String, in 1954. Jack’s autobiography, Surprised by Joy, had been published in September 1955. It was dedicated to Dom Bede, and it was this book Jack was sending him.]

  TO DOM BEDE GRIFFI
THS, O.S.B.: from Magdalene College

  8 February 1956

  I have just got yr letter of Jan. 1st., wh. is full of interest. I am having a copy of the book sent you and wd have done so long ago, but I had lost your address.

  Yes, I do feel the old Magdalen years to have been a v. important period in both our lives. More generally, I feel the whole of one’s youth to be immensely important and even of immense length. The gradual reading of one’s own life, seeing the pattern emerge, is a great illumination at our age. And partly, I hope, getting freed from the past as past by apprehending it as structure. If I ever write a story about someone like She or the Wandering Jew who lived for millennia, I shd make a great point of this: he wd, after 10,000 years, still feel his first 50 years to be the biggest part of his life. I am glad you found a Chestertonian quality in the book. Actually, it seems to me that one can hardly say anything either bad enough or good enough about life.

  The one picture that is utterly false is the supposedly realistic fiction of the XIX century where all the real horrors & heavens are excluded. The reality is a queer mixture of idyll, tragedy, farce, hymn, melodrama: and the characters (even the same characters) far better and worse than one ever imagined.

  I wd have preferred yr book on Mysticism to be a Penguin, for I think they reach a larger audience than anything else. I look forward to it v. much. I think it is just the thing for you to do.

  You are (as you well know) on dangerous ground about Hinduism, but someone must go to dangerous places. One often wonders how different the content of our faith will look when we see it in the total context. Might it be as if one were living on an infinite earth? Further knowledge wd leave our map of, say, the Atlantic quite correct, but if it turned out to be the estuary of a great river—and the continent thro’ wh. that river flowed turned out to be itself an island—off the shores of a still greater continent—and so on! You see what I mean? Not one jot of Revelation will be proved false: but so many new truths might be added.