by C. S. Lewis
I wish I had known your wife better. But she has a bright place in my memory. It was so reassuring to the Oxford deserter to meet someone from L.[ady] M.[argaret] H.[all] and be able to talk about ‘the Hippo’.188 She will be very greatly missed—on her own account, quite apart from any sympathy with you—by every fellow of this College.
And poor Horace189 too—‘the single talent well employed’. I shall not be at the funeral. You can understand and forgive my desire, now, to spend every possible moment at home. Forgive me if I have said anything amiss in this letter. I am too much involved myself to practise any skill.
TO DR ALASTAIR FOWLER: from Magdalene College
10 December 1959
Thanks greatly. The Spenser article confirms the impression increasingly made on me while writing lectures on F.Q. last term: that of its amazing close-wovenness.190 Damme, you can’t pick up a line anywhere but it starts another line wriggling ten cantos away . . .
Sorry my OHEL is such a nuisance.191 I only once detected a pupil offering me some one else (Elton) as his own work. I told him I was not a detective nor even a schoolmaster, nor a nurse, and that I absolutely refused to take any precaution against this puerile trick: that I’d as soon think it my business to see that he washed behind his ears or wiped his bottom . . . He went down of his own accord the next week and I never saw him again. I think you ought to make a general announcement of that sort. You must not waste your time constantly reading me and Dowden and Churton Collins as a sort of police measure. It is bad for them to think this is ‘up to you’. Flay them alive if you happen to detect them: but don’t let them feel that you are a safeguard against the effects of their own idleness.
What staggers me is how any man can prefer the galley-slave labour of transcription to the freeman’s work of attempting an essay on his own . . .
TO A SCHOOLGIRL IN AMERICA: from The Kilns (She had written, at her teacher’s suggestion, to request advice on writing.)
14 December 1959
(1) Turn off the Radio.
(2) Read all the good books you can, and avoid nearly all magazines.
(3) Always write (and read) with the ear, not the eye. You shd hear every sentence you write as if it was being read aloud or spoken. If it does not sound nice, try again.
(4) Write about what really interests you, whether it is real things or imaginary things, and nothing else. (Notice this means that if you are interested only in writing you will never be a writer, because you will have nothing to write about . . .)
(5) Take great pains to be clear. Remember that though you start by knowing what you mean, the reader doesn’t, and a single ill-chosen word may lead him to a total misunderstanding. In a story it is terribly easy just to forget that you have not told the reader something that he needs to know—the whole picture is so clear in your own mind that you forget that it isn’t the same in his.
(6) When you give up a bit of work don’t (unless it is hopelessly bad) throw it away. Put it in a drawer. It may come in useful later. Much of my best work, or what I think my best, is the rewriting of things begun and abandoned years earlier.
(7) Don’t use a typewriter. The noise will destroy your sense of rhythm, which still needs years of training.
(8) Be sure you know the meaning (or meanings) of every word you use.
TO SOPHIA STORR (a schoolgirl): from The Kilns
24 December 1959
No, of course it was not unconscious. So far as I can remember it was not at first intentional either. That is, when I started The Lion, Witch and Wardrobe I don’t think I foresaw what Aslan was going to do and suffer. I think He just insisted on behaving in His own way. This of course I did understand and the whole series became Christian.
But it is not, as some people think, an allegory. That is, I don’t say ‘Let us represent Christ as Aslan’. I say, ‘Supposing there was a world like Narnia, and supposing, like ours, it needed redemption, let us imagine what sort of Incarnation and Passion and Resurrection Christ would have there.’ See?
I think this is pretty obvious if you take all the seven Narnian books as a whole. In The Magician’s Nephew Aslan creates Narnia. In Prince Caspian the old stories about Him are beginning to be disbelieved. At the end of the Dawn Treader He appears as the Lamb. His three replies to Shasta suggest the Trinity. In The Silver Chair the old king is raised from the dead by a drop of Aslan’s blood. Finally in the Last Battle we have the reign of anti-Christ (the ape), the end of the world, and the Last Judgement.
TO FATHER PETER MILWARD: from The Kilns
Christmas Day 1959
I hope my last letter to you did not sound chilling: still less (heaven help us!) as if I were offended by criticism. I think the chief reason why I am less disposed than you for large-scale discussion by letter is the difference of our ages. In youth we conduct (at least I did) long and deep disputations through the post. It is indeed a most valuable part of our education. We put into it quite as much thought and labour as wd go to writing a book. But later, when one has become a writer of books, it is hard to keep it up. One can’t fill one’s leisure with the v. same activity which is one’s main work. And in my case not only the mind but the hand needs rest. Penmanship is increasingly laborious, and the results (as you see) increasingly illegible!
If you sometimes read into my books what I did not know I had put there, neither of us need be surprised, for greater readers have doubtless done the same to far greater authors. Shakespeare wd, I suspect, read with astonishment what Goethe, Coleridge, Bradley and Wilson Knight have found in him! Perhaps a book ought to have more meanings than the writer intends? But then the writer will not necessarily be the best person with whom to discuss them.
You are in my daily prayers. Will you pray much for me at present? The cancer from which my wife was (as I believe, miraculously) delivered 2½ years ago, when death in a few weeks was predicted, is returning. Can one without presumption ever ask for a second miracle? The prophet turned back the shadow for Hezekiah once: not twice. Lazarus, raised from the dead, presently died again.
1960–1963
TO MRS VERA GEBBERT: from The Kilns
17 January 1960
The ghastly daily grind of unavoidable letters leaves me a hand very ill disposed to pleasanter and friendlier correspondence. It is now 9.50 A.M. and I’ve already been writing letters as hard as I can drive the pen across the paper for an hour and a half: and when on earth I shall get a chance to begin my own work I don’t know . . . I quite realise that it wd be difficult to emulate H. B. Stowe, writing in the kitchen. But—we know what the books were like—do we know what the cooking was like? . . . I am pretty well, though always very tired.
[Joy had all her life wanted to see Greece. Before the return of her old enemy, cancer, Roger and June Lancelyn Green—who had been there on a ‘Wings’ tour in April 1959—offered to make arrangements for a similar visit in April 1960. The Lewises were delighted with the idea, and in September 1959 Jack told their friends which days in April would be best for them. Even the pains and the various complications of Joy’s illness did not deter them. Jack and Joy were in Greece with the Lancelyn Greens during 2–14 April 1960. Roger Lancelyn Green kept a diary of their travels through Greece and it can be found in his and my C. S. Lewis: A Biography (1974).]
TO CHAD WALSH (who had known Jack and Joy since the late 1940s): from The Kilns
23 May 1960
It looked very doubtful if Joy and I would be able to do our trip to Greece, but we did. From one point of view it was madness, but neither of us regrets it. She performed prodigies of strength, limping to the top of the Acropolis and up through the Lion gate of Mycenae and all about the medieval city of Rhodes. (Rhodes is simply the Earthly Paradise.) It was as if she were divinely supported. She came back in a nunc dimittis frame of mind, having realised, beyond hope, her greatest, lifelong, this-worldly, desire.
There was a heavy price to pay in increased lameness and legpains: not that her exertions had or could
have any effect on the course of the cancers, but that the muscles etc had been overtaxed. Since then there has been a recrudescence of the original growth in the right breast which started the whole trouble. It had to be removed last Friday—or, as she characteristically put it, she was ‘made an Amazon’. This operation went through, thank God, with greater ease than we had dared to hope. By the evening of the same day she was free from all severe pain and from nausea, and cheerfully talkative. Yesterday she was able to sit up in a chair for fifteen minutes or so.
Love and greetings to you all, in which Warnie (who is fine) joins me. Thank you for your prayers.
I had some ado to prevent Joy (and myself) from relapsing into Paganism in Attica! At Daphne it was hard not to pray to Apollo the Healer. But somehow one didn’t feel it wd have been very wrong—wd have only been addressing Christ sub specie Apollinis. We witnessed a beautiful Christian village ceremony in Rhodes and hardly felt a discrepancy. Greek priests impress one very favourable at sight—much more so than most Protestant or R.C. clergy. And the peasants all refuse tips.
TO DELMAR BANNER: from Magdalene College
27 May 1960
Thanks. I’m glad you liked the book [The Four Loves].
I quite agree with you about Homosexuals: to make the thing criminal cures nothing and only creates a blackmailer’s paradise. Anyway, what business is it of the State’s? But I couldn’t well have had a digression on that.192 One is fighting on two fronts. a. For the persecuted Homo. against snoopers and busybodies. b. For ordinary people against the widespread freemasonry of the highbrow Homos who dominate so much of the world of criticism, and won’t be v. nice to you unless you are in their set . . .
[Samuel Pepys had been a member of Magdalene College and his diary is the property of Magdalene. At this time the College was trying to reach a decision as to whether or not to publish the Diary in its unexpurgated entirety.]
TO SIR HENRY WILLINK: from The Kilns
17 June 1960
Francis193 flatters me with the idea that, if there is a division as to printing those ‘curious’ passages in our new Pepys, my opinion might be asked for. Since I can’t be sure of coming to the next meeting of the Governing Body, I have decided to let you have it in writing.
A prudential and moral problem are both involved.
The prudential one is concerned (a) with the chances of a prosecution, and (b) with the chances of disrepute and ridicule. On (a) it would be ridiculous for me to express an opinion in your presence and Mickey’s.194 As to (b), a spiteful or merely jocular journalist would certainly make us for a week or two malodorous in the public nostril. But a few weeks, or years, are nothing in the life of the College. I think it would be pusillanimous and unscholarly to delete a syllable on that score.
The moral problem comes down to the question ‘Is it probable that the inclusion of these passages will lead anyone to commit an immoral act which he would not have committed if we had suppressed them?’ Now of course this question is strictly unanswerable. No one can foresee the odd results that any words may have on this or that individual. We ourselves, in youth, have been both corrupted and edified by books in which our elders could have foreseen neither edification nor corruption. But to suggest that in a society where the most potent aphrodisiacs are daily put forward by the advertisers, the newspapers, and the films, any perceptible increment of lechery will be caused by printing a few obscure and widely separated passages in a very long and expensive book, seems to me ridiculous, or even hypocritical.
A very severe moralist might argue that it is not enough to be unable to foresee harm: that we ought, before we act, to be able to foresee with certainty the absence of harm. But this, as you see, would prove too much. It is really an argument against doing, or not doing, any action whatever. For they all go on having consequences, mostly unforeseeable, to the world’s end.
I am therefore in favour of printing the whole unexpurgated Pepys.
TO MRS VERA GEBBERT: from The Kilns
15 July 1960
Alas, you will never send anything along ‘for the three of us’ again, for my dear Joy is dead. Until within ten days of the end we hoped, although noticing her increasing weakness, that she was going to hold her own, but it was not to be.
Last week she had been complaining of muscular pains in her shoulders, but by Monday 11th seemed much better, and on Tuesday, though keeping her bed, said she felt a great improvement: on that day she was in good spirits, did her ‘crossword puzzle’ with me, and in the evening played a game of Scrabble. At quarter past six on Wednesday morning [13 July] my brother, who slept over her, was wakened by her screaming and ran down to her. I got the doctor, who fortunately was at home, and he arrived before seven and gave her a heavy shot. At half past one I took her into hospital in an ambulance. She was conscious for the short remainder of her life, and in very little pain thanks to drugs: and died peacefully in my company about 10.15 the same night . . .
You will understand that I have no heart to write more, but I hope that when next I send a letter it will be a less depressing one.
TO MRS VERA GEBBERT: from The Kilns
5 August 1960
I believe in the resurrection . . . but the state of the dead till the resurrection is unimaginable. Are they in the same time that we live in at all? And if not, is there any sense in asking where they are ‘now’? . . .
Perhaps being maddeningly busy is the best thing for me. Anyway I am. This is one of those things which makes the tragedies of real life so very unlike those of the stage.
TO HERR KUNZ (in Germany): from The Kilns
16 August 1960
My Out of the Silent Planet has no factual basis and is a critique of our own age only as any Christian work is implicitly a critique of any age. I was trying to redeem for genuinely imaginative purposes the form popularly known in this country as ‘science-fiction’—I think you call it ‘future-romanz’; just as (si parva licet componere magnis)195 Hamlet redeemed the popular revenge play.
TO MRS ANNE SCOTT: from The Kilns
26 August 1960
Thank you very much for your most kind and encouraging letter. You gave me great pleasure by what you said about Till We Have Faces, for that book, which I consider far and away the best I have written, has been my one big failure both with the critics and with the public.
My small stepson entirely agrees with your children about the present wicked misdirection of my talents, and asks ‘When are you going to stop writing all this bilge and write interesting books again?’
Cookery books are not such bad reading. Have you Mrs Beeton with the original preface? It is delicious.
TO ARTHUR GREEVES: from The Kilns
30 August 1960
It is nice to hear from you. It might have been worse. Joy got away easier than many who die of cancer. There were a couple of hours of atrocious pain on her last morning, but the rest of the day mostly asleep, tho’ rational whenever she was conscious. Two of her last remarks were ‘You have made me happy’ and ‘I am at peace with God’. She died at 10 that evening. I’d seen violent death but never seen natural death before. There’s really nothing to it, is there? One thing I’m very glad about is that in the Easter Vac she realised her life long dream of seeing Greece. We had a wonderful time there. And many happy moments even after that. The night before she died we had a long, quiet, nourishing, and tranquil talk.
W. is away on his Irish holiday and has, as usual, drunk himself into hospital. Douglas—the younger boy—is, as always, an absolute brick, and a very bright spot in my life. I’m quite well myself. In fact, by judicious diet and exercise, I’ve brought myself down from thirteen stone to just under eleven.
TO ROGER LANCELYN GREEN: from The Kilns (The Lancelyn Greens had invited Jack to their home, ‘Poulton Hall’, in Cheshire for a holiday.)
15 September 1960
Oh Hell! What a trial I am to you both! If Warnie really came home on the 23rd—and if he did not come home so drunk
as to have to be put straight into a nursing home—I could and wd with delight come to you on the 24th. But neither is really at all probable. And of course I can’t leave this house with no grown-up in charge. What it comes to is that you must count me out. I am very sorry. Don’t make any further efforts to accommodate such an entangled man as me—it wd only for me add to the loss of a great pleasure the embarrassment of knowing I was a nuisance.
Have you seen Allan Garner’s The Wierdstone of Brisingamen? Not bad, tho’ too indebted to Tolkien. He seems to be a fairly near neighbour of yours—Aldersley, Cheshire.
Thanks, evermore thanks, and love.
TO FATHER PETER MILWARD: from The Kilns
26 September 1960
First, about the Grail. I think it important to keep on remembering that a question can be v. interesting without being answerable and one of my main efforts as a teacher has been to train people to say those (apparently difficult) words ‘We don’t know’.
We haven’t even got anything that can be quite accurately called ‘the Grail legend’. We have a number of romances which introduce the Grail and are not consistent with one another. No theory as to the ultimate origin is more than speculative. The desire to make that origin either Pagan or (less commonly) heretical is clearly widespread, but I think it springs from psychological causes not from any evidence.
I do not myself doubt that it represents in a general way an imaginative and literary response to the doctrine of Transubstantiation and the visible act of the elevation. But we must be on our guard against abstraction. A story does not grow like a tree nor breed other stories as a mouse begets other mice. Each story is told by an individual, voluntarily, with an unique artistic purpose. Hence the real germination goes on where historical, theological, or anthropological studies can never reach it—in the mind of some man of genius, like Chretien or Wolfram. Those who have written stories themselves will come nearer to understanding it than those who have ‘studied the Grail legend’ all these lives.