C. S. Lewis – A Life
Page 45
509 Ibid., 1–4.
510 Ibid., 18.
511 The best study is Lucas, “The Restoration of Man.”
512 George Macaulay Trevelyan to Lewis, 2 February 1945, MS Eng. c. 6825, fol. 602, Bodleian Library, Oxford.
513 J. R. R. Tolkien to Christopher Tolkien, 13 April 1944; Tolkien, Letters, 71.
514 For example, Pearce, C. S. Lewis and the Catholic Church, 107–112.
515 Surprised by Joy, 38.
516 “On Science Fiction,” in Essay Collection, 456–457.
517 Ibid., 459.
518 Letter to Roger Lancelyn Green, 28 December 1938; Letters, vol. 2, 236–237.
519 Haldane, Possible Worlds, 190–197.
520 For further details, see Harry Bruinius, Better For All the World: The Secret History of Forced Sterilization and America’s Quest for Racial Purity (New York: Knopf, 2006).
521 “Vivisection,” in Essay Collection, 693–697.
522 Ibid., 696.
523 Ibid., 695.
524 “Religion: Don v. Devil,” Time, 8 September 1947.
525 J. R. R. Tolkien to Christopher Tolkien, 1 March 1944; Tolkien, Letters, 68.
526 Lewis made little effort to conceal his home telephone number: Oxford 6963.
527 J. R. R. Tolkien to Joy Hill, 10 May 1966; Tolkien, Letters, 368–369.
528 J. R. R. Tolkien to Christopher Tolkien, 28 October 1944; Tolkien, Letters, 102.
529 J. R. R. Tolkien to Rayner Unwin, 9 September 1954; Tolkien, Letters, 184.
530 MS RSL E2, C. S. Lewis file, Cambridge University Library.
531 A. N. Wilson, Lewis: A Biography, 191.
532 Letter to Jill Flewett, 17 April 1946; Letters, vol. 2, 706.
533 Letter to Lord Salisbury, 9 March 1947; Letters, vol. 2, 766.
534 Letter to Owen Barfield, 4 April 1949; Letters, vol. 2, 929.
535 Letter to Arthur Greeves, 2 July 1949; Letters, vol. 2, 952.
536 Letter to J. R. R. Tolkien, 27 October 1949; Letters, vol. 2, 990–991.
537 Letter to Don Giovanni Calabria, 13 September 1951; Letters, vol. 3, 136. My translation of Lewis’s Latin.
538 Letter to the Prime Minister’s Secretary, 4 December 1951; Letters, vol. 3, 147. The British cabinet office finally confirmed this information following a “Freedom of Information” request on 26 January 2012.
539 Tolkien, Letters, 125–129.
540 Stella Aldwinckle, OH/SR-1, fol. 9, Wade Center Oral History Collection, Wheaton College, Wheaton, IL.
541 Per. 267 e.20, no. 1, fol. 4, Bodleian Library, Oxford.
542 Stella Aldwinckle Papers, 8/380; Wade Center, Wheaton College, Wheaton, IL.
543 “Evil and God,” in Essay Collection, 93.
544 J. B. S. Haldane, “When I Am Dead,” in Possible Worlds and Other Essays (London: Chatto and Windus, 1927), 209.
545 This conclusion was printed in italics in the original first edition: C. S. Lewis, Miracles (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1947), 27.
546 The text of her critique of Lewis is to be found in Socratic Digest 4 (1948): 7–15. This was later reprinted in The Collected Philosophical Papers of G. E. M. Anscombe, vol. 2 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1981), 224–232.
547 A. N. Wilson, C. S. Lewis: A Biography, 220.
548 John Lucas, personal communication to author, dated 14 October 2010. Lucas (born 1929) was studying Literae Humaniores at Balliol College at the time of the Anscombe debate.
549 “Christian Apologetics,” in Essay Collection, 159.
550 Letter to Mary van Deusen, 18 June 1956; Letters, vol. 3, 762.
551 The Italian translation was titled Le Lettere di Berlicche. The book’s two chief characters—Screwtape and Wormwood—were renamed Berlicche and Malacoda.
552 The best study of this correspondence is Dal Corso, Il Servo di Dio, 78–83.
553 Letter to Don Giovanni Calabria [in Latin; my translation], 14 January 1949; Letters, vol. 2, 905. Although Lewis was able to read Dante’s Italian, it is interesting to note that he did not use this language when writing to Don Giovanni.
554 Letter to Robert C. Walton, 10 July 1951; Letters, vol. 3, 129.
555 Letter to Stella Aldwinckle, 12 June 1950; Letters, vol. 3, 33–35.
556 Letter to Carl F. H. Henry, 28 September 1955; Letters, vol. 3, 651. For Lewis’s approach to apologetics, see McGrath, “Reason, Experience, and Imagination: Lewis’s Apologetic Method,” in The Intellectual World of C. S. Lewis.
557 “C. S. Lewis’s Handwriting Analysed,” Times, 27 February 2008. Lewis did indeed have a “garden shed of sorts”: see his “Meditation in a Toolshed,” in Essay Collection, 607–610.
558 Letter to Eliza Marian Butler, 25 September 1940; Letters, vol. 2, 444–446.
559 J. R. R. Tolkien to W. H. Auden, 7 June 1955; Tolkien, Letters, 215.
560 Miracles, 44.
561 Letter to Sister Penelope, 20 February 1943; Letters, vol. 2, 555. Lewis’s Greek phrase ex hypokeimenōn (mistranscribed by the editor of Letters) literally means “out of those things that lie to hand,” although it is better understood as “out of underlying realities.”
562 This memory is not dated, but must precede Maureen’s marriage to Leonard Blake on 27 August 1940, when she moved out of The Kilns.
563 Lady Maureen Dunbar, OH/SR-8, fol. 35, Wade Center Oral History Collection, Wheaton College, Wheaton, IL.
564 Green and Hooper, Lewis: A Biography, 305–306.
565 We later learn that their family name is “Pevensie.” This is not disclosed in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, but only appears in a later volume in the series, The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader.”
566 The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, 11.
567 A Preface to “Paradise Lost,” v.
568 “On Three Ways of Writing for Children,” in Essay Collection, 512.
569 Surprised by Joy, 14.
570 E. Nesbit, The Enchanted Castle (London: Fisher Unwin, 1907), 250.
571 E. Nesbit, The Magic World (London: Macmillan, 1924), 224–225.
572 J. R. R. Tolkien to Allen & Unwin, 16 March 1949; Tolkien, Letters, 133.
573 Letter to Pauline Baynes, 4 May 1957; Letters, vol. 3, 850.
574 HarperCollins’s statement is clearly based on—even if it does not accurately summarise the substance of—Lewis’s letter to Laurence Krieg, 21 April 1957; Letters, vol. 3, 847–848. It is essential to appreciate the tentative note of Lewis’s comments in this letter, and especially his revealing remark that “perhaps it does not matter very much in which order anyone reads them.”
575 “On Criticism,” in Essay Collection, 543–544.
576 Ibid., 550.
577 The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, 67.
578 For a good example, see Jack R. Lundbom, “The Inclusio and Other Framing Devices in Deuteronomy I–XXVIII,” Vetus Testamentum 46 (1996): 296–315.
579 “Vivisection,” in Essay Collection, 693–697.
580 Ibid., 695–696.
581 Ibid., 695.
582 “On Three Ways of Writing for Children,” in Essay Collection, 511.
583 “Is Theology Poetry?” in Essay Collection, 21.
584 “The Hobbit,” in Essay Collection, 485. See also Williams, The Lion’s World, 11–29.
585 “On Criticism,” in Essay Collection, 550.
586 Letter to Mrs. Hook, 29 December 1958; Letters, vol. 3, 1004.
587 Letter to a fifth grade class in Maryland, 24 May 1954; Letters, vol. 3, 480.
588 “Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings,” in Essay Collection, 525.
589 G. K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1993), 105.
590 See An Experiment in Criticism, 40–49, which identifies six characteristics of myths—all of which can be found in the Chronicles of Narnia. See also “The Mythopoeic Gift of Rider Haggard,” in Essay Collection, 559–562.
591 See Lewis’s comments in An Experiment in Criticism, 57–73. For comment, see Fernandez, Mythe,
Raison Ardente, 174–389; Williams, The Lion’s World, 75–96.
592 An Experiment in Criticism, 45.
593 “It All Began with a Picture . . .,” in Essay Collection, 529.
594 Letter to Carol Jenkins, 22 January 1952; Letters, vol. 3, 160.
595 The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, 166.
596 See the list of ten works Lewis identified in 1962, the year before his death: Christian Century, 6 June 1962.
597 Surprised by Joy, 274.
598 The Problem of Pain, 5–13.
599 Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows (New York: Charles Scribner, 1908), 156.
600 Ibid., 154. This section is omitted from some modern popular editions of Grahame’s classic story.
601 The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, 65.
602 Ibid.
603 “The Weight of Glory,” in Essay Collection, 98–99.
604 The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, 75. See the excellent discussion in Williams, The Lion’s World, 49–71.
605 Bertrand Russell to Colette O’Niel, 21 October 1916; Bertrand Russell, The Selected Letters of Bertrand Russell, ed. Nicholas Griffin, vol. 2, The Public Years 1914–1970 (London: Routledge, 2001), 85.
606 The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader,” 188.
607 On film, see Christopher Deacy, “Screen Christologies: Evaluation of the Role of Christ-Figures in Film,” Journal of Contemporary Religion 14 (1999): 325–338.
608 Mark D. Stucky, “Middle Earth’s Messianic Mythology Remixed: Gandalf’s Death and Resurrection in Novel and Film,” Journal of Religion and Popular Culture 13 (2006); Padley and Padley, “From Mirrored Truth the Likeness of the True.”
609 The Problem of Pain, 82.
610 Broadcast Talks, 52.
611 Ibid., 53–54.
612 The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, 128–129.
613 Ibid., 142.
614 Ibid., 148.
615 See, for example, C. William Marx, The Devil’s Rights and the Redemption in the Literature of Medieval England (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1995); John A. Alford, “Jesus the Jouster: The Christ-Knight and Medieval Theories of Atonement in Piers Plowman and the ‘Round Table’ Sermons,” Yearbook of Langland Studies 10 (1996): 129–143.
616 See Karl Tamburr, The Harrowing of Hell in Medieval England (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2007).
617 English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, 380.
618 Ward, Planet Narnia, 3–41.
619 Ibid., 77–99.
620 The Last Battle, 160.
621 Ibid., 159.
622 Ibid., 160.
623 The Silver Chair, 141–142.
624 Ibid., 143.
625 John Ezard, “Narnia Books Attacked as Racist and Sexist,” The Guardian, 3 June 2002. Pullman did not specifically name Susan, referring merely to “one girl” in the story of Narnia.
626 Letter to Sheldon Vanauken, 14 May 1954; Letters, vol. 3, 473.
627 Figures for students reading for honour degrees from Brockliss, Magdalen College Oxford, 617.
628 Letter to James W. Welch, 24 November 1945; Letters, vol. 2, 681.
629 See letter to Arthur Greeves, 11 December 1944; Letters, vol. 3, 1554.
630 Roy S. Lee to Lewis, 29 August 1945, file 910/TAL 1b, BBC Written Archives Centre, Caversham Park.
631 Cambridge University Reporter 84, no. 30 (31 March 1954), 986. See Barbour, “Lewis and Cambridge,” 459–465.
632 Tolkien dates the loss of intimacy between Lewis and himself to around this time: J. R. R. Tolkien to Michael Tolkien, November 1963?; Tolkien, Letters, 341.
633 G. M. Trevelyan, master of Trinity College, later recalled that this was the only time an electing committee had voted unanimously in his long experience at Cambridge: W. H. Lewis, “Memoir of C. S. Lewis,” 22.
634 Henry Willink to Lewis, 11 May 1954; Group F, Private Papers, F/CSL/1, Magdalene College, Cambridge.
635 Letter to Henry Willink, 12 May 1954; Letters, vol. 3, 470–471.
636 Henry Willink to Lewis, 14 May 1954; Group F, Private Papers, F/CSL/1, Magdalene College, Cambridge.
637 J. R. R. Tolkien to Henry Willink, 17 May 1954; Group F, Private Papers, F/CSL/1, Magdalene College, Cambridge. Neither this letter nor his accompanying letter to H. S. Bennett are included in existing published collections of Tolkien’s correspondence.
638 On receiving Lewis’s letter, dated 19 May, reopening negotiations, Willink penned these words on its first page: “I wrote to Miss Gardner, May 18.”
639 Henry Willink to Lewis, 24 May 1954; Group F, Private Papers, F/CSL/1, Magdalene College, Cambridge.
640 Basil Willey to Henry Willink, 19 May 1954; Group F, Private Papers, F/CSL/1, Magdalene College, Cambridge.
641 The most obvious source would be Gardner’s Oxford colleague Tolkien. But Tolkien did not make any statement to this effect in either of his letters of 17 May 1954 to Willink and Bennett.
642 Gardner makes this clear in her obituary notice of Lewis for the British Academy: Gardner, “Clive Staples Lewis, 1898–1963.” The reader needs to know that Gardner was Cambridge’s second choice to make sense of her intriguing comments.
643 Henry Willink to Lewis, 3 June 1954; Group F, Private Papers, F/CSL/1, Magdalene College, Cambridge. A link between Magdalen College Oxford and Magdalene College Cambridge already existed: an “amicable accord” was agreed upon in March 1931, based on a pairing arrangement by which members of each college had shared dining rights: Brockliss, Magdalen College Oxford, 601.
644 Two letters to Sir Henry Willink, one in his capacity as vice-chancellor of the University of Cambridge, and one in his capacity as master of Magdalene College, both dated 4 June 1954; Letters, vol. 3, 483–484. The official history of Magdalene College incorrectly records Lewis’s election to a fellowship at Magdalene as taking place in 1953: Cunich et al., A History of Magdalene College Cambridge, 258.
645 Brockliss, Magdalen College Oxford, 593.
646 John Wain, The Observer, 22 October 1961, 31.
647 Letter to Edward A. Allen, 5 December 1955; Letters, vol. 3, 677–678.
648 Barbara Reynolds, OH/SR-28, fols. 49–50, Wade Center Oral History Collection, Wheaton College, Wheaton, IL.
649 See the exchanges between Christopher Holme and P. H. Newby, 3 March 1945, file 910/TAL 1b, BBC Written Archives Centre, Caversham Park. The “Third Programme,” established in 1946, provided comment on intellectual and cultural issues, and was often parodied as “two dons talking.”
650 Letter to Douglas Bush, 28 March 1941; Letters, vol. 2, 475.
651 G. M. Trevelyan, English Social History: A Survey of Six Centuries from Chaucer to Queen Victoria (London: Longman, 1944), 92.
652 “De Descriptione Temporum,” in Selected Literary Essays, 2.
653 Reflections on the Psalms, 7.
654 Keith Thomas, “Diary,” London Review of Books 32, no. 11 (10 June 2010), 36–37.
655 Her views are best studied from her unpublished journals: see MS. Eng. lett. c. 220/3, Bodleian Library, Oxford.
656 For an excellent study, see King, “The Anatomy of a Friendship.”
657 Sayer, Jack, 347–348.
658 Pitter herself was quite unaware of any suggestion that she was the obvious choice for Lewis’s wife: Ruth Pitter, OH/SR-27, fol. 30, Wade Center Oral History Collection, Wheaton College, Wheaton, IL.
659 Dorsett, And God Came In, 17.
660 Davidman, “The Longest Way Round,” 23–24.
661 Observer, 20 September 1998; Belfast Telegraph, 12 October 1998.
662 Davidman’s correspondence is revealing at this point, particularly her interest in Madame de Maintenon (née Françoise d’Aubigné, 1635–1719), the second wife of the French king Louis XIV. Though “born in the workhouse,” she secured a dramatic rise in her social status through marrying a poet, and finally the king. See Davidman, Out of My Bone, 197.
663 For a discussion of these papers, see the forthcoming study of Don W. King, Yet One Mo
re Spring: A Critical Study of Joy Davidman (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2013).
664 Dorsett, And God Came In, 87.