Letters of C. S. Lewis

by C. S. Lewis

  I have since come to know and respect Mr Derrick very much, and he has kindly supplied me with this account, dated 16 November 1987, about his editing of the book: ‘Here’s how I see the question. Over the years, I have done a good many jobs of editorial carpentry for various publishers, ranging from petty correcting to full ghosting. This was one such job among many. Jock Gibb asked me to do it, on lines specified by himself: I did it to the best of my ability and to his satisfaction: I feel neither pride nor shame at the outcome, apart from the general satisfaction of pleasing a friend and ad hoc employer . . . . Do tell this aspect of the story exactly as you see fit, with or without any mention of my name. I don’t suppose you’ll want to cast me for the villain of the piece! In so far as there is any villain, it is doubtlessly the drink, as then making it impossible for Warnie to do a proper job or even supervise it . . . . Some further blame attaches, I suppose, to that very understandable error of judgement on Jock’s part—his fear that a hot property would die on him, and his consequent reluctance to invest a lot of money in it. The vast present scale of the CSL-industry shows how wrong he was! But he wasn’t making an idiotic mistake, recognizable as such at the time.’

  Such then is the story of this book in so far as I am able to reconstruct it. If Warnie were still alive I believe he would consider all my corrections as pedantic, not really necessary but not wrong either. I think he would be more cheerful about my attempts at restoration, a job he incidently helped with by giving me the original typescript of his book. A number of female correspondents were willing to lend their letters to him on condition that he kept their identities secret. He did this by giving them fictitious names. I passed these made-up names on to his publisher who decided instead that the letters to these different women should all be designated ‘To A Lady’. The problem with this is that many have supposed there to be only one lady. My solution has been to reinstate the fictitious names but using inverted commas so that the reader will know that ‘Mrs Arnold’, ‘Mrs Ashton’ and the others between inverted commas are not real names.

  The biggest difference between the edition of 1966 and this one is the ‘thickening’ which I felt was needed. It suited the kind of book Warnie was writing to quote only short excerpts from most letters. He rarely quoted a complete letter. Because this book is meant to be a selection of his brother’s letters, and not a biography, I have extended some of the excerpts. For instance, it seemed to me a pity that Warnie gave only three sentences of the letter of 20 July 1940 about the conception of The Screwtape Letters, and I have quoted all he says about that book. In some places, where he gave most of a letter, I have given all of it. This edition is also more substantial for having in it a few complete letters which Warnie may not have known about. One of these is the letter of Dr Warfield Firor of 15 October 1949 in which Jack discusses Old Age. There are many more superb letters to Dr Firor, all of which will go into the Collected Letters.

  Readers will discover that I took very seriously Mr Sayer’s suggestion about the letters being ‘annotated a little’. My annotations do not, however, include any of those bits and pieces of Warnie’s narrative that were left out of the ‘Memoir’. It would have been as impossible to make anything out of them as to put Humpty Dumpty together again. Instead, I have supplied footnotes where I thought they were called for, as well as short notes providing such biographical information as was needed to make the letters clearer.

  My task would have been even harder had it not been for all those friends whose advice helped so much. I am particularly grateful to Owen Barfield, Father John Tolkien, George Sayer, Christopher Derrick, Father Paul King, Ben Sykes and Madame Eliane Tixier.

  One thing remains to be told. After all the heart-ache of remembering Warnie’s initial disappointment over what happened to this book, it was surely appropriate that the last editorial problem to be faced was as delightful as Jack Lewis himself. He loathed having to date letters, and when he did the dates could be off by months, or even years. The penultimate letter in this book is dated 25 October 1963. Dear old Jock Gibb had wanted the book to end with a particular letter in which Jack expresses his regret that old age, like Autumn, doesn’t last. The problem for him was that Warnie had given it the date ‘30 September’. To make it the last letter in the book Jock changed the date to ‘27 October’. When I looked at a copy of the original I found written in Jack’s own hand—31 September 1963. Nothing could persuade me to insert an ugly little ‘[sic.]’ beside that date.

  Walter Hooper

  Holy Saturday 1988

  Oxford

  MEMOIR OF C. S. LEWIS

  My brother was born in one of the inner suburbs of Belfast on 29 November 1898, when I was nearly three-and-a-half years old. I first remember him, dimly, as a vociferous disturber of my domestic peace and a rival claimant to my mother’s attention: few detailed and particular memories remain of our first years together, though during these first years—up to our move to the new house in the spring of 1905—we laid the foundations of an intimate friendship that was the greatest happiness of my life and lasted unbroken until his death fifty-eight years later.

  Looking back now upon the pattern of his life and work, I feel that one particular and even trivial circumstance in our early life together needs some emphasis. I refer to the wetness of Irish weather, and the nervousness of the parents of that time about damp and exposure. By the standards of present-day childhood in England, we spent an extraordinary amount of our time shut up indoors. We would gaze out of our nursery window at the slanting rain and the grey skies, and there, beyond a mile or so of sodden meadow, we would see the dim high line of the Castlereagh Hills—our world’s limit, a distant land, strange and unattainable. But we always had pencils, paper, chalk, and paintboxes, and this recurring imprisonment gave us occasion and stimulus to develop the habit of creative imagination. We learnt to draw: my brother made his first attempts at writing: together we devised the imaginary country of ‘Boxen’, which proliferated hugely and became our solace and joy for many years to come. And so, in circumstances that might have been merely dull and depressing, my brother’s gifts began to develop; and it may not be fanciful to see, in that childhood staring out to unattainable hills, some first beginnings of a vision and viewpoint that ran through the work of his maturity.

  The highlight of our year was the annual seaside holiday. Children of today, accustomed as they are to be driven casually to the coast on any fine Sunday afternoon, can hardly imagine the excitement, the bustle and glory of preparation that these holidays entailed, the unique moment of arrival. Of many such holidays, two pictures remain in my memory. The first is of my father’s gloomy detachment. He would sometimes come down for the week-end, but he never stayed with his wife and children throughout this summer holiday. Urgent business was his excuse—he was a solicitor—and he may also have felt that eleven months of our company every year was more than enough. It may have gone deeper than that. I never met a man more wedded to a dull routine, or less capable of extracting enjoyment from life. A night spent out of his house was a penance to him: a holiday he loathed, having not the faintest conception of how to amuse himself. I can still see him on his occasional visits to the seaside, walking moodily up and down the beach, hands in trouser pockets, eyes on the ground, every now and then giving a heartrending yawn and pulling out his watch.

  Then, in the course of one holiday, my brother made the momentous decision to change his name. Disliking ‘Clive’, and feeling his various baby-names to be beneath his dignity, he marched up to my mother, put a forefinger on his chest, and announced ‘He is Jacksie’. He stuck to this next day and thereafter, refusing to answer to any other name: Jacksie it had to be, a name contracted to Jacks and then to Jack. So to his family and his intimate friends, he was Jack for life: and Jack he will be for the rest of this book.

  Looking back in later years on our childhood, he once remarked to me that for one thing, and one thing only, he envied the modern child. In 1904 the rai
n kept us indoors, whether at home or in cramped seaside lodgings: the child of today splashes about outside, in gumboots and oilskins and sou’wester. Otherwise, not for a king’s ransom did Jack wish to be a modern child, facing the stress and anxiety of today’s world. This was no blind nostalgia, no mere regret for vanished class privilege and financial security: what he sighed for was the lost simplicity of country pleasures, the empty sky, the unspoilt hills, the white silent roads on which you could hear the rattle of a farm cart half a mile away.

  The pleasures—all but unattainable to the modern child—were ours, and more especially after our move in 1905. Our new house, ‘Little Lea’, was on the borderline—suburb one way, open hilly farmland the other. We both had bicycles, and in these golden years before school, Jack developed a passionate and lifelong devotion to County Down. And the new house itself was a child’s delight, by reason of its atrociously uneconomical design: on the top floor, cupboard-like doors opened into huge, dark, wasted spaces under the roof, tunnel-like passages through which children could crawl from one space into another, with here and there a rectangular pit, floored with the ceiling of a bedroom—space which the architect had despaired of putting to use. Best of all, we had our own day-room in the attic, instead of a day-nursery and bedroom combined, as in the old house: in this glorious privacy, never invaded by officiously tidying maids, ‘Boxen’ and the rest of our secret life flourished wonderfully. These were golden days, even after they became for Jack mere interludes in the horror of school: we remember them with delight to the end.

  But 1908 was a year of death, and the happy times ended. During that year my father lost his own father, then his wife, then his brother. If I gave any account of my mother’s lingering illness and death, it would only be a poor paraphrase of what Jack wrote in Surprised by Joy. She died on my father’s birthday, 23 August: there was a Shakespearean calendar hanging on the wall of the room where she died, and my father preserved for the rest of his life the leaf for that day, with its quotation: ‘Men must endure their going hence.’

  In the Christmas term of that year, Jack followed me at the school referred to in Surprised by Joy as ‘Belsen’. As he has made very clear, he hated the place, but he escaped its worse brutalities: he amused the headmaster, who even made something of a pet of him, so far as was possible for such a man.

  Jack’s letter and diaries of the time convey little of the full depressing story of this school and its headmaster. In 1901 a boy had been treated so brutally that his father brought a High Court action: this was settled out of court, but it confirmed local suspicions, and the school went downhill rapidly. In 1910 the headmaster wrote to my father that he was ‘giving up school work’, which meant deliverance for Jack: in fact the school collapsed, the house was sold, and its proprietor retired to a country living. There, his behaviour towards his choir and churchwardens was such that he was put under restraint and certified insane: he died in 1912, soon afterwards. With his uncanny flair for making the wrong decision, my father had given us helpless children into the hands of a madman.

  In the spring term of 1911, after a brief spell at Campbell College, Belfast, Jack came with me to Malvern—not to the College, of course, but to the preparatory school, which he calls ‘Chartres’. Two years later, he entered for the scholarship examination to the College: when the day came, he was in bed with a high temperature, and I am inclined to rate his winning of a scholarship under these circumstances as the greatest academic triumph of his career. And so, in September 1913, he started his first term at Malvern.

  There, as readers of Surprised by Joy will have gathered, he was something of a square peg in a round hole. By this time I had left the College and was reading for Sandhurst with W. T. Kirkpatrick, my father’s old headmaster: that autumn, I visited Malvern to attend a House Supper, a noisy and cheerful function, of which I can remember only one thing—Jack’s gloom and boredom, unaltered all through the evening, glaringly obvious to all, not calculated to increase his popularity with the House. He was no kind of failure academically—within a few weeks of arriving, still at the age of fourteen, he attracted the headmaster’s attention with a brilliant translation from Horace—but Malvern was the wrong place for him: and in March 1914 he wrote home, imploring his father to take him away.

  Much to my surprise, my father reacted to this letter by making an immediate and sensible decision: Jack was to leave Malvern at the end of the school year to become Kirkpatrick’s pupil at Great Bookham in Surrey, reading for an Oxford scholarship. This meant one more term at the College, a burden that Jack carried bravely: then at the end of July 1914, he left Malvern for ever with profound relief.

  Here I feel it my duty to make some comment upon his criticisms of the school, as expressed in his letters of the time as well as in Surprised by Joy. ‘I would not’, as Boswell says somewhere, ‘war offensively with the dead’, and least of all with my brother: and yet I find it very difficult to believe in the Malvern that he portrays. In July 1913 I had been on more or less close terms with all the brutes of prefects whom he describes, and I found them (with one exception) very pleasant fellows. How did they come to change their characters entirely during the summer holidays of that year? As regards his lurid descriptions of the immorality of Malvern, I am far from denying that there was immorality; but when I got to Sandhurst and could compare notes with boys from every public school in the country, I found that there was little to choose between them in this respect. And it must be remembered that a boy in his first year at a public school knows very little of what goes on: he lives by scandal and rumour, and tends therefore to see immorality in every sentimental association between an older boy and a younger. Such associations—inevitable under a system which keeps a youth of eighteen isolated from feminine company for two-thirds of the year—are certainly silly and undesirable: but they are very often physically innocent, a fact that Jack seemed reluctant to see or admit.

  When I first read Surprised by Joy I pointed this out to him, and drew his attention to his absurd statement that ‘there was only one topic of conversation’ in the house. I could well remember many others—theatrical, sartorial, sporting, and so forth. I record the incident with pride, because on that occasion, and then only, I persuaded Jack to admit that he had been wrong.

  The fact is that he should never have been sent to a public school at all. Already, at fourteen, his intelligence was such that he would have fitted in better among undergraduates than among schoolboys; and by his temperament he was bound to be a misfit, a heretic, an object of suspicion within the collective-minded and standardizing Public School system. He was, indeed, lucky to leave Malvern before the power of this system had done him any lasting damage.

  Of his days under Kirkpatrick’s tutorship at Great Bookham, he has left a full and lyrical record in Surprised by Joy. The stimulation of a sharp and vigorous mind, the romantic beauty which the Surrey countryside then possessed, the ordered security of Jack’s life, his freedom to read widely and gratuitously—these factors combined to develop his particular gifts and determine his future. ‘He was born with the literary temperament,’ Kirkpatrick wrote to my father, ‘and we have to face that fact with all that it implies.’ And later: ‘Outside a life of literary study, life has no meaning or attraction for him . . . he is adapted for nothing else. You may make up your mind to that.’ There is a note here of warning and limitation, but for Jack these days were paradisal without qualification, his letters of the time being charged with the intoxication of literary discovery.

  From time to time I would come home on leave from France, taking Jack with me to visit our father whenever I could; but already there were difficulties and reluctances in this respect, life at ‘Little Lea’ having certain irksome and frustrating aspects. I mention this subject with reluctance: nevertheless, some awareness of my father’s smothering tendency to dominate the life and especially the conversation of his household is necessary to an understanding of Jack’s mind and life. This tend
ency had borne curious fruit in early days. Ever since the days of the old house, which we left in 1905, Jack had been trying to write: after his death, we found among his papers any number of childish but ambitious beginnings of histories, stories, poems, nearly all of them dealing with our private fantasy world of Animal-Land or Boxen. Then, in 1912, he had produced a complete novel, a creditable performance for a boy not yet thirteen; and the interesting thing to note is that this novel, like the sequel to it that followed soon after, revolved entirely around politics.

  To anyone who recalls Jack’s adult contempt for politics and politicians this will seem extraordinary: but this first predilection and his subsequent revulsion from the whole subject stemmed from the same root. In the upper-middle-class society of our Belfast childhood, politics and money were the chief, almost the only, subjects of grown-up conversation: and since no visitors came to our house who did not hold precisely the same political views as my father, what we heard was not discussion and the lively clash of minds, but rather an endless and one-sided torrent of grumble and vituperation. Any ordinary parent would have sent us boys off to amuse ourselves, but not my father: we had to sit in silence and endure it. The immediate result, in Jack’s case, was to convince him that grown-up conversation and politics were one and the same thing, and that everything he wrote must therefore be given a political framework: the long-term result was to fill him with a disgust and revulsion from the very idea of politics before he was out of his ’teens.

  Now, during his happy days at Great Bookham, Jack’s mind was developing and flowering on lines as unpolitical as can be imagined. His letters of the time are full of landscape and romance: they record his discovery of George Macdonald—a turning-point in his life—and his first and characteristic delight in Chaucer, Scott, Malory, the Brontës, William Morris, Coleridge, de Quincey, Spenser, Swinburne, Keats. In his friend Arthur Greeves he had found a kindred spirit, with whom he could share and celebrate these discoveries: they corresponded regularly, went on holiday together, and Jack enjoyed the hospitality of Arthur’s home at Belfast. Here again, my father’s temperament was a limiting and dampening influence. Jack would have liked to return Arthur’s hospitality: had this been arranged, my father would certainly have welcomed his son’s friend very cordially, but not for a moment would it have occurred to him that the two boys might want to talk together, alone. No: he would have joined them, inescapably, for a good talk about books, doing nine-tenths of the talking himself, eulogizing his own favourites without regard to their interests. Two bored and frustrated youths would have been subjected to long readings from Macaulay’s essays, Burke’s speeches, and the like, and my father would have gone to bed satisfied that he had given them a literary evening far more interesting than they could have contrived for themselves.