Letters of C. S. Lewis

by C. S. Lewis

  Things are no better since I last wrote, and I am really very despondent about him. Yet it would be an offence against Pigiebotian ethics to seal ourselves up therefore in perpetual solemnity: and, however you may feel in China, I on the spot can only get through my days and nights by allowing myself an enjoyment of the old humours, which, needless to say, show through even this situation. If only it did not always raise anxiety, the daily visit of the Doctor would be irresistably funny. The patient’s utter refusal to answer to the point, his hazy accounts (on the familiar ‘mouthful’ principle) of what he has eaten, and his habit of replying to some such question as ‘Have you noticed any change in yourself?’ with a sudden ‘Doctor! I’m perfectly satisfied in my own mind that the root of all this trouble etc. etc.’ and his subsequent belief that the doctor has propounded to him the grossly improbable theory which he had in fact propounded to the doctor—all this you will be able to imagine on the slightest of hints from me. It was very alarming the night he was a little delirious. But (I cannot refrain from telling you) do you know the form it took? The watercloset element in his conversation rose from its usual 30% to something nearly like 100% . . .

  However, perhaps all this water closet world is appropriate to me at the moment as I have just finished the formidable task of reading the whole of the works of Rabelais . . . I had to read him for the light he throws on the Renaissance in general and his particular influence on our own Elizabethans. Would I advise you to do the same? I hardly know. He is very long, very incoherent, and very, very stercoraceous. But you must base no opinion of him on what you hear from uneducated people who have never read any other comic book written before the reign of Queen Victoria and are therefore so blinded by a few familiar words when they first see them in print that they never go on seeing the drift of a page, much less a chapter, as a whole.

  The first surprise is that about a quarter of the book is perfectly serious propaganda in favour of humanist education. The comic parts are mostly satires on the papacy, monasticism, and scholastic learning. The free farce of the Miller’s Tale-cum-Decameron type is really only about a third of the whole. There is a great deal of quite sincere piety and humanity of a pleasant Shandeyian, Montaignesque type. Some of the aphorisms must be added to our stock at once. ‘The greatest loss of time that I know is to count the hours’—‘Drunkards live longer than physicians’ . . . Some of the satire—tho’ satire tends always to bore me—is very ‘sly’, to use a good old word which we moderns have dropped or degraded without finding a better to fill its place.

  31 August 1929

  I have been continuously on the run since I got up—going to the McNeills to fetch the various jellies and confections with which they daily supply us—their decency to the O.A.B. all along has been extraordinary—helped your father to shave, giving him cheques to sign and endorse. If I start to work now I shall be interrupted by the doctor before I have well got my head into it, so I may as well put in ten minutes conversation with you.

  After finishing your letter-portion last night and wiped up the deluge occasioned by opening one of those remarkable soda water bottles, I read a few pages of Macaulay’s letters. My reading them pleased the patient and as I have to do them some time or other I may as well do it now when it provides a common topic for our conversations. They are not uninteresting. Do you know that Macaulay developed his full manner as a schoolboy and wrote letters home from school which read exactly like pages out of the Essays? This is very illuminating. He was talking about the nature of government, the principles of human prosperity, the force of the domestic affections and all that (you know the junk) at the age of fourteen. He could not at that age have known anything about them: least of all could he have known enough for the flowing generalizations which he makes. One can see quite clearly that having so early acquired the talk he found he could go on quite comfortably for the rest of his life without bothering to notice the things. He was from the first clever enough to produce a readable and convincing slab of claptrap on any subject whether he understood it or not, and hence he never to his dying day discovered that there was such a thing as understanding. Don’t you think the last word on him is Southey’s statement—‘Macaulay’s a clever lad, and a clever lad he’ll remain’—? . . .

  This is Saturday night. The patient is rather better . . . The great consolation about Leeborough at present is my control of the meals. As soon as I came home and found P. on light diet I said I would make things easier for him by giving up my own meat for lunch. I substituted bread and cheese, cream crackers and butter, and fruit. This may not appeal to you: but the glory is that I can have it when I choose. There has not been a day for the last fortnight on which one o’clock has not seen me sitting down to my cheese, fruit and wine in a dining room with the windows open. A little effort of imagination will enable you to realize what a comfort this is. I maintain the same arrangement during the week end. Fancy a Leeboro Saturday with light lunch at one instead of a gorge at half past two, and then high tea (cold roast chicken and ham tonight) at seven! . . .

  If only I wasn’t constantly bothered about the P’daitabird (for one never knows really what the next temperature may bring forth), if only I could get decent walks, and if only I could get some more work done, it wouldn’t be a bad life. A formidable list of exceptions! Its like the poacher in Punch ‘If I get three more after the one I’m after now, I shall have caught four.’ . . . I break off here and drink my drop of spirits.

  By the way we had tonight the old stunt about whiskey being an unpalatable drink. Incidentally all the doctors without exception say that he has done and is doing himself harm with it. Joey says that when he mentions this to the patient, the patient simply laughs at him—and has ruled that there’s no good trying to stop it as the good which cd now be done by cessation would be less than the psychological irritation. He gave me a real fright as I was going out of the gate the other day, having left him as comfortably settled up for the afternoon as I could. He suddenly appeared at his window shouting at me in a voice that made me think some terrible crisis had come. I [went] tearing upstairs to find the real tragedy: he had suddenly discovered that I was going out with the cellar key in my pocket—and apparently the ‘odd dregs’ in the two bottles which he keeps in the wardrobe were not enough to last him the afternoon. There is a very serious side to all this, but I agree with Joey: and I’d go a long way before I’d be leagued with the doctors to deprive the poor old chap of what is about his only pleasure. Let us hope Rabelais is right . . .

  Sept. 3rd. The surgeon and Squeaky and Joey have all consulted today and decided on an operation. He is taking it like a hero. By the time this reaches you all will be settled for good or ill. It has been the devil of a day as you may imagine, infernally nerve racking and painful and I’m dead sleepy. I shall post this tomorrow. I had meant to write more, but I’m too tired. As to facts theres nothing more to add. Anyway this can’t reach you in time to give any information.

  TO OWEN BARFIELD: from ‘Little Lea’

  9 September 1929

  Many thanks for your letter. I am not sure that the distinction between ‘intimacy’ and ‘familiarity’ is really very profound. It seems to be largely a matter of accident that you know so little of my previous history. I knew more of yours because we meet in England: if we had met in Ireland the position would be reversed. Again, we do not much narrate our past lives, but this is because we have so much else to talk about. Any day might have started a topic to which such narrative would have been relevant, and out it would have come. Consider how many bores whose history you know well after a short acquaintance, not because familiarity has in their case replaced intimacy but because they had nothing to say and would not be silent.

  I am not saying that there is nothing in the distinction. When the parties are of different sexes it may be more important. I suppose a good Greek was familiar with his wife and intimate with his . But between men I suspect that intimacy includes familiarity potentially. Now
with a woman, of course, no degree of intimacy includes any familiarity at all; for that there must be or or both.

  The test really is this. When you have talked to a man about his soul, you will be able, whenever the necessity arises, say, to assist him in using a catheter or nurse him through an attack of dysentry, or help him (if it should so happen) in a domestic problem. This is not so in the case of a woman.

  As for my present situation, it frightens me for what it implies. I argue thus: 1. I am attending at the almost painless sickbed of one for whom I have little affection and whose society has for many years given me much discomfort and no pleasure. 2. Nevertheless I find it almost unendurable. 3. Then what in heavens name must it be like to fill the same place at the sickbed, perhaps agonized, of someone really loved, and someone whose loss will be irreparable? A formidable argument a fortiori. No doubt under 1. it is proper to include the fact that if lack of real affection spares some pains, it introduces others. Where every kind word and forbearance is the result of calculated duty, and where all we do leaves us still rather ashamed, there is, I suppose, a particular kind of strain which would be absent from the other situation. There is also, in this present case, though no spiritual sympathy, a deep and terrible physiological sympathy. My father and I are physical counterparts: and during these days more than ever I notice his resemblance to me. If I were nursing you I should look forward to your possible death as a loss lifelong and irremediable: but I don’t think I should shrink from the knife with the sub-rational sym-pathy (in the etymological sense) that I feel at present.

  Having said all this I must proceed to correct the exaggeration which seems to be inherent in the mere act of writing. Who was it said that disease has its own pleasures of which health knows nothing? I have my good moments to which I look forward, and perhaps, though the whole tone of the picture is lowered, there is as much chiaroscuro as ever. When my patient is settled up for the night I go out and walk in the garden. I enjoy enormously the cool air after the atmosphere of the sick room. I also enjoy the frogs in the field at the bottom of the garden, and the mountains and the moon. I often get an afternoon walk when things are going well, and my friend Arthur Greeves—the ‘friend’ of It you know, who mentioned the beech tree in his letter—sees me every day, and often twice a day. Some of my consolations are very childish and may seem brutal. When Arthur and I talk late into the night there is, even now, a magical feeling of successful conspiracy; it is such a breach, not of course of the formal rules but of the immemorial custom of a house where I have hardly ever known freedom. There is pleasure of the same kind in sitting with open windows in rooms where I have suffocated ever since childhood: and in substituting a few biscuits and fruit for the Gargantuan mid-day meal which was hitherto compulsory. I hope this is not so uncharitable as it sounds.

  At any rate, I have never been able to resist the retrogressive influence of this house which always plunges me back into the pleasures and pains of a boy. That, by the bye, is one of the worst things about my present life. Every room is soaked with the bogeys of childhood, the awful ‘rows’ with my father, the awful returnings to school: and also with the old pleasures of an unusually ignoble adolescence.

  By the way, that is just the point about intimacy containing familiarity. If it ever became really relevant to some truth that we were exploring in common I could and would expand the last sentence into detail: on the other hand I have not the slightest inclination to do so. i.e. what would be an end for familiars is only an instrument for intimates. I enclose a few epigrams on which I would like your opinion. With many thanks . . .

  [Warren did not receive the last two letters from Jack until some forty days after they were posted. He was, in fact, unaware that there was anything wrong with his father until he received a cable from Jack on 27 September which read: ‘Sorry report father died painless twenty-fifth September. Jack.’]

  TO HIS BROTHER: from ‘Hillsboro’

  29 September 1929

  By this [time] you will have had my cable and the two letters written from Leeboro. As there is a good deal of business I will only give you the bare facts. The operation, in spite of what they prophesied, discovered cancer. They said he might live a few years. I remained at home, visiting him in the Nursing Home, for ten days. There were ups and downs and some bad spasms of pain from flatulence (apparently the usual sequence to abdominal operations) going over the wound: but nothing really dreadful. Quite often he was himself and telling wheezes, tho’ of course he was often wandering from the dopes. By this time I had been at home since Aug. 11th and my work for next term was getting really desperate, and, as Joey said, I might easily wait several weeks more and still be in the same position—i.e. not really making the progress he should, but not likely to take a sudden turn for the worse. I therefore crossed to Oxford on Saturday Sept. 22. On Tuesday 24 I got a wire saying that he was worse, caught the train an hour later, and arrived to find that he had died on Tuesday afternoon. The immediate cause seems to have been some blood moving on to the brain: at least that is how they interpreted it. The facts were that he never woke on Tuesday, and remained all that day in a state of unconsciousness with a rising temperature . . .134

  TO HIS BROTHER: from ‘Hillsboro’

  27 October [1929]

  What you say in your letter is v. much what I am finding myself. I always before condemned as sentimentalists and hypocrites the people whose view of the dead was so different from the view they held of the same people living. Now one finds out that it is a natural process. Of course, on the spot, ones feelings were in some ways different. I think the mere pity for the poor old chap and for the life he had led really surmounted everything else. It was also (in the midst of home surroundings) almost impossible to believe. A dozen times while I was making the funeral arrangements I found myself mentally jotting down some episode or other to tell him: and what simply got me between wind and water was going into Robinson and Cleaver’s to get a black tie and suddenly realizing ‘You can never put anything down to his account again’.

  By the way, a great deal of his jollities and wheezes remained to the end. One of the best things he ever said was the day before I left—four days before his death. As I came in the day nurse said ‘I’ve just been telling Mr Lewis that he’s exactly like my father.’ P. ‘And how am I like your father?’ N. ‘Why he’s a pessimist.’ P. (after a pause) ‘I suppose he has several daughters.’

  As time goes on the thing that emerges is that, whatever else he was, he was a terrific personality. You remember ‘Johnson is dead. Let us go to the next. There is none. No man can be said to put you in mind of Johnson.’135 How he filled a room! How hard it was to realize that physically he was not a very big man. Our whole world, the whole Pigiebotian world, is either direct or indirect testimony to the same effect. Take away from our conversation all that is imitation or parody (sincerest witness in the world) of his, and how little is left. The way we enjoyed going to Leeborough and the way we hated it, and the way we enjoyed hating it: as you say, one can’t grasp that that is over. And now you could do anything on earth you cared to in the study at midday or on Sunday, and it is beastly.

  I sympathize with you in the strange experience of returning to a British Isles which no longer contains a P’daitaheim. I hope that when all your books are set up (presumably in the non-glassed little end room bookcase) in Magdalen, where you can always have an empty sitting room to which you can repair at all hours, I hope that a leave at Hillsboro will be able to pass not unpalatably. Its no good pretending that its the old thing, but there you are . . .136

  TO HIS BROTHER: from ‘Hillsboro’

  21 December 1929

  One of the pities of the present state of affairs seems to be that it is impossible for either of us to write the other a real letter. I will try to break the spell by giving you some account of my adventures since you last heard from me before the great divide. The chief adventure is the quite new light thrown on P. by a closer knowledge of h
is two brothers.137 One of his failings—his fussily directed manner ‘Have you got your keys etc.’—takes on a new air when one discovers that in his generation the brothers all habitually treated one another in exactly the same way.

  On the morning of the funeral Uncle Dick arrived before breakfast and came to Uncle Bill who was sleeping in the spare room. I drifted in. After a few greetings, it was with a shock of mild surprise that I heard Limpopo [Bill] suddenly cut short a remark of Uncle Dick’s with the words ‘Now Dick, you’d better go and take off your collar, huh, (gesture) and wash yourself and that sort of thing, eh, and have a bit of a shave.’ To which his brother, with perfect seriousness replied ‘Now how had we better handle the thing, eh Jacks? You’d better go to the bathroom first and I’ll go downstairs and get a cup of tea. Bill, you’d better lie down (gesture) and cover yourself up and I’ll come and tell you . . .’ Limpopo (cutting in) ‘Well Dick, get along downstairs, huh, and Jacks will go and tell you, wouldn’t that be best, eh?’

  Later in the day we had a session of the wardrobe committee quite in the old manner: and in the afternoon I was told ‘Jacks, show Mrs Hamilton that coat you found. Isn’t it a splendid fit, huh, might have been made for him, wha’?’

  Another light came to me during the visit to the undertakers: the whole scene had such an insane air of diabolical farce that I cannot help recording it. After a man with a dusty face had approached me with the assurance that he had buried my grandfather, my mother, and my uncle, a superior person led us into an inner room and enquired if we wanted ‘a suite of coffins’. Before I had recovered from this—and it sounded like the offer of some scaley booking clerk at an hotel in hell—the brute suddenly jerked out of the wall a series of enormous vertical doors, each one of which when lowered revealed on its inner side a specimen coffin. We were quite surrounded by them. Slapping one of them like a drum with his resonant hand he remarked ‘That’s a coffin I’m always very fond of’ and it was then that the ‘light’ came.