Letters of C. S. Lewis

by C. S. Lewis

  * I hope it’s quite like ours, of course: but you never know with Him.

  TO HIS BROTHER: from The Kilns

  18 September 1939

  For the moment dons are a reserved occupation: and as long as they stick to their present plans of not calling up boys between 18 and 20 there will, of course, be a full generation of freshmen each year who must do something between leaving school and joining the army . . .

  I am about two-thirds of the way through the job of restoring the books to the shelves [in Magdalen]. Your bookcase by the window is now almost full again and looks, to my unskilled eye, very nearly its old self, though you will doubtless perceive a most perverse disorder, suggesting a positive determination to separate natural neighbours . . .

  I have said that the [evacuated] children are ‘nice’, and so they are. But modern children are poor creatures. They keep on coming to Maureen and asking ‘What shall we do now?’ She tells them to play tennis, or mend their stockings, or write home: and when that is done they come and ask again. Shades of our own childhood! . . .

  I quite agree that one of the worst features of this war is the spectral feeling of all having happened before. As Dyson said ‘When you read the headlines (French advance—British steamship sunk) you feel as if you’d had a delightful dream during the last war and woken up to find it still going on.’ But perhaps the better view is the Frenchman’s ‘Well, that was a good armistice!’ If one could only hibernate. More and more sleep seems to me the best thing—short of waking up and finding yourself safely dead and not quite damned . . .

  TO HIS BROTHER: from The Kilns (In October Warren was posted to the Base Supply Depot at Le Havre.)

  5 November 1939

  I was glad to hear that your journey had proved so much pleasanter than we both expected. The account of the moonlight ride in [the] black-out train was, for some reason, curiously vivid and I almost have the sense of having done it myself. I suppose I shall hear a definite address from you soon . . .

  I had a pleasant evening on Thursday with Williams, Tolkien, and Wrenn, during which Wrenn almost seriously expressed a strong wish to burn Williams, or at least maintained that conversation with Williams enabled him to understand how inquisitors had felt it right to burn people.156 Tolkien and I agreed afterwards that we just knew what he meant: that as some people . . . are eminently kickable, so Williams is eminently combustible.

  The occasion was a discussion of the most distressing text in the Bible (‘narrow is the way and few they be that find it’) and whether one really could believe in a universe where the majority were damned and also in the goodness of God. Wrenn, of course, took the view that it mattered precisely nothing whether it conformed to your ideas of goodness or not, and it was at that stage that the combustible possibilities of Williams revealed themselves to him in an attractive light. The general sense of the meeting was in favour of a view on the lines taken in Pastor Pastorum—that Our Lord’s replies are never straight answers and never gratify curiosity, and that whatever this one meant its purpose was certainly not statistical . . .

  TO SISTER PENELOPE, C.S.M.V.: from Magdalen College

  8 November 1939

  The Tableland [in The Pilgrim’s Regress] represents all high and dry states of mind, of which High Anglicanism then seemed to me to be one—most of the representatives of it whom I had then met being v. harsh people who called themselves scholastics and appeared to be inspired more by hatred of their fathers’ religion than anything else. I wd modify that view now: but I’m still not what you’d call high. To me the real distinction is not between high and low but between religion with real supernaturalism & salvationism on the one hand and all watered-down and modernist versions on the other. I think St Paul has really told us what to do about the divisions within the Ch. of England: i.e. I don’t care twopence what I eat on Friday but when I am at table with High Anglicans I abstain in order not ‘to offend my weak brother’ . . .

  TO HIS BROTHER: from The Kilns

  11 November [1939]

  On Thursday we had a meeting of the Inklings—you and Coghill both absented unfortunately. We dined at the Eastgate. I have never in my life seen Dyson so exuberant—‘a roaring cataract of nonsense’. The bill of fare afterwards consisted of a section of the new Hobbit book from Tolkien, a nativity play from Williams (unusually intelligible for him, and approved by all) and a chapter out of the book on The Problem of Pain from me. It so happened—it would take too long to explain why—that the subject matter of the three readings formed almost a logical sequence, and produced a really first rate evening’s talk of the usual wide-ranging kind—‘from grave to gay, from lively to severe’. I wished very much we could have had you with us . . .

  Yes—I too enjoyed our short time together in College enormously, until the shadow of the end began to fall over it: not that one has lost the art (our boyhood was well trained in it) of dealing with such shadows, but that one so resents having to start putting it into practice again after so many years. Pox on the whole business.

  TO HIS BROTHER: from The Kilns

  24 November 1939

  I am almost ashamed to describe my leisurely days to one leading such a gruelling life as you—by the way, there is a curious irony about your present job, because, thirty years ago, bustling about between ships and trains would have seemed to you the ideal occupation. Do you remember what a triumph a bit of ‘unforced traffic’ was in the attic days? Well, my son, you have it now! No, I hadn’t thought of it’s being a crime to keep an engine waiting, though it’s fairly obvious when you come to think of it: I had known already, I suppose from notices half consciously read in goods stations that ‘an engine in steam’ is a venerable object, almost like a mare in foal.

  A few hours ago while waiting for the bus outside Magdalen I saw a sight I bet you’ve never seen—an undergraduate whom I know approaching with what I took to be a dead pheasant in his hand but what turned out to be a live falcon on his wrist. It was hooded with a little leather hood and is quite a gaily coloured bird, provided on the lower leg with natural spots of a kind of yellow varnish. Blessings on the man who while waiting to be called up for a first class European war is exclusively intent on restoring the ancient sport of hawking . . .

  I suppose a French novel is the very last thing you want to read at present, but I can’t refrain from telling you that in the French library (where the exam was held) I picked up Balzac’s Curé de Tours quite carelessly and was immediately enchanted—just as I was by his Père Goriot in 1917. It is so very unlike most French things—the Cure and the whole cathedral surroundings in Tours are almost Trollopian: so provincial, loveable, prosaic, unobstrusive . . .

  The day is wet—an outside world of dripping branches and hens in the mud and cold which I am glad to have shut out (tea is just finished) but which, no doubt, is very much pleasanter than your sugar-floored sheds. How nasty the sugar cottage in Hansel and Grettel must have been in wet weather. I gave your greetings to those of the Inklings who were present on Thursday which were received with gratification.

  TO HIS BROTHER: from The Kilns

  3 December 1939

  This has been a beautiful week. It began to clear up last Sunday (you remember my letter was written on Saturday) and that afternoon I had the first really enjoyable walk I’ve had this many a day . . . Later, I had the odd experience of leaving home for college at about 6, as Harwood had announced his intention of coming for the night. The journey in by bus was delightful because it was now bright moonlight and the lights inside the bus were so dimmed as to make no difference, so that I had the quite unusual experience of seeing Magdalen bridge and tower by moonlight from the height and speed of a bus-top: a short thing compared with the train journey you described, but of course the elevation gave it an advantage.

  Harwood, owing to train difficulties, didn’t turn up till about 10.30, but we sat up lateish and had a good talk. I may have mentioned to you that he has evacuated to Minehead—nicely placed
for country but with bad prospects financially, as the splitting up of their pupils’ London homes has led to their losing a good many. His son John is not with them but billeted in the neighbourhood—with the local M.F.H. [Master of Foxhounds]! and already has acquired a new language and says that his father ought to get his hair cut!

  I hardly know which to pity more—a father like Harwood who watches his son being thus ‘translated’ or a son in process of such translation who has the embarrassment of a father like Harwood. I think, the son: for as some author whom I’ve forgotten says the anxiety that parents have about children ‘being a credit to them’ is a mere milk and water affair beside the anxiety of children that their parents should not be an absolute disgrace. Certainly it wd not be pleasant to have to explain to a M.F.H. that one’s father was an Anthroposophist—except that the only impression left on the M.F.H.’s mind wd probably be that your father was some kind of chemist. (If the M.F.H. was a P’daita it might, of course, lead to almost anything—‘Sort of fellow who comes to the door offering to feel your bumps’.) . . .

  Talking of books, I have been looking rapidly through St François de Sales this week end to find a passage I wanted to quote, and have derived much ‘social pleasure’ from your pencillings: as I have experienced before, to read a book marked by you in your absence is almost the nearest thing to a conversation. When I read that hares turn white in winter because they eat nothing but snow (used as an argument for frequent communion) and see your mark it is almost as if one of us was pointing the passage out to the other here in the study . . .

  The usual Thursday evening party did not meet as Williams & Hopkins were both away,157 so I went up to Tolkien’s . . . We had a very pleasant evening drinking gin and lime juice (wh. sounds chilly, but I was quite in a sweat by the time I got to Northmoor Rd) and reading our recent chapters to each other—his from the new Hobbit and mine from The Problem of Pain. (N.B. If you are writing a book about pain and then get some actual pain as I did from my rib, it does not either, as the cynic wd expect, blow the doctrine to bits, nor, as a Christian wd hope, turn into practice, but remains quite unconnected and irrelevant, just as any other bit of actual life does when you are reading or writing) . . .

  TO HIS BROTHER: from The Kilns

  18 December 1939

  Yes, I know well what you mean by the materialistic gains of being a Christian. It more often presents itself to me the other way round—how on earth did we manage to enjoy all these books so much as we did in the days when we had really no conception of what was at the centre of them? Sir, he who embraces the Christian revelation rejoins the main tide of human existence! And I quite agree about Johnson. If one had not experienced it, it wd be hard to understand how a dead man out of a book can be almost a member of one’s family circle—still harder to realise, even now, that you and I have a chance of someday really meeting him . . .

  We had a very pleasant ‘cave’ in Balliol last Wednesday. Everyone remarked that it was more frolic and youthful than any we have had for years—quite one of the old caves in fact—a curious result, if it is a result, of war conditions. During the evening Ridley read to us a Swinburne ballad and, immediately after it, that ballad of Kipling’s which ends up ‘You’ve finished with the flesh, my Lord’.158 Nobody except me knew who the second one was by, and everyone agreed that it just killed the Swinburne as a real thing kills a sham. I then made him read ‘Iron, cold iron’ with the same result and later he drifted into McAndrew’s Hymn. Surely Kipling must come back? When people have had time to forget ‘If’ and the inferior Barrack Room Ballads, all this other stuff must come into its own. I know hardly any poet who can deliver such a hammer stroke. The stories, of course, are another matter and are, I suppose, even now admitted to be good by all except a handful of Left idiots . . .

  TO HIS BROTHER: from The Kilns

  31 December 1939

  Minto has probably told you of the ‘ludicrous edisode’ on the Wednesday in which Havard had to come up with a hack-saw and saw my ring off my finger.159 To you, I expect, the most interesting feature of this event will be the extreme P’daytaishness of my act in forcing the damned thing into such a position originally: it being a marked trait in the character of a P’dayta that tho’ being physically rather feeble for any useful purpose such as cranking a car or lifting a log, he is subject to fits of demoniac strength when it is a question of jamming, twisting, bursting or crushing anything into ruin—e.g. a lobster or a door. Havard performed his operation with great skill and delicacy, beguiling the time with interesting and edifying conversation.

  I couldn’t help contrasting him with B. E. C. Davies, a professor of London, whom I went on to see in Old Headington the same morning. Here is a man of my own age, who knew Barfield when he was up: of my own profession, who has written on Spenser. You’d have thought these were all the materials for a good meeting. But no. One got through all the preliminary stuff about how his London she-students were getting on in Oxford, thinking that the real conversation would then begin. But every single time I tried to turn it to books, or life, or friends (as such) I was completely frustrated. i.e. about friends, he’d talk of their jobs, marriages, houses, incomes, arrangements, but not of them. Books—oh yes, editions, prices, suitability for exams—not their contents. In fact hardly since the days of ‘How are things at the yard, Gussie?’ have I had to endure so much irredeemably ‘grown-up conversation’. Unless I misjudge him, he is one of those dreadful fellows who never refers to literature except during the hours he’s paid for talking about it. Just as one meets clergymen—indeed we are told the Archdeacon was one of them—who resent the intrusion of Christianity into the conversation. How small a nucleus there is in each liberal profession of people who care about the thing they are supposed to be doing: yet I suppose the percentage of garage-hands and motor-touts who are really interested in motoring is about 95! . . .

  1940–1949

  TO HIS BROTHER: from The Kilns

  9 January 1940

  It seems almost brutal to describe a January walk taken without you in a letter to you, but I suppose ‘concealment is in vain’ . . . When I reached Taunton [by train] it was definitely a warm evening. God send us to be soon together again, for here came that moment in a holiday which you would so have appreciated and wh. cannot be fully enjoyed alone—the moment when, at the last of the big stations, you find, far from the other traffic, in a remote silent bay, the little, dark, non-corridor train of two coaches—usually, for some reason, exuding steam from all the compartments—which is going to jerk and bump you to your real destination. And then those stops at unheard-of halts with wooden platforms, and the gleam of an oil lantern in a porter’s hand. It wd have been partly spoiled for you, however, by the presence of a young man of undergraduate type and age who turned out to be a student training to be a mining engineer, and who, having tackled me on politics, the English character, propaganda, improvements in the Everymans series, Hindu theology and so forth, exclaimed ‘You must be a man of very wide interests!’ and, do you know, I never realised before the naivete with which we all think this, even if we do not say it, in such circumstances—i.e. the bland inference ‘By gum! His interests are as wide as mine!’

  This brought me to Minehead, at about 6.30. I dined that evening with the Harwoods, and being ‘carried’ back to my hotel by him at about 10.30 had the very unpleasant surprise of finding it locked up and silent as the grave. It was about 10 minutes’ work of banging and shouting and ringing before I was let in—and during the time I had, as you may suppose, some ‘very uneasy sensations’.

  Next morning, leaving my greatcoat and suitcase at this hotel, and retaining rucksack and mack, I climbed the steep hill to Harwood’s billet and collected him. His children are now so numerous that one ceases to notice them individually, any more than a scuffle of piglets in a field or a waddle of ducks. A few platoons of them accompanied us for about the first mile of the walk, but returned, like tugs, when we were out of harbo
ur.

  The idea had been to cross Dunkery Beacon and lie at Exford, but the day was so misty that we decided to hug the valleys where one wd have those near-at-hand beauties which mist rather enhances than destroys. It wouldn’t be much good trying to describe the route without a map—but it consisted in reaching Porlock by a very wide detour up one valley and down another. I was ‘very angry’ with Harwood when, though professing to know the country, he brought us at 1 o’clock to a village without a pub! (Luccombe). We succeeded (a sort of success, by the bye, which never happens to you and me when we are on our own) in finding a cottage that gave us tea and bread and cheese and jam—in one of those slippery, oil-clothy, frosty best parlours, with an oil stove that created an intolerable stench and a small library of reference works—you know, Plain Man’s Encyclopedia, Inquire within about everything—monuments, doubtless, to the success of those advertisements which promise you a rise in salary and endless occupation for the long winter evenings if you will buy such works. One that specially intrigued us was ‘Every Man his own Lawyer—Illustrated’. We looked in vain however for a portrait of a tort or a south aspect of Habeas Corpus—the pictures consisting entirely of photos of court-houses and famous judges. Can you imagine anything more infuriating than, on turning to such a book to try to extricate yourself from an income tax muddle or an injudicious betrothal (and for what other purpose wd you ever open it?) to be met by the bland features of Lord Darling? . . .

  TO DOM BEDE GRIFFITHS, O.S.B.: from Magdalen College

  17 January 1940

  Thanks for letter and article. I believe I found myself in agreement with every point you made in the latter. The Platonic and neo-Platonic stuff has, no doubt, been reinforced (a) By the fact that people not very morally sensitive or instructed by trying to do their best recognise temptations of appetite as temptations but easily mistake all the spiritual (and worse) sins for harmless or even virtuous states of mind: hence the illusion that the ‘bad part’ of oneself is the body. (b) By a misunderstanding of the Pauline use of , wh in reality cannot mean the body (since envy, witchcraft, and other spiritual sins are attributed to it) but, I suppose, means the unregenerate manhood as a whole. (You have no doubt noticed that is nearly always used by St Paul in a good sense.) (c) By equating ‘matter’ in the ordinary sense with λη or materia in the scholastic and Aristotelian sense, i.e. equating the concrete corporeality of flesh, grass, earth or water with ‘pure potentiality’. The latter, being nearest to not-being and furthest from the Prime Reality can, I suppose, be called the ‘least good’ of things. But I fear Plato thought the concrete flesh and grass bad, and have no doubt he was wrong. (Besides these two senses of ‘matter’ there is also a third—the thing studied in physics. But who would dare to vilify such a miracle of unceasing energy as that?—its more like pure form than pure potentiality.)