Letters of C. S. Lewis

by C. S. Lewis

  P.S. C is for CLIVE—no connection with the iniquitous Anglo-Indian of that name.

  TO ‘MRS LOCKLEY’: from Magdalen College (‘Mrs Lockley’s’ husband had taken a mistress.)

  2 September 1949

  Apparently I was mistaken in thinking that to condone the infidelity and submit to the arrangement your husband suggests would be wrong. My adviser of course says that it is impossible to him to ‘give a fair ruling without knowing more of the parties’. But with that reservation he suggests (1) Mrs A. shd refuse to have intercourse with her husband, otherwise carry on, completely ignoring the mistress. (2) Mr A. must never mention the mistress in his house nor when he has seen her, nor shd he let Mrs A. or anyone else have any suspicion when or where he meets the mistress. I can’t myself quite see the point of No. 2, and I take it that anyway it is impracticable . . .

  On the actual practical arrangements I don’t feel that I—an elderly bachelor and the most amateurish of theologians—can be useful. Where I might help, on the internal and spiritual problems for yourself, you obviously do not need my help. All the things I would have said to most women in your position (about charity, submission to God’s will, and the poisonous nature of indulged jealousy, however just the case) you clearly know already. I don’t think it can do you any harm to know that you have these graces, provided you know that they are Graces, gifts from the Holy Spirit, and not your own merits. God, who foresaw your tribulation, has specially armed you to go through it, not without pain but without stain; not a case of ‘tempering the wind to the shorn lamb’ but of giving the lamb a coat proportional to the wind. On all that side you have only to go on as you are doing. And you certainly needn’t worry at all about there being any material for psychotherapy in you . . .

  One point in your story looms large in my mind—the fatal consequences of your husband’s lack of faith in you when he did not get those letters. For this is just how we also might desert God. If nothing, or nothing we recognise comes through, we imagine He has let us down and reject Him, perhaps at the very moment when help was on its way. No doubt your husband may have been readier to desert you because a quite different temptation had already begun. But then that applies to the God-Man situation also . . .

  TO ‘MRS LOCKLEY’: from Magdalen College

  6 September 1949

  Telling these things to someone you approach as a consultant is no more disloyalty than revealing one’s body to a doctor is indecent exposure. With a trained confessor this, as it were, disinfectant situation would be even more so.

  I don’t think the arrangement the old man suggested is ‘dishonest’. I think his advice turns on the fine but important distinction between enduring a situation which is some one else’s fault and sanctioning it in a way wh. makes one an accessory. After all, your husband has no right to have it both ways and you have no duty (or right) to make him feel as if he had. It wd do him no harm to realise that this affair is just as much adultery as if it were ‘furtive visits to a prostitute’ . . .

  TO ‘MRS LOCKLEY’: from Magdalen College

  12? September 1949

  I don’t think your objection to ‘setting yourself up as a judge’ is cowardly. It may spring from the fact that you are the injured party and have a v. proper conviction that the plaintiff cannot also be on the Bench. I also quite realise that he didn’t feel the sin as a Christian wd: but he must, as a man, feel the dishonour of breaking a promise. After all constancy in love thunders at him from every love-song in the world, quite apart from our mystical conception of marriage . . .

  As you say, the thing is to rely only on God. The time will come when you will regard all this misery as a small price to pay for having been brought to the dependence. Meanwhile (don’t I know) the trouble is that relying on God has to begin all over again every day as if nothing had yet been done . . .

  The reason why I am saddled with many people’s troubles is, I think, that I have no natural curiosity about private lives and am therefore a good subject. To anyone who (in that sense) enjoyed it, it wd be a dangerous poison.

  TO ‘MRS LOCKLEY’: from Magdalen College

  22 September 1949

  The intellectual problem (why some children lose one or both parents in this way and other ways) is no harder than the problem why some women lose their husbands. In each case, no doubt what we regard as a mere hideous interruption and curtailment of life is really the data, the concrete situation on which life is to be built . . . When the data are of the kind we naturally like (wealth, health, good fathers or husbands) of course we tend not to notice that they are data or limitations at all. But we’re told that they are: and what seem to us the easiest conditions may really be the hardest (‘How hardly shall they that have riches’ etc.) . . .

  TO ‘MRS LOCKLEY’: from Magdalen College

  27 September 1949

  Yes, yes, I know. The moment one asks oneself ‘Do I believe?’ all belief seems to go. I think this is because one is trying to turn round and look at something which is there to be used and work from—trying to take out one’s eyes instead of keeping them in the right place and seeing with them. I find that it happens about other matters as well as faith. In my experience only v. robust pleasures will stand the question, ‘Am I really enjoying this?’ Or attention—the moment I begin thinking about my attention (to a book or a lecture) I have ipso facto ceased attending. St Paul speaks of ‘Faith actualized in Love’. And ‘the heart is deceitful’: you know better than I how very unreliable introspection is. I shd be much more alarmed about your progress if you wrote claiming to be overflowing with Faith, Hope and Charity.

  TO DR WARFIELD M. FIROR: from Magdalen College (Dr Firor had come over to visit Jack in the summer of 1949.)

  15 October 1949

  To-day the less pleasant side of Autumn has showed itself for the first time. Up till now it has been paradisal, the sort of weather which for some reason excites me much more than spring: cool, cobwebby mornings developing into the mildest sunlight, and exquisite colours in the woods. It always gives me Wanderlust & ‘divine discontent’ and all that. To-day we have had a low, dirty, smoke-coloured sky racing overhead and a steady down-pour. That, however, has no causal connection (chronology proves it) with the subject that is uppermost in my mind and has been for some days: Old Age.

  You are a bit further on the road than I am and will probably smile at a man whose fifty-first birthday is still several weeks ahead starting his meditation de senectute. Yet why? The realisation must begin sometime. In one way, of course (no, in two) it began much earlier (1) With the growing realisation that there were a great many things one wd never have time to do. Those golden days when one could still think it possible that one might some time take up a quite new study: say Persian, or Geology, were now definitely over. (2) Harder to express. I mean, the end of that period when every goal, besides being itself, was an earnest or promise of much more to come. Like a pretty girl at her first dance: valued not chiefly for itself but as the prelude to a whole new world. Do you remember the time when every pleasure (say, the smell of a hayfield or a country walk, or a swim) was big with futurity and bore on its face the notice ‘Lots more where I came from’? Well, there’s a change from that to the period when they all begin to say ‘Make the most of me: my predecessors outnumber my successors’.

  Both these two feelings—the twitch of the tether and the loss of promise I have had for a long time. What has come lately is much harsher—the arctic wind of the future catching one, so to speak, at a corner. The particular corner was the sharp realisation that I shall be compulsorily ‘retired’ in 1959, and the infernal nuisance (to put it no higher) of patching up some new sort of life somewhere. You will not suppose I am putting these things as lamentations: that, to a man older than oneself, wd be very odd. They are merely the data. (Add, of course, among them, the probable loss of friends, especially if, like me, one has the imprudent habit of making more friends among one’s seniors than among one’s juniors.) A
nd as usual, the result of all this (wd you agree?) is almost entirely good.

  Have you ever thought what it wd be like if (all other things remaining as they are) old age and death had been made optional? All other things remaining: i.e. it wd still be true that our real destiny was elsewhere, that we have no abiding city here and no true happiness, but the un-hitching from this life was left to be accomplished by our own will as an act of obedience & faith. I suppose the percentage of di-ers wd be about the same as the percentage of Trappists is now.

  I am therefore (with some help from the weather and rheumatism!) trying to profit by this new realisation of my mortality. To begin to die, to loosen a few of the tentacles which the octopus-world has fastened on one. But of course it is continuings, not beginnings, that are the point. A good night’s sleep, a sunny morning, a success with my next book—any of these will, I know, alter the whole thing. Which alteration, by the bye, being in reality a relapse from partial waking into the old stupor, wd nevertheless be regarded by most people as a returning to health from a ‘morbid’ mood!

  Well, it’s certainly not that. But it is a very partial waking. One ought not to need the gloomy moments of life for beginning detachment, nor be re-entangled by the bright ones. One ought to be able to enjoy the bright ones to the full and at that very moment have the perfect readiness to leave them, confident that what calls one away is better . . .

  1950–1959

  TO SARAH (a goddaughter): from Magdalen College

  [9 January 1950]

  I’m just back from a weekend at Malvern and found an awful pile of letters awaiting me, so I am scribbling in haste. But I must tell you what I saw in a field—one young pig cross the field with a great big bundle of hay in its mouth and deliberately lay it down at the feet of an old pig. I could hardly believe my eyes. I’m sorry to say the old pig didn’t take the slightest notice. Perhaps it couldn’t believe its eyes either . . .

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

  12 January 1950

  All good wishes for St Bernard. My book with Professor Tolkien—any book in collaboration with that great but dilatory and unmethodical man—is dated, I fear, to appear on the Greek Kalends!172 . . .

  Term begins on Sat. and there is a cruel mail to-day, so I must stop. And pray for me: I am suffering incessant temptations to uncharitable thoughts at present: one of those black moods in which nearly all one’s friends seem to be selfish or even false. And how terrible that there shd be even a kind of pleasure in thinking evil. A ‘mixed pleasure’ as Plato wd say, like scratching!

  TO SISTER MARY ROSE: from Magdalen College

  [ January 1950]

  I am sorry if I misunderstood your letter: and I think that you misunderstood mine. What I meant was that if I replied to your original question (why I am not a member of the Roman Church) I shd have to write a v. long letter. It would of course be answerable: and your answer would be answerable by me . . . and so on. The resulting correspondence would certainly not, of course, be in excess of the importance of the subject: but haven’t you and I both probably more pressing duties? For a real correspondence on such a subject wd be nearly a wholetime job. I thought we cd both discuss the matter more usefully with people nearer at hand. Even the two letters which we have exchanged have already revealed the pitfalls of argument by letter. With all good wishes.

  TO ARTHUR GREEVES: from Magdalen College

  2 May 1950

  Once again the axe has fallen. Minto was removed to a Nursing Home last Saturday and her Doctor thinks this arrangement will probably have to be permanent. In one way it will be an enormous liberation for me. The other side of the picture is the crushing expense—ten guineas a week wh. is well over £500 a year. (What on earth I shall do if poor Minto is still alive nine years hence when I have to retire, I can’t imagine.) The order of the day thus becomes for me stringent economy and such things as a holiday in Ireland are fantastically out of the question. So cancel all. I hardly know how I feel—relief, pity, hope, terror, & bewilderment have me in a whirl. I have the jitters! God bless you. Pray for me.

  [ Jack’s problems had been mounting for a long time. Mrs Moore had become, in the course of time, old and ill. On 29 April she was moved into ‘Restholme’ in 230 Woodstock Road, Oxford. Unfortunately, Jack had not always been able to count on Warren being around to help with Mrs Moore and his vast correspondence. For some time now Warren had been going on alcoholic binges, and he sometimes needed more vigilant nursing than Mrs Moore. The last time Jack had been able to see Arthur was in 1947 when he had to go to Ireland to see Warren who had become ill over there from alcoholic poisoning. Overworked and tired, Jack became so ill in the summer of 1949 that he had to spend a week in the hospital. Dr Havard ordered a month’s rest, and Jack planned to spend it in Ireland with Arthur. Before he could escape Warren was drinking again and Jack could not leave. And so it went on.

  Unbelievably—but yet it’s true—Jack wrote what might be his most enduring books in 1949 and the three years that followed. Encouraged by his friend Roger Lancelyn Green, he wrote most of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950) in March–April 1949. Prince Caspian (1951) and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (1952) were completed by the end of February 1950. Before the year was out he had written The Silver Chair (1953), The Horse and His Boy (1954) and made a start on The Magician’s Nephew (1955). The Last Battle was written in 1953.]

  TO MRS HALMBACHER: from Magdalen College

  28 November 1950

  I avoided the word ‘Grace’ because I thought it didn’t carry much clear meaning to the uninstructed readers I had in view. I think the thing is dealt with in a rough and ready way in Case for Christianity and Beyond Personality. Any advanced or technical theology of Grace was quite beyond my scope. Naturally that does not mean that I thought the subject unimportant.

  The other question, about the limits of faith and superstition, is also important. But my own mind is v. far from clear on it. I think you must seek counsel (if it is a practical problem for you) from a real theologian, not from an amateur like me. I am sorry to disappoint you: but it is better to refuse than to mislead.

  TO ‘MRS ARNOLD’: from Magdalen College

  7 December 1950

  (1) To the best of my knowledge the Episcopalian Church in America is exactly the same as the Anglican Church.

  (2) The only rite which we know to have been instituted by Our Lord Himself is the Holy Communion (‘Do this in remembrance of me.’ ‘If ye do not eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, ye have no life in you.’) This is an order and must be obeyed. The other services are, I take it, traditional and might lawfully be altered. But the New Testament does not envisage solitary religion: some kind of regular assembly for worship and instruction is everywhere taken for granted in the Epistles. So we must be regular practising members of the Church.

  Of course we differ in temperament. Some (like you—and me) find it more natural to approach God in solitude: but we must go to church as well. For the Church is not a human society of people united by their natural affinities but the Body of Christ, in which all members, however different (and He rejoices in their differences and by no means wishes to iron them out) must share the common life, complementing and helping one another precisely by their differences. (Re-read 1st Corinthians Chap. 12 and meditate on it. The word translated members wd perhaps be better translated organs.) If people like you and me find much that we don’t naturally like in the public and corporate side of Christianity all the better for us: it will teach us humility and charity towards simple lowbrow people who may be better Christians than ourselves. I naturally loathe nearly all hymns: the face and life of the charwoman in the next pew who revels in them teach me that good taste in poetry or music are not necessary to salvation.

  (3) I am not clear what question you are asking me about spiritual healing. That this gift was promised to the Church is certain from Scripture. Whether any instance of it is a real instanc
e, or chance, or even (as might happen in this wicked world) fraud, is a question only to be decided by the evidence in that particular case. And unless one is a doctor one is not likely to be able to judge the evidence. V. often I expect, one is not called upon to do so. Anything like a sudden furore about it in one district, especially if accompanied by a publicity campaign on modern commercial lines, would be to me suspect: but even then I might be wrong. On the whole my attitude wd be that any claim may be true, and that it is not my duty to decide if it is.

  (4) ‘Regular but cool’ in Church attendance is no bad symptom. Obedience is the key to all doors: feelings come (or don’t come) and go as God pleases. We can’t produce them at will, and mustn’t try.

  TO MRS EDWARD A. ALLEN: from Magdalen College

  28 December 1950

  In term time I have my meals in College, including a free dinner, which has from time immemorial been part of the stipend of a tutor. My brother takes a snack in town in the middle of the day—usually something he has bought on the way in—and has the rest of his meals out at the house; he keeps a very sharp eye on my, or perhaps I should say your parcels, and abstracts anything likely to be useful for his lunches, justifying his peculations by quoting that ‘the labourer is worthy of his hire’ . . .

  The whole question of the atomic bomb is a very difficult one; the Sunday after the news of the dropping of the first one came through, our minister asked us all to join in prayer for forgiveness for the great crime of using it. But, if what we have since heard is true, i.e. that the first item on the Japanese anti-invasion programme was the killing of every European in Japan, the answer did not, to me, seem so simple as all that . . .

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

  30 December 1950

  Our state is thus: my ‘mother’ has had to retire permanently into a Nursing Home. She is in no pain but her mind has almost completely gone. What traces of it remain seem gentler and more placid than I have known it for years. Her appetite is, oddly, enormous. I visit her, normally, every day, and am divided between a (rational?) feeling that this process of gradual withdrawal is merciful and even beautiful, and a quite different feeling (it comes out in my dreams) of horror.