by C. S. Lewis
By the way, that business of having to look up the same word ten times in one evening is no proof of failing powers. You have simply forgotten that it was exactly like that when we began Latin or even French.
Your Hindus certainly sound delightful. But what do they deny? That’s always been my trouble with Indians—to find any proposition they wd pronounce false. But truth must surely involve exclusions?
I’m reading Runciman’s Hist. of the Crusades: a terrible revelation—the old civilisation of the E. Mediterranean destroyed by Turkish barbarians from the East & Frankish barbarians from the West. Oremus pro invicem.
TO ‘MRS ASHTON’: from Magdalene College
13 March 1956
You’ll find my views about drinks in ‘Christian Behaviour’ . . . Smoking is much harder to justify. I’d like to give it up but I’d find this v. hard, i.e. I can abstain, but I can’t concentrate on anything else while abstaining—not smoking is a whole time job.
Birth control I won’t give a view on: I’m certainly not prepared to say that it is always wrong. The doctrines about the Blessed Virgin which you mention are R.C. doctrines aren’t they? And as I’m not an R.C. I don’t think I need bother about them. But the habit (of various Protestant sects) of plastering the landscape with religious slogans about the Blood of the Lamb etc. is a different matter. There is no question here of doctrinal difference: we agree with the doctrines they are advertising. What we disagree with is their taste. Well, let’s go on disagreeing but don’t let us judge. What doesn’t suit us may suit possible converts of a different type.
My model here is the behaviour of the congregation at a ‘Russian Orthodox’ service, where some sit, some lie on their faces, some stand, some kneel, some walk about, and no one takes the slightest notice of what anyone else is doing. That is good sense, good manners, and good Christianity. ‘Mind one’s own business’ is a good rule in religion as in other things . . .
TO MRS R. E. HALVORSON: from Magdalene College
[March 1956]
One must first distinguish the effect which music has on people like me who are musically illiterate and get only the emotional effect, and that which it has on real musical scholars who perceive the structure and get an intellectual satisfaction as well.
Either of these effects is, I think, ambivalent from the religious point of view: i.e. each can be a preparation for or even a medium for meeting God but can also be a distraction and impediment. In that respect music is not different from a good many other things, human relations, landscape, poetry, philosophy. The most relevant one is wine which can be used sacramentally or for getting drunk or neutrally.
I think every natural thing which is not in itself sinful can become the servant of the spiritual life, but none is automatically so. When it is not, it becomes either just trivial (as music is to millions of people) or a dangerous idol. The emotional effect of music may be not only a distraction (to some people at some times) but a delusion: i.e. feeling certain emotions in church they mistake them for religious emotions when they may be wholly natural. That means that even genuinely religious emotion is only a servant. No soul is saved by having it or damned by lacking it. The love we are commanded to have for God and our neighbour is a state of the will, not of the affections (though if they ever also play their part so much the better). So that the test of music or religion or even visions if one has them is always the same—do they make one more obedient, more God-centered, and neighbour-centered and less self-centred? ‘Though I speak with the tongues of Bach and Palestrina and have not charity etc.!’
TO ‘MRS ARNOLD’: from The Kilns
2 April 1956
I’m a little, but unamusedly, surprised that my Surprised by Joy causes you envy. I doubt if you really would have enjoyed my life much better than your own. And the whole modern world ludicrously overvalues books and learning and what (I loathe the word) they call ‘culture’. And of course culture itself is the greatest sufferer by this error: for second things are always corrupted when they are put first . . .
TO FATHER PETER MILWARD: from Magdalene College
9 May 1956
You need not be afraid of telling me ‘only what I know already’ about the Grail legend, for indeed I know v. little. If you think otherwise, you are perhaps confusing my interest in C. [harles] W. [illiams] with C. W.’s interest in the legend.
For my own part, I am v. puzzled as to what exactly we are doing when we study—not this or that work of art—but a myth in abstract. Supposing (pontionis causa) that what people mean when they say ‘The Grail is the Caldron of the Dead’ is true, what do they mean? More briefly, what does is mean in such a sentence? It is not the is of equality (2X6 is 3X4) nor of classification (a horse is a mammal) nor of allegory (this Rock is Christ). How can an imagined object in one story ‘be’ an imagined object in another story?
About my Inaugural—aren’t you rather forgetting that I was trying to fix merely the cultural change? From my angle even the original conversion of Europe, you remember, had to be ranked as a minor change. After that, you cd hardly expect the Reformation to be v. prominent. To be sure, if my point of view had been different, it wd have become fundamental and you and I wd of course differ v. widely about its character.
TO JOAN LANCASTER: from The Kilns
26 June 1956
You describe your Wonderful Night v. well. That is, you describe the place & the people and the night and the feeling of it all, very well—but not the thing itself—the setting but not the jewel. And no wonder! Wordsworth often does just the same. His Prelude (you’re bound to read it about ten years’ hence. Don’t try it now, or you’ll only spoil it for later reading) is full of moments in which everything except the thing itself is described. If you become a writer you’ll be trying to describe the thing all your life: and lucky if, out of dozens of books, one or two sentences, just for a moment, come near to getting it across.
About amn’t I, aren’t I, and am I not, of course there are no right and wrong answers about language in the sense in which there are right and wrong answers in Arithemetic. ‘Good English’ is whatever educated people talk: so that what is good in one place or time wd not be so in another. Amn’t was good fifty years ago in the North of Ireland where I was brought up, but bad in Southern England. Aren’t I wd have been hideously bad in Ireland but was good in England. And of course I just don’t know which (if either) is good in modern Florida. Don’t take any notice of teachers and text-books in such matters. Nor of logic. It is good to say ‘More than one passenger was hurt’ although more than one equals at least two and therefore logically the verb ought to be plural were not singular was! What really matters is:
(1) Always try to use the language so as to make quite clear what you mean and make sure yr sentence couldn’t mean anything else.
(2) Always prefer the plain direct word to the long, vague one. Don’t implement promises, but keep them.
(3) Never use abstract nouns when concrete ones will do. If you mean ‘more people died’ don’t say ‘mortality rose’.
(4) In writing. Don’t use adjectives which merely tell us how you want us to feel about the thing you are describing. I mean, instead of telling us a thing was ‘terrible’, describe it so that we’ll be terrified. Don’t say it was ‘delightful’: make us say ‘delightful’ when we’ve read the description. You see, all those words (horrifying, wonderful, hideous, exquisite) are only like saying to your readers ‘Please will you do my job for me’.
(5) Don’t use words too big for the subject. Don’t say ‘infinitely’ when you mean ‘very’; otherwise you’ll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite . . .
TO CHRISTOPHER DERRICK: from The Kilns
2 August 1956
(I’d sooner you called me Lewis tout court, both for old acquaintance sake and because, as Brightman—was he before your time?—used to say, ‘When I was a young man no one was called professor except conjurors.’181)
&n
bsp; All universities are now N.I.C.E.s when it comes to buildings: tho’ I met a civilised American don once who claimed that his own university (I forgot which) had got over that malady and, looking at the Parks with their new laboratories . . . observed, ‘I see you are still in the Stone Age’.
You ought to have been spending (if you haven’t already done so) on Tolkien’s 3 vol. Lord of the Rings the time you spent on OHEL. The Lord is the book we have all been waiting for.182 And it shows too, which cheers, that there are thousands left in Israel who have not bowed the knee to Leavis . . .
TO FATHER PETER MILWARD: from The Kilns
22 September 1956
Tolkien’s book is not an allegory—a form he dislikes. You’ll get nearest to his mind on such subjects by studying his essay on Fairy Tales in the Essays Presented to Charles Williams. His root idea of narrative art is ‘sub-creation’—the making of a secondary world. What you wd call ‘a pleasant story for the children’ wd be to him more serious than an allegory. But for his views, read the essay, wh. is indispensible.
My view wd be that a good myth (i.e. a story out of which ever varying meanings will grow for different readers and in different ages) is a higher thing than an allegory (into which one meaning has been put). Into an allegory a man can put only what he already knows: in a myth he puts what he does not yet know and cd not come to know in any other way.
[ Joy Davidman Gresham had been divorced from her husband, William Lindsay Gresham, in 1953 and in that year she took up residence in England with her sons David and Douglas. They lived in London until August 1955 when they moved to 10 Old High Street, Headington. When it became clear that the Home Office would not renew Joy’s permit to remain in Great Britain, Jack entered into a civil marriage with her so that she could remain in England. This took place in the Oxford Registry Office on 23 April 1956. Joy had for a long while been suffering from what seemed rheumatism. However, after she was taken to the Wingfield-Morris Orthopaedic Hospital, Oxford, on 19 October 1956 she was found to be suffering from cancer.]
TO A FORMER PUPIL: from Magdalene College
14 November 1956
I wish you would pray very hard for a lady called Joy Gresham and me. I am like v. shortly to be both a bridegroom and widower, for she has cancer. You need not mention this till the marriage (which will be at a hospital bedside if it occurs) is announced. I’ll tell you the whole story some day . . .
TO ARTHUR GREEVES: from The Kilns
25 November 1956
Joy is in hospital, suffering from cancer. The prospects are 1. A tiny 100th chance of ultimate cure. 2. A reasonable probability of some years more of (tolerable) life. 3. A real danger that she may die in a few months.
It will be a great tragedy for me to lose her. In the meantime, if she gets over this bout and emerges from hospital she will no longer be fit to live alone so she must come and live here. That means (in order to avoid scandal) that our marriage must shortly be published. W. has written to Janie and the Ewarts to tell them I am getting married, and I didn’t want the news to take you by surprise. I know you will pray for her and for me: and for W., to whom also, the loss if we lose her, will be great.
TO MR LUCAS: from Magdalene College
6 December 1956
(1) I think there may be some humour [in the New Testament]. Matt. IX.12 (People who are well don’t need doctors) could well be said in a way that wd be v. funny to everyone present except the Pharisees. So might Matt. XVII.25. And in Mark X.30—quickly slipping in ‘tribulations’ among all the assets—that cd be funny too. And of course the Parable of the Unjust Steward (it’s comic element is well brought out in Dorothy Sayers’ excellent Man Born to Be King).
(2) If there were more humour, should we (modern Occidentals) see it? I’ve been much struck in conversation with a Jewess by the extent to which Jews see humour in the O.T. where we don’t. Humour varies so much from culture to culture.
(3) How much wd be recorded? We know (John XXI.25) that we have only a tiny fraction of what Our Lord said. Wd the Evangelists, anxious to get across what was vitally necessary, include it? They told us nothing about His appearance, clothes, physical habits—none of what a modern biographer would put in.
TO FATHER PETER MILWARD: from The Kilns
10 December 1956
One historical point first. There cd not have been an allegory about the atomic bomb when Tolkien began his romance for he did so before it was invented. That, however, has little to do with the theoretical question: tho’ it has much to do with the extreme danger, in individual cases, of applying allegorical interpretations. We shd. probably find that many particular allegories critics read into Langland or Spenser are impossible for just that sort of reason, if we knew all the facts. I am also convinced that the wit of man cannot devise a story in wh. the wit of some other man cannot find an allegory.
For the rest, I wd agree that the word can be used in wider or narrower senses. Indeed, in so far as the things unseen are manifested by the things seen, one might from one point of view call the whole material universe an allegory. The truth is it’s one of those words which needs defining in each context where one uses it. It wd be disastrous if anyone took your statement that the Nativity is the greatest of all allegories to mean that the physical event was merely feigned!
Who is the man on your stamp? Looks like a tough to me. Thanks for pleasant card, and all good wishes.
[The following announcement appeared in The Times on 24 December 1956, p. 8: ‘A marriage has taken place between Professor C. S. Lewis, of Magdalene College, Cambridge, and Mrs Joy Gresham, now a patient in the Churchill Hospital, Oxford. It is requested that no letters be sent.’]
TO MISS DOROTHY L. SAYERS: from The Kilns
24 December 1956
Thanks for your kind card. You may see in The Times a notice of my marriage to Joy Gresham. She is in hospital (cancer) and not likely to live; but if she gets over this go she must be given a home here. You will not think that anything wrong is going to happen. Certain problems do not arise between a dying woman and an elderly man. What I am mainly acquiring is two (nice) stepsons. Pray for us all, and God bless you.
TO PROFESSOR CLYDE S. KILBY: from Magdalene College (about his novel Till We Have Faces, which was published in September 1956)
10 February 1957
An author doesn’t necessarily understand the meaning of his own story better than anyone else, so I give you my account of the TWHF simply for what’s it’s worth. The ‘levels’ I am conscious of are these.
1. A work of (supposed) historical imagination. A guess at what it might have been like in a little barbarous state on the borders of the Hellenistic world with Greek culture just beginning to affect it. Hence the change from the old priest (of a very normal fertility mother-goddess) to Arnom: Stoic allegorisations of the myths standing to the original cult rather as Modernism to Christianity (but this is a parallel, not an allegory). Much that you take as allegory was intended solely as realistic detail. The Wagon men are Nomads from the steppes. The children made mud pies not for symbolic purposes but because children do. The Pillar Room is simply a room. The Fox is such an educated Greek slave as you might find at a barbarous court—and so on.
2. Psyche is an instance of the anima naturaliter Christiana making the best of the Pagan religion she is brought up in and thus being guided (but always ‘under the cloud’, always in terms of her own imagination or that of her people) towards the true God. She is in some ways like Christ not because she is a symbol of Him but because every good man or woman is like Christ. What else could they be like? But of course my interest is primarily in Orual.
3. Orual is (not a symbol but) an instance, a ‘case’, of human affection in its natural condition: true, tender, suffering, but in the long run, tyrannically possessive and ready to turn to hatred when the beloved ceases to be its possession. What such love particularly cannot stand is to see the beloved passing into a sphere where it cannot follow. All this, I hoped, w
ould stand in a mere story in its own right. But—
4. Of course I had always in mind its close parallel to what is probably at this moment going on in at least five families in your own town at this moment. Someone becomes a Christian, or, in a family nominally Christian already, does something like becoming a missionary or entering a religious order. The others suffer a sense of outrage. What they love is being taken from them! The boy must be mad! And the conceit of him! Or is there something in it after all? Let’s hope it is only a phase! If only he’d listen to his natural advisers! Oh come back, come back, be sensible, be the dear son we used to know. Now I, as a Christian, have a good deal of sympathy with these jealous, puzzled, suffering people (for they do suffer and out of their suffering much of the bitterness against religion arises). I believe the thing is common. There is very nearly a touch of it in Luke II, 48, ‘Son, why hast thou so dealt with us?’ And is the reply easy for a loving heart to bear?
TO SISTER PENELOPE, C.S.M.V.: from Magdalene College
Ash Wednesday [6 March 1957]
Yes, it is true. I married (knowingly) a very sick, save by near-miracle a dying, woman. She is the Joy Davidman whose Smoke on the Mountain I think you read. She is in the Wingfield Morris Hospital at Headington. When I see her each week end she is, to a layman’s eyes (but not to a doctor’s knowledge) in full convalescence, better every week. The disease is of course cancer: by which I lost my mother, my father, and my favourite aunt. She knows her own state of course: I wd allow no lies to be told to a grown-up and a Christian. As you can imagine new beauty and new tragedy have entered my life. You wd be surprised (or perhaps you would not?) to know how much of a strange sort of happiness and even gaiety there is between us . . .
I don’t doubt that Joy and I (and David & Douglas, the two boys) will have your prayers. Douglas is an absolute charmer (11½). David, at first sight less engaging, is at any rate a comically appropriate stepson for me (13), being almost exactly what I was—bookworm, pedant, and a bit of a prig.
