Letters of C. S. Lewis

by C. S. Lewis

  TO MRS EDWARD A. ALLEN: from The Kilns

  16 March 1957

  I think I haven’t told you my news. I have lately married a lady who is very ill and probably dying: I shall be left with two stepsons. Thus, as you may guess, great beauty and great tragedy have come into my life. We need your prayers more than ever . . .

  In my job one hardly works to a schedule of hours you know: nor, apart from lectures and committees, can one draw any hard and fast line between what is and what is not ‘work’. I couldn’t tell you which of the books I read are professional reading and which are for pleasure. In writing I do regard all non-academic works (all the ones you have read) as being leisure occupations. They have been done at odd moments: nothing unusual about that for better authors would have said the same—Caesar, Chaucer, Sidney, Fielding, Lamb, Jane Austen and Trollope (the last incredibly copious: he wrote most of his novels on railways journeys).

  [ Jack had hitherto been using the word ‘marriage’ to refer to the civil marriage of 23 April 1956 as well as a real marriage (see the letter to Arthur Greeves of 25 November 1956) which might take place. What he and Joy considered the real one—the Christian sacrament—was performed by Father Peter Bide in the Wingfield-Morris Hospital at 11 A.M. on 21 March 1957.]

  TO SISTER MADALEVA, C.S.C.: from Magdalene College

  8 May 1957

  It is always nice to hear from you again. But alas, I was never less likely to come to America than now. I am newly married and to a dying woman. Every moment is spent at her bedside. I am sure we may both count on your prayers: and I, your prayers for help and guidance in the difficult responsibility of bringing up two orphan stepsons. I have only one qualification, if it is one: these two boys are now facing the very same calamity that befell my brother and me at about their age.

  TO SISTER PENELOPE, C.S.M.V.: from The Kilns

  12 May 1957

  The idea of anyone seeking a ‘sober, male opinion’ from such a wretched man of business as I am! I would advise you to do as I have at last done: put yourself in the hands of a good Literary Agent (Curtis Brown, Henrietta St., Covent Garden, is probably the best) and never deal direct with publishers again. An agent will of course take his percentage off your royalties, but then he will probably get you better terms.

  One of my publishers, on hearing that I was in touch with Brown, motored down to Cambridge at once and offered to raise the terms on all previous books if I wd promise not to! That is surely significant. Also, which may be no less important, it will save you a lot of work and thought and frustration of a sort that people like you and me are not good at. (‘Study to be quiet—’!)

  Joy is now home here, completely bed-ridden. Though the doctors hold out no ultimate hope, the progress of the disease does seem to be temporarily arrested, to a degree they never expected. There is little pain, often none, her strength increases, and she eats and sleeps well. This has the paradoxical (but, come to think of it, natural) result of giving her lower spirits and less peace. The more general health, of course the stronger is the instinctive will to live. Forbidden and torturing hopes will intrude (on us both). In short, a dungeon is never harder to bear than when the door is opened and the sunshine & birdsongs float in. It is the doom of Tantalus. Pray hard for us both, dear sister.

  TO MISS DOROTHY L. SAYERS: from The Kilns

  25 June 1957

  I ought to tell you my own news. On examination it turned out that Joy’s previous marriage, made in her pre-Christian days, was no marriage: the man had a wife still living. The Bishop of Oxford said it was not the present policy to approve re-marriage in such cases, but that his view did not bind the conscience of any individual priest. Then dear Father Bide (do you know him?) who had come to lay his hands on Joy—for he has on his record what looks v. like one miracle—without being asked and merely on being told the situation at once said he wd marry us. So we had a bedside marriage with a Nuptial Mass.

  When I last wrote to you I would not even have wished this: you will gather (and may say ‘guessed as much’) that my feelings have changed. They say a rival often turns a friend into a lover. Thanatos, certainly (they say) approaching but at an uncertain speed, is a most efficient rival for this purpose. We soon learn to love what we know we must lose. I hope you give us your blessing: I know you’ll give us your prayers.

  She is home now, not because she is better (tho’ in fact she seems amazingly better) but because they can do no more for her at the Wingfield: totally bed-ridden but—you’d be surprised—we have much gaiety and even some happiness. Indeed, the situation is not easy to describe. My heart is breaking and I was never so happy before: at any rate there is more in life than I knew about. My own physical pains lately (which were among the severest I’ve known) had an odd element of relief in them . . .

  TO JOAN LANCASTER: from The Kilns

  18 July 1957

  They tell me that one shd never try to learn Spanish and Italian at the same time. The fact that they are so alike of course helps one a bit over the meanings of words (but Latin wd help you almost equally for both) but it makes a confusion in one’s mind about grammar and idioms—in the end one makes a horrid soup out of both. I don’t know Spanish, but I know there are lovely things in Italian to read. You’ll like Boiardo, Ariosto, and Tasso. By the way good easy Latin reading to keep one’s Latin up with is the New Testament in Latin. Any Roman Catholic bookshop will have one: say you want a copy of the ‘Vulgate (VULGATE) New Testament’. Acts goes specially well in Latin.

  I don’t think being good always goes with having fun: a martyr being tortured by Nero, or a resistance movement man refusing to give away his friends when tortured by the Germans, were being good but not having fun. And even in ordinary life there are things that wd be fun to me but I mustn’t do them because they wd spoil other people’s fun.

  But of course you are quite right if you mean that giving up fun for no reason except that you think it’s ‘good’ to give it up, is all nonsense. Don’t the ordinary old rules about telling the truth and doing as you’d be done by tell one pretty well which kinds of fun one may have and which not? But provided the thing is in itself right, the more one likes and the less one has to ‘try to be good’, the better. A perfect man wd never act from sense of duty; he’d always want the right thing more than the wrong one. Duty is only a substitute for love (of God and of other people), like a crutch which is a substitute for a leg. Most of us need the crutch at times: but of course it’s idiotic to use the crutch when our own legs (our loves, tastes, habits etc) can do the journey on their own!

  TO MISS JANE GASKELL: from The Kilns (Her first novel, Strange Evil, had just been published.)

  2 September 1957

  My wife and I have just been reading your book and I want to tell you that I think it a quite amazing achievement—incomparably beyond anything I could have done at that age. The story runs, on the whole, very well and there is some real imagination in it. The idea of the gigantic spoiled brat (had you a horrid baby brother once?) is really excellent: perhaps even profound. Unlike most modern fantasies your book also has a firm core of civilised ethics. On all these grounds, hearty congratulations.

  On the other hand there is no reason at all why your next book should not be at least twice as good. I hope you will not think it impertinent if I mention (this is only one man’s opinion of course) some mistakes you can avoid in future.

  1. In all stories which take one to another world, the difficulty (as you and I know) is to make something happen when we’ve got there. In fact, one needs ‘filling’. Yours is quite sufficient in quantity (almost too much) but not quite, I think, of the right sort. Aren’t all these economic problems and religious differences too like the politics of our own world? Why go to faerie for what we already have? Surely the wars of faerie should be high, reckless, heroical, romantic wars—concerned with the possession of a beautiful queen or an enchanted treasure? Surely the diplomatic phase of them should be represented not by conferen
ces (which, on your own showing, are as dull as ours) but by ringing words of gay taunt, stern defiance, or Quixotic generosity, interchanged by great warriors with sword in hand before the battle joins?

  2. This is closely connected with the preceding. In a fantasy every precaution must be taken never to break the spell, to do nothing which will wake the reader and bring him back with a bump to the common earth. But this is what you sometimes do. The moving van on which they travel is a dull invention at best, because we can’t help conceiving it as mechanical. But when you add upholstered seats, lavatories, and restaurants, I can’t go on believing in faerie for a moment. It has all turned into commonplace technological luxury! Similarly even a half-fairy ought not climb a fairyhill carrying a suitcase full of new nighties. All magic dies at this touch of the commonplace. (Notice, too, the disenchanting implication that the faeries can’t make for themselves lingerie as good as they can get—not even in Paris, which wd be bad enough—but, of all places, in London.)

  3. Never use adjectives or adverbs which are mere appeals to the reader to feel as you want him to feel. He won’t do it just because you ask him: you’ve got to make him. No good telling us a battle was ‘exciting’. If you succeeded in exciting us the adjective will be unnecessary: if you don’t, it will be useless. Don’t tell us the jewels had an ‘emotional’ glitter; make us feel the emotion. I can hardly tell you how important this is.

  4. You are too fond of long adverbs like ‘dignifiedly’, which are not nice to pronounce. I hope, by the way, you always write by ear not by eye. Every sentence shd be tested on the tongue, to make sure that the sound of it has the hardness or softness, the swiftness or languor, which the meaning of it calls for.

  5. Far less about clothes, please! I mean, ordinary clothes. If you had given your fairies strange and beautiful clothes and described them, there might be something in it. But your heroine’s tangerine skirt! For whom do you write? No man wants to hear how she was dressed, and the sort of women who does seldom reads fantasy: if she reads anything it is more like to be the Women’s Magazines. By the way, these are a baneful influence on your mind and imagination. Beware! they may kill your talent. If you can’t keep off them, at least, after each debauch, give your imagination a good mouth-wash by a reading (or wd it be a re-reading) of the Odyssey, Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, E. R. Eddison’s The Worm Ouroboros, the romances of Stephens, and all the early mythical plays of W. B. Yeats. Perhaps a touch of Lord Dunsany too.

  6. Names not too good. They ought to be beautiful and suggestive as well as strange: not merely odd like Enaj (wh. sounds as if it came out of Butler’s Erewhon).

  I hope all this does not enrage you. You’ll get so much bad advice that I felt I must give you some of what I think good.

  TO DOM BEDE GRIFFITHS, O.S.B.: from The Kilns

  24 September 1957

  My wife’s condition, contrary to the expectation of the doctors, has improved, if not miraculously (but who knows?) at any rate wonderfully. (How wd one say that in Latin?) No one, least of all herself, encourages me to dream of a permanent recovery, but this is a wonderful reprieve. Tho’ she is still a cripple, her general health is better than I have ever seen it, and she says she has never been happier.

  It is nice to have arrived at all this by something which began in Agape, proceeded to Philia, then became Pity, and only after that, Eros. As if the highest of these, Agape, had successfully undergone the sweet humiliation of an incarnation.

  My own trouble, after one terrible fortnight, has taken a turn for the better. No one suggests that the disease is either curable or fatal. It normally accompanies that fatal disease we call Senility! but no one knows why I have got it so early (comparatively) in life . . .

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

  6 November 1957

  Whatever our state had been a letter from you wd always have cheered and comforted. In reality it is beyond all we dared to hope. When they sent Joy home from hospital last April, they sent her home to die. The experienced nurses expected her life to be a matter of weeks. She could not even be moved in bed without a lifting squad of three of us, and, with all our care, we nearly always hurt her.

  Then it began to appear that the cancer had been arrested: the diseased spots in the bones were no longer spreading or multiplying. Then the tide began to turn—they were disappearing. New bone was being made. And so little by little till the woman who cd hardly be moved in bed can now walk about the house and into the garden—limping and with a stick, but walking. She even found herself getting up unconsciously to answer the telephone the other day. It is the unconsciousness that is the real triumph—the body wh. could not obey the most planned volition now begins to act on its own. General health and spirits excellent. Of course the sword of Damocles still hangs over us: or, shd I say, we are forced to be aware of the sword wh. really overhangs all mortals.

  Did I tell you I also have a bone disease? It is neither mortal nor curable: a prematurely senile loss of calcium. I was v. crippled and had much pain all summer but am in a good spell now. I was losing calcium just about as fast as Joy was gaining it, and a bargain (if it were one) for wh. I’m v. thankful. So continue your prayers but now with fervent thanks. I am almost frightened by God’s mercies: how can we ever be good enough?

  I’ve been reading some of the books you mention. I was busy on Macrobius, Chalcidius, Boethius, & Pseudo-Dionysius for a book wh. will probably be called Prolegomena to Medieval Poetry.183 That late antique period when a sort of synthesised high Paganism (mainly neo-Platonic) and Christian theology were both contending and influencing each other is fascinating . . .

  TO ROGER LANCELYN GREEN: from The Kilns (Green had sent Jack a copy of his book, Into Other Worlds: Space-Flight in Fiction, from Lucian to Lewis)

  17 November 1957

  Nicest of all was getting your new book, which I should still be reading if Joy, after the manner of wives (how I have ‘dwindled into a husband’!) had not taken it out of my hands.

  What a lot there is in it, and how much I didn’t know! The Lunar Hoax interested me especially, not primarily as a hoax, tho’ that is good fun too, but because some of it is really the best invention and description of extra-terrestrial landscape (the animals are less good) before First Men in the Moon.

  I think you are hard on Wells. Obviously, he touches off something in you which he didn’t in me. I still think that a v. good book indeed and don’t dislike the Selenites themselves as much as you do. Bedford is of course a cad. I’m with you about the ‘ghastly materialistic’ tenacity of Stapledon’s humans. And of course I enjoyed the kind things you say about myself: as also the moving inscription in my copy.

  By the way, Douglas, when home for half term,184 quite unsolicited, produced a testimonial to Shirard whom he described as ‘very popular’ and then (oh the delicious superiority of small fry over smaller) ‘one of the most promising New-Boys he had known’. So strike the stars with your sublime head, for this, you know, is ‘beyond all Greek, beyond all Roman fame’. We both send our love to June and you.

  TO JOCELYN GIBB: from The Kilns (his publisher, who had sent him some honey)

  Christmas Day 1957

  Your parcel, as it happened, was opened before your letter, so you had a good joke in absentia. We did wonder a little whether there were any core or whether we were peeling an onion. But the golden treasures surpassed the wrappings in value more than they surpassed it in bulk: I had a stanza of this edible poem for breakfast to-day with much enjoyment. Thank you very much.

  Marry gup! The hymn, which you miscall a psalm, truly hath in that place ‘to pay the price of sinne’, which paying the price of sinne I do suppose to be all one with redeeming.185 Go to. You lie at the catch, neighbour. Nor is it unfit that I admonish printers concerning printing and publishers concerning publishing, the which if I now were to handle I might chance to recall that old sawe ex sutore medicus and scribble the ultracrepidations of cobblers. With what stoma
ch, think you, would Tullie have borne the Salii going about to mende his periods?

  Mid-day dinner with a generous burgandy is perhaps a mistake . . . Vinum locutum est. I wish you a merry Christmas retrospectively.

  TO MRS EDWARD A. ALLEN: from The Kilns

  1 February 1958

  I quite agree with the Archbishop that no sin, simply as such, should be made a crime. Who the deuce are our rulers to enforce their opinions about sin on us?—a lot of professional politicians, often venal time-servers, whose opinion on a moral problem in one’s life we shd attach very little value to. Of course many acts which are sins against God are also injuries to our fellow-citizens, and must on that account, but only on that account, be made crimes. But of all the sins in the world I shd have thought homosexuality was the one that least concerns the State. We hear too much of the State. Government is at its best a necessary evil. Let’s keep it in its place.

  TO MISS MURIEL BRADBROOK: from Magdalene College

  18 April 1958

  I am glad you raised this question. I was maintaining yesterday that when a bifurcation of meaning is sufficiently old and wide, the resulting senses often enter the linguistic consciousness of each new generation as mere homophones, and their reunion has the explosion of a pun. But on the other hand, when the bifurcation is less wide there may be a period during which the speakers really do not know in which sense they are using the word. When we speak of a ‘simple meal’ do we always know whether we mean (a) not complicated, (b) modest, not ‘posh’, or (c) easy to prepare? (Of course they needn’t coincide. A haunch of venison is more ‘posh’ than a shepherd’s pie, but less complicated, and helpings of caviare out of a jar are easier to prepare than either.) In the passage you quote, almost all of the senses of ‘sad’ (including that which would yield a tautology) seem to me possible, and I suggest that Webster may not have made up his mind between them. Cf. the passage in Boswell where Goldsmith lets Johnson tell him what he meant by ‘slow’ in the first line of the Traveller.