A retired naval captain whom you may have sometimes heard of in the papers (Bernard Acworth) tells me he was at Derryherk¹⁸¹ shortly before us and says the fishing was just as bad as the food. I wonder what the Magic Major is really up to.

I’ve got a 100 Horsepower cold but feel mentally & spiritually much the better from our holiday. It—and you—have done me lots of good. All blessings.

Yours

Jack

TO JONATHAN FRANCIS ‘FRANK GOODRIDGE (P): ¹⁸²

Coll. Magd.

22/9/52

My dear Goodridge

I’m going to give those lectures next term and cd. hardly separate myself from the notes at the moment.¹⁸³ But for the moment:–the trichotomy is not Hesperian, Aerial, or Celestial, but Terrestrial (Men), Aerial (Aerial Genii or daemons), Aetherial (Angels). At death Man goes from 1 to 2: from which, if they make the grade, they go on to 3, but if ploughed relapse into 1. 1 and 2 are mortal, 3 immortal. It’s at one’s second death (or an Aerial) that one either goes up or falls back.

Hence 11. 459-472¹⁸⁴ really mean (I believe) ‘Chastity carries us safely from terrestrial thro’ aerial up to aetherial, but sensuality draws us back to terrestrial. Ghosts are “ploughed” aerial longing to get back to their terrestrial state.’

The Attendant Spirit¹⁸⁵ is an aerial (i.e. a native aerial not an ex-human who has been promoted). For he lives not in the highest heaven but only ‘before’ its ‘threshold’ (l.)¹⁸⁶ among ‘aerial spirits’ (3.)¹⁸⁷ in ‘serene air’ (4.)¹⁸⁸ is called ‘daemon’ in Trinity MS., & returns to ‘suck the liquid air’ (980)¹⁸⁹ wh. Aerials live on, in a region still subject to mutability where Venus mourns Adonis (999-1002) and it is ‘far above’ (1003) his realm that Celestial Love consummates His marriage with human soul (1004-1011). That ought to keep them going for a bit! I am so glad you have a happy job.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO MARGARET SACKVILLE HAMILTON (BOD):¹⁹⁰

Magdalen College,

Oxford

23/9/52

Dear Mrs. Hamilton

The ancient books which put this view best are Plato’s Timaeus and Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy, Book V. (The Loeb Library edition of the latter has a nice 17th century English translation on the right hand pages).¹⁹¹ There is, however, no need to go back to the original sources. Modern statements will be found in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason: (in the part called ‘Transcendental Aesthetic’)¹⁹² and in Von Hügel’s Eternal Life¹⁹³– the latter, I think, far easier. From the scientific angle try Eddington’s Nature of the Physical Universe.¹⁹⁴, There are what maybe regarded as evidences for the theory in Dunne’s Experiment with Time,¹⁹⁵ tho’ he (wrongly I believe) treats them as evidence for a different and unnecessarily complicated theory of what he calls Serialism.¹⁹⁶

The nearest we get to scriptural support is II. Peter 8-9 where St. Peter transforms the simple Old Testament saying that 1000 years are only one day to God (which in itself might mean only that God is permanent in time) by adding the new and important point that to God one day is like 1000 years.¹⁹⁷

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

Joy Gresham at this time was a 37-year-old New Yorker who had begun a correspondence with Lewis in 1950.¹⁹⁸ Her marriage to the novelist, William Lindsay Gresham, was under strain, and in August she had left their two children, David (b. 1944)¹⁹⁹ and Douglas (b. 1945),²⁰⁰ with their father and a cousin, Renée Pierce, to go to London for a few months, hoping during that time to meet Lewis.

During August and September she stayed in London with her old friend, Phyllis Williams. They invited Lewis to have lunch with them in Oxford, and on 24 September Lewis met Joy and Phyllis at the Eastgate Hotel, across the road from Magdalen College. A few days later Lewis invited them to lunch in his College rooms. Warnie was invited too, but when he withdrew George Sayer took his place. Sayer recalled the luncheon in Magdalen in his biography of Lewis:

The party was a decided success. Joy was of medium height, with a good figure, dark hair, and rather sharp features. She was an amusingly abrasive New Yorker, and Jack was delighted by her bluntness and her anti-American views. Everything she saw in England seemed to her far better than what she had left behind. Thus, of the single glass of sherry we had before the meal, she said: ‘I call this civilized. In the States, they give you so much hard stuff that you start the meal drunk and end with a hangover.’ She was anti-urban and talked vividly about the inhumanity of the skyscraper and of the new technology and of life in New York City…She attacked modern American literature…‘Mind you, I wrote that sort of bunk myself when I was young.’ Small farm life was the only good life, she said. Jack spoke up then, saying that, on his father’s wise, he came from farming stock. ‘I felt that,’ she said. ‘Where else could you get the vitality?’²⁰¹

TO ROGER IANCELYN GREEN (BOD):

Coll. Magd.

26/9/52

My dear Roger–

I find Miss Graham’s criticism rather hard to understand. ‘Tone’ might conceivably refer to the emphasis on poaching or the poacher’s religious hypocrisy, but quite possibly masks some objection which she herself cannot understand. I don’t know what to advise, for the books you fail to publish seem to me sometimes better than, and sometimes no different from, your published ones. I shouldn’t be surprised if it all depends on the time of the month at which Miss G. reads the MS. I am old enough now to realise that one always has to reckon with that.

We also have had visitors. For heaven’s sake don’t let June increase her toils by bothering to write to me. But let me have her and your advice on my immediate problem wh. is the title of the new story. Bles, like you, thinks The Wild Waste Lands bad, but he says Night Under Narnia is ‘gloomy’. George Sayer & my brother say Gnomes Under N wd. be equally gloomy, but News under Narnia wd do. On the other hand my brother & the American writer Joy Davidman (who has been staying with us & is a great reader of fantasy and children’s books) both say that The Wild Waste Lands is a splendid title. What’s a chap to do?

Yours

Jack

TO MICHAEL IRWIN (P): TS

REF.52/373.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

26th September 1952.

Dear Michael,

Thank you for writing. I am so glad you liked the Voyage. Your idea of a story about Asian in England is a good one, but I think it would be too hard for me to write—it would have to be so different. Perhaps you will write it yourself when you are grown up,

Love from

C. S. Lewis

TO PATRICK IRWIN (P):²⁰² TS

REF.52/373.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

26th September 1952.

Dear Mr. Irwin,

I have written to Michael approving the idea, but saying it would be too difficult for me to do. I did’nt add that the story of Asian in this world (if not in England) has been written already. His letter gave me great pleasure, and so does yours.

Yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO VERA GEBBERT (W): TS

REF.52/103.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

30th September 1952.

Dear Mrs. Gebbert,

We are both delighted to hear that it is Proposition B, and are looking forward eagerly to your visit; and we note that, as one would expect from you, you come laden with gifts: which however you will have the novel experience of sharing with the recipients!

Yes, the dates suit excellently; I hope you will come down on one of the morning trains, in time for us all to have lunch here in my rooms before we go out to the house. Let me know in due course.

Is Andy the Antelope with you? Does he like iced water for breakfast? What brand of hay does he use?

With all best wishes to you both,

yours anticipatorily,

C. S. Lewis

TO CHARLES MOORMAN (L): ²⁰³

Magdalen

2/10/52

Dear Mr Moorman,

I am sure you are on a false scent.²⁰⁴ Certainly most, perhaps all the poems in Williams’s Taliessin volume were written before the last novel, All Hallows Eve, was even conceived,²⁰⁵ and there had been Arthurian poems (not of much value) in his earlier manner long before. I can’t tell you when he first became interested in the Arthurian story, but the overwhelming probability is that, like so many English boys, he got via Tennyson into Malory in his ‘teens. The whole way in which he talked of it implied a life-long familiarity. Much later (but even so, before I met him) came the link-up between his long-standing interest in Arthuriana and a new interest in Byzantium.

Everything he ever said implied that his prose fiction, his ‘pot boilers’, and his poetry all went on concurrently: there was no ‘turning from’ one to the other. He never said anything to suggest that he felt his themes ‘would not fit with ease into tales of modern life’. What would have expressed the real chronological relation between the novels would have been the words (tho’ I don’t think he ever actually said them) ‘I haven’t got much further with my Arthurian poems this week because I’ve been temporarily occupied with the idea for a new story’

The question when did he first come across the doctrine of ‘Caritas’ puzzled me. What doctrine do you mean? If you mean the ordinary Christian doctrine that there are three theological virtues and ‘the greatest of these is charity’²⁰⁶ of course he would never remember a time when he had not known it. If you mean the doctrine of Coinherence and Substitution, then I don’t know when he first met these.²⁰⁷ Nor do I know when he began the Figure of A.²⁰⁸ His knowledge of the earlier Arthurian documents was not that of a real scholar: he knew none of the relevant languages except (a little) Latin.

The VII Bears and the Atlantean Circle (in That Hideous Strength) are pure inventions of my own, filling the same purpose in the narrative that ‘noises off wd in a stage play.²⁰⁹ Numinor is a mis-spelling of Numenor which, like the ‘true West’, is a fragment from a vast private mythology invented by Professor J. R. R. Tolkien.²¹⁰ At the time we all hoped that a good deal of that mythology would soon become public through a romance which the Professor was then contemplating. Since then the hope has receded…²¹¹

TO PHOEBE HESKETH (W):²¹²

Magdalen College,

Oxford

Oct 4th 1952

Dear Miss Hesketh–

You will have given up expecting any acknowledgement of No Time for Cowards²¹³ which you so kindly sent me, and must think me no end of a curmudgeon. But you know what the alternative is—either to write a wholly perfunctory letter at once, or else to wait for that rare day and hour (it’s rarer as I get older) when one is receptive of a new book of poems. I now can really say Thank you, for I’ve got many real delights. You are a superb phrase-maker: ‘the bell-noised streams’²¹⁴ and ‘infant fists of fern’²¹⁵ on p. 8–‘Shack-Age’²¹⁶ on p. 9–‘caged in comic bars of camouflage’²¹⁷ on 39–and the really unbearable two lines about Time’s finger & the evening train on p. 81.²¹⁸Ugh! The ones I liked best as wholes (wh. aren’t necessarily the ones from which I shall remember bits to quote) are Lion’s Eye–it has a perfect shape, couldn’t be either longer or shorter–The White Roe–the extra rhyming line added to some stanzas is delightful–I Am Not Resigned (I’d love to have thought of ‘greener centuries’)²¹⁹–Strange Country, and (perhaps best of all) Second Birth. A painful book—I understand R. Church’s fears²²⁰–but then most good poetry (tho’ not the very topmost best of all like parts of Dante) is.

I really am very glad you sent it. Remember me most kindly to dear old Herbert Palmer and accept my very best thanks, good wishes, and congratulations. Perhaps if you are ever in these parts you will come and see me.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W):

Magdalen

11/10/52

My dear Arthur

James’s Letters vol. I arrived yesterday. I don’t know if I really ought to accept it, lames being so much more your kind of author than mine. On the other hand it is too big for an envelope and putting up parcels is one of the many things I can’t do. And there seems to be a good deal about books in it after all. Well, thanks very much indeed. Yes, I love my Father’s underlinings: the pencil (can’t you see him, with his spectacles far down on his nose, getting out the little stump?) so heavily used that, as W said, he didn’t so much draw a line as dig a line.

Term began yesterday, so I have now returned to harness after what has been perhaps the happiest year of my life. I began, appropriately, by cutting myself when I shaved, breaking my lace when I put on my shoes, and coming into College without my keys.

There have been some most perfect autumn days here lately and this is a well timbered country which they suit.

Love to l’Incroyable²²¹ and your good self and all blessings.

Yours

Jack

TO VERA GEBBERT (W): TS

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

11th October 1952.

Dear Mrs. Gebbert,

But hang it all, if you come on the 18th and 19th I shall see so little of you—being engaged to dine out on Saturday; and I can’t put it off because it is with people I’ve had to refuse on several other occasions. Would you think us Pigs if we adhered to the original date? Not if it means you’ll have to sleep on the Embankment of course!

Yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO HERBERT PALMER (TEX):

Coll. Magd.

16/10/52

My dear Palmer

I wrote a letter to Miss Hesketh²²² (I mean, a real one, not the mere acknowledgement) about the book²²³ some weeks ago. As Heinemann is one of those accursed firms that don’t put their address on the title page I sent it c/o their old address and it came back as a dead letter. I then sent it c/o my own publisher. Has Miss Hesketh not had it yet?

I liked many of the poems v. much, especially the phrasing. Do let me know if the letter has ever arrived. As for helping the book, what can one do against the massive rampart of false taste in our times? That is the ‘railway line’: you and Miss Hesketh are the real unmacadamised road or immemorial Right of Way across the field. But they are stopping the Right of Way. How are you these days? It was nice to hear from you again.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO JOHN ROWLAND (TEX):²²⁴ PC

Magdalen College

Oxford

16/10/52

Good. My Mon. evgs. are, unhappily, always filled up by the Socratic Club. The safest thing (for an unspecified week) is Lunch on Monday and as much talk as you can spare me afterwards. If you can fix which Monday I will book it. I much look forward to meeting.

C. S. Lewis

TO ARTHUR GREEVES (BOD):

Magdalen College

Oxford

17/10/52

My dear Arthur

I’ve finished vol. I of the Letters of HJ. I announce this not to hurry you but to show that I have enjoyed yr. gift. I’m afraid he was a dreadful Prig, but he is by no means a bore and has lots of interesting things to say about books. Was it you sent me the Northern ‘Whig’?²²⁵ If so thanks.

Yours

Jack

TO VERA GEBBERT (W): TS 52/103.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

18th October 1952.

Dear Mrs. Gebbert,

What a misfortune for you, and what a disappointment for us! ‘Flu is a horrid thing at the best of times, but to contract it when on holiday, and in a strange city, is to have it under the most wretched conditions.

We hope that this does not mean a final cancellation of your visit: but I am making no alternative suggestion until I see what is in the letter you are writing me.

With deepest sympathy to you both and best wishes for a short illness and speedy recovery,

Yours,

C. S. Lewis

TO MARY VAN DEUSEN (W):

Magdalen etc.

Oct 20th 1952

Dear Mrs. Van Deusen

I think you are perfectly right to change your manner of prayer from time to time and I shd. suppose that all who pray seriously do thus change it. One’s needs and capacities change and also, for creatures like us, excellent prayers may ‘go dead’ if we use them too long. Whether one shd. use written prayers composed by other people, or one’s own words or own wordless prayer, or in what proportion one shd. mix all three, seems to me entirely a question for each individual to answer from his own experience.

I myself find prayers without words the best, when I can manage it, but I can do so only when least distracted and in best spiritual and bodily health (or what I think best). But another person might find it quite otherwise.

Your question about old friendships where there is no longer spiritual communion is a hard one. Obviously it depends v. much on what the other party wants. The great thing in friendship as in all other forms of love is, as you know, to turn from the demand to be loved (or helped or answered) to the wish to love (or help or answer). Perhaps in so far as one does this one also discovers how much love one shd. spend on the sort of friends you mention. I don’t think a decay in one’s desire for mere ‘society’ or ‘acquaintance’ or ‘the crowd’ is a bad sign. (We mustn’t take it as a sign of one’s increasing spirituality of course: isn’t it merely a natural, neutral, development as one grows older?).

All that Calvinist question—Free-Will & Predestination, is to my mind undiscussable, insoluble. Of course (say us) if a man repents God will accept him. Ah yes, (say they) but the fact of his repenting shows that God has already moved him to do so. This at any rate leaves us with the fact that in any concrete case the question never arrives as a practical one. But I suspect it is really a meaningless question. The difference between Freedom & Necessity is fairly clear on the bodily level: we know the difference between making our teeth chatter on purpose & just finding them chattering with cold. It begins to be less clear when we talk of human love (leaving out the erotic kind). ‘Do I like him because I choose or because I must?’–there are cases where this has an answer, but others where it seems to me to mean nothing. When we carry it up to relations between God & Man, has the distinction perhaps become nonsensical? After all, when we are most free, it is only with a freedom God has given us: and when our will is most influenced by Grace, it is still our will. And if what our will does is not ‘voluntary’, and if ‘voluntary’ does not mean ‘free’, what are we talking about? I’d leave it all alone. Blessings.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO VERA GEBBERT (W):

Magdalen etc.

Oct 20th 1952

Poor dear Gebberts

I am sorry. Whatever may be said for foreign travel, it is horrid when one is ill: the wounded animal wants to creep away to its own den. But the total situation, you must now learn, is quite other than you supposed when you wrote on Saturday evening. That same evening our housekeeper (the only stay of our house and the nearest thing you wd. have had to a hostess) also went down with flu’. So if she had gone down 24 hours earlier we shd. have been wiring to put you off: and if you’d gone down 24 hours later our house wd. now be an amateur Nursing Home staffed by two elderly and incompetent bachelors–themselves liable at any moment to become two more patients. So all has not, perhaps, been quite so much for the worst as you supposed.

At any rate you have nothing to apologise for except what we should have had to apologise for if you hadn’t. (Don’t try to work this sentence out until your temperature is now normal). We had hoped that, tho’ we can’t now offer hospitality, you might have got down here for lunch some day, but I quite see how you can’t. Don’t feel in the least bad about the contre-temps: if you, and our Miss Henry, were to have flu’ the times couldn’t have fitted in better!²²⁶ And you keep that whiskey and drink it all yourselves: you’ll need it—and you won’t get any fit to drink over here. Thanks—blessings–sympathies—and all good wishes for a speedy recovery.

Yours,

W. H. Lewis

C. S. Lewis

TO ROGER LANCELYN GREEN (BOD):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

21/10/52

My dear Roger

Your letter was more than usually welcome: for tho’ reason assured me that so busy a man might have 100 motives for not writing, I had also a lurking fear that you might be offended. Forgive me the suspicion. It arose not at all because I judge you to be that kind of ass, or any kind, but because, we being ‘of one blood’, the loss of you wd. be a very raw gash in my life.

I had a letter from G. Greene’s secretary to say that he was abroad but wd. be shown my letter as soon as he returned. I fear that will make it too late for him to act on it even if he has justice enough to wish to. I have just finished Vol. I of Henry James’s letters. An interesting man, tho’ a dreadful prig: but he did appreciate Stevenson. A phantasmal man, who had never known God, or earth, or war, never done a day’s compelled work, never had to earn a living, had no home & no duties.

My brother is reading A.E.W.M.²²⁷ with great enjoyment. You seem to be getting a pretty good Press: congratulations.

Love to lune. I look forward to seeing you next month.

Yours

Jack

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