Collected Letters Volume Three: Narnia, Cambridge and Joy 1950–1963

We wouldn’t call Alfred and Egbert and all those the ‘British’ line. They are the ‘English’ line, the Angles, who come from Angel in South Denmark. By the British line, we’d mean the Celtic line that goes back through the Tudors to Cadwallader and thence to Arthur, Uther, Cassibelan, Lear, Lud, Brut, Aeneas, Jupiter. The present royal family can claim descent from both the British and the English lines. So, I suppose, can most of us: for since one has 2 parents, 4 grandparents, 16 great grandparents, and so on, one is presumably descended from nearly everyone who was alive in this island in the year 600 A.D. In the long run one is related to everyone on the planet: in that quite literal sense we are all ‘one flesh’.⁷²

Of course I don’t mean to ignore (in fact I find it nice) the distinction between a peasant’s grandson like myself and those of noble blood. I only observe that the nobility lies not in the ancient descent (wh. is common to us all) but in having been for so many generations illustrious that more of the steps are recorded. I do hope you’ll be better by the time this reaches you.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO PAUL PIEHLER(W): ⁷³

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

28/i/54

Dear Piehler

Blurb enclosed. Never again throw out the old water before you’ve got new on tap! Good hunting.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

*

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

I have much pleasure in recommending my friend and former pupil Mr. P. Piehler. Mr. Piehler is a sound and sensitive scholar whose interest in his subject is widening and deepening as he grows and from whom we may reasonably expect valuable contributions. He has the clarity of voice and language which a lecturer requires. His manners and personality are attractive; he was generally liked here and bore a thoroughly good character. I should be very glad to have him as a colleague in any English Faculty of which I was a member myself. I understand that he already knows Swedish.

C. S. Lewis

Fellow & Tutor

Jan 28th 1954

TO DOM BEDE GRIFFITHS OSB (W):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

30/i/54

Dear Dom Bede

Yes, I’d certainly rule out Little Emily and Little Nell and all the ‘littles’. The Marchioness is the real thing.⁷⁴

The trouble with Thackeray, is that he can hardly envisage goodness except as a kind of ⁷⁵ all his ‘good’ people are not only simple, but simpletons. That is a subtle poison wh. comes in with the Renaissance: the Machiavellian (intelligent) villain presently producing the idiot hero. The Middle Ages didn’t make Herod clever and knew the devil was an ass. There is really an un-faith about Thackeray’s ethics: as if goodness were somehow charming, & ‘seelie’ & infantile. No conception that the purification of the will (ceteris paribus)⁷⁶ leads to the enlightenment of the intelligence.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO HILA NEWMAN (W):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

Jan 30/54

Dear Hila

Upon my word, a statue of Reepicheep.⁷⁷ He stares at me from my mantelpiece with just the right mixture of courtesy and readiness to fight. Thank you very much.

It is very cold here now–not so cold as in N.Y, I expect, but then we have no central heating in College, so my fingers are hardly able to write. I am so glad you liked the Chair. With all good wishes.

Yours ever

C. S. Lewis

TO KATHARINE FARRER(BOD):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

Feb 3/54

Dear Mrs Farrer

Sternly suppressing my conscience (in George Herbert’s style, you know ‘Peace, prattler, do not lour’)⁷⁸ I have allowed no duties to interfere with my reading The Cretan Counterfeit.⁷⁹ I admire very much the thick-woven texture: it doesn’t easily come apart. Janet and Shrubsole are very well done and Janet wins my heart. Two scenes that especially engaged me were that where Richard is hunting for Shrubsole in Janet’s house and the final scene. The tragic-heroic twist at the very end is good technique as well as being moving in itself. Georgios is, in his smaller way, a wonderful little horror.

Would Clare have giggled (p. 201)? Or even if she had, isn’t the word ‘giggled’ too damaging? (I’m always reminding people that nothing can get into literature save by becoming a word, and that things may be O.K. where the words are not. The bearings of this are wide, as you’ll see if you reflect on the difference between drawing a nude and verbally describing it,⁸⁰ or the impossibility of mentioning Cheko-Slovakia (is that how you spell it) at the apex of a lyric however deeply one may feel about that country).

I am outraged on p. 96 when you describe the moon ‘like the white face of an idiot lost in a wood’. Dear lady, this is simply Eliotic:⁸¹ for (a.) It illustrates what we’ve all seen by what most of us have not seen (b.) It denigrates, in the leering modern mode, the high creation of God. If I were your directeur you’d learn Psalm 136 by heart.⁸² Not safe, either, to be rude to goddesses–Artemis still owes Aphrodite a come-back for the Hippolytus affair and we shd. hate you to be the target.⁸³

I labour this because in general the actual writing is so good. But of course the great thing is the invention–a fine prodigality of characters, far beyond what a Tekky⁸⁴ needs but by no means beyond what it can carry and be all the better for. Thank you very much indeed. Can you read a word of this? It is so cold I can’t write any better, not if I tried ever so.

If you come across Arthur Clarke’s Childhood’s End, I recommend it.

Yours gratefully

C. S. Lewis

TO O. T. BRYANT (P): ⁸⁵

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

Feb 5/54

Dear Mr. Bryant

Thanks for your kind & encouraging letter.⁸⁶ The idea of voluntary ignorance (like your man refusing a secret) is v. interesting. One has often wished for ignorance oneself. I expect there are logical difficulties about Omniscience voluntarily annihilating its own knowledge, but there may be ways out of this. The terrible text ‘Depart from me, ye wicked, I never knew you’,⁸⁷ comes in here: also St Paul’s promise not (as we shd. expect) that the Christian knows God but ‘is known of God.’⁸⁸

Thanks for a fruitful idea. Genia (trans, ‘generation’) might mean race–i.e. the Jews will not disappear till all is accomplished. And they have certainly outlived nearly all the races of that time.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO MRS D. JESSUP (W):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

Feb 5/54e

Dear Mrs. Jessup

I fully agree with you about the difference between a doctrine merely accepted by the intellect and one (as Keats says) ‘proved in the pulses’⁸⁹ so that [it] is solid and palpable. You have clearly progressed from the one stage to the other as regards those sins by which (there again you’re right) we daily fashion the Nails. About 2 years ago I made a similar progress from mere intellectual acceptance of, to realisation of, the doctrine that our sins are forgiven. That is perhaps the most blessed thing that ever happened to me. How little they know of Christianity who think that the story ends with conversion: novelties we never dreamed of may await us at every turn of the road.

About the question of abandoning the ‘World’ or fighting right inside it, don’t you think that both may be right for different people? Some are called to the one and some to the other. Hence Our Lord, after pointing the contrast between the hermit and ascetic John the Baptist, and Himself who drank wine & went to dinner parties and jostled with every kind of man, concluded ‘But Wisdom is justified of all her children’:⁹⁰ meaning, I take it, both these kinds. I fancy we are all too ready, once we are converted ourselves, to assume that God will deal with everyone exactly as He does with us. But He is no mass-producer and treats no two quite alike.

I’m so glad your news is a little better. In great haste.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO ‘MRS LOCKLEY (WHL):

[Magdalen College]

Feb 8/54

Dear Mrs Lockley

You behaved like an angel in not writing at Christmas or the New Year: that whole period is to me simply one long ‘imposition’ (in the schoolboys’ sense) so that I often say, ‘If there were less goodwill there would be more peace on earth’. But I was very glad to hear from you now. How nice it is to hear of the wound healing–things getting ‘ordinary’ again…

TO KATHARINE FARRER(BOD):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

Feb 9th 54

Dear Mrs. Farrer

I must admit that I was mounting too high a horse about the ‘idiot-moon’.⁹¹ And I do fully allow the pathetic fallacy.⁹²

I’m afraid you came in for the backwash of my feeling about a widespread tendency in modern literature which strikes me as horrid: I mean, the readiness to admit extreme uses of the pathetic fallacy in contexts where there is nothing to justify them and always of a kind that belittles or ‘sordidises’ (‘sordidifies’) nature. Eliot’s evening ‘like a patient etherised upon a table’⁹³ is the locus classicus.⁹⁴ I don’t believe one person in a million, under any emotional stress, wd. see evening like that. And even if they did, I believe that anything but the most sparing admission of such images is a v. dangerous game. To invite them, to recur willingly to them, to come to regard them as normal, surely, poisons us?

I don’t mean you do this: I think a lot of moderns do. The real (human) idiot is another matter. I suppose him to be like ‘this daughter of Abraham whom Satan hath bound’.⁹⁵ Of course, higher than the Moon or all the Galaxies. But a transitory reference (‘like an idiot’) carries my mind only to the binding. If I said (in the cheery modern way) ‘dawn reddened like a chilblain on the horizon’, it wouldn’t be quite a defence to say that people with chilblains are immortal souls. Or would it? Perhaps I’m over-sensitive on this point. All that Eliotic world is so unlike anything I’ve ever seen–and perhaps I’m only making a peculiarity into a Norm. Of course to me, as to others, Nature may look dreadful, hostile, sinister, etc: but never just dingy or silly.

‘A man, not the Moon’, by the way, is splendid: I wish that was what you had said. She wd. look to me like Idiocy–like a power threatening me with idiocy–rather than an idiot. But I’m wasting your time. Don’t bother to reply.

I am so sorry to hear of your father-in-law’s illness.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

P.S. By the bye idiot itself is one of those words wh. has power different from the thing.

TO SISTER PENELOPE CSMV(BOD):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

15/ii/54

Dear Sister Penelope

‘What a life,’ indeed. I mean, how rich, how enviable: we who have waiting lists of things to do hardly realise the involuntary (and felt) vacancy of some lives. Though here too, I sometimes think ‘how hardly shall the rich enter’⁹⁶–I mean, the very work God gives us to do seems at times to separate us from God–

Oh that my Lord wd. give me power to be Mary and Martha simultaneously!

I am v. glad all goes so well, and look forward with great pleasure to reading the MS of Alma Mater.⁹⁷ I will try to read Grimble⁹⁸ if it comes my way.

I have had to abandon the book on prayer: it was clearly not for me. Have you read Miss Nott’s Emperor’s New Clothes where I am pilloried along with some of my betters? All blessings.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO MRS JOHNSON (W):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

Feb. 18. 1954

Dear Mrs. Johnson–

My word, you are getting on! A printed author (and a well written, well organised article too) and a T.V. star! I congratulate you. It must have been all great fun.

Of course taking in the poor illegitimate child is ‘charity’. Charity means love. It is called Agapë in the N.T.⁹⁹” to distinguish it from Eros (sexual love), Storgë (family affection) and Philia (friendship).¹⁰⁰ So there are 4 kinds of ‘love’, all good in their proper place, but Agapë is the best because it is the kind God has for us and is good in all circumstances. (There are people I mustn’t feel Eros towards, and people I can’t feel Storge or Philia for: but I can practise Agape to God, Angels, Man & Beast, to the good & the bad, the old & the young, the far and the near.)

You see Agape is all giving, not getting. Read what St Paul says about it in First Corinthians Chap. 13. Then look at a picture of Charity (or Agape) in action in St Luke, chap 10 w. 30-35. And then, better still, look at Matthew chap 25 w. 31-46: from which you see that Christ counts all that you do for this baby exactly as if you had done it for Him when He was a baby in the manger at Bethlehem: you are in a sense sharing in the things His mother did for Him. Giving money is only one way of showing charity: to give time & toil is far better and (for most of us) harder. And notice, tho’ it is all giving–you needn’t expect any reward–how you do gets rewarded almost at once.

Yes, I know one doesn’t even want to be cured of one’s pride because it gives pleasure. But the pleasure of pride is like the pleasure of scratching. If there is an itch one does want to scratch: but it is much nicer to have neither the itch nor the scratch. As long as we have the itch of self-regard we shall want the pleasure of self-approval: but the happiest moments are those when we forget our precious selves and have neither, but have everything else (God, our fellow-humans, animals, the garden & the sky) instead.

Yes, I do believe people are still healed by miracles by faith: but of course whether this has happened in any one particular case, is not so easy to find out.

God bless you, you are always in my prayers.

Yours ever

C. S. Lewis

TO HERBERT PALMER (TEX):

Magdalen College

Oxford

Feb 19/54

Dear Palmer–

As far as I know the history is roughly thus. Soul (Psyche) is the ordinary Gk. for ‘life’ of a plant, beast, or man. In Aristotle a man has vegetable Psyche (shared with plants), sensitive Psyche (shared with beasts) and intellectual Psyche.¹⁰¹ In St. Paul there comes in a different distinction, between Psyche and Spirit (Pneuma). There are 2 kinds of man the Psychic (A.V. ‘natural’) man and the Pneumatic (A.V. ‘spiritual’) man.¹⁰²

God is Pneuma, not Psyche: and ‘evil spirits’ are Pneumata. The tripartite division of Man into Body (Sarx or Sôma, Psyche, and Pneuma) was, I’m told (but I don’t know) ecclesiastically condemned in the Middle Ages. But none of this comes through intact into any modern language, so far as I know.

Lat. Spiritus is no doubt the normal trans, of Gk. Pneuma, but the derivatives, Fr. esprit and It. spirito have taken on quite different meanings such as ‘intellect’, ‘wit’ etc. Where the native Eng. sawol (‘soul’) and gâst (ghost) fit into the jigsaw I really don’t know. I don’t know any scheme wh. wd. separate consciousness from both spirit and soul as you do. For mind, by the way, no real equivalent seems to exist in any modern language.

I suppose you will find your room in College and get ‘dug in’ before going to the dinner?¹⁰³ What is the time of the said dinner, and place? I’ve no note of either. Will you call in my room about 1/2 hour before the zero hour & we’ll go together?

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO ROGER LANCELYN GREEN (BOD):

Magdalen College

Oxford

Feb 22/54

My dear Roger–

Oh angel! What a lovely present,¹⁰⁴ and all the more valuable for being the copy from that enchanted place your own library. I re-read it at once. It is perhaps the most complete of his books: as funny, or v. nearly as funny, as Vice Versa¹⁰⁵ but with a beauty wh. V.V. did not attempt. The ogre is somehow a v. real character. Very, very many thanks.

I’ve read The Buzzard¹⁰⁶ with total approval. I rather think it is the best of your realistic stories. It is certainly a masterpiece of construction. You set yourself a difficult problem in interlocking all the different interests, and you have solved it, for they all seem to get their turn naturally and inevitably. The characters are all alive, and Diana is maturing nicely. I like her better than in any of the previous books.

There is a bad sentence on p. 81. ‘After making a brew of tea, the fire was etc’ Better, ‘They stamped’.

All the scenes, mountaineering, etc. is v. real.

The MS. is just too big to fit into the biggest strong envelope I can get. Do you want it back, or will it do if you called [for] it at your next visit?

I was relieved that P & D¹⁰⁷ got your nihil obstat. I was afraid you might object to Uncle Andrew as a character more amusing to adults than to children. You can always feel a paternal interest in this tale, for it owes more than half its merit to your shrewdness in discerning, and honesty in pointing out, the fatal ‘sag’ in the original draft.

Love to all.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO MARY VAN DEUSEN (W):

Magdalen College

Oxford

Feb 22/54

Dear Mrs Van Deusen–

Thanks for yr. letter of Jan 13th. I don’t think one gains anything from calling Genia’s fears ‘Hypochondria’ and regarding them as something pathological. They are, like the fears of a soldier under fire, rational and natural fears of a real evil, so that her problem, like the soldier’s, is moral, not medical. They must be faced on the conscious level and overcome by the Grace of God.

If only people (including myself: I also have fears) were still brought up with the idea that life is a battle where death and wounds await us at every moment, so that courage is the first and most necessary of virtues, things wd. be easier. As it is, fears are all the harder to combat because they disappoint expectations bred on modern poppycock in which unbroken security is regarded as somehow ‘normal’ and the touch of reality as anomalous. Notice, too, how our bad habit of lying to those who are really ill renders vain our true assurances to those who are not!

I’ve had an exchange of letters with Genia on this very subject. I hope she won’t go to a psychiatrist. How cd. a psychiatrist help her except by saying ‘It is perfectly certain that you will never get any painful or dangerous disease’–and do you want her to be fool enough to believe than

I feel some of the same qualm as you about the Ecumenical Movement. In great haste. (I’ll be examining this summer, alas, not going for trips![)] All blessings.

Yours ever

C. S. Lewis

TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE (W):

Magdalen College

Oxford

Feb 22/54

Dear Mrs. Shelburne–

I am very sorry indeed to hear that anxieties again assail you. (By the way, don’t ‘weep inwardly’ and get a sore throat. If you must weep, weep: a good honest howl! I suspect we–and especially, my sex–don’t cry enough nowadays. Aeneas & Hector & Beowulf & Roland & Lancelot blubbered like school-girls, so why shouldn’t we?).¹⁰⁸ You were wonderfully supported in your worries last time: I shall indeed pray that it may be so again.

Wd. the Kilmer family like to have the next story but one dedicated to them? Let me know: the site is still vacant.

I didn’t object to the family reading the trilogy¹⁰⁹ on the ground that it wd. be too difficult–that wd. do no harm–but because in the last one there is so much evil, in a form not, I think, suitable for their age, and many specifically sexual problems which it wd. do them no good to think of at present. I daresay the Silent Planet is alright: Perelandra, little less so: T.H.S. most unsuitable.

I don’t think that an appreciation of ancient & noble blood is ‘snobbery’ at all. What is snobbery is a greedy desire to know those who have it, or a mean desire to flatter them, or a conceited desire to boast of their acquaintance. I think it quite legitimate to feel that such things give an added interest to a person who is nice on other grounds, just as a hotel wh. was nice on other grounds wd. have an added charm for me if it was also a building with ‘historic interest’.

I write in great haste–I can’t, like you, do it in working hours! But you’re nothing to Lamb: as far as I can make out all his letters, which now fill two volumes, were written in the office. Happy days those.

Well I hope I shall have better news in your next. God bless you.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO JILL FREUD (T): TS

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

2nd March 1954.

My dear June,

This is most kind of you, and we are both very grateful; the book shall certainly circulate amongst those worthy to read it.

Glad to hear you are well; I’m rather run down, having had a very strenuous term which is now working up to its finale, with everything playing fortissimo–including an examination. But the sinus has so far behaved itself.

Warnie has spoken to Paxford about the generous offer of the puppy, and I hear that Paxford replied (at great length, and about three times over), that he would like to know what the father was. If Polly made a misalliance I think he’ll take one, but if she married an aristocrat of her own race, no; because what he wants is a mongrel, having no faith in well-bred dogs. I don’t blame him after several years of Bruce, a gentleman if ever there was one, but as Dickens says, ‘with a head three hundred years thick’.¹¹⁰ From your remark that some of the pups are chocolate coloured, I presume they are mongrels?

Love to you and Mr. and Miss Freud (and Polly) from both of us; and we’re very glad indeed to hear that the night club flourishes.

Yours ever,

Jack

P. S. Belated Christmas box herewith.

J.

TO DOROTHY L. SAYERS (W):

Magdalen College

Oxford

March 4th 1954

Dear Miss Sayers–

Whole seas of scholarship papers and other interruptions already flow salt and estranging between me and your delightful visit, so that I have only in the last few days begun to study polarity.¹¹¹ The Me Meum is the best of all:¹¹² so good, and so diabolical, that it is hardly funny and has its own infernal poetry. The hymns are more for ‘pure delight’. ‘We are but lower age groups’ is perhaps my favourite–or else Alimony. But none is without its charm and I look forward to more.

I doubt (frankly) whether my enclosed effort is quite on the right lines. It is not a sufficiently close parody of the real hymn, and it is perhaps too much of an argument (even if one by reductio ad absurdum)¹¹³ What matters more is that it is not really an attack on Polarity proprement dite, but on a false philosophy which must be allowed to be not individualistic nor self centred and indeed has some generosity tho’ in a phoney way. However, you will judge.

I had the young Williams¹¹⁴ to dine the other night, and thought him not a bad chap (certainly not dull) tho’ rather alarmingly young for his age.

If my brother had not gone home for the night he wd. join me in our ‘duty’. We both hope you will be in these parts soon again (it grows late, you know!). He has been re-reading Gaudy Night¹¹⁵–to prolong (in some sort) your visit.

Yours ever

C. S. Lewis

Libellous? Or too nasty?

C.S.L.

Lead us, Evolution, lead us Up the future’s endless stair, Chop us, change us, clip us, weed us, For stagnation is despair: Groping, guessing, yet progressing, Lead us nobody-knows-where.

To whatever variation Our posterity may turn, Hairy, squashy, or crustacean, Bulbous-eyed or square of stern, Bland or ruthless, tusked or toothless, Towards that unknown god we yearn.

Ask not ‘Is he god or devil?’ Brethren, lest your words imply Static norms of good or evil Throned immutable on high; Such a dated, antiquated Mode of thought we must defy.

Since the goal of our endeavour Has no content, form, or name, No position, we can never (Happy warriors!) miss our aim; Since improvement means just movement, All directions are the same.

But unnatural selection Must bring aid to Nature’s plan; Sterilise each backward section Of the family of Man: Gas the creatures, change the features Of the planet if you can!

Mercy, justice, in the present, Beauty, wisdom, what are they, So our offspring (though unpleasant By the standards of today) With no rival by survival Value rules the Milky Way? ¹¹⁶

D. H. Lawrence, Dr Stopes, ¹¹⁷ Taught by you we fix our hopes On that balmiest of dopes, Wholly earthly Luv.

Money-making calls for brains, And of all our hard-won gains After taxes what remains? No one taxes Luv.

Whiskey, port, or gin-and-It Harm the liver, sap the wit; We can take (and yet keep fit) Lots and lots of Luv.

All the outdoor games we play Fail us as years pass away: Even the very old, they say, Still can manage Luv.

Even when toothless, blind, and hoar, Able to perform no more, Still in thought we fumble o’er Dreams and drams of Luv.

Therefore let each film and book, Every dinner that we cook, Every tonic, garment, look, Nudge us on to Luv.¹¹⁸

TO DOROTHY L. SAYERS (W): TS 54/76

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

9th March 1954.

Dear Miss Sayers,

Yes, of course Dr. Stopes is fatal. Would it go ‘D. H. Laurence, Sigmund Freud, Taught by you we now avoid, All restraints that once destroyed, Wholly earthly Lerv’–accepting your spelling, which is better than mine.¹¹⁹

Yes: I felt that M.W.¹²⁰ was somewhat over-mothered. His only other trouble is that he is in a badly paid job, and probably has really no claims on a better one.

My brother is delighted that you are enjoying the book.¹²¹ We both read the proofs: it does’nt seem to make any difference when it’s we who do it! We must try to meet in London.

Yours ever,

C. S. Lewis

TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE (W):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

March 10/54

Dear Mrs. Shelburne

I am sorry things are not better. I am v. puzzled by people like your Committee Secretary, people who are just nasty. I find it easier to understand the great crimes, for the raw material of them exists in us all: the mere disagreeableness which seems to spring from no recognisable passion is mysterious. (Like the total stranger in a train of whom I once asked ‘Do you know when we get to Liverpool’ and who replied ‘I’m not paid to answer your questions: ask the guard’). I have found it more among Boys than anyone else. That makes me think it really comes from inner insecurity–a dim sense that one is Nobody, a strong determination to be Somebody, and a belief that this can be achieved by arrogance. Probably you, who can’t hit back, come in for a good deal of resentful arrogance aroused by others on whom she doesn’t vent it, because they can. (A bully in an Elizabethan play, having been sat on by a man he dare not fight, says ‘I’ll go home and beat all my servants’). But I mustn’t encourage you to go on thinking about her: that, after all, is almost the greatest evil nasty people can do us–to become an obsession, to haunt our minds. A brief prayer for them, and then away to other subjects, is the thing, if one can only stick to it. I hope the other job will materialise.

I thought the poem by that woman was very good Christianity, but not a v. good poem: no rhythmic vitality, no reason why the lines should end where they do, & no vocalic melody. But then I’m old fashioned. I think vers libre succeeds only in a few exceptional poems and its prevalence has really ruined the art.

I too had mumps after I was grown up. I didn’t mind it as long as I had the temperature: but when one came to convalescence and a convalescent appetite and even thinking of food started the salivation and the pain–ugh! I never realised ‘the disobedience in our members’¹²² so clearly before. Verily ‘He that but looketh on a plate of ham and eggs to lust after it, hath already committed breakfast with it in his heart’ (or in his glands).¹²³

I shall wait anxiously for all your news, always praying not only for a happy issue but that you may be supported in all interim anxieties.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO HELMUT KUHN (W):¹²⁴ TS

54/175

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

11th March 1954.

Dear Mr. Kuhn,

It was most kind of you to write. I look forward to reading the book (when the translation arrives!¹²⁵ My German is wretched, and what there is of it belongs chiefly to the libretto of the Ring and Grimm’s Marchen–works whose style and vocabulary you very possibly do not closely follow).

I am glad you are happy at Munich: especially as I hope you will visit England more often from there than you could from America.

With all good wishes,

yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO HARRY BLAMIRES (BOD):

As from Magdalen College.

March 14th. 54.

Dear Blamires–

I started your book¹²⁶ as soon as it arrived and was interrupted (shortly after the transition from Helicon to Fordshaw)¹²⁷ first by scholarship papers and then by proofs, so that I was able to finish it only to day. This was of course the worst way to read it, for the first part was then still too fresh for a genuine re-reading and yet not quite fresh enough to give me a single impression as a whole. So I shall probably be able to give you a more reliable account of it about a year hence than I can now.

In the meantime, however, I have no hesitation in saying that it is the best thing you have done yet. It is very good moral theology and (this is what you most want to know) caused me uneasiness, as intended. The earlier chapters–the examinations–are so good that I wanted them to go on longer. Their theme is necessarily larger (quidquid agunt homines)¹²⁸ than in the two cities: in that way, they are possibly a slight structural error–a promise of a different book. But this is not v. serious, and the cities themselves are good.

In Lamiel you tackle a desperately difficult job. (I had thought of having letters to the guardian angel from an archangel side by side with those from Screwtape to Wormwood in my Letters but funked it). As a corrective of the feminine soothing angel dear to XlXth. Century fancy, he is a success. Whether you quite get (but could anyone?) the beauty of charity shining through the hardness, is doubtful. And he is at times in danger of being not only severe (wh. he should be) but rude: as if he disagreed with Bacon’s principle that rebukes to inferiors shd. be ‘grave and weighty, not taunting’.¹²⁹ Perhaps I am demanding impossibilities. How to show that he can pity, without letting in the least idea of indulgence? Especially when, not being human, he cannot, like Our Lord, weep. I’ve an idea that his most devastating remarks shd. have the air of devastating by accident, in a sort of innocent objectivity. (Have you noticed, by the way, that we devastate our pupils never when we intended to wound or snub but just when we [are] dealing dispassionately with the facts and had no intention of severity? A blessed paradox. Men need to be humiliated, but the intention to humiliate, being wicked, is always frustrated).