1930–1939

1930–1939

TO HIS BROTHER: from ‘Hillsboro’

12 January 1930

Do you find that the present state of affairs produces a permanent condition of—so to speak—comfortless excitement? Every thing is unsettled: all the old structure of things has collapsed and the complete liberty of making plans exactly as we choose, which one would once have sighed for, turns out to be in practice merely a bewildering impossibility of envisaging the future at all.

For the moment however, you will be most anxious to hear about the present, or, as it will be for you, the past. Well up to date Leeboro has not been sold. It will become very anxious as the time draws nearer your return. If a really good offer, plus a demand for immediate possession turns up, say, a fortnight before you are due at Liverpool, I really think I shall go out of my mind . . . It is not ‘Can we afford to keep it three—or ten—months longer before selling it’ but ‘Can we afford to refuse any good offer for a thing that may turn out to be unsaleable?’ Can we afford to gamble on the off chance of there being a second good offer at all? (Remember, there hasn’t been one yet.) That is, we are not in the position of an impoverished Victorian Colonel wondering whether he can afford to go on hunting for one season more, but rather in that of a middle aged Victorian spinster wondering if she can safely refuse any proposal.

This infernal ‘two presents’ system—which began by being a joke and has ended by being an incubus—has naturally reduced most of your logical divisions and subdivisions of alternative possibilities to matchwood. To take the points that survive . . .

The trunk in the attic [containing the Boxen toys]. I entirely agree with you. Our only model for dealing with our world is the heavenly P’daita’s method of dealing with this: and as he has long since announced his intention of ending the universe with a general conflagration, we will follow suit . . . I should not like to make an exception even in favour of Benjamin. After all these characters (like all others) can, in the long run, live only in ‘the literature of the period’: and I fancy that when we look at the actual toys again (a process from which I anticipate no pleasure at all), we shall find the discrepancy between the symbol (remember the outwards and visible form of Hedges, the Beetle—or Bar or even Hawki) and the character, rather acute. No, Brother. The toys in the trunk are quite plainly corpses. We will resolve them into their elements, as nature will do to us . . .

The New little end room. The most jarring comment on this proposal reached me before the proposal itself, in the form of a rather offensive letter from that old harridan Aunt Mary, to the following effect—that she had heard that ‘Little Lea’ was going to be sold: that she supposed I knew about the two book cases of Uncle Joe’s that P. has ‘stored’ for him: that she very much wanted to have them: could she send and have them taken away at once: she had expected to see me at Christmas etc. etc. The minute I read it I knew in my bones that it was our little end room bookcases . . . Well that is the first and great comment on your plan of a new little end room.

The second is that to my mind the question largely turns on another: if we can succeed in getting another and larger house than Hillsboro, and you (as I hope—but this comes in a later paragraph) are with us, should such a room be there or in College. Thirdly, apart from these questions, your proposal is one that I partly agree with and partly disagree with. It runs in your letter ‘A place where we can always meet on the common ground of the past and ipso facto a museum of the Leeborough we want to preserve.’ Now my view would run ‘A place where we can always meet on the common ground of the past and present and ipso facto a continuation and development of the Leeborough etc.’ You see, Pigiebuddie, a museum is preciously like a mausoleum. An attempt at exact reconstruction (supposing it could succeed—wh. it can’t in a room of quite different size and shape—) would fix the externals of a certain period for ever. But if you and I had gone home and lived at Leeborough, that is precisely what wouldn’t have happened. Sooner or later we should have substituted good prints for the groups. As our library grew, new bookcases would have come. In the mere course of time the long thin table would have finished the process which it had already made a good start on, of falling to pieces. A thing fixed in imitation of the little end room as it is, can only be a perpetual reminder that that whole life is not going on. If it were going on, it would gradually change . . . I [think] that an attempt to imitate the little end room in detail would be a mistake. A mistake in sentiment, for it could only mean that we were embalming the corpse of something that isn’t really dead, and needn’t die at all. An aesthetic mistake—because we don’t really want to have the taste of our schooldays established as a boundary for our whole lives . . .

What I am chiefly talking against in all this is the faint implication that the past is the only ‘common ground’ on which we can meet. I think, perhaps this is an occasion for frankness—a virtue which should be very sparingly used, but not never. I have no doubt that there have been times when you have felt that, shall we call it, Pigiebotianism was in danger of being swallowed up by, shall we say, Hillsborovianism: at such moments you may even have felt that the past was the only common ground—that wearing the national costume had become, as in Wales, an archaic revival. I am very sorry to have been the cause of such a period (this is not an apology but a statement)—but isn’t that period itself passed? We have both changed since the real old days, but, on the whole, we have changed in the same direction. We are really much nearer together now than in the days when I was writing ridiculous epic poems at Cherbourg and you were wearing scarcely less ridiculous patent leathers at the Coll.

Now, as to your own plans. If you decide to become a full and permanent member of the household, you will be very welcome to all of us: and I must confess that it doesn’t seem good enough that the two Piggiebudda should spend so much of their life divided by the whole breadth of the planet. Having laid this down as a starting pont, you won’t I hope think that I am trying to dissuade you if I put up certain signposts. e.g. I suppose you do realize that to exchange an institutional for a domestic life is a pretty big change. (I take it for granted obviously that as a permanent member you neither could nor would wish to have, even remotely, the guest status.) Both kinds of life have their discomforts: and all discomforts are in a sense intolerable. The great thing is to choose with one’s eyes open. Can you stand as a permanency our cuisine—Maureen’s practising—Maureen’s sulks—Minto’s burnettodesmondism—Minto’s mare’s nests—the perpetual interruptions of family life—the partial loss of liberty? This sounds as if I were either sick of it myself or else trying to make you sick of it: but neither is the case. I have definitely chosen and don’t regret the choice. What I hope—very much hope—is that you, after consideration, may make the same choice, and not regret it: what I can’t risk is your just floating in on the swell of a mood and then feeling trapped and fed up. Of course to weigh it fairly one must compare the best of this sort of life with the best of the other, and the worst of this with the worst of the other. What one is tempted to do is just the opposite—when one is exasperated in a home, to compare it with one of those splendid evenings one had in a mess or common room. Of course what one ought to do is to weigh it against the evening with the mess bore. On the whole my judgement would be that domestic life denies me a great many pleasures and saves me a great many pains.

There is also this further point. I spoke above of Pigiebotianism and Hillsborovianism. I presume that if you join us you are prepared for a certain amount of compromise in this matter. I shall never be prepared to abandon Pigiebotianism to Hillsborovianism. On the other hand there are the others to whom I have given the right to expect that I shall not abandon Hillsborovianism to Pigiebotianism. Whether I was right or wrong, wise or foolish, to have done so originally, is now only an historical question: once having created expectations, one naturally fulfills them . . .

TO OWEN BARFIELD: from Magdalen College

[3? February 1930]

Terrible things are happening to me. The ‘Spirit’ or ‘Real I’ is showing an alarming tendency to become much more personal and is taking the offensive, and behaving just like God. You’d better come on Monday at the latest or I may have entered a monastery . . .

[Warren arrived back in England on 16 April 1930, having been away a little over three years. On the 17th he met Jack in London and they took a holiday with Mrs Moore and Maureen in Southbourne, Dorset. On 22 April the brothers set off for Belfast, arriving there on the 23rd. After visiting their father’s grave they went to ‘Little Lea’ for their last stay there together. On the afternoon of the 23rd they carried the tin trunk containing the Boxen toys into the garden and, by mutual consent, buried it unopened. On 24 April they returned to Oxford and Warren stayed at ‘Hillsboro’ until he reported for duty at Bulford in Wiltshire on 15 May. Warren paid one last visit to ‘Little Lea’, 1–3 June, before it was sold.]

TO OWEN BARFIELD: from Magdalen College

10 June 1930

I have just finished the Angel in the House. Amazing poet! How all of a piece it is—how the rivetted metre both expresses and illustrates his almost fanatical love of incarnation. What particularly impressed me was his taking—what one expects to find mentioned only in anti-feminists—the Lilithian desire to be admired and making it his chief point—the lover as primarily the mechanism by wh. the woman’s beauty apprehends itself.

I see now why Janet saw female breasts on the dog collars, and have at last brought into consciousness the important truth: Venus is a female deity, not ‘because men invented the mythology’ but because she is. The idea of female beauty is the erotic stimulus for women as well as men . . . i.e. a lascivious man thinks about women’s bodies, a lascivious woman thinks about her own. What a world we live in! . . .

TO A PUPIL: from Magdalen College (This is an early example of the innumerable painstaking and courteous letters Jack wrote to pupils and ex-pupils.)

18 June 1931

Now as to work. If you are staying up over the week-end and could call on me on Saturday morning we could discuss this. If this is impossible, my present advice is this:

Doing Chaucer and Shakespeare in the same term seems to me a hazardous experiment, unless there is some special reason which I don’t know yet. Our usual plan here is to spend a term on Chaucer and his contemporaries. As regards reading for the Vac., my general view is that the Vac. should be given chiefly to reading the actual literary texts, without much attention to problems, getting thoroughly familiar with stories, situation, and style, and so having all the data for aesthetic judgement ready; then the term can be kept for more scholarly reading. Thus, if you were doing Chaucer and contemporaries next term, I shd advise you to read Chaucer himself, Langland (if you can get Skeat’s edtn, the selection is not much good), Gower (again Macaulay’s big edtn if possible, not so that you may read every word of the Confessio but so that you may select yourself—not forgetting the end which is one of the best bits), Gawain (Tolkien and Gordon’s edtn), Sisam’s XIV century prose and verse (all the pieces of any literary significance). If you can borrow Ritson’s Metrical Romance so much the better.

But perhaps you have read all these before. If so, and if there are other special circumstances, we must try to meet. If Saturday is impossible, ring me up on Friday and I will squeeze in a time somehow or other.

[Warren discovered almost as soon as he arrived back in England that Jack and Mrs Moore were thinking of building their own home. On 25 May 1930 he covered in his diary the reasons why he chose to become a member of their household. Then, on 6 June they went to see a house called The Kilns in Headington Quarry which was coming up for sale. They liked the house, with its eight acres of woodlands, so much that in the end Jack, Warren and Mrs Moore bought it together. They moved there on 11 October 1930.

The following Autumn Warren was posted for the second time to Shanghai. He sailed from Southampton on 9 October 1931.]

TO ARTHUR GREEVES: from The Kilns, Kiln Lane, Headington Quarry

22 September 1931

I couldn’t write to you last Sunday because I had a week-end guest—a man called Dyson who teaches English at Reading University. I meet him I suppose about four or five times a year and am beginning to regard him as one of my friends of the 2nd class—i.e. Not in the same rank as yourself or Barfield, but on a level with Tolkien or Macfarlane.

He stayed the night with me in College—I sleeping in in order to be able to talk far into the night as one cd hardly do out here. Tolkien came too, and did not leave till 3 in the morning: and after seeing him out by the little postern on Magdalen bridge Dyson and I found still more to say to one another, strolling up and down the cloister of New Building, so that we did not get to bed till 4. It was really a memorable talk. We began (in Addison’s walk just after dinner) on metaphor and myth—interrupted by a rush of wind which came so suddenly on the still, warm evening and sent so many leaves pattering down that we thought it was raining. We all held our breath, the other two appreciating the ecstasy of such a thing almost as you would. We continued (in my room) on Christianity: a good long satisfying talk in which I learned a lot . . .

I am so glad you have really enjoyed a Morris again. I had the same feeling about it as you, in a way, with this proviso—that I don’t think Morris was conscious of the meaning either here or in any of his works, except Love Is Enough where the flame actually breaks through the smoke so to speak. I feel more and more that Morris has taught me things he did not understand himself. These hauntingly beautiful lands which somehow never satisfy—this passion to escape from death plus the certainty that life owes all its charm to mortality—these push you on to the real thing because they fill you with desire and yet prove absolutely clearly that in Morris’s world that desire cannot be satisfied.

The Macdonald conception of death—or, to speak more correctly, St Paul’s—is really the answer to Morris: but I don’t think I should have understood it without going through Morris. He is an unwilling witness to the truth. He shows you just how far you can go without knowing God, and that is far enough to force you (tho’ not poor Morris himself) to go further. If ever you feel inclined to relapse into the mundane point of view—to feel that your book and pipe and chair are enough for happiness—it only needs a page or two of Morris to sting you wide awake into uncontrollable longing and to make you feel that everything is worthless except the hope of finding one of his countries. But if you read any of his romances through you will find the country dull before the end. All he has done is to rouse the desire: but so strongly that you must find the real satisfaction. And then you realise that death is at the root of the whole matter, and why he chose the subject of the Earthly Paradise, and how the true solution is one he never saw . . .

TO ARTHUR GREEVES: from The Kilns (on his conversion to Christianity)

18 October 1931

What has been holding me back (at any rate for the last year or so) has not been so much a difficulty in believing as a difficulty in knowing what the doctrine meant: you can’t believe a thing while you are ignorant what the thing is. My puzzle was the whole doctrine of Redemption: in what sense the life and death of Christ ‘saved’ or ‘opened salvation to’ the world. I could see how miraculous salvation might be necessary: one could see from ordinary experience how sin (e.g. the case of a drunkard) could get a man to such a point that he was bound to reach Hell (i.e. complete degradation and misery) in this life unless something quite beyond mere natural help or effort stepped in. And I could well imagine a whole world being in the same state and similarly in need of miracle. What I couldn’t see was how the life and death of Someone Else (whoever he was) two thousand years ago could help us here and now—except in so far as his example helped us. And the example business, tho’ true and important, is not Christianity: right in the centre of Christianity, in the Gospels and St Paul, you keep on getting something quite different and very mysterious expressed in those phrases I have so often ridiculed (‘propitiation’—‘sacrifice’—‘the blood of the Lamb’)—expressions wh. I cd only interpret in senses that seemed to me either silly or shocking.

Now what Dyson and Tolkien showed me was this: that if I met the idea of sacrifice in a Pagan story I didn’t mind it at all: again, that if I met the idea of a god sacrificing himself to himself (cf. the quotation opposite the title page of Dymer) I liked it very much and was mysteriously moved by it: again, that the idea of the dying and reviving god (Balder, Adonis, Bacchus) similarly moved me provided I met it anywhere except in the Gospels. The reason was that in Pagan stories I was prepared to feel the myth as profound and suggestive of meanings beyond my grasp even tho’ I could not say in cold prose ‘what it meant’.

Now the story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened: and one must be content to accept it in the same way, remembering that it is God’s myth where the others are men’s myths: i.e. the Pagan stories are God expressing Himself through the minds of poets, using such images as He found there, while Christianity is God expressing Himself through what we call ‘real things’. Therefore it is true, not in the sense of being a ‘description’ of God (that no finite mind could take in) but in the sense of being the way in which God chooses to (or can) appear to our faculties. The ‘doctrines’ we get out of the true myth are of course less true: they are translations into our concepts and ideas of that wh. God has already expressed in a language more adequate, namely the actual incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection. Does this amount to a belief in Christianity? At any rate I am now certain (a) That this Christian story is to be approached, in a sense, as I approach the other myths. (b) That it is the most important and full of meaning. I am also nearly certain that it really happened . . .

TO HIS BROTHER: from Magdalen College

24 October 1931

I hasten to tell you of a stroke of good luck for us both—I now have the 15 volume in Jeremy Taylor, in perfect condition, and have paid the same price of 20/-. My old pupil Griffiths spent a night with me last Monday and told me that Saunders the bookseller, who is a friend of his, had a copy. He went round next day, got the book reserved and arranged the price . . .

On the same visit Griffiths presented me with a poorly bound but otherwise delightful copy (1742) of Law’s An Appeal/ To all that doubt, or disbelieve/ The Truths of the Gospel/ Whether they be Deists, Arians/ Socinians or Nominal Christians/. It bears the book plate of Lord Rivers. I like it much better than the same author’s Serious Call, and indeed like it as well as any religious work I have ever read. The prose of the Serious Call has here all been melted away, and the book is saturated with delight, and the sense of wonder: one of those rare works which make you say of Christianity ‘Here is the very thing you like in poetry and the romances, only this time it’s true’ . . .

I am glad you liked Browne as far as you got when your letter was written. Your query ‘Was there anything he didn’t love?’ hits the nail on the head. It seems to me that his peculiar strength lies in liking everything both in the serious sense (Christian charity and so forth) and in the Lambian sense of natural gusto: he is thus at once sane and whimsical, and sweet and pungent in the same sentence—as indeed Lamb is. I imagine that I get a sort of double pleasure out of Thomas Browne, one from the author himself and one reflected from Lamb. I always feel Lamb, as it were, reading the book over my shoulder. A lot of nonsense is talked about the society of books, but ‘theres more in it than you boys think’ in a case of this sort: it is almost like getting into a club . . .

Yes, indeed: how many essays I have heard read to me on Descartes’ proofs (there are more than one) of the existence of God. (It was a remark of Harwood’s first suggested to me that God might be defined as ‘a being who spends his time having his existence proved and disproved’.) The particular one you quote (‘I have the idea of a perfect being’) seems to me to be valid or invalid according to the meaning you give the words ‘have an idea of’. I used to work it out by the analogy of a machine. If I have the idea of a machine which I, being unmechanical, couldn’t have invented on my own, does this prove that I have received the idea from some really mechanical source—e.g. a talk with the real inventor? To which I answer ‘Yes, if you mean a really detailed idea’: but of course there is another sense in which e.g. a lady novelist ‘has an idea’ of a new airship invented by her hero—in the sense that she attaches some vague meaning to her words, which proves nothing of the sort. So that if anyone asks me whether the idea of God in human minds proves His existence, I can only ask ‘Whose idea?’ The Thistle-Bird’s idea, for instance, clearly not, for it contains nothing whereof his own pride, fear, and malevolence could not easily provide the materials . . .

On the other hand it is arguable that the ‘idea of God’ in some minds does contain, not a mere abstract definition, but a real imaginative perception of goodness and beauty, beyond their own resources: and this not only in minds which already believe in God. It certainly seems to me that the ‘vague something’ which has been suggested to ones mind as desirable, all ones life, in experiences of nature and music and poetry, even in such ostensibly irreligious forms as ‘The land East of the Sun and West of the Moon’ in Morris, and which rouses desires that no finite object even pretends to satisfy, can be argued not to be any product of our own minds. Of course I am not suggesting that these vague ideas of something we want and haven’t got, wh. occur in the Pagan period of individuals and of races (hence mythology) are anything more than the first and most rudimentary forms of the ‘idea of God’ . . .

TO HIS BROTHER: from The Kilns

22 November 1931

I am sorry I have not been able to write for some weeks. During the week it is out of the question. My ordinary day is as follows. Called (with tea) 7.15. After bath and shave I usually have time for a dozen paces or so in Addison’s walk (at this time of year my stroll exactly hits the sunrise) before chapel at 8. ‘Dean’s Prayers’—which I have before described to you—lasts about quarter of an hour. I then breakfast in common room with the Dean’s Prayers party (i.e. Adam Fox, the chaplain, Benecke and Christie) which is joined punctually by J. A. Smith at about 8.25. I have usually left the room at about 8.40, and then saunter . . . answer notes etc till 9. From 9 till 1 is all pupils—an unconscionable long stretch for a man to act the gramaphone in. At one Lyddiatt or Maureen is waiting for me with the car and I am carried home.

My afternoons you know. Almost every afternoon as I set out hillwards with my spade, this place gives me all the thrill of novelty. The scurry of the waterfowl as you pass the pond, and the rich smell of autumnal litter as you leave the drive and strike into the little path, are always just as good as new. At 4.45 I am usually driven into College again, to be a gramaphone for two more hours, 5 till 7. At 7.15 comes dinner.

On Tuesday, which is my really shocking day, pupils come to me to read Beowulf at 8.30 and usually stay till about 11, so that when they have gone and I have glanced round the empty glasses and coffee cups and the chairs in the wrong places, I am glad enough to crawl to bed. Other standing engagements are on Thursday when a man called Horwood (another English don) comes and reads Dante with me, every second Monday when the College literary society meets. When you have thrown in the usual irregular dinner engagements you will see that I am lucky when I have two evenings free after dinner.

The only exception to this programme (except of course Saturday when I have no pupils after tea) is Monday when I have no pupils at all. I have to employ a good deal of it in correcting transcripts done by B. Litt. pupils, and other odd jobs. It has also become a regular custom that Tolkien should drop in on me of a Monday morning and drink a glass. This is one of the pleasantest spots in the week. Sometimes we talk English school politics: sometimes we criticise one another’s poems: other days we drift into theology or ‘the state of the nation’: rarely we fly no higher than bawdy and ‘puns’.

What began as an excuse for not writing has developed into a typical diary or hebdomadal compendium. As to the last two week ends, they have both been occupied. The one before last I went to spend a night at Reading with a man called Hugo Dyson—now that I come to think of it, you heard all about him before you left. We had a grand evening. Rare luck to stay with a friend whose wife is so nice that one almost (I can’t say quite) almost regrets the change when he takes you up to his study for serious smoking and for the real midnight talking. You would enjoy Dyson very much for his special period is the late 17th century: he was much intrigued by your library when he was last in our room. He is a most fastidious bookman and made me (that same ocasion) take out one of the big folios from the bottom shelf of the Leeboro bookcase because they were too tightly packed . . .

At the same time he is far from being a dilettante as anyone can be: a burly man, both in mind and body, with the stamp of the war on him, which begins to be a pleasing rarity, at any rate in civilian life. Lest anything should be lacking, he is a Christian and a lover of cats. The Dyson cat is called Mirralls, and is a Viscount . . .

Tutorial necessities have spurred me into reading another Carlyle Past and Present which I recommend: specially the central part about Abbot Samson. Like all Carlyle it gets a little wearisome before the end—as all listening to these shouting authors does. But the pungency and humour and frequent sublimity is tip-top. It is very amusing to read the 19th century editor’s preface (in our Leeborough edition), obviously by a P’daita: pointing out that, of course, the matter of the book is out of date, but it ‘lives by its style’. ‘We can afford to smile at the pessimism with which the sage approached problems that have since vanished like a dream before the onward march etc. etc.’ Actually the book is an indictment of the industrial revolution pointing out precisely the problems we have not solved and prophesying most of the things that have happened since.

I get rather annoyed at this endless talk about books ‘living by the style’. Jeremy Taylor ‘lives by the style in spite of his obsolete theology’; Thos. Browne does the same, in spite of ‘the obsolete cast of his mind’: Ruskin and Carlyle do the same in spite of their ‘obsolete social and political philosophy’. To read histories of literature, one would suppose that the great authors of the past were a sort of chorus of melodious idiots who said, in beautifully cadenced language that black was white and that two and two made five. When one turns to the books themselves—well I, at any rate, find nothing obsolete. The silly things these great men say, were as silly then as they are now: the wise ones are as wise now as they were then . . .

I had to set a paper for School Certificate the other day on the Clarendon Press selections from Cowper—a ridiculous book for schoolboys. It includes a large chunk of Bagehot’s Essay on Cowper which makes me think I must read all Bagehot. We have him, haven’t we? Not that I ‘hold with him’, he is too much of a pudaita by half: but he has great fun . . . How delicious Cowper himself is—the letters even more than the poetry. Under every disadvantage—presented to me as raw material for a paper and filling with a job an evening wh. I had hoped to have free—even so he charmed me. He is the very essence of what Arthur calls ‘the homely’ which is Arthur’s favourite genre. All these cucumbers, books, parcels, tea-parties, parish affairs. It is wonderful what he makes of them.

I suppose we may expect a Colombo letter from you soon. I will vary the usual ‘must stop now’ by saying ‘I am going to stop now’. I am writing in the common room (Kilns) at 8.30 of a Sunday evening: a moon shining through a fog outside and a bitter cold night.

TO HIS BROTHER: from The Kilns

Christmas Day 1931

I also heard at the same binge a very interesting piece of literary history from an unexceptionable source—that the hackneyed ‘A German officer crossed the Rhine’ was being sung at undergraduate blinds in 1912. What do you make of that? Can it date from the Franco Prussian war? Or is it a German student song made in anticipation of Der Tag about 1910? The latter would be an interesting fact for the historian. I never heard the ballad as a whole, but think it is poor—in fact, nasty. Bawdy ought to be outrageous and extravagant . . . must have nothing cruel about it . . . it must not approach anywhere near the pornographic . . .

We had a poorish discourse from Thomas at Matins, but otherwise he has been keeping his end up very well. In one sermon on foreign missions lately he gave an ingenious turn to an old objection. ‘Many of us’ he said ‘have friends who used to live abroad, and had a native Christian as a cook who was unsatisfactory. Well, after all there are a great many unsatisfactory Christians in England too. In fact I’m one myself.’ Another interesting point (in a different sermon) was that we should be glad that the early Christians expected the second coming and the end of the world quite soon: for if they had known that they were founding an organisation for centuries they would certainly have organised it to death: believing that they were merely making provisional arrangements for a year or so, they left it free to live.

How odd it is to turn from Thomas to F. K. He really surpassed himself the other day when he said that he objected to the early chapters of St Luke (the Annunciation particularly) on the ground that they were—indelicate. This leaves one gasping. One goes on re-acting against the conventional modern re-action against nineteenth century prudery, and then suddenly one is held up by a thing like this, and almost pardons all the followers of Lytton Strachey. If you turn up the passage in St Luke the thing becomes even more grotesque. The Middle Ages had a different way with these things. Did I tell you that in one of the Miracle Plays, Joseph is introduced as a typical comic jealous husband, and enters saying ‘This is what comes of marrying a young woman’ . . .

I have bought The Brothers Karamazov but not yet read it with the exception of some special detachable pieces (of which there are many). Thus read it is certainly a great religious and poetical work: whether, as a whole, it will turn out a good, or even a tolerable novel I don’t know. I have not forgotten your admirable Russian novel ‘Alexey Poldorovna lived on a hill. He cried a great deal’ . . .

TO HIS BROTHER: from Magdalen College

17 January 1932

It is one of the ‘painful mysteries’ of history that all languages progress from being very particular to being very general. In the first stage they are bursting with meaning, but very cryptic because they are not general enough to show the common element in different things: e.g. you can talk (and therefore think) about all the different kinds of trees but not about Trees. In fact you can’t really reason at all. In their final stage they are admirably clear but are so far away from real things that they really say nothing. As we learn to talk we forget what we have to say. Humanity, from this point of view, is rather like a man coming gradually awake and trying to describe his dreams: as soon as his mind is sufficiently awake for clear description, the thing which was to be described is gone. You see the origin of journalese and of the style in which you write army letters.

Religion and poetry are about the only language in modern Europe—if you can regard them as ‘languages’—which still have traces of the dream in them, still have something to say. Compare ‘Our Father which art in Heaven’ with ‘The supreme being transcends space and time’. The first goes to pieces if you begin to apply the literal meaning to it. How can anything but a sexual animal really be a father? How can it be in the sky? The second falls into no such traps. On the other hand the first really means something, really represents a concrete experience in the minds of those who use it: the second is mere dexterous playing with counters, and once a man has learned the rule he can go on that way for two volumes without really using the words to refer to any concrete fact at all . . .

Most of my recent reading, before term, has been of rather a simple and boyish kind. I re-read The People of the Mist—a tip-top yarn of the sort. If someone would start re-issuing all Rider Haggard at 1/-a volume I would get them all, as a permanent fall-back for purely recreational reading. Then I read The Wood Beyond the World—with some regret that this leaves me no more Wm Morris prose romances to read (except Child Christopher wh. is an adaptation of a mediaeval poem already known to me and therefore hardly counts). I wish he had written a hundred of them! I should like to have the knowledge of a new romance always waiting for me the next time I am sick or sorry and want a real treat . . .

While at Cambridge (staying, as I foretold you in a posh hotel, at the expense of the Board. Four of us had to hold an examiners meeting one evening, and accordingly, just like the heroes of a romance, called for fire, lights, and a bottle of claret in a private room. All that was lacking was to have prefaced the order by tweaking the landlord’s nose with a ‘Hark’ee, rascal!’ This was in the University Arms which perhaps you know)—while in Cambridge, or rather on my long, slow, solitary, first class journey there and back through fields white with frost—I read Pater’s Marius the Epicurean. This is the best specimen extant of the Epicurean-aesthetic business: which one wrongs by reading it in its inferior practitioners such as George Moore and Oscar Wilde. As you probably know it is a novel—or, since the story is so slight, a faintly narrative causerie—laid in the reign of Marcus Aurelius. The interesting thing is, that being a really consistent aesthete, he has to bring in the early Christians favourably because the flavour of the early Church—the new music, the humility, the chastity, the sense of order and quiet decorum—appeal to him aesthetically. It is doubtful if he sees that he can only have it in by blowing to bits the whole Epicurean basis of his outlook—so that aestheticism, honestly followed, refutes itself by leading him to something that will put aestheticism in its place—and Pater’s position is therefore, in the long run, all nonsense. But it is [a] very beautiful book . . . I should try it if it is in your library. Gad! How it would have bowled one over at eighteen. One would be only just beginning to recover now . . .

If your idea of reading Descartes holds, begin with the Discourse on Method. This is in biographical form and is on the border-land between philosophy proper and what might be called the ‘history of intellectual manners’. But I’m not at all sure that a man so steeped in the XVIIth century as you would not find his natural starting point in Boethius—I suppose ‘Boece’ is as common in France at that time as he was in England? As he was translated about once a century into every civilised language, you would have no difficulty in finding a well flavoured version . . .

How ones range of interests grows! Do you find a sort of double process going on with relation to books—that while the number of subjects one wants to read is increasing, the number of books on each which you find worth reading steadily decreases. Already in your own corner of French history you have reached the point at which you know that most of the books published will be merely re-hashes, but in revenge you are reading Vaughan and thinking of reading Taylor. Ten years ago you would have read eight books on your period (getting only what the one book behind those eight would have given you) and left Vaughan and Taylor out of account . . .

TO HIS BROTHER: from Magdalen College (Warren was in Shanghai and possibly in danger from the Japanese attack on the Chinese part of that city.)

21 February 1932

I have had your cheering letter of Jan 14th—‘cheering’ for giving one some conversation with you, though of course it bears not at all on the source of anxiety. I must confess I have imbibed enough of that rather specially shabby superstition which cries ‘Touch wood’ etc, to shudder when I read your proposals about walks in Ulster etc. In fact I have two unpleasantly contrasted pictures in my mind. One ‘features’ the two Pigibudda with packs and sticks de-training into the sudden stillness of the moors at Parkmore: the other is of you progressing from the Bund to Gt Western Rd with an eye cocked skyward, just in the old French manner, curse it, and ducking at the old Who-o-o-o-p—Bang!

Like Boswell, on that perilous crossing in the Hebrides, I ‘at last took refuge in piety: but was much embarrassed by the various objections which have been raised against the doctrine of special providences’. Unfortunately I have not at hand the work of Dr Ogden in which Boswell found this difficulty solved.

I suppose the solution lies in pointing out that the efficacy of prayer is, at any rate no more of a problem then the efficacy of all human acts. i.e. if you say ‘It is useless to pray because Providence already knows what is best and will certainly do it’, then why is it not equally useless (and for the same reason) to try to alter the course of events in any way whatever—to ask for the salt or book your seat in a train? . . .

TO HIS BROTHER: from The Kilns

20 March 1932

Next to the good news from China, the best thing that has happened to me lately is to have assisted at such a scene in the Magdalen smoking room as rarely falls one’s way. The Senior Parrot—that perfectly ape-faced man whom I have probably pointed out to you—was seated on the padded fender with his back to the fire, bending down to read a paper, and thus leaving a tunnel shaped aperture between his collar and the nape of his neck [designated ‘P’ in a drawing of the man]. A few yards in front of him stood MacFarlane. Let MacFarlane now light a cigarette and wave the match to and fro in the air to extinguish it. And let the match be either not wholly extinguished or so recently extinguished that no fall of temperature in the wood has occurred. Let M. then fling the match towards the fire in such a way that it follows the dotted line and enters the aperture at P with the most unerring accuracy. For a space of time which must have been infinitesimal, but which seemed long to us as we watched in the perfect silence which this very interesting experiment so naturally demanded, the Senior Parrot, alone ignorant of his fate, continued absorbed in the football results. His body then rose in a vertical line from the fender, without apparent muscular effort, as though propelled by a powerful spring under his bottom. Re-alighting on his feet he betook himself to a rapid movement of the hands with the apparent intention of applying them to every part of his back and buttock in the quickest possible succession: accompanying this exercise with the distention of the cheeks and a blowing noise. After which, exclaiming (to me) in a very heightened voice ‘It isn’t so bloody funny’ he darted from the room.

The learned Dr Hope (that little dark, mentally dull, but very decent demi-butty who breakfasted with you and me) who alone had watched the experiment with perfect gravity, at this stage, remarked placidly to the company in general, ‘Well, well, the match will have gone out by now’, and returned to his periodical—But the luck of it! How many shots would a man have taken before he succeeded in throwing a match into that tiny aperture if he had been trying?

You asked Minto in a recent letter about this Kenchew man. As a suitor he shows deplorable tendency to hang fire, and I fancy the whole thing will come to nothing. (Ah there won’t be any proposal): as a character, however, he is worth describing, or seems so to me because I had to go for a walk with him. He is a ladylike little man of about fifty, and is toa-tee that ‘sensible, well-informed man’ with whom Lamb dreaded to be left alone.

My troubles began at once. It seemed good to him to take a bus to the Station and start our walk along a sort of scrubby path between a factory and a greasy strip of water—a walk, in fact, which was as good a reproduction as Oxford could afford of our old Sunday morning ‘around the river bank’. I blundered at once by referring to the water as a canal. ‘Oh—could it be possible that I didn’t know it was the Thames? I must be joking. Perhaps I was not a walker?’ I foolishly said that I was. He gave me an account of his favourite walks; with a liberal use of the word ‘picturesque’. He then called my attention to the fact that the river was unusually low (how the devil did he know that?) and would like to know how I explained it. I scored a complete Plough, and was told how he explained it.

By this time we were out in Port Meadow, and a wide prospect opened before him. A number of hills and church spires required to be identified, together with their ‘picturesque’, mineral, or chronological details. A good many problems arose, and again I did very badly. As his map, though constantly brought out, was a geological map, it did not help us much. A conversation on weather followed, and seemed to offer an escape from unmitigated fact. The escape, however, was quite illusory, and my claim to be rather fond of nearly all sorts of weather was received with the stunning information that psychologists detected the same trait in children and lunatics.

Anxious to turn my attention from this unpleasing fact, he begged my opinion of various changes which had recently been made in the river: indeed every single lock, bridge, and stile for three mortal miles had apparently been radically altered in the last few months. As I had never seen any of the places before (‘But I thought you said you were a walker . . .’) this bowled me middle stump again. The removal of a weir gave us particular trouble. He could not conceive how it had been done. What did I think? And then, just as I was recovering from this fresh disgrace, and hoping that the infernal weir was done with, I found that the problem of how it had been removed was being raised only as the preliminary to the still more intricate problem of why it had been removed. (My feelings were those expressed by Macfarlane at dinner one night last term, in an answer to someone’s question. ‘Yes. He is studying the rhythms of mediaeval Latin prose, and it is a very curious and interesting subject, but it doesn’t interest me.’) For a mile or so after the weir we got on famously, for Kenchew began ‘I was once passing this very spot or, no, let me see—perhaps it was a little further on—no! It was exactly here—I remember that very tree—when a very remarkable experience, really remarkable in a small way, happened to me.’ The experience remarkable in a small way, with the aid of a judicious question or two on my part, was bidding fair to last out the length of the walk, when we had the horrible misfortune of passing a paper mill (You see, by the bye, what a jolly walk it was even apart from the company!). Not only a paper mill but the paper mill of the Clarendon Press. ‘Of course I had been over it. No? Really etc.’ (The great attraction was that you could get an electric shock.)

But I must stop my account of this deplorable walk somewhere. It was the same all through—sheer information. Time after time I attempted to get away from the torrent of isolated, particular facts: but anything tending to opinion, or discussion, to fancy, to ideas, even to putting some of his infernal facts together and making something out of them—anything like that was received in blank silence. Once, while he was telling me the legendary foundation of a church, I had a faint hope that we might get onto history: but it turned out that his knowledge was derived from an Edwardian Oxford pageant. Need I add that he is a scientist? A geographer, to be exact. And now that I come to think of it he is exactly what one would have expected a geographer to be. But I mustn’t give you too black an impression of him. He is kind, and really courteous (you know the rare quality I mean) and a gentleman. I imagine he is what women call ‘Such an interesting man. And so clever’ . . .

TO HIS BROTHER: from Magdalen College

8 April 1932

I wonder can you imagine how reassuring your bit about Spenser is to me who spend my time trying to get unwilling hobble-de-hoys to read poetry at all? One begins to wonder whether literature is not, after all, a failure. Then comes your account of the Faerie Queene on your office table, and one remembers that all the professed ‘students of literature’ don’t matter a rap, and that the whole thing goes on, unconcerned by the fluctuations of the kind of ‘taste’ that gets itself printed, living from generation to generation in the minds of the few disinterested people who sit down alone and read what they like and find that it turns out to be just the thing that every one has liked since they were written. I agree with all you say about it, except about the distinctions of characters. The next time I dip in it I shall keep my weather eye on them. It would be quite in accord with all ones experience to find out one day that the usual critical view (i.e. that Spenser has no characters) was all nonsense . . .

By the way, I most fully agree with you about ‘the lips being invited to share the banquet’ in poetry, and always ‘mouth’ it while I read, though not in a way that would be audible to other people in the room. (Hence the excellent habit which I once formed but have since lost, of not smoking while reading a poem.) I look upon this ‘mouthing’ as an infallible mark of those who really like poetry. Depend upon it, the man who reads verses in any other way, is after ‘noble thoughts’ or ‘philosophy’ (in the revolting sense given to that word by Browning societies and Aunt Lily) or social history, or something of the kind, not poetry.

To go back to Spenser—the battles are a bore . . .

The whole puzzle about Christianity in non-European countries is very difficult . . . Sometimes, relying on his remark ‘Other sheep I have that are not of this fold’ I have played with the idea that Christianity was never intended for Asia—even that Buddha is the form in which Christ appears to the Eastern mind. But I don’t think this will really work. When I have tried to rule out all my prejudices I still can’t help thinking that the Christian world is (partially) ‘saved’ in a sense in which the East is not. We may be hypocrites, but there is a sort of unashamed and reigning iniquity of temple prostitution and infanticide and torture and political corruption and obscene imagination in the East, which really does suggest that they are off the rails—that some necessary part of the human machine, restored to us, is still missing with them . . . For some reason which we cannot find out they are still living in the B.C. period (as there are African tribes still living in the stone-age) and it is apparently not intended that they should yet emerge from it . . .

TO OWEN BARFIELD: from Magdalen College

[April? 1932]

As regards our argument about Gethsemane, I quite see that it sounds odd to attribute to perfect man a fear which imperfect men have often overcome. But one must beware of interpreting ‘perfect man’ in a sense which would nullify the temptation in the wilderness: a scene on which, at first, one would be tempted to comment (a) As regards the stone and bread ‘Imperfect men have voluntarily starved’ (b) As regards Satan’s demand for worship ‘Most men have never sunk so low as to feel this temptation at all’.

If we are to accept the Gospels however, we must interpret Christ’s perfection in a sense which admits of his feeling both the commonest and most animal temptations (hunger and the fear of death) and those temptations which usually occur only to the worst of men (devil worship for the sake of power). I am assuming that the stones and bread represents hunger: but if you prefer to regard it as primarily a temptation to thaumaturgy (‘If thou be the Son of God, command these stones’) then it falls into my second class.

The consideration of this second class at once raises the question ‘Are there not temptations proper to the very best and the very worst, which the middle sort of men do not feel?’: or, again ‘Do not common temptations attack most fiercely the best and the worst?’ I should answer Yes, and say that fear of death was one of these: and in respect of that fear I wd divide men into three classes.

A. The very bad to whom death represents the final defeat of the systematic self-regarding caution and egoism which has been the sole occupation of life. (False freedom defeated)

B. The virtuous. These in fact do not conquer fear of death without the support of any or all of the following

     (1) Pride . . .

     (2) Fear (Charge, charge, ’tis too late to retreat!)

     (3) Taedium vitae (My baby at my breast, that lulls the nurse asleep.)

     (4) Abandonment of the exhausting attempt at real freedom wh. makes the Necessary appear as a relief (The ship glides under the green arch of peace).

C. The Perfect. He cannot resort to any of the aids wh. class B. have, for they all depend on defect. His position is thus closely parallel to class A: death for Him also is the final defeat, but the time of real Freedom. (I am taking it for granted that the spiritual essence of death is ‘the opposite of Freedom’: hence the most mortal images are rigidity, suffocation etc.)

No doubt, He also knows the answer—that voluntary death (really voluntary, not the anodynes and dutch courages) makes unfreedom itself the assertion of freedom. But voluntary submission does not mean that there is nothing to submit to.

What is it to an ordinary man to die, if once he can set his teeth to bear the merely animal fear? To give in—he has been doing that nine times out of ten all his life. To see the lower in him conquer the higher, his animal body turning into lower animals and these finally into the mineral—he has been letting this happen since he was born. To relinquish control—easy for him as slipping on a well worn shoe. But in Gethsemane it is essential Freedom that is asked to be bound, unwearied control to throw up the sponge, Life itself to die. Ordinary men have not been so much in love with life as is usually supposed: small as their share of it is they have found it too much to bear without reducing a large portion of it as nearly to non-life as they can: we have drugs, sleep, irresponsibility, amusement, are more than half in love with easeful death—if only we could be sure it wouldn’t hurt! Only He who really lived a human life (and I presume that only one did) can fully taste the horror of death. I am sure that if the thing were presented to you in a myth you wd be the first to cry out upon the prosaic critic who complained that the Sun was discredited because it fled from the Wolves.

Your idea of Christ as suffering from the mere fact of being in the body, and therefore tempted, if at all, to hasten rather than postpone his death, seems to imply that he was not (as the Christian mystery runs) ‘perfect God and perfect man’ but a kind of composite being, a δαιμωυ or archangel imprisoned in a vehicle unsuitable to it (like Ariel in the oak) and in constant revolt against that vehicle. This is mythological in the bad sense. The Son was certainly not incarnated in such a sense as not also to remain God (if He had been, the universe wd have disappeared).

I don’t pretend to have an explanation: but I take it that the precise differentia of the Christian doctrine is that ‘Something wh. eternally is in the Noumenal world (and is impassible, blessed, omniscient, omnipotent etc) nevertheless once was in the phenomenal world (and was suffering etc).’ You can’t regard the earthly life of Jesus as an episode in the eternal life of the Son: as the slavery to Admetus was an episode in the immortal life of Apollo.

I need not say that on my view, the doctrine (do you hold it) that what was incarnated was ‘One of the hierarchies’ (or ‘one of’ the ‘anythings’) appears to me quite incompatible with the position given to Christ by his own words and by his followers. Aut deus aut malus angelus is as true as the old aut deus aut malus homo.

TO HIS BROTHER: from Schools (where he was invigilating)

14 June 1932

I have just read your letter of May 15th, but not as you supposed in College. ‘Schools’ has arrived and I am invigilating and although your letter arrived before lunch I deliberately brought it here unopened so that the reading it might occupy at least part of the arid waste of talk-less, smoke-less, exercise-less time between 2 P.M. and 5 P.M. Theoretically of course there ought to be no greater blessing than three hours absolutely safe from interruption and free from reading: but somehow or other—everyone has made the discovery—reading is quite impossible in the Schools. There is a sort of atmosphere at once restless and soporific which always ends in that stage which (for me) is a signal to stop reading:—the stage I mean at which you blink and ask yourself ‘Now what was the last page about’ . . .

I have read, or rather re-read, one novel namely Pendennis. How pleased the Pdaitabird would have been—why hadn’t I the grace to read it a few years ago. Why I re-read it now I don’t quite know—I suppose some vague idea that it was time I gave Thackeray another trial. The experiment, on the whole, has been a failure. I can just see, mind you, why they use words like ‘great’ and ‘genius’ in talking of him which we don’t use of Trollope. There are indications, or breakings in, all the time of something beyond Trollope’s range. The scenery for one thing (tho’ to be sure there is only one scene in Thackeray—always summer evening—English garden—rooks cawing) has a sort of depth (I mean in the painting sense) wh. Trollope hasn’t got. Still more there are the sudden ‘depths’ in a very different sense in Thackeray. There is one v. subordinate scene in Pendennis where you meet the Marquis of Steyne and a few of his led captains and pimps in a box at a theatre. It only lasts a page or so—but the sort of rank, salt, urinous stench from the nether pit nearly knocks you down and clearly has a kind of power that is quite out of Trollope’s range. I don’t think these bits really improve Thackeray’s books: they do, I suppose, indicate whatever we mean by ‘genius’. And if you are the kind of reader who values genius you rate Thackeray highly.

My own secret is—let rude ears be absent—that to tell you the truth, brother, I don’t like genius. I like enormously some things that only genius can do: such as Paradise Lost and the Divine Comedy. But it is the results I like. What I don’t care twopence about is the sense (apparently dear to so many) of being in the hands of ‘a great man’—you know: his dazzling personality, his lightening energy, the strange force of his mind—and all that. So that I quite definitely prefer Trollope—or rather this re-reading of Pen. confirms my long standing preference. No doubt Thackeray was the genius: but Trollope wrote the better books. All the old things I objected to in Thackeray I object to still.

Do you remember saying of Thomas Browne in one of your letters ‘Was there anything he didn’t love?’ One can ask just the opposite of Thackeray. He is wrongly accused of making his virtuous women too virtuous: the truth is he does not make them virtuous enough. If he makes a character what he wd call ‘good’ he always gets his own back by making her (its always a female character) a bigot and a blockhead. Do you think Sir, pray, that there are many slum parishes which could not produce half a dozen old women quite as chaste and affectionate as Helen Pendennis and ten times more charitable and more sensible? Now Phippy is a much better woman than most of Thackeray’s ‘good’ women. Still—the Major deserves his place in ones memory. So does Foker—surely the most balanced picture of the kindly vulgar young fop that there is. I’m not sure about Costigan. There’s a good deal too much of Thackeray’s habit of laughing at things like poverty and mispronunciation in the Costigan parts. Then, of course theres ‘the style’—Who the deuce wd begin talking about the style in a novel till all else was given up.

I have had another visit to Whipsnade [Zoo]—Foord Kelcie motored Arthur and me over on a fine Monday when Arthur was staying here. This was not the best company in the world with whom to revisit Whipsnade as F. K. combines extreme speed of tongue with a very slow walk, which is reduced to a stop when he has a good thing to say . . . Perhaps however it was just as well that A. drew me out of my course, for the place has been so increased and altered that I should have missed a good deal. The novelties include lions, tigers, polar bears, beavers etc. Bultitude [a bear] was still in his old place. Wallaby wood, owing to the different season, was improved by masses of bluebells: the graceful faun-like creatures hopping out of one pool of sunshine into another over English wildflowers—and so much tamer now than when you saw them that it is really no difficulty to stroke them—and English wildbirds singing deafeningly all round, came nearer to ones idea of the world before the Fall than anything I ever hoped to see . . .

TO HIS BROTHER: from The Kilns

12 December 1932

A thousand welcomes to Harve (of hated memory.) We have had so many alarms about you that I shall hardly believe it till I see you with my own eyes. But on that score, and on all your last six months’ adventures there is so much to be said that it is absurd to begin. You would be amused to hear the various hypotheses that were entertained during your long summer silence—that you had been captured by bandits—were in jail—had gone mad—had married—had married a Chinese woman. My own view of course was ‘Indeed he’s such a fellow etc’, but I found it hard to maintain this against the riot of rival theories . . .

It all seems too good to be true. I can hardly believe that when you take your shoes off a week or so hence, please God, you will be able to say ‘This will do me—for life’ . . .

[In July 1932 Warren applied to be placed on retired pay. He left Shanghai by cargo ship on 22 October and reached Liverpool on 14 December. Upon reaching The Kilns he was delighted to find that the new wing of the house, containing a study and bedroom, had been built specially for him. His retirement from the Royal Army Service Corps after eighteen years became official on 21 December 1932.

The letter which follows reveals something of the interests which led Jack to write The Allegory of Love and to begin his ‘Prolegomena’ lectures which led ultimately to his book The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature (1964). These twice-weekly lectures began on 18 January 1932 and were entitled ‘Prolegomena to Medieval Poetry’. They were continued during Trinity Term of 1932 and the final two lectures, devoted to Chaucer, were given in Trinity Term of 1933—24 and 26 April. These lectures were repeated a number of times. In Trinity Term of 1937 he began his other well-known series entitled ‘Prolegomena to Renaissance Poetry’.]

TO SISTER MADELEVA C. S. C. of Notre Dame, Indiana: from Magdalen College (Sister Madeleva was living in Oxford at the time and attending the ‘Prolegomena’ lectures.)

7 June 1934

In answer to your first question, there are probably such printed bibliographies as you mention, but I have no knowledge of them. The history of my lecture is this. After having worked for some years on my own subject (which is the medieval allegory) I found that I had accumulated a certain amount of general information which, tho’ far from being very recondite, was more than the ordinary student in the school could gather for himself. I then conceived the idea of my ‘prolegomena’. There were however several gaps in the general knowledge which I had accidentally got. To fill these up I adopted the simple method of going through Skeats notes on Chaucer and Langland, and other similar things, and following these up to their sources when they touched on matters that seemed to me important. This led me sometimes to books I already knew, often to new ones. This process explains why I inevitably appear more learned than I am. E.g. my quotations from Vincent of Beauvais don’t mean that I turned from a long reading of Vincent to illustrate Chaucer, but that I turned from Chaucer to find explanations in Vincent. In fine, the process is inductive for the most part of my lecture: tho’ on allegory, courtly love, and (sometimes) on philosophy, it is deductive—i.e. I start from the authors I quote. I elaborate this point because, if you are thinking of doing the same kind of thing (i.e. telling people what they ought to know as the prius of a study of medieval vernacular poetry) I think you would be wise to work in the same way—starting from the texts you want to explain. You will soon find of course that you are working the other way at the same time, that you can correct current explanations, or see things to explain where the ordinary editors see nothing. I suppose I need not remind you to cultivate the wisdom of the serpent: there will be misquotations, and misunderstood quotations in the best books, and you must always hunt up all quotations for yourself and find what they are really like in situ.

But, of course, I do not know what it is you propose to do. I have therefore mentioned all the more important ‘sources’ in my note-book without any attempt at selection. You will see at once that this is the bibliography of a man who was following a particular subject (the love-allegory), and this doubtless renders the list much less useful to you, who are hardly likely to be after the same quarry. In the second part, texts, I have been more selective, and have omitted a certain amount of low or low-ish Latin love poetry which is useful only for my own special purpose. You will observe that I begin with classical authors. This is a point I would press on anyone dealing with the middle ages, that the first essential is to read the relevant classics over and over: the key to everything—allegory, courtly love etc—is there. After that the two things to know really well are the Divine Comedy and the Romance of the Rose. The student who has really digested these (I don’t claim to be such a person myself!), with good commentaries, and who also knows the Classics and the Bible (including the apocryphal New Testament) has the game in his hands, and can defeat over and over again those who have simply burrowed in obscure parts of the actual middle ages.

Of scholastic philosophy and theology you probably know much more than I do. If by any chance you don’t, stick to Gilson as a guide and beware of the people (Maritain in your Church, and T. S. Eliot in mine) who are at present running what they call ‘neo-scholasticism’ as a fad.

Of periodicals you will find Romania, Speculum, and Medium Aevum useful.

Remember (this has been all important to me) that what you want to know about the Middle Ages will often not be in a book on the Middle Ages, but in the early chapters of some history of general philosophy or science. The accounts of your period in such books will, of course, usually be patronising and ill-informed, but it will mention dates and authors whom you can follow up and thus put you in the way of writing a true account for yourself.

If there is any way in which I can assist you, or if you would care to call and discuss anything with me, do not hesitate to let me know . . .

P. S. I shd warn you that I am very bad at German and this has doubtless influenced my choice of reading.

I suppose you will have access to a complete Aristotle wherever you are working? He is often useful.

TO OWEN BARFIELD: from Magdalen College (while reading the proofs of The Allegory of Love which was published on 21 May 1936)

[December 1935]

The Diary of an Old Soul is magnificent. You placed the moment of giving it to me admirably. I remember with horror the absurdity of my last criticism on it, and with shame the vulgarity of the form in which I expressed it. He knows all about the interplay between the religious and metaphysical aspects of the One. I see now (since I began this letter) that these two are opposite only with the fruitful opposition of male & female (how deep the old erotic metaphor of the proelia Veneris is) and what they beget is the solution.

Incidentally, since I have begun to pray, I find my extreme view of personality changing. My own empirical self is becoming more important and this is exactly the opposite of self love. You don’t teach a seed how to die into treehood by throwing it into the fire: and it has to become a good seed before its worth burying.

As to my own book—the question whether notes shd come at the end of the chapter or the bottom of the page is partly for publisher & printer. Personally I loathe a book where they come at the end—and I am writing mainly for people who will want to know where they must look to verify my facts . . .

TO MRS JOAN BENNETT (of Cambridge): from Magdalen College

13 January 1937

A foul copy of an essay (which now that I re-read it doesn’t seem as good as I had hoped) is a poor return for the delightful, the champagne holiday you gave me. But you asked for it and here it is.

What splendid talk goes on in your house!—and what a wonderful thing . . . your English Faculty is. If only we and you could combine into a single teaching body (leaving out your freaks and our nonentities) we could make ‘English’ into an education that would not have to fear any rivalries. In the meantime we have lots to exchange. I am sure you practise more ‘judgement’; I suspect we have more ‘blood’. What we want is to be well commingled.

The Lucas book proves disappointing as you go on. His attack on [I. A.] Richards for splitting up poetic effects which we receive as a unity, is silly; that is what analysis means and R. never suggested that the products of analysis were the same as the living unity. Again, he doesn’t seem to see that Richards is on his side in bringing poetry to an ethical test in the long run; and his own ethical standard is so half-hearted—he’s so afraid of being thought a moralist that he tries to blunt it by gas about ‘health’ and ‘survival’. As if survival can have any value apart from the prior value of what survives. To me especially it is an annoying book; he attacks my enemies in the wrong way . . . and a good deal of mere ‘superiority’ too . . .

TO MRS JOAN BENNETT: from Magdalen College

[February? 1937]

I also have been having ’flu or you should have heard from me sooner. I enclose the article; pray make whatever use you please of it . . . It is a question (for your sake and that of the Festschrift, not mine) whether a general pro-Donne paper called Donne and his critics—a glance at Dryden and Johnson and then some contemporaries including me—wouldn’t be better than a direct answer. C.S.L. as professional controversialist and itinerant prize-fighter is, I suspect, becoming already rather a bore to our small public, and might in that way infect you. Also, if you really refute me, you raise for the editor the awkward question, ‘Then why print the other article?’ However, do just as you like . . . and good luck with it whatever you do.

I’ve had a grand week in bed—Northanger Abbey, The Moonstone, The Vision of Judgement, Modern Painters (Vol. 3), Our Mutual Friend, and The Egoist. Of the latter I decided this time that it’s a rare instance of the conception being so good that even the fantastic faults can’t kill it. There’s a good deal of the ass about Meredith—that dreadful first chapter—Carlyle in icing sugar. And isn’t the supposedly witty conversation much poorer than much we have heard in real life? Mrs Mountstuart is a greater bore than Miss Bates—only he didn’t mean her to be. The Byron was not so good as I remembered; the Ruskin, despite much nonsense, glorious.

TO A FORMER PUPIL: from Magdalen College

8 March 1937

I haven’t yet got Grierson’s new book Milton and Wordsworth, but I’m going to: it ought to kill two of your birds with one stone. Have you read F. L. Lucas’ Decline and Fall of the Romantic Ideal? Hideously over-written in parts, but well worth reading: he has grasped what seems to be a hard idea to modern minds, that a certain degree of a thing might be good and a further degree of the same thing bad. Elementary, you will say—yet a realisation of it would have forbidden the writing of many books.

These are new. A few years old—but you may not have read it—is E. K. Chambers’ Sir Thomas Wyatt and Other Studies. Some of the essays are medieval, but most of it is 16th century. I can’t think of anything much on ‘general tendencies of the 17th century’ since one you almost certainly read when you were up, Grierson’s Cross Currents of XVIIth c. Lit, very good indeed. By the bye a festschrift to Grierson shortly appearing (Tillyard, Nichol Smith, Joan Bennett and myself are among the contributors) might contain something of what you want. The book on the 17th c. by Willey (I have forgotten the title) is more on the thought background than the poets, rather doing for that century, what my Prolegomena tried to do for the middle ages. I don’t know of anything general on the 18th century. Sherburn’s Early Life of Pope tho’ good is hardly what you want . . .

TO OWEN BARFIELD: from The Kilns

2 September 1937

‘Curiously comfortless stuff in the background’ is the criticism of a sensible man just emerging from the popular errors about Morris. Not so curiously, not quite in the background—that particular discomfort is the main theme of all his best work, the thing he was born to say. The formula is ‘Returning to what seems an ideal world to find yourself all the more face to face with gravest reality without ever drawing a pessimistic conclusion but fully maintaining that heroic action in, or amelioration of, a temporal life is an absolute duty though the disease of temporality is incurable.’

Not quite what you expected, but just what the essential Morris is. ‘Defeat and victory are the same in the sense that victory will open your eyes only to a deeper defeat: so fight on.’ In fact he is the final statement of good Paganism: a faithful account of what things are and always must be to the natural man. Cf. what are in comparison the ravings of Hardy on the one hand and optimistic Communists on t’other.

But the Earthly Paradise after that first story is inferior work. Try Jason, House of the Wolfings, Roots of the Mts, Well at the World’s End.

The thriller is finished and called Out of the Silent Planet . . .

TO OWEN BARFIELD: from Magdalen College

10 June 1938

Think not the doom of man reversed for thee. Apropos of Johnson, isn’t this good, from the Rambler, from a man who decided not to marry a blue-stocking on finding her an atheist and a determinist: ‘It was not difficult to discover the danger of committing myself forever to one who might at any time mistake the dictates of passion, or the calls of appetite, for the decree of fate; or consider cuckoldom as necessary to the general system, as a link in the everlasting chain of successive causes.’

And, in another way, isn’t this splendid ‘Whenever, after the shortest relaxation of vigilance, reason and caution return to their charge, they find hope again in possession.’

What is the betting I forget to put that lyric in after all?—They keep sheep in Magdalen grove now and I hear the fleecy care bleating all day long; I am shocked to find that none of my pupils, though they are all acquainted with pastoral poetry, regards them as anything but a nuisance: and one of my colleagues has been heard to ask why sheep have their wool cut off. (Fact)

It frightens me almost. And so it did the other night when I heard two undergrads. giving a list of pleasures which were (a) Nazi. (b) Leading to homosexuality. They were, feeling the wind in your hair, walking with bare feet in the grass, and bathing in the rain. Think it over: it gets worse the longer you look at it.

More cheering is the true report from Cambridge of a conversation:

A. What is this Ablaut that K. keeps on talking about in his lectures?

B. Oh don’t you know, he was in love with Eloise . . .

TO OWEN BARFIELD: from Magdalen College (at the time of Munich and the approach of the next war)

12 September 1938

What awful quantities of this sort of thing seem necessary to break us in, or, more correctly, to break us off. One thinks one has made some progress towards detachment, some , and begin to realise, and to acquiesce in, the rightly precarious hold we have on all our natural loves, interests, and comforts: then when they are really shaken, at the very first breath of that wind, it turns out to have been all a sham, a field-day, blank cartridges.

This is how I was thinking last night about the war danger. I had so often told myself that my friends and books and even brains were not given me to keep: that I must teach myself at bottom to care for something else more (and also of course to care for them more, but in a different way), and I was horrified to find how cold the idea of really losing them struck.

An awful symptom is that part of oneself still regards troubles as ‘interruptions’—as if (ludicrous idea) the happy bustle of our personal interests was our real e’´πυον, instead of the opposite. I did in the end see (I dare not say ‘feel’) that since nothing but these forcible shakings will cure us of our worldliness, we might have at bottom reason to be thankful for them. We force God to surgical treatment: we won’t (mentally) diet . . .

Of course, our whole joint world may be blown up before the end of the week. I can’t feel in my bones that it will, but my bones know damn-all about it. If we are separated, God bless you, and thanks for a hundred good things I owe to you, more than I can count or weigh. In some ways we’ve had a corking time these twenty years.

Be thankful you have nothing to reproach yourself about in your relations with your father (I had lots) and that it is not some worse disease. The horror of a stroke must be felt almost entirely by the spectators . . .

TO OWEN BARFIELD: from Magdalen College

8 February [1939]

Two week ends of Feb. fall in term: the 5th–8th and the 12th–15th. If you choose the former you will be able to hear Tillyard and me finishing our controversy viva voce, but as I have to give him a bed perhaps the 12th wd be better. No doubt I shall be defeated in the controversy.

I don’t know if Plato did write the Phaedo: the canon of these ancient writers, under the surface, is still quite chaotic. It is also a very corrupt text. Bring it along by all means, but don’t pitch your hopes too high. We are both getting so rusty that we shall make very little of it—and my distrust of all lexicons and translations is increasing. Also of Plato—and of the human mind.

I suppose for the sake of the others we must do something about arranging a walk. Those maps are so unrealiable by now that it is rather a farce—but still ‘Try lad, try! No harm in trying’. Of course hardly any districts in England are unspoiled enough to make walking worth while: and with two new members—I have very little doubt it will be a ghastly failure.

I haven’t seen C. W.’s play: it is not like to be at all good.

As for Orpheus—again it’s no harm trying. If you can’t write it console yourself by reflecting that if you did you wd have been v. unlikely to get a publisher. I am more and more convinced that there is no future for poetry.

Nearly everyone has been ill here: I try to prevent them all croaking and grumbling but it is hard being the only optimist. Let me know which week end: whichever you choose something will doubtless prevent it. I hear the income-tax is going up again. The weather is bad and looks like getting worse. I suppose war is certain now. I don’t believe language is a perpetual Orphic song . . .

P.S. Even my braces are in a frightful condition. ‘Damn braces’ said Blake.

TO MRS JOAN BENNETT: from Magdalen College (Mrs Bennett had probably taken exception to the chapter entitled ‘Limbo’ in Lewis’s book The Pilgrim’s Regress [1933].)

5 April 1939

I’m sorry about the Athanasian Creed—the passage illustrates how important it is in writing to say what you mean and not to say anything you don’t mean. As the context suggests, I was thinking purely of the Trinitarian doctrine and had quite forgotten the damnatory clauses. There are however several palliatives. Residence in Limbo I am told is compatible with ‘perishing everlastingly’ and you’ll find it quite jolly, for whereas Heaven is an acquired taste, Limbo is a place of ‘perfect natural happiness’. In fact you may be able to realise your wish ‘of attending with one’s whole mind to the history of the human spirit’. There are grand libraries in Limbo, endless discussions, and no colds. There will be a faint melancholy because you’ll all know that you have missed the bus, but that will provide a subject for poetry. The scenery is pleasant though tame. The climate endless autumn.

Seriously, I don’t pretend to have any information on the fate of the virtuous unbeliever. I don’t suppose this question provided the solitary exception to the principle that actions on a false hypothesis lead to some less satisfactory result than actions on a true. That’s as far as I would go—beyond feeling that the believer is playing for higher stakes and incurring danger of something really nasty . . .

TO DOM BEDE GRIFFITHS, O.S B.: from Magdalen College

8 May 1939

It was nice to hear from you again. I think I said before that I have no contribution to make about re-union. It was never more needed. A united Christendom should be the answer to the new Paganism. But how reconciliation of the Churches, as opposed to conversions of individuals from a church to another, is to come about, I confess I cannot see. I am inclined to think that the immediate task is vigorous co-operation on the basis of what even now is common—combined, of course, with full admission of the differences. An experienced unity on some things might then prove the prelude to a confessional unity on all things. Nothing wd give such strong support to the Papal claims as the spectacle of a Pope actually functioning as head of Christendom. But it is not, I feel sure, my vocation to discuss reunion.

Yes, I do like George Eliot. Romola is a most purgative work on the facilis descensus, because the final state of the character is so different from his original state and yet all the transitions are so dreadfully natural. Mind you, I think George Eliot labours her morality a bit: it has something of the ungraceful ponderousness of all heathen ethics. (I recently read all Seneca’s epistles and think I like the Stoics better than George Eliot.) The best of all her books as far as I have read is Middlemarch. It shows such an extraordinary understanding of different kinds of life—different classes, ages, and sexes. Her humour is nearly always admirable.

I thought we had talked of Patmore. I think him really great within his own limited sphere. To be sure he pushes the parallel between Divine and human love as far as it can sanely or decently go, and perhaps at times a little further. One can imagine his work being most pernicious to a devout person who read it at the wrong age. But a superb poet. Do you remember the comparison of the naturally virtuous person who receives grace at conversion to a man walking along and suddenly hearing a band playing, and then ‘His step unchanged, he steps in time’. Or on the poignancy of spring, ‘With it the blackbird breaks the young day’s heart’. Or the lightening during a storm at sea which reveals ‘The deeps/ Standing about in stony heaps’. That is sheer genius. And the tightness (if you know what I mean) of all his work. The prose one (Rod, Root & Flower) contains much you might like.

No, I haven’t joined the Territorials. I am too old. It wd be hypocrisy to say that I regret this. My memories of the last war haunted my dreams for years. Military service, to be plain, includes the threat of every temporal evil; pain and death wh. is what we fear from sickness: isolation from those we love wh. is what we fear from exile: toil under arbitrary masters, injustices and humiliation, wh. is what we fear from slavery: hunger, thirst, cold and exposure wh. is what we fear from poverty. I’m not a pacifist. If its got to be, its got to be. But the flesh is weak and selfish and I think death wd be much better than to live through another war.

Thank God, He has not allowed my faith to be greatly tempted by the present horrors. I do not doubt that whatever misery He permits will be for our ultimate good unless, by rebellious will, we convert it to evil. But I get no further than Gethsemane: and am daily thankful that that scene, of all others in Our Lord’s life, did not go unrecorded. But what state of affairs in this world can we view with satisfaction?

If we are unhappy, then we are unhappy. If we are happy, then we remember than the crown is not promised without the cross and tremble. In fact, one comes to realize, what one always admitted theoretically, that there is nothing here that will do us good: the sooner we are safely out of this world the better. But ‘would it were evening, Hal, and all well’. I have even, I’m afraid, caught myself wishing that I have never been born, wh. is sinful. Also, meaningless if you try to think it out.

The process of living seems to consist in coming to realize truths so ancient and simple that, if stated, they sound like barren platitudes. They cannot sound otherwise to those who have not had the relevant experience: that is why there is no real teaching of such truths possible and every generation starts from scratch . . .

TO SISTER PENELOPE, C.S.M.V. (who had written to him about Out of the Silent Planet): from Magdalen College

9 July [August] 1939

The letter at the end is pure fiction and the ‘circumstances wh. put the book out of date’ are merely a way of preparing for a sequel. But the danger of ‘Westonism’ I meant to be real.

What set me about writing the book was the discovery that a pupil of mine took all that dream of interplanetary colonisation quite seriously, and the realisation that thousands of people, in one form or another depend on some hope of perpetuating and improving the human species for the whole meaning of the universe—that a ‘scientific’ hope of defeating death is a real rival to Christianity. At present, of course, the prospect of a war has rather damped them: which shows that whatever evil Satan sets on foot God will always do some good or other by it. I don’t think even ‘for believers only’ I could describe Ransom’s revelation to Oyarsa: the fact that you want me to really proves how well advised I was merely to suggest it.

You will be both grieved and amused to learn that out of about sixty reviews, only two showed any knowledge that my idea of the fall of the Bent One was anything but a private invention of my own! But if only there were someone with a richer talent and more leisure, I believe this great ignorance might be a help to the evangelization of England: any amount of theology can now be smuggled into people’s minds under cover of romance without their knowing it.

I have given your God Persists a first reading with great pleasure. I value it particularly for its frank emphasis on those elements in the faith which too many modern apologists try to keep out of sight for fear they will be called mythical. I am sure this weakens our case. I like very much your treatment of Heathenism (my own debts to it are enormous—it was through almost believing in the gods that I came to believe in God) on p. 31. Also p. 33 on the seedling for special culture and the danger of reverting to ‘common’ weed. That continual narrowing out, selecting from a selection, does seem to be so very characteristic of God’s method. Can you tell me anything more about the ‘crossing’ of the nomadic and agricultural religions on p. 36? On p. 43 ‘God sat again for His portrait’ is a most successful audacity.

I think your task of finding suitable fiction for the convalescents must be interesting. Do you know George Macdonald’s fantasies for grown-ups (his tales for children you probably know already): Phantastes & Lilith I found endlessly attractive, and full of what I felt to be holiness before I really knew that it was. One of his novels, Sir Gibbie (Everyman), though often, like all his novels, amateurish, is worth reading. And do you know the works of Charles Williams? Rather wild, but full of love and excelling in the creation of convincing good characters. (The reason these are rare in fiction is that to imagine a man worse than yourself you’ve only got to stop doing something, while to imagine one better you’ve got to do something.)

Though I’m forty years old as a man I’m only about twelve as a Christian, so it would be a maternal act if you found time sometimes to mention me in your prayers.

[Following Germany’s invasion of Czechoslovakia in March 1939 Neville Chamberlain announced that England would support Poland should it be invaded. It was clear that war was inevitable. Warren, who was on the Army Reserve List, learned that he would be called back into active service. Men between the ages of eighteen and forty-one were liable for military service and for a while it looked as if Jack might have to go back into the Army as he would not be forty-two until 29 November. It had been announced that New Building would be required for government use and, as it seemed there would be no one to teach in any case, Jack and Warren had to move all their books into the cellar. Unfortunately, Jack had to lecture on Shakespeare at Stratford on 31 August and 1 September, and he arrived back home on 1 September to find that Warren had just left for an Army base at Catterick in Yorkshire. That same day Germany invaded Poland, and on 3 September England declared war on Germany. Children were being evacuated from London and, like many families, Jack and the Moores offered to look after those sent to them.]

TO HIS BROTHER: from Magdalen College

2 September 1939

Apparently I arrived at Oxford station yesterday very shortly before you left from it—however, this is perhaps a good thing for though a farewell tankard can just be carried off, a farewell cup of camp coffee is almost unbearable.

Our schoolgirls have arrived and all seem to me—and, what’s more important, to Minto—to be very nice, unaffected creatures and all most flatteringly delighted with their new surroundings. They’re fond of animals which is a good thing (for them as well as for us) . . .

My second lecture at Stratford was cancelled and my first went down very well. It was fully reported (the irony!) in the Times yesterday. I had a pretty ghastly time—a smart, nearly empty hotel in a strange town with a wireless blaring away all the time and hours and hours to get through without work compose perhaps the worst possible background to a crisis . . . The brightest spot was Right-Ho Jeeves which, in opposition to you, I think one of the funniest books I’ve ever read. Fink-Nottle’s speech at the speech-day made me laugh aloud in an empty lounge.

I’ve just been to see the President who laughs to scorn the alarms raised in my breast by the announcement of liability to service up to 41. I hope he’s right . . .

Did you see that the enemy planes retreated from Warsaw(?) before Polish fighters & went to bomb a holiday resort in the neighbourhood instead!

God save you, brother.

TO HIS BROTHER: from The Kilns

10 September 1939

One of the most reminiscent features of the last war has already appeared—i.e. the information which always comes too late to prevent you doing an unnecessary job. We have just been informed that New Building will not be used by Govt. and that fellows’ rooms in particular will be inviolable: also that we are going to have a term and quite a lot of undergraduates up. So you see—I had pictured myself either never seeing those books again or else, with you, and in great joy, unearthing them after the war. To-morrow, I suppose, I must start on the never envisaged task of bringing them up single-handed during a war. I daresay it’s the sort of thing you’d think funny!

Another quite unexpected blow is Bleiben’s announcement this morning that though ‘some of us would know’ he had been intending to leave the Parish, ‘in the present circumstances he feels it his duty’ to stay on. A non sequitur in my opinion. In the Litany this morning we had some extra petitions, one of which was ‘Prosper, oh Lord, our righteous cause’. Assuming that it was the work of the Bishop or someone higher up, when I met Bleiben in the porch, I ventured to protest against the audacity of informing God that our cause was righteous—a point on which He may have His own view.* But it turned out to be Bleiben’s own. However, he took the criticism very well.

Along with these not very pleasant indirect results of the war, there is one pure gift—the London branch of the University Press has moved to Oxford so that Charles Williams is living here. I lunched with him on Thursday and hope to do so again on Monday.

Life at The Kilns is going on at least as well as I expected. We had our first air raid warning at 7.45 the other morning when I expect you had yours too. Everyone got to the dugout quite quickly and I must say they all behaved well, and though v. hungry and thirsty before the all clear went, we quite enjoyed the most perfect late summer morning I have ever seen. The main trouble of life at present is the blacking out which is done (as you may imagine) with a most complicated Arthur Rackham system of odd rags—quite effectively but at the cost of much labour. Luckily I do most of the rooms myself, so it doesn’t take me nearly so long as if I were assisted . . .

* I hope it’s quite like ours, of course: but you never know with Him.

TO HIS BROTHER: from The Kilns

18 September 1939

For the moment dons are a reserved occupation: and as long as they stick to their present plans of not calling up boys between 18 and 20 there will, of course, be a full generation of freshmen each year who must do something between leaving school and joining the army . . .

I am about two-thirds of the way through the job of restoring the books to the shelves [in Magdalen]. Your bookcase by the window is now almost full again and looks, to my unskilled eye, very nearly its old self, though you will doubtless perceive a most perverse disorder, suggesting a positive determination to separate natural neighbours . . .

I have said that the [evacuated] children are ‘nice’, and so they are. But modern children are poor creatures. They keep on coming to Maureen and asking ‘What shall we do now?’ She tells them to play tennis, or mend their stockings, or write home: and when that is done they come and ask again. Shades of our own childhood! . . .

I quite agree that one of the worst features of this war is the spectral feeling of all having happened before. As Dyson said ‘When you read the headlines (French advance—British steamship sunk) you feel as if you’d had a delightful dream during the last war and woken up to find it still going on.’ But perhaps the better view is the Frenchman’s ‘Well, that was a good armistice!’ If one could only hibernate. More and more sleep seems to me the best thing—short of waking up and finding yourself safely dead and not quite damned . . .

TO HIS BROTHER: from The Kilns (In October Warren was posted to the Base Supply Depot at Le Havre.)

5 November 1939

I was glad to hear that your journey had proved so much pleasanter than we both expected. The account of the moonlight ride in [the] black-out train was, for some reason, curiously vivid and I almost have the sense of having done it myself. I suppose I shall hear a definite address from you soon . . .

I had a pleasant evening on Thursday with Williams, Tolkien, and Wrenn, during which Wrenn almost seriously expressed a strong wish to burn Williams, or at least maintained that conversation with Williams enabled him to understand how inquisitors had felt it right to burn people. Tolkien and I agreed afterwards that we just knew what he meant: that as some people . . . are eminently kickable, so Williams is eminently combustible.

The occasion was a discussion of the most distressing text in the Bible (‘narrow is the way and few they be that find it’) and whether one really could believe in a universe where the majority were damned and also in the goodness of God. Wrenn, of course, took the view that it mattered precisely nothing whether it conformed to your ideas of goodness or not, and it was at that stage that the combustible possibilities of Williams revealed themselves to him in an attractive light. The general sense of the meeting was in favour of a view on the lines taken in Pastor Pastorum—that Our Lord’s replies are never straight answers and never gratify curiosity, and that whatever this one meant its purpose was certainly not statistical . . .

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

8 November 1939

The Tableland [in The Pilgrim’s Regress] represents all high and dry states of mind, of which High Anglicanism then seemed to me to be one—most of the representatives of it whom I had then met being v. harsh people who called themselves scholastics and appeared to be inspired more by hatred of their fathers’ religion than anything else. I wd modify that view now: but I’m still not what you’d call high. To me the real distinction is not between high and low but between religion with real supernaturalism & salvationism on the one hand and all watered-down and modernist versions on the other. I think St Paul has really told us what to do about the divisions within the Ch. of England: i.e. I don’t care twopence what I eat on Friday but when I am at table with High Anglicans I abstain in order not ‘to offend my weak brother’ . . .

TO HIS BROTHER: from The Kilns

11 November [1939]

On Thursday we had a meeting of the Inklings—you and Coghill both absented unfortunately. We dined at the Eastgate. I have never in my life seen Dyson so exuberant—‘a roaring cataract of nonsense’. The bill of fare afterwards consisted of a section of the new Hobbit book from Tolkien, a nativity play from Williams (unusually intelligible for him, and approved by all) and a chapter out of the book on The Problem of Pain from me. It so happened—it would take too long to explain why—that the subject matter of the three readings formed almost a logical sequence, and produced a really first rate evening’s talk of the usual wide-ranging kind—‘from grave to gay, from lively to severe’. I wished very much we could have had you with us . . .

Yes—I too enjoyed our short time together in College enormously, until the shadow of the end began to fall over it: not that one has lost the art (our boyhood was well trained in it) of dealing with such shadows, but that one so resents having to start putting it into practice again after so many years. Pox on the whole business.

TO HIS BROTHER: from The Kilns

24 November 1939

I am almost ashamed to describe my leisurely days to one leading such a gruelling life as you—by the way, there is a curious irony about your present job, because, thirty years ago, bustling about between ships and trains would have seemed to you the ideal occupation. Do you remember what a triumph a bit of ‘unforced traffic’ was in the attic days? Well, my son, you have it now! No, I hadn’t thought of it’s being a crime to keep an engine waiting, though it’s fairly obvious when you come to think of it: I had known already, I suppose from notices half consciously read in goods stations that ‘an engine in steam’ is a venerable object, almost like a mare in foal.

A few hours ago while waiting for the bus outside Magdalen I saw a sight I bet you’ve never seen—an undergraduate whom I know approaching with what I took to be a dead pheasant in his hand but what turned out to be a live falcon on his wrist. It was hooded with a little leather hood and is quite a gaily coloured bird, provided on the lower leg with natural spots of a kind of yellow varnish. Blessings on the man who while waiting to be called up for a first class European war is exclusively intent on restoring the ancient sport of hawking . . .

I suppose a French novel is the very last thing you want to read at present, but I can’t refrain from telling you that in the French library (where the exam was held) I picked up Balzac’s Curé de Tours quite carelessly and was immediately enchanted—just as I was by his Père Goriot in 1917. It is so very unlike most French things—the Cure and the whole cathedral surroundings in Tours are almost Trollopian: so provincial, loveable, prosaic, unobstrusive . . .

The day is wet—an outside world of dripping branches and hens in the mud and cold which I am glad to have shut out (tea is just finished) but which, no doubt, is very much pleasanter than your sugar-floored sheds. How nasty the sugar cottage in Hansel and Grettel must have been in wet weather. I gave your greetings to those of the Inklings who were present on Thursday which were received with gratification.

TO HIS BROTHER: from The Kilns

3 December 1939

This has been a beautiful week. It began to clear up last Sunday (you remember my letter was written on Saturday) and that afternoon I had the first really enjoyable walk I’ve had this many a day . . . Later, I had the odd experience of leaving home for college at about 6, as Harwood had announced his intention of coming for the night. The journey in by bus was delightful because it was now bright moonlight and the lights inside the bus were so dimmed as to make no difference, so that I had the quite unusual experience of seeing Magdalen bridge and tower by moonlight from the height and speed of a bus-top: a short thing compared with the train journey you described, but of course the elevation gave it an advantage.

Harwood, owing to train difficulties, didn’t turn up till about 10.30, but we sat up lateish and had a good talk. I may have mentioned to you that he has evacuated to Minehead—nicely placed for country but with bad prospects financially, as the splitting up of their pupils’ London homes has led to their losing a good many. His son John is not with them but billeted in the neighbourhood—with the local M.F.H. [Master of Foxhounds]! and already has acquired a new language and says that his father ought to get his hair cut!

I hardly know which to pity more—a father like Harwood who watches his son being thus ‘translated’ or a son in process of such translation who has the embarrassment of a father like Harwood. I think, the son: for as some author whom I’ve forgotten says the anxiety that parents have about children ‘being a credit to them’ is a mere milk and water affair beside the anxiety of children that their parents should not be an absolute disgrace. Certainly it wd not be pleasant to have to explain to a M.F.H. that one’s father was an Anthroposophist—except that the only impression left on the M.F.H.’s mind wd probably be that your father was some kind of chemist. (If the M.F.H. was a P’daita it might, of course, lead to almost anything—‘Sort of fellow who comes to the door offering to feel your bumps’.) . . .

Talking of books, I have been looking rapidly through St François de Sales this week end to find a passage I wanted to quote, and have derived much ‘social pleasure’ from your pencillings: as I have experienced before, to read a book marked by you in your absence is almost the nearest thing to a conversation. When I read that hares turn white in winter because they eat nothing but snow (used as an argument for frequent communion) and see your mark it is almost as if one of us was pointing the passage out to the other here in the study . . .

The usual Thursday evening party did not meet as Williams & Hopkins were both away, so I went up to Tolkien’s . . . We had a very pleasant evening drinking gin and lime juice (wh. sounds chilly, but I was quite in a sweat by the time I got to Northmoor Rd) and reading our recent chapters to each other—his from the new Hobbit and mine from The Problem of Pain. (N.B. If you are writing a book about pain and then get some actual pain as I did from my rib, it does not either, as the cynic wd expect, blow the doctrine to bits, nor, as a Christian wd hope, turn into practice, but remains quite unconnected and irrelevant, just as any other bit of actual life does when you are reading or writing) . . .

TO HIS BROTHER: from The Kilns

18 December 1939

Yes, I know well what you mean by the materialistic gains of being a Christian. It more often presents itself to me the other way round—how on earth did we manage to enjoy all these books so much as we did in the days when we had really no conception of what was at the centre of them? Sir, he who embraces the Christian revelation rejoins the main tide of human existence! And I quite agree about Johnson. If one had not experienced it, it wd be hard to understand how a dead man out of a book can be almost a member of one’s family circle—still harder to realise, even now, that you and I have a chance of someday really meeting him . . .

We had a very pleasant ‘cave’ in Balliol last Wednesday. Everyone remarked that it was more frolic and youthful than any we have had for years—quite one of the old caves in fact—a curious result, if it is a result, of war conditions. During the evening Ridley read to us a Swinburne ballad and, immediately after it, that ballad of Kipling’s which ends up ‘You’ve finished with the flesh, my Lord’. Nobody except me knew who the second one was by, and everyone agreed that it just killed the Swinburne as a real thing kills a sham. I then made him read ‘Iron, cold iron’ with the same result and later he drifted into McAndrew’s Hymn. Surely Kipling must come back? When people have had time to forget ‘If’ and the inferior Barrack Room Ballads, all this other stuff must come into its own. I know hardly any poet who can deliver such a hammer stroke. The stories, of course, are another matter and are, I suppose, even now admitted to be good by all except a handful of Left idiots . . .

TO HIS BROTHER: from The Kilns

31 December 1939

Minto has probably told you of the ‘ludicrous edisode’ on the Wednesday in which Havard had to come up with a hack-saw and saw my ring off my finger. To you, I expect, the most interesting feature of this event will be the extreme P’daytaishness of my act in forcing the damned thing into such a position originally: it being a marked trait in the character of a P’dayta that tho’ being physically rather feeble for any useful purpose such as cranking a car or lifting a log, he is subject to fits of demoniac strength when it is a question of jamming, twisting, bursting or crushing anything into ruin—e.g. a lobster or a door. Havard performed his operation with great skill and delicacy, beguiling the time with interesting and edifying conversation.

I couldn’t help contrasting him with B. E. C. Davies, a professor of London, whom I went on to see in Old Headington the same morning. Here is a man of my own age, who knew Barfield when he was up: of my own profession, who has written on Spenser. You’d have thought these were all the materials for a good meeting. But no. One got through all the preliminary stuff about how his London she-students were getting on in Oxford, thinking that the real conversation would then begin. But every single time I tried to turn it to books, or life, or friends (as such) I was completely frustrated. i.e. about friends, he’d talk of their jobs, marriages, houses, incomes, arrangements, but not of them. Books—oh yes, editions, prices, suitability for exams—not their contents. In fact hardly since the days of ‘How are things at the yard, Gussie?’ have I had to endure so much irredeemably ‘grown-up conversation’. Unless I misjudge him, he is one of those dreadful fellows who never refers to literature except during the hours he’s paid for talking about it. Just as one meets clergymen—indeed we are told the Archdeacon was one of them—who resent the intrusion of Christianity into the conversation. How small a nucleus there is in each liberal profession of people who care about the thing they are supposed to be doing: yet I suppose the percentage of garage-hands and motor-touts who are really interested in motoring is about 95! . . .

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