1940–1949

1940–1949

TO HIS BROTHER: from The Kilns

9 January 1940

It seems almost brutal to describe a January walk taken without you in a letter to you, but I suppose ‘concealment is in vain’ . . . When I reached Taunton [by train] it was definitely a warm evening. God send us to be soon together again, for here came that moment in a holiday which you would so have appreciated and wh. cannot be fully enjoyed alone—the moment when, at the last of the big stations, you find, far from the other traffic, in a remote silent bay, the little, dark, non-corridor train of two coaches—usually, for some reason, exuding steam from all the compartments—which is going to jerk and bump you to your real destination. And then those stops at unheard-of halts with wooden platforms, and the gleam of an oil lantern in a porter’s hand. It wd have been partly spoiled for you, however, by the presence of a young man of undergraduate type and age who turned out to be a student training to be a mining engineer, and who, having tackled me on politics, the English character, propaganda, improvements in the Everymans series, Hindu theology and so forth, exclaimed ‘You must be a man of very wide interests!’ and, do you know, I never realised before the naivete with which we all think this, even if we do not say it, in such circumstances—i.e. the bland inference ‘By gum! His interests are as wide as mine!’

This brought me to Minehead, at about 6.30. I dined that evening with the Harwoods, and being ‘carried’ back to my hotel by him at about 10.30 had the very unpleasant surprise of finding it locked up and silent as the grave. It was about 10 minutes’ work of banging and shouting and ringing before I was let in—and during the time I had, as you may suppose, some ‘very uneasy sensations’.

Next morning, leaving my greatcoat and suitcase at this hotel, and retaining rucksack and mack, I climbed the steep hill to Harwood’s billet and collected him. His children are now so numerous that one ceases to notice them individually, any more than a scuffle of piglets in a field or a waddle of ducks. A few platoons of them accompanied us for about the first mile of the walk, but returned, like tugs, when we were out of harbour.

The idea had been to cross Dunkery Beacon and lie at Exford, but the day was so misty that we decided to hug the valleys where one wd have those near-at-hand beauties which mist rather enhances than destroys. It wouldn’t be much good trying to describe the route without a map—but it consisted in reaching Porlock by a very wide detour up one valley and down another. I was ‘very angry’ with Harwood when, though professing to know the country, he brought us at 1 o’clock to a village without a pub! (Luccombe). We succeeded (a sort of success, by the bye, which never happens to you and me when we are on our own) in finding a cottage that gave us tea and bread and cheese and jam—in one of those slippery, oil-clothy, frosty best parlours, with an oil stove that created an intolerable stench and a small library of reference works—you know, Plain Man’s Encyclopedia, Inquire within about everything—monuments, doubtless, to the success of those advertisements which promise you a rise in salary and endless occupation for the long winter evenings if you will buy such works. One that specially intrigued us was ‘Every Man his own Lawyer—Illustrated’. We looked in vain however for a portrait of a tort or a south aspect of Habeas Corpus—the pictures consisting entirely of photos of court-houses and famous judges. Can you imagine anything more infuriating than, on turning to such a book to try to extricate yourself from an income tax muddle or an injudicious betrothal (and for what other purpose wd you ever open it?) to be met by the bland features of Lord Darling? . . .

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

17 January 1940

Thanks for letter and article. I believe I found myself in agreement with every point you made in the latter. The Platonic and neo-Platonic stuff has, no doubt, been reinforced (a) By the fact that people not very morally sensitive or instructed by trying to do their best recognise temptations of appetite as temptations but easily mistake all the spiritual (and worse) sins for harmless or even virtuous states of mind: hence the illusion that the ‘bad part’ of oneself is the body. (b) By a misunderstanding of the Pauline use of , wh in reality cannot mean the body (since envy, witchcraft, and other spiritual sins are attributed to it) but, I suppose, means the unregenerate manhood as a whole. (You have no doubt noticed that is nearly always used by St Paul in a good sense.) (c) By equating ‘matter’ in the ordinary sense with λη or materia in the scholastic and Aristotelian sense, i.e. equating the concrete corporeality of flesh, grass, earth or water with ‘pure potentiality’. The latter, being nearest to not-being and furthest from the Prime Reality can, I suppose, be called the ‘least good’ of things. But I fear Plato thought the concrete flesh and grass bad, and have no doubt he was wrong. (Besides these two senses of ‘matter’ there is also a third—the thing studied in physics. But who would dare to vilify such a miracle of unceasing energy as that?—its more like pure form than pure potentiality.)

Yes, I’ve read the Scale of Perfection with much admiration. I think of sending the anonymous translator a list of passages that he might reconsider for the next edition. I’ve also read the work of R. W. Chambers which you mention. It is first class as an essay on the continuity of the devotional tradition, but not, what it professes, the continuity of prose style. At least I think some of the passages he quotes as similar in style are really similar only in matter. I doubt if he recognises that More’s style is greatly inferior to Hilton’s. But Chambers is a very good man. If you have his Man’s Unconquerable Mind, read the essay on Measure for Measure. He simply treats it as an ordinary Christian story and all the old stuff about ‘Shakespeare’s dark period’ vanishes into thin air. I see what you mean by calling G. Eliot’s Dorothea a saint manquée: nothing is more pathetic than the potential holiness in [the] quality of the devotion which actually wrecks itself on Casaubon. If you like such leisurely novels, let me recommend John Galt: specially the Entail.

About active service—I think my account was true in what it said, but false in what it excluded. I quite agree that the obedience and comradeship are very good things: and I have no sympathy with the modern view that killing or being killed is simpliciter a great evil. But perhaps the truths are rather odious on the lips of a civilian, unless some pastoral or civil office absolutely obliges him to utter them.

Fascism and Communism, like all other evils, are potent because of the good they contain or imitate. Diabolus simius Dei. And, of course, their occasion is the failure of those who left humanity starved of that particular good. This does not for me alter the conviction that they are very bad indeed. One of the things we must guard against is the penetration of both into Christianity—availing themselves of that very truth you have suggested and I have admitted. Mark my words: you will frequently see both a Leftist and a Rightist pseudo-theology developing—the abomination will stand where it ought not . . .

TO HIS BROTHER: from The Kilns

3 February 1940

This has been an interesting week in some ways. On Monday Williams began his lectures in the beautiful carved Divinity School. A good audience. I attended with Tolkien and Hopkins and afterwards repaired to the Mitre Bar, joined by Williams, to drink sherry. I think he will retain most of his audience.

That afternoon I had the coldest dawdle round the estate with old Taylor [a neighbour] that I have yet had. In spite of the bitter wind we had to stop to examine every track and speculate what kind of animal it was—but indeed I am rather ashamed that a man of over seventy should have so much more gust for natural philosophy and so much less shrinking from the wind than I. (Between ourselves, too, I have a sort of faint hope that what I can put in with such as F. K. [Foord-Kelcey] and old Taylor may be accepted as a kind of penance for my many sins against the P’daitabird: the blackest chapter in my life.) . . .

We had the usual pleasant party on Thursday evening in college with the welcome addition of Havard, who has been bidden all along but has hitherto been prevented from attending by various accidents. He read us a short paper on his clinical experience of the effects of pain, wh. he had written in order that I might use all or part of it as an appendix to my book. We had an evening almost equally compounded of merriment, piety, and literature. Rum this time again. The Inklings is now really v. well provided, with Fox as chaplain, you as army, Barfield as lawyer, Havard as doctor—almost all the estates!—except, of course, anyone who could actually produce a single necessity of life, a loaf, a boot, or a hut . . .

[On 27 January Warren was promoted to the rank of Major. Not long after this he spent some time in a hospital with a ‘high temperature’. It is not clear what caused him so much illness during his time in France.]

TO HIS BROTHER: from The Kilns

11 February 1940

We have your letter (with note enclosed for me) telling us that you are again in hospital. It is impossible, on your hint that you might be sent home, not to wish that this may happen, though I see your point of view about it too. But surely if you keep on returning to bed with these high temperatures even the invincible army must decide in the end that keeping you in France at all is too costly? Anyone who knows your medical history for the last ten years must realise that active service even at the base is for you ‘an impossible pleasure’. Let us, while you are ill, have short notes at pretty frequent intervals, will you? . . .

On Monday C. W. lectured nominally on Comus but really on Chastity. Simply as criticism it was superb—because here was a man who really started from the same point of view as Milton and really cared with every fibre of his being about ‘the sage and serious doctrine of virginity’ which it would never occur to the ordinary modern critic to take seriously. But it was more important still as a sermon. It was a beautiful sight to see a whole room full of modern young men and women sitting in that absolute silence which can not be faked, very puzzled, but spell-bound: perhaps with something of the same feeling which a lecture on unchastity might have evoked in their grandparents—the forbidden subject broached at last. He forced them to lap it up and I think many, by the end, liked the taste more than they expected to. It was ‘borne in upon me’ that that beautiful carved room had probably not witnessed anything so important since some of the great medieval or Reformation lectures. I have at last, if only for once, seen a university doing what it was founded to do: teaching Wisdom. And what a wonderful power there is in the direct appeal which disregards the temporary climate of opinion—I wonder is it the case that the man who has the audacity to get up in any corrupt society and squarely preach justice or valour or the like always wins? . . .

TO HIS BROTHER: from The Kilns

18 February 1940

Barfield has been up to spend an evening with me: rather unfortunately it was Thursday, for, though he knows most of that set and harmonises with them very well, I should have preferred to have him to myself. He is going to take a part time job in—of all disgusting things—the Inland Revenue.

He is very much depressed having a greater faculty than you or I for feeling the miseries of the world in general—which led to a good deal of argument, how far, as a man and a Christian, one ought to be vividly and continuously aware of, say, what it’s like on the Mannerheim line at this moment. I took the line that the present rapidity of communication etc. imposed a burden on sympathy for which sympathy was never made: that the natural thing was to be distressed about what was happening to the poor Jones’s in your own village and that the modern situation, in which journalism brings the Chinese, Russians, Finns, Poles and Turks to your notice each morning really could not be met in the same way. Of course I know the more obvious reply, that you can’t do them any good by being miserable, but that is hardly the point, for in the case of the Jones’s next door we should think ill of the man who felt nothing whether his feeling did them good or not.

I am afraid the truth is in this, as in nearly everything else I think about at present, that the world, as it is now becoming and has partly become, is simply too much for people of the old square-rigged type like you and me. I don’t understand its economics, or its politics, or any dam’ thing about it. Even its theology—for that is a most distressing discovery I have been making these last two terms as I have been getting to know more and more of the Christian element in Oxford.

Did you fondly believe—I did—that where you got among Christians, there, at least, you would escape (as behind a wall from a keen wind) from the horrible ferocity and grimness of modern thought? Not a bit of it. I blundered into it all, imagining that I was the upholder of the old, stern doctrines against modern quasi-Christian slush: only to find that my ‘sterness’ was their ‘slush’. They’ve all been reading a dreadful man called Karl Barth, who seems the right opposite number to Karl Marx. ‘Under judgement’ is their great expression. They all talk like Covenanters or old Testament prophets. They don’t think human reason or human conscience of any value at all: they maintain, as stoutly as Calvin, that there’s no reason why God’s dealings should appear just (let alone, merciful) to us: and they maintain the doctrine that all our righteousness is filthy rags with a fierceness and sincerity which is like a blow in the face . . .

But, in a private letter, one may, for a moment, bewail happier days—the old world when Politics meant Tariff Reform, and war, war with Zulus, and even religion meant (beautiful word) Piety. ‘The decent church that crowns the neighbouring hill’—Sir Roger at Church—‘Mr Arabin sent the farmers home to their baked mutton very well satisfied’ . . .

TO HIS BROTHER: from The Kilns

25 February 1940

Plague on this nonsense of putting back the clock which has docked me of an hour’s sleep and which for the next few weeks will give me darkness at shaving and dressing time when I want light and light after tea when it is an impertinence; and which also, by abolishing 3.30 Evensong has sent me back to Mattins and the old morning rush.

I am just back from it now. The change was aggravated by the fact that, as Bleiben announced ‘We are now approaching that time of the year in which the Church revises her Electoral Roll’. We had the whole bag of tricks of course, followed by a full exposition of the Free Will Offering scheme. He preached a very good sermon, however, on Joseph, as the type of man who has an almost unique series of excuses for being ‘embittered’, ‘disillusioned’ and all the usual bunk but doesn’t take them.

Reflection on the story raised in my mind a problem I never happen to have thought of before: why was Joseph imprisoned, and not killed, by Potiphar? Surely it seems extraordinarily mild treatment for attempted rape of a great lady by a slave? Or must one assume that Potiphar, tho’ ignorant of the lady’s intention to make him a cuckold, was aware in general (like Bishop Proudie and many other husbands) that her stories about the servants were to be taken with a grain of salt—that his real view was ‘I don’t suppose for a moment that Joseph did anything of the sort, but I foresee there’ll be no peace till I get him out of the house’? One is tempted to begin to imagine the whole life of the Potiphar family: e.g. how often had he heard similar stories from her before? . . .

TO HIS BROTHER: from The Kilns

3 March 1940

One pleasant thing which happened this week was a visit from Dyson on Thursday which produced a meeting of all Inklings except yourself and Barfield. Fox read us his latest ‘Paradisal’ on Blenheim Park in winter. The only line I can quote (wh. seems to me very good) is ‘Beeches have figures; oaks, anatomies’. It was in the Troilus stanza and full of his own ‘cool, mellow flavour’ as the tobacconists say. He has really in some respects a considerable similarity to Miss Sackville West. Dyson, according to Tolkien (you know how bad an observer of such things I am) was looking changed and ill, but he was in his usual form and, on being told of Williams’ Milton lectures on ‘the sage and serious doctrine of virginity’, replied ‘The fellow’s becoming a common chastitute’ . . .

TO HIS BROTHER: from Magdalen College (on Maundy Thursday)

[21 March] 1940

About Spain—after, first, Hitler’s, and, now, Mussolini’s, abandonment of anti-Communism I am prepared for almost anything. There are people in Europe quite depraved enough to stage that whole ceremony without having the slightest belief in Christianity or the slightest intention of treating it as anything more than a bait. Let us hope—and indeed pray—that France is not one of them. Even if he is not, he might be sincere in a sense which bodes very ill for us. I mean, his Christendom might be, on the Papist side, what Ulster Orangeism is on the Protestant side. One can imagine Condlin, if he were a Dictator, whipping up a kind of Protestant revival which wd be in a sense sincere, but which would be quite ready to ally itself with Germany or Russia or both for the destruction of Italy and Spain. I can never forget Tolkien’s Spanish friend who, after having several colleges pointed out to him by name from the roof of the Radder, observed with surprise ‘So this was once a Christian country?’

Mind you, I think the Pope is sound. Something might be done through him to persuade France to put the Christian-Totalitarian issue first, at any rate for the present, and the Papist-Protestant second. Of course I absolutely agree with you that Papistry even of the most obscurantist and persecuting kind would be better (I mean in terms of this world) than the great rebellion of the other force not only against Grace but against Nature.

Why should quiet ruminants as you and I have been born in such a ghastly age? Let me palliate the apparent selfishness of this complaint by asserting that there are people who, while not, of course, liking actual suffering when it falls to their own share, do really like the ‘stir’, the ‘sense of great issues’. Lord!, how I loathe great issues. How I wish they were all adjourned sine die. ‘Dynamic’ I think is one of the words invented by this age which sums up what it likes and I abominate. Could one start a Stagnation party—which at General Elections would boast that during its term of office no event of the least importance had taken place . . .

TO A FORMER PUPIL: from Magdalen College

26 March 1940

(1) About obedience. Nearly everyone will find himself in the course of his life in positions where he ought to command and in positions where he ought to obey . . . Now each of them requires a certain training or habituation if it is to be done well; and indeed the habit of command or of obedience may often be more necessary than the most enlightened views on the ultimate moral grounds for doing either. You can’t begin training a child to command until it has reason and age enough to command someone or something without absurdity. You can at once begin training it to obey: that is teaching it the art of obedience as such—without prejudice to the views it will hold later on as to who should obey whom, or when, or how much . . . since it is perfectly obvious that every human being is going to spend a great deal of his life in obeying.

(2) Psychoanalysis. In talking to me you must beware, because I am conscious of a partly pathological hostility to what is fashionable. I may therefore have been betrayed into statements on this subject which I am not prepared to defend. No doubt, like every young science, it is full of errors, but so long as it remains a science and doesn’t set up to be a philosophy, I have no quarrel with it, i.e. as long as people judge what it reveals by the best human logic and scheme of values they’ve got and do not try to derive logic and values from it. In practice no doubt, as you say, the patient is always influenced by the analyst’s own values. And further, in so far as it attempts to heal, i.e. to make better, every treatment involves a value-judgement. This could be avoided if the analyst said, ‘Tell me what sort of a chap you want to be and I’ll see how near I can make you’: but of course he really has his own idea of what goodness and happiness consist in and works to that. And his idea is derived, not from his science (it couldn’t) but from his age, sex, class, culture, religion and heredity, and is just as much in need of criticism as the patients’s . . .

Another way in which any therapeutic art may have bad philosophical results is this. It must, for the sake of method, take perfection as the norm and treat every departure from it as disease: hence there is always a danger that those who practise it may come to treat a perfectly ideal perfection as ‘normal’ in the popular sense and consequently waste their lives in crying for the moon . . .

I see no reason why a Christian shd not be an analyst. Psychoanalysis after all merely defines what was always admitted, that the moral choices of the human soul operate inside a complex non-moral situation . . . The Christian view would be that every psychological situation, just like every degree of wealth or poverty, had its own peculiar temptations and peculiar advantages: that the worst could always be turned to a good use and the best could always be abused, to one’s spiritual ruin . . . This doesn’t mean that it wd be wrong to try to cure a complex any more than a stiff leg: but it does mean that if you can’t, then so far from the game being up, life with a complex or a stiff leg, is precisely the game you have been set . . . We must play the parts we find ourselves given . . . Once make the medical norm our idea of the ‘normal’ and we shall never lack an excuse for throwing up the sponge. But these are all illegitimate abuses of analysis.

(3) Christianity. My own experience in reading the Gospels was at one stage even more depressing than yours. Everyone told me that there I should find a figure whom I couldn’t help loving. Well, I could. They told me I would final moral perfection—but one sees so very little of Him in ordinary situations that I couldn’t make much of that either. Indeed some of His behaviour seemed to me open to criticism, e.g. accepting an invitation to dine with a Pharisee and then loading him with torrents of abuse.

Now the truth is, I think, that the sweetly-attractive-human-Jesus is a product of 19th century scepticism, produced by people who were ceasing to believe in His divinity but wanted to keep as much Christianity as they could. It is not what an unbeliever coming to the records with an open mind will (at first) find there. The first thing you find is that we are simply not invited to speak, to pass any moral judgement on Him, however favourable: it is only too clear that He is going to do whatever judging there is: it is we who are being judged, sometimes tenderly, sometimes with stunning severity, but always de haut en bas. (Have you ever noticed that your imagination can hardly be forced to picture Him as shorter than yourself?)

The first real work of the Gospels on a fresh reader is, and ought to be, to raise very acutely the question, ‘Who or What is this?’ For there is a good deal in the character which, unless He really is what He says He is, is not lovable or even tolerable. If He is, then of course it is another matter: nor will it then be surprising if much remains puzzling to the end. For if there is anything in Christianity, we are now approaching something which will never be fully comprehensible.

On this whole aspect of the subject I should go on . . . to Chesterton’s Everlasting Man. You might also find Mauriac’s Vie de Jesus useful . . . If childish associations are too intrusive, in reading the New Testament it’s a good idea to try it in some other language, or Moffat’s translation.

As for theology proper: a good many misunderstandings are cleared away by Edwyn Bevan’s Symbolism and Belief. A book of composite authorship and of varying merit, but on the whole good, is Essays Catholic and Critical ed. E. G. Selwyn (S.P.C.K.). Gore’s The Philosophy of the Good Life (Everyman) is rather wordy, but taught me a lot. If you can stand serious faults of style (and if you can get them, they are long out of print) Geo. Macdonald’s 3 vols of Unspoken Sermons go to the very heart of the matter. I think you would also find it most illuminating to re-read now many things you once read in ‘Eng. Lit.’ without knowing their real importance—Herbert, Traherne, Religio Medici.

As for a person ‘with whom to discuss’, choice is more ticklish. L. W. Grensted is very interested in psychoanalysis and wrote a book on its relations to Christianity: would that be an advantage or the reverse? O. C. Quick whom I know and like. Milford, the present rector of St Mary’s, some like and some don’t. Let me know what, or what sort you want, and I’ll see what can be done.

Come and see me when you’re better and bring the gudeman.

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

16 April 1940

Congratulations (if that is the right word) on becoming a Priest, and thanks for the pleasing woodcut. Yes: Melchisedech is a figure who might have been intended (nay, was intended, since God provides not for an abstraction called Man but for individual souls) for people who were being led to the truth by the peculiar route that you and I know.

I do most thoroughly agree with what you say about Art and Literature. To my mind they are only healthy when they are either (a) Definitely the handmaids of religious, or at least moral, truth—or (b) Admittedly aiming at nothing but innocent recreation or entertainment. Dante’s alright, and Pickwith is alright. But the great serious irreligious art—art for art’s sake—is all balderdash; and, incidentally, never exists when art is really flourishing. In fact one can say of Art as an author I recently read says of Love (sensual love, I mean) ‘It ceases to be a devil when it ceases to be a god’. Isn’t that well put? So many things—nay, every real thing—is good if only it will be humble and ordinate.

One thing we want to do is to kill the word ‘spiritual’ in the sense in which it is used by writers like Arnold and Croce. Last term I had to make the following remark to a room full of Christian undergraduates ‘A man who is eating or lying with his wife or preparing to go to sleep, in humility, thankfulness, and temperance, is, by Christian standards, in an infinitely higher state than one who is listening to Bach or reading Plato in a state of pride’—obvious to you, but I could see it was quite a new light to them.

I don’t know what to think about the present state of the world. The sins on the side of the democracies are very great. I suppose they differ from those on the other side by being less deliberately blasphemous, fulfilling less the condition of a perfectly mortal sin. Anyway, the question ‘Who is in the right’ (in a given quarrel) is quite distinct from the question ‘Who is righteous?’—for the worse of two disputants may always be in the right on one particular issue. It is therefore not self righteous to claim that we are in the right now. But I am chary of doing what my emotions prompt me to do every hour; i.e. identifying the enemy with the forces of evil. Surely one of the things we learn from history is that God never allows a human conflict to become unambiguously one between simple good and simple evil?

The practical problem about charity (in our prayers) is very hard work, isn’t it? When you pray for Hitler & Stalin, how do you actually teach yourself to make the prayer real? The two things that help me are (a) A continual grasp of the idea that one is only joining one’s feeble little voice to the perpetual intercession of Christ, who died for those very men (b) A recollection, as firm as one can make it, of all one’s own cruelty wh. might have blossomed, under different conditions, into something terrible. You and I are not, at bottom, so different from these ghastly creatures.

I have been reading Lady Julian of Norwich. What do you make of her? A dangerous book, clearly, and I’m glad I didn’t read it much earlier. (Have you noticed how God so often sends us books at just the right time?) One thing in her pleased me immensely. Contemptus mundi is dangerous and may lead to Manicheeism. Love of the creature is also dangerous. How the good of each is won, and the danger rejected, in her vision of ‘all that is made’ as a little thing like a hazel nut ‘so small I thought it could hardly endure’. Not bad, you see: just very, very small.

I’m enclosing a book in which you might like the last essay. I’ve been busy this winter on a book called The Problem of Pain wh. I was asked to write for a thing called The Christian Challenge Series. I have hopes you may like it . . .

TO A FORMER PUPIL: from Magdalen College

18 April 1940

On the marriage service. The three ‘reasons’ for marrying, in modern English are (a) To have children, (b) Because you are very unlikely to succeed in leading a life of total sexual abstinence, and marriage is the only innocent outlet, (c) To be in a partnership. What is there to object to in the order in which they are put?

The modern tradition is that the proper reason for marrying is the state described as ‘being in love’. Now I have nothing to say against ‘being in love’: but the idea that this is or ought to be the exclusive reason or that it can ever be by itself an adequate basis seems to me simply moonshine. In the first place, many ages, many cultures, and many individuals don’t experience it—and Christianity is for all men, not simply for modern Western Europeans. Secondly, it often unites most unsuitable people. Thirdly, is it not usually transitory? Doesn’t the modern emphasis on ‘love’ lead people either into divorce or into misery, because when that emotion dies down they conclude that their marriage is a ‘failure’, tho’ in fact they have just reached the point at wh. real marriage begins. Fourthly, it wd be undesirable, even if it were possible, for people to be ‘in love’ all their lives. What a world it wd be if most of the people we met were perpetually in this trance! The Prayer Book therefore begins with something universal and solid—the biological aspect. No one is going to deny that the biological end of the sexual functions is offspring. And this is, on any sane view, of more importance than the feelings of the parents. Your descendants may be alive a million years hence and may number tens of thousands. In this regard marriages are the fountains of History. Surely to put the mere emotional aspects first would be sheer sentimentalism.

Then the second reason. Forgive me: but it is simply no good trying to explain this to a woman. The emotional temptations may be worse for women than for men: but the pressure of mere appetite on the male, they simply don’t understand. In this second reason, the Prayer Book is saying ‘If you can’t be chaste (and most of you can’t) the alternative is marriage’. This may be brutal sense, but, to a man, it is sense, and that’s that.

The third reason gives the thing that matters far more than ‘being in love’ and will last and increase, between good people, long after ‘love’ in the popular sense is only as a memory of childhood—the partnership, the loyalty to ‘the firm’, the composite creature. (Remember it is not a cynic but a devoted husband and inconsolable widower, Dr Johnson, who said that a man who has been happy with one woman cd have been equally happy with any one of ‘tens of thousands’ of other women. i.e. the original attraction will turn out in the end to have been almost accidental: it is what is built up on that, or any other, basis wh. may have brought the people together that matters.)

Now the second reason involves the whole Christian view of sex. It is all contained in Christ’s saying that two shall be ‘one flesh’. He says nothing about two ‘who married for love’: the mere fact of marriage at all—however it came about—sets up the ‘one flesh’. There is a terrible comment on this in I Cor. VI. 16 ‘he that is joined to a harlot is one flesh’. You see? Apparently, if Christianity is true, the mere fact of sexual intercourse sets up between human beings a relation wh. has, so to speak, transcendental repercussions—some eternal relation is established whether they like it or not. This sounds very odd. But is it? After all, if there is an eternal world and if our world is its manifestation, then you would expect bits of it to ‘stick through’ into ours. We are like children pulling the levers of a vast machine of which most is concealed. We see a few little wheels that buzz round on this side when we start it up—but what glorious or frightful processes we are initiating in there, we don’t know. That’s why it is so important to do what we’re told. (Cf.—what does the Holy Communion imply about the real significance of eating?)

From this all the rest flows. (1) The seriousness of sexual sin and the importance of marriage as ‘a remedy against sin’. (I don’t mean, of course, that sins of that sort will not, like others, be forgiven if they are repented, nor that the ‘eternal relations’ wh. they have set up will not be redeemed. We believe that God will use all repented evil as fuel for fresh good in the end.) (2) The permanence of marriage wh. means that the intention of fidelity matters more than ‘being in love’. (3) The Headship of the Man.

I’m sorry about this—and I feel that my defence of it wd be more convincing if I were a woman. You see, of course, that if marriage is a permanent relation, intended to produce a kind of new organism (‘the one flesh’) there must be a Head. It’s only so long as you make it a temporary arrangement dependent on ‘being in love’ and changeable by frequent divorce, that it can be strictly democratic—for, on that view, when they really differ, they part. But if they are not to part, if the thing is like a nation not a club, like an organism not a heap of stones, then, in the long run, one party or other must have the casting vote. That being so, do you really want the Head to be the woman? In a particular instance, no doubt you may. But do you really want a matriarchal world? Do you really like women in authority? When you seek authority yourself, do you naturally seek it in a woman?

Your phrase about the ‘slave-wife’ is mere rhetoric, because it assumes servile subordination to be the only kind of subordination. Aristotle cd have taught you better. ‘The householder governs his slave despotically. He governs his wife and children as being both free—but he governs the children as a constitutional monarch, and the wife politically’ (i.e. as a democratic magistrate governs a democratic citizen).

My own feeling is that the Headship of the husband is necessary to protect the outer world against the family. The female has a strong instinct to fight for its cubs. What do nine women out of ten care about justice to the outer world when the health, or career, or happiness of their own children is at stake? That is why I want the ‘foreign policy’ of the family, so to speak, to be determined by the man; I expect more mercy from him! Yet this fierce maternal instinct must be preserved, otherwise the enormous sacrifices involved in motherhood wd never be borne. The Christian scheme, therefore, does not suppress it but protects us defenceless bachelors from its worst ravages! This, however, is only my own idea. The Headship doctrine is that of Christianity. I take it to be chiefly about man as man and woman as woman, and therefore about husbands and wives, since it is only in marriage that they lawfully meet as epitomes of their sex. Notice that in I Cor. XI just after the bit about the man being the Head, St Paul goes on to add the baffling reservation (v. 11) that the sexes ‘in the Lord’ don’t have any separate existence. I have no idea what this means: but I take it it must imply that the existence of a man or woman is not exhausted by the fact of being male or female, but that they exist in many other modes.

I mean, you may be a citizen, a musician, a teacher etc. as well as a woman, and you needn’t transfer to all these personalities everything that is said about you as wife qua wife. I think that is the answer to your view that the Headship doctrine wd prevent women going in for education. St Paul is not a system maker, you know. As a Jew, he must, for instance, have believed that a man ought to honour and obey his Mother: but he doesn’t stop and put that in when talking about the man being Head in marriage. As for Martha & Mary, either Christ and St Paul are inconsistent here, or they are not. If they’re not, then, whether you can see how or not, St Paul’s doctrine can’t have the sense you give it. If they are inconsistent, then the authority of Christ of course completely over-rides that of St Paul. In either event, you needn’t bother.

I very strongly agree that it’s no use trying to create a ‘feeling’. But what feeling do you want to have? Isn’t your problem one of thought, not feeling? The question is ‘Is Christianity true—or even, is there some truth mixed up in it?’ The thing in reading Macdonald is not to try to have the feelings he has, but to notice whether the whole thing does or does not agree with such perceptions (I mean, about good & evil etc.) as you already have—and, where it doesn’t, whether it or you are right.

Term begins on Saturday next. If you and the gudeman cd come and lunch with me on the following Saturday (27th) it wd suit admirably. Let me know (address to College). Thank you for taking my mind off the war for an hour or so!

P.S. I don’t think the Marriage Service is ascetic, and I think your real objection to it may be that it’s not prudish enough! The service is not for celebrating the flesh, but for making a solemn agreement in the presence of God and of society—an agreement which involves a good many other things besides the flesh . . . ‘Sober and godly matrons’ may be a stickler, if you haven’t read the English Schools: but you ought to know that all the associations you are putting into it are modern and accidental. It means ‘Married women (matrons) who are religious (godly) and have something better and happier to think about than jazz and lipstick (sober).’ But you must know that as well as I do!

TO HIS BROTHER: from The Kilns

21 April 1940

I never told you a curious thing—I have meant to include it in several letters—wh. provides a new instance of the malignity of the Little People. I was going into town one day and had got as far as the gate when I realized that I had odd shoes on, and one of them clean and the other dirty. There was no time to go back. As it was impossible to clean the dirty one, I decided that the only way of making myself look less ridiculous was to dirty the clean one. Now wd you have believed that this is an impossible operation? You can of course get some mud on it—but it remains obviously a clean shoe that has had an accident and won’t look in the least like a shoe that you have been for a walk in. One discovers new catches and snags in life every day . . .

TO OWEN BARFIELD: from The Kilns

2 June 1940

Mrs Moore told me yesterday about your loss of your mother. I cannot imagine myself, in similar circumstances, not feeling very strongly felix opportunitate mortis, but I daresay, when it comes to the point, that is very far from being the predominant emotion; I have always remembered what you told me of the dream in which you were condemned to death and of the part your mother played in it. I am very sorry you should have this particular desolation added to the general one in which we are. It is like the first act of Prometheus ‘Peace is in the grave, the grave hides all things beautiful and good’. He was near, however, to his release when he said that, and I accept the omen—that you and I and our friends will soon be past the worst, if not in one way, then in the other. For I am very thankful to say that while my often plays tricks I am ashamed of, I retain my faith, as I have no doubt you do yours. ‘All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well’—This is from Lady Julian of Norwich whom I have been reading lately and who seems, in the Fifteenth century, to have rivalled Thomas Aquinas’ reconciliation of Aristotle and Christianity by nearly reconciling Christianity with Kant.

The real difficulty is, isn’t it, to adapt ones steady beliefs about tribulation to this particular tribulation; for the particular, when it arrives, always seems so peculiarly intolerable. I find it helpful to keep it very particular—to stop thinking about the ruin of the world etc., for no one is going to experience that, and to see it as each individual’s personal sufferings, which never can be more than those of one man, or more than one man, if he were very unlucky, might have suffered in peacetime.

Do you get sudden lucid intervals? islands of profound peace? I do: and though they don’t last, I think one brings something away from them.

I wish we could meet more, but I can hardly reckon on any one evening at present. But make no mistake: if you ever feel inclined to doubt whether (to talk in our old style!) language really is a P.O.S., you needn’t. All is well still—except ones stomach.

And oddly enough, I notice that since things got really bad, everyone I meet is less dismayed. Macdonald observes somewhere that ‘the approach of any fate is usually also the preparation for it’. I began to hope he is right. Even at this present moment I don’t feel nearly so bad as I should have done if anyone had prophesied it to me eighteen months ago.

But I am merely doling out what you know as well as I and are better qualified to say to me that I to you. Blessings on you for everything in our common life these twenty years.

TO HIS BROTHER: from The Kilns (In May Warren had been evacuated with his unit from Dunkirk and sent to Wenvoe Camp in Cardiff.)

12 July 1940

I’ve been up for some days now, still feeling rather weak, and shall be embroiled in examiners’ meetings all the week end. Before the illness was over I read your copy of Southey’s letters from end to end with great enjoyment:—a bad poet, but a delightful man. I also found things in it that were very consoling; as (a) The daily fear of invasion. (b) The haunting fear of traitors on the home front. (c) The repeated statement that ‘even now’ we might pull through if only we had a decent government. (d) The settled conviction that ‘even if’ we defeated Buonaparte we should still have to face revolution at home. God send it’s a true omen.

Other impressions were (a) How much nicer people, tho’ worse writers, the Tory romantics were than the other crew—the Shelleys and L. Hunts and even Keats. (b) What a happy life he had on the whole, and yet what a grim business even a happy human life is when you read it rapidly through to the inevitable end . . .

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

16 July 1940

A lot of work and an illness have kept me from answering your letter, but I have been intending ever since I got it to let you know that I think your criticisms on my Aristotelian idea of leisure are largely right. I wouldn’t write that essay now. In fact I have recently come to the conclusion that a besetting sin of mine all my life has been one which I never suspected—laziness—and that a good deal of the high sounding doctrine of leisure is only a defence of that. The Greek error was a punishment for their sin in owning slaves and their consequent contempt for labour. There was a good element in it—the recognition, badly needed by modern commercialism, that the economic activities are not the end of man: beyond that, they were probably wrong. If I still wanted to defend my old view I shd ask you why toil appears in Genesis not as one of the things God originally created and pronounced ‘very good’, but as a punishment for sin, like death. I suppose one wd point out in reply that Adam was a gardener before he was a sinner, and that we must distinguish two degrees and kinds of work—the one wholly good and necessary to the animal side of the animal rationale, the other a punitive deterioration of the former due to the Fall.

My enjoyment of the Psalms has been greatly increased lately. The point has been made before, but let me make it again: what an admirable thing it is in the Divine economy that the sacred literature of the world shd have been entrusted to a people whose poetry, depending largely on parallelism, shd remain poetry in any language you translate it into . . .

TO HIS BROTHER: from The Kilns (in which he records the conception of The Screwtape Letters)

20 July 1940

Humphrey [Havard] came up to see me last night (not in his medical capacity) and we listened to Hitler’s speech together. I don’t know if I’m weaker than other people: but it is a positive revelation to me how while the speech lasts it is impossible not to waver just a little. I should be useless as a schoolmaster or a policeman. Statements which I know to be untrue all but convince me, at any rate for the moment, if only the man says them unflinchingly. The same weakness is why I am a slow examiner: if a candidate with a bold, mature handwriting attributed Paradise Lost to Wordsworth, I shd feel a tendency to go and look it up for fear he might be right after all . . .

I resume [21 July] at coffee-time on Sunday morning. I have been to Church for the first time for many weeks owing to the illness, and considered myself invalid enough to make a mid-day communion . . . Before the service was over—one cd wish these things came more seasonably—I was struck by an idea for a book wh. I think might be both useful and entertaining. It wd be called As One Devil to Another and would consist of letters from an elderly retired devil to a young devil who has just started work on his first ‘patient’. The idea wd be to give all the psychology of temptation from the other point of view. e.g. ‘About undermining his faith in prayer, I don’t think you need have any difficulty with his intellect, provided you never say the wrong thing at the wrong moment. After all, the Enemy will either answer his prayers or not. If he does not, then that’s simple—it shows prayers are no good. If he does—I’ve always found that, oddly enough, this can be just as easily utilised. It needs only a word from you to make him believe that the very fact of feeling more patient after he’s prayed for patience will be taken as a proof that prayer is a kind of self hypnosis. Or if it is answered by some external event, then since that event will have causes which you can point to, he can be persuaded that it would have happened anyway. You see the idea? Prayer can always be discredited either because it works or because it doesn’t.’ Or again. ‘In attacking faith, I should be chary of argument. Arguments only provoke answers. What you want to work away at is the mere unreasoning feeling that “that sort of thing can’t really be true”’. . .

TO HIS BROTHER: from The Kilns (Jack has begun his duties with the Local Defence Volunteers, the name of which was soon changed to The Home Guard.)

11 August [1940]

I have commenced my L.D.V. Duties with the 1.30 A.M. patrol on what they call Saturday morning and mortals call Friday night. As it seemed no use going to bed to be raked out at 12.45 I asked Dyson and Humphrey to dine and the others to join us afterwards so as to make a ‘wake’ of it in the original sense . . .

We have a very good Inklings breaking up about ten to one, when the others went home and I set out for my rendez-vous at Lake St.—eating my sandwiches on the way, as I didn’t feel I cd provide sandwiches for the whole party and hadn’t the face to eat my own in their presence. I was with two men much younger than myself: one a bluecoat and the other, I think a burley—both very nice and intelligent and neither too talkative nor too silent. One is allowed to smoke and I was pleased to find that our tour of duty included a quite prolonged soak on the veranda of a college pavilion—a pleasant spot, looking out over broad playing fields in a mild but windy night of sufficient starlight and some light clouds—with the occasional interest of a train trundling past. Unfortunately our watch was not so well arranged as Dogberry’s (‘All sit in the church porch till two, and then every man to bed’); still, the three hours passed surprisingly quickly, and if it hadn’t been for the bother of lugging a rifle about all the time I should have said that pleasure distinctly predominated. I had quite forgotten the weight of a ‘tripe’ [rifle]. We broke off at 4.30 and after a really beautiful walk back through an empty and twilight Oxford I was in bed by 5 . . .

[Warren’s health had been unsatisfactory ever since he went to France, and in August he retired and was transferred to the Reserve List. On 27 August Maureen was married to Leonard Blake who had been the Director of Music at Worksop College since 1935. Jack’s new book, The Problem of Pain, which was both read to The Inklings as it was written and dedicated to them was published on 18 October.]

TO A FORMER PUPIL: from The Kilns

4 January 1941

Congratulations . . . on your own decision. I don’t think this decision comes either too late or too soon. One can’t go on thinking it over for ever; and one can begin to try to be a disciple before one is a professed theologian. In fact they tell us, don’t they, that in these matters to act on the light one has is almost the only way to more light. Don’t be worried about feeling flat, or about feeling at all.

As to what to do, I suppose the normal next step, after self-examination, repentance and restitution, is to make your Communion; and then to continue as well as you can, praying as well as you can . . . and fulfilling your daily duties as well as you can. And remember always that religious emotion is only a servant . . . This, I say, would be the obvious course. If you want anything more e.g. Confession and Absolution which our church enjoins on no-one but leaves free to all—let me know and I’ll find you a directeur. If you choose this way, remember it’s not the psychoanalyst over again: the confessor is the representative of Our Lord and declares His forgiveness—his advice or ‘understanding’ tho’ of real, is of secondary importance.

For daily reading I suggest (in small doses) Thomas à Kempis’ Imitation of Christ and the Theologia Germanica (Golden Treasury series, Macmillan) and of course the Psalms and N.T. Don’t worry if your heart won’t respond: do the best you can. You are certainly under the guidance of the Holy Ghost, or you wouldn’t have come where you now are: and the love that matters is His for you—yours for Him may at present exist only in the form of obedience. He will see to the rest.

This has been great news for me I need hardly say. You have all my prayers (not that mine are worth much).

TO THE SAME: from Magdalen College

29 January 1941

Thanks very much for your kind letter. My own progress is so very slow (indeed sometimes I seem to be going backwards) that the encouragement of having in any degree helped someone else is just what I wanted. Of course the idea of not relying on emotion carries no implication of not rejoicing in it when it comes: you may remember Donne’s Litanie ‘That our affections kill us not—nor die’. One of the minor rewards of conversion is to be able to see at last the real point of all the old literature which we are brought up to read with the point left out! . . .

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

10 April 1941

Yes, I will come and address your Junior Sisters next Easter unless ‘wife and oxen’ have by that time taken the form of incarceration in a German Concentration camp, an English Labour Company, or (to pitch on a brighter idea) some sort of Borstal Institution on the lower foot-hills of the mountain of Purgatory. But (if one may say so salva reverentia) what odd tasks God sets us; if anyone had told me ten years ago that I should be lecturing in a convent—! Thanks for the offer of hospitality in the Gate House, which I accept gratefully, though the Protestant in me has just a little suspicion of an oubliette or a chained skeleton—the doors do open outwards as well, I trust.

Thank you very much for the book. It has given me real help. What I particularly enjoy in all your work, specially this, is the avoidance of that curious drabness which characterises so many ‘little books on religion’. Partly it is due to your Hebraic background which I envy you: partly, no doubt, to deeper causes . . . There are, in fact, a good many Gifford Lectures and other such weighty tomes out of which I’ve got less meat (and indeed less efficient cookery!)

You never told me how you got on with the WAFS. I have just started doing something of the same kind with R.A.F. officers and shd be interested to compare notes . . .

[One of the immediate results of The Problem of Pain was a great deal of ‘war work’ for Jack. In the Winter of 1941 the Chaplain-in-Chief of the RAF asked him to accept a kind of travelling lectureship, which meant going round to various RAF bases and lecturing on Theology. The first of these talks was given at the RAF base in Abingdon during April 1941. In February 1941 he had been asked to give a series of talks over the BBC, and it is this series which he told Sister Penelope about in the letter which follows. The series consisted of four fifteen-minute talks entitled Right and Wrong: A Clue to the Meaning of the Universe? and they were given during August. Although Sister Penelope did not speak over the radio herself, she was writing some talks for someone else to deliver.]

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

15 May 1941

We ought to meet about B.B.C. talks if nothing else as I’m giving four in August. Mine are praeparatio evangelica rather than evangelium, an attempt to convince people that there is a moral law, that we disobey it, and that the existence of a Lawgiver is at least very probable and also (unless you add the Christian doctrine of the Atonement) imparts despair rather than comfort. You will come after to heal any wounds I may succeed in making. So each of us ought to know what the other is saying.

I’ve given some talks to the R.A.F. at Abingdon already and as far as I can judge they were a complete failure. I await instructions from the Chaplain in Chief about the Vacation.

Yes—jobs one dare neither refuse nor perform. One must take comfort in remembering that God used an ass to convert the prophet: perhaps if we do our poor best we shall be allowed a stall near it in the celestial stable—rather like this:

[The remainder of the sheet is filled with an amusing drawing of the ass, flanked by a nun and a figure in a mortarboard, seated outside a stable in the radiance of the heavenly city.]

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

9 October 1941

I am ashamed of having grumbled. And your act was not that of a brute—in operation it was more like that of an angel, for (as I said) you started me on a quite new realization of what is meant by being ‘in Christ’, and immediately after that ‘the power which erring men call chance’ put into my hands [E. L.] Mascall’s two books in the Signposts series which continued the process. So I lived for a week end (at Aberystwyth) in one of those delightful vernal periods when doctrines that have hitherto been only buried seeds began actually to come up—like snowdrops or crocuses. I won’t deny they’ve met a touch of frost since (if only things would last, or rather if only we would!) but I’m still very much, and gladly, in your debt. The only real evil of having read your scripts when I was tired is that it was hardly fair to them and not v. useful to you.

I have had to refuse a request from Sister Janet. Will you tell her that the ‘wives and oxen’ are quite real ones?

I enclose the MS. of Screwtape. If it is not a trouble I shd like you to keep it safe until the book is printed (in case the one the publisher has got blitzed)—after that it can be made into spills or used to stuff dolls or anything.

Thank you very much for the photo of the Shroud. It raises a whole question on which I shall have to straighten out my thoughts one of these days.

TO SISTER PENELOPE, C.S.M.V.: from Magdalen College (The book referred to is Perelandra.)

9 November 1941

I’ve got Ransom to Venus and through his first conversation with the ‘Eve’ of that world: a difficult chapter. I hadn’t realised till I came to write it all the Ave-Eva business. I may have embarked on the impossible. This woman has got to combine characteristics which the Fall has put poles apart—she’s got to be in some ways like a Pagan goddess and in other ways like the Blessed Virgin. But if one can get even a fraction of it into words it is worth doing.

Have you room for an extra prayer? Pray for Jane if you have. She is the old lady I call my mother and live with (she is really the mother of a friend)—an unbeliever, ill, old, frightened, full of charity in the sense of alms, but full of uncharity in several other senses. And I can do little for her.

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

19 November 1941

It is a curious fact that the advice we can give to others we cannot give to ourselves and truth is more effective through any life rather than our own. Chas. Williams in Taliessin is good on this ‘No one can live in his own house. My house for my neighbour, his for me’.

I think what really worries me is the feeling (often on waking in the morning) that there’s really nothing I so much dislike as religion—that it’s all against the grain and I wonder if I can really stand it! Have you ever had this? Does one outgrow it? Of course there’s no intellectual difficulty. If our faith is true then that is just what it ought to feel like, until the new man is full-grown. But it’s a considerable bore. What you say about ‘disappointed with oneself’ is very true—and a tendency to mistake mere disappointment (in wh. there is much wounded pride and much of a mere sportsman’s irritation at breaking a record) for true repentance. I ought to have devoted a Screwtape letter to this.

Please tell Mother Annie Louisa that I have booked April 20th–22nd. I shouldn’t reach Wantage until (I suppose) mid-day or tea-time Monday, but after that will do as I’m told . . .

TO MISS PATRICIA THOMSON: from Magdalen College

8 December 1941

When I said it was ‘no good’ trying to regard Jesus as a human teacher I only meant that it was logically untenable—as you might say ‘It’s no good trying to maintain that the earth is flat’. I was saying nothing in that sermon about the destiny of the ‘virtuous unbeliever’. The parable of the sheep & the goats suggests that they have a very pleasant surprise coming to them. But in the main, we are not told God’s plans about them in any detail.

If the Church is Christ’s body—the thing He works through—then the more worried one is about the people outside, the more reason to get inside oneself, where one can help—you are giving Him, as it were, a new finger. I assumed last night that I was talking to those who already believed. If I’d been speaking to those who didn’t, of course everything I’d said wd be different.

Fear isn’t repentance—but it’s alright as a beginning—much better at that stage than not being afraid.

How interested are you? If you care to come and talk about it I expect we can arrange a date. Let me know.

TO DOM BEDE GRIFFITHS, O.S.B.: from The Kilns (Jack had asked Dom Bede to read and criticize a second series of talks for the BBC on ‘What Christians Believe’.)

21 December 1941

(1) I’m extremely glad you’ve got onto my friend Chas. Williams, tho’ onto one of his worst books. He is living in Oxford during the war and we made him lecture on Milton to the faculty, so that (would you believe it, remembering the English lectures of your own period) we actually heard a lecture on Comus wh. put the importance where Milton had put it. In fact the lecture was a panegyric of chastity! Just fancy the incredulity with which (at first) an audience of undergraduates listened to something so unheard of. But he beat them in the end.

He is an ugly man with rather a cockney voice. But no one ever thinks of this for five minutes after he has begun speaking. His face becomes almost angelic. Both in public and private he is of nearly all the men I have met the one whose address most overflows with love. It is simply irresistible. Those young men and women were lapping up what he said about Chastity before the end of the hour. It’s a big thing to have done. I have seen his impress on the work in the Milton papers when I examined. Fancy an Oxford student, and a girl, writing about Mammon’s speech in Book II ‘Mammon proposes an ordered state of sin with such majesty of pride that but for the words live to ourselves which startle our conscience, we should hardly recognise it as sin, so natural is it to man.’ (Compare that with the sort of bilge you and I were proud to write in Schools!)

Williams, Dyson of Reading, & my brother (Anglicans) and Tolkien and my doctor, Havard (your church) are the ‘Inklings’ to whom my Problem of Pain was dedicated. We meet on Friday evenings in my rooms: theoretically to talk about literature, but in fact nearly always to talk about something better. What I owe to them all is incalculable. Dyson and Tolkien were the immediate human causes of my own conversion. Is any pleasure on earth as great as a circle of Christian friends by a good fire? His stories (I mean Williams) are his best work—Descent into Hell and The Place of the Lion are the best. I quite agree about what you call his ‘affectations’—not that they are affectations, but honest defects of taste. He is largely a self-educated man, labouring under an almost oriental richness of imagination (‘clotted glory from Charles’ as Dyson called it) which could be saved from turning silly and even vulgar in print only by a severe early discipline which he has never had. But he is a lovely creature. I’m proud of being among his friends.

(2) Now about the scripts. (a) The claim to forgive sins is in S. Mark and all the Synoptics. (b) Yes—I think I gave the impression of going further than I intended, in saying that all theories of the Atonement were ‘to be rejected if we don’t find them helpful’. What I meant was ‘need not be used’—a v. different thing. Is there, on your view, a real difference here: that the Divinity of Our Lord has to be believed whether you find it a help or a ‘scandal’ (otherwise you’re not a Xtian at all) but the Anselmic theory of Atonement is not in that position. Wd you admit that a man was a Xtian (and could be a member of your Church) who said ‘I believe that Christ’s death redeemed man from sin, but I can make nothing of any of the theories as to how’?

You see, what I wanted to do in these talks was to give simply what is still common to us all, and I’ve been trying to get a nihil obstat from friends in various communions. (The other dissentient besides you is a Methodist who says I’ve said nothing about justification by faith.) It therefore doesn’t much matter what you think of my own theory because that is advanced only as my own. But I’d like to be able to meet you on the other point—how far any theory is de fide. The Council of Trent ‘made satisfaction’ seems to be the real hitch. What was the context? What error was it directed against? Still—don’t bother, for I fear I shall have to give up my original hope. I think I could get something you and your friends wd pass, but not without making the talk either longer or shorter: but I’m on the Procrustes’ bed of neither more nor less than fifteen minutes—you can imagine the difficulty.

What did you think of In Memorian on re-reading it? I re-read it (with Barfield) some months ago and thought (1) That the last quarter is a falling off—and can hardly help being since the poem represents a sorrow neither being transmuted, nor ending in tragedy, but just petering out (2) That the mere difficulty of construing some stanzas is v. great. (3) That a great deal of the poetry is simply overwhelmingly good.

About the Son being subject to the Father (as God—of course, obviously subject as Man in the Incarnation)—yes, that’s what I think: but was recently contradicted by a theologian. Can you back me up? What is the correct interpretation of ‘equal to His Father as touching His Godhead’ in the Athanasian Creed?

The Talks will be at 4.40 P.M. on Jan. 11th, 4.45 Jan. 18th, Feb. 1st., 4.40 Feb. 8th, 4.45 Feb. 15th.

You look positively fat in the photo—you abbey-lubber!

TO A FORMER PUPIL: from Magdalen College

20 January 1942

Sorry you’re in a trough. I’m just emerging (at least I hope I am) from a long one myself. As for the difficulty of believing it is a trough, one wants to be careful about the word ‘believing’. We too often mean by it ‘having confidence or assurance as a psychological state’—as we have about the existence of furniture. But that comes and goes and by no means always accompanies intellectual assent, e.g. in learning to swim you believe, and even know intellectually, that water will support you, long before you feel any real confidence in the fact. I suppose a perfection of faith would make this confidence invariably proportionate to the assent. In the meantime, as one has learnt to swim only by acting on the assent in the teeth of all instinctive conviction, so we shall proceed to faith only by acting as if we had it. Adapting a passage in the Imitation one can say ‘What would I do now if I had a full assurance that this was only a temporary trough’, and having got the answer, go and do it. I am a man, therefore lazy; you a woman, therefore probably a fidget. So it may be good advice to you (though it wd be bad to me) not even to try to do in the trough all you can do on the peak.

I know all about the despair of overcoming chronic temptations. It is not serious, provided self-offended petulance, annoyance at breaking records, impatience etc., don’t get the upper hand. No amount of falls will really undo us if we keep on picking ourselves up each time. We shall of course be v. muddy and tattered children by the time we reach home. But the bathrooms are all ready, the towels put out, and the clean clothes in the airing cupboard. The only fatal thing is to lose one’s temper and give it up. It is when we notice the dirt that God is most present in us: it is the v. sign of His presence . . .

TO MARTYN SKINNER: from Magdalen College

23 April [1942]

I hope you got through Sanders some time ago my great enjoyment of your Letters to Malaya. A really good poem. Not in the least a pastiche as the silly people will say but a real proof that the Popian manner is a real lingua franca wh. anyone who has anything to say can use for original work. In fact, it is already less ‘archaic’ than the manner of ‘Georgian poetry’. The pother about ‘originality’ all comes from the people who have nothing to say: if they had they’d be original without noticing it . . .

TO SISTER PENELOPE, C.S.M.V.: from Magdalen College (Upon leaving the Mother House of the Community of St Mary the Virgin in Wantage on 22 April Jack went to London to read a paper entitled ‘Hamlet: The Prince or the Poem?’ to the British Academy.)

11 May 1942

The Venus book is just finished, except that I now find the two first chapters need re-writing. I will send you a typed MS as soon as it is typed and you can report on it to Reverend Mother for her consent to the dedication.

The British Academy made a v. stupid audience compared with your young ladies! They were all the sort of people whom one often sees getting out of taxis and going into some big doorway and wonders who on earth they are—all those beards and double chins and fur collars and lorgnettes. Now I know . . .

TO SISTER PENELOPE, C.S.M.V.: from Magdalen College (Sister Penelope was engaged upon a translation of St Athanasius’ De Incarnatione.)

29 July 1942

(1) The Rabbit [in Magdalen’s deer park] and I have quarrelled. I don’t know why, unless I gave him something that disagreed with him. At any rate, he has cut me dead several times lately—so fair and so fickle! Life is full of disappointments. ‘The strong hearts of the conies’ is prob. the true reading in that Psalm. (2) I’m glad to hear you are a little better, but wish you were better still.

(3) After having to abandon S. Athanasius for examining, I have now returned to the De Incarnatione and have just finished the long section on Jewish prophecies. If that is the bit you are omitting, I expect you are right. Though it crosses my mind that modern apologetics may have given up too completely the old ‘proof of prophecy’. Each individual passage can be explained away as really meaning something else, or accidental: but could it still be argued that to apply this to the whole lot involves stretching the arm of coincidence rather far?

(4) Have you read Martin Buber’s I and Thou. Tell me what I am to think of it? From Heaven, or (very subtly) from Hell? I’m by no means sure. And why does he limit all true ‘meeting’ to a Thou-situation? Is there no ye-situation? What happens when three friends are together or when a man meets his wife and child? (5) On Witches. I didn’t really mean to deny them, tho’ I see I have given that impression. I was interested in them at the moment only as an illustration. I think my considered view wd be much the same as yours. But if a truth, it is not a truth I am at all anxious to spread.

(6) About ‘became Man’ versus ‘a man’. There is you will admit, a v. obvious sense in which He became ‘a man’—a man of a particular height and weight, the Son of a particular Mother, who was in one place and time and not (in that mode) elsewhere. The Fathers, writing in a language with no indefinite article didn’t have to plump for one or the other. Are you correct in saying ‘the Person, the Ego, of the incarnated Lord is God’? I had thought there was a human soul involved (when we speak of His humanity we don’t mean simply His body) and that the human and divine natures together made one Person. Your way of putting it suggests that there was simply a human body with God substituted for the human soul one wd ordinarily have expected. Is this right? I thought not, but I don’t know . . .

TO A FORMER PUPIL: from Magdalen College (answering a question about the reference to G. B. Shaw in ch. IV of Broadcast Talks)

[August? 1942]

Of course Shaw is not a scientist and the attack is not on science as such. But there is a sort of creed which might be called ‘scientific humanism’, tho’ many of its votaries know very little science (just as some people go to Church who know very little theology), and which is shared by people so different as Haldane, Shaw, Wells, and Olaf Stapleton . . . cf. Shaw’s Lilith’s ‘Beyond’ with Haldane p. 309: ‘It is possible that under the conditions of life on the outer planets the human brain may alter in such a way as to open up possibilities inconceivable to our own minds.’ (on p. 303 one of these alterations, the elimination of pity, had already occurred.) All tarred with the same brush in fact . . .

TO DOM BEDE GRIFFITHS, O.S.B.: from Magdalen College (in reply to questions about parts of Broadcast Talks.)

13 October 1942

I shouldn’t have written quite as I did if I had thought that there was a consensus of theologians in favour of the Anselmic theory. I believed that it was not to be found either in N. T. or most of the Fathers. If I’m wrong in this, it is a matter of plain historical ignorance.

War & Peace is in my opinion the best novel—the only one wh. makes a novel really comparable to epic. I have read it about three times. What we lose (I’m told) in our translations is the humour wh. is an important merit of the real book.

You wouldn’t be surprised at the space I give to Dualism if you knew how attractive it is to some simple minds. As for retiring into ‘private life’, while feeling very strongly the evil of publicity, I don’t see how one can. God is my witness I don’t look for engagements . . .

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

22 December 1942

Perelandra will reach you, I hope, early in January: I have deterred the artist from putting his idea of Tinidril (you can imagine!) on the cover. I have been very busy with one thing and another: there aren’t the days and the hours there used to be, are there? The minute hand used to go as the hour hand goes now!

How does one feel thankful? I am thinking of the improvement in the war news, and I don’t mean (rhetorically) ‘How can one be thankful enough?’ but just what I say. It seems to be something which disappears or becomes a mere word the moment one recognises one ought to be feeling it. I always tell people not to bother about ‘feelings’ in their prayers, and above all, never to try to feel, but I’m a bit puzzled about Gratitude: for if it is not a feeling, what is it? A funny thing how merely formulating a question awakes the conscience! I hadn’t a notion of the answer at the bottom of the last sheet, but now I know exactly what you are going to say: ‘Act your gratitude and let feelings look after themselves.’ Thank you. (Do all theoretical problems conceal shirkings by the will?) . . .

I have ‘sinitis’ (it feels like toothache but isn’t) but not very badly and it is, I think, going away. I have to sit for twenty min. every evening with my face in a jug of Friars Balsam, like a horse with a nose-bag, and the family say all sorts of things and I can’t answer, tho’ it is ‘pain and grief to me’! God bless you all for Christmas: you are in my daily prayers as I know I am in yours.

TO A FORMER PUPIL: from The Kilns

31 January 1943

I’m the worst person in the world to write to someone who is feeling weak and listless . . . because I don’t myself dislike it nearly as much as most people. To lie in bed—to find one’s eyes filling with facile tears at the least hint of pathos in one’s book—to let the book drop from one’s hand as one sinks deeper and deeper into reverie—to forget what you were thinking about a moment ago and not to mind—and then be roused by the unexpected discovery that it is already tea-time—all this I do not find disagreeable.

Yes, it is funny what horrid young men one meets in Dickens and Thackeray. Of course the descent of David Copperfield is partly due to the fact that no later chapters could come up to the early ones. Have you noticed that nearly all writers describe childhood (when it is in the first person) well? Jane Eyre is also best at the beginning: and almost every biography. But it is also due to the convention whereby Victorian novelists are not allowed to attribute their hero’s peccadilloes in respect of chastity? Hence the ‘scrapes’ of youth all have to be represented by other less probable and (to me) more repellent sins. You notice that Tom Jones does not similarly lose our regard as he grows up . . .

No. Bears seem to be very modest. No one seems to know anything about their love passages. Perhaps they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but gather their young from the flowers as Virgil thought the bees did. It would explain why the bear’s whelp has to be ‘licked into shape’.

I’ve re-read The Ring and the Book in trains lately with great enjoyment: but don’t recommend it to you in your present state . . . Jane Austen, Scott, and Trollope are my favourite authors when ill . . .

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

20 February [1943]

I have been putting off my answer to your first letter from day to day in the hope that I shd be able to send Perelandra with it: but tho’ the publishers said it wd be out in Jan. there is no sign of it yet. No doubt there is some hitch with the binders for it has been printed some months ago . . .

‘Creation’ as applied to human authorship (I’m on your first letter now, you see) seems to me an entirely misleading term. We make . i.e. we re-arrange elements He has provided. There is not a vestige of real creativity de novo in us. Try to imagine a new primary colour, a third sex, a fourth dimension, or even a monster wh. does not consist of bits of existing animals stuck together. Nothing happens. And that surely is why our works (as you said) never mean to others quite what we intended: because we are re-combining elements made by Him and already containing His meanings. Because of those divine meanings in our materials it is impossible we shd ever know the whole meaning of our own works, and the meaning we never intended may be the best and truest one.

Writing a book is much less like creation than it is like planting a garden or begetting a child: in all three cases we are only entering as one cause into a causal stream which works, so to speak, in its own way. I wd not wish it to be otherwise. If one cd really create in the strict sense wd one not find we had created a sort of Hell? . . .

How dull all ones books are except the one you are waiting for at the moment!—wh. again has an analogical bearing on the parable of the lost sheep. I shd have more joy of Perelandra at the moment than of 99 books that have had no hitch about them . . .

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

10 August 1943

I should like a few days at Wantage, but things are so bad at home that I’m cancelling several of my R.A.F. engagements. Pray for me, Sister, and for poor Jane (very bad with her varicose ulcer) and for ‘Muriel’ (a kind of lady gardener & ‘help’ who is putting off an operation she ought to have, out of funk, and getting hysterical and going into rages, and losing her faith) and for poor dear Margaret (certified ‘mental deficient’ maid, at times the humblest, most affectionate, quaintest little person you can imagine, but subject to fits of inexplicable anger and misery).

There is never any time when all these three women are in a good temper. When A is in B is out: and when C has just got over her resentment at B’s last rage and is ready to forgive, B is just ripe for the next, and so on!

But out of evil comes good. From praying anxiously for a little of God’s peace to communicate to them, I have been given more of it myself than I think I ever had before. Which is interesting. You don’t get it when you ask for yourself: want it for the sake of the others, you do . . .

TO THE SOCIETY FOR THE PREVENTION OF PROGRESS, OF WALNUT CREEK, CALIFORNIA: from Magdalen College (in reply to an offer of membership)

[May 1944]

While feeling that I was born a member of your Society, I am nevertheless honoured to receive the outward seal of membership. I shall hope by continued orthodoxy and the unremitting practice of Reaction, Obstruction, and Stagnation to give you no reason for repenting your favour.

I humbly submit that in my Riddell Lectures entitled The Abolition of Man you will find another work not all unworthy of consideration for admission to the canon.

Yours regressively . . .

[Ever since Jack began making any money from his religious writings, beginning with the serialisation of The Screwtape Letters in the now defunct Church newspaper The Guardian, he had it sent to destitute widows and others in need. He directed the BBC to send the fees paid for his broadcasts to a list of widows which he provided. Jack had no idea that he would have to pay tax on all this income until the Inland Revenue demanded it. At this time Owen Barfield was running his own legal firm in London and Jack turned to him for help. Mr Barfield set up a Charitable Trust, the ‘Agape Fund’ or ‘Agapany’, into which Jack hereafter paid two-thirds of his income from royalties for helping the poor.

During the summer of 1944 Jack had a piece of shell, received in the last war, removed from his chest. He thought it would be rather nice if the Inland Revenue paid for the operation.]

TO OWEN BARFIELD: from The Kilns

20 August [1944]

(1) Have you read Esmond lately? What a detestable woman is Lady Castlewood: and yet I believe Thackeray means us to like her on the ground that all her actions spring from ‘love’. This love is, in his language ‘pure’ i.e. it is not promiscuous or sensual. It is none the less a wholly uncorrected natural passion, idolatrous and insatiable. Was that the great 19th century heresy—that ‘pure’ or ‘noble’ passions didn’t need to be crucified & re-born but wd of themselves lead to happiness? Yet one sees it makes Lady C. disastrous both as a wife & a mother and is a source of misery to herself and all whom she meets. This is all irrelevant, but I’ve been reading Esmond all day and it rose to the surface.

(2) Yes: do come, you and Harwood, on Sept 1st. If we think College has had enough of the two we can dine at the Eastgate: less well, but perhaps more at our ease. (3) Thanks for dealing with Mrs Boshell and Mrs Askins [widows]. (4) Congratulations on recovering £237 for the Agapany. This is stupendous . . . (5) While Government is reeling under this blow, is it worth while trying to get them to pay for my operation on the ground that it was due to a wound?

(6) When you ask me to remember you in my prayers, it is like the Punch joke where the Doctor says to the patient (a colonel) ‘And I think I should recommend a glass of good nourishing wine once a day.’ Patient ‘Oh well—I’ve taken a bottle of port every night for twenty years, but I don’t mind trying to manage an extra glass if you like.’

I am v. sorry you are blue as a whortle-berry within. I feel what people feel when they say ‘I’d do anything to amend it’: which on closer introspection means, alas, ‘I dare to hope that, if the situation really arose, even my cowardice and selfishness wd not prevent me doing something.’ Blessings on you.

TO CHARLES A. BRADY: from Magdalen College (Professor Brady of Canisius College, Buffalo, New York, had sent Jack two articles entitled ‘Introduction to Lewis’ and ‘C. S. Lewis: II’ published in America, vol. 71 (27 May and 10 June 1944.)

29 October 1944

Obviously one ought never to thank a critic for praise: but perhaps one can congratulate a fellow scholar on the thoroughness of his work even if the subject of his work happens to be oneself. You are the first of my critics so far who has really read and understood all my books and ‘made up’ the subject in a way that makes you an authority. The results interest me of course because they flatter my vanity as an author. But there’s also an interest of another kind. Here is a man trying to do what all of our profession do, and by the same methods, in the one case where I happen to know already the answers to most of the questions: surely an ideal opportunity for learning something about the efficiency of the methods themselves! The result is encouraging. I have always been haunted by the fear that all our studies of the dead authors (who can’t up and protest when we go wrong) may, in spite of careful documentation etc, be quite wide of the mark: on the whole you set that at rest. The Quellenforschung is good.

Morris and Macdonald were more or less given you (Morris is more important than you suggest, I think) I admit, but you are the first to stress them properly. On the Tir-na’n-Og element, you hit the bull and might even have deduced much reading of the early Yates (worth twenty of the reconditioned 1920 model) and of James Stephens.

Space-and-time fiction, yes: but oddly enough not Rice-Burroughs. But this is probably a mere chance and the guess was a sound one. The real father of my planet book is David Lindsay’s Voyage to Arcturus, which you also will revel in if you don’t yet know it. I had grown up on Wells’s stories of that kind: it was Lindsay who first gave me the idea that the ‘scientifiction’ appeal could be combined with the ‘supernatural’ appeal—suggested the ‘cross’ (in biological sense). His own spiritual outlook is detestable, almost diabolist I think, and his style is crude: but he showed me what a bang you cd get from mixing these two elements.

R. H. Benson is wrong: at least I think the Dawn of All (the only one I can remember having read) never meant much to me. Chesterton, of course: but more, I think, on thought than on imagination. Rackham, yes: but having mentioned him you just missed tapping my whole Norse complex—Old Icelandic, Wagner’s Ring and (again) Morris. The Wagner is important: you will also see, if you look, how operatic the whole building up of the climax is in Perelandra. Milton I think you possibly over-rate: it is difficult to distinguish him from Dante & St Augustine. (Tinidril at her second appearance owes something to Matilda at the end of Purgatorio.)

When you talk about meetings of human races in connexion with Ransom and the Hrossa you say something that was not in my mind at all. So much the better: a book’s not worth writing unless it suggests more than the author intended.

The only place where, as it seems to me, your work contains a warning for us all is the bit based on the portrait. The whole thing depends upon the portrait’s being a good one. In fact it was drawn from a photo by a man who never saw me and, I’m told, is only just recognizable. Memo: let us both remember this the next time we’re writing about a 17th century or Elizabethan author and feel inclined to base anything on his portrait! It may not have been at all like him. (Why do we continue to assume that all portrait painters in the past were faithful tho’ experience in the present tells us that it is the rarest thing for even a good painter to produce a real likeness?)

Tolkien (and Charles Williams, whom I wish you’d do, specially his novels) is most important. The Hobbit is merely the adaptation to children of part of a huge private mythology of a most serious kind: the whole cosmic struggle as he sees it but mediated through an imaginary world. The Hobbit’s successor, which will soon be finished, will reveal this more clearly. Private worlds have hitherto been mainly the work of decadents or, at least, mere aesthetes. This is the private world of a Christian. He is a very great man. His published works (both imaginative & scholarly) ought to fill a shelf by now: but he’s one of those people who is never satisfied with a MS. The mere suggestion of publication provokes the reply ‘Yes. I’ll just look through it and give it a few finishing touches’—wh. means that he really begins the whole thing over again.

I have now had an orgy of talking about myself. But let me congratulate you again on your very thorough and perceptive piece of work. I need not, perhaps, add that if you ever come here our own little circle will make a red letter day of it. (By the way, port is usually drunk in common room, whereas oaks are sported in one’s own private rooms! But we’ll arrange port behind a sported oak for you if you like—though indeed beer and/or tea is our usual fare.) Tell me about yourself if you reply: I’m quite ignorant of modern American letters.

TO OWEN BARFIELD: from Magdalen College (about the death of Charles Williams on the 15th May 1945)

18 May 1945

Thanks for writing. It has been a very odd experience. This, the first really severe loss I have suffered, has (a) Given a corroboration to my belief in immortality such as I never dreamed of. It is almost tangible now. (b) Swept away all my old feelings of mere horror and disgust at funerals, coffins, graves etc. If need had been I think I cd have handled that corpse with hardly any unpleasant sensations. (c) Greatly reduced my feelings about ghosts. I think (but who knows?) that I shd be, tho afraid, more pleased than afraid, if his turned up. In fact, all v. curious. Great pain but no mere depression.

Dyson said to me yesterday that he thought what was true of Christ was, in its lower degree, true of all Christians—i.e. they go away to return in a closer form and it is expedient for us that they shd go away in order that they may do so. How foolish it is to imagine one can imaginatively foresee what any event will be like! ‘Local unique sting’ alright of course for I love him (I cannot say more) as much as you: and yet—a sort of brightness and tingling . . .

To put it in a nutshell—what the idea of death has done to him is nothing to what he has done to the idea of death. Hit it for six. Yet it used to rank as a fast bowler!

TO A FORMER PUPIL: from The Kilns

20 May 1945

I also have become much acquainted with grief now through the death of my great friend Charles Williams, my friend of friends, the comforter of all our little set, the most angelic man. The odd thing is that his death has made my faith stronger than it was a week ago. And I find that all that talk about ‘feeling that he is closer to us than before’ isn’t just talk. It’s just what it does feel like—I can’t put it into words. One seems at moments to be living in a new world. Lots, lots of pain, but not a particle of depression or resentment . . .

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

28 May 1945

I was intensely interested in the story of your healing of the little dog. I don’t see why one shouldn’t. Perhaps indeed those to whom God allows a gift in this way should confirm their own faith in it by practising on beasts for in one way they may be easier to heal than men. Although they cannot have faith in Him (I suppose) they certainly have faith in us, wh. is faith in Him at one remove: and there is no sin in them to impede or resist. I am glad it happened.

You will have heard of the death of my dearest friend, Charles Williams, and, no doubt, prayed for him. For me too, it has been, and is, a great loss. But not at all a dejecting one . . .

The title Who Goes Home? has had to be dropped because someone has used it already. The little book will be called The Great Divorce and will appear about August. That Hideous Strength is due in July. The Miracle book is finished but will not come out till next year.

Jane is up and down: very liable, I’m afraid, to fits of really bad jealousy—she can’t bear to see other people doing the work. Pray for her, dear Sister . . .

TO CECIL AND DAPHNE HARWOOD: from The Kilns (Cecil and his wife had each written to him about That Hideous Strength.)

11 September 1945

About Merlin, I don’t think it wd have made any difference if I did hold your views of the after-world. I mean, of course he wouldn’t be naif if he returned from my world any more than if he returned from yours. Whatever the normal status animarum post mortem may be, it is feigned that this one man was exempted from it and returned just as he was. (I know they don’t really: I was writing a story).

Re Jane, she wasn’t meant to illustrate the problem of the married woman and her own career in general: rather the problem of everyone who follows an imagined vocation at the expense of the real one. Perhaps I shd have emphasized more the fact that her thesis on Donne was all derivative bilge. If I’d been tackling the problem wh. Cecil thinks I had in mind, of course I’d have taken a woman capable of making a real contribution to literature.

I’m uncomfortably afraid Cecil is right (with MacPhee) about St Anne’s being rather like the House of Lords in Iolanthe. All reviewers so far (except Punch) have damned the book: comfortingly for different reasons—I mean it can hardly be bad in so many different ways as all that . . .

TO I. O. EVANS: from Magdalen College (about That Hideous Strength)

26 September 1945

I’m glad you recognized the N.I.C.E. as not being quite the fantastic absurdity some readers think. I hadn’t myself thought that any of the people in contemporary rackets were really dabbling in Magic: I had supposed that to be a romantic addition of my own. But there you are. The trouble about writing satire is that the real world always anticipates you, and what were meant for exaggerations turn out to be nothing of the sort.

About Merlin: I don’t know much more than you do. Apart from Malory (the Everyman edition and the Temple Classics are both complete) you will get something more in Geoffrey of Monmouth (Temple Classics), and Layamon (to be found in the Everyman volume entitled ‘Arthurian Chronicles from Wace to Layamon’). For Arthur in general see ‘Arthur of Britain’ by E. K. Chambers, Collingwood in Vol. 1 of Oxford History of England, and Vinaver’s ‘Malory’. But the blessing about Merlin (for you and me) is that ‘very little is known’—so we have a free hand!

TO MISS DOROTHY L. SAYERS: from Magdalen College

10 December 1945

Although you have so little time to write letters you are one of the great English letter writers. (Awful vision for you—‘It is often forgotten that Miss Sayers was known in her own day as an Author. We who have been familiar from childhood with the Letters can hardly realise! . . .) But I’m not.

No, Hopkins is not contributing to the volume [Essays Presented to Charles Williams]. A dear creature, though.

I’m all for little books on other subjects with the Christianity latent. I propounded this in the S.C.R. at Campion Hall and was told that it was ‘Jesuitical’. The Hall Porter at the ‘Bull’, Fairford, likes ‘The Man Born to be King’ (and of such is the kingdom). I’ve got to have a long talk with you about Socratic Clubs soon. In great haste.

TO A FRIEND (who was troubled about a younger woman’s unsuitable devotion): from Magdalen College

[1945?]

‘Frown not!’ . . .? We frown when we see a child too near a puddle: do we frown when we see it on the edge of a precipice (skeletons white on the rocks a thousand feet below)? . . .

I suppose it is all right, is it? I wish Charles Williams were alive: this was just his pigeon. His solution was, in a peculiar way, to teach ’em the ars amandi and then bestow them on other (younger) men. Sic vos non vobis. He was not only a lover himself but the cause that love was in other men.

But it’s a ticklish game. Perhaps I’m taking it all too seriously—but the world is growing chilly and I just couldn’t stand any serious miscarriage in your life. (‘Save yourself for my sake, Pickwick!’ said Mr Tupman.) I burn to explain to this young woman that a good many people have a concern in your happiness and Gad! she’d better mind what she’s about . . .

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

31 January 1946

I had meant to write to you before now, but life is very crowded. The rush of pupils returning from the forces makes Terms quite different from what they were in war time. By the way, the returning men are nice: far nicer than my generation were when we came out of the army—and a much higher percentage of Christians . . .

That Hideous Strength has been unanimously damned by all reviewers.

About Holst’s Planets, I heard Mars and Jupiter long ago and greatly admired them but have heard the complete work only within the last six weeks. But his characters are rather different from mine, I think. Wasn’t his Mars brutal and ferocious?—in mine I tried to get the good element in the martial spirit, the discipline and freedom from anxiety. On Jupiter I am closer to him: but I think his is more ‘jovial’ in the modern sense of the word. The folk tune on which he bases it is not regal enough for my conception. But of course there is a general similarity because we’re both following the medieval astrologers. His is, anyway, a rich and marvellous work.

Jane is up and down: some days miserable and jealous, at other times gentle and even jolly. We have two nice maids at present. My writing gets worse and worse, partly from rheumatism and partly from haste . . .

TO MISS DOROTHY L. SAYERS: from The Kilns

2 August 1946

I don’t think the difference between us comes where you think. Of course one mustn’t do dishonest work. But you seem to take as the criterion of honest work the sensible desire to write, the ‘itch’. That seems to me precious like making ‘being in love’ the only reason for going on with a marriage. In my experience the desire has no constant ratio to the value of the work done. My own frequent uneasiness comes from another source—the fact that apologetic work is so dangerous to one’s own faith. A doctrine never seems dimmer to me than when I have just successfully defended it. Anyway, thanks for an intensely interesting letter.

TO SISTER PENELOPE, C.S.M.V.: from Magdalen College (in reference to early rumours of actual travel in space)

21 October 1946

Yes, it is only too true. I begin to be afraid that the villains will really contaminate the moon.

TO MRS FRANK L. JONES: from Magdalen College

23 February 1947

(1) The doctrine that Our Lord was God and man does not mean that He was a human body which had God instead of the normal human soul. It means that a real man (human body and human soul) was in Him so united with the 2nd Person of the Trinity as to make one Person: just as in you and me a complete anthropoid animal (animal body and animal ‘soul’ i.e. instincts, sensations etc.) is so united with an immortal rational soul as to be one person. In other words, if the Divine Son had been removed from Jesus what wd have been left wd have been not a corpse but a living man.

(2) This human soul in Him was unswervingly united to the God in Him in that which makes a personality one, namely Will. But it had the feelings of any normal man: hence could be tempted, cd fear etc. Because of these feelings it could pray ‘If it be possible, let this cup pass from me’: because of its perfect union with His Divine Nature it unwaveringly answered ‘Nevertheless, not as I will but as thou wilt’. The Matthew passage and the John passage both make clear this unity of will. The Matthew one gives in addition the human feelings.

(3) God cd, had He pleased, have been incarnate in a man of iron nerves, the Stoic sort who lets no sigh escape him. Of His great humility He chose to be incarnate in a man of delicate sensibilities who wept at the grave of Lazarus and sweated blood in Gethsemane. Otherwise we should have missed the great lesson that it is by his will alone that a man is good or bad, and that feelings are not, in themselves, of any importance. We should also have missed the all important help of knowing that He has faced all that the weakest of us face, has shared not only the strength of our nature but every weakness of it except sin. If He had been incarnate in a man of immense natural courage, that wd have been for many of us almost the same as His not being incarnate at all.

(4) The prayer recorded in Matthew is much too short to be long enough for the disciples to go to sleep! They record the bit they heard before they fell asleep.

(5) It is probable that all the Gospels are based on acts and sayings wh. the disciples deliberately learned by heart: a much surer method even now than transmission by writing: still more so among people whose memories were uninfected by too many books and whose books were only MSS. But this is guess work. With all good wishes.

[P.S.] Keep clear of psychiatrists unless you know that they are also Christians. Otherwise they start with the assumption that your religion is an illusion and try to ‘cure’ it: and this assumption they make not as professional psychologists but as amateur philosophers. Often they have never given the question any serious thought.

TO MARTYN SKINNER: from Magdalen College

15 October 1947

I have just finished your admirable Letters [to Malaya] V wh. you kindly sent me more months ago than I care to remember. I think it is the best yet and full of plums . . . The smaller stabs of pleasure are too numerous to mention and on some pages almost continuous. I pick out for special loveliness the ‘open boat, the drifting grave’ and ‘each temple like a curl’. A beautiful book and terrible too for one, who shares (as I do) your apprehensions.

It wd be less terrifying if one cd really attribute the murder of beauty to any particular set of evil men; the trouble is that from man’s first and wholly legitimate attempt to win safety and ease from Nature it seems, step by step, to lead on quite logically to universal suburbia . . .

TO OWEN BARFIELD: from Magdalen College

16 December 1947

Yes, I did read your letter. You must bear with me. Things were never worse at The Kilns. W[arren] is away, so correspondence was never heavier in College. ‘Sleep hath forsook and giv’n me o’er.’ I hadn’t thought retirement at our age was quite like betrothal: nor how concrete the proposal was. It needs thinking of. In any case the professional job is in some degree a compulsory defence against, and alleviation of, the domestic. Take care. Where there is no office there may be no leisure at all . . .

Your essay is magnificent and I don’t know why you are disappointed with it. Tolkien thinks the same & has read it twice. His is v. good too. Mine thin. D. Sayers perhaps a trifle vulgar in places . . .

In haste—have wasted most of the morning (soon there will be no mornings) packing up a huge MS sent me unsolicited by a brutal stranger with a name like Van Tripe. Well, all’s one . . .

P.S. Of course the real trouble is within. All things wd be bearable if I were delivered from this internal storm (buffera infernal) of self-pity, rage, envy, terror, horror and general bilge!

TO OWEN BARFIELD: from The Kilns

22 December 1947

(This absurd notepaper is a present from an American.)

I already regret my last letter except in so far as it has produced such a valuable one from you. It was 2/3 temper and melodrama. Thus ‘Sleep has forsook and given me o’er’ meant ‘I have had one or two bad nights lately’ plus ‘Isn’t Samson Agonistes fine?’

There is no problem about vocation. Quite obviously one can’t leave an old semi-paralysed lady in a house alone for days or even hours: and the duty of looking after one’s people rests on us all and is common form.

The rage comes from impatientia in the strict theological sense: because one treats as an interruption of one’s (self-chosen) vocation the vocation actually imposed on one—regards the exam paper actually set as a distraction from the one you wd like to be doing. Anyway, Maureen is coming for Christmas and W. and I are going to Malvern . . .

Don’t imagine I didn’t pitch into C[harles] W[illiams] for all I was worth.

TO EDWARD A. ALLEN, OF WESTFIELD, MASSACHUSETTS: from Magdalen College (Mr Allen and his mother were two of the numerous Americans who sent Jack food and other gifts after the War.)

29 January 1948

I just don’t know what to say in answer to your letter of 23rd January. One, two, perhaps even three parcels can be inadequately, but not entirely unsuitably acknowledged, but what is one to say when bombarded with a non-stop stream of kindnesses? Nothing has in my time made such a profound impression in this country as the amazing outburst of individual American generosity, which has followed on the disclosure of our economic situation. (I say nothing of government action, because naturally this strikes the ‘man in the street’ much less obviously.) The length of time which a parcel takes to cross the Atlantic is a significant indication of the volume of food which must be pouring into England.

As regards the ‘Tuxedo’—‘dinner jacket’ here, ‘le smoking’ in Paris—if it doesn’t fit me, it will certainly fit one of my friends, and will save some grateful man a year’s clothing coupons: and at least £25 cash.

As regards things to send—don’t send any of that sixty-six million tons of snow, thanks very much! We still shudder when we think of last winter. A packet or two of envelopes are almost always welcome; a small thing, but the constant shortage of them becomes very irritating to a busy man after a time. With heartiest thanks for all your great kindness, and best good wishes.

TO MISS VERA MATHEWS: from Magdalen College (another American benefactor)

7 February 1948

How lovely! Bacon, tea, shortening, what not—and again. A thousand thanks. Typing expert is away, as you see, and me hardly able to write legibly. But (if you can make it out) believe me our hearts are very warm and we enjoy the kindness and friendship as well as its tangible (and chew-able) results. I really hardly know how to say what I feel; thank you again and again.

TO EDWARD A. ALLEN: from Magdalen College

29 May 1948

So once more I have to send you my inadequate, but very sincere thanks, not only for the ‘tuxedo’, but for the impending food parcel . . . The extent to which your folk have come to our rescue is amazing, and moving; I knew in a general way of course that very large quantities of gift food, clothing etc. were coming into Britain, but I was none the less surprised to read in a recent debate in the House of Lords that every household in the kingdom benefits by American aid to the tune of £1–0–0 a week, and has done so for the past two years. You may well be proud of yourselves . . .

‘Just what a Don does?’ Like a woman, his work is never done. Taking ‘tutorials’ occupies the best part of his day, i.e. pupils come in pairs, read essays to him, then follows criticism, discussion etc: then he gives public lectures in his own subject; takes his share in the business of managing the College; prepares his lectures and writes books; and in his spare time stands in queues.

I trust our meeting will not be postponed until the hereafter; why not take a trip over here and distribute some dollars among our hard working and deserving innkeepers? . . .

TO JOHN WAIN: from Magdalen College

6 November 1948

I am wondering whether you have thought of applying for the tutorial fellowship in English at New College? I understand (this is of course strictly confidential) that they have a strong candidate who is an old New College man but they are not settled to elect him, i.e. if a definitely stronger candidate puts in they will elect that candidate. I know you are well thought of by D. C., it is therefore possible that you might be the stronger candidate if you applied. If you were out of a job of course it wd be obvious that you shd try for this. As things are, I don’t know if you will wish to or not. I shall never be satisfied myself until you are at Oxford: and this job wd no doubt be better paid than your present one. On the other hand it wd probably mean more work and of course, house-hunting. I don’t know that I cd add anything by writing at greater length. Think it over for twenty-four hours and let me know.

TO OWEN BARFIELD: from Magdalen College

10 November 1948

I wonder whether what you say about depressions does not really mark an advance in self criticism and objectivity—i.e. that the very same experiences wh. wd once have led you to say ‘How nasty everyone (or the weather, or the political situation) is at present’ now leads you to say ‘I am depressed’—a Copernican revolution revealing as motion in the self what in ones more naif period was mistaken for motion in the Cosmos. (True, your last letter shows some decline in your critical powers: but we have all been warned that an inability to appreciate new poetry comes with years!) But I’m serious about the other suggestion.

I also will soon be fifty. Just the twenty years more now! A happy birthday to you. If the knowledge that for some twenty-five years you have been always food (and often physic as well) to my mind and heart can contribute to it, well it is so.

TO DR WARFIELD M. FIROR, OF BALTIMORE, MARYLAND: from Magdalen College (Dr Firor was particularly generous in sending Jack hams.)

22 January 1949

Your bounty (see Anthony and Cleopatra) ‘an autumn is that grows the more by reaping’. Only yesterday I said to myself, How I should like to see America if only one could see the quiet parts of it, and not the cities—things which in every country interest me only if I want to hear an opera or buy a book! And you anticipated me.

But it’s all impossible. An old invalid ties me to home. Absence in the afternoon, even for one day, has to be carefully planned ahead. So a visit to another continent is as impossible to me as one to the Moon. Oh what a pity! To think that I might as your guest have seen bears, beavers, Indians, and mountains! How did you know what I wanted?

Meanwhile, the only chance of meeting is that you should visit this island prison. To all my set you are by now an almost mythical person—Firor-of-the-Hams, a sort of Fertility god.

TO I. O. EVANS: from Magdalen College

28 February 1949

I’m with you on the main issue—that art can teach (and much great art deliberately set out to do so) without at all ceasing to be art. On the particular case of Wells I wd agree with Burke, because in Wells it seems to me that one had first class pure fantasy (Time Machine, First Men in the Moon) and third class didacticism: i.e. I object to his novels with a purpose not because they have a purpose but because I think them bad. Just as I object to the preaching passages in Thackeray not because I dislike sermons but because I dislike bad sermons. To me, therefore, Wells & Thackeray are instances that obscure the issue. It must be fought on books where the doctrine is as good on its own merits as the art—e.g. Bunyan, Chesterton (as you agree), Tolstoi, Charles Williams, Virgil.

TO SARAH (a goddaughter): from The Kilns

3 April 1949

I am sorry to say that I don’t think I shall be able to be at your confirmation on Saturday. For most men Saturday afternoon is a free time, but I have an invalid lady to look after and the weekend is the time when I have no freedom at all, and have to try to be Nurse, Kennel-Maid, Wood-cutter, Butler, House-maid and Secretary all in one. I had hoped that if the old lady were a little better than usual and if all the other people in the house were in good tempers I might be able to get away next Saturday. But the old lady is a good deal worse than usual and most of the people in the house are in bad tempers. So I must ‘stick to the ship’.

If I had come and we had met, I am afraid you might have found me very shy and dull. (By the way, always remember that old people can be quite as shy with young people as young people can be with old. This explains what must seem to you the idiotic way in which so many grown-ups talk to you.) But I will try to do what I can by a letter.

I think of myself as having to be two people for you. (1) The real, serious, Christian godfather (2) The fairy godfather. As regards (2) I enclose a bit of the only magic (a very dull kind) which I can work. Your mother will know how to deal with the spell. I think it will mean one or two, or even five, pounds for you now, to get things you want, and the rest in the Bank for future use. As I say, it is a dull kind of magic and a really good godfather (of type 2) would do something much more interesting: but it is the best an old bachelor can think of, and it is with my love.

As for No 1, the serious Christian godfather, I feel very unfit for the work—just as you, I dare say, may feel very unfit for being confirmed and for receiving the Holy Communion. But then an angel would not be really fit and we must all do the best we can. So I suppose I must try to give you advice. And the bit of advice that comes into my head is this: don’t expect (I mean, don’t count on and don’t demand) that when you are confirmed, or when you make your first Communion, you will have all the feelings you would like to have. You may, of course: but also you may not. But don’t worry if you don’t get them. They aren’t what matter. The things that are happening to you are quite real things whether you feel as you wd wish or not, just as a meal will do a hungry person good even if he has a cold in the head which will rather spoil the taste. Our Lord will give us right feelings if He wishes—and then we must say Thank you. If He doesn’t, then we must say to ourselves (and Him) that He knows best. This, by the way, is one of the very few subjects on which I feel I do know something. For years after I had become a regular communicant I can’t tell you how dull my feelings were and how my attention wandered at the most important moments. It is only in the last year or two that things have begun to come right—which just shows how important it is to keep on doing what you are told.

Oh—I’d nearly forgotten—I have one other piece of advice. Remember that there are only three kinds of things anyone need ever do. (1) Things we ought to do (2) Things we’ve got to do (3) Things we like doing. I say this because some people seem to spend so much of their time doing things for none of the three reasons, things like reading books they don’t like because other people read them. Things you ought to do are things like doing one’s school work or being nice to people. Things one has got to do are things like dressing and undressing, or household shopping. Things one likes doing—but of course I don’t know what you like. Perhaps you’ll write and tell me one day.

Of course I always mention you in my prayers and will most especially on Saturday. Do the same for me.

TO OWEN BARFIELD: from The Kilns (with allusion to some very unpleasant characters in his science fiction trilogy)

4 April 1949

Did I ever mention that Weston, Devine, Frost, Wither, Curry, and Miss Hardcastle were all portraits of you? (If I didn’t, that may have been because it isn’t true. By gum, though, wait until I write another story.)

Plus aux bois? We will, Oscar, we will.

Henry 7th had some mastiffs hanged for fighting a Lion: said, they were rebelling against their natural sovereigne. That’s the stuff. Also, had his own hawk decapitated for fighting an eagle.

Talking of beasts and birds, have you ever noticed this contrast: that when you read a scientific account of any animal’s life you get an impression of laborious, incessant, almost rational economic activity (as if all animals were Germans), but when you study any animal you know, what at once strikes you is their cheerful fatuity, the pointlessness of nearly all they do. Say what you like, Barfield, the world is sillier and better fun than they make out . . .

TO MISS BRECKENRIDGE: from Magdalen College

1 August 1949

Don’t bother about the idea that God ‘has known for millions of years exactly what you are about to pray’. That isn’t what it’s like. God is hearing you now, just as simply as a mother hears a child. The difference His timelessness makes is that this now (which slips away from you even as you say the word now) is for Him infinite. If you must think of His timelessness at all, don’t think of Him having looked forward to this moment for millions of years: think that to Him you are always praying this prayer. But there’s really no need to bring it in. You have gone into the Temple (‘one day in Thy court is better than a thousand’) and found Him, as always, there. That is all you need to bother about.

There is no relation of any importance between the Fall and Evolution. The doctrine of Evolution is that organisms have changed, sometimes for what we call (biologically) the better . . . quite often for what we call (biologically) the worse . . . The doctrine of the Fall is that at one particular point one species, Man, tumbled down a moral cliff. There is neither opposition nor support between the two doctrines . . . Evolution is not only not a doctrine of moral improvements, but of biological changes, some improvements, some deteriorations . . .

TO MRS EDWARD A. ALLEN: from Magdalen College

16 August 1949

I shd think I do like salt water and in all its forms; from a walk on the beach in winter when there is not a soul in sight, or seen washing past (rather like beaten copper) from the deck of a ship, or knocking one head over heels in great green, ginger-beer-coloured waves. I grew up close to it, but there’s no chance of getting there now. On the other hand I have discovered the joys of shallow river bathing . . . It is like bathing in light rather than in water; and having walked for miles, you can drink it at the same time . . . We also are in a drought and heat wave . . .

P.S. C is for CLIVE—no connection with the iniquitous Anglo-Indian of that name.

TO ‘MRS LOCKLEY’: from Magdalen College (‘Mrs Lockley’s’ husband had taken a mistress.)

2 September 1949

Apparently I was mistaken in thinking that to condone the infidelity and submit to the arrangement your husband suggests would be wrong. My adviser of course says that it is impossible to him to ‘give a fair ruling without knowing more of the parties’. But with that reservation he suggests (1) Mrs A. shd refuse to have intercourse with her husband, otherwise carry on, completely ignoring the mistress. (2) Mr A. must never mention the mistress in his house nor when he has seen her, nor shd he let Mrs A. or anyone else have any suspicion when or where he meets the mistress. I can’t myself quite see the point of No. 2, and I take it that anyway it is impracticable . . .

On the actual practical arrangements I don’t feel that I—an elderly bachelor and the most amateurish of theologians—can be useful. Where I might help, on the internal and spiritual problems for yourself, you obviously do not need my help. All the things I would have said to most women in your position (about charity, submission to God’s will, and the poisonous nature of indulged jealousy, however just the case) you clearly know already. I don’t think it can do you any harm to know that you have these graces, provided you know that they are Graces, gifts from the Holy Spirit, and not your own merits. God, who foresaw your tribulation, has specially armed you to go through it, not without pain but without stain; not a case of ‘tempering the wind to the shorn lamb’ but of giving the lamb a coat proportional to the wind. On all that side you have only to go on as you are doing. And you certainly needn’t worry at all about there being any material for psychotherapy in you . . .

One point in your story looms large in my mind—the fatal consequences of your husband’s lack of faith in you when he did not get those letters. For this is just how we also might desert God. If nothing, or nothing we recognise comes through, we imagine He has let us down and reject Him, perhaps at the very moment when help was on its way. No doubt your husband may have been readier to desert you because a quite different temptation had already begun. But then that applies to the God-Man situation also . . .

TO ‘MRS LOCKLEY’: from Magdalen College

6 September 1949

Telling these things to someone you approach as a consultant is no more disloyalty than revealing one’s body to a doctor is indecent exposure. With a trained confessor this, as it were, disinfectant situation would be even more so.

I don’t think the arrangement the old man suggested is ‘dishonest’. I think his advice turns on the fine but important distinction between enduring a situation which is some one else’s fault and sanctioning it in a way wh. makes one an accessory. After all, your husband has no right to have it both ways and you have no duty (or right) to make him feel as if he had. It wd do him no harm to realise that this affair is just as much adultery as if it were ‘furtive visits to a prostitute’ . . .

TO ‘MRS LOCKLEY’: from Magdalen College

12? September 1949

I don’t think your objection to ‘setting yourself up as a judge’ is cowardly. It may spring from the fact that you are the injured party and have a v. proper conviction that the plaintiff cannot also be on the Bench. I also quite realise that he didn’t feel the sin as a Christian wd: but he must, as a man, feel the dishonour of breaking a promise. After all constancy in love thunders at him from every love-song in the world, quite apart from our mystical conception of marriage . . .

As you say, the thing is to rely only on God. The time will come when you will regard all this misery as a small price to pay for having been brought to the dependence. Meanwhile (don’t I know) the trouble is that relying on God has to begin all over again every day as if nothing had yet been done . . .

The reason why I am saddled with many people’s troubles is, I think, that I have no natural curiosity about private lives and am therefore a good subject. To anyone who (in that sense) enjoyed it, it wd be a dangerous poison.

TO ‘MRS LOCKLEY’: from Magdalen College

22 September 1949

The intellectual problem (why some children lose one or both parents in this way and other ways) is no harder than the problem why some women lose their husbands. In each case, no doubt what we regard as a mere hideous interruption and curtailment of life is really the data, the concrete situation on which life is to be built . . . When the data are of the kind we naturally like (wealth, health, good fathers or husbands) of course we tend not to notice that they are data or limitations at all. But we’re told that they are: and what seem to us the easiest conditions may really be the hardest (‘How hardly shall they that have riches’ etc.) . . .

TO ‘MRS LOCKLEY’: from Magdalen College

27 September 1949

Yes, yes, I know. The moment one asks oneself ‘Do I believe?’ all belief seems to go. I think this is because one is trying to turn round and look at something which is there to be used and work from—trying to take out one’s eyes instead of keeping them in the right place and seeing with them. I find that it happens about other matters as well as faith. In my experience only v. robust pleasures will stand the question, ‘Am I really enjoying this?’ Or attention—the moment I begin thinking about my attention (to a book or a lecture) I have ipso facto ceased attending. St Paul speaks of ‘Faith actualized in Love’. And ‘the heart is deceitful’: you know better than I how very unreliable introspection is. I shd be much more alarmed about your progress if you wrote claiming to be overflowing with Faith, Hope and Charity.

TO DR WARFIELD M. FIROR: from Magdalen College (Dr Firor had come over to visit Jack in the summer of 1949.)

15 October 1949

To-day the less pleasant side of Autumn has showed itself for the first time. Up till now it has been paradisal, the sort of weather which for some reason excites me much more than spring: cool, cobwebby mornings developing into the mildest sunlight, and exquisite colours in the woods. It always gives me Wanderlust & ‘divine discontent’ and all that. To-day we have had a low, dirty, smoke-coloured sky racing overhead and a steady down-pour. That, however, has no causal connection (chronology proves it) with the subject that is uppermost in my mind and has been for some days: Old Age.

You are a bit further on the road than I am and will probably smile at a man whose fifty-first birthday is still several weeks ahead starting his meditation de senectute. Yet why? The realisation must begin sometime. In one way, of course (no, in two) it began much earlier (1) With the growing realisation that there were a great many things one wd never have time to do. Those golden days when one could still think it possible that one might some time take up a quite new study: say Persian, or Geology, were now definitely over. (2) Harder to express. I mean, the end of that period when every goal, besides being itself, was an earnest or promise of much more to come. Like a pretty girl at her first dance: valued not chiefly for itself but as the prelude to a whole new world. Do you remember the time when every pleasure (say, the smell of a hayfield or a country walk, or a swim) was big with futurity and bore on its face the notice ‘Lots more where I came from’? Well, there’s a change from that to the period when they all begin to say ‘Make the most of me: my predecessors outnumber my successors’.

Both these two feelings—the twitch of the tether and the loss of promise I have had for a long time. What has come lately is much harsher—the arctic wind of the future catching one, so to speak, at a corner. The particular corner was the sharp realisation that I shall be compulsorily ‘retired’ in 1959, and the infernal nuisance (to put it no higher) of patching up some new sort of life somewhere. You will not suppose I am putting these things as lamentations: that, to a man older than oneself, wd be very odd. They are merely the data. (Add, of course, among them, the probable loss of friends, especially if, like me, one has the imprudent habit of making more friends among one’s seniors than among one’s juniors.) And as usual, the result of all this (wd you agree?) is almost entirely good.

Have you ever thought what it wd be like if (all other things remaining as they are) old age and death had been made optional? All other things remaining: i.e. it wd still be true that our real destiny was elsewhere, that we have no abiding city here and no true happiness, but the un-hitching from this life was left to be accomplished by our own will as an act of obedience & faith. I suppose the percentage of di-ers wd be about the same as the percentage of Trappists is now.

I am therefore (with some help from the weather and rheumatism!) trying to profit by this new realisation of my mortality. To begin to die, to loosen a few of the tentacles which the octopus-world has fastened on one. But of course it is continuings, not beginnings, that are the point. A good night’s sleep, a sunny morning, a success with my next book—any of these will, I know, alter the whole thing. Which alteration, by the bye, being in reality a relapse from partial waking into the old stupor, wd nevertheless be regarded by most people as a returning to health from a ‘morbid’ mood!

Well, it’s certainly not that. But it is a very partial waking. One ought not to need the gloomy moments of life for beginning detachment, nor be re-entangled by the bright ones. One ought to be able to enjoy the bright ones to the full and at that very moment have the perfect readiness to leave them, confident that what calls one away is better . . .

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