1950–1959

1950–1959

TO SARAH (a goddaughter): from Magdalen College

[9 January 1950]

I’m just back from a weekend at Malvern and found an awful pile of letters awaiting me, so I am scribbling in haste. But I must tell you what I saw in a field—one young pig cross the field with a great big bundle of hay in its mouth and deliberately lay it down at the feet of an old pig. I could hardly believe my eyes. I’m sorry to say the old pig didn’t take the slightest notice. Perhaps it couldn’t believe its eyes either . . .

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

12 January 1950

All good wishes for St Bernard. My book with Professor Tolkien—any book in collaboration with that great but dilatory and unmethodical man—is dated, I fear, to appear on the Greek Kalends! . . .

Term begins on Sat. and there is a cruel mail to-day, so I must stop. And pray for me: I am suffering incessant temptations to uncharitable thoughts at present: one of those black moods in which nearly all one’s friends seem to be selfish or even false. And how terrible that there shd be even a kind of pleasure in thinking evil. A ‘mixed pleasure’ as Plato wd say, like scratching!

TO SISTER MARY ROSE: from Magdalen College

[ January 1950]

I am sorry if I misunderstood your letter: and I think that you misunderstood mine. What I meant was that if I replied to your original question (why I am not a member of the Roman Church) I shd have to write a v. long letter. It would of course be answerable: and your answer would be answerable by me . . . and so on. The resulting correspondence would certainly not, of course, be in excess of the importance of the subject: but haven’t you and I both probably more pressing duties? For a real correspondence on such a subject wd be nearly a wholetime job. I thought we cd both discuss the matter more usefully with people nearer at hand. Even the two letters which we have exchanged have already revealed the pitfalls of argument by letter. With all good wishes.

TO ARTHUR GREEVES: from Magdalen College

2 May 1950

Once again the axe has fallen. Minto was removed to a Nursing Home last Saturday and her Doctor thinks this arrangement will probably have to be permanent. In one way it will be an enormous liberation for me. The other side of the picture is the crushing expense—ten guineas a week wh. is well over £500 a year. (What on earth I shall do if poor Minto is still alive nine years hence when I have to retire, I can’t imagine.) The order of the day thus becomes for me stringent economy and such things as a holiday in Ireland are fantastically out of the question. So cancel all. I hardly know how I feel—relief, pity, hope, terror, & bewilderment have me in a whirl. I have the jitters! God bless you. Pray for me.

[ Jack’s problems had been mounting for a long time. Mrs Moore had become, in the course of time, old and ill. On 29 April she was moved into ‘Restholme’ in 230 Woodstock Road, Oxford. Unfortunately, Jack had not always been able to count on Warren being around to help with Mrs Moore and his vast correspondence. For some time now Warren had been going on alcoholic binges, and he sometimes needed more vigilant nursing than Mrs Moore. The last time Jack had been able to see Arthur was in 1947 when he had to go to Ireland to see Warren who had become ill over there from alcoholic poisoning. Overworked and tired, Jack became so ill in the summer of 1949 that he had to spend a week in the hospital. Dr Havard ordered a month’s rest, and Jack planned to spend it in Ireland with Arthur. Before he could escape Warren was drinking again and Jack could not leave. And so it went on.

Unbelievably—but yet it’s true—Jack wrote what might be his most enduring books in 1949 and the three years that followed. Encouraged by his friend Roger Lancelyn Green, he wrote most of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950) in March–April 1949. Prince Caspian (1951) and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (1952) were completed by the end of February 1950. Before the year was out he had written The Silver Chair (1953), The Horse and His Boy (1954) and made a start on The Magician’s Nephew (1955). The Last Battle was written in 1953.]

TO MRS HALMBACHER: from Magdalen College

28 November 1950

I avoided the word ‘Grace’ because I thought it didn’t carry much clear meaning to the uninstructed readers I had in view. I think the thing is dealt with in a rough and ready way in Case for Christianity and Beyond Personality. Any advanced or technical theology of Grace was quite beyond my scope. Naturally that does not mean that I thought the subject unimportant.

The other question, about the limits of faith and superstition, is also important. But my own mind is v. far from clear on it. I think you must seek counsel (if it is a practical problem for you) from a real theologian, not from an amateur like me. I am sorry to disappoint you: but it is better to refuse than to mislead.

TO ‘MRS ARNOLD’: from Magdalen College

7 December 1950

(1) To the best of my knowledge the Episcopalian Church in America is exactly the same as the Anglican Church.

(2) The only rite which we know to have been instituted by Our Lord Himself is the Holy Communion (‘Do this in remembrance of me.’ ‘If ye do not eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, ye have no life in you.’) This is an order and must be obeyed. The other services are, I take it, traditional and might lawfully be altered. But the New Testament does not envisage solitary religion: some kind of regular assembly for worship and instruction is everywhere taken for granted in the Epistles. So we must be regular practising members of the Church.

Of course we differ in temperament. Some (like you—and me) find it more natural to approach God in solitude: but we must go to church as well. For the Church is not a human society of people united by their natural affinities but the Body of Christ, in which all members, however different (and He rejoices in their differences and by no means wishes to iron them out) must share the common life, complementing and helping one another precisely by their differences. (Re-read 1st Corinthians Chap. 12 and meditate on it. The word translated members wd perhaps be better translated organs.) If people like you and me find much that we don’t naturally like in the public and corporate side of Christianity all the better for us: it will teach us humility and charity towards simple lowbrow people who may be better Christians than ourselves. I naturally loathe nearly all hymns: the face and life of the charwoman in the next pew who revels in them teach me that good taste in poetry or music are not necessary to salvation.

(3) I am not clear what question you are asking me about spiritual healing. That this gift was promised to the Church is certain from Scripture. Whether any instance of it is a real instance, or chance, or even (as might happen in this wicked world) fraud, is a question only to be decided by the evidence in that particular case. And unless one is a doctor one is not likely to be able to judge the evidence. V. often I expect, one is not called upon to do so. Anything like a sudden furore about it in one district, especially if accompanied by a publicity campaign on modern commercial lines, would be to me suspect: but even then I might be wrong. On the whole my attitude wd be that any claim may be true, and that it is not my duty to decide if it is.

(4) ‘Regular but cool’ in Church attendance is no bad symptom. Obedience is the key to all doors: feelings come (or don’t come) and go as God pleases. We can’t produce them at will, and mustn’t try.

TO MRS EDWARD A. ALLEN: from Magdalen College

28 December 1950

In term time I have my meals in College, including a free dinner, which has from time immemorial been part of the stipend of a tutor. My brother takes a snack in town in the middle of the day—usually something he has bought on the way in—and has the rest of his meals out at the house; he keeps a very sharp eye on my, or perhaps I should say your parcels, and abstracts anything likely to be useful for his lunches, justifying his peculations by quoting that ‘the labourer is worthy of his hire’ . . .

The whole question of the atomic bomb is a very difficult one; the Sunday after the news of the dropping of the first one came through, our minister asked us all to join in prayer for forgiveness for the great crime of using it. But, if what we have since heard is true, i.e. that the first item on the Japanese anti-invasion programme was the killing of every European in Japan, the answer did not, to me, seem so simple as all that . . .

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

30 December 1950

Our state is thus: my ‘mother’ has had to retire permanently into a Nursing Home. She is in no pain but her mind has almost completely gone. What traces of it remain seem gentler and more placid than I have known it for years. Her appetite is, oddly, enormous. I visit her, normally, every day, and am divided between a (rational?) feeling that this process of gradual withdrawal is merciful and even beautiful, and a quite different feeling (it comes out in my dreams) of horror.

There is no denying—and I don’t know why I should deny to you—that our domestic life is both more physically comfortable and more psychologically harmonious for her absence. The expense is of course v. severe and I have worries about that. But it wd be v. dangerous to have no worries—or rather, no occasion of worry. I have been feeling that v. much lately: that cheerful insecurity is what Our Lord asks of us. Thus one comes, late & surprised, to the simplest & earliest Christian lessons! . . .

TO ‘MRS ARNOLD’: from Magdalen College

5 January 1951

Whether any individual Christian who attempts Faith Healing is prompted by genuine faith and charity or by spiritual pride is I take it a question we cannot decide. That is between God and him. Whether the cure occurs in any given case is clearly a question for the doctors. I am speaking now of healing by some act such as anointing or laying on of hands. Praying for the sick, i.e. praying simply, without any overt act, is unquestionably right and indeed we are commanded to pray for all men. And of course your prayers can do real good. Needless to say they don’t do it either as a medicine does or as magic is supposed to do, i.e. automatically. Prayer is a request . . . One cannot establish the efficacy of prayer by statistics . . . It remains a matter of faith and of God’s personal action; it would become a matter of demonstration only if it were impersonal or mechanical. When I say ‘personal’ I do not mean private or individual. All our prayers are united with Christ’s perpetual prayer and are part of the Church’s prayer. (In praying for people one dislikes I find it helpful to remember that one is joining in His prayer for them.)

TO MISS RUTH PITTER: from Magdalen College

6 January 1951

What is the point of keeping in touch with the contemporary scene? Why should one read authors one doesn’t like because they happen to be alive at the same time as oneself? One might as well read everyone who had the same job or the same coloured hair, or the same income, or the same chest measurements, as far as I can see. I whistle, and plunge into the tunnel of term.

[Mrs Moore died at ‘Restholme’ on 12 January.]

TO ‘MRS ARNOLD’: from Magdalen College

7 February 1951

If ‘planning’ is taken in the literal sense of thinking before one acts and acting on what one has thought out to the best of one’s ability, then of course planning is simply the traditional virtue of Prudence and not only compatible with, but demanded by, Christian ethics. But if the word is used (as I think you use it) to mean some particular politico-social programme, then one cd only say after examining that programme in detail . . . Where benevolent planning, armed with political or economic power, becomes wicked is when it tramples on people’s rights for the sake of their good . . .

TO ‘MRS LOCKLEY’: from Magdalen College

5 March 1951

How right you are: the great thing is to stop thinking about happiness. Indeed the best thing about happiness itself is that it liberates you from thinking about happiness—as the greatest pleasure that money can give us is to make it unnecessary to think about money. And one sees why we have to be taught the ‘not thinking’ when we lack as well as when we have. And I’m sure that, as you say, you will ‘get through somehow in the end’. Here is one of the fruits of unhappiness: that it forces us to think of life as something to go through. And out at the other end. If only we could steadfastly do that while we are happy, I suppose we shd need no misfortunes. It is hard on God really. To how few of us He dare send happiness because He knows we will forget Him if He gave us any sort of nice things for the moment . . .

I do get that sudden feeling that the whole thing is hocus pocus and it now worries me hardly at all. Surely the mechanism is quite simple? Sceptical, incredulous, materialistic ruts have been deeply engraved in our thought, perhaps even in our physical brains by all of our earlier lives. At the slightest jerk our thought will flow down those old ruts. And notice when the jerks come. Usually at the precise moment when we might receive Grace. And if you were a devil would you not give the jerk just at those moments? I think that all Christians have found that he is v. active near the altar or on the eve of conversion: worldly anxieties, physical discomforts, lascivious fancies, doubt, are often poured in at such junctures . . . But the Grace is not frustrated. One gets more by pressing steadily on through these interruptions than on occasions when all goes smoothly . . .

I am glad you all liked ‘The Lion’ [the Witch and the Wardrobe]. A number of mothers, and still more, schoolmistresses, have decided that it is likely to frighten children, so it is not selling very well. But the real children like it, and I am astonished how some very young ones seem to understand it. I think it frightens some adults, but v. few children . . .

TO MRS HALMBACHER: from Magdalen College

[March 1951]

The question for me (naturally) is not ‘Why should I not be a Roman Catholic?’ but ‘Why should I?’ But I don’t like discussing such matters, because it emphasises differences and endangers charity. By the time I had really explained my objection to certain doctrines which differentiate you from us (and also in my opinion from the Apostolic and even the Medieval Church), you would like me less.

TO MISS VERA MATHEWS: from Magdalen College

27 March 1951

I have just got your letter of the 22nd containing the sad news of your father’s death. But, dear lady, I hope you and your mother are not really trying to pretend it didn’t happen. It does happen, happens to all of us, and I have no patience with the high-minded people who make out that it ‘doesn’t matter’. It matters a great deal, and very solemnly. And for those who are left, the pain is not the whole thing. I feel v. strongly (and I am not alone in this) that some great good comes from the dead to the living in the months or weeks after the death. I think I was much helped by my own father after his death: as if Our Lord welcomed the newly dead with the gift of some power to bless those they have left behind . . . Certainly they often seem just at that time to be very near us . . .

TO SHELDON VANAUKEN: from Magdalen College (after becoming a Christian)

17 April 1951

My prayers are answered. No: a glimpse is not a vision. But to a man on a mountain road by night, a glimpse of the next three feet of road may matter more than a vision of the horizon. And there must perhaps always be just enough lack of demonstrative certainty to make free choice possible; for what could we do but accept if the faith were like the multiplication table?

There will be a counter attack on you, you know, so don’t be too alarmed when it comes. The enemy will not see you vanish into God’s company without an effort to reclaim you. Be busy learning to pray and (if you have made up yr mind on the denominational question) get confirmed. Blessings on you and a hundred thousand welcomes. Make use of me in any way you please: and let us pray for each other always.

TO MISS BRECKENRIDGE: from Magdalen College

19 April 1951

I think that if God forgives us we must forgive ourselves. Otherwise it is almost like setting up ourselves as a higher tribunal than Him.

Many religious people, I’m told, have physical symptoms like the ‘prickles’ in the shoulder. But the best mystics set no value on that sort of thing, and do not set much on visions either. What they seek and get is, I believe, a kind of direct experience of God, immediate as a taste or colour. There is no reasoning in it, but many would say that it is an experience of the intellect—the reason resting in it’s enjoyment of its object . . .

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

23 April 1951

A succession of illnesses and a holiday in Ireland have so far kept me from tackling Lubac. The Prelude has accompanied me through all the stages of my pilgrimage: it and the Aeneid (which I never feel you value sufficiently) are the two long poems to wh. I most often return.

The tension you speak of (if it is a tension) between doing full & generous justice to the Natural while also paying unconditional & humble obedience to the Supernatural is to me an absolute key position. I have no use for mere either-or people (except, of course, in that last resort, when the choice, the plucking out the right eye, is upon us: as it is in some mode, every day. But even then a man needn’t abuse & blackguard his right eye. It was a good creature: it is my fault, not its, that I have got myself into a state wh. necessitates jettisoning it).

The reason I doubt whether it is, in principle, even a tension is that, as it seems to me, the subordination of Nature is demanded if only in the interests of Nature herself. All the beauty of nature withers when we try to make it an absolute. Put first things first and we get second things thrown in: put second things first & we lose both first and second things. We never get, say, even the sensual pleasure of food at its best when we are being greedy.

As to Man being in ‘evolution’, I agree, tho’ I wd rather say ‘in process of being created’.

I am not nearer to your Church than I was but don’t feel v. inclined to re-open a discussion. I think it only widens & sharpens differences. Also, I’ve had enough of it on the opposite flank lately, having fallen among—a new type to me—bigoted & proselytizing Quakers! I really think that in our days it is the ‘undogmatic’ & ‘liberal’ people who call themselves Christians that are most arrogant & intolerant. I expect justice & even courtesy from many Atheists and, much more, from your people: from Modernists, I have come to take bitterness and rancour as a matter of course . . .

TO ‘MRS ARNOLD’: from Magdalen College

25 May 1951

About loving one’s country, you raise two different questions . . . About there seeming to be (now) no reason for loving it, I’m not at all bothered. As Macdonald says, ‘No one loves because he sees reason, but because he loves.’ Surely, where we love, the very faults and blemishes of the object are a spur to love more? Or say there are two kinds of love: we love wise and kind and beautiful people because we need them, but we love (or try to love) stupid and disagreeable people because they need us. This second kind is the more divine because that is how God loves us: not because we are loveable but because He is love, not because He needs to receive but because He delights to give.

But the other question (what one is loving in loving a country) I do find v. difficult. What I feel sure of is that the personifications used by journalists and politicians have v. little reality. A treaty between the govts of two countries is not like a friendship between two people: more like a transaction between two people’s lawyers.

I think love for one’s country means chiefly love for people who have a good deal in common with oneself (language, clothes, institutions) and in that is very like love of one’s family or school: or like love (in a strange place) for anyone who once lived in one’s home town. The familiar is in itself ground for affection. And it is good, because any natural help towards our spiritual duty of loving is good and God seems to build our higher loves round our merely natural impulses—sex, maternity, kinship, old acquaintance etc. And in a less degree there are similar grounds for loving other nations—historical links and debts for literature etc . . . But I would distinguish that from the talk in the papers . . .

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

5 June 1951

My love for G. MacDonald has not extended to most of his poetry, though I have naturally made several attempts to like it. Except for the Diary of an Old Soul it won’t (so far as I’m concerned) do . . .

As for me I specially need your prayers because I am (like the pilgrim in Bunyan) travelling across ‘a plain called Ease’. Everything without, and many things within, are marvellously well at present. Indeed (I do not know whether to be ashamed or joyful at confessing this) I realise that until about a month ago I never really believed (tho’ I thought I did) in God’s forgiveness. What an ass I have been both for not knowing and for thinking I knew. I now feel that one must never say one believes or understands anything: any moment a doctrine I thought I already possessed may blossom into this new reality. Selah! But pray for me always, as I do for you . . .

TO ‘MRS SONIA GRAHAM’ (daughter of ‘Mrs Catherine Arnold’): from Magdalen College

13 June 1951

(1) I think you are confusing the Immaculate Conception with the Virgin Birth. The former is a doctrine peculiar to the Roman Catholics and asserts that the mother of Jesus was born free of original sin. It does not concern us at all.

(2) The Virgin Birth is a doctrine plainly stated in the Apostle’s Creed that Jesus had no physical father, and was not conceived as a result of sexual intercourse. It is not a doctrine on which there is any dispute between Presbyterians as such and Episcopalians as such. A few individual Modernists in both these churches have abandoned it. The exact details of such a miracle—an exact point at which a supernatural enters this world (whether by the creation of a new spermatazoon, or the fertilisation of an ovum without a spermatazoon or the development of a foetus without an ovum) are not part of the doctrine. These are matters in which no one is obliged and everyone is free, to speculate. Your starting point about this doctrine will not, I think, be to collect the opinions of individual clergymen, but to read Matthew and Luke I and II.

(3) Similarly, your question about the resurrection is answered in Luke XXIV. This makes it clear beyond any doubt that what is claimed is physical resurrection. (All Jews except Sadducees already believed in spiritual revival—there would have been nothing novel or exciting in that.)

(4) Thus the questions that you raise are not questions at issue between real P. and real Ep. at all for both these claim to agree with Scripture. Neither church by the way seems to be very intelligently represented by the people you have gone to for advice, which is bad luck. I find it very hard to advise in your choice. At any rate the programme, until you can make up your mind, is to read your New Testament (preferably a modern translation) intelligently. Pray for guidance, obey your conscience in small as well as in great matters, as strictly as you can.

(5) Don’t bother much about your feelings. When they are humble, loving, brave, give thanks for them: when they are conceited, selfish, cowardly, ask to have them altered. In neither case are they you, but only a thing that happens to you. What matters is your intentions and your behaviour. (I hope all of this is not very dull and disappointing. Write freely again if I can be of any use to you.)

P.S. Of course God does not consider you hopeless. If He did He would not be moving you to seek Him (and He obviously is). What is going on in you at present is simply the beginning of the treatment. Continue seeking Him with seriousness. Unless He wanted you, you would not be wanting Him.

TO ‘MRS ARNOLD’: from Magdalen College

12 September 1951

I have not a word to say against the doctrine that Our Lord suffers in all the sufferings of His people (see Acts IX. 6) or that when we willingly accept what we suffer for others and offer it to God on their behalf, then it may be united with His sufferings and, in Him, may help to their redemption or even that of others whom we do not dream of. So that it is not in vain: tho’ of course we must not count on seeing it work out exactly as we, in our present ignorance, might think best. The key text for this view is Colossians 1.24. Is it not, after all, one more application of the truth that we are all ‘members one of another’? I wish I had known more when I wrote The Problem of Pain . . .

TO MISS VERA MATHEWS: from Magdalen College

12 September 1951

Since then I have been in really quiet and unearthly spots in my native Ireland. I stayed for a fortnight in a bungalow which none of the peasants will approach at night because the desolate coast on which it stands is haunted by ‘the good people’. There is also a ghost but (and this is interesting) they don’t seem to mind him: the faeries are a more serious danger . . .

TO DR WENDELL W. WATTERS: from Magdalen College

25 October 1951

Yes. I’m not surprised that a man who agreed with me in Screwtape (ethics served with an imaginative seasoning) might disagree with me when I wrote about religion. We can hardly discuss the whole matter by post, can we? I’ll only make one shot. When people object, as you do, that if Jesus was God as well as Man, then He had an unfair advantage which deprives Him for them of all value, it seems to me as if a man struggling in the water shd refuse a rope thrown to him by another who had one foot on the bank, saying ‘Oh but you have an unfair advantage’. It is because of that advantage that He can help.

But all good wishes: we must just differ: in charity I hope. You must not be angry with me for believing you know: I’m not angry with you . . .

TO A CHARITABLE READER: from Magdalen College

October 1951

I feel sure you will not be offended if I tell you that I have—with great reluctance—sent your gift straight on to someone else, whose need is much greater than mine . . . an elderly lady who has always had a struggle to make both ends meet and who . . . is now on the verge of actual want . . . Amongst the elderly, living on dwindling investment income in a world of rising prices, there is already discomfort, hardship, and I fear in many cases, real suffering . . .

TO THE PRIME MINISTER’S SECRETARY: from Magdalen College (in reply to the offer of a C.B.E.)

3 December 1951

I feel greatly obliged to the Prime Minister, and so far as my personal feelings are concerned this honour would be highly agreeable. There are always however knaves who say, and fools who believe, that my religious writings are all covert anti-Leftist propaganda, and my appearance in the Honours List would of course strengthen their hands. It is therefore better that I should not appear there. I am sure the Prime Minister will understand my reason, and that my gratitude is and will be none the less cordial.

[As far back as 1935 Jack had promised the Delegates of Oxford University Press to write the volume on English Literature in the Sixteenth Century for their ‘Oxford History of English Literature’. It reached what he called its ‘embryonic state’ as the Clark Lectures which he gave in Cambridge in 1944. However, he needed much more time than he had previously had if he were ever to complete it. Because of the importance of the undertaking Magdalen College gave him a year off, beginning Michaelmas Term of 1951, to finish the book. It was, as it turned out, completed by June of 1952. Remembering the great amount of work which went into it, Jack always referred to English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, excluding Drama (1954)—vol. III in the ‘O.H.E.L.’ series—as ‘the O Hell!’]

TO DR WARFIELD M. FIROR: from Magdalen College

20 December 1951

How the years flick past at our time of life, don’t they: like telegraph posts seen from an express train: and how they crawled once, when the gulf between one Christmas and another was too wide almost for a child’s eye to see across. If ever I write a story about a long-liver, like Haggard’s She or the Wandering Jew (and I might) I shall make that point. The first century of his life will, to the end, seem to him longer than all that have followed it: the Norman Conquest, the discovery of America and the French Revolution will be all huddled up in his mind as recent events.

My year ‘off’ has been, as it was meant to be, so far a year of very hard work, but mostly congenial. The book really begins to look as if it might be finished in 1952 and I am, between ourselves, pleased with the manner of it—but afraid of hidden errors. In that way I rather envy you for being engaged in empirical inquiry where, I suppose, mistakes rise up in the laboratory and proclaim themselves. But a mistake in a history of literature walks in silence till the day it turns irrevocable in a printed book and the book goes for review to the only man in England who wd have known it for a mistake.

This, I suppose, is good for one’s soul: and the kind of good I must learn to digest. I am going to be (if I live long enough) one of those men who was a famous writer in his forties and dies unknown—like Christian going down into the green valley of humiliation. Which is the most beautiful thing in Bunyan and can be the most beautiful thing in life if a man takes it quite rightly—a matter I think and pray about a good deal. One thing is certain: much better to begin (at least) learning humility on this side of the grave than to have it all as a fresh problem on the other. Anyway, the desire wh. has to be mortified is such a vulgar and silly one . . .

TO ‘MRS ARNOLD’: from Magdalen College

26 December 1951

I am v. glad you have discovered François de Sales. I would regard his prose and Geo. Herbert’s verse as the sweetest of religious writings. And how remarkable it is that such a man’s mere statement that anxiety is a great evil at once helps you to escape from that evil. That indeed seems to be one of the magical Laws of this very creation in which we live: that the thing we know already, the thing we have said to ourselves a hundred times, when said by someone else becomes suddenly operative. It is part of C. Williams’ doctrine, isn’t it?—that no one can paddle his own canoe but everyone can paddle someone else’s . . .

TO ‘MRS LOCKLEY’: from Magdalen College

8 January 1952

‘Whether it is any good praying for actual things’—the first question is what one means by ‘any good’. Is it a good thing to do? Yes: however we explain it, we are told to ask for particular things such as our daily bread. Does it ‘work’? Certainly not like a mechanical operation or a magical spell. It is a request which of course the Other Party may or may not, for His own good reasons, grant. But how can it change God’s will? Well—but how v. odd it would be if God in His actions towards me were bound to ignore what I did (including my prayers). Surely He hasn’t to forgive me for sins I didn’t commit or to cure me of errors into which I have never fallen? In other words His will (however changeless in some ultimate metaphysical sense) must be related to what I am and do? And once grant that, and why should my asking or not asking not be one of the things He takes into account? At any rate He said He would—and He ought to know. (We often talk as if He were not very good at Theology!)

I certainly believe (now really, long since with a merely intellectual assent) that a sin once repented and forgiven, is gone, annihilated, burnt up in the fire of Divine Love, white as snow. There is no harm in continuing to ‘bewail’ it, i.e. to express one’s sorrow, but not to ask for pardon, for that you already have—one’s sorrow for being that sort of person. Your conscience need not be ‘burdened’ with it in the sense of feeling that you have an unsettled account, but you can still in a sense be patiently and (in a sense) contentedly humbled by it . . .

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

10 January 1952

I have, if not thought, yet imagined, a good deal about the other kinds of Men. My own idea was based on the old problem ‘Who was Cain’s wife?’ If we follow Scripture it wd seem that she must have been no daughter of Adam’s. I pictured the True Men descendants (in Genesis VI. 1–4, where I agree with you), interbreeding and thus producing the wicked Antediluvians.

Oddly enough I, like you, had pictured Adam as being, physically, the son of two anthropoids, on whom, after birth, God worked the miracle which made him Man: said, in fact, ‘Come out—and forget thine own people and thy father’s house’. The Call of Abraham wd be a far smaller instance of the same sort of thing, and regeneration in each one of us wd be an instance too, tho’ not a smaller one. That all seems to me to fit in both historically and spiritually.

I don’t quite feel we shd gain anything by the doctrine that Adam was a hermaphrodite. As for the (rudimentary) presence in each sex of organs proper to the other, does that not occur in other mammals as well as in humans? Surely pseudo-organs of lactation are externally visible in the male dog? If so there wd be no more ground for making men (I mean, humans) hermaphroditic than any other mammal. (By the way, what an inconvenience it is in English to have the same word for Homo and Vir.) No doubt these rudimentary organs have a spiritual significance: there ought spiritually to be a man in every woman and a woman in every man. And how horrid the ones who haven’t got it are: I can’t bear a ‘man’s man’ or a ‘woman’s woman’.

I will order They Shall Be My People and look forward to it. Congratulations. For my own part, I have been given a year’s leave from all teaching duties to enable me to finish my book on XVIth century literature, so I am plugging away at that as hard as I can. My hope is to kill some popular mythology about that fabulous monster called ‘the Renaissance’. There are five fairy tales already written, of which the second has now appeared.

‘Jane’ died almost a year ago, after a long but, thank God, painless illness. I beg you will often pray for her. She was an unbeliever and, in later years, very jealous, exacting, and irascible, but always tender to the poor and to animals . . .

TO ‘MRS ARNOLD’: from Magdalen College

31 January 1952

That suffering is not always sent as a punishment is clearly established for believers by the book of Job and by John IX. 1–4. That it sometimes is, is suggested by parts of the Old Testament and Revelation. It wd certainly be most dangerous to assume that any given pain was penal. I believe that all pain is contrary to God’s will, absolutely but not relatively. When I am taking a thorn out of my finger (or a child’s finger) the pain is ‘absolutely’ contrary to my will: i.e. if I could have chosen a situation without pain I would have done so. But I do will what caused the pain, relatively to the given situation: i.e. granted the thorn I prefer the pain to leaving the thorn where it is. A mother spanking a child would be in the same position: she would rather cause it this pain than let it go on pulling the cat’s tail, but she would like it better if no situation which demands a smack had arisen.

On the heathen, see I Tim. IV. 10. Also in Matt, XXV. 31–46 the people don’t sound as if they were believers. Also the doctrine of Christ’s descending into Hell (i.e. Hades, the land of the dead: not Gehenna the land of the lost) and preaching to the dead: and that would be outside time and would include those who died long after Him as well as those who died before He was born as Man. I don’t think we know the details: we must just stick to the view that (a) All justice and mercy will be done, (b) but that nevertheless it is our duty to do all we can to convert unbelievers.

TO ‘MRS SONIA GRAHAM’: from Magdalen College

29 February 1952

I learn from ‘Mrs Arnold’ that you are taking the plunge. As you have been now for so long in my prayers, I hope it will not seem intrusive to send my congratulations. For whatever people who have never undergone an adult conversion may say, it is a process not without its distresses. Indeed they are the very sign that it is a true initiation. Like learning to swim or to skate, or getting married, or taking up a profession. There are cold shudderings about all these processes. When one finds oneself learning to fly without trouble one soon discovers (usually—there are blessed exceptions where we are allowed to take a real step without that difficulty) by waking up, that it was only a dream. All blessings and good wishes.

TO ‘MRS SONIA GRAHAM’: from Magdalen College

18 March 1952

Don’t bother at all about that question of a person being ‘made a Christian’ by baptism. It is only the usual trouble about words being used in more than one sense. Thus we might say a man ‘became a soldier’ the moment that he joined the army. But his instructors might say six months later ‘I think we have made a soldier of him’. Both usages are quite definable, only one wants to know which is being used in a given sentence. The Bible itself gives us one short prayer which is suitable for all who are struggling with the beliefs and doctrines. It is: ‘Lord I believe, help Thou my unbelief.’

Would something of this sort be any good?: Almighty God, who art the father of lights and who has promised by thy dear Son that all who do thy will shall know thy doctrine: give me grace so to live that by daily obedience I daily increase in faith and in the understanding of thy Holy Word, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

TO ‘MRS ARNOLD’: from Magdalen College

1 April 1952

The advantage of a fixed form of service is that we know what is coming. Ex tempore public prayer has this difficulty: we don’t know whether we can mentally join in it until we’ve heard it—it might be phoney or heretical. We are therefore called upon to carry on a critical and a devotional activity at the same moment: two things hardly compatible. In a fixed form we ought to have ‘gone through the motions’ before in our private prayers: the rigid form really sets our devotions free. I also find the more rigid it is, the easier it is to keep one’s thoughts from straying. Also it prevents getting too completely eaten up by whatever happens to be the preoccupation of the moment (i.e. War, an election, or what not). The permanent shape of Christianity shows through. I don’t see how the ex tempore method can help becoming provincial and I think it has a great tendency to direct attention to the minister rather than to God.

Quakers—well I’ve been unlucky in mine. The ones I know are atrocious bigots whose religion seems to consist almost entirely in attacking other people’s religions. But I’m sure there are good ones as well.

TO ‘MRS LOCKLEY’: from Magdalen College

13 May 1952

In Bp. Gore’s ‘Sermon on the mount’ . . . I find the view that Christ forbade ‘divorce in such a sense as allowed remarriage’. The question is whether He made an exception by allowing divorce in such a sense as allowed re-marriage when the divorce was for adultery. In the Eastern Church remarriage of the innocent party is allowed: not in the Roman. The Anglican Bps at Lambeth in 1888 denied re-marriage to the guilty party, and added that ‘there has always been a difference of opinion in the Ch. as to whether Our Lord meant to forbid re-marriage of the innocent party in a divorce’.

It wd seem then that the only question is whether you can divorce your husband in such a sense as wd make you free to re-marry. I imagine that nothing is further from your thoughts. I believe that you are free as a Christian woman to divorce him especially since the refusal to do so does harm to the innocent children of his mistress: but that you must (or should) regard yourself as no more free to marry another man than if you had not divorced him. But remember I’m no authority on such matters, and I hope you will ask the advice of one or two sensible clergymen of our own Church.

Our own Vicar whom I have just rung up, says that there are Anglican theologians who say that you must not divorce him. His own view was that in doubtful cases the Law of Charity shd always be the over-riding consideration, and in a case such as yours charity directs you to divorce him . . .

TO ‘MRS SONIA GRAHAM’: from Magdalen College

15 May 1952

Thanks for your letter of the 9th. All our prayers are being answered and I thank God for it. The only (possibly, not necessarily) unfavourable symptom is that you are just a trifle too excited. It is quite right that you should feel that ‘something terrific’ has happened to you . . . Accept these sensations with thankfulness as birthday cards from God, but remember that they are only greetings, not the real gift. I mean that it is not the sensations that are the real thing. The real thing is the gift of the Holy Spirit which can’t usually be—perhaps not ever—experienced as a sensation or emotion. The sensations are merely the response of your nervous system. Don’t depend on them. Otherwise when they go and you are once more emotionally flat (as you certainly will be quite soon), you might think that the real thing had gone too. But it won’t. It will be there when you can’t feel it. May even be operative when you can feel it least.

Don’t imagine it is all ‘going to be an exciting adventure from now on’. It won’t. Excitement of whatever sort, never lasts. This is the push to start you off on your first bicycle: you’ll be left to [do] lots of dogged pedalling later on. And no need to feel depressed about it either. It will be good for your spiritual leg muscles. So enjoy the push while it lasts, but enjoy it as a treat, not as something normal.

Of course none of us have ‘any right’ at the altar. You might as well talk of a non-existent person ‘having a right’ to be created. It is not our right but God’s free bounty. An English peer said, ‘I like the order of the Garter because it has no dam’ nonsense about merit’. Nor has Grace. And we must keep on remembering that as a cure for Pride. Yes, pride is a perpetual nagging temptation. Keep on knocking it on the head but don’t be too worried about it. As long as one knows one is proud one is safe from the worst form of pride.

If S—answers your letter, then let the correspondence drop. He is not a great philosopher (and none of my scientific colleagues think much of him as a scientist) but he is strong enough to do some harm. You’re not David and no one has told you to fight Goliath. You’ve only just enlisted. Don’t go off challenging enemy champions. Learn your drill. I hope this doesn’t sound all like cold water. I can’t tell you how pleased I was with your letter. God bless you.

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

28 May 1952

It isn’t chiefly men I am kept in touch with by my huge mail: it is women. The female, happy or unhappy, agreeing or disagreeing, is by nature a much more epistolary animal than the male.

Yes, Pascal does directly contradict several passages in Scripture and must be wrong. What I ought to have said was that the Cosmological argument is, for some people at some times, ineffective. It always has been for me. (By the way do read K. Z. Lorenz King Solomon’s Ring on animal—especially bird—behaviour. There are instincts I had never dreamed of: big with a promise of real morality. The wolf is a v. different creature from what we imagine.)

The stories you tell about two perverts belong to a terribly familiar pattern: the man of good will, saddled with an abnormal desire wh. he never chose, fighting hard and time after time defeated. But I question whether in such a life the successful operation of Grace is so tiny as we think. Is not this continued avoidance either of presumption or despair, this ever renewed struggle itself a great triumph of Grace? Perhaps more so than the (to human eyes) equable virtue of some who are psychologically sound.

I am glad you think J. Austen a sound moralist. I agree. And not platitudinous, but subtle as well as firm.

TO ‘MISS HELEN HADOW’: from Magdalen College

20 June 1952

I would prefer to combat the ‘I’m special’ feeling not by the thought ‘I’m no more special than anyone else’, but by the feeling ‘Everyone is as special as me’. In one way there is no difference, I grant, for both remove the speciality. But there is a difference in another way. The first might lead you to think, ‘I’m only one of the crowd like everyone else’. But the second leads to the truth that there isn’t any crowd. No one is like anyone else. All are ‘members’ (organs) in the Body of Christ. All different and all necessary to the whole and to one another: each loved by God individually, as if it were the only creature in existence. Otherwise you might get the idea that God is like the government which can only deal with the people as the mass.

About confession, I take it that the view of our Church is that everyone may use it but none is obliged to. I don’t doubt that the Holy Spirit guides your decisions from within when you make them with the intention of pleasing God. The error wd be to think that He speaks only within, whereas in reality He speaks also through Scripture, the Church, Christian friends, books etc . . .

TO ‘MRS ARNOLD’: from Magdalen College

20 June 1952

Incense and Hail Marys are in quite different categories. The one is merely a question of ritual: some find it helpful and others don’t, and each must put up with its absence or presence in the church they are attending with cheerful and charitable humility.

But Hail Marys raise a doctrinal question: whether it is lawful to address devotions to any creature, however holy. My own view would be that a salute to any saint (or angel) cannot in itself be wrong any more than taking off one’s hat to a friend: but that there is always some danger lest such practices start one on the road to a state (sometimes found in R.C.s) where the B.V.M. is treated really as a divinity and even becomes the centre of the religion. I therefore think such salutes are better avoided. And if the Blessed Virgin is as good as the best mothers I have known, she does not want any of the attention which might have gone to her Son diverted to herself . . .

TO ROGER LANCELYN GREEN: from Magdalen College (Jack needed his friend’s advice in finding a suitable name for the Narnian story which eventually was given the title The Silver Chair. He had only just come to know Mrs Joy Davidman Gresham from New York.)

26 September 1952

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

TO CHARLES MOORMAN: from Magdalen College

2 October 1952

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

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

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

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

TO ‘MRS ARNOLD’: from Magdalen College

20 October 1952

I think you are perfectly right to change your manner of prayer from time to time and I should suppose that all who pray seriously do thus change it. One’s needs and capacities change and also, for creatures like us, excellent prayers may ‘go dead’ if we use them too long. Whether one shd use written prayers composed by other people, or one’s own words, or wordless prayer, or in what proportion one should mix all three, seems entirely a question for each individual to answer from his own experience. I myself find prayers without words the best when I can manage it, but can do so only when least distracted and in the best spiritual and bodily health (or what I think best). But another person might find it quite otherwise.

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

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

TO ROGER LANCELYN GREEN: from Magdalen College

21 October 1952

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

I have just finished Vol I of Henry James’s letters. An interesting man, tho’ a dreadful prig: but he did appreciate Stevenson. A phantasmal man, who had never known God, or earth, or war, never done a day’s compelled work, never had to earn a living, had no home & no duties . . .

TO ‘MRS ASHTON’: from Magdalen College

8 November 1952

I am returning your letter with the questions in it numbered so that you’ll know wh. I am answering.

(1) Some call me Mr and some Dr. And I not only don’t care but usually don’t know which.

(2) Distinguish (A) A second chance in the strict sense, i.e. a new earthly life in which you wd attempt afresh all the problems you failed at in the present one (as in religions of Re-Incarnation). (B) Purgatory: a process by which the work of redemption continues, and first perhaps begins to be noticeable after death. I think Charles Williams depicts (B) and not (A).

(3) We are never given any knowledge of ‘What would have happened if . . .’

(4) I think that every prayer which is sincerely made even to a false god or to a very imperfectly conceived true God, is accepted by the true God and that Christ saves many who do not think they know Him. For He is (dimly) present in the good side of the inferior teachers they follow. In the parable of the Sheep and the Goats (Matt. XXV. 31 and following) those who are saved do not seem to know that they have served Christ. But of course our anxiety about unbelievers is most usefully employed when it leads us, not to speculation but to earnest prayer for them and the attempt to be in our own lives such good advertisements for Christianity as will make it attractive.

(5) It is Christ Himself, not the Bible, who is the true word of God. The Bible, read in the right spirit and with the guidance of good teachers, will bring us to Him. When it becomes really necessary (i.e. for our spiritual life, not for controversy or curiosity) to know whether a particular passage is rightly translated or is myth (but of course myth specially chosen by God from among countless myths to carry a spiritual truth) or history, we shall no doubt be guided to the right answer. But we must not use the Bible (our fathers too often did) as a sort of Encyclopedia out of which texts (isolated from their context and not read with attention to the whole nature and purport of the books in which they occur) can be taken for use as weapons.

(6) Kill means murder. I don’t know Hebrew: but when Our Lord quotes this commandment he uses the Greek . . .

(7) The question of what you wd ‘want’ is off the point. Capital punishment might be wrong tho’ the relations of the murdered man wanted him killed: it might be right tho’ they did not want this. The question is whether a Xtian nation ought or ought not to put murderers to death: not what passions interested individuals may feel.

(8) There is no doubt at all that the natural impulse to ‘hit back’ must be fought against by the Xtian whenever it arises. If one I love is tortured or murdered my desire to avenge him must be given no quarter. So far as nothing but this question of retaliation comes in ‘turn the other cheek’ is the Christian law. It is however quite another matter when the neutral public authority (not the aggrieved person) may order killing of either private murderers or public enemies in mass. It is quite clear that St Paul . . . approved of capital punishment—he says ‘the magistrate bears the sword and should bear the sword’. It is recorded that the soldiers who came to St John Baptist asking, ‘What shall we do?’ were not told to leave the army. When Our Lord Himself praised the Centurion He never hinted that the military profession was in itself sinful. This has been the general view of Christendom. Pacificism is a v. recent and local variation. We must of course respect and tolerate Pacifists, but I think their view erroneous.

(9) The symbols under which Heaven is presented to us are (a) a dinner party, (b) a wedding, (c) a city, and (d) a concert. It would be grotesque to suppose that the guests or citizens or members of the choir didn’t know one another. And how can love of one another be commanded in this life if it is to be cut short at death?

(10) When I have learnt to love God better than my earthly dearest, I shall love my earthly dearest better than I do now. In so far as I learn to love my earthly dearest at the expense of God and instead of God, I shall be moving towards the state in which I shall not love my earthly dearest at all. When first things are put first, second things are not suppressed but increased. If you and I ever come to love God perfectly, the answer to this tormenting question will then become clear and will be far more beautiful than we cd ever imagine. We can’t have it now.

TO MRS EDWARD A. ALLEN: from Magdalen College

19 January 1953

I don’t wonder that you got fogged in Pilgrim’s Regress. It was my first religious book and I didn’t then know how to make things easy. I was not even trying to very much, because in those days I never dreamed I would become a ‘popular’ author and hoped for no readers outside a small ‘highbrow’ circle. Don’t waste your time over it any more. The poetry is my own . . .

TO ‘MRS ARNOLD’: from Magdalen College

6–7 April 1953

I don’t think gratitude is a relevant motive for joining an Order. Gratitude might create a state of mind in which one became aware of a vocation: but the vocation would be the proper reason for joining. They themselves would surely not wish you to join without it? You can show your gratitude in lots of other ways. Is there in this Order, even for lay members such as you would be, not something like a noviciate or experimental period? If so, that would be the thing wouldn’t it? If not, I think I can only repeat my previous suggestion of undergoing a sort of unofficial noviciate by living according to the Rule for six months or so and seeing how it works. Most of the things you probably do anyway and are things we ought to do. (The only one I’m doubtful about is the ‘special intention’ clause. I’m not quite sure what the theological implications are.) . . . Is the vow irrevocable or can you contract out again?

About putting one’s Christian point of view to doctors and other unpromising subjects I’m in great doubt myself. All I’m clear about is that one sins if one’s real reasons for silence is simply the fear of looking a fool. I suppose one is right if one’s reason is that the other party will be repelled still further and only confirmed in his belief that Christians are troublesome and embarrassing people, to be avoided whenever possible. But I find it a dreadfully worrying problem. (I am quite sure that an importunate bit of evangelisation from a comparative stranger would not have done me any good when I was an unbeliever.)

I think our official view of Confession can be seen in the form for the Visitation of the Sick where it says, ‘Then shall the sick person be moved (i.e. advised, prompted) to make a . . . Confession . . . if he feel his conscience troubled with any weighty matters.’ That is, where Rome makes Confession compulsory for all, we make it permissable for any: not ‘generally necessary’ but profitable. We do not doubt that there can be forgiveness without it. But, as your own experience shows, many people do not feel forgiveness, i.e. do not effectively believe in ‘the forgiveness of sins’ without it. The quite enormous advantage of coming really to believe in forgiveness is well worth the horrors (I agree that they are horrors) of a first Confession. Also, there is the gain in self-knowledge: most of us have never really faced the facts about ourselves until we uttered them aloud in plain words, calling a spade a spade. I certainly feel that I have profited enormously by the practice. At the same time I think we are quite right not to make it generally obligatory, which might force it on some who are not ready for it and might do harm . . .

TO ‘MRS ASHTON’: from Magdalen College

17 July 1953

I’m v. glad you’ve seen that Christianity is as hard as nails: i.e. hard and tender at the same time. It’s the blend that does it: neither quality would be any good without the other. You needn’t worry about not feeling brave. Our Lord didn’t—see the scene in Gethsemane. How thankful I am that when God became Man He did not choose to become a man of iron nerves: that would not have helped weaklings like you and me nearly so much. Especially don’t worry (you may of course pray) about being brave over merely possible evils in the future. In the old battles it was usually the reserve, who had to watch the carnage, not the troops who were in it, whose nerve broke first. Similarly I think you in America feel much more anxiety about atomic bombs than we do: because you are further from the danger. If and when a horror turns up, you will then be given Grace to help you. I don’t think one is usually given it in advance. ‘Give us our daily bread’ (not an annuity for life) applies to spiritual gifts too: the little daily support for the daily trial. Life has to be taken day by day and hour by hour.

The writer you quote was very good at the stage at wh. you met him: Now, as is plain, you’ve got beyond him. Poor boob—he thought his mind was his own. Never his own until he makes it Christ’s: up till then merely a result of heredity, environment, and the state of his digestion. I became my own only when I gave myself to Another.

‘Does God seem real to me?’ It varies: just as lots of other things I firmly believe in (my own death, the solar system) feel more or less real at different times. I have dreamed dreams but not seen visions: but don’t think all that matters a hoot. And the saints say that visions are unimportant. If Our Lord did seem to appear to you at your prayer (bodily) what after all could you do but go on with your prayers? How cd you know that it was not an hallucination? . . .

No, no, I’m not committed to a real belief in Aslan, all that comes in a story. I haven’t the faintest idea whether there was a real Grail or not. Of course I believe that people are still healed by faith: whether that has happened in any particular case one can’t of course say without getting a real doctor who is also a real Christian to go through the whole case-history . . .

TO MRS EMILY McLAY: from Magdalen College

3 August 1953

I take it as a first principle that we must not interpret any one part of Scripture so that it contradicts other parts, and specially we must not use an apostle’s teaching to contradict that of Our Lord. Whatever St Paul may have meant, we must not reject the parable of the sheep and the goats (Matt. XXV. 30–46). There, you see there is nothing about Predestination or even about Faith—all depends on works. But how this is to be reconciled with St Paul’s teaching, or with other sayings of Our Lord, I frankly confess I don’t know. Even St Peter you know admits that he was stumped by the Pauline epistles (II Peter III. 16–17).

What I think is this. Everyone looking back on his own conversion must feel—and I am sure the feeling is in some sense true—‘It is not I who have done this. I did not choose Christ: He chose me. It is all free grace, which I have done nothing to earn.’ That is the Pauline account: and I am sure it is the only true account of every conversion from the inside. Very well. It then seems to us logical and natural to turn this personal experience into a general rule, ‘All conversions depend on God’s choice’.

But this I believe is exactly what we must not do: for generalisations are legitimate only when we are dealing with matters to which our faculties are adequate. Here, we are not. How our individual experiences are in reality consistent with (a) Our idea of Divine justice, (b) The parable I’ve just quoted, and lots of other passages, we don’t and can’t know: what is clear is that we can’t find a consistent formula. I think we must take a leaf out of the scientist’s book. They are quite familiar with the fact that, for example, Light has to be regarded both as a wave in the ether and as a stream of particles. No one can make these two views consistent. Of course reality must be self-consistent: but till (if ever) we can see the consistency it is better to hold two inconsistent views than to ignore one side of the evidence.

The real inter-relation between God’s omnipotence and Man’s freedom is something we can’t find out. Looking at the Sheep & the Goats every man can be quite sure that every kind act he does will be accepted by Christ. Yet, equally, we all do feel sure that all the good in us comes from Grace. We have to leave it at that. I find the best plan is to take the Calvinist view of my own virtues and other people’s vices: and the other view of my own vices and other people’s virtues. But tho’ there is much to be puzzled about there is nothing to be worried about. It is plain from Scripture that, in whatever sense the Pauline doctrine is true, it is not true in any sense which excludes its (apparent) opposite.

You know what Luther said: ‘Do you doubt if you are chosen? Then say your prayers and you may conclude that you are.’

TO MRS EMILY McLAY: from Magdalen College

8 August 1953

Your experience in listening to those philosophers gives you the technique one needs for dealing with the dark places in the Bible. When one of the philosophers, one whom you know on other grounds to be a sane and decent man, said something you didn’t understand, you did not at once conclude that he had gone off his head. You assumed you’d missed the point.

Same here. The two things one must not do are (a) To believe, on the strength of Scripture or on any other evidence, that God is in any way evil. (In Him is no darkness at all.) (b) To wipe off the slate any passage which seems to show that He is. Behind that apparently shocking passage, be sure, there lurks some great truth which you don’t understand. If one ever does come to understand it, one will see that [it] is good and just and gracious in ways we never dreamed of. Till then, it must be just left on one side.

But why are baffling passages left in at all? Oh because God speaks not only for us little ones but also to great sages and mystics who experience what we only read about and to whom all the words have therefore different, richer contents. Would not a revelation which contained nothing that you and I did not understand be for that v. reason rather suspect? To a child it wd seem a contradiction to say both that his parents made him and that God made him, yet we see both can be true.

TO MRS EDWARD A. ALLEN: from Magdalen College

9 January 1954

Thank you for your nice woody and earthy (almost like Thoreau or Dorothy Wordsworth) letter of the 6th. I think I go with you in preferring trees to flowers in the sense that if I had to live in a world without one or the other I’d choose to keep the trees. I certainly prefer tree-like people to flower-like people—the staunch and knotty and storm-enduring to the frilly and fragrant and easily withered . . .

I think what makes even beautiful country (in the long run) so unsatisfactory when seen from a train or a car is that it whirls each tree, brook, or haystack close up into the foreground, soliciting individual attention but vanishing before you can give it . . . Didn’t someone give a similar explanation of the weariness we feel in a crowd where we can’t help seeing individual faces but can do no more than see them so that (he said) ‘it is like being forced to read the first page, but no more, of a hundred books in succession’? . . .

TO DOM BEDE GRIFFITHS, O.S.B.: from Magdalen College (Dom Bede was concerning himself with the problems of Christian missionary work in India.)

16 January 1954

I suspect that a great going-to-meet-them is needed not only on the level of thought but in method. A man who had lived all his life in India said ‘That country might be Christian now if there had been no Missions in our sense but many single missionaries walking the roads with their begging-bowls. For that is the sort of Holy Man India believes in and she will never believe in any other.’ Of course we must beware of thinking of ‘the East’ as if it were homogeneous. I suppose the Indian and the Chinese ethos are as alien to each other as either is to us.

The article on Tolerance in that same issue made my flesh creep. What do they mean by ‘Error has no rights’? Of course Error has no rights, because it is not a person: in the same sense Truth has no rights. But if they mean ‘Erroneous persons have no rights’, surely this is as contrary to the plain dictates of Natural Law as any proposition could be?

Quite a different question. Has any one composed prayers for children NOT on the sense of special prayers supposed suitable for their age (which easily leads to wish-wash) BUT simply in the sense of translation of ordinary prayers into the easiest language? And wd it be worth doing?

TO MISS PAULINE BAYNES: from Magdalen College (Miss Baynes had been chosen to illustrate ‘The Chronicles of Narnia’.)

21 January 1954

I lunched with Bles yesterday to see the drawings for The Horse [and His Boy] and feel I must write to tell you how very much we both enjoyed them. It is delightful to find (and not only for selfish reasons) that you do each book a little bit better than the last—it is nice to see an artist growing. (If only you cd take six months off and devote them to anatomy, there’s no limit to your possibilities.)

Both the drawings of Lasaraleen in the litter were a rich feast of line & of fantastic-satiric imagination: my only regret was that we couldn’t have both. Shasta among the tombs (in the new technique, wh. is lovely) was exactly what I wanted. The pictures of Rabadash hanging on the hook and just turning into an ass were the best comedy you’ve done yet. The Tisroc was superb: far beyond anything you were doing five years ago. I thought that your human faces—the boys, K. Lune etc.—were, this time, really good. The crowds are beautiful, realistic yet also lovely wavy compositions: but your crowds always were. How did you do Tashbaan? We only got its full wealth by using a magnifying glass! The result is exactly right. Thanks enormously for all the intense work you have put into them all. And more power to your elbow: congratulations . . .

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

23 January 1954

I have a taste for Dickens but don’t think it a low one. He is the great author on mere affection (στoργη): only he & Tolstoi (another great favourite of mine) really deal with it. Of course his error lies in thinking it will do instead of Agape. Scott, as D. Cecil said, has, not the civilised mind, but the civilised heart. Unforced nobility, generosity, liberality, flow from him. But Thackeray I positively dislike. He is the voice of ‘the World’. And his supposedly ‘good’ women are revolting: jealous pharisiennes. The publicans and sinners will go in before Mrs Pendennis and La. Castlewood . . .

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

30 January 1954

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

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

TO ‘MRS ASHTON’: from Magdalen College

18 February 1954

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

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

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

[After a good deal of effort, Cambridge University persuaded Jack to accept the newly-created Chair of Medieval and Renaissance English Literature—a position created with him in mind. Although he had to teach at Magdalen during the Michaelmas Term of 1954 (he finished his last tutorial at 12.50 p.m. on 3 December), he gave his Inaugural Lecture in Cambridge on 29 November 1954. It was published under the title De Descriptione Temporum. He did not move to Magdalene College, Cambridge until 7 January 1955.]

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

30 July 1954

Yes, I have been made Professor of ‘Medieval & Renaissance English’ at Cambridge: the scope of the chair (a new one) suits me exactly. But it won’t be as big a change as you might think. I shall still live at Oxford in the Vac. and on many week ends in term. My address will be Magdalene, so I remain under the same Patroness. This is nice because it saves ‘Admin’ re-adjustments in Heaven: also I can’t help feeling that the dear lady now understands my constitution better than a stranger would . . .

TO MRS URSULA ROBERTS: from Magdalen College

31 July 1954

I am certainly unfit to advise anyone else on the devotional life. My own rules are (1) To make sure that, wherever else they may be placed, the main prayers should not be put ‘last thing at night’. (2) To avoid introspection in prayer—I mean not to watch one’s own mind to see if it is in the right frame, but always to turn the attention outwards to God. (3) Never, never to try to generate an emotion by will power. (4) To pray without words when I am able, but to fall back on words when tired or otherwise below par. With renewed thanks. Perhaps you will sometimes pray for me?

TO MRS EDWARD A. ALLEN: from Magdalen College

1 November 1954

I think it would be dangerous to suppose that Satan had created all the creatures that are disagreeable or dangerous to us for (a) those creatures, if they could think, wd have just the same reason for thinking that we were created by Satan. (b) I don’t think evil, in the strict sense, can create. It can spoil something that Another has created. Satan may have corrupted other creatures as well as us. Part of the corruption in us might be the unreasoning horror and disgust we feel at some creatures quite apart from any harm they can do us. (I can’t abide a spider myself.) We have scriptural authority for Satan originating diseases—see Luke XIII.16.

Do you know, the suffering of the innocent is less of a problem to me v. often than that of the wicked. It sounds absurd: but I’ve met so many innocent sufferers who seem to be gladly offering their pain to God in Christ as part of the Atonement, so patient, so meek, even so at peace, and so unselfish that we can hardly doubt they are being, as St Paul says, ‘made perfect by suffering’. On the other hand I meet selfish egoists in whom suffering seems to produce only resentment, hate, blasphemy, and more egoism. They are the real problem.

Christian Scientists seem to me to be altogether too simple. Granted that all the evils are illusions, still, the existence of that illusion wd be a real evil and presumably a real evil permitted by God. That brings us back to exactly the same point as we began from. We have gained nothing by the theory. We are still faced with the great mystery, not explained, but coloured, transmuted, all through the Cross. Faith, not wild over-simplifications, is what will help, don’t you think? It is so v. difficult to believe that the travail of all creation which God Himself descended to share, at its most intense, may be necessary in the process of turning finite creatures (with free wills) into—well, Gods . . .

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

1 November 1954

Your book came at a moment of low spiritual temper, external worry, and (mild) physical pain. I had prayed v. hard a couple of nights before that my faith might be strengthened. The response was immediate and your book gave the finishing touch. It did me a great deal of good: apart, of course from its lower gains in the way of interest and enjoyment. That made an objective literary judgement v. difficult, but I think you have probably done it very well. It must have been a job to keep it so short without becoming perfunctory, and so subjective without being (and it is not in the least) mawkish or suffocating. Much that you said about the Sacraments was v. illuminating. One felt how Paganism does not merely survive but first becomes really itself in the v. heart of Christianity. By the way wd you agree that the un-Christening of Europe (much of it) is an even bigger change that its Christening? So that the gap between Professor [Gilbert] Ryle and, say Dante, is wider than that between Dante and Virgil?

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

5 November 1954

The best Dickens always seems to me to be the one I have read last! But in a cool hour I put Bleak House top for its sheer prodigality of invention.

About death, I go through different moods, but the times when I can desire it are never, I think, those when this world seems harshest. On the contrary, it is just when there seems to be most of Heaven already here that I come nearest to longing for the patria. It is the bright frontispiece [which] whets one to read the story itself. All joy (as distinct from mere pleasure, still more amusement) emphasises our pilgrim status: always reminds, beckons, awakes desire. Our best havings are wantings.

TO MRS VERA GEBBERT (NÉE MATHEWS): from Magdalen College

17 December 1954

Would you believe it: an American school girl has been expelled from her school for having in her possession a copy of my Screwtape. I asked my informant whether it was a Communist school, or a Fundamentalist school, or an RC school, and got the shattering answer, ‘No, it was a select school’. That puts a chap in his place, doesn’t it? . . .

TO JOCELYN GIBB: from Magdalen College (Mr Gibb, who had been the partner of Geoffrey Bles for a few years, took over the publishing firm of Geoffrey Bles Ltd when Mr Bles retired in 1954. He had sent Jack handsomely bound copies of Surprised by Joy and Mere Christianity.)

22 December 1954

I never had a handsomer present (both in a bibliophile’s and in Mr Woodhouse’s sense of the word handsome). Perhaps these two charming volumes will teach me at last to have for the bodies of my own books the same reverence I have for the bodies of all other books. For it is a curious fact that I never can regard them as being really books; the boards and print, in however mint a condition, remain a mere pretence behind which one sees the scratchy, inky old MS. You might do a little research to find out if it is so with all authors. Thank you so much. Who did them?

I am always glad to hear of anyone’s taking up that Cinderella, The Great Divorce.

With renewed thanks and all good wishes for Christmas and the New Year.

TO I. O. EVANS: from Magdalen College

22 December 1954

About the word ‘hiking’ my own objection wd lie only against its abuse for something so simple as taking an ordinary ‘walk’: i.e. to the passion for making specialised & self-conscious stunts out of activities which have hitherto been as ordinary as shaving or playing with the kitten. Kipling’s Janeites, where he makes a sort of secret-society-ritual out of (of all things!) reading Jane Austen is a specimen. Or professionals on the BBC playing to an audience the same games we used to play for ourselves at children’s parties. I expect any day to find a book written on how to swing your stick when you walk or a club (with badges) formed for Singers in the Bath.

There was a grain of seriousness in my sally against the Civil Service. I don’t think you have worse taste or worse hearts than other men. But I do think that the State is increasingly tyrannical and you, inevitably, are among the instruments of that tyranny . . . This doesn’t matter for you who did most of your service when the subject was still a freeman. For the rising generation it will become a real problem, at what point the policies you are ordered to carry out have become so iniquitous that a decent man must seek some other profession. I expect you really feel at least as strongly as I do about it. All good wishes.

[On 28 December 1954 the Society held ‘A Milton Evening in honour of Douglas Bush and C. S. Lewis’. They published for the occasion a pamphlet containing tributes to both men and a facsimile of the following undated letter. William B. Hunter Jr was Secretary of the Society.]

TO THE MILTON SOCIETY OF AMERICA: from Magdalen College

Mr Hunter informs me that your society has done me an honour above my deserts. I am deeply grateful to be chosen for it and also delighted by the very existence of such a society as yours. May it have a long and distinguished history!

The list of my books which I send in answer to Mr Hunter’s request will, I fear, strike you as a very mixed bag. Since he encourages me to ‘make a statement’ about them, I may point out that there is a guiding thread. The imaginative man in me is older, more continuously operative, and in that sense more basic than either the religious writer or the critic. It was he who made me first attempt (with little success) to be a poet. It was he who, in response to the poetry of others, made me a critic, and, in defence of that response, sometimes a critical controversialist. It was he who, after my conversion led me to embody my religious belief in symbolical or mythopoeic forms, ranging from Screwtape to a kind of theologised science-fiction. And it was, of course, he who has brought me, in the last few years to write the series of Narnian stories for children; not asking what children want and then endeavouring to adapt myself (this was not needed) but because the fairy-tale was the genre best fitted for what I wanted to say. But you see already that it is dangerous to ask an author to talk about his own work. The difficulty is to make him stop: and I should ill repay your kindness if I did not sternly draw rein . . .

TO ‘MRS ASHTON’: from Magdalene College, Cambridge

1 January 1955

Few presents can ever have arrived so opportunely as this notepaper of yours . . .

This will be my first night in my new home and there is lots of work to do before I go to bed. The books are all on the shelves, but must be put in the right order. I can’t bear to look at them till they are . . .

TO MRS EDWARD A. ALLEN: from The Kilns

17 January 1955

No, my change of address does not imply retirement—or at least retirement from academic life; what has happened is that Cambridge has given me a Professorship. In many ways I regretted leaving Magdalen, but after nearly thirty years of the tutorial grind, I shall appreciate the less strenuous life of a ‘Chair’ at Cambridge. I am now settling in there, and think I shall be happy: many of my colleagues are Christians, more than was the case in my old College: my rooms are comfortable, and Cambridge, unlike Oxford, is still a country town, with a farming atmosphere about it. I plan to come back here at intervals during the term, and of course to stop here all the vacations. My brother will live here, so the break with the old life is not as violent as you have pictured it . . .

TO ‘MRS ASHTON’: from Magdalene College

2 February 1955

Thanks for your letter. The day before I got a letter from someone else asking me if the ‘Silent Planet’ was a true story. It’s not the first I’ve had. So I’m beginning to think that some people (and if you don’t look out I’ll have to include you!) just don’t understand what fiction is. When you say what is natural with the intention of making people believe it, that’s lying. When you say it with no such intention, that’s fiction. But it may be perfectly serious in the sense that people often express their deepest thoughts, speculations, desires etc in a story. Of course it would have been wrong for R. [ansom] to talk bout the land of the Pf. [ifltriggi] when he hadn’t really been there, as if he had: because inside the book R. is supposed (or pretended) to be telling his story as true. Surely we can have a character in a story telling a lie, and distinguish it from what he ought to have said, although the v. things he is lying about are themselves (from our point of view who live outside the story) imaginary?

As for ‘writing stories about God’, it would be rather a tall order to have a story strictly about God (beginning ‘One day God decided’ . . .). But to imagine what God might be supposed to have done in other worlds does not seem to be wrong: and a story is only imagining out loud.

It is right and inevitable that we shd be much concerned about the salvation of those we love. But we must be careful not to expect or demand that their salvation shd conform to some ready-made pattern of our own. Some Protestant sects have gone very wrong about this. They have a whole programme of conversion etc. marked out, the same for everyone, and will not believe that anyone can be saved who doesn’t go through it ‘just so’. But (see the last chapter of my Problem of Pain) God has His own way with each soul. There is no evidence that St John underwent the same kind of ‘conversion’ as St Paul.

It’s not essential to believe in the Devil: and I’m sure a man can get to Heaven without being accurate about Methuselah’s age. Also, as Macdonald says ‘the time for saying comes seldom, the time for being is always here’. What we practise, not (save at rare intervals) what we preach is usually our great contribution to the conversion of others . . .

TO MISS RUTHER PITTER: from Magdalene College

5 March 1955

I await the marmalade with the sweet-sharp anticipation proper to it. Might it be Hesperian rather than Hyperborean? The word comes thro’ Portuguese from Meli-mela, ‘honey-apples’ which was what the benighted Greeks called oranges, and oranges might be the golden apples of the Western Garden. The maker of elder-flower wine is G. Sayer, Hamewith, Alexandra Rd., Malvern, a Roman Catholic, a master at Malvern, a former pupil of mine and the most unselfish man I have ever gone about with. Like Long John Silver he has ‘a face as large as a ham’.

It is lovely here (even tho’ I have had burst pipes four times this term): unlike Oxford, it still shows the country town just an inch beneath the academic surface. I am having an ‘impact’, whether ‘joyous’ or not. If you have seen the ‘Cambridge Number’ of The XXth Century you’ll see that the Orthodox Atheists are v. alarmed at this influx of Christians (Butterfield, Knowles, and C.S.L.). They don’t call themselves atheists, though, but ‘Humanists’, tho’ I doubt if they cd write very good Latin and I am sure that E. M. Forster (who is the silliest of the lot: disappointing, for I liked his novels) wd not really enjoy a meeting with Poggio or Scaliger.

Thanks for all the lovely things you say about my Great Fat Book (always scribble, scribble, scribble, Mr Gibbon!). It is glorious not to be doing it any longer . . .

TO ‘MRS ASHTON’: from Magdalene College

16 March 1955

I am afraid I am not going to be much help about all the religious bodies mentioned in your letter of March 2nd. I have always in my books been concerned simply to put forward ‘mere’ Christianity, and am no guide on these (most regrettable) ‘interdenominational’ questions. I do however strongly object to the tyrannic and unscriptural insolence of anything that calls itself a Church and makes teetotalism a condition of membership. Apart from the more serious objection (that Our Lord Himself turned water into wine and made wine the medium of the only rite He imposed on all His followers) it is so provincial (what I believe you people call ‘small town’). Don’t they realise that Christianity arose in the Mediterranean world where, then as now, wine was as much part of the normal diet as bread? It was the 17th Century Puritans who first made the universal into a rich man’s luxury . . .

I think I can understand that feeling about a housewife’s work being like that of Sisyphus (who was the stone rolling gentleman). But it is surely in reality the most important work in the world. What do ships, railways, mines, cars, government etc. exist for except that people may be fed, warmed, and safe in their own homes? As Dr Johnson said, ‘To be happy at home is the end of all human endeavour’. (1st to be happy to prepare for being happy in our own real home hereafter: 2nd in the meantime to be happy in our houses.) We wage war in order to have peace, we work in order to have leisure, we produce food in order to eat it. So your job is the one for which all others exist . . .

TO ‘MRS ASHTON’: from The Kilns

14 May 1955

My own view about Elisha and the bears (not that I haven’t known small boys who’d be much improved by the same treatment!) and other such episodes is something like this. If you take the Bible as a whole, you see a process in which something which, in its eccentric levels (these aren’t necessarily the ones that come first in the Book as now arranged) was hardly moral at all, and was in some ways not unlike the Pagan religions, is gradually purged and enlightened till it becomes the religion of the great prophets, and of Our Lord Himself. That whole process is the greatest revelation of God’s true nature. At first hardly anything comes through except mere power. Then (v. imperfect) the truth that He is One and there is no other God. Then justice, then mercy, last wisdom.

Of course Our Lord never drank spirits (they had no distilled liquors) but of course the wine of the Bible was real fermented wine and alcoholic. The repeated references to the sin of drunkenness in the Bible, from Noah’s first discovery of wine down to the warnings in St Paul’s epistles, make this perfectly plain. The other theory could be (honestly) held only by a v. ignorant person. One can understand the bitterness of some temperance fanatics if one had ever lived with a drunkard: what one finds it harder to excuse is any educated person telling such lies about history.

I think myself that the shocking reply to the Syrophenician woman (it came alright in the end) is to remind all us Gentile Christians—who forget it easily enough and even flirt with anti-Semitism—that the Hebrews are spiritually senior to us, that God did entrust the descendants of Abraham with the first revelation of Himself . . .

TO MRS VERA GEBBERT: from The Kilns

25 June 1955

I’m all for a planet without aches or pains or financial worries, but I doubt if I’d care for one of pure intelligence. No senses (no relish of smells, tastes), no affection, no nonsense. I must have a little fooling. I want to tickle a cat’s ears and sometimes have a slugging match with an impertinent squirrel . . .

My lecture has proved a best seller and I’ve no copies left. . . . You’ve got it nearly right: the only error being that instead of saying the Great Divide came between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, I said at great length and emphatically that it didn’t. But of course ‘not’ is a very small word and one can’t get every fine shade just right!

TO FATHER PETER MILWARD: from The Kilns

22 September 1955

What Malory meant, I have no idea. I doubt if he had any clear intention. To use an image I have used before, I think his work is like one of our old English cathedrals to which many generations have contributed in many different styles, so that the total effect was foreseen by no-one and must be regarded as something midway between a work of art and a work of nature. I therefore give up asking what M. meant: we can ask only what his book in fact means. And to me it means primarily neither the Grail story nor the Lancelot story but precisely the tension and interlocking between the two.

I know v. little about the Albigensians (except that Denis de Rougemont talks manifest nonsense!). If I undertook a study of the Grail, I shd begin by making up (you perhaps know it already) the history—with v. exact chronology—of the doctrine of Transubstantiation and of contemporary controversies and reactions. I suspect the story is closely connected with these.

It is certainly a remarkable fact (I hadn’t noticed it before) that the post-medieval interest in Arthur has been almost exclusively Protestant. But one must beware of seeking causes too deep. Might it not be simply that the only nation wh. cd regard Arthur as a national hero was a Protestant nation.

No, I never read St Ignatius. I must do so one of these days.

This is a short, dry letter, but not thro’ lack of interest: I have nearly three weeks’ mail to get through, having returned from Ireland to day . . .

TO JOAN LANCASTER (a child in America): from Magdalene College

16 October 1955

In this country we hardly ever have any snow worth talking about till January, or later. Once we had it at Easter after all the trees had their spring leaves on. So the snow could lie on the trees far heavier than if they had been bare, and there was great destruction in the way of broken branches. We had our first frost last night—this morning the lawns are all grey, with a pale, bright sunshine on them: wonderfully beautiful. And somehow exciting. The first beginning of the winter always excites me: it makes me want adventures. I expect our autumn has gentler colours than your fall and it goes far slower. The trees, especially beeches, keep their leaves for weeks & weeks after they have begun to change colour, turning from yellow to gold & from gold to flame-colour.

I never knew a guinea-pig that took any notice of humans (they take plenty of one another). Of those small animals I think Hamsters are the most amusing—and, to tell you the truth, I’m still fond of mice. But the guinea-pigs go well with your learning German. If they talked, I’m sure that is the language they’d speak.

TO EDWARD A. ALLEN: from The Kilns

5 December 1955

I now pronounce the move to Cambridge a great success. However it may be with my new university, my new college is a smaller, softer, more gracious place than my old. The mental and social atmosphere is like the sunny side of a wall in an old garden. The only danger is less I grow too comfortable and over-ripe. The town, after Nuffield-ruined and industrialised Oxford, is delightfully small and I can get a real country walk whenever I want. All my friends say I look younger.

Oddly enough the week-end journies are no trouble at all. I find myself perfectly content in a slow train that crawls thro’ green fields stopping at every station. Just because the service is so slow and therefore, in most people’s eyes bad, these trains are almost empty and I have the compartment (you know the funny little boxes into which an English train is divided?) to myself, where I get through a lot of reading and sometimes say my prayers. A solitary railway journey is, I find, quite excellent for this purpose . . .

TO FATHER PETER MILWARD: from The Kilns

17 December 1955

Thank you for yr letter of Nov. 17. The enclosed card was one of the v. few I have been pleased at getting. Christmas cards in general and the whole vast commercial drive called ‘Xmas’ are one of my pet abominations: I wish they could die away and leave the Christian feast unentangled. Not of course that even secular festivities are, on their own level, an evil: but the laboured and organised jollity of this—the spurious childlikeness—the half-hearted and sometimes rather profane attempts to keep up some superficial connection with the Nativity—are disgusting. But yr card is most interesting as an application of Japanese style to a Christian subject: and, me judice, extremely successful.

Albigensianism, and ancient Celtic Paganism, are both increasingly popular ‘sources’ for medieval story: but, I fear, they are an asylum ignorantiae, chosen because we know so v. little about either. The facts I’d try to hold onto are (1) The name Galahad (Gilead). (2) The resemblance of the Grail to Manna (see, I think, Wisdom: the reference is at Cambridge). (3) The (I think proved) Cistercian provenance.

Enthusiasm is Ronny Knox’s worst book. And of course you won’t be misled by de Rougement’s nonsense in L’Amour et l’Occident. (Not that the ethics of the last chapter—l’amour cesse d’etre un demon quand il cesse d’etre un dieu—aren’t excellent; but the historical parts are mildly speculative.)

One quite sees the chilvalric idea in St Ignatius, but of course the chivalry of Amadis (an excellent romance, by the way) is pretty different from that of Arthuriana in general, let alone Sangrealiana in particular.

Oremus pro invicem: Give thanks for me, for a great family anxiety has been lifted and perhaps forever removed. No doubt you have found, like me, that if one regularly transfers people from one’s urgent-petition-list to one’s thanksgiving list, the mere statistics of the two lists are some corroboration of faith. (Not of course that the efficacy of prayer cd strictly be either proved or disproved by empirical evidence.)

[Dom Bede, who was now in India, had published his autobiography, The Golden String, in 1954. Jack’s autobiography, Surprised by Joy, had been published in September 1955. It was dedicated to Dom Bede, and it was this book Jack was sending him.]

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

8 February 1956

I have just got yr letter of Jan. 1st., wh. is full of interest. I am having a copy of the book sent you and wd have done so long ago, but I had lost your address.

Yes, I do feel the old Magdalen years to have been a v. important period in both our lives. More generally, I feel the whole of one’s youth to be immensely important and even of immense length. The gradual reading of one’s own life, seeing the pattern emerge, is a great illumination at our age. And partly, I hope, getting freed from the past as past by apprehending it as structure. If I ever write a story about someone like She or the Wandering Jew who lived for millennia, I shd make a great point of this: he wd, after 10,000 years, still feel his first 50 years to be the biggest part of his life. I am glad you found a Chestertonian quality in the book. Actually, it seems to me that one can hardly say anything either bad enough or good enough about life.

The one picture that is utterly false is the supposedly realistic fiction of the XIX century where all the real horrors & heavens are excluded. The reality is a queer mixture of idyll, tragedy, farce, hymn, melodrama: and the characters (even the same characters) far better and worse than one ever imagined.

I wd have preferred yr book on Mysticism to be a Penguin, for I think they reach a larger audience than anything else. I look forward to it v. much. I think it is just the thing for you to do.

You are (as you well know) on dangerous ground about Hinduism, but someone must go to dangerous places. One often wonders how different the content of our faith will look when we see it in the total context. Might it be as if one were living on an infinite earth? Further knowledge wd leave our map of, say, the Atlantic quite correct, but if it turned out to be the estuary of a great river—and the continent thro’ wh. that river flowed turned out to be itself an island—off the shores of a still greater continent—and so on! You see what I mean? Not one jot of Revelation will be proved false: but so many new truths might be added.

By the way, that business of having to look up the same word ten times in one evening is no proof of failing powers. You have simply forgotten that it was exactly like that when we began Latin or even French.

Your Hindus certainly sound delightful. But what do they deny? That’s always been my trouble with Indians—to find any proposition they wd pronounce false. But truth must surely involve exclusions?

I’m reading Runciman’s Hist. of the Crusades: a terrible revelation—the old civilisation of the E. Mediterranean destroyed by Turkish barbarians from the East & Frankish barbarians from the West. Oremus pro invicem.

TO ‘MRS ASHTON’: from Magdalene College

13 March 1956

You’ll find my views about drinks in ‘Christian Behaviour’ . . . Smoking is much harder to justify. I’d like to give it up but I’d find this v. hard, i.e. I can abstain, but I can’t concentrate on anything else while abstaining—not smoking is a whole time job.

Birth control I won’t give a view on: I’m certainly not prepared to say that it is always wrong. The doctrines about the Blessed Virgin which you mention are R.C. doctrines aren’t they? And as I’m not an R.C. I don’t think I need bother about them. But the habit (of various Protestant sects) of plastering the landscape with religious slogans about the Blood of the Lamb etc. is a different matter. There is no question here of doctrinal difference: we agree with the doctrines they are advertising. What we disagree with is their taste. Well, let’s go on disagreeing but don’t let us judge. What doesn’t suit us may suit possible converts of a different type.

My model here is the behaviour of the congregation at a ‘Russian Orthodox’ service, where some sit, some lie on their faces, some stand, some kneel, some walk about, and no one takes the slightest notice of what anyone else is doing. That is good sense, good manners, and good Christianity. ‘Mind one’s own business’ is a good rule in religion as in other things . . .

TO MRS R. E. HALVORSON: from Magdalene College

[March 1956]

One must first distinguish the effect which music has on people like me who are musically illiterate and get only the emotional effect, and that which it has on real musical scholars who perceive the structure and get an intellectual satisfaction as well.

Either of these effects is, I think, ambivalent from the religious point of view: i.e. each can be a preparation for or even a medium for meeting God but can also be a distraction and impediment. In that respect music is not different from a good many other things, human relations, landscape, poetry, philosophy. The most relevant one is wine which can be used sacramentally or for getting drunk or neutrally.

I think every natural thing which is not in itself sinful can become the servant of the spiritual life, but none is automatically so. When it is not, it becomes either just trivial (as music is to millions of people) or a dangerous idol. The emotional effect of music may be not only a distraction (to some people at some times) but a delusion: i.e. feeling certain emotions in church they mistake them for religious emotions when they may be wholly natural. That means that even genuinely religious emotion is only a servant. No soul is saved by having it or damned by lacking it. The love we are commanded to have for God and our neighbour is a state of the will, not of the affections (though if they ever also play their part so much the better). So that the test of music or religion or even visions if one has them is always the same—do they make one more obedient, more God-centered, and neighbour-centered and less self-centred? ‘Though I speak with the tongues of Bach and Palestrina and have not charity etc.!’

TO ‘MRS ARNOLD’: from The Kilns

2 April 1956

I’m a little, but unamusedly, surprised that my Surprised by Joy causes you envy. I doubt if you really would have enjoyed my life much better than your own. And the whole modern world ludicrously overvalues books and learning and what (I loathe the word) they call ‘culture’. And of course culture itself is the greatest sufferer by this error: for second things are always corrupted when they are put first . . .

TO FATHER PETER MILWARD: from Magdalene College

9 May 1956

You need not be afraid of telling me ‘only what I know already’ about the Grail legend, for indeed I know v. little. If you think otherwise, you are perhaps confusing my interest in C. [harles] W. [illiams] with C. W.’s interest in the legend.

For my own part, I am v. puzzled as to what exactly we are doing when we study—not this or that work of art—but a myth in abstract. Supposing (pontionis causa) that what people mean when they say ‘The Grail is the Caldron of the Dead’ is true, what do they mean? More briefly, what does is mean in such a sentence? It is not the is of equality (2X6 is 3X4) nor of classification (a horse is a mammal) nor of allegory (this Rock is Christ). How can an imagined object in one story ‘be’ an imagined object in another story?

About my Inaugural—aren’t you rather forgetting that I was trying to fix merely the cultural change? From my angle even the original conversion of Europe, you remember, had to be ranked as a minor change. After that, you cd hardly expect the Reformation to be v. prominent. To be sure, if my point of view had been different, it wd have become fundamental and you and I wd of course differ v. widely about its character.

TO JOAN LANCASTER: from The Kilns

26 June 1956

You describe your Wonderful Night v. well. That is, you describe the place & the people and the night and the feeling of it all, very well—but not the thing itself—the setting but not the jewel. And no wonder! Wordsworth often does just the same. His Prelude (you’re bound to read it about ten years’ hence. Don’t try it now, or you’ll only spoil it for later reading) is full of moments in which everything except the thing itself is described. If you become a writer you’ll be trying to describe the thing all your life: and lucky if, out of dozens of books, one or two sentences, just for a moment, come near to getting it across.

About amn’t I, aren’t I, and am I not, of course there are no right and wrong answers about language in the sense in which there are right and wrong answers in Arithemetic. ‘Good English’ is whatever educated people talk: so that what is good in one place or time wd not be so in another. Amn’t was good fifty years ago in the North of Ireland where I was brought up, but bad in Southern England. Aren’t I wd have been hideously bad in Ireland but was good in England. And of course I just don’t know which (if either) is good in modern Florida. Don’t take any notice of teachers and text-books in such matters. Nor of logic. It is good to say ‘More than one passenger was hurt’ although more than one equals at least two and therefore logically the verb ought to be plural were not singular was! What really matters is:

(1) Always try to use the language so as to make quite clear what you mean and make sure yr sentence couldn’t mean anything else.

(2) Always prefer the plain direct word to the long, vague one. Don’t implement promises, but keep them.

(3) Never use abstract nouns when concrete ones will do. If you mean ‘more people died’ don’t say ‘mortality rose’.

(4) In writing. Don’t use adjectives which merely tell us how you want us to feel about the thing you are describing. I mean, instead of telling us a thing was ‘terrible’, describe it so that we’ll be terrified. Don’t say it was ‘delightful’: make us say ‘delightful’ when we’ve read the description. You see, all those words (horrifying, wonderful, hideous, exquisite) are only like saying to your readers ‘Please will you do my job for me’.

(5) Don’t use words too big for the subject. Don’t say ‘infinitely’ when you mean ‘very’; otherwise you’ll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite . . .

TO CHRISTOPHER DERRICK: from The Kilns

2 August 1956

(I’d sooner you called me Lewis tout court, both for old acquaintance sake and because, as Brightman—was he before your time?—used to say, ‘When I was a young man no one was called professor except conjurors.’)

All universities are now N.I.C.E.s when it comes to buildings: tho’ I met a civilised American don once who claimed that his own university (I forgot which) had got over that malady and, looking at the Parks with their new laboratories . . . observed, ‘I see you are still in the Stone Age’.

You ought to have been spending (if you haven’t already done so) on Tolkien’s 3 vol. Lord of the Rings the time you spent on OHEL. The Lord is the book we have all been waiting for. And it shows too, which cheers, that there are thousands left in Israel who have not bowed the knee to Leavis . . .

TO FATHER PETER MILWARD: from The Kilns

22 September 1956

Tolkien’s book is not an allegory—a form he dislikes. You’ll get nearest to his mind on such subjects by studying his essay on Fairy Tales in the Essays Presented to Charles Williams. His root idea of narrative art is ‘sub-creation’—the making of a secondary world. What you wd call ‘a pleasant story for the children’ wd be to him more serious than an allegory. But for his views, read the essay, wh. is indispensible.

My view wd be that a good myth (i.e. a story out of which ever varying meanings will grow for different readers and in different ages) is a higher thing than an allegory (into which one meaning has been put). Into an allegory a man can put only what he already knows: in a myth he puts what he does not yet know and cd not come to know in any other way.

[ Joy Davidman Gresham had been divorced from her husband, William Lindsay Gresham, in 1953 and in that year she took up residence in England with her sons David and Douglas. They lived in London until August 1955 when they moved to 10 Old High Street, Headington. When it became clear that the Home Office would not renew Joy’s permit to remain in Great Britain, Jack entered into a civil marriage with her so that she could remain in England. This took place in the Oxford Registry Office on 23 April 1956. Joy had for a long while been suffering from what seemed rheumatism. However, after she was taken to the Wingfield-Morris Orthopaedic Hospital, Oxford, on 19 October 1956 she was found to be suffering from cancer.]

TO A FORMER PUPIL: from Magdalene College

14 November 1956

I wish you would pray very hard for a lady called Joy Gresham and me. I am like v. shortly to be both a bridegroom and widower, for she has cancer. You need not mention this till the marriage (which will be at a hospital bedside if it occurs) is announced. I’ll tell you the whole story some day . . .

TO ARTHUR GREEVES: from The Kilns

25 November 1956

Joy is in hospital, suffering from cancer. The prospects are 1. A tiny 100th chance of ultimate cure. 2. A reasonable probability of some years more of (tolerable) life. 3. A real danger that she may die in a few months.

It will be a great tragedy for me to lose her. In the meantime, if she gets over this bout and emerges from hospital she will no longer be fit to live alone so she must come and live here. That means (in order to avoid scandal) that our marriage must shortly be published. W. has written to Janie and the Ewarts to tell them I am getting married, and I didn’t want the news to take you by surprise. I know you will pray for her and for me: and for W., to whom also, the loss if we lose her, will be great.

TO MR LUCAS: from Magdalene College

6 December 1956

(1) I think there may be some humour [in the New Testament]. Matt. IX.12 (People who are well don’t need doctors) could well be said in a way that wd be v. funny to everyone present except the Pharisees. So might Matt. XVII.25. And in Mark X.30—quickly slipping in ‘tribulations’ among all the assets—that cd be funny too. And of course the Parable of the Unjust Steward (it’s comic element is well brought out in Dorothy Sayers’ excellent Man Born to Be King).

(2) If there were more humour, should we (modern Occidentals) see it? I’ve been much struck in conversation with a Jewess by the extent to which Jews see humour in the O.T. where we don’t. Humour varies so much from culture to culture.

(3) How much wd be recorded? We know (John XXI.25) that we have only a tiny fraction of what Our Lord said. Wd the Evangelists, anxious to get across what was vitally necessary, include it? They told us nothing about His appearance, clothes, physical habits—none of what a modern biographer would put in.

TO FATHER PETER MILWARD: from The Kilns

10 December 1956

One historical point first. There cd not have been an allegory about the atomic bomb when Tolkien began his romance for he did so before it was invented. That, however, has little to do with the theoretical question: tho’ it has much to do with the extreme danger, in individual cases, of applying allegorical interpretations. We shd. probably find that many particular allegories critics read into Langland or Spenser are impossible for just that sort of reason, if we knew all the facts. I am also convinced that the wit of man cannot devise a story in wh. the wit of some other man cannot find an allegory.

For the rest, I wd agree that the word can be used in wider or narrower senses. Indeed, in so far as the things unseen are manifested by the things seen, one might from one point of view call the whole material universe an allegory. The truth is it’s one of those words which needs defining in each context where one uses it. It wd be disastrous if anyone took your statement that the Nativity is the greatest of all allegories to mean that the physical event was merely feigned!

Who is the man on your stamp? Looks like a tough to me. Thanks for pleasant card, and all good wishes.

[The following announcement appeared in The Times on 24 December 1956, p. 8: ‘A marriage has taken place between Professor C. S. Lewis, of Magdalene College, Cambridge, and Mrs Joy Gresham, now a patient in the Churchill Hospital, Oxford. It is requested that no letters be sent.’]

TO MISS DOROTHY L. SAYERS: from The Kilns

24 December 1956

Thanks for your kind card. You may see in The Times a notice of my marriage to Joy Gresham. She is in hospital (cancer) and not likely to live; but if she gets over this go she must be given a home here. You will not think that anything wrong is going to happen. Certain problems do not arise between a dying woman and an elderly man. What I am mainly acquiring is two (nice) stepsons. Pray for us all, and God bless you.

TO PROFESSOR CLYDE S. KILBY: from Magdalene College (about his novel Till We Have Faces, which was published in September 1956)

10 February 1957

An author doesn’t necessarily understand the meaning of his own story better than anyone else, so I give you my account of the TWHF simply for what’s it’s worth. The ‘levels’ I am conscious of are these.

1. A work of (supposed) historical imagination. A guess at what it might have been like in a little barbarous state on the borders of the Hellenistic world with Greek culture just beginning to affect it. Hence the change from the old priest (of a very normal fertility mother-goddess) to Arnom: Stoic allegorisations of the myths standing to the original cult rather as Modernism to Christianity (but this is a parallel, not an allegory). Much that you take as allegory was intended solely as realistic detail. The Wagon men are Nomads from the steppes. The children made mud pies not for symbolic purposes but because children do. The Pillar Room is simply a room. The Fox is such an educated Greek slave as you might find at a barbarous court—and so on.

2. Psyche is an instance of the anima naturaliter Christiana making the best of the Pagan religion she is brought up in and thus being guided (but always ‘under the cloud’, always in terms of her own imagination or that of her people) towards the true God. She is in some ways like Christ not because she is a symbol of Him but because every good man or woman is like Christ. What else could they be like? But of course my interest is primarily in Orual.

3. Orual is (not a symbol but) an instance, a ‘case’, of human affection in its natural condition: true, tender, suffering, but in the long run, tyrannically possessive and ready to turn to hatred when the beloved ceases to be its possession. What such love particularly cannot stand is to see the beloved passing into a sphere where it cannot follow. All this, I hoped, would stand in a mere story in its own right. But—

4. Of course I had always in mind its close parallel to what is probably at this moment going on in at least five families in your own town at this moment. Someone becomes a Christian, or, in a family nominally Christian already, does something like becoming a missionary or entering a religious order. The others suffer a sense of outrage. What they love is being taken from them! The boy must be mad! And the conceit of him! Or is there something in it after all? Let’s hope it is only a phase! If only he’d listen to his natural advisers! Oh come back, come back, be sensible, be the dear son we used to know. Now I, as a Christian, have a good deal of sympathy with these jealous, puzzled, suffering people (for they do suffer and out of their suffering much of the bitterness against religion arises). I believe the thing is common. There is very nearly a touch of it in Luke II, 48, ‘Son, why hast thou so dealt with us?’ And is the reply easy for a loving heart to bear?

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

Ash Wednesday [6 March 1957]

Yes, it is true. I married (knowingly) a very sick, save by near-miracle a dying, woman. She is the Joy Davidman whose Smoke on the Mountain I think you read. She is in the Wingfield Morris Hospital at Headington. When I see her each week end she is, to a layman’s eyes (but not to a doctor’s knowledge) in full convalescence, better every week. The disease is of course cancer: by which I lost my mother, my father, and my favourite aunt. She knows her own state of course: I wd allow no lies to be told to a grown-up and a Christian. As you can imagine new beauty and new tragedy have entered my life. You wd be surprised (or perhaps you would not?) to know how much of a strange sort of happiness and even gaiety there is between us . . .

I don’t doubt that Joy and I (and David & Douglas, the two boys) will have your prayers. Douglas is an absolute charmer (11½). David, at first sight less engaging, is at any rate a comically appropriate stepson for me (13), being almost exactly what I was—bookworm, pedant, and a bit of a prig.

TO MRS EDWARD A. ALLEN: from The Kilns

16 March 1957

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

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

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

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

8 May 1957

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

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

12 May 1957

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

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

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

TO MISS DOROTHY L. SAYERS: from The Kilns

25 June 1957

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

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

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

TO JOAN LANCASTER: from The Kilns

18 July 1957

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

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

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

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

2 September 1957

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

24 September 1957

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

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

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

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

6 November 1957

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

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

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

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

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

17 November 1957

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

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

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

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

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

Christmas Day 1957

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

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

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

TO MRS EDWARD A. ALLEN: from The Kilns

1 February 1958

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

TO MISS MURIEL BRADBROOK: from Magdalene College

18 April 1958

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

TO MRS JOHN WATT: from The Kilns (following a holiday he and Joy had in Ireland with Arthur Greeves)

28 August 1958

All goes amazing well with us. My wife walks up the wooded hill behind our house and shoots—or more stictly shoots at—pigeons, picks peas and beans, and heaven knows what.

We had a holiday—you might call it a belated honeymoon—in Ireland and were lucky enough to get that perfect fortnight at the beginning of July. We visited Louth, Down, and Donegal, and returned drunk with blue mountains, yellow beaches, dark fuchsia, breaking waves, braying donkeys, peat-smell, and the heather just then beginning to bloom.

We flew to Ireland, for, tho’ both of us wd prefer ship to plane, her bones, and even mine, could not risk a sudden lurch. It was the first flight either of us had ever experienced and we found it, after one initial moment of terror, enchanting. The cloud-scape seen from above is a new world of beauty—and then the rifts in the clouds through which one sees (like Tennyson’s Tithonus) ‘a glimpse of that dark world where I was born’. We had clear weather over the Irish Sea and the first Irish headland, brightly sunlit, stood out from the dark sea (it’s very dark when you’re looking directly down on it) like a bit of enamel.

As for the picture in The Observer, even our most ribald friends don’t pretend it has any resemblance to either of us. As a spiritualist picture of the ectoplasms of a dyspeptic orangutan and an immature Sorn it may have merits, but not as a picture of us . . .

TO MRS JOHN WATT: from The Kilns

30 October 1958

I was much interested to hear of the ‘Eye on research’ programme on TV: myself, I’m glad to say I don’t often see television, but my brother, who sometimes looks in on a friend’s set, says he can well understand your feelings of ‘horror and terror’. He adds that to him the most terrible part of the business is the implicit assumption that progress is an inevitable process like decay, and that the only important thing in life is to increase the comfort of homo sapiens, at whatever cost to posterity and to the other inhabitants of the planet. I can well imagine how a ‘scientific’ programme would jar after watching such a stately ceremony as the opening of Parliament.

TO MRS HOOK: from The Kilns

29 December 1958

By an allegory I mean a composition (whether pictorial or literary) in wh. immaterial realities are represented by feigned physical objects e.g. a pictured Cupid allegorically represents erotic love (which in reality is an experience, not an object occupying a given area of space) or, in Bunyan a giant represents Despair.

If Aslan represented the immaterial Deity in the same way in which Giant Despair represents Despair, he would be an allegorical figure. In reality however he is an invention giving an imaginary answer to the question, ‘What might Christ become like if there really were a world like Narnia and He chose to be incarnate and die and rise again in that world as He actually has done in ours?’ This is not allegory at all. So in Perelandra. This also works out a supposition. (‘Suppose, even now, in some other planet there were a first couple undergoing the same that Adam and Eve underwent here, but successfully’.)

Allegory and such supposals differ because they mix the real and the unreal in different ways. Bunyan’s picture of Giant Despair does not start from supposal at all. It is not a supposition but a fact that despair can capture and imprison a human soul. What is unreal (fictional) is the giant, the castle, and the dungeon. The Incarnation of Christ in another world is mere supposal: but granted the supposition, He would really have been a physical object in that world as He was in Palestine and His death on the Stone Table would have been a physical event no less than his death on Calvary. Similarly, if the angels (who I believe to be real beings in the actual universe) have that relation to the Pagan gods which they are assumed to have in Perelandra, they might really manifest themselves in real form as they did to Ransom. Again, Ransom (to some extent) plays the role of Christ not because he allegorically represents Him (as Cupid represents falling in love) but because in reality every real Christian is really called upon in some measure to enact Christ. Of course Ransom does this rather more spectacularly than most. But that does not mean that he does it allegorically. It only means that fiction (at any rate my kind of fiction) chooses extreme cases.

There is no conscious connection between any of the phonetic elements in my ‘Old Solar’ words and those of any actual language. I am always playing with syllables and fitting them together (purely by ear) to see if I can hatch up new words that please me. I want them to have an emotional, not intellectual, suggestiveness: the heaviness of glund for as huge a planet as Jupiter, the vibrating, tintillating quality of viritrilbia for the subtlety of Mercury, the liquidity . . . of Maleldil. The only exception I am aware of is hnau which may (but I don’t know) have been influenced by Greek nous.

TO PROFESSOR CLYDE S. KILBY: from Magdalene College

20 January 1959

As to Professor Van Til’s point it is certainly scriptural to say that ‘to as many as believed He gave power to become the sons of God’, and the statement ‘God became Man that men might become gods’ is Patristic. Of course Van Til’s wording ‘that man must seek to ascend in the scale of life’ with its suggestions (a) That we could do this by our own efforts, (b) That the difference between God and Man is a difference of position on a ‘scale of life’ like the difference between a (biologically) ‘higher’ and a (biologically) ‘lower’ creature, is wholly foreign to my thought.

I think an anthology of extracts from a living writer would make both him and the collector look rather ridiculous and I’m sure publishers would not agree to the plan. I am sorry to reply so ungraciously to a proposal which does me so much honour. But I’m convinced it would not do.

TO FATHER PETER BIDE: from Magdalene College (Father Bide is the priest who married Jack and Joy, and now his wife was dying from cancer.)

29 April 1959

Indeed, indeed we both will. I don’t see how any degree of faith can exclude the dismay, since Christ’s faith did not save Him from dismay in Gethsemane. We are not necessarily doubting that God will do the best for us: we are wondering how painful the best will turn out to be. In a case like the one you refer to, where the growth is detected in its primary state and in the most operable part, there are of course solid grounds for an entirely optimistic view. But then one of your fears and her’s, is of all the fears you will have to suffer before you are out of the wood. The monotony of anxiety—the circular movement of the mind—is horrible. As far as possible I think it is best to treat one’s own anxiety as being also an illness. I wish I could help. Can I? You did so much for me.

As to the ‘frightening monotony’ I think this disease now ranks as a plague and we live in a plague-striken population.

God bless you both. I shall have no need to ‘remind’ myself to remember you. Let us have news as soon as there is any.

If you find (some do) that mental anguish produces an inclination to eat more—paradoxical but it can—I should jolly well do so.

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

30 April 1959

First, in answer to your question. My wife has continuously gone on from strength to strength. Except that one leg will always be shorter than the other so that she walks with a stick and a limp, she now leads a normal, and active, life. My own bone-trouble, tho’ not completely cured, is so much better as to be now merely a trivial inconvenience.

Thanks for Christ and India. It confirms what I had, less clearly, thought already—that the difficulty of preaching Christ in India is that there is no difficulty. One is up against true Paganism—the best sort of it as well as the worst—hospitable to all gods, naturally ‘religious’, ready to take any shape but able to retain none. [fear of the gods] is harder to convert than materialism as a fog is harder to remove than a tree.

About the Semitic genius, my wife, who is a Jewess by blood, holds two views which wd interest you.

1. That the only living Judaism is Christianity. Where her own people still have any religion it is archaic, pedantic, and—so to speak—sectarian, so that being a devout Jew is rather like being a Plymouth Brother.

2. That we Goyim misread much of the O.T. because we start with the assumption that its sacred character excludes humour. That no one who knew the Jewish ethos from inside could fail to see the fully accepted comic element in Abraham’s dialogue with God (Genesis XVIII) or in Jonah.

While we are on exegesis, am I right in thinking that the key to the parable of the Unjust Steward is to grasp that the Master in it is The World? (= this Aion). The dismissal is the notice—apparently now being served on you and long since served on me—that our present tabernacle will soon be taken down. The moral is ‘Cheat your master’. If he gives us wealth, talent, beauty, power etc. use them for your own (eternal) purposes—spoil the Egyptian! If you can’t do that with his kind of property, who will trust you with the true kind? Of course who praised the Steward is not the Master in the parable but Our Lord, the Master who is telling the story. And telling it not without paradoxical humour.

It would be very nice to meet when you are in Europe, if this should be at all possible.

The man (Peter Bide) who laid his hands on my wife and she recovered, writes to me that his own wife is now struck down with the same disease. Would you mention him in your prayers?

TO PROFESSOR CLYDE S. KILBY: from Magdalene College (Professor Kilby says of the following letter,

‘Written after I had sent him a copy of the Wheaton College statement concerning inspiration of the Bible and asked for his opinion’.)

7 May 1959

I enclose what, at such short notice, I feel able to say on this question. If it is at all likely to upset anyone, throw it in the waste paper basket. Remember too that it is pretty tentative, much less an attempt to establish a view than a statement of the issue on which, whether rightly or wrongly, I have come to work. To me the curious thing is that neither in my own Bible-reading nor in my religious life as a whole does the question in fact ever assume that importance which it always gets in theological controversy. The difference between reading the story of Ruth and that of Antigone—both first class as literature—is to me unmistakable and even overwhelming. But the question ‘Is Ruth historical?’ (I’ve no reason to suppose it is not) doesn’t really seem to arise till afterwards. It can still act on me as the Word of God if it weren’t, so far as I can see. All Holy Scripture is written for our learning. But learning of what? I should have thought the value of some things (e.g. The Resurrection) depended on whether they really happened, but the value of others (e.g. the fate of Lot’s wife) hardly at all. And the ones whose historicity matters are, as God’s will, those where it is plain . . .

Whatever view we hold on the divine authority of Scripture must make room for the following facts.

1. The distinction which St Paul makes in I Cor vii between (v. 10) and (v. 12).

2. The apparent inconsistencies between the genealogies in Matt i and Luke iii: with the accounts of the death of Judas in Matt xxvii 5 and Acts i. 18–19.

3. St Luke’s own account of how he obtained his matter (i. 1–4).

4. The universally admitted unhistoricity (I do not say, of course, falsity) of at least some narratives in Scripture (the parables), which may well extend also to Jonah and Job.

5. If every good and perfect gift comes from the Father of Lights then all true and edifying writings, whether in Scripture or not, must be in some sense inspired.

6. John xi. 49–52. Inspiration may operate in a wicked man without his knowing it, and he can then utter the untruth he intends (propriety of making an innocent man a political scapegoat) as well as the truth he does not intend (the divine sacrifice).

It seems to me that 2 and 4 rule out the view that every statement in Scripture must be historical truth. And 1, 3, 5, and 6 rule out the view that inspiration is a single thing in the sense that, if present at all, it is always present in the same mode and the same degree. Therefore, I think, rules out the view that any one passage taken in isolation can be assumed to be inerrant in exactly the same sense as any other: e.g. that the numbers of O.T. Armies (which in view of the size of the country, if true, involve continuous miracle) are statistically correct because the story of the Resurrection is historically correct. That the over-all operation of Scripture is to convey God’s Word to the reader (he also needs his inspiration) who reads it in the right spirit, I fully believe. That it also gives true answers to all the questions (often religiously irrelevant) which he might ask, I don’t. The very kind of truth we are often demanding was, in my opinion, not even envisaged by the ancients.

TO CHARLES MOORMAN: from Magdalene College (who was writing Arthurian Triptych: Mythic Materials in Charles Williams, C. S. Lewis, and T. S. Eliot [1960])

15 May 1959

I don’t think your project at all ‘presumptuous’, but I do think you may be chasing after a fox that isn’t there. Charles Williams certainly influenced me and I perhaps influenced him. But after that I think you would draw a blank. No one ever influenced Tolkien—you might as well try to influence a bandersnatch. We listened to his work, but could affect it only by encouragement. He has only two reactions to criticism: either he begins the whole work over again from the beginning or else takes no notice at all. Dorothy Sayers was not living in Oxford at the time and I don’t think she ever in her life met Tolkien. She knew Charles Williams well, and me much later. I am sure she neither exerted nor underwent any literary influence at all. Of course it may be that, just because I was in it myself, I don’t see (objectively) what was really going on. But I give my honest impression for what it is worth.

To be sure, we had a common point of view, but we had it before we met. It was the cause rather than the result of our friendship.

I hope I don’t seem to be ‘putting you off’. My real anxiety is lest you shd waste time on what might prove a barren field.

TO KATHLEEN RAINE (Mrs Madge): from The Kilns

19 June 1959

One must (and will) write poetry if one can. That one must therefore return to the place where the Muse once appeared, as if she were bound to appear there again, is quite a different proposition. The gods will not be met by appointment. They never give us their addresses. And tho’ the Faculty has not been able to give you what you, reasonably, want, it does not follow that they don’t want you. At any rate postpone. There will never be a time when you can’t leave Cambridge: there could easily be one when you couldn’t return.

TO ‘MRS ARNOLD’: from The Kilns

8 September 1959

No one, I presume, can imagine life in the glorified body. On this, and on the distinction (in general) between belief and imagination, I have said all I can in Miracles. Lor’ bless us, I can picture very few of the things I believe in. I can’t picture will, thought, time, atoms, astronomical distance, New York, nor even (at this moment) my mother’s face.

Your whole worry about the word Christian comes from ignoring the fact that words have different meanings in different contexts. The best parallel is the word poet. We can argue till the cows come home whether ‘Pope is a poet’. On the other hand a librarian, putting ‘poets’ in one shelf and prose in another, after a single glance at one page of Pope, classifies him as a ‘poet’.

In other words, the word has a deep, ambiguous, disputable and (for many purposes) useless sense: also a shallower, clear, useful sense. In the second sense it seems to be more useful not to classify Quakers as Christians. But this is a linguistic, not a religious question . . .

TO ROGER LANCELYN GREEN: from Magdalene College

25 November 1959

In a sense it might be said that Joy ‘is’ not ill at present. But the last X-ray check revealed that the cancer in the bones is awake again. This last check is the only one we approached without dread—her health seemed so complete. It is like being recaptured by the giant when you have passed every gate and are almost out of sight of his castle. Whether a second miracle will be vouchsafed us, or, if not, when the sentence will be inflicted, remains uncertain. It is quite possible she may be able to do the Greek trip next spring. Pray for us . . .

TO SIR HENRY WILLINK: from Magdalene College (Sir Henry, the Master of Magdalene College, had just lost his wife.)

3 December 1959

I have learned now that while those who speak about one’s miseries usually hurt one, those who keep silence hurt more. They help to increase the sense of general isolation which makes a sort of fringe to the sorrow itself. You know what cogent reason I have to feel with you: but I can feel for you too. I know that what you are facing must be worse than what I must shortly face myself, because your happiness has lasted so much longer and is therefore so much more intertwined with your whole life. As Scott said in like case ‘What am I to do with that daily portion of my thoughts which has for so many years been hers?’

People talk as if grief were just a feeling—as if it weren’t the continually renewed shock of setting out again and again on familiar roads and being brought up short by the grim frontier post that now blocks them. I, to be sure, believe there is something beyond it: but the moment one tries to use that as a consolation (that is not its function) the belief crumbles. It is quite useless knocking at the door of Heaven for earthly comfort: it’s not the sort of comfort they supply there.

You are probably very exhausted physically. Hug that and all the little indulgences to which it entitles you. I think it is tiny little things which (next to the very greatest things) help most at such a time.

I have myself twice known, after a loss, a strange excited (but utterly un-spooky) sense of the person’s presence all about me. It may be a pure hallucination. But the fact that it always goes off after a few weeks proves nothing either way.

I wish I had known your wife better. But she has a bright place in my memory. It was so reassuring to the Oxford deserter to meet someone from L.[ady] M.[argaret] H.[all] and be able to talk about ‘the Hippo’. She will be very greatly missed—on her own account, quite apart from any sympathy with you—by every fellow of this College.

And poor Horace too—‘the single talent well employed’. I shall not be at the funeral. You can understand and forgive my desire, now, to spend every possible moment at home. Forgive me if I have said anything amiss in this letter. I am too much involved myself to practise any skill.

TO DR ALASTAIR FOWLER: from Magdalene College

10 December 1959

Thanks greatly. The Spenser article confirms the impression increasingly made on me while writing lectures on F.Q. last term: that of its amazing close-wovenness. Damme, you can’t pick up a line anywhere but it starts another line wriggling ten cantos away . . .

Sorry my OHEL is such a nuisance. I only once detected a pupil offering me some one else (Elton) as his own work. I told him I was not a detective nor even a schoolmaster, nor a nurse, and that I absolutely refused to take any precaution against this puerile trick: that I’d as soon think it my business to see that he washed behind his ears or wiped his bottom . . . He went down of his own accord the next week and I never saw him again. I think you ought to make a general announcement of that sort. You must not waste your time constantly reading me and Dowden and Churton Collins as a sort of police measure. It is bad for them to think this is ‘up to you’. Flay them alive if you happen to detect them: but don’t let them feel that you are a safeguard against the effects of their own idleness.

What staggers me is how any man can prefer the galley-slave labour of transcription to the freeman’s work of attempting an essay on his own . . .

TO A SCHOOLGIRL IN AMERICA: from The Kilns (She had written, at her teacher’s suggestion, to request advice on writing.)

14 December 1959

(1) Turn off the Radio.

(2) Read all the good books you can, and avoid nearly all magazines.

(3) Always write (and read) with the ear, not the eye. You shd hear every sentence you write as if it was being read aloud or spoken. If it does not sound nice, try again.

(4) Write about what really interests you, whether it is real things or imaginary things, and nothing else. (Notice this means that if you are interested only in writing you will never be a writer, because you will have nothing to write about . . .)

(5) Take great pains to be clear. Remember that though you start by knowing what you mean, the reader doesn’t, and a single ill-chosen word may lead him to a total misunderstanding. In a story it is terribly easy just to forget that you have not told the reader something that he needs to know—the whole picture is so clear in your own mind that you forget that it isn’t the same in his.

(6) When you give up a bit of work don’t (unless it is hopelessly bad) throw it away. Put it in a drawer. It may come in useful later. Much of my best work, or what I think my best, is the rewriting of things begun and abandoned years earlier.

(7) Don’t use a typewriter. The noise will destroy your sense of rhythm, which still needs years of training.

(8) Be sure you know the meaning (or meanings) of every word you use.

TO SOPHIA STORR (a schoolgirl): from The Kilns

24 December 1959

No, of course it was not unconscious. So far as I can remember it was not at first intentional either. That is, when I started The Lion, Witch and Wardrobe I don’t think I foresaw what Aslan was going to do and suffer. I think He just insisted on behaving in His own way. This of course I did understand and the whole series became Christian.

But it is not, as some people think, an allegory. That is, I don’t say ‘Let us represent Christ as Aslan’. I say, ‘Supposing there was a world like Narnia, and supposing, like ours, it needed redemption, let us imagine what sort of Incarnation and Passion and Resurrection Christ would have there.’ See?

I think this is pretty obvious if you take all the seven Narnian books as a whole. In The Magician’s Nephew Aslan creates Narnia. In Prince Caspian the old stories about Him are beginning to be disbelieved. At the end of the Dawn Treader He appears as the Lamb. His three replies to Shasta suggest the Trinity. In The Silver Chair the old king is raised from the dead by a drop of Aslan’s blood. Finally in the Last Battle we have the reign of anti-Christ (the ape), the end of the world, and the Last Judgement.

TO FATHER PETER MILWARD: from The Kilns

Christmas Day 1959

I hope my last letter to you did not sound chilling: still less (heaven help us!) as if I were offended by criticism. I think the chief reason why I am less disposed than you for large-scale discussion by letter is the difference of our ages. In youth we conduct (at least I did) long and deep disputations through the post. It is indeed a most valuable part of our education. We put into it quite as much thought and labour as wd go to writing a book. But later, when one has become a writer of books, it is hard to keep it up. One can’t fill one’s leisure with the v. same activity which is one’s main work. And in my case not only the mind but the hand needs rest. Penmanship is increasingly laborious, and the results (as you see) increasingly illegible!

If you sometimes read into my books what I did not know I had put there, neither of us need be surprised, for greater readers have doubtless done the same to far greater authors. Shakespeare wd, I suspect, read with astonishment what Goethe, Coleridge, Bradley and Wilson Knight have found in him! Perhaps a book ought to have more meanings than the writer intends? But then the writer will not necessarily be the best person with whom to discuss them.

You are in my daily prayers. Will you pray much for me at present? The cancer from which my wife was (as I believe, miraculously) delivered 2½ years ago, when death in a few weeks was predicted, is returning. Can one without presumption ever ask for a second miracle? The prophet turned back the shadow for Hezekiah once: not twice. Lazarus, raised from the dead, presently died again.

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