1960–1963
TO MRS VERA GEBBERT: from The Kilns
17 January 1960
The ghastly daily grind of unavoidable letters leaves me a hand very ill disposed to pleasanter and friendlier correspondence. It is now 9.50 A.M. and I’ve already been writing letters as hard as I can drive the pen across the paper for an hour and a half: and when on earth I shall get a chance to begin my own work I don’t know . . . I quite realise that it wd be difficult to emulate H. B. Stowe, writing in the kitchen. But—we know what the books were like—do we know what the cooking was like? . . . I am pretty well, though always very tired.
[Joy had all her life wanted to see Greece. Before the return of her old enemy, cancer, Roger and June Lancelyn Green—who had been there on a ‘Wings’ tour in April 1959—offered to make arrangements for a similar visit in April 1960. The Lewises were delighted with the idea, and in September 1959 Jack told their friends which days in April would be best for them. Even the pains and the various complications of Joy’s illness did not deter them. Jack and Joy were in Greece with the Lancelyn Greens during 2–14 April 1960. Roger Lancelyn Green kept a diary of their travels through Greece and it can be found in his and my C. S. Lewis: A Biography (1974).]
TO CHAD WALSH (who had known Jack and Joy since the late 1940s): from The Kilns
23 May 1960
It looked very doubtful if Joy and I would be able to do our trip to Greece, but we did. From one point of view it was madness, but neither of us regrets it. She performed prodigies of strength, limping to the top of the Acropolis and up through the Lion gate of Mycenae and all about the medieval city of Rhodes. (Rhodes is simply the Earthly Paradise.) It was as if she were divinely supported. She came back in a nunc dimittis frame of mind, having realised, beyond hope, her greatest, lifelong, this-worldly, desire.
There was a heavy price to pay in increased lameness and legpains: not that her exertions had or could have any effect on the course of the cancers, but that the muscles etc had been overtaxed. Since then there has been a recrudescence of the original growth in the right breast which started the whole trouble. It had to be removed last Friday—or, as she characteristically put it, she was ‘made an Amazon’. This operation went through, thank God, with greater ease than we had dared to hope. By the evening of the same day she was free from all severe pain and from nausea, and cheerfully talkative. Yesterday she was able to sit up in a chair for fifteen minutes or so.
Love and greetings to you all, in which Warnie (who is fine) joins me. Thank you for your prayers.
I had some ado to prevent Joy (and myself) from relapsing into Paganism in Attica! At Daphne it was hard not to pray to Apollo the Healer. But somehow one didn’t feel it wd have been very wrong—wd have only been addressing Christ sub specie Apollinis. We witnessed a beautiful Christian village ceremony in Rhodes and hardly felt a discrepancy. Greek priests impress one very favourable at sight—much more so than most Protestant or R.C. clergy. And the peasants all refuse tips.
TO DELMAR BANNER: from Magdalene College
27 May 1960
Thanks. I’m glad you liked the book [The Four Loves].
I quite agree with you about Homosexuals: to make the thing criminal cures nothing and only creates a blackmailer’s paradise. Anyway, what business is it of the State’s? But I couldn’t well have had a digression on that. One is fighting on two fronts. a. For the persecuted Homo. against snoopers and busybodies. b. For ordinary people against the widespread freemasonry of the highbrow Homos who dominate so much of the world of criticism, and won’t be v. nice to you unless you are in their set . . .
[Samuel Pepys had been a member of Magdalene College and his diary is the property of Magdalene. At this time the College was trying to reach a decision as to whether or not to publish the Diary in its unexpurgated entirety.]
TO SIR HENRY WILLINK: from The Kilns
17 June 1960
Francis flatters me with the idea that, if there is a division as to printing those ‘curious’ passages in our new Pepys, my opinion might be asked for. Since I can’t be sure of coming to the next meeting of the Governing Body, I have decided to let you have it in writing.
A prudential and moral problem are both involved.
The prudential one is concerned (a) with the chances of a prosecution, and (b) with the chances of disrepute and ridicule. On (a) it would be ridiculous for me to express an opinion in your presence and Mickey’s. As to (b), a spiteful or merely jocular journalist would certainly make us for a week or two malodorous in the public nostril. But a few weeks, or years, are nothing in the life of the College. I think it would be pusillanimous and unscholarly to delete a syllable on that score.
The moral problem comes down to the question ‘Is it probable that the inclusion of these passages will lead anyone to commit an immoral act which he would not have committed if we had suppressed them?’ Now of course this question is strictly unanswerable. No one can foresee the odd results that any words may have on this or that individual. We ourselves, in youth, have been both corrupted and edified by books in which our elders could have foreseen neither edification nor corruption. But to suggest that in a society where the most potent aphrodisiacs are daily put forward by the advertisers, the newspapers, and the films, any perceptible increment of lechery will be caused by printing a few obscure and widely separated passages in a very long and expensive book, seems to me ridiculous, or even hypocritical.
A very severe moralist might argue that it is not enough to be unable to foresee harm: that we ought, before we act, to be able to foresee with certainty the absence of harm. But this, as you see, would prove too much. It is really an argument against doing, or not doing, any action whatever. For they all go on having consequences, mostly unforeseeable, to the world’s end.
I am therefore in favour of printing the whole unexpurgated Pepys.
TO MRS VERA GEBBERT: from The Kilns
15 July 1960
Alas, you will never send anything along ‘for the three of us’ again, for my dear Joy is dead. Until within ten days of the end we hoped, although noticing her increasing weakness, that she was going to hold her own, but it was not to be.
Last week she had been complaining of muscular pains in her shoulders, but by Monday 11th seemed much better, and on Tuesday, though keeping her bed, said she felt a great improvement: on that day she was in good spirits, did her ‘crossword puzzle’ with me, and in the evening played a game of Scrabble. At quarter past six on Wednesday morning [13 July] my brother, who slept over her, was wakened by her screaming and ran down to her. I got the doctor, who fortunately was at home, and he arrived before seven and gave her a heavy shot. At half past one I took her into hospital in an ambulance. She was conscious for the short remainder of her life, and in very little pain thanks to drugs: and died peacefully in my company about 10.15 the same night . . .
You will understand that I have no heart to write more, but I hope that when next I send a letter it will be a less depressing one.
TO MRS VERA GEBBERT: from The Kilns
5 August 1960
I believe in the resurrection . . . but the state of the dead till the resurrection is unimaginable. Are they in the same time that we live in at all? And if not, is there any sense in asking where they are ‘now’? . . .
Perhaps being maddeningly busy is the best thing for me. Anyway I am. This is one of those things which makes the tragedies of real life so very unlike those of the stage.
TO HERR KUNZ (in Germany): from The Kilns
16 August 1960
My Out of the Silent Planet has no factual basis and is a critique of our own age only as any Christian work is implicitly a critique of any age. I was trying to redeem for genuinely imaginative purposes the form popularly known in this country as ‘science-fiction’—I think you call it ‘future-romanz’; just as (si parva licet componere magnis) Hamlet redeemed the popular revenge play.
TO MRS ANNE SCOTT: from The Kilns
26 August 1960
Thank you very much for your most kind and encouraging letter. You gave me great pleasure by what you said about Till We Have Faces, for that book, which I consider far and away the best I have written, has been my one big failure both with the critics and with the public.
My small stepson entirely agrees with your children about the present wicked misdirection of my talents, and asks ‘When are you going to stop writing all this bilge and write interesting books again?’
Cookery books are not such bad reading. Have you Mrs Beeton with the original preface? It is delicious.
TO ARTHUR GREEVES: from The Kilns
30 August 1960
It is nice to hear from you. It might have been worse. Joy got away easier than many who die of cancer. There were a couple of hours of atrocious pain on her last morning, but the rest of the day mostly asleep, tho’ rational whenever she was conscious. Two of her last remarks were ‘You have made me happy’ and ‘I am at peace with God’. She died at 10 that evening. I’d seen violent death but never seen natural death before. There’s really nothing to it, is there? One thing I’m very glad about is that in the Easter Vac she realised her life long dream of seeing Greece. We had a wonderful time there. And many happy moments even after that. The night before she died we had a long, quiet, nourishing, and tranquil talk.
W. is away on his Irish holiday and has, as usual, drunk himself into hospital. Douglas—the younger boy—is, as always, an absolute brick, and a very bright spot in my life. I’m quite well myself. In fact, by judicious diet and exercise, I’ve brought myself down from thirteen stone to just under eleven.
TO ROGER LANCELYN GREEN: from The Kilns (The Lancelyn Greens had invited Jack to their home, ‘Poulton Hall’, in Cheshire for a holiday.)
15 September 1960
Oh Hell! What a trial I am to you both! If Warnie really came home on the 23rd—and if he did not come home so drunk as to have to be put straight into a nursing home—I could and wd with delight come to you on the 24th. But neither is really at all probable. And of course I can’t leave this house with no grown-up in charge. What it comes to is that you must count me out. I am very sorry. Don’t make any further efforts to accommodate such an entangled man as me—it wd only for me add to the loss of a great pleasure the embarrassment of knowing I was a nuisance.
Have you seen Allan Garner’s The Wierdstone of Brisingamen? Not bad, tho’ too indebted to Tolkien. He seems to be a fairly near neighbour of yours—Aldersley, Cheshire.
Thanks, evermore thanks, and love.
TO FATHER PETER MILWARD: from The Kilns
26 September 1960
First, about the Grail. I think it important to keep on remembering that a question can be v. interesting without being answerable and one of my main efforts as a teacher has been to train people to say those (apparently difficult) words ‘We don’t know’.
We haven’t even got anything that can be quite accurately called ‘the Grail legend’. We have a number of romances which introduce the Grail and are not consistent with one another. No theory as to the ultimate origin is more than speculative. The desire to make that origin either Pagan or (less commonly) heretical is clearly widespread, but I think it springs from psychological causes not from any evidence.
I do not myself doubt that it represents in a general way an imaginative and literary response to the doctrine of Transubstantiation and the visible act of the elevation. But we must be on our guard against abstraction. A story does not grow like a tree nor breed other stories as a mouse begets other mice. Each story is told by an individual, voluntarily, with an unique artistic purpose. Hence the real germination goes on where historical, theological, or anthropological studies can never reach it—in the mind of some man of genius, like Chretien or Wolfram. Those who have written stories themselves will come nearer to understanding it than those who have ‘studied the Grail legend’ all these lives.
The whole (unconscious) effort of the orthodox scholars is to remove the individual author and individual romance and substitute the picture of something diffusing itself like an infectious disease or a fashion in clothes. Hence the (really senseless) question ‘What is the Grail?’ The Grail is in each romance just what that romance exhibits it to be. There is no ‘Grail’ over and above these ‘Grails’. Hence, again, the assumption that the mystery in each romance could be cleared up if we knew more about the Celtic Caldron of Plenty or the Cathari or what you will. It never occurs to the scholars that this mysteriousness may be a calculated and wholly effective literary technique.
I am entirely on the side of your Society [of Jesus] for shutting de Chardin up. The enormous boosts he is getting from scientists who are very hostile to you seem to me v. like the immense popularity of Pasternak among anti-Communists. I can’t for the life of me see his merit. The cause of Man against men never needed championing less than now. There seems to me a dangerous (but also commonplace) tendency to Monism or even Pantheism in his thoughts. And what in Heaven’s name is the sense of saying that before there was life there was ‘pre-life’. If you choose to say that before you switched on the light in the cellar there was ‘pre-light’, of course you may. But the ordinary English word for ‘pre-light’ is darkness. What do you gain by such nick-names?
TO MRS VERA GEBBERT: from The Kilns
16 October 1960
I wasn’t at all questioning the life after death you know: only saying that its character is for us unimaginable. The things you tell me about it are all outside my powers of conception. To say, ‘They are now as they were then’ and add next moment, ‘unhampered of course by the body’ is to me like saying, ‘They are exactly the same but of course unimaginably different’. But don’t let us trouble one another about it. We shall know when we are dead ourselves. The Bible seems scrupulously to avoid any description of the other world, or worlds, except in terms of parable or allegory . . .
TO ‘MRS ARNOLD’: from Magdalene College
February 1961
There are, as you know, two schools of Existentialism, one anti-religious and one religious. I know the anti-religious school only through one work—Sartre’s L’Existentialisme est un Humanisme. I learned from it one important thing—that Sartre is an artist in French prose, has a sort of wintry grandeur which partly explains his immense influence. I couldn’t see that he was a real philosopher: but he is a great rhetorician.
The religious school I know only from having heard a lecture by Gabriel Marcel and reading (in English) Martin Buber’s I and Thou. They both say almost exactly the same thing, though I believe they reached their common position quite independently. (As a man Marcel was a perfect old dear.) And what they are saying is impressive—as a mood, an aperçue, a subject for a poem. But I didn’t feel that it really worked out as a philosophy.
I had been classifying Tillich more as an interpreter of the Bible than as a philosopher. I dare say you are right in thinking that for some people at some moments what I call semi-Christianity may be useful. After all, the road into the city and the road out of it are usually the same road: it depends on which direction one travels in.
At the back of religious Existentialism lies Kierkegaard. They all revere him as their pioneer. Have you read him? I haven’t or hardly at all.
TO DR ALASTAIR FOWLER: from Magdalene College
4 May 1961
You talk of Evolution as if it were a substance (like individual organisms) and even a rational substance or person. I had thought it was an abstract noun. So far as I know it is not impossible that in addition to God and the individual organisms there might be a sort of daemon, a created spirit, in the evolutionary process. But that view must surely be argued on its own merits? I mean we mustn’t unconsciously and without evidence, slip into the habit of hypostatising a noun . . .
TO MRS MARGARET GRAY: from Magdalene College
9 May 1961
How right you are when you say ‘Christianity is a terrible thing for a lifelong atheist to have to face’! In people like us—adult converts in the 20th century—I take this feeling to be a good symptom. By the way, you have had in most respects a tougher life than I, but there’s one thing I envy you. I lost my wife last summer after a very late, very short, and intensely happy married life, but I have not been vouchsafed (and why the deuce shd I be?) a visit like yours—or certainly not except for one split second. Now about reading.
For a good (‘popular’) defence of our position against modern woffle, to fall back on, I know nothing better than G. K. Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man. Harder reading, but very protective, is Edwyn Bevan’s Symbolism & Belief. Charles Williams’ He Came Down from Heaven doesn’t suit everyone, but try it.
For meditative and devotional reading (a little bit at a time, more like sucking a lozenge than eating a slice of bread) I suggest The Imitation of Christ (astringent) and Traherne’s Centuries of Meditations (joyous). Also my selection from MacDonald, Geo MacDonald: An Anthology. I can’t read Kierkegaard myself, but some people find him helpful.
For Christian morals I suggest my wife’s (Joy Davidman) Smoke on the Mountain: Gore’s The Sermon on the Mount and (perhaps) his Philosophy of the Good Life. And possibly (but with a grain of salt, for he is too puritanical) Wm Law’s Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life. I know the v. title makes one shudder, but we have both got a lot of shuddering to get through before we’re done!
You’ll want a mouth-wash for the imagination. I’m told that Mauriac’s novels (all excellently translated, if your French is rusty) are good, tho’ very severe. Dorothy Sayers’ Man Born to be King (those broadcast plays) certainly is. So, to me, but not to everyone, are Charles Williams’s fantastic novels. Pilgrim’s Progress, if you ignore some straw-splitting dialogues on Calvinist theology and concentrate on the story, is first class.
St Augustine’s Confessions will give you the record of an earlier adult convert, with many v. great devotional passages intermixed.
Do you read poetry? George Herbert at his best is extremely nutritious.
I don’t mention the Bible because I take that for granted. A modern translation is for most purposes far more useful than [the] Authorized Version.
As regards my own books, you might (or might not) care for Transposition, The Great Divorce, or The Four Loves.
Yes—‘being done good to’—grrr! I never asked even to be.
TO FATHER PETER MILWARD: from Magdalene College
23 May 1961
I saw nothing rude in your manner, tho’ I thought you were misunderstanding me. I, you see, come to the matter from fighting on another front, against Atheists who say (I have seen it in print) ‘Christians believe in a God who committed adultery with a carpenter’s wife’. You used language which cd have been interpreted as an agreement with them. Naturally there is no disagreement between us on that point. And I wd agree that the supernatural begetting of Our Lord is the archtype, and human marriage the ectype: not the perversion (that wd seem to me Manichaean). All these agreements are perfectly consistent with a disagreement between us on the Immaculate Conception of Mary and your general Marian theology.
Of course when one has decided that A is the Archtype and B the ectype one has not said A = B: i.e. whichever way you work it, it remains true that Mary was not the Bride of the Holy Ghost in the same sense in which the words are used of ordinary marriages: whereas she was the Mother of Jesus in exactly the same sense in wh. my mother was my mother—as Gervase Mathew said.
TO ROGER LANCELYN GREEN: from The Kilns
6 September 1961
It’s a bit tricky. I am awaiting an operation on my prostate: but as this trouble upset my kidneys and my heart, these have to be set right before the surgeon can get to work. Meanwhile, I live on a no-protein diet, wear a catheter, sleep in a chair, and have to stay on the ground floor. I’m quite capable of having a guest, but the problem is that the date for the operation remains unfixed—it depends on how the weekly blood-tests go. This means that, for all I know, it might come just when you want to be here so I think you’d better make alternative arrangements, wh. cd be abandoned in favour of coming to The Kilns if, when the time comes, I shd be here and not in the Acland. I’d hate to miss the chance of a visit from you if it turns out to be feasible. Is this all too bothersome?
You needn’t pity me too much. I am in no pain and I quite enjoy the hours of uninterrupted reading which I now get.
[Jack had neglected his own health for a long time, and now he was seriously ill. He was unable to go to Cambridge during the Michaelmas Term of 1961 and Hilary Term of 1962. However, before he returned to take up his duties at Cambridge in April 1962, he read a good deal and wrote The Discarded Image.]
TO ‘MRS ARNOLD’: from The Kilns
28 October 1961
I’m not well enough to answer your letter properly . . . The nearest I can put up as a Scriptural warrant for prayers for the dead is the place in one of the Epistles about people being ‘baptized for the dead’. If we can be baptised for them, then surely we can pray for them? I’d like to give you the reference, but my Concordance is upstairs and—my heart being one of the things that is wrong with me—I’m not allowed to go upstairs.
TO DOM BEDE GRIFFITHS, O.S.B.: from The Kilns
3 December 1961
Thank you for your letter of the 27 Nov. Your hand, though not yet nearly so bad as mine, deteriorates: but the bits I could read were very interesting. The difficulty about Hinduism, and indeed about all the higher Paganisms, seems to me to be our double task of reconciling and converting. The activities are almost opposites, yet must go hand in hand. We have to hurl down false gods and also elicit the peculiar truth preserved in the worship of each. I had just heard of Vinota: but what is an ashram or astram? Like the man in The Hunting of the Snark you ‘wholly forget that English is what I speak’!
Try to time your next letter so that it does not arrive near Christmas. Every year the merciless spate of correspondence makes this season more pestilential and less festal for me.
I forget whether you know that my wife died in July. Pray for us both. I am learning a great deal. Grief is not, as I thought, a state but a process: like a walk in a winding valley which gives you a new landscape every few miles.
All blessings. I am tired, and slightly ill, at the moment, or I wd answer your letter more as it deserves.
TO DOM BEDE GRIFFITHS, O.S.B.: from The Kilns
20 December 1961
To lose one’s wife after a very short married life may, I suspect, be less miserable than after a long one. You see, I had not grown accustomed to happiness. It was all a ‘treat’. I was like a child at a party. But perhaps earthly happiness, even of the most innocent sort, is I suspect, addictive. The whole being gets geared to it. The withdrawal must be more like lacking bread than lacking cake . . .
About Nature—you are apparently meeting, at an unusually late hour, the difficulty which I met in adolescence and which was for years my stock argument against Theism. Romantic Pantheism has in this matter led us all up the garden path. It has taught us to regard Nature as divine. But she is a creature, and surely a creature lower than ourselves. And a fallen creature—not an evil creature but a good creature corrupted, retaining many beauties but all tainted . . . The Devil cd make nothing but has infected everything. I have always gone as near Dualism as Christianity allows—and the N.T. allows one to go v. near. The Devil is the (usurping) lord of this age. It was he, not God, who ‘bound this daughter of Abraham’.
Even more disturbing, as you say, is the ghastly record of Christian persecution. It had begun in Our Lord’s time—‘Ye know not what spirit ye are of’ (John of all people!). I think we must fully face the fact that when Christianity does not make a man v. much better, it makes him v. much worse. It is, paradoxically, dangerous to draw nearer to God. Doesn’t one find in one’s own experience, that every advance (if one ever has advanced) in the spiritual life opens to one the possibility of blacker sins as well as brighter virtues? Conversion may make of one who was, if no better, no worse than an animal, something like a devil. Satan was an angel. I wonder have any of us taken seriously enough the prohibition of casting pearls before swine? This is the point of Our Lord’s remarks after the parable of the Unjust Steward. We are denied many graces that we ask for because they would be our ruin. If we can’t be trusted even with the perishable wealth of this world, who will trust us with the real wealth? (The ‘Lord’ in this parable is of course not God but the world.) . . .
I am rather seriously ill. Prostate trouble, by the time it was diagnosed, had already damaged my kidneys, blood, and heart, so that I’m now in a vicious circle. They can’t operate until my bio-chemistry gets right and it looks as if that can’t get right until they operate. I am in some danger—not sentenced but on trial for my life. I know I shall have your prayers. My temptation is not to impatience. Rather, I am far too inclined to snuggle down in the enforced idleness and other privileges of an invalid.
Have you read anything by an American Trappist called Thomas Merton? I’m at present on his No Man Is an Island. It is the best new spiritual reading I’ve met for a long time.
TO ‘MRS ARNOLD’ (further to the letter of 28 October): from The Kilns
28 December 1961
I’ve found the passage—I Cor. XV. 29. Also I Pet. III.19–21 bears indirectly on the subject. It implies that something can be done for the dead. If so, why should we not pray for them?
Beware of the argument, ‘the Church gave the Bible and therefore the Bible can never give us grounds for criticising the Church’. It is perfectly possible to accept B on the authority of A and yet regard B as a higher authority than A. It happens when I recommend a book to a pupil. I first send him to the book, but having gone to it he knows (for I’ve told him) that the author knows more about the subject than I.
TO THE REVD DR AUSTIN FARRER: from The Kilns
29 December 1961
I’ve read your book [Love Almighty and Ills Unlimited] with great enjoyment. You once said that you wrote with difficulty, but no one would guess it: this is full of felicities that sound as unsought as wildflowers . . .
Of course admiration is not always agreement. I stick at the diagnosis, ‘Emotional reaction rather than rational conviction’ . . . How do people decide what is an emotion and what is a value judgement? Not presumably just by introspection wh. will certainly be hard put to it to find a value judgement chemically pure from emotion . . . I find however that the problem of animal pain is just as tough when I concentrate on creatures I dislike as on ones I cd make pets of. Conversely, if I removed all emotion from, say my view of Hitler’s treatment of Jews, I don’t know how much value judgement would remain. I loathe hens. But my conscience would say the same things if I forgot to feed them as if I forgot to feed the cat . . .
TO WAYNE SCHUMAKER: from The Kilns
21 March 1962
Thanks for the article on Paradise Lost. I think I agree with all you say, especially your distinction between what is common to all the myths and what is peculiar to Paradise Lost. Possibly that kind of distinction should be pressed even further. Thus the child is not like the savage simpliciter but like a savage in close contact with and subject to civilisation: controlled, protected, corrupted and elevated by it at every turn. Again, does not a myth built into a systematic and fully believed theology differ, by that very fact, from a myth told by primitive man (usually in explanation of a ritual)? For I doubt whether primitives stand to their myths in a relation of full credal affirmation such as one finds in Christianity and Islam. All this had happened to the Fall story long before Milton. Indeed M’s great success lies in practising the credal affirmation without losing the quality of myth. M does lose this (for me) in Books XI and XII, I’m afraid.
[Jack and T. S. Eliot had become good friends after they began meeting in 1959 as members of the ‘Commission to Revise the Psalter’. The first part of the Psalter was published in 1961 and the complete work, The Revised Psalter, was published in 1963. Jack had also been consulted about points of translation of the New Testament section of The New English Bible.]
TO T. S. ELIOT: from Magdalene College
25 May 1962
You need not sympathise too much: if my condition keeps me from doing some things I like, it also excuses me from doing a good many things I don’t. There are two sides to everything!
We must have a talk—I wish you’d write an essay on it—about Punishment. The modern view, by excluding the retributive element and concentrating solely on deterrence and cure, is hideously immoral. It is vile tyranny to submit a man to compulsory ‘cure’ or sacrifice him to the deterrence of others, unless he deserves it. On the other view what is there to prevent any of us being handed over to Butler’s ‘Straighteners’ at any moment?
I’d have to know more about the Greek of that period to make a real criticism of the N.E.B. (N.T. which is the only part I’ve seen). Odd, the way the less the Bible is read the more it is translated.
TO JAMES E. HIGGINS: from The Kilns
31 July 1962
I shall be glad to help if I can. It is however rather a big IF, for my knowledge of children’s literature is really very limited. The real expert is Roger L. Green, Poulton-Lancelyn, Bebington, Wirral, Cheshire. My own range is about exhausted by MacDonald, Tolkien, E. Nesbit, and Kenneth Grahame. The Alice books are, aren’t they, in a totally different category, the effect being exclusively comic-nonsensical: not, in my experience, fully appreciated by children. Oh by the way, don’t miss the utterly unexpected influence of Rabelais on Kingsley’s Water Babies.
TO DOM BEDE GRIFFITHS, O.S.B.: from The Kilns
4 August 1962
By being an invalid I meant that even if the operation comes off and delivers me from the catheter and the low protein diet, I shall have to be careful about my heart—no more bathing or real walks, and as few stairs as possible. A very mild fate: especially since nature seems to remove the desire for exercise when the power declines.
Syriac too? I envy you the wide linguistic conquests you have made, though I hardly share one of the purposes for which you use it. I cannot take an interest in liturgiology. I see very well that some ought to feel it. If religion includes cult and if cult requires order it is somebody’s business to be concerned with it. But not, I feel, mine! Indeed, for the laity I sometimes wonder if an interest in liturgiology is not rather a snare. Some people talk as if it were itself the Christian faith.
I am deeply interested by what emerged from that Hindu-Christian debate, but not surprised. I always thought the real difference was the rival conceptions of God. A ticklish question. For I suppose we, by affirming three Persons, implicitly say that God is not a Person.
I am delighted to hear that there is some chance of seeing you in England again.
TO CHRISTOPHER DERRICK: from The Kilns
10 August 1962
Yes, I jolly well have read Gombrich and give him alpha with as many plusses as you please. The writers on art have hopelessly outstripped the writers on literature in our period. Seznec, Wind, and Gombrich are a very big three indeed. I am much better: still dieted and—well, plumbered, but otherwise almost normal.
TO HENRY NOEL: from Magdalene College (with reference to a theme central to The Great Divorce)
14 November 1962
About all I know of the ‘Refrigerium’ is derived from Jeremy Taylor’s sermon on ‘Christ’s advent to judgement’ and the quotations there given from a Roman missal printed at Paris in 1626, and from Prudentius. See Taylor’s Whole Works, edit. R. Heber, London 1822, Vol. V, p. 45.
The Prudentius says, ‘Often below the Styx holidays from their punishments are kept, even by the guilty spirits . . . Hell grows feeble with mitigated torments and the shadowy nation, free from fires, exults in the leisure of its prison; the rivers cease to burn with their usual sulphur’.
TO ‘MRS ARNOLD’: from Magdalene College
21 November 1962
I think I share to excess your feelings about a move. By nature I demand from the arrangements of this world just that permanence which God has expressly refused to give them. It is not merely the nuisance and expense of any big change in one’s way of life that I dread, it is also the psychological uprooting and the feeling—to me or to you intensely unwelcome—of having ended a chapter. One more portion of oneself slipping away into the past. I would like everything to be immemorial—to have the same old horizons, the same garden, the same smells and sounds, always there, changeless. The old wine is to me always better. That is, I desire the ‘abiding city’ where I well know it is not and ought not to be found. I suppose all these changes should prepare us for the greater change which has drawn nearer even since I began this letter. We must ‘sit light’ not only to life itself but to all its phases. The useless word is ‘encore’.
TO JAMES E. HIGGINS: from The Kilns
2 December 1962
. . . (5) I turned to fairy tales because that seemed the form which certain ideas and images in my mind seemed to demand: as a man might turn to fugues because the musical phrases in his head seemed to him to be ‘good fugal subjects’.
(6) When I wrote The Lion I had no notion of writing the others.
(7) Writing ‘juveniles’ certainly modified my habits of composition. Thus (a) It imposed a strict limit on vocabulary. (b) Excluded erotic love. (c) Cut down reflective and analytical passages. (d) Led me to produce chapters of nearly equal length for convenience in reading aloud.
All these restrictions did me great good—like writing in a strict metre.
TO ARTHUR GREEVES: from The Kilns
3 March 1963
On July 28 W., Douglas, and I will be at the Glenmachan Towers Hotel [Belfast], and on the 29th W. will go to Eire. Can Doug and you and I go off somewhere for a week or two beginning on that date? If you don’t feel up to driving us to wherever we go, I’ll hire a car & driver for the journey. Wd Castlerock or Glens of Antrim be any good? Portrush only as a last resource. But we want to be pretty quick about booking three rooms (it must be three) and about berths for Doug & me on our return journey to England.
I saw snowdrops for the first time last week.
[As far back as 1952 Jack had started writing a book on prayer. Not much was written because it was not turning out well. It was probably during this time, while planning a holiday in Ireland, that the idea of an imaginary correspondence about prayer occurred to him. Despite the difficulty of penmanship, he thoroughly enjoyed writing Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer, which was completed in May of this year. After having a typed copy sent to his publisher, Jocelyn Gibb, he was asked to write a blurb for the book. While the actual books came easily to Jack, he disliked composing what he called ‘blurbology’.]
TO JOCELYN GIBB: from The Kilns
28 June 1963
I’ve thought and thought about the blurb but find I just can’t write it—apparently I can hardly write the word either! I’d like you to make the point that the reader is merely being allowed to listen to two v. ordinary laymen discussing the practical & speculative problems of prayer as these appear to them: i.e. the author does not claim to be teaching.
Will it be good to say ‘Some passages are controversial but this is almost an accident. The wayfaring Christian cannot quite ignore recent Anglican theology when it has been built as a barricade across the high road.’
I wouldn’t stress your point about my not having given tongue v. recently. It can’t feel like that to the public. They must get the impression that I bring out a book once a fortnight. And your denial, however true in fact, will, like the sculptor’s fig-leaf, only draw attention to what it wd fain conceal.
I enclose a new passage for the last letter. This will make that letter unusually long but that’s legitimate as a finale. Anyway, I like the new bit.
[The ‘new bit’ in the final chapter of Letters to Malcolm comes directly after the paragraph which ends ‘There is our freedom, our chance for a little generosity, a little sportsmanship’, and is a hauntingly beautiful passage about the resurrection of the body.
It is a fine thing to have on one’s mind when death is made unavoidably clear. When Jack went to the Acland Nursing Home on 15 July for a blood-transfusion he had a heart attack and went into a coma. He surprised everyone by waking from it the next day—asking for his tea. By 9 August he was well enough to go home, and a few days later he resigned his Chair and Fellowship at Cambridge.]
TO SISTER PENELOPE, C.S.M.V.: from The Kilns
17 September 1963
What a pleasant change to get a letter which does not say the conventional things! I was unexpectedly revived from a long coma—and perhaps the almost continuous prayers of my friends did it—but it would have been a luxuriously easy passage and one almost (but nella sua voluntade e nostra pace) regrets having the door shut in one’s face. Ought we to honour Lazarus rather than Stephen as the protomartyr? To be brought back and have all one’s dying to do again was rather hard.
If you die first, and if ‘prison visiting’ is allowed, come down and look me up in Purgatory.
It is all rather fun—solemn fun—isn’t it?
TO THE MASTER AND FELLOWS OF MAGDALENE COLLEGE (who had elected Jack an Honorary Fellow of the College): from The Kilns
25 October 1963
The ghosts of the wicked old women in Pope ‘haunt the places where their honour died’. I am more fortunate, for I shall haunt the place whence the most valued of my honours came.
I am constantly with you in imagination. If in some twilit hour anyone sees a bald and bulky spectre in the Combination Room or the garden, don’t get Simon to exorcise it, for it is a harmless wraith and means nothing but good.
If I loved you all less I should think much of being thus placed (‘so were I equall’d with them in renown’) beside Kipling and Eliot. But the closer and more domestic bond with Magdalene makes that side of it seem unimportant.
TO MISS JANE DOUGLASS: from The Kilns
31 September 1963
Thanks for your kind note. Yes, autumn is really the best of the seasons: and I’m not sure that old age isn’t the best part of life. But of course, like Autumn, it doesn’t last.
My brother’s Autumn lasted, like the year’s, a few weeks longer; and on that note very characteristic of his last days—peaceful acceptance, combined with enduring grief for ‘mutabilitie’—I end my selection from his correspondence.—W.H.L.