Preface
When C. S. Lewis wrote the first letter in the following collection he was 51 years old and long established at Magdalen College, Oxford, as university lecturer and tutor. He had published twenty books, of which four, the outcome of his scholarly pursuits, had given him a wide reputation as medievalist and literary critic. Most of the other sixteen were the results of Lewis’s conversion, at 29, to Christianity and were divided between expository and creative works. Among the former were The Problem of Pain and Miracles and among the latter The Screwtape Letters, a space trilogy called Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength. In that year was published The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the first of a series of seven children’s books with clear Christian overtones.
Almost twenty years earlier he and his brother Warren, both bachelors, had settled in a house called The Kilns, four miles east of Oxford and abutting a hillside of fine trees rising above tangled vines and blackberry bushes and, at its base, a small quarry lake where they could swim in water apparently once used by the poet Shelley to sail his little paper boats. With them lived Mrs. Moore, a widowed mother of one of Lewis’s friends who was a casualty on the French front in World War I. Despite the fact that Mrs. Moore during her last years succeeded in making life at The Kilns something of a continuous misery, Lewis treated her with filial love as long as she lived.
Long since Lewis had completed brilliantly his study at University College, Oxford, and had been elected to Magdalen. He had sometimes found his tutorials boring, especially when his student could not rise to the high intellectual bait that was offered, but his lectures, both from their content and expression, were often crowded to the point of standing room only. One of his students said that he had “more knowledge at his finger tips” than anyone he had ever known, and another described his mind as “the most exact and penetrating” he had encountered.
The letters in this volume pretty well identify the events in Lewis’s life after 1950. He traveled little and in general lived the sort of life he preferred—scholarship, lectures, daily walks whenever possible and long cross-country hikes with friends at seasonable periods, conversation (especially that engendered in the Inklings, a group of intellectuals who met on Thursday evenings), and reading and writing. Three of the main events of his later life were his marriage to Joy Davidman in 1957, her death a little over three years later, and his election to the chair of Medieval and Renaissance English at Cambridge. Lewis died on November 22, 1963, a week before his sixty-fifth birthday and the same afternoon on which President John F. Kennedy was assassinated.
These letters accentuate rather than change the character of Lewis as it is generally known. In them are his antipathy to journalism, advertising, snobbery, psychoanalysis, to the false and the patent, to wheels and stir and “administration” and the multitude of petty or insidious practices that sap personal and national freedom. And we must not fail to add his antipathy to letter-writing. In his autobiography he says that one essential of the happy life is “that a man would have almost no mail and never dread the postman’s knock.” Yet here we have enough letters to fill a book written to one person in a far country whom he never expected to meet in this world. Although this is one of the longest of Lewis’s correspondences, it is not the only one running to a hundred or more letters.
Here is a man who could have found a whole bag of reasons to justify pitching his mail into the wastepaper basket. He was often worked to the point of distraction by his university duties, a man whose successful books both in scholarship and religion clamor for more of the same sort, a man with a remarkable combination of logic and imagination that might produce such books almost endlessly, a man who by nature tends to avoid strangers and loves the inner world of ideas and the intimate circle of old friends. Yet this man meticulously endeavors to answer, sometimes with an arm so rheumatic that he can hardly push the pen, the vast correspondence falling into his hands from around the world. Why?
The main cause was that Lewis believed taking time out to advise or encourage another Christian was both a humbling of one’s talents before the Lord and also as much the work of the Holy Spirit as producing a book. John Wesley somewhere in his journal during the days when vast crowds were hearing him says that on a given night he preached to only one poor sinner at the inn. Lewis had the same dedicated attitude, the belief that one’s days and his talents are given him not for private expenditure but to be used in all lowliness within the will of God. Though the flesh abhorred it, he mortified the flesh. There seems no shred of idea that these letters might eventually be published and thus take their place beside his other Christian works. They come to the point immediately, cover it and conclude. They are not “literary” letters. There is little description, little reminiscence, little urbanity, wit, sentiment, little even that is reflective. There is little of Lewis’s lifelong interest in fantasy, joy, Sehnsucht. His academic and scholarly interests get brief mention only.
The obvious thrust of these letters is spiritual encouragement and guidance and it is chiefly here that they have their value. There is the hope that his soul may stay utterly responsive to God and his behavior never lapse into mere rule-keeping. Like the Fathers, there is the conviction that holiness is actually to be practiced by the Christian and the belief that if only ten percent of the world’s population had holiness the rest of the people would be converted quickly. When his correspondent hesitates to accept financial aid, he reminds her that all men are charity cases and that God “foots all our bills.” Concerning God’s goodness, he points out that shadows make up half the beauty of the world and that it is not necessarily different with the shadows coming into our lives if we recognize them as permitted by perfect Goodness. As in all his other writings, Lewis hews the sharpest of lines between the utter and continuous practice of Christianity and our feelings. We are to do and let our feelings be as they may. Also as elsewhere, Lewis emphasizes that God’s grace is sufficient for this day, this hour, not for all the troubles we can imagine for the future or remember from the past. And here, as always, we find Lewis’s firm belief in the resurrection of the body and the felicities of heaven. “It’ll be fun when we meet at last,” he tells her. They are indeed Christian letters.
But they are not without glimpses of Lewis the man, lover of cats and dogs, of the first cuckoo and the first crocus of spring, of Lewis getting up to prepare his own breakfast and do his chores during the much-loved “empty, silent, dewy, cobwebby hours” of the morning. There is Lewis announcing that he may soon be both a husband and a widower, then finding that something like a miracle has taken place and Joy’s cancer has seemingly disappeared, and then, later, the fierce shock of her death. Because both Lewis and his correspondent had in common a mélange of physical troubles, we learn more here than anywhere else of his increasingly numerous maladies that were finally to join hands in his decease. There is Lewis the dreader of poverty who, it became known after his death, gave away two-thirds of his income and even then was not satisfied with the extent of his charities.
At her own request, the identity of Lewis’s correspondent is withheld. A widow four years older than Lewis, she was described by one friend as “very charming, gracious, a southern aristocratic lady who loves to talk and speaks well.” Once financially independent, she had fallen upon privation and, what was worse, serious family problems. In due course Lewis arranged through his American publishers a small stipend for her, and this continues to the present. About the time the correspondence began she turned from the Episcopal Church to the Roman Catholic. Twice she has been so near death that the last rites of the church were administered. Though I have occasionally felt the necessity of a footnote, I believe her interests (except the family problems, which are excised) explain themselves. She is a writer of reviews articles, poems and stories.
The aim in editing has been as far as possible to leave the letters just as Lewis wrote them. I have expanded some of his unusual abbreviations, such as v. for very, wh. for which, etc. His interesting multiformity in the writing of dates is retained, including of course the British method of, for instance, “26/10/50” for October 26, 1950. Included among the letters are a few by his wife Joy Lewis, his brother W. H. Lewis and his personal secretary Walter Hooper. The reason for inclusion in each instance is explained within the letter itself.
As agent of Wheaton College, I should like to express our sincerest gratitude to the recipient of these letters both for donating them to our library and also for graciously offering us the privilege of publication. We are also grateful to the Executors of Lewis’s estate for their kind cooperation. The Reverend Walter Hooper, Chaplain of Wadham College, Oxford, has shown his usual willingness to render every help possible, including an examination of the manuscript and suggestions for improvement. Mrs. Ruth Cording and my wife Martha have been most useful in transcribing the letters and in other ways. Mr. Robert Golter, Librarian of Wheaton College, has worked closely with me in various ways. To Major W. H. Lewis for his friendship and encouragement I feel endless gratitude.
Wheaton College —CLYDE S. KILBY