Letters to An American Lady
Magdalen College
Oxford
26/10/50
Dear Mrs. __________
Thank you for your most kind and encouraging letter. I should need to be either of angelic humility or diabolical pride not to be pleased at all the things you say about my books. (I think, by the way, you have all the ones that would matter to you). May I assure you of my deep sympathy in all the very grievous troubles that you have had. May God continue to support you; that He has done so till now, is apparent from the fact that you are not warped or embittered. I will have you in my prayers. With all good wishes.
Yours sincerely
C. S. Lewis
Magdalen College
Oxford
Nov. 10th 1952
Dear Mrs. __________
It is a little difficult to explain how I feel that tho’ you have taken a way which is not for me I nevertheless can congratulate you—I suppose because your faith and joy are so obviously increased. Naturally, I do not draw from that the same conclusions as you—but there is no need for us to start a controversial correspondence! I believe we are very near to one another, but not because I am at all on the Romeward frontier of my own communion. I believe that, in the present divided state of Christendom, those who are at the heart of each division are all closer to one another than those who are at the fringes. I would even carry this beyond the borders of Christianity: how much more one has in common with a real Jew or Muslim than with a wretched liberalising, occidentalised specimen of the same categories. Let us by all means pray for one another: it is perhaps the only form of “work for re-union” which never does anything but good. God bless you.
Yours most sincerely
C. S. Lewis
Magdalen College,
Oxford
Jan. 19th 1953
Dear Mrs. __________
Thank you for your kind letter of Dec. 29th which arrived to-day. I am afraid I have no idea what the first editions of Screwtape or the Divorce sell at: I haven’t even got a first of the former myself. But you would be foolish to spend a cent more on them than the published prices: both belong to the worst war-period and are scrubby little things on rotten paper—your American editions are far nicer. Your letter was most cheering and I am full of agreements. Of course we’ll help each other in our prayers. God bless you.
Yours most sincerely
C. S. Lewis
Magdalen College
Oxford, England
4/iii/53
Dear Mrs. __________
Thank you for your letter of Feb. 26 which arrived today. . . . Eldila is the true plural: but you can Anglicise it as eldils!
I am delighted that your lecturer approved my angels. I was very definitely trying to smash the 19th century female angel. I believe no angel ever appears in Scripture without exciting terror: they always have to begin by saying “Fear not”. On the other hand the Risen Lord excites terror only when mistaken for a ghost, i.e. when not recognised as risen. For we are in one most blessed sense nearer to Him than to them: partly of course because He has deigned to share our humanity, but partly, I take it, because every creature is nearer to its creator than it can be to superior creatures. By the way, none of my Eldila would be anything like so high up the scale as Cherubim and Seraphim. Those orders are engaged wholly in contemplation, not with ruling the lower creatures. Even the Annunciation was done by—if I may so put it!—a “mere archangel”. Did your lecturer point out my heavy debt to Ezekiel?
Of course I knew you weren’t asking for a copy of a “First”: but I wanted to explain why I was not offering one—quite a different matter!
I also am having a kind of flu’ that seems never to get beyond early convalescence, tho’ nothing like so acute as yours. For that, and all else, deepest sympathy. Let us continue to pray for each other.
Yours most sincerely
C. S. Lewis
Magdalen College
Oxford, England
31/3/53
Dear Mrs. __________
I’ve no time for a proper letter to-day but this is just a scrape of the pen to thank you for yours of the 27th and to wish you a very blessed Easter. . . .
Apropos of horrid little fat baby “cherubs”, did I mention that Heb. Kherub is from the same root as Gryphon? That shows what they’re really like!
Yours
C. S. Lewis
Magdalen College
Oxford, England
17/4/53
Dear Mrs. __________
I’m not quite so shocked as you by the story of Charles and Mary. If even adult and educated Christians in trying to think of the Blessed Trinity have to guard constantly against falling into the heresy of Tritheism, what can we expect of children. And “another of whom he was not quite sure” is perhaps no bad beginning for a knowledge about the Holy Ghost.
About my fairy-tales, there are three published by Macmillan, New York (The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Prince Caspian, and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader). Local bookshops are often very unhelpful. If your friend wants these books she should, of course, write to the publisher at New York.
I expect there is a photo of me somewhere, but my brother, who knows where things are, is away and I couldn’t find it to-day. Ask me again at a more favourable hour!—if you still have the fancy for this very undecorative object.
I’d sooner pray for God’s mercy than for His justice on my friends, my enemies, and myself.
With all good wishes.
Yours sincerely
C. S. Lewis
Magdalen College,
Oxford
9th May 1953
Dear Mrs. __________
There’s very little time today, so I must be short. I am afraid it is certainly true in England that Christians are in the minority. But remember, the change from, say, thirty years ago, consists largely in the fact that nominal Christianity has died out, so that only those who really believe now profess. The old conventional church-going of semi-believers or almost total unbelievers is a thing of the past. Whether the real thing is rarer than it was would be hard to say. Fewer children are brought up to it: but adult conversions are very frequent. . . .
I enclose a copy of the only photo which I have at the moment; it’s only a passport one I’m afraid.
Yours most sincerely,
C. S. Lewis
Magdalen College,
Oxford
May 30th, 1953
Dear Mrs. __________
Thank you for your letter of the 26th. . . .
Yes, we are always told that the present widespread apostasy must be the fault of the clergy, not of the laity. If I were a parson I should always try to dwell on the faults of the clergy: being a layman, I think it more wholesome to concentrate on those of the laity. I am rather sick of the modern assumption that, for all events, “WE”, the people, are never responsible: it is always our rulers, or ancestors, or parents, or education, or anybody but precious “US”. WE are apparently perfect and blameless. Don’t you believe it. Nor do I think the Church of England holds out many attractions to the worldly. There is more real poverty, even actual want, in English vicarages than there is in the homes of casual labourers.
I look forward to Martin’s “appreciations”. Yes, we have the word “dither”—and the thing too. And our offices are in a dither too. This is so common that I suspect there must be something in the very structure of a modern office which creates Dither. Otherwise why does our “College Office” find full time work for a crowd of people in doing what the President of the College, 100 years ago, did in his spare time without a secretary and without a typewriter? (The more noise, heat, and smell a machine produces the more power is being wasted!) I’d rather like to see one of your hail storms: our climate is in comparison, very tame. Have you read S. V. Benet’s Western Star? Excellent, I think.
Yours sincerely
C. W. Lewis
Magdalen College.
Oxford.
June 16th, 1953
Dear Mrs.
It was a kind thought on your part to send on these two little items. Whether it’s good for me to hear them is another matter! One of the things that make it easier to believe in Providence is the fact that in all trains, hotels, restaurants and other public places I have only once seen a stranger reading a book of mine, tho’ my friends encounter this phenomenon fairly often. Things are really very well arranged. I hope you keep well? With all blessings.
Yours
C. S. Lewis
Magdalen College
Oxford
June 22d 53
Dear Mrs. __________
Thank you for your letter of the 18th. I am very sorry to hear of your fall (that sounds sinister, doesn’t it!) They are very nasty things: even worse than the subsequent pain, I think, is the dreadful split second in which one knows one is falling and it’s too late to do anything about it. It always brings back to one vividly one’s childish days when a fall was one of the commonest catastrophes, and I think it really hurt then more than it does now: one of the many things that people forget when they wish they were children again! You and I who still enjoy fairy tales have less reason to wish actual childhood back. We have kept its pleasures and added some grown-up ones as well. One hasn’t kept the senses, though. What a comparatively tasteless thing an egg or a strawberry is now! Yes: I think the palate is the only part of me that need regret the early years. . . . By the way did the reviewers mean “writes like a woman” to be dispraise? Are the poems of Sappho or, if it comes to that, the Magnificat, to be belittled on the same ground?
You are quite right, I didn’t go to the Coronation. I approve of all that sort of thing immensely and I was deeply moved by all I heard of it; but I’m not a man for crowds and Best Clothes. The weather was frightful.
As you had forgotten what called for my remarks about WE, THE PEOPLE, so I have now quite forgotten what the said remarks were! That is one way correspondence differs from conversation. On the other hand neither party can interrupt! Oh—I’m often in a dither: usually when I’ve made two engagements for the same time in different places.
Yours
C. S. Lewis
Magdalen College
Oxford
July 10, 1953
Dear Mrs. __________
Thanks for your letter of June 30th. I found the poem interesting—especially metrically interesting. From that point of view L. 3 is the important one: notice how it keeps the five beats because one is forced to give full value to the two long monosyllables—“one goal”—Remémber the ónly, the óne góal of lífe”. L. 2 where you collapse into a 4 beat-rhythm is not, I think, nearly so good. “God speed” at the end is a trifle weak isn’t it? And if one puts it into God’s mouth—as the context invites one to do—a little comic: like in the old miracle play where God, in a moment of excitement, is made to exclaim “By God!”
You know, over here people did not get that fairytale feeling about the coronation. What impressed most who saw it was the fact that the Queen herself appeared to be quite overwhelmed by the sacramental side of it. Hence, in the spectators, a feeling of (one hardly knows how to describe it)—awe—pity—pathos—mystery. The pressing of that huge, heavy crown on that small, young head becomes a sort of symbol of the situation of humanity itself: humanity called by God to be His vice-gerent and high priest on earth, yet feeling so inadequate. As if He said “In my inexorable love I shall lay upon the dust that you are glories and dangers and responsibilities beyond your understanding”. Do you see what I mean? One has missed the whole point unless one feels that we have all been crowned and that coronation is somehow, if splendid, a tragic splendour. . . .
By the way isn’t a motor-car the safest place to be in a thunderstorm: isolated from the earth by rubber tyres which are non-conductors? Or do I only display my ignorance?
Yours
C. S. Lewis
Magdalen etc.
Aug 1st [1953]
Dear Mrs. __________
Thanks for yours of the 16th. Our climatic troubles are just the opposite of yours; one of the coldest and wettest summers I remember. But I’d dislike your heat very much more than our cold. I am so glad you gave me an account of the lovely priest. How little people know who think that holiness is dull. When one meets the real thing (and perhaps, like you, I have met it only once) it is irresistible. If even 10% of the world’s population had it, would not the whole world be converted and happy before a year’s end? Yes, I too think there is lots to be said for being no longer young; and I do most heartily agree that it is just as well to be past the age when one expects or desires to attract the other sex. It’s natural enough in our species, as in others, that the young birds should show off their plumage—in the mating season. But the trouble in the modern world is that there’s a tendency to rush all the birds on to that age as soon as possible and then keep them there as late as possible, thus losing all the real value of the other parts of life in a senseless, pitiful attempt to prolong what, after all, is neither its wisest, its happiest, or most innocent period. I suspect merely commercial motives are behind it all: for it is at the showing-off age that birds of both sexes have least sales-resistance! Naturally I can have no views on a choice between your home town and Washington any more than on one between Omsk and Teheran! but of course you shall have my prayers. Sorry to hear about the fall: they’re nasty things. I must stop now, for I’m dead tired from standing at catalogue-shelves in a library all morning verifying titles of books and editions. I think, like the Irishman in the story “I’d sooner walk 10 miles than stand one”. I go to Ireland on the 11th so don’t be surprised if you don’t hear from me again till the end of September. All blessings.
Yours
C. S. Lewis
Magdalen
Aug 10th 53
Dear Mrs. __________
I have just got your letter of the 6th. Oh I do so sympathise with you: job-hunting, even in youth, is a heartbreaking affair and to have to go back to it now must be simply—I was going to say “simply Hell”, but no one who is engaged in prayer and humility, as you are, can be there, so I’d better say “Purgatory”. (We have as a matter of fact good authorities for calling it something better than Purgatory. We are told that even those tribulations which fall upon us by necessity, if embraced for Christ’s sake, become as meritorious as voluntary sufferings and every missed meal can be converted into a fast if taken in the right way.) I suppose—tho’ the person who is not suffering feels shy about saying it to the person who is—that it is good for us to be cured of the illusion of “independence”. For of course independence, the state of being indebted to no one, is eternally impossible. Who, after all, is more totally dependent than what we call the man “of independent means”. Every shirt he wears is made by other people out of other organisms and the only difference between him and us is that even the money whereby he pays for it was earned by other people. Of course you ought to be dependent on your daughter and son-in-law. Support of parents is a most ancient and universally acknowledged duty. And if you come to find yourself dependent on anyone else you mustn’t mind. But I am very, very sorry. I’m a panic-y person about money myself (which is a most shameful confession and a thing dead against Our Lord’s words) and poverty frightens me more than anything else except large spiders and the tops of cliffs: one is sometimes even tempted to say that if God wanted us to live like the lilies of the field He might have given us an organism more like theirs! But of course He is right. And when you meet anyone who does live like the lilies, one sees that He is. God keep you and encourage you. I am just about to go off to Ireland where I shall be moving about, so I shan’t hear from you for several weeks. All blessings and deepest sympathy.
Yours
C. S. Lewis
Magdalen College
Oxford
Nov. 6/53
Dear Mrs. __________
Oh I am glad, I am glad. And here’s a thing worth recording. Of course I have been praying for you daily, as always, but latterly have found myself doing so with much more concern and especially about 2 nights ago, with such a strong feeling how very nice it would be, if God willed, to get a letter from you with good news. And then, as if by magic (indeed it is the whitest magic in the world) the letter comes to-day. Not (lest I should indulge in folly) that your relief had not in fact occurred before my prayer, but as if, in tenderness for my puny faith God moved me to pray with especial earnestness just before He was going to give me the thing. How true that our prayers are really His prayers; He speaks to Himself through us. I am also most moved at hearing how you were supported thro’ the period of anxiety. For one is sometimes tempted to think that if He wanted us to be as un-anxious as the lilies of the field He really might have given us a constitution more like theirs! But then when the need comes He carries out in us His otherwise impossible instructions. In fact He always has to do all the things—all the prayers, all the virtues. No new doctrine, but newly come home to me. Forgive a short letter, quite inadequate to the subject: I am at present just so busy (tho’ not unhappily so) that I don’t know if I’m on my head or my heels. God bless you.
Yours
C. S. Lewis
Magdalen College
Oxford
27/xi/53
Dear Mrs. __________
Thank you for your letter of Nov. 23rd. We have a good many things in common at the moment, for I also am dead tired (cab-horse tired) and I also have sinusitis. I don’t think we exactly “call it catarrh” over here. Intense catarrh is one symptom of sinusitis, and as none of us have heard of s. till quite lately I suppose cases of it used to be wrongly diagnosed as mere catarrh. I find myself that when it produces most catarrh it produces least pain and vice versa. About sleep: do you find that the great secret (if one can do it) is not to care whether you sleep? Sleep is a jade who scorns her suitors but woos her scorners. I feel exactly as you do about the horrid commercial racket they have made out of Christmas. I send no cards and give no presents except to children.
It is fun to see you agreeing with what you believe to be my views on prayer: well you may, for they are not mine but scriptural. “Our prayers are God talking to Himself” is only Romans, VIII, 26–27. And “praying to the end” is of course our old acquaintance, the parable of the Unjust Judge.
I am sure you will be glad to hear that your recent adventures have been a great support and “corroboration” to me. I am also very conscious (and was especially so while praying for you during your workless time) that anxiety is not only a pain which we must ask God to assuage but also a weakness we must ask Him to pardon—for He’s told us take no care for the morrow. The news that you had been almost miraculously guarded from that sin and spared that pain and hence the good hope that we shall all find the like mercy when our bad times come, has strengthened me much. God bless you.
Yours
C. S. Lewis
Magdalen College
Oxford
Jan. 1st 1954
Dear Mrs. __________
Thanks for your letter of the 28th, to which I’m afraid I can manage only a very small answer, for Christmas mails have “got me down”. This season is to me mainly hard, gruelling work—write, write, write, till I wickedly say that if there were less good will (going through the post) there would be more peace on earth. By Jove, I do sympathise with you about the sinus (I am warned by everyone who has ever had it not at any price to have the operation. One doctor said that he would like to prosecute any surgeon who did it. This concerns you too!). I am sure that when God allows some cause like illness or a ’bus-strike or a broken alarm clock to keep us from Mass, He has His own good reasons for not wishing us to go to it on that occasion. He who took care lest the 5000 should “faint” going home on an empty stomach may be trusted to know when we need bed even more than Mass. I don’t think there is anything superstitious in your story about the Voice. These visions or “auditions” at the moment of death are all very well attested: quite in a different category from ordinary ghost stories. I am so glad people liked your poem, which deserved it, and that you liked mine of which (a very unusual thing for me) I can’t now remember a single word. But I must stop; wishing and praying for you “a happy issue out of all your afflictions” and better days in 1954.
Yours
C. S. Lewis
Magdalen College
Oxford
24/1/54
Dear Mrs. __________
Thanks for the lovely bundle of letters and pictures from the _____ family which, as you anticipated, I revelled in: I have written them a joint letter—not mentioning the poem as I gather you are not supposed to have a copy. They sound a delightful family. But surely you are not going to put the whole trilogy in their hands? I should have thought That Hideous Strength both unsuitable and unintelligible to children, and even Perelandra rather doubtful. I hope you have got rid of that cold. There seems no way of guarding against them, does there? One part of me almost envies you that deep snow: real snow. This is very late at night and my writing is dreadful, so I must stop. All blessings.
Yours
C. S. Lewis
Magdalen College
Oxford
26/1/54
Dear Mrs. __________
Thanks for yours of the 23rd and for copy of my verses, which I had almost totally forgotten. ’Pon my word, they’re not so bad as I feared. I’m very sorry about your cold. We mustn’t let these modern doctors get us down by calling a cold a virus and a sore throat a streptococcus, you know! (Do you ever read Montaigne? He says “The peasants make everything easier by the names they use. To them a consumption is only a cough and a cancer only a stomachache”). You should have stayed tucked up in a warm bed all that day instead of trying to write and walking up and down the room.
We wouldn’t call Alfred and Egbert and all those the “British” line. They are the “English” line, the Angles, who come from Angel in South Denmark. By the British line we’d mean the Celtic line that goes back through the Tudors to Cadwallader and thence to Arthur, Uther, Cassibelan, Lear, Lud, Brut, Aeneas, Jupiter. The present royal family can claim descent from both the British and the English lines. So, I suppose, can most of us: for since one has 2 parents, 4 grandparents, 16 great-grandparents, and so on, one is presumably descended from nearly everyone who was alive in this island in the year 600 A.D. In the long run one is related to everyone on the planet: in that quite literal sense we are all “one flesh”. Of course I don’t mean to ignore (in fact I find it nice) the distinction between a peasant’s grandson like myself and those of noble blood. I only observe that the nobility lies not in the ancient descent (which is common to us all) but in having been for so many generations illustrious that more of the steps are recorded. I do hope you’ll be better by the time this reaches you.
Yours
C. S. Lewis
Magdalen College
Oxford
Feb 22/54
Dear Mrs.
I am very sorry indeed to hear that anxieties again assail you. (By the way, don’t “weep inwardly” and get a sore throat. If you must weep, weep: a good honest howl! I suspect we—and especially, my sex—don’t cry enough now-a-days. Aeneas and Hector and Beowulf, Roland and Lancelot blubbered like schoolgirls, so why shouldn’t we?) You were wonderfully supported in your worries last time; I shall indeed pray that it may be so again.
I didn’t object to the family reading the trilogy on the ground that it would be too difficult—that would do no harm—but because in the last one there is so much evil, in a form not, I think, suitable for their age, and many specifically sexual problems which it would do them no good to think of at present. I daresay the Silent Planet is alright: Perelandra, little less so: T.H.S. most unsuitable.
I don’t think an appreciation of ancient and noble blood is “snobbery” at all. What is snobbery is a greedy desire to know those who have it, or a mean desire to flatter them, or a conceited desire to boast of their acquaintance. I think it quite legitimate to feel that such things give an added interest to a person who is nice on other grounds, just as a hotel which was nice on other grounds would have an added charm for me if it was also a building with “historic interest”.
I write in great haste—I can’t, like you, do it in working hours! But you’re nothing to Lamb: as far as I can make out all his letters, which now fill two volumes, were written in the office. Happy days those.
Well, I hope I shall have better news in your next. God bless you.
Yours
C. S. Lewis
Magdalen College
Oxford
March 10/54
Dear Mrs. __________
I am sorry things are not better. I am very puzzled by people like your Committee Secretary, people who are just nasty. I find it easier to understand the great crimes, for the raw material of them exists in us all; the mere disagreeableness which seems to spring from no recognisable passion is mysterious. (Like the total stranger in a train of whom I once asked “Do you know when we get to Liverpool” and who replied “I’m not paid to answer your questions: ask the guard”). I have found it more among Boys than anyone else. That makes me think it really comes from inner insecurity—a dim sense that one is Nobody, a strong determination to be Somebody, and a belief that this can be achieved by arrogance. Probably you, who can’t hit back, come in for a good deal of resentful arrogance aroused by others on whom she doesn’t vent it, because they can. (A bully in an Elizabethan play, having been sat on by a man he dare not fight, says “I’ll go home and beat all my servants”). But I mustn’t encourage you to go on thinking about her: that, after all, is almost the greatest evil nasty people can do us—to become an obsession, to haunt our minds. A brief prayer for them, and then away to other subjects, is the thing, if one can only stick to it. I hope the other job will materialise.
I thought the poem by that woman was very good Christianity, but not a very good poem: no rhythmic vitality, no reason why the lines should end where they do, and no vocalic melody. But then I’m old fashioned. I think vers libre succeeds only in a few exceptional poems and its prevalence has really ruined the art.
I too had mumps after I was grown up. I didn’t mind it as long as I had the temperature: but when one came to convalescence and a convalescent appetite and even thinking of food started the salivation and the pain—ugh! I never realised “the disobedience in our members” so clearly before. Verily “He that but looketh on a plate of ham and eggs to lust after it, hath already committed breakfast with it in his heart” (or in his glands).
I shall wait anxiously for all your news, always praying not only for a happy issue but that you may be supported in all interim anxieties.
Yours
C. S. Lewis
Magdalen College
Oxford
March 31st 54
Dear Mary
(I return the compliment by telling you that my friends all call me Jack). I am sorry the persecution still goes on. I had that sort of thing at school, and in the army, and here too when I was a junior fellow, and it does very much darken life. I suppose (tho’ it seems a hard saying) we should mind humiliation less if [we] were humbler. It is, at any rate, a form of suffering which we can try to offer, in our small way, along with the supreme humiliation of Christ Himself. There is, if you notice it, a very great deal in the N.T. about His humiliations as distinct from His sufferings in general. And it is the humble and meek who have all the blessings in the Magnificat. So your position is, spiritually, far safer than the opposite one. But don’t think I don’t know how much easier it is to preach than practice. Yes, I have read Martin’s story, with much interest. I don’t think the nonchalance of the policeman was one of its merits, though: I think it only means that Martin (very naturally) is still at the stage of imagining an event but not yet at the stage of imagining the reactions. Of course this has a whimsically comic effect for a grown-up reader, but that is accidental. How right you are to see that anger (even when directed against oneself) “worketh not the righteousness of God”. One must never be either content with, or impatient with, oneself. My old confessor (now dead) used to impress on me the need for the 3 Patiences: patience with God, with my neighbour, with oneself. Need one ever be anxious about mumps in a woman? It sometimes is serious in men if they get it as adults. Yes, I’m sick of our Abracadabrist poets. What gives the show away is that their professed admirers give quite contradictory interpretations of the same poem—I’m prepared to believe that an unintelligible picture is really a very good horse if all its admirers tell me so; but when one says it’s a horse, and the next that it’s a ship, and the third that it’s an orange, and the fourth that it’s Mt. Everest, I give it up. All blessings.
Yours
Jack
P.S.—You speak of the “cult of the OBSTUSE”. Do you mean ABSTRUSE, OBTUSE or OBSCURE? Lord Dunsany is a glorious writer in prose: try The Charwoman’s Shadow.
Magdalen College,
Oxford.
17th April 1954.
Dear Mary
Only a scrap, for everyone writes to me at Easter, so that what ought to be a bright spot in the year threatens to become for me a very dark one. Will you, please, always avoid “holiday” periods in writing to me?
All blessings, and I hope the new job will go nicely.
Yours,
Jack
Magdalen College
Oxford
May 27th 1954
Dear Mary
Thanks for yours of the 24th. I am glad to hear you have moved into pleasanter quarters and hope there will be a great blessing both upon them and on the new job. The saving of time and money on bus travel is a great point: or rather, if your experience is at all like mine, the time spent not in travelling but in waiting at ’bus stops, often in very cold or very hot weather. I’ve no idea what a “pent-house apartment” may be! I’m sorry to disappoint you with such a scrap of a letter, but the rush is still on (I foresee no end to it before August) and the mails have been above the average for weeks now: I don’t know why. It’s a cold backward spring here but there are some lovely days. Sunshine just flirts with us and then disappears. You are always in my prayers.
Yours ever
Jack
Magdalen College
Oxford.
14th. June 1954.
Dear Mary
Yes, I’m through the Easter letters, and now examining. I have averaged 20 scripts a day (including Sundays) for six weeks—the viva voce examinations will take eight hours a day. I shall become human again at about the end of September. Meanwhile, love and good wishes.
Yours,
Jack