Magdalen College
Magdalen College
Oxford
Sept 19/54
Dear Mary
I got back from my holiday yesterday, to the usual pile of letters which makes one wonder if holidays are worth it. (I had been in Ireland, Donegal, which is lovely. All the mountains look like mountains in a story, and there are wooded valleys, and golden sands, and the smell of peat from every cottage). I’m glad I wasn’t in your heatwave! Your description fully reconciles me to the unusually cold and wet summer we have had here. But I would like to have a stage-door acquaintance with a star Rabbit! I was very glad to hear about——. (How different girls are from boys. To me at her age clothes would have been the dullest of all presents). About the lack of religious education: of course you must be grieved, but remember how much religious education has exactly the opposite effect to that which was intended, how many hard atheists come from pious homes. May we not hope, with God’s mercy, that a similarly opposite effect may be produced in her case? Parents are not Providence: their bad intentions may be frustrated as their good ones. Perhaps prayers as a secret indulgence which Father disapproves may have a charm they lacked in houses where they were commanded. And congratulations on [being included in] the Virginia Anthology. . . . I can well understand your fears about old age. And of course you are doing the very best thing in meditating on the sufferings of Our Lord. (Drat—on top of all the letters comes a telephone call to say that “a lady” in the Lodge wants to come across to see me). I’ve been made a Professor at Cambridge, which will mean less work and therefore of course (’tis the way of the world) more pay. I’ve also got rheumatism, but not very bad: only like always feeling you’ve just had a 20 mile walk on a rather hard road! It is nice to be able to write again; I’ve had a very hectic summer. You are always in my prayers.
Yours
Jack
Magdalen College,
Oxford.
Oct 9th 54
Dear Mary
Thanks for your letter of the 6th, enclosing poem which I enjoyed. Fairies—the people of the Shidhe (pronounced Shee)—are still believed in many parts of Ireland and greatly feared. I stayed at a lovely bungalow in Co. Louth where the wood was said to be haunted by a ghost and by fairies. But it was the latter who kept the country people away. Which gives you the point of view—a ghost much less alarming than a fairy. A Donegal man told a parson I know that one night when he was walking home on the beach a woman came up out of the sea and “her face was as pale as gold”. I have seen a leprechaun’s shoe, given to a doctor by a grateful patient. It was the length, and hardly more than the breadth, of my forefinger, made of soft leather and slightly worn on the sole. But get out of your head any ideas of comic or delightful creatures. They are greatly dreaded, and called “the good people” not because they are good but in order to propitiate them. I have found no trace of anyone believing or ever having believed (in England or Ireland) in the tiny fairies of Shakespeare, which are a purely literary invention. Leprechauns are smaller than men, but most fairies are of human size, some larger. I don’t know that a professorial chair or anything else will now provide for a comfortable old age in this country. You see pensions and investments are taxed as “unearned income” and that leaves very little of them. It will be a pretty tough job translating a French book with no more knowledge of French than a dictionary can give! I don’t see how any dictionary will enable one to understand a phrase like est ce qu’il y en avait. Get the French translation of some book you have in English (say the Bible) and try to get the hang of the language from that. Or perhaps the French Lion, Witch, W., which I enclose, would be more up to date and idiomatic. Between ourselves, I don’t think you’ll translate your present book very well, but you’ll learn quite a lot of French in struggling with it and then your next attempt might be good. I wish I could relieve any of your various troubles—but it is very clear that the Holy Ghost is leading you through them all. With every blessing.
Yours
Jack Lewis
Magdalen
Nov 1st 54
Dear Mary
If you tell me that you don’t know French, of course I believe you! If you were only coying and found my literal acceptance of the statement a shock—well, it’ll “larn you” to practice mock modesty another time. It never works with me, I assure you. If a man tells me he can’t do something I always believe him: he ought to know! I am very sorry to hear you have been ill. You don’t give me any idea what the “old trouble” is. Anyway, I hope it has stood off again. About copies of the Lion et la Sorcière I presume the price and publisher’s name and address are printed in the one you have, and an order to that publisher enclosing the requisite sum will elicit the goods! (People so often ask me how to get a book, and it seems an odd question. Are they equally puzzled how to order a cwt. of coals or a bottle of gin?). . . . No, my rheumatism is not really bad. It only produces extreme footsoreness in the left foot, so that after 50 yards, tho’ the right one is fresh as a daisy the left keeps on whimpering “Stop! Stop! We’ve been 25 miles already.” The real nuisance is that I am beginning to get horribly fat and this foot comes just when I ought to be slimming by long walks. I have had to give up potatoes, milk, and bread: perhaps having to fast for medical reasons is a just punishment for not having fasted enough on higher grounds! Did I tell you I’ve been made a professor at Cambridge? I take up my duties on Jan. 1st at Magdalene College, Cambridge (Eng.). Note the difference in spelling. It means rather less work for rather more pay. And I think I shall like Magdalene better than Magdalen. It’s a tiny college (a perfect cameo architecturally) and they’re all so old fashioned, and pious, and gentle and conservative—unlike this leftist, atheist, cynical, hard-boiled, huge Magdalen. Perhaps from being the fogey and “old woman” here I shall become the enfant terrible there. It is nice to be still under the care of St. Mary Magdalene: she must by now understand my constitution better than a stranger would, don’t you think. The allegorical sense of her great action dawned on me the other day. The precious alabaster box which one must break over the Holy Feet is one’s heart. Easier said than done. And the contents become perfume only when it is broken. While they are safe inside they are more like sewage. All very alarming.
Yours
Jack
Magdalen College,
Oxford
Nov 17, 54
Dear Mary
No time to write properly but just a line to thank you for two letters. There is no need to apologise for your joke about the French: its only fault, as a joke, is that it is a bit complicated! Neuralgia in the ear is an old friend of mine and I think it usually comes from a draught. All blessings.
Yours
Jack
Magdalen College
Oxford
Nov 20 54
Dear Mary
Thanks for the magazine. I think your “Pome” gets the awe and rigidity of the Byzantine atmosphere very well. As for McCarthy I never met anyone, American or English, who did not speak of him with horror. A very intelligent American pupil said “He is our potential Hitler”.
In haste.
Yours
Jack
The Kilns,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford
29/1/55
Dear Mary
Yes, I’ve been treating you (and others) badly of late, but, I think, with some excuse. First there were visitors; then the preparations for the move; then the move itself (at which moment my brother got ill so that I had all the correspondence to tackle single handed); then the settling in at Cambridge plus various delights like burst water-pipes; repeated journeys to and fro—in fact a period during which life seemed to consist entirely of journeys and letter writing—the pen has become to me what the oar is to a galley slave; then (God be praised) influenza and long half-comatose days in bed. Yesterday was my first day out. I hope to go back to work and Cambridge on Thursday next. So I was about as likely to ride in a steeplechase as to write a poem! But you have never been absent from my prayers. So try not to be hurt by my silence. And always remember that there is no time in the whole year when I am less willing to write than near Christmas, for it is then that my burden is heaviest. I suspect you have a very false idea of what my days are like! I am truly sorry about your “physical difficulties” and hope the “examination” (always a horrid thing, whether scholastic, medical, or police!) is now all happily over. And now, you really must forgive me: as you see, I can hardly form the letters legibly! God bless you.
Yours
Jack
As from Magdalen College,
Cambridge
20/2/55
Dear Mary
Thanks for your letter of 14th. But why on earth didn’t you write it a day later and tell me the result of the examination? I don’t think we ought to try to keep up our normal prayers when we are ill and over-tired. I would not say this to a beginner who still has the habit to form. But you are past that stage. One mustn’t make the Christian life into a punctilious system of law, like the Jewish [for] two reasons (1) It raises scruples when we don’t keep the routine (2) It raises presumption when we do. Nothing gives one a more spuriously good conscience than keeping rules, even if there has been a total absence of all real charity and faith. And people who stay away from Mass with the approval of their director and at the bidding of their doctor are just as obedient as those who go. Check all these points with your confessor: I bet he’ll say just the same. And of course the presence of God is not the same as the sense of the presence of God. The latter may be due to imagination; the former may be attended with no “sensible consolation”. The Father was not really absent from the Son when He said “Why hast thou forsaken me?” You see God Himself, as man, submitted to man’s sense of being abandoned. The real parallel on the natural level is one which seems odd for a bachelor to write to a lady, but too illuminating not to be used. The act which engenders a child ought to be, and usually is attended by pleasure. But it is not the pleasure that produces the child. Where there is pleasure there may be sterility: where there is no pleasure the act may be fertile. And in the spiritual marriage of God and the soul it is the same. It is the actual presence, not the sensation of the presence, of the Holy Ghost which begets Christ in us. The sense of the presence is a super-added gift for which we give thanks when it comes, and that’s all about it. I am very sorry you are so overworked. Thanks for the review of Griffiths’ book which I have of course read and enjoyed already. And I’m so pleased about the Abolition of Man, for it is almost my favorite among my books but in general has been almost totally ignored by the public. Give my love to Fanda: I am very “cat-minded”. And always, let us pray for one another.
Yours
Jack
The Kilns
Kiln Lane
Headington Quarry
Oxford, England
21/3/55
Dear Mary
Thanks for your letter of the 16th. I am indeed sorry to hear of all the shocking things that have been happening to you. The bright spot is the result of the physical examination: there is one thing off your mind for good. I get the impression, not only from you but from many other correspondents, that in your country people are far too medically minded: they read and think too much about health and go to doctors too often! It seems to me crazy ever to have an operation unless it is either a quite trivial one or quite clearly necessary. My own doctor, who happened to be also one of my most intimate friends (he’s a R.C.) says that the vast majority of illnesses are either incurable or (which is fortunately the larger class) cure themselves in due course. I said “But my cough does get better after I’ve been taking cough mixture for a day or two”. He replied “Yes, because you don’t start the mixture until the cough has become a real nuisance, which means until it was reaching its peak after which it would have gone away in about the same time whether you had taken the mixture or not”. A good deal of your alarming story I didn’t understand. Why is cutting off one’s telephone a protection against assault? It sounds to me just as much a non-sequitur as going armed in the streets to protect oneself from the telephone calls! But of course the thing itself is no joke and you must be badly shaken: I hope you feel better now. We were talking about cats and dogs the other day and decided that both have consciences but the dog, being an honest, humble person, always has a bad one, but the cat is a Pharisee and always has a good one. When he sits and stares you out of countenance he is thanking God that he is not as these dogs, or these humans, or even as these other cats! I’m sending this by air mail because you enclosed stamps. But the stamps are, you know, quite useless here, and in future I’ll continue to send by surface mail. Postage is rather a serious item in my weekly budget. In great haste—I hope it is legible—and with all sympathy and blessings. Oremus pro invicem as you people say.
Yours
Jack
The Kilns, etc
24/3/55
Dear Mary
Just a line of sympathy and encouragement on the impending operation. Extra faith has been given to meet crises before, and I pray that it will be now. Be very much on guard against the growth of a feeling that Fr.A. or anyone else “Does not sound interested”. When we are in trouble we easily think this, don’t we? And at all times, we very easily misinterpret expressions of face and tones of voice. Often, too, the person we speak to is at that moment full of troubles we know nothing about. Fr. D’Arcy and I were both members of the Dante Society at one time and I have also spoken on the same platform, so I know him pretty well. He is a most interesting man and an excellent speaker.
My prayers always,
Yours
Jack
The Kilns, etc
2nd April 1955.
Dear Mary
In great haste. I hope your next letter will bring me news that the operation has gone swimmingly. Fear is horrid, but there’s no reason to be ashamed of it. Our Lord was afraid (dreadfully so) in Gethsemane. I always cling to that as a very comforting fact. All blessings.
Yours,
Jack
The Kilns, etc
8/5/55
Dear Mary
I am extremely sorry (and at such a time too) to have left your letter of April 14th so long unanswered. But there was a chapter of obstacles. First, you put no address on the letter and the outside of the envelope had got damp so that the address was illegible. Second, I was in Cambridge (where your letter was forwarded) and your address in the files here. Thirdly, my brother was away ill, so that I couldn’t send mine to him to be addressed. Fourthly, there was a railway strike which prevented me coming home last week-end as I would normally have done. That brings us to yesterday!
I’m glad the operation is over, and sorry about the sinus headaches (an enemy of mine for some years now). But I prefer them to sick headaches all the same: they’re a “clean pain” and don’t entail the same general malaise—what someone I knew called “the all-overish feeling”. How nice all that is about the “efficient” young woman you were able to help. I think I know what you mean by the “humiliation” of finding everyone much nicer to one than seemed probable beforehand. It is a very gentle, pleasant kind, though, isn’t it? (There are others! By gum, aren’t there?). I like the second stanza of Easter best. Between ourselves, as one rhymester to another, it’s a great pity that world, such a good important word and often so emphatically demanding to come at the end of a line, has so few rhymes in English. Furled, hurled, curled—none of them very serviceable—and what else is there. Let’s invent a verb to churl (behave churlishly).
This is the coldest spring ever in England, and I have hardly heard the cuckoo at all till (when I didn’t specially want him) 5 a.m. this morning.
You are always in my prayers: have me in yours.
Yours
Jack
The Kilns, etc
14/5/55
Dear Mary
Thanks for yours of the 8th. I hope you now have a letter of mine, explaining my involuntary silence. Here’s the lecture: a dull work, except for the special audience I had in view. I heard Time had been at me (Time, in another sense always is!) but didn’t see it. I’m glad you had such a nice birthday party; not that I’m fond of birthday parties myself. You don’t say exactly how you are, but I hope no news is good news. All good wishes.
Yours in haste
Jack
Magdalene College
Cambridge
7/6/55
Dear Mary
Thanks for your letter of the 29th. The photo from Time was a useful mortification; good as a hair shirt. (What an exaggeration! as if one wouldn’t rather look like the Ugly Duchess than wear even ordinary tickly underclothing for half a day!) I think all your activities as fairy-godmother to a Chinese bride must be delightful, and you obviously find them so. It’s a little alarming to hear that she doesn’t want to marry anyone. But I daresay she’ll feel differently when she’s had a baby. But of course the whole Chinese set-up is quite different, isn’t it? With them (I understand) parents are everything, and one’s husband (still more, one’s wife) is nothing. I’m shocked to find that a shop wouldn’t serve a Chinese. But I have long known that the talk about Brotherhood, wherever it occurs, in America or here, is hypocrisy. Or rather, the man who talks it means ‘I have no superiors’: he does not mean ‘I have no inferiors’. How loathsome it all is!
The warm weather (what we call warm here) has begun at last and the cuckoo is at his work. I had my first bathe two days ago. Meanwhile the railway strike (there’s Brotherhood and Democracy for you again) goes on. I’m going to try to travel to Oxford on Saturday, but it is a mere adventure. My whitening bones will probably be found by the wayside.
All good wishes and blessings.
Yours
Jack
Magdalene College
Cambridge
21/6/55
Dear Mary
Thanks for the cutting. It does seem rum to be afraid of the Confessional and then send off your whole story to be printed in a newspaper! (You don’t think some of these letters are really written in the editor’s office: a pious fraud for instructional purposes?). I’m sorry about your two jealous colleagues. I suppose the only way with thorns in the flesh (until one can get them out) is not to press on the place where they are embedded; i.e. to stop one’s thoughts (firmly but gently: no good snapping at oneself, it only increases the fuss—read St. François de Sales’ chapter on Meekness toward oneself) whenever one finds them moving towards the unpleasant people. . . .
The pen doesn’t lure me on as the typewriter, you say, lures you! So I must stop. All good wishes.
Yours
Jack
The Kilns, etc
30/6/55
Dear Mary
In great haste. It wasn’t a battle I had; only a bathe—my bad writing again. About prides, superiorities, and affronts there’s no book better than Law’s Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life where you’ll find all of us pinned like butterflies on cards—the cards being little stories of typical characters in the most sober, astringent 18th century prose. Now for my train—I have to go to London for two nights.
Yours
Jack
Magdalene College,
Cambridge
5/10/55
Dear Mary
I have just got your letter of Oct. 1st. I don’t know quite what has happened, and it is possible a letter may have gone astray. I didn’t think I was so far behindhand. (You have, you know, recently stepped up the pace of the correspondence! I can’t play at that tempo, you know). I thought I had sent you a copy of my new book, Surprised by Joy. But that can be remedied when I’m back in Oxford this week end. I was there most of the vacation and then for a fortnight or so in Ireland:—Donegal, which is a most heavenly place. I found my brother ill when I got home and so lacked his usual secretarial help, so that for a while life seemed to consist almost entirely of letter writing—I wonder how many people besides you I have failed to answer! I am now, as you see, back in Cambridge, where the marvellous summer (I remember only one other so hot and dry in my life) is still going on, or only turning deliciously into still, misty, voluptuous autumn. I am sorry you tell me so little about yourself in your letter, for even when I don’t write I pray. . . . You have no idea how many instances of domestic nastiness come before me in my mail: how deceptive the smooth surface of life is! The only “ordinary” homes seem to be the ones we don’t know much about, just as the only blue mountains are those 10 miles away. And now, I really must tackle the remaining letters. With all good wishes.
Yours
Jack Lewis
As from Magdalene,
Cambridge
9/10/55
Dear Mary
I’ve just got your letter from the 3rd. and am glad to find that the book has arrived; not least because it saves me doing one of the things which (in a small way) I dislike most in the world: putting up a Parcel. Thanks also for the almost scandalously munificent gift of stamps. But (seriously) never do it again. Stamps are money, and you have none to spare. I envy your friends their 12 acre tract of woodland but should loathe a house that is nearly all glass. Not (I think) because I’m very fond of throwing stones, but I like to feel in-doors when I’m in. The main charm of the view from a room is the fact that it is framed in, and unified by, the window. And I hate indoor sunlight. It makes shadows across the page of your book and turns the print green. All really open-air people (sailors, and farm labourers) like thick walls, small windows, and those shut! I couldn’t agree with you more about games; but—dare I confess it?—I feel just the same about furs. I like them on the beasts of course. I am sorry the trials come so thick and fast, but glad you should be so supported by Our dear Lord. All blessings.
Yours
Jack Lewis
Magdalene College
Cambridge.
26/10/55
Dear Mary
I have your letter of Oct. 21, and do feel the deepest sympathy for all your complication of troubles. Your dentist, I feel, ought to go to jail. I never heard (in modern times) of such an operation being done without anaesthetics. Here, you’d get it free. I didn’t quite understand the bit about the hypodermic nor what is the suspected cause of the pains. The anxiety about the future is, however, a thing we can all understand, and very hard to bear. You were almost miraculously supported in such anxiety before and I pray you may be now. And I think it is happening. Your faith is a support to me as well as to yourself. But how one even ought to feel—let alone, how one can succeed in feeling—about——is a problem. It is very hard to believe that all one’s indignation is simply bad: but I suppose one must stick to the text “The wrath of man worketh not the righteousness of God”, I suppose one must keep on remembering that there is always something deeply wrong inside with a man so bad as this. For yourself I can only hope—and passages in your letter confirm my hope—that through all this you are being brought closer to God than you could have been otherwise. And it is not forever (wouldn’t it be ghastly to be immortal on earth, like the Wandering Jew?). It will all one day go away like a dream.
The only reason I’m not sick of all the stuff about——is that I don’t read it. I never read the papers. Why does anyone? They’re nearly all lies, and one has to wade thru’ such reams of verbiage and “write up” to find out even what they’re saying.
Well, must stop. Ten letters this morning and (one can’t get breakfast till 8.30 here) it’s now 11.25. Not a stroke of my own work done and all the cream of the day gone. God bless and keep you.
Yours
Jack
As from Magdalene,
Cambridge
9/11/55
Dear Mary
Thanks for yours of the 3rd and very kind review. Kind, but not quite accurate when you say I met “joy” in the “whimsical creations of my boyish imagination”. Surely the book tells you very explicitly that I never met it there? But no matter. You give the core of it very well and with great economy and clarity: a good bit of work.
How it bucks one up to get a poem accepted! the children we are. I look forward to your article.
I agree: the only thing one can usually change in one’s situation is oneself. And yet one can’t change that either—only ask Our Lord to do so, keeping on meanwhile with one’s sacraments, prayers, and ordinary rule of life. One mustn’t fuss too much about one’s state. Do you read St. Francis de Sales? He has good things to say on this subject. All good wishes.
Yours
Jack Lewis
The Kilns,
Headington Quarry
16/12/55
Dear Mary
I was most distressed by the news in your letter of Dec. 2d. It was touching the way you spent the first page telling me nice things about my own books and . . . then disclosed your own great trouble at the end. And I can’t help you, because under the modern laws I’m not allowed to send money to America. (What a barbarous system we live under. I knew a man who had to risk prison in order to smuggle a little money to his own sister, widowed in U.S.A.). By the way, we mustn’t be too sure there was any irony about your just having refused that other job. There may have been a snag about it which God knew and you didn’t.
I feel it almost impossible to say anything (in my comfort and security—apparent security, for real security is in Heaven and thus earth affords only imitations) which would not sound horribly false and facile. Also, you know it all better than I do. I should in your place be (I have in similar places been) far more panic-stricken and even perhaps rebellious. For it is a dreadful truth that the state of (as you say) “having to depend solely on God” is what we all dread most. And of course that just shows how very much, how almost exclusively, we have been depending on things. But trouble goes so far back in our lives and is now so deeply ingrained, we will not turn to Him as long as He leaves us anything else to turn to. I suppose all one can say is that it was bound to come. In the hour of death and the day of judgment, what else shall we have? Perhaps when those moments come, they will feel happiest who have been forced (however unwittingly) to begin practising it here on earth. It is good of Him to force us; but dear me, how hard to feel that it is good at the time.
The little Christmas poem was nice. I particularly liked “The curtain spread By the simplicity around”—a very precise idea economically expressed.
All’s well—I’m half ashamed it should be—with me. God bless and keep you. You shall be constantly in my prayers by day and night.
Yours
Jack Lewis
The Kilns etc.
19/12/55
Dear Mary
Thanks for your letter of Dec. 15. I don’t see anything wrong with the way in which you tell your story . . . wrong in the stylistic way, I mean. You have made it sound at one point as if Episcopalians didn’t think suicide a sin! But no doubt that is unintentional. I think the narrative good.
I do hope you will get the nicer of those two jobs, which is certainly the one I also would prefer in your place. Not of course that one can be sure what either is like till one has got inside. Things turn out both so much [better] and so much worse than they look, don’t they? Be sure you remain very much in my thoughts and prayers.
I seem to have been writing Christmas letters most of this day! I’m afraid I hate the weeks just before Christmas, and so much of the (very commercialised and vulgarised) fuss has nothing to do with the Nativity at all. I wish we didn’t live in a world where buying and selling things (especially selling) seems to have become almost more important than either producing or using them.
All blessings. “Beneath are the everlasting arms” even when it doesn’t feel at all like it.
Yours
Jack Lewis
Magdalene College,
Cambridge
8/2/56
Dear Mary
Thanks for your letter of the 2d and for the Time cutting. My brother says the photo of me is the best ever, but another friend says it is unrecognisable. What’s most impressive is the smoke from the match, which looks like the explosion of a miniature shell. The review is of course a tissue of muddles and direct falsehoods—I don’t say “lies” because the people who write such things are not really capable of lying. I mean, to lie = to say what you know to be untrue. But to know this, and to have the very ideas of truth and falsehood in your head, presupposes a clarity of mind which they haven’t got. To call them liars would be as undeserved a compliment as to say that a dog was bad at arithmetic.
I am delighted to hear that the new job continues to give satisfaction. What a difference it makes to work with nice people and to do work that you can believe in.
We have just come through a spell of what we call hard frost. It would be nothing by American standards: but here all the pipes burst and electricity and gas go down to low pressure, so one is comfortless enough.
You are still always in my prayers.
Yours
Jack Lewis
Magdalene College,
Cambridge
4/3/56
Dear Mary
I thought the boot was on the other foot and that I had in fact written to you since you wrote to me—congratulating you on the new job which seemed such an answer to your prayers and those of your friends.
Well, what is my news? A good deal of it is probably not interesting. I was very excited by seeing a performance of the Bacchae, but Greek plays aren’t up your street. I’ve just been in Edinburgh to speak at the annual dinner of the Walter Scott Club: but unless you happen to be a reader of Scott there’s no point in telling you that the Provost of Edinburgh (who sat next me) was exactly like Bailie Nichol Jarvie out of Rob Roy. The Scotch run awfully true to type and never change. Edinburgh is a wonderful city, with a castle on a crag and mountains beyond it all visible from the main street. (I imagine Quebec being a bit like it, but I may be all wrong). We’ve lived thro’ 3 weeks (for us) very severe frost, but to-day is the first of spring: warm sunshine, pure blue sky, and all the birds singing like mad. My new book went to press last week. It is the story of Cupid and Psyche told by one of the sisters—so that I believe I’ve done what no mere male author has done before, talked thro’ the mouth of, and lived in the mind of, an ugly woman for a whole book. All female readers so far have approved the feminine psychology of it: i.e. no masculine note intrudes. I think that’s about all that has happened to me. This is the eighth letter this (Sunday) morning. What Sabbath-breach!
I hope all continues to go well.
Yours sincerely
Jack Lewis
The Kilns,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford
19/3/56
Dear Mary
A line in haste about the bits underlined in your letter (which I enclose for reference). Don’t be too easily convinced that God really wants you to do all sorts of work you needn’t do. Each must do his duty “in that state of life to which God has called him”. Remember that a belief in the virtues of doing for doing’s sake is characteristically feminine, characteristically American, and characteristically modern: so that three veils may divide you from the correct view! There can be intemperance in work just as in drink. What feels like zeal may be only fidgets or even the flattering of one’s self-importance. As MacDonald says “In holy things may be unholy greed”. And by doing what “one’s station and its duties” does not demand, one can make oneself less fit for the duties it does demand, one can make oneself less fit for the duties it does demand and so commit some injustice. Just you give Mary a little chance as well as Martha!
Yours
Jack