The Kilns, Kiln Lane,
The Kilns, Kiln Lane,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford.
20th August 1961.
Dear Mrs. __________
Many thanks for yours of the 14th, which I answer because you ask me to do so. This sounds a little ungracious, but what I mean is that I really have no news to give you. What there is, is good though, thank God. The kidney condition which has been holding everything up is improving rapidly and the doctor is very satisfied with him. His last blood test was excellent. He is, so far as a sick man can be, in the best of spirits, eating well, hungry and what we all take to be a splendid sign, is beginning to complain of being bored—which is very different from even a fortnight ago when he was quite content to doze away each day.
On his and my own behalf I send you grateful thanks for your prayers.
Yours sincerely,
W. H. Lewis
The Kilns, Kiln Lane,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford.
7th October 1961.
Dear Mrs. __________
I have your letter of the 5th addressed to Jack, but I’m sure you will understand why you are not getting a personal reply to it. Not that he isn’t really making a recovery, but the process is very slow, he does get so tired, and so easily, and consequently we don’t give him any of his letters to answer unless they are on quite unavoidable business. But he is grateful for yours, and for your kind anxiety.
The position at the moment is this. Jack has had a series of blood transfusions in hospital and the result was that he came home a week ago most definitely improved; with not only the permission but the encouragement of his doctors, he now gets up in the morning and cooks his own breakfast, and every day he goes out for half an hour’s walk. Better still, he has been put on a more generous diet and enjoys his meals. But perhaps the best sign is that he tells me he is getting very bored with invalid life and is itching to get back to work. As for the impending operation, the surgeon now talks of it as a thing quite in the future—six, or even twelve months ahead he says. Which naturally is an enormous relief to me, for if they are taking this view there cannot be anything very urgent the matter. In fact on the whole I’m a much happier man than I was when I last wrote to you. With kindest regards,
Yours sincerely,
W. H. Lewis
The Kilns
Headington Quarry
Oxford
23 Dec 1961
Dear Mary
We both seem to be having a sticky time at present? I am much the same; that is, I keep on looking and feeling better but each new blood count shows that I have made no real progress.
I’ve been greatly impressed by the work of an American Trappist called Thomas Merton—No Man Is An Island. You probably know it?
I can’t write much at present. All blessings.
Yours
Jack
The Kilns,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford
17 Jan 62
Dear Mary
I am distressed by all you tell me. Alas! advances in hygiene have made most of us live longer but other things have made old age harsher than it ever was before. It is a pity that the old usually dislike one another. In your position I myself would prefer a “Home”—or almost anything—to solitude. Your view reminds me of a dipsomaniac retired major I once knew who refused the suggestion that he should try A.A. on the ground that “it would be full of retired majors”! I am better, but that only means more nearly ripe for a big operation. I still can’t write much. With deepest sympathy,
Yours
Jack
The Kilns.
6 April 62
Dear Mary
My news is neither good nor bad. On the one hand they have decided that my kidneys will never be fit for the operation: on the other, that I have developed a tolerance for my present condition and can carry on indefinitely in a semi-invalid way without surgery. I am sorry to hear you have run into more trouble.
Yours
Jack
Magdalene College,
Cambridge
4 May 62
Dear Mary
Thank you all for your kind prayers. You have mine daily. Yes—it is sometimes hard to obey St. Paul’s “Rejoice”. We must try to take life moment by moment. The actual present is usually pretty tolerable, I think, if only we refrain from adding to its burden that of the past and the future. How right Our Lord is about “sufficient to the day”. Do even pious people in their reverence for the more radiantly divine element in His sayings, sometimes attend too little to their sheer practical common-sense? I was charmed with your two Chinese children. It reminded me of an adventure Joy and I had in Crete, when Joy gave a few drachmae to a very starved looking little girl (She wasn’t begging—just looking at us with a child’s open-eyed curiosity). The girl instantly rushed into a neighbouring thicket and returned with her hands full of fruit for us. (It was a nice fruit which we’d never seen before, but all our efforts to find out its name elicited only the word karpos, which simply means “fruit”!).
Yours
Jack
Magdalene College,
Cambridge
Ascension Day 1962
Dear Mary
Yes. The doctors allowed me to come back to work this term “experimentally”. So far the experiment has been a great success. I am better than I have ever been since last June. But I am permanently a semi-invalid on a low-protein diet (it must be good for my soul when there are things I really like for dinner and I mustn’t have them!). Like you, I have to reduce stair-climbing to the minimum. It does make life complicated, doesn’t it? There’s no going back upstairs for something you have forgotten, so that every time one goes down one has to think of everything as if one were planning an expedition to the North Pole or central Africa. But one learns!
All you tell me about China is horrible, and I was shocked to read an article the other day about Portugal. I had got the idea that Salazar was (as if such a thing were possible!) a good dictator. But apparently Portugal is just like all the other totalitarian countries, indeed worse in one way, for the atrocities are done in the name of Christianity. As a verse in our version of the Psalter says “All the earth is full of darkness and cruel habitations”.
I’m sorry my letters are so short compared with yours, but I’m afraid this is an irremovable difference between the sexes—women love letter writing and men loathe it. And there is so much other writing in my day’s work!
Something has gone wrong with spring this year and we are still having winter weather. The cuckoo has arrived, very late. But I bet he wishes he’d stayed in sunnier climes.
Yours
Jack
The Kilns,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford
3/7/62
Dear Mary
Yes, we do seem to be having a certain amount of experience in common! Perhaps if we had done more voluntary fasting before God would not now have put us on these darn diets! Well, the theologians say that an imposed mortification can have all the merit of a voluntary one if it is taken in the right spirit. We are also both ruled by cats. Joy’s Siamese—my “stepcat” as I call her—is the most terribly conversational animal I ever knew. She talks all the time and wants doors and windows to be opened for her 1000 times an hour. Yes, and one gets bored with the medicines too—besides always wondering “Did I remember to take them after breakfast?” and then wondering whether the risk of missing a dose or the risk of an over dose is the worst! All my sympathy. In haste.
Yours
Jack
Magdalene College,
Cambridge
31/7/62
Dear Mary
Yes, it is strange that anyone should dislike cats. But cats themselves are the worst offenders in this respect. They very seldom seem to like one another.
I have a notion that, apart from actual pain, men and women are quite diversely afflicted by illness. To a woman one of the great evils about it is that she can’t do things. To a man (or anyway a man like me) the great consolation is the reflection “Well, anyway, no one can now demand that I should do anything”. I have often had the fancy that one stage in Purgatory might be a great big kitchen in which things are always going wrong—milk boiling over, crockery getting smashed, toast burning, animals stealing. The women have to learn to sit still and mind their own business: the men have to learn to jump up and do something about it. When both sexes have mastered this exercise, they go on to the next. . . .
I think I continue to improve physically. As I get better I feel the loss of Joy more. I suppose the capacity for happiness must re-awake before one becomes fully aware of its absence.
Yes, one gets sick of pills. But thank God we don’t live in the age of horrible medicines such as our grandparents had to swallow.
All blessings.
Yours
Jack
The Kilns,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford
3 Sept 62
Dear Mary
Our situations are curiously reversed: you live in fear that an operation may be necessary, and I in hope that one may become possible. (At least it ought to be hope, but sometimes the flesh is weak!). Nausea is horrible, isn’t it? Worse than all but really severe pains: at least it dominates the mind and the emotions more.
I am surprised that you should doubt your forgiveness for sins from which you have doubtless long since received absolution. Especially as what apparently troubles you is not malice but the unforeseen results (or things only possibly the result) of behaviour whose intention was innocent. No doubt, as I know only too well, the knowledge that one’s acts have, contrary to one’s intention, led to all sorts of dreadful consequences, is a heavy burden. But it is a burden of regret and humiliation, isn’t it?, rather than of guilt. Perhaps we all dislike humiliation so much that we tend to disguise it from ourselves by treating blunders as sins? . . .
Of course you always have my prayers.
My idea of the Purgatorial kitchen didn’t mean that anyone had lately been “getting in my hair”. It is simply my lifelong experience—that men are more likely to hand over to others what they ought to do themselves, and women more likely to do themselves what others wish they would leave alone. Hence both sexes must be told “Mind your own business”, but in two different senses!
Yours
Jack
P.S. There is no question at all of my going to America at present.
The Kilns,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford
2 Oct. 62
Dear Mary
What a horrible treatment! One easily gets to dread the doctors more than the diseases. And I can sympathise with you about old Mrs.——. I saw a great deal of a woman like that at one time. One trouble about habitual liars is that, since you can’t believe anything they say, you can’t feel the slightest interest in it. One has to keep on saying “But for the Grace of God, there go I”. Let us pray that we never become like that. . . .
“I am glad to hear you have rehabilitated a displaced cat. I can’t understand the people who say cats are not affectionate. Our Siamese (my “step-cat”) is almost suffocatingly so. True, our ginger Tom (a great Don Juan and a mighty hunter before the Lord) will take no notice of me, but he will of others. He thinks I’m not quite socially up to his standards, and makes this very clear. No creature can give such a crushing “snub” as a cat! He sometimes looks at the dog—a big Boxer puppy, very anxious to be friendly—in a way that makes it want to sink into the floor.
I never could find out what the VIIth Day Adventists believe, tho’ I had a long talk with one the other day, a professor of electrical engineering from your country. I fear it is very mixed up with attempts to interpret the prophecies in the Book of Daniel—not, to my mind, a very profitable undertaking. But he was a grand young chap, sweet as a nut and absolutely sincere. No fool, either.
Prayers as usual!
Yours
Jack
Magdalene College,
Cambridge
26 Oct 62
Dear Mary
I do most thoroughly agree with your father’s principle about alms. It will not bother me in the hour of death to reflect that I have been “had for a sucker” by any number of impostors; but it would be a torment to know that one had refused even one person in need. After all, the parable of the sheep and goats makes our duty perfectly plain, doesn’t it. Another thing that annoys me is when people say “Why did you give that man money? He’ll probably go and drink it”. My reply is “But if I’d kept [it] I should probably have drunk it”. The old negro sounds delightful. Is the Catholic University Encyclopedia the same as the “New Catholic Encyclopedia” to which I was lately asked to contribute the article on Medieval Romance? (I didn’t; more work than I can manage now). I am sorry to hear of the little dog’s death. The animal creation is a strange mystery. We can make some attempt to understand human suffering: but the sufferings of animals from the beginning of the world till now (inflicted not only by us but by one another)—what is one to think? And again, how strange that God brings us into such intimate relations with creatures of whose real purpose and destiny we remain forever ignorant. We know to some degree what angels and men are for. But what is a flea for, or a wild dog? What you say about the VII Day Adventists interests me extremely. If they have so much charity there must be something very right about them. . . .
And what is a “wall can opener”? It suggests either opening a tin by means of a wall or opening a wall by means of a tin, and both sound very strange operations.
Well, now to the other letters. Always, prayers.
Yours
Jack
Magdalene College,
Cambridge
8 Nov 62
Dear Mary
. . . . I nominally have [a place of my own] and am nominally master of the house, but things seldom go as I would have chosen. The truth is that the only alternatives are either solitude (with all its miseries and dangers, both moral and physical) or else all the rubs and frustrations of a joint life. The second, even at its worst seems to me far the better. I hope one is rewarded for all the stunning replies one thinks of one does not utter! But alas, even when we don’t say them, more than we suspect comes out in our look, our manner, and our voice. An elaborately patient silence can be very provoking! We are all fallen creatures and all very hard to live with. . . .
I do hope the operation will turn out to be unnecessary.
Yours
Jack
The Kilns
Headington Quarry,
Oxford
26 Nov. 62
Dear Mary
My stuff about animals came long ago in The Problem of Pain. I ventured the supposal—it could be nothing more—that as we are raised in Christ, so at least some animals are raised in us. Who knows, indeed, but that a great deal even of the inanimate creation is raised in the redeemed souls who have, during this life, taken its beauty into themselves? That may be the way in which the “new heaven and the new earth” are formed. Of course we can only guess and wonder. But these particular guesses arise in me, I trust, from taking seriously the resurrection of the body: a doctrine which now-a-days is very soft pedalled by nearly all the faithful—to our great impoverishment. Not that you and I have now much reason to rejoice in having bodies! Like old automobiles, aren’t they? where all sorts of apparently different things keep going wrong, but what they add up to is the plain fact that the machine is wearing out. Well, it was not meant to last forever. Still, I have a kindly feeling for the old rattle-trap. Through it God showed me that whole side of His beauty which is embodied in colour, sound, smell and size. No doubt it has often led me astray: but not half so often, I suspect, as my soul has led it astray. For the spiritual evils which we share with the devils (pride, spite) are far worse than what we share with the beasts: and sensuality really arises more from the imagination than from the appetites; which, if left merely to their own animal strength, and not elaborated by our imagination, would be fairly easily managed. But this is turning into a sermon!
Yours
Jack
The Kilns
Headington Quarry
Oxford
10 Dec 62
Dear Mary
Thanks for your letter and the amusing enclosure. What is a Magna Charta badge?—quite a “new one on me”. About ancient lineage (I haven’t any myself). My feeling is that all such things can legitimately be enjoyed provided one takes them lightly enough. Like tinsel crowns worn for private theatricals! And the prig who considers himself above enjoying his tinsel crown is perhaps as far astray as the paranoiac who mistakes it for gold. This goes for things like beauty, talent, fame etc. as well as for blood (Of course a great deal of so-called “democratic” feeling against the claims of blood is really based on a desire to make the claims of money all important; and of all claims to distinction money is, I suppose, the basest).
There is much that is cheering, along with much that isn’t, in your letter. One must get over any false shame about accepting necessary help. One never has been “independent”. Always, in some mode or other, one has lived on others, economically, intellectually, spiritually. Who, after all, is less independent than someone with “a private income”—every penny of which has been earned by the skill and labour of others? Poverty merely reveals the helpless dependence which has all the time been our real condition. We are members of one another whether we choose to recognise the fact or not.
I get on fairly well. My chief trouble is a difficulty in sleeping at night and keeping awake by day. Perhaps I am turning into a nocturnal animal. Bat? Wolf? Owl? Let’s hope it will be owl, the bird of wisdom (And I always was attracted by mice!)
Yours
Jack
The Kilns,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford.
2 Jan 63
Dear Mary
. . . . As for looks—do most women value beauty in a man at all? My experience is that they rather distrust and dislike it. We are having something more like an American winter than we’ve had for nearly a century, and as we are not prepared for it (very little central heating, no snowploughs, etc) it hits us very hard. There will be real famine conditions in a week or so if a thaw doesn’t come. This, with the ghastly drudgery of Christmas mails—they get heavier every year—has left us in a very chastened and un-festive frame of mind! Let’s hope 63 will be a better year for us all!
Yours
Jack
The Kilns
8 Jan ’63
Dear Mary
I don’t mind betting that the things which “had to be done” in your room didn’t really have to be done at all. Very few things really do. After one bad night with my heart–not so bad as yours, for it was only suffocation, not pain—my doctor strictly rationed me on stairs, and I have obeyed him. Of course it is hideously inconvenient, but that can be put up with and must. What worse than inconvenience would have resulted if you had left those “things” undone? Do take more care of yourself and less of “things”!
Still snow-bound,
Yours
Jack
The Kilns
26/1/63
Dear Mary
That wedding party would have half killed me! and I am afraid it was very bad for you. I too am having bad nights. I find the best sedative if one is wakeful in the middle of the night is—simply FOOD. Have a few biscuits on the table by your bed. I’d a queer night a week ago. Something (not dangerous but a little painful) went wrong at about 1.30 a.m. and needed the surgeon so rang up for ambulance. But as our drive is impassible to wheeled traffic with the snow drifts I had to go out and wait for said ambulance in the road: from about 2 to 2.20. Nice to look at: full moon on snow. But I thought my ears would have dropped off with the cold! Got back to bed about 6 o’clock. Your young friend can get the P. of Pain in a paper-back in America. Mails perfectly frightful just now. I suppose the snow keeps people in doors and that encourages them to write letters! In haste
Yours
Jack
Magdalene College,
Cambridge
8 Feb 63
Dear Mary
I’m not surprised at Son Suez’s reaction. She couldn’t possibly know that this inexplicable arrest, exile, and imprisonment had a kind intention. It suggests the comforting thought that the strange and terrifying things which happen to us are really for our benefit. That’s an old platitude of course; but seeing it the other way round, in relation to the cat, somehow brings it to life.
Still snow!
Yours
Jack
The Kilns,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford
19 March 63
Dear Mary
I am sorry they threaten you with a painful disease. “Dangerous” matters much less, doesn’t it? What have you and I got to do but make our exit? When they told me I was in danger several months ago, I don’t remember feeling distressed. I am talking, of course, about dying, not about being killed. If shells started falling about this house I should feel quite differently. An external, visible, and (still worse) audible threat at once wakes the instinct of self-preservation into fierce activity. I don’t think natural death has any similar terrors. I am thrilled to hear that Son Suez has a sweater! Is this part of the demarché (it’s in all our papers) which a body of American women are making to the President to get animals properly clothed “in the interests of decency”? Can it be true? If so, not only what insanity, but also (as in all super-refinements) what fundamental foulmindedness! But also, what fun! The elephant looks as if he wore trousers already, but terribly baggy ones. What he needs is braces. The Rhino seems to wear a suit much too big for him: can it be “taken in”? What sort of collars will giraffes wear? Will seals and otters have ordinary clothes or bathing suits? The hedgehog will wear his shirts out terribly quickly, I should think. The reason I stood out waiting for the ambulance was that the 200 yards of avenue which lead up to this house were under such deep snowdrifts that wheeled traffic couldn’t reach the house. You get arctic winters much more often than we, but you have no idea what they are like when they do fall in a country where no-one is prepared for them. But it didn’t do me the slightest harm. In my experience colds and coughs come from infection far more often than from exposure. Yes, private communions (I shared many during Joy’s last days) are extraordinarily moving. I am in danger of preferring them to those in church.
Blessings and prayers.
Yours
Jack
The Kilns
22 April 63
Dear Mary
What in Heaven’s name is “distressing” about an old man saying to an old woman that they haven’t much more to do here? I wasn’t in the least expressing resentment or despondency. I was referring to an obvious fact and one which I don’t find either distressing or embarrassing. Do you?
Didn’t the flowers all say “Good morning, Lawd!” in the (excellent) film of Green Pastures.
I’ve finished a book on Prayer. Don’t know if it is any good.
I’m glad you can still enjoy a new dress. I can still dislike a new suit.
In haste.
Yours
Jack
The Kilns
19 May 63
Dear Mary
Sorry to hear of all your expenses. I have directed Harcourt Brace to send you a little extra. No time to write; my brother is ill and of course the mails have chosen that moment to be unusually heavy.
Yours
Jack
Magdalene College,
Cambridge
10 June 63
Dear Mary
I am sorry to hear of the acute pain and the various other troubles. It makes me unsay all I have ever said against our English “Welfare State”, which at least provides free medical treatment for all. God’s purposes are terribly obscure. I am thinking both of your sufferings and of the removal of such a Pope at such a moment. And the horrid conclusions which some bigots on both sides will probably draw from it. My brother is away in Ireland. . . . This throws a lot of extra work on me, besides condemning me to—what I hate—solitude. God help us all.
Yours
Jack
Magdalene College,
Cambridge
17 June 63
Dear Mary
This is terrible news. The doctor who refused to come would, I think, be liable to criminal prosecution in this country.
Pain is terrible, but surely you need not have fear as well? Can you not see death as the friend and deliverer? It means stripping off that body which is tormenting you: like taking off a hairshirt or getting out of a dungeon. What is there to be afraid of? You have long attempted (and none of us does more) a Christian life. Your sins are confessed and absolved. Has this world been so kind to you that you should leave it with regret? There are better things ahead than any we leave behind.
Remember, tho’ we struggle against things because we are afraid of them, it is often the other way round—we get afraid because we struggle. Are you struggling, resisting? Don’t you think Our Lord says to you “Peace, child, peace. Relax. Let go. Underneath are the everlasting arms. Let go, I will catch you. Do you trust me so little?”
Of course this may not be the end. Then make it a good rehearsal.
Yours (and like you a tired traveller, near the journey’s end)
Jack
The Kilns
Headington Quarry,
Oxford
25 June 63
Dear Mary
Tho’ horrified at your sufferings, I am overjoyed at the blessed change in your attitude to death. This is a bigger stride forward than perhaps you yourself yet know. For you were rather badly wrong on that subject. Only a few months ago when I said that we old people hadn’t much more to do than to make a good exit, you were almost angry with me for what you called such a “bitter” remark. Thank God, you now see it wasn’t bitter; only plain common sense. Yes: I do wonder why the doctors inflict such torture to delay what cannot in any case be very long delayed. Or why God does! Unless there is still something for you to do, as far as weakness allows. I hope, now that you know you are forgiven, you will spend most of your remaining strength in forgiving. Lay all the old resentments down at the wounded feet of Christ. I have had dozens of blood transfusions in the last two years and know only too well the horrid—and long—moments during which they are poking about to find the vein. And then you think they’ve really got in at last and it turns out that they haven’t. (Is there an allegory here? The approaches of Grace often hurt because the spiritual vein in us hides itself from the celestial surgeon?). But oh, I do pity you for waking up and finding yourself still on the wrong side of the door! How awful it must have been for poor Lazarus who had actually died, got it all over, and then was brought back—to go through it all, I suppose, a few years later. I think he, not St. Stephen, ought really to be celebrated as the first martyr.
You say too much of the very little I have been able to do for you. Perhaps you will very soon be able to repay me a thousandfold. For if this is Good-bye, I am sure you will not forget me when you are in a better place. You’ll put in a good word for me now and then, won’t you? It will be fun when we at last meet.
Yours
Jack
The Kilns
Frid. 28 June 63
Dear Mary
It was anaemia that endangered my life the winter before last, but of course trifling compared with yours. I think the best way to cope with the mental debility and total inertia is to submit to it entirely. Don’t try to concentrate. Pretend you are a dormouse or even a turnip. But of course I know the acceptance of inertia is much easier for men than for women. We are the lazy sex. Think of yourself just as a seed patiently waiting in the earth; waiting to come up a flower in the Gardener’s good time, up into the real world, the real waking. I suppose that our whole present life, looked back on from there, will seem only a drowsy half-waking. We are here in the land of dreams. But cockcrow is coming. It is nearer now than when I began this letter.
Yours
Jack
The Kilns
6 July 63
Dear Mary
. . . Do you know, only a few weeks ago I realised suddenly that I at last had forgiven the cruel school-master who so darkened my childhood. I’d been trying to do it for years; and like you, each time I thought I’d done it, I found, after a week or so it all had to be attempted over again. But this time I feel sure it is the real thing. And (like learning to swim or to ride a bicycle) the moment it does happen it seems so easy and you wonder why on earth you didn’t do it years ago. So the parable of the unjust judge comes true, and what has been vainly asked for years can suddenly be granted. I also get a quite new feeling about “If you forgive you will be forgiven”. I don’t believe it is, as it sounds, a bargain. The forgiving and the being forgiven are really the very same thing. But one is safe as long as one keeps on trying.
How terribly long these days and hours are for you. Even I, who am in a bed of roses now compared with you, feel it a bit. I live in almost total solitude, never properly asleep by night (all loathsome dreams) and constantly falling asleep by day. I sometimes feel as if my mind were decaying. Yet, in another mood, how short our whole past life begins to seem!
It is a pouring wet summer here, and cold. I can hardly remember when we last saw the sun.
Well, we shall get out of it all sooner or later, for
even the weariest river
Winds somewhere safe to sea.
Let us pray much for one another.
Yours
Jack
The Kilns
9 July 63
Dear Mary
I can well understand with what mixed feelings you received what was obviously, in the ordinary medical sense very “good” news. Aren’t you a trifle fierce about the Doctor? It can’t be much fun attempting to explain the details to 100 bio-chemical patients who have no knowledge of bio-chemistry and who, one knows, won’t really understand, however hard one tries. I was always only too glad to let mine off with the merest skeleton account of my own state—I found it such a boring subject. Also, aren’t your doctors (like ours) hideously overworked? I know my specialist, when I was in hospital, had a working day which had begun at 8.30 a.m. and was still going on at 9.45 p.m. Doesn’t leave much elbow room.
Our hearts, by the way, must be different. When yours is worst you have to lie flat. When mine was worst I had to sit up—night and day for months.
By the way, as you come out I may possibly go in. Swollen ankles—the Red Light for me—have returned. I see the doctor about this to-morrow. My fear is that he will forbid me to go to Ireland on Monday as I had arranged, and put me back in hospital.
Our friends might really get up a sweepstake as to whose train really will go first! Blessings.
Yours
Jack
The Kilns,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford
16th July 63
Dear Mary
I go into hospital this afternoon. Think any sudden change in my state is very improbable. Last time, the repeated blood-transfusions got me past the danger point, tho’ they took much longer to do it than the doctors expected. This time they will either take even longer, or else they will fail to do it at all. I’m so sleepy and tired that I feel very little concerned. The loss of all mental concentration is what I dislike most. I fell asleep 3 times during your letter and found it very hard to understand! Don’t expect to hear much from me. You might as well expect a Lecture on Hegel from a drunk man.
Yours
Jack
27 July 1963
Oxford
As from the Acland Nursing Home
Dear Mary
Jack asked me to tell you that letter writing is physically impossible, his fingers jerk and twitch so. His physical crisis has greatly disordered his intelligence and he is vividly aware of living in a world of hallucinations. I am afraid it seems very difficult to communicate to one another the high comforts. One strange and beautiful reason is that I myself suffer so little by their withdrawal. I have no physical pain—only extreme lethargy and some sense of absurdity.
God bless you.
Yours,
Jack
10 August 1963,
The Kilns,
Kiln Lane,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford.
Dear Mrs. __________
I am Professor C. S. Lewis’s secretary writing to tell you some of the facts of Professor Lewis’s present state of health. He felt that you were entitled to this history. I trust that you will not mind it coming from my hand; but so it must.
Professor Lewis had a relapse the second week in July. On the 15th of July he entered the Acland Nursing Home. During the last hours of the night he had a heart attack from which it was not expected by his doctors that he would emerge. He lay in a coma for nearly 24 hours breathing only because of an oxygen mask. As the Professor was incapable of receiving the Sacrament his priest administered Extreme Unction (2:00 p.m., 16th July). Contrary to the expectations of the medical staff, Professor regained consciousness at 3:00 p.m. (16th July) and asked for his tea. His state was still critical even though he revived somewhat during the next two days. Then followed a “black period” of dreams, illusions, and some moments of tangled reason. I hope it is clear to you that he was incapable of the normal exertions of correspondence.
During the third week in the Nursing Home, Professor Lewis regained, very slowly, his rational faculties and, even slower, his strength. Last Tuesday (6 August) he was allowed to come home, accompanied, of course, by a nurse. Even though he is enjoying more ease and comfort at the Kilns Professor Lewis is, by no means, capable of writing letters or receiving visitors. He has with regret, but love for his College, resigned his Chair and Fellowship at Cambridge.
Professor Lewis regrets that he is unable at this time (and probably for a long time) to answer your letters. He is much concerned for you and prays that you may have courage for whatever may be yours both in the present and future.
I am, with prayers and affection,
Yours faithfully,
Walter Hooper
The Kilns etc
30 Aug 63
Dear Mary
Thanks for yours of the 27. I am quite comfortable but very easily tired. B.B. is still away so I have all the mail to do. So you must expect my letters to be very few and very short. More a wave of the hand than a letter.
Yours
Jack