1945
TO SISTER PENELOPE: On his domestic difficulties and a lesson to be learned from them. The Latin of The Imitation of Christ means “If you wish to be a peacemaker, keep peace in yourself.”
3 JANUARY 1945
Jane [Mrs. Moore] is no worse in body: in mind and spirits sometimes very bad, sometimes better. Pray for us always, we are not a very happy house. More and more I am driven to realise what it says in The Imitation ‘Si vis alios pacificare, habe pacem in te ipso’ and how I fail to carry it out.
TO BEDE GRIFFITHS, who had mentioned to Lewis that he was thinking of writing a book on the New Creation: On feeling so spared by God in the victory over the Nazis that nothing short of holiness is the only adequate response; and on how thinking about miracles, about the new heavens and the new earth, and about the resurrection of the body has deepened Lewis’s appreciation of nature itself. Lewis asks about the chapters of The Great Divorce, then being published serially in The Guardian newspaper.
10 MAY 1945
And how did you feel on V-Day? I found it impossible to feel either so much sympathy with the people or so much gratitude to God as the occasion demanded. I am sometimes a little awed by the burden of our favours. Every one of us has escaped by a series of Providences, some not far short of miracles: and it seems to me that the sort of life which would be saintly for men less favoured becomes mere minimum decency for us. And how to come up to that standard!
You will remind me that this is precisely the situation we have always been in since our Redemption anyway. True: perhaps one of the great [accomplishments] of a worldly deliverance is to bring that other more fully home to one.
I’m interested in what you say about the serial. Do you think the failure to satisfy is due to lack of real unity or development? I mean that the dialogues succeed one another arbitrarily and might have come in any other order and might have gone on a longer or shorter time? Spiritual unity I hope it has: but a book needs musical or architectural unity as well.
…I too have been very much occupied by the idea of the New Creation. I’m absolutely with you. New heavens and earth—the resurrection of the body—how we have neglected these doctrines and indeed left the romantics and even the Marxists to step into the gap.
I’m working at a book on Miracles at present in which this theme will play a large part. And here’s a funny thing. To write a book on miracles, which are in a sense invasions of Nature, has made me realise Nature herself as I’ve never done before. You don’t see Nature till you believe in the Supernatural: don’t get the full, hot, salty tang of her except by contrast with the pure water from beyond the world. Those who mistake Nature for the All are just those who can never realise her as a particular creature with her own flamed, terrible, beautiful individuality. No time to develop this now—but I thought you’d like to know the thoughts I am drunk with.
I hope you will go on with your own idea of a book on the New Creation.
Oremus pro invicem.
In the light of the New Creation all miracles are like snowdrops—anticipations of the full spring and high summer which is slowly coming over the whole wintry field of space and time.
The same day Lewis wrote to Griffiths, Thursday, 10 May, Charles Williams suddenly fell ill and was taken to the Radcliffe Infirmary where he was operated on. The following Tuesday, 15 May, Lewis went to the infirmary to call on him before joining the other Inklings at the Bird and Baby pub. He learned that Williams had just died. Lewis wrote later:
I heard of his death at the Infirmary itself, having walked up there with a book I wanted to lend him, expecting this news that day as little (almost) as I expected to die that day myself. It was a Tuesday morning, one of our times of meeting. I thought he would have given me messages to take to the others. When I joined them with my actual message—it was only a few minutes’ walk from the Infirmary but, I remember, the very streets looked different—I had some difficulty in making them believe or even understand what had happened.
TO OWEN BARFIELD: On the sudden death of Charles Williams and the graces this occasioned in Lewis’s life.
18 MAY 1945
Thanks for writing. It has been a very odd experience. This, the first really severe loss I have suffered, has (a) Given corroboration to my belief in immortality such as I never dreamed of. It is almost tangible now. (b) Swept away all my old feelings of mere horror and disgust at funerals, coffins, graves et cetera. If need had been I think I could have handled that corpse with hardly any unpleasant sensations. (c) Greatly reduced my feeling about ghosts. I think (but who knows?) that I should be, tho afraid, more pleased than afraid, if his turned up. In fact, all very curious. Great pain but no mere depression.
Dyson said to me yesterday that he thought what was true of Christ was, in its lower degree, true of all Christians—i.e., they go away to return in a closer form and it is expedient for us that they should go away in order that they may do so. How foolish it is to imagine one can imaginatively foresee what any event will be like! ‘Local unique sting’ alright of course for I love him (I cannot say more) as much as [I love] you: and yet…a sort of brightness and tingling….
To put it in a nutshell—what the idea of death has done to him is nothing to what he has done to the idea of death. Hit it for six: yet it used to rank as a fast bowler!
TO MARY NEYLAN, whose husband has received job security: More on the graces accompanying the death of Charles Williams. Lewis asks if he can dedicate George MacDonald: An Anthology to her.
20 MAY 1945
I think what you say about ‘ grief being better than estrangement’ is very true. I am sorry you should have had this grief….
I also have become much acquainted with grief now through the death of my great friend Charles Williams, my friend of friends, the comforter of all our little set, the most angelic. The odd thing is that his death has made my faith ten times stronger than it was a week ago. And I find all that talk about ‘feeling he is closer to us than before’ isn’t just talk. It’s just what it does feel like—I can’t put it into words. One seems at moments to be living in a new world. Lots, lots of pain but not a particle of depression or resentment.
By the bye I’ve finished a selection from Geo. MacDonald (365 extracts) which will come out about Xmas: would you (or not) care to have it dedicated to you? I feel it is rather yours by right as you got more out of him than anyone else to whom I introduced his books. Just let me know.
And why should you assume I’m too occupied to see you? Friday mornings in term are bad, but alright in Vac: and Friday afternoons in both. I should like a visit (with a week’s notice) whenever you find one convenient.
Excuse this paper. It may be less blotched than yours but yours did at least begin life as a real piece of note paper! I’m so glad Dan has got his job made permanent. Blessings!
TO FLORENCE (MICHAL) WILLIAMS, the widow of Charles Williams: A letter of condolence.
22 MAY 1945
Thank you for your most kind letter. We all knew that your marriage was one in a thousand. I think you will not be offended if I tell you this; that whenever Charles disagreed with anything we had said about women in general, it was a common turn of raillery to reply ‘Oh Charles!—of course he’s in love, so his opinions on that subject are worthless!’
I feel, in my degree, as you do. My friendship is not ended. His death has had the very unexpected effect of making death itself look quite different. I believe in the next life ten times more strongly than I did. At moments it seems almost tangible. Mr. Dyson, on the day of the funeral, summed up what many of us felt, ‘It is not blasphemous’, he said ‘To believe that what was true of Our Lord is, in its less degree, true of all who are in Him. They go away in order to be with us in a new way, even closer than before.’ A month ago I would have called this silly sentiment. Now I know better. He seems, in some indefinable way, to be all around us now. I do not doubt he is doing and will do for us all sorts of things he could not have done while in the body. Of course this expects no answer. God bless you.
TO SISTER PENELOPE,, who had written Lewis of having successfully laid hands for healing on a crippled dog: On praying for animals; and on what he was learning from the death of Charles Williams.
28 MAY 1945
I was intensely interested in the story of your healing of the little dog. I don’t see why one shouldn’t. Perhaps indeed those to whom God allows a gift in this way should confirm their own faith in it by practising on beasts for in one way they may be easier to heal than men. Although they cannot have faith in Him (I suppose) they certainly have faith in us, which is faith in Him at one remove: and there is no sin in them to impede or resist. I am glad it happened….
…The little book will be called The Great Divorce and will appear about August. That Hideous Strength is due in July. The Miracle book is finished but will not come out till next year.
Jane is up and down: very liable, I’m afraid, to fits of really bad jealousy—she can’t bear to see other people doing the work. Pray for her, dear Sister.
TO ANNE RIDLER, the poet, who had published an obituary of Charles Williams: On what he was learning from the death of Charles Williams.
3 JUNE 1945
I envy you parts of your obituary. You get in very essential points which I had missed—his scepticism and his way of converting the other person’s mere stammer into great truth….
It is an interesting fact that everyone almost who has spoken or written to me about his death says something different of him and all true. One feels curiously un-depressed, do you find? It has increased enormously one’s faith in the next life and I can’t help feeling him all over the place. I can’t put it into words: I never knew the death of a good man could itself do so much good. I don’t mean there isn’t pain, pain in plenty: but not dull, sullen, sickening, drab, resentful pain.
TO ROGER LANCELYN GREEN, who had sent Lewis the manuscript of his latest tale: A letter of blessing and wounding, encouragement and challenge, with a diagnosis of spiritual disease and a prescription to read Charles Williams’s novel.
16 SEPTEMBER 1945
I have now read The Wood That Time Forgot and this is what I think. The general narrative power is excellent: i.e., on the question whether you have in general the story-telling talent, you may (in my opinion) set your mind at rest. I read it on a railway journey and it carried me as far as Bletchley (which was at chapter VII) without a single flagging of interest. I particularly admired the transition from the natural to the supernatural part. This went just gradually enough to solicit one’s faith and by the right stages. I thank you for giving me the authentic thrill: as you did several times….
Now for a matter which I would not mention if it were not that you and I (obviously) can converse with the freedom of patients in the same hospital. None of these faults is purely literary. The talent is certain: but you have a sickness in the soul. You are much too much in that enchanted wood yourself—and perhaps with no very powerful talisman round your neck. You are in love with your own heroine—which is author’s incest and always spoils a book. I know all about it because I’ve been in the wood too. It took me years to get out of it: and only after I’d done so did re-enchantment begin. If you try to stay there the wood will die on you—and so will you!
Have you read C. Williams’s Descent into Hell? If not, do so at once (I can lend you a copy). May I show the MS to Tolkien? My brother has read it and likes it very much.
TO ARTHUR GREEVES: On the meaning of the incarnation; and on how God might reconstruct in eternity Lewis’s selfish uncle, Augustus Hamilton, from the goodness that his uncle possessed.
26 DECEMBER 1945
I am sorry to see that it was October last when you wrote to me. But real correspondence (i.e., with my personal friends) is almost impossible in term time now.
You ask me…‘Surely God has always been the same loving and heavenly Father and it was the interpretation of God that Christ revealed.’ I see what you mean but the question is to me very difficult to answer. On the one hand something really new did happen at Bethlehem: not an interpretation but an event. God became Man. On the other hand there must be a sense in which God, being outside time, is changeless and nothing ever ‘happens’ to Him. I think I should reply that the event at Bethlehem was a novelty, a change to the maximum extent to which any event is a novelty or change: but that all time and all events in it, if we could see them all at once and fully understand them, are a definition or diagram of what God eternally is.
But that is quite different from saying that the incarnation was simply an interpretation, or a change in our knowledge. When Pythagoras discovered that the square on the hypotenuse was equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides he was discovering what had been just as true the day before though no one knew it. But in 50 bc the proposition ‘God is Man’ would not have been true in the same sense in which it was true in 10 ad because though the union of God and Man in Christ is a timeless fact, in 50 bc we hadn’t yet got to that bit of time which defines it. I don’t know if I make myself clear….
We got news of Uncle Gussie’s death yesterday. A difficult man to think of from that point of view. He was, as far as one can see, a very selfish man who yet succeeded in avoiding all the usual consequences of selfishness: that is, he was not at all a bore, had no self-pity, was not jealous, and seemed to be as happy as the day was long. I think he illustrates the enormous difference between selfishness and self-centredness. He had plenty of the first: he pursued his own interests with very little regard to other people. But he had none of the second. I mean, he loved outside himself. His mind was not occupied with himself but with science, music, yachting et cetera. That was the good element and it was (as I think all good elements are) richly rewarded in this life. Let’s hope and pray that it will carry him through where he is now. It may be the little spark of innocence and disinterestedness from which the whole man can be reconstructed.
There’s all the difference in the world between a fire that has gone out and one that is nearly out. The latter, with skilful treatment, can always be coaxed back to life. It is rather a terrible thing that some people who try really hard to be unselfish yet have in them that terrible self-centredness which he was free from.