Collected Letters Volume Three: Narnia, Cambridge and Joy 1950–1963

THE COLLECTED LETTERS OF C. S. Lewis ———Volume III——— Narnia, Cambridge and Joy 1950-1963 EDITED BY WALTER HOOPER

Preface

Abbreviations

Letters:

Chapter 1 - 1950

Chapter 2 - 1951

Chapter 3 - 1952

Chapter 4 - 1953

Chapter 5 - 1954

Chapter 6 - 1955

Chapter 7 - 1956

Chapter 8 - 1957

Chapter 9 - 1958

Chapter 10 - 1959

Chapter 11 - 1960

Chapter 12 - 1961

Chapter 13 - 1962

Chapter 14 - 1963

Supplementary Letters

‘Great War’ Letters

Biographical Appendix

Index

About the Author

Books By C. S. Lewis

Copyright

About the Publisher

PREFACE

This is the third and final volume of the Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis. In the same way that the third novel of Lewis’s interplanetary trilogy, That Hideous Strength, grew to be twice the length of the first story, Out of the Silent Planet, so it is with Volume III of his correspondence, which is almost twice as long as Volume I. It would, I admit, have been neater to have had three equally sized books, but this is the way things have turned out, and I hope readers will welcome the many extra letters in this bulky concluding collection.

When it was agreed years ago between the publishers and the Lewis Estate that there would be only three volumes of letters, it was left unsaid how long a volume might be. I was halfway through editing Volume I when someone at HarperCollins suggested that the Collected Letters might consist of three paperback volumes of 325 pages each. This was not acceptable to the Estate because it would mean publishing only about a third of the letters known to exist, and leaving the others to an uncertain future. Lewis was one of the last great letter-writers and we felt it would be a pity not to publish all his letters. And so I persevered with Volume I, hoping that a book comprising about a third of the letters would be accepted by HarperCollins.

However, when the time came to send the publishers the typescript of the first volume, a different person at HarperCollins was in charge. This was lames Catford, of whom I’d heard many good things. I nevertheless feared he would turn the book down if it were very long, and I cut out a few letters. As I explained in the Preface to Volume I, ‘To prevent the book from being too long it was necessary to leave out a few letters, but the volume contains about 95 per cent of the letters from that period.’ I explained that some of the letters I omitted were ‘weekly “regulation” letters from lack to his father from his various schools’, while others were letters to Lewis’s great friends Owen Barfield and Cecil Harwood, in which he ‘was primarily arguing philosophical points or criticizing his correspondents’ poetry’.1

On 19 April 1999, a few days after sending the typescript of Volume I to HarperCollins, I went up to London to meet James Catford, who would be guiding it through the press. I expected him to complain of it being too long, and I could not have been more surprised when he said: ‘Congratulations! We’re into Big Books!’

James gave the Collected Letters exactly the lift it needed, and although he left soon afterwards to become chief executive of the Bible Society, those who followed him at HarperCollins have supported the project with equal enthusiasm. More than that, they have shared my keenness to include in the Collected Letters all the letters that have come to light. Volume I, Family Letters, covered the period from Lewis’s first letters in 1905 up to his conversion in September 1931. Volume II, Books, Broadcasts and War, covered the period from October 1931 up to 1949 when Lewis wrote The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and was finding his way into Narnia, and I tried to include all the letters that fitted into that second period.

By the time I reached Volume III, with its triple theme, Narnia, Cambridge, Joy, covering 1950 up to Lewis’s death in 1963, David Brawn, the projects director at HarperCollins, and Chris Smith, commissioning editor, were as enthusiastic about the project as I. They liked my idea of including in Volume III a Supplement of those letters which were deliberately omitted from or, for various reasons, failed to get into Volumes I and II. Apart from the early letters to his father and those to Barfield and Harwood, for reasons of space I had also omitted Lewis’s letters to various periodicals, such as the Times Literary Supplement and the Church Times; these letters too are now included in the Supplement.

Besides the Supplement, there are the ‘Great War’ Letters dating from 1927-8. They are the only part of Lewis’s dispute with Owen Barfield about myth, imagination and anthroposophy conducted by letter. Long before the ‘Great War’ began in 1923, Lewis dismissed Christianity as a ‘myth’. Then, in February 1923, while preparing for his examinations in Greats, he witnessed a man he liked go mad.2 This was Mrs Moore’s brother, Dr John Askins, who Lewis explained ‘had flirted with Theosophy, Yoga, Spiritualism, Psychoanalysis, what not?’3 In the little house Lewis shared with Mrs Moore he helped to hold Dr Askins down ‘while he kicked and wallowed on the floor, screaming out that devils were tearing him and that he was that moment falling down into Hell’.4Largely as a result of this Lewis assumed what he called his intellectual ‘New Look’. ‘There were to be,’ he insisted,

no flirtations with any idea of the supernatural, no romantic delusions. In a word, like the heroine of Northanger Abbey, I formed the resolution ‘of always judging and acting in future with the greatest good sense? And good sense meant, for me at that moment, a retreat, almost a panic-stricken flight, from all that sort of romanticism which had hitherto been the chief concern of my life.6

Lewis had just arrived at this ‘New Look’, with its rejection of anything supernatural, when Owen Barfield and Cecil Harwood became followers of Rudolf Steiner and the theosophical beliefs expressed in anthroposophy. ‘I was hideously shocked,’ said Lewis:

Everything that I had laboured so hard to expel from my own life seemed to have flared up and met me in my best friends. Not only my best friends, but those whom I would have thought safest…As I came to learn…what Steiner thought, my horror turned into disgust and resentment. For here, apparently, were all the abominations; none more abominable than those which had once attracted me. Here were gods, spirits, after-life and pre-existence, initiates, occult knowledge, meditation…There was no danger of my being taken in. But then, the loneliness, the sense of being deserted.7

The ‘Great War’ was to last until 1931, when Lewis converted to Christianity.

In a word, HarperCollins and I were determined that the three volumes would contain not a ‘selection’ of Lewis’s letters but all. The reader can see from the frequency of the abbreviations ‘BOD’ and ‘W’ that most of the letters are from the two major collections in the Bodleian Library and the Wade Center. But for the purpose of this volume, the net was thrown very wide, and this volume contains the letters I have found in all the Lewis collections I know about. When I began work on Volume III, I guessed that, with the addition of the Supplement, it would be only a few hundred pages longer than the other two. However, as word spread that this would be the final volume, I received numerous Lewis letters preserved in private collections. And so the book grew to be the size it is.

Despite our efforts to include in these volumes all of Lewis’s letters, there are a few that either I forgot about or which turned up too late to be fitted in. No doubt others will come to light. We should not be discouraged. This happens with the letters of nearly all eminent people. I doubt we can say we have all the letters written by anyone. Letters from Dr Samuel Johnson have shown up hundreds of years after his letters were first published, and despite the efforts of the many editors of Cardinal John Henry Newman’s Letters and Diaries, over a period of fifty years, letters from Newman still show up from time to time. While I have no doubt that most of Lewis’s letters are contained in these volumes, I expect the occasional letter will be popping up for the next 100 years. If this happens, perhaps HarperCollins will publish an additional volume of letters.

The theme of this volume is Narnia, Cambridge and Joy, but up to the end of 1949, there was almost nothing to suggest that the last thirteen years of Lewis’s life would involve any of those things, that it would be the fullest of all, and that the period would yield so many letters. In short, there was no reason for Lewis to imagine a revolution taking place in his life. He was very tired from years of looking after his aged companion, Mrs Moore, and he would have been glad of an occasional day of freedom. Thus, when Don Giovanni Calabria wrote from Verona at the beginning of 1949, urging him to write more, Lewis replied on 14 January:

I would not wish to deceive you with vain hope. I am now in my fiftieth year. I feel my zeal for writing, and whatever talent I originally possessed, to be decreasing; nor (I believe) do I please my readers as I used to…My aged mother, worn out by long infirmity, is my daily care…Perhaps it will be the most wholesome thing for my soul that I lose both fame and skill lest I were to fall into that evil disease, vainglory8

The clearest evidence that his ‘zeal for writing’ was decreasing was that he had written no stories since the last Ransom novel in 1945. For Lewis story-writing was never a matter of effort, but depended entirely, as he said, on ‘seeing pictures in my head’.9 But there were no ‘pictures’. And in any event, Lewis was poised, after years of preparation, to begin writing English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (1954), the volume of the Oxford History of English Literature which he once complained ‘lies like a nightmare on my chest’.10 The burden of that ‘nightmare’ would have been eased had he received more help from his brother, Warnie. The brothers were the greatest friends, but Warnie would periodically disappear to Ireland on drinking binges, often absenting himself at the times when Jack needed most help with Mrs Moore.

As I mentioned in the Preface to Volume II, it was shortly after Lewis thought his talents to be ‘decreasing’ that he began dreaming of lions.11 ‘At first,’ he said about The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, ‘I had very little idea how the story would go. But then suddenly Asian came bounding into it. I think I had been having a good many dreams of lions about that time…Once He was there He pulled the whole story together, and soon He pulled the six other Narnian stories in after him.’12

The extraordinary burst of inspiration that led to the writing of the Narnian stories was beyond anything he had experienced since his interplanetary stories. How did it happen? As he explained,

In the Author’s mind there bubbles up every now and then the material for a story. For me it invariably begins with mental pictures. This ferment leads to nothing unless it is accompanied with the longing for a Form: verse or prose, short story, novel, play or what not. When these two things click you have the Author’s impulse complete. It is now a thing inside him pawing to get out. He longs to see this bubbling stuff pouring into that Form as the housewife longs to see the new jam pouring into the clean jam jar. This nags him all day long and gets in the way of his work and his sleep and his meals. It’s like being in love.13

The first two chapters of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe were probably composed soon after he wrote to Don Giovanni on 14 January 1949, and they were ready for Roger Lancelyn Green to read when he visited Lewis in March. This first ‘Chronicle of Narnia’ was completed by the end of May, and in June Lewis made a start on what became The Magician’s Nephew. He dropped this story when he ran into some difficulties with it, and in September 1949 he wrote Prince Caspian. In August 1949 Lewis signed a contract with publisher Geoffrey Bles for The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and by Christmas Pauline Baynes had illustrated it.

Volume III opens in January 1950, when Lewis was writing a third story, The Voyage of the ‘Dawn Treader’. This was followed by The Horse and His Boy, which he was in the middle of when he found it impossible any longer to look after Mrs Moore. On 29 April 1950 she was moved to Restholme, a nursing home at 230 Woodstock Road. There Lewis visited her every day.14 ‘The old lady’s retirement to a Nursing Home,’ he wrote to Dr Warfield Firor on 6 December 1950, ‘has made me a good deal freer in a small way. I can plan my days and count on some domestic leisure as I have not been able to do these last fifteen years.’15

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, always the most popular of the stories, was published on 16 October 1950. The Magician’s Nephew was not completed until the spring of 1954, but all the other five were finished by March 1953. This meant that, with the exception of The Magician’s Nephew, Lewis wrote six Narnian stories in about four years. It was his publisher, Geoffrey Bles, who decided they should appear one per year.

The Narnian stories were favourably reviewed from the start, but it took several years before they captured the imagination of children. What became in the end a flood of letters from children was only a trickle when Lewis said in a letter to Dr Firor of 20 December 1951: ‘I am going to be (if I live long enough) one of those men who was a famous writer in his forties and dies unknown.’16 A few years later he was inundated with letters from children, and he enjoyed these more than any others he received. This volume contains all those previously published in Letters to Children (1985) as well as others, and they provide one of our most important sources of information about Narnia. Even today, Lewis continues to receive letters of gratitude from children, and I imagine he would be amused that I have answered more letters from children after his death than he did before it.17 Before the creation of Narnia The Screwtape Letters was his most popular book, but today Lewis is, of course, best known and best loved as the author of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

Magdalen College gave Lewis a year off, from Michaelmas Term 1951 to Michaelmas Term 1952, to complete English Literature in the Sixteenth Century. Despite the fact that Asian was still ‘pulling in’ the remaining Narnian stories, Lewis managed to complete the book by May 1952. He celebrated by motoring around his native Ulster with Arthur Greeves. Those who have read both the Narnian stories and English Literature in the Sixteenth Century will probably agree that the two tasks were highly complementary. Lewis’s pupil, John Wain, spoke for many when he said in his review of the Oxford History: ‘Most dons have moved a long way from any recognition that literature is something that people read for fun. Mr Lewis, now as always, writes as if inviting us to a feast.’18

Turning to the second theme of these letters–Cambridge–many readers wonder why Oxford did not honour Lewis with a professorship. There is nothing to suggest that Lewis was hurt, much less angry, about this, but his friends were hurt for him. J. R. R. Tolkien felt that he and Lewis would be ideally suited for the two Chairs at Merton College, the Chair of English and the Chair of English Literature. But while Tolkien was elected Merton Professor of English in 1945, the Chair of English Literature, when it became vacant in 1947, went instead to Lewis’s former tutor, R P. Wilson. Lewis was passed over again in 1948 when the Goldsmith’s Professorship of English at New College went to Lord David Cecil, who often said, ‘This chair should have gone to Lewis.’ While Lewis’s reputation as a literary scholar will probably always be overshadowed by Narnia and his apologetics, he was the author of a number of works of literary criticism that have taken their place with the classics, notably The Allegory of Love (1936) and A Preface to Paradise Lost (1942).

Why was it that Lewis had to leave Oxford and go to Cambridge in order to find a professorial position? It is possible that Dame Helen Gardner supplied the answer in the obituary of Lewis she wrote for the British Academy. She suggested that a suspicion had arisen that he was ‘so committed to what he himself called “hot-gospelling”‘19 that he would not have time for the demands of a Chair. ‘In addition,’ she said, ‘a good many people thought that shoemakers should stick to their lasts and disliked the thought of a professor of English Literature winning fame as an amateur theologian.’20

I met Professor Tolkien in 1964, having not long come from the United States. When he saw how perplexed I was by Oxford’s attitude to Lewis he explained it to me:

In Oxford you are forgiven for writing only two kinds of hooks. You may write hooks on your own subject whatever that is, literature or science, or history. And you may write detective stories because all dons at some time get the flu, and they have to have something to read in bed. But what you are not forgiven is writing popular works, such as Jack did on theology, and especially if they win international success as his did.21

One of the most pleasant parts of the ‘revolution’ that occurred in the last thirteen years of Lewis’s life was the offer of the Chair of Medieval and Renaissance English at Cambridge University, created with him in mind. We are fortunate in having not only Lewis’s side of the correspondence about the Chair, but that of the Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge University, Sir Henry Willink, who offered him the position. That correspondence, which begins on page 470, is as full of unexpected twists as an Agatha Christie novel, and I will say no more than that I hope the reader enjoys it.

Finally, what began as the quietest part of the ‘revolution’ in the end transformed Lewis’s entire life—Joy. Readers will not find in the many letters about Joy Davidman and her marriage to Lewis anything resembling the ‘love at first sight’ affair which some imagine befell these two people. Bearing in mind how it all turned out, readers will probably be as amused as I am about how Lewis viewed Joy’s stay at The Kilns during Christmas 1952. Writing to Laurence Harwood on 19 December 1952 he said: ‘I am completely “circumvented” by a guest, asked for one week but staying for three, who talks from morning till night.’22 The bitter-sweet story that followed that Christmas visit is treated so fully and touchingly in these letters there is no reason for me to say any more.

One of the first things I noticed when I moved into Lewis’s house in the summer of 1963 was the immensely heavy burden of ‘loathsome letter-writing’23 he shouldered almost every morning. After breakfast we spent about two hours replying to every letter he received. He had rheumatism in his right hand, and it had become painful to write very much. At that time he was receiving as many as three letters a week from Mrs Mary Willis Shelburne. She was the anonymous recipient of the Letters to an American Lady, edited by Clyde S. Kilby and published in 1967. Dr Kilby was not allowed to reveal the lady’s identity, and the ‘American Lady’ also insisted that all references to her daughter, Lorraine, and son-in-law, Don Nostadt, be omitted. The letters to Mrs Shelburne are published here for the first time in their entirety.

By the time I moved into The Kilns Mrs Shelburne was writing more letters than Lewis could possibly answer, and Lewis decided to end it. He had me take out my notebook and write down the names of the two people I would be totally responsible for—Mary Willis Shelburne and Margaret Radcliffe, a one-legged nurse who was always threatening to move into The Kilns and ‘Iook after him’. Lewis felt he had written enough to them, that he had said all there was to say, and he chose to reserve a little time for the things he wanted to write.

Lewis missed Warnie, and he said in the letter to Mrs Shelburne of 10 June 1963: ‘My brother is away in Ireland…This throws a lot of extra work on me, besides condemning me to—what I hate—solitude.’24 I soon realised he did not always like to be alone, and as long as I was busy with my own work he asked me to remain in the room while he wrote. If he had a decent chair, a bottle of ink and an endless supply of nibs for his pen, Lewis might have been in a private world. The exception was the period between after-lunch coffee and about three o’clock. I suspected he had a sleep when I left him alone in the common room after lunch; one day, as I was leaving, I said, ‘lack, do you ever take a nap?’ ‘Oh, no!’ he said. ‘But, mind you, sometimes a nap takes me!’

I once asked how he managed to write with such ease, and I think his answer tells us more about his writing than anything he said. He told me that the thing he most loved about writing was that it did two things at once. This he illustrated by saying: ‘I don’t know what I mean till I see what I’ve said.’ In other words, writing and thinking were a single process.

Lewis retired from Cambridge in the summer of 1963, and besides helping with letters, he had plans about how I would help with the books he planned to write. I never wanted anything more. What would Lewis have written had he lived longer? But that is enough speculation: Asian has made it clear that he will ‘tell no one any story but his own’.25 On the other hand, I expect the great Lion is responsible for the comfort I get from knowing that the many hours Lewis spent ‘coaxing a rheumatic wrist to drive this pen across paper’26 were not wasted. We have three large volumes of his letters.

In the period covered by Volume I Lewis was writing primarily to family members and close friends, in that covered by Volume II to a greatly enlarged circle of correspondents. The letters in Volume III were written to an even larger circle of people. As in Volume II, I have included substantial biographies of close friends, such as Nan Dunbar, Peter Bide and Katharine Farrer, and shorter biographies of associates and other people whose details were too substantial to be included merely as footnotes. It was fairly easy to gather facts when I was writing about people like Nan Dunbar and others whom I knew. Sometimes I was fortunate enough to track down those to whom Lewis wrote a single letter, such as Father George Restropo SJ (p. 1387). In some instances the recipient of a letter tracked me down. Unfortunately, many letters in this volume were bought by libraries from dealers who could supply no information about the recipients. Despite my efforts, many of these correspondents remain unidentified beyond their names.

Readers should note that the abbreviation ‘TS’ means the letter was typed by Lewis’s brother Warnie; ‘PC’ means it was written on a postcard. As Lewis grew older, and had more letters to answer, he often restricted his replies to postcards. Readers will also notice the abbreviation ‘p.p.’–per procurationem–meaning ‘through another’. If Lewis was not present when Warnie had typed a letter for him Warnie would sometimes sign his brother’s name, and I have indicated this by ‘p.p.’ Although most of the typed letters were composed by Lewis himself, I suspect that Warnie had a hand in the writing of a few of those marked ‘p.p.’