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

TO DON GIOVANNI CALABRIA (V): 7

Collegium Stae Mariae Magdalenae

apud Oxonienses

Vig. fest. Trium Regum

MCMLIII [5 January 1953]

Dilectissime Pater

Grato animo, ut semper, paternas tuas benedictiones accepi. Sit tibi, precor, suavissima gustatio omnium hujus temporis gaudiorum et inter curas et Dolores consolatio. Tractatum Responsabilità apud Amicum (Dec.) invenire nequeo. Latet aliquis error. Orationes tuas peto de opera quod nunc in manibus est dum conor componere libellum de precibus privatis in usum laicorum praesertim eorum qui nuper in fidem Christianam conversi sunt et longo stabilitoque habitu orandi adhuc carent. Laborem aggressus sum quia videbam multos quidem pulcherrimosque libros de hac re scriptos esse in usum religiosorum, paucos tamen qui tirones et adhuc (ut ita dicam) infantes in fide instruunt. Multas difficultates invenio nee certe scio utrum Dominus velit me hoc opus perficere an non. Ora, mi pater, ne aut nimia audacitate in re mihi non concessâ persistam aut nimia timiditate a labore debito recedam: aeque enim damnati et ille qui Arcam sine mandato tetigit et ille qui manum semel aratro impositam abstrahit.

Et tu et congregatio tua in diurnis orationibus meis. Haec sola, dum in via sumus, conversatio: liceat nobis, precor, olim in Patria facie ad faciem congredi. Vale.

C. S. Lewis

Adhuc spero tractatum Responsabilità accipere.

*

The College of St Mary Magdalen, Oxford

n Vigil of the Feast of the Three Kings, 1953

[5 January 1953]

Dearest Father

Thank you, as always, for your fatherly blessings.

May you, I pray, have the sweetest relish of all the joys of this life and consolation amid cares and griefs.

I am unable to find the article ‘Responsibility’ in the December issue of Friend. There is some unexplained mistake here.8

I invite your prayers about a work which I now have in hand. I am trying to write a book about private prayers for the use of the laity, especially for those who have been recently converted to the Christian faith and so far are without any sustained and regular habit of prayer. I tackled the job because I saw many no doubt very beautiful books written on this subject of prayer for the religious but few which instruct tiros and those still babes (so to say) in the Faith. I find many difficulties nor do I definitely know whether God wishes me to complete this task or not.9

Pray for me, my Father, that I neither persist, through over-boldness, in what is not permitted to me nor withdraw, through too great timidity, from due effort: for he who touches the Ark without authorization10 and he who, having once put his hand to the plough, draws it back are both lost.11

Both you and your Congregation are in my daily prayers. While we are in the Way, this is our only intercourse: be it granted to us, I pray, hereafter, to meet in our True Country face to face.

C. S. Lewis

I still hope to receive the article ‘Responsibility’.

TO DON GIOVANNI CALABRIA (V):

e Coll. Stae Mariae Magdalenae

apud Oxonienses

Jan. vii. MCMLIII

Tandem, pater dilectissime, venit in manus exemplar Amid (Oct.) quod continent tractatum tuum de clade illa Serica. De illa natione quum ibi per multos annos evangelistae haud infeliciter laboravissent, equidem multa sperabam: nunc omnia retro fluere, ut scribis, manifestum est. Et mihi multa atrocia multi de illa re epistolis renuntiaverunt ñeque aberat ista miseria a cogitationibus et precibus nostris. Neque tamen sine peccatis nostris evenit: nos enim justitiam illam, curam illam pauperum quas (mendacissime) communistae praeferunt debueramus jam ante multa saecula rê verâ effecisse. Sed longe hoc aberat: nos occidentales Christum ore praedicavimus, factis Mammoni servitium tulimus. Magis culpabiles nos quam infideles: scientibus enim volunta-tem Dei et non facientibus major poena. Nunc unicum refugium in contritione et oratione. Diu erravimus. In legendo Europae historiam, seriem exitiabilem bellorum, avaritiae, fratricidarum Christianorum a Christianis persecutionum, luxuriae, gulae, superbiae, quis discerneret rarissima Sancti Spiritus vestigia? Oremus semper. Vale.

C. S. Lewis

*

from The College of St. Mary Magdalen

Oxford

Jan 7th 1953

At last, dearest Father, there has come to hand that copy of Friend (Oct.) which contains your article on that Chinese disaster. I used myself to entertain many hopes for that nation, since the missionaries have served there for many years not unsuccessfully: now it is clear, as you write, that all is on the ebb. Many have reported to me too, in letters on this subject, many atrocities, nor was this misery absent from our thoughts and prayers.12

But it did not happen, however, without sins on our part: for that justice and that care for the poor which (most mendaciously) the Communists advertise, we in reality ought to have brought about ages ago. But far from it: we Westerners preached Christ with our lips, with our actions we brought the slavery of Mammon. We are more guilty than the infidels: for to those that know the will of God and do it not, the greater the punishment.

Now the only refuge lies in contrition and prayer. Long have we erred. In reading the history of Europe, its destructive succession of wars, of avarice, of fratricidal persecutions of Christians by Christians, of luxury, of gluttony, of pride, who could detect any but the rarest traces of the Holy Spirit?

Let us pray always. Farewell,

C. S. Lewis

TO SISTER PENELOPE CSMV(BOD):

Coll Magd.

Jan 9th 1953

Dear Sister Penelope

As usual, your letter is full of interest, and I shall chew it over very thoroughly. That is, I shall go on wondering whether ooa can mean quite the same as

13 and whether it is or is not an objection that your interpretation involves the assumption that what is being prayed for is something internal. One couldn’t (or could one?) believe that a dead man had risen before you saw him rise. I don’t know. You might believe the prayer had been answered before he did. By the way, what are Aramaic tenses like? Does it have futures and preterits?

The poor old soul in Holloway is a famous confidence trickster, Mrs. Hooker, against whom I had to appear as a witness because she had borrowed money by pretending to be my wife! I am sure you will pray for her. It was nice to meet the other day.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO J. O. REED (P): TS

REF.34/53.

Magdalen College,

9th January 1953.

Dear Reed,

Can you meet me for a pot of beer in the Eastgate at 12.30 tomorrow, Saturday 10th?

Yours,

C. S. Lewis

TO DON GIOVANNI CALABRIA (V):

E Coll. Stae Mariae Magdalenae

apud Oxonienses

Jan. xiv LIII

Pater dilectissime

Multo gaudio accepi epistolam tuam die ix Jan. datam: credo jampridem te meam accepisse quam de tractatu Responsabilità scripsi. Et vides me per errorem putavisse te auctorem esse et Sac. P. Mannam esse id quod Galli vocant nomen plumae. At minime refert quum liber De Imitatione nos doceat ‘Attende quid dicatur, non quis dixerit’. Multas ex corde gratias refero, quia tanta caritate ob libellum meum propositum meditare et orare voluisti. Sententiam tuam pro signo accipio. Et nunc, carissime, audi de quâ difficultate máximo haesito. Duo paradigmata orationis videntur nobis in Novo Testamento expósita esse quae inter se concillare haud facile est. Alterum est ipsa Domini oratio in horto Gethsemane (‘si possibile est…nihilominus non quod ego volo sed quod tu vis’). Alterum vero apud Marc XI, v. 24 ‘Quidquid petieritis credentes quod accipietis, habebitis’. (Et nota, loco quo versio latina accipietis habet et nostra vernacula similiter futurum tempus shall receive, graecus textus tempus praeteritum έλάβετε, accepistis, id quod difficillimum est). Nunc quaestio: quomodo potest homo uno eod-emque momento temporis et credere plenissime se accepturum et voluntati Dei fortasse negantis se submittere? Quomodo potest dicere simul ‘Credo firmiter te hoc daturum esse’ et ‘si hoc negaveris, fiat voluntas tua’. Quomodo potest unus actus mentis et possibilem negationem excludere et tractare? Rem a nullo doctorum tractatam invenio.

Nota bene: nullam difficultatem mihi facit quod Deus interdum non vult faceré ea quae fidèles petunt. Necesse est quippe ille sapiens et nos stulti sed cur apud Marc. XI 24 pollicetur se omnia (quidquid) facere quas plena fide petimus? Ambo loci Dominici, ambo inter credenda. Quid faciam? Vale. Et pro te et pro congregatione tua oro et semper orabo.

C. S. Lewis

*

from The College of St Mary Magdalen

Oxford

14th January 1953

Dearest Father

I received your letter dated 9th Jan. with much joy. I trust that long since you have received my letter on the tract Responsabilità. And you see that I mistakenly thought that you yourself were the author and that ‘Sac. P. Mannam’14 was what the French call a nom de plume.

But it is of no consequence since the De Imitatione teaches us to ‘Mark what is said, not who said it.’15

I send you many heartfelt thanks for your charity in being willing to meditate on my proposed little book16 and pray for it. I take your opinion as a good sign.

And now, my dearest friend, hear what difficulty leaves me in most doubt. Two models of prayer seem to be put before us in the New Testament which are not easy to reconcile with each other.

One is the actual prayer of the Lord in the Garden of Gethsemane (‘if it be possible17…nevertheless, not as I will but as Thou wilt’).18

The other, though, is in Mark XI v. 24. ‘Whatsoever you ask believing that you shall receive you shall obtain’ (and observe that in the place where the version has, in Latin, accipietis-and our vernacular translation, similarly, has the future tense, ‘shall receive’-the Greek text has the past tense έλάετε = accepistis-which is very difficult).

Now the question: How is it possible for a man, at one and the same moment of time, both to believe most fully that he will receive and to submit himself to the Will of God–Who perhaps is refusing him?

How is it possible to say, simultaneously, ‘I firmly believe that Thou wilt give me this’, and, ‘If Thou shalt deny me it, Thy will be done’? How can one mental act both exclude possible refusal and consider it? I find this discussed by none of the Doctors.

Please note: it creates no difficulty for me that God sometimes does not will to do what the faithful request. This is necessary because He is wise and we are foolish: but why in Mark XI 24, does He promise to do everything (whatsoever) we ask in full faith? Both statements are the Lord’s; both are among what we are required to believe. What should I do?19

Farewell. And for you and for your Congregation I pray and shall ever pray.

C. S. Lewis

TO WILLIAM L. KINTER(BOD): TS

REF.51/53.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

17th January 1953.

Dear Mr. Kinter,

Yes. Eustace, Edmund, Jane, and Mark20 are all meant to be recipients of Grace.

All good wishes.

Yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE (W):

Magdalen College

Oxford

Jan. 19th 1953

Dear Mrs. Shelburne

Thank you for your kind letter of Dec. 29th which arrived today. I am afraid I have no idea what the first editions of Screwtape or the Divorce sell at: I haven’t even got a first of the former myself. But you would be foolish to spend a cent more on them than the published price: both belong to the worst war-period and are scrubby little things on rotten paper–your American editions are far nicer.

Your letter was most cheering and I am full of agreements. Of course we’ll help each other in our prayers. God bless you.

Yours most sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO BELLE ALLEN (L, WHL):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

19 January 1953

I don’t wonder that you got fogged in Pilgrim’s Regress. It was my first religious book and I didn’t then know how to make things easy. I was not even trying to very much, because in those days I never dreamed I would become a ‘popular’ author and hoped for no readers outside a small ‘highbrow’ circle. Don’t waste your time over it any more. The poetry is my own…We all feel ashamed of receiving so much from you and are not even sure-now-whether our scarcities are any worse than your high prices. Don’t you think you ought to stop?…

TO MARG’RIETTE MONTGOMERY (W): TS

REF.65/53.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

21st January 1953

Dear Miss Montgomery,

This is a splendid poem of Edna Millay’s and the last two lines put the whole of one’s experience in a nut-shell.21 You were right not to send me the R.S.22 books: I have several Anthroposophical friends here who would readily supply me with all his works. And by the way, the point about a musician is surely her music, not her advice about reading! Keep your independence.

All good wishes.

Yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO NELL BERKERS’PRICE (W): TS

REE67/53.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

21st January 1953.

Dear Nell,

Your letter is tantalisingly cryptic, but as I have to go to Holloway next Sunday, no doubt I shall see for myself!

Love to all.

Yours,

Jack

TO CHAD WALSH (W): TS

RER73/53.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

24th January 1953.

Dear Chad,

I wonder if I may trouble you to do me a service? You will already guess what it is when you have read the enclosed note, which was an answer to Revd. Iones B. Shannon,23 who kindly invited me to lecture at his College. The only address he gave was:–

St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church,

State College,

Pennsylvania

and the U.S. mail has returned the letter, stamped ‘No Post Office named’. You presumably have his full address, and I would take it kindly if you would send my note to him. Thank you.

Joy Gresham left here on the first of the month for New York; and I think really enjoyed her English adventures. She visited Oxford twice, and I saw quite a lot of her. She certainly got well off the beaten tourist track, her adventures including attendance at a wedding in the East End of London, where she and the other guests were invited to spend the night on the kitchen floor. It was pleasant news that she is about to join the church, and will shortly be confirmed.24

How goes it with you? We got a little news of you from Joy, but would have liked more.

With all blessings,

yours,

lack Lewis

TO SARAH NEYIAN (T): PC

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

Ian 26/53

Thanks for most interesting letter and congratulations on the good time you seem to be having. lust as you are going back to old experiences in liking parties again, so I am by pulling out one of my teeth with fingers the other day, wh. I can’t have done for many a year!*

I liked Mrs. Masham’s Repose25 far the best of White’s books myself. Our Christmas was conditioned by having a visitor for nearly 3 weeks: very nice one but one can’t feel quite free. Love to all.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO MARY VAN DEUSEN (W):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

Jan. 26th 1953

Dear Mrs. Van Deusen

Thank you for your letter of the 17th and the wholly delightful photographs. I am glad things are still Fine. I’ve never thought of becoming an Associate of anything myself and feel difficulty about advising. You mention externals–what Associates have to do and that they have asked you to become one–but say nothing about the motives in your own mind either for or against it.26 They are the real point, aren’t they? I don’t think one ought to join an Order, however much one might like it or however nice the people who have asked you-unless one thinks that God especially presses one to do so as the only, or the best, way of doing some good to others or receiving some good oneself. And if one does think that, then I suppose one must join however much one disliked it & however nasty the particular inviters were! It is not as if it were a club! Why not try living according to their Rule for a bit without joining them and seeing what it is like for a person such as you in circumstances such as yours?

Confession, of course, you can have without joining anything. I think it is a good thing for most of us and use it myself.

That is v. good news about really good people beginning to go into government jobs, and at a sacrifice. I have always thought of how that the greatest of all dangers to your country is the fear that politics were not in the hands of your best types and that this, in the long run, might prove ruinous. A change in that, the beginning of what might be called a volunteer aristocracy, might have incalculable effects. More power to your myriad elbows!

M. James is wrong.27 It is my brother, not I, who is or was a vestryman.28

With love to all.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO EDWARD A. ALLEN (W): TS

REF.53/53.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

26th January 1953.

My dear Edward,

Many thanks for your letter of the 21st: and for the welcome news that a ‘guided missile’ is even now winging its way from Highland Avenue to Magdalen College. Yes, anticipation v. realization is a very old problem, is’nt it? Certainly there is a time when realization always falls flat, as compared with anticipation; but one of the advantages of old age–naturally a stripling of 45 like you won’t appreciate this–is that anticipation comes to be pitched so low that realization generally exceeds it.

The G.B.S.29 remark was new to me; and is a typical example of what he thought funny and others would think merely ill-bred. A silly man I feel, in spite of his great ability; for you must have noticed that while a fool cannot be clever, a clever man can often be silly. Do you know the story of how this same G.B.S. once got more than he bargained for? He had been asked to stay with Lady Londonderry, a great society hostess in the old days, and sent her a letter warning her that it was not his habit to eat the bodies of dead and often putrefying animals and birds and so on, in typical Shaw style; he got his answer by telegram-‘Know nothing of your habits: trust they are better than your manners.’

We will certainly take you at your word and let you have a critical review of the contents of package 204; but as I cannot at the moment remember ever having had a useless article in an Allen parcel, I don’t think there will be much to say except ‘very many thanks’. Yes, things seem to be looking up a bit in the ration world here; there is even talk of de-rationing meat in 1954-a pretty safe thing though to say, for by that time the politicians will have found some excellent excuse for not doing so. Meat, butter, and sugar are still on rations over here: meat and sugar because we can’t afford to buy them, and butter because there is a world shortage–or so our papers say. Though how this can be so, I don’t quite see. Are you short of it in U.S.A.?

I am ungallant enough to suspect that perhaps R. L. Stevenson said the last word on the marrying or not marrying question: ‘marriage is terrible, but so is a lonely old age’.30 Not a very consoling remark, but there it is. My brother and I can both sympathize with you over rheumatism: having had it for several years, and it being a family heirloom. We often talk ruefully of the days when we used to think it a comic disease, and laugh at our elder’s complaints about it!

It is heartening and rebuking to think of your father rising superior to his sufferings and producing champion dahlias; and is, as you say, a sermon on the value of work as an alternative to worry. May he long be spared to continue at his gardening.

With anticipatory thanks for the parcel, and with all best wishes to you and your mother from both of us.

Yours

Jack Lewis

TO NATHAN COMFORT STARR (W):

Magdalen College,

Oxford

Feb 3rd 1953

Dear Starr

Thanks for your immensely interesting letter from antipodean Po’Lu.31 I shall be v. intrigued to hear more of the Arthurian story as told there, tho’ more so to hear what their own chivalric stories are like.

I have no adventures to tell you in return–unless it is an adventure that I have at last finished, and am now reading proofs of, my volume on 16th Century literature. It is an adventure to me to be free of that 12-15 year labour. I know now how Ariel felt,32 or how a balloon feels when the sandbags are thrown out.

Your F. H. Heard sounds worth following up. I have just read two books by an American ‘scientifiction’ author called Ray Bradbury. Most of that genre is abysmally bad, a mere transference of ordinary gangster or pirate fiction to the sidereal stage, and a transference which does harm not good. Bigness in itself is of no imaginative value: the defence of a ‘galactic’ empire is less interesting than the defence of a little walled town like Troy. But Bradbury has real invention and even knows something about prose. I recommend his Silver Locusts.33

When do you revisit Europe? Don’t stay out yonder till you grow yellow. And try to correct your young friend’s idea of what it wd. be like meeting someone who’d been to Heaven! All good wishes for this (so far not v. attractive) year.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

P.S. (By the other Lewis). I too greatly enjoyed the letter. Remember seeing the tomb of the 47 Ronin when I was in Japan, but no one cd. tell me who they were or what they did.34 This is Tuesday, Bird and Baby day, and I’m off to drink good luck to you.

W.H.L

TO ANTHONY BOUCHER (P): 35

Magdalen College

Oxford

5/ii/53

Dear Mr. Boucher

This is a delightful meeting. I did indeed value St. Aquin very highly and I have also greatly enjoyed Star-Dummy in its different way.36 This wd. go for nothing if I were the real out-and-out S F reader who is, within that field, omnivorous. In reality I’m extremely hard to please. Most of the modern work in this genre seems to me atrocious: written by people who just take an ordinary spy-story or ship-wreck story or gangster story and think it can be improved by a sidereal or galactic setting. In reality the setting, so long as it is a mere setting, does harm: the wreck of a schooner is more interesting than that of a space-ship and the fate of a walled village like Troy moves us more than that of a galactic empire. You, and (in a different way) Ray Bradbury, are the real thing.

All my imagination at present is going into children’s stories. When that is done, I may try another fantasy for adults, but it wd. be too quiet and leisurely for your magazine.

I don’t belong to a press-cutting agency and so miss, along with many brickbats, some bouquets intended for me. I must thank you in the dark, therefore, for kind things you have apparently said about my work. (I found that neither the favourable nor the unfavourable reviews helped one at all: they merely either soothed or wounded one’s vanity-neither a very beneficial experience. They v. often hadn’t even read the book with any accuracy).