P. 26. She might even laugh…wd. not have. Oh but surely—surely—a man so near renunciation and enlightenment as you mean C. to be wd. have got beyond the stage of minding whether people laughed at him or not ages ago. You might as well introduce a great pianist who has difficulty about five finger exercises!

visit the Tower. More what schoolboys, foreigners, or very country cousins wd. do—not an ‘Indian Civilian’ and his bride. They’re not like that.

P 28. Period is purely American. The English is ‘full stop’. But of course you may be entitled to translate, just as you’d make ancient Egyptians talk modern American if you were writing a story about them. Still, it raises awkward problems when the two languages are almost identical.

P 29. I’m kind. Wouldn’t anyone say ‘I am kind’?

P. 30. would they laugh…military man. See notes on pp. 26 and 4.

P. 36. I’m not quite clear what is meant by putting God ‘primarily’ above everything.

P. 34. beg apology. Surely one begs a pardon or makes an apology?

P. 36. soldier etc. see on pp. 4, and 30.

I’m like you…bloody Mary. This sounds to me like the language of an utterly commonplace old grumbler, not one far advanced in the mystic path.

I will pay you the compliment (for it is one: the naked truth is not for fools) of giving you a perfectly honest criticism. I don’t think the story, as it stands, will do. But its partial failure does not prove (this is what you most want to know) an absence of literary talent. That, I think, you probably have. What is wrong with this story is due to inexperience. You have set yourself two handicaps, either one of which wd. be enough to wreck most authors. (1.) You are writing about a society you don’t know. I don’t know much about Anglo-Indian life myself, but your picture somehow smells all wrong. (2.) You have tried to put across a marvel (the lévitation. Whether Swamiji wd. have let us call it a ‘miracle’ or not doesn’t concern us as literary critics).

Now there were only two ways to make us accept it. One was by making the whole story fantastic—like a fairy tale—from the word go. That, of course I see, wd. have been quite inconsistent with the mood you wanted to create. The other was so to build up the spirituality of Cobham or Swamiji or (better) both, that we could believe anything of them. And that’s where you come down. We see v. little of Swamiji and what we do see has no aura of grandeur or mystery, nothing numinous, about it. As for Cobham, he is incredible as a mystic. There’s no trace of serenity or love, and his numerous speeches to Hermione are in a vein both of censoriousness and of slangy bullying which is not only unlike a budding sage but quite untrue to the social group he wd. belong to. In other words the difficulties of the theme have, on this occasion, defeated you. I await with interest a story with a better chosen scene and subject. There is nothing amateurish about the actual writing and you have, I think, the gift for ordonnance.³⁸

Are we still friends? I hope so,

yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO WAYLAND HILTON YOUNG (P):

Magdalen

24/2/52

Dear Hilton-Young–

I think I muffled the point I was trying to make yesterday about the significance-unknown-to-the-artist in a work of art. I certainly didn’t intend to treat ‘Either Inspiration or the Unconscious’ as an exhaustive alternative for its source.

It’s more like this. Every fiction, realistic or fantastic, uses forms taken from the real world: a woman, a ship, a gun, a horse etc. Now the total significance of these in the real world (call it T) is known to nobody. And the fraction of it known to each is slightly (or, it may be) widely different. The fraction in the artist’s mind (both conscious and unconscious) is T/A: in the reader’s T/R. An extreme case of difference wd. be, say, if a child who didn’t yet know the facts of generation put a marriage into a story. His ignorance might make that bit of his story simply comic & absurd to the adult reader: but it might also make that bit to the adult reader far more significant than the child had ever intended it to be.

Now I hope no individual reader of my work is to me as adult to child. But the aggregate experiences of my readers, contributing to each from T/Rl + T/R2 etc, presumably are. At any rate a classic, wh. has been read by great minds for 1000 years, and discussed, will have all its forms interpreted by a composite mind, which ought to see in them more than the artist intended. This is not a complete substitution of a new work for his original one, for it is his particular grouping of forms which evoke the whole response. (As if successive generations learned better and better dances to one original tune: a certain formal element in it remaining constant but being more richly & subtly filled).

All this is only an elaboration of the old maxim that what you get out of work depends on what you bring to it. Humanity as a whole brings to the Aeneid more than Virgil could: therefore it must get more out. After all, you as an Atheist have to believe that in admiring natural beauty we are getting out of it what no-one put in: why shd. we not equally get out of verbal compositions what the composer didn’t put in?

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO WAYLAND HILTON YOUNG (P): PC

Magdalen College

Oxford

27/2/52

Yes. T/Rn is only an aggregate unless either (A.) [?]³⁹ are real, as Plato & Hegel, in a different way, thought or (B.) Each educated T/R is, through tradition & critical discussion modified by the other T/Rs. Now I think A is probably and B is certainly true. Thanks for kind offer of hospitality: I’ll try to make it one of these days.

C.S.L.

TO GENIA GOELZ (Z/P):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

29 Feb 1952

Dear Mrs. Goelz (or may I, being old, and bold, and avuncular, say dear Genia?

I learn from Mrs. Van Deusen that you are ‘taking the plunge’.⁴⁰ As you have been now for so long in my prayers, I hope it will not seem intrusive to send my congratulations. Or I might say condolences and congratulations. For whatever people who have never undergone an adult conversion may say, it is a process not without its distresses. Indeed, they are the very sign that it is a true initiation. Like learning to swim or to skate, or getting married, or taking up a profession. There are cold shudderings about all these processes. When one finds oneself learning to fly without trouble one soon discovers (usually. There are blessed exceptions where we are allowed to take a real step without that difficulty), by waking up, that it was only a dream.

All blessings and good wishes.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO MARY VAN DEUSEN (W):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

29/2/52

Dear Mrs. Van Deusen

How odd and delightful that you should meet James! Give him my kind regards.

He has perhaps not given you quite the right idea about our ‘Long Vacation’.⁴¹ It is precisely that part of the year on which both dons and serious students rely for their real work: the term for lectures & discussion, the Vacations, and especially the ‘Long’ for steady reading. I think your universities suffer from not having it. Mine, this year, will be v. busy indeed, and no question of holidays to America.

But don’t think I am the less touched or grateful for your most kind offer of hospitality. I am speaking of the ‘Long’ as it has now come to be: of course originally this prolonged summer gap in all our English institutions–Parliament, Law courts, etc—dates, no doubt, from the days when we were an agricultural community and no one cd., at that time of the year, be spared from the land.

I have written to Genia. Your news is v. good. In a way it is [a] good sign, isn’t it?, that the Rector shd. not be a person she particularly likes. I will indeed continue my prayers for her. With love to all.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO HELEN D. CALKINS (W):⁴² TS

REE 52/123.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

1st March 1952.

Dear Mrs. Calkins,

I will read it with pleasure,⁴³ but I must’nt write a foreword. I have done far too many of them. It begins to make both the authors and me ridiculous, and also I run dry. I wish the book all success.

Yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO THE ROYAL LITERARY FUND (BOD):

Magdalen College,

Oxford

7/3/52

Sir

I write in support of an application which, I understand, my very deeply respected friend Mr. J. A. Chapman⁴⁴ is making to your Committee. Mr. Chapman has in his old age a serious devotion both to his art and to humanity which we usually meet only in the young; if he has spent on the publication of his poem⁴⁵ a sum very serious to him, though not large, I trust, by the standards of the R.L.E, I am sure he has been moved to do so not by an author’s vanity but by a sense of his mission. A grant to him would be a proper recognition of a long and arduous life devoted to letters and learning in a spirit of self-dedication.

I am, Sir,

Yours faithfully

C. S. Lewis

TO ARTHUR G REEVE S (W):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

8/3/52

My dear Arthur

I hope to arrive at Crawfordsburn with W.⁴⁶ on Aug. Wed. 20th. He will leave on Aug. Sat. 23rd. If agreeable I wd. like to stay on at the Hotel⁴⁷ for a fortnight of your society, i.e. sail again on Mon. Sept 8th. Will that suit you? I can’t manage the Easter as well.

In the Last Chronide⁴⁸ I think all the London parts (the ‘Bayswater Romance’) a bore and now always skip them. But I think the Crawley parts splendid.

I am wondering how your date with Tchainie went? Give her my love. Blessings.

Yours

Jack

TO SHELDON VANAUKEN (BOD): PC

Magdalen College

Oxford

15/3/52

Excellent. I’ll be (D.V.) in the Eastgate about 12 noon on Sat. March 22 d.

C.S.L.

TO GENIA GOELZ (L/P):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

18 March 1952

Dear Genia

Don’t bother at all about that question of a person being ‘made a Christian’ by baptism. It is only the usual trouble about words being used in more than one sense. Thus we might say a man ‘became a soldier’ the moment that he joined the army. But his instructors might say six months later ‘I think we have made a soldier of him’. Both usages are quite definable, only one wants to know which is being used in a given sentence. The Bible itself gives us one short prayer which is suitable for all who are struggling with the beliefs and doctrines. It is: ‘Lord I believe, help Thou my unbelief.’⁴⁹ Would something of this sort be any good?: Almighty God, who art the father of lights and who hast promised by thy dear Son that all who do thy will shall know thy doctrine:⁵⁰ give me grace so to live that by daily obedience I daily increase in faith and in the understanding of thy Holy Word, through lesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO VERA MATHEWS (W):

Magdalen etc.

22/3/52

Dear Miss Mathews

I was glad to get your letter. I seem to be as ignorant of America as you are of India. I had no idea your parsons preached Hell-fire: indeed I thought the ordinary presentation of Christianity with you was quite as milk-and-watery as with us, if not more so. We could do with a bit more Hell fire over here.

Clearly I misunderstood Cobham. I hadn’t thought of a wholly unregenerate man being levitated simply by someone else’s sanctity—tho’ of course we all hope this will happen to ourselves. Thanks for a picture of two charming creatures. I am glad to have one of them among my correspondents and wish Andy would write too: but I suppose that’s not much in his line. They sound as if they were animals with a sense of humour. Shall we see some more literary works by you? I hope you’ll go on. With very good wishes from us both.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO ROGER LANCELYN GREEN (BOD):

Magdalen College

Oxford

24/3/52

My dear Roger–

I have re-read The Luck⁵¹ and liked it very much. I felt, as I had felt at the first reading, that tho’ it could not have the quality you and I most prize in a story, yet it had a freshness, a real feel of wet wood & spring days wh. make it more than a mere treasure hunt. It is also extremely exciting. As luck wd. have it I met a lady who was looking for things to ‘read to the children’ & the Luck is now on her list. I think she’s a buyer too, not a library addict.

Now for Logistics. I see that the Beaumaris jaunt must be on my backward journey as, on the outward, it wd. be in the midst of the Aug. bank-holiday period.⁵²1 propose to sail from Belfast to L’pool⁵³ on the night of Sept. Mon. 8th. Can we meet, say at Woodside ferry landing stage on the morning of the 9th & lie that night at Beaumaris. I shall be alone and, if quite convenient wd. gladly accept a night’s lodging chez vous on Wed. 10th, setting out for Oxford the first convenient train on Thurs. 11th. But I trust you to tell me if this is in the least a nuisance, for I can be perfectly well housed in Woodside Hotel. My duty to June. Good hunting.

Yours

Jack

TO SHELDON VANAUKEN:⁵⁴ PC

Magdalen College

Oxford

24 March 1952

Porcus sum, I am a pig, porcissimus, the piggest of pigs. I looked at my diary at about 3 o’clock on Sat. afternoon and found to my horror that I had failed a tryst with you at 12. Please forgive a nit-wit. Will you prove your charity by meeting me at the Eastgate 12 o’clock next Saturday? Even I seldom make exactly the same howler twice! I really am very sorry: I had been much looking forward to it.

C.S.L.

TO MICHAEL IRWIN (P): ⁵⁵

Magdalen College,

Oxford

25th March 1952

Dear Michael

Thank you very much for your nice letter. I am very glad you liked the Narnian books. Yes–there is another one already written but you won’t be able to get it till next November: they are printing it at present, and printing takes a long time, especially for a book that has pictures in it.

Lucy and Edmund and Caspian and Reepicheep (but not Peter and Susan, who are now getting a bit too old) all come into the new one. They get into the Narnian world and all go to sea and have a long voyage: it is called The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.

I wonder what other books you like. Do you like E. Nesbitt’s The Phoenix and the Carpet, and The Amulet,⁵⁶ and Tolkien’s The Hobbit,⁵⁷ and MacDonald’s The Princess and the Goblins and Curdy and the Princess?.⁵⁸ I think all these are very good. Please thank your father for writing to me. Love to all.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO ROGER IANCELYN GREEN (BOD):

Magdalen College

Oxford

29/3/52

Hearken, Little Brother, to the wisdom of Baloo.⁵⁹ Neither you nor I will write to the Bulkeley Arms⁶⁰ for rooms for us both, for the modern hotel keeper wd. then be v. likely to put us both in one room without warning or remedy.

But you will write for your room & I will write (today) for mine. And then, by the permission of Allah, he will think he has to do with a Mr. Green of Bebington & a Mr. Lewis of Oxford who have no connection.

High Wind in Jamaica⁶¹ wh. I’ve just read is better than I expected. Tho’ none of them speak about the brother’s death we are told that the eldest girl ‘missed him badly’: her silence was not due to indifference but to a kind of taboo wh. I think quite possible. As to her evidence wh. hanged the pirates, I suppose some children, as some adults, wd. do that and others not. She was in a tight place: and as a certain type of woman wd. play her sex, a certain type of child wd. play its childishness. A grim book but good in its way.

Love to all.

TO HELEN D. CALKINS (W):

Magdalen College,

Oxford

March 29th 1952

Dear Miss Calkins

I’ve read India Looks with as much interest as if it were an adventure story: especially the parts about ancient Indian history which were absolutely new. That’s one of the reasons why I won’t do a preface: I am not qualified to sponsor a book on this subject. For all I know it might be (tho’ I’m sure it is not) a mass of errors! The other is that you are kind to me and quote me, and after that a preface from me wd. make us both look silly—a mutual admiration society.

It’s v. well done. Here are a few notes wh. you may or may not find worth considering.

P. 3. para 4. Trojan heroes etc. Does it matter that of those you mention only Hector was on the Trojan side? Or that many people think the Trojans were not Aryans! Wd. Homeric for Trojan be safer?

P 4. Leaf’s poem, dazzle and the stress. Are you sure it isn’t dazzle and stress*.

P. 23 Quotation from me. I’m afraid people may think (despite the quotation marks) that the view expressed is mine! Could you without too much labour find another motto for this chapter?

‘I am the doubter and the doubt’–is it from Emerson or Henley?–might do by itself.⁶²

P. 36 Para 1. Its connotation…receptivity. This clause conveys no meaning whatever to my mind! This migh the because all the words had different shades of meaning in America. But a knot of abstract nouns, all rather hard to define, is usually a danger signal. (Beware of aspect, framework, connotation, and all their family!)

P 41. Quotation from Hooker. For intensive read intentive.

P 41. last line but one. of separated. Something must have dropped here.

P 42. Para 3. Surely the correct construction is ‘enamoured of ‘not ‘enamoured with’?

And above, Para 3, for Origin read Origen.

P. 45 First sentence. Again, conveys no clear meaning to me. Simplify! Simplify!

P 49 Footnote. You quote as if it was mine what I (as I told you) was quoting from Whitehead.⁶³ Return it to him. I haven’t got a copy to hand but it’ll do you no harm to read his Chapter II! (By the way in a serious book like yours all other books shd. be mentioned with place and date of the edition you are using. Otherwise it will look amateurish to publishers’ readers.

P. 51 Para 1. Christ-centric. Surely the usual word is Christocentric?. (I’m not quite clear at what date the processes described are meant to be happening.)

P 52. Para 1. The reason for his reluctance was because. You’re saying it twice over! Either The reason…was that or Dr. H. was reluctant because he (The second is better. Always prefer concrete to abstract nouns when you can get them: it avoids Gobbledegook.)

P 53. Was there really no effort to do all these works till modern times? Jesuits in Paraguay? Evangelicals attacking slavery?

P 59. Para 2. The assumption etc. Ambiguous. Does it mean ‘We can’t bear it when others assume that we are naif ‘or ‘when others assume that they are naif ‘?

P. 67. It is not…estimate of God. Good. Very good. That’s how to write.

Very good wishes; and thanks for an interesting bit of reading.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO MARY NEYLAN (T):⁶⁴

Magdalen College

Oxford

1/4/52

Dear Mrs. Neylan–

Yes, I do miss him.⁶⁵ But what strikes me even more is the sense that he is already helping me more from where he is than he would do on earth. It was v. nice to meet you all and especially Sarah, now at last old enough to talk to! I liked her and cd. have done with less of Mingo! She wants fattening, though! Bless you all.

Yours

Jack Lewis

TO MARY VAN DEUSEN (W):

Magdalen etc

April 1st 1952

Dear Mrs. Van Deusen

The advantage of a fixed form of service is that we know what is coming. Ex tempore public prayer has this difficulty: we don’t know whether we can mentally join in it until we’ve heard it—it might be phoney or heretical. We are therefore called upon to carry on a critical and a devotional activity at the same moment: two things hardly compatible. In a fixed form we ought to have ‘gone through the motions’ before in our private prayers: the rigid form really sets our devotions free.

I also find the more rigid it is, the easier it is to keep one’s thoughts from straying. Also it prevents any service getting too completely eaten up by whatever happens to be the pre-occupation of the moment (a war, an election, or what not). The permanent shape of Christianity shows through. I don’t see how the ex tempore method can help becoming provincial & I think it has a great tendency to direct attention to the minister rather than to God.

Quakers…well I’ve been unlucky in mine. The ones I know are atrocious bigots whose religion seems to consist almost entirely in attacking other people’s religions. But I’m sure there are good ones as well.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO EDWARD A. ALLEN (W):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

April 3rd 1952

My dear Mr. Allen

Sugar and tea! Hurrah. They are just what we need most, tea being our most powerful addiction-drug, and we thank you v. heartily.

I’m not quite sure whether we are playing into Uncle loe’s⁶⁶ hand by messing about in Korea and elsewhere. If the enemy were the Germans I’d agree with you. He has always been a big fighter and it’s no good doing anything about him short of a full-dress war. The Russian, so far (whether Tsarist or pseudo-Communist makes no odds, I expect) has not been like that. He grabs things here and grabs things there when he finds them unguarded. I think there’s a real chance that by rearmament and resistance at minor points we just might prevent it coming to a real show-down. But heaven knows I am as ill qualified as anyone in the world to have an opinion. At any rate both your country and mine have twice in our lifetime tried the recipe of appeasing an aggressor and it didn’t work on either occasion: so that it seems sense to try the other way this time.

I’m all with you about Orion. It’s nice to live in the Northern Hemisphere because the winter stars are much better than the summer ones and of course one sees more of them when the nights are longest. The whole combination Sirius—Orion–Aldebaran—Pleiades is magnificent. I wonder what constellation our Sun forms part of as seen from the planets (if any) of Sirius?

Spring has been arrested here by a sudden cold snap, snow & frost and all the crocuses are in a bad way: but the birds, bless them, keep on talking as if it were real April weather. I suffer from your inability to remember what I have to buy. In my case it happens chiefly about razor-blades. One remembers it during the five minutes painful scrape each morning but never when one is among the shops. With many thanks & v. good wishes.

Yours ever

C. S. Lewis

For some time now a woman calling herself ‘Mrs C. S. Lewis’ had been living on her ‘husband’s’ credit at the Courtstairs Hotel, Thanet, Kent. The lady had a history of living cheaply by pretending to be married to some well-known person who would soon be joining her. In this instance she told the owners of Courtstairs Hotel, Alan and Nell Berners-Price, that Lewis would soon be arriving and would pay the bill. However, by April 1952 she had been living at Court Stairs for over a year, and Mrs Berners-Price went up to Oxford to confront Lewis with a mass of unpaid bills.

On being admitted to Lewis’s rooms in Magdalen College, Mrs Berners-Price said, ‘I’ve come to ask about your wife.’ ‘But I’m not married,’ replied Lewis. Mrs Berners-Price was as surprised by this as Lewis was on learning he had a ‘wife’. Following the advice of his solicitor, Owen Barfield, Lewis took out an injunction of jactitation of marriage against the woman.

The woman, Mrs Nella Victoria Hooker, had been in jail a number of times for similar offences. She was arrested in April and her trial set for 8 May in the court at Canterbury. While in jail she wrote letters to Lewis, as he mentions in the letter to Christian Hardie below.

TO CHRISTIAN HARDIE (P):

Palm Sunday [6 April] 1952

Dear Christian

I romped through The Power and the Glory.⁶⁷ Its theme makes it suitable enough as a preface to Holy Week but if you intended it as a penance you have bowled a wide. It is a most moving and (in its proper mode) enjoyable book.

As far as I am concerned there is no common measure between it and Waugh.⁶⁸ In Waugh’s book the supposedly good end of the old rake had simply to be taken on trust: but one lives through the whole experience of Greene’s hunted priest, filled from the first with interest, soon with compassion, and finally with love. Also Greene seems to know things. All that about the ‘pious woman’ in the cell (few laymen perhaps get letters from her so often as I) is excellent: also the bit about forgiveness of sins being easier to believe than forgiveness of the ‘habit of piety’. Greene loves and understands his most repulsive characters–the lieutenant and the half-caste—better than Waugh does his favourites.

I think he has a fault. The central tragic theme is not made more effective by filling up all the chinks with other, irrelevant, miseries, like those of the Fellows family. The great tragic artists didn’t do that. Macbeth⁶⁹ wd. not have been improved by making the drunken porter get cancer: nor the Iliad by making the domestic life of Hector and Andromache squalid and miserable. That is the modern nimiety. But it is a very good book all the same.

Thanks very much for the loan of it. (It wd. be unkind to discuss my views on tragedy with Colin just at present. He seems to be a little tired of that subject). A happy Easter to you both.

Yours

Jack

TO DON GIOVANNI CALABRIA (V):

[Magdalen College,

Oxford.]

April 14th 1952

Pater dilectissime

Multum eras et es in orationibus meis et grato animo litteras tuas accepi. Et ora tu pro me, nunc praesertim, dum me admodum orphanum esse sentio quia grandaevus meus confessor et carissimus pater in Christo nuper mortem obiit. Dum ad altare celebraret, subito, post acerrimum sed (Deo gratias) brevissimum dolorem, expiravit, et novissima verba erant venio, Domine Jesu. Vir erat maturâ spirituali sapientiâ sed ingenuitate et innocentiâ fere puerili–buono fanciullo, ut ita dicam.

Potesne, mi pater, quaestionem resolvere? Quis sanctorum scriptorum scripsit ‘Amor est ignis jugiter ardens’? Credidi haec verba esse in libro De Imitatione Christi sed non possum ibi invenire.

‘Ut omnes unum sint’ est petitio numquam in meis precibus praetermissa. Dum optabilis unitas doctrinae et ordinis abest, eo acrius conemur caritatis unionem tenere: quod, eheu, et vestri in Hispania et nostri in Hibernia Septentrionali non faciunt. Vale, mi pater,

C. S. Lewis

[Magdalen College,

Oxford.]

April 14th 1952

Dearest Father,

You were and are much in my prayers and thank you for your letters. And do you pray for me, especially at present when I feel very much an orphan because my aged confessor and most loving father in Christ has just died. While he was celebrating at the altar, suddenly, after a most sharp but (thanks be to God) very brief attack of pain, he expired; and his last words were, ‘I come, Lord Jesus.’ He was a man of ripe spiritual wisdom—noble minded but of an almost childlike simplicity and innocence: ‘buono fandullo’ if I may put it so.⁷⁰

Can you, my Father, resolve a question? Which of the holy writers wrote ‘Amor est ignis jugiter ardens’? I thought these words were in The Imitation of Christ but I cannot find them there.⁷¹

‘That they all may be one’⁷² is a petition which in my prayers I never omit. While the wished-for unity of doctrine and order is missing, all the more eagerly let us try to keep the bond of charity: which, alas, your people in Spain and ours in Northern Ireland do not.

Farewell, my Father.

C. S. Lewis

TO RUTH PITTER(BOD):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

April 16th 1952

Dear Miss Pitter

It always seems a bit of cheek to send anyone (especially the likes of you) a ticket for one’s lecture, unless one could do it in the Chinese style ‘In the inconceivably unlikely event of honourable poetess wishing to attend this person’s illiterate and erroneous lecture…’⁷³ Oh dear, to think of that immemorial urbanity, that remote, fantastic world being in the hands of the Bolshevists!

Hero & Leander⁷⁴ has no Original in the strict sense. The Greek poem on the subject is late, rather charmingly precious, and was falsely attributed to the primeval and mythical Musaeus: the real author is unknown—some Alexandrian, I think. But neither the Marlovian nor the Chapmanic part is anything like a translation—not so close to pseudo-Musaeus as Tennyson is to Malory.

Have you read Andrew Young’s Into Hades,⁷⁵ and what do you think of it. I found the content absorbing and the images like all his, simply enchanting (There’s a bit about reflected water-drops from a raised oar rushing up to meet the real water drops—lovely!) but my ear was a bit unsatisfied. I believe ‘Blank Verse’, unrhymed five footers, is not a metre to be written loosely. I think the unrhymed Alexandrine, written without a break at the 6th syllable wd. be far better: e.g.

I know far less of spiders than that poetess Who (like the lady in Comus in the perilous wood) Can study nature’s infamies with secure heart…

The third line is here the best: one wants plenty of trisyllables to leap across the threatened medial pause. Try a few. Commending me to you in the lowliest wise that I can or may.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO EDWARD A. ALLEN (W): TS

REF.52/28.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

19th April 1952.

My dear Allen,

I got back today from a delightful three days break in the country, just a little dissatisfied to be at my desk again, and therefore just in the mood for the welcome fillip which your admirable parcel administered. You must by this time be as tired of hearing C.S.L. on the English food situation as I am tired of enduring it: so I will say no more than that all these good things will be a wonderful help at the house, and thank you once again for your kindness.

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