Thanks for yr. most interesting letter. I am delighted to hear of your success in getting some Christian knowledge across to these children. It is wicked that they shd. be so deprived. Even an agnostic who does not believe the stories to be true ought to see that they are, at the very least, part of our common heritage, like Homer and the Arthurian stories.

About re-reading books: I find like you that those read in my earlier ‘teens often have no appeal, but this is not nearly so often true of those read in earlier childhood. Girls may develop differently, but for me, looking back, it seems that the glories of childhood and the glories of adolescence are separated by a howling desert during which one was simply a greedy, cruel, spiteful little animal and imagination, in all but the lowest form, was asleep.

I hope your new house will be very blessed. It was Charles Williams from whom I got the words ‘holy luck’. And now for piles of Christmas letters: many of them, unlike yours, from people I don’t want to write to at all. Every blessing.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO NATHAN COMFORT STARR (W): PC, TS

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

26th December 1953.

Dear Starr,

Yes, Hori did call: an interesting man. Glad you’re home again, and no doubt so are you.

All good wishes from us both for a happy and prosperous New Year.

Yours,

C. S. Lewis

TO MARY VAN DEUSEN (W):

Magdalen College

Oxford

Dec 28th 53

Dear Mrs. Van Deusen

Thanks for yr. letter of the 20th: my congratulations to yr. husband on his interesting work. About Paul, I believe (having been a sickly child myself) that there are compensations. I think that from many minor illnesses in the first 12 years one develops sometimes a certain amount of immunity later on: ones system has had so much practice in dealing with bacilli. It also probably helps to make one a reader: not that there isn’t a danger of falling or sinking too far into the life of the imagination, but a habit of reading is a great source of happiness.

I think someone ought to write a book on ‘Christian life for Laymen under a bad Parish Priest’ for the problem is bound to occur in the best churches. The motto wd. be of course Herbert’s lines about the sermon ‘If all Jack sense, God takes a text and preaches patience’.²⁶¹

Like you, we suffer (but under a v. good priest) from the virtual extinction of Morning Prayer in favour of an 11 o’clock Celebration.²⁶² But I suppose there is something to be said for it. This is the only ritual act Our Lord commanded Himself. It is the one we can have only thro’ a priest, whereas we can all read Matins to ourselves or our families at home whenever we please. So here I have no difficulty in submission.

Is there not something especially good (and even, in the end, joyful) about mere obedience (in lawful things) to him who bears our Master’s authority, however unworthy he be–perhaps all the more, if he is unworthy? Perhaps we are put under tiresome priests chiefly to give us the opportunity of learning this beautiful & happy virtue: so that if we use the situation well we can profit more, perhaps, than we shd. have done under a better man. I have seen lovely children under not v. nice parents, & good troops under bad officers: and a good dog with a bad master is a lesson to us all. I mean, of course, as long as the bad orders are not in themselves wrong: and attendance at Holy Communion can’t be that!

Yes, we must both go on thinking about the two kinds of prayer. I think the one in Mark xi is for very advanced people: and you point out it was said to the disciples, not to the crowds. All blessings.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO PHYLLIS ELINOR SANDEMAN (W):

Magdalen College

Oxford

Dec 31/53

Dear Mrs Sandeman–

You have of course been much in my prayers since your first letter and today’s seems like an answer to them. I was afraid of some real crack in the structure! Now it is clear that you have to deal only with what we may call a ‘clean pain’.

I can well understand how in addition to, and mingling with, the void and loneliness, there is a great feeling of unprotectedness and a horror of coping with all the things–the harsh, outer world–from which you have hitherto been shielded. I first met this ‘cold blast on the naked heath’²⁶³ at about 9, when my Mother died, and there has never really been any sense of security and snugness since. That is, I’ve not quite succeeded in growing up on that point: there is still too much of ‘Mammy’s little lost boy’ about me. Your position is of course v. different, both because dependence on a husband is more legitimate than dependence (after a certain age) on one’s Mother, and also because, at your age, tho’ it will feel just as bad, it is not so likely to go down into the unconscious and produce a trauma. And one sees too (tho’ it sounds brutal to say it) how this miserable necessity of fending for oneself might be an essential part of your spiritual education. I suppose God wants a bit of Imogen and Portia in you, having worked in the Miranda and Perdita part enough²⁶⁴ (it is sometimes helpful to think of oneself as a picture wh. He is painting).

By the way, I share to the full–no words can say how strongly I share–that distaste for everything communal and collective wh. you describe in your husband. I really believe I wd. have come to Christianity much less reluctantly if it had not involved the Church. And I don’t wonder you failed to convince him that that community is perfectly right. It is holy and commanded: not at present (I think) perfect! No doubt he is learning ‘togetherness’ now as you, alas, are learning ‘aloneness’. Both painful lessons: it can so seldom happen that what we need is what we like (for if we liked it we’d have helped ourselves to it already & wouldn’t need it–aren’t children made to eat fat wh. they hate?). You will be all right, Mrs. Sandeman. All will be well in the end, tho’ by hard ways. All earthly loves go thro’ some fire before they can inherit the Kingdom. If it weren’t this, it wd. be some other fire. God bless you. Let us pray for one another.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

P.S. Of course, I’m not obeying your request, ‘Help me to find some comfort in faith again.’ We shan’t find faith by looking for comfort. That’s why, even brutally, I can’t help talking in terms of a work to be done. You are, on my view, being moved into a higher form of the great school and set harder work to do. Comfort will come as you master that work, as you learn more & more to be a channel of God’s grace to your husband (and perhaps to others): not for trying to get back the conditions you had in the lower form.

Keep clear of Psychical Researchers.

1 J. Keith Kyle of the North American Service of the BBC wrote to Lewis on 31 December 1952: ‘The Columbia Broadcasting System with whom the North American Service of the BBC often co-operates…has invited us to assist them with a series called “This I Believe”…It is designed to put on the air a number of statements of personal conviction from “men and women in all stations of life, who have been successful in their chosen profession.” The CBS emphasizes that the contributions should be extremely personal in approach and as they are to be only 3 1/4 minutes in length, complete simplicity is obviously essential.’

2 Pitter gave a lecture entitled ‘A Return to Poetic Law’ to the Royal Institution of Great Britain on 22 February 1952. A copy can be found in the Pitter Papers, Temporary Box, Bodleian Library.

3 Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, First Part, pp. 73-4: ‘I thought again, this Shame tells me what men are; but it tells me nothing what God or the Word of God is. And I thought moreover, That at the day of doom, we shall not be doomed to death or life according to the hectoring spirits of the world, but according to the Wisdom and Law of the Highest. Therefore thought I, what God says, is best, though all the men in the world are against it…But indeed this Shame was a bold villain; I could scarce shake him out of my company; yea, he would be haunting of me, and continually whispering me in the ear, with some one or other of the infirmities that attend Religion; but at last I told him, Twas but in vain to attempt further in this business; for those things that he disdained, in those did I see most glory; And so at last I got past this importunate one.’

4 Since 1930 the Pitter family had owned a cottage in Felsted, Essex, where Ruth taught herself viticulture. The cottage, however, had to be left behind when Ruth and her companion of many years, Kathleen O’Hara, decided to buy a house in the village of Long Crendon, Buckinghamshire. ‘The Hawthorns’ in Chilton Road was set in several acres of garden and orchard, and was within reach of Oxford and London. They moved in shortly before Christmas 1953. Pitter noted: ‘In coming to the neighbourhood of Oxford, of course I had hoped to see a little more of Lewis, of David Cecil, and others, and to attend open lectures, plays, etc. But we could not find anything near enough to make this at all easy’ (Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. lett. c. 220/3, fol. 113).

5 Dorsett, And God Came In, ch. 3, pp. 90-1.

6 ibid., p. 91.

7 This is a reply to a letter from Don Giovanni of 9 January 1953 (?), which appears in Letters: C. S. Lewis-Don Giovanni Calabria, pp. 76-7.

8 There had been a mistake. The article, ‘Responsabilité’–which was not by Don Giovanni Calabria but by Padre Paolo Manna—was published in L’Amico, 8 (Sep.-Oct. 1952), pp. 122-4. The article is reproduced in Una Gioia Insolita, pp. 283-5.

9 Lewis had only recently begun writing the book on prayer mentioned here. He mentioned it to Don Giovanni again in a letter of 17 March 1953, but had abandoned it by the following year (see the letter to Sister Penelope of 15 February 1954). He could not think how to go on with the book until, in the spring of 1963, he found the form for what he wanted to say. The result was Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer (London: Bles, 1964; Fount, 1998).

10 1 Chronicles 13:9-10: ‘And when they came unto the threshingfloor of Chidon, Uzza put forth his hand to hold the ark; for the oxen stumbled. And the anger of the Lord was kindled against Uzza, and he smote him, because he put his hand to the ark: and there he died before God.’

11 Luke 9:62: ‘And Jesus said unto him, No man, having put his hand to the plough, and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God.’

12 In ‘Responsabilità’ Fr Manna pleads for greater recognition of the gravity of Communist persecution of Christians (hospital workers as well as missionaries) in China. He argues that if a Communist (e.g., French Communist Party leader Jacques Duelos) is arrested in the West, the Communists rise in protest. There should be no less an outcry on behalf of victimized missionaries.

13 ‘so far as’; ‘whenever’.

14 i.e., Paolo Manna.

15 Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, Bk. I, ch. 5.

16 i.e., the book on prayer.

17 Matthew 26:39; Mark 14:35.

18 Luke 22:42.

19 Lewis read a paper on this same problem to the Oxford Clerical Society on 8 December 1953. It was published as ‘Petitionary Prayer: A Problem Without an Answer’ in Christian Reflections, ed. Walter Hooper (London: Bles, 1967; Fount, 1998).

20 Eustace and Edmund are characters in the Narnian stories; Jane and Mark Studdock are the married couple in That Hideous Strength.

21 Lewis probably had in mind the last two lines of the title poem of Edna St Vincent Millay’s Renascence, and Other Poems (1925): ‘Ah, awful weight! Infinity/Pressed down upon the finite Me!’

22 Rudolf Steiner.

23 The Rev. Jones B. Shannon was executive director of the Church Society of College Work, Washington, DC.

24 In February 1953 Joy became a member of the Episcopal Church and was confirmed in the Cathedral of St John the Divine, New York.

* This is the beginning of Act V, I suppose?

25 T. H. White, Mistress Masham’s Repose (1946).

26 Mrs Van Deusen, an Episcopalian, was in touch with the Order of the Holy Cross, a Benedictine Anglican monastic order in West Park, New York. The order had suggested she become one of the Associates of Holy Cross. These lay associates lived under a modified form of the Benedictine rule suitable to laymen.

27 James was probably a clergyman Mrs Van Deusen knew.

28 Warnie served for a number of years on the vestry of Holy Trinity Church, Headington Quarry, Oxford. Vestrymen help the churchwardens deal with the temporal affairs of a parish church.

29 George Bernard Shaw.

30 Robert Louis Stevenson, Virginibus Puerisque and Other Papers (1901), ch. 1, ‘Virginibus Puerisque’: ‘Marriage is terrifying, but so is a cold and forlorn old age.’

31 In Charles Williams’s Region of the Summer Stars, ‘P’o-l’u’ is in the Antipodean Ocean. Starr was spending the academic year at Kansai University, Osaka, Japan as a Fulbright Scholar. He was then offered a professorship at the University of Florida in Gainesville, where he stayed until his retirement.

32 William Shakespeare, The Tempest (1623), I, ii, 250-93. Ariel, a spirit of the air, was once the servant of Sycorax, a wicked sorceress who imprisoned him in a ‘cloven pine’ for refusing to fulfil her commands. He was trapped inside the tree for twelve years until Prospero arrived on the island, released him, and bound him to his service.

33 Ray Bradbury, The Silver Locusts (1951).

34 The forty-seven Ronin were Samurai retainers who in 1701 avenged their master’s death by killing his enemy, and then awaiting the death sentence to be passed on them by the government. The act of defying the government, and following instead the way of the Samurai to be faithful to their lord unto death, won them everlasting fame. Every year on 14 December people gather at their graves at Sengakuji Temple in Tokyo.

35 Anthony Boucher was the pseudonym of William Anthony Parker White (1911-68), critic and author. He wrote a column on mystery stories, ‘Criminal at Large’, for the New York Times, 1951-68, and was the editor of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, 1949-58. He is the author of many works of mystery and science fiction, and it was at his suggestion that Lewis contributed two short stories, ‘The Shoddy Lands’ and ‘Ministering Angels’-reprinted in The Dark Tower and Other Stories- to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.

Boucher’s short story, ‘The Quest for St. Aquin’ was first published in New Tales of Space and Time, ed. Raymond J. Healy (New York: Holt, 1951), and ‘The Star Dummy’ was published in Fantastic (Fall 1952). They are reprinted in The Compleat Boucher: The Complete Short Science Fiction and Fantasy of Anthony Boucher (1998).

37 Old Solar for ‘God bless you.’ It is found several times in the last chapter of That Hideous Strength when Ransom blesses those who have fought with him at St Anne’s on the Hill.

* The porter at Holloway Jail told me it was ‘a ladies’ prison’

38 Bodle said of this letter: ‘I had spoken of a girl in my class at Manchester who was intelligent and had a great deal of language as she had acquired it before being deafened. In answer to her anxieties about the remoteness of God I had tried to explain who Christ is and why He had come. Then she herself said with unusual relief “Then Jesus is God”-a conception entirely new to her. I think that I must have been wondering how much of the teaching about Christ I could present with the Gospel story–a problem which I still find very difficult’ (Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. lett. c. 220/4, fols. 248-9).

39 Acts 8:31.

40 Matthew 6:12.

41 See Sir Arthur Charles Clarke in the Biographical Appendix to CX II, pp. 1024-5.

42 Clarke, in his capacity as chairman of the British Interplanetary Society, wrote to Lewis on 13 February 1953: ‘I am now trying to arrange this Society’s lecture programme for October ’53-April ’54, and the suggestion has been put forward that you might care to propose a notion that interplanetary travel is a bad thing!…It would be only fair to point out that your position might be somehow analogous to that of a Christian martyr in the arena, but I trust that consideration would not deter you’ (Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. lett. c. 220/4, fol. 16).

43 Robin Oakley-Hill (1932-) was born on 30 May 1932, the son of Dayrell R. Oakley-Hill. He went up to Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1950 where he read English under Lewis. After taking his BA in 1953 he worked as an administrative officer in the Architects’ Department of the London City Council.

44 In a note dated August 2003 Oakley-Hill said of this letter: ‘I was walking from the boathouse back to college on an unpleasantly raw winter afternoon after an unsatisfactory session of coxing when I was joined by CS Lewis waiting to cross the High. He said something like “You’re limping–did you hurt yourself?” I said no, I’d had polio, in a fairly unfriendly manner, because I was fed up with the weather, the unsatisfactory rowing and the tedious unfinished work I was going back to. He looked embarrassed and said “Oh, poor chap,” and we went our separate ways. I was astounded to get the letter next day, and was inclined to reply that it didn’t signify, but a confidant warned me to take the apology in a serious manner because otherwise it would seem that I did not appreciate the trouble he had taken in writing the letter, and I did so.’

45 In the country of Brobdingnag in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) the people are as tall as steeples, and everything else is in proportion.

46 Chad Walsh, Nellie and her Flying Crocodile, illus. Marc Simont (New York: Harper, 1956).

47 That is, become an Associate of Holy Cross.

48 Wilkie Collins, Armadale (1866).

49 Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White (1860); The Moonstone (1868).

50 In The Woman in White.

51 Green, From the World’s End, ch. 5, p. 70. In Roman legend Tarquín raped Lucrece.

52 ibid., p. 83: ‘a supreme surrender and a supreme assumption of responsibility.

53 Theodore Watts-Dunton, Aylwin (1898).

54 Green spelled the names ‘Danai’ and ‘Pasiphai’.

55 i.e., The Last Battle (1956).

56 Clifford W. Stone was writing from PO Box 528, El Dorado, Kansas.

57 Mark Twain, Report from Paradise, with drawings by Charles Locke (New York: Harper & Bros., 1952). For many years Twain played with the idea of writing an account of heaven that would debunk Christian revelation. In 1909 he published ‘Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven’, a fragment of his manuscript. Report from Paradise contains ‘Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven’ as well as the other surviving chapters of Twain’s unfinished work.

58 Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889).

59 For The Silver Chair.

60 ‘he is limping’.

61 Shakespeare, King Lear, IV, vi, 133-4: ‘Give me an ounce of civet, good apothecary, to sweeten my imagination.’

62 Palmer wanted Lewis to recommend one of his books to a publisher.

63 Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass, ch. 6: ‘’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves/Did gyre and gimble in the wabe’.

64 John Bunyan, The Life and Death of Mr. Badman (1680), ch. 8: ‘For they are a shame to religion, I say, these slithy, rob-shop, pick-pocket men, they are a shame to religion, and religious men should be ashamed of them.’

65 The New English Dictionary, the precursor of the Oxford English Dictionary.

66 See the reference to the eldila in the letter to Douglas Harding of 25 March 1951.

67 e.g., Luke 1:30: ‘And the angel said unto her, Fear not, Mary: for thou hast found favour with God.’ See also Genesis 15:1; Luke 2:10.

68 In Perelandra, ch. 16, p. 202, during the attempt to make themselves visible to Ransom, the eldila or Oyéresu of Mars and Venus appear as ‘concentric wheels moving with a rather sickening slowness one inside the other’. This imagery was inspired by the appearance of angels in Ezekiel 1:16: ‘Their appearance and their work was as it were a wheel in the middle of a wheel.’ We should notice too Miracles, ch. 14, pp. 120-1: ‘[Jahweh’s] appearance to Ezekiel is attended with imagery that does not borrow from Nature, but (it is a mystery too seldom noticed) from those machines which men were to make centuries after Ezekiel’s death. The prophet saw something suspiciously like a dynamo’

* This is not an afterthought. Mycroft funked it!

69 ‘Apiciarí had been added in Lewis’s hand.

70 W. K. Scudamore was writing from 3 Maurice Road, Seaford, Sussex.

71 This was Lewis’s ‘mangling’ of Scudamore’s name.

72 Sir Scudamour is the lover of Amoret in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, as well as the name of Lewis’s hero in The Dark Tower.

73 Bodleian Library.

74 Jane (‘Janie’) Agnes McNeill (1889-1959) was a close friend from Strandtown. See her biography in CL I, p. 117n.

75 In his letter of 16 March 1953 Bles said: ‘With some trepidation I venture to address you again on the gender of mythological creatures…On returning to the galleys of “The Silver Chair”…I find the same thing has happened again, not only with the Dwarf but with that curious creature, the Marsh-wiggle…It looks to me as though the discrepancies are due to the fact that, although, for some philological reason, you try to keep Dwarf and Marsh-wiggle neuter, you naturally think of them as persons–as indeed most readers would. If I may say so, this neuter business seems strained and artificial, and in places reminds me of Mark Twain’s joke about the German language, “The girl took the spoon and fork. It laid him and her on the table’” (Bodleian Library, Dep. c. 771, fol. 20).

76 Bles replied on 18 March 1953: ‘I am so glad that you agree to a “he” for the Dwarf and the Marshwiggle. I would suggest this Rule: when mythological creatures speak like human beings, masculine/feminine gender; when they are personae mutai [silent characters] neuter’ (ibid., fol. 22).

77 Lewis probably had in mind the following three statements regarding natural law. The classical definition is found in St Thomas Aquinas: ‘The natural law is nothing other than the light of understanding placed in us by God; through it we know what we must do and what we must avoid. God has given this light or law at the creation’ (Collationes in decent praeceptis, 1). Cicero (51 BC) said in De Republica, 11:33: ‘There is in fact a true law–namely, right reason–which is in accordance with nature, applies to all men and is unchangeable and eternal.’ The chief New Testament text on which natural law is based is Romans 2:14-15: ‘When Gentiles who have not the law do by nature what the law requires, they are a law to themselves, even though they do not have the law. They show that what the law requires is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness.’ Lewis’s writings on natural law include the first book of Mere Christianity, The Abolition of Man, and ‘The Poison of Subjectivism’ and ‘On Ethics’ in Christian Reflections.

78 These reflections were to be repeated the following year in Lewis’s inaugural lecture at Cambridge, ‘De Descriptione Temporum: ‘It is hard to have patience with those Jeremiahs, in Press or pulpit, who warn us that we are “relapsing into Paganism”. It might be rather fun if we were. It would be pleasant to see some future Prime Minister trying to kill a large and lively milk-white bull in Westminster Hall. But we shan’t. What lurks behind such idle prophecies, if they are anything but careless language, is the false idea that the historical process allows mere reversal; that Europe can come out of Christianity “by the same door as in she went” and find herself back where she was. It is not what happens. A post-Christian man is not a Pagan; you might as well think that a married woman recovers her virginity by divorce. The post-Christian is cut off from the Christian past and therefore doubly from the Pagan past’ (SLE, p. 10). See ‘A Cliché Came Out of Its Cage’, CP, p. 17, which begins: ‘You said “The world is going back to Paganism”. Oh bright Vision!’

79 i.e., the tale which was eventually to be titled The Horse and His Boy.

80 P. Vergili Maronis: Opera, ed. Frederick Arthur Hirtzel (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1900), p. [iii]: ‘Eager to correct what they consider errors, they more often trample upon the most delicate flowers of the Muses.’

81 Delirium tremens.

82 Shakespeare, Hamlet, III, iv, 140: ‘My pulse, as yours, doth temperately keep time.’

83 Michael was an American schoolboy.

84 In her letter to Lewis of 18 March, Gebbert wrote: ‘A physical condition…caused my mind to wander and speculate for too long now, and recently drove me to a doctor. He told me in no uncertain terms that my husband and I can expect an heir or heiress in a month or two! And all along I had been blaming everything on seasickness!’ (Bodleian Library, MS. Facs. c. 47, fol. 238).

85 Lewis ends SBJ, ch. 12, ‘Guns and Good Company’ with these same words.

86 In her letter of 18 March Gebbert continued: ‘I was so dismayed at the doctor’s diagnosis that, for a moment, I wished it had not happened–that I was not going to have a child. I know I was guilty of the lowest form of ignorance: fear, and that night, as I was dining alone in my library, my eyes fell upon the Bible I keep open on the table. It had been open to Psalms for several days-1 had been reading them off and on and had not turned or disturbed the pages in any way. Nor had anyone else. This night, then, as I glanced from the food to the Book, I saw and read the verse: “Shall I bring to the birth, and not cause to bring forth? saith the Lord: shall I cause to bring forth, and shut the womb? saith thy God.” Isaiah, Chap. 66, Verse 9. How did the pages get turned from Psalms? And by whom? In such ways, at times, do we receive the miracle of His rebuke, His admonition, His comfort, and the workings of His plan? Am I wrong to take the words I read as a rebuke? Am I wrong in assuming my eye fell on the chapter and verse it was supposed to?’ (Bodleian Library, MS. Facs. c. 47, fol. 238).

87 Matthew 10:29: Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? And one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father.’

88 The Screwtape Letters (London: Bles, 1942; Fount, 1998), Letter 27, pp. 106-7: ‘If you tried to explain to [the Patient] that men’s prayers today are one of the innumerable co-ordinates with which the Enemy [God] harmonizes the weather of tomorrow, he would reply that then the Enemy always knew men were going to make those prayers and, if so, they did not pray freely but were predestined to do so…What he ought to say, of course, is obvious to us; that the problem of adapting the particular weather to the particular prayers is merely the appearance, at two points in his temporal mode of perception, of the total problem of adapting the whole spiritual universe to the whole corporeal universe; that creation in its entirety operates at every point of space and time, or rather that their kind of consciousness forces them to encounter the whole, self-consistent creative act as a series of successive events.’

89 Chang had sent Lewis his translation of a Chinese allegory to read.

90 ‘model of Christ’.

91 The Great Divorce, Preface, p. 5: ‘It was a wonderful vehicle, blazing with golden light, heraldically coloured. The Driver himself seemed full of light and he used only one hand to drive with. The other he waved before his face as if to fan away the greasy steam of the rain.’ Cf. The Comedy of Dante Alighieri the Florentine: Cántica I Hell L’Inferno, trans. Dorothy L. Sayers (London: Penguin, 1949), IX, 82: ‘His left hand, moving, fanned away the gross/Air from his face, nor elsewise did he seem/At all to find the way laborious.’

92 The Great Divorce, ch. 12, cf. Dante, Purgatorio, XXX.

93 i.e., Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando Furioso.

94 See the discussion of David Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus (1920) in CL II, pp. 440, 541, 630, 753.

95 A vast French prose romance of the fourteenth century, in which the anonymous author sought to link the legends of Alexander the Great and King Arthur.

96 Old French.

97 The story of Balin, or Balain, is recounted in the Old French Suite du Merlin and in Malory’s Morte dArthur. Balin and Balan are tragic brothers who, despite their nobility, wind up killing each other.

98 John Francis Gilfedder (1925-), musician, was born in Melbourne, Australia, on 27 January 1925. After studying medicine, he began composing music in 1948. In 1951-2 he studied composition with Benjamin Frankel and Raymond Jones in England, and it was in 1952 that he met Lewis. On returning to Australia, he studied at the University of Melbourne and graduated with a Bachelor of Music degree in 1958. This was followed by a Dip. Ed. in 1959, and a B. Ed. in 1962, also from the University of Melbourne. Gilfedder was employed by the Victorian Education Department, 1953-69, before taking up a position at the Queensland Conservatorium of Music in 1970. His works include The Timeless Land Symphony, which had its premiere in 2002.

99 Gilfedder suggested Lewis provide a glossary of obscure terms to go with the Arthurian poems of Charles Williams, Taliessin Through Logres and The Region of the Summer Stars.

100 A Religious of CSMV (Sister Penelope), The Coming of the Lord: A Study in the Creed (London: Mowbray, 1953; 2nd impression, 1954).

101 Lewis was reading the typescript of the book; the page numbers of the typescript differ from those in the published book which are the ones given below.

102 ibid., ch. 8, p. 48: ‘When a smith says of a sword, “It is finished,” he means that it is ready to be used. Only when it has served its purpose and has no longer any raison d’être, does the end of a thing mean its ceasing to exist. The two Ends that our Lord is seeing in St. Mark xiii exactly illustrate this difference. The End of the Temple was the destruction of the Temple, because the type was no longer needed when the thing typified, the New Humanity, had come. But when Man comes to his End, he will be finished in the sense of being ready, at last, for the purpose for which he was made.’

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