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

It is very odd about the envelopes; we certainly received them, and they were all used up in due course. Why one never went back to it’s home, neither of us can understand. Of course I write to twenty English folk for one American, and therefore the odds against your getting one back would be considerable. Our very small envelopes are due, I understand, to the fact that we are very seriously short of paper—having broken our contract with Canada, for some reason I have never followed. I don’t think there is any mail restriction.

The whole question of the atomic bomb is a very difficult one: the Sunday after the news of the dropping of the first one came through, our minister asked us all to join in prayer for forgiveness for the great crime of using it. But, if fwhat we have since heard is true, i.e. that the first item on the Japanese anti-invasion programme was the killing of every European in Japan, the answer did not, to me, seem so simple as all that.

I read with interest and indignation your story of the experiment on the monkeys; there seems no end to the folly and wickedness of this world. Dogs are jealous; perhaps the besetting sin they inherited at the Fall.^*

I see that in rambling along I have nearly forgotten to thank you for the impending gifts. I hope, indeed if I may so put it, insist that you give up spoiling me in this way if prices rise still more against you.

With all good wishes from us both to you both for 1951,

yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

* On second thoughts, I don’t think it is a sin in them, tho’ it is in us.²⁰⁷

TO SISTER PENELOPE CSMV(BOD):

Magdalen College

Oxford

Dec 30/50

Dear Sister Penelope

Yours was a cheering letter which warmed my heart (I wish it wd. have warmed my fingers too: as it is they will hardly form the letters!).

I can’t offer any comments on the re-planning of the novel, not now having all the problems clearly enough in my head. I feel like saying it wd. be a pity to lose Adam, but then one has really no business to compare a work with its own pre-history.

I’m delighted about the Biblical plays which I remember doing me a lot of good when I read them. They may be, in a way, your most important work.

Our state is thus: my ‘mother’ has had to retire permanently into a Nursing Home. She is in no pain but her mind has almost completely gone. What traces of it remain seem gentler and more placid than I have known it for years. Her appetite is, oddly, enormous. I visit her, normally, every day, and am divided between a (rational?) feeling that this process of gradual withdrawal is merciful and even beautiful, and a quite different feeling (it comes out in my dreams) of horror.

There is no denying—and I don’t know why I should deny to you—that our domestic life is both more physically comfortable and more psychologically harmonious for her absence. The expence is of course v. severe and I have worries about that. But it wd. be v. dangerous to have no worries—or rather no occasions of worry. I have been feeling that v. much lately: that cheerful insecurity is what Our Lord asks of us. Thus one comes, late & surprised, to the simplest & earliest Christian lessons!

Rê pseudo- or deutero Screwtapes. My own feeling is that a literary idea ought to belong to anyone who can use it and that literary property is a sort of Simony. But you might find my publisher taking a different view. I don’t know, though: perhaps not, if it was published with proper acknowledgements. Let me know if it reaches the stage of a practical decision. I am glad to hear your inner news. Mine, too, is I think (but who am I to judge?) fairly good. Oremus pro invicem,²⁰⁸

Yours most sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO RUTH PITTER(BOD):

Magdalen College

Oxford

Dec 30/50

Dear Miss Pitter—

I don’t know if I can write, my fingers are so cold. (Almost the only pleasure of which age has yet deprived me—I mean the only good one—is the power of enjoying hard frost. Otherwise youth’s a stuff that’s over-rated).

What helps you in Theocritus hinders me, and in the Georgics too: i.e. when I’ve looked up the vegetables in the Lexicon, I don’t know the English any better than the Greek. The equation ‘γλώε,’²⁰⁹ the lesser mud-wort, fangoleum paludis’, is to me a = b where both are unknown. Not that I don’t enjoy the vegetables when I meet them in the cool, green flesh: but each individual is new to me each time. Heroic books–is this yours? And for a ‘work in progress’? It is obviously some poet’s prose, sweet on the tongue. I feel that about the poet being a Parthian too: but am not quite sure whether it doesn’t come from living in an un-poetical age when the poet is perilously near being ‘vestigial’. Did people feel that way about Virgil or Firdausi?²¹⁰ (Here have been interrupted for an hour by an elderly lady asking moral advice!).

I hope you had a nice time with the Duchess.²¹¹ Shd. I like her poetry? I don’t know it. My brother joins me in all good wishes and I must go to lunch. My humble duty, Ma’am

Yours very sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO GEORGE SAYER (W):

Magdalen College

Oxford

Dec 30. 50

My dear George

What dears you both are: but a ruddy fellowship exam will keep me immobilised right up till term. Thanks all the same. Can you come up for a night any time after our term begins (Jan 13)?

MS rec’d safely. Yes, la belle Baynes²¹² will do the lot: Magnae virtutes nee minora vítía.²¹³ Her Mouse is one of her best beasts, however.

No, I don’t wish a cheque! You have both been much in oratíoníbus nostris. Name your night & do come.

Jack

1 See Roger Lancelyn Green in the Biographical Appendix to CL II, pp. 1039-43. Green was the primary reader and critic of Lewis’s Narnian stories.

2 For information about the writing of the Narnian stories see Roger Lancelyn Green and Walter Hooper, C. S. Lewis: A Biography (London: Bles, 1974; rev. edn HarperCollins, 2002), ch. 11.

3 This is a letter of reference for Lewis’s former pupil, lonathan Francis ‘Frank’ Goodridge, whose biography appears in CL II, p. 936n. Goodridge was applying for the position of Senior Lecturer in English at St Mary’s College, Strawberry Hill, Twickenham, London. He taught at St Mary’s College, 1950-65. See Goodridge’s comments on this testimonial in CSL: The Bulletin of the New York C. S. Lewis Society, Whole No. 75 (Ian. 1976), p. 13.

4 This is one of those occasions on which Lewis misspelled his pupil’s name.

5 This was the Oxford University Socratic Club, founded in 1941 by Stella Aldwinckle with Lewis as its first president. See Stella Aldwinckle in the Biographical Appendix. The club’s purpose was to discuss the pros and cons of Christianity, and it met weekly during term-time. Goodridge was secretary of the Socratic Club, 1947-8. For a history of the club see Walter Hooper, ‘Oxford’s Bonny Fighter’ in Remembering C. S. Lewis: Recollections of Those Who Knew Him, ed. James T. Como (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2005). This book was previously published as C. S. Lewis at the Breakfast Table (1979; new edn, 1992).

6 See the biography of George Rostrevor Hamilton in CL II, p. 707n.

7 Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus), Satires, II, vi, 65: ‘O nights and suppers of gods!’ Horace (65-8 BC) was one of the greatest of the Roman poets.

8 Claudian, De Raptu Proserpinae, II, 282-3: ‘There are other stars for us.’ Pluto speaks the phrase, attempting to calm Persephone’s weeping, telling her that he is a person of importance and that there is an upside to being in the underworld.

9 The word planta– ‘a young tree’–appears in Virgil, Georgia, II, 23.

10 See Owen Barfield in the Biographical Appendix to CL I, pp. 979-82. Barfield was one of Lewis’s oldest friends and also his lawyer.

11 ‘ritual’.

12 John Masefield (1878-1967), Poet Laureate 1930-67.

13 See the biography of Nathan Comfort Starr, Professor of English at the University of Florida in Gainesville, in CL II, p. 809n. His essay on Lewis, ‘Good Cheer and Sustenance’, appears in Remembering C. S. Lewis.

14 Lewis’s group of friends, the Inklings, met regularly every Tuesday morning in the Eagle and Child (‘Bird and Baby’) pub in St Giles.

15 p.p. See Abbreviations.

16 Sarah Neylan (later Tisdall) was Lewis’s eleven-year-old goddaughter. See Mary Neylan in the Biographical Appendix to CL II, pp. 1054-5.

17 Rhona Bodle, from New Zealand, arrived in England in 1947 to study the education of deaf children. That same year she began teaching at Oakdene School for girls in Burgess Hill, Sussex. In December 1947 she began reading Lewis’s Broadcast Talks (London: Bles, 1942) and this led her to write to him. She became a Christian in 1949. See her biography in CL II, p. 823n. Her notes to Lewis’s letters are in the Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. lett. c. 200/4.

18 See Charles Walter Stansby Williams (1886-1945) in the Biographical Appendix to CL II, pp. 1081-6.

19 Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene (1590, 1596), I, xi, 45, 6: ‘It chaunst (eternal God that chaunce did guide)’.

20 See Sister Penelope CSMV in the Biographical Appendix to CL II, pp. 1055-9.

21 In 1948 Sister Penelope began asking Lewis’s advice about a story she was writing, to be called ‘The Morning Gift’. She was never able to find a publisher. It is first mentioned in Lewis’s letter to Sister Penelope of 8 April 1948 (CL II, p. 848).

22 This was probably a reference to Sir Herbert Butterfield’s Christianity and History (London: Bell, 1949).

23 Sister Penelope’s St Bernard on the Love of God, De Diligendo Deo, newly translated by A Religious of C.S.M.V. (London: Mowbray, 1950).

24 In a letter of 29 November 1944 to his son Christopher, Professor J. R. R. Tolkien said that he and Lewis ‘begin to consider writing a book in collaboration on “Language” (Nature, Origins, Functions)’ (The Letters of]. R. R. Tolkien, ed. Humphrey Carpenter (1981), p. 105). By 1948 it had got as far as being called Language and Human Nature in an announcement of forthcoming books from the Student Christian Movement, who expected it to be published in 1949. In the end, it was never written. Emperor Augustus used ‘on the Greek Kalends’ for ‘Never’.

25 Edward A. Allen and his mother, Mrs Belle Allen, lived at 173 Highland Avenue, Westfield, Massachusetts. They were very generous to the Lewis brothers, and sent them numerous parcels of food over the years. For the beginning of the correspondence see Lewis’s letter to Allen of 3 January 1948 (CL II, p. 827).

26 John Strachey (1901-63), a British Socialist writer and Labour politician, who served as Minister of Food, 1946-50.

27 Vera Mathews (later Gebbert) was living at this time at 510 North Alpine Drive, Beverly Hills, California. She supplied the Lewis brothers with vast quantities of food during the lean years following the war.

28 See Edward Thomas Dell, Jr in the Biographical Appendix to CL II, p. 1025. At this time Dell was a student at Eastern Nazarene College, Wollaston, Massachusetts.

29 In a letter of 12 December 1949 Dell had asked whether ‘evil is an illusion’. Lewis replied on 19 December 1949: ‘I don’t think the idea that evil is an illusion helps. Because surely it is a (real) evil that the illusion of evil shd. exist. When I am pursued in a nightmare by a crocodile the pursuit and the crocodile are illusions: but it is a real nightmare, and that seems a real evil’ (CL II, p. 1010). Continuing the discussion, Dell asked in a letter of 26 January 1950: ‘If the illusion of the crocodile is evil isn’t it so because of man’s sin rather than a basic relationship set up either by an evil or uncontrolled by a finite God?’ (Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. lett. c. 220/4, fols. 89-90).

30 Nothing is known of this American nun who, it appears, wanted to know why Lewis was not a Roman Catholic.

31 See Nicolas Zernov, Spalding Lecturer in Eastern Orthodox Culture in the University of Oxford, in the Biographical Appendix.

32 Henry Norman Spalding (1877-1953), philanthropist. In his early life Spalding came across a book about the history of India which kindled in him an interest in the Far East. He settled in Oxford and devoted himself to the attempt to cultivate better relations between the West and the East by fostering scholarly approaches to the history, art, religion and philosophy of Oriental countries. He was so impressed by the work of Nicolas Zernov that in 1965 he founded the Spalding Lectureship in Eastern Orthodox Culture, with Zernov as its first holder.

33 Mrs Frank Iones, who was still sending food parcels to Lewis, wrote from 320 Brookside Road, Darien, Connecticut.

34 The Problem of Pain (London: Bles, 1940; HarperCollins, 2002).

35 The Old Testament.

36 Mr Lake had presumably asked Lewis about the association of planetary intelligences and eldila with angels in his interplanetary trilogy, Out of the Silent Planet (London: John Lane, 1938), Perelandra (London: John Lane, 1943) and That Hideous Strength (London: John Lane, 1945). Lewis was later to write about these angels or daemons in The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964), ch. 3, pp. 40-2.

37 For years Lewis had been publishing some of his poems under the pseudonym Nat Whilk (or N.W.)–Anglo-Saxon for ‘I know not whom’. In Perelandra (1943; HarperCollins, 2000), ch. 1, p. 13, he quotes a note on the eldila or angels by one ‘Natvilcius’, which is Latin for ‘Nat Whilk’.

38 See Daphne Harwood in the Biographical Appendix to CL II, pp. 1050-1. Mrs Harwood, the wife of Cecil Harwood, had not been well.

39 i.e., her husband.

40 Bede (c. 673-735) established the date of Easter in his De Temporum Ratione (written in 725).

41 Christopher Fry, The Lady’s Not For Burning (1949).

42 John, the Harwoods’ eldest son, was Lewis’s pupil at Magdalen College. See his biography in CL II, p. 300n.

43 Sylvia was one of the Harwoods’ daughters.

44 See the biography of Walter Ogilvie ‘Woff Field in CL II, p. 572n. Field, like Cecil Harwood, was a teacher at Michael Hall School, Kidbrooke Park, Forest Row, Sussex.

45 See Roger Lancelyn Green in the Biographical Appendix to CL II, pp. 1039-43. At this time Green was living at 119 Woodstock Road, Oxford,

46 Lewis’s original title for what became Prince Caspian: The Return to Narnia (1951) was ‘A Horn in Narnia’ (since it was Queen Susan’s magic horn which drew the children back to the rescue of Prince Caspian).

47 See Lady Freud in the Biographical Appendix to CL II, pp. 1033-6. June Flewett (known familiarly as ‘Jill’) had been evacuated to Oxford at the beginning of the Second World War, and ended up living at The Kilns during 1943-5, helping Mrs Moore and the Lewis brothers. After graduating from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, London, in 1947, she became an actress, using the screen name Jill Raymond.

48 Warnie was in Restholme on this occasion.

49 Bruce was Mrs Moore’s elderly dog.

50 This letter was published in The Times Literary Supplement (3 March 1950), p. 137, under the title ‘Text Corruptions’.

51 William Shakespeare, Two Gentlemen of Verona, ed. John Dover Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1921).

52 William Shakespeare, Two Gentlemen of Verona (1594), V, iv, 90. References to Shakespeare in the present volume are to William Shakespeare, Complete Works, ed. W J. Craig, Oxford Standard Authors (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1905).

53 Shakespeare, Two Gentlemen of Verona, ed. Dover Wilson, p. 103.

54 See Dr Warfield M. Firor in the Biographical Appendix to CL II, pp. 1031-2.

55 On 24 February 1950 the British Labour Party won the general election, with Clement Attlee (1883-1967) returning as Prime Minister.

56 William Shakespeare, Hamlet (1603), IV, iv, 36-9.

57 ‘masterpiece’.

58 ‘way to arrive’.

59 Green had written a blurb for the cover of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (London: Bles, 1950), but in the end it was not used.

60 See the biography of Geoffrey Bles in CL II, p. 554n. Bles, Lewis’s publisher, was the owner of Geoffrey Bles Ltd, London.

61 Milton Waldman (1895-1976) was born in the United States and educated at Yale University. After serving with the US Army, 1917-19, he moved to England where he spent his life in publishing. He was assistant editor of The London Mercury, 1924-7, before becoming a literary advisor to the publishers Longmans Green, 1929-34, and then William Collins, 1939-52. He was joint managing director of Rupert Hart-Davis Ltd, 1952-3, and literary advisor to Collins, 1955-69. During his years with Collins he edited the Golden Hind and Brief Lives series. Waldman was the author of Americana (1925), Elizabeth of England (1933), and The Lady Mary: A Biography of Queen Mary L (1972).

62 The King’s Arms public house on the corner of Holywell Street and Parks Road.

63 See George and Moira Sayer in the Biographical Appendix.

64 In a letter of 3 April 1950 Dell said: ‘I have been reading your Allegory of Love with great interest. It has occurred to me to wonder whether the present-day lack…of a depth of love between men so often seen in the middle ages could be part of the cause for the male lack of interest in God’ (Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. lett. c. 220/4, fol. 91).

65 In the same letter Dell asked: ‘I am a bit confused on a point. You say in “Membership”…that “all biological life (will be)…extinct”…But nonetheless I remember that your view of immortality in Miracles includes animals…Now, will only part of Nature then be redeemed when we, please God, “ride those greater mounts…with the King” and what we know as Bios be gone and Zoe reign in the “more organic” Nature?’ (ibid., fols. 91-2).

66 ‘existence’.

67 The Problem of Pain, ch. 9, pp. 145-6: ‘Supposing, as I do, that the personality of the tame animals is largely the gift of man—that their mere sentience is reborn to soulhood in us as our mere soulhood is reborn to spirituality in Christ—I naturally suppose that very few animals indeed, in their wild state, attain to a “self “or ego. But if any do, and if it is agreeable to the goodness of God that they should live again, their immortality would also be related to man—not, this time, to individual masters, but to humanity.’

68 Dell asked: ‘In reading the new translation of St. Athanasius’ Incarnation of the Word of God by your friend at “Wantage” [Sister Penelope]…I have wondered about an intimation on p. 28…that Athanasius may have assumed that God superimposed the Word or His image on the animal form of man. Do you think St. Athanasius was merely using a convenient way of speaking to describe a difference between man and animals or that he saw man as a progressively developed animal that was finally “made in the image” of the Word?’ (Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. lett. c. 220/4, fol. 92). Dell was referring to The Incarnation of the Word of God, Being the Treatise of St. Athanasius ‘De Incarnatione Verbi Dei’, trans. ‘A Religious of C.S.M.V.’ (London: Bles, 1944). In Against the Heathen, 33, St Athanasius distinguishes between humans, who have immortal souls, and animals, who do not: ‘These things simply prove that the rational soul presides over the body. For the body is not even constituted to drive itself, but it is driven by another’s will, just as a horse does not harness himself, but is driven by his master. Hence laws for human beings to practise what is good and to abstain from evil-doing, while for animals evil remains unthought of and undiscerned, because they lie outside rationality and the process of understanding. I think then that the existence of a rational soul in man is proved by what we have said…O God, You have given us an immortal soul which distinguishes us from irrational creatures. Help us all to safeguard it from evil influences and everything that tarnishes it and turns it away from You.’

69 See Dom Bede Griffiths OSB in the Biographical Appendix to CL II, pp. 1043-9. Griffiths, Lewis’s former pupil, had been prior of the Benedictine abbey at Farnborough since 1947.

70 Dom Bede Griffiths, ‘Catholicism today’, Pax: The Quarterly Review of the Benedictines of Prinknash, XL, no. 254 (Spring 1950), pp. 11-16.

71 See the biography of Dr Robert Emlyn ‘Humphrey’ Havard in CL II, p. 182n. Havard was Lewis’s doctor and an Inkling. As an oblate of Ampleforth—a lay member of the Benedictine order—he probably met Griffiths while visiting Farnborough Abbey.

72 ‘[He is] pure spirit’.

73 Griffiths, ‘Catholicism today’, p. 13.

74 The classical definition of natural law 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). 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’ (RSV). Lewis devoted the first book of Mere Christianity (London: Bles, 1952) to natural law, and in The Abolition of Man (London: Oxford University Press, 1943; Fount, 1999), ch. 1, pp. 11-12, he defines it as ‘the doctrine of objective value, the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others really false, to the kind of thing the universe is, and the kind of things we are’. See the section on natural law in CG, pp. 586-96.

75 Romans 7:12-13: ‘The law is holy, and the commandment holy, and just and good. Was then that which is good made death unto me? God forbid. But sin, that it might appear sin, working death in me by that which is good; that sin by the commandment might become exceeding sinful’

76 Lewis was referring to the belief in ‘salvation by faith and faith alone’, as understood by the Protestant Reformers, and St Paul’s statement in Galatians 2:16: ‘Knowing that a man is not justified by the works of the law, but by the faith of Jesus Christ, even we have believed in Jesus Christ, that we might be justified by the faith of Christ, and not by the works of the law: for by the works of the law shall no flesh be justified.’

77 As president of the Oxford University Socratic Club, Lewis was present at its meeting on 10 November 1947 when Ronald Grimsley read a paper on ‘Existentialism’, later published in the Socratic Digest, no. 4 [1948], pp. 66-77.

78 Jean-Paul Sartre, L’Existentialisme est un Humanisme [Existentialism Is a Humanism] (1945).

79 On the philosophical theory of Bishop George Berkeley, see CL II, p. 703, n. 21.

80 On 3 November 1947 Lewis read a paper to the Socratic Club entitled ‘A First Glance at Sartre’. A brief summary of the paper, which was a critique of Sartre’s L’Existentialisme est un Humanisme, is found in Walter Hooper, ‘Oxford’s Bonny Fighter’, Remembering C. S. Lewis, pp. 160-1.

81 In his letter to Dom Bede Griffiths of 5 July 1949 (CL II, pp. 953-4), Lewis mentions hearing the French Catholic philosopher Gabriel Marcel (1889-1973) give a lecture to the Oxford University Socratic Club on 18 February 1948. ‘It is definitely not my philosophy,’ commented Lewis.

82 See Marcel’s ‘theism and personal relationships’ in Socratic Digest, No. 4, pp. 78-9.

83 In her note to this letter Bodle said: ‘I had received bad and completely unexpected news from home’ (Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. lett. c. 220/4, fol. 247).

84 Dr Firor had invited Lewis to spend a holiday with him at his cabin in the Rocky Mountains.

85 i.e., his responsibility for taking care of Mrs Moore.

86 While Lewis was preparing to spend a fortnight in Ireland with Arthur Greeves during the summer of 1949, Warnie went on a binge and the holiday was cancelled. See the letter to Greeves of 2 July 1949 (CL II, pp. 952-3).

87 William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra (1623), V, ii, 87-8.

88 George John Romanes (1848-94) was born in Canada and moved with his family to London in 1850. After reading Medicine and Physiology at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, he decided to devote his life to scientific research. This led to a lifelong friendship with Charles Darwin. Romanes was, at the same time, a man of strong religious convictions. In 1891 he provided for the Romanes Lectureship, the oldest and most famous of Oxford’s lectures. It is delivered once a year on a subject relating to science, art or literature. See Ethel Romanes, The Life and Letters of George John Romanes (1896). Lewis was asked to deliver the Romanes Lecture at the end of his life.

89 Mrs Maude M. McCaslin, wife of Alston Jones McCaslin, was writing from Europa, Mississippi.

90 ‘The Wood that Time Forgot’ is a novel by Roger Lancelyn Green. Although it was written before The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe it remains unpublished because it would seem to owe too much to Lewis’s Lion.

91 BF, p. 233.

92 See Arthur Greeves in the Biographical Appendix to CL I, pp. 993-6.

93 Matthew 6:28-30; Luke 12:27-8: ‘Consider the lilies how they grow: they toil not, they spin not; and yet I say unto you, that Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. If then God so clothe the grass, which is to day in the field, and tomorrow is cast into the oven; how much more will he clothe you, O ye of little faith?’

94 See Cecil Harwood in the Biographical Appendix to CL I (pp. 998-1000).

Harwood, one of Lewis’s oldest friends, was an anthroposophist and a teacher at Michael Hall School, Kidbrooke, Forest Row, East Sussex.

95 Virgil, Aeneid, II, 61: ‘prepared for either thing’.

96 In SB], ch. 13, p. 155, Harwood is described as ‘a pillar of Michael Hall’.

97 The Bellman was the captain of the ship in Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark (1876). In Fit the Second, stanzas 5-8, the Bellman persuades his crew that a blank sheet of paper makes an ideal chart of the open sea. ‘This was charming, no doubt: but they shortly found out/That the Captain they trusted so well/Had only one notion for crossing the ocean,/And that was to tingle his bell./…And the Bellman, perplexed and distressed,/Said he had hoped, at least, when the wind blew due East,/That the ship would not travel due West!’

98 Harwood had written to tell Lewis that his wife, Daphne, was dying of cancer.

99 Lewis had published a poem, ‘As One Oldster to Another’ under the pseudonym ‘N.W.’ in Punch, CCXVLII (15 March 1950), p. 295. Mr Dixey wrote to compliment him on his use of Alcaics, a four-line stanza using a predominantly dactylic metre named after the Greek poet, Alcaeus. A slightly revised version of the poem appears in Poems (1974) and CP.

100 Ernest H. Shepard (1879-1976), a cartoonist for Punch, illustrated ‘As One Oldster to Another’ and other of Lewis’s poems. Shepard also illustrated all A. A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh books.

101 In 1942 Lewis had Owen Barfield set up a charitable trust into which Lewis directed all his royalties. It was named ‘Agapony’ ‘or ‘Agapargyry’ or ‘The Agapargyrometer’ = love + money. The money was available for whoever might be in need, with preference given to widows and orphans. For details see CL II, p. 483.

102 While protecting Lewis’s confidentiality, Barfield devoted a chapter to the Agapony in his book This Ever Diverse Pair (1950).

103 Harwood had written to say that he had received some money from the Agapony fund.

104 See Stella Aldwinckle, founder of the Socratic Club, in the Biographical Appendix.

105 As president of the Oxford University Socratic Club, Lewis was suggesting in his letter to Aldwinckle a list of people she might ask to speak at the club, along with possible topics.

106 Gilbert Ryle (1900-76), philosopher, was Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy and Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, 1945-68.

107 Henry Habberley Price (1899-1984), philosopher, was educated at Winchester College and New College, Oxford, where he took a First in Classics in 1921. In 1924 he was elected a Fellow and lecturer in Philosophy at Trinity College, Oxford, where he remained until 1935. In that year he was elected Wykeham Professor of Logic and moved to New College where he remained until his retirement in 1959. He was a frequent speaker at the Socratic Club. See his biography in the Oxford DNB.

108 i.e., an admirer of Jean-Paul Sartre.

109 Francis Joseph ‘Frank’ Sheed (1897-1981), publisher and author, was born in Sydney, Australia, and read law at Sydney University, taking his BA in 1917. In 1920 he went to London where he came across the recently formed Catholic Evidence Guild, devoted to out-of-doors speaking to explain the teaching of the Roman Catholic Church. He was bowled over by the excitement of the Guild’s task, and he joined. There he met Mary ‘Maisie’ Josephine Ward (1889-1975), and they were married in 1926. That same year Frank and Maisie founded a publishing firm, Sheed and Ward. In 1933 they opened an office in New York, through which Sheed and Ward became the most influential Catholic publisher in the English-speaking world. Maisie died on 28 January 1975 and Frank on 20 November 1981.

110 Christopher Dawson (1889-1970), cultural historian, was born at Hay, Brecknockshire, on 12 October 1889 and educated at Winchester College and Trinity College, Oxford, taking his degree in 1911. He had sufficient means to be able to follow his own highly original path of historical research and reflection. His first book, The Age of the Gods (1928), was the result of fourteeen years of research. His second, Progress and Religion (1929), articulated the major theme of his subsequent writings, that religion is the dynamic of all social culture. The Making of Europe (1932) discussed a specific case of this, showing that the ‘dark ages’ were in fact the most creative period in the culture of the Western world. Dawson developed the topic further in his Gifford Lectures for Edinburgh University, Religion and Culture (1948), about which Lewis wrote to him on 27 September 1948 (see Supplement). Dawson became a Roman Catholic shortly after going down from Oxford and was an influential member of the group of writers which formed around the Catholic publishing house of Sheed and Ward. Dawson’s achievements were mainly overlooked by the academic world. He was eventually offered a chair in the United States at Harvard where he was Professor of Roman Catholic Studies, 1958-62. He died on 25 May 1970.