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

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ

      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).

      The ‘Antiparody’ (a word we need) of the Lord’s Prayer in Star Dummy was very fine.

      Thank you v. much for the year of F & S F. I hope there will be plenty of your work in it.

If you are ever in England or I in U.S.A. we must most certainly meet and split a CH³ CH² OH together. Urendi Maleldil.³⁷

      Yours

      C. S. Lewis

       СКАЧАТЬ