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

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СКАЧАТЬ bless you and send you many happy Easters. As for my part in it, remember that anybody (or any thing) may be used by the Holy Spirit as a conductor. I say this not so much from modesty as to guard against any danger of your feeling, when the shine goes out of my books (as it will) that the real thing is in any way involved. It mustn’t fade when I do.

      Yours sincerely

      C. S. Lewis

      

       TO RHONA BODLE (BOD):

      Magdalen College

      Oxford 12/4/50

      Dear Miss Bodle

I will indeed pray for you.⁸³ So often after a period of exaltation and comfort (such as, I think, you were having at Easter) round the very next corner something horrid lies in wait for us, either in ourselves or outside. I suppose the preceding comfort was sent, partly, to prepare us for the other: like (to use a crude simile) the rum-issue before the battle. Courage!

      Yours sincerely

      C. S. Lewis

      

       TO WARHELD M. FIROR(BOD):

      Magdalen etc

      14/4/50

      My dear Firor

What a vision!⁸⁴ Not that my attempts to ride and fish wd. give pleasure to anyone except the spectators (I don’t know, though. Perhaps the horse and the fish wd. find them mildly amusing) but I’d love walking in the sort of places where better men do ride and fish.

But it’s all visionary. I’ve told you what chains bind me to England.⁸⁵ If I can succeed in getting just over a fortnight away this summer (as I was prevented from doing last year)⁸⁶ I shall have realised more freedom than I have had since 1929. But I do get a real and strange pleasure out of the invitation. You are a fairy-tale character: your bounty (as Cleopatra says) is an autumn that grows the more by reaping.⁸⁷ (Autumn here, rather oddly, means harvest not the fall of the leaf). And I can’t understand why I should be selected for it all. However, this verges on a subject you have forbidden me.

Romanes has hitherto been to me more the name of a lecture than a man, by which I see I have done him a grave injustice.⁸⁸ (Odd that things left as the memorial of a man often in fact obliterate him like this). Have I confessed to you that an inability to read biography is one of my defects? Except Boswell, of course.

      I’ve a pile of letters this afternoon, and this is just a note of thanks and regrets. We’re all well, and frequently asking when that next visit of yours is to be looked for.

      All blessings.

      Yours,

      C. S. Lewis

      

TO MARY MARGARET MCCASLIN (W):⁸⁹ TS

      REF.50/188.

      Magdalen College,

      Oxford. 20th April 1950.

      Dear Mrs. McCaslin,

      Many thanks for your most kind and encouraging letter of the 17th. It gives me great pleasure to know that my books have been of some service to you.

      With all best wishes for the success of your work,

      yours sincerely,

      C. S. Lewis

      

       TO VERA MATHEWS (W): TS

      REF.50/81

      Magdalen College,

      Oxford. 22nd April 1950.

      My dear Miss Mathews,

      Your delightful parcel and the English spring arrived together this morning to supply badly needed cheer on the first day of Term: always a somewhat gloomy moment. From what I know of my native climate, the contents of the parcel will last longer than the fine weather.

      Our latest food news is that fish has been ‘decontrolled’ as official English has it: which means that one’s fishmonger can select what he wants instead of having to take what our rulers think is good for his customers. The immediate result was a huge increase in the price of the better kinds of fish, but things have since settled down, and now the prices are in many cases below pre-war.

      With many thanks for the huge parcel and all best wishes,

      yours sincerely,

      C. S. Lewis

      

       TO ROGER IANCELYN GREEN (BOD):

      Magdalen College

      Oxford 29/4/50

      Dear Roger–

I like it very much indeed: less haunting than the Wood that Time Forgot⁹⁰ but richer. There are about four alterations I will try to persuade you to make, three of them quite easy.

      Can you come & dine Thurs. May 11th to talk of that & other things?

      Yours

      Jack Lewis

Lewis’s friend, Mrs Janie King Moore–‘Minto’–was now 78. She had been bed-ridden for several years, and it had become impossible for Lewis to look after her. On 29 April 1950 she was moved to Restholme, the Oxford nursing home run by Dorothy Watson. Warnie wrote about Mrs Moore’s first day there, ‘The first news from Restholme is…[Minto’s] “very strong language”: and M wants to know how soon she will be able to escape from this hell on earth in which she is imprisoned. On the whole the outlook is as black as it well can be.’ ⁹¹

      But there Mrs Moore was to remain for the rest of her life, visited almost every day by Lewis.

TO ARTHUR GREEVES (BOD): ⁹²

      Magdalen College

      Oxford 2/5/50

      My dear Arthur

      Once СКАЧАТЬ