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

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СКАЧАТЬ is the sort of small touch that counts in international relations.

Apropos of which, it seems a pity that our Queen could’nt have dropped in on America in the course of her tour; but I suppose international etiquette demands that, if she went there at all, it must be a full-dress state visit to Washington. Anyway I suppose a visit to the Republic of Panama is to all intents and purposes a visit to U.S.A.²²⁸

      I am in the final agonies of producing a learned work for the Oxford Press, and very, very busy: so I hope you will excuse such a scanty letter.

      With all best wishes to all three of you from us two,

yours ever,²²⁹

TO SIR STANLEY UNWIN (BOD): ²³⁰

      Magdalen College

      Oxford Dec 4th 1953

      Dear Mr. Unwin

      I would willingly do all in my power to secure for Tolkien’s great book the recognition it deserves. Wd. the enclosed be any use? If not, tell me, and I will try again. I can’t tell you how much we think of your House for publishing it.

      Yours sincerely

      C. S. Lewis

      It would be almost safe to say that no book like this has ever been written. If Ariosto rivalled it in invention (in fact he does not) he would still Jack its heroic seriousness. No imaginary world has been projected which is at once so multifarious and so true to its own inner laws; none so seemingly objective, so disinfected from the taint of an author’s merely individual psychology; none so relevant to the actual human situation yet so free from allegory. And what fine shading there is in the variations of style to meet the almost endless diversity of scenes and characters–comic, homely, epic, monstrous, or diabolic!

      

       TO KATHARINE FARRER(BOD):

      Magdalen College

      Oxford Dec. 4th 1953

      Dear Mrs. Farrer

Yes, I know. That issue about the leonine form divides people sharply and you and I are on opposite sides of a fence.²³¹

      I too have got The Fellowship of the Ring and have gluttonously read two chapters instead of saving it all for the week-end. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if it really succeeded (in selling, I mean)? It would inaugurate a new age. Dare we hope?

      Yours sincerely

      Jack Lewis

      

       TO J. R R TOLKIEN (P):

      [The Kilns]

      Dec 7th 1953

      Dear Tollers

I have been trying–like a boy with a bit of toffee–to take Vol. I slowly, to make it last, but appetite overmastered me and it’s now finished: far too short for me. The spell does not break. The love of Gimli²³² and the departure from Lothlórien is still almost unbearable.²³³ What came out stronger at this reading than on any previous one was the gradual coming of the shadow–step by step–over Boromir.²³⁴

I wrote what I could to Unwin.²³⁵ Even if he and you approve my words, think twice before using them: I am certainly a much, and perhaps an increasingly, hated man whose name might do you more harm than good. In festina lente.²³⁶ All the best.

      Yours

      Jack

      

      TO EDNA GREENE WATSON (BOD): TS 504/53.

      Magdalen College,

      Oxford. 7th December 1953.

      Dear Mrs. Watson,

      How very kind indeed of you to send me such a nice Xmas present; for, though things are improving over here under Winston, we are still not exactly living in a land of milk and honey–cake in particular remaining something of a luxury. So your parcel comes in very apropos to ‘mend our cheer’ as the older writers would have put it.

      In one way we are exceptionally lucky this year, and that is in having so far a freak winter. I am writing in an unwarmed room, temperature 60, though it is a dull, sunless day; and the Sunday before last, the crowds were out sun-bathing on Brighton beach! Yesterday it was reported on the wireless that the butter-cups are out in Switzerland, the tulips in Holland, and that wild strawberries are being gathered in Norway; whilst in Petrograd they are having what I suppose seems to them like a heat wave–temperature in the open, 41. I hope you too in America are benefiting by this postponement of winter; not that I, personally, think it very healthy, but no doubt the real winter is lurking not far away.

      Weather apart, there is not much to report here. Term is just over, and I have finished a troublesome academic book, and look forward to my vacation. But, alas, at my time of life, vacations get shorter and shorter: though to be sure, so do terms. With all best wishes for a happy Christmas, and many thanks,

      yours sincerely,

      C. S. Lewis

      

       TO R. B. GRIBBON (W):

      Magdalen College

      Oxford Dec. 10th 1953

      Dear Mr. Gribbon

Thanks for your letter of the 7th, and all good wishes to the readers of Lucretius.²³⁷

Harding has fought his way towards genuinely Christian Theism, but whether he has yet quite reached it is another matter.²³⁸ I think his ‘God’ could be said to ‘transcend’. Isn’t each being in his hierarchy related to the one below it rather as my consciousness is related to any obscure consciousness there may be in my particles. And ‘I’ am not related to them (I think) simply as a Pantheistic god is to finite beings: for I am something v. much more than their sum or even their organising principle. Of course H’s God is immanent in all things: but it is not the affirmation of immanence, but the denial of transcendence that constitutes Pantheism. In fact my main objection to Harding’s system wd. be a v. different one: that we are in it completely cut off from God. There can be no I-Thou relation between Him and us any more than between me and my particles. Memo: I said in the preface that I wasn’t at all sure whether his method СКАЧАТЬ