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

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      You’ll have fun with Lucretius. I looked into him the other day & came to the melancholy conclusion that I didn’t know so much Latin as I had done 30 years ago. With all good wishes.

      Yours very sincerely,

      C. S. Lewis

      

TO DOROTHY L. SAYERS (W): ²⁴⁰

      Magdalen College

      Oxford Dec 16th. 1953

      Dear Miss Sayers,

Thank you for a really august card. I have spent several minutes doing the Paper Pilgrimage with the aid of the pen-knife point–dig- and it shall be opened. Not all the doors in my copy do actually open: but that admits (only too easily) of an allegorical interpretation.²⁴¹

I see we have been in the pillory together along with company which I enjoy less than yours. Have you read Miss Nott yet?²⁴² And should I? I had hoped she might send us all (as someone said) UN complimentary copies: for I’m an Ulster Scot and don’t like spending good siller²⁴³ on the lady. As for answering her (if one can) the trouble is that the people who read answers have hardly ever read the attack.

When may we expect the Purgatorio?²⁴⁴ It is perhaps my favourite part of the Comedy and I look forward very much to going up and round the terraces with your guidance. (By the way some of the paths on the Malvern hills are exactly like them.

      I hope you are reading my brother’s Splendid Century. It is his first book, tho’ he is three years my senior, but he has been at the court of Louis XIV pretty well all his life. It seems to be going down well. I have got my huge 16th. c volume for the Oxford History of English Literature nearly off my chest now, and feel inclined never to do any work again as long as I live.

      It seems very long since we met. Are you at all likely to be here in 1954? I hope so. In the meantime, all good wishes, all my duty,

      yours ever

      C. S. Lewis

      Lewis invited Joy and her sons to The Kilns for a three-day visit, from 17 to 20 December. Renée Pierce had now divorced her husband, Claude, preparatory to marrying Bill Gresham.

       TO PHYLLIDA (W):

      Magdalen College

      Oxford Dec 18th 53

      Dear Phyllida

      Thanks for your most interesting cards. How do you get the gold so good? Whenever I tried to use it, however golden it looked on the shell, it always looked only like rough brown on the paper. Is it that you have some trick with the brush that I never learned, or that gold paint is better now than when I was a boy? The ‘conversation-piece’ (I think that is what the art critics wd. call your group) is excellent and most interesting. If you hadn’t told me your Father was mixing putty I shd. have thought he was mixing colours on a palette, but otherwise everything explains itself. I never saw a family who all had such a likeness to their Mother.

      I’m not quite sure what you meant about ‘silly adventure stories without any point’. If they are silly, then having a point won’t save them. But if they are good in themselves, and if by a ‘point’ you mean some truth about the real world wh. one can take out of the story, I’m not sure that I agree. At least, I think that looking for a ‘point’ in that sense may prevent one from getting the real effect of the story in itself–like listening too hard for the words in singing which isn’t meant to be listened to that way (like an anthem in a chorus). I’m not at all sure about all this, mind you: only thinking as I go along.

We have two American boys in the house at present, aged 8 and 61/2.²⁴⁵ Very nice. They seem to use much longer words than English boys of that age would: not showing off but just because they don’t seem to know the short words. But they haven’t as good table manners as English boys of the same sort would.

      Well–all good wishes to you all for Christmas, and very many thanks.

      Yours

      C. S. Lewis

      PS. Of course you’re right about the Narnian books being better than the tracts: at least, in the way a picture is better than a map.

      

       TO LAURENCE HARWOOD (BOD):

      Magdalen College

      Oxford Dec 21st 1953

      My dear Lawrence,

      What luck now? I enclose a trifle for current expenses. Please tell your father how sorry I was I couldn’t have him for either of the two days he mentioned: we have had an American lady staying in the house with her two sons, eldest 91/2 Whew! But you have younger brothers, so you know what it is like. We didn’t: we do now. Very pleasant, but like surf bathing, leaves one rather breathless. Love to yourself and Sylvia and all.

      Yours ever

      C. S. Lewis

      Millions of letters to write.

      

       TO RUTH PITTER(BOD):

      Magdalen College

      Oxford Dec 21st 53

      My dear Ruth

Welcome to what Tolkien calls the Little Kingdom, at least to the marches of it. Its centre lies about Worminghall: see his Farmer Giles of Ham.²⁴⁶ I hope much happiness awaits you there. It will be interesting to see how soon you rusticate–grow slow-witted like us and believe that the streets of Thame (now your metropolis) are paved with gold and shiver delightfully at the thought of its mingled wickedness and splendour.

      Warnie (short for Warren, for my mother’s mother was of that stock so we have ¼ of gentle blood in us the rest being peasant and bourgeois) and I are dazed: we have had an American lady staying in the house with her two sons aged 91/2 and 8. I now know what we celibates are shielded from. I will never laugh at parents again. Not that the boys weren’t a delight: but a delight like surf-bathing which leaves one breathless and aching. The energy, the tempo, is what kills. I have now perceived (what I always suspected from memories of our childhood) that the way to a child’s heart is quite simple: treat them with seriousness & ordinary civility–they ask no more. What they can’t stand (quite rightly) is the common adult assumption that everything they say shd. be twisted into a kind of jocularity. The mother (Mrs. Gresham) had rather a boom in USA in the entre-guerre as the poetess Joy Davidman: do you know СКАЧАТЬ