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

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      I can go to Crendon with v. little main-road, but at the moment I have (dooced¹⁴ gentlemanly complaint, what?) gout! There’s glory for you!¹⁵ If that’s not grown up (I beg their pardon, adult is the word, now) I’d like to know what is. You’re sure to have to come to Oxford one day, aren’t you? Dentist? Bookshop? Bodleian? Let me know and let us lunch together. On provenance, I always thought the Pitters (diespiter¹⁶ and all that) descended from love, probably through Aeneas¹⁷ and Brute.¹⁸ My doctor’s wife, who died a few years ago,¹⁹ came in right line from Cerdic,²⁰ hence from Odin. So of course does H.M.²¹ ‘In every way we are sprung of earth’s best blood, have titles manifold’.²² Have you read Vincent Benét’s (inspired) Western Star? Better than John Browns Body which I thought good.

      A very happy New Year,

      Yours

      Jack

      

       TO MRS D. JESSUP (W):

      Magdalen College,

      Oxford. Jan 5th 1954

      Dear Mrs. Jessup

      Oh I am sorry. How dreadful. I don’t know to which of you my sympathy goes out most. Your share is, however, easier to imagine, for I know what it’s like to have to be the comforter when one most needs comforting, and the competent arranger at the v. moment when one feels most disabled.

      I don’t know whether anything an outsider can say is much use; and you know already the things we have been taught–that suffering can (but oh!, with what difficulty) be offered to God as our part in the whole redemptive suffering of the world beginning with Christ’s own suffering: that suffering by itself does not fester or poison, but resentment does; that sufferings which (heaven knows) fell on us without and against our will can be so taken that they are as saving and purifying as the voluntary sufferings of martyrs & ascetics.

      And it is all true, and it is so hard to go on believing it. Especially as the dark time in which you are now entering (I’ve tried it; my own life really begins with my Mother’s illness & death from cancer when I was about 9) is split up into so many minor horrors and fears and upsets, some of them trivial & prosaic.

      May God support you. Keep a firm hold of the Cross. And try to keep clear of the modern fancy that all this is abnormal & that you have been singled out for something outrageous. For no one escapes. We are all driven into the front line to be sorted sooner or later. With all blessings & with deep sorrow.

      Yours

      C. S. Lewis

      

       TO GEORGE AND MOIRA SAYER(W):

      Magdalen College

      Oxford Jan 8, 1954

      My dear George and Moira

      What a lifeline you both are–’bless’d pair of Sirenes’.²³ It was a very minor operation, done under gas, the lancing of an inflamed ‘sebaceous cyst’, tho’ there might be a slightly bigger one (excision of said cyst) later. But I have to have daily dressings, and the penicillin with which they’ve filled me up with leaves me never really quite awake. Distinguish sebaceous from Herbacious, lest the latter lead you to think there has been a revolt of my Vegetable Soul. (Why does one feel less shame at surrendering to the Vegetable in oneself than to the Animal?). Sebum appears to be the source of Fat, the Vis pinguifica. I suppose I am now so fat in the ordinary way that the V.P. has to seek fresh outlets. Staying with you wd. hardly be the right treatment: not that I wouldn’t come (and a plague on treatment) if I was mobile. But only thanks and longings can go.

      Talking of new romances have you both read Arthur Clark’s Childhood’s End?. A great tragic myth. And has Tolkien sent you proofs of The Fellowship of the Ring? And is The Isle of the Undead finished?

      Congratulations on your new H.M.²⁴ It is nice to find that the Enemy sometimes commits blunders too.

      A thousand thanks & blessings from

      Yours

       Aeterno devinctus amore ²⁵

      Jack

      

       TO BELLE ALLEN (L):

      [Magdalen College]

      Jan 9th ’54

      Dear Mrs Allen.

      Thank you for your nice woody and earthy (almost like Thoreau or Dorothy Wordsworth) letter of the 6th. I think I go with you in preferring trees to flowers in the sense that if I had to live in a world without one or the other I’d choose to keep the trees. I certainly prefer tree-like people to flower-like people–the staunch and knotty and storm-enduring to the frilly and fragrant and easily withered…

      I think what makes even beautiful country (in the long run) so unsatisfactory when seen from a train or a car is that it whirls each tree, brook, or haystack close up into the foreground, soliciting individual attention but vanishing before you can give it…Didn’t someone give a similar explanation of the weariness we feel in a crowd where we can’t help seeing individual faces but can do no more than see them so that (he said) ‘it is like being forced to read the first page, but no more, of a hundred books in succession’?…

       TO SARAH NEYIAN (T):

      Magdalen College,

      Oxford. 16/i/54

      My dear Sarah

      Thanks for your most interesting letter. It sounds as if you were having a much nicer time at school than most of us remember having, and if you reply ‘I should hope so too’, well, I can’t agree with you more. I particularly envy you having half a pony and learning to ride. I can’t, but I love the sight and sound and smell and feel of a horse and v. much wish that I could. I’d sooner have a nice, thickset, steady-going cob that knew me & that I knew how to ride than all the cars and private planes in the world.

      I’ve been reading Pride and Prejudice²⁶ on and off all my life and it doesn’t wear out a bit. Lamb, too. You’ll find his letters²⁷ as good as his essays: indeed they are almost exactly the same, only more of it.

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