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

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СКАЧАТЬ very much what a Hross is like but a bit too fat. And I don’t know who did the one of the Prince fighting the Serpent: but it’s a fine snaky snake. (I was born in Holy Ireland where there are no snakes because, as you know, St. Patrick sent them all away.) And I think Nicholas’s picture of the Prince and Jill and the Chair very good–especially the Prince’s legs, for legs aren’t too easy to draw, are they? Noelie’s White Witch is superb!–just as proud and wicked as I meant her to be. And Nicholas’s other one of the L., the W, and the W (I can’t write it all out!) is a nice deep picture, going away into the distance. Thank you all.

      I have done lots of dish-washing in my time and I have often been read to, but I never thought of your very sensible idea of doing both together. How many plates do you smash in a month?

      There is no snow here yet and it is so warm that the foolish snowdrops and celandines (little yellow flowers; I don’t know if you have them or not) are coming up as if it was spring. And squirrels (we have hundreds and thousands about this college) have never gone to bed for their winter sleep at all. I keep on warning them that they really ought to and that they’ll be dreadfully sleepy (yawning their heads off) by June if they don’t, but they take no notice.

      You are a fine big family! I shd. think your mother sometimes feels like the Old-Woman-who-lived-in-a-shoe (you know that rhyme?). I’m so glad you like the books. The next one, The Horse and His Boy will be out quite soon. There are to be 7 altogether. Lots of love.

      Yours ever

      C. S. Lewis

      

      TO MARY VAN DEUSEN (W): TS 54/70.

      Magdalen College,

      Oxford. 25th January 1954.

      Dear Mrs. Van Deusen,

      All presents–or nearly all presents–are welcome, but how rarely does it happen that just exactly the right one arrives at the right moment. Stationary is an article of which there is a constant and acute shortage in these rooms, and you have plugged the gap which would have occurred tomorrow morning. Thank you very much.

      Winter has at last come to these islands, and an encouraging observation from the weather people that conditions now are identical with those in late January 1947, when we began the new year with fifty five days of continuous frost, burst pipes, fuel famine, and all the rest of it. It’s a queer thing that nothing will convince us English that we have extremes of weather, like other people; our whole set-up is based on the assumption that the weather will be mild and wet for most of the year, and either a hot or a cold spell always takes us by surprise.

      I hope all goes well with you. With best wishes,

      yours sincerely,

      C. S. Lewis

      

       TO HERBERT PALMER (TEX): PC

      Magdalen College,

      Oxford. 25/i/54

      Your presence was one of my reasons for coming to the Do on March 2nd.⁵⁹ Yes, do spend the night here. But I can’t ask you to dine for I’m committed to dining with Thwaite.⁶⁰ Surely they have asked you to dinner too?

      The poetical situation seems to me still without one spark of hope. And the cunning devils are now translating Virgil & Sophocles into the modern style so as [to] make people believe that poetry always was the same sort of muck it is now.⁶¹ And some of the worst are schoolmasters & boys [who] are being brought up on the muck: so that it won’t be ‘all the same 100 years hence’.

      C.S.L.

      

       TO RUTH PITTER(BOD):

      Magdalen College

      Oxford 26/i/54

      Bravissima! Unless I hear to the contrary I shall assume that you will meet me in the lounge of the Eastgate Hotel (nearly opposite College) at 1 o’clock on Monday Feb 1st.

      J. ⁶²

       TO DOROTHY L. SAYERS (W): ⁶³

      Magdalen College,

      Oxford. Jan 26/54

      Dear Miss Sayers

      But how good! Will you come and lunch at 1.15 on Thurs Feb 18th?

      Yours very sincerely

      C. S. Lewis

      

       TO ARTHUR C. CLARKE (BOD):

      Magdalen College,

      Oxford. Jan 26/54

      Dear Clarke,

      Human interest, yes. But that is inevitably present if the fears and hopes and wonders of the astronauts are vividly realised–e.g. as in Bedford & Cavor on the Moon⁶⁴ or even Crusoe on the island.⁶⁵ And an author who can’t do that won’t mend matters by dragging in Crooks, Crutches, or Conspiracies: for the sort of story he drags in will be just as lacking in Human interest as his space story.

      About ‘escapism’, never let that flea stick in your ear. I was liberated from it once & for all when a friend said ‘These critics are v. sensitive to the least hint of Escape. Now what class of men wd. one expect to be thus worked-up about Escape?–Jailers! Turn-key critics: people who want to keep the world in some ideological prison because a glimpse at any remote prospect wd. make their stuff seem less exclusively important.

      Fantasy & S-F. is by miles the best.⁶⁶ Some of the most serious satire of our age appears in it. What is called ‘serious’ literature now–Dylan Thomas & Pound and all that–is really the most frivolous. All the best.

      Yours

      C. S. Lewis

      

       TO MARY VAN DEUSEN (W):

      Magdalen College,

      Oxford. 26/i/54

      Dear Mrs. Van Deusen

      Thanks for your letter of Jan 20 and also (v. much) for the most useful stationary: the thing I needed most.

      I quite agree that God ‘takes a text’ much more forcibly in the general behaviour of a bad priest than in a bad sermon, wh. is, in comparison, a trifle. You seem, if I may say so, to be taking the treatment well! Finding (as Shakespeare ought to have said) ‘sermons in prigs, СКАЧАТЬ