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

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СКАЧАТЬ a couple of confirmed old batchelors, sharing a rather nice house with an eight acre garden in the suburbs.

      And now I really must stop, with all good wishes to you and Edward,

      Yours sincerely,

      C. S. Lewis

      

TO RHONA BODLE (BOD): ¹⁴⁷

      Magdalen College

      Oxford Sept 7th 50

      Dear Miss Bodle

      The question ‘Is it better to live in cramped quarters with sister and Aunt-step-mother and bad prospects or to be uprooted and begin a new life elsewhere?’ immediately provokes the other question ‘Better for whom?‘

      In other words it all turns on the actual character of, and relations between, Gertrude and Franzel. One can imagine a sort of home life wh. was worth clinging to at all costs, or one wh. was worth escaping from at all costs: and (troublesomely) the chances are that this home-life is between the two extremes. Now you hardly know enough to decide, and of course I know nothing. Mustn’t Franzel and Gertrude make the decision? Especially Franzel.

      My own immediate feeling is that the uprooting wd. on the whole be the best thing for now. After all, what with jobs and marriage and one thing and another, most boys get pretty well uprooted anyway. But I think you can only offer, pray, and wait for their decision. Of course I can’t ‘see F’s point of view’. Boys are no more like one another than anyone else! With all good wishes.

      Yours sincerely

      C. S. Lewis

      

TO DON LUIGI PEDROLLO (V): ¹⁴⁸

      Magdalen College,

      Oxford. Sept. 12, 1950

      Reverende Pater

      Contristatus sum audita dilecti D. J. Calabriae valetudine. Placeat Domino nostro diutius servare nobis ‘tam carum caput’. De nugis meis, mi crede, non scripsissem si putavissem virum aegritudine teneri: quo fit ut importunior esse viderer. Attamen quodcumque est libelli mitto. Saluta pro me D. J. Calabria: quem, cum tota domo vestra, benedicat benedictus Jesus Christus. Vale

      C. S. Lewis

      

      *

      Magdalen College,

      Oxford. Sept. 12, 1950

      Reverend Father,

I am very sorry to hear of dear Fr. G. Calabria’s illness.¹⁴⁹ May it please our Lord to preserve ‘tam carum caput’¹⁵⁰ longer. Believe me, had I known he was unwell, I would not have written about my trifles, which may have seemed rather untimely. Anyway, I am sending the book, just in case. Give my regards to Fr. G. Calabria: may the blessed Christ bless him, and all of your house. Farewell

      C. S. Lewis

      

       TO VERA MATHEWS (W): TS

      REF.50/81

      Magdalen College,

      Oxford. 20th September 1950.

      Dear Miss Mathews,

      To receive one of your kind gifts produces a perceptible lightening of the gloom which descends on an elderly tutor when he realizes that he is on the verge of beginning yet another term. Many thanks for your unwearying attentions. The parcel which has just arrived is that numbered 2999, posted at Beverly Hills on 14th. August.

      This however is perhaps not the time to be gloomy, for if our domestic news has little in it to cheer us, at least the world situation is distinctly better. We are all following anxiously the despatches from Korea; they are not very informative, but it does seem as if the tide had really turned in your favour at last. (One should I suppose, to be pedantic, say in U.N.O.’s favour, but it seems rather absurd to call a ninety per cent American army the ‘UNO Army’). What surprises me most about the whole war is the extraordinary fighting qualities of the Koreans; I’d never heard of them as soldiers before the outbreak of this trouble, and my brother tells me that in his time in the East, they were regarded as primitive agricultural nonentitites. Even allowing for their immensely superior number, they appear to be putting up a remarkable show.

      Of home politics the less said the better; you may have seen that we have chosen this period of rearmament of all possible periods to nationalize the steel industry–apparently against the wishes of the Steel masters, and of the Trades Union leaders concerned. But enough of this.

      After one of the worst summers on record, we are entering upon what looks like a wet autumn, and one either carries a raincoat on hot, fine days, or goes out without it and gets soaked. Still, the country is looking lovely, and autumn is my favourite season. My brother and I took a day off last week, put sandwiches in our pockets, and tramped sixteen miles or more along the old Roman road–now a mere track–which runs from Dorchester Abbey to Oxford. Foreigners are apt to think of this island, I find, as just one huge factory site. But you would be surprised if you could see the unspoilt beauty and charm which can still be found, even in the purely industrial areas: and here, within a few miles of Morris Motors, there are plenty of villages off the main highways, where nothing seems to have happened for the last two hundred years or so.

I hope to send you the autographed children’s book by Christmas, but will probably know more about its progress this afternoon, as I am going out to lunch with my publisher¹⁵¹ in the Cotswold village of Burford, where he is on holiday.

      With many thanks, and all good wishes to you and your father,

      yours sincerely,

      C. S. Lewis

      

TO ANNE RIDLER(BOD): ¹⁵²

      Magdalen College

      Oxford 25/9/50

      Dear Miss Ridler–

5 minutes after yr. departure I was kicking myself to having let you go without getting either yr. real name or yr. address. Well, I now have at any rate the address. No, no, I never confused you with R.P.¹⁵³ And don’t you go looking down your nose at her poetry neither. The earlier vols (not the late, comic ones wh. are not to my taste) contain surely v. choice work. Do try them again in a favourable hour.

Thanks for the C.W.¹⁵⁴ sonnet which, I agree, is good & characteristic СКАЧАТЬ