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

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What helps you in Theocritus hinders me, and in the Georgics too: i.e. when I’ve looked up the vegetables in the Lexicon, I don’t know the English any better than the Greek. The equation ‘γλώε,’²⁰⁹ the lesser mud-wort, fangoleum paludis’, is to me a = b where both are unknown. Not that I don’t enjoy the vegetables when I meet them in the cool, green flesh: but each individual is new to me each time. Heroic books–is this yours? And for a ‘work in progress’? It is obviously some poet’s prose, sweet on the tongue. I feel that about the poet being a Parthian too: but am not quite sure whether it doesn’t come from living in an un-poetical age when the poet is perilously near being ‘vestigial’. Did people feel that way about Virgil or Firdausi?²¹⁰ (Here have been interrupted for an hour by an elderly lady asking moral advice!).

I hope you had a nice time with the Duchess.²¹¹ Shd. I like her poetry? I don’t know it. My brother joins me in all good wishes and I must go to lunch. My humble duty, Ma’am

      Yours very sincerely

      C. S. Lewis

      

       TO GEORGE SAYER (W):

      Magdalen College

      Oxford Dec 30. 50

      My dear George

      What dears you both are: but a ruddy fellowship exam will keep me immobilised right up till term. Thanks all the same. Can you come up for a night any time after our term begins (Jan 13)?

MS rec’d safely. Yes, la belle Baynes²¹² will do the lot: Magnae virtutes nee minora vítía.²¹³ Her Mouse is one of her best beasts, however.

      No, I don’t wish a cheque! You have both been much in oratíoníbus nostris. Name your night & do come.

      Jack

1 See Roger Lancelyn Green in the Biographical Appendix to CL II, pp. 1039-43. Green was the primary reader and critic of Lewis’s Narnian stories.

2 For information about the writing of the Narnian stories see Roger Lancelyn Green and Walter Hooper, C. S. Lewis: A Biography (London: Bles, 1974; rev. edn HarperCollins, 2002), ch. 11.

3 This is a letter of reference for Lewis’s former pupil, lonathan Francis ‘Frank’ Goodridge, whose biography appears in CL II, p. 936n. Goodridge was applying for the position of Senior Lecturer in English at St Mary’s College, Strawberry Hill, Twickenham, London. He taught at St Mary’s College, 1950-65. See Goodridge’s comments on this testimonial in CSL: The Bulletin of the New York C. S. Lewis Society, Whole No. 75 (Ian. 1976), p. 13.

4 This is one of those occasions on which Lewis misspelled his pupil’s name.

5 This was the Oxford University Socratic Club, founded in 1941 by Stella Aldwinckle with Lewis as its first president. See Stella Aldwinckle in the Biographical Appendix. The club’s purpose was to discuss the pros and cons of Christianity, and it met weekly during term-time. Goodridge was secretary of the Socratic Club, 1947-8. For a history of the club see Walter Hooper, ‘Oxford’s Bonny Fighter’ in Remembering C. S. Lewis: Recollections of Those Who Knew Him, ed. James T. Como (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2005). This book was previously published as C. S. Lewis at the Breakfast Table (1979; new edn, 1992).

6 See the biography of George Rostrevor Hamilton in CL II, p. 707n.

7 Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus), Satires, II, vi, 65: ‘O nights and suppers of gods!’ Horace (65-8 BC) was one of the greatest of the Roman poets.

8 Claudian, De Raptu Proserpinae, II, 282-3: ‘There are other stars for us.’ Pluto speaks the phrase, attempting to calm Persephone’s weeping, telling her that he is a person of importance and that there is an upside to being in the underworld.

9 The word planta– ‘a young tree’–appears in Virgil, Georgia, II, 23.

10 See Owen Barfield in the Biographical Appendix to CL I, pp. 979-82. Barfield was one of Lewis’s oldest friends and also his lawyer.

11 ‘ritual’.

12 John Masefield (1878-1967), Poet Laureate 1930-67.

13 See the biography of Nathan Comfort Starr, Professor of English at the University of Florida in Gainesville, in CL II, p. 809n. His essay on Lewis, ‘Good Cheer and Sustenance’, appears in Remembering C. S. Lewis.

14 Lewis’s group of friends, the Inklings, met regularly every Tuesday morning in the Eagle and Child (‘Bird and Baby’) pub in St Giles.

15 p.p. See Abbreviations.

16 Sarah Neylan (later Tisdall) was Lewis’s eleven-year-old goddaughter. See Mary Neylan in the Biographical Appendix to CL II, pp. 1054-5.

17 Rhona Bodle, from New Zealand, arrived in England in 1947 to study the education of deaf children. That same year she began teaching at Oakdene School for girls in Burgess Hill, Sussex. In December 1947 she began reading Lewis’s Broadcast Talks (London: Bles, 1942) and this led her to write to him. She became a Christian in 1949. See her biography in CL II, p. 823n. Her notes to Lewis’s letters are in the Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. lett. c. 200/4.

18 See Charles Walter Stansby Williams (1886-1945) in the Biographical Appendix to CL II, pp. 1081-6.

19 Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene (1590, 1596), I, xi, 45, 6: ‘It chaunst (eternal God that chaunce did guide)’.

20 See Sister Penelope CSMV in the Biographical Appendix to CL II, pp. 1055-9.

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