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

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      C. S. Lewis

      

TO CHRISTIAN HARDIE (P): ³⁵

      Magdalen etc

      22/3/51

      Dear Christian

Your commands have been obeyed.³⁶ About half way through, not having yet met a single scene or character that thoroughly engaged my interest, I nearly gave up: but perseverance was rewarded, for the second half is better. One forgives Julia quite a lot for her outburst on p 255 about Charles’s ‘damned bounderish way’.

Waugh is a writer, certainly. Many descriptions, phrases, and long-tailed similes pleased me: but not the novel, as a novel. If one’s going to tell the story through one of the characters then, surely, either that character ought to be a fairly sane and straightforward one (as in Erewhon³⁷ or Rob Roy),³⁸ or else, if he’s a monstrosity, then the other characters ought to be normal (as in Hogg’s Justified Sinner³⁹ or McKenna’s Well Meaning Woman).⁴⁰

As Chesterton said, you can have a story about a knight among dragons, but not about a dragon among dragons.⁴¹ Or, to come nearer, I can manage humans seen in a distorting mirror or goblins seen in an ordinary mirror: but goblins in a distorting mirror is too much. In spite of clear distinctions, the narrator is so very much ‘the same kind of thing’ as Blanche & Sebastian and his own father & Ld. M, and all the others—the tiresome seen through the eyes of the tiresome. And Sebastian would be a terrible bore on any terms. The narrator’s spontaneous dislike [of] all nice people (e.g. old Lady M. or Ld. Brideshead) has, I suppose, a theological significance?

But apart from all this—what, please, ought I now to know about the ‘contemporary scene’ after reading it? His picture of undergraduate life is, I suspect, much more characteristic of 1912 than of 1923: but for obvious reasons cd. not be really characteristic of any period. Not even characteristic within the circles he describes: for though I didn’t know them, I do know that if I did they wouldn’t look at all like that to me–any more than the circles I do know consist solely of Hoopers.⁴² Julia’s excellent remark about Mottram on p. 277 (‘He was a tiny bit of one’) seems to me true of all the characters except Julia herself. There isn’t one that is round and live like Levin⁴³ or the Rostovs,⁴⁴ or Archdeacon Grantly,⁴⁵ or Ld. Monmouth in Coningsby.⁴⁶ They’re more like people out of an Oscar Wilde melodrama, only without the epigrams.

Am I missing the point? Haunted by that fear I asked a man so young that W is to him an old master what he had got out of the book. He said ‘Oh, snob-value: it delighted the housemaid in me’ (i.e. he got out of it the same sort of pleasure my generation got out of Benson—I mean the Dodo one).⁴⁷ But that can’t be why you admire it. Nor can you think that ‘the contemporary scene’ is just what W describes: because after all we have independent access (worse luck!) to that scene. I’m puzzled.

      You shall prescribe me a book to read every Lent: a kind of literary hair shirt.

      You gave me a charming interlude on Tuesday—a bit of ‘contemporary scene’ quite omitted by W.!

      Yours

      Jack

      

       TO ARTHUR GREEVES (BOD):

      [The Kilns]

      23/3/51

      My dear Arthur

Naturally, without a Co. Down Ry.⁴⁸ time-table I can’t tell you what time I’d be at Helen’s Bay! But we shall find better uses for your petrol, and I’ll come by bus from Oxford St. I’m glad to know there’s a ‘regular’ service and am wondering whether it runs regularly every 5 minutes, every hour, once a week, or only a century.⁴⁹ No doubt I shall find out.

      Looking forward!–yes, I can’t keep the feeling within bounds. I know now how a bottle of champagne feels while the wire is being taken off the cork.

      Yours

      Jack

      Pop!!

      

TO DOUGLAS EDISON HARDING (P): ⁵⁰

      Magdalen etc

      Easter Day [25 March] 1951

      Dear Mr. Harding

Hang it all, you’ve made me drunk, roaring drunk as I haven’t been on a book (I mean, a book of doctrine: imaginative works are another matter) since I first read Bergson during World War I.⁵¹ Who or what are you? How have you lived 40 years without my hearing of you before? Understand at once that my delight is not, alas!, so significant as it may seem, for I was never a scientist and have long ceased to be even the very minor philosopher I once was.

A great deal of your book is completely beyond me. My opinion is of no value. But my sensation is that you have written a work of the highest genius. It may not be—I mean, I can’t vouch that it is–philosophical genius. It may be only literary genius. The feeling I get is like a mix up of Pindar, Dante, & Patmore. (But can anything be so well written if it’s not good thought as well?). You follow the rocket course wh. you ascribe to Tellus.⁵² Paragraph after paragraph starts as if we were embarked for only the sort of Pantheistic uplift one gets in Emerson, but then swoops down and comes all clean & hard. But remember always, I don’t really understand: especially the crucial cap. 13 wh. is no easier than the Deduction of the Categories. (One difficulty is that my excitement makes me read it too quickly).

One criticism. Somebody is sure to answer the Missing Head gambit by saying that it wd. have no meaning for a blind man who knew the world and himself by palpation instead of vision.⁵³ My head is just as feelable (tho’ not as visible) as the rest of me. In other words, they’ll say, you have merely tripped over the fact that the eyes are in the Head. I’m sure this objection misses the real point: but had it not better be СКАЧАТЬ