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

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СКАЧАТЬ other hand, out of the mouths of babes:¹⁶⁴ indeed, as once to Balaam, out of the mouth of an ass!)¹⁶⁵ It is this: you write much about your own sins. Beware (permit me, my dearest Father, to say beware) lest humility should pass over into anxiety or sadness. It is bidden us to ‘rejoice and always rejoice’.¹⁶⁶ lesus has cancelled the handwriting which was against us.¹⁶⁷ Lift up our hearts!

      Permit me, I pray you, these stammerings. You are ever in my prayers and ever will be.

      Farewell.

      C. S. Lewis

1 1 Timothy 2:1: ‘I exhort therefore, that, first of all, supplications, prayers, intercessions, and giving of thanks, be made for all men.’

2 Many of these thoughts were later to go into Lewis’s essay, ‘The Efficacy of Prayer’, published in Fern-seed and Elephants and Other Essays on Christianity, ed. Walter Hooper (London: Collins, 1975; Fount, 1998).

3 Vanauken had asked Lewis his opinion as to whether he should continue with his postgraduate work in history or study theology.

4 Francis Bacon, Essays (1625), ‘Of Atheism’: ‘The great atheists, indeed are hypocrites; which are ever handling holy things, but without feeling; so as they must needs be cauterized in the end.’

5 Pauline Baynes was illustrating the Narnian books.

6 At a meeting with Geoffrey Bles in London on 1 January 1951 Lewis gave Pauline Baynes a map he had drawn of Narnia bordered on the north by the ‘Wild Lands of the North’ as well as his drawing of a Monopod. In this letter he refers to that map which is in the Bodleian Library. (MS. Eng. lett. c. 220/1, fol. 160), and is reproduced by the Bodleian as a postcard. Baynes used Lewis’s original map to draw (1) ‘A Map of Narnian and Adjoining Lands’ which appeared on the endpapers of Prince Caspian; (2) a map of the Bight of Calormen and the Lone Islands of the Great Eastern Ocean which appeared on the endpapers of The Voyage of the ‘Dawn Treader’ (1952); (3) ‘A Map of the Wild Lands of the North’ which appeared on the endpapers of The Silver Chair (1953); and (4) a map on the endpapers of The Horse and His Boy (1954) showing the position of Tashbaan, the Desert and Archenland.

7 George MacDonald, Unspoken Sermons, 2nd series (1885), ‘The Fear of God’, p. 163.

8 See Percy Howard Newby, writer and broadcasting administrator, in the Biographical Appendix.

9 Newby, Organizer of Third Programme Talks for the BBC, had written to Lewis on 9 February 1951: ‘From time to time we broadcast in the Third Programme talks under the general title of “Work in Progress”, the general idea being that scholars and critics should discuss the nature and scope of a particular book they are engaged upon. We should be very happy if you would talk in this way about the volume you are preparing for the Oxford History of English Literature.’

10 William Lewis Kinter (1915–) was born in St Thomas, Pennsylvania, on 21 October 1915. He took a BA in English from Lafayette College, Easton, Pennsylvania, in 1938, another BA from Yale University in 1940, and a PhD from Columbia University, New York, in 1958. He taught Latin and English at Westminster School, Hartford, Connecticut, 1944-6, was Assistant Professor of English at Muhlenberg College, Allentown, Pennsylvania, 1946-62, and Associate Professor of English at Loyola College, Baltimore, Maryland, 1962-78. From there he became Chairman of the Department of Language and Literature at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. He is the author, with loseph R. Keller, of The Sibyl: Prophetess of Antiquity and Medieval Fay (Philadelphia: Dorrance, 1967).

11 Spirits in Bondage: A Cycle of Lyrics (1919), Lewis’s first book, was published under the pseudonym ‘Clive Hamilton’. See CL I, p. 443n.

12 Dymer, with a preface by the author (London: Dent; New York: Macmillan, 1950).

13 i.e. Lewis’s interplanetary trilogy, Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra and That Hideous Strength.

14 Ludovico Ariosto (1474-1535) was the author of Orlando Furioso (1532). See The Allegory of Love, Ch 7, Sect. 1, pp. 312-13).

15 Bernardus Silvestris, De Mundi Universitate, ed. Carl Sigmund Barach and lohann Wrobel (Innsbruck: Verlag der Wagner’schen Universitats-Buchhandlung, 1876).

16 Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890-69), American general and President of the United States, 1953-61, who launched the invasion of Normandy on 6 June 1944 and oversaw the final defeat of Germany. In 1950 President Truman asked Eisenhower to become supreme commander of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and in 1951 he flew to Paris to assume his new position. For the next fifteen months he devoted himself to the task of creating a united military organization in western Europe to be a defence against the possibility of Communist aggression.

17 On Mrs Alice Hamilton Moore (1853-1939), see CL II, p. 281n.

18 Rider Haggard, She (1887); Ayesha (1905); She and Allan (1921); Wisdom’s Daughter (1923).

19 After Greeves’s mother died in 1949 he moved from the family home, ‘Bernagh’ in Belfast, to a cottage at Silver Hill, Crawfordsburn, Co. Down, about twelve miles from Belfast. When he visited Arthur there, Lewis always stayed at the Old Inn, Crawfordsburn.

20 When Roger Lancelyn Green’s father died in 1947, Roger, his eldest son, became the 31st Lord of Poulton, and in August 1950 he moved with his wife and son from Oxford to the family home, Poulton Hall, Poulton-Lancelyn, Bebington, Wirral, Cheshire.

21 The Festival of Britain was opened by King George VI in London on 3 May 1951, six years after the end of the Second World War. It was designed to celebrate the best of British art, design and industry, and raise the nation’s spirits after the austerity of the war years. More than eight million people visited the exhibition over a period of five months.

22 Frederick lames Eugene Woodbridge, An Essay on Nature СКАЧАТЬ