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

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      Magdalen College,

      Oxford. 2nd January 1952.

      Dear Mrs. Watson,

      Very many thanks for your kind present of the cake, which has just arrived in good condition; good external condition that is, for it will not be opened until I get it out to my house this evening, where it will be received with enthusiasm. I often hear laments about the difficulty of getting cake making materials, so you can imagine how much pleasure it will give.

It will also help to distract attention from all the news in the papers about the shortages which are expected in 1952: news which is not rendered any the more palatable by Churchill’s assurance that when he gets back from your country,¹ and meets Parliament, he will have several proposals to make which ‘will be very unpleasant for all of us.’ But we are in hopes that his treatment will differ from Atlee’s in being like the pain after you have had a tooth out–getting less every day—whereas under the late government we were shirking going to the dentist and the pain was getting worse every day.²

      With many thanks, and all good wishes for the New Year,

      yours sincerely,

      C. S. Lewis

      

       TO RUTH PITTER(BOD):

      Magdalen etc

      Jan 8th. 1952

      Dear Miss Pitter

May Maleldil send you a good year.³ Of course use those Spenserian stanzas as you wish.⁴ I think your idea of the sheepdog-trial for readers is excellent.

The poem of yours which I didn’t like was the one about the enamoured earwig and the lady:⁵ and it all comes of mere idiosyncrasies of mine, (a.) My imagination goes easily to humanised mammals but stops dead at humanised insects, (b.) I can’t bear the least suggestion (however sportive) of love affairs between different species or even between children. That is one of the many things which for me sinks Tom Sawyer so immeasurably below the divine Huckleberry. But as I can’t give any reason for the second—I think I could for the first–this doesn’t help you v. much. I suspect it originates with the mingled embarrassment and nausea evoked in oneself as a child by grown-up jokes of an arch character at childrens’ parties.

Isn’t Herbert–?⁶ well: one can only say well. I am glad you are swimming in poetry and cannot help hoping great things.

      Yours most sincerely

      C. S. Lewis

      

       TO EDWARD A. ALLEN (W): TS

      REF. 52/28

      Magdalen College,

      Oxford. 8th January 1951 [1952].

      My dear Mr. Allen,

      A very happy new year to you both, and many thanks for your amusing letter of the 2nd. As you will observe, you were very nearly in time to call up on the old wave length, but not quite; my brother makes a clear sweep of all the old numbers every 31st December. I don’t know why, and I dare’nt ask him, in case he should insist on explaining it to me. He by the way asks to send greetings to both of you, and asks me to tell you that your thin blue summer suit is still going strong: and adds, that in view of the amount of summer we get in this country, he reckons on it figuring amongst the assets of his estate when the Landlord terminates his lease.

      I doubt if there is a man in America besides yourself who would have seriously contemplated sending a private gift of coal to this country: I believe if I said ‘thanks very much, and while you are about it, make me a present of the ship that brings it’, you would do your best to comply! But I’m glad to be able to report that your prayers for mild weather have been answered; I got up this morning to find the thermometer standing at 52 in my unheated bedroom, in which the window had been wide open all night. Your weather is the sort I hate—or at least like least, for we should’nt hate even the weather. But I confess I don’t enjoy wet snow.

Talking of ships, the epic of the ‘Flying Enterprise’ has played even the Truman-Winston conference off the front page of our diminished dailies: and rightly so.⁷ The American merchantile marine, and indeed the whole nation must be very proud of their Captain Carlsen. I wonder is a flair for journalism inborn in your people? You must have noticed how good are the reports from the commanders of the U.S.N. destroyers which have been standing by; no professional journalist could have done the thing better. A British naval officer in the same circumstances would be transmitting reports in what we call ‘Whitehall English’ which would make even the ‘Flying Enterprise’ story sound dull.

      I like the name of your car; over here we are more aristocratic. My brother’s old Colonel has a car which has been raised to the Peerage under the title of Victor, Viscount Vauxhall, but he is called Vic for short; on the other hand he had an American friend in Shanghai whose car rejoiced in the name of ‘Puddlejumper’.

      If you send a letter to Lieutenant-Colonel R. K. Wilson, Royal Artillery, c/o the War Office, Whitehall, London, S.W.I., it should reach him wherever he is, but of course if he is in Korea or some such place, it will take some time to reach him; it would be as well to endorse the envelope ‘Please Forward’ anyway. I’m sorry I can’t be more helpful, but our army is very scattered these days; I saw in the Sunday paper that at any given moment, we have ninety thousand trained troops on board ship, going to or coming from somewhere. As you say, what a muddle. Is this ghastly Korean war never going to end: or are we to spend the rest of our lives running round the Iron Curtain stopping leaks in it?

      Yours ever.

C. S. Lewis⁸

       TO SISTER PENELOPE CSMV(BOD):

      Magdalen etc.

      10/1/52

      Dear Sister Penelope

      It was, as always, a great pleasure to hear from you. Hearty good wishes and prayers for the new year.

I was very intrigued by the Snow Men last time the story came up (about 15 years ago, was it?) but had hardly noticed its re-occurrence: certainly I am not well enough equipped to write to the Times.⁹

I have, if not thought, yet imagined, a good deal about the other kinds of Men. My own idea was based on the old problem ‘Who was Cain’s wife?’ If we follow Scripture it wd. seem that she must have been no daughter of Adam’s. I pictured the True Men descending from Seth, then meeting Cain’s not perfectly human descendants (in Genesis vi. 1-4, where I agree with you), interbreeding and thus producing the wicked Antediluvians.¹⁰

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