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

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СКАЧАТЬ was invited to address the Library Association during their Bournemouth conference, held between 29 April and 2 May. On 29 April he read a paper entitled ‘On Three Ways of Writing for Children’.⁸³

       TO ROGER IANCELYN GREEN (BOD):

      Magdalen College

      Oxford May 1/52

      I think the Bournemouth Lecture was a success. One librarian said I had almost converted him to fairy-tales, he having hitherto taken the ‘real life’ stuff for granted.

Two librariennes said The Luck of the Lynns was in much demand and one praised The Wonderful Stranger.⁸⁴ I added that some of your unpublished & more ‘faerian’ books were even better. You were spoken of with much respect.

      J.

      

       TO MARY VAN DEUSEN (W):

      Magdalen College,

      Oxford May 5th 1952

      Dear Mrs. Van Deusen

Thank you for your cheery letter and the delightful enclosures. I’ve seldom seen better photos of children. And the landscape lures one into it. I long to be tramping over those wooded—or, what is better, half wooded hills. I’m as sensitive as a German to the spell of das Feme⁸⁵ and all that.

      About the high-low quarrels in the Church, whatever the merits of the dispute are, the ‘heat’ is simply and solely Sin, and I think parsons ought to preach on it from that angle.

      By the way, the ‘conversation-piece’ by Paul & Mini is really excellent. I hope you will all go on having a lovely time. God bless you all.

      Yours

      C. S. Lewis

      

       TO NELL BERNERS-PRICE (W): TS

      REF.52/205.

      Magdalen College,

      Oxford. 6th May 1952.

      Dear Mrs. Berners-Price,

Many thanks for your letter of the 4th. This is most kind of you, and I will very gladly accept your hospitality for the night of Wednesday 7th, tomorrow;⁸⁶ I should like to stop over Thursday too, but I fear that will be impossible. Indeed nothing but the Majesty of the Law would have got me out of Oxford for one night at the present moment. I come by a train which reaches Ramsgate at 6.8 p.m.

      Yours gratefully,

      C. S. Lewis

(modern blotting paper!)⁸⁷

TO THE EDITOR OF THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT:⁸⁸

      Sir,–

      The authorship of The Sheepheards Slumber (No. 133 in Englands Helicon, beginning ‘In Pescod time, when Hound to Home’) is not stated in any edition that I have been able to consult. The poem will be found in A pleasaunte Laborinth called Churchyardes Chance etc. London. Ihon Kyngston 1580. It is there entitled A matter of fonde Cupid, and vain Venus.

      C. S. Lewis

      

       TO NELL BERNERS-PRICE (W):

      Magdalen College,

      Oxford. May 9th 1952

      Dear Mrs Berners Price

      Thanks to you and your husband the trial now looms so small in the total adventure that I feel more like a man back from a holiday than a witness released from the box: not that it was a box, neither, being more like a nursery fender.

      The actual scene in court was horrid. I never saw Justice at work before, and it is not a pretty sight. Any creature, even an animal, at bay, surrounded by its enemies, is a dreadful thing to see: one felt one was committing a sort of indecency by being present. What did impress me was the absence of any resentment or vindictiveness on the part of the witnesses: you two victims especially were, I thought, getting v. high marks. But, as I say, what I really remember most is a delightful visit to very nice people in a charming house. I am sorry I left my kind host without even a hand-shake: but my doom was upon me.

      May I now book a room at Courtstairs (in the ordinary way) for the night of May 18th? I think Walsh said he wd. drive us to Canterbury on the morning of the 19th. I expect I can get on from Canterbury on the afternoon of the 19th.

I enclose ‘PC’⁸⁹ for Penelope.⁹⁰ And once again many, many thanks. I don’t really know why you should have been so kind to a stranger, whose very name must have rather sinister associations in both your minds by now!

      Yours sincerely

      C. S. Lewis

      

       TO ‘MRS LOCKLEY (L):

      [Magdalen College]

      13/5/52

      Dear ‘Mrs Lockley’

In Bp. Gore’s ‘Sermon on the mount’…I find the view that Christ forbade ‘divorce in such a sense as allowed re-marriage’.⁹¹ The question is whether He made an exception by allowing divorce in such a sense as allowed re-marriage when the divorce was for adultery. In the Eastern Church re-marriage of the innocent party is allowed: not in the Roman. The Anglican Bps. at Lambeth in 1888 denied re-marriage to the guilty party, and added that ‘there has always been a difference of opinion in the Ch. as to whether Our Lord meant to forbid re-marriage of the innocent party in a divorce’.⁹²

      It wd. seem then that the only question is whether you can divorce your husband in such a sense as wd. make you free to re-marry. I imagine that nothing is further from your thoughts. I believe that you are free as a Christian woman to divorce him especially since the refusal to do so does harm to the innocent children of his mistress: but that you must (or should) regard yourself as no more free to marry another man than if you had not divorced him. But remember I’m no authority on such matters, and I hope you will ask the advice of one or two sensible clergymen of our own Church.

      Our own Vicar whom I have just rung up, says that there are Anglican theologians who say that you must not divorce him. His own view was that in doubtful cases the Law of Charity shd. always be the over-riding consideration, and in a case such СКАЧАТЬ