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

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СКАЧАТЬ It knocks you down: it rubs its eyes Intending to apologise. But when it sees it’s laid you flat It takes offence and steals your hat.

       TO ARTHUR GREEVES (BOD):

      Magdalen College,

      Oxford. June 22nd 1952

      My dear Arthur

I shall be free to be with you from Sat. Aug. 23rd till Mon. Sept. 8th when I sail for L’pool. These dates cannot be changed but if you like to spend all or any of this time motoring me about Ireland, I shd. like it v. much and will fall in with any dates (between those two) or any itinerary you choose. Just us two, of course: I wouldn’t face any third.^* You and I know the worst about each other by now! I look forward to it immensely.

      Yours

      Jack

      P.S. But I’d forgotten. My room at the C’burn Inn is already booked for that period. I’m afraid I couldn’t manage to pay it and other ones as well. Can you decide on your dates at once & then see if the Inn will cancel my room for the period of our tour without charging? If not, then I’d better stick to my original plan & you take your motor trip after I’ve gone. But I hope not. I shall be a little anxious till I hear from you again.

      P.P.S. No sharing a room: but you’d hate it as much as I, so I’m safe!

      

       TO WILLIAM BORST (P):

      Magdalen College,

      Oxford. June 22nd 1952

      Dear Mr. Borst (or shall we stop mistering one another? Let’s)

      Dear Borst,

      Thanks for your most indulgent letter of the 17th which lifts a load from my mind. It occurs to me that the typist may understand perfectly easily the instructions that baffled me: if so, you shall get the MS. in the form you want. If she is as stupid as I (a pessimistic hypothesis) I shall avail myself of your concession.

      I’ve finished the introduction wh. seemed to write itself, so that I could hardly keep up with it. If it is as good as it seems to me at the moment it’s a corker: but of course things never are. You will find one or two allusions in it that your students will not quite understand, but these have been left in on purpose. If they are too carefully shielded from the rumour of worlds they have not yet broken into, what will ever drive them on. Now I shall get on with the scissors and paste work. At the end of the first day everything in the room (except the bits of Spenser, perhaps) will be pasted to everything else. All will be in the most literal sense CO-HERENT. But no palm without paste.

      Yours

      C. S. Lewis

Interim Report¹²⁶

      I merveill much that critiques doe complaine

      Of bookes with scisers and with past compyld; Certes who weenes this is a lesser payne Then free invention is sore beguyld!

      Witness myself who with sic labour vyld

      Am oft so dased that I half repent This great emprise, my fingers all defyld With slimie stickphast foule and feculent And deeme Dan Spenser self an easier journie went.

      C. S. Lewis

TO RHONA BODLE (BOD):¹²⁷

      Magdalen College,

      Oxford. June 22nd 1952

      Dear Miss Bodle

      It was a great joy to hear from you again. You have been daily in my prayers for a long time and, needless to say, will remain. I shall be grateful for a place in yours.

The work you are engaged in is a magnificent one (much in my mind because, as it falls out, I’ve just been reading Helen Keller’s book):¹²⁸ hard, no doubt, but you can never be attacked by the suspicion that it is not worth doing. There are jolly few professions of which we can say that. The translation of great stories into a limited vocabulary will, incidentally, be a wonderful discipline: you will learn a lot about thought and language in general before you are done. I hope you will sometimes let me know how you get on. God bless you.

      Yours most sincerely

      C. S. Lewis

      

       TO ROGER IANCELYN GREEN (BOD):

      As from Magdalen

      June 23rd 1952

      My dear Roger

Shortly after you left me I took up From the World’s End¹²⁹ one night and re-read it: finding it so much better than I had remembered, or perhaps, perceived, that I think I ought to tell you so. The original reading must have caught me in an imperceptive mood. There are, as you yourself wd. now feel, one or two places where one can ‘see the works’, perceive you deliberately concocting an atmosphere—but they are few and once the main story (which hangs together v. well) takes hold they vanish.

The snatches of ‘modern’ poetry on p. 62 are exactly like it: you might have been reading Rostrevor Hamilton’s The Tell-Tale Article, but it was not published then.¹³⁰ The Voice is excellently managed. The most important thing is that (this time) I was really interested in the crisis it depicts throughout, wh. is significant because it never was my crisis.

Craigie’s Dark Atlantis¹³¹ has come and is an almost total disappointment. I don’t think he has much real imagination: and he certainly can’t write at all. The good reviews and the high praise from Grahame Greene (who certainly can write himself, whether one likes his books or not) alarm me. We here catch the critics on the sort of book we do understand, and that shows them to be without any standards at all. (Craigie thinks rights means rites and that the Atlanteans had a metal called ORICHALEUM!¹³² We are in the post-literate age

      Yours

      Jack

      

       TO HARRY BIAMIRES (BOD):

      Coll. Magd.

      24/6/52

      Dear Blamires

      Yes, of course. I am sorry the book has not yet found a home. All the best.

      Yours

      C. S. Lewis

      

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