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

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      Dear Evans

Thank you for your kind letter. I am so glad you liked the story. What is one to do with illustrators—especially if, like mine, they are (a far surer defence than obstinacy) timid, shrinking young women who, when criticised, look as if you’d pulled their hair or given them a black eye? My resolution was exhausted by the time I’d convinced her that rowers face aft not (as she thinks) forward.²⁹⁹

      All that about the earlier text of the “War of the Worlds is most interesting. With all good wishes.

      Yours

      C. S. Lewis

      

TO RHONA BODLE (BOD): ³⁰⁰

      Magdalen College,

      Oxford. Dec 15th 1952

      Dear Miss Bodle

      I think the little book quite excellent. The ‘baldness & flatness’ as you call them—I shd. say ‘economy & simplicity’ are its great merit. I want only one change: in the prayer beginning ‘bless mother & father’ there should be some indication that we are to pray for particular people by name: a child might think that ‘all the people I like’ was a rigid formula and that one oughtn’t to individualise. And the same with all the clauses of the prayer. You have the rare happiness of being engaged on a work of real & undoubted value: more power to your elbow!

      I can quite understand that your brief English life will sometimes seem a mere entracte in your N.Z. life. But it doesn’t matter what it seems (emotionally & imaginatively) so long as what happened to you in England is operative in your will, both at work and elsewhere. But of course you know this. All good wishes. You (and that unnamed colleague of yours) are always in my prayers.

      Yours sincerely

      C. S. Lewis

      

       TO MARG-RIETTE MONTGOMERY (W): TS

      REF.52/248.

      Magdalen College,

      Oxford. 16th December 1952.

      Dear Miss Montgomery,

Thanks for the cutting, and for the picture of the charming little church. But you ought to know more about the Father than the Galaxy! Our Lord said ‘He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father’,³⁰¹ but also ‘My Father is greater than I’,³⁰² and St. Paul said ‘He is not far from any one of us’.³⁰³ Don’t let the Anthros turn it all into a fog for you. You know better. All good wishes.

      Yours sincerely,

      C. S. Lewis

      

TO CLYDE S. KILBY (W):³⁰⁴ TS

      REF52/509.

      Magdalen College,

      Oxford. 17th December 1952.

      Dear Mr. Kilby,

      Thank you for your very kind and encouraging letter of the 10th. It would give me pleasure to meet you during your visit to Oxford, and I shall expect to hear from you more definitely when your plans are settled. So far as can be foreseen at the moment, I shall probably be out of Oxford for August and the earlier part of September. With all best wishes.

      Yours sincerely,

      C. S. Lewis

      Joy Gresham had arrived at The Kilns during the second week of December to visit the Lewis brothers. As indicated by Lewis’s letter to his godson, Laurence Harwood, of 19 December, there appears to have been a misunderstanding about the length of her stay.

       TO VERA GEBBERT (W): TS

      52/103.

      Magdalen College,

      Oxford. 18th December 1952.

      Dear Mrs. Gebbert,

      Many thanks for the book which has just arrived, and which judging from a hasty dip, I am going to enjoy. It is kind of you to send it. I hope that by this time your journey across the Atlantic is a fast fading memory, and that it has not given you both a determination never to cross it again. Courage! Next time (I much hope there will be a ‘next time’), try crossing over it rather than on it.

      We have an American visitor with us at the moment, who is starting for home on the 3rd. of next month, and is not much cheered by the fact that we are now having a succession of gales. Is’nt it an astonishing thing that whenever one has a guest in the home, the weather turns freakish? And the host always feels that he is somehow to blame for it. We are now getting the weather which normally we never have until after Christmas—ice, snow, bitter wind etc. However, either out of native politeness or because it is true, the lady assures us that the worst English winter weather is not to be compared for general beastliness with that of New York state. What she does criticise is the heating of the English home: not so much of the rooms, but of the passages and so forth.

      As your last letter was dated from Alpine Drive, I send this note there; though of course by the time it gets to California, you may be enjoying the society of Andy on his native heath once more. In whichever spot you are, you may congratulate yourselves on having fled homewards when you did. You would like England even less now than when you visited it!

      With warmest good wishes to you both from us both for a happy and prosperous New Year,

      yours as ever,

      C. S. Lewis

      

TO LAURENCE HARWOOD (BOD): ³⁰⁵

      Coll. Magd.

      Dec 19th 1952

      Dear Laurence

      Here’s something for usual expenses. I am completely ‘circumvented’ by a guest, asked for one week but staying for three, who talks from morning till night. I hope you’ll all have a nicer Christmas than I. I can’t write (write? I can hardly think or breathe. I can’t believe it’s all real).

      Yours

      C. S. Lewis

      

       TO MRS JOHNSON (W): TS

      REF.52/183

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