Collected Letters Volume Two: Books, Broadcasts and War, 1931–1949. Walter Hooper

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10 See Dom Bede Griffiths in the Biographical Appendix. Alan Richard Griffiths became a Catholic on Christmas Eve 1932. He spent much of the following year at Prinknash, the Benedictine priory near Gloucester, testing his vocation as a monk. On 20 December 1933 he was clothed as a novice and took the name Dom Bede Griffiths.

11 For the biography of Frank Sanders see note 28 to the letter of 22 March 1941.

12 William Law, A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life (1728).

13 Major Herbert Denis Parkin (1886–1958) joined the army in 1908 and the Army Service Corps (later Royal Army Service Corps) in 1911. He became captain in 1915 and major in 1918. He served in France during the First World War, in India during 1922, and Egypt, 1927–8. Major Parkin was Warnie’s commanding officer in Shanghai, 1928–9 and they became lifelong friends, but this was the first time Jack had met him. On learning of Parkin’s death, Warnie wrote in his diary of 13 November 1958: ‘He was a friend of almost thirty years standing, and one whose place no one can fill…We shared a stock of memories which were very precious to both of us, and he had a humour that was entirely his own…I shall miss him to the end—the only real friend I ever made in me army’ (BF, p. 246).

14 John Trail! Christie (1899–1980) was Fellow and Classical Tutor at Magdalen College, 1928–32, Headmaster of Repton School, 1932–7, Headmaster of Westminster School. 1937–49. and Principal of Jesus College, Oxford, 1950–67.

15 Sir Thomas Browne (1605–82), natural historian, antiquary, and moralist, best known for his Religio Medici (1642).

16 i.e. like Charles Lamb.

17 Mr Papworth, or Baron Papworth as he was also known, was Lewis’s and Mrs Moore’s dog. Of the many pets they had over the years, he was their favourite. He died in 1937.

18 ‘I love games, love, books, music.’ From Jean de La Fontaine, Les Amours de Psyché et de Cupidon (1669), quoted in The Oxford Book of French Verse, ed. St John Lucas (1920), p. 182.

19 René Descartes (1596–1650) was the chief architect of the seventeenth-century intellectual revolution. His philosophical masterpiece, Meditations on First Philosophy (1641) contains many of his proofs of the existence of God.

20 See Alfred Cecil Harwood (1898–1975) in the Biographical Appendix to CL I. After taking his BA from Oxford in 1921 he became a teacher at Michael Hall School in London.

21 In the third of his Meditations on First Philosophy Descartes’s argument for the existence of God runs: ‘I have the idea of a perfect being. Whatever caused this idea must have all the perfections that are represented in the idea.’

22 By the ‘Thistle-Bird’ Lewis probably meant the Rev. Henry Edward Bird who, after serving in various London parishes, was Vicar of St Andrew’s, Headington, 1924–46. He sometimes preached at Holy Trinity, Headington Quarry.

23 Rudyard Kipling, The Seven Seas (1896), ‘McAndrew’s Hymn’, slightly misquoted.

24 ‘The Land East of the Sun and West of the Moon’ is a story in William Morris, The Earthly Paradise (1868–70).

25 One of Jack and Warnie’s nicknames for each other. When they were small children their nurse sometimes threatened to smack their ‘pigieboties’ or ‘piggiebottoms’. Over time the brothers decided that Warnie was ‘Archpiggiebotham’ or ‘APB’ and Jack ‘Smallpiggiebotham’ or ‘SPB’, and thereafter they frequently addressed each other by these names or variations of them. In his letter to Warnie of 2 August 1928 (CL I, p. 768), Jack discusses the nature of ‘pigiebotism’—the manners and ideas of young men like Warnie and Jack.

26 Ephesians 6:13.

27 18 October.

28 John is the ‘mystical’ fourth Gospel. The other three Gospels—Matthew, Mark and Luke—are remarkably similar in workings and structure; scholars call these three Gospels synoptic (from the Greek for ‘seeing together or at the same time’, a name derived from the practice of tabulating their similarities in parallel columns for comparison). It is generally believed that Mark was used as a source by Matthew and Luke.

29 The English School was divided between those who upheld the primacy of the study of English literature and those advocating the importance of language. Lewis had complained when Professor J. R. R. Tolkien wanted more linguistic courses, these to be based on Old or Middle English literature, but by 1931 he had come to see the merit of Tolkien’s proposals and thereafter gave him his full support. Soon the curriculum of the English School required that students learn the English language of all periods, while the literature syllabus began with Beowulf and ended with the Romantics in 1830. There were murmurings of dissent from the other side about the monopoly of philology and the absence from the curriculum of any modern literary criticism.

30 Miss Kathleen Whitty had been Maureen’s music teacher when the Moores lived in Bristol, and she often visited them in Oxford.

31 Ramsay MacDonald (1866–1937), Labour Prime Minister, 1924, 1929–35.

32 Philip, Viscount Snowden (1864–1937), Chancellor of the Exchequer, 1924, 1929–31.

33 Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey (1818).

34 See Owen Barfield (1898–1997) in the Biographical Appendix to CL I. Barfield, one of Lewis’s closest friends, joined the family law firm in London, Barfield and Barfield, in 1929. After taking a degree of Bachelor of Civil Law from Oxford in 1930, he began preparing for law exams in London. During his many years with Barfield and Barfield he acted as Lewis’s solicitor.

35 Lewis had been given a pair of swans by the Provost of Worcester College. See Fred W. Paxford, ‘He Should Have Been a Parson’ in We Remember C.S. Lewis, ed. David Graham (2001), p. 122.

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