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

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СКАЧАТЬ course have killed any sale it might hope for. But it is going to be decorated by a map on the end leaf which I had great fun in drawing the sketch for. I suppose you have no objection to my dedicating the book to you? It is yours by every right—written in your house, read to you as it was written, and celebrating (at least in the most important parts) an experience which I have more in common with you than anyone else. By the bye, you will be interested to hear that in finally revising the MS I did adopt many of your corrections, or at least made alterations where you objected. So if the book is a ghastly failure I shall always say ‘Ah it’s this Arthur business’¹⁶

      Do write. W. in bed with flu’ (mild) but otherwise all well here

      Yours

      Jack

      Give my love to your mother: I hope she is well.

       TO OWEN BARFIELD (W):

      [The Kilns],

      March 28th 1933

      My dear Barfield—

Thanks for sending me the book.¹⁷ Any war-book that is any good at all stirs up my

¹⁸ so much that I find it difficult—through the din—to discover what it is really like. But this is, of course, much more than a war book. My chief complaint is that it stops too soon, without pulling the threads (the philosophical ones) together. Is it, by any chance, the first of a trilogy? As that, it would be capital. There are, as it stands, several things I want to know more about, e.g.

      1. Courage used to be less conscious, more in the blood: that is why our ancestors did not have to exhaust on keeping brave all the conscious energy needed for the fighting. Good! But does the author’s solution by discipline mean that nature was simply wrong in transferring courage from the blood to the mind? For this discipline (sharply distinguished from regimental spirit etc) is just a method of putting the courage-problem back on the unconscious: i.e. he says to nature ‘I don’t want this freedom. All you have done is to put me to the trouble of inventing an elaborate machinery for making myself again un-free in this matter—freedom in this matter having turned out to be such a job that if I attend to it I have no time to attend to anything else.’ Is this what H-S’s position comes to? And does he know that it does?

      2. One wants emphatically to know more about those Australians and Canadians. We are told that they were braver than the English. If, as I surmise, they were not subjected to the martinettery, then they cast doubt on the whole thesis. If they were, then still, since it did not produce the same effect on them and on the English, why then, (by the ‘method of difference’) discipline can’t be the whole secret.

3. How much weight does he give to the discovery made at the end of the book that martinettery can be applied by anyone who has learned the trick i.e. it depends on no spiritual quality in the applier?¹⁹ Wd. he admit that this is the same as saying it is mechanical. When I got to the end, where this discovery is made, I at once connected it with the early passage ‘Spirit wept…’ (that bit is splendid)²⁰ and saw discipline related to courage precisely as the mechanical battle of heavy guns is related (by H-S) to ‘the noble end of war.’

      In fact, all my three points come to one—an uncertainty how far the author has faced his own growing discovery of the bad element in discipline and how far he has seen the resulting problem. For the position he leaves us in is this. Discipline is the only way of making it at all probable that your men will win battles: and therefore without discipline the cause of freedom and virtue, so far as it lies with you, will be lost. On the other hand, discipline is unfree, can be applied mechanically like a trick, there is no warrant that it will fall justly etc etc: so that it looks as if discipline itself may be just as fatal to the cause as defeat. This is where one would like the next book to take up the problem. (It is the old damnable fix—efficiency at the cost of the values for whose sake only you wish to be effective, or justice, liberty, and equality preserved only to be knocked on the head by your efficient neighbour. All this bears acutely on the problem of the college junto—of wh. we must discuss).

There were places in the book where one felt the old hatred.

.²¹ Still, he seems to share them himself. On the purely literary side, I think it good: vivid without the journalese that usually accompanies these vivid war books. Some of the battles are not v. easy to visualise, but that is almost unavoidable: they are certainly easier than Blunden’s.²² One really glorious bit is the description of the gusto he feels even for the filthy air and Stygian landscape of the front when expecting death: the preciousness of matter as such. I don’t think that’s been done before.

I am a good deal worried by my inability to understand some of your article on Coleridge.²³ It is all exciting, but I can’t really find much to correspond with the diagrams, except the first. Things I do get are a. The explanation of C’s apparent incoherence.²⁴ b. The privileged position of the vb. to be²⁵ (By the bye, Sadism and Masochism are both over-emphases of the Difference element, but the first as verb and the second as Noun. Will that do?)²⁶ c. The insect as externalised consciousness.²⁷ All the rest you must explain on the walk.

      Both poems improve on re-reading, but the first one still remains the better, for the reasons given before. The selection of imagery in it is almost perfect and the effect all one like a taste.

       HAVE YOU BOOKED THOSE SEATS FOR THE RHEINGOLD?

      Have the venue where you like: but with such a large party—and in Easter week—some room-booking shd. be done at once

      Yours

      C. S. Lewis

      Last Saturday was the anniversary of the Creation of the World!

TO DAPHNE HARWOOD (BOD): ²⁸

      Magdalen College,

      Oxford.

      March 28th 1933

      Dear Mrs. Harwood,

      I hope it was not only literary vanity that made me enjoy so much your very kind and very discriminating letter. Thank you very much indeed.

I was much interested in the account of your journey. I was never myself up against anything quite so bad as I take Ogden to be, but I can quite imagine him on the St. Theresa theme.²⁹

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