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

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СКАЧАТЬ target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="#ulink_8258c291-6248-5f7d-ace1-c3dec4d31e7d">52 Paul-Alexandre Janet, Histoire de la Science Politique dans ses Rapports avec la Morale (1872).

53 James Stephens, The Crock of Gold (1912).

54 John 1:5.

55 In J. M. Barrie’s play, Mary Rose (1920), Mary Rose while visiting the Hebrides is spirited away by Elvish voices calling her name, although angel voices try to counteract them.

56 MacDonald, Lilith, ch. 39.

57 Voltaire, Candide (1759).

58 Charles Gore, Jesus of Nazareth, Home University Library (1929).

59 Jane (‘Janie’ or ‘Tchainie’) McNeill (1889–1959), the daughter of James and Margaret McNeill, would have liked to go to university, but remained at home to look after her widowed mother. See the biography of Jane McNeill in CG.

60 Lewis had been working on The Allegory of Love since 1928. See the letter to Albert Lewis of 10 July 1928 (CL I, pp. 766–7).

61 Walter de la Mare, The Fleeting, and Other Poems (1933).

62 John Galsworthy, The Forsyte Saga (1922).

63 i.e. Collier, Tom’s A-Cold.

64 Of the nine symphonies of Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827), the ‘Eroica’, composed to celebrate the memory of Napoleon, is No. 3.

65 The Pilgrim’s Regress, book VI, ch. 6.

66 Hermann Poppelbaum, Man and Animal: Their Essential Difference, trans. Edith Rigby and Owen Barfield (1931).

67 ‘will-o’-the-wisp’, lit. ‘the foolish fire’.

68 Richard Howard Stafford Crossman (1907–74), who took a double First in Classics at New College, Oxford, was Fellow and Tutor of Philosophy at New College, 1930–7. He became the assistant editor of the New Statesman and Nation in 1938 but in 1940 was drafted into the Ministry of Economic Warfare to organize the British propaganda effort against Hitler’s Germany. He was elected MP for Coventry East in 1945, holding the seat until 1974, and was appointed Minister for Housing and Local Government by Harold Wilson in 1964. His three-volume Diaries of a Cabinet Minister (1975–7), the first of which was published shortly after his death, were followed by The Backbench Diaries of Richard Crossman (1981).

69 His position as godfather to the Harwoods’ son, Laurence. See Laurence Hardy Harwood in the Biographical Appendix.

70 The ‘guideman’, ‘gudeman’ or ‘goodman’ means husband or head of the house.

71 William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra (1606–7), V, ii, 87–8.

1934

       Maureen Moore had acquired a car and in April 1934 she took Lewis and her mother on a motor tour of parts of England and Ireland, stopping to visit Arthur Greeves in Belfast.

       TO HIS BROTHER (W):

      [2 Princess Villas,

      Bayview Park,

      Kilkeel, Co. Down]

      April 3rd 1934

      My dear W.,

This is turning out a great success. Even the journey was pleasant as far as Chester. There Maureen discovered that she still had far too much petrol, and time, so we used up both by going round through Warrington and Runcorn—the most hideous Morlockheim¹ you can imagine. Lime Street Hotel, where we had hoped to lounge for a few hours, is now shut up, all except the Grill: another landmark gone.

      On the way to Bernagh next morning I noticed a new big house half way up the hill, in the field by the Glenmachan quarry. I had an excellent morning with Arthur, who at last has something wrong with him: an internal narrowing, poor man, almost amounting to a stoppage. His mother does not know about it, I think: and, paradoxically, tho’ not unprecedently, he is taking it with fortitude. Lunch, for which Minto and Maureen arrived, was enlivened by Minto upsetting a tumbler, but was not otherwise so amusing as I had anticipated—tho’ Maureen dropped a brick at the outset by saying that ‘Of course, Co. Down isn’t real Ireland.’

The drive down from town was a pure joy. I took them by Comber, Downpatrick, Dundrum, and Newcastle. Maureen rather affected to sniff at the countryside for the first few miles, but the Mournes knocked all that out of her. Kilkeel itself is, I think, among the two or three most beautiful places I have ever been. It is on a point or flat tongue which spreads out almost eight miles from the foot hills of the mountains. This distance is a positive advantage as it saves you from the darkness and obtrusiveness of mountains too near and also gives you a huge panorama of blue and jagged shapes which you couldn’t have closer. The coup d’oeil² suggests the Tyrol rather than anything else: if it were not for the middle distance of white cottages, fir clumps, stone walls & flax ponds—and the foreground of Fakerty’s Spirit Grocery, Orange Hall etc—I should hardly believe I was in Ulster.

      In a word, for varied pleasure (the scale runs from a mountain like a castle ten miles off to a silent harbour full of apparently dead schooners and one puffer half a mile off) this is just the best place I have struck for years. I very much wish we were not moving to Rostrevor tomorrow. I am strongly upholding this house as a place for a family holiday in August. It is a dingy, faded place with the indescribable smell of all Irish lodging houses, but all the important things are right, i.e. light that you can really read by, comfortable chairs, very good beds, hot baths, and a capital chapter house round the corner. The landlady was rather too talkative at the beginning but we see less of her now. (Memo—Canon Hayes was rector of Kilkeel before he went to St Marks ‘He was a very queer man. He did awfully crazy things’)

You were wrong in supposing that I would be attending the Easter celebration at the same time as you: they СКАЧАТЬ