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

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      P.S. The ‘Ah woe…kiss…ah woe’ is astonishing. It’s not like a passage in a book at all: it’s a thing.

       TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W):

      [The Kilns]

      29th. Dec. 1935

      My dear Arthur,

      I am staying at home from Church this morning with a cold on the chest, so it seems a good occasion to answer your letter.

      As regards your news—sympathy and congratulations. Sympathy on the wrench of parting and the gap it will leave: congratulations on having done the right thing and made a sacrifice. The chief consolation at such times, I think, is that the result, however unpleasant, must be a kind of relief after the period of saying ‘Shall I really have to-no I won’t—and yet perhaps I’d better.’ There is always some peace in having submitted to the right. Don’t spoil it by worrying about the results, if you can help it. It is not your business to succeed (no one can be sure of that) but to do right: when you have done so, the rest lies with God—and Will!

      I don’t think you exaggerate at all in your account of how it feels. After all—tho’ our novels now ignore it-friendship is the greatest of worldly goods. Certainly to me it is the chief happiness of life. If I had to give a piece of advice to a young man about a place to live, I think I shd. say, ‘sacrifice almost everything to live where you can be near your friends.’ I know I am v. fortunate in that respect, and you much less so. But even for me, it wd. make a great difference if you (and one or two others) lived in Oxford.

      I am correcting the first bunch of proofs for my book and am (as we wd. have said in the old days) tearing my hair because it doesn’t look at all the size of page I expected. It will not be as tall a book as I had pictured—and what is the good of a scholarly work if it does not rise like a tower at the end of a shelf?! I fear it may even be thickish and stumpy. Mon Dieu! quel douleur, o rage, o desespoir! (What on earth would we have done if either of us had succeeded in publishing a book in the old days—I imagine we might have gone literally out of our minds with horrors and ecstasies.)

      I’m sorry you didn’t have our weather. We had about a week of snow with frost on top of it—and then rime coming out of the air and making thick woolly formations on every branch. The little wood was indescribably beautiful. I used to go and crunch about on the crusted snow in it every evening—for the snow kept it light long after sunset. It was a labyrinth of white—the smallest twigs looking thick as seaweed and building up a kind of cathedral vault overhead. One thing the snow showed me was the amazingly high population of rabbits-usually concealed among the greens and greys. On the snow one cd. see them scuttling. W. and I have been much puzzled by some of the footprints. There seem to be a great many more and larger animals than we had supposed. Bears, Arthur, bears—at least it looks like it. I wish you cd. have had a couple of strolls with me round this place in the snow: it would have charmed away all your sorrows.

      No, no, I never meant that Sibelius had the tonic quality of Beethoven. Do you remember our once talking about B. and Wagner & agreeing that B. was Olympian, W. titanic—B spiritual, W. natural? Well Sibelius is definitely like W. not like B. in that respect. He is not noble like Beethoven: he is inarticulate, intimate, enthralling, and close to one, like Nature itself. Very, very Northern: he makes me think of birch forests & moss and salt-marshes and cranes and gulls. I mean the symphonies. You needn’t be busied for music while you have a gramophone. Set aside a portion of your money for buying big works (symphonies etc): never play them except in their entirety—but perhaps I’ve given you all this good advice before.

      I never finished Gape Row. But the descriptions of our own walks & hills were v. interesting. I thinkk yourr neww methodd of sspellingg bby ddoubbllingg alll cconnssonnanntts ssavvess a ggreatt ddeall off ttroubblle!

      Please give my love to Mrs Greeves and remember me to all our friends.

      Yours,

      Jack

      When I said you had vetoed the idea of regular correspondence, I meant that you had vetoed the idea of your taking part in it. I didn’t mean you had actually forbidden me to write to you!!

1 Nygren, Agape and Eros.

2 Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1072b.

means ‘moves’. In The Discarded Image (1964), Lewis mentioned Aristotle’s teachings about God as Unmoved Mover: ‘We must not imagine Him moving things by any positive action, for that would be to attribute some kind of motion to Himself and we should then not have reached an utterly unmoving Mover. How then does He move things? Aristotle answers, , “He moves as beloved”. He moves other things, that is, as an object of desire moves those who desire it’ (ch. 5, p. 113).

3 Lewis went on considering the relation of Agape and Eros for years, and in The Four loves (London, 1960; Fount, 1998) he discusses them under the names ‘gift-love’ and ‘need-love’ (using ‘Eros’ to mean sexual love).

4 In Spens, Spenser’s Faerie Queene, pp. 57–9.

5 Spenser, The Faerie Queene. II, xii, 46–9.

6 ibid., II, xii, 48.

7 i.e. the waste paper basket,

8 Barfield, Harwood and Lewis planned a walking-tour for April 1936, but at the last minute Lewis was unable to go. As a joke Barfield and Harwood decided Lewis must sit for a re-examination—based on the old School Certificate—before he could be readmitted to their ‘College of Cretaceous Perambulators’. The questions and answers were published as Owen Barfield and C. S. Lewis, A Cretaceous Perambulator (The Re-examination of) ed. Waller Hooper (Oxford: The Oxford University C. S. Lewis Society, 1983, limited to 100 copies). One of the questions was ‘Give the (long) semantic history of the word “Guiting”.’ Lewis did not attempt this question, but the editor supplied the following explanation (p. 14): ‘The semantic history of the word “Guiting” is, that it became for the perambulators a convenient expletive for anything they didn’t like. A “guiter” was, for instance, a bad person. It may have been suggested by the inconveniences caused them on the 1928 walk when they passed the villages of Temple Guiting and Guiting Power in Gloucestershire.’

9 This was probably one of Barfield’s poems. It has not been published.

10 The Pilgrim’s Regress.

11 i.e. Lieutenant-Colonel Arthur Alan Hanbury-Sparrow, author of The Land-Locked Lake.

12 Robert Louis Stevenson, The СКАЧАТЬ