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

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СКАЧАТЬ to “Mother Kirk”, whether you had turned Roman Catholic, or Anglo Catholic, or Scotch Presbyterian, or what. W. avowed that he didn’t know, but was pretty sure you had not become R.C. And then he added: “The other day several of us were together when X (I don’t recall the name) burst into the room in a state of great excitement. ‘Do you know,’ he shouted, ‘what that man Lewis is up to? Y (another forgotten name) says he saw him in the College chapel, and that on inquiry he finds the fellow has been going to chapel for weeks unbeknownst to any of us. What’s it all mean?’” So Wolfenden. And then Eliot with that sly smile of his: “Why, it’s quite evident that if a man wishes to escape detection at Oxford, the one place for him to go is the college chapel”’ (Princeton University Library).

38 ibid.: ‘Yes, I have read Agape and Eros, and I don’t like it at all, indeed I very heartily dislike it. It seems to me the last word of the most abominable form of Protestantism in a straight line from Luther through Barth.’

39 Robert Shafer, Paul Elmer More and American Criticism (1935).

40 ‘about all matters’.

41 Professor Eugène Vinaver (1899–1979) was born in St Petersburg, and was educated in Paris and Oxford. He was a lecturer in French Language and Literature at Lincoln College, Oxford, 1924–8, and lecturer in French, 1928–31. He was appointed a Reader in French Language and Literature at Oxford in 1931, and was Professor of French Language and Literature at the University of Manchester, 1933–66. His many works include Malory (1929), The Works of Sir Thomas Malory, 3 vols. (1947), The Tale of the Death of King Arthur (1955) and The Rise of Romance (1971).

42 Eugène Vinaver, ‘Malory’s Morte d’Arthur in the Light of a Recent Discovery’ (1935). The ‘discovery’ referred to here is that of a manuscript of Malory’s Arthurian romances roughly contemporary with Caxton’s edition and independent of it, found in Winchester College in 1934. See the passage from Lewis’s review of Professor Vinaver’s edition of the Works of Sir Thomas Malory (1947) that follows the letter to Ruth Pitter of 6 June 1947.

43 The Arthurian Society.

44 Catholicon Anglicum: An English-Latin Wordbook, dated 1483, introduction and notes by Sidney J. H. Heritage (Early English Text Society, 1881).

45 The New English Dictionary.

46 In his review of E. K. Chambers’ Sir Thomas Wyatt and Some Collected Studies (1933) in Medium Aevum, III, No. 3 (October 1934), pp. 237–40, Lewis criticized Vinaver for the importance he attached to ‘sources’. ‘It is possible for our reading of an author to become what we may call ‘source-ridden’, so that we no longer see his book as it is in itself, but only as it contrasts with its sources. This is clearly an injustice to the author, for we are preserving in their original form elements which he has transmuted, and even elements which he rejected. It is as though we ate all the ingredients of a pudding along with the pudding itself; such an eating is emphatically not the pudding’s proof’(p. 238).

      In note 1 of ‘Malory’s Morte d’Arthur in the Light of a Recent Discovery’, Vinaver responded: ‘I do not feel with Mr Lewis that those who see too much of Malory’s sources are apt to overlook the book “as it is in itself”. We must obviously avoid eating “all the raw ingredients of a pudding along with the pudding itself” for “such eating is emphatically not the pudding’s proof”…but literature is one of the few things to which the metaphor of the pudding does not apply. Knowledge of the recipe may spoil the caste of a pudding but it need not distort our immediate impression from a literary work. It is of course possible to read Malory “as if we knew nothing about his sources”, but our understanding of him will be deepened, not spoilt, by the knowledge of what is peculiar and unique in his work.’

47 Frank Percy Wilson (1889–1963), who had been Lewis’s tutor in English, took a B. Litt. from Lincoln College, Oxford. After serving in the First World War, he returned to Oxford as a university lecturer. He was Professor of English at the University of Leeds, 1929–36, and Merton Professor of English at Oxford, 1947–57. Wilson contributed the volume on English Drama 1485–1585 (1969), ed. G. K. Hunter, to the Oxford History of English Literature.

48 Bonamy Dobrée (1891–1974), distinguished scholar and lecturer, went to Christ’s College, Cambridge, after serving in the First World War. In 1936 he was appointed to the Chair of English Literature at the University of Leeds, a post he held until his retirement in 1955. His books include the volume on The Early Eighteenth Century (1959) in the Oxford History of English Literature.

49 See the ‘Background’ to English Literature in the Sixteenth Century in CG, pp. 474–82.

50 J. R. R. Tolkien had too many other commitments to write a volume on Old English literature, and in the end the series began with Middle English literature.

51 Raymond Wilson Chambers (1874–1942) graduated in English from University College, London, in 1894 and spent his entire professional life at University College. He became a Fellow of English in 1900, Assistant Professor in 1904, and Professor of English, 1922–41. His works include Beowulf (1914) and Thomas More (1935).

52 William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet (1597), II, v, 64: ‘Are you so hot? Many, come up, I trow.’

53 The guests were Molly Askins and her son Michael. Molly was the widowed daughter-in-law of Mrs Moore’s brother, Dr Robert Askins (1880–1935) who, while practising medicine in Southern Rhodesia died at sea on I September 1935.

54 James 1:27: ‘Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world.’

55 In the end Lewis was persuaded to call his book The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition.

56 Sheed and Ward of London published their edition of The Pilgrim’s Regress in October 1935. Lewis had been worried about obscurity in the work, and this edition differs from the first in having a short ‘Argument’ at the beginning of each of the ten books.

57 The Workes of Sir Thomas More Knyght, sometyme Lorde Chauncellour of England, wrytten by him in the Englysh tonge, ed. William Rastell (1557).

58 Utopia (1516), in Latin, is the principal literary work of СКАЧАТЬ