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

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СКАЧАТЬ but the degree to which it has been made necessary to salvation.⁷

      With continued good wishes.

      Yours

      C. S. Lewis

       TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W):

      Magdalen College,

      Oxford.

      Feb 26th 1936

      My dear Arthur,

      I see to my consternation that it is over a month since your letter came. It certainly deserved an earlier answer but you must forgive me.

I was very sorry indeed to hear about ‘Tommy’. I am particularly sorry for John.⁸ You know I crossed with the pair of them last time I left home: and I should like to say as impressively as I can—and you to take note—that I was very much impressed by seeing them together and by the fine, almost the spiritual atmosphere of their whole world of mountain climbing. It gave me a new and most favourable sidelight on John: and I am afraid it is most unlikely that he will find any one to take Tommy’s place. I am very sorry for him. Try to be as nice to him as you can—but I have no doubt you are doing that already.

      For yourself I expect days are pretty dim at present. Do you hear good news of the boy? As I said before, I am sure you have done the right thing, and I’m afraid that is all the comfort I can offer.

      I quite understand what you say about the comfort derived from all a dog’s ‘little affairs’, and enjoyed reading that passage as much as any in your letter. They are a busy folk. And talking of dogs, poor old Mr Papworth has been gathered to his fathers. He had been ailing for some time and finally got a bad ulcer on his chin. He was given a strong sleeping draught. When I went to bed he was asleep in his basket and breathing as gently as a child: in the morning he was dead. Minto has been very badly upset—almost as if for a human being. I don’t feel it as badly as that myself and would discourage the feeling (I think) if I had it. But it is a parting, and one sometimes remembers his old happy days, especially his puppyhood, with an ache.

I have just read what I think a really great book, ‘The Place of the Lion’ by Charles Williams.⁹ It is based on the Platonic theory of the other world in which the archtypes of all earthly qualities exist: and in the novel, owing to a bit of machinery which doesn’t matter, these archtypes start sucking our world back. The lion of strength appears in the world & the strength starts going out of houses and things into him. The archtypal butterfly (enormous) appears and all the butterflies of the world fly back into him. But man contains and ought to be able to rule all these forces: and there is one man in the book who does, and the story ends with him as a second Adam ‘naming the beasts’ and establishing dominion over them.

      It is not only a most exciting fantasy, but a deeply religious and (unobtrusively) a profoundly learned book. The reading of it has been a good preparation for Lent as far as I am concerned: for it shows me (through the heroine) the special sin of abuse of intellect to which all my profession are liable, more clearly than I ever saw it before. I have learned more than I ever knew yet about humility. In fact it has been a big experience. Do get it, and don’t mind if you don’t understand everything the first time. It deserves reading over and over again. It isn’t often now-a-days you get a Christian fantasy.

My own book will be 15/-, so if you can sell it it will be 15/-clear! I am sick of proof correcting which has had to go on concurrently with all my other work this whole term.¹⁰

      Our visitors, thank God, are gone. They have left Minto very worn out but not, so far as I can see, actually ill.

      We have had such a severe winter that even I, with all my polar bear instincts am tired of it. But the snow drops are up now and we have had one or two of those very early fine days which excite me more than the real spring. You know—that thin, tingling, virginal weather.

Most of Sibelius’ symphonies are recorded and are glorious. I agree with you about the Old Curiosity Shop¹¹—one of the most homely and friendly of all Dickens. With love to you all.

      Yours

      Jack

Since the early 1930s a group of Christian friends had been meeting in Lewis’s Magdalen College rooms every Thursday evening to talk and usually to read aloud whatever they might be writing. The group had its origins in J. R. R. Tolkien’s weekly visits to Lewis’s rooms in 1929 where he read aloud his stories of Middle-Earth. Shortly afterwards, Edward Tangye Lean (1911–74),¹² a brilliant young student and one of Lewis’s pupils, founded a society of undergraduates and dons who met in his rooms to read unpublished manuscripts aloud, after which there would be comments and criticism. Lewis and Tolkien both became members. Lean christened the group ‘The Inklings’—suggesting someone who dabbles in ink. The club founded by Lean died when he took his degree and left Oxford. But, wrote Professor Tolkien,

Its name was transferred (by C.S.L.) to the undetermined and unelected circle of friends who gathered about C.S.L., and met in his rooms in Magdalen. Although our habit was to read aloud compositions of various kinds (and lengths!), this association and its habit would in fact have come into bang at this time, whether the original short-lived club had ever existed or not. C.S.L. had a passion for hearing things read aloud, a power of memory for things received in that way, and also a facility in extempore criticism, none of which were shared (especially not the last) in anything like the same degree by his friends.¹³

By 1936 this informal group included Lewis, Tolkien, Warnie Lewis, Owen Barfield, Hugo Dyson, Nevill Coghill, Lord David Cecil,¹⁴ Dr Robert E. Havard¹⁵ and Charles Wrenn.¹⁶ Besides the Thursday meetings in Lewis’s rooms in Magdalen, they met on Tuesday mornings at the Eagle and Child (‘Bird and Baby’) pub. Lewis’s next letter was to a man he was keen to introduce to these friends.

TO CHARLES WILLIAMS (W): ¹⁷

      [Magdalen College]

      March 11th 1936

      [Dear Mr Williams,]

      I never know about writing to an author. If you are older than I, I don’t want to seem impertinent: if you are younger, I don’t want to seem patronizing. But I feel I must risk it.

      A book sometimes crosses ones path which is so like the sound of ones native language in a strange country that it feels almost uncivil not to wave some kind of flag in answer. I have just read your Place of the Lion and it is to me one of the major literary events of my life—comparable to my first discovery of George Macdonald, G. K. Chesterton, or Wm. Morris. There are layers and layers—first the pleasure that any good fantasy gives me: then, what is rarely (tho’ not so very rarely) combined with this, the pleasure of a real philosophical СКАЧАТЬ