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

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СКАЧАТЬ href="#litres_trial_promo">** as soon as you conveniently can, let me have word through someone else, how you are getting on and whether there is anything of any kind I can do for you.

      Yours

      C. S. Lewis

       TO ALEC VIDLER (BOD):¹¹

      Magdalen College,

      Oxford

      Ian 17th 1939

      Dear Mr. Vidler

      I fear I am a very bad salesman, but I enclose the names of those people who might be induced to take Theology)¹²

      On the question of reviewing—would it be a good thing sometimes to review books which had not been sent for review? I am thinking chiefly of infamous and ill informed books. Review copies of what you specially want to refute are not likely to be sent you, and that is one of the ways in which nonsense circulates uncontradicted. The reviewer wd. presumably, in such cases, pay for his own copy. (I have no particular book in view at the moment).

      yours sincerely,

      C. S. Lewis

       TOA. K. HAMILTON JENKIN (BOD):

      [The Kilns]

      Ian 22nd 1939.

      My dear Jenkin–

      I was delighted to hear from Barfield that you are quite markedly better though not yet well enough for writing. I have, thank God, no experience of your ailment so I don’t know what the recovery is like-whether as after fever you suddenly wake up after the first good night feeling ravenous with hunger (oh those first slices of bread and butter: angel’s food!)—or itch as after chickenpox—or (I hope not) whether you pass into a state of melancholy as after flu.

      On the assumption of melancholy, let me cheer you up. I don’t think it is likely we shall enjoy that walk much as we shall be so hard up after the capital levy in February (you heard about that I suppose): even if we do go you will have seen in the papers that a spring of unprecedented rains and sleet is prophesied. Still we must make a push for it. I shouldn’t get maps and plan out a tour: those ordinance survey maps are so unreliable that its not much use. I’m told Prohibition will probably be brought in as soon as Parliament meets. Never mind: we must drink the pure element, Adam’s wine (tho’ by the bye you will have noticed warnings lately against drinking any water south and west of a line drawn from London to Carlisle). Milk, of course, there will be none. And whatever happens don’t worry about your feet on a first walk-newcomers are nearly always quite alright again by Xmas. So you see, dear friend, how our little troubles melt away if only they are faced in the right spirit. Ripeness is all.¹³

      You would (seriously) like it here to day. The Cherwell is up almost to a level of Addison’s walk and running (so Salters¹⁴ told my brother yesterday) 10 miles an hour, the speed being very visible by the endless procession of big mats or flakes of froth that go shooting by. The meadow enclosed within Addison’s walk (you remember?) is flooded and under a greyish, fine, morning sky gives pleasant reflections of trees and upward lights in unexpected places. Several birds are singing. There is always a specially fresh and poignant quality about them at this time of the year—like voices in a big empty ball-room the day before the ball—perhaps because they are few, or perhaps only because ones ears have grown unused to them in the winter.

      Which reminds me, I heard an explanation the other day of why the stars look so unnaturally bright if one wakes up at night from really deep sleep and looks out: viz. because one’s eyes are rested and completely on top of their job.

      Talking of jobs, did you see that D. L. Keir of Univ. has been made Principal of Queen’s University Belfast. A little galling to me because he will now become such a great man in my home town that whenever I go there I shall find people regarding it as the very peak of my career to have known him.

      I have just been writing a review of Charles Williams’ new poem Taliessin through Logres, ¹⁵ and wonder if you have read his novels. The two I recommend most strongly are The Place of the Lion and Descent into Hell¹⁶ They are ‘shockers’ in a sense, but of a peculiar sort. The first is of special interest to chaps like you (a B. Litt.!) and me (a don) because it is about a perfect bitch of a female researcher called Damaris who is writing a doctorate thesis on the relation between ‘ideas’ in Plato and Angels in Abelard, without the slightest idea that it ever really meant anything, and all the time treating Plato and Aristotle and Dionysius and Abelard like ‘the top form of a school in which she was an inspector.’ Then, suddenly, owing to a piece of supernatural machinery which needn’t be described, she wakes up to find that the things she is studying are really there-one such primal energy looking in at her study window in the form of a gigantic pterodactyl. The novels are also interesting as the only modern ones I know which contain convincing ‘good’ characters.

      I have a theory why the ‘good’ characters in literature are so often dull. To make an interesting character you have to see him from the inside, all agree. Now to imagine from within a person morally inferior to yourself you don’t need to do anything, you only need to stop doing something-to take the brake off and give all your usually suppressed vanity, or greed, or cruelty, or envy a delightful holiday. But how to make one better than yourself? Well, you can make him a little better by making him actually do what you only try to do, or do often what you only do seldom. That is, you can give him the sort of virtue in full which you have in some degree yourself. But for anything beyond that you simply haven’t got the material. Not only do you not actually behave as a hero would, you don’t even know what he feels like. Hence in most literature ideally good characters have to be made ‘from outside’ and accordingly look like puppets.¹⁷

      From which silly readers draw the conclusion that good people are dull in real life—as if there were anything particularly delectable in the society of bullies, cheats, egoists and drug-addicts, or as if the same qualities which made a man an egoist did not normally make him a bore. Moral—beware of putting ‘good’ characters into a book for that’s where you give yourself away, as Richardson (to my mind) is given away by Pamela.¹⁸ I said ‘to my mind’ not only because of my habitual modesty and temperance (you will remember that of old) but because Dr. Johnson thought differently.¹⁹

      I go to Cambridge to lecture once a week this term, so if you have any commissions in Bletchley now is your time. Did I tell you I have discovered the Renaissance never occurred—that is what I’m lecturing on.²⁰ Do you think it is reasonable to call the lecture ‘The Renaissance’ under the circumstances? ‘Absence of the Renaissance’ sounds so odd, and ‘What was happening while the Renaissance was not taking place’ is inaccurate because, of course, if the Renaissance never occurred, then all times were times at which it did not occur, and therefore everything that ever happened happened ‘while the Renaissance was not taking place’. Alas, as Wordsworth said, ‘I fear/That I am trifling.’²¹

      So, I hope, are you by now. Don’t СКАЧАТЬ