Collected Letters Volume Three: Narnia, Cambridge and Joy 1950–1963. Walter Hooper

Чтение книги онлайн.

       1954

      At the beginning of the year Lewis resigned from the presidency of the. Oxford University Socratic Club. With his help, its founder Stella Aldwinckle had built it into one of the most exciting and best-attended clubs in Oxford. But Lewis was now tired. He had been working since 1938 on his massive English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, and he was in the middle of writing the last Chronicle of Narnia. The Narnian stories were being published at a rate of one per year, and there were three more to go. Yet in resigning as president of the Socratic Club to give himself more leisure, Lewis was unaware of an invitation he would receive from Cambridge University in May 1954. Meanwhile, Stella Aldwinckle met with others of the Socratic Club to decide who should be their new president.

       TO STELLA ALDWINCKLE (W):

      Magdalen College

      Oxford Jan 1st 1954

      Dear Stella

      Thank you for your kind card. And I must ask your pardon for not (I think) having yet ‘placed in your hands’ my resignation from the Presidency of the Socratic. I do so now, wishing you a better and more active man as my successor.

      The moment seems a good one for saying how very much I have admired the great work you have been doing in Oxford all these years; a work which, I expect, no one else could have done, and v. few others would have done. I have worked with some who had your energy and with some who had your good temper, but I am not sure that I have worked with any who had both. It has been a great privilege and I have at all times appreciated it more than (I fear) my behaviour showed. May you long continue the work.

      Oremus pro invicem.

      Yours

      Jack

       TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE (W):

      Magdalen College

      Oxford Jan 1st 1954

      Dear Mrs. Shelburne

      Thanks for your letter of the 28th, to which I’m afraid I can only manage a v. small answer, for Christmas mails have ‘got me down’. This season is to me mainly hard, gruelling work–write, write, write, till I wickedly say that if there were less good will (going through the post) there would be more peace on earth.

      By Jove, I do sympathise with you about the sinus (I am warned by everyone who has ever had it not at any price to have the operation. One doctor said that he wd. like to prosecute any surgeon who did it. This concerns you too!). I am sure that when God allows some cause like illness or a ‘bus-strike or a broken alarm clock to keep us from Mass, He has His own good reasons for not wishing us to go to it on that occasion. He who took care lest the 5000 should ‘faint’ going home on an empty stomach¹ may be trusted to know when we need bed even more than Mass.

      I don’t think there is anything superstitious in your story about the Voice. These visions or ‘auditions’ at the moment of death are all v. well attested: quite in a different category from ordinary ghost stories. I am so glad people liked your poem, which deserved it, and that you liked mine² of which (a v. unusual thing for me) I can’t now remember a single word.

      Then I must stop: wishing and praying for you ‘a happy issue out of all your afflictions’³ and better days in 1954.

      Yours

      C. S Lewis

       TO DANIEL DAVIN (OUP): ⁴

      Magdalen College

      Oxford Jan 1st 1954

      Dear Davin

      By all means make the Norman Davis⁵ corrections;⁶ or rather, that selection of them (about 85%) which I accepted in the list I sent you some time ago. I have not, myself, found any other misprints. I added to the Davis list one correction of my own–the omission of the word first before printed in the Bibliographical account of’The Court of Love’ under Anonyma. I can’t tell you the page for all my books are now packed.⁷

      Yours

      C. S. Lewis

       TO RUTH PITTER(BOD):

      Magdalen College

      Oxford Jan 4th 54

      Dear Ruth–

      Yes, but wouldn’t Evelyn⁸ and Bp. King⁹ and all our ancestors and many contemporary foreigners be equally astonished at the amazing retardation wh. the English Nineteenth Century methods imposed on human growth. In my brother’s period (I trust you are reading his Splendid Century) boys of 15 successfully commanded cavalry regiments in action. Juliet¹⁰ was dying in the tomb at an age when our girls are thinking only of Lacrosse. I never really understood Shakespeare’s Berownes¹¹ and Mer cutios¹² till I realised that they were, in age, Fifth Form boys let loose with ducats in their pockets and swords at their sides.

      I’m not saying which is best: only that one mustn’t assume our tempo to be ‘nature’ and all the others to be artificial. I remember two or three of us at my prep-school discussing v. eagerly whether the future was like a line wh. one can’t see or like a line not yet drawn. We didn’t think we were doing anything ‘grown-up’–the subject just arose like any other. We probably thought we were more grown up when reading PickwickСКАЧАТЬ