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

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СКАЧАТЬ S. I enclose the fairy tale, and hope you will like it.

      

       TO DOM BEDE GRIFFITHS OSB (W):

      Magdalen College

      Oxford 13/11/50

      My dear Dom Bede

      Good. I think we are in entire agreement on this point. One cd. put it this way. The bad (natural) tree cannot produce good fruit. But oddly, it can produce fruits that by all external tests are indistinguishable from the good ones: the act done from one’s own separate and unredeemed, tho’ ‘moral’ will, looks exactly like the act done by Christ in us. And oddly enough it is the tree’s real duty to go on producing these imitation fruits till it recognises this futility and despairs and is made a new (spiritual) tree. The trouble in the XVIth century was that Luther—who intuited the truth—was fundamentally an uneducated man, a peasant type: and really let the whole question get immediately entangled with political and ecclesiological questions wh. were really quite irrelevant to it. But the whole question must now be raised again. What most people who talk about Reunion don’t realise is that continental Protestantism regards the C. of E. as still theologically ‘uniformed’ and the Lutheran-Anglican gap is really at present at least as wide as the Anglican-Roman. It is thus a three cornered affair.

How very much superior the Imitation¹⁷⁷ is to the Scale of Perfection¹⁷⁸–yet I’d have said just the opposite once.

      Yours

      C. S. Lewis

      

       TO VERA MATHEWS (W): TS

      REF.50/81

      Magdalen College,

      Oxford. 20th November 1950.

      My dear Miss Mathews,

      The nine pounds fourteen ounces of comfort and cheer, whose arrival was heralded by your last letter, has this morning arrived in good condition, and will be very welcome for what the papers still describe rather pathetically as ‘the festive season’. Which, as I told you, threatens to be even leaner than usual this year; there are amongst other things, cheerful prognostications of turkey at 7/6 per pound. My board will not ‘groan under coarse plenty’ at any such price, especially as we shall be in a position to sacrifice a couple of chickens.

      I never read the papers, and would not have known anything about it except for my brother, who kindly reads me out the more cheerful extracts at breakfast. However, I am grateful to him for one excerpt from yesterday’s paper—a delicious printer’s error in a description of a revivalist meeting in the Midlands:–‘At the conclusion of the exercises, a large CROW remained in the hall, singing Abide with Me’. With renewed thanks and all good wishes,

      Yours sincerely,

      C. S. Lewis

      

       TO VERA MATHEWS (W): TS

      REF.50/81

      Magdalen College,

      Oxford. 25th November 1950.

      Dear Miss Mathews,

Many thanks for your letter of the 20th, and especially for the quotation from R Giovanni;¹⁷⁹ it is good, is’nt it?

      I don’t think I should like the climate of Beverly Hills for a permanency; do you never feel the need to get away up north for a holiday and see snow on the ground? My idle brother on the other hand, with nostalgic memories of long lazy days in the tropics—at the taxpayer’s expense—feels it would suit him down to the ground: and talks still at times, generally at dinner times, of a steak and mushrooms which he once ate in San Francisco.

I note, with the usual gratitude—and embarrassment—that the usual stream of gifts is making its way steadily along the pipeline which you have laid from Alpine Drive to Magdalen College. Many, many thanks. Will you despise my pedestrian taste if I say I prefer envelopes to butter Scotch? I fear there is a sort of echo of Goering’s ‘guns before butter’ about this,¹⁸⁰ but stationary is for some reason, absurdly hard to get over here, and very dear when got. Probably now that I come to think of it, because we have recently broken off our paper contract with Canada; not unnaturally to the great annoyance of the Canadians.

      If a magic carpet could transport you to Oxford this morning, it would work a very rapid cure on your lethargy. The floods are out, and now it is freezing, with a heavy fog; I can’t see across the quadrangle.

      With all best wishes,

      yours sincerely,

      C. S. Lewis

      

       TO BELLE ALLEN (WHL):

      Magdalen etc.

      25 November 1950.

      Dear Mrs Allen,

I too am an admirer of Bernard Shaw’s work, and could love him for his attack on the vivisectionists. That in the preface to the Doctor’s Dilemma is just devastating.¹⁸¹ Many before and since have attacked them for their cruelty, but Shaw was, I think, the first man to attack them for their stupidity; which I’m sure gets them on the raw whilst an attack on their cruelty would most likely leave their withers unwrung. No one who has ever read Shaw is able afterwards to think of vivisectionists without remembering the imbecile who spent his time cutting the tails off generations of mice to see if presently one would be born without a tail…

TO RUTH PITTER(BOD): ¹⁸²

      REF.50/4.

      Magdalen College,

      Oxford. 28th November 1950.

      Dear Miss Pitter,

What a delightful surprise! You cheer me up no end, and provide a makeweight to letters from a headmistress which tell me the book will cause confusion and terror, and that many people are much ‘distressed’ at my having written it. But I get nice letters from actual children and parents.^* I noted, of course, the lion image in your previous letter and rejoiced darkly.

      But next time you write, don’t write all about me: what are you doing, and how are you? Well, I hope. With very many thanks,

      yours sincerely,

      C. S. Lewis

      

       TO MRS HALMBACHER (L):

      Magdalen СКАЧАТЬ