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

is or should be. But the bus-driver in the Divorce is certainly, and consciously, modelled on the angel at the gates of Dis,⁹¹ just as the meeting of the ‘Tragedian’ with his wife is consciously modelled on that of Dante & Beatrice at the end of the Purgatorio:⁹² i.e. it is the same predicament, only going wrong. I intended readers to spot these resemblances: so you may go to the top of the class!

‘By the Furioso⁹³ out of the Commedia’ is not far wrong. My real model was David Lyndsay’s Voyage to Arcturus wh. first suggested to me that the form of ‘science fiction’ cd. be filled by spiritual experiences.⁹⁴ And as the Furioso was in some ways the science-fiction of its age, your analogy works. But mind you, there is already a science-fiction element in the Commedia: e.g. Inferno xxxiv 85-114.

      It’s fun laying out all my books as a cathedral. Personally I’d make Miracles and the other ‘treatises’ the cathedral school: my children’s stories are the real side-chapels, each with its own little altar.

No, I never read Perceforest.⁹⁵ The only O.R⁹⁶ prose romance I’ve read is Balain.⁹⁷ How lovely, how like water–or Grace–that limpid O.E prose is. Damn the Renaissance.

      I return cordially your wishes for a blessed Easter.

      Yours

      C. S. Lewis

      

TO JOHN GILFEDDER(W): ⁹⁸

      Magdalen College

      Oxford 30/iii/53

      Dear Gilfedder

      (I wish you’d call me Lewis not Sir) Thanks both for card of Florence and for your letter of the 15th.

I think a glossarial Index (I call it that because your specimens are partly index as well as glossary) wd. be a most useful addition to C.W.’s cycle.⁹⁹ But the chances of the O.U.P. ever re-printing Taliessin, let alone adding any matter to the volume, are infinitesimal. They wd. only do that if it showed signs of becoming a popular success: which of course it doesn’t.

      I am glad you are settled down and hope you are enjoying your work. Please remember me to your wife; all good wishes to both for a happy Easter.

      Yours

      C. S. Lewis

      

       TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE (W):

      Magdalen College

      Oxford 31/3/53

      Dear Mrs. Shelburne

      I’ve no time for a proper letter today but this is just a scrape of the pen to thank you for yours of the 27th and to wish you a v. blessed Easter. I expect Jeannie will grow up the most devoted grand-daughter ever. Your silly son-in-law doesn’t realise the charm of forbidden fruit: a grandmother one is forbidden to see rises almost into the status of a fairy godmother!

      Apropos of horrid little fat baby ‘cherubs’, did I mention that Heb. Kherub is from the same root as Gryphon? That shows what they’re really like!

      Yours

      C. S. Lewis

      

       TO SISTER PENELOPE CSMV(BOD):

      Magdalen

      1/4/53

      Dear Sister Penelope

I am simply delighted with The Coming of the Lord;¹⁰⁰ delighted, excited, and most grateful. I think it is the best book you have yet done, and the best theological book by anyone I have read for a long time. (You are, among other things, the only person I ever meet who gives me real light on the Old Testament). Chap VIII now convinces me completely.

I was talking nonsense when we last discussed this matter: I hadn’t really grasped the point that Man is the true Temple. That is a splendid bit on p. 76¹⁰¹ about the true sense of ‘it is finished’-the sword ‘finished’ when its life as a sword can begin)¹⁰² How did you think of it? Why did all the rest of us non And the explanation on p. 26 of why the Bride is never mentioned, is brilliant.¹⁰³ Indeed, I’ll say it is clever-why should we acquiesce in that word’s sliding into a contemptuous meaning. And many, many thanks for St. Bernard’s conception of the Palm Sunday procession.¹⁰⁴ And the daring use of larval at the bottom of p. 45 is a complete success: I wanted to clap my hands when I came to it.¹⁰⁵

      Now for a few tiny flaws, or what I think to be such.

P. 3. ‘Expectation, therefore, is a specifically human exercise.’¹⁰⁶ Yes, in the peculiar sense you give it of ex-spectation. But you haven’t explained that yet, have you? Won’t the reader take it in the current sense of

¹⁰⁷ and say that ‘expectation’, far from being specifically human, is seen at its v. maximum in a dog waiting to be taken for a walk or to have a ball thrown for it?

P. 5. at top. Basis or foundation wd. for many reasons be a better word than fundament.¹⁰⁸

P 5 later. Oh, oh why should an attitude almost impossible to a Pagan be called ‘neo-Paganism’?¹⁰⁹ You know that no Pagan, bless him, wd. ever have dreamed of thinking the sky belonged to Man. They had their faults, but that is just the sort of sin they never committed. They had too much αίδώσ,¹¹⁰ and δειδαιμονα,¹¹¹ and all that. You are falling into the common error of equating the post-Christian with the pre-Christian. They are as different as an unmarried girl is from a woman who has deserted her husband.

P. 44. Here I’m not sure, but, as the barristers say, I ‘put it to you.’ Can we take χóσμον¹¹² to mean Universe (as dist. from Earth) in view of other Johannine uses of it? But you are so often right that I dare say you will convince me on this point too.

      Anyway, it is a lovely little book. I am very much in your debt. All blessings.

      Yours sincerely

      C. S. Lewis

      

TO