I’m the last person to give an opinion. I am so much the reverse of the type that ‘joins things’ or ‘gets things up’ that I’d be no fair judge even if I knew the parish and the people. Of course it all depends what the latter are really like! On that turns whether it is (a.) A holy, beneficent & sensible activity (b.) A harmless, if rather fussy, hobby (c.) A pestilent coven of snoopers & busybodies (d) A mixture of all three. It might be anything almost! I’m afraid you’ll have to find out! Praying for ‘a right judgement in all things’.213
I hope in a few weeks I’ll be through my present furore of work & able to correspond properly again. Bless you all
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE (W):
Magdalen College
Oxford Nov. 6/53
Dear Mrs. Shelburne
Oh I am glad, I am glad. And here’s a thing worth recording. Of course I have been praying for you daily, as always, but latterly have found myself doing so with much more concern and especially about 2 nights ago, with such a strong feeling how very nice it would be, if God willed, to get a letter from you with good news. And then, as if by magic (indeed it is the whitest magic in the world) the letter comes today. Not (lest I should indulge in folly) that your relief had not in fact occurred before my prayer, but as if, in tenderness for my puny faith, God moved me to pray with especial earnestness just before He was going to give me the thing. How true that our prayers are really His prayers: He speaks to Himself through us.
I am also most moved at hearing how you were supported thro’ the period of anxiety. For one is sometimes tempted to think that if He wanted us to be as un-anxious as the lilies of the field He really might have given us a constitution more like theirs! But then when the need cornes He carries out in us His otherwise impossible instructions. In fact He always has to do all the things–all the prayers, all the virtues. No new doctrine, but newly come home to me. Forgive a short letter, quite inadequate to the subject: I am at present just so busy (tho’ not unhappily so) that I don’t know if I’m on my head or my heels. God bless you.
Yours
C. S. Lewis
During the first week of November Joy Gresham arrived in London, this time with her two sons, David and Douglas. They took rooms in the Avoca House Hotel, 43 Belsize Park, Hampstead. A few days later they moved into a flat at 14 Belsize Park, in the hotel annexe.
TO VERA GEBBERT (W):
Magdalen College
Oxford Nov 7th 53
Dear Mrs. Gebbert
This will have to be an inadequate scrawl for my brother, who drives the typewriter, is away and I’ve so much to do that I can hardly write–in the double sense that I’ve hardly time and that my right hand is stiff and tired with compulsory scribbling! Yes, babies (tho’ I know yours is quite unlike all other babies!) do look like Sir W.214 I wonder why? ‘Trailing clouds of glory’ I suppose.215
I’d love to have seen that shop window and hope they have done the same with all the Lions successors: there are 3 of these now, I hope you know.
Mrs. Williams216 lives at 23 ANTRIM MANSIONS, LONDON, N.W.3. I think life is pretty hard for her and am very glad to hear of your friend’s wish to write to her. You shd. warn her that Mrs. W is not at all intellectual.
How wrong you are when you think that streamlined planes and trains wd. attract me to America. What I want to see there is yourself and 3 or 4 other good friends, after New England, the Rip Van Winkle Mts., Nantucket, the Huckleberry Finn country, the Rockies, Yellowstone Park, and a sub-Artie winter. And I shd. never come if I couldn’t manage to come by sea instead of air: preferably on a cargo boat that took weeks on the voyage. I’m a rustic animal and a maritime animal: no good at great cities, big hotels, or all that. But this is becoming egotistical. And here comes my first pupil of the morning. All blessings, and love to all.
Yours,
C. S. Lewis
I’d love to see a bear, a snow-shoe, and a real forest
TO GEOFFREY BLES (BOD):
Magdalen College
Oxford Nov 12th 53
My dear Bles
Right-oh. I’ll take the £17-0-0 and expect to have £8-10-0 Royalties deducted.
I can’t tell you how glad I am that you spotted that howler about the frying pan and the fire. I wonder no hostile reviewer seized on it.217
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE (W):
Magdalen College
Oxford 27/xi/53
Dear Mrs. Shelburne
Thank you for your letter of Nov. 23rd. We have a good many things in common at the moment, for I also am dead tired (cab-horse tired) and I also have sinusitis. I don’t think we exactly ‘call it catarrh’ over here. Intense catarrh is one symptom of sinusitis, and as none of us have heard of s. till quite lately I suppose cases of it used to be wrongly diagnosed as mere catarrh. I find myself that when it produces most catarrh it produces least pain and vice versa.
About sleep: do you find that the great secret (if one can do it) is not to care whether you sleep? Sleep is a jade who scorns her suitors but woos her scorners.
I feel exactly as you do about the horrid commercial racket they have made out of Christmas. I send no cards and give no presents except to children.
It is fun to see you agreeing with what you believe to be my views on prayer: well you may, for they are not mine but scriptural. Our prayers are God talking to Himself’ is only Romans, VII, 26-27.218 And ‘praying to the end’ is of course our old acquaintance, the parable of the Unjust Judge.219
I am sure you will be glad to hear that your recent adventures have been a great support and ‘corroboration’ to me. I am also v. conscious (and was especially so while praying for you during your workless time) that anxiety is not only a pain wh. we must ask God to assuage but also a weakness we must ask Him to pardon–for He’s told us take no care for the morrow. The news that you had been almost miraculously guarded from that sin and spared that pain and hence the good hope that we shall all find the like mercy when our bad times come, has strengthened me much. God bless you.
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO MARY VAN DEUSEN (W):
Magdalen College
Oxford Nov 28th 1953
Dear Mrs. Van Deusen–
Your letter links onto something I’ve been thinking of lately. There are two patterns of prayer in the N.T. (a) That in Gethsemane, ‘Not my will but thine’220 (b) That in Mark xi, 24.