College
Oxford Dec 4th 1953
Dear Mr. Unwin
I would willingly do all in my power to secure for Tolkien’s great book the recognition it deserves. Wd. the enclosed be any use? If not, tell me, and I will try again. I can’t tell you how much we think of your House for publishing it.
Yours sincerely
C. S. Lewis
It would be almost safe to say that no book like this has ever been written. If Ariosto rivalled it in invention (in fact he does not) he would still Jack its heroic seriousness. No imaginary world has been projected which is at once so multifarious and so true to its own inner laws; none so seemingly objective, so disinfected from the taint of an author’s merely individual psychology; none so relevant to the actual human situation yet so free from allegory. And what fine shading there is in the variations of style to meet the almost endless diversity of scenes and characters–comic, homely, epic, monstrous, or diabolic!
TO KATHARINE FARRER(BOD):
Magdalen College
Oxford Dec. 4th 1953
Dear Mrs. Farrer
Yes, I know. That issue about the leonine form divides people sharply and you and I are on opposite sides of a fence.231
I too have got The Fellowship of the Ring and have gluttonously read two chapters instead of saving it all for the week-end. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if it really succeeded (in selling, I mean)? It would inaugurate a new age. Dare we hope?
Yours sincerely
Jack Lewis
TO J. R R TOLKIEN (P):
[The Kilns]
Dec 7th 1953
Dear Tollers
I have been trying–like a boy with a bit of toffee–to take Vol. I slowly, to make it last, but appetite overmastered me and it’s now finished: far too short for me. The spell does not break. The love of Gimli232 and the departure from Lothlórien is still almost unbearable.233 What came out stronger at this reading than on any previous one was the gradual coming of the shadow–step by step–over Boromir.234
I wrote what I could to Unwin.235 Even if he and you approve my words, think twice before using them: I am certainly a much, and perhaps an increasingly, hated man whose name might do you more harm than good. In festina lente.236 All the best.
Yours
Jack
TO EDNA GREENE WATSON (BOD): TS 504/53.
Magdalen College,
Oxford. 7th December 1953.
Dear Mrs. Watson,
How very kind indeed of you to send me such a nice Xmas present; for, though things are improving over here under Winston, we are still not exactly living in a land of milk and honey–cake in particular remaining something of a luxury. So your parcel comes in very apropos to ‘mend our cheer’ as the older writers would have put it.
In one way we are exceptionally lucky this year, and that is in having so far a freak winter. I am writing in an unwarmed room, temperature 60, though it is a dull, sunless day; and the Sunday before last, the crowds were out sun-bathing on Brighton beach! Yesterday it was reported on the wireless that the butter-cups are out in Switzerland, the tulips in Holland, and that wild strawberries are being gathered in Norway; whilst in Petrograd they are having what I suppose seems to them like a heat wave–temperature in the open, 41. I hope you too in America are benefiting by this postponement of winter; not that I, personally, think it very healthy, but no doubt the real winter is lurking not far away.
Weather apart, there is not much to report here. Term is just over, and I have finished a troublesome academic book, and look forward to my vacation. But, alas, at my time of life, vacations get shorter and shorter: though to be sure, so do terms. With all best wishes for a happy Christmas, and many thanks,
yours sincerely,
C. S. Lewis
TO R. B. GRIBBON (W):
Magdalen College
Oxford Dec. 10th 1953
Dear Mr. Gribbon
Thanks for your letter of the 7th, and all good wishes to the readers of Lucretius.237
Harding has fought his way towards genuinely Christian Theism, but whether he has yet quite reached it is another matter.238 I think his ‘God’ could be said to ‘transcend’. Isn’t each being in his hierarchy related to the one below it rather as my consciousness is related to any obscure consciousness there may be in my particles. And ‘I’ am not related to them (I think) simply as a Pantheistic god is to finite beings: for I am something v. much more than their sum or even their organising principle. Of course H’s God is immanent in all things: but it is not the affirmation of immanence, but the denial of transcendence that constitutes Pantheism. In fact my main objection to Harding’s system wd. be a v. different one: that we are in it completely cut off from God. There can be no I-Thou relation between Him and us any more than between me and my particles. Memo: I said in the preface that I wasn’t at all sure whether his method of trying to restore reality to the universe wd. work. It was the mere attempt to do so which seemed to me so important and welcome.239
You’ll have fun with Lucretius. I looked into him the other day & came to the melancholy conclusion that I didn’t know so much Latin as I had done 30 years ago. With all good wishes.
Yours very sincerely,
C. S. Lewis
TO DOROTHY L. SAYERS (W): 240
Magdalen College
Oxford Dec 16th. 1953
Dear Miss Sayers,
Thank you for a really august card. I have spent several minutes doing the Paper Pilgrimage with the aid of the pen-knife point–dig- and it shall be opened. Not all the doors in my copy do actually open: but that admits (only too easily) of an allegorical interpretation.241
I see we have been in the pillory together along with company which I enjoy less than yours. Have you read Miss Nott yet?242 And should I? I had hoped she might send us all (as someone said) UN complimentary copies: for I’m an Ulster Scot and don’t like spending good siller243 on the lady. As for answering her (if one can) the trouble is that the people who read answers have hardly ever read the attack.
When