Walter Hooper

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


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as a result of this Lewis assumed what he called his intellectual ‘New Look’. ‘There were to be,’ he insisted,

      Lewis had just arrived at this ‘New Look’, with its rejection of anything supernatural, when Owen Barfield and Cecil Harwood became followers of Rudolf Steiner and the theosophical beliefs expressed in anthroposophy. ‘I was hideously shocked,’ said Lewis:

      The ‘Great War’ was to last until 1931, when Lewis converted to Christianity.

      In a word, HarperCollins and I were determined that the three volumes would contain not a ‘selection’ of Lewis’s letters but all. The reader can see from the frequency of the abbreviations ‘BOD’ and ‘W’ that most of the letters are from the two major collections in the Bodleian Library and the Wade Center. But for the purpose of this volume, the net was thrown very wide, and this volume contains the letters I have found in all the Lewis collections I know about. When I began work on Volume III, I guessed that, with the addition of the Supplement, it would be only a few hundred pages longer than the other two. However, as word spread that this would be the final volume, I received numerous Lewis letters preserved in private collections. And so the book grew to be the size it is.

      Despite our efforts to include in these volumes all of Lewis’s letters, there are a few that either I forgot about or which turned up too late to be fitted in. No doubt others will come to light. We should not be discouraged. This happens with the letters of nearly all eminent people. I doubt we can say we have all the letters written by anyone. Letters from Dr Samuel Johnson have shown up hundreds of years after his letters were first published, and despite the efforts of the many editors of Cardinal John Henry Newman’s Letters and Diaries, over a period of fifty years, letters from Newman still show up from time to time. While I have no doubt that most of Lewis’s letters are contained in these volumes, I expect the occasional letter will be popping up for the next 100 years. If this happens, perhaps HarperCollins will publish an additional volume of letters.

      The theme of this volume is Narnia, Cambridge and Joy, but up to the end of 1949, there was almost nothing to suggest that the last thirteen years of Lewis’s life would involve any of those things, that it would be the fullest of all, and that the period would yield so many letters. In short, there was no reason for Lewis to imagine a revolution taking place in his life. He was very tired from years of looking after his aged companion, Mrs Moore, and he would have been glad of an occasional day of freedom. Thus, when Don Giovanni Calabria wrote from Verona at the beginning of 1949, urging him to write more, Lewis replied on 14 January:

      The extraordinary burst of inspiration that led to the writing of the Narnian stories was beyond anything he had experienced since his interplanetary stories. How did it happen? As he explained,

      The first two chapters of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe were probably composed soon after he wrote to Don Giovanni on 14 January 1949, and they were ready for Roger Lancelyn Green to read when he visited Lewis in March. This first ‘Chronicle of Narnia’ was completed by the end of May, and in June Lewis made a start on what became The Magician’s Nephew. He dropped this story when he ran into some difficulties with it, and in September 1949 he wrote Prince Caspian. In August 1949 Lewis signed a contract with publisher Geoffrey Bles for The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and by Christmas Pauline Baynes had illustrated it.

      The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, always the most popular of the stories, was published on 16 October 1950. The Magician’s Nephew was not completed until the spring of 1954, but all the other five were finished