But we shall find better uses for your petrol, and I’ll come by bus from Oxford St. I’m glad to know there’s a ‘regular’ service and am wondering whether it runs regularly every 5 minutes, every hour, once a week, or only a century.49 No doubt I shall find out.
Looking forward!–yes, I can’t keep the feeling within bounds. I know now how a bottle of champagne feels while the wire is being taken off the cork.
Yours
Jack
Pop!!
TO DOUGLAS EDISON HARDING (P): 50
Magdalen etc
Easter Day [25 March] 1951
Dear Mr. Harding
Hang it all, you’ve made me drunk, roaring drunk as I haven’t been on a book (I mean, a book of doctrine: imaginative works are another matter) since I first read Bergson during World War I.51 Who or what are you? How have you lived 40 years without my hearing of you before? Understand at once that my delight is not, alas!, so significant as it may seem, for I was never a scientist and have long ceased to be even the very minor philosopher I once was.
A great deal of your book is completely beyond me. My opinion is of no value. But my sensation is that you have written a work of the highest genius. It may not be—I mean, I can’t vouch that it is–philosophical genius. It may be only literary genius. The feeling I get is like a mix up of Pindar, Dante, & Patmore. (But can anything be so well written if it’s not good thought as well?). You follow the rocket course wh. you ascribe to Tellus.52 Paragraph after paragraph starts as if we were embarked for only the sort of Pantheistic uplift one gets in Emerson, but then swoops down and comes all clean & hard. But remember always, I don’t really understand: especially the crucial cap. 13 wh. is no easier than the Deduction of the Categories. (One difficulty is that my excitement makes me read it too quickly).
One criticism. Somebody is sure to answer the Missing Head gambit by saying that it wd. have no meaning for a blind man who knew the world and himself by palpation instead of vision.53 My head is just as feelable (tho’ not as visible) as the rest of me. In other words, they’ll say, you have merely tripped over the fact that the eyes are in the Head. I’m sure this objection misses the real point: but had it not better be obviated, if only in a footnote?
England is disgraced if this book doesn’t get published: yet ordinary publishers will be so likely to send it to someone like Ryle to vet, and that will be fatal. Gollancz, Sheed, Faber, are possibles.
May I pass on my copy to Owen Barfield?–I must have someone to talk to about it.
When can we meet? Can you come over sometime next May or June and dine? (I can provide bed & breakfast)
I now feel that my illnesses etc are no excuse for my not having read it before. That this celestial bomb shd. have lain undetonated on my table all these months is a kind of allegory. Thanks to the Nth.
Yours sincerely
C. S. Lewis
P.S. On p. 97 (30b) Further, it was until recently often held…By whom? I thought the doctrine always was that of my eldila54–‘He has no need at all for anything that is made55…He has infinite use for all that is made.’
TO RUTH PITTER(BOD): TS
Magdalen College,
Oxford. 26th March 1951.
Dear Miss Pitter,
May I book May 10th: 1.15? The ferly in the engraving is not at all like a concrete mixer.56
I did’nt know arm chairs were ever cleaned: should they be?57
Yours ignorantly,
C. S. Lewis
TO GEORGE SAYER(W): TS
Magdalen College,
Oxford. 26th March 1951.
My dear George,
The time has come, the Walrus said, to talk of many things58–but chiefly of when you next propose to take a bed in College. Any time you like after the 23rd of next month, Mondays excepted, and also excepting 8th and 15th May.
Pray, Sir, how does Moira do? And Cardinal Schwanda?59 All well here except myself, who have a bad cold; but I’m off to Ireland I hope on Friday for a fortnight, which may shift it. (Warnie in his usual way of encouragement, reads me paragraphs from the paper at breakfast about liners wind bound in the Mersey and waves 61/2 feet high off the Irish coast.)
Yours
Jack
TO CHRISTIAN HARDIE (P):
[Magdalen]
27/3/51
Dear Christian
The difference isn’t exactly that I read a novel for the characters. It’s more that for me a novel, or any work of art, is primarily a Thing, an Object, enjoyed for its colour, proportions, atmosphere, its flavour—the Odyssey-ishness of the Odyssey60 or the Learishness of K Lear: but never, never (here is the real difference) as a personal acquaintance with the author.
Of course it is not a question of where I like the characters in the sense of wishing to meet them in real life. In that sense I like Sebastian better than lulia (or dislike him less): but I ‘like’ lulia better as a character in the sense that I find her live & worth reading about, while I find him dull. What matters more than absolute liking or disliking is some degree of sympathy with the author’s revealed preferences. I didn’t think the mother & Brideshead ‘priggish & imperious’ & I didn’t think Ryder ‘a sane & ordinary chap!’ As to liking & disliking the ‘idea’ of twitch-on-the-thread, I’m not absolutely certain that I often have any experience I wd. call liking or disliking an idea.
My trouble is quite different: a twitch-on-the-thread conversion doesn’t seem to me to be capable of artistic presentation. When the old man crosses himself we are shown (and can only be shown) only the physical gesture. The difference between (a.) Grace (b.) Momentary sentiment (c.) Semi-conscious revival of a gesture learned in childhood, can’t appear. It can be in real life. But in art de non existentibus et non apparentibus eadem lex.61 In fact, we’re left to put in all the important part for ourselves. I know about the veil over Agamemnon’s face:62 but the success must have depended on the rest of the picture
As to whether ‘religious people should be good’ Nicholas63