Rector of Université Laval, Quebec, wrote to Lewis on 6 June 1952 to say the University wanted to confer on him an Honorary Doctorate of Literature. No difficulties were put in the way of Lewis receiving the degree in absentia, and it was duly conferred upon him on 22 September 1952.
122 1 Corinthians 12:27.
123 The two nonsense poems referred to are the one reproduced above, and ‘Awake, My Lute!’, published in The Atlantic Monthly, CLXXII (November 1943), pp. 113, 115, and reprinted in Poems and CR
124 Rudyard Kipling, Just So Stories (1902).
125 A vol is a heraldic symbol consisting of a pair of outstretched wings, connected together at the shoulders without any bird’s body in the middle.
* Except the Unbelievable, of course: he has more sense than we have!
126 It is not known which of the letters to Borst this undated poem, in the style of Spenser’s Faerie Queene, accompanied. It seems likely that it was sent with the letter of 22 June 1952.
127 In 1950-1 Bodle trained at the Department of Education of the Deaf at Manchester University, and at this time she was teaching at the Manchester Royal School for the Deaf.
128 Helen Keller, The Story of My Life (New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1903). Born blind and deaf, Helen Keller (1880-1968) learned to read, write and speak from her teacher, Anne Sullivan. She graduated from Radcliffe College, and lectured widely on behalf of deaf people.
129 Roger Lancelyn Green, From the World’s End: A Fantasy (Leicester: E. Ward, [1948]).
130 See Lewis’s comments on George Rostrevor Hamilton’s The Tell-Tale Article: A Critical Approach to Modern Poetry (1949) in the letter to Hamilton of 14 August 1949 (CL II, pp. 966-7).
131 David Craigie, Dark Atlantis (1951).
132 ‘Orichalcum’ is golden copper.
133 Blessed Virgin Mary.
134 Of his poem, ‘The Pilgrim’s Problem’, first published in The Month, VII (May 1952), p. 275, and reprinted in Poems and CP.
135 See the letter to Greeves of 18 September 1916 (CL I, pp. 221-3).
136 See the biography of Geoffrey Bles in CL II, p. 554n.
137 ‘Mycroft’ was Bles’s name for Warnie, a joke the Lewis brothers greatly enjoyed. Mycroft is the name Sir Arthur Conan Doyle gave the mysterious elder brother of Sherlock Holmes. He is first mentioned in ‘The Adventure of the Greek Interpreter’ in Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (1894), in which Holmes says: ‘My brother would be the greatest criminal agent that ever lived. But he has no ambition and no energy. He would not even go out of his way to verify his own solutions, and would rather be considered wrong than take the trouble to prove himself right.’ The mysterious brother is also mentioned in ‘The Adventure of the Bruce–Partington Plans’ in His Last Bow (1917). In that story Holmes says Mycroft ‘has the tidiest and most orderly brain, with the greatest capacity for storing facts, of any man living’.
138 Lewis was referring to Le Lion et la Sorcière Blanche, trans. Émile-R. Blanchet (Paris: Librairie Hachette, 1952), the French translation of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
139 Le Lion et la Sorcière Blanche, ch. 17, p. 185: ‘great shame would we have’.
140 Mere Christianity.
141 On ‘Parson’s Pleasure’ see CL I, p. 304n.
142 Young published his essay on Lewis’s trilogy as ‘The Contented Christian’ in the Cambridge Journal, V (July 1952), pp. 603-12.
143 Driver probably had in mind Richard Capper’s Judith: An Historical Drama (1867).
144 Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game, trans. Mervyn Savill (London: Aldus, 1949).
145 In George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949).
146 Horace, Ars Poética, 70-1: ‘Multa renascentur quae iam cecidere, cadentque/quae nunc surit in honore.’ (The next word in the poem, vocabula, refers not to ‘many things’ but ‘many words’–words that go in and out of favour in literary language.)
147 i.e., Anthroposophists. See the letter to Montgomery of 10 June 1952.
148 Lewis was referring to the Latin poem, ‘Dies Irae, dies ilia’ (‘Day of wrath’) by Thomas of Celano (c. 1200-1260), companion and biographer of St Francis of Assisi. The poem forms a part of the requiem Masses in the Roman Missal.
149 Revelation 22:20.
150 John 13:34.
151 John 16:22.
152 Bodle was returning to New Zealand to teach at the School for the Deaf, Titirangi, Auckland, and she had asked for Lewis’s prayers.
153 Charles Williams Dunn (1915–) was one of the editors of Major British Writers. He was also editing at this time A Chaucer Reader: Selections from the Canterbury Tales (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1952). Dunn was the editor (with E. T. Byres) of Middle English Literature (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1973) and many other works.