me!
I have been progressing all this lent through the first volume of a v. nice edition of St Augustine’s City of God only to find that the other volume has been so wrongly bound that it begins and ends in the middle of sentences. What a tragedy this would once have been!
We have got (vice Mr. Papworth, now gathered to his fathers) a golden retriever puppy who is about the size of a calf and as strong as a horse: has the appetite of a lion, the manners of a hurricane, the morals of a gangster, and an over salivated mouth.
Please give my love to your mother, and remember me to Reid. I saw Bryson about a fortnight ago and I think he said he was going home this Vac. Will you be able to have me this summer? It is a very bright spot in the year, but don’t hesitate to say if it is inconvenient.
Yours
Jack
TO DANIEL NEYLAN (T): 26
Magdalen College,
Oxford.
May 5th 1937
Dear Neylan,
I am sorry your wife has been ill—give her my sympathy. Your offer is attractive to the hot-gospeller in me, but after a lot of thought I feel I must refuse. I have no notion how to handle such an audience nor what to say to them: but many thanks.
I am in the middle of a scholarship exam, or I shd. write more.
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO JOAN BENNETT (WHL):
Magdalen College,
Oxford.
May 7th 1937.
Dear Mrs Bennett
Will this do?27 Don’t hesitate to let me know if there is an expression in it which you think unfortunate or obscure, or any emphasis in dangerous directions.
About the imaginary chronology (by which I mean the sorting out of the love poems into cynical and idealistic periods), I find it nearly so embedded in everyone’s mind that I am haunted by the fear that there may be some real evidence for it which I don’t know; my jibe was made in the hope of eliciting this.
All I meant about the book was that it is not nearly so exciting as a book by you ought to be. Of course I disagree with the phonetic criticism, but very respectable people agree with you…
TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W):
Magdalen College.
Oxford.
June 10th 1937
My dear Arthur,
In my diary I have down ‘cross to Arthur’ for July 12th not July 5th and as I have arranged everything on this basis I trust it will be alright.
Your suspicion that I was fuming with wrath during the lunch is a sad commentary on my previous character, and coming from one who knows me so well, it must (I fear) be correct. This time, however, tho’ of course I would have preferred to see you alone, I quite liked it. Stamps…I can’t understand the attraction: but I send all I have.*
Yours
Jack
TO CECIL HARWOOD (BOD):
Magdalen College
Oxford
June 19th 1937
My dear Harwood
I had a quite unexpected windfall the other day as a result of which I am able to make Lawrence a present. My idea is that you should lodge it in a deposit account and let the trifle of interest accumulate, the whole to be used for or by him when he reaches the costly age (18–20). But you probably understand such matters better than I—at least a professional Bursar ought to—so dispose it for Godson’s future use as you think best. Is there any chance of seeing you this summer? Give my love to Daphne.
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO DOM BEDE GRIFFITHS (W):
Magdalen College,
Oxford.
[27] June 1937
Dear Griffiths
Your reply about the body leaves all my questions unanswered. I’d better tell you how it arose. I was talking the other day to an intelligent infidel who said that he pinned all his hopes for any significance in the universe on the chance that the human race by adapting itself to changed conditions and first planet jumping, then star jumping, finally nebula jumping, could really last forever and subject matter wholly to mind.
When I said that it was overwhelmingly improbable, he said Yes, but one had to believe even in the 1000th chance or life was mockery. I of course asked why, feeling like that, he did not prefer to believe in the other and traditional ‘chance’ of a spiritual immortality. To that he replied—obviously not for effect but producing something that had long been in his mind—‘Oh I never can believe that: for if that were true our having a physical existence wd. be so pointless.’ He’s a nice, honest chap, and I have no doubt at all that this is one of the things standing between him and Christianity.
Your remarks seem to me to leave the question much where they found it. Whatever you hold about the blessed in the state of separation, the resurrection either makes some change in it or none. If none, why does it occur? If change, then either for the worse or for the better. For the worse?—nefas credere.28 If for the better…well there the question stands.
As to the rest of your letter—the question of Divine Presence was introduced rather for example: but, of course, I have no wish to discuss with you anything you don’t want to discuss with me. I received your statement that you do not think I am acting ‘in bad faith’ with some puzzlement: as if, in a conversation that had no apparent connection with money, you suddenly remarked ‘I am not saying you are bribed’. One is of course glad to be acquitted: but quite in the dark as to how one came to be on trial.
I also am doing a lot of rustic work at present but more with a scythe than a spade.
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO OWEN BARFIELD (W):
The Kilns,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford.
Sept 2nd 1937
Instrument approved with the exception of ‘were reduced to’ which hardly seems the right style
Malory—Morris—are you preparing a chapter on Quellen for a book about me.
‘Curiously comfortless stuff in the background’ is the criticism of a sensible man just emerging from the popular errors about Morris. Not so curiously, nor quite in the background—that particular discomfort is the main theme of all his best work, the thing he was born to say. The formula is ‘Returning to what seems an ideal world to find yourself all the more face to face with gravest reality without ever drawing a pessimistic conclusion but fully maintaining that heroic action in, or amelioration of, a temporal life is an absolute duty though the disease of temporality is incurable.’29
Not quite what you expected, but just what the essential Morris is. ‘Defeat and victory are the same in the sense that victory will open your eyes only to a deeper defeat: so fight on.’30 In fact he is the final statement of good