Collected Letters Volume Three: Narnia, Cambridge and Joy 1950–1963. Walter Hooper
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don’t think there is anything superstitious in your story about the Voice. These visions or ‘auditions’ at the moment of death are all v. well attested: quite in a different category from ordinary ghost stories. I am so glad people liked your poem, which deserved it, and that you liked mine2 of which (a v. unusual thing for me) I can’t now remember a single word.
Then I must stop: wishing and praying for you ‘a happy issue out of all your afflictions’3 and better days in 1954.
Yours
C. S Lewis
TO DANIEL DAVIN (OUP): 4
Magdalen College
Oxford Jan 1st 1954
Dear Davin
By all means make the Norman Davis5 corrections;6 or rather, that selection of them (about 85%) which I accepted in the list I sent you some time ago. I have not, myself, found any other misprints. I added to the Davis list one correction of my own–the omission of the word first before printed in the Bibliographical account of’The Court of Love’ under Anonyma. I can’t tell you the page for all my books are now packed.7
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO RUTH PITTER(BOD):
Magdalen College
Oxford Jan 4th 54
Dear Ruth–
Yes, but wouldn’t Evelyn8 and Bp. King9 and all our ancestors and many contemporary foreigners be equally astonished at the amazing retardation wh. the English Nineteenth Century methods imposed on human growth. In my brother’s period (I trust you are reading his Splendid Century) boys of 15 successfully commanded cavalry regiments in action. Juliet10 was dying in the tomb at an age when our girls are thinking only of Lacrosse. I never really understood Shakespeare’s Berownes11 and Mer cutios12 till I realised that they were, in age, Fifth Form boys let loose with ducats in their pockets and swords at their sides.
I’m not saying which is best: only that one mustn’t assume our tempo to be ‘nature’ and all the others to be artificial. I remember two or three of us at my prep-school discussing v. eagerly whether the future was like a line wh. one can’t see or like a line not yet drawn. We didn’t think we were doing anything ‘grown-up’–the subject just arose like any other. We probably thought we were more grown up when reading Pickwick13 than when discussing metaphysics. I suspect that, tho’ we have merriment from infancy we learn triviality as an adult accomplishment.
I can go to Crendon with v. little main-road, but at the moment I have (dooced14 gentlemanly complaint, what?) gout! There’s glory for you!15 If that’s not grown up (I beg their pardon, adult is the word, now) I’d like to know what is. You’re sure to have to come to Oxford one day, aren’t you? Dentist? Bookshop? Bodleian? Let me know and let us lunch together. On provenance, I always thought the Pitters (diespiter16 and all that) descended from love, probably through Aeneas17 and Brute.18 My doctor’s wife, who died a few years ago,19 came in right line from Cerdic,20 hence from Odin. So of course does H.M.21 ‘In every way we are sprung of earth’s best blood, have titles manifold’.22 Have you read Vincent Benét’s (inspired) Western Star? Better than John Browns Body which I thought good.
A very happy New Year,
Yours
Jack
TO MRS D. JESSUP (W):
Magdalen College,
Oxford. Jan 5th 1954
Dear Mrs. Jessup
Oh I am sorry. How dreadful. I don’t know to which of you my sympathy goes out most. Your share is, however, easier to imagine, for I know what it’s like to have to be the comforter when one most needs comforting, and the competent arranger at the v. moment when one feels most disabled.
I don’t know whether anything an outsider can say is much use; and you know already the things we have been taught–that suffering can (but oh!, with what difficulty) be offered to God as our part in the whole redemptive suffering of the world beginning with Christ’s own suffering: that suffering by itself does not fester or poison, but resentment does; that sufferings which (heaven knows) fell on us without and against our will can be so taken that they are as saving and purifying as the voluntary sufferings of martyrs & ascetics.
And it is all true, and it is so hard to go on believing it. Especially as the dark time in which you are now entering (I’ve tried it; my own life really begins with my Mother’s illness & death from cancer when I was about 9) is split up into so many minor horrors and fears and upsets, some of them trivial & prosaic.
May God support you. Keep a firm hold of the Cross. And try to keep clear of the modern fancy that all this is abnormal & that you have been singled out for something outrageous. For no one escapes. We are all driven into the front line to be sorted sooner or later. With all blessings & with deep sorrow.
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO GEORGE AND MOIRA SAYER(W):
Magdalen College
Oxford Jan 8, 1954
My dear George and Moira
What a lifeline you both are–’bless’d pair of Sirenes’.23 It was a very minor operation, done under gas, the lancing of an inflamed ‘sebaceous cyst’, tho’ there might be a slightly bigger one (excision of said cyst) later. But I have to have daily dressings, and the penicillin with which they’ve filled me up with leaves me never really quite awake. Distinguish sebaceous from Herbacious, lest the latter lead you to think there has been a revolt of my Vegetable Soul. (Why does one feel less shame at surrendering to the Vegetable in oneself than to the Animal?). Sebum appears to be the source of Fat, the Vis pinguifica. I suppose I am now so fat in the ordinary way that the V.P. has to seek fresh outlets. Staying with you wd. hardly be the right treatment: not that I wouldn’t come (and a plague on treatment) if I was mobile. But only thanks and longings can go.
Talking of new romances have you both read Arthur Clark’s Childhood’s End?. A great tragic myth. And has Tolkien sent you proofs of The Fellowship of the Ring? And is The Isle of the Undead finished?
Congratulations on your new H.M.24