Collected Letters Volume Three: Narnia, Cambridge and Joy 1950–1963. Walter Hooper
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target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="#ulink_1c194702-8f3e-58cd-9158-7d7797e17dfc">65 i.e., Charles Williams.
66 Joseph Stalin.
67 Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory (1940). This novel, usually regarded as Greene’s best, is set in Mexico during a time of religious persecution. It describes the desperate last wanderings of a priest, the central character in the book, who is never given a name. The priest, who ‘carried a wound, as though a whole world had died’, commits the moral sin of fornication with the peasant woman Maria, after falling into the worst sin of ‘despair’. The only priest left in the state who has not either escaped or died, or conformed to the atheistic government, he returns to the village where Maria lives with their illegitimate daughter. Despite the fact that he believes himself to be condemned by God, he knows he can nevertheless bring salvation to others. In the end he achieves holiness and eventually martyrdom by virtue of, rather than in spite of, his sins.
68 Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. See the letter to Christian Hardie of 22 March 1951.
69 William Shakespeare, Macbeth (1623).
70 Lewis’s confessor was Father Walter Adams SSJE of Cowley, Oxford. He had been Lewis’s confessor since Lewis began going to confession in 1940. Father Adams died on 3 March 1952, but Lewis is curiously wrong about his dying at the altar. He died peacefully at the home of friends in Headington. See Father Walter Adams SSJE in the Biographical Appendix to CL II, pp. 1015-16.
71 The words quoted seem to be a conflation of two very similar passages. The first is Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, Book IV, Ch. 4, 3: ‘et tu fons es semper plenus et super abundans, ignis semper ardens et numquam deficiens’: ‘and you are a fountain ever full and over abundant, a flame always burning and never failing’. This passage has a textual problem: sometimes ‘ignis semper ardens’ is read as ‘ignis iugiter ardens’, ‘a flame continually burning’. Lewis’s text presumably read ‘ignis iugiter ardens’. Then there is the passage from Book IV, Ch. 16, 3: ‘cum tu sis ignis semper ardens et numquam deficiens, amor corda purificans et intellectum illuminans’: ‘since you are a flame always burning and never failing, a love that purifies the heart and illuminates the intellect’. Lewis seems to have conflated the two passages in his memory, creating something like this: ‘cum tu sis ignis iugiter ardens et numquam deficiens, amor corda…’
72 John 17:21.
73 Lewis had sent Pitter a ticket to his lecture on ‘Hero and Leander’, given to the British Academy on 20 February 1952. The lecture is reprinted in SLE.
74 Christopher Marlowe and George Chapman, Hero and Leander (1598). Marlowe wrote the first two books of this poem, and Chapman (? 1559-1634) the remaining four. See English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Pt. III, Ch. 3, Sect. 3.
75 Andrew Young, Into Hades (1952).
76 i.e., George Sayer.
77 The incumbent President, Harry S. Truman, decided against seeking re-election in 1952. He threw his support behind Illinois Governor Adlai Stevenson—not Robert A. Taft—who was drafted in as the Democratic nominee. Stevenson proved no match for General Dwight D. Eisenhower who won a landslide victory.
78 See the biography of Delmar Banner, artist, in CL II, p. 537n.
79 P. G. Wodehouse, Thank You, Jeeves (1934), ch. 1: ‘I fear I cannot recede from my position.’
80 Banner had invited Lewis to his home at The Bield, Little Langdale, in the Lake District.
81 ‘I could’.
82 ‘I couldn’t’.
83 Library Association Proceedings, Papers and Summaries of Discussion at the Bournemouth Conference on 29 April to 2 May 1952 (1952), pp. 22-8, and reprinted in Of This and Other Worlds, ed. Walter Hooper (London: Collins, 1982; HarperCollins, 2000); published in the United States as On Stories: and Other Essays on Literature (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982).
84 Roger Lancelyn Green, The Wonderful Stranger (1950).
85 ‘the far country’.
86 See Nell Berners-Price in the Biographical Appendix. Lewis had to be present as a witness at Mrs Hooker’s trial in Canterbury on 8 May. Nell Berners-Price had invited him to spend the night before the trial at Courtstairs Hotel, so that he would be near Canterbury. Following the trial Mrs Hooker was sent to Holloway Prison in London.
87 Lewis had smudged his signature when using a piece of blotting paper.
88 This letter was published in The Times Literary Supplement (9 May 1952), p. 313, under the title ‘The Sheepheard’s Slumber’.
89 Prince Caspian.
90 Penelope was the seven-year-old daughter of Mr and Mrs Berners-Price.
91 Charles Gore, The Sermon on the Mount (1896), Appendix III, p. 215: ‘Christ, by a distinct act of legislation, prohibited divorce among His disciples in such sense as allows of remarriage, except in the case of adultery of one of the parties.’
92 Conference of Bishops of the Anglican Communion, Holden at Lambeth Palace in July 1888 (London: SPCK, 1888), pp. 43-4: ‘No. 3.–Divorce…a. That, inasmuch as our Lord’s words expressly forbid divorce, except in the case of fornication or adultery, the Christian Church cannot recognize divorce in any other than the excepted case, or give any sanction to the marriage of any person who has been divorced contrary to this law, during the life of the other party.
‘b. That under no circumstances ought the guilty party, in the case of a divorce for fornication or adultery, to be regarded, during the lifetime of the innocent party, as a fit recipient of the blessing of the