Collected Letters Volume Three: Narnia, Cambridge and Joy 1950–1963. Walter Hooper
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155 One part of the examination system at Oxford University consists in a spoken or viva voce (‘by the living voice’) examination.
156 George Sayer’s cat.
157 See Anne Barbara Scott in the Biographical Appendix. She had attended Charles Williams’s lectures when an undergraduate, and she and Williams became close friends.
158 The draft of Scott’s letter of 26 July 1952 referred to here by Lewis is preserved in the Bodleian Library (MS. Eng. lett. c. 220/7, fols. 10-14).
159 In his Commentary in Arthurian Torso, Containing the Posthumous Fragment of The Figure of Arthur by Charles Williams and A Commentary on The Arthurian Poems of Charles Williams (London: Oxford University Press, 1948), Lewis wrote: ‘Between this poem and the Last Voyage we should probably place The Meditation of Mordred. The doom of Logres is almost accomplished. Gawaine, the king’s nephew, son of Morgause and Lot, whom Williams calls “the canonical Gawaine” because the canon or code of earthly honour is his only principle, urged on by his half-brother Mordred, has revealed to Arthur the loves of Guinivere and Lancelot’ (ch. 5, p. 177).
160 ‘The Meditation of Mordred’ in Charles Williams, The Region of the Summer Stars (1944). Scott said in her letter: ‘(1) “Canonical G.” is surely the ecclesiastical equivalent of “legitimate G.”–his birth was approved by the laws of both Church & State, as that of Mordred was forbidden by both. Thus, in the Meditation, M. refers to the K. as “my uncanonical father” ‘(Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. lett. c. 220/7, fol. 13).
161 Williams, Taliessin Through Logres, ‘The Departure of Merlin’, XIII, 4.
162 Scott asked in her letter: ‘(2) Is not “the world’s base” Caucasia, & “the worm in the world’s base” the Caucasian women, all loving naturally as opposed to arch-naturally? Guinevere’s vocation was to “exhibit the glory” so clearly & resplendently to the women of Logres that they should not be able to help being “brought to a flash of seeing” (or as my husband more forcibly puts it “her job was to make the silly ones sit up & take notice”)’ (Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. lett. c. 220/7, fol. 13).
163 Williams, The Region of the Summer Stars, ‘The Prayers of the Pope’, pp. 46-55.
164 Arthurian Torso, ‘The Grail and the Morte’, p. 180: ‘In The Prayers of the Pope we are invited to study more fully this extinguishing of lights. The situation which “the young Pope Deodatus, Egyptian-born” contemplates is of course very like that which Williams contemplated in 1944 and which we still contemplate in 1946. But the poem is not simply a tract for the time. We are seeing, partly, the real present; partly the imaginary world of the poem; partly the real past, the division of Christendom which culminated with the breach between Pope and Patriarch in 1054 and the great retreat of Christendom before Islam which had preceded it.’ In her letter of 26 July 1952 Scott observed: ‘(3) About the “women of Burma” in The Prayers of the Pope, there was an explanation on the level you reject as well as the other, & far more important, meanings. Towards the end of my time at Oxford I went to walk, on most afternoons…with Charles Williams…& at one such time when he was working on that poem, he was speaking of the difficulty of devising some method of defeat for the octopus & saying, of course playfully but seriously in the game, that points in the Taliessin poems had coincided with points in the war so often that he must hurry up and do it, or the Japanese would have taken India before he had thought how to stop them’ (Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. lett. c. 220/7, fol. 13).
165 Williams, Taliessin Through Logres, ‘The Coming of Galahad’: XIII, 1-3: ‘But he: “Proofs were; roofs were: 1/ what more? Creeds were; songs were. Four/zones divide the empire from the Throne’s firmament.” ‘Scott commented: ‘I am sure that he said the “proofs”, “roofs”, “creeds” & “songs” were connected forwards with the four planetary Zones, & not backwards with the five Houses…“Proofs” I suppose might appropriately be connected with Mercury, the Lord of Language. Could “roofs”, as providing shelter which you can make use of if you choose, be connected with preferences? “Creeds” seem to fit “irony & defeated irony”, the irony being in the absurdity of saying, as creeds must, this is Thou about Him of whom we must instantly add neither is this Thou, & the defeated irony in the absolute necessity of doing just that. And Saturn, beyond the rest & nearest to, though still utterly divided from, “the Throne’s firmament” might fitly represent poetry which Charles certainly held to be able to express truth in a way which the prose of creeds could not’ (Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. lett. c. 220/7, fol. 14).
166 Before the presidential election of 1952 Robert A. Taft (1889-1953) ran against Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890-1969) as candidate for the Republican Party. Eisenhower was chosen, and in the election, held on 4 November, he defeated the Democratic candidate, Adlai Stevenson.
167 i.e., Mrs Frank Jones.
168 Green met Lewis at the Woodside Hotel, Liverpool, on 9 September. They visited Beaumaris Castle and spent that night at the Bulkeley Arms Hotel. Lewis spent the following night as the guest of Roger and June Lancelyn Green at Poulton Hall, Bebington, returning to Oxford on 11 September.
169 H. Rider Haggard, The Virgin of the Sun (1922).
170 Thank-you notes addressed to one’s hostess.
171 Roger Lancelyn Green, The Story of Lewis Carroll (London: Methuen, 1949).
172 Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass, ch. 5. Asked by the White Queen how old she is, Alice answers, ‘I’m seven and a half, exactly’ ‘“You needn’t say ‘exactually’,” the Queen remarked. “I can believe it without that.” ‘
173 For the biography of Florence (Michal) Williams, wife of Charles Williams, see Charles Walter Stansby Williams in the Biographical Appendix to CL II, pp. 1081-6.
174 Michael Williams (1922-2000) was the son of Charles and Michal Williams.
175 In his diary entry for 5 November 1956 Warnie wrote of the correspondence between Joy Gresham and his brother: ‘Until 10th January 1950 neither