Collected Letters Volume Two: Books, Broadcasts and War, 1931–1949. Walter Hooper
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href="#ulink_01310b91-12ed-59d7-aaf7-f71c25c82f23">24 Llewelyn Powys, Damnable Opinions (1935).
25 Powys did not mention Lewis by name in Damnable Opinions, but he attacked orthodox Christianity, especially as practised and written about at Oxford. On p. 5 he said: ‘True religion is simple—it is to worship life, to bow down before life, beating our heads upon the grass in jubilant acquiescence.’
26 Joseph O’Neill, Land Under England (1935).
27 After retracing the walk with Owen Barfield, Walter Hooper gave the following account in Through joy and Beyond: A Pictorial Biography of C. S. Lewis (1982), pp. 76–7: ‘They entered (Derbyshire) from Staffordshire by Rudyard Lake. Then after lunch down the Goyt Valley to Chapel-en-le-Frith and so next day to Kinder Downfall, where the shallow river Kinder plunges off the edge of the peaty moor. Here on windy days when the sun warms the moorside the water is blown into myriad droplets of rainbowed light. Crossing the Kinder Scout and down Grindsbrook they came to Edale and at last stopped the night in Castleton. Next day they walked up the Winnat Pass and across Tideswell Moor to Wardlow and Monsal Dale. It’s just a short way now to Ashford in the Water and Bakewell and on again the fourth day to Ashbourne and Dovedale.’
28 John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress from this World to That which is to Come, ed. James Blanton Wharey, 2nd edn rev. Roger Sharrock (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960), First Part, p. 119: ‘They went then, till they came to the delectable Mountains, which Mountains belong to the Lord of that Hill…so they went up to the Mountains, to behold the Gardens, and Orchards, the Vineyards, and Fountains of water, where also they drank, and washed themselves, and did freely eat of the Vineyards.’
29 William Blake, Songs of Innocence (1789).
30 This was due to the expansion of Morris Motors Ltd. In 1912 William Richard Morris (1877–1963), created 1st Baron Nuffield in 1934 and 1st Viscount Nuffield in 1938, opened his first car factory at Cowley, halfway between Oxford and Headington Quarry. In 1926 he started the Pressed Steel Company, employing more than 10,000 people, alongside the car factory. Morris Motors is only about a mile from The Kilns, and by 1935 it had expanded so much that, whereas The Kilns had been one of only a few houses for miles around, a rash of small houses now almost surrounded it.
31 See Leo Baker in the Biographical Appendix to CL I. Leo Baker was for a long time in an Austrian clinic with suspected cancer. It later proved to be a false alarm.
32 Arthur Alan Hanbury-Sparrow, Gilt-Edged Insecurity (1934).
33 In his letter to Lewis of 26 April 1935 More wrote: ‘I have directed the publisher of the American Review to send you a copy of the May Issue, which contains an article of mine on James Joyce. I hope and believe, that you will approve of my treatment of that gentleman, though you may perhaps think I have credited him with too much native genius. In the June issue I shall have an article on the modernist movement in French poetry’.
34 ‘limit’. More had been arguing for a return to Christian humanism as exemplified by limit and order—an idea which Eliot’s Waste Land explodes by its repeated emphasis on chaos.
35 T. S. Eliot. The Waste Land (1922). This complex poem, praised for its sense of depression and futility, was the epitome of what lewis hated in modern poetry.
36 ‘and all that sort’. Horace, Satires, I. ii, 2.
37 In his letter of 26 April 1935 More wrote: ‘Eliot is a dear friend of mine, and on the whole I do not like to see him placed among the enemies. He started out wrong, under the influence of the French notion of “pure art”, but he has been…moving away from that nasty heresy. Naming him, I am tempted to tell you a story—I hope not committing an indiscretion. It was after I had first met you and had read The Pilgrim’s Regress. Eliot was visiting me at Oxford, and [John Wolfenden (1906–85), Magdalen’s Tutor in Philosophy] invited us to luncheon at Magdalen, I asked W, about you, and particularly what you meant by return to “Mother Kirk”, whether you had turned Roman Catholic, or Anglo Catholic, or Scotch Presbyterian, or what. W. avowed that he didn’t know, but was pretty sure you had not become R.C. And then he added: “The other day several of us were together when X (I don’t recall the name) burst into the room in a state of great excitement. ‘Do you know,’ he shouted, ‘what that man Lewis is up to? Y (another forgotten name) says he saw him in the College chapel, and that on inquiry he finds the fellow has been going to chapel for weeks unbeknownst to any of us. What’s it all mean?’” So Wolfenden. And then Eliot with that sly smile of his: “Why, it’s quite evident that if a man wishes to escape detection at Oxford, the one place for him to go is the college chapel”’ (Princeton University Library).
38 ibid.: ‘Yes, I have read Agape and Eros, and I don’t like it at all, indeed I very heartily dislike it. It seems to me the last word of the most abominable form of Protestantism in a straight line from Luther through Barth.’
39 Robert Shafer, Paul Elmer More and American Criticism (1935).
40 ‘about all matters’.
41 Professor Eugène Vinaver (1899–1979) was born in St Petersburg, and was educated in Paris and Oxford. He was a lecturer in French Language and Literature at Lincoln College, Oxford, 1924–8, and lecturer in French, 1928–31. He was appointed a Reader in French Language and Literature at Oxford in 1931, and was Professor of French Language and Literature at the University of Manchester, 1933–66. His many works include Malory (1929), The Works of Sir Thomas Malory, 3 vols. (1947), The Tale of the Death of King Arthur (1955) and The Rise of Romance (1971).
42 Eugène Vinaver, ‘Malory’s Morte d’Arthur in the Light of a Recent Discovery’ (1935). The ‘discovery’ referred to here is that of a manuscript of Malory’s Arthurian romances roughly contemporary with Caxton’s edition and independent of it, found in Winchester College in 1934. See the passage from Lewis’s review of Professor Vinaver’s edition of the Works of Sir Thomas Malory (1947) that follows the letter to Ruth Pitter of 6 June 1947.
43 The Arthurian Society.
44 Catholicon Anglicum: An English-Latin Wordbook, dated 1483, introduction and notes by Sidney J. H. Heritage (Early English Text Society, 1881).
45 The New English Dictionary.