Collected Letters Volume Three: Narnia, Cambridge and Joy 1950–1963

222 (#ulink_a10f7674-44c3-5fad-a9b5-d31baefefac7) Charles Williams, Evelyn Underhill, George MacDonald.

223 (#ulink_7d6d5a7d-cfd1-5be5-8503-0157c593b9b3) John 3:16.

224 (#ulink_7d6d5a7d-cfd1-5be5-8503-0157c593b9b3) 1 John 2:15.

225 (#ulink_b59ccb41-9843-5f27-9fb4-d8bc98a5edf0) Revelation 18:4.

226 (#ulink_4910b53b-33f7-5c8e-b2d0-c9ec68c2266b) Mrs Gebbert had asked if Lewis would autograph a copy of The Stiver Chair for her son, Charles Marion Gebbert.

227 (#ulink_3bc9ecd1-f57f-5eac-a10a-431a370c78c1) The Bermuda Summit, 4-8 December 1953, was held at the initiative of Sir Winston Churchill and included Britain, the United States, France and the USSR. In the aftermath of loseph Stalin’s death and the Soviet development of a hydrogen bomb, Churchill hoped to gain President Eisenhower’s support for a top-level dialogue with the new Soviet leadership. He was motivated primarily by a wish to break the stalemate of the Cold War and avert a possible nuclear conflict.

228 (#ulink_4c998f6d-4716-55c5-ad28-8e40702c6bfd) Panama was Queen Elizabeth II’s and Prince Philip’s first port of call (29 November 1953) on their visit to Australia, which was part of the Queen’s first Commonwealth tour.

229 (#ulink_b125d53d-dab9-5b5b-b74c-c7703f3a7cdb) The letter is unsigned.

230 (#ulink_aecd2f87-5694-512d-8e5d-4be980679193) Sir Stanley Unwin (1884-1968), publisher, was the son of Edward Unwin, a London printer. In 1904 he joined his lather’s stepbrother, T. Fisher Unwin, in his publishing firm. At 28 he began his own firm and soon afterwards bought George Allen & Sons. With the new company, George Allen & Unwin, he quickly built a formidable list of authors. In 1926 Unwin published The Truth about Publishing, which became the authoritative textbook on the subject. He was a tireless worker, but spared time for his other passion–tennis, which he played every weekend throughout the year. In 1937, acting on the recommendation of his ten-year-old son, Rayner, he published Tolkien’s The Hobbit. Again at the recommendation of Rayner, he published The Lord of the Rings. Because that book was so difficult to describe, Unwin asked Lewis if he would write something to serve as a ‘blurb’ for its cover. Lewis included such a piece with this letter. Unwin was knighted in 1946.

231 (#ulink_79243c6f-b503-5e2c-8932-d2032bc94843) Mrs Farrer took exception to Lewis’s portrayal of God as, not male, but masculine. In That Hideous Strength, ch. 14, part V, p. 350, Ransom tells Jane Studdock: ‘You are offended by the masculine itself: the loud, irruptive, possessive thing–the gold lion, the bearded bull–which breaks through hedges and scatters the carefully made bed. The male you could have escaped, for it exists only on the biological level. But the masculine none of us can escape. What is above and beyond all things is so masculine that we are all feminine in relation to it.’ that he was born blind? Jesus answered, Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents: but that the works of God should be made manifest in him.’

232 (#ulink_85d6b6ce-7fd2-5359-9d8f-3855b53796a7) Lewis was referring to the love of the dwarf, Gimli, for Galadriel, Queen of the Elves, in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, Bk. II, ch. 7: ‘The Dwarf, hearing the names given in his own ancient tongue, looked up and met her eyes, and it seemed to him that he looked suddenly into the heart of an enemy and saw there love and understanding.’

233 (#ulink_85d6b6ce-7fd2-5359-9d8f-3855b53796a7) In The Fellowship of the Ring, Bk. II, ch. 8, ‘Farewell to Lórien’, the Fellowship takes leave of the security of Lothlórien to destroy the Ring.

234 (#ulink_85d6b6ce-7fd2-5359-9d8f-3855b53796a7) In the final chapter of The Fellowship of the Ring, the noble Boromir covets the Ring so badly he tries to take it from Frodo: ‘“It is by our own folly that our Enemy will defeat us,” cried Boromir. “How it angers me! Fool! Obstinate fool! Running wilfully to death and ruining our cause. If any mortals have claim to the Ring, it is the men of Númenor, and not Halflings. It is not yours save by unhappy chance. It might have been mine. It should be mine. Give it to me!”’

235 (#ulink_ff3a9165-732b-59c5-a345-5242d9616561) See the letter to Sir Stanley Unwin of 4 December 1953.

236 (#ulink_ff3a9165-732b-59c5-a345-5242d9616561) ‘make haste slowly’.

237 (#ulink_14ec733e-cb65-5282-a3cc-63494c4eb0c6) The Roman poet Lucretius (c. 99-c. 55 BC).

238 (#ulink_c2e578c6-f151-5939-b9bd-d401f4d20c51) Lewis was referring to D. E. Harding’s The Hierarchy of Heaven and Earth.

239 (#ulink_c2e578c6-f151-5939-b9bd-d401f4d20c51) ibid., Preface, p. 12: ‘It would be affectation to pretend that I know whether Mr. Harding’s attempt, in its present form, will work. Very possibly not. One hardly expects the first, or the twenty-first, rocket to the Moon to make a good landing. But it is a beginning.’

240 (#ulink_4318090e-5283-5181-9474-b02d53ba0b96) See Dorothy L. Sayers in the Biographical Appendix to CL II, pp. 1065-72.

241 (#ulink_467f8644-3038-5d85-9086-2e1b39dd130d) Lewis had received one of Sayers’ Christmas cards. The text, ‘The Days of Christ’s Coming’, was by Sayers, with a painting by Fritz Wegner, and the card was printed by Hamish Hamilton. The picture had 27 numbered doors to be opened from 14 December to 7 January

242 (#ulink_f7e2f178-d870-5d3d-ad0e-7dd21c0e4389) Kathleen Nott had just published The Emperor’s Clothes (London: Heinemann, 1953), described on the jacket as ‘An attack on the dogmatic orthodoxy of T. S. Eliot, Graham Greene, Dorothy Sayers, C. S. Lewis, and others.’

243 (#ulink_f7e2f178-d870-5d3d-ad0e-7dd21c0e4389) A Scots word for money or silver.

244 (#ulink_c1fbcc74-152a-5057-b6ec-453ea2c743d4) Sayers’ first part of Dante’s Divine Comedy had been published in 1949. She was now working on her translation of the Purgatorio.

245 (#ulink_2e11f50d-65ff-5db7-9b47-2618c646aeb0) David Gresham was in fact nine and a half years old and Douglas eight.

246 (#ulink_2141a4a9-9ca5-5c98-acdc-ad69c7ce152f) The ‘Little Kingdom’ of J. R. R. Tolkien’s Farmer Giles of Ham (1949) is set in that pleasant area east of Oxford which includes Thame, Long Crendon and Worminghall.

247 (#ulink_00f183ae-57ce-5198-8e95-a341b05de7ad) Arthur C. Clarke, Childhood’s End (New York: Ballantine, 1953).

248 (#ulink_00f183ae-57ce-5198-8e95-a341b05de7ad) H. G. Wells, The First Men in the Moon (1901).

249 (#ulink_00f183ae-57ce-5198-8e95-a341b05de7ad) Olaf Stapledon (1886-1950), whose Last and First Men (1930) and Star Maker (1937) are mentioned in CL II, pp. 236, 594.

250 (#ulink_1021a8ae-8280-50ae-b01b-3acc07622740) i.e., Richard Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung, one of Lewis’s oldest loves. See the references to it in CL I, pp. 29, 139n, 381-2.

251 (#ulink_1021a8ae-8280-50ae-b01b-3acc07622740) Clarke, Childhood’s End, ch. 21, p. 163.

252 (#ulink_1021a8ae-8280-50ae-b01b-3acc07622740) ibid., p. 164.

253 (#ulink_1021a8ae-8280-50ae-b01b-3acc07622740) Luke 14:26.

254 (#ulink_1021a8ae-8280-50ae-b01b-3acc07622740) But in Book V when they have returned to Sicily, the women try to burn the ships so they need not go to Latium. See CL 11, p. 750, N. 148. In Virgil, Aeneid, Book III Aeneas and his companions build a fleet and set off in search of the land that first bore the Trojan race (Italy). They have many strange adventures along the way, but eventually reach Libya.

255 (#ulink_9b62907a-733b-520a-82a4-deed20b421d0) That is, from matters of the soul (psyche) to those of the spirit (pneuma).

256 (#ulink_e30ef0a0-5513-5a04-baaa-6c46da79b97e) Dante, Inferno, IV, 42.

257 (#ulink_d7e3c8d4-9cf9-5b6c-9b96-64cd05c31143) The letter was unsigned.

258 (#ulink_1a13decb-e114-5263-b613-b478e1445ce2) Her husband, Henry Gerard Walter Sandeman, died on 19 January 1953.

259 (#ulink_1a13decb-e114-5263-b613-b478e1445ce2) Matthew 19:5-6; Mark 10:8-9.

260 (#ulink_91f12ac4-d8b3-5db6-a4d5-f4356916a94f) Titirangi School for the Deaf had now merged with the Kelston Deaf Education Centre, New Lynn, Auckland, and Bodle had moved to New Lynn to continue her teaching.

261 (#ulink_ca6f5ef1-f6ac-5ca0-83bf-b653b7aaae34) Herbert, The Temple, ‘The Church-porch’, Stanza 72, 5-6: ‘If all want sense, God takes a text, and preacheth Patience.’

262 (#ulink_21fde156-f615-58c2-a630-a4b5608cf1a4) The Rev. Canon Ronald Edwin Head (1919-91) was appointed Curate of Holy Trinity, Headington Quarry, in 1952, and Vicar in 1956. When he arrived in the parish Holy Communion was celebrated at 8 a.m. and Morning Prayer at 11 a.m. He was responsible for reversing the times of these services.

263 (#ulink_800619e1-d222-5e9a-bdc1-4b1f477adbc7) Lewis may have been remembering Joanna Baillie (1762-1851), ‘The Storm-Beat Maid’ (1790), XL, 1: ‘I’ll share the cold blast on the heath.’

264 (#ulink_800619e1-d222-5e9a-bdc1-4b1f477adbc7) The four women are characters in the works of William Shakespeare. Imogen is the heroine of Cymbeltne (1623), Portia the heroine of The Merchant of Venice (1600). Miranda is a character in The Tempest, and Perdita appears in The Winter’s Tale (1623). While Miranda and Perdita grew up in sheltered circumstances and made happy marriages, Imogen and Portia had complicated and eventful lives which nevertheless turned out well in the end.

1954 (#uab6a892d-65f5-5b6b-a50d-b1b354fd0ecb)

At the beginning of the year Lewis resigned from the presidency of the. Oxford University Socratic Club. With his help, its founder Stella Aldwinckle had built it into one of the most exciting and best-attended clubs in Oxford. But Lewis was now tired. He had been working since 1938 on his massive English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, and he was in the middle of writing the last Chronicle of Narnia. The Narnian stories were being published at a rate of one per year, and there were three more to go. Yet in resigning as president of the Socratic Club to give himself more leisure, Lewis was unaware of an invitation he would receive from Cambridge University in May 1954. Meanwhile, Stella Aldwinckle met with others of the Socratic Club to decide who should be their new president.

TO STELLA ALDWINCKLE (W):

Magdalen College

Oxford

Jan 1st 1954

Dear Stella