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

Blurb enclosed. Never again throw out the old water before you’ve got new on tap! Good hunting.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

*

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

I have much pleasure in recommending my friend and former pupil Mr. P. Piehler. Mr. Piehler is a sound and sensitive scholar whose interest in his subject is widening and deepening as he grows and from whom we may reasonably expect valuable contributions. He has the clarity of voice and language which a lecturer requires. His manners and personality are attractive; he was generally liked here and bore a thoroughly good character. I should be very glad to have him as a colleague in any English Faculty of which I was a member myself. I understand that he already knows Swedish.

C. S. Lewis

Fellow & Tutor

Jan 28th 1954

TO DOM BEDE GRIFFITHS OSB (W):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

30/i/54

Dear Dom Bede

Yes, I’d certainly rule out Little Emily and Little Nell and all the ‘littles’. The Marchioness is the real thing.

(#litres_trial_promo)

The trouble with Thackeray, is that he can hardly envisage goodness except as a kind of

(#litres_trial_promo) all his ‘good’ people are not only simple, but simpletons. That is a subtle poison wh. comes in with the Renaissance: the Machiavellian (intelligent) villain presently producing the idiot hero. The Middle Ages didn’t make Herod clever and knew the devil was an ass. There is really an un-faith about Thackeray’s ethics: as if goodness were somehow charming, & ‘seelie’ & infantile. No conception that the purification of the will (ceteris paribus)

(#litres_trial_promo) leads to the enlightenment of the intelligence.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO HILA NEWMAN (W):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

Jan 30/54

Dear Hila

Upon my word, a statue of Reepicheep.

(#litres_trial_promo) He stares at me from my mantelpiece with just the right mixture of courtesy and readiness to fight. Thank you very much.

It is very cold here now–not so cold as in N.Y, I expect, but then we have no central heating in College, so my fingers are hardly able to write. I am so glad you liked the Chair. With all good wishes.

Yours ever

C. S. Lewis

TO KATHARINE FARRER(BOD):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

Feb 3/54

Dear Mrs Farrer

Sternly suppressing my conscience (in George Herbert’s style, you know ‘Peace, prattler, do not lour’)

(#litres_trial_promo) I have allowed no duties to interfere with my reading The Cretan Counterfeit.

(#litres_trial_promo) I admire very much the thick-woven texture: it doesn’t easily come apart. Janet and Shrubsole are very well done and Janet wins my heart. Two scenes that especially engaged me were that where Richard is hunting for Shrubsole in Janet’s house and the final scene. The tragic-heroic twist at the very end is good technique as well as being moving in itself. Georgios is, in his smaller way, a wonderful little horror.

Would Clare have giggled (p. 201)? Or even if she had, isn’t the word ‘giggled’ too damaging? (I’m always reminding people that nothing can get into literature save by becoming a word, and that things may be O.K. where the words are not. The bearings of this are wide, as you’ll see if you reflect on the difference between drawing a nude and verbally describing it,

(#litres_trial_promo) or the impossibility of mentioning Cheko-Slovakia (is that how you spell it) at the apex of a lyric however deeply one may feel about that country).

I am outraged on p. 96 when you describe the moon ‘like the white face of an idiot lost in a wood’. Dear lady, this is simply Eliotic:

(#litres_trial_promo) for (a.) It illustrates what we’ve all seen by what most of us have not seen (b.) It denigrates, in the leering modern mode, the high creation of God. If I were your directeur you’d learn Psalm 136 by heart.

(#litres_trial_promo) Not safe, either, to be rude to goddesses–Artemis still owes Aphrodite a come-back for the Hippolytus affair and we shd. hate you to be the target.

(#litres_trial_promo)

I labour this because in general the actual writing is so good. But of course the great thing is the invention–a fine prodigality of characters, far beyond what a Tekky

(#litres_trial_promo) needs but by no means beyond what it can carry and be all the better for. Thank you very much indeed. Can you read a word of this? It is so cold I can’t write any better, not if I tried ever so.