Collected Letters Volume One: Family Letters 1905–1931

I wonder would hunting be good sport? The matter ocurred to me, not because I am really interested in it, but because I have just returned from a compulsory chase–trying to find out where the bit at the top of page 2 of your letter was meant to come in. Now, faint & perspiring, I am enjoying the fruits of my labours.

By this time you will probably have finished ‘Villette’.

(#ulink_4cd74016-8fbb-5894-9fff-bc9f9c575789) What do you think of the ending? I can just hear you saying, ‘Cracked–absolutely!’. It certainly is most unsatisfactory, but yet a touch of genius. I fancy it is the only novel in existence that leaves you in a like uncertainty. Merriman is a far cry from the Brontes. Both of course are good, but while they should be sipped with luxurious slowness in the winter evening, he may be read in a cheap copy on top of a tram. And yet I don’t know: of course his novels are melodrama, but then they are the best melodrama ever written, while passages like the ‘Storm’ or the ‘Wreck’ in the Grey Lady, or the Reconciliation between the hero and his father in ‘Edged Tools’, are as good things as English prose contains.

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The remark about the Maiden Islands was really quite smart for you. You might have it framed? Also such gems of orthography as ‘simpathise’ and ‘phisically’ which appeared in your last correspondance, tho’ of course I, being almost as bad, have no right to complain.

The weather here is perfectly damnable, there having been scarcely a couple of hours’ sunshine since I left home. Now that my friends have gone, there is nothing to do but sit & read or write when it rains, and consequently I have nearly finished The Morte D’arthur. I am more pleased at having bought it every day, as it has opened up a new world to me. I had no idea that the Arthurian legends were so fine (The name is against them, isn’t it??) Malory is really not a great author, but he has two excellent gifts, (1) that of lively narrative and (2) the power of getting you to know characters by gradual association. What I mean is, that, although he never sits down–as the moderns do–to describe a man’s character, yet, by the end of the first volume Launcelot & Tristan, Balin & Pellinore, Morgan Le Fay & Isoud are all just as much real, live people as Paul Emanuel or Mme Beck.

(#ulink_b8385ad9-dcf9-5af5-afe8-1b0b7983af47) The very names of the chapters, as they spring to meet the eye, bear with them a fresh, sweet breath from the old-time, faery world, wherein the author moves. Who can read ‘How Launcelot in the Chapel Perilous gat a cloth from a Dead corpse’ or ‘How Pellinore found a damosel by a Fountain, and of the Jousts in the Castle of Four Stones’, and not hasten to find out what it’s all about?

To obey my own theory that a letter should tell of doings, readings, thinkings, I will conclude by saying that I am trying to find some suitable theme for my Celtic narrative Poem: there are heaps of stories but mostly too long. Fare-thee-well.

yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

N.B. This was written on the same day as I got your letter, but I forgot to post it. Mille pardons. J.

TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W):

[Gastons

2 February 1915]

Dear Arthur,

The first essential point for a letter writer to master is that of making himself intelligable to his reader. Or, to come down from my high horse, what was the (it?) in brackets meant for? A thousand pardons for my dulness, only I utterly failed to follow your wheeze: please explain in your next epistle.

I am deep in Morte D’Arthur by this time, and it is really the greatest thing I’ve ever read. It is strangely different from William Morris, although by subject & language they challenge comparison. One is genuine, and the other, tho’ delightful, must, of course, be only an artificial reproduction. You really ought to read your copy of it, or at any rate parts of it, as the connecting chain between book and book is not very tightly drawn. I don’t think it can be the Library Edition, that those people have sent me, as it does not agree with your description at all, being bound in plum-coloured leather, with pale-blue marker attached. However, partly through my keenness to read the book & partly because it was a very handsome binding, I did not send it back.

By the way, is there anything the matter with my father, as I have not heard from him for some time now? Or perhaps it is only this submarine nonsense that makes the conveyance of letters uncertain: which reminds me, that, though I do not usually take much interest in the war, yet it would be unpleasantly brought home to me if I had to spend my holydays in England.

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Your remarks á propos of loneliness are quite true, and I admit that what I said before was rather not, as uncongenial companions produce in reality a worse desolation than actual solitude.

I am glad to hear you have read Esmond:

(#ulink_217b6d5c-7b88-55e4-a892-fbb73a6a04e4) it is one of my favourite novels, and I hardly know which to praise most, the wonderful, musical, Queen Anne English, or the delicate beauty of the story. True, I did rather resent the history, and still maintain, that when a man sets out to write a novel he has no right to ram an European War down your throat–it is like going back to Henty!

(#ulink_3c0cc8a1-cfb3-52f0-a15e-81b8fc7bbca2) Did you ever try that arch-fiend?

I am surprised that there is no snow in Ulster as we had a week of good, thick, firm, ‘picture’ snow–and very much I enjoyed it. And other things too! She is better now, up & about, and we have progressed very rapidly. In fact the great event is actually fixed–fixed!–do you realize that? I don’t think I’ve ever been so bucked about anything in my life, she’s an awfully decent sort.

(#ulink_e8edab33-33d1-5e41-808c-766ea589efa9) But I suppose this is boring you, so I must cut short my raptures–& my letter.

Yours

Jack

TO HIS FATHER (LP IV: 292-3):

[Gastons]

Postmark: 3 February 1915

My dear Papy,

As you will be by this time accustomed to my using ‘this week’ as synonymous with ‘next week’, I will make no further mention of that matter than to say that the Iliad which you are to exchange is being sent by the same post as this. I must confess to extraordinary dullness in failing to catch any point–if point there be–in your remark, ‘now for a nasty one’: ‘I found a Homer’. Why a nasty one? The fact that you have begun to suffer from a mania for sending poor, unnecessary unoffending books about the channel is nothing which should disturb the peace of mind of the philosophers of Gastons.

Talking about the channel reminds me of this morning’s news. Of course the really important feature of this submarine work is not so much the actual danger to goods and individuals as the inevitable ‘scare’ which it will cause, and the injury to business arising from that. I suppose this was their intention. As for the Zepplin talk, it seems to me to be rather childish folly on the part of the Germans: a few babies and an odd chimney stack cannot afford a recompense proportionate to the labour, expense and danger of managing an aerial raid. The only point is the moral influence, which again depends entirely on the amount of ‘guts’ of the victims.

I am glad to hear that the new Kiplings are poems, as we have had none of them yet. The question as to whether he was a greater poet or proseur is one of those everlasting things. Perhaps however, we may admit that someone else might possibly have written his best poems, but there is only one man alive who could have written ‘Kim’ or the ‘Jungle books’ or ‘Puck’.

(#ulink_057ccc82-4cf1-50b7-b514-5df14f1ea0b7) I am not sure whether I have read the Seven Seas or not. Is it there that the ballads about the prehistoric Song-Man and Picture Man (the story of Ung) occurs?

(#ulink_77b5b3f9-3806-5b8f-b990-32de154520a6) I remember they make a very interesting criticism on artists and their public, ancient and modern, and impressed me greatly.

We have had one day of spring and are now paying for it by a wind and a rain that would take you off your feet. My German is progressing with such alarming success that I am rather afraid they will put me under suspicious as a spy! Keep well.

your loving son,

Jack

TO HIS FATHER (LP IV: 296-7):

[Gastons]

Postmark: 13 February 1915

My dear Papy,

As Spenser naively remarks at the beginning of about the thousandth canto of his poem,

‘Oh, what an endlesse work I have in hand’,

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so might a parent doomed to supply an ignorant philosopher with the forgotten necessities of life echo the sentiment. Or in other words there is ‘still one river to cross’, and I really do think this will be the end. What I want is a copy of the Helena of Euripides,

(#ulink_1dea9079-928c-5ab1-b6ab-458efceb0c7d) which you will find kicking its heels somewhere in the little end room. The shoes have just arrived, for which many thanks: and by the way, when I want to pay for anything, we’ll let you know boss, don’t worry.

I am very annoyed that an opera company should come while I am away from home, although indeed it is a common enough state of affairs. Perhaps we are accustomed to regard John Harrison as an oratorio singer and it would be rather a shock to hear him in opera, although I have often seen records of him in operatic songs. I think you would be wise if you raised the energy to go. Perhaps Uncle Hamilton and Aunt Annie would care to take you–do you think so?

They must be having a rotten time at Glenmachan: ‘les jeunes maries’ particularly are making a bright start, aren’t they? What one always feels about these troubles is that they are so hard on poor Bob.