Collected Letters Volume One: Family Letters 1905–1931

(#ulink_f1422da2-aabf-566d-9cc6-a4a67397fce5) Anyway I quite agree with it: but perhaps even nicer is a humorous looking old horse, living contentedly in a field by himself, it’s those little things that keep one from being lonely on a walk–there is one horse here that I have got to know quite well by giving him sugar. Perhaps he may save me from a witch some day or lead me home in a fog?

You will be amused to hear that my Tristen’ has not YET come: that is nearly three weeks now, and I am beginning to get angry. You ask at what shop it’s being done: well you see it’s being worked indirectly through the village stationer here who will send books to be bound for you in London, I don’t know where. The reason for its taking so long, I imagine is that the wretch really waits until he has several to do and then makes one parcel of them so as to save himself the postage. In any case I shall not give him another opportunity, as there are people in the neighbouring town of Leatherhead who bind books themselves.

I am glad you like ‘John Silence’ and must get it too. I have now read all the tales of Chaucer which I ever expected to read, and feel that I may consider the book as finished: some of them are quite impossible. On the whole, with one or two splendid exceptions such as the Knight’s and the Franklin’s tales, he is disappointing when you get to know him. He has most of the faults of the Middle Ages–garrulity and coarseness–without their romantic charm which we find in the ‘Green Knight’ or in Malory. Still, I only really expected to enjoy some of the Tales, and feel that the book was worth getting for their sake. I am not sure whether you would like him or not, but you should certainly not start poetry with him.

Which reminds me, have you ever carried out your plans of reading ‘Jason’?

(#ulink_6bbb6c7c-2288-54c4-b2e4-685596c6cbf0)I am wondering what I ought to get next, or whether I ought to save money and read some of the Gastons books–perhaps finish the Brontes or take up another Scott. I have found that Sidney’s romance the Arcadia’

(#ulink_03e021b1-9ffc-534c-b6a6-3a32868dae2c) is published at 4/6 by the Cambridge University Press (what are they like?) and am strongly tempted to get it. One thing that interests me is that Sidney wrote it for his sister, the Countess of Pembroke, sending it to her chapter by chapter as he wrote it as I send you ‘Bleheris’. Perhaps we were those two in a former state of existence–and that is why your handwriting is so like a girl’s. Though even my self conceit will hardly go as far as to compare myself with Sidney.

What a queer compound you are. You talk about your shyness and won’t send me the MS of ‘Alice’, yet say that you are willing to read it to me–as if reading your own work aloud wasn’t far more of an ordeal. By the way I hope that you are either going on with ‘Alice’ or starting something else: you have plenty of imagination, and what you want is practice, practice, practice. It doesn’t matter what we write (at least this is my view) at our age, so long as we write continually as well as we can. I feel that every time I write a page either of prose or of verse, with real effort, even if it’s thrown into the fire next minute, I am so much further on. And you too who have been so disappointed at the technical difficulties of composing, won’t you find it a relief to turn to writing where you can splash about, so to speak, as you like, and gradually get better and better by experience? Or in other words, I shall expect an MS of some sort with your next week’s letter: if I don’t get it, I may have recourse to serious measures.

I like the way you say ‘why don’t’ I ‘take’ a day in town! As if I could just stroll down one morning and say that I wasn’t going to do any work today: no Galahad, that sort of thing may do in Franklin Street, but where people WORK–note that word, you may not have met it before–it can’t be did.

I am being fearfully lacerated at present: thinking that Pindar is a difficult author whom we haven’t time to read properly, Kirk has made me get it in the Loeb library–nice little books that have the translation as well as the text.

(#ulink_baef69a2-fcb8-5305-9ec3-80ed09f4cc37) I have now the pleasure of seeing a pretty, 5/-volume ruined by a reader who bends the boards back and won’t wash his filthy hands: while, without being rude, I can’t do anything to save it. Of course it is a very little thing I suppose, but I must say it makes me quite sick whenever I think of it.

In case you despair of ever getting rid of the ‘City of the Nesses’, I promise you that in the next chapter after this one Bleheris actually does get away. Don’t forget the MS when you write, and tell me everything about yourself. Isn’t this writing damnable?

Yours,

Jack

The time had come for Lewis to apply to an Oxford college, and it was to this end that Mr Kirkpatrick had been preparing him. Seventeen colleges then made up the University of Oxford, and the question before Lewis was which to apply for. The practice at the time was to list at least three on the entry form, stating one’s order of preference. The ‘big group’ of colleges mentioned in the following letter to his father included New College, Corpus Christi, Christ Church, Oriel, Trinity and Wadham, and of these New College became Lewis’s first choice. Before being accepted by a college, Jack had to sit a scholarship examination in the subject he wished to read, Literae Humaniores, or Classics, to be given in December 1917. If accepted by an Oxford college, this would not make him a member of Oxford University. For that he would need to pass Responsions, the entrance examination administered by the University. Meanwhile, in preparation for the scholarship examination, Mr Kirkpatrick obtained some of the examination questions used in previous years so that he and Jack would have a better idea of how to prepare.

TO ARTHUR GREEVES (LP V: 93-5):

[Gastons

20 June 1916]

My dear Arthur,

I do wish you would be serious about ‘Alice’: whatever else is a matter for joking, work–in this particular sense of the word–certainly is not. I do really want to see something of yours, and you must know that it is impossible to write one’s best if nobody else ever has a look at the result.

However, I told you I would proceed to serious measures, so here is my manifesto. I, Clive Staples Lewis, student, do hereby give notice that unless some literary composition of Arthur Greeves be in my possession on or before midnight on the last night of June in the year nineteen hundred and sixteen, I shall discontinue from that date forward, all communication to the said Arthur Greeves of every kind, manner, and description whatsoever, until such composition or compositions be forwarded. ‘So there’ as the children say. Now let us go on.

‘Oh rage, Oh desespoir’! Alas I am undone. All men are liars. Never, never get a book bound. You will gather from this that ‘Tristan’ has arrived and is a complete and absolute failure. When I told them to bind it in brown leather, with corner pieces etc., I imagined that it would look something like Kelsie’s Dickens or like a 2/- Everyman. Wouldn’t you have thought so? Well as a matter of fact, though in a sense they have done what I told them, yet the total effect, instead of being booky and library like, is somehow exactly like a bank book or a ledger. For one thing the leather–though I must say excellent in quality–is very dark and commercial looking, and the cloth between the back and triangular bits is the absolute abomination of desolation. As if this wasn’t enough–the edges of the paper were before nice, and artistically rough. Well what do you think the brutes have done? They have smoothed them down and coloured them a horrible speckled red colour, such as you see in account books. You can imagine my absolute fury.

True, it is some consolation to find the book itself good beyond what I had expected: it gets the romantic note (which the French don’t usually understand) very well indeed. One or two little descriptions are full of atmosphere. In particular, what could be better for Lyonesse–glorious name–as we imagine it, than this simple sentence: ‘Climbing to the top of the cliff he saw a land full of vallies where forest stretched itself without end.’ I don’t know whether you will agree with me, but that gives me a perfect impression of loneliness and mystery. Besides its other good points, it is very, very simple French, so that if you think of starting to read that language this would make a very good beginning.

I am sorry to hear about the ‘Beowulf, and if it is at all like what I imagine, surprised as well. Of course you were always less patient of the old fashioned things than I, and perhaps it is not a good translation. However (seriously) I may buy it from you at a reasonable price, if I like the look of it, just to match my ‘Gawaine’–that is unless I get Morris’s ‘Beowulf’

(#ulink_ed412efa-c47e-5f1e-931e-f062790e81e0) instead, which is rather too dear at 5/-.

Your remarks about music would seem to lead back to my old idea about a face being always a true index of character: for in that case, if you imagined from the music of the soul either of Gordon or of this mysterious ‘fille aux cheveux de lin’

(#ulink_07d8a8c2-f523-5d2d-bd79-fa85f86e7ee8) one would be bound to imagine the face too–not of course exactly, but its general tone. What type of person is this girl of whom Debussy has been talking to you? As to your other suggestions about old composers like Schubert or Beethoven, I imagine that, while modern music expresses both feeling, thought and imagination, they expressed pure feeling. And you know all day sitting at work, eating, walking etc., you have hundreds of feelings that can’t (as you say) be put into words or even into thought, but which would naturally come out in music. And that is why I think that in a sense music is the highest of the arts, because it really begins where the others leave off. Painting can only express visible beauty, poetry can only express feeling that can be analysed–conscious feeling in fact: but music–however if I let myself go on such a fruitful subject I should take up the rest of this letter, whereas I have other things to tell you.

What is nicer than to get a book–doubtful both about reading matter and edition, and then to find both are topping? By way of balancing my disappointment in ‘Tristan’ I have just had this pleasure in Sidney’s Arcadia’. Oh Arthur, you simply must get it–though indeed I have so often disappointed you that I oughtn’t to advise. Still, when you see the book yourself, you will be green with envy. To begin with, it is exactly the sort of edition you describe in your last letter–strong, plain, scholarly looking and delightfully–what shall I say–solid: that word doesn’t really do, but I mean it is the exact opposite of the ‘little book’ type we’re beginning to get tired of. The paper is beautiful, and the type also.

The book itself is a glorious feast: I don’t know how to explain its particular charm, because it is not at all like anything I ever read before: and yet in places like all of them. Sometimes it is like Malory, often like Spenser, and yet different from either. For one thing, there is a fine description of scenery in it (only one so far, but I hope for more) which neither of them could have done. Then again the figure of the shepherd boy, ‘piping as though he would never be old’

(#ulink_4ff99059-fcad-59f3-a8ba-1689bed2018a) rather reminds me of the ‘Crock of Gold’.

(#ulink_59ae121d-e435-54e2-9163-c0a117add668) But all this comes to is that Sidney is not like anyone else, but is just himself. The story is much more connected than Malory: there is a great deal of love making, and just enough ‘brasting and fighting’ to give a sort of impression of all the old doings of chivalry in the background without becoming tedious: there is a definite set of characters all the time instead of a huge drifting mass, and some of them really alive. Comic relief is supplied by the fussy old king of Arcadia–rather like Mr Woodhouse in Emma–and his boor, Dametas. The only real fault is that all the people talk too much and with a tendency to rhetoric, and the author insists on making bad puns from time to time, such as ‘Alas, that that word last should so long last’.

(#ulink_cdd83875-a1ef-55d9-bbe3-5f85e15c9655) But these are only small things: true, there is a good deal of poetry scattered through it which is all detestable, but then that has nothing to do with the story and can be skipped. I’m afraid this description won’t help much, but I am just longing for Saturday when I can plunge into it again. (I mean the book, not the description.)

So much have I chattered that I have hardly any more room left. No, I have never yet read any of Christina Rosetti’s poems, though, as you have heard me say, I love her brother Gabriel Rosetti. I believe she is very good, and a faery picture illustrating the ‘Goblin market’

(#ulink_8d7689ce-be76-5e56-8d33-584ebf5af872) which I saw in the Academy attracted me very much. That is certainly a lovely edition of Lily’s, though of course not worth [getting], unless somebody presented it to you. A nice sentiment truly! But you understand.

I see that I have scribbled a note about illustrations on this week’s instalment (of course each is written a fortnight before you get it). Well do have a try: or rather that is a patronizing thing to say: I mean, do exert yourself. I am afraid my poor description won’t inspire you much. I wonder do you really know what Cloudy Pass

(#ulink_3047fd00-f4c3-5650-8cdd-72bca0a611ee) looks like?

Well, they’re going to bed now. It is eleven o’clock so I suppose you yourself are already in that happy place. Don’t forget my manifesto.

Yours,

Jack

TO HIS FATHER (LP V: 86-7):

[Gastons

23 June 1916]

My dear Papy,

There is certainly something mysterious about the ‘machinations of the Knock’, as one might put it in the title of a novel; because, though I had not thought of it before, his success with Warnie is an unanswerable point against him. As to the Smythe business, however, I understand that mathematics were taught by him at some school in Manchester to which he went every day. But still, we are not flying so high as Woolwich. Tell me what Kirk says in answer to your letter. I do not think that there is anyone at Malvern whose advice I should prefer to Kirk’s on the question of Oxford: unless indeed I were to amuse myself by writing to Smugy and asking in an off-hand way whether it was Oxford or Cambridge he was at!

No; to be serious, I think we must rely chiefly on K. and on our own judgement. There is of course a considerable temptation to risk it and try for a Balliol: it was Balliol we always thought of, before we knew as much as we do now, and I must admit there is still a glamour about the name. On the other hand, Dodds says in his letter that the prestige of Balliol is on the decline, and quotes as Colleges in the big group, New, Corpus, Christ Church, Oriel, Trinity, and Wadham. Of course these are all merely names to us both, but the first three and Trinity are generally admitted to be in the first rank, while Dodds speaks with particular admiration of New, and Kirk assures me that now-a-days Christ Church is little if at all inferior to Balliol in scholarship. Bearing all this in mind I am afraid we should hardly be well advised in following,

‘The desire of the moth for the star’

(#ulink_21141925-03d4-51df-b2be-dcbd7040e390)

when the star in this case is so perilous, and perhaps after all does not differ from another in glory so much as we have been led to expect. A further point to remember is that New College–of which Kirk has got a prospectus–substitutes for verse a paper of French and German translation instead of prose; which of course is far better from our point of view.

If then we decide to enter the big group, as I think we must, it remains to consider in what order we shall put down our Colleges. I should suggest Christ Church first, as undoubtedly the biggest name of the six, and after it perhaps New: and then the others in any order, keeping Wadham to the last.

It is a great relief to hear your news about the exact terms of the Military Service Act, as in this case I ought to be able to get a commission of some sort at home, or even a nomination from Oxford. At any rate, since there is no hurry–detestable expression, but let it pass–we can leave the matter to be discussed at ease in the seclusion of Leeborough.

If you have had even two hot days at home, you need not complain of the weather. We have had,