Reepicheep in your coloured picture has just the right perky, cheeky expression. I love real mice. There are lots in my rooms in College but I have never set a trap. When I sit up late working they poke their heads out from behind the curtains just as if they were saying, ‘Hi! Time for you to go to bed. We want to come out and play’
All good wishes,
Yours ever
C. S. Lewis
TO MARY VAN DEUSEN (W):
Magdalen College,
Oxford. June 8th 1953
Dear Mrs Van Deusen
Yes, I think your position is the right one. If one is asked for advice, then, and then only, one has to have an opinion about the exact rule of life which wd. suit some other Christian. Otherwise, I think the rule is to mind one’s own business.
St. Paul goes further than this: it may even be proper at times to adopt practices which you yourself think unnecessary, and which are unnecessary to you, if your difference on such points is a stumbling-block to the Christians you find yourself among. Hence, you see, other Christians’ practices concern us, when at all, as a ground for concessions on our part, not for interference or complacent assertion that our way is best. This is in Romans chap XIV:140 read the chapter and meditate on it. I am very glad you have seen the real point.
My ‘troubles’, thanks, are in abeyance, except that I am suffering from Sinusitis: but that too is better than it was.
Don’t doubt that you and Genia are in my daily prayers. Hasn’t what you are kind enough to say about our Coronation a wider relevance?—that nothing stirs us if it has the sole purpose of stirring us: i.e. the stirring must be a by-product.
God bless you.
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO ROGER LANCELYN GREEN (BOD): TS
REF.162.53.
Magdalen College,
Oxford. 11th June 1953.
My dear Roger,
You have been having a time, have’nt you? I’m glad you are now in calmer waters. I shall be away on July 2nd, but am good for July 1st. Will you dine then? You can sleep too,* if that helps.
Yours,
Jack
TO MILDRED BOXILL (P): 141
Magdalen College,
Oxford. June 14th 1953
Dear Miss Boxill
Thank you for yours of the 11th. I am sending off to you to day by registered post the corrected galleys, but retaining the carbon of the footnotes (for which many thanks) for later use. In the meantime I send you some corrections of the footnotes on the chance that they might reach you in time to be of use. If they do not I should [be] glad to have this list back again. Like an ass I have in it italicised all that is meant to be printed, which of course I ought not to have done: perhaps someone in the office can re-type it or you can explain to the printer.
In the general list of Contents (for which, again, thanks) I think the words ‘Books I-VI’ after Faerie Queene shd. be deleted. They are not, as you see from the Mutability section, quite accurate, and we are selecting from the whole poem: i.e. the Books of P.L.142 in Bush’s Milton section are not a parallel.143
I put in references to Book and Canto at the head of each selection before the proofs of the notes arrived and showed me that it had been done thus. I suppose you will delete whichever is more easily deleted on technical grounds.
I have added a Headnote to the Epithalamion.
I have put in such cross-references as occurred to me in the margin of the galleys: not knowing where or in what form they will appear in the book. Some (not most) of their re-duplicate parallels appear already in the notes.
Accents, being given in the text, need not be repeated in the note: if this occurs anywhere, it shd. be deleted. I’m glad you agreed about having them all restored. Lor bless you, metre doesn’t guide the modern student, on either side of the Atlantic. He wholly ignores it. It is not a question of metre guiding him to the pronunciation: we are giving him pronunciation to guide him (‘tis a faint hope) to metre. Of course it’s a losing battle: but let’s fight for the ship till she goes down under us.
Yours sincerely
C. S. Lewis
TO HARRY BLAMIRES (BOD): TS
REF.307/53.
Magdalen College,
Oxford. 15th June 1953.
Dear Blamires,
Heartiest congratulations.144 This is a most important turning-point: on the other line you would have been in danger of writing what was substantially the same book over and over again. Lloyd is a good man, and we have every reason to believe he is right.145
How right you are to put the house first in your budget: it is ‘the bread and tea of life’ that really matter.
All good wishes.
Yours,
C. S. Lewis
TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE (W):
Magdalen College,
Oxford. June 16th 1953
Dear Mrs. Shelburne
It was a kind thought on your part to send on these two little items. Whether it’s good for me to hear them is another matter! One of the things that make it easier to believe in Providence is the fact that in all trains, hotels, restaurants and other public places I have only once seen a stranger reading a book of mine, tho’ my friends encounter this phenomenon fairly often. Things are really very well arranged. I hope you keep well? With all blessings.
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO VERA GEBBERT (W):
Magdalen College
Oxford June 20th 53
Dear Mrs. Gebbert
The young gentleman looks already, as he should, fathomlessly American: not so much the current model as the heavy millionaire of earlier fiction and film (you’d hardly remember) who was always bringing his clenched fist down on the desk and saying ‘We gotta smash the Medicine Hat toothbrush combine.’ He clearly has a will of his own. From the height of your new technical expertise you will despise me