Yours
C. S. Lewis
P.S. Of course, I’m not obeying your request, ‘Help me to find some comfort in faith again.’ We shan’t find faith by looking for comfort. That’s why, even brutally, I can’t help talking in terms of a work to be done. You are, on my view, being moved into a higher form of the great school and set harder work to do. Comfort will come as you master that work, as you learn more & more to be a channel of God’s grace to your husband (and perhaps to others): not for trying to get back the conditions you had in the lower form.
Keep clear of Psychical Researchers.
1 J. Keith Kyle of the North American Service of the BBC wrote to Lewis on 31 December 1952: ‘The Columbia Broadcasting System with whom the North American Service of the BBC often co-operates…has invited us to assist them with a series called “This I Believe”…It is designed to put on the air a number of statements of personal conviction from “men and women in all stations of life, who have been successful in their chosen profession.” The CBS emphasizes that the contributions should be extremely personal in approach and as they are to be only 3 1/4 minutes in length, complete simplicity is obviously essential.’
2 Pitter gave a lecture entitled ‘A Return to Poetic Law’ to the Royal Institution of Great Britain on 22 February 1952. A copy can be found in the Pitter Papers, Temporary Box, Bodleian Library.
3 Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, First Part, pp. 73-4: ‘I thought again, this Shame tells me what men are; but it tells me nothing what God or the Word of God is. And I thought moreover, That at the day of doom, we shall not be doomed to death or life according to the hectoring spirits of the world, but according to the Wisdom and Law of the Highest. Therefore thought I, what God says, is best, though all the men in the world are against it…But indeed this Shame was a bold villain; I could scarce shake him out of my company; yea, he would be haunting of me, and continually whispering me in the ear, with some one or other of the infirmities that attend Religion; but at last I told him, Twas but in vain to attempt further in this business; for those things that he disdained, in those did I see most glory; And so at last I got past this importunate one.’
4 Since 1930 the Pitter family had owned a cottage in Felsted, Essex, where Ruth taught herself viticulture. The cottage, however, had to be left behind when Ruth and her companion of many years, Kathleen O’Hara, decided to buy a house in the village of Long Crendon, Buckinghamshire. ‘The Hawthorns’ in Chilton Road was set in several acres of garden and orchard, and was within reach of Oxford and London. They moved in shortly before Christmas 1953. Pitter noted: ‘In coming to the neighbourhood of Oxford, of course I had hoped to see a little more of Lewis, of David Cecil, and others, and to attend open lectures, plays, etc. But we could not find anything near enough to make this at all easy’ (Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. lett. c. 220/3, fol. 113).
5 Dorsett, And God Came In, ch. 3, pp. 90-1.
6 ibid., p. 91.
7 This is a reply to a letter from Don Giovanni of 9 January 1953 (?), which appears in Letters: C. S. Lewis-Don Giovanni Calabria, pp. 76-7.
8 There had been a mistake. The article, ‘Responsabilité’–which was not by Don Giovanni Calabria but by Padre Paolo Manna—was published in L’Amico, 8 (Sep.-Oct. 1952), pp. 122-4. The article is reproduced in Una Gioia Insolita, pp. 283-5.
9 Lewis had only recently begun writing the book on prayer mentioned here. He mentioned it to Don Giovanni again in a letter of 17 March 1953, but had abandoned it by the following year (see the letter to Sister Penelope of 15 February 1954). He could not think how to go on with the book until, in the spring of 1963, he found the form for what he wanted to say. The result was Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer (London: Bles, 1964; Fount, 1998).
10 1 Chronicles 13:9-10: ‘And when they came unto the threshingfloor of Chidon, Uzza put forth his hand to hold the ark; for the oxen stumbled. And the anger of the Lord was kindled against Uzza, and he smote him, because he put his hand to the ark: and there he died before God.’
11 Luke 9:62: ‘And Jesus said unto him, No man, having put his hand to the plough, and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God.’
12 In ‘Responsabilità’ Fr Manna pleads for greater recognition of the gravity of Communist persecution of Christians (hospital workers as well as missionaries) in China. He argues that if a Communist (e.g., French Communist Party leader Jacques Duelos) is arrested in the West, the Communists rise in protest. There should be no less an outcry on behalf of victimized missionaries.
13 ‘so far as’; ‘whenever’.
14 i.e., Paolo Manna.
15 Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, Bk. I, ch. 5.
16 i.e., the book on prayer.
17 Matthew 26:39; Mark 14:35.
18 Luke 22:42.
19 Lewis read a paper on this same problem to the Oxford Clerical Society on 8 December 1953. It was published as ‘Petitionary Prayer: A Problem Without an Answer’ in Christian Reflections, ed. Walter Hooper (London: Bles, 1967; Fount, 1998).
20 Eustace and Edmund are characters in the Narnian stories; Jane and Mark Studdock are the married couple in That Hideous Strength.
21 Lewis probably had in mind the last two lines of the title poem of Edna St Vincent Millay’s Renascence, and Other Poems (1925): ‘Ah, awful weight! Infinity/Pressed down upon the finite Me!’
22 Rudolf Steiner.
23 The Rev. Jones B. Shannon was executive director of the Church Society