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

however is perhaps not the time to be gloomy, for if our domestic news has little in it to cheer us, at least the world situation is distinctly better. We are all following anxiously the despatches from Korea; they are not very informative, but it does seem as if the tide had really turned in your favour at last. (One should I suppose, to be pedantic, say in U.N.O.’s favour, but it seems rather absurd to call a ninety per cent American army the ‘UNO Army’). What surprises me most about the whole war is the extraordinary fighting qualities of the Koreans; I’d never heard of them as soldiers before the outbreak of this trouble, and my brother tells me that in his time in the East, they were regarded as primitive agricultural nonentitites. Even allowing for their immensely superior number, they appear to be putting up a remarkable show.

      Of home politics the less said the better; you may have seen that we have chosen this period of rearmament of all possible periods to nationalize the steel industry–apparently against the wishes of the Steel masters, and of the Trades Union leaders concerned. But enough of this.

      After one of the worst summers on record, we are entering upon what looks like a wet autumn, and one either carries a raincoat on hot, fine days, or goes out without it and gets soaked. Still, the country is looking lovely, and autumn is my favourite season. My brother and I took a day off last week, put sandwiches in our pockets, and tramped sixteen miles or more along the old Roman road–now a mere track–which runs from Dorchester Abbey to Oxford. Foreigners are apt to think of this island, I find, as just one huge factory site. But you would be surprised if you could see the unspoilt beauty and charm which can still be found, even in the purely industrial areas: and here, within a few miles of Morris Motors, there are plenty of villages off the main highways, where nothing seems to have happened for the last two hundred years or so.

I hope to send you the autographed children’s book by Christmas, but will probably know more about its progress this afternoon, as I am going out to lunch with my publisher¹⁵¹ in the Cotswold village of Burford, where he is on holiday.

      With many thanks, and all good wishes to you and your father,

      yours sincerely,

      C. S. Lewis

      

TO ANNE RIDLER(BOD): ¹⁵²

      Magdalen College

      Oxford 25/9/50

      Dear Miss Ridler–

5 minutes after yr. departure I was kicking myself to having let you go without getting either yr. real name or yr. address. Well, I now have at any rate the address. No, no, I never confused you with R.P.¹⁵³ And don’t you go looking down your nose at her poetry neither. The earlier vols (not the late, comic ones wh. are not to my taste) contain surely v. choice work. Do try them again in a favourable hour.

Thanks for the C.W.¹⁵⁴ sonnet which, I agree, is good & characteristic in thought. Not bad in expression either, except for thrall. (Tho’ whether, in the long run the banishment of Poetic Diction & Archaism, wh. reduces us from the freedom of Greek, Anglo-Saxon & Skaldic verse, to the straight-waistcoast of classical French, may not shend us all, I’m not sure.) My duty remembered.

      Yours sincerely

      C. S. Lewis

      

       TO JILL FREUD (T): TS

      Magdalen College,

      Oxford. 29th September 1950.

      Dearest June,

      Hurrah! A book I’ve always wanted. I shall devour it. Thank Clay enormously.

      (Here concludes the manuscript of C.S.L., and as he has left to week-end with Barfield at Abingdon, I can’t challenge his spelling of Clay—surely Clé: to whom all greetings. How delightful of you to send this excellent book; I remember from our lunch at the Royal Oxford that Clé is an expert in this sort of thing, and no gift could have pleased us better.

      As for coming to see you, it is, in the jargon of the day, a priority programme: but I fear nothing can be done about it until this term is over; you remember what term is like for poor J.

      I hope Mrs. Freud is very happy in her new life; I don’t send the same wishes to Cle, for if he is’nt happy, what would make him so?).

      No news here. Minto continues much the same, some days recognizing us, some days not. It sounds horribly unChristian and callous, but I can’t help wishing she would die. Can you imagine anything more horrible than lingering on in this state? However, she seems fairly contented.

      All love to you both.

      Yours,

      Warnie

      P.S. Many thanks for the wedding cake. Pushkin is up to a bit of no good in the neighbour’s gardens, but will be made to sleep on his portion as soon as he comes back.

      

TO MARTYN SKINNER (BOD): ¹⁵⁵

      Magdalen College

      Oxford 11/10/50

      Dear Skinner

Great Heavens, what must you think of me by now! I see it is almost exactly a year since you so kindly sent me a copy of Two Colloquies:¹⁵⁶ and all that time not even a word of acknowledgement. I reject a momentary temptation to tell you that the year has been spent in a continuous, intensive study of the text. The truth is, I didn’t want to write until I had given them a sympathetic reading and somehow I never was in the mood for them till tonight. (Reading collection papers,¹⁵⁷ like marking School Cert.,¹⁵⁸ I have always found a great whetter of appetite for poetry. Fact! I don’t know why). The right mood for a new poem doesn’t come so often now as it used to. There is so little leisure, and when one comes to that leisure untried—well, you know, Ink is a deadly drug. One wants to write. I cannot shake off the addiction.

They’re good. The puns may be a bit too frequent for my taste, but most of them excellent in quality. (I mean, I couldn’t make them myself!)–especially ‘Lies is for me a realistic word.’¹⁵⁹ And other Wit too, and wit that involves wisdom, like ‘Doesn’t a cap still fit turned inside out.’¹⁶⁰ ‘Shelley-shalley’¹⁶¹ is a verb in a thousand. But ‘me rather all that bowery etc,’¹⁶² I mean the bits (in the good, obvious, old fashioned sense of the word) more ‘poetical’. Everyone has had a try at dewy cobwebs: few better than yours on p. 7. And I liked ‘A branch’s beauty in a waggon’s curve’,¹⁶³ and all p. 14 about the honey coloured ham and the white mines of pork inside the crackling made my mouth water.¹⁶⁴ ‘Simple, sensuous, and passionate’¹⁶⁵ egad! So too the whole bit beginning ‘This scene describes the hermit.’¹⁶⁶