We are all a good deal depressed—and doubtless you are much more so—over the very unpleasant news from Korea. It is horrible to think of the distress of wives and mothers who had thought the fighting over, only to discover that what is virtually a new war has to be faced. And how is it going to end? Of the ultimate end there can of course be no doubt, but I fear there is very little chance now of a decision being reached before the northern winter clamps down on the country. We can but hope and pray for some speedy success.
Here, we have just recovered from the periodical nuisance of a by-election for parliament: our sitting member having been elevated to the House of Lords, much to the poor man’s disgust, for he is a keen party politician. The Socialist vote is down by three thousand on a poll of some 69,000, and the Conservative was returned with a majority of nearly double that polled by his Conservative predecessor at the General Election. It does not do to take by-elections too seriously, but there is a certain significance about this one, since we are now largely an industrial constituency.
Winter is beginning with grey sky and north east winds, and I find myself envying you in comfortable California, where I suppose you are still in summer clothes? You should buy yourself an enormous fur coat, fill the pockets with brandy and aspirin, and come over here and see how the poor live, on the fringes of civilization!
Again many thanks,
yours sincerely,
C. S. Lewis
P. S. I enclose the fairy tale, and hope you will like it.
TO DOM BEDE GRIFFITHS OSB (W):
Magdalen College
Oxford 13/11/50
My dear Dom Bede
Good. I think we are in entire agreement on this point. One cd. put it this way. The bad (natural) tree cannot produce good fruit. But oddly, it can produce fruits that by all external tests are indistinguishable from the good ones: the act done from one’s own separate and unredeemed, tho’ ‘moral’ will, looks exactly like the act done by Christ in us. And oddly enough it is the tree’s real duty to go on producing these imitation fruits till it recognises this futility and despairs and is made a new (spiritual) tree. The trouble in the XVIth century was that Luther—who intuited the truth—was fundamentally an uneducated man, a peasant type: and really let the whole question get immediately entangled with political and ecclesiological questions wh. were really quite irrelevant to it. But the whole question must now be raised again. What most people who talk about Reunion don’t realise is that continental Protestantism regards the C. of E. as still theologically ‘uniformed’ and the Lutheran-Anglican gap is really at present at least as wide as the Anglican-Roman. It is thus a three cornered affair.
How very much superior the Imitation177 is to the Scale of Perfection178–yet I’d have said just the opposite once.
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO VERA MATHEWS (W): TS
REF.50/81
Magdalen College,
Oxford. 20th November 1950.
My dear Miss Mathews,
The nine pounds fourteen ounces of comfort and cheer, whose arrival was heralded by your last letter, has this morning arrived in good condition, and will be very welcome for what the papers still describe rather pathetically as ‘the festive season’. Which, as I told you, threatens to be even leaner than usual this year; there are amongst other things, cheerful prognostications of turkey at 7/6 per pound. My board will not ‘groan under coarse plenty’ at any such price, especially as we shall be in a position to sacrifice a couple of chickens.
I never read the papers, and would not have known anything about it except for my brother, who kindly reads me out the more cheerful extracts at breakfast. However, I am grateful to him for one excerpt from yesterday’s paper—a delicious printer’s error in a description of a revivalist meeting in the Midlands:–‘At the conclusion of the exercises, a large CROW remained in the hall, singing Abide with Me’. With renewed thanks and all good wishes,
Yours sincerely,
C. S. Lewis
TO VERA MATHEWS (W): TS
REF.50/81
Magdalen College,
Oxford. 25th November 1950.
Dear Miss Mathews,
Many thanks for your letter of the 20th, and especially for the quotation from R Giovanni;179 it is good, is’nt it?
I don’t think I should like the climate of Beverly Hills for a permanency; do you never feel the need to get away up north for a holiday and see snow on the ground? My idle brother on the other hand, with nostalgic memories of long lazy days in the tropics—at the taxpayer’s expense—feels it would suit him down to the ground: and talks still at times, generally at dinner times, of a steak and mushrooms which he once ate in San Francisco.
I note, with the usual gratitude—and embarrassment—that the usual stream of gifts is making its way steadily along the pipeline which you have laid from Alpine Drive to Magdalen College. Many, many thanks. Will you despise my pedestrian taste if I say I prefer envelopes to butter Scotch? I fear there is a sort of echo of Goering’s ‘guns before butter’ about this,180 but stationary is for some reason, absurdly hard to get over here, and very dear when got. Probably now that I come to think of it, because we have recently broken off our paper contract with Canada; not unnaturally to the great annoyance of the Canadians.
If a magic carpet could transport you to Oxford this morning, it would work a very rapid cure on your lethargy. The floods are out, and now it is freezing, with a heavy fog; I can’t see across the quadrangle.
With all best wishes,
yours sincerely,
C. S. Lewis
TO BELLE ALLEN (WHL):
Magdalen etc.
25 November 1950.
Dear Mrs Allen,
I too am an admirer of Bernard Shaw’s work, and could love him for his attack on the vivisectionists. That in the preface to the Doctor’s Dilemma is just devastating.181 Many before and since have attacked them for their cruelty, but Shaw was, I think, the first man to attack them for their stupidity; which I’m sure gets them on the raw whilst an attack on their cruelty would most likely leave their withers unwrung. No one who has ever read Shaw is able afterwards to think of vivisectionists without remembering the imbecile who spent his time cutting the tails off generations of mice to see if presently one would be born without a tail…
TO RUTH PITTER(BOD): 182
REF.50/4.
Magdalen College,
Oxford. 28th November 1950.
Dear Miss Pitter,
What