Love to the Unbelievable and to yourself.
Yours
Jack
TO WARFIELD M. FIROR(BOD):
Magdalen College,
Oxford 22/6/51
Dear Firor
I sympathise with you about my handwriting. I used to have a v. good one but no efforts will now recover it. I say! nothing could be nicer than the Hams. If it is not troublesome I’d like you to cancel the new order about Beef & Eggs and revert to the Hams. (We keep poultry and are alright about Eggs).
I don’t know about Deadlines. I somehow can’t quite believe in myself going to Wyoming120–perhaps this is a case for psychoanalysis. Your patient who actually wants his Red Lizard121 fattened up is of course a disgusting old brute but is he also mad? By what sort of transaction did he propose to transfer his soul? And what value did he suppose it wd. have?
My brother is away so I have all the mail to cope with by hand. Therefore in haste.
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO ROBERT C. WALTON (BBC): 122
04/SB/RCW
Magdalen College,
Oxford 10/7/51
Dear Mr. Walton
I am afraid I couldn’t. The route by which I actually became a Theist (viâ subjectivism and as an escape from Solipsism, almost in Berkeley’s manner) could not be used for such a dialogue as you have in view. And also, like the old fangless snake in The Jungle Book,123 I’ve largely lost my dialectical power. I am really very sorry. It sounds an excellent series and I wd. like to have been in it if I could.
Yours sincerely
C. S. Lewis
TO MARY VAN DEUSEN (W):
Magdalen College
Oxford 14/7/51
Dear Mrs. Van Deusen
Yes: GEORGE HERBERT, Seventeenth Century religious poet: his book is called The Temple and is available in many modern reprints.
Yes: by Reason I meant ‘the faculty whereby we recognise or attain necessary truths’ or ‘the faculty of grasping self-evident truths or logically deducing those which are not self-evident’. I wd. not call the truths Reason any more than I wd. call colours Sight, or food Eating.
Yes: Christ is the eternal, unique 2nd Person of the Trinity: sharing His Sonship we can become sons of God in a real, but derived, manner.
I am v. sorry your husband is going through a bad time. You are all in my prayers. Thanks for the charming photos.
Yours very sincerely
C. S. Lewis
TO RUTH PITTER(BOD):
Magdalen College,
Oxford 17/7/51
Dear Miss Pitter
Very many thanks for reading the MS. The idea that you should also thank [me] is to me fantastic: I was ‘making use of you’, you were a thermometer. The thermometer reading (print the good ones because they’re good and the bad ones because they’re bad) is intriguing: a line more easy to take about other people’s work than one’s own. One sees Huck’s point of view: the Widow, getting the house ready for a visitor would not have shared it.
I am lately back from Cornwall where I have been sailing for the first time. I think it is a way in which people who can’t dance can get some of what dancing was made to give. There’s nothing like water after all. Do you know David Lindsay’s lines explaining why there was no wine before the Flood—
The wattir was sae strung and fine Thei wald nat labour to mak wyne.124
That is why they lived so long. Well, thank you. My duty to you both.
Yours sincerely
C. S. Lewis
TO WILLIAM L. KINTER(BOD):
REF.310/51.
Magdalen College,
Oxford. 17th July 1951.
Dear Mr. Kinter,
The sardines, and the enormous tin of ham which you so very kindly sent me, have arrived in good condition, and I am most grateful to you for such a welcome gift; it could hardly have arrived more apropos, for I saw yesterday in the paper that our microscopic ration of bacon is shortly to be reduced by one ounce. Your ham will be of great service in tiding us over a lean period. It shall be consigned to the refrigerator until the time comes—though I was a little surprised to find the instruction that it needed refrigeration on the label; over here we never put canned goods into the frig., but just store them in the coolest part of a larder.
There is a larger number of American visitors in Oxford this year than usual, and I’m glad to say that they are having what—by our standards—is a very good summer. They are doing the Colleges very thoroughly, and putting us natives to shame daily by asking questions about them which we can’t answer. You never realize how little you know about your home town until you meet an intelligent visitor in it.
We are all very thankful—and you are no doubt more so—to see that at last there is some prospect of an end to this ghastly Korean war. Our only fear now is that it may be replaced by a Persian one; but it will be time enough to cross that river when we come to it.
With many thanks and all good wishes,
yours sincerely,
C. S. Lewis
TO MRS D. JESSUP (W): TS
RER328/51.
Magdalen College,
Oxford. 27th July 1951.
Dear Mrs. Jessup,
Thank you for your letter of the 21st. Someone (and someone I don’t even know) had been selected by Charles Williams as his biographer some time before his death, and is in possession of all the materials. So that is that! But don’t imagine you are losing anything. Biography is not in my line.
I agree most strongly with all you say about him, and wish someone really good could do him: but I would’nt, even if there were not another claimant in possession.
With all best wishes,
yours sincerely,
WH Lewis
Secretary.
(Dictated by Mr. Lewis)
TO THE EDITOR OF THE CHURCH TIMES (EC): 125
Magdalen College,
Oxford.