Of bookes with scisers and with past compyld; Certes who weenes this is a lesser payne Then free invention is sore beguyld!
Witness myself who with sic labour vyld
Am oft so dased that I half repent This great emprise, my fingers all defyld With slimie stickphast foule and feculent And deeme Dan Spenser self an easier journie went.
C. S. Lewis
TO RHONA BODLE (BOD):127
Magdalen College,
Oxford. June 22nd 1952
Dear Miss Bodle
It was a great joy to hear from you again. You have been daily in my prayers for a long time and, needless to say, will remain. I shall be grateful for a place in yours.
The work you are engaged in is a magnificent one (much in my mind because, as it falls out, I’ve just been reading Helen Keller’s book):128 hard, no doubt, but you can never be attacked by the suspicion that it is not worth doing. There are jolly few professions of which we can say that. The translation of great stories into a limited vocabulary will, incidentally, be a wonderful discipline: you will learn a lot about thought and language in general before you are done. I hope you will sometimes let me know how you get on. God bless you.
Yours most sincerely
C. S. Lewis
TO ROGER IANCELYN GREEN (BOD):
As from Magdalen
June 23rd 1952
My dear Roger
Shortly after you left me I took up From the World’s End129 one night and re-read it: finding it so much better than I had remembered, or perhaps, perceived, that I think I ought to tell you so. The original reading must have caught me in an imperceptive mood. There are, as you yourself wd. now feel, one or two places where one can ‘see the works’, perceive you deliberately concocting an atmosphere—but they are few and once the main story (which hangs together v. well) takes hold they vanish.
The snatches of ‘modern’ poetry on p. 62 are exactly like it: you might have been reading Rostrevor Hamilton’s The Tell-Tale Article, but it was not published then.130 The Voice is excellently managed. The most important thing is that (this time) I was really interested in the crisis it depicts throughout, wh. is significant because it never was my crisis.
Craigie’s Dark Atlantis131 has come and is an almost total disappointment. I don’t think he has much real imagination: and he certainly can’t write at all. The good reviews and the high praise from Grahame Greene (who certainly can write himself, whether one likes his books or not) alarm me. We here catch the critics on the sort of book we do understand, and that shows them to be without any standards at all. (Craigie thinks rights means rites and that the Atlanteans had a metal called ORICHALEUM!132 We are in the post-literate age
Yours
Jack
TO HARRY BIAMIRES (BOD):
Coll. Magd.
24/6/52
Dear Blamires
Yes, of course. I am sorry the book has not yet found a home. All the best.
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO MARY VAN DEUSEN (W):
Magdalen College,
Oxford. 26/6/52
Dear Mrs. Van Deusen–
Incense and Hail Marys are in quite different categories. The one is merely a question of ritual: some find it helpful and others don’t, and each must put up with its absence or presence in the church they are attending with cheerful and charitably humility.
But Hail Marys raise a doctrinal question: whether it is lawful to address devotions to any creature, however holy. My own view would be that a salute to any saint (or angel) cannot in itself be wrong any more than taking off one’s hat to a friend: but that there is always some danger lest such practices start one on the road to a state (sometimes found in R.C.’s) where the B.V.M.133 is treated really as a deity and even becomes the centre of the religion. I therefore think that such salutes are better avoided. And if the Blessed Virgin is as good as the best mothers I have known, she does not want any of the attention which might have gone to her Son diverted to herself.
It seems, nevertheless, quite clear that the Spirit of God is, or is more strongly with Kemper Hall than with P. A. Wolfe. In him you describe a type I know. I think we may except [accept] it as a rule that whenever a person’s religious conversation dwells chiefly, or even frequently, on the faults of other people’s religions, he is in a bad condition. The fact that he shakes your faith is significant. Pray for him but not, I shd. say, with him. If he insists on talking religion to you ask him for positive things: ask him to tell you what he knows of God.
All blessings. My ‘new trouble’ is still there: but I have much to be thankful for.
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO MISS REIDY (P): TS
REF.52/265.
Magdalen College,
Oxford. 28th June 1952.
Dear Miss Reidy,
The point134 was that as foolish people on a walk, when by their own errors they are off the course, think the map was wrong, so, when we do not find in ourselves the fruits of the Spirit which all our teachers promise, it is not that the promise was false, but that we have failed to use the Grace we have been given. The ‘map’ can be found in almost any Christian teaching.
C. S. Lewis
TO ARTHUR GREEVES (BOD):
Magdalen College.
28th June 52
My dear Arthur
Splendid. The manageress is right: Aug 21st is my first night at Crawfordsburn. Setting off with you on Mon. 25th will do fine. And of course I don’t want all day & every day in the car: we think just the same on that subject. I look forward to the trip immensely: the first time you and I have been away together since Portsalon in about 1916!135 This time we shall at least not quarrel about Hair-Oil!
Yours
Jack
TO GEOFFREY BLES (BOD): 136
Coll. Magd.
28/6/52
My dear Bles,
Mycroft