We hope that this does not mean a final cancellation of your visit: but I am making no alternative suggestion until I see what is in the letter you are writing me.
With deepest sympathy to you both and best wishes for a short illness and speedy recovery,
Yours,
C. S. Lewis
TO MARY VAN DEUSEN (W):
Magdalen etc.
Oct 20th 1952
Dear Mrs. Van Deusen
I think you are perfectly right to change your manner of prayer from time to time and I shd. suppose that all who pray seriously do thus change it. One’s needs and capacities change and also, for creatures like us, excellent prayers may ‘go dead’ if we use them too long. Whether one shd. use written prayers composed by other people, or one’s own words or own wordless prayer, or in what proportion one shd. mix all three, seems to me entirely a question for each individual to answer from his own experience.
I myself find prayers without words the best, when I can manage it, but I can do so only when least distracted and in best spiritual and bodily health (or what I think best). But another person might find it quite otherwise.
Your question about old friendships where there is no longer spiritual communion is a hard one. Obviously it depends v. much on what the other party wants. The great thing in friendship as in all other forms of love is, as you know, to turn from the demand to be loved (or helped or answered) to the wish to love (or help or answer). Perhaps in so far as one does this one also discovers how much love one shd. spend on the sort of friends you mention. I don’t think a decay in one’s desire for mere ‘society’ or ‘acquaintance’ or ‘the crowd’ is a bad sign. (We mustn’t take it as a sign of one’s increasing spirituality of course: isn’t it merely a natural, neutral, development as one grows older?).
All that Calvinist question—Free-Will & Predestination, is to my mind undiscussable, insoluble. Of course (say us) if a man repents God will accept him. Ah yes, (say they) but the fact of his repenting shows that God has already moved him to do so. This at any rate leaves us with the fact that in any concrete case the question never arrives as a practical one. But I suspect it is really a meaningless question. The difference between Freedom & Necessity is fairly clear on the bodily level: we know the difference between making our teeth chatter on purpose & just finding them chattering with cold. It begins to be less clear when we talk of human love (leaving out the erotic kind). ‘Do I like him because I choose or because I must?’–there are cases where this has an answer, but others where it seems to me to mean nothing. When we carry it up to relations between God & Man, has the distinction perhaps become nonsensical? After all, when we are most free, it is only with a freedom God has given us: and when our will is most influenced by Grace, it is still our will. And if what our will does is not ‘voluntary’, and if ‘voluntary’ does not mean ‘free’, what are we talking about? I’d leave it all alone. Blessings.
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO VERA GEBBERT (W):
Magdalen etc.
Oct 20th 1952
Poor dear Gebberts
I am sorry. Whatever may be said for foreign travel, it is horrid when one is ill: the wounded animal wants to creep away to its own den. But the total situation, you must now learn, is quite other than you supposed when you wrote on Saturday evening. That same evening our housekeeper (the only stay of our house and the nearest thing you wd. have had to a hostess) also went down with flu’. So if she had gone down 24 hours earlier we shd. have been wiring to put you off: and if you’d gone down 24 hours later our house wd. now be an amateur Nursing Home staffed by two elderly and incompetent bachelors–themselves liable at any moment to become two more patients. So all has not, perhaps, been quite so much for the worst as you supposed.
At any rate you have nothing to apologise for except what we should have had to apologise for if you hadn’t. (Don’t try to work this sentence out until your temperature is now normal). We had hoped that, tho’ we can’t now offer hospitality, you might have got down here for lunch some day, but I quite see how you can’t. Don’t feel in the least bad about the contre-temps: if you, and our Miss Henry, were to have flu’ the times couldn’t have fitted in better!226 And you keep that whiskey and drink it all yourselves: you’ll need it—and you won’t get any fit to drink over here. Thanks—blessings–sympathies—and all good wishes for a speedy recovery.
Yours,
W. H. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
TO ROGER LANCELYN GREEN (BOD):
Magdalen College,
Oxford. 21/10/52
My dear Roger
Your letter was more than usually welcome: for tho’ reason assured me that so busy a man might have 100 motives for not writing, I had also a lurking fear that you might be offended. Forgive me the suspicion. It arose not at all because I judge you to be that kind of ass, or any kind, but because, we being ‘of one blood’, the loss of you wd. be a very raw gash in my life.
I had a letter from G. Greene’s secretary to say that he was abroad but wd. be shown my letter as soon as he returned. I fear that will make it too late for him to act on it even if he has justice enough to wish to. I have just finished Vol. I of Henry James’s letters. An interesting man, tho’ a dreadful prig: but he did appreciate Stevenson. A phantasmal man, who had never known God, or earth, or war, never done a day’s compelled work, never had to earn a living, had no home & no duties.
My brother is reading A.E.W.M.227 with great enjoyment. You seem to be getting a pretty good Press: congratulations.
Love to lune. I look forward to seeing you next month.
Yours
Jack
TO VERA GEBBERT (W): TS 52/103.
Magdalen College,
Oxford. 21st October 1952.
My dear Mr. and Mrs. Gebbert,
I am sure you will not misunderstand me when I say that the opening of your wonderful parcel this morning was a melancholy rather than joyful ceremony; we had both looked forward so much to its happening under very different circumstances—your presentation, our (for the first time verbal) thanks, the popping of a cork in front of the log fire in our sitting room—well, well, ‘man never is, but always to be blessed’. Once more it is a case of ‘thank you very, very much’ on the typewriter, instead of in person. By the way, it was very naughty of you to send the whisky, unless, as I hope, you had some more with you: for there is no better tonic after ‘flu–experto crede.228
We both hope that the second part of your holiday will be less unfortunate than its beginning, and that by this time you are really over your troubles; if you find time to send a post card letting us know how you fare, it would be very welcome. In any case I feel that climatically Munich must be a change for the better, and no doubt also financially.
Our Vera, Vera Henry does’nt look like escaping as well as you have done; she was removed to a nursing home yesterday, and the doctor talks in the roundabout way that doctors do, about a possible risk of pneumonia. But we shan’t know anything definite for a day or two.
While