TO SARAH NEYIAN (T): PC
Magdalen College,
Oxford. Ian 26/53
Thanks for most interesting letter and congratulations on the good time you seem to be having. lust as you are going back to old experiences in liking parties again, so I am by pulling out one of my teeth with fingers the other day, wh. I can’t have done for many a year!*
I liked Mrs. Masham’s Repose25 far the best of White’s books myself. Our Christmas was conditioned by having a visitor for nearly 3 weeks: very nice one but one can’t feel quite free. Love to all.
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO MARY VAN DEUSEN (W):
Magdalen College,
Oxford. Jan. 26th 1953
Dear Mrs. Van Deusen
Thank you for your letter of the 17th and the wholly delightful photographs. I am glad things are still Fine. I’ve never thought of becoming an Associate of anything myself and feel difficulty about advising. You mention externals–what Associates have to do and that they have asked you to become one–but say nothing about the motives in your own mind either for or against it.26 They are the real point, aren’t they? I don’t think one ought to join an Order, however much one might like it or however nice the people who have asked you-unless one thinks that God especially presses one to do so as the only, or the best, way of doing some good to others or receiving some good oneself. And if one does think that, then I suppose one must join however much one disliked it & however nasty the particular inviters were! It is not as if it were a club! Why not try living according to their Rule for a bit without joining them and seeing what it is like for a person such as you in circumstances such as yours?
Confession, of course, you can have without joining anything. I think it is a good thing for most of us and use it myself.
That is v. good news about really good people beginning to go into government jobs, and at a sacrifice. I have always thought of how that the greatest of all dangers to your country is the fear that politics were not in the hands of your best types and that this, in the long run, might prove ruinous. A change in that, the beginning of what might be called a volunteer aristocracy, might have incalculable effects. More power to your myriad elbows!
M. James is wrong.27 It is my brother, not I, who is or was a vestryman.28
With love to all.
Yours sincerely
C. S. Lewis
TO EDWARD A. ALLEN (W): TS
REF.53/53.
Magdalen College,
Oxford. 26th January 1953.
My dear Edward,
Many thanks for your letter of the 21st: and for the welcome news that a ‘guided missile’ is even now winging its way from Highland Avenue to Magdalen College. Yes, anticipation v. realization is a very old problem, is’nt it? Certainly there is a time when realization always falls flat, as compared with anticipation; but one of the advantages of old age–naturally a stripling of 45 like you won’t appreciate this–is that anticipation comes to be pitched so low that realization generally exceeds it.
The G.B.S.29 remark was new to me; and is a typical example of what he thought funny and others would think merely ill-bred. A silly man I feel, in spite of his great ability; for you must have noticed that while a fool cannot be clever, a clever man can often be silly. Do you know the story of how this same G.B.S. once got more than he bargained for? He had been asked to stay with Lady Londonderry, a great society hostess in the old days, and sent her a letter warning her that it was not his habit to eat the bodies of dead and often putrefying animals and birds and so on, in typical Shaw style; he got his answer by telegram-‘Know nothing of your habits: trust they are better than your manners.’
We will certainly take you at your word and let you have a critical review of the contents of package 204; but as I cannot at the moment remember ever having had a useless article in an Allen parcel, I don’t think there will be much to say except ‘very many thanks’. Yes, things seem to be looking up a bit in the ration world here; there is even talk of de-rationing meat in 1954-a pretty safe thing though to say, for by that time the politicians will have found some excellent excuse for not doing so. Meat, butter, and sugar are still on rations over here: meat and sugar because we can’t afford to buy them, and butter because there is a world shortage–or so our papers say. Though how this can be so, I don’t quite see. Are you short of it in U.S.A.?
I am ungallant enough to suspect that perhaps R. L. Stevenson said the last word on the marrying or not marrying question: ‘marriage is terrible, but so is a lonely old age’.30 Not a very consoling remark, but there it is. My brother and I can both sympathize with you over rheumatism: having had it for several years, and it being a family heirloom. We often talk ruefully of the days when we used to think it a comic disease, and laugh at our elder’s complaints about it!
It is heartening and rebuking to think of your father rising superior to his sufferings and producing champion dahlias; and is, as you say, a sermon on the value of work as an alternative to worry. May he long be spared to continue at his gardening.
With anticipatory thanks for the parcel, and with all best wishes to you and your mother from both of us.
Yours
Jack Lewis
TO NATHAN COMFORT STARR (W):
Magdalen College,
Oxford Feb 3rd 1953
Dear Starr
Thanks for your immensely interesting letter from antipodean Po’Lu.31 I shall be v. intrigued to hear more of the Arthurian story as told there, tho’ more so to hear what their own chivalric stories are like.
I have no adventures to tell you in return–unless it is an adventure that I have at last finished, and am now reading proofs of, my volume on 16th Century literature. It is an adventure to me to be free of that 12-15 year labour. I know now how Ariel felt,32 or how a balloon feels when the sandbags are thrown out.
Your F. H. Heard sounds worth following up. I have just read two books by an American ‘scientifiction’ author called Ray Bradbury. Most of that genre is abysmally bad, a mere transference of ordinary gangster or pirate fiction to the sidereal stage, and a transference which does harm not good. Bigness in itself is of no imaginative value: the defence of a ‘galactic’ empire is less interesting than the defence of a little walled town like Troy. But Bradbury has real invention and even knows something about prose. I recommend his Silver Locusts.33
When do you revisit Europe? Don’t stay out yonder till you grow yellow. And try to correct your young friend’s idea of what it wd. be like meeting someone who’d been to Heaven!