THE COLLECTED LETTERS OF C. S. LEWIS
———VOLUME II——— Books, Broadcasts, and the War, 1931–1949 EDITED BY WALTER HOOPER
William Collins
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
THE COLLECTED LETTERS OF C. S. LEWIS, VOLUME II: Books, Broadcasts, and the War, 1931–1949. Copyright © 2004 by C. S. Lewis Pte Ltd.
The right of C. S. Lewis to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780006281467
Ebook Edition © JUNE 2009 ISBN: 9780007332663
Version: 2017-03-24
CONTENTS
Preface
Abbreviations
Letters:
‘I have just passed on from believing in God to definitely believing in Christ—in Christianity.’1 C. S. Lewis had been an atheist for twenty years, and this was news his boyhood friend Arthur Greeves longed to hear. Arthur pressed him for details, and in the letter of 18 October 1931 with which Volume I of the Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis closed, Lewis described his momentous evening on 19 September when J. R. R. Tolkien and Hugo Dyson dined with him at Magdalen. They strolled through Addison’s Walk and then sat in Lewis’s rooms until 4 a.m. talking about Christianity and its relation to myth. ‘The story of Christ,’ Lewis concluded, ‘is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened.’2
This second volume of letters begins at that point, and the reader soon discovers what a ‘tremendous difference’ conversion to Christianity made in Lewis. In the Family Letters Lewis was struggling to find his voice as a poet; in the letters included in this volume he had, it seems, found many voices. He writes on such a wide range of subjects that some readers will wonder if, perhaps, there was more than one C. S. Lewis.
Owen Barfield,3 the intimate friend whose letters from Lewis run through all three volumes, suggested that there was indeed more than one Lewis. In a piece entitled ‘The Five C. S. Lewises’ Barfield wrote:
A fairly unsophisticated person who had never had any