Collected Letters Volume Two: Books, Broadcasts and War, 1931–1949. Walter Hooper

We drove for hours through the finest old beech woods—a real forest country where the villages are only clearings. The local industry is chair making, and as beech, apparently, can be worked green, the old method of actually working in the wood, turning the newly felled timber with a primitive lathe, still goes on. At least F.-K.—come, I see for the first time that it won’t do on paper-Foord-Kelsie says so. Perhaps this is no more reliable than the consolations which he offered me when you were in danger at Shanghai, when he pointed out that the combatants were firing at each other not at the Settlement. I replied that shells, once fired, didn’t discriminate on whom they fell. To which he answered ‘Oh but you know modern artillery is a wonderful thing. They can place their shells with the greatest possible nicety.’ This from him to me, considering our relative experience, is worthy of the P’daitabird at his best.

      By the way, talking of shells, we had a conversation about the next war in College the other night, and the Senior Parrot (the hero of the match episode) who flies in the reserve was treating us to the usual business—modern weapons—capital cities wiped out in an hour-non-combatants decimated—whole thing over in a month. It suddenly occurred to me that after all, these statements are simply the advertisement of various new machines: and the next war will be precisely as like this as the real running of a new car is like the account of it in the catalogue. We had all, of course,—at least people of your and my way of thinking—been skeptical, but I never saw the ‘rationale’ of it before.

      To return to Foord-Kelsie. I had one magnificent score off him that drive. All the way along, whenever we passed a rash of bungalows or a clutch of petrol pumps, he was at his usual game. ‘How ridiculous to pretend that these things spoiled the beauty of the countryside etc’ Late in the day, and now in his own country, he waved his hand towards a fine hillside and remarked ‘My old friend Lee—a most remarkable man—bought all that and presented it to the nation to save it from being covered with bungalows.’ He saw the pit he had fallen into a moment too late.

      His old rectory at Kimble is one of the very best places I have ever seen. It is a huge garden sloping down one side and up the other of a little ravine: beyond that divided only by a fence from the almost miniature-mountain scenery of Chekkers park. In this little ravine is a good specimen of a kind of beauty we shall never, I fear, have at the Kilns—that of uneven ground evenly shaved by lawn-mowers. You know the effect (one sometimes gets it on golf links)—rather like the curves on a closely clipped race-horse: an almost sensuous beauty-one wants to stroke the hillside. If you add a few finely clipped yews you will have the picture complete.

I have done little reading other than work since the Aeneid, except, of course, the inevitable snippet of Boswell. I began the first epistle to the Corinthians but didn’t make much of it. Lately I have been skimming The Way of All Flesh.⁴⁷ I thought I should probably not like it on a re-reading, but it wears well. Its crudities of satire are so honest and hilarious that one can’t resist them.

      Elder-rooting in the top wood has begun again, and this afternoon, thanks to a night and morning of delicious soft rain which had softened the earth after a long continued drought, I got up four of them. I wished you were with me. The wood, and, even more, the path to it, smelled deliciously. There were still drops on every branch, and a magnificent chorus of birds. It was one of those days when, in the old phrase, you can almost hear things growing. The catkins (half way up to the topwood) are all out, and the first purple look on the birches is just beginning. There is something unusually pleasant about public works when one is just getting really strong again after being ill: it is nice to sweat again.

      Thanks for two copies of the North China News. You were really a good deal nearer the front than I supposed.

      Yours

      Jack

       TO OWEN BARFIELD (W):

      The Kilns,

      Hdngtn Quarry

      March 22nd [1932]

      Dear old chap

      (Is this a sufficiently untruculent opening?) I have received your incoherent and exasperating letter. You asked me for opinions (‘a short essay’ were your words) on the time and place you proposed for a walk, and I volunteered ‘em. There is no question in my mind of going for a walk with Griffiths and Beckett (preposterous conjunction) without you. When you walk, I walk. I think Sussex a bad place to walk in but shall of course go there if you can’t go anywhere else. And at any time you choose. Now, is that clear? Got it, old bean.

      Now for another bibfull. Please tell me which Thursday night we are assembling on at Eastbourne (Sorry, I see you have. March 31st) Right, I’ll do that. Where, in Eastbourne? Will you tell Griffiths or shall I?

      Kent is a perfectly stinking place. Let us go west rather than go there.

Bridges⁴⁸-what the devil would I imitate Bridges for? I’d as soon think of imitating Tupper.⁴⁹

      If you can’t see the joke about Griffiths being a burden-it’s all one. Plague o’ these pickled herrings.

      Nobody ever said the note on Pain was nonsense. But if you insist, I am prepared to call anything you say nonsense.

      Well: 31st of March at Eastbourne: at a place to be later arranged. I shan’t tell Griffiths unless ordered to, for I cannot make out from your letter what, whether, and when you have written to him. Ta-ta, old boy

      Yours

      C. S. Lewis

      P.S. Please acknowledge this and confirm details in your next moment of calm.

      P.P.S. Harwood wants not ‘his bottom kicked’ but, more idiomatically ‘his bottom kicking’.

       TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W):

      [The Kilns]

      Easter Sunday [27 March] 1932

      My dear Arthur,

      We are about ‘quits’ this time in lateness of answering. I had to get off a letter to Warnie before I wrote to you, as he had been longer in my debt, and that of course had to be a long one. (By the bye the trouble in China seems to be over, I am glad to see.) And now I find that your last letter is in College, while I am out here at the Kilns, so that I shan’t be able to answer it very definitely.

Almost the only thing I remember about it is that you are writing a detective story. After I have spent so much of my life in writing things of the kind that don’t appeal to you, I suppose I should not be surprised at you writing in one of the kinds that doesn’t appeal to me-gradually more of your letter begins to come back to me. You have given up Naomi Mitchison because you find the characters unreal. I didn’t feel that myself. Of course one does not feel the same intimacy in detail with characters from the far past as with those in a novel of contemporary life. I don’t think I mind that. Hamlet or, say, the Baron of Bradwardine-of course one doesn’t in one way know them as well as Soames Forsyte or Kipps:⁵⁰ in another way I feel I know them better. In fact ‘in one way it is, in another way it isn’t’. But then, I think one of the differences between us [is] that you appreciate much more than I do the ‘close-up’ detail—superficial detail I often think-of modern character drawing.

      There I go in my usual way—expressing an opinion on modern fiction when the real state of the case is that I have read so little of it, and that so carelessly, that I ought to have no opinion on it at all. I must rely mainly on you. Perhaps as time goes on you will drift more to the present and I more to the past and we shall be useful to each other in that way. Fortunately, there is a solid something, neither of the present or of the past, which we shall always have in common.

Talking of the past, I had a really delightful