Everything the three ‘Lewises’ wrote is immensely readable, but the BBC broadcasts taught him to translate complicated truths into the vernacular. ‘Any fool can write learned language,’ Lewis once observed, ‘The vernacular is the real test. If you can’t turn your faith into it, then either you don’t understand it or you don’t believe it.’18 But Lewis knew that no vernacular lasts forever, and one of the most valuable letters in this book is his reply to Canon John Beddow of 7 October 1945. Beddow, struck by the success of Lewis’s radio broadcasts, asked him to ‘translate’ some writings for the Christian Workers’ Union. ‘People praise me as a “translator”’, Lewis replied, ‘but what I want is to be the founder of a school of “translation”. I am nearly forty-seven. Where are my successors?’19
Where indeed? While we wait in hope for them to appear, we rejoice in Lewis’s theological legacy. It is breathtaking that during the war, when he had so much else to do, Lewis provided the Western world with its primary body of modern Christian apologetics—The Problem of Pain (1940), The Screwtape Letters (1942), The Abolition of Man (1943), Mere Christianity (1942–4), The Great Divorce (1946) and Miracles (finished in 1945, published in 1947).
We may now add to this list Lewis’s theological letters, most of which appear here for the first time, or at least for the first time in their entirety. Lewis was annoyed when he saw how many letters he received as a result of his first radio talks. On 25 February 1942 he complained to Eric Fenn, the director of his broadcasts, ‘I wrote 35 letters yesterday…It “gets one down”—not to mention postage.’ This fretfulness ended as quickly as it began: Lewis realized that if you publish a book you are responsible for its consequences. As more and more people turned to him for help he saw it as a clear duty to help them, and letter-writing thus became a valuable aspect of his apostolate. Thereafter Lewis answered nearly all letters by return of post. When one considers what a large part of the letters in this volume are replies to those who wrote to him about his books it must seem that Lewis spent more time replying to their letters than writing the books themselves.
In this he was given great help by his devoted brother, Warnie Lewis. Warnie had acquired a portable Royal typewriter many years before and, while he never advanced beyond the hunt-and-peck system with two fingers, he did it well. He came to the job of being his brother’s secretary well qualified; between 1933 and 1935 he had typed the 3,000-odd pages that make up the unpublished ‘Memoirs of the Lewis Family: 1850–1930’, or the ‘Lewis Papers’ as they are known. While we cannot be certain when Warnie began helping his brother, the first of his typed letters to appear in the Collected Letters is that to Eric Fenn of 30 November 1942.
C. S. Lewis—Jack—did not dictate his letters to Warnie, but using a kind of shorthand the brothers both knew—‘cd’ for ‘could’, ‘wd’ for ‘would’, ‘shd’ for ‘should’ etc.—he scribbled his reply on to whatever letter he was answering, after which Warnie typed it. Lewis used the same abbreviations in many of the letters written in his own hand, but with the difference that he could do it faster if Warnie was his only reader. In Lewis’s correspondence with Dorothy L. Sayers, for instance, a number of his replies are written on her letters. As an example, the typed letter to Sayers of 14 December 1945 is exactly as Lewis wrote it for Warnie to copy. Because Warnie looked after the posting of his brother’s letters, Jack could rely on him to add technical information. On 4 January 1946 Dorothy L. Sayers asked Lewis to return the copy of an essay she had sent him. In his draft reply of 7 February Lewis began, ‘I enclose the MS…’, which words Warnie altered to read: ‘I forward the MS as a registered packet by this post’. The remainder of the letter is exactly as Lewis dashed it off on the letter from Sayers. The typed letters to Sayers of 7 August 1946, 5 June 1947, and 1 January 1949 are exactly as Lewis scribbled them.
Warnie was especially useful in replying to some of the many people who sent parcels of food during and after the war. These generous folk had a special place in Warnie’s heart, not least because he and the other Inklings shared that food. Some of Jack’s replies to them, if not written entirely by Warnie, contained passages by him. A number of instances appear in the letters to Edward A. Allen and his mother of Westfield, Massachusetts. This passage in the letter to Mr Allen of 10 August 1948 was almost certainly written by Warnie; as Jack did not read newspapers it is unlikely he would have known that Paul Gray Hoffman was the administrator of the Marshall Plan:
I quite agree with you that Mr. Hoffman has a man size job in front of him; he has so far as I can judge, made a good impression so far, which is a big start. And I feel that the task is being tackled in the right way, i.e. insistance on Europe helping itself, not merely standing by to collect American money…20
This did not mean that Jack did not care what went into these letters, but his brother was able to make the replies more interesting and informative. After replying to people like the Allens over a period of years, C. S. Lewis let it be known that the letters were a joint production. On a few occasions Warnie even signed his brother’s name for him, although Jack himself signed all the letters to Edward A. Allen in this volume. Mr Allen was one of the American friends to whom Warnie continued to write after Jack died.
In 1944, Warnie began evolving a ‘system’ for dealing with the correspondence, although its workings are not easy to follow and it appears to have changed form more than once over the years. Beginning with the letter to J. S. A. Ensor of 26 February 1944, he gave most letters a reference number, ‘REF. 55/44’. The number probably means this was the 55th letter Warnie typed in 1944, and we later find that ‘55’ has become Mr Ensor’s reference number, one that appears on all correspondence to him. But this did not hold true for all Lewis’s correspondents. His first letters to Dorothy L. Sayers bear the reference number ‘231’, but thereafter the number changed every year.
The Lewis brothers were not good spellers. Warnie—who kept a diary for fifty years—joked that he was never sure whether he kept a ‘diary’ or a ‘dairy’. I should mention that his most characteristic error concerned contractions. He spelled, for instance, ‘can’t’ as ‘ca’nt’ and ‘couldn’t’ as ‘could’nt’, although at least he was consistent. His spelling, and that of his brother, has been retained throughout.
I mentioned in the Preface to Volume I that, following his brother’s death, Warnie set out to write a biography of Jack to be called ‘C. S. Lewis: 1898–1963’. However, instead of an account of his brother’s life containing occasional quotations from his letters, the book was mostly quotation. The publishers objected, and in the end most of Warnie’s narrative was gathered into a ‘Memoir’ attached to what became Letters of C. S. Lewis (1966; revised and enlarged edition, 1988). Warnie was very hurt, not least because the publishers failed to include the dedication—‘To Those Overseas Friends Who Helped Him In the Lean Years’—which was added to the edition of 1988.
Shortly after I came to know Warnie in January 1964 I began helping him copy the letters from his brother which people were sending back to him as he prepared his biography. If there was a method of photocopying in Oxford neither of us knew about it, and so we could not make exact copies. Since I feared we might never see the letters again, I copied every word of the letters Warnie assigned me. But because Warnie believed himself to be writing a biography of his brother, he typed only the parts he intended