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

whatever else it may be, is no diminution of the friendship. I think you pointed out to me once that it was natural we should write more easily in the old days, when everything was new and our correspondence was really like two explorers signalling to one another in a new country. Also—neither of us had any other outlet: we still thought that we were the only two people in the world who were interested in the right kind of things in the right kind of way.

      I think I mentioned the skating in my last letter. Since then life has gone on in a pretty smooth way. Warnie sinks deeper and deeper into the family life: it is hard to believe he was not always here. What a mercy that the change in his views (I mean as regards religion) should have happened in time to meet mine—it would be awkward if one of us were still in the old state of mind. He has an excellent gramophone and is building up a complete set of the Beethoven symphonies, one of which (complete) he often plays us on a Sunday evening. I have quite foresworn the old method of hearing one’s favourite bits played separately, and I am sure one gains enormously by always hearing one symphony as a whole and nothing else. By the way which is the one that contains the beautiful slow movement you played me—the one whose quality you defined as ‘compassion’? I have been waiting for it eagerly but so far W. has not produced it. I am getting back more of my old pleasure in music all the time.

I saw Bryson last night.¹¹ We were having a little supper for some of the English tutors, at the ‘Golden Cross’, which Bryson ought to have attended and as we knew he was in Oxford we went round to his digs to root him out. We found him sitting nursing a terrific black eye (the result of a very mild motor accident—better not mention this at home) and refusing to join us. I suspect that these little suppers are not really much to his taste: the fare is fried fish, ham and eggs, bread and cheese, and beer, and the whole thing is too homely, too rowdy, and too unluxurious for Bryson. This sounds like malice, but it isn’t. Between ourselves, Bryson’s beautiful clothes and general daintiness are a perfectly friendly and well established joke among some of his colleagues. There must be some real good in him; for though many laugh at his foppery and grumble at his laziness, I have never met any one, even in this hotbed of squabbles, who seriously dislikes him.

      I had to abandon Lockhart at the beginning of last term and have not yet resumed it. It is most annoying when the last few volumes of a long book have to be left over like that. One somehow feels a disinclination to begin them again and to find how many names and facts one has forgotten: yet it is uncomfortable not to polish the book off. You will have the laugh of me this time.

While having a few days in bed recently I tried, at W’s earnest recommendation, to read the Three Musketeers,¹² but not only got tired of it but also found it disgusting. All these swaggering bullies, living on the money of their mistresses—faugh! One never knows how good Scott is till one tries to read Dumas. Have you noticed how completely Dumas Jacks any background? in Scott, behind the adventures of the hero, you have the whole society of the age, with all the interplay of town and country, Puritan and Cavalier, Saxon and Norman, or what not, and all the racy humour of the minor characters: and behind that again you have the eternal things—the actual countryside, the mountains, the weather, the very feel of travelling. In Dumas, if you try to look even an inch behind the immediate intrigue, you find just nothing at all. You are in an abstract world of gallantry and adventure which has no roots—no connection with human nature or mother earth. When the scene shifts from Paris to London there is no sense that you have reached a new country, no change of atmosphere. And I don’t think there is a single passage to show that Dumas had ever seen a cloud, a road, or a tree. In a word, if you were asked to explain what you and I meant by ‘the homely’ in literature, you could almost reply, ‘It means the opposite of The Three Musketeers.’ But perhaps I am being too hard on what after all was written only for amusement. I suppose there must be a merit in the speed and verve of the plot, even if I don’t like that kind of thing.

I was talking about this to Tolkien who, you know, grew up on Morris and Macdonald and shares my taste in literature to a fault. We remarked how odd it was that the word romance should be used to cover things so different as Morris on the one hand and Dumas or Rafael Sabatini on the other—things not only different but so different that it is hard to imagine the same person liking both. We agreed that for what we meant by romance there must be at least the hint of another world—one must ‘hear the horns of elfland’.¹³

For fear you shd. think I am going too much off the deep end, let me add that I have just read a real modern thriller (Buchan’s Three Hostages)¹⁴ and enjoyed it thoroughly. So perhaps I shall be able to enjoy yours. Is it finished, by the way, and am I to see it? I have also read a war book (Landlocked Lake by Hanbury Sparrow)¹⁵—but that was because Barfield is introducing him as a new member of our Easter walking party. A ‘regular’ colonel seems an odd fish to come on a walk with my friends and me—I wonder if I shall quarrel with him!

      Do try to write me a long letter soon. You are constantly in my mind even when I don’t write, and to lose touch with you would be like losing a limb.

Dents say they will have Pilgrim’s Regress out by the end of May. I have successfully resisted a foolish idea they had of an illustrated edition—whose price wd. of course have killed any sale it might hope for. But it is going to be decorated by a map on the end leaf which I had great fun in drawing the sketch for. I suppose you have no objection to my dedicating the book to you? It is yours by every right—written in your house, read to you as it was written, and celebrating (at least in the most important parts) an experience which I have more in common with you than anyone else. By the bye, you will be interested to hear that in finally revising the MS I did adopt many of your corrections, or at least made alterations where you objected. So if the book is a ghastly failure I shall always say ‘Ah it’s this Arthur business’¹⁶

      Do write. W. in bed with flu’ (mild) but otherwise all well here

      Yours

      Jack

      Give my love to your mother: I hope she is well.

       TO OWEN BARFIELD (W):

      [The Kilns],

      March 28th 1933

      My dear Barfield—

Thanks for sending me the book.¹⁷ Any war-book that is any good at all stirs up my

¹⁸ so much that I find it difficult—through the din—to discover what it is really like. But this is, of course, much more than a war book. My chief complaint is that it stops too soon, without pulling the threads (the philosophical ones) together. Is it, by any chance, the first of a trilogy? As that, it would be capital. There are, as it stands, several things I want to know more about, e.g.

      1. Courage used to be less conscious, more in the blood: that is why our ancestors did not have to exhaust on keeping brave all the conscious energy needed for the fighting. Good! But does the author’s solution by discipline mean that nature was simply wrong in transferring courage from the blood to the mind? For this discipline (sharply distinguished from regimental spirit etc) is just a method of putting the courage-problem back on the unconscious: i.e. he says to nature ‘I don’t want this freedom. All you have done is to put me to the trouble of inventing an elaborate machinery for making myself again un-free in this matter—freedom in this matter having turned out to be such a job that if I attend to it I have no time to attend to anything else.’ Is this what H-S’s position comes to? And