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

is impossible to imagine a more courteous man than Warnie, and when some female correspondents asked him to keep their identities secret, he more than complied. He provided them with fictitious names which even now, years after their deaths, cannot be penetrated. And with their identities went their addresses. The identities of a few of these correspondents have since been revealed: Mary Neylan let it be known that she was the recipient of some of the letters addressed ‘To a Lady’ in the Letters of 1966, and it has come to light that the late Mrs Mary Van Deusen was ‘Mrs Arnold’ of the 1966 Letters. But we still do not know who ‘Mrs Ashton’ is and cannot discover if her letters from Lewis have survived. The result is that in a few instances the only copy of a letter (or part of a letter) we have is the one found in Letters of C. S. Lewis or in Warnie’s typescript of ‘C. S. Lewis: 1898–1963’. When this happens the location of the original letter is given as given as ‘L’—Letters of C. S. Lewis—or ‘WHL’—the unpublished typescript of ‘C. S. Lewis: 1898–1963’, copies of which are held in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, and the Wade Center, Wheaton College, Wheaton, Illinois.

      As with Volume I of the Collected Letters, I have provided the name of the person to whom a letter is addressed followed by the place where the reader can consult the original. The list of abbreviations reveals that ‘Bod’ means the Bodleian Library, ‘W’ the Wade Center, and so on. The Bodleian and the Wade Center have a reciprocal arrangement which means that each receives copies of what the other acquires. It was my intention to include in this volume all Lewis’s existing letters from the period 1931–49, but—inevitably-I learned of a few when it was too late for them to go in. However, HarperCollins are making provision for Volume III to include a supplement containing letters omitted from the first two volumes.

      The letters in Volume I were addressed primarily to family members or close friends, and because most were very important in Lewis’s life I felt I should provide substantial biographies of them in a Biographical Appendix. During the period covered by Volume II Lewis was writing to a greatly enlarged circle of correspondents, and I have included substantial biographies of close friends, such as Sister Penelope, as well as shorter biographies of associates and various prominent or otherwise interesting people whose details were too long to be included merely as footnotes.

During the forty years I have been editing the writings of C. S. Lewis I have rarely needed so much help as I have with this volume. It is one thing to edit a single ‘C. S. Lewis’, quite another to edit three! I make the claim Lewis made in The Allegory of Love—that of standing on the shoulders of giants. The first is Dr Francis Warner who was Lewis’s last pupil, and whom Lewis described as ‘the best mannered man of his generation I have ever met’.²¹ Nothing could be truer, and no one has given me as much encouragement as he. Other giants are Professor Emrys Jones and Dr Barbara Everett who are responsible for identifying most of Lewis’s quotations from English literature.

Lewis’s friends often asked him to criticize their work, and this volume includes a number of his replies. It is astonishing how generous he was with his time. I was unsure whether to include such letters, especially if, as in the case of that to J. A. Chapman of 6 July 1949, the composition in question was never published. Dr Warner and the others thought I should. Dr Everett opened my eyes to an aspect of Lewis’s generosity I had not considered before. Regarding Lewis’s letter to J. A. Chapman, she wrote in April 2003:²²

       What is remarkable about the letter is his gentlemanly kindness, something more than courtesy, and the fact that he is telling the exact truth. You couldn’t have a better ‘report’ in the sense that it is terribly truthful and terribly gentle with it…This is a sort of model…of how to write nicely about a book which the reader knows is unpublishable, not to say unreadable. You must publish it!

      Another on whose shoulders I often stand is Dr A. T. Reyes, the Classics scholar, whom I have relied on for helping with Lewis’s Greek and Latin quotations since I began work on the Collected Letters.

      My debts are very great, and I owe good words to those who have helped in numerous and valuable ways. They include Miss Priscilla Tolkien, Raphaela Schmid, Professor James Como, Professor G. B. Tennyson, Dr John Walsh, Dr Richard Mullen, Dr James Munson, and Dr Robin Darwall-Smith, archivist of Magdalen College and University College, who provided copies of the Lewis letters in Magdalen College Library. Mrs Valerie Eliot graciously supplied me with copies of Lewis’s letters to her husband, while Dr Edwin W. Brown donated copies of the letters to Mary Neylan and others. Laurence Harwood, Lewis’s godson, gave valuable help with the letters to the Harwood family. I am indebted to Mrs Anne Al-Shahi for helping with the biography of her grandfather, E. R. Eddison. Thanks to Madame Eliane Tixier and Dr René Tixier, to Dr David L. Neuhouser and Taylor University, Upland, Indiana, for providing copies of letters to Lady Freud and her mother, and my warmest thanks to Lady Freud for annotating those letters. Mrs Jacquie Kavanagh of the Written Archives Centre of the BBC provided copies of Lewis’s letters to the BBC, Princeton University Library donated copies of the letters to Paul Elmer More, and Professor Brian Murdoch drew my attention to the letters to Eliza Marian Butler in the London University Germanic Institute. I am grateful to Mrs Madeleine F. Stebbins for giving the Bodleian Library the letter to her husband H. Lyman Stebbins, the late Dorothy Robinson who gave the Bodleian the letter to her father, Canon John Beddow, and Lewis’s former pupil, Harry Blamires, for help with Lewis’s letters to him. Thanks to Dr Christopher Mitchell of the Wade Center for providing copies of the Charles Williams letters, and Tracy Fleischman and the University of Texas at Austin for copies of the letters to Herbert Palmer. Dr Andrew Cuneo helped me type the letters in this volume.

      There seems no end to my debts—which include thanks to William Griffin, Aidan Mackey, Dr C. M. Bajetta, Dr Don W. King, George J. Houlé, Father Robert Byrne of the Oxford Oratory, Dr David Downing, with particular thanks to my friends Michael Ward, Richard Jeffery and Scott Johnson for proof-reading this volume. Dr Judith Priestman and Colin Harris of the Bodleian Library know how many reasons I have to be grateful to them. There would have been no volume of letters without the encouragement of David Brawn of HarperCollinsPublishers, and my copy-editor, Steve Gove, who is responsible for much of the care that has gone into the editing of this second volume of Lewis’s Collected Letters. The best thing of all was getting to know well so many people who share my admiration for the author of this book.

      Walter Hooper

      22 November 2003

      Oxford

1 CL I, letter to Arthur Greeves of 1 October 1931, p. 974.

2 ibid., letter to Arthur Greeves of 18 October 1931, p. 977.

3 See Owen Barfield in the Biographical Appendix to CL I, pp. 979–82.

4 ‘The Five C. S. Lewises’, Owen Barfield on C. S. Lewis, ed. G. B. Tennyson (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1989), pp. 120–1.

5 ibid., p. 121.

6 ibid., pp. 121–2.

7 ‘Is Theology Poetry?’ Screwtape Proposes a Toast and Other Pieces (London: 1965; Fount, 1998), p. 37.

8 Letter to Mary Neylan, 29 January 1941, in this volume.

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