Collected Letters Volume Two: Books, Broadcasts and War, 1931–1949. Walter Hooper. Читать онлайн. Newlib. NEWLIB.NET

Автор: Walter Hooper
Издательство: HarperCollins
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Жанр произведения: Биографии и Мемуары
Год издания: 0
isbn: 9780007332663
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own book will be 15/-, so if you can sell it it will be 15/-clear! I am sick of proof correcting which has had to go on concurrently with all my other work this whole term.10

      Our visitors, thank God, are gone. They have left Minto very worn out but not, so far as I can see, actually ill.

      We have had such a severe winter that even I, with all my polar bear instincts am tired of it. But the snow drops are up now and we have had one or two of those very early fine days which excite me more than the real spring. You know—that thin, tingling, virginal weather.

      Yours

      Jack

      [Magdalen College]

      March 11th 1936

      [Dear Mr Williams,]

      I never know about writing to an author. If you are older than I, I don’t want to seem impertinent: if you are younger, I don’t want to seem patronizing. But I feel I must risk it.

      A book sometimes crosses ones path which is so like the sound of ones native language in a strange country that it feels almost uncivil not to wave some kind of flag in answer. I have just read your Place of the Lion and it is to me one of the major literary events of my life—comparable to my first discovery of George Macdonald, G. K. Chesterton, or Wm. Morris. There are layers and layers—first the pleasure that any good fantasy gives me: then, what is rarely (tho’ not so very rarely) combined with this, the pleasure of a real philosophical and theological stimulus: thirdly, characters: fourthly, what I neither expected nor desired, substantial edification.

      I mean the latter with perfect seriousness. I know Damaris very well: in fact I was in course of becoming Damaris (but you have pulled me up). That pterodactyl…I know all about him: and wanting not Peace, but (faugh!) ‘peace for my work’. Not only is your diagnosis good: but the very way in which you force one to look at the matter is itself the beginning of a cure. Honestly, I didn’t think there was anyone now alive in England who could do it.

      Coghill of Exeter put me on to the book: I have put on Tolkien (the Professor of Anglo Saxon and a papist) and my brother. So there are three dons and one soldier all buzzing with excited admiration. We have a sort of informal club called the Inklings: the qualifications (as they have informally evolved) are a tendency to write, and Christianity. Can you come down some day next term (preferably not Sat. or Sunday), spend the night as my guest in College, eat with us at a chop house, and talk with us till the small hours. Meantime, a thousand thanks.

      [C. S. Lewis]

       On 12 March Charles Williams wrote to Lewis from Oxford University Press, Amen House, London:

       My dear Mr Lewis, If you had delayed writing another 24 hours our letters would have crossed. It has never before happened to me to be admiring an author of a book while he at the same time was admiring me. My admiration for the staff work of the Omnipotence rises every day.

      To be exact, i finished on Saturday looking—too hastily—at proofs of your Allegorical Love Poem. had been asked to write something about it for travellers and booksellers and people so I read it first…I admit that I fell for the Allegorical Love Poem so heavily because it is an aspect of the subject with which my mind has always been playing; indeed I once wrote a little book called An Essay in Romantic Theology, which the Bishop of Oxford (between ourselves) shook his head over. So Amen House did not publish it, and I quite agree now that it was a good thing. For it was very young and rhetorical. But I still toy with the notion of doing something on the subject, and I regard your book as practically the only one that I have ever come across, since Dante, that shows the slightest understanding of what this very peculiar identity of love and religion means. I know there is Coventry Patmore, but he rather left the identity to be deduced.

       TO CHARLES WILLIAMS (W):

      [Magdalen College]

      March 23rd 1936

      [Dear Williams,]