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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of Paris? If not look on p. 319 of my book (the very long one).57

      I think probably the greatest influence on my purely literary taste since the old days has been old Germanic poetry, which, as a friend says, sometimes makes everything else seem a little thin and halfhearted. There is a metre in Icelandic called the Drapa which goes like this:

       Wildest brunt of winter Woke amidst the oak-wood

      (This isn’t meant to make sense) First you have the three alliterations (wild—wint—woke). Then you have the half-rhyme (consonantal but not vocalic) of-unt and-int. Then you have the full rhyme woke-oak. All these features are required to make a couplet. And note well—the beats must be long in quantity as well as accented: i.e.

       Wildest broth of weather

      But I don’t know why I have digressed into Icelandic prosody. More to the points—read any of Charles Williams’ novels (Gollancz) which you can get hold of—specially The Place of the Lion and Many Dimensions. In the rare genre of ‘theological shocker’ which Chesterton (I think) invented, these are superb. On the first level they are exciting stories: beyond that, the philosophical implications are extremely interesting: finally he has the power (absolutely unknown in our generation) of painting virtue. His morally best characters are his artistically best. The fact that Gollancz publishes them (in lurid covers) suggests that all this substantial edification—for it is nothing less—must be reaching the ordinary thriller-reader. If so, I may be telling you about a historical event of the first moment.

      I think it is hospitality heroical on your own part and that of your wife to ask guests to a sick-house. Do accept my real (not conventional) thanks for this very great kindness. But I can’t well come. I am busy this vac. with work undertaken at haste and now to be repented—not heaven knows, at leisure, but at length: and such breaks as I shall take have to be concerted with a good many other people’s plans. But I hope some lawful occasion will take me your way sooner or later. Till then, better health,

      Yours truly,

      C. S. Lewis

      TO OWEN BARFIELD (W):

      [The Kilns]

      June 28th 1936

      My dear Barfield

      All the things which the wiseacres on child psychology in our circle said when you wrote it turn out to be nonsense. ‘They liked the sad parts’, said Tolkien ‘because they were sad and the puzzling parts because they were puzzling, as children always do.’ The youngest boy liked Gamboy because ‘she was clever and the bad people in books usually aren’t.’ The tags of the Podger have become so popular as to be almost a nuisance in the house. In fine, you have scored a direct hit.

      2. After the sugar, the rhubarb. Can you repeat the poem on the dedication you sent me? I liked it immensely, not only, I hope, for the intimacy, but for the felicity (not hitherto the commonest excellence in your work or mine): but after keeping it on my table for about ten days with the intention of copying it onto the fly leaf of the book, I cannot find it high or low. I am very, very sorry.

      4. We must exchange week end visits this Vac: I am ready to begin discussing dates.

      Yours

      TO CECIL HARWOOD (BOD):

      Magdalen College

      Oxford

      [? July 1936]

      My dear Harwood

      The Hero etc is also good. The third one is not quite a success to my mind. Makes his room for makes his room here or makes this his room creaks rather, and the rest has the opposite fault—too facile. It is a good subject of course.

      There was a young person of Streatham Who said to his friends when he met ’em ‘Old Lewis is dyin’ For The Place of the Lion But I keep people’s books once I get ‘em.’

      Have a heart!

      Yours

      C. S. Lewis

      TO DOM BEDE GRIFFITHS (W):

      [Magdalen College

      28 July 1936]

      My dear Griffiths

      First, about the PS in your letter. I think both your old attitude to poetry (when you looked for religion in it) and your present one (in which you reject it as a bridge you have now finally crossed) are equally based on an error common to all modern critics—that of taking poetry as a substantive thing like chemistry or agriculture.