I am glad you mentioned the substitution of heaven for space as that is my favourite idea in the book.35 Unhappily I have since learned that it is also the idea which most betrays my scientific ignorance: I have since learned that the rays in interplanetary space, so far from being beneficial, would be mortal to us. However, that, no doubt, is true of Heaven in other senses as well!
Again thanking you very much,
Yours very truly,
C. S. Lewis
During the course of 1938 the Delegates of the Oxford University Press asked F. P. Wilson to prepare a ‘progress report’ on the Oxford History of English Literature. In his Report to the Delegates, dated 20 December 1938, Wilson said that C. S. Lewis had written to him thus:
I go on reading and write on each subject while it is fresh in mind. Out of these scattered sheets, perhaps after much correction, I hope to build up a book. The subjects so treated already are Platonism, Douglas, Lyndsay, Tottel, Mulcaster’s Elementarie, Sir Thomas More, Prayer-book, Sidney, Marlowe (non-dramatic), Nashe, Watson, Barclay, Googe, Raleigh (poems), Shakespeare (poems), Webbe; and among other sources Petrarch and Machiavelli.
I am at present hard at work not directly on the book but on a lecture entitled ‘Prolegomena to Renaissance Poetry’: a similar Prolegomena to Medieval Poetry which I have and still give proved to be a useful buttress to the other book. 36
I can give no indication of when it will be done. I find the work to be got through is enormous and would be delighted for an honourable pretext to withdraw: excessive pressure from the delegates might come to constitute an honourable pretext.37
TO ROGER LANCELYN GREEN (BOD):38
[The Kilns]
Dec. 28th 1938
Thanks for kind letter. I don’t think letters to authors in praise of their works really require apology for they always give pleasure.
You are obviously much better informed than I about this type of literature and the only one I can add to your list is Voyage to Arcturus by David Lyndsay (Methuen) wh. is out of print but a good bookseller will prob. get you a copy for about 5 to 6 shillings. It is entirely on the imaginative and not at all on the scientific wing.
What immediately spurred me to write was Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men (Penguin Libr.)39 and an essay in J. B. S. Haldane’s Possible Worlds40 both of wh. seemed to take the idea of such travel seriously and to have the desperately immoral outlook wh. I try to pillory in Weston. I like the whole interplanetary idea as a mythology and simply wished to conquer for my own (Christian) pt. of view what has always hitherto been used by the opposite side. I think Wells’ 1st Men in the Moon41 the best of the sort I have read. I once tried a Burroughs42 in a magazine and disliked it. The more astronomy we know the less likely it seems that other planets are inhabited: even Mars has practically no oxygen.
I guessed who you were as soon as you mentioned the lecture. I did mention in it, I think, Kircher’s Iter Celestre, 43 but there is no translation, and it is not v. interesting. There’s also Voltaire’s Micromégas44 but purely satiric.
Yrs.
C. S. Lewis
1 Professor Douglas Bush (1896–1983), born in Morrisburg, Ontario, Canada, was educated at the University of Toronto and Harvard University. An instructor in English at Harvard, 1924–7, he taught in the Department of English at the University of Minnesota, 1927–36. In 1936 he returned to Harvard as Professor of English, a position he held until his retirement in 1966. He and Lewis were both writing volumes for the Oxford History of English Literature, Bush’s contribution being English Literature in the Earlier Seventeenth Century (1945). His other boob include Classical Influences in Renaissance Literature (1952), John Milton (1964) and Pagan Myth and Christian Tradition in English Poetry (1968).
2 Milton, Paradise Lost, XII, 641–4: ‘They, looking back, all the eastern side beheld/Of Paradise, so late their happy seat./Waved over by that flaming brand, the gate/With dreadful faces thronged and fiery arms.’
3 Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, vol. 1,1759, letter to Joseph Simpson, p. 347: ‘Omit no decent nor manly degree of importunity.’
4 Deo volente— ‘God willing’.
5 This was probably his friend of undergraduate days, Alfred Kenneth Hamilton Jenkin. See note 3 to the letter to Hamilton Jenkin of 11 January 1939.
6 Barfield had finally completed his poetic drama, Orpheus, which is first mentioned in the poem Lewis included in his letter to Barfield of 5 April 1935. The play was performed on stage in 1948 and was eventually published as Orpheus: A Poetic Drama, ed., with an afterword by John C. Ulreich, Jr (West Stockbridge, Massachusetts, Lindisfarne Press, 1983). In the foreword to the published work Barfield wrote: ‘I had casually mentioned to my friend C. S. Lewis that I seemed to be feeling an impulse to write a play in verse and was wondering about a subject…He said in effect: “Why not take one of the myths and simply do your best with it—Orpheus for instance?”…Apart from the actual writing, the “getting down to it” consisted almost exclusively of a careful re-reading, with a classical dictionary beside me, of Virgil’s presentation of the myth in the fourth Georgic.’
7 A character in Spenser, The Faerie Queene, III, iv.
8 Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Witch of Atlas (1824).
9 William Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793).
10 Percy Bysshe Shelley married Godwin’s daughter, Mary.
11 Griffiths published the two-part story of his conversion to Catholicism in the Benedictine periodical, Pax. nos. 198 and 199 (April/May 1938).
12 Pax, no. 198, p. 8: ‘[At Oxford] found friends who were of a like mind with myself, and the love of nature and poetry became the ruling passion of our lives. We sought out the solitude of the hills and the sea, whenever it was possible, and passed whole days, and weeks in the vacation, in reading and