Letters of C. S. Lewis

C. S. Lewis

• Publisher: HarperOne
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780062565556
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Letters
• Index: Literature

A repackaged edition of the revered author's collection of personal letters—a curated selection of the best of his correspondence with family, friends, and fans—and a short biography by his brother Warren Lewis.

Letters of C. S. Lewis reveals the most intimate beliefs of the great British writer, scholar, lay theologian, broadcaster, Christian apologist, and bestselling author of Mere Christianity, The Screwtape Letters, The Great Divorce, The Chronicles of Narnia, and many other beloved classics. Written to friends, family, and fans at various stages in his life, from his youth to the weeks before his death, these letters illuminate Lewis's thoughts on God, humanity, nature, and creativity. In this captivating collection, devotees will discover details about Lewis's conversion from atheism to Christianity as well as his philosophical thoughts on spirituality and personal faith.

THE LETTERS

1916–1919

TO ARTHUR GREEVES: from Great Bookham, Surrey^*

[7 March 1916]

I have had a great literary experience this week . . . The book, to get to the point, is George Macdonald’s ‘Faerie Romance’, Phantastes, which I picked up by hazard . . . Have you read it? . . . At any rate, whatever the book you are reading now, you simply MUST get this at once . . . Of course it is hopeless for me to try and describe it, but when you have followed the hero Anodos along the little stream of the faery wood, have heard about the terrible ash tree . . . and heard the episode of Cosmo, I know you will quite agree with me. You must not be disappointed at the first chapter, which is rather conventional faery tale style, and after it you won’t be able to stop until you finish. There are one or two poems in the tale . . . which, with one or two exceptions are shockingly bad, so don’t TRY to appreciate them . . .

I quite agree with what you say about buying books, and love the planning and scheming beforehand, and if they come by post, finding the neat little parcel waiting for you on the hall table and rushing upstairs to open it in the privacy of your own room . . . I have at last come to the end of the Faerie Queene: and though I say ‘at last’, I almost wish he had lived to write six books more as he hoped to do—so much have I enjoyed it. The two cantos of ‘Mutabilitie’ with which it ends are perhaps the finest thing in it . . . I well remember the glorious walk of which you speak, how we lay drenched with sunshine on the ‘moss’ and were for a short time perfectly happy—which is a rare enough condition, God knows . . .

TO ARTHUR GREEVES: from Great Bookham (The ‘Mrs K.’ referred to here is Mrs Kirkpatrick.)

[14 March 1916]

I am afraid our Galahad [Arthur] will be growing a very stodgy mind if he reads nothing but Trollope and Goldsmith and Austen. Of course they are all very good, but I don’t think myself I could stand such a dose of solidity. I suppose you will reply that I am too much the other way, and will grow an unbalanced mind if I read nothing but lyrics and faery tales. I believe you are right, but I find it so hard to start a fresh novel: I have a lazy desire to dally with the old favourites again . . . I have found my musical soul again—you will be pleased to hear—this time in the preludes of Chopin. I suppose you must have played them to me, but I never noticed them before. Aren’t they wonderful? Although Mrs K. doesn’t play them well, they are so passionate, so hopeless, I could almost cry over them: they are unbearable . . .

TO ARTHUR GREEVES: from Great Bookham

[30 May 1916]

I cannot urge you too strongly to go on and write something, anything, but at any rate WRITE. Of course everyone knows his own strength best, but if I may give any advice, I would say as I did before, that humour is a dangerous thing to try: as well, there are so many funny books in the world that it seems a shame to make any more, while the army of weird and beautiful or homely and passionate works could well do with recruits . . . And by the way, while I’m on this subject, there’s one thing I want to say: I do hope that in things like this you’ll always tell me the absolute truth about my work, just as if it were by someone we didn’t know: I will promise to do the same for you. Because otherwise there is no point in sending them, and I have sometimes thought that you are inclined not to. (Not to be candid I mean) . . .

TO ARTHUR GREEVES: from Great Bookham

[6 June 1916]

I was rather surprised to see the note paper of your last letter and certainly wish I could have been with you: I have some vague memories of the cliffs round there and of Dunluce Castle, and some memories which are not vague at all of the same coast a little further on at Castlerock, where we used to go in the old days. Don’t you love a windy day at a place like that? Waves make one kind of music on rocks and another on sand, and I don’t know which of the two I would rather have . . . I don’t like the way you say ‘don’t tell anyone’ that you thought ‘Frankenstein’ badly written, and at once draw in your critical horns with the ‘of course I’m no judge’ theory. Rot! You are a very good judge for me because our tastes run in the same direction. And you ought to rely more on yourself than on anyone else in matters of books—that is if you are out for enjoyment and not for improvement or any nonsense of that sort . . .

TO ARTHUR GREEVES: from Great Bookham

[14 June 1916]

I have now read all the tales of Chaucer which I ever expected to read, and feel that I may consider the book as finished: some of them are quite impossible. On the whole with one or two splendid exceptions such as the Knight’s and the Franklin’s tales, he is disappointing when you get to know him. He has most of the faults of the Middle Ages—garrulity and coarseness—without their romantic charm . . .

I hope that you are either going on with ‘Alice’ or starting something else: you have plenty of imagination, and what you want is practice, practice, practice. It doesn’t matter what we write (at least in my view) at our age so long as we write continually as well as we can. I feel that every time I write a page either of prose or of verse, with real effort, even if it’s thrown into the fire next minute, I am so much further on . . .

TO ARTHUR GREEVES: from Great Bookham

[20 June 1916]

What is nicer than to get a book—doubtful both about reading matter and edition, and then to find both are topping? By the way of balancing my disappointment in ‘Tristan’ I have just had this pleasure in Sidney’s ‘Arcadia’. Oh Arthur, you simply must get it . . . I don’t know how to explain its peculiar charm, because it is not at all like anything I ever read before: and yet in places like all of them. Sometimes it is like Malory, often like Spenser, and yet different from either . . . The story is much more connected than Malory: there is a great deal of love making, and just enough ‘brasting and fighting’ to give a sort of impression of all the old doings of chivalry in the background without becoming tedious . . .

TO ARTHUR GREEVES: from Great Bookham (after a holiday spent together at Portsalon in County Donegal)

27 September 1916

As you say, it seems years and years since I left: I have quite dropped back into the not unpleasant, though monotonous routine of Bookham, and could believe I never left it. Portsalon is like a dream . . . One part of my journey I enjoyed very much was the first few miles out of Liverpool: because it was one of the most wonderful mornings I have ever seen—one of those lovely white misty ones when you can’t see ten yards. You could just see the nearest trees and houses, a little ghostly in appearance, and beyond that everything was a clean white blank. It felt as if the train was alone in space, if you know what I mean . . .

Have you reached home yet? . . . The country at home was beginning to look nice and autumn-y, with dead leaves in the lanes and a nice nutty smell . . . Here it is horrible bright summer, which I hate. Love to all our friends such as the hedgepig etc.

TO ARTHUR GREEVES: from Great Bookham

4 October 1916

The beastly summer is at last over here, and good old Autumn colours & smells and temperatures have come back. Thanks to this we had a most glorious walk on Saturday: it was a fine cool, windy day & we set out after lunch to go to a place called ‘Friday Street’ which is a very long walk from here through beautiful woods and vallies that I don’t know well. After several hours wandering over fields & woods etc. with the aid of a map we began to get lost and suddenly at about 4 o’clock—we had expected to reach the place by that time—we found ourselves in a place where we had been an hour before! . . . We had a lot of difficulty in at last reaching the place, but it was glorious when we got there. You are walking in the middle of a wood when all of a sudden you go downwards and come to a little open hollow just big enough for a little lake and some old, old red-tiled houses: all round it the trees tower up on rising ground and every road from it is at once swallowed up in them. You might walk within a few feet of it & suspect nothing unless you saw the smoke rising up from some cottage chimney. Can you imagine what it was like? Best of all, we came down to the little inn of the village and had tea there with—glory of glories—an old tame jackdaw hopping about our feet and asking for crumbs. He is called Jack and will answer to his name. The inn has three tiny but spotlessly clean bedrooms, so some day, if the gods will, you & I are going to stay there . . .

TO ARTHUR GREEVES: from Great Bookham

12 October [1916]

You ask me my religious views: you know, I think, that I believe in no religion. There is absolutely no proof for any of them, and from a philosophical standpoint Christianity is not even the best. All religions, that is, all mythologies to give them their proper name, are merely man’s own invention—Christ as much as Loki. Primitive man found himself surrounded by all sorts of terrible things he didn’t understand—thunder, pestilence, snakes etc: what more natural than to suppose that these were animated by evil spirits trying to torture him. These he kept off by cringing to them, singing songs and making sacrifices etc. Gradually from being mere nature-spirits these supposed being[s] were elevated into more elaborate ideas, such as the old gods: and when man became more refined he pretended that these spirits were good as well as powerful.

Thus religion, that is to say mythology, grew up. Often, too, great men were regarded as gods after their death—such as Heracles or Odin: thus after the death of a Hebrew philosopher Yeshua (whose name we have corrupted into Jesus) he became regarded as a god, a cult sprang up, which was afterwards connected with the ancient Hebrew Jahweh-worship, and so Christianity came into being—one mythology among many, but the one that we happened to have been brought up in . . .

TO ARTHUR GREEVES: from Great Bookham

25 October 1916

I don’t know when I shall buy some new books, as I am at present suffering from a flash of poverty—poverty comes in flashes like dullness or pleasure. When I do it will be either Our Village, or Cranford or Chaucer’s Troilus and Cressida, if I can get a decent edition of it. By all accounts it is much more in my line than the Canterbury Tales, and anyway I can take no more interest in them since I have discovered that my Everyman is abridged & otherwise mutilated. I wish they wouldn’t do that (Lockhart, you say, is another case) without telling you. I can’t bear to have anything but what a man really wrote.

I have been reading the quaintest book this week, The Letters of Dorothy Osbourne to Sir William Temple in Everyman. I suppose, as a historian you will know all about those two, but in case you don’t they lived in Cromwell’s time. It is very interesting to read the ordinary everyday life of a girl in those days, and, tho’ of course they are often dull there is a lot in them you would like: especially a description of how she spends the day and another of a summer evening in the garden . . . I have read today—there’s absolutely no head or tale in this letter but you ought to be used to that by now—some ten pages of Tristram Shandy and am wondering whether I like it. It is certainly the maddest book ever written or ‘ever wrote’ as dear Dorothy Osbourne would say. It gives you the impression of an escaped lunatic’s conversation while chasing his hat on a windy May morning. Yet there are beautiful serious parts in it though of a sentimental kind, as I know from my father . . .

Tang-Tang there goes eleven o’clock ‘Tis almost faery time’. Don’t you simply love going to bed. To curl up warmly in a nice warm bed, in the lovely darkness, that is so restful & then gradually drift away into sleep . . . I’m turning out the gas. Bon soir!

TO ARTHUR GREEVES: from Great Bookham

[1 November 1916]

I can’t let it pass unchallenged that you should put ‘Beowulf’ and ‘Malory’ together as if they belonged to the same class. One is a mediaeval, English prose romance and the other an Anglo-Saxon epic poem: one is Christian, the other heathen: one we read just as it was actually written, the other in a translation. So you can like one without the other, and anyway you must like or dislike them both for different reasons. It is always very difficult of course to explain to another person the good points of a book he doesn’t like.

TO HIS FATHER: from I Mansfield Road, Oxford (a scholarship candidate’s first impressions of Oxford)

[7 December 1916]

This is Thursday and our last papers are on Saturday morning: so I will cross on Monday night if you will kindly make the arrangements. We have so far had General Paper, Latin Prose, Greek and Latin unseen, and English essay. The subject for the latter was Johnson’s ‘People confound liberty of thinking with liberty of talking’¹—rather suggestive, tho’ to judge by faces, some did not find it so. I don’t know exactly how I am doing, because my most dangerous things—the two proses—are things you can’t judge for yourself . . . The place has surpassed my wildest dreams: I never saw anything so beautiful, especially on these frosty moonlight nights: tho’ in the Hall of Oriel where we do our papers it is fearfully cold at about four o’clock on these afternoons. We have most of us tried with varying success to write in our gloves. I will see you then on Tuesday morning.

TO HIS BROTHER: from Belfast

Postmark: 8 January 1917

Many thanks indeed for the letter, and the most acceptable enclosure, which arrived, thank goodness, while P[apy] was out, and so was saved from going the same road as my poor legacy. For you know I got £21 (is that the amount?) the same as you, but of course I have never seen a penny of it: my humble suggestion that I might have a pound or two was greeted with the traditional ‘Ah, such nonsense.’

Congers on being made a real Lieut., which of course I suppose is far more important than the temporary Captaincy. Is there any chance of your being made a real Captain when this war is over—which I hope to God will be before my valuable person gets anywhere near it . . .

Oxford is absolutely topping, I am awfully bucked with it and longing to go up,...