Collected Letters Volume Three: Narnia, Cambridge and Joy 1950–1963

But apart from all this—what, please, ought I now to know about the ‘contemporary scene’ after reading it? His picture of undergraduate life is, I suspect, much more characteristic of 1912 than of 1923: but for obvious reasons cd. not be really characteristic of any period. Not even characteristic within the circles he describes: for though I didn’t know them, I do know that if I did they wouldn’t look at all like that to me–any more than the circles I do know consist solely of Hoopers.

(#ulink_055a984b-f611-50b4-9434-252f9b272344) Julia’s excellent remark about Mottram on p. 277 (‘He was a tiny bit of one’) seems to me true of all the characters except Julia herself. There isn’t one that is round and live like Levin

(#ulink_090a6b9b-b39c-52e7-b711-31f2ad1f322a) or the Rostovs,

(#ulink_a1e7c090-337a-5700-a3c6-a199a12dd53e) or Archdeacon Grantly,

(#ulink_3b1c92dc-de3b-5414-9bb3-14a65d9fad3e) or Ld. Monmouth in Coningsby.

(#ulink_7b8e827b-0935-596f-8c42-c20b9b6437ac) They’re more like people out of an Oscar Wilde melodrama, only without the epigrams.

Am I missing the point? Haunted by that fear I asked a man so young that W is to him an old master what he had got out of the book. He said ‘Oh, snob-value: it delighted the housemaid in me’ (i.e. he got out of it the same sort of pleasure my generation got out of Benson—I mean the Dodo one).

(#ulink_29f192f4-ccfd-51cd-aaec-d2c8fcdb4e30) But that can’t be why you admire it. Nor can you think that ‘the contemporary scene’ is just what W describes: because after all we have independent access (worse luck!) to that scene. I’m puzzled.

You shall prescribe me a book to read every Lent: a kind of literary hair shirt.

You gave me a charming interlude on Tuesday—a bit of ‘contemporary scene’ quite omitted by W.!

Yours

Jack

TO ARTHUR GREEVES (BOD):

[The Kilns]

23/3/51

My dear Arthur

Naturally, without a Co. Down Ry.

(#ulink_58907d2b-8fb3-55d3-bd1f-470025c2a64a) time-table I can’t tell you what time I’d be at Helen’s Bay! But we shall find better uses for your petrol, and I’ll come by bus from Oxford St. I’m glad to know there’s a ‘regular’ service and am wondering whether it runs regularly every 5 minutes, every hour, once a week, or only a century.

(#ulink_b3c94b36-027b-5743-8b47-35d8e344b2df) No doubt I shall find out.

Looking forward!–yes, I can’t keep the feeling within bounds. I know now how a bottle of champagne feels while the wire is being taken off the cork.

Yours

Jack

Pop!!

TO DOUGLAS EDISON HARDING (P):

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Magdalen etc

Easter Day [25 March] 1951

Dear Mr. Harding

Hang it all, you’ve made me drunk, roaring drunk as I haven’t been on a book (I mean, a book of doctrine: imaginative works are another matter) since I first read Bergson during World War I.

(#ulink_41cb6afc-ec1d-5526-a62c-27ec053a8f67) Who or what are you? How have you lived 40 years without my hearing of you before? Understand at once that my delight is not, alas!, so significant as it may seem, for I was never a scientist and have long ceased to be even the very minor philosopher I once was.

A great deal of your book is completely beyond me. My opinion is of no value. But my sensation is that you have written a work of the highest genius. It may not be—I mean, I can’t vouch that it is–philosophical genius. It may be only literary genius. The feeling I get is like a mix up of Pindar, Dante, & Patmore. (But can anything be so well written if it’s not good thought as well?). You follow the rocket course wh. you ascribe to Tellus.

(#ulink_3454bba7-bcb0-5622-9c01-5452995e89bd) Paragraph after paragraph starts as if we were embarked for only the sort of Pantheistic uplift one gets in Emerson, but then swoops down and comes all clean & hard. But remember always, I don’t really understand: especially the crucial cap. 13 wh. is no easier than the Deduction of the Categories. (One difficulty is that my excitement makes me read it too quickly).

One criticism. Somebody is sure to answer the Missing Head gambit by saying that it wd. have no meaning for a blind man who knew the world and himself by palpation instead of vision.

(#ulink_ea7e132c-eb60-54d3-a55d-d741a86e0d64) My head is just as feelable (tho’ not as visible) as the rest of me. In other words, they’ll say, you have merely tripped over the fact that the eyes are in the Head. I’m sure this objection misses the real point: but had it not better be obviated, if only in a footnote?

England is disgraced if this book doesn’t get published: yet ordinary publishers will be so likely to send it to someone like Ryle to vet, and that will be fatal. Gollancz, Sheed, Faber, are possibles.

May I pass on my copy to Owen Barfield?–I must have someone to talk to about it.

When can we meet? Can you come over sometime next May or June and dine? (I can provide bed & breakfast)

I now feel that my illnesses etc are no excuse for my not having read it before. That this celestial bomb shd. have lain undetonated on my table all these months is a kind of allegory. Thanks to the Nth.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

P.S. On p. 97 (30b) Further, it was until recently often held…By whom? I thought the doctrine always was that of my eldila

(#ulink_07318076-2853-520b-887e-e27f0b3104c2)–‘He has no need at all for anything that is made

(#ulink_5e1fee9c-0da1-5b76-94f4-6569be6cb154)…He has infinite use for all that is made.’

TO RUTH PITTER(BOD): TS

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

26th March 1951.

Dear Miss Pitter,

May I book May 10th: 1.15? The ferly in the engraving is not at all like a concrete mixer.

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