The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Volume lll: Narnia, Cambridge, and Joy 1950-1963

6229 Pages·2009·10.28 MB·English

by  Lewis

The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis

Volume III

Narnia, Cambridge and Joy 1950–1963
Edited by Walter Hooper
Contents

Preface
Abbreviations
Letters:

1950
1951
1952
1953
1954
1955
1956
1957
1958
1959
1960
1961
1962
1963
Supplementary Letters
‘Great War’ Letters
Biographical Appendix
Searchable Terms
About the Author and the Editor
Other Books by C. S. Lewis
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
PREFACE

This is the third and final volume of the Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis. In the
same way that the third novel of Lewis’s interplanetary trilogy, That Hideous
Strength, grew to be twice the length of the first story, Out of the Silent Planet,
so it is with Volume III of his correspondence, which is almost twice as long as
Volume I. It would, I admit, have been neater to have had three equally sized
books, but this is the way things have turned out, and I hope readers will
welcome the many extra letters in this bulky concluding collection.
When it was agreed years ago between the publishers and the Lewis Estate
that there would be only three volumes of letters, it was left unsaid how long a
volume might be. I was halfway through editing Volume I when someone at
HarperCollins suggested that the Collected Letters might consist of three
paperback volumes of 325 pages each. This was not acceptable to the Estate
because it would mean publishing only about a third of the letters known to
exist, and leaving the others to an uncertain future. Lewis was one of the last
great letter-writers and we felt it would be a pity not to publish all his letters.
And so I persevered with Volume I, hoping that a book comprising about a third
of the letters would be accepted by HarperCollins.
However, when the time came to send the publishers the typescript of the
first volume, a different person at HarperCollins was in charge. This was James
Catford, of whom I’d heard many good things. I nevertheless feared he would
turn the book down if it were very long, and I cut out a few letters. As I
explained in the Preface to Volume I, ‘To prevent the book from being too long
it was necessary to leave out a few letters, but the volume contains about 95 per
cent of the letters from that period.’ I explained that some of the letters I omitted
were ‘weekly “regulation” letters from Jack to his father from his various
schools’, while others were letters to Lewis’s great friends Owen Barfield and
Cecil Harwood, in which he ‘was primarily arguing philosophical points or
criticizing his correspondents’ poetry’.1
On 19 April 1999, a few days after sending the typescript of Volume I to
HarperCollins, I went up to London to meet James Catford, who would be
guiding it through the press. I expected him to complain of it being too long, and
I could not have been more surprised when he said: ‘Congratulations! We’re into
Big Books!’
James gave the Collected Letters exactly the lift it needed, and although he
left soon afterwards to become chief executive of the Bible Society, those who
followed him at HarperCollins have supported the project with equal
enthusiasm. More than that, they have shared my keenness to include in the
Collected Letters all the letters that have come to light. Volume I, Family
Letters, covered the period from Lewis’s first letters in 1905 up to his conversion
in September 1931. Volume II, Books, Broadcasts and War, covered the period
from October 1931 up to 1949 when Lewis wrote The Lion, the Witch and the
Wardrobe and was finding his way into Narnia, and I tried to include all the
letters that fitted into that second period.
By the time I reached Volume III, with its triple theme, Narnia, Cambridge,
Joy, covering 1950 up to Lewis’s death in 1963, David Brawn, the projects
director at HarperCollins, and Chris Smith, commissioning editor, were as
enthusiastic about the project as I. They liked my idea of including in Volume III
a Supplement of those letters which were deliberately omitted from or, for
various reasons, failed to get into Volumes I and II. Apart from the early letters
to his father and those to Barfield and Harwood, for reasons of space I had also
omitted Lewis’s letters to various periodicals, such as the Times Literary
Supplement and the Church Times; these letters too are now included in the
Supplement.
Besides the Supplement, there are the ‘Great War’ Letters dating from 1927–
8. They are the only part of Lewis’s dispute with Owen Barfield about myth,
imagination and anthroposophy conducted by letter. Long before the ‘Great
War’ began in 1923, Lewis dismissed Christianity as a ‘myth’. Then, in
February 1923, while preparing for his examinations in Greats, he witnessed a
man he liked go mad.2 This was Mrs Moore’s brother, Dr John Askins, who
Lewis explained ‘had flirted with Theosophy, Yoga, Spiritualism,
Psychoanalysis, what not?’3 In the little house Lewis shared with Mrs Moore he
helped to hold Dr Askins down ‘while he kicked and wallowed on the floor,
screaming out that devils were tearing him and that he was that moment falling
down into Hell’.4 Largely as a result of this Lewis assumed what he called his
intellectual ‘New Look’. ‘There were to be,’ he insisted,
no flirtations with any idea of the supernatural, no romantic delusions. In a
word, like the heroine of Northanger Abbey, I formed the resolution ‘of
always judging and acting in future with the greatest good sense.’5 And
good sense meant, for me at that moment, a retreat, almost a panic-stricken
flight, from all that sort of romanticism which had hitherto been the chief
concern of my life.6

Lewis had just arrived at this ‘New Look’, with its rejection of anything
supernatural, when Owen Barfield and Cecil Harwood became followers of
Rudolf Steiner and the theosophical beliefs expressed in anthroposophy. ‘I was
hideously shocked,’ said Lewis:
Everything that I had laboured so hard to expel from my own life seemed to
have flared up and met me in my best friends. Not only my best friends, but
those whom I would have thought safest…As I came to learn…what Steiner
thought, my horror turned into disgust and resentment. For here,
apparently, were all the abominations; none more abominable than those
which had once attracted me. Here were gods, spirits, after-life and pre-
existence, initiates, occult knowledge, meditation…There was no danger of
my being taken in. But then, the loneliness, the sense of being deserted.7

The ‘Great War’ was to last until 1931, when Lewis converted to
Christianity.
In a word, HarperCollins and I were determined that the three volumes
would contain not a ‘selection’ of Lewis’s letters but all. The reader can see
from the frequency of the abbreviations ‘BOD’ and ‘W’ that most of the letters
are from the two major collections in the Bodleian Library and the Wade Center.
But for the purpose of this volume, the net was thrown very wide, and this
volume contains the letters I have found in all the Lewis collections I know
about. When I began work on Volume III, I guessed that, with the addition of the
Supplement, it would be only a few hundred pages longer than the other two.
However, as word spread that this would be the final volume, I received
numerous Lewis letters preserved in private collections. And so the book grew to
be the size it is.
Despite our efforts to include in these volumes all of Lewis’s letters, there
are a few that either I forgot about or which turned up too late to be fitted in. No
doubt others will come to light. We should not be discouraged. This happens
with the letters of nearly all eminent people. I doubt we can say we have all the
letters written by anyone. Letters from Dr Samuel Johnson have shown up
hundreds of years after his letters were first published, and despite the efforts of
the many editors of Cardinal John Henry Newman’s Letters and Diaries, over a
period of fifty years, letters from Newman still show up from time to time.
While I have no doubt that most of Lewis’s letters are contained in these
volumes, I expect the occasional letter will be popping up for the next 100 years.
If this happens, perhaps HarperCollins will publish an additional volume of
letters.
The theme of this volume is Narnia, Cambridge and Joy, but up to the end
of 1949, there was almost nothing to suggest that the last thirteen years of
Lewis’s life would involve any of those things, that it would be the fullest of all,
and that the period would yield so many letters. In short, there was no reason for
Lewis to imagine a revolution taking place in his life. He was very tired from
years of looking after his aged companion, Mrs Moore, and he would have been
glad of an occasional day of freedom. Thus, when Don Giovanni Calabria wrote
from Verona at the beginning of 1949, urging him to write more, Lewis replied
on 14 January:
I would not wish to deceive you with vain hope. I am now in my fiftieth
year. I feel my zeal for writing, and whatever talent I originally possessed,
to be decreasing; nor (I believe) do I please my readers as I used to…My
aged mother, worn out by long infirmity, is my daily care…Perhaps it will
be the most wholesome thing for my soul that I lose both fame and skill lest
I were to fall into that evil disease, vainglory.8

The clearest evidence that his ‘zeal for writing’ was decreasing was that he
had written no stories since the last Ransom novel in 1945. For Lewis story-
writing was never a matter of effort, but depended entirely, as he said, on ‘seeing
pictures in my head’.9 But there were no ‘pictures’. And in any event, Lewis was
poised, after years of preparation, to begin writing English Literature in the
Sixteenth Century (1954), the volume of the Oxford History of English
Literature which he once complained ‘lies like a nightmare on my chest’.10 The
burden of that ‘nightmare’ would have been eased had he received more help
from his brother, Warnie. The brothers were the greatest friends, but Warnie
would periodically disappear to Ireland on drinking binges, often absenting
himself at the times when Jack needed most help with Mrs Moore.
As I mentioned in the Preface to Volume II, it was shortly after Lewis
thought his talents to be ‘decreasing’ that he began dreaming of lions.11 ‘At
first,’ he said about The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, ‘I had very little idea
how the story would go. But then suddenly Aslan came bounding into it. I think
I had been having a good many dreams of lions about that time…Once He was
there He pulled the whole story together, and soon He pulled the six other
Narnian stories in after him.’12
The extraordinary burst of inspiration that led to the writing of the Narnian
stories was beyond anything he had experienced since his interplanetary stories.
How did it happen? As he explained,
In the Author’s mind there bubbles up every now and then the material for
a story. For me it invariably begins with mental pictures. This ferment leads
to nothing unless it is accompanied with the longing for a Form: verse or
prose, short story, novel, play or what not. When these two things click you
have the Author’s impulse complete. It is now a thing inside him pawing to
get out. He longs to see this bubbling stuff pouring into that Form as the
housewife longs to see the new jam pouring into the clean jam jar. This
nags him all day long and gets in the way of his work and his sleep and his
meals. It’s like being in love.13

The first two chapters of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe were
probably composed soon after he wrote to Don Giovanni on 14 January 1949,
and they were ready for Roger Lancelyn Green to read when he visited Lewis in
March. This first ‘Chronicle of Narnia’ was completed by the end of May, and in
June Lewis made a start on what became The Magician’s Nephew. He dropped
this story when he ran into some difficulties with it, and in September 1949 he
wrote Prince Caspian. In August 1949 Lewis signed a contract with publisher
Geoffrey Bles for The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and by Christmas
Pauline Baynes had illustrated it.
Volume III opens in January 1950, when Lewis was writing a third story,
The Voyage of the ‘Dawn Treader’. This was followed by The Horse and His
Boy, which he was in the middle of when he found it impossible any longer to
look after Mrs Moore. On 29 April 1950 she was moved to Restholme, a nursing
home at 230 Woodstock Road. There Lewis visited her every day.14 ‘The old
lady’s retirement to a Nursing Home,’ he wrote to Dr Warfield Firor on 6
December 1950, ‘has made me a good deal freer in a small way. I can plan my
days and count on some domestic leisure as I have not been able to do these last
fifteen years.’15
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, always the most popular of the
stories, was published on 16 October 1950. The Magician’s Nephew was not