TO OWEN BARFIELD (W):
The Kilns,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford.
March 16th/32
My dear Barfield
Death and damnation! This will never do. Look here—when you walk I walk. If you are finally forced to take your holiday earlier, make that the walk and Griffiths and I will come with you. A walk with the new Anthroposophical
(#ulink_a64591bf-88eb-5681-b55f-b5356791decb) member and without you is not good enough. But I trust you will be able to stick to the original arrangement.
Somehow prurient doesn’t seem to be the right word for Spenser. Delicatus- relaxed in will—of course he is.
You must have been having a horrible time alternating between bed and exams.
(#ulink_d01037b8-cdb1-5281-809f-1c999af9d28a) Condolences! I have written about 100 lines of a long poem in my type of Alexandrine. It is going to make the Prelude (let alone the Tower)
(#ulink_ebfc3f5e-ac00-533f-9868-65cc99af1f3d) look silly.
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO OWEN BARFIELD (W):
The Kilns,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford.
March 19th 1932
My dear Barfield–
Rê Walk: (1) I could certainly come earlier, but very strongly deprecate a date too near Easter on account of crowded hotels etc. (2) I would reluctantly agree to changing the terrain to Sussex: but if the date is put near Easter, this reluctance increased to just not being absolute recalcitrance. That country at that time will be a stream of hikers talking about yaffles. Is it, by the way, to any one’s interest besides yours to walk in Sussex.
(3) I enclose Griffiths’ letter, to which I have replied telling him all I know (it isn’t much) about dates. It is an alarming and disappointing letter. I am afraid Anthroposophy is his only chance now. He seems to be heading for unmitigated egoism. I wrote him rather a breezy letter trying to give him the feeling, without saying it, that the idea of his being a ‘burden’ on our walk (damn his impudence) was unutterably ridiculous. I’d like to see anyone try? This walk is his last chance. Either we’ll cure him or make an enemy of him for life!
Thanks for the Note on Pain. ‘I kan not bult it to the bran’
(#ulink_d39205aa-ce49-5a9a-8f25-2e823810b46a) at all. When you say that the redeemed self can feel no pain, does this mean that the actual sense-data would be different, or only that the self’s attitude to them would be i.e. it would feel what we call pain but would not ‘mind it’—have
(#ulink_2dcd4b51-1172-5f6f-9666-583aa396bfed) but not.
(#ulink_e191a7b9-3578-5201-ba87-b7b8edfb7d94) Again, is ‘being aware of something as good’ equal to ‘feeling something as pleasurable’. If pain disappears as soon as we find it good, then can’t we be said to find pain good? You see I am all muddled. I will try to get clear and write about it later on: but I think the ‘note’ very important.
I am still pleased with my new poem. What Wordsworth didn’t see was that the subjective epic can learn a lot from the structure of the old epic. There need be no flats if you use the equivalent of inlet narrative and hastening in media res.
Have you passed your exam?
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO HIS BROTHER (W):
[The Kilns]
March 20th 1932
My dear Warnie–
We had a few days ago your letter of Jan. 28th and the first written by you during the troubles. The papers had of course relieved our minds some time before we got it: and I have now passed from anxiety to that sulky state in which I feel that you have given us all a great deal of unnecessary trouble. I feel as the P’daitabird did when he replied to a Cherbourg letter of mine, telling him how I had had a nasty fall in a puddle, ‘Please try for my sake to avoid such drenchings in the future.’ I hope you will be equally considerate. By the way, as regards one point in your letter,—there is no question of building a fence instead of building the two rooms. Indeed, considering the comparative cost of the two works, this would be rather like buying a new pair of braces instead of a Rolles-Royce.
Next to the good news from China, the best thing that has happened to me lately is to have assisted at such a scene in the Magdalen smoking room as rarely falls one’s way. The Senior Parrot-that perfectly ape-faced man whom I have probably pointed out to you—was seated on the padded fender with his back to the fire, bending down to read a paper, and thus leaving a tunnel shaped aperture between his collar and the nape of his neck [designated P in a drawing of the man]. A few yards in front of him stood MacFarlane.
(#ulink_f11f1e10-55d3-5745-9f80-b194da3f8698) Let MacFarlane now light a cigarette and wave the match to and fro in the air to extinguish it. And let the match be either not wholly extinguished or so recently extinguished that no fall of temperature in the wood has occurred. Let M. then fling the match towards the fire in such a way that it follows the dotted line and enters the aperture at P with the most unerring accuracy. For a space of time which must have been infinitesimal, but which seemed long to us as we watched in the perfect silence which this very interesting experiment so naturally demanded, the Senior Parrot, alone ignorant of his fate, continued absorbed in the football results. His body then rose in a vertical line from the fender, without apparent muscular effort, as though propelled by a powerful spring under his bottom. Re-alighting on his feet he betook himself to a rapid movement of the hands with the apparent intention of applying them to every part of his back and buttock in the quickest possible succession: accompanying this exercise with the distention of the cheeks and a blowing noise. After which, exclaiming (to me) in a very heightened voice ‘It isn’t so bloody funny’ he darted from the room. The learned Dr Hope (that little dark, mentally dull, but very decent demi-butty who breakfasted with you and me)
(#ulink_e9c12328-c15e-54a7-b00a-f5d4de261741) who alone had watched the experiment with perfect gravity, at this stage, remarked placidly to the company in general, ‘Well, well, the match will have gone out by now’, and returned to his periodical—But the luck of it! How many shots would a man have taken before he succeeded in throwing a match into that tiny aperture if he had been trying?
You asked Minto in a recent letter about this Kenchew man.
(#ulink_75648e35-d624-5e7e-a57f-089ae1bfa2b2) As a suitor he shows deplorable tendency to hang fire, and I fancy the whole thing will come to nothing. (Ah there won’t be any proposal): as a character, however, he is worth describing, or seems so to me because I had to go for a walk with him. He is a ladylike little man of about fifty, and is to-a-tee that ‘sensible, well-informed man’ with whom Lamb dreaded to be left alone. My troubles began at once. It seemed good to him to take a bus to the Station and start our walk along a sort of scrubby path between a factory and a greasy strip of water—a walk, in fact, which was as good a reproduction as Oxford could afford of our old Sunday morning ‘around the river bank’. I blundered at once by referring to the water as a canal. ‘Oh-could it be possible that I didn’t know it was the Thames? I must be joking. Perhaps I was not a walker?’ I foolishly said that I was. He gave me an account of his favourite walks; with a liberal use of the word ‘picturesque’. He then called my attention to the fact that the river was unusually low (how the devil did he know that?) and would like to know how I explained it. I scored a complete Plough, and was told how he explained it.
By this time we were out in Port Meadow, and a wide prospect opened before him. A number of hills and church spires required to be identified, together with their ‘picturesque’, mineral, or chronological details. A good many problems arose, and again I did very badly. As his map, though constantly brought out, was a geological map, it did not help us much. A conversation on weather followed, and seemed to offer an escape from unmitigated fact. The escape, however, was quite illusory, and my claim to be rather fond of nearly all sorts of weather was received with the stunning information that psychologists detected the same trait in children and lunatics.
Anxious to turn my attention from this unpleasing fact, he begged my opinion of various changes which had recently been made in the river: indeed every single lock, bridge, and stile for three mortal miles had apparently been radically altered in the last few months. As I had never seen any of the places before (‘But I thought you said you were a walker…’) this bowled me middle stump again. The removal of a weir gave us particular trouble. He could not conceive how it had been done. What did I think? And then, just as I was recovering from this fresh disgrace, and hoping that the infernal weir was done with, I found that the problem of haw it had been removed was being raised only as the preliminary to the still more intricate problem of why it had been removed. (My feelings were those expressed by Macfarlane at dinner one night last term, in an answer to someone’s question. ‘Yes. He is studying the rhythms of mediaeval Latin prose, and it is a very curious and interesting subject, but it doesn’t interest me.’)
For a mile or so after the weir we got on famously, for Kenchew began ‘I was once passing this very spot or, no, let me see—perhaps it was a little further on—no! It was exactly here—I remember that very tree—when a very remarkable experience, really remarkable in a small way, happened to me.’ The experience remarkable in a small way, with the aid of a judicious question or two on my part, was bidding fair to last out the length of the walk, when we had the horrible misfortune of passing a paper mill (You see, by the bye, what a jolly walk it was even apart from the company!). Not only a paper mill but the paper mill of the Clarendon Press. ‘Of course I had been over it. No? Really etc’ (The great attraction was that you could get an electric shock.)
But I must stop my account of this deplorable walk somewhere. It was the same all through—sheer information. Time after time I attempted to get away from the torrent of isolated, particular facts: but anything tending to opinion, or discussion, to fancy, to ideas, even to putting some of his infernal facts together and making something out of them—anything like that was received in blank silence. Once, while he was telling me the legendary foundation of a church, I had a faint hope that we might get onto history: but it turned out that his knowledge was derived from an Edwardian Oxford pageant. Need I add that he is a scientist? A geographer, to be exact. And now that I come to think of it he is exactly what one would have expected a geographer to be. But I mustn’t give you too black an impression of him. He is kind, and really courteous (you know the rare quality Id mean) and a gentleman. I imagine he is what women call ‘Such an interesting man. And so clever.’
One day in College lately I had a long browse over Lockhart,
(#ulink_5fe67ad9-f2c9-51ab-a646-557cd0f41eeb) using your pencilled index as a guide. It had almost the effect of having a conversation with you. What a good book it is, isn’t it? I must gradually browse through it all. Some baggage called Dame Una Pope-Henessy has just brought out (for the centenary) a real petty, chatty, Strachey-esque Life of Scott which begins by expressing a desire to ‘rescue’ Scott from ‘the solemn nine-volume tomb’ of Lockhart.
(#ulink_9f633227-0bb7-5001-99f4-2124a9416d91) This kind of thing is insufferable. Christie reviewed it for the Oxford Magazine and, very happily in my opinion, ended up with the view that this chatty, impudent life was ‘bound to come’ and it was a good thing to have it over.
(#ulink_2ff36f3b-0be5-5ea7-828f-a9424e1714e5)
Talking about Scott, I finished the Heart of Midlothian shortly after I last wrote to you. It seems to me on the whole one of the best. Dumbiedikes is one of the great lairds—almost as good as Ellangowans, though not quite. I suppose every one has already remarked how wonderfully Jennie escapes the common dulness of perfectly good characters in fiction. Do you think that the fact of her being uneducated helps? Is it that the reader wants to feel some superiority over the characters he reads about, and that a social or intellectual one will give him a sop and induce him to believe in the purely moral superiority? But this sounds rather too ‘modern’ and knowing to be true; I for one not beleiving that we are all such ticks as is at present supposed. I did not read the Georgics after all, but did read the Aeneid.
The other day Foord-Kelsie succeeded in carrying out a project that he has been hammering away at for a long time, that of taking me over to see his old village of Kimble where he was rector. I mention it in order to say that you and I have unduly neglected the Chilterns. Of course you have been there, and noticed how completely different they are from the Cotswolds, but one forgets the beauty. We drove for hours through the finest old beech woods—a real forest country where the villages are only clearings. The local industry is chair making, and as beech, apparently, can be worked green, the old method of actually working in the wood, turning the newly felled timber with a primitive lathe, still goes on. At least F.-K.—come, I see for the first time that it won’t do on paper-Foord-Kelsie says so. Perhaps this is no more reliable than the consolations which he offered me when you were in danger at Shanghai, when he pointed out that the combatants were firing at each other not at the Settlement. I replied that shells, once fired, didn’t discriminate on whom they fell. To which he answered ‘Oh but you know modern artillery is a wonderful thing. They can place their shells with the greatest possible nicety.’ This from him to me, considering our relative experience, is worthy of the P’daitabird at his best.
