My dear Barfield
‘Very facetious to be sure.’ I have not answered your previous letter (I know of only one) because I have been very busy. I didn’t know I had been asked to stay with you until I got this one-not very long ago: and beyond a single night for the opera I can’t manage it very well. Can’t you come for a night to me?
As to operas I should like May 16th (Siegfried).
(#ulink_679377c9-48aa-5061-9ce0-1bb36254f821) Monday and Saturday are the only days possible, which rules out the Rheingold. Would this suit you? What wd. be best of all wd. be if you could get off work on Tuesday 17th and we could come back here together during the morning and be here Tuesday night. Do try.
I am very sorry (seriously) if I have been rude: but getting the term started immediately after flu’ (did you know I had another bout in the last week of the Vac.) has pretty well boxed my compass.
Yours
C.S.L.
P.S. I send (P.T.O.) the opening of the poem. I am not satisfied with any part I have yet written and the design is ludicrously ambitious. But I feel it will be several years anyway before I give it up.
I feel it wd show ill temper if I didn’t use the stamped envelope.
I will write down the portion that I understandOf twenty years wherein I went from land to land.At many bays and harbours I put in with joyHoping that there I should have built my second TroyAnd stayed. But either stealing harpies drove me thence, Or the trees bled, or oracles, whose airy senseI could not understand, yet must obey, once moreSent me to sea to follow the retreating shoreOf this land which I call at last my home, where mostI feared to come; attempting not to find whose coastI ranged half round the world, with vain design to shunThe last fear whence the last security is won.Oh perfect life, unquivering, self-enkindled flameFrom which my fading candle first was lit, oh nameToo lightly spoken, therefore left unspoken here, Terror of burning, nobleness of light, most dearAnd comfortable warmth of the world’s beating side.Feed from thy unconsumed what wastes in me, and guideMy soul into the silent places till I makeA good end of this book for after-travellers’ sake.In times whose faded chronicle lies in the roomThat memory cannot turn the key of, they to whomI owe this mortal body and terrestrial years, Uttered the Christian story to my dreaming ears.And I lived then in Paradise, and what I heardRan off me like the water from the water-bird;And what my mortal mother told me in the dayAt night my elder mother nature wiped away;And when I heard them telling of my soul, I turnedAside to read a different lecture when I learnedWhat was to me the stranger and more urgent news, That I had blood and body now, my own, to useFor tasting and for touching the young world, for leapingAnd climbing, running, wearying out the day, and sleeping…
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TO OWEN BARFIELD (W):
Magdalen College,
Oxford.
[?] 6th May 1932
My dear Bar field
I am sorry to hear that you can’t manage Siegfried. I am going to be selfish. I find that my desire—born ‘in painful side’ since 1913-has been so inflated that I would rather not give up the hope. Will you v. kindly at once book me the cheapest bookable seat for Siegfried May 16th. I will go to 20/-if need be, or a bit over. If you don’t put me up in the ‘enormous room’ for that night perhaps you could advise me about a bed elsewhere. Would you accept a seat (Siegfried, not a seat in your own flat!) from me? Schools this summer make me affluent. You will do me a real kindness if you will.
For a visit—any week night this term except Mondays I shall be delighted if you will come. If that is impossible make it a week end, but I shd. prefer the former.
It really takes a load off my mind to hear that you like the poem. Couplets, however dangerous are needed if one is to try to give to the subjective poem some of the swing and narrative zest of the old epic.
Yrs
C. S. Lewis
P.S. I shall be as anxious as a child till I hear that you have got two seats for Siegfried.
TO OWEN BARFIELD (W):
Magdalen College,
Oxford.
Thursday [12 May 1932]
Dear Barfield
I am in horrors and raptures—if only you wd. have come it wd. be raptures alone. I would like the bed at Swiss Cottage on Monday night if it is convenient—in sending me directions please give me the exact address. (A letter posted by return ought to reach me before Monday morning).
If you reconsider your decision and can get an extra seat my offer of course still holds—you would be cheap at the price. I can’t refund you the 15/-by this post, as I am in College. A thousand thanks: I didn’t know till now that I had so much boyish appetite for a show left.
Yours
C.S.L.
P.S. If there is anyway of getting my existing ticket (Amphitheatre Stall 191) changed for two of the 28/-ones and you cd. come. I honestly can afford it this year and it wd. make good better.
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TO HIS BROTHER (W):
[Magdalen College]
June 14th 1932
Dear W—
I have just read your letter of May 15th, but not as you suppose in College. ‘Schools’ has arrived and I am invigilating
(#ulink_49d9e980-f6d7-59c1-bc52-35aca81e301d) and although your letter arrived before lunch I deliberately brought it here unopened so that the reading it might occupy at least part of the arid waste of talk-less, smoke-less, exercise-less time between 2 p.m. and 5 p.m.
Theoretically of course there ought to be no greater blessing than three hours absolutely safe from interruption and free for reading: but somehow or other—everyone has made the discovery—reading is impossible in the Schools. There is a sort of atmosphere at once restless and soporific which always ends in that stage which (for me) is a signal to stop reading—the stage I mean at which you blink and ask yourself ‘Now what was the last page about.’ Whether it will turn out that writing under schools conditions is more possible than reading, the fate of this letter will decide. At any rate thank heaven for grandfather’s black alpacca coat: with this I feel as if I were in bathing things (at any rate from the waist up) while most of my colleagues are sweating in their best blue or brown suitings.
You will gather from this that summer has arrived: in fact last Sunday (it is Tuesday to day) I had my first bathe. You will be displeased to hear that in spite of my constant warnings the draining of the swamp has not been carried out without a fall in the level of the pond. I repeatedly told both Lydiatt (who began the job) and Knight (usually a very reliable man, who finished it) that the depth of water in the pond was sacrosanct: that nothing which might have even the remotest tendency to interfere with that must be attempted: that I would rather have the swamp as swampy as ever than lose an inch of pond. But of course I might have known that it is quite vain ever to get anything you want carried out: and the pond is lower. However, don’t be too alarmed. I don’t think it can get any lower than it is now.
I don’t know how much of the draining operations Minto has described to you nor whether you understood them. In fact, remembering what a mechanical process described by Minto is like I may assume that the more she has said the less you know about it. The scheme was a series of deep holes filled with rubble and covered over with earth. Into each of these a number of trenches drain: and from each of these pipes lead into the main pipe now occupying the old ditch between the garden and the swamp, which in its turn, by pipes under the lawn, drains into the ditch beside the avenue.
It was however useless to do all this as long as the overflow outlet from the pond (you know—the tiny runnel with the tiny bridge over near the Philips end of the pond) was meandering—as it did—over all the lower parts of the swampy bit. Nor was it possible to stop this up and deny the pond any outlet, as it would then have been stagnant and stinking in summer, and overflowing in winter. It was therefore decided to substitute a pipe outlet for the mere channel outlet—wh. pipe could carry the overflow from the pond, through the swampy bit without wetting it, to the rest of the drainage system. When they first laid this pipe I said that its mouth (i.e. at the pond end) was too low and that it would therefore carry off more water than the old channel and so lower the pond. The workmen shortly denied this but I stuck to my point and actually made them raise it. Even after they had raised it I was still not sure that it wasn’t taking off more water than the old channel did: so I have now had a stopper made which is in the mouth of the pipe at this moment. I have also given the spring-tap up beyond the small pond a night turned on, and I trust that by thus controlling in-flow and outflow of water I can soon nurse the pond back to its old level.
At any rate I don’t see how it can sink as long as its escape is bunged up. As to the degree of loss at present, as there are no perpendicular banks anywhere it is hard to gauge. I should think that the most pessimistic episode could hardly be more than ½ of a foot: i.e. a difference one is unconscious of in bathing. Still I grudge every inch. By the way, it has just occurred to me that the sinking may not be due to the draining at all: for the old ‘channel’ escape, when I looked at it just before the operations began, had certainly widened itself extremely from what I first remembered, and must have been letting out more than it ought. In that case the new pipe may have arrested rather than created a wastage.
I have been infernally busy getting ready for Schools and have therefore little to tell you (By the bye Percy Tweedlepippin
(#ulink_120da6ed-e3f0-5f9b-87ce-c99d0f74a3bb) is my colleague and his principles as an examiner are perhaps worth recording. In answer to a suggested question of mine he retorted ‘Its no good setting that. They’d know that!’)
I have read, or rather re-read, one novel namely Pendennis.
(#ulink_37d1d589-68ff-5079-b6a1-36894dd31a34) How pleased the Pdaitabird would have been—why hadn’t I the grace to read it a few years ago. Why I re-read it now I don’t quite know—I suppose some vague idea that it was time I gave Thackeray another trial. The experiment, on the whole, has been a failure. I can just see, mind you, why they use words like ‘great’ and ‘genius’ in talking of him which we don’t use of Trollope. There are indications, or breakings in, all the time of something beyond Trollope’s range. The scenery for one thing (tho’ to be sure there is only one scene in Thackeray—always summer evening—English-garden—rooks crowing) has a sort of depth (I mean in the painting sense) wh. Trollope hasn’t got. Still more there are the sudden ‘depths’ in a very different sense in Thackeray. There is one v. subordinate scene in Pendennis where you meet the Marquis of Steyne and a few of his led captains and pimps in a box at a theatre. It only lasts a page or so—but the sort of rank, salt, urinous stench from the nether pit nearly knocks you down and clearly has a kind of power that is quite out of Trollope’s range. I don’t think these bits really improve Thackeray’s books: they do, I suppose, indicate whatever we mean by ‘genius’. And if you are the kind of reader who values genius you rate Thackeray highly.
My own secret is—let rude ears be absent—that to tell you the truth, brother, I don’t like genius. I like enormously some things that only genius can do: such as Paradise Lost and the Divine Comedy.
(#ulink_825e0a06-0206-5317-9558-1399ce663c1b) But it is the results I like. What I don’t care twopence about is the sense (apparently dear to so many) of being in the hands of ‘a great man’—you know; his dazzling personality, his lightening energy, the strange force of his mind—and all that. So that I quite definitely prefer Trollope—or rather this re-reading of Pen. confirms my long standing preference. No doubt Thackeray was the genius: but Trollope wrote the better books.
