Thanks. I was in some anxiety for your letter;—the whole thing (thanks to the long preparation by failure in the prose ‘It’ and the autobiographical poem) spurted out so suddenly that I have still very little objective judgement of it.
Friday is my best day as I have no afternoon pupil. Say next Friday (Nov 4th), and try to arrive in College about 5 p.m.
Yrs
C. S. Lewis
TO OWEN BARFIELD (W):
Magdalen College,
Oxford.
Nov 2nd 1932
My dear Barfield
I was already a good deal bothered as to whether the crossing of the Main Road ought not to have been recorded: and it says much for your sagacity that you have guessed it quite right. The map is [Lewis here drew that part of the Mappa Mundi which appears on the end leaves of almost all copies of The Pilgrim’s Regress: to the north of the Grand Canyon is Eschropolis and Claptrap and in the south is Wisdom.]
Nov 18th it is—I wish it were sooner.
Yours
C.S.L.
TO OWEN BARFIELD (W):
Magdalen College,
Oxford.
Nov 7th 1932
My dear B.
(1.) You are the pilgrims, rot you, as you go always a little further. Let it be Friday the 25th if ’t suits you so—but please don’t make it 1933.
(2.) No—you must keep your dental affair till Saturday morning, since that morning I spend piddling in Pinkery pond.
(3.) Show the MS. to any one you please provided you bring it with you when you do at last come
Yours
C.S.L.
TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W):
[The Kilns]
Dec 4th 1932
My dear Arthur,
Thank you very much for your list of suggestions. I am really grateful for the trouble and interest you have taken. As for the future, I think I cannot ask you to sweat through the rest of the book
(#ulink_28e106fc-ca2d-5ff8-914d-e468da259f0a) in quite such detail. What I had in mind was not so much criticisms on style (in the narrower sense) as on things like confusion, bad taste, unsuccessful jokes, contradictions etc., and for a few of these I should be very much obliged. These would be less trouble to you than minute verbal points: and also, if anything, more useful to me. I have not had a free day yet to work through your notes, but from a cursory glance I anticipate that on the purely language side of writing our aims and ideals are very far apart—too far apart for either of us to be of very much help to the other. I think I see, from your criticisms, that you like a much more correct, classical, and elaborate manner than I. I aim chiefly at being idiomatic and racy, basing myself on Malory, Bunyan, and Morris, tho’ without archaisms: and would usually prefer to use ten words, provided they are honest native words and idiomatically ordered, than one ‘literary word’. To put the thing in a nutshell you want ‘The man of whom I told you’ and I want ‘The man I told you of’. But, no doubt, there are many sentences in the P.R.
(#ulink_33bbae63-62a8-59c9-b09e-99e9a7359ef7) which are bad by any theory of style.
I have just finished the 2nd volume of Lockhart and it fully justifies all the recommendations both of you and of Warnie. After Boswell it is much the best biography I have read: and the subject is in some ways, or at least in some moods, more attractive. Didn’t you enjoy the account of his ballad-hunting journey in Liddesdale?
(#ulink_93183904-49e4-5e49-b100-2f9b89fa05ba) It will send me back to the Dandie Dinmont parts of Guy Mannering
(#ulink_b58cc08f-9a42-5542-a11a-005fb6b1bab3) with renewed appetite.
It is a very consoling fact that so many books about real lives—biographies, autobiographies, letters etc.—give one such an impression of happiness, in spite of the tragedies they all contain. What could be more tragic than the main outlines of Lamb’s or Cowper’s lives?
(#ulink_d02845f8-df7c-5969-b1c4-b23e63575a9f) But as soon as you open the letters of either, and see what they were writing from day to day and what a relish they got out of it, you almost begin to envy them. Perhaps the tragedies of real life contain more consolation and fun and gusto than the comedies of literature?
I wish you could see this place at present. The birch wood is a black bristly mass with here and there a last red leaf. The lake is cold, cold lead colour. The new moon comes out over the fir trees at the top and a glorious wail of wind comes down from them. I certainly like my garden better at winter than any other time.
I hope I shall soon have a letter from you. This, by the bye, is not a letter, but a note of acknowledgement. And I hope you will not think me any less grateful for your criticisms because of what I have said. I do appreciate your pains most deeply.
Do you ever take a run down to your cottage in winter. It would be ‘rather lovely’.
Yours
Jack
TO HIS BROTHER (W):
The Kilns
Dec 12th 1932
My dear W–
A thousand welcomes to Havre (of hated memory.) We have had so many alarms about you that I shall hardly believe it till I see you with my own eyes. But on that score, and on all your last six month’s adventures there is so much to be said that it is absurd to begin. You would be amused to hear the various hypotheses that were entertained during your long summer silence—that you had been captured by bandits—were in jail—had gone mad—had married—had married a Chinese woman. My own view of course was ‘Indeed he’s such a fellow etc,’ but I found it hard to maintain this against the riot of rival theories.
I think you will find us all pretty ship shape here. The only two things to complain of are, the presence of Vera,
(#ulink_4a156e84-87ec-54ef-aed3-3213b0a58497) and the threatened arrival of Lings to pay me a visit—both, of course, arranged before we had any hopes of seeing you this year: indeed, when we were beginning to wonder if we should see you at all or not. However, Lings is not going to be allowed to interfere with any jaunt of yours and mine, having made himself such a friend of the family that I can be away even while he is here. (He shows a tendency to play duets with Maureen which Minto thinks ought to be encouraged.) But how differently all such interruptions will henceforth appear to you—like church going to the Superannuated man—no longer hewing great cantels out of tiny leaves, but punctuating a leisure sine die. It all seems too good to be true! I can hardly believe that when you take your shoes off a week or so hence, please God, you will be able to say ‘This will do for me—for life.’
I have not had any opportunity to reply till now to your questions about money. We shall do very well on what your percentage comes to: the only request I have to make on the bursarial side is that you must wash less (I mean your clothes, not your person)—your present standard of shifting being the one item in which you live beyond our scale. Minto says I ought not to mention this, but I expect you would prefer to know. (Of course if you like to wash any number of clothes yourself, no one will object!)
I have just planted a holly tree—the one we got last season being, despite our order, a bush, not a tree. I have also successfully resisted an attempt made by old Jacks to abbotsford
(#ulink_218be2dd-d50b-543f-89fa-6f361730f393) us (I owe this delightful verb to you) into going shares with him in buying, if you please, the whole of Phillips’ (deceased—did you hear?) property, on the ground that gypsies wd. otherwise buy it. A ramp, I think.
