80 (#ulink_68926f77-c884-5683-a972-d5c3a60f6b9e) A berth on a cross-channel boat. As planned, Lewis crossed over to Ireland on 15 August and was there as Arthur’s guest al Bernagh, Circular Road, Belfast, until 29 August.
81 (#ulink_b5419c18-2236-5ccd-80c1-0de15d5191c6) This letter is undated, but if Lewis’s mention of ‘Thursday Sept. 1st’ is correct it was almost certainly written in 1932. Lewis and the Moores normally had a holiday together in Ireland, and Lewis probably met Mrs Moore, Maureen and their friend Dorothea ‘Dotty’ Vaughan (a close friend of the family who had been at Headington School with Maureen Moore) for a few days in Kilkeel before returning to England.
82 (#ulink_c7e36288-7e83-5690-bcbe-97271b582a7e) For some time Lewis had been trying to write the story of his conversion, and especially of the part ‘Joy’ played in it. While he probably had no intention of attempting this on his holiday, The Pilgrim’s Regress: Art Allegorical Apology for Christianity, Reason and Romanticism (1933) came quite unexpectedly and was written during the fortnight spent at Bernagh. The manuscript had been sent to Arthur for criticism. For details of his earlier attempts to tell the story of his conversion see the treatment of The Pilgrim’s Regress in CG.
83 (#ulink_c7e36288-7e83-5690-bcbe-97271b582a7e) i.e. The Pilgrim’s Regress.
84 (#ulink_6e2999d9-dfdb-5b26-9432-99564f7d8b5e) Lockhart, Memoirs of the Life of Scott, vol. II, ch. 10.
85 (#ulink_6e2999d9-dfdb-5b26-9432-99564f7d8b5e) Sir Wilier Scott, Guy Mannering (1815).
86 (#ulink_adc09b55-613e-5a07-9d23-d0dd2bc06d13) Charles Lamb (1775–1834) and William Cowper (1731–1800).
87 (#ulink_58188063-7025-5a37-ae68-b1cd51b94330) Vera Henry, Mrs Moore’s goddaughter, ran a holiday resort at Annagasan, a few miles from Drogheda, where Jack and Warnie sometimes spent holidays. From time to time Vera acted as housekeeper at The Kilns, but inevitably Jack had to act as peacemaker when she and Mrs Moore quarrelled.
88 (#ulink_2c5c932d-0a79-51a0-afef-fd10c2186fbe) Abbotsford is the name of Sir Walter Scott’s house near Melrose on the Tweed in Scotland.
89 (#ulink_27b90e0c-7e41-56b7-9ba7-77ea10a957c1) Lockhart, Memoirs of the Life of Scott, vol. IV, chs 28–32.
90 (#ulink_27b90e0c-7e41-56b7-9ba7-77ea10a957c1) Sir Walter Scott, The Pirate (1821).
91 (#ulink_b2ac5546-7fa9-5d48-93db-6627891c86be) Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers (1836–7).
92 (#ulink_08b534ec-1caa-5805-b2e0-2dbd37d31730) Matthew 18:3–4; Mark 10:15; Luke 18:16–17.
* (#ulink_84abc098-10cd-54f6-b7e5-b2f24a2aa2d3) I had to make them violent mistakes for feer you wldn’t notis them
1933 (#u9c47d65c-00f5-53d1-b288-9095cdf4355d)
TO GUY POCOCK (W):
(#ulink_c87fb72a-2f80-5f40-a6e0-53699c0ed54a)
Magdalen College,
Oxford.
Jan 17th 1933
Dear Pocock
I have written a new book and should like to know whether it is worth my while sending it to you. After our experiences over Dymer I can hardly suppose that you will be very eager! The new one, however, is in prose. It is called The Pilgrim’s Regress: an allegorical apology for Christianity, Reason, and Romanticism, and is a kind of Bunyan up to date. It is serious in intention but has a good many more comic passages than I originally intended, and also a fair controversial interest (the things chiefly ridiculed are Anglo Catholicism, Materialism, Sitwellism, Psychoanalysis, and T. S. Elliot.) If published, it would be under my own name.
Perhaps you could let me know whether, if I sent it, I could rely on its having a fair and moderately early consideration.
Yours sincerely
C. S. Lewis
On 19 January Pocock answered: ‘Yes, indeed…the Firm would be glad to have an opportunity of considering your new book for publication.’
(#ulink_56576008-bbda-583d-8781-8a788b053f26) After reading the manuscript Pocock wrote again on 2 February:
I am writing now to say that we shall be very pleased to publish it for you…I look upon it as an important and penetrating book. Now there are one or two important points we want todiscuss with you. First, we all feel that it is a little long for complete success…Secondly, something would have to be done about the Latin in the text. Will you make a suggestion, or shall we? Thirdly, we feel that the book ought to be illustrated. I suggest landscape and figures in the Nosh style. Mr Dent has in mind woodcut figures. What are your views? Lastly, we feel that the present title won’t do. ‘Pilgrim’ or ‘Pilgrimage’ by all means, but not the other part
(#ulink_6ea223b0-27c5-5fde-bbf8-633500756d70).
TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W):
The Kilns.
Feb 4th 1933
My dear Arthur,
I am really penitent for having left you so long without a letter. The reasons are the usual ones—term and its demands, coupled this time with a good deal of laziness for I have been rather less busy than usual and have been in excellent health and form.
Warnie has been home since before Christmas and is now retired (Read Lamb’s Essay on The Superannuated Man).
(#ulink_5487dc77-d6b7-58dc-872e-a0e50cd715c4) He has become a permanent member of our household and I hope we shall pass the rest of our lives together. He has settled down as easily as a man settles into a chair, and what between his reading and working in the garden finds himself busy from morning till night. He and I are making a path through the lower wood—first along the shore of the pond and then turning away from it up through the birch trees and rejoining at the top the ordinary track up the hill. It is very odd and delightful to be engaged on this sort of thing together: the last time we tried to make a path together was in the field at Little Lea when he was at Malvern and I was at Cherbourg. We both have a feeling that ‘the wheel has come full circuit’, that the period of wanderings is over, and that everything which has happened between 1914 and 1932 was an interruption: tho’ not without a consciousness that it is dangerous for mere mortals to expect anything of the future with confidence. We make a very contented family together.
I have had some fine solitary moments too when we have been working in different parts of the wood. You know how intensely silent it is in a thicket on a warm winter afternoon: and how if you are digging sooner or later a robin comes up and hops about for worms—both his eye and his breast looking unnaturally bright among the prevailing greys and greyish greens. I say warm days, for the warm weather has just arrived with a rush: but we had the frost alright. The pond was frozen and we had two days skating. You can imagine how lovely the smooth flow of ice looked as the sun came down onto it through the steep little wood.
In the way of reading Lockhart kept me going through the whole vac. and I am still only at Vol. 8. What an excellent book it is, isn’t it?—and what a nice addition. I think Scott is the one of all my favourite authors whom I admire most as a man—though of course there is a side of him that you and I would not have got on with, the rather insolent Tory country-gentleman side with the coursing, hard riding and hard drinking. Also perhaps as a father he was a little heavy—how sententious (and how unlike all his other letters) the letters to young Walter are.
Since term began I have had a delightful time reading a children’s story which Tolkien has just written.
(#ulink_ea496415-0f3a-5deb-94f9-fadfa5cc2525) I have told of him before: the one man absolutely fitted, if fate had allowed, to be a third in our friendship in the old days, for he also grew up on W. Morris and George Macdonald. Reading his fairy tale has been uncanny—it is so exactly like what we wd. both have longed to write (or read) in 1916: so that one feels he is not making it up but merely describing the same world into which all three of us have the entry. Whether it is really good (I think it is until the end) is of course another question: still more, whether it will succeed with modern children.
And, talking of this sort of thing, would you believe it—I am actually officially supervising a young woman who is writing a thesis on G. Macdonald.
(#ulink_5dc3bed7-5559-5d8d-90b6-9d07b02fc9bd) It is very odd—and curiously difficult—to approach as work something so old and intimate. The girl is, unfortunately, quite unworthy of her subject: apart from everything else, she is an American.
Dent’s has accepted the Pilgrim’s Regress with a number of conditions—shortening, alteration of title etc—which I intend to make some resistance to.
(#ulink_fb81cdbf-54d2-5f40-a202-faef2579a267) I have no right to expect a letter after my long silence, but of course I shd. like one. How does the detective story go? It will soon be getting suitable weather for your cottage again: although, as you see, I am having a good time, the memory of the Mournes is still very poignant. Give my love to Mrs Greeves, and to the McNeills
(#ulink_7234a0b2-0af4-532b-ae6e-15d0bae980ec) (all three— the one on the hill included) if you see them.
Yours,
Jack
Warnie sends you his greetings and hopes we shall see you this year.
TO GUY POCOCK(W):
Magdalen College,
