TO T. R. HENN (P):
(#ulink_edfe3744-dcf8-5b76-9e1f-cd86c4de1e97)
Magdalen College,
Oxford.
July 2nd 1933.
Dear Henn
If you like this,
(#ulink_3b5aeca9-def8-5a0d-8383-90151beecb3b) accept it as a peace offering. If you think it worth disliking heartily, then have at me in print or private—dismount your tuck, be yare in your preparing.
(#ulink_49a4ae03-46ba-5336-9dc8-c786b7c54025) If it is simply a bore, then pass it on to your second hand bookseller.
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO MARY SHELLEY (T):
(#ulink_083df618-1d82-5649-9324-18d6444799f0)
Magdalen
July 21st [1933]
Dear Miss Shelley,
If you are not, at the moment, too sick of me and all my kind to read further, it may be worth saying that you must not run away with the idea that you are a Fourth Class mind. What really ruined you was an NS and a Δ on language, which would of course have spoiled even very good work elsewhere.
(#ulink_28e96184-818f-5516-b354-95f2abc7a18b) In the Lit. your highest mark was Β+ (XIXth century).
Why your literature papers were not better I do not understand. I blame myself for not having exhorted more essays from you—but I doubt if that was the whole cause. You were very short and general. But I am quite clear in my own mind that you have not done yourself justice and that your real quality is far beyond the work you did in Schools.
This is cold comfort to you with the world to face!—but at least it is said quite sincerely and not merely for the sake of consoling you.
Try to forgive me both as an examiner and as a tutor. If there should at any time be any way in which I can be of use to you, let me know at once. Till then, good-bye and good luck.
Yours very sincerely
C. S. Lewis
TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W):
The Kilns,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford.
Aug. 17th. 1933.
My dear Arthur,
I have been silent for a terribly long time, I know, but it has not really been my fault. I had a solid month’s examining after term ended, and then I went away for my sea holiday. I had pictured myself writing to you on the boat, but this turned out to be practically impossible: so that I am really writing if not on the first possible day, at any rate on the second or third. Before I go on to anything else I must answer one point in your last letter:—you comment on my saying nothing about your having come so near me without visiting me. The fact is I deliberately said nothing about it because I feared that, if I did, it might seem that my intention of not visiting you this year was a kind of tit-for-tat—that I was offended and was thus taking my revenge, or, at least, was excusing my intention by your action. I would have liked you to come and see me, of course: but I never thought that England ought to be forbidden ground to you if you were not seeing me for any reason. I have no wish to reduce you to stealing past Oxford with a false beard on—like you and me stealing past Leeborough from Bernagh in the old days.
I did not enjoy the Rheingold this year nearly as much as I enjoyed Siegfried last year—neither at the time nor in memory. Oddly enough the hammer passage which you mention I actually disliked. I had enjoyed it on your gramophone, but at Covent Garden it seemed to me so much cruder and, before it ended (and I thought it would never end) nearly ridiculous. You must not think that my loyalty to the Ring is wavering. The main causes of my disliking the Rheingold were (a) Our having very bad seats (b) My not liking the man who sang Alberich.
(#ulink_c40dcf8f-4889-5ebd-bd79-e9c3a34bc628) I admit that Alberich must sometimes shout instead of singing—but that man seemed to shout unnecessarily. Next year I hope to go to the Valkyrie.
While I am on these things, I might add that I have actually been to the films today!—to see Cavalcade!!
(#ulink_732f9e9d-eb5f-5836-a897-493da4b21876) This is one of the most disgraceful confessions I have ever made to you. I thought it would be interesting historically, and so I suppose it was: and certainly very clever. But there is not an idea in the whole thing from beginning to end: it is a mere brutal assault on one’s emotions, using material which one can’t help feeling intensely. It appeals entirely to that part of you which lives in the throat and chest, leaving the spirit untouched. I have come away feeling as if I had been at a debauch.
The sea holiday was a success. We went first by train to Arrochar where we slept a night
(#ulink_a0fd3f0e-cd6d-5729-95c3-82136f451970) and had one glorious day’s walking on the shores of Loch Long and Loch Lomond and across the mountains between them. I forget if you have been in those parts. They seemed to me to excell all other mountains in one respect—the curiously fantastic, yet heavy shapes of rock into which the summits are formed. They realise one’s idea of mountains as the fastnesses of the giants. The actual beach of Loch Lomond also pleased me very much—an ordinary pebbly beach such as you might find at the sea with the unusual addition that it had trees on it and that you could drink the water. Up in the mountains we had a glorious hour at a stream—a golden brown stream, with cataracts and deep pools. We spread out all our clothes (sweat-sodden) to dry on the flat stones, and lay down in a pool just under a little waterfall, and let the foam come down the back of our heads and round our necks. Then when we were cool, we came out and sat naked to eat our sandwiches, with our feet still in the rushing water. Why have you and I never done this? (Answer—because we never came to a suitable stream at a suitable time)
This glorious day was followed by a very tiring and trying, but extremely interesting, week end chez l’oncle at Helensburgh. It was uncannily like being at home again—specially when Uncle Bill announced on the Sunday evening ‘I won’t be going into town tomorrow’, and we with well-feigned enthusiasm replied ‘Good!’. But to describe the whole thing would take a book. On the Monday afternoon
(#ulink_c0e7039d-d07a-5f49-b1c2-7165a69607c9) we sailed from Glasgow. The journey down the Clyde was beautiful, despite some rain, and tho’ there were more passengers on board than I would have chosen, there was usually a quiet corner to read in. I liked—you would probably not—the homely feeling on these boats, with dinner at 1 and ‘High Tea’ at 6. It was very strange coming into Belfast next morning.
I had made up my mind that it was no good trying to arrange a meeting with you. The time—we were sailing again at one o’clock—was much too long for a three-handed talk of you and W. and me, and too short for sending him off anywhere so that I could have you tete-à-tete. Our programme was simple. We trammed to Campbell and thence walked up the hills round the Shepherd’s hut. The sight of all those woods and fields made me regret very much that I was not having an Irish holiday with you: and the new house (near Kelsie’s new house) made me wonder how much more might be altered by next year. We walked down by the ordinary, poignantly familiar, route, stopped to look at Leeborough—how the trees are growing!—and then went down the Circular Rd. to St Marks to see the window which W. had never yet seen.
(#ulink_5054c175-6a52-5849-95ba-dbfaa118fbfb) He was delighted with it. Here we had a conversation with the verger—who referred to Gordon
(#ulink_a4b1db9d-6453-5dcc-bd4f-b0a5e664152a) as ‘Gordon’! Then, after a drink in the reformed pub at Gelson’s corner, we got back into town.
The rest of the tour I shall not describe in detail. The bit I should most like to have shared with you was the departure from Waterford. The sail down the river, peppered with v. early Norman castles, was good, but what was better was the next three hours out to sea. Imagine a flat French grey sea, and a sky of almost the same colour: between these a long fish-shaped streak of pure crimson, about 20 miles long, and lasting, unchanged or changing imperceptibly, for hours. Then add three or four perfectly transparent mountains, so extraordinarily spiritualised that they absolutely realised the old idea of Ireland as the ‘isle of the saints’. Like this—I do not remember that I have ever seen anything more calm and spacious and celestial. Not but what we had some wonderful sunsets at other times in the voyage. You with your dislike of the sea will hardly admit it, but from a boat out of sight of land one does get effects hardly to be got elsewhere. For one thing the sky is so huge and the horizon is uninterrupted in every direction, so that the mere scale of the sky-scenery is beyond anything you get ashore: and for another, the extreme simplicity of the design—flat disk and arched dome and nothing else—produces a kind of concentration. And then again to turn suddenly from these huge sublimities as one passes a staircase head and hear the sound of plates being laid or the laugh of a boy coming up on the warmer air from below, gives that delicious contrast of the homely and familiar in the midst of the remote, which is the master-stroke of the whole thing.
I am re-reading Malory, and am astonished to find how much more connected, more of a unity, it is man we used to see. I no longer lose myself in the ‘brasting’. There is still too much of it, to be sure, but I am sustained by the beauty of the sentiment, and also the actual turns of phrase. How could one miss ‘He commanded his trumpets to blow that all the earth trembled and dindled of the sound.’
(#ulink_20431946-18f2-50e8-a1e4-195a42c564ca) Clearly one must read every good book at least once every ten years. It now seems to me that my Bookham reading of Malory was almost worthless. Did you ever realise that it is full of pathos? I never did until a pupil pointed it out to me a few months ago—wh. is what set me re-reading it.
I hope I shall be able to be a fairly regular correspondent again for the rest of the summer. Bad luck about the book!
Yours,
Jack
TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W):
[The Kilns]
Sept 1st. 1933
