Yours
Jack
TO LEO BAKER (BOD):
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Magdalen College,
Oxford.
April 28th 1935
My dear Baker
I was very distressed on meeting Barfield this year for a walk (a ghost of its old self for he and I were the only participants) to hear of your illness. It stimulated an impulse that has been hovering in my mind for some time to write to you and to try and pick up some of the old links. That they were ever dropped was, I imagine, chiefly my fault-at least even self-love on my part cannot find any substantial respect in which it could have been yours. Will you forgive me? I think I have learned a little since those days and can promise not to serve you so again.
You must not bother yourself with letter writing while you are unwell, nor need you: for I trust that any news of your state will trickle to me in the end by one channel or another. The last I heard from Barfield was a little more encouraging. Beyond wishing you well, I cannot enlarge on the subject: almost anything said from a well man to a sick man seems an impertinence.
My father is dead and my brother has retired from the army and now lives with us. I have deep regrets about all my relations with my father (but thank God they were best at the end). I am going bald. I am a Christian. Professionally I am chiefly a medievalist. I think that is all my news up to date.
I suppose you have heard from, or at least of, the others fairly regularly. I don’t know if you met the new addition to our party before you left—namely Hanbury Sparrow, a Lt. Colonel and all that. Barfield picked him up somewhere on the continent: he has written a good book called ‘The Landlocked Gate’ and a bad one called ‘Gilt-Edged Insecurity’.
(#ulink_debb149b-288f-5aaf-8f01-b7a485f6661a) I mention him to boast of our power of assimilation, for tho’ an Anthroposophist and an author he remains very much a colonel and a man of the world—so that when on the last walk but one we heard him and Beckett agreeing that ‘you could now get quite a decent suit for fifteen guineas’, the rest of us felt this element in the firm was at last adequately represented.
Beckett, by the way, I am a little nervous about: he is becoming a real bureaucrat—but I trust his very delightful family (whom I recently met for the first time) will save him. But you can imagine the whole scene of him and Sparrow together: and how that bursts on the unconscious pin-point of Field or passes unobserved over the rustic, almost parochial, solidity of Cecil.
Barfield is writing a play—or a masque or a ballet rather—on Orpheus and Eurydice. You shd. get him to send it to you if you are well enough to care for such things. It is excellent and ultra poetical in matter (poetry itself), plain to baldness in style. A funny change from the Barfield of the Tower. But how archaic that sounds now! I hardly write anything these days except things proper to a don. I suppose we have all lived to discover that we are not great men, and not to mind: there are better things than that in the world, and out of it.
All this may be silly chat—as letters from home so often were to a man in the front line, which, I know, is where you are at present. We have so spoiled language that I cannot even say God bless you without pausing to try and explain that I mean the words in their literal sense.
Don’t attempt to reply unless some day you feel quite up to it and apt for it.
Yours,
C. S. Lewis
TO PAUL ELMER MORE (PRIN):
Magdalen College,
Oxford.
May 23rd 1935
Dear Mr. More
Very many thanks for the American Review.
(#ulink_35578064-8aed-5832-bcc2-bbe259c4ef93) It contains only one of the articles you mention, the other, I suppose, having been postponed. I am pretty sure I should agree with you about Joyce if I had read him, but I never have, and would as soon choose a treadmill for my recreation.
There may be many reasons why you do not share my dislike of Eliot, but I hardly know why you should be surprised at it. On p. 154 of the article on Joyce you yourself refer to him as ‘a great genius expending itself on the propagation of irresponsibility’. To me the ‘great genius’ is not apparent: the other thing is. Surely it is natural that I should regard Eliot’s work as a very great evil. He is the very spear head of that attack on
(#ulink_954a1f39-75b1-59cc-917f-dacde3a44b26) which you deplore. His constant profession of humanism and his claim to be a ‘classicist’ may not be consciously insincere, but they are erroneous. The plea that his poems of disintegration are all satiric, are intended as awful warnings, is the common plea of all these literary traitors to humanity. So Juvenal, Wycherley, Byron excuse their pornography: so Eliot himself excuses Joyce. His intention only God knows. I must be content to judge his work by its fruits, and I contend that no man is fortified against chaos by reading the Waste Land,
(#ulink_ed2af826-471f-5160-8bc4-be498ab03c60) but that most men are by it infected with chaos.
The opposite plea rests on a very elementary confusion between poetry that represents disintegration and disintegrated poetry. The Inferno is not infernal poetry: the Waste Land is. His criticism tells the same tale. He may say he is a classicist, but his sympathy with depraved poets (Marlowe, Jonson, Webster) is apparent: but he shows no real love of any disciplined, and magnanimous writer save Dante. Of Homer, Sophocles, Virgil, Milton, Racine he has nothing to say. Assuredly he is one of the enemy: and all the more dangerous because he is sometimes disguised as a friend.
And this offence is aggravated by attendant circumstances, such as his arrogance. And (you will forgive me) it is further aggravated for an Englishman by the recollection that Eliot stole upon us, a foreigner and a neutral, while we were at war—obtained, I have my wonders how, a job in the Bank of England—and became (am I wrong) the advance guard of the invasion since carried out by his natural friends and allies, the Steins and Pounds and hoc genus Omne,
(#ulink_3cc91fe5-9516-54cb-905f-995dc51c8dbb) the Parisian riff-raff of denationalised Irishmen and Americans who have perhaps given Western Europe her death wound.
Enough. You see my views; and may answer them as bluntly as I have put them. Of the man himself I know nothing and will do my best to believe any good that I may hear from you or other authorised sources.
As for your story—it is an amusing comment on human vanity that other peoples’ conversation about oneself always pleases if it is not directly insulting: and so did this.
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Of Nygrens, another time. I don’t fully agree—Protestant is not for me a dyslogistic term.
(#ulink_51810557-b174-533c-ad84-f297ec7836c1)
A Mr. Shafer has sent me a long book,
(#ulink_aee97534-af92-5b4a-ab80-989fa32256bd) nominally about you but actually de omnibus rebus,
(#ulink_3a398490-6a7f-526f-a15e-855dfcadda26) which I am enjoying.
Yours very sincerely
C. S. Lewis
TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W):
Magdalen College,
Oxford.
June 17th. 1935
My dear Arthur,
‘Will you come Sunday or Monday?’ says the host. ‘No, I’ll come Saturday,’ says the guest. ‘Oh Lord,’ says the host (as it might be my father) or ‘Why do you do these things?’ (as it might be another). On second thoughts I am booking a berth for Monday night, July 1st by Liverpool—leaving you Mon 8th.
There is just one cloud on the horizon. Minto’s sister is seriously ill (in Dublin) and if Minto has to go over for a funeral she may want me to stay and run the house. Let us hope this won’t happen. If it does, I suppose we shall be able to fix on a week that will suit both you and me later. In the meantime I thought it better to let the arrangement stand, and hope for the best—I hate putting off anything so nice.
Give my love to your mother and many, many thanks.
