My other bit of literary news is that Sheed and Ward have bought the Regress from Dent. I didn’t much like having a book of mine, and specially a religious book, brought out by a Papist publisher: but as they seemed to think they could sell it, and Dents clearly couldn’t, I gave in. I have been well punished: for Sheed, without any authority from me, has put a blurb on the inside of the jacket which says ‘This story begins in Puritania (Mr Lewis was brought up in Ulster)’-thus implying that the book is an attack on my own country and my own religion.
(#ulink_0014d5fe-fe78-5f46-b35a-0ac016ce60b8) If you ever come across any one who might be interested, explain as loudly as you can that I was not consulted & that the blurb is a damnable lie told to try and make Dublin riff-raff buy the book. I didn’t mean to spend so much of this letter on egoism.
I have tried in vain to buy Voyage to Arcturus but it is out of print. For reading, lately, I have re-read the Faerie Queene with enormous enjoyment. It must be a really great book because one can read it as a boy in one way, and then re-read it in middle life and get something very different out of it—and that to my mind is one of the best tests. I am at present engaged with Sir Thomas More’s English works
(#ulink_b32d7287-5ed3-5651-ab3f-ca366ffff44d) (i.e. everything except the Utopia)
(#ulink_9c0d08a1-b829-5a9e-a9d4-9faf5c4f3f7e) which are necessary to a job I’m doing. They are quite interesting, and sometimes really helpful in religious aspects, but not so good as they have lately been made out to be.
The worst of these letters at long intervals is that I can never remember how much has happened since I wrote last. e.g. did I tell you how much I was moved by seeing A Winter’s Tale?
(#ulink_85570046-0dcd-551c-879f-c2d01f592db8) I can’t have told you about the magnificent philharmonic performance of me Ninth Symphony we were at a few weeks ago.
(#ulink_bfa420d8-357a-5309-bdc4-e1e3ce58f71d) You know I used to dislike the choral part of it. I was completely converted and have seldom enjoyed anything more. How tonic Beethoven is, and how festal—one has the feeling of having taken part in the revelry of giants. By the way, the Siegfried Idyll,
(#ulink_59430fb9-2286-5cbb-99d0-8eea56c0593c) which we had in the same programme seems to me the dullest thing Wagner ever wrote: do you agree? The only successor to Wagner (since we’ve got onto that subject), the only man who has exercised the same enchantment over me since the old days, is Sibelius. This bent to ‘Northern’ things is quite real and one can’t get over it-not that I ever thought of trying!
You would like this day. Behind the hill there is yellow early morning light and small clouds racing. Then, the bit of wood, bare and brown, and furiously agitated. Then, the pond half skinned with ice—the swans both ashore. And round the house a terrific wind is roaring-‘Arthur O’Bower has broken his band.’
(#ulink_ab567028-3942-5634-ac8b-c09fe3a22a69) In fact I have enjoyed the whole of this winter—especially after the really tropical summers.
The only member of the visiting family whose society we like is the boy, Michael, about 5. You will be interested to hear that W. gets on with him much better than I do. That is, I theoretically hold that one ought to like children, but am shy with them in practice: he theoretically dislikes them, but is actually the best of friends. (So many new sides to his character have appeared in the last few years.)
Minto reads him the Peter Rabbit books every evening, and it is a lovely sight. She reads very slowly and he gazes up into her eyes which look enormous through her spectacles—what a pity she has no grandchildren. Would you believe it, that child had never been read to nor told a story by his mother in his life? Not that he is neglected. He has a whole time Nurse (an insufferable semi-lady scientific woman with a diploma from some Tom-fool nursing college), a hundred patent foods, is spoiled, and far too expensively dressed: but his poor imagination has been left without any natural food at all. I often wonder what the present generation of children will grow up like (how many middle aged men in all generations have said this). They have been treated with so much indulgence yet so little affection, with so much science and so little mother-wit. Not a fairy tale nor a nursery rhyme.
Please thank your mother for her kind and forgiving letter; I was very rude to her. I should like to be at home in these gales. I am sure there are waves in the Lough, and the firs are lifting the earth in our old wood. I must stop now and do a little work. A happy Christmas to you all, and from all.
Yours,
Jack
TO OWEN BARFIELD (W):
Magdalen College,
Oxford.
[9? December 1935]
In the crescendo of horror at the end of the myth you have done what v. few people could now do.
(#ulink_593f30b1-725c-5ec6-8f53-b382ef2aa784) About the greatness and truth of that part I have no doubts. In the earlier parts of the myth I had not been prepared for so large a satiric element and therefore had to make rapid re-adjustments: but of course the ordinary reader will not be in that position. There are lovely things all about the place—the honest Caliban, Ariel, Bottom, the luring voice that all old civilisations hear. (By the bye, you have been re-imbursing yourself pretty freely for ‘sheep dotted downs’!—or else Dymer and English People have a common source).
(#ulink_9ccbc1e9-c128-525c-b832-e5d88f9d49d3)
The Diary of an Old Soul is magnificent.
(#ulink_82b65080-c6ea-52f2-b3ea-dcb8717e8269) You placed the moment of giving it to me admirably. I remember with horror the absurdity of my last criticism of it, and with shame the vulgarity of the form in which I expressed it. He knows all about the interplay between the religious and metaphysical aspects of the One. I see now (since I began this letter) that these two are opposite only with the fruitful opposition of male & female (how deep the old erotic metaphor of the proelia veneris is) and what they beget is the solution.
Incidentally, since I have begun to pray, I find my extreme view of personality changing. My own empirical self is becoming more important and this is exactly the opposite of self love. You don’t teach a seed how to die into treehood by throwing it into the fire: and it has to become a good seed before its worth burying.
As to my own book—the question whether notes shd. come at the end of the chapter or the bottom of the page is partly for publisher & printer.
(#ulink_00e6f452-6eb0-5c0e-a9d7-757ced601ce9) Personally I loathe a book where they come at the end—and I am writing mainly for people who will want to know where they must look to verify my facts. Your other criticism about the two classes of readers whom I conflate, I don’t understand. I meant this to be only a note.
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO OWEN BARFIELD (W):
[Magdalen College 12?
December 1935]
My dear Barfield
What a drivelling letter I wrote you a few days ago. A day in bed has given me the chance to re-read Pt IV and my opinions are revised. In every way the merits are far greater than I had seen, specially the myth of wh. the ‘crescendo of horror’ tho’ perfectly adequate is, as I now perceive, the least excellence. You have done what you wanted-how you could get so much good tenderness & so much good sensuousness into prose is a mystery. There is of course a lot I don’t follow-has the extraordinary jumble of Hindu with Mohameddan accessories any significance? But the whole thing is a real evocation.
Yrs
CSL
P.S. The ‘Ah woe…kiss…ah woe’ is astonishing. It’s not like a passage in a book at all: it’s a thing.
TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W):
[The Kilns]
29th. Dec. 1935
My dear Arthur,
I am staying at home from Church this morning with a cold on the chest, so it seems a good occasion to answer your letter.
As regards your news—sympathy and congratulations. Sympathy on the wrench of parting and the gap it will leave: congratulations on having done the right thing and made a sacrifice. The chief consolation at such times, I think, is that the result, however unpleasant, must be a kind of relief after the period of saying ‘Shall I really have to-no I won’t—and yet perhaps I’d better.’ There is always some peace in having submitted to the right. Don’t spoil it by worrying about the results, if you can help it. It is not your business to succeed (no one can be sure of that) but to do right: when you have done so, the rest lies with God—and Will!
I don’t think you exaggerate at all in your account of how it feels. After all—tho’ our novels now ignore it-friendship is the greatest of worldly goods. Certainly to me it is the chief happiness of life. If I had to give a piece of advice to a young man about a place to live, I think I shd. say, ‘sacrifice almost everything to live where you can be near your friends.’ I know I am v. fortunate in that respect, and you much less so. But even for me, it wd. make a great difference if you (and one or two others) lived in Oxford.
I am correcting the first bunch of proofs for my book and am (as we wd. have said in the old days) tearing my hair because it doesn’t look at all the size of page I expected. It will not be as tall a book as I had pictured—and what is the good of a scholarly work if it does not rise like a tower at the end of a shelf?! I fear it may even be thickish and stumpy. Mon Dieu! quel douleur, o rage, o desespoir! (What on earth would we have done if either of us had succeeded in publishing a book in the old days—I imagine we might have gone literally out of our minds with horrors and ecstasies.)
I’m sorry you didn’t have our weather. We had about a week of snow with frost on top of it—and then rime coming out of the air and making thick woolly formations on every branch. The little wood was indescribably beautiful. I used to go and crunch about on the crusted snow in it every evening—for the snow kept it light long after sunset. It was a labyrinth of white—the smallest twigs looking thick as seaweed and building up a kind of cathedral vault overhead. One thing the snow showed me was the amazingly high population of rabbits-usually concealed among the greens and greys. On the snow one cd. see them scuttling. W. and I have been much puzzled by some of the footprints. There seem to be a great many more and larger animals than we had supposed. Bears, Arthur, bears—at least it looks like it. I wish you cd. have had a couple of strolls with me round this place in the snow: it would have charmed away all your sorrows.
No, no, I never meant that Sibelius had the tonic quality of Beethoven. Do you remember our once talking about B. and Wagner & agreeing that B. was Olympian, W. titanic—B spiritual, W. natural? Well Sibelius is definitely like W. not like B. in that respect. He is not noble like Beethoven: he is inarticulate, intimate, enthralling, and close to one, like Nature itself. Very, very Northern: he makes me think of birch forests & moss and salt-marshes and cranes and gulls. I mean the symphonies. You needn’t be busied for music while you have a gramophone. Set aside a portion of your money for buying big works (symphonies etc): never play them except in their entirety—but perhaps I’ve given you all this good advice before.
I never finished Gape Row. But the descriptions of our own walks & hills were v. interesting. I thinkk yourr neww methodd of sspellingg bby ddoubbllingg alll cconnssonnanntts ssavvess a ggreatt ddeall off ttroubblle!
Please give my love to Mrs Greeves and remember me to all our friends.
