June 24th /36
My dear Baker
I should have hesitated to send you the book
(#ulink_c152cedb-c864-58bd-9923-c52d5eec80a6) if I had known that it would find you in pain and by the need to acknowledge it lay a new burden on you. The book itself, I fear, is more than a grasshopper—as I find from this dialogue between myself and the Merton Professor of English
(#ulink_da379ba4-20f4-5d42-9fe7-e2bc1adba1aa)—more or less my ‘chief’ as they would say in the disciplined professions.
P. Well, Lewis, you’ve certainly gone beyond the whole English school with your new book.L. (Blushing at the supposed extremity of the compliment) Oh, really-P. Oh clearly. Much the longest book any of us has written.L. (With ghastly laughter) Oh surely not. I can understand it seeming the longest.P. No, no, there’s no seeming about it. It is a very long book. (Pause) A very long book indeed.L. Come, it’s not as long as X.P. X? It’s half as long again. Far longer than X. Far longer. (And so on)
I am greatly distressed to hear that you are still suffering. Is it possible that the doctors can have a man so long in their hands and find out so little about him. It is indeed a comfort that the number of serious diseases which you know you have not got must be higher—far higher than anything the ordinary person in health could boast of. I take it, if the arthritis diagnosis is correct, the pain is the main thing i.e. that it hurts out of all proportion to the harm it will do. Am I right?
I must confess I have not myself yet got beyond the stage of feeling physical pain as the worst of evils. I am the worst person in the world to help anyone else to support it. I don’t mean that it presents quite the intellectual difficulties it used to, but that my nerves even in imagination refuse to move with my philosophy. In my own limited experience the sufferer himself nearly always towers above those around him: in fact, nothing confirms the Christian view of this world so much as the treasures of patience and unselfishness one sees elicited from quite commonplace people when the trial really comes. Age, too—nearly everyone improves as he gets old, if this is a ‘vale of soul making’,
(#ulink_3d7181aa-f793-580a-a55f-6d1dd6fccd01) it seems to, by round and by large, to be working pretty well. Of course I can’t hazard a guess why you should be picked out for this prolonged suffering.
I am told that the great thing is to surrender to physical pain—I mean not to do what’s commonly called ‘standing’ it, above all not to brace the soul (which usually braces the muscles as well) not to try to ignore it: to be like earth being ploughed not like marble being cut. But I have no right to discuss such things on the basis of my very limited experience.
You were talking about Peele
(#ulink_2f302786-fa02-5be0-805f-4f67584e1159) when you last wrote. Personally I find Renaissance poetry on the whole less and less attractive as time goes on. When it succeeds (‘His thunder is entangled in my hair’—‘Take but thy lute and make the mountains dance’)
(#ulink_797eabf8-307b-5666-adf6-2e513d843151) it has a wonderful gloss on; but even then I prefer the dull finish—something either humbler or harder. When it fails-! Did you notice how Peele allows Venus to describe Helen in the Arraignement of Paris? If not look on p. 319 of my book (the very long one).
(#ulink_b3048c20-0618-5167-936e-cdc8ea521099)
I think probably the greatest influence on my purely literary taste since the old days has been old Germanic poetry, which, as a friend says, sometimes makes everything else seem a little thin and halfhearted. There is a metre in Icelandic called the Drapa which goes like this:
Wildest brunt of winterWoke amidst the oak-wood
(This isn’t meant to make sense) First you have the three alliterations (wild—wint—woke). Then you have the half-rhyme (consonantal but not vocalic) of-unt and-int. Then you have the full rhyme woke-oak. All these features are required to make a couplet. And note well—the beats must be long in quantity as well as accented: i.e.
Wildest broth of weather
would be unmetrical. This sounds mere puzzle poetry. In fact it works up a storm of sound which, when combined, as it usually is, with a tragic theme, and contrasting its rock-like form with the vain liquidity of sorrow, produces an almost unbearable tension of stoical pathos-‘iron tears down Pluto’s cheek.’
(#ulink_5350a5bd-0a12-589b-8901-f9328a0b4504) W. H. Auden (one of the few good young poets) has caught something of it in places. You might try hammering one out some night when sleep is denied: but the thing is so difficult to our metrical habits, that you won’t finish it by morning.
But I don’t know why I have digressed into Icelandic prosody. More to the points—read any of Charles Williams’ novels (Gollancz) which you can get hold of—specially The Place of the Lion and ManyDimensions. In the rare genre of ‘theological shocker’ which Chesterton (I think) invented, these are superb. On the first level they are exciting stories: beyond that, the philosophical implications are extremely interesting: finally he has the power (absolutely unknown in our generation) of painting virtue. His morally best characters are his artistically best. The fact that Gollancz publishes them (in lurid covers) suggests that all this substantial edification—for it is nothing less—must be reaching the ordinary thriller-reader. If so, I may be telling you about a historical event of the first moment.
I think it is hospitality heroical on your own part and that of your wife to ask guests to a sick-house. Do accept my real (not conventional) thanks for this very great kindness. But I can’t well come. I am busy this vac. with work undertaken at haste and now to be repented—not heaven knows, at leisure, but at length: and such breaks as I shall take have to be concerted with a good many other people’s plans. But I hope some lawful occasion will take me your way sooner or later. Till then, better health,
Yours truly,
C. S. Lewis
TO OWEN BARFIELD (W):
[The Kilns]
June 28th 1936
My dear Barfield
1. I lent The Silver Trumpet
(#ulink_fcf96ef4-0d27-5ade-94e6-2075af1febbb) to Tolkien and hear that it is the greatest success among his children that they have ever known. His own fairy-tales, which are excellent, have now no market: and its first reading—children are so practical!—led to a universal wail ‘You’re not going to give it back to Mr. Lewis, are you?’
All the things which the wiseacres on child psychology in our circle said when you wrote it turn out to be nonsense. ‘They liked the sad parts’, said Tolkien ‘because they were sad and the puzzling parts because they were puzzling, as children always do.’ The youngest boy liked Gamboy because ‘she was clever and the bad people in books usually aren’t.’ The tags of the Podger have become so popular as to be almost a nuisance in the house. In fine, you have scored a direct hit.
2. After the sugar, the rhubarb. Can you repeat the poem on the dedication you sent me? I liked it immensely, not only, I hope, for the intimacy, but for the felicity (not hitherto the commonest excellence in your work or mine): but after keeping it on my table for about ten days with the intention of copying it onto the fly leaf of the book, I cannot find it high or low. I am very, very sorry.
3. I wish I could Christianise the Summa
(#ulink_b00e67a7-b01a-5346-a472-5d27af163b35) for you—but I dunno, I dunno! When a truth has ceased to be a mistress for pleasure and become a wife for fruit it is almost unnatural to go back to the dialectic ardours of the wooing. There may come a moment—one of those recoveries of virginity, or to speak more suitably to the subject, one of those Nth deaths, and then I’ll try
4. We must exchange week end visits this Vac: I am ready to begin discussing dates.
5. Cecil now has The Place of the Lion: get it out of him before he returns it to me. And read The Castle by Kafka
(#ulink_47c6e65f-e8d0-55a6-8692-a5745807dfb8) (Seeker).
Yours
The Alligator of Love
(#ulink_e7250e58-37c7-51db-8e05-5e2d16e91cf4)
TO CECIL HARWOOD (BOD):
Magdalen College
Oxford
[? July 1936]
My dear Harwood
How nice to get poems again! It was a bit of a shock to find you writing vers libre just as if you were beardless and modern, but that poem is the best of the three all the same: specially the second stanza (‘there is no rainbow’
(#ulink_e973b35a-9465-5b4e-99dc-4f3ac8fef620) ‘light like fine sand’
(#ulink_7d418f81-47ef-54f8-a775-928f8243878b) are lovely[)]. The first doesn’t work with me because I never have resisting lids nor close them consciously and my eyes at bedtime are hungry for darkness not light.
(#ulink_1f0674f5-2579-5ae7-b669-acea55deb093)
The Hero etc is also good. The third one is not quite a success to my mind. Makes his room for makes his room here or makes this his room creaks rather, and the rest has the opposite fault—too facile. It is a good subject of course.
