I fancy the rift between us is here pretty wide. I know you would talk that way when most serious and most sincere: but most people wouldn’t. I’m afraid that the interchange of formulae like ‘Under the Mercy’
(#ulink_0c1f1c35-67fb-5dd9-a891-e07fdb758acc) may sound like a game to people who don’t know you. The L.C.M.
(#ulink_b43e28f3-c172-5e6e-bf76-5a304a481d00) between Dante and P. G. Wodehouse is a difficult thing to hit and I’m not sure if it’s a good thing to aim at. The worst of trying to explain one’s minor objections to a book one has very much liked is that they don’t sound minor enough when the inevitably lengthy explanation has been made.
This is a thundering good book and a real purgation to read. I shall come back to it again and again. A thousand thanks for writing it—without prejudice to thanks on a different level for the presentation copy.
I want you to be at the next Inklings probably on 20 or 27 October. Can you keep yourself fairly free about the time? This sounds a large order, but the others are not get-at-able yet. I have written a thriller about a journey to Mars on which I urgently want your opinion: also you’d be able to take your revenge!
[C. S. Lewis]
TO E. F. CARRITT (P):
(#ulink_e4cc9ea2-f1f4-5ccc-9034-59c44b221245)
Magdalen College,
Oxford.
Oct. 29th [1937]
Dear Carritt
Alas—I have no Saturdays now! The B. Litt work which I do involves correcting of transcripts which can be done only when Bodley is open, so that Saturday afternoon has become one of my busiest times.
(#ulink_9efac6d8-457e-55be-ada1-2a7f0be20afe) I should have loved to come.
If any time in the Vac. you feel you have a free afternoon and a permit for Wytham eating their heads off, I’m your man.
Where are the walks? Where are the woods? Where is Wytham gone?Leisure and literature are lost underThe night’s helmet as tho never they had been!
(#ulink_ec498aa9-d549-5fe9-8c7d-72b2e94cae6b)
Yrs
C.S.L.
* (#ulink_1a6dd0f5-281a-57ff-bb25-eebed932dca1) Of course there are many more in number, but only duplicating what I enclose
1 (#u41185bc1-b197-5209-a81f-50534564bebf) Joan Bennett (1896–1986) was born in London, the daughter of novelist Arthur Frankau who wrote under the pseudonym Frank Danby. In 1920 she married Stanley Bennett (1889–1972), Librarian of Emmanuel College, Cambridge. Mrs Bennett was a Fellow of Girton College, Cambridge, and a lecturer in English at Cambridge University, 1936–64, Her books include Sir Thomas Browne (1962) and Five Metaphysical Poets: Donne, Herbert, Vaughan, Crashaw, Marvell (1965). Lewis was a frequent visitor to the home of Stanley and loan Bennett, and his Studies in Words (1960) was dedicated to them. The original letters to Bennett have disappeared, and the only copies that survive are found in L.
2 (#ulink_1c60d202-934f-5d86-9b03-58d9edf70162) Bennett was helping to edit a Festschriftt—a collection of writings—entitled Seventeenth Century Studies Presented to Sir Herbert Grierson (1937), to which Lewis contributed ‘Donne and Love Poetry in the Seventeenth Century’.
3 (#ulink_d776cbd6-f42d-5f03-a785-441d883f1108) Frank Laurence Lucas, The Decline and Fall of the Romantic Ideal (1936).
4 (#ulink_d776cbd6-f42d-5f03-a785-441d883f1108) I. A. Richards (1893–1979), literary critic, and Fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge. His works include Principles of Literary Criticism (1925) and Practical Criticism (1929). It was the former of these that Lucas was criticizing.
5 (#ulink_7d9665f3-b5df-5f0f-8655-855c7bae215e) i.e. ‘Donne and Love Poetry in the Seventeenth Century’.
6 (#ulink_7d9665f3-b5df-5f0f-8655-855c7bae215e) He and E. M. W. Tillyard were halfway through their debate over ‘The Personal Heresy’. Lewis’s most recent contribution, an ‘Open Letter to Dr Tillyard’, was published in Essays and Studies by Members of the English Association, XXI (1936).
7 (#ulink_c4be1135-f573-55c6-a4b0-27cddd2eeffc) Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone (1868).
8 (#ulink_c4be1135-f573-55c6-a4b0-27cddd2eeffc) George Gordon, Lord Byron, The Vision of Judgement (1822).
9 (#ulink_c4be1135-f573-55c6-a4b0-27cddd2eeffc) John Ruskin, Modern Painters, vol. III (1856).
10 (#ulink_c4be1135-f573-55c6-a4b0-27cddd2eeffc) Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend (1864–5).
11 (#ulink_c4be1135-f573-55c6-a4b0-27cddd2eeffc) George Meredith, The Egoist (1879).
12 (#ulink_c4be1135-f573-55c6-a4b0-27cddd2eeffc) A character in Jane Austen, Emma (1816).
13 (#ulink_4c66c122-f6bb-5bb8-9735-a0edaa57fd4c) i.e. the former Mary Shelley, who had married Daniel Neylan in 1934. See Mary Neylan in the Biographical Appendix.
14 (#ulink_35186ebf-e91b-5c47-9b5b-656868ef2c94) Sir Herbert Grierson, Milton and Wordsworth, Poets and Prophets: A Study of the Reactions to Political Events (1937).
15 (#ulink_ba3796a4-162c-57b2-8a3b-946c71091b67) E. K. Chambers, Sir Thomas Wyatt and Some Collected Studies (1933).
16 (#ulink_ba3796a4-162c-57b2-8a3b-946c71091b67) Sir Herbert Grierson, Cross Currents in English Literature of the XVIIth Century: or, The World, the Flesh and the Spirit, Their Actions and Reactions (1929).
17 (#ulink_ba3796a4-162c-57b2-8a3b-946c71091b67) Basil Willey, The Seventeenth Century Background: Studies in the Thought of the Age in Relation to Poetry and Religion (1934).
18 (#ulink_ba3796a4-162c-57b2-8a3b-946c71091b67) George Sherburn, The Early Career of Alexander Pope (1934).
19 (#ulink_f198105e-d9ad-5e7a-a11b-45a2d5ac61f4) J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit was published on 21 September 1937.
20 (#ulink_f198105e-d9ad-5e7a-a11b-45a2d5ac61f4) Lewis’s mother’s brother, Augustus Warren ‘Gus’ Hamilton (1886–1945). See The Hamilton Family in the Biographical Appendix to CL I.
21 (#ulink_1b400871-3992-5e45-ab32-97a8824294d1) Arthur’s trip to the United States was at the invitation of William Moncrief McClurg (1907-) of Belfast. The two young men met in the 1920s and, though unlike in many ways, they delighted in one another’s company and took a number of trips together. Arthur’s visit to America, presumably in the summer of 1936, was described by Dr McClurg in a letter to Walter Hooper of 25 April 1978: ‘We drove up to the Adirondack Mountains in New York state and stayed in Hurricane Lodge, a delightful place—chalets with balcony and main building and dining room: the air was so fresh after the City…We drove through Vermont state and visited some friends there, then we started on our trip to Cape Cod…There is quite an artists colony there and of interest to Arthur to see some paintings by local artists.’
22 (#ulink_1b400871-3992-5e45-ab32-97a8824294d1) He was referring to William Richard Morris, later Lord Nuffield, who had built Morris Motors about a mile from The Kilns. See note 30 to the letter to Arthur Greeves of 23 April 1935.
23 (#ulink_240109b6-abea-5aa0-8bac-8a59bec1ccb9) Frederick William Calcutt Paxford (1898–1979), gardener and handyman at The Kilns. Mrs Moore hired him shortly after they moved into The Kilns and he remained there until after Lewis’s death in 1963. Over the years he became an indispensable member of the family, lending the nine acres of ground, growing vegetables, managing an orchard, driving a car and often serving as cook. He never married. This inwardly optimistic, outwardly pessimistic man became the model for Puddleglum in The Silver Chair (1953). See his biography in CG.
24 (#ulink_c6a1d115-2edc-513a-bba3-432f2669b12c) François Mauriac, Vie de Jésus (1936).
25 (#ulink_c6a1d115-2edc-513a-bba3-432f2669b12c) Richard M. H. Quittenton, ‘Roland Quiz’ (1833–1914), Giant-land: or the Wonderful Adventures of Tim Pippin (London: [1874]; new edn, 1936).
26 (#ulink_17b94c1f-fc4c-5164-b7ac-b5c6edbe44a8) Daniel Neylan (1905–69) was the husband of Lewis’s former pupil, Mary (Shelley) neylan.
27 (#ulink_aa2b73a0-7b23-5bf9-a4bb-e89556be0211) Mrs Bennett had applied for a lectureship in Cambridge University and Lewis was supplying a letter of reference. The rest of the letter refers to her book, Four Metaphysical Poets: Donne, Herbert, Vaughan, Crashaw (1934).
28 (#ulink_4fd577af-636f-56bf-b583-9acda838004d) ‘It is forbidden to believe this.’
29 (#ulink_7e28c3be-b246-5100-8228-9c050654ac4a) These thoughts echo those found in Lewis’s essay ‘William Morris’ in SLE.
30 (#ulink_a040bacf-72d7-5f0d-a0e2-ea1d7254dadb)Bhagavad-Gita, ch. 2.
