31 (#ulink_a040bacf-72d7-5f0d-a0e2-ea1d7254dadb) William Morris, The Earthly Paradise (1868–70); The House of the Wolfings (1889); The Well at the World’s End (1896).
32 (#ulink_cc6fe07d-3318-5a92-8fd1-0a178f41067d) This poem, entitled ‘Sonnet’, was published in The Oxford Magazine, vol. LIV (14 May 1936) under the pseudonym, ‘Nat Whilk’. It is reprinted in Poems and CP.
33 (#ulink_02a848db-2d66-5c18-8f50-b91a367fae0f) Charles Williams’s new supernatural thriller, Descent into Hell (1937).
34 (#ulink_03d244ad-0eb3-5d60-85a7-758745b6ed1b) A character in one of Williams’s other supernatural thrillers, War in Heaven (1930).
35 (#ulink_e0f69d84-5991-5178-b051-ac58d8b56b71) Gertrude Stein (1874–1946), American author who lived in Paris and turned her home into a salon for the avant-garde. Lewis disliked her idiosyncratic poems such as Tender Sultans (1914) which carried fragmentation and abstraction to the point of idiocy.
36 (#ulink_76485530-6d3c-501d-8b8a-91f28e7311eb) ‘Under the Mercy’ was perhaps Williams’s favourite formula. It appeared in ch. 10 of Descent into Hell, at the end of many of his letters, and even on his gravestone.
37 (#ulink_76485530-6d3c-501d-8b8a-91f28e7311eb) i.e. lowest common multiple.
38 (#ulink_d4e506c2-d5dc-5e59-b1ed-be3171da8819) Edgar Frederick Carritt (1876–1964), Lewis’s tutor in Philosophy, was Fellow of Philosophy at University College, 1898–1941. See his biography attached to the letter to Albert Lewis of 1 May 1920 (CL I, pp. 485–6).
39 (#ulink_66bef4eb-4018-5444-841e-558e9d2a3671) During this time the Bodleian Library was open every day from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m., but on 1 July 1938 it began closing at 1 p.m. on Saturdays and all day Sunday.
40 (#ulink_1051c121-52b7-5b27-8f4a-0f64738b499b) Lewis was imitating lines 92 and 95–6 of the Anglo-Saxon poem, The Wanderer, which may be translated:
Where went the horse, where went the hero? Where went the hoard-giver?……How the time has gone, Has darkened under night’s helmet as if never had been!
1938 (#ulink_1f4bf8b5-8d8c-5b5c-9551-85773ae161f0)
As mentioned earlier, the editors of the Oxford History of English Literature, F. P. Wilson and Bonamy Dobrée, knew that the individual volumes of this history would require some dovetailing, and it was up to them to see that there was no overlapping of periods. The American scholar, Douglas Bush,
(#ulink_731822eb-9d5b-580d-8fa7-d6080aa912ba) agreed to write to ‘The Early Seventeenth Century, From c. 1600 to c. 1660’ and in January 1938 Wilson informed Lewis of this, asking if he wanted to include William Dunbar and Gavin Douglas in his sixteenth-century volume.
TO FRANK PERCY WILSON (OUP):
Magdalen College
Oxford
Jan 25th 1938
My dear Wilson
No, I don’t want Dunbar: and I don’t cleave to Douglas even, if anyone wants him. And at the other end of the principle is a simple one—the sooner Bush can begin and I leave off, the better I shall be pleased. The O HELL lies like a nightmare on my chest ever since I got your specimen bibliography: I shan’t try to desert—anyway, I suppose the exit is thronged with dreadful faces and fiery arms
(#ulink_8cade237-41bb-5129-a1bb-7853ee72427f)—but I have a growing doubt if I ought to be doing this.
Mind you, I’d sooner have Dunbar than Donne: sooner, in general, come early on the scene than linger late. Let the others choose.
I hoped we should all meet at the Aldwych and set out to find it with Tillyard who proved to know no more about London than I do. We got to a thing called Bush House in the end where we lunched in a barber’s shop, served by tailors, off sponges. I was sorry not to see you again.
Do you think there’s any chance of the world ending before the O HELL appears?
Yours, in deep depression,
C. S. Lewis
TO OWEN BARFIELD (W):
[The Kilns]
March 28th 1938
My dear Barfield–
Thanks for letter: I have written to Tolkien. ‘Omit no manly degree of importunity’
(#ulink_6f4ed944-c9dc-516e-9b4a-47349b63fa72) towards Harwood. I begin to realise how much the quidity of the walks depended on him. I love your part in him as Lamb said. Can nothing be done about it. I am ready for feudal arrangements if they are any good. Also, I must warn you that something seems to be wrong with my left foot. I shall come, of course, D.V.,
(#ulink_948836c7-eeb4-5803-ba70-28b7ece8d6cc) but how much I’ll be able to walk, I don’t know. (Memo: I can’t drive a car) and H.J.
(#ulink_5af233ed-bf73-5d92-ab8d-926384357fbf) said ‘I hope you are not the sort of people who walk 12 or 15 miles a day.’ (That’s where the Sadism will come in!) So there’ll be much more tour than walking. I suppose you know Bournemouth is about 20 miles long.
Orpheus goes back tomorrow.
(#ulink_259550f3-2a6c-5931-b953-f77dbaf6f216) I can’t pretend to have anything like taken it in yet: think what one would make of the Ring under similar conditions—and this presents difficulties of the same kind. I like the matter of I i as much as I always did and am more reconciled to the style. I ii is excellent, though I’d like more (and better) variations in the Hiawatha metre. I iii I’m still not quite sure about: I expect it wd. act well. Act II is simply superb. It brought tears to my eyes. III i also very good—until the scene with Persephone which I don’t understand. IV i Aristaeus’s opening speech does not get me at all. The ‘thing’ may be good. I begin to see my way a little more in the scene between O. and the satyr, but this needs more re-reading. IV ii very good: Cyrene’s ritual goes off admirably. IV iii—I don’t know. Mostly above my head. The lyrical part at the end: that is very unlike you. A sort of Swinburne-Morris-Kipling style (I deemed that I had good hunting…Have I used well, Demeter, the man’s good gift of his breath—the high gods etc). Is there some point in this that I’m missing? This is rotten criticism: but it’s not an easy poem.
Yours
C.S.L
TO JANET SPENS (BOD):
The Kilns,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford.
April 18th 1938
Dear Miss Spens
Thanks for your kind and interesting letter. You are right of course about the silliness of dragging in Mason: that was merely (as sillinesses so often are) the intrusion of a favourite hobby horse of mine in a place where it was not wanted—my belief, namely, that the continuity between the Romantics and the XVIIIth c. needs to be stressed more than it usually is.
Yes, the Dynasts is very queer: the invention of a whole pantheon to symbolise the non existence of God. I think it is not uncommon to find atheists perpetually angry with God for not being there. Perhaps it is a laudable trait!
I hadn’t noticed the parallel between Urania and Cymoent.
(#ulink_2919f09b-314e-5896-b115-df327e399b1d) But I still think there is an important difference. Marinell is, in the story, Cymoent’s literal son, and Cymoent is a character not a personification only. But Adonais and the Muse are ‘a poet’ and ‘the spirit of poetry’ and I don’t count the latter to break down like a bereaved human being. Shelley seems to be taking his symbols too seriously in one way and not seriously enough in another. It is like making the sun weep because a candle has gone out. I must re-read The Witch.
(#ulink_3a1de405-f685-5067-a108-0d40c9fc0ab1)
The chief reason why I can’t read Godwin is that I have never got hold of a copy of Political Justice;
