Thanks very much for your nice long letter—I hope I have not thereby stolen time which ought to have been employed in the best of all occupations, and by you, perforce, the most neglected-doing nothing.
As a bachelor who has seldom even talked to children I should be very foolish if I gave any advice as to books for Lawrence: if I felt qualified to choose books I should send books—not tokens.
But John is right about rum. It has a romantic interest. It is one of those things which give us a sensuous and an imaginative pleasure at once. And the only reason why I am going to refuse your very tempting offer of a bottle (or was it a keg? do say it was a keg—or a noggin) of rum is that it is your positive wifely duty to see that Cecil drinks it all. If he turns coy and altruistic and says (as men will say anything) that he doesn’t care for rum, you may reply lightly in the Latin tongue Hoc est omnis meus oculus, or Nonne narrabis ista marinis equestribus?
(#litres_trial_promo) He has not forgotten dancing through the streets of Caerleon with the bottle of white rum in one hand and his cutlass in the other. Of course for domestic purposes the question shd. not be put in a nakedly convivial form: some proper pretext about wet feet, overwork, or the like will do gentle violence to his coyness. But ye maun ablains give it to the guideman, ma’am.
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I don’t remember anything you said that day which could possibly offend anyone.
All here sent their loves, and best wishes for the New Year. I hope it will be less exciting than the last but not with much confidence: one is reduced to the last form of hope now (I mean as regards this world) which consists in remembering that creaking gates hang long and things expected never happen. However, the prospect of leaving * (#litres_trial_promo) this planet gets daily less terrible. Tell Cecil to write to me some time.
Yours
Jack Lewis
TOA. K. HAMILTON JENKIN (BOD):
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The Kilns,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford.
Jan 11th 1939
My dear Jenkin—
I had hoped to be dining somewhere in London to-night with you and Barfield and Harwood (who had, by the way, announced that he was bringing a bottle of Jamaica rum), but I heard yesterday that the arrangement was breaking down as far as they were concerned and to day the much worse news that you were smitten with a fell disease. Very bad luck!-and I suppose you have, in addition, hated every minute of this fine old English winter: unless, at least, your tastes in weather have changed very much since the old days.
I who profess the predilections of a polar bear tried to make believe that I was enjoying it, but the week before Christmas wore the pretence pretty thin: it wasn’t so much the snow underfoot that depressed me as the vast clot of lentil soup which had replaced the sky.
The second fall in the first week of the New Year spoiled my annual January walking tour with my brother. We had one glorious day crossing Wenlock Edge (our course was from Church Stretton to Ludlow)
(#litres_trial_promo) with new snow on the ground and cloudless sunshine from end to end of the skies—beautiful shadows. And out in the country snow is a great betrayer. Rabbits and squirrels became as easy to see as bushes. The tracks are rather exciting, too, aren’t they? To climb up some unearthly lane to a hill crest far from any house, still early in the morning, and find from the innumerable paw-prints how long ago the animals’ day has begun. But on the second day we had to give it up before noon and make the rest of the way by train.
Which, by the way, on those remote railways took us nearly as long as it would have done on foot and was rather fun. We had pleasant hours sitting by roaring fires with the combined station-master, porter, and ticket clerk of tiny stations: and one specially good talk with a little Welsh porter about four feet tall (probably a leprechaun disguised as a porter) who praised Balfour’s Foundations of Belief.
(#litres_trial_promo) What things any twenty square miles of country contains if a man can only find them. Still, I confess that even I am tired of this winter.
The truth is I am tired of so many things—of weather, of work, of reading, of writing, above all of News. In other words I have a cold: to complain of which to you in your present state is rather carrying colds to Newcastle. As to News and ‘the state of the nation’ what worries me sometimes more than the dangers is our reaction to them, beginning, of course, with my own reaction. To be faced with wars and ruins is I suppose the normal state of humanity: did any people before He shivering under it as we do? Just after the September crisis I sat next to old Powick
(#litres_trial_promo) the professor of history and asked him how it had compared with what people felt in 1914: he said at once ‘The difference is that this time one missed the note of exaltation that one felt then.’ Exaltation begad! Yes: I know they were ignorant of some things we have learned, but I can’t believe that is the only difference. Something has slipped.
This is a grand cheery letter to write to a sick man, isn’t it? The mention of snow, I now realise, was a fatal blunder, for you once told me that when you woke up cold and ill in the middle of the night one of your main troubles was that you couldn’t even imagine warm and pleasant places—that nothing would arise before your inner eye except cold rocks with rain falling on them and ice-fringed ponds. Something of the same kind occasionally happens to me.
But talking of places, has Barfield yet suggested to you that you should try to join us on our Easter walk this year? I know he wanted you to be asked. You needn’t be afraid of the distances. There is often a car in attendance and, failing that, by judicious bus-hopping you can always manage to have all the fun and little of the fatigue. We will make you billeting officer and send you on ahead by wheels to book rooms. So you will be sitting with a pipe and a pint in some cheery bar, with a stuffed pike in a glass case on one wall and a tradesman’s calendar on the other, and a loud-ticking clock, and a board for shove-halfpenny, and through the window you’ll see us wearily limping up to the door—and you’ll come out fresh as a new pin and say ‘Wherever have you been? I expected you two hours ago.’ At least that is what you’ll feel like saying but after a glance at our faces you will change it to ‘What will you have?’
We’ll make it a southern walk, Dorset perhaps. Somewhere, at any rate, where the spring will be surprisingly far on, the woods almost green, and great cushiony clumps of primroses, and a view of the sea: and we’ll have glorious mid-morning halts lying in barns or on the sunny side of hills. Make a note of it. (You’ll probably be the only atheist present, by the way, but we will respect your susceptibilities—‘Leave thou thy sister when she fails to pray/Her simple unbelief, for that’s her way.’* (#litres_trial_promo) (Give the context of and add any explanatory note that seems necessary)).
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What did you think of Snowwhite and the vii Dwarfs?
(#litres_trial_promo) I saw it at Malvern last week on that holiday. And talking of Malvern, what an exquisite, unchanging place that is. Hardly a sound in the streets after eight o’clock: such nice, warm, quiet, carpeted immemorial hotels: such comfort, such bright, quiet cheerfulness with no silly luxury or novelty. ‘I design to end my days’ in Malvern. Let me especially recommend the Tudor Hotel for a bottle of really excellent burgundy. They also have a splendid idea that ‘gentlemen’, being noisy, tobacco-smelling animals, should be segregated, which means that as soon as you arrive a fire is lit in a little, dark, warm, cushioned smoking-room miles away from anywhere, and it’s as good as a private sitting room.
But about Snow-White. Leaving out the tiresome question of whether it is suitable for children (which I don’t know and don’t care) I thought it almost inconceivably good and bad—I mean, I didn’t know one human being could be so good and bad. The worst thing of all was the vulgarity of the winking dove at the beginning, and the next worst the faces of the dwarfs. Dwarfs ought to be ugly of course, but not in that way. And the dwarfs’ jazz party was pretty bad. I suppose it never occurred to the poor boob that you could give them any other kind of music. But all the terrifying bits were good, and the animals really most moving: and the use of shadows (of dwarfs and vultures) was real genius. What might not have come of it if this man had been educated—or even brought up in a decent society?
If you’d care for a copy of my story (a journey to Mars) let me know and I’ll send you one. But I rather think it is not a genre you care for: and I know that if people don’t like stories of that kind they usually dislike them very much indeed. These sharp frontiers of taste are a very interesting literary fact which I’ve never seen discussed by any critic, and which are far more important in dividing readers than any of the formal divisions, even that of verse and prose. ‘Do you like stories about other planets—or hunting stories—or stories of the supernatural—or historical novels?’—surely these are questions which elicit an unalterable Yes or No from the very depth of a reader’s heart: but Aristotle, Johnson, and Coleridge have nothing to say about them.
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(By the way, why is North’s Plutarch
(#litres_trial_promo) such very dull reading?)
I hope you’ll be mending by the time you get this. If you are unable to write, then,** (#litres_trial_promo) as soon as you conveniently can, let me have word through someone else, how you are getting on and whether there is anything of any kind I can do for you.
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO ALEC VIDLER (BOD):
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Magdalen College,
Oxford
Ian 17th 1939
Dear Mr. Vidler
I fear I am a very bad salesman, but I enclose the names of those people who might be induced to take Theology)
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On the question of reviewing—would it be a good thing sometimes to review books which had not been sent for review? I am thinking chiefly of infamous and ill informed books. Review copies of what you specially want to refute are not likely to be sent you, and that is one of the ways in which nonsense circulates uncontradicted. The reviewer wd. presumably, in such cases, pay for his own copy. (I have no particular book in view at the moment).
yours sincerely,
C. S. Lewis
TOA. K. HAMILTON JENKIN (BOD):
