LITMIR.BIZ

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Oxford Dictionary as ‘the part of the visible sea distant from the shore or beyond the anchoring ground’.

      But don’t talk to me of your snow, for we are all shivering here in the hardest winter we have had since 1946, and with a fuel crisis to add to our troubles. Much recrimination too as to who is responsible for the latter, and wide publicity is being given to a piece of ineptitude which is going on in Cardiff Docks; in one berth is a Norwegian ship discharging American coal for the British Railways—in the next one to it, a Spanish ship loading Welsh coal for the Argentine Railways! There certainly seems something very wrong there.

      With us too, the steady rise in retail prices is a constant nightmare to all except the weekly wage earners, who can remedy their position by striking. Only yesterday a lady told me that now the material to make a pair of man’s socks costs ten shillings: and everything else is up in proportion. Except the basic items of the ration, and these of course are heavily subsidized, so in the long run we pay for them too, through the taxes. But we have a most excellent housekeeper, who is a marvel at ‘making do’, and there are five of us in the house.

The people who are really hard hit are the single ones, or the childless married couples: for naturally the more of you in the house, the easier it is to get enough meat for stews and suchlike. In term time I have my meals in College, including a free dinner, which has from time immemorial been part of the stipend of a tutor. My brother takes a snack in town in the middle of the day—usually something he has bought on the way in—and has the rest of his meals out at the house; he keeps a very sharp eye on my, or perhaps I should say your parcels, and abstracts anything likely to be useful for his lunches, justifying his peculations by quoting that ‘the labourer is worthy of his hire’.²⁰⁶

      It is very odd about the envelopes; we certainly received them, and they were all used up in due course. Why one never went back to it’s home, neither of us can understand. Of course I write to twenty English folk for one American, and therefore the odds against your getting one back would be considerable. Our very small envelopes are due, I understand, to the fact that we are very seriously short of paper—having broken our contract with Canada, for some reason I have never followed. I don’t think there is any mail restriction.

      The whole question of the atomic bomb is a very difficult one: the Sunday after the news of the dropping of the first one came through, our minister asked us all to join in prayer for forgiveness for the great crime of using it. But, if fwhat we have since heard is true, i.e. that the first item on the Japanese anti-invasion programme was the killing of every European in Japan, the answer did not, to me, seem so simple as all that.

I read with interest and indignation your story of the experiment on the monkeys; there seems no end to the folly and wickedness of this world. Dogs are jealous; perhaps the besetting sin they inherited at the Fall.^*

      I see that in rambling along I have nearly forgotten to thank you for the impending gifts. I hope, indeed if I may so put it, insist that you give up spoiling me in this way if prices rise still more against you.

      With all good wishes from us both to you both for 1951,

      yours sincerely,

      C. S. Lewis

      

* On second thoughts, I don’t think it is a sin in them, tho’ it is in us.²⁰⁷

       TO SISTER PENELOPE CSMV(BOD):

      Magdalen College

      Oxford Dec 30/50

      Dear Sister Penelope

      Yours was a cheering letter which warmed my heart (I wish it wd. have warmed my fingers too: as it is they will hardly form the letters!).

      I can’t offer any comments on the re-planning of the novel, not now having all the problems clearly enough in my head. I feel like saying it wd. be a pity to lose Adam, but then one has really no business to compare a work with its own pre-history.

      I’m delighted about the Biblical plays which I remember doing me a lot of good when I read them. They may be, in a way, your most important work.

      Our state is thus: my ‘mother’ has had to retire permanently into a Nursing Home. She is in no pain but her mind has almost completely gone. What traces of it remain seem gentler and more placid than I have known it for years. Her appetite is, oddly, enormous. I visit her, normally, every day, and am divided between a (rational?) feeling that this process of gradual withdrawal is merciful and even beautiful, and a quite different feeling (it comes out in my dreams) of horror.

      There is no denying—and I don’t know why I should deny to you—that our domestic life is both more physically comfortable and more psychologically harmonious for her absence. The expence is of course v. severe and I have worries about that. But it wd. be v. dangerous to have no worries—or rather no occasions of worry. I have been feeling that v. much lately: that cheerful insecurity is what Our Lord asks of us. Thus one comes, late & surprised, to the simplest & earliest Christian lessons!

Rê pseudo- or deutero Screwtapes. My own feeling is that a literary idea ought to belong to anyone who can use it and that literary property is a sort of Simony. But you might find my publisher taking a different view. I don’t know, though: perhaps not, if it was published with proper acknowledgements. Let me know if it reaches the stage of a practical decision. I am glad to hear your inner news. Mine, too, is I think (but who am I to judge?) fairly good. Oremus pro invicem,²⁰⁸

      Yours most sincerely

      C. S. Lewis

      

       TO RUTH PITTER(BOD):

      Magdalen College

      Oxford Dec 30/50

      Dear Miss Pitter—

      I don’t know if I can write, my fingers are so cold. (Almost the only pleasure of which age has yet deprived me—I mean the only good one—is the power of enjoying hard frost. Otherwise youth’s a stuff that’s over-rated).

What helps you in Theocritus hinders me, and in the Georgics too: i.e. when I’ve looked up the vegetables in the Lexicon, I don’t know the English any better than the Greek. The equation ‘γλώε,’²⁰⁹ the lesser mud-wort, fangoleum paludis’, is to me a = b where both are unknown. Not that I don’t enjoy the vegetables when I meet them in the cool, green flesh: but each individual is new to me each time. Heroic books–is this yours? And for a ‘work in progress’? It is obviously some poet’s prose, sweet on the tongue. I feel that about the poet being a Parthian too: but am not quite sure whether it doesn’t come from living in an un-poetical age when the poet is perilously near being ‘vestigial’. Did people feel that way about Virgil or Firdausi?²¹⁰ (Here have been interrupted for an hour by an elderly lady asking moral advice!).

I hope you had a nice time with the Duchess.²¹¹ Shd. I like her poetry? I don’t know it. My brother joins me in all good wishes and I must go to lunch. My humble duty, Ma’am

      Yours very sincerely

      C. S. Lewis

      

       TO GEORGE SAYER (W):

      Magdalen College

      Oxford Dec 30. 50

      My

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