LITMIR.BIZ

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Cf. what are in comparison the ravings of Hardy on the one hand and optimistic Communists on t’other. But the Earthly Paradise after that first story is inferior work. Try Jason, House of the Wolfings, Roots of the Mts, Well at the World’s End.³¹

      The thriller is finished and called ‘Out of the Silent Planet.’

      Yes, another next term, certainly.

      Yrs

      C.S.L.

If you want my sonnets, I’ve a very good one beginning ‘The Bible says Sennacherib’s campaign was spoiled.’³²

      TO CHARLES WILLIAMS (W):

      [Magdalen College]

      Sept. 23rd, 1937

      [Dear Williams]

Many thanks for the book;³³ fortunately I had seen it announced and ordered a copy before it arrived, so that both of us have it both ways. I think this is much the best book you have given us yet.

In the first place I find the form of evil that you are dealing with much more real than the Evil (with a big E) that appears in the other books and which, though I enjoy it, (like pantomime red fire) in a story, I do not believe in. But your Gomorrah is the real thing, and Wentworth a truly tragic study. Of course he can’t in the nature of things be as good fun as Sir Giles Tumulty,³⁴ but he’s more important. And Mrs Sammile is excellent too.

      In the second place I’m glad to have got off the amulet or ‘sacred object’ theme.

Thirdly—I hope this doesn’t sound patronising—in sheer writing I think you have gone up, as we examiners say, a whole class. Chapter II is in my opinion your high water mark so far. Your have completely overcome a certain flamboyance which I always thought your chief danger: this is crisp as grape nuts, hard as a hammer, clear as glass. I am a little worried in the Wentworth part by the tendency to Gertrude Steinisms (eaves eves, guard card, etc.).³⁵ I agree, of course, that if there is any place for this kind of writing, the descent into Hell is the place.

      But I believe this representative style, this literary programme music in which the writer writes as if he were in the predicament he describes, to be a false trail. I would rather see you becoming or remaining rigidly sober and classic as you describe chaos, your limit emphasizing nearly all good, except in the conversations between Stanhope and Pauline.

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’³⁶ may sound like a game to people who don’t know you. The L.C.M.³⁷ 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):³⁸

      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.³⁹ 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 under The night’s helmet as tho never they had been! ⁴⁰

      Yrs

      C.S.L.

* Of course there are many more in number, but only duplicating what I enclose

1 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 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 Frank Laurence Lucas, The Decline and Fall of the Romantic Ideal (1936).

4 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 i.e. ‘Donne and Love Poetry in the Seventeenth Century’.

6 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 Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone (1868).

8 George Gordon, Lord Byron, The Vision of Judgement (1822).

9 John Ruskin, Modern Painters, vol. III (1856).

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