Oh the mails: every bore in two continents seems to think I like getting letters. One’s real friends are precisely the people one never gets time to write to.” Thus Lewis sounds off to one of those real friends, Dorothy L. Sayers, in the letter closing the second volume of this collected correspondence. Editor Walter Hooper has chosen an interesting note on which to pause for breath before he brings out the third and final volume next year. Lewis’ complaint reminds us that a writer’s correspondence may reflect duty much more than joy, and in that regard these two volumes show him as the very slave of duty. (His fantastically tireless thank-you letters to Warfield Firor ought to be compulsory reading for all children on Boxing Day.) The complaint also has a delicious proleptic irony for we know that, within a year, Lewis will publish The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and henceforth his mails will be even heavier. He really has only himself to blame.
Once complete, this three-volume edition of Lewis’ correspondence will replace all previous collections, gathering up into its comprehensive embrace Letters (1988), Letters to Children (1985), Letters to an American Lady (1967), Letters to Arthur Greeves (1979), and the Latin Letters (1989). 1 However, that is not to say that every single extant letter by Lewis will then have been published. Some, of course, have still not come to light. (Incidentally, those letters which materialized too late to get into volumes 1 and 2 will be given their own appendix in volume 3.) And some letters have been omitted from the first volume to prevent it from being too long. The omissions mostly consist of the weekly “regulation” letters from the schoolboy Lewis to his father and the abstruse letters to Owen Barfield in the 1920s when Lewis was debating—as his brother mockingly put it—”the utterness of the nothingness.” They constitute about five per cent of the total correspondence from the period covered by volume 1, and it is to be regretted that the publisher should not have found a way to squeeze them in. So near and yet so far. (Perhaps Hooper will at least be given space to list all omitted letters in a second appendix to volume 3.)
Another mark against the publisher is incurred by the subtitles of these two volumes, which are, respectively, inaccurate and jejune. The first volume is made up of letters to friends as much as family: it would have been better called something like “The Road to Faith,” concluding, as it does, with a letter detailing that seminal moment in which Lewis first thought of Christianity as “a true myth.” And to say that the second deals with “books, broadcasts and war” serves to distinguish it from volume 1 only in respect of “broadcasts,” but Lewis’ radio talks are not a major subject of this second volume. An apter subtitle would have been “The Road to Narnia” or some such, since it finishes with Lewis on the brink of his greatest achievement and having just penned his first letter to Narnia’s illustrator, Pauline Baynes.
Although most of these letters have been published before, there are many which are new to print, especially in volume 2. These include 11 to his bête noire, T.S. Eliot, which are fascinating as much for their tone as their content. When Eliot failed, despite repeated undertakings, to supply an essay for the festschrift dedicated to the memory of Charles Williams, Lewis, who was editing the book, wrote to tell him that his time was up, adding, “Perhaps you will find your own way of honoring our friend later and no less effectively.” In the light of Lewis’ inveterate hostility toward Eliot on literary matters and given that the festschrift was designed to bring a little financial relief to Williams’ widow, one can detect all sorts of undercurrents in that single sentence: doubt, disappointment, confirmation of worst suspicions, mild chastisement, and all within a perfectly polite and encouraging suggestion. Peachy.
Also new are 26 letters to Ruth Pitter, the poet, whom Lewis once said he would have liked to have married. “I should love to come and lunch,” he writes: “Will September do for you?—when the world begins to stir again and one puts back the eiderdown and there are cobwebs of a morning? I long for it.” This correspondence gives a glimpse into a rarely seen gentleness and sensitivity in the letter-writing Lewis and into a deeply felt, deeply restrained relationship, like something out of a Barbara Pym novel; a contrast to the hefty, hearty rallies with Dorothy Sayers.
Third, in this survey of the newcomers, we must include mention of the numerous letters to E.R. Eddison, author of one of Lewis’ favorite books, The Worm Ouroboros. These are written in a mock-Tudor style, full of duncicall, saucie, and malapert periods, very witty and light. Much of the correspondence was composed before the two men had ever met; when they eventually did, it was at a lively Inklings session at Magdalen, where Eddison found himself “one martyr-lion fallne vnawares ammiddes an whole covine of Xtianes.” Once we have learned that Eddison was an unbeliever we can see the yeast in Lewis’ habitual signoff: “euer yo~ hono~’s humble bedesman.” He is effectively saying, “I’m praying for you, dear pagan; you’re in my prayers.” But he makes it palatable; it coheres with the whole epistolary relationship.
The Eddison letters, like the Latin letters to Don Giovanni Calabria (presented by Hooper above English translations), typify Lewis’ extraordinary ability to adjust his language and modulate his tone to suit the correspondent. There is never a pro forma response. Lewis’ pen is like a magical stream which can run now fresh, now salt, now cream, now wine. His complete mastery of voice is an object lesson in the art of becoming “all things to all men.” Occasionally (in volume 1 especially) this capsizes into hypocrisy. In his late teens and early twenties, Lewis’ letters to his father were pitch-perfect pretences of filial piety; they alternate with letters to Greeves which show a very different, but equally presentable, persona. Lewis’ two-facedness in these years is the evil twin of his later ability sincerely to accommodate himself and his style to interlocutor, occasion and subject matter.
As we witness Lewis develop we find that these volumes are working as a kind of unconscious autobiography. Lewis is unwittingly portraying his own maturation, a portrait which is, in its own way, as instructive an insight into the shape of his early life as Surprised by Joy. The alteration in manner which occurs between, say, 1927 and 1933, is striking to observe, clear empirical evidence of the objective efficacy of spiritual conversion. The crisis which Lewis was brought to by his encounter with Christ really was the hinge on which his whole life turned. The man demonstrably became more integrated, more purposeful, more relaxed, more self-effacing as a consequence of that life-changing talk with Tolkien in Addison’s Walk. Faults and flaws and foibles remain, of course, and privately intended correspondence can be expected to reveal such characteristics; it opens a window onto a man’s weaknesses more revealingly than any public confessional. Lewis sometimes writes irritably, eristically, posingly, de haut en bas; he can still, on occasion, denigrate people behind their backs. But he never writes dully, is never less than imaginative.
Not only do these volumes track the development of an individual; in the background we can make out (in soft focus) larger historical movements and moments: the rise of modernism, socialism, feminism, the debate over Irish Home Rule, the flaring of the General Strike, the election of Adolf Hitler (“as contemptible for his stupidity as he is detestable for his cruelty,” Lewis wrote in 1933). We enjoy, indirectly, a history of Lewis’ lifetime, alongside that of his life.
In all this we are enriched and enlightened by Hooper’s superbly researched footnotes: every quotation sourced, every person dated and placed, every enigma clarified. What is more, each of Lewis’ correspondents is given a brief biographical treatment so that the reader may better understand the personal context into which Lewis was writing. These hard facts, which so usefully underpin every page, will not leave either the scholar or the Lewis enthusiast feeling short-changed; indeed, if anything, the level of detail may occasionally appear supererogatory. But this explains why Hooper is the world’s leading expert on Lewis’ life and work. He knows and cares more about the subject than anyone else in the field.
Lewis wrote to his father in 1926 that “a heavy responsibility rests on those who forage through a dead man’s correspondence and publish it indiscriminately.” HarperCollins may want to try a little harder to live up to that responsibility with volume 3, but Hooper need only do a third time what he has already done twice so well. Encore!
Michael Ward has just taken the post of chaplain at Peterhouse, University of Cambridge.
1. The first volume of this edition of Lewis’ letters was published by HarperCollins in the United Kingdom in 2000 but is only now appearing in the United States, along with the newly published second volume.
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