Collected Letters Volume Three: Narnia, Cambridge and Joy 1950–1963. Walter Hooper

24 In February 1953 Joy became a member of the Episcopal Church and was confirmed in the Cathedral of St John the Divine, New York.

* This is the beginning of Act V, I suppose?

25 T. H. White, Mistress Masham’s Repose (1946).

26 Mrs Van Deusen, an Episcopalian, was in touch with the Order of the Holy Cross, a Benedictine Anglican monastic order in West Park, New York. The order had suggested she become one of the Associates of Holy Cross. These lay associates lived under a modified form of the Benedictine rule suitable to laymen.

27 James was probably a clergyman Mrs Van Deusen knew.

28 Warnie served for a number of years on the vestry of Holy Trinity Church, Headington Quarry, Oxford. Vestrymen help the churchwardens deal with the temporal affairs of a parish church.

29 George Bernard Shaw.

30 Robert Louis Stevenson, Virginibus Puerisque and Other Papers (1901), ch. 1, ‘Virginibus Puerisque’: ‘Marriage is terrifying, but so is a cold and forlorn old age.’

31 In Charles Williams’s Region of the Summer Stars, ‘P’o-l’u’ is in the Antipodean Ocean. Starr was spending the academic year at Kansai University, Osaka, Japan as a Fulbright Scholar. He was then offered a professorship at the University of Florida in Gainesville, where he stayed until his retirement.

32 William Shakespeare, The Tempest (1623), I, ii, 250-93. Ariel, a spirit of the air, was once the servant of Sycorax, a wicked sorceress who imprisoned him in a ‘cloven pine’ for refusing to fulfil her commands. He was trapped inside the tree for twelve years until Prospero arrived on the island, released him, and bound him to his service.

33 Ray Bradbury, The Silver Locusts (1951).

34 The forty-seven Ronin were Samurai retainers who in 1701 avenged their master’s death by killing his enemy, and then awaiting the death sentence to be passed on them by the government. The act of defying the government, and following instead the way of the Samurai to be faithful to their lord unto death, won them everlasting fame. Every year on 14 December people gather at their graves at Sengakuji Temple in Tokyo.

35 Anthony Boucher was the pseudonym of William Anthony Parker White (1911-68), critic and author. He wrote a column on mystery stories, ‘Criminal at Large’, for the New York Times, 1951-68, and was the editor of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, 1949-58. He is the author of many works of mystery and science fiction, and it was at his suggestion that Lewis contributed two short stories, ‘The Shoddy Lands’ and ‘Ministering Angels’-reprinted in The Dark Tower and Other Stories- to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.

Boucher’s short story, ‘The Quest for St. Aquin’ was first published in New Tales of Space and Time, ed. Raymond J. Healy (New York: Holt, 1951), and ‘The Star Dummy’ was published in Fantastic (Fall 1952). They are reprinted in The Compleat Boucher: The Complete Short Science Fiction and Fantasy of Anthony Boucher (1998).

37 Old Solar for ‘God bless you.’ It is found several times in the last chapter of That Hideous Strength when Ransom blesses those who have fought with him at St Anne’s on the Hill.

* The porter at Holloway Jail told me it was ‘a ladies’ prison’

38 Bodle said of this letter: ‘I had spoken of a girl in my class at Manchester who was intelligent and had a great deal of language as she had acquired it before being deafened. In answer to her anxieties about the remoteness of God I had tried to explain who Christ is and why He had come. Then she herself said with unusual relief “Then Jesus is God”-a conception entirely new to her. I think that I must have been wondering how much of the teaching about Christ I could present with the Gospel story–a problem which I still find very difficult’ (Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. lett. c. 220/4, fols. 248-9).

39 Acts 8:31.

40 Matthew 6:12.

41 See Sir Arthur Charles Clarke in the Biographical Appendix to CX II, pp. 1024-5.

42 Clarke, in his capacity as chairman of the British Interplanetary Society, wrote to Lewis on 13 February 1953: ‘I am now trying to arrange this Society’s lecture programme for October ’53-April ’54, and the suggestion has been put forward that you might care to propose a notion that interplanetary travel is a bad thing!…It would be only fair to point out that your position might be somehow analogous to that of a Christian martyr in the arena, but I trust that consideration would not deter you’ (Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. lett. c. 220/4, fol. 16).

43 Robin Oakley-Hill (1932-) was born on 30 May 1932, the son of Dayrell R. Oakley-Hill. He went up to Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1950 where he read English under Lewis. After taking his BA in 1953 he worked as an administrative officer in the Architects’ Department of the London City Council.

44 In a note dated August 2003 Oakley-Hill said of this letter: ‘I was walking from the boathouse back to college on an unpleasantly raw winter afternoon after an unsatisfactory session of coxing when I was joined by CS Lewis waiting to cross the High. He said something like “You’re limping–did you hurt yourself?” I said no, I’d had polio, in a fairly unfriendly manner, because I was fed up with the weather, the unsatisfactory rowing and the tedious unfinished work I was going back to. He looked embarrassed and said “Oh, poor chap,” and we went our separate ways. I was astounded to get the letter next day, and was inclined to reply that it didn’t signify, but a confidant warned me to take the apology in a serious manner because otherwise it would seem that I did not appreciate the trouble he had taken in writing the letter, and I did so.’

45 In the country of Brobdingnag in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) the people are as tall as steeples, and everything else is in proportion.

46 Chad Walsh, Nellie and her Flying Crocodile, illus. Marc Simont (New York: Harper, 1956).

47 That is, become an Associate