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

has been a difference of opinion in the Church on the question whether our Lord meant to forbid marriage to the innocent party in a divorce for adultery, the Conference recommends that the clergy should not be instructed to refuse the sacraments or other privileges of the Church to those who, under civil sanction, are thus married.’

93 Sir Godfrey Rolles Driver (1892-1975), Old Testament scholar and Semitic philologist, was elected a Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1919 and was Professor of Semitic Philology, 1938-62. He was intimately concerned with the New English Bible, and his works include The Judaean Scrolls (1965). Young was interested in writing a novel based on the Book of Judith from the Old Testament Apocrypha.

94 Mrs Goelz was being confirmed in the Episcopal Church.

95 David Cecil, Lord M.: or The Later Life of Lord Melbourne (London: Constable, 1954), p. 6: ‘[Lord Melbourne] loved to defend the indefensible. “What I like about the Order of the Garter,” he once remarked, “is that there is no damned merit about it.”‘

96 Sir Fred Hoyle (1915-2001) was Plumian Professor of Astronomy at Cambridge University, and the founder of the Institute of Theoretical Astronomy.

97 ‘writer of extended romances’.

98 Edmund Spenser, Epíthalamíon (1595).

99 Vera Mathews had married K. H. Gebbert, and they were now living at Sun Valley Lodge, Sun Valley, Idaho, where Mr Gebbert had was working.

100 Since 21 December 1951 Griffiths had been at the Benedictine priory at Pluscarden, Elgin, Moray, Scotland, where he was novice master.

101 Konrad Z. Lorenz, King Solomon’s Ring: New Light on Animal Ways (1952).

102 The top of this letter was torn off, and with it the date and salutation.

103 During the Summer Term 1952 Vanauken sent Lewis copies of his ‘Oxford Sonnets’: ‘I sent round the whole six sonnets, though he had seen two of them, to C. S. Lewis, and he replied, in part: “I think all the sonnets really good. The Sands is v. good, indeed. So is Advent, perhaps it is best. (L. 5 is a corker)” ‘(Vanauken, A Severe Mercy, ch. 5, p. 123). All six sonnets are included in A Severe Mercy.

104 ibid., ch. 4, p. 100, ‘The Gap’, iii, 1-4: ‘Between the probable and proved there yawns/A gap. Afraid to jump, we stand absurd,/Then see behind us sink the ground and, worse,/Our very standpoint crumbling.’

105 See Austin and Katharine Farrer in the Biographical Appendix.

106 Katharine Farrer, The Missing Link (London: Collins, 1952). This was the first of Farrer’s detective novels.

107 i.e., Martyn Skinner’s The Return of Arthur: Merlin.

108 Farrer, The Missing Link, ch. 11, p. 141: ‘He moodily watched Plummer and Thomas go into the watchman’s hut and turned towards the darkness and the familiar devil of the stairs.’ This sentence was changed in the Penguin paperback of 1955 to read: ‘He moodily watched Plummer and Thomas go into the watchman’s hut and turned towards the darkness to wrestle with his hopes and despairs.’

109 Ibid., p. 127: ‘not families, family-allowances’ etc.

110 i.e., a character in one of the novels of Charles Williams.

111 John Milton, At a Vacation Exercise in the College, part Latin, part English (1673), ‘The Latin Speeches ended, the English thus began’, 29-30: ‘Yet I had rather, if I were to choose,/Thy service in some graver subject use.’

112 Miss Marg-riette Montgomery was writing from San Antonio, Texas.

113 See the biography of Rudolf Steiner, founder of Anthroposophy, in CL I, p. 671n.

114 i.e., Owen Barfield and Cecil Harwood.

115 Lewis used this German word in SBJ, ch. 1, to mean the ‘intense longing’ or ‘Joy’ which played a large part in his conversion.

116 Mark 15:31.

117 Charles Williams, He Came Down from Heaven (1938), ‘The Practice of Substituted Love’.

118 William Borst, an editor in the college department of Harcourt, Brace & World, was handling Lewis’s essay on Spenser for Major British Writers.

119 Spenser, The Faerie Queene, I, i, 2, 1-2: ‘But on his brest a bloudie Crosse he bore/ The deare remembrance of his dying Lord.’

120 Hsin-Chang Chang was born in China. He attended the University of Shanghai before taking a D. Phil, in English from Edinburgh University. For some years he was a lecturer in English at the University of Malaya in Singapore. In 1959 he returned to England to become University Lecturer in Chinese. He later became University Lecturer in Chinese Studies and Fellow of Wolfson College, Cambridge. He is the author of Allegory and Courtesy in Spenser: A Chinese View (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1955) and Chinese Literature, 3 vols (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1973-83). In ‘Memories’, In Search of C. S. Lewis, ed. Stephen Schofield (South Plainfield, New Jersey: Bridge Publishing Co., 1983), Chang said (p. 104): ‘I did not then realize, as I have since come to think…that we had much in common. For his hero was Sir Philip Sidney…and Sidney, too, was mine. And indeed Sidney had embodied in his life both chivalry and courtesy. My ingrained belief that a definite code ought to govern the tone of one’s writing as well as one’s conduct—which in essence is Confucian but not uninfluenced by European chivalry—must have appealed to Lewis and made him readier, in later years, to accept me as a friend. Certainly a vein of chivalry underlies all his own writings, and this explains for me the style and verve of his literary criticism.’