Collected Letters Volume Two: Books, Broadcasts and War, 1931–1949. Walter Hooper

      

       THE COLLECTED LETTERS OF C. S. LEWIS

       ———VOLUME II——— Books, Broadcasts, and the War, 1931–1949 EDITED BY WALTER HOOPER

      

Copyright

      William Collins

      An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

       www.harpercollins.co.uk

      THE COLLECTED LETTERS OF C. S. LEWIS, VOLUME II: Books, Broadcasts, and the War, 1931–1949. Copyright © 2004 by C. S. Lewis Pte Ltd.

      The right of C. S. Lewis to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

      A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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      Source ISBN: 9780006281467

      Ebook Edition © JUNE 2009 ISBN: 9780007332663

      Version: 2017-03-24

       CONTENTS

       Cover

       Title Page

       Copyright

      Preface

      Abbreviations

      Letters:

       Chapter 1 - 1931

       Chapter 2 - 1932

       Chapter 3 - 1933

Chapter 4 - 1934

Chapter 5 - 1935

Chapter 6 - 1936

Chapter 7 - 1937

Chapter 8 - 1938

Chapter 9 - 1939

       Chapter 10 - 1940

       Chapter 11 - 1941

       Chapter 12 - 1942

       Chapter 13 - 1943

       Chapter 14 - 1944

       Chapter 15 - 1945

       Chapter 16 - 1946

       Chapter 17 - 1947

       Chapter 18 - 1948

       Chapter 19 - 1949

       Keep Reading

       Biographical Appendix

       Index

       Books By C. S. Lewis

       About the Publisher

       PREFACE

‘I have just passed on from believing in God to definitely believing in Christ—in Christianity.’¹ C. S. Lewis had been an atheist for twenty years, and this was news his boyhood friend Arthur Greeves longed to hear. Arthur pressed him for details, and in the letter of 18 October 1931 with which Volume I of the Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis closed, Lewis described his momentous evening on 19 September when J. R. R. Tolkien and Hugo Dyson dined with him at Magdalen. They strolled through Addison’s Walk and then sat in Lewis’s rooms until 4 a.m. talking about Christianity and its relation to myth. ‘The story of Christ,’ Lewis concluded, ‘is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened.’²

      This second volume of letters begins at that point, and the reader soon discovers what a ‘tremendous difference’ conversion to Christianity made in Lewis. In the Family Letters Lewis was struggling to find his voice as a poet; in the letters included in this volume he had, it seems, found many voices. He writes on such a wide range of subjects that some readers will wonder if, perhaps, there was more than one C. S. Lewis.

Owen Barfield,³ the intimate friend whose letters from Lewis run through all three volumes, suggested that there was indeed more than one Lewis. In a piece entitled ‘The Five C. S. Lewises’ Barfield wrote:

A fairly unsophisticated person who had never had any