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

& it was rather delightful to renew ones acquaintance with that highly specialised form of composition-a preface to a school text. You know. ‘Plato, the celebrated Gk. philosopher (500–400 B.C.) thought—’ and then a clear, dogmatic, and misleading sentence. No half lights.

Wuthering Heights⁸⁹ which I re-read the other day is, I believe, one of your biblia abiblia.⁹⁰ I should not like to make it my constant fare, but I still like it very much. R. Macaulay’s Mystery at Geneva⁹¹ I also re-read recently: much the poorest she has written, and a mere repetition of all her favourite tricks. I feel P’daytesque and ask ‘Will she live?’

I have bought The Brothers Karamazov⁹² but not yet read it with the exception of some special detachable pieces (of which there are many). Thus read, it is certainly a great religious and poetical work: whether, as a whole, it will turn out a good, or even a tolerable novel I don’t know. I have not forgotten your admirable Russian novel ‘Alexey Poldorovna lived on a hill. He cried a great deal.’

      It is pleasant to reflect that one of the nine terms of your exile is now over.

      Yrs

      Jack

1 The Rev. Wilfrid Savage Thomas (1879–1959) took a BA from Pembroke College, Cambridge, in 1900. Ordained in 1903 after a year at Wells Theological College, he was Curate of Great Marlow until 1906 and spent the next two years in Australia as Domestic Chaplain to the Bishop of Adelaide. He returned to Great Marlow, 1909–11, and was assigned Banbury with Grimsbury, 1911–13. After a further spell in Australia in 1915 as priest-in-charge of Mallala Mission, he was Curate of Amersham, 1916–18, Vicar of Holy Trinity, Lambeth, and Chaplain of St Thomas’s Hospital, London, 1918–23. Thomas became Vicar of Holy Trinity, Headington Quarry, in 1924 and remained there until 1935. He was subsequently Vicar of Adderbury with Milton, 1935–9.

2 The grounds of The Kilns covered nine acres, and the Lewis brothers began planting trees and clearing pathways immediately after moving there.

3 The Rev. Edward Foord-Kelcey (1859–1934) matriculated at Pembroke College, Oxford, in 1884. He read Theology at Cuddesdon College and was ordained in 1888. He was Curate of St Saviour, Leicester, 1887–92, Vicar of Quorn (or Quorndon), Leicestershire, 1892–1909, and Rector of Great Kimble, Buckinghamshire, 1909–26. He officiated in the Diocese of Oxford from 1927 until his death. His wife died shortly before the First World War. In a short biography of Foord-Kelcey (LP XI: 24–5), Lewis wrote; ‘A common love of Scott and Johnson was the ground on which we met…These, with Shakespeare and Carlyle, were the constant themes of his talk… As a man of letters his range was not very wide—of poetry, for example, he knew little—nor was his judgement above the ordinary: but he was always worth listening to for the intensity of his gusto, and his chuckles and ecstatic repetition.’

4 There had been a footpath running across a field from Headington to Headington Quarry since 1804. The Oxford City Corporation wished to divert it, but many people who had been using the footpath for the whole of their lives, including Mr J. Snow, managed to have the City’s plan altered. See the letter from Mr Thomas, ‘Closing the Quarry Field Footpath’ in the Oxford Times (7 August 1931), p. 10.

5 Maureen Moore, the daughter of Janie King Moore, taught music at the Monmouth School for Girls, Monmouthshire, 1930–3. See Dame Maureen Dunbar of Hempriggs (1906–97) in the Biographical Appendix to CL I.

6 The nickname of Mrs Janie King Moore (1872–1951). See the Biographical Appendix to CL I.

7 George Robert Sabine Snow (1897–1969) was a Fellow of Magdalen College, 1922–60.

8 James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, ed. George Birkbeck Hill, 6 vols. (1934), 18 April 1783, vol. IV, p. 205. slightly misquoted.

9 Jeremy Taylor, The Whole Works…With a Life of the Author, and a Critical Examination of His Writings, by Reginald Heber, 15 vols. (1822).

10 See Dom Bede Griffiths in the Biographical Appendix. Alan Richard Griffiths became a Catholic on Christmas Eve 1932. He spent much of the following year at Prinknash, the Benedictine priory near Gloucester, testing his vocation as a monk. On 20 December 1933 he was clothed as a novice and took the name Dom Bede Griffiths.

11 For the biography of Frank Sanders see note 28 to the letter of 22 March 1941.

12 William Law, A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life (1728).

13 Major Herbert Denis Parkin (1886–1958) joined the army in 1908 and the Army Service Corps (later Royal Army Service Corps) in 1911. He became captain in 1915 and major in 1918. He served in France during the First World War, in India during 1922, and Egypt, 1927–8. Major Parkin was Warnie’s commanding officer in Shanghai, 1928–9 and they became lifelong friends, but this was the first time Jack had met him. On learning of Parkin’s death, Warnie wrote in his diary of 13 November 1958: ‘He was a friend of almost thirty years standing, and one whose place no one can fill…We shared a stock of memories which were very precious to both of us, and he had a humour that was entirely his own…I shall miss him to the end—the only real friend I ever made in me army’ (BF, p. 246).

14 John Trail! Christie (1899–1980) was Fellow and Classical Tutor at Magdalen College, 1928–32, Headmaster of Repton School, 1932–7, Headmaster of Westminster School. 1937–49. and Principal of Jesus College, Oxford, 1950–67.

15 Sir Thomas Browne (1605–82), natural historian, antiquary, and moralist, best known for his Religio Medici (1642).

16 i.e. like Charles Lamb.

17 Mr Papworth, or Baron Papworth as he was also known, was Lewis’s and Mrs Moore’s dog. Of the many pets they had over the years, he was their favourite. He died in 1937.

18 ‘I love games, love, books, music.’ From Jean de La Fontaine, Les Amours de Psyché et de Cupidon (1669), quoted in The Oxford Book of French Verse, ed. St John Lucas (1920), p. 182.

19 René Descartes (1596–1650) was the chief architect of the seventeenth-century intellectual revolution. His philosophical masterpiece, Meditations on First Philosophy (1641) contains many of his proofs of the existence of God.