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

76 William Morris, A Dream of John Ball (1888); Love is Enough (1872); The Wood Beyond the World (1894).

77 See Martin Lings in the Biographical Appendix.

78 Adrian Hugh Paterson (1909–401 look his BA from Magdalen in 1934. He lectured on English in the University of Hong Kong, 1934–8, and was a lecturer on English at Cairo University from 1938 until 1940 when he died as a result of an accident that occurred while he and Martin Lings were riding together in the desert.

79 ‘The Cave’ was a group of English dons who met regularly for talks about literary subjects or to discuss matters in the English School. It was named after the Cave of Adullam in which David organized the conspiracy against Saul (1 Samuel 22:1: ‘David…escaped to the cave Adullam: and when his brethren and all his father’s house heard it, they went down thither to him’). The membership, which included Lewis, Tolkien, Nevill Coghill, Hugo Dyson, Leonard Rice-Oxley, H. F. B. Brett-Smith and Maurice Ridley, were opponents of what had been, until 1931, the reigning faction in the School of English. See also note 29 to the letter to Warnie of 24 October 1931.

80 Drinking parties.

81 Edward Maurice Hugh-Jones (1903–97) read History at New College. Oxford, in 1924, after which he read Philosophy. Politics and Economics (PPE) and look a BA in 1925. He was a lecturer at Keble College, 1926–7, and Tutor in Economics. 1927–59. He was Professor of Economics at Keele University. 1959–68. His works include (with E. A. Radice) An American Experiment (1936) and Woodrow Wilson and American Liberalism (1947).

82 Molière, Le Tartuffe (1664).

83 Molière, Tartuffe, or The Hypocrite, trans. Curtis Hidden Page (1912) Line 58.

84 This was probably William Taylor, who lived at Shotover Cottage, Old Road, Headington Quarry.

85 The 8 a.m. ‘early celebration’ of Holy Communion at Holy Trinity Church, Headington Quarry. This was an important turning point in Lewis’s life. For some time he had been attending matins and evensong in his college chapel and at Holy Trinity, but in participating in the sacrament, Lewis was doing something he knew would be blasphemous unless he was a believer. Jack knew his brother would understand the seriousness of his action.

      Warnie, too, went to Holy Communion on Christmas Day 1931. He wrote in his diary that day: ‘I attended the service with very mixed feeling, gladness predominating at once again finding myself a full member of the Church after so many years of indifference or worse…I came away feeling profoundly thankful that I have once again become a communicant, and intend (D.V.) [Deo Volente-“God Willing”] to go regularly at least four times a year in future’ (BF). On receiving the present letter from his brother, Warnie wrote on 17 January 1932: ‘A letter from | today containing the news that he too has once more started to go to Communion, at which I am delighted. Had he not done so, I, with my altered views would have found—hardly a bar between us, but a Jack of a complete identity of interest which I should have regretted’ (ibid.).

86 i.e. the Rev. Edward Foord-Kelcey.

87 Foord-Kelcey would no doubt have thought of donating his letter from Dr Johnson to Mrs Hester Thrale (1741–1821) to Pembroke College, Oxford, because this was the college of both Johnson and Foord-Kelcey himself. When he died in 1934, Foord-Kelcey left the letter to C. S. Lewis, who kept it for the rest of his life. Upon his death in 1963, Warnie gave it to Pembroke College.

88 The Somnium Scipiona (‘Dream of Scipio’) is the fable with which Cicero ends his De Republica.

89 Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (1847).

90 ‘one of those books which are not books’. Charles Lamb, Last Essays of Elia (1833), ‘Detatched Thoughts on Books and Reading’: ‘I can read anything which I call a book. There are things in that shape which [cannot allow for such. In this catalogue of books which are not books—Biblia A-Biblia—I reckon…all those volumes which “no gentleman’s library should be without.”’

91 Rose Macaulay, Mystery at Geneva (1922).

92 Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (1880).

1932

       TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W):

      [The Kilns]

      Jan 10th 1932

      My dear Arthur,

      I was glad to hear from you again, and sorry you are so dull. Perhaps you are suffering from too much turkey and ‘plumb’ pudding—or too many late nights and dances! How did you manage to get your mother’s consent to the introduction of a dog—I thought she was the insuperable difficulty?

      I quite understand the mood in wh. you fall back upon detective stories, though I have never been able to understand how that mood could lead to detective stories. I mean, I know well from experience that state of mind in which one wants immediate and certain pleasure from a book, for nothing—i.e. without paying the price of that slight persistence, that almost imperceptible tendency not to go on, which, to be honest, nearly always accompanies the reading of [a] good book. Not only accompanies by the way, but (do you agree) actually makes part of the pleasure. A little sense of labour is necessary to all perfect pleasures I think: just as (to my palate at least) there is no really delicious taste without a touch of astringency—the ‘bite’ in alcoholic drinks, the resistance to the teeth in nuts or meat, the tartness of fruit, the bitterness of mint sauce. The apple must not be too sweet, the cheese must not be too mild. Still, I know the other mood, when one wants a book of sheer pleasure.

In fact I have been going through such a mood lately. I have had to work v. hard all day this Vac. and in the evenings I have wanted relaxation. I have accordingly read The Wood Beyond the World, Rider Haggard’s The People of the Mist,¹ and am now at Kingsley’s Hereward the Wake.² In fact when I am in that state of mind I want not so much a grown-up ‘light’ book (to me usually the hardest of all kinds of reading) as a boy’s book;—distant lands, strange adventures, mysteries not of the American but of the Egyptian kind. Of course what makes detective stories appeal to you is that they were one of your first loves in the days when you used to come round and borrow Sherlock Holmes from my father, and therefore in reading them now you have the sense of return, you step back as into an old easy shoe—and