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

at the Breakfast Table and Other Reminiscences, ed. James T. Como (1979; new edn, 1992), pp. 109–10.

10 See Janie King Moore in the Biographical Appendix to CL I.

11 See Dame Maureen Dunbar of Hempriggs in the Biographical Appendix to CL I.

12 See Edward Francis Courtenay ‘Paddy’ Moore in the Biographical Appendix to CL I.

13 Roger Lancelyn Green and Walter Hooper, C. S. Lewis: A Biography (London: Bles, 1974; rev. edn, 2002), ch. 2, p. 46.

14 see p. 496.

15 See p.766.

16 ‘It All began with a Picture…’, Of This and Other Worlds, ed. Walter Hooper (London: Collins, 1984; Fount, 2000), p. 64.

17 ‘Christian Apologetics’,. EC, p. 158.

18 ‘Version Vernacular’, The Christian Century, Vol. LXXV (31 December 1958), p. 515. Reprinted in EC, p. 779.

19 Letter to Canon John Beddow of 7 October 1945, p. 674.

20 See p. 869.

21 Letter to Nancy Warner of 26 October 1963 quoted in Green and Hooper, C. S. Lewis: A Biography, p. 415.

22 Letter to Walter Hooper of 5 April 2003.

       ABBREVIATIONS

      AMR = All My Road Before Me: The Diary of C. S. Lewis 1922–1927, edited by Walter Hooper (1991)

      BBC = Written Archive Centre, British Broadcasting Corporation

      BF = Brothers and Friends: The Diaries of Major Warren Hamilton Lewis, edited by Clyde S. Kilby and Marjorie Lamp Mead (1982)

      Bod = Bodleian Library, Oxford University

      CG = Walter Hooper, C. S. Lewis: A Companion and Guide (1996)

      CL I = C. S. Lewis, Collected Utters. Vol. I: Family Letters 1905–1931, edited by Walter Hooper (2000)

      CP = C. S. Lewis, Collected Poems, edited by Walter Hooper (1994)

      EC = C. S. Lewis, Essay Collection and Other Short Pieces, edited by Lesley Walmsley (2000)

      L = Letters of C. S. Lewis, edited with a Memoir by W. H. Lewis (1966); revised and enlarged edition edited by Walter Hooper (1988)

      Lambeth Palace = Lambeth Palace Library, Lambeth Palace, London

      LU = London University Germanic Institute

      M = Magdalen College, Oxford

      OUP = Oxford University Press, Oxford

      P = Private collection

      Prin = Princeton University Library, Princeton, New Jersey

      SBJ = C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life (1955)

      SLE = C. S. Lewis, Selected Literary Essays, edited by Walter Hooper (1969)

      T = Taylor University, Upland, Indiana

      Tex = University of Texas at Austin

      UC North Wales = University College of North Wales, Bangor

      V = Congregation of the Poor Servants of Divine Providence, Verona, Italy

      Vic = University of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada

      W = Marion E. Wade Center, Wheaton College, Wheaton, Illinois

      WHL = W. H. Lewis’s unpublished biography of his brother, ‘C. S. Lewis: 1898–1963’. The greater part of the narrative was brought together as a ‘Memoir’ and it was published with most of the letters as Letters to C. S. Lewis, edited with a Memoir by W. H. Lewis (1966). There are two typescripts of ‘C. S. Lewis: 1898–1963’, one in the Bodleian Library, and one in the Wade Center

1931

      Volume I of the Collected Letters ended with a letter of 18 October 1931 in which Lewis described to his friend, Arthur Greeves, what happened on the night of 19 September when J. R. R. Tolkien and Hugo Dyson dined with him at Magdalen College. The three of them were up until 4 a.m. discussing Christianity and its relation to myth. Lewis wrote:

      What Dyson and Tolkien showed me was this: that if I met the idea of sacrifice in a Pagan story I didn’t mind it at all: again, that if I met the idea of a god sacrificing himself to himself…I liked it very much and was mysteriously moved by it: again, that the idea of the dying and reviving god (Balder, Adonis, Bacchus) similarly moved me provided I met it anywhere except in the Gospels. The reason was that in Pagan stories I was prepared to feel the myth as profound and suggestive of meanings beyond my grasp…Now the story of Christ 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.

      Volume II opens with a letter to Warnie who had left on 9 October for a second tour of China with the Royal Army Service Corps. He would not reach Shanghai until 17 November. Meanwhile, at Magdalen, Lewis was giving a series of lectures on Textual Criticism and writing The Allegory of Love. He, Mrs Moore and Maureen Moore had been in their new home, The Kilns, for a year.

       TO HIS BROTHER (W):

      [Magdalen College)

      Oct. 24th 1931

      My dear W—

      Your letter from Gibraltar has arrived and my reading aloud of as much as was suitable to the female capacity had something of the air of an event in the household. As you say it seems long ago to our day at Whipsnade and so many things have since followed it into the past that I must write history and get you up to date before I can talk.

By a stroke of bad luck for you Mr. Thomas rang up and invited you and me to tea the day after you had left.¹ His wife was there at the meal but he took me into his study afterwards and we had quite a long talk. He is, I think, a little shy, or at any rate in a first meeting seemed to be feeling his way with me. He is a moderate conservative, an enemy of the wireless, has travelled a good deal, encourages us ‘not to stand any nonsense’ from the fox-hunters, was bred in Surrey, approves strongly of our afforestation programme,² and knows his Foord Kelsie.³

      I ventured to remark that I noticed how a