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

Martyn Skinner, was Griffiths’s closest friend at Oxford. After taking his BA in 1928 he spent his life as a farmer. For more about this charming man see Dom Bede Griffiths, The Golden Siring (1954).

6 Martyn Skinner (1906–93) and Lewis were to become friends a few years later. See Lewis’s letter to Skinner of 23 April 1942.

7 Lewis had misunderstood. In Catholic theology a proposition is said to be de fide (‘of faith’) if it has been expressly declared and defined by the Church to be true; there are, however, different degrees of certainty in Catholic theology. The highest order of certainty, de fide catholica, appertains to those truths, such as the inerrancy of the Bible, that are revealed by God and taught by the Church. When such a truth is solemnly defined by the pope or by a council it may also take the notation de fide definita, an example of this being the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. Lewis had in mind Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Aeterni Patris (1879). However, one cannot apply ‘de fide’ certainty to every word contained in the writings of St Thomas Aquinas: rather, it was the wisdom of St Thomas that Leo XIII wished to restore, as he said in Aeterni Patris, paragraph 31: ‘We exhort you, venerable brethren, in all earnestness to restore the golden wisdom of St. Thomas…The wisdom of St. Thomas, We say; for if anything is taken up with too great subtlety by the Scholastic doctors, or too carelessly stated—if there be anything that ill agrees with the discoveries of a later age, or, in a word, improbable in whatever way—it does not enter Our mind to propose that for imitation to Our age.’

8 Tommy and John were Arthur’s dogs.

9 Charles Williams, The Place of the Lion (1931).

10 Lewis’s ‘own book’ was The Allegory of Love.

11 Charles Dickens. The Old Curiosity Shop (1841).

12 See the biography of Edward Tangye Lean in CG.

13 The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, ed. Humphrey Carpenter (1981), letter to William Luther White of 11 September 1967, p. 388.

14 Lord David Cecil (1902–86), second son of the fourth Marquess of Salisbury, taught Modern History and English Literature at Wadham College, 1924–30, leaving Oxford in 1930 to pursue literary work in London. He returned in 1939 to become Fellow of English at New College, a position he held until he became Goldsmith’s Professor of English Literature in 1949. His numerous writings include a biography of William Cowper, The Stricken Deer (1929), as well as biographies of Lord Melbourne and lane Austen. See his biography in CG.

15 Dr Robert Emlyn Havard (1901–85) took a First in Chemistry at Keble College in 1921. He became a Catholic shortly afterwards, and because of Keble’s ban on Catholics, moved to Queen’s College, Oxford, where he received a degree of Bachelor of Medicine. He practised at London Hospital and the Radcliffe Infirmary, Oxford, and then taught in the Biochemistry Department of Leeds University. He returned to Oxford in 1934 to take over a surgery in Headington and St Giles. Lewis became his patient in 1934 and soon afterwards Havard joined the Inklings. Lewis gave him the nickname ‘Humphrey’ after the doctor in Perelandra. See his biography in CG.

16 Charles Leslie Wrenn (1895–1969) became a lecturer in English Language at Oxford in 1930, where he helped J. R. R. Tolkien with the teaching of Anglo-Saxon. In 1939 he was appointed Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of London, where he remained until 1946. When Tolkien became Merton Professor of English Language and Literature, Wrenn returned to Oxford to replace him as Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon, a post he held until his retirement in 1963. His writings include an edition of Beowulf (1940), The Poetry of Caedmon (1947) and A Study of Old English Literature (1967). See his biography in CG.

17 See Charles Williams in the Biographical Appendix. Williams, the author of seven ‘supernatural thrillers’ and numerous other works, was an employee of the Oxford University Press in London. All Lewis’s letters to Charles Williams, with the exception of the one dated 22 February 1939, are transcripts believed to have been made by Williams from the originals, which are lost. These transcripts, as well as Williams’s letter to Lewis of 12 March 1936, appear to have been typed on the same typewriter.

18 Charles Williams, Poems of Conformity (1917).

19 Charles Williams. Thomas Cranmer of Canterbury, acting edn (Canterbury: H. J. Goulden, 1936).

20 Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. c. 6825, fols. 48–9.

21 i.e. Williams’s Poems of Conformity.

22 It was probably The Pilgrim’s Regress.

23 Williams, Poems of Conformity, p. 78.

24 ibid.

25 Charles Williams, Many Dimensions (1931).

26 On the cover of The Allegory of Love.

27 Sir Humphrey Milford.

28 Ira is the Latin word for anger or wrath, one of the seven deadly sins; Sapientia is the Latin word for wisdom.

29 ‘enduring’ or ‘perennial philosophy’. The expression comes from the sixteenth-century theologian, Augustine Steuch (1497–1548), and was popularized by the German philosopher, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716).

30 Matthew 11:29–30: ‘Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.’

31 George Sayer (1914-) read English with Lewis, and took his BA from Magdalen in 1938. He served in the Army during the Second World War, and in 1949 became the senior English master at Malvern College. He retired in 1974. Over the years he became a close friend of Lewis, and is the author of Jack: C. S. Lewis and his Times (1988). See his biography in CG.

32