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

11 George Meredith, The Egoist (1879).

12 A character in Jane Austen, Emma (1816).

13 i.e. the former Mary Shelley, who had married Daniel Neylan in 1934. See Mary Neylan in the Biographical Appendix.

14 Sir Herbert Grierson, Milton and Wordsworth, Poets and Prophets: A Study of the Reactions to Political Events (1937).

15 E. K. Chambers, Sir Thomas Wyatt and Some Collected Studies (1933).

16 Sir Herbert Grierson, Cross Currents in English Literature of the XVIIth Century: or, The World, the Flesh and the Spirit, Their Actions and Reactions (1929).

17 Basil Willey, The Seventeenth Century Background: Studies in the Thought of the Age in Relation to Poetry and Religion (1934).

18 George Sherburn, The Early Career of Alexander Pope (1934).

19 J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit was published on 21 September 1937.

20 Lewis’s mother’s brother, Augustus Warren ‘Gus’ Hamilton (1886–1945). See The Hamilton Family in the Biographical Appendix to CL I.

21 Arthur’s trip to the United States was at the invitation of William Moncrief McClurg (1907-) of Belfast. The two young men met in the 1920s and, though unlike in many ways, they delighted in one another’s company and took a number of trips together. Arthur’s visit to America, presumably in the summer of 1936, was described by Dr McClurg in a letter to Walter Hooper of 25 April 1978: ‘We drove up to the Adirondack Mountains in New York state and stayed in Hurricane Lodge, a delightful place—chalets with balcony and main building and dining room: the air was so fresh after the City…We drove through Vermont state and visited some friends there, then we started on our trip to Cape Cod…There is quite an artists colony there and of interest to Arthur to see some paintings by local artists.’

22 He was referring to William Richard Morris, later Lord Nuffield, who had built Morris Motors about a mile from The Kilns. See note 30 to the letter to Arthur Greeves of 23 April 1935.

23 Frederick William Calcutt Paxford (1898–1979), gardener and handyman at The Kilns. Mrs Moore hired him shortly after they moved into The Kilns and he remained there until after Lewis’s death in 1963. Over the years he became an indispensable member of the family, lending the nine acres of ground, growing vegetables, managing an orchard, driving a car and often serving as cook. He never married. This inwardly optimistic, outwardly pessimistic man became the model for Puddleglum in The Silver Chair (1953). See his biography in CG.

24 François Mauriac, Vie de Jésus (1936).

25 Richard M. H. Quittenton, ‘Roland Quiz’ (1833–1914), Giant-land: or the Wonderful Adventures of Tim Pippin (London: [1874]; new edn, 1936).

26 Daniel Neylan (1905–69) was the husband of Lewis’s former pupil, Mary (Shelley) neylan.

27 Mrs Bennett had applied for a lectureship in Cambridge University and Lewis was supplying a letter of reference. The rest of the letter refers to her book, Four Metaphysical Poets: Donne, Herbert, Vaughan, Crashaw (1934).

28 ‘It is forbidden to believe this.’

29 These thoughts echo those found in Lewis’s essay ‘William Morris’ in SLE.

30 Bhagavad-Gita, ch. 2.

31 William Morris, The Earthly Paradise (1868–70); The House of the Wolfings (1889); The Well at the World’s End (1896).

32 This poem, entitled ‘Sonnet’, was published in The Oxford Magazine, vol. LIV (14 May 1936) under the pseudonym, ‘Nat Whilk’. It is reprinted in Poems and CP.

33 Charles Williams’s new supernatural thriller, Descent into Hell (1937).

34 A character in one of Williams’s other supernatural thrillers, War in Heaven (1930).

35 Gertrude Stein (1874–1946), American author who lived in Paris and turned her home into a salon for the avant-garde. Lewis disliked her idiosyncratic poems such as Tender Sultans (1914) which carried fragmentation and abstraction to the point of idiocy.

36 ‘Under the Mercy’ was perhaps Williams’s favourite formula. It appeared in ch. 10 of Descent into Hell, at the end of many of his letters, and even on his gravestone.

37 i.e. lowest common multiple.

38 Edgar Frederick Carritt (1876–1964), Lewis’s tutor in Philosophy, was Fellow of Philosophy at University College, 1898–1941. See his biography attached to the letter to Albert Lewis of 1 May 1920 (CL I, pp. 485–6).

39 During this time the Bodleian Library was open every day from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m., but on 1 July 1938 it began closing at 1 p.m. on Saturdays and all day Sunday.

40 Lewis was imitating lines 92 and 95–6 of the Anglo-Saxon poem, The Wanderer, which may be translated:

      Where went the horse, where went the hero? Where went the hoard-giver? ……How the time has gone, Has darkened under night’s helmet as if never had been!

1938

As mentioned earlier, the editors of the Oxford History of English Literature, F. P. Wilson and