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

across a writer of sufficient imaginative power to give one a new slant on reality: & this is just what you seem to me to have achieved. And what is more, you have not done it in a solemn & oppressive way but with a delightful combination of beauty, humour & deep seriousness. I enjoyed every bit of it, in spite of starting with a decided prejudice against “voyages to Mars”. I wish you had felt able to report the conversation in which Ransom explained the Christian mysteries to the eldil, but I suppose that would be too much to ask. We should be content with the fact that you have turned “empty space” into heaven!’ (Bodleian Library. MS. Eng. c. 6825, fol. 68).

35 Inch. 5 of Out of the Silent Planet (London: 1938; HarperCollins, 2000), Ransom is in the spaceship on the way to Mars: ‘He had read of “Space”: at the back of his thinking for years had lurked the dismal fancy of the black, cold vacuity, the utter deadness, which was supposed to separate the worlds…now…the very name “Space” seemed a blasphemous libel for the empyrean ocean of radiance in which they swam…it was the womb of worlds, whose blazing and innumerable offspring looked down nightly even from the earth with so many eyes—and here, with how many more! No: Space was the wrong name. Older thinkers had been wiser when they named it simply the heavens’ (p. 29).

36 i.e. The Allegory of Love.

37 CG, p. 477.

38 See Roger Lancelyn Green in the Biographical Appendix. Green was reading English Literature and had been attending Lewis’s ‘Prolegomena’ lectures. He had written to thank Lewis for Our of the Silent Planet.

39 Olaf Stapledon, Last and First Men (1930; Penguin, 1937).

40 J. B. S. Haldane, ‘Last Judgement’, Possible Worlds and Other Essays (1927). John Burdon Sanderson Haldane (1892–1964), geneticist, was Professor of Genetics at University College, London, 1933–57. For most of his life he was a disillusioned Marxist. Haldane hated Lewis’s science fiction novels and attacked them in his essay ‘Auld Hornie, F.R.S.’ in the Modern Quarterly (Autumn 1946). Lewis’s ‘Reply to Professor Haldane’ is published in Of This and Other Worlds, ed. Walter Hooper (London: Collins, 1982; Fount, 2000).

41 H. G. Wells, The First Men in the Moon (1901).

42 Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875–1950), American novelist remembered principally for his Tarzan stories and who wrote a number of stories set on other planets.

43 Athanasius Kircher (1602–1680), Iter Exstaticum Coelestre (1656).

44 Voltaire, Micromégas (1753).

1939

       TO DAPHNE HARWOOD (BOD):

      The Kilns,

      Headington Quarry,

      Oxford.

      Jan. 6th 1939.

      Dear Daphne

      Thanks very much for your nice long letter—I hope I have not thereby stolen time which ought to have been employed in the best of all occupations, and by you, perforce, the most neglected-doing nothing.

      As a bachelor who has seldom even talked to children I should be very foolish if I gave any advice as to books for Lawrence: if I felt qualified to choose books I should send books—not tokens.

      But John is right about rum. It has a romantic interest. It is one of those things which give us a sensuous and an imaginative pleasure at once. And the only reason why I am going to refuse your very tempting offer of a bottle (or was it a keg? do say it was a keg—or a noggin) of rum is that it is your positive wifely duty to see that Cecil drinks it all. If he turns coy and altruistic and says (as men will say anything) that he doesn’t care for rum, you may reply lightly in the Latin tongue Hoc est omnis meus oculus, or Nonne narrabis ista marinis equestribus?¹ He has not forgotten dancing through the streets of Caerleon with the bottle of white rum in one hand and his cutlass in the other. Of course for domestic purposes the question shd. not be put in a nakedly convivial form: some proper pretext about wet feet, overwork, or the like will do gentle violence to his coyness. But ye maun ablains give it to the guideman, ma’am.²

      I don’t remember anything you said that day which could possibly offend anyone.

      All here sent their loves, and best wishes for the New Year. I hope it will be less exciting than the last but not with much confidence: one is reduced to the last form of hope now (I mean as regards this world) which consists in remembering that creaking gates hang long and things expected never happen. However, the prospect of leaving * this planet gets daily less terrible. Tell Cecil to write to me some time.

      Yours

      Jack Lewis

       TOA. K. HAMILTON JENKIN (BOD): ³

      The Kilns,

      Headington Quarry,

      Oxford.

      Jan 11th 1939

      My dear Jenkin—

      I had hoped to be dining somewhere in London to-night with you and Barfield and Harwood (who had, by the way, announced that he was bringing a bottle of Jamaica rum), but I heard yesterday that the arrangement was breaking down as far as they were concerned and to day the much worse news that you were smitten with a fell disease. Very bad luck!-and I suppose you have, in addition, hated every minute of this fine old English winter: unless, at least, your tastes in weather have changed very much since the old days.

      I who profess the predilections of a polar bear tried to make believe that I was enjoying it, but the week before Christmas wore the pretence pretty thin: it wasn’t so much the snow underfoot that depressed me as the vast clot of lentil soup which had replaced the sky.

      The second fall in the first week of the New Year spoiled my annual January walking tour with my brother. We had one glorious day crossing Wenlock Edge (our course was from Church Stretton to Ludlow)⁴ with new snow on the ground and cloudless sunshine from end to end of the skies—beautiful shadows. And out in the country snow is a great betrayer. Rabbits and squirrels became as easy to see as bushes. The tracks are rather exciting, too, aren’t they? To climb up some unearthly lane to a hill crest far from any house, still early in the morning, and find from the innumerable paw-prints how long ago the animals’ day has begun. But on the second day we had to give it up before noon and make the rest of the way by train.

      Which, by the way, on those remote railways took us nearly as long as it would have done on foot and was rather fun. We had pleasant hours sitting by roaring fires with the combined station-master, porter, and ticket clerk of tiny stations: and one specially good talk with a little Welsh porter about four feet tall (probably a leprechaun disguised as a porter) who praised Balfour’s Foundations