On December 27th, I finally finished the third volume of The Letters of C.S. Lewis (Walter Hooper, ed.). I bought the Kindle versions in January 2023, so I've had a yearlong journey in this work alone. I'm going to have to write another blog about the rest of the year with Lewis, but I also set myself to read all of Lewis's book-length literary criticism that I haven't read, so I've read through the OHEL volume, The Personal Heresy, A Preface to Paradise Lost, The Discarded Image (again), An Experiment in Criticism (again), and am finishing up Arthurian Torso and Studies in Words. Earlier I'd also read The Allegory of Love and Spenser's Images of Life.
But back to the letters: I feel as though I have immersed myself in a sprawling autobiography. Since I've spent the last year, off and on, reading through the volumes, I have, I believe, a sense of the more personal Lewis behind the published persona. That's not to say that the letters are not rhetorical, but they are more individualized. Here are some preliminary observations:
- The early letters point the centrality of Lewis's relationship with Arthur Greeves, a relationship that continued throughout his life. The pre-Christian Lewis was warm and open to Greeves, sometimes in ways that are disturbing. The general warmth of letters to friends throughout his life, however, is prefigured in these early letters.
- He seems (from a contemporary American perspective) to be unfailingly polite, even to his father (though, given that he was being supported by his father during the period of his higher education while he himself was secretly supporting Mrs. Moore and Maureen with those resources, there is a high degree of rhetorical hypocrisy in those letters, of which he repented later). I may, however, be misreading a kind of crisp "businesslike" tone with his father as polite, when it was actually more distant and disconnected. (In fact, after also immersing myself in English TV and contemporary fantasy over the past year and a half, I've come to realize the high degree of icy politeness in many exchanges is actually aggression. If anyone ever says, "May I have a word?", it's never good.) Very soon after his father's death, Lewis begins to confess his guilty feelings about his treatment of his father, and ultimately writes to correspondents evaluating his behavior as instances of sinfulness.
- The recorded correspondence does little to dispel the mystery of his early relationship with Mrs. Moore, nor does it clarify elements of his relationship with Arthur Greeves. [Greeves apparently censored some of Lewis's letters that he (Greeves) gave to Hooper for the first volume]. The letters do make clear, however, that as the 1940s progressed, Lewis wrote publicly about Mrs. Moore as "his mother." In the same way, he often characterizes his brother's troubles in the letters as "illness." Is this prevarication or a strong wish for privacy? By the late 1950s, however, he was beginning to speak publicly about his brother's alcoholism to some correspondents.
- As Lewis was writing apologetics for publication, he anticipated and rehearsed many of the arguments he would put more formally in published works in his letters to various correspondents, most specifically Dom Bede Griffiths, and occasionally to Owen Barfield (outside of the "Great War" correspondence). His "apologetic" correspondence continues even after he transitions from published apologetics to children's fiction.
- His long-term warm correspondence with Dorothy L. Sayers, Ruth Pitter, and Sister Penelope belie any real deep misogyny. It is clear that he seems to have had a sense of "gender" as a spiritual category, rather than a social construction; I do remember reading that Sayers had made at least one response to his statements about gender before her death in 1957.
- He had a significant correspondence with many of the literary figures of his generation, including T.S. Eliot, but also Sayers and even E.R. Eddison, whose fantasy novel, The Worm Ouroboros, he highly praised. In fact, he carried on a relatively lengthy correspondence with Eddison in a stylized version of fifteenth-early sixteenth century English. He corresponded several times with Arthur C. Clarke, not only about science fiction, but about the place and role of science and scientists in modern thought (of course, they strenuously disagreed with each other). When Clarke published Childhood's End in 1953, Lewis highly praised it, both to Clarke personally, and to Joy Davidman (before she became his wife). Clarke's publisher used a passage from one of Lewis's letters to Davidman about the book as part of a blurb in a later edition. It's probably significant that Lewis's earlier fictions were in the genre of science fiction/fantasy, which explains the more frequent correspondence with other writers of science fiction and fantasy.
- His early correspondence, especially, gives many clues about the kinds of works he did like (medievalist fiction and historical fiction, as well as novels, dominated his earlier reading for pleasure). He also read in a specific way (or for a specific purpose) that foreshadows An Experiment in Criticism.
- I was, however, completely startled by the literally hundreds of thank you notes he wrote in response to the Americans who donated so much food to him and his circle during the postwar years (1946-the early 1950s). Just a few further observations about these letters and the donations: my impression is that he must have received hundreds, maybe a thousand or more (!) pounds of American food and other items over the years of rationing in Britain; he is conscientious to answer with a thank-you each parcel (which he seems to have kept numbered records of in most cases); these answers were invariably graceful and often quite witty, as he struggled to find fresh ways to communicate his gratitude. There's a noticeable shift in his attitude toward the U.S. in these postwar years. Circa WWI, he and his correspondents are relatively dismissive of Americans and the U.S. After the outpouring of American generosity, he often comments that he would gladly visit America, except that Mrs. Moore needed relatively constant care.
- I noted a progression in Lewis's attitude towards T.S. Eliot in correspondence between the early post WWI years and his work with Eliot on the Prayer Book revision of the 1950s. I'd been struck when reading the Personal Heresy that Lewis's comments about the "subject" of an author's writing and the relationship between that "subject" and the individual author's life paralleled in many ways Eliot's assertions in "Tradition and the Individual Talent." It is clear that it's literary modernism (the literary movement) and "modernism" (the intellectual movement) that Lewis objected to. What Lewis seems to have objected to most in literary modernism was the lack of poetic form, and the aesthetic unpleasantness of many of its characteristic images.
- In The Pilgrim's Regress, Lewis had much to say about the reductionism of the Freudian view of the human personality, but he also had several things to say in the letters (not all of them negative) about Jung and archetypes (which he spells "archtypes"). Given Lewis's views on myth, it's not surprising that he might have had some affinities with Freud's erstwhile disciple.
- Whatever one might say about Joy Davidman's motivations for marrying Lewis, it is clear that from his perspective, they enjoyed an amazing few years of marriage. Lewis mentions their happiness and compatibility in many letters, and in one letter calls this the happiest period of his life.
- The timetable of Lewis's writing of A Grief Observed was also a revelation. After Davidman's death in mid-July of 1960, it was barely 2 1/2 months later that Lewis showed a draft of the book to Roger Lancelyn Green under pledge of secrecy.
- It is clear that from about the mid-1950s, Lewis's books, but especially his children's books, began to make significant money. His primary publisher, Jocelyn Gibb, began to collect the multitude of essays Lewis had written for some collection volumes after the success of an American-published collection.
- From the late 1950s to the early 1960s Lewis gained an understanding and appreciation for some existentialist thinkers (Buber and one French thinker), though he claims to have read little of Kierkegaard and understood less. In the early 1960s, he begins to mention Thomas Merton with appreciation, and is reading him.
This experience has given me a new perspective on Lewis's life, and unsettled my perceptions of his career and motivations for writing. Lewis certainly seems to have made a careful distinction between the kinds of writing he did: poetry, allegory, science fiction, supposal, apologetics, myth, children's fantasy, and literary criticism, but outside of the children's fantasy, which had a definite beginning and and end (that is, the first and last books of the Chronicles of Narnia), he wrote all of the other kinds pretty much throughout his life. He often talked about the genesis of his books in biological terms (he called it "being big with book") and their occasions, and continued to do a kind of pastoral apologetics until the end of his life in his correspondence. It is as though writing was a labor that became completely natural for him. He was also a quick and prodigious writer, judging from the volume of letters, diaries, lectures, books and essays of all kinds that issued from his pen.
