Selected Writings of C.S. Lewis

Remember what St. John says ‘If our heart condemn us, God is stronger than our heart.’ The feeling of being, or not being, forgiven & loved, is not what matters. One must come down to brass tacks.

If there is a particular sin on your conscience, repent & confess it. If there isn’t, tell the despondent devil not to be silly.

You can’t help hearing his voice (the odious inner radio) but you must treat it merely like a buzzing in your ears or any other irrational nuisance.

Today I have been revisiting old haunts, taking one of the long rambles that made me so happy in my bachelor days.... Every stile or clump of trees, summoned me into a past kind of happiness, my pre-Joy happiness.

But the invitation seemed to me horrible. The happiness into which it invited me was insipid. I find that I don’t want to go back again and be happy in that way.

It frightens me to think that a mere going back should even be possible. For this fate would seem to me the worst of all; to reach a state in which my years of love and marriage should appear in retrospect a charming episode — like a holiday — that had briefly interrupted my interminable life and returned me to normal, unchanged. And then it would come to seem unreal — something so foreign to the usual texture of my history that I could almost believe it had happened to someone else. Thus Joy would die to me a second time; a worse bereavement than the first. Anything but that.

Did you ever know, dear, how much you took away with you when you left? You have stripped me even of my past, even of the things we never shared.

The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books.

Not, of course, that there is any magic about the past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes. They will not flatter us in the errors we are already committing; and their own errors, being now open and palpable, will not endanger us.

Two heads are better than one, not because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction.

It is very hard to give any general advice about writing. Here’s my attempt.

(1) Turn off the Radio.

(2) Read all the good books you can, and avoid nearly all magazines.

(3) Always write (and read) with the ear, not the eye. You should hear every sentence you write as if it was being read aloud or spoken. If it does not sound nice, try again.

(4) Write about what really interests you, whether it is real things or imaginary things, and nothing else. (Notice this means that if you are interested only in writing you will never be a writer, because you will have nothing to write about…)

(5) Take great pains to be clear. Remember that though you start by knowing what you mean, the reader doesn’t, and a single ill-chosen word may lead him to a total misunderstanding.

In a story it is terribly easy just to forget that you have not told the reader something that he needs to know–the whole picture is so clear in your own mind that you forget that it isn’t the same in his.

(6) When you give up a bit of work don’t (unless it is hopelessly bad) throw it away. Put it in a drawer. It may come in useful later. Much of my best work, or what I think my best, is the re-writing of things begun and abandoned years earlier.

(7) Don’t use a typewriter. The noise will destroy your sense of rhythm, which still needs years of training.

(8) Be sure you know the meaning (or meanings) of every word you use.

On Easter morning we had the biggest crowd at 8 o'clock that I've ever seen - I was one of four in our pew; trying to rejoice in spirit that there should be so many communicants but very far from comfortable in the flesh - my hip being tightly wedged against the pillar and my bottom resting on the angle at the end of the bench.

No veils should hide the truth, no truth should cow The dear self-pitying heart...

Young Lewis wrote two long narrative poems. Dymer was the second.

A first impression is one of inner conflict within the author. The hatred of systems and yet the hopelessness of rebellion. The love of beauty, and yet the betrayal of it. The love of nature, and nature's indifference. The ultimate tragedy of existence.

Overall, I would not call it great poetry, but poetic beauty lies largely in the eye of the beholder.

Even with knowledge of lewisian themes, the meaning of the poem is a tad obscure. Thankfully, another edition was issued in 1950 in which Lewis himself outlined his intentions. (He stated that nobody noticed the reprint and it sold less than a hundred copies, but at least we have his thoughts on the work.)

Dymer got a few good reviews, but no real readership. Lewis later stated:

"...I gave up. The old wound aches just a little at the touch. Though in graver moods I wonder what on earth or out of it would have happened to me if I really had become a successful poet in my twenties."

Lewis' two narrative poems are now in the public domain and are available on Gutenberg.org. If you are at all interested, I suggest reading it first (how else can you judge whether a work stands on its own?) and then going back to read Lewis' own preface. But if you're more interested in enjoyment than unbiased evaluation, do it the other way around.

You can see foreshadows of his later beliefs about beauty and the source of it. But here he feels it is a deception.

“Ah, but the earth never did sing for joy.... There is a glamour on the leaf and flower And April comes and whistles to a boy Over white fields: and, beauty has such power Upon us, he believes her in that hour, For who could not believe? Can it be false, All that the blackbird says and the wind calls?..." He had worshipt earth, and this —The venomed clouds fire spitting from the abyss, This was the truth indeed, the world’s intent Unmasked and naked now, the thing it meant.... “She said, for this land only did men love The shadow-lands of earth. All our disease Of longing, all the hopes we fabled of, Fortunate islands or Hesperean seas Or woods beyond the West, were but the breeze That blew from off those shores: one farspent breath That reached even to the world of change and death.... "She shone like flame Before me in the dusk, all love, all shame— Faugh!—and it was myself..... “So beautiful, she seemed Almost a living soul. But every part Was what I made it—all that I had dreamed— No more, no less: the mirror of my heart..." “To obey that springtime and my blood, This was to be unarmed and off my guard And gave God time to hit once and hit hard."

At its original appearance in 1926, Dymer, like many better books, found some good reviews and almost no readers. The idea of disturbing its repose in the grave now comes from its publishers, not from me, but I have a reason for wishing to be present at the exhumation.

Nearly a quarter of a century has gone since I wrote it, and in that time things have changed both within me and round me; my old poem might be misunderstood by those who now read it for the first time.

I am told that the Persian poets draw a distinction between poetry which they have 'found' and poetry which they have 'brought': if you like, between the given and the invented, though they wisely refuse to identify this with the distinction between good and bad. Their terminology applies with unusual clarity to my poem.

What I 'found', what simply 'came to me', was the story of a man who, on some mysterious bride, begets a monster: which monster, as soon as it has killed its father, becomes a god. This story arrived, complete, in my mind somewhere about my seventeenth year.

The better swordsman with a smile His cool passado gives; Smooth is the flooding of the Nile By which all Egypt lives.

In 1958, the London Observer ran an essay by Lewis with this picture.

When acquaintances commented on it, Lewis responded:

You and I have both known happy marriage. But how different our wives were from the imaginary mistresses of our adolescent dreams! So much less exquisitely adapted to all our wishes; and for that very reason (among others) so incomparably better.

The purported inspiration behind the character of Lucy in the Chronicles of Narnia has died.

The character was named after Owen Barfield's daughter Lucy, but was said to be patterned after a teenager who stayed at the Kilns during WWII. Her name was Jill Flewett (she later married a Freud), although the Lewis brothers called her June. She impressed them both.

Warnie wrote in his diary:

"Our dear, delightful June Flewett leaves us tomorrow... She is not yet eighteen, but I have met no one of any age further advanced in the Christian way of life... She is one of those rare people to whom one can venture to apply the word 'saintly.'

C.S. Lewis wrote to Jill's mother:

When June goes the only bright spot in our prospect goes with her. But, putting ourselves out of it, I think she ought to go [to drama school]... in talking to June it is no use to appeal to selfish motives (she is, without exception, the most selfless person I have ever known) I told her she had a duty to you and her father in the matter...

Lewis paid for her schooling.

Jill later recounted:

Of course I fell madly in love with him. It was a tremendous crush. I was 16. And I would have lain down and he could have walked all over me for the next two years... I'm sure I made a complete idiot of myself. He was a very honourable man - he wouldn't have taken any sort of advantage of it.... Every smile, every kind word was like daylight, like the summer... Lewis was the first person who made me believe that I was an intelligent human being and the whole of the time I was there he built up my confidence in myself and in my ability to think and understand. He never put me down. He never made me feel foolish, no matter how small my contribution towards any conversation might be... He built up my self-esteem.

In an ironic twist of fate, she was scheduled to come visit Lewis for the first time in many years the very night he died.

Jack had not been well and the night President Kennedy was assassinated I rang the Kilns to say I was coming. I actually telephoned within half an hour of Jack's death.

Her daughter Emma produced a tribute which aired on BBC 4. Jill's coffin was decorated by her granddaughter Martha.

There is a strange idea abroad that in every subject the ancient books should be read only by the professionals, and that the amateur should content himself with the modern books.

Thus I have found as a tutor in English Literature that if the average student wants to find out something about Platonism, the very last thing he thinks of doing is to take a translation of Plato off the library shelf and read the Symposium. He would rather read some dreary modern book ten times as long, all about "isms" and influences and only once in twelve pages telling him what Plato actually said.

The error is rather an amiable one, for it springs from humility. The student is half afraid to meet one of the great philosophers face to face. He feels himself inadequate and thinks he will not understand him.

But if he only knew, the great man, just because of his greatness, is much more intelligible than his modern commentator. The simplest student will be able to understand, if not all, yet a very great deal of what Plato said; but hardly anyone can understand some modern books on Platonism.

It has always therefore been one of my main endeavors as a teacher to persuade the young that firsthand knowledge is not only more worth acquiring than secondhand knowledge, but is usually much easier and more delightful to acquire.