"Come on, Howard!" urged Helen, pausing to look back at the small, stooped man with the vacant smile. She glanced at her son and sighed.
Todd shook his head with amusement. "I can't walk that slow even if I try." His eyes were on his father as he spoke to her. Erin said nothing. The three watched Howard approach, passing a bank. When he was still several yards from them, they turned away and began walking again, resuming the conversation they had interrupted. After a few minutes, Erin glanced back. Howard had stopped completely in the middle of the sidewalk, his head down as if listening to or waiting for something.
Helen glanced back too and again they all stopped walking. "I've taken him to doctor after doctor," she said. "He keeps saying he doesn't feel well, but they never find anything wrong. There's no reason why he can't walk this far."
This time they waited interminably until he caught up with them, although he seemed to walk even slower when they waited than when they walked ahead of him.
"Where are we going?" he asked in a small voice.
"Down to the shops. It's just a couple more blocks."
"I don't think--" His voice barely carried over the sound of a passing car. Todd cupped his ear and leaned toward him to hear better, but Howard had stopped talking.
"Would you like to go back to the hotel?" asked Helen.
He smiled apologetically, his kind eyes catching Erin's. She thought he said, "--that would be better." She wasn't sure.
"Here's the key, if you need it," Helen said matter-of-factly. "Remember to push it all the way in and turn the doorknob to the right at the same time. Why don't you just buy a newspaper and wait for us in the lobby-- Do you know how to get back?"
It was hard to tell from his vague gesture and inaudible response whether he had said yes or no.
"Just go straight back along this street," she told him. "It'll be on your right. The Surf and Sand."
He took little steps, revolving in a tight, stiff circle, until he was facing the way they'd come. The hotel was not in sight.
"Wait for us in the lobby. Don't have your lunch until we get back. We'll eat when we get back."
He held the room key up and looked at her inquiringly.
"You won't need the key. Just keep it in your pocket." She had already taken it from him and dropped it into his shirt pocket. Then she turned. They were standing beside a bakery.
"Don't those cinnamon rolls smell good!" she said. "You'll be all right, Howard," she told him and started walking away. Todd and Erin fell into place beside her.
Erin's eyes sought him out when they reached the corner. Howard was standing where they had left him, feeling his pocket uncertainly and gazing down the sidewalk toward the unseen goal. By the time they reached the next corner, where the road bent, Howard was taking an experimental step in the direction they'd come from.
Helen glanced back at her. "I have to make him do things for himself or he'd let himself become totally helpless," she explained, though no one had asked.
--
"Dad," Todd said after lunch, drawing his father aside, "we found something Mom would like for her birthday. It's a painting." He paused but there was no answer. "A painting," he repeated. "She really wants it."
Erin watched for her father-in-law's reaction, but the pale face was impassive.
Then, "How would I--" The man struggled to birth his thoughts in words. "How--?"
"Yes?"
Howard seemed to be searching mentally. His hands fluttered, then drifted to his sides. He smiled humbly and shrugged. "I forgot what I was going to say."
"You can just write on the card that that's what you're giving her, okay?"
Howard didn't say anything.
"Okay, Dad?" Todd's voice was louder, more insistent.
"Okay," said Howard.
--
"Well, it's all set," Todd told Erin, as they let themselves into their room. "He'll tell her on the card at the party tonight."
"Does he even have a card?"
"I didn't think of that. He has to have a card!"
"I could take him to buy one. I wouldn't mind."
--
As the two of them started out, the aged, shrunken man and the daughter-in-law half his age, she matched her pace to his. She didn't know what to say to him. He has always been so self-assured, the classic self-made millionaire. She hadn't know what to say then and she still didn't, but she felt closer to him now, protective. Besides, now he wasn't any bigger than she was.
They inched from the elevator, across the hall, through the lobby.
"This way," she said, indicating. "Down these stairs."
They were wide stairs and there was no railing. He teetered unsteadily as he placed all his weight on one foot so he could lower the other to the top step.
She reached out and slipped her hand into his. This is the first time I've touched him, she thought, in the 20 years I've known him, unless you count the hug I gave him after Todd announced we wanted to get married.
"You mean you want to get engaged," Todd's mother had clarified firmly. Erin had hugged her, too, after Helen had dabbed her eyes and Howard had said, with genuine pleasure, "Welcome to the family!" Erin hadn't known back then that Todd's family never hugged except on certain very set occasions. At the airport, after long separations. At funerals, maybe. On Christmas morning.
The hand was dry and cool, like a leaf on some shady tree in summer. Erin took the steps slowly, pausing as her father-in-law extended a cautious shoe from one to the next, his free hand still feeling vaguely for the railing that wasn't there.
At the bottom she released his hand a little self-consciously and they resumed walking. Across the sidewalk, around the lamppost, to the curb. Should she point out that the light was red and they couldn't cross yet or would that be patronizing? Instead of speaking, she tried to herd him with the merest touch on his sleeve, then, when the light changed, on the small of his back. The light was red again before they got across.
He stepped up onto the curb without help and she said again, "It's this way." They walked past a dentist's office and a yogurt place; seagulls mewed overhead. Erin smiled at a little boy going the other way with his mother; the boy's shirt read, "I get chocolate and nobody gets hurt." She started to point it out to Howard and changed her mind. He hadn't noticed the boy, the shirt, or the fact that she had opened her mouth to speak. Should she speak--about something else? About anything? It seemed up to her to make conversation.
She tried to steer him with her presence, to will him around people in their path. Groups parted and flowed around them. They passed a restaurant, a toy store. The town seemed endless and there were endless blocks still ahead of them. Two, maybe even three, she couldn't remember.
Still they trudged together without speaking and though Howard did not seem to feel awkward in the silence, she burst out, "So, you're going to buy Helen that painting for her birthday!"
His answer confused her. "She'd just take it back." Or is that what he had said? Had she heard wrong?
"I'm sure she'll like it," she ventured. She had never disagreed with him before and she did so now obsequiously. "She seems to like it a lot."
They were passing a pizza parlor. From inside came the aroma of warm dough, the clinking of glasses. In the middle of the sidewalk a young girl on a high stool, like a lifeguard's chair, reached down to hand them a discount coupon for a large cheese pizza.
Howard hadn't answered her. From his silence, Erin found herself thinking, He doesn't want to buy her the painting. Aloud she said, "Was there something else you'd rather get her?"
"I usually get her clothes," he said. His voice trailed off. "She likes clothes."
"Would you like me to help you pick out some clothes?"
"Yes," he said. He sounded relieved. "She likes clothes."
There was a store on the corner with casual women's suits in the window. White suits with gold braid outlining the blazer, navy suits with gold braid. Docilely, Howard let Erin steer him to a rack.
"How about this?"
He didn't respond as she held up the white suit, and she sensed the same something, a hesitation, that said no. She understood. His wife's birthday wasn't broadcloth and buttons with anchors on them. it was femininity and elegance. She led him to another rack.
"Or this?" She held up a pink silk blouse.
"I think--" He reached out jerkily as if to touch it and his head bobbed imperceptibly.
"With a skirt? Or pants? A jacket?"
It was too many choices at once. She backed off.
"Would you like to buy something else with it?"
He nodded mutely.
"A skirt?" She held one up. His hands fluttered, indicating, she thought, that she should hold the outfit against herself so he could evaluate it. That's how he always shopped for Helen, Erin remembered now. The family joked about how Howard would always pick out a salesgirl who seemed about Helen's size to hold up the clothes and let him consider them.
As the clerk rang up the purchase, Howard reached behind him--so slowly Erin found herself holding her breath and had to let it out several times--and drew a fat wallet from his pocket. He opened it with both hands and stared at its contents.
"Two hundred twenty-three dollars and thirty-nine cents," the clerk said, for the second time.
Howard's fingers hovered over the bills, trembling.
"Two hundred," repeated Erin. "You can give her four fifties."
He began to extract the bills one at a time with little tugs, examining each one as he drew it out and again as he laid it on the counter. The clerk didn't seem impatient; Erin threw her a grateful glance.
When there were four fifties on the counter Erin prodded, "A twenty and three ones-- Make it four ones," she amended hastily. "She'll give you change." She resisted the desire to reach into his wallet and help him.
He's a little child, she thought. A lost, bewildered child, losing his sight, his hearing, his memory--everything familiar. The thick wallet made him seem all the more vulnerable.
The clerk rang up the order and handed Erin the change, which she passed on to Howard, and the box, in a paper bag with handles. She handed that to Howard, too.
"Shall we buy a card?"
"Where?" His voice faltered a little.
"It's about a block from here," she said, thinking that a block seemed an incredible distance away and might take the rest of the day to reach. If only she could plant him somewhere and run on ahead to get it for him!
"We can go slowly."
He didn't have to stop in the middle of the street to rest when she let him set the pace. Todd was right; Howard didn't pick up his feet when he walked. "He slides his feet along," Todd had complained to her privately. "He shuffles--like an old man!"
At the stationers, she moved through the kaleidoscope of stationery and calendars and stuffed toys to the cards and through the cards to the birthday cards. She picked out one inscribed, "To my wife," glanced inside and handed it to Howard. He took it from her and studied it silently, first the picture on the front, then the sentiment inside.
"That might do," he said. But he looked at the rack. Erin handed him another. "This has a nice verse," she offered. But when he had worked his way through it, he said, "I don't think-- it isn't--" She had to tip her head to hear him.
"How about this one?" He was already holding a card in each hand. Gently she took from him the second one and replaced it with a third. She pretended to be absorbed in something else as he read the front and the inside and then the front again. His lips moved as he concentrated over and over on the sentiment inside.
"I think this one--" he said.
When they got back to the hotel, she took him to his door across the hall from hers and just before she unlocked it for him, she said, "It must be scary to be forgetting things." She squeezed the dry, cool hand.
--
"WHAT!" Todd burst out. "A skirt and blouse? But she wants the painting!"
"He didn't want to get her the painting," said Erin, her stomach contracting.
"Why did you even bring the subject up? We had it all arranged. He told me he'd get her the painting."
Erin didn't speak. Why had she brought it up? She tried to remember. Because she had to say something. Because it was taking them so long to get to the card shop and they had been side by side and she had to say something.
Todd was still speaking. "He just doesn't want to spend the money, that's all. It's selfishness, plain and simple."
"He wanted to buy her clothes," said Erin. It was all vanishing, the delight she had felt, being in sync with Howard. Her defense sounded weak in her own ears. "He chose them." There was no way Todd could understand, not in this mood.
"You should never have brought the subject up," he said. "We had it all arranged."
"We had a good time together." She knew he wouldn't consider that relevant, but somehow it mattered to her. "He-- He made his own decisions. I only gave him two things at a time and he knew what he wanted." But it was spoiled.
He sighed then. "It's not your fault."
--
They walked to dinner, all four of them. Erin dropped behind to walk with Howard, pausing when he paused. Couples in jeans surged around them, happy, their arms around each other. Young men called to each other over their heads.
At the restaurant, their server slid large menus down in front of each of them, cutting them off from each other.
"I'll have tortellini," Todd said after a minute.
"What do you want, Howard?" asked Helen from behind her menu.
Beyond her, Howard lowered his menu and looked at her meekly. "Do you understand what this says?" he asked her.
"How about lasagna?" said Helen. "You like lasagna."
Howard didn't respond. After a minute, he closed the menu and offered it to a passing busboy.
"The server will come get it," said Helen.
Erin thought about the present Helen would be opening later. She hoped Helen wouldn't be disappointed. I guess I ruined everything, she thought. I should have kept my mouth shut. But she didn't feel sorry. Helen could buy herself any painting she wanted.
The server was there, pencil poised.
"Tell her what you want, Howard."
"What are you getting?"
"You don't have to get what I'm getting. What do you want?"
"What do I want?" he echoed. He held the menu, still open.
"He'll have the lasagna," she told the server briskly. "You want wine, Howard?"
"You mean to drink?"
"Yes. Or do you want a soft drink?"
"A Coke." His voice was faint.
"You don't want caffeine this late in the day," Helen said. "How about a 7-Up?"
Howard didn't answer.
When they had all ordered, Todd held up his wine. "To your birthday, Mom!" Erin lifted her glass and waited until Howard realized something was expected of him and raised his 7-Up. They clinked glasses with Helen and drank.
"Tomorrow," Helen said to Todd and Erin, "we should try to visit the art festival. If we get there early, it won't be so hot."
"Or crowded," put in Todd.
Howard didn't look at them. He stared blankly at the floor beside their booth.
"We'll have to get around early. Where do you want to have breakfast?"
"We could eat at the hotel again," said Todd. "They're having that special buffet tomorrow."
"How about that little bakery we saw?" Helen asked them.
Howard roused himself and his head swiveled toward them. "What are you talking about?"
"Breakfast, Howard. We're talking about where to have breakfast." Howard's "Oh" was lost as Helen went on to the others, "They had those big cinnamon rolls that smelled so good, remember?"
"Where were they?" asked Howard.
"At that bakery we passed this morning, Howard. Don't you remember? Great big ones." She stretched the manicured fingers of both hands into a circle.
He gazed at her. "Not exactly," he said with a sheepish smile. He let his gaze sink to the floor again until the food came. Then he concentrated on carefully cutting his pasta, his broccoli, even his roll, spearing each piece with deliberation and raising it mechanically to his mouth. When Helen turned to speak to her son, Erin saw Howard over Helen's shoulder. He had paused, butter knife raised in one hand, fork in the other. He was looking at his glass. She wanted to reach across Helen and help him; instead she watched painfully, losing track of Helen's words.
At last Howard looked at the fork, started to put it down, looked at the knife, did put it down. Then he put down the fork, too, and reached for the 7-Up with both hands. His shoulders slumped and his head tilted so the edges of his mouth could feel tremblingly for the top of the straw.
They had paid the bill and were starting out the door when they realized he was not with them. He was consulting the maitre d', who showed him to the restroom door. They waited out on the sidewalk, occasionally glancing back through the window. Three minutes, five, eight, ten--
"Is he lost?" his son asked irritably.
His wife said with amusement, "The other day he got up to go to the bathroom at home--and couldn't find it."
"That's sad," said his daughter-in-law. "There must be some Alzheimer's association that could help--"
"It's not Alzheimer's," said Helen, straightening up as Howard finally emerged from the restroom and began looking around for them. "He doesn't have Alzheimer's."
Saturday, June 5, 2010
Friday, June 4, 2010
STORY: The Swordfish
I remember them distinctly. A party of five: four barbecued swordfish and a scampi. A middle-aged couple, the man immaculately tailored, graying hair, conservatively cut. The woman, undoubtedly his wife, attractive in a worn, overstuffed way. She might have been pretty once and perhaps in a softer color still would be, but she wore black and its severity emphasized a kind of resignation about the eyes and jaw.
With them, three young people in their early to mid-twenties: a gentleman and two young ladies. One of the young ladies was especially striking. Blonde hair drawn back and secured somehow to the top of her head with a few loose tendrils escaping, as if artlessly--and yet the effect was one which other women might spend hours before the mirror or at their hairdresser's attempting vainly to copy.
From her features and her behavior with the somewhat nervous young gentleman to her left, I believe that they were sister and brother and that the other young lady, less stylish but suggesting more depth of character and perhaps a latent sense of puckish humor, was the young man's wife. I recall this party in particular because of the barbecued swordfish, our special that evening--not so much because they ordered it but because there was some difficulty among them regarding it.
The tip was not remarkable.
I am J. Stuart Taylor. I took my wife Evelyn out for her birthday. She wore the outfit I gave her. They were out of the mahimahi, so I had the swordfish.
You took us all out, Dad. You need to tell them you took us all out to dinner--Mom, Stacy, Beth and me. I'm Stuart's son Tom. Dad ordered the special: barbecued swordfish for four. I said that sounded good to me. I love swordfish.
See, the thing was, Beth--that's my wife--tried to do something good for Mom but the timing was bad, that's all. Mom should have stood up for herself. She's always sacrificing herself for everyone else. What a mess.
I'm Stacy Taylor. I don't know why this is such a big deal. Dad took us to this expensive seafood restaurant in San Diego for Mom's birthday. Dad wanted three of us to go in with him on the swordfish but I wasn't in the mood for swordfish. I ordered scampi.
Tom's sticking up for Beth but nobody made her order swordfish. Beth said she wanted swordfish and waited until Dad gave the server the order--and then she said she didn't want it, after everyone had agreed! She's been my sister-in-law for three years now and I still don't understand her at all.
My name is Evie Taylor and I'm Stuart's wife. I'm sure Beth didn't mean anything. You see, it was my birthday and Stuart said we could go out to dinner at Pierre's, down in San Diego--you know, the one right on the shore? I wore the black dress he bought me. Black isn't really my color but I wore my silver necklace and earrings with it and the kids said it looked real nice.
I was going to order the Dover sole--I never get Dover sole, hardly any restaurant has it on the menu anymore--but Stuart wanted the swordfish and he couldn't order it unless three of us had it, too, so I said I'd have the swordfish. It was his second choice, you know. He really wanted the mahimahi, but when the server came to take our order, he said they were out of the mahimahi. I couldn't see having Stuart disappointed twice.
Okay, I'm Beth. I'm the troublemaker. It's like everyone has already said: we went to the fish place for dinner. I don't really like fish but it was Evelyn's birthday and that's what she wanted. She was really pleased to find Dover sole on the menu. She said she loves Dover sole. She hadn't had it for a long time.
Stuart ordered first, but they were out of whatever it was. He looked taken aback. He said there wasn't anything else on the menu he wanted. The server suggested the special--the now infamous barbecued swordfish--if Stuart could find three others who wanted to order it with him. Stuart said all right, he'd have that and my husband said right away that he would too. He and his dad didn't have a problem with it because they both like swordfish.
That made two. There were three of us left. I knew Evelyn wanted the sole, and it was her birthday, so that meant Stacy and I had to order the swordfish.
It wasn't that Stacy didn't know what was expected of her. She's lived in this family all 23 years of her life; I've only been in it for three. Well, it's true, Stacy, it was expected of you.
Anyway, Stacy ordered scampi.
That left Evelyn and me. Evelyn said she'd have swordfish. It shouldn't have surprised me. The family always jokes about Evelyn being the one who volunteers to sit behind the post supporting the grandstand at sporting events.
Three down, one to go--and I was the only person left. I didn't want swordfish, barbecued or any other way. I don't even like fish. As I hesitated, I felt everyone waiting.
"I guess I'll have the swordfish," I said. They all relaxed and closed their menus. The server wrote it down. Just as he turned away, I burst out, "No, wait! I don't want swordfish, I want the steak!"
You would have thought I'd just announced I was a transvestite. All four faces turned toward me, not accusingly, just incredulous. No one in the family had ever done this before. I felt like a deer caught in four pairs of headlights.
I don't remember if anyone said anything or not. It seemed like the place broke into pandemonium, that people were telling me, "But you can't do that! Stuart can't get the swordfish without four people!"
Maybe all the accusations were in my own head but they were deafening. Stuart's eyes were blank with bewilderment, Stacy's rolled in disgust, Tom's darted back and forth from face to face. Evelyn busied herself rearranging the cloth napkin in her lap.
I didn't feel any of the satisfaction or relief, if not triumph, I expected to feel. What I felt was something very different, something more unpleasant even than the conflict I'd known a minute before. I felt as if I'd been caught urinating on the oriental carpet in the foyer.
"Evelyn doesn't want the swordfish either," I found myself saying desperately, "and it's her birthday. I think she should be able to have what she wants on her birthday."
I don't know what I expected; maybe I thought Evelyn would smile and say, "She's right. To be honest, I'd really rather have the sole."
But she didn't. She said hastily, placing a small, manicured hand on mine, "That's all right, Beth. I don't really care what kind of fish I have. All the fish is good here."
So there I was, hanging out to dry. I suppose Stuart could have said, "Oh, I didn't realize you didn't really want the swordfish, Evelyn. Don't just order it on my account. I'll get something else." Or Stacy could have said, "If three of you are willing to order the swordfish, I'll be the fourth. I can get the scampi some other time." Or Tom could have said, "It's Mom's birthday, Dad. Let her get what she wants."
But none of them did.
I looked at all those stunned faces and I said, "Never mind. I'll have the swordfish." Tom asked, "Are you sure it's what you want?" I looked at my lap, my face burning, and said, "Yes."
I'm sure the painful silence until our food came was in my head, too. The server brought our orders and after a minute Tom said it first. "How's your swordfish, Mom? My piece is kind of dry." Stuart and Evelyn agreed. "It's awfully dry."
I didn't say a word.
(First published in Inklings, Summer, 1994)
With them, three young people in their early to mid-twenties: a gentleman and two young ladies. One of the young ladies was especially striking. Blonde hair drawn back and secured somehow to the top of her head with a few loose tendrils escaping, as if artlessly--and yet the effect was one which other women might spend hours before the mirror or at their hairdresser's attempting vainly to copy.
From her features and her behavior with the somewhat nervous young gentleman to her left, I believe that they were sister and brother and that the other young lady, less stylish but suggesting more depth of character and perhaps a latent sense of puckish humor, was the young man's wife. I recall this party in particular because of the barbecued swordfish, our special that evening--not so much because they ordered it but because there was some difficulty among them regarding it.
The tip was not remarkable.
I am J. Stuart Taylor. I took my wife Evelyn out for her birthday. She wore the outfit I gave her. They were out of the mahimahi, so I had the swordfish.
You took us all out, Dad. You need to tell them you took us all out to dinner--Mom, Stacy, Beth and me. I'm Stuart's son Tom. Dad ordered the special: barbecued swordfish for four. I said that sounded good to me. I love swordfish.
See, the thing was, Beth--that's my wife--tried to do something good for Mom but the timing was bad, that's all. Mom should have stood up for herself. She's always sacrificing herself for everyone else. What a mess.
I'm Stacy Taylor. I don't know why this is such a big deal. Dad took us to this expensive seafood restaurant in San Diego for Mom's birthday. Dad wanted three of us to go in with him on the swordfish but I wasn't in the mood for swordfish. I ordered scampi.
Tom's sticking up for Beth but nobody made her order swordfish. Beth said she wanted swordfish and waited until Dad gave the server the order--and then she said she didn't want it, after everyone had agreed! She's been my sister-in-law for three years now and I still don't understand her at all.
My name is Evie Taylor and I'm Stuart's wife. I'm sure Beth didn't mean anything. You see, it was my birthday and Stuart said we could go out to dinner at Pierre's, down in San Diego--you know, the one right on the shore? I wore the black dress he bought me. Black isn't really my color but I wore my silver necklace and earrings with it and the kids said it looked real nice.
I was going to order the Dover sole--I never get Dover sole, hardly any restaurant has it on the menu anymore--but Stuart wanted the swordfish and he couldn't order it unless three of us had it, too, so I said I'd have the swordfish. It was his second choice, you know. He really wanted the mahimahi, but when the server came to take our order, he said they were out of the mahimahi. I couldn't see having Stuart disappointed twice.
Okay, I'm Beth. I'm the troublemaker. It's like everyone has already said: we went to the fish place for dinner. I don't really like fish but it was Evelyn's birthday and that's what she wanted. She was really pleased to find Dover sole on the menu. She said she loves Dover sole. She hadn't had it for a long time.
Stuart ordered first, but they were out of whatever it was. He looked taken aback. He said there wasn't anything else on the menu he wanted. The server suggested the special--the now infamous barbecued swordfish--if Stuart could find three others who wanted to order it with him. Stuart said all right, he'd have that and my husband said right away that he would too. He and his dad didn't have a problem with it because they both like swordfish.
That made two. There were three of us left. I knew Evelyn wanted the sole, and it was her birthday, so that meant Stacy and I had to order the swordfish.
It wasn't that Stacy didn't know what was expected of her. She's lived in this family all 23 years of her life; I've only been in it for three. Well, it's true, Stacy, it was expected of you.
Anyway, Stacy ordered scampi.
That left Evelyn and me. Evelyn said she'd have swordfish. It shouldn't have surprised me. The family always jokes about Evelyn being the one who volunteers to sit behind the post supporting the grandstand at sporting events.
Three down, one to go--and I was the only person left. I didn't want swordfish, barbecued or any other way. I don't even like fish. As I hesitated, I felt everyone waiting.
"I guess I'll have the swordfish," I said. They all relaxed and closed their menus. The server wrote it down. Just as he turned away, I burst out, "No, wait! I don't want swordfish, I want the steak!"
You would have thought I'd just announced I was a transvestite. All four faces turned toward me, not accusingly, just incredulous. No one in the family had ever done this before. I felt like a deer caught in four pairs of headlights.
I don't remember if anyone said anything or not. It seemed like the place broke into pandemonium, that people were telling me, "But you can't do that! Stuart can't get the swordfish without four people!"
Maybe all the accusations were in my own head but they were deafening. Stuart's eyes were blank with bewilderment, Stacy's rolled in disgust, Tom's darted back and forth from face to face. Evelyn busied herself rearranging the cloth napkin in her lap.
I didn't feel any of the satisfaction or relief, if not triumph, I expected to feel. What I felt was something very different, something more unpleasant even than the conflict I'd known a minute before. I felt as if I'd been caught urinating on the oriental carpet in the foyer.
"Evelyn doesn't want the swordfish either," I found myself saying desperately, "and it's her birthday. I think she should be able to have what she wants on her birthday."
I don't know what I expected; maybe I thought Evelyn would smile and say, "She's right. To be honest, I'd really rather have the sole."
But she didn't. She said hastily, placing a small, manicured hand on mine, "That's all right, Beth. I don't really care what kind of fish I have. All the fish is good here."
So there I was, hanging out to dry. I suppose Stuart could have said, "Oh, I didn't realize you didn't really want the swordfish, Evelyn. Don't just order it on my account. I'll get something else." Or Stacy could have said, "If three of you are willing to order the swordfish, I'll be the fourth. I can get the scampi some other time." Or Tom could have said, "It's Mom's birthday, Dad. Let her get what she wants."
But none of them did.
I looked at all those stunned faces and I said, "Never mind. I'll have the swordfish." Tom asked, "Are you sure it's what you want?" I looked at my lap, my face burning, and said, "Yes."
I'm sure the painful silence until our food came was in my head, too. The server brought our orders and after a minute Tom said it first. "How's your swordfish, Mom? My piece is kind of dry." Stuart and Evelyn agreed. "It's awfully dry."
I didn't say a word.
(First published in Inklings, Summer, 1994)
Thursday, June 3, 2010
STORY: When I Named the Kangaroo
"The woman took of its fruit and ate and tried to give some to her husband also but he would not eat. . ."
"Adam?" The soft voice came again, a little less confidently.
Before his eyes the purple fruit trembled, its surface slick with dew as she held it out to him. Shiny trails of juice ran down her hand to her elbow and purple pulp was under her fingernails.
"It's all right," she urged. "I ate some. It was good." Her wide, earnest expression contrasted with the absurd goatee dripping from her chin to the ground.
With an effort, he raised his stunned eyes from the fruit in her extended hand, pulling hers into focus. "But God said--"
"He said it was good. And it is."
"Everything He made is good," he agreed, seeing behind her the great leafed dome, weighed down with purple spheres. He became aware of the breeze softly riffling its branches, bees purring among its white blossoms. "But the fruit is not for us, Eve."
"It tastes good," she insisted. "If it tastes good, He would want us to eat it, wouldn't He?"
He reached out to touch her sticky hand. "Why, Eve? Why would you want it, when we have so much?"
She drew her hand from his and took another bite without speaking.
"He gives us mangoes and papaya and pineapple. We have aspens that tremble in the lightest air and sunlight through maple leaves. We have the smell of the moist earth after a rain and of jasmine at twilight and a thousand shades of color reflected in the sea at sunset. Only this tree, only this fruit, He has forbidden us. Is that so much to ask?"
"But knowledge is good," she persisted. "What is wrong with knowing good and evil and deciding for ourselves?" She turned and jerked more fruit from the tree, leaving the pits, coated with shredded fruit, dangling from their stems. "Have some!"
"We don't need that knowledge," he reasoned. "If something is good, He will tell us. Why would we want to decide for ourselves when the One who is wise can decide for us? You have done what He said brings death and I am afraid for you."
"You are stupid," she said, making up the word. "Maybe death is good, how do you know? Besides, we won't die. Look at me! I didn't."
The implications of this were too much for him.
"The Lord said--"
Her eyes, her outstretched hand, waited. In the silence, she could not say, "He was wrong," and Adam would not think it. He turned away.
Then she was angry.
"Don't you believe me?" she argued. "I tell you, I ate some and nothing happened."
"I believe you," he said uncomfortably.
"Well?"
Because he didn't know what else to do, he covered his ears and ran away.
Then she pouted. She would not speak to him and when he brought her the choicest of the sugar cane and the artichoke, as he always did, she flipped her head away and gave her attention instead to a lamb, crooning over it and scratching its back through its thick wool.
For the first time, he couldn't understand her.
When he heard the rustle of day settling into dusk, he was relived to see the Lord coming toward him as He did every evening.
"Where is she?" asked the Lord.
Adam looked around. Eve had crouched behind a sleeping emu, trying to pull some of its feathers up around her neck.
"Leave me alone!" she shouted defensively. "I don't like You anymore!"
"Have you eaten the fruit I commanded you not to eat?" The Lord's words were thunder but His look was rain.
"The serpent told me to," she said, her voice loud and tense. She avoided His gaze. "He said my eyes would be opened and I would be wise, like You." She stood up abruptly, looked the Lord in the face and hurled her words at Him.
"The serpent was right! You said I'd die--but I didn't die! I am wise! I'm like You! I can decide for myself what is good and what is evil. You wanted to keep me from knowing, didn't You? But I have the right to know!" Her eyes narrowed. "Yes, I ate the fruit--and I'm glad I did!"
The Lord turned to Adam. And you? He asked with His eyes.
Adam gazed into the Lord's face. "You told us not to," he said simply.
Turning back to Eve, the Lord said, "Because you have disobeyed, I will put alienation between you and your husband. You will hunger for his love and never be filled by it. You will long for his touch and never permit it."
The woman looked at the ground as He spoke, her arms crossed in front of her body. Now her voice was barely audible but edged with resentment. "Why didn't You tell me I was naked?"
Without answering, the Lord took the lamb Eve had been petting and with a motion wrung its neck. He severed the woolly pelt from its warm body and held it out. She shoved it away. He waited a moment but she kept a guarded distance. The Lord gently laid the skin on the grass. Then He was gone.
Night was falling and Adam felt an unaccustomed chill. He saw Eve reach out slowly, shivering, and pull the skin to her. She wrapped herself in it and hunkered down in misery. Adam went toward his wife and started to squat beside her but she jerked away, tightening her hold on the sheepskin.
"Cover yourself!" she said accusingly. "You are naked, too!"
"I am just as the Lord made me," he said, trying to reassure her, "and He called it good."
She covered her ears, as he had earlier. With the love and closeness he always felt toward her, something new was stirring inside him, a sadness. He wanted to take her into his arms and hold her against him but when he reached out, she knocked his arm aside. His bewilderment increased.
He sat silent for a few minutes, darting glances at her now and then as she continued to squeze herself tight and motionless. Then, not knowing exactly why, he said, "When I named the kangaroo, it wasn't you."
She didn't respond. He tried again. "None of the animals was right for me. The Lord put me to sleep and formed you and you were right." Again he stretched out a hand toward her.
Instantly she seized it and bit him hard on the thumb, then scrambled to her feet holding the sheepskin to her and ran from him.
In the darkness he could not see the blood but the bite hurt. When she was gone, his confusion gradually subsided. The donkey had bitten him once, when he offered it grain, but it didn't mean to. The breeze in the tops of the palms was familiar and comforting. The lion was rounding up its family with little approving grunts and from across the lake a parrot screeched a last goodnight.
Despite the heaviness in his heart, these things soothed Adam. Surely she would come back tomorrow and everything would be all right
It was good, it had to be good. That was how the Lord had made it. He curled up in a shallow indentation he had scraped in the dirt but it was a long time before he fell asleep.
The next morning he did not see the woman at all. She did not eat with him. They did not laugh together over the coyote cubs tumbling with their mother. They did not collect dewdrops from the giant pandanus leaves and let them slide into each other's mouths. They did not rub each other's backs or comb each other's hair with sticks or watch the shadows make patterns across each other's bodies as they rested lazily after making love. Adam was restless and the garden seemed lonely again, as it had before she was created.
In the late afternoon he saw her by the river. She had fastened the lamb's skin to her body somehow and she was washing her hands. When she saw him she threw stones at him.
When the Lord came that evening, Adam was glad to see Him. He tried to tell the Lord how he felt. "Feeling like this can't be good, can it, Lord?"
"It is what has happened that is not good," said the Lord.
"I don't like feeling like this," said Adam bluntly.
"I know," the Lord told him. "I hurt too, Adam."
Adam burst out, "Isn't there anything we can do?"
"Only if she lets us."
For several days and nights Eve avoided them but sometimes he caught her watching him. Whenever she realized he was looking at her, she would throw stones at him. Her hair was no longer beautiful. She had let it become tangled and matted.
One night he found part of a vine tied to a branch that overhung the ravine. Looking down, he saw her body, pale in the moonlight, lying crumpled at the base of the cliff.
He climbed down to her and removed the piece of vine that was wrapped tightly around her neck. He held her and sang to her and rocked her all night and all the next day until the Lord came again.
Then he looked up and asked in distress, "And this, Lord--surely this can't be good?"
"No," said the Lord with great sorrow. "This is not good. It is what I told you about, Adam. This is death."
"When will it be over?"
The Lord did not answer. Adam found the Lord's face blurring before him. He shook the water from his eyes and looked up again. The Lord was stooping down and there was moisture in His eyes, too. He took Adam, still holding Eve, into His strong arms and held them both tightly without speaking and the two wept together for a long time.
And so Adam lived forever in the garden alone and the Lord God walked with him in the cool of the day. But no helper was ever found for him.
(First published in Inklings, Fall, 1995)
"Adam?" The soft voice came again, a little less confidently.
Before his eyes the purple fruit trembled, its surface slick with dew as she held it out to him. Shiny trails of juice ran down her hand to her elbow and purple pulp was under her fingernails.
"It's all right," she urged. "I ate some. It was good." Her wide, earnest expression contrasted with the absurd goatee dripping from her chin to the ground.
With an effort, he raised his stunned eyes from the fruit in her extended hand, pulling hers into focus. "But God said--"
"He said it was good. And it is."
"Everything He made is good," he agreed, seeing behind her the great leafed dome, weighed down with purple spheres. He became aware of the breeze softly riffling its branches, bees purring among its white blossoms. "But the fruit is not for us, Eve."
"It tastes good," she insisted. "If it tastes good, He would want us to eat it, wouldn't He?"
He reached out to touch her sticky hand. "Why, Eve? Why would you want it, when we have so much?"
She drew her hand from his and took another bite without speaking.
"He gives us mangoes and papaya and pineapple. We have aspens that tremble in the lightest air and sunlight through maple leaves. We have the smell of the moist earth after a rain and of jasmine at twilight and a thousand shades of color reflected in the sea at sunset. Only this tree, only this fruit, He has forbidden us. Is that so much to ask?"
"But knowledge is good," she persisted. "What is wrong with knowing good and evil and deciding for ourselves?" She turned and jerked more fruit from the tree, leaving the pits, coated with shredded fruit, dangling from their stems. "Have some!"
"We don't need that knowledge," he reasoned. "If something is good, He will tell us. Why would we want to decide for ourselves when the One who is wise can decide for us? You have done what He said brings death and I am afraid for you."
"You are stupid," she said, making up the word. "Maybe death is good, how do you know? Besides, we won't die. Look at me! I didn't."
The implications of this were too much for him.
"The Lord said--"
Her eyes, her outstretched hand, waited. In the silence, she could not say, "He was wrong," and Adam would not think it. He turned away.
Then she was angry.
"Don't you believe me?" she argued. "I tell you, I ate some and nothing happened."
"I believe you," he said uncomfortably.
"Well?"
Because he didn't know what else to do, he covered his ears and ran away.
Then she pouted. She would not speak to him and when he brought her the choicest of the sugar cane and the artichoke, as he always did, she flipped her head away and gave her attention instead to a lamb, crooning over it and scratching its back through its thick wool.
For the first time, he couldn't understand her.
When he heard the rustle of day settling into dusk, he was relived to see the Lord coming toward him as He did every evening.
"Where is she?" asked the Lord.
Adam looked around. Eve had crouched behind a sleeping emu, trying to pull some of its feathers up around her neck.
"Leave me alone!" she shouted defensively. "I don't like You anymore!"
"Have you eaten the fruit I commanded you not to eat?" The Lord's words were thunder but His look was rain.
"The serpent told me to," she said, her voice loud and tense. She avoided His gaze. "He said my eyes would be opened and I would be wise, like You." She stood up abruptly, looked the Lord in the face and hurled her words at Him.
"The serpent was right! You said I'd die--but I didn't die! I am wise! I'm like You! I can decide for myself what is good and what is evil. You wanted to keep me from knowing, didn't You? But I have the right to know!" Her eyes narrowed. "Yes, I ate the fruit--and I'm glad I did!"
The Lord turned to Adam. And you? He asked with His eyes.
Adam gazed into the Lord's face. "You told us not to," he said simply.
Turning back to Eve, the Lord said, "Because you have disobeyed, I will put alienation between you and your husband. You will hunger for his love and never be filled by it. You will long for his touch and never permit it."
The woman looked at the ground as He spoke, her arms crossed in front of her body. Now her voice was barely audible but edged with resentment. "Why didn't You tell me I was naked?"
Without answering, the Lord took the lamb Eve had been petting and with a motion wrung its neck. He severed the woolly pelt from its warm body and held it out. She shoved it away. He waited a moment but she kept a guarded distance. The Lord gently laid the skin on the grass. Then He was gone.
Night was falling and Adam felt an unaccustomed chill. He saw Eve reach out slowly, shivering, and pull the skin to her. She wrapped herself in it and hunkered down in misery. Adam went toward his wife and started to squat beside her but she jerked away, tightening her hold on the sheepskin.
"Cover yourself!" she said accusingly. "You are naked, too!"
"I am just as the Lord made me," he said, trying to reassure her, "and He called it good."
She covered her ears, as he had earlier. With the love and closeness he always felt toward her, something new was stirring inside him, a sadness. He wanted to take her into his arms and hold her against him but when he reached out, she knocked his arm aside. His bewilderment increased.
He sat silent for a few minutes, darting glances at her now and then as she continued to squeze herself tight and motionless. Then, not knowing exactly why, he said, "When I named the kangaroo, it wasn't you."
She didn't respond. He tried again. "None of the animals was right for me. The Lord put me to sleep and formed you and you were right." Again he stretched out a hand toward her.
Instantly she seized it and bit him hard on the thumb, then scrambled to her feet holding the sheepskin to her and ran from him.
In the darkness he could not see the blood but the bite hurt. When she was gone, his confusion gradually subsided. The donkey had bitten him once, when he offered it grain, but it didn't mean to. The breeze in the tops of the palms was familiar and comforting. The lion was rounding up its family with little approving grunts and from across the lake a parrot screeched a last goodnight.
Despite the heaviness in his heart, these things soothed Adam. Surely she would come back tomorrow and everything would be all right
It was good, it had to be good. That was how the Lord had made it. He curled up in a shallow indentation he had scraped in the dirt but it was a long time before he fell asleep.
The next morning he did not see the woman at all. She did not eat with him. They did not laugh together over the coyote cubs tumbling with their mother. They did not collect dewdrops from the giant pandanus leaves and let them slide into each other's mouths. They did not rub each other's backs or comb each other's hair with sticks or watch the shadows make patterns across each other's bodies as they rested lazily after making love. Adam was restless and the garden seemed lonely again, as it had before she was created.
In the late afternoon he saw her by the river. She had fastened the lamb's skin to her body somehow and she was washing her hands. When she saw him she threw stones at him.
When the Lord came that evening, Adam was glad to see Him. He tried to tell the Lord how he felt. "Feeling like this can't be good, can it, Lord?"
"It is what has happened that is not good," said the Lord.
"I don't like feeling like this," said Adam bluntly.
"I know," the Lord told him. "I hurt too, Adam."
Adam burst out, "Isn't there anything we can do?"
"Only if she lets us."
For several days and nights Eve avoided them but sometimes he caught her watching him. Whenever she realized he was looking at her, she would throw stones at him. Her hair was no longer beautiful. She had let it become tangled and matted.
One night he found part of a vine tied to a branch that overhung the ravine. Looking down, he saw her body, pale in the moonlight, lying crumpled at the base of the cliff.
He climbed down to her and removed the piece of vine that was wrapped tightly around her neck. He held her and sang to her and rocked her all night and all the next day until the Lord came again.
Then he looked up and asked in distress, "And this, Lord--surely this can't be good?"
"No," said the Lord with great sorrow. "This is not good. It is what I told you about, Adam. This is death."
"When will it be over?"
The Lord did not answer. Adam found the Lord's face blurring before him. He shook the water from his eyes and looked up again. The Lord was stooping down and there was moisture in His eyes, too. He took Adam, still holding Eve, into His strong arms and held them both tightly without speaking and the two wept together for a long time.
And so Adam lived forever in the garden alone and the Lord God walked with him in the cool of the day. But no helper was ever found for him.
(First published in Inklings, Fall, 1995)
Sunday, May 16, 2010
The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, Volumes 1-3 (Harper San Francisco, 2004, 2004, 2007)
But I’ve often thought he would have been an intimidating man to hang out with. He and his wife Joy played Scrabble in five languages, including Chaucerian English. Lewis kept up a correspondence with an Italian priest in Latin, the only language they had in common. Of the hundreds of books in his library, a visitor could pick one at random, start to read aloud any sentence - and listen to Lewis quote the rest by memory.
I couldn’t possibly match the breadth of his literary allusions, his powers of articulation. And then there’s his early snobbery, when he felt that Americans and women were inferior beings. I am both. He preferred the camaraderie of men, especially accompanied by a pint in a smoke-filled pub. He would have awed me and I would have bored him.
But by reading his letters, I can look over his shoulder as he writes. I can stop him and say, “So that’s where you got the idea for Aslan.” Or I can ramble contentedly with him on walking tours through England on winter mornings with mist as “tangible as treacle” or on summer evenings with golden light so “liquid” one can almost drink it. Through his letters I can become his friend, without his even knowing I’m there.
C.S. (”Jack”) Lewis would have had no patience with what we are about to do: discuss his personal life. “I have no natural curiosity about private lives,” he wrote to one friend and to another, “…we begin thinking about the private life of the actors when the play ceases to grip us.”
In response to a request for “background information” from an American minister in 1948, the British author of The Screwtape Letters, Mere Christianity, A Space Trilogy, and The Chronicles of Narnia wrote back, in a rare burst of pique, ‘Ought you, as a Pastor, to encourage the public demand for quite irrelevant facts about authors?… I can’t abide the idea that a man’s books shd. be ‘set in their biographical context’ and if I had some rare information about the private life of Shakespeare or Dante I’d throw it in the fire, tell no one, and re-read their works.” In the same letter he declared, “…the only thing of any importance (if that is) about me is what I have to say.”
But since, at 17, he was the first one to suggest publishing his letters and since in those letters he gives us glimpses of his private life, he might not mind our extracting from them what he had to say about himself.
Now edited and annotated, The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis (HarperSan Francisco, 2004, 2004, 2007) show the progression of the man intellectually, professionally, and spiritually. The three volumes, totaling 3,600 pages, consist of Family Letters 1905-1931; Books, Broadcasts, and the War 1931-1949; and Narnia, Cambridge, and Joy 1950-1963.
To children, Jack described himself at 55 as "tall. . . double-chinned, black-haired, have a deep voice, and wear glasses for reading." "I look awful. Imagine a marsh-wiggle gone fat and red in the face. And deaf and bald. I talk far too loud." He excused himself from his goddaughter Sarah's confirmation with "I am afraid you might have found me very shy and dull." He called himself and brother Warnie "two crusted old batchelors," "old square-rigged types(s)," "quiet ruminants."
He couldn't drive, couldn't type: "I'm no good at any sort of machine." An abnormality in his thumbs made him "clumsy," "unhandy and messy." He couldn't tie knots. When "putting up a parcel. . .(i)t always looks like a bundle of old clothes. . .and my fingers are covered with sealing wax." "Why did I become a writer? Chiefly, I think, because my clumsiness of fingers prevented me from making things in any other way."
To the Milton Society of America in 1954, he described himself more seriously. His books may appear "a very mixed bag" but they have "a guiding thread": "The imaginative man in me is older, more continuously operative, and in that sense more basic than either the religious writer or the critic. It was he who made me first attempt (with little success) to be a poet. It was he who, in response to the poetry of others, made me a critic. . . It was he who, after my conversion led me to embody my religious belief in symbolical or mythopoeic forms, ranging from Screwtape to a kind of theologised science-fiction. And it was, of course, he who has brought me, in the last few years to write the series of Narnian stories for children. . . because the fairy-tale was the genre best fitted for what I wanted to say."
His earliest loves lasted his whole life. His first extant letter written when he was nearly eight years old begins: "My dear Warnie[,] Peter [Jack's canary] has had two un-fortunate aventures since I last wrote, however they came out all right in the end. . ." he goes on to describe other animal "aventures," fun with fireworks and apples at Halloween, studies in French and Latin: "Tomorrow I decline that old 'Bonus,' 'Bona,' 'Bonum' thing. . ."
Observations about animals, seasons, scholarship--these themes echo throughout his letters for the next 57 years. As Jack wrote of his friend Arthur Greeves' letters, his own are "full of enthusiasm about books and music and scenery" as well as "walking tours," seasons, "bathing," animals, and writing--marvelous, lengthy descriptions from which deciding which gems to offer in a review like this one is hopelessly (and frustratingly) limiting.
Volume 1 closes with Jack embracing a new love, Jesus Christ, which will permeate everything he writes from then on. Each new radio broadcast or publication brings him increased numbers of invitations to write and speak (many from America), almost all of which he turns down as redundant. There are book galleys to edit, personal requests for advice, unsolicited poems and stories to critique, and "a great number of theological letters. . .which can't be neglected because they are answers to people in great need of help & often in great misery." Many of these letters are too carefully reasoned for a mere extract to do them justice.
By the end of Volume 2, letter-writing consumes more and more of his time, giving him less time for the things he loves to do: the conversations with peers, the walking tours, the trips back to Ireland. He is increasingly becoming the "crusted old batchelor." His peeves are becoming more evident: correspondence; cities; TV; newspapers; modern novels, poetry, and theology; movies; Americans.
Two new loves revived Lewis in the last 13 years of his life (Volume 3). He accepted the invitation from Magdalene College of Cambridge University to assume the Chair of Medieval and Renaissance English, a position created for him (although, ironically, he did not believe in the Renaissance), and he married Joy Davidman Gresham.
Joy Gresham came into his life and his letters in December 1952. She went from being "a guest, asked for one week but staying for three, who talks from morning till night," to "a visitor. . . very nice but one can't feel quite free," to "a lady from New York," to "our queer Jewish, ex-Communist, American convert. . . at any rate, not a Bore."
During that time his attitude toward America softened, probably without his realizing it. But he still didn't realize he was falling in love with an American. On August 1, 1953, Jack wrote Mary Willis Shelburne, "I do most heartily agree that it is just as well to be past the age when one expects or desires to attract the other sex." Three years later she was the second correspondent to whom he confided (with no intervening mention of Joy, love, courtship, or marriage in his responses to her frequent letters), "I may soon be, in rapid succession, a bridegroom and a widower." But there was a reprieve in that timeline.
Joy had a remission, and during that period Lewis wrote to Dorothy Sayers, "We soon learn to love what we know we must lose. . . My heart is breaking and I was never so happy before" and a week later, "The house ripples with laughter and esoteric jokes. . .O God, if there were no such thing as the Future!" Of their "belated honeymoon' to Ireland in July 1958 (it was his first flight: "after one initial moment of terror, enchanting"), Jack wrote, "We visited Louth, Down, and Donegal, and returned drunk with blue mountains, yellow beaches, braying donkeys, peat-smell, and the heather just then beginning to bloom."
After her death in July 1960, he called her "my dear Joy" and "the great love of my life."
His nearly 60 years of letters show that people became more important to Lewis as he matured. At 16, he wrote Arthur, "I find that the people whose society I prefer to my own are very few and far between." At 33, he wrote, "(T)here is hardly a year in which I do not make some real friend. I am glad to find that people become more and more one of the sources of pleasure as I grow older." By the age of 37 he could write, "(F)riendship is the greatest of worldly goods. Certainly to me it is the chief happiness of life. If I had to give a piece of advice to a young man about a place to live, I think I shd. say, 'sacrifice almost everything to live where you can be near your friends.'"
Of his friend J.R.R. Tolkien, whom he called Tollers, "I don't think Tolkien influenced me, and I am certain I didn't influence him. That is, didn't influence what he wrote. My continual encouragement, carried to the point of nagging, influenced him v. much to write at all with that gravity and at that length. In other words I acted as a midwife not as a father."
With maturity also came humility. In his 30s Jack looked back with "humiliation" at the letters he had written Arthur, recognizing in them "egotism" and "affectation": "I seem to be posturing and showing off in every letter." During the period of his transition to Christianity, he wrote Arthur that pride was his "besetting sin." "I have found out ludicrous and terrible things about my own character. . ."
By 1940, he had apparently learned that lesson well. Buried in a letter to Arthur, he mentioned what would become one of his finest and best-known works, "I have published another book, only a little thing called The Problem of Pain." When his godson wrote to congratulate him for being conferred with a doctorate, Jack deflected the praise, "The most interesting thing about that was the place I went to be made a Doctor--Saint Andrews. It is a most lovely little town with the sea breaking just under the windows of some of the colleges. There is a ruined castle and a ruined cathedral and miles and miles of sand. . ."
In later years, he would thank his fans with remarks like "There is a great element of chance in fame" or, in telling a child about his newest Narnian story, The Silver Chair, add, "Don't look forward to it too much or you are sure to be disappointed." To Walter Hooper, who would become editor of his Letters, "I am glad if I have been the instrument of Our Lord's help to you: in His hands almost any instrument will do. . ."
Jack corresponded for years with a woman who was filled with anxieties and complaints. Finally, weighed down with his own medical problems which would take his life five months later, he wrote a reassurance to her fear of death, "Don't you think Our Lord says to you 'Peace, child, peace. Relax. Let go. Underneath are the everlasting arms. Let go, I will catch you. Do you trust me so little?'" His letter must have been life-transforming, since eight days later he was able to write, "I am overjoyed at the blessed change in your attitude to death. . . now that you know you are forgiven. . ."
He, too, had had a similar experience with God's forgiveness, believing in it for years before he felt it: "Then, one blessed day, it suddenly became real to me and made what I had previously called 'belief' look absolutely unreal. It is a wonderful thing. . . This real belief in the truths of our religion is a great gift from God."
In August 1963, Jack had a heart attack and was thought to be dying but (according to his brother) he regained consciousness "and asked for his tea." Home again, he wrote a friend, "It seems almost a pity, having reached the gate so easily, not to be allowed through--" Three months later, on November 22, he was "allowed through.' His last letter, written the day before, was to a child, "Thank you for telling me that you like my books, a thing an author is always pleased to hear. It is a funny thing that all the children who have written to me see at once who Aslan is, and grownups never do!"
"The good things even of this world are far too good ever to be reached by imagination. Even the common orange, you know: no one cd. have imagined it before he tasted it. How much less Heaven" (C.S. Lewis, 55, August 7, 1956).
What a zest for this life he had and what an eagerness for the next! After reading almost all his books plus nine-and-a-half pounds of his personal correspondence, I'm sure when we do meet, I'll feel right at home with Jack--and Joy. We'll have eternity to discuss substance; the chaff will blow away. And we'll all be awed by Jesus.
Reviewed by Jessica Shaver Renshaw
“I think you and I ought to publish our letters (they’d be a jolly interesting book by the way)…”
– C.S. Lewis, age 17, to Arthur Greeves, March 14, 1916
I’ve wondered what C.S. Lewis was like as a person. He was a colossus as thinker and author, able to sever knots of intellectual and theological difficulty (and stuffiness) with insightful words, offering truth in clear, sensible, emotionally satisfying chunks.
But I’ve often thought he would have been an intimidating man to hang out with. He and his wife Joy played Scrabble in five languages, including Chaucerian English. Lewis kept up a correspondence with an Italian priest in Latin, the only language they had in common. Of the hundreds of books in his library, a visitor could pick one at random, start to read aloud any sentence - and listen to Lewis quote the rest by memory.
I couldn’t possibly match the breadth of his literary allusions, his powers of articulation. And then there’s his early snobbery, when he felt that Americans and women were inferior beings. I am both. He preferred the camaraderie of men, especially accompanied by a pint in a smoke-filled pub. He would have awed me and I would have bored him.
But by reading his letters, I can look over his shoulder as he writes. I can stop him and say, “So that’s where you got the idea for Aslan.” Or I can ramble contentedly with him on walking tours through England on winter mornings with mist as “tangible as treacle” or on summer evenings with golden light so “liquid” one can almost drink it. Through his letters I can become his friend, without his even knowing I’m there.
C.S. (”Jack”) Lewis would have had no patience with what we are about to do: discuss his personal life. “I have no natural curiosity about private lives,” he wrote to one friend and to another, “…we begin thinking about the private life of the actors when the play ceases to grip us.”
In response to a request for “background information” from an American minister in 1948, the British author of The Screwtape Letters, Mere Christianity, A Space Trilogy, and The Chronicles of Narnia wrote back, in a rare burst of pique, ‘Ought you, as a Pastor, to encourage the public demand for quite irrelevant facts about authors?… I can’t abide the idea that a man’s books shd. be ‘set in their biographical context’ and if I had some rare information about the private life of Shakespeare or Dante I’d throw it in the fire, tell no one, and re-read their works.” In the same letter he declared, “…the only thing of any importance (if that is) about me is what I have to say.”
But since, at 17, he was the first one to suggest publishing his letters and since in those letters he gives us glimpses of his private life, he might not mind our extracting from them what he had to say about himself.
Now edited and annotated, The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis (HarperSan Francisco, 2004, 2004, 2007) show the progression of the man intellectually, professionally, and spiritually. The three volumes, totaling 3,600 pages, consist of Family Letters 1905-1931; Books, Broadcasts, and the War 1931-1949; and Narnia, Cambridge, and Joy 1950-1963.
To children, Jack described himself at 55 as "tall. . . double-chinned, black-haired, have a deep voice, and wear glasses for reading." "I look awful. Imagine a marsh-wiggle gone fat and red in the face. And deaf and bald. I talk far too loud." He excused himself from his goddaughter Sarah's confirmation with "I am afraid you might have found me very shy and dull." He called himself and brother Warnie "two crusted old batchelors," "old square-rigged types(s)," "quiet ruminants."
He couldn't drive, couldn't type: "I'm no good at any sort of machine." An abnormality in his thumbs made him "clumsy," "unhandy and messy." He couldn't tie knots. When "putting up a parcel. . .(i)t always looks like a bundle of old clothes. . .and my fingers are covered with sealing wax." "Why did I become a writer? Chiefly, I think, because my clumsiness of fingers prevented me from making things in any other way."
To the Milton Society of America in 1954, he described himself more seriously. His books may appear "a very mixed bag" but they have "a guiding thread": "The imaginative man in me is older, more continuously operative, and in that sense more basic than either the religious writer or the critic. It was he who made me first attempt (with little success) to be a poet. It was he who, in response to the poetry of others, made me a critic. . . It was he who, after my conversion led me to embody my religious belief in symbolical or mythopoeic forms, ranging from Screwtape to a kind of theologised science-fiction. And it was, of course, he who has brought me, in the last few years to write the series of Narnian stories for children. . . because the fairy-tale was the genre best fitted for what I wanted to say."
His earliest loves lasted his whole life. His first extant letter written when he was nearly eight years old begins: "My dear Warnie[,] Peter [Jack's canary] has had two un-fortunate aventures since I last wrote, however they came out all right in the end. . ." he goes on to describe other animal "aventures," fun with fireworks and apples at Halloween, studies in French and Latin: "Tomorrow I decline that old 'Bonus,' 'Bona,' 'Bonum' thing. . ."
Observations about animals, seasons, scholarship--these themes echo throughout his letters for the next 57 years. As Jack wrote of his friend Arthur Greeves' letters, his own are "full of enthusiasm about books and music and scenery" as well as "walking tours," seasons, "bathing," animals, and writing--marvelous, lengthy descriptions from which deciding which gems to offer in a review like this one is hopelessly (and frustratingly) limiting.
Volume 1 closes with Jack embracing a new love, Jesus Christ, which will permeate everything he writes from then on. Each new radio broadcast or publication brings him increased numbers of invitations to write and speak (many from America), almost all of which he turns down as redundant. There are book galleys to edit, personal requests for advice, unsolicited poems and stories to critique, and "a great number of theological letters. . .which can't be neglected because they are answers to people in great need of help & often in great misery." Many of these letters are too carefully reasoned for a mere extract to do them justice.
By the end of Volume 2, letter-writing consumes more and more of his time, giving him less time for the things he loves to do: the conversations with peers, the walking tours, the trips back to Ireland. He is increasingly becoming the "crusted old batchelor." His peeves are becoming more evident: correspondence; cities; TV; newspapers; modern novels, poetry, and theology; movies; Americans.
Two new loves revived Lewis in the last 13 years of his life (Volume 3). He accepted the invitation from Magdalene College of Cambridge University to assume the Chair of Medieval and Renaissance English, a position created for him (although, ironically, he did not believe in the Renaissance), and he married Joy Davidman Gresham.
Joy Gresham came into his life and his letters in December 1952. She went from being "a guest, asked for one week but staying for three, who talks from morning till night," to "a visitor. . . very nice but one can't feel quite free," to "a lady from New York," to "our queer Jewish, ex-Communist, American convert. . . at any rate, not a Bore."
During that time his attitude toward America softened, probably without his realizing it. But he still didn't realize he was falling in love with an American. On August 1, 1953, Jack wrote Mary Willis Shelburne, "I do most heartily agree that it is just as well to be past the age when one expects or desires to attract the other sex." Three years later she was the second correspondent to whom he confided (with no intervening mention of Joy, love, courtship, or marriage in his responses to her frequent letters), "I may soon be, in rapid succession, a bridegroom and a widower." But there was a reprieve in that timeline.
Joy had a remission, and during that period Lewis wrote to Dorothy Sayers, "We soon learn to love what we know we must lose. . . My heart is breaking and I was never so happy before" and a week later, "The house ripples with laughter and esoteric jokes. . .O God, if there were no such thing as the Future!" Of their "belated honeymoon' to Ireland in July 1958 (it was his first flight: "after one initial moment of terror, enchanting"), Jack wrote, "We visited Louth, Down, and Donegal, and returned drunk with blue mountains, yellow beaches, braying donkeys, peat-smell, and the heather just then beginning to bloom."
After her death in July 1960, he called her "my dear Joy" and "the great love of my life."
His nearly 60 years of letters show that people became more important to Lewis as he matured. At 16, he wrote Arthur, "I find that the people whose society I prefer to my own are very few and far between." At 33, he wrote, "(T)here is hardly a year in which I do not make some real friend. I am glad to find that people become more and more one of the sources of pleasure as I grow older." By the age of 37 he could write, "(F)riendship is the greatest of worldly goods. Certainly to me it is the chief happiness of life. If I had to give a piece of advice to a young man about a place to live, I think I shd. say, 'sacrifice almost everything to live where you can be near your friends.'"
Of his friend J.R.R. Tolkien, whom he called Tollers, "I don't think Tolkien influenced me, and I am certain I didn't influence him. That is, didn't influence what he wrote. My continual encouragement, carried to the point of nagging, influenced him v. much to write at all with that gravity and at that length. In other words I acted as a midwife not as a father."
With maturity also came humility. In his 30s Jack looked back with "humiliation" at the letters he had written Arthur, recognizing in them "egotism" and "affectation": "I seem to be posturing and showing off in every letter." During the period of his transition to Christianity, he wrote Arthur that pride was his "besetting sin." "I have found out ludicrous and terrible things about my own character. . ."
By 1940, he had apparently learned that lesson well. Buried in a letter to Arthur, he mentioned what would become one of his finest and best-known works, "I have published another book, only a little thing called The Problem of Pain." When his godson wrote to congratulate him for being conferred with a doctorate, Jack deflected the praise, "The most interesting thing about that was the place I went to be made a Doctor--Saint Andrews. It is a most lovely little town with the sea breaking just under the windows of some of the colleges. There is a ruined castle and a ruined cathedral and miles and miles of sand. . ."
In later years, he would thank his fans with remarks like "There is a great element of chance in fame" or, in telling a child about his newest Narnian story, The Silver Chair, add, "Don't look forward to it too much or you are sure to be disappointed." To Walter Hooper, who would become editor of his Letters, "I am glad if I have been the instrument of Our Lord's help to you: in His hands almost any instrument will do. . ."
Jack corresponded for years with a woman who was filled with anxieties and complaints. Finally, weighed down with his own medical problems which would take his life five months later, he wrote a reassurance to her fear of death, "Don't you think Our Lord says to you 'Peace, child, peace. Relax. Let go. Underneath are the everlasting arms. Let go, I will catch you. Do you trust me so little?'" His letter must have been life-transforming, since eight days later he was able to write, "I am overjoyed at the blessed change in your attitude to death. . . now that you know you are forgiven. . ."
He, too, had had a similar experience with God's forgiveness, believing in it for years before he felt it: "Then, one blessed day, it suddenly became real to me and made what I had previously called 'belief' look absolutely unreal. It is a wonderful thing. . . This real belief in the truths of our religion is a great gift from God."
In August 1963, Jack had a heart attack and was thought to be dying but (according to his brother) he regained consciousness "and asked for his tea." Home again, he wrote a friend, "It seems almost a pity, having reached the gate so easily, not to be allowed through--" Three months later, on November 22, he was "allowed through.' His last letter, written the day before, was to a child, "Thank you for telling me that you like my books, a thing an author is always pleased to hear. It is a funny thing that all the children who have written to me see at once who Aslan is, and grownups never do!"
"The good things even of this world are far too good ever to be reached by imagination. Even the common orange, you know: no one cd. have imagined it before he tasted it. How much less Heaven" (C.S. Lewis, 55, August 7, 1956).
What a zest for this life he had and what an eagerness for the next! After reading almost all his books plus nine-and-a-half pounds of his personal correspondence, I'm sure when we do meet, I'll feel right at home with Jack--and Joy. We'll have eternity to discuss substance; the chaff will blow away. And we'll all be awed by Jesus.
The Passions of C.S. Lewis as seen in His Collected Letters
INKLINGS FOREVER, Volume VI
A Collection of Essays Presented at the Sixth FRANCES WHITE EWBANK COLLOQUIUM on C.S. LEWIS & FRIENDS, Taylor University 2008
Upland, Indiana
THE PASSIONS OF C.S. LEWIS AS SEEN IN HIS COLLECTED LETTERS
Jessica Shaver Renshaw
Abstract:
Rather than speaking about C.S. Lewis, we will let Jack speak about himself through his letters: what he loved, such as books, seasons/weather, walking tours, "bathing," Ireland, animals, convalescence, Joy, and writing; what he loathed: writing letters, Americans, cities, TV, newspapers, movies, modern novels/poetry/theology; what he feared; what he didn‘t understand; and what he regretted, as well as his descriptions of what he looked like, what he did well, what he did badly. I will force myself with Great Difficulty (because of all the choice bits I will have to leave out) to limit these tastes of his sixty-year, three-volume, 3,600-page, 9-1/2 pound correspondence to what can be savored in twenty minutes!
THE PASSIONS OF C.S. LEWIS AS SEEN IN HIS COLLECTED LETTERS
Jessica Shaver Renshaw
"You are one of the great English letter writers," C.S. Lewis once wrote to Dorothy Sayers. "But I‘m not" (2:682-3). "You write such excellent letters that if I were a bad man I should lure you into an epistolary controversy and you wd. find you had written a book for us without knowing it: I shd. simply publish the letters" (2:728).
Instead, and without being lured, Lewis has "written a book for us without knowing it" and Walter Hooper has superbly edited and "simply" published it: the three-volume Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis (2004, 2004, 2007). Volume 1 chronicles Jack‘s intellectual development up to his being hired at Oxford and becoming a Christian, Volume 2 his blossoming career as teacher, writer, and speaker, and Volume 3 the burdensome demands of his publishers and fans, the loss of his wife, and growing health problems, all of which turn his heart from this life to the next one.
With this publication, we now have all sixty years--three volumes, 3,600 pages, and 9-1/2 pounds--of Lewis‘ correspondence, from which to extract glimpses of Lewis, the man. Jack himself would have no patience with what we are about to do. "I have no natural curiosity about private lives,' he wrote to a friend (2:980) and to another, '. . .we begin thinking about the private life of the actors when the play ceases to grip us'' (3:877).
But most of us do have a natural curiosity—don‘t we?--about private lives, especially about the life of someone like C.S. Lewis, who could write books as varied as Mere Christianity, The Screwtape Letters, A Space Trilogy, and The Chronicles of Narnia, a man who through his writing could spar with intellectuals—even in Latin--and stir the imagination of children, always with grace and humor.
In this paper we will extract from those letters what Lewis LOVED, what he HATED, what he FEARED, what he REGRETTED and what he DIDN‘T UNDERSTAND.
But let‘s start with his own descriptions of himself. To a Miss Coffey, who had asked for a picture of him, ''Sorry, but I‘m out of photos. Which is perhaps just as well, for I look awful. Imagine a marsh-wiggle gone fat and red in the face. And deaf and bald. I talk far too loud." (3:1429-30) He called himself and his brother Warnie "two crusted old batchelors" (3:394), "old square-rigged type(s)" (2:350), and "quiet ruminants" (2:368). Yet he was always young at heart. To a 12-year old he wrote, "Parts of me are still 12 and I think other parts of me were already 50 when I was 12. . ." (3:362).
In his own words, what did he do well and what did he do badly? He wrote a child, "I am amused you should think 'my hand must be good at making things'. In reality I‘m the clumsiest and most ham-handed person in the world! I can‘t make anything—words are the only tools I am any good at" (3:1424). He never learned to drive or type: "I‘m no good at any sort of machine" (3:615). He couldn‘t tie knots (3:1193). A missing joint in each thumb made him "unhandy and messy" (3:4). To a Miss Mathews, he mourned, "If Man is defined as a tool-using animal, I am not human" (2:981).
LEWIS LOVED:
Books: "My dear Arthur," Jack wrote his friend Arthur Greeves when he was 16, "Do you ever wake up in the morning and suddenly wonder why you have not bought such-and-such a book long ago, and then decided that life without it will be quite unbearable? I do frequently. .." (2:94).
Jack‘s letters to Arthur (as Jack says of Arthur‘s letters to him) are "full of enthusiasm about books and music and scenery" (1:287). They read like an annotated bibliography of the Great Books. Jack must have read at least a book a day--in English, French, German, Latin, Greek, Italian, Old French and Old English. He considered "re-reading old favourites" one of his greatest pleasures: "indeed I can‘t imagine a man really enjoying a book and reading it only once" (2:54). Authors he re-read included Milton, Spenser, Malory, Dante, Austen, Wordsworth, and George Macdonald.
Years later, an author himself, he wrote his publisher that he did not "have for the bodies of my own books the same reverence I have for the bodies of all other books. For it is a curious fact that I never can regard them as being really books: the boards and print, in however mint a condition, remain a mere pretence behind which one sees the scratchy, inky old MS [manuscript]" (3:546).
Seasons: Jack often describes the weather in his letters: The beginning of winter "always excites me; it makes me want adventures" (3:659). He notes winter afternoons "when the sky is the colour of putty and the rain comes down in sheets for hour after hour" (1:247).
Early spring is "that thin, tingling, virginal weather" (2:181).
As for summer: "I am not and never will be a hot weather man—having been reared in the north of Ireland, by the sea, where fifty degrees is a cold day, and seventy a very hot one" (3:32-3). He informs an American, "If you have any friends who think of coming over, tell them that the English summer generally falls in the third week in June." (3:15)
Autumn was his "favourite:" "Anyone else may have all my summers if they‘ll give me their autumns. . ." (2:980) "Everything horrid that ever happened to me was in an August. But courage! Divine September, the grey mornings, the beady cobwebs, the delicious hint of frost in the evening, is at hand" (2:875). In autumn, the pond is "sprinkled, or rather paved with bright leaves" (2:128).
Nature, scenery: Jack took at least two "walking tours" per year, which were planned rambles or hikes with a few friends through country and town, feasting at a pub on "bread & cheese, beer, and a following cup of tea," perhaps spending a night or two at tucked-away inns. His descriptions of these, which go on for pages, exude pleasure: "We drank tea at the tiny hamlet of Stoke Pero where there is a little grey church without a tower that holds only about twenty people. Here, according to an excellent custom of our walks, one of the party read us a chapter of Scripture from the lectern while the rest of us sat heavily in the pews and spread out our mackintoshes to let the linings steam off. . . Best of all was after tea when we struck inland again over the moor in one of those golden evening lights that pours a dreamlike mildness over the world: light seemed to be a liquid that you could drink. . .We had done well over twenty miles and felt immortal" (1:895).
Ireland: "I was with a friend in Donegal which is a v. fine, wild country with green mountains, rich secretive valleys, and Atlantic breakers on innumerable desolate sands. But alas!, they get less desolate every year and it will soon be just a holiday resort like so many other places. (One always disapproves of all holiday-makers except oneself!)" (3:797)
"Bathing" (swimming): Until his physical ailments prevented it, Jack swam daily, sometimes naked, in ponds: "I wish you could join me as I board the punt in the before-breakfast solitude and push out from under the dark shadow of the trees onto the full glare of the open water, usually sending the moor hens and their chicks scudding away into the reeds. . . with a delicious flurry of silver drops. Then I tie up to the projecting stump in the middle and dive off the stern of the punt" (1:963) Or in the ocean as it "knock(s) one head over heels in great green, ginger-beer-coloured waves" (2:969). He also liked bathing in the tub. As he wrote his delighted goddaughter: "I like getting down like a Hippo with only my nostrils out" (3:407).
Animals: Jack usually wrote about animals only to children and although his household at the Kilns had, at various times, dogs, cats, hens, geese, rabbits, hamsters, and a white rat this is one of his few references to the pets: "Our (Siamese cat) adores me because I lift her up by her tail—an operation which I can‘t imagine I should like if I were a cat, but she comes back for more and more, purring all the time" (3:1044) More often he mentioned wild animals in the surrounding woods. He describes to his godchildren a wild rabbit yawning "a very bored triangular yawn in the middle of a long hot afternoon" (2:819) and a hedgehog which came into the kitchen, drank a saucer of milk and then "got into the saucer and settled down to sleep" (2:751)
Convalescence: "Unless it is (a) very painful or opressive [sic] illness I always get some pleasure out of 'keeping my bed.' Especially if you are sick enough to have a fire! There is something beautifully cosy about meals brought up on a tray. . . I love to pile up my pillows, call for a choice pile of bright volumes and settle down to an endless read: if there be snow falling so much the better." (1:293)
Writing fiction: "I enjoy writing fiction more than writing anything else. Wouldn‘t anyone?" (3:1214)
LEWIS HATED:
Correspondence: "(I)t is just when one would be most ready for a talk in the odd hour of the day when one shoves ones work from one and lights the pipe of peace, that one is least ready to sit down and write a letter," Jack complained to his father in early 1921. "I often wonder how the born letter writers whose 'works‘ fill volumes, overcame this difficulty" (1:518). Perhaps they did not, as Jack did, take it upon themselves to personally answer every letter they received—by hand, preferably with a pen which had to be frequently dipped in ink—even after he developed rheumatism and struggled to write legibly.
He called correspondence "the chief burden of my life" (3:1023), "very laborious" (3:1043), "the ghastly, daily grind" (3:1123), "the bane of my life!" (3:1297). "Yes," he wrote one lady, "I have many other correspondents: some, alas, lunatics!" (3:581)
In 1949 he fusses to fellow author Dorothy Sayers, "Oh the mails: every bore in two continents seems to think I like getting letters. One‘s real friends are precisely the people one never gets time to write to" (2:1014). He dreaded Christmas time, when mail was delivered every half-hour. Yet he dutifully answered every letter and card during what he termed (1959) "that utterly galley-slave hour or so every day" before breakfast (3:1076).
Exceptions: "No author minds having to answer letters in praise of his own book" (3:447). "But fan mail from children is delightful. . . They want to know whether Aslan repaired Tumnus‘s furniture for him. Lovely" (3:65).
Cities: "How horrid all great cities are for more than a fortnight!" (3:907).
Newspapers: "I never read the papers," (3:63) but "Warnie in his usual way of encouragement, reads me paragraphs. . . at breakfast about liners wind bound in the Mersey and waves 6-1/2 feet high off the Irish coast." (3:102).
Modern novelists (such as Graham Greene) and poets (Dylan Thomas, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot): "Why should one read authors one does‘nt like because they happen to be alive at the same time as oneself?" (3:83)
TV: "(W)e have‘nt got a set, and don‘t propose to get one; it is I think a very bad habit to develop" (3:350).
Movies: "I have actually been to the films to-day!—to see Cavalcade!!" Jack wrote Arthur in 1933. "This is one of the most disgraceful confessions I have ever made to you. . . There is not an idea in the whole thing from beginning to end: it is a mere brutal assault on one‘s emotions. . . I have come away feeling as if I had been at a debauch" (2:114-5).
In 1951, he summed up film as "an astonishingly ugly art. I don‘t mean 'ugly‘ in any high flying moral or spiritual sense, but just disagreeable to the eye—crowded, unrestful, inharmonious" (3:105).
As far as we can tell from his letters, the only movies Jack had ever seen besides Cavalcade were Snow White and Bambi! He critiqued these as he critiqued everything. Of Snow White, he wrote a long paragraph, conceding, "[A]ll the terrifying bits were good, and the animals really most moving: and the use of shadows (of dwarfs and vultures) was real genius. . ." (2:242) Of Bambi, he admitted being impressed by the "loveliness" of an American autumn on the screen (2:884).
In response to the suggestion that he allow the Narnian stories to be filmed: "Aslan is a divine figure, and anything remotely approaching the comic (above all anything in the Disney line) would be to me simple blasphemy" (3:491). To one young fan, he explained, "The whole Narnian story is about Christ. That is to say, I asked myself 'Supposing there really were a world like Narnia, and supposing it had (like our world) gone wrong, and supposing Christ wanted to go into that world and save it (as He did ours) what might have happened?‘
"The stories are my answer. Since Narnia is a world of Talking Beasts, I thought He would become a Talking Beast there, as he became a Man here. I pictured Him becoming a lion there because (a) The lion is supposed to be the King of beasts: (b) Christ is called 'The Lion of Judah‘ in the Bible: (c) I‘d been having strange dreams about lions when I began writing the books" (3:1244-5).
But is there anyone who loves "the Narnian story" with its Christ-figure Aslan (which means "lion" in Turkish: "I chose it for the sound" (3:519).) who doubts that C.S. Lewis would have thoroughly approved of what Walt Disney Pictures and Walden Media have done with The Chronicles so far?
He chose not to attend Queen Elizabeth‘s coronation in 1953: "I approve of all that sort of thing immensely and I was deeply moved by all I heard of it; but I‘m not a man for crowds and Best Clothes" (3:340). He did attend the Queen‘s garden party in 1956. "Croquet is not mentioned in the invitation," he wrote Ruth Pitter, "but I am well-read enough to know that a royal garden party will involve hedgehogs, flamingoes, soldiers, Headsman, and the grin of a Cheshire cat." He reported afterward, "I learn from the papers that I was one of 8,000 guests and also that the Queen was present, a fact of which I had no evidence from my own experience. . . (T)he crowd round the refreshment tables was reminiscent of Liverpool Street Station on an August bank holiday. . . In a word, it was simply ghastly. Two pints at the little pub on Praed St. were necessary afterwards." (3:769, 771).
Change: "I would like everything to be immemorial—to have the same old horizons, the same garden, the same smells and sounds, always there, changeless. . . I suppose all these changes shd. prepare us for the far greater change which has drawn nearer even since I began this letter" (3:1383).
Velvet: "I can‘t enjoy velvet as a sound, lovely though it is, because I hate the stuff" (3:1440). He also disliked politics, biographies, and being alone (3:1431).
Americans: In 1916 he wrote, "What a pity such a genius (Nathanael Hawthorne) should be a beastly American!" (1:259) and in 1917 he described "Yanks" as "a set of squatters and damned money grubbing puritans" (1:266). In 1933 he still looked down on Americans: "I am . . . supervising a young woman who is writing a thesis on G(eorge) MacDonald. . . The girl is, unfortunately, quite unworthy of her subject: apart from everything else, she is an American" (2:96-7).
He would have been shocked to know he would someday marry one!
HE FEARED: "(P)overty frightens me more than anything else except large spiders and the tops of cliffs." (3:359)
HE DID NOT UNDERSTAND:
Mathematics: "I am also bad at Maths. . .I get muddled over my change in shops."
(3:882) Economics: "I am very ignorant of the ways of 'big business‘. . . We are as frightened of (a recession) as you, for apparently—for reasons I can‘t follow—a recession in America will automatically reproduce the same conditions over here." (3:906)
Housecleaning: To writer Ruth Pitter: "I didn‘t know arm chairs were ever cleaned: should they be?" (3:101)
HE REGRETTED: "I treated my own father abominably and no sin in my whole life now seems to be so serious" (3:445).
HE WAS DISAPPOINTED that The Screwtape Letters became so popular: "On my own view Perelandra is worth 20 Screwtapes" (3:627). His favorite, besides Perelandra, was Till We Have Faces: "I think it far and away my best book but it has, with the critics and the public, been my one great failure: an absolute 'flop‘. No one seems to have the slightest idea what I‘m getting at in it" (3:1148).
At the end of Volume 1, Jack has a new love which will color everything he does and writes the rest of his life: "I have just passed on from believing in God to definitely believing in Christ," he writes Arthur (1:974). "My puzzle was the whole doctrine of Redemption," of one man‘s death effectively providing salvation for others through "something . . . very mysterious expressed in those phrases I have so often ridiculed ('propitiation‘ -- 'sacrifice‘-- 'the blood of the Lamb‘)" (1:976).
Jack described how he, with friends J.R.R. Tolkien and Hugo Dyson, spent most of one night in September walking the grounds of Magdalene College, Oxford, discussing (among other things) "metaphor and myth' (1:970).
"Now what Dyson and Tolkien showed me was this: that if I met the idea of sacrifice in a Pagan story I didn‘t mind it at all: again, that if I met the idea of a god sacrificing himself to himself. . . I liked it very much and was mysteriously moved by it: again, that the idea of the dying and reviving god (Balder, Adonis, Bacchus) similarly moved me provided I met it anywhere except in the Gospels. . . Now the story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened. . ." (1:976-7)
During his transition to Christianity, Jack looked back with "humiliation" at the letters he had written Arthur, recognizing in them "priggery" and "affectation": "I seem to be posturing and showing off in every letter" (1:973). Of his thoughts, "one out of every three is a thought of self-admiration. . . I pretend I am carefully thinking out what to say to the next pupil (for his good, of course) and then suddenly realise I am really thinking how frightfully clever I‘m going to be and how he will admire me. . ." (1:878) "You have no idea how much of my time I spend just hating people whom I disagree with—tho‘ I know them only from their books—and inventing conversations in which I score off them" (2:125-6).
His conversion brings about other humbling insights about himself. In one letter, he identified with Arthur, who had apparently had a manuscript rejected: "The side of me which longs . . . to be approved as a writer, is not the side of us that is really worth much. . . I would have given almost anything—I shudder to think what I would have given if I had been allowed—to be a successful writer. . . I think the only thing for you to do is absolutely to kill the part of you that wants success" (1:924-7).
One of his most poignant letters shares his own struggles before he was hired as don (tutor) at Magdalen College, Oxford University. To his godson Laurence Harwood, who had just failed the preliminary exam for entrance to the university, Jack wrote in 1953: "I remember only too well what a hopeless oyster to be opened the world seemed at your age. I would have given a good deal to anyone who cd. have assured me that I ever wd. be able to persuade anyone to pay me a living wage for anything I cd. do. Life consisted of applying for jobs which other people got, writing books that no one wd. publish, and giving lectures wh. no one attended. . .Yet the vast majority of us manage to get in somewhere and shake down somehow in the end" (3:353).
Two new loves revived Lewis in the last 13 years of his life (Volume 3). He accepted the invitation from Magdalene College, Cambridge, to assume the Chair of Medieval and Renaissance English, a position created for him (although, ironically, he did not believe in the Renaissance), and he married Joy Davidman Gresham.
Joy came into his life and his letters in December, 1952. She went from being "a guest, asked for one week but staying for three, who talks from morning till night" (3:268), to "a visitor . . . very nice but one can‘t feel quite free" (3:285), to "a lady from New York" (3:394) to "our queer, Jewish, ex-Communist, American convert. . .at any rate, not a Bore" (3:450).
During that time his attitude toward America softened, probably without his realizing it. For the first time he expressed interest in visiting the country. As he wrote another American lady, "How wrong you are when you think that streamlined planes and trains wd. attract me to America. What I want to see there is yourself and 3 or 4 other good friends, after New England, the Rip Van Winkle Mts., Nantucket, the Huckleberry Finn country, the Rockies, Yellowstone Park, and a sub-Artic [sic] winter. And I shd. never come if I couldn‘t manage to come by sea instead of air: preferably on a cargo boat that took weeks on the voyage. I‘m a rustic animal and a maritime animal: no good at great cities, big hotels, or all that. . ." As a postscript, he added, "I‘d love to see a bear, a snow-shoe, and a real forest" (3:377) He never did travel to the States.
But he still didn‘t realize he was falling in love with an American. On August 1, 1953, Jack wrote Mary Willis Shelburne, "I do most heartily agree that it is just as well to be past the age when one expects or desires to attract the other sex." (3:352). Three years later she was the second correspondent to whom he confided (with no intervening mention of Joy, love, courtship, or marriage in his responses to her frequent letters), "I may soon be, in rapid succession, a bridegroom and a widower" (3:808).
Even after the wedding in December, 1956 he referred to Joy as a lady "who is very ill, too probably dying" (3:825), "a lady suffering from cancer" (3:826), and finally, after five months, "my wife" (3:830).
During Joy‘s remission Lewis wrote to Dorothy Sayers, "We soon learn to love what we know we must lose. . . My heart is breaking and I was never so happy before" (3:862) and a week later, "The house ripples with laughter and esoteric jokes. . . O God, if there were no such thing as the Future!" (3:864)
After her death in July, 1960, he called her "my dear Joy" (3:1170) and "the great love of my life." (3:1223)
Cambridge University, anticipated: "I think I shall like Magdalene better than Magdalen. It‘s a tiny college (a perfect cameo architecturally) and they‘re so old fashioned, & pious, & gentle and conservative—unlike this leftist, atheist, cynical, hard-boiled, huge Magdalen. Perhaps from being the fogey and 'old woman‘ here I shall become the enfant terrible there" (3:521).
Cambridge University, honeymoon period: ". . . (I)t is so small that I feel I‘d like to take it to bed with me or have it swimming in my bath!" (3:600)
Cambridge University, 18 months later: "(M)y medieval mission at Cambridge is, so far, a flop d’estime. A few dons come to my lectures but far fewer undergrads. I‘ve never had such small audiences before. Must be frightfully good for me" (3:793).
If pride was his "besetting sin" in the first third of his life, humility characterized the last two-thirds. To an American who wrote glowingly of both his and Tolkien‘s works, he responded, "Oh, but believe me, you are still only paddling in the glorious sea of Tolkien. Go on from The Hobbit at once to The Lord of the Rings. . ." while thanking him "for all the nice things you say about my own little efforts." (3:980-1) He wrote one fan, "I‘m so glad you liked my amateurish little book on the Psalms." (3:1017) and in telling a child about his newest book, The Silver Chair, he warned, "Don‘t look forward to it too much or you are sure to be disappointed" (3:310).
To a priest: "Yes, God has been v. good to me and allowed my work to reach more people than I would have dared to hope. But I always remember that He can preach thro‘ any instrument—Balaam‘s ass is the example I keep in mind." He has an asterisk after "Balaam‘s ass" and adds a footnote, "Can‘t you get it canonised?" (3:1387)
In August, 1963, Jack had a heart attack and was thought to be dying but (according to his brother) he regained consciousness "and asked for his tea." Home again, he wrote a friend, "It seems almost a pity, having reached the gate so easily, not to be allowed through. . ." (3:1452)
Three months later, on November 22, he was "allowed through." His last letter, written the day before, was to a child: "Thank you for telling me that you like my books, a thing an author is always pleased to hear. It is a funny thing that all the children who have written to me see at once who Aslan is, and grown ups never do!" (3:1483)
http://www.taylor.edu/dotAsset/77489.pdf">
A Collection of Essays Presented at the Sixth FRANCES WHITE EWBANK COLLOQUIUM on C.S. LEWIS & FRIENDS, Taylor University 2008
Upland, Indiana
THE PASSIONS OF C.S. LEWIS AS SEEN IN HIS COLLECTED LETTERS
Jessica Shaver Renshaw
Abstract:
Rather than speaking about C.S. Lewis, we will let Jack speak about himself through his letters: what he loved, such as books, seasons/weather, walking tours, "bathing," Ireland, animals, convalescence, Joy, and writing; what he loathed: writing letters, Americans, cities, TV, newspapers, movies, modern novels/poetry/theology; what he feared; what he didn‘t understand; and what he regretted, as well as his descriptions of what he looked like, what he did well, what he did badly. I will force myself with Great Difficulty (because of all the choice bits I will have to leave out) to limit these tastes of his sixty-year, three-volume, 3,600-page, 9-1/2 pound correspondence to what can be savored in twenty minutes!
THE PASSIONS OF C.S. LEWIS AS SEEN IN HIS COLLECTED LETTERS
Jessica Shaver Renshaw
"You are one of the great English letter writers," C.S. Lewis once wrote to Dorothy Sayers. "But I‘m not" (2:682-3). "You write such excellent letters that if I were a bad man I should lure you into an epistolary controversy and you wd. find you had written a book for us without knowing it: I shd. simply publish the letters" (2:728).
Instead, and without being lured, Lewis has "written a book for us without knowing it" and Walter Hooper has superbly edited and "simply" published it: the three-volume Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis (2004, 2004, 2007). Volume 1 chronicles Jack‘s intellectual development up to his being hired at Oxford and becoming a Christian, Volume 2 his blossoming career as teacher, writer, and speaker, and Volume 3 the burdensome demands of his publishers and fans, the loss of his wife, and growing health problems, all of which turn his heart from this life to the next one.
With this publication, we now have all sixty years--three volumes, 3,600 pages, and 9-1/2 pounds--of Lewis‘ correspondence, from which to extract glimpses of Lewis, the man. Jack himself would have no patience with what we are about to do. "I have no natural curiosity about private lives,' he wrote to a friend (2:980) and to another, '. . .we begin thinking about the private life of the actors when the play ceases to grip us'' (3:877).
But most of us do have a natural curiosity—don‘t we?--about private lives, especially about the life of someone like C.S. Lewis, who could write books as varied as Mere Christianity, The Screwtape Letters, A Space Trilogy, and The Chronicles of Narnia, a man who through his writing could spar with intellectuals—even in Latin--and stir the imagination of children, always with grace and humor.
In this paper we will extract from those letters what Lewis LOVED, what he HATED, what he FEARED, what he REGRETTED and what he DIDN‘T UNDERSTAND.
But let‘s start with his own descriptions of himself. To a Miss Coffey, who had asked for a picture of him, ''Sorry, but I‘m out of photos. Which is perhaps just as well, for I look awful. Imagine a marsh-wiggle gone fat and red in the face. And deaf and bald. I talk far too loud." (3:1429-30) He called himself and his brother Warnie "two crusted old batchelors" (3:394), "old square-rigged type(s)" (2:350), and "quiet ruminants" (2:368). Yet he was always young at heart. To a 12-year old he wrote, "Parts of me are still 12 and I think other parts of me were already 50 when I was 12. . ." (3:362).
In his own words, what did he do well and what did he do badly? He wrote a child, "I am amused you should think 'my hand must be good at making things'. In reality I‘m the clumsiest and most ham-handed person in the world! I can‘t make anything—words are the only tools I am any good at" (3:1424). He never learned to drive or type: "I‘m no good at any sort of machine" (3:615). He couldn‘t tie knots (3:1193). A missing joint in each thumb made him "unhandy and messy" (3:4). To a Miss Mathews, he mourned, "If Man is defined as a tool-using animal, I am not human" (2:981).
LEWIS LOVED:
Books: "My dear Arthur," Jack wrote his friend Arthur Greeves when he was 16, "Do you ever wake up in the morning and suddenly wonder why you have not bought such-and-such a book long ago, and then decided that life without it will be quite unbearable? I do frequently. .." (2:94).
Jack‘s letters to Arthur (as Jack says of Arthur‘s letters to him) are "full of enthusiasm about books and music and scenery" (1:287). They read like an annotated bibliography of the Great Books. Jack must have read at least a book a day--in English, French, German, Latin, Greek, Italian, Old French and Old English. He considered "re-reading old favourites" one of his greatest pleasures: "indeed I can‘t imagine a man really enjoying a book and reading it only once" (2:54). Authors he re-read included Milton, Spenser, Malory, Dante, Austen, Wordsworth, and George Macdonald.
Years later, an author himself, he wrote his publisher that he did not "have for the bodies of my own books the same reverence I have for the bodies of all other books. For it is a curious fact that I never can regard them as being really books: the boards and print, in however mint a condition, remain a mere pretence behind which one sees the scratchy, inky old MS [manuscript]" (3:546).
Seasons: Jack often describes the weather in his letters: The beginning of winter "always excites me; it makes me want adventures" (3:659). He notes winter afternoons "when the sky is the colour of putty and the rain comes down in sheets for hour after hour" (1:247).
Early spring is "that thin, tingling, virginal weather" (2:181).
As for summer: "I am not and never will be a hot weather man—having been reared in the north of Ireland, by the sea, where fifty degrees is a cold day, and seventy a very hot one" (3:32-3). He informs an American, "If you have any friends who think of coming over, tell them that the English summer generally falls in the third week in June." (3:15)
Autumn was his "favourite:" "Anyone else may have all my summers if they‘ll give me their autumns. . ." (2:980) "Everything horrid that ever happened to me was in an August. But courage! Divine September, the grey mornings, the beady cobwebs, the delicious hint of frost in the evening, is at hand" (2:875). In autumn, the pond is "sprinkled, or rather paved with bright leaves" (2:128).
Nature, scenery: Jack took at least two "walking tours" per year, which were planned rambles or hikes with a few friends through country and town, feasting at a pub on "bread & cheese, beer, and a following cup of tea," perhaps spending a night or two at tucked-away inns. His descriptions of these, which go on for pages, exude pleasure: "We drank tea at the tiny hamlet of Stoke Pero where there is a little grey church without a tower that holds only about twenty people. Here, according to an excellent custom of our walks, one of the party read us a chapter of Scripture from the lectern while the rest of us sat heavily in the pews and spread out our mackintoshes to let the linings steam off. . . Best of all was after tea when we struck inland again over the moor in one of those golden evening lights that pours a dreamlike mildness over the world: light seemed to be a liquid that you could drink. . .We had done well over twenty miles and felt immortal" (1:895).
Ireland: "I was with a friend in Donegal which is a v. fine, wild country with green mountains, rich secretive valleys, and Atlantic breakers on innumerable desolate sands. But alas!, they get less desolate every year and it will soon be just a holiday resort like so many other places. (One always disapproves of all holiday-makers except oneself!)" (3:797)
"Bathing" (swimming): Until his physical ailments prevented it, Jack swam daily, sometimes naked, in ponds: "I wish you could join me as I board the punt in the before-breakfast solitude and push out from under the dark shadow of the trees onto the full glare of the open water, usually sending the moor hens and their chicks scudding away into the reeds. . . with a delicious flurry of silver drops. Then I tie up to the projecting stump in the middle and dive off the stern of the punt" (1:963) Or in the ocean as it "knock(s) one head over heels in great green, ginger-beer-coloured waves" (2:969). He also liked bathing in the tub. As he wrote his delighted goddaughter: "I like getting down like a Hippo with only my nostrils out" (3:407).
Animals: Jack usually wrote about animals only to children and although his household at the Kilns had, at various times, dogs, cats, hens, geese, rabbits, hamsters, and a white rat this is one of his few references to the pets: "Our (Siamese cat) adores me because I lift her up by her tail—an operation which I can‘t imagine I should like if I were a cat, but she comes back for more and more, purring all the time" (3:1044) More often he mentioned wild animals in the surrounding woods. He describes to his godchildren a wild rabbit yawning "a very bored triangular yawn in the middle of a long hot afternoon" (2:819) and a hedgehog which came into the kitchen, drank a saucer of milk and then "got into the saucer and settled down to sleep" (2:751)
Convalescence: "Unless it is (a) very painful or opressive [sic] illness I always get some pleasure out of 'keeping my bed.' Especially if you are sick enough to have a fire! There is something beautifully cosy about meals brought up on a tray. . . I love to pile up my pillows, call for a choice pile of bright volumes and settle down to an endless read: if there be snow falling so much the better." (1:293)
Writing fiction: "I enjoy writing fiction more than writing anything else. Wouldn‘t anyone?" (3:1214)
LEWIS HATED:
Correspondence: "(I)t is just when one would be most ready for a talk in the odd hour of the day when one shoves ones work from one and lights the pipe of peace, that one is least ready to sit down and write a letter," Jack complained to his father in early 1921. "I often wonder how the born letter writers whose 'works‘ fill volumes, overcame this difficulty" (1:518). Perhaps they did not, as Jack did, take it upon themselves to personally answer every letter they received—by hand, preferably with a pen which had to be frequently dipped in ink—even after he developed rheumatism and struggled to write legibly.
He called correspondence "the chief burden of my life" (3:1023), "very laborious" (3:1043), "the ghastly, daily grind" (3:1123), "the bane of my life!" (3:1297). "Yes," he wrote one lady, "I have many other correspondents: some, alas, lunatics!" (3:581)
In 1949 he fusses to fellow author Dorothy Sayers, "Oh the mails: every bore in two continents seems to think I like getting letters. One‘s real friends are precisely the people one never gets time to write to" (2:1014). He dreaded Christmas time, when mail was delivered every half-hour. Yet he dutifully answered every letter and card during what he termed (1959) "that utterly galley-slave hour or so every day" before breakfast (3:1076).
Exceptions: "No author minds having to answer letters in praise of his own book" (3:447). "But fan mail from children is delightful. . . They want to know whether Aslan repaired Tumnus‘s furniture for him. Lovely" (3:65).
Cities: "How horrid all great cities are for more than a fortnight!" (3:907).
Newspapers: "I never read the papers," (3:63) but "Warnie in his usual way of encouragement, reads me paragraphs. . . at breakfast about liners wind bound in the Mersey and waves 6-1/2 feet high off the Irish coast." (3:102).
Modern novelists (such as Graham Greene) and poets (Dylan Thomas, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot): "Why should one read authors one does‘nt like because they happen to be alive at the same time as oneself?" (3:83)
TV: "(W)e have‘nt got a set, and don‘t propose to get one; it is I think a very bad habit to develop" (3:350).
Movies: "I have actually been to the films to-day!—to see Cavalcade!!" Jack wrote Arthur in 1933. "This is one of the most disgraceful confessions I have ever made to you. . . There is not an idea in the whole thing from beginning to end: it is a mere brutal assault on one‘s emotions. . . I have come away feeling as if I had been at a debauch" (2:114-5).
In 1951, he summed up film as "an astonishingly ugly art. I don‘t mean 'ugly‘ in any high flying moral or spiritual sense, but just disagreeable to the eye—crowded, unrestful, inharmonious" (3:105).
As far as we can tell from his letters, the only movies Jack had ever seen besides Cavalcade were Snow White and Bambi! He critiqued these as he critiqued everything. Of Snow White, he wrote a long paragraph, conceding, "[A]ll the terrifying bits were good, and the animals really most moving: and the use of shadows (of dwarfs and vultures) was real genius. . ." (2:242) Of Bambi, he admitted being impressed by the "loveliness" of an American autumn on the screen (2:884).
In response to the suggestion that he allow the Narnian stories to be filmed: "Aslan is a divine figure, and anything remotely approaching the comic (above all anything in the Disney line) would be to me simple blasphemy" (3:491). To one young fan, he explained, "The whole Narnian story is about Christ. That is to say, I asked myself 'Supposing there really were a world like Narnia, and supposing it had (like our world) gone wrong, and supposing Christ wanted to go into that world and save it (as He did ours) what might have happened?‘
"The stories are my answer. Since Narnia is a world of Talking Beasts, I thought He would become a Talking Beast there, as he became a Man here. I pictured Him becoming a lion there because (a) The lion is supposed to be the King of beasts: (b) Christ is called 'The Lion of Judah‘ in the Bible: (c) I‘d been having strange dreams about lions when I began writing the books" (3:1244-5).
But is there anyone who loves "the Narnian story" with its Christ-figure Aslan (which means "lion" in Turkish: "I chose it for the sound" (3:519).) who doubts that C.S. Lewis would have thoroughly approved of what Walt Disney Pictures and Walden Media have done with The Chronicles so far?
He chose not to attend Queen Elizabeth‘s coronation in 1953: "I approve of all that sort of thing immensely and I was deeply moved by all I heard of it; but I‘m not a man for crowds and Best Clothes" (3:340). He did attend the Queen‘s garden party in 1956. "Croquet is not mentioned in the invitation," he wrote Ruth Pitter, "but I am well-read enough to know that a royal garden party will involve hedgehogs, flamingoes, soldiers, Headsman, and the grin of a Cheshire cat." He reported afterward, "I learn from the papers that I was one of 8,000 guests and also that the Queen was present, a fact of which I had no evidence from my own experience. . . (T)he crowd round the refreshment tables was reminiscent of Liverpool Street Station on an August bank holiday. . . In a word, it was simply ghastly. Two pints at the little pub on Praed St. were necessary afterwards." (3:769, 771).
Change: "I would like everything to be immemorial—to have the same old horizons, the same garden, the same smells and sounds, always there, changeless. . . I suppose all these changes shd. prepare us for the far greater change which has drawn nearer even since I began this letter" (3:1383).
Velvet: "I can‘t enjoy velvet as a sound, lovely though it is, because I hate the stuff" (3:1440). He also disliked politics, biographies, and being alone (3:1431).
Americans: In 1916 he wrote, "What a pity such a genius (Nathanael Hawthorne) should be a beastly American!" (1:259) and in 1917 he described "Yanks" as "a set of squatters and damned money grubbing puritans" (1:266). In 1933 he still looked down on Americans: "I am . . . supervising a young woman who is writing a thesis on G(eorge) MacDonald. . . The girl is, unfortunately, quite unworthy of her subject: apart from everything else, she is an American" (2:96-7).
He would have been shocked to know he would someday marry one!
HE FEARED: "(P)overty frightens me more than anything else except large spiders and the tops of cliffs." (3:359)
HE DID NOT UNDERSTAND:
Mathematics: "I am also bad at Maths. . .I get muddled over my change in shops."
(3:882) Economics: "I am very ignorant of the ways of 'big business‘. . . We are as frightened of (a recession) as you, for apparently—for reasons I can‘t follow—a recession in America will automatically reproduce the same conditions over here." (3:906)
Housecleaning: To writer Ruth Pitter: "I didn‘t know arm chairs were ever cleaned: should they be?" (3:101)
HE REGRETTED: "I treated my own father abominably and no sin in my whole life now seems to be so serious" (3:445).
HE WAS DISAPPOINTED that The Screwtape Letters became so popular: "On my own view Perelandra is worth 20 Screwtapes" (3:627). His favorite, besides Perelandra, was Till We Have Faces: "I think it far and away my best book but it has, with the critics and the public, been my one great failure: an absolute 'flop‘. No one seems to have the slightest idea what I‘m getting at in it" (3:1148).
At the end of Volume 1, Jack has a new love which will color everything he does and writes the rest of his life: "I have just passed on from believing in God to definitely believing in Christ," he writes Arthur (1:974). "My puzzle was the whole doctrine of Redemption," of one man‘s death effectively providing salvation for others through "something . . . very mysterious expressed in those phrases I have so often ridiculed ('propitiation‘ -- 'sacrifice‘-- 'the blood of the Lamb‘)" (1:976).
Jack described how he, with friends J.R.R. Tolkien and Hugo Dyson, spent most of one night in September walking the grounds of Magdalene College, Oxford, discussing (among other things) "metaphor and myth' (1:970).
"Now what Dyson and Tolkien showed me was this: that if I met the idea of sacrifice in a Pagan story I didn‘t mind it at all: again, that if I met the idea of a god sacrificing himself to himself. . . I liked it very much and was mysteriously moved by it: again, that the idea of the dying and reviving god (Balder, Adonis, Bacchus) similarly moved me provided I met it anywhere except in the Gospels. . . Now the story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened. . ." (1:976-7)
During his transition to Christianity, Jack looked back with "humiliation" at the letters he had written Arthur, recognizing in them "priggery" and "affectation": "I seem to be posturing and showing off in every letter" (1:973). Of his thoughts, "one out of every three is a thought of self-admiration. . . I pretend I am carefully thinking out what to say to the next pupil (for his good, of course) and then suddenly realise I am really thinking how frightfully clever I‘m going to be and how he will admire me. . ." (1:878) "You have no idea how much of my time I spend just hating people whom I disagree with—tho‘ I know them only from their books—and inventing conversations in which I score off them" (2:125-6).
His conversion brings about other humbling insights about himself. In one letter, he identified with Arthur, who had apparently had a manuscript rejected: "The side of me which longs . . . to be approved as a writer, is not the side of us that is really worth much. . . I would have given almost anything—I shudder to think what I would have given if I had been allowed—to be a successful writer. . . I think the only thing for you to do is absolutely to kill the part of you that wants success" (1:924-7).
One of his most poignant letters shares his own struggles before he was hired as don (tutor) at Magdalen College, Oxford University. To his godson Laurence Harwood, who had just failed the preliminary exam for entrance to the university, Jack wrote in 1953: "I remember only too well what a hopeless oyster to be opened the world seemed at your age. I would have given a good deal to anyone who cd. have assured me that I ever wd. be able to persuade anyone to pay me a living wage for anything I cd. do. Life consisted of applying for jobs which other people got, writing books that no one wd. publish, and giving lectures wh. no one attended. . .Yet the vast majority of us manage to get in somewhere and shake down somehow in the end" (3:353).
Two new loves revived Lewis in the last 13 years of his life (Volume 3). He accepted the invitation from Magdalene College, Cambridge, to assume the Chair of Medieval and Renaissance English, a position created for him (although, ironically, he did not believe in the Renaissance), and he married Joy Davidman Gresham.
Joy came into his life and his letters in December, 1952. She went from being "a guest, asked for one week but staying for three, who talks from morning till night" (3:268), to "a visitor . . . very nice but one can‘t feel quite free" (3:285), to "a lady from New York" (3:394) to "our queer, Jewish, ex-Communist, American convert. . .at any rate, not a Bore" (3:450).
During that time his attitude toward America softened, probably without his realizing it. For the first time he expressed interest in visiting the country. As he wrote another American lady, "How wrong you are when you think that streamlined planes and trains wd. attract me to America. What I want to see there is yourself and 3 or 4 other good friends, after New England, the Rip Van Winkle Mts., Nantucket, the Huckleberry Finn country, the Rockies, Yellowstone Park, and a sub-Artic [sic] winter. And I shd. never come if I couldn‘t manage to come by sea instead of air: preferably on a cargo boat that took weeks on the voyage. I‘m a rustic animal and a maritime animal: no good at great cities, big hotels, or all that. . ." As a postscript, he added, "I‘d love to see a bear, a snow-shoe, and a real forest" (3:377) He never did travel to the States.
But he still didn‘t realize he was falling in love with an American. On August 1, 1953, Jack wrote Mary Willis Shelburne, "I do most heartily agree that it is just as well to be past the age when one expects or desires to attract the other sex." (3:352). Three years later she was the second correspondent to whom he confided (with no intervening mention of Joy, love, courtship, or marriage in his responses to her frequent letters), "I may soon be, in rapid succession, a bridegroom and a widower" (3:808).
Even after the wedding in December, 1956 he referred to Joy as a lady "who is very ill, too probably dying" (3:825), "a lady suffering from cancer" (3:826), and finally, after five months, "my wife" (3:830).
During Joy‘s remission Lewis wrote to Dorothy Sayers, "We soon learn to love what we know we must lose. . . My heart is breaking and I was never so happy before" (3:862) and a week later, "The house ripples with laughter and esoteric jokes. . . O God, if there were no such thing as the Future!" (3:864)
After her death in July, 1960, he called her "my dear Joy" (3:1170) and "the great love of my life." (3:1223)
Cambridge University, anticipated: "I think I shall like Magdalene better than Magdalen. It‘s a tiny college (a perfect cameo architecturally) and they‘re so old fashioned, & pious, & gentle and conservative—unlike this leftist, atheist, cynical, hard-boiled, huge Magdalen. Perhaps from being the fogey and 'old woman‘ here I shall become the enfant terrible there" (3:521).
Cambridge University, honeymoon period: ". . . (I)t is so small that I feel I‘d like to take it to bed with me or have it swimming in my bath!" (3:600)
Cambridge University, 18 months later: "(M)y medieval mission at Cambridge is, so far, a flop d’estime. A few dons come to my lectures but far fewer undergrads. I‘ve never had such small audiences before. Must be frightfully good for me" (3:793).
If pride was his "besetting sin" in the first third of his life, humility characterized the last two-thirds. To an American who wrote glowingly of both his and Tolkien‘s works, he responded, "Oh, but believe me, you are still only paddling in the glorious sea of Tolkien. Go on from The Hobbit at once to The Lord of the Rings. . ." while thanking him "for all the nice things you say about my own little efforts." (3:980-1) He wrote one fan, "I‘m so glad you liked my amateurish little book on the Psalms." (3:1017) and in telling a child about his newest book, The Silver Chair, he warned, "Don‘t look forward to it too much or you are sure to be disappointed" (3:310).
To a priest: "Yes, God has been v. good to me and allowed my work to reach more people than I would have dared to hope. But I always remember that He can preach thro‘ any instrument—Balaam‘s ass is the example I keep in mind." He has an asterisk after "Balaam‘s ass" and adds a footnote, "Can‘t you get it canonised?" (3:1387)
In August, 1963, Jack had a heart attack and was thought to be dying but (according to his brother) he regained consciousness "and asked for his tea." Home again, he wrote a friend, "It seems almost a pity, having reached the gate so easily, not to be allowed through. . ." (3:1452)
Three months later, on November 22, he was "allowed through." His last letter, written the day before, was to a child: "Thank you for telling me that you like my books, a thing an author is always pleased to hear. It is a funny thing that all the children who have written to me see at once who Aslan is, and grown ups never do!" (3:1483)
http://www.taylor.edu/dotAsset/77489.pdf">
Prayer for self or others
Dear Heavenly Father, I pray ________________ will know and believe that:
--You are the one true God,
omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent,
eternal, unchanging, living and personal,
all-wise, all-just, all-good, faithful, trustworthy, patient,
loving, compassionate, merciful--You have designed and created all things
and uphold them by the word of Your power,
--You have designed and created us for a purpose,
that we may humble ourselves to seek that purpose,
to seek You where You may be found,
--Everything we have is from You
and You will hold us accountable for our use of it
--You have designed and created us
in Your own image, with a family resemblance,
--You can be known, You want to be known but
You are holy and we are not,
we fall short of Your perfect standard.
We can reach up to You
but we cannot reach You.
You must reach down to us--
--and You have!
You have provided Your written word
which shows us our need for salvation,
You have provided Your spoken word, Jesus Christ,
the sin-bearer,
who met our need for salvation
by giving Himself for us, the just for the unjust,
that He who knew no sin would be made sin for us,
that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him,
who is the one Mediator between God and man,
the only One through whose name we can and must be saved
You have provided the Holy Spirit, who lives His life through us
and You have provided the church, his body,
for our direction, accountability, support and encouragement.
I pray that
--we will have ears to hear Your truth
--You will remove all deception, delusion, distortion, and distraction from our minds
and remove any veils or scales over our understanding.
--You will speak truth to the lies we believe
--we may know the truth and it will set us free
--the enemy's agenda will not be realized in or through us but
--Your agenda will be realized in our lives.
--________ will be born again, receiving Your son Jesus Christ as their savior,
Yeshua as their Messiah
Convict us of our idols, so we will forsake them, having no other gods before You,
Convict us of our sins, so we will renounce them, confessing whatever we need to confess,
Convict us of our grudges, so we will forgive whoever we need to forgive.
I pray we will commit everything we have to You, our
--lives
--intelligence
--emotions
--looks
--talent
--health
--money
--time
--relationships
--reputations
--opportunities
--past, present, and future
--personal agendas, dreams, ambitions, aspirations, and desires
I pray for Your personal impact on our lives, that we will
--seek Your guidance and wisdom
--recognize and receive it when You give it to us
--come into a deeper relationship with You.
I pray You will infuse our decisions with
--a strong moral dimension
--a commitment to use the mighty power of whatever our field to
--walk uprightly
--be assets to society,
preferring others and respecting their property
--uplift, inspire
--exalt truth and righteousness
--be and provide good role models
--do all things with excellence
I pray those of us who know You will
--abide in You
--read, study, understand, believe, remember, meditate on and obey Your word
reflecting You clearly,
in everything giving thanks to You
--advance Your kingdom, enduring until the end,
--and bring You glory.
Father, thank You for exposing and thwarting all terrorist, false and evil agendas.
Please continue to expose and thwart all terrorist, false and evil agendas.
In Jesus' name,
Amen
--You are the one true God,
omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent,
eternal, unchanging, living and personal,
all-wise, all-just, all-good, faithful, trustworthy, patient,
loving, compassionate, merciful--You have designed and created all things
and uphold them by the word of Your power,
--You have designed and created us for a purpose,
that we may humble ourselves to seek that purpose,
to seek You where You may be found,
--Everything we have is from You
and You will hold us accountable for our use of it
--You have designed and created us
in Your own image, with a family resemblance,
--You can be known, You want to be known but
You are holy and we are not,
we fall short of Your perfect standard.
We can reach up to You
but we cannot reach You.
You must reach down to us--
--and You have!
You have provided Your written word
which shows us our need for salvation,
You have provided Your spoken word, Jesus Christ,
the sin-bearer,
who met our need for salvation
by giving Himself for us, the just for the unjust,
that He who knew no sin would be made sin for us,
that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him,
who is the one Mediator between God and man,
the only One through whose name we can and must be saved
You have provided the Holy Spirit, who lives His life through us
and You have provided the church, his body,
for our direction, accountability, support and encouragement.
I pray that
--we will have ears to hear Your truth
--You will remove all deception, delusion, distortion, and distraction from our minds
and remove any veils or scales over our understanding.
--You will speak truth to the lies we believe
--we may know the truth and it will set us free
--the enemy's agenda will not be realized in or through us but
--Your agenda will be realized in our lives.
--________ will be born again, receiving Your son Jesus Christ as their savior,
Yeshua as their Messiah
Convict us of our idols, so we will forsake them, having no other gods before You,
Convict us of our sins, so we will renounce them, confessing whatever we need to confess,
Convict us of our grudges, so we will forgive whoever we need to forgive.
I pray we will commit everything we have to You, our
--lives
--intelligence
--emotions
--looks
--talent
--health
--money
--time
--relationships
--reputations
--opportunities
--past, present, and future
--personal agendas, dreams, ambitions, aspirations, and desires
I pray for Your personal impact on our lives, that we will
--seek Your guidance and wisdom
--recognize and receive it when You give it to us
--come into a deeper relationship with You.
I pray You will infuse our decisions with
--a strong moral dimension
--a commitment to use the mighty power of whatever our field to
--walk uprightly
--be assets to society,
preferring others and respecting their property
--uplift, inspire
--exalt truth and righteousness
--be and provide good role models
--do all things with excellence
I pray those of us who know You will
--abide in You
--read, study, understand, believe, remember, meditate on and obey Your word
reflecting You clearly,
in everything giving thanks to You
--advance Your kingdom, enduring until the end,
--and bring You glory.
Father, thank You for exposing and thwarting all terrorist, false and evil agendas.
Please continue to expose and thwart all terrorist, false and evil agendas.
In Jesus' name,
Amen
Thursday, May 13, 2010
Daily Warfare Prayer
Heavenly Father, I humble myself in worship before You. To Your holy name be glory, honor and praise forever! You are worthy of my adoration, devotion and thanksgiving. I commit myself to love You with all of my heart, mind, soul and strength--including my energy output and all of my best efforts. I submit myself to You (and to my husband/wife) whom You have given me to love. I yield my money, sex, power, imagination, emotions, appetite and health to You. Here is my body as a living sacrifice, consecrated to You and made holy as a temple of the Holy Spirit. I give myself to You completely and without holding anything back.
By faith I claim the protection of the blood of the Lord Jesus Christ around and within me. I give myself to abide and remain in Christ during this day. In union with Christ, I take my stand against all efforts of Satan and his demons to hinder me in this time of prayer and in this day.
Righteous Father, by faith and in obedience to Your command, I put off the old self which is being corrupted by its deceitful desires and put on the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness. I resist all the forces of darkness that stimulate the desires of my sinful nature. By the power and authority of our Lord Jesus Christ, I retake any ground given to the devil and release its full control to the Holy Spirit.
I confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh. I claim the power of His crucifixion on my behalf as an astoning sacrifice for all my sins and not for mine only but also for the sins of the whole world. I claim the victory of His resurrection and the power of His intercession for us. I submit to His authority as the head of the church and rejoice in His rule and reign in the universe. For this day I appropriate the fullness of the Holy Spirit. I bring all this power to bear against Satan, his forces of evil and his strategies against us.
In obedience to the command in Your word, I commit myself to be strong in the Lord and His mighty power. Thank You for the full armor of God that You provide. Right now I put on the belt of truth, the breastplate of righteousness and the boots of readiness of the gospel of peace. I hold up the shield of faith that extinguishes all the flaming arrows of the evil one. I put on the helmet of salvation. I grasp the sword of the Spirit, the word of God. Train me to use it with superntural ability. Stimulate me to pray on all occasions with all kinds of prayers and requests.
Heavenly Father, with the divine power of these weapons that You give in Christ, I tear down Satan's strongholds in my life and in the lives of those I love. I demolish the plans of Satan formed against us today. I smash the strongholds of Satan against my mind, my will, my soul, my spirit, my body, my heart and my emotions. I reject the ideas and phrases that make sin attractive and plausible. By faith I claim the mind of Christ. I take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ. I release every negative emotion, replacing it with the peace of God that transcends all understanding.
Thank You, Lord Jesus, for loving me and laying down Your life for me. Open my eyes today to the opportunity to love (my husband/wife and) others and to lay down my life for them, using my spiritual gifts in a spirit of humility, joy and service. Help me to take my focus off myself and to fix my eyes on Jesus Christ. Show me what You are doing, Holy Father, and allow me to be used of the Holy Spirit as a part of it. I enter this day with thanksgiving and praise.
I pray all this in the confidence of the wonderful name of our Lord Jesus Christ who is able to keep me from falling and to present me before Your glorious presence without fault and with great joy.
Amen.
(Note: I believe the original prayer was written by Derek Prince. We have edited it down and modified it somewhat. We read it aloud together every morning. It takes about five minutes.)
By faith I claim the protection of the blood of the Lord Jesus Christ around and within me. I give myself to abide and remain in Christ during this day. In union with Christ, I take my stand against all efforts of Satan and his demons to hinder me in this time of prayer and in this day.
Righteous Father, by faith and in obedience to Your command, I put off the old self which is being corrupted by its deceitful desires and put on the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness. I resist all the forces of darkness that stimulate the desires of my sinful nature. By the power and authority of our Lord Jesus Christ, I retake any ground given to the devil and release its full control to the Holy Spirit.
I confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh. I claim the power of His crucifixion on my behalf as an astoning sacrifice for all my sins and not for mine only but also for the sins of the whole world. I claim the victory of His resurrection and the power of His intercession for us. I submit to His authority as the head of the church and rejoice in His rule and reign in the universe. For this day I appropriate the fullness of the Holy Spirit. I bring all this power to bear against Satan, his forces of evil and his strategies against us.
In obedience to the command in Your word, I commit myself to be strong in the Lord and His mighty power. Thank You for the full armor of God that You provide. Right now I put on the belt of truth, the breastplate of righteousness and the boots of readiness of the gospel of peace. I hold up the shield of faith that extinguishes all the flaming arrows of the evil one. I put on the helmet of salvation. I grasp the sword of the Spirit, the word of God. Train me to use it with superntural ability. Stimulate me to pray on all occasions with all kinds of prayers and requests.
Heavenly Father, with the divine power of these weapons that You give in Christ, I tear down Satan's strongholds in my life and in the lives of those I love. I demolish the plans of Satan formed against us today. I smash the strongholds of Satan against my mind, my will, my soul, my spirit, my body, my heart and my emotions. I reject the ideas and phrases that make sin attractive and plausible. By faith I claim the mind of Christ. I take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ. I release every negative emotion, replacing it with the peace of God that transcends all understanding.
Thank You, Lord Jesus, for loving me and laying down Your life for me. Open my eyes today to the opportunity to love (my husband/wife and) others and to lay down my life for them, using my spiritual gifts in a spirit of humility, joy and service. Help me to take my focus off myself and to fix my eyes on Jesus Christ. Show me what You are doing, Holy Father, and allow me to be used of the Holy Spirit as a part of it. I enter this day with thanksgiving and praise.
I pray all this in the confidence of the wonderful name of our Lord Jesus Christ who is able to keep me from falling and to present me before Your glorious presence without fault and with great joy.
Amen.
(Note: I believe the original prayer was written by Derek Prince. We have edited it down and modified it somewhat. We read it aloud together every morning. It takes about five minutes.)
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