The Lewis Legacy-Issue 71, Winter 1997 From the Mailbag

What a lot in Legary #70! I particularly enloyed the thumbnail summary of Lewis’s views on dreams. Your essay on the natural law hit me at an opportune time. I’d just read Abolition. What an amazlngly prescient book, worth more than all those sanctimonious money-makers from Bennett put together.

Brenda Griffing, Lakeland, FL

I called the Manuscripts Department of the Davis Library at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and spoke with a Richard Shrader, who informed me that of the nine boxes of materials in the Walter Hooper Papers, only Box #1 was open for public access, and then permission had to be granted to make copies of anything. None of this material, including the microfilm you wrote of [in Light in the Shadowlands], is allowed to be sent out on Interlibrary Loan [anymore]; so I would need to go to Chapel Hill even to look at what’s in Box # 1.

Richard James, Burkesville KY

Last night I was reading J. B. Phillips’ Plain Christianity and read, “…is to give you in English as nearly and as accurately as we can what was written twenty centuries ago. It’s like seeing a famous picture after its been cleaned’ a well-known English scholar once wrote to me. I treasure those words…” I am sure the “well-known English scholar” must be C. S. Lewis!

Jonathan Bremer, St. Columb, Cornwall

I hope you don’t mind my calling you Kathryn [instead of Kay]. Its such a lovely name…

Christopher Mitchell, Wheaton, IL

Reply: I like Kathryn better too, but l’ve always been called Kay. So I use both.

I read the Lewis Legacy faithfully. and always profit from it.

Phillip Yancey, Evergreen, CO

This month I presented a paper [“Pilgrimage in the Writings of C.S. Lewis”] to the New York C. S. Lewis Society [published in CSL, November-December 1996] and I want to thank you for your book on Pilgrim’s Regress.

Charles Franklyn Beach, Nyack, NY

I think I’ve just had a visit from Michael Bruce. “The Gentle Poet of Lochleven” (Spring ’96 Legacy). In yesterday’s mail I received a handsome new hard-cover volume published by Barbour & Co. entitled The Psalms in Verse. Here’s a tidbit from its attractive slipcover: “As you read a loud each Scripturally accurate couplet, the power of the author’s divinely inspired lyrics, and the depth of his legendary faith, is realized as never before.”

Whose legendary faith they’re talking about isn’t divulged. The only attribution is the following: “These psalms were originally approved by the Church of Scotland to be used in worship over 100 years ago.”It would be interesting to know which of these rhyming verses belong to Michael Bruce.

Borrowing the words of another poetic Scot, “Oh was some power the giftie give us / To see plagiarism where Heaven sees it.”

Ranelda Hunsicker, Visalia, CA

I have been amusing myself re-reading “C.S. Lewis, Images of His World”, and looking for the similarities in our histories. A quite useless but amusing pastime!, but I guess there is the hope that by association some of the glory will rub off! We were both born in Northern Ireland, sent to boarding school at the age of 10. Both went to Campbell, with 30 years in between!, he for half a term, me for seven years. Both of us missed a scholarship because of lack of mathematical ability. I still hate math, it’s too unforgiving, words are easier to manipulate!. Both of us have traveled from Belfast to England via the mail boat to Liverpool. Both were married in 1956. Here the similarities end.

Dorothy and I spent last Thursday evening [21 November 1996] with Faith Sand when she came to Toronto to give a seminar on the Power of Prayer. We had a super time.

Cleaver Keenan, Espana, Ontario

The house next door to the Kilns is “for sale.” On Sunday morning [in early September] I spotted Walter Hooper hurrying into The Oratory in Woodstock Road just behind my hotel! How surreal!

Ralph Blair, New York, NY

I wish academic libraries would pay more attention to Legacy: the time will come when they will hunt around for individual issues.

I have been editing a book on Graham Grecne for an American Catholic priest, John Seland, who teaches at Nanzan University in Japan (a Christian college). He wrote me recently to say he had introduced his students to CSL, to Narnia, and they were proving exceptionally enthusiastic, as if the whole idea came upon them from another world, supporting their Christianity one supposes.

Lewis’s OHEL volume is perhaps the most complex and brilliant piece of scholarship in the whole series and is certainly a seminal book. There are literally hundreds and perhaps thousands of points worth marking on in this wonderful work. The erudition of course puts it in a class by itself [and] the sound instincts CSL shows throughout…

Robert O. Evans, Lexington, KY

I particularly enjoyed your and Gracia Fay Ellwood’s paper on Lewis and natural law [in Legacy 70]. Your qualifiers are useful, for Lewis was certainly a person of his time in many respects and among those were an overly masculine view of things, but I don’t find myself faulting him often in his perception of reality.

I hope you can keep up the good work for a long time.

Fred Graham, East Lansing, MI

Thank you for the encouragement of your faithful testimony.

Wes Brenneman, Aukland, New Zealand

In my class on Regress we came up with some discoveries. For example, in Lewis’s preface: “One of them described Romanticism as spilled religion.'”we figured out that this was Thomas E. Hulme’s definition of Romanticism in his essay “Romanticism and classicism.” Hume advocated the “hard dry image” and predicted a new “cheerful, dry and sophisticated” poetry. T.S. Eliot praised Hulme’s reaction against Romanticism.

David Mortimer, Chicago, IL