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The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, Volume I
The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, Volume I: (Family Letters, 1905-1931) by Amy E. Black, Douglas L. Koopman, and David K. Ryden Georgetown Univ. Press, 2004 356 pp., $ 26.95, paper 
The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, Volume II
The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, Volume II: (Books, Broadcasts and War, 1931-1949) by Dave Donaldson and Stanley W. Carlson-Thies Baker Books, 2003 208 pp., $14.99, paper |
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." Thus Lewis sounds off to one of those real friends, Dorothy L. Sayers, in the letter closing the second volume of this collected correspondence. Editor Walter Hooper has chosen an interesting note on which to pause for breath before he brings out the third and final volume next year. Lewis' complaint reminds us that a writer's correspondence may reflect duty much more than joy, and in that regard these two volumes show him as the very slave of duty. (His fantastically tireless thank-you letters to Warfield Firor ought to be compulsory reading for all children on Boxing Day.) The complaint also has a delicious proleptic irony for we know that, within a year, Lewis will publish The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and henceforth his mails will be even heavier. He really has only himself to blame.
Once complete, this three-volume edition of Lewis' correspondence will replace all previous collections, gathering up into its comprehensive embrace Letters (1988), Letters to Children (1985), Letters to an American Lady (1967), Letters to Arthur Greeves (1979), and the Latin Letters (1989). 1 However, that is not to say that every single extant letter by Lewis will then have been published. Some, of course, have still not come to light. (Incidentally, those letters which materialized too late to get into volumes 1 and 2 will be given their own appendix in volume 3.) And some letters have been omitted from the first volume to prevent it from being too long. The omissions mostly consist of the weekly "regulation" letters from the schoolboy Lewis to his father and the abstruse letters to Owen Barfield in the 1920s when Lewis was debating—as his brother mockingly put it—"the utterness of the nothingness." They constitute about five per cent of the total correspondence from the period covered by volume 1, and it is to be regretted that the publisher should not have found a way to squeeze them in. So near and yet so far. (Perhaps Hooper will at least be given space to list all omitted letters in a second appendix to volume 3.)
Another mark against the publisher is incurred by the subtitles of these two volumes, which are, respectively, inaccurate and jejune. The first volume is made up of letters to friends as much as family: it would have been better called something like "The Road to Faith," concluding, as it does, with a letter detailing that seminal moment in which Lewis first thought of Christianity as "a true myth." And to say that the second deals with "books, broadcasts and war" serves to distinguish it from volume 1 only in respect of "broadcasts," but Lewis' radio talks are not a major subject of this second volume. An apter subtitle would have been "The Road to Narnia" or some such, since it finishes with Lewis on the brink of his greatest achievement and having just penned his first letter to Narnia's illustrator, Pauline Baynes.
Although most of these letters have been published before, there are many which are new to print, especially in volume 2. These include 11 to his bête noire, T.S. Eliot, which are fascinating as much for their tone as their content. When Eliot failed, despite repeated undertakings, to supply an essay for the festschrift dedicated to the memory of Charles Williams, Lewis, who was editing the book, wrote to tell him that his time was up, adding, "Perhaps you will find your own way of honoring our friend later and no less effectively." In the light of Lewis' inveterate hostility toward Eliot on literary matters and given that the festschrift was designed to bring a little financial relief to Williams' widow, one can detect all sorts of undercurrents in that single sentence: doubt, disappointment, confirmation of worst suspicions, mild chastisement, and all within a perfectly polite and encouraging suggestion. Peachy.
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