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Also new are 26 letters to Ruth Pitter, the poet, whom Lewis once said he would have liked to have married. "I should love to come and lunch," he writes: "Will September do for you?—when the world begins to stir again and one puts back the eiderdown and there are cobwebs of a morning? I long for it." This correspondence gives a glimpse into a rarely seen gentleness and sensitivity in the letter-writing Lewis and into a deeply felt, deeply restrained relationship, like something out of a Barbara Pym novel; a contrast to the hefty, hearty rallies with Dorothy Sayers.
Third, in this survey of the newcomers, we must include mention of the numerous letters to E.R. Eddison, author of one of Lewis' favorite books, The Worm Ouroboros. These are written in a mock-Tudor style, full of duncicall, saucie, and malapert periods, very witty and light. Much of the correspondence was composed before the two men had ever met; when they eventually did, it was at a lively Inklings session at Magdalen, where Eddison found himself "one martyr-lion fallne vnawares ammiddes an whole covine of Xtianes." Once we have learned that Eddison was an unbeliever we can see the yeast in Lewis' habitual signoff: "euer yo~ hono~'s humble bedesman." He is effectively saying, "I'm praying for you, dear pagan; you're in my prayers." But he makes it palatable; it coheres with the whole epistolary relationship.
The Eddison letters, like the Latin letters to Don Giovanni Calabria (presented by Hooper above English translations), typify Lewis' extraordinary ability to adjust his language and modulate his tone to suit the correspondent. There is never a pro forma response. Lewis' pen is like a magical stream which can run now fresh, now salt, now cream, now wine. His complete mastery of voice is an object lesson in the art of becoming "all things to all men." Occasionally (in volume 1 especially) this capsizes into hypocrisy. In his late teens and early twenties, Lewis' letters to his father were pitch-perfect pretences of filial piety; they alternate with letters to Greeves which show a very different, but equally presentable, persona. Lewis' two-facedness in these years is the evil twin of his later ability sincerely to accommodate himself and his style to interlocutor, occasion and subject matter.
As we witness Lewis develop we find that these volumes are working as a kind of unconscious autobiography. Lewis is unwittingly portraying his own maturation, a portrait which is, in its own way, as instructive an insight into the shape of his early life as Surprised by Joy. The alteration in manner which occurs between, say, 1927 and 1933, is striking to observe, clear empirical evidence of the objective efficacy of spiritual conversion. The crisis which Lewis was brought to by his encounter with Christ really was the hinge on which his whole life turned. The man demonstrably became more integrated, more purposeful, more relaxed, more self-effacing as a consequence of that life-changing talk with Tolkien in Addison's Walk. Faults and flaws and foibles remain, of course, and privately intended correspondence can be expected to reveal such characteristics; it opens a window onto a man's weaknesses more revealingly than any public confessional. Lewis sometimes writes irritably, eristically, posingly, de haut en bas; he can still, on occasion, denigrate people behind their backs. But he never writes dully, is never less than imaginative.
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