J O N K E R S R A R E B O O K S
P R E S E N T A T I O N C O P I E S & M A N U S C R I P T S
“I have had to postulate some sort of God as the least objectionable theory: but of course we know nothing. At any note we don’t know what the real Good is, and consequently I have stopped de- fying heaven” (25th September 1920). Shortly after this, in what Baker has described as “a most violent letter”, Lewis wrote to say he did not wish to see or speak to him again. Baker has never made further reference to this particular letter, and it does not survive. It is therefore with an apologetic tone that Lewis renewed their correspondence in 1935, having heard that Baker was ill: “It stimulated an impulse that has been hovering in my mind for some time to write to you and to try and pick up some of the old links. That they were ever dropped was, I imagine, chiefly my fault–at least even self-love on my part cannot find any substantial respect in which it could have been yours. Will you forgive me? I think I have learned a little since those days and can promise not to serve you so again”. Updating Baker on the intervening years he states plainly, “I am going bald. I am a Christian. Professionally I am chiefly a medievalist” (28th April 1935). The final letter follows Lewis having sent Baker a copy of his first major academic work, The Allegory Of Love (1936). Lewis is most modest about the work, chiefly sharing the jokes told by fellow Dons about its excessive length. As ever, the subject soon returns to poetry, and particular to Lewis’s recent interest - instigated by Tolkien - in Icelandic verse: “it wakes up a storm of sound which, when combined, as it usually is, with a tragic theme, and contrasting its rock-like form with the vain liquidity of sorrow, produces an almost unbearable tension of stoical pathos - ‘iron tears down Pluto’s cheek’” (June 24th 1936). In 1971, Baker lent Walter Hooper nine of the present letters, and copies of these letters were xeroxed so that reproductions could be stored in the Bodleian Library’s Lewis Collection. A letter to this effect is also present, from the Assistant to The Keeper Of Western Manuscripts. The same nine letters were reproduced in Hooper’s Collected Letters, though the 4-page letter, dated 12th April 1920 and focussed on Lewis’s theory of poetry, remains unpublished. PROVENANCE: Leo Kingsley Baker (1898-1986), thence by descent.
C.S. LEWIS DISCUSSES T.S. ELIOT 45. LEWIS, C. S. AUTOGRAPH LETTER SIGNED May 26th 1943.
A single sheet of letter paper written closely on both sides, to Rufus Buxton, who had written for advice about his own poetry. “I am quite incapable of helping people about this kind of poetry, ‘modern’ poetry in the technical sense...”. On Eliot in particular, “My appreciation of Eliot himself... is v. limited” and “even when I get pleasure from him I am quite doubtful whether it is the type of pleasure he intends to give... I liked many of the images and disliked all the gnomic-cryptic passages (‘your aloneness is not necessary’) - but so do I in Eliot and I haven’t the least idea whether I’m right in either case... I suspect the whole thing is a bit too like Eliot: but one wd have to be much more ‘in the movement’ than I am to say where fruitful discipleship ends and mere deriva- tiveness begins.” Rust mark to the top of the first page and a couple of stains to the rear. [30949] £3,000 Rufus Buxton, 2nd Baron Noel-Buxton (1917-1980) published several volumes of poetry including No Smooth Journey (1938) and The Ford (1955).
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