January 16, 2015

Pitter on Narnia

Category: History,Literature :: Permalink

One of Lewis’s female friends (and yes, he did have some!) was the poet Ruth Pitter.  Largely unknown today, Pitter was the first woman to win the Queen’s Medal for Poetry.  She and Lewis met on occasion and exchanged a number of letters.  I expect that she found it rather tiresome, after Lewis’s death, to have quoted to her and to be asked about what Lewis allegedly said to his friend Hugo Dyson: “I am not a man for marriage; but if I were, I would ask R.P.”

She writes about one meeting with Lewis and his brother, Major “Warnie” Lewis.  Pitter had asked if she “might query him about the first of his children’s books,” and Lewis consented.  She reports that the conversation went like this (Ruth Pitter, “Poet to Poet,” in In Search of C. S. Lewis, ed. Stephen Schofield, 113):

PITTER: In the land of Narnia, the witch makes it always winter and never Christmas?

LEWIS: Yes.

PITTER: Does she allow any foreign trade?

LEWIS: She does not.

PITTER: Am I allowed to postulate on the lines of Santa Claus with the tea tray?

LEWIS: You are not.

PITTER: Then where did all the materials for the good dinner the beavers gave came from?

LEWIS: The beavers caught fish through holes in the ice.

PITTER: Yes, the potatoes to go with them, the flour and sugar and oranges and milk for the children?

LEWIS: I must refer you to a further study of the text.

MAJOR LEWIS: Nonsense, Jack!  You’re stumped.  And you know it.

Posted by John Barach @ 3:46 pm | Discuss (2)

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