Dear Friends,
I always schedule my letters to you in advance—sometimes weeks in advance. So this is actually the first instalment I’ve written since returning from vacation in June. I wanted to get back in the rhythm of writing with something lighter than usual, so this week, let me introduce you to one of my favourite characters in the life of C. S. Lewis: the Magdalen grove rabbit.
Or, more precisely, one of the rabbits who happened to live in the grounds of Magdalen College, Oxford.
Our protagonist first appears (that I can find) in 1942. Jack writes of him to his longtime correspondent Sister Penelope Lawson:
I am establishing quite a friendship with one of the rabbits wh. we now keep along with the deer in Magdalen grove. It was done by the discovery that he relishes chestnut leaves which grow too high for his reach. He doesn’t allow me any familiarities but he comes and eats from my hand…. But oh!, the great lollipop eyes and the twitching velvet nose! How does He come to create both this and the scorpion? (Letters II.520–21)
Alas, mere weeks later, discord emerges in this Edenic relationship!
The Rabbit and I have quarrelled. I don’t know why, unless I gave him something that disagreed with him. At any rate, he has cut me dead several times lately—so fair and so fickle! Life is full of disappointments. (Letters II.525)
Their falling out must have been of some duration, for months later Jack tells Arthur Greeves about it:
Did I tell you in my last letter that I’d struck up quite an acquaintance (almost a friendship) with a rabbit in Magdalen Grove who used to come and eat leaves from my hand? Alas, I must have given something that disagreed with him, for he disappeared for about 10 days, and since his reappearance has refused to look at me. (II.540)
Happily for us all, Jack must, at some point in the next two years, effected a rapprochement with the offended creature). In July 1944, the rabbit reappears in his letters to his goddaughter Sarah Neylan:
I am getting to be quite friends with an old Rabbit who lives in the Wood at Magdalen. I pick leaves off the trees for him because he can’t reach up to the branches and he eats them out of my hand. One day he stood up on his hind legs and put his front paws against me, he was so greedy. I wrote this about it:
A funny old man had a habit
Of giving a leave to a rabbit.
At first it was shy
But then, by and by,
It got rude and would stand up to grab it.
But it’s a very nice Rabbit all the same: I call him ‘Baron Biscuit’. (II.618–19)
Ok, so he might have befriended a new rabbit. But I prefer to think that he reclaimed his friendship with the first one.
By December, Jack must have gained new insight into the nature of his lapine companion, for in his Christmas letter to Laurence Harwood (another godchild) he describes the same elderly creature as “Baroness Bisket.” I’ll insert an image of the whole letter here because it a) contains a drawing of the rabbit, and b) I found the entire thing delightful. Jack was, by his own admission, awkward around children. But he wrote to and for them wonderfully—as we’ll discuss next week when we get into the Narnia books.
This seems to be the last recorded encounter with the venerable Baroness.
In 1947, though, the Magdalen rabbit makes a final appearance in a letter to Ruth Pitter, a Christian writer who exchanged poems with Jack often throughout the 40s. She apparently wrote to him to express a longing for the worlds and creatures described in his Ransom Trilogy. Judging by Jack’s use of quotes, she seems to have used the phrase “nostalgia for the non-existent” in describing her emotions: a turn of phrase which I find accurate and evocative.
Jack wrote this response:
I think ‘nostalgia for the non-existent’… is not the final diagnosis. You wouldn’t really exchange a hross, a sorn, and a bubble tree [creatures and plants from Out of the Silent Planet] for humans, a cat, and a cherry tree…. But the point is that if you really were in Perelandra you wd. still feel the same nostalgia: just as if Wordsworth or Proust cd. have gone back to their own past they wd. still have felt it. What you are really wanting will never be in any finite here or now… and the rabbit in Magdalen grove may mediate it as well as a hross. And oh how much sweeter is this longing than any other having. (II.754)
Those familiar with Jack’s nonfiction writing will immediately notice the mention of longing, an experience which for him was the heart of joy and pointed to things eternal. I’ll be writing more about nostalgia, longing, and joy in future instalments. For the moment, it makes me happy to think that a friendly rabbit was a vehicle of that sort of deep emotion for Jack.
I’ll leave you with that thought. Nothing deep this week. I just wanted to share one of my favourite minor characters from Jack’s biography.
May you all find small moments of joy in your week—and if you have a chance, try feeding a rabbit.
Sarah