In fits of melancholy, I get up from my desk and pace in the stacks. I walk around the floor and try avert my eyes when I get near patrons at their computers. To distract myself, I look at books instead. I suppose it might be easier if I just went outside, but then, I wouldn’t find many books that way.

Most of what catches my eye is somewhere between waist and eye level, and either near the end of the shelf or on the last shelf in a row. In the biographies a few weeks ago, I recently found cluster of books about C.S. Lewis, including Letters to an American Lady and Letters to Children.

Letters to an American Lady was a much more tantalizing and mysterious title. The preface refuses to reveal the identity of The Lady, but tells us that the two never met in person. I began flipping through it. God, god, god, letter-writing, god. One hundred letters in all, from Lewis to The Lady, and none in reply. It turned out that this was not, after all, the woman the New Yorker reported he met late in life, married, and had kinky sex with.

Letters to Children might then, I thought, have something more interesting to offer. It begins in 1944, but the letters are sparse until his Narnia books start to be published in 1950 and shortly thereafter become popular. At that time, children started sending Lewis letters containing both fan art and questions about the series.

Lewis replied to them all.

June 3rd. 1953

Dear [Hila]
Thank you so much for your lovely letter and pictures. I realised at once that the coloured one was not a particular scene but a sort of line-up like what you would have at the very end if it was a play instead of stories. The [Voyage of the] “Dawn Treader” is not to be the last: There are to be 4 more, 7 in all. Didn’t you notice Aslan said nothing about Eustace not going back? I thought the best of your pictures was the one of Mr. Tumnus at the bottom of the letter. As to Aslan’s other name, well I want you to guess.

I admit I’ve never read the series, or anything else by Lewis. I do have fond memories of my father reading The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe to my brother and me by the woodstove before bed, and more recently I saw the movie; somewhere in-between those events I owned a horribly scratchy LP recording of the same story, until I snuck it into a crate of mostly hip-hop records and sold it at Crossroads in Portland.

I am considerably more likely to read the series after having read these letters because Letters to Children is a secret library book, as Anne-Marie put it. It is a book not explicitly about libraries, but one which, when read by a librarian, can be understood to be about the profession.

In one letter to a family, Lewis dispenses writing advice, but in the librarian’s hands, the letter is also instructive as to how to talk to children.

March 19th, 1954

[Dear Hugh, Anne, Noelie, Nicholas, Martin, Rosamund, Matthew, and Miriam]

You have sent me such a lot of treasures I don’t know where to begin. Your story, Martin, is good and keeps one right to the end guessing what is really happening. I am a little bit surprised that the Policeman did not feel at all afraid of such a strange hostess. Or did he, and you didn’t tell us? I think just a word about how he felt, and a name for him, are the only improvements I can suggest. The one place where you do tell us what it felt like for him (”He thought a moment”) does a bit of good to the story.

Lewis acknowledges the children, first each by name, and then again as he responds to the stories and drawings they have presumably enclosed in their last letter. He calls the children’s enclosures treasures and expresses his gratitude and appreciation. Finally, and it seems only if asked for, he offers a bit of help.

In other letters, Lewis’ address is much simpler. “Dear Fifth Graders, I am so glad you liked the Narnian books and it was very kind of you to write and tell me”, he begins, before arguing that the entire story isn’t allegorical and asking them to include him in their prayers.

One-off letters to classrooms full of fans are the exception in the book. Most of the letters are to the same children over and over. Perhaps these were the ones that were easiest to collect, but it is also clear that a characteristic of Lewis’s correspondence was that he didn’t just respond to fan mail from children, he carried on relationships with them.

He corresponds with one young woman for almost a decade, during which she enters high school, takes up opera singing and the cello, and eventually grows into “a pretty woman” (according to a photograph she sends). In another case, a mother writes to Lewis because her son worries he loves Narnia’s Aslan the lion more than he loves Jesus; Lewis replies, and years later, Lewis includes the news that he has married. I presume the boy’s idolatry was cured.

Letters to Children is even a bit of a biography. Lewis begins the book as an awkward middle-aged man, apologizing to his god-daughter for refusing to attend her confirmation. He becomes a wildly popular writer of books for children, and has mild success writing for adults. Loads of fan mail arrives, and he responds to it all, often dispensing Christianly advice. Through letters, he meets and falls in love with a dying woman, who is rejuvenated for a while when they are together. He is torn apart when she dies, and he himself eventually declines.

In the book’s introduction, his stepson Douglas H. Gresham writes that “Lewis’ understanding of children … came from within himself.” To the recipients of these letters, Lewis is a favorite author, a scholar, a friend and an adviser; the collection demonstrates how to be all of those things to a child and not be one yourself. Most of all, I love that Lewis is ever kind to children, and that to seems to have come from an entirely other world.