Читать книгу The Inklings: C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien and Their Friends - Humphrey Carpenter - Страница 10

From the nursery window of the big house there could be seen a line of long, low mountains. Often the view was blurred by a slight mist, for the weather was generally damp, and on many days the sight of the hills was shut out entirely by slanting rain. Then, all that the boy could see were the wet fields that sloped down towards Belfast, where the tall cranes marked the shipyards whose hum could be heard even at this distance.

Even on wet days there was plenty to be done. Outside the nursery door were long upstairs corridors, attics to be explored, games to be played among the gurgling water-tanks where the wind blew under the slates. Or if the boy tired of that, there were pictures to be drawn and stories to be invented, and his diary of the holiday to be written up.

‘My Life during the Exmas Holydays of 1907, by Jacks or Clive Lewis. Author of “Building of the promenad”, “Toyland”, “Living races of mouse-land” etc. I begin my life after my 9th birthday. On which I got a book from Papy and a post card album from Mamy. Warnie (my brother) was coming home and I was looking forward to him and the Xmas holydays.’

The boy had been christened Clive, but he always called himself Jacks or Jack. His brother Warnie, whose real name was Warren, was three years older than him, and went to a boarding-school in England. Jack always looked forward to Warnie’s return, because then they could paint pictures together or make up stories. Warnie liked stories about steamships and trains and India, while Jack liked to write about animals who did heroic deeds. But they usually managed to fit all this into the same story. While Warnie was away at school, Jack carried on with the stories by himself, when he was not learning things from Miss Harper, his governess, or from his mother, who taught him French and Latin.

‘Mamy is like most middle-aged ladys, stout, brown hair, spectaciles, kniting her cheif industry etc. etc. Papy of course is the master of the house, and a man in whom you can see strong Lewis features, bad temper, very sensible, nice wen not in a temper. I am like most boys of 9 and I am like Papy, bad temper, thick lips, thin, and generaly weraing a jersey.’

His father, who worked as a solicitor in Belfast, was changeable in mood, and Jack felt more comfortable with his mother, who behaved in the same calm affectionate way all the time. On the other hand it was his father who had bought all the hundreds of books which lined the study and the drawing-room and the cloakroom, and were stacked two deep in the landing bookcase, and filled the corridors and the bedrooms. Jack turned the pages of most of them in turn. One day he found these lines in a book of poetry by Longfellow:

I heard a voice that cried

Balder the beautiful

Is dead, dead.

He had never heard of Balder, but the words gave him an extraordinary feeling, a notion of great cold expanses of northern sky. He could not understand exactly what he felt, and the more he tried to recapture the feeling the more it slipped away.

There were lots of other books to read: the Beatrix Potter tales, Gulliver’s Travels in a big illustrated volume, and stories by Conan Doyle and Mark Twain and E. Nesbit. In the summer there were picnics on the hills and days by the sea, and there was always something to be done in the big house; so that the time passed quickly in a steady humdrum happiness.

Then one night not very long after his ninth birthday he woke with a headache, and when he cried, his mother did not come to him. There were lights in her room and a bustle of doctors and nurses. She had cancer. Jack prayed that God would make her better, but she went on being ill. On the day she died, the calendar in her room (which had a Shakespearian quotation for each day) bore the words: Men must endure their going hence, even as their coming hither. After that, everything changed. Jack would still have moments of happiness, but the old unshakeable comfort had gone. As he himself said, ‘It was sea and islands now. The great continent had sunk like Atlantis.’

First came the discomfort of being crammed into Eton collar, knickerbockers and bowler hat; then the clop clop of the four-wheeler driving him and his brother to the quay in Belfast; then the sea crossing, followed by his first sight of England, which seemed a sadly flat landscape after the Irish hills; then school.

Wynyard School in Hertfordshire had been moderately good when Warnie was first sent there, but by the time Jack joined his elder brother it was deteriorating as its headmaster became insane. For the next two years Jack had to endure grossly incompetent teaching, bad food, stinking sanitation, arbitrarily inflicted beatings and perpetual fear. It was a terrible introduction to the outer world, and its only good result was to drive the two brothers closer together for mutual protection. By the time the school finally collapsed and the headmaster was certified mad, Warnie had already moved on to Malvern College; the younger boy was sent briefly to a school in Belfast, then to another in England.

Meanwhile Jack continued to read voraciously. He had discovered most of the English poets by the time he was fifteen. He found The Faerie Queene in a big illustrated edition and loved it. He was delighted by the romances of William Morris. Best of all, one day he chanced across an Arthur Rackham illustration to Siegfried and the Twilight of the Gods, and felt the same sensation as he had known when he first read the Longfellow lines about Balder. ‘Pure “Northernness” engulfed me,’ he said; and he began a quest for everything ‘Northern’. Books of Norse myths, a synopsis of the Ring operas, Wagner’s music itself, all were food to his imagination. Soon he was writing his own poem on the Nibelung story, rhyming ‘Mime’ with ‘time’ and ‘Alberich’ with ‘ditch’ because he knew no better. He worked hard at his school-books, too, showing considerable aptitude for Latin and Greek. Yet there was no sense of stability, no ultimate feeling of safety, neither in the school term nor at home during the holidays, when even his brother’s companionship could not entirely lighten the oppressiveness of the big house, with its stuffy routine now dictated entirely by his father.

At the age of fourteen he won a classical scholarship to Malvern College.

*

‘Not only does this persecution get harder to bear as time goes on, but it is actually getting more severe.’ Fifteen-year-old Jack Lewis was writing home to his father from Malvern. ‘All the prefects detest me and lose no opportunity of venting their spite. Today, for not being able to find a cap which one gentleman wanted, I have been sentenced to clean his boots every day after breakfast for a week. It is after breakfast that the form goes through their translation together. From this I am cut off. When I asked if I might clean them in the evening (an arrangement which you observe would have made no difference to him), I received a refusal, strengthened by being kicked downstairs. So we go on.’

Malvern was no worse than most English public schools of the time, but it was no better. Warnie had been happy there – he left just as Jack arrived – but the elder boy was, at this stage in their lives, the more resilient. Jack almost immediately took a dislike to the place. It was not that the teaching was bad: far from it, for he was encouraged by a first-rate form master and was commended for excellent work. But academic study and the opportunity to read books seemed to play such a small part in the life of the place. Almost all the day it was bells ringing, feet running, shouted commands from older boys, little sleep and no privacy. Two things in particular alarmed him. One was homosexuality, especially the flirtations of the older boys with the younger. The other was the fact that Malvern, like many other public schools, was run not so much by the staff as by an unofficial clique of senior boys called ‘the Bloods’. Admission to this clique was not through formal qualification, but through being ‘the right sort of person’ and knowing ‘the right people’. Moreover once a senior boy became a Blood he had considerable power over his fellows. Bloods who had any tendency to be bullies would pick on those who showed resentment of their power. Jack Lewis did show such resentment. He was soon selected as an ideal victim, and after just two terms of persecution he had seen enough. What he was going through was no worse than what thousands of other boys at English public schools were enduring, but he had no intention of staying firm and enduring it. He was not that sort of person. When faced with something he hated, he did not tolerate it but went to war on it. And since he could not take on the Malvern Bloods single-handed he decided that he had better get away. He wrote to his father: ‘Please take me out of this, as soon as possible.’

His father, a man of peculiarly disjointed thinking, was usually notable for making the wrong decisions. But for once he did the right thing. He removed Jack from Malvern and sent him to the man who had been his own headmaster, and who was now retired in Surrey and taking one or two private pupils. W. T. Kirkpatrick, tall and muscularly lean, was a strict atheist who nevertheless put on his best suit to dig the garden on Sunday. This, however, was his only recorded piece of illogical behaviour: in every other particular his life was ruled by strictly rational principles. He was fearsome in conversation, for no sentence passed his lips that was not ruthlessly logical. When Jack Lewis first met his new teacher on arrival at the railway station, the boy attempted some small talk, remarking that the Surrey countryside was more wild than he had expected. ‘Stop!’ shouted Kirkpatrick. ‘What do you mean by wildness, and what grounds had you for not expecting it?’ Jack did his best, but answer after answer was rejected as being the product of inadequate thought. ‘Do you not see’, Kirkpatrick concluded, ‘that your remark was meaningless?’

Under the tuition of ‘Kirk’ in the two years that followed, the boy learnt to phrase all remarks as logical propositions and to defend his opinions by argument. Not that ‘opinion’ was a term admissible in that household. ‘I have’, Kirkpatrick would exclaim with raised hands, ‘no opinion on any subject whatsoever.’

Soon, Jack Lewis was learning to match his teacher’s mind with dialects of his own, especially in his letters to a Belfast friend, Arthur Greeves, who was prone to vague and illogical statements and who in consequence found himself on the receiving end of Kirk-like arguments. Greeves adhered to the religious beliefs of his childhood, and when he mentioned this in a letter to Lewis there came back a tirade. ‘I had thought that you were gradually being emancipated from the old beliefs,’ Lewis declared. ‘You know, I think, that I believe in no religion. There is absolutely no proof for any of them, and from a philosophical standpoint Christianity is not even the best. All religions, that is all mythologies to give them their proper name, are merely man’s own invention – Christ as much as Loki.’ And Lewis offered his own interpretation of Christianity: ‘After the death of a Hebrew prophet Yesua (whose name we have corrupted into Jesus), he became regarded as a god, a cult sprang up, which was afterwards connected with the ancient Hebrew Jahweh-worship, and so Christianity came into being – one mythology among many.’

This atheism was in fact not the result of Kirkpatrick’s teaching. Knowledge of his tutor’s opinions and access to the rationalist books in the house did encourage Jack, but he had begun to abandon religious belief some years earlier, partly because he found it impossible to make his prayers sincere, partly because he did not think that Christianity had much relation to the largely unhappy world around him, and partly because the Bible did not appeal to him as a story. Or rather, it was when reading pagan stories, especially the myths of the Norsemen, that he experienced his most profound sensations of delight. He began to write a tragedy about the Norse gods. It was in Greek form, under the title ‘Loki Bound’, and it was an attempt to express both the appeal of Northern myth and his contempt for the Christian view of the universe; for in the play Loki sets himself in opposition to Odin the creator of the world, declaring that such creation was wanton cruelty. Lewis also wrote short poems on this theme, picturing God as a brutish force whose hatred has scarred men’s lives.

Yet his own life now was remarkably unscarred. Placid days succeeded one another. He read Homer under Kirkpatrick’s tuition, he walked in the Surrey countryside, he wrote poetry, and he sent for innumerable parcels of books from London shops. ‘How one does want to read everything,’ he remarked to Arthur Greeves, and soon there was little in English literature that he had not encountered. For an atheist, he found delight in unlikely places. Of Malory’s account of the Grail he remarked to Greeves, ‘Those mystic parts are very good to read late at night when you are drowsy and tired and get into a sort of “exalted” mood.’ And when he discovered George MacDonald’s ‘faery’ novel Phantastes on a station bookstall he declared that reading it was ‘a great literary experience’. Meanwhile his progress at academic work was good; indeed it was clear that he was suited for an academic career – and for that only. ‘While admirably adapted for excellence,’ Kirkpatrick wrote to Lewis’s father, ‘and probably for distinction in literary matters, he is adapted for nothing else. You may make up your mind on that.’

At the end of 1916 Jack Lewis won a scholarship to University College, Oxford.

*

It was the summer of 1917. Lewis’s first term as an Oxford undergraduate had been interrupted, not unexpectedly, by his call-up papers, and he was now a cadet in uniform. His battalion was quartered just down the road, in Keble College. Cadets were billeted two to a set of rooms, and the allocations were made in alphabetical order. As a result, Lewis C. S. found himself sharing sleeping quarters with Moore E. F. C. Many years later, Jack Lewis’s brother remarked in his diary, ‘Lewis and Moore: it might just as easily have been Lewis and Sergeant Muggins, or Lewis and Lord Molineux, and the very fact would have been forgotten by now – but it was Lewis and Moore, and when the clerk filled in the names he permanently and almost immediately altered the course of several lives.’

Jack Lewis did not particularly care for his room-mate; he found ‘Paddy’ Moore rather childish. But Paddy’s mother, an Irishwoman who had been separated from her husband for many years, was living in lodgings close by, so as to be near her son; and when they met she and Jack got on very well, so well that he was soon spending week-ends in her company. Later, when he got a month’s leave, he stayed for most of it with the Moores at their Bristol home, going home to his father in Belfast only for the final few days. His father was surprised and hurt at this division of Jack’s time.

Once or twice there had already been incipient romances in Jack’s life. During his Surrey days he had been attracted to a Belgian refugee girl who was staying in the neighbourhood, and had talked about her in his letters to Arthur Greeves – ‘I don’t think I’ve ever been so bucked about anything in my life, she’s an awfully decent sort.’ Later, in his first few months at Oxford, he had been very friendly with a young woman from Belfast, who was in the city with her mother. But before any real romance could begin he met Mrs Janie Moore.

She was aged forty-five, Irish, and lively. She was poorly educated and her conversation was largely illogical nonsense, so in this respect she was a very odd friend for Jack; but something made him enjoy her company. Perhaps it was in large part simply the fact that she made him feel at home. He was never at ease at his real home in Belfast; his father lived according to an enervating daily routine, and was also perpetually inquisitive into his sons’ lives. This made Warnie and Jack draw apart from their parent. Now, when Jack’s military training was over and he was about to embark for the front line in France, he telegraphed to his father asking him to come over to England and say goodbye. His father, typically failing to understand the telegram, did not come. It was little wonder that Jack turned to Mrs Moore for affection.

By the time that Jack left for France he and Mrs Moore were behaving to each other like mother and son. As for the real son, Jack once remarked (years later, to his brother) that Mrs Moore and Paddy ‘hadn’t got on at all well’. In the spring of 1918, Paddy was reported missing in action, and when his death was officially confirmed Mrs Moore wrote to Lewis’s father that Paddy had asked Jack ‘to look after me if he did not come back’. This became the public explanation for what followed, but probably Jack would have looked after her whether Paddy had come back or not.

*

Jack Lewis’s time in the trenches was short, and though he found it horrific he was not deeply shaken by the experience. He had, after all, lived with the knowledge of the war for more than three years before going out to the front line himself. It was something he knew he would have to endure, and (unlike public school) nobody expected him to like it. When he finally reached the front line he found that it was as bad as he had anticipated, but no worse.

Certainly he would always remember what he described as ‘the horribly smashed men still moving like half-crushed beetles, the sitting or standing corpses’. And just once he put something of this into his poetry:

‘What, brother, brother,

Who groaned?’ – ‘I’m hit. I’m finished. Let me be.’

– ‘Put out your hand, then. Reach me. No, the other.’

– ‘Don’t touch. Fool! Damn you! Leave me.’ – ‘I can’t see.

Where are you?’ Then more groans. ‘They’ve done for me.

I’ve no hands. Don’t come near me. No, but stay,

Don’t leave me … O my God! Is it near day?’

(These lines are from his narrative poem Dymer, written not long after the war.) Lewis himself was wounded by a shell a few months after going into the front line. But when he came to write an autobiography he devoted three heated chapters to the horrors of public school and only part of one – entitled ‘Guns and Good Company’ – to his war experiences. Two remarks about the war, in that book, sum up his attitude. After recording his memories of the animal horror of the trenches, he says: ‘It is too cut off from the rest of my experience and often seems to have happened to someone else.’ The other remark describes his response to hearing for the first time the whine of a bullet: ‘At that moment there was something not exactly like fear, much less like indifference: a little quavering signal that said, “This is War. This is what Homer wrote about.”’

*

When Jack Lewis was sent home wounded from the trenches in the spring of 1918, Mrs Moore came to London to be near his hospital. Later, he chose to convalesce in Bristol where she lived. After he had recovered and had re-entered army life, she spent the rest of the war following him from camp to camp, setting up temporary homes as near to him as possible. And when in the autumn of 1918 the war ended and he went back to Oxford as an undergraduate, she packed up her house in Bristol and came too.

They found a furnished house in Warneford Road in east Oxford, and shared the rent between them, Jack making use of an allowance from his father and Mrs Moore depending chiefly on money from her estranged husband, whom she called ‘the Beast’. Officially, Jack was living in University College where he was an undergraduate reading Classics, but in reality he spent as much time as possible in ‘our hired house’, as he described it. ‘After lunch,’ he told Arthur Greeves, ‘I work until tea, then work again until dinner. After that, a little more work, talk and laziness and sometimes bridge, then bicycle back to College at 11.I then light my fire and work or read till 12 o’clock when I retire to sleep the sleep of the just.’ This may have been his routine on an ideal day, but more often his time at Warneford Road was occupied with one of the innumerable domestic chores which Mrs Moore was in the habit of devising for him: helping her to make jam and marmalade, scrubbing the floors, washing up, walking the dog, mending broken furniture, taking messages and doing shopping errands. It was not that she did not try to do any of these things herself, but she was easily exhausted – or at least Jack believed that she was – and, though they were generally able to afford a maid, Mrs Moore was suspicious of servants and did not like to trust the girl with these tasks. She used to say of Jack, ‘He is as good as an extra maid.’ As for Jack, he developed the ability to work at his desk in the middle of domestic mayhem. Only a few minutes would pass in an afternoon at Warneford Road without Mrs Moore’s strident voice summoning him to some job or other; he would lay down his pen patiently, go and do what was wanted (however trivial) and then come back and resume work as if nothing had happened. He called this ‘the hopeless business of trying to save D. from overwork’. ‘D.’ was how he referred to Mrs Moore in his diary; to other people he called her ‘Minto’. Both names are inexplicable.

Remarkably, this disturbed way of life did no harm to his studies. Long before, in Surrey days, his tutor Kirkpatrick had reported to Jack’s father, ‘He has read more classics than any boy I ever had – or indeed I might add than any I ever heard of, unless it be an Addison or Landor or Macaulay.’ Kirkpatrick had also said of Jack’s enthusiasm for his work, ‘He is a student who has no interest except in reading and study. The very idea of urging him or stimulating him to increased exertion makes me smile.’ Nevertheless, given the distractions of life with ‘Minto’, Jack Lewis did very well to take a First Class in Classical Moderations in March 1920.

Meanwhile his friends and relatives were puzzling over his strange involvement with Mrs Moore. It was easy to explain the mother—son element in it by the losses of real mother and real son which they had suffered. But was that all? Some people perhaps suspected a romantic-sexual element in the liaison, and possibly this was what Jack’s father had in mind when he referred to it as ‘Jack’s affair’. This sort of speculation was, if anything, fostered by the silence of Jack himself, who refused to discuss the matter with any of his close friends. On the only occasion Warnie Lewis asked his brother about the relationship he was told to mind his own business. In particular Jack tried to keep his father as much in the dark about it as possible, pretending to him that he was living in ordinary ‘digs’ with other undergraduates, and disguising a holiday spent with ‘Minto’ as a walking tour with a college friend. None of this helped to make it seem entirely respectable.¹

On the other hand nobody who knew Jack Lewis supposed seriously that Mrs Moore was his mistress. Certainly he discussed sex in his letters to Arthur Greeves, but only in relation to masturbation, and this was probably all that he meant by the rather veiled and arch references he made (in the books he was later to write) to his sexual experience as a young man. On the practical level, a sexual relationship with Mrs Moore would have been difficult without servants’ gossip, let alone the fact that another member of the household was Mrs Moore’s daughter Maureen, who was eight years younger than Paddy and still a child.

After this strange ménage had been established in Oxford for a little over a year, Jack was able to move out of college and make the home with ‘Minto’ his official lodgings. But they were obliged to leave the Warneford Road house, and there began a long search for a permanent home in which they could use Mrs Moore’s own furniture. Unfurnished houses at a moderate rent seemed impossible to find, and for two long years they moved from one place to another, renting furnished rooms or being lent the use of a house for a few weeks while the owner was away. Between 1918 and 1923 they lived at nine different addresses, ‘most of them vile’, as Jack remarked in his diary. At one time during this period Mrs Moore told him that ‘she was quite convinced that she would never again live in a house of her own’.

*

Until 1918 Jack Lewis had gone on writing poems that were deeply pessimistic, flinging accusations at a cruel God. They were not particularly good as poetry, so he was lucky to have a volume of them published by Heinemann in 1918 under the title Spirits in Bondage. They attracted almost no attention, and Lewis brought no reputation as a poet when he came up to Oxford. Indeed, tastes were already changing, and he discovered that many of his fellow undergraduates who were interested in poetry admired T. S. Eliot and other exponents of modern verse. ‘I’m afraid I shall never be an orthodox modern,’ Lewis wrote to Arthur Greeves in October 1918. ‘I like lines that will scan and do not care for descriptions of sea-sickness.’

He was not alone in disliking modern verse: he soon made friends with several other undergraduates who shared his views, and who (like him) wanted to go on writing poetry uninfluenced by the new movement. Among these was a young man at Wadham College, Owen Barfield. He and Lewis and several others conceived the rather grand idea of issuing a yearly collection of their verses; but this idea petered out. However, they continued to read each other’s poetry with interest, and to offer criticisms.

By the time that Lewis began to read for the second part of the Classics course, ‘Greats’ (Ancient History and Philosophy), he had abandoned the pessimistic viewpoint of his early poems. He also decided to turn his back on the sensations of delight that he had received from Norse mythology, Malory, George MacDonald, and many other books. Privately he still sometimes felt such sensations, though not so often as before; but these he now labelled ‘aesthetic experience’ and said that they were valuable but not really informative. As to the existence of God, he adopted the attitude that ‘it really made no difference whatever whether there was such a person or no’. All this he called his New Look. It certainly harmonised with the Oxford approach to philosophy at the time; the ruthlessly analytical Logical Positivism had not yet made its appearance, but there was a prevailing tone of scepticism which Lewis gladly adopted.

In 1922 he took a First Class in ‘Greats’.

*

Shortly after this, he and Mrs Moore finally found a house that offered a hope of permanence, ‘Hillsboro’, a villa in the Oxford suburb of Headington which was available as an unfurnished letting. Out came Mrs Moore’s furniture from store; Jack spent endless days painting and laying linoleum; and they moved in. This, however, did not mean domestic tranquillity, for ‘Minto’ still found more than enough for Jack to do, partly thanks to her habit of quarrelling with servants. Jack noted in his diary that the incompetence of one maid had become ‘the exclusive subject of conversation’ with Mrs Moore, remarking, ‘I do not blame D. for this in the least, but of course it makes things very miserable.’

Jack now hoped for a teaching appointment at Oxford. But there were no university jobs available in Philosophy, his strong subject in ‘Greats’; so, as his father was good-naturedly prepared to continue financial support for a time, he decided to read English Language and Literature, tackling the full course in just one year, a mere third of the time that most undergraduates devoted to it. This meant learning Anglo-Saxon and studying the principles of philology, besides reading literature from the medieval period to the nineteenth century. He was, of course, far from ignorant in this field already, but there was still a lot of ground to cover, and it was amazing that he managed to do it in the moments he could spare from domestic life. During the months while he was racing through the English syllabus he was teaching Latin to Mrs Moore’s daughter Maureen and to her music-mistress in lieu of Maureen’s fees, tutoring a neighbour’s child in return for Maureen’s lessons with its mother, and washing up after almost every meal. For two weeks he was, by day and night, looking after Mrs Moore’s brother, who was having a severe nervous breakdown in the house. He was also coping with a perpetual series of what he called ‘Minto’s mare’s nests’ – imaginary crises of every conceivable kind – and with a stream of visitors and paying guests. The most remarkable thing was that he did this with almost unvarying good humour. This was perhaps partly because he knew that the whole thing was very nearly his fault anyway, and if he complained it could be justly retorted that the household owed its existence to him. But really it was his immense fund of good nature that kept him going. He was already practised at coping with domestic oddities, thanks to the strangeness of family life with his father in Belfast; and in any case he was not a complainer by nature. Far from it: he derived immense amusement from the odd visitors who came to the house, to whom he and Mrs Moore gave nicknames: ‘the Blackguard’ for a grotesque French lodger, and ‘Smudge’ for the inoffensive and rather indistinct music teacher. Only when the question was raised of his brother Warnie coming to live with them did Jack warn him openly of ‘the perpetual interruptions of family life – the partial loss of liberty’. And even then he qualified it by adding: ‘This sounds as if I were either sick of it myself or else trying to make you sick of it: but neither is the case. I have definitely chosen and don’t regret the choice. Whether I was right or wrong, wise or foolish, to have done so originally, is now only an historical question: once having created expectations, one naturally fulfils them.’

*

He was not very impressed by his first experiences when reading English Language and Literature at Oxford. ‘The atmosphere of the English school’, he wrote in his diary after attending a lecture, ‘is very different from that of Greats. Women, Indians, and Americans predominate and – I can’t say how – one feels a certain amateurishness in the talk and look of the people.’ He thought poorly of many of the lectures, and felt no enthusiasm for the study of philological niceties such as glottal stops and vowel shifts, of which he remarked, ‘Very good stuff in its way, but why physiology should form part of the English school I really don’t know.’ He was comfortable, however, in the company of the Martlets, the literary society of University College, which met to listen to papers read by its members. Lewis often contributed monographs on his favourite authors. He gave a talk on William Morris and another on Spenser. After the paper there would be a discussion, which sometimes turned into intellectual pyrotechnics; for like Lewis many of the Martlets were well read in philosophy. They enjoyed showing off their command of logic, as did Lewis, for he believed that his mind was well trained in argument. He was always in the forefront of any dialectical battle that concluded a Martlets evening, and he also liked to go for brisk walks with fellow members, during which they would continue an intricate argument from the previous Martlets meeting. This kind of talk was often an intellectual duel for the sake of the sport, and Lewis judged his and his opponent’s performance as much on method as on content. ‘In spite of many well contested points I was gravelled in the end,’ he recorded after one such contest which was conducted while he and a friend strode across the meadows on the edge of Oxford, adding, ‘We were neither of us in really good dialectical form.’

It was not only among the Martlets that he engaged in logical argument. It was indeed a form of conversation that he sought wherever it could be found, not least perhaps because it was a relief from Mrs Moore’s illogical chatter; and he judged his acquaintances by their capacity for it, despising men who talked only in anecdotes or merely peddled facts. Nor did he care for men who were flippant or cynical. To get on with Lewis you had to argue with feeling as well as with your brain; you had to hold your opinions passionately and be prepared to defend them with logic. Not surprisingly, few people came up to the mark.

One who did was a fellow Irishman, Nevill Coghill, who like Lewis was reading the English course in one year, having previously graduated in History. Each found the other a good companion for energetic country walks, and while striding together over Hinksey Hill they would talk excitedly about what they had been reading that week. Coghill never forgot how on one such walk Lewis, who had just encountered the Anglo-Saxon Battle of Maldon, boomed out some lines from the end of the poem:

‘Hige sceal þe heardra, heorte þe cenre,

mod sceal þe mare, þe ure maegen lytlað.’

‘Will shall be the sterner, heart the bolder, spirit the greater as our strength lessens.’

In the summer of 1923 Lewis was awarded a First Class in the English School He now had three Firsts to his name, and was determined to get an academic job, but the days were over when a clever young man could walk out of examinations into a college fellowship. There was plenty of competition and few jobs. Certainly Lewis had a wider choice than some men, for he could teach Philosophy as well as English Literature, but even so there were not many opportunities. For a year he could find nothing at all and, though his father generously continued to pay an allowance despite his suspicions (or perhaps because of his ignorance) about Jack’s life with Mrs Moore, it was a worrying time. Jack occupied himself by reading and by writing poetry. He was now at work on a long narrative poem which he called Dymer, about a young man who escapes from a totalitarian society, begets a monster on an unseen and mysterious bride, and is eventually killed by the monster, which becomes a god. Lewis declared that he had no idea what its meaning might be. ‘Everyone may allegorise or psychoanalyse it as he pleases,’ he said; and certainly one episode in the poem does seem to relate closely to his own life at the time of its composition. When Dymer wakes after his night of love in the dark room with the unseen girl, he wanders out into the daylight and explores the mysterious palace in which he has found her. After a few moments he returns to seek her, but the way to the room is now blocked by the witch-like shape of an old woman squatting on the threshold. Whichever way Dymer takes through the corridors, still the way is barred by this ‘old, old matriarchal dreadfulness’, so that in the end he is forced to leave the palace and abandon his lover, whom he never sees again. When Lewis began to write Dymer in 1922 he had been living with Mrs Moore for three years, and now that she had come into his life he took no further romantic interest in girls of his own age.

Dymer was more contemporary in tone than Lewis’s 1918 anthology, being rather in the style of John Masefield. While Lewis was working on it, he often showed the manuscript to his undergraduate friend Owen Barfield. Barfield was generally very complimentary about the poem, and when he showed his own verse to Lewis he received equal praise.

Barfield, too, graduated with a First in English, and then tried to earn a living by contributing to London literary journals. Meanwhile Nevill Coghill, was awarded a fellowship at Exeter College, where he had been an undergraduate. Lewis himself continued to wait, applying for several jobs without success. After a year the position improved when he was given some part-time work teaching Philosophy at University College for a don who was temporarily in America. Then in the spring of 1925 a fellowship in English Language and Literature was advertised at Magdalen College. Lewis applied, though without much hope.

The weeks that followed were anxious. He continued to give tutorials and lectures at University College, generally walking home afterwards to save the bus fares. His afternoons spent striding across the Oxfordshire countryside with friends like Coghill had made him a practised walker, and the mere mile and a quarter from the town to Headington was nothing to him. He could be seen on most days, coming down the steps from the main entrance of his college, a heavily built young man with a florid face and a flop of dark hair, dressed in baggy flannel trousers and an old blazer with a University College badge, and wearing a battered hat and a shabby mackintosh if the weather was not warm. ‘Several Univ. people whom I don’t know passed me,’ he noted one morning. ‘One of them, noticing my blazer, must have asked another who I was, for I heard him answer “Heavy Lewis”.’

On 22 May 1925 The Times announced that ‘The President and Fellows of Magdalen College have elected to an official Fellowship in the College as Tutor in English Language and Literature, for five years as from next June 25, Mr Clive Staples Lewis.’

*

Lewis settled into his new college during the Long Vacation of 1925. He had been allocated rooms in the eighteenth-century New Buildings, with windows overlooking the tower and lawns on one side and the Grove with its herd of deer on the other. Few people in Oxford had a finer view. Lewis reported to his father that it was ‘beautiful beyond compare’.

By the time the Michaelmas term began he had bought the few pieces of furniture necessary for his rooms, choosing the very plainest because he did not think that such things mattered much. In fact he could have afforded a few extravagances, had they been to his taste, for he would have a good income from the fellowship and plenty of security. The appointment at Magdalen was nominally for five years only, but fellows were almost always re-elected when that period was over. It would only be necessary to keep on good terms with the other Magdalen dons and to do his job fairly conscientiously to be secure for the rest of his working days.

The snag was that one of these conditions – keeping on good terms with his colleagues – did not look as if it was going to be particularly easy. Some of them seemed pleasant enough; he liked and admired Frank Hardie, a don of about the same age as himself;¹ but he could not come to the same opinion about many of the others. ‘I am beginning to be rather disillusioned about my colleagues,’ he told his father. ‘There is a good deal more intrigue and mutual back-scratching and even direct lying than I ever suspected possible: and what worries me most of all is that the decent men seem to be all the old ones (who will die) and the rotters seem to be all the young ones (who will last my time).’ Among the older men were P. V. M. Benecke, the Ancient History tutor, and J. A. Smith, the moral philosopher, both of them Victorians in ideas as well as appearance. Lewis took to having his breakfast with them, partly as a way of avoiding the younger dons. To a couple of these he responded with horrified fascination. Of one, the historian H. M. D. Parker, he wrote in his diary: ‘He thinks of himself as a plain man with no nonsense about him, and hopes that even his enemies regard him as an honest fellow at bottom. The desire to be always exercising this shrewd practical commonsense leads him to endless discussions on everything that happens: he will draw anyone who listens into a corner and stand there exchanging husky confidences about his pupils and colleagues. He always implies that “we two (or three or four) are the only people in College who understand this matter and we must hold together”. The very same people against whom he marshals his confidants on Wednesday will themselves be taken into council on Thursday. He believes all that he says for the moment, but being weak as water, takes a new colour from every group that he falls into.’ In sharp contrast was another of the younger dons at Magdalen, T. D. (‘Harry’) Weldon, the Philosophy tutor, who was a militant atheist and who soon became the leader of the more radical dons. Of him, Lewis wrote: ‘He has great abilities, but would despise himself if he wasted them on disinterested undertakings. He would be capable of treachery and would think the victim a fool for being betrayed. He preaches what he practises: tells you openly that anyone who believes another is a fool, and holds that Hobbes alone saw the truth: tells me I am an incurable romantic and is insolent to old men and servants. He is very pale, this man, good-looking, and drinks a great deal without getting drunk. I think he is the best of our younger fellows and I would sign his death-warrant to-morrow, or he mine, without turning a hair.’

When term began, Lewis’s duties in Magdalen consisted of giving an hour’s tutorial each week, together with any extra teaching he thought necessary, to those undergraduates in the college who were reading English In his first years as a tutor he rarely had more than half a dozen pupils; and as they came to him either singly or in pairs for their tutorials, this meant some six or eight hours of teaching a week. In addition to this he gave courses of lectures to the University as a whole, which meant another hour or two’s work each week, plus the time taken to prepare the lectures. In some academic years he would also be required to serve as an examiner, which occupied a good deal of time. But much of his day was still his own, to use as he liked for private research, for helping Mrs Moore with domestic chores (which he continued to do each afternoon), and for meeting his friends.

Lewis did not find the Magdalen undergraduates much more attractive than many of the dons. He told his father that in his opinion the college was no more than ‘a country club for all the idlest “bloods” of Eton and Charterhouse’, adding, ‘I really don’t know what gifts the public schools bestow on their nurslings, beyond the mere surface of good manners: unless contempt of the things of the intellect, extravagance, insolence, self-sufficiency, and sexual perversion are to be called gifts.’ Certainly there was a Magdalen tradition of recruiting undergraduates from the smarter public schools; but here again, Lewis’s own schooling had left him sensitive to such things, particularly to homosexuality.

As to the undergraduates, this is how one Magdalen freshman responded to his surroundings in that Michaelmas term of 1925:

Balkan Sobranies in a wooden box,

The college arms upon the lid; Tokay

And sherry in the cupboard; on the shelves

The University Statutes bound in blue,

Crome Yellow, Prancing Nigger, Blunden, Keats …

Privacy after years of public school;

First college rooms, a kingdom of my own:

What words of mine can tell my gratitude?

No wonder, looking back, I never worked.

The undergraduate who wrote these lines was among Lewis’s first pupils that term, and they did not get on well. ‘Betjeman and Valentin came for Old English,’ Lewis wrote in his diary. ‘Betjeman appeared in a pair of eccentric bedroom slippers and said he hoped I didn’t mind them as he had a blister. He seemed so pleased with himself that I couldn’t help saying that I should mind them very much myself but that I had no objection to his wearing them – a view which I believe surprised him. Both had been very idle over the O.E. and I told them it wouldn’t do.’

John Betjeman found Magdalen a blessed relief after schooldays at Marlborough, where he had endured just as much discomfort as Lewis at Malvern. He was certainly prepared to pay a little desultory attention to English literature, but he had not bargained for Old English (Anglo-Saxon), nor for such a tutor. Lewis, who was going to be responsible for teaching his pupils the whole English School syllabus from The Battle of Maldon to Blake, had decided to do his best to make the early part of the course palatable by organising evenings of ‘Beer and Beowulf’ and by inventing mnemonics to teach his pupils the laws of sound-changes. Betjeman, whose taste was for Swinburne, Firbank and the Gothic Revival, could scarcely be expected to respond enthusiastically to Lewis chanting over the beer-jug:

Thus Æ to E they soon were fetchin’,

Compare such forms as þÆC and þECCEAN.

(The last word is pronounced approximately as thetchen and so provides a rhyme.) Betjeman absented himself from this ordeal whenever possible, slipping away to friends who had an exotic country house at Sezincote near Moreton-in-Marsh:

I cut tutorials with wild excuse,

For life was luncheons, luncheons all the way.

‘While in College,’ Lewis wrote in his diary, ‘I was rung up on the telephone by Betjeman speaking from Moreton-in-Marsh, to say that he hadn’t been able to read the Old English, as he was suspected for measles and forbidden to read a book. Probably a lie, but what can one do?’

When Betjeman was not lunching at Sezincote he could usually be found at the George Restaurant in Oxford with Harold Acton and the Etonian set from Christ Church, or at Wadham College in the group of young men who gathered around Maurice Bowra. But if Bowra’s hospitality and wit showed Betjeman that dons were sometimes prepared to treat undergraduates as more than pupils, Betjeman found nothing of this reflected in his relationship with his tutor. The instant the tutorial hour was over, Lewis showed Betjeman to the door, generally with a fierce admonition to work harder. It was not that Lewis behaved in this way to all his pupils: he began to make friends with one or two who liked brisk walks and whose ideas interested him. But most undergraduates found him formal and fierce, and certainly he kept his distance from those whose behaviour had overtones of homosexuality – a fashionable mannerism among Oxford undergraduates at the time. Lewis’s own attitude to homosexuality is hard to define; it was perhaps a mixture of revulsion, due to his Ulster upbringing which encouraged an Old Testament severity towards sexual deviation, and fear, even suppression, due to the fact that his own feelings for his male friends were so warmly affectionate. At all events, while many of the ‘Georgoisie’ (as Betjeman named his friends) ate their dinners in loose-knotted shantung ties and pastel shirts, Lewis seemed to be taking almost exaggerated care to be shabby, with his regular uniform of dung-coloured mackintosh and old cloth hat.

John Betjeman was sent down from Magdalen after only a few terms for failing the obligatory University examination in Divinity. He sought out Lewis ‘in his arid room’, but was told bluntly, ‘You’d have only got a Third.’

Some years later, Betjeman turned the tables on his tutor. In his volume of poems Continual Dew (1937), he wrote in the preface that he was ‘indebted to Mr C. S. Lewis for the fact on page 256’. The book consisted of only forty-five pages. And in one of the poems contained in it, ‘A Hike on the Downs’ – which might indeed be a deliberate parody of Lewis’s whole way of life – there is this stanza, supposedly spoken by a young don:

‘Objectively, our Common Room

Is like a small Athenian State –

Except for Lewis: he’s all right

But do you think he’s quite first rate?’

*

Betjeman and his set were enthusiastic about modern poetry. Lewis was becoming less and less sympathetic to it. In fact he was now thoroughly vehement about T. S. Eliot.

In the early months of 1926, while Betjeman was still his pupil, he borrowed a volume of Eliot’s verse from him, and after studying it began to organise an anti-Eliot campaign among his friends. It was to take the form of a parody of modern verse which would be sent to the Criterion, which Eliot edited, in the hope that it would be mistaken for serious poetry and published as such. Lewis acquired several collaborators: his Magdalen colleague Frank Hardie, his pupil Henry Yorke (who had already published his first novel as ‘Henry Green’), and Nevill Coghill. They wrote some appropriate verses and agreed to send them to Eliot under the names of a brother and sister, Rollo and Bridget Considine. ‘Bridget is the elder,’ wrote Lewis in his diary, ‘and they are united by an affection so tender as to be almost incestuous. Bridget will presently write a letter to Eliot (if we get a foothold) telling him about her own and her brother’s life. She is incredibly dowdy and about thirty-five. We rolled about in laughter as we pictured a tea party where the Considines should meet Eliot: Yorke would dress up for Bridget and perhaps bring a baby. The poems are to be sent from Vienna where Hardie has a friend. We think Vienna will decrease suspicion and is a likely place for the Considines to live in. Hardie and Coghill are in it for pure fun, I from burning indignation, Yorke chiefly for love of mischief.’ The venture gained momentum when Lewis’s acquaintance William Force Stead, the American clergyman and man of letters who knew Eliot and in 1927 baptised him a member of the Anglican Church, was shown one of the parodies without being told that it was parody, and expressed a serious enthusiasm for it. But this seemed to indicate not so much that the parody was good poetry as that Stead was a hopeless judge, and shortly after this the prank petered out.

*

Lewis’s long narrative poem Dymer was now finished. It was offered to Heinemann, who had published his 1918 volume of verse, and Lewis was badly shaken when they rejected it. He asked Nevill Coghill for an opinion of the poem. Coghill was quite enthusiastic, liking Dymer enough to pass it to a friend who worked for J. M. Dent; and he and Lewis were delighted when Dent’s expressed admiration and agreed to publish it. When it was issued in 1926 it earned some good reviews. But almost nobody bought it, and Lewis now doubted whether he would achieve success as a poet. He still believed that poetry was his ‘only real line’, but though he went on writing verse it took up a smaller part of his attention. Another factor in this was that old friends from undergraduate days, such as Owen Barfield, were no longer at hand to give advice and criticism. Indeed there were many ways in which Lewis felt the need for more companionship. In a letter to another friend from undergraduate days who had now left the University, A. K. Hamilton Jenkin, Lewis described the idyllic setting of his college rooms and went on: ‘I wish there was anyone here childish enough (or permanent enough, not the slave of his particular and outward age) to share it with me. Is it that no man makes real friends after he has passed the undergraduate age? Because I get no forr’arder, since the old days. I go to Barfield for sheer wisdom and a sort of richness of spirit. I go to you for some smaller and yet more intimate connexion with the feel of Things. But the question I am asking is why I meet no such men now. Is it that I am blind? Some of the older men are delightful: the younger fellows are none of them men of understanding. Oh for the people who speak one’s own language.’

*

Professors and college tutors at Oxford do not necessarily meet often in the course of duty, even if they are members of the same faculty. It was not until Tuesday 11 May 1926, after he had been in residence at Magdalen for two terms, that Lewis had a chance to talk at any length to the new Professor of Anglo-Saxon, who had started work in the University at the same time as himself. On that day he went to an ‘English Tea’ at Merton College for a discussion of faculty business.

At the tea there was some discussion of the General Strike, but not much was said about it, for Oxford had scarcely been affected. Then came some business involving the lecture lists. After that (Lewis recorded in his diary) ‘Tolkien managed to get the discussion round to the proposed English Prelim. I had a talk with him afterwards. He is a smooth, pale, fluent little chap – can’t read Spenser because of the forms – thinks the language is the real thing in the school – thinks all literature is written for the amusement of men between thirty and forty – we ought to vote ourselves out of existence if we were honest – still the sound changes and the gobbets are great fun for the dons. His pet abomination is the idea of “liberal studies”. Technical hobbies are more in his line. No harm in him: only needs a smack or so.’