Читать книгу C. S. Lewis: A Biography - Walter Hooper - Страница 14

It might be thought that C.S. Lewis, with a Double First in Classics and a First in English, to say nothing of the Chancellor’s Prize and a published volume of verse, would have found a fellowship waiting for him in the autumn of 1923. But the post-war ‘bulge’ was at its worst, no college seemed to appreciate his outstanding merits as a tutor and lecturer – they were, of course, still represented only by his examination results – and he still had two years of struggle and anxiety before him.

F.P. Wilson suggested a postgraduate degree, B.Litt. or D.Phil., and Lewis was tempted by the idea. Just after the results of his finals came out, in mid-July 1923, he went to tea with Wilson. ‘He asked me if I had a book in my head. I said at first “No – unless you mean an epic poem”, but afterwards trotted out various schemes which have been more or less in my mind. He thought my idea of a study of the Romantic Epic from its beginnings down to Spenser, with a side glance at Ovid, a good one: but too long for a research degree …’¹

It seems that anxiety over the future and the need to earn money to keep his establishment at Headington going prevented Lewis from following up Wilson’s suggestion. The book finally materialized as The Allegory of Love (1936), but no real start could be made on it until some time after he had achieved his fellowship at Magdalen. ‘Domestic drudgery is excellent as an alternative to idleness or to hateful thoughts,’ he wrote in his diary the following March, ‘– which is perhaps poor D’s [Mrs Moore’s] reason for piling it on at this time: as an alternative to work one is longing to do and able to do (at that time and Heaven knows when again) it is maddening. No one’s fault: the curse of Adam … I managed to get in a good deal of writing in the intervals of jobbing in the kitchen and doing messages in Headington,’ he added. ‘I wrote the whole of the last canto [of Dymer] with considerable success, though the ending will not do. I also kept my temper nearly all the time.’²

‘Family life’ produced even more trying distractions than the constant chores and the frequent removals from house to house. An experience which he mentions in Surprised by Joy and which had an effect on his spiritual development took place the term before he sat for his finals in English, and he wrote to Arthur Greeves on 22 April 1923 describing it and his reactions to it: ‘We have been through very deep waters. Mrs Moore’s brother – the Doc.^* – came here and had a sudden attack of war neurasthenia. He was here for nearly three weeks, and endured awful mental tortures. Anyone who didn’t know would have mistaken it for lunacy.’ After ‘three weeks of Hell the Doc. was admitted to a pensions hospital at Richmond. [There] quite suddenly heart failure set in and he died – unconscious at the end, thank God … Isn’t it a damned world – and we once thought we could be happy with books and music!’³

Worry about the future was fairly intense in that autumn of 1923 when there was still no sign of a fellowship. ‘D and I had a conversation on the various troubles that have pursued us,’ he wrote in his diary on 8 September: ‘losses for the past, fears for the future, and for the present, all the humiliations, the hardships, and the waste of time that come from poverty. Poor D feels keenly (what is always on my mind) how the creative years are slipping past me without a chance to get to my real work.’⁴ And out walking a couple of weeks later, 12 September, while suffering from depression and ill-health, ‘I went through Mesopotamia and then to Marston where I had some beer and a packet of cigarettes – an extravagance of which I have not been guilty this many a day.’⁵

After correcting Higher School Certificate examination papers to earn a little money, Lewis went off to Ireland at the end of September to visit his father. With great generosity and foresight Albert Lewis promised to continue his allowance. ‘While Jacks was at home,’ he wrote in his diary on 11 October, ‘I repeated my promise to provide for him at Oxford if I possibly could, for a maximum of three years from this summer. I again pointed out to him the difficulties of getting anything to do at 28 if he had ultimately to leave Oxford.’⁶

Back again at Univ. the following term, the new Master, Sir Michael Sadler,^* was offering to get Lewis some reviewing in London periodicals. He gave him a copy of the recently published Wordsworth by H.W. Garrod, the Professor of Poetry, and asked him for a specimen review. Lewis supplied this, but there is no evidence that it or any other reviews were published at this time.

In June and July 1922 Lewis was so short of money that he placed the following advertisement in the Oxford Times: ‘Undergraduate, Classical Scholar, First-class in Honour Moderations, University Prizeman will give TUITION, Philosophy, Classics to Schoolboy or Undergraduate.’ Towards the end of November 1923 he had his first pupil, a young man of eighteen called Austin Sandeman who was trying to win a scholarship to Oxford, whom Lewis was to coach, as he told his father on 22 November, ‘in essay writing and English for the essay paper and general papers which these exams always include’.⁷

The only other events for the rest of the year were visits to Harwood in London and Barfield in the country, and three weeks at Little Lea: ‘My three weeks in Ireland, though improved by Warnie’s presence, were as usual three weeks too long.’⁸

On returning to Oxford, Lewis tried for a fellowship at St John’s, apparently in philosophy since he submitted an essay on ‘The Promethean Fallacy in Ethics’ together with testimonials from Carritt and Wilson. Nothing came of this, and Nevill Coghill got the English fellowship at Exeter College in February. Lewis, still thinking that his future lay in philosophy, considered trying for a research fellowship at All Souls, and entering for a D.Phil. degree.

On 28 February 1924 he dined at High Table in Univ. as Carritt’s guest, and his host told him of a fellowship in philosophy that was to be awarded at Trinity, worth £500 a year, and advised him to try for it. Walking home late that night, Lewis recorded in his diary,

looking at the details of the Trinity fellowship as I passed the lamps – for some reason the possibility of getting it and all that would follow if I did came before my mind with unusual vividness. I saw it would involve living in and what a break up of our present life that would mean, and also how the extra money would lift terrible loads off us all. I saw that it would mean pretty full work and that I might become submerged and poetry crushed out. With deep conviction I suddenly had an image of myself, God knows when or where, in the future looking back on these years since the War as the happiest or the only really valuable part of my life, in spite of all their disappointments and fears. Yet the longing for an income that would free us from anxiety was stronger than all these feelings. I was in a strange state of excitement – and all on the mere hundredth chance of getting it.⁹

So the first few months of 1924 dragged along through disappointments and much enjoyment of his leisure when writing and revising Dymer, which was nearing completion. In April Lewis had a poem, ‘Joy’, accepted by a small literary magazine, The Beacon – an attempt to capture in verse the elusive experience he was again having from time to time, the meaning of which did not become clear until his conversion. The first stanza (of six) deals the most directly with spiritual ecstasy:

Today was all unlike another day.

The long waves of my sleep near morning broke

On happier beaches, tumbling lighted spray

Of soft dreams filled with promise. As I woke,

Like a huge bird, Joy with the feathery stroke

Of strange wings brushed me over. Sweeter air

Came never from dawn’s heart. The misty smoke

Cooled it upon the hills. It touched the lair

Of each wild thing and woke the wet flowers everywhere.¹⁰

Lewis was still hoping for the Trinity fellowship when he dined at High Table with the President on 4 May, and met many of the other Fellows there and in the Senior Common Room – doubtless that they might consider his suitability if there was any chance of his election.

Next day, however, Sir Michael Sadler offered him a temporary post at Univ. – to take over Carritt’s work as philosophy tutor during the coming academic year, which Carritt was to spend in America. After being assured that the appointment would not stand in his way if he got the Trinity fellowship, and that the emolument would be at least £200, Lewis accepted gratefully.

Much of his time was now taken up preparing for this, his first serious assault upon his chosen profession. But he found time for evenings of discussion with Coghill and other friends; for a week in London with Harwood when he paid his first visit to the Elgin Marbles – ‘what impressed me most was the Artemis among the reliefs of the other gods – the only one I have ever seen that is virginal – but not in the way that appeals to a man’s base love of virginity – and without being girlish and insignificant’¹¹ – and saw Leo Baker playing First Lord in a very bad production of As You Like It by the Old Vic Company.

He also spent several weekends and odd days with Warnie, who was now stationed near Colchester, and went on expeditions with him on his motorcycle. On a typical visit, 3 July 1924, Lewis records that after a drink in the Mess ‘we then motored back to town [Colchester] to a civilian club of which Warnie is a member, where he had provided a royal feast of the sort we both like: no nonsense about soup and pudding, but a sole each, cutlets with green peas, a large portion of strawberries and cream, and a tankard of the local beer which is very good. So we gorged like Roman Emperors in a room to ourselves and had good talk.’¹²

In this way they explored a good deal of the country within reach of Oxford and later much of Wiltshire and the counties north of London. An expedition on 4 July 1924 took them in search of Wynyard, at Warnie’s suggestion. ‘I assented eagerly,’ wrote Lewis in his diary that day. ‘I love to exult in my happiness at being for ever safe from at least one of the major ills of life – that of being a boy at school.’¹³

Lewis was correcting local examination papers throughout July, and at the beginning of August press of work on these and on his lectures in philosophy for the coming term caused a break in his diary which finally widened to six months.

Lewis gave his first lecture, ‘The Good, Its Position Among Values’, on 14 October 1924 – to an audience of four, owing to a mistake in the lecture list and an important lecture by someone else at the same hour. However, he was able to report to his father on 15 October 1924 that it ‘went off all right … Otherwise everything goes well. All my new colleagues are kindness itself and everyone does his best to make me feel at home – especially dear old Poynton. I find the actual tutoring easy at the time (though I am curiously tired at the end of the day) and have already struck some quite good men among my pupils.’¹⁴ One of these first pupils, H.D. Ziman,^* recorded forty years later that he found him ‘the most stimulating of my tutors’.

By February 1925 Lewis was well settled into his new duties, giving an average of four tutorials a day – three in the morning and one between tea and dinner – and lecturing twice a week on ‘Moral Good’, though sometimes the audience was so small that he took them to his college rooms for an informal discussion instead.

Though living at Headington, he frequently reached college in time for breakfast, returned home in the afternoon but was back for tutorial and Hall dinner, with often a meeting of a literary or philosophic society thereafter. He was most conscientious about attending such meetings, and seems to have gained much enjoyment from them. For example, on 12 February after Hall, ‘I went to Ware’s rooms in Worcester Street for a meeting of the Philosophical Society. Ziman read his paper on causality. I, having heard it all from him in the morning, was rather bored. The discussion afterwards drifted off on to Touche’s and Dawson’s favourite position and I had an enjoyable argument. Home late.’^†15

At this time Lewis lunched on most days of the week with F.H. Lawson, the law tutor at Univ.^‡ and D.L. Keir, the historian,^§ whom he found a more entertaining companion than the erudite lawyer: ‘The usual brisk but not really interesting conversation’,¹⁶ Lewis confided to his diary after one of these meals.

But he had very few other entertainments. To go to the theatre was a rare event indeed – and then also perhaps from a sense of duty, as for example the visit to the Oxford University Dramatic Society (OUDS) production of Peer Gynt on 10 February 1925 of which he records: ‘I was very disappointed in the play. The general idea of a history of the soul is all right, but Peer’s soul hasn’t enough in it to last for four hours: most of him is mere Nordic windbagism. No good making a story of Peer: you only want to kick his bottom and get on. The Troll parts from the visual point of view were the best stage devilment I’ve ever seen.’¹⁷

He and Warnie had spent three weeks over Christmas 1924 in Belfast, and on their return toured on the motorcycle via Shrewsbury and Ludlow – ‘an orgy of woods, hills, broad rivers, grey castles, Norman abbeys and towns that have always been asleep’. But almost as soon as he got back to Oxford he went down with flu: ‘I am very much afraid my organism is acquiring the habit of getting this troublesome complaint every time it becomes prevalent,’ he wrote to his father on 11 February 1925.¹⁸ Diary writing lapsed again from March till August, most of the time being taken up between his tutorial duties and domestic life at Headington. On 7–8 April he was away on the motorcycle with Warnie, visiting Salisbury, Wells and Stonehenge.

‘This is my last term “in the bond” at Univ.,’ he wrote to his father after returning to Oxford, ‘and there is still no word of the Fellowship. I begin to be afraid that it is not coming at all. A Fellowship in English is announced at Magdalen and of course I am applying for it, but without any serious hopes as I believe much senior people are in for it.’¹⁹

The chances of getting the Magdalen fellowship seemed remote at first. Oxford’s School of English was in its infancy, the subject having been officially recognized only in 1899 and given its first Chair as recently as 1904. It was to be a part of the Modern Languages Board until 1926 when a separate English faculty board was firmly established. Now, as it turned out, Lewis had been well advised to read both Greats and English for he suddenly found himself a candidate for the fellowship. He was soon left with only one serious rival, J.N. Bryson (later a Fellow of Balliol and a leading authority on the Pre-Raphaelites);^* but a satisfactory dinner to be ‘looked-over’ by the other Magdalen Fellows and several interviews with Sir Herbert Warren, the President, tipped the scales in his favour – doubtless aided by the good offices of Gordon; and on 20 May 1925 he was elected.

‘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, MA (University College)’, ran the gratifying announcement in The Times of 22 May, and the long prologue was over.^†

Lewis was not altogether sorry to leave Univ., feeling – rightly or wrongly – that the college might have done more to keep him, had it wanted him. But he kept up his connections with friends there, was later made an Honorary Fellow, and near the end of his life (though he may never have known) there was a suggestion, if not a firm proposal, that he should be elected Master. He also gave up philosophy for English with few regrets, feeling already that the former led nowhere: ‘I have come to think that if I had the mind, I have not the brain and nerves for a life of pure philosophy,’ he wrote to his father on 14 August. ‘A continued search among the abstract roots of things, a perpetual questioning of all the things that plain men take for granted, a chewing the cud for fifty years over inevitable ignorance and a constant frontier watch on the little tidy lighted conventional world of science and daily life – is this the best life for temperaments such as ours? Is it the way of health or even of sanity?’²⁰ But the philosophical training was not wasted. Lewis had to be always ready to ‘fill in’ with a philosophy tutorial or lecture if required. Of the sixteen pupils Lewis had in 1926 only five were reading English. Lewis’s philosophical training also gave weight to his later theological writings, and in particular such a purely philosophical work as The Abolition of Man (1943).

Lewis’s first reaction on gaining the fellowship was to write to his father a moving letter of gratitude for the faith and the financial support that had made it possible for him to hold on at Oxford until he achieved his goal, while others less fortunate or less persevering had been forced to drop out of the lists. He then went on, with a gaiety that showed better than protestations of his relief and happiness, to describe the ‘admission’ ceremony at Magdalen: ‘English people have not the talent for graceful ceremonial.’ He concluded, ‘They go through it lumpishly and with a certain mixture of defiance and embarrassment as if everyone felt he was being rather silly and was at the same time ready to shoot the first man who said so. In a French or Italian University now, this might have gone off nobly.’²¹

Lewis seems to have had a deep craving for ritual and pageantry all his life, a craving that finds expression in most of his works of fiction, notably the cosmic celebrations near the end of both Perelandra and That Hideous Strength. But he fought shy of it, felt ‘lumpish and embarrassed’ when he came across it in actual experience – from university ceremonies to ritual in religious services – and avoided it whenever possible.

Before setting to work on the necessary preparation for his first term at Magdalen, Michaelmas 1925, Lewis spent a few days with the Barfields in London (as soon as he had finished the exam correcting for which he had already signed on) and then went with Mrs Moore and Maureen for three weeks’ holiday, 17 August to 6 September, at Oare on the borders of Exmoor. There he spent many days walking, usually alone, in the Doone country, reading for enjoyment, and only towards the end turning to works that he might be teaching the following term.

Lewis visited his father in Belfast during the last two weeks of September. It was a great success, partly because Jack was no longer dependent on his father. Mr Lewis wrote in his diary on 1 October 1925: ‘Jacks returned. A fortnight and a few days with me. Very pleasant, not a cloud. Went to the Boat with him. The first time I did not pay his passage money. I offered, but he did not want it.’²²

While in Belfast during this same Long Vacation Jack discussed the furnishing of his rooms in Magdalen, for he was writing to his father on 21 October in dismay over the quantity of furniture he was expected to supply – far more than they had planned on transporting from Ireland. ‘At one time I thought I should have to take pupils in my bedroom as the bed was the only thing to sit down on,’ he remarked ruefully. But

my external surroundings are beautiful beyond expectation and beyond hope. To live in the Bishop’s Palace at Wells would be good but could hardly be better than this. My big sitting-room looks north and from it I see nothing, not even a gable or spire, to remind me that I am in a town. I look down on a stretch of grass which passes into a grove of immemorial forest trees, at present coloured with autumn red. Over this stray the deer. They are erratic in their habits. Some mornings when I look out there may be half a dozen chewing the cud just beneath me, and on others there will be none in sight – or one little stag (not much bigger than a calf and looking too slender for the weight of his own antlers) standing still and sending through the fog that queer little bark or hoot which is these beasts’ ‘moo’. It is a sound that will soon be as familiar to me as the cough of the cows in the field at home, for I hear it day and night. On my right hand as I look from these windows is ‘his favourite walk’.^* My smaller sitting-room and bedroom look out southward and across a broad lawn to the main buildings of Magdalen with the tower beyond it.²³

Lewis occupied these rooms (New Buildings 3.3 – Staircase 3, Rooms 3) for almost thirty years, and in some way he seems to be more closely associated with them than either with his subsequent rooms in Magdalene, Cambridge, or even with The Kilns, his home in Headington Quarry from 1930 until his death in 1963. To the New Buildings at Magdalen (built about 1740, which is ‘new’ in Oxford when one thinks of Chaucer reading in Merton library) came most of those who sought Lewis, from pupils and celebrity-hunters to the greatest writers and scholars of his age. There most of his famous books were written, from The Allegory of Love to The Last Battle; and there for a moment in Oxford’s history a group gathered to read and discuss their works, as similar groups had met and will meet again. A century earlier it was William Morris, Burne-Jones, R.W. Dixon and their friends in Cornell Price’s rooms at Brasenose College; this time Tolkien would be reading the half-written Lord of the Rings, Charles Williams All Hallows’ Eve, and C.S. Lewis Perelandra.

But all this was still far in the utterly unexpected future when the new English don moved in early in October 1925 to meet his first pupils and begin preparing his first lectures.

The concentration on work at Magdalen took up most of his time and prevented diary writing until the following summer, and much in the way of letter writing too. The long letters to Arthur Greeves had already grown fewer and become less intimate, and although Lewis continued to write to his earliest friend, we learn relatively little of his more personal feelings and experiences from them.

But indeed there was little to record of Lewis’s first years at Magdalen. He worked hard and conscientiously at his profession, and his experiences in so doing differed only in detail from those of any other don. He did not suddenly become the best lecturer and (for the right pupil) the best tutor in the English School at Oxford: it was ten or fifteen years before such a description could be considered seriously.

Among Lewis’s first pupils was John Betjeman:^* but there is no indication that either discerned the other’s future greatness or felt that the experience was anything out of the ordinary. In fact, Lewis considered that he did not do anything like enough work, was particularly slack over Old English, and in a moment of exasperation described him as ‘an idle prig’.²⁴

His first lectures caused him considerable trouble. Having announced as his theme ‘Eighteenth-Century Precursors of the Romantic Movement’, he discovered that F.P. Wilson was lecturing on ‘English Poetry from Thomson to Cowper’, and he wrote to his father on 4 December 1925, ‘It is in fact the same subject under a different name. This means that, being neither able nor willing to rival Wilson, I am driven to concentrate on the prose people of whom at present I know very little. I have as hard a spell cut out for me between now and next term as I have ever had.’²⁵

However, even an attack of German measles at the beginning of the following year did not prevent the lectures from being prepared. He wrote to his father on 25 January 1926:

Will you think me affected if I number a small illness among the minor pleasures of life? The early stages are unpleasant but at least they bring you to a point when the mere giving up and going to bed is a relief. Then after twenty-four hours the really high temperature and the headache are gone: one is not well enough to get up, but one is ill enough not to want to get up. Best of all, work is impossible and one can read all day for mere pleasure with a clear conscience.²⁶

(Lewis never changed his views, and as late as 1959 Green remembered finding him laid up with a heavy cold, and his positive delight when he was found to have a temperature and could look forward to a three-day ‘holiday in bed’, instead of getting up and going to Cambridge.)

On Saturday, 23 January 1926, Lewis had given his first lecture in the English School. Writing to his father about it in his letter of 25 January, he said,

I suppose my various friends in the English Schools have been telling their pupils to come to it: at any rate it was a pleasant change from talking to empty rooms in Greats. I modestly selected the smallest lecture room in college. As I approached, half wondering if anyone would turn up, I noticed a crowd of undergraduates coming into Magdalen, but it was no mock modesty to assume that they were coming to hear someone else. When however I actually reached my own room it was crowded out and I had to sally forth with the audience at my heels to find another. The porter directed me to one which we have in another building across the street. So we all surged over the High in a disorderly mass, suspending the traffic. It was a most exhilarating scene. Of course their coming to the first lecture, the men to see what it is like, the girls to see what I am like, really means nothing: curiosity is now satisfied – I have been weighed, with results as yet unknown – and next week I may have an audience of five or none.²⁷

Besides his own pupils, Lewis took a class of seven girls at Lady Margaret Hall each week during the Hilary Term of 1926, and found several of them clever and stimulating, and ‘very good at discussion’.²⁸ Contrary to a rumour that persisted for many years, Lewis neither looked down on women undergraduates nor refused to tutor them: he made no distinction between them and his male pupils – and made no special allowances. His bluff manner, the lightning speed at which his mind worked, and the downright assertion or contradiction that often seemed like a snub though not so intended, was apt to alarm or antagonize the more sensitive of his male pupils: this treatment could have seemed to show a veiled contempt to some of his female pupils who were not accustomed to it.

The hard work at the beginning of Lewis’s career as lecturer and tutor at Magdalen cut down even the social events which he enjoyed. One, however, which he made a point of attending was a dinner with Nevill Coghill to meet Walter de la Mare^* and A.L. Rowse^† – the latter he continued to meet in Oxford, the former he does not seem to have met again. A much closer friend made at this time, and the earliest among his new Magdalen associates, was William Francis Ross Hardie,^‡ the young classics tutor: being depressed over the outbreak of the General Strike in May 1926, they went to the cinema ‘where I saw Felix (excellent) and Harold Lloyd for the first time in my life’.²⁹

‘Nearly all my pupils went off during the Strike to unload boats or swing batons or drive engines,’ he wrote to his father on 5 June. ‘We of course had to stay on as long as any pupils were left, and it had just got to the point of us having to go when the thing ended. I don’t mind telling you that I was in a funk about it. Docking was filled up and I would sooner have gone to the war again than have been a constable.’³⁰

Another acquaintance at this time who afterwards became a close friend – though the attraction was not immediate – was J.R.R. Tolkien, six years his senior, who had just been elected Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford. They met at the English Faculty meeting at Merton College on 11 May 1926. ‘He is a smooth, pale, fluent little chap,’ wrote Lewis in his diary, ‘can’t read Spenser because of the forms – thinks 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. No harm in him: only needs a smack or so.’³¹

In the Michaelmas Term of 1926 Tolkien founded the Kolbítar, an informal club for dons who met for the purpose of reading the Icelandic sagas and myths in the original Old Icelandic and Old Norse. Lewis joined the club and whatever initial antipathy they may have felt was soon forgotten. It was not long before they were meeting in each other’s rooms and talking far into the night. ‘Tolkien came back with me to college and sat discoursing of the gods and giants and Asgard for three hours’ is a typical note, from a letter to Arthur Greeves on 3 December 1929.³²

During 1926 Lewis was still much concerned with poetry. Dymer was at last completed, and accepted by J.M. Dent & Sons in May, being published on 20 September. Before its appearance he was showing some interest in the contemporary poetry, siding with Abercrombie^* and the ‘Georgians’ against Eliot^† and the ‘Moderns’. Perhaps piqued at his failure to get any of his own poems accepted, he hatched the idea of a ‘literary dragonade: a series of mock Eliotic poems to be sent up to the Dial and the Criterion until sooner or later one of these filthy editors falls into the trap’.³³

Coghill and W.F.R. Hardie, and his pupil Henry Yorke,^* joined in the scheme – but it does not seem to have gone very far. The American literary critic and philosopher Paul Elmer More (1864–1937) was in Oxford in the spring of 1933 and met Lewis shortly after The Pilgrim’s Regress was published. More was a close friend of T.S. Eliot, and liked his poetry. Even so, Lewis got on well with More and in his letter to him of 23 May 1935 Lewis explained exactly what he thought wrong with Eliot’s poetry:

There may be many reasons why you do not share my dislike of Eliot, but I hardly know why you should be surprised at it. On p. 143 of the article on Joyce you yourself refer to him as ‘a great genius expending itself on the propagation of irresponsibility’. To me the ‘great genius’ is not apparent: the other thing is. Surely it is natural that I should regard Eliot’s work as a very great evil. He is the very spearhead of that attack on πéραζ^† which you deplore. His constant profession of humanism and his claim to be ‘classicist’ may not be consciously insincere, but they are erroneous. The plea that his poems of disintegration are all satiric, are intended as awful warnings, is the common plea of all these literary traitors to humanity. So Juvenal, Wycherley, Byron excuse their pornography: so Eliot himself excuses Joyce. His intention only God knows: I must be content to judge his work by its fruits, and I contend that no man is fortified against chaos by reading the Waste Land, but that most men are by it infected with chaos. The opposite plea rests on a very elementary confusion between poetry that represents disintegration and disintegrated poetry. The Inferno is not infernal poetry: the Waste Land is. His criticism tells the same tale. He may say he is a classicist, but his sympathy with depraved poets (Marlowe, Johnson, Webster) is apparent: but he shows no real love of any disciplined and magnanimous writer save Dante. Of Homer, Sophocles, Virgil, Milton, Racine he has nothing to say. Assuredly he is one of the enemy: and all the more dangerous because he is sometimes disguised as a friend. And this offence is exaggerated by attendant circumstances, such as his arrogance. And (you will forgive me) it is further aggravated for an Englishman by the recollection that Eliot stole upon us, a foreigner and a neutral, while we were at war – obtained, I have my wonders how, a job in the Bank of England – and became (am I wrong) the advance guard of the invasion since carried out by his natural friends and allies, the Steins and Pounds and hoc genus omne, the Parisian riff-raff of denationalized Irishmen and Americans who have perhaps given Western Europe her death wound.³⁴

It took Lewis many years to come to terms with ‘modern’ poetry. Though he never accepted it as equal in value to the best of the traditional variety, he came to recognize the greatness of some of its exponents and numbered Eliot and Auden among his personal friends. His favourite contemporary poets, however, seem to have been Charles Williams, Roy Campbell and Kathleen Raine – perhaps he inclined to be over-partial to the poetry when he liked the poet. He never lost his respect for Masefield and the best of the Georgians, whom he would quote, praise and defend when occasion called – though he would allow few virtues to Noyes, perhaps on account of his own dislike for ‘elfin’ poetry, even if written by Herrick or Drayton.

He was reading the proofs of Dymer at this time and feeling an author’s usual sensation of failure and disappointment when it is too late to rewrite or revise. ‘I never liked it less,’ he confessed, ‘I felt that no mortal could get any notion of what the devil it was all about. I am afraid this sort of stuff is very much hit or miss, yet I think it is my only real line.’³⁵

Dymer was published on 20 September 1926. That it was a miss was not, however, the opinion of the more discerning reviewers. ‘Mr Clive Hamilton’s long allegorical poem Dymer is executed with a consistent craftsmanship which excites admiration even where criticism is readiest to speak,’ wrote Dilys Powell in the Sunday Times on 19 September; and after picking out several ‘felicitous phrases’ she assured the reader that ‘the tediousness which is so often the chief feature of allegorical poetry is absent’. But, prophetically, she concluded, ‘Mr Hamilton has mistaken his opportunity. The idea was not one for treatment in verse. The exigencies of the poetic line prevent such an easy sequence as the allegory demands; but as a prose tale how splendidly it would have flowed!’³⁶ And A.T. Quiller-Couch wrote to Guy Pocock, the editor at Dent, who passed it on to Lewis, ‘Dymer is a fine piece of work: fine in conception and full of brilliant lines and images. Can you convey my thanks to the author of the best new thing I have read for many a long day? He has that gift of metaphor too, which Aristotle was cunning enough to spot as the one quality of style which cannot be taught or imparted because it is genius, and its happy owner is born with it.’

After Christmas with his father and Warnie (the last Christmas they were all to spend together, for Warnie was posted to the Far East the following April), Lewis began on his next poem, The King of Drum, still feeling that his literary future lay in the direction of epic. The full history of this, perhaps his most successful work of this kind, is given in the introduction to Narrative Poems (1969) where it was first published. Lewis worked eagerly on the poem for a time, but seems to have given it up as Dymer proved more and more obviously to be a failure from the financial point of view. By 1938, when he consulted John Masefield on its merits, he had rewritten it as The Queen of Drum, with a certain amount of Christian symbolism worked into it. Masefield urged publication, and other friends read and enjoyed it from time to time. Lewis read part of it aloud at the Oxford Summer Diversions on 4 August 1938 – but somehow it never won into print, though he was still considering publication twenty years after this.

The burst of poetic creativity in January 1927 coincided with the first definite evidence for the spiritual worries and struggles that were to lead Lewis back to Christianity four years later. During a solitary walk on 18 January he was

thinking about imagination and intellect and the unholy muddle I am in about them at present: undigested scraps of anthroposophy and psychoanalysis jostling with orthodox idealism over a background of good old Kirkian rationalism. Lord, what a mess! And all the time (with me) there’s the danger of falling back into most childish superstitions, or of running into dogmatic materialism to escape them. I hoped the ‘King of Drum’ might write itself so as to clear things up – the way ‘Dymer’ cleared up the Christina Dream business.³⁷

But he was still attacking religion – with, perhaps, some of the shrill contempt of the man who does not want to believe rather than of one who simply does not believe. ‘A pest on all this nonsense which has half spoiled so much beauty and wonder for me, degraded pure imagination into pretentious lying, and truths of the spirit into mere matters of fact, slimed everything over with the trail of its infernal mumbo-jumbo,’ he wrote in his diary on 8 February 1927, after rereading the myth of Atlantis from Plato, and realizing how Steiner had interpreted it from the point of view of Anthroposophy. ‘How I would have enjoyed this myth once: now behind Plato’s delightful civilized imagination I always have the picture of dark old traditions picked up from mumbling medicine men, professing to be “private information” about facts. To bed and had a much worse night than I have had for a long time.’³⁸

But Lewis’s spiritual biography of the next few years will be dealt with fully in the next chapter: in 1927 he was still trying to ‘live by philosophy’ – like A.C. Bradley in The Masque of Balliol he was still seeking refuge ‘in the blessed Absolute’. His diary writing was, however, growing more and more sporadic, and it was, he said, his acceptance of Theism which ‘cured me of the time-wasting and foolish practice of keeping a diary’.³⁹

Meanwhile his outer life at Oxford continued much on the lines of any other don. Though still superior to and contemptuous of the average philistine undergraduates – ‘a drinking, guffawing cry of barbarians with hardly any taste among them’⁴⁰ – he performed what seemed his duties to them with conscientious thoroughness. Evenings were given up to reading and debating societies; he attended parties given by his pupils – one of these by John Betjeman on 24 January 1927 in his rooms in St Aldates – ‘a very beautiful panelled room looking across to the side of the House’, he recorded.

I found myself pitchforked into a galaxy of super-undergraduates, including Sparrow^* of the Nonesuch Press and an absolutely silent and astonishingly ugly person called McNiece,^† of whom Betjeman said afterwards, ‘He doesn’t say much, but he’s a great poet’. It reminded me of the man in Boswell ‘who was always thinking of Locke and Newton’. This silent bard comes from Belfast or rather Carrickfergus. The conversation was chiefly about lace curtains, arts and crafts (which they all dislike), china ornaments, silver versus earthen teapots, architecture, and the strange habits of ‘hearties’. The best thing was Betjeman’s very curious collection of books. Came away with him and back to college to pull him along through Wulfstan until dinner time.⁴¹

Certainly Lewis did not find himself at home among the brittle young world of what he was later to describe as ‘The Empty Twenties’ – but there was some truth in a moment of self-recognition recorded the previous year: ‘Was led somehow into a train of thought in which I made the unpleasant discovery that I am becoming a prig – righteous indignation against certain modern affectations has its dangers, yet I don’t know how to avoid it either.’⁴²

Warnie was setting off for Shanghai on 11 April 1927, where he would remain with the Royal Army Service Corps for almost three years. Warnie was becoming part of Jack’s Oxford family and after a night there he left in a rather nostalgic mood. ‘The bus,’ he wrote in his diary on 7 April, ‘did not start at once, and I watched Jack in his mac and old cloth hat stride along until he was out of sight.’⁴³ He had visited Ireland briefly the week before to see his father – for the last time, as it turned out.

Lewis stopped writing a regular diary at this time, though he continued to record his activities in an occasional journal to Warnie. For part at least of the following year he kept a diary in Anglo-Saxon, none of which seems to have survived except a literal translation of the account of the election of George Gordon to succeed Sir Herbert Warren as President of Magdalen in 1928.

In the first of the diary-letters to his brother, the section dated 26 April, Lewis described a walking tour with Owen Barfield, Cecil Harwood and Walter ‘Wof’ Field^* to Marlborough and Salisbury Plain. This was always his favourite form of holiday and he continued to make such tours until his mid-fifties when failing health put an end to them, his most frequent companion in later years being his brother and their most usual venue the north of Ireland during the Long Vacation.⁴⁴

Apart from longer or shorter walks and thoughts on the books he was reading, Lewis had little news to impart either to his father or to his brother at this time. Albert Lewis’s health was beginning to cause anxiety, and Jack exerted himself to be entertaining in his letters, quoting amusing schoolboy howlers from the examination papers he was again correcting that summer, and telling anecdotes of the more eccentric dons with whom he came in contact. There is an occasional illuminating remark about himself: ‘Like all us Celts,’ he wrote on 29 July, ‘I am a born rhetorician, one who finds pleasure in the expression of forcible emotions independently of their grounds and even to the extent to which they are felt at any time save the moment of speaking.’⁴⁵ And the same letter concludes, ‘I am going bald at a prodigious rate and in a few years time you will have a better head of hair than either of your sons.’⁴⁶

In September Lewis was on holiday with Mrs Moore and Maureen at Perranporth in Cornwall and wrote an ecstatic account of the surf-bathing to Warnie. He tore himself away from the delights of the seaside for a visit to his father. ‘Jack arrived, bright and cheerful and amusing as usual,’⁴⁷ recorded Albert Lewis in his diary. But the Cornish trip ‘was not official and should not be referred to in letters’ to their father, he instructed Warnie.

This year Lewis began learning the language of the Sagas: ‘it is an exciting experience when I remember my first passion for things Norse,’ he wrote in his diary on 8 February 1927.⁴⁸ He described the experience to Arthur Greeves in a letter of 26 June:

I am realizing a number of very old dreams in the way of books – reading Sir Gawain in the original^* and, above all, learning Old Icelandic. We have a little Icelandic Club in Oxford called the ‘Kolbítar’: which means (literally) ‘coal-biters’, i.e. an Icelandic word for old cronies who sit round the fire so close that they look as if they were biting the coals. We have so far read the Younger Edda and the Volsung Saga: next term we shall read the Laxdale Saga. You will be able to imagine what a delight this is to me, and how, even in turning over the pages of my Icelandic Dictionary, the mere name of god or giant catching my eye will sometimes throw me back fifteen years into a wild dream of northern skies and Valkyrie music: only they are now even more beautiful seen through a haze of memory.⁴⁹

He spent four weeks with his father towards the end of the Long Vacation. ‘Jacks sets me a very good example of industry,’ wrote Albert Lewis to Warnie on 26 September 1927. ‘I leave him at breakfast when I go out and immediately he has finished it he goes up to the end room and works steadily till lunch. In the afternoon he goes out for a walk. I am glad to say that he is in good health and great spirits and has many funny “wheezes” about the older Dons at Oxford.’⁵⁰

Not all Lewis’s ‘work’, however, was of a very academic nature, as he seems to have spent much of the month at Little Lea compiling an Encyclopaedia Boxoniana of all his and Warnie’s early stories.⁵¹ At about this time he also began his only attempt at a modern novel, which did not get much beyond the first 7,000 words. The fragment that remains among the Lewis Papers⁵² takes the narrator, Dr Easley, from Liverpool to Belfast on a first visit to his Irish relations, and includes a good deal of amusing dialogue with a loquacious Irishman whom he meets on the voyage – typical of the voyages that Lewis had made and was still to make so many times.

At Oxford there was little time for writing during term. Most of each day was taken up with tutorials and lectures, with a walk in the afternoon if not captured for chores by Mrs Moore. The evenings were mostly filled also, as he explained to Warnie on 12 December 1927 when excusing the brevity of letters written to him in term time:

My evenings for the fortnight in term run thus: Mon. Play reading with undergraduates (till Midnight). Tue. Mermaid club. Wedn. Anglo-Saxon with undergraduates. Thurs. – Frid. – Sat. – Sunday. Common room till late. Mon. Play reading. Tue. Icelandic Society. Wedn. Anglo-Saxon. Thurs. Philosophical supper. Fri. – Sat. – Sunday. As you will see this gives at the very best only three free evenings in the even weeks and two in the odd. And into these two everything in the way of casual entertaining, correspondence, and what we used to call ‘A-h-h-h!’ has to be crammed.⁵³

That Christmas he spent with his father in Belfast. As Albert Lewis aged, he became more and more difficult and demanding, but Lewis himself was learning ever greater patience and charity – though still occasionally letting off steam to Warnie in letters packed with examples of their father’s exigent behaviour. This Christmas, besides walks with Arthur Greeves, he managed to get out for one evening to give him and John Bryson dinner at a Belfast hotel: ‘to be seated in a hotel, eating an ordinary dinner and drinking your wine, indulging in ordinary chat, and then to reflect that Belfast is outside the window, is a marvellous sensation. I discovered to my surprise that Bryson (whom I always regarded as an imposing junior Don) was in just the same state at home as Arthur and myself,’ he wrote to Warnie in the current diary-letter.⁵⁴

Albert Lewis finally retired on a pension from the Petty Sessions in May 1928, his health growing more precarious. The poor man suffered acutely from lumbago and the occasional bout of sciatica. This made visits home even more of a penance, since his father was in the house all the time; but Lewis managed to stay for part of each vacation, and continued with long and cheerful letters.

Early in 1928 he was working on the idea of a book about sixteenth-century letters, sparked off by reading the letters of Erasmus, a task necessitating long, quiet days in the Bodleian which he described in glowing terms to his father. But very soon he found himself immersed in and fascinated by medieval French poetry, of which he would transcribe and translate scraps in letters to Warnie, apologizing that ‘my reading contains less and less that I can share with my non-professional friends’, but delighting in his new discovery of the world of courtly love and allegory. ‘Don’t you think this is rather jolly?’ he wrote to Warnie in that same letter of 24 April 1928. ‘In one of those gardens in a dream, which medieval love poetry is full of, we find the tomb of a knight, dead for love, covered with flowers.’ Then, after quoting the Old French, he goes on, ‘I suppose it can be very roughly Englished:

And birds that for the soul of that Signor

Who lay beneath, songs of true love did pour:

Being hungered, each from off the flowers bore

A kiss, and felt that day no hunger more.⁵⁵

‘The odd thing is that one would expect the same rhyme going through to be monotonous and ugly: but to my ear it produces a beautiful lulling like the sound of the sea.’⁵⁶

This letter is the first indication that Lewis’s mind was turning seriously in the direction of his most famous volume of literary scholarship, The Allegory of Love, and by July of the same year he was writing the first draft. ‘I have actually begun the first chapter of my book,’ he told his father on July 10. ‘The actual book is going to be about medieval love poetry and the medieval idea of love, which is a very paradoxical business indeed when you go into it.’⁵⁷

Little else happened in 1928 of which Lewis took much note. Besides the usual visits to Belfast, Arthur Greeves stayed with him at Magdalen in the early autumn. After a great deal of ‘College politics’, inner rings and cliques functioning in full force, George Gordon was elected President of Magdalen in November, to the general satisfaction of Lewis himself, and indeed the majority of the Fellows.

Lewis spent Christmas 1928 with his father – Albert’s last, though his son had no idea that such a thing was likely – and was able to present him with his two earliest reviews, both in The Oxford Magazine, of Evelyn Waugh’s Rossetti (23 October) and Hugh Kingsmill’s Matthew Arnold (15 November) – the first laudatory and the second condemnatory in the extreme, one of the earliest examples of his witheringly logical approach, the delenda est Carthago in which he became so adept in later years. (Yet he developed no animus against the author since, as Chad Walsh records, he was quoting Kingsmill’s brilliant parody of A.E. Housman with much glee and commendation a dozen years later.)⁵⁸

A flu-ish cold, with temperature and sore throat, confined Lewis to bed and prevented him from visiting his father in April 1929, his only holiday from Oxford being a four-day walking tour with Barfield and several other friends from Salisbury to Lyme Regis.

As Lewis was having to devote July 1929, as usual, to the correction of examination papers, he wrote to his father on 18 June about a holiday together: ‘I am still undecided (it depends largely on when I finish Chapter II of the book) whether August 12th or something like August 25th would be best for me,’⁵⁹ at the same time urging his father to take a holiday with him away from Little Lea. He crossed to Ireland on the earlier date and was writing to Warnie on the 25th: ‘This is a line to let you know that P. [Papy] is rather seriously ill.’⁶⁰ Albert Lewis’s health deteriorated rapidly, with Jack in day and night attendance – and writing bulletins to Warnie in Shanghai, who could not possibly receive them for a month or six weeks.

On 3 September an operation was deemed necessary. This was performed a few days later, and seemed successful. ‘The operation, in spite of what they prophesied, discovered cancer,’ wrote Jack to Warnie on 29 September.

They said he might live a few years. I remained at home, visiting him in the Nursing Home for ten days … By this time I had been at home since Aug. 11th, and my work for next term was getting really desperate and, as [the doctor] said I might easily wait for several weeks more and still be in the same position … I crossed to Oxford on Saturday, Sept. 22. On Tuesday 24 I got a wire saying that he was worse, caught the train an hour later, and arrived to find that he had died on Tuesday afternoon.⁶¹

Jack was confused about the dates when he wrote this. He left Oxford on Tuesday, 24 September. However, when he arrived in Belfast on the evening of Wednesday 25 September, he found that his father had died that afternoon.

Both Warnie and Jack felt Albert Lewis’s death far more than they had thought possible; and the wrench of leaving Little Lea, their home for most of their lives, whatever their later reactions to it, was also acute. The letters for the next six months are taken up mainly with the business of sorting and selling or keeping the contents of the house, employing a caretaker while the house was put up for sale, and generally winding up the Lewis affairs in Belfast.

In November the letters show Lewis living a normal Oxford life again – sitting up late talking of Norse mythology with Tolkien; learning textual criticism so as to be able to teach it the following term to B.Litt. students; reading Anglo-Saxon poetry with a congenial and promising pupil, Neil Ker.^* ‘Ker shares to the full’, Lewis wrote to Arthur on 5 November, ‘my enthusiasm for the saga world and we had a pleasant evening – with the wind still roaring outside.’⁶² He also attended meetings of the Icelandic Society, the Linguistic Society, the Michaelmas Club, and so on.

As soon as term ended he was off to Ireland, staying with Arthur and setting to work at Little Lea each day. On his return journey to Oxford on 21 December he was reading Bunyan’s Grace Abounding: ‘I should like to know … in general,’ Jack wrote to Arthur on 22 December, ‘what you think of all the darker side of religion as we find it in old books. Formerly I regarded it as mere devil-worship based on horrible superstitions. Now that I have found, and am still finding more and more the element of truth in the old beliefs, I feel I cannot dismiss even their dreadful side so cavalierly. There must be something in it: only what?’⁶³

He was present at the Christmas Eve celebrations in Magdalen for the first time that year, and found them most impressive. He still did not attend church, even on Christmas Day, but was finding more and more of a religious experience during his long walks in the country – ‘the utter homeliness, the Englishness, the Christendom of it’, he wrote to Arthur on 26 December. It was, he said, so different from a walk they had taken in Co. Antrim a week or so earlier, and yet that too was but ‘another instance of … the “broad-mindedness” of the infinite … Perhaps it is less strange that the Absolute should make both than that we should be able to love both.’⁶⁴

Looking back in 1935 to his long friendship with Greeves, Lewis summed up their relationship and what he owed to the friend who always remained steadfast to the Christian faith however much he bombarded him with the ‘thin artillery’ of the rationalist:

He remains victor in that debate. It is I who have come round. The thing is symbolical of much in our joint history. He was not a clever boy, he was even a dull boy; I was a scholar. He had no ‘ideas’. I bubbled over with them. It might seem that I had much to give him and that he had nothing to give me. But this is not the truth. I could give concepts, logic, facts, arguments, but he had feelings to offer, feelings which most mysteriously – for he was always very inarticulate – he taught me to share. Hence, in our commerce, I dealt in superficies, but he in solids. I learned charity from him but failed, for all my efforts, to teach him arrogance in return.⁶⁵

Meanwhile plans for the future were going ahead. Warnie was to join the Lewis – Moore set-up, but a bigger house must be found, and now there might be sufficient money to purchase a definite home of their own, if Little Lea sold well enough.

Warnie’s service abroad ended in March. He reached England on 16 April 1930 and went straight to London where his brother met him, taking him back to Oxford and then down to Bournemouth where the family holiday was in progress. Later in the month they went over to Belfast to continue sorting out the accumulation of years at Little Lea, selecting what books and furniture to keep, and arranging for the sale of the rest. They had already decided what to do with all the toys that had been the foundation and background to the world of Boxen and its literature, and Jack had written to Warnie on 12 January 1930:

I should not like to make an exception even in favour of Benjamin. After all, these characters (like all others) can, in the long run, live only in ‘the literature of the period’, and I fancy that when we look at the actual toys again (a process from which I anticipate no pleasure at all) we shall find the discrepancy between the symbol … and the character rather acute. No, Brother. The toys in the trunk are quite plainly corpses. We will resolve them into their elements, as nature will do to us.⁶⁶

Like the children at the end of Kenneth Grahame’s Dream Days, ‘we took turn about in digging a hole in the vegetable garden in which to put our toys’, recorded Warnie in his diary on 23 April 1930, ‘and then carried the old attic trunk down and buried them. What struck me most was the scantiness of the material out of which that remarkable imaginary world was constructed. By tacit mutual consent the boxes of characters were buried unopened.’⁶⁷

Warnie was posted to Bulford on Salisbury Plain in mid-May, but was able to get leave early in June to superintend the final sale of Little Lea, which he left for the last time on 3 June. But little more than a fortnight later their combined house-hunting on the outskirts of Oxford led them to The Kilns, Headington Quarry, which was to be their home for the rest of their lives – and which would become by the end, thirty-three years later, much dearer to Jack who was to know there his greatest happiness and his greatest sorrow near the end of his life.

On 7 July 1930 Warnie wrote in his diary that on the previous morning

Jack and I went out and saw the place, and I instantly caught the infection. We did not go inside the house, but the eight-acre garden is such stuff as dreams are made on. I never imagined that for us any such garden would ever come within the sphere of discussion. The house (which has two more rooms than Hillsboro) stands at the entrance to its own grounds at the northern foot of Shotover at the end of a narrow lane, which in turn opens off a very bad and little-used road, giving as great privacy as can be reasonably looked for near a large town. To the left of the house are the two brick kilns from which it takes its name – in front, a lawn and hard tennis court – then a large bathing pool, beautifully wooded, and with a delightful circular brick seat overlooking it. After that a steep wilderness broken with ravines and nooks of all kinds runs up to a little cliff topped by a thistly meadow, and then the property ends in a thick belt of fir trees, almost a wood. The view from the cliff over the dim blue distance is simply glorious.⁶⁸

The pool or ‘lake’ in the woods they soon discovered ‘has quite distinguished literary associations, being known locally as “Shelley’s Pool”, and there is a tradition that Shelley used to meditate there’.⁶⁹

This ideal little estate was duly purchased that July for £3,300, and £200 more set aside for building on two additional rooms – one of which became the new ‘little end room’. The remainder of the lease of Hillsboro was sold fairly satisfactorily in August, and the Lewis brothers, with Mrs Moore and Maureen, and Mr Papworth the dog, moved into The Kilns on 11 October 1930.

Shortage of money unfortunately prevented them from buying the adjoining field for £300, and a few years later an unsightly row of small houses was built on it. The rest of the Kilns environment, however, remained in almost unspoilt beauty until after Lewis’s death, though by then the area at the end of their lane, in a square from the bypass to the London road, was a solid block of development, joining on to the suburbs of Oxford.^*

^* Dr John Hawkins Askins (1877–1923) – ‘the Doc.’ – was Mrs Moore’s brother. He was educated at Trinity College, Dublin, where he obtained his Bachelor of Medicine in 1904. During the First World War he served in the Royal Army Medical Corps, and he was wounded in 1917. His health seems to have been broken by the war. He was married to the former Mary Emmet Goldsborough, and they had one child, Peony. About 1922 they moved to Iffley, just outside Oxford, to be near Mrs Moore. Lewis was writing about Dr Askins in Chapter 13 of Surprised by Joy where he said he spent ‘fourteen days, and most of fourteen nights as well, in close contact with a man who was going mad … And this man, as I well knew, had not kept the beaten track. He had flirted with Theosophy, Yoga, Spiritualism, Psychoanalysis, what not?’

^* Sir Michael Ernest Sadler (1861–1943), educational pioneer and patron of the arts, read Classics at Trinity College, Oxford. He was Professor of Education at the University of Manchester, 1903–11, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Leeds, 1911–23, and Master of University College, 1923–34.

^* Herbert David Ziman (1902–83) took a Second in Greats and received his BA from University College in 1924. He was leader-writer for the Daily Telegraph, 1934–9, and literary editor, 1956–68.

^† All these pupils were reading Greats at University College. Robert Remington Ware, George Lawrence Capel Touche, and John Hill Mackintosh Dawson took their BAs in 1925.

^† Frederick Henry Lawson (1897–1983), academic lawyer, was Lecturer in Law at University College, 1924–5, at Christ Church, 1925–6, Junior Research Fellow of Merton College, 1925–30, and official Fellow and Tutor in Law, 1930–48. Lawson was Professor of Law and a Fellow of Brasenose College, 1948–64.

^§ David Lindsay Keir (1895–1973) was a Fellow of New College, Oxford, 1921–39, President and Vice-Chancellor of Queen’s College, Belfast, 1939–49, and Master of Balliol College, 1949–65.

^* John Norman Bryson (1896–1976) was born in Belfast and educated at the Queen’s University, Belfast and Merton College. He was a lecturer in English at Balliol, Merton, and Oriel Colleges, 1923–40, and Fellow and Tutor in English at Balliol College, 1940–63.

^† ‘For five years’ was a mere matter of form. Re-election was almost certain, provided the Fellow fulfilled his duties satisfactorily.

^* The favourite walk of the essayist and poet, Joseph Addison (1672–1719). When he was a Fellow of Magdalen, living in New Buildings, he greatly enjoyed the walk that runs northward from the College buildings. On 13 May 1998 a stone tablet was erected in Addison’s Walk to mark the centenary of Lewis’s birth. On it is inscribed Lewis’s poem about the walk – ‘What the Bird Said Early in the Year’ – which can be found in The Collected Poems of C.S. Lewis.

^* (Sir) John Betjeman (1906–84), Poet Laureate, was Lewis’s first pupil in Magdalen. He would not work, and in the end he failed the University’s Divinity examination and left Oxford without a degree. At first he blamed Lewis for not supporting him, and in some of his poems Lewis is made a figure of fun. However, in time Betjeman admitted that he was himself to blame for his troubles. He was a devoted member of the Church of England. His many volumes of poems include Ghastly Good Taste (1933), Old Lights for New Chancels (1940) and A Few Late Chrysanthemums (1954).

^* Walter de la Mare (1873–1956), poet and novelist. His Songs of Childhood (1902) was followed by a large output of poems, novels and other books. Among his best known are The Return (1910), Peacock Pie (1913) and Behold the Dreamer (1939).

^† Alfred Leslie Rowse (1903–97), poet, biographer and historian, was born in Cornwall and was educated at Christ Church, Oxford.

^† William Francis Ross Hardie (1902–90), educated at Balliol College, was the Fellow of Philosophy at Magdalen College in 1925, Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, 1926–50, and President of Corpus Christi College, 1950–69.

^* Lascelles Abercrombie (1881–1938), poet and critic, was educated at Malvern College. He was Professor of English Literature at the University of Leeds, 1922–9, the University of London, 1929–35, and Goldsmith’s Reader at Oxford, 1935–8. The works of this distinguished ‘metaphysical poet’ include Mary and the Bramble (1910) and The Sale of St Thomas (1931).

^† Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888–1965), poet, playwright, critic and publisher, was born in St Louis, Missouri and educated at Harvard. He intended to be a philosopher, and he spent 1914–15 at Merton College, Oxford on a fellowship. After meeting Ezra Pound he decided to become a poet and he settled in England. In 1925 he became a director of the publishing firm Faber & Gwyer (later Faber & Faber), and in 1927 was baptized in the Church of England. His poems include Prufrock and Other Observations (1917), Poems (1919) and Four Quartets (1935–42). In 1922 he founded a review entitled The Criterion, the first volume of which contained The Waste Land, the poem that established him as the voice of a disillusioned generation. Lewis feared the effect of his verse on modern poetry, and he never liked Eliot’s poetry or criticism. Years later, however, when they were brought together to work on a revision of the Psalter, Lewis came to like him very much. See his biography in CG.

^* Henry Vincent Yorke (1905–73), who wrote under the name ‘Henry Green’, is considered one of the most original prose writers of his generation. He was educated at Eton and Magdalen College, and worked for a while in the family business in London. His first novel, Blindness (1926), was begun while he was still at Eton. His other novels include Party Going (1939), and Caught (1943). He wrote an autobiographical work, Pack My Bag (1940).

^† ‘limit’. More had been arguing for a return to Christian Humanism as exemplified by limit and order – an idea which Eliot’s Waste Land explodes by its repeated emphasis on chaos.

^* John Hanbury Angus Sparrow (1906–92) was educated at Winchester College and New College, Oxford. He took a first in Classical Honour Moderations in 1927, and a first in Literae Humaniores in 1929. He was elected a Fellow of All Souls College in 1929, was called to the Bar in 1931. During the Second World War he served in the Coldstream Guards and the War Office, after which he resumed his practice at the Bar. He was Warden of All Souls College, 1952–77.

^† Louis MacNeice (1907–63), poet and critic, was born in Belfast, but he lived in Carrickfergus 1908–31 when his father was rector of the church there. He was educated at Marlborough and Merton College. His works include Blind Fireworks (1930), Poems (1935), The Earth Compels (1938), Springboard (1940) and Visitations (1957).

^* Walter Ogilvie ‘Wof’ Field (1893–1957) came up to Trinity College, Oxford, from Marlborough College in 1912. He left to join the Warwickshire Rifle Regiment in 1914, was promoted to captain in 1916, and after seeing action in France and Italy was wounded and forced to retire. In 1926 he became a teacher at the Rudolf Steiner School in Forest Row, East Sussex.

^* I.e. Middle English.

^* Neil Ripley Ker (1908–82), palaeographer, was born in London. He matriculated at Magdalen College in 1927, intending to read Philosophy, Politics and Economics. Lewis, however, persuaded him to turn to English Literature, and he obtained a Second Class Honours degree in 1931. Even as an undergraduate his antiquarian interests were pronounced, and this led him to the Bodleian to examine the manuscript copies of the texts he was studying. He began giving classes in Palaeography in 1936, and in 1941 he was appointed Lecturer in Palaeography. In 1945 he was elected a Fellow of Magdalen College, and in 1946 he was appointed Reader in Palaeography. He brought to the study acute powers of observation, and published a number of important catalogues of manuscripts.

^* The Kilns was bought with the understanding that it would be the Lewis brothers’ home for as long as they lived, after which it would go to Mrs Moore’s daughter, Maureen. On the death of his brother, Warnie feared it would be too expensive to live there. He put it up for rent, and moved to a smaller house in nearby Ringwood Road where he lived 1964–7. As he did not expect to return to The Kilns, he gave Maureen permission to build some houses on what had been the orchard. In May 1967 Warnie moved back to The Kilns, but by this time the rustic beauty of the place had been spoiled by the houses built around it. In 1969 the woodlands and the pond to the north of the house were acquired by the Berkshire, Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire Naturalists Trust and made into the Henry Stephen/C.S. Lewis Nature Reserve. Following Warnie’s death in 1973, The Kilns changed hands several times. In 1984 it was acquired by the C.S. Lewis Foundation who have restored it.