Читать книгу Collected Letters Volume Two: Books, Broadcasts and War, 1931–1949 - Клайв Льюис, Клайв Стейплз Льюис, Walter Hooper - Страница 7

Volume I of the Collected Letters ended with a letter of 18 October 1931 in which Lewis described to his friend, Arthur Greeves, what happened on the night of 19 September when J. R. R. Tolkien and Hugo Dyson dined with him at Magdalen College. The three of them were up until 4 a.m. discussing Christianity and its relation to myth. Lewis wrote:

What Dyson and Tolkien showed me was this: that if I met the idea of sacrifice in a Pagan story I didn’t mind it at all: again, that if I met the idea of a god sacrificing himself to himself…I liked it very much and was mysteriously moved by it: again, that the idea of the dying and reviving god (Balder, Adonis, Bacchus) similarly moved me provided I met it anywhere except in the Gospels. The reason was that in Pagan stories I was prepared to feel the myth as profound and suggestive of meanings beyond my grasp…Now the story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened.

Volume II opens with a letter to Warnie who had left on 9 October for a second tour of China with the Royal Army Service Corps. He would not reach Shanghai until 17 November. Meanwhile, at Magdalen, Lewis was giving a series of lectures on Textual Criticism and writing The Allegory of Love. He, Mrs Moore and Maureen Moore had been in their new home, The Kilns, for a year.

TO HIS BROTHER (W):

[Magdalen College)

Oct. 24th 1931

My dear W—

Your letter from Gibraltar has arrived and my reading aloud of as much as was suitable to the female capacity had something of the air of an event in the household. As you say it seems long ago to our day at Whipsnade and so many things have since followed it into the past that I must write history and get you up to date before I can talk.

By a stroke of bad luck for you Mr. Thomas rang up and invited you and me to tea the day after you had left.¹ His wife was there at the meal but he took me into his study afterwards and we had quite a long talk. He is, I think, a little shy, or at any rate in a first meeting seemed to be feeling his way with me. He is a moderate conservative, an enemy of the wireless, has travelled a good deal, encourages us ‘not to stand any nonsense’ from the fox-hunters, was bred in Surrey, approves strongly of our afforestation programme,² and knows his Foord Kelsie.³

I ventured to remark that I noticed how a sermon preached in his Church had reached the honours of print in the Oxford Times. ‘The old rascal!’ said Thomas, bursting into laughter. ‘Do you know the history of that? The Wednesday after he preached it, he met me and asked me if there had been a reporter in the Church, for somehow or the other they had got hold of his sermon. So I taxed him with it. “You sent it to the papers,” I said; and then he owned up. The old rascal—the old rascal!’

He also gave me the final stages of the footpath quarrel, in which we have practically got our point: at least a route v. nearly the same as the original path has been conceded.⁴ Apparently old Snow ended, as he had begun, by being the hero of the story. Thomas asked for written statements from as many parishioners as he could get hold of, and Snow produced one the length of your arm—a marvellous and highly autobiographical document which Thomas forwarded to the committee of the Town Council as likely to move anyone who had a sense of humour. But it was embarrassing when the case came into court and Thomas, going down to give evidence, found that old Snow had prepared the second and much longer statement which he proposed to read to the Magistrates from the spectators gallery during the hearing of the case: and since the old man thought that he could give a good account of himself if the police attacked him, Thomas had great difficulty in persuading him that he would be removed if he spoke or that the probability of removal was any reason for not at any rate beginning to read his statement. By the bye, the doury old man who made the speech about women and children turns out to be our local member of the Town Council, in fact one of the enemy: so that Snow’s instinct (‘I want him stopped’) guided him very well.

The next important event since you left is that Maureen has been offered and accepted a residential job in a school at Monmouth⁵—a choice of time in which again you might have been more fortunate. I didn’t know whether to approve or disapprove. Minto⁶ was in favour of it, and I only held back by the greater solitude she would be exposed to. Now that it is all settled, Minto, as I foresaw, fears the loneliness and is a little depressed about the whole thing. One must hope that the actual freedom from the innumerable extra jobs and endless bickerings wh. Maureen’s presence occasions will make up in fact for any feeling of ‘missing’ her.

In public works I have made tolerable headway. As soon as I began to choose a site for my first tree in this autumn’s programme, it occurred to me that even if uprooting of all the elders were impracticable, still, there was no reason why each tree should not replace an elder instead of merely supplementing it. The job of digging out a complete elder root proved much easier than I had expected, and does not take much longer than digging an ordinary hole—the extra time you spend on extraction being compensated for by the fact that when once you have got the root out you find little solid digging left to be done. Unfortunately some of the places I chose as sites for the trees did not contain elder stumps, and many elders are in spots where one could hardly hope to make a new tree grow. However of the four tree holes which I have dug in the wood three are vicê elders cashiered. When I came to the problem of afforestation outside the wood I was held up by the necessity of doing a good deal of mowing. I have now scythed a wide open space round the western clump (i.e. the clump containing the ill fated beech) and a more or less continuous strip along past the Wasps nest to where I rejoined my summer’s mowing. General October has proved a complete failure and last week while I was at work near the enemy lines vedettes seemed to be out and as twilight drew on riders or working parties were constantly passing me on their homeward journey.

Talking of beeches, Snow (you remember, the Magdalen botanist)⁷ tells me that beeches will never grow well on a soil of clay and sand: chalk is what they want. I am inclined (if you agree) after one more trial to give up the effort to grow beeches, as Snow certainly knows his stuff: and you remember Johnson ‘Nay Sir, never grow things simply to show that you cannot grow them.’⁸

And this, in turn, raising the idea of books, I hasten to tell you of a stroke of good luck for us both—I now have the 15 volume Jeremy Taylor, in perfect condition, and have paid the same price of 20/-.⁹ My old pupil Griffiths¹⁰ spent a night with me last Monday and told me that Saunders¹¹ the bookseller, who is a friend of his, had a copy. He went round next day, got the book reserved and arranged the price: so we have done much better than if Galloway and Porters had had it. It is not indeed the nicest type of book—nineteenth century half leather of the granular and nearly black type, giving the volumes a legal or even commercial appearance. Still the Cambridge copy would probably have been the same plus its admitted dilapidations.

On the same visit Griffiths presented me with a poorly bound but otherwise delightful copy (1742) of Law’s An Appeal/To all that doubt, or disbelieve/The Truths of the Gospel/Whether they be Deists, Arians/Socinians or Nominal Christians/. It bears the book plate of Lord Rivers. I like it much better than the same author’s Serious Call,¹² and indeed like it as well as any religious work I have ever read. The prose of the Serious Call has here all been melted away, and the book is saturated with delight, and the sense of wonder: one of those rare works which make you say of Christianity ‘Here is the very thing you like in poetry and the romances, only this time it’s true.’

I had nearly forgotten about the Parkin dinner.¹³ I think it was a success: at any rate he sat with me till 12.30. We didn’t get much beyond puns, bawdy, and politics, but there is a real friendliness (and an almost embarrassing modesty) about him which makes even ordinary ante-room talk worth while. By a stroke of luck he had Christie next to him at dinner who is one of the few fellows of Magdalen who keeps up the quaint old tradition of being polite to guests.¹⁴ He told me your sunset at Southampton had been richly illuminated: you had departed, as Browne would doubtless say, like that unparalleled piece of nature the Phoenix.

I am glad you like Browne as far as you got when your letter was written.¹⁵ Your query ‘Was there anything he didn’t love?’ hits the nail on the head. It seems to me that his peculiar strength lies in liking everything both in the serious sense (Christian charity and so forth) and in the Lambian¹⁶ sense of natural gusto: he is thus at once sane and whimsical, and sweet and pungent in the same sentence—as indeed Lamb often is. I imagine that I get a sort of double pleasure out of Thomas Browne, one from the author himself and one reflected from Lamb. I always feel Lamb, as it were, reading the book over my shoulder. A lot of nonsense is talked about the society of books, but ‘there’s more in it than you boys think’ in a case of this sort: it is almost like getting into a club.

The discomforts of your train journey must have added the finishing touch to that unpleasant evening. Your departure affected Mr. Papworth so much that he retired to his basket as soon as you and I had left the house and refused to take any notice of anyone till the following morning.¹⁷ I am glad the book on the literature of the Grand Siecle proved a success. I owe it one little debt myself, for I have been repeating at odd moments ever since the La Fontaine quatrain—‘j’aime le jeu, l’amour, les livres, la musique’.¹⁸

Yes indeed: how many essays I have heard read to me on Descartes’ proofs (there are more than one) of the existence of God.¹⁹ (It was a remark of Harwood’s first suggested to me that God might be defined as ‘a Being who spends his time having his existence proved and disproved’.)²⁰ The particular one you quote (‘I have the idea of a perfect being’)²¹ seems to me to be valid or invalid according to the meaning you give the words ‘have an idea of’. I used to work it out by the analogy of a machine. If I have the idea of a machine which I, being unmechanical, couldn’t have invented on my own, does this prove that I have received the idea from some really mechanical source—e.g. a talk with the real inventor? To which I answer ‘Yes, if you mean a really detailed idea’: but of course there is another sense in which e.g. a lady novelist ‘has an idea’ of a new airship invented by her hero—in the sense that she attached some vague meaning to her words, which proves nothing of the sort. So that if anyone asks me whether the idea of God in human minds proves His existence, I can only ask ‘Whose idea?’ The Thistle-Bird’s²² idea, for instance, clearly not, for it contains nothing whereof his own pride, fear, and malevolence could not easily provide the materials (cf. McAndrew’s Hymn ‘Yer mother’s God’s a grasping deil, the image of yourself’).²³

On the other hand it is arguable that the ‘idea of God’ in some minds does contain, not a mere abstract definition, but a real imaginative perception of goodness and beauty, beyond their own resources: and this not only in minds which already believe in God. It certainly seems to me that the ‘vague something’ which has been suggested to ones mind as desirable, all ones life, in experiences of nature and music and poetry, even in such ostensibly irreligious forms as ‘The land East of the Sun and West of the Moon’ in Morris,²⁴ and which rouses desires that no finite object even pretends to satisfy, can be argued not to be any product of our own minds. Of course I am not suggesting that these vague ideas of something we want and haven’t got, wh. occur in the Pagan period of individuals and of races (hence mythology) are anything more than the first and most rudimentary forms of the ‘idea of God’.

This subject has drawn me into a longer digression (if indeed digression is possible in my type of letter!) than I had intended. I do wish you could see the Kilns now. We have had very cold weather (the last few mornings have been white with frost) and little wind: most of the leaves have become yellow and red without dropping from their branch, and those that have fallen lie in smooth circular carpets at the foot of their tree. The firs in the top wood are getting slowly barer, and working these afternoons in the high countries I begin to get the real autumn beauties.

Meanwhile you have been having very different beauties. I was intrigued by your account of the Portugal coast, which sounds both scenically and socially an admirable place: well worthy to be added (it costs nothing) to the lengthening list of places the Pigibudda²⁵ must visit some day. I resent more and more these impertinent three years which still divide us from the beginning of a joint rational life.

I am at present writing this on a Sunday afternoon in the Common Room, having begun it yesterday in College. Maureen has her usual week end guest, a harmless girl whom we carried to [the] sermon this morning. Our pew felt a little awkward when Thomas, before the text, said ‘We shall be glad if members of the congregation who are absolutely unable to stay for the whole service, will go out during the hymn: but it is very much to be preferred that they should wait till the service is over.’ We went out during the hymn according to our usual practice. I think myself he is a little unfair to try and make it a rule that you must communicate if you want to hear a sermon. Of these (since you mention them among items of news) I have heard two, having skipped on the first Sunday after you left in order to correct my collection papers. This morning’s was on the ‘armour of God’²⁶ and not one of his best.

Last week’s was on St Luke’s day,²⁷ from which I learned that St Luke was a painter as well as a doctor and that there is at Rome a painting of the Good Shepherd traditionally attributed to him. The attribution is probably wrong, said Thomas, but the tradition of his being a painter was interesting if we considered the specially artistic character of the 3rd gospel, as against the purely facty nature of the other two synoptics, or the mystical nature of the 4th.²⁸ I have so many different departments of news, what with sermons and swans, that I could well adopt the different datings of the Tatler ‘fashion from White’s coffee house, politics from Wills’ etc.

This is a great feather in my cap, specially as next year is the first exam held under the syllabus which my party and I have forced upon the junto after much hard fighting: so that if I get a good colleague we shall be able to some extent to mould the new tradition. In fact, in English School politics, the anti-junto is in the ascendant—perhaps, from a prejudiced point of view, might be said to have become the junto. How long will it take us to become corrupt in our turn?²⁹

The General Election takes place on Tuesday next, and the results will be stale long before this reaches you. I had a wonderful conversation about it last Sunday with a Dr Lees whom Kathleen Whitty³⁰ brought here (or rather he drove her) to tea in the course of a motor drive from Bristol. I said ‘Politics have really become unintelligible to the amateur now. In the old days when it was about votes for women or home rule for Ireland one could have an opinion: now I feel one’s opinion, and therefore one’s vote, is quite worthless’—He replied with emotion ‘I’m so glad to hear you say that, because that is exactly how I feel. What is the good of all these ignorant opinions? That is why we must leave it to the government who really understand, and that is why it is so all important to vote against Labour.’ I tried again. ‘One is rather sickened to see the way the papers are buttering up Macdonald³¹ and Snowden³² now, while a month ago they couldn’t find anything bad enough to say for them’—‘Yes, indeed. Very sickened’—‘And it is such nonsense all this about Macdonald having “done the big thing”’—‘Ah well there I don’t agree with you. You see no man likes to desert his old friends, but this chap, when he saw the good of the country demanded it etc’—then followed verbatim the whole of the Daily Mail stuff about the big thing. All this from an old blether in a black city coat and streaked trousers and spats introduced by Kathleen as ‘the cleverest doctor in Bristol’. Alas, this description may well be perfectly true! An essay on the conception of ‘cleverness’ would be worth writing.

I finished the Wodehouse the day after you left. It is not the best (I think) of his that I have read, but very well worth reading indeed. I also re-read Northanger Abbey³³ about the same time. Christie well describes it as ‘Jane Austen in high spirits’. It is much nearer farce (or burlesque) than the others, but none the worse on that account.

I enclose a formal letter to you on the mortgage. If you will write one to me, the same except for the necessary changes, and return both with your next letter, I will send them to be taken care of by Barfield.³⁴ He has not been to see me yet so your will has not yet been regularised. Minto was—to use a trite phrase in its genuine sense—‘overcome’ by your kind provision for Maureen.

As I look up (3.30) I see those obscene birds advancing across the lawn, turning their infernal conning towers this way and that.³⁵ They are unfed, Tykes unwalked, and I must go out. I suppose this will cross your next letter and so produce a mal-adjustment of question and answer which we shall not right for the whole three years. Meanwhile one quarter of first term of the nine Non-APB terms is gone.

Yours

Jack

TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W):

[The Kilns]

Nov 8, 1931

My dear Arthur,

I was sorry to hear of your cold and of your musical disappointment, though I must confess that your beginning your letter with an (unfavourable) account of a concert was pleasantly remeniscent of old times.

It is delightful to hear of your reading Endymion³⁶ Funnily enough I had been re-dipping into it the last week end too. I don’t think you can say that either it or Hyperion³⁷ is the better for they are different in kind. The one is a sweet, the other a dry, flavour. It is like comparing Spenser & Milton, or Wagner (at his richest) with Bach (at his most classical). People will tell you that Hyperion is more Greek, but I doubt if that is a good description. As to why the goddess takes on the form of a mortal at the end, he may mean that the mystical love does not complete itself until it has appeared as a human love also, and that the soul, when this happens, may dread as an infidelity to the spiritual what is really its completion. But I am inclined to think that when Keats wrote Endymion he was not v. certain of his own intention: that he faltered between the myth as his imagination set it before him (full of meaning, but not meaning necessarily decipherable by Keats’ intellect) and between various ideas of conscious meanings of his own invention, wh., considering his age and education, were possibly confused and even shallow. There is thus some confusion throughout: and this, along with another fault, prevents it from being a perfect poem.

The other fault is the Jack of spiritual experience. He knows about the hunting for ‘it’³⁸ and longing and wandering: but he has, as yet, no real idea of what it wd. be if you found it. Hence while Endymion’s description to Peona of his unrest, and Endymion’s journeying under earth and sea, are wonderful, his actual meetings with Cynthia are (to me) failures: not because they are erotic but because they are erotic in a rather commonplace way—all gasps and exclamations and a sort of suburban flirtatious air. It is horrible to use such words of Keats, but I think he would be the first to agree.

My memories of the Phaedrus³⁹ are vague—mainly of the beautiful scene in which the discussion takes place and of the procession of the gods round the sky. You must be enjoying yourself no end. I don’t know any greater pleasure than returning to a world of the imagination which one has long forsaken and feeling ‘After all this is my own.’ Be careful of Reid.⁴⁰ I am sure he is in danger of stopping at the purely sensuous side of the Greek stories and of encouraging you to do the same. You, on the other hand, if you are in for a new Greek period, will be able to do him some good.

I, like you, am worried by the fact that the spontaneous appeal of the Christian story is so much less to me than that of Paganism. Both the things you suggest (unfavourable associations from early upbringing and the corruption of one’s nature) probably are causes: but I have a sort of feeling that the cause must be elsewhere, and I have not yet discovered it. I think the thrill of the Pagan stories and of romance may be due to the fact that they are mere beginnings—the first, faint whisper of the wind from beyond the world—while Christianity is the thing itself: and no thing, when you have really started on it, can have for you then and there just the same thrill as the first hint. For example, the experience of being married and bringing up a family, cannot have the old bittersweet of first falling in love. But it is futile (and, I think, wicked) to go on trying to get the old thrill again: you must go forward and not backward. Any real advance will in its turn be ushered in by a new thrill, different from the old: doomed in its turn to disappear and to become in its turn a temptation to retrogression. Delight is a bell that rings as you set your foot on the first step of a new flight of stairs leading upwards. Once you have started climbing you will notice only the hard work: it is when you have reached the landing and catch sight of the new stair that you may expect the bell again. This is only an idea, and may be all rot: but it seems to fit in pretty well with the general law (thrills also must die to live) of autumn & spring, sleep and waking, death and resurrection, and ‘Whosoever loseth his life, shall save it.’⁴¹

On the other hand, it may be simply part of our probation—one needs the sweetness to start one on the spiritual life but, once started, one must learn to obey God for his own sake, not for the pleasure. Perhaps we are in the stage Endymion went through on the bottom of the sea.

I saw a most attractive review of Uncle Stephen in the T.L.S.⁴² I am glad he stuck to that name after all, though surprised, for I thought he had definitely turned it down.

Did I tell you I had bought the complete works of Jeremy Taylor in 15 volumes—half leather (not v. nice—the rather pimply, nearly black, office-looking type of leather but excellent paper and print) for 20/-. I have also been presented by an old pupil with what I think must be a frst editn of Law’s Appeal: much better than the Serious Call, but it will need a letter to itself.

I wish you could see the Kilns at present in the autumn colours

Yours

Jack

P.S. Minto says I must have left a suit of pyjamas at Bernagh, and I seem to remember your saying something about it (wh. I didn’t heed) in a previous letter. If so ‘woooo-d’ you please send them. Really Arthur, I am awfully sorry, honestly, really Yrs J.

P.P.S. I chust wanted to say, Arthur, how very sorry I am.

On 17 November 1931, Warnie arrived in Shanghai where he was to serve as the officer commanding the Royal Army Service Corps. He had been here in 1927–9 as officer in command of the Supply Depot. He wrote in his diary on 23 November:

I almost feel as I had never left Shanghai, a feeling accentuated by the fact that I have bought back from Bill Wilson the identical pieces of furniture which I sold him when I went home. I am writing this at the same old desk, and in front of me are my own old curtains and mosquito windows…Now that I have got my pictures up, and bought a $30 Japanese rush carpet, unpacked all my books and the gramophone, I feel I can sit back and breathe. ⁴³

TO HIS BROTHER (W):

[The Kilns]

Nov. 22nd 1931

My dear W,

I really think your recent editorial difficulties have impressed upon me the habit of dating my letters!⁴⁴ And talking of the Lewis papers, I looked into the editorial drawer the other day and made a correction, by adding to your note ‘Grace by A.J.L.’ the words ‘On the contrary, traditional Latin Grace translated by C.S.L.’ Such are the traps into which even a careful editor falls.

I am sorry I have not been able to write for some weeks. During the week it is out of the question. My ordinary day is as follows. Called (with tea) 7.15. After bath and shave I usually have time for a dozen paces or so in Addison’s walk⁴⁵ (at this time of year my stroll exactly hits the sunrise) before chapel at 8. ‘Dean’s Prayers’—which I have before described to you—lasts about quarter of an hour. I then breakfast in common room with the Dean’s Prayers party (i.e. Adam Fox,⁴⁶ the chaplain, Benecke⁴⁷ and Christie) which is joined punctually by J. A. Smith⁴⁸ at about 8.25. I have usually left the room at about 8.40, and then saunter, go to the stool, answer notes etc till 9. From 9 till 1 is all pupils—an unconscionable long stretch for a man to act the gramaphone in. At one Lyddiatt⁴⁹ or Maureen is waiting for me with the car and I am carried home.

My afternoons you know. Almost every afternoon as I set out hillwards with my spade, this place gives me all the thrill of novelty. The scurry of the waterfowl as you pass the pond, and the rich smell of autumnal litter as you leave the drive and strike into the little path, are always just as good as new. At 4.45 I am usually driven into College again, to be a gramaphone for two more hours, 5 till 7. At 7.15 comes dinner.

On Tuesday, which is my really shocking day, pupils come to me to read Beowulf at 8.30 and usually stay till about 11, so that when they have gone and I have glanced round the empty glasses and coffee cups and the chairs in the wrong places, I am glad enough to crawl to bed. Other standing engagements are on Thursday when a man called Horwood⁵⁰ (another English don) comes and reads Dante with me, every second Monday when the College literary society meets. When you have thrown in the usual irregular dinner engagements you will see that I am lucky when I have two evenings free after dinner.

The only exception to this programme (except of course Saturday when I have no pupils after tea) is Monday when I have no pupils at all. I have to employ a good deal of it in correcting transcripts done by B. Litt. pupils, and other odd jobs. It has also become a regular custom that Tolkien⁵¹ should drop in on me of a Monday morning and drink a glass. This is one of the pleasantest spots in the week. Sometimes we talk English school politics: sometimes we criticise one another’s poems: other days we drift into theology or ‘the state of the nation’: rarely we fly no higher than bawdy and ‘puns’.

What began as an excuse for not writing has developed into a typical diary or hebdomadal compendium. As to the last two week ends, they have both been occupied. The one before last I went to spend a night at Reading with a man called Hugo Dyson⁵²—now that I come to think of it, you heard all about him before you left. We had a grand evening. Rare luck to stay with a friend whose wife is so nice that one almost (I can’t say quite) almost regrets the change when he takes you up to his study for serious smoking and for the real midnight talking. You would enjoy Dyson very much for his special period is the late 17th century: he was much intrigued by your library when he was last in our room. He is a most fastidious bookman and made me (that same occasion) take out one of the big folios from the bottom shelf of the Leeboro bookcase because they were too tightly packed. He disapproved strongly of the method (wh. I confess I had always followed) of taking books out of the shelf by putting a finger at the top so—and adopts a different one: which you will find described in ‘Portrait of a Scholar’ in that book of essays you took away with you.⁵³

At the same time he is as far from being a dilettante as anyone can be: a burly man, both in mind and body, with the stamp of the war on him, which begins to be a pleasing rarity, at any rate in civilian life. Lest anything should be lacking, he is a Christian and a lover of cats. The Dyson cat is called Mirralls, and is a Viscount. That accounts for one week end.

Last Saturday Barfield came down. He arrived unexpectedly for lunch in College—Saturday being my day for a rotatory lunch with Keir⁵⁴ and Lawson.⁵⁵ As it happened, Keir didn’t turn up, and the bore Lawson was neither here nor there. Barfield remarked afterwards that he went away feeling that Lawson had contributed most valuably to the conversation, though when he came to think it over he could not remember his having made a single rational remark. You know the type—the man who has an air of saying something interesting, which often carries you away.

Barfield and I then motored to the Kilns, took our packs (or rather your pack and mine) and set out to walk to the Barley Mow.⁵⁶ We failed to get any four o’clock [tea] at Marsh Baldon, but being both tired of work, and badly in need of a jaunt, we were too delighted to find ourselves on the road again and in each other’s company, to be dampened even by that. It was dark before we reached the B.M., and after a noble supper of ham and eggs and a little yawning at the fire in that panelled room (shared with the same couple whom you and I saw there) we went to bed. We lay in one room, mighty snug, and had a good deal of talk before it drifted off into prodigious yawns. We didn’t stir till about 9 the Sunday morning, he being delighted with the unaccustomed absence of a restless child (how do married men live?) and I glad enough not to have chapel at 8.

That day we walked up Didcot Clumps (Sinodun Hills? Wittenham Clumps?) and crossed the Thames, not at Shillingford but at a ferry near Shillingford. As we reached the bank a torrent of dogs and one cat burst from the ferryman’s house on the far shore and got as near as they could on the bows of a barge: and when finally we were ferried across they all (cat included) leaped aboard us before we were well alongside with the frantic haste of porters or customs officials. The ferryman’s only explanation was the cryptic sentence ‘Brought us all together’ which he repeated about four times.

The rest of the day was spent tramping along the route Warborough—Stadhampton-Denton-Cuddesdon-Wheatley-Kilns. It was a colourless autumn day—about a quarter of the leaves still hanging on the trees: you know—just a yellow freckle on the black timber. We had tea at Wheatley, Barfield denouncing birth control. I could not help thinking, though I hardly cared to say, that a man married to an obviously barren woman was in this matter an arm chair critic. We were both home for supper, both feeling enormously the better for our jaunt. It is curious how the actual length of a holiday and the feeling of length are almost in inverse ratio. We had the sensation of having been away from our routine for an almost endless time.

Looking back on our own last trip I feel the same. I can believe that we were only a day and two nights at Larne: as for Castlerock, we seem we have been there for weeks, in all kinds of weather and at different seasons of the year. Did we really walk only twice to the tunnel? In retrospect, by the bye, the thing that wears best of all in my mind is the narrow gauge journey: the journey back, of course, is—like a lane by a brickyard on a hot day. Before Barfield went to bed that night (in your room) I gave him your will and he is doubtless now re-writing it in unintelligible language.

Which reminds me—I have had a letter from Condlin⁵⁷ about the Templeton family: but what he is saying about them, or whether he has found them, I can’t for the life of me make out. Did I tell you that his acknowledgment of the £100 tip was not very enthusiastic? I don’t say it was definitely chilly—nor, by the way, do I know how far Condlin’s epistolary style is adapted for registering surprise or pleasure—or, for the matter of that, anything whatever on any subject.

I have also heard from the Tower of Glass⁵⁸ to say that they have at last got the Bishop’s authority (he doesn’t kill himself with work, does he? Prissy prelatical dog!) and also-which pleased me less, that the Rev. Chevasse⁵⁹ had suggested that St Mark’s Tower should be included somewhere in the window.⁶⁰

Clearly the proper [answer] is ‘Ah such nonsense.’ I actually replied by telling them to consult the artist, and to ask him to consider the proposal on purely aesthetic grounds. Unless the artist is a fool, that ought to safeguard us pretty well, and if he is—why then there is no help for us in any case.

It just occurs to me as I write, that Chevasse in this matter is probably the unwilling mouthpiece of the Select Vestry: I daresay even that the monstrous regiment of women,⁶¹ incarnated in Lily Ewart,⁶² is really at the bottom of it. Zounds!—I’d like a few minutes at the bottom of her! No ‘thought infirm’ would there ‘stain my cheek’:⁶³ a firm hand rather would stain both hers. I also sent them the (revised by Christie) inscription. That, I think, is all the business news.

As regards books—what time have I to read? Tutorial necessities have spurred me into reading another Carlyle ‘Past and Present’⁶⁴ which I recommend: specially the central part about Abbot Samson. Like all Carlyle it gets a little wearisome before the end—as all listening to these shouting authors does. But the pungency and humour and frequent sublimity is tip-top. It is very amusing to read the 19th century editor’s preface (in our Leeborough edition),⁶⁵ obviously by a P’daita:⁶⁶ pointing out that, of course, the matter of the book is out of date, but it ‘lives by its style’. ‘We can afford to smile at the pessimism with which the sage approached problems that have since vanished like a dream before the onward march etc. etc’ Actually the book is an indictment of the industrial revolution pointing out precisely the problems we have not solved and prophesying most of the things that have happened since.

I get rather annoyed at this endless talk about books ‘living by the style’. Jeremy Taylor ‘lives by the style in spite of his obsolete theology’; Thos. Browne does the same, in spite of ‘the obsolete cast of his mind’: Ruskin and Carlyle do the same in spite of their ‘obsolete social and political philosophy’. To read histories of literature one would suppose that the great authors of the past were a sort of chorus of melodious idiots who said, in beautifully cadenced language that black was white and that two and two made five. When one turns to the books themselves-well I, at any rate, find nothing obsolete. The silly things these great men say, were as silly then as they are now: the wise ones are as wise now as they were then.

At this stage in my letter I begin to be haunted by the idea of having read and experienced many interesting things which I meant to tell you but cannot now bring to mind. One un- interesting thing was being preached to in ‘mine own church’ by little ‘Clarkie’ (the m-yes man).⁶⁷ He is the sort of preacher who calls God ‘gudd’, and soars off into great emotion cadenzas. The matter was good enough, the manner detestable. This morning was the commemoration of the dedication of the church, and why they saw fit to let (or even get) Clark to preach I don’t know: Bathtowel and Thomas being both there.

I had to set a paper for School Certificate the other day on the Clarendon Press selections from Cowper—a ridiculous book for schoolboys.⁶⁸ It includes a large chunk of Bagehot’s Essay on Cowper which makes me think I must read all Bagehot. We have him, haven’t we? Not that I ‘hold with him’, he is too much of a pudaita by half: but he has great fun. ‘Boy—the small pomivorous animal so called.’

How delicious Cowper himself is—the letters even more than the poetry. Under every disadvantage—presented to me as raw material for a paper and filling with a job an evening wh. I had hoped to have free—even so he charmed me. He is the very essence of what Arthur calls ‘the homely’ which is Arthur’s favourite genre. All these cucumbers, books, parcels, tea-parties, parish affairs. It is wonderful what he makes of them.

I suppose we may expect a Colombo letter from you soon. I will vary the usual ‘must stop now’ by saying ‘I am going to stop now’. I am writing in the common room (Kilns) at 8.30 of a Sunday evening: a moon shining through a fog outside and a bitter cold night.

Yours

Jack

TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W):

[The Kilns]

Dec 6th 1931

My dear Arthur,

Hurrah! I was beginning to feel the want of a word from you. I envy you your stay at Ballycastle, or rather I wish I had been there: I feel I can do so without selfishness because I should have enjoyed the storms better than Reid who doubtless lost through them most of the pleasure he expected to get out of his jaunt.

That is a thing you and I have to be thankful for—the fact that we do not only don’t dislike but positively enjoy almost every kind of weather. We had about three days of dense fog here lately. That was enough to tax even my powers of doing without the sun, but though it became oppressive in the end I felt that it was a cheap price to pay [for] its beauties. There was one evening of mist about three feet deep lying on the fields under the moon—like the mist in the first chapter of Phantastes.⁶⁹ There was a morning (up in the top wood) of mist pouring along the ground through the fir trees, so thick and visible that it looked tangible as treacle. Then there were afternoons of fairly thin, but universal fog, blotting out colour but leaving shapes distinct enough to become generalised—silhouettes revealing (owing to the suppression of detail) all sorts of beauties of grouping that one does not notice on a coloured day. Finally there were days of real fog: days of chaos come again: specially fine at the pond, when the water was only a darker tinge in the fog and the wood on the far side only the ghostliest suggestion: and to hear the skurry of the waterfowl but not to see them. Not only was it an exciting time in itself but by the contrast has made to day even more beautiful than it would have been—a clear, stinging, winter sunshine.

As to Lucius⁷⁰ about the atonement not being in the Gospels, I think he is very probably right. But then nearly everyone seems to think that the Gospels are much later than the Epistles, written for people who had already accepted the doctrines and naturally wanted the story. I certainly don’t think it is historical to regard the Gospels as the original and the rest of the New Testament as later elaboration or accretion-though I constantly find myself doing so. But really I feel more and more of a child in the whole matter.

I begin to see how much Puritanism counts in your make up—that both the revulsion from it and the attraction back to it are strong elements. I hardly feel either myself and perhaps am apt to forget in talking to you how different your experience and therefore your feeling is. All I feel that I can say with absolute certainty is this: that if you ever feel that the whole spirit and system in which you were brought up was, after all, right and good, then you may be quite sure that that feeling is a mistake (tho’ of course it might, at a given moment—say, of temptation, be present as the alternative to some far bigger mistake).

My reasons for this are 1. That the system denied pleasures to others as well as to the votaries themselves: whatever the merits of self-denial, this is unpardonable interference. 2. It inconsistently kept some worldly pleasures, and always selected the worst ones—gluttony, avarice, etc. 3. It was ignorant. It could give no ‘reason for the faith that was in it’.⁷¹ Your relations have been found very ill grounded in the Bible itself and as ignorant as savages of the historical and theological reading needed to make the Bible more than a superstition. 4. ‘By their fruits ye shall know them.’⁷² Have they the marks of peace, love, wisdom and humility⁷³ on their faces or in their conversation? Really, you need not bother about that kind of Puritanism. It is simply the form which the memory of Christianity takes just before it finally dies away altogether, in a commercial community: just as extreme emotional ritualism is the form it takes on just before it dies in a fashionable community.

Like you I can get very little out of the Imitation?⁷⁴ Since last writing I have read Carlyle’s Past and Present. One gets rather tired of a certain monotonous stridency, as in Sartor⁷⁵ but more so, but it is tremendously exciting (often wrong-headed) and very well worth reading, specially the mediaeval part in the middle.

I also read the Dream of John Ball, perhaps the most serious of W. Morris’s works, except Love is Enough and the fullest exposition of his whole philosophy of life and The Wood Beyond the World wh. is neither better nor worse than any other of the prose romances.⁷⁶ What an achievement his treatment of love is: so undisguisedly physical and yet so perfectly sane and healthy—real paganism at its best, which is the next best thing to Christianity, and so utterly different from the nonsense that passes under the name of paganism in, say, Swinburne or Aldous Huxley.

I wish you knew my two pupils. Lings⁷⁷ and Paterson.⁷⁸ Both are poets (quite promising I think) and fast friends of each other. They are just in the state you and I remember so well—the whole world of beauty opening upon them-and as they share the same digs they must have a glorious time. One or other of them often accompanies me on my afternoon walk. Paterson is the wild, and Lings the steady one. Paterson looks very southern, almost an Italian face, and is all moods, and a little effeminate, and is at present in the throes of a terrific quarrel with his father which he poured into my sympathetic ear the other day. Lings is about five feet nothing, very ugly, very dark, and looks a hundred years old, and moves and sits as stiffly as an old man. Paterson truly says that Lings hurrying noiselessly along the cloisters is like nothing so much as a furtive mouse. This doesn’t sound like a poet, does it? But he is the better poet and the better man of the two. What times you and I could have had if we had been up here together as undergraduates! Neither of them knows many other people in College and they only discovered each other after they had been up some time. Paterson spent most of his first two terms sitting in his rooms listening to the feet of people on the staircase, always hoping that it was someone coming to call on him, but it never was.

You can imagine how I enjoy them both. Indeed this is the best part of my job. In every given year the pupils I really like are in a minority; but there is hardly a year in which I do not make some real friend. I am glad to find that people become more and more one of the sources of pleasure as I grow older.

Not that I agree for a moment about books & music being ‘vanity and vexation’. Really imaginative (or intellectual) pleasure is neither the one or the other: the bad element is the miserly pleasure of possession, the delight in this book because it is mine.

Of course it was entirely my own fault about the pyjamas—I only hope that your mother was not worried when you asked about them. Give her my love and if her mind needs setting at rest on the subject—why Sir, set it.

Try to write soon again.

Yours

Jack

TO HIS BROTHER (W):

[The Kilns]

Christmas Day 1931

My dear W–

I believe that for the first time I shall be really gravelled for matter in this letter to you, simply because what with examining and lecture writing I have done, read, and heard nothing for a long time that could possibly interest you. Minto has had a letter from you dated from your ‘improved’ hotel in Shanghai, and we were surprised that you found none of ours awaiting you. No doubt you have had several by this [time].

The afforestation programme 1931 has been carried out, successfully, but not according to plan. What I am more pleased to record is that in the wood four new trees have replaced (instead of being added to) four elder stumps. I think I told you before that the uprooting of these is practicable, and I shall make it a rule never to plant a new tree without getting rid of a stump. I hope also, if I am energetic enough, to be able to do a little buckshee uprooting during the rest of the year. What interfered with the design of my afforestation was water. I dug one hole far on the Eastern frontier (‘in the parts over against Phillips-land’) and found it half full of water next day. This I attributed to rain and set to with gum boots and bucket to bail it out. Next morning, although there had been no rain it was fuller than before, so I concluded I had struck a spring. I shifted my ground and dug another a little to the West. This time was even worse. It was not a question of water ‘collecting’—water leaped round my spade as if I had struck a pipe. I hastily filled in what I had dug and tried again. This time my excavation remained dry for a day or so and then began to fill with water. The upshot of it all is that the afforestation this year has been entirely lop sided. I have only managed to plant two at the east end, and the West is overweighted. Next autumn, if we have had a drier summer, the eastern frontier may be practicable again and I shall then restore the balance. If, on the other hand, these springs are permanent, we shall just be unable to plant that side (‘there won’t be any wood there’). After all, regularity is not our aim, and an irregularity, not devised for ornament, but dictated by the nature of the ground, is an honest sort of beauty.

Except for the afforestation there have naturally been no public works so far this Vac. An examiner can hardly be expected to occupy his scanty hours off in such a vigorous way. I hope to do a little now that I am free and shall begin this afternoon by finishing off with the sickle the evacuated (at least I hope it is evacuated) strongpoint of the wasps and the piece of nettle and briar which we left—I can’t think why-along the Philipian boundary.

The only social diversion I have had lately was the binge of the English ‘Cave’—the anti-junto which, as I said in an earlier letter, is in danger of becoming simply the regular junto.⁷⁹ I mention this because I heard recited there a bawdy ballad which was quite new to me, and which seems to me in its conclusion so ludicrous that I can’t resist handing it on. Perhaps you know it already. (The rimes seem to have degenerated during the process of oral tradition and now are mere assonances—if that). The early stanzas don’t matter: we will begin with the one that ends–

Never a word the damsel said But roared with laughter when the fun was over. (Rum-ti-iddle-ey etc)

Then comes the good part:

Hark! I hear a step on the stair! Sounds to me like an angry father, With a pistol in either hand, Looking for the man who screwed his daughter (Rum-ti-iddle-ey etc)

I have seized him by the hair of his head And shoved it into a bucket of water, And I screwed his pistol up his arse A dam sight harder than I screwed his daughter (Rum-ti-iddle-ey etc)

With the rôle of the heavy father properly cast—stumping up the stairs with a desperate expression and his two pistols—this anticlimax, this adding of injury to insult, seems to me irresistible.

I also heard at the same binge a very interesting piece of literary history from an unexceptionable source—that the hackneyed ‘A German officer crossed the Rhine’ was being sung at undergraduate blinds⁸⁰ in 1912. What do you make of that? Can it date from the Franco Prussian war? Or is it a German student song made in anticipation of Der Tag about 1910? The latter would be an interesting fact for the historian. I never heard the ballad as a whole, but think it is poor—in tact, nasty. Bawdy ought to be outrageous and extravagant like the piece quoted. It can, of course, be funny through sheer indefensible insolence, like the following (to the tune of ‘Here we go gathering nuts in May’)

The Dean of Balliol sleeps with men Sleeps with men, sleeps with men. The Dean of Balliol sleeps with men Till three o’clock in the morning.

But any parts I have ever heard of the ‘German Officer’ relate quite possible happenings that have really nothing funny about them. Again, bawdy must have nothing cruel about it, like ‘Old Mother Riley’: it must not approach anywhere near the pornographic like the poem in which every line begins ‘A little’. Within these limits I think it is a good and wholesome genre: though I can’t help feeling sorry that it should be the only living folk-art left to us. If our English binge had been held in a mediaeval university we should have had, mixed with the bawdy songs, tragical and even devotional pieces, equally authorless and handed on from mouth to mouth in the same way, with the same individual variations.

I go to Cambridge on New Years Eve for a couple of day’s awarding, not this time to be lodged in Queen’s but in the University Arms: with—would you believe it—the same carte blanche. So, at least, I gather from Hugh-Jones of Keble,⁸¹ who stayed there on the same job some years ago and wondered till the last night, when he discovered (almost but not quite too late) the explanation—wondered at the lavish orders of his colleagues and concluded them all to be rich men.

This same Hugh-Jones has been one of my disappointments. I met him in Cambridge at the Award last year: we discovered a common enthusiasm for Shaw and Chesterton and just an interesting amount of disagreement on the subjects they led on to: sat till after midnight: and parted with a strong desire to continue the acquaintance. A few weeks ago he asked me to dine, not in Keble but at his house. That was the first shock—married! I arrived and got the second shock—not only a wife present, but a sister in law—an Anglo-Indian sister in law. Still I consoled myself with the expectation that he would carry me off to his study after dinner for some talk. Not a bit of it. Not even a temporary separation from the ladies over our wine. He had asked me, apparently, to sit solidly with his wife and sister in law till ten o’clock when I could endure it no longer and went.

The sister in law was the sort of woman who, when the talk drifted towards education, remarked that it was astonishing how badly children were taught now a days: she had met a boy of fourteen who didn’t know the principal export of Burma. ‘He thought it was fruit’ she said, and laid down her needles and gazed at me. In fact I was like Lamb, left alone with his sensible, well-informed man. (I could have told her the chief export of Anglo-India all right). The wife was not so bad, and I had seen her a few days before acting the part of the maid in Tartuffe (in English)⁸² given by the Magdalen dramatic society. She had ‘done very well’ wh. is surprising, for my pupil Lings (I think you met him) who was producer, as well as playing Organ, had given me an amusing account of her behaviour at rehearsals. In his scene with her he had a speech ending ‘His only care is religion,’⁸³ which he inadvertently altered to ‘Religion is his only care.’ After a long pause she said dreamily ‘Are you waiting for me? I haven’t got to say my speech until you get to “is religion”, you know.’

Tartuffe was really excellently done. I had neither read nor seen it before and enjoyed it thoroughly. To a reader I daresay the savagery is the most striking thing, but on the stage it made me laugh ‘consumedly’. The final scene between Organ and his wife is as funny as anything I know (‘But I tell you, Mother, I saw him with my own eyes. I saw the rascal embracing my wife’—‘Ah, my son, beware of tale-bearers. Without doubt the worthy man has been slandered’—‘I shall go mad! I saw it myself’—‘Ah tongues will wag, to be sure’ etc.) A most maddening type of female P’dayta. By the way doesn’t Tartuffe, specially in the opening scenes, bring out very strongly that Latin dominance of the familia which you have often spoken of?—except that in Tartuffe’s household it is not so much patria potestas as materna potestas: which possibly is very French too.

It is now after tea and I have put in a very tolerable afternoon’s walk on the nettles and brambles. A civil gamekeepery kind of man walked up on the Philips side of the boundary—I think he lives in the other house on Philips land—and had a chat about trees.⁸⁴ He knows the place very well having originally ploughed up what is now the grass platform before the top wood when Mrs Goodman got rid of the hawthorns. I regretted the loss of the hawthorns less when this man told me that before he ploughed it that part was a mass of undergrowth so that you couldn’t walk through it. I was not so pleased to learn that our new holly is, after all our instructions to Suttons, the bush type and not the tree. He promised to find out for me the real name of the tree kind, which he will be able to do as one of his employers is a Forestry tutor. He also remarked that elder and bramble are the two strongest growing things there are and that, left a free field, each will defeat everything except the other.

It was a foggy afternoon, but very warm: really springlike early this morning as I went to ‘the early celebbbrrration’.⁸⁵ We had a poorish discourse from Thomas at Matins, but otherwise he has been keeping his end up very well. In one sermon on foreign missions lately he gave an ingenious turn to an old objection. ‘Many of us’ he said ‘have friends who used to live abroad, and had a native Christian as a cook who was unsatisfactory. Well, after all there are a great many unsatisfactory Christians in England too. In fact I’m one myself.’ Another interesting point (in a different sermon) was that we should be glad that the early Christians expected the second coming and the end of the world quite soon: for if they had known that they were founding an organisation for centuries they would certainly have organised it to death: believing that they were merely making provisional arrangements for a year or so, they left it free to live.

How odd it is to turn from Thomas to F.K.⁸⁶ He really surpassed himself the other day when he said that he objected to the early chapters of St Luke (the Annunciation particularly) on the ground that they were—indelicate. This leaves one gasping. One goes on reacting against the conventional modern reaction against nineteenth century prudery, and then suddenly one is held up by a thing like this, and almost pardons all the followers of Lytton Strachey. If you turn up the passage in St Luke the thing becomes even more grotesque. The Middle Ages had a different way with these things. Did I tell you that in one of the Miracle Plays, Joseph is introduced as a typical comic jealous husband, and enters saying ‘This is what comes of marrying a young woman.’

F.K., however, gave me a treat last week by showing a treasure which I never would have guessed that he had—a letter in Johnson’s own hand to Mrs Thrale. He talks of giving it to Pembroke but as he has had it for many years I guess that he will never part with it.⁸⁷

Minto has probably told you that we are at present revelling in the unaccustomed luxury of a good maid. (What an ambiguous sentence!) You will hardly imagine the Kilns under the regime of a maid who not only can cook (that is odd enough) but who is actually allowed to cook by Minto—a state of affairs I had long since given up hoping for. Esto perpetua!

As I said at the outset I have been able to read very little: and nothing in your line. The Somnium Scipionis⁸⁸ is worth mentioning only because the handiest edition I could get was a school edition, & it was rather delightful to renew ones acquaintance with that highly specialised form of composition-a preface to a school text. You know. ‘Plato, the celebrated Gk. philosopher (500–400 B.C.) thought—’ and then a clear, dogmatic, and misleading sentence. No half lights.

Wuthering Heights⁸⁹ which I re-read the other day is, I believe, one of your biblia abiblia.⁹⁰ I should not like to make it my constant fare, but I still like it very much. R. Macaulay’s Mystery at Geneva⁹¹ I also re-read recently: much the poorest she has written, and a mere repetition of all her favourite tricks. I feel P’daytesque and ask ‘Will she live?’

I have bought The Brothers Karamazov⁹² but not yet read it with the exception of some special detachable pieces (of which there are many). Thus read, it is certainly a great religious and poetical work: whether, as a whole, it will turn out a good, or even a tolerable novel I don’t know. I have not forgotten your admirable Russian novel ‘Alexey Poldorovna lived on a hill. He cried a great deal.’

It is pleasant to reflect that one of the nine terms of your exile is now over.

Yrs

Jack

1 The Rev. Wilfrid Savage Thomas (1879–1959) took a BA from Pembroke College, Cambridge, in 1900. Ordained in 1903 after a year at Wells Theological College, he was Curate of Great Marlow until 1906 and spent the next two years in Australia as Domestic Chaplain to the Bishop of Adelaide. He returned to Great Marlow, 1909–11, and was assigned Banbury with Grimsbury, 1911–13. After a further spell in Australia in 1915 as priest-in-charge of Mallala Mission, he was Curate of Amersham, 1916–18, Vicar of Holy Trinity, Lambeth, and Chaplain of St Thomas’s Hospital, London, 1918–23. Thomas became Vicar of Holy Trinity, Headington Quarry, in 1924 and remained there until 1935. He was subsequently Vicar of Adderbury with Milton, 1935–9.

2 The grounds of The Kilns covered nine acres, and the Lewis brothers began planting trees and clearing pathways immediately after moving there.

3 The Rev. Edward Foord-Kelcey (1859–1934) matriculated at Pembroke College, Oxford, in 1884. He read Theology at Cuddesdon College and was ordained in 1888. He was Curate of St Saviour, Leicester, 1887–92, Vicar of Quorn (or Quorndon), Leicestershire, 1892–1909, and Rector of Great Kimble, Buckinghamshire, 1909–26. He officiated in the Diocese of Oxford from 1927 until his death. His wife died shortly before the First World War. In a short biography of Foord-Kelcey (LP XI: 24–5), Lewis wrote; ‘A common love of Scott and Johnson was the ground on which we met…These, with Shakespeare and Carlyle, were the constant themes of his talk… As a man of letters his range was not very wide—of poetry, for example, he knew little—nor was his judgement above the ordinary: but he was always worth listening to for the intensity of his gusto, and his chuckles and ecstatic repetition.’

4 There had been a footpath running across a field from Headington to Headington Quarry since 1804. The Oxford City Corporation wished to divert it, but many people who had been using the footpath for the whole of their lives, including Mr J. Snow, managed to have the City’s plan altered. See the letter from Mr Thomas, ‘Closing the Quarry Field Footpath’ in the Oxford Times (7 August 1931), p. 10.

5 Maureen Moore, the daughter of Janie King Moore, taught music at the Monmouth School for Girls, Monmouthshire, 1930–3. See Dame Maureen Dunbar of Hempriggs (1906–97) in the Biographical Appendix to CL I.

6 The nickname of Mrs Janie King Moore (1872–1951). See the Biographical Appendix to CL I.

7 George Robert Sabine Snow (1897–1969) was a Fellow of Magdalen College, 1922–60.

8 James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, ed. George Birkbeck Hill, 6 vols. (1934), 18 April 1783, vol. IV, p. 205. slightly misquoted.

9 Jeremy Taylor, The Whole Works…With a Life of the Author, and a Critical Examination of His Writings, by Reginald Heber, 15 vols. (1822).

10 See Dom Bede Griffiths in the Biographical Appendix. Alan Richard Griffiths became a Catholic on Christmas Eve 1932. He spent much of the following year at Prinknash, the Benedictine priory near Gloucester, testing his vocation as a monk. On 20 December 1933 he was clothed as a novice and took the name Dom Bede Griffiths.

11 For the biography of Frank Sanders see note 28 to the letter of 22 March 1941.

12 William Law, A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life (1728).

13 Major Herbert Denis Parkin (1886–1958) joined the army in 1908 and the Army Service Corps (later Royal Army Service Corps) in 1911. He became captain in 1915 and major in 1918. He served in France during the First World War, in India during 1922, and Egypt, 1927–8. Major Parkin was Warnie’s commanding officer in Shanghai, 1928–9 and they became lifelong friends, but this was the first time Jack had met him. On learning of Parkin’s death, Warnie wrote in his diary of 13 November 1958: ‘He was a friend of almost thirty years standing, and one whose place no one can fill…We shared a stock of memories which were very precious to both of us, and he had a humour that was entirely his own…I shall miss him to the end—the only real friend I ever made in me army’ (BF, p. 246).

14 John Trail! Christie (1899–1980) was Fellow and Classical Tutor at Magdalen College, 1928–32, Headmaster of Repton School, 1932–7, Headmaster of Westminster School. 1937–49. and Principal of Jesus College, Oxford, 1950–67.

15 Sir Thomas Browne (1605–82), natural historian, antiquary, and moralist, best known for his Religio Medici (1642).

16 i.e. like Charles Lamb.

17 Mr Papworth, or Baron Papworth as he was also known, was Lewis’s and Mrs Moore’s dog. Of the many pets they had over the years, he was their favourite. He died in 1937.

18 ‘I love games, love, books, music.’ From Jean de La Fontaine, Les Amours de Psyché et de Cupidon (1669), quoted in The Oxford Book of French Verse, ed. St John Lucas (1920), p. 182.

19 René Descartes (1596–1650) was the chief architect of the seventeenth-century intellectual revolution. His philosophical masterpiece, Meditations on First Philosophy (1641) contains many of his proofs of the existence of God.

20 See Alfred Cecil Harwood (1898–1975) in the Biographical Appendix to CL I. After taking his BA from Oxford in 1921 he became a teacher at Michael Hall School in London.

21 In the third of his Meditations on First Philosophy Descartes’s argument for the existence of God runs: ‘I have the idea of a perfect being. Whatever caused this idea must have all the perfections that are represented in the idea.’

22 By the ‘Thistle-Bird’ Lewis probably meant the Rev. Henry Edward Bird who, after serving in various London parishes, was Vicar of St Andrew’s, Headington, 1924–46. He sometimes preached at Holy Trinity, Headington Quarry.

23 Rudyard Kipling, The Seven Seas (1896), ‘McAndrew’s Hymn’, slightly misquoted.

24 ‘The Land East of the Sun and West of the Moon’ is a story in William Morris, The Earthly Paradise (1868–70).

25 One of Jack and Warnie’s nicknames for each other. When they were small children their nurse sometimes threatened to smack their ‘pigieboties’ or ‘piggiebottoms’. Over time the brothers decided that Warnie was ‘Archpiggiebotham’ or ‘APB’ and Jack ‘Smallpiggiebotham’ or ‘SPB’, and thereafter they frequently addressed each other by these names or variations of them. In his letter to Warnie of 2 August 1928 (CL I, p. 768), Jack discusses the nature of ‘pigiebotism’—the manners and ideas of young men like Warnie and Jack.

26 Ephesians 6:13.

27 18 October.

28 John is the ‘mystical’ fourth Gospel. The other three Gospels—Matthew, Mark and Luke—are remarkably similar in workings and structure; scholars call these three Gospels synoptic (from the Greek for ‘seeing together or at the same time’, a name derived from the practice of tabulating their similarities in parallel columns for comparison). It is generally believed that Mark was used as a source by Matthew and Luke.

29 The English School was divided between those who upheld the primacy of the study of English literature and those advocating the importance of language. Lewis had complained when Professor J. R. R. Tolkien wanted more linguistic courses, these to be based on Old or Middle English literature, but by 1931 he had come to see the merit of Tolkien’s proposals and thereafter gave him his full support. Soon the curriculum of the English School required that students learn the English language of all periods, while the literature syllabus began with Beowulf and ended with the Romantics in 1830. There were murmurings of dissent from the other side about the monopoly of philology and the absence from the curriculum of any modern literary criticism.

30 Miss Kathleen Whitty had been Maureen’s music teacher when the Moores lived in Bristol, and she often visited them in Oxford.

31 Ramsay MacDonald (1866–1937), Labour Prime Minister, 1924, 1929–35.

32 Philip, Viscount Snowden (1864–1937), Chancellor of the Exchequer, 1924, 1929–31.

33 Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey (1818).

34 See Owen Barfield (1898–1997) in the Biographical Appendix to CL I. Barfield, one of Lewis’s closest friends, joined the family law firm in London, Barfield and Barfield, in 1929. After taking a degree of Bachelor of Civil Law from Oxford in 1930, he began preparing for law exams in London. During his many years with Barfield and Barfield he acted as Lewis’s solicitor.

35 Lewis had been given a pair of swans by the Provost of Worcester College. See Fred W. Paxford, ‘He Should Have Been a Parson’ in We Remember C.S. Lewis, ed. David Graham (2001), p. 122.

36 John Keats, Endymion (1818).

37 John Keats, Hyperion (1820).

38 ‘It’ was Lewis’s original name for the inconsolable longing he called ‘Joy’ in SBJ.

39 This, one of Plato’s dialogues, is about Persuasion and Eros and their part in our perception of the eternal Forms.

40 Arthur’s friend, the novelist Forrest Reid (1875–1947), was living in Belfast at this time. Reid told his story in two autobiographies, Apostate (1926) and Private Road (1940). His novel, Uncle Stephen, was published in October 1931.

41 Luke 9:24.

42 The Times Literary Supplement (29 October 1931), p. 838.

43 BF, p. 89.

44 Before he left for Gibraltar Warnie had begun editing the enormous number of family diaries, letters and other memorabilia amassed by Albert Lewis. When he finished in 1933, the ‘Memoirs of the Lewis Family: 1850–1930’ consisted of eleven volumes of papers with numerous notes by the Lewis brothers. The original of the unpublished ‘Lewis Papers’, as the ‘Memoirs’ are known, is in the Marion E. Wade Center, Wheaton College, Wheaton, Illinois, with microfilm in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, and the Southern Historical Collection, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

45 This was the favourite walk of the essayist and poet Joseph Addison (1672–1719). When a Fellow of Magdalen he lived in New Buildings and greatly enjoyed the walk which runs northward from the college buildings. Since the nineteenth century it has been known as ‘Addison’s Walk’. On the centenary of Lewis’s birth In 1998 a memorial stone was placed along the walk inscribed with Lewis’s poem ‘What the Bird Said Early in the Year’ in which he mentions Addison’s Walk.

46 See Adam Fox in the Biographical Appendix.

47 Paul Victor Mendelssohn Benecke (1868–1944), great-grandson of the composer Felix Mendelssohn, was Classics Tutor at Magdalen College, 1893–1925. He was Lewis’s history tutor when he was an undergraduate at University College. See Lewis’s letter to Albert Lewis of 21 January 1921.

48 John Alexander Smith (1893–1939), philosopher and classical scholar, was Waynflete Professor of Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy and Fellow of Magdalen, 1910–36. Born at Dingwall in Cromarty, he came up to Balliol College from Edinburgh University in 1884. After taking a First in Classics in 1887 he was Fellow in Philosophy at Balliol, 1891–1910, before moving to Magdalen. A distinguished scholar of Aristotle, for many years he exercised great influence in the Oxford Aristotelian Society. His translation of De Anima appeared in 1931. He maintained the Idealist tradition of T. H. Green and Edward Caird. A chapter is devoted to him in James Patrick, The Magdalen Metaphysicals: Idealism and Orthodoxy at Oxford, 1901–1945 (Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press, 1985).

49 Frederick David Lyddiatt, who lived at 52 Wharton Road, Headington, helped out at The Kilns, sometimes acting as chauffeur.

50 Chesney Horwood (1904–90) came up to Oxford in 1922 as an exhibitioner of the Non-Collegiate Society. After graduating he spent two years as Lektor in English Literature at the University of Freiburg-im-Breisgau. On returning to Oxford in 1928 he became Fellow of English and Dean at the Non-Collegiate Society which in 1930 was refounded as St Catherine’s Society, and which in 1962 became St Catherine’s College. Apart from 1940–6, when he served in the Intelligence Service, Horwood spent his entire working life in the service of the society.

51 See J. R. R. Tolkien (1892–1973) in the Biographical Appendix to CL I. Tolkien and Lewis were just beginning their regular meetings which led to the founding of the Inklings.

52 See Henry Victor Dyson ‘Hugo’ Dyson (1896–1975) in the Biographical Appendix to CL I. He was a lecturer and tutor in English in the University of Reading, 1921–45, and Fellow and Tutor in English at Merton College, Oxford, 1945–63.

53 R. W. Chapman, The Portrait of a Scholar & Other Essays Written in Macedonia, 1916–1918 (1922).

54 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.

55 Frederick Henry Lawson (1897–1983) was Fellow and Tutor in Law at Merton College, Oxford, 1930–48, and Professor of Comparative Law and a Fellow of Brasenose College, 1948–64.

56 The Barley Mow pub at Blewbury, Oxfordshire.

57 J. W. A. Condlin was Albert Lewis’s managing clerk from 1917 until Albert’s death in 1929.

58 ‘The Tower of Glass’ was the Rev. Ernest William Carlisle Hayes (1896–1950). Hayes took his BA from Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, in 1889, and was ordained in the Church of Ireland in 1893. After serving in a number of parishes, he was Rector of St Mark’s, Dundela, 1925–35. The Lewis brothers gave him this nickname after the firm of stained-glass artists (see note 60) because he was in charge of installing the window dedicated to their parents.

59 The Rev. Claude Lionel Chavasse (1897–1983), of an Anglo-Irish family, took his BA from Exeter College, Oxford, in 1922. He was trained at St Stephen’s House, Oxford, and ordained in the Church of Ireland in 1929. He was Curate of St Mark’s, Dundela, 1928–31, after which he served in a number of parishes in County Cork. He was Vicar of Kidlington, Oxfordshire, 1947–57.

60 Jack and Warnie planned to give a stained-glass window to St Mark’s in honour of their parents. The window, erected in 1935, was designed by Michael Healy (1873–1941). He was a member of The Tower of Glass, a group of stained-glass window artists of the time. For information about the window see David Bleakley, C. S. Lewis—At Home in Ireland (Belfast: Strandtown Press, 1998), pp. 182–3.

61 John Knox, The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women (1558).

62 Mary Elizabeth ‘Lily’ Ewart (1888–1976) was the sister of Arthur Greeves, and the wife of Charles Gordon Ewart (1885–1936).

63 John Milton, Paradise Lost (1667), V, 384–5: ‘no though! infirm/Altered her cheek’

64 Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present (1843).

65 ‘Leeborough’ or ‘Leeboro’ was Jack and Warnie’s private name for their family home, Little Lea. A ‘Leeborough edition’ is a book from Little Lea.

66 Since they were boys Jack and Warnie had been amused by their father’s ‘low’ Irish pronunciation of ‘potatoes’ as ‘p’daytas’. As a result, Mr Lewis was nicknamed ‘The P’dayta’ or ‘The P’daytabird’. The term came to be applied to anyone displaying the characteristics of their father, in particular an ignorant dogmatism. Jack eventually discovered this characteristic in himself: ‘I’m afraid I must be a P’dayta,’ he wrote to Warnie on 2 August 1928, ‘for I made a P’daytism the other day: I began talking about the world and how it was well explored by now and, said I “We know there are no undiscovered islands.” It was left for Maureen to point out the absurdity’ (CI I, p. 777).

67 The Rev, Alured George Clarke was Vicar of All Saints, Highfield, Oxford, 1920–35.

68 William Cowper, Poetry & Prose, With Essays by Hazlitt & Bagehot. introduction and notes by Humphrey S. Milford (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1921),

69 George MacDonald, Phantastes: A Faerie Romance (1858).

70 Mr (later Sir) Frederick Lucius O’Brien (1896–1974), a Quaker, was Arthur’s cousin on his mother’s side. During his life he held many civil and governmental positions in Belfast. He and Arthur often travelled together.

71 I Peter 3:15.

72 Matthew 7:20.

73 Galatians 5:22–3: ‘But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy. peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.’ (RSV)

74 The Imitation of Christ, a manual of spiritual devotion first put into circulation in 1418 and traditionally ascribed to Thomas à Kempis (c. 1380–1471).

75 Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Rasartus (1836).

76 William Morris, A Dream of John Ball (1888); Love is Enough (1872); The Wood Beyond the World (1894).

77 See Martin Lings in the Biographical Appendix.

78 Adrian Hugh Paterson (1909–401 look his BA from Magdalen in 1934. He lectured on English in the University of Hong Kong, 1934–8, and was a lecturer on English at Cairo University from 1938 until 1940 when he died as a result of an accident that occurred while he and Martin Lings were riding together in the desert.

79 ‘The Cave’ was a group of English dons who met regularly for talks about literary subjects or to discuss matters in the English School. It was named after the Cave of Adullam in which David organized the conspiracy against Saul (1 Samuel 22:1: ‘David…escaped to the cave Adullam: and when his brethren and all his father’s house heard it, they went down thither to him’). The membership, which included Lewis, Tolkien, Nevill Coghill, Hugo Dyson, Leonard Rice-Oxley, H. F. B. Brett-Smith and Maurice Ridley, were opponents of what had been, until 1931, the reigning faction in the School of English. See also note 29 to the letter to Warnie of 24 October 1931.

80 Drinking parties.

81 Edward Maurice Hugh-Jones (1903–97) read History at New College. Oxford, in 1924, after which he read Philosophy. Politics and Economics (PPE) and look a BA in 1925. He was a lecturer at Keble College, 1926–7, and Tutor in Economics. 1927–59. He was Professor of Economics at Keele University. 1959–68. His works include (with E. A. Radice) An American Experiment (1936) and Woodrow Wilson and American Liberalism (1947).

82 Molière, Le Tartuffe (1664).

83 Molière, Tartuffe, or The Hypocrite, trans. Curtis Hidden Page (1912) Line 58.

84 This was probably William Taylor, who lived at Shotover Cottage, Old Road, Headington Quarry.

85 The 8 a.m. ‘early celebration’ of Holy Communion at Holy Trinity Church, Headington Quarry. This was an important turning point in Lewis’s life. For some time he had been attending matins and evensong in his college chapel and at Holy Trinity, but in participating in the sacrament, Lewis was doing something he knew would be blasphemous unless he was a believer. Jack knew his brother would understand the seriousness of his action.

Warnie, too, went to Holy Communion on Christmas Day 1931. He wrote in his diary that day: ‘I attended the service with very mixed feeling, gladness predominating at once again finding myself a full member of the Church after so many years of indifference or worse…I came away feeling profoundly thankful that I have once again become a communicant, and intend (D.V.) [Deo Volente-“God Willing”] to go regularly at least four times a year in future’ (BF). On receiving the present letter from his brother, Warnie wrote on 17 January 1932: ‘A letter from | today containing the news that he too has once more started to go to Communion, at which I am delighted. Had he not done so, I, with my altered views would have found—hardly a bar between us, but a Jack of a complete identity of interest which I should have regretted’ (ibid.).

86 i.e. the Rev. Edward Foord-Kelcey.

87 Foord-Kelcey would no doubt have thought of donating his letter from Dr Johnson to Mrs Hester Thrale (1741–1821) to Pembroke College, Oxford, because this was the college of both Johnson and Foord-Kelcey himself. When he died in 1934, Foord-Kelcey left the letter to C. S. Lewis, who kept it for the rest of his life. Upon his death in 1963, Warnie gave it to Pembroke College.

88 The Somnium Scipiona (‘Dream of Scipio’) is the fable with which Cicero ends his De Republica.

89 Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (1847).

90 ‘one of those books which are not books’. Charles Lamb, Last Essays of Elia (1833), ‘Detatched Thoughts on Books and Reading’: ‘I can read anything which I call a book. There are things in that shape which [cannot allow for such. In this catalogue of books which are not books—Biblia A-Biblia—I reckon…all those volumes which “no gentleman’s library should be without.”’

91 Rose Macaulay, Mystery at Geneva (1922).

92 Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (1880).