by C. S. Lewis
There is still no news of Optimism, and by now little optimism among those who await the news. I should have thought they could have decided on the productions before this: an unsettled possibility like that becomes in the end a nuisance at the back of one’s mind.
TO HIS BROTHER: from University College
10 May [1921]
Here term is still new enough to be interesting. It is still pleasant to see fewer foreign visitors pacing the High with guide books and taking photos of spires—where I know they’ll get them crooked—and to see one’s friends again instead. Pasley was the first to wait upon us, in a blinding snow shower, a few days before term began . . .
A great friend of mine, Baker of Wadham, has come up again after being down for a couple of terms.80 I often amuse myself by thinking how you and he would worry each other: not so much by direct antagonism as by being absolutely unable to understand one another. Have you ever met a person who talks habitually in metaphors and doesn’t know that they are metaphors? He has certainly the perverseness and troublesomeness of speech which betoken greatness: his poems are like rooms full of exotic and insolent ornaments, but with nowhere to sit down . . .
The only strictly social function I have attended so far this term was tea with the Carlyles in their most charming house in Holywell.81 It is a place I greatly envy: long uneven rooms with beams in the ceiling and wide stone grates where a little kind of brazier sits in a deep cave of Dutch tiles. I need hardly say that in Oxford houses all such things were unearthed only fairly recently: the XVIII Cent. wd doubtless have said ‘elegance and civility for Gothic rudeness’.
The principles on which tea fights are conducted at the Carlyles is this: you are given a seat by someone and when you have had a reasonable time to get to the interesting part of the conversation, Mrs C., a rather fatuous woman, gets up and says, ‘Mr Lewis, go and talk to Professor Smith’ or ‘Mr Wyllie, I think you know my daughter’ or whatever it may be: then every single pair is shuffled. When you’ve got fairly settled, the same thing happens again: as some one said, it is like nothing so much as a game of cricket with nothing in it but an umpire calling ‘over’. I had my longest ‘spell’ between Pasley and a lady whom the elder Miss C. describes as ‘my little sister’ . . . By the rule of the house of course Pasley and I had scarcely started trying to instil a little pessimism when she said, ‘Oh, I must get Father to talk to you’. OVER!
When that had subsided I recovered consciousness beside Dr Carlyle. He has every reason to be an optimist: a man who can hold a parish AND a College Chaplaincy (you remember Poynton’s remark ‘Dr Carlyle repeats as much of the service as he can remember’) without being a Christian, and who has lived on the bounty of a Royal Foundation for the last century while being a Socialist, ought to be. All the same he’s a dear old man with a thin brick red face and very straight white hair and never takes anything seriously.
People talk about the Oxford manner and the Oxford life and the Oxford God-knows what else: as if the undergraduates had anything to do with it. Sitting beside this worthy priest I felt that it is really a thing we are quite outside: the real Oxford is a close corporation of jolly, untidy, lazy, good for nothing humorous old men, who have been electing their own successors ever since the world began and who intend to go on with it: they’ll squeeze under the Revolution or leap over it somehow when it comes, don’t you worry.
When I think how little chance I have of ever fighting my way into that unassuming yet impregnable fortress, that modest unremovability, that provokingly intangible stone wall, I think of Keats’s poison.
Brewed in monkish cell
To thin the scarlet conclave of old men.82
. . . Today the 11th, little Jenkin appeared after lunch and bade me go for a bike ride. As I had decided to work, I thought this would be an excellent opportunity of breaking my resolution. Jenkin has his own principles of push biking, the maxim being that ‘where I go my machine can go’. He rides over moors and once carried it down a cliff in Cornwall.
After stopping for a drop of the negus at Garsington in the same little pub whither I went (v. last letter) on Easter Monday, we rode along the top of a long hill where you look down into a good, woody English valley with the Chilterns, rather sleek and chalky—like greyhounds—on the horizon. It was a grey day with clouds in muddled perspective all round. Just as the first drops of rain began to fall, we found a young man looking as if he were going to be hanged, crossing a field.
He turned out to be one Groves of Univ., who is now gone down and incarcerated at a High Church Theological Seminary in the neighbouring village of Cuddesdon.83 ‘He would have liked to ask us in to tea, but couldn’t—indeed oughtn’t to be talking to us—because they were having a QUIET DAY.’ Ye gods: a lot of young men shut up together, all thinking about their souls! Isn’t it awful?
After this it was quite fresh and lively to investigate an old wind mill near Wheatley: it has the sort of atmosphere we felt at Doagh and a little copper place over the door with a figure of a bird on it. Under it was a word variously read by Jenkin and myself as County and Cointy. I do not know what this all was about. Jenkin keeps on picking up stones and telling you that it is iron here.
We rode over Shotover Hill: through sandy lanes with gorse on each side and passing occasional warm comfortable English barns and haystacks. Most attractive sign posts, ‘Bridle path to Horsley’—a bridle path always sounds mysterious. And dozens of rabbits and whole bunches of bluebells: and a view far off between the two slopes of Forest Hill and the little house where the first Mrs Milton used to live. About the time he wrote L’Allegro and Il Penseroso he would often be riding over here from his home to court her—God help her! . . .
TO HIS FATHER: from University College (after ‘Optimism’ had been awarded the Chancellor’s Prize for an English Essay)
29 [May 1921]
Thank you very much for your wire and the letter: I am very glad to have been able to send you good news. I had almost lost heart about the thing, it dragged on so long. Everyone has been very nice about it, particularly the Mugger who is delighted, and this ought to be of use to me later on.
Some of my congratulations indeed have made me feel rather ashamed, coming from people whom I have been used to class generically as ‘louts’. By louts I denote great beefy people unknown to me by name, men with too much money and athletic honour, who stand blocking up passages. If looks could kill I’m afraid they would often have been in danger as I shouldered my way through them. Now they have weighed in with polite remarks and gratified my vanity with the grand-paternal ‘No. Does HE know ME?’ I suppose the explanation is that in their view we have done so badly on the river that any success—even in so unimportant a field as letters—should be encouraged.
I have also had a letter from Blackwell offering to see me about publishing it, and have, as a formality, written to Heinemann’s. In any case I am not sure what to do about that: I shall certainly not spend any money (nor allow you to, tho’ I know you gladly would) on forcing it into print if publishers won’t take the risk. I have always thought that a bad thing to do. Perhaps publication in some periodical might provide a compromise: it would remind people that I exist and yet it would not give too permanent a form to any opinion or argument that I may outgrow later on. At worst, if any one would like it, it would mean a five pound note and enable you and everyone else to read it decently printed instead of in type. If all these plans fall through, or if they are likely to take a long time, I will get another copy done and send it to you. You must not expect too much: the trains of argument are rather dull and I am afraid this effect is not neutralized by anything more than adequacy in the form. No purple patches—hardly a faint blue. But I must drop the annoying habit of anticipating your judgement . . .
I have been reading the oddest book lately—Newman’s Loss and Gain.84 I never knew that he had written a novel. As fiction or drama it is of course beneath contempt, but it has some real satirical humour. Do yo
u know it? The picture of the then Oxford, with its ecclesiastical controversies etc., is something more remote from my experience whether real or imagined, than ancient Britain or modern Cathay.
I haven’t heard anything about the prize—I think it is in money—not very much—and there are some books from College. I too thought about Kirk. We are all old, disillusioned creatures now, and look back on the days of ‘buns and coffee’ through a long perspective and only seldom come out of our holes: the young men up from school in their immaculate clothes think we have come to clean the windows when they see us. It happens to everyone here. In your first year you drink your sherry and see people: after that your set narrows, you haunt the country lanes more than the High, and cease to play at being the undergraduate of fiction. 1919 seems further off than France at times . . .
TO HIS FATHER: from University College
27 [June 1921]
The event of last week was one of the unforseen consequences of my winning ‘Optimism’. I had almost forgotten, if I had ever known, that ‘prizemen’ have to read portions of their compositions at our ceremony of the Encaenia.85 Being of the troglodytic nature I have never before exerted myself so far as to assist at this show: but having been now compelled, I am glad.
It is a most curious business. We unhappy performers attend (tho’ it is at noon) in caps, gowns, and FULL EVENING DRESS. It was held in the Sheldonian Theatre: I think Macaulay has a purple passage about ‘the painted roof of the Sheldonian’ under which Charles held his last parliament. During the long wait, while people trickled in, an organ (much too large for the building) gave a recital. The undergraduates and their guests sit round in the galleries: the ‘floor’ is occupied by the graduates en masse, standing at barriers in all their war paint. At noon the Vice Chancellor enters with his procession of ‘Heads of Colleges, Doctors, Proctors, and Noblemen’—a very strange show they make, half splendid and half grotesque, for few don’s faces are fit to bear up against the scarlet and blue and silver of their robes.
Then some ‘back chat’ in Latin from the Vice Chancellor’s throne and the Public Orator led in the persons who were to receive honorary degrees: with the exception of Clemenceau and Keyes (the Zeebruge man), they were not well known to the world at large. Keyes was a very honest looking fellow and Clemenceau the tough, burly ‘people’s man’ whom one expected: but what was beyond everything was the Canon of Notre Dame, a great theologian apparently, with some name like Raffitol.86 Such a picture of a great priest with all the pale dignity that one had imagined, I never saw. If the words ‘love at first sight’ were not tied down to one kind of feeling only, I would almost use them to express the way this man attracted me. He would have appealed to you immensely.
After the honorary degrees, the Professor of Poetry made an ‘oration’ in Latin, chiefly about colleagues who had died during the last year: this was my first experience of spoken Latin and I was pleased to find that I could follow and enjoy it.
The performance of us prizemen was of course very small beer after all this. We had been instructed to read for about two minutes each: I had some difficulty in finding a short passage which would be intelligible by itself. I was, of course, nervous: I am also told that I was the first of our little band whom Clemenceau looked at: but as I do not know WITH WHAT EXPRESSION he looked, nor whether he speaks English, we must remain in doubt whether this was a compliment or not.
I have had a good lesson in modesty from thus seeing my fellow prize men. I was hardly prepared for such a collection of scrubby, beetle-like, bespectacled oddities: only one of them appeared to be a gentleman. Any I spoke to sounded very like fools, perhaps like Goldsmith, they ‘writ like an angel and talked like poor Poll’.87 It brings home to one how very little I know of Oxford: I am apt to regard my own set, which consists mainly of literary gents, with a smattering of political, musical and philosophical—as being central, normal, and representative. But step out of it, into the athletes on one side or the pale pot hunters on the other, and it is a strange planet . . .
TO HIS BROTHER: from 28 Warneford Road, Oxford
1 July [1921]
I was delighted to get your letter this morning; for some reason it had been sent first to a non-existent address in Liverpool. I had deliberately written nothing to you since those two you mention: not that I was tired of the job, but because I did not feel disposed to go on posting into the void until I had some assurance that my effusions would reach you. That seemed a process too like prayer for my taste: as I once said to Baker—my mystical friend with the crowded poetry—the trouble about God is that he is like a person who never acknowledges one’s letters and so, in time, one comes to the conclusion either that he does not exist or that you have got the address wrong. I admitted that it was of great moment: but what was the use of going on despatching fervent messages—say to Edinburgh—if they all came back through the dead letter office: nay more, if you couldn’t even find Edinburgh on the map. His cryptic reply was that it would be almost worth going to Edinburgh to find out . . .
Here another term has blossomed and faded: that time moves has I believe been observed before. I have lived my usual life: a few lectures, until—as happens about half way through the term—I got tired of them all: work, meetings with friends, walks and rides, solitary or otherwise, and meetings of the Martlets. These birds by the by were all invited to dinner by the don Martlets a few weeks ago, and I again had the opportunity of peeping into the real Oxford: this time through the medium of a very excellent meal (‘with wine’ as Milton says with the air of a footnote) in cool, brown oaky rooms. I have been thinking of a formula for it all and decided on ‘Glenmachan turned male and intellectualized’ as fairly good.
The great event of MY term was of course ‘Optimism’. I must thank you for your congratulations before going on: THEY were provoked by the event, but the consequences of it will move your ribaldry. ‘Prizemen’, the Statues say, ‘will read at the Encaenia portions of their exercises (I like that word)—their exercises chosen by the Professor of Poetry and the Public Orator.’ Sounds dam’ fine, doesn’t it? But the Statues omit to mention the very cream of the whole situation—namely that the prizemen will appear in full evening dress. Fancy me entering the Sheldonian at 11.30 A.M. on a fine June morning in a cap, gown, boiled shirt, pumps, white tie and tails. Of course it was a ‘broiling’ day as the P’daytabird would say, and of course, for mere decency I had to wear an overcoat.
However, I managed to make myself audible, I am told, and beyond nearly falling as I entered the rostrum, I escaped with success. (They DO actually call it a rostrum, so that I was delighted: for the whole gallery of the Damerfesk seemed to gaze at me, and the jarring ghosts of Big, Polonius and Arabudda to lend me countenance.)88 This was really the fault of one not unlike our Arabudda—old Ker the professor of poetry,89 who, having earlier in the proceeding delivered his Latin oration, decided to remain sitting in the rostrum instead of going back to his own stall. This (in the language of Marie Stopes) ‘made entry difficult if not impossible’ for us prizemen: in my anxiety to avoid the burly professor, I stumbled over a raised step and nearly fell backwards. This must have appeared curiously enough to those who were on a level with, or higher than the rostrum: but the best effect of all was from the floor, from which, owing to the height of the front barrier and the big velvet cushion on it, I appeared simply to sink through a trap and rise again like a jack-in-the-box. However, I rallied my sang froid and bawled defiant remarks on the universe for two minutes. It is a good thing that the P’daytabird was not present or he would have been sorely put to it—especially if you had been beside him, giddy with laughter (You can imagine his asking me afterwards ‘Did you do it to annoy me?’).
I will send you a copy of my essay, since you ask for it, though I do not think it will be much in your line. Some of the insolent passages may amuse you: I hope you will like the way I dealt with the difficulty of ‘God or no God’. To admit that person’s existence would have u
pset my whole applecart: to deny it seemed inadvisable, on the off chance of there being a Christian among the examiners. I therefore adopted the more Kirkian alternative of proving—at any rate to my own satisfaction—that it ‘really made no difference whatsoever’ whether there was such a person or no. The second part of my essay you may use as a mild test whether you are ever likely to come to metaphysics or not. I look forward with some trepidation to discussing it at home: for his ‘reading of the thing’ will doubtless differ vastly from my writing of it90 . . .
I had not meant, in my other letters, to bring any serious charge against the Oxfordshire country. Tried by European standards it takes a lowish rank: but I am not such a fool as to deprecate any decent country now, and rather wrote in deprecation for fear you’d fancy I was ‘writing up’ a place [in] which you would remember no particular beauties. Of landscapes, as of people, one becomes more tolerant after one’s twentieth year (which reminds me to congratulate you on your birthday and ask what age it makes you. The rate at which we both advance towards a responsible age is indecent). We learn to look at them not in the flat as pictures to be seen, but in depth as things to be burrowed into. It is not merely a question of lines and colours but of smells, sounds and tastes as well: I often wonder if professional artists don’t lose something of the real love of earth by seeing it in eye sensations exclusively?
From the house where we are now living there are few good walks, but several decent rides. Last Saturday we rode to Strandlake. In the heat of the day—we are having drought here too—it was an heroic undertaking. Don’t come down on me with any traveller’s tale about ‘what real heat is’: I know with my intellect that it is much hotter in Africa, but put any honest man on a treeless road, uphill, in an English summer, and he can’t really imagine anything is hotter.
