by C. S. Lewis
TO HIS FATHER: from University College
20 July [1922]
I am now close to my viva and of course on that subject I have nothing new to tell you. The details of the examination for the Magdalen Fellowship have however been published at last. The subjects are, as was expected, identical with those of Greats: but it is also notified that candidates may send in a dissertation on any relevant subject in addition to competing on the papers. I felt at once that this gave me a great pull. To choose your topic at your ease, to stake out your own line and display a modicum of originality—these, for men of our ilk, are more promising roads to victory than mere answering of questions. Indeed this condition is a rare bit of luck and of course I am all agog to begin. Naturally I shall not sit seriously to the work until my viva is over.
Under these circumstances you will understand that I cannot promise an early return home. I must see how I get on. No doubt this is disappointing for us all: but apart from that—on the score of health—you need have no misgiving. I am in excellent form at the moment and I shall not play the fool: midnight oil and ten hours a day were never my passion, and I am careful about the daily walk. Being confident on that score I feel it would be folly to throw away any chances for the sake of an immediate holiday. Also—odious factor—in my present position it is advisable to be on the spot, to be seen, to let people remember that there’s a young genius on the look out for a job.
In the meantime I find the financial waters a trifle low. I have had examination fees and a few old wardrobe repairs to pay and I look forward to more expenses, including tipping, when I take my degree. The dates of terms naturally make a long interval between my spring and autumn allowances, but it has not been worth bothering you about before, and last year the Chancellors Prize helped to fill up. I had hoped to combine a little light tutoring with my own work—which would have been useful experience apart from the scheckels—but I was too late and the possible jobs in Oxford were filled up. Could you then let me have £25? I am sorry to ‘out and come again’ but you will understand the reasons.
I thought I had got hold of a temporary job for next year the other day. It was before I knew full details of the Magdalen fellowship, and consisted of a classical lectureship at University College, Reading. For geographical reasons I had hoped that this would combine—by means of a season ticket—the diplomatic or ‘advertizement’ advantages of keeping in touch with Oxford with the advantages of a salaried post. This however turned out impossible. As well, pure classics is not my line. I told them quite frankly and they gave the job to some one else. Perhaps I was too young. My pupils would nearly all have been girls. The funny thing was that the head of their classical department and one of the committee who interviewed me was Eric Dodds. I had lunch with him in Reading and some talk. He is a clever fellow, but I didn’t greatly take to him somehow.
Arthur [Greeves] has been staying in Oxford. He was painting and I was working, but we saw a good deal of one another. He is enormously improved and I didn’t feel the qualms which I once should have about introducing him to people. He is not a brilliant talker and he seldom sees a joke, but his years in London are brightening him up amazingly. His painting is getting on and he did one landscape here which I thought really good . . .
FROM HIS DIARY: at 28 Warneford Road
24 July 1922
At about 2.30 Baker came. He had been at Tetsworth yesterday with the Kennedys, to see Vaughan Williams. As if by arrangement, he was at work on his new symphony when they arrived, and was quite ready to talk of music. He is the largest man Baker has ever seen—Chestertonian both in figure and habits. He eats biscuits all the time while composing. He said that after he had written the first bar on the page of a full score, the rest was all mechanical drudgery and that in every art there was 10% of real ‘making’ to 90% of spadework. He has a beautiful wife who keeps a pet badger—Baker saw it playing both with the dog and the kittens and it licked his hand . . .
TO HIS FATHER: from University College
26 July [1922]
Very many thanks for the enclosure. ‘There’s a power of washboards in that’ as Mehawl Macmurrachu said when he found the crock of gold. It is very kind of you to tell me to possess my soul in patience, when the patience has rather to be practised on your side. But let us hope that my unique merits will soon be appreciated and that I shall be able to rely on the inexhaustible patience of the tax payer and the sainted generosity of dead benefactors. In the meantime thank you and again thank you.
I have wondered, as you suggest in your letter, whether I unduly decried my own wares before the Readingites. I think, on the whole, that I behaved wisely: I am, after all, nothing remarkable as a pure scholar, and there is no good hiding what is so easily in their power to find out. As well one produces only misery for oneself, don’t you think, by taking on jobs one is not up to. Biting off more than you can chew is about the most poisonous sensation I know . . .
It is a strange irony that Dodds who is a born pure scholar, spends his time lecturing on philosophy. As you say however, the loss is hardly to be regretted: but there is a mean spirit somewhere in most of us that strives under all circumstances to explain away the success of the other fellow . . .
FROM HIS DIARY: at 28 Warneford Road
28 July 1922
Up betimes in white tie and ‘subfusc’ and into my viva. We all presented ourselves (I knew none of the others) at 9.30. Myers, looking his most piratical, called over our names and read out the times at which we were to come, but not in alphabetical order. Two others and myself were told to stay and I was immediately called out, thus being the first victim of the day. My operator was Joseph. He was very civil and made every effort to be agreeable . . . The whole show took about five minutes . . .
[On 1 August Jack, Mrs Moore and Maureen moved into a large, furnished house in Headington, where they were to remain until 5 September. The house is named ‘Hillsboro’ and it is located on what was called Western Road but has since been altered to 14 Holyoake Road.]
FROM HIS DIARY: at ‘Hillsboro’, 14 Holyoake Road, Headington (where he, Mrs Moore and Maureen had lived since 30 April 1923)
2 August 1922
I bussed into College and called on Farquharson.99 Apparently I am not too late to take my B.A. on Saturday . . . He also discussed exams and kept saying that everyone knew my abilities and would not change their opinions if I happened to get a second. From a don, such talk has its uncomfortable side—I hope there is nothing behind it more than his general desire of flattery . . .
I then returned and took my share of getting things straight . . . This house is full of unnecessary ornaments in the sitting rooms: beyond them, in the kitchen etc., we found a state of indescribable filth: bottles of cheap champagne in the cellar. Trash for the drawing room, dirt for the kitchen, second rate luxury for the table—an epitome of a ‘decent English household’ . . .
[Warren was on leave from West Africa. He arrived in Oxford on the morning of 3 August and took a room at the Roebuck Hotel in Cornmarket Street.]
3 August 1922
After tea I hastened into town and met Warnie at the Roebuck; dined with him at Buols with a bottle of Heidsick. He has certainly grown enormously fat. He was in excellent form. I mooted the proposal of his coming out here: he did not seem inclined to take it up. I left him my diary to read to put him en rapport with the life.
4 August 1922
I . . . met W[arnie] and we strolled to the Schools to see if my lists would be out in the evening. It gave me rather a shock to find them already up. I had a first, Wyllie a second: everyone else from College a third. The whole thing was rather too sudden to be as pleasant as it sounds on paper. I wired at once to P[apy] and went to lunch with W. at Buols.
During the meal I thought I had arranged for him to come and meet the family at tea: but quite suddenly while sitting in the garden of the Union he changed his mind and refused pertinaciously either to come to tea or to consider staying with
us. I therefore came back to tea . . . after which I returned to W., and dined. He was now totally changed. He introduced the idea of coming to stay off his own bat and promised to come out tomorrow . . .
5 August 1922
Went to College after breakfast and saw Poynton about money matters . . . I then bussed out to Headington, changed rapidly into white tie and subfusc suit, and returned to lunch with W. at Buols. At 2 o’clock I assembled with the others at Univ. porch to be taken under Farquharson’s wing for degrees. A long and very ridiculous ceremony making us B.A.s . . .
I met W. again at the Roebuck and came up here. Everyone present for tea and [Warnie] got on well . . .
6 August 1922
W. came out with his luggage. Bridge in the afternoon. A wet night.
25 August 1922
W. and I did most of our packing before breakfast. We were delayed for a few minutes to have a photo taken by Maureen, and then departed, carrying his tin trunk between us. His visit here has been a great pleasure to me—a great advance too towards connecting up my real life with all that is pleasantest in my Irish life. Fortunately everyone liked him and I think he liked them . . .
[Warren visited his father in Belfast after leaving Oxford. He was joined at ‘Little Lea’ by Jack who was there from 11 to 21 September. On 6 October Warren reported at his new station in Colchester.]
FROM HIS DIARY: at 28 Warneford Road
30 September 1922
After breakfast I washed up and did the dining room. I then went to my own room and started to work again on the VIth Canto of Dymer. I got on splendidly—the first good work I have done since a long time . . . An absurd episode after lunch. Maureen had started saying she didn’t mind which of two alternative sweets she had: and D, who is always worried by these indecisions, had begun to beg her to make up her mind in rather a weary voice. Thus developed one of those little mild wrangles about nothing which a wise man accepts as in the nature of things. I however, being in a sublime mood, and unprepared for jams, allowed a silent irritation to rise and sought relief in jabbing violently at a piece of pastry. As a result I covered myself in a fine shower of custard and juice: my melodramatic gesture was thus deservedly exposed and everyone roared with laughter.
13 October 1922
Shortly before one I saw Farquharson. He told me to go to Wilson of Exeter for tuition in English.100 He then gave me a paternal lecture on an academic career which was not (he said) one of leisure as popularly supposed. His own figure however lessened the force of the argument. He advised me, as he has done before, to go to Germany for a time and learn the language. He prophesied that there would soon be a school of modern European literature and that linguistically qualified Greatsmen would be the first to get the new billets thus created. This was attractive, but of course circumstances make migration impossible for me . . .
15 October 1922
Worked all morning in the dining room on my piece in Sweet’s Reader and made some progress. It is very curious that to read the words of King Alfred gives more sense of antiquity than to read those of Sophocles. Also, to be thus realizing a dream of learning Anglo-Saxon which dates from Bookham days . . . After [supper] and washing up and more Troilus up till nearly the end of Book III. It is amazingly fine stuff. How absolutely anti-Chaucerian Wm Morris was in all save the externals . . .
16 October 1922
Bicycled to the Schools after breakfast to a 10 o’clock lecture: stopping first to buy a batchelor’s gown at the extortionate price of 32/6. According to a usual practice of the schools we were allowed to congregate in the room where the lecture was announced, and then suddenly told that it would be in the North School: our exodus of course fulfilled the scriptural condition of making the last first and the first last. I had thus plenty of time to feel the atmosphere of the English School which is very different from that of Greats. Women, Indians, and Americans predominate and—I can’t say how—one feels a certain amateurishness in the talk and look of the people. The lecture was by Wyld on the History of the language.101 He spoke for an hour and told us nothing that I haven’t known these five years . . . After lunch I bicycled again to Schools to seek out the library of the English school. I found it at the top of many stories, inhabited by a strange old gentleman who seems to regard it as his private property . . .
18 October 1922
Bicycled to Schools for a 12 o’clock lecture on Chaucer by Simpson, who turns out to be the old man I found in the English school library.102 Quite a good lecture . . . Jenkin arrived and I went to him in the drawing room. We talked of Troilus and this led us to the question of chivalry. I thought the mere ideal, however unrealized, had been a great advance. He thought the whole thing had been pretty worthless. The various points which I advanced as good results of the Knightly standard he attributed to Christianity. After this Christianity became the main subject. I tried to point out that the mediaeval knight ran his class code and his church code side by side in watertight compartments. Jenkin said that the typical example of the Christian ideal at work was Paul, while admitting that one would probably have disliked him in real life. I said that one got very little definite teaching in the gospels: the writers had apparently seen something overwhelming, but been unable to reproduce it. He agreed, but added that this was so with everything worth having . . .
TO HIS FATHER: from University College (after failing to be elected to the Fellowship in Philosophy at Magdalen College)
28 [October 1922]
I judged that you would see my fate in the Times. This needs little comment. I am sorry for both our sakes that the ‘hastings days fly on with full career and my late spring no bud nor blossom showeth’. But there’s no good crying over spilt milk and one must not repine at being fairly beaten by a better man. I do not think I have done myself any harm, for I have had some compliments on my work. One examiner, at any rate, said I was ‘probably the ablest man in for it’, but added that my fault was a certain excess of caution or ‘timidity in letting myself go’ . . . For the rest, except for the extra drain on you, I should be glad enough of the opportunity or rather the necessity of taking another School. The English may turn out to be my real line, and, in any case, will be a second string to my bow.
I very much appreciate your enquiries about the adequacy of my allowance, and hasten to assure you that it leads to no such privations as you imagine. I will be quite frank with you. It is below the average, but that is balanced by the longer period of time over which it has been spread. It leaves no margin for superfluities, but I am lucky in having found cheap digs and, as my tastes are simple and my friends neither rich nor very numerous, I can manage alright—specially as you have been always very ready to meet any extraordinary charges. I am very grateful of the slow period of incubation which you have made possible—and have no mental reservations on the subject.
On the contrary, I very often regret having chosen a career which makes me so slow in paying my way: and, on your account, would be glad of a more lucrative line. But I think I know my own limitations and am quite sure that an academic or literary career is the only one in which I can hope ever to go beyond the meanest mediocrity. The Bar is a gamble which would probably cost more in the long run, and in business, of course I should be bankrupt or in jail very soon. In short you may make your mind easy on this subject. As to looking run down—I suppose I am turning from a very chubby boy into a somewhat thinner man: it is, at all events, not the result of a bun diet . . .
I am drumming ahead like anything with my Anglo-Saxon, and it is great fun. One begins it in a Reader constructed on the admirable system of having nearly all the text in one dialect and nearly all the glossary in another. You can imagine what happy hours this gives the young student—for example, you will read a word like ‘Wado’ in the text: in the glossary this may appear as Wedo, Waedo, Weodo, Waedu, or Wiedu. Clever bloke, ain’t he? The language in general, gives the impression of parodied English badly spelled. Thus the word ‘Cwic’ may baffle you till
you remember the ‘quick and the dead’ and suddenly realize that it means ‘Alive’. Or again ‘Tingul’ for a star, until you think of ‘Twinkle, twinkle little star’.
By the way I was quite wrong about Miss Waddell: it turns out to be Miss Wardale—an amazing old lady who is very keen on phonetics and pronounciation.103 I spend most of my hours with her trying to reproduce the various clucking, growling and grunted noises which are apparently an essential to the pure accent of Alfred—or Aelfred as we must now call him . . .
FROM HIS DIARY: at 28 Warneford Road
29 October 1922
[Aunt Lily] has been here for about three days and has snubbed a bookseller in Oxford, written to the local paper, crossed swords with the Vicar’s wife, and started a quarrel with her landlord . . . Her conversation is like an old drawer, full both of rubbish and valuable things, but all thrown together in great disorder. She is still engaged on her essay, which starting three years ago as a tract on the then state of woman suffrage, is still unfinished and now embraces a complete philosophy on the significance of heroism and maternal instinct, the nature of matter, the primal one, the value of Christianity, and the purpose of existence. That purpose by the way is the return of differences to the One through heroism and pain. She thus combines a good deal of Schopenhaur with a good deal of theosophy: besides being indebted to Bergson and Plotinus. She told me that ectoplasm was done with soap bubbles, that women had no balance and were cruel as doctors, that what I needed for my poetry was a steeping in scientific ideas and terminology, that many prostitutes were extraordinarily purified and Christ-like, that Plato was a Bolshevist . . . that the importance of Christ could not have lain in what He said, that Pekinese were not dogs at all but dwarfed lions bred from smaller and ever smaller specimens by the Chinese through ages innumerable, that matter was just the stop of motion and that the cardinal error of all religions made by men was the assumption that God existed for, or cared about us. I left Dymer with her and got away, with some difficulty, at one o’clock . . .
