Letters of C. S. Lewis

by C. S. Lewis

  We drove back to camp. W. had turned out into another hut and I had his bedroom. He has two rooms for his quarters. The sitting room with stove, easy chair, pictures, and all his French books, is very snug. I notice that a study in a hut, or a cave, or a cabin of a ship can be snug in a way that is impossible for a mere room in a house, the snugness there being a victory, a sort of defiant comfortableness—whereas in a house of course, one demands comfort and is simply annoyed at its absence. He ‘put into my hands’ Anatole France’s Revolt of the Angels in a translation, which seems an amusing squib.

  4 July 1924

  We started on our Oxford journey after breakfast in the mess. The day looked threatening at first, but we had fair weather. I do not remember the names of the villages we passed, except Braintree and Dunmow (where the flich lives). At St Albans we stopped to see the Cathedral: I had been there once before in my Wynyard days about 1909 or 1910 to sit and kneel for three hours watching Wyn Capron (whom God reject!) ordained a deacon or priest, I forget which. Yet, in those days, that day without work, the journey to St Alban’s, the three hour’s service and a lunch of cold beef and rice in an hotel was a treat for which we counted the days beforehand and felt nessum maggior dolore when the following day brought us back to routine.

  I was rather glad to find the Cathedral quite definitely the poorest English cathedral I have yet seen. In the town we bought two pork pies to supplement what W. considered the Spartan allowance of sandwiches given us by the mess, and drank some beer. I think it was here that W. formed the project of going far out of our way to eat our lunch at Hunton Bridge on the L.N.W.R. where we used to sit and watch the trains when out on our walk from Wynyard. I assented eagerly. I love to exult in my happiness at being forever safe from at least one of the major ills of life—that of being a boy at school.

  We bowled along very merrily in brilliant sunshine, while the country grew uglier and meaner at every turn, and therefore all the better for our purpose. We arrived at the bridge and devoured the scene—the two tunnels, wh. I hardly recognized at first, but memory came back. Of course things were changed. The spinney of little saplings had grown quite high. The countryside was no longer the howling waste it once looked to us. We ate our egg sandwiches and pork pies and drank our bottled beer. In spite of W.’s fears it was as much as we could do to get through them all. But then, as he pointed out, this was appropriate to the scene. We were behaving just as we would have done fifteen years earlier. ‘Having eaten everything in sight, we are now finished.’ We had a lot of glorious reminiscent talk. We developed our own version of si jeunesse savait: if we could only have seen as far as this out of the hell of Wynyard. I felt a half comic, half savage pleasure (Hobbes’s sudden glory) to think how by the mere laws of life we had completely won and Oldy had completely lost. For here were we with our stomachs full of sandwiches, sitting in the sun and wind, while he had been in hell these ten years.

  We drove on and had tea at Aylesbury—dizzy by now and stupid with fresh air—and got to Oxford before seven. On Saturday . . . W. and I (after I had done the lunch wash up) biked to Wantage Road where he wanted to take a photo of the fastest train in England. We did this successfully and looked out for a suitable place for tea on the return journey. A countryman told us that there was no pub near, but that we could get tea at the—it sounded like Dog House. We both felt sure there could be no place called the dog house, yet presently found it. Here we had strange adventures. I rang at the closed door—it is a little red house under a woodside—and waited for ten minutes: then rang again. At last a very ancient beldame appeared. I asked if we could have some tea. She looked hard at me and asked ‘Are you golfers?’: on my answering ‘no’ she shut the door softly and I could hear her hobbling away into the bowels of the house. I felt like Arthur at Orgoglio’s Castle. Anon the ancient dame appeared again and looking even harder at me asked me a second time what I wanted. I repeated that we wanted some tea. She brought her face closer to mine and then with the air of one who comes at last to the real point asked ‘How long did you want it for?’ I was quite unable to answer this question but by God’s grace the witch left me multa parantem dicere and hobbled away once more. This time she left the door open and we walked in and found our way to a comfortable dining room where a plentiful and quite unmagical tea was presently brought us. We sat here for a very long time. A storm of wind got up (raised, I make no doubt, by our hostess, who by the by, may have been the matriarchal dreadfulness) and the ivy lashed the windows. On the next day, Sunday, we went to bathe at Parson’s Pleasure . . . W. left us on Monday . . .

  9–16 July 1924

  I spent most of this time looking up the books I was to examine in . . . This was the first time I had looked into Macaulay for many years: I hope it will be many years before I read him again. It’s not the style (in the narrower sense) that’s the trouble—it’s a very good style within its own limits. But the man is a humbug—a vulgar, shallow, self-satisfied mind: absolutely inaccessible to the complexities and delicacies of the real world. He has the journalist’s air of being a specialist in everything, of taking in all points of view and being always on the side of the angels: he merely annoys a reader who has had the least experience of knowing things, of what knowing is like. There is not two pence worth of real thought or real nobility in him. But he isn’t dull . . .

  TO HIS FATHER: from University College (after reading and correcting many School Certificate essays)

  [27 July 1924]

  I should have answered your last generous letter earlier but for the last three weeks I have been busy from morning to night examining. To examine is like censoring letters in the army or (I fancy) like hearing confessions if you are a priest. Beforehand it seems interesting—a curious vantage point from which to look into the minds of a whole crowd of people ‘as if we were God’s spies’: but it turns out to be cruelly dull. As the censoring subaltern finds that every man in his platoon says the same things in his letters home, and as the priest, no doubt, finds that all his penitents confess the same sins, so the examiner finds that out of hundreds of girls and boys of all social classes from all parts of England, scarcely a dozen make themselves memorable either for original ideas or amusing mistakes.

  The paper which I corrected most of was on David Copperfield and Kinglake’s Eothen: and the first question was ‘Contrast the characters of Uriah Heep and Mr Micawber’. So one takes up one’s first sheet of answers and reads ‘Uriah Heep is the finished type of a rogue: Mr Micawber on the other hand is the portrait of a happy go lucky debtor.’ Then one plods on to the same question answered by the next candidate and reads ‘Mr Micawber is the finished portrait of a happy go lucky debtor, while Uriah Heep is a typical (or perhaps “typicle”) rogue.’ And so it goes on through all the weary hours of the day till one’s brain reels with Uriah Heep and Mr Micawber and one would willingly thrash the editor or whoever it is who has supplied them with that maddening jargon about the ‘finished portrait of a rogue’.

  I must set down on the credit side the fact of having been thus forced to read Eothen. I know of course that it has stood in red cloth, skied near the ceiling in the bookcase nearest the study door, since I can remember—unmoved by twenty spring cleanings, the Russian Revolution and the fall of the German Monarchy. I don’t know whether this is one of the books you have advised me to read or not. It is even possible (such things have been known) that Eothen has lived there all these years in the study bookcase undisturbed not only by the Russian revolution, but equally by the hand of its owner . . . At any rate I most strongly advise you to give yourself a very pleasant evening by taking down Kinglake. If you don’t feel a stomach for the whole thing at least read the interview between the Pasha and the ‘possible policeman of Bedfordshire’ in the first chapter and the Surprise of Sataleih in the last, for humour: and for ornate prose I should recommend the opening of the chapter on Constantinople, the part beginning ‘the stormy bride of the Doge is the bowing slave of the Sultan’.
The Colonel was over here shortly before my durance began and I have converted him to my new idol: so you must by all means ‘come in’ and share the spoil—unless of course you really had read it already . . .

  I had almost forgotten to say that on the occasion of W.’s last visit I went over to Colchester for the night in order to come back with him in the sidecar. The new bike is a noble machine and we stopped to eat our lunch at a railway bridge near Watford which used to be the regular goal of our walks when we were at Wynyard. Here we sat on the slope of the cutting looking down on the L.N.W.R. main line on which we used to gaze in the old days when it was the only object of interest in the landscape. It was strange to find that the said landscape was quite an ordinary, even pleasant English countryside: and it was almost impossible to realize the appalling blankness and hostility which it once wore. In those days we had not grown used to the English colouring (so different from Ulster): our interests and appreciation of nature were limited to the familiar: rivers might wind and trees bloom in vain—one saw it all only as an abominable mass of earth dividing one by hundreds of miles from home and the hills and the sea and ships and everything a reasonable man could care for. We were puzzled for some time as to why the line was invisible from a fence on which we used to sit to watch it: until W. hit on the simple truth that some trees which had been little trees in 1909 had become big trees in 1924. That’s the sort of moment that makes the youngest of us feel old . . .

  TO HIS FATHER: from University College

  Postmark: 28 August 1924

  When I came to the part in your letter where you speak of how God does temper the wind to the shorn lamb I fairly laid it down and laughed. A joke by letter seldom has this effect: it usually arrives but the ghost of the spoken joke—it reaches the intellect without disturbing the face. But the image of Warnie as a shorn lamb, and of the expression with which he would say ‘What d’you mean?’ if you tried to explain to him why he was funny as a shorn lamb, was too much for me. But though you didn’t mention it, I know very well who tempered the wind in the present case.

  I am plodding on with my fourteen lectures—I am at number five, or rather have just finished it. I think I said before that I am not writing them in extenso, only notes. The extemporary element thus reproduced is dangerous for a beginner, but read lectures send people to sleep and I think I must make the plunge from the very beginning and learn to talk, not to recite. I practise continually, expanding my notes to imaginary audiences, but of course it is difficult to be quite sure what will fill an hour. Perhaps I will experiment on you when I come home! The laborious part is the continual verifying of references and quoting. As Johnson says ‘a man can write pretty quickly when he writes from his own mind: but he will turn over one half a library to make one book.’110 And of course when one is trying to teach one can take nothing for granted. Hitherto I have always talked or read to people to whom I could say ‘You remember Bradley’s stunt about judgement’ or ‘The sort of business you get at the beginning of Kant’. But of course that won’t do now—and the deuce of it is that when you actually look the passage up you always find that they either say more or less than you want. Consequently I spend my days running from library to library, or hunting things from the index of one book to another. By the way, in oral instruction, how many times do you have to say the same thing before people tumble to it? You should be able to answer that.

  While it comes into my head—a propos of the photo of Warnie bathing—I take it it is the one of him floating which he showed me: telling me at the same time that one of his colleagues had remarked ‘It is one of the sights of the summer to see Lewis anchored off the coast’ . . .

  TO HIS FATHER: from University College

  [15 October 1924]

  My maiden lecture yesterday went off alright in a sense—the only difficulty was the audience. They put me down for the same time at which a much more important lecture by an established man was being held elsewhere. They also, by a misprint, put me down as lecturing at Pembroke, not at Univ. In these conditions it is not to be wondered at if no one came at all. As a matter of fact four people turned up! This of course is not very encouraging. But I shall not let it come between me and my rest. Better men than I have begun in the same way and one must be patient. As long as Mr Pritchard’s highly essential lectures are held at the same time as mine, I can hardly expect anyone to come to me.111 Don’t be worried about it.

  Otherwise everything goes well. All my new colleagues are kindness itself and everyone does his best to make me feel at home—especially dear old Poynton. I find the actual tutoring easy at the time (tho’ I am curiously tired at the end of the day) and have already struck some quite good men among my pupils. I have seen only one real dud so far—a man who celebrated his first hour with me by telling me as many obvious lies as I have ever heard in a short space . . . I have the College football captain among my pupils and am busy making up that subject also in order to be able to talk to him.

  [Jack and Warren travelled to Belfast by motorcycle and sidecar and were with their father from 23 December to 10 January 1925. They took a few days’ excursion in the South of England before returning to Oxford on 13 January.]

  TO HIS FATHER: from University College

  Postmark: 11 February 1925

  You should have heard from me before, but I have hardly been in a position to write. I spent the first fortnight of the term in bed with flu. I am very much afraid my organism is acquiring the habit of getting this troublesome complaint every time it becomes prevalent. As you have had it yourself and as you doubtless remember the curious psychological results it produces in the convalescent stage—the depression and dead alive feeling—I need not describe them . . .

  W. and I had a magnificent ride back and I was sorry he had not his camera with him. From Shrewsbury to Oxford was all perfect: an orgy of woods, hills, broad rivers, grey castles, Norman abbeys and towns that have always been asleep. I wish I could describe Ledbury to you. It consists of about four broad streets in which every second house is of the Elizabethan type, timbered and white, with gables to the front. It is set in the middle of delightful rolling country and the end of the Malvern hills comes down to the town end. Best of all, no one has yet ‘discovered’ it: it has not become a show place and the inhabitants are quite unaware that there is anything remarkable about it. Ludlow too I would like you to see: with its castle, former seat of the Earl of the Marches, where Comus was first performed. But after all where can you go in the South and West of England without meeting beauty?

  I don’t think I have much news. All goes on as usual here—that is to say very pleasantly on the whole though with some sense of strain and little leisure. My lectures have gone off rather better this term though it’s still very much a case of ‘fit audience though few’. My most persevering auditor is an aged parson (I can’t imagine where he comes from) who takes very copious notes and darts dagger glances at me every now and then. Some one suggests that he is a spy sent out by the board of faculties to detect young lecturers in heresy—and that he keeps on coming with the idea that if he gives me enough rope I shall hang myself in the end. There is also a girl who draws pictures half the time—alas, I have done so myself! . . .

  TO HIS FATHER: from University College

  [April 1925]

  I am sorry to hear of your ‘rotten Easter’: mine was redeemed by the glorious two days trip with Warnie. Otherwise I was pretty well hustled during the vacation, working against time to prepare for this term, which, to tell the truth I begin in rather a tired state. As you once said to me, ‘Talking is the most exhausting of all occupations’.

  The trip was delightful. I was pleased to revisit Salisbury and see it more thoroughly. I well remember my former visit. ‘It was a Sunday’ and not very early in the morning, as you doubtless recollect, when we stopped for a few minutes in Uncle Hamilton’s headlong career and heard morning prayer going on in the Cathedral. At that time I did not agree with you and cared
for it less than Wells or Winchester.

  This time as we came into sight of Salisbury, where, on those big rolling downs that spire can be seen from fifteen miles away, I began to have my doubts. Later, when we had had tea and strolled into the Close I decided that it was very good in its own way but not in my favourite way. But when we came out again and saw it by moonlight after supper, I was completely conquered. It was a perfect spring night with the moon nearly full, and not a breath of wind stirring nor a sound from the streets. The half light enhanced its size, and the sharp masses of shadow falling in three great patches from the three main faces of one side emphasized the extraordinary simplicity in which it differs so from say, Wells.

  That is the real difference I think, and what repelled me at first: the others, mixed of a dozen styles, have grown from century to century like organic things and the slow history of secular change has been built into them. One feels the people behind them more: the nameless craftsmen in this or that gargoyle which is different from every other.

  Salisbury, on the other hand, is the idea of a master mind, struck out at once for ever. Barring mechanical difficulties it might have been built in a day. Doesn’t Kipling talk of the Taj-Mahal as ‘a sigh made marble’? On the same metaphor one might say that Wells is an age made into stone and Salisbury a petrified moment. But what a moment! The more one looks the more it satisfies. What impressed me most—the same thought has come into everyone’s head in such places—was the force of Mind: the thousands of tons of masonry held in place by an idea, a religion: buttress, window, acres of carving, the very lifeblood of men’s work, all piled up there and gloriously useless from the side of the base utility for which alone we build now. It really is typical of a change—the mediaeval town where the shops and houses huddle at the foot of the cathedral, and the modern city where the churches huddle between the sky scraping offices and the appalling ‘stores’. We had another good look at it in the morning light after breakfast—when the plump and confident members of the feathered chapter cooing in the very porch added a new charm. W. says that Salisbury is Barset: if so, we must have been standing near where the Warden said ‘I’m afraid I shall never like Mrs Proudie’ and the Archdeacon took off his hat to ‘let a cloud of steam escape’.