Letters of C. S. Lewis

by C. S. Lewis

  As to the ‘College’ in the other sense—as a human society—I can say little yet. One’s first impressions of a new set are changed many times in the first month. They are all very nice to me. The general tone of the place strikes me as rather slack and flippant—I mean among the Dons—but I may very well be mistaken. Sambo [the President] hardly ever appears. The most surprising thing is that they are much less formal than Univ. They don’t dress for dinner except when the President dines on which occasion a warning notice is sent round to our rooms. Again, there are an enormous number of us compared with Univ., and we meet much more often. Thus we breakfast and lunch in Common Room; meals in your own rooms (which I had thought universal at Oxford) being unknown here either for Dons or undergraduates. The latter are a little aloof from the rest of Oxford: not entirely thro’ affectation but because as a matter of geography we are ‘at the town’s end’: or, as someone said, we are the beginning of suburbia. I have very few pupils at present, wh. of course is helping me to improve my reading. They are quite nice fellows . . .

  TO HIS FATHER: from Magdalen College

  4 December [1925]

  I have had a nasty blow—don’t be alarmed, it concerns neither life, limb or reputation. I was already rather worried about the difficulty of preparing an English lecture in the time at my disposal, but by dint of choosing a short subject which I know well (XVIII century precursors of the Romantic movement) I hoped to be able to acquit myself well enough. What was my displeasure on finding, when the rough draft of next term’s lecture list was sent me, that my old tutor Wilson was lecturing on ‘English Poetry from Thomson to Cowper’. Now of course my ‘precursors’, with the exception of some critics and other prose writers, are just the poets from Thomson and Cowper. It is in fact the same subject under a different name. This means that, being neither able nor willing to rival Wilson, I am driven to concentrate on the prose people of whom at present I know very little. I have as hard a spell cut out for me between now and next term as I have ever had. Of course all the more easy and obvious subjects which will leap to your mind are long since occupied by the bigwigs.

  The immediate consequence is that I am afraid I shall scarcely be able to take more than a week at home this Christmas. To compensate for this I shall try to get across at Easter. I am sorry to disappoint you (and myself): but it is only one of the many evils which I see following from this bad luck about the lecture. At the very best it means working much harder for a much poorer result. Of course no one, least of all Wilson himself, is to blame . . .

  TO HIS FATHER: from Magdalen College (Following a visit with their father in Belfast 20–28 December Warren was posted to Woolwich.)

  [5 January 1926]

  Warnie and I had a rather interesting journey back. First there was the episode of the friendly and intoxicated stranger in the smoking room of the Liverpool boat: but I feel that the Colonel’s pen will do that story more justice than mine. Secondly there was the amazingly erudite fellow traveller in the train. I suppose he had gathered from our conversation—W. was reading Evelyn’s diaries—that we were bookish people, but he let several hours pass before he quite suddenly chipped in, in a rather apologetic manner. I surmise that he lives among people who do not share his tastes and it is a relief to him to talk about them. He did not speak with the voice of an educated man, but his reading was curious: Pepys, Evelyn, Burnet, Boswell, Macaulay, Trollope, Thackeray, Ruskin, Morris and The Golden Bough. He seemed to be some kind of architect or decorator.

  Now this is the sort of thing I like. To have a literary conversation in the study at Leeborough or the common room at Magdalen is (by comparison) nothing, because one remains in the charmed circle of ones own set and caste: there is nothing to refute the accusation of being out of the world, of playing with things that perhaps derive a fictitious value from the chatter of specially formed groups. But to talk over the same things with a man whose aitches are uncertain in a third class carriage—this restores ones faith in the value of the written word and makes one feel suddenly at home in ones country. It is the difference between grapes in a greenhouse and a hillside of vines.

  The other interesting thing in our journey was the new scenery produced by the floods. Round about Warwick (you remember Warwick) for miles at a time there was nothing but water between one hedgerow and the next—and then the little hills made into islands. A village on a rise with ‘the decent church that fronts (or is it crowns) the neighbouring hill’ has a very fine effect.

  You probably spotted the enclosed picture [of Magdalen College] in today’s Times, but I send it in case you have not. The long building to the right of the tower is ‘New Building’ which Gibbon, who lived in it, called ‘a stately pile’ . . . You can imagine from the picture what a magnificent view I now have when the park has been converted into a lake. On a fine day when the sky makes the water blue and the wind fills it with ripples, one might almost take it for an arm of the sea. Of course I am not forgetting the serious side of the floods: but after all, what would you? I can’t save the life of Dutch peasants or the pockets of Warwickshire peasants by refusing to enjoy the beauty of the thing as it appears from my window . . .

  TO HIS FATHER: from Magdalen College

  Postmark: 25 January 1926

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

  I re-read some of my favourite Jane Austens and read for the first time that jolly, unexpected tale, Quentin Durward. I even took the chance of going on with my neglected Italian and got through several cantos of Boiardo: an interminable fairy-tale kind of a poet, full of dragons and distressed damsels, without the slightest moral or intellectual significance. It is suited to the atmosphere of a day in bed with the snow falling outside: the drift, the holiday from all sublunary cares. Then one returns to a primitive and natural life as regards sleeping and waking. One dozes when the doze comes unsought and if one lies castle building at night one does not mind because there is no getting up in the morning.

  But of course all these delights have to be paid for: the first few days back to work when legs still ache and hours are long, are an unwelcome shock of earth—and that, I think, is the really bad part of it. I hope you are now past that stage . . .

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

  FROM HIS DIARY: at Magdalen College

  27 May 1926

  Betjemann and Valentin came with O. E. [Old English].120 Betjemann appeared in a pair of eccentric bedroom slippers and said he hoped I didn’t mind them as he had a blister. He seemed so pleased with himself that I couldn’t help saying that I should mind them very much myself but that I had no objection t
o his wearing them—a view which I believe surprised him . . .

  TO HIS FATHER: from Magdalen College

  5 June 1926

  I hear with delight from Warnie that you propose to visit England this summer. Let us determine that no light reason shall be allowed to upset this plan, and no difficulty be made into an impossibility. My idea is that I should cross to Ireland for part of my usual time and that we shd then return to Oxford and you spend some days with me in College. There is a set of guest rooms on this very staircase, so we should be very snug and able to hob nob a’ nights without going out of doors. We could dine in Common Room (not dressed) or go to an ordinary in the town as we preferred, and you would have an opportunity of sauntering about the city and its fields with more leisure than Uncle Hamilton’s peremptory programme allowed us. Then, if possible, W. could come up for a week and we might proceed to London or elsewhere. Do make every effort to realize this plan. Now that I am in College we have a pied à terre in England which seems to have all the advantages and none of the drawbacks of a hotel, and which certainly ought to make visits more possible than they have ever been before. It is rather important to try and fix a date, and I should be glad to know when you think you could get away.

  But I know what I do in raising the point of ‘date’. At least I presume it is from you that I inherit a peculiar tendency by which a chill comes over the happiest designs as soon as a definite detail of time or place is raised. At first all is attractive and like a floating island, detached from the actual world: at the mention of a date, obstructions crowd upon the mind: arrangements to be made, difficulties to be overcome, and all the repellent lumber of packings, boats, time tables and interrupted habits rush in and ‘quench the smoking flax’. The odds are that the whole scheme, if injudiciously pressed at that moment becomes a sort of bugbear. Is this a true bill? It is of me, I know only too well. The only remedy seems to be to remember that every happiness we have attained in the past depended on the lucky moments when we were not cowed by the ‘lumber’. (Lord! Was there ever such a young fellow for preaching at his elders? He cannot take up his pen but a steady flow of doctrine begins. Perhaps it comes from taking pupils.)

  A heavy responsibility rests on those who forage through a dead man’s correspondence and publish it indiscriminately. In those books of Raleigh’s we find, as you say, letters like ‘a glass of good champagne’ side by side with mere squibs thrown off in high spirits or mere grumbles written when he was liverish.121 Notice how Liverpool, India and Oxford all come up for castigation in turn. Much of this should never have seen print. The antireligious passages are odd. Something must be allowed for the mere turn of his language which was always violent and dogmatic—like Johnson . . . When all allowance has been made for the haphazard nature of casual letter writing, it remains true that there must be a flaw in a man who is always blessing or damning something or other. There are too many exstasies and the opposite . . .

  I have been bothered into the last job I ever expected to do this term: taking a class of girls once a week at one of the women’s Colleges. However, I am not engaged to be married yet, and there are always seven of them there together, and the pretty ones are stupid and the interesting ones are ugly, so it is alright. I say this because as a general rule women marry their tutors. I suppose if a girl is determined to marry and has a man alone once a week to whom she can play the rapt disciple (most fatal of all poses to male vanity) her task is done . . .

  The best strike story I have heard was about engines. A train (with amateur driver) set out from Paddington for Bristol, first stop Bath. When it reached Bath half an hour earlier than normal express time, every single passenger got out of that train and refused to enter it again. Apparently the genius in the engine had just opened the throttle full, said to the stoker ‘Carry on’, and left the rest to fate . . .

  FROM HIS DIARY: at Magdalen College

  6 June 1926

  As Hardie122 and I were coming across to New Building we were overtaken by J. A.123 who proposed a stroll in the walks. We went in [and] sat in the garden till it was quite dark. He was very great, telling us about his travels in the Balkans. The best things were (a) the masterful ladies (English of course) on a small Greek steamer who made such a nuisance of themselves that the Captain said ‘Have you no brothers? Why have they not got someone to marry you?’ and went on muttering at intervals for the rest of the evening ‘It ought to have been possible to get someone’. (b) The Austrian minister at some unhealthy town who took J. A. and his party out for a walk on the railway line, which was the only place level enough to walk on, and beginning to balance himself on the rails, remarked sadly ‘C’est mon seul sport’. (c) The Greek clergyman who asked J. A. and his sister to tea and when they departed, accompanied them back to their hotel repeating ‘You will remember me?’ ‘Yes, certainly’ said J. A. The clergyman repeated his touching request about fifteen times and each time J. A. (tho’ somewhat surprised) assured him with increasing warmth that he would never forget him. It was only afterwards that they realized that the reverend gentleman was asking for a tip . . .

  13 June 1926

  D tired but I hope none the worse. The chief excitement today was over Henry, Dotty’s tortoise, who was discovered about two hundred yards from the gate, working his passage towards the London road. He was brought back and tethered by a cord across his body, and supplied with lettuce leaves and snails, in which he took no interest. He escaped repeatedly during the day. When I buy a tortoise I shall say I want a quiet one for the ladies. Began G. K. Chesterton’s Eugenics and Other Evils.

  4 July 1926

  Beginning to re-read The Well at the World’s End. I was anxious to see whether the old spell still worked. It does—rather too well. This going back to books read at that age is humiliating: one keeps on tracing what are now quite big things in one’s mental outfit to curiously small sources. I wondered how much even of my feeling for external nature comes out of the brief convincing little descriptions of mountains and woods in this book.

  6 July 1926

  Home for tea, with a sharp headache, at 4.30 and changed socks and shoes. Poor D felt too ill to take even a cup of tea. Afterwards I went over the revised proofs of Dymer wh. arrived today from Canto I, 30, to the end of the whole. I never liked it less. I felt that no mortal could get any notion of what the devil it was all about. I am afraid this sort of stuff is very much hit or miss, yet I think it is my only real line . . .

  [ Jack was unable to persuade his father to travel to Oxford for a visit. He was, however, on a holiday at ‘Little Lea’ 11–20 September and, so, with Mr Lewis when his long narrative poem, Dymer, was published by J. M. Dent on 18 September under the pseudonym ‘Clive Hamilton’.

  On 19 September Warren learned that he had been selected to attend a six months’ course in Economics at London University beginning 4 October. He was able to travel with Jack to Belfast on 21 December to be with their father for Christmas. On 8 January 1927 Mr Lewis wrote in his diary: ‘Warnie and Jacks returned tonight by Fleetwood. As the boat did not sail until 11. O.C. they stayed with me to 9.30. So ended a very pleasant holiday. Roses all the way.’]

  FROM HIS DIARY: at ‘Hillsboro’

  10 January 1927

  It was a most extraordinary afternoon. Most of the sky was very pale creamy blue, and there were clouds about, of the coldest shade of dark blue I have ever seen. The further hills were exactly the same as the clouds in colour and texture. Then near the sun the sky simply turned white and the sun itself (its outline was invisible) was a patch of absolutely pure white light that looked as if it had no more power of heating than moonlight—tho’ it was quite a mild day in fact. I got into a tremendously happy mood . . .

  3 February 1927

  Dined in and sat in common room beside J. A. who told me of a lady who had long worried him by coming up at the end of lectures to ask questions, and finally wrote offering him her hand. ‘She pretended it was a joke afterwards’ he said, shaki
ng his white head. ‘But it wasn’t. And she wasn’t the only one either. A man who lectures to women takes his life in his hand’ . . .

  8 February 1927

  Spent the morning partly on the Edda, partly on the Realtetus. Hammered my way through a couple of pages in about an hour, but I am making some headway. It is an exciting experience when I remember my first passion for things Norse under the initiation of Longfellow (Tegner’s Drapa and the Saga of K. Olaf) at about the age of nine: and its return, much stronger, when I was about thirteen, when the high priests were M. Arnold, Wagner’s music, and the Arthur Rackham Ring. It seemed an impossible [thing] then that I shd ever come to read these things in the original. The old authentic thrill came back to me once or twice this morning: the mere names of god and giant catching my eye as I turned the pages of Zoega’s dictionary was enough . . .

  9 February 1927

  [A. J. Carlyle] told me a lot more about the murderer of Rasputin, who had been incapable of passing any exam and had suggested to the Fark. that ‘of course, he presumed, there wd be no difficulty in arranging these things in the case of a person of quality’. Being told that the organization of our exams was inflexibly democratic he exclaimed ‘But what am I to do? My parents will not let me marry unless I get some sort of certificate or diploma. They will only send me to some other university.’ Finally Farquharson and Carlyle made him out a parchment v. solemnly, a sort of certificate of their own . . .