The burst of poetic creativity in January 1927 coincided with the first definite evidence for the spiritual worries and struggles that were to lead Lewis back to Christianity four years later. During a solitary walk on 18 January he was
thinking about imagination and intellect and the unholy muddle I am in about them at present: undigested scraps of anthroposophy and psychoanalysis jostling with orthodox idealism over a background of good old Kirkian rationalism. Lord, what a mess! And all the time (with me) there’s the danger of falling back into most childish superstitions, or of running into dogmatic materialism to escape them. I hoped the ‘King of Drum’ might write itself so as to clear things up – the way ‘Dymer’ cleared up the Christina Dream business.37
But he was still attacking religion – with, perhaps, some of the shrill contempt of the man who does not want to believe rather than of one who simply does not believe. ‘A pest on all this nonsense which has half spoiled so much beauty and wonder for me, degraded pure imagination into pretentious lying, and truths of the spirit into mere matters of fact, slimed everything over with the trail of its infernal mumbo-jumbo,’ he wrote in his diary on 8 February 1927, after rereading the myth of Atlantis from Plato, and realizing how Steiner had interpreted it from the point of view of Anthroposophy. ‘How I would have enjoyed this myth once: now behind Plato’s delightful civilized imagination I always have the picture of dark old traditions picked up from mumbling medicine men, professing to be “private information” about facts. To bed and had a much worse night than I have had for a long time.’38
But Lewis’s spiritual biography of the next few years will be dealt with fully in the next chapter: in 1927 he was still trying to ‘live by philosophy’ – like A.C. Bradley in The Masque of Balliol he was still seeking refuge ‘in the blessed Absolute’. His diary writing was, however, growing more and more sporadic, and it was, he said, his acceptance of Theism which ‘cured me of the time-wasting and foolish practice of keeping a diary’.39
Meanwhile his outer life at Oxford continued much on the lines of any other don. Though still superior to and contemptuous of the average philistine undergraduates – ‘a drinking, guffawing cry of barbarians with hardly any taste among them’40 – he performed what seemed his duties to them with conscientious thoroughness. Evenings were given up to reading and debating societies; he attended parties given by his pupils – one of these by John Betjeman on 24 January 1927 in his rooms in St Aldates – ‘a very beautiful panelled room looking across to the side of the House’, he recorded.
I found myself pitchforked into a galaxy of super-undergraduates, including Sparrow* of the Nonesuch Press and an absolutely silent and astonishingly ugly person called McNiece,† of whom Betjeman said afterwards, ‘He doesn’t say much, but he’s a great poet’. It reminded me of the man in Boswell ‘who was always thinking of Locke and Newton’. This silent bard comes from Belfast or rather Carrickfergus. The conversation was chiefly about lace curtains, arts and crafts (which they all dislike), china ornaments, silver versus earthen teapots, architecture, and the strange habits of ‘hearties’. The best thing was Betjeman’s very curious collection of books. Came away with him and back to college to pull him along through Wulfstan until dinner time.41
Certainly Lewis did not find himself at home among the brittle young world of what he was later to describe as ‘The Empty Twenties’ – but there was some truth in a moment of self-recognition recorded the previous year: ‘Was led somehow into a train of thought in which I made the unpleasant discovery that I am becoming a prig – righteous indignation against certain modern affectations has its dangers, yet I don’t know how to avoid it either.’42
Warnie was setting off for Shanghai on 11 April 1927, where he would remain with the Royal Army Service Corps for almost three years. Warnie was becoming part of Jack’s Oxford family and after a night there he left in a rather nostalgic mood. ‘The bus,’ he wrote in his diary on 7 April, ‘did not start at once, and I watched Jack in his mac and old cloth hat stride along until he was out of sight.’43 He had visited Ireland briefly the week before to see his father – for the last time, as it turned out.
Lewis stopped writing a regular diary at this time, though he continued to record his activities in an occasional journal to Warnie. For part at least of the following year he kept a diary in Anglo-Saxon, none of which seems to have survived except a literal translation of the account of the election of George Gordon to succeed Sir Herbert Warren as President of Magdalen in 1928.
In the first of the diary-letters to his brother, the section dated 26 April, Lewis described a walking tour with Owen Barfield, Cecil Harwood and Walter ‘Wof’ Field* to Marlborough and Salisbury Plain. This was always his favourite form of holiday and he continued to make such tours until his mid-fifties when failing health put an end to them, his most frequent companion in later years being his brother and their most usual venue the north of Ireland during the Long Vacation.44
Apart from longer or shorter walks and thoughts on the books he was reading, Lewis had little news to impart either to his father or to his brother at this time. Albert Lewis’s health was beginning to cause anxiety, and Jack exerted himself to be entertaining in his letters, quoting amusing schoolboy howlers from the examination papers he was again correcting that summer, and telling anecdotes of the more eccentric dons with whom he came in contact. There is an occasional illuminating remark about himself: ‘Like all us Celts,’ he wrote on 29 July, ‘I am a born rhetorician, one who finds pleasure in the expression of forcible emotions independently of their grounds and even to the extent to which they are felt at any time save the moment of speaking.’45 And the same letter concludes, ‘I am going bald at a prodigious rate and in a few years time you will have a better head of hair than either of your sons.’46
In September Lewis was on holiday with Mrs Moore and Maureen at Perranporth in Cornwall and wrote an ecstatic account of the surf-bathing to Warnie. He tore himself away from the delights of the seaside for a visit to his father. ‘Jack arrived, bright and cheerful and amusing as usual,’47 recorded Albert Lewis in his diary. But the Cornish trip ‘was not official and should not be referred to in letters’ to their father, he instructed Warnie.
This year Lewis began learning the language of the Sagas: ‘it is an exciting experience when I remember my first passion for things Norse,’ he wrote in his diary on 8 February 1927.48 He described the experience to Arthur Greeves in a letter of 26 June:
I am realizing a number of very old dreams in the way of books – reading Sir Gawain in the original* and, above all, learning Old Icelandic. We have a little Icelandic Club in Oxford called the ‘Kolbítar’: which means (literally) ‘coal-biters’, i.e. an Icelandic word for old cronies who sit round the fire so close that they look as if they were biting the coals. We have so far read the Younger Edda and the Volsung Saga: next term we shall read the Laxdale Saga. You will be able to imagine what a delight this is to me, and how, even in turning over the pages of my Icelandic Dictionary, the mere name of god or giant catching my eye will sometimes throw me back fifteen years into a wild dream of northern skies and Valkyrie music: only they are now even more beautiful seen through a haze of memory.49
He spent four weeks with his father towards the end of the Long Vacation. ‘Jacks sets me a very good example of industry,’ wrote Albert Lewis to Warnie on 26 September 1927. ‘I leave him at breakfast when I go out and immediately he has finished it he goes up to the end room and works steadily till lunch. In the afternoon he goes out for a walk. I am glad to say that he is in good health and great spirits and has many funny “wheezes” about the older Dons at Oxford.’50
Not all Lewis’s ‘work’, however, was of a very academic nature, as he seems to have spent much of the month at Little Lea compiling an Encyclopaedia Boxoniana of all his and Warnie’s early stories.51 At about this time he also began his only attempt at a modern novel, which did not get much beyond the first 7,000 words. The fragment that rema
ins among the Lewis Papers52 takes the narrator, Dr Easley, from Liverpool to Belfast on a first visit to his Irish relations, and includes a good deal of amusing dialogue with a loquacious Irishman whom he meets on the voyage – typical of the voyages that Lewis had made and was still to make so many times.
At Oxford there was little time for writing during term. Most of each day was taken up with tutorials and lectures, with a walk in the afternoon if not captured for chores by Mrs Moore. The evenings were mostly filled also, as he explained to Warnie on 12 December 1927 when excusing the brevity of letters written to him in term time:
My evenings for the fortnight in term run thus: Mon. Play reading with undergraduates (till Midnight). Tue. Mermaid club. Wedn. Anglo-Saxon with undergraduates. Thurs. – Frid. – Sat. – Sunday. Common room till late. Mon. Play reading. Tue. Icelandic Society. Wedn. Anglo-Saxon. Thurs. Philosophical supper. Fri. – Sat. – Sunday. As you will see this gives at the very best only three free evenings in the even weeks and two in the odd. And into these two everything in the way of casual entertaining, correspondence, and what we used to call ‘A-h-h-h!’ has to be crammed.53
That Christmas he spent with his father in Belfast. As Albert Lewis aged, he became more and more difficult and demanding, but Lewis himself was learning ever greater patience and charity – though still occasionally letting off steam to Warnie in letters packed with examples of their father’s exigent behaviour. This Christmas, besides walks with Arthur Greeves, he managed to get out for one evening to give him and John Bryson dinner at a Belfast hotel: ‘to be seated in a hotel, eating an ordinary dinner and drinking your wine, indulging in ordinary chat, and then to reflect that Belfast is outside the window, is a marvellous sensation. I discovered to my surprise that Bryson (whom I always regarded as an imposing junior Don) was in just the same state at home as Arthur and myself,’ he wrote to Warnie in the current diary-letter.54
Albert Lewis finally retired on a pension from the Petty Sessions in May 1928, his health growing more precarious. The poor man suffered acutely from lumbago and the occasional bout of sciatica. This made visits home even more of a penance, since his father was in the house all the time; but Lewis managed to stay for part of each vacation, and continued with long and cheerful letters.
Early in 1928 he was working on the idea of a book about sixteenth-century letters, sparked off by reading the letters of Erasmus, a task necessitating long, quiet days in the Bodleian which he described in glowing terms to his father. But very soon he found himself immersed in and fascinated by medieval French poetry, of which he would transcribe and translate scraps in letters to Warnie, apologizing that ‘my reading contains less and less that I can share with my non-professional friends’, but delighting in his new discovery of the world of courtly love and allegory. ‘Don’t you think this is rather jolly?’ he wrote to Warnie in that same letter of 24 April 1928. ‘In one of those gardens in a dream, which medieval love poetry is full of, we find the tomb of a knight, dead for love, covered with flowers.’ Then, after quoting the Old French, he goes on, ‘I suppose it can be very roughly Englished:
And birds that for the soul of that Signor
Who lay beneath, songs of true love did pour:
Being hungered, each from off the flowers bore
A kiss, and felt that day no hunger more.55
‘The odd thing is that one would expect the same rhyme going through to be monotonous and ugly: but to my ear it produces a beautiful lulling like the sound of the sea.’56
This letter is the first indication that Lewis’s mind was turning seriously in the direction of his most famous volume of literary scholarship, The Allegory of Love, and by July of the same year he was writing the first draft. ‘I have actually begun the first chapter of my book,’ he told his father on July 10. ‘The actual book is going to be about medieval love poetry and the medieval idea of love, which is a very paradoxical business indeed when you go into it.’57
Little else happened in 1928 of which Lewis took much note. Besides the usual visits to Belfast, Arthur Greeves stayed with him at Magdalen in the early autumn. After a great deal of ‘College politics’, inner rings and cliques functioning in full force, George Gordon was elected President of Magdalen in November, to the general satisfaction of Lewis himself, and indeed the majority of the Fellows.
Lewis spent Christmas 1928 with his father – Albert’s last, though his son had no idea that such a thing was likely – and was able to present him with his two earliest reviews, both in The Oxford Magazine, of Evelyn Waugh’s Rossetti (23 October) and Hugh Kingsmill’s Matthew Arnold (15 November) – the first laudatory and the second condemnatory in the extreme, one of the earliest examples of his witheringly logical approach, the delenda est Carthago in which he became so adept in later years. (Yet he developed no animus against the author since, as Chad Walsh records, he was quoting Kingsmill’s brilliant parody of A.E. Housman with much glee and commendation a dozen years later.)58
A flu-ish cold, with temperature and sore throat, confined Lewis to bed and prevented him from visiting his father in April 1929, his only holiday from Oxford being a four-day walking tour with Barfield and several other friends from Salisbury to Lyme Regis.
As Lewis was having to devote July 1929, as usual, to the correction of examination papers, he wrote to his father on 18 June about a holiday together: ‘I am still undecided (it depends largely on when I finish Chapter II of the book) whether August 12th or something like August 25th would be best for me,’59 at the same time urging his father to take a holiday with him away from Little Lea. He crossed to Ireland on the earlier date and was writing to Warnie on the 25th: ‘This is a line to let you know that P. [Papy] is rather seriously ill.’60 Albert Lewis’s health deteriorated rapidly, with Jack in day and night attendance – and writing bulletins to Warnie in Shanghai, who could not possibly receive them for a month or six weeks.
On 3 September an operation was deemed necessary. This was performed a few days later, and seemed successful. ‘The operation, in spite of what they prophesied, discovered cancer,’ wrote Jack to Warnie on 29 September.
They said he might live a few years. I remained at home, visiting him in the Nursing Home for ten days … By this time I had been at home since Aug. 11th, and my work for next term was getting really desperate and, as [the doctor] said I might easily wait for several weeks more and still be in the same position … I crossed to Oxford on Saturday, Sept. 22. On Tuesday 24 I got a wire saying that he was worse, caught the train an hour later, and arrived to find that he had died on Tuesday afternoon.61
Jack was confused about the dates when he wrote this. He left Oxford on Tuesday, 24 September. However, when he arrived in Belfast on the evening of Wednesday 25 September, he found that his father had died that afternoon.
Both Warnie and Jack felt Albert Lewis’s death far more than they had thought possible; and the wrench of leaving Little Lea, their home for most of their lives, whatever their later reactions to it, was also acute. The letters for the next six months are taken up mainly with the business of sorting and selling or keeping the contents of the house, employing a caretaker while the house was put up for sale, and generally winding up the Lewis affairs in Belfast.
In November the letters show Lewis living a normal Oxford life again – sitting up late talking of Norse mythology with Tolkien; learning textual criticism so as to be able to teach it the following term to B.Litt. students; reading Anglo-Saxon poetry with a congenial and promising pupil, Neil Ker.* ‘Ker shares to the full’, Lewis wrote to Arthur on 5 November, ‘my enthusiasm for the saga world and we had a pleasant evening – with the wind still roaring outside.’62 He also attended meetings of the Icelandic Society, the Linguistic Society, the Michaelmas Club, and so on.
As soon as term ended he was off to Ireland, staying with Arthur and setting to work at Little Lea each day. On his return journey to Oxford on 21 December he was reading Bunyan’s Grace Abounding: ‘I should like to know … in gener
al,’ Jack wrote to Arthur on 22 December, ‘what you think of all the darker side of religion as we find it in old books. Formerly I regarded it as mere devil-worship based on horrible superstitions. Now that I have found, and am still finding more and more the element of truth in the old beliefs, I feel I cannot dismiss even their dreadful side so cavalierly. There must be something in it: only what?’63
He was present at the Christmas Eve celebrations in Magdalen for the first time that year, and found them most impressive. He still did not attend church, even on Christmas Day, but was finding more and more of a religious experience during his long walks in the country – ‘the utter homeliness, the Englishness, the Christendom of it’, he wrote to Arthur on 26 December. It was, he said, so different from a walk they had taken in Co. Antrim a week or so earlier, and yet that too was but ‘another instance of … the “broad-mindedness” of the infinite … Perhaps it is less strange that the Absolute should make both than that we should be able to love both.’64
Looking back in 1935 to his long friendship with Greeves, Lewis summed up their relationship and what he owed to the friend who always remained steadfast to the Christian faith however much he bombarded him with the ‘thin artillery’ of the rationalist:
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