C. S. Lewis

by Roger Lancelyn Green

  Another undergraduate who became Lewis’s pupil remembers his interview for a demyship at Magdalen in March 1941, and ‘the plump, cheerful man, with a large red countryman’s face, and a loud voice, who rolled his r’s, and who asked most of the questions’. And when Derek Brewer* had been accepted by the college and written to ask his future tutor what he should read before coming up in October, Lewis had replied with a long letter of good advice: certain relevant Latin works (to be read in the Loeb edition with the English on the opposite page); ‘a fairly sound Biblical background is assumed by most of the older English writers: if you lack this, acquire it’; and concluded: ‘Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton are certainties whatever shortened course or ordinary course you take. Next to these in importance come Malory, Spenser, Donne, Browne, Dryden, Pope, Swift, Johnson, Wordsworth. After that it becomes more a matter of taste. The great thing is to be always reading but not to get bored – treat it not like work, more as a vice! Your book bill ought to be your biggest extravagance.’

  Derek Brewer came into residence for a year in Michaelmas Term 1941 – and found Oxford still itself as far as English literature was concerned. Lewis rarely suggested ‘any critical books, and in those days there were indeed few that were much good. Neither he nor anyone else ever mentioned to me such names as I.A. Richards or F.R. Leavis. Nor did Lewis ever mention his own work’ – though the days of decline were even then at hand when freshers on coming up would inquire who their examiners were to be, and then make a point of reading and digesting anything they had written. For Lewis, true to the great tradition of English scholarship, concentrated always ‘on actual texts and their historical meaning, rather than on modern critical books’, and was never fully convinced that any Oxford tutor could fall so low as to teach the tenets of cultural disintegration which he sought to discredit in The Abolition of Man.

  In 1947 Derek Brewer returned to take up his interrupted course, and records that

  in those crowded days just after the War Lewis gave tutorials from 10 to 1 and 5 to 7 (apart from one or two lectures), from Monday to Friday. A heavy load … He had a set of rooms in the middle of the handsome eighteenth-century New Buildings at Magdalen. The high-ceilinged principal room faced north over the deer-park, and we met there in groups for Old English translation and occasionally for individual tutorials. A door led off to a bedroom, and another to a small inner room, with windows looking south to the rest of the College, where Lewis kept his books, and we often had tutorials. All the furniture was very shabby. A large table filled the middle of the main room, where he wrote, with wooden chairs around, and there were a couple of battered armchairs by the marble fireplace in which we sat opposite each other for tutorials. There was always a smell of pipe-tobacco. My most vivid memory of Lewis in this room is during the great freeze-up in the winter of 1947, when there was no heating,* and he sat in his armchair fully clothed, with a dressing-gown on top, and on top of that a blanket which came up over his head like a cowl. It was rather like medieval castles, he said, where you put on extra clothes when you came inside, as Gawain did in the great Middle-English poem of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

  The general form of the tutorial was simple. First, after two or three minutes of general conversation, one read the essay. The reading of this, and the effort of composition were, if done seriously, the major part of a full week’s work that included preparation of translation and attendance at lectures. Reading the essay usually took me about ten minutes. Lewis listened with extreme intentness, not, I am all too sure, because of the fascination of my words, but because it was his duty. Once, in the middle of an essay, the ’phone rang. I stopped and he answered it in the other room. When he returned after a five-minute interruption he repeated verbatim my last sentence as far as it had got. He had an astonishing verbatim memory, and could repeat chunks of prose to illustrate a point arising in discussion. Given any line in Paradise Lost he could usually continue with the next line.2

  Warnie Lewis comments also in his Memoir on his brother’s amazing memory, which he put down to ‘the long years of grinding self-inflicted poverty which had made it second nature to him never to buy a book if he could master its contents without doing so’. Even in later years when his own works were bringing in large royalties, Lewis seldom bought books, and had completely lost his early love of fine editions, handmade paper and the other desiderata of the true bibliophile. On one occasion Green tried to give him a copy of George MacDonald’s first book – a first edition inscribed by MacDonald to his wife’s sister: but Lewis refused it, saying that he already had Within and Without (1855) in the cheap reprint of MacDonald’s Collected Poems (1892), and took no interest in first editions or association copies. This even went so far as his own manuscripts were concerned – which he used as scrap paper as soon as typescripts had been made for the publisher. Green found that notes about one of his own books were written on the backs of two odd pages of an early version of Miracles: had he realized in time that Lewis treated even his completed manuscripts in this way, he would have tried to save one from the general destruction!

  Apart from necessary work books and essential texts, Lewis’s meagrely populated shelves looked as if they had been stocked entirely from ‘the fourpenny box’ – and in fact many of the sets: the ‘Border’ Scott, the ‘Gadshill’ Dickens, the ‘Swanston’ Stevenson, and so on, the titles almost illegible on their faded spines, probably came from his father’s store of books at Little Lea. To these he was always pleased to add cheap volumes of fiction or copies of his friends’ books: while refusing gifts of first editions as such from Green, he was delighted with spare copies of books new to him by such mutual favourites as Rider Haggard, F. Anstey and E. Nesbit – and was blissfully unaware when a really rare volume that he happened to want slipped in among them.

  But to return to Derek Brewer’s recollections of tutorials with Lewis:

  As I read the essay, he made notes. Many of these were minute points of verbal structure, rhythm, clarity, precision. In general Lewis had a Johnsonian literalism. He always claimed to be baffled by the phrase, too often applied to Chaucer, ‘with tongue in cheek’, and would put it to comic visual effect. Such literalism, both on this small scale, and more generally in his whole outlook, was a very important part of his criticism, his religion, and the Socratic faux-naïveté that he often used in argument. To return to the essay, if he started to doodle I knew I was being boring. When the essay was finished he first gave a general word or two of judgement. One week I surpassed myself on Shakespeare’s tragedies, and rejoiced in high praise. Next I thought I had produced something equally stunning, a judicious condemnation of the late romances. ‘Well,’ he began, ‘I couldn’t disagree more.’ He was a ‘romance critic’, not (as most modern critics are) a ‘tragedy critic’. After a general comment or two he usually pointed out the small-scale deficiencies of the essay, not at all in a captious way. Then we discussed the principal points made, and any other things to be said about the texts. This was almost always delightfully interesting. He had a vivid response to the most various texts, a ready penetrating comment and wit. One of his most notable characteristics as a man as well as a tutor was his generous acceptance of variety and difference, sure of his own standards but tolerant of others, and of failings. Add to this an almost inexhaustible interest in literature and ideas.

  It would be easy to continue with recollections of Lewis as a tutor, for he had so many articulate pupils, from John Betjeman to Kenneth Tynan* and John Wain,† and so many who ranked high in the ranks of English studies – John Lawlor, R.T. Davies, Derek Brewer and many more – that one must stand for all in the present case, though several of them have published excellent descriptions and assessments.

  But, as John Lawlor has pointed out, ‘the plain fact is that he hated teaching’.3 In his earlier years as a tutor Lewis was disappointed and frustrated by the poor numbers of students reading English, which made it necessary for him to continue for some time giving tu
torials in philosophy and even political science; too few even of his English pupils rose above the mediocre (to one of his outstanding powers), and,

  Where he could not strike fire, he tended to accept with ironic resignation; but it did not endear teaching to him. Thirdly – and I have, I believe, kept the true order of importance – Lewis valued time as few men I have met, before or since, have done. After an early breakfast and a walk, nine o’clock in Term time would see him seated at his writing-table, wooden penholder and steel nib moving steadily over the page until the ten o’clock pupil knocked on his door. ‘The hungry generations tread thee down’ was a witticism he ruefully acknowledged. No man was better equipped for silent industry, hour upon hour … To Lewis, tutorial work was a school of patience; and if one was ever disappointed that one’s best things had gone unregarded, one was also conscious that one’s best wasn’t good enough to feed and sustain his most remarkable mind. The effect of this was that a good many of Lewis’s pupils, including the very best of them, were reduced to silence or, worse, incoherence when dealing with him …4

  Lewis had something of this numbing effect on others besides pupils. Apart from the odd word at lectures, Green met him for the first time in November 1939 when he was asked to coffee and port one evening. There were several others present, probably Lewis’s brighter pupils, and the talk was so scintillating and rarefied that Green sat a mute and overawed spectator – and was never asked again. In March 1944, having been Lewis’s pupil at a series of B.Litt. classes on textual criticism and having also met him once or twice under other circumstances, Green called on him early one evening to show him a letter from Gordon Bottomley* about the recently published Preface to ‘Paradise Lost’. Under the circumstances Lewis cannot have resented having his time broken into, and he talked in friendly fashion for half an hour. But as his visitor was leaving, he suddenly boomed out: ‘Green! How old are you now?’ ‘Twenty-five, sir.’ ‘Ah! A sad age to reach! You will never again be able to read one of the great epics of the world for the first time!’ Green left hurriedly lest his opinion should be asked on Ariosto or Camoëns.

  But Lewis was famous – or notorious – for such devastating remarks, which were too often reported maliciously as examples of his contempt for young people and his delight in scoring off them. In fact they were made in absolute good faith: Lewis simply found it impossible to realize or to remember that most of his hearers were infinitely less well read than he was, or to follow the workings of the average second-class mind. At a mixed dinner-party he had been heard to fire a sudden, petrifying question at one of the youngest women present – and then, as it were, to remember, and turn whatever answer she managed to stammer out into the gambit for a scintillating discourse – of which he was able skilfully to suggest that she was the originator. One of Lewis’s pupils, Thomas Stock, said that those who insisted on pitting their wits against Lewis found that they either managed to hold themselves just barely erect when the full force of his rational opposition struck or they were knocked flat. ‘To argue with Lewis,’ said Mr Stock, ‘was like entering a beauty contest. You had to be prepared to be told “You’re damned ugly”.’

  He learnt what might be called mental charity more slowly than any other virtue – and it became most notable in his later years and particularly after his marriage. But he never outgrew the teachings of ‘the Great Knock’. As he says of him in Surprised by Joy, ‘the most casual remark was taken as a summons to disputation’,5 and so it was with Lewis himself. If a friend made a thoughtless remark or a loose generality in conversation, Lewis would boom out, ‘I challenge that!’ and the foils of logic would be clashing in a moment – thrust, parry and riposte, his eyes positively sparkling at the skilful play of words until one could almost hear the click and slide of pliant steel upon steel – and indeed the final thrust, given or very occasionally received, would often be accompanied by a joyous ‘Touché!’

  Naturally Lewis’s relations with his fellow members of Magdalen Senior Common Room varied over the thirty years of his residence in college. In Surprised by Joy he pays particular tribute to ‘five great Magdalen men who enlarged my very idea of what a learned life should be – P.V.M. Benecke,* C.C.J. Webb,* J.A. Smith,† F.E. Brightman‡ and C.T. Onions … In my earlier years at Magdalen I inhabited a world where hardly anything I wanted to know needed to be found out by my own unaided efforts. One or other of these could always give you a clue … I found as always that the ripest are kindest to the raw and the most studious have most time to spare.’6 But as early as 10 July 1928 he was writing to his father:

  I am almost ashamed to tell you – I am beginning to be rather disillusioned about my colleagues. There is a good deal more intrigue and mutual back-scratching and even direct lying than I ever supposed possible … Of course it may simply be that, being rather an innocent in practical matters myself, and having been deceived once or twice, I have rushed too hastily to conclusions. But the bad thing is that the decent men seem to me to be all the old ones (who will die) and the rotters seem to be all the young ones (who will last my time).7

  However mistaken he may have been in the main, this rather jaundiced view of college politics, ‘the Magdalen junta’ and other ‘inner rings’ gave Lewis a good background for what might happen in a Senior Common Room where ‘the rotters’ really did gain control, as vividly imagined and described in the first chapter of That Hideous Strength (1945). In actual fact, although during his earlier years as a Fellow Lewis undoubtedly got on better with his seniors, he was also to make lasting friendships among the younger Fellows, notably with Colin Hardie the classics scholar.§ Nevertheless he continued to pay that deference to the old which, he maintained, was growing more and more out of fashion in the modern world. One noticed, for example, the gentleness and patience he showed to Professor Arthur Lee Dixon,* whose mind was beginning to wander in his very last year, and with what tact and skill he would draw him out to talk of the days when Lewis Carroll employed him as temporary mathematics tutor at Christ Church, or when in the 1890s as a Fellow of Merton he was visited unexpectedly by Andrew Lang who had previously occupied the same rooms.

  Canon Adam Fox,† who became a Fellow of Magdalen in 1929, recollected forming a breakfast quartet with Lewis, Benecke and J.A. Smith: ‘If my recollection is correct he never read the newspaper in Common Room himself.’ (Lewis, in fact, never read the paper at all: he would skim the headlines of The Times and sometimes do the crossword.)

  I seem to think that in the earlier years, when he was struggling out of atheism into the Church, he rarely came to breakfast at all. But from about 1933 he attended Chapel regularly, and came in from it with Benecke and myself about 8.15 to join J.A. … Lewis was the first to leave us. There was a touch of haste without hurry about his attitude to breakfast. He was anxious to get back to his work and have a little time at something congenial before the pupils arrived … On Fridays our Chapel Service consisted of the Litany, which in the Book of Common Prayer contains three substantial suffrages for the Sovereign and another for his family. As we came into Common Room one Friday Lewis commented: ‘That Litany makes one feel as if the Royal Family were not pulling their weight.’8

  Later, when fame began to swell his correspondence, Lewis always employed the hour or so between breakfast and his first pupil in concentrated letter writing; he also found time for a walk, usually before chapel, or perhaps sometimes in lieu of it, round Addison’s Walk, the Magdalen meadow within the college bounds. But, with Adam Fox,

  we must come back to him at breakfast in Common Room. I think he had a great respect for Benecke, but he had a real reverence for J.A., though both respect and reverence were mingled with some amusement. He had not many interests in common with Benecke, nothing to give or to receive about the College or about Music or about ancient history, in which Benecke had been tutor for many years in the past; and Benecke was in any case too modest to sustain a lively debate. But Lewis was a philosopher as well as a man of letters, and as s
uch able to bring out J.A. much better, and make him show his paces. He asked him enticing questions and chaffed him not a little in an affectionate way. In me Lewis found someone much devoted to poetry as a reader but not as a student. I looked to him for information and opinion, but I must often have asked the wrong question. He sometimes surprised me, as when he named Dante as the best example of ‘pure poetry’. He did not often quote poetry, at any rate so early in the morning.9

  Canon Fox was struck by the way in which Lewis

  was notably detached from this world and yet made so great an impact on it. His innocence and ignorance were unlimited. He took a very slight interest in what was going on round about him in our little academic world. Some current discussion about College or University affairs which had been in everybody’s mind and on everybody else’s lips passed him by, though when at last he heard of it, he often made a very sound observation slightly tinged with petulance. About some proposed changes in the tutorial system which tended to exalt the Faculties at the expense of the Colleges he remarked ‘We shall soon be just the Staff’, an anticipation not far from the truth.10

  Lewis had very definite ideas about university education and the proper relation between tutor and student. ‘The student is, or ought to be,’ he said in an essay on ‘Our English Syllabus’, ‘a young man who is already beginning to follow learning for its own sake, and who attaches himself to an older student, not precisely to be taught, but to pick up what he can.’11 Comparing education with training, he said in the same essay, ‘if education is beaten by training, civilization dies’.12 And by civilization he meant ‘humanity’, ‘by which I do not mean kindness so much as the realization of the human idea. Human life means to me the life of beings for whom the leisured activities of thought, art, literature, conversation are the end, and the preservation and propagation of life merely the means. That is why education seems to me so important: it actualizes that potentiality for leisure, if you like for amateurishness, which is man’s prerogative.’13