All My Road Before Me

by C. S. Lewis

  Carlyle was in great form. Curtis was rather absurd. By the bye, with his large nose, prominent teeth, straight hair and tortoise shell spectacles, he is exactly like the hero of Tons of Money in his parsonical scene. Carlyle said ‘The long poem was a will o’ the wisp.’ I wonder is this a warning.

  I walked home part of the way with Jenkin and Robson-Scott: later with a man called Mort. We went very fast along Cowley Road. I couldn’t get him to talk. At last I said ‘You’re the only man in Oxford who walks at a reasonable pace.’ He replied ‘I was just going to say the same thing.’106 . . .

  Thursday 26 October: Woke very tired and with a headache, taking aspirin before breakfast. Walked to the Schools and heard a lecture by Onions.107 As I came back I realised I had to finish the Canterbury Tales and write an essay on them by tomorrow: so to my room and went on at the Clerke’s Tale (beastly story) reading at a pace which is rather an insult to the author.

  When I came down for lunch D reminded me that Smudge was coming for lunch and lesson: this seemed to take away the last hope and it was so unexpected (I had quite forgotten her) that I am afraid I cursed her aloud in rather an inexcusable way. Soon afterwards she arrived and we had lunch. I did Latin with her till four o’clock and then resumed work.

  With breaks for tea, supper, and washing up, I continued till 12 o’clock, by which time I had finished to my comparative satisfaction. Then to bed with sore limbs—the paradoxical result of brain work as I usually find it . . .

  Friday 27 October: . . . After breakfast I did Vergil with Maureen till it was time to go to Miss Wardale’s lecture in the Schools. From this I cycled, a very wet ride, to Wilson. I arranged to come to him at 4.45 on Fridays in future instead of at 12, as I was then always necessarily late. He asked me to tea at four next Friday. I read him my essay and we discussed. He very sensibly refused to have any theory about Melibeus and the Monke’s Tale: one could imagine several things . . .

  Letter . . . from Carritt. One of the Magdalen examiners has said that I was ‘probably the ablest man in’: but that my fault is timidity and too much caution in letting myself go. He also asks me to come and see him . . .

  Saturday 28 October: It grows colder every day. By first post D had a letter from Mrs Hankin saying that her son would not be coming up to Oxford and that she herself was staying in London to look for a job: she might or might not be coming back to us, and would we mind if she should not. Would we mind! . . .

  Sunday 29 October: . . . Immediately after breakfast I got out my bicycle and started for Forest Hill. It was one of the coldest days we have had and a strong wind in my face all the way. As a result, tho’ it cannot have been much about freezing, I was dripping with heat by the time I arrived.

  She [Aunt Lily] is in a cottage which I once went to see for us a long time ago. From the windows you look across fields to the ridge of Shotover—she did not know of its connection with Shelley and was glad to hear of it. There is a very pleasant kitchen sitting room.

  She 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.

  The adventure of the Vicar’s wife was good. That lady, meeting her in the Forest Hill bus, asked who she was, and promised to call. Aunt Lily said she might call if she liked, but she wasn’t going to church. Being asked why, she said she had vowed never to enter any church until the clergy as a body came out in defence of the Dog’s Protection Bill. ‘Oh!’ said the priest’s wife in horrified amazement, ‘So you object to vivisection?’ ‘I object to all infamies,’ replied Aunt L.

  Nevertheless the Vicar and his wife came to her all humble at the journey’s end and said ‘Even if you don’t come to church, will you come to our whist drive?’ She says all parsons look like scolded dogs when you challenge them on this subject.

  I refused an invitation to lunch, but stayed till one o’clock. She talked all the time, with her usual even, interminable fluency, on a variety of subjects. 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 Schopenhauer 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 Bateson (?) at Oxford was one of the worst vivisectors in the world,108 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. I imagine a morning with Coleridge must have been something like this . . .

  Monday 30 October: After breakfast I walked to the Schools and heard Wyld’s lecture. Walked home again and settled down to Anglo-Saxon. Maureen back from a not very successful lesson with Mr Allchin. After lunch I went to the drawing room. Got the wretched Riddles finished at last—the one about the sun and the moon has got a sort of nursery rhyme charm about it which the poet, I am sure, never suspected. Went on with Aelfred’s translation of the Cura Pastoralis . . .

  At supper we talked of operas and Maureen asked me some questions about the Ring in a way that looks as if her imagination were coming to life at last . . . After finishing work I sat with D by the drawing room fire. She had a headache and was very worried about Maureen’s slowness and dawdling and consequent inability to manage her work . . .

  Tuesday 31 October: To Wyld’s lecture after breakfast. I found a formal letter in College from the Mugger informing me that the Master and Fellows had decided to continue my scholarship. I replied at once in the J.C.R. Then . . . I cycled to Miss Wardale. She startled me by promising to give me for next week a paper on all the phonetics and laws of mutation wh. she has been talking about and wh. I have not been listening to! . . .

  I took out Hassal’s European Tables, came home and started, with the help of it and Saintsbury, making out a table of English literature from 1500. I worked hard on this for the rest of the day . . .

  Wednesday 1 November: . . . It was a wet, windy morning. I decided to skip Simpson’s lecture and spent the morning hard at work on my table. After lunch I went to the library of the English Schools and read Wyld’s most elementary book (I forget the title) by way of preparing for Miss Wardale’s paper109 . . . I then walked to the Union and took out a volume of Gower, containing the Vox Clamantis . . . the Latin poem is pitiable muck so far as I could see. After supper I began my essay, and brought my table down to the end of the 18th Century before going to bed.

  Thursday 2 November: . . . I . . . went to the Schools library. Here I puzzled for the best of two hours over phonetics, back voice stops, glides, glottal catches and open Lord-knows-whats. Very good stuff in its way, but why physiology should form part of the English School I really don’t know.

  From there I went at four o’clock to the Union and took out a volume of Gower. Walked back. D and I were just sitting down to tea when the Doc turned up . . . After tea I came into the drawing room and went on with my essay: the Doc did not stay long. D is busy on her jumper for Miss Brody and again has a bit of a headache: we are afraid it may be her eyes. After supper and washing up I finished m
y essay.

  Friday 3 November: . . . After lunch I went in to the library again and worried away at my phonetics, trying to master the laws of i-mutation. While I was there, a stout youth came in and began to talk to Simpson who was pasting in book plates at my table—the rule of silence apparently does not obtain in this library. He asked Simpson if [Walter] Raleigh had not been preparing a book on Chaucer before his death. Simpson said ‘No, he funked it, and he was quite right. He’d have been caught out on the scholarship. Now he once suggested to me that we might collaborate in a book on Chaucer. I would have done the scholarship and he would have done the appreciation.’

  God above! Polonius and Ariel, Wagner and Euphorion would be well mated to this! Simpson droned on just beside me till he drove me nearly mad and I went out and bought pressed beef.

  I then walked to Manor Place and had tea with Wilson. Perhaps he had a cold, or had been asleep over his fire: for whatever reason, I found him a little dull. I told him of my shock at finding that Miss Wardale expected me to know something of her phonetics. He said exactly the same thing had happened to him, but added that ‘Betsy Wardale had a fine mind.’

  He had been lunching with Gordon,110 and Gordon had been talking about the difference between an Oxford and a Scotch audience at a lecture: here we sat looking as if we were bored, whether we were or not. There, they stamped with their feet when they were displeased and loudly applauded every good point. We agreed that the Scotch was the best practice. It would certainly do Simpson, Joachim and Joseph a lot of good.

  Afterwards I read him my essay on Gower: he approved, I think, on the whole, but thought I should have read more. I like this man, tho’ he is a bit sleepy . . .

  Saturday 4 November: . . . I . . . got out my bike and started for Forest Hill—a delightful ride, tho’ I have seen many an autumn with better colours. I met Aunt Lily coming down the hill to get milk and bread, in which duty I joined her after putting my bike in.

  When we got back to the cottage she gave me some pages of her essay to read. I really had a great surprise. It is not in my line and I hope it is not true, but I must say I thought it great literature. It seemed to me—with all the obvious faults that some people will find in it—to have just ‘that’ about it. I really believe it’s going to last: not for its matter but for its enthusiasm.

  You can see at any rate that she’s a real, convinced prophet and not a bit of a quack. Her absolute inability to take in anything that cannot be used as fuel for her own particular fire is also a prophet’s characteristic fault.

  We talked on several subjects. Speaking of a wife who had left a bad husband she said ‘Her consolation is that she has stopped a bad heredity from perpetuating itself: her strain and her bringing up has made good the children, so that particular man is done with—biologically.’

  She said the part of Hamlet could never be done properly on the stage because Hamlet wd. have to be fat: his particular trouble—inability to feel the emotions which the intellect clearly recognises as right—was dementia praecox which goes with obesity. She surprised me by liking The Taming of the Shrew: she said that Petruchio was the only one of all Shakespeare’s heroes whom she herself would have married. She also declared that Richardson was, next to Shakespeare, the greatest knower of characters and perhaps Shakespeare’s equal. She also put Jane Austen very high in that line. She said that Bergson’s chapter on ‘Rein’ was the worst in the book and in it he had relapsed into intellectualism: I thought it the most intuitive and wonderful of the lot.

  She strongly disapproved of ‘Dymer’ which I had left with her last week. She called it brutal. She said ‘Where has all your old simplicity and rightness of language gone?’ She said I seemed to be deliberately slipshod and wrong in my words and ‘positively like Bill Patterson’.111 She also said I ‘must not describe’. When she came to a description of a wood in a poem—whether in Keats or me!!—she gave it up. She didn’t mind a man writing a poem just about a wood: but to have a wood flung in your way when you were reading about a man—!

  She said what I needed was the sort of swing you get in Don Juan: I was surprised to find that she knew Don Juan. She said it was the only thing of Byron’s she could ever read. She ridiculed the view that it was immoral. What she particularly liked was the swing forward. She said I had utterly failed to get this: or, relenting, that I had only a trace of it here and there. I asked her if she disliked Dymer himself: she said, no, it was me: Dymer was just a young animal let loose.

  She said that in reading Bacon she had often been struck by Shakespearian echoes: and when the Baconian theory first came out she had taken it up keenly. Later on she noticed that the Baconian bits of Shakespeare usually came in the speeches of Polonius and such characters: so that Shakespeare was not indebted to Bacon’s writings but to Bacon the man, much as he was indebted to the original of Dogberry.

  I left—or started leaving—about 3.30. She kindly insisted on my taking away a bottle of cream and a volume of Emerson. This last she had intended to give me one day at Holywood: but I had said in the course of our talk ‘Damn Emerson!’ and so she refrained even till now . . .

  Monday 6 November: In the morning to Wyld’s lecture. I was very much impressed by his abuse of the privilege of monologue. He said of a certain word ‘Some of you superfine young gentlemen may pronounce it so—if you ever deign to mention such a vulgar thing. I don’t care if you do. I pronounce it so.’ This is the only occasion on which I have ever noticed a similar hectoring strain: and all the women laughed obsequiously . . .

  Coming home I found Jenkin here. He had called to ask me out for a ride, but this was of course impossible. I spoke of the personnel of the English school. I said that I had expected to find them more liberal and ‘humane’ than the Greats people: but, instead, they seemed pedantic and rather ill bred. He agreed with my feeling about Wyld. Wyld, he said, had been heard to boast that he enjoyed frightening people at vivas: and at some minor university where he had been, female candidates usually left him in floods of tears. He was in fact an ordinary bully: and, while professing a purely scientific attitude towards rival pronunciations, he was in fact morbidly class conscious. A snob, who liked to picture himself a country gentleman of the old school and piqued himself on saying ‘wescitt’ . . .

  Tuesday 7 November: My cold still very heavy. I decided to skip the Cad Wyld’s lecture and worked hard translating the Wanderer till 11.30 when I bicycled to Miss Wardale’s. She seemed quite pleased with what I had done, and we had a useful hour.

  On getting home I heard from D that Mrs Stevenson wanted me to tutor Sydney in Latin. This at first I refused point blank to do: but afterwards I found that it could be swopped against Mrs Stevenson’s tutoring of Maureen and thus save money. We are too poor to waste and I arranged to take her on Sundays.

  After lunch I bicycled to Jenkin’s rooms . . . We started by the Botley Road and went through Ferry Hinksey . . . When we got to Thessaly we laid our bikes down in the bracken and walked into the wood. We went further than I have ever been, across three ridges. We were as pleased as two children revelling in the beauty, the secrecy, and the thrill of trespassing. Jenkin’s undisguised delight in the more elementary pleasures of a ramble always bucks me: one really would not be surprised if he suddenly said, ‘Let’s pretend to be Red Indians.’ I got the real joy in this wood. We spent a long time there and got back late to his rooms, where we had tea. He read me a new piece of his which I liked: he made me read aloud ‘Foster’ which I had lent him and which he liked very well . . .

  Thursday 9 November: . . . I worked hard all morning finishing Piers Plowman: I read it all in the C text, except the last passages on Antichrist. It contains some bits which, all said and done, have more of the real thing than poor old Chaucer could ever have managed—and very little of the usual mediaeval cackle about Cato and Boethius. In the few minutes before lunch I started my essay.

  Smudge came to lunch and afterwards I did Latin with her till tea time. After
tea I continued my essay, and so also after supper. D rather depressed and suffering from a headache. Extraordinarily tired tonight.

  Friday 10 November: I had the devil of a night. I was twice sick and spent the rest of the time between sleeping and waking in a sort of feverish muddle of headache and dreams about Piers Plowman—the sort of dream which seems to go on for years and years and is so wearisome you’d be glad of a nightmare for a change. Some very heavy rain just as it was getting light . . .

  Got home and changed (in preparation for the concert) . . . to which I was to go with Maureen. I read for a few minutes when D saw an advertisement of a house to let in the Oxford Times. I at once bussed to Ship St. to Galpin’s the house agent, but found it shut. Home again and supper: after which Maureen and I set out.

  Tho’ not much better I did not greatly want to come and was therefore the more pleased at finding I could enjoy it. The best thing was the Beethoven Sonata—like a Titan’s laughter but with all the melancholy just underneath. I find it is no good for me to hear Chopin immediately after Beethoven—seems so luxuriously self pitying. Home in fairly good time and to bed.

  Saturday 11 November: Into town to Galpin immediately after breakfast to find that there have been forty applicants and the house was already let. Then home and worked at O.E. Grammar as long as I could stand it. Then turned to the Wanderer. For a few minutes before lunch I walked round the circle of the roads taking The Return with me. I understand very little of the dialogue in this book: worth reading for the one sentence ‘We are all like children playing knuckle bones in a giant’s scullery.’112 After lunch, having got held up in the Wanderer, I began Beowulf. Worked hard rather than well till tea time: a wet afternoon and very dark.