All My Road Before Me

by C. S. Lewis

  Friday 25 May: . . . I worked all morning on my essay for Wilson very busily, curarum oblitus.53 After lunch I biked in to him, for he had changed my time till 2.30. We had a capital hour, more literary chat than tutorial. I made him give me a correct list of the papers I am really taking in Schools, with which I hastened to the Assistant Registrar’s office. . . .

  After an early supper I bussed in to the Discussion Class . . . At Exeter when I arrived in Coghill’s rooms I found Martley alone and asked him ‘what had happened on the river’—in order to appear normal and interested.54 He however after some reply asked me what had happened to Univ. the day before—which completely non-plussed me. Coghill himself had left a note for Gordon and was not there.

  Lloyd Jones, a fool who spoke in the Farnell debate, read very badly a bad paper on Swift.

  The discussion afterwards was pretty interesting. My remark that literature which simply gave vent to passions, literature born of conation not of imagination and tending to vicarious satisfaction rather than truth was all to be treated as pornography whatever passion I dealt with, raised strong opposition from Bateson, and Robson-Scott.55 Martley, backed by Gordon, held the balance and said that there must be a little of both in most literature. I saw afterwards that they were right. Martley told me that Bateson was the editor of Oxford Poetry this year, and for a moment I thought of sending something in: but soon decided that it was a puerile wish . . .

  When we were leaving Gordon called me to him in the street. He said he had heard that I was standing for the Exeter Fellowship and could he give me a recommendation or help me in any way. I thanked him profusely and explained that I already had the only ones I was allowed.

  He said he had dined at Magdalen lately where they had talked about me and ‘thought very highly of me. Price had been elected because he was a little more mature, and even so they had been very doubtful.’ I thanked him again and said with a silly giggle ‘I have got my two official references and I suppose informal references are hardly fair’—an odious remark as I realised a moment later . . .

  Monday 28 May: A rather better night, though I was awake with my cough for some time when it was just getting light—with the result that when I did get to sleep I overslept and woke up with a headache and feeling rather stupid. At supper last night I had felt my weak gland in the throat beginning to swell: but thank the Lord it was no worse today, though it had got enormous when I was coughing during the night . . . D got hold of me and took my pulse and temperature. The latter was alright but the pulse was ‘very fast’ and I agreed to stay in by the fire as it was a bitterly cold day of wind and rain.

  I decided to give up work and have a real day off in the hope that this would rid me of my long lethargy. I read Ovid’s Metamorphoses most of the day, beginning at the beginning and reaching the Pyramus story in Book IV. I used no dictionary but with the aid of the very full and very quaint Latin notes by five Germans in my edition I was hardly ever stumped . . . The style is a little affected but what really matters is the genuine narrative power and the scenery—the latter, quâ scenery, hardly to be bettered in any ancient poet. The speeches are not so rhetorical, in the bad sense, as I have been led to believe: in fact they give just so much sense of reality and passion as is needed for this kind of holiday poem—far better than most of the speeches in The Faerie Queene . . .

  Tuesday 29 May: . . . As we were at supper Jenkin came in and afterwards he and I sat in the drawing room. He began by showing me an article of his which had been rejected by the Daily Mail: a description of a night in a mine, much too good for his market and not highly coloured enough.

  From that we passed on to a discussion of the horror play in which we are thinking almost seriously of collaborating. It is to turn on the idea of a scientist who discovers a means of keeping the brain and motor nerves alive in a corpse by means of injections. The victim is kept in cold storage but occasionally allowed a turn round the house, wearing a mask: the scientist tells people he is a poor fellow whose face was badly smashed in the war. He is always sitting over fires and complaining of being cold and always being chased away by the scientist for obvious reasons.

  The hero and heroine find the corpse lying in a box room in its coffin packed in ice: but there will be a long leading up to the moment at which they realise that the corpse upstairs and the figure they have seen wandering about the house are one and the same. The heroine of course has been designed as the scientist’s next victim: the play turns on her escape.

  Jenkin had seen in the Bodleian this morning the man whom we shall take for our model of the scientist. He had a bright red beard, Mephistophelian in shape but reaching to his waist, very thick lips and one leg shorter than the other. We were half tempted by the idea of a much better and clearer play about Helen as Thaïs redeemed by Simon Magus, but realised that that would have to be real literature and returned to our shocker.

  We discussed all this, appropriately, till near eleven in a dark room beside a moribund fire. Later we drifted into a different vein talking of the futility of most things: the outgrowing of half gods without the courage to face real ones . . .

  Thursday 31 May: After breakfast I started work on my essay on Cowper and Crabbe but soon found that I could not go much further without more fuel. I biked into town in a cold wind and took two volumes of Crabbe’s and Cowper’s moral satires from the Union.

  Before leaving town I looked (according to my invariable custom) into the Exeter porch to see if the result of the election had yet been announced. Though I have no grounds for any hope I have enough childish clinging to the hundredth chance to make this daily visit, in the long run, very trying to the nerves . . .

  Friday 1 June: . . . Rink . . . asked me if I should like a free seat for the Folk Dancing tomorrow. I replied that I really did not understand that sort of thing: I could be said to like dancing only as a girl who picnicked in a ruin could be said to like architecture.

  . . . Coming back to College I heard with interest what is I suppose my nickname. Several Univ. people whom I don’t know passed me. One of them, noticing my blazer, must have asked another who I was, for I heard him answer ‘Heavy Lewis’.

  At 4.30 I went to Wilson where we had a most interesting hour. I forget how we drifted away from Crabbe and Cowper, but we ended by agreeing that Wordsworth and Shakespeare had this curious point in common—that in their great passages neither had any style that you could call their own.

  I biked home, had supper, and bussed in to Exeter. A small gathering [at the Discussion Class]—Gordon, Strick, Martley, Coghill, Wynn, Bateson and Payne.

  Strick read us his paper on Tragedy. Tho’ I recant no former opinion of the absurdities in Strict, I was amazed at the excellence of his paper. It was more on life than on letters. He defined Tragedy as the irreparable and inquired if it were real, rejecting the views of Bradley and Bosanquet. He also enquired if indignation against the Demiurge were an essential or an accident of tragedy. The essence seemed to him to be the frustration of an act of faith: every tragic hero was a person who gave of himself lavishly, who chose (this choice was always unfree) to trust the dynasts and got evil or nothing in return. There was some good discussion on the points which he had deliberately left open. Later we drifted to talking of Masefield and then to war reminiscences between Gordon, Strick, Coghill and me.

  Coghill then produced some port to celebrate our last meeting, and we drank Gordon’s health. I for one drank with great sincerity, for he is an honest, wise, kind man, more like a man and less like a don than any I have known. My opinion of him was rather low at first and has gone up steadily ever since . . .

  Saturday 2 June: I decided to take today and tomorrow off, preparatory to a severe week of revision. After breakfast I went out for a walk—a thing I have not done for a long time. I had thought it an ordinary day but I discovered that tho’ cool and grey and full of damp, it was an ‘alive’ coolness with a sort of heat underneath—in fact that it was summer after all . . . />
  Coghill did not come till five—he had been doing papers for some College prize which he is taking in his stride. We both praised Strick’s paper, but Coghill pointed out that Strick’s talk yesterday was as silly as any other day—in fact ‘he writ like an angel and talked like poor Poll’.

  We talked of co-education, of which he is a very violent opponent: then of the education of boys in the earlier stages. I reminded him that looking back in one’s own life one found so many things exercising influence or failing to influence in a way which no other person could anticipate or believe, that one was reduced to despair: one could calculate nothing.

  This led to discussion of psychoanalysis—did not that also discourage one from ‘influencing’ young boys? He was rather silly about psychoanalysis, adopting really the position that it couldn’t be true because ‘how unpleasant if it were’. He laughed at himself when this was pointed out, and took the much firmer ground that sympathy and commonsense would carry you through most difficulties if you were made to be a teacher.

  He is an admirer of Meredith’s and thinks Modern Love a great poem. I said I had never read it. He also writes poetry himself—of rather a subtle and social kind I gathered, chiefly sonnets. We compared notes over methods of work. He is going to try a longer piece in the next vac. and proposes to show it to Wilson. I agreed that Wilson’s criticism would be valuable but admitted that I had not the face to do it.

  I said my own line was chiefly narrative: he stated that he didn’t care for narrative and then made exceptions in favour of Paradise Lost, The Earthly Paradise, Don Juan, Troilus and Cresseide, The Ancient Mariner.

  I discovered that he is a nephew of the ‘Somerville’ in Somerville and Ross. He was at Haileybury. He left at 7.30 after a (to me) very interesting time.

  I like and admire this man so far as I can judge: but the funny thing is that in recording this conversation I have had to control a tendency to misrepresent him all through. Which is what never happened to me before since I kept a diary, and I do not know the explanation . . .

  Sunday 3 June: A real summer day at last and quite hot. I played a game of croquet with Maureen in the morning and she won. Afterwards I read Ovid in the garden till lunch time. After lunch I began the New Arabian Nights, reading the ‘Suicide Club’ and the ‘Rajah’s Diamond’. I thought them very good in their style: the humorous part in the diamond story especially. After tea I played another game of croquet with Maureen and beat her.

  I then went over to see Aunt Lily, shamefully taking my bicycle that I might seem to come from away.56 She is very full of a new book she has discovered—Space and Individuality, by a Scotch minister called Allan. She says he is greater than Bergson. I was of course sceptical about this, but it looks really interesting . . .

  Monday 4 June: Hard at revision all day except between lunch and tea when I walked into town.

  Tuesday 5 June: The same. Worked in the Union in the afternoon. The drawing room has (to my mind) been spoiled and Victorianised today by lace curtains.

  Thursday 7 June: The same. Into town in the afternoon where I met Robson-Scott and we stood nearly half an hour in the High comparing notes and anyone wd. have laughed to see us stumping one another with strange bits of knowledge: not in the least from malice, but to acquire a kind of Dutch courage.

  Saturday 9 June: In town in the morning and called on Coghill to find out our times. Found him closeted with Strick doing O.E. Strick seems to know very little but talked well. To my remark that there was no evidence of Chaucer’s having read Langland he retorted ‘There’s no evidence of your having read Chaucer,’ wh. was good.

  Memorised all afternoon. D gardening. High wind still blowing.

  After supper I read Antony and Cleopatra—the most intelligible play in the world—clear through like a theorem—and lovely.

  Wednesday 13 June: Dined in the Senior Common Room with Carritt, Stevenson, and the Greats men of this year, who seemed rather a dull lot. Carritt and Steve very jolly and agreeable . . . Stevenson had a good story from Wilson about an American pupil who had brought him an essay on Falstaff beginning ‘I’ve no use for Falstaff. He isn’t a white man and the way he talks to Mrs Quickly gets my goat. No gentleman would do it.’

  I left very early. I took white wine instead of red at dinner for the first time and liked it very much but I have forgotten its name.

  It was during 14–19 June that Lewis took examinations in the Final Honour School of English. Candidates were required to show competent knowledge of the English language at all periods, including Old and Middle English, and of English literature.

  Thursday 14 June: Began Schools today. Old English in the morning. The translation and literary questions were alright but I could make no serious attempt at the grammar despite all my painful memorising and did the worst paper I have ever done since I came up.

  I saw Payne, Martley and Coghill afterwards and they were all equally dejected. Lunched in College on tongue and beef with salad.

  In the afternoon we had history of the language which was even worse: and even when I got a question on Milton wh. I knew, my memory deserted me and I could do nothing. I realised what Schools must be like to the unhappy dunces and felt like Lear—‘I have not thought of this enough.’

  Biked home and mowed the lawn in the evening.

  Friday 15 June: Middle English in the morning. To my great surprise this was quite a good paper with the exception of the one compulsory language question and I think I did really well. In the afternoon we did Chaucer and again I was very satisfied. I did rather badly in the gobbets but everyone I spoke to seemed to have done even worse. Biked home and gardened in the evening.

  Saturday 16 June: No paper in the morning. I spent most of the time clipping and cutting straight the border of the lawn.

  After lunch I biked in to Schools and did a paper on the age of Shakespeare which I thought most perverse and unfairly set. The Spenser question was tied up by asking you to compare Spenser with any other non dramatic poet of the period. I took the non dramatic Shakespeare and Marlowe, tho’ I doubt if they will allow it: tho’ I think they will have to give me some credit for the tons of Spenserian quotation and appreciation which I flung at them. I did a good answer on Bacon and also on Sydney’s Daniel.

  Afterwards I met Coghill who bade me and Strick to tea . . . We all condemned what Coghill called this bloodstained paper. Coghill read us the Decameron version of the Reeve’s Tale which is very good. Strick is very despondent and silent and pleaded guilty when I rallied him for a victim of wanhope.

  Sunday 17 June: Spent most of the day reading Waverley which I shall always like because I first read it at Old Cleve in that one glorious month which is worth all the hard years we have had since—almost since Bookham days.57

  Monday 18 June: Paper on Shakespeare and Milton in the morning. I was bad, as I expected to be, on Shakespeare. The Milton questions were set with cruel malice and I revenged myself by doing them, I think, very well indeed—this being the one question on which even Simpson’s ingenuity cannot beat me.

  In the afternoon we had a paper on the Seventeenth Century. Like the Age of Shakespeare it was well tied up—Bunyan coupled with Shadwell so that one’s knowledge of Bunyan might have no credit. It is of a piece with the whole school: neither for Mods nor Greats did I ever meet cads for lecturers and malicious papers as I have done in this. I hope more than ever for a first, if only to defeat the old men.

  Afterwards I had tea with Jenkin in Merton St. He showed me the diary of Dr Dee who was a noted astrologer and occultist. It was very funny, tho’ very natural, that his diary should consist almost entirely of the most hum drum and ordinary events.

  Tuesday 19 June: Paper on the Eighteenth Century in the morning, the first really catholic and comprehensive one we have had—tho’ even this left out Johnson: no disappointment to me, but bad examining all the same.

  At lunch a little dark man whose name I don’t know but whom I met at the Greats dinner
sat opposite me. He talked to me about ordinary things till the end of the meal and then asked ‘What is this Fellowship at Exeter which has just been awarded?’ ‘Oh, has it?’ said I. I then heard that Mr Studdert Clarke of Balliol had got it. I rather disliked the way in which my informant had broached it: perhaps after all it was only his way of ‘breaking’ the news and I am beginning to suffer from a conspiracy complex.

  After I had left hall and was in the porch, up comes Ewing pattering along like a little dog under the shade of his large homburg hat, swinging his watch chain: shows his teeth, titters, looks as if he were going to trot away again and suddenly blurts out in a high falsetto ‘I suppose we shall have to condole with each other now.’

  On my way back to School I met Coghill who told me that Strict had had a nervous breakdown. In the afternoon an easy paper on the nineteenth century which I did pretty badly because it was easy and tempted you to impossible undertakings . . .

  Wednesday 20 June: . . . I biked down Cowley Road to Strick’s address at 390, which is one of the new white council houses beyond Magdalen Rd. I found him in bed. He is not allowed to read, stammers a good deal, is pale and drained dry of all good. Luckily the trouble seems to have gone to his stomach and produced no ‘horrors’. He was obviously not fit to talk and I soon came away.

  Rode home and read Wycherley’s Country Wife before lunch. The Country Wife herself is really funny: but I must admit the sulphurous brutality of all the characters is about as much as I can stomach. Clever stuff.