All My Road Before Me

by C. S. Lewis

  Thence on to Cheddar by a road that skirts the hills. Here I saw many fields and trees quite white with blossom and daisies. At Cheddar we caught sight of the gorge up to our left quite unexpectedly: and then while I was still in a confused impression—the speed of a motor cycle is sometimes a great aesthetic advantage—W suddenly turned and ran up it. I lay back in the side car and watched the huge coloured cliffs pushing up further round us and closer till it seemed like going into a tunnel. I was quite unprepared for anything of the sort. It was a great moment.

  We turned on our tracks and went on to Wells. Just before reaching it we turned off left at a signpost ‘To Wookey Hole’ to find some quiet pub where we cd. eat our lunch. The lane wound on so long that we began to fear that Wookey Hole was a natural feature, a devil’s punch bowl or the like, and not a village. A village however it turned out to be, with a pub where we sat on a curiously comfortless bench and ate our sandwiches and drank cider. We then went back and into Wells where W was charged 6d. for leaving the bike in Wells Square by the town authorities, who however ‘took no responsibility of any sort’ for it.

  W was delighted with the outside of the Cathedral but less pleased with the interior. I think I agreed with him. I also agreed with his view that King’s Chapel, Cambridge, is the perfect building. We then strolled all round the Palace talking of all things that arose therefrom—Barchester, abbots, mediaeval siege tactics. Our ease and freedom and pleasant chat made this visit to Wells far better than my first when I came here on the motor tour with my father and the Hamiltons.27 In many ways W is the ideal person to go for a jaunt with . . .

  It was shortly before W’s arrival that I had a long letter from Baker, giving me his news, and saying that it was apparent there had been some considerable misunderstanding between us—wh. he had also gathered from his conversation with Pasley. He said he had written to D at the time of the Doc’s death and then, later, to me, and had had no answer to either of them. I was in considerable doubt how to answer this. My only alternatives seemed to be silence, insincere acceptance of his account with mental reservations on my part, or the whole truth.

  In the end I wrote accepting his explanation (i.e. that he had sent letters tho’ I had never got them) but adding that this was only the occasion of my coolness: the real reasons were certain qualities in him with wh. I was growing more and more discontented. I explained quite bluntly what those were, adding, at the same time, that I hoped we shd. find it possible to take up our old friendship again.

  On Saturday 26th we all came back to Oxford. It had been arranged that I shd. travel in the sidecar. It was obvious that one of us shd. do so to save fares and D, of course, refused to be that one. I therefore trained with her to Yatton and saw her into a through train to Bristol with the luggage, and W, Pat and I got aboard the bike. As we were making all snug outside Yatton station, a hamper, wh. had just been taken out of the train, was suddenly opened just beside us to release a cloud of pigeons that filled the air with an amazing noise before we knew what was forward. It was a curious experience for I had not suspected the hamper of containing anything live. It was raining when we started but soon cleared up. We got into the main road shortly before Wrington and entered Bristol by Bedminster . . .

  From Faringdon we came along at a very good speed thro’ Bickland, Kingston Bagpuize, Fyfield, Bessels, Leigh, Cumnor and Botley to Oxford. It is a tame, well combed, cheerful country of tidy well growing woods, white gates, dark tarred roads, comfortable cottages, sometimes exeedingly beautiful, green hedges and flat blue distances. The speed, the sunlight, and the sense of coming home put me into an unusually prolonged fit of ‘joy’. Home by about five to find D quite well, tho’ after a rather uncomfortable journey. Maureen turned up at eight o’clock. In the evening I introduced W to the poems of W. de la Mare and made him, I think, a convert.

  Sunday–Wednesday 27–30 April: W left by bike for Colchester soon after breakfast, in pouring rain. His departure left me disquieted and unsettled for an hour or so—it is bad for me to get into the way of living with anyone who has leisure and money and ease of mind—until I came to my senses and was glad enough to be settled down to our own ordinary life again. There is always a pleasure in being to ourselves after anyone has been here for a while.

  In the course of the next few days I had an invitation to dine at Trinity, and also a mysterious wire from the Master asking me to come to his lodgings at 9.30 on Monday evening ‘to meet Farquharson and Carritt’.

  Pat became very ill and Gillard came out one day and pronounced it to be valvular disease of the heart and ordered him whiskey. At this time I took to using the attic (where Ada used to sleep) as a study. I finished and fair copied Canto VII of ‘Dymer’, and so, for the first time there was actually a text of the whole thing in existence. Domestic interruptions (nobody’s fault) made it impossible for me to get a chance of reading it all through at one sitting: but even without that I soon found that there was something wrong. It lacks unity. I came to the conclusion that Canto VI wd. have to be altered, and started a new one.

  Sunday 4 May: Dined at Trinity this evening. I went first to the President’s house and he brought me along to Hall.28 His manner was rather repellent at first, but I think unintentionally so and he became better later on. I found that he knew my old form master at Malvern, H. W. Smith, ‘Smugy’ of blessed memory: but I couldn’t get him to talk much about him.29

  We were a very full table. I talked to my neighbour who was a scientist newly imported from Cambridge and seemingly a pleasant fellow: also to my opposite number who is their law tutor—a very dark, smooth skinned, clever looking, laughing, serpentine man whom I took a dislike to.30 He was however very agreeable.

  At dessert I was beside Pritchard who condemned Jane Austen, or rather the life presented by Jane Austen, for its narrowness and triviality. I, and a very nice man with one arm, tried to defend her and pleaded that one had to use historical imagination to get over this, as one did to get over the vices in Plato. But we did not make much of it.

  We then went to have coffee and smokes in an upper room, for the President will allow no smoking in the Common Room proper. Here I had some talk with their Mods Tutor about Mods, Poynton, Bailey, and Myres, whom this man had known in the Aegean. An elderly man in holy orders and in liquor came and sat by me (Patterson, senior Tutor)31 and, after taking me for someone else, discovered I was from Univ. and said ‘Ah . . . ! then you’ll know my dear friend Farki’. He proceeded to tell me how Farki’s daughter had just got the sack from a London hospital for feeding a child who had diabetes on plum cake in the article of death. He also told us some stories from Jeremy Bentham’s letters.

  After him came Kirk, their chaplain.32 Conversation became general. We talked of Dickens and of the grace Benedictus benedicatur wh. no one cd. translate. Came away after a very enjoyable evening and discovered when I got into the open air that I was not quite sober.

  Monday 5 May: Spent the morning working at a new version of my ‘Hegemony of Moral Values’ for Mind. D and I took Pat out for a gentle walk in Cuckoo Lane after tea.

  After supper I bussed in to College and found Carritt and Farquharson with the Master. The latter laid before me the proposal that I shd. take over part of Carritt’s work during the next year, wh. Carritt is to spend in America. He said he recognised that there must be two things in my mind: the Trinity job and the ultimate possibility of a Fellowship at Univ: but perhaps for the moment we had best leave these in the air and without prejudice. I said that for me it came down to one question ‘Does my undertaking this work involve my withdrawing my candidature for Trinity?’ The Master said that no one had contemplated making any such demand of me. If Trinity elected me it was quite possible that Trinity wd. not object to my doing the Univ. work as well: if they did object Univ. wd. release me. ‘Or,’ added Carritt, ‘if you, although Trinity allows it, find the double work too much.’

  I thanked them for taking such a liberal attitude and said that th
is removed the only objection I cd. have. We then proceeded to finance and what I made out after many convolutions of Farquharson’s tongue was that I cd. be sure of £200 for the year, as a minimum. Needless to say I agreed to everything and came away at about ten. It was arranged that I should lecture twice a week next term.

  Tuesday 6 May: Worked on my paper again in the morning. After lunch and my usual jobs I went in to have tea with Robson-Scott in his rooms in Beaumont St. It was just what happened last time: we were just getting into a really interesting talk when in came his friend Bateson. I cannot imagine why Robson always insists on asking this young prodigy to meet me. We talked of Yates, W. de la Mare, Walter Scott, and Marlowe: I was glad to find this much good in Bateson, that he really does feel the speed and spring of Marlowe’s blank verse.

  Sometime after this he observed that as he progressed he found his interest in a poem centred more and more round the author. I said this seemed to me inconsistent with real aesthetic experience. In a few minutes, by some circumbendibus I can’t remember, he was saying that his enjoyment of a poem consisted in understanding and watching and analysing the effect it had on himself. He said that on my basis of mere direct alogical enjoyment one cd. never prove that a thing was good—one cd. only say ‘I like it.’

  I asked him if it was possible to prove goodness on his basis: to wh. he made the egregious reply ‘It may not be possible, but it’s easier than on yours.’ I asked him whether this pleasure (of analysis etc.) cd. not be derived just as well from bad poetry as from good: to wh. at first he assented, but afterwards said that the effects to be analysed were more complex and intense in the case of good poetry. Asked how his enjoyment could be called enjoyment of the poetry, he said ‘Because the poetry is necessary to it.’ I asked him if oxygen and digestion and other things were not just as necessary. He ended up by saying that at any rate other people felt as he did, people like W. Pater and J. A. Symonds: so I suppose these are his gods. Needless to say he is a follower, or believes himself to be a follower, of Croce, and cares almost nothing for nature.

  Home by about eight after calling in the Union to take out Leibnitz.33

  Wednesday 7 May: I spent the morning in my attic reading the Monadologie, the first book of Sur L’Entendement Humain and the Systeme Nouveau of Leibnitz. There is more subtlety in him than I expected.

  After lunch I had time to sweep out the kitchen and shake out the mats and do my other jobs before Ziman, who had really forced the engagement on me, appeared to take me for a walk. We went by field path to Stowe Woods road and home by Elsfield etc. It was a beautiful day and a fine bit of country—blue and white sky, cuckoos everywhere and innumerable colours in the hedges. I don’t think Ziman cared twopence for it, tho’ he was able to talk well enough about a cloud effect that I mentioned. After all, they teach them that here.

  By dint of taking everything steadily au pied de la lettre I fairly soon induced him to stop being clever and some conversation resulted. Came home and [had] tea: afterwards he sat with me till 7.30, talking of what he called ‘happiness’ by wh. he apparently means my ‘real joy’, and of many other things. Not a bad fellow, but what a waste of an afternoon!

  Thursday 8 May: This evening to the Univ. Philosophical Society after dinner to hear McMurray of Balliol read a paper.34 He is Lindsay’s successor, a Scotsman, with a mind that seems to me curiously perverse.

  The moral judgement for him is primarily the judgement ‘This is evil’, wh., since he is a Bradleyan, means ‘the whole is such that this is evil’ and he finds a difficulty about the universe being logically coherent and morally incoherent. A good discussion afterwards.

  Sunday 11 May: A short walk to Stowe Woods with Pat in the morning. Washed up after lunch and read Malory for the first time since I was about sixteen. I read the book about Balin and Balan, and tho’ I have often called Malory ‘dreamy’ in a loose sense I now saw for the first time how strictly like a dream the whole scene in King Pellam’s castle is, and indeed the whole story of Balin’s inexplicable superhuman guilt and bad luck. I enjoyed it greatly.

  Monday 12 May: . . . I washed up etc after lunch and then locked up the house and went down to Ewing’s digs in Iffley Road—he having invited me, for my sins, to walk with him. We went to Iffley and back. I asked him if he suffered as I did periodically from a sense of the vanity of learning: he had no notion of what I meant. He said that Price (of Magdalen) was a dangerous man for the Trinity hope, as he had been asked to dinner there. I said ‘Won’t all the candidates be asked?’ He replied ‘Oh dear no, only those in the running.’ Back for tea in his digs and a long talk on Theism. I don’t know how it is that Ewing can talk quite well and yet he never interests one.

  On the way back I called to see Miss Featherstone because D had had a bad dream about her last night. Miss F said the dream was postdated, for she had been very ill about five weeks ago but was now better. She is a great heart . . .

  Tuesday 13 May: I spent the morning in the attic reading through the new version of my ‘Hegemony’ paper which I am sending to Mind and altering the ending. I also wrote a few stanzas of ‘Dymer’ VI.

  After lunch I went out with Pat and walked over the allotments to Quarry, thence up Shotover and down into Pullen’s Gap wh. is now a sea of green and white. It was a bright warm day with an endless succession of clouds crossing the sky. The ground covered with blue bells and some gorse, tho’ much less brilliant in colour than down at Clevedon . . .

  Thursday 15 May: Went into town shopping in the morning and sat for a long time in the Union reading Bosanquet’s Suggestions in Ethics wh. I brought out for the sake of the beautiful passage about the Absolute eating out of your hand. Bosanquet has apparently the right point of view about most things . . . but a little bit woolly.

  Home again, lunch and chores, and then to the attic where I worked on Locke (with a break for tea) till supper.

  In the evening I read Masefield’s Right Royal with intense enjoyment and excitement—but of course one can’t really tell what it is worth till it has been re-read without the excitement.

  Sunday 18 May: A lovely summer day. After breakfast D had the sudden idea that we ought ourselves to lay down linoleum in the kitchen instead of waiting for Knight to come and do it—why, I don’t know. All that hot day which ended in a thunderstorm we worked on our knees in the kitchen with short intervals for rather squalid meals in the scullery till half past ten in the evening. Then we went to bed.

  Monday 19 May: D very tired and cross today. Went into town after breakfast and did shopping for her. Hurried home and was immediately sent out into Headington on another message: when I came back from this D turned on me rather savagely for having forgotten to take Pat out with me. I made no reply, knowing that it was in my power to speak or not to speak but fearing that if I once began I might say regrettable things. In practice however I think my silence had an unkind and sulky appearance and was not really the right line to take. Poor D—I was probably as bad or worse for the rest of the day, though I honestly tried not to be disagreeable. I am afraid I have a good deal of my father’s unhappy nature in me.

  After lunch the nervous irritation bottled up inside me reached such a pitch and my thoughts became so irresponsible and foolish and so out of control that for a moment I was really afraid that I was going into hysteria.

  I spent the afternoon finishing the linoleum job in the kitchen: another hot day. Poor D was busy making cakes for the sake of her cousin Norah Murray who is coming to stay tomorrow. This was Edie’s suggestion: she thought it would be ‘so nice’ for us to get to know her.

  This night I began again to have the same pains that frightened me so in Ireland last summer: the imperfectly localised pain which makes its headquarters near the appendix and which I hope is indigestion.

  Tuesday 20 May: Norah Murray arrived today—tall, plain, very Scotch, uneducated, an earnest bridge player and golfer. A storm came on at tea time and she was so afraid of the thunder that D put her to
bed in the yellow room and went to sit with her. She is about thirty five and as a child was one of Rob’s ‘girls’.

  Friday 23 May: The Holmes children arrived after breakfast and D soon took me aside and told me that Mrs Holmes was dying and that the children would stay with us for the night and until further notice. She and I went upstairs in haste to arrange beds and so forth. Afterwards I washed up. I suggested sending a wire to put off Harwood (who was to come for the week end) lest his arrival should only mean fresh trouble for her and his visit moreover be wasted in these conditions. But D would not let me . . .

  We had supper in good time and were finishing (D and I) when Harwood arrived. Tho’ I wished exceedingly that his visit could have come at a better time, I was delighted to see him—such a breath from the comfortable, easy outside world. While I washed up he talked to me of his walking tour with Beckett in the Tyrol. I got so much vicarious enjoyment that it was only afterwards that I felt the pains of envy. Later on all three of us sat in the dining room. Harwood and I had a good talk of books and of friends and every sentence brought me back to sanity. He is setting up a publishing business with one Lewis May, a great Vergilian who had resource to the Sortes Vergilianae before committing himself and fell upon the words Una salus ambobus erit.35

  Tonight I slept in my garret. My pains were pretty bad and of course the case of Mrs Holmes so near to hand brings certain thoughts rather prominently into my mind: but it makes an enormous difference being at home and not exiled in Ireland. I was also very cold until I went downstairs to get my overcoat.

  Saturday 24 May: I washed up after breakfast while Harwood did Trojan service in amusing the children and tho’ he admitted it was a strain in the end, you could see he had a natural aptitude for it. I did various jobs till about twelve when he and I set off to carry Norah’s luggage by bus to the station—a welcome task—and thence went to All Souls to lunch with Beckett.