by C. S. Lewis
2 November 1922
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 HIS DIARY: on his way to Belfast
23 December 1922
Shortly before 4 I returned to the Central hall at Euston and there was met by W[arnie], when we immediately went and had tea in the refreshment room. He gave me a most favourable account of Colchester which, he said, was a very old world town in an Arthur Rackham country. We caught the 5.30 for Liverpool: what between dinner, drinks, and conversation the journey passed very quickly: we succeeded in sitting in the dining car the whole way. We had two single berth rooms in the boat, with a communicating door. I was greatly worried all day by the pain in my armpit. A rough night, but we both slept well.
FROM HIS DIARY: at ‘Little Lea’ in Belfast
24 December 1922
We got out to Leeborough in the grey of the morning, not in the best of spirits. My father was not up yet. When he finally appeared, he was in poor form and rather shaky—for whatever reason. He approved of my new suit. Then followed breakfast and the usual artificial conversation. We vetoed churchgoing and went out for a walk at twelve o’clock . . . The path was so narrow that the other two walked ahead and I was left, not to my own thoughts, for in Ireland I have none, but to the undisturbed possession of my lethargy. We came back and had some sherry: W. and I have often remarked on the extraordinary effect of this sherry. Last night I drank four whiskies without any undue result: today, in the study, my own glass of sherry led to a dull and cheerless shadow of intoxication. We had a heavy midday dinner at 2.45. The rest of the day was spent entirely in the study: our three chairs in a row, all the windows shut . . .
25 December 1922
We were awakened early by my father to go to the communion service. It was a dark morning with a gale blowing and some very cold rain . . . As we walked down to church we started discussing the time of sunrise: my father saying rather absurdly that it must have risen already, or else it wouldn’t be light.
In Church it was intensely cold. W. offered to keep his coat on. My father expostulated and said ‘Well at least you won’t keep it on when you go up to the Table’. W. asked why not and was told it was ‘most disrespectful’. I couldn’t help wondering why. But W. took it off to save trouble . . .
Another day set in exactly similar to yesterday. My father amused us by saying in a tone, almost of alarm, ‘Hello, it’s stopped raining. We ought to go out’ and then adding with undisguised relief ‘Ah no. It’s still raining: we needn’t.’ Christmas dinner, a rather deplorable ceremony, at quarter to four.
Afterwards it had definitely cleared up: my father said he was too tired to go out, not having slept the night before, but encouraged W. and me to do so—which we did with great eagerness and set out to reach Holywood by the high road and there have a drink. It was delightful to be in the open air after so many hours’ confinement in one room. Fate however, denied our drink: for we were met just outside Holywood by the Hamilton’s car and of course had to travel back with them. Uncle Gussie drove back along the narrow winding road in a reckless and bullying way that alarmed W. and me . . .
Early to bed, dead tired with talk and lack of ventilation. I found my mind was crumbling into the state which this place always produces: I have gone back six years to be flabby, sensual and unambitious. Headache again.
11 January 1923
After this I read Macdonald’s Phantastes over my tea, which I have read many times and which I really believe fills for me the place of a devotional book . . .
FROM HIS DIARY: at 28 Warneford Road (having left Belfast on 12 January)
25 January 1923
I went to Schools at 10 o’clock to hear Onions on Middle English.104 . . . Onions gave a delightful lecture: the best part being the quotations, which he does inimitably. Once he repeated nearly a whole poem with much relish and then observed ‘That wasn’t what I meant to say’. A man after my own heart.
26 January 1923
Got home in time for tea and read Donne and Raleigh till just before supper when I began my essay. I was just sitting down to it again after supper when I heard a knock and going out, found Barfield. The unexpected delight gave me one of the best moments I have had since the even better ones of leaving Ireland and arriving home . . . We went at our talk like a dogfight: of Baker, of Harwood, of our mutual news . . .
[Barfield] is working with Pearsall Smith who is genuinely trivious and an utter materialist.105 He (Smith) and De la Mare are fast friends . . . Barfield hopes soon to meet De la Mare. He sees Squire fairly often. He says Squire is a man who promises more than he can perform, not through flattery but because he really believes his own influence to be greater than it is . . . He said it had always surprised him that my things were as good as they were, for I seemed to work simply on inspiration and did no chipping. I thus wrote plenty of good poetry but never one perfect poem. He said that the ‘inspired’ percentage was increasing all the time and that might save me in the end . . . I thought his insight was almost uncanny and agreed with every word . . . I walked back to Wadham with him in the moonlight . . .
4 February 1923
Went off on my bike to have tea with Miss Wardale . . . I found Miss W. alone. After we had talked for a few minutes I was pleasantly surprised by the arrival of Coghill106 . . . Miss W., apart from a few sensible remarks on Wagner, was content to sit back in a kind of maternal attitude with her hands on her knees. Coghill did most of the talking, except when contradicted by me. He said that Mozart had remained like a boy of six all his life. I said nothing could be more delightful: he replied (and quite right) that he could imagine many things more delightful. He entirely disagreed with my love of Langland and of Morris . . . He said that Blake was really inspired. I was beginning to say ‘In a sense—’ when he said ‘In the same sense as Joan of Arc’. I said ‘I agree. In exactly the same sense. But we may mean different things.’ He: ‘If you are a materialist.’ I apologized for the appearance of quibbling but said that ‘materialist’ was too ambiguous . . .
When I rose to go he came with me and we walked together as far as Carfax. It was very misty. I found out that he had served in Salonika: that he was Irish and came from near Cork . . . He said (just like Barfield) that he felt it his duty to be a ‘conchy’ if there was another war, but admitted that he had not the courage. I said yes—unless there was something really worth fighting for. He said the only thing he would fight for was the Monarchy . . . I said I didn’t care twopence about monarchy—the only real issue was civilization against barbarism. He agreed, but thought with Hobbes that civilization and monarchy went together . . . Before parting I asked him to tea: he said he had just been going to ask me, and we finally arranged that I should go to him on Friday. I then biked home. I thought Coghill a good man, quite free from our usual Oxford flippancy and fear of being crude . . .
9 February 1923
On getting into bed I was attacked by a series of gloomy thoughts about professional and literary failure—what Barfield calls ‘one of those moments when one is afraid that one may not be a great man after all’.
15 February 1923
Again today—it is happening much too often now—I am haunted by fears for the future, as to whether I will ever get a job and whether I shall ever be able to write good poetry . . .
21 March 1923
Got home very tired and depressed: D made me have some tea. I told her (what had been on my mind all afternoon) that I didn’t feel very happy about the plan of staying here as a more or less unattached tutor. I do not want to join the rank of advertisements in the Union—it sounds so like the prelude of being a mere grinder all my days. If it wasn’t for Maureen I think I should plump for a minor university if possible. We had rather a dismal conversation about our various
doubts and difficulties . . .
22 March 1923
I went to Carritt’s room and returned his Aristotle. I then went and saw Stevenson, whom I found sitting in his rooms by a hot fire, very miserable with a bad throat and not able to talk much. I asked him what prospects there were of my being able to exist as a free lance tutor until something turned up. He said there was practically no such work to be had in my subject . . . He said he thought I was pretty sure to get a fellowship soon . . . In the mean time he advised me to get a job at a minor university . . .
I then came home . . . and discussed the situation with D. We are both greatly depressed. If one cd be sure of my coming back to a fellowship after a term or two at some minor University we could take the Woodstock Rd house—but if not? . . . It was certainly a damnably difficult situation. Thence we drifted into the perennial difficulty of money, which would be far more acute if we had to separate for a time . . .
TO HIS FATHER: from University College
27 May [1923]
I do not care to think how long it is since I last wrote to you. I have made some attempts to do so before this, but they have all collapsed under the pressure of work, or of the mere trifling and lassitude which is the reaction to work. You wrote to me that a disinclination to write letters was ‘one of the marks of approaching old age’ which you felt or thought you felt. If that were true, what a premature senility is mine! It is a very ridiculous and a very wretched confession that I can hardly remember any period since I was a child at which I have not had a crowd of unanswered letters nagging at the back of my mind: things which would have been no trouble if answered by return but which hang on for weeks or months, getting always harder to write in the end, and contributing their share to the minor worries that lay hold of us when we have the blues or lie awake. That anyone should let himself maintain such a standing army of pinpricks would be incredible if it were not fairly common . . . Our Colonel, on the principle of ‘diamond cut diamond’ knows how to defeat this laziness in another because he is so familiar with it himself. At Whitsun he wrote to me saying he would arrive for the weekend unless he heard to the contrary: that at any rate means that no one can keep him waiting for a reply!
He came from Friday evening to Monday. He is at present deep in Gibbon and is very enthusiastic about it. I envy him his routine work—in itself apparently not uninteresting and finished definitely at four o’clock with the rest of the day free for general reading, with no uncertainties or anxieties. Despite the frittering away of time over drinks and gossip in the mess and the low mental level of the society I cannot help feeling that for him the military life has solved the problem of existence very well . . .
Our summer here consists of sleet, frost and east winds: tho’ the summer invasion of Americans has come punctually enough. I mention this because they introduce a good American story which you may not have heard. In the old days of primitive sheriff rule in the western states a man was hanged and shortly afterwards his innocence was proved. The local authorities assembled and deliberated on the best method of conveying the news to the inconsolable widow. It was felt that a too sudden statement would be a little ‘brutal’ and the Sheriff himself, as the man of greatest refinement, was finally deputed to wait upon the lady. After a few suitable remarks on the figs and the maize, he began with the following, ‘Say, Ma’am, I guess you’ve got the laugh of us this time!’ . . .
FROM HIS DIARY: at ‘Hillsboro’
1 June 1923
A cold day. I spent the morning working on my essay . . . 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’ . . .
20 June 1923
I . . . rode home. Found D and Dorothy polishing in D’s room. Had hardly left them when I heard an awful crash and rushed back thoroughly frightened and half believing that the wardrobe had fallen on D. I found however that it was only she herself who had fallen and hurt her elbow: she was badly shaken. All attempts to get her to stop polishing and rest on her laurels were treated in the usual way . . . This put me into such a rage against poverty and fear and all the infernal net I seemed to be in that I went out and mowed the lawn and cursed all the gods for half an hour . . .
22 June 1923
In the morning I read Venice Preserved107 which contains more loathsome sentimentality, flat language, and bad verse than I should have imagined possible. Later I scraped and began to stain the exposed passages of floor in the hall, which was work both hot and hard. After lunch I finished the hall and did the same for the drawing room and helped D with some changes of furniture in the dining room . . . At six I walked out to find a new field path that I had heard of . . . This brought me up [a] hill beside a very fine hedge with wild roses in it. This, in the cool of the evening, together with some curious illusion of being on the slope of a much bigger hill than I really was, and the wind in the hedge, gave me intense pleasure with a lot of vague reminiscences . . . I got back about 8 and watered the garden . . .
TO HIS FATHER: from University College (after taking Schools in English Literature)
1 July [1923]
Before everything else let me thank you very heartily . . . I hope some day to repay these long years of education in the only way in which they can be repaid—by success and distinction in the kind of life which they aim at. But that is partly in the power of fortune and in the meantime I can only record that I am not foolish enough to take these things for granted and that the thought of how much you are doing for me is often, even insistently, before my mind . . .
I should not be a son of yours if the prospect of being adrift and unemployed at thirty had not been very often present to my mind: for of course the worrying temperament of the family did not end in your generation, and to quote Jeremy Taylor ‘we were born with this sadness upon us’ . . .
But, shaking off all that is temperamental and due to momentary fits of optimism and pessimism, I can only put the situation thus. I have, and of course, shall always have, qualifications that should, by all ordinary probability, make a tolerable schoolmastering job practically certain whenever we decide to give up Oxford as hopeless. The same qualifications also put me fairly high in the rank of candidates for academic jobs here. The Magdalen people told my tutor quite recently that they thought my work for their fellowship quite on a level with that of the man who won it, except that it was ‘more mature’. But of course the number of hungry suitors with qualifications equal to mine, tho’ not very large, is large enough to put up a well filled ‘field’ for every event: and the number of vacancies depends, as in other spheres, on all sorts of accidents.
What it comes to is that there is a pretty healthy chance here which would, on the whole, be increased by a few years’ more residence in which I should have time to make myself more known and to take some research degree such as B. Litt. or Doc. Phil. and which would be, perhaps indefinitely or permanently lost if I now left. On the other hand, even apart from the financial point of view, I very keenly realize the dangers of hanging on too long for what might not come in the end. Speaking, for the moment, purely for myself, I should be inclined to put three years as a suitable term for waiting before beating a retreat . . .
The English School is come and gone, tho’ I still have my viva to face. I was of course rather hampered by the shortened time in which I took the school and it is in many ways so different from the other exams that I have done that I should be sorry to prophesy . . .
FROM HIS DIARY: at ‘Hillsboro’
7 July 1923
I went to the Station where I met Harwood. He is working on a temporary job connected with the British Empire Exhibition and says that he is becoming the complete business man. He was in excellent form . . . We walked to Parson’s Pleasure to bathe. It was the first time I have been there this year. They had finished mowing the meadows beyond the water: all was coo
l and green and lovely beyond anything. We had a glorious bathe and then lay on the grass talking of a hundred things till we got hot and had to bathe again. After a long time we came away and back to the Union where he had left his suitcase and thence bussed up to Headington. D and Maureen had of course got home before us and we all had tea on the lawn. Afterwards Harwood and I lay under the trees and talked. He told me of his new philosopher, Rudolf Steiner who has ‘made the burden roll from his back’.
Steiner seems to be a sort of panpsychist, with a vein of posing superstition, and I was very much disappointed to hear that both Harwood and Barfield were impressed by him. The comfort they got from him (apart from the sugar plum of promised immortality, which is really the bait with which he has caught Harwood) seemed something I could get much better without him. I argued that the ‘spiritual forces’ which Steiner found everywhere were either shamelessly mythological people or else no-one-knows-what. Harwood said this was nonsense and that he understood perfectly what he meant by a spiritual force. I also protested that Pagan animism was an anthropomorphic failure of imagination and that we should prefer a knowledge of the real unhuman life which is in the trees etc. He accused me of a materialistic way of thinking when I said that the similarity of all languages probably depended on the similarity of all throats. The best thing about Steiner seems to be the Goetheanum which he has built up in the Alps . . . Unfortunately the building (which must have been very wonderful) has been burned by the Catholics . . .
10 July 1923
Up betimes and dressed in subfusc and white tie . . . At 9.30 we entered the viva room and after the names had been called, six of us were told to stay, of whom I was one. I then sat in the fearful heat, in my gown and rabbit skin, on a hard chair, unable to smoke, talk, read, or write, until 11.50 . . . Most of the vivas were long and discouraging. My own—by Brett Smith—lasted about two minutes. I was asked my authority, if any, for the word ‘little-est’.108 I gave it—the Coleridge-Poole correspondence in Thomas Poole and his friends. I was then asked if I had not been rather severe on Dryden and after we had discussed this for a little Simpson said that they need not bother me any more. I came away much encouraged, and delighted to escape the language people—one of whom, not a don, was a foul creature yawning insolently at his victims and rubbing his small puffy eyes. He had the face of a pork butcher and the manners of a village boy on a Sunday afternoon, when he has grown bored but not yet quite arrived at the quarrelsome stage . . .