Letters of C. S. Lewis

by C. S. Lewis

  10 February 1927

  I went on to Corpus—Hardie having sent me a note to say that the Theaetetus was off, but would I come round and talk. We had an evening of pleasant and desultory tomfoolery, enriched later on by the arrival of Weldon.124 Someone started the question ‘whether God can understand his own necessity’: whereupon Hardie got down St Thomas’s Summa and after ferreting in the index suddenly pronounced, without any intention of being funny, ‘He doesn’t understand anything’. This lead to great amusement, the best being an imaginary scene of God trying to explain the theory of vicarious punishment to Socrates. We left Hardie at about 10 to 12, and found Corpus in total darkness. Escaped in the end with difficulty . . .

  15 February 1927

  Spent the morning on Trevelyan’s England in the Age of Wycliff and partly in reading Gower, a poet I always turn to for pure, tho’ not for intense pleasure. It’s a rum thing that Morris shd have wanted so desperately to be like Chaucer and succeeded in being so exactly like Gower . . .

  Back to College and read Gower till dinner time: after dinner to meet D and Maureen at the theatre where the OUDS were doing Lear. We decided that we wd give up going to them hereafter. It was all that sort of acting wh. fills one at first with embarrassment and pity, finally with an unreasoning personal hatred of the actors. ‘Why should that damned man keep bellowing at me?’ They nearly all shouted hoarsely and inarticulately. Bussed with the others to Magdalen gate, all v. cheery in spite of our wasted evening . . .

  1 April 1927

  I am entertaining the Mermaids tonight, drat ’em.125 They are nothing but a drinking, guffawing cry of barbarians with hardly any taste among them, and I wish I hadn’t joined them: but I don’t see my way out now . . . Back to College, and had to spend most of the time getting things ready for the sons of Belial. The evening passed off alright I think: Tourneur’s Revenger’s Tragedy was read, a rotten piece of work whose merits, pretty small to begin with, were entirely lost in the continual cacking wh. greeted every bawdy reference (however tragic) and every mistake made by a reader. If one spent much time with these swine one wd blaspheme against humour itself, as being nothing but a kind of shield with which rabble protect themselves from anything wh might disturb the muddy puddle inside them.

  TO HIS FATHER: from Magdalen College

  30 March 1927

  I was very sorry both to hear of the eclipse of the visit scheme and of your disappointing state of health. As to the former, if it stood by itself, I would reply (adapting Falstaff) ‘Are there not trains? Are there not motor busses? Are there not men of war in side cars?’ Why should your movements depend on the erratic and extremely hazardous aurigations of a boiler maker [Gussie Hamilton]? On the score of economy, trains have it every time. On the score of safety I can think of no method of travelling which is not superior to a seat in Uncle Gussie’s car. Your account of the swelling on the right knee elicited the word ‘gout’ from the only knowledgeable person I mentioned it to . . .

  The scene of Squeaky in the office is a masterpiece and made me roar with laughter . . . It reminds me of the President’s latest exploit, when we met to elect a Proctor (it falls to each College in turn to choose one of its own Fellows as Proctor). When the election had been made the President said that a formal notice had to be sent to the Vice-Chancellor at once ‘so perhaps Mr Benecke’ (Benecke is about sixty years of age) ‘you wouldn’t mind going round: and then you must ring at the door and hand it to the maid’. As some one said, it only needed the additional injuncions, ‘and remember to wipe your feet and take a clean handkerchief’ to make it really complete. While I’m on this, I must tell you another. We are putting up a new building. In the committee that met to discuss it, someone suggested an architect’s name, adding by way of explanation, ‘that’s the man who built Liverpool Cathedral’. To which the President at once retorted with an air of closing the matter, ‘Oh, I don’t think we want anything quite so large as that’.

  He has at last announced his intention of retiring, so I suppose we shall live in the excitement of an election for the next year. He has certainly had a wonderful run for his money, and tho’ a very laughable, is also a very loveable old fellow. He had the ludicrous, without the odious side of snobbery. He may have reverenced a Prince or a Duke too much, but never in his life did he despise or snub a poor scholar from a grammar school. When snobbery consists only of the admiring look upward and not of the contemptuous look downward, one need not be hard on it. A laugh—no unfriendly laugh—is the worst it deserves. After all, this kind of snobbery is half of it mere romance . . .

  We live in the most absurd age. I met a girl the other day who had been teaching in an infant school (boys and girls up to the age of six) where the infants are taught the theory of Evolution. Or rather the Headmistress’s version of it. Simple people like ourselves had an idea that Darwin said that life developed from simple organisms up to the higher plants and animals, finally to the monkey group, and from the monkey group to man. The infants however seem to be taught that ‘in the beginning was the Ape’ from whom all other life developed—including such dainties as the Brontosaurus and the Iguanadon. Whether the plants were supposed to be descendants of the ape I didn’t gather. And then people talk about the credulity of the middle ages!

  A propos of this can you tell me who said ‘Before you begin these studies, I should warn you that you need much more faith in science than in theology’. It was Huxley or Clifford or one of the nineteenth-century scientists, I think. Another good remark I read long ago in one of E. Nesbitt’s fairy tales—‘Grown ups know that children can believe almost anything: that’s why they tell you that the earth is round and smooth like an orange when you can see perfectly well for yourself that it’s flat and lumpy’ . . .

  I dined the other night at an Italian Professor’s, who is a Fellow of Magdalen, and sat next to a Frenchwoman who has met Mussolini. She says he is a rhetorician, and escapes from questions he doesn’t want to answer into a cloud of eloquence. I asked if she thought him a charlatan. She said no: he quite believes all his own gas, like a school boy, and is carried away by it himself. It interested me very much as being true to type—Cicero must have been just that sort of man . . .

  I quite see that the hotel in Donegal is in some ways unattractive. But temperance and plain diet are to be had everywhere. May I suggest that nothing hinders—indeed the Lenten season encourages—you and the Colonel to make Leeborough during the coming week into a temperance hotel with plain but plentiful food. Dumb bells and ‘Instant Postum’ you know.

  [ Jack and Warren were anxious about their father’s health although it was not clear what was wrong. Mr Lewis was delighted when Warren suddenly showed up at ‘Little Lea’ on 26 March and, using one of his son’s nicknames, he wrote in his diary: ‘Badge arrived on a flying visit after finishing his course of Economics at London University. Well and cheerful, and good company.’

  Warren reported to Woolwich on 2 April and two days later he learned that he was ordered to Aldershot on 7 April in preparation for sailing to Shanghai. On Wednesday the 6th he took his books and other belongings to Oxford and he spent the night with Jack. He arrived in Southampton on 11 April and he sent Mr Lewis a postcard of the troopship Derbyshire on which he was sailing. On it he wrote: ‘Just off (2.30). Double berth outside cabin to myself. Good bye, Warren.’ He feared that he might not see his father again.]

  TO HIS BROTHER: from ‘Hillsboro’

  26 April 1927

  I arrived back from my travels at lunch time yesterday and found your letter, posted at Gib. [Gibraltar], awaiting me. It had come in fact the day after I left. It left me with a fine impression of boundless leisure and sea air, that is particularly tantalizing in view of the recollection that term begins on Friday. The arrival of income tax forms this morning drives home my irritation with this hanky-panky which keeps a few hundreds of self-indulgent fellows like you fooling about in the Mediterranean on my money in order to fill the pockets of
the ‘China Merchants’. However, you may be in less pleasant circumstances by the time this reaches you, so I must suppress the note of envy. Still, provided that you don’t meet with a war in China, every ordinary boredom and discomfort which may await you is a price almost worth paying for a free trip half round the world, well fed, unworked, and in tolerably congenial society. (You must be putting on flesh at a desperate rate.)

  I thought we had mentioned Squire Western’s choice of table talk before [in Fielding’s Tom Jones]. It goes to the root of the matter, doesn’t it? By the way I have never been able to share that popular feeling about Western as a fine type of bluff, honest, genial Englishman: he seems to me one of the four or five most intolerable people in fiction (I mean to meet: of course he is excellent in a book). Tom Jones goes far to explain why Johnson and his set didn’t like the country. I can quite imagine that a countryside of highwaymen and the rural jokes of the period, inhabited by Westerns and Blifils would have led him to ‘abstract his mind and think of Tom Thumb’:126 for one can hardly imagine him knocking them down with folios. At least, if he had made the attempt, he would have liked the country even less after it than before it. He would have dismissed Mr Square as a infidel dog, and I don’t feel that he would have got on with Thwackum. Sophia is good. She comes during that lucid interval when good heroines were possible in novels written by men, when the restoration tradition by which a heroine must be a whore was dead, and the Victorian tradition by which she must be a fool had not been born.

  Now for my own adventures. I was joined [on 19 April] at Oxford station by two others and we proceeded together to Goring.127 One of them was new to the game and turned up carrying a Tommies pack filled square like a tommy’s pack, for inspection. On the way we extracted from it a large overcoat, a sponge, four shirts, a heavy tin mug holding about a pint, two strong metal cigarette cases of pudaita proportions, and a number of those insane engines which some people associate with holidays. You know—the adaptable clasp knife which secrets a fork at one end and a spoon at the other, but in such a way that you could never really use the fork and the spoon together—and all those sort of things. Having recovered from our delighted laughter and explained that we were going to walk in an English county and not in Alaska, we made up the condemned articles into a parcel wh. we compelled him to post home from Goring. It weighed about seven pounds. Our fourth met us at Goring station.

  After tea in the garden of the lock keeper at Goring lock—we ate it sitting just beside the weir, dipping our hands into the water and enjoying the rush and the noise—we set out N.N.W. In half an hour the suburbanity of Goring was out of sight. We soaked for a long time in a winding valley with all the bigness of downs opening behind and the richer Chiltern country towards Henley rising in the distance. We were on the broad grass track of the Icknield Way, the grass very short and fine and perfectly dry, as it is nearly all the year round in these chalk hills. It was an afternoon of lovely sunshine with a pleasant light wind, and a lark overhead displayed all its accomplishments. That night we slept at East Ilsley which (I think) you and I went through on our way to Salisbury.

  We spent nearly the whole of Wednesday [20 April] following the Icknield Way along the northern edge of the downs, overlooking the Wantage valley on our right. Around us, and to our left, the country had all the same character: close smooth grass, very pale in colour, deliciously springy to the foot: chalk showing through here and there and making the few ploughed pieces almost cream colour: and, about three to a mile, clumps of fir, whose darkness made them stand out very strikingly from the low tones of the ground. The extent of prospect was (or seemed to be) larger than any I have seen, even from the highest hills I have been on—just wave after wave of down, and then more of them, for ever. The air is very clear here and one sometimes sees a hay stack or a farm on a ridge, so distinct and at the same time so remote that it is like something seen through the wrong end of a telescope. We had tea at Lambourn and slept at Aldbourne.

  Thursday [21 April] opened with discussions. A survey of the maps showed a lamentable discrepancy between the route we wanted to follow and the possible places for lunch. Then emerged the dark and hideous prospect of ‘taking’ lunch. Perfectly simple you know. Buy some bread and cheese before we start and have lunch where we like. Makes you independant you know. Drinks? Oh, get a few oranges if you don’t feel inclined to carry a bottle of beer in your pack for the first ten miles. I need hardly say that our novice—the Knight of the Adaptable Jack Knife—was entirely in favour of a scheme which promised to restore his original conception. I of course, who had seen days spoiled this way before, was the head of the opposition. The wrong party won. We stuffed our packs with bread, butter, cheese and oranges. The only thing I look back on with satisfaction was that the butter, at any rate, was not in my pack. Then we set off.

  The first mile made us thoroughly aware of the fact that the wind (wh. had been in our faces since Goring) had risen to a gale. The next three miles left no one in any doubt of the fact that when a strong wind blows in your face all day, it parches your throat and chaps your lips without cooling your body. We were now in sight of ‘Barberry Castle’, a Roman Camp, for the sake of seeing which all this folly had started. The exponents of the ‘carry your lunch’ school had now reached the stage of indulging in a quite unusual degree of praise of the scenery and the pleasures of walking tours, on the ‘this is fine’ lines. But long before we had reached the top of that disastrous camp they slunk in silence, and only the malcontents (Barfield and myself) felt inclined to talk. In fact we talked quite a lot.

  When we reached the top we found ourselves in one of those places where you can neither speak for the hurricane nor open your eyes for the sun. Beyond the suggestion (mine) of performing on the wind (and the Romans) a certain physiological operation disallowed by English law and by polite conversation, we were silent here. Turning up our collars and pulling our hats down hard on our heads, we couched under a scrannel gorse bush wherever prickles and sheep dung left a space, and produced our scanty and squalid meal. The appearance of the butter faintly cheered us (all of us except the man among whose socks and pyjamas it had travelled), but it was a sight that moved mirth, not appetite. The last straw was the oranges, wh. proved to be of the tough, acrid, unjuicy type, which is useless for thirst and revolting to taste.

  The midday siesta (that great essential of a day’s walking) was out of the question in that abominable camp, and we set off gloomily S. W. Barfield and I dropped behind and began composing in Pope-ian couplets a satire on the people who arrange walking tours. Nothing cd have been happier. At a stroke every source of irritation was magically changed into a precious fragment of ‘copy’. By the time we had walked three miles we were once more in a position to enjoy the glorious country all round us. Five o’clock found us descending a slope full of druidical stones, where we started three hares successively so close that we had nearly trodden on them, into the village of Avebury.

  Avebury overwhelmed me and put me into that dreamlike state which is sometimes the reward of being very tired. Imagine a green ancient earthwork with four openings to the four points of the compass, almost perfectly circular, the wall of a British city, large enough to contain broad fields and spinneys inside its circuit, and, in the middle of them, dwarfed by its context, a modern village. Obviously here was the capital of a great king before the Roman times. We had been passing British things all day—stones, mounds, camps etc. But it was extraordinary to find a Berkshire village inside one. Here we had tea gloriously, in the orchard of an inn: and took off our shoes, and ordered a fresh pot and more hot water, and fair copied the satire and lay on our backs and talked Oxford reminiscences and smoked pipes.

  Then Wof—he’s the jack knife man—did a sensible thing by returning after a moment’s absence and saying ‘If you’re not very keen on walking to Marlborough there’s a man here with a milk cart who will take us in’. So we sat among milk cans (which are just the right angle to lean
against) and bumped and rattled along the Bath road (of Pickwickian and coaching memories) into Marlborough. Field is an old Marlburian but we were too tired to let him show us the sights. He told us however (what will interest you) that the fine old Georgian building which faces you as you enter the school precincts was an inn on the Bath road in the old days. Pleasant days they must have been.

  Next day [22 April] we walked about four miles into Savernake Forest. It is not to be compared with the Forest of Dean, but well worth an hour or so. It is the typically English kind of wood—nearly all big oaks with broad mossy spaces between them and deer flitting about in the distance. Leaving the forest we struck westward into the vale of Pewsey, and were threading about little woods and field-paths for an hour or so. After our windy days on the Downs this was a pleasant change: the richness of the colours, the soft burring of the wind (now harmless) in the little trees, and the flowers everywhere were specially delightful by contrast. We crossed a fine rise called Hansell Hill: a thing rising so abruptly on both sides that it was like a gigantic tumulus. From the top of this we had one of the finest views in England. Northward, the Berkshire Downs, huge even in their apparent extent, and huger to our minds because we had spent two whole days walking on them. Southward, across the valley, rose the edge of the Salisbury plain.

  We came down the side of that hill over a big spur called the Giant’s Grave and lunched admirably in the village of Ocue—beer and bread and cheese followed by a pot of tea, and then a game of darts: you know the apparatus for that game which one finds in pubs. Shortly after lunch we had the best ‘soak’128 I’ve ever had in a walk, by turning out of a little grassy lane into a wood where the grass grew soft and mossy, and there were solid clumps of primroses the size of dinner plates: not to mention a powdering of those little white flowers—wood anemones. We laid ourself flat on our back with packs under our head for pillows (for it is in the beauty of a pack that it can thus convert into a regular bed a flat ground otherwise useless for soaking): some rash attempts at conversation were ignored and we spent an hour with half shut eyes listening to the burring of the wind in the branches, and an occasional early bumble bee. The remainder of the day brought forth a bad bit of wrong map reading: but this also is among the delights of a journey: for it found us ambling into our tea stopping place along the grassy tow-path of an all but obsolete canal where we had never meant to go and which was all the better for that. We lay at Devizes: a poor inn.