Of course none of these critical vices are peculiar to undergraduates. They imitate that which, in their elders, has far less excuse.
Leavis’s Scrutiny ceased publication in October 1953. The closest thing to a replacement was Delta: The Cambridge Literary Magazine, a Cambridge undergraduate publication which began life when Scrutiny ended. Lewis’s comments on ‘Undergraduate Criticism’ went unremarked for some months, after which Delta devoted a twelve-page article to ‘Professor C.S. Lewis and the English Faculty’. The editors, Simon Gray of Trinity College and Howard Burns of King’s, were incensed that he should think the Bible and the classics important in understanding most European literature. ‘In placing the stress there,’ they complained, ‘Professor Lewis appears to be indicating both a contempt for the undergraduate’s preoccupation with literature, and even more seriously, what amounts to contempt for the highly individual sensibilities and imaginations … that have created so differently in our literature.’ After touching on every point of Lewis’s article, they concluded that its tone was ‘distasteful in its arrogance, distasteful in its authoritarian self-righteousness, distasteful finally in the contempt for the undergraduate that it suggests’.
The argument was picked up by the Cambridge University newspaper, Varsity, in an article called ‘Detachment’ (15 October): ‘Professor C.S. Lewis, when asked to comment on the attacks on him in last week’s “Delta”, … informs us that “(a) he can’t bear interviews … (b) he never heard of ‘Delta’ and knows nothing about the articles”. See what they mean?’ From there news of it spread to The Listener (20 October). A leader entitled ‘English – Left or Right’ stated that
What we are witnessing is one more skirmish in the battle between ‘tradition’ (the Classics, ‘Q’, the historical approach) and ‘nonconformity’ (Dr Leavis, psychology, sociology, and practical criticism) … There must be an agreed hard core of fact. You cannot start selecting until you have some idea what there is to select from. It is all very well to sneer at Aristotle as irrelevant to our time. But who are the editors of Delta, who is any man, that they or he should call Aristotle irrelevant?
This, in its turn, elicited a very long letter from F.R. Leavis himself, who in The Listener of 3 November said he could not see anything in Delta ‘that is not decent and intelligent. Professor Lewis himself, in launching such an attack, will hardly have expected to remain unanswered.’ At the end of a very heated debate that went on for months, and in which The Times Literary Supplement (25 November) and The Spectator (16 December) took part, Lewis finally responded with a letter to the editors of Delta (February 1961):
I complained that the tone of undergraduate criticism was too often ‘that of passionate resentment’. You illustrate this admirably by accusing me of ‘Pecksniffian disingenuousness’, ‘shabby bluff’ and ‘self-righteousness’. Do not misunderstand. I am not in the least deprecating your insults; I have enjoyed these twenty years l’honneur d’être une cible and am now pachydermatous. I am not even rebuking your bad manners; I am not Mr. Turveydrop and ‘gentlemanly deportment’ is not a subject I am paid to teach. What shocks me is that students, academics, men of letters, should display what I had thought was an essentially uneducated inability to differentiate between a disputation and a quarrel. The real objection to this sort of thing is that it is all a distraction from the issue. You waste on calling me liar and hypocrite time you ought to have spent on refuting my position. Even if your main purpose was to gratify a resentment, you have gone about it the wrong way. Any man would much rather be called names than proved wrong.
Lewis had finished his lectures on ‘Some Difficult Words’ in 1959, and on 9 September 1960 the book based on those lectures, Studies in Words, was published by Cambridge University Press. Ever since his debate with E.M.W. Tillyard in the 1930s over ‘The Personal Heresy’, Lewis had been urging his readers to find in literature ‘an acquisition, a voyage beyond the limits of his personal point of view, an annihilation of the brute fact of his own particular psychology rather than its assertion’, and in his new book he continues the argument. ‘One of my aims’, he said in the introduction,
is to facilitate, as regards certain words, a more accurate reading of the old books; and therefore to encourage everyone to similar exploration of many other words. I am sometimes told that there are people who want a study of literature wholly free from philology; that is, from the love and knowledge of words. Perhaps no such people exist. If they do, they are either crying for the moon or else resolving on a lifetime of persistent and carefully guarded delusion. If we read an old poem with insufficient regard for change in the overtones, and even the dictionary meanings, of words since its date – if, in fact, we are content with whatever effect the words accidentally produce in our modern minds – then of course we do not read the poem the old writer intended. What we get may still be, in our opinion, a poem; but it will be our poem, not his.
He goes on to say that ‘After hearing one chapter of his book when it was still a lecture, a man remarked to me “You have made me afraid to say anything at all.” I know what he meant … It is well we should become aware of what we are doing when we speak, of the ancient, fragile, and (well used) immensely potent instruments that words are.’ Talking of good and bad language, he defines the delicious word ‘Verbicide’:
Verbicide, the murder of a word, happens in many ways. Inflation is one of the commonest; those who taught us to say awfully for ‘very’, tremendous for ‘great’, sadism for ‘cruelty’, and unthinkable for ‘undesirable’ were verbicides. Another way is verbiage, by which I here mean the use of a word as a promise to pay which is never going to be kept. The use of significant as if it were an absolute, and with no intention of ever telling us what the thing is significant of, is an example.
Warnie arrived home in October, and when Jack returned to The Kilns for the weekends he found his brother at work on his fifth book about the ancien régime. His fourth, Louis XIV, had been published on 29 May 1959, and the new one was to be called The Scandalous Regent: A Life of Philippe, Duc d’Orléans 1674–23 and of his Family. On Saturday, 3 December, Jack went out for lunch with two fellow Inklings, Humphrey Havard and James Dundas-Grant, and over the next few weeks there were dinners with Austin and Katharine Farrer, Colin and Christian Hardie, Nevill Coghill, and other friends.
Lewis returned to Cambridge immediately after Christmas for a meeting at St Catharine’s College of the Commission to Revise the Psalter during 28–30 December. He had left Warnie deep in seventeenth-century France, and Warnie’s fertile period continued. The Scandalous Regent was published on 7 April 1961, and he was already rereading the memoirs of the diplomat and adventurer, the Chevalier d’Arvieux. ‘I began to re-read Arvieux and make notes on what I read, with an eye to manufacturing a book out of him,’ he wrote on 13 January 1961. ‘I see I last read Arvieux in 1930: how little I then imagined that I would ever live to be the author of five books on my pet subject!’
In Cambridge Jack faced a heavy winter of lectures. His twice-weekly lectures on ‘English Literature 1300–1500’ were followed by eight lectures on Spenser’s Faerie Queene. Several times during the term he met with Professor D. Winton Thomas to work on the Psalms, and on 28 February and 1 March he joined the rest of the Commission at Lambeth Palace. February 23 was the birthday of Samuel Pepys (1633–1703), whose library and diary are among the great treasures of Magdalene College. Lewis was invited to give a talk on Pepys that evening. Richard Ladborough, the Pepys Librarian, said of the occasion:
It is always a matter of astonishment to me that during the whole of his period at Magdalene, Cambridge, he should only once have visited the Pepys Library, and that for only twenty minutes when incited to do so by two eminent Oxford visitors. And yet he read the whole of Pepys’s Diary with insight and, of course, with intelligence, and made one of the best speeches on Pepys I have ever heard. This was in hall at the annual dinner held to celebrate Pepys’s birthday. Pepys in fact was a late ac
quaintance of his, and he took it for granted, with his usual modesty, that his hearers knew the text as well as he did.
Halfway through Easter Term 1961 Lewis learned that Arthur Greeves was planning a visit to England and wanted to spend a few days with him. ‘Your letter has brightened my whole sky,’ Lewis wrote with obvious delight on 8 May. ‘This time you shall have a double-bed nearly as broad as it’s long.’ On 22 June Lewis and his driver collected Arthur from London and returned with him to Oxford. Writing to Arthur on 30 June, he described their two days together as ‘one of the happiest times I’ve had for many a long day’. Arthur was worried about his old friend, and scribbled a note for himself saying Jack ‘was looking very ill’.
Lewis was ill. Immediately following Arthur’s visit Lewis went to the Acland Nursing Home where he was examined by Mr (later Sir) John Badenoch,* Director of Clinical Studies in the University of Oxford, and a consultant physician with the Oxfordshire Health Authority. ‘My trouble’, he told Arthur on 27 June, ‘has been diagnosed as one very common at our time of life, namely an enlarged prostate gland. I shall soon be in a nursing home for the necessary operation.’ The operation was set for Sunday, 2 July. In the end Mr Badenoch decided it was too dangerous. Jack’s kidneys were infected as well, and he was suffering from toxaemia, which caused cardiac irregularities. He was fitted with a catheter and put on a low-protein diet. Lewis loved fish, and he was discouraged from eating even that. In September, when Roger Lancelyn Green suggested coming down for a visit, Lewis was still waiting for the doctors to decide whether they would operate. He wrote to Green on 6 September:
It’s a bit tricky. I am awaiting an operation on my prostate: but as this trouble upset my kidneys and my heart, these have to be set right before the surgeon can get to work. Meanwhile, I live on a no-protein diet, wear a catheter, sleep in a chair, and have to stay on the ground floor. I’m quite capable of having a guest, but it depends on how the weekly blood-tests go. This means that, for all I know, it might come just when you want to be here so I think you’d better make alternative arrangements, which could be abandoned in favour of coming to the Kilns if, when the time comes, I should be here and not in the Acland. I’d hate to miss the chance of a visit from you if it turns out to be feasible. Is this all too bothersome?
You needn’t pity me too much. I am in no pain and I quite enjoy the hours of uninterrupted reading which I now get.
For the last six months Jack had been planning a trip to Scotland with Jean Wakeman and the boys. Now it had to be called off. Lewis was also finding it difficult to know what was best for his elder stepson. Unlike Douglas, who went sometimes to the parish church, Holy Trinity, in Headington Quarry, David had been interested in Judaism since he was eleven. The boy was now trying to understand the faith that Joy’s parents had abandoned. He was also devoted to not being English, and this as well as a need for an identity led him to memorize the conjugations of Hebrew irregular verbs during the Greek lessons at Magdalen College School. Joy had encouraged him to have Hebrew lessons, and Lewis entirely approved.
Lewis knew what it was like to work hard, and he admired David’s efforts to learn. He allowed him to have private lessons in Hebrew from Ronald May, who was working as a proof-reader for the Oxford University Press and who later taught at the Oxford Centre for Post-Graduate Hebrew Studies. At the same time that David was being taught Hebrew, he started to learn Yiddish by himself. One of the world’s leading Yiddish scholars, Professor Chone Shmeruk of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, was in Oxford during the winter of 1961–2 and gave him lessons in Yiddish. It was an important day when David passed the Hebrew O-level examination. He began attending the Jewish Synagogue in Oxford in 1961.
Lewis was not well enough to go back to Cambridge for Michaelmas Term 1961, but stayed at home with his brother and the boys. Warnie had been a teetotaller since his return from Ireland the previous September, and we learn from his diary that he finished his book on d’Arvieux on 9 August 1961. It was published on 30 November as Levantine Adventurer: The Travels and Missions of the Chevalier d’Arvieux, 1653–1697.
An operation was still impossible, and Mr Badenoch arranged for Lewis to receive blood transfusions every few weeks. Warnie wrote to Mary Willis Shelburne on 7 October:
The result was that he came home a week ago most definitely improved; with not only the permission but the encouragement of his doctors, he now gets up in the morning and cooks his own breakfast, and every day he goes out for half an hour’s walk. Better still, he has been put on a more generous diet and enjoys his meals. But perhaps the best sign is that he tells me he is getting very bored with invalid life and is itching to get back to work. As for the impending operation, the surgeon now talks of it as a thing quite in the future – six, or even twelve months ahead he says. Which naturally is an enormous relief to me, for if they are taking this view there cannot be anything very urgent the matter.
Two days later Lewis wrote to his colleague at Magdalene, Richard Ladborough: ‘I grow quite homesick for college and very much hope that tho’ not good for much, I’ll be back in January. I haven’t had too bad a time and have re-read all the long books … which one never has time to read when in health. But one grows weary of leisure in the end.’ This, however, proved impossible, and soon the question was whether he would be well enough to go back in March 1962. He explained his problem to his pupil Francis Warner in a letter of 6 December 1961: ‘The position is that they can’t operate on my prostate till they’ve got my heart and kidneys right, and it begins to look as if they can’t get my heart and kidneys right till they operate on my prostate. So we’re in what an examinee, by a happy slip of the pen, called “a viscous circle”. Still, it is not quite closed. Meanwhile, I have no pain and am neither depressed nor bored.’
In the end, Lewis had to ask someone else to supervise Francis Warner. But the years they worked together were happy ones for both of them, and when replying to a letter from his pupil’s mother, Nancy Warner, on 26 October 1963, Lewis said of Francis: ‘He is not only a very promising scholar but the best mannered man of his generation I have ever met.’
An Experiment in Criticism was published on 13 October 1961, and he wrote to Kathleen Raine on 21 October: ‘My Experiment has elicited fan mail from a few Cambridge undergraduates. This was a hopeful surprise – can it be that the tide is turning at last? I’d write more but I’ve just had a blood transfusion and am feeling drowsy. Dracula must have led a horrid life!’ It was not only Cambridge undergraduates who thought well of the book. It was highly praised by most reviewers. Near the end of the book Lewis mentions the evaluative school of criticism, with particular emphasis on what he called ‘the Vigilant school of critics’:
To them criticism is a form of social and ethical hygiene. They see all clear thinking, all sense of reality, and all fineness of living, threatened on every side by propaganda, by advertisement, by film and television … The printed word is most subtly dangerous, able ‘if it were possible, to deceive the very elect’, not in obvious trash beyond the pale but in authors who appear … to be ‘literary’ and well within the pale … Against this the Vigilant school are our watchdogs or detectives … They are entirely honest, and wholly in earnest. They believe they are smelling out and checking a very great evil. They could sincerely say like St Paul, ‘Woe to me if I preach not the gospel’: ‘Woe to me if I do not seek out vulgarity, superficiality, and false sentiment, and expose them wherever they lie hidden.’
Christopher Derrick wrote in the Catholic periodical, The Tablet:
This is a plea for a resolutely low-church attitude to criticism, and already it has drawn some angry gunfire from representatives of the high and powerful priesthood which it threatens. The point is that this cultural priesthood not only offers … something rather like a surrogate religion, but also creates in its observants an habitual attitude of anxious prickly suspicion towards books, and even towards life and the universe at large. Dr Lewis insists that this is a bad
thing, that imaginative literature offers an immensely valuable ‘enlargement of our being’ … He is wonderfully right; for those in favour of happiness but distrustful of politics and the elevated disapproving mind, his book is a charter and a liberation.
The particular passage which offers ‘a charter and a liberation’ from the Vigilants – and now the Deconstructionists! – is one of the most moving passages Lewis ever wrote:
The primary impulse of each is to maintain and aggrandize himself. The secondary impulse is to go out of the self, to correct its provincialism and heal its loneliness. In love, in virtue, in the pursuit of knowledge, and in the reception of the arts, we are doing this. Obviously this process can be described either as an enlargement or as a temporary annihilation of the self. But that is an old paradox; ‘he that loseth his life shall save it’ …
Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality. There are mass emotions which heal the wound; but they destroy the privilege. In them our separate selves are pooled and we sink back into sub-individuality. But in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.
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