by C. S. Lewis
Thursday 13 July: . . . I worked all morning on my dissertation with great enjoyment, and again after lunch until Miss Wiblin came for Maureen.
Just at that moment a bulky figure loomed in sight and Cranny entered the hall. D at once asked him if he had been ill—and indeed he looked shrunk and changed. He said he had been worried and came into the dining room with D and me. His story came out by degrees. He was utterly changed. He said his effort to exchange with a London parish had fallen through and his wife had been ‘very much upset’. Further, they had invited a girl down to distract his son from an undesirable girl, but the decoy had worked too well and the son was distracted to the extent of getting engaged to the girl provided by the family.
Cranny said he lived among mad people and he thought he was going mad himself. It can’t be his son’s engagement, for he’s used to trouble with the son: more probably his wife has nagged him half dead. He kept repeating that he wanted a change. D said ‘a change from his family’ and he did not contradict her. He said his time was done: he had nothing to live for. He was quite unable to talk in his old style—soon tired of his own troubles, yet incapable of changing to other topics. I never saw a man so utterly at sea: yet even so, poor devil, he didn’t forget his invariable little present of cigarettes for D.
Miss Featherstone, who came for tea, thought that there was a touch of madness about him. After the meal she and D foregathered in D’s room: Arthur, Cranny and I remained in the dining room and talked a little about spiritualism, but it was all constrained and miserable. He departed at about 6.
Arthur and I walked to Headington, turned right along the Barracks Rd., thence by the Green Lane to the Horsepath Rd., and home via the golf links. We joyously compared an evening walk under these conditions to one which brought us back to our respective fathers . . .
Friday 14 July: A wet morning. Sat in the drawing room and wrote a few stanzas for the IVth Canto of ‘Dymer’. Arthur went out to the Gonners, taking Maureen’s violin with him.
It cleared up later and I went into College and saw Farquharson. He gave me some Latin proses and good advice, recommending Rivington’s ‘Class Books’ of Latin Unseens for Miss Wiblin. I then went for a short time to the Union and then returned home. Arthur in, Maureen out, for lunch.
Afterwards Arthur and I went up Shotover . . . I took him over the stile to the left to show him the ‘crab apple’ landscape. We then proceeded to the bracken ridge above Horsepath. He had brought sandwiches and milk. I left him to paint and returned for tea—very strong sun by now and a plague of flies.
Found D and Dorothy making jam and joined them in snagging red currants—a beastly job—till tea at five. Did a little more snagging afterwards and read Hingley’s Psychoanalysis: he seems to belong to a different school from River: it is a better written book . . .
Saturday 15 July: A beautiful morning. After breakfast I foolishly trusted to Arthur’s timing, who was characteristically sitting down to the piano when I found we had only 20 min. in which to reach the Parks. We hastened into town and met Veronica—Sylvia Stevenson whom I seem happily fated not to meet had gone up to town. We walked to L.M.H.70 and there took a canoe. Veronica and I paddled while Arthur made himself comfortable with the cushions.
We first went down as far as Parson’s Pleasure, then up again a longish way between pleasant banks and under a fine sky—hard stony blue, veined with white showing through fleet after fleet of puffy clouds, some of them very large. We landed for a few minutes in a field where horses were pulling raking machines over new mown hay. We sat on the hay: there were ticks in it: Arthur tried to draw Veronica.
Embarking again, we continued upstream to the Cherwell Hotel: I was struck with the delightful little formal gardens coming down to the water. Here we had ginger beer through straws—unhappily Arthur considered it humorous to make a bubbling noise and Veronica followed suit, I think from sheer devilment, divining my shudder. She made one good remark—that an educational career is a school of hypocrisy in which you spend your life teaching others observances which you have rejected yourself.
On the return journey we yielded to Arthur’s request to paddle, but he always desisted after three strokes until spurred into activity again. His violent and impulsive movements were near to having us over and once gave me a real fright. The river was perfectly empty and we might have been in a lost continent.
On the way back we looked into L.M.H. (which from the gardens is very jolly). I was amused by the stiff little J.C.R. with its irredeemably drawing room air.
Got home at about 2: found jam making still in progress and D looking very tired—for which I cd. willingly have every fruit tree in England burnt down . . .
Arthur told us today how he and all his brothers and sisters were baptised in bathing suits by immersion in the bath of the Bernagh bathroom when he was about 12—in the presence of a gathering of the faithful.71 I begin to see that his father is not at all temperamentally devout—goes to theatres when away from home—is religious from a sense of duty only—is cold and sullen by his own nature . . .
Sunday 16 July: . . . I found Miss Wiblin here and we settled to work. First we did grammar: I do not seem to shine in teaching this even where I know it, but I think she is fairly sound. We then went to Unseens for the rest of the morning: she stayed for lunch. D rather poorly these days but I think earlier hours make some difference. Afterwards we discovered that Miss W. had to go somewhere to tea from here and might as well stay. She asked to be allowed to work and I gave her some more Latin till four o’c.
I was rather fagged after my morning and afternoon session—but after Maureen’s stupidity, devilment, and amazing faculty for forgetting, it is rather a relief to work with anyone who moves. Arthur went to tea at the Gonners. Later Maureen and I bussed into New College where we met Arthur and went to chapel. I enjoyed the music immensely, especially the psalms and Stanford’s Magnificat: I wondered why I had never troubled to go before—the last time I was there was with Cherry Robbins in 1917 . . .
Monday 17 July: . . . After lunch Arthur and I set off with baskets of food and thermoi. We found Veronica at L.M.H. who greeted us with the cheerful news that she was bringing ‘two other females’. As we had provided tea for only four, I thought this rather cool. The two parasites turned out to be Miss Wigg (who is recovering from paratyphoid, and anyhow seems a nonentity) and Miss Hugon—a grey faced, broad shouldered, slow spoken Frenchwoman, after the style of Miss Powell at Reading, over educated, affected, vain, flippant and insufferable. Yet she would have impressed me once. She said Masefield ‘took himself too seriously’ this being a form of words applied indifferently to everyone by fools of her type.72
Arthur punted us up the river with some success. We had tea under the trees opposite the Cherwell Hotel during a shower. We dropped the Hugon woman at the L.M.H. landing stage at five o’clock: then proceeded to a suitable place beside the Parks and tied up. Arthur began painting Veronica, with lavish burlesque criticism and encouragement from us.
All very merry till 7 o’clock when we came home. Getting back, we were surprised to find Baker who had been there since 2 o’clock. He had his viva this morning and swears that he is ploughed. He also gave us a further account of Lilian Bayliss: they sat with their knees touching and agreed to share their joys and sorrows while she addressed him as ‘dear boy’. After she had been talking for some minutes he felt it obligatory to make noises in his throat: after quarter of an hour he laid aside his gloves and took out his handkerchief, pulling up his trousers in momentary expectation that he might have to kneel with her in prayer. He is up here for a fortnight to rehearse and act in a melodrama by Bernice de Bergerac at the House.73 . . .
Tuesday 18 July: I forgot to call Arthur this morning and going late into his room was privileged to see the pellet of India rubber in situ in his hither ear. D and I with some difficulty persuaded him to postpone his departure till tomorrow.
D much better today. Shortly after breakfast
Baker arrived: the three of us sat in the drawing room where he read out some of the more absurd passages in the melodrama. Later on we were joined by the Doc, who has been in London. He has spent most of his time at the Coué Institute and had ça passe treatment on his rheumatic arm. He said it did stop the pain: but when we asked for how long, he had to admit ‘for about twenty minutes’.74 This naturally led to a conversation on kindred subjects and in a few minutes the Doc was expounding his philosophy of the primal One and its objectification. My suggestion that people of his ilk really ignored the antithesis of mind and body proved an excellent hare wh. we followed all morning. I thought the Doc confused—but was delighted at his description of solipsism as ‘that old gag’. It was very good talk anyway. We walked out for a short while before lunch.
At 2.30 came Miss Wiblin. I understood that she was to give Maureen a lesson but it appeared that she was to have one from me instead: so we set to our Latin prose until nearly five o’clock, having tea brought to us.
It was now a glorious evening. I walked over to Iffley where I found Arthur with the Doc: Mary was also there, having come from London by a later train. We all walked to Iffley church and admired the Norman tower and arches: while we were inside, the parson—Clarendon, possibly a Ewart connection—came in and said that a service was about to begin: whereupon we all went out shamelessly and sat above the weir on the Lincoln bridge. The Doc gave us a vivid description of his sail 1500 miles up the Amazon. Speaking of the project of exploring central Brazil, Arthur said ‘That’s the sort of thing I’d like to do!!’
We then returned home. Jam making still continued and I helped D to snag currants in the kitchen. Even when this was done, we had a long wait for supper, as the mushroom stew was not quite cooked. Seeing Arthur’s misery I could not refrain from remarking on the gluttony which so demoralised my father if a meal were late. Whereupon he replied ‘Oh but some people do really get sick if they don’t have their meals at the regular times. Mother does. I’m just the same!’ So we gave him bread and butter and he struggled on somehow.
The reference to his mother reminds me of his reply which I forgot to put down the other day. After D had left the breakfast table and while he was still feeding, I ventured to say something about the sucking, squeaking, crunching noises he makes in eating, from which D and I suffer tortures. ‘I know. Sorry. It’s in the family. Mother does it too!’ . . .
Wednesday 19 July: Up betimes and a fine morning. Arthur took to his packing and I wrote a storm passage for the beginning of ‘Dymer’ IV. He departed with many and I think true regrets: I accompanied him in his taxi to the station.
Came back and found that jam making had set in with unusual severity. After helping for a little longer I began to be afraid that Baker wd. arrive before we had lunch, and had a cold meal alone. The result was that he did not come till half past two.
We walked up Shotover. Not much serious conversation. He spoke of an American woman whom he had recently met, whose ruling passion for twenty years had been astrology. She had taken his horoscope: tho’ ignorant of his circumstances she had said that teaching was not his real job, begged him to go on the stage and prophesied an early success. He would not get fame by writing. He would never have much domestic happiness: and if he married or had an affair before he was thirty, it would cause great trouble. His health would always be bad. We came back here for tea. D and I, after the charm of Barfield, were struck by the unfortunate brusqueness of his manners.
Not long after tea—Baker being gone—the Doc and Mary arrived. I had a few words alone with him: he admitted that he had suffered from what I call Arthur’s ‘mania for confession’ . . .
Saturday 22 July: We think that it will never stop raining again. In all morning, working on my dissertation. I was in poor form and seemed to be writing nonsense. Afterwards I read the Chanson de Roland. The Doc was here in the morning. After lunch came Baker: he must be royally bored in his digs if he finds us, in our present state, diverting. It is high time we were in Headington. After tea Maureen and I made him play ‘boys’ names’ which he did with great gusto—he is certainly improving. Miss Wiblin came in the evening for Latin . . .
Sunday 23 July: Another wet day. After lateish breakfast I settled down in the drawing room and read more than half of Henry VI, Part I, at first with great pleasure, but later I grew tired of the too wide field of action, the monotony of the verse and the continual intrusion of merely ‘public’ interests on the real play.
Between this, chatting, sauntering and reading the Sunday Times, I got to luncheon. D rather poorly with rheumatism and indigestion—both results of the weather. After lunch I read Bradley’s Appearance and Reality—the chapter on Reality. It is most difficult: he seems to do the very thing he protests against, namely, pass from the necessary consistency of the Absolute for thought to its harmony for feeling, using the word ‘inharmonious’ in an ambiguous sense. But probably I do not understand him . . .
At six o’clock came Miss Wiblin and I did Latin with her until supper time. After she was gone, D and I talked. The question is whether Maureen is to leave school and give all her time to music or not: certainly there is no education, musical or otherwise, to be had at Headington . . .
Monday 24 July: . . . At about 2.30 Baker came. He had been at Tetsworth yesterday with the Kennedys, who took him to see Vaughan Williams. As if by arrangement, he was at work on his new symphony when they arrived, and was quite ready to talk of music. He is the largest man Baker has ever seen—Chestertonian both in figure and habits. He eats biscuits all the time while composing. He said that after he had written the first bar on the page of a full score, the rest was all mechanical drudgery and that in every art there was 10% of real ‘making’ to 90% of spadework. He has a beautiful wife who keeps a pet badger—Baker saw it playing both with the dog and the kittens and it licked his hand . . .
Tuesday 25 July: . . . Allchin had been to see D in the morning and the whole question of Maureen’s schooling had been discussed, the general result being that she must choose between music and school. The Doc, Baker and I sat like a jury on the sofa while D summed up: by some curious freak the conversation took only two minutes to degenerate in a really preposterous dialogue between Baker and the Doc on the educational merits of Holy Scripture, in which neither got on to the other’s line of argument for a moment . . .
Miss Wiblin came as usual after tea. Her exam starts tomorrow and there is no doubt she has knowledge enough for a sporting chance, but with overwork and wind up she has got into a state in which anything may happen.
. . . the school problem was of course left entirely to Maureen: and she definitely decided to leave, tho’ doubtless with regrets.
Wednesday 26 July: Fair weather. Went over my books and papers and made a few notes for the viva. Having waited till 11 o’clock did a little more gardening and went in to the Union, where I could not find anything of much use. What I did find was the VIth volume of Havelock Ellis’s Psychology of Sex which is curious. The most interesting part was quotation expecially from Hindu and Persian books. Apropos of the ignorance of girls he quotes an amazing case of an American girl who was homosexual and was twice married (in disguise) to other women, neither of whom ever realised that she was not a man. Memo to look up Oneida where Plato’s Communism seems to have been practised with some success.
Came back for lunch. D very much better, but busy. Baker came shortly after lunch and I persuaded him to accompany me to the show at Headington School. It was a dreadful business. The first item was a Latin play about H. Coccles, including a battle on the stage at which everyone, including the performers, roared with laughter. Who can have been the idiot who allowed them to do this? Next came a kind of fairy play, cheap mysticism from beginning to end, an undigested mass of Shelley, Maeterlinck, Walt Whitman, Trine, Barrie and Algernon Blackwood. I writhed at it. Lastly we had the murder scene from Macbeth . . .
Before supper—which was very late on account of D’s work—I
nailed up the peeling paper in various parts of the house. In the evening wrote to P, whose letter arrived this morning with an enclosure of £30.
Thursday 27 July: Did some work after breakfast, but with incredible reluctance. A lovely morning and I have seven devils in me. Baker came at about 10.30. He is now thoroughly depressed about Glorious England of which he showed us an absurd bill in the most ignorant attempt at mediaeval English, with ‘ye’ for ‘the’ and other tomfoolery. He is also worried by the girl who plays daughter to him and who has to ‘cling passionately’ to his dead body: she is so shy that she is afraid to come near his face—the result being that she clings to his waist with embarrassing effect.
We walked to Headington by the cemetery and sat on a stone wall. The sun was intensely strong. We talked of group marriage as a remedy for monogamy. I pleaded that it was better than prostitution and a thousand times better than [an] affaire de coeur, but he didn’t think much of it.
He said very truly of Mrs Hinckley that the only thing about her was her sincerity: she said things that ought to make you writhe but in a way that made them all right. They had talked of the school, and to Baker’s onslaught she had replied ‘Don’t you think that Mrs Moore is rather prejudiced?’: to which absurdity Baker replied ‘Yes, she is. But what’s the origin of the prejudice?’ I’m afraid my opinion of Mrs Hinckley sinks steadily . . .
Friday 28 July: Heaven, to do it justice, granted me my prayer. Up betimes in white tie and ‘subfusc’ and in to my viva. We all presented ourselves (I knew none of the others) at 9.30. Myers, looking his most piratical, called over our names and read out the times at which we were to come, but not in alphabetical order.75 Two others and myself were told to stay and I was immediately called out, thus being the first victim of the day.