by C. S. Lewis
Saturday 5 January: We were rather late getting up and almost immediately after breakfast set off all three for town where Maureen was to have a tooth drawn. It was colder than ever—frost and wind without sun. A present of three woodcock arrived today from Willie, which I left at the poulterer’s to be plucked and trussed before we went into town.
I . . . went to the Union. Here I read the opening of Bertrand Russell’s A.B.C. of Atoms and after finding that the notion of atoms which I have from general reading is sufficiently correct, decided that there was no need to go further and took up his Philosophical Essays.
In his ‘Worship of a Free Man’ I found a very clear and noble statement of what I myself believed a few years ago. But he does not face the real difficulty—that our ideals are after all a natural product, facts with a relation to all other facts, and cannot survive the condemnation of the fact as a whole. The Promethean attitude would be tenable only if we were really members of some other whole outside the real whole: wh. we’re not. His essay on ethics I found very interesting. I came away bringing out Santayana’s Winds of Doctrine . . .
Sunday 6 January: . . . After making up my diary I got a fright through not being able to find the first volume of ‘Dymer’, but soon ran it to ground. Although I disagree with all Santayana’s definite conclusions, the atmosphere of sanity and coolness which pervades his book has influenced me in the direction of discontent with the whole plan of ‘Dymer’: it seems ‘full of sound and fury, signifying nothing’. I spent the morning rewriting the opening of the ‘Wild Hunt’ and, I think, greatly improving it . . .
I . . . helped to get ready for the Thurstons—thanks to whose impertinence poor D had been busily making cakes all morning. They arrived presently. Mrs Thurston, on a fuller view, turns out to be very ugly. The children are too delicate to eat cakes, and elected to have boiled eggs instead. After tea Maureen and I played animal grab with them: the little girl climbed on the sofa and stood on the chair and tried to break the metronome and stuck my favourite pipe in her mouth . . .
We had woodcock for supper and they were a supper fit for the gods. Afterwards I worked a little more on the ‘Wild Hunt’ and then read to D. Poor Maureen was very ill after having her tooth out and had a temperature of 101. D is afraid she may get a septic mouth.
Tuesday 8 January: This morning I decided to see what I could do about writing a thesis for St John’s, D having pointed out to me a possible fellowship there. I looked over my old ‘Hegemony of Moral Values’ thinking that I might use an improved version of it: at any rate it will be useful as a fallback if I cannot get anything else ready in time. On the whole however I decided to try and write instead an answer to Bertrand Russell’s ‘Worship of a Free Man’, in fact a prose version of ‘Foster’ . . .
After lunch I walked into town and got my typescript and, in the Union, wrote to Squire telling him that I had a poem 480 lines long and asking whether, if he liked it on other grounds, its length would exclude it from the Mercury.
I then took out Huxley’s Romanes Lecture,2 Russell’s Philosophical Essays and Ward’s Realm of Ends. I came home and had tea. I then read Huxley’s lecture which is a very noble and tonic piece of work. After it I went on to Ward’s book. I had taken it out because I foolishly misread the title ‘Reality of Ends’ and therefore supposed that it would be on my problem. I found it to be a silly, soft kind of book. . . . After supper I sat down with paper in front of me and began to follow the argument where it would lead me, conscientiously avoiding the conclusions I desired to reach. It led me almost into impossible antimonies: but I got a lot of interesting stuff.
I then read out to D for a little and we went to bed. When I took Pat out (as I always do before going to bed) I found that it was snowing and the ground covered with snow.
Wednesday 9 January: The snow was piled very deep on all the windows this morning and had covered the arm chair in my room near the window. It was unusually dry snow—firm and powdery like sand.
I spent the morning working on my new paper which I intend to call ‘The Promethean Fallacy in Ethics’ and wrote the first draft of a section which will come near the end, in which I reject the kind of solution offered in Balfour’s Theism and Humanism . . .
I then changed my clothes and walked through Headington Quarry to the Hinckleys . . . We played various very simple games and it was really quite good fun.
I came away at 6.45 and got home to find old Taylor here who stayed to supper. Although it was an interruption for everyone’s business we were all very glad to have him. I discovered that he was a reader of Trollope and we had a good deal of talk about that. After supper he and Maureen amused themselves on their fiddles. My throat was rather bad again tonight. In bed about one o’clock.
Thursday 10 January: . . . I . . . went to the Union and took out the second volume of Martineau’s Types [of Ethical Theory] and Sorley’s Moral Values and the Idea of God: and so home . . . After lunch I settled down to work and worked for the whole of the rest of the day till 10.30 with breaks of course for meals, trying hard to curb my infernal rapidity and to write the sentences instead of letting them write themselves.
Poor D had a headache and a sick feeling most of the day and was very miserable. As soon as I stopped work at ten thirty I got a very sharp headache which however soon grew milder. I read out to D till bedtime . . .
Saturday 12 January: . . . At the Union I returned Sorley and Martineau and took out Balfour’s Theism and Humanism and Theism and Thought. It rained and blew furiously all day. After lunch I worked hard and satisfactorily till supper at 8 o’clock. In the evening I read Theism and Thought.
About 10 o’clock Maureen discovered a rash and a temperature which D pronounced to be chicken-pox. My first thought was that this would save D all the extra work connected with the party: but I am afraid it will only give her more trouble in the long run. It is infernally hard luck on Maureen after all her other troubles and will dish her chances of getting into the team this term. She was put to bed and I got coal from the cellar and carried it up and laid the fire in her room. Very late to bed, very tired.
Sunday–Wednesday, 13–16 January: Three unpleasant days. I divided my time between doing housemaid’s work for D (Ada having been sent away lest she should catch the chicken-pox) and finishing my essay as best I could. I suffered from a very bad sore throat, headache and earache, and was very tired from morning till night.
Thursday–Sunday 17–20 January: Much the same except that, praise God, I got rid of my various disorders. I decided that any effort to continue my regular work at present could only lead to exasperation and, lest the time should be wholly wasted, I began to continue the Phaedrus from the point where I left it off some years ago.
Pat however soon put an end to that project by pulling the volume of Plato off the table one day when I had left him alone for five minutes and eating most of it. Afterwards I began to have ideas and am now re-writing Canto III of ‘Dymer’ and re-reading The Life and Death of Jason.3
Monday 21 January: Pouring with rain. After late breakfast, washing up, and cleaning vegetables, I corrected the typescript of my ‘Promethean Fallacy in Ethics’ and bussed into town. There I had Carritt’s and Wilson’s testimonials typed out and, enclosing them with an application and the essay, took the whole packet by hand and left it at St John’s.
Home by about two where I had a cold lunch, washed up, ‘did’ the kitchen, and the scullery and worked on ‘Dymer’ till tea, which we had in the kitchen at five and afterwards (with a few minutes of Jason) till supper time.
Maureen was bothered with her throat again tonight. D much better these days: she attributes this to the extra ‘bustling about’ and talks of getting rid of Ada, in whom many heinous sins have been discovered during the last week.
Tuesday 22 January: Up rather earlier than usual, tho’ still late: breakfast, washed up, cleaned vegetables, and was finished by eleven. I worked on my new Canto III and, finishing it, went to Hewitt’
s for a MS book and began to fair copy it. Lunch about 1.30: washed up, brushed the kitchen and mopped the scullery and came back to my fair copy . . .
Thursday 24 January: After finishing my morning chores I began my work on More again, feeling that I could not remain idle for ever. After I had worked for a few minutes I had occasion to leave the drawing room for a moment: whereupon Lady Gonner was shown in and D had to go and talk to her, thus shutting me off from my books. Lady G., though charming in a way, is one of those idle and talkative women who imagine that time is as free for everyone else as it is for themselves. D and I were both annoyed at being held up in our several businesses for twenty minutes. As soon as she was gone and I was fairly started again, Mrs Wilbraham arrived. After this I went up and worked in my own room.
A very cold day. I worked again in the afternoon and read Carr’s translation of Bergson’s Energie Spirituelle in the evening, which I did not find interesting. Bergson always seems almost incoherent in English.
Friday 25 January: A cold bright morning. I walked with Pat to Stowe Woods and strolled there for some time: it was very springlike, tho’ there are no primroses yet—there is one in the garden. D found in The Times yesterday that Coghill has got a Fellowship at Exeter. Worked all afternoon . . .
Saturday 26 January: A fine day. D had to go into town in the morning and I worked on Henry More. After lunch, which was very late, I was just about to start my chores when a ring brought me to the door and there I found Ewing. Thank heavens the blessed name of chicken-pox prevented him from coming in. He wanted me to read a paper to the postgraduate philosophical group next ‘Thirsty’ as he pronounced it, which I agreed to do. While he was talking to me Jenkin arrived on his bike . . . I had to leave the washing up to D and go for a walk with Jenkin.
We went up Shotover by the Quarry path, where he had never been before, talking of architecture, parents and children, his leaving Oxford, Havelock Ellis on dreams and other things. A wonderful lurid sunset on the way back . . .
Monday 28 January ad fin: After two days during which my jobs seemed inexplicably laborious and I was always cold, D found on Wednesday afternoon that I had a temperature of 102. It turned out to be this wretched chicken-pox and I lived for the next week in the yellow room. Towards the end I took walks in the garden. If you cross the lawn seventeen times you have walked a mile. As I could not shave for fear of cutting the spots on my face, I grew a considerable beard and have—provisionally—retained the moustache.
During my illness and solitary confinement I read the first three volumes of Gibbon with great enjoyment. I also read Vanity Fair for the first time and it has largely removed my old blindness to Thackery’s merit, tho’ I still detest his horrible ‘knowingness’ and winks to the reader. He is almost wholly negative. He finds meanness in all things but he does not show us any ‘light by which he has seen that darkness’: hence his pessimism, being based not on any original vision of the ideal, but simply on ready made morality as he found it in his class and age, is of a very low order. I admire his art, but I have no affection for him.
I also read Don Juan all through. The Cantos of the shipwreck, the island, and Constantinople are not worth reading twice—the rest not worth reading once: an indefensible swimming with the tide—a mere flinging out of everything that came into Byron’s rather ordinary head. The violences in metre soon cease to be amusing.
I re-read the first book of The Faerie Queene, except the fight with the dragon, and enjoyed it as much as ever. I think I never before saw how much real beauty there is in the religious parts. I read Maurice Hewlett’s Fool Errant—over-sexed like nearly all his work, but rather distinguished: also Mrs Humphrey Ward’s Lady Rose’s Daughter which is ‘as good as the first novel you will pick up’.
I re-wrote ‘Dymer’ VI—or rather wrote an entirely new canto with which I am pleased. ‘Foster’ was sent to Squire and refused. Appleton of the Beacon wrote to me saying that he had found ‘Joy’ again and asking if I still wanted it to appear. An unknown publisher called Stockwell wrote saying that ‘a mutual friend’ had told him I would soon have enough poems for a book and telling me he would be pleased to see them.
D kept wonderfully well.
Up until now Lewis’s Scholarship at University College had paid his College fees and left him with £11 per term. To make up what was needed Mr Lewis had been giving him £67 per term as well as paying incidental expenses. This would have been enough for an undergraduate living in college, but it was not nearly enough for a householder with two dependents. Now that the Scholarship was at an end Lewis wrote to his father on 4 February asking for help:
‘You know that my Scholarship is at an end. It was nominally a scholarship of £80 a year. What I actually got out of it was about £11 a term. Sometimes it would be a little more or a little less, but it generally averaged out to £33 a year. I had hopes of being able to make up that in other ways—pupils and the like—but they have not been realised and I am afraid I must ask for help.’ Letters of C. S. Lewis, p. 191.
Lewis did not keep a diary during 1–19 February.
Wednesday 20 February: I walked into town after breakfast and called on Farquharson. There was a pupil with him and he himself was sitting by the fire looking very sleepy. I told him I wished to go for a D.Litt. He asked me if ‘I had it ready’. I replied, with some surprise, that I had not—I understood that one had to send in one’s application before, not after the work was done. He said yes, that I must make out a scheme showing the authorities and MSS I was using etc.—all in fact that I can only know when the work is done.
I thanked him and went to the Union where I began to read Haldane’s Daedalus—a diabolical little book, bloodless tho’ stained with blood.4 This must be read and digested—or vomited.
I met Robson-Scott and we retired into the upper room to talk. He told me that he had had the same trouble with the Farq. and that it didn’t matter. He thought poorly of the O.U.D.S. Hamlet.5 This led to a discussion of the whole value of presentation as a test of plays, in wh. I forgot where we were and suddenly found myself lecturing in a voice which cd. be heard all over the library. We were both reduced to laughter. I am to go to tea with him next Tuesday. He told me that once, on being asked his name suddenly in strange company, he had actually been unable to give it for one terrible moment.
I got back the typescript of a new version of ‘Joy’ for Appleton and bussed home after some shopping for D. I washed up after lunch and read Oliver Elton’s Sheaf of Papers. Miss Featherstone came for tea. In the evening I sent ‘Joy’ to the Beacon, wrote to Stockwell explaining that I was under contract to Heinemann, and to Harwood refusing an invitation to London which we cannot afford at present. Later on I started reading out The Crock of Gold to D, but I don’t think she cared greatly for it.6
Thursday 21 February: . . . Immediately after breakfast I took Biddy Anne in to Gillard to be vetted. Biddy Anne is a yellow cat that has recently adopted us. I walked in from the Plain, called at College and went to the Union, coming home again by bus.
I then made up my diary since my illness. After lunch the weather changed. A startling mildness came over the air and it was like spring though there were heavy black clouds to the east. After D and I had strolled in the garden to enjoy this, I came in and read over my diary for this time last year. It is dully written—I recover the horrors from memory and not from the words.
A letter from Aunt Lily came by the afternoon post in answer to one I had written her recently protesting against her assertion that the last words of Pompilia in The Ring and the Book were the last words of his wife. I read her letter and began to answer it . . .
Friday 22 February: I had an unusually nasty dream connected with my father in the night—a dream of the clinging sort.
After breakfast I took down all the gas globes for D to clean. I spent the morning working on Henry More’s Defence of the Cabbala, a fantastic, tedious work. After lunch I crumbled a ham and swept the kitchen and scullery and
then went out for a walk with Pat . . .
Saturday 23 February: A dreamful night. Up and into town to get a washer for one of the hot water bottles, and other things.
We were all of us very little pleased at the prospect of the Pasleys’ arrival today for a week end. They invited themselves and I strongly advised D not to have them, for they gave us plenty of room for escape, but she insisted. I washed up after lunch while D got their room ready: everything was in a pandemonium.
They arrived at tea time. Mrs P. seems to have got rid of a great many of her affectations. The deafness is not worse. I liked her better this time. After tea, which we had in the kitchen, we talked in the drawing room. I think he still likes his married life but he is overworked and takes little interest in his work.7 They have few friends, and, tho’ they are within reach of the country, they seldom take a walk for more than half an hour. He is a little fatter and a little paler. He has learned to sleep after dinner and grown sensitive to draughts. He gave me an interesting account of the diary which his great-grandfather Admiral Pasley kept while serving in the war against America. I wish he would publish it.8
After supper D insisted on washing up—as indeed she insisted on doing everything during the whole week end, so that she and they hardly ever met. We played Boys’ Names in the evening—quite good fun. D and I of course were late to bed—D very tired and bothered.
Sunday 24 February: The Pasleys take a prodigious time to dress. After breakfast they and I went for a walk up Shotover, taking Pat. I would willingly have spun it out, as Maureen wanted the drawing room to practise in, but Pasley is not much of a walker, tho’ his wife is. He is quite insensible to nature—I think he always was.