by C. S. Lewis
Read Plato’s Erastae after supper, wh. contains a v. comic little account of the ideal Gk. gentleman—v. like the renaissance one, in a way.
Back to College and think I was feverish in the night—always half awake and asleep in a skein of muddled dreams, v. thirsty.
Monday 29 [28] February: (the dates have got wrong somehow). Woke with a headache and feeling shaky. Got through the morning pretty well, discovering to my delight that Hetherington is an admirer of Phantastes. Home for lunch. Still raining. D was better today tho’ still tired. Back after tea to take Hamilton & Betjeman. After dinner decided to nurse myself and shake off this whatever-it-is. Sat over my fire with a detective story and hot toddy till about 10.45 and then went to bed.
Tuesday 1 March: Woke after a good night feeling much better. Spent the morning noting parallels between Donne, Milton and Burton.
Hudson came round from All Souls to give me the recipe for the punch, as I am entertaining the Mermaids tonight, drat ’em. 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.
Home for lunch. D seemed still v. tired. We all tried talking French at lunch. It was not raining when I set out for my walk, over the fields to Stowe Woods, but came on just as I turned homeward on the Crab Apple Road, and I got pelted.
Back to College, and had to spend most of the time getting things ready for the sons of Belial. The evening passed off all right 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 cackling 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 that might disturb the muddy puddle inside them.
Put the room straight after they’d gone and sorted out clean from dirty things for the benefit of Hatton. Then to bed and slept well, and oh the beautiful silence and fresh air after all that evening!
Wednesday 2 March: A bright, beautiful morning. Read Courthope’s chapters on Wit. There’s nothing in them (‘She’s empty. Hark, she sounds’). Anyone can do this talk in generals about the break-up of scholasticism, and it gets you no further. What you want is something that will make you realise from inside how the break up of scholasticism might have made you yourself take to paradox. One can do it for oneself better without Courthope.
I also read some Dryden in the attempt to find out what he meant by wit. But he means something different each time. He’s a rum case of a man who was just a poet and nothing else—no magnanimity, no knowledge, no power of thought: just rhythm and gusto.
Went to Bodley and ordered the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th Edns. of Paradise Lost for tomorrow to find out about ‘crouch’ or ‘couch’. Met Cowley there who bowed with his hand on his heart and invited me to make use of his services. Then set off home, in excellent spirits till I suddenly got something in my eye.
D still v. tired and bothered, having been dragged to the cemetery by Mrs Studer again this morning. I do hope Mrs S. leaves the country or quarrels with D before she has made her ill. And Dotty had kept D up, and Winifred had annoyed her, and a visitor came to tea—oh curse it all! Is there never to be any peace or comfort?
EPILOGUE
There was to be much peace and comfort. In 1930 Mrs Janie Moore and Jack bought such a house as they had always wanted. This is The Kilns in Headington Quarry, with its own pond and woodlands. There Mrs Moore remained, with her many pets, for most of her long life. Besides a large garden, she had a gardener called Paxford in whom she never found a fault. In 1949, when she was very old and forgetful, she went to a nursing home in the nicest part of Oxford. Jack visited her every day until her death on 12 January 1951. Her husband, Courtenay Moore, never left Ireland. When he died, six months after Janie, he left everything to the Dublin Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Maureen went to the Royal College of Music and became a music teacher. She married Leonard Blake and they had two children. In 1963 she became quite unexpectedly Lady Dunbar of Hempriggs with a castle in Scotland. Warnie retired from the Army in 1932 and came to live at The Kilns. He pleased everyone by writing six delightful books of French history. And Jack Lewis, as nearly everyone knows by now, was converted to Christianity. You can read about this spiritual journey in his autobiography, Surprised by Joy. The literary career, which he had already begun to combine with his academic one, blossomed unfalteringly and books of all sorts poured from his pen.
BIOGRAPHICAL APPENDIX
ALLCHIN, Basil Charles (1877–1957) was from Oxford. He was a member of Oxford’s Society of Non-Collegiate Students and took his BA in 1898, after which he went to the Royal College of Music in London. After returning to Oxford in 1905 he became a member of Hertford College, where for over 20 years he was College Organist. During World War I he was a Captain in the Oxford O.T.C., and Lewis was taught map-reading, platoon-drill and other military subjects by him. Besides taking pupils privately at 15 Beaumont Street, Allchin gave lectures in the University on ‘Aural Training’. In 1920 he was appointed a member of the board of the Royal College of Music and he was Director of Music at the Ladies’ College, Cheltenham, 1921–28. He became the Registrar of the Royal College of Music in 1935, and in 1940 he published Aural Training: Musicianship for Students. He was considered to have a genius for explaining complex matters in simple language.
ASKINS, Dr John Hawkins (1877–1923)—‘the Doc’—was Mrs Moore’s brother. He was the son of the Rev. William James Askins and Jane King Askins and he was born in Dunany, Co. Louth, where his father was the Church of Ireland priest. He was educated at Trinity College Dublin, where he obtained a Bachelor of Medicine in 1904. In 1915 he became a Lieutenant in the Royal Army Medical Corps, a Captain in 1916, and he was wounded in January 1917. Following his marriage to Mary Emmet Goldworthy of Washington, D.C., they lived in Osborne House, Elton Road, Clevedon, where their daughter Peony was born. Dr Askin’s health seems to have been broken by the war, and after his discharge he devoted much of his time to psychoanalysis. Shortly before 1922 he and his family moved to the village of Iffley, just outside Oxford, so he could be near his sister. C. S. Lewis never forgot having to watch the madness of Dr Askins shortly before his death, which episode is recorded in the Diary. It was of Dr Askins that Lewis was writing in Surprised by Joy, ch. XIII, where he says: ‘It had been my chance to spend fourteen days, and most of the fourteen nights as well, in close contact with a man who was going mad . . . And this man, as I well knew, had not kept the beaten track. He had flirted with Theosophy, Yoga, Spiritualism, Psychoanalysis, what not?’
ASKINS, Dr Robert (1880–1935), another of Mrs Moore’s brothers, was the son of the Rev. and Mrs William James Askins. He was brought up in Dunany, Co. Louth, where his father was the Church of Ireland priest. He took his Bachelor of Medicine in 1907 and his M.D. in 1913, both from Trinity College Dublin. He was commissioned a Lieutenant in the Royal Army Medical Corps in 1915, a Captain in 1916, and was mentioned in Despatches in August 1919. He practised medicine in Bristol for many years. Later he moved to Southern Rhodesia, where he was Director of Medical Services. In 1931 he married Mollie Whaddon, and he died at sea on 1 September 1935.
ASKINS, the Rev. William James (1879–1955) was a brother of Mrs Moore. His parents were the Rev. and Mrs William James Askins, and he was brought up in Dunany, Co. Louth, where his father was the Church of Ireland priest. He took a BA from Trinity College Dublin in 1901, and was ordained a priest in the Church of Ireland in 1903. He was a Curate of Kilmore Cathedral, Co. Cavan, 1902–6, Rector of Kilmore 1906–30 and Dean of Kilmore Cathedral 1931–55. He was married to Elizabeth Askins (d. 1941) and they had two children, Charles and Frances.
BAKER, Leo (1898–1987?) matriculated at Wadham College in 1917, but left to serve as a Flight Lieutenant in the RAF.
He was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross in 1918. He returned to Oxford in 1919 to read History. He and Lewis met in 1919 through a mutual interest in poetry, and for a while they worked on an anthology of poems for which they were unable to find a publisher. He took his BA in 1922 and had a brief career on the London stage.
BARFIELD, Owen (1898–) was born in North London and educated at Highgate School. He won a Classical Scholarship to Wadham College, Oxford, in 1919. After receiving his BA in 1921 he took a B.Litt. and a B.C.L. It was while an undergraduate at Oxford that he met C. S. Lewis through their friend Leo Baker. Owen Barfield had been at Highgate School with Cecil Harwood, and in 1922, while writing his B.Litt. thesis on ‘Poetic Diction’, the two men lived in ‘Bee Cottage’ at Beckley. Barfield and Harwood became interested in the works of Rudolf Steiner during 1922 when he was in England, and both became Anthroposophists. In 1923 he married Matilda Douie (1885–1982). Owen Barfield was a solicitor in London for twenty-eight years. Since his retirement in 1959 he has been a visiting professor at a number of American universities. His books include Poetic Diction (1928), Romanticism Comes of Age (1944), Saving the Appearances (1957), Worlds Apart (1963), Unancestral Voice (1965), What Coleridge Thought (1971), and (as G.A.L. Burgeon) This Ever Diverse Pair (1950). Although Barfield and Lewis disagreed about many things, especially Anthroposophy, there is probably no one Lewis admired so much. There is an affectionate portrait of Barfield in chapter XIII of Surprised by Joy, and an affectionate one of Lewis in Owen Barfield on C. S. Lewis (1990).
BECKETT, (Sir) Eric (1896–1966), was in the Cheshire Regiment 1914–18 and served in France and Salonika. He took a first class degree in Jurisprudence from Wadham College in 1921 and was a Fellow of All Souls College 1921–28. He was called to the Bar in 1922 and he was assistant Legal Adviser to the Foreign Office 1925–45 and Legal Adviser 1955–53. Eric Beckett often went on walks with C. S. Lewis, Owen Barfield and Cecil Harwood.
CARLYLE, the Rev. Alexander James (1861–1943) was a political philosopher, ecclesiastical historian, and social reformer. He was ordained in the Church of England in 1888, and became a Fellow and Chaplain of University College in 1893. He had to give up the fellowship when he married in 1895, but he continued to serve the College as a lecturer in Politics and Economics and as Chaplain. He was the mainstay of the Christian Social Union. His works include the influential History of Mediaeval Political Theory in the West (6 vols., 1903–36), which he wrote in collaboration with his brother, Sir R. W. Carlyle.
CARRITT, Edgar Frederick (1876–1964), C. S. Lewis’s tutor in Philosophy, was a Fellow and Praelector in Philosophy at University College 1898–1941. He was considered an excellent lecturer, combining as he did a very logical procedure with commonsense illustrations. He was not content with the familiar track, and in 1902 was the first in his Faculty to lecture on Aesthetics. From 1933 he gave a regular course on Dialectical Materialism. Some of his lectures were amplified in published works. They include Theory of Beauty (1914), Philosophies of Beauty (1931), and Ethical and Political Thinking (1947) in which is summed up the conclusions drawn from what he himself reckoned to be 15,000 hours’ discussion of moral, political and aesthetic philosophy with pupils and colleagues. Mr Carritt, a devoted Socialist and steadfast supporter of the left wing, was not a Christian. An argument he and others had with Lewis is referred to in Lewis’s ‘Christianity and Culture’ found in Christian Reflections (1967).
COGHILL, Nevill (1899–1980). He was born at Castle Townshend, Skibbereen, Co. Cork, of distinguished Anglo-Irish parentage. His father was Sir Egerton Bushe Coghill, and his mother was the daughter of Col. Henry Somerville and sister of E. Oe. Somerville, the authoress. After leaving Haileybury College he was a gunner on the Salonika front in 1918. He matriculated at Exeter College, Oxford, in 1919 and read History and then English. Following a short period of teaching at the Royal Naval College, Dartmouth, he became a Research Fellow of Exeter College in 1924, and he was a Fellow of English at Exeter College 1925–57. In 1957 he was elected Merton Professor of English Literature, which position he held until his retirement in 1966. Coghill was one of the best known and best loved men in Oxford. To get a theatre for Oxford was one of the main aims of his life, and to this end he worked ceaselessly. His own productions were brilliant and seemed to hint at a new art form. Among other things, he is credited with giving Richard Burton his first part. Coghill was an admired scholar of Middle English Literature and his translation into contemporary English of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales (1951) has enjoyed a wide audience. He performed the same service for Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde (1971). This delightful man recalled his friendship with Lewis in ‘The Approach to English’, found in Light on C. S. Lewis, ed. Jocelyn Gibb (1965).
EWART FAMILY, THE. The head of this Belfast family was Sir William Quartus Ewart (1844–1919) who obtained a degree from Trinity College Dublin and entered the family firm of Wm. Ewart and Son Ltd, Flax Spinners and Linen Manufacturers. In 1876 he married Mary Heard (1849–1929), who was a niece of Lewis’s maternal grandmother, Mrs Mary Warren Hamilton. These are the relatives that Lewis refers to as ‘Cousin Quartus’ and ‘Cousin Mary’ in Surprised by Joy. They lived near the Lewises in a house called ‘Glenmachan’. The children of Sir William and Lady Ewart were: (1) Robert Heard Ewart (1879–1939), who succeeded to the baronetcy after his father; (2) Charles Gordon Ewart (1885–1936), who married Lily Greeves (sister of Arthur Greeves); (3) Hope Ewart (1882–1934), who in 1911 married George Harding and moved to Dublin; (4) Kelso ‘Kelsie’ Ewart (1886–1966), who lived near Glenmachan all her life; (5) Gundrede ‘Gunny’ Ewart (1888–1978), who married John Forrest in 1927.
Writing about this family in chapter III of Surprised by Joy Lewis said: ‘Less than a mile from our home stood the largest house I then knew, which I will here call Mountbracken, and there lived Sir W. E. Lady E. was my mother’s first cousin and perhaps my mother’s dearest friend, and it was no doubt for my mother’s sake that she took upon herself the heroic work of civilising my brother and me. We had a standing invitation to lunch at Mountbracken whenever we were at home; to this, almost entirely, we owe it that we did not grow up savages . . . Cousin Mary was the very type of the beautiful old lady, with her silver hair and her sweet Southern Irish voice; foreigners must be warned that this resembles what they call a “brogue” about as little as the speech of a Highland gentleman resembles the jargon of the Glasgow slums. But it was the three daughters whom we knew best. All three were “grown-up” but in fact much nearer to us in age than any other grown-ups we knew, and all three were strikingly handsome. H., the eldest and the gravest, was a Juno, a dark queen who at certain moments looked like a Jewess. K. was more like a Valkyrie (though all, I think, were good horsewomen) with her father’s profile. There was in her face something of the delicate fierceness of a thoroughbred horse, an indignant fineness of nostril, the possibility of an excellent disdain. She had what the vanity of my own sex calls a “masculine” honesty; no man ever was a truer friend. As for the youngest, G., I can only say that she was the most beautiful woman I have ever seen, perfect in shape and colour and voice and every movement—but who can describe beauty?’
FARQUHARSON, Arthur Spenser Loat (1871–1942) went to University College in 1890 and took a first class degree in Classics. After a short time as a schoolmaster he returned to University College as a lecturer and was a Fellow of the College 1899–1942. From 1900 until the outbreak of the First World War he held the office of Dean, and this brought him into contact with many generations of undergraduates. During the War, when he was Chief Postal Censor, he took missions to France, Belgium and Italy and was twice mentioned in Despatches. In 1918 he became a brevet Lieutenant-Colonel in the Territorial Force, and he was made a C.B.E. in 1919. Farquharson taught Philosophy to men reading ‘Greats’, and later to those taking the new school of Philosophy, Politics and Economics. He also had a keen interest in English Literature, which was stimulated by his brother-in-law Sir W
alter Raleigh. He was a keen student of military history, and the figure of Marcus Aurelius, the soldier-philosopher, made a special appeal to him.
GORDON, George Stuart (1881–1942) was educated at Glasgow University and Oriel College, Oxford. He was Merton Professor of English Literature 1922–28, after which he was President of Magdalen College 1928–42. Sir Walter Raleigh had inaugurated a Discussion Class for those reading English Literature, and Gordon continued this practice when he became the Merton Professor of English Literature. Lewis contributed a description of Gordon’s Discussion Class to The Life of George S. Gordon 1881–1942 (1945) by M.C.G., p. 77.
GREEVES, Arthur (1895–1966) was one of the five children of Joseph Malcomson Greeves and Mary Margretta Greeves, whose house, ‘Bernagh’, was directly across the road from that of C. S. Lewis’s family. Although Arthur and Jack Lewis were in Campbell College at the same time, they did not meet until April 1914 when Lewis was at Malvern College. This important first meeting, which led to a close, life-long friendship, is mentioned in chapter VIII of Surprised by Joy. They corresponded fairly regularly and Lewis’s letters to Arthur are published under the title They Stand Together (1979). The Greeves family were Plymouth Brethren, and there is much in the letters about Arthur’s influence as a Christian on Lewis. Arthur had a bad heart, and with an income from his family, he never had to work. Except for the years 1921–23, when he was at the Slade School of Fine Art in London, Arthur spent most of his life in Belfast. In 1949 he moved to Crawfordsburn. Whereas Arthur had been more theologically orthodox than Lewis when they were young men, this was reversed as they grew older. Near the end of his life Arthur became a Quaker.