by C. S. Lewis
72 One of the books Lewis chose as a College prize was Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered.
73 Sir Hugh Allen (1869–1946) was the director of the Royal College of Music 1918–37, director of music, University College, Reading 1908–18. In Oxford, where he was Professor of Music 1918–46, he obtained creation of the music faculty in 1944.
74 Daphne Olivier (1889–1950) was one of the four daughters of Sydney Haldane Olivier (Lord Olivier), who was Governor of Jamaica 1907–13. She was a member of Newhnam College, Cambridge, where she read Medieval and Modern Languages, taking a BA in 1913. During the summer of 1923 Cecil Harwood and Owen Barfield attended an Anthroposophical conference at which Rudolf Steiner spoke, and it was there they met Miss Olivier, who was already a convinced Anthroposophist. Cecil Harwood married Daphne Olivier on 14 August 1925, both having taken a leading part in setting up the first Rudolf Steiner school in this country at Streatham.
75 Owen Barfield’s The Silver Trumpet was published by Faber and Gwyer (now Faber and Faber) of London in 1925. It was reprinted by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. of Grand Rapids, Michigan in 1968, and by Bookmakers Guild of Longmont, Colorado, in 1986.
76 Warnie was still stationed at Colchester. He and Jack arrived at Little Lea together on 9th December and were with their father until 28th December 1923.
1 An Antidote Against Atheism (1652; 1655).
2 Thomas Henry Huxley, ‘Ethics and Evolution’ (1893).
3 By William Morris (1867).
4 J. B. S. Haldane, Daedalus or Science and the Future (1924).
5 Hamlet performed by the Oxford University Dramatic Society.
6 By James Stephens (1912).
7 Rodney Pasley was Assistant Master at Alleyn’s School, Dulwich, 1921–25.
8 It was published as Private Sea Journals, 1778–1782, Kept by Admiral Sir Thomas Pasley, ed. R. M. S. Pasley (1931).
9 Mr Lewis’s letter to his son of 24th February has not survived, but in his diary for that day he said: ‘Wrote Jacks a long letter in reply to one from him asking for an increased allowance: “What I shd. like is to have an annual sum fixed for the remainder of your stay at Oxford so that I shd. know where I am and what I must provide for. If instead of lodging £67 a term to your account I lodged £85 a term to cover everything, would that be sufficient? You must be quite frank with me etc. etc.”’ Lewis Papers, vol. VIII, p. 186.
10 Henry More, An Explanation of the Grand Mystery of Godliness (1660).
11 From memory of Suetonius, Life of Emperor Vespasian, xx: ‘vulta veluti nitentis’—‘with an expression as if of one straining’.
12 All Souls College was founded by Henry VI in 1438. It is unique in that it consists of a Warden and Fellows (originally 40), and no undergraduates. Lewis was thinking of the advantages of being able to enjoy a life of scholarship without having to teach.
13 ‘Not to have tried does harm.’
14 Lewis was replying to his father’s letter of the 24th February, which reply is found in the Lewis Papers, vol. VIII, pp. 193–95. After going into detail about his many small expenses he said: ‘You ask me whether £85 a term to “cover everything” would be sufficient. If by “covering everything” you mean covering my books, shoes, shirts, socks and other items that I have hitherto sent you, I am afraid it would not. As I said, if you wish it, I will try to undertake my own books in the future, and, at any rate to cut them down . . . If on the other hand you see fit to lodge £85 a term and to pay for such extras in the way of clothing etc. as may occur, I will try to make them as little as I can . . .
‘I have made a change in my work. I started work experimentally on Dr Henry More—a 17th Century theologian—with the idea of “doing” him for a D.Phil. . . . I had not however gone very far in this naïf wonderland without deciding that I was on a fool’s errand. The D.Phil. would add very little to my Firsts in the way of qualification: and in the mean time I should be letting my knowledge of philosophy and above all my Greek rust. I have determined instead to go on vigorously improving my philosophy and classics and also to learn some history—history being the gate to an All Souls fellowship.’
15 Ernst Troeltsch (1865–1923), theologian and philosopher, was Professor of the History of Philosophy and Civilisation at Berlin from 1915 to 1923.
16 Alan Ker Stout (1900–83) took his BA from Oriel College in 1922 after which he became a Research Scholar. He was Lecturer in Philosophy at University College of North Wales 1924–34, and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sydney 1939–65.
17 William David Ross (1877–1971) was Fellow in Philosophy at Oriel College 1902–29, and White’s Professor of Moral Philosophy 1923–28.
18 Mr Carritt was anxious for Lewis to meet Harold Arthur Prichard (1871–1947) who was the Philosophy Fellow of Trinity College 1898–1924. Prichard was later White’s Professor of Moral Philosophy 1928–37, and he was already well known for his Kant’s Theory of Knowledge (1909) and an influential paper, ‘Does Moral Philosophy Rest on a Mistake?’ (Mind, 1912).
19 The picture now [1933] hangs in Clive’s rooms in Magdalen College; the Honorius is remarkably like Clive as he was in 1924.—W.H.L.
20 Robert Remington Ware and Richard Henry King read Greats at University College and took their BAs in 1925.
21 This is T. E. Lawrence, whom Lewis met in All Souls on 11 August 1922. In September 1922 Lawrence joined the RAF, changing his name to T. E. Shaw.
22 This is a seaside town west of Bristol in Somerset. Lewis and the Moores were spending a holiday in Mary Askins’ flat in ‘Osborne House’, Elton Road, Clevedon, while she was in the United States.
23 ‘But everything, unless you are vigilant, will go off into sex.’
24 Cyril Hackett Wilkinson (1888–1960), Vice-Provost of Worcester College 1920–47, was the Oxford Secretary of the Oxford and Cambridge Schools Examination Board and the one to whom Lewis was answerable regarding the School Certificates.
25 ‘Joy’ was published in The Beacon, vol. III (May 1924), pp. 444–51. This was probably the first work Lewis published about ‘Joy’ as intense longing, the experience that was to become the subject of Surprised by Joy.
26 i.e. IX.—C. S.L.
27 This motor tour is described in Lewis’s letter to Warnie of 7 August 1921, and is found in the Letters of C. S. Lewis, pp. 142–156.
28 The Rev. Herbert Edward Douglas Blakiston (1862–1942) was President of Trinity College, Oxford, 1907–38.
29 Lewis pays a handsome tribute to Harry Wakelyn Smith (1861–1918) in ch. VII of Surprised by Joy.
30 Philip Aislabie Landon (1886–1961).
31 Melville Watson Patterson (1873–1944) became a Fellow of Trinity in 1897 and was Vice President and Senior Tutor until his retirement in 1938.
32 The Rev. Kenneth Escott Kirk (1886–1954) was Chaplain and Lecturer in Theology at Trinity College 1922–33, Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology and Canon of Christ Church 1933–37, and Bishop of Oxford 1937–54.
33 Lewis was beginning to get in his Greats reading before he started teaching in October 1924.
34 John Macmurray (1891–1976) was Tutor in Philosophy at Balliol College 1922–28, and Professor of Philosophy of Mind and Logic, University of London 1928–44.
35 Virgil, Aeneid, II, 710. Aeneas to his father, whom, with his young son Iulus, he is leading away from the sacking of Troy—‘There will be one [way of] deliverance for us both.’
36 ‘An Epitaph on a Sudden Death’, ‘A Meeting with R.M.’, ‘At Ille Labitur’ and ‘A Modern Journey’ are found in The Voice of Cecil Harwood (loc. cit.).
37 ‘Here a more abundant ether clothes the plains with brilliant light’—Virgil, Aeneid, VI, 640—talking of the abode of the blessed in the underworld.
38 George Lawrence Capel Touche matriculated at University College in 1921. He took a first in Greats and received his BA in 1925.
39 Lewis must have found it painfully ironic that the man who won the Fellowship at Magdalen which Lewis had appl
ied for in 1922—H. H. Price—had now been given the Fellowship at Trinity.
40 Sir John Charles Miles (1870–1963) was the Tutor of Law in Merton College 1899–1930, Domestic Bursar 1904–23, and Warden of Merton College 1936–47.
Kenneth King Munsie Leys (1876–1950) was Fellow of Modern History at University College 1911–42.
41 By Aldous Huxley (1923).
42 ‘O three times, four times blessed!’ (are those who died in battle at Troy). Virgil, Aeneid, I, 94.
43 (Sir) George Catlin (1896–1979) took his BA from New College in 1924. Upon leaving Oxford he was Professor of Politics at Cornell University 1924–35, after which he became concerned with Atlantic Community policy and was the founder of the Movement for Atlantic Union (UK). Besides lecturing all over the world, he wrote numerous books on philosophy and politics and he published an autobiography, For God’s Sake, Go (1972).
44 George Berkeley, Principles of Human Knowledge (1710).
45 Dermot Macgreggor Morrah (1896–1974) was a Fellow of All Souls College 1921–28. He was a leader writer for a number of newspapers, and he published a number of books on the Royal Family.
46 An account of Lewis’s paper from the Martlets’ minutebook is reproduced in ‘To the Martlets’ in C. S. Lewis: Speaker and Teacher, ed. Carolyn Keefe (Grand Rapids, 1971; London, 1974).
47 Douglas Alexander Donald matriculated in 1922 and received his BA in 1927.
48 Sir Charles Blake Cochran (1872–1951), the showman who promoted boxing and wrestling matches, and music-hall acts such as Houdini, as well as introducing onto the popular stage such people as Sarah Bernhardt and Diaghilev’s ballet.
49 Cecil Harwood had taken Lewis there to hear George Adams von Kaufmann (1894–1963). Kaufmann was born in Poland and for some years he had been one of the leading lights of the Anthroposophical Movement in England.
50 Plans were being made at this time for the setting up of a school in Streatham, London, ‘to educate boys and girls in the light of the educational teaching of Dr Rudolf Steiner’. Miss Olivier was expected to be one of its teachers, and she and Cecil Harwood went down to Torquay during 9–23 August 1924 to hear Rudolf Steiner lecture on ‘True and False Paths of Spiritual Investigation’. It was at this conference that Cecil Harwood met Steiner, and so bowled over was he by Steiner that he at once became totally committed to Anthroposophy, and remained so for the rest of his life. Michael Hall School, the first Steiner school in the country, was founded in January 1925 with Cecil Harwood and Daphne Olivier, who married on 14 August 1925, as two of its original five teachers. See Owen Barfield’s ‘Cecil Harwood’, Anthroposophical Quarterly, vol. 21, no. 2 (Summer 1976), pp. 36–39.
51 ‘Make us grieve with thee.’ The poem is called ‘The Repentant City’ in The Voice of Cecil Harwood (loc. cit.).
52 From a walk in Kensington Gardens.—C. S.L.
53 In Lewis’s Dymer, Canto VI, 18.
54 By John Masefield (1913).
55 Eight miles from St Albans, in Watford, the brothers had suffered for several years in Wynyard School. Before its demise in 1910 it had been run by Robert ‘Oldy’ Capron and his son Wynyard, and it is the school referred to as ‘Belsen’ in chapter II of Lewis’s Surprised by Joy.
56 ‘There is no greater pain’ (than to remember times of happiness when in wretchedness). Dante, Inferno, V, 121.
57 ‘preparing to say many things’—Aeneas trying (and failing) to answer Dido’s reproaches on his leaving her. Virgil, Aeneid, IV, 390.
58 ‘mind also Venus herself gave’. Virgil, Georgics, III, 267—changing the meaning from Virgil’s, which is about sexual passion seizing mares.
59 By Jonathan Swift (1704).
1 Charles Douglas Buckley took his BA in 1925.
2 Robert Heuzé Hogg took his BA in 1926.
3 Michael Robert Swanwick took his BA in 1926. These pupils were reading Kant, and Swanwick was using The Philosophy of Kant as Contained in Extracts from His Own Writings, selected and translated by John Watson (1888).
4 The Rev. Frank Nightingale had gone to the University of London after being a priest in the Church of England since 1894, and he had now retired to Oxford.
5 Gerald Wynne Hawker of University College took a BA in 1923.
6 Frederick Henry Lawson (1897–1983) was Lecturer in Law at University College 1924–25. From there he went to Merton College as Fellow of Law 1925–30, after which he became Professor of Comparative Law and a Fellow of Brasenose College in 1948.
7 By Henri Bergson (1896).
8 George Liddell Caruthers Beattie matriculated at University College in 1923.
9 Douglas Alexander Donald took his BA in 1927.
10 By Robert Louis Stevenson (1879).
11 Edward Handasyde Buchanan took his BA in 1928.
12 Eric Francis Nash took his BA in 1926.
13 Ralph Abercrombie Campbell matriculated in 1924.
14 By F. H. Bradley (1893).
15 Kenneth Grenville Bradley and John Stanley Gordon-Clark took their BAs in 1925.
16 Kenneth David Druitt Henderson took his BA in 1926, and James Alexander Ross took his in 1925.
17 Edward Michael Tyndell Firth took his BA in 1926.
18 The philosophy of Giovanni Gentile (1875–1944).
19 By Sir James Barrie (1920).
20 This was Harold Henry Cox, who was able to stay up and take his BA in 1927.
21 By George Edward Moore (1922).
22 Marcus Warren Low took his BA in 1926.
23 Harold Cottam Johnson matriculated in 1922.
24 Herbert James Paton (1887–1969) was Fellow and Praelector in Classics and Philosophy at Queen’s College, Oxford, 1911–27, and White’s Professor of Moral Philosophy, Oxford, 1937–52.
25 ‘other things being equal’.
26 By Sir Walter Scott (1819).
1 Miss Margery Freda Perham was Tutor in Modern History at St Hugh’s College.
2 See William Francis Ross Hardie in the Biographical Appendix.
3 Alfred Leslie Rowse (1903–), a Fellow of All Souls 1925–74, devoted a chapter to Lewis in his Memories and Glimpses (1986).
4 See Thomas Dewar Weldon in the Magdalen College Appendix.
5 It is impossible to be sure, but there is a chance that Lewis had this conversation with Weldon in mind when he said in Surprised by Joy, ch.XIV: ‘Early in 1926 the hardest boiled of all the atheists I ever knew sat in my room on the other side of the fire and remarked that the evidence for the historicity of the Gospels was really surprisingly good. “Rum thing,” he went on. “All that stuff of Frazer’s about the Dying God. Rum thing. It almost looks as if it had really happened once.”’
6 Henry Vincent Yorke (1905–73) matriculated in 1924 and was reading English Literature. He was to write a good many novels under the pseudonym ‘Henry Green’ and an autobiography called Pack My Bag (1940).
7 John Betjeman (1906–85), the poet, was one of Lewis’s most difficult pupils. He matriculated in 1924 and read English, but went down from Oxford without a degree. The story of John Betjeman’s relationship with Lewis is told in Bevis Hillier’s Young Betjeman (1988).
Deric William Valentin (1907–) matriculated in 1924. He also read English, and also left without a degree.