‘It’s still no good,’ said Richard when Julian had done.
‘Look, Richard,’ I said. ‘This afternoon Davy and I were talking about writing a novel of Oxford with the Studio in it, and us, and everybody. Now, assuming we could do it—’
‘Assuming you could do it,’ said Richard, ‘I’ d buy a copy. Not more than five shillings, though.’
‘Listen,’ I said. ‘We’re talking about the Incarnation. Okay, suppose / write it—it’s too complicated with two authors—and I put myself in it. There I am, walking down the High, wearing a Jesus tie—in the book. And let’s say I make up a lot of characters, not using real people for fear of hurting their feelings. But I am in it, and I, the character, say whatever I would say in the various situations that occur in my plot.’
‘What about the Incarnation?’ said Richard.
‘That’s what I’ m telling you, stupid fellow,’ I said with a grin. ‘Don’t you see? I am incarnate in my book. I am out here writing it, so I’ m like God the Father. But it’s really me in the book, too, isn’t it? So that’s Jesus, the Son, right? The me in the book speaks my words—and yet they are speeches that I’ ve probably never made in real life, not being in those situations. And yet can’t you see that it’s really me?’
‘Um,’ said Richard. ‘Yes, right. I see. Go on.’
‘Well,’ I said. ‘All right. I’ m out here, being “the Author of all things” and I’ m in the book, taking part in scenes of “drammer”. Incarnate in my book. Now, the me in the book: he’s all me, isn’t he? And he’s all character, too, isn’t he? Like the doctrine: All God and All man. It makes sense, doesn’t it? And one more thing: suppose the characters run away with the story—authors are always saying that that happens. It might be necessary, whatever I had originally intended, for me to get killed—um, crucified . . . Anyhow—you see?’
‘You win,’ said Richard. ‘It does make sense that way. I’ ll have to think about it.’
‘There’s something else, though,’ said Davy. ‘The other characters —made-up ones. Invented ones. If Van invents characters, they’ll all, even the bad ones, have something of Van in them, won’t they? So, you see? We all have something of God in us—God’s spirit— but only the One, Jesus, is God Incarnate. But God’s Spirit in us . . . Well, that makes the Trinity, doesn’t it? God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. Actually, I’ ve never seen it so clearly myself. More tea?’
At intervals during the Oxford years, in the vacs, we went off on visits to friends or on longer exploring journeys. There were many one-day or two-day trips to London. There was a jolly Christmas in Yorkshire, full of family games and carolling in the misty streets, at the home of a college friend, Trevor. And a fort-night in Wild Wales with Bee and Peter, and Geraint part of the time, mainly climbing Cader Idris when it was fine, and reading John Buchan in the farmhouse when it was wet. We and Thad borrowed a car and wandered for days about the lovely Cotswolds country, exploring ruined abbeys and stopping to see friends. Another friend, an Irishman, Paddy O’Leary, whom I’ d met whilst drinking bad sherry at our Moral Tutor’s in college, and his sweet English wife, Margaret, invited us to her house, where we stood as godparents to their son. With Edmund, my dining companion, and a girl named Lore, we travelled in France for a fort-night, exploring cathedrals and Roman ruins and the Caves of Lascaux, as well as dining at some great restaurants, as indicated by the Guide Michelin. We also drank a great deal of the wine-of-the-country wherever we were; and we ended up with a joyous drive into Paris, top down, on the first balmy day of spring. The sky was blue, the parks full of lovers, the river sparkling, and Notre-Dame on the Ile de la Cite looking awfully noble. One of the happiest visits was to the Hampshire home of a very dear friend in the college, a frequent caller at the Studio, Peter Crane. His huge and rambling house, Fritham, was in the New Forest; and we were to remember the house itself and the kitchen garden full of lavender, the warmly hospitable Major and Mrs. Crane, the pleasant drawing-room, and the mysterious window on an upper storey that opened into no room—unless it were a small, walled-up one. One soft, dark night without a star, Davy and Peter and I walked a long way on the small roads running through the ancient forest. After awhile we saw firelight ahead and heard a girl’s voice singing. We crept closer. Then we saw, in a firelit glade with the great trees all around, a number of gypsy caravans drawn up. The men were sprawled about in the grass, and the girl, dark and lovely in the firelight, was stirring a pot on the fire and singing, almost as though she sang to herself, some lonesome-sounding song in Romany.
Although there were these journeys full of vivid memories, and although there were also, of course, hundreds of hours in the depths of the great Bodleian Library, the centre of our Oxford experience, one which Davy and I wholly shared, was the Studio. Even at some cost to our time alone together, we had decided from the first to reach out to or draw in all we could of the extra-ordinary richness of the great university round us. In a way all of us at Oxford knew, knew as an undercurrent in our minds, that it wouldn’t last for ever. Lew and Mary Ann expressed it one night by saying: ‘This, you know, is a time of taking in— taking in friendship, conversation, gaiety, wisdom, knowledge, beauty, holiness—and later, well, there’ll be a time of giving out.’ Later, when we were scattered about the world. Now we must store up the strength, the riches, all that Oxford had given us, to sustain us after. She stood there, Oxford, like a mother to us all with her hands heaped with riches. We could take what we would. We, Davy and I, would, for one thing, take all who came to the Studio. Whoever came, whatever the hour, was always welcome.
No account of our Oxford Christian life could be complete without some reference to the pervasive influence of C. S. Lewis upon our whole group of friends. In addition to our constantly hauling down some Lewis book to read a passage, dozens of things from the ‘canon’ were woven into our conversations and jokes. ‘By Jove! I’ m being humble,’ one of us would say with slight self-mockery. We referred constantly to ‘red buses’, meaning the red bus that Screwtape used, along with thoughts of lunch, to divert the chap in the British Museum from dangerous thoughts of God. We meant by ‘red busses’ the screen that the ‘real world’interposes between us and true Reality. We jokingly spoke of ‘Our Father Below’, usually accompanying the words with an upward glance and a murmured ‘Pardon, Sire!’ There were many references to the people in Lewis’s Great Divorce, particularly the unctuous bishop who refused to believe. Often one of us would say, ‘Oh, I forgive you as a Christian, of course; but there are some things one can never forget!’ Sometimes we said it in self-mockery. Sometimes we said it seriously and questioningly if we thought one of us might not be wholly forgiving. And sometimes we said it with utter, joyous forgiveness as a kind of luminous ‘heavenly irony’.
All our friends and acquaintances, Christian or otherwise, came by, sometimes bringing others—sometimes only for a few minutes, sometimes for hours. There were conversations upon almost every imaginable subject, yet sooner or later, it seemed, the talk would drift round to ultimate things and Christianity. Never was there such talk as there was at St. Udio’s, as we some-times called it, talk gay and serious by turns, or both at once. No one who was a part of that scene has ever quite forgotten it. And as a background, accepted, hardly noticed, yet a part of the texture of the hours, there were the bells of Oxford, ringing across the night. Hardly less part of it was the rain on the skylight. And, as in Julian’s poem, the goodbyes: going down the narrow staircase and out into Pusey Lane to speed the departing friend with ‘Good-bye, goodnight. Go under the Mercy.’ The phrase comes from Charles Williams, and we all used it—indeed, still use it, some of us, after the years. There would be a halo round the gas lamp in the lane, and the slight English rain like a mist, and the cobble-stones of the lane would be glistening. ‘Goodnight. Go under the Mercy.’ And the friend would say perhaps: ‘Sleep under the Protection. Goodnight.’ And then the sound of heels marching away into the Oxfor
d night and perhaps bells marking the midnight.
We went to see other people, too, of course—parties in college rooms with mulled wine by the fire or flats in North Oxford. But the Studio was central, more or less on the way to anywhere, so the knocker sounded day and night. People were always welcome.
Except once. We had got up late and were, consequently, grumpy. The place was a ruin of dirty cups and glasses and books spread out on the floor. Grey light fell upon the room from the skylight. The fire of course was cold and dead. Finally I got it together enough to go down and get some coal and make a fire. It had just got going well when, simultaneously, two things happened: Davy plugged in the vacuum cleaner which blew all the fuses, and the wind veered round and smoke poured into the room. We staggered about in the gloom, treading on coffee cups, carrying pots of water to put out the fire. At that moment came a cheery tattoo on the door knocker. Davy and I looked at each other in the smoke with mad red eyes and, in unspoken agreement, did not move. The knock came again. We did not stir. Whoever it was—we never found out—gave up. Heels went away. Probably it Was Jesus.
Later in the day we went out and had lunch at the Trout and then crossed over the river and, after pausing to contemplate the ancient walls of Godstow nunnery, now used by a farmer to keep hay in, walked far on to the west. Although so many people came to the Studio, we were mindful of the need to keep close and mindful, too, of our old injunction about having time ‘Out-doors alone’ together. So we walked a lot in all weather, talking as we walked; or took a punt out on the river. In spring and summer, we would take a book of poetry—or The Wind in the Willows—and go out to some pleasant grassy nook along the Cherwell to read and talk. Although we were Christians now, we were Christians together, perfectly agreed about what we were doing. All the principles of the Shining Barrier, now that we had got by that brief time when she was a Christian and I was not, seemed to us to be operating as of old. In the Studio, however many people were about, we were constantly aware of each other and in wordless communication, quick to sense anything that might bother one of us and do something about it.
One night to the Studio for dinner came C. S. Lewis. It was in Summer Term or the Long Vacation, so there was no fear of the fire smoking; it almost never did at night, anyhow. Lewis arrived and wedged himself up that narrow stair like a good one, and his great genial voice practically made the walls bulge. After sherry, we had mutton and new potatoes. It was a grand evening. We talked gaily about word origins, and about differences of usage between Great Britain and the United States, such as the use still in American of ‘gotten’, now archaic in England. Davy talked of the old words and the faintly cockney accents of the Chesapeake islanders when we were cruising there in Grey Goose. Lewis seemed interested in our sailing adventures, so we talked a little about boats. He stayed quite late, and eventually the conversation turned to a more serious vein as we talked about prayer. At one point Davy asked him about prayers to enlist the help of the Blessed Virgin. Lewis would never commit himself on anything having to do with differences between high church and low. He did say, though, that if one’s time for prayer was limited, the time one took for asking Mary’s help was time one might be using for going directly to the Most High. We talked, too, of praying that someone might become a Christian—whether such prayer was useful, since (I) God must presumably want it to happen anyway, and (2) the person prayed for presumably has the free will to reject. All the same, Lewis was firm that we should and must pray for it. Pray for it as, he might have added, he and Davy had prayed for me to become a Christian. When he finally took his leave, we both went down with him to the lane; and then we both walked part of the way back to Magdalen with him, parting near the Martyrs’ Memorial.
That year Summer Term was extraordinarily lovely. On May Morning, not long after the light appeared in the east, we had sat in a punt under Magdalen Tower with friends, hearing first a belated nightingale and then, from the top of the tall tower, the pure voices of little boys singing their Latin madrigal. When they had done, the tower bells rang out to welcome the Maytime in, and we, with the great bells still ringing astern, went off down the river to eat the breakfast we had brought.
And one Sunday with the may trees all in bloom we and Peter and Bee walked across the meadows to the tiny village of Binsey and on down the lane of beeches to go to Mattins at St. Margaret’s, as we had long planned to do. But we had got the time wrong; nobody showed up. We decided, therefore, to have our own little twopenny-halfpenny (tup’ny-ha’p’ ny) Mattins. Davy played the little organ. Peter read the first lesson, and I read the second. Then we all knelt and said the General Confession, though of course no Absolution, except, we trusted, from on high. We sang at least one hymn, and Bee gave us a sermon of exceptional merit, lasting about one minute, on the theme of loving one another. But what I remember most vividly is our singing the Te Deum Laudamus: our voices filled the little church when we swept into ‘Thou Art the King of Glory’. After it was over and we emerged into the bright country morning, we all felt as churched and holy as we would have done if the vicar had come.
Looking back to that first Advent when Davy had become a Christian—and I, one holy night, almost had, I wrote the last of my Oxford sonnets, with Davy’s help, as always:
ADVENT
Two thousand years go by while on the Cross
Our Lord is suffering still—there is no end
Of pain: the spear pierces, nails rend —
And we below with Mary weep our loss.
The chilling edge of night crawls round the earth;
At every second of the centuries
The dark comes somewhere down, with dreadful ease
Slaying the sun, denying light’s rebirth.
But if the agony and death go on,
Our Lady’s tears, Our Lord’s most mortal cry,
So, too, the timeless lovely birth again—
And the forsaken tomb. Today: the dawn
That never ended and can never die
In breaking glory ushers in the slain.
I sent round the whole six sonnets, though he had seen two of them, to C. S. Lewis, and he replied, in part: ‘I think all the sonnets really good. The Sands is v. good, indeed. So is Advent, perhaps it is best. (L. 5 is a corker).’
After Summer Term, several of our friends were going down, including a sad Julian, for whatever part of the world claimed them. For us the Long Vacation and the early autumn was a time of immense work, academically, although we had time for such friends as still remained or who, like Jane, came for a gay visit and a poem or two.
In the autumn the end of our own Oxford day was drawing near. We should be going down in the dead of winter. Julian, now back in his monastery, wrote of wishing to be in Oxford again and spoke of ‘eager’ Davy, that quality that seemed the very essence of her being. And he sent us a poem:
EVENING
Sometimes I light my pipe and the fall evenings are long
And getting cool, gone the summer song,
Somehow my mind returns
My mind and heart long to return
To the Studio fireside, to Van and Jean.
We will talk of prayer.
And the gaslight and perhaps the evening rain
Will rise in mist from the lane,
As our wills to God to mortal eyes unseen.
We went often that autumn to our local pub, the Lamb and Flag. There amidst the dart throwers we would sit in the corner and drink brown ale and talk. There was a sort of realisation in us that it was we two again. All this grey magic of Oxford would fade away, but we—we should go on, we should be together, back-to-back if need be. We knew what it was to be Christians at Oxford, and we knew what it was to be gay pagans elsewhere. But now we were about to head for elsewhere as Christians— Virginia, to be precise—and that would be a new thing. But the dear God would be with us, and we should cope.
We talked about our Oxford years from the point of view of ‘us’. How much, desp
ite all the people, how very much of comrade-ship and love there had been. We thought of all the gay moments together, walking in the Parks, going somewhere on the train, lying in the grass along the Cherwell, wandering out to the Perch or the Trout. But we both felt, and said to one another, that the whole experience of both Oxford and Christ was not less than overwhelming. We both felt that we needed a long time alone, on some isle, desert but for us, to talk and talk in order to harmonise Oxford and Christ, Grey Goose and Shining Barrier. The pagan philosophy and the Christian truth in our own ‘Summa’. We planned, then, that in a year or two, somehow, we would take off a year or half year and find some country place where we could ‘hole up’ and do just that. We thought with longing of vanished Glenmerle. The place we would find, though—perhaps in England, perhaps Virginia—we named ‘Ladywood’. At Ladywood we would talk, find ourselves and each other, and set our course for the future. We still thought in terms of Grey Goose, but we were not certain—not with Christianity. At all events, we needed to recoup our fortunes a bit. In us in all these talks there at the Lamb and Flag was the sense that the time was ending, the Oxford time, and was ending, we felt, at the right moment. Because we had not, during these Oxford years, talked much of the future—the present being such a glorious whirlwind—we felt almost as though we were finding each other again. And we had a curious sense, there at the pub, of being poised in a timeless way between two worlds.
Suddenly it was our last full day in Oxford. Tomorrow morning Edmund Dews would give us breakfast—he was already exercising his mind to select the perfect light wine for a farewell breakfast. And then he would take us to the train up to London. There we should just have time to lunch at my club in Pall Mall, the Oxford and Cambridge, and then the train called the Red Rose to Liver-pool. And by nightfall our ship would be standing out into the wide and wintry North Atlantic.
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