1916–1919

TO ARTHUR GREEVES: from Great Bookham, Surrey^*

[7 March 1916]

I have had a great literary experience this week . . . The book, to get to the point, is George Macdonald’s ‘Faerie Romance’, Phantastes, which I picked up by hazard . . . Have you read it? . . . At any rate, whatever the book you are reading now, you simply MUST get this at once . . . Of course it is hopeless for me to try and describe it, but when you have followed the hero Anodos along the little stream of the faery wood, have heard about the terrible ash tree . . . and heard the episode of Cosmo, I know you will quite agree with me. You must not be disappointed at the first chapter, which is rather conventional faery tale style, and after it you won’t be able to stop until you finish. There are one or two poems in the tale . . . which, with one or two exceptions are shockingly bad, so don’t TRY to appreciate them . . .

I quite agree with what you say about buying books, and love the planning and scheming beforehand, and if they come by post, finding the neat little parcel waiting for you on the hall table and rushing upstairs to open it in the privacy of your own room . . . I have at last come to the end of the Faerie Queene: and though I say ‘at last’, I almost wish he had lived to write six books more as he hoped to do—so much have I enjoyed it. The two cantos of ‘Mutabilitie’ with which it ends are perhaps the finest thing in it . . . I well remember the glorious walk of which you speak, how we lay drenched with sunshine on the ‘moss’ and were for a short time perfectly happy—which is a rare enough condition, God knows . . .

TO ARTHUR GREEVES: from Great Bookham (The ‘Mrs K.’ referred to here is Mrs Kirkpatrick.)

[14 March 1916]

I am afraid our Galahad [Arthur] will be growing a very stodgy mind if he reads nothing but Trollope and Goldsmith and Austen. Of course they are all very good, but I don’t think myself I could stand such a dose of solidity. I suppose you will reply that I am too much the other way, and will grow an unbalanced mind if I read nothing but lyrics and faery tales. I believe you are right, but I find it so hard to start a fresh novel: I have a lazy desire to dally with the old favourites again . . . I have found my musical soul again—you will be pleased to hear—this time in the preludes of Chopin. I suppose you must have played them to me, but I never noticed them before. Aren’t they wonderful? Although Mrs K. doesn’t play them well, they are so passionate, so hopeless, I could almost cry over them: they are unbearable . . .

TO ARTHUR GREEVES: from Great Bookham

[30 May 1916]

I cannot urge you too strongly to go on and write something, anything, but at any rate WRITE. Of course everyone knows his own strength best, but if I may give any advice, I would say as I did before, that humour is a dangerous thing to try: as well, there are so many funny books in the world that it seems a shame to make any more, while the army of weird and beautiful or homely and passionate works could well do with recruits . . . And by the way, while I’m on this subject, there’s one thing I want to say: I do hope that in things like this you’ll always tell me the absolute truth about my work, just as if it were by someone we didn’t know: I will promise to do the same for you. Because otherwise there is no point in sending them, and I have sometimes thought that you are inclined not to. (Not to be candid I mean) . . .

TO ARTHUR GREEVES: from Great Bookham

[6 June 1916]

I was rather surprised to see the note paper of your last letter and certainly wish I could have been with you: I have some vague memories of the cliffs round there and of Dunluce Castle, and some memories which are not vague at all of the same coast a little further on at Castlerock, where we used to go in the old days. Don’t you love a windy day at a place like that? Waves make one kind of music on rocks and another on sand, and I don’t know which of the two I would rather have . . . I don’t like the way you say ‘don’t tell anyone’ that you thought ‘Frankenstein’ badly written, and at once draw in your critical horns with the ‘of course I’m no judge’ theory. Rot! You are a very good judge for me because our tastes run in the same direction. And you ought to rely more on yourself than on anyone else in matters of books—that is if you are out for enjoyment and not for improvement or any nonsense of that sort . . .

TO ARTHUR GREEVES: from Great Bookham

[14 June 1916]

I have now read all the tales of Chaucer which I ever expected to read, and feel that I may consider the book as finished: some of them are quite impossible. On the whole with one or two splendid exceptions such as the Knight’s and the Franklin’s tales, he is disappointing when you get to know him. He has most of the faults of the Middle Ages—garrulity and coarseness—without their romantic charm . . .

I hope that you are either going on with ‘Alice’ or starting something else: you have plenty of imagination, and what you want is practice, practice, practice. It doesn’t matter what we write (at least in my view) at our age so long as we write continually as well as we can. I feel that every time I write a page either of prose or of verse, with real effort, even if it’s thrown into the fire next minute, I am so much further on . . .

TO ARTHUR GREEVES: from Great Bookham

[20 June 1916]

What is nicer than to get a book—doubtful both about reading matter and edition, and then to find both are topping? By the way of balancing my disappointment in ‘Tristan’ I have just had this pleasure in Sidney’s ‘Arcadia’. Oh Arthur, you simply must get it . . . I don’t know how to explain its peculiar charm, because it is not at all like anything I ever read before: and yet in places like all of them. Sometimes it is like Malory, often like Spenser, and yet different from either . . . The story is much more connected than Malory: there is a great deal of love making, and just enough ‘brasting and fighting’ to give a sort of impression of all the old doings of chivalry in the background without becoming tedious . . .

TO ARTHUR GREEVES: from Great Bookham (after a holiday spent together at Portsalon in County Donegal)

27 September 1916

As you say, it seems years and years since I left: I have quite dropped back into the not unpleasant, though monotonous routine of Bookham, and could believe I never left it. Portsalon is like a dream . . . One part of my journey I enjoyed very much was the first few miles out of Liverpool: because it was one of the most wonderful mornings I have ever seen—one of those lovely white misty ones when you can’t see ten yards. You could just see the nearest trees and houses, a little ghostly in appearance, and beyond that everything was a clean white blank. It felt as if the train was alone in space, if you know what I mean . . .

Have you reached home yet? . . . The country at home was beginning to look nice and autumn-y, with dead leaves in the lanes and a nice nutty smell . . . Here it is horrible bright summer, which I hate. Love to all our friends such as the hedgepig etc.

TO ARTHUR GREEVES: from Great Bookham

4 October 1916

The beastly summer is at last over here, and good old Autumn colours & smells and temperatures have come back. Thanks to this we had a most glorious walk on Saturday: it was a fine cool, windy day & we set out after lunch to go to a place called ‘Friday Street’ which is a very long walk from here through beautiful woods and vallies that I don’t know well. After several hours wandering over fields & woods etc. with the aid of a map we began to get lost and suddenly at about 4 o’clock—we had expected to reach the place by that time—we found ourselves in a place where we had been an hour before! . . . We had a lot of difficulty in at last reaching the place, but it was glorious when we got there. You are walking in the middle of a wood when all of a sudden you go downwards and come to a little open hollow just big enough for a little lake and some old, old red-tiled houses: all round it the trees tower up on rising ground and every road from it is at once swallowed up in them. You might walk within a few feet of it & suspect nothing unless you saw the smoke rising up from some cottage chimney. Can you imagine what it was like? Best of all, we came down to the little inn of the village and had tea there with—glory of glories—an old tame jackdaw hopping about our feet and asking for crumbs. He is called Jack and will answer to his name. The inn has three tiny but spotlessly clean bedrooms, so some day, if the gods will, you & I are going to stay there . . .

TO ARTHUR GREEVES: from Great Bookham

12 October [1916]

You ask me my religious views: you know, I think, that I believe in no religion. There is absolutely no proof for any of them, and from a philosophical standpoint Christianity is not even the best. All religions, that is, all mythologies to give them their proper name, are merely man’s own invention—Christ as much as Loki. Primitive man found himself surrounded by all sorts of terrible things he didn’t understand—thunder, pestilence, snakes etc: what more natural than to suppose that these were animated by evil spirits trying to torture him. These he kept off by cringing to them, singing songs and making sacrifices etc. Gradually from being mere nature-spirits these supposed being[s] were elevated into more elaborate ideas, such as the old gods: and when man became more refined he pretended that these spirits were good as well as powerful.

Thus religion, that is to say mythology, grew up. Often, too, great men were regarded as gods after their death—such as Heracles or Odin: thus after the death of a Hebrew philosopher Yeshua (whose name we have corrupted into Jesus) he became regarded as a god, a cult sprang up, which was afterwards connected with the ancient Hebrew Jahweh-worship, and so Christianity came into being—one mythology among many, but the one that we happened to have been brought up in . . .

TO ARTHUR GREEVES: from Great Bookham

25 October 1916

I don’t know when I shall buy some new books, as I am at present suffering from a flash of poverty—poverty comes in flashes like dullness or pleasure. When I do it will be either Our Village, or Cranford or Chaucer’s Troilus and Cressida, if I can get a decent edition of it. By all accounts it is much more in my line than the Canterbury Tales, and anyway I can take no more interest in them since I have discovered that my Everyman is abridged & otherwise mutilated. I wish they wouldn’t do that (Lockhart, you say, is another case) without telling you. I can’t bear to have anything but what a man really wrote.

I have been reading the quaintest book this week, The Letters of Dorothy Osbourne to Sir William Temple in Everyman. I suppose, as a historian you will know all about those two, but in case you don’t they lived in Cromwell’s time. It is very interesting to read the ordinary everyday life of a girl in those days, and, tho’ of course they are often dull there is a lot in them you would like: especially a description of how she spends the day and another of a summer evening in the garden . . . I have read today—there’s absolutely no head or tale in this letter but you ought to be used to that by now—some ten pages of Tristram Shandy and am wondering whether I like it. It is certainly the maddest book ever written or ‘ever wrote’ as dear Dorothy Osbourne would say. It gives you the impression of an escaped lunatic’s conversation while chasing his hat on a windy May morning. Yet there are beautiful serious parts in it though of a sentimental kind, as I know from my father . . .

Tang-Tang there goes eleven o’clock ‘Tis almost faery time’. Don’t you simply love going to bed. To curl up warmly in a nice warm bed, in the lovely darkness, that is so restful & then gradually drift away into sleep . . . I’m turning out the gas. Bon soir!

TO ARTHUR GREEVES: from Great Bookham

[1 November 1916]

I can’t let it pass unchallenged that you should put ‘Beowulf’ and ‘Malory’ together as if they belonged to the same class. One is a mediaeval, English prose romance and the other an Anglo-Saxon epic poem: one is Christian, the other heathen: one we read just as it was actually written, the other in a translation. So you can like one without the other, and anyway you must like or dislike them both for different reasons. It is always very difficult of course to explain to another person the good points of a book he doesn’t like.

TO HIS FATHER: from I Mansfield Road, Oxford (a scholarship candidate’s first impressions of Oxford)

[7 December 1916]

This is Thursday and our last papers are on Saturday morning: so I will cross on Monday night if you will kindly make the arrangements. We have so far had General Paper, Latin Prose, Greek and Latin unseen, and English essay. The subject for the latter was Johnson’s ‘People confound liberty of thinking with liberty of talking’¹—rather suggestive, tho’ to judge by faces, some did not find it so. I don’t know exactly how I am doing, because my most dangerous things—the two proses—are things you can’t judge for yourself . . . The place has surpassed my wildest dreams: I never saw anything so beautiful, especially on these frosty moonlight nights: tho’ in the Hall of Oriel where we do our papers it is fearfully cold at about four o’clock on these afternoons. We have most of us tried with varying success to write in our gloves. I will see you then on Tuesday morning.

TO HIS BROTHER: from Belfast

Postmark: 8 January 1917

Many thanks indeed for the letter, and the most acceptable enclosure, which arrived, thank goodness, while P[apy] was out, and so was saved from going the same road as my poor legacy. For you know I got £21 (is that the amount?) the same as you, but of course I have never seen a penny of it: my humble suggestion that I might have a pound or two was greeted with the traditional ‘Ah, such nonsense.’

Congers on being made a real Lieut., which of course I suppose is far more important than the temporary Captaincy. Is there any chance of your being made a real Captain when this war is over—which I hope to God will be before my valuable person gets anywhere near it . . .

Oxford is absolutely topping, I am awfully bucked with it and longing to go up, tho’ apparently I am not to do this until next October . . .

TO HIS FATHER: from Great Bookham

[28 January 1917]

At about half past 11 on the Saturday morning I went to Univ. and was led across two quads, one behind the other, to a house in a beautiful old walled garden. This was the ogre’s castle. He was a clean shaven, white haired, jolly old man, and was very nice indeed.² He treated me to about half an hour’s ‘Oxford Manner’, and then came gradually round to my own business. Since writing last, he had made enquiries, and it seems that if I pass Responsions in March I could ‘come up’ in the following term and join the O.T.C. [Officers’ Training Corps]. This plan he thinks the best, because I should have far more chance of a commission from the Oxford O.T.C. than from anything else of the sort . . . After that he made me stay to lunch with his wife and niece and ‘so to the station’. I am very pleased with my ogre after all . . .

TO HIS FATHER: from University College (on first taking up residence in wartime Oxford)

Postmark: 28 April 1917

The effect of the war here is much more startling than I could have expected, and everything is very homely and out of order. The College at present numbers six men, of whom four are freshmen! Others are coming all the time, but I do not think we shall be more than eleven all told. Last night we had dinner not in Hall but in a small lecture room, and none of the dons appeared. Hall is in possession of the blue-coated wounded, who occupy the whole of one quad . . . The first thing that strikes you is the enormous size of the rooms. I imagined a ‘sitter’ something smaller than the little end room. The first one they showed me was rather larger than our drawing room and full of most beautiful oak. I wasn’t left there however, and am now in a much humbler, and very nice set, on the other side of the quad. It is a pity in a way that all the furniture and pictures really belong to a man who may be coming back after the war—it saves me expenses, but it prevents me from having what I want.³

I have been to see the Dean, who turns out to be a beardless boy of about twenty-five, and also my tutor, who is also the bursar.⁴ They don’t appear to suggest any real reading while I am in the Corps, but the Bursar has promised to find me a coach for elementary mathematics, if possible.⁵ Corps does not begin till Monday evening for which respite I am very thankful. I think it will be quite cheap living in this ‘vast solitude’: the only serious expenses so far have been £2.10.0 for uniform (which seems very reasonable), and £1.9.0 for cap and gown (which does not) . . .

TO HIS FATHER: from University College

Postmark: 17 May 1917

Our ‘military duties’ are as light as they well could be. We have a morning parade from 7 till 7.45, and another from 2 till 4, with occasional evening lectures on map reading and such like subjects . . . The early morning parade of course makes it impossible for us to go to chapel, except to the Celebration on Sundays. I am afraid that I usually find the place in possession of us freshers and the dons. As to St Mary’s, I have not been yet. The last two Sundays were so fine that having been to the early service, I felt justified in going off to bathe after ‘brekker’. I have however found out enough about it to realize that it is rather different from what we imagine. There are only a few prayers, and a very long sermon, usually more of a philosophical and political than of a religious nature: in fact it is more a Sunday lecture room than a church in the true sense. The best place to go for a fine service is the Cathedral at ‘The House’ as Christ Church is called: it is typical of the House that it should have the Cathedral of the diocese for its chapel!

TO HIS FATHER: from University College

[3? June 1917]

I am glad to find that my money ‘pans out’ quite sufficiently, and is indeed just about the average. I mean the amount of pocket money is about the same as that of other people, though of course many have an allowance out of which they pay all their own bills—in which case the actual pocket money will vary with the ups and downs of their Battels. To give you some idea of the latter, I enclose mine as supplied so far . . . The first week was necessarily expensive chiefly through ignorance, ‘in which accomplishment’, as De Quincey says, ‘I excel’.

My scout is a very fatherly old man who has been here for forty-six years, and is really exceedingly good about keeping my expenses down: he once even told me to change my socks when they were wet!!!⁶ His only failing is an impentrible (or-able) deafness which causes many conversations of the ‘It’s a fine day’—‘No, not much to pay’ type.

I am afraid you must not build anything on the idea of my rowing, as I have almost given it up in favour of canoeing. You see a row boat can be used only on the big river, where you run into all the real rowing men, as the Cherwell (much prettier and more interesting) soon gets too narrow for rowers to pass each other. Besides, there is to me something very attractive about one of these little canoes—so very light and so all-to-yourself. Perhaps when we all come back again from the war, and there is no O.T.C., I will take up rowing again.

The O.T.C. gets more interesting as we go on. We spend a good deal of our time in ‘the trenches’—a complete model system with dug outs, shell holes and—graves. This last touch of realistic scenery seems rather superfluous . . .

I have nearly finished Renan, whom I find delightful.⁷ He seems to have written a good many other books on different subjects. I am going to borrow Wells’s new book⁸ from a man in College called Edwards, who is thinking of becoming a Catholic. He is an ardent Newmanite, and we have some talk on literary subjects.⁹ Someone pointed me out our present poet-laureate, Bridges (1), on the river last Wednesday. (1) Its just occurred to me that you might have known the name anyway. Apologies!—J.

[Keble College, Oxford, had been used since 1 January 1915 for the training of officers. Jack was one of the many from Oxford and other places who arrived there on 7 June 1917. He shared a room with Edward Francis Courtenay (‘Paddy’) Moore, who came into the Oxford O.T.C. from Clifton College, Bristol. In their Introduction to the Oxford University Roll of Service (Oxford, 1920), the editors, E. S. Craig and W. M. Gibson, said this about the colleges which made up Oxford University: ‘By the end of the year 1917 there were only three hundred and fifteen students in residence. Of these some fifty were Oriental students, twenty-five were refugees, chiefly Serbians, some thirty were medical students, and about a hundred and twenty were members of the Officers’ Training Corps, waiting till their age should qualify them for admission to a Cadet Battalion. The military history of Oxford, during the latter years of the War, is to be read among the records of the battle fronts, from Flanders to Mesopotamia’ (pp. x–xi). In order to help these young men from other universities and schools who were also quartered in Keble, Leonard Rice-Oxley published a booklet entitled Oxford in Arms: With an Account of Keble College (1917).]

TO HIS FATHER: from Keble College, Oxford

Postmark: 8 June 1917

Just a line in a hurry, to let you know how things go. I have not been able to write to you before. Well of course this is not an agreeable change, but it was the natural next step in any pilgrimage towards a commission. The cadet batallion, which I joined yesterday (of course it has nothing to do with the varsity) is quartered in Keble. There are several gentlemen among it, and I am fortunate in sharing a room with one. It is a great comfort to be in Oxford, as I shall still be able to see something of my Univ. friends and Cherry.¹⁰ As to Responsions, I may or may not be able to persuade them to give me three days’ leave to do it in: if they do, I should not think that under the circumstances my chances of passing would be very bright. At any rate, six months’ service with the colours will exempt me from it. As to the artillery, I am afraid that only those who have ‘some special knowledge of mathematics’ will be recommended. About leave we don’t know anything yet. I am sorry I can’t write any more to cheer you up, but we must both of us thole for a while. My tips etc. on leaving College have cleared me out, so could you let me have something to go on with? . . .

TO HIS FATHER: from Keble College

[10? June 1917]

And now for some account of the new life. Well at first when I left my own snug quarters and my own friends at Univ. for a carpetless little cell with two beds (minus sheets or pillows) at Keble, and got into a Tommy’s uniform, I will not deny that I thought myself very ill used. However, as What’s-his-name said, ‘I have had many misfortunes in life, but most of them never happened to me’. I have quite recovered, and am now leading a very happy life, tho’ not of course the life I would have chosen. In many ways it is a better life: I have never worked until now, and it is high time that I began.

As to my companions, they are really divided into three lots. The first and largest lot consists of rankers who have been out for some time and have come here to get commissions. These are mostly jolly good chaps: clean, honest, infinitely good natured. As they have come here to be made into ‘officers and gentlemen’ their own naïve conceptions of how gentlemen behave among themselves lead them into an impossible politeness that is really very pathetic. Most of our set get on very well with them. The next lot (about one third of the whole) consists of cads and fools pure and simple. They don’t need much description: some of them are vicious, some merely doltish, all vulgar and uninteresting. They drop their h’s, spit on the stairs, and talk about what they’re going to do when they get to the front—where of course none of them has been. Then comes the third lot, our own set, the public school men and varsity men with all their faults and merits ‘already ascertained’.

My chief friend is Somerville, scholar of Eton and scholar of King’s, Cambridge, a very quiet sort of person, but very booky and interesting. Moore of Clifton, my room companion, and Sutton of Repton (the company humourist) are also good fellows. The former is a little too childish for real companionship, but I will forgive him much for his appreciation of Newbolt. I must not pass over the knut, De Pass, also of Repton, our regnant authority on all matter of dress, who is reported to wear stays: nor Davy, the Carthusian, who remembers my Sinn Fein friend as a prefect at Charterhouse.¹¹

The daily round is of course pretty strenuous, and leaves little time for dreaming or reading. However, I eat and sleep as I have never done before, and am getting rid of some adipose tissue . . .

TO HIS FATHER: from Keble College

Postmark: 18 July 1917

Life here goes on pretty much in the usual way, except that the work gets rather more interesting and involves less actual ‘sweat of the brow’ than at first. We do a good deal of night work, which I rather like, and which leads to getting up later in the morning . . . You are allowed week end leave here every week, provided that you do not go out of Oxford. The last four weeks I have spent it over at Univ., enjoying all my old luxuries over again. Now however the Dean—Who as I remarked is a superior person—has vetoed the plan; on the ground that College is kept open in vacation for men who want to read ‘and not for use as an hotel’. I suppose he is quite right in a way, but it is rather a pity.

You can’t imagine how I have grown to love Univ., especially since I left. Last Saturday evening when I was sleeping there alone, I spent a long time wandering over it, into all sorts of parts where I had never been before, where the mullioned windows are dark with ivy that no one has bothered to cut since the war emptied the rooms they belong to. Some of these rooms were all dust sheeted, others were much as the owners had left them—the pictures still on the wall and the books dust covered in their shelves. It was melancholy in a way, and yet very interesting. I have found one room that I have mapped out to be my own when I come back.

At present I am reading a countrymen of ours, Bishop Berkely, ‘that silly old man’ as Andrew Lang calls him: in fact, one of our few philosophers and a very interesting fellow, whom I always admired for the courage with which you find him standing up to the ogre in Boswell¹² . . . Could you let me have some money to get boots for my officer-pattern uniform. I find the cadet school so far much more expensive than the Varsity. When does W. get his leave?

TO HIS FATHER: from Keble College

Postmark: 22 July 1917

Pay there was none at first, except for the old soldiers: but the War Office has at last discovered our existence, and on Friday I drew 7/-, the first money I have earned. It ought to be hung on a watch chain. You say that you should talk to me ‘not of the Muse’. Indeed the reverse is quite the truth, for I make every effort to cling to the old life of books, hoping that I may save my soul alive and not become a great, empty headed, conceited military prig. I am finding out that the military ideal in our army differs from the German one only in degree and not in kind. The Sergeant Major told us the other day that ‘soldiering is more than ’arf swank. You’ve got to learn to walk out as if the bloody street belonged to you. See?’ We are also encouraged in every way to be pharisees and pat ourselves on the back for being in khaki, and stare rudely at apparently eligible young men whom we meet in mufti. Well I hope that neither I nor any of my friends—and I have done well here in the way of friends—will ever attain to that degree of soldierhood. The promised four days’ leave will come in about a fortnight’s time: I am sorry that I cannot let you know more definitely. I shall of course come home the quickest way, there being no question of ‘lucre’ when a paternal government provides you with a pass . . .

On Saturday I drank tea with a dear old gentleman named Goddard, formerly an undergrad of Balliol and now a don at Trinity.¹³ What interested me most was his opinion of Jowett¹⁴ (here usually pronounced to rhyme with ‘poet’) who, he said, had spoiled the scholarly tone of Balliol by a vulgar running after lions . . .

Of Swinburne’s prose, I have read the book on Charlotte Bronte, and the smaller one on William Blake.¹⁵ It is undoubtedly very bad prose (I did not find the coarseness) but it is so vigorous that you can forgive it. Don’t forget to keep Wells’s God the Invisible King in the house, as I am longing to read it.

TO HIS FATHER: from Keble College (having visited his father in Belfast 9–11 August)

Postmark: 27 August 1917

You must have been wondering what had come over me, but the crowded time I have been having since I left home will serve as some excuse. First of all came the week at Warwick, which was a nightmare. I was billeted with five others in the house of an undertaker and memorial sculptor. We had three beds between six of us, there was of course no bath, and the feeding was execrable. The little back yard full of tomb stones, which we christened ‘the quadrangle’, was infinitely preferable to the tiny dining room with its horse hair sofa and family photos. When all six of us sat down to meals there together, there was scarcely room to eat, let alone swing the traditional cat round. Altogether it was a memorable experience. We came back on Saturday, and the following week I spent with Moore at the digs of his mother who, as I mentioned, is staying at Oxford.¹⁶ I like her immensely and thoroughly enjoyed myself. On Wednesday as you know, Warnie was up here and we had a most enjoyable afternoon and evening together, chiefly at my rooms in Univ. How I wish you could have been there too. But please God I shall be able to see you at Oxford and show you my ‘sacred city’ in happier times . . .

TO HIS FATHER: from Keble College

Postmark: 10 September 1917

I was very glad to get your letter, for, though my own sins in that line are as scarlet, I must admit that I was beginning to get a little bit anxious. It was such a pity that Warnie and I could not be home together—and yet too, in a way, it spread out the ‘invasion’ of your young hopefuls longer for you. Warnie seems to have thoroughly enjoyed his leave, and I am sure the ‘drag’ exists only in your imagination . . .

The next amusement on our programme is a three days bivouac up in the Wytham hills. As it has rained all the time for two or three days, our model trenches up there will provide a very unnesseccarily good imitation of Flanders mud. You know how I always disapproved of realism in art! . . .

As time gets on towards the end of our course, we are more and more crowded and live only in hope for the fabulous amounts of leave we are going to get before we’re gazetted. Tell Arthur I simply CAN’T write.

TO HIS FATHER: from Keble College

Postmark: 24 September 1917

I hope I was not grousing in my last letter, for though this may not be the life I had chosen, yet a little hard work never did any one any harm, and I might be much worse off. The sleeping out on Cumnor hills (there were only two nights of it) illustrated some old theories of anticipation etc.—but I needn’t go through it. In point of fact, sleeping out of doors proved delightful. You have a waterproof groundsheet, two blankets, and your haversack for a pillow. There was plenty of bracken to make a soft bed, and I slept excellently. You wake up in a flash without any drowsiness, feeling wonderfully fresh. Both nights were fine, but of course it would be horrible in the wet.

Our final exam comes off next Tuesday: and remembering my wonderful faculty for failing in easy exams (vide Smalls¹⁷) I don’t feel too confident. There seems some doubt as to when we get away after it, but probably before the end of this week. In any case I shall stay on here with the Moores over the Sunday, and wire exact date of my crossing to you later. We get a free warrant home, but I should be glad if you would send me the Samaritans ‘two pence’ for oil and wine en route . . . ¹⁸

TO HIS FATHER: from 56 Ravenswood Road, Redlands, Bristol

3 October [1917]

I suppose you must have been wondering what had become of your prodigal son all this time. Rather a chapter of adventures has occurred, and I will hasten to recount them—in the best journalese style.

We got away from Keble on the Saturday, and instead of staying in Oxford with the Moores I came down here to their home at Bristol—within a mile or so of Clifton school. On the Sunday we went and saw the latter, including the Chapel where I failed to find Qui procul hinc ante diem etc,¹⁹ which in fact does not exist. The place is fine, but inferior to Malvern.

On Monday a cold (complete with sore throat) which I had developed at Oxford, went on so merrily that Mrs Moore took my temperature and put me to bed, where I am writing this letter (Wednesday). I am quite looking forward to seeing you soon again . . .

[Albert Lewis wrote in his diary: ‘Friday 12 October. Jacks arrived from Oxford. News arrived that Jacks gazetted Somerset Light Infantry. He had stayed with Moore at Bristol for three weeks, leaving one week for home.’ ‘Thursday 18 October. Jacks left by Holyhead to join regiment at Crownhill, S. Devon.’ As Mr Lewis was to learn later, Jack was separated from ‘Paddy’ Moore who was sent to France with the Rifle Brigade.]

TO HIS FATHER: from 3rd Somerset Light Infantry, Crownhill, South Devon

Monday, 5.5 P.M.

[22 October 1917]

I have waited till now so that I could tell you what an ordinary working day here is like. Incidentally the phrase ‘working day’ is merely façon de parler: but more of that anon, as you will first be anxious to hear what sort of thieves I have fallen among. I should say the gentlemen are about sixty-five per cent of the whole crowd of officers, which is quite as large a majority as one has a right to expect now-a-days. One or two of them I think I shall like, though of course it is hard to say at present. It must be admitted that most of them are hardly after my style: the subjects of conversation are shop (Oh! for the ancient taboo that ruled in officers messes in the piping times of peace), sport and theatrical news recurring with a rather dull regularity—that is in the few moments of conversation which interrupt the serious business of bridge and snooker. However, they are for the most part well bred and quite nice to me. So that if this new life rouses no violent enthusiasm in me, it is on the other hand quite bearable or even pleasant.

The ‘work’ is a very simple matter. All the men nearly are recruits, and the training is carried on by N.C.O.s. All you do is to lead your party onto parade, hand them over to their instructor, and then walk about doing nothing at all. This you do for several hours a day. It is a little tiring to the legs and I think will finally result in atrophy of the brain. However, it is very much better than hard work, and I am quite satisfied.

I was a bit too previous in wiring from Plymouth station that Crownhill was a barracks. It turns out to be a village of wooden huts, set up in the hills amid really very beautiful scenery. Besides the officers’ mess—which is a sort of glorified golf club-house—we each have our own room, with a stove in it. When this is lit, it is really very snug . . . So my verdict you see is quite favourable. The life, so long as I am in England, will be rather dull, but easy and not unpleasant. There is no need to transfer into any other infantry regiment. So at least I think now: of course I may change . . .

[For weeks it was rumoured that Jack’s battalion would almost certainly be sent to Ireland to fight either the Sinn Fein or the Germans, said to be landing there. However, on 15 November they were ordered to the front following a 48-hour leave. As it was impossible for him to go to Belfast, Jack went to Mrs Moore’s home in Bristol from where he sent a telegram to his father saying: ‘Have arrived in Bristol on 48 hours leave. Report Southampton Saturday. Can you come Bristol. If so meet at station. Reply Mrs Moore’s address 56 Ravenswood Road Redlands Bristol. Jack.’ Mr Lewis wired back: ‘Don’t understand telegram. Please write.’]

TO HIS FATHER: telegraphed from Bristol

15 November 1917

I have just got your wire. I am sending off another to explain things more clearly: I’m awfully sorry, but I can’t think how I failed to make it plain in the first. It is perfectly wretched giving me such short leave—forty-eight hours is no earthly use to a person who lives in Ireland and would have to spend about two days and nights travelling. Please don’t worry, I shall probably be a long time at the base as I have had so little training in England. Can’t write more now: must go and do some shopping. I return the proofs. I should like one of each I think. I’ll let you know my address in France as soon as I can.²⁰

TO HIS FATHER: from France

21 November 1917

This is really a very sudden and unpleasant surprise. I had no notion of it until I was sent off on my forty-eight hours final leave, in fact I thought they were ragging me when they told me. I am now at a certain very safe base town where we live comfortably in huts as we did at Crownhill. I am being innoculated this afternoon and have forty-eight hours off duty afterwards . . . I suppose we have no reason to grumble: this was bound to come sooner or later. There is no need to worry for a good time yet, and I’ll try and let you hear every day when there is. Have got to go on parade in a few minutes, so must stop. Shall be able to write you a proper letter off duty tomorrow.

[Mr Lewis was desperately worried about Jack’s safety. Upon receiving the above letter he wrote to Colonel James Craig, later Viscount Craigavon (1871–1940), who was M.P. for the East Division of Co. Down, asking for his help in getting Jack transferred from the Infantry to the Artillery. He believed Jack would be safest with the gunners. Colonel Craig replied that it would be necessary for him to have a letter from Jack expressing his wish to be transferred, as well as a recommendation from his Commanding Officer. Mr Lewis then sent a copy of this correspondence to Jack.]

TO HIS FATHER: from France

13 December 1917

The letter of which you forwarded me a copy is rather a surprise, and I hope you will not be disappointed at my answer to it. Some arguments in favour of staying in the infantry have arisen since we were last together. In the first place, I must confess that I have become very much attached to this regiment. I have several friends whom I should be sorry to leave and I am just beginning to know my men and understand the work. In the second place, if the main reason for going into the gunners is their supposed safety, I hardly think it is enough. On this part of the front the guns are exposed to almost as heavy shelling (and it is shells that count far more than rifle fire) as the infantry: if their casualties are fewer that must be because their total strength is so much smaller. Then, again, nobody holds out any hopes of my getting recommended by the C.O. He would be sure to reply (and not without reason) that it would be expensive and wasteful to take a half-trained infantry officer home again and turn him into a gunner. Our C.O.—a Lt Colonel Majendie—is a splendid fellow for whom I have a great admiration, and I should be sorry to cut so poor a figure in his eyes as I must do in trying to back out as I get nearer the real part of my job.²¹ Of course I fully understand that it is rather late for me to talk thus; and beyond the right which you have to guide me in any case, you have ample grounds for claiming that I should stick to our arrangement. Yet I think you will sympathize with what I have said above.

I am at present in billets in a certain rather battered town somewhere behind the line. It is quite comfy, but of course the work is hard and (which is worse) irregular. I have just finished Adam Bede²² which I liked immensely—but don’t send me any more of hers as I know a shop (or rather canteen here) that has them—in the Tauchnitz edition . . .

TO HIS FATHER: from France

4 January 1918

I have thought a good deal about the question that is uppermost in both our minds, and talked it over with some of my friends. The arguments in favour of staying where I am seem overwhelming, and I have finally made up my mind to do so. I am very sorry that you should have taken trouble unnecessarily, and I hope that my decision will not be a disappointment to you. From what you say in your last letter, I think you agree with me that the gunners are not really preferable for safety or society. I have been up in the trenches for a few days (which I will speak about later on) attached to a company for instruction, and the number of shells that went singing over our heads to fall on the batteries far away behind, did not—as you may imagine—weaken my affection for the infantry!

I am now back again on a course of bombing, where I live with the bombing officer, a very nice fellow, of literary tastes, in a quite comfortable billet. The work, involving a good deal of chemical and mechanical questions, is not of the sort my brain takes to readily, but as long as one is safe and has an unbroken night’s sleep, there is nothing to grouse about I suppose.

You will be anxious to hear my first impressions of trench life. This is a very quiet part of the line and the dug outs are very much more comfortable than one imagines at home. They are very deep, you go down to them by a shaft of about twenty steps: they have wire bunks where a man can sleep quite snugly, and brasiers for warmth and cooking. Indeed, the chief discomfort is that they tend to get TOO hot, while of course the bad air makes one rather headachy. I had quite a pleasant time, and was only once in a situation of unusual danger, owing to a shell falling near the latrines while I was using them.

I think I told you that I had read Adam Bede and am now at The Mill on the Floss,²³ which I like even better. Do you know of any life of George Eliot published in a cheap edition? If you find one, I should like to read it.

Thank you muchly for the smokeables. The pipes have been soaked in whisky, according to the dictum of experts, and are going very well. I also thank you from my heart for your last letter that defies definition. I am very proud of my father . . .

[On 2 February 1918 the War Office in London sent the following message to Albert Lewis: ‘The Military Secretary presents his compliments to Mr Lewis and begs to inform him that the following report has just been received. 2nd Lieutenant C. S. Lewis, Somerset Light Infantry, was admitted to 10th Red Cross Hospital, Le Tréport on February 1st., suffering from slight Pyrexia. Further news will be sent when received.’]

TO HIS FATHER: from No. 10 British Red Cross Hospital, Le Tréport

16 February 1918

Your letter has remained unanswered for some time, and if I had literally fulfilled my promise of ‘writing when I got up’, I fear the time would have been longer still. ‘Trench fever’ sounds a formidable name enough—like ‘prison fever’ in the days of the Bloody Assize I always think, but it is not usually a troublesome business. In this country it is called P.U.O. which, I am told, stands for ‘Pyrexia unknown origin’: which in plain English means merely a high temperature arising from the general irregularity of life at the front. In my case however, after they had got me down to normal, I had a relapse, and was pretty ill for a day or two. I am now however on the highroad to recovery, though still in bed. I consider this little turn as an unmixed blessing: even if I get no leave by it—and I’m afraid that is not very likely—I shall have had a comfortable rest from the line. The place where I have been dropped down is a little fishing village so far as I can make out. There are cliffs and a grey sea beyond—which one is very glad to see again—and from my own window pleasant wooded country. They tell me Dieppe is about eighteen miles away: and that makes one remember . . . eheu fugaces!²⁴

By the way (I can’t remember whether I told you before or not) the Captain of the Company I am in is the Harris who used to be a master at Cherbourg: I think you met him once. He impressed me in those days, but I find him very disappointing. I wonder is it my own fault that so many of my old acquaintances I have run up against since leaving my shell at Bookham ‘Please me not’? I suppose these things are to be expected.²⁵

You kindly ask if there is anything you could send. The next time you are in Mullan’s, I should be ‘beholden’ if you would ask them to look out some cheap edition of Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy and send it to me, or the 1st volume of it. You remember it used to be a fancy of mine, and somebody has recommended it to me lately. If the only edition is in a fairly large book, let them send it all the same—I can find room for it. What are you reading? You see I make some desperate attempt to keep in touch with a life beyond the one which we lead here. I hope you keep well in body: so long as I am in hospital you may keep easy in mind. How I wish your hopes about leave could be realized. Of course it is possible, but I don’t think there is much chance. By the way, offer Warnie all my congratulations upon his recent glories when next you write. That at least is a blessing: he won’t be doing badly in the soldiering line if he is to be a Captain after the war at his age . . .

TO HIS FATHER: from No. 10 British Red Cross Hospital, Le Tréport

22 February 1918

Your letter of the 17th has just arrived, with the enclosure, for which many thanks: a widening experience of other people’s parents has taught me to value these things more than I once did, both for themselves and what they mean. That suggests literary possibilities: there is already a book called Other people’s children,²⁶ but why not a companion volume Other people’s parents?—in our schooldays we have most of us suffered from time to time at the hands of these irrelevant beings.

It is one of the punishments—to be sure, richly deserved—of a bad correspondant, that when at last he does write, his letter usually crosses the next one from his victim. I hope that you have before this got the longer letter which apparently had not come when you wrote yours.

I don’t think there is need to worry if at any future time you hear of my being in hospital merely with illness. Even supposing it to be fairly serious, it is a more natural and easy kind of danger than that of the front: as well, there is always the rest, the unaccustomed comforts, and at the end of the possibility of leave. In this case I am afraid I have not been bad enough.

I am sending you in this two photographs of my room at Univ. They were taken by my friend Moore shortly before I left Oxford, but remained undeveloped for a long time and have lately been sent to me by his mother. The room is not of much personal interest, as everything in it belonged to another man—I think I mentioned that at the time. But I daresay you may care to see them. Do you remember it used to be one of my dreams that I might some day entertain you and the Knock [W. T. Kirkpatrick] there together. As you said, ‘That would be a symposium of the gods’. What crack there would have been! With what an added zest we would have drunk in the man’s ‘statements of fact’ in the hope of chuckling over them between ourselves later on. Who knows? At any rate we can hope that you and I will some time see Oxford together.

The picture of our Warnie attending an A-murican proffessor’s lecture from the chair of Poker is good. But I’m afraid the psychology of the card player will always baffle me as it has baffled you. I had as soon spend the evening building card houses—much sooner watch the picture in the red of the fire.

I have discovered that optimism about the war increases in an inverse ratio to the optimist’s proximity to the line. Was our Colonel so hopeful a month ago?²⁷ But indeed I’m afraid I must live up to our family reputation, for certainly I can’t see any bright prospects at present. The conditions at home are almost as bad as anything we once fabled of starvation in Germany: spirits will be more pacific every day on short commons: there seems to be ‘spiritual wickedness in high places’ . . .

I am ordering a couple of books of Vergil from my bookseller in London, and if I find that I get on with these I shall order something equally pleasant and simple in Greek. German and Italian I fear must go to the wall: of course I read a French book from time to time and seek opportunities of speaking it—but one sees very little of the natives. I am also still at Boswell, and have also begun Middlemarch. You see I am quite ‘caught’ by George Eliot’s books.

I have now almost written my pen out of ink, and—perhaps my reader out of patience: but ‘out of the abundance of the heart’ and as well there will be days when I cannot write much. I have been out once or twice, and can’t say how much longer I shall be here. Write as often and as long (grammar!) as you can.

[Jack was discharged from the hospital on 28 February. He rejoined his battalion at Fampoux. Then after being on the front line of the Battle of Arras 21–24 March he returned to Fampoux, from where he wrote the following letter.]

TO HIS FATHER: from France

[25 March 1918]

I have been living at such a rush since I left hospital that it needed this battle and your probable anxiety to make me write. I am out of the fighting area, but of course we are not enjoying the old peaceful trench warfare I knew before Le Tréport. We have just come back from a four days’ tour in the front line during which I had about as many hours’ sleep: then when we got back to this soi-disant rest, we spent the whole night digging. Under these conditions I know you will excuse me from much letter writing: but I will try and let you know that I am safe from time to time.

[Jack Lewis was among those who were wounded on Mount Bernenchon during the Battle of Arras on 15 April by an English shell which burst behind him. Wyrall records in his History of the Somerset Light Infantry (p. 295): ‘The casualties of the 1st Battalion between the 14th and 16th April were: 2/Lieut. L. B. Johnson died of wounds (15/4/18) and 2/Lieuts. C. S. Lewis, A. G. Rawlence, J. R. Hill and C. S. Dowding wounded: in other ranks the estimated losses were 210 killed, wounded and missing.’ It is not known whether Lewis learned of the death of his friend Laurence Johnson before he was taken to the Liverpool Merchants Mobile Hospital at Etaples. On 24 April Warren learned from Mr Lewis that Jack was ‘severely wounded’. Such was his anxiety that he borrowed a bicycle and rode the fifty miles from near Doullens to Etaples to see him. He then had to cycle back to his camp.]

TO HIS FATHER: from the Liverpool Merchants Mobile Hospital at Etaples

4 May [1918]

Many thanks for the smokes and also for the letter which I was particularly glad to get, as I had not heard from you for so long. I am very sorry—and angry—that you have been through a lot of unnecessary worry and anxiety owing to the carelessness of some fool at the War Office, who—as Arthur informs me—told you some rubbish about my being hit in both arms and in the face. As a matter of fact I was really hit in the back of the left hand, on the left leg from behind and just above the knee, and in the left side just under the arm pit. All three were only flesh wounds. The myth about being hit in the face arose, I imagine, from the fact that I got a lot of dirt in the left eye which was closed up for a few days, but is now alright. I still can’t lie on my side (neither the bad one nor the other one) but otherwise I lead the life of an ordinary mortal and my temperature is alright. So there is no need for any anxiety at all.

TO HIS FATHER: from Etaples

[14 May 1918]

I expect to be sent across in a few days time, of course as a stretcher case: indeed whatever my condition they would have to send me in that way, because I have no clothes. This is a standing joke out here—the mania which people at the dressing stations have for cutting off a wounded man’s clothes whether there is any need for it or not. In my case the tunic was probably beyond hope, but I admit that I mourn the undeserved fate of my breeches. Unfortunately I was unconscious when the sacrilege took place and could not very well argue the point.

I am doing exceedingly well and can lie on my right side (not of course on my left), which is a great treat after you have been on your back for a few weeks. In one respect I was wrong in my last account of my wounds: the one under my arm is worse than a flesh wound, as the bit of metal which went in there is now in my chest, high up under my ‘pidgeon chest’ as shown: this however is nothing to worry about as it is doing no harm. They will leave it there and I am told that I can carry it about for the rest of my life without any evil results.

Aunt Lily keeps up a sharp fire of literature—Browning, Emerson, Mill (on ‘the subjection of women’)²⁸ and The Scotsman. How on earth can I be supposed to be interested in The Scotsman? However there are one or two Scotch patients here to whom I hand it over: so I can truthfully tell her that they ‘are read and enjoyed’.²⁹

My friend Mrs Moore is in great trouble—Paddy has been missing for over a month and is almost certainly dead. Of all my own particular set at Keble he has been the first to go, and it is pathetic to remember that he at least was always certain that he would come through.³⁰

TO HIS FATHER: from Endsleigh Palace Hospital, Endsleigh Gardens, London (after arriving there on 25 May)

30 May 1918

I hope that you got my telegram and that I will soon hear from you, and not only hear but receive a visit in the aristocratic neighbourhood of Euston. You will be able to come over, will you not, if only for a few days? We must get Kirk up to meet you and have a famous crack. In the meantime, will you please send me my new brown suit, and also, if possible, a pair of black brogue shoes: I ought to have several. It is allowed to wear ordinary clothes here until I can get a uniform made. This is merely a note, as you are already heavily in my debt in the matter of letters . . .

TO HIS FATHER: from Endsleigh Palace Hospital

12 June 1918

Thank you for both the letters, as the ‘essay with enclosures’ has followed me here, and indeed arrived shortly after the one I wrote, venturing to suggest that my score of letters was still one up. Peccavi: I most humbly apologise. ‘And you wid a bronchitis in you.’ (By the way it is not a whole shell in me, only a bit of one.) Seriously, I hope that before this you have got over any suggestion of the old trouble: you cannot be too careful in warding it off . . .

I am now up and dressed and have been out a few times: you can well imagine how delightful it is for me to wear decent clothes again—to have pockets without buttons, and to be able to change one’s tie from day to day. I have written to the transport officer of the battalion about my valise, but so far there is no answer: poor man, I expect he has other things to think about than my kit. And—who knows—perhaps even now a Teutonic unter offizier is sleeping in my blankets and improving his English on my bits of books.³¹ Which reminds me, though the reproach is usually the other way, on the only occasion when we took any prisoners, I was able to talk a little German to their officer, though he could speak no English to me³² . . .

I have since added to my new knowledge of Trollope The Warden and Dr Thorne. Although it may seem strange that Warnie and I both neglect books that are at home and then afterwards read them elsewhere, there is a reason. A book must find you in the right mood, and its mere presence on a shelf will not create that mood, tho’ it lie there for years: as well, when you meet ‘in a strange land’ a book that is associated with home, it has for that very reason an attraction which it would not have at ordinary times. I am now at work, and very much at work on Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature, a new Maeterlinck and a new volume of Swinburne. I keep up a very brisk fire of correspondence on Literary and pseudo-scientific subjects with my Aunt Suffern: at this distance she is entertaining, but in a tête à tête ‘no, a thousand times no’ . . .

It is a great pity that you are laid up: there would be points about London for us two—I should like to go with you to the Abbey and the Temple and a few other places. (Just as I am making Arthur green with envy by my accounts of Charing Cross Road, ‘a mile of bookshops’.) On Sunday I am going down to Bookham to see the sage: if only you could make the same pilgrimage! . . .

TO HIS FATHER: from Endsleigh Palace Hospital (after visiting Mr W. T. Kirkpatrick)

[20? June 1918]

On Sunday [16 June] I made my pilgrimage. Even to go to Waterloo was an adventure full of memories, and every station that I passed on the way down seemed to clear away another layer of the time that passed and bring me back to the old life. Bookham was as its best: a mass of green, very pleasing to one ‘that has been long in city pent’. As I walked up to Gastons the familiar road was crowded with good people coming back from church, and I passed many a stuffy old couple whom I remembered well, though none of them recognised me. It was like being a ghost: I opened the gate of Kirk’s garden almost with stealth and went on past the house, to the vegetable garden and the little wild orchard with the pond, where I had sat so often on hot Sunday afternoons, and practised skating with Terry when the long frost began two years ago. And there among the cabbages, in his shirt and ‘Sunday’ trousers, there sure enough was the old man, still digging and smoking his villainous pipe. His back was towards me and I had come within a few paces of him before he turned and saw me. And so I was led into the house with much triumph and displayed to Mrs K., whom we found fussing with the maid just as of old. I have seldom spent a more delightful afternoon: what ‘crack’ we had, what reminiscences, how often my opinions were shown to be based (‘bazed’ as the sage pronounces it) on an insufficient knowledge of the subject! When I told him that it was by an English shell I was hit, it called forth a magnificent Tirade on the ‘simple mathematical problem’ of calculating how a gun’s range would shorten as it got heated by firing—on the ‘every school boy knows’ lines.

I have bought an edition of Yeats which I ordered the bookseller to send home and which should have arrived by this time.³³ Of course I need not add that you are welcome to open the parcel, if you would care to. Arthur at any rate would like to see it, and if you replace the books in their boxes they will be safe from dust and damp until I come home. I hope you do not think it extravagant in me to have bought such a thing, for I knew it was a limited edition which would be very much dearer in a few years’ time. In the same shop where I made this purchase, I’m afraid I gave myself away badly. What first tempted me to go in was a battered copy of Burton’s Anatomy: as you know, I had been looking for this and thought here was an opportunity of picking up a cheap second hand copy. I went in and requested a courtly old gentleman to let me see it. ‘H’m’, said I, glancing over the dirty little volume, ‘it seems rather worn: haven’t you a newer copy?’ The gentleman looked at me in rather a pained way and said that he had not. ‘Well, how much is it?’ I asked, expecting a considerable reduction. ‘Twenty-five guineas’, said my friend with a bland smile. Ye Gods! Just think of it: there was I for the first time in my life fingering a really valuable old edition and asking for a ‘NEWER’ copy. I turned hot all over: and even you as you read, will blush for the credit of the clan. However, the old gentleman was very forgiving: he turned his treasury inside out for me. He showed me priceless old copies of Vergil and Rabelais, books from the Kelmscott Press, including the Chaucer at £82 and strange forgotten waifs of French literature with stiff engravings ‘from the age of snuff boxes and fans’. And so what could I do but bring away the Yeats? Apropos of Beardsley,³⁴ he told me that the ‘fleshly’ artist had often been in that shop and had finally gone the way of all mortal things without paying his account. Well, et ego in Arcadia vixi,³⁵ it is something to have been in the shop of James Bain even for an hour.

It seems that now-a-days one is sent from hospital to be kept for some time in a ‘convalescent home’ before going on leave. Of course I have asked to be sent to an Irish one, but there are only a few of these and they are already crowded: we must not therefore expect too much. But wherever I am I know that you will come and see me. You know I have some difficulty in talking of the greatest things: it is the fault of our generation and of the English schools. But at least you will believe that I was never before so eager to cling to every bit of our old home life and to see you. I know I have often been far from what I should in my relations to you, and have undervalued an affection and a generosity which (as I said somewhere else) an experience of ‘other people’s parents’ has shown me in a new light. But, please God, I shall do better in the future. Come and see me. I am homesick, that is the long and the short of it.

I have been once or twice to the English Opera at Drury Lane and seen among other things my long desired Valkyrie and Faust again—full of reminiscences of course. This week Mrs Moore has been up on a visit to her sister who works at the War Office, and we have seen a good deal of each other. I think it some comfort to her to be with someone who was a friend of Paddy’s and is a link with the Oxford days: she has certainly been a very, very good friend to me . . .

TO HIS FATHER: from Ashton Court, Long Ashton, Clifton, Bristol (after his arrival there on 25 June)

[29 June 1918]

Surely this is the most unfortunate thing that ever happened to us! I was prepared to be disappointed in my efforts to be sent to an Irish convalescent home, but this is the very acme of ill luck. When they finally told me in London that I could not go to Ireland, they asked me to choose some part of England: at first I said London, thinking that this would be more convenient for you than any provincial town, but this could not be done. I then elected Bristol, where I could have the society of Mrs Moore, and also of Perrett of the Somersets, whose being wounded some days before myself I mentioned to you.³⁶ Little could I foresee what was going to happen: we are still close prisoners . . .

All the ‘gilded youth’ among the patients, who have no interests in themselves, of course grow more troublesome being confined. The place echoes to the crack of their billiard balls and their loud, tuneless whistling: I was very miserable for the first few days until I discovered a little, almost disused writing room at one end of the house. Here I can sit in comparative safety and read Burton’s anatomy which I have had sent from town.³⁷

If I should happen to get the disease I suppose all my bits of things will be burned. I could sit down and cry over the whole business: and yet of course we have both much to be thankful for. When a man can sleep between sheets as long as he will, sit in arm chairs, and have no fears, it is peevish to complain. If I had not been wounded when I was, I should have gone through a terrible time. Nearly all my friends in the Battalion are gone.

Did I ever mention Johnson who was a scholar of Queens? I had hoped to meet him at Oxford some day, and renew the endless talks that we had out there. Dis aliter visum, he is dead.³⁸ I had had him so often in my thoughts, had so often hit on some new point in one of our arguments, and made a note of things in my reading to tell him when we met again, that I can hardly believe he is dead. Don’t you find it particularly hard to realise the death of people whose strong personality makes them particularly alive: with the ordinary sons of Belial who eat and drink and are merry, it is not so hard.

But I must not enlarge on a melancholy subject: I have no doubt that we are all three of us pretty low. However, ‘better luck next time’: this cannot last for ever and I hope yet to have a visit from you. As for my own health it is pretty good, although the wound in the leg—the smallest of the three—is still giving some trouble.

The house here is the survival, tho’ altered by continual rebuilding, of a thirteenth-century castle: the greater part is now stucco work of the worst Victorian period (à la Norwood Towers) but we have one or two fine old paintings and a ghost. I haven’t met it yet and have not much hope to—indeed if poor Johnson’s ghost would come walking into the lonely writing room this minute, I should be glad enough. Greatly to my chagrin the library is locked up. The park is several miles in extent, very pleasant and stocked with deer: once or twice while wandering in the bracken I have suddenly come upon the solemn face and branching antlers of a stag, within a few feet of me. He examines me for a moment, then snorts, kicks up his heels, and is gone: a second later, head after head comes up—his panic has reached the rest of the herd, and they too scamper off after him like the wind.

A most generous and welcome consignment of smokeables came this morning. Communication with the town is scanty now of course, and this is a most welcome addition to our diminishing stocks: what is more, such little attentions are infinitely cheering when one is dull, lonely and disappointed . . .

TO HIS FATHER: from Ashton Court

[29? July 1918]

You can imagine how mystified I was by an envelope from the U.V.F.—the contents too were unexpected.³⁹ In some ways this scheme has given me to think: you see the Board which sate upon me in London gave me two months convalescence which will be finished on the 24th of August. It appears however in this hospital, if you are quiet and inoffensive and keep yourself well out of the notice of the authorities, you may be often left for several weeks after your time. The great danger about this change would be that of getting the reply ‘If you are so anxious to move, we will have you boarded at once and discharged from hospital.’ Such a procedure would of course hasten my return to France. The amount of leave I get after hospital (whatever it may be) will not be influenced by the time which I have spent in the former, and it is therefore to our interest to prolong the hospital period to the utmost. The smaller Irish hospitals are notoriously strict and up to time with their Boards. I must admit too, I should be sorry to give up the idea of your coming to visit me here: it would give me great pleasure for you to meet Mrs Moore, and I feel that this visit to me is the only excuse on which you will ever get away for a while from Belfast and the office. If you were at the office all day and I had to be back at the hospital at 6 or 7 every night, it would be hardly worth while coming to a hospital at home. Here we could have a delightful little holiday together . . .

TO HIS FATHER: from Ashton Court

3 September 1918

Ever since my last letter to you I have been almost daily expecting to hear from you, and I am rather surprised that neither my answer to your proposal nor my suggestion that you should come over here has met with any reply. Have you not yet decided on a date for coming over? It is four months now since I returned from France, and my friends laughingly suggest that ‘my father in Ireland’ of whom they hear is a mythical creation like Mrs Harris.⁴⁰

As to my decision, I think you will agree that it has already justified itself. I am now nearly a month over my time, and even if I were boarded tomorrow this would be so much to the good. Of course in the present need for men, being passed fit by a board would mean a pretty quick return to France. I am afraid there is not much possibility of the ‘job at home’ which you once thought might be the result of my wounds: although not quite well I am almost ‘fit’ now in the military sense of the word, and depend only on the forgetfulness of the authorities for my continued stay in hospital. Of course this has nothing to do with my leave.

I hope there is nothing wrong and that I shall soon hear from you again and see you here. I know there are difficulties in the way, but I suppose they are no more serious now than when Warnie was at home . . .

TO HIS FATHER: from Ashton Court

9 September 1918

I write in haste to give you a piece of news which I hope will please you not much less than it did me. You are aware that for some years now I have amused myself by writing verses, and a pocket book collection of these followed me through France. Since my return I have occupied myself in revising these, getting them typed with a few additions, and trying to publish them. After a refusal from Macmillans they have, somewhat to my surprise, been accepted by Heinemann. Wm. Heinemann thinks it would ‘be well to reconsider the inclusion of one or two pieces which are not perhaps on a level with my best work’. I have sent him some new ones as substitutes for these and things are going on well, although his absence from town on a fortnight’s holiday will cause a delay in coming to a definite arrangement about money. I don’t know when I may hope actually to see the book, but of course I will send you a copy at once. It is called Spirits in Prison: a cycle of lyrical poems by Clive Staples. The paper and printing will probably be detestable, as they always are now-a-days. This little success gives me a pleasure which is perhaps childish and yet akin to greater things . . .

TO HIS FATHER: from Ashton Court

14 September 1918

I am sorry that you should have been so troubled as you were when you last wrote to me, and sorrier still that I should have been to any extent the cause of it. At the same time it is only fair to add that I do not entirely acquiesce in the blame which you lay upon me. Above all, the joking reference to ‘Mrs Harris’ which you take au pied de la lettre was quite harmlessly meant. I do not choose my friends among people who jeer, nor has a tendency to promiscuous confidence ever been one of my characteristic faults. However, perhaps it was tactless, and there is no need to go into it further.

Many thanks for the ‘monies numbered’ and the parcel. Those Virginian cigarettes which you have sent me several times are a good brand. Are matches obtainable at home? We are very badly off for them here: hardly any tobacconist will give you a box, and grocers only give a small weekly allowance to their regular customers.

I was very much cheered by your telegram. Such things are the most valuable part of the successes which they accompany. I hope I have not led you to expect too much: the publisher is only the first fence in our steeplechase—the book may still be badly reviewed or not reviewed at all, may fail to sell, or your own taste and judgement may be disappointed in it. The news I need hardly say should be communicated with discretion to the ‘hoi polloi’ . . .

TO HIS FATHER: from Ashton Court

18 September 1918

It had quite escaped my notice that Hichens had written a novel called Spirits in Prison, but now that you mention it, I think that you are right—or perhaps it is A Spirit in Prison—the resemblance at any rate is close enough to hit that title on the head.⁴¹ I don’t know whether I shall be able to find another that expresses so aptly the general scheme of the book, but we must do our best. The subtitle ‘A cycle of lyrical poems’ was not given without a reason: the reason is that the book is not a collection of really independant pieces, but the working out, loosely of course and with digressions, of a general idea. If you can imagine In Memoriam⁴² with its various parts in different metres it will give you some idea of the form I have tried to adopt. Such merit as it has depends less on the individual than on the combined effect of the pieces. To call it a cycle is to prepare the reader for this plan and to induce him to follow the order of the poems as I have put them. Probably he will not, but we must do our best. At the same time I admit that the word ‘cycle’ is a very objectionable one. The only others which I know to express the same thing are ‘series’ and ‘sequence’ and of these the former is hardly definite enough and the latter in my opinion more affected and precieux than ‘cycle’ itself. Of course one could dispense with a sub-title altogether, but I rather approve of the old practice by which a book gives some account of itself—as Paradise Lost—a heroic poem in twelve books—The Pilgrim’s Progress—being an account of his journey from this world to the next. Perhaps you can suggest some simpler and more dignified way of saying that the book is a whole and not a collection.

My only reason for choosing a pseudonym at all was a natural feeling that I should not care to have this bit of my life known in the regiment. One doesn’t want either officers or men to talk about ‘our b****y lyrical poet again’ whenever I make a mistake . . .

Mrs Moore had received news at last of her son’s death: I suppose it is best to know, and fortunately she never cherished any hopes⁴³ . . .

[For some time Warren had been asking his father if he had been to see Jack. In his letter to Warren of 19 September Mr Lewis praised Jack’s success in having his poems accepted by Heinemann. He went on to say: ‘I am sorry—I won’t say ashamed—to say that I have not been over to see him yet. Nor do I see a prospect of going soon. I have never been so awkwardly—or at least more awkwardly—placed in the office and Court than I am at the present time. I cannot be certain any morning that my managing man will turn up. If I left home and went on the spree, the result to my little livelihood would be disastrous. Indeed the worry and overwork is beginning to tell on me. The last holiday I had was my visit to Malvern and some water has flowed under the bridge since then. I have never felt as limp and depressed in my life I think, as I have for the last few weeks. I have no doubt that Jacks thinks me unkind and that I have neglected him. Of course that fear makes me miserable. One night about ten days ago I went to bed worrying about it, and I heard every hour strike from eleven to seven.’]

TO HIS FATHER: from Ashton Court

Postmark: 3 October 1918

I think ‘Spirits in Bondage’ would be a good substitute for the old title and would sound well: ‘Spirits in Bonds’ would not do so well, and suggests tiresome jokes about whiskey. I think it is only natural to describe it as a Cycle of poems, just to say ‘a cycle’ is rather unintelligible. After all I’m not claiming that they are good poems—you know the schoolboy’s definitions, ‘Prose is when the lines go on to the end of the page: poetry is when they don’t.’

The more I think of it the less I like anonymity. If it wasn’t for the army I’d let my own name take its chance. Don’t you think Clive is too famous a surname to take as a nom de plume (just as we thought Staples too notorious)? Of course we must always remember that the people who are most likely to talk to ‘our b****y poet’ are also the least likely to hear anything about it; they don’t haunt bookshops, nor do they read literary papers.

I read and posted the letter which you enclosed for Mrs Moore. It seemed to me up to the high standard of your usual letters on such occasions. I have heard lately that Somerville, whom I have mentioned to you, is gone too. With him the old set completely vanishes . . . ⁴⁴

TO HIS FATHER: from Officers Mess, No. 3 Camp, Perham Down, Andover, Hampshire

18 October 1918

I have had a board at last, and been moved to this ‘Command Depot’ for an unspecified period. This is the usual step after leaving hospital, unless one is well enough to be passed for general service. Of course I am still far from this, but one doesn’t usually remain here very long. It is a sort of a glorified hospital here, although we live in a mess and wear uniform: the best feature is that we have rooms to ourselves, which is a pleasant change after hospital wards.

I have just had a letter from Heinemann’s which has taken some time to come round through Ashton Court. He accepts some new pieces I had sent him and mentions a few he wants rejected. He also objects to a ‘too frequent use of certain words’ and points to one or two places that seem weak and which I might alter. ‘After that’ he suggests we might come to terms, a point on which I am quite ready to agree with him. I am hoping to get a day off some time next week and run up to town and see him . . .

Of course I remembered the text about ‘the spirits which are in prison’⁴⁵ and it is that which seemed to give the old title its significance which ‘Spirits in bondage’ could never have. I think perhaps we should stick to ‘Prison’. I shall ask Heinemann whether that novel by Hichens really exists; he ought to know.

By the way, what about Clive Hamilton for a pseudonym? It will be a complete disguise to outsiders, transparent to ‘our ain folk’, and will be a name which we have the best of reasons to love and honour.

TO HIS FATHER: from Perham Down Camp

27 October 1918

I succeeded in getting my day off to see Heinemann yesterday, after being stopped last week through a very ridiculous incident of a kind that is common in the army. In order to get leave for a day you have to write down your name, the time of leaving, and your destination in the book which is then signed by the medical officer. Last week the book was lost: no objection was made to my going on either military or medical grounds, but—how could I go without the book? A suggestion that I might write the particulars on a slip of paper which could then afterwards be put in the book was treated as a sort of sacrilege. After a week however it occurred to the Adjutant (who must be a man of bold originality and signal generosity) that we might spend half a crown on a new book, and so I was able to go after all.

Heinemann was out when I reached the office and I was shown in to the Manager, a man called Evans, quite a young fellow and very agreeable.⁴⁶ Afterwards Heinemann himself came in and I was with him for about three-quarters of an hour. He produced a typed agreement of which, with many ‘hereinafter’s and ‘aforesaid’s, the gist is that they are to publish the book ‘at their own expense, in such style and to be sold at such price as they deem best’ and that I am ‘to receive the following royality: 10% of the profits on the published price of 12 out of every thirteen copies sold’. It concludes with a stipulation that they should have the refusal of my next work, if any. Whether I am being well or ill treated I am of course too ignorant to say: but I suppose, poetry being such an unprofitable branch of publishing, I have no reason to be dissatisfied. He also told me that John Galsworthy (who publishes with them) had seen my MS and wanted to publish a certain poem in a new monthly called Revielle which he is bringing out in aid of disabled soldiers and sailors. I naturally consented, both because it is pleasant laudari a laudato viro and because it is an excellent advertisement. Before I left he said he would go on with the printing at once and might be able to have the proofs ready for me in three weeks. He is a fat little man with a bald head, apparently well read, and a trifle fussy—inclined to get his papers mixed up and repeat himself . . .

TO HIS FATHER: from Perham Down Camp

3 Sept. [November] 1918

You may make your mind easy on the question of the War Office’s ‘tricks’, as my removal to a command depot is quite in order. At the same time I am afraid I shall have to disappoint you on the two months leave as I am not likely to get nearly so long. The idea doubtless arose in your mind from the fact that officers discharged from hospital and still convalescent, were formerly sent home and told to report for a board again in two, three or even six months’ time. This however was

      ‘In the olden

      Time long ago’

It was found that the average uniformed bounder had only two interests—alcohol and women—and that two months’ undisturbed indulgence in his natural tastes left him very much less fit than when he began. As well, men were continually being forgotten, and there were even cases of officer’s desertion: consequently tho’ Majors et hoc genus omne still get their sick leave, we unfortunates convalesce in hospitals and depots and get some leave as a sop after we are cured. As usual, the innocent suffer for the guilty, but this is too common an event to surprise either you or me. Any attempt to ‘work’ things is dangerous: we had a hopelessly unfit man at Ashton, who, on trying to be sent to a different hospital was boarded and sent to France. It’s a way they have in the army . . .

Yes—a year and six days is a long stretch enough: indeed my life is rapidly becoming divided into two periods, one including all the time before we got into the battle of Arras, the other ever since. Already last year seems a long, long way off. However, there appears to be some prospect of the whole beastly business coming to an end fairly soon . . .

TO HIS FATHER: from Perham Down Camp

10 November 1918

Although one does not wish to live in a fool’s paradise or be foolishly confident, yet I do think the present course of events is such as to render the question of trying to get a home job rather less important than it was a month ago. In twenty-four hours’ time it may have ceased to have any meaning at all. Of course even it we do get peace, I suppose I shall take some time in escaping from the army. But in no position should I stand a better chance of a speedy discharge, than in my present one of convalescent officer at a Command Depot. Our attitude therefore must simply be to ‘stand by’ . . .

Of course the question whether Heinemann is treating me well or no has often been in my mind, and I have come to the conclusion that such an agreement is all that we have a right to expect. We must remember that even when poetry has a succès fou it is still less profitable to the publisher than even fairly good fiction. As Evans said to me, ‘We don’t expect to make a commercial success out of poetry: we only publish it—well simply because its good.’ . . . Since you ask, such compliments as I was payed by Heinemann were of a somewhat peculiar nature—their object being to impress upon me the great honour that was being done me, and the majesty of the firm. ‘Of course Mr Lewis we never accept poetry unless it is really good’ and more in that strain—with mental reservations on my part as I remembered some specimens. He merely said that Galsworthy ‘admired’ the one he wanted for Reveille . . .

[The following day, Monday 11 November 1918, Albert Lewis wrote in his diary: ‘Armistice signed. War ended. Thanks be to God.’]

TO HIS FATHER: from Officers’ Command Depot, Eastbourne

[17? November 1918]

As you see, I have been moved again. That is to say I have in the literal sense covered several hundreds of miles of country, but in the military sense I have not moved at all. In other words, ‘Command Depot’ itself has moved: as a step towards demobilisation the officers who were scattered at various depots over the country have been collected into a special depot for officers here. As to the great news which is uppermost in our minds, I can only echo what you have already said. The man who can give way to mafficking at such a time is more than indecent—he is mad. I remember five of us at Keble, and I am the only survivor: I think of Mr Sutton, a widower with five sons, all of whom have gone. One cannot help wondering why. Let us be silent and thankful.

The question of how to get most quickly out of the army has of course occupied me too. I wrote to Macan explaining my position and asking whether Colleges propose to make any representations to the powers on behalf of the Sam-Browne’d freshmen who wanted to get back—for I had heard that something of that kind was being done. He replied in a kind and even cordial letter that I was not likely, so far as he knew, to be discharged for several months, and that the head of the U.T.C. [University Training Courses] was writing to me. The latter wrote to me saying that if I could get passed by a board as ‘unfit for at least three months’ I could go back to Oxford in khaki and on army pay, for what they call ‘an intensive course of University training’ on the chance of not being disturbed again. This seems to me however rather a cat and mouse business . . .

We’re a nice pair! In the same letter you say—quite truly—that I have never told you to what extent I am likely to be disabled by the wound, and also that you are in Squeaky’s hands for trouble—unspecified.⁴⁷ Well let’s make a bargain. Here is my health report, and in return I shall look for a full account of your own bother. The effects of the wound in general movement are practically nil. I can do everything except hold my left arm straight above my head, which I don’t want to do anyway. The effects on general health are very small: I have had one or two stoppages of breath which I am told are not unusual after a chest wound and which will soon disappear, and of course I still get tired easily and have a few headaches in the evenings. On the nerves there are two effects which will probably go with quiet and rest . . . The other is nightmares—or rather the same nightmare over and over again. Nearly everyone has it, and though very unpleasant, it is passing and will do no harm. So you see I am almost in status quo . . .

TO HIS FATHER: from Eastbourne

8 December 1918

As you have probably seen in the papers, we are all going to get 12 days’ ‘Christmas leave’. I use the inverted commas advisedly as mine seems likely to be in January. I suppose it would be unreasonable to expect them to let us all go at the same time, and you and I won’t quarrel with dates. It has been a long time coming and a time unpleasantly and wastefully spent, but thank God it is over at last. By the way although, as I understand, I am entitled to a vote, I have not yet received any of the ‘Election Communications’ which have fallen to the lot of most men I know. Perhaps you can advise the constituency that it is in danger of losing the support of an influential voter! I suppose we are all voting for the Coalition, though I must confess I distrust them most heartily and look for no liberty as long as they are in power. Most of us here would be ready to vote for Lucifer himself if he rose up in red velvet and sulpher whispering the word ‘Discharged’. But I see we are not to be ‘discharged’ but ‘demobilized’ and kept on a leash for the rest of our lives . . .

At my suggestion Mrs Moore has come down here and is staying in rooms near the camp, where I hope she will remain until I go on leave. It is a great relief to get away from the army atmosphere, although for that matter I have been lucky in finding several decent fellows, including even another aspirant for poetical laurels—a most amusing card. It is fine country down here and I am glad that chance has given me its hills and cliffs to walk on. Certainly, if nothing else, the army has shown me some bits of England that I would not otherwise have seen . . .

TO HIS FATHER: from Eastbourne

[16?] December 1918

I have already wired to you the dates of my leave: a list of the periods alloted to each of us has been posted up here, and, as was to be expected, the coveted dates which would include Christmas fall to the Majors and Captains et hoc genus omne. If however you can let Warnie know in time, I should think he would have no difficulty in getting his leave postponed. Everyone of course will be trying to get home for Christmas day, and it ought to be easy to change with someone who had got a later date against his will. I quite agree with you that it would be most disappointing if even now our little gathering were broken up.

Of course I shall be only too pleased if any influence of yours could succeed in getting me a discharge, though at the same time I am afraid it will be a very difficult business. As you have probably seen in the papers, we are to be drafted on our demobilization in ‘Class Z Reserve’ where I suppose we shall remain ready for the next scrape that some Labour government in the future may get the country into. I don’t want to be pessimistic, but there does not seem much hope of ever being quite free of the army again. To get a discharge might be possible on the score of unfitness, but I do not think that my degree of military unfitness will be sufficient to serve our turn . . .

So far my readings both in Latin and Greek have been a pleasant surprise: I have forgotten less than I feared, and once I get the sound and savour of the language into my head by a spell of reading, composition should not come too hard either. In English I have started friend Trollope again—The Small House at Allington . . .

[In his wire Jack told his father that his leave was 10–22 January. Warren was, however, unable to alter the dates of his and he arrived home on 23 December. Suddenly Jack found himself demobilized from the Army. There was no time to tell his father. Mr Lewis and Warren were in the study of ‘Little Lea’ on 27 December when a cab drove up the drive and Jack got out. As Warren says in his Memoir, they drank champagne to celebrate the occasion. Following this reunion with his family, Jack returned to Oxford on 13 January 1919 to begin the ‘Honour Mods’ course in Greek and Latin literature. Mrs Moore and Maureen found rooms nearby in 28 Warneford Road, Oxford.]

TO HIS FATHER: from University College, Oxford

27 January 1919

After a quite comfortable journey (which showed me that 1st Class travelling is very little different from 3rd) I arrived here somewhat late in the evening. The moon was just rising: the porter knew me at once and ushered me into the same old rooms (which by the way I am going to change). It was a great return and something to be very thankful for. I was also pleased to find an old friend, Edwards, who was up with me in 1916, and being unfit, has been there all the time.

There is of course already a great difference between this Oxford and the ghost I knew before: true, we are only twenty-eight in College, but we DO dine in Hall again, the Junior Common Room is no longer swathed in dust sheets, and the old round of lectures, debates, games, and whatnot is getting under weigh. The reawakening is a little pathetic: at our first [meeting of the J.C.R.] we read the minutes of the last—1914. I don’t know any little thing that has made me realise the absolute suspension and waste of these years more thoroughly.

The Mugger⁴⁸ preached a quite memorable sermon on the first Sunday evening. It was very plain, even homely in style, not what one expected, but it grew on one, and I admire the restraint where ‘gush’ would have been so fatally easy. By the way, I have not been asked to see the Mugger yet, but I gather he has a waiting list and is working slowly through it. We have quite a number of old members who were up before the war and are a kind of dictionary of traditions.

Now as to work: I am ‘deemed to have passed’ Responsions and Divinity and it was open to me either to take Honour Mods or go straight on to ‘Greats’—as you know, the final fence. In consideration of my wish to get a fellowship, Poynton, who is my tutor, strongly advised me not to avail myself of this opportunity of slurring over Mods. I presume I was acting as I should when I followed his advice. Except for the disadvantage of starting eighteen books of Homer to the bad I find myself fairly alright: of course the great difference after Kirk’s is that you are left to work very much on your own. It is a little bit strange at first, but I suppose hard work in any lines will not be wasted. The best thing I go to is the series of lectures by Gilbert Murray, which are very good indeed: I always feel much the better for them.⁴⁹

The coal difficulty is not very serious. We have all our meals in Hall, which, if it abolishes the cosy breakfast in one’s rooms and the interchange of ‘decencies and proprieties’ is a little cheaper: we shall go back to the old arrangement as soon as we can. The library, one lecture room, and the Junior Common Room are always warm, and the two former are quite quiet: then for the evening we can afford a modest blaze at one’s ‘ain fireside’. Our little body gets on very well together and most of us work. The place is looking more beautiful than ever in the wintry frost: one gets splendid cold colouring at the expense of tingling fingers and red noses.

TO HIS FATHER: from University College

4 February 1919

I find the work pretty stiff, but I think I am keeping my head above water. Poynton is, so far as I can judge, quite an exceptionally good tutor, and my visits to him are enjoyable as well as useful—although he objects to my style of Greek prose—‘I don’t care very much for treacle OR barley sugar myself’. So you have bequeathed to me some remnant of the old Macaulese taint after all. I drank tea with him last Sunday. Another man from Univ. went with me and the party consisted of Mrs and Miss Poynton, two girl undergraduates, and ourselves. As a matter of fact our host did nearly all the talking and kept us very well amused: he is an excellent if somewhat unjust raconteur. He came up to Balliol under Jowett and had a lot to say of the great man. It’s funny you know, they all laugh at him, they all imitate his little mannerisms, but nobody who ever met him forgets to tell you so.

Much to my surprise I have had ‘greatness thrust upon me’. There is a literary club in College called the Martlets, limited to twelve undergraduate members: it is over three hundred years old, and alone of all College Clubs has its minutes preserved in the Bodleian. I have been elected Secretary—the reason being of course that my proposer, Edwards, was afraid of getting the job himself. And so if I am forgotten as all else, at least a specimen of my handwriting will be preserved to posterity. Someone will read a paper on Yeats at our next meeting: we are also going to have one on Masefield and we hope to get Masefield himself (who lives just outside [Oxford]) to come up and listen to it and give a reply.⁵⁰

I have a very bad piece of news for you: Smugy is dead. Sometime in the middle of last term he fell a victim to flu. I suppose I am very inexperienced but I had come to depend on his always being there⁵¹ . . .

TO HIS FATHER: from University College

5 March 1919

I don’t think that anyone who takes the trouble to read my book through will seriously call it blasphemous, whatever criticism he may make on artistic grounds.⁵² If he does not, we need not bother about his views. Of course I know there will be a number of people who will open it by chance at some of the gloomiest parts of Part I and decide ‘Swinburnian Ballads’ and never look at it again. But what would you do? If one writes at all—perhaps like Talleyrand many ‘don’t see the necessity’—one must be honest. You know who the God I blaspheme is and that it is not the God you or I worship, or any other Christian. But we have talked over this before. Arthur tells me that you have a copy of Reveille with my thing in it.⁵³ They have omitted to send me one—‘who am I?’ as Knowles said.

I look like having a busy time next week: I am reading in Chapel, saying grace in Hall, writing a paper on Morris for the Martlets, finishing the Iliad, and dining with the Mugger. I hope to be able to eat and sleep a little as well! As the time goes on I appreciate my hours with Poynton more and more. After Smugy and Kirk I must be rather spoiled in the way of tutors, but this man comes up to either of them, both as a teacher and as a humorous ‘card’. Gilbert Murray is, I’m afraid, not very much good for exams., tho’ his literary merits are unsurpassed . . .

TO HIS FATHER: from University College

15 [March 1919]

I am writing to tell you that the ’Varsity term ends today and the College term on Monday. I shall be staying up for a week more, following Poynton’s instructions. After that I shall go down to help Mrs Moore with her move at Bristol: she has had to come back to clear out the house. There seems to be considerable difficulty about getting anywhere else. London and Bristol are both hopeless: I have suggested here, but that seems equally impossible. I can’t understand where the influx of people is coming from. Of course the expences of the journey I shall pay myself . . .

TO HIS BROTHER: from University College

[2? April 1919]

The reason for my silence in general is that I have got to work like Hell here—I seem to have forgotten everything I know. If you are on the look out for a cheap modern edition of Chesterfield’s letters, I will see what I can do, but I feel inclined to reply in Tommy’s irreverent style, ‘Wot ’opes’. About St Simon you will find it much easier to write to Paris for a French edition: when you had finished with it you could send it on to me to be bound and pressed—after which you would find it as good as new. I don’t know of a crib to it.⁵⁴ To take up P’s style, have you ever noticed a book at home ‘very much on the same lines’, the Memoirs of Count Gramont, written in French by a Hamilton who was a hanger on of the grand monarque, and translated?⁵⁵

In the name of all the gods why do you want to go into the ‘Russian Expeditionary Force’? You will drag on a post-less, drink-less, book-less, tobacco-less existence for some months until the Bolshevists finally crush us and then probably end your days at a stake or on a cross.

The typewriting of private letters is the vile invention of business men, but I will forgive you on the ground that you were practising . . . Did you see the ‘very insolent’ review of me on the back page of the Times Literary Supplement last week?⁵⁶ . . .

TO HIS FATHER: from University College

25 May 1919

I have not written to Evans, as I found a circular from a Press cutting Association to which I have replied, enclosing 10/-. The results so far have been a very interesting review on ‘The Principles of Symbolic Logic’ by C. S. Lewis of the University of California. I am writing back to tell them that they have got rather muddled. Symbolic Logic forsooth! I started reading it without noticing the title and was surprised to find myself—as I thought—being commended for a ‘scholarly elucidation of a difficult subject’.

As nearly everyone here is a poet himself, they have naturally no time left for lionizing others. Indeed the current literary set is one I could not afford to live in anyway, and tho’ many of them have kindly bought copies of the book, their tastes run rather to modernism, vers libre and that sort of thing. I have a holy terror of coteries: I have already been asked to join a Theosophist, a Socialist, and a Celtic society.

By the way, the distinction which one finds in such books as Tom Brown by which the poor, the industrious, and the intellectual, are all in one class, and the rich, brainless and vicious, all in another, does not obtain. Some ‘poor scholars’ are bad lots, and some of the ‘gilded youth’ are fond of literature . . .

[Increasingly, Mr Lewis and Warren worried about the prominent position of Mrs Moore in Jack’s life. Writing to Warren on 20 May, Mr Lewis said: ‘I confess I do not know what to do or say about Jacks’ affair. It worries and depresses me greatly. All I know about the lady is that she is old enough to be his mother—that she is separated from her husband and that she is in poor circumstances. I also know that Jacks has frequently drawn cheques in her favour running up to £10—for what I don’t know. If Jacks were not an impetuous, kind hearted creature who could be cajoled by any woman who has been through the mill, I should not be so uneasy. Then there is the husband whom I have always been told is a scoundrel—but the absent are always to blame—somewhere in the background, who some of these days might try a little aimable blackmailing. But outside all these considerations that may be the outcome of a suspicious, police court mind, there is the distraction from work and the folly of the daily letters.’ On 3 June Warren wrote to his father, saying: ‘I am greatly relieved . . . to hear that Mrs Moore HAS a husband: I understood that she was a widow; but as there is a Mr Moore, the whole complexion of the business is altered. We now get the following very unsatisfactory findings. (1) Mrs Moore can’t marry Jacks. (2) Mr Moore can’t blackmail him because “IT” hasn’t enough money to make it a paying risk. (3) YOU can’t be blackmailed because you wouldn’t listen to the proposition for one moment. But the daily letter business DOES annoy me: especially as I have heard from Jacks ONCE since January of this year.’]

TO HIS BROTHER: from University College

9 [June 1919]

‘Sir,’ said Dr Johnson, ‘you are an unsocial person.’ In answer to the charge I can only plead the general atmosphere of the summer term which is the same here as it was at school: whatever energy I have has to be thrown into work and, for the rest, the seductive influence of the river and hot weather must bear the blame. Term ends some time in July, but I shall be staying up for part of the vac. Would the early part of September do for your leave: one doesn’t get any chance of fine weather or of endurably warm sea water any earlier in Donegal. I quite agree with you that we could have quite an excellent time together at Portsalon—if we were ‘both’ there, if, as you suggest, we were ‘all’ there, I suppose we could endure as we always have endured.

You ask me what is wrong with P . . . which he describes as exceedingly painful and horribly depressing. I don’t meet the doctors myself and therefore, in the case of a man who would hold precisely the same language about a boil or a wasp’s sting, it is impossible to say how bad he is: I am afraid however it is rather a serious bother. There is also a second thing wrong with him—namely that he is fast becoming unbearable. What the difficulties of life with him always were, you know: but I never found it as bad as when I was last at home. I needn’t describe the continual fussing, the sulks, the demand to know all one’s affairs—you might think I was exaggerating as you have been out of it for so long . . .

TO HIS BROTHER: from University College

22 [July 1919]

I have just got your letter to which I am replying immediately. Of course I quite see your point, and am greatly relieved to hear from you as I had—of course—lost your address and wanted to get into touch with you. Now will you please wire to me at Univ. and let me know the day and approximate time of your arrival at Oxford: I will then report at the station at a suitable hour. If by any chance I am absent from parade you must drive to Univ. and wait for me, even if I do not turn up at once. The porter will have means of getting on to me if I am out. The programme you sketch is very attractive and it would be grand to have ignorance exposed by the Knock again. You understand why I behave so queerly—the effort to avoid being left alone at Leeborough. With you to back me up however, I have no doubt that we shall depart up to scheduled time. I doubt if this letter will reach you before you leave . . .

[Warren arrived in Oxford on 23 July to begin his holiday with Jack. They were in London for the next two days, and on the 25th they visited Mr Kirkpatrick in Great Bookham. On 26 July they crossed to Ireland to stay with their father until 22 August. The already uneasy relations between Jack and his father were considerably worsened by an event described by Mr Lewis in his diary on 6 August: ‘Sitting in the study after dinner I began to talk to Jacks about money matters and the cost of maintaining himself at the University. I asked him if he had any money to his credit, and he said about £15. I happened to go up to the little end room and lying on his table was a piece of paper. I took it up and it proved to be a letter from Cox and Co stating that his a/c was overdrawn £12 odd. I came down and told him what I had seen. He then admitted that he had told me a deliberate lie. As a reason, he said that he had tried to give me his confidence, but I had never given him mine etc., etc. He referred to incidents of his childhood where I had treated them badly. In further conversation he said he had no respect for me—nor confidence in me.’ This rupture was to last for quite a long time. On 5 September Mr Lewis wrote in his diary: ‘I have during the past four weeks passed through one of the most miserable periods of my life—in many respects the most miserable. It began with the estrangement from Jacks. On 6 August he deceived me and said terrible, insulting, and despising things to me. God help me! That all my love and devotion and self-sacrifice should have come to this—that ‘he doesn’t respect me. That he doesn’t trust me, and cares for me in a way.’ He has one cause of complaint against me I admit—that I did not visit him while he was in hospital. I should have sacrificed everything to do so and had he not been comfortable and making good progress I should have done so . . . The other troubles and anxieties which have come upon me can be faced by courage, endurance, and self-denial. The loss of Jacks’ affection, if it be permanent, is irreparable and leaves me very miserable and heart sore.’]

TO HIS FATHER: from University College

9 October [1919]

Once again, in the words of the immortals, we have resumed our round of steady work, relieved and sweetened by hearty play. I would have written earlier but I have been rather incapacitated by a bite from a playful cat—merely a scratch at the end of my forefinger, but enough for a while to prevent one laying it to a pen with any comfort. It is now alright.

I was sorry to see the other day news of our friend Heineman’s sudden death. The papers have been so covering him with eulogy since he went that I begin to feel glad I met him, if only for once—Vergilium vidi tantum!⁵⁷ In this case however I think the virtues are not wholly of the tombstone nature: a great publisher is really something more than a mere machine for making money: he has opportunities for doing things for the best of motives, and if one looks round most of our English houses, I think he avails himself of them as well as anyone can expect. I always put up a fight for the tribe of publishers here where so many young men with manuscripts have nothing too bad to say of them . . .

TO HIS FATHER: from University College

Postmark: 20 October 1919

I had already seen about the death of Cousin Quartus in the Times before I got your telegram.⁵⁸ For this I suppose one should have been prepared, and indeed for himself, poor man, it was no tragedy. Yet I had come to think of his always being there: it will be a sad thing to go to Glenmachan now. As far back as I can remember he has always had a big place in our life—always the same kindly, courteous old gentleman. I am of course writing to Cousin Mary, although I think such letters are of little use. There is a great deal that we could all say, and say honestly, but it usually sounds conventional on paper . . .

As regards the other matter of which you spoke in your letters, I must ask you to believe that it would have been much easier for me to have left those things unsaid. They were as painful to me as they were for you. Yet, though I have many things to blame myself for, I should blame myself still more if I had tried to establish the relations you refer to by any other means than that of saying frankly what I thought. I did not speak in anger; still less for the purpose of giving pain. But I am sure you will agree with me that the confidence and affection which we both desire are more likely to be restored by honest effort on both sides and toleration—such as is always necessary between imperfect human creatures—than by any answer of mine which was not perfectly sincere . . .