1920–1929

TO HIS FATHER: from University College

Postmark: 4 February 1920

I am preparing to wait upon my great aunt Warren this afternoon, with transports as moderate as those of the Colonel. I think this particular form of introducing strangers by letter, on the theory that blood is thicker than water (‘and a good deal nastier’ as someone added) is one of the most irritating of social amenities. It always reminds me of two hostile children being shoved into a room and told to ‘have a nice game’ together . . .

I am inclined to agree with you—and Mrs Ward—about the lack of charm in Wells: but there are other qualities as important, if less delightful. I am now reading Lavengro⁵⁹ at breakfast every morning and should like it very much if one could cut out the anti-Catholic propaganda . . .

TO HIS FATHER: from 22 Old Cleve, Washford, Somerset

4 April 1920

I am glad to be able to begin with a bit of good news. I did get a First [in Honour Mods] after all. Unfortunately that is almost all I can tell you, as the names in each class are given only in alphabetical order and I can see no possibility of finding out places or marks.

Now as to our movements: as this is the shortest vac., and also as I felt in need of some ‘refresher’ I thought it a good opportunity of paying off an engagement with a man who has been asking me for some time to go and ‘walk’ with him. We are at present at this tiny little village in a perfectly ideal cottage (which is, so to speak, his people’s Teigh-na-mara) from which base we shall set out when the weather clears.⁶⁰

We are quite alone and live an idyllic life on eggs, bully beef and—divine treasure—an excellent ham which Aunt Lily very opportunely sent. The country is delightful, consisting of high moors with charming valleys full of orchards between them, and everything is a mass of white blossom. It is on the borders of Somerset and Devon. Our address will of course be moveable but letters sent here will reach me after some delay. I am sorry to desert you for the present, but it had to be polished off sooner or later.

I am just getting over a rather tiresome cough and cold and am beginning to feel much better than I have done for a long time. I have brought Waverley⁶¹ to clean out my mind—there is great comfort in these solid old books . . .

TO HIS FATHER: from Washford

11 April 1920

I had quite forgotten about Aunt Warren. She must be pretty old, and dresses (with cap and white collar) in a style which makes her look rather more so. At the same time there is nothing senile in her conversation or manner. We talked chiefly about Glenmachan and Irish politics. The only one of ‘the girls’ present was Daisy, who is, I suppose, over forty. She struck me as being ecclesiastical in a high degree: for instance from her point of view the chief argument in favour of expelling the Turks from Europe was ‘that it would reestablish the Patriarch at Constantinople and thus create a balance to the Papacy’. After the Armenian massacres, not to mention the war, THAT would hardly have appeared to me—nor to you I presume—the most important reason. There was a very attractive child whose parents are in India: but I like the old lady the best of the three.

As you see, we have not yet moved: indeed the weather has not encouraged us to set out, though it has not prevented us from a great deal of walking. It is more beautiful here almost than any place I have ever seen—whether in the valleys full of orchards or up on the big heathery hills from which one looks down on the sea and the Welsh coast away on the horizon.

You need not have any fears about our cuisine here. Remember we are almost in Devon and the clotted cream of the country is a host in itself: also—shades of Oldie—the real ‘Deevonshire’ cider in every thatched and sanded pub.⁶²

A few miles away is a little fishing town called Watchet, which saw at least one interesting scene in its obscure history: it was here that Coleridge and the Wordsworths slept (or ‘lay’ as they would have said) on the first night of their walking tour. During that afternoon the germ of the Ancient Mariner occurred in conversation and in the inn at Watchet the first lines were jotted down . . .

TO HIS FATHER: from University College

1 May 1920

I have two tutors now that I am doing ‘Greats’, one for history and one for philosophy. Of course I am sorry to have parted brass rags with old Poynton: the other two are much younger men, but seem quite nice.⁶³ We go to the philosophy one in pairs: then one of us reads an essay and all three discuss it. I wish you could hear the ‘crack’, it is very amusing. Luckily I find that my previous dabbling in the subject stands me in good stead and for some time I shall have only to go over more carefully ground through which I have already meandered on my own.

I expect that what you feel about travel would be endorsed by a great many other people of your own age, who, as you say, have never really wanted a shilling in their lives. As far as I can see it is only the few who can do it without the least sacrifice who bother to see the world at all: the majority will not give up anything for it and would sooner afford a car to go round Stangford on, than see Greece or Cathay—if there really is a Cathay. One is amazed at the resolution of a real traveller like Herodotus, whom I am reading at present: knowing apparently no language but his own and relying on merchant caravans and dragomans with a smattering of Greek, he had yet penetrated to Babylon and seen the hanging gardens and the temple of Bel-Baal I suppose—and up the Nile as far as Elephantine where there were rumours of the land of dwarfs beyond—the Pygmies of course. Or Marco Polo—whom you should read: books of travel are a great resource.

I can’t understand the Irish news at all. One of the most curious things is the rapprochement which seems probable between English Trades Unionism and Sinn Fein. I was always confident that the religious differences, the odium theologicum would prevent a junction between the two. If they really do work together I think it is all up for England and Ireland . . .

TO HIS FATHER: from University College

6 June 1920

I thought I had said something about the Anthology. It is being got up as a kind of counterblast to the ruling literary fashion here, which consists in the tendencies called ‘Vorticist’. Vorticist poems are usually in vers libre (which means they are printed like verse, but neither rhyme nor scan, a line ending wherever you like). Some of them are clever, the majority merely affected, and a good few—especially among the French ones—indecent: not a sensuous indecency, but one meant to nauseate, the whole genus arising from the ‘sick of everything’ mood. So some of us others who are not yet sick of everything have decided to bring out a yearly collection of our own things in the hope of persuading the gilded youth that the possibilities of metrical poetry on sane subjects are not yet quite exhausted because the Vorticists are suffering from satiety. Of course we may end by proving just the opposite, but we must risk that: there will be a polemical preface and the first number is to appear in the autumn. We call it The way’s the way which is a quotation from Bunyan (a writer of books you know)!⁶⁴ . . .

We have had a bus strike here. The President of the Liberal Club and the President of the Labour Club, with followers, very foolishly addressed the world at large from chairs the other evening: and a warm scene between mixed workers and undergraduates on each side was only interrupted by the appearance of the Proctors: whereupon the undergraduates fled from the Proctors and the Proctors, with less success, fled from the mob. This, you see, is true democracy . . .

TO HIS FATHER: from University College

25 July 1920

I should have answered you before but I have been engaged in entertaining the colonel [Warren]. He, despite the efforts of a tyrannical and slave driving general staff, is still managing to keep body and soul together and to sustain his labours with that equanimity for which he is justly famed. Contrary to your fears he, as yet, [has] only one car: which he proposes to sell and buy another. As soon as his leave begins he is going to motor me to Liverpool, via Malvern, and so home. I am still debating whether I can sufficiently brace my nerves to such an ordeal . . .

I had nearly forgotten to tell you that Uncle and Aunt Hamilton were here for a night on their tour.⁶⁵ If any man has ever been successful in screwing the honey out of life it is he. One cannot help admiring the skill with which he knows exactly how far selfishness can go without rebounding on himself: he has learned to a nicety how much every plank will bear. At the same time this worldly wisdom which has an appetite for everything and yet can be content with little, which knows what can be got out of life and does not expect more, would be almost a virtue, so pleasant is it and so sensible, if it were not centred completely on self. He made one good mot here—that ‘England would be an excellent country to tour in were it not for the Cathedrals.’⁶⁶ . . .

TO HIS FATHER: from University College

Postmark: 8 December 1920

My journey to Cambridge was on this wise. You will remember that a society of Martlets at Pembroke, Cambridge sent representatives to our society of that name: on this occasion four of us were sent to play a return match. The trip was rendered both cheaper and pleasanter by the fact that one of the four lives there, and very kindly put us all up. I read them a paper on narrative poetry. Of course I don’t know what they thought of it, but at any rate nothing was thrown at me.⁶⁷ We dined with them first. It was a wretched night, which having attempted to freeze, had finally decided instead on a sleety rain. The old library of their college, where we had dinner, was very badly heated, and what between that and going about their quadrangle in the chilliness of evening dress and the rain, I got rather a nasty chill—whereof I am just now recovered.

It was very interesting next day to see Cambridge. In many ways it is a contrast: there is something, I can hardly say whether of colour or of atmosphere, which at once strikes a more northern, a bleaker and a harder note. Perhaps the flatness of the country, suggesting places seen from the railway beyond Crewe, has something to do with it. The streets are very narrow and crowded: the non-university parts depressing enough. Some things—such as King’s College Chapel, in which I was prepared to be disappointed—are indeed beautiful beyond hope or belief: several little quadrangles I remember, with tiled gables, sun dials and tall chimnies like Tudor houses, were charming. One felt everywhere the touch of Puritanism, of something Whiggish, a little defiant perhaps. It has not so much Church and State in its veins as we. The stained windows in the Halls show figures like Erasmus and Cranmer. Oxford is more magnificent, Cambridge perhaps more intriguing. Our characteristic colour is the pale grey, almost the yellow of old stone: their’s the warm brown of old brick. A great many Cambridge buildings remind one of the Tower of London. Most of the undergraduates whom I met I liked very much. Their dons, as judged by those who were at the ‘do’, are certainly inferior to ours in charm of manners and geniality. One I thought hardly a gentleman.

I am afraid you took my remark about ‘a small book’ rather too literally—I meant only an essay for my tutor: I am hardly up to writing historical monographs (for publication) just yet. I have however been recommended to try for the Vice Chancellor’s Essay Prize next April. The subject is ‘Optimism’ under which heading one could include almost anything one wanted to write about. My point of view will be mainly metaphysical and rather dry. It would be a splendid advertisement if I could pull it off, but of course competition is very keen . . . ⁶⁸

TO HIS FATHER: from the Oxford Union Society

21 January [1921]

My history tutor has handed me over to a gentleman at Magdalen whom he recommended by telling me that he was a grandson of Mendelsohn’s: a trifle irrelevant I thought.⁶⁹ The exchange was presented to me in the form of a compliment and I am quite satisfied with it. The reason I mention it is because the new man deserves to be known to fame. I had not been many minutes in his room until I had an uneasy sense of strange yet familiar neighbours. When he went out for a moment I discovered what it was—pigs! Do not mistake me: not live pigs: but pigs of china, of bronze, of clay, of wood, of stuff and of stone: pigs jovial and pigs quizzical, kindly pigs and severe pigs, Falstaffian pigs and pigs philosophical. I counted twenty-eight in a few seconds and had still not got beyond the mantelpiece. The porcine seraglio of a lonely old batchelor is one of the little comedies I would not have missed for a good deal. And yet how wise! Here are companions for every mood, who need practically no upkeep and are never untrue or unkind. I think I must give him a new one: perhaps one of those balloon pigs filled with gas, so that it could hover against the ceiling—and be drawn down by a windlass at nights to rest, like a Zeppelin in some little ‘hangar’.

I am very sorry to hear that you were laid up so long, and hope that you now have quite shaken it off. I have had a bit of a cold, but it is now gone, and beyond the perennial need of having my hair cut, I think you would pass me as ‘all present and correct’. I am still smoothing and varnishing the work on Optimism.

Here is a story that will please the Colonel. The other night at the ‘Martlets’ old Carlyle read a paper.⁷⁰ He is a foxy old gentleman with a cleanshaven face as red as a berry and straight hair the colour of snuff—a very comical face and a high croaking voice. He began by saying that he ought to apologize for his paper ‘because—h’m—to tell you the truth—I had meant to publish it—but h’m—h’m—it was so unsatisfactory that—I—I just sent it to an American magazine.’ That’s the proper spirit! . . .

TO HIS BROTHER: from University College (a serial letter, written on various dates)

I am waiting to hear your address from M. L’Oiseau Pomme de Terre,⁷¹ and in the meantime have begun—tho’ with what promise of continuance I don’t know—my journal letter. As nothing ever happens to me it will be filled, if at all, with trivialities and things that have interested me from day to day. As we talk a good deal of odd fragments out of books when we are together, there’s no reason why we should not reproduce the same sort of tittle-tattle. Perhaps one of the reasons why letters are so hard to write and so much harder to read is that people confine themselves to news—or in other words think nothing worth writing except that which would not be worth saying. All that should be said by way of preamble has already been better said by Lamb in his letter to a friend at the Antipodes. I feel the same difficulty: I cannot imagine in what kind of melodramatic setting you will be reading this. I hear that your ‘preposterous box’ on the ‘East Indiaman’ was not to your liking. Well, you would be a soldier: you must keep a stiff upper lip about it and button up your coat. Here we have sleet and that sort of wind that freezes you when you go out drest for summer: if you do otherwise, ‘the wild winds whist’ and the sun comes out a good 80. But I will be on with my journal: the dates are only approximate.

1 March 1921

Going into College today I met Hamilton-Jenkin in the porch, who carried me to his rooms in Merton Street.⁷² Jenkin is a little, pale person with a smooth green face, not unlike a lizard’s. He was too young for the war and I always look on him as rather a child, though some people think I am wrong in this. I mention him for the amusing passages he showed me from two books. One was A Tour of the County of Cornwall written in the 17th Century: an admirable codology. Under the heading of Beastes we find (after those of Venerie and Draught) Rats. These are described as ‘not only mischievious by day for their devouring of clothes, writings and meats, but cumbersome by night for their rattling and jaunting as they gallup their galliards in the roof’. This sentence I at once learnt by heart. ‘The slow six legged crawler’ which in Cornwall infest all but the ‘cleanly home bred’ are also worth recording.⁷³

Jenkin himself is an enthusiastic Cornishman and some are bored with his persistency in talking of his native scenery, habits, language and superstitions. I rather like it. He put on a little linen cap which he wears when ‘he goes down mines’. Cornwall of course is all mines: they are full of beings called Nackers whom one hears knocking at the ends of the lonelier galleries. The workmen leave little bits of their food for them, for they are terrible bringers of good and bad luck—rather like Leprechauns as I understand. Jenkins has only one vice: that of writing very sad poetry which he sometimes shows me. It is usually about Cornwall.

12 March 1921

Everyone was going down today. Such days have all the atmosphere of a school end of term with its joy taken out of it—body without soul. I hate it: and lest empty rooms and stacks of suit cases should not be sufficiently offensive, we have the intolerable institution of Collections. This is the worst relic of barbarism which yet hangs about the University. From 9 until noon the Master with all his ‘auxiliar fiends’ sits at the high table in Hall and one by one sheepish or truculent undergraduates, as their names are called, walk up the long emptiness, mount the dais and stand foolishly gaping while he delivers a little homily. In my case he always used to say the same thing. ‘Well Mr Lewis, I—ah—I—have nothing but—ah—satisfaction to express as regards—ah—ah. We expect great things of you.’ Apparently he has now given up expecting great things of me.

Now you, lolling in your punkah while the lotuses fly over a pagoda coloured sky etc, may think me very weak: but it is extraordinary that any ceremony which is destined to make you feel like an inky schoolboy will succeed in making you feel like an inky schoolboy. I doubt if even the P’daytabird could have invented anything more subtly undermining of one’s self-respect than that early morning procession up a big hall to be complimented by an old gentleman at a table. Try to imagine it and then add the idea of nine o’clock in the morning: and that your collar has broken loose from its stud at the back: and that there’s a smell of last night’s dinner about: a fly on your nose: a shaving cut beginning to bleed—but no, it is too painful . . .

13 March 1921

It being Lord’s Day I waited after breakfast on Pasley in his rooms at Unity House: that is a cottage in a lane by Headington Church where the buildings are so ruinous that it looks like a bit of France as the cant goes—well FAIRLY like it. Pasley is my oldest ally: he used to write poetry but is now too engrossed in history and he has also become engaged—that fatal tomb of all lively and interesting men⁷⁴ . . . Unity House is ruled by a strangely ugly woman . . . I had an excellent walk with Pasley: he described to me the humours of the new constitution of TzechoSlovakia, which I wish I cd. remember. We sat in a wood full of primroses. Damnit, how generations of P’dayta’s have teased the language till the very name of a primrose sounds sentimental: when you come to look at them, they are really rather attractive. I walked Pasley off his legs and we lunched chez moi on rabbit pie—our common fare at present—Pasley and Mrs Moore having a lively conversation on money in view of his intent shortly to try ‘this marrying business’.

14 March 1921

I received this morning a letter from my obliging friend Stead.⁷⁵ Stead is rather a punt: I think you saw me stop to speak to him one day in the Corn. He is an undergraduate but also curate of a parish in Oxford. He writes poetry. The annoying thing is that it’s exactly like mine, only like the bad parts of mine: this was my own original opinion and it has been confirmed by others. Perhaps you can imagine the sensation I experienced in reading it. Stead’s letter was to say that he had mentioned to Yeats—whom he knows—‘my double claim to distinction as an Irishman and a poet’ and would I come along this evening and see him?

I accordingly repaired after dinner to Stead’s lodging in Canterbury Street. He is a married man: his wife is an American: she is the sister of a woman who is married to a brother of Mrs Moore’s.⁷⁶ She was a woman of implacable sullenness who refused even to say good evening to me: beside her at the fire sat an American gentleman who was apparently left to console her for the absence of her husband. This was a very amiable person: he was ‘studyin’ when I entered, but politely laid his book down. You know the sort of face in which a long promontory of nose (eagle build) projects from between two rounded hills of cheek (cherub build)? Picture this surmounted by a pair of horn spectacles and made of a texture rather like cod’s roe: then add that this face beams but can contribute to the crack only by saying ‘That’s right’ at the end of everyone’s remark. In these rather nasty surroundings Stead was finishing a very nasty meal of cold fish and cocoa: but he soon put on his coat and after asking his lady why there were no stamps in the house and receiving no answer, swung out with me into the usual Oxford theatrical night. Trusting soul to leave his wife unguarded in such society!

Yeats lives at the end of Broad St, the first house on your right as you leave the town. I can assure you I felt a veritable Bozzy as I reflected that I was now to meet at last WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS! But enough of that. We were shown up a long stairway lined with rather wicked pictures by Blake—all devils and monsters—and finally into the presence chamber, lit by tall candles, with orange coloured curtains and full of things which I can’t describe because I don’t know their names.

The poet was very big, about sixty years of age: ‘awful’ as Bozzy says: grey haired, clean shaven. When he first began to speak I would have thought him French, but the Irish sounds through after a time. Before the fire was a circle of hard antique chairs. Present were the poet’s wife, a little man who never spoke all evening, and Father Martindale.⁷⁷ Father M. is a Catholic Priest, a little twinkling man like a bird, or like Puck, whom I take to be an atheistical dog. I used to go to his lectures in the old days: he is a mocker. Everyone got up as we came in: after the formalities I was humbly preparing to sink into the outlying chair leaving the more honourable to Stead, but the poet sternly and silently motioned us into other ones. The meaning of this I have not fathomed: ’twas very Pumblechookian.

Then the talk began. It was all of magic and cabbalism and ‘the Hermetic knowledge’. The great man talked while the priest and Mrs Yeats fed him with judicious questions. The matter I admit was either mediaeval or modern, but the manner was so XVIII Century that I lost my morale. I understood how it is possible for a man to terrify a room into silence: and I had a ghastly presentment that something would presently impel me to up like that ‘unknown curate’ and say ‘Were not Vale Owen’s revelations, Sir, addressed to the passions?’ And then as Max Beerbohm says ‘Bang’ the suddenness of it! However I remembered that Johnson WAS really dead and controlled myself. Indeed some good angel guided me: for presently I really had something to say—a case mentioned by Coleridge which was most apposite and indeed crying for quotation on something just said. But thank God I didn’t: for a minute later the priest did.

YEATS (thumping his chair): ‘Yes—yes—the old woman in Coleridge. That story was published by Coleridge without the slightest evidence. Andrew Lang exposed it. I’ve never had a conversation on the subject that SOMEONE didn’t bring in Coleridge’s old woman. It is anonymous in the first place and every one has taken it over without question. It just shows that there’s no limit to the unscrupulousness that a sceptical man will go to—’

MARTINDALE: ‘Oh surely Mr Yeats—’

YEATS: ‘Yes! There is a Professor living in Oxford at this moment who is the greatest sceptic in print. The same man has told me that he entered a laboratory where X (some woman whose name I didn’t catch) was doing experiments: saw the table floating near the ceiling with X sitting on it: vomited: gave orders that no further experiments were to be done in the laboratories—and refused to let the story be known.’

But it would be only ridiculous to record it all: I should give you the insanity of the man without his eloquence and presence, which are very great. I could never have believed that he was so exactly like his own poetry.

One more joke must be recorded. Stead presently told us a dream he had had: it was so good that I thought it a lie. YEATS (looking to his wife): ‘Have you anything to say about that, Georges?’ Apparently Stead’s transcendental self, not important enough for the poet, has been committed to Mrs Yeats as a kind of ersatz or secondary magician.

Finally we are given sherry or vermouth in long and curiously shaped glasses, except Martindale who has whiskey out of an even longer and more curiously shaped glass, and the orgy is at an end. Try to mix Pumblechook, the lunatic we met at the Mitre, Dr Johnson, the most eloquent drunk Irishman you know, and Yeat’s own poetry, all up into one composite figure, and you will have the best impression I can give you.

21 March 1921

Having met Stead yesterday in the Broad with his wife and of course with our friend of the nose, I was told that the great man had expressed himself sorry not to have been able to see more of me owing to his argument with the priest, and would I come again with Stead next night?

This night we were shown to a study up in the ceiling and entertained by him alone: and, would you believe it, he was almost quite sane, and talked about books and things, still eloquently and quite intelligently? Of course we got on to magic in the end—that was only to be expected. It was really my fault, for I mentioned Bergson. ‘Ah yes,’ said he, ‘Bergson. It was his sister who taught me magic.’ The effect of this statement on Aunt Suffern (already in paroxysms of contempt over what I had already told her about Yeats) ought to be amusing.

We spoke of Andrew Lang. YEATS: ‘I met him once—at a dinner somewhere. He never said a word. When we began to talk afterwards, he just got up and took his chair into a corner of the room and sat down facing the wall. He stayed there all the evening.’ Perhaps Lang didn’t like wizards!

Of the ‘great Victorians’ he said: ‘The most interesting thing about the Victorian period was their penchant for selecting one typical great man in each department—Tennyson, THE poet, Roberts, THE soldier: and then these types were made into myths. You never heard of anyone else: if you spoke of medicine it meant . . . (some “THE Doctor” whose name I’ve forgotten): if you spoke of politics it was Gladstone.’

This is especially interesting to us as explaining the mental growth of a certain bird we wot of. (‘Well all said and done boys, he was a GREAT man.’) So home to bed more pleased with our poet than I had been on the last occasion: and rather thankful that L’Oiseau Pomme de Terre hadn’t been there to explain that ‘you can see he’s a disappointed man’ after every adverse criticism on any living writer. Oh, before I leave it, Stead told me he had shown Yeats a poem: Yeats said he thought ‘IT WOULD DO VERY WELL’ to set to music! Stead thinks this is a compliment. H’mh!

TO HIS FATHER: from University College

28 March 1921

I am glad that you sent me the wire. I am a poor reader of papers and should have been very sorry, through ignorance, to let such a thing pass in silence. Poor old Kirk!⁷⁸ What shall one say of him? It would be a poor compliment to that memory to be sentimental: indeed, if it were possible, he would himself return to chide the absurdity. It is however no sentiment, but plainest fact to say that I at least owe to him in the intellectual sphere as much as one human being can owe another. That he enabled me to win a scholarship is the least that he did for me. It was an atmosphere of unrelenting clearness and rigid honesty of thought that one breathed from living with him—and this I shall be the better for as long as I live. And if this is the greatest thing, there are others which none of us will forget: his dry humour, his imperturbable good temper and his amazing energy—these it is good to have seen. He was a unique personality with nothing inconsistent about him—except the one foible about the Sunday suit: the more one sees of weakness, affectation and general vagueness in the majority of men, the more one admires that rigid, lonely old figure—more like some ancient Stoic standing fast in the Roman decadence than a modern scholar living in the home countries. Indeed we may almost call him a great man, tho’, as it happened, his greatness was doomed to reach so small a circle. I should have liked to have seen him once again before this happened. I have of course written to Mrs K.

You ask whether I am satisfied with my Optimism, and I am afraid I hardly know. For one thing I almost know it by heart, and consequently can least of all judge it impartially . . . At any rate, it has given me, in parts, as much trouble as anything I have ever done and I shall be glad to have it launched into the registrar’s box for good and all and to leave the rest on the knees of the gods. Only don’t expect any results. You see I am afraid I have rather fallen between two stools: it has to aim at being both literary and philosophical, and, in the effort to accomplish the double object, I have made it too literary for the philosophers and too metaphysical for the dons of English Literature. These are the pitfalls with which the walks of Academe are digged. Such things are written for a tiny public of appointed judges, and you never know what their particular point of view is going to be: they are only human beings and must have tastes and tempers of their own, but one can’t find these out. It must be difficult to be quite fair to an essay which expresses some view that you have been denouncing to a submissive Senior Common Room for the last half century, however good it may be . . .

TO HIS BROTHER: from University College (a continuation of the serial letter)

20? April [1921]

About the coal strike itself you have, I suppose, heard AD NAUSEAM from the papers: what it means to me personally is that I have done a good deal of wood sawing. Have you ever sawed wood? If not, you probably have an idea that one sets the saw lightly on the log, gets to work, and continues steadily deepening until the two halves fall apart. Not a bit of it: you set the saw lightly on the log and then try to move it. It darts aside with a sound like a swallow, and you wrap a handkerchief round your hand: when the blood has soaked through this you go into the house and get some court plaster. Next time you go more cautiously and after the saw has chirped a whole song, a bit of bark comes off: by this time you are fairly warm. Then you really get to it: back and forward you go, changing uneasily from your left to your right feeling the blisters arise on your hand, while the shadows lengthen and the sweat pours down. When you go to bed that night, the ‘big push’ has got about as far as you see in the cut, and you get visions of getting through that log on your thirtieth birthday. I have now become quite good at it and sometimes even get a degree of enjoyment out of it when the day is fine and it goes well. Pasley has turned up the other day: everyone has drifted in since.

Many thanks for your most interesting letter. What a queer end of the world backwater—just like the places we used to imagine out of God knows what sea stories but, still more ‘all made out of the carver’s brain’. I certainly never thought to hear anything like H.M.S. Dwarf in real life: and how very homely to have a telescope and a Lloyd’s register!

You will have plenty more to tell me in your next letter: I haven’t quite got my picture yet. What type of mountains are they? I assume they don’t rise to snow: I know they can’t be heathery: and I have a suspicion they are not smooth green like the hills at Malvern. So you see I am at a loss for them . . .

I am very glad you have become a convert to Milton: what put you on to him and what parts have you been reading? I wonder will you ever get to the end of the Bible: the undesirable ‘primitives’ around you will enable you to appreciate the Hebrews who were Class A primitives after all . . .

TO HIS FATHER: from University College

23 April [1921]

I can of course appreciate your feelings about poor Kirk’s funeral.⁷⁹ Stripped of all wherewith belief and tradition have clothed it, death appears a little grimmer—a shade more chilly and loathsome—in the eyes of the most matter of fact. At the same time, while this is sad, it would have been not only sad but shocking to have pronounced over Kirk words that he did not believe and performed ceremonies that he himself would have denounced as meaningless. Yet, as you say, he is so indelibly stamped on one’s mind once known, so often present in thought, that he makes his own acceptance of annihilation the more unthinkable. I have seen death fairly often and never yet been able to find it anything but extraordinary and rather incredible. The real person is so very real, so obviously living and different from what is left that one cannot believe something has turned into nothing. It is not faith, it is not reason—just a ‘feeling’. ‘Feelings’ are in the long run a pretty good match for what we call our beliefs.

TO HIS FATHER: from University College

9 May [1921]

I am beginning my period of Roman history and this has sent me back to Tacitus whom I read with Kirk. It is the strangest and in a way the pleasantest sensation. The old phrases come up inevitably in his own voice and manner, not only by the usual force of association, but also because Tacitus is a grim, sardonic author whose hardest sayings Kirk relished and made his own. One seems to remember those days in the little upper room with the photograph of Gladstone and the gas stove all the more often now that they are absolutely finished and shut up.

The weather continues pretty cold here and there are still a good many soldiers passing to and fro. I don’t know that the Colonel’s letter to me was very discursive: the Lloyd’s Register in his office and his dislike of the natives and cockchafers were the chief points. But for the climate it would not be a bad job for troglodytes and readers like ourselves: fortunately he has a streak of that in him. For the average officers with no mind and no resources it must be a terrible business and a nurse of all the solitary vices: it is a curious necessity that always casts these sort of jobs—Lighthouses, wireless stations etc.—on the men least fitted for them by nature.

There is still no news of Optimism, and by now little optimism among those who await the news. I should have thought they could have decided on the productions before this: an unsettled possibility like that becomes in the end a nuisance at the back of one’s mind.

TO HIS BROTHER: from University College

10 May [1921]

Here term is still new enough to be interesting. It is still pleasant to see fewer foreign visitors pacing the High with guide books and taking photos of spires—where I know they’ll get them crooked—and to see one’s friends again instead. Pasley was the first to wait upon us, in a blinding snow shower, a few days before term began . . .

A great friend of mine, Baker of Wadham, has come up again after being down for a couple of terms.⁸⁰ I often amuse myself by thinking how you and he would worry each other: not so much by direct antagonism as by being absolutely unable to understand one another. Have you ever met a person who talks habitually in metaphors and doesn’t know that they are metaphors? He has certainly the perverseness and troublesomeness of speech which betoken greatness: his poems are like rooms full of exotic and insolent ornaments, but with nowhere to sit down . . .

The only strictly social function I have attended so far this term was tea with the Carlyles in their most charming house in Holywell.⁸¹ It is a place I greatly envy: long uneven rooms with beams in the ceiling and wide stone grates where a little kind of brazier sits in a deep cave of Dutch tiles. I need hardly say that in Oxford houses all such things were unearthed only fairly recently: the XVIII Cent. wd doubtless have said ‘elegance and civility for Gothic rudeness’.

The principles on which tea fights are conducted at the Carlyles is this: you are given a seat by someone and when you have had a reasonable time to get to the interesting part of the conversation, Mrs C., a rather fatuous woman, gets up and says, ‘Mr Lewis, go and talk to Professor Smith’ or ‘Mr Wyllie, I think you know my daughter’ or whatever it may be: then every single pair is shuffled. When you’ve got fairly settled, the same thing happens again: as some one said, it is like nothing so much as a game of cricket with nothing in it but an umpire calling ‘over’. I had my longest ‘spell’ between Pasley and a lady whom the elder Miss C. describes as ‘my little sister’ . . . By the rule of the house of course Pasley and I had scarcely started trying to instil a little pessimism when she said, ‘Oh, I must get Father to talk to you’. OVER!

When that had subsided I recovered consciousness beside Dr Carlyle. He has every reason to be an optimist: a man who can hold a parish AND a College Chaplaincy (you remember Poynton’s remark ‘Dr Carlyle repeats as much of the service as he can remember’) without being a Christian, and who has lived on the bounty of a Royal Foundation for the last century while being a Socialist, ought to be. All the same he’s a dear old man with a thin brick red face and very straight white hair and never takes anything seriously.

People talk about the Oxford manner and the Oxford life and the Oxford God-knows what else: as if the undergraduates had anything to do with it. Sitting beside this worthy priest I felt that it is really a thing we are quite outside: the real Oxford is a close corporation of jolly, untidy, lazy, good for nothing humorous old men, who have been electing their own successors ever since the world began and who intend to go on with it: they’ll squeeze under the Revolution or leap over it somehow when it comes, don’t you worry.

When I think how little chance I have of ever fighting my way into that unassuming yet impregnable fortress, that modest unremovability, that provokingly intangible stone wall, I think of Keats’s poison.

Brewed in monkish cell

To thin the scarlet conclave of old men.⁸²

. . . Today the 11th, little Jenkin appeared after lunch and bade me go for a bike ride. As I had decided to work, I thought this would be an excellent opportunity of breaking my resolution. Jenkin has his own principles of push biking, the maxim being that ‘where I go my machine can go’. He rides over moors and once carried it down a cliff in Cornwall.

After stopping for a drop of the negus at Garsington in the same little pub whither I went (v. last letter) on Easter Monday, we rode along the top of a long hill where you look down into a good, woody English valley with the Chilterns, rather sleek and chalky—like greyhounds—on the horizon. It was a grey day with clouds in muddled perspective all round. Just as the first drops of rain began to fall, we found a young man looking as if he were going to be hanged, crossing a field.

He turned out to be one Groves of Univ., who is now gone down and incarcerated at a High Church Theological Seminary in the neighbouring village of Cuddesdon.⁸³ ‘He would have liked to ask us in to tea, but couldn’t—indeed oughtn’t to be talking to us—because they were having a QUIET DAY.’ Ye gods: a lot of young men shut up together, all thinking about their souls! Isn’t it awful?

After this it was quite fresh and lively to investigate an old wind mill near Wheatley: it has the sort of atmosphere we felt at Doagh and a little copper place over the door with a figure of a bird on it. Under it was a word variously read by Jenkin and myself as County and Cointy. I do not know what this all was about. Jenkin keeps on picking up stones and telling you that it is iron here.

We rode over Shotover Hill: through sandy lanes with gorse on each side and passing occasional warm comfortable English barns and haystacks. Most attractive sign posts, ‘Bridle path to Horsley’—a bridle path always sounds mysterious. And dozens of rabbits and whole bunches of bluebells: and a view far off between the two slopes of Forest Hill and the little house where the first Mrs Milton used to live. About the time he wrote L’Allegro and Il Penseroso he would often be riding over here from his home to court her—God help her! . . .

TO HIS FATHER: from University College (after ‘Optimism’ had been awarded the Chancellor’s Prize for an English Essay)

29 [May 1921]

Thank you very much for your wire and the letter: I am very glad to have been able to send you good news. I had almost lost heart about the thing, it dragged on so long. Everyone has been very nice about it, particularly the Mugger who is delighted, and this ought to be of use to me later on.

Some of my congratulations indeed have made me feel rather ashamed, coming from people whom I have been used to class generically as ‘louts’. By louts I denote great beefy people unknown to me by name, men with too much money and athletic honour, who stand blocking up passages. If looks could kill I’m afraid they would often have been in danger as I shouldered my way through them. Now they have weighed in with polite remarks and gratified my vanity with the grand-paternal ‘No. Does HE know ME?’ I suppose the explanation is that in their view we have done so badly on the river that any success—even in so unimportant a field as letters—should be encouraged.

I have also had a letter from Blackwell offering to see me about publishing it, and have, as a formality, written to Heinemann’s. In any case I am not sure what to do about that: I shall certainly not spend any money (nor allow you to, tho’ I know you gladly would) on forcing it into print if publishers won’t take the risk. I have always thought that a bad thing to do. Perhaps publication in some periodical might provide a compromise: it would remind people that I exist and yet it would not give too permanent a form to any opinion or argument that I may outgrow later on. At worst, if any one would like it, it would mean a five pound note and enable you and everyone else to read it decently printed instead of in type. If all these plans fall through, or if they are likely to take a long time, I will get another copy done and send it to you. You must not expect too much: the trains of argument are rather dull and I am afraid this effect is not neutralized by anything more than adequacy in the form. No purple patches—hardly a faint blue. But I must drop the annoying habit of anticipating your judgement . . .

I have been reading the oddest book lately—Newman’s Loss and Gain.⁸⁴ I never knew that he had written a novel. As fiction or drama it is of course beneath contempt, but it has some real satirical humour. Do you know it? The picture of the then Oxford, with its ecclesiastical controversies etc., is something more remote from my experience whether real or imagined, than ancient Britain or modern Cathay.

I haven’t heard anything about the prize—I think it is in money—not very much—and there are some books from College. I too thought about Kirk. We are all old, disillusioned creatures now, and look back on the days of ‘buns and coffee’ through a long perspective and only seldom come out of our holes: the young men up from school in their immaculate clothes think we have come to clean the windows when they see us. It happens to everyone here. In your first year you drink your sherry and see people: after that your set narrows, you haunt the country lanes more than the High, and cease to play at being the undergraduate of fiction. 1919 seems further off than France at times . . .

TO HIS FATHER: from University College

27 [June 1921]

The event of last week was one of the unforseen consequences of my winning ‘Optimism’. I had almost forgotten, if I had ever known, that ‘prizemen’ have to read portions of their compositions at our ceremony of the Encaenia.⁸⁵ Being of the troglodytic nature I have never before exerted myself so far as to assist at this show: but having been now compelled, I am glad.

It is a most curious business. We unhappy performers attend (tho’ it is at noon) in caps, gowns, and FULL EVENING DRESS. It was held in the Sheldonian Theatre: I think Macaulay has a purple passage about ‘the painted roof of the Sheldonian’ under which Charles held his last parliament. During the long wait, while people trickled in, an organ (much too large for the building) gave a recital. The undergraduates and their guests sit round in the galleries: the ‘floor’ is occupied by the graduates en masse, standing at barriers in all their war paint. At noon the Vice Chancellor enters with his procession of ‘Heads of Colleges, Doctors, Proctors, and Noblemen’—a very strange show they make, half splendid and half grotesque, for few don’s faces are fit to bear up against the scarlet and blue and silver of their robes.

Then some ‘back chat’ in Latin from the Vice Chancellor’s throne and the Public Orator led in the persons who were to receive honorary degrees: with the exception of Clemenceau and Keyes (the Zeebruge man), they were not well known to the world at large. Keyes was a very honest looking fellow and Clemenceau the tough, burly ‘people’s man’ whom one expected: but what was beyond everything was the Canon of Notre Dame, a great theologian apparently, with some name like Raffitol.⁸⁶ Such a picture of a great priest with all the pale dignity that one had imagined, I never saw. If the words ‘love at first sight’ were not tied down to one kind of feeling only, I would almost use them to express the way this man attracted me. He would have appealed to you immensely.

After the honorary degrees, the Professor of Poetry made an ‘oration’ in Latin, chiefly about colleagues who had died during the last year: this was my first experience of spoken Latin and I was pleased to find that I could follow and enjoy it.

The performance of us prizemen was of course very small beer after all this. We had been instructed to read for about two minutes each: I had some difficulty in finding a short passage which would be intelligible by itself. I was, of course, nervous: I am also told that I was the first of our little band whom Clemenceau looked at: but as I do not know WITH WHAT EXPRESSION he looked, nor whether he speaks English, we must remain in doubt whether this was a compliment or not.

I have had a good lesson in modesty from thus seeing my fellow prize men. I was hardly prepared for such a collection of scrubby, beetle-like, bespectacled oddities: only one of them appeared to be a gentleman. Any I spoke to sounded very like fools, perhaps like Goldsmith, they ‘writ like an angel and talked like poor Poll’.⁸⁷ It brings home to one how very little I know of Oxford: I am apt to regard my own set, which consists mainly of literary gents, with a smattering of political, musical and philosophical—as being central, normal, and representative. But step out of it, into the athletes on one side or the pale pot hunters on the other, and it is a strange planet . . .

TO HIS BROTHER: from 28 Warneford Road, Oxford

1 July [1921]

I was delighted to get your letter this morning; for some reason it had been sent first to a non-existent address in Liverpool. I had deliberately written nothing to you since those two you mention: not that I was tired of the job, but because I did not feel disposed to go on posting into the void until I had some assurance that my effusions would reach you. That seemed a process too like prayer for my taste: as I once said to Baker—my mystical friend with the crowded poetry—the trouble about God is that he is like a person who never acknowledges one’s letters and so, in time, one comes to the conclusion either that he does not exist or that you have got the address wrong. I admitted that it was of great moment: but what was the use of going on despatching fervent messages—say to Edinburgh—if they all came back through the dead letter office: nay more, if you couldn’t even find Edinburgh on the map. His cryptic reply was that it would be almost worth going to Edinburgh to find out . . .

Here another term has blossomed and faded: that time moves has I believe been observed before. I have lived my usual life: a few lectures, until—as happens about half way through the term—I got tired of them all: work, meetings with friends, walks and rides, solitary or otherwise, and meetings of the Martlets. These birds by the by were all invited to dinner by the don Martlets a few weeks ago, and I again had the opportunity of peeping into the real Oxford: this time through the medium of a very excellent meal (‘with wine’ as Milton says with the air of a footnote) in cool, brown oaky rooms. I have been thinking of a formula for it all and decided on ‘Glenmachan turned male and intellectualized’ as fairly good.

The great event of MY term was of course ‘Optimism’. I must thank you for your congratulations before going on: THEY were provoked by the event, but the consequences of it will move your ribaldry. ‘Prizemen’, the Statues say, ‘will read at the Encaenia portions of their exercises (I like that word)—their exercises chosen by the Professor of Poetry and the Public Orator.’ Sounds dam’ fine, doesn’t it? But the Statues omit to mention the very cream of the whole situation—namely that the prizemen will appear in full evening dress. Fancy me entering the Sheldonian at 11.30 A.M. on a fine June morning in a cap, gown, boiled shirt, pumps, white tie and tails. Of course it was a ‘broiling’ day as the P’daytabird would say, and of course, for mere decency I had to wear an overcoat.

However, I managed to make myself audible, I am told, and beyond nearly falling as I entered the rostrum, I escaped with success. (They DO actually call it a rostrum, so that I was delighted: for the whole gallery of the Damerfesk seemed to gaze at me, and the jarring ghosts of Big, Polonius and Arabudda to lend me countenance.)⁸⁸ This was really the fault of one not unlike our Arabudda—old Ker the professor of poetry,⁸⁹ who, having earlier in the proceeding delivered his Latin oration, decided to remain sitting in the rostrum instead of going back to his own stall. This (in the language of Marie Stopes) ‘made entry difficult if not impossible’ for us prizemen: in my anxiety to avoid the burly professor, I stumbled over a raised step and nearly fell backwards. This must have appeared curiously enough to those who were on a level with, or higher than the rostrum: but the best effect of all was from the floor, from which, owing to the height of the front barrier and the big velvet cushion on it, I appeared simply to sink through a trap and rise again like a jack-in-the-box. However, I rallied my sang froid and bawled defiant remarks on the universe for two minutes. It is a good thing that the P’daytabird was not present or he would have been sorely put to it—especially if you had been beside him, giddy with laughter (You can imagine his asking me afterwards ‘Did you do it to annoy me?’).

I will send you a copy of my essay, since you ask for it, though I do not think it will be much in your line. Some of the insolent passages may amuse you: I hope you will like the way I dealt with the difficulty of ‘God or no God’. To admit that person’s existence would have upset my whole applecart: to deny it seemed inadvisable, on the off chance of there being a Christian among the examiners. I therefore adopted the more Kirkian alternative of proving—at any rate to my own satisfaction—that it ‘really made no difference whatsoever’ whether there was such a person or no. The second part of my essay you may use as a mild test whether you are ever likely to come to metaphysics or not. I look forward with some trepidation to discussing it at home: for his ‘reading of the thing’ will doubtless differ vastly from my writing of it⁹⁰ . . .

I had not meant, in my other letters, to bring any serious charge against the Oxfordshire country. Tried by European standards it takes a lowish rank: but I am not such a fool as to deprecate any decent country now, and rather wrote in deprecation for fear you’d fancy I was ‘writing up’ a place [in] which you would remember no particular beauties. Of landscapes, as of people, one becomes more tolerant after one’s twentieth year (which reminds me to congratulate you on your birthday and ask what age it makes you. The rate at which we both advance towards a responsible age is indecent). We learn to look at them not in the flat as pictures to be seen, but in depth as things to be burrowed into. It is not merely a question of lines and colours but of smells, sounds and tastes as well: I often wonder if professional artists don’t lose something of the real love of earth by seeing it in eye sensations exclusively?

From the house where we are now living there are few good walks, but several decent rides. Last Saturday we rode to Strandlake. In the heat of the day—we are having drought here too—it was an heroic undertaking. Don’t come down on me with any traveller’s tale about ‘what real heat is’: I know with my intellect that it is much hotter in Africa, but put any honest man on a treeless road, uphill, in an English summer, and he can’t really imagine anything is hotter.

We had to begin by climbing the ‘warm green muffled Cumnor hills’: a long pull, all on foot. You have a fine, but conventional view of Oxford as you look back: but we really enjoyed nothing until beyond Cumnor we sunk into the long grass by the side of the road under one of the deplorably rare trees and tackled our luncheon basket. A local pub supplied beer for me and lemonade for the children, and we had a basket of cherries.⁹¹ After this it became better and when after a long and pleasant decline through corkscrew lanes full of meadowsweet (that’s the white, dusty stuff with a nice smell, you know) we reached Bablocke Hythe, it was quite delightful. Beyond this the country is very flat, but tree-y: full of villages rather too ‘warm and muffled’: they make you feel like a bumble bee that has got into damp cotton wool.

Our objective was a cottage in Strandlake about the letting of which during the summer Mrs Moore was going to see. Here (tho’ our purpose failed) we were rewarded by meeting a wonderful old woman, the owner, Mrs Penfold, who talked of her husband as ‘Penfold’ without the Mr, just like a character in Jane Austen. This I am afraid you will hardly credit, but it is true all the same. Although flat and almost too blankety for a man to strike a match in, this country is much favoured of the Muse.

A few miles beyond us was Kelmscott, where Wm Morris lived and built that ‘red house’ whose brick nudity first defied the stucco traditions: from it, all the pretty villas of our day are directly descended. A little to our right at Stanton Harcourt (where Jenkins is always going to take me) is an old Manor with a tower room where Pope wrote his famous parody—which he called a translation—of the Iliad. And of course, as you know, every mile smells of Arnold. We were not far from ‘the Fyfield elm’: we had ‘crossed the stripling Thames’ and saw in the distance near Cumnor what I took for the ‘plot of forest ground called Thessaly’.

Oh by the way I have found the ideally bad edition of [Matthew Arnold’s] Thyrsis and the Scholar Gipsy. It was lying in Blackwells between grey boards with very black type: illustrated with photographs—one to almost every two stanzas. For ‘what sedged brooks are Thames’s tributaries’ you had a bed of rushes taken close, as you would for a plate in a natural history handbook, with a water rat in the middle: but best of all—there’s a line somewhere I can’t remember, about a ‘battered merchant-man coming into port’: for this we had two cutter racing yachts!! How are such things possible: and yet people will buy this and like it and be very proud of it. I am writing in our little strip of garden at five past ten and it is getting too dark to see: I will in and drink some of the eveningmilch . . .

The steps by which you became a Miltonian are very interesting. Can one quite have done by labelling him a republican and a puritan? Puritanism was after all (in some of its exponents) a very different thing from modern ‘dissent’. One cannot imagine Milton going about and asking people if they were saved: that intolerable pride is the direct opposite to sentimentalism. He really had the vices and virtues of the aristocracy—writing for ‘fit audience tho’ few’. He always seems to look down on the vulgar from an almost archducal height. ‘How charming is divine philosophy. Not harsh and crabbed as dull fools suppose.’ The dull fools are the ordinary mass of humanity, and though it has its ridiculous side, that deliberate decision of his, taken at my age ‘to leave something so written that posterity wd not willingly let it die’ takes a little doing. Paradise Regained I only read once: it is a bit too much for me. In it the Hebrew element finally gets the better of the classical and romantic ingredients. How can people be attracted to things Hebrew? However, old Kirk really summed up Milton when he said ‘I would venture to assert that no human being ever called him Johnnie’.

By the way, on a ride the other day I passed an inn which the landlord had seen fit to call ‘The Olde Air Balloon’. What a splendid name for the P’daytabird—who, by the way, is threatening to come here in a few days, thanks to the persistent endeavours of Uncle and Aunt Hamilton, backed, according to his account, by your advice. I wish you’d mind your own business, Master P. B. I have told him I’ve been moved out of College, so the business resolves itself into my presenting my abode here as ordinary digs—and keeping him out of them as much as may be. Luckily Pasley will be up for his viva and ‘a friend sharing with me and working very hard’ ought to be a sufficient deterrent. I think too, that if I walk the Old Air Balloon out here in the present insupportable heat, once will be enough for him.

The temperature is over 90 in the shade: even the water at Parson’s Pleasure has reached 71. Though still the only comfortable place (where I spend many a happy hour) this takes the real bite and shock out of a bathe. One great beauty at present is that they are mowing the meadows on the far side, and as you splash along with your nose just above the dark brown water, you swim into the smell of hay. But to expiate over the delights of an English river would be really unkind to you.

You will probably await my next with interest, in which you will hear of the success or failure of the paternal visit. What an anachronism he will be here . . .

[On 20 July 1921 Mr Lewis set off from Belfast with Augustus and Annie Hamilton on one of his very rare holidays. Travelling in the Hamiltons’ car, they traversed Wales and arrived in Oxford on 24 July.]

TO HIS BROTHER: from 28 Warneford Road

7 August [1921]

You heard in my last letter of the consternation into which our little household was thrown by the threatened and hardly precedented migration of the P’daytabird. I have so much history to record that I must bustle on from that point. By rights I should tell you of all the preparations that were made: how Pasley came up at a whistle, like the faithful comrade in arms he is, to be the man who was digging with me and to ‘lend artistic verisimilitude’: how the little back room was dressed up in the semblance of an undergraduate’s digs, where women never set foot. But the story would be too long. The gods spared me the need of this Palais Royal farce with its uneasy tendency to degenerate into something more like Grand Guignol.

It so worked out that the Irish party only stopt at Oxford for their midday eating and then took me with them for a week. My compulsory holiday took me through so much good country and supplied me with such a rare crop of P’daytisms that it gives me really too much epic matter to write about. I shall try to give you any information that may interest you as prospective pilot of the Dawdle through the same parts: but of course you must not take it for as accurate as Michelin.

The first and by far the funniest piece of scenery I saw was my first glimpse of the Old Air Balloon himself, outside the Clarendon in Cornmarket. You’ve no idea how odd he looked, almost a bit shrunk: pacing alone with that expression peculiar to him on a holiday—the eyebrows half way up his forehead. I was very warmly greeted by all; and with the exception of Aunt Annie, we took a short stroll before lunch. I was in a great flutter for fear of meeting some fool who might out with any irrelevance, but everything passed off well.

I learned that he found the heat intolerable, that he had not slept a wink since he left home, that he had a feather bed last night at Worcester—which Uncle Hamilton thought a great joke. He seemed dazed by his surroundings and showed no disposition to go and see my rooms, tho’ he observed that College had ‘treated me very shabbily as they distinctly mentioned free rooms as one of the privileges of scholars’—a statute by the by completely unknown at Oxford, however familiar at Leeborough. We lunched heavily at the Clarendon: I succeeded in getting some cold meats (suitable to a shade temperature of near 90) in spite of the frequently advanced proposition that it would be ‘better’ (how or why?) for us ‘all to have the table d’hôte’.

We addressed ourselves to the road as soon as the meal was over. Uncle Hamilton’s car is a 4-seater Wolsley: I have forgotten the horse power. It is pale grey and wears a light hood. Our direction was South and West, so we ran out over Folly Bridge and towards Berkshire, thro’ pleasant but tame wooded country. The weather was oppressively hot, even in an open car which our uncle keeps almost permanently over thirty-five miles an hour: when you dropped to twenty at a turn or a village a stifling heat leaps up round you at once. This first run was almost the only one where Excellency [Mr Lewis] sat behind me, and it was about half an hour south of Oxford that he made his first mot, and one of the best of his life, by asking ‘Are we IN CORNWALL YET?’ Honest Injun, he did!

I don’t know if you have a map with you: we drove by Nailsworth, Cirencester, Tetbury (I think) to Malmesbury (‘MAWMSbury, Gussie’ from the O.A.B.) where we hoped to lie. The people here have a very barbarous, uncivil custom of closing hotels, even to resident visitors, on a Sunday—this being Sunday. In this quandary various proposals were raised: the P’daytabird was in favour of going on to Bath and going to the largest hotel there—being reduced to a painful uneasiness when we told him that he could get supper, not dinner, of a Sunday evening in these small towns. Here and elsewhere through the tour Uncle H. displayed great skill in his family tactics of amusing all parties with a frivolous appearance of a discussion while he was preparing his own plans.

It ended by our pushing on to a place called Chippenham, which we made about five o’clock, and, liking the house where we had tea, we took rooms for the night. Aunt A. and I were sent to look at them, and the O.A.B., despite of all his pother of the feather bed overnight refused (of course) to look at them. ‘If they satisfy you, Annie, they’ll satisfy me.’ Chippenham is one of (I suppose) a thousand English towns that one has never heard of, but once having seen, remembers kindly. It is perhaps about the size of Wrexham, but as different as the south from the north. Here are quiet streets with nice old ivied houses, at a strange variety of levels, so that you can look into their gardens, with a little river running through them, and very fine trees. These streets widen occasionally into what are called squares, being, after the manner of English country towns, any other shape in Euclid rather than a square.

Our hotel was very comfortable and nearly empty. After dinner of course we ‘strolled’. I had some Leeburian talk with the O.A.B. and afterwards some, of another sort, with our uncle—about God: a monstrous unlikely subject under such conditions. He finds the proof of intelligible work, of a mind something like his own in the universe, because the universe does after all work: it is not all higgledy piggledy. The conversation was perhaps not worth saving, but he has great merits as a talker: he has many gaps in his thinking, but it is all absolutely his own—he never takes anything over. If he covers familiar ground he still uses maps of his own making.

I found him a wonderful antidote to the P’daytabird: the latter was made happily miserable by a Salvation Army band which played the Dead March from Saul up and down the streets—why I don’t know. When we got back to our hostel we sat for a time in the dark hall on a very comfortable sort of benching, and the O.A.B. offered us drinks.

Uncle H. wd have some beer and so would I. O.A.B. (in his ‘desperate’ voice): ‘I’ll have a bottle of soda water. Here! Waitress: two half pints of bitter beer and a bottle of soda water—(pause)—and if you’d just put a little Scotch whiskey in it.’ (The waitress goes and returns.) ‘Here you are Gussie. Is that my soda water?’ Waitress: ‘Yes sir—with the whiskey in it.’ O.A.B.: ‘Hm’h.’ (Roars of laughter from Uncle H.) This was truly in our best manner, wasn’t it?

The next morning I was early astir, after an excellent night and a bath, to buy some aspirin surreptitiously at the nearest chemist’s, having had a headache the night before: but I never used it again. What is pleasanter than a hotel breakfast in a strange town—porridge, crisp fried fish, and an ample plinth? I have never outgrown the child’s belief that food grows better with every mile further from our usual table (except tea, which I can never get good outside my Oxford residentiary).

On this second day I had a typed itinerary to keep me right: the Oxford journey, being unrehearsed, was not on it. In our seats at about ten. We drove through a hilly country, the weather being a little cooler, by Bath, Farrington Gurney and Chewton Mendip to Wells. The landscape has everything, tho’ on a small scale: rocks, hills, woods and water. Chiefly you run along the sides of winding valleys. The villages and their churches are very pleasant.

At Wells I distinguished myself in a way to make you laugh: (should I remind you that it is the Cathedral city of the diocese of Bath and Wells?) We were not quite certain of our whereabouts, and seeing a military looking old gentleman standing on the pavement, I lean out and shout ‘What’s this place, sir?’ M.O.G. (in a tone of thunder) ‘The City of Wells!’ A minute later an irreverent little boy jerked a finger at the M.O.G. and informed us ‘E’s the Mayor’.

The whole street seemed to be in laughter. As Uncle H. said, it must have been the word ‘place’ which stuck in his gorge: we should have asked ‘What great city are we now approaching?’ I profited however by this lesson, and after Uncle H. had given me an itinerary and a look at the maps he had I steered our course very satisfactorily. The P’daytabird only advanced so far as to get hold of the Michelin every day and look up hotels: usually he looked up some place he thought suitable to lie at: very often it was wrong—once or twice it was a place we had stopped at the night before.

We lunched at Wells after seeing the Cathedral. I do not know whether such things come into your horizon: I at any rate am no architect and not much more of an antiquarian. Strangely enough it was Uncle H. with his engineering more than the O.A.B. with his churchmanship that helped me to appreciate them: he taught me to look at the single endless line of the aisle, with every pillar showing at once the strain and the meeting of the strain (like a ships frame work inverted): it certainly is wonderfully satisfying to look at. The pleasure one gets is like that from rhyme—a need, and the answer of it following so quickly, that they make a single sensation. So now I understand the old law in architecture ‘No weight without a support, and no support without an adequate weight’. For the rest, Wells is particularly rich in a wilderness of cloisters all round the Cathedral where one can cut the cold and quiet with a knife. There is a fine castle with the only real drawbridge I ever saw, just across the Close.

We lunched pretty well in this city (I daren’t call it a town) and were on the road by two. Henceforward the P’daytabird nearly always took the front seat since this seemed to please him. We ran through Westbury, Cheddar (‘Are we in Cheshire, Gussie?’ asked the Balloon), Axbridge, Highbridge, Bridgewater etc., into Somerset. All this was country I knew (towards the end), having stayed twice in the village of Old Cleeve: for this reason I had been able to name Dunster to Uncle H. as a likely stopping place. I had at first been rather troubled lest my apparent knowledge of the place should lead to long and tedious questioning from the P’daytabird: but I found him advancing from his own resources that I had got to know it while stationed at Plymouth (‘They’re both in Devonshire aren’t they?’)—and did not pursue the subject.

Here it begins to be very beautiful. Through the village of Nether Stowey we climbed up through the Quantocks: they are a tremendous barrier of moor, with the most wonderful valleys, called ‘combes’, running up them. From the high ground we looked down into the last valley in Somerset—a little piece of ground that I love as well as any I have ever walked in. On your right is the Bristol Channel with the faint line of the Welsh coast beyond it. Ahead are the enormous hills of [the] Devonshire border, the beginnings of Exmoor, with Minehead just this side of them where they go down to the water. On the left are the lower moors, known as the Black Hills, and all between the pleasantest green country with no end of red iron streams, orchards, thatched villages and buried lanes that wind up the hills in leafy cuttings.

I pointed the Welsh coast out to the O.A.B. He replied, ‘Ah, the thing’s got twisted. It ought to be round to our left.’ How I should like to draw a P’daytamap of England! It was a curious sensation for me to scoot down the Quantocks into Williton and on through Washford, passing at forty miles an hour through country that I had often walked.

We made Dunster at about 4 o’clock, and had our first engine trouble just as we drew up at the Luttrell Arms: my ignorance reduces me to saying that it ‘was the gear jammed somehow’. Later on you may be able to gather what was really the matter. Uncle H. treated the business with admirable sang froid: his faculty of never being ruffled is a great virtue in a companion, and if life was confined to this kind of intercourse I really think it would cover all his other sins. The O.A.B. insisted on standing by with an expression like a pirate flag, making irritating suggestions: I made one or two attempts to remove him, in sympathy with our uncle, but of course they were unsuccessful. Later on he discussed the situation with me in private. I remarked that Uncle Gussie took it very well. O.A.B.: ‘Ah Jacks, you don’t know the fellow as I do. Making a mess of things like this just hits him on his sore point: he’s as vain as a peacock. He’s just fuming under the surface. That’s why I waited: just to smooth things over.’ Why by the way is any misfortune that happens to anyone but himself always described in P’daytesque as the sufferer’s ‘having made a mess of something’? It was finally arranged to have the car towed into Minehead, about two miles further on, where there is a well appointed garage: Uncle Hamilton was afraid that he would have to get a new part from Birmingham: the P’daytabird was strongly in favour of taking a ‘day of rest tomorrow’.

For the present, however, we could do nothing but wait: and it was fortunately in the most delightful place. One of the many mountain valleys that I mentioned before ends in a small wooded hill attached to the main mountain by a sort of isthmus. The little hill is crowned by Dunster Castle: the village of Dunster winds up the isthmus, consisting chiefly of a very broad lazy street with old houses. The Luttrell Arms itself is a sixteenth-century building with embrasures for musketry fire on either side of the porch. Just opposite its door is a curious octagonal erection with a tiled roof, used I suppose for market purposes in wet weather. It was ‘pierced by a ball’ from the Castle during the Civil Wars. I remarked that this gave one a visible specimen of the trajectory of the old cannon: to which Uncle Hamilton very shrewdly replied that unless one knew whether it was aimed at the thing or not, it told one nothing.

I am afraid that from my description this may sound a typical guide book village: as a matter of fact there is nothing really curious enough in it to attract the tourist, and it is more completely tucked away than anywhere. Wherever you look, through every V left by two meeting gables, you see the hills, so close that they seem to go straight up and the rare paths in the heather look perpendicular: it gives one a great sense of snugness. Only from the little garden at the back of the hotel do you get an unexpected view across to the cliffs by Watchet and the Bristol Channel. Nobody talks loud, nobody walks fast, rooms are deep and shady, chairs have their backs well broken so that you can’t sit down without an ‘Ah!’, hotels are never crowded at Dunster. It has a personality as definite as, though antithetical to, Doagh. It has changed hands only once; from the De Mohuns to the Luttrells in almost mediaeval times. It’s off the main road: nobody goes there: when I saw the car towed off to Minehead I had a notion that nobody ever leaves it either. Oh what a place for a soak—but not for a ‘day of rest’ with the P’daytabird.

After an excellent dinner we strolled: Aunt Annie and I both climbed the nearest ridge—a very stiff scramble—and left the uncles behind, being rewarded with a fine view over Exmoor and the Channel: then, after the evening beer in the little garden, to bed.

Next morning was very warm again: the male section of the party—one of them most unwillingly, to wit myself—walked to Minehead to see if the car was done: the mechanic thought it would be quite alright. We drove it back and decided to take the road after lunch. The P’daytabird was now quite in love with Dunster (which he called ‘Dernster’, ‘Deemster’ and other weird names) and was still talking of a day of rest. I noticed that he was usually in love with somewhere we had left: after anything good he could hardly be brought to admit merits anywhere else, and when he was, the whole process began over again. Thus for the first days, if you ventured to praise anything, you were told it was not to be compared with the Welsh mountains: after that it was Dunster that blotted every other halt: then Land’s End: when I left him he had settled down to the view that ‘none of these places come up to’ Salisbury.

But to proceed, we ran very comfortably through Minehead and immediately began to climb, tho’ still on tolerable surfaces. We passed one barrier and saw the first real Exmoor ahead—tremendous mountains and awful gradients: but we weren’t there yet and dropped into Porlock, a very pleasant town at the bottom of the moors. All though Devon and Cornwall a valley and a town are synonymous: ‘they all live in holes’ as Uncle Gussie said. At Porlock we had [a] choice of two roads: one the ‘old’ road and the other a private venture which the local lord of the soil supports by a shilling toll.

We paid our toll and Uncle G. was just changing gear in preparation for the next appalling hill when it stuck again. Telephoned back to Minehead for the same mechanic. More buttoning up of coats and stiffening of upper lips as per previous night. Aunt Annie and I went and looked at the Church—we found it cooler both psychologically and physically—for the sun was terrific (none of your traveller’s advice here!). Apparently there is a bar that fits into a hollow cylinder where the gear works: and the Wolseley people ‘have a catch of’ making everything a perfect fit: which means that everything is just a little too tight when the metal gets hot. The bar was reduced by sand paper when the relief car came, and we had no more trouble with it. We were held up there for some three-quarters of an hour, greatly to the annoyance of the other traffic: and the heat as we stood still made us very glad to be in motion again.

Our objective was now Lynmouth, a very short run which would be occupied entirely in climbing up and down over the next shoulder of Exmoor into the next hole. Let me here solemnly warn you against ever attempting this ride on the Dawdle. The toll road is generally detestable in surface and hardly anywhere—after the first hundred yards—broad enough for two cars to pass: it ascends at a gradient which is habitually worse than Broadway hill and which seems all but impossible, especially at the inner corners of the twenty odd hairpin bends by which it reaches the top. The humourist who owns it has also left it without any kind of barrier at the outside, and everywhere the banking is all wrong.

I must confess that mountain scenery is often seen most impressively when I for one wd be least ready to enjoy it. To look back as you attack an almost perpendicular corner, down an enormous cliff: to see other hills piled up on the far side of the gorge and, in their unusual perspective from such a position, giving the whole scene a gauchmaresque appearance: to look forward at the same moment and see the road getting even worse ahead to the next bend: to remember that the cheery man from the garage told us that a car backed over into the sea further along this road a few days ago: to wonder what exactly you’d do if one of those char-a-banc came down—on my life I had the wind up.

We did reach the top somehow, where nature played another practical joke by plunging us into a cold winter’s day with a misting rain. It was fine here all the same: an enormous stretch of moor all round you, and a car going all out over a single road, which was not straight if it was rough. It reminded me of the opening chapter of Meriman’s Sowers. The descent from this into the next hole was even worse than the ascent. You just wind down the cliff edge on a road about seven ft wide, which touches, at times, the pleasant gradient of 1/41/2. That’s not my own conjecture, it’s from some guide book of Uncle H. The view over the sea below you wd be very fine—on foot.

We were exceedingly glad to drop into Lynmouth, a little town wedged into this next wooded gorge round the edge of a broad, brown, stony river: the heights all round are perhaps too beetling, and to live there permanently would be like living at the bottom of a well. Our hotel had a veranda above the river, where we sat very pleasantly after the four o’clock and watched a water rat manoeuvering from stone to stone.

I had to share a room with Excellency here, and I am not likely to forget the fact that it was the scene of a typical episode. We all walked out after dinner and up the road which we were to follow next day. Uncle Hamilton and I outstripped the others. It was a fine evening, delightfully cool and dewy. The road was good: it wound up the sides of big gorges that kept opening out of one and other into mysterious and chaotic landscape—‘forest on forest piled’. Looking back you saw the sea in the V shaped opening between the hills. Whenever you were still the sound of that stream under the trees many feet below and the EEE-eee of bats worked a kind of counterpoint on the general theme of silence. We walked faster: we talked most entertainingly. Finally we reached the top where these valleys, getting shallower and shallower, at last come out on the surface of the moor. We sat under a haystack enjoying the smell and the air of a good starless, moonless English country night.

We arrived back at the Hotel about eleven, and, incredible to relate, our Uncle gave me a drink. But when I reached my room, ’twas to be greeted by the O.A.B. in shirt and ‘drawers’ with the apostrophe ‘Jacks, why did you do it?’ How much real nervousness, how much pique and desire for drama went, and in what proportions, to making up a scene at once ridiculous and unpleasant, I cannot say. But the sound of the stream under our window drowned the puffings and blowings of the O.A.B. In fairness I should record how earlier that day, P’daytism had blossomed into something like grandeur: which it reaches at times, because of rather than in spite of its absurdity. After arriving there had been some discussion as to which hotel we should lie in. Aunt Annie suggested that the one we finally chose was rather too big. O.A.B.: ‘IT’S NO BIGGER THAN WE ARE.’ If only he had the right, no one could quarrel with his power to assume the grand manner.

I find that I have very few distinct images left of the next day’s run, but I know that it was wild and beautiful. From this [point] onwards all the roads are bad. We ate Mittagessen [lunch] at Clovelly. It carried the West Country tradition of living in holes to its logical conclusion, consisting simply of a stairway some 250 yards long with whitewashed houses on each side, ending in a cove and a jetty. The local tramway consists of a dozen well cared for donkeys on which lazy people travel up and down: goods are carried or trailed in a kind of wooden sledge. The bump bump from step to step is one of the most characteristic sounds of the place. Commercial enterprise has made the place convenient as a halt, for there are several eating places varying from the trimly modest and artificially rural where you can get galantines, salad and wines, to the frankly ‘vulgar, easy, and therefore disgusting’ where you can get—I suppose—mutton pies and brandy balls.

The O.A.B. strongly disapproved of going down to the cove before lunch, or indeed afterward over that infinite staircase: and it certainly was a very slippery and tedious journey of which you could say in Miltonic phrase

      ‘Each stair mysteriously was meant, nor stood

      There always’—where one’s foot expected it.

Arrived at the beach, he sternly refused the unanimous advice of his companions to facilitate his ascent by mounting one of the donkeys. Doubtless because he thought it unbecoming to his dignity: we continued to press him, for precisely the same reason: but he would not. After a hearty lunch, we proceeded.

This day we passed into Cornwall. I have always imagined Cornwall a place of rocky heights and gulfs. At first I was very disappointed: for, to be candid, it is so like county Down or parts of Antrim that it felt uncanny. The same absence of bright colours, the same cottages, the same sloping, somewhat bare hills, grey rather than green. The only thing that disturbs the illusion is the continual engine houses of the tin and copper mines . . . some in use and more half decayed. I can hardly remember a landscape which had not a dozen of these silhouetted on the horizon: they rather increase the general celtic dreariness and ‘oddness’ (you know what I mean) which bring it so close at times to our own country—a thing by the by far more insidious than the sensuous idleness of richer scenery. Are any ‘flower coloured fingers’ of the tropics half so numbing as the tepid morsels of putty that such places ‘put down into your brain’?

The hills never rise into mountains, but are heaped together like eggs as far as the eye can reach, and the road winds on and on between them. The gates are coming off their hinges: the loose stones that divide the fields are all getting scattered. ‘They’ll do rightly—ach, never bother your head.’ Then every little while you drop on one of the mining settlements: a valley probably, not unlike the back areas in France, splashed with great dirty pools and ringed round with enormous conical piles of shingle: and narrow gauge railways threading in and out like fussing insects among the debris. Why does a metal mine have such a glamour and a coal mine not?

The show parts of Cornwall—the parts one has read about—are all on the coast. We lay this night at Tintagel, storied name. There is a generally diffused belief that this place is connected with King Arthur: so far as I know from Malory, Layamon and Geoffrey of Monmouth, it is not: it is really the seat of King Mark and the Tristram story. This has not however deterred some wretch, hated by the muse, from erecting an enormous hotel on the very edge of the cliff, built in toy Gothic, and calling it the King Arthur’s Hotel. The interior walls are made of cement with lines stamped on them to represent stone. They are profusely illustrated with toy armour from Birmingham: a Highland target, suitable for Macbeth, jostles a reproduction of late Tudor steel plate and is lucky to escape a Cromwellian helmet for its next door neighbour. In the centre of the lounge, with the Sketch and Tatler lying on it, is—of course—THE Round Table. Ye Gods!! Even the names of the Knights are written on it. Then there are antique chairs—on which very naturally we find the monogram K. A. stamped.

I have not yet exhausted the horrors of the place: I was glad to see a book case in the lounge. All the books were uniformly bound, and I was surprised to see such unlikely titbits as the Ethics of Aristotle and the works of the Persian epic poet Firdausi. I solved the mystery by finding out that they were a uniform series of Lubbock’s Hundred Best Books!!! How I abominate such culture for the many, such tastes ready made, such standardization of the brain. To substitute for the infinite wandering of the true reader thro’ the byways of the country he discovers, a char-a-banc tour. This whole place infuriated me.

But the coast was wonderful: very like the Antrim coast only better: foreland after foreland stretching away on each side, and just in front of us, joined by a narrow ridge of rock and grass the huge Tintagel rock. There is a little sandy bay between it and the mainland. There are some remains of fortification on it, but not very old: nature has however so marked it for a stronghold that I could imagine its having been a fort almost immemorially.

In the evening I extracted honey even from the hundred best books by reading an excellent play of Molière’s. I cannot remember the title but it is the one from which the famous phrase ‘Tu l’as voulu, Georges Dandin’ comes. Do you know him at all? We left Tintagel after breakfast. By the way it is of course pronounced Tingtagj-le: which was a sufficient reason for the P’daytabird’s insisting on calling it TIntagEL, with a hard G. I find (like Bozzy) that ‘I have preserved no record of the O.A.B.’s conversation during this period’.

We passed through a perfectly abominable town, Redruth. It was about here that a stinging rain, that might equally be described as a fast moving fog, attacked us. At Penzance we put up our side screens and excluded the view but nothing would deter Uncle Hamilton from going on to Land’s End: I indeed thoroughly agreed, but I was his only supporter. Of the last bit of England I saw nothing. Hot clothes began to steam under the screen and hood: outside there was only a genuinely celtic greyness: the road winds abominably and has no surface. My chief recollection is of Aunt Annie shouting ‘Gus, don’t run into that post!’ We began to pass several hotels, nearly every one of which announced that it was the ‘last hotel in England’. Some of them looked as if this was perfectly true. Our Uncle scorned them all and drove ahead till we reached the real end of the world where the road stops on a cliff outside the really last hotel.

It was pouring with rain and blowing a terrific gale. It is a place well worth seeing. The cliffs go down sheer, and one is so to speak in a salient. The same driving mist continued all the time we were there, clearing up for ten minute intervals with extraordinary suddenness every now and then. When this happens the blue suddenly leaps out of the grey and you see the clouds packing all along the cliff for miles, while a light house or some rocks about three and a half miles out turns up from nowhere. Indeed the appearance and disappearance of this place is what I most remembered. It has almost the regular phases of a revolving light: first the blank mist—then the outlines rather ghostly in it—then golden—then quite clear with hard outlines and waves breaking on it—then blurred again and so back into the fog. Watching it from behind the thick plate windows of the very snug hotel, I found there was something curiously soporific about it—this most ‘debatable land’ that comes and goes, as if it winked at you with confiding solemnity. Whenever the rain thinned we went out and climbed as near the cliffs as was safe and watched the enormous breakers.

We had—A big lacuna occurs here: some pages of journeying have been lost and you will perhaps be relieved to hear that I do not propose to rewrite them. Dartmoor and New Forest must remain unsung. Three more vignettes I give and then I will leave the tour.

The first is simply to record our monster run in one day from Lyndhurst in the New Forest, thro’ Camberley, Maidenhead and Oxford to Warwick, including our only headlight voyage.

The second is a good P’daytism—or shall I report as Minister of Experimental Philology a new word for an old thing—shall a P’daytism be a Balloon play or Ballonenspeil?—which occurred at Warwick. Uncle Hamilton could get no cover for the car which had to spend the night—a threatening night, in an open yard. When I lamented this fact, the O.A.B. replied ‘Ah well, the holiday’s nearly over now’. This remark contains so many distinct trains of thought and pure P’dayta ethics that you may spend a wet afternoon in disentagling them.

My third—as the Acrostics say—is connected with a certain Cathedral city in the North Midlands where I found the masterpiece of comic or satiric statuary. It represents a little eighteenth-century gentleman with a toy sword. I cannot explain how cunningly a kind of simpering modesty is combined with a certain profound vanity in this figure. Perhaps the eyes looking down the nose and the smug smile have something to do with it—perhaps it is the stomach thrust forward or the conventionally statuesque pose of the feet, as if to support a figure of heroic proportions, and then at once belied by the stiff little doll to which they really belong. Or, on second thoughts, perhaps it owes something to the colossal figure on the other pedestal, older and less ingenious work, obviously meant to be the centre and obviously made into the fool of the piece by its compulsory second. At any rate the effect is too funny for laughter: real genius went to make it. Need I add that the town was Lichfield and that the statue bore the mystic name—BOSWELL.

From Lichfield I returned to Oxford by train: I am going home in a few days, but you had better send your next as usual to Univ. I was delighted with your letter and have much to say in answer which must at present wait. I liked particularly your description of the rains—I can see that. Just one word about Paradise Regained—surely the real reason for the shrinkage of Satan is the very proper one that since the great days of P. Lost, he has spent sixty centuries in the Miltonic Hell? It comes out in his great speech beginning ‘’Tis true—I am that spirit unfortunate.’ . . .

TO HIS FATHER: from University College

31 August 1921

As you say, the change from society for which ‘lively’ would at times have been too mild an epithet, and from the constant variety of our moving seats to the routine of ordinary work, is one that we are rather acutely conscious of at first.

I still feel that the value of such a holiday is still to come—in the images and ideas which we have put down to mature in the cellarage of our brains, thence to come up with a continually improving bouquet. Already the hills are getting higher, the grass greener, and the sea bluer than they really were: and, thanks to the deceptive working of happy memory, our poorest stopping places will become haunts of impossible pleasure and Epicurean repast.

As to myself, I do not propose, as you may be sure, to spend the whole vac. here. I will do what I can: but I must ‘sit to my book’ for a little while yet. The fault of our course here is that we get so little guidance and can never be sure that our efforts are directed exactly to the right points and in the right proportions. I suppose that is part of the education—part at any rate of the game.

I expect you have heard from Warnie before this. I had a letter since my return, the first for a considerable time. I am sorry to hear that he has had a bad attack of boils, followed by prickly heat: but he seems better now and is in excellent spirits and reading Dante. The revolutions which Africa has produced in his literary policy are really amazing.

I am still working whenever I have half an hour to spare, at my account for him of our journey. It would be amusing and will no doubt be amusing for him to compare the two versions. We shall differ in selection and (so confused does one get) even on matters of fact, where a map will often show both authorities equally wrong. Uncle Hamilton on the other hand would be able to give exact information about every stage and distance—but totally incapable of describing anything at all . . . ⁹²

TO HIS FATHER: from the Oxford Union Society

Postmark: 30 November 1921

I am afraid that my weakness in yielding to the Colonel’s request for a copy of ‘Optimism’ had reduced the poor man to permanent silence. I must try to get some sort of letter off to him before Christmas.⁹³ . . .

A dread portent has arisen above our horizon here—an immortalist, nihilist, determinist, fatalist. What are you to do with a man who denies absolutely everything? The joke is that he’s an army officer on a course. He talks you blind and deaf. The more I see of him the clearer does my mental picture become of his brother officers en masse imploring him to take advantage of a two years course at Oxford—or Cathay or the Moon . . .

FROM HIS DIARY: while still living at 28 Warneford Road

1 April 1922

I walked to Iffley in the morning and called in at the Askins [Dr and Mrs John Hawkins Askins]. The doc. has foolishly knocked himself up by walking too far and cd not come to Headington in the afternoon. He talked about Atlantis, on which there is apparently a plentiful philosophical literature: nobody seems to realize that a Platonic myth is fiction, not legend, and therefore no base for speculation . . .

2 April 1922

A beautiful spring day. D.⁹⁴ busy cutting oranges for marmalade. I sat in my own bedroom by an open window in bright sunshine and started a poem on Dymer in rhyme royal . . .

5 April 1922

I . . . got the two poems (typed v. accurately for 1/-) and saw Stead in order to get the address of the London Mercury. He told me with a solemn face and admirable naïvety how he had got his accepted. Two or three were sent back by return post, whereupon he went up to London and called on the Editor, saying, ‘Look here Mr Squire, you haven’t taken these poems of mine and I want to know what’s wrong with them!!’ If the story ended there, it would be merely a side light on Stead, but the joke is that Squire said, ‘I’m glad you’ve come to talk it over: that’s just what I want people to do’ and actually accepted what he’d formerly refused. Truly the ways of editors are past finding out! . . .

7 April 1922

I wish life and death were not the only alternatives, for I don’t like either: one could imagine a via media . . .

15 April 1922

Tried to work at Dymer and covered some paper: but I am very dispirited about my work at present—especially as I find it impossible to invent a new opening for the Wild Hunt. The old one is full of clichés and will never do. I have learned much too much on the idea of being able to write poetry and if this is a frost I shall be rather stranded . . . A dissatisfying day, but, praise God, no more headaches . . .

18 April 1922

In the afternoon I walked into Oxford and looked up Civil Service examination papers in the Union. ‘Greats’ is child’s play compared with them . . . Before supper I called and saw Arthur Stevenson and his mother, hoping to hear something of the Civil Service. He tells me there is no vacancy this year in the Home Civil, and that probably there will be none next . . . Thus ends the dream of a Civil Service career as suddenly as it began: I feel at once that I have been in alien territory—not mine, and deep down, impossible . . .

21 April 1922

Got up shortly before seven, cleaned the grate, lit the fire, made tea, ‘did’ the drawing room, made toast, bathed, shaved, breakfasted, washed up, put the new piece of ham on to boil, and was out by half past ten . . . Washed up after lunch. Worked at Gk History notes until tea when Miss Baker came. Had got settled to work when D called me down ‘for five minutes’ to talk about Maureen’s programme for next term. This would not have mattered, but before I could make my escape, Miss Baker began to be ‘just going’ and continued so. When she finally got away it was time to get supper and to clear the tea things which Maureen had kindly left in statu quo. A good hour thus wasted altogether . . .

3 May 1922

Went into town after lunch, and after looking in vain for Jenkin in Merton St., met him in the High. It had now cleared and we walked down St Aldate’s and over the waterworks to Hincksey. I talked of staying up for another year and lamented that all my friends would be down: he said he had not got to know any new people who had any interest in literature and who were not, at the same time, dam’d affected dilettanti talking l’art pour l’art etc., etc., was almost impossible—in fact he put Baker, Barfield⁹⁵ and me as the only exceptions in his own circle: and even the ‘hearty’ men were preferable to the usual literary sort . . .

TO HIS FATHER: from University College

18 May 1922

And now I want to talk about my plans. You will remember a talk we had when I was last at home. On that occasion I repeated to you a conversation which had taken place some time before between one of my tutors and myself. I had asked him for a testimonial, preparatory to giving my name to the employment agency. Instead of giving me one he advised me very earnestly not to take any job in a hurry: he said that if there was nothing for me in Oxford immediately after Greats, he was sure that there would be something later: that College would almost certainly continue my scholarship for another year if I chose to stay up and take another school, and that ‘if I could possibly afford it’ this was the course which he would like me to take. He ended with some complimentary remarks.

I was not particularly keen at the time about doing so: partly on your account, partly because I did not care to survive most of my contemporaries. At this time there seemed to be one or two things in view—a vacant fellowship at Lincoln, another at Magdalen. Soon however it ‘transpired’ (I know you love the word) that one of these was to lapse and the other be filled from its own college without open election. I thought of the Civil Service: but as my tutor says, ‘There is no Civil Service now’. Thanks to the Geddes axe there are no vacancies in the Home Civil this year, and there probably will be none next.

The advice of my first tutor was repeated by my other one: and with new points. The actual subjects of my own Greats school are a doubtful quantity at the moment: for no one quite knows what place classics and philosophy will hold in the educational world in a years time. On the other hand the prestige of the Greats School is still enormous: so that what is wanted everywhere is a man who combines the general qualification which Greats is supposed to give, with the special qualifications of any other subjects. And English Literature is a ‘rising’ subject. Thus if I cd take a First or even a Second in Greats, and a First next year in English Literature, I should be in a very strong position indeed: and during the extra year I might reasonably hope to strengthen it further by adding some other University prize to my ‘Optimism’.

‘While I yet pondered’ came the news of a substantial alteration in the English Schools. That course had formerly included a great deal of philology and linguistic history and theory: these are now being thrown over and formed into a separate school, while what remains is simply literature in the ordinary sense—with the exception of learning to read a very few selected passages of Anglo-Saxon, which anyone can do in a month. In such a course, I should start knowing more of the subject than some do at the end: it ought to be a very easy proposition compared with Greats. All these considerations have tended to confirm what my tutor advised in the first place.

You may probably feel that a subject of this sort ought to be left for discussion by word of mouth: but, while I do not want to hurry you, my decision must be taken in the near future, as, if I stay up, I must apply to College for permission to do so and for the continuation of my scholarship; if not, I must beat up the agency at once. And after all, I do not know what discussion can do beyond repeating the same points over again. The facts—I hope my account is intelligible—naturally suggest all the pros and cons. I ought, in fairness, to say that I am pretty certain I can get a job of some sort as I am: but if it comes to schoolmastering, my inability to play games will count against me. Above all, I hope it is clear that in no case will Greats be wasted.

The point on which I naturally like to lean is that the pundits at Univ. apparently don’t want me to leave Oxford. That is rather a loathsome remark for any man to make about himself—but no one overhears us, and it really is relevant. Now if, on all this, you feel that the scheme is rather a tall order and that my education has already taken long enough, you must frankly tell me so, and I shall quite appreciate your position. If you think that the chance thus offered can and ought to be taken, I shall be grateful if you will let me know as soon as may be . . .

FROM HIS DIARY: at 28 Warneford Road

19 May 1922

After tea I bussed back to College and called on the Mugger. He had just had a letter from ‘Mr Wyllie’ asking him to recommend some one for a studentship tenable for one year in Cornell University [New York State]. He said I was the only person he would care to offer: but as the money, tho’ adequate for the year out there, did not include the travelling expenses, it was hardly to be considered. We then talked of my plans. He said the days were past when one could walk out of the schools into a Fellowship: even in minor universities there was a demand for men who had done something . . . He advised me however to take the extra year. He said that College was very hard up, but that he thought that they could manage to continue my scholarship. I asked him whether if I ‘came a cropper in Greats’ he would still advise the extra year, and he said he would . . . A dear old man, but the inexhaustible loquacity of educated age drove me to the City and University to recoup on a Guinness . . .

[On 22 May Jack received a wire from Mr Lewis saying: ‘Letter of 18 just received. Stay on. Father.’]

FROM HIS DIARY: at 28 Warneford Road

24 May 1922

Bussed into Oxford, meeting Barfield outside the Old Oak. After finding a table we decided to go to the Good Luck instead. An excellent lunch . . . From there we walked to Wadham gardens and sat under the trees. We began with Christina dreams: I condemned them—the love dream made a man incapable of real love, the hero dream made him a coward. He took the opposite view and a stubborn argument followed. We then turned to Dymer which he had brought back: to my surprise, his verdict was even more favourable than Baker’s. He said it was ‘by streets’ the best thing I had done, and ‘Could I keep it up?’ He did not feel the weakness of the lighter stanzas. He said Harwood had ‘danced with joy’ over it and had advised me to drop everything else and go on with it.⁹⁶ From such a severe critic as Barfield the result was very encouraging. We then drifted into a long talk about ultimates. Like me, he has no belief in immortality etc., and always feels the materialistic pessimism at his elbow . . .

27 May 1922

I called on [G. H.] Stevenson and asked him to let me know of any tutorial work for the vac., which he might hear of. I then called on [A. B.] Poynton and made the same request of him. He also promised to give my name to the Manchester Guardian for some reviewing. In the course of the morning I met Blunt who said he was sure he could get me a school boy to coach from Lynhams’s⁹⁷ . . . I also visited Williams, who is the local agent for Trueman & Knightley: he gave me a form and said that by narrowing the field to Oxford I reduced my chances, but that if there was anything my qualifications would get it. He advised me also to put an advertisement in the Oxford Times . . .

[Jack took his examination for Greats 8–14 June.]

TO HIS FATHER: from University College

[21 June 1922]

I have waited for some days to try and get a birds eye view from a distance before telling you anything—only to find how difficult it is to form or keep any opinion of what I’ve done. With the history papers where I can look up facts and see how near or far I was, it is easier: and on these I think I have done pretty fairly—in one case, very much better than I expected. But my long suit is the philosophy and here it is like trying to criticise an essay you wrote a week ago and have never seen again, nor ever read over. Sometimes I feel I have done badly, sometimes that I have done brilliantly. Last night however, I got a little light from my tutor who repeated the following conversation he had had with one of the examiners. ‘One of your young men seems to think that Plato is always wrong’—‘Oh! Is it Simpson?’ ‘No.’ ‘Blunt? Hastings?’ ‘No, a man called Lewis: seems an able fellow anyway.’

On the whole I may sum up: I don’t at all know whether I have got a first or not, but at least I know that there was nothing in the nature of a débacle. Of course the viva is still ahead, and there the family ability to bluff on paper will be no use . . . Luckily we had a spell of cool weather for the exam, which for six hours writing a day for six days is a great blessing . . .

FROM HIS DIARY: at 28 Warneford Road (after being interviewed for a Classical Lectureship at University College in Reading)

24 June 1922

Breakfasted before 8 and cycled to the station to catch the 9.10 to Reading: I read the Antigone during the journey. Arriving at Reading I found my way to University College and left my bike at the Lodge. I saw a great many undergraduates of both sexes walking about: a nice looking lot. I then strolled until 11 o’clock when I was taken to the Principal’s rooms. Childs, de Burgh and Dodds were present.⁹⁸ All were very nice to me, but Childs very firmly ruled out my idea of living anywhere else than at Reading . . . [Dodds] then showed me round the college which is pleasant and unpretentious, and left me in the Senior Common room, to wait for lunch . . .

I left the College at 2 and cycled to Bradfield [to see Sophocles’ ‘Antigone’ performed in Greek at Bradfield College] . . . [The theatre] is perfectly Greek—simple stone steps to sit on and incense burning on the altar of Dionysus in the orchestra. Unfortunately the weather was perfectly English . . . most of the actors were inaudible and as the rain increased (beating on the trees) it completely drowned them . . . The audience were spectacle enough: rows of unhappy people listening to inaudible words in an unknown language and sitting bunched up on stone steps under a steady downpour . . . I then noticed that Jenkin was standing on the last tier where the amphitheatre merged into the hillside—a steep bank of ivy overhanging the stone work. Crept up to join him—‘Oh, think of a cup of steaming hot tea’ said he. We exchanged a pregnant glance: then I led the way and in a trice we had plunged into the bushes, plugged our way on all fours up the ivy bank, and dropped into a lane beyond. Never shall I forget J. shaking streams off his hat and repeating over and over again, ‘Oh, it was a tragedy’. We then repaired to a marquee and had tea . . .

30 June 1922

After lunch I packed up my things for the night and biked into Oxford: failing to see Poynton in College I went on to Beckley through wind and rain. I was warmly welcomed by Barfield and Harwood . . . We got into conversation on fancy and imagination: Barfield cd not be made to allow any essential difference between Christina dreams and the material of art. In the end we had to come to the conclusion that there is nothing in common between different people’s ways of working, and, as Kipling says, ‘every single one of them is right’.

At supper I drank Cowslip Wine for the first time in my life. It is a real wine, green in colour, bittersweet, as warming as good sherry, but heavy in its results and a trifle rough on the throat—not a bad drink however.

After supper we went out for a walk, into the woods on the edge of Otmoor. Their black and white cat, Pierrot, accompanied us like a dog all the way. Barfield danced round it in a field—with sublime lack of self-consciousness and wonderful vigour—for our amusement and that of three horses. There was a chilling wind but it was quite warm in the wood. To wander here as it got dark, to watch the cat poising after imaginary rabbits and to hear the wind in the trees—in such company—had a strange de la Mare-ish effect. On the way back we started a burlesque poem in terza rima composing a line each in turn: we continued it later, with paper, by candle light. It was very good nonsense. We entitled it the ‘Button Moulder’s story’ and went to bed.

2 July 1922

In the evening D and I discussed our plans. It was hard to decide yes or no about the Reading job and D was so anxious not to influence me that I cd not be quite sure what her wishes were—I am equally in the dark as to what my own real wishes are . . .

TO HIS FATHER: from University College

20 July [1922]

I am now close to my viva and of course on that subject I have nothing new to tell you. The details of the examination for the Magdalen Fellowship have however been published at last. The subjects are, as was expected, identical with those of Greats: but it is also notified that candidates may send in a dissertation on any relevant subject in addition to competing on the papers. I felt at once that this gave me a great pull. To choose your topic at your ease, to stake out your own line and display a modicum of originality—these, for men of our ilk, are more promising roads to victory than mere answering of questions. Indeed this condition is a rare bit of luck and of course I am all agog to begin. Naturally I shall not sit seriously to the work until my viva is over.

Under these circumstances you will understand that I cannot promise an early return home. I must see how I get on. No doubt this is disappointing for us all: but apart from that—on the score of health—you need have no misgiving. I am in excellent form at the moment and I shall not play the fool: midnight oil and ten hours a day were never my passion, and I am careful about the daily walk. Being confident on that score I feel it would be folly to throw away any chances for the sake of an immediate holiday. Also—odious factor—in my present position it is advisable to be on the spot, to be seen, to let people remember that there’s a young genius on the look out for a job.

In the meantime I find the financial waters a trifle low. I have had examination fees and a few old wardrobe repairs to pay and I look forward to more expenses, including tipping, when I take my degree. The dates of terms naturally make a long interval between my spring and autumn allowances, but it has not been worth bothering you about before, and last year the Chancellors Prize helped to fill up. I had hoped to combine a little light tutoring with my own work—which would have been useful experience apart from the scheckels—but I was too late and the possible jobs in Oxford were filled up. Could you then let me have £25? I am sorry to ‘out and come again’ but you will understand the reasons.

I thought I had got hold of a temporary job for next year the other day. It was before I knew full details of the Magdalen fellowship, and consisted of a classical lectureship at University College, Reading. For geographical reasons I had hoped that this would combine—by means of a season ticket—the diplomatic or ‘advertizement’ advantages of keeping in touch with Oxford with the advantages of a salaried post. This however turned out impossible. As well, pure classics is not my line. I told them quite frankly and they gave the job to some one else. Perhaps I was too young. My pupils would nearly all have been girls. The funny thing was that the head of their classical department and one of the committee who interviewed me was Eric Dodds. I had lunch with him in Reading and some talk. He is a clever fellow, but I didn’t greatly take to him somehow.

Arthur [Greeves] has been staying in Oxford. He was painting and I was working, but we saw a good deal of one another. He is enormously improved and I didn’t feel the qualms which I once should have about introducing him to people. He is not a brilliant talker and he seldom sees a joke, but his years in London are brightening him up amazingly. His painting is getting on and he did one landscape here which I thought really good . . .

FROM HIS DIARY: at 28 Warneford Road

24 July 1922

At about 2.30 Baker came. He had been at Tetsworth yesterday with the Kennedys, to see Vaughan Williams. As if by arrangement, he was at work on his new symphony when they arrived, and was quite ready to talk of music. He is the largest man Baker has ever seen—Chestertonian both in figure and habits. He eats biscuits all the time while composing. He said that after he had written the first bar on the page of a full score, the rest was all mechanical drudgery and that in every art there was 10% of real ‘making’ to 90% of spadework. He has a beautiful wife who keeps a pet badger—Baker saw it playing both with the dog and the kittens and it licked his hand . . .

TO HIS FATHER: from University College

26 July [1922]

Very many thanks for the enclosure. ‘There’s a power of washboards in that’ as Mehawl Macmurrachu said when he found the crock of gold. It is very kind of you to tell me to possess my soul in patience, when the patience has rather to be practised on your side. But let us hope that my unique merits will soon be appreciated and that I shall be able to rely on the inexhaustible patience of the tax payer and the sainted generosity of dead benefactors. In the meantime thank you and again thank you.

I have wondered, as you suggest in your letter, whether I unduly decried my own wares before the Readingites. I think, on the whole, that I behaved wisely: I am, after all, nothing remarkable as a pure scholar, and there is no good hiding what is so easily in their power to find out. As well one produces only misery for oneself, don’t you think, by taking on jobs one is not up to. Biting off more than you can chew is about the most poisonous sensation I know . . .

It is a strange irony that Dodds who is a born pure scholar, spends his time lecturing on philosophy. As you say however, the loss is hardly to be regretted: but there is a mean spirit somewhere in most of us that strives under all circumstances to explain away the success of the other fellow . . .

FROM HIS DIARY: at 28 Warneford Road

28 July 1922

Up betimes in white tie and ‘subfusc’ and into my viva. We all presented ourselves (I knew none of the others) at 9.30. Myers, looking his most piratical, called over our names and read out the times at which we were to come, but not in alphabetical order. Two others and myself were told to stay and I was immediately called out, thus being the first victim of the day. My operator was Joseph. He was very civil and made every effort to be agreeable . . . The whole show took about five minutes . . .

[On 1 August Jack, Mrs Moore and Maureen moved into a large, furnished house in Headington, where they were to remain until 5 September. The house is named ‘Hillsboro’ and it is located on what was called Western Road but has since been altered to 14 Holyoake Road.]

FROM HIS DIARY: at ‘Hillsboro’, 14 Holyoake Road, Headington (where he, Mrs Moore and Maureen had lived since 30 April 1923)

2 August 1922

I bussed into College and called on Farquharson.⁹⁹ Apparently I am not too late to take my B.A. on Saturday . . . He also discussed exams and kept saying that everyone knew my abilities and would not change their opinions if I happened to get a second. From a don, such talk has its uncomfortable side—I hope there is nothing behind it more than his general desire of flattery . . .

I then returned and took my share of getting things straight . . . This house is full of unnecessary ornaments in the sitting rooms: beyond them, in the kitchen etc., we found a state of indescribable filth: bottles of cheap champagne in the cellar. Trash for the drawing room, dirt for the kitchen, second rate luxury for the table—an epitome of a ‘decent English household’ . . .

[Warren was on leave from West Africa. He arrived in Oxford on the morning of 3 August and took a room at the Roebuck Hotel in Cornmarket Street.]

3 August 1922

After tea I hastened into town and met Warnie at the Roebuck; dined with him at Buols with a bottle of Heidsick. He has certainly grown enormously fat. He was in excellent form. I mooted the proposal of his coming out here: he did not seem inclined to take it up. I left him my diary to read to put him en rapport with the life.

4 August 1922

I . . . met W[arnie] and we strolled to the Schools to see if my lists would be out in the evening. It gave me rather a shock to find them already up. I had a first, Wyllie a second: everyone else from College a third. The whole thing was rather too sudden to be as pleasant as it sounds on paper. I wired at once to P[apy] and went to lunch with W. at Buols.

During the meal I thought I had arranged for him to come and meet the family at tea: but quite suddenly while sitting in the garden of the Union he changed his mind and refused pertinaciously either to come to tea or to consider staying with us. I therefore came back to tea . . . after which I returned to W., and dined. He was now totally changed. He introduced the idea of coming to stay off his own bat and promised to come out tomorrow . . .

5 August 1922

Went to College after breakfast and saw Poynton about money matters . . . I then bussed out to Headington, changed rapidly into white tie and subfusc suit, and returned to lunch with W. at Buols. At 2 o’clock I assembled with the others at Univ. porch to be taken under Farquharson’s wing for degrees. A long and very ridiculous ceremony making us B.A.s . . .

I met W. again at the Roebuck and came up here. Everyone present for tea and [Warnie] got on well . . .

6 August 1922

W. came out with his luggage. Bridge in the afternoon. A wet night.

25 August 1922

W. and I did most of our packing before breakfast. We were delayed for a few minutes to have a photo taken by Maureen, and then departed, carrying his tin trunk between us. His visit here has been a great pleasure to me—a great advance too towards connecting up my real life with all that is pleasantest in my Irish life. Fortunately everyone liked him and I think he liked them . . .

[Warren visited his father in Belfast after leaving Oxford. He was joined at ‘Little Lea’ by Jack who was there from 11 to 21 September. On 6 October Warren reported at his new station in Colchester.]

FROM HIS DIARY: at 28 Warneford Road

30 September 1922

After breakfast I washed up and did the dining room. I then went to my own room and started to work again on the VIth Canto of Dymer. I got on splendidly—the first good work I have done since a long time . . . An absurd episode after lunch. Maureen had started saying she didn’t mind which of two alternative sweets she had: and D, who is always worried by these indecisions, had begun to beg her to make up her mind in rather a weary voice. Thus developed one of those little mild wrangles about nothing which a wise man accepts as in the nature of things. I however, being in a sublime mood, and unprepared for jams, allowed a silent irritation to rise and sought relief in jabbing violently at a piece of pastry. As a result I covered myself in a fine shower of custard and juice: my melodramatic gesture was thus deservedly exposed and everyone roared with laughter.

13 October 1922

Shortly before one I saw Farquharson. He told me to go to Wilson of Exeter for tuition in English.¹⁰⁰ He then gave me a paternal lecture on an academic career which was not (he said) one of leisure as popularly supposed. His own figure however lessened the force of the argument. He advised me, as he has done before, to go to Germany for a time and learn the language. He prophesied that there would soon be a school of modern European literature and that linguistically qualified Greatsmen would be the first to get the new billets thus created. This was attractive, but of course circumstances make migration impossible for me . . .

15 October 1922

Worked all morning in the dining room on my piece in Sweet’s Reader and made some progress. It is very curious that to read the words of King Alfred gives more sense of antiquity than to read those of Sophocles. Also, to be thus realizing a dream of learning Anglo-Saxon which dates from Bookham days . . . After [supper] and washing up and more Troilus up till nearly the end of Book III. It is amazingly fine stuff. How absolutely anti-Chaucerian Wm Morris was in all save the externals . . .

16 October 1922

Bicycled to the Schools after breakfast to a 10 o’clock lecture: stopping first to buy a batchelor’s gown at the extortionate price of 32/6. According to a usual practice of the schools we were allowed to congregate in the room where the lecture was announced, and then suddenly told that it would be in the North School: our exodus of course fulfilled the scriptural condition of making the last first and the first last. I had thus plenty of time to feel the atmosphere of the English School which is very different from that of Greats. Women, Indians, and Americans predominate and—I can’t say how—one feels a certain amateurishness in the talk and look of the people. The lecture was by Wyld on the History of the language.¹⁰¹ He spoke for an hour and told us nothing that I haven’t known these five years . . . After lunch I bicycled again to Schools to seek out the library of the English school. I found it at the top of many stories, inhabited by a strange old gentleman who seems to regard it as his private property . . .

18 October 1922

Bicycled to Schools for a 12 o’clock lecture on Chaucer by Simpson, who turns out to be the old man I found in the English school library.¹⁰² Quite a good lecture . . . Jenkin arrived and I went to him in the drawing room. We talked of Troilus and this led us to the question of chivalry. I thought the mere ideal, however unrealized, had been a great advance. He thought the whole thing had been pretty worthless. The various points which I advanced as good results of the Knightly standard he attributed to Christianity. After this Christianity became the main subject. I tried to point out that the mediaeval knight ran his class code and his church code side by side in watertight compartments. Jenkin said that the typical example of the Christian ideal at work was Paul, while admitting that one would probably have disliked him in real life. I said that one got very little definite teaching in the gospels: the writers had apparently seen something overwhelming, but been unable to reproduce it. He agreed, but added that this was so with everything worth having . . .

TO HIS FATHER: from University College (after failing to be elected to the Fellowship in Philosophy at Magdalen College)

28 [October 1922]

I judged that you would see my fate in the Times. This needs little comment. I am sorry for both our sakes that the ‘hastings days fly on with full career and my late spring no bud nor blossom showeth’. But there’s no good crying over spilt milk and one must not repine at being fairly beaten by a better man. I do not think I have done myself any harm, for I have had some compliments on my work. One examiner, at any rate, said I was ‘probably the ablest man in for it’, but added that my fault was a certain excess of caution or ‘timidity in letting myself go’ . . . For the rest, except for the extra drain on you, I should be glad enough of the opportunity or rather the necessity of taking another School. The English may turn out to be my real line, and, in any case, will be a second string to my bow.

I very much appreciate your enquiries about the adequacy of my allowance, and hasten to assure you that it leads to no such privations as you imagine. I will be quite frank with you. It is below the average, but that is balanced by the longer period of time over which it has been spread. It leaves no margin for superfluities, but I am lucky in having found cheap digs and, as my tastes are simple and my friends neither rich nor very numerous, I can manage alright—specially as you have been always very ready to meet any extraordinary charges. I am very grateful of the slow period of incubation which you have made possible—and have no mental reservations on the subject.

On the contrary, I very often regret having chosen a career which makes me so slow in paying my way: and, on your account, would be glad of a more lucrative line. But I think I know my own limitations and am quite sure that an academic or literary career is the only one in which I can hope ever to go beyond the meanest mediocrity. The Bar is a gamble which would probably cost more in the long run, and in business, of course I should be bankrupt or in jail very soon. In short you may make your mind easy on this subject. As to looking run down—I suppose I am turning from a very chubby boy into a somewhat thinner man: it is, at all events, not the result of a bun diet . . .

I am drumming ahead like anything with my Anglo-Saxon, and it is great fun. One begins it in a Reader constructed on the admirable system of having nearly all the text in one dialect and nearly all the glossary in another. You can imagine what happy hours this gives the young student—for example, you will read a word like ‘Wado’ in the text: in the glossary this may appear as Wedo, Waedo, Weodo, Waedu, or Wiedu. Clever bloke, ain’t he? The language in general, gives the impression of parodied English badly spelled. Thus the word ‘Cwic’ may baffle you till you remember the ‘quick and the dead’ and suddenly realize that it means ‘Alive’. Or again ‘Tingul’ for a star, until you think of ‘Twinkle, twinkle little star’.

By the way I was quite wrong about Miss Waddell: it turns out to be Miss Wardale—an amazing old lady who is very keen on phonetics and pronounciation.¹⁰³ I spend most of my hours with her trying to reproduce the various clucking, growling and grunted noises which are apparently an essential to the pure accent of Alfred—or Aelfred as we must now call him . . .

FROM HIS DIARY: at 28 Warneford Road

29 October 1922

[Aunt Lily] has been here for about three days and has snubbed a bookseller in Oxford, written to the local paper, crossed swords with the Vicar’s wife, and started a quarrel with her landlord . . . Her conversation is like an old drawer, full both of rubbish and valuable things, but all thrown together in great disorder. She is still engaged on her essay, which starting three years ago as a tract on the then state of woman suffrage, is still unfinished and now embraces a complete philosophy on the significance of heroism and maternal instinct, the nature of matter, the primal one, the value of Christianity, and the purpose of existence. That purpose by the way is the return of differences to the One through heroism and pain. She thus combines a good deal of Schopenhaur with a good deal of theosophy: besides being indebted to Bergson and Plotinus. She told me that ectoplasm was done with soap bubbles, that women had no balance and were cruel as doctors, that what I needed for my poetry was a steeping in scientific ideas and terminology, that many prostitutes were extraordinarily purified and Christ-like, that Plato was a Bolshevist . . . that the importance of Christ could not have lain in what He said, that Pekinese were not dogs at all but dwarfed lions bred from smaller and ever smaller specimens by the Chinese through ages innumerable, that matter was just the stop of motion and that the cardinal error of all religions made by men was the assumption that God existed for, or cared about us. I left Dymer with her and got away, with some difficulty, at one o’clock . . .

2 November 1922

Went to the Schools library. Here I puzzled for the best of two hours over phonetics, back voice stops, glides, glottal catches and open Lord-knows-whats. Very good stuff in its way, but why physiology should form part of the English school I really don’t know . . .

FROM HIS DIARY: on his way to Belfast

23 December 1922

Shortly before 4 I returned to the Central hall at Euston and there was met by W[arnie], when we immediately went and had tea in the refreshment room. He gave me a most favourable account of Colchester which, he said, was a very old world town in an Arthur Rackham country. We caught the 5.30 for Liverpool: what between dinner, drinks, and conversation the journey passed very quickly: we succeeded in sitting in the dining car the whole way. We had two single berth rooms in the boat, with a communicating door. I was greatly worried all day by the pain in my armpit. A rough night, but we both slept well.

FROM HIS DIARY: at ‘Little Lea’ in Belfast

24 December 1922

We got out to Leeborough in the grey of the morning, not in the best of spirits. My father was not up yet. When he finally appeared, he was in poor form and rather shaky—for whatever reason. He approved of my new suit. Then followed breakfast and the usual artificial conversation. We vetoed churchgoing and went out for a walk at twelve o’clock . . . The path was so narrow that the other two walked ahead and I was left, not to my own thoughts, for in Ireland I have none, but to the undisturbed possession of my lethargy. We came back and had some sherry: W. and I have often remarked on the extraordinary effect of this sherry. Last night I drank four whiskies without any undue result: today, in the study, my own glass of sherry led to a dull and cheerless shadow of intoxication. We had a heavy midday dinner at 2.45. The rest of the day was spent entirely in the study: our three chairs in a row, all the windows shut . . .

25 December 1922

We were awakened early by my father to go to the communion service. It was a dark morning with a gale blowing and some very cold rain . . . As we walked down to church we started discussing the time of sunrise: my father saying rather absurdly that it must have risen already, or else it wouldn’t be light.

In Church it was intensely cold. W. offered to keep his coat on. My father expostulated and said ‘Well at least you won’t keep it on when you go up to the Table’. W. asked why not and was told it was ‘most disrespectful’. I couldn’t help wondering why. But W. took it off to save trouble . . .

Another day set in exactly similar to yesterday. My father amused us by saying in a tone, almost of alarm, ‘Hello, it’s stopped raining. We ought to go out’ and then adding with undisguised relief ‘Ah no. It’s still raining: we needn’t.’ Christmas dinner, a rather deplorable ceremony, at quarter to four.

Afterwards it had definitely cleared up: my father said he was too tired to go out, not having slept the night before, but encouraged W. and me to do so—which we did with great eagerness and set out to reach Holywood by the high road and there have a drink. It was delightful to be in the open air after so many hours’ confinement in one room. Fate however, denied our drink: for we were met just outside Holywood by the Hamilton’s car and of course had to travel back with them. Uncle Gussie drove back along the narrow winding road in a reckless and bullying way that alarmed W. and me . . .

Early to bed, dead tired with talk and lack of ventilation. I found my mind was crumbling into the state which this place always produces: I have gone back six years to be flabby, sensual and unambitious. Headache again.

11 January 1923

After this I read Macdonald’s Phantastes over my tea, which I have read many times and which I really believe fills for me the place of a devotional book . . .