FROM HIS DIARY: at 28 Warneford Road (having left Belfast on 12 January)

25 January 1923

I went to Schools at 10 o’clock to hear Onions on Middle English.¹⁰⁴ . . . Onions gave a delightful lecture: the best part being the quotations, which he does inimitably. Once he repeated nearly a whole poem with much relish and then observed ‘That wasn’t what I meant to say’. A man after my own heart.

26 January 1923

Got home in time for tea and read Donne and Raleigh till just before supper when I began my essay. I was just sitting down to it again after supper when I heard a knock and going out, found Barfield. The unexpected delight gave me one of the best moments I have had since the even better ones of leaving Ireland and arriving home . . . We went at our talk like a dogfight: of Baker, of Harwood, of our mutual news . . .

[Barfield] is working with Pearsall Smith who is genuinely trivious and an utter materialist.¹⁰⁵ He (Smith) and De la Mare are fast friends . . . Barfield hopes soon to meet De la Mare. He sees Squire fairly often. He says Squire is a man who promises more than he can perform, not through flattery but because he really believes his own influence to be greater than it is . . . He said it had always surprised him that my things were as good as they were, for I seemed to work simply on inspiration and did no chipping. I thus wrote plenty of good poetry but never one perfect poem. He said that the ‘inspired’ percentage was increasing all the time and that might save me in the end . . . I thought his insight was almost uncanny and agreed with every word . . . I walked back to Wadham with him in the moonlight . . .

4 February 1923

Went off on my bike to have tea with Miss Wardale . . . I found Miss W. alone. After we had talked for a few minutes I was pleasantly surprised by the arrival of Coghill¹⁰⁶ . . . Miss W., apart from a few sensible remarks on Wagner, was content to sit back in a kind of maternal attitude with her hands on her knees. Coghill did most of the talking, except when contradicted by me. He said that Mozart had remained like a boy of six all his life. I said nothing could be more delightful: he replied (and quite right) that he could imagine many things more delightful. He entirely disagreed with my love of Langland and of Morris . . . He said that Blake was really inspired. I was beginning to say ‘In a sense—’ when he said ‘In the same sense as Joan of Arc’. I said ‘I agree. In exactly the same sense. But we may mean different things.’ He: ‘If you are a materialist.’ I apologized for the appearance of quibbling but said that ‘materialist’ was too ambiguous . . .

When I rose to go he came with me and we walked together as far as Carfax. It was very misty. I found out that he had served in Salonika: that he was Irish and came from near Cork . . . He said (just like Barfield) that he felt it his duty to be a ‘conchy’ if there was another war, but admitted that he had not the courage. I said yes—unless there was something really worth fighting for. He said the only thing he would fight for was the Monarchy . . . I said I didn’t care twopence about monarchy—the only real issue was civilization against barbarism. He agreed, but thought with Hobbes that civilization and monarchy went together . . . Before parting I asked him to tea: he said he had just been going to ask me, and we finally arranged that I should go to him on Friday. I then biked home. I thought Coghill a good man, quite free from our usual Oxford flippancy and fear of being crude . . .

9 February 1923

On getting into bed I was attacked by a series of gloomy thoughts about professional and literary failure—what Barfield calls ‘one of those moments when one is afraid that one may not be a great man after all’.

15 February 1923

Again today—it is happening much too often now—I am haunted by fears for the future, as to whether I will ever get a job and whether I shall ever be able to write good poetry . . .

21 March 1923

Got home very tired and depressed: D made me have some tea. I told her (what had been on my mind all afternoon) that I didn’t feel very happy about the plan of staying here as a more or less unattached tutor. I do not want to join the rank of advertisements in the Union—it sounds so like the prelude of being a mere grinder all my days. If it wasn’t for Maureen I think I should plump for a minor university if possible. We had rather a dismal conversation about our various doubts and difficulties . . .

22 March 1923

I went to Carritt’s room and returned his Aristotle. I then went and saw Stevenson, whom I found sitting in his rooms by a hot fire, very miserable with a bad throat and not able to talk much. I asked him what prospects there were of my being able to exist as a free lance tutor until something turned up. He said there was practically no such work to be had in my subject . . . He said he thought I was pretty sure to get a fellowship soon . . . In the mean time he advised me to get a job at a minor university . . .

I then came home . . . and discussed the situation with D. We are both greatly depressed. If one cd be sure of my coming back to a fellowship after a term or two at some minor University we could take the Woodstock Rd house—but if not? . . . It was certainly a damnably difficult situation. Thence we drifted into the perennial difficulty of money, which would be far more acute if we had to separate for a time . . .

TO HIS FATHER: from University College

27 May [1923]

I do not care to think how long it is since I last wrote to you. I have made some attempts to do so before this, but they have all collapsed under the pressure of work, or of the mere trifling and lassitude which is the reaction to work. You wrote to me that a disinclination to write letters was ‘one of the marks of approaching old age’ which you felt or thought you felt. If that were true, what a premature senility is mine! It is a very ridiculous and a very wretched confession that I can hardly remember any period since I was a child at which I have not had a crowd of unanswered letters nagging at the back of my mind: things which would have been no trouble if answered by return but which hang on for weeks or months, getting always harder to write in the end, and contributing their share to the minor worries that lay hold of us when we have the blues or lie awake. That anyone should let himself maintain such a standing army of pinpricks would be incredible if it were not fairly common . . . Our Colonel, on the principle of ‘diamond cut diamond’ knows how to defeat this laziness in another because he is so familiar with it himself. At Whitsun he wrote to me saying he would arrive for the weekend unless he heard to the contrary: that at any rate means that no one can keep him waiting for a reply!

He came from Friday evening to Monday. He is at present deep in Gibbon and is very enthusiastic about it. I envy him his routine work—in itself apparently not uninteresting and finished definitely at four o’clock with the rest of the day free for general reading, with no uncertainties or anxieties. Despite the frittering away of time over drinks and gossip in the mess and the low mental level of the society I cannot help feeling that for him the military life has solved the problem of existence very well . . .

Our summer here consists of sleet, frost and east winds: tho’ the summer invasion of Americans has come punctually enough. I mention this because they introduce a good American story which you may not have heard. In the old days of primitive sheriff rule in the western states a man was hanged and shortly afterwards his innocence was proved. The local authorities assembled and deliberated on the best method of conveying the news to the inconsolable widow. It was felt that a too sudden statement would be a little ‘brutal’ and the Sheriff himself, as the man of greatest refinement, was finally deputed to wait upon the lady. After a few suitable remarks on the figs and the maize, he began with the following, ‘Say, Ma’am, I guess you’ve got the laugh of us this time!’ . . .

FROM HIS DIARY: at ‘Hillsboro’

1 June 1923

A cold day. I spent the morning working on my essay . . . Coming back to College I heard with interest what is I suppose my nickname. Several Univ. people whom I don’t know passed me. One of them, noticing my blazer, must have asked another who I was, for I heard him answer ‘Heavy Lewis’ . . .

20 June 1923

I . . . rode home. Found D and Dorothy polishing in D’s room. Had hardly left them when I heard an awful crash and rushed back thoroughly frightened and half believing that the wardrobe had fallen on D. I found however that it was only she herself who had fallen and hurt her elbow: she was badly shaken. All attempts to get her to stop polishing and rest on her laurels were treated in the usual way . . . This put me into such a rage against poverty and fear and all the infernal net I seemed to be in that I went out and mowed the lawn and cursed all the gods for half an hour . . .

22 June 1923

In the morning I read Venice Preserved¹⁰⁷ which contains more loathsome sentimentality, flat language, and bad verse than I should have imagined possible. Later I scraped and began to stain the exposed passages of floor in the hall, which was work both hot and hard. After lunch I finished the hall and did the same for the drawing room and helped D with some changes of furniture in the dining room . . . At six I walked out to find a new field path that I had heard of . . . This brought me up [a] hill beside a very fine hedge with wild roses in it. This, in the cool of the evening, together with some curious illusion of being on the slope of a much bigger hill than I really was, and the wind in the hedge, gave me intense pleasure with a lot of vague reminiscences . . . I got back about 8 and watered the garden . . .

TO HIS FATHER: from University College (after taking Schools in English Literature)

1 July [1923]

Before everything else let me thank you very heartily . . . I hope some day to repay these long years of education in the only way in which they can be repaid—by success and distinction in the kind of life which they aim at. But that is partly in the power of fortune and in the meantime I can only record that I am not foolish enough to take these things for granted and that the thought of how much you are doing for me is often, even insistently, before my mind . . .

I should not be a son of yours if the prospect of being adrift and unemployed at thirty had not been very often present to my mind: for of course the worrying temperament of the family did not end in your generation, and to quote Jeremy Taylor ‘we were born with this sadness upon us’ . . .

But, shaking off all that is temperamental and due to momentary fits of optimism and pessimism, I can only put the situation thus. I have, and of course, shall always have, qualifications that should, by all ordinary probability, make a tolerable schoolmastering job practically certain whenever we decide to give up Oxford as hopeless. The same qualifications also put me fairly high in the rank of candidates for academic jobs here. The Magdalen people told my tutor quite recently that they thought my work for their fellowship quite on a level with that of the man who won it, except that it was ‘more mature’. But of course the number of hungry suitors with qualifications equal to mine, tho’ not very large, is large enough to put up a well filled ‘field’ for every event: and the number of vacancies depends, as in other spheres, on all sorts of accidents.

What it comes to is that there is a pretty healthy chance here which would, on the whole, be increased by a few years’ more residence in which I should have time to make myself more known and to take some research degree such as B. Litt. or Doc. Phil. and which would be, perhaps indefinitely or permanently lost if I now left. On the other hand, even apart from the financial point of view, I very keenly realize the dangers of hanging on too long for what might not come in the end. Speaking, for the moment, purely for myself, I should be inclined to put three years as a suitable term for waiting before beating a retreat . . .

The English School is come and gone, tho’ I still have my viva to face. I was of course rather hampered by the shortened time in which I took the school and it is in many ways so different from the other exams that I have done that I should be sorry to prophesy . . .

FROM HIS DIARY: at ‘Hillsboro’

7 July 1923

I went to the Station where I met Harwood. He is working on a temporary job connected with the British Empire Exhibition and says that he is becoming the complete business man. He was in excellent form . . . We walked to Parson’s Pleasure to bathe. It was the first time I have been there this year. They had finished mowing the meadows beyond the water: all was cool and green and lovely beyond anything. We had a glorious bathe and then lay on the grass talking of a hundred things till we got hot and had to bathe again. After a long time we came away and back to the Union where he had left his suitcase and thence bussed up to Headington. D and Maureen had of course got home before us and we all had tea on the lawn. Afterwards Harwood and I lay under the trees and talked. He told me of his new philosopher, Rudolf Steiner who has ‘made the burden roll from his back’.

Steiner seems to be a sort of panpsychist, with a vein of posing superstition, and I was very much disappointed to hear that both Harwood and Barfield were impressed by him. The comfort they got from him (apart from the sugar plum of promised immortality, which is really the bait with which he has caught Harwood) seemed something I could get much better without him. I argued that the ‘spiritual forces’ which Steiner found everywhere were either shamelessly mythological people or else no-one-knows-what. Harwood said this was nonsense and that he understood perfectly what he meant by a spiritual force. I also protested that Pagan animism was an anthropomorphic failure of imagination and that we should prefer a knowledge of the real unhuman life which is in the trees etc. He accused me of a materialistic way of thinking when I said that the similarity of all languages probably depended on the similarity of all throats. The best thing about Steiner seems to be the Goetheanum which he has built up in the Alps . . . Unfortunately the building (which must have been very wonderful) has been burned by the Catholics . . .

10 July 1923

Up betimes and dressed in subfusc and white tie . . . At 9.30 we entered the viva room and after the names had been called, six of us were told to stay, of whom I was one. I then sat in the fearful heat, in my gown and rabbit skin, on a hard chair, unable to smoke, talk, read, or write, until 11.50 . . . Most of the vivas were long and discouraging. My own—by Brett Smith—lasted about two minutes. I was asked my authority, if any, for the word ‘little-est’.¹⁰⁸ I gave it—the Coleridge-Poole correspondence in Thomas Poole and his friends. I was then asked if I had not been rather severe on Dryden and after we had discussed this for a little Simpson said that they need not bother me any more. I came away much encouraged, and delighted to escape the language people—one of whom, not a don, was a foul creature yawning insolently at his victims and rubbing his small puffy eyes. He had the face of a pork butcher and the manners of a village boy on a Sunday afternoon, when he has grown bored but not yet quite arrived at the quarrelsome stage . . .

[On 16 July the examination results of the English School were posted and the next day Jack sent a wire to his father saying ‘A First in English’. The next few weeks he made a little money correcting English essays for School Certificates. This was followed by a visit to his father in Belfast during 22 September—10 October.]

FROM HIS DIARY: at ‘Hillsboro’

11 October 1923

I crossed last night from Ireland after nearly three weeks at ‘Little Lea’. In two respects my compulsory holiday was a great improvement on most that I have had, for I got on very well with my father and held the usual mental inertia at arm’s length by working steadily at my Italian . . . In revenge, I was never really well, suffering from headaches and indigestion. In the loneliness of that house I became hypochondriacal and for a time imagined that I was getting appendicitis or something worse. This worried me terribly, not only chiefly for its own sake but because I didn’t see how I could manage to get back here in time. I had one or two dreadful nights of panic.

I did many long walks hoping to make myself sleep. I was twice up the Cave Hill where I intend to go often in future. The view down the chasm between Napoleon’s Head and the main body of the cliffs is almost the best I have seen. I had one other delightful walk over the Castlereagh hills where I got the real joy—the only time for many years that I have had it in Ireland.

This morning I was called at 7 . . . On getting out at Oxford I found myself in a crisp wintry air and as I bussed up to Headington I felt the horrors of the last week or so going off like a dream . . . So home, full of happiness, and early to bed, both being very tired and sleepy.

TO HIS FATHER: from University College

22 November [1923]

I have a certain amount of news to give you, all of an inconclusive character. To get the least agreeable item over first, I am afraid old Poynton has proved a broken reed in the matter of pupils: I believe, because he put off the job too long. He is an oldish man and habitually overworked so I do not judge him hardly, tho’ I was rather disappointed . . .

I have got quite recently one pupil, tho’ not through Poynton. He is a youth of eighteen who is trying to get a Classical scholarship. I am to coach him in essay writing and English for the essay paper and general papers which these exams always include. I fear we shall win no laurels by him. I questioned him about his classical reading: our dialogue was something like this:

SELF: ‘Well Sandeman, what Greek authors have you been reading?’

SAND (cheerfully): ‘I never can remember. Try a few names and I’ll see if I get on to any.’

SELF (a little damped): ‘Have you read any Euripides?’

SAND: ‘No.’

SELF: ‘Any Sophocles?’

SAND: ‘Oh yes.’

SELF: ‘What plays of his have you read?’

SAND (after a pause): ‘Well—the Alcestis.’

SELF (apologetically): ‘But isn’t that by Euripides?’

SAND (with the genial surprise of a man who finds £1 where he thought there was a 10/-note): ‘Really. Is it now? By Jove, then I have read some Euripides!’

My next is even better. I asked him if he were familiar with the distinction that critics draw between a natural and a literary epic. He was not: you may not be either, but it makes no difference. I then explained to him that when a lot of old war songs about some mythological hero were handed down by aural tradition and gradually welded into one whole by successive minstrels (as in the case of ‘Homer’) the result was called a natural epic: but when an individual poet sat down with pen in hand to write Paradise Lost, that was a literary epic. He listened with great attention and then observed ‘I suppose Grey’s Elegy is the natural kind.’

What idiots can have sent him in for a Scholarship? However, he is one of the cheeriest, healthiest, and most perfectly contented creatures I have ever met with . . .

FROM HIS DIARY: at ‘Hillsboro’ (part of a summary of events from 22 October to the end of December 1923)

[December 1923]

It was shortly after this that I read Flecker’s Hassan. It made a great impression on me and I believe it is really a great work. Carritt (whom I met at the Martlets shortly after) thinks that its dwelling on physical pain puts it as much outside literature as is pornography in another: that it works on the nervous system rather than the imagination. I find this hard to answer: but I am almost sure he is wrong . . .

TO HIS FATHER: from University College

4 February [1924]

You will explain your long silence as an answer to mine—at least I hope there is no more serious reason for it than that and the desultoriness in correspondence which you claim as one of the penalties, if it is not rather one of the privileges, of the years beyond fifty. I, like the judge, have other reasons.

As soon as I had met people here I heard of a new will-o-the-wisp, a poor Fellowship at St John’s now vacant and calling out for candidates. The warning that preference would be given to ‘founder’s kin and persons born in the County of Stafford’ did not seem sufficient to deter me from trying my luck. At first I thought of sending them my old dissertation which I had written for Magdalen: but no man cares greatly for his own things when once the bloom is off them, and I decided in the end to write a new one. I was in pretty good form, but I was pressed for time: and of course there is a waste of time when one flings oneself back into work which one has abandoned for a few months—the old harness will not at once sit easily.

It was only after I had sent this in that I discovered how small my chances must necessarily be. I had supposed—and who would not—that the preference for natives of Staffordshire etc., meant only a preference, other things being equal. I find however that if any candidate appears who claims such preference and who has in addition either a Second in Greats or a First in any other final school, he must be elected. I do not of course know in fact whether there is such a candidate in the field, for Stafford is a large county, and we may be sure that the founder was some philoprogenitive old fellow who, like Charles II in Dryden, ‘scattered his Maker’s image through the land’. In short we may expect a defeat with almost complete certainty . . .

This then occupied my first weeks. And I had hardly looked about me when a most irritating thing happened. I got chicken pox and am only now out of quarantine. I have of course been quite well enough to write for some time but I don’t know whether you have had this complaint and thought it better not to chance infecting you: I am told that the older you are the less likely it will be to ‘take’, but the worse if it does. I had a pretty high temperature at the beginning and some very uncomfortable nights of intense perspiration, but it soon passed off. The danger of cutting any of the spots on my face of course made shaving impossible till this very day and I had a fine beard. I have left the moustache which would excite ‘poor Warren’s’ envy, but I shall probably get tired of it in a few weeks. It is very stiff, and all the hairs grow in different directions and it is thicker on one side than on the other . . .

You know of course that my Scholarship is at an end. It was nominally a scholarship of £80 a year. What I actually got out of it was about £11 a term. Sometimes it would be a little more or a little less, but it generally averaged out to £33 a year . . . I had hopes of being able to make up that in other ways—pupils and the like—but they have not been realized and I am afraid I must ask for help. I do not like increasing your charges—but as Kirk said, ‘All this has been said before’.

I have lost Sandeman. He got good marks in his English in the Scholarship he tried for near Christmas and his mother and his other coach said the nicest things of me, when dash it if the fool doesn’t go and break his leg . . .

FROM HIS DIARY: at ‘Hillsboro’

29 February 1924

Shortly after tea, which was very late, I went up to dress, preparatory to dining with Carritt . . . At dinner Carritt put into my hand the notice of the vacancy at Trinity—an official Fellowship in Philosophy, worth £500 a year . . . I walked home, looking at the details of the Trinity Fellowship as I passed the lamps. For some reason the possibility of getting it and all that would follow if I did came before my mind with unusual vividness. I saw it would involve living in [Trinity College] and what a break up of our present life that would mean, and also how the extra money would lift terrible loads off us all. I saw that it would mean pretty full work and that I might become submerged and poetry crushed out. With deep conviction I suddenly had an image of myself, God knows when or where, in the future looking back on these years since the war as the happiest or the only really valuable part of my life, in spite of all their disappointments and fears. Yet the longing for an income that wd free us from anxiety was stronger than all these feelings. I was in a strange state of excitement—and all on the mere hundredth chance of getting it . . .

17–25 March 1924

During this time it was unfortunate that my first spring flood of Dymer should coincide with a burst of marmalade making and spring cleaning on D’s part which led without intermission into packing. I managed to get in a good deal of writing in the intervals of jobbing in the kitchen and doing messages in Headington. I wrote the whole of a last canto with considerable success, tho’ the ending will not do. I also kept my temper nearly all the time.

Domestic drudgery is excellent as an alternative to idleness or to hateful thoughts—which is perhaps poor D’s reason for piling it on at this time: as an alternative to the work one is longing to do and able to do (at that time and heaven knows when again) it is maddening. No one’s fault: the curse of Adam.

TO HIS FATHER: from University College

27 April [1924]

I have been exercised in the slightly unpleasant duty of getting all things in readiness for my application for the Trinity Fellowship—getting testimonials and talking to one or two people who will write unofficially for me. I also went to a dinner where I met the present philosophy man from Trinity whose successor I should become if I were elected. This was done no doubt to give me an opportunity of impressing him with my unique social and intellectual qualifications.

Unhappily the whole conversation was dominated by a bore who wanted to talk (and did talk) about the state of India, and I suppose I hardly exchanged ten words with the Trinity man. However, it may have been just as well. A man who knows he is on show can hardly be at his best: and I am told that this Trinity man is a very shy, retiring, moody old man and difficult to talk to. In the meantime I send in my application and wait—reminding myself that the best cure for disappointment is the moderation of hopes . . .

I can’t remember if I told you about my last visit to Aunt Lily. I went out by bus. The conductor did not at once understand where I wanted to stop, and a white bearded old farmer chipped in, ‘You know, Jarge—where that old gal lives along of all them cats’. I explained that this was exactly where I did want to go. My informant remarked, ‘You’ll ’ave a job to get in when you do get there’. He was as good as his word, for when I reached the cottage I found the fence supporting a wire structure about nine feet high which was continued even over the gate. She does it to prevent her cats escaping into the main road. On this occasion she presented me with a print of an old picture: ‘St Francis preaching before Pope Honorius’ because, she said, the Pope was a portrait of me. It is not one of her fads, for I do really see the likeness myself. I suppose nature has only a limited number of faces to use after all . . .

TO HIS FATHER: from University College

[11 May 1924]

I have a bit of good—or fairly good—news. Some nights ago I was summoned to call on the new Master after dinner, there to meet Farquharson and my old philosophy tutor Carritt, and when I arrived the following ‘transpired’. Carritt it appears is going for a year to teach philosophy in the University of Ann Arbor, Michigan, and it was suggested that I should undertake his tutorial duties here during his absence and also give lectures. As soon as I heard the proposal I said that I was already a candidate for the vacancy at Trinity. To this they replied that they had no intention of asking me to sacrifice the possibility of a permanent job: it would be understood that if I were elected to Trinity I should be released from my engagement to Univ.—unless indeed Trinity were willing to let me do both tasks and I felt able to do so. This being settled, I of course accepted their offer.

I was a little disappointed that they only offered me £200—specially as I anticipate that when living in and dining at high table I shall hardly be able to economise as much as I do now. I am afraid that I shall still need some assistance from you. Of course Carritt’s job must be worth more than that: I imagine he is keeping his fellowship and I am getting his tutorial emoluments and of these, Farquharson, who is ‘taking a few of the senior men’ is getting a share.

Being under Farquharson’s superintendance will be in some ways troublesome: and indeed I have already had a specimen of his fussy futility. I sent in to the Master as the title of my proposed lectures for the next term ‘The Moral Good—its place among the values’. Within an hour I had a notice brought out to my digs by special messenger ‘Farquharson suggests “position” instead of “place”. Please let me know your views at once.’ There’s glory for you, as Humpty Dumpty said! Well, it is poorly paid and temporary and under the shadow of Farquharson, but it is better to be inside than out, and is always a beginning. The experience will be valuable.

You may imagine that I am now pretty busy. I must try to get through most of the Greats reading before next term and do it more thoroughly than ever I did when I was a candidate myself. I must be ready for all comers and hunt out the bye ways which I considered it safe to neglect in my own case. There can be no throwing dust in the examiner’s eyes this time. Preparing my lectures will however be the biggest job of all. I am to lecture twice a week next term, which comes to fourteen hours’ talking in all. You who have been so much on your legs, can tell better than I what a lot of talking a man can do in one hour. I rather fancy I could really tell the world everything I think about everything in five hours—and, Lord, you hear curates grumbling because they have to preach for twenty minutes a week. However, as Keats remarks somewhere, ‘Demme, who’s afraid?’: we must learn that slow deliberate method dear to the true lecturer. As Farquharson remarked (without the ghost of a smile) ‘Of course your first lecture would be introductory’. I felt like replying, ‘Of course: that’s why I always skipped your first lectures!’

As a perspective candidate I dined at Trinity the other night . . . I was very favourably impressed with the Trinity people. In the smoking room after dinner we were just of a number for conversation to be general and I had one of the best evenings imaginable, the ‘crack’ ranging over all things . . . So if Trinity don’t give me a Fellowship, at least they gave me a very good time . . .

FROM HIS DIARY: at ‘Hillsboro’

15 June 1924

After supper I bussed in to Exeter and went to Coghill’s rooms where, after a short wait, I was joined by Coghill and Morrah.¹⁰⁹ The latter is a Fellow of All Souls . . . He told us a good story of how H. G. Wells had dined at All Souls and said that Oxford wasted too much time over Latin and Greek. Why should these two literatures have it all to themselves? Now Russian and Persian literature were far superior to the classics. Someone (I forget the name) asked a few questions. It soon became apparent that Wells knew neither Greek, Latin, Persian, nor Russian. ‘I think’, said someone, ‘I am the only person present here tonight who knows these four languages: and I can assure you, Mr Wells, that you are mistaken: neither Russian nor Persian literature are as great as the literatures of Greece or Rome’ . . .

3 July 1924

Today I went to Colchester in order to travel back in W[arnie]’s sidecar . . . A brisk shower of rain came down as I reached Colchester where I was met at the station by W. and driven to the Red Lion where I had tea. This is one of the oldest hotels in England, curiously and beautifully beamed. W. tells me that the American who insulted Kipling at the Rhodes dinner in Oxford has made a great name for himself (of a sort) in the army. W. had just been reading Puck of Pook’s Hill for the first time: he praised it highly and I agreed with him.

While we were sitting under the roof of a kind of courtyard after tea waiting for the rain to stop, a Major came up, to whom W. introduced me, telling me afterwards that he was a very well preserved specimen of the real old type of army bore. When it cleared a little we walked out to see the town which is a very pleasant sprawling old world place, not unlike Guildford. The Roman castle is very fine in a kind quite new to me, as also the remains of the old gate of Camolodunum. There is also a pleasant old house (now an office but it ought to be a pub) bullet marked from the civil wars. After all this we motored up out of the town to a higher, windy land, full of camps. W.’s camp consists of a small old country house (‘a Jorrocks house’ he called it) and its park, now filled with huts. The C.O. lives in the Jorrocks house.

I was taken to the Mess (Lord, how strange to be in such a place again!) and of course given a drink. The ‘Orficers’ were really very nice to me. It was odd to me to see a mess full of people in mufti. We then motored back to town to a civilian club of which W. is a member, where he had provided a royal feast of the sort we both liked: no nonsense about soup and pudding, but a sole each, cutlets with green peas, a large portion of strawberries and cream, and a tankard of the local beer which is very good. So we gorged like Roman Emperors in a room to ourselves and had good talk . . .

We drove back to camp. W. had turned out into another hut and I had his bedroom. He has two rooms for his quarters. The sitting room with stove, easy chair, pictures, and all his French books, is very snug. I notice that a study in a hut, or a cave, or a cabin of a ship can be snug in a way that is impossible for a mere room in a house, the snugness there being a victory, a sort of defiant comfortableness—whereas in a house of course, one demands comfort and is simply annoyed at its absence. He ‘put into my hands’ Anatole France’s Revolt of the Angels in a translation, which seems an amusing squib.

4 July 1924

We started on our Oxford journey after breakfast in the mess. The day looked threatening at first, but we had fair weather. I do not remember the names of the villages we passed, except Braintree and Dunmow (where the flich lives). At St Albans we stopped to see the Cathedral: I had been there once before in my Wynyard days about 1909 or 1910 to sit and kneel for three hours watching Wyn Capron (whom God reject!) ordained a deacon or priest, I forget which. Yet, in those days, that day without work, the journey to St Alban’s, the three hour’s service and a lunch of cold beef and rice in an hotel was a treat for which we counted the days beforehand and felt nessum maggior dolore when the following day brought us back to routine.

I was rather glad to find the Cathedral quite definitely the poorest English cathedral I have yet seen. In the town we bought two pork pies to supplement what W. considered the Spartan allowance of sandwiches given us by the mess, and drank some beer. I think it was here that W. formed the project of going far out of our way to eat our lunch at Hunton Bridge on the L.N.W.R. where we used to sit and watch the trains when out on our walk from Wynyard. I assented eagerly. I love to exult in my happiness at being forever safe from at least one of the major ills of life—that of being a boy at school.

We bowled along very merrily in brilliant sunshine, while the country grew uglier and meaner at every turn, and therefore all the better for our purpose. We arrived at the bridge and devoured the scene—the two tunnels, wh. I hardly recognized at first, but memory came back. Of course things were changed. The spinney of little saplings had grown quite high. The countryside was no longer the howling waste it once looked to us. We ate our egg sandwiches and pork pies and drank our bottled beer. In spite of W.’s fears it was as much as we could do to get through them all. But then, as he pointed out, this was appropriate to the scene. We were behaving just as we would have done fifteen years earlier. ‘Having eaten everything in sight, we are now finished.’ We had a lot of glorious reminiscent talk. We developed our own version of si jeunesse savait: if we could only have seen as far as this out of the hell of Wynyard. I felt a half comic, half savage pleasure (Hobbes’s sudden glory) to think how by the mere laws of life we had completely won and Oldy had completely lost. For here were we with our stomachs full of sandwiches, sitting in the sun and wind, while he had been in hell these ten years.

We drove on and had tea at Aylesbury—dizzy by now and stupid with fresh air—and got to Oxford before seven. On Saturday . . . W. and I (after I had done the lunch wash up) biked to Wantage Road where he wanted to take a photo of the fastest train in England. We did this successfully and looked out for a suitable place for tea on the return journey. A countryman told us that there was no pub near, but that we could get tea at the—it sounded like Dog House. We both felt sure there could be no place called the dog house, yet presently found it. Here we had strange adventures. I rang at the closed door—it is a little red house under a woodside—and waited for ten minutes: then rang again. At last a very ancient beldame appeared. I asked if we could have some tea. She looked hard at me and asked ‘Are you golfers?’: on my answering ‘no’ she shut the door softly and I could hear her hobbling away into the bowels of the house. I felt like Arthur at Orgoglio’s Castle. Anon the ancient dame appeared again and looking even harder at me asked me a second time what I wanted. I repeated that we wanted some tea. She brought her face closer to mine and then with the air of one who comes at last to the real point asked ‘How long did you want it for?’ I was quite unable to answer this question but by God’s grace the witch left me multa parantem dicere and hobbled away once more. This time she left the door open and we walked in and found our way to a comfortable dining room where a plentiful and quite unmagical tea was presently brought us. We sat here for a very long time. A storm of wind got up (raised, I make no doubt, by our hostess, who by the by, may have been the matriarchal dreadfulness) and the ivy lashed the windows. On the next day, Sunday, we went to bathe at Parson’s Pleasure . . . W. left us on Monday . . .

9–16 July 1924

I spent most of this time looking up the books I was to examine in . . . This was the first time I had looked into Macaulay for many years: I hope it will be many years before I read him again. It’s not the style (in the narrower sense) that’s the trouble—it’s a very good style within its own limits. But the man is a humbug—a vulgar, shallow, self-satisfied mind: absolutely inaccessible to the complexities and delicacies of the real world. He has the journalist’s air of being a specialist in everything, of taking in all points of view and being always on the side of the angels: he merely annoys a reader who has had the least experience of knowing things, of what knowing is like. There is not two pence worth of real thought or real nobility in him. But he isn’t dull . . .

TO HIS FATHER: from University College (after reading and correcting many School Certificate essays)

[27 July 1924]

I should have answered your last generous letter earlier but for the last three weeks I have been busy from morning to night examining. To examine is like censoring letters in the army or (I fancy) like hearing confessions if you are a priest. Beforehand it seems interesting—a curious vantage point from which to look into the minds of a whole crowd of people ‘as if we were God’s spies’: but it turns out to be cruelly dull. As the censoring subaltern finds that every man in his platoon says the same things in his letters home, and as the priest, no doubt, finds that all his penitents confess the same sins, so the examiner finds that out of hundreds of girls and boys of all social classes from all parts of England, scarcely a dozen make themselves memorable either for original ideas or amusing mistakes.

The paper which I corrected most of was on David Copperfield and Kinglake’s Eothen: and the first question was ‘Contrast the characters of Uriah Heep and Mr Micawber’. So one takes up one’s first sheet of answers and reads ‘Uriah Heep is the finished type of a rogue: Mr Micawber on the other hand is the portrait of a happy go lucky debtor.’ Then one plods on to the same question answered by the next candidate and reads ‘Mr Micawber is the finished portrait of a happy go lucky debtor, while Uriah Heep is a typical (or perhaps “typicle”) rogue.’ And so it goes on through all the weary hours of the day till one’s brain reels with Uriah Heep and Mr Micawber and one would willingly thrash the editor or whoever it is who has supplied them with that maddening jargon about the ‘finished portrait of a rogue’.

I must set down on the credit side the fact of having been thus forced to read Eothen. I know of course that it has stood in red cloth, skied near the ceiling in the bookcase nearest the study door, since I can remember—unmoved by twenty spring cleanings, the Russian Revolution and the fall of the German Monarchy. I don’t know whether this is one of the books you have advised me to read or not. It is even possible (such things have been known) that Eothen has lived there all these years in the study bookcase undisturbed not only by the Russian revolution, but equally by the hand of its owner . . . At any rate I most strongly advise you to give yourself a very pleasant evening by taking down Kinglake. If you don’t feel a stomach for the whole thing at least read the interview between the Pasha and the ‘possible policeman of Bedfordshire’ in the first chapter and the Surprise of Sataleih in the last, for humour: and for ornate prose I should recommend the opening of the chapter on Constantinople, the part beginning ‘the stormy bride of the Doge is the bowing slave of the Sultan’. The Colonel was over here shortly before my durance began and I have converted him to my new idol: so you must by all means ‘come in’ and share the spoil—unless of course you really had read it already . . .

I had almost forgotten to say that on the occasion of W.’s last visit I went over to Colchester for the night in order to come back with him in the sidecar. The new bike is a noble machine and we stopped to eat our lunch at a railway bridge near Watford which used to be the regular goal of our walks when we were at Wynyard. Here we sat on the slope of the cutting looking down on the L.N.W.R. main line on which we used to gaze in the old days when it was the only object of interest in the landscape. It was strange to find that the said landscape was quite an ordinary, even pleasant English countryside: and it was almost impossible to realize the appalling blankness and hostility which it once wore. In those days we had not grown used to the English colouring (so different from Ulster): our interests and appreciation of nature were limited to the familiar: rivers might wind and trees bloom in vain—one saw it all only as an abominable mass of earth dividing one by hundreds of miles from home and the hills and the sea and ships and everything a reasonable man could care for. We were puzzled for some time as to why the line was invisible from a fence on which we used to sit to watch it: until W. hit on the simple truth that some trees which had been little trees in 1909 had become big trees in 1924. That’s the sort of moment that makes the youngest of us feel old . . .

TO HIS FATHER: from University College

Postmark: 28 August 1924

When I came to the part in your letter where you speak of how God does temper the wind to the shorn lamb I fairly laid it down and laughed. A joke by letter seldom has this effect: it usually arrives but the ghost of the spoken joke—it reaches the intellect without disturbing the face. But the image of Warnie as a shorn lamb, and of the expression with which he would say ‘What d’you mean?’ if you tried to explain to him why he was funny as a shorn lamb, was too much for me. But though you didn’t mention it, I know very well who tempered the wind in the present case.

I am plodding on with my fourteen lectures—I am at number five, or rather have just finished it. I think I said before that I am not writing them in extenso, only notes. The extemporary element thus reproduced is dangerous for a beginner, but read lectures send people to sleep and I think I must make the plunge from the very beginning and learn to talk, not to recite. I practise continually, expanding my notes to imaginary audiences, but of course it is difficult to be quite sure what will fill an hour. Perhaps I will experiment on you when I come home! The laborious part is the continual verifying of references and quoting. As Johnson says ‘a man can write pretty quickly when he writes from his own mind: but he will turn over one half a library to make one book.’¹¹⁰ And of course when one is trying to teach one can take nothing for granted. Hitherto I have always talked or read to people to whom I could say ‘You remember Bradley’s stunt about judgement’ or ‘The sort of business you get at the beginning of Kant’. But of course that won’t do now—and the deuce of it is that when you actually look the passage up you always find that they either say more or less than you want. Consequently I spend my days running from library to library, or hunting things from the index of one book to another. By the way, in oral instruction, how many times do you have to say the same thing before people tumble to it? You should be able to answer that.

While it comes into my head—a propos of the photo of Warnie bathing—I take it it is the one of him floating which he showed me: telling me at the same time that one of his colleagues had remarked ‘It is one of the sights of the summer to see Lewis anchored off the coast’ . . .

TO HIS FATHER: from University College

[15 October 1924]

My maiden lecture yesterday went off alright in a sense—the only difficulty was the audience. They put me down for the same time at which a much more important lecture by an established man was being held elsewhere. They also, by a misprint, put me down as lecturing at Pembroke, not at Univ. In these conditions it is not to be wondered at if no one came at all. As a matter of fact four people turned up! This of course is not very encouraging. But I shall not let it come between me and my rest. Better men than I have begun in the same way and one must be patient. As long as Mr Pritchard’s highly essential lectures are held at the same time as mine, I can hardly expect anyone to come to me.¹¹¹ Don’t be worried about it.

Otherwise everything goes well. All my new colleagues are kindness itself and everyone does his best to make me feel at home—especially dear old Poynton. I find the actual tutoring easy at the time (tho’ I am curiously tired at the end of the day) and have already struck some quite good men among my pupils. I have seen only one real dud so far—a man who celebrated his first hour with me by telling me as many obvious lies as I have ever heard in a short space . . . I have the College football captain among my pupils and am busy making up that subject also in order to be able to talk to him.

[Jack and Warren travelled to Belfast by motorcycle and sidecar and were with their father from 23 December to 10 January 1925. They took a few days’ excursion in the South of England before returning to Oxford on 13 January.]

TO HIS FATHER: from University College

Postmark: 11 February 1925

You should have heard from me before, but I have hardly been in a position to write. I spent the first fortnight of the term in bed with flu. I am very much afraid my organism is acquiring the habit of getting this troublesome complaint every time it becomes prevalent. As you have had it yourself and as you doubtless remember the curious psychological results it produces in the convalescent stage—the depression and dead alive feeling—I need not describe them . . .

W. and I had a magnificent ride back and I was sorry he had not his camera with him. From Shrewsbury to Oxford was all perfect: an orgy of woods, hills, broad rivers, grey castles, Norman abbeys and towns that have always been asleep. I wish I could describe Ledbury to you. It consists of about four broad streets in which every second house is of the Elizabethan type, timbered and white, with gables to the front. It is set in the middle of delightful rolling country and the end of the Malvern hills comes down to the town end. Best of all, no one has yet ‘discovered’ it: it has not become a show place and the inhabitants are quite unaware that there is anything remarkable about it. Ludlow too I would like you to see: with its castle, former seat of the Earl of the Marches, where Comus was first performed. But after all where can you go in the South and West of England without meeting beauty?

I don’t think I have much news. All goes on as usual here—that is to say very pleasantly on the whole though with some sense of strain and little leisure. My lectures have gone off rather better this term though it’s still very much a case of ‘fit audience though few’. My most persevering auditor is an aged parson (I can’t imagine where he comes from) who takes very copious notes and darts dagger glances at me every now and then. Some one suggests that he is a spy sent out by the board of faculties to detect young lecturers in heresy—and that he keeps on coming with the idea that if he gives me enough rope I shall hang myself in the end. There is also a girl who draws pictures half the time—alas, I have done so myself! . . .

TO HIS FATHER: from University College

[April 1925]

I am sorry to hear of your ‘rotten Easter’: mine was redeemed by the glorious two days trip with Warnie. Otherwise I was pretty well hustled during the vacation, working against time to prepare for this term, which, to tell the truth I begin in rather a tired state. As you once said to me, ‘Talking is the most exhausting of all occupations’.

The trip was delightful. I was pleased to revisit Salisbury and see it more thoroughly. I well remember my former visit. ‘It was a Sunday’ and not very early in the morning, as you doubtless recollect, when we stopped for a few minutes in Uncle Hamilton’s headlong career and heard morning prayer going on in the Cathedral. At that time I did not agree with you and cared for it less than Wells or Winchester.

This time as we came into sight of Salisbury, where, on those big rolling downs that spire can be seen from fifteen miles away, I began to have my doubts. Later, when we had had tea and strolled into the Close I decided that it was very good in its own way but not in my favourite way. But when we came out again and saw it by moonlight after supper, I was completely conquered. It was a perfect spring night with the moon nearly full, and not a breath of wind stirring nor a sound from the streets. The half light enhanced its size, and the sharp masses of shadow falling in three great patches from the three main faces of one side emphasized the extraordinary simplicity in which it differs so from say, Wells.

That is the real difference I think, and what repelled me at first: the others, mixed of a dozen styles, have grown from century to century like organic things and the slow history of secular change has been built into them. One feels the people behind them more: the nameless craftsmen in this or that gargoyle which is different from every other.

Salisbury, on the other hand, is the idea of a master mind, struck out at once for ever. Barring mechanical difficulties it might have been built in a day. Doesn’t Kipling talk of the Taj-Mahal as ‘a sigh made marble’? On the same metaphor one might say that Wells is an age made into stone and Salisbury a petrified moment. But what a moment! The more one looks the more it satisfies. What impressed me most—the same thought has come into everyone’s head in such places—was the force of Mind: the thousands of tons of masonry held in place by an idea, a religion: buttress, window, acres of carving, the very lifeblood of men’s work, all piled up there and gloriously useless from the side of the base utility for which alone we build now. It really is typical of a change—the mediaeval town where the shops and houses huddle at the foot of the cathedral, and the modern city where the churches huddle between the sky scraping offices and the appalling ‘stores’. We had another good look at it in the morning light after breakfast—when the plump and confident members of the feathered chapter cooing in the very porch added a new charm. W. says that Salisbury is Barset: if so, we must have been standing near where the Warden said ‘I’m afraid I shall never like Mrs Proudie’ and the Archdeacon took off his hat to ‘let a cloud of steam escape’.

On our run that day we stopped at Stonehenge—a very fine morning and intensely quiet except for a battery practising over the next ride. It was the first time I had heard a gun fired since I left France, and I cannot tell you how odd the sensation was. For one thing it seemed much louder and more sinister and generally unpleasant than I had expected: as was perhaps natural for the general tendency of memory to minimize, and also from the solitude and quiet of the place.

I thought (as I had thought when we revisited Watford) how merciful it would be if we could sometimes forsee the future: how it would have carried me through many a long working night in the trenches if I could have seen myself ‘seven years on’ smoking my pipe in the oldest place in the old, safe, comfortable English fields where guns fire only at targets. But on the whole, however, it would not be a comfortable priveledge: though I have no doubt at all that it is accorded to some—but like all these mysterious leaks through of Something Else into our experience it seems to come without rhyme or reason, indifferently chosen for the trivial or the tragic occasion. I don’t know why I have blundered into this subject, which may not interest you: you must put it down as a momentary eruption of that sense of irremediable ignorance and bewilderment which is becoming every year more certainly my permanent reaction to things. Whatever else the human race was made for, it at least was not made to know.

This is my last term ‘in the bond’ at Univ. and there is still no word of the Fellowship. I begin to be afraid that it is not coming at all. A Fellowship in English is announced at Magdalen and of course I am applying for it, but without any serious hopes as I believe much senior people including my own old English tutor are in for it. If he gets it I may get some of the ‘good will of the business’: I mean some of the pupils at Univ., Exeter and elsewhere whom he will have to abandon. These continued hopes deferred are trying, and I’m afraid trying for you too. About money, if you will put in £40—if you think this is reasonable—I shall be on the pig’s back.

My best pupil is in great trouble. He went down in the middle of last term to attend his father’s deathbed. He came up late at the beginning of this term, having been detained at home while his mother was operated on for cancer. To make matters worse the poor fellow has been left very badly off by his father’s death, and it was even doubted last term whether he would be able to go on with his course. It is really extraordinary how long troubles are in letting go when they have once fastened on an individual or a house. If only he had a decent chance he would almost certainly get a first: he is in addition a very modest decent chap. One feels very helpless in coming continually into contact with such a case. If I were an older man, or again if I were his contemporary I might be able to convey some sense of sympathy: but the slight difference in age, or some defect in myself makes an insurmountable barrier and I can only feel how trivial or external and even impertinent my ‘philosophy’ must seem to him at such a moment.

I am sorry if this is rather a scrappy letter—and likewise rather smudged and meanly written. I have been writing in pauses between pupils, and odd moments. You must not think that I am forgetful in my long silences. I have often things to say to you day by day, but in the absence of viva voce conversation they die away and the time and mood for a set letter do not come so easily.

I have been into Hall and common room afterwards and heard an interesting thing. Do you remember Mrs Asquith’s saying in that detestable autobiography that she once asked Jowett if he had ever been in love? He replied ‘Yes’ and being asked what the lady was like, replied ‘Violent—very violent.’¹¹² Apparently the lady was really Florence Nightingale. Poynton and Farquharson both knew of it. For her ‘violence’ see Strachey in Eminent Victorians. The story—a strange tragicomedy—seems to have been common property. Both the parties were irascable and opinionated and quarrelled nearly as often as they met: and yet the affair hung on for a long time . . .

[On 20 May 1925 Mr Lewis recorded the following incident in his diary:

While I was waiting for dinner Mary came into the study and said ‘The Post Office is on the phone’. I went to it.

‘A telegram for you.’

‘Read it.’

‘Elected Fellow Magdalen. Jack.’

‘Thank you.’

I went up to his room and burst into tears of joy. I knelt down and thanked God with a full heart. My prayers have been heard and answered.]

TO HIS FATHER: from University College

26 May 1925

First, let me thank you from the bottom of my heart for the generous support, extended over six years, which alone has enabled me to hang on till this. In the long course I have seen men at least my equals in ability and qualifications fall out for the lack of it. ‘How long can I afford to wait’ was everybody’s question: and few had those at their back who were both able and willing to keep them in the field so long. You have waited, not only without complaint but full of encouragement, while chance after chance slipped away and when the goal receded furthest from sight. Thank you again and again. It has been a nerve racking business, and I have hardly yet had time to taste my good fortune with a deliberate home felt relish.

First of all, as I told you, I thought that I had my own tutor Wilson as a rival, which would have made the thing hopeless. But that I found to be a false rumour. Then I wrote to Wilson and Gordon (the Professor of English Literature)¹¹³ for testimonials, relying on them as my strongest supports. Within twenty-four hours I had the same answer from both. They were very sorry. If only they had known I was going in for it . . . they thought I had definitely abandoned English for philosophy. As it was, they had already given their support to my friend Coghill of Exeter. Once more, they were exceedingly sorry, and remained mine sincerely etc.

This was enough to make anyone despair: but mark how the stars sometimes fight for us. Two days later came news that Coghill had been offered a fellowship by his own College and had withdrawn from the field. Wilson’s testimonial—a very good one—came by the next post. Gordon said he wouldn’t write anything as he was going to be consulted personally by the Magdalen people, but he would back me. This of course was much better than the testimonial. Still, I hardly allowed myself to hope. Then came a letter from Gordon—‘CONFIDENTIAL’. ‘I was asked my opinion about the candidates yesterday and I put my money on you. I think your chances good, but of course one never knows what the spin of the coin may do in such things.’ This, I said to myself, is at least nearer than I’ve ever got before: but don’t hope, don’t build on it.

Then came an invitation to dine at Magdalen on Sunday a fortnight ago. This showed only that I was one of the possibles. Then came the little problems that seem so big at the time. Was Magdalen one of the Colleges where they wore white ties and tails, or did they wear dinner jackets and black ties? I asked the Farq. and he advised white tie and tails: and of course when I got there I found every one in black ties and dinner jackets. These dinners for inspection are not exactly the pleasantest way of spending one’s evening—as you may imagine. You can hardly say ‘He’ll enjoy it when he gets there’. But I must say they carried off as well as could be asked a situation which must be irksome to the hosts as well as to the guest. So far so good.

Then came a spell of thundery weather of the sort that makes a man nervous and irritable even if he has nothing on his mind: and the news that Bryson and I were the two real candidates.¹¹⁴ Bryson comes from home and knows Arthur: but of course I mention his name in the strictest possible secrecy. One afternoon, in that week, I saw the said Bryson emerging from Magdalen and (‘so full of shapes is fancy’)¹¹⁵ felt an unanswerable inner conviction that he had won and made up my mind on it.

On the Saturday Warren (1) met me in the street and had a vague tho’ kindly conversation with me.¹¹⁶ On Monday I had a very abrupt note from him asking me to see him on Tuesday morning, with the curious addition ‘It is most important’. I didn’t like it at all: it suggested some horrible hitch. Was I going to be viva-d on Anglo–Saxon verbs or asked my views on the Thirty Nine Articles? We had thunder that night, but a poor storm and not enough to clear the air: and Tuesday rose up a grey clammy morning when one sweats every time one moves and the big blue bottles settle on your hands. This sounds like writing it up to an exciting conclusion: but it was a nasty morning and it was quite exciting enough for me at the time.

I got to Magdalen, and, would you believe it, he kept me waiting for half an hour before he saw me. The choir boys were practising in the tower close by. When he did see me it turned out to be all formalities. They were electing tomorrow and thought me the ‘strongest and most acceptable candidate’. Now if I were elected would I agree to this, and would I be prepared to do that, and did I understand that the terms of the fellowship implied so and so. The only thing of the slightest importance was ‘would I be prepared in addition to the English pupils, to help with the philosophy’. (This, I imagine, stood me in good stead: probably no other candidate had done English as well as philosophy.) I need hardly say that I would have agreed to coach a troupe of performing bagbirds in the quadrangle: but I looked very wise and thought over all his points and I hope let no subservience appear. He then gave me a long talk about the special needs of Magdalen undergraduates—as if they were different from any others!—all as if I had been elected, but without saying I had been. During the whole interview he was cold and dry and not nearly so agreeable as he had been on the Saturday. He finally dismissed me with a request that I would hang about Univ. the following afternoon in case I were called for.

And then next day—about 2.30—they telephoned for me and I went down. Warren saw me, told me I had been elected and shook hands: since, he has written me a very nice letter of congratulations saying that he believes they may congratulate themselves. It is a fine job as our standards go: starting at £500 a year with ‘provision made for rooms, a pension, and dining allowance’. The election for five years only in the first case of course means only that in five years they have the chance of getting rid of you if you turn out ‘hardly one of our successes’. One hopes, in the ordinary course of events, to be re-elected.

A cat ‘met me in the day of my success’ and bit me deeply in the right thumb while I was trying to prevent it from attacking a small dog. In fact, to go on with the Shakespearian allusion, I came ‘between the fell incensed points of mighty opposites’.¹¹⁷ By dint of poultices I have now reduced the inflammation, and this is the first day I have been able to write with ease. It would have been better sooner if I had not been forced daily to answer as best I could the kind congratulations which have reached me. I must cut it short now. It has been an egotistical letter, but you asked for it. Once more, with very hearty thanks and best love . . .

(1) I mean the President of Magdalen of course, not Big Brother.

TO HIS FATHER: from University College

14 August [1925]

The only other event of importance since I last wrote has been my formal ‘admission’ at Magdalen. It is a formidable ceremony and not entirely to my taste. Without any warning of what was in store for me, the Vice-President (a young fellow called Wrong whom I have since got to know on the Cambridge jaunt)¹¹⁸ ushered me into a room where I found the whole household—it is large at Magdalen. Warren was standing and when Wrong laid a red cushion at his feet I realized with some displeasure that this was going to be a kneeling affair. Warren then addressed me for some five minutes in Latin. I was able to follow some three-quarters of what he said: but no one had told me what response I ought to make and it was with some hesitation that I hasarded do fidem as a reply—copying the formula for taking your M.A. This appeared to fill the bill. I was then told (in English) to kneel. When I had done so Warren took me by the hand and raised me with the words ‘I wish you joy’. It sounds well enough on paper but it was hardly impressive in fact: and I tripped over my gown in rising. I now thought my ordeal at an end: but I was never more mistaken in my life. I was sent all round the table and every single member in turn shook my hand and repeated the words ‘I wish you joy’. You can hardly imagine how odd it sounded by the twenty-fifth repetition. English people have not the talent for graceful ceremonial. They go through it lumpishly and with a certain mixture of defiance and embarrassment as if everyone felt he was being rather silly and was at the same time ready to shoot the first man who said so. In a French or Italian university now, this might have gone off nobly . . .

In a way I share your regret that when the opening came it did not come at Univ. I shall never find a common room that I did not like better: and every break in the continuity of ones associations is in some degree unpleasant. No one likes, even at my age, to see any slice of life being finally turned over to the past.

As to the other change—from Philosophy to English—I share your feeling less. I think you are mistaken in supposing that the field is less crowded in Philosophy: it seems so to you only because you have more chance of seeing the literary crowd. If you read Mind and one or two other periodicals of the sort as regularly as you read the Literary Supplement, you would probably change your view. I think things are about equal in that way. On other grounds I am rather glad of the change. I have come to think that if I had the mind, I have not the brain and nerves for a life of pure philosophy. A continued search among the abstract roots of things, a perpetual questioning of all that plain men take for granted, a chewing the cud for fifty years over inevitable ignorance and a constant frontier watch on the little tidy lighted conventional world of science and daily life—is this the best life for temperaments such as ours? Is it the way of health or even of sanity? There is a type of man, bull necked and self satisfied in his ‘pot bellied equanimity’ who urgently needs that bleak and questioning atmosphere. And what is a tonic to the Saxon may be a debauch to us Celts. As it certainly is to the Hindoos.

I am not condemning philosophy. Indeed in turning from it to literary history and criticism, I am conscious of a descent: and if the air on the heights did not suit me, still I have brought back something of value. It will be a comfort to me all my life to know that the scientist and the materialist have not the last word: that Darwin and [Herbert] Spencer undermining ancestral beliefs stand themselves on a foundation of sand; of gigantic assumptions and irreconcilable contradictions an inch below the surface. It leaves the whole thing rich in possibilities: and if it dashes the shallow optimisms it does the same for the shallow pessimisms. But having once seen all this ‘darkness’, a darkness full of promise, it is perhaps best to shut the trapdoor and come back to ordinary life: unless you are one of the really great who can see into it a little way—and I was not.

At any rate I escape with joy from one definite drawback of philosophy—its solitude. I was beginning to feel that your first year carries you out of the reach of all save other professionals. No one sympathizes with your adventures in that subject because no one understands them: and if you struck treasure trove no one would be able to use it. But perhaps this is enough on this subject. I hope you are well and free from corns, sore gums and all other ‘crosses’ . . .

[On Jack’s next visit with his father they got on better than they had in a long time. In his diary for 13 September Mr Lewis wrote: ‘Jacks arrived for holiday. Looking very well and in great spirits.’ On 1 October he wrote: ‘Jacks returned. A fortnight and a few days with me. Very pleasant, not a cloud. Went to the boat with him. The first time I did not pay his passage money. I offered, but he did not want it.’

Following his return to Oxford Jack divided his time between Magdalen and ‘Hillsboro’. During term he slept in his college rooms—Staircase 3, Number 3, of New Buildings—and visited the ‘family’ at ‘Hillsboro’ in the afternoons. When term ended this was reversed and he spent his nights at ‘Hillsboro’ and came into Magdalen whenever there was a need to do so.]

TO HIS FATHER: from Magdalen College

21 October 1925

When we discussed the question of furnishing my rooms before I left, I thought it a very remote contingency. It was rather a crushing blow to find that I had to get everything—and for three spacious rooms: the extent of College’s bounty being some linoleum in the smaller sitting room and a washstand in the bedroom. It is hard to say on what principle fellows are provided with washstands but left to provide their own beds: unless it is a symbol of the combined vigilance and purity which is so characteristic of their corporate life. Carpets, tables, curtains, chairs, fenders, fire irons, coal boxes, table covers—everything—had to be bought in haste. It has cost me over £90, although I was able to pick up some things second hand. It sounds an alarming total, but I do not think I have been extravagant; the rooms certainly do not look as if they had been furnished by a plutocrat.

My external surroundings are beautiful beyond expectation and beyond hope. To live in the Bishop’s Palace at Wells would be good but could hardly be better than this. My big sitting room looks north and from it I see nothing, not even a gable or spire, to remind me that I am in a town. I look down on a stretch of level grass which passes into a grove of immemorial forest trees, at present coloured with autumn red. Over this stray the deer. They are erratic in their habits. Some mornings when I look out there will be half a dozen chewing the cud just underneath me, and on others there will be none in sight—or one little stag (not much bigger than a calf and looking too slender for the weight of its own antlers) standing still and sending through the fog that queer little bark or hoot which is these beasts ‘moo’. It is a sound that will soon be as familiar to me as the cough of the cows in the field at home, for I hear it day and night. On my right hand as I look from these windows is ‘his favourite walk’.¹¹⁹ My smaller sitting room and bedroom looks out southward across a broad lawn to the main buildings of Magdalen with the tower across it. It beats Bannaher!

As to the ‘College’ in the other sense—as a human society—I can say little yet. One’s first impressions of a new set are changed many times in the first month. They are all very nice to me. The general tone of the place strikes me as rather slack and flippant—I mean among the Dons—but I may very well be mistaken. Sambo [the President] hardly ever appears. The most surprising thing is that they are much less formal than Univ. They don’t dress for dinner except when the President dines on which occasion a warning notice is sent round to our rooms. Again, there are an enormous number of us compared with Univ., and we meet much more often. Thus we breakfast and lunch in Common Room; meals in your own rooms (which I had thought universal at Oxford) being unknown here either for Dons or undergraduates. The latter are a little aloof from the rest of Oxford: not entirely thro’ affectation but because as a matter of geography we are ‘at the town’s end’: or, as someone said, we are the beginning of suburbia. I have very few pupils at present, wh. of course is helping me to improve my reading. They are quite nice fellows . . .

TO HIS FATHER: from Magdalen College

4 December [1925]

I have had a nasty blow—don’t be alarmed, it concerns neither life, limb or reputation. I was already rather worried about the difficulty of preparing an English lecture in the time at my disposal, but by dint of choosing a short subject which I know well (XVIII century precursors of the Romantic movement) I hoped to be able to acquit myself well enough. What was my displeasure on finding, when the rough draft of next term’s lecture list was sent me, that my old tutor Wilson was lecturing on ‘English Poetry from Thomson to Cowper’. Now of course my ‘precursors’, with the exception of some critics and other prose writers, are just the poets from Thomson and Cowper. It is in fact the same subject under a different name. This means that, being neither able nor willing to rival Wilson, I am driven to concentrate on the prose people of whom at present I know very little. I have as hard a spell cut out for me between now and next term as I have ever had. Of course all the more easy and obvious subjects which will leap to your mind are long since occupied by the bigwigs.

The immediate consequence is that I am afraid I shall scarcely be able to take more than a week at home this Christmas. To compensate for this I shall try to get across at Easter. I am sorry to disappoint you (and myself): but it is only one of the many evils which I see following from this bad luck about the lecture. At the very best it means working much harder for a much poorer result. Of course no one, least of all Wilson himself, is to blame . . .

TO HIS FATHER: from Magdalen College (Following a visit with their father in Belfast 20–28 December Warren was posted to Woolwich.)

[5 January 1926]

Warnie and I had a rather interesting journey back. First there was the episode of the friendly and intoxicated stranger in the smoking room of the Liverpool boat: but I feel that the Colonel’s pen will do that story more justice than mine. Secondly there was the amazingly erudite fellow traveller in the train. I suppose he had gathered from our conversation—W. was reading Evelyn’s diaries—that we were bookish people, but he let several hours pass before he quite suddenly chipped in, in a rather apologetic manner. I surmise that he lives among people who do not share his tastes and it is a relief to him to talk about them. He did not speak with the voice of an educated man, but his reading was curious: Pepys, Evelyn, Burnet, Boswell, Macaulay, Trollope, Thackeray, Ruskin, Morris and The Golden Bough. He seemed to be some kind of architect or decorator.

Now this is the sort of thing I like. To have a literary conversation in the study at Leeborough or the common room at Magdalen is (by comparison) nothing, because one remains in the charmed circle of ones own set and caste: there is nothing to refute the accusation of being out of the world, of playing with things that perhaps derive a fictitious value from the chatter of specially formed groups. But to talk over the same things with a man whose aitches are uncertain in a third class carriage—this restores ones faith in the value of the written word and makes one feel suddenly at home in ones country. It is the difference between grapes in a greenhouse and a hillside of vines.

The other interesting thing in our journey was the new scenery produced by the floods. Round about Warwick (you remember Warwick) for miles at a time there was nothing but water between one hedgerow and the next—and then the little hills made into islands. A village on a rise with ‘the decent church that fronts (or is it crowns) the neighbouring hill’ has a very fine effect.

You probably spotted the enclosed picture [of Magdalen College] in today’s Times, but I send it in case you have not. The long building to the right of the tower is ‘New Building’ which Gibbon, who lived in it, called ‘a stately pile’ . . . You can imagine from the picture what a magnificent view I now have when the park has been converted into a lake. On a fine day when the sky makes the water blue and the wind fills it with ripples, one might almost take it for an arm of the sea. Of course I am not forgetting the serious side of the floods: but after all, what would you? I can’t save the life of Dutch peasants or the pockets of Warwickshire peasants by refusing to enjoy the beauty of the thing as it appears from my window . . .

TO HIS FATHER: from Magdalen College

Postmark: 25 January 1926

As to the German measles—will you think me affected if I number a small illness among the minor pleasures of life? The early stages are unpleasant but at least they bring you to a point at which the mere giving up and going to bed is a relief. Then after twenty-four hours the really high temperature and the headache are gone: one is not well enough to get up, but then one is ill enough not to want to get up. Best of all, work is impossible and one can read all day for mere pleasure with a clear conscience.

I re-read some of my favourite Jane Austens and read for the first time that jolly, unexpected tale, Quentin Durward. I even took the chance of going on with my neglected Italian and got through several cantos of Boiardo: an interminable fairy-tale kind of a poet, full of dragons and distressed damsels, without the slightest moral or intellectual significance. It is suited to the atmosphere of a day in bed with the snow falling outside: the drift, the holiday from all sublunary cares. Then one returns to a primitive and natural life as regards sleeping and waking. One dozes when the doze comes unsought and if one lies castle building at night one does not mind because there is no getting up in the morning.

But of course all these delights have to be paid for: the first few days back to work when legs still ache and hours are long, are an unwelcome shock of earth—and that, I think, is the really bad part of it. I hope you are now past that stage . . .

I have given my first lecture. I suppose my various friends in the English Schools have been telling their pupils to come to it: at any rate it was a pleasant change from talking to empty rooms in Greats. I modestly selected the smallest lecture room in College. As I approached, half wondering if anyone would turn up, I noticed a crowd of undergraduates coming into Magdalen, but it was no mock modesty to assume that they were coming to hear someone else. When however I actually reached my own room it was crowded out and I had to sally forth with the audience at my heels to find another. The porter directed me to one which we have in another building across the street. So we all surged over the High in a disorderly mass, suspending the traffic. It was a most exhilirating scene. Of course their coming to the first lecture, the men to see what it is like, the girls to see what I am like, really means nothing: curiosity is now satisfied—I have been weighed, with results as yet unknown—and next week I may have an audience of five or none. Still it is something to be given a chance . . .

FROM HIS DIARY: at Magdalen College

27 May 1926

Betjemann and Valentin came with O. E. [Old English].¹²⁰ Betjemann appeared in a pair of eccentric bedroom slippers and said he hoped I didn’t mind them as he had a blister. He seemed so pleased with himself that I couldn’t help saying that I should mind them very much myself but that I had no objection to his wearing them—a view which I believe surprised him . . .

TO HIS FATHER: from Magdalen College

5 June 1926

I hear with delight from Warnie that you propose to visit England this summer. Let us determine that no light reason shall be allowed to upset this plan, and no difficulty be made into an impossibility. My idea is that I should cross to Ireland for part of my usual time and that we shd then return to Oxford and you spend some days with me in College. There is a set of guest rooms on this very staircase, so we should be very snug and able to hob nob a’ nights without going out of doors. We could dine in Common Room (not dressed) or go to an ordinary in the town as we preferred, and you would have an opportunity of sauntering about the city and its fields with more leisure than Uncle Hamilton’s peremptory programme allowed us. Then, if possible, W. could come up for a week and we might proceed to London or elsewhere. Do make every effort to realize this plan. Now that I am in College we have a pied à terre in England which seems to have all the advantages and none of the drawbacks of a hotel, and which certainly ought to make visits more possible than they have ever been before. It is rather important to try and fix a date, and I should be glad to know when you think you could get away.

But I know what I do in raising the point of ‘date’. At least I presume it is from you that I inherit a peculiar tendency by which a chill comes over the happiest designs as soon as a definite detail of time or place is raised. At first all is attractive and like a floating island, detached from the actual world: at the mention of a date, obstructions crowd upon the mind: arrangements to be made, difficulties to be overcome, and all the repellent lumber of packings, boats, time tables and interrupted habits rush in and ‘quench the smoking flax’. The odds are that the whole scheme, if injudiciously pressed at that moment becomes a sort of bugbear. Is this a true bill? It is of me, I know only too well. The only remedy seems to be to remember that every happiness we have attained in the past depended on the lucky moments when we were not cowed by the ‘lumber’. (Lord! Was there ever such a young fellow for preaching at his elders? He cannot take up his pen but a steady flow of doctrine begins. Perhaps it comes from taking pupils.)

A heavy responsibility rests on those who forage through a dead man’s correspondence and publish it indiscriminately. In those books of Raleigh’s we find, as you say, letters like ‘a glass of good champagne’ side by side with mere squibs thrown off in high spirits or mere grumbles written when he was liverish.¹²¹ Notice how Liverpool, India and Oxford all come up for castigation in turn. Much of this should never have seen print. The antireligious passages are odd. Something must be allowed for the mere turn of his language which was always violent and dogmatic—like Johnson . . . When all allowance has been made for the haphazard nature of casual letter writing, it remains true that there must be a flaw in a man who is always blessing or damning something or other. There are too many exstasies and the opposite . . .

I have been bothered into the last job I ever expected to do this term: taking a class of girls once a week at one of the women’s Colleges. However, I am not engaged to be married yet, and there are always seven of them there together, and the pretty ones are stupid and the interesting ones are ugly, so it is alright. I say this because as a general rule women marry their tutors. I suppose if a girl is determined to marry and has a man alone once a week to whom she can play the rapt disciple (most fatal of all poses to male vanity) her task is done . . .

The best strike story I have heard was about engines. A train (with amateur driver) set out from Paddington for Bristol, first stop Bath. When it reached Bath half an hour earlier than normal express time, every single passenger got out of that train and refused to enter it again. Apparently the genius in the engine had just opened the throttle full, said to the stoker ‘Carry on’, and left the rest to fate . . .

FROM HIS DIARY: at Magdalen College

6 June 1926

As Hardie¹²² and I were coming across to New Building we were overtaken by J. A.¹²³ who proposed a stroll in the walks. We went in [and] sat in the garden till it was quite dark. He was very great, telling us about his travels in the Balkans. The best things were (a) the masterful ladies (English of course) on a small Greek steamer who made such a nuisance of themselves that the Captain said ‘Have you no brothers? Why have they not got someone to marry you?’ and went on muttering at intervals for the rest of the evening ‘It ought to have been possible to get someone’. (b) The Austrian minister at some unhealthy town who took J. A. and his party out for a walk on the railway line, which was the only place level enough to walk on, and beginning to balance himself on the rails, remarked sadly ‘C’est mon seul sport’. (c) The Greek clergyman who asked J. A. and his sister to tea and when they departed, accompanied them back to their hotel repeating ‘You will remember me?’ ‘Yes, certainly’ said J. A. The clergyman repeated his touching request about fifteen times and each time J. A. (tho’ somewhat surprised) assured him with increasing warmth that he would never forget him. It was only afterwards that they realized that the reverend gentleman was asking for a tip . . .

13 June 1926

D tired but I hope none the worse. The chief excitement today was over Henry, Dotty’s tortoise, who was discovered about two hundred yards from the gate, working his passage towards the London road. He was brought back and tethered by a cord across his body, and supplied with lettuce leaves and snails, in which he took no interest. He escaped repeatedly during the day. When I buy a tortoise I shall say I want a quiet one for the ladies. Began G. K. Chesterton’s Eugenics and Other Evils.

4 July 1926

Beginning to re-read The Well at the World’s End. I was anxious to see whether the old spell still worked. It does—rather too well. This going back to books read at that age is humiliating: one keeps on tracing what are now quite big things in one’s mental outfit to curiously small sources. I wondered how much even of my feeling for external nature comes out of the brief convincing little descriptions of mountains and woods in this book.

6 July 1926

Home for tea, with a sharp headache, at 4.30 and changed socks and shoes. Poor D felt too ill to take even a cup of tea. Afterwards I went over the revised proofs of Dymer wh. arrived today from Canto I, 30, to the end of the whole. I never liked it less. I felt that no mortal could get any notion of what the devil it was all about. I am afraid this sort of stuff is very much hit or miss, yet I think it is my only real line . . .

[ Jack was unable to persuade his father to travel to Oxford for a visit. He was, however, on a holiday at ‘Little Lea’ 11–20 September and, so, with Mr Lewis when his long narrative poem, Dymer, was published by J. M. Dent on 18 September under the pseudonym ‘Clive Hamilton’.

On 19 September Warren learned that he had been selected to attend a six months’ course in Economics at London University beginning 4 October. He was able to travel with Jack to Belfast on 21 December to be with their father for Christmas. On 8 January 1927 Mr Lewis wrote in his diary: ‘Warnie and Jacks returned tonight by Fleetwood. As the boat did not sail until 11. O.C. they stayed with me to 9.30. So ended a very pleasant holiday. Roses all the way.’]

FROM HIS DIARY: at ‘Hillsboro’

10 January 1927

It was a most extraordinary afternoon. Most of the sky was very pale creamy blue, and there were clouds about, of the coldest shade of dark blue I have ever seen. The further hills were exactly the same as the clouds in colour and texture. Then near the sun the sky simply turned white and the sun itself (its outline was invisible) was a patch of absolutely pure white light that looked as if it had no more power of heating than moonlight—tho’ it was quite a mild day in fact. I got into a tremendously happy mood . . .

3 February 1927

Dined in and sat in common room beside J. A. who told me of a lady who had long worried him by coming up at the end of lectures to ask questions, and finally wrote offering him her hand. ‘She pretended it was a joke afterwards’ he said, shaking his white head. ‘But it wasn’t. And she wasn’t the only one either. A man who lectures to women takes his life in his hand’ . . .

8 February 1927

Spent the morning partly on the Edda, partly on the Realtetus. Hammered my way through a couple of pages in about an hour, but I am making some headway. It is an exciting experience when I remember my first passion for things Norse under the initiation of Longfellow (Tegner’s Drapa and the Saga of K. Olaf) at about the age of nine: and its return, much stronger, when I was about thirteen, when the high priests were M. Arnold, Wagner’s music, and the Arthur Rackham Ring. It seemed an impossible [thing] then that I shd ever come to read these things in the original. The old authentic thrill came back to me once or twice this morning: the mere names of god and giant catching my eye as I turned the pages of Zoega’s dictionary was enough . . .

9 February 1927

[A. J. Carlyle] told me a lot more about the murderer of Rasputin, who had been incapable of passing any exam and had suggested to the Fark. that ‘of course, he presumed, there wd be no difficulty in arranging these things in the case of a person of quality’. Being told that the organization of our exams was inflexibly democratic he exclaimed ‘But what am I to do? My parents will not let me marry unless I get some sort of certificate or diploma. They will only send me to some other university.’ Finally Farquharson and Carlyle made him out a parchment v. solemnly, a sort of certificate of their own . . .

10 February 1927

I went on to Corpus—Hardie having sent me a note to say that the Theaetetus was off, but would I come round and talk. We had an evening of pleasant and desultory tomfoolery, enriched later on by the arrival of Weldon.¹²⁴ Someone started the question ‘whether God can understand his own necessity’: whereupon Hardie got down St Thomas’s Summa and after ferreting in the index suddenly pronounced, without any intention of being funny, ‘He doesn’t understand anything’. This lead to great amusement, the best being an imaginary scene of God trying to explain the theory of vicarious punishment to Socrates. We left Hardie at about 10 to 12, and found Corpus in total darkness. Escaped in the end with difficulty . . .

15 February 1927

Spent the morning on Trevelyan’s England in the Age of Wycliff and partly in reading Gower, a poet I always turn to for pure, tho’ not for intense pleasure. It’s a rum thing that Morris shd have wanted so desperately to be like Chaucer and succeeded in being so exactly like Gower . . .

Back to College and read Gower till dinner time: after dinner to meet D and Maureen at the theatre where the OUDS were doing Lear. We decided that we wd give up going to them hereafter. It was all that sort of acting wh. fills one at first with embarrassment and pity, finally with an unreasoning personal hatred of the actors. ‘Why should that damned man keep bellowing at me?’ They nearly all shouted hoarsely and inarticulately. Bussed with the others to Magdalen gate, all v. cheery in spite of our wasted evening . . .

1 April 1927

I am entertaining the Mermaids tonight, drat ’em.¹²⁵ They are nothing but a drinking, guffawing cry of barbarians with hardly any taste among them, and I wish I hadn’t joined them: but I don’t see my way out now . . . Back to College, and had to spend most of the time getting things ready for the sons of Belial. The evening passed off alright I think: Tourneur’s Revenger’s Tragedy was read, a rotten piece of work whose merits, pretty small to begin with, were entirely lost in the continual cacking wh. greeted every bawdy reference (however tragic) and every mistake made by a reader. If one spent much time with these swine one wd blaspheme against humour itself, as being nothing but a kind of shield with which rabble protect themselves from anything wh might disturb the muddy puddle inside them.

TO HIS FATHER: from Magdalen College

30 March 1927

I was very sorry both to hear of the eclipse of the visit scheme and of your disappointing state of health. As to the former, if it stood by itself, I would reply (adapting Falstaff) ‘Are there not trains? Are there not motor busses? Are there not men of war in side cars?’ Why should your movements depend on the erratic and extremely hazardous aurigations of a boiler maker [Gussie Hamilton]? On the score of economy, trains have it every time. On the score of safety I can think of no method of travelling which is not superior to a seat in Uncle Gussie’s car. Your account of the swelling on the right knee elicited the word ‘gout’ from the only knowledgeable person I mentioned it to . . .

The scene of Squeaky in the office is a masterpiece and made me roar with laughter . . . It reminds me of the President’s latest exploit, when we met to elect a Proctor (it falls to each College in turn to choose one of its own Fellows as Proctor). When the election had been made the President said that a formal notice had to be sent to the Vice-Chancellor at once ‘so perhaps Mr Benecke’ (Benecke is about sixty years of age) ‘you wouldn’t mind going round: and then you must ring at the door and hand it to the maid’. As some one said, it only needed the additional injuncions, ‘and remember to wipe your feet and take a clean handkerchief’ to make it really complete. While I’m on this, I must tell you another. We are putting up a new building. In the committee that met to discuss it, someone suggested an architect’s name, adding by way of explanation, ‘that’s the man who built Liverpool Cathedral’. To which the President at once retorted with an air of closing the matter, ‘Oh, I don’t think we want anything quite so large as that’.

He has at last announced his intention of retiring, so I suppose we shall live in the excitement of an election for the next year. He has certainly had a wonderful run for his money, and tho’ a very laughable, is also a very loveable old fellow. He had the ludicrous, without the odious side of snobbery. He may have reverenced a Prince or a Duke too much, but never in his life did he despise or snub a poor scholar from a grammar school. When snobbery consists only of the admiring look upward and not of the contemptuous look downward, one need not be hard on it. A laugh—no unfriendly laugh—is the worst it deserves. After all, this kind of snobbery is half of it mere romance . . .

We live in the most absurd age. I met a girl the other day who had been teaching in an infant school (boys and girls up to the age of six) where the infants are taught the theory of Evolution. Or rather the Headmistress’s version of it. Simple people like ourselves had an idea that Darwin said that life developed from simple organisms up to the higher plants and animals, finally to the monkey group, and from the monkey group to man. The infants however seem to be taught that ‘in the beginning was the Ape’ from whom all other life developed—including such dainties as the Brontosaurus and the Iguanadon. Whether the plants were supposed to be descendants of the ape I didn’t gather. And then people talk about the credulity of the middle ages!

A propos of this can you tell me who said ‘Before you begin these studies, I should warn you that you need much more faith in science than in theology’. It was Huxley or Clifford or one of the nineteenth-century scientists, I think. Another good remark I read long ago in one of E. Nesbitt’s fairy tales—‘Grown ups know that children can believe almost anything: that’s why they tell you that the earth is round and smooth like an orange when you can see perfectly well for yourself that it’s flat and lumpy’ . . .

I dined the other night at an Italian Professor’s, who is a Fellow of Magdalen, and sat next to a Frenchwoman who has met Mussolini. She says he is a rhetorician, and escapes from questions he doesn’t want to answer into a cloud of eloquence. I asked if she thought him a charlatan. She said no: he quite believes all his own gas, like a school boy, and is carried away by it himself. It interested me very much as being true to type—Cicero must have been just that sort of man . . .

I quite see that the hotel in Donegal is in some ways unattractive. But temperance and plain diet are to be had everywhere. May I suggest that nothing hinders—indeed the Lenten season encourages—you and the Colonel to make Leeborough during the coming week into a temperance hotel with plain but plentiful food. Dumb bells and ‘Instant Postum’ you know.

[ Jack and Warren were anxious about their father’s health although it was not clear what was wrong. Mr Lewis was delighted when Warren suddenly showed up at ‘Little Lea’ on 26 March and, using one of his son’s nicknames, he wrote in his diary: ‘Badge arrived on a flying visit after finishing his course of Economics at London University. Well and cheerful, and good company.’

Warren reported to Woolwich on 2 April and two days later he learned that he was ordered to Aldershot on 7 April in preparation for sailing to Shanghai. On Wednesday the 6th he took his books and other belongings to Oxford and he spent the night with Jack. He arrived in Southampton on 11 April and he sent Mr Lewis a postcard of the troopship Derbyshire on which he was sailing. On it he wrote: ‘Just off (2.30). Double berth outside cabin to myself. Good bye, Warren.’ He feared that he might not see his father again.]

TO HIS BROTHER: from ‘Hillsboro’

26 April 1927

I arrived back from my travels at lunch time yesterday and found your letter, posted at Gib. [Gibraltar], awaiting me. It had come in fact the day after I left. It left me with a fine impression of boundless leisure and sea air, that is particularly tantalizing in view of the recollection that term begins on Friday. The arrival of income tax forms this morning drives home my irritation with this hanky-panky which keeps a few hundreds of self-indulgent fellows like you fooling about in the Mediterranean on my money in order to fill the pockets of the ‘China Merchants’. However, you may be in less pleasant circumstances by the time this reaches you, so I must suppress the note of envy. Still, provided that you don’t meet with a war in China, every ordinary boredom and discomfort which may await you is a price almost worth paying for a free trip half round the world, well fed, unworked, and in tolerably congenial society. (You must be putting on flesh at a desperate rate.)

I thought we had mentioned Squire Western’s choice of table talk before [in Fielding’s Tom Jones]. It goes to the root of the matter, doesn’t it? By the way I have never been able to share that popular feeling about Western as a fine type of bluff, honest, genial Englishman: he seems to me one of the four or five most intolerable people in fiction (I mean to meet: of course he is excellent in a book). Tom Jones goes far to explain why Johnson and his set didn’t like the country. I can quite imagine that a countryside of highwaymen and the rural jokes of the period, inhabited by Westerns and Blifils would have led him to ‘abstract his mind and think of Tom Thumb’:¹²⁶ for one can hardly imagine him knocking them down with folios. At least, if he had made the attempt, he would have liked the country even less after it than before it. He would have dismissed Mr Square as a infidel dog, and I don’t feel that he would have got on with Thwackum. Sophia is good. She comes during that lucid interval when good heroines were possible in novels written by men, when the restoration tradition by which a heroine must be a whore was dead, and the Victorian tradition by which she must be a fool had not been born.

Now for my own adventures. I was joined [on 19 April] at Oxford station by two others and we proceeded together to Goring.¹²⁷ One of them was new to the game and turned up carrying a Tommies pack filled square like a tommy’s pack, for inspection. On the way we extracted from it a large overcoat, a sponge, four shirts, a heavy tin mug holding about a pint, two strong metal cigarette cases of pudaita proportions, and a number of those insane engines which some people associate with holidays. You know—the adaptable clasp knife which secrets a fork at one end and a spoon at the other, but in such a way that you could never really use the fork and the spoon together—and all those sort of things. Having recovered from our delighted laughter and explained that we were going to walk in an English county and not in Alaska, we made up the condemned articles into a parcel wh. we compelled him to post home from Goring. It weighed about seven pounds. Our fourth met us at Goring station.

After tea in the garden of the lock keeper at Goring lock—we ate it sitting just beside the weir, dipping our hands into the water and enjoying the rush and the noise—we set out N.N.W. In half an hour the suburbanity of Goring was out of sight. We soaked for a long time in a winding valley with all the bigness of downs opening behind and the richer Chiltern country towards Henley rising in the distance. We were on the broad grass track of the Icknield Way, the grass very short and fine and perfectly dry, as it is nearly all the year round in these chalk hills. It was an afternoon of lovely sunshine with a pleasant light wind, and a lark overhead displayed all its accomplishments. That night we slept at East Ilsley which (I think) you and I went through on our way to Salisbury.

We spent nearly the whole of Wednesday [20 April] following the Icknield Way along the northern edge of the downs, overlooking the Wantage valley on our right. Around us, and to our left, the country had all the same character: close smooth grass, very pale in colour, deliciously springy to the foot: chalk showing through here and there and making the few ploughed pieces almost cream colour: and, about three to a mile, clumps of fir, whose darkness made them stand out very strikingly from the low tones of the ground. The extent of prospect was (or seemed to be) larger than any I have seen, even from the highest hills I have been on—just wave after wave of down, and then more of them, for ever. The air is very clear here and one sometimes sees a hay stack or a farm on a ridge, so distinct and at the same time so remote that it is like something seen through the wrong end of a telescope. We had tea at Lambourn and slept at Aldbourne.

Thursday [21 April] opened with discussions. A survey of the maps showed a lamentable discrepancy between the route we wanted to follow and the possible places for lunch. Then emerged the dark and hideous prospect of ‘taking’ lunch. Perfectly simple you know. Buy some bread and cheese before we start and have lunch where we like. Makes you independant you know. Drinks? Oh, get a few oranges if you don’t feel inclined to carry a bottle of beer in your pack for the first ten miles. I need hardly say that our novice—the Knight of the Adaptable Jack Knife—was entirely in favour of a scheme which promised to restore his original conception. I of course, who had seen days spoiled this way before, was the head of the opposition. The wrong party won. We stuffed our packs with bread, butter, cheese and oranges. The only thing I look back on with satisfaction was that the butter, at any rate, was not in my pack. Then we set off.

The first mile made us thoroughly aware of the fact that the wind (wh. had been in our faces since Goring) had risen to a gale. The next three miles left no one in any doubt of the fact that when a strong wind blows in your face all day, it parches your throat and chaps your lips without cooling your body. We were now in sight of ‘Barberry Castle’, a Roman Camp, for the sake of seeing which all this folly had started. The exponents of the ‘carry your lunch’ school had now reached the stage of indulging in a quite unusual degree of praise of the scenery and the pleasures of walking tours, on the ‘this is fine’ lines. But long before we had reached the top of that disastrous camp they slunk in silence, and only the malcontents (Barfield and myself) felt inclined to talk. In fact we talked quite a lot.

When we reached the top we found ourselves in one of those places where you can neither speak for the hurricane nor open your eyes for the sun. Beyond the suggestion (mine) of performing on the wind (and the Romans) a certain physiological operation disallowed by English law and by polite conversation, we were silent here. Turning up our collars and pulling our hats down hard on our heads, we couched under a scrannel gorse bush wherever prickles and sheep dung left a space, and produced our scanty and squalid meal. The appearance of the butter faintly cheered us (all of us except the man among whose socks and pyjamas it had travelled), but it was a sight that moved mirth, not appetite. The last straw was the oranges, wh. proved to be of the tough, acrid, unjuicy type, which is useless for thirst and revolting to taste.

The midday siesta (that great essential of a day’s walking) was out of the question in that abominable camp, and we set off gloomily S. W. Barfield and I dropped behind and began composing in Pope-ian couplets a satire on the people who arrange walking tours. Nothing cd have been happier. At a stroke every source of irritation was magically changed into a precious fragment of ‘copy’. By the time we had walked three miles we were once more in a position to enjoy the glorious country all round us. Five o’clock found us descending a slope full of druidical stones, where we started three hares successively so close that we had nearly trodden on them, into the village of Avebury.

Avebury overwhelmed me and put me into that dreamlike state which is sometimes the reward of being very tired. Imagine a green ancient earthwork with four openings to the four points of the compass, almost perfectly circular, the wall of a British city, large enough to contain broad fields and spinneys inside its circuit, and, in the middle of them, dwarfed by its context, a modern village. Obviously here was the capital of a great king before the Roman times. We had been passing British things all day—stones, mounds, camps etc. But it was extraordinary to find a Berkshire village inside one. Here we had tea gloriously, in the orchard of an inn: and took off our shoes, and ordered a fresh pot and more hot water, and fair copied the satire and lay on our backs and talked Oxford reminiscences and smoked pipes.

Then Wof—he’s the jack knife man—did a sensible thing by returning after a moment’s absence and saying ‘If you’re not very keen on walking to Marlborough there’s a man here with a milk cart who will take us in’. So we sat among milk cans (which are just the right angle to lean against) and bumped and rattled along the Bath road (of Pickwickian and coaching memories) into Marlborough. Field is an old Marlburian but we were too tired to let him show us the sights. He told us however (what will interest you) that the fine old Georgian building which faces you as you enter the school precincts was an inn on the Bath road in the old days. Pleasant days they must have been.

Next day [22 April] we walked about four miles into Savernake Forest. It is not to be compared with the Forest of Dean, but well worth an hour or so. It is the typically English kind of wood—nearly all big oaks with broad mossy spaces between them and deer flitting about in the distance. Leaving the forest we struck westward into the vale of Pewsey, and were threading about little woods and field-paths for an hour or so. After our windy days on the Downs this was a pleasant change: the richness of the colours, the soft burring of the wind (now harmless) in the little trees, and the flowers everywhere were specially delightful by contrast. We crossed a fine rise called Hansell Hill: a thing rising so abruptly on both sides that it was like a gigantic tumulus. From the top of this we had one of the finest views in England. Northward, the Berkshire Downs, huge even in their apparent extent, and huger to our minds because we had spent two whole days walking on them. Southward, across the valley, rose the edge of the Salisbury plain.

We came down the side of that hill over a big spur called the Giant’s Grave and lunched admirably in the village of Ocue—beer and bread and cheese followed by a pot of tea, and then a game of darts: you know the apparatus for that game which one finds in pubs. Shortly after lunch we had the best ‘soak’¹²⁸ I’ve ever had in a walk, by turning out of a little grassy lane into a wood where the grass grew soft and mossy, and there were solid clumps of primroses the size of dinner plates: not to mention a powdering of those little white flowers—wood anemones. We laid ourself flat on our back with packs under our head for pillows (for it is in the beauty of a pack that it can thus convert into a regular bed a flat ground otherwise useless for soaking): some rash attempts at conversation were ignored and we spent an hour with half shut eyes listening to the burring of the wind in the branches, and an occasional early bumble bee. The remainder of the day brought forth a bad bit of wrong map reading: but this also is among the delights of a journey: for it found us ambling into our tea stopping place along the grassy tow-path of an all but obsolete canal where we had never meant to go and which was all the better for that. We lay at Devizes: a poor inn.

Next day [23 April] we struck south across the vale of Pewsey. We expected to be bored in this low ground which divides the Berkshire Downs from Salisbury Plain: but it turned out a pleasant morning’s tramp through roads with very fine beech trees and a tangle of footpaths. Even if it had been dull, who would not make sacrifices to pass through a place called Cuckold’s Green. (We passed Shapley Bottom two days before.) I myself was for tossing a pot of beer at Cuckold’s Green, which we might have done by going two hundred yards out of our course, but the other two being both married, ruled that this was no place to rest a moment longer than we need. So did literary associations render possible a joke that the illiterate would hardly venture on. (In passing, if one had lived in the 17th century, what a horrible fate it would have been to live at Cuckold’s Green. ‘Your servant sir. Your wife tells me that you are carrying her to the country in a few days. Pray sir where do you live?’ ‘Cuckold’s Green.’ By the age of forty one wd be quite definitely tired of the joke.)

We lunched this side of the climb on to the Plain, and crawled up on to that old favourite afterwards. It pleased me as much as ever: more than all, after being given tea by a postmistress, with boiled eggs and bread and jam at lib., for which she wanted to take only 6d. Oddly enough, up there in the chalk of the plain, that village was almost completely under water. Our evening walk, up and down mile and mile of unfenced chalk road with smooth grey grass all round and sheep and young lambs (so numerous that in places they were deafening), and a mild setting sun in our faces, was heavenly.

But what no one can describe is the delight of coming (as we came—) to a sudden drop and looking down into a rich wooded valley where you see the roofs of a place where you’re going to have supper and bed: specially if the sunset lies on the ridge beyond the valley. There is so much mixed in it: the mere physical anticipations as of a horse nearing its stable, the sense of accomplishment and the feeling of ‘one more town’, one further away into the country you don’t know, and the old never hackneyed romance of travelling (not of ‘travel’ wh. is what you are doing and wh. no doubt has its own different pains and pleasures). It always seems to sum up the whole day that is behind you—give it a sort of climax and then stow it away with the faintly melancholy (but not unpleasant) feeling of things going past. This town I am gassing about was Warminster . . .

Next day [24 April] we walked all morning through the estates of the Marquis of Bath, in a very old and fine forest on a hillside. About a mile and a half below us on the hillside we saw the house—a rather tiresome place on the lines of Blenheim, with three lakes—and we emerged at one o’clock into a village just outside one of the park gates. The atmosphere here is feudal, for the hostess of our Mittagessen pub would talk about nothing but His Lordship, who apparently lives here all the year round and knows everyone in the village. We asked how old he was. ‘O, we don’t think ’im old’, she replied, which stumped me. The rest of that day was so intensively complex in route and so varied in scenery (also we were so embroiled in conversation) that I give no account of it . . . Next day we all returned home by train . . .

And now for Lamb’s final division of a letter—‘puns’. I think I have only two. (1). The story of a man who was up with me, and who was the only genuine maker of malapropisms I ever met: but this one I never heard till the other day. It appears that while having tea with the ‘dear Master of University’ he conducted a long conversation with the ladies, chiefly re places to stay for one’s holidays, under the impression that the word ‘salacious’ meant ‘salubrious’. You can imagine the result. But what you can’t imagine is that when the Mugger himself, whose brow had been steadily darkening for some minutes (during which he had heard his daughters told that they wouldn’t like Devonshire very much because it wasn’t very salacious) finally decided to cut it short and broke in with ‘Well Mr Robson-Scott, how do you like Oxford?’ Robson-Scott turned to him with imperturbable good humour and said ‘Well to tell you the truth sir, it isn’t so salacious as I had hoped.’¹²⁹

This fellow Robson indulged also—as I well remember—in a kind of complicated misfire of meaning: rather like a rarefied or quintessential p’daitaism. Two I can vouch for. When arriving with me late somewhere he observed panting, ‘We might have known that it wd take us longer than it did.’ Another time, in a debate, he said, ‘I quite agree with Mr So-and-So’s point as far as it goes but it goes much too far.’ You will see how easily this sort of thing wd pass for sense in the heat of the moment.

(2). I don’t know if this can rank as a pun, but I’ll put it down. When S. P. B. Mais (whose Diary of a Schoolmaster we have both read) got a 3rd in English here, the examiners told him they were very sorry, but added by way of consolation that he ‘was the very best Third they had ever examined’. On which Raleigh remarked ‘It is bad enough for a man to get a Third: but to be pointed out as the most brilliant Third of your year is damnable.’

TO HIS FATHER: from Magdalen College

[28 May 1927]

Your wire, which arrived this morning, contributed more to my grandeur than to my peace of mind. It contributed to my grandeur because it happened to be the third communication of an urgent nature which I had received during that hour, and the pupil who was with me, seeing me inundated with these messages and telegrams, must doubtless have supposed that I was the hub of some mighty academical, or even national intrigue. I am sorry you were bothered. I had not thought my silence had been long enough to give you serious anxiety, though it was longer than I wished. If I had written before I could only have given you a line, for the summer term is always the busiest and my days are very full . . .

Now for a more important matter. W and I both agreed that heaven and earth must be moved to get you out of Ireland this summer—preferably to some place where rheumatics are cured. The Colonel’s parting instructions were given with characteristic emphasis ‘Take him to Droitwich and just get him boiled in mud or whatever it is they do to people there.’ And I agreed, and promised to do my best. I don’t insist on the boiling and the mud: but I do frankly think that it would be absurd for a man who has otherwise a very tolerable constitution to sit down with ‘close lipped patience, sister of despair’ under rheumatism while all the natural cures (muds, waters etc.) and all the modern electrical cures remain untried. Confess that the man who could be induced to wearing zinc in his boots and drinking (what was it you were advised to drink—an onion soaked in gin, or port or mustard?) but who could not be induced to try what has cured hundreds, is in an indefensible position.

I therefore propose that part or all of my annual holiday should be spent in some such places as I have suggested with perhaps a few days here in Oxford—as our jam after our powder. I know there are difficulties. What have you ever done in which there was not? A man of your age and in your position cannot really be the slave of business engagements. I know too that the thought of an hotel in a ‘spa’ does not fill you with rapture: but even a troglodyte can’t find the presence of strangers as painful as sciatica. And after all, once the plunge is made, would there not be a sort of holiday spirit that would descend on us in such a place and make us no unpleased spectators of the ‘stir’. The change of diet alone, and of hours and of way of life is I think a pick-me-up. I know I have always found it so. Monotony is no better for the body than for the mind. Now the first essential of this scheme is to concert our movements. August would be impossible for me. That leaves September and the early part of October. Whether you have time or inclination to write me a long letter or not, please let me have a line soon giving me at least the outline of a scheme possible for you. I have really set my heart on the plan and very earnestly hope that an indulgence of my wishes and a reasonable care for yourself will combine to persuade you to the effort (it cannot really be a very great one) of making arrangements and removing obstacles. If you will fix a time for getting away I will start finding out details at once (I wish W. were here, he’d do it far better and serve you up five alternative operation orders worked out to a half minute at every station, while you waited. But alas—!)

Yes. There is no good balking the fact that this China journey is a bad business, a piece of rotten luck. I confess that when he sailed I was horribly uneasy. By this time (if I can judge at all from the papers) the chance of a war in China is greatly lessened and I am more cheerful. If the trouble clears up I don’t see why he might not be home again in eighteen months or so . . .

His letters are of the greatest interest and very good. How the travels of anyone we know suddenly light up the waste places of the Atlas. I suppose the Red Sea coast is described in hundreds of books: but we had to wait till Warnie went East before we ever heard about it. (I always imagined it flat and sandy myself.)

There is no need to bother about my health, and, even when busiest, I usually get my daily walk. I work as a rule from 9 till 1, from 5 till 7.15 (when we dine) and then after dinner till about 11 or 12. This you see gives me time for a good long tramp every afternoon. Nightmares I am afraid are hereditary in more senses than the one you meant. The thing, or what is stands [for] is in the blood of not one family but of the creature called Man . . .

TO HIS BROTHER (now in China): from ‘Hillsboro’

9 July 1927

The Term has now been over some weeks, for which I am not sorry. It produced one public event of good omen—the carrying in Congregation of a Statute limiting the number of wimmen at Oxford. The appalling danger of our degenerating into a woman’s university (nay worse still, into the women’s university, in contradistinction to Cambridge, the men’s university) has thus been staved off. There was fierce opposition of course, our female antagonists being much more expert than we in the practice of ‘whipping’ in the parliamentary sense.

Since the victory the papers have been full of comment from such people as Sybil Thorndike, Lady Astor, Daisy Devoteau, Fanny Adams and other such notable educational authorities. They mostly deplore (especially in the Daily Mirror and the Little Ha’penny Sketch) one more instance of the unprogressiveness of those ‘aged Professors’. The word ‘academic’ is also worked hard: tho’ how the politics of an academy could, or why they should, cease to be ‘academic’, ‘might admit of a wide conjecture’.

But the question of the age of the anti-feminists is an interesting one: and the voting (we have no secret franchise) revealed very consolatory facts. First came the very old guard, the octogenarians and the centurions, the full fed patriarchs of Corpus, the last survivors of the days when ‘women’s rights’ were still new fangled crankery. They were against the women. Then came the very-nearly-as-old who date from the palmy days of J. S. Mill, when feminism was the new, exciting, enlightened thing: people representing, as someone said, ‘the progressiveness of the “eighties”.’ They voted for the women. Then came the young and the post-war (I need not say I trust that I did my duty) who voted solid against. The arrangement is quite natural when you think it out. The first belong to the age of innocence when women had not yet been noticed: the second, to the age when they had been noticed but not yet found out: the third to us. Ignorance, romance, realism . . .

I have just read Smollet’s Roderick Random which, as you probably know, is our chief literary document for the life of the navy in the 18th century . . . By the way, can you suggest why it is that when you read Boswell, Walpole’s letters, or Fanny Burney’s diary you find the 18th century a very delightful period, differing from ours chiefly by a greater formality and ‘elegance’ of manners, whereas when you turn to the novel (including Evelina), you suddenly step into a world full of full-blooded, bawdy, brutal, strident, pull-away-the-chair barbarity? The sea captain in Evelina who supplies the comic element does so by playing a series of tricks on an elderly French lady, whom he addresses as ‘Madam Frog’, throws into ditches, and trips up in the mud. What is the common denominator between this and Johnson’s circle? And what is true? Perhaps both are and one sees what the Doctor meant when he said that in a jail the society was commonly better than at sea.

But I mustn’t spend too long on books for I have the ludicrous adventure of my own to tell. Unfortunately it needs a good deal of introduction to render it intelligible, but I think it is worth it. Mme Studer is the widow of M. Studer who died recently under distressing circumstances. She had been temporarily insane once during his lifetime: and tho’ there was no serious fear of a relapse, her state of mind after his death, together with some traces of hysteria and more depression than even the death of a husband seemed to justify, led most of her friends to keep an eye on her. Minto [Mrs Moore] went to see her pretty regularly. So did (the heroine of my story) a Mrs Wilbraham. She is what is called ‘a brave little woman’ (tho’ it is not known what dangers she ever had to encounter) and is never idle. She brings up her daughter in the light of lectures on child psychology delivered by professors whose own children never get born at all or are notable puppies. She is a spiritualist: a psychoanalyst, but does not believe in the theories of Freud because they are so horrid: she weighs the babies of poor women: her business in fact is universal benevolence. ‘If only one feels that one can be of some use in the world . . .’ as she often says.

Well, the other night I was just settling down to translate a chapter of the Edda, when suddenly Minto called me out of the dining room and said ‘Mrs Wilbraham is here. She says Mrs Studer has twice tried to commit suicide today. She’s got a taxi here and wants me to go and see the doctor at the Warneford [Asylum]. We shall have to get a nurse for Mrs Studer.’ I said I’d come along, because Minto has been rather poorly and I didn’t know what she might be let in for. So Mrs W., Minto and I drove off to the Warneford. I remained in the taxi while the two ladies went in to see the Doctor. It was about half past nine, dusk and raining. At an unlighted window just opposite stood a very pale man with a long beard who fixed his eyes on the taxi with insane steadiness for half an hour without ever blinking or moving as far as I could see: to complete the picture (you’ll hardly believe it) a large black cat sat on the window sill beneath him. (I always imagined they kept the patients in back rooms or something, or at any rate had bars on the window.) I liked this so little that in desperation I tried to start a conversation with Griffin the taximan (also your garager when you are at Headington). ‘This is an unpleasant place, Griffin’, said I. He replied promptly ‘You know sir you can’t put her in without a doctor and a magistrate.’ I then realized that he thought we were there for the purpose of ‘putting in’ either Minto or Mrs W. In my dismay, not quite decided what I meant, I blurted out ‘Oh I hope that won’t be necessary’ and when he replied ‘Well it was the last time I got one put in ’ere’ I realized that I had hardly improved matters.

The others emerged at last with a Nurse Jones and we started off for the Studer’s. But now the question was what to do? Madame would certainly refuse to have a strange young woman thrust upon her for the night for no apparent reason: as her husband was dead and her relatives abroad, no one had any authority over her. And even if we wished, no doctor would certify her as insane on the evidence of a child—the only person who ever claimed to have seen the attempt at suicide. Mrs Wilbraham said it was all perfectly simple. She would stay hidden in Mme Studer’s garden all night. Nurse would be put up in the bungalow of a stranger opposite Madame’s house. She must herself stay in the garden. It was no good arguing. It was her duty. If only her nephew was here! If only she could have a man with her, she confessed, she would feel less nervous about it. I began to wish I’d stayed at home: but in the end of course I had to offer.

No one raised the question as to why the Nurse had been prevented from going to bed at the Warneford in order to be carried half a mile in a taxi and immediately put to bed in another house totally unconnected with the scene of action, where she could not possibly be of the slightest use. The girl herself, who was possibly in some doubt as to who the supposed lunatic might be, remained in a stupefied silence.

I now suggested as a last line of defence that nothing wd be more likely to upset Mme Studer than to find dim figures walking about her garden all night: to which Mrs W. replied brightly that we must keep out of sight and go very quietly. ‘We could put our stockings on outside our boots you know.’ At that moment (we were all whispering just outside a house further down in the same street as Madame’s, and it was now about eleven o’clock) a window opened overhead and someone asked me rather curtly whether we wanted anything, and if not, would we kindly go away. This restored me to some of the sanity I was rapidly losing, and I determined that whatever else happened, four o’clock should not find me ‘with my stockings over my boots’ explaining to the police that I was (v. naturally) spending the night in some one else’s garden for fear the owner might commit suicide.

I therefore ruled that we must keep our watch in the road, where, if we sat down, we wd be hidden from the window by the paling (and, I added mentally, wd be open to arrest for vagabondage, not for burglary). Several neighbours had now turned up (all women, and nearly all vulgar) to revel in excitement and Mrs W. (while insisting on the absolute necessity of letting no one know—‘it would be dreadful if it got about poor thing’) gave each newcomer, including the total strangers, a full account of the situation.

I came home with Minto, drank a cup of tea, put on my great coat, took some biscuits, smokes, a couple [of] apples, a rug, a waterproof sheet and two cushions, and returned to the fatal road. It was now twelve o’clock. The crowd of neighbours had now melted away: but one (neither vulgar nor a stranger) had had the rare good sense to leave some sandwiches and three thermos flasks. I found the brave little woman actually eating and drinking when I arrived. Hastily deciding that if I were to lie under the obligations of a man I wd assume his authority, I explained that we should be really hungry and cold later on and authoritatively put a stop to that nonsense. My next step was to provide for my calls of nature (no unimportant matter in an all night tête-àtête with a fool of an elderly woman who has had nothing to do with men since her husband had the good fortune to die several years ago) by observing that the striking of a match in that stillness wd easily be heard in the Studer’s house and that I wd tiptoe to the other end of the road to light my pipe.

Having thus established my right to disappear into the darkness as often as I chose—she conceded it with some reluctance—I settled down. There had been some attempt at moonlight earlier, but it had clouded over and a fine rain began to fall. Mrs Wilbraham’s feminine and civilian vision of night watches had apparently not included this. She was really surprised at it. She was also surprised at its getting really cold: and most surprised of all to find that she became sleepy, for she (after the first ten minutes) had answered to my warning on that score with a scornful ‘I don’t think there’s much danger of that!’ However all these hardships gave her the opportunity of being ‘bright’ and ‘plucky’ as far as one can be in sibilant whispers.

If I could have been quit of her society I wd have found my watch just tolerable—despite the misfortune of finding my greatcoat pockets stuffed with camphor balls (Minto is very careful about moths) which I flung out angrily on the road and then some hours later forgetting this and trying to eat one of the apples that had lain in those pockets. The taste of camphor is exactly like the smell. During the course of the night my companion showed signs of becoming rather windy and I insisted on playing with her the old guessing game called ‘Animal, Vegetable, or Mineral’. (Incidentally I thought I would find it more interesting than her conversation.) After assuring me that she was thinking of an animal, a live animal, an animal we had seen that night, she had the impudence to announce in the end that ‘it’ was the ‘voice of an owl we had heard’—which shows the working of her mind. However my story is over now, and when I have added that the crows had been ‘tuning up their unseasonable matins’ a full half hour before any other bird squeaked (a fact of natural history which I never knew before) I may dismiss Mrs-Ruddy-Wilbraham from my mind . . .

TO HIS FATHER: from Magdalen College

29 July [1927]

I am a little surprised at your response to the programme of being ‘boiled in mud’. Neither of us of course would choose Harrogate or any similar place for pleasure: that may be taken as a starting point to any discussion on the subject—tho’, I repeat, the unpleasantness must not be exaggerated. (Damme Sir, are we to be frightened of some retired colonels and rich old maids?) I suggested it purely and simply on medical grounds and your reply strikes me rather as if I had said to a man with toothache ‘Why not go to a dentist?’ and he had answered ‘You’re quite right—I will go out. But I won’t go to a dentist. I’ll go and get fitted for a new pair of boots.’ However, I am so pleased at your agreement on the main issue, that of going away, that I must not press the other too hard . . .

I am just in the few days lull between my two ‘fittes’ of summer examining. I have finished reading the boy’s answers in Oxford, and next week I go to Cambridge for the pleasanter (and more profitable) business of awarding. I had rather a heavy dose of it this time, and the strain took the form of giving me neuralgia. At least my dentist, after striking probes into me, punching me in the face, and knocking my teeth with small hammers—accompanied with the blatantly impertinent question ‘Does that hurt?’ (to which the proper reply seems to be a sharp return blow at his jaw with the words ‘Yes, just like that’)—my dentist I say, assured me that there was nothing wrong with my teeth and therefore it must be neuralgia . . .

My labours were rewarded by some good things from the candidates (who are school boys under sixteen). The definition of a Genie as ‘an oriental spirit inhabiting bottles and buttons and rings’ is a rather rare example of a correct answer which is funny. ‘A Censer is one who incenses people’ is more of the familiar type. In answer to a question from a paper on Guy Mannering ‘Would you have liked Colonel Mannering as a father? Support your answer by an account of his behaviour to Julia’, one youth sagely replied that he would. It is true that Mannering was cold, suspicious, autocratic etc., ‘but he was very rich and I think he would have made an excellent father’. That boy should be sent to the City at once: he has the single eye . . .

My only other recent adventure was a purely literary one—that of quite accidentally picking up The Woman in White and reading it: a book of course now practically unknown to anyone under forty. I thought it extremely good of its kind, and not a bad kind. But what spacious days those were! The characters, or at least all the wicked ones, flame in jewels and the hero is so poor in one place that he actually travels second class on the railway. I have decided to model my behaviour for the future (socially I mean, not morally) on that of Count Fosco, but without the canaries and the white mice.

Another curious thing is the elaborate descriptions of male beauty, which I hardly remember to have seen since Elizabethan poetry: or do the ‘noble brow’, the ‘silky beard’ and the ‘Manly beauty’ still flourish in fiction which I don’t happen to have read? Of course only third rate people write that kind of novel now, whereas Wilkie Collins was clearly a man of genius: and there is a good deal to be said for his point of view (expressed in the preface) that the first business of a novel is to tell a story, and that characters etc. come second . . .

TO HIS BROTHER: from Perranporth, Cornwall

3 September [1927]

I returned from Cambridge and almost immediately set out with Minto, Maureen, Florence de Forest and Baron Papworth [a dog] for Perranporth (Cornwall) where I am now writing. On Sunday (it is now Friday) I set out for P’daitaheim: whether to spend my days interminably strolling in the cemetry-like walks of a hydro garden or drinking two o’clock buckets of sherry in the study, I don’t yet know: for of course it is still quite uncertain whether he can be got to move or not . . .

The only Cornish city I have been to is Truro. The town is an ordinary little market town, much less pleasing than any in the ‘homely’ counties between Morlockheim and the West Country: in fact so true is the Co. Down element in my Cornish recipe that Truro has more than a flavour of Newtownards about it. The Cathedral is the poorest, almost, that I have ever seen . . . The main object of my visit was to get a book, having finished Martin Chuzzlewit which I brought down.

And here let me digress for a moment to advise you v. strongly to make one more effort with Dickens and make it on Martin Chuzzlewit, if only for the sake of an account of 19th century America . . . Of course to enjoy it, or any other Dickens you must get rid of all idea of realism—as much as in approaching William Morris or the music hall. In fact I should say he is the good thing of which the grand Xmas panto. is the degeneration and abuse: broadly typical sentiment, only rarely intolerable if taken in a jolly after dinner pantomime mood, and broadly effective ‘comics’: only all done by a genius, so that they become mythological . . .

But this is all by the way. I had assumed that as Truro was a cathedral city, it must have at least a clerical intelligentsia: and if that, a decent bookshop. If appeared to have only a Smith’s and a faded looking place that seemed half a news agents. At the door of this I stopped an elderly parson and asked him whether this and Smith were the only two booksellers. He said they were: then a few moments later came back walking on tip toes as some parsons do, and buzzed softly in my ear (he had a beard) ‘There is an S.P.C.K. depot further down this street’. This almost adds a new character to my world: henceforth among my terms of abuse none shall rank lower than ‘he’s the sort of man who’d call an S.P.C.K. depot a bookshop’.

I discovered however that my unpromising bookshop had a second hand quarter upstairs. This at first was depressing as it appeared to consist entirely of two sections: one labelled ‘books on Cornwall’, the other ‘Second hand rewards’. That also is a valuable new idea . . . However in the end I discovered an upper garret where there were at last some books. I had v. little money and the selection was poor. I got inter alia the poetical work of ‘Armstrong, Dyer, and Green’ . . . As for my poets, Dyer you will remember as the author of The Fleece, perhaps the best example of that curious 18th century growth, the commercial epic—cf. Also Cyder and The Sugar Cane. Armstrong wrote a similar poem in Miltonic blank verse on The Art of Preserving Health. I have read it with huge enjoyment. It is beyond all parody as the specimen of the noble art of making poetry by translating ordinary sentences into ‘Miltonic’ diction. Thus ‘some people can’t eat eggs’ is rendered,

        Some even the generous nutriment detest

        Which, in the shell, the sleeping embryo rears.

(Where ‘rears’ I suspect is a misprint for ‘bears.’) If one eats too much fat,

The irresoluable oil

        So gentle late and blandishing, in floods

        Of rancid bile o’erflows: what tumults hence

        What horrors rise, were nauseous to relate.¹³⁰ . . .

I enclose some photos and good wishes from all.

TO HIS BROTHER: aboard the S.S. Patriotic, about to leave Belfast (where he had been with his father from 6 September to 5 October)

5 October 1927

[posted with letter of 12 December]

Tho’ I am uncertain when my next proper letter to you will be written, I should be unpardonable if I failed to salute you on an occasion over which your spirit so emphatically presides . . . The cry of ‘Any more for the shore’ has gone round. Arthur, who saw me off and drank with me (nay! at his expence) has just gone. The ‘flip, flip’ of the boots of Belfastians on the rubber floor of the saloon deck is heard on all sides. In a moment we shall shove off. I gave the P’daytabird four solid weeks and a day: tomorrow I shall be in Oxford. Of course it proved impossible to get him away . . . So the attempt to get him boiled in mud, which I made sincerely and even importunately, was a complete failure. A usual P’daytaborough holiday took its place, with an inordinate number of P’dayta Days. It is cruellest of all when he comes home on Monday at 11.30. To be given just enough time to decant the brisk liquour of Monday morning and then to have the cup dashed from your hand.

It was specially annoying this time because I wanted to be very busy putting into action my project of an Encyclopedia Boxoniana. I have worked through the texts down to The Locked Door and at Christmas hope to be able to begin the actual encyclopedia . . . I find the work fascinating: the consistency between the very early texts and the ones we usually read is much greater than I dared to hope for: and an odd sentence in the Locked Door or the Life of Big will fit into a narrative written in Wynyard or pre-Wynyard days in the most startling way. I suppose it is only accident, but it is hard to resist the conviction that one is dealing with a sort of reality. At least so it seems to me, alone in the little end room. How it will appear tomorrow in Magdalen Common Room or a month hence to you in How Kow is another matter. We’re off. The screw turns. I had stewed steak for lunch today and boiled mutton for supper dinner. I am going to eat some supper. Can you forget the flavour of one’s first non-P’dayta meal. (I was mistaken. The screw has stopped again.)

TO HIS FATHER: from Magdalen College

[29? November 1927]

They had great fun at the Union last week. Birkenhead [F. E. Smith] came to speak. The first thing that worried him was the private business in which two gentlemen got up and discussed the library list—additions to the library of the Union being a subject which naturally comes up in private business. On this occasion the merits of Psmith Journalist by P. G. Woodhouse, That Ass Psmith by the same author, and The Wreck of the Birkenhead were hotly canvassed. The noble lord was understood to make some observations to those around him in which the word ‘schoolboys’ figured.

Then the debate began. The first speaker produced the good old ancient Wadham story of how Smith and Simon had decided what parties they were to follow in their political careers by the toss of a coin the night before they took schools. You will hardly believe me when I tell you that Smith jumped up: ‘baseless fabrication’—‘silly, stale story’—‘hoped that even the home of lost causes had abandoned that chestnut, etc. etc.’—and allowed himself to be sidetracked and leg pulled to such an extent that he never reached his real subject at all. It seems to me impossible that a man of his experience could fall to such frivolous tactics: unless we accept the accompanying story that he was drunk at the time, or the even subtler explanation that he was not . . .

TO HIS BROTHER: from Magdalen College

12 December [1927]

I enclose a fragment written when and how, you will see. I had hoped to continue it in reasonable time: but the monthly letter has proved an impossibility during the term. My evenings for the fortnight in term run thus. Mon. Play reading with undergraduates (till Midnight). Tue. Mermaid club. Wedn. Anglo-Saxon with undergraduates. Thurs.—Frid.—Sat.—Sunday. Common room till late. Mon. Play reading. Tue. Icelandic Society. Wedn. Anglo-Saxon. Thurs. Philosophical supper. Fri.—Sat.—Sunday.

As you will see this gives at the very best only three free evenings in the even weeks, and two in the odd. And into these two everything in the way of casual entertaining, correspondence and what we used to call ‘A-h-h-h!’ has to be crammed . . .

I have done very little reading outside my work these last months. In Oman’s Dark Ages I have come up against a thing I had almost forgotten since my school days—the boundless self assurance of the pure text book. ‘The four brothers were all worthy sons of their wicked father—destitute of natural affection, cruel, lustful, and treacherous.’ Lewis the Pious was ‘a man of blameless and virtuous habits’—tho’ every other sentence in the chapter makes it plain that he was a sh*t. ‘Charles had one lamentable failing—he was too careless of the teaching of Christianity about the relations of the sexes.’ It is so nice too, to be told without a hint of doubt who was in the right and who was in the wrong in every controversy, and exactly why every one did what he did. Yet Oman is quite right: that is the way—I suppose—to write an introduction to a subject . . . I am almost coming to the conclusion that all histories are bad. Whenever one turns from the historian to the writings of the people he deals with, there is always such a difference . . .

By the way, what a wonderful conceit of Thomas Brown’s referring to the age of the long lived antediluvians—‘an age when living men might be antiquities’. Query: Would a living man a thousand years old give you the same feeling that an old building does? I think there is a good deal to be said for Alice Meynell’s theory that one’s idea of antiquity and the standard one measures it by, is derived entirely from one’s own life. Certainly ‘Balbec and Tadmor’ (whoever they may be) could hardly give one a more weird sense of ‘ages and ages ago’ than some early relic discovered in the drawers of the little end room often does. One has one’s own ‘dark ages’. But I daresay this is not so for everyone: it may be that you and I have a specially historical sense of our own lives. Are you often struck, when you become sufficiently intimate with other people to know something of their development, how late their lives begin so to speak? . . .

TO HIS FATHER: from Magdalen College (after spending Christmas with his father)

25 February 1928

I have had one letter from Warnie since I left, but it largely duplicated his last to you. I cannot help envying him the richness of his subject matter. My own life is hard to turn into matters for letters. You make the same complaint I know of yours: but at least you have the advantage, that you can write trifles to me because I know the people and places concerned. If you tell me you had a very jolly evening’s chat with John Greeves or went and had a slap-up dinner with excellent champagne at Uncle Hamilton’s, that is of interest because I know who John Greeves and Uncle Hamilton are. If I, on the other hand, were to tell you how I enjoyed Bircham’s brilliant and original views on Hamlet last night, or what a pleasant talk I had the other day with Nicholl Smith (statements by the way as probable as those I have put in your mouth), it would convey nothing.

However, I see that the main thing is to go on talking: for this wheeze brings into my head the fact that I did really have a very good evening the night before last when I exercised for the first time my newly acquired right of dining at Univ.—an exercise which must be rare because it is so damned expensive. Poynton, the Fark, Carritt and Stevenson, as luck would have it, were all in that evening, and it was delightful to revisit the whimsical stateliness of that particular common room. There’s no getting away from the fact that we at Magdalen are terribly ‘ordinary’ beside it. We are just like anyone else: there, every single one of them is a character part that could be found nowhere outside their own walls.

I wonder is there some influence abroad now-a-days that prevents the growth of rich, strongly marked personal peculiarities. Are any of our contemporaries ‘characters’ as Queen Victoria or Dizzy or Carlyle were ‘characters’? I am not asking the ordinary question whether we produce greater or smaller men. ‘To be a character’ in this sense is not the same thing as ‘to have character’. For instance, I suppose Abraham ‘had character’, but no one ever thought of calling him ‘a character’: your friend in the Rocket, on the contrary, was lacking in character, but he distinctly was ‘a character’. There seems to be no doubt that the thing is growing rarer. Or is it that you need to be at least elderly to be a character? In that case, each generation, seeing the characters all among its elders, would naturally conclude that the phenomenon was passing away. Or perhaps it goes further yet. Perhaps the secret of being a character in the very highest degree is to be dead, for then the anecdotes cluster and improve unchecked.

But all this is from the purpose. What I began on was the difficulties of letter writing. I fear

      The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars

      But in ourselves.¹³¹

for the born letter writer is quite independent of material. Have you ever read the letters of the poet Cowper? He had nothing—literally nothing—to tell any one about: private life in a sleepy country town where Evangelical distrust of ‘the world’ denied him even such miserable society as the place would have afforded. And yet one reads a whole volume of his correspondence with unfailing interest. How his tooth came loose at dinner, how he made a hutch for a tame hare, what he is doing about his cucumbers—all this he makes one follow as if the fate of empires hung on it . . .

TO HIS FATHER: from Magdalen College

31 March [1928]

My studies in the XVIth Century—you will remember my idea of a book about Erasmus—has carried me much further back than I anticipated. Indeed it is the curse and the fascination of literary history that there are no real beginnings. Take what point you will for the start of some new chapter in the mind and imagination of man, and you will invariably find that it has always begun a bit earlier: or rather, it branches so imperceptibly out of something else that you are forced to go back to the something else. The only satisfactory opening for any study is the first chapter of Genesis.

The upshot of all this is that the book will be a very different one from what I imagined, and I hope to try a preliminary canter in a course of lectures sometime next year. In the mean time I spend all my mornings in the Bodleian: and the evenings in trying, for the hundredth time, to get a real working knowledge of the German language, since in my present occupation I find my ignorance of it up against me at every turn. For example, the only history of mediaeval Latin literature is in German. The authoritative edition of an old French poem I shall have to read is in German. And so on. But I am making progress.

If only you could smoke, and if only there were upholstered chairs, the Bodleian would be one of the most delightful places in the world. I sit in ‘Duke Humphrey’s Library’, the oldest part, a Fifteenth-Century building with a very beautiful painted wooden ceiling above me and a little mullioned window at my left hand through which I look down on the garden of Exeter where, these mornings, I see the sudden squalls of wind and rain driving the first blossoms off the fruit trees and snowing the lawn with them. At the bottom of the room the gilt bust of Charles I presented by Laud, faces the gilt bust of Strafford—poor Strafford.

The library itself—I mean the books—is mostly in a labyrinth of cellars under the neighbouring squares. This room however is full of books (duplicate copies I suppose, or overflows) which stand in little cases at right angles to the wall, so that between each pair there is a kind of little ‘box’—in the public house sense of the word—and in these boxes one sits and reads. By a merciful provision, however many books you may send for, they will all be left on your chosen table at night for you to resume work next morning: so that one gradually accumulates a pile as comfortably as in ones own room. There is not, as in modern libraries, a forbidding framed notice to shriek ‘Silence’: on the contrary a more moderate request ‘Talk little and tread lightly’. There is indeed always a faint murmur going on of semi-whispered conversations in neighbouring boxes. It disturbs no one. I rather like to hear the hum of the hive, and it is pleasant when someone steps into your box and says ‘Hello, are you here?’

As you may imagine one sees many oddities among one’s fellow readers—people whom I have never met elsewhere and who look as if they were shut up with the other properties every night. Positively the only drawback to the place is that beauty, antiquity and over-heating weave a spell very much more suited to dreaming than to working. But I resist to the best of my abilities and trust in time to become innoculated. (The practice of opening the window in one’s box is not, I need hardly say, encouraged.) In such a life as this, what news should there be?

By the time this reaches you, you will probably have heard the result of the boat race—with the same very moderated grief as myself. Perhaps you will also have heard that there is a religious revival going on among our undergraduates. Which is true. It is run by a German-American called Dr [Frank] Buchman. He gets a number of young men together (some reports say women too, but I believe not) and they confess their sins to one another. Jolly, ain’t it? But what can one do? If you try to supress it (I am assuming that you agree with me that the thing is unhealthy) you only make martyrs . . .

TO HIS BROTHER: from ‘Hillsboro’

1 April 1928

My last letter, if I remember rightly, was ironically begun on the return from the summer visit to P’daytaheim and finished only on the eve of the Christmas visit. I have thus a new ‘holiday’ period to record, which is almost barren in events. The p’dayta crop was singularly poor. The only item worth remembering was his curious contribution to the problem of venereal disease, to the effect that obviously it must have begun with women and spread thence to men. Being asked why, he replied ‘Sure how could a man have given it to a woman if he hadn’t got it from a woman herself?’ This is unanswerable.

Another illuminating remark was made in answer to some casual remark of mine as to the control of one’s imagination—I was talking, I think, about not letting one’s mind brood on grievances or fears. He replied ‘What on earth do you mean by controlling the imagination? One controls ones appetites.’ That is the whole psychology of his generation in a nutshell, isn’t it? A man sits thinking of negus and making ‘iron rules’ not to drink any, with much contortion of the face and muttered ‘Oh Lords’ until the inevitable moment when he finds some excellent reason for breaking the iron rules. The idea of a simpler method—that of applying his mind to something else and using a little concentration—would never occur.

The discussion ended (of course) with the infuriating statement that we were not ‘ad idem’ on the ‘connotation’ of the word control. Which reminds me of the splendid definition of an egoist which he read to me out of Punch in happy unconsciousness of its application. ‘An egoist is a man who thinks that all the words he doesn’t understand are misprints’ . . .

Apart from these there is little to record. We had the usual regrets that you were in the army and the usual astonishment that you didn’t appear to be nearly as unhappy as a man of your income ought by all reason to be. We had the usual discussions on theology, drifting off into something else as soon as one had cleared one’s ground to begin. His health was tolerable, I thought . . .

TO OWEN BARFIELD: from Magdalen College

[7? June 1928]

Come on Tuesday next and let your lady wife come and lie at Headington while you stay in College, for both will be very welcome. I haven’t read Aeschylus this long time but I don’t mind having a shot. The Prometheus is a bit easier than the Agamemnon.

You cd hardly expect the man in the T.L.S. to know the esoteric doctrine of myths.¹³²

By the bye, we now need a new word for the ‘science of the nature of myths’ since ‘mythology’ has been appropriated to the myths themselves. Would ‘mythonomy’ do? I am quite serious. If your views are not a complete error this subject will become more important and it’s worth while trying to get a good word before they invent a beastly one. ‘Mytho-logic’ (noun) wouldn’t be bad, but people wd read it as an adjective. I have also thought of ‘mythopoeics’ (cf. ‘Metaphysics’) but that leads to ‘a mythopoeician’ wh. is frightful: whereas ‘a mythonomer’ (better still ‘The Mythonomer Royal’) is nice. Or shall we just invent a new word—like ‘gas’. (Nay Sir, I meant nothing.)

I am writing a great new poem—also a Mnemonic rime on English sound changes in octosyllabic verse

        (Thus Æ to Ĕ they soon were fetchin’,

        Cf. such forms as ÞÆC and ÞECCEAN.)

which will be about as long as the Cursor Mundi, & great fun.

Arrive about 3 o’clock on Tuesday, if that suits you.

P.S. Wd ‘Mythologics’ do?

TO HIS FATHER: from Magdalen College (with an early reference to the book which became The Allegory of Love)

10 July [1928]

I have actually begun the first chapter of my book. This perhaps sounds rather odd since I was working on it all last vac., but you will understand that in a thing of this sort the collection of the material is three quarters of the battle. Of course, like a child who wants to get to the painting before it has really finished drawing the outline, I have been itching to do some actual writing for a long time. Indeed—you can imagine it as well as I—the most delightful sentences would come into one’s head: and now half of them can’t be used because, knowing a little more about the subject, I find they aren’t true. That’s the worst of facts—they do cramp a fellow’s style. If I can get it—the first chapter—to the stage of being typed, I shall bring a copy home for your amusement.

I should warn you, by the by, that Erasmus and all that has had to be postponed to a later book. The actual book is going to be about mediaeval love poetry and the mediaeval idea of love which is a very paradoxical business indeed when you go into it: for on the one hand it is extremely super-sensual and refined and on the other it is an absolute point of honour that the lady should be some one else’s wife, as Dante and Beatrice, Lancelot and Guinevere etc. The best introduction is the passage in Burke about ‘the unbought grace of life’.

I am intending by the way to pay you my summer visit in August this year instead of at the usual time. This is because the whole of the later part of the Long [Vacation] will be occupied with the preliminary stages of the Presidential election, specially the informal conversations which matter most. I am particularly anxious to be there, with one or two others, at the early parts and see what is going on: for—I am almost ashamed to tell you—I am beginning to be rather disillusioned about my colleagues. There is a good deal more intrigue and mutual back-scratching and even direct lying than I ever supposed possible: and what worries me most of all, I have good reason to believe that it is not the same in other colleges.

Of course it may simply be that, being rather an innocent in practical matters myself, and having been deceived once or twice, I have rushed too hastily to conclusions: as they say a simple man becomes too knowing by half when he once becomes knowing at all. Let us hope so. But the bad thing is that the decent men seem to me to be all the old ones (who will die) and the rotters seem to be all the young ones (who will last my time) . . .

TO HIS BROTHER: from ‘Hillsboro’

‘Begun Aug. 2nd’ [1928]

I am glad you like the Lives of the Poets. There is no subject on which more nonsense has been talked than the style of Johnson. For me his best sentences in writing have the same feeling as his best conversation—‘pop! it was so sudden’. I don’t know anyone who can settle a thing so well in half a dozen words. I have read a good deal of the Rambler last term, which is supposed to be more Johnsonian than the Lives. But he does the dagger business—or no, it’s more like a mace, but a mace properly used is not a cumbersome weapon—what is there clumsy about choosing an infinitesimal point of time in which quietly to break a man’s head with a perfectly directed tap of a sledge hammer?—he does it again and again.

You know that the Rambler is a mass of moral platitudes—and infuriates the French critics who say that they haven’t come to their time of life to be told that life is short and that wasted time can never be recovered. Johnson, anticipating that kind of objection, simply remarks ‘People more frequently require to be reminded, than to be instructed’. What more is there to say? or again ‘The natural process of the mind is not from enjoyment to enjoyment but from hope to hope’. That would be a page of whining and snivelling in Thackery—ah, which of us, dear reader, has his hearts desire etc., etc.

Better still, this on marriage: ‘Marriage is not otherwise unhappy than as life is unhappy.’ I can’t say that would be a whole novel with the moderns because the whole novel would not get as far as that. The author would make a great fuss about how Pamela got on Alan’s nerves and how in the end they decided that life was a failure, and would be praised for his fearless criticism of the institution of marriage, without ever getting one glimpse of the fact that he was merely describing the general irritatingness of daily life, as it happens in the case of married people. Johnson just knocks a whole silly literature aside. He has been through all that (Ibsen and Wells and such) before it was written. But the Lives are the best—specially Savage, Dryden and Pope. I can imagine that the atmosphere, the Englishness, is specially delightful to you in ‘furrin parts’. To me, the queerest thing about Johnson is that he is by no means an enthusiastic critic and yet he always makes me want to read the people he talks of even when I know that I shall dislike them . . .

Earlier in the year—just before term began—I had a delightful week end at a farm house in the Forest of Dean. As you know, I have walked in those parts before, but never stayed there. It is, I think, the most glorious inland place I know . . . almost untouched by trippers, and excellently solitary: almost uncannily so on an all day walk if one gets into the fir districts where birds don’t sing and happens to be for a moment out of the sound of a stream (Mr Papworth by the way decided at once that the whole forest was a dangerous place, and always kept close to heel). Here and there in the wood you come on a little old farm house with a few acres of clearing, surrounded by a hedge and approached by a road so desolate that it is hardly different from the green ‘rides’ that pierce the wood in every direction. In these ‘islands’ of farms—in one of which we stayed—there is the most comfortable sense of being tucked away miles deep from the world, of being snugged down in a blanket, of having found a lee shore. We lived in a world of country butter and fresh eggs and boiled fowl, of early hours and hens lazily squawking (not crowing, just making that long drawling sound that they make). The nights were noisy with the sounds that keep no right thinking man awake—owls, a very good nightingale, and once the barking of a fox. ‘A pleasant land of drowsy-head it was . . .’ But as a matter of fact it isn’t the drowsiness that really counts, its the sense of being ‘well away’ . . .

It sounds astonishing but English poetry is one of the things that you can come to the end of. I don’t mean of course that I shall ever have read everything worth reading that was ever said in verse in the English language. But I do mean that there is no longer any chance of discovering a new long poem in English which will turn out to be just what I want and which can be added to the Faerie Queene, The Prelude, Paradise Lost, The Ring and the Book, the Earthly Paradise, and a few others—because they aren’t any more. I mean, in the case of poems one hasn’t read, one knows now pretty well what they’re like, and knows too that tho’ they may be worth reading, they will not become part of ones permanent stock. In that sense I have come to the end of English poetry—as you may be said to have come to the end of a wood, not where you have actually walked every inch of it, but when you have walked about in it enough to know where all the boundaries are and to feel the end near even when you can’t see it: when there is no longer any hope (as there was for the first few days) that the next turn of the path might bring you to an unsuspected lake or cave or clearing on the edge of a new valley—when it can no longer conceal anything . . .

TO HIS FATHER: from Magdalen College (as the College prepared to elect a new President)

[3 November 1928]

Thank heavens our electioneering troubles are nearly over. This day fortnight we shall all be locked into chapel like so many Cardinals and proceed to make a President and then goodbye to the endless talk and agreements and disagreements and personalities that I have lived in since term began. A subject of this sort hanging in the air manifests itself chiefly by a plethora of informal meetings which naturally spring up on those few hours and days when the ordinary routine has left one a little freedom. As I have anyway a rather heavy time table this term—chiefly, alas, those philosophy pupils whom I share with Weldon and whom he regards as his if they turn out well and mine if they turn out ill—I am now heartily sick of the whole business.¹³³

At the same time I have added to my occupations in other and I hope more hopeful ways. Two or three of us who are agreed as to what a College ought to be, have been endeavouring to stimulate the undergraduates into forming some sort of literary society. In any other Colleges the idea that undergraduates should require, or endure, stimulus in that direction from the dons, would be laughable. But this is a very curious place. All College societies whatever were forbidden early in the reign of the late President—an act which was then necessitated by the savagely exclusive clubs of rich dipsomaniacs which really dominated the whole life of the place. This prohibition succeeded in producing decency, but at the cost of all intellectual life. When I came I found that any Magdalen undergraduate who had interests beyond rowing, drinking, motoring and fornication, sought his friends outside the College, and indeed kept out of the place as much as he could. They certainly seldom discovered one another, and never collaborated so as to resist the prevailing tone. This is what we wish to remedy: but it had to be done with endless delicacy, which means, as you know, endless waste of time.

First of all we had to make sure that our colleagues would agree to the relaxation of the rule against societies. Then we had to pick our men amongst the undergraduates very carefully. Luckily I had been endeavouring already for a term or two to get a few intelligent men to meet one another in my rooms under the pretext of play reading or what not, and that gave us a lead. Then we had to try to push those chosen men v. gently so that the scheme should not appear too obviously to be managed by the dons. At present we are at the stage of holding a preparatory meeting ‘at which to discuss the foundation of a society’ next Monday—so the whole show may yet be a dismal failure. I hope not: for I am quite sure that this College will never be anything more than a country club for all the idlest ‘bloods’ of Eton and Charterhouse as long as undergraduates retain the schoolboy’s idea that it would be bad form to discuss among themselves the sort of subjects on which they write essays for their tutors. Ours at present are all absolute babies and terrific men of the world—the two characters I think nearly always go together. Old hearts and young heads, as Henry James says: the cynicism of forty and the mental crudeness and confusion of fourteen.

I sometimes wonder if this country will kill the public schools before they kill it. My experience goes on confirming the ideas about them which were first suggested to me by Malvern long ago. The best scholars, the best men, and (properly understood) the best gentlemen, seem now to come from places like Dulwich, or to be wafted up on country scholarships from secondary schools. Except for pure classics (and that only at Winchester, and only a few boys even there) I really don’t know what gifts the public schools bestow on their nurslings, beyond the mere surface of good manners: unless contempt of the things of the intellect, extravagance, insolence, self-sufficiency, and sexual perversion are to be called gifts . . .

The first chapter of my book is finished and typed and the only two people who have seen it approve. The unfortunate thing is that nobody in Oxford really knows anything about the subject I have chosen. I may have made some elementary blunder which the French people—who have so far mainly studied the matter—would pounce on in a moment. However, my translation of some Old French into contemporary English (forgery is great fun) has passed Onions who knows more than anyone else about the English of that period . . .

TO HIS FATHER: from Magdalen College (after spending Christmas at ‘Little Lea’)

[3 February 1929]

I look in vain for any item of news fit to be extracted from the uneventful routine . . . The new President and his family have not yet moved into the Lodgings, where the work of putting in bathrooms which is now going forwards, throws a new light on the venerable domestic economy of the previous regime.

My current lecture (on Elyot, Ascham, Hooker and Bacon) has attracted as a distinguished member of its audience the Mother Superior of the local hostel for papish undergraduettees—I suppose because I fired off by an attack on Calvin. If you hear indirectly that the Church of Rome is hoping for a distinguished convert among the young Oxford dons, you will know how to interpret it.

The undergraduates have just brought off a good rag by getting a copy of the university seal and circularizing all the garages in Oxford with a notice purporting to come from the Vice Chancellor and Proctors and rescinding an order made last term by which all these places were compelled to shut for undergraduate use at eleven. Unfortunately this excellent joke was disclosed before it had had any time to run its course . . .

TO HIS BROTHER (in Shanghai): from ‘Hillsboro’

Postmark: 13 April 1929

I am ashamed of my long idleness, though indeed the gap between my last and your last was almost as long as the gap between your last and this. I must admit too, that I am moved to write at this moment by the selfish consideration that I heard last night a thing which you of all people ought to hear—you know how one classifies jokes according to the people one wants to tell them to—and am therefore uneasy till I have unloaded it.

The other night an undergraduate, presumably drunk, at dinner in the George covered the face of his neighbour with potatoes, his neighbour being a total stranger. Whether this means simply that he flung the contents of the potato dish at him or (as I prefer to think) that he seized him firmly by the short hairs and systematically lathered him with warm mash, my informant could not say. But that is not the point of the story. The point is, that being haled before the Proctors and asked why he had done so, the culprit, very gravely and with many expressions of regret, pleaded in so many words ‘I couldn’t think of anything else to do!’

I am sure you will share my delight at this transference of the outrage from the class of positive to that of negative faults: as though it proceeds entirely from a failure of the inventive faculty or a mere poverty of the imagination. One ought to be careful of sitting near one of these unimaginative men. The novel idea can be worked equally well from either end: whether one thinks of the mohawk bashing your hat over your eyes with the words ‘Sorry old chap, I know its a bit hackneyed, but I can’t think of anything better’—or of some elderly P’dayta exclaiming testily ‘Ah what all these young men lack now-a-days is initiative’ as he springs into the air from the hindward pressure of a pin . . .

By the by, I thoroughly agree with you about Scott: in fact I think that even his most fanatical admirers have ‘given up’ his heroines (with the exception of Die Vernon and Jeanie Deans) and his love scenes. But then one gives that up in all XIX Century novels: certainly in Dickens and Thackeray. And when you have ruled that out, what remains is pure delight. Isn’t it nice to find a person who knows history almost entirely by tradition? History to Scott means the stories remembered in the old families, or sometimes the stories remembered by sects and villages. I should say he was almost the last person in modern Europe who did know it that way: and that, don’t you think, is at the back of all his best work. Claverhouse, say, was to Scott not ‘a character out of Macaulay’ (or Hume or Robertson) but the man about whom old Lady so and so tells one story and about whom some antediluvian local minister’s father told another. Printed and documented history probably kills a lot of this traditional local history and what is finally left over is put in guide books. (When nothing else can be said about an old church you can always say that Cromwell stabled his horses in it.)

Scott was only just in time to catch it still living. This (so historians tell me) has had one unforseen result, that Scotch history has ever since been more neglected than that of any other civilized country: the tradition, once stamped by Scott’s imagination, has so satisfied curiosity that science has hardly ventured to show its head. It is a pity that no one similarly caught the tradition in England—tho’ probably there was less to catch.

I suppose the Scotch were a people unusually tenacious of old memories, as for example Mr Oldbuck. I am not sure that The Antiquary is not the best. Do you remember his efforts to get the hero to write an epic on the battle of? in order to work in his excursus on castramentation? . . . Nothing militates so much against Scott as his popularity in Scotland. The Scotch have a curious way of rendering wearisome to the outside world whatever they admire. I daresay Burns is quite a good poet—really: if only he could ever escape from the stench of that unmerciful haggis and the lugubrious jollities of Auld Lang Syne. What a world it opens upon—the ‘kail yard’ school—beside the bonny briar bush—Mansie Wauch.

I have just suddenly (as I write) seen what is the trouble about all this Scotchness. When you want to be typically English you pretend to be very hospitable and honest and hearty. When you want to be typically Irish you try to be very witty and dashing and fanciful. That is to say, the typical English or Irish mode consists in the assumption of certain qualities which are in themselves quite pleasant. But the typically Scotch consists not in being loud or quiet, or merry or sad, or in any recognizable quality, but just in being Scotch . . .

TO HIS FATHER: from Magdalen College

[19 May 1929]

I hope your recovery from the winter ’flu has been permanent. My own prolonged cold, having lasted out the term, worked up into a sore throat and temperature and a few days in bed about Easter time. This finally got rid of the trouble and was not unpleasant. It gave me the excuse to be idle and the chance to re-read some old favourites—including The Antiquary. Read the Antiquary. I think it contains the cream of Scott’s humour and very nearly the cream of his tragedy.

I also re-read Pickwick, but this, as you know, I can hardly call an old favourite. Indeed I have only read it once before. This time I hoped I had at last got the secret and become a real convert: but my second reading has broken the spell, I am a relapsed heretic. It won’t do. I like the Wellers, both father and son, and I like the trial: but Eatanswill and Mrs Leo Hunter and Bill Stumps, his Mark, seem to me laboured and artificial, and I can’t forgive him for showing us poor Jingle in prison and repentance. The whole spirit in which we enjoy a comic rogue depends on leaving out the consideration of the consequences which his character would have in real life: bring that in, and every such character (say Falstaff) becomes tragic. To invite us to treat Jingle as a comic character and then spring the tragic side on us, is a mere act of bad faith. No doubt that is how Jingle wd end in real life. But then in real life it would have been our fault if we had originally treated him as a comic character. In the book you are forced to do so and are therefore unjustly punished when the tragedy comes . . .

I have a capital story which is quite new to me. The hero is a certain Professor Alexander, a philosopher, at Leeds, but I have no doubt that the story is older than he. He is said to have entered a railway carriage with a large perforated cardboard box which he placed on his knees. The only other occupant was an inquisitive woman. She stood it as long as she could, and at last, having forced him into conversation and worked the talk round (you can fill in that part of the story yourself) ventured to ask him directly what was in the box. ‘A mongoose madam.’ The poor woman counted the telegraph posts going past for a while and again could bear her curiosity no further. ‘And what are you going to do with the mongoose?’ she asked. ‘I am talking it to a friend who is unfortunately suffering fom delirium tremens.’ ‘And what use will a mongoose be to him?’ ‘Why, Madam, as you know, the people who suffer from that disease find themselves surrounded with snakes: and of course a mongoose eats snakes.’ ‘Good Heavens!’ cried the lady, ‘but you don’t mean that the snakes are real?’ ‘Oh dear me, no’ said the Professor with imperturbable gravity. ‘But then neither is the mongoose!’ . . .

TO HIS FATHER: from Magdalen College

17 July [1929]

This week a curious thing has happened. I have had a letter from Malvern stating that ‘Malvern College Ltd’ has been wound up and the school has now been put under a board of governors, and asking me to allow my name to be put up for election as one of them. As they are to number over a hundred the honour is not so overwhelming as at first appears. In my first heat I composed a very fine letter declining on the ground of my ‘limited knowledge of public school life and, still more, my imperfect sympathy with the aims and ideals of public schools’. This I enjoyed doing: but then alas ‘the native hue of resolution was sickled o’er with the pale cast of thought’. I reflected that this would get about and that the great junta of masters and old boys of various schools would pass from one to the other the word—‘If you have a boy going to Oxford, I shouldn’t recommend Magdalen. Lot of queer fish there now. Cranks etc. etc.’ So I funked it, tore up my first letter, and wrote an acceptance. I hope I should have been able to hold out against the purely prudential considerations (‘funk’ is the simpler word) if I had not been supported by the feeling, as soon as I had cooled, that membership of such a huge board would be purely nominal, except for the ring of ‘insiders’, and that therefore if I refused I should be only making a storm in a teacup. But won’t Warnie be tickled?—if I remember you and I discussed this situation purely as a joke when I was last at home.

Try to let me have a line when you feel like it. Don’t be put off writing altogether because you feel unequal to an essay—just a note to say that you have made up your mind where we are going. I should also be glad to hear some news of the Colonel, and of when he is coming back. He is badly in my epistolatory debt.

[For some time Jack had been trying to take his father on a holiday away from Belfast. But this time Mr Lewis was avoiding a holiday because he felt too ill to go anywhere. One of the doctors attending him was his brother Joseph’s son, Dr Joseph ‘Joey’ Lewis (1898–1969), who had known Jack and Warren all his life. ‘Joey’ was a distinguished blood specialist in the Belfast Infirmary and he persuaded his uncle to have some X-rays made on 26 July. That evening Mr Lewis wrote in his diary: ‘Xrayed. Results rather disquieting.’ Jack had already heard from Mr Lewis’s brother, Richard Lewis, who had visited Albert 4–9 July, that his father was not well. He learned from ‘Joey’ about the results of the X-rays.]

TO HIS FATHER: from Magdalen College

Postmark: 5 August 1929

My dear, dear Papy,

I am very glad you have written. I had heard the news and was anxious to write, but hardly knew how to do so. I will, of course, come home at the first moment. Unfortunately I have to go to Cambridge on the 8th for this examining, but will cross to Ireland on the 12th. Don’t bother to write yourself if you are not up to it, but see that I am informed.

I gather from what I heard that there is much that is hopeful in the first photo. It would be silly to pretend that this can set worries at rest for either of us; there is surer ground—at least for you—in the wonderful spirit, as shown in your letter, with which you are taking it. I wish I could convey to you one tithe of the respect and affection which I felt in reading it. For the rest, what can I say to you that is not already understood? What can any of us do for one another except give a handshake and a good wish, and hope to do as well when our own time comes to be under fire. It has been a bit of a strain this last week to keep my mind on examination papers for nine hours a day, and I am specially glad that you have written. I was told everything in confidence, I didn’t know that you knew I knew, and I could do nothing. I wish I could come straight away but I can hardly get out of Cambridge now. I know what hospitals and nursing homes are like—there at any rate I can sympathize with some experience.

Whatever the next few days brings forth I hope you will make no decision about your treatment without letting me know. I don’t of course mean to postpone such decision (necessarily) till next week: but see that I am told. Of course if there is serious trouble, you will have other advice than that of the Belfast crowd.

With all my love and my best wishes—I wish there was anything more useful I could offer—your loving son . . .

TO HIS BROTHER: from ‘Little Lea’

25 August 1929

In the study, 8.30 P.M.

This is a line to let you know that P. is rather seriously ill. The first I heard of it was from Uncle Dick about a month ago when I was still in Oxford, and then, in answer to my enquiry, from Joey who is attending him. The trouble is abdominal. The first fear was of course cancer. Xray photos cannot apparently disprove this with certainty, but their evidence, I’m glad to say, is all against it and according to Joey the other features of the case render it very improbable. We must not of course kid ourselves by saying impossible. The present diagnosis is that he is suffering from a narrowing of the passage in one of the bowels. The ordinary cure for this is the operation known as short circuiting: but they had hoped that if he would go on a light diet he would manage to get along, not in perfect health but in tolerable comfort, without being operated upon—or at any rate that the operation would be indefinitely postponed.

I came home immediately after my Cambridge examining and found things at this point. He was up and pretty well. About a week ago however he had an attack in the night of a sort of convulsion and shivering—they call it rigor—of which I only learnt next morning. This was not regarded as a very serious symptom by either Joey or Squeaky, but they kept him in bed. Next night when I took his temperature about nine I found it 103 and got the surgeon McConnell (a colleague of Joey’s in the case from the start) out to see him about midnight. He was light headed but the temperature fell in the morning. Since then he has been monkeying up and down and of couse he has been in bed. This evening they have told him that it is pretty certain that he will have to have the operation. They are to consult again in a few days and we shall then know for sure. He is taking it extraordinarily well. I shall of course stay until the operation is over, unless they postpone it till Christmas. As for you, I suppose it would be (a) Impossible, (b) Useless for you to get special leave as the affair is pretty sure to be settled before you could get home.

I have a great many things on other subjects to say—on Liverpool Cathedral and the new Liverpool boat and so forth—but this is only a note for necessity. I have been up the most of a good many nights with the P’daitabird and can’t leave the house long enough to get decent walks, so am rather tired and do not feel in form for a letter. This is from the little end room at about 10. P.M. What a pity you’re not here. In spite of the worrying situation we should find redeeming features about Leeborough under the present regime. When one is alone it is by no means so pleasant. Thanks for your last letter and excuse me for this scrawl. Remember I have the Leeborough demoralization on me as well as the cures of a patient. And by Gum, both ones morals and ones morale are hard put to it.

Of course the present emergency does not cancel immemorial rules. If your letter arrives P. may be—lets hope to goodness he will be—up again, and you must write therefore only what can be shown. When I am creeping about at night at present, or looking at his fire, I often derive a sort of whimsical pleasure from thinking of the long training in stealth for quite different purposes of which he is now the object in a new sense. I’m sorry that you have had an envelope in my handwriting, of which the contents will disappoint you so much as this. I am just going to creep on tiptoe to the cellar—the key being very sensibly in my charge—to get a mouthful of the whiskey.

TO HIS BROTHER: from ‘Little Lea’

29 August 1929

To be frank, you owe this second letter to a typically Leeburian situation. I had mentioned to the P’daitabird that I was writing to you, and this has provoked such a hailstorm of advice and warning—I must write on the thinnest paper and I must go to Condlin [his managing clerk] to get the right sort of envelope—and of questions—how am I getting on with my letter to the Colonel—that there is nothing for it. Sooner or later I must satisfy him with the touch and sight of a letter that by its size will not [be] too obviously a notification of his illness and therefore a cause of alarm to him. And I think it would be really too unkind to send you a wad of toilet paper.

Things are no better since I last wrote, and I am really very despondent about him. Yet it would be an offence against Pigiebotian ethics to seal ourselves up therefore in perpetual solemnity: and, however you may feel in China, I on the spot can only get through my days and nights by allowing myself an enjoyment of the old humours, which, needless to say, show through even this situation. If only it did not always raise anxiety, the daily visit of the Doctor would be irresistably funny. The patient’s utter refusal to answer to the point, his hazy accounts (on the familiar ‘mouthful’ principle) of what he has eaten, and his habit of replying to some such question as ‘Have you noticed any change in yourself?’ with a sudden ‘Doctor! I’m perfectly satisfied in my own mind that the root of all this trouble etc. etc.’ and his subsequent belief that the doctor has propounded to him the grossly improbable theory which he had in fact propounded to the doctor—all this you will be able to imagine on the slightest of hints from me. It was very alarming the night he was a little delirious. But (I cannot refrain from telling you) do you know the form it took? The watercloset element in his conversation rose from its usual 30% to something nearly like 100% . . .

However, perhaps all this water closet world is appropriate to me at the moment as I have just finished the formidable task of reading the whole of the works of Rabelais . . . I had to read him for the light he throws on the Renaissance in general and his particular influence on our own Elizabethans. Would I advise you to do the same? I hardly know. He is very long, very incoherent, and very, very stercoraceous. But you must base no opinion of him on what you hear from uneducated people who have never read any other comic book written before the reign of Queen Victoria and are therefore so blinded by a few familiar words when they first see them in print that they never go on seeing the drift of a page, much less a chapter, as a whole.

The first surprise is that about a quarter of the book is perfectly serious propaganda in favour of humanist education. The comic parts are mostly satires on the papacy, monasticism, and scholastic learning. The free farce of the Miller’s Tale-cum-Decameron type is really only about a third of the whole. There is a great deal of quite sincere piety and humanity of a pleasant Shandeyian, Montaignesque type. Some of the aphorisms must be added to our stock at once. ‘The greatest loss of time that I know is to count the hours’—‘Drunkards live longer than physicians’ . . . Some of the satire—tho’ satire tends always to bore me—is very ‘sly’, to use a good old word which we moderns have dropped or degraded without finding a better to fill its place.

31 August 1929

I have been continuously on the run since I got up—going to the McNeills to fetch the various jellies and confections with which they daily supply us—their decency to the O.A.B. all along has been extraordinary—helped your father to shave, giving him cheques to sign and endorse. If I start to work now I shall be interrupted by the doctor before I have well got my head into it, so I may as well put in ten minutes conversation with you.

After finishing your letter-portion last night and wiped up the deluge occasioned by opening one of those remarkable soda water bottles, I read a few pages of Macaulay’s letters. My reading them pleased the patient and as I have to do them some time or other I may as well do it now when it provides a common topic for our conversations. They are not uninteresting. Do you know that Macaulay developed his full manner as a schoolboy and wrote letters home from school which read exactly like pages out of the Essays? This is very illuminating. He was talking about the nature of government, the principles of human prosperity, the force of the domestic affections and all that (you know the junk) at the age of fourteen. He could not at that age have known anything about them: least of all could he have known enough for the flowing generalizations which he makes. One can see quite clearly that having so early acquired the talk he found he could go on quite comfortably for the rest of his life without bothering to notice the things. He was from the first clever enough to produce a readable and convincing slab of claptrap on any subject whether he understood it or not, and hence he never to his dying day discovered that there was such a thing as understanding. Don’t you think the last word on him is Southey’s statement—‘Macaulay’s a clever lad, and a clever lad he’ll remain’—? . . .

This is Saturday night. The patient is rather better . . . The great consolation about Leeborough at present is my control of the meals. As soon as I came home and found P. on light diet I said I would make things easier for him by giving up my own meat for lunch. I substituted bread and cheese, cream crackers and butter, and fruit. This may not appeal to you: but the glory is that I can have it when I choose. There has not been a day for the last fortnight on which one o’clock has not seen me sitting down to my cheese, fruit and wine in a dining room with the windows open. A little effort of imagination will enable you to realize what a comfort this is. I maintain the same arrangement during the week end. Fancy a Leeboro Saturday with light lunch at one instead of a gorge at half past two, and then high tea (cold roast chicken and ham tonight) at seven! . . .

If only I wasn’t constantly bothered about the P’daitabird (for one never knows really what the next temperature may bring forth), if only I could get decent walks, and if only I could get some more work done, it wouldn’t be a bad life. A formidable list of exceptions! Its like the poacher in Punch ‘If I get three more after the one I’m after now, I shall have caught four.’ . . . I break off here and drink my drop of spirits.

By the way we had tonight the old stunt about whiskey being an unpalatable drink. Incidentally all the doctors without exception say that he has done and is doing himself harm with it. Joey says that when he mentions this to the patient, the patient simply laughs at him—and has ruled that there’s no good trying to stop it as the good which cd now be done by cessation would be less than the psychological irritation. He gave me a real fright as I was going out of the gate the other day, having left him as comfortably settled up for the afternoon as I could. He suddenly appeared at his window shouting at me in a voice that made me think some terrible crisis had come. I [went] tearing upstairs to find the real tragedy: he had suddenly discovered that I was going out with the cellar key in my pocket—and apparently the ‘odd dregs’ in the two bottles which he keeps in the wardrobe were not enough to last him the afternoon. There is a very serious side to all this, but I agree with Joey: and I’d go a long way before I’d be leagued with the doctors to deprive the poor old chap of what is about his only pleasure. Let us hope Rabelais is right . . .

Sept. 3rd. The surgeon and Squeaky and Joey have all consulted today and decided on an operation. He is taking it like a hero. By the time this reaches you all will be settled for good or ill. It has been the devil of a day as you may imagine, infernally nerve racking and painful and I’m dead sleepy. I shall post this tomorrow. I had meant to write more, but I’m too tired. As to facts theres nothing more to add. Anyway this can’t reach you in time to give any information.

TO OWEN BARFIELD: from ‘Little Lea’

9 September 1929

Many thanks for your letter. I am not sure that the distinction between ‘intimacy’ and ‘familiarity’ is really very profound. It seems to be largely a matter of accident that you know so little of my previous history. I knew more of yours because we meet in England: if we had met in Ireland the position would be reversed. Again, we do not much narrate our past lives, but this is because we have so much else to talk about. Any day might have started a topic to which such narrative would have been relevant, and out it would have come. Consider how many bores whose history you know well after a short acquaintance, not because familiarity has in their case replaced intimacy but because they had nothing to say and would not be silent.

I am not saying that there is nothing in the distinction. When the parties are of different sexes it may be more important. I suppose a good Greek was familiar with his wife and intimate with his . But between men I suspect that intimacy includes familiarity potentially. Now with a woman, of course, no degree of intimacy includes any familiarity at all; for that there must be or or both.

The test really is this. When you have talked to a man about his soul, you will be able, whenever the necessity arises, say, to assist him in using a catheter or nurse him through an attack of dysentry, or help him (if it should so happen) in a domestic problem. This is not so in the case of a woman.

As for my present situation, it frightens me for what it implies. I argue thus: 1. I am attending at the almost painless sickbed of one for whom I have little affection and whose society has for many years given me much discomfort and no pleasure. 2. Nevertheless I find it almost unendurable. 3. Then what in heavens name must it be like to fill the same place at the sickbed, perhaps agonized, of someone really loved, and someone whose loss will be irreparable? A formidable argument a fortiori. No doubt under 1. it is proper to include the fact that if lack of real affection spares some pains, it introduces others. Where every kind word and forbearance is the result of calculated duty, and where all we do leaves us still rather ashamed, there is, I suppose, a particular kind of strain which would be absent from the other situation. There is also, in this present case, though no spiritual sympathy, a deep and terrible physiological sympathy. My father and I are physical counterparts: and during these days more than ever I notice his resemblance to me. If I were nursing you I should look forward to your possible death as a loss lifelong and irremediable: but I don’t think I should shrink from the knife with the sub-rational sym-pathy (in the etymological sense) that I feel at present.

Having said all this I must proceed to correct the exaggeration which seems to be inherent in the mere act of writing. Who was it said that disease has its own pleasures of which health knows nothing? I have my good moments to which I look forward, and perhaps, though the whole tone of the picture is lowered, there is as much chiaroscuro as ever. When my patient is settled up for the night I go out and walk in the garden. I enjoy enormously the cool air after the atmosphere of the sick room. I also enjoy the frogs in the field at the bottom of the garden, and the mountains and the moon. I often get an afternoon walk when things are going well, and my friend Arthur Greeves—the ‘friend’ of It you know, who mentioned the beech tree in his letter—sees me every day, and often twice a day. Some of my consolations are very childish and may seem brutal. When Arthur and I talk late into the night there is, even now, a magical feeling of successful conspiracy; it is such a breach, not of course of the formal rules but of the immemorial custom of a house where I have hardly ever known freedom. There is pleasure of the same kind in sitting with open windows in rooms where I have suffocated ever since childhood: and in substituting a few biscuits and fruit for the Gargantuan mid-day meal which was hitherto compulsory. I hope this is not so uncharitable as it sounds.

At any rate, I have never been able to resist the retrogressive influence of this house which always plunges me back into the pleasures and pains of a boy. That, by the bye, is one of the worst things about my present life. Every room is soaked with the bogeys of childhood, the awful ‘rows’ with my father, the awful returnings to school: and also with the old pleasures of an unusually ignoble adolescence.

By the way, that is just the point about intimacy containing familiarity. If it ever became really relevant to some truth that we were exploring in common I could and would expand the last sentence into detail: on the other hand I have not the slightest inclination to do so. i.e. what would be an end for familiars is only an instrument for intimates. I enclose a few epigrams on which I would like your opinion. With many thanks . . .

[Warren did not receive the last two letters from Jack until some forty days after they were posted. He was, in fact, unaware that there was anything wrong with his father until he received a cable from Jack on 27 September which read: ‘Sorry report father died painless twenty-fifth September. Jack.’]

TO HIS BROTHER: from ‘Hillsboro’

29 September 1929

By this [time] you will have had my cable and the two letters written from Leeboro. As there is a good deal of business I will only give you the bare facts. The operation, in spite of what they prophesied, discovered cancer. They said he might live a few years. I remained at home, visiting him in the Nursing Home, for ten days. There were ups and downs and some bad spasms of pain from flatulence (apparently the usual sequence to abdominal operations) going over the wound: but nothing really dreadful. Quite often he was himself and telling wheezes, tho’ of course he was often wandering from the dopes. By this time I had been at home since Aug. 11th and my work for next term was getting really desperate, and, as Joey said, I might easily wait several weeks more and still be in the same position—i.e. not really making the progress he should, but not likely to take a sudden turn for the worse. I therefore crossed to Oxford on Saturday Sept. 22. On Tuesday 24 I got a wire saying that he was worse, caught the train an hour later, and arrived to find that he had died on Tuesday afternoon. The immediate cause seems to have been some blood moving on to the brain: at least that is how they interpreted it. The facts were that he never woke on Tuesday, and remained all that day in a state of unconsciousness with a rising temperature . . .¹³⁴

TO HIS BROTHER: from ‘Hillsboro’

27 October [1929]

What you say in your letter is v. much what I am finding myself. I always before condemned as sentimentalists and hypocrites the people whose view of the dead was so different from the view they held of the same people living. Now one finds out that it is a natural process. Of course, on the spot, ones feelings were in some ways different. I think the mere pity for the poor old chap and for the life he had led really surmounted everything else. It was also (in the midst of home surroundings) almost impossible to believe. A dozen times while I was making the funeral arrangements I found myself mentally jotting down some episode or other to tell him: and what simply got me between wind and water was going into Robinson and Cleaver’s to get a black tie and suddenly realizing ‘You can never put anything down to his account again’.

By the way, a great deal of his jollities and wheezes remained to the end. One of the best things he ever said was the day before I left—four days before his death. As I came in the day nurse said ‘I’ve just been telling Mr Lewis that he’s exactly like my father.’ P. ‘And how am I like your father?’ N. ‘Why he’s a pessimist.’ P. (after a pause) ‘I suppose he has several daughters.’

As time goes on the thing that emerges is that, whatever else he was, he was a terrific personality. You remember ‘Johnson is dead. Let us go to the next. There is none. No man can be said to put you in mind of Johnson.’¹³⁵ How he filled a room! How hard it was to realize that physically he was not a very big man. Our whole world, the whole Pigiebotian world, is either direct or indirect testimony to the same effect. Take away from our conversation all that is imitation or parody (sincerest witness in the world) of his, and how little is left. The way we enjoyed going to Leeborough and the way we hated it, and the way we enjoyed hating it: as you say, one can’t grasp that that is over. And now you could do anything on earth you cared to in the study at midday or on Sunday, and it is beastly.

I sympathize with you in the strange experience of returning to a British Isles which no longer contains a P’daitaheim. I hope that when all your books are set up (presumably in the non-glassed little end room bookcase) in Magdalen, where you can always have an empty sitting room to which you can repair at all hours, I hope that a leave at Hillsboro will be able to pass not unpalatably. Its no good pretending that its the old thing, but there you are . . .¹³⁶

TO HIS BROTHER: from ‘Hillsboro’

21 December 1929

One of the pities of the present state of affairs seems to be that it is impossible for either of us to write the other a real letter. I will try to break the spell by giving you some account of my adventures since you last heard from me before the great divide. The chief adventure is the quite new light thrown on P. by a closer knowledge of his two brothers.¹³⁷ One of his failings—his fussily directed manner ‘Have you got your keys etc.’—takes on a new air when one discovers that in his generation the brothers all habitually treated one another in exactly the same way.

On the morning of the funeral Uncle Dick arrived before breakfast and came to Uncle Bill who was sleeping in the spare room. I drifted in. After a few greetings, it was with a shock of mild surprise that I heard Limpopo [Bill] suddenly cut short a remark of Uncle Dick’s with the words ‘Now Dick, you’d better go and take off your collar, huh, (gesture) and wash yourself and that sort of thing, eh, and have a bit of a shave.’ To which his brother, with perfect seriousness replied ‘Now how had we better handle the thing, eh Jacks? You’d better go to the bathroom first and I’ll go downstairs and get a cup of tea. Bill, you’d better lie down (gesture) and cover yourself up and I’ll come and tell you . . .’ Limpopo (cutting in) ‘Well Dick, get along downstairs, huh, and Jacks will go and tell you, wouldn’t that be best, eh?’

Later in the day we had a session of the wardrobe committee quite in the old manner: and in the afternoon I was told ‘Jacks, show Mrs Hamilton that coat you found. Isn’t it a splendid fit, huh, might have been made for him, wha’?’

Another light came to me during the visit to the undertakers: the whole scene had such an insane air of diabolical farce that I cannot help recording it. After a man with a dusty face had approached me with the assurance that he had buried my grandfather, my mother, and my uncle, a superior person led us into an inner room and enquired if we wanted ‘a suite of coffins’. Before I had recovered from this—and it sounded like the offer of some scaley booking clerk at an hotel in hell—the brute suddenly jerked out of the wall a series of enormous vertical doors, each one of which when lowered revealed on its inner side a specimen coffin. We were quite surrounded by them. Slapping one of them like a drum with his resonant hand he remarked ‘That’s a coffin I’m always very fond of’ and it was then that the ‘light’ came.

Limpopo—and even Limpopo came as a relief in such an atmosphere—put an end to this vulgarity by saying in his deepest bass ‘What’s been used before, huh? There must be some tradition about the thing. What has the custom been in the family, eh?’ And then I suddenly saw, what I’d never seen before: that to them family traditions—the square sheet, the two thirty dinner, the gigantic overcoat—were what school traditions and college traditions are, I don’t say to me, but to most of our generation. It is so simple once you know it. How could it be otherwise in those large Victorian families with their intense vitality, when they had not been to public schools and when the family was actually the solidest institution they experienced? It puts a great many things in a more sympathetic light than I ever saw them in before.

But apart from these two lights, what I carried away from those few days was the feeling (perhaps I mentioned it before) that all the other members of that family were only fragments of our own P’daitabird. Uncle Dick has the wheezes, but only the crudest of them and none of the culture. In Joey you see the wheeze side of the character gone to seed—the man whose conversation is nothing but giggles. In Limpopo, of course you see simply all the bad points without any of the good: with the additional property of being an outrageous bore, which is the one thing P. never was at any time.

His idea of conversation is almost unbelievable. On the evening of the day of his arrival, after dinner, having been supplied with whiskey, he drew up the little wooden seated study chair to the fire, and having placed his little tubby body in it and crossed his flaccid hands on his belly, proceeded to enunciate the following propositions. ‘I usually leave town about quarter to six, huh, and then I get out to Helensburgh about quarter past and walk up to me house, eh, and then I (Jacks I’ll have another drop of that whiskey) put on an old coat, huh, then I come down and have something to drink and a bit of a chat with your Aunt Minnie, huh, and then . . .’ Without any exaggeration, he kept me up till 1.30 with this drivel. The last night, when the Hamiltonians were there, was much better. Limpopo explained that he had given up dealing with Hogg. ‘The last suit he sent me . . . the trousers came up to my chin (gesture) . . . I was very nearly going to law with him.’ Uncle Gussie: ‘I think you should. You should have gone into court wearing that suit.’ Limpopo (with profound gravity): ‘Oh, I wouldn’t like to have done that, huh’ . . .