1928

TO HIS FATHER (LP IX: 329–31):

Magdalen.

Feb. 25th. 1928

My dear Papy,

I am afraid I have been a sad defaulter. The truth is that one finds oneself in the middle of term before there is time to look round, and this particular term has not been a very good one with me. First of all, I walked out through the College garden one fine Sunday morning and slammed the door of it on my finger. I wrapped a handkerchief round it to stop the bleeding and gave utterance to a few ‘blasphemies’, but until I had set out to a place where I could get it dressed and had very nearly fainted on route, I hardly realised what a nasty knock it was. Luckily it was the left hand, but I had some pain and great inconvenience with it. Then I developed a series of colds and a troublesome cough which kept me for some weeks in that border line condition wherein one manages to stumble through the daily round but slinks to bed very soon after dinner (when this is possible) and wakes muddy and unrefreshed. In the end it would not be denied. In spite of my coyness I found that I would have to keep my annual assignation with our lady influenza. A few days in bed soon settled that (this comes rather unfortunately after the assignation metaphor–a consequence not foreseen by the writer) and I am now on my legs again and indeed much better than I have been for many weeks.

The chief event has been the death of one of our fellows, Wrong, ¹ which you may have seen in the papers. He was Vice President when I first joined: and had invited me to become Pro-Proctor with him as a junior Proctor–which could not be done as I was just a term too little from my matriculation to be eligible. He was always extremely friendly to me, and I liked him as well as any one in College. He was that very rare and very delightful thing, a colonial aristocrat–being of an old Canadian family. His grandfather was one of the last people to fight a political duel; to which he was challenged on whatever corresponds to the floor of the ‘House’ in Canada. The blend is curious. It is odd to find a man who has canoed in Hudson bay and knows all about trapping and skunks and Indians, and yet who has distinction in the lines of his face and tradition in his outlook. No doubt, like other good things, it is disappearing: the influx of commercial democracy and the rule of the Bosses from the States will soon put an end to that element in Canada, just as (I am told) it has always swamped some things in their own vaunted southern states. He had (as Johnson would have said) ‘a great deal of literature’, though his own subject was history, and I have had much good crack with him about books. He was even responsible himself for a thin volume of poetry–whose merit it would be unkind now to discuss. He was one of the most brilliant of our men, and we shall have trouble in filling his place. Our ‘Mods’ tutor is also leaving us: so with his place, Wrong’s, and the President to fill, we shall live this summer in a riot of elections. The great consolation is that Sambo cannot take part in the choosing of his own successor: if he could, heaven knows what Homeric length of meetings, speeches, committees, memoranda, and what not might await us!

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’ ² brilliant and original views on Hamlet last night, or what a pleasant talk I had the other day with Nicholl Smith ³ (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.’ ⁴

for the born letter writer is quite independent of material.

Have you ever read the letters of the poet Cowper? ⁵ 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, ⁶ how he made a hutch for a tame hare, ⁷ what he is doing about his cucumbers ⁸–all this he makes one follow as if the fate of empires hung on it.

Some authors, on the other hand, are far below themselves in their letters. Notably Charlotte Brontë and Mrs Gaskell whose life I re-read again while I was laid up. I had forgotten one of the best unintentionally funny things in literature until I saw it again. It comes where a letter written by Charlotte immediately after her profligate brother’s death has been quoted. The situation is genuine tragedy. After giving the letter, Mrs Gaskell proceeds ‘The dear friend to whom these affecting lines were written was unfailing in her sympathy for the poor worn mind and harassed frame and shortly afterwards sent her a present of a shower bath.’ ⁹ (I cannot resist thinking of the idea of giving presents of this sort instead of letters of condolence. ‘Poor so and so, I must send his wife a vacuum cleaner tomorrow’. It would be ‘brutal’ to work it out in detail: but undeniably a good idea.

I find that when I left home I came away without (1) a cardigan jumper, (2) a mackintosh. If you can conveniently lay your hands on these and direct the Witch of Endor to send them to me, I shall be much obliged. Try to let me have a letter in the near future–I hope it will contain a favourable account of your health and doings.

your loving son,

Jack

TO HIS FATHER (LP X: 2–3):

Magdalen.

March 31st.[1928]

My dear Papy,

Many thanks for the parcel which arrived safely. I should have acknowledged it earlier but I was in hope that I would have heard from you before now. I hope that your continued silence has no worse cause than ‘a truant disposition’ ¹⁰ and the enticements of forty winks of a Sunday afternoon. Try to let me have a line–if no more–in the course of the next week or so to let me know how you are getting on. I have had no word from the Colonel either for a great while.

I have succeeded, at last, in shaking off the ailments of one of the most troublesome terms I have yet had. I forget whether I told you that after the squashed finger and the flu, I developed a swollen gland under my tongue. A doctor soon put my mind at rest about it, but of course before consulting him I had plenty of opportunity of listening–specially at night–to all the grim suggestions which the selfishness and cowardice of one’s uncorrected ‘natural man’ pours into ones ear on such occasions. The nail, by the by, is going to come off and at present hangs by a thread, looking very black and ugly and catching in everything. It reminds me of the far off days when one used to get a shilling for pulling out one’s own tooth. I await with much philosophical interest to see how a new nail grows.

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: ¹¹ 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 squall 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. ¹²

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 Buchman. ¹³ 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 suppress it (I am assuming that you agree with me that the thing is unhealthy) you only make martyrs.

The rumour that Big Bill Thompson ¹⁴ is to be the new President of Magdalen is untrue, and should be contradicted.

your loving son,

Jack

TO HIS BROTHER (LP X: 37–43):

[Hillsboro]

All Fool’s Day, 1928

Postmark: 24 April 1928

My dear W.,

Once again I have found it impossible to keep up my letters to you during the term. This will be a chronic complaint and I am afraid you will have to accept it as a law of nature.

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.’ He said I ought to write it down. I told him I should certainly remember it. He said, ‘Well I bet you if I ask you tomorrow you won’t know.’ Next evening just as he was about to leave the study, he suddenly whipped round (in the ‘I’ll tell you another thing’ style) and bellowed out in a voice that made me jump out of my skin, ‘Jacks!! What’s an optimist?’

We had indeed a good deal about words, because I had given him Fowler’s ‘Modern English Usage’, a kind of prig’s dictionary which contains such entries as ‘METICULOUS, see vogue words,’ and ‘CACHIN-NATION, see Humour, polysyllabic’, and which agrees with him about nearly everything. I really lacked the courage to give him another picture. I added to Fowler the new Nineteenth Century volume of the Dictionary of National Biography. Both these proved to be the most successful jumping jacks we have ever struck on, without exception. Both were intolerable nuisances also, lending themselves fatally well to the ‘Now there’s a very funny thing’ style of conversation. My third and last was Max Beerbohm’s ‘Zuleika Dobson’ ¹⁵ which was much less successful because he insisted on trying to find a hidden meaning in it. ‘I wonder what this fellow’s driving at…’ ‘AH, he’s got some meaning in all this you know.’ 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. But there will be no more calculable days or weeks of non-p’dayta time at home. That is a problem that you and I will have to have a very serious talk about one of these days.

The little end room and all it stands for is rapidly becoming uninhabited territory. My Encyclopedia Boxoniana made hardly any progress at all. And I have not yet done going through the texts, let alone making the actual entries. ¹⁶ And even when he does go to town, he may return any time between eleven and three. By the way, what is the explanation of the fact that even if he returns at one o’clock when the lunch ought to be already cooking, the domestic staff immediately goes into p’dayta hours and puts the meal back to two or two thirty? He tells us that it is by no order of his, but I strongly suspect that he’s hiding something from us. I find the bucket of sherry a very poor consolation for the disturbance of my day. Talking of sherry you will be surprised to hear that I have been at last moved on to the whiskey roster. I have even overshot you to such an extent that lemon, hot water, and sugar bowl now appear nightly together with the whiskey. The new regimen is accompanied of course with many ponderous jocosities of look, word, and wink, and a frequent use of that very offensive word ‘boozing’. This can hardly fail to redound to your advantage. You being now the old guard and I the novice, no doubt the jokes and insinuations (and also the suggested alternative of ‘your’ Burgundy and soda) will hence forward be transferred to my lot. But I hope there will be no nonsense about continuing in the medium of whiskey the good old theme of the large and the small suitcase. (With what resignation will he explain to visitors, nay with what viciousness ‘They each have their whiskey now’. Or more pointedly, ‘Yes, when I take my little drop they each have a tumbler of whiskey.’)

One of the misfortunes of my position is that my reading contains less and less that I can share with my non-professional friends. Except Pickwick ¹⁷ (a very overrated work) I have read hardly anything this term which you would care to hear of. At present I am deep in medieval things. ¹⁸ I find I shall have to try to ‘get’ some Old French. Don’t you think this is rather jolly. In one of those gardens in a dream, which mediaeval love poetry is full of, we find the tomb of a knight, dead for love, covered with flowers. Then:–

‘Oysiaus i ot: por l’ame del signor

Qui la gisoit, cantent de vrai amor.

Quant il unt fain, cascuns baise une flor,

Ja puis n’arunt ne faim ne soif le jor.’ ¹⁹

I am still so ignorant that I don’t know what ‘i ot’ (1) or ‘Ja’ mean, but I suppose it can be v. roughly Englished,

‘And birds that for the soul of that signor

Who lay beneath, songs of true love did pour:

Being hungered, each from off the flowers bore

A kiss, and felt that day no hunger more.’

The odd thing is that one would expect the same rime going all through to be monotonous and ugly: but to my ear it produces a beautiful lulling like the sound of the sea. I fancy one pronounces the N’s less nasal than the modern French N, and almost certainly makes a real syllable out of the mute E’s. In quite a different vein I like the mere baldness of this address to ladies,

‘Toutes estes, seres, ou futes,

De fait ou de volonte, putes.’ ²⁰

where you can easily guess the meaning of putes if you don’t know it already–and also understand the insolence of Swift in calling his flying island ‘La Puta’. ²¹ Which leads to another question. The only modern editions of ‘The Romans de la Rose’ are old fashioned enough to print asterisks for certain words. So you get,

‘Car volontiers, non pas enirs

Mist Diex en C****** et en v**

Force generacion.’²²

We all see what c…and v.. are. Do you know the words? And is c……the same as its modern English equivalent? I think you and I ought to do a little old French together, where your superior knowledge of the modern language and my wider experience of language in general would put us at the same point. We might begin with Aucassin and Nicolette, ²³ to which, if I remember rightly, you first introduced me. Also, sooner or later, you will be bound to look back at the mediaeval roots out of which your France grew.

(1) On second thoughts ‘ot’ must be an old preterit of avoir, and i ot equals il ya avait.’

April 15th

Last week end I was away on my Easter walking tour, and as Sundays are the only days I can spare for these ‘loose undigested pieces’ this has had to lie fallow for a fortnight. You should take a box of English maps away with you whenever you go abroad: recalling old jaunts and planning new ones would be a great solace to you and you would also be able to follow any itineraries I write. And, by the same token, don’t you approve of the suggestion made by a friend of mine that there shd. be a set of new conventional signs to put on one’s map: e.g. ²⁴ means here we bathed our feet in a cool stream. ²⁵Here we drank beer: ²⁶ bad beer: ²⁷ fleas in beds here, and so forth.

My own Oxford sheet at least shows the right tendency in bearing crossed swords, the sign of a battle, at the point of N.W. of Chipping Norton where you and I contended with that puncture in the teeth of a gale. As I presume that you haven’t your maps with you, I shall not give you a detailed account of our journey. It was the inexhaustible Cotswolds again, as all of us this year happened to be too straitened for time and money to attempt a longer walk. I say ‘inexhaustible’ advisedly. This year, within a mile or so of country we had walked before, we found valley after valley and wood after wood as beautiful as ever, and whole days of country different totally in character from what we had already seen. The Bathurst estate beyond Cirencester is a place we must revisit when you come home. You can take the whole breakfast to lunch walk in the glorious woods and then emerge into the open in time to lunch at the most glorious village on the edge of the Stroud valley, which winds away as far as you can see, delightfully wooded and watered. (The first Lord Bathhurst, I am told, was raised to the peerage for inventing a new kind of toilet paper for Queen Anne. I have often heard of honours won by getting up the…. ²⁸ of one’s superiors. Perhaps this is the origin of the expression. Now there is an idea quite silly enough to write to Notes and Queries or the Spectator about–if only public prejudice didn’t render it impossible on other grounds.)

Shortly after this one passes the western mouth of the (now disused) canal tunnel that runs under the Chilterns. It is very awe inspiring and suggests the mouth of the Styx. It seems in the nature of things that one real blunder should be produced by each walking tour. This time we committed the folly of selecting a billeting area for the night instead of one good town: i.e. we said ‘Well here are four villages within a mile of one another and the map marks an inn in each, so we shall be sure to get in somewhere.’ Your imagination can suggest what this results in by about eight o’clock of an evening, after twenty miles of walking, when one is just turning away from the first unsuccessful attempt and a thin cold rain is beginning to fall. Yet these hardships had their compensations: thin at the time, but very rich in memory. One never knows the snugness and beauty of an English village twilight so well as in the homelessness of such a moment: when the lights are just beginning to show up in the cottage windows and one sees the natives clumping past to the pub–clouds meanwhile piling up ‘to weather’.

Our particular village was in a deep narrow valley with woods all round it and a rushing stream that grew louder as the night came on. Then comes the time when you have to strike a light (with difficulties) in order to read the maps: and when the match fizzles out, you realise for the first time how dark it really is: and as you go away, the village fixes itself in your mind–for enjoyment ten, twenty, or thirty years hence–as a place of impossible peace and dreaminess. Failure to find lodging brings to my mind the excellent story of the Golden Opportunity which I heard for the first time the other day. I hope it is new to you.

‘They say and they sing and relate’ that a young man on a walking tour found himself benighted once in Scotland with only a tiny farm house in sight. Knocking at the door, he was greeted by a gaunt God-fearing man who told him to get out of that: when suddenly the voice of the farmer’s young wife from behind said, no, let the laddie in. So the farmer reluctantly admitted him. At supper an excellent meat pie was produced. The young man was very hungry, but when the hostess offered him a second helping, the God-fearing man said ‘Na. Na. The rest of yon pie’s for ma breikfast’: so it was put away. Upstairs was only a single bed. The guest got in first: then the God-fearing man: then the wife. They had hardly had time to close their eyes when a voice from without bellowed up ‘Jock! Jock! Come down man, the grey coo’s goin’ to calve.’ Unwillingly for many reasons did that God-fearing man arise, and bundling his long white nightshirt into his trousers, shuffle away. Then ‘Young man’ said the hostess softly, ‘He maun be oot there twa hours at the least. It’s a golden opportunity.’ ‘By Gad, maam, you’re right. It is a golden opportunity’ replied the guest fervently, as he leapt from the bed: and going downstairs swiftly, finished to the last morsel that very excellent meat pie.

I sincerely hope this is a really modern story, for it would show that the mind of the nation was not yet spoiled. But it has a suspiciously Chaucerian flavour, and I expect we shall meet [it] in the middle ages again some day. What pleases me so much is the idea of the breakfast party next morning, on one side ‘Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned’: ²⁹ on the other the G.F.M., up most of the night and breakfast-less.

Our own adventures in the inhospitable billeting area ended by the miserable expedient of walking on five miles of main road into that most loathsome city, Cheltenham: in the outskirts of wh.–you will find this hard to believe–we found a brilliantly lighted hotel, echoing with music, in the midst of a garden, and no gate into it anywhere so far as we could discover. The wind blew and the rain poured. We walked on until we had clearly passed the hotel grounds: then we walked back. But we found no gate and I am still divided as to whether it was merely a Christina dream ³⁰ or an extension of the view taken up in that hotel where you and I were asked whether we’d be wanting anything more after our tea and where (if you remember) we concluded that the proprietors regarded us as a nuisance. You may imagine how glad we were to get down to it when we did finally reach an hotel in the middle of Cheltenham. Though I have decided not to be topographical (in your lack of maps), I must just put on record the delightful valley in which Temple Guiting stands–a place we ought certainly to visit.

I had almost forgotten to tell you of another snatch of holiday–only a week end–which I had immediately after term when a colleague motored me down to his bungalow at Rhossilli in the Gower peninsula. This, as you probably know, lies on the south coast of Wales, near the mouth of the channel. The bottle neck is closed by the formidable city of Swansea. The tide of people of leisure and taste (who, by the by with their cars, villas and bungalows, really spoil sport for us far more than the bluecoat and the burley) having looked at Swansea, very naturally go further. But once past that detestable town (I once v. nearly tried for a job there) you find yourself in a solitude of bare hills, limestone cliffs and crags, coves well wooded, and more Norman castles than I ever believed possible. As the peninsula is a dead end leading to nowhere but a harbourless sea, nothing comes down its road: even tramps have long since decided not to walk down and have to walk back. There is nothing spectacular: no real mountains and no great cliffs–rather the sort of cliffs that is sheep bitten grass half the way up and then breaks into grey spires. (Limestone is the pale grey rock that tends to go pointy. How useful these sciences are after all!). The whole of the western end of Gower is owned by an old lady who, because she will not sell any of her land for building–in other words will not raise her income by rendering her home uninhabitable–is described as eccentric. Blessings on her.

My visit would have been pleasanter if my host had not discovered in himself elements of the Burnetto-Desmond ³¹ which I had no previous means of discovering. I could have pardoned his firm adherence to the Take-Lunch-With-You school on our daily expeditions–being a malady specially incident to married men–but his fixed idea about picking up any bit of odd timber on the way home for firewood was what really annoyed me. His account of the thing was ‘If I see a nice bit of firewood when we’re in sight of home, I sometimes bring it along with me.’ The fact was that any time after lunch on an all day walk, not he, but we, began to burden ourselves with every lump and spar of timber we could find. In my simplicity I had joined in planning a walk that would bring us home along four miles of sand (A wonderful bathing beach it would be in summer, and not a human habitation). Little did I realise that his praises of a beach walk were inspired by something very much more lively than aesthetic appreciation and that the word which flashed across his mind was ‘Driftwood’. I had indeed wondered whether it might not be tiring to walk so far on sand. It was. By six o’clock I was feverishly engaged in keeping his attention fixed on the horizon for fear he would notice the foreparts of a wrecked rowing boat which we were passing. By half past six I heard, to my inexpressible horror, that even metal objects came in very useful, and saw him stop to look longingly at an old anchor which four men could not have lifted. Whether he smelts them or chemically produces one of those heats in which iron will burn I stayed not to inquire. However, I had a very pleasant week end on the whole: and how few people has one followed into their native haunts without finding some such drawback.

The only disadvantage in the place was the ever present danger of his latrine: whereof he only appraised me as my hand was on the latch after breakfast the first morning, by remarking casually that I’d better not drop a match down it as he de-odorised it with a highly inflammable chemical. To throw a cigarette end or a match down the rears is an action so natural that I was always in terror of the place. It reminds me of what someone told me about his school where a continuous channel underneath united a row of rears, and it passed for an excellent witticism to set fire to a mass of toilet paper and launch it burning on the stream–thus, according to naval traditions, introducing as it were a fire ship under the bottoms of a man’s acquaintances.

It is a long time since I’ve heard from you, and I am not even clear when exactly your oriental spell comes to an end. All here are pretty fit. I re-read The Man of Property ³² in the mornings in bed last week. I didn’t change my views at all about the general merits of it, but was surprised not to have noticed before [that these] who are meant (I suppose) to be sympathetic are really v. like the rest. If anyone contended that Irene herself is a typical Forsyte it wd. be quite easy to make out a case for him. Do you observe that no disinterested action is anywhere recorded of her? One also discovers that Soames is much more broadly drawn in the early parts of the Man of Property than anywhere else in the saga–much more a figure of satire. He is described as ‘mousing’ along the street. I don’t think Galsworthy would have used the word later on. Indeed I wish he’d kept more to the original level: I want more of the glorious Forsytism, the soup and port and saddle of mutton and family gatherings and less of the ordinary novelistic ‘pash’–less about young Jolyon’s feelings and Irene’s hips. I don’t think I like Galsworthy in his tender vein. A man so sensual ought not to be so serious about it. All those scents and sunsets–we all know it’s bosh really. But a great book, whenever he stops writing a novel and just tells us about the Forsytes.

yrs,

Jack

TO OWEN BARFIELD (W):

[Hillsboro]

Whitsunday [27 May 1928]

My dear Barfield,

After an unconscionable delay for which no excuse was offered, Messrs. Brooks have been out to view the ‘property’ at Crendon. ³³ They sent me a letter saying that the matter seemed rather difficult and would I come to call on them. I replied that I would if they wished: but added that I had already said all I had authority to say, and that if it were a question of interpretation, my interpretation would have no more warrant than theirs and they had better write to you direct. I hope you won’t attribute this to mere laziness. It is quite clear that I can’t really move an inch without again referring to you, and, that being so, it seems absurd for the resulting correspondence to go round from you to me and me to Brooks. What is the train to do at my station beyond having the doors opened and slammed again and the wheels tapped? So I hope you are now in communication with them.

I have just got a copy of Poetic Diction–having just learned of its appearance from a marvelously absurd review in the T.L.S., ³⁴ where the critic fiddles about for a paragraph with the main argument, obviously unable to make anything of it and very much afraid of giving himself away, and then with almost audible relief grasps at some parenthetical remark of yours about Lamb, and having at last got something he can understand, begins eagerly ‘But surely Mr Barfield is wrong in calling Lamb a minor poet’–But you must not be angry with him: the poor man was having a very bad time and this was the shadow of a great rock in a thirsty land. I spent ten minutes after breakfast this morning trying to lend the book to J.A. ³⁵ but like the two girls in Sense and Sensibility he ‘resolutely and fervently’ declined the invitation. ³⁶ People will never borrow the books you want to lend, but always the others. I haven’t yet reread it, but am rather astonished at what I have seen so far. In Appendix IV iii you quote with approval a passage from Steiner where he seems to

be saying just what I always say and you always deny. ³⁷ That the subject is a product of thought and not its author is almost my . ³⁸ I think in general that I am going to agree with the whole book more than we thought I did. We are really at one about imagination as the source of meanings i.e. almost of objects. We both agree that it is the prius of truth. But I can’t write about it now.

When are you coming home? I must see someone sane again soon. Just by the bye–and you must not repeat it to anyone, even myself–this college is a cesspool, a stinking puddle, faex Romuli, ³⁹ inhabited by Fals-Semblant, ⁴⁰ Favel, ⁴¹ Mal-Bouche ⁴² and Losengeres: ⁴³ things in men’s shapes climbing over one another and biting one another in the back: ignorant of all things except their own subjects and often even of those: caring for nothing less than for learning: cunning, desperately ambitious, false friends, nodders in corners, tippers of the wink: setters of traps and solicitors of confidence: vain as women: self-important: fie upon them–excepting always the aged who have lived down to us from a purer epoch. Don’t you think it dammed unfair to have resisted all youthful temptations to cynicism and then to have ones lines cast in a sewer where all that the cynic asserts in general happens for the nonce to be true?

I forgot. We have one honest man. He preaches what he practices: tells you openly that anyone who believes another is a fool, and holds that Hobbs alone saw the truth: tells me I am an incurable romantic and is insolent by rule to old men and servants. He is very pale, this man, good-looking, and drinks a great deal without getting drunk. I think he is best of our younger fellows and I would sign his death warrant to-morrow, or he mine, without turning a hair. ⁴⁴ Don’t conclude that all Oxford colleges are like this: I’ve seen a good deal of them, and I know.

I have written no poetry since. Last Vac. I spent mostly in Bodley starting a book on–what do you think?–the Romance of the Rose and its school. I’ll explain the choice when we meet, till when roll on the time. Love to both of you.

yrs.,

C. S. Lewis

 

I’ve no right to ask for a letter after my endless silences: but if you had a wet afternoon or so it would be a very meritorious act.

TO OWEN BARFIELD (W):

[Magdalen College

7? June 1928]

My dear Barfield,

When I asked you I forgot that that evening wd. find me in the middle of examining in B6. Can you both take Wednesday June 13th instead, and will Mrs Barfield lie at Headington & you lie at Magdalen that night? I hope this presents no difficulties. I enclose a scrap of paper to pull the controversy together: I have been trying very hard to see whether I could find my trace of consciousness of thinking pure and am concluding definitely Wal–I don’t believe it. Let me have a line.

Yrs.,

C. S. Lewis

TO OWEN BARFIELD (W):

[Magdalen College

8? 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. ⁴⁵ You cd hardly expect the man in the T.L.S. to know the esoteric doctrine of myths. 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 they soon were fetchin’,

Cf. such forms as ÆC and ECCEAN.)

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?

C.S.L.

TO HIS FATHER (LP X: 73–5):

July 10th [1928]

Magdalen.

My dear Papy,

It is so long now since I have heard either from you or from Warnie that I begin to wonder whether I am one of the men who came out of the earth full grown in a Greek story and had neither kith nor kin. Try to let me have a few lines soon if you can possibly manage it.

Since I last wrote to you I have had a visit from Uncle Dick and Aunt Agnes. ⁴⁶ I had them to lunch and they had me to dinner and we met once or twice in between: after my first suggestion of taking Uncle Dick to the top of Magdalen Tower had been refused, they showed no desire to solicit, or even to tolerate my services as a showman. It was the oddest sensation to see him again and brought a great many submerged memories to life. After the first embarrassment, which I always feel in meeting that queer mixture of the intimate and the stranger–a rarely seen relation–I liked them both extremely. I found that my picture of him had got rather badly mixed up with Uncle Bill, ⁴⁷ greatly to its disadvantage. That was all swept away in the first ten minutes. But what surprised me most of all was that, apart from his parrot nose and grey hair, his appearance reminded me strongly of you: and not only his appearance but his turns of expression and even something of his voice that kept on becoming audible even through the top dressing of Scotch. This set me thinking on the strange persistence of a family type and how it breaks through differences of environment. I could not help wondering whether the same voice was really present beneath my southern English as it was beneath his Scotch. That the appearance is there, we have all heard ad nauseam: and there are certainly traits of a common character both welcome and unwelcome, which I am sometimes startled to observe in myself. As I said to him ‘We’re a cantankerous lot’ to which Aunt Agnes replied ‘Indeed you are’, but he ‘Speak for yourself.’ Of course he hardly came up to my childhood’s memories of the ‘funny’ Uncle Dick. But he has certainly a great sense of humour, and to watch him enjoying the joke is almost as good as the joke itself. His stories are not as good as yours and are drawn from a narrower field, but they have gusto. To an irreverent member of the younger generation, of course the best fun of all was the attitude of not unkindly pity–on the ‘Poor Warren’ lines–which he adopted throughout when speaking of you or Uncle Bill. Aunt Agnes is a dear. In fact if they liked me anything like so well as I liked them, the meeting may be pronounced a brilliant success.

I have actually begun the first chapter of my book. ⁴⁸ 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’. ⁴⁹

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 ⁵⁰ 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).

I have a bad cold, I think from sleeping in a damp bed at the cottage of a friend (whose wife was away) last week. Is it of any use to ask how you are? I mean will one get an answer? I earnestly hope that your long silence means nothing bad.

your loving son,

Jack

TO HIS BROTHER (LP X: 75–81):

Hillsboro.

Begun Aug. 2nd. [1928]

My dear W.,

Your letter of the 23rd June reached me yesterday and just gave me the mental pick-up required after my annual week’s penance as an examiner. It has even stimulated me to begin an early reply, for though I had not said in my wrath that I’d see you farther if I wrote until I heard from you again, still I was certainly allowing your silence to act as a sort of makeweight with my own idleness. At the moment I can’t clearly recollect when I last wrote to you or how much has happened since.

To start with something I am certain of, I have recently made the acquaintance of Uncle Dick and Aunt Agnes, who came for a few days to Oxford towards the end of last term. I think I remember you once wishing that we had been old enough to appreciate the spectacle of the three P’daytas together when that conjunction (good idea–in the astronomy of our island there would be a P’dayta constellation so that you would have ‘The Greater P’dayta in Negus’ or something of that sort)–when that conjunction occurred at Helensburgh. Failing that, the next most interesting thing was to see one of the other P’daytas alone, and I profited by it.

The result that emerges clearly is the overwhelming steadiness of the type: there are differences between the Pomum Terrestre Albertense and the Pomum Terrestre Ricardense, but they are a mere nothing compared to the resemblances. (What ghastly speculations this raises about myself, you may easily imagine). To begin with, the faces are very much alike: and so are the voices. But it’s the style of conversation which simply hits you in the chest. You know what I mean…the indefinable allusiveness, knowingness, the tipping the wink, the pantomime. The language in which ‘They raised a subscription’ becomes ‘So these Johnnies (jerk of the head towards the imaginary Johnnies) had to take the hat round (wide opened eyes and head suddenly lowered, with expression suggesting the worst come to the worst) and then of course we had to put our hands in our pockets (imitative gesture) and see what could be done’ etc. Under the heading of manner I should perhaps record how–after I had given them a posh lunch with wine in College–having asked me to dinner in the Clarendon, he suddenly beamed into that expression of hospitality to the Nth with a touch of roguery and one-of-the-boys-ness known only to P’daytas and said ‘Well Jacksie, as this is a special occasion I think I may order two pints, eh?’

So much for manner. As for matter, it consisted entirely of wheezes: not only like the P’dayta wheezes but often the identical wheezes. Of course he is a man of far less erudition than your father, and the wheezes were drawn from a narrower field: nothing of the literary or legal element came in. Rather what we may call the McGlusgie element–stories about men getting their heads broken and then being arrested for making a disturbance–what makes only a part of the P’dayta’s repertory made Uncle Dick’s whole stock in trade. It is quite a sound sort of humour of course, and we all appreciate it–indeed I submit that an intensive appreciation of it is one of the few genuinely P’dayta traits which has descended to you in fuller measure than to me. However, Uncle Dick doesn’t tell his stories nearly so well as the P’daytabird, and indeed recalls him less vividly in the humour of the thing than in the intolerable quantity and in the merciless determination to extract from you the last guffaw–you know: repeating the denouement and saying ‘Eh? What?’ when your jaws are already aching. I hate a joke used as a thumbscrew. Indeed it just occurs to me at the moment of writing that the proper answer to the P’daytesque ‘Well it was very funny’ is ‘Yes–it was! Half an hour ago.’

In one way he is above the P’daytabird–he doesn’t whine. He described, in answer to my enquiries, the difficulties of his business etc. (Of course you know he’s ‘ruined’) with the same humour he applied to everything else and without a touch of the Limpopo or P’daytesque self-pity. That is all to the good. On the other hand he descends to conversational depths which the P’daytabird knows not, such as carrying in his pocket case a joke (of the McGlusgie type) which he has cut from a comic paper and producing it suddenly for your delectation. Now that is the sort of thing which I thought was only done by people in trains.

You must not imagine from all this that I didn’t like him. We got on admirable, and if when I first saw him from my window stumping towards new buildings with his large block hat and respectable umbrella, I felt a moment’s qualm, it was checked by the memory of Sir Willoughby when he saw his naval relative walking up the drive with his carpet bag. ⁵¹

One great subject of conversation which we had in common was the P’daytabird himself. Of all the jokes, Uncle Dick enjoys his brother James the best. Your father’s faculty of getting stung financially in every undertaking was referred to again and again with gusto. He also said that both the O.A.B. and Uncle Limpopo were born old. And the moral of that is, Master Pigibuddie, that you and I needn’t imagine that we are necessarily outside the orbit of P’datism when we laugh at it–perhaps we are then fullest inside, for they all find each other ridiculous.

Of course the alternative is to say that Uncle Dick is not a P’dayta. Sometimes I almost think not: specially when having written home and said ‘he referred to you and Uncle Bill with a vaguely humorous tone on the “poor Warren” lines’–wh. I thought would amuse him–I got a reply ‘I know very well the tone you refer to. Anyone who is not up to concert pitch all the time is only shamming and needs to pull himself together and be shaken up. It is, I confess, an attitude that I am sometimes very tired of.’ There certainly is a wide rift there. But all it comes to is that Uncle Dick’s unpardonable offence in the eyes of his brothers is courage. He will not join the Crying Club. He has all the typical P’dayta troubles–suffers from lumbago and his business is going to the dogs–but he will not take them in the right way. He makes jokes of them. Still, they are P’dayta jokes. He has the P’dayta dislike of animals. He has the P’dayta habit of drifting away from a subject the moment it becomes interesting–the movement of his mind is from story to story by association of words, not from topic to topic by association of ideas. I think we must call him a P’dayta–say, a ‘P’dayta with courage’–a sweet P’dayta–a clam.

As for Aunt Agnes, she is one of those very reliable, solid, affectionate, dull wives and mothers who are so profitable and comfortable to their own menfolk, but not very interesting to anyone else: a walking justification for that mixture of Northern respect and Oriental suppression which is the essentially P’daytesque answer to the female sex–and not a bad answer either. While hunting for a definition to fit Uncle Dick my mind threw up a phrase, I think, of yours ‘a new P’dayta’. Do you remember who you coined it for?

And talking of memory (‘dear me, it’s a funny thing the way the human mind works’) I can tell you about Pongee. ⁵² We did get it from print, but not from the book about Tibet. A person called the ‘Crown Prince of Pongee’ was referred to in a children’s story in a magazine long ago, and the word passed into our stock much as ‘Lord Bugabu’ passed into it from the P’dayta conversation–you remember of course that Bugabu is a name for a lord whenever the O.A.B. is in his democratic mood. Could anyone say whether he hates or loves a lord most? (Did I tell you his good remark when I was last at home, and had told him that Lord Chelmsford ⁵³ was a possible new President of Magdalen, and he observed ‘Ah he wouldn’t be a suitable man’–admitting a little later that he confessed he didn’t know who this fellow Chelmsford might be. But that of course was done with an air which made it an additional argument against Chelmsford.)

It was odd your mentioning Dr Thorne, as I had just re-read the book. He, you remember, ‘hated a lord and would have died in defence of the House of Lords.’ ⁵⁴ What do you think of Thorne as a character? I felt he would have been nicer if the author hadn’t been so determined to make him so nice. He’s just a little bit too manly with his basins of tea and his suppressed emotions. I am afraid, brother, he gulped. As in the only extant chapter of your father’s public school novel ‘A swallowing sound was heard’. But this is really rather rot I suppose, and all books need an allowance for the emotional code of their times. Yes–the dinner given by the Duke of Omnium is almost incredible and suggests Roman society more than anything else. I am so ignorant that for all I know things may be very much the same still. If you or I became celebrities of some sort and were asked to a crush at some great house tomorrow, I wonder how exactly we would be treated?

At any rate, after reading Jane Austen, Trollope, and Thackeray a man must give up the pleasure of talking about the coarse snobberies of the nouveaux riches. All the evidence shows that as far as that goes, the aristocracy was not a bit better than the plutocracy which has replaced it. They may have differed in other ways: but for downright crudity in throwing their weight about, can one really see a pin to choose between the modern millionaire and say Lady de Bourgh, the de Courcys, Lord Chesterfield? ⁵⁵ I know that we are told that they did all with the grace of unconsciousness, but it doesn’t sound at all as if they did.

I am glad you like the Lives of the Poets. ⁵⁶ 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 ⁵⁷ 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’. ⁵⁸ 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’. ⁵⁹ 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.’ ⁶⁰ 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.

I remember your precious account of Wei-Hei-Wei and rather envy you. Except for my twenty one days Field Punishment ⁶¹ we shan’t be able to manage a holiday this year, and we are having one of our rare really hot summers–when a lane by a brickyard is not to be thought of–the first since that terrific one when you were in Sierra Leone. Its first sweets are long over. The flowers wither on their stalks in the garden, the pea pods are shriveled and yellow, the soil is mere dust, red roses are bleached white, and white are also brown. There is no dew either morning or evening. Wasps are very plentiful and to go for a walk is to make yourself the leader of a column of flies. In fact it is rich man’s weather, pleasant only on a sea shore with flannels and long long drinks.

I must allow that 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. Imagine two clumps of forest, one about the size of Island Magee, the other about the size of a quadrilateral whose corners are St Marks, Holywood, Helen’s Tower and Canadian Villas. Both occupy very hilly, almost mountainous ground, and are divided by a couple of miles of fields. The smaller one is cut by the deep gorge of the Wye, a broad, brown, rattling river with islands in it. Though they are quickly being destroyed as forests–for the Crown fells far more quickly than it replants and indeed is quite a wanton forester–they are still 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 drowsyhead it was…’ ⁶² But as a matter of fact it isn’t the drowsiness that really counts, its the sense of being ‘well away’–of having avoided the ‘Crewe Train’. ⁶³

I read that admirable book some months ago and instantly thought of you. There are two passages in it which I shall always remember. (A) When the mother in law explains to the heroine that ‘doing out a room’ means taking all the furniture out and then putting it back again, and she (i.e. the heroine) ‘could not help wondering whether the same end might not be attained by leaving it where it was.’ ⁶⁴ (B) When she tells her husband that she thinks she is going to have a child, and keeps on saying ‘Of course it may pass off’ until he exclaims in exasperation ‘I wish you wouldn’t talk about it as if it were the measles.’ ⁶⁵ Another admirable passage is the first review of his novel. Have you noticed that in almost every one of Rose Macaulay’s novels there is a character something like this–a person who just lives in some private world of her own (it is always a woman in these novels) and lets the whole life of the other characters slip by, anxious only not to be forced into adult, practical, moral, or immoral, social, or economic life? In Orphan Island there is the girl who is interested only in islands: in Potterism the girl who is always going away to see battleships launched and pretending to be a naval officer: and in the Lee Shore the same thing, treated more seriously and perhaps less sincerely, is the whole theme.

The Crewe Train goes far to answer that old question in natural philosophy whether there can be in nature such a thing as a female PB. ⁶⁶ I take it the heroine is one: and so, in a less degree, the corresponding characters in the other books. Of course in Rose Macaulay they all have–and they are the only characters in the books who do have–a touch of poetry about them: an earthy poetry like that of Caliban: hence Denham’s cave, and the other girl’s islands. And perhaps that is foreign to the true nature of PBism. I am not absolutely certain about this, for there may be a kind of poetry about a brewing outfit. But I think not. The great ideal projection of PBism in Boxen is a world which has almost every charm except that of poetry. The only character who ever showed the slightest trace of an aesthetic side was Polonius Green, ⁶⁷ who did enjoy the opera. I wonder how we could define the genuine PB spirit. Idleness won’t do: any fool can be idle. Perhaps ‘idleness raised to the dignity of a principle and pursued by at least two idlers in common, with the zest of a conspiracy’. I am sure there must be an element of conspiracy, of making common cause against a stubbornly un-idle world: and that, in its turn, necessitates at least two. Quaere in a perfectly idle world could there be such a thing as a Pigiebotie? Must he not be a pilgrim flying from the City of Industry, a brand snatched from the fire of Energy? A door bolted on the inside against a crowd of Bernetto-Desmonds who would fain get in, not to share but to shatter what is inside, seems to be essential. Again, a Pigiebotie must be conscious of idling and approve of it. He must not merely like to sit still, but he must also like to think of himself sitting still, or even like to think of himself liking to sit still. He must be rewarded by the pleasures of a good conscience which applauds his own immobility. He must say ‘A-h-h-h’ not only with his lips, but in spirit. He is the only true ‘Quietist’. He sitteth down like a giant and rejoiceth not to run his course. He eateth all things, neglecteth all things, moveth not himself, is not waked up. ⁶⁸ Observe–no man is really a Pigiebotie when tired. Aching limbs and unconquerable yawns sink us all into a common mass: Burnetto-Desmonds and Pigibudda snore together. There is no merit in lying down when you can’t stand up. The Pigiebotie slumber must come not by merit but by grace. It is, brother, a Mystery of Inactivity.

You know the only real disadvantage of poetry as against negus–since you make the comparison–is that there’s less of it. 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.

This reminds me by the way–I’m afraid I must be a P’dayta, for I made a P’daytism the other day: I began talking about the world and how it was well explored by now and, said I ‘We know there are no undiscovered islands’. It was left for Maureen to point out the absurdity.

Well, as the Tommies say, ‘no more now’ (and by the way, all the writers of the Paston letters ⁶⁹–XV Century you know–end up just in the same way). I go to Ireland at the end of the week. I think the Everyman volume of Fletcher ⁷⁰ is the best form for you to read the Faithful Shepherdess in, and will have it sent. I don’t think you can get Chatterton in any cheap edition but I will make enquiries. I shan’t go more than 10/-without further instructions. They are mostly bosh to my mind.

yrs,

Jack

TO HIS FATHER (LP X: 94–6):

[Magdalen College

3 November 1928]

Saturday.

My dear Papy,

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.

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. ⁷¹ 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.

Arthur came and went and I think enjoyed his visit. He was a little alarmed at the idea of rising at 7.30, but did not mind it when it came to the point–indeed decided that a long morning was so valuable that he wd. stick to 7.30 rising when he got back to Bernagh. Good resolutions! I piloted him away from unsuitable people and those whom he met he got on with admirably. It was very pleasant to have him–but I could not help reflecting on another guest who has a nearer claim on my best arm chair and reading lamp and whose visit has been already very long delayed. But it needs Uncle Dick to talk to you on a subject like that!

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. ⁷² However, my translation of some Old French into contemporary English (forgery is great fun) ⁷³ has passed Onions ⁷⁴ who knows more than anyone else about the English of that period.

I am afraid this has been an egotistical letter. But it is dull work asking questions which you can’t (at any rate for the moment) give a reply to. You do not need to be told that I hope you are keeping fairly well and that I shall be glad to hear if this is the case. For myself–if you came into the room now you would certainly say that I had a cold and that my hair needed cutting: what is more remarkable: you would (this time) be right in both judgements.

your loving son,

Jack

 

Mr Lewis had been following the presidential election at Magdalen College with great interest, and when he opened The Times on 19 November he learned that Magdalen had elected Professor George Gordon. He remembered that Gordon had supported Jack for his election to a Fellowship (see letter to A.J. Lewis of 26 May 1925), and when he wrote to Jack on 25 November he said: ‘I hope his election is acceptable to you. I am heartily glad the thing is over’ (LP X: 96). Jack replied with this brief but clear account of the whole process.

TO HIS FATHER (LP X: 97):

Magdalen

[27? November 1928]

My dear Papy,

Many thanks for your letter and kind offer. I think I shall take the liberty of rolling Christmas and birthday into one and get myself another picture.

I am not dissatisfied with the election. The history of the thing was this. Stage 1. Hogarth put forward with almost universal approval. Hogarth dies. Stage 2. Chelmsford put forward by all the Winchester interest and Craig ⁷⁵ put forward by Weldon and his friends–to be their puppet. Stage 3. Benecke put forward by party including myself who dislike both Chelmsford and Craig. Stage 4. Absolute determination of the Craig-ites not to have Chelmsford–absolute determination of the Beneck-ites not to have Chelmsford or Craig. Stage 5. Benecke leading by a long way. Stage 6. Proposal of Gordon. Satisfies Craig-ites as being at any rate better than Chelmsford: satisfies Beneck-ites as better than Chelmsford or Craig. Stage 7. Benecke v. Gordon. Stage 8. No clear majority for Benecke possible. Fear of letting in Chelmsford if the Craig-ites and Beneck-ites quarrel about Benecke and Gordon. Stage 9. Agreement of the two parties on Gordon, which then outvotes the remnant of the Chelmsford and Craig people. So, as you say, it is more or less of a compromise.

I hope to come down on Friday next (i.e. crossing Friday night) and shall have to leave home on 5th January.

your loving son,

Jack