2

OXFORD: THE WAR AND AFTER

Jack Lewis returned to Oxford on 20 March 1917, lodged in the same digs as before, and presented himself to take Responsions. In this exam he was ‘handsomely ploughed’,¹ on account of his inability to cope satisfactorily with mathematics – in particular algebra. In spite of this, however, he was allowed to come into residence in the Trinity Term so as to be able to pass into the Army by way of the University Officers’ Training Corps. From the academic point of view he was supposed to be reading for Responsions, and even went for algebra lessons to J.E. Campbell of Hertford College. But he never, in fact, passed Responsions; and after the war was able to take up his scholarship at Univ. without having done so, ex-servicemen being exempted from any need to pass it. ‘Otherwise,’ he commented, ‘I should have had to abandon the idea of going to Oxford.’²

On Thursday, 26 April, after a three-week holiday in Belfast, he arrived at University College for his brief interlude before going into the Army. He matriculated on 28 April and joined the Officers’ Training Corps on 30 April. By this time Lewis was under the spell of Oxford, writing long, lyrical descriptions to Arthur Greeves of all that he was doing and seeing and reading.

He had Room 5 on Staircase XII of Radcliffe Quad, a suite filled with the furniture of some pre-war member of the college still at the front, or perhaps long dead. ‘It is getting to be quite homely to me, this room,’ he wrote on 28 April after only two days, ‘especially when I come back to it by firelight and find the kettle boiling. How I love kettles! Dinner is not in Hall now, as there are only twelve men in College, but in a small lecture room, and the dons don’t turn up. For all other meals the scout brings you your cover in your rooms.’³ ‘The place is on the whole absolutely ripping,’ he wrote on 6 May. ‘If only you saw the quad on these moonlit nights with the long shadows lying half across the level perfect grass and the tangle of towers & spires beyond in the dark!’⁴

Very soon Lewis discovered the river, going boating on most afternoons, bathing at Parson’s Pleasure ‘without the tiresome convention of bathing things’,⁵ and generally revelling in the usual delights of a first Summer Term. Soon, too, he discovered the bookshops – of which there were many more than there are now, and all still independent. In his letter of 6 May he told Arthur he had made the acquaintance of the College library, and ‘still better is the Library of the Union Society (a club everyone belongs to)’.⁶ ‘It has a writing room of strictest silence,’ he wrote to Arthur on 13 May, ‘and an admirable library where I have passed many happy hours and hope to pass many more.’⁷

The happy time at Univ. came to an end on 7 June when Lewis joined a cadet battalion. He was, however, fortunate in that the battalion was quartered in Keble College, so that he was to remain in Oxford for another three months. Writing to his father on 10 June, he said,

at first when I left my own snug quarters and my own friends at Univ. for a carpetless little cell with two beds (minus sheets or pillows) at Keble, and got into a Tommy’s uniform, I will not deny that I thought myself very ill used … My chief friend is Somerville, scholar of Eton and scholar of King’s, Cambridge, a very quiet sort of person, but very booky and interesting. Moore of Clifton, my room companion, and Sutton of Repton (the company humorist) are also very good fellows. The former is a little too childish for real companionship, but I will forgive him much for his appreciation of Newbolt.^*

‘Though the work is very hard and not very interesting, I am quite reconciled to my lot. It is doing me a lot of good,’ he confided to Greeves that same day:

I have made a number of excellent friends … My room-mate Moore (of Clifton) is quite a good fellow, tho’ a little too childish and virtuous for ‘common nature’s daily food’. The advantages of being in Oxford are very great as I can get weekend leave (from 1 o’clock Saturday till 11 o’clock p.m. Sunday) and go to Univ. where I enjoy the rare luxury of sheets and a long sleep …

I am in a strangely productive mood at present and spend my few moments of spare time in scribbling verse. When my four months course in the cadet battalion is at an end, I shall, supposing I get a commission all right, have a four weeks leave before joining my regiment. During it I propose to get together all the stuff I have perpetrated and see if any kind publisher would like to take it. After that, if the fates decide to kill me at the front, I shall enjoy a nine days immortality while friends who know nothing about poetry imagine that I must have been a genius – what usually happens in such cases. In the meantime my address is – No. 738 Cadet C.S. Lewis, ‘E’ Company, Keble College, Oxford.⁸

While he continued to see Martin Somerville and his other friends, a close bond developed quickly between Lewis and his room-mate, Edward Francis Courtenay ‘Paddy’ Moore. Paddy was exactly Lewis’s age, and his sister Maureen was eleven. Their mother, Mrs Janie Askins Moore, was born in Pomeroy, County Tyrone, on 28 March 1872, the daughter of a Church of Ireland clergyman. In 1897 she married Edward Francis Courtney Moore. They lived in Dublin, where Mr Moore was an engineer. Mr and Mrs Moore separated in 1907 and Mrs Moore moved with the children to Bristol to be near one of her brothers. Paddy had been educated there at Clifton College, and when he was sent to Oxford for training with the Officers’ Training Corps, Mrs Moore and Maureen came with him. They took rooms in Wellington Square, a short distance from Keble College, and almost at once Lewis was a favoured guest. He, in turn, was able to show Paddy and his family the hospitality of Univ., and Lewis clearly liked their company.

The Dean of Univ. soon made Lewis’s double life impossible, and he was forced to give up his room. ‘This week end, as you gather, I am again spending in Univ.,’ he wrote to Greeves on 8 July. ‘Do you know, Ami, I am more homesick for this College than ever I was for Little Lea. I love every stone in it.’⁹

After a brief leave in Belfast (9–11 August) Jack wrote to his father on 27 August 1917:

You must have been wondering what had come over me, but I hope that the crowded time I have been having since I left home will serve as some excuse. First of all came the week at Warwick, which was a nightmare … We came back on Saturday, and the following weekend I spent with Moore at the digs of his mother who, as I mentioned, is staying at Oxford. I like her immensely and thoroughly enjoyed myself. On Wednesday as you know, Warnie was up here and we had a most enjoyable afternoon and evening together, chiefly at my rooms in Univ. How I wish you could have been there too. But please God I shall be able to see you at Oxford and show you my ‘sacred city’ in happier times.¹⁰

‘The next amusement on our programme’, he wrote again on 10 September, ‘is a three-day bivouac up in the Wytham hills. As it has rained all the time for two or three days, our model trenches up there will provide a very unnecessarily good imitation of Flanders mud. You know how I always disapproved of realism in art!’¹¹

This was followed by an exam on 25 September 1917, which seems to have been little more than a formality. The next day Jack was given a temporary commission in the Army and a month’s leave. Albert Lewis waited in vain for Jack to come home, and he was saddened and puzzled to learn that Jack had gone to Bristol to visit Paddy Moore and his family. ‘I suppose you must have been wondering what had become of your prodigal son,’ Jack wrote to his father on 3 October. ‘We got away from Keble on Saturday, and instead of staying in Oxford with the Moores I came down here to their home in Bristol … On Monday a cold (complete with sore throat) which I had developed at Oxford, went on so terribly that Mrs Moore took my temperature and put me to bed, where I am writing this letter.’¹²

This stay in Bristol was to have far-reaching consequences. Lewis and Paddy, and indeed Mrs Moore too, would have known that the slaughter of young officers at this period in the war was very great and that their chances of surviving the war were slim. However, despite Paddy’s conviction that he would come back, Maureen was to recall hearing her brother and Jack promise one another that if only one survived the war the survivor would look after Paddy’s mother and Jack’s father. Mrs Moore was to mention the promise to Albert Lewis after the war. While Jack was still with the Moores in Bristol Paddy learned that he had been placed in the Rifle Brigade, and he crossed to France ahead of Lewis.

In the end Jack didn’t reach Belfast until Friday, 12 October, and he was with his father for only a few days. On the 16th he was gazetted into the Somerset Light Infantry, and on Thursday, 18 October he left home to join his regiment at Crownhill, South Devon.

While at home Jack had talked with Arthur Greeves, and the first suggestion that Lewis’s feelings for Mrs Moore approached infatuation comes in the letter he wrote Arthur from his army base at Crownhill on 28 October.

Since coming back and meeting a certain person, I have begun to realize that it was not at all the right thing for me to tell you so much as I did. I must therefore try to undo my actions as far as possible by asking you to try and forget my various statements and not to refer to the subject … And now to tell you all the news. I am quite fairly comfortable here, we are in huts: but I have a room to myself with a fire in it and so am quite snug.¹³

But suddenly the dreaded summons to the front reached him. At 5.55 p.m. on 15 November 1917 Jack wired desperately to his father: ‘Have arrived Bristol on 48 hours leave. Report Southampton Saturday. Can you come Bristol. If so meet at Station. Reply Mrs Moore’s address 56 Ravenswood Road, Redlands, Bristol. Jack.’¹⁴

‘No one in Great Britain getting Jack’s wire would have had a moment’s doubt that he was on the eve of embarkation for overseas service,’¹⁵ wrote Warnie. But Albert Lewis simply wired back: ‘Don’t understand telegram. Please write.’¹⁶ Even more desperately Jack wired back at 11.20 the following morning: ‘Orders France. Reporting Southampton 4 p.m. Saturday. If coming wire immediately.’¹⁷

Albert Lewis did not come, and Jack crossed to France on 17 November 1917. ‘This is really a very sudden and unpleasant surprise,’ he wrote to his father from France on 21 November. ‘I had no notion of it until I was sent off on my forty-eight hours final leave, in fact I thought they were ragging me when they told me. I am now at a certain very safe base town where we live comfortably in huts as we did at Crownhill.’¹⁸

Lewis arrived at the front-line trenches on his nineteenth birthday, 29 November. To his great surprise he found that the captain of his company, P.G.K. Harris, was none other than ‘Pogo’ who taught him at Cherbourg School. Years before, Lewis said, the flashy Pogo had instilled in him the desire for ‘glitter, swagger, distinction, the desire to be in the know’.¹⁹ The years since Cherbourg and the war had changed both pupil and master. Lewis says in Surprised by Joy, ‘As I emerged from the shaft into the dug-out and blinked in the candle-light I noticed that the Captain to whom I was reporting was a master whom I had liked more than I had respected at one of my schools. I ventured to claim acquaintance. He admitted in a low, hurried voice that he had once been a schoolmaster, and the topic was never raised between us again.’²⁰ Lewis may never have known of Harris’s heroism. For his bravery at Verchain in October 1918 Captain Harris was awarded the Military Cross; his gallantry at Preseau on 1 November 1918 won him a glowing place in military histories.²¹

Meanwhile, Albert Lewis was very worried about his son and, believing that he would be safer in the artillery than in the infantry, he contacted Colonel James Craig, MP for the East Division of Co. Down, asking if he could get Jack transferred. ‘I am at present in billets in a certain rather battered town somewhere behind the line,’ Jack wrote to his father on 13 December.²² As Mr Lewis laboured to have his son transferred, Jack fell ill at the beginning of February 1918 with what the troops called ‘trench fever’ and the doctors PUO (pyrexia, unknown origin). He was sent for a pleasant three weeks at No. 10 British Red Cross Hospital at Le Tréport.

He remained in hospital for the rest of the month, with one slight relapse early on, writing more and more nostalgic letters to Arthur Greeves about their quiet days together in Belfast and his own brief stay in Oxford. Arthur was worried that, because of Lewis’s love for Mrs Moore, their friendship was imperilled. ‘I must admit,’ Jack wrote to him on 2 February 1918, ‘fate has played strange with me since last winter: I feel I have definitely got into a new epoch of life and one feels extraordinarily helpless over it … As for the older days of real walks far away in the hills … Perhaps you don’t believe that I want all that again, because other things more important have come in: but after all there is room for other things besides love in a man’s life.’²³

He returned to the front on 28 February, but was out of the immediate fighting area when the Germans launched their great spring offensive on 21 March utilizing all the additional troops withdrawn from the Eastern Front after the collapse of revolution-ridden Russia.

This, perhaps the worst crisis of the war, galvanized the War Cabinet into action at last. Lloyd George took over the direction of the War Office on 23 March and was soon transporting 30,000 men a day to France. General Sir Douglas Haig, Commander-in-Chief of the British Army in France, had said that he could only hold the Germans for eighteen days without the reserve: Lloyd George got them over to him within a week. Nevertheless, the Allies were not merely retreating, they were disintegrating. On 3 April Field Marshal Ferdinand Foch took over supreme command of the Allied Armies (his position was made official on 14 April) and was slowly able to halt the advance when the Germans were within forty miles of Paris. ‘With our backs to the wall and believing in the justice of our cause, each one of us must fight to the end,’ cried General Haig,²⁴ speaking for the British forces of which he was still in supreme command when the second German putsch came (9–25 April) – and the line of defence stretched without breaking. General Ludendorff, the German chief of staff, drew back slowly and sullenly towards ultimate defeat.

During the First Battle of Arras, from 21 to 28 March 1918, Lewis was in or near the front line. ‘Until the great German attack came in the spring we had a pretty quiet time,’ he recorded in Surprised by Joy.

Even then they attacked not us but the Canadians on our right, merely ‘keeping us quiet’ by pouring shells into our line about three a minute all day … Through the winter, weariness and water were our chief enemies. I have gone to sleep marching and woken up again and found myself marching still. One walked in the trenches in thigh gumboots with water above the knee; one remembers the icy stream welling up inside the boot when you punctured it on concealed barbed wire … I came to know and pity and reverence the ordinary man: particularly dear Sergeant Ayres, who was (I suppose) killed by the same shell that wounded me. I was a futile officer (they gave commissions too easily then), a puppet moved about by him, and he turned this ridiculous and painful relation into something beautiful, became to me almost like a father. But for the rest, the war – the frights, the cold, the smell of H.E., the horribly smashed men still moving like half crushed beetles, the sitting or standing corpses, the landscape of sheer earth without a blade of grass, the boots worn day and night until they seemed to grow to your feet – all this shows rarely and faintly in memory. It is too cut off from the rest of my experience and often seems to have happened to someone else.²⁵

Still in the area around Arras, Lewis next saw action in the Battle of Hazebrouck, from 12 to 15 April. The particular phase of that great battle in which he took part centred on Riez du Vinage. Everard Wyrall, in his official History of the Somerset Light Infantry, gives an account of the battle that took place between 14 and 16 April:

The 13th was a quiet day. Apparently the German advance was, for the time being, at a standstill, his infantry having got well ahead of his artillery so that the latter had to be brought up. His forward guns were only moderately active, but during the evening Mt Bernenchon was shelled and a group of buildings set on fire. Daylight patrols ascertained that the enemy was holding Riez du Vinage, a small wooded village north of the canon and north-east of Mt Bernenchon … As the leading Somerset men approached the eastern exits of Riez [on 14 April], the enemy launched a counter-attack from east of the village and the northern end of the Bois de Cacaut. This counter-attack was at once engaged with Lewis-gun and rifle fire and about 50 per cent of the Germans were shot down. Of the remainder about half ran away and the other half ran towards the Somerset men with their hands in the air crying out ‘Kamerad!’ and were made prisoners.

When dawn broke on the 15th a considerable number of Germans in full marching order were seen: they were advancing in twos and threes into shell holes from houses north and north-east of Riez and from the northern end of Bois de Pacaut. Heavy rifle fire and Lewis-gun fire was opened on them, serious casualties being inflicted, and if a serious counter-attack was intended it was definitely broken up, for no further action was taken by the evening: his stretcher bearers were busy for the rest of the day.

About noon on the 16th the enemy opened a trench-mortar and artillery fire on the line held by the Somerset men … a little later he was observed massing immediately north-east of Riez with the obvious intention of wresting the village from the Somersets … About 2 p.m. the Germans were seen retiring in twos and threes: they had given up the struggle, having found the stout opposition put up by the Somersets impossible to break down …

The casualties of the 1st Battalion between the 14th and 16th April were: 2/Lieut. L.B. Johnson died of wounds (15/4/18) and 2/Lieuts. C.S. Lewis, A.G. Rawlence, J.R. Hill and C.S. Dowding wounded: in other ranks the estimated losses were 210 killed, wounded and missing.²⁶

Lewis was wounded by an English shell exploding behind him. (‘Hence the greeting of an aunt,’ wrote Lewis, ‘who said, with obvious relief, “Oh, so that’s why you were wounded in the back!”’)²⁷ He was able to write a few lines to his father on 17 April, to say that he was in the ‘Liverpool Merchants Mobile Hospital, Etaples – Getting on all right but can’t write properly yet as my left arm is still tied up and it’s hard to manage with one.’²⁸ And on 14 May: ‘I expect to be sent across in a few days time, of course as a stretcher case … In one respect I was wrong in my last account of my wounds: the one under my arm is worse than a flesh wound, as the bit of metal which went in there is now in my chest, high up under my “pigeon chest” … this however is nothing to worry about as it is doing no harm. They will leave it there and I am told that I can carry it about for the rest of my life without any evil results.’²⁹

When the Army medical records were released many years later, the Proceedings of the Medical Board assembled by order of the GOC London District described Lewis’s wounds thus:

The Board find he was struck by shell fragments which caused 3 wounds. 1st, left chest post-axillary region, this was followed by haemoptysis and epistaxis and complicated with a fracture of the left 4th rib. 2nd wound: left wrist quite superficial. 3rd wound: left leg just above the popliteal space. Present condition: wounds have healed and good entry of air into the lung, but the left upper lobe behind is dull. Foreign body still present in chest, removal not contemplated – there is no danger to nerve or bone in other wounds.^*

On 25 May 1918 Lewis arrived by stretcher at Endsleigh Palace Hospital, Endsleigh Gardens, London. His first act was to send his father a telegram. Lewis was out of the war, though he did not yet know it. ‘I am sitting up in bed in the middle of a red sunset to answer this evening’s letter straightaway,’ he wrote to Arthur on 29 May. ‘I am in a vastly comfortable hospital, where we are in separate rooms and have tea in the morning and big broad beds and every thing the heart of man could desire; and best of all, in close communication with all the bookshops of London.’³⁰

It is at this point in Lewis’s life that his biographers find themselves in difficulties. When about to describe his return to Oxford in January 1919, Lewis says in Surprised by Joy: ‘But before I say anything of my life there I must warn the reader that one huge and complex episode will be omitted. I have no choice about this reticence. All I can or need say is that my earlier hostility to the emotions was very fully and variously avenged. But even if I were free to tell the story, I doubt if it has much to do with the subject of this book.’³¹ In a more civilized age this would be accepted as an absolute embargo on prying further into private affairs. But as so many of Lewis’s most personal letters and papers have been published or are available in public collections, we have no choice but to follow up all the available evidence as far as it will take us.

It does not, in fact, take us very far. Early ‘hostility to the emotions’, aggravated by his (perhaps exaggerated) revulsion against the unsavoury perversions at Malvern, made Lewis excessively wary of ‘the lusts of the flesh’. While he discussed these matters freely with Arthur Greeves, and after his conversion spoke of his early sins with understandable detestation (we may add, with perhaps some exaggeration hovering between a touch of subconscious pride at his regeneration and a very real gratitude to God for helping him to achieve it), the available material gives absolutely no concrete evidence of lapses from chastity in the stricter sense.

Undoubtedly Lewis ‘fell in love’ once or twice in his youth and early manhood, just as naturally as he felt carnal desire for the dancing mistress at Cherbourg – or the various other women whose physical charms, or the lack of them, he discussed with Greeves. Even during the terrible stress of his fifteen months in the Army, several of them with death imminent and probable, he apparently did not waste his pay ‘on prostitutes, restaurants and tailors, as the gentiles do’.³² And none of the more serious love-affairs that he mentions or suggests in letters and diaries seem to have progressed very far.

The only really overwhelming ‘love-affair’ of his early life, and that to which he may well be referring in Surprised by Joy, was of a kind and took so surprising a turn that it can hardly be classified with the ordinary ‘lusts of the flesh’. His affection for Mrs Moore – his infatuation, as it seemed to his friends and even to his brother who knew him more intimately than any of them – may have started with that incomprehensible passion which attractive middle-aged women seem occasionally able to inspire in susceptible youths: but it very soon turned from the desire for a mistress into the creation of a mother-substitute – in many ways a father-substitute also.

When Lewis had been ordered to the front and had telegraphed to his father to come and spend his last day in England with him, Albert Lewis had indeed ‘misunderstood’ the telegram and not come. It might have been a genuine misunderstanding. But in June 1918, when he lay wounded in hospital in London, Lewis wrote several times begging his father to visit him: ‘Come and see me,’ he wrote on 20 June. ‘I am homesick, that is the long and short of it.’³³ Warnie later wrote:

One would have thought that it would have been impossible to resist such an appeal as this. But my father was a very peculiar man in some respects; in none more than in an almost pathological hatred of taking any step which involved a break in the dull routine of his daily existence. Jack remained unvisited, and was deeply hurt at a neglect which he considered inexcusable. Feeling himself to have been rebuffed by his father, he turned to Mrs Moore for the affection which was apparently denied him at home.³⁴

Lewis was moved from London towards the end of July, to a convalescent home in Ashton Court near Clifton, Bristol, which he chose as it was near Mrs Moore – and there were difficulties in the way of getting into one in Northern Ireland. He was supposed to be there for only two months, but an outbreak of infectious disease which caused the home to be isolated, and his own unexpectedly slow recovery from his wounds, kept him there until mid-October, when he was posted to Ludgershall, near Andover, Hampshire.

Paddy Moore, who had been with the 2nd Battalion of the Rifle Brigade, had taken part in resisting the great German attack which began on 21 March 1918. He had last been seen on the morning of 24 March, and by September 1918 he was known to have died at Pargny on that day.^* When definite news of his death had come through Albert Lewis wrote to commiserate. Mrs Moore replied on 1 October 1918: ‘I just lived my life for my son, and it is very hard to go on now … Of the five boys who came out to us so often at Oxford, Jack is the only one left. I feel that I can never do enough for those that are left. Jack has been so good to me. My poor son asked him to look after me if he did not come back. He possesses for a boy of his age such a wonderful power of understanding and sympathy.’³⁵

Meanwhile Lewis’s first literary venture was taking shape. The embarkation leave in October 1917 had been so curtailed by illness that he was probably able to do little in the way of assembling and copying out his poems during his visit to Belfast. But as soon as he was able to do so in the hospital in London, he set to work on preparing a fair copy that could be typed and sent to a publisher – now with several recent poems to add to those written during the Bookham and Oxford periods – and continued to do so even more industriously when he got to Ashton Court. On 12 September, Lewis wrote to Greeves from Mrs Moore’s home in Ravenswood Road, Bristol:

The best of news! After keeping my MS. for ages Heinemann has actually accepted it … You can imagine how pleased I am, and how eagerly I now look at all Heinemann’s books and wonder what mine will be like. I’m afraid the paper will be poor as it always is now in new books. It is going to be called ‘Spirits in Prison’ by Clive Staples and is mainly strung round the idea that I mentioned to you before – that nature is wholly diabolical and malevolent and that God, if he exists, is outside of and in opposition to the cosmic arrangements.³⁶

On 6 October he was writing to Arthur from Pelham Downs Camp, Ludgershall (near Andover): ‘No, you were wrong, I have not gone on my leave; I was only out for a night at Mrs Moore’s. I have now, however, had my Board, over a month late I’m glad to say, and have been sent for further convalescence to a camp here.’³⁷

‘It is terrible to think how quickly an old order changes and how impossible it is to build it up again exactly the same,’ he wrote on 2 November 1918.

I wonder will there be many changes when we meet again? Maureen told me the other day that I was greatly changed since she first knew me, but, with the impenetrable reticence of a child, declined to say in what way … I made a journey to London to see Heinemanns.^* C.S. Evans, the manager, was very nice to me and quite enthusiastic about the book and especially about one piece. John Galsworthy, he said, had read the MS. and wanted to put this piece in a new Quarterly which he is bringing out for disabled soldiers and sailors called Reveille: of course I consented … So at last dreams come to pass and I have sat in the sanctum of a publisher discussing my own book.³⁸

Spirits in Bondage (the name was changed on account of A Spirit in Prison (1908) by Robert Hichens) was delayed in publication on account of a shortage of cloth for binding, and did not come out until 20 March 1919, after the appearance of ‘Death in Battle’ in the February number of Reveille – Lewis’s first publication, other than contributions to school magazines. He was in good company in the third number of Reveille, which included poems by Robert Bridges, Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves and Hilaire Belloc; his own poem appeared under the pseudonym ‘Clive Hamilton’ on which he had finally decided – his own Christian name and his mother’s maiden name.

It received no special attention (‘graceful and polished’, said The Times; ‘the work is strongly imagined and never unhealthy, trifling or affected’, according to the Scotsman), and Lewis seems to have been rather unduly disappointed. He certainly almost ceased writing lyrics, but turned back none the less to his real literary love, the long narrative poem. While Spirits in Bondage was still in the press he was writing to Greeves (on 2 December 1918, from Officers’ Command Depot, Eastbourne, to which he had been moved a couple of weeks earlier): ‘I have just finished a short narrative, which is a verse version of our old friend “Dymer”, greatly reduced and altered to my new ideas. The main idea is that of development by self-destruction, both of individuals and species … I am also at work on a short blank verse scene (you can hardly call it a play) between Tristram and King Mark, and a poem on Ion, which is a failure so far.’³⁹

There is no further reference to either the Arthurian or the classical poem, and Dymer in any form seems soon to have been set aside, not to be resumed until 1922.

For great changes were coming, though they threw no shadows before. On 8 December, Lewis wrote to his father: ‘As you have probably seen in the papers, we are all going to get 12 days “Christmas leave”. I use the inverted commas advisedly, as mine seems likely to be in January … I see that we are not to be “discharged”, but “demobilized” and kept on the leash for the rest of our lives.’⁴⁰ His fear was of being kept in ‘Class Z Reserve’, as he had volunteered and not been conscripted; but physical unfitness due to his wounds procured him a complete discharge. Over twenty years later the piece of shrapnel had to be removed from his chest, and a further result of his experiences at the front seems to have been a ‘distressing weakness’ of the bladder from which he suffered for the rest of his life.

Meanwhile Warnie, who had been in France all this time, and promoted to captain on 29 November, returned to Belfast on leave on 23 December, bitterly disappointed to find that he had once again missed seeing his brother, since their leaves would not overlap. But he was able to record in his diary for 27 December: ‘A red letter day. We were sitting in the study about eleven o’clock this morning when we saw a cab coming up the avenue. It was Jack! He has been demobilized, thank God. Needless to say there were great doings. He is looking pretty fit … In the evening there was bubbly for dinner in honour of the event: the first time I have ever had champagne at home.’⁴¹

The festivities over, Lewis was able to return to Oxford early in January to take up his life as an undergraduate where he had left after his one term in the summer of 1917. He wrote to his father on 27 January:

It was a great return and something to be very thankful for. There is of course already a great difference between this Oxford and the ghost I knew before: true, we are only twenty-eight in College, but we do dine in Hall again, the Junior Common Room is no longer swathed in dust sheets, and the old round of lectures, debates, games, and whatnot is getting under weigh. The reawakening is a little pathetic: at our first J.C.R. Meeting we read the minutes of the last – 1914. I don’t know any little thing that has made me realize the absolute suspension and waste of these years more thoroughly.⁴²

On account of his war service, Lewis was ‘deemed to have passed’ Responsions and Divinity, and could have proceeded directly to Literae Humaniores or ‘Greats’. But in view of his ambition of obtaining a Fellowship in one of the Oxford colleges, his tutor, A.B. Poynton,^* advised against doing this. Consequently Lewis embarked at once on the ‘Honour Mods’ course in Greek and Latin literature for the examination in March 1920, before proceeding to the course in Greats in which he would specialize in philosophy and ancient history for a final examination in June 1922.

Meanwhile Oxford was returning to its normal routine and Lewis was falling into it very happily. He would spend all morning working in the college library or attending lectures. Mrs Moore had moved with Maureen to Oxford and they were living nearby in 28 Warneford Road, Headington. Lewis usually lunched and spent the afternoon with Mrs Moore, returning to college for Hall dinner, and work in his rooms, where he was able to have a fire only in the evenings owing to the coal shortage.

Among lectures which he was attending, he was particularly impressed by Cyril Bailey’s^† on Lucretius, and, as he wrote to Greeves on 26 January, ‘a piece of good luck – I go to lectures by Gilbert Murray^‡ twice a week on Euripides’ “Bacchae”. Luckily I have read the play before and can therefore give him a free-er attention: it is a very weird play (you have read his translation, have you not?) and he is a real inspiration – quite as good as his best books.’⁴³

Lewis did not concern himself with games, but a leisure activity in which he early took part was the literary and debating society of the college, the Martlets, one of the older and more permanent societies of its kind, and one that ‘alone of all College Clubs has its minutes preserved in the Bodleian’.⁴⁴ The society was limited to twelve members, but Lewis was asked to join and become secretary, ‘the reason being, of course,’ he said to his father on 4 February, ‘that my proposer, Edwards,^* was afraid of getting the job himself’;⁴⁵ two years later he was elected president.

Other contemporaries who were members of the Martlets included Cyril Hartmann,^† Rodney Pasley^‡ and E.F. Watling,^§ and they became his friends during their time at Univ. Lewis’s first paper (12 March 1919) was on William Morris – the subject, too, of almost the last he ever gave to the club, on 5 November 1937; his second paper on ‘William Morris’ was that published in Rehabilitations in 1939. Other subjects on which he spoke as an undergraduate included ‘Narrative Poetry’ and ‘Spenser’, and after he had become a don he returned to give papers on ‘James Stephens’, ‘Boswell’, ‘The Personal Heresy in Poetics’, ‘Is Literature an Art?’ and finally ‘The Kappa Element in Romance’ (14 November 1940), which formed the basis of his essay ‘On Stories’, finally expanded into An Experiment in Criticism in 1961.

Other events of Lewis’s first term included dining with the Master, reading Grace in Hall, and attending tutorials. ‘As time goes on,’ he wrote to his father on 5 March, ‘I appreciate my hours with Poynton more and more. After Smewgy and Kirk I must be rather spoiled in the way of tutors, but this man comes up to either of them.’⁴⁶ Indeed, Lewis was singularly fortunate in this particular at Oxford, Poynton being followed by E.F. Carritt^* for philosophy, and F.P. Wilson^† and George Gordon^‡ when he came to read for the English School: and students’ success at Oxford can often be made or marred by their tutors.

When term ended on 17 March 1919 Lewis stayed up working for a week, and then went to Bristol to help Mrs Moore move house, but got over to Belfast for part of the vacation. The ‘entanglement’ with Mrs Moore was by now causing his father considerable anxiety, and he wrote to Warnie on 20 May, a month after Lewis had returned to Oxford (via Bristol again):

I confess I do not know what to do or say about Jack’s affair. It worries and depresses me greatly. All I know about the lady is that she is old enough to be his mother – that she is separated from her husband and that she is in poor circumstances. I also know that Jacks has frequently drawn cheques in her favour running up to £10 – for what I don’t know. If Jacks were not an impetuous, kind-hearted creature who could be cajoled by any woman who had been through the mill, I should not be so uneasy.⁴⁷

Jack’s involvement with Mrs Moore may or may not have been innocent but he felt that it would be quite impossible to explain it to his father. He had for years been led into taking the easy course and lying to him when lies seemed the only way of keeping the family peace, and now, sadly, he fell back on simple deceit in an attempt to keep his father reasonably happy.

But duplicity led to the inevitable result, and during the following vacation it came to an open quarrel. Albert Lewis, as his own diary shows, was in the habit of reading any letters to his son that he could lay hands on when he was out of the way – and when he incautiously revealed this during an argument over money, Lewis ‘weighed in with a few home truths’.⁴⁸

The quarrel rankled for some months: Lewis made unnecessarily scathing remarks about his father in letters to Greeves, and Albert Lewis lamented the ‘estrangement from Jacks’ in his diary, blaming himself for not having visited him when wounded, but maintaining that this was unavoidable – and certainly insufficient reason for his son to declare that ‘he doesn’t respect me: that he doesn’t trust me, though he cares for me in a way’.⁴⁹ The clash of temperaments was too extreme for any real mutual understanding – and had been so for years. But in fact the quarrel cleared the air considerably, and within a year or so Lewis and his father seem to have been back again on much the same terms as before. The visits to Little Lea were resumed, though now much shortened, and both they and the weekly letter became less of an imposition.

Moreover, in spite of his disapproval of the association with Mrs Moore and his only half-hearted approval of the academic life, Albert Lewis not only continued his son’s allowance, but when the scholarship at Univ. came to an end, promised to finance him for three more years while he tried for various fellowships and lecturing appointments – and this in spite of his almost pathological conviction that, well-to-do though he was, he hovered continually on the edge of bankruptcy. Without his father’s aid, Lewis could never have hung on at Oxford until he obtained the fellowship that allowed him to follow the one course of life which provided an opportunity for the full expression of his genius.

But this was far in the future when Lewis returned to Oxford at the end of April 1919 to occupy a new set of rooms at Univ. into which he had begun to move at the end of the previous term. He had distempered the walls ‘a nice quiet greyish blue’ on which his Dürer prints looked well, and procured ‘one good piece of furniture, a small bookcase of dark oak’. ‘You would agree with me,’ he wrote to Arthur Greeves on 5 May, ‘in liking the beam in the ceiling and the deep windows, and the old tree that taps against them recalling Phantastes and Wuthering Heights. When it gets into leaf I shall look out into a mass of greenery with glimpses of the old walls across and of the grass below.’⁵⁰ In spite of his concentrated efforts for Mods, Lewis was able to fit in some literary work, and he continues:

I have nearly finished the Venus poem and am full of ideas for another, which Gilbert Murray gave me the hint of in a lecture – a very curious legend about Helen, whom Simon Magus, a gnostic magician mentioned in the Acts, found living as a very earthly person in Antioch and gradually recalled to her who she was and took her up to Zeus again, reborn: on their way they had to fight ‘the Dynasties’ or planets – the evil powers that hold the heaven, between us and something really friendly beyond. I have written some of it, but of course I get hardly any time either for reading or writing.⁵¹

Nothing remains of the poem about Helen, but Lewis may have drawn something from his recollections of it near the end of his life when he began his unfinished romance ‘After Ten Years’ about her adventures as a worn and middle-aged woman after the fall of Troy. As for Simon Magus’s ‘Dynasties’, they surely contributed something to the Oyéresu and the Eldila (both good and bad) in Out of the Silent Planet and its sequels.

In spite of continuing with his ambition to become a poet, Lewis submitted no poems to the various undergraduate periodicals and volumes of Oxford poetry of his day. Oxford after the First World War (as after the Second) produced a generation of undergraduates with unusually high artistic gifts. ‘As nearly everyone here is a poet himself, they have naturally no time left for lionizing others,’ he wrote to his father on 25 May 1919. ‘Indeed, the current literary set is one I could not afford to live in anyway, and though many of them have kindly bought copies of the book,^* their tastes run rather to modernism, vers libre, and that sort of thing. I have a holy terror of coteries …’⁵²

Yet in spite of this professed dislike for coteries, Lewis was trying to form something of the sort at the time of this letter, with two of his Univ. friends, Cyril Hartmann and Rodney Pasley. ‘I don’t think anything, even an undergraduate clique, can live on denials,’ he was writing to Hartmann from Little Lea on 25 July; and later in the correspondence,

It is no use to attack ‘The Swiss Family Sitwell’ unless we offer something in its place – not perhaps actual work – for we are likely to do that in any case – but at least some new and definite formula. Is it possible to find some common ground, other than mere dislike of eccentricity on which to meet? … I agree that we should not form ourselves into a definite society. Above all we must not take ourselves too seriously … Could people not circulate their things in manuscript and then face an informal meeting in which the others would discuss the victim, who of course could defend himself?⁵³

The correspondence continued at some length throughout the Long Vacation of 1919, but little came of it, though Lewis’s involvement in the movement is of interest: it shows an early aversion to ‘modernism’ in literature that he never fully overcame, as well as indicating that his thoughts were already turning towards the formation of the kind of unofficial literary group that found fruition years later in the Inklings.

And indeed Lewis very soon lost contact with the literary movements of the younger members of the university. He was able to give little time to poetry or social activities until the summer of 1920, since he was reading hard for Honour Mods during the three previous terms – and he was able to report to his father on 4 April that ‘I did get a First after all’, which served as sugar to the black draught of a holiday in Somerset ‘with a man who has been asking me for some time to go and “walk” with him’⁵⁴ and which would keep him from visiting Little Lea that vacation. Jack was really on holiday in Somerset with Mrs Moore and Maureen.

During the summer of 1920 Mrs Moore and her daughter Maureen moved permanently to Oxford, renting various flats in Headington towards the cost of which Lewis contributed. He continued to live in college during term until the following June, when, after the custom of normal undergraduates, he moved out into lodgings – but in his case it was into what was largely his own rented house, shared with the Moores; they had returned to 28 Warneford Road, Headington. Lewis described his ‘usual life’ to Greeves after the move in a letter of June 1921:

I walk and ride out into the country, sometimes with the family, sometimes alone. I work; I wash up and water the peas and beans in our little garden; I try to write; I meet my friends and go to lectures. In other words I combine the life of an Oxford undergraduate with that of a country householder, a feat which I imagine is seldom performed. Such energies as I have left for general reading go almost entirely on poetry – and little enough of that.⁵⁵

In fact, as Warnie Lewis subsequently wrote,

What had actually happened was that Jack had set up a joint establishment with Mrs Moore, an arrangement which bound him to her service for the next thirty years and ended only with her death in January 1951. How the arrangement came into being no one will ever know, for it was perhaps the only subject which Jack never mentioned to me; more than never mentioned, for on the only occasion when I hinted at my curiosity he silenced me with an abruptness which was sufficient warning never to re-open the topic.⁵⁶

There were many drawbacks to this curious state of bondage to which Lewis had voluntarily submitted himself. To begin with, it made him miserably poor at a time when his academic and creative life seemed to demand complete freedom from financial worries. He had an adequate allowance for a bachelor undergraduate living in college or lodgings, but not for a householder with a ‘mother’ and adopted sister largely dependent on him. And he could not, of course, ask his father to increase his allowance as the whole ‘set-up’ with the Moores was kept a secret from him.

While Lewis clearly enjoyed the family life Mrs Moore made possible, even his own diary suggests that she was highly possessive and selfish – or thoughtless – to an astonishing degree. Lewis was expected to help with the housework and run errands for her, even when they were able to employ two resident maids, a daily and a handyman-gardener. ‘I came to live with him after my retirement from the Army in 1932,’ wrote Warnie Lewis, ‘and in the vacation we shared a workroom. I do not think I ever saw Jack at his desk for more than half an hour without Mrs Moore calling for him. “Coming!” Jack would roar, down would go his pen, and he would be away perhaps five minutes, perhaps half an hour; and then return and calmly resume work on a half-finished sentence.’⁵⁷

Owen Barfield met Lewis in 1919 and after being introduced to Mrs Moore in 1922 he was a frequent visitor to their home. Over the years he and his wife came to know Mrs Moore well, and in a Foreword he wrote for All My Road Before Me: The Diary of C.S. Lewis 1922–1927 (1991), he attempted to balance Warnie’s account of her. ‘I find it strange to recall,’ he said,

that during those early years I was given no hint at all of that household background. He was simply a fellow undergraduate and later a literary and philosophical friend. I remember him telling me on one occasion that he had to get back in order to clear out the oven in the gas cooker, and I took it to be something that would happen once in a blue moon. It is only from the Diary that I have learnt what a substantial part of his time and energy was being consumed in helping to run Mrs Moore’s household, and also how much of that was due to the shadow of sheer poverty that remained hanging over them both until at last he obtained his fellowship … One of the things that make me welcome its appearance in print is, that it will do much to rectify the false picture that has been painted of her as a kind of baneful stepmother and inexorable taskmistress. It is a picture that first appeared as early as 1966 in the introductory Memoir to W.H. Lewis’s Letters of C.S. Lewis, and it has frequently reappeared in the prolific literature on C.S. Lewis which has since been published here and there. If she imposed some burdens on him, she saved him from others by taking them on herself even against his protestations. Moreover she was deeply concerned to further his career.⁵⁸

The most immediate result of Lewis’s double life when he moved out of college was to prevent him from following up the lead given by even the relative success of Spirits in Bondage and his first tentative steps towards taking his place among the new, young poets of the twenties, or of entering into any kind of literary life outside the ordinary university round. A proposed anthology did not appear, and there were no more letters to Hartmann and Pasley about founding their own poetic movement. With his great mental ability and his developing powers of concentration, Lewis was just able to take a Double First in Literae Humaniores – Mods in March 1920 and Greats in June 1922. He also competed for the Chancellor’s English Essay Prize, the subject set being ‘Optimism’, and won it triumphantly on 24 May 1921.

Another interesting experience about this time was two meetings with W.B. Yeats, then living in Oxford, which he described fully to his brother in a letter of 21 March 1921. Yeats seems to have made a considerable impression on Lewis, who modelled the physical appearance of his magician in Dymer on him:⁵⁹ ‘If he were now alive I would ask his pardon with shame for having repaid his hospitality with such freedom,’ he wrote in the preface to the new edition of 1950. ‘It was not done in malice, and the likeness is not, I think, in itself, uncomplimentary.’⁶⁰ And something of this grander Yeats may have helped to create Merlin in That Hideous Strength.

The visits to Yeats were among the more interesting highlights of the Oxford side of Lewis’s double existence during the years before he graduated from the Junior to the Senior Common Room. It would be possible to follow him in considerable detail through these years with the aid of copious letters to his brother, regular reports to his father and, from April 1922, a reasonably full diary which he continued, with occasional lapses, until March 1927 – but both letters and diaries are well represented, with long extracts, in the various editions of his letters and All My Road Before Me. The diary, though of great interest from an external point of view, tells little or nothing of Lewis’s spiritual adventures: it was, indeed, almost a public document and was read out loud from time to time to Mrs Moore and her daughter, or handed over to Warnie to peruse when on leave.

Already in 1921 Lewis had made up his mind that an academic career was what he most hankered after – and if possible an academic career in Oxford. But it seemed an almost impossible ambition. On 18 May 1922, however, ideas for the future were taking more definite shape, and he was writing to his father that one of his tutors, to whom he went for a testimonial,

instead of giving me one advised me very earnestly not to take any job in a hurry; he said that if there was nothing for me in Oxford immediately after Greats, he was sure there would be something later: that College would almost certainly continue my scholarship for another year if I chose to stay up and take another school, and that ‘if I could possibly afford it’ this was the course which he would like me to take.⁶¹

He mentioned in the same letter that another tutor pointed out that

the actual subjects of my own Greats school are a doubtful quantity at the moment: for no one quite knows what place classics and philosophy will hold in the educational world in a year’s time. On the other hand, the prestige of the Greats school is still enormous: so that what is wanted everywhere is a man who combined the general qualification which Greats is supposed to give, with the special qualifications of any other subjects. And English Literature is a ‘rising’ subject. Thus if I could take a First, or even a Second, in Greats, and a First next year in English Literature, I should be in a very strong position indeed … In such a course I should start knowing more of the subject than some do at the end: it ought to be a very easy proposition compared with Greats.⁶²

Lewis went on to inform his father that he could pretty certainly get a job at once as a schoolmaster, though his inability to play games might count against him – but that ‘the point on which I naturally like to lean is that the pundits at Univ. apparently don’t want me to leave Oxford’.⁶³ To this Albert Lewis responded generously, and in the end continued his son’s allowance until he obtained his fellowship at Magdalen in September 1925. Meanwhile Lewis was awarded a First in Greats, which was announced on 4 August 1922, the day before he took his BA, L.R. Farnell, the Vice-Chancellor and Rector of Exeter College, performing the ceremony.

A typical extract from Lewis’s diary may serve to round off the picture of that Summer Term of 1922. On 24 May he wrote:

I left home at about 12.45 and bussed into Oxford, meeting Barfield outside the ‘Old Oak’ … From here we walked to Wadham gardens and sat under the trees. We began with Christina Dreams: I condemned them – the love dream made a man incapable of real love, the hero dream made him a coward. He took the opposite view, and a stubborn argument followed.^* We then turned to ‘Dymer’ which he had brought back: to my surprise his verdict was even more favourable than Baker’s.^† He said it was ‘by streets’ the best thing I had done, and ‘Could I keep it up?’ … He said Harwood had ‘danced with joy’ over it and had advised me to drop everything else and go on with it. From such a severe critic as Barfield the result was very encouraging … The conversation ranged over many topics and finally died because it was impossible to hold a court between two devil’s advocates. The gardens were ripping – lilac and chestnut magnificent. I find Wadham gardens fit my image of Acrasia’s island very well.^* I walked with him as far as Magdalen, took a turn in the cloisters, and then came home for tea. Went in again to Carritt at 5.45 and read him my paper. Interesting discussion: he was on his usual line of right unrelated to good, which is unanswerable: but so is the other side …⁶⁴

We may note that Lewis had begun seriously on Dymer on 2 April and finished Canto I, more or less as published, by 11 May.⁶⁵ The references to Christina Dreams and Acrasia’s ‘Bower of Bliss’ in the diary tie up with the poem, as Lewis recorded in the preface to the 1950 reprint of Dymer. There he points out how strong had been his ‘romantic longing’ for the ‘Hesperian or Western Garden system’ of imagery, and how ‘by the time I wrote Dymer I had come under the influence of our common obsession about Christina Dreams, into a state of revolt against that spell … In all this, as I now believe, I was mistaken. Instead of repenting my idolatry I spat upon the images which only my own misunderstanding greed had ever made into idols.’⁶⁶

Nevertheless, in a letter of 16 September 1945 he was warning Roger Lancelyn Green against the subtler dangers of the Christina Dream as revealed in an early version of his fantasy story, The Wood that Time Forgot:

Now for a matter which I would not mention if it were not that you and I (obviously) can converse with the freedom of patients in the same hospital. None of these faults is purely literary. The talent is certain: but you have a sickness in the soul. You are much too much in that enchanted wood yourself – and perhaps with no very powerful talisman round your neck. You are in love with your heroine – which is author’s incest and always spoils a book. I know all about it because I’ve been in the wood too. It took me years to get out of it: and only after I’d done so did re-enchantment begin. If you try to stay there the wood will die on you – and so will you!⁶⁷

Of the companions mentioned in the diary extracts, Lewis wrote in Surprised by Joy:

The first lifelong friend I made at Oxford was A.K. Hamilton Jenkin, since known for his books on Cornwall^* … My next was Owen Barfield. There is a sense in which Arthur [Greeves] and Barfield are the types of every man’s First Friend and Second Friend. The First is the alter ego, the man who first reveals to you that you are not alone in the world by turning out (beyond hope) to share all your most secret delights … But the Second Friend is the man who disagrees with you about everything. He is not so much the alter ego as the anti-self. Of course he shares your interests; otherwise he would not become your friend at all. But he has approached them all at a different angle … Closely linked with Barfield of Wadham was his friend (and soon mine) A.C. Harwood of The House, later a pillar of Michael Hall, the Steinerite school at Kidbrooke. He was different from either of us; a wholly imperturbable man.⁶⁸

On 11 June, a few days after he began sitting for Greats, Lewis went for a long walk up Hinksey Hill, ‘sat down in the patch of wood – all ferns and pines and the very driest sand and the landscape towards Wytham of an almost polished brightness. Got a whiff of the real Joy, but only momentary.’⁶⁹ Schools over, he tried for a lectureship in Classics at Reading under E.R. Dodds,^† later Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford, but without success.

In August Lewis and the ‘family’ moved again, this time to Hillsboro, 14 Holyoake Road, Headington, and in mid-September he spent ten days with his father at Little Lea. Warnie was also there, and the atmosphere seemed less strained. Arthur Greeves was at home, but Lewis noted that although they saw each other frequently, ‘we found practically nothing to say to each other’,⁷⁰ for, though he may not have realized it in such terms, Lewis’s mind had outgrown Greeves’s, and he needed the more stimulating friendship of men such as Jenkin and Barfield and Harwood, and others whom he was soon to meet, notably Nevill Coghill,^* Hugo Dyson^† and J.R.R. Tolkien.^‡

Back in Oxford he was trying for a classical fellowship at Magdalen, having an interview with the President, Sir Herbert Warren, and sitting for the examination during the last week of September – but without success. Accordingly on 13 October 1922 he began his more formal work for the English School by visiting his new tutor, F.P. Wilson, at that time attached to Exeter College. ‘Wilson was not there,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘but I found him at his house in Manor Place. He tells me I shall have my work cut out to manage the work in time’⁷¹ (the English course normally took over two years, following Mods or Pass Mods). Next day he went to St Hugh’s College in search of his language tutor, Miss E.E. Wardale, author of An Old English Grammar (1922);^* and soon Lewis was revelling in Old English under her skilled supervision. ‘It is very curious,’ he wrote in his diary on 15 October, ‘that to read the words of King Alfred gives more sense of antiquity than to read those of Sophocles. Also, to be thus realizing a dream of learning Anglo-Saxon which dates from Bookham days.’⁷²

Now that he had to write essays on English literature, with the finest examples in the language daily before him, Lewis began to think about his own literary performance: ‘My prose style is really abominable, and between poetry and work I suppose I shall never learn to improve it,’⁷³ he confided sadly to his diary of 17 October. In later life he was to achieve one of the finest and most lucid prose styles of any writer of his period.

The reading of medieval English literature caused Lewis to have a fresh look at and a deeper consideration of Christianity, and even the first reading of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde set him arguing on the subject with Jenkin. ‘We talked of Troilus,’ he wrote of a walk on 18 October, ‘and this led us to the question of Chivalry. I thought the mere ideal, however unrealized, had been a great advance. He thought the whole thing had been pretty worthless. The various points which I advanced as good results of the Knightly standard he attributed to Christianity. After this Christianity became the main subject.’⁷⁴

There were many such rambles and talks with Jenkin at this time: on a beautiful November day, ‘above the forest ground called Thessaly’, he got ‘the real Joy’ again, between a discussion of The Wanderer and The Seafarer, and ‘Jenkin’s undisguised delight in the more elementary pleasure of a ramble’.⁷⁵ On other such outings they were deciding that of Housman’s Last Poems ‘some are exquisite – some mere sentimental jingle’,⁷⁶ or that Saintsbury’s History of English Literature was ‘a very poor book: his articles on Chaucer and Keats seem designed to prevent anyone reading them’.

The difficulty of finding enough time for reading, with so much whittled away by the exactions of Mrs Moore, led Lewis to develop the habit of reading as he walked. ‘I find that one really sees more of the country with a book than without,’ he decided, ‘for you are always forced to look up every now and then and the scene into which you have blundered without knowing it comes upon you like something in a dream.’⁷⁷

After Christmas 1922, passed with his father at Little Lea, Lewis was back in Oxford revelling in lectures by Strickland Gibson^* on bibliography and C.T. Onions (soon to be a much revered friend at Magdalen)^† on Middle English, and enjoying his Anglo-Saxon studies which he found were much more extensive than he had expected. He was also reading Donne for the first time and finding The Second Anniversary ‘“a new planet”: I never imagined or hoped for anything like it’, but The Soul’s Progress he dismissed as ‘mostly bosh and won’t scan’.⁷⁸

Meanwhile he had begun to attend the English classes organized by George Gordon, who had just become Merton Professor of English Literature in succession to Walter A. Raleigh,^‡ a post which he held until 1928 when he became President of Magdalen and was succeeded by David Nichol Smith.^§ The first meeting, on 26 January, did not impress him very much – ‘Gordon was sensible rather than brilliant’⁷⁹ – but the next, held on 2 February, brought Lewis a new friend: ‘We were a much smaller gathering. This afternoon a good-looking fellow called Coghill from Exeter read a very good paper on “realism” – as defined in his own special sense – “from Gorboduc to Lear”. He seems an enthusiastic sensible man, without nonsense, and a gentleman, much more attractive than the majority. The discussion afterwards was better than last week’s.’⁸⁰

The friendship with Coghill ripened fast, and they were soon going for long walks together, eagerly discussing both literature and life. On the first walk, by the Hinkseys and Thessaly, on 11 February, Lewis ‘found to my relief that he still has an open mind on ultimate questions: he spoke contemptuously of the cheap happiness obtainable by people who shut themselves up in a system of belief’⁸¹ – but, as he recorded in Surprised by Joy, ‘I soon had the shock of discovering that he – clearly the most intelligent and best-informed man in that class – was a Christian and a thoroughgoing supernaturalist.’⁸² Professor Coghill wrote in 1965:

We used to foregather in our rooms, or go off for country walks together in endless but excited talk about what we had been reading the week before – for Wilson [whom they both had as tutor] kept us pretty well in step with each other – and what we thought about it. So we would stride over Hinksey and Cumnor – we walked almost as fast as we talked – disputing and quoting, as we looked for the dark dingles and the tree-topped hills of Matthew Arnold. This kind of walk must be among the commonest, perhaps among the best, of undergraduate experience. Lewis, with the gusto of a Chesterton or a Belloc, would suddenly roar out a passage of poetry that he had newly discovered and memorized, particularly if it were in Old English, a language novel and enchanting to us both for its heroic attitudes and crashing rhythms … his big voice boomed it out with all the pleasure of tasting a noble wine … His tastes were essentially for what had magnitude and a suggestion of myth: the heroic and romantic never failed to excite his imagination, and although at that time he was something of a professed atheist, the mystically supernatural things in ancient epic and saga always attracted him … We had, of course, thunderous disagreements and agreements, and none more thunderous or agreeing than over Samson Agonistes, which neither of us had read before and which we reached, both together, in the same week; we found we had chosen the same passages as our favourites, and for the same reasons – the epic scale of their emotions and their over-mastering rhythmical patterns … Yet when I tried to share with him my discovery of Restoration comedy he would have none of it …⁸³

The brief, concentrated English course drew to an end in June 1923. On 1 June Lewis attended Gordon’s last class held in Nevill Coghill’s rooms at Exeter, when they discussed tragedy: ‘There was some good discussion … Later we drifted to talking of Masefield and then to War reminiscences … Coghill then produced some port to celebrate our last meeting, and we drank Gordon’s health. I for one drank with great sincerity, for he is an honest, wise, kind man, more like a man and less like a don than any I have known. My opinion of him was rather low at first and has gone up steadily ever since.’⁸⁴

The actual examination took place from 14 to 19 June. ‘The English School is come and gone,’ Lewis wrote to his father on 1 July, ‘though 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.’⁸⁵

The viva took place on 10 July, the oral examiners being W.A. Craigie, the Icelandic scholar,^* and H.F.B. Brett-Smith, the editor of Peacock.^† ‘Most of the vivas were long and discouraging,’ wrote Lewis in his diary. ‘My own … lasted about two minutes … I came away much encouraged, and delighted to escape the language people.’⁸⁶

The results appeared on 16 July, Nevill Coghill and C.S. Lewis being among the six to obtain ‘First Class Honours in the Honour School of English Language and Literature’.

---

^*  Martin Ashworth Somerville became a member of King’s College, Cambridge in 1917. The others were Edward Francis Courtenay ‘Paddy’ Moore of Clifton College, Bristol, and Alexander Gordon Sutton of Repton School. After their training all three served in the Rifle Brigade.

^*  The authors are grateful to Dr Robert Clarke for his help with this medical record. He has provided the following commentary: ‘Lewis was probably struck from behind and received a penetrating injury to the left side of his chest, resulting in a fractured 4th rib (and coughing up blood), but escaped with no significant loss of lung function. While he had good air entry in his lung (which would have excluded a collapsed lung), there was dullness on percussion (which would reflect evidence of fluid accumulation around the foreign body [shell fragment] lodged in the upper lobe of his left lung). The injuries to left leg and left wrist were superficial involving soft tissue damage only.’

^*  Second Lieutenant E.F.C. Moore is buried in the British Cemetery at Pargny. On 2 December 1918 he was awarded the Military Cross for ‘conspicuous gallantry and initiative’. A full account of the battle he took part in is found in William W. Seymour’s History of the Rifle Brigade in the War of 1914–1918, Vol. II (1936).

^*  On 26 October 1918.

^*  Arthur Blackbourne Poynton (1876–1944) was Lewis’s tutor in Greek. He distinguished himself as an undergraduate at Balliol College. In 1890 he was elected a Fellow of Hertford College, and in 1894 he became the Fellow and Praelector in Greek at University College. He was Master of University College 1935–7.

^†  Cyril Bailey (1871–1957) was Classical Tutor at Balliol College.

^†  George Gilbert Aimeé Murray (1866–1957) was known as ‘the most accomplished Greek scholar of the day’. He was from Sydney, Australia, and after being educated at St John’s College, Oxford, he was Professor of Greek at Glasgow University, 1889–99, and then Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford, 1908–36.

^*  John Robert Edwards (1897–1992) grew up in Manchester. He graduated from University College in 1920, after which he held a number of appointments. He taught Classics at Chigwell School and Merchant Taylor’s School, Crosby, until 1931. He was afterwards headmaster of Grove Park Grammar School, Wrexham, until 1935, and headmaster of Liverpool Institute High School until his retirement in 1961.

^†  Cyril Hughes Hartmann (1896–1967) came up to University College in 1914. He read Modern History and after leaving Oxford became a successful writer. His books on literary and historical subjects include The Cavalier Spirit and its Influence on the Life and Work of Richard Lovelace (1618–1658) (1925).

^†  (Sir) Rodney Pasley (1899–1982) took his BA from University College in 1921, after which he taught in a number of schools. He was headmaster of Barnstaple Grammar School, 1936–43, and headmaster of Central Grammar School, Birmingham, 1943–59.

^§  Edward Fairchild Watling (1899–1990) matriculated in 1918 and took his degree in 1922. On leaving Oxford he went to King Edward VII School, Sheffield, where he taught classics for thirty-six years. He will be remembered for his idiomatic and highly readable translations of the classics.

^*  Edgar Frederick Carritt (1876–1964) was Fellow of Philosophy at University College, 1898–1941. He was the first member of the faculty to lecture on aesthetics, and his books include Theory of Beauty (1914) and Philosophies of Beauty (1931). An argument he had with Lewis years later is mentioned in Lewis’s ‘Christianity and Culture’, found in Christian Reflections (1967).

^†  Frank Percy Wilson (1889–1963), Lewis’s tutor in English, took a B.Litt. from Lincoln College, Oxford. After serving in the war, he returned to Oxford in 1920 as a university lecturer. He was Professor of English at the University of Leeds, 1929–36, and Merton Professor of English at Oxford, 1947–57.

^†  George Stuart Gordon (1881–1942) was the first Fellow of English in Magdalen College. After serving as Professor of English in the University of Leeds, 1913–22, he returned to Oxford as Merton Professor of English, 1922–8. He was President of Magdalen College, 1928–42, and Professor of Poetry, 1933–8.

^*  i.e. Spirits in Bondage.

^*  ‘In those days,’ Lewis wrote in the preface to the 1950 edition of Dymer, ‘the new psychology was just beginning to make itself felt in the circles I most frequented at Oxford. This joined forces with the fact that we felt ourselves (as young men always do) to be escaping from the illusions of adolescence, and as a result we were much exercised about the problem of fantasy or wishful thinking. The “Christina Dream”, as we called it, after Christina Pontifex in Butler’s novel [The Way of All Flesh (1903)], was the hidden enemy whom we were all determined to unmask and defeat’ (p. xi).

^†  Leo Kingsley Baker (1898–1986) was born in London. He served in the Royal Flying Corps during the First World War, after which he came up to Wadham College in 1919 and read Modern Languages. He and Lewis shared a love for poetry, and he introduced Lewis to Owen Barfield. After taking his BA in 1923, he became an actor with the Old Vic Company. In 1925 he married Eileen Brookes and they set up a handloom weaving business, Kingsley Weavers, in Chipping Campden. Baker had meanwhile become an Anthroposophist, and after their business was dissolved during the Second World War he taught in a Rudolf Steiner school. He was Drama Adviser for Gloucestershire, 1942–6, and National Drama Adviser for the Carnegie United Kingdom Trust, 1946–63. See his biography in CG.

^*  Acrasia is the witch-maiden in Edmund Spenser’s ‘Bower of Bliss’ in The Faerie Queene (1590, 1596).

^*  Alfred Kenneth Hamilton Jenkin (1900–80) was born in Redruth, Cornwall. He matriculated at University College in 1919 and read English. He and Lewis met at that time and were members of the Martlets. After taking a BA in 1922, Jenkin wrote a B.Litt. thesis on Richard Carew. On leaving Oxford he returned to Cornwall where he became a very popular and highly respected author and broadcaster. His many books include The Cornish Miner (1927), Cornish Seafarers (1932) and The Story of Cornwall (1934). See his biography in CG.

^†  Eric Robertson Dodds (1893–1979) was born in Co. Down and educated at Campbell College, Belfast. He read Classics at University College, taking his BA in 1917. He was lecturer in Classics at University College, Reading, 1919–24, Professor of Greek at the University of Birmingham, 1924–36, and Professor of Greek at Oxford, 1936–60. See his autobiography, Missing Persons (1977).

^*  Nevill Coghill (1899–1980), an Inkling, was born in Co. Cork. He served with the Royal Artillery during the war, after which he came up to Exeter College, Oxford. He read History and then English. After teaching for a while at the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth, he was elected Fellow of English at Exeter College in 1925. He was Merton Professor of English, 1957–66. Coghill produced many plays for the Oxford University Dramatic Society. However, it is as the translator of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (1951) and Troilus and Criseyde (1971) that he was without peer. See his biography in CG.

^†  Henry Victor Dyson ‘Hugo’ Dyson (1896–1975), an Inkling, was born in Hove. After leaving the Royal Military College at Sandhurst, he served in the Queen’s Own Royal Military Kent Regiment in 1915–18. He read English at Exeter College, after which he taught English at Reading University, 1924–45. He came to know Lewis in 1930 through Nevill Coghill, and he and Tolkien played a vital part in Lewis’s conversion the following year. He became the Fellow of English at Merton College in 1945. See his biography in CG.

^†  John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (1892–1973) was born in South Africa to English parents, but from 1895 was raised in Birmingham. His mother became a Catholic in 1900 and from that point on Ronald and his brother Hilary were raised as Catholics. In 1902 Ronald became a pupil at St Philip’s School. He went up to Exeter College, Oxford in 1911 and read Honour Moderations, and then English, gaining a First in 1915. He served with the Lancashire Fusiliers 1915–18, having meanwhile married Edith Mary Bratt in 1916. They were to have four children. After being demobilized, Tolkien returned to Oxford and worked on the Oxford Dictionary. He was Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Leeds, 1924, and in 1925 returned to Oxford as Professor of Anglo-Saxon. He was elected Merton Professor of English Language and Literature in 1945. Tolkien met Lewis in 1926, and in 1929 they began weekly meetings to read one another their compositions. They were the original Inklings’. Tolkien’s writings about ‘Middle Earth’ resulted in the publication of The Hobbit (1937) and the three volumes of The Lord of the Rings – The Fellowship of the Ring (1954), The Two Towers (1955) and The Return of the King (1955). See Humphrey Carpenter’s J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography (1977) and The Inklings (1978).

^*  Edith Elizabeth Wardale (1863–1943) entered Lady Margaret Hall in 1887, but moved a year later to the recently opened St Hugh’s College. After taking a First in Modern Languages she became Vice-Principal and Tutor of St Hugh’s College. She was intimately connected to women’s education during some of the most important years of its history. She remained at St Hugh’s until her retirement in 1923.

^*  Strickland Gibson (1877–1958) was from Oxford and was educated at St Catherine’s College. After taking his degree he was Assistant to Bodley’s Librarian, 1895–1912, Secretary to Bodley’s Librarian, 1912–31, and sub-librarian, 1931–45. Besides being Keeper of the University Archives, 1927–45, he was a Lecturer in Bibliography for the English Faculty, 1923–45. He published a number of historical and bibliographical articles.

^†  Charles Talbut Onions (1873–1965) was a distinguished lexicographer and grammarian. After taking a degree from the University of Birmingham in 1892 he published An Advanced English Syntax (1904). In 1895 he was invited to join the staff of the Oxford Dictionary at Oxford where he remained for the rest of his life. He was appointed a Fellow of Magdalen College in 1923. Besides his work on the Dictionary, he was a lecturer in English, 1920–7, and Reader in English Philology, 1927–49. See J.A.W. Bennett’s biography of him in the Dictionary of National Biography.

^†  Professor Sir Walter Raleigh (1861–1922), who was educated at University College, Oxford, became the first holder of the Chair of English Literature at Oxford in 1904. In 1914 he was made Merton Professor of English. His contribution to the study of English at Oxford was enormous, and his lectures aroused great enthusiasm.

^§  David Nichol Smith (1875–1962) entered Glasgow University in 1895 and was in the first class reading English. He became Fellow of English at Merton College in 1921, and was Merton Professor of English Literature, 1929–46.

^*  Sir William Alexander Craigie (1867–1957), lexicographer and philologist, read Greats at Oriel College, Oxford, after which he worked on the New English Dictionary, 1897–1933, and was joint editor, 1901–33. He was Taylorian Lecturer in Scandinavian Languages, 1904–16, and Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon, 1916–25. His works include Scandinavian Folk-Lore (1896) and Specimens of Icelandic Rímur (1952).

^†  Herbert Francis Brett-Smith (1884–1951) took his BA from Corpus Christi College, Oxford, in 1907. He was afterwards a lecturer in English Literature in several colleges of Oxford, and Goldsmith’s Reader in English.

NOTES

  ¹  SBJ, ch. 12, p. 144.

  ²  Ibid., p. 145.

  ³  FL, pp. 297–8.

  ⁴  Ibid., p. 301.

  ⁵  Ibid., letter to Arthur Greeves of 13 May 1917, p. 304.

  ⁶  Ibid., p. 301.

  ⁷  Ibid., p. 304.

  ⁸  Ibid., p. 321.

  ⁹  Ibid., p. 324.

¹⁰  Ibid., p. 334.

¹¹  Ibid., p. 335.

¹²  Ibid., p. 337.

¹³  Ibid., p. 339.

¹⁴  Ibid., p. 345.

¹⁵  ‘C.S. Lewis: 1898–1963’, p. 57.

¹⁶  FL, p. 345n.

¹⁷  Ibid., p. 346.

¹⁸  Ibid.

¹⁹  SBJ, ch. 4, p. 51.

²⁰  Ibid., ch. 12, p. 150.

²¹  For an account of his bravery see FL, p. 357, n. 11.

²²  FL, p. 348.

²³  Ibid., p. 353.

²⁴  Martin Gilbert, The First World War (1994), p. 414.

²⁵  SBJ, ch. 12, pp. 151–2.

²⁶  Everard Wyrall, A History of the Somerset Light Infantry (Prince Albert) 1914–1919 (1927), pp. 292–4.

²⁷  From a sketch of his life Lewis wrote for the jacket of Perelandra (New York: Macmillan, 1944).

²⁸  FL, p. 366.

²⁹  Ibid., p. 368.

³⁰  Ibid., pp. 373–4.

³¹  SBJ, ch. 13, p. 154.

³²  FL, letter to Arthur Greeves of 23 May 1918, p. 371.

³³  Ibid., p. 386.

³⁴  ‘Memoir’, p. 30.

³⁵  LP VI, pp. 44–5.

³⁶  FL, p. 397.

³⁷  Ibid., p. 403.

³⁸  Ibid., pp. 411, 412, 413.

³⁹  Ibid., p. 419.

⁴⁰  Ibid., p. 420.

⁴¹  ‘C.S. Lewis: 1898–1963’, p. 67.

⁴²  FL, p. 428.

⁴³  Ibid., p. 426.

⁴⁴  Ibid., letter to Albert Lewis of 4 February 1919, p. 430.

⁴⁵  Ibid., p. 430.

⁴⁶  Ibid., p. 444.

⁴⁷  LP VI, p. 123.

⁴⁸  Warnie’s diary, 9 August 1919. LP VI, p. 161.

⁴⁹  Albert’s diary, 5 September 1919. LP VI, p. 167.

⁵⁰  FL, p. 447.

⁵¹  Ibid.

⁵²  Ibid., p. 450.

⁵³  Estate of Roger Lancelyn Green.

⁵⁴  Ibid., p. 479.

⁵⁵  Ibid., p. 566.

⁵⁶  ‘C.S. Lewis: 1898–1963’, p. 86.

⁵⁷  Ibid., p. 87.

⁵⁸  AMR, pp. ix–x.

⁵⁹  Dymer (1950), VI, 6–9.

⁶⁰  Ibid., Preface, p. xiv.

⁶¹  FL, p. 591.

⁶²  Ibid., pp. 591–2.

⁶³  Ibid., p. 592.

⁶⁴  AMR, pp. 39–40.

⁶⁵  For further details see Narrative Poems, ed. Walter Hooper (1969), n. 1.

⁶⁶  Dymer, Preface, pp. xi–xii.

⁶⁷  Bodleian Library, Ms.Eng.Lett.C. 835, Fol. 4.

⁶⁸  SBJ, ch. 13, p. 155.

⁶⁹  AMR, p. 48.

⁷⁰  Ibid., entry for 9–23 September 1922, p. 106.

⁷¹  Ibid., p. 118.

⁷²  Ibid., p. 119.

⁷³  Ibid., p. 121.

⁷⁴  Ibid.

⁷⁵  Ibid., entry for 7 November 1922, pp. 133–4.

⁷⁶  LP VII, entry for 15 November 1922, p. 277.

⁷⁷  AMR, entry for 19 November 1922, p. 139.

⁷⁸  Ibid., entry for 18 January 1923, p. 181.

⁷⁹  Ibid., entry for 26 January 1923, p. 185.

⁸⁰  Ibid., entry for 2 February 1923, p. 189.

⁸¹  Ibid., entry for 11 February 1923, pp. 194–5.

⁸²  SBJ, ch. 14, p. 165.

⁸³  Nevill Coghill, ‘The Approach to English’, Light on C.S. Lewis, ed. Jocelyn Gibb (1965) pp. 54–5.

⁸⁴  AMR, entry for 1 June 1923, pp. 240–1.

⁸⁵  FL, p. 611.

⁸⁶  AMR, entry for 10 July 1923, p. 256.