Collected Letters Volume One: Family Letters 1905–1931

I am sorry to hear of your infatuation (very much inFATuation)

(#ulink_df70233d-2f3c-5789-a27e-0f3a2a966d2e) for a certain lady, but you need not despair, nor do I propose to call you out; we will divide mother & daughter between us, and you can have first choice! I really don’t know which would be the worse do you?

That is certainly a glorious prelude to Aida. Do you remember that first afternoon last hols! How dissappointed we were at first and yet how we enjoyed ourselves afterwards sitting under those trees in the evening (or rather late afternoon) sunlight & throwing pencils & poems from one to the other? Well, we shall soon be there again if all goes well. I am going up for this damnable exam next Monday, shall be back here not later than Saturday & home on the following Monday if not sooner. So that is all well, but I wish to hell next week was over. Don’t you sympathise with me? Pray for me to all your gods and goddesses like a good man!

No the Meagre One was not born with a squint: but long, long, long ago, so long ago that Stonehenge had a roof and walls & was a new built temple, he killed a spider. The good people of his day, outraged at this barbarity, stuck a dagger thro his nerve centre which paralyzed him without making him unconscious, seated him on the altar at St. Henge’s temple & locked him up with the spiders son. The latter began to spin a solid mass of cobwebs from the Opposite corner. Very very slowly through countless years the web grew while the poor Meagre One–who couldn’t die–developed a squint from watching it getting nearer. At last after countless ages Stonehenge dissapeared under an enormous mass of web & remained thus till one day Merlin hapenned to set a match to it and so discover what was inside: hence the myth of Merlin’s having ‘built’ St. Henge’s. To this day if you go there at sunrise & run round it 7 times, looking over your shoulder you can see again the wretched prisoner trying to struggle as the horrid sticky strands close round him. Cheap excursion trains are run for those who wish to try it.

The Tales of a Grandfather

(#litres_trial_promo) in a rather scrubby but old edition has lived in the study these ten years, so you may try a taste of it before risking your money. I imagine it is in rather a childish style, tho’ of course you know more about Scott than I do.

I am sorry to hear that you have not yet begun your novel, and as I am sending you four pages of punishment I trust you will let me have something in your next letter. Which reminds [me] I don’t know what my address will be at Oxford so you must just write to Bookham as usual. Do go on with the good work. What about taking that magic story Mr Thompson told us, for instance, toning down the supernatural parts a bit & making a Donegal novel of the Bronte type? Or else working that local idea of the Easelys

(#litres_trial_promo) and all. Remember the second attempt will be easier & pleasanter than the first, and the third than the second.

Talking about the Easeleys, whether I read ‘Guy Mannering’ or no I shall not take to skimming as Kelsie does–for much as we esteem our beautiful and accomplished cousin–as Mr Collins

(#litres_trial_promo) would have said–I don’t think I shall follow her in literary matters. I am quite sure that every thing bad is true of your cousin Florence: she and her sister are young women who need transportation–as also my cousins at Bloom-field.

(#litres_trial_promo) But indeed if only those who deserved to have books had them!–who besides you & me would there be to support the booksellers?

We have had some glorious frosty mornings here, with the fields all white & the sun coming up late like a red hot ball behind the bare woods. How I do love winter. We have had a book of Yeats’ prose out of the library, and this has revived my taste for things Gaelic & mystic. Ask Mullan’s if he knows a book called ‘The Rosacrutian Cosmo Conception’ or any on that subject. Gute Nacht. I wish I were dead–

Jack

∗ (#ulink_823ab92e-e990-577d-946a-5c94de21d017)Ha! Ha! Poor little Bill, he only tries to be agreeee-able.

TO HIS FATHER (LP V: 152-3):

[Gastons]

Friday Dec. 1st 1916

My dear Papy,

I am sorry I did not tell you earlier that the exam was so soon, but the idea was so familiar in my own mind that I only just realized, the day when I wrote to you, that I had never given you the date. I suppose by the time this reaches you, you will have sent off the suit case etc., but even if you have not had time, I dare say Mrs. K. would have something that would serve. So far, that pestilent knave at New College has failed to keep his promise of letting me know about lodgings: however, if the worst comes to the worst I can always go to an hotel, though of course this will be more expensive for you and less convenient for me.

We have also seen about this exemption business. K. and I both thought the matter beyond us, so we decided to consult my solicitors (Don’t forget the ‘my’–or is ‘my man of business’ the better expression) at Leatherhead. Having only a limited knowledge of solicitor’s offices–purely provincial in fact–I was duly impressed. He was a state solicitor–a little, bald, figetty man, in a dingy black suit, and he advised me to put my case before the Chief Recruiting officer at Guildford. I wrote to the latter and today, after a long interval, have a reply saying that I am exempt from the Military Service Act, but that I must get registered at once: which I shall do either this afternoon or tomorrow.

The cold here is quite as bad as with you, and it freezes every night. This week I have been reading ‘The House of the Seven Gables’ which I have often heard praised but never met before. Have you? It is well worth the reading. As to coming home, the Oxford authorities, whose principle apparently is to worry the candidate by every concievable sort of mystery, have given me no idea how long the exam lasts. But I shall write to you about that from Oxford next week. I suppose I want only a day or two to get back from here and bring my trunk from Bookham. Many thanks for the enclosure–I wish it were for my sixteenth birthday, with two years more of Gastons life ahead.

your loving

son Jack.

Lewis went up to Oxford for the first time on Monday, 4 December 1916, to sit for a scholarship examination. He described this visit in SBJ XII where he says he found lodgings in the first house ‘on the right as you turn into Mansfield Road out of Holywell’. The examination, given in Oriel College, took place between 5 and 9 December, after which he returned to Great Bookham.

TO HIS FATHER (LP V: 156):

[1 Mansfield Road,

Oxford

7 December 1916]

My dear P.,

This is Thursday and our last papers are on Saturday morning so I will cross on Monday night if you will kindly make the arrangements. We have so far had General Paper, Latin Prose, Greek and Latin unseen, and English essay. The subject for the latter was Johnson’s ‘People confound liberty of thinking with liberty of talking’

(#litres_trial_promo)–rather suggestive, tho’ to judge by faces, some did not find it so.

I don’t know exactly how I am doing, because my most dangerous things–the two proses–are things you can’t judge for yourself. The General paper was ideal and each of the unseens contained a piece I had done before. I am surprised at the number of candidates, tho’ I can find only one going to New, a Harrow boy who sits opposite me.

The place has surpassed my wildest dreams: I never saw anything so beautiful, especially on these frosty moonlight nights: tho’ in the Hall of Oriel where we do our papers it is fearfully cold at about four o’clock on these afternoons. We have most of us tried with varying success to write in our gloves. I will see you then on Tuesday morning.

your loving son,

Jack.

He crossed over to Belfast on 11 December and his rather fearful worries about the examination were laid to rest when he received a letter of 13 December from the Master of University College, Reginald W. Macan,

(#litres_trial_promo) who said: ‘This College elects you to a Scholarship (New College having passed you over). Owing to your having furnished us with no Oxford address, I am obliged to send this to your home. I should have been glad to see you and ascertain your plans. Will you be so good now as to write to me and let me know what you propose to be doing between this time and next October’ (LP V: 159-60). An announcement of this award appeared in The Times of 14 December, along with the news that University College had awarded Jack not only a Scholarship but an Exhibition–an additional financial endowment.

The question for Jack, his father, and Mr Kirkpatrick was what Jack should do until the following October. Jack was keen to begin his studies, and in replying to the Master of University College, he said he had ‘formed no plans for the intervening time’ and that he would be glad of the Master’s ‘guidance in the matter (LP V: 160).

While they waited to hear from the Master, Albert Lewis wrote at once to thank Mr Kirkpatrick for all he had done to secure Jack the Scholarship. Those who have read C. S. Lewis’s tribute to Mr Kirkpatrick in Surprised by Joy will be interested in what the ‘Great Knock’ thought of his pupil. In his letter to Albert Lewis of 20 December, Mr Kirkpatrick said:

The generosity of your heart has led you to express yourself in terms altogether too complimentary to me. I ask you, what could I have done with Clive if he had not been gifted with literary taste and the moral virtue of perseverance? Now to whom is Clive indebted for his brains? Beyond all question to his father and mother. And I hold that he is equally indebted to them for those moral qualities which though less obvious and striking than the intellectual, are equally necessary for the accomplishment of any great object in life–I mean fixity of purpose, determination of character, persevering energy. These are the qualities that carried him through. I did not create them, and if they had not been there, I could not have accomplished anything. All this is so perfectly obvious that it is hardly worth emphasizing…As a dialectician, an intellectual disputant, I shall miss him, and he will have no successor. Clive can hold his own in any discussion, and the higher the range of the conversation, the more he feels himself at home. (LP V: 165)

Over Christmas Jack received a letter from the Master of University College. It has not survived, but Albert Lewis provided the gist of it in a letter to Warnie of 31 December. Dr Macan, he said, wrote to Jack

asking him what his intentions were in regard to Military Service, and informing him at the same time that all their Scholars are with the Colours, save one who is hopelessly unfit physically. Pretty plain speaking that! So now I have to start to look for a commission for Jacks. Failing that, I am afraid that he must either chuck Oxford or go into the ranks. Apparently it is a moral impossibility for a healthy man over 18 years of age to go into residence at Oxford. (LP V: 172-3)

Mr Kirkpatrick, again, solved the deadlock. He thought Jack should take Responsions, the University entrance examinations, and have this out of the way. In his letter to Albert of 2 January 1917 he pointed out that Mathematics ‘form an important element in this exam.’ and that Jack ‘could very usefully employ a good part of the day in working up a subject for which he has not only no taste, but on the contrary a distinct aversion (LP V: 174). It was further decided, as Jack mentioned in the letter to his father of 8 February, that if all his ideas about Oxford ‘fell through’, he would try for the Foreign Office. For this reason Mr Kirkpatrick planned for him to learn Italian, German and Spanish.

1 (#ulink_b51fd1ef-1d56-510f-90c9-17497d3816b4)Carmen, an opera by Georges Bizet, first performed in 1875.

2 (#ulink_34e53034-ae5a-52ff-a696-5d2d930286a7) The village in question was Dorking.

3 (#ulink_3e9065e2-1811-5635-8594-ae24e4e48fc5) Algernon Charles Swinburne, A Forsaken Garden (1878): ‘As a god self-slain on his own strange altar’.

4 (#ulink_2dda6aff-7bb1-5c9e-a53a-d47c109fbdd1) 29 January 1916.

5 (#ulink_c70324ec-3415-514f-b408-d231a0b74592) Algernon Blackwood, The Education of Uncle Paul (1909).

6 (#ulink_c70324ec-3415-514f-b408-d231a0b74592) ibid., ch. X, p. 130; ch. XIV, p. 182.

7 (#ulink_2e09934d-1afd-5afe-854f-2f6167af90eb) Enrico Caruso (1873-1921), Italian tenor who made his first public appearance in Naples in 1894, and whose powerful, wonderfully pure voice made him one of the greatest singers of the century.