C. S. Lewis: A Biography

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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.

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On account of his war service, Lewis was ‘deemed to have passed’ Responsions and Divinity, and could have proceeded directly to LiteraeHumaniores or ‘Greats’. But in view of his ambition of obtaining a Fellowship in one of the Oxford colleges, his tutor, A.B. Poynton,

(#ulink_cc703577-f109-5d4e-af80-6a4de93a02a9) 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

(#ulink_84210ccc-ebb0-5436-b3cd-d1602a0a92b7) on Lucretius, and, as he wrote to Greeves on 26 January, ‘a piece of good luck – I go to lectures by Gilbert Murray

(#ulink_d3848dac-da3a-55e8-91cc-b055c3224113) 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.’

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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’.

(#ulink_ae0db891-ab28-59d0-8487-f8e88e245f69) 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,

(#ulink_cfc4c0fa-999e-5eb1-bdc6-52580844d8d2) was afraid of getting the job himself’;

(#ulink_0e0966d2-f416-5efe-8dc8-0ed4e03d5ff5) two years later he was elected president.

Other contemporaries who were members of the Martlets included Cyril Hartmann,

(#ulink_ca04bac6-e4d4-5669-bc86-0f55e1af3255) Rodney Pasley

(#ulink_5472d322-52ed-5a5d-afc7-e73998b521af) and E.F. Watling,

(#ulink_3b5aed43-5e8f-5045-954c-181adbd140a2) 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.’

(#ulink_8ffd14c7-3adc-502b-80fc-9cd44c54b5d3) Indeed, Lewis was singularly fortunate in this particular at Oxford, Poynton being followed by E.F. Carritt

(#ulink_3aba7cd8-1de2-5846-9551-e73f7db63418) for philosophy, and F.P. Wilson

(#ulink_ae54e9b3-dcc6-5180-9282-bee5a8dd1d46) and George Gordon

(#ulink_a44912e2-6e9a-5348-93e4-2326d1b1551f) 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.

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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’.

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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’.

(#ulink_373e1174-0ab2-5f28-a911-5effb24d6c3c) 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.’

(#ulink_5fa1a954-914e-56de-a6f1-e23549031266) 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.

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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,

(#ulink_95a02465-7f8c-5d8d-8192-9f86610b5218) their tastes run rather to modernism, vers libre, and that sort of thing. I have a holy terror of coteries …’

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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 findsome 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?

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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’

(#ulink_08d81036-0781-5724-9b9d-86871a968b0d) 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.

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