C. S. Lewis: A Biography

F.P. Wilson suggested a postgraduate degree, B.Litt. or D.Phil., and Lewis was tempted by the idea. Just after the results of his finals came out, in mid-July 1923, he went to tea with Wilson. ‘He asked me if I had a book in my head. I said at first “No – unless you mean an epic poem”, but afterwards trotted out various schemes which have been more or less in my mind. He thought my idea of a study of the Romantic Epic from its beginnings down to Spenser, with a side glance at Ovid, a good one: but too long for a research degree …’

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It seems that anxiety over the future and the need to earn money to keep his establishment at Headington going prevented Lewis from following up Wilson’s suggestion. The book finally materialized as The Allegory of Love (1936), but no real start could be made on it until some time after he had achieved his fellowship at Magdalen. ‘Domestic drudgery is excellent as an alternative to idleness or to hateful thoughts,’ he wrote in his diary the following March, ‘– which is perhaps poor D’s [Mrs Moore’s] reason for piling it on at this time: as an alternative to work one is longing to do and able to do (at that time and Heaven knows when again) it is maddening. No one’s fault: the curse of Adam … I managed to get in a good deal of writing in the intervals of jobbing in the kitchen and doing messages in Headington,’ he added. ‘I wrote the whole of the last canto [of Dymer] with considerable success, though the ending will not do. I also kept my temper nearly all the time.’

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‘Family life’ produced even more trying distractions than the constant chores and the frequent removals from house to house. An experience which he mentions in Surprised by Joy and which had an effect on his spiritual development took place the term before he sat for his finals in English, and he wrote to Arthur Greeves on 22 April 1923 describing it and his reactions to it: ‘We have been through very deep waters. Mrs Moore’s brother – the Doc.

(#ulink_d6a81dc0-0246-537c-85d1-b237096d39e7) – came here and had a sudden attack of war neurasthenia. He was here for nearly three weeks, and endured awful mental tortures. Anyone who didn’t know would have mistaken it for lunacy.’ After ‘three weeks of Hell the Doc. was admitted to a pensions hospital at Richmond. [There] quite suddenly heart failure set in and he died – unconscious at the end, thank God … Isn’t it a damned world – and we once thought we could be happy with books and music!’

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Worry about the future was fairly intense in that autumn of 1923 when there was still no sign of a fellowship. ‘D and I had a conversation on the various troubles that have pursued us,’ he wrote in his diary on 8 September: ‘losses for the past, fears for the future, and for the present, all the humiliations, the hardships, and the waste of time that come from poverty. Poor D feels keenly (what is always on my mind) how the creative years are slipping past me without a chance to get to my real work.’

(#ulink_8714182a-b5e8-5313-80d4-278723f28e5f) And out walking a couple of weeks later, 12 September, while suffering from depression and ill-health, ‘I went through Mesopotamia and then to Marston where I had some beer and a packet of cigarettes – an extravagance of which I have not been guilty this many a day.’

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After correcting Higher School Certificate examination papers to earn a little money, Lewis went off to Ireland at the end of September to visit his father. With great generosity and foresight Albert Lewis promised to continue his allowance. ‘While Jacks was at home,’ he wrote in his diary on 11 October, ‘I repeated my promise to provide for him at Oxford if I possibly could, for a maximum of three years from this summer. I again pointed out to him the difficulties of getting anything to do at 28 if he had ultimately to leave Oxford.’

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Back again at Univ. the following term, the new Master, Sir Michael Sadler,

(#ulink_2089292b-ad68-5eaa-a599-64da5a3ae83f) was offering to get Lewis some reviewing in London periodicals. He gave him a copy of the recently published Wordsworth by H.W. Garrod, the Professor of Poetry, and asked him for a specimen review. Lewis supplied this, but there is no evidence that it or any other reviews were published at this time.

In June and July 1922 Lewis was so short of money that he placed the following advertisement in the Oxford Times: ‘Undergraduate, Classical Scholar, First-class in Honour Moderations, University Prizeman will give TUITION, Philosophy, Classics to Schoolboy or Undergraduate.’ Towards the end of November 1923 he had his first pupil, a young man of eighteen called Austin Sandeman who was trying to win a scholarship to Oxford, whom Lewis was to coach, as he told his father on 22 November, ‘in essay writing and English for the essay paper and general papers which these exams always include’.

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The only other events for the rest of the year were visits to Harwood in London and Barfield in the country, and three weeks at Little Lea: ‘My three weeks in Ireland, though improved by Warnie’s presence, were as usual three weeks too long.’

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On returning to Oxford, Lewis tried for a fellowship at St John’s, apparently in philosophy since he submitted an essay on ‘The Promethean Fallacy in Ethics’ together with testimonials from Carritt and Wilson. Nothing came of this, and Nevill Coghill got the English fellowship at Exeter College in February. Lewis, still thinking that his future lay in philosophy, considered trying for a research fellowship at All Souls, and entering for a D.Phil. degree.

On 28 February 1924 he dined at High Table in Univ. as Carritt’s guest, and his host told him of a fellowship in philosophy that was to be awarded at Trinity, worth £500 a year, and advised him to try for it. Walking home late that night, Lewis recorded in his diary,

looking at the details of the Trinity fellowship as I passed the lamps – for some reason the possibility of getting it and all that would follow if I did came before my mind with unusual vividness. I saw it would involve living in and what a break up of our present life that would mean, and also how the extra money would lift terrible loads off us all. I saw that it would mean pretty full work and that I might become submerged and poetry crushed out. With deep conviction I suddenly had an image of myself, God knows when or where, in the future looking back on these years since the War as the happiest or the only really valuable part of my life, in spite of all their disappointments and fears. Yet the longing for an income that would free us from anxiety was stronger than all these feelings. I was in a strange state of excitement – and all on the mere hundredth chance of getting it.

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So the first few months of 1924 dragged along through disappointments and much enjoyment of his leisure when writing and revising Dymer, which was nearing completion. In April Lewis had a poem, ‘Joy’, accepted by a small literary magazine, The Beacon – an attempt to capture in verse the elusive experience he was again having from time to time, the meaning of which did not become clear until his conversion. The first stanza (of six) deals the most directly with spiritual ecstasy:

Today was all unlike another day.

The long waves of my sleep near morning broke

On happier beaches, tumbling lighted spray

Of soft dreams filled with promise. As I woke,

Like a huge bird, Joy with the feathery stroke

Of strange wings brushed me over. Sweeter air

Came never from dawn’s heart. The misty smoke

Cooled it upon the hills. It touched the lair

Of each wild thing and woke the wet flowers everywhere.

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Lewis was still hoping for the Trinity fellowship when he dined at High Table with the President on 4 May, and met many of the other Fellows there and in the Senior Common Room – doubtless that they might consider his suitability if there was any chance of his election.

Next day, however, Sir Michael Sadler offered him a temporary post at Univ. – to take over Carritt’s work as philosophy tutor during the coming academic year, which Carritt was to spend in America. After being assured that the appointment would not stand in his way if he got the Trinity fellowship, and that the emolument would be at least £200, Lewis accepted gratefully.

Much of his time was now taken up preparing for this, his first serious assault upon his chosen profession. But he found time for evenings of discussion with Coghill and other friends; for a week in London with Harwood when he paid his first visit to the Elgin Marbles – ‘what impressed me most was the Artemis among the reliefs of the other gods – the only one I have ever seen that is virginal – but not in the way that appeals to a man’s base love of virginity – and without being girlish and insignificant’

(#ulink_4524fdfd-1102-5952-b7fb-aedc3b04e020) – and saw Leo Baker playing First Lord in a very bad production of As You Like It by the Old Vic Company.

He also spent several weekends and odd days with Warnie, who was now stationed near Colchester, and went on expeditions with him on his motorcycle. On a typical visit, 3 July 1924, Lewis records that after a drink in the Mess ‘we then motored back to town [Colchester] to a civilian club of which Warnie is a member, where he had provided a royal feast of the sort we both like: no nonsense about soup and pudding, but a sole each, cutlets with green peas, a large portion of strawberries and cream, and a tankard of the local beer which is very good. So we gorged like Roman Emperors in a room to ourselves and had good talk.’

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In this way they explored a good deal of the country within reach of Oxford and later much of Wiltshire and the counties north of London. An expedition on 4 July 1924 took them in search of Wynyard, at Warnie’s suggestion. ‘I assented eagerly,’ wrote Lewis in his diary that day. ‘I love to exult in my happiness at being for ever safe from at least one of the major ills of life – that of being a boy at school.’

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Lewis was correcting local examination papers throughout July, and at the beginning of August press of work on these and on his lectures in philosophy for the coming term caused a break in his diary which finally widened to six months.

Lewis gave his first lecture, ‘The Good, Its Position Among Values’, on 14 October 1924 – to an audience of four, owing to a mistake in the lecture list and an important lecture by someone else at the same hour. However, he was able to report to his father on 15 October 1924 that it ‘went off all right … Otherwise everything goes well. All my new colleagues are kindness itself and everyone does his best to make me feel at home – especially dear old Poynton. I find the actual tutoring easy at the time (though I am curiously tired at the end of the day) and have already struck some quite good men among my pupils.’

(#ulink_6797e315-4cce-599c-ad46-1d3c05932f9f) One of these first pupils, H.D. Ziman,

(#ulink_a6cedc0b-cb90-5d61-a9da-ef0e24b7ac0e) recorded forty years later that he found him ‘the most stimulating of my tutors’.

By February 1925 Lewis was well settled into his new duties, giving an average of four tutorials a day – three in the morning and one between tea and dinner – and lecturing twice a week on ‘Moral Good’, though sometimes the audience was so small that he took them to his college rooms for an informal discussion instead.

Though living at Headington, he frequently reached college in time for breakfast, returned home in the afternoon but was back for tutorial and Hall dinner, with often a meeting of a literary or philosophic society thereafter. He was most conscientious about attending such meetings, and seems to have gained much enjoyment from them. For example, on 12 February after Hall, ‘I went to Ware’s rooms in Worcester Street for a meeting of the Philosophical Society. Ziman read his paper on causality. I, having heard it all from him in the morning, was rather bored. The discussion afterwards drifted off on to Touche’s and Dawson’s favourite position and I had an enjoyable argument. Home late.’

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At this time Lewis lunched on most days of the week with F.H. Lawson, the law tutor at Univ.