C. S. Lewis: A Biography

(#ulink_85fa27aa-d1a0-56e0-baf2-003e21cf3633) and D.L. Keir, the historian,

(#ulink_90adbdd0-5947-53a3-b77b-fa704a1acefd) whom he found a more entertaining companion than the erudite lawyer: ‘The usual brisk but not really interesting conversation’,

(#ulink_9df27ebf-eb19-5b37-84e0-089d4d634613) Lewis confided to his diary after one of these meals.

But he had very few other entertainments. To go to the theatre was a rare event indeed – and then also perhaps from a sense of duty, as for example the visit to the Oxford University Dramatic Society (OUDS) production of Peer Gynt on 10 February 1925 of which he records: ‘I was very disappointed in the play. The general idea of a history of the soul is all right, but Peer’s soul hasn’t enough in it to last for four hours: most of him is mere Nordic windbagism. No good making a story of Peer: you only want to kick his bottom and get on. The Troll parts from the visual point of view were the best stage devilment I’ve ever seen.’

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He and Warnie had spent three weeks over Christmas 1924 in Belfast, and on their return toured on the motorcycle via Shrewsbury and Ludlow – ‘an orgy of woods, hills, broad rivers, grey castles, Norman abbeys and towns that have always been asleep’. But almost as soon as he got back to Oxford he went down with flu: ‘I am very much afraid my organism is acquiring the habit of getting this troublesome complaint every time it becomes prevalent,’ he wrote to his father on 11 February 1925.

(#ulink_76e89db8-6c14-568f-beb3-56a4a5a2a258) Diary writing lapsed again from March till August, most of the time being taken up between his tutorial duties and domestic life at Headington. On 7–8 April he was away on the motorcycle with Warnie, visiting Salisbury, Wells and Stonehenge.

‘This is my last term “in the bond” at Univ.,’ he wrote to his father after returning to Oxford, ‘and there is still no word of the Fellowship. I begin to be afraid that it is not coming at all. A Fellowship in English is announced at Magdalen and of course I am applying for it, but without any serious hopes as I believe much senior people are in for it.’

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The chances of getting the Magdalen fellowship seemed remote at first. Oxford’s School of English was in its infancy, the subject having been officially recognized only in 1899 and given its first Chair as recently as 1904. It was to be a part of the Modern Languages Board until 1926 when a separate English faculty board was firmly established. Now, as it turned out, Lewis had been well advised to read both Greats and English for he suddenly found himself a candidate for the fellowship. He was soon left with only one serious rival, J.N. Bryson (later a Fellow of Balliol and a leading authority on the Pre-Raphaelites);

(#ulink_9cc94b2d-60f2-5d48-813d-ae82cd82c37d) but a satisfactory dinner to be ‘looked-over’ by the other Magdalen Fellows and several interviews with Sir Herbert Warren, the President, tipped the scales in his favour – doubtless aided by the good offices of Gordon; and on 20 May 1925 he was elected.

‘The President and Fellows of Magdalen College have elected to an official Fellowship in the College as Tutor in English Language and Literature, for five years as from next June 25, Mr Clive Staples Lewis, MA (University College)’, ran the gratifying announcement in The Times of 22 May, and the long prologue was over.

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Lewis was not altogether sorry to leave Univ., feeling – rightly or wrongly – that the college might have done more to keep him, had it wanted him. But he kept up his connections with friends there, was later made an Honorary Fellow, and near the end of his life (though he may never have known) there was a suggestion, if not a firm proposal, that he should be elected Master. He also gave up philosophy for English with few regrets, feeling already that the former led nowhere: ‘I have come to think that if I had the mind, I have not the brain and nerves for a life of pure philosophy,’ he wrote to his father on 14 August. ‘A continued search among the abstract roots of things, a perpetual questioning of all the things that plain men take for granted, a chewing the cud for fifty years over inevitable ignorance and a constant frontier watch on the little tidy lighted conventional world of science and daily life – is this the best life for temperaments such as ours? Is it the way of health or even of sanity?’

(#ulink_8caf5f2d-d5c1-5ae5-b23b-698bd21da527) But the philosophical training was not wasted. Lewis had to be always ready to ‘fill in’ with a philosophy tutorial or lecture if required. Of the sixteen pupils Lewis had in 1926 only five were reading English. Lewis’s philosophical training also gave weight to his later theological writings, and in particular such a purely philosophical work as The Abolition of Man (1943).

Lewis’s first reaction on gaining the fellowship was to write to his father a moving letter of gratitude for the faith and the financial support that had made it possible for him to hold on at Oxford until he achieved his goal, while others less fortunate or less persevering had been forced to drop out of the lists. He then went on, with a gaiety that showed better than protestations of his relief and happiness, to describe the ‘admission’ ceremony at Magdalen: ‘English people have not the talent for graceful ceremonial.’ He concluded, ‘They go through it lumpishly and with a certain mixture of defiance and embarrassment as if everyone felt he was being rather silly and was at the same time ready to shoot the first man who said so. In a French or Italian University now, this might have gone off nobly.’

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Lewis seems to have had a deep craving for ritual and pageantry all his life, a craving that finds expression in most of his works of fiction, notably the cosmic celebrations near the end of both Perelandra and That Hideous Strength. But he fought shy of it, felt ‘lumpish and embarrassed’ when he came across it in actual experience – from university ceremonies to ritual in religious services – and avoided it whenever possible.

Before setting to work on the necessary preparation for his first term at Magdalen, Michaelmas 1925, Lewis spent a few days with the Barfields in London (as soon as he had finished the exam correcting for which he had already signed on) and then went with Mrs Moore and Maureen for three weeks’ holiday, 17 August to 6 September, at Oare on the borders of Exmoor. There he spent many days walking, usually alone, in the Doone country, reading for enjoyment, and only towards the end turning to works that he might be teaching the following term.

Lewis visited his father in Belfast during the last two weeks of September. It was a great success, partly because Jack was no longer dependent on his father. Mr Lewis wrote in his diary on 1 October 1925: ‘Jacks returned. A fortnight and a few days with me. Very pleasant, not a cloud. Went to the Boat with him. The first time I did not pay his passage money. I offered, but he did not want it.’

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While in Belfast during this same Long Vacation Jack discussed the furnishing of his rooms in Magdalen, for he was writing to his father on 21 October in dismay over the quantity of furniture he was expected to supply – far more than they had planned on transporting from Ireland. ‘At one time I thought I should have to take pupils in my bedroom as the bed was the only thing to sit down on,’ he remarked ruefully. But

my external surroundings are beautiful beyond expectation and beyond hope. To live in the Bishop’s Palace at Wells would be good but could hardly be better than this. My big sitting-room looks north and from it Isee nothing, not even a gable or spire, to remind me that I am in a town. I look down on a stretch of grass which passes into a grove of immemorial forest trees, at present coloured with autumn red. Over this stray the deer. They are erratic in their habits. Some mornings when I look out there may be half a dozen chewing the cud just beneath me, and on others there will be none in sight – or one little stag (not much bigger than a calf and looking too slender for the weight of his own antlers) standing still and sending through the fog that queer little bark or hoot which is these beasts’ ‘moo’. It is a sound that will soon be as familiar to me as the cough of the cows in the field at home, for I hear it day and night. On my right hand as I look from these windows is ‘his favourite walk’.

(#ulink_5bae1d2b-7502-569d-b88d-86dee9028bf8)My smaller sitting-room and bedroom look out southward and across a broad lawn to the main buildings of Magdalen with the tower beyond it.

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Lewis occupied these rooms (New Buildings 3.3 – Staircase 3, Rooms 3) for almost thirty years, and in some way he seems to be more closely associated with them than either with his subsequent rooms in Magdalene, Cambridge, or even with The Kilns, his home in Headington Quarry from 1930 until his death in 1963. To the New Buildings at Magdalen (built about 1740, which is ‘new’ in Oxford when one thinks of Chaucer reading in Merton library) came most of those who sought Lewis, from pupils and celebrity-hunters to the greatest writers and scholars of his age. There most of his famous books were written, from The Allegory of Love to The Last Battle; and there for a moment in Oxford’s history a group gathered to read and discuss their works, as similar groups had met and will meet again. A century earlier it was William Morris, Burne-Jones, R.W. Dixon and their friends in Cornell Price’s rooms at Brasenose College; this time Tolkien would be reading the half-written Lord of the Rings, Charles Williams All Hallows’ Eve, and C.S. Lewis Perelandra.

But all this was still far in the utterly unexpected future when the new English don moved in early in October 1925 to meet his first pupils and begin preparing his first lectures.

The concentration on work at Magdalen took up most of his time and prevented diary writing until the following summer, and much in the way of letter writing too. The long letters to Arthur Greeves had already grown fewer and become less intimate, and although Lewis continued to write to his earliest friend, we learn relatively little of his more personal feelings and experiences from them.

But indeed there was little to record of Lewis’s first years at Magdalen. He worked hard and conscientiously at his profession, and his experiences in so doing differed only in detail from those of any other don. He did not suddenly become the best lecturer and (for the right pupil) the best tutor in the English School at Oxford: it was ten or fifteen years before such a description could be considered seriously.

Among Lewis’s first pupils was John Betjeman:

(#ulink_d2783629-d669-56a7-8e44-8eb2b86fbcf8) but there is no indication that either discerned the other’s future greatness or felt that the experience was anything out of the ordinary. In fact, Lewis considered that he did not do anything like enough work, was particularly slack over Old English, and in a moment of exasperation described him as ‘an idle prig’.

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His first lectures caused him considerable trouble. Having announced as his theme ‘Eighteenth-Century Precursors of the Romantic Movement’, he discovered that F.P. Wilson was lecturing on ‘English Poetry from Thomson to Cowper’, and he wrote to his father on 4 December 1925, ‘It is in fact the same subject under a different name. This means that, being neither able nor willing to rival Wilson, I am driven to concentrate on the prose people of whom at present I know very little. I have as hard a spell cut out for me between now and next term as I have ever had.’

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However, even an attack of German measles at the beginning of the following year did not prevent the lectures from being prepared. He wrote to his father on 25 January 1926:

Will you think me affected if I number a small illness among the minor pleasures of life? The early stages are unpleasant but at least they bring you to a point when the mere giving up and going to bed is a relief. Then after twenty-four hours the really high temperature and the headache are gone: one is not well enough to get up, but one is ill enough not to want to get up. Best of all, work is impossible and one can read all day for mere pleasure with a clear conscience.

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(Lewis never changed his views, and as late as 1959 Green remembered finding him laid up with a heavy cold, and his positive delight when he was found to have a temperature and could look forward to a three-day ‘holiday in bed’, instead of getting up and going to Cambridge.)

On Saturday, 23 January 1926, Lewis had given his first lecture in the English School. Writing to his father about it in his letter of 25 January, he said,

I suppose my various friends in the English Schools have been telling their pupils to come to it: at any rate it was a pleasant change from talking to empty rooms in Greats. I modestly selected the smallest lecture room in college. As I approached, half wondering if anyone would turn up, I noticed a crowd of undergraduates coming into Magdalen, but it was no mock modesty to assume that they were coming to hear someone else. When however I actually reached my own room it was crowded out and I had to sally forth with the audience at my heels to find another. The porter directed me to one which we have in another building across the street. So we all surged over the High in a disorderly mass, suspending the traffic. It was a most exhilarating scene. Of course their coming to the first lecture, the men to see what it is like, the girls to see what I am like, really means nothing: curiosity is now satisfied – I have been weighed, with results as yet unknown – and next week I may have an audience of five or none.

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Besides his own pupils, Lewis took a class of seven girls at Lady Margaret Hall each week during the Hilary Term of 1926, and found several of them clever and stimulating, and ‘very good at discussion’.

(#ulink_46698353-b02a-5ed4-b7f0-33bf1a4c8072) Contrary to a rumour that persisted for many years, Lewis neither looked down on women undergraduates nor refused to tutor them: he made no distinction between them and his male pupils – and made no special allowances. His bluff manner, the lightning speed at which his mind worked, and the downright assertion or contradiction that often seemed like a snub though not so intended, was apt to alarm or antagonize the more sensitive of his male pupils: this treatment could have seemed to show a veiled contempt to some of his female pupils who were not accustomed to it.

The hard work at the beginning of Lewis’s career as lecturer and tutor at Magdalen cut down even the social events which he enjoyed. One, however, which he made a point of attending was a dinner with Nevill Coghill to meet Walter de la Mare

(#ulink_5d846a7c-f727-5d6c-ac40-f93b3690f60c) and A.L. Rowse

(#ulink_09de956c-5c7a-55c1-96df-db9f08cb5051) – the latter he continued to meet in Oxford, the former he does not seem to have met again. A much closer friend made at this time, and the earliest among his new Magdalen associates, was William Francis Ross Hardie,

(#ulink_89a513e4-8686-58d0-b688-cb3c201c1f7b) the young classics tutor: being depressed over the outbreak of the General Strike in May 1926, they went to the cinema ‘where I saw Felix (excellent) and Harold Lloyd for the first time in my life’.

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‘Nearly all my pupils went off during the Strike to unload boats or swing batons or drive engines,’ he wrote to his father on 5 June. ‘We of course had to stay on as long as any pupils were left, and it had just got to the point of us having to go when the thing ended. I don’t mind telling you that I was in a funk about it. Docking was filled up and I would sooner have gone to the war again than have been a constable.’

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