C. S. Lewis: A Biography. Walter Hooper

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ