C. S. Lewis: A Biography. Walter Hooper

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.⁴⁷

      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’.⁴⁸

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’.⁴⁹ 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.’⁵⁰ 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.⁵¹

      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,^* their tastes run rather to modernism, vers libre, and that sort of thing. I have a holy terror of coteries …’⁵²

      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 find some 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?⁵³

      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’⁵⁴ 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 СКАЧАТЬ