C. S. Lewis: A Biography. Walter Hooper

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СКАЧАТЬ To this Albert Lewis responded generously, and in the end continued his son’s allowance until he obtained his fellowship at Magdalen in September 1925. Meanwhile Lewis was awarded a First in Greats, which was announced on 4 August 1922, the day before he took his BA, L.R. Farnell, the Vice-Chancellor and Rector of Exeter College, performing the ceremony.

      A typical extract from Lewis’s diary may serve to round off the picture of that Summer Term of 1922. On 24 May he wrote:

I left home at about 12.45 and bussed into Oxford, meeting Barfield outside the ‘Old Oak’ … From here we walked to Wadham gardens and sat under the trees. We began with Christina Dreams: I condemned them – the love dream made a man incapable of real love, the hero dream made him a coward. He took the opposite view, and a stubborn argument followed.^* We then turned to ‘Dymer’ which he had brought back: to my surprise his verdict was even more favourable than Baker’s.^† He said it was ‘by streets’ the best thing I had done, and ‘Could I keep it up?’ … He said Harwood had ‘danced with joy’ over it and had advised me to drop everything else and go on with it. From such a severe critic as Barfield the result was very encouraging … The conversation ranged over many topics and finally died because it was impossible to hold a court between two devil’s advocates. The gardens were ripping – lilac and chestnut magnificent. I find Wadham gardens fit my image of Acrasia’s island very well.^* I walked with him as far as Magdalen, took a turn in the cloisters, and then came home for tea. Went in again to Carritt at 5.45 and read him my paper. Interesting discussion: he was on his usual line of right unrelated to good, which is unanswerable: but so is the other side …⁶⁴

We may note that Lewis had begun seriously on Dymer on 2 April and finished Canto I, more or less as published, by 11 May.⁶⁵ The references to Christina Dreams and Acrasia’s ‘Bower of Bliss’ in the diary tie up with the poem, as Lewis recorded in the preface to the 1950 reprint of Dymer. There he points out how strong had been his ‘romantic longing’ for the ‘Hesperian or Western Garden system’ of imagery, and how ‘by the time I wrote Dymer I had come under the influence of our common obsession about Christina Dreams, into a state of revolt against that spell … In all this, as I now believe, I was mistaken. Instead of repenting my idolatry I spat upon the images which only my own misunderstanding greed had ever made into idols.’⁶⁶

      Nevertheless, in a letter of 16 September 1945 he was warning Roger Lancelyn Green against the subtler dangers of the Christina Dream as revealed in an early version of his fantasy story, The Wood that Time Forgot:

Now for a matter which I would not mention if it were not that you and I (obviously) can converse with the freedom of patients in the same hospital. None of these faults is purely literary. The talent is certain: but you have a sickness in the soul. You are much too much in that enchanted wood yourself – and perhaps with no very powerful talisman round your neck. You are in love with your heroine – which is author’s incest and always spoils a book. I know all about it because I’ve been in the wood too. It took me years to get out of it: and only after I’d done so did re-enchantment begin. If you try to stay there the wood will die on you – and so will you!⁶⁷

      Of the companions mentioned in the diary extracts, Lewis wrote in Surprised by Joy:

The first lifelong friend I made at Oxford was A.K. Hamilton Jenkin, since known for his books on Cornwall* … My next was Owen Barfield. There is a sense in which Arthur [Greeves] and Barfield are the types of every man’s First Friend and Second Friend. The First is the alter ego, the man who first reveals to you that you are not alone in the world by turning out (beyond hope) to share all your most secret delights … But the Second Friend is the man who disagrees with you about everything. He is not so much the alter ego as the anti-self. Of course he shares your interests; otherwise he would not become your friend at all. But he has approached them all at a different angle … Closely linked with Barfield of Wadham was his friend (and soon mine) A.C. Harwood of The House, later a pillar of Michael Hall, the Steinerite school at Kidbrooke. He was different from either of us; a wholly imperturbable man.⁶⁸

On 11 June, a few days after he began sitting for Greats, Lewis went for a long walk up Hinksey Hill, ‘sat down in the patch of wood – all ferns and pines and the very driest sand and the landscape towards Wytham of an almost polished brightness. Got a whiff of the real Joy, but only momentary.’⁶⁹ Schools over, he tried for a lectureship in Classics at Reading under E.R. Dodds,^† later Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford, but without success.

In August Lewis and the ‘family’ moved again, this time to Hillsboro, 14 Holyoake Road, Headington, and in mid-September he spent ten days with his father at Little Lea. Warnie was also there, and the atmosphere seemed less strained. Arthur Greeves was at home, but Lewis noted that although they saw each other frequently, ‘we found practically nothing to say to each other’,⁷⁰ for, though he may not have realized it in such terms, Lewis’s mind had outgrown Greeves’s, and he needed the more stimulating friendship of men such as Jenkin and Barfield and Harwood, and others whom he was soon to meet, notably Nevill Coghill,^* Hugo Dyson^† and J.R.R. Tolkien.^‡

Back in Oxford he was trying for a classical fellowship at Magdalen, having an interview with the President, Sir Herbert Warren, and sitting for the examination during the last week of September – but without success. Accordingly on 13 October 1922 he began his more formal work for the English School by visiting his new tutor, F.P. Wilson, at that time attached to Exeter College. ‘Wilson was not there,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘but I found him at his house in Manor Place. He tells me I shall have my work cut out to manage the work in time’⁷¹ (the English course normally took over two years, following Mods or Pass Mods). Next day he went to St Hugh’s College in search of his language tutor, Miss E.E. Wardale, author of An Old English Grammar (1922);^* and soon Lewis was revelling in Old English under her skilled supervision. ‘It is very curious,’ he wrote in his diary on 15 October, ‘that to read the words of King Alfred gives more sense of antiquity than to read those of Sophocles. Also, to be thus realizing a dream of learning Anglo-Saxon which dates from Bookham days.’⁷²

Now that he had to write essays on English literature, with the finest examples in the language daily before him, Lewis began to think about his own literary performance: ‘My prose style is really abominable, and between poetry and work I suppose I shall never learn to improve it,’⁷³ he confided sadly to his diary of 17 October. In later life he was to achieve one of the finest and most lucid prose styles of any writer of his period.

The reading of medieval English literature СКАЧАТЬ