C. S. Lewis: A Biography. Walter Hooper

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       3 THE YOUNG DON

      It might be thought that C.S. Lewis, with a Double First in Classics and a First in English, to say nothing of the Chancellor’s Prize and a published volume of verse, would have found a fellowship waiting for him in the autumn of 1923. But the post-war ‘bulge’ was at its worst, no college seemed to appreciate his outstanding merits as a tutor and lecturer – they were, of course, still represented only by his examination results – and he still had two years of struggle and anxiety before him.

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 …’¹

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.’²

‘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.^* – 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!’³

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.’⁴ 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.’⁵

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.’⁶

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