C. S. Lewis: A Biography. Walter Hooper

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СКАЧАТЬ 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’.^* 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.²³

      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:^* 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’.²⁴

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.’²⁵

      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.²⁶

      (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.²⁷

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’.²⁸ 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^* and A.L. Rowse^† – 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,^‡ 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’.²⁹

‘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.’³⁰

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