C. S. Lewis: A Biography. Walter Hooper

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СКАЧАТЬ about imagination and intellect and the unholy muddle I am in about them at present: undigested scraps of anthroposophy and psychoanalysis jostling with orthodox idealism over a background of good old Kirkian rationalism. Lord, what a mess! And all the time (with me) there’s the danger of falling back into most childish superstitions, or of running into dogmatic materialism to escape them. I hoped the ‘King of Drum’ might write itself so as to clear things up – the way ‘Dymer’ cleared up the Christina Dream business.³⁷

But he was still attacking religion – with, perhaps, some of the shrill contempt of the man who does not want to believe rather than of one who simply does not believe. ‘A pest on all this nonsense which has half spoiled so much beauty and wonder for me, degraded pure imagination into pretentious lying, and truths of the spirit into mere matters of fact, slimed everything over with the trail of its infernal mumbo-jumbo,’ he wrote in his diary on 8 February 1927, after rereading the myth of Atlantis from Plato, and realizing how Steiner had interpreted it from the point of view of Anthroposophy. ‘How I would have enjoyed this myth once: now behind Plato’s delightful civilized imagination I always have the picture of dark old traditions picked up from mumbling medicine men, professing to be “private information” about facts. To bed and had a much worse night than I have had for a long time.’³⁸

But Lewis’s spiritual biography of the next few years will be dealt with fully in the next chapter: in 1927 he was still trying to ‘live by philosophy’ – like A.C. Bradley in The Masque of Balliol he was still seeking refuge ‘in the blessed Absolute’. His diary writing was, however, growing more and more sporadic, and it was, he said, his acceptance of Theism which ‘cured me of the time-wasting and foolish practice of keeping a diary’.³⁹

Meanwhile his outer life at Oxford continued much on the lines of any other don. Though still superior to and contemptuous of the average philistine undergraduates – ‘a drinking, guffawing cry of barbarians with hardly any taste among them’⁴⁰ – he performed what seemed his duties to them with conscientious thoroughness. Evenings were given up to reading and debating societies; he attended parties given by his pupils – one of these by John Betjeman on 24 January 1927 in his rooms in St Aldates – ‘a very beautiful panelled room looking across to the side of the House’, he recorded.

I found myself pitchforked into a galaxy of super-undergraduates, including Sparrow^* of the Nonesuch Press and an absolutely silent and astonishingly ugly person called McNiece,^† of whom Betjeman said afterwards, ‘He doesn’t say much, but he’s a great poet’. It reminded me of the man in Boswell ‘who was always thinking of Locke and Newton’. This silent bard comes from Belfast or rather Carrickfergus. The conversation was chiefly about lace curtains, arts and crafts (which they all dislike), china ornaments, silver versus earthen teapots, architecture, and the strange habits of ‘hearties’. The best thing was Betjeman’s very curious collection of books. Came away with him and back to college to pull him along through Wulfstan until dinner time.⁴¹

Certainly Lewis did not find himself at home among the brittle young world of what he was later to describe as ‘The Empty Twenties’ – but there was some truth in a moment of self-recognition recorded the previous year: ‘Was led somehow into a train of thought in which I made the unpleasant discovery that I am becoming a prig – righteous indignation against certain modern affectations has its dangers, yet I don’t know how to avoid it either.’⁴²

Warnie was setting off for Shanghai on 11 April 1927, where he would remain with the Royal Army Service Corps for almost three years. Warnie was becoming part of Jack’s Oxford family and after a night there he left in a rather nostalgic mood. ‘The bus,’ he wrote in his diary on 7 April, ‘did not start at once, and I watched Jack in his mac and old cloth hat stride along until he was out of sight.’⁴³ He had visited Ireland briefly the week before to see his father – for the last time, as it turned out.

      Lewis stopped writing a regular diary at this time, though he continued to record his activities in an occasional journal to Warnie. For part at least of the following year he kept a diary in Anglo-Saxon, none of which seems to have survived except a literal translation of the account of the election of George Gordon to succeed Sir Herbert Warren as President of Magdalen in 1928.

In the first of the diary-letters to his brother, the section dated 26 April, Lewis described a walking tour with Owen Barfield, Cecil Harwood and Walter ‘Wof’ Field^* to Marlborough and Salisbury Plain. This was always his favourite form of holiday and he continued to make such tours until his mid-fifties when failing health put an end to them, his most frequent companion in later years being his brother and their most usual venue the north of Ireland during the Long Vacation.⁴⁴

Apart from longer or shorter walks and thoughts on the books he was reading, Lewis had little news to impart either to his father or to his brother at this time. Albert Lewis’s health was beginning to cause anxiety, and Jack exerted himself to be entertaining in his letters, quoting amusing schoolboy howlers from the examination papers he was again correcting that summer, and telling anecdotes of the more eccentric dons with whom he came in contact. There is an occasional illuminating remark about himself: ‘Like all us Celts,’ he wrote on 29 July, ‘I am a born rhetorician, one who finds pleasure in the expression of forcible emotions independently of their grounds and even to the extent to which they are felt at any time save the moment of speaking.’⁴⁵ And the same letter concludes, ‘I am going bald at a prodigious rate and in a few years time you will have a better head of hair than either of your sons.’⁴⁶

In September Lewis was on holiday with Mrs Moore and Maureen at Perranporth in Cornwall and wrote an ecstatic account of the surf-bathing to Warnie. He tore himself away from the delights of the seaside for a visit to his father. ‘Jack arrived, bright and cheerful and amusing as usual,’⁴⁷ recorded Albert Lewis in his diary. But the Cornish trip ‘was not official and should not be referred to in letters’ to their father, he instructed Warnie.

This year Lewis began learning the language of the Sagas: ‘it is an exciting experience when I remember my first passion for things Norse,’ he wrote in his diary on 8 February 1927.⁴⁸ He described the experience to Arthur Greeves in a letter of 26 June:

I am realizing a number of very old dreams in the way of books – reading Sir Gawain in the original^* and, above all, learning Old Icelandic. We have a little Icelandic Club in Oxford called the ‘Kolbítar’: which means (literally) ‘coal-biters’, i.e. an Icelandic word for old cronies who sit round the fire so close that they look as if they were biting the coals. We have so far read the Younger Edda and the Volsung Saga: next term we shall read the Laxdale Saga. You will be able to imagine what a delight this is to me, and how, even in turning over the pages of my Icelandic Dictionary, the mere name of god СКАЧАТЬ