C. S. Lewis: A Biography. A. Wilson N.

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      That gleam when day is fast

      I’ the yearning west

      Nor seek some faery town

      Nor cloud land lest

      I lose the hills of Down

      The long low hills of Down.

      It is extraordinary that someone who, as Kirkpatrick observed, had such an unfailing eye for the excellent in other poets could have gone on writing poetry of such appalling quality. True, large numbers of people write bad poetry in their teens. But Lewis went on and on doing so, apparently convinced that he was going to turn into a poet in the same class as W. B. Yeats.

      Not that he imagined he would be able to make a living out of poetry. He realized that he was expected to do something with his life, and the next stage in the life of a clever person inevitably looked like university. By the close of 1916, when he was just eighteen years old, he was ready to sit the scholarship examination for Oxford, and on 4 December he arrived in the town where, with periods of exile, he was to spend the rest of his life. This was the Oxford which existed before the building of the Cowley motor works and the expansion of the place into a mixture of modern industrial town and ‘shopping centre’ into which the old University buildings now appear to have been slotted by chance. The Oxford which Lewis saw was an unspoilt Gothic paradise. True, there were dull suburbs growing up around what Gerard Manley Hopkins, the Oxford Jesuit poet, had called its ‘base and brickish skirt’. But encircling it all there were open fields and meadows. No motor-car disturbed its tranquil streets. From college entrances hobbled old men in gowns who had known Dr Pusey and Dr Pattison. ‘This place has surpassed my wildest dreams,’ Lewis wrote. ‘I never saw anything so beautiful, especially on these frosty moonlight nights; though the Hall at Oriel [College] where we do the papers is fearfully cold at about four o’clock in the afternoons. We have most of us tried with varying success to write in our gloves.’²⁹

      Oxford is a collegiate university. To gain entrance there you have to be accepted by a college. The exact method of entrance to the colleges has varied over the years. When Lewis was sitting for the scholarship, there was a central pool from which the more brilliant candidates could be drawn. New College – in those days a place still very largely inhabited by boys who had been to Winchester – turned him down, but he was accepted at University College. After Christmas in Belfast, Lewis passed through Oxford for an interview with the Master of ‘Univ’ (as the college is invariably called), who explained that though he had been accepted as a scholar of the college, he had not yet matriculated as a member of the University. To do this, he would have to pass an examination called Responsions, which involved some elementary mathematics. If he passed this exam in March, then he could come up to Univ in the Trinity Term (i.e. April to June) of 1917.

      It was a tedious chore, but he went back to the Kirkpatricks to brush up his (never very strong) mathematics. It was during this period that he started Italian and German. It was also during this period that he began to disclose to Arthur some of his more bizarre sexual preferences and fantasies.

      In January 1917, his hand wobbles and he apologizes for his poor handwriting, poor because ‘it is being done across my knee’. The very phrase is enough to set off in his mind a train of sado-masochistic reflections: ‘“Across my knee” of course makes one think of positions for whipping: or rather not for whipping (you couldn’t get any swing) but for that torture with brushes. This position, with its childish nursery associations would have something beautifully intimate and also very humiliating for the victim.’³⁰ He began to sign his name Philomastix (‘Lover of the whip’). He enjoyed fantasies about Arthur Greeves’s sister who should be ‘punished … to the general enjoyment of the operator and to the great good of her soul’, and about some other girl in Belfast whose large bottom was ‘shaped with an intolerable grace … Ah me! if she had suffered indeed half the stripes that have fallen upon her in imagination she would be well disciplined.’³¹ He also enjoyed, and recommended, the Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. ‘Altogether “a really rather lovely” book. His taste is altogether for suffering rather than inflicting: which I can feel too, but it is a feeling more proper to the other sex.’

      These distractions did nothing to impair Lewis’s academic achievements, and he began his first term as an undergraduate at Oxford. It might readily be supposed that there was a tremendous contrast between the total solitude of Great Bookham and the merry life of Oxford; but by its own standards Oxford was strangely deserted. At Univ there were only twelve men in college³² and the hall was no longer used for dinner. The students ate in a small lecture room. Lewis was given an enormous sitting room all for himself. It was thickly carpeted with a profusion of rugs and furnished in stupendous style, with richly carved oak tables and a grand piano. A fire was burning in the grate, and his scout (college servant) had put the kettle on to boil on a gas ring. This was his first glimpse of college life. The room he had been given, including its furniture, belonged to ‘a tremendous blood who is at the front’.³³

      For the reason Oxford was so empty was that it was 1917, and nearly all the young men were in Flanders and France, fighting in the trenches. The war was going badly for the Allies, and conscription had by now been introduced. Since he was an Irishman, Lewis was not obliged to enlist, but he volunteered to do so. This meant that, although he was technically a student, he was in effect a trainee officer in the British Army. The Dean of the college refused to map out any plan of reading for Lewis ‘on the grounds that the Corps will take me all my time’.

      Still, in that first Oxford term at Univ, there was a chance to wander about and drink in the atmosphere of the place. One alumnus of the college had been Percy Bysshe Shelley – another atheist poet. He had actually been sent down from Oxford for his atheism, but after his death the college had accepted a remarkable statue of him which is housed beneath a blue dome. Lewis believed that Greeves would have loved it. ‘I pass it every morning on the way to my bath. On a slab of black marble, carved underneath with weeping muses, lies in white stone the nude figure of Shelley, as he was cast up by the sea – all tossed into curious attitudes with lovely ripples of muscle and strained limbs. He is lovely.’ Then – since the thought of naked loveliness will obviously raise the question of whether Lewis has masturbated recently, he adds, ‘No – not since I came back. Somehow I haven’t thought of it.’

      As well as naked figures in marble, there were naked figures in the flesh at ‘Parson’s Pleasure’, a stretch of the River Cherwell where men could bathe ‘without the tiresome convention of bathing things’. It was to be one of his favourite spots for many years to come. And, as well as the newly discovered delights of architecture, there were libraries and bookshops such as he had never known before.

      It was a beautifully, unreally happy first term, made the more poignant by the knowledge that sooner or later training would start in earnest and he would be sent off to the Western Front. On 3 June, he passed Robert Bridges, the Poet Laureate, in the street and would dearly have loved to speak to him.³⁴ But by 10 June term was over and he was moved to Keble College, which had been requisitioned as a military barracks. ‘It is a great change to leave my own snug room at Univ for a carpetless room, with beds without sheets or pillows, kept miserably tidy and shared with another cadet, at Keble,’ he wrote. The other cadet was a schoolboy who had only just left Clifton College in Bristol. Like Lewis, he was an Irishman, but that was not the reason he had been put to share with him. It was simply that their names came together on the alphabetical list. The other cadet, ‘though he was a little too childish’, was ‘quite a good fellow’. His name was Edward Francis СКАЧАТЬ