LITMIR.BIZ

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and his first tentative steps towards taking his place among the new, young poets of the twenties, or of entering into any kind of literary life outside the ordinary university round. A proposed anthology did not appear, and there were no more letters to Hartmann and Pasley about founding their own poetic movement. With his great mental ability and his developing powers of concentration, Lewis was just able to take a Double First in Literae Humaniores – Mods in March 1920 and Greats in June 1922. He also competed for the Chancellor’s English Essay Prize, the subject set being ‘Optimism’, and won it triumphantly on 24 May 1921.

Another interesting experience about this time was two meetings with W.B. Yeats, then living in Oxford, which he described fully to his brother in a letter of 21 March 1921. Yeats seems to have made a considerable impression on Lewis, who modelled the physical appearance of his magician in Dymer on him:⁵⁹ ‘If he were now alive I would ask his pardon with shame for having repaid his hospitality with such freedom,’ he wrote in the preface to the new edition of 1950. ‘It was not done in malice, and the likeness is not, I think, in itself, uncomplimentary.’⁶⁰ And something of this grander Yeats may have helped to create Merlin in That Hideous Strength.

      The visits to Yeats were among the more interesting highlights of the Oxford side of Lewis’s double existence during the years before he graduated from the Junior to the Senior Common Room. It would be possible to follow him in considerable detail through these years with the aid of copious letters to his brother, regular reports to his father and, from April 1922, a reasonably full diary which he continued, with occasional lapses, until March 1927 – but both letters and diaries are well represented, with long extracts, in the various editions of his letters and All My Road Before Me. The diary, though of great interest from an external point of view, tells little or nothing of Lewis’s spiritual adventures: it was, indeed, almost a public document and was read out loud from time to time to Mrs Moore and her daughter, or handed over to Warnie to peruse when on leave.

      Already in 1921 Lewis had made up his mind that an academic career was what he most hankered after – and if possible an academic career in Oxford. But it seemed an almost impossible ambition. On 18 May 1922, however, ideas for the future were taking more definite shape, and he was writing to his father that one of his tutors, to whom he went for a testimonial,

instead of giving me one advised me very earnestly not to take any job in a hurry; he said that if there was nothing for me in Oxford immediately after Greats, he was sure there would be something later: that College would almost certainly continue my scholarship for another year if I chose to stay up and take another school, and that ‘if I could possibly afford it’ this was the course which he would like me to take.⁶¹

      He mentioned in the same letter that another tutor pointed out that

the actual subjects of my own Greats school are a doubtful quantity at the moment: for no one quite knows what place classics and philosophy will hold in the educational world in a year’s time. On the other hand, the prestige of the Greats school is still enormous: so that what is wanted everywhere is a man who combined the general qualification which Greats is supposed to give, with the special qualifications of any other subjects. And English Literature is a ‘rising’ subject. Thus if I could take a First, or even a Second, in Greats, and a First next year in English Literature, I should be in a very strong position indeed … In such a course I should start knowing more of the subject than some do at the end: it ought to be a very easy proposition compared with Greats.⁶²

Lewis went on to inform his father that he could pretty certainly get a job at once as a schoolmaster, though his inability to play games might count against him – but that ‘the point on which I naturally like to lean is that the pundits at Univ. apparently don’t want me to leave Oxford’.⁶³ 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

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