LITMIR.BIZ

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such as ours? Is it the way of health or even of sanity?’²⁰ But the philosophical training was not wasted. Lewis had to be always ready to ‘fill in’ with a philosophy tutorial or lecture if required. Of the sixteen pupils Lewis had in 1926 only five were reading English. Lewis’s philosophical training also gave weight to his later theological writings, and in particular such a purely philosophical work as The Abolition of Man (1943).

Lewis’s first reaction on gaining the fellowship was to write to his father a moving letter of gratitude for the faith and the financial support that had made it possible for him to hold on at Oxford until he achieved his goal, while others less fortunate or less persevering had been forced to drop out of the lists. He then went on, with a gaiety that showed better than protestations of his relief and happiness, to describe the ‘admission’ ceremony at Magdalen: ‘English people have not the talent for graceful ceremonial.’ He concluded, ‘They go through it lumpishly and with a certain mixture of defiance and embarrassment as if everyone felt he was being rather silly and was at the same time ready to shoot the first man who said so. In a French or Italian University now, this might have gone off nobly.’²¹

      Lewis seems to have had a deep craving for ritual and pageantry all his life, a craving that finds expression in most of his works of fiction, notably the cosmic celebrations near the end of both Perelandra and That Hideous Strength. But he fought shy of it, felt ‘lumpish and embarrassed’ when he came across it in actual experience – from university ceremonies to ritual in religious services – and avoided it whenever possible.

      Before setting to work on the necessary preparation for his first term at Magdalen, Michaelmas 1925, Lewis spent a few days with the Barfields in London (as soon as he had finished the exam correcting for which he had already signed on) and then went with Mrs Moore and Maureen for three weeks’ holiday, 17 August to 6 September, at Oare on the borders of Exmoor. There he spent many days walking, usually alone, in the Doone country, reading for enjoyment, and only towards the end turning to works that he might be teaching the following term.

Lewis visited his father in Belfast during the last two weeks of September. It was a great success, partly because Jack was no longer dependent on his father. Mr Lewis wrote in his diary on 1 October 1925: ‘Jacks returned. A fortnight and a few days with me. Very pleasant, not a cloud. Went to the Boat with him. The first time I did not pay his passage money. I offered, but he did not want it.’²²

      While in Belfast during this same Long Vacation Jack discussed the furnishing of his rooms in Magdalen, for he was writing to his father on 21 October in dismay over the quantity of furniture he was expected to supply – far more than they had planned on transporting from Ireland. ‘At one time I thought I should have to take pupils in my bedroom as the bed was the only thing to sit down on,’ he remarked ruefully. But

my external surroundings are beautiful beyond expectation and beyond hope. To live in the Bishop’s Palace at Wells would be good but could hardly be better than this. My big sitting-room looks north and from it I see nothing, not even a gable or spire, to remind me that I am in a town. I look down on a stretch of grass which passes into a grove of immemorial forest trees, at present coloured with autumn red. Over this stray the deer. They are erratic in their habits. Some mornings when I look out there may be half a dozen chewing the cud just beneath me, and on others there will be none in sight – or one little stag (not much bigger 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

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