C. S. Lewis: A Biography. Walter Hooper
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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 or giant catching my eye will sometimes throw me back fifteen years into a wild dream of northern skies and Valkyrie music: only they are now even more beautiful seen through a haze of memory.49
He spent four weeks with his father towards the end of the Long Vacation. ‘Jacks sets me a very good example of industry,’ wrote Albert Lewis to Warnie on 26 September 1927. ‘I leave him at breakfast when I go out and immediately he has finished it he goes up to the end room and works steadily till lunch. In the afternoon he goes out for a walk. I am glad to say that he is in good health and great spirits and has many funny “wheezes” about the older Dons at Oxford.’50
Not all Lewis’s ‘work’, however, was of a very academic nature, as he seems to have spent much of the month at Little Lea compiling an Encyclopaedia Boxoniana of all his and Warnie’s early stories.51 At about this time he also began his only attempt at a modern novel, which did not get much beyond the first 7,000 words. The fragment that remains among the Lewis Papers52 takes the narrator, Dr Easley, from Liverpool to Belfast on a first visit to his Irish relations, and includes a good deal of amusing dialogue with a loquacious Irishman whom he meets on the voyage – typical of the voyages that Lewis had made and was still to make so many times.
At Oxford there was little time for writing during term. Most of each day was taken up with tutorials and lectures, with a walk in the afternoon if not captured for chores by Mrs Moore. The evenings were mostly filled also, as he explained to Warnie on 12 December 1927 when excusing the brevity of letters written to him in term time:
My evenings for the fortnight in term run thus: Mon. Play reading with undergraduates (till Midnight). Tue. Mermaid club. Wedn. Anglo-Saxon with undergraduates. Thurs. – Frid. – Sat. – Sunday. Common room till late. Mon. Play reading. Tue. Icelandic Society. Wedn. Anglo-Saxon. Thurs. Philosophical supper. Fri. – Sat. – Sunday. As you will see this gives at the very best only three free evenings in the even weeks and two in the odd. And into these two everything in the way of casual entertaining, correspondence, and what we used to call ‘A-h-h-h!’ has to be crammed.53
That Christmas he spent with his father in Belfast. As Albert Lewis aged, he became more and more difficult and demanding, but Lewis himself was learning ever greater patience and charity – though still occasionally letting off steam to Warnie in letters packed with examples of their father’s exigent behaviour. This Christmas, besides walks with Arthur Greeves, he managed to get out for one evening to give him and John Bryson dinner at a Belfast hotel: ‘to be seated in a hotel, eating an ordinary dinner and drinking your wine, indulging in ordinary chat, and then to reflect that Belfast is outside the window, is a marvellous sensation. I discovered to my surprise that Bryson (whom I always regarded as an imposing junior Don) was in just the same state at home as Arthur and myself,’ he wrote to Warnie in the current diary-letter.54
Albert Lewis finally retired on a pension from the Petty Sessions in May 1928, his health growing more precarious. The poor man suffered acutely from lumbago and the occasional bout of sciatica. This made visits home even more of a penance, since his father was in the house all the time; but Lewis managed to stay for part of each vacation, and continued with long and cheerful letters.
Early in 1928 he was working on the idea of a book about sixteenth-century letters, sparked off by reading the letters of Erasmus, a task necessitating long, quiet days in the Bodleian which he described in glowing terms to his father. But very soon he found himself immersed in and fascinated by medieval French poetry, of which he would transcribe and translate scraps in letters to Warnie, apologizing that ‘my reading contains less and less that I can share with my non-professional friends’, but delighting in his new discovery of the world of courtly love and allegory. ‘Don’t you think this is rather jolly?’ he wrote to Warnie in that same letter of 24 April 1928. ‘In one of those gardens in a dream, which medieval love poetry is full of, we find the tomb of a knight, dead for love, covered with flowers.’ Then, after quoting the Old French, he goes on, ‘I suppose it can be very roughly Englished:
And birds that for the soul of that Signor
Who lay beneath, songs of true love did pour:
Being hungered, each from off the flowers bore