Collected Letters Volume Two: Books, Broadcasts and War, 1931–1949. Walter Hooper
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is a lively, though sometimes inaccurate, record of Europe in the fourteenth century with particular emphasis on the first half of the Hundred Years’ War between France and England. The best-known translation is that by Lord Berners, published 1923–5. Lewis was using the Globe Edition of The Chronicles of Froissart, trans. John Bouchier, Lord Berners. ed. and reduced into one volume by G. M. Macaulay (1924).
33 Sir Walter Scott, The Heart of Midlothian (1818).
34 Scott, The Antiquary, ch. 35. After remarking that he never tastes anything ‘after sun-set’, Mr Oldbuck says to Lord Glenallan: ‘A broiled bone, or a smoked haddock, or an oyster, or a slice of bacon of our own curing, with a toast and a tankard or something or other of that sort, to close the orifice of the stomach before going to bed, does not fall under my restriction, nor. I hope, under your Lordship’s.’
35 Anthroposophy is a religious system founded by Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925). Steiner’s aim was to develop the faculty of spirit cognition inherent in ordinary people and to put them in touch with the spiritual world from which materialism had caused them to be estranged. Owen Barfield and Cecil Harwood became Anthroposophists in 1923. Lewis was later to write in SB/, ch. 13. p. 161: ‘Barfield’s conversion to Anthroposophy marked the beginning of what I can only describe as the Great War between him and me…it was an almost incessant disputation, sometimes by letter and sometimes face to face, which lasted for years.’ Perhaps the most important of the ‘Great War’ documents is Lewis’s unpublished Metaphysices contra Anthroposophos- better known as the Summa after its model by St Thomas Aquinas. For an account of the ‘Great War’ see Lionel Adey, G S. Lewis’s Great War with Owen Barfield (British Columbia, University of Victoria, ELS Monograph Series no. 14, 1978; new edn, Rosley, Ink Books, 2002). Lewis eventually got over his disagreement with Barfield and Harwood.
36 Barfield was taking the examinations required for practice as a solicitor.
37 ‘The Tower’ is a long poem by Owen Barfield, much admired by Lewis. It has never been published.
38 Geoffrey Chaucer, Canterbury Tales, The Nun’s Priest’s Tale, 474: ‘But I ne kan nat bullet it to the bren’: ‘But I cannot sift the chaff from the grain.’
39 ‘pain’.
40 ‘vexation’.
41 Kenneth Bruce McFarlane (1903–661 took a BA from Exeter College, Oxford, in 1925 and was Tutor in Modern History at Magdalen College, 1927–66.
42 Edward Hope (1866–1953) took a Sc.D. from Manchester and in 1919 was elected Fellow and Tutor in Natural Science at Magdalen and Lecturer in Chemistry. Lewis provides a portrait of him in the Magdalen College Appendix to AMR: ‘This is one of those men in whom knowledge and intellect have taken up their abode without making any difference: they are added on to a decent drab nonentity of character, and the character has not been transformed. If you wiped out his technical knowledge there would be nothing left to distinguish him from any respectable shopkeeper in Tottenham Court Road…’
43 Nothing is known of Mr Kenchew except that he was a teacher of geography who failed to win Maureen’s affections.
44 John Gibson Lockhart, Memoirs of the Life of Scott, 10 vols. (1839).
45 Una Pope-Hennessy, The Laird of Abbotsford; an Informal Presentation of Sir Walter Scott (1932).
46 John Christie, The Oxford Magazine, L (10 March 1932), pp. 570–1: ‘In truth Dame Una seems less interested in the author of Waverly than, to use her own phrase, in “spicy gossip”…It was bound to come, this bright, inquisitive, anything but intimate portrait of Sir Walter, with his foibles, his snobbery, and his subterfuges touched in with loving care, and most of the deeper traits left out.’
47 Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh (1903).
48 Robert Bridges (1844–1930), Poet Laureate from 1913. Lewis had enjoyed his poetry when he was younger.
49 Martin Tupper (1810–89), whose four series of Proverbial Philosophy 11838–761, maxims and reflections couched in rhythmical form, were the favourite of many who knew nothing about poetry.
50 The Baron of Bradwardine is a character in Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley (18141; Soames Forsyte is a character in John Galsworthy’s Forsyte Saga (1922); Arthur Kipps is a character in H. G. Wells’s Kipps (1905).
51 Arthur Denis Blackford Wood (1907–92), after liking his BA in 1929, joined the family firm of William Wood & Son Ltd., landscape gardeners, Taplow. He served with the RAF, 1941–5. Later he published a number of books on gardening: Terrace and Courtyard Gardens for Modern Homes (1965], (with Kate Crosby) Grow it and Cook It (1975), and Practical Garden Design (1976). Mr Wood, on being shown this letter, said he was ‘engaged in one, continuing, happy love-affair’ as an undergraduate, and that he thinks Lewis may have confused him with someone else.
52 Arthur worked for his brother Thomas Jackson Greeves (1886–1974), a linen merchant, 1915–17.
53 Charles Morgan, The Fountain (1932).
54 Their mother’s sister, Mrs Lilian ‘Lily’ Suffern (1860–1934), the eldest daughter of the Rev. Thomas Hamilton. An ardent suffragette, she quarrelled with everyone in her family. Following the death of her husband. William, in 1913 she was constantly on the move, but wherever she lived she bombarded Jack with books and a pseudo-metaphysical correspondence. After her widowhood the poetry of Robert Browning became her chief intellectual solace.
55 Torquato Tasso, Gerusalemme Liberata (1581).
56 Singlestick was a method of fighting or fencing with a wooden stick provided with a large basket-handle and requiring only one hand. It was used by young boys and people of ‘inferior quality’ or social standing. A good description of it is found in Thomas Hughes, Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857).
57 Pearl Buck, The Good Earth (1931).