On 11 June, a few days after he began sitting for Greats, Lewis went for a long walk up Hinksey Hill, ‘sat down in the patch of wood – all ferns and pines and the very driest sand and the landscape towards Wytham of an almost polished brightness. Got a whiff of the real Joy, but only momentary.’69 Schools over, he tried for a lectureship in Classics at Reading under E.R. Dodds,† later Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford, but without success.
In August Lewis and the ‘family’ moved again, this time to Hillsboro, 14 Holyoake Road, Headington, and in mid-September he spent ten days with his father at Little Lea. Warnie was also there, and the atmosphere seemed less strained. Arthur Greeves was at home, but Lewis noted that although they saw each other frequently, ‘we found practically nothing to say to each other’,70 for, though he may not have realized it in such terms, Lewis’s mind had outgrown Greeves’s, and he needed the more stimulating friendship of men such as Jenkin and Barfield and Harwood, and others whom he was soon to meet, notably Nevill Coghill,* Hugo Dyson† and J.R.R. Tolkien.‡
Back in Oxford he was trying for a classical fellowship at Magdalen, having an interview with the President, Sir Herbert Warren, and sitting for the examination during the last week of September – but without success. Accordingly on 13 October 1922 he began his more formal work for the English School by visiting his new tutor, F.P. Wilson, at that time attached to Exeter College. ‘Wilson was not there,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘but I found him at his house in Manor Place. He tells me I shall have my work cut out to manage the work in time’71 (the English course normally took over two years, following Mods or Pass Mods). Next day he went to St Hugh’s College in search of his language tutor, Miss E.E. Wardale, author of An Old English Grammar (1922);* and soon Lewis was revelling in Old English under her skilled supervision. ‘It is very curious,’ he wrote in his diary on 15 October, ‘that to read the words of King Alfred gives more sense of antiquity than to read those of Sophocles. Also, to be thus realizing a dream of learning Anglo-Saxon which dates from Bookham days.’72
Now that he had to write essays on English literature, with the finest examples in the language daily before him, Lewis began to think about his own literary performance: ‘My prose style is really abominable, and between poetry and work I suppose I shall never learn to improve it,’73 he confided sadly to his diary of 17 October. In later life he was to achieve one of the finest and most lucid prose styles of any writer of his period.
The reading of medieval English literature caused Lewis to have a fresh look at and a deeper consideration of Christianity, and even the first reading of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde set him arguing on the subject with Jenkin. ‘We talked of Troilus,’ he wrote of a walk on 18 October, ‘and this led us to the question of Chivalry. I thought the mere ideal, however unrealized, had been a great advance. He thought the whole thing had been pretty worthless. The various points which I advanced as good results of the Knightly standard he attributed to Christianity. After this Christianity became the main subject.’74
There were many such rambles and talks with Jenkin at this time: on a beautiful November day, ‘above the forest ground called Thessaly’, he got ‘the real Joy’ again, between a discussion of The Wanderer and The Seafarer, and ‘Jenkin’s undisguised delight in the more elementary pleasure of a ramble’.75 On other such outings they were deciding that of Housman’s Last Poems ‘some are exquisite – some mere sentimental jingle’,76 or that Saintsbury’s History of English Literature was ‘a very poor book: his articles on Chaucer and Keats seem designed to prevent anyone reading them’.
The difficulty of finding enough time for reading, with so much whittled away by the exactions of Mrs Moore, led Lewis to develop the habit of reading as he walked. ‘I find that one really sees more of the country with a book than without,’ he decided, ‘for you are always forced to look up every now and then and the scene into which you have blundered without knowing it comes upon you like something in a dream.’77
After Christmas 1922, passed with his father at Little Lea, Lewis was back in Oxford revelling in lectures by Strickland Gibson* on bibliography and C.T. Onions (soon to be a much revered friend at Magdalen)† on Middle English, and enjoying his Anglo-Saxon studies which he found were much more extensive than he had expected. He was also reading Donne for the first time and finding The Second Anniversary ‘“a new planet”: I never imagined or hoped for anything like it’, but The Soul’s Progress he dismissed as ‘mostly bosh and won’t scan’.78
Meanwhile he had begun to attend the English classes organized by George Gordon, who had just become Merton Professor of English Literature in succession to Walter A. Raleigh,‡ a post which he held until 1928 when he became President of Magdalen and was succeeded by David Nichol Smith.§ The first meeting, on 26 January, did not impress him very much – ‘Gordon was sensible rather than brilliant’79 – but the next, held on 2 February, brought Lewis a new friend: ‘We were a much smaller gathering. This afternoon a good-looking fellow called Coghill from Exeter read a very good paper on “realism” – as defined in his own special sense – “from Gorboduc to Lear”. He seems an enthusiastic sensible man, without nonsense, and a gentleman, much more attractive than the majority. The discussion afterwards was better than last week’s.’80
The friendship with Coghill ripened fast, and they were soon going for long walks together, eagerly discussing both literature and life. On the first walk, by the Hinkseys and Thessaly, on 11 February, Lewis ‘found to my relief that he still has an open mind on ultimate questions: he spoke contemptuously of the cheap happiness obtainable by people who shut themselves up in a system of belief’81