‘Family life’ produced even more trying distractions than the constant chores and the frequent removals from house to house. An experience which he mentions in Surprised by Joy and which had an effect on his spiritual development took place the term before he sat for his finals in English, and he wrote to Arthur Greeves on 22 April 1923 describing it and his reactions to it: ‘We have been through very deep waters. Mrs Moore’s brother – the Doc.* – came here and had a sudden attack of war neurasthenia. He was here for nearly three weeks, and endured awful mental tortures. Anyone who didn’t know would have mistaken it for lunacy.’ After ‘three weeks of Hell the Doc. was admitted to a pensions hospital at Richmond. [There] quite suddenly heart failure set in and he died – unconscious at the end, thank God … Isn’t it a damned world – and we once thought we could be happy with books and music!’3
Worry about the future was fairly intense in that autumn of 1923 when there was still no sign of a fellowship. ‘D and I had a conversation on the various troubles that have pursued us,’ he wrote in his diary on 8 September: ‘losses for the past, fears for the future, and for the present, all the humiliations, the hardships, and the waste of time that come from poverty. Poor D feels keenly (what is always on my mind) how the creative years are slipping past me without a chance to get to my real work.’4 And out walking a couple of weeks later, 12 September, while suffering from depression and ill-health, ‘I went through Mesopotamia and then to Marston where I had some beer and a packet of cigarettes – an extravagance of which I have not been guilty this many a day.’5
After correcting Higher School Certificate examination papers to earn a little money, Lewis went off to Ireland at the end of September to visit his father. With great generosity and foresight Albert Lewis promised to continue his allowance. ‘While Jacks was at home,’ he wrote in his diary on 11 October, ‘I repeated my promise to provide for him at Oxford if I possibly could, for a maximum of three years from this summer. I again pointed out to him the difficulties of getting anything to do at 28 if he had ultimately to leave Oxford.’6
Back again at Univ. the following term, the new Master, Sir Michael Sadler,* was offering to get Lewis some reviewing in London periodicals. He gave him a copy of the recently published Wordsworth by H.W. Garrod, the Professor of Poetry, and asked him for a specimen review. Lewis supplied this, but there is no evidence that it or any other reviews were published at this time.
In June and July 1922 Lewis was so short of money that he placed the following advertisement in the Oxford Times: ‘Undergraduate, Classical Scholar, First-class in Honour Moderations, University Prizeman will give TUITION, Philosophy, Classics to Schoolboy or Undergraduate.’ Towards the end of November 1923 he had his first pupil, a young man of eighteen called Austin Sandeman who was trying to win a scholarship to Oxford, whom Lewis was to coach, as he told his father on 22 November, ‘in essay writing and English for the essay paper and general papers which these exams always include’.7
The only other events for the rest of the year were visits to Harwood in London and Barfield in the country, and three weeks at Little Lea: ‘My three weeks in Ireland, though improved by Warnie’s presence, were as usual three weeks too long.’8
On returning to Oxford, Lewis tried for a fellowship at St John’s, apparently in philosophy since he submitted an essay on ‘The Promethean Fallacy in Ethics’ together with testimonials from Carritt and Wilson. Nothing came of this, and Nevill Coghill got the English fellowship at Exeter College in February. Lewis, still thinking that his future lay in philosophy, considered trying for a research fellowship at All Souls, and entering for a D.Phil. degree.
On 28 February 1924 he dined at High Table in Univ. as Carritt’s guest, and his host told him of a fellowship in philosophy that was to be awarded at Trinity, worth £500 a year, and advised him to try for it. Walking home late that night, Lewis recorded in his diary,
looking at the details of the Trinity fellowship as I passed the lamps – for some reason the possibility of getting it and all that would follow if I did came before my mind with unusual vividness. I saw it would involve living in and what a break up of our present life that would mean, and also how the extra money would lift terrible loads off us all. I saw that it would mean pretty full work and that I might become submerged and poetry crushed out. With deep conviction I suddenly had an image of myself, God knows when or where, in the future looking back on these years since the War as the happiest or the only really valuable part of my life, in spite of all their disappointments and fears. Yet the longing for an income that would free us from anxiety was stronger than all these feelings. I was in a strange state of excitement – and all on the mere hundredth chance of getting it.9
So the first few months of 1924 dragged along through disappointments and much enjoyment of his leisure when writing and revising Dymer, which was nearing completion. In April Lewis had a poem, ‘Joy’, accepted by a small literary magazine, The Beacon – an attempt to capture in verse the elusive experience he was again having from time to time, the meaning of which did not become clear until his conversion. The first stanza (of six) deals the most directly with spiritual ecstasy:
Today was all unlike another day.
The long waves of my sleep near morning broke
On happier beaches, tumbling lighted spray
Of soft dreams filled with promise. As I woke,
Like a huge bird, Joy with the feathery stroke
Of strange wings brushed me over. Sweeter air
Came never from dawn’s heart. The misty smoke
Cooled it upon the hills. It touched the lair
Of each wild thing and woke the wet flowers everywhere.10
Lewis was still hoping for the Trinity fellowship when he dined at High Table with the President on 4 May, and met many of the other Fellows there and in the Senior Common Room – doubtless that they might consider his suitability if there was any chance of his election.
Next day, however, Sir Michael Sadler offered him a temporary post at Univ. – to take over Carritt’s work as philosophy tutor during the coming academic year, which Carritt was to spend in America. After being assured that the appointment would not stand in his way if he got the Trinity fellowship, and that the emolument would be at least £200, Lewis accepted gratefully.
Much of his time was now taken up preparing for this, his first serious assault upon his chosen profession. But he found time for evenings of discussion with Coghill and other friends; for a week in London with Harwood when he