He also spent several weekends and odd days with Warnie, who was now stationed near Colchester, and went on expeditions with him on his motorcycle. On a typical visit, 3 July 1924, Lewis records that after a drink in the Mess ‘we then motored back to town [Colchester] to a civilian club of which Warnie is a member, where he had provided a royal feast of the sort we both like: no nonsense about soup and pudding, but a sole each, cutlets with green peas, a large portion of strawberries and cream, and a tankard of the local beer which is very good. So we gorged like Roman Emperors in a room to ourselves and had good talk.’12
In this way they explored a good deal of the country within reach of Oxford and later much of Wiltshire and the counties north of London. An expedition on 4 July 1924 took them in search of Wynyard, at Warnie’s suggestion. ‘I assented eagerly,’ wrote Lewis in his diary that day. ‘I love to exult in my happiness at being for ever safe from at least one of the major ills of life – that of being a boy at school.’13
Lewis was correcting local examination papers throughout July, and at the beginning of August press of work on these and on his lectures in philosophy for the coming term caused a break in his diary which finally widened to six months.
Lewis gave his first lecture, ‘The Good, Its Position Among Values’, on 14 October 1924 – to an audience of four, owing to a mistake in the lecture list and an important lecture by someone else at the same hour. However, he was able to report to his father on 15 October 1924 that it ‘went off all right … Otherwise everything goes well. All my new colleagues are kindness itself and everyone does his best to make me feel at home – especially dear old Poynton. I find the actual tutoring easy at the time (though I am curiously tired at the end of the day) and have already struck some quite good men among my pupils.’14 One of these first pupils, H.D. Ziman,* recorded forty years later that he found him ‘the most stimulating of my tutors’.
By February 1925 Lewis was well settled into his new duties, giving an average of four tutorials a day – three in the morning and one between tea and dinner – and lecturing twice a week on ‘Moral Good’, though sometimes the audience was so small that he took them to his college rooms for an informal discussion instead.
Though living at Headington, he frequently reached college in time for breakfast, returned home in the afternoon but was back for tutorial and Hall dinner, with often a meeting of a literary or philosophic society thereafter. He was most conscientious about attending such meetings, and seems to have gained much enjoyment from them. For example, on 12 February after Hall, ‘I went to Ware’s rooms in Worcester Street for a meeting of the Philosophical Society. Ziman read his paper on causality. I, having heard it all from him in the morning, was rather bored. The discussion afterwards drifted off on to Touche’s and Dawson’s favourite position and I had an enjoyable argument. Home late.’†15
At this time Lewis lunched on most days of the week with F.H. Lawson, the law tutor at Univ.‡ and D.L. Keir, the historian,§ whom he found a more entertaining companion than the erudite lawyer: ‘The usual brisk but not really interesting conversation’,16 Lewis confided to his diary after one of these meals.
But he had very few other entertainments. To go to the theatre was a rare event indeed – and then also perhaps from a sense of duty, as for example the visit to the Oxford University Dramatic Society (OUDS) production of Peer Gynt on 10 February 1925 of which he records: ‘I was very disappointed in the play. The general idea of a history of the soul is all right, but Peer’s soul hasn’t enough in it to last for four hours: most of him is mere Nordic windbagism. No good making a story of Peer: you only want to kick his bottom and get on. The Troll parts from the visual point of view were the best stage devilment I’ve ever seen.’17
He and Warnie had spent three weeks over Christmas 1924 in Belfast, and on their return toured on the motorcycle via Shrewsbury and Ludlow – ‘an orgy of woods, hills, broad rivers, grey castles, Norman abbeys and towns that have always been asleep’. But almost as soon as he got back to Oxford he went down with flu: ‘I am very much afraid my organism is acquiring the habit of getting this troublesome complaint every time it becomes prevalent,’ he wrote to his father on 11 February 1925.18 Diary writing lapsed again from March till August, most of the time being taken up between his tutorial duties and domestic life at Headington. On 7–8 April he was away on the motorcycle with Warnie, visiting Salisbury, Wells and Stonehenge.
‘This is my last term “in the bond” at Univ.,’ he wrote to his father after returning to Oxford, ‘and there is still no word of the Fellowship. I begin to be afraid that it is not coming at all. A Fellowship in English is announced at Magdalen and of course I am applying for it, but without any serious hopes as I believe much senior people are in for it.’19
The chances of getting the Magdalen fellowship seemed remote at first. Oxford’s School of English was in its infancy, the subject having been officially recognized only in 1899 and given its first Chair as recently as 1904. It was to be a part of the Modern Languages Board until 1926 when a separate English faculty board was firmly established. Now, as it turned out, Lewis had been well advised to read both Greats and English for he suddenly found himself a candidate for the fellowship. He was soon left with only one serious rival, J.N. Bryson (later a Fellow of Balliol and a leading authority on the Pre-Raphaelites);* but a satisfactory dinner to be ‘looked-over’ by the other Magdalen Fellows and several interviews with Sir Herbert Warren, the President, tipped the scales in his favour – doubtless aided by the good offices of Gordon; and on 20 May 1925 he was elected.
‘The President and Fellows of Magdalen College have elected to an official Fellowship in the College as Tutor in English Language and Literature, for five years as from next June 25, Mr Clive Staples Lewis, MA (University College)’, ran the gratifying announcement in The Times of 22 May, and the long prologue was over.†
Lewis was not altogether sorry to leave Univ., feeling – rightly or wrongly – that the college might have done more to keep him, had it wanted him. But he kept up his connections with friends there, was later made an Honorary Fellow, and near the end of his life (though he may never have known) there was a suggestion, if not a firm proposal, that he should be elected Master. He also gave up philosophy for English with few regrets, feeling already that the former led nowhere: ‘I have come to think that if I had the mind, I have not the brain and nerves for a life of pure philosophy,’ he wrote to his father on 14 August. ‘A continued search among the abstract roots of things, a perpetual questioning of all the things that plain men take for granted, a chewing the cud for fifty years over inevitable ignorance and a constant frontier watch on the little tidy lighted