C. S. Lewis: A Biography. Walter Hooper

Saturday, 23 January 1926, Lewis had given his first lecture in the English School. Writing to his father about it in his letter of 25 January, he said,

I suppose my various friends in the English Schools have been telling their pupils to come to it: at any rate it was a pleasant change from talking to empty rooms in Greats. I modestly selected the smallest lecture room in college. As I approached, half wondering if anyone would turn up, I noticed a crowd of undergraduates coming into Magdalen, but it was no mock modesty to assume that they were coming to hear someone else. When however I actually reached my own room it was crowded out and I had to sally forth with the audience at my heels to find another. The porter directed me to one which we have in another building across the street. So we all surged over the High in a disorderly mass, suspending the traffic. It was a most exhilarating scene. Of course their coming to the first lecture, the men to see what it is like, the girls to see what I am like, really means nothing: curiosity is now satisfied – I have been weighed, with results as yet unknown – and next week I may have an audience of five or none.²⁷

Besides his own pupils, Lewis took a class of seven girls at Lady Margaret Hall each week during the Hilary Term of 1926, and found several of them clever and stimulating, and ‘very good at discussion’.²⁸ Contrary to a rumour that persisted for many years, Lewis neither looked down on women undergraduates nor refused to tutor them: he made no distinction between them and his male pupils – and made no special allowances. His bluff manner, the lightning speed at which his mind worked, and the downright assertion or contradiction that often seemed like a snub though not so intended, was apt to alarm or antagonize the more sensitive of his male pupils: this treatment could have seemed to show a veiled contempt to some of his female pupils who were not accustomed to it.

The hard work at the beginning of Lewis’s career as lecturer and tutor at Magdalen cut down even the social events which he enjoyed. One, however, which he made a point of attending was a dinner with Nevill Coghill to meet Walter de la Mare^* and A.L. Rowse^† – the latter he continued to meet in Oxford, the former he does not seem to have met again. A much closer friend made at this time, and the earliest among his new Magdalen associates, was William Francis Ross Hardie,^‡ the young classics tutor: being depressed over the outbreak of the General Strike in May 1926, they went to the cinema ‘where I saw Felix (excellent) and Harold Lloyd for the first time in my life’.²⁹

‘Nearly all my pupils went off during the Strike to unload boats or swing batons or drive engines,’ he wrote to his father on 5 June. ‘We of course had to stay on as long as any pupils were left, and it had just got to the point of us having to go when the thing ended. I don’t mind telling you that I was in a funk about it. Docking was filled up and I would sooner have gone to the war again than have been a constable.’³⁰

Another acquaintance at this time who afterwards became a close friend – though the attraction was not immediate – was J.R.R. Tolkien, six years his senior, who had just been elected Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford. They met at the English Faculty meeting at Merton College on 11 May 1926. ‘He is a smooth, pale, fluent little chap,’ wrote Lewis in his diary, ‘can’t read Spenser because of the forms – thinks language is the real thing in the school – thinks all literature is written for the amusement of men between thirty and forty – we ought to vote ourselves out of existence if we were honest – still the sound-changes and the gobbets are great fun for the dons. No harm in him: only needs a smack or so.’³¹

In the Michaelmas Term of 1926 Tolkien founded the Kolbítar, an informal club for dons who met for the purpose of reading the Icelandic sagas and myths in the original Old Icelandic and Old Norse. Lewis joined the club and whatever initial antipathy they may have felt was soon forgotten. It was not long before they were meeting in each other’s rooms and talking far into the night. ‘Tolkien came back with me to college and sat discoursing of the gods and giants and Asgard for three hours’ is a typical note, from a letter to Arthur Greeves on 3 December 1929.³²

During 1926 Lewis was still much concerned with poetry. Dymer was at last completed, and accepted by J.M. Dent & Sons in May, being published on 20 September. Before its appearance he was showing some interest in the contemporary poetry, siding with Abercrombie^* and the ‘Georgians’ against Eliot^† and the ‘Moderns’. Perhaps piqued at his failure to get any of his own poems accepted, he hatched the idea of a ‘literary dragonade: a series of mock Eliotic poems to be sent up to the Dial and the Criterion until sooner or later one of these filthy editors falls into the trap’.³³

Coghill and W.F.R. Hardie, and his pupil Henry Yorke,^* joined in the scheme – but it does not seem to have gone very far. The American literary critic and philosopher Paul Elmer More (1864–1937) was in Oxford in the spring of 1933 and met Lewis shortly after The Pilgrim’s Regress was published. More was a close friend of T.S. Eliot, and liked his poetry. Even so, Lewis got on well with More and in his letter to him of 23 May 1935 Lewis explained exactly what he thought wrong with Eliot’s poetry:

There may be many reasons why you do not share my dislike of Eliot, but I hardly know why you should be surprised at it. On p. 143 of the article on Joyce you yourself refer to him as ‘a great genius expending itself on the propagation of irresponsibility’. To me the ‘great genius’ is not apparent: the other thing is. Surely it is natural that I should regard Eliot’s work as a very great evil. He is the very spearhead of that attack on πéραζ^† which you deplore. His constant profession of humanism and his claim to be ‘classicist’ may not be consciously insincere, but they are erroneous. The plea that his poems of disintegration are all satiric, are intended as awful warnings, is the common plea of all these literary traitors to humanity. So Juvenal, Wycherley, Byron excuse their pornography: so Eliot himself excuses Joyce. His intention only God knows: I must be content to judge his work by its fruits, and I contend that no man is fortified against chaos by reading the Waste Land, but that most men are by it infected with chaos. The opposite plea rests on a very elementary confusion between poetry that represents disintegration and disintegrated poetry. The Inferno is not infernal poetry: the Waste Land is. His criticism tells the same tale. He may say he is a classicist, but his sympathy with depraved poets (Marlowe, Johnson, Webster) is apparent: but he shows no real love of any disciplined and magnanimous writer save Dante. Of Homer, Sophocles, Virgil, Milton, Racine he has nothing to say. Assuredly he is one of the enemy: and all the more dangerous because he is sometimes disguised as a friend. And this offence is exaggerated by attendant circumstances, such as his arrogance. And (you will forgive me) it is further aggravated for an Englishman by the recollection that Eliot stole upon us, a foreigner and a neutral, while we were at war – obtained, I have my wonders how, a job in the Bank of England – and became (am I wrong) the advance guard of the invasion since carried out by his natural friends and allies, the Steins and Pounds and hoc genus omne, the Parisian riff-raff of denationalized Irishmen and Americans who have perhaps given Western Europe her death wound.³⁴