C. S. Lewis: A Biography. Walter Hooper

poetry. Though he never accepted it as equal in value to the best of the traditional variety, he came to recognize the greatness of some of its exponents and numbered Eliot and Auden among his personal friends. His favourite contemporary poets, however, seem to have been Charles Williams, Roy Campbell and Kathleen Raine – perhaps he inclined to be over-partial to the poetry when he liked the poet. He never lost his respect for Masefield and the best of the Georgians, whom he would quote, praise and defend when occasion called – though he would allow few virtues to Noyes, perhaps on account of his own dislike for ‘elfin’ poetry, even if written by Herrick or Drayton.

He was reading the proofs of Dymer at this time and feeling an author’s usual sensation of failure and disappointment when it is too late to rewrite or revise. ‘I never liked it less,’ he confessed, ‘I felt that no mortal could get any notion of what the devil it was all about. I am afraid this sort of stuff is very much hit or miss, yet I think it is my only real line.’³⁵

Dymer was published on 20 September 1926. That it was a miss was not, however, the opinion of the more discerning reviewers. ‘Mr Clive Hamilton’s long allegorical poem Dymer is executed with a consistent craftsmanship which excites admiration even where criticism is readiest to speak,’ wrote Dilys Powell in the Sunday Times on 19 September; and after picking out several ‘felicitous phrases’ she assured the reader that ‘the tediousness which is so often the chief feature of allegorical poetry is absent’. But, prophetically, she concluded, ‘Mr Hamilton has mistaken his opportunity. The idea was not one for treatment in verse. The exigencies of the poetic line prevent such an easy sequence as the allegory demands; but as a prose tale how splendidly it would have flowed!’³⁶ And A.T. Quiller-Couch wrote to Guy Pocock, the editor at Dent, who passed it on to Lewis, ‘Dymer is a fine piece of work: fine in conception and full of brilliant lines and images. Can you convey my thanks to the author of the best new thing I have read for many a long day? He has that gift of metaphor too, which Aristotle was cunning enough to spot as the one quality of style which cannot be taught or imparted because it is genius, and its happy owner is born with it.’

      After Christmas with his father and Warnie (the last Christmas they were all to spend together, for Warnie was posted to the Far East the following April), Lewis began on his next poem, The King of Drum, still feeling that his literary future lay in the direction of epic. The full history of this, perhaps his most successful work of this kind, is given in the introduction to Narrative Poems (1969) where it was first published. Lewis worked eagerly on the poem for a time, but seems to have given it up as Dymer proved more and more obviously to be a failure from the financial point of view. By 1938, when he consulted John Masefield on its merits, he had rewritten it as The Queen of Drum, with a certain amount of Christian symbolism worked into it. Masefield urged publication, and other friends read and enjoyed it from time to time. Lewis read part of it aloud at the Oxford Summer Diversions on 4 August 1938 – but somehow it never won into print, though he was still considering publication twenty years after this.

      The burst of poetic creativity in January 1927 coincided with the first definite evidence for the spiritual worries and struggles that were to lead Lewis back to Christianity four years later. During a solitary walk on 18 January he was

thinking about imagination and intellect and the unholy muddle I am in about them at present: undigested scraps of anthroposophy and psychoanalysis jostling with orthodox idealism over a background of good old Kirkian rationalism. Lord, what a mess! And all the time (with me) there’s the danger of falling back into most childish superstitions, or of running into dogmatic materialism to escape them. I hoped the ‘King of Drum’ might write itself so as to clear things up – the way ‘Dymer’ cleared up the Christina Dream business.³⁷

But he was still attacking religion – with, perhaps, some of the shrill contempt of the man who does not want to believe rather than of one who simply does not believe. ‘A pest on all this nonsense which has half spoiled so much beauty and wonder for me, degraded pure imagination into pretentious lying, and truths of the spirit into mere matters of fact, slimed everything over with the trail of its infernal mumbo-jumbo,’ he wrote in his diary on 8 February 1927, after rereading the myth of Atlantis from Plato, and realizing how Steiner had interpreted it from the point of view of Anthroposophy. ‘How I would have enjoyed this myth once: now behind Plato’s delightful civilized imagination I always have the picture of dark old traditions picked up from mumbling medicine men, professing to be “private information” about facts. To bed and had a much worse night than I have had for a long time.’³⁸

But Lewis’s spiritual biography of the next few years will be dealt with fully in the next chapter: in 1927 he was still trying to ‘live by philosophy’ – like A.C. Bradley in The Masque of Balliol he was still seeking refuge ‘in the blessed Absolute’. His diary writing was, however, growing more and more sporadic, and it was, he said, his acceptance of Theism which ‘cured me of the time-wasting and foolish practice of keeping a diary’.³⁹

Meanwhile his outer life at Oxford continued much on the lines of any other don. Though still superior to and contemptuous of the average philistine undergraduates – ‘a drinking, guffawing cry of barbarians with hardly any taste among them’⁴⁰ – he performed what seemed his duties to them with conscientious thoroughness. Evenings were given up to reading and debating societies; he attended parties given by his pupils – one of these by John Betjeman on 24 January 1927 in his rooms in St Aldates – ‘a very beautiful panelled room looking across to the side of the House’, he recorded.

I found myself pitchforked into a galaxy of super-undergraduates, including Sparrow^* of the Nonesuch Press and an absolutely silent and astonishingly ugly person called McNiece,^† of whom Betjeman said afterwards, ‘He doesn’t say much, but he’s a great poet’. It reminded me of the man in Boswell ‘who was always thinking of Locke and Newton’. This silent bard comes from Belfast or rather Carrickfergus. The conversation was chiefly about lace curtains, arts and crafts (which they all dislike), china ornaments, silver versus earthen teapots, architecture, and the strange habits of ‘hearties’. The best thing was Betjeman’s very curious collection of books. Came away with him and back to college to pull him along through Wulfstan until dinner time.⁴¹

Certainly Lewis did not find himself at home among the brittle young world of what he was later to describe as ‘The Empty Twenties’ – but there was some truth in a moment of self-recognition recorded the previous year: ‘Was led somehow into a train of thought in which I made the unpleasant discovery that I am becoming a prig – righteous indignation against certain modern affectations has its dangers, yet I don’t know how to avoid it either.’⁴²

Warnie was setting off for Shanghai on 11 April 1927, where he would remain with the Royal Army Service Corps for almost three years. Warnie was becoming part of Jack’s Oxford family and after a night there he left in a rather nostalgic mood. ‘The bus,’ he wrote in his diary on 7 April, ‘did not start at once, and I watched Jack in his mac and old cloth hat stride along until he was out of sight.’⁴³ He had visited Ireland briefly the week before to see his father – for the last time, as it turned out.

      Lewis stopped writing a regular