The cold here is quite as bad as with you, and it freezes every night. This week I have been reading ‘The House of the Seven Gables’ which I have often heard praised but never met before. Have you? It is well worth the reading. As to coming home, the Oxford authorities, whose principle apparently is to worry the candidate by every concievable sort of mystery, have given me no idea how long the exam lasts. But I shall write to you about that from Oxford next week. I suppose I want only a day or two to get back from here and bring my trunk from Bookham. Many thanks for the enclosure–I wish it were for my sixteenth birthday, with two years more of Gastons life ahead.
your loving
son Jack.
Lewis went up to Oxford for the first time on Monday, 4 December 1916, to sit for a scholarship examination. He described this visit in SBJ XII where he says he found lodgings in the first house ‘on the right as you turn into Mansfield Road out of Holywell’. The examination, given in Oriel College, took place between 5 and 9 December, after which he returned to Great Bookham.
TO HIS FATHER (LP V: 156):
[1 Mansfield Road,
Oxford 7 December 1916]
My dear P.,
This is Thursday and our last papers are on Saturday morning so I will cross on Monday night if you will kindly make the arrangements. We have so far had General Paper, Latin Prose, Greek and Latin unseen, and English essay. The subject for the latter was Johnson’s ‘People confound liberty of thinking with liberty of talking’211–rather suggestive, tho’ to judge by faces, some did not find it so.
I don’t know exactly how I am doing, because my most dangerous things–the two proses–are things you can’t judge for yourself. The General paper was ideal and each of the unseens contained a piece I had done before. I am surprised at the number of candidates, tho’ I can find only one going to New, a Harrow boy who sits opposite me.
The place has surpassed my wildest dreams: I never saw anything so beautiful, especially on these frosty moonlight nights: tho’ in the Hall of Oriel where we do our papers it is fearfully cold at about four o’clock on these afternoons. We have most of us tried with varying success to write in our gloves. I will see you then on Tuesday morning.
your loving son,
Jack.
He crossed over to Belfast on 11 December and his rather fearful worries about the examination were laid to rest when he received a letter of 13 December from the Master of University College, Reginald W. Macan,212 who said: ‘This College elects you to a Scholarship (New College having passed you over). Owing to your having furnished us with no Oxford address, I am obliged to send this to your home. I should have been glad to see you and ascertain your plans. Will you be so good now as to write to me and let me know what you propose to be doing between this time and next October’ (LP V: 159-60). An announcement of this award appeared in The Times of 14 December, along with the news that University College had awarded Jack not only a Scholarship but an Exhibition–an additional financial endowment.
The question for Jack, his father, and Mr Kirkpatrick was what Jack should do until the following October. Jack was keen to begin his studies, and in replying to the Master of University College, he said he had ‘formed no plans for the intervening time’ and that he would be glad of the Master’s ‘guidance in the matter (LP V: 160).
While they waited to hear from the Master, Albert Lewis wrote at once to thank Mr Kirkpatrick for all he had done to secure Jack the Scholarship. Those who have read C. S. Lewis’s tribute to Mr Kirkpatrick in Surprised by Joy will be interested in what the ‘Great Knock’ thought of his pupil. In his letter to Albert Lewis of 20 December, Mr Kirkpatrick said:
The generosity of your heart has led you to express yourself in terms altogether too complimentary to me. I ask you, what could I have done with Clive if he had not been gifted with literary taste and the moral virtue of perseverance? Now to whom is Clive indebted for his brains? Beyond all question to his father and mother. And I hold that he is equally indebted to them for those moral qualities which though less obvious and striking than the intellectual, are equally necessary for the accomplishment of any great object in life–I mean fixity of purpose, determination of character, persevering energy. These are the qualities that carried him through. I did not create them, and if they had not been there, I could not have accomplished anything. All this is so perfectly obvious that it is hardly worth emphasizing…As a dialectician, an intellectual disputant, I shall miss him, and he will have no successor. Clive can hold his own in any discussion, and the higher the range of the conversation, the more he feels himself at home. (LP V: 165)
Over Christmas Jack received a letter from the Master of University College. It has not survived, but Albert Lewis provided the gist of it in a letter to Warnie of 31 December. Dr Macan, he said, wrote to Jack
asking him what his intentions were in regard to Military Service, and informing him at the same time that all their Scholars are with the Colours, save one who is hopelessly unfit physically. Pretty plain speaking that! So now I have to start to look for a commission for Jacks. Failing that, I am afraid that he must either chuck Oxford or go into the ranks. Apparently it is a moral impossibility for a healthy man over 18 years of age to go into residence at Oxford. (LP V: 172-3)
Mr Kirkpatrick, again, solved the deadlock. He thought Jack should take Responsions, the University entrance examinations, and have this out of the way. In his letter to Albert of 2 January 1917 he pointed out that Mathematics ‘form an important element in this exam.’ and that Jack ‘could very usefully employ a good part of the day in working up a subject for which he has not only no taste, but on the contrary a distinct aversion (LP V: 174). It was further decided, as Jack mentioned in the letter to his father of 8 February, that if all his ideas about Oxford ‘fell through’, he would try for the Foreign Office. For this reason Mr Kirkpatrick planned for him to learn Italian, German and Spanish.
1 Carmen, an opera by Georges Bizet, first performed in 1875.
2 The village in question was Dorking.
3 Algernon Charles Swinburne, A Forsaken Garden (1878): ‘As a god self-slain on his own strange altar’.
4 29 January 1916.
5 Algernon Blackwood, The Education of Uncle Paul (1909).
6 ibid., ch. X, p. 130; ch. XIV, p. 182.
7 Enrico Caruso (1873-1921), Italian tenor who made his first public appearance in Naples in 1894, and whose powerful, wonderfully pure voice made him one of the greatest singers of the century.