As to the undergraduates, this is how one Magdalen freshman responded to his surroundings in that Michaelmas term of 1925:
Balkan Sobranies in a wooden box,
The college arms upon the lid; Tokay
And sherry in the cupboard; on the shelves
The University Statutes bound in blue,
Crome Yellow, Prancing Nigger, Blunden, Keats …
Privacy after years of public school;
First college rooms, a kingdom of my own:
What words of mine can tell my gratitude?
No wonder, looking back, I never worked.
The undergraduate who wrote these lines was among Lewis’s first pupils that term, and they did not get on well. ‘Betjeman and Valentin came for Old English,’ Lewis wrote in his diary. ‘Betjeman appeared in a pair of eccentric bedroom slippers and said he hoped I didn’t mind them as he had a blister. He seemed so pleased with himself that I couldn’t help saying that I should mind them very much myself but that I had no objection to his wearing them – a view which I believe surprised him. Both had been very idle over the O.E. and I told them it wouldn’t do.’
John Betjeman found Magdalen a blessed relief after schooldays at Marlborough, where he had endured just as much discomfort as Lewis at Malvern. He was certainly prepared to pay a little desultory attention to English literature, but he had not bargained for Old English (Anglo-Saxon), nor for such a tutor. Lewis, who was going to be responsible for teaching his pupils the whole English School syllabus from The Battle of Maldon to Blake, had decided to do his best to make the early part of the course palatable by organising evenings of ‘Beer and Beowulf’ and by inventing mnemonics to teach his pupils the laws of sound-changes. Betjeman, whose taste was for Swinburne, Firbank and the Gothic Revival, could scarcely be expected to respond enthusiastically to Lewis chanting over the beer-jug:
Thus Æ to E they soon were fetchin’,
Compare such forms as þÆC and þECCEAN.
(The last word is pronounced approximately as thetchen and so provides a rhyme.) Betjeman absented himself from this ordeal whenever possible, slipping away to friends who had an exotic country house at Sezincote near Moreton-in-Marsh:
I cut tutorials with wild excuse,
For life was luncheons, luncheons all the way.
‘While in College,’ Lewis wrote in his diary, ‘I was rung up on the telephone by Betjeman speaking from Moreton-in-Marsh, to say that he hadn’t been able to read the Old English, as he was suspected for measles and forbidden to read a book. Probably a lie, but what can one do?’
When Betjeman was not lunching at Sezincote he could usually be found at the George Restaurant in Oxford with Harold Acton and the Etonian set from Christ Church, or at Wadham College in the group of young men who gathered around Maurice Bowra. But if Bowra’s hospitality and wit showed Betjeman that dons were sometimes prepared to treat undergraduates as more than pupils, Betjeman found nothing of this reflected in his relationship with his tutor. The instant the tutorial hour was over, Lewis showed Betjeman to the door, generally with a fierce admonition to work harder. It was not that Lewis behaved in this way to all his pupils: he began to make friends with one or two who liked brisk walks and whose ideas interested him. But most undergraduates found him formal and fierce, and certainly he kept his distance from those whose behaviour had overtones of homosexuality – a fashionable mannerism among Oxford undergraduates at the time. Lewis’s own attitude to homosexuality is hard to define; it was perhaps a mixture of revulsion, due to his Ulster upbringing which encouraged an Old Testament severity towards sexual deviation, and fear, even suppression, due to the fact that his own feelings for his male friends were so warmly affectionate. At all events, while many of the ‘Georgoisie’ (as Betjeman named his friends) ate their dinners in loose-knotted shantung ties and pastel shirts, Lewis seemed to be taking almost exaggerated care to be shabby, with his regular uniform of dung-coloured mackintosh and old cloth hat.
John Betjeman was sent down from Magdalen after only a few terms for failing the obligatory University examination in Divinity. He sought out Lewis ‘in his arid room’, but was told bluntly, ‘You’d have only got a Third.’
Some years later, Betjeman turned the tables on his tutor. In his volume of poems Continual Dew (1937), he wrote in the preface that he was ‘indebted to Mr C. S. Lewis for the fact on page 256’. The book consisted of only forty-five pages. And in one of the poems contained in it, ‘A Hike on the Downs’ – which might indeed be a deliberate parody of Lewis’s whole way of life – there is this stanza, supposedly spoken by a young don:
‘Objectively, our Common Room
Is like a small Athenian State –
Except for Lewis: he’s all right
But do you think he’s quite first rate?’
*
Betjeman and his set were enthusiastic about modern poetry. Lewis was becoming less and less sympathetic to it. In fact he was now thoroughly vehement about T. S. Eliot.
In the early months of 1926, while Betjeman was still his pupil, he borrowed a volume of Eliot’s verse from him, and after studying it began to organise an anti-Eliot campaign among his friends. It was to take the form of a parody of modern verse which would be sent to the Criterion, which Eliot edited, in the hope that it would be mistaken for serious poetry and published as such. Lewis acquired several collaborators: his Magdalen colleague Frank Hardie, his pupil Henry Yorke (who had already published his first novel as ‘Henry Green’), and Nevill Coghill. They wrote some appropriate verses and agreed to send them to Eliot under the names of a brother and sister, Rollo and Bridget Considine. ‘Bridget is the elder,’ wrote Lewis in his diary, ‘and they are united by an affection so tender as to be almost incestuous. Bridget will presently write a letter to Eliot (if we get a foothold) telling him about her own and her brother’s life. She is incredibly dowdy and about thirty-five. We rolled about in laughter as we pictured a tea party where the Considines should meet Eliot: Yorke would dress up for Bridget and perhaps bring a baby. The poems are to be sent from Vienna where Hardie has a friend. We think Vienna will decrease suspicion and is a likely place for the Considines to live in. Hardie and Coghill are in it for pure fun, I from burning indignation, Yorke chiefly for love of mischief.’ The venture gained momentum when Lewis’s acquaintance William Force Stead, the American clergyman and man of letters who knew Eliot and in 1927 baptised him a member of the Anglican Church, was shown one of the parodies without being told that it was parody, and expressed a serious enthusiasm for it. But this seemed to indicate not so much that the parody was good poetry as that Stead was a hopeless judge, and shortly after this the prank petered out.
*
Lewis’s long narrative poem Dymer was now finished. It was offered to Heinemann, who had published his 1918 volume of verse, and Lewis was badly shaken when they rejected it. He asked Nevill Coghill for an opinion of the poem. Coghill was quite enthusiastic, liking Dymer enough to pass it to a friend who worked for J. M. Dent; and he and Lewis were delighted when Dent’s expressed admiration and agreed to publish it. When it was issued in 1926 it earned some good reviews. But almost nobody bought it, and Lewis now doubted whether he would achieve success as a poet. He still believed that poetry was his ‘only real line’, but though he went on writing verse it took up a smaller part of his attention. Another factor in this was that old friends from undergraduate days, such as Owen Barfield, were no longer at hand to give advice and criticism. Indeed there were many ways in which Lewis felt the need for more companionship. In a letter to another friend from undergraduate days who had now left the University, A. K. Hamilton Jenkin, Lewis described the idyllic setting of his college rooms and went on: ‘I wish there was anyone here childish enough (or permanent enough, not the slave of his particular and outward age) to share it with me. Is it that no man makes real friends after he has passed the undergraduate age? Because I get no forr’arder,