As the months went on, feelings between the father and son, who had not seen one another since Jack’s return from France, grew less and less amiable. Albert complained to Warnie about the silences of ‘that young scoundrel IT’. For his part, Jack complained to his father, ‘It is four months now since I returned from France and my friends suggest laughingly that “my father in Ireland” of whom they hear, is a mythical creation like Mrs. ‘Arris.’ Albert took the Mrs ‘Arris joke in very poor part, and not unnaturally felt that his son and Mrs Moore had been jeering at him behind his back. Jack, with the pomposity of youth, felt constrained to justify himself: ‘I do not choose my friends among people who jeer, nor has a tendency to promiscuous confidence ever been one of my characteristic faults.’ His father was aware that he had been negligent. ‘No doubt Jacks thinks me unkind and that I have neglected him,’ he wrote to Warnie. ‘Of course that fear makes me miserable … I have never felt so limp and depressed in my life.’15 Warnie assured him that everyone understood that the solicitor’s office could not be neglected. But Jack never did quite understand this, and the estrangement of that summer of 1918 was to leave wounds as lasting as those sustained at Arras. In September 1918 it was confirmed that Paddy Moore had indeed been killed, and Albert Lewis wrote a letter of condolence to the bereaved mother. Janie Moore wrote back:
I just lived my life for my son and it is very hard to go on now … Of the five boys who came out to us so often at Oxford, Jack is the only one left … Jack has been so good to me. My poor son asked him to look after me if he did not come back. He possesses for a boy of his age such a wonderful power of understanding and sympathy. He is not at all fit yet and we can only hope will remain so for a long time [sic].
Presumably the last, somewhat ‘Irish’, sentence means that she hopes Jack will continue to be regarded as a convalescent and not be sent back to the slaughter of the Front.
His wound was still troubling him in October when he was sent to the Officers’ Command Depot in Eastbourne, Sussex. Mrs Moore took her daughter to lodgings in Eastbourne so as to be near him. Lewis and Mrs Moore were mutually dependent. Whatever other ingredients there might have been in their relationship, one which made sense to talk about was that of the mother and the son. Janie Moore had gained a son. She always spoke of him as her adopted son and this, in effect, was what he was. By a route of tortuous coincidences, the wounds which had been inflicted on him in August 1908 with the death of Flora were now to be given a chance to heal. Anodos had kissed the marble statue and she had come to life.
As for the other wound, his hospitalization and enforced convalescence had provided Lewis with precisely the right degree of leisure for some literary activity. He had set off to France with a pocket-book full of his own poems, and in the course of the year he had added to them. Since being taken back to Blighty, he had rearranged these verses – all lyrics – into a cycle which he wanted to call Spirits in Prison, taken from the First Epistle of St Peter, where Christ went ‘and preached unto the spirits in prison’. The lyric cycle is not markedly religious in tone, but it is striking that, even in his ‘atheistical’ phase, the young poet should have looked to the New Testament for his title.
He sent it off to publishers, and by September he heard ‘the best of news’,16 that it had been accepted for publication. His editor, C. S. Evans, arranged for him to have an interview in October with William Heinemann himself. Lewis found Heinemann ‘a fat little old man with a bald head, apparently well read and a trifle fussy – inclined to get his papers mixed up and repeat himself’.
Heinemann said, ‘Of course, Mr Lewis, we never accept poetry unless it is really good.’17
Whether this was an attempt to convince himself, or whether Heinemann really meant it, we shall never know. The publishers not only accepted Spirits in Prison for publication; they also assured Lewis that John Galsworthy, the novelist and author of The Forsyte Saga, would give it some publicity in his magazine Reveille, in which a selection of work by contemporary poets was promised. ‘You’ll be in very good company,’ Evans assured Lewis, ‘for we have poems by Robert Bridges, Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves in the same number.’18 Actually, much to Lewis’s chagrin, Galsworthy decided not to include any of Lewis’s poems in the next number of Reveille, so clearly not everyone shared Heinemann’s glowing opinion of the young poet.
Albert Lewis was proud, but he did not allow paternal pride to blind him to the poor quality of the work. He said that ‘for a first book – and of poetry – written by a boy not yet twenty it is an achievement. Of course we must not expect too much from it.’ That would seem to be the sanest judgement of the book that there is. Albert, the catholic and voracious reader, also pointed out to his son that there was already a novel by Robert Hichens called Spirits in Prison and that he would do well to choose a different title. It was duly changed to Spirits in Bondage. Lewis did not publish it under his own name, but under that of Clive Hamilton – his own first name and his mother’s surname. Nevertheless, by some absurd oversight, he appeared in the Heinemann catalogue as George S. Lewis. Galsworthy did eventually relent, and in the February 1919 issue of Reveille he published Lewis’s poem ‘Death in Battle’. The book had the quietest, tamest of receptions, much to the poet’s disappointment, but this did nothing to diminish his sense that a poet, first and foremost, was what he was.
In November 1918, the dread that he might be transported from Eastbourne back to the Western Front was lifted. The Armistice was signed. ‘It is almost incredible that the war is over, isn’t it?’ he wrote to Greeves. ‘Not to have that “going back” hanging over my head all the time.’ Holidays with no school term to cloud them, the condition of being perpetually at home, these were to become images in his mind of the heavenly places. Life was returning to normal. He spent Christmas in Ulster, but in an important sense Belfast was not any longer home. When he resumed his undergraduate career at Oxford in the new year, he did not go alone.
–SEVEN– UNDERGRADUATE 1919–1922
Lewis returned to University College, Oxford, in January 1919. Because of his experiences in the war, he was excused the matriculation requirements, Responsions and Divinity. Had he chosen to do so, he could also have dispensed with the first of his public examinations, Honour Moderations, ‘Mods’ (that is to say, Latin and Greek Literature), and proceeded straight to the second part of the Classics course, Ancient History and Philosophy (Literae Humaniores, or Greats). He had decided, however, upon an academic career, and was advised that for this he would do better to take the whole course.
Many of the books, perhaps most of them,