21 In the third of his Meditations on First Philosophy Descartes’s argument for the existence of God runs: ‘I have the idea of a perfect being. Whatever caused this idea must have all the perfections that are represented in the idea.’
22 By the ‘Thistle-Bird’ Lewis probably meant the Rev. Henry Edward Bird who, after serving in various London parishes, was Vicar of St Andrew’s, Headington, 1924–46. He sometimes preached at Holy Trinity, Headington Quarry.
23 Rudyard Kipling, The Seven Seas (1896), ‘McAndrew’s Hymn’, slightly misquoted.
24 ‘The Land East of the Sun and West of the Moon’ is a story in William Morris, The Earthly Paradise (1868–70).
25 One of Jack and Warnie’s nicknames for each other. When they were small children their nurse sometimes threatened to smack their ‘pigieboties’ or ‘piggiebottoms’. Over time the brothers decided that Warnie was ‘Archpiggiebotham’ or ‘APB’ and Jack ‘Smallpiggiebotham’ or ‘SPB’, and thereafter they frequently addressed each other by these names or variations of them. In his letter to Warnie of 2 August 1928 (CL I, p. 768), Jack discusses the nature of ‘pigiebotism’—the manners and ideas of young men like Warnie and Jack.
26 Ephesians 6:13.
27 18 October.
28 John is the ‘mystical’ fourth Gospel. The other three Gospels—Matthew, Mark and Luke—are remarkably similar in workings and structure; scholars call these three Gospels synoptic (from the Greek for ‘seeing together or at the same time’, a name derived from the practice of tabulating their similarities in parallel columns for comparison). It is generally believed that Mark was used as a source by Matthew and Luke.
29 The English School was divided between those who upheld the primacy of the study of English literature and those advocating the importance of language. Lewis had complained when Professor J. R. R. Tolkien wanted more linguistic courses, these to be based on Old or Middle English literature, but by 1931 he had come to see the merit of Tolkien’s proposals and thereafter gave him his full support. Soon the curriculum of the English School required that students learn the English language of all periods, while the literature syllabus began with Beowulf and ended with the Romantics in 1830. There were murmurings of dissent from the other side about the monopoly of philology and the absence from the curriculum of any modern literary criticism.
30 Miss Kathleen Whitty had been Maureen’s music teacher when the Moores lived in Bristol, and she often visited them in Oxford.
31 Ramsay MacDonald (1866–1937), Labour Prime Minister, 1924, 1929–35.
32 Philip, Viscount Snowden (1864–1937), Chancellor of the Exchequer, 1924, 1929–31.
33 Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey (1818).
34 See Owen Barfield (1898–1997) in the Biographical Appendix to CL I. Barfield, one of Lewis’s closest friends, joined the family law firm in London, Barfield and Barfield, in 1929. After taking a degree of Bachelor of Civil Law from Oxford in 1930, he began preparing for law exams in London. During his many years with Barfield and Barfield he acted as Lewis’s solicitor.
35 Lewis had been given a pair of swans by the Provost of Worcester College. See Fred W. Paxford, ‘He Should Have Been a Parson’ in We Remember C.S. Lewis, ed. David Graham (2001), p. 122.
36 John Keats, Endymion (1818).
37 John Keats, Hyperion (1820).
38 ‘It’ was Lewis’s original name for the inconsolable longing he called ‘Joy’ in SBJ.
39 This, one of Plato’s dialogues, is about Persuasion and Eros and their part in our perception of the eternal Forms.
40 Arthur’s friend, the novelist Forrest Reid (1875–1947), was living in Belfast at this time. Reid told his story in two autobiographies, Apostate (1926) and Private Road (1940). His novel, Uncle Stephen, was published in October 1931.
41 Luke 9:24.
42 The Times Literary Supplement (29 October 1931), p. 838.
43 BF, p. 89.
44 Before he left for Gibraltar Warnie had begun editing the enormous number of family diaries, letters and other memorabilia amassed by Albert Lewis. When he finished in 1933, the ‘Memoirs of the Lewis Family: 1850–1930’ consisted of eleven volumes of papers with numerous notes by the Lewis brothers. The original of the unpublished ‘Lewis Papers’, as the ‘Memoirs’ are known, is in the Marion E. Wade Center, Wheaton College, Wheaton, Illinois, with microfilm in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, and the Southern Historical Collection, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
45 This was the favourite walk of the essayist and poet Joseph Addison (1672–1719). When a Fellow of Magdalen he lived in New Buildings and greatly enjoyed the walk which runs northward from the college buildings. Since the nineteenth century it has been known as ‘Addison’s Walk’. On the centenary of Lewis’s birth In 1998 a memorial stone was placed along the walk inscribed with Lewis’s poem ‘What the Bird Said Early in the Year’ in which he mentions Addison’s Walk.
46 See Adam Fox in the Biographical Appendix.
47 Paul Victor Mendelssohn Benecke (1868–1944), great-grandson of the composer Felix Mendelssohn, was Classics Tutor at Magdalen College, 1893–1925. He was Lewis’s history tutor when he was an undergraduate at University College. See Lewis’s letter to Albert Lewis of 21 January 1921.
48 John Alexander Smith