Three Firsts and a Fellowship

“And whatsoever ye do, do it heartily, as to the Lord, and not unto men.”

— Colossians 3:23, KJV

The Oxford Course

The Oxford that Lewis came back to in 1919 was crowded with ex-servicemen, older than the usual undergraduates, many of them carrying wounds of body or mind, all of them in a hurry to make up for lost years. Lewis was one of them. He read Literae Humaniores, the great Oxford course in Greek and Latin literature, ancient history and philosophy, which was taken in two parts. In March 1920 he took a First in the first part, Honour Moderations. In 1921 he won the Chancellor’s English Essay Prize. In the summer of 1922 he took a First in the second part, known as Greats.

That should have been enough to secure him a college fellowship, but in the early 1920s fellowships in philosophy were scarce, and none came. So, with Albert’s reluctant financial support, Lewis took the unusual step of reading a third degree, in English language and literature, which he completed in a single year. In July 1923 he took a First in that too. It was a formidable record, and it made him one of the best-qualified young scholars in Oxford.

It did not immediately make him employed. For two more years he lived on very little, examining, marking papers and writing, while the Moore household scraped along. In 1924 he was given a temporary post teaching philosophy at University College, standing in for a tutor who was away for a year. He applied for one fellowship after another and was turned down. His diary from these years records constant anxiety about money and about his future, and a good deal of quiet desperation.

Friends of the Mind

These were also the years in which Lewis made several of the friendships that shaped his life. Owen Barfield, a young man of brilliant and original mind, had come up to Wadham College after the war, and he and Lewis became close friends. Barfield was a poet and a philosopher of language, and in the early 1920s he became a follower of Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophy, a kind of spiritual philosophy that Lewis found repellent. The two argued about it for years, in letters and in long walks, in what Lewis jokingly called their Great War. Lewis learned an enormous amount from Barfield, above all the habit of questioning the modern assumption that whatever is newer must be truer. Barfield later became Lewis’s solicitor and the trustee of his charitable fund, and he outlived him by more than thirty years.

There was also Nevill Coghill, a fellow student in the English school, whom Lewis met in a discussion class and was astonished to discover was both the cleverest man in the room and a Christian. There was Cecil Harwood, another follower of Steiner. And there was A. K. Hamilton Jenkin, who taught him to enjoy things for exactly what they were, the ugly and dismal as well as the beautiful. One after another, the most interesting people Lewis met seemed to him to be either Christians or seriously spiritual seekers. He noticed it, and it disturbed him.

Magdalen

In May 1925 Lewis was elected a Fellow of Magdalen College, as tutor in English Language and Literature. Magdalen was, and is, one of the most beautiful colleges in Oxford, with a great medieval bell tower, a deer park and, behind the college, a path called Addison’s Walk that runs around a water meadow between branches of the River Cherwell. Lewis was given a set of rooms in the eighteenth-century New Building, overlooking the deer park on one side and the cloisters on the other. He kept those rooms for nearly thirty years.

Albert was overjoyed. For all the strain between them, his son’s success meant more to him than almost anything. Jack, for his part, wrote his father a long and grateful letter acknowledging all that Albert had done to make it possible. It is one of the warmest letters he ever sent him. It still said nothing about Mrs Moore.

The Tutor

Lewis was a demanding tutor. Each week his pupils came to his rooms, one or two at a time, read him an essay, and then had it taken apart. Some found him intimidating, even crushing. He had learned his methods from Kirkpatrick, and he did not believe in flattering anyone. Others found him the best teacher they ever had. He took their work seriously, he made them think, and once the argument was over he was warm, funny and generous with his time. John Betjeman, the future poet laureate, was one of his early pupils, and the two disliked each other heartily. Others, like George Sayer and the future literary scholars who passed through his rooms, became lifelong friends.

His lectures, on medieval and Renaissance literature, became famous. He lectured without notes, in a loud, clear voice, with enormous learning lightly worn, and his hall was often full. He loved the old books, and he made his hearers love them. He had begun, too, to write the scholarly work that would make his name among his colleagues: a study of the allegorical love poetry of the Middle Ages, which would take him ten years to finish.

Tolkien

On 11 May 1926, at a meeting of the English faculty at Merton College, Lewis met a new professor of Anglo-Saxon, John Ronald Reuel Tolkien. His first impressions, recorded in his diary, were not warm. Tolkien was smooth, pale and fluent, and he held views about the English syllabus that Lewis thought wrong. But Tolkien also loved the northern myths that Lewis had loved since boyhood, and before long Lewis joined a club Tolkien had founded, the Kolbítar, or Coalbiters, whose members met to read the Icelandic sagas in the original. The friendship grew slowly and then fast. By 1929 the two men were sitting up late in Lewis’s rooms, talking about gods and heroes and the old stories, and Tolkien had begun to show Lewis the poems and tales of his own invented mythology.

Tolkien was a devout Roman Catholic. He had lost his mother when he was twelve, and had been brought up by a priest. He did not argue Lewis into faith; argument was not his way. But he took the Christian faith as utterly serious and utterly real, and he took myth seriously too, and he could not see why the two should be kept apart. In time that conviction would be the key that turned the lock.

As to the Lord

The verse at the head of this chapter tells servants to work heartily, as to the Lord. Lewis in the 1920s did not work as to the Lord. He worked for his own advancement, for the pleasure of the work, and for the household that depended on him. But he worked heartily, and the habits he formed in these years, of reading everything, writing clearly, preparing thoroughly and treating pupils as minds rather than customers, stayed with him. When he became a Christian, he did not need to learn how to work. He only needed to learn for whom.