Foreword by Owen Barfield
Lewis himself has answered the first question: why devote the substantial tale of hours it must consume to perusing this meticulous record of a few years when he was still on the threshold of his career? Though admittedly interspersed with occasional shrewd comments on life and literature, by far the greater part of it is a factual, often repetitive, catalogue of endless household and domestic chores, academic studies and job-hunting. Well, in the entry dated 20 June 1923, he observed:
I think the day to day continuity helps one to see the larger movement and pay less attention to each damned day in itself.
Such, I believe, will be the experience of those readers, and they are likely to be the majority, who feel a special interest not only in the whole or some part of his literary legacy but also in the personal being of C. S. Lewis. They will have got inside the skin, so to speak, of the young man he was between 1922 and 1927 to an extent that no other information or reflection could have enabled.
The second question is more difficult: why, since he himself was already inside that skin, did he find time to keep it up throughout (with only a few gaps) the exceptionally numerous and heavy other burdens he was carrying? Did he have it in mind that at some later stage in this life he would read it in order to ‘see the larger movement’? I doubt it very much. Entries here and there record his having read the diary to Mrs Moore, and on at least one occasion she rebuked him for having let it drop for some days. My guess therefore, and it is no more, is that these contemporary readings aloud were his main motive in sustaining it.
I find it strange to recall that during those early years I was given no hint of all of that household background. He was simply a fellow undergraduate and later a literary and philosophical friend. I remember his telling me on one occasion that he had to get back in order to clean out the oven in the gas cooker, and I took it to be something that would happen once in a blue moon. It is only from the Diary that I have learnt what a substantial part of his time and energy was being consumed in helping to run Mrs Moore’s household, and also how much of that was due to the shadow of sheer poverty that remained hanging over them both until at last he obtained his fellowship. Perhaps it is relevant here to recall that it was not until some time in the ’forties that we used Christian names. Before that it was Lewis and Barfield. When he did suggest the change, I was able to remind him that I myself had done so some years previously and he had judiciously demurred on the ground that our friendship was intellectual rather than domestic!
It is of course not only in connection with domestic work and financial worries that Mrs. Moore’s name—‘D’, as he called her and in the Diary names her—occurs so frequently. One of the things that make me welcome its appearance in print is that it will do much to rectify the false picture that has been painted of her as a kind of baneful stepmother and inexorable taskmistress. It is a picture that first appeared as early as 1966 in the introductory Memoir to W. H. Lewis’s Letters to C. S. Lewis, and it has frequently reappeared in the prolific literature on C. S. Lewis which has since been published here and there. If she imposed some burdens on him, she saved him from others by taking them on herself even against his protestations. Moreover she was deeply concerned to further his career. Such was the case at all events during the five or six years the Diary covers. They were followed by more years of what, at all events to friends and visitors, looked like a normal and reasonably happy family life. I recall more than one quite jolly social evening at Hillsboro with the three of them, Lewis, Mrs. Moore and her daughter, Maureen; and here I can perhaps be of some technical help to the reader. There is more than one mysterious reference to a parlour game called ‘Boys’ Names’, which was sometimes played on these occasions. It was a pencil-and-paper game. Someone chose a letter from the alphabet and everyone was given a minute or two to write down as many boys’ names as he or she could think of, beginning with that letter. At least that had presumably been the programme the first time the game was played. Boys’ names, however, were soon exhausted and the practice was to select some other category: famous writers, capital cities, rivers, artists, patent foods or whatever. I once suggested that a more satisfactory name for the pastime would be ‘Categories’, but tradition was too strong and the old label stuck.
Perhaps I have overstated the diarists’ preoccupation with his personal problems whether academic or familial. There is much else. The love of nature, for instance, that transpired through the numberless descriptions of his daily walk at home and of others on holiday visits. Some of these reminded me of similar detailed accounts of walks in Coleridge’s early Notebooks. It was a landscape painter’s or a poet’s love rather than a naturalist’s, a delight in the prospect, in the impact of nature on his sense, rather than any intimate participation in her secret goings on, such as we find in a Richard Jefferies, a W. H. Hudson or a Konrad Lorenz. But it was none the less a deep love, and one not unconnected with that elusive experience of which he was to write later in Surprised by Joy:
Beyond the fence was a deep rich brown. I got a very good touch of the right feeling.
The stone seemed softer everywhere, the birds were singing, the air was deliciously cold and rare. I got a sort of eerie unrest and dropped into the real joy.
I turned up to the left and so through the bracken to my favourite fir grove where I sat down for a long time and had the ‘joy’—or rather came just within sight of it but didn’t arrive.
Nor was sight the only one of the five senses through which that love could surface:
Walked over the fields to Stowe Woods after lunch, to see if any flowers were up there, but found none. It was all I could do on the way back to walk against the wind or keep my eyes open against the sun. How one enjoys nature’s violences up to the very moment at which they become painful or dangerous.
I confess to some surprise at finding no reference to his long argument with myself, later referred to in Surprised by Joy as ‘the great war’, since he makes it so clear there that he was a good deal preoccupied by it in the latter part of the diary years. The nearest he comes to it is an entry for 18 January 1927:
Was thinking about imagination and intellect and the unholy muddle I am in about them at present: undigested scraps of anthroposophy and psychoanalysis jostling with orthodox idealism over a background of good old Kirkian rationalism. Lord what a mess! And all the time (with me) there’s the danger of falling back into most childish superstitions, or of running into dogmatic materialism to escape them.
Perhaps it is no accident that the previous day reports ‘A letter from Barfield to say he is at Air Hill and will come over—always good news.’
There is indeed plenty of readable metal in the large lump of ore besides its value as personal revelation: pithy comments on friends, colleagues, pupils; his continuing struggle with his narrative poem Dymer and his hopes and fears for its intrinsic quality as well as for its possible success; numerous critical observations both on contemporary writers and on the many books from different periods that he was reading or re-reading for his coming degree in English Language and Literature. For example:
After this I read Macdonald’s Phantastes over my tea, which I have read many times and which I really believe fills for me the place of a devotional book. It tuned me up to a higher pitch and delighted me.
I also read some Dryden in the attempt to find out what he meant by wit. But he means something different each time. He’s a rum case of a man who was just a poet and nothing else—no magnanimity, no knowledge, no power of thought: just rhythm and gusto.
I re-read some of the best stories in H. G. Wells’s Country of the Blind. One never re-reads an old favourite without finding that it has contributed more than one suspected to one’s habitual stock in trade.
That day I bought Fielding’s Amelia and began to read it. It is odd how such a monotonous succession of misfortunes—in which the continual assaults on Amelia’s impregnable virtue become ludicrous—ballasted with such shoddy rhetoric in the dialogue can be made palatable by dint of sheer narrative powers. The born story teller can really do what he likes in literature.
For a certain kind of humour, the prose Milton beats anyone I know. He abuses like an inspired coster—like Falstaff.
Or, more generally:
In the pressures of conversation I discovered a new idea of my own which I think true: what we call the ‘philosophy’ of these modern novelists is a habit they have of attaching their characters to what they assume to be big movements of the Zeitgeist—as for example the revolt of youth in [Hugh] Walpole’s novels. But this is really a literary device: parallel to the King and Queen setting of tragedies or the supernatural—a means to avoid the purely private and individual, who we don’t really like.
These are only a few examples out of a great many that could equally well have been chosen. They suffice, I hope, to show that, interspersed with the humdrum reportage, the reader will find in the ensuing pages plenty of writing where, if it is not yet ‘vintage Lewis’, we can already discern through the abundant foliage the glimmer of ripening clusters.
Owen Barfield
May 1990
Forest Row, Sussex