1923

1923

Lewis remained with his father in Belfast until 12 January when he crossed to England by cross-channel boat, arriving in Oxford on 13 January. Because he had decided to read English in one academic year, instead of the usual three, he had only two terms to prepare for his final examinations in June. He was primed to get the most out of this, with the welcome addition of Professor George Gordon’s ‘Discussion Class’, when Dr John Askins came to ‘Hillsboro’ and went mad. Thus began a very miserable period for Lewis and Mrs Moore. They were so poor that they continued to take in Paying Guests, and Lewis began correcting School Certificate essays. By midsummer a college fellowship was still eluding him, and his father offered to extend his allowance so that he could begin a research degree while waiting for something to turn up.

Monday 1 January: Early awake and began wondering whether New Year’s Day was a business holiday in Belfast: however, my father came in fully dressed and was out before I came down. A very frosty morning. Breakfasted alone, reading Beauchamp’s Career, and went afterwards to the little end room. Here I wrote up my diary and also wrote a letter to D. I was rung up, first by Molly Boyd, who made me promise to go to progressive bridge on Friday next, and then, a few minutes later, by Mrs Greeves. She asked me to come out for a walk with her and lunch at Bernagh afterwards. I did not much enjoy the prospect but felt it absolutely necessary to go, in common decency, and went over as soon as I had finished my writing.

We walked to Knocknagoney by the High Holywood Rd., then down and back by the low road. Mrs Greeves annoyed me very much by bewailing the hard times wh. had fallen on the linen business since the war. I was not in a position to tell her (as I wished) that only shame ought to prevent her from giving thanks for the success with which her family had shirked the war. When once this subject was over, we got on very well. She is very simple (up to a point) and humble. We discussed the possibility of Arthur’s coming home and I promised to write and urge him, drawing his attention to the reduced fares which she had forgotten to mention in her letter.

She referred openly to ‘this lady whom Arthur calls Minto’ and asked how she was: she told me she would not bring any letters over, but I was to come to Bernagh for them—which relieved me, for I have been very nervous of her doing something foolish. She also went up 100% in my opinion by speaking sensibly about the enormous families among the lower classes.

In answer to their plea that ‘God never sends a mouth but he sends the means to fill it,’ she said roundly that ‘God isn’t such a fool.’ I could hardly believe my ears: of course she tried to take the sting out of it afterwards and ‘Hoped it wasn’t irreverent’, but still—the words must remain to her credit. We met Gundrede and talked to her for a few minutes before we went into Bernagh.

After lunch Mrs Greeves asked me with delightful naivety what philosophy was: Arthur had told her I did philosophy. I declined to answer, as nice as I could. She said she wished she could talk like my father and me—a truly dreadful ambition! I tried to enlighten her and make her believe how very different really good talkers (Yeats for instance) are. I then came away and wrote a short letter to Arthur: urging the reduced fares, his mother’s solitude, his father’s absence, my presence . . .

After having posted this I read W’s W. African diary for a few minutes until tea was ready: and after tea walked down to Strandtown to buy some cigarettes. Coming back, I settled down to Sweet’s Anglo-Saxon Reader and continued with a break for dinner, until my father went to bed at 10.30.

My father brought home tonight the two volumes of Donne wh. I asked for as a Christmas present. I think I shall love Donne: surely the only old poet who understands love in the modern sense? After my father had gone to bed I read two more cantos of the Faerie Queene and was in bed by 11.30. I find that when I think of D in the evenings there is nearly always some anxiety mixed with it—wh. doesn’t increase the pleasures of Little Lea. A very wet night: went to sleep sooner than usual.

Tuesday 2 January: Up rather late and after breakfast to the little end room where I wrote to D and made up my diary. Janie rang me up to remind me that I was lunching with her today and to ask me to come out for a walk with her and Gundrede: which I refused to do, on the pretext of work. By the time I had finished my writing and had my morning beer it seemed hardly worth while to begin. I rummaged about the books and things in the little end room rather aimlessly for half an hour and then changed and went to the McNeills.

A very aged great aunt of Janie’s was there when I arrived, but soon departed. Mother and daughter both talked to me about the Glenmachan atmosphere, wh. they said was the cause of Bob, and about the Irish atmosphere in general. They seemed to feel it as I do: tho’ I doubt if they have ever been out of it long enough to see it objectively. The rest of the talk was mainly about books.

I mentioned I was going to the Boyds and wished that I could have a little practice first. Janie suggested that we should both go to Schomberg and make Lily and Gordon play with us in the afternoon. She then remembered that Lily would be out: and very decently asked me to come round after dinner tomorrow and she would find two others.

I left soon after lunch, came back, and started Anglo-Saxon. After tea I went out for one of the finest walks I have ever had. As I left the house the full moon was just rising behind the hills, the ‘shepherd’s hut’ and its neighbouring trees standing out in black against it. The rest of the sky was almost entirely covered with dark grey clouds and only one break, to the west. A terrific wind was blowing, however, and this soon began to tear huge gaps in the cloud, leaving cold looking bits of sky and sending the clouds packing in such odd, hostile looking shapes.

As I got further up the hill the wind became so tremendous that I thought it might bring a tree down. My special luck was that I saw two moonrises: the horizon having risen so, as I approached the hills, that the moon was out of sight again for a time. I walked as far as Sandy Loaning on the high road, then turned up to the right, up again at the corner of Glenmachan Glen, down by the side of the Robber’s Glen, so and back.

I then started Anglo-Saxon once more and continued until dinner and after dinner till 10 o’clock. My father was reading Inge’s essays: he said ‘If you were living at home I believe I should start serious reading again: the thing’s infectious.’ After he was in bed I read Beauchamp’s Career for a while. I was a very long time getting to sleep.

Wednesday 3 January: After writing to D and making up my diary I went out for a walk. A fairly calm morning. I walked up the hills to the third glen and then turned off to my left, intending to come back by the Shepherd’s Hut: but I found the path, which I have used these ten years, blocked by a fence and so had to come back the way I went. I was meaning to go to Bernagh on the return journey, but I met Mrs Greeves at the bottom of the hill. She had no letter for me, as indeed I expected. She had not heard from Arthur. She arranged that I should go with her next Monday or Tuesday to see a Mr Osborne who has been at all the Universities of the world.

I then came back and lunched off chops, cabbage and mashed potatoes, all tepid. I was unable to open the bottle of beer wh. my father had left out for me. This uninspiring meal was enlivened by a welcome letter from Harwood, enclosing a poem which I do not think quite a success. Harwood is very depressed and is getting a job on the North Euston Railway. After lunch I did Anglo-Saxon grammar. After tea I read some more of Beauchamp’s Career and began Webster’s White Divel but did not make much of it. Very spiritless and stupid this afternoon.

After dinner I changed and walked to the McNeills: another beautiful evening of wind and moonlight. Janie explained to me that Gladys Leslie had failed her and that we should have to play cutthroat. The third was a Miss Ethel Rogers—a Scotch girl with a round nose. We got on quite nicely. Later on Florrie Greeves (who had not been asked) came in on her way home from a concert and made a fourth. The Rogers girl and I won. Janie and Florrie wrangled all the time, Janie boisterously and outrageously, Florrie in a resigned peevish manner. She is reputed to be very clever (Janie says she is a doctor of philosophy) but is intensely vulgar and prim in her voice and manner.

As I walked home I felt very strongly the difference between coming back to Little Lea and coming back to my real home of an evening. My father went to bed as soon as I came in. I sat up and tried to write a new poem on my old theme of ‘Alone in the House’. I soon found that I was creating rather too well in myself the creepy atmosphere wh. I was trying to create in the poem, and gave it up. I then read Meredith’s letters, to get rid of the atmosphere, and went to bed.

Thursday 4 January: After breakfast I tried go on with my poem without much success. I then wrote to D and made up my diary: then down to the study and worked at Anglo-Saxon grammar until just before lunch time when I went over to Bernagh to see if anything had come. Mrs Greeves was out: but as she had ordered letters to be given to me and nothing was given, I suppose nothing had come.

After lunch I began work again and continued till tea time. Over my tea I read Frazer’s Golden Bough in the new abridged edition. Afterwards I went out and walked as far as Sloan’s Seat and back the same way. A cloudy evening and no moon: as I was coming back the lights in the valley and especially at the docks were rather fine.

My father had just got in when I came back. After dinner I did the piece about Caedmon in Sweet’s Reader, which kept me busy until ten o’clock when my father went to bed. I then read a little more of Frazer and went to bed, rather pleased at having done a fair day’s work. A night of pouring rain: I was full of gloomy forebodings about the future—and nervy during the day.

Friday 5 January: Did my usual letter and diary writing after breakfast in the little end room. I then came down to the study and worked at Anglo-Saxon till lunch time. Immediately after lunch I went over to Bernagh. Mrs Greeves was out but the servant handed me a letter, which I came home and devoured eagerly, having first posted my own. Poor D has been having a terrible time with the tooth. I then shaved, not having done so this morning, had tea, and walked down to Strandtown to buy some cigarettes.

I changed before dinner and went off at 7.30 in a strange elongated taxi which (I couldn’t help thinking) looked exactly like a hearse. I was among the first to arrive at the Boyds, who have a very beautiful house. ‘The Boyds’ consisted on this occasion of Mrs B. and two daughters, Molly and Dot, neither of them pretty but both very nice. Mr Boyd was in England on business and the duties of host were performed by Colonel Yatman of the Somersets, a very cheery old boy. Except for the Heyns I didn’t know a soul: the men were mostly officers of the Somersets.

I enjoyed my evening very much from the mere sense of being among ordinary commonplace English people and in a clear atmosphere. During the stand up supper I foregathered with Maurice Heyn and felt strangely tempted to ask him if he knew my friend Commander Hawes. I decided however that it would be risky. Left at about eleven, after a very enjoyable evening: I think I behaved creditably over the Bridge, or at least did nothing outrageous.

My father went to bed as soon as I got in. He had announced that he wouldn’t go into town tomorrow. I sat up for a little and then went to bed, feeling not too cheerful.

Saturday 6 January: My father called me very late—just then preparing to go to the bathroom himself—and I spun out my dressing as long as I could, to shorten the long day. When I came down I was told by the servant that Mrs Greeves had already been trying to get me on the telephone. As I thought she might have something private to say and as our telephone stands in the hall so that a conversation on it can be heard all over the house, I went over to Bernagh as soon as we had had breakfast. I found that she had merely wanted to arrange for me to go with her on Wednesday to see a man called Osborne.

While I was sitting with her, Lily turned up with two dogs. She had been asked to the Boyds’ party but Gordon (who hates going out himself) had frightened her into refusing by drawing pictures of the good bridge players she would meet. I enlarged on the delights of the party, and her childish regrets were quite funny. I thought her very pretty today, and much nicer than she usually is. It was a splendid sunshiny morning. I walked with Mrs Greeves and Lily half way up the Glenfarlough Road and then very reluctantly and dutifully turned back: for tho’ they were neither of them real friends I could at any rate be easy with them and the morning was jolly.

Coming back, I found my father debating whether we should go out or not. I helped to make up his mind for him and we set out for our usual walk through the slum park. Even here the morning was not without something brisk. We talked a lot of solemn nonsense which I have forgotten. Back again, sherry, and Anglo-Saxon till 2.30 dinner of boiled mutton—a dish I loathe. I continued Anglo-Saxon for the rest of the day.

After tea my father began asking me if I wanted to go out again. I was ready to do anything to escape from the study. He stated roundly that he didn’t want to go, but nevertheless insisted on accompanying me, adding ‘Unless I’m forbidden’ in the jocular pathetic tone I so hate. Out we trudged again—like a prisoner and warder handcuffed together.

By a funny coincidence we met the McNeills just as we had done last week. Janie said she was bored. Mrs McNeill was just starting to explain to my father ‘what was wrong with Janie’ when Janie very properly shut her up. I think I quite understood Janie—mentally she can just see beyond Strandtown and of course there must be sexual despair as well. ‘Lord, send them somer sometime.’

We came back and had supper. Afterwards, being on the qui vive as usual, I heard the servant going to the front door. By great good fortune I was able to slip out in time and meet John who gave me a letter. Knowing that I was lost if he just went away and left me to explain to my father who had come, and why, and why he did not come in, I persuaded him in desperation to come in and have a chat. He stayed for a long time and we had a lot of silly conversation.

After my father had gone to bed I read and burned the letter. I was very glad to get it and thank goodness, the tooth seems to be better. The evening’s adventure however left me in terrible discomfort. I felt now, that however late in the evening it was, I could never be safe. I became shamefully ungrateful to poor Mrs Greeves and cursed myself for trusting to such a fool. I reflected that there might be a letter from D tomorrow and wondered how I could possibly warn Mrs Greeves not to send things over. I went to bed very late and lay awake for a long time.

Sunday 7 January: Woke up very tired with a headache and a sense of panic. Spent the whole time till we went to church watching for John or Mrs G. in the hope that as a last resource I might meet them on the avenue. Nobody, however, appeared. While I was in church my terror was that one of the fools would leave something for me at Little Lea while I was out. Barton preached a capital sermon.

Came back and was relieved to find nothing. I then took my chance and said I would go over to Bernagh to see if Mrs Greeves had had any news from Arthur. My father made no comment beyond saying that in that case I had better not have my usual glass of sherry for fear Mrs Greeves might smell it. Even in my intense desire to be off and put things safe I had time to feel what an awful social atmosphere this revealed: all the worse because my father was probably quite right. I went over and saw Mrs G., impressing upon her the peculiar conditions of life at Little Lea and telling her never to send anything over. She read me a letter from Arthur, who is not coming home. I already knew this, as he had written to D. I came back from Bernagh greatly relieved, but feeling rather exhausted: there is nothing I hate worse than anxiety coupled with the knowledge that I must continue to talk and never for a moment appear to be anxious.

During the afternoon I read a good deal of The Faithful Shepherdess with much pleasure. I also finished Beauchamp’s Career—a fine book, tho’ there is a good deal I do not understand. Everard Romfrey, Cecilia, Rosamund Culling and Nevil himself are however characters whom I hope I shall remember for a long time. After tea I went out for a walk, and for once my father did not come with me. In the evening I began the Autobiography of Trollope. So, at last, to bed hoping that I shall not have another Little Lea weekend for many a long day.

Monday 8 January: As the weekend involved two dies non I had this morning to make up my diary since Thursday. After doing that and writing to D, there was just time to walk to the post and call at Bernagh before lunch. There was no letter for me. After lunch I returned to the little end room and worked very well at Sweet till tea time. After tea I went out for a short stroll round the back of Glenmachan: it was a clear and beautiful evening. I then came back, spoke to my father for a few minutes and changed. He told me that old Graham was dead, for which I was very sorry.

I then walked over to Schomberg. At the corner a lady passed me whom I thought to be Mrs Greeves: I was however going to pass her, as it was quite dark and I wasn’t sure. Mrs Greeves recognised me and gave me a letter. At Schomberg there was only one other guest, Miss Wharton, who is at present a student at a university settlement (whatever that may be) in Birmingham. She has been a matron at several schools in England, including one that was run on the principle of no compulsion. If a girl didn’t want to go into form one morning, she just didn’t. Miss W said it worked very well.

She is rather pretty: when I was left alone with Gordon after dinner he went out of his way to tell me that she was much older than she looked, forty three in fact. I wondered why. Afterwards she told us many amusing stories—one specially good one about her unsuccessful efforts to get rid of a packet of sandwiches which someone had pressed upon her for a journey.

Lily annoyed me by her blasé account of her travels to Italy and elsewhere: she hates them all, it seems, because trains are sometimes crowded, journeys sometimes tiring, and Italy was full of horrible Italians. She much preferred Donaghadee—because there she could have such a rest. To my knowledge she has never done a day’s work in her life. I left at about 10.30.

After my father had gone to bed I read D’s letter: a most unhappy one, what between toothache and the final loss of the house in Woodstock Rd. Before going to bed I finished Trollope’s Autobiography. He is a very self-satisfied, self-made man, quite unconscious of his strain of genius, hopelessly bad in criticism of his own work, proud of the moral tone of his books, and still prouder of his punctuality, industry and ability to get on. One forgives him for a certain disarming honesty. Late to bed.

Tuesday 9 January: I was rung up by Janie after breakfast and accepted yet another invitation to lunch. I then went up to the little end room, despatched my writing, and worked at Wulfstan’s address to the English till lunch time when I changed and walked to the McNeills. It was a very cold and blowing day and had snowed during the morning.

Today, I think for the first time on record, I had some real and serious conversation with Janie: she talked about her longing to get away from Strandtown and the impossibility of doing so, as she could neither leave nor transplant her mother. Her idea of going to Oxford or Cambridge had been knocked on the head years ago by her father’s death. She talked about the abominable vulgarity of the set in which Ruth Hamilton lives. There was one dreadful story of Ruth and her friends shutting up a drunk boy in the bedroom of Kelsie’s hut while Kelsie was out: such are the jokes of the gilded youth at Holywood!

She also told me some funny stories about Warnie and Mona Peacocke when they were both staying with Kelsie at the hut. Mona used to escape with W every day to the mainland to drink cocktails and W used to ‘do’ her hair every night. The evidence for these adventures is Mona herself. I thought Mrs McNeill particularly nice today and shrewd.

At about three o’clock I got up to go, hoping to get a letter from Bernagh and then settle to work. Janie however volunteered to come with me, refused to come in to tea, and made me instead go for a walk with her. On the way back she came into Little Lea to borrow a book. I foolishly gave her a cigarette and then, though I had told her I wanted to go and see Mrs Greeves before my father turned up, she sat on for an interminable time. She found out that I was sailing on Friday and expressed her regrets with a vehemence that I didn’t care much about.

When at last she rose to go I accompanied her, and we met my father on the avenue. I parted from her at the gate and hurried across to Bernagh, to find that Mrs Greeves had just gone out. She has given up the practice of leaving letters for the servants to hand to me, which I think is very wise, tho’ in this case it was annoying.

My father was very fidgety and depressed this evening. He read from the paper a proposal for further heavy reductions in the army and enquired ‘What on earth that fellow Warren would do if he were kicked out.’ I said it was unlikely as W was a fairly senior Captain and had been out from the beginning of the war and seemed to be now in a position of some importance. My father observed with a sort of desperate cheerfulness ‘Ah well, he’d just have to go to the Colonies,’ adding that ‘the thing had been ridiculous from the start’.

Later on he unexpectedly opened the question of my allowance. He asked me if it was sufficient. As I had already said so in my letters, I felt I had to reply that ‘I could manage,’ which indeed is true. To my remark that anyone would naturally like a little more if it was possible, he remarked that he was a poor man but that he could raise a little more if it was ‘necessary’. I could not say that it was.

The whole thing happened very suddenly and did not take the lines I was expecting: so that I really spoke first and reflected afterwards. My only regrets were on D’s account: but I reflected that the arrangement was nearly over now anyway and that I could hardly have said an increase was necessary: tho’ I am afraid that D will hardly take that view.

Worked hard till 11.30 and then to bed, feeling far from cheerful. A very stormy, magnificent night. Forgot to say that I had a long argument with Janie today, defending myself against the charge of inhumanity which she brought against me. By inhumanity she meant not unkindness, but I think, a kind of detachment, an untouched centre: the attitude of Puck’s ‘What fools these mortals be’, wh. she quoted. She attributed the same quality to herself and seemed to consider it a thing to be proud of. I was not flattered.

Wednesday 10 January: Immediately after breakfast I crossed over to Bernagh and excused myself from lunching there on the ground of work: I also got a letter—yesterday’s—from D, chiefly concerned with Dorothy’s latest delinquency. After answering this and making up my diary, I started on Anglo-Saxon and continued till lunch time. After lunch I wasted some time reading Arnold Bennett’s Human Machine till it was time to change and call for Mrs Greeves who was taking me to see Dr Osborne, a don from some Australian University.

She gave me a second letter which I had time to read before we started: D seemed a little better. On the walk over to Knock I could have believed that Mrs Greeves was parodying herself. She spent some twenty minutes telling me that she had sent two new hair brushes to Arthur and why and how. She went to endless trouble to point out to me the house of Mrs Purden in the distance: I had never heard of Mrs Purden, whose celebrity seems to rest on the fact that she has been recently killed by a motor lorry. Mrs Greeves had forgotten the name of Mrs Gilmore’s house at which we were to meet the great man, but we found it at last.

Here I was plunged into a stagnant pool of such vulgarity as I have seldom met. In England I am not a snob: I can talk with those who drop their h’s and like them: Belfast vulgarity I have not yet mastered. In a stifling room, small and with shut windows and a fire like a furnace, we met Mrs Gilmore and her ugly daughter and Dr Osborne, the latter a good looking man. In spite of a rather lecture like manner (he does not bear his learning as easily as our own dons) he seemed a good fellow. We were presently joined by a very small and very ugly woman who had been so upset by the execution of Mrs Thompson that she had passed a very bad night. We sat there a long time and I found it very dull.

On the return journey Mrs Greeves (decent soul) was inclined to be disappointed for my sake because the great man had not talked about the universities of the world. I assured her in the most convincing language of which I was capable that I had enjoyed myself immensely and been very interested in hearing about the rabbits in Australia, the supremacy of American poetry, the poisonous effects of tobacco and the true history of Buffalo Bill.

After seeing her into Bernagh I came back here, finding my father already in, changed, and had dinner. I worked well afterwards and finished the Beowulf section in Sweet. Before going to bed I read a chapter or two in Strachey’s Adventure of Living which seems a curious and delightful book. I was much excited by his account of what he (from Berlioz) calls isolement. I found great difficulty in deciding whether it is like my ‘sense of the is-ness of things’ or my ‘Joy’, but concluded that it was really different. Had a good letter from Arthur today, but containing nothing new. To bed and slept well.

Thursday 11 January: After letter and diary writing I turned to Anglo-Saxon and read till lunch time, a good part of the Fall of the Angels, which is very fine indeed: in Satan’s feeling about his own powers of creation (if that is what the author means) it gets a point which even Milton missed.

Noticing just before lunch that the post had come, I went over to Bernagh, but was surprised and rather worried to find nothing for me. After lunch I walked out to the post, and, coming back went to the little end room where I fully intended to continue the Anglo-Saxon.

As I came into the room, however, I was suddenly flooded with the conviction that now at last I should be able to write some more ‘Dymer’. I sat down at once and went at it with a run, securing eight stanzas with which I was well pleased.

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 then went out and walked to Holywood: descended through the town to the low road and rejoined the high road by the lane which skirts the barracks. By going out a little before five and returning at 6.15 I managed during this comparatively short walk to get a great variety of light and colours. It was a clear, quiet evening: as I came back there were very brilliant stars. I was quite unusually happy.

My father was already here when I came back. In the evening I finished the Fall of the Angels and read some of the Gnomic Verses which seem great rubbish. Then, after finishing Phantastes, to bed at half past eleven.

Friday 12 January: Immediately after breakfast I went over to Bernagh and found again that there was no letter. Mrs Greeves told me that she was setting out for town at 2 o’clock and if anything came by the second post she would then give it to me. I then came back and went up to the little end room where I made up my diary and wrote to D—a postcard.

After this I trammed into town, got a new Homberg hat at Laird’s, or rather the shop that used to be Laird’s, and came back, getting off the tram at Mopsi Todd’s. Here I got a sponge and some shaving soap and walked to Leeborough. As soon as I had finished lunch I went out and paced up and down the front path until I saw Mrs Greeves passing. She gave me a letter and I said good bye to her, thanking her warmly for her services.

I was not best pleased to read in this letter that D was giving a party for Maureen tonight—but I suppose it is necessary. I next made all preparations for packing and then wrote three more stanzas of ‘Dymer’, which seemed fairly satisfactory. The vein however soon ran dry and I came down to the study and read Bernard Shaw’s Candida (an amusing trifle) till tea and finished it. After tea I went for a short stroll round by the fenced tree: a cold misty evening.

Coming back I went upstairs and had hardly started packing when the cook, ‘The Witch of Endor’ as my father calls her, came to my door and announced in her breathless manner that she had made me a cake and it wasn’t very big and could I fit it in my case. As I have had nothing but cake for three weeks at tea time this kindness was a little disconcerting. I thanked her profusely: but when she produced a cake of some five pounds burthen, which almost completely filled my suitcase, I had to ask her to send it after by post.

I then went down to greet my father who had just come in, and returned to finish packing. For some reason I had a horror of this last tail end of my long penance, and, I am afraid, spun out packing as long as I could. After dinner I changed.

The taxi came at 8.15 and my father accompanied me into town. Up to the moment of leaving Little Lea I was still feeling that I was not yet out of the wood and half expecting something to turn up.

Once alone and on the boat I experienced a great sense of relief and security, tempered by sympathy for my father. I had Mrs McNaughton’s Lame Dog’s Diary with me, which has some charm: but I fear it is a toy book. After reading this in the smoking room till ten o’clock and drinking a bottle of stout I retired to my single berth room where I was very comfortable and above all, at last, easy in my mind. Slept excellently.

Saturday 13 January: I was called by my steward at 7.30 and shaved and dressed while the boat was moving from the landing stage to the dock. After a very good breakfast on board, which I ate with extraordinary appetite, I crossed by ferry and arrived at Woodside Station shortly after nine o’clock. It was a typical Liverpool morning, grey and foggy, but with a certain cheerfulness on the river.

I came down by the 9.35, an excellent through train with a luncheon car, reaching Oxford at 2.18. I travelled with an interesting man, a civil servant of some sort. He was not a man of breeding but had travelled a good deal in Germany and Italy. He contrasted the civility and refinement of continental life—the music, the gardens, the bowing managers of hotels etc.—with our English barbarism. During the morning I finished the Lame Dog’s Diary. A good deal of the country was flooded, with ice here and there. I had lunch at 12.30.

I arrived home about [3] and was glad to find that D, tho’ tired, was much better—the tooth being painless for the time. After I had changed and had a bath we spent most of the rest of the day talking. D described to me the curious affair with the Askins. The Doc had been, according to Mary, ‘much hurt’ by some chaff of Maureen’s. If this is true it shows only how ill the poor man must be. The party last night seems to have been a great success. Maureen went out shortly after my arrival.

I was so delighted at being home again that even the news that we must all support Maureen tomorrow morning at her first experience of the uncomfortable sacrament did not damp me. After supper it was delightful to write up my diary—describing a Leeborough day while sitting here. D, rather extravagantly, has presented me with a desk, which will be a great comfort. We were in bed by 11.30.

Sunday 14 January: All of us were up by 7.30 and, after tea and biscuits, up to Headington on our bicycles. On the outward journey it seemed a mild morning. Mr Clarke and a curate who came in late, officiated.

On the return journey we found it had turned much colder. After breakfast I spent most of the morning putting my things into my new desk and destroying a lot of old MS books. D was slightly threatened with the tooth off and on today, but was otherwise in excellent form. After lunch I made a new start on the Vth Canto of ‘Dymer’. What between my stanzas written at Leeborough and selections from those written before I went to Ireland and some new ones today, I have now a continuous opening of sixteen stanzas with which I am fairly pleased.

After tea I read through my Magdalen dissertation preparatory to sending my father a copy and chatted with D: then, at about six, I walked up to Headington, down the Green Lane and home by the old London Rd. where there was a fine display of stars through the bare trees.

We had supper at 7.30 and after it I assisted D in the composition of a letter to Moppie. Moppie had written to D saying that she had saved 30/- a week and given it to Miss Quinlan to keep: and proposing, so far as we could gather, to spend this on further lessons for which she would go three times a week to London while living here for the six months which she is out of work. It had been understood that she was to try and find temporary work for this period: or, at the worst, that the saving would go to help the common stock while she was with us. We felt her letter rather cool: she seems to have no compunction about being a deadweight and we cannot entirely trust what she tells us.

In the end we produced a letter which laid the facts before her, I hope without being unkind. We explained that she had run away to a poor family and that we could not afford the arrangements she suggested. The business is a worry to us and D has quite lost confidence in Moppie: I still try to hope for the best.

After posting this letter I came back to a belated wash up and then sat in the drawing room where D and I talked of a lot of things—death, second marriages, and whether one would feel horror at the ghost of a friend. In bed about twelve o’clock.

Monday 15 January: . . . After lunch I went over my notes on the Elizabethan plays, which I find that I remember very well. I finished them after tea and began Lodge’s Rosalynde which is almost quite worthless. I continued it till supper time and afterwards went on for a page or two with my fair copy of ‘Forster’, making a few corrections.

Later I had a long and interesting conversation with D in which she answered several questions greatly to my enlightenment. To bed about 12. I forgot to say that I met the Doc as I was returning through Iffley. We had some talk, but nothing of interest.

Tuesday 16 January: . . . After lunch I did some work on Anglo-Saxon grammar and later on began to write my paper on Spenser for Gordon’s discussion class. Just before tea the Doc appeared and I joined him and D in the dining room. D and I both remarked afterwards that he was very much worse: we also heard him swearing to himself in a very odd way in the bathroom, which is a bad sign in a man of his sort. He seems less interested in life than he used to be and can hardly be got to talk outside theosophical philosophy.

After tea he and I had our usual kind of talk. I told him what Fasnacht had said—that as, by perspective, you could represent a three dimensional object in two dimensions, so you must be able to make in three a model of a four dimensional object. He agreed with my objection that one would have no means of recognising it when made . . .

Thursday 18 January: . . . After breakfast I worked all morning on my paper on Spenser. D had a letter from Moppie in which she says she has been advised by Miss Quinlan to take more lessons during the summer and apparently intends to do so and believes that she can on her savings. It was a beautiful bright day and I tried to persuade D to come out for a ride: as she had been busy all morning she wisely refused . . .

I . . . hastened to get tea, intending to go into town afterwards and have a look into College—today being the beginning of term. During tea however a card came from Wilson telling me to call on him at 9.45 tomorrow and I decided that I would make one journey do. After tea I went on with Donne and read the Second Anniversary which is ‘a new planet’: I never imagined or hoped for anything like it: also the Soul’s Progress which is mostly bosh and won’t scan.

Just as we were getting supper Smudge arrived unexpectedly, looking much thinner than when I last saw her, but in very good form and greatly improved in appearance. She has been making good progress with her exercise. Maureen has a curious instrument, a cylinder of cardboard which turns on a handle and when made to revolve executes an arpeggio: it sounds like a cross between a violin and a concertina. We had arranged to try this on Smudge and during supper I twirled it outside the dining room door. To our surprise, the first strain of the music, which has rather a weird way of swelling up from nowhere, reduced her to abject terror. And even afterwards she refused to look at it or have it brought near her, saying it was a device of the devil. She has a bad term before her, working for Smalls. After supper we had a lot of talk and chaff in the drawing room. She left about ten.

Friday 19 January: . . . I . . . rode to Manor Road: on the way I met Robson-Scott and one unknown who were also going to Wilson. There were others with him already and we three sat in his dining room downstairs to wait. When I went up he dictated a collections paper to me and advised me to see Miss Wardale at once.

As soon as I left him I rode to Margaret Rd. and caught her just before she went out. She also promised to send me a paper (which arrived this afternoon), said, in answer to my enquiries, that I owed her five pounds, and hoped I had had a pleasant vacation. I said that I had and hoped that she had had the same: whereupon she dropped her lower lip, shot out her eyes, looked as if I had insulted her, ‘roseate and pained as any ravished nymph’ and said nothing.

I picked up my gloves and stole away to the Union where I read Santayana’s Reason in Art for an hour: very pugnacious and bracing and mostly true. I then came home and read a little Homer—Iliad 16—before lunch. D and I were alone, Maureen being at lunch in Headington . . .

Saturday 20 January: I spent the first part of the morning doing the O.E. translation paper with moderate success: and then, till lunch time, looked up O.E. grammar . . . After tea I began my O.E. grammar paper. I realised as soon as I had opened it that it contained a lot of unexpected questions and almost thought of putting it away and reading up some more. I decided however that this would be unfair and proceeded to do a shockingly bad paper. When I had finished it I put it in an envelope, enclosing £5 as a peace offering, and posted it.

In the evening Smudge came to supper, bringing her sister: she had threatened to do so because we had been condemning the sister for going to London in the Vac and compelling Smudge to look after her mother: and in general for her selfishness towards Smudge. Smudge thought she would cure this by showing how nice her sister really was. She turned out to be very plain, with an old maid’s manner, as self confident as Smudge is shy.

I was left alone with her for a few minutes before supper. She said she always made her pupils promise never to touch the piano during the holidays. She said that children should be sent to boarding school as early as possible—say at the age of two: because no mother could have ‘the sympathy and wisdom’ that the ideal school marm would have.

During supper she explained that she had given up meat for vegetables and then vegetables for fruit: she hoped to give up milk and eggs soon and finally to live without food at all: tho’ she admitted that she hardly expected that in this life. She said (under examination) that animal food was gross. Asked why a pig was grosser than an apple—the pig being more highly organised matter—she said you should eat the lower kingdom rather than the higher. Asked why again, she said something which I do not remember. The legitimacy of pork eating, I gathered, depended on the age of one’s soul: a young soul might eat it, but not an advanced one. During this dialogue she executed a great many curious gestures with her arms above her head. After supper I did Tacitus with Smudge. D and I both thought S’s sister a perfect fool . . .

Monday 22 January: . . . At twelve o’clock again I went to Schools and heard Gordon give a capital lecture by way of introduction to Shakespeare’s tragedy. As I was getting my bike from College afterwards, I met Stevenson, who tells me that Wyllie has still got no permanent job—anxious news for me. Forgot to say that I had a card from Jenkin yesterday, from some place South of Naples: he is not coming back till February, so I have now no friend in the University at all . . .

After a little opposition from D I succeeded in being allowed to wash up: after which I came to the drawing room and had hardly sat down to my desk when I saw Cranny opening the gate. Much against my will, I ushered him into the room. He was in great form, enormously improved since his last visit. D turned up presently and we listened to him till tea time . . . At tea we talked of music. He said that the Americans had used a gun for the accompaniment of Handel’s ‘Wonderful conqueror’ passage in the Messiah. I said it was a cheap passage: he said it was the finest in all music. He asked whether Christ, apart from the question of his divinity, was a great teacher or a fanatic? He also doubted whether Christian ethics were practicable.

After tea I escaped to the drawing room and attacked my essay on the influence of Donne on 17th century lyric. I decided an essay (for tomorrow) was out of the question and did notes instead.

At supper the subject of personality arose—I said that it made one giddy to think that oneself might not have been. Maureen said ‘Yes—I was wishing the other day that you had married someone else (to D) and then I thought, Oh it wouldn’t make any difference to me, I shouldn’t have been there.’ This shows she thinks more than I hoped for.

After supper went on with my notes and read a little O.E. Poor D very miserable and depressed today . . .

Tuesday 23 January: A busy day. Cycled into town after breakfast and worked in the Union at my notes on the Metaphysicals: I read Johnson’s passage in the life of Cowley, and found that I had been rather off the track. Worked hard to pull it straight and went to Wilson at 12, where I had a good hour.

So home. D insisted on doing the washing up after lunch. For the rest of the day I did Middle English, reading the reign of Stephen from the Chronicle and a passage from Havelock, which is great stuff. Then I started a paper on the Chronicle passage for Miss Wardale and continued very busy till 11 o’clock.

Thursday 25 January: . . . Biked to College where I got a note from Carritt inviting me to dine in Hall some day next week. I answered at once, accepting for Tuesday . . .

I went to Schools at 10 o’c. to hear Onions on Middle English. Here I met Robson-Scott who told me there would be a meeting of the Martlets on Wednesday next, though there were no cards printed yet. Onions gave a delightful lecture: the best part being the quotations, which he does inimitably. Once he repeated nearly a whole poem with much relish and then observed ‘That wasn’t what I meant to say.’ A man after my own heart.

Friday 26 January: . . . After lunch and washing up I changed and went in to Schools to ‘assist at’ the first meeting of Gordon’s Discussion Class. It was held in an upper room, on the High, to the right of the entrance hall: a bare, over-heated room with a round table. I was there early and watched it gradually fill up with a crowd of people who were certainly not there when the show was arranged and the papers alloted. Robson-Scott was there, but with a friend, and I did not speak to him. Darlow (see Dec. 7. 22.) who was to read, came and sat close to me and talked to another man, tho’ eyeing me from time to time with what seemed a glazed insolence but may have been unintentional. Gordon arrived rather late.

Darlow’s paper on the 18th century was really very good: above all it was spoken from notes and not read, for which I admired him. At the same time—such was my dislike—I was ashamed to find myself pleased that he had a vulgar accent, saying ‘taime’ for ‘time’. His paper was almost entirely historical. The discussion which followed was disappointing, as we were too large a party for informal conversation and tended to break up into groups.

Gordon was sensible rather than brilliant. Some of the best things were said by a Scotsman (I think), a middle aged man whose name I didn’t hear. I had one or two passages with Darlow—opposing his view that Hume showed the extreme of reliance on reason and his stranger view that Johnson’s kicking a stone to refute Berkeley showed the same thing. He proved quite civil and even agreeable in argument. Sometimes I thought him a little bit stupid.

Got home in time for tea and read Donne and Ralegh till just before supper when I heard a knock and going out, found Barfield. The unexpected delight gave me one of the best moments I have had since the even better ones of leaving Ireland and arriving home. He had come up, he said, to give a dancing lesson, and was leaving next day. We went at our talk like a dogfight: of Baker, of Harwood, of our mutual news, of the Beacon which is now all but dead. He is working with Pearsall Smith who is genuinely trivisus and an utter materialist. He (Smith) and De la Mare are fast friends and imaginative philologists of a type which they have christened ‘milvers’—partly because it is a good word, partly because it ‘supplies a long felt want’ in rhyming with silver. Barfield hopes soon to meet De la Mare.

He sees Squire fairly often. He says Squire is a man who promises more than he can perform, not through flattery but because he really believes his own influence to be greater than it is. I asked him if he knew Darlow. He did, and thought he was probably a homosexualist and was only eighteen: if so, he is certainly brilliant and may grow into a good fellow yet.

Barfield showed me—or wrote out for me from memory—his new poem ‘Lama Sabacthani’ beginning ‘It is impossible to keep awake’. I pronounced it perfect and thought it one of the finest contemporary poems I have seen, perhaps the finest. His rhythm is remarkable.

I showed him my ‘Requiem Mass’ and ‘What? Has the night’ etc. He approved very much of the ‘one spirit’ part in the Mass and liked the lyric fairly: he went on however to a very serious and honest review of my work in general. He said it always surprised him that my things were as good as they were, for I seemed to work simply on inspiration and did no chipping. I thus wrote plenty of good poetry but never one perfect poem. He said that the ‘inspired’ percentage was increasing all the time and that might save me in the end: the fact that I so often get there for a line or a stanza even, was, he thought, ‘promising’.

I thought his insight was almost uncanny and agreed with every word, wishing that I could ‘chip’ more perseveringly and had time to do it. This led to a long talk about poetry and ended in his reading to me out of The Veil.

D came in and pressed him to stay the night, but he had arranged to sleep at Wadham and we had to be contented with his promise to come to breakfast. I walked back to Wadham with him in the moonlight. He said that when one had accepted the materialist’s universe one went on and on to a point and suddenly exclaimed ‘Why should my facts be the only facts that don’t count?’: then came the revulsion and you took a more spiritual view till that too worked itself to its reaction and flung you back to materialism: and so to and fro all the days of your life . . .

Saturday 27 January: D woke me this morning with the news ‘It’s half past eight and Dorothy hasn’t turned up and Barfield’s coming to breakfast at half past nine.’ All hands on deck forthwith: D naturally very angry, but soon restored to cheerfulness and wouldn’t allow me to do the grates. We got everything shipshape in time, and I was ready to meet Barfield when he came and fed him on bananas till breakfast was ready.

After breakfast—at which he talked a great deal about music with Maureen—he asked to be shown ‘Dymer’. His verdict on the fourth canto was most enthusiastic: he called it ‘great’ wh. is a lot from him and pointed out how I had done things there which I had failed to do in the lyrics.

He told us he was being married in April. I walked to Wadham with him, where he packed his case, and we then took a turn in the gardens—beautiful they are all the year. He said his first year at Oxford had been extraordinarily happy. We talked of Yeats, whom he considers ruined artistically by self love, tho’ his later poems were rather better. Finally I saw him off at the station and came home . . .

Tuesday 30 January: . . . I reached the Senior Common Room just as the dons were preparing to move in to dinner. There were a good many present—an American pianist called Antony, Carlyle, Stevenson, Keir, a man unknown, Allen, Emmet, and Carritt. Farquharson, who was in the chair for the night, came in late and said he had been delayed by a lady who wanted him to explain Aristotle’s dictum about poetry being more philosophical than history. Carlyle talked about realism to Antony during dinner but from where I sat I could not hear all of it. I think he was being paradoxical and perhaps gently smoking his guest.

When we retired to the Common Room Antony soon departed to Carlyle’s house and his hosts proceeded to talk about him. Farquharson had told him that Carritt was an eminent philosopher, wh. he said was exciting to a stranger who didn’t know that we had dozens in Oxford: and he boasted that he had added the finishing touch by whispering ‘ascetic’ in the poor man’s ear when introducing him to Carritt. Allen (who I think, but not for this reason, I dislike) observed that people were always rather shocked at a philosopher who was not a beaver.

Carritt, Emmet and I fell into a conversation on the expressionist theory of art. I contended that two persons might be equally expressive, but in practice one preferred the one who had the better content. Emmett agreed with me. Allen was brought in on the question of whether any emotions were unfit for art and a lot of jokes wh. I did not understand passed between him and Carritt.

The party broke up very soon, and I got up to go. Carritt followed me out and asked me to come up to his room. We talked about books chiefly. He explained to me his mysterious conversation with Allen. Nearly a year ago there had been an argument on the same subject and Allen had said, as an example, that the emotions of a man going to the —— could not be matter for art: Carritt had taken up the challenge and written a poem on that subject. He said it was not very good, but he thought it had proved his point.

He happened to get on the subject of Matthew Arnold, and was surprised to find that I shared his flair for Arnold’s poetry. We became almost intimate over this, for he is the most reserved of men. He said he always felt in reading it that ‘this was a man I’d have got on with’: on my demurring he said what he really meant was ‘this is the kind of poetry I should like to have written myself’. Now I have often thought that Carritt must at one time have wanted and tried to write poetry. We talked also of Pearsall Smith and why there was no English sculpture . . .

Wednesday 31 January: . . . After an early supper I bussed into College and went to the Martlets held in Dawson’s rooms. Present were Terry, Ziman, Curtis, Robson-Scott, MacCissack [McKisack], Rink, and another. MacCissack read a paper on Galsworthy, which I thought distinctly poor. As soon as it was over I approached him and said I believed he came from Belfast, and told him that I did so too. He said he never went there if he could avoid it and agreed (I think he said it ‘ultro’ before I had said it) with my own view that it was full of Forsytes. A fairly good discussion followed.

In the pressure 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 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, wh. we don’t really like. I am surprised that they all with one accord condemned Galsworthy’s plays . . .

Thursday 1 February: Up rather late and had a rush to get in to Onions’ lecture. After hearing this and buying some margarine I biked home again in wind and some rain. Maureen was having a violin lesson when I arrived so I went upstairs and worked at Milton’s prose, in a singularly uninspired mood . . .

After lunch—we are having all meals in the kitchen these days—I went on with my work till 3.30 when I walked into town to have tea with Fasnacht. I met him in the Union alley talking to Robson-Scott and he took me to the Cadena. Rather a dull afternoon. We talked a little philosophy and a little about books. The most interesting thing that he told me was that the Mugger is definitely retiring in April: also how Rink had got leave off chapel by going to the Mugger and saying he had ceased to believe in a personal God. The Mugger had said ‘I hope if we fully discussed the matter I should show you that your opinion is not well grounded, but perhaps we had better not go into that.’ . . .

Friday 2 February: . . . We were a very much smaller gathering [George Gordon’s Discussion Class]: the crowd last week having apparently turned up unbidden because they had seen the class on the lecture list and had assumed it was open to everyone.

This afternoon a good looking fellow called Coghill from Exeter read a very good paper on ‘Realism’—as defined in his own special sense—‘from Gorboduc to Lear’. He seems an enthusiastic sensible man, without nonsense, and a gentleman, much more attractive than the majority.

The discussion afterwards was better than last week’s. Coghill’s definition of realism was attacked: he claimed Hobbes’ immunity of definitions and I supported him: but Lloyd-Jones and I opposed his view that realism, in his sense, was not to be found in Corneille. Mr Singh, the Indian, made a lot of remarks which seemed to me foolish. Gordon said, apropos of something else, that one remembered the choruses in Aeschylus chiefly by their difficulty: of which remark the most charitable explanation is that he was trying to raise a cheap laugh.

Oh for a sitting in full force in Bee Cottage or Wadham and how we could have blown away all these blindworms and got down to something! The best man in the class is the Scotsman (Strick, I think) from Wadham. Darlow was not there today, wh. was a pity as the secretary pulled his leg in the minutes . . .

Sunday 4 February: . . . I . . . went off by bike to have tea with Miss Wardale. The sun was now going down very frostily and the town looked splendid. I found Miss W. alone. After we had talked for a few minutes I was pleasantly surprised by the arrival of Coghill. He was followed in a short while by a girl whose name I didn’t catch: she struck me as being quite nice but she was too shy and breathless to contribute much to the conversation. Miss W., apart from a few sensible remarks on Wagner, was content to sit back in a kind of maternal attitude with her hands on her knees.

Coghill did most of the talking, except when contradicted by me. He said that Mozart had remained like a boy of six all his life. I said nothing could be more delightful: he replied (and quite right) that he could imagine many things more delightful. He entirely disagreed with my love of Langland and of Morris: the girl agreed with both.

He said that Blake was really inspired: I was beginning to say ‘In a sense—’ when he said ‘In the same sense as Joan of Arc.’ I said ‘I agree. In exactly the same sense.—But we may mean different things.’ He: ‘If you are a materialist.’ I apologised for the appearance of quibbling but said that ‘materialist’ was too ambiguous. He gave a description of a ballet which he spun out much too long.

When I rose to go he came with me and we walked together as far as Carfax. It was very misty. I found out that he had served in Salonika: that he was Irish and came from near Cork. He had had the appalling experience of being caught by an Irish mob, threatened with lynching, let go, called back again, stood up and pointed at with revolvers, and finally released. He said it was much more terrifying than any war experience. Apropos of my condemnation of Ulster he asked me if I were a Catholic which made me suspect he might be one himself.

He said (just like Barfield) that he felt it his duty to be a ‘conchy’ if there was another war, but admitted that he had not the courage. I said yes—unless there was something really worth fighting for. He said the only thing he would fight for was the Monarchy, adding ‘I don’t mean the Windsor family.’ I said I didn’t care twopence about monarchy—the only real issue was civilisation against barbarism. He agreed, but thought with Hobbes that civilisation and monarchy went together. He returned abruptly to the duty of being a conchy: at all costs we must get rid of the bloodthirst and have more Christianity.

He had read Stoddart and accepted his views. He agreed with me that Darlow was an egregious ass. Before parting I asked him to tea: he said he had just been going to ask me, and we finally arranged that I should go to him on Friday. I then biked home. I thought Coghill a good man, quite free from our usual Oxford flippancy and fear of being crude: much inferior to Barfield and Beckett in intellect and still a little undeveloped . . .

Monday 5 February: . . . Biked into town after breakfast and duly attended the Cad’s lecture at 10 o’clock. All the usual old tricks—including the tirade against people who didn’t know the history of the language. How long has he lived and got no further than this?

Afterwards I saw Robson-Scott and asked him if he could possibly get anyone to read to the Martlets instead of me. He said he couldn’t at such short notice. I felt that my paper on Spenser was quite unsuitable: and besides I had read once before on Morris and once on Narrative Poetry (or twice rather, for I read it again at Cambridge: its first reading here was on the night when Farquharson brought M. Goblet who chanted Breton epic songs to us): and to read again on Spenser would be to finally label myself as having only one taste.

I biked home and found Mary in the kitchen. After I had been working for some time the Doc appeared and we had some talk. Starting from dissociation he went on to speak of the awful depths that one sometimes caught sight of underneath ones own mind. I agreed with him that most of us could find positive Satanic badness down there somewhere, the desire for evil not because it was pleasant but because it was evil.

He expiated on the freedom of the Yogis, but confessed that Yoga was too hard for him. I read Barfield’s poem to him: he said it might have been written under the influence of a drug, wh. is ridiculous. He was much more cheerful today, but looking wretched, his eyes all sunken . . .

After lunch I went out. I had decided to try and patch up some notes on Prometheus Bound for the Martlets: I took the book with me. The great point which struck me was the way Shelley sets out with the quite commonplace idea of a world ruled by a supreme devil and redeemed by love: then he runs up against reality, finds the whole thing much bigger, and so the inscrutable Demorgorgon (the IT-IS) becomes the real character: and the redemption is affected by inexplicable inspiration: i.e. Panthea doesn’t know what her own dream was. In other words Shelley throws the whole thing over to the untried forces of a logical situation welling up from the élan vital—and neither he nor we ever find out what really happens. It is much deeper than he meant it to be . . .

Friday 9 February: . . . By the second post came back my ‘Waking’ from The Challenge, with the usual printed notice of rejection . . . I shall try The Spectator . . .

Soon after lunch I set out on foot and went into town . . . I repaired to the Schools . . . The others gradually arrived and we began our meeting [of the Discussion Class]. The minutes, in verse, were really quite clever.

I then read my paper on Spenser. Thank goodness my cough behaved decently. Gordon was pleased with the passage about yávos [inner brightness] and made me read it again.

The discussion was entirely dominated by Darlow, who talked great nonsense. He described Spenser as coming ‘at the end of a period’: that was why he had nothing strong and positive: nor had Catullus, who also came at the end of a period. I think he was gambling on the chance of no one having read Catullus—which he obviously has not done himself. Of course he was contradicted at once by everyone. We asked him what about the passion and the friendship in Catullus. He took up the desperate position that passion and friendship were negative things: then suddenly asked me if one could afford to neglect the allegory in Spenser. I reminded him that the prohibition to discuss allegory came from himself.

He replied to this by proceeding, after a short sketch of Arisoto, to say that the great beauty in Spenser was that, despite the allegory, one could be quite interested in his characters: one could always go on working out what little was given. Several of us demurred to this preposterous view of Spenser. I forget how but it soon developed into a tirade from Darlow on the necessity of facing facts, the flippancy of the Victorians and the ‘moral earnestness’ of our own generation.

The sight of Darlow with horned spectacles, aesthetic tie and white lily in buttonhole, looking eightyish to the last degree and putting himself up as representative of an earnest generation was too much, and we all roared. He went on however. I turned and whispered to Strick ‘Can’t you put an end to this nuisance?’ He came suddenly out of a brown study and hissed in my ear with quite surprising virulence ‘Yes! I will.’ His own contribution however was quite futile and only supplied a few moments obligato to the steady trombone of Darlow. All attempts to answer or interrupt him failed.

At last I succeeded in getting a pause in which I made everyone agree that his way of reading Spenser was a peculiarity of his own, not a manifestation of the moral tendencies of our generation. I then had a smart bit of fence with him and actually succeeded in shutting him up for a while. This was not really a dialectical feat, for he was talking nonsense that would go over at a touch. My only merit was that by saying ‘Wait a moment!’ in a loud voice I succeeded in making him hear my answer. I did not hear a single enlightening remark from anyone all afternoon.

I left with Coghill and Martley, both of whom complimented me on my paper. At tea in his rooms, besides us three, were Coghill’s younger brother (a subaltern, his guest) and a fool called Cuthbert. We talked about spiritualism, dreams and futurism: pretty silly, but I should have liked Coghill if I had got him alone.

So home on foot and to supper. Worked afterwards. On getting into bed I was attacked by a series of gloomy thoughts about professional and literary failure—what Barfield calls ‘one of those moments when one is afraid that one may not be a great man after all’.

Saturday 10 February: . . . After lunch I had to go into town again to return books to the English Library. While I was there looking in vain for more information about Prometheus Strick came in and began to talk to me. We began of course by a few criticisms of Darlow. Strick doesn’t think much of Gordon or of any of the English dons except Simpson. He said Raleigh had been dead sick of the English School before he died, ‘It was life that interested him.’ This agrees with what Jenkin has often said.

He talked to me for a long time. I can only describe what he was like by saying that without returning to any one subject too often or doing anything to suggest a fixed idea, he gave me the impression of a man with a fixed idea . . .

Sunday 11 February: . . . A beautiful springlike morning with great sunshine. I called at Exeter and found that Coghill and his brother were there—the soldier brother being still in his dressing gown. Coghill however was ready and we walked out at once. We went via Lake Street and S. Hinksey up to Thessaly and down by Ferry Hinksey. We talked on a great many subjects.

He apparently has been great friends with the Earp, Childe, Crowe and Harris set. I said I had been rather taken up by them in 1919 but not quite taken in. He defended them, but agreed with most of my criticisms . . .

I found to my relief that he has still an open mind on ultimate questions: he spoke contemptuously of the cheap happiness obtainable by people who shut themselves up in a system of belief. When in doubt he is still quite content with the Promethean attitude: if God doesn’t aim at what we call good, so much the worse for God. He is quite confident in the sanctions of one’s own impulse and says you must take it for final. He seems very ignorant of literature and thinks music the greater art, because it can do two things at once. He is quite right there. He agreed with me that women were bores until they were forty.

We went into the pub at Ferry Hinksey where an old customer informed us in whispers that it was before time. When the beer was brought we had a lot of talk from this old fellow—about prospects for the boat race, his early days as a boxer, and other pleasant themes. We parted at the Turl.

Home and had lunch. Afterwards came Sidney and I had an hour and a half with her. I find it impossible to make her do any serious preparation for me. After tea, having first written to my father, I began to work on my ‘Requiem’. Worked as hard as I have ever done on a poem, trying to resist all my clichés, shortcuts and other original sins . . .

Monday 12 February: A thick fog this morning. Dorothy came back today after her long absence. D gave her a great telling off about all the things which have come to light while she has been doing the work herself and told her that she must do things in our way or clear out. Dorothy seems to have taken it very well.

After breakfast I walked to Schools and heard the Cad’s lecture. Wynn came and sat next to me: according to my invariable custom with new acquaintances I gave him a full list of all the Cad’s enormities and he seemed duly impressed. He says he thinks we shall have no sound laws etc. this year and seems to think that Miss Wardale is going too deeply into it with me.

Walked home again. After lunch I walked over to Iffley and got back my Wordsworth from the Doc’s rooms: I then crossed the river—there is a fine rush of water at the new weir—intending to go down by Sandford, but it was such a marsh in the meadows that I turned back. I then walked up the field path opposite the church, reading the opening of the last book of the Excursion. I tried the experiment of treating it as real philosophy, taking it as prose and trying to follow the thought conscientiously. The result was rather discreditable either to me or to Wordsworth, I am not sure which. What has the ‘active principle’ in all things got to do with the passage (a fine passage) about old age? . . .

Coming home again I sat down to work a little more on my ‘Requiem’ when Cranny arrived. He seemed in much better form, tho’ his exchange is still hanging fire . . . Cranny was somehow funnier than usual today. He talked so hard at tea that at first we couldn’t get him to help himself at all: at last, under pressure, he stretched out his hand absent-mindedly and took the whole half of a cake.

Today, for the first time, I found out something that Cranny really believes: that is, the moral order of the world as manifested in history. He gives various examples. He said the fall of all empires based on force was the central fact. The Hebrew prophets did not of course foretell particular historical facts but they were prophetic in the sense of seeing this moral order. This is the nearest approach to a religion I have ever heard from him and I was impressed at the time: though I decided afterwards that it would be better to believe in pardons than to see moral order in the change from Rome to the Middle Ages.

After tea he left and I worked on the Vth Canto of ‘Dymer’, not without a little success: feeling as confident today as I was depressed yesterday, wh. shows how much worth either mood is.

D has a tiresome cough tonight, and has had a sore back (of which she had said nothing) for the last few days—doubtless the result of the unusual work. She struck out a most excellent phrase tonight, saying of Dalkey, where houses of all kinds are mixed together, that it looked as they had been rained from heaven. I at once hailed this as literature and announced my intention of stealing it . . .

Tuesday 13 February: Worked on Beowulf, revising, most of the morning and then bicycled to Manor Place where I read my essay on Milton to Wilson. Quite an interesting hour tho’ I don’t know that I learnt anything new . . .

Afterwards I began Dryden. Started him with great good will and managed to raise some feeble appreciation of the Cromwell stanzas: but the Astraea Redux seemed to me such unutterable sawdust that I relapsed into my usual view of the Augustans . . .

D was very miserable all today: I discovered finally that her finger joints were bothering her and also forebodings as to how bad they might become. If only we could move to drier ground! Began this evening to read Tess of the d’Urbervilles aloud.

Wednesday 14 February: . . . After lunch I walked into Schools and worked all afternoon supplementing my Spenser paper with a short review of Wyatt, Surrey and Sackville. On reaching home for tea I was greeted with the cheering news that Jenkin had been here and would come to the Martlets tonight. From tea to supper time I worked on and completed my paper.

Then after supper I bussed to College. Going into the J.C.R. I found Jenkin sitting with Terry, Robson-Scott and Fasnacht. I seated myself on the floor and we talked until it was time to repair to Anderson’s rooms in Durham buildings—new rooms where I have never been before. They are divided into two by an arch and are quite pretty. Present were Anderson, R-Scott, Curtis, Terry, Jenkin, McKissack, Rink, and Keir. Arrangements were made about the dinner next week when the Cambridge Martlets were coming.

My paper was very kindly received. In the discussion the conception of γάνος raised a lot of talk of a rather aimless kind—was there γάνος in Lear? Was there in Tamburlaine etc.? I had, in my paper, applied Murray’s view of Pindar to Spenser, i.e. he failed to be a great poet because he was only a poet. This presently led to an argument of which the skeleton was something like this.

RINK: ‘Do you say that a work of art cannot be the greatest in kind if it is only art?’

SELF: ‘Certainly.’

RINK: ‘But can’t it be judged and oughtn’t it to be judged just as art?’

SELF: ‘Well taking art as an expression it must be the expression of something: and one can’t abstract the “something” from the expression.’

RINK: Stated Croce’s position.

SELF: ‘You can’t judge it simply as expression, in practice. A lyric which perfectly expressed the pleasure of scratching wd. not really be judged equal to Lear.’

RINK: ‘But it would be, quâ art.’

SELF: ‘But not quâ thing.’

RINK: ‘Perhaps not: but it could be criticised just as art without reference to its further nature as thing and that is what Croce means.’

SELF: ‘I suggest that the object of a work of art is not to be criticised but to be experienced and enjoyed. And that which appeals to the whole man must be greater than that which appeals to part of the man.’

RINK: ‘I don’t think so, provided the emotion of the artist is perfectly expressed.’

SELF: ‘That’s all right, if you consider the artist alone. But you forget that art is a social thing.’

ROBSON-SCOTT and RINK (together): ‘Oh no, certainly not, you can’t mean that.’

SELF: ‘Why not? Isn’t the object of the artist to communicate his emotion?’

RINK: ‘Oh! Then you make art not expression but communication?’

SELF: ‘Yes. I’m sorry I said expression before. I mean communication.’

RINK: ‘But is it not disinterested? Does the artist, while at work, think about an audience or about anything but perfect expression?’

SELF: ‘No artist has ever taken that view. Why are all artists so eager to be understood? Why do they bother to alter their first drafts?’

RINK: ‘To express more perfectly.’

TERRY: ‘Mere jottings might be the most expressive of all—to the artist.’

SELF: ‘The artist goes on altering phrases which are merely expressive to himself and hunting for those which will reproduce the right emotion in the audience.’

JENKIN: ‘Yes, I agree with that.’

KEIR: ‘Keats’ first draft of the Nightingale was found scattered all over the garden: so he had no idea of communication.’

JENKIN: ‘That was mere accident—carelessness.’

RINK: ‘But how can the essence of art depend upon its being communicative? If an Athenian had written Wagnerian music it would have communicated nothing to his contemporaries but it would have been art.’

SELF: ‘I don’t mean what “happens to communicate” in fact: but what is “such as to be communicative”, tho’ of course mere accidents—e.g. a MS getting lost—may prevent it ever actually arousing the right emotion.’

FASNACHT: ‘Potentially communicative?’

SELF: ‘Yes, I suppose so.’

TERRY: ‘But almost anything would be that. A mere sign would be communicative to a person who happened to have the same associations as the artist.’

RINK: ‘No, communication won’t do: it will have to be expression.’

SELF: ‘What do you mean by expression, if you don’t mean what is potentially communicative?’

RINK: ‘I mean that which embodies the form of the artist’s experience.’

SELF: ‘Form in the Platonic sense?’

RINK: ‘Not exactly—I mean like the form of a penny.’

SELF: ‘That comes to the Platonic form. That which corresponds to the round form of the penny, in a pain say, is Painfulness. You don’t mean that the expression of the particular pain is the concept of painfulness?’

RINK: ‘There’s a difference. There are many pennies but every emotion is unique.’

SELF: ‘Well can you talk about form and content in a unique thing?’

RINK: ‘Why not?’

SELF: ‘Well take the whole. Is its form inside it or out and what happens in either case?’

FASNACHT: ‘It is neither, it is diffused.’

SELF: ‘Can you distinguish it in this case from the particular?’

FASNACHT: ‘The difficulty comes not from the uniqueness of the Whole but from its Wholeness.’

RINK: ‘In any case, I take back Form in that sense. I really think I mean the form you impose on the experience. As perception is the forming of sensation.’

SELF: ‘But do you impose that? Isn’t it given?’

RINK: ‘Oh no—for instance I impose form on that lamp. If it was on the edge of vision it would have none.’

FASNACHT: ‘But that isn’t a mental operation, it’s the turning of your head.’

SELF: ‘Yes, the form depends on your body: but to you, as Mind, it’s part of the given.’

(This led to a longish argument on ‘sensations when not attended to’—were they sensations?—and so on to a discussion of the Ego. Did it exist when not filled by an object? Rink thought it did potentially. I trotted out my favourite argument about the potential being always resident in the lower actual, greatly to Fasnacht’s amusement. Rink said the actual in which potential subjectivity resided was the spirit unknown in its essence. We then returned to our muttons.)

RINK (having abandoned the word Form as hopeless): ‘The work of art is the crystallised emotion—the emotion made permanent.’

FASNACHT: ‘Made permanent in whose mind?’

RINK: ‘I mean potentially permanent.’

SELF: ‘Doesn’t that mean, capable of rearousing the original experience?’

RINK: ‘Well yes.’

SELF: ‘Then the issue is that I think art is communication, you make it auto-communication.’

RINK: ‘The work of art is capable of recreating the original experience but that is an accident of it.’

SELF: ‘Well what is its essence?’

RINK: ‘I don’t think I can put it into words. What I object to is making its essence depend on the future and on its contingent success in reproducing the experience. I want to make it retrospectively what this makes it in the future.’

We all now agreed that we had a certain inkling of what he meant. I said this was certainly not what I meant by art: in fact it stood to art as——. Rink walked part of the way back with me and invited me to lunch tomorrow . . .

Thursday 15 February: . . . Again today—it is happening much too often now—I am haunted by fears for the future, as to whether I will ever get a job and whether I shall ever be able to write good poetry.

This spring term seems always rather nasty: last year it was Mary and the Brat, to whom may Malebolge be hospitable, the year before that it was the Jeffries.

Friday 16 February: D stayed in bed today, very bad indeed with her violent cold and neuralgia. After breakfast I made another attempt to get something out of Wyld: but after despairing I finished the Ancrene Riwle and went on with Sir Gawain . . .

I then went to Schools for the Discussion Class. I was for some time alone with Payne who seems a pleasant fellow. The others gradually arrived and Macdonald read a short and very bad paper on the adapters of Shakespeare in a monstrous high pitched voice with a Scotch accent. The discussion which followed was pretty poor, but better than usual. Darlow was fairly silent. The only really amusing thing was Coghill’s minutes in Chaucerian verse, which, excluding some lapses, were good . . .

Wednesday 21 February: . . . I proceeded to 14 Longwall Street to lunch with Rink. He provided a very pleasing lunch of salad, cheese, jam, tangerines, dates, walnuts and coffee . . .

Shortly before three we went out for a walk. It was only after this that we began to progress. I started a new attack on expressionism on the ground that it didn’t (by his definition) cover the phenomena of failure. He had defined expression as the pure disinterested and intelligent consequences of experience. I said this described a bad poem as well as a good one. He failed to defend by an examination of ‘intelligent’ but finally cut me off by inserting ‘complete’ in his definition. Having thus come to a temporary standstill we reversed positions and he attacked my theory. In spite of many well contested points I was gravelled in the end by the simple question of communicative to how many . . . He had distinctly the honours today . . .

Coming in, I found the two Raymonds here. He is moving soon and will let his house for three years if he can’t sell it. As D said afterwards, this means he will get high rent, get the house done up by the tenant and retire thither with all to the good. After tea I was left with him in the dining room and endured wonderful boredom.

I was the more annoyed by hearing the Doc come in. At last Father Raymond made a move. The Doc had just gone as we two came out of the dining room. I found D in great distress about him and at her suggestion ran after him to see if I could have a chat. I did not overtake him till the end of Magdalen Road. He was walking very stiffly, but that is not uncommon. He was rather abstracted: talked about immortality. At Iffley Turn I left him and came home by bus.

D said he had seemed in great worry and ready to break down: in the very few minutes which she had had alone with him on the doorstep he had said that he was going down to Bristol to see a specialist. D is afraid it is cancer. I tried to take the view that doctors often imagine things in their own case: but indeed the poor old Doc is the last man to do so. D cried out against the old enemy—fate and all. As we said, he is the most unoffending, the gentlest, the most unselfish man imaginable . . .

Friday 23 February: . . . Mary and the Doc came before lunch. D told me the Doc was very bad and must stay here. After lunch he began raving. Quieted later and explained that he was haunted by horrible blasphemous and obscene thoughts. Talked quietly a long time with me alone. Had two more bad attacks before tea—very violent. The third was the worse. Thinks (while in the fit) that he is going to Hell. Dr Hichens came in the evening. After his visit Doc told Mary and D that he was doomed—lunacy and death. Traced it to V.D. in his College days. D said he was quite lucid but exaggerated repentance and misery something incredible . . .

Rob came. Completely reversed the earlier view: said the whole thing was neurasthenia and bunkum. He tried to hearten up the Doc who seemed at first to listen to him. When we started trying to get him to bed on a mattress in the drawing room there was another frightful fit—rolling on the floor and shrieking that he was damned for ever and ever. Screams and grimaces unforgettable. The fits began to get more frequent and worse. I noticed how exactly he reproduces what Faustus says in Marlowe. We spent most of the time holding him quiet—very hard work . . . While we were struggling with the Doc, Rob nodded at me and muttered ‘mad’, so I knew he’s given up the neurasthenic theory.

Dr Hichens came. They chloroformed the Doc. I had to hold his legs—dript with sweat, he’s got as strong as a horse. He was ages going over: and kept on imploring us not to shorten his last moments and send him to Hell sooner than need be. When he was finally over Dr Hichens said ‘Now is the time to decide what to do with him.’ As D and I said afterwards this was the worst moment of all: it seemed so treacherous.

They agreed that there was nothing for it but the asylum in the morning: or rather Rob pretended to agree, but it was only tactics as we afterwards discovered. They injected some strong narcotic, not morphia, I forget what, and Dr Hichens went away, promising to come back at 8.30. The Doc was now quite quiet but soon began to mutter. I was with him alone for a long time.

Saturday 24 February: The Doc continued fairly quiet under the drug, but gabbling. After it had got light Rob watched him and I went out and took a few turns in front of the house. It was raining. Maureen of course had been awake all the night owing to the horrible noise and very much rattled. Mary had slept a good deal. I found the worst thing I had to contend with was a sort of horrible sympathy with the Doc’s yellings and grovellings—a cursed feeling that I could quite easily do it myself.

Dorothy came. I was watching the Doc again for some time. Had some tea and a little bread and butter: but went upstairs and was sick as soon as I had swallowed it. The Doc seemed to become quite sane again and kept on saying irrelevant things: was threatened with several further attacks but they didn’t come on. Mary and I had to hold his hands a good deal. Sometimes he talked quite sensibly for several minutes: expressed gratitude to us in a way that would break your heart. We got him to take a little warm milk with great difficulty.

Hichens, despite his promise, did not come till 11.30. The Doc seemed quite glad to see him. Afterwards Rob and Hichens retired to consult while I stayed to watch the Doc. In their consultation (D told me) Hichens took a much more cheerful view. Rob told him how many of the Doc’s symptoms were normal in his case. They concluded that it might possibly be mere hysteria, partly constitutional, partly from the war: but chiefly because the poor man thought that his syphilis had come awake and was going to drive him mad.

During the day there were many encouraging signs. Tho’ often threatened with the attacks the Doc himself recognised them as a nervous ailment and didn’t talk about Hell. At about one o’clock Rob sent me into town to engage an ex-policeman for tonight in case of emergencies, since next time, instead of the Hell idea, the Doc might decide to murder someone. I did so and came back after lunch.

Things seeming fairly quiet, I went up and lay down on my bed. Found I was now getting frightfully nervy: never having seen madness before, I was afraid of every odd thought that came into my own head. I kept thinking I heard the Doc start to rave again downstairs but it was only imagination.

Came down for tea. D—looking wonderfully fresh and cheerful—told me there was nothing to do, and after some tea (not v. much, still feeling sick in the stomach) I went back to bed. Couldn’t stick it and came down at once to potter about with D for company. She was amazingly good. Everything really much more cheerful this evening, but somehow I found it much harder to stand.

The Doc came in to supper and was coaxed to eat a little. Soon however the beastly preliminary signs came on and we had to lead him into the drawing room (Rob and I). The poor fellow had got his will back and was making an effort. He begged us to help him: accepted our ‘suggestions’ that he was alright and was now mastering it. My ‘perfectly safe’ turned out a most efficient catchword. Rob spoke to him sternly when he got wild and I spoke to him soothingly when he got scared. We managed to keep the fit in hand. Just before we got him to bed he started a bad one again, but asserted himself, using the phrase which I had suggested the day before about being a man and not afraid of bogeys. We had got him to take his sleeping draught a little earlier. He held my hand for a long time after he was in bed.

The others lowered the gas and went away, Rob to bed and D to the next room. The Doc most pathetically thanked me for staying with him: he began to get a little extravagant, calling me an angel etc, but soon checked himself and said ‘Yes, I know that’s all sentimental nonsense’. At last to my delight I heard him to go to sleep—not a gabbling drug sleep, but steady snoring. At first he woke up a little startled whenever the clock struck: but after a word or two with me in which he invariably thanked me and apologised for keeping me up, he turned over and fell asleep. Once he started up and started the old contortions: but after I had spoken to him he lay down.

I felt much better than in the afternoon—quite fresh and not at all nervy. Sat and smoked in the firelight till 4 o’clock. It wd. have been quite safe if I had slept: but whenever I began to doze, horrible faces came up, and I daren’t risk a nightmare, so I had to keep awake. At 4 o’c D went and called Rob to relieve me. She and I had just gone upstairs when the Doc—where Rob was I’m not sure—awoke and came up to the lavatory of his own accord. He seemed absolutely himself when he came out. Rob and I got him back to bed and he then said that he must see . . . Got to bed a little before five and slept like a log.

Sunday 25 February: Woke up about eleven o’clock or later. Found that the Doc had slept well after I left him. I shaved for the first time since the trouble began, washed and had a large breakfast. I heard that Jenkin had been round to see me and asked me to go in. Rob said it would be quite safe for me to go out and D encouraged me to go, promising that she would rest that afternoon. I looked in to see the Doc, who was quite normal, tho’ naturally very much exhausted, and apologised for having been ‘such a fool’.

With inexpressible relief I came out of this house of nightmare and walked in to Merton Street. Jenkin was just finishing lunch. Afterwards we rode on the top of a bus to the Banbury Road terminus, then crossed and returned by the Woodstock Road bus. It was a lovely springlike afternoon and all the almond trees were out. After our ride I had tea with Jenkin and walked home.

Began to get a little nervy as I neared the house. Everything however was alright. The Doc was moved upstairs tonight, he and Mary taking my room. We discussed plans for the future. Rob promised to see early tomorrow morning about arranging for the Doc to be boarded and taken into a Pensions Hospital for war neurasthenia. We were left with the uncomfortable prospect of the Doc and Mary here and Rob gone, indefinitely, should this fail.

Mary throughout this time has behaved with her usual relentless selfishness, rudeness, ingratitude, and sullen gluttony. She slept and cried upstairs while we were saving her husband from an asylum: she called us out of Hell on Saturday morning to get her a hot bath: come rain come fine, her cups of cocoa had to be ready when she wanted them. Tonight she called D upstairs to bring her biscuits when she was in bed. To be short, we must endure her for his sake: but there’s no two and sixpenny whore from a garrison town and no oily old gipsy woman who wouldn’t be a more welcome guest. She is not a woman at all—she is a stomach with a voice to ask for food without a please.

I slept on the dining room sofa: lay very hard, so that I awoke feeling sore all over.

Monday 26 February: The Doc and Mary—thank God—slept very late. I tried in vain to work. Rob went into town to make arrangements about the Doc being boarded preparatory to his being admitted to a Pensions Hospital. He returned with the good news that the people he had seen were ready to further the matter and hoped that it would be easily managed. It was not till afterwards that I gathered from D that at the very best there would be a delay of ten days—jolly news for us. Rob then went upstairs and told the Doc what he had done. The latter seemed to approve and to be quite ready to go to hospital. Rob then departed—lucky man! The Doc came down for lunch—quite normal and looking very much better than he did before the attack.

In the afternoon came Jenkin on his bike: D thought it safe for me to go out. I rode with him to Horsepath and back over Shotover. I don’t think much of importance was said.

Coming back, I had tea and afterwards went out for a walk along Cowley Road with Mary and the Doc. The latter was really wonderfully improved: hummed tunes: made a few attempts at conversation: said he would never forget what I had done for him etc. After we came back I had to go out to the post and took him with me. He said he felt one of the hysterical attacks coming on again but it did not materialise. Later at supper he started the same thing, and again at bed time. Later still, after I had gone to bed, I heard him starting again and had to go to him. D holds out wonderfully. Myself still worried with the feeling of sickness.

Tuesday 27 February: D told me the Doc was very much better this morning than he has yet been. He stayed in bed till lunch time. At 12 o’clock I went to Wilson and explained to him that I had not done any work and why. He was very sympathetic. He agreed with me about the absurd slowness of getting things through the Ministry of Pensions and cited examples from his own experience. We employed the hour talking about Elizabethan criticism on which I should normally have done my essay today.

I then biked home. Was just going upstairs to change my clothes when Mary said ‘Johnnie says he’s got the horrid feeling again and you can stop them.’ I went to the drawing room and did so. In the afternoon I tried to work on The Owl and the Nightingale: but was much too tired and rattled to make any headway. At suppertime we had the usual performance of the threatened attack . . . and in a few seconds [the Doc] had himself worked up into a very good beginning of a fit. We succeeded in staving it off and gave him Horlick’s with a sleeping powder in it. He and Mary were soon snoring.

D said she must have a few minutes peace to read the papers to herself but urged me to go to bed. I did—to lie awake for an hour or so, thoroughly nervy and miserable. Got up and found D just going to bed, and already in her room. I asked her if there was any milk to spare. I was sorry, for she came downstairs again to find some for me. I had a cup of hot milk and retired to bed, still to lie awake. A very windy night. Kept on thinking that I heard the Doc and at last I really did. I decided to try D’s advice of letting him alone. I heard Mary get up and she came into my room. I pretended to be asleep. She glided out again. I must have really fallen asleep soon after this, for I heard no more.

Wednesday 28 February: Woke up deciding that the bed in Maureen’s room (where I lay) was a very much poorer affair than my own. The Doc unfortunately woke early. I went in to Miss Wardale and explained why I had nothing done. She taught me for a solid hour and I found it very tough to sit it out.

Came home after leaving a note asking Jenkin to come out this afternoon. During the morning D had a very straight talk with the Doc, telling him that he knew and we knew that he was perfectly alright and that the continued hysteria was mere selfishness and nonsense. He remained quiet during the morning. We had another scene during lunch but succeeded in keeping him in hand.

Afterwards I waited for a long time for Jenkin and finally rode in to Merton St. but he was out. I then turned and began to ride to Cowley but was driven back by rain. Coming home, I found all well, except that there had been a blowdown of soot in the drawing room. When it cleared up I went out on foot: walked up to Headington and along the private road in beautiful sunshine. I tried hard to detach myself from the atmosphere in which we have now lived for what seems eternity—with some little success, but not much.

Came back to find Mary sitting alone by the drawing room fire. I passed on hastily to the dining room where I found D engaged in battling down another of the Doctor’s fits. As I heard afterwards, he had started on the damnation stunt again and had confessed new sins. He says that what is really on his mind is that he once betrayed a girl in Philadelphia: she wrote in despair telling him that a child was coming, and he never answered. Of course one can’t believe what he says: but if this is true, then the hell the cur is now going through serves him jolly well right—but it seems rather rough that we should have to share it.

Before we started tea, Jenkin came in: he and I sat with the Doc for some time and all went well. Tea was a nervous meal for everyone. Afterwards Jenkin and I walked with the Doc as far as Claytons, where I got some more of the powders: Jenkin came back with me and then left. During the walk the Doc was absolutely silent. He remained alright till supper and made some little response to my efforts at conversation. Towards the end of supper he began again. After much wear and tear we got him round again. I took him upstairs, helped him with . . . and got him into his bath. When he came out I brought him Horlicks with a powder in it, wh. though now perfectly compos mentis he refused to drink. Mary then went to bed.

D and I then sat in the drawing room till 11.30 and then went to bed ourselves. I went to sleep at once. Presently in the middle of a complicated and interesting dream which I have forgotten—I was woken up by Mary. Went into the Doc’s room. Poor D was with him and had been for some time: as she said afterwards she had only called me because she was afraid of him getting absolutely out of hand again. He was nearer the complete breakdown this time than he has been since Rob left. Contortions horrible and screaming always just about to begin. At an enormous cost of will and muscle we kept him in control. They had succeeded in giving him the drug before I was called and he fought off its effects perversely for a solid hour. Then at last he went to sleep and we returned to bed, rattled and shivering with cold—forsan et haec.

Thursday 1 March: . . . I got up and had breakfast alone with D in blissful quiet. Our two charming guests remained fast asleep. D then despatched me into the town to buy pressed beef and pork pie.

On returning home I found the Doc, who had now woken, was very well this morning. I looked in to see him. The poor devil naturally looked tired, but peaceful and easy and apologetic for last night. There was also a wire from Rob (to whom both D and Mary had written yesterday) to say that he was coming up by the 11.35. This was a great relief. I resolved, if human entreaty could compass it, to make him stay: for after all, as even Mary admits, the Doc is his ruddy brother and not mine. . . .

Jenkin came and I told him I could not go out with him. While D and I were talking to him at the gate, Rob appeared. The Doc had another attack soon after his arrival: Rob—who had lunched in town—faced the music while D, Mary, and I escaped to have some food in the kitchen. Rob afterwards went off to interview the pensions people in St Aldates. He came back with the news that the Doc could go before one Dr Goode next Tuesday. If necessary Goode (who lives at Littlemore) could come out here instead, but it would need some pressure to manage that. In the meantime Mary and the Doc had been out for a walk: they returned about tea time, the Doc again on the point of starting ‘The Horrors’.

After tea I went up to the Gonners for another mattress. Rob accompanied me the greater part of the way. He had just been looking at Maureen. He suggested that she had been overworking. I explained the necessity of the situation: in order to be fully qualified for a musical career she would have to pass the Oxford Senior. He said ‘Are they betting on a sound horse? Miss Whitty said that she had very little talent, certainly nothing above the average.’ I was very surprised to hear this: Rob thought that Miss W. had already said as much to D. He went on to enlarge on the disadvantages of a musical career and the delights of teaching domestic science. I asked him whether D ought to be told, but he wd. not commit himself.

He left me at the corner of Gipsy Lane and I went on to borrow the mattress. After a little chat with Lady Gonner I came away with it. I strapped it up in a roll and by bringing the loose end of the strap over my shoulder and bending down at an angle of 45 degrees I was able to carry it home on my back. It was one of the heaviest loads I have had. At our gate I found Rob setting out for the Gonners with Maureen.

During his absence the Doc had another attack wh. I managed to fight down. To supper came Smudge and afterwards I did Anglo Greek with her. How far it was any good I don’t know, for I was very sleepy and nervy and the noise of scenes going on upstairs was worse than if I had been in them.

After she had gone D, Rob and I met in the drawing room. Rob was debating whether to communicate with Goode or not and try to get him to hurry up. During this conversation he remarked that he wd. be leaving us again tomorrow. I laid before him as strongly as I possibly could the dreadful position in which he was leaving us. He refused absolutely to stay and then went to bed. D and I sat up for a little time—poor D is naturally beginning to be very tired. I slept on the dining room sofa, Rob having my bed.

Friday 2 March: At breakfast D, Rob, and I had a council of war. After many arguments we concluded that it would be better not to bother Goode. Any hint of urgency, anything in the nature of an S.O.S. wd. only arouse Goode’s suspicions. Of course the fact of the syphilis would be pretty sure to emerge anyway: our only hope was that Goode would decide ‘This man has had syphilis and is therefore liable to insanity: but his present trouble is neurasthenia induced by worrying about that possibility, and by the war.’ Of course if they ruled that the present trouble was syphilitic they would not only not take him, but would cut his pension. And this was more likely to happen if they saw we were panicking to get him out of the house. Rob announced that he had changed his mind and wd. stay on to see the thing through. I have seldom been so grateful for any words . . .

Lunch was very late and immediately afterwards I bussed into town to the Discussion Class. Gordon was ill, but seven of us carried on alone. My minutes were well received. Burns read a capital paper on Schools of Poetry: he quoted from the ‘Imagists’ one or two poems which I liked immensely—tho’ I was prepared to dislike them in theory. The discussion was quite jolly—and infinitely comfortable—a glimpse of the clean, sane, outer world again . . .

Afterwards D and I went out to do some shopping—even in Cowley Rd. it was delightful to be together and away for a few minutes. Coming back—a big moon—we met Rob walking outside: he said ‘Johnnie is quite happy, confessing his sins to Mary.’ Rob told us that the girl whom the Doc had ‘betrayed’ was a common prostitute. Thank the Lord! We all remarked how the poor man would regret his many confessions if he ever recovered. At supper the Doc was nearly asleep and Rob got him up to bed soon afterwards.

I soon came up with a hot water bottle and stayed to help in restraining an attack. Pretty near the edge this time and he said ‘I’m in Hell’ for the first time since Friday night . . .

Saturday 3 March: Woke up after a very good night but too sore to lie on the dining room sofa any longer. After my tea I went upstairs and lay on the bed which D had just vacated, where I fell asleep again. Had breakfast alone in the dining room and afterwards did messages in Cowley Road: a most glorious fresh morning of blue sky and puff’d clouds. The Doc and Mary slept late: he had had a fairly good night but she had been forced to give him the second dope.

Rob wrote a letter to Goode asking him to interview the Doc here instead of holding a board in town and I cycled with it over to Littlemore. Maureen was down here all morning from the Gonners with whom she has been staying ever since the trouble began. I found her and Rob playing catch in the road when I came back, which was really rather comforting.

The Doc had rather a bad attack at lunch. Even between the attacks he never rallies now: a frightful expression of misery and lethargy has settled on his face, he replies if spoken to, only in monosyllables and in a whisper. Nothing can wring the ghost of a smile from him. For painfulness I think this beats anything I’ve seen in my life . . .

D pretty tired today and had to cook a joint in addition to everything else. We got to bed about 12.30, I on the dining room sofa where I at once fell heavily asleep. At about three I was aroused by noises above: went up and found D (who had not slept at all) trying to quiet the Doc. The same old hopeless business and we got him over at last . . .

The sight of these attacks has almost changed my deep rooted conviction that no mental pain can equal bad physical pain. Down again and noticed that it was 5.30. Soon asleep again.

Sunday 4 March: Up about 9.45. As no one dare wash in the bathroom these mornings for fear of waking the Doc, and the scullery is always in use, I seldom get a chance of a morning wash. Just after I had shaved in Rob’s room Jenkin turned up. I went out with him: we rode to Garsington, then to our left and home by the windmill and Horsepath. Jenkin and I seldom say anything of importance on our jaunts these days, but it is like cool water to be out with him . . .

After lunch I looked over an atrociously bad Latin prose by Sidney Stevenson: then Rob and I walked out on the golf links with the Doc. He had rather a bad attack soon after we had reached it: then pulled himself together and made some horribly pathetic attempts to join in the conversation. On the whole he was very bad this afternoon and (what was perhaps the most terrible thing of all) asked us what we were going to do with him. When we got home we found D on the doorstep who told Rob he was wanted in the drawing room.

I knew at once that Dr Goode had come. (Goode, it appears, had been here for half an hour and D was on the verge of collapse, having been left to make nerve racking conversation with him.) Shortly after the three Doctors had been closeted together, D, who listened in the hall, announced that they had got on to the dreaded subject of the syphilis. Mary seemed to feel the suspense least: Maureen, tho’ of course not understanding the real issue, was trembling all over. D very nearly on the edge but holding on. I couldn’t stick the dining room any longer and went and smoked cigarettes in the lobby upstairs for the windiest hour and a half I have spent except under fire. It was freezingly cold.

D came up now and then with news of what she cd. overhear: the prospect gradually improved. Goode had been heard to say ‘You have none of the symptoms of G.P.I.’ Then he was heard talking to him about neurasthenia, particularly about the Hell idea, wh. results apparently from being frightened by one’s father in youth. The first fearful question was thus settled—Goode did not think that the poor old Doc was going mad. Of the next questions—whether he would be admitted to hospital and how soon—we cd. only hear the most tantalising murmurs.

I was now given a little early supper so as I could set off to the Gonners with Maureen. Before I set off Goode left and Rob followed him out into the road. The Doc, who had been heard during the interview talking in a strong and ordinary voice, was now collapsed again. He was nevertheless more like himself and, poor fellow, very penitent for the trouble we had had. He said Goode was getting him into hospital but ‘it won’t be for a few days, and how can I go on staying here?’ Before Maureen left she kissed him and he smiled naturally for the first time this many a day. When I came back from seeing Maureen up to Red Gables the others were at supper and I went up to sit with the Doc, who was in bed. He said he was ‘afraid he’d upset my applecart’, meaning my work: I reassured him on this point . . .

All the others early in bed. As I was taking up the jars for D I heard the Doc making noises as if he were going to be sick. Anon out came Mary and said she was going to get him his second go of dope. D and I were very doubtful about the wisdom of this, and after some hesitation I woke Rob to ask him, and he said sleepily, ‘Give it to him.’ I went into their room. The Doc showed no signs of hysteria but was complaining of flatulency wh. kept him awake. Mary kept on grumblingly urging him to take his dope. He became naturally angry in a way which was rather comforting to see, and shouted out, ‘I’m not going to take it Maimie.’ And Mary got angry too, and I held up my finger and recited ‘Birds in their little nests agree’ which didn’t amuse anyone—except me . . .

Monday 5 March: Rob came into the dining room while I was having my morning tea and asked Dorothy to get him his breakfast at once as he had to ring up Goode between nine and ten. Later I went up and lay on D’s bed, she having looked into the dining room to tell me that it was empty. She presently came to me with the news that Rob was going back to Bristol today: which of course pleased us very little . . .

When I went up to shave in Rob’s room he followed and made some tentative remarks about this being a nasty business for me. In fact he wanted, in addition to the pleasure of his own escape, the pleasure of being told by me that he was quite right to leave us and had been very good to stay so long and of course we couldn’t expect any more etc. He did not get it. He left the house at about ten.

I began to work on Sidney’s Latin prose: the post-prandial demands of nature became so urgent, however, that I had to bus into College—our own lavatory being now inaccessible in the morning for fear of waking the Doc. In College I had a good wash in the bath rooms. Bussed back and finished my job. D and I were just going to have our own lunch when the Askins were heard stirring overhead. The Doc just as depressed and lethargic as ever today . . .

Tuesday 6 March: Up lateish, bussed into town and washed at the Union: thence to Wilson to tell him again that I had done nothing. He quite understood the position of course, but said that all this waste of time was a very serious thing for me.

I then came home and worked on Sir Gawain. The others got up for lunch: Mary said he had had a tolerable night without any dope. This was (at first) one of the best days he had had. He seemed perfectly normal and made some effort to join in the conversation . . .

After tea I began work on my paper for Miss Wardale. The Doc soon began to get restless and an attack was staved off. Mary got him to bed after supper and D had to go up and sit with him while I worked. I just managed to finish my paper when Smudge turned up—by appointment of course, but we had all forgotten her. I did Anglo Greek with her till twelve thirty, with a long interruption to soothe the Doc.

After she had gone D and I sat down for a while: when I went up for the jars I heard the Doc making noises as if he was going to be sick. We knew this was the prelude to trouble and didn’t think it worth while to go to bed. Presently Mary came down and got him hot milk, but without powder, contrary to the advice of D and me who saw that powder would be necessary tonight. At about half past one we ventured to go up. I had just got into bed when I heard the Doc beginning: I waited a few minutes, then, seeing that it shaped badly, I hopped up. I succeeded in quieting him and Mary got him to take the dope. Before going back to bed I looked into D’s room and saw that she was sleep, for wh. I was very glad, tho’ it is a sad proof of how exhausted she is.

Wednesday 7 March: Was called by D at 9.30 with the horrible news that there was no letter from the Pensions people: we had foolishly been hoping that the end of this hell might be announced today. Dorothy was poorly this morning: she had (D said) been wanting to get up all night, but, with the exaggerated niceness of her class, she had been afraid to do so.

I went to see Miss Wardale and did my hour. Afterwards I did some shopping and came home. New trouble was afoot: Dorothy was suffering from acute pains and a dose of D’s salts had had no result. Before lunch I had to go up and talk to the Doc while he dressed. I hope I sympathise with the poor wretch, but, by God, never do I want him again to be within twenty miles of me—never.

At lunch D discussed Dorothy’s condition. With unpardonable folly we all asked the Doc’s advice. D explained that she had already given her salts and cascara. The Doc advised further a strong dose of Epsom salts. After lunch I biked to Claytons to get this and when I came back it was administered under the Doc’s supervision. A few minutes later he began announcing, ‘Oh, I’d forgotten she’d had cascara as well. Oh dear, oh dear, I’ve killed her! The girl will die! Get her an emetic at once!’

After the first shock I saw that this was probably another of his hysterical scares: but of course there was the possibility that it might be true. D, inclining to the latter view, was naturally nearly frantic. Mary was despatched to Dr Hichens. The unfortunate Dorothy was made to swallow a cup of mustard and water. I had to take the Doc into the drawing room and keep him quiet. It was tough work and by the time Mary returned I had passed a truly awful half hour, trying hard to hope for the best. Poor D broke down for once when Mary brought back the blessed news that it was alright and the Doc had been talking through his hat . . .

D and I both feel pretty bitter against Rob for sneaking home and leaving us to hold the front line: we cannot believe that it is really inevitable. Mary and D both wrote him their accounts of the situation tonight. D and I sat up till about 12.15 . . .

Some time afterwards we went to bed. After an hour or so of sleep I was awakened by the usual noise: went in and found D already there. He was very bad this time . . . We got to bed again at about four. About an hour later we were hauled up again. Mary said the dope had apparently had no effect. After another ghastly struggle . . . we got him to take a second dose. In bed again about six. The light was coming into my window and a lot of birds were singing—sane, clean, comfortable things.

Thursday 8 March: . . . There was nothing from Rob—I had been hoping, like a fool, that last night’s letters would have fetched Rob. D was rather hurt when I described him as a cur: but I really find it hard to take any other view of his behaviour . . . Dorothy was of course pretty poorly after yesterday’s dietary of salts, mustard and cascara. D had done most of the work in the morning (so far as Dorothy wd. let her, for she is most anxious to spare D, to whom I think she is really attached) and I now washed up.

Afterwards I did the Bruce passage in Sisam—good honest stuff. Mary went over to Iffley to get some clothes. She came back at about four thirty and went up to their room from which, a moment later, one of the patient’s best screams was heard. I went up and succeeded in pulling him together again. As soon as he came downstairs he started the paralysis stunt until Mary took him out for a walk . . .

The Doc had an attack after tea, followed by several others (I think). D wrote a letter to Rob wh. was practically an S.O.S. Plenty of trouble with the Patient both at supper and afterwards. He and Mary had hot baths (I wish to heaven D and I ever had a chance of a bath these days) and we gave him his dope afterwards. As soon as he saw me bringing it into the room he started, or tried to start, ‘the horrors’ but I succeeded in hushing him up and Mary gave him the stuff by spoonfuls . . . Tho’ expecting to be called up again at any minute, D and I now went to bed, about 2 o’clock I think, and actually had a whole night.

Friday 9 March: Nothing from the Pensions this morning, nothing from Rob all morning in answer to D’s S.O.S. of last night. I went into College for necessary reasons after breakfast. Coming home I found that Miss Featherstone had been to see D and promised, in her capacity of nurse, to come up and help with the patient today.

D had been bucked up no end by Miss Featherstone’s visit and insisted on my going to the [discussion] class this afternoon, which I did, after an early lunch. It was held this afternoon in Gordon’s house in Chadlington Rd. Singh read us a paper on Tagore: really very courageous and praiseworthy but frightfully funny, full of the most impossible Babu rhetoric, through no fault of his own but just because some things won’t work in English.

I came away before tea and walked back to Carfax with Burns, who was inclined to be friendly in his cold way and asked me to have tea with him, which of course I refused. Came home. Miss Featherstone and the Patient were in the dining room. D told me that she had been simply splendid with him: but she had been hard put to it, and but for her this would have been the hardest day of all. There had been a wire from Rob asking ‘could we hold on till tomorrow’. I should like to know what alternative we have. I went in and spoke to Miss F—very cheering to see that queer, homely, common, sensible old face again . . .

Saturday 10 March: Awoke after a quiet night to find that a communication had at last come from the Pensions people. It was a masterpiece. The case had been put to them as urgent on Monday: they now asked to know when Dr Askins could be ready to go to hospital at Henley. As Rob was expected up today and we did not know when he was leaving Bristol, it was useless to wire for his advice. All morning we were expecting a wire from Rob, but none came. I managed to do a little work for Smudge . . .

I soon had to come in to attend to the Patient. He was very bad in his horrors today, flinging himself on the floor and restrained with difficulty from screaming. I was alone in charge for some time. He got a little better before tea: but at tea the effort to make him eat anything had the usual result in screams and contortions . . .

He finally lay down on the sofa and I sat on the table and talked to him: all the old wearisome assurances that he was quite alright, that it was nothing but nerves, that he was getting better, that there was no such place as Hell, that he was not dying, that he was not going mad . . . that he was not paralysed, that he could master himself. It is a sort of devil’s litany that he must be as sick of hearing as I am of saying . . .

Sunday 11 March: Up late and very sore from the sofa, to which I don’t seem to get any more accustomed—as one rapidly did to much harder beds, in France, say. After breakfast I walked into College and there had a hot bath—a delicious treat in these days . . . Afterwards I went in to the Union and worked patching up some sort of an essay for Wilson on Elizabethan criticism—a subject that I shall always hate for its association with this time.

I had tea in the Union and went to Chapel to hear the Mugger’s farewell sermon, which was quite moderate, and not the ‘heavy sob stuff’ which Jenkin had anticipated. It was followed, comically enough, by ‘Now thank we all our God’.

Came home, had supper, worked for Smudge, and so to bed on the sofa. The Doc had several fits (indeed, tho’ milder, they have become almost continuous) but Rob attended to them. Rob is very impatient with him and bullying rather than masterful, wh. only excites the poor fellow more.

Monday 12 March: Into town by 10 o’clock for my hour with Wilson. Came back to hear that Rob had fixed everything up by a trunk call to Pensions and the Doc was to go to Henley this afternoon. One of the most delicious moments I have had this long time: I could have gone on my knees to thank any deity who cared to claim the credit for this release. Pottered about revelling in the end of term feeling till lunch time.

The Doc was very violent at lunch time and when the taxi (wh. Rob had ordered) came, I was afraid we would never get him into it. All through the meal he had been hooting and kicking and spitting out mouthfuls of food: he now began his ‘paralysis’ in a very acute form and fell on the floor. He bade ‘a last farewell’ to Mary. It was all very painful. I hoped it was mainly an hysteric’s instinct for melodrama, but I am afraid there was a certain amount of real pain in it too.

Rob and I at last got him on board and the three of us drove to Henley. The country for the last half of the journey was very pretty, but it was a cold day. When we got to the hospital Rob went in alone, leaving the Doc and me in the taxi. He was away for a long time. I was in agonies lest there should be some hitch at the last moment. The poor Doc described his symptoms to me once again and very nearly began the screaming. At long last Rob appeared with a very fat man and they took the patient in.

Thank God! Rob was going back to Bristol direct from Henley, so I drove home alone. Found D dreadfully tired, and no wonder. Worked after tea and went out just before supper to have a large whiskey and soda. Mary goes tomorrow. I hear she is buying me a present: I had thought it was not in her power to annoy me more, but this is the last straw. However, may the intention be accounted to her for her righteousness—for by God she needs it, the gaunt she wolf of Washington.

Tuesday 13 March: Awake once or twice in the night and had the delightful experience of imagining that I heard the Doc and then realising that all that was over: then turning luxuriously to sleep, with the sound of heavy rain.

Mary, of course, had breakfast in bed: D and I had ours alone downstairs. It was delightful to be able to make a noise. Worked on M.E. in the drawing room all morning till Smudge came at 12, and I did Anglo Greek with her. Tho’ horribly overworked, she seemed in excellent form at lunch . . . Sidney came at three with a much better prose. I worked with her till after five . . .

After tea Jenkin appeared on his bike and I gladly went out with him. We rode round by Elsfield. I talked nonsense all the time and he commented on the outrageous joy which I emanated. I said what we had been through was almost worth it for the relief I now felt: to wh. he replied that one could and did get just as much relief out of the smaller troubles which one imagines to be bad at the time. We were extraordinarily merry. I said I should like to motor to London and there dine. We expiated on this theme for some time—our mental age, for the nonce, being about twelve.

A grey cold evening. Home and had an enormous supper alone with D in delightful privacy, peace and jollity. Finished my paper for Miss Wardale afterwards.

Wednesday 14 March: Woke lateish after an excellent night and read a few pages of Hazlitt’s essay on ‘Going a Journey’ over my tea with extraordinary gusto.

After breakfast biked to Margaret Rd. and had my last tutorial with Miss W. A cold morning. Home again and was presented with a woolly waistcoat left for me by Mary: really very good of her and I must in fairness say that, tho’ American and tho’ poor, she is not mean. But I cannot help remembering some other facts . . .

After a fish lunch I went in by bike to Merton St., where I found Jenkin reading De la Mare’s Return. He said it produced exactly the atmosphere of flu. I thought this a sound criticism. He had heard De la Mare read a paper on ‘Atmosphere’ the day before yesterday to the Plantagenet Club in Oriel, which was really good. They had had a good evening otherwise, for Jenkin had retired afterwards to hear ghost stories in a select company, of which the leading light was an army officer aged about fifty and recently become an undergraduate, who had learned some very primitive kind of magic from the blacks in Jamaica. This man also indulges in the Oriental habit of obtaining ecstasies by the contemplation of his own navel.

In pursuance of my light headed mood I proposed we should go to the pictures as Jenkin had suggested yesterday. This however was vetoed, and we rode out instead: Jenkin remarking maliciously ‘You’ll be very cold without a coat’ as he put on his own and turned up the collar. We rode through Kennington, up the Bagley Woods road and so to the pretty village of Sunningwell which he has quite recently discovered . . .

We separated in Iffley Road and I came home. Mrs Hume-Rothery and Betty were with D when I got in, but soon left. Before supper I read The Battle of the Books—very good in its way, but not much in my line. Maureen back tonight: three of us (and no more) at supper so that we are now really back to the normal again . . .

Friday 16 March: D had a long letter from Mary with nothing new about the Doc, except the opinion given by Rob that he would be kept in hospital for a long time and we must hope for the best. He went, by the by, to Richmond in the end, and not to Henley.

Maureen had a temperature of 101 this morning and was kept in bed: presumably flu, which she may have caught from Lady Gonner . . .

After lunch I bussed into town and went to Merton where Gordon was reading to a joint meeting of the male and female discussion classes. It was held in the Senior Common Room—a comfortable place, but without the dignity of our own . . .

Gordon talked about the writing of literary papers. He complimented us on those which had been written, as everyone expected him to do, and then went on to attack several critical heresies, introducing them artfully as ‘things which he was glad to see we had not done’. He was particularly down on the sentimental, esoteric school, as represented by Mackail. What was most interesting, he claimed that Couch’s chapter on jargon has been largely taken without acknowledgement from Chapman and himself.

Best of all was his discussion of the large audience of the semi-educated people who ‘never would know’ to whom critics and ‘bribed poets’ were now always talking. Such people wanted to be told about beauty, sensibility etc: in fact about all that side of literature which men of letters took for granted and never mentioned. I was delighted with this. Afterwards there was some discussion on the method of conducting the classes, and Coghill (backed by several others including myself) suggested that they shd. be more formal . . .

Saturday 17 March: D had a letter from Mrs Stevenson announcing that Sidney had complained of feeling ill and might not come this morning—news which I received with great equanimity. The same letter contained a lot of Job’s comfort about the Doc: she said that his ego was now eclipsed, but we must hope that it would soon assert itself. Even if it did not do so in this life, we must look forwards to the happy time when he would have an etheric body. Then followed a long rhapsody on the delights of spiritualism.

This was rather unfortunate as spiritualism, together with Yoga and undigested psychoanalysis seem to have hastened and emphasised the Doc’s collapse. On the very first Friday he said himself that Baker had told him long ago he was a fool to have any thing to do with them. I at any rate am scared off anything mystical and abnormal and hysterical for a long time to come.

Maureen still in bed today, but her temperature only 99. After breakfast I finished Gulliver. It does not give me the horrors which the critics say it ought to—I fancy because it overshoots the mark. We know things aren’t so bad as all that. Just before lunch I tried my hand at some fourteeners—the idea of a Gulliver like poem having developed in that way. They were not a great success. If you make them regular, they deafen you: if not, the possible variations are so rich that it would take a better man than I to make order out of the chaos.

After lunch I bussed into town (a most beautiful afternoon) and went to the Union where I read most of the first book of Chapman’s Iliad. I had no idea what splendid stuff it was—tho’ it didn’t help me much in my metrical problem . . .

Saturday 18 March: . . . After lunch I sat down to work on ‘Dymer’. I had just started in high hopes, when I was called upstairs to help in fixing up the curtains in D’s rooms: which, having been fixed with rawlplugs, come down in an avalanche about once a week.

While I was doing this Dorothy announced that Sidney had come for a lesson. Heartily wishing her in Hong Kong I came down and did Latin with her for two hours. While we were working, Sheila Gonner called to see Maureen. After tea I heard that she had brought news that I need not take the Gonners’ mattress up this evening: of which I was very glad, as I was afraid the whole day would be lost . . .

Monday 19 March: Maureen still in bed . . . After supper I had to work very hard to get my essay done. Before going to bed D and I fell into a conversation about my position—not knowing whether I should stay in Oxford, whether we could get the Walters’ house, or whether we shd. take the Raymonds’. As the latter is in urgent need of repairs and as Raymond proposes to leave all repairs to us for three years and then return to the house, which we should almost have rebuilt, I regarded that as a trap. We agreed that I should go into town tomorrow to try and get information about the house in Woodstock Rd. from Brooks; and also see Carlyle and Stevenson about my prospects. D has a headache again—from darning stockings in the bad light in her room where she is now sitting with Maureen all afternoon and evening . . .

Wednesday 21 March: Pouring with rain this morning. I forgot to say that a copy of James Stephens’ Insurrections came for me yesterday, sent by Rob who has two and promised me one. They are very odd and in one sense not poems at all, but some of them have a good, tho’ eccentric flavour of their own: in matter they are chiefly easy pessimism of the sort I did in Spirits in Bondage, only I really think I did it better!

During this morning I went on with the Prelude. The drop after the fourth book is appalling . . .

In the Union I met Robson-Scott. He is up till Saturday and has moved into College, which he says is almost as full as in term time, with school boys up for Entrance, Responsions and Scholarships. He said that the rumour went that the new Mugger would certainly not be one of the fellows, as they all hated one another too much: nor would it be Carlyle, who was very unpopular, and, for that reason, had not been re-elected to his own fellowship. I suddenly conceived a violent loathing for all these creepy old charlatans—Allen with his sneer, Carlyle a mere sink of facts, the Farq. with his rather cruel looking face, flattering us all and a bit mad, the sentimental Mugger and all the rest: except Carritt and Steve whom I still think to be good fellows in their different ways . . .

Got home very tired and depressed: D made me have some tea. I told her (what had been on my mind all afternoon) that I didn’t feel very happy about the plan of staying here as a more or less unattached tutor. I do not want to join the rank of advertisements in the Union—it sounds so like the prelude to being a mere grinder all my days. If it wasn’t for Maureen I think I should plump for a minor university if possible. We had rather a dismal conversation about our various doubts and difficulties . . .

Thursday 22 March: After breakfast I walked into town. I went to Carritt’s room and returned his Aristotle. I then went and saw Stevenson, whom I found sitting in his rooms by a hot fire, very miserable with a bad throat and not able to talk much. I asked him what prospects there were of my being able to exist as a free lance tutor until something turned up. He said there was practically no such work to be had in my subject. Pupils were now so well looked after by their colleges that the thing was dying out . . .

He said he thought I was pretty sure to get a fellowship soon and went on to remark that Bourdillon was resigning his, and that it was quite possible that I might get it. In the mean time he advised me to get a job at a minor university: this would not put me out of the running for a fellowship, and if I were elected in September after being established elsewhere, I could still accept it and either defer my residence or put in a modicum at week ends etc. as he had done while holding a lectureship at Edinburgh. He thought it likely that College, after Bourdillon’s resignation, might decide to have an English don now that the English School was getting so popular. I remarked that I might very easily fail to get a first in English: he thought that would not matter with my previous record.

I left him and went to the Appointments Committee, now in Broad St., and asked about the Nottingham job . . . I then came home . . . and discussed the situation with D. We were both greatly depressed. If one cd. be sure of my coming back to a fellowship after a term or two at some minor University we could take the Woodstock Rd. house—but if not? And then again, if we all moved to some unearthly place and had to come back again after a short time, we should have lost the chance of a house here, interrupted Maureen’s work and had many expenses for nothing. It was certainly a damnably difficult situation.

Thence we drifted into the perennial difficulty of money, which would be far more acute if we had to separate for a time. When I began to work after lunch I was thoroughly bothered and found it hard at first to concentrate . . .

D and I had another very miserable conversation. She was afraid it might be her duty to stay at Oxford for Maureen’s music, wherever I went: I did not know how to answer this . . .

Sunday 25 March: A most delightful day—very mild—blue sky with moving clouds and a faint south wind . . . After lunch I rode out again. I went back to Prattle Wood by way of Marston and Water Eaton . . . I explored the wood much more fully today, and it is splendid. If I hadn’t been bothered with the short lived headache which comes on so often when I am out, I should have been in the seventh heaven. As it was I enjoyed it very much. I picked and brought home as many primroses as I could, but they are very few . . .

I found to my delight that D had been out on the golf links with Maureen and was in very good form. After tea I wrote to my father. As it was impossible to tell him what had really been happening during the Askins trouble, I had to account for my silence by a lie. I said I had had flu—which I consider justifiable because I have been going through something very much worse . . .

Monday 26 March: Another beautiful day. In the morning I read in Sweet and finished three acts of Othello. After lunch I biked into the Union where I read the whole of Santayana’s article on Lucretius . . . In my present mood, still remembering the Doc, Santayana’s almost aggressive sanity is very attractive, but I suspect it is but one more cul de sac . . .

In the evening there was an announcement in The Times inviting applications for a Research Fellowship at Exeter. Touch wood, but this looks a less wispy will-of-the-wisp than the others.

Tuesday 27 March: Worked on O.E. in the morning. After lunch I went up to Stile Rd. in Headington where Aunt Lily is now living and saw her . . . She is full of a recent ‘discovery’ which has carried her further, she says, than Bergson and Plotinus ever went. The discovery is that time consists in sacrifice: the continual annihilation of A to create B, the continual ‘making room’. But the essence of the world is also sacrifice: ergo time is the very essence of the world. She seemed to use God, Time and Being as synonymous . . .

When I was going she spoke very strongly about the brute Carr in Univ., who had been fined for setting dogs on cats and watching them worried. She said that if it hadn’t been for her relationship to me she would have sought him out and beaten him, adding ‘I once broke a man’s wrist with a horse whip.’ On the subject of pit ponies I mentioned the days when young children had crawled about pulling trolleys in the mines. She said she much preferred that: she had no sympathy with the children because they all grew up, and would grow up to be brutes themselves. I asked her if she did not mind cruelty to human beings. She said it did not affect her as cruelty to animals did: humans were less helpless and also they were so vile that they deserved less sympathy. I was very disgusted with her abominable confession . . .

Smudge was here for tea and told us that Walter’s house had been sold. This, coupled with last night’s will-of-the-wisp, inclined us again to the Raymonds’ house. I biked off at once into town and enquired at all the agents whether it was still easy to sublet houses in Headington. All the replies were favourable and after coming home again I went up and told Mrs Raymond that we wd. take it after all. Worked after supper and all merry.

Thursday 29 March: . . . I had tea in the Union. I also met Carlyle . . . I mentioned the Exeter Fellowship. He seemed to remember it as something which had temporarily escaped his notice and said he was very glad to know that I was going in for it. He thought I was just the man, and proceeded to give me some hints.

He said that what they particularly wanted in a candidate for a Research Fellowship was a definite programme. I told him the line I wanted to follow in Ethics: he seemed to approve . . . In the meantime he promised to see Marett of Exeter and get what he could out of him. . . .

I now repaired to the station in heavy rain and met W[arnie]:—who had brought a Leeborough suitcase. We left this in the Union and went and had some beer in the Mitre . . . We came out by taxi. After supper W and I gossiped for a while, but he was so sleepy that he soon went to bed. I went too, reluctantly leaving D downstairs, and Lord knows when she went to bed.

Friday 30 March: . . . After lunch I began Sidney Colvin’s Life of Keats and W also read a book. D sat alone in the dining room without a fire. This worried me and I came in to remonstrate with her. Unfortunately I asked her ‘not to make herself miserable’ and she misunderstood the words in a way that is easily understood but impossible to explain on paper. We came as near a quarrel as we ever do over this, which, coupled with the fact that she was thoroughly tired, made me very miserable.

As well, for no assignable reason, certainly through no fault of his, I found W’s society, which I had looked forward to with some pleasure, quite unbearable this time. His contented cynicism, his rejection of everything warm and generous and ideal, above all his constant and self conscious assumption of this Gryll’s attitude as if it were something to be kept up every moment at all costs—well for some reason I couldn’t stick it.

Saturday 31 March: This morning W and I walked into town. He had hoped for a ramble in the bookshops, but of course they were all shut. I got Typhoon (Conrad) and Havelock Ellis’s Kanga Creek out of the Union for him. He took me to have a drink at the Roebuck which they have completely altered since the old days when we used to frequent it.

Sitting there and drinking, as usual at his expense, I was quite worried at the change of my feelings towards him, as I remembered so many jolly sittings in the same place. Perhaps it is only the recent upset I have been through and may pass . . .

Sunday 1 April: . . . W took me to the Mitre and fed me with beer—for which, as it was now a very hot day, I was duly grateful. It is certainly a good trait in him that he puts up with our domestic life and he is always ‘generous’ in the narrower sense of the word: but I have been wretchedly strained and tired and depressed this time and can’t help feeling that I don’t want to see him soon again.

We bussed home to lunch. Afterwards we sat in the garden and I wrote three stanzas of the VIth Canto of ‘Dymer’—who is a year old today.

It was a delightful afternoon. D and Maureen went up to tea with the Raymonds. Later on W and I had ours alone in the garden. Afterwards I asked him whether he had any ready money and if he could lend us anything for the move. I heard to my amazement that (besides income) he had, or had had only £60 invested. The £500 which he had saved in the war had gone in the first year of peace when he had spent £1200: and had been paying off debts ever since . . . He said he was afraid the £60 was gone and all he could offer was a fiver in reply to an S.O.S. now and then. So closed one of the beastliest of the many beastly scenes I have been forced into by poverty.

Later on we went out for a stroll on the golf links. Coming back we found D and Maureen already at home, with the unexpected news that there are three purchasers after the Raymonds’ house and that Father Raymond has come down in his price and is probably going to settle it. I was very disappointed and realised that D wd. be very much more so—tho’ of course, from the money point of view, it is a momentary relief . . .

Monday 2 April: W departed by the 10.50 to attend a football match at Aldershot between the A.S.C. and some Scotch regiment. I bussed in with him and saw him off. Before leaving he told me to write to him in a few days and tell him whether the Raymonds’ house was definitely ‘off’: if not, he would set about trying to realise his elusive £60 . . .

I came home and sat in the back room with D, reading Colvin’s Keats till lunchtime. I must admit that the sense of being to ourselves again was very pleasant. Afterwards the sun came out and we both sat in the alley way. I finished Colvin and read Isabella, St Agnes, and the Odes. I am a bit scared of Keats for he could resume complete dominion over me with very little trouble . . .

Wednesday 4 April: Another warm day. By the first post came a letter from Harwood enclosing a proposed Epithalamion for Barfield and asking my opinion of it by return. I thought it quite tolerable tho’ far below his best, and replied telling him so.

There was also a card from Aunt Lily changing our engagement for today . . . I rode to Headington and saw Aunt Lily and explained that I couldn’t go today. We arranged for tomorrow instead and she kept me a considerable time. She talked about mutation. In her typical Hamilton way she thinks she has the secret of it—just as uncle Gussie thinks he anticipated Einstein. She says Bateson will never find it out by vivisection. As far as I understood her she thinks that a species gets into a low state through lack of differences, and then mutates producing variations whose wide diversity gives good crosses for healthy reproduction: it is best studied in corn . . .

Thursday 5 April: A very much colder day. Worked on O.E. all morning and succeeded in concentrating, but without interest . . . D had spent the morning boiling marmalade and was very tired and had a headache . . .

I went on to Stile Rd. and had supper with Aunt Lily. We talked of a great many subjects—I forget most of it—I am tired of her inhumanity.

Got home after ten and found D in the depths of despair, having had a particularly tantalising disappointment over the house. If we had gone yesterday we might have had it!—and for the amazingly low rent of £45 a year. It was every way delightful and we should have saved £60 a year. To add to our troubles Dorothy had come in with news that Miss Featherstone had spoken to her mother expressing a hope that we would let her have the house for three months in the summer. To bed late, after lamenting our luck.

Friday–Wednesday 6–11 April: On Friday I worked getting into shape a prospectus of my ethical work to show to Carritt. On Saturday morning there came by the second post a letter from Rob announcing the death of the Doc the day before from heart failure. I forget most of that day. Rob had said that the funeral would be at Richmond on Tuesday, but we heard later that it would be at Clevedon on Wednesday. Rob said that he had been unconscious at the end . . .

Tuesday was a bitterly cold day: I had an ear ache. Had great difficulty in getting together black things: I borrowed a black overcoat from Mr Taylor and had to get a new bowler from Walters. D and Maureen went at about six and I saw them off. Had a pretty miserable evening here: read Byron’s Beppo and Vision of Judgement (both good).

As I was to go by the 9.30 in the morning I told Dorothy to call me at 7.15 which turned out to be much too early. I had finished breakfast before eight and had to fill up the time by walking to the station . . .

Arriving at Bristol station I met Cranny who was coming to the funeral. His daughter was with him . . . I sat with them until D, Edie, Maureen and Grace turned up with wreaths and other grisly things—it is a natural idea of course, but why should lilies be spoilt for ever by these associations?

With them came a most distinguished man in a tall hat and clerical frock coat, with a white moustache: D’s brother Willie from Cavan where he has a parish. He is rather a hero in his own way, and his name has been twice on the death list of the irregulars.

Ourselves and the flowers took up so much room that we had to divide on getting into the train. I was with Willie and Cranny who talked clerical shop. It was half sleeting, half raining. We seemed to be a long time getting to Clevedon . . .

We had another long wait at the church—it is up on a hill and Arthur Hallam is buried there. At last the hearse arrived, and shortly after, the others. Cranny and Willie read the service. While we were waiting Cranny had been talking with me about immortality—neither of us very optimistic. Rob had remarked ‘a ditch at the back of Ypres is better than this’—I think he was right. Mary behaved very bravely. When it was over Rob and Willie stayed, the others went back to the flat by taxi: Cranny and I found our way back to the station and had tea in a stuffy little cake shop beside it . . .

Here followed a period of laziness, depression, irritation and constant anxiety about the future during which I gave up my diary together with most other things. D was very tired and depressed and had several sick turns. I had an interesting talk with Carritt, who preferred to my ethical scheme my other idea of a metaphysical critique of modern psychology. After several days of very hard work I made out a scheme from this which I submitted to J. A. Smith. He has not yet answered me—which adds to the fidgety atmosphere I have got into.

Preparations for moving to Hillsboro have meanwhile been going on. The furniture removers’ tender, under pressure from Rob, has come down to £28 and Willie has lent D £30. We are therefore able to do without W’s loan, for which, with great generosity, he raised, or prepared to raise, a mortgage on his life insurance. Wall papers have been selected—the other evening I turned over 2000 odd patterns for D in a huge book.

I have been working at O.E. and have also read Richard III, Twelfth Night, Timon of Athens, and The Phoenix and the Turtle. At the beginning of this time I finished my fair copy of ‘Foster’ to my satisfaction. Since then poetry has been below the horizon.

I have disgracefully accumulated arrears of correspondence—wh. is a fool’s game and leaves a permanent background of small worry in one’s mind. Maureen and I are taking phospherine. All this time the weather has been colder than during the winter, dust and wind alternating with foggy frosts. The spring blossom on the trees has disappeared.

Everything now depends on my getting the Exeter Fellowship.

Lewis kept no diary during 12–19 April.

Friday 20 April: A very cold day. I finished Beowulf and worked on the Battle of Maldon all morning . . .

I had meant to go into town: but I realised that I should have to go after tea anyway and as it was now a little sunny and pretending to be like spring again I walked to Iffley instead. My hope thus to cast off some of this idiotic stupid mood was disappointed and I did not much enjoy my walk . . .

Came back and found poor D busy darning—she also in pretty poor form. Maureen seems cheerful—but I think the giggly mood she is in is also another kind of collapse: for I get into it now and then myself and it is really very different from optimism . . .

I got into Hillsboro: the garden with the grass grown long and the general desertion was rather attractive. I found Tolley—a protégé of the fish mongers who is doing the paper—and plied him with innumerable questions from D. I then walked home by the barracks and the golf links. I had a Wordsworthian adventure—being asked for a penny in a woeful voice by two gypsy children who had been playing happily the minute before. Home again and after supper I finished The Battle of Maldon (good stuff) and began The Fall of the Angels.

In the evening I happened to tell D that I had dropped my diary pro tem. She was very opposed to it and urged me to begin again.

Saturday 21 April: Another cold morning. After breakfast D, Maureen and I went into Oxford taking with us Baker’s book of patterns from the shop. We went first to Elliston and Cavell’s and ordered paper for the hall, then to Baker’s and ordered paper for the bathroom. We then proceeded to the gas office in St Aldate’s to see about hiring a stove. Here they had nothing but elaborate new stoves with very small ovens, all of which could be had only on the hire purchase system. Apparently they are trying gradually to kill the established practise of hiring stoves. D tackled the man with her customary vigour and he admitted in the end that they had some older models for hire, which could be seen at the works in Speedwell St.

Thither accordingly we went through dreadful slums in clouds of driving dust. We came first into a yard full of the most appalling smell: then waited endlessly before a little window until D took the bull by the horns and opened a door marked private. We were thus finally taken some notice of and led into a place of sheds, steam, leaking pipes, and smells and scrap iron, where Maureen and I sat on a bench while D negotiated with the attendant spirits . . .

Sunday 22 April: . . . Immediately after breakfast Maureen and I set out for Hillsboro to paint . . . Tolley was painting the bathroom when I arrived and he abandoned it to me . . . The small quantity and bad quality of the work and the curious way in which he has done—nibbling now at one room and now at another has very much worried us: his behavior is so queer that we hardly know whether to call him dishonest or half witted. D decided that she must come up in the afternoon and investigate. After lunch I returned at once to the bathroom at Hillsboro and continued my painting, where I was presently joined by Maureen and later by D who had come up by bus.

After looking at the state of the house D felt pretty hopeless and we went to Windsor Terrace where Tolley emerged grinning and blinking from his Sunday afternoon’s sleep. D told him that at the present rate he would never get the place done in time. He said he was getting a man in tomorrow who would finish the ceilings in two days . . .

Tuesday 24 April: A glorious spring morning—very bright but cold—with a glass blue sky. Walked up to Hillsboro after breakfast and immediately began painting. They say everything will need two coats. I worked solidly till 1.15, by which time I had finished to the skirting, door, window sill and mantel piece of the drawing room. Tolley appeared at about noon, put in a stepladder through the cellar window and then disappeared. I came home to lunch and found that Dorothy had just cleared out the cupboard at the back of the stairs which D calls the ‘back of beyond’ . . .

Smudge, who had been playing duets with Maureen in the morning, was here for lunch. She has found out that tho’ she failed in Mods. she has passed in Anglo Greek. After lunch I bicycled up to Hillsboro and began work on the drawing room . . .

Wednesday 25 April: In the morning came a letter for D from Moppie. She is taking lessons in London and is apparently making no effort to get a summer job. Doubtless she intends to spend all her money and hang on us as a deadweight till September. I had a card from Jenkin acknowledging my apologies in the kindest possible terms—a contrast to the glum silence of the Bakers. It was a wet morning, but the greenery looked and smelled delightful in the rain.

After breakfast I walked up to Hillsboro. I painted the hall door and most of my own room . . . Before leaving I again asked Tolley what he proposed to do about the holes in the ceiling of D’s room and of Andrée’s. He assured me that they would be done with ‘mortar and adamantine’—with which truly Aeschylean phrase I departed . . .

Friday 27 April: I dreamed first that I was sitting in the dusk on Magdalen Bridge and there met Jenkin: then I went up a hill with a party of people. On the top of the hill stood a window—no house, a window standing alone, and in the sashes of the window a sheep and a wolf were caught together and the wolf was eating the sheep. The wolf then disappeared from my dream and one of my friends began to cut up the sheep which screamed like a human being but did not bleed. Afterwards we proceeded to eat it . . .

This morning I worked on O.E. After lunch at about three o’clock, all three of us proceeded to go into town. I had to carry in the wringer, a miniature mangle which we have never used and which we are trying to sell to Eaglestons or give in part exchange for a lawn mower. It was a very heavy load and I had to carry it under my arm with its long crank projecting behind, rather like a bagpipe—greatly to Maureen’s delight. We got rid of the monstrosity at Eaglestons and went on to the gas office where we ordered the stove . . .

I left the others and went to College where I found that Sadler had that day been made Master. I met Ewing in the porch—emerged from his burrow for the Exeter Fellowship no doubt. Thence I went to Manor Place, where I found Wilson and Robson-Scott finishing tea. Robson had been at Stratford to see the festival performance of Measure for Measure and Midsummer Night’s Dream, of which he spoke very highly indeed. We discussed the Birmingham performance of Cymbeline in modern clothes. Wilson thought it a mere freak. We decided that the Merry Wives would have worked best and had an amusing discussion of the proper costume of Falstaff—we fixed on a very old blazer and plus fours in the end. After Robson had withdrawn Wilson dictated a collections paper to me and arranged for a tutorial hour . . .

Lewis kept no diary during 29 April–21 May.

Tuesday 22 May: After my last entry there followed a period so busy and on the whole so miserable that I had neither time nor heart to continue my diary, nor poetry, nor pleasant effort of any sort.

Our move to ‘Hillsboro’ was carried out according to plan: but our friend Tolley (whom we had to turn off) had left so much undone and so much to undo that we had to put off the arrival of the furniture for a fortnight. The interval of ‘camping’—helped by a spell of delightful weather—was not so uncomfortable as I expected and we sat down so seldom that the scarcity of furniture, borrowed from Miss Featherstone, was hardly noticed. The garden was a great joy and there were some pleasant moments when we saw our chosen wall papers going up and the Raymond atmosphere gradually defeated.

We naturally hoped more and more intensely every day that we should get the Exeter Fellowship: but Carritt told me just before I sent my papers in that Joseph of New College said it was a dud election—they had a candidate of their own already picked out for it. This disappointment threw me into a very childish rage against the old men and I believe I really understood how the Queen Anne satirists used to feel. I have now got over it . . .

So far I have not been caught by Aunt Lily. Warnie was here for the Whitsun week end and departed yesterday: this time I thoroughly enjoyed his visit, although it has unsettled me with acute envy of the comfortable, care free, pleasant life by which he has solved the problem of existence: vobis parta quies. I think I have the curse of something of my father’s luck and temperament and shall be in a fidget as long as I am above ground.

On Sunday last I dined at the High Table at Magdalen. I have had a charming letter from Harwood. He and Beckett and Baker are going for a walking tour on the Sussex downs—which sounds to me like a rumour of heaven heard this side of the great gulf.

The weather has been mostly cold and wet all this time. Today I worked all morning on a paper for Miss Wardale and on O.E. . . . I came home thinking of the possibility of a modern Ariosto: at first I thought of adventures in far lands but soon realised that London is really the modern equivalent of the forest of romances. I thought a story of impossible and complex adventures in London in the spirit of old romance, as modern as Don Juan but not so satiric, might be made very good. In the evening I read The Testament of Cresseid and part of The Flower and the Leaf with much enjoyment.

D is naturally rather tired and worried these days.

Wednesday 23 May: Biked to Miss W at 11.45 and had my usual tutorial . . . I then came home, having taken three volumes of Johnson’s Lives [of the Poets] from the English Library. I changed and sat down in the drawing room to read the life of Savage and wait for Ewing whom I have had to ask to tea.

He was with me at Univ. in 1917, when he was known as the Rabbit and was, I’m afraid, everyone’s butt. He is a First in Mods. and Greats, a John Locke scholar, a senior demi of Magdalen, and a Doctor of Philosophy. He is standing for the Exeter fellowship. He is a very small man, usually dressed in a neat, old fashioned style with a stiff collar and a watch chain, and a strange, quick, jerky action suggestive of a Robot, which results I believe from some nervous weakness and saved him from the war. He has a smooth pinkish face, prominent teeth and a little moustache and speaks in a shrill falsetto. He is a non smoker. No one has ever been able, to my knowledge, to establish a personal contact with him: he is the standing example of intellect in the narrowest sense and industry, but without wisdom, imagination, or humour. Perhaps I am misjudging him. We talked mainly about philosophy. He said he had met Pilly of Exeter who is supposed to be the pet candidate for the fellowship . . .

Thursday 24 May: I spent the morning working on Johnson’s Lives and on Hurd in the drawing room, which I begin to like very much. After lunch I biked in to town, took Warton’s life of Pope from the English Library and went to the Union where I worked on Addison. I had tea there.

Coming home I found Jenkin and allowed myself to be persuaded to accompany him up Shotover with bikes. Just before lunch I had thought of a new stanza (aabccbcb) which pleased me very much: this set me talking to him about the Ariosto idea. He disapproved of it saying that the only romance anyone would expect or tolerate in such a poem would be a sexual one, and anyway why not do it in prose.

A very funny conversation followed. We rested at a gate on the Horsepath lane looking east. It was a sunny evening, the Chilterns very blue and transparent in the distance. Jenkin said he always perceived rather than felt this kind of scenery to be beautiful. He hinted at the danger he was now in of becoming a scholar, a mere potterer: I thought the danger rather real specially as he is a Celt and therefore chosen by nature to effect nothing. As it was now too late for him to get supper in Hall I asked Jenkin to sup with us. It is very strange that a man who is in every way so well bred should eat so noisily . . .

Friday 25 May: . . . I worked all morning on my essay for Wilson very busily, curarum oblitus. After lunch I biked in to him, for he had changed my time till 2.30. We had a capital hour, more literary chat than tutorial. I made him give me a correct list of the papers I am really taking in Schools, with which I hastened to the Assistant Registrar’s office. . . .

After an early supper I bussed in to the Discussion Class . . . At Exeter when I arrived in Coghill’s rooms I found Martley alone and asked him ‘what had happened on the river’—in order to appear normal and interested. He however after some reply asked me what had happened to Univ. the day before—which completely non-plussed me. Coghill himself had left a note for Gordon and was not there.

Lloyd Jones, a fool who spoke in the Farnell debate, read very badly a bad paper on Swift.

The discussion afterwards was pretty interesting. My remark that literature which simply gave vent to passions, literature born of conation not of imagination and tending to vicarious satisfaction rather than truth was all to be treated as pornography whatever passion I dealt with, raised strong opposition from Bateson, and Robson-Scott. Martley, backed by Gordon, held the balance and said that there must be a little of both in most literature. I saw afterwards that they were right. Martley told me that Bateson was the editor of Oxford Poetry this year, and for a moment I thought of sending something in: but soon decided that it was a puerile wish . . .

When we were leaving Gordon called me to him in the street. He said he had heard that I was standing for the Exeter Fellowship and could he give me a recommendation or help me in any way. I thanked him profusely and explained that I already had the only ones I was allowed.

He said he had dined at Magdalen lately where they had talked about me and ‘thought very highly of me. Price had been elected because he was a little more mature, and even so they had been very doubtful.’ I thanked him again and said with a silly giggle ‘I have got my two official references and I suppose informal references are hardly fair’—an odious remark as I realised a moment later . . .

Monday 28 May: A rather better night, though I was awake with my cough for some time when it was just getting light—with the result that when I did get to sleep I overslept and woke up with a headache and feeling rather stupid. At supper last night I had felt my weak gland in the throat beginning to swell: but thank the Lord it was no worse today, though it had got enormous when I was coughing during the night . . . D got hold of me and took my pulse and temperature. The latter was alright but the pulse was ‘very fast’ and I agreed to stay in by the fire as it was a bitterly cold day of wind and rain.

I decided to give up work and have a real day off in the hope that this would rid me of my long lethargy. I read Ovid’s Metamorphoses most of the day, beginning at the beginning and reaching the Pyramus story in Book IV. I used no dictionary but with the aid of the very full and very quaint Latin notes by five Germans in my edition I was hardly ever stumped . . . The style is a little affected but what really matters is the genuine narrative power and the scenery—the latter, quâ scenery, hardly to be bettered in any ancient poet. The speeches are not so rhetorical, in the bad sense, as I have been led to believe: in fact they give just so much sense of reality and passion as is needed for this kind of holiday poem—far better than most of the speeches in The Faerie Queene . . .

Tuesday 29 May: . . . As we were at supper Jenkin came in and afterwards he and I sat in the drawing room. He began by showing me an article of his which had been rejected by the Daily Mail: a description of a night in a mine, much too good for his market and not highly coloured enough.

From that we passed on to a discussion of the horror play in which we are thinking almost seriously of collaborating. It is to turn on the idea of a scientist who discovers a means of keeping the brain and motor nerves alive in a corpse by means of injections. The victim is kept in cold storage but occasionally allowed a turn round the house, wearing a mask: the scientist tells people he is a poor fellow whose face was badly smashed in the war. He is always sitting over fires and complaining of being cold and always being chased away by the scientist for obvious reasons.

The hero and heroine find the corpse lying in a box room in its coffin packed in ice: but there will be a long leading up to the moment at which they realise that the corpse upstairs and the figure they have seen wandering about the house are one and the same. The heroine of course has been designed as the scientist’s next victim: the play turns on her escape.

Jenkin had seen in the Bodleian this morning the man whom we shall take for our model of the scientist. He had a bright red beard, Mephistophelian in shape but reaching to his waist, very thick lips and one leg shorter than the other. We were half tempted by the idea of a much better and clearer play about Helen as Thaïs redeemed by Simon Magus, but realised that that would have to be real literature and returned to our shocker.

We discussed all this, appropriately, till near eleven in a dark room beside a moribund fire. Later we drifted into a different vein talking of the futility of most things: the outgrowing of half gods without the courage to face real ones . . .

Thursday 31 May: After breakfast I started work on my essay on Cowper and Crabbe but soon found that I could not go much further without more fuel. I biked into town in a cold wind and took two volumes of Crabbe’s and Cowper’s moral satires from the Union.

Before leaving town I looked (according to my invariable custom) into the Exeter porch to see if the result of the election had yet been announced. Though I have no grounds for any hope I have enough childish clinging to the hundredth chance to make this daily visit, in the long run, very trying to the nerves . . .

Friday 1 June: . . . Rink . . . asked me if I should like a free seat for the Folk Dancing tomorrow. I replied that I really did not understand that sort of thing: I could be said to like dancing only as a girl who picnicked in a ruin could be said to like architecture.

. . . Coming back to College I heard with interest what is I suppose my nickname. Several Univ. people whom I don’t know passed me. One of them, noticing my blazer, must have asked another who I was, for I heard him answer ‘Heavy Lewis’.

At 4.30 I went to Wilson where we had a most interesting hour. I forget how we drifted away from Crabbe and Cowper, but we ended by agreeing that Wordsworth and Shakespeare had this curious point in common—that in their great passages neither had any style that you could call their own.

I biked home, had supper, and bussed in to Exeter. A small gathering [at the Discussion Class]—Gordon, Strick, Martley, Coghill, Wynn, Bateson and Payne.

Strick read us his paper on Tragedy. Tho’ I recant no former opinion of the absurdities in Strict, I was amazed at the excellence of his paper. It was more on life than on letters. He defined Tragedy as the irreparable and inquired if it were real, rejecting the views of Bradley and Bosanquet. He also enquired if indignation against the Demiurge were an essential or an accident of tragedy. The essence seemed to him to be the frustration of an act of faith: every tragic hero was a person who gave of himself lavishly, who chose (this choice was always unfree) to trust the dynasts and got evil or nothing in return. There was some good discussion on the points which he had deliberately left open. Later we drifted to talking of Masefield and then to war reminiscences between Gordon, Strick, Coghill and me.

Coghill then produced some port to celebrate our last meeting, and we drank Gordon’s health. I for one drank with great sincerity, for he is an honest, wise, kind man, more like a man and less like a don than any I have known. My opinion of him was rather low at first and has gone up steadily ever since . . .

Saturday 2 June: I decided to take today and tomorrow off, preparatory to a severe week of revision. After breakfast I went out for a walk—a thing I have not done for a long time. I had thought it an ordinary day but I discovered that tho’ cool and grey and full of damp, it was an ‘alive’ coolness with a sort of heat underneath—in fact that it was summer after all . . .

Coghill did not come till five—he had been doing papers for some College prize which he is taking in his stride. We both praised Strick’s paper, but Coghill pointed out that Strick’s talk yesterday was as silly as any other day—in fact ‘he writ like an angel and talked like poor Poll’.

We talked of co-education, of which he is a very violent opponent: then of the education of boys in the earlier stages. I reminded him that looking back in one’s own life one found so many things exercising influence or failing to influence in a way which no other person could anticipate or believe, that one was reduced to despair: one could calculate nothing.

This led to discussion of psychoanalysis—did not that also discourage one from ‘influencing’ young boys? He was rather silly about psychoanalysis, adopting really the position that it couldn’t be true because ‘how unpleasant if it were’. He laughed at himself when this was pointed out, and took the much firmer ground that sympathy and commonsense would carry you through most difficulties if you were made to be a teacher.

He is an admirer of Meredith’s and thinks Modern Love a great poem. I said I had never read it. He also writes poetry himself—of rather a subtle and social kind I gathered, chiefly sonnets. We compared notes over methods of work. He is going to try a longer piece in the next vac. and proposes to show it to Wilson. I agreed that Wilson’s criticism would be valuable but admitted that I had not the face to do it.

I said my own line was chiefly narrative: he stated that he didn’t care for narrative and then made exceptions in favour of Paradise Lost, The Earthly Paradise, Don Juan, Troilus and Cresseide, The Ancient Mariner.

I discovered that he is a nephew of the ‘Somerville’ in Somerville and Ross. He was at Haileybury. He left at 7.30 after a (to me) very interesting time.

I like and admire this man so far as I can judge: but the funny thing is that in recording this conversation I have had to control a tendency to misrepresent him all through. Which is what never happened to me before since I kept a diary, and I do not know the explanation . . .

Sunday 3 June: A real summer day at last and quite hot. I played a game of croquet with Maureen in the morning and she won. Afterwards I read Ovid in the garden till lunch time. After lunch I began the New Arabian Nights, reading the ‘Suicide Club’ and the ‘Rajah’s Diamond’. I thought them very good in their style: the humorous part in the diamond story especially. After tea I played another game of croquet with Maureen and beat her.

I then went over to see Aunt Lily, shamefully taking my bicycle that I might seem to come from away. She is very full of a new book she has discovered—Space and Individuality, by a Scotch minister called Allan. She says he is greater than Bergson. I was of course sceptical about this, but it looks really interesting . . .

Monday 4 June: Hard at revision all day except between lunch and tea when I walked into town.

Tuesday 5 June: The same. Worked in the Union in the afternoon. The drawing room has (to my mind) been spoiled and Victorianised today by lace curtains.

Thursday 7 June: The same. Into town in the afternoon where I met Robson-Scott and we stood nearly half an hour in the High comparing notes and anyone wd. have laughed to see us stumping one another with strange bits of knowledge: not in the least from malice, but to acquire a kind of Dutch courage.

Saturday 9 June: In town in the morning and called on Coghill to find out our times. Found him closeted with Strick doing O.E. Strick seems to know very little but talked well. To my remark that there was no evidence of Chaucer’s having read Langland he retorted ‘There’s no evidence of your having read Chaucer,’ wh. was good.

Memorised all afternoon. D gardening. High wind still blowing.

After supper I read Antony and Cleopatra—the most intelligible play in the world—clear through like a theorem—and lovely.

Wednesday 13 June: Dined in the Senior Common Room with Carritt, Stevenson, and the Greats men of this year, who seemed rather a dull lot. Carritt and Steve very jolly and agreeable . . . Stevenson had a good story from Wilson about an American pupil who had brought him an essay on Falstaff beginning ‘I’ve no use for Falstaff. He isn’t a white man and the way he talks to Mrs Quickly gets my goat. No gentleman would do it.’

I left very early. I took white wine instead of red at dinner for the first time and liked it very much but I have forgotten its name.

It was during 14–19 June that Lewis took examinations in the Final Honour School of English. Candidates were required to show competent knowledge of the English language at all periods, including Old and Middle English, and of English literature.

Thursday 14 June: Began Schools today. Old English in the morning. The translation and literary questions were alright but I could make no serious attempt at the grammar despite all my painful memorising and did the worst paper I have ever done since I came up.

I saw Payne, Martley and Coghill afterwards and they were all equally dejected. Lunched in College on tongue and beef with salad.

In the afternoon we had history of the language which was even worse: and even when I got a question on Milton wh. I knew, my memory deserted me and I could do nothing. I realised what Schools must be like to the unhappy dunces and felt like Lear—‘I have not thought of this enough.’

Biked home and mowed the lawn in the evening.

Friday 15 June: Middle English in the morning. To my great surprise this was quite a good paper with the exception of the one compulsory language question and I think I did really well. In the afternoon we did Chaucer and again I was very satisfied. I did rather badly in the gobbets but everyone I spoke to seemed to have done even worse. Biked home and gardened in the evening.

Saturday 16 June: No paper in the morning. I spent most of the time clipping and cutting straight the border of the lawn.

After lunch I biked in to Schools and did a paper on the age of Shakespeare which I thought most perverse and unfairly set. The Spenser question was tied up by asking you to compare Spenser with any other non dramatic poet of the period. I took the non dramatic Shakespeare and Marlowe, tho’ I doubt if they will allow it: tho’ I think they will have to give me some credit for the tons of Spenserian quotation and appreciation which I flung at them. I did a good answer on Bacon and also on Sydney’s Daniel.

Afterwards I met Coghill who bade me and Strick to tea . . . We all condemned what Coghill called this bloodstained paper. Coghill read us the Decameron version of the Reeve’s Tale which is very good. Strick is very despondent and silent and pleaded guilty when I rallied him for a victim of wanhope.

Sunday 17 June: Spent most of the day reading Waverley which I shall always like because I first read it at Old Cleve in that one glorious month which is worth all the hard years we have had since—almost since Bookham days.

Monday 18 June: Paper on Shakespeare and Milton in the morning. I was bad, as I expected to be, on Shakespeare. The Milton questions were set with cruel malice and I revenged myself by doing them, I think, very well indeed—this being the one question on which even Simpson’s ingenuity cannot beat me.

In the afternoon we had a paper on the Seventeenth Century. Like the Age of Shakespeare it was well tied up—Bunyan coupled with Shadwell so that one’s knowledge of Bunyan might have no credit. It is of a piece with the whole school: neither for Mods nor Greats did I ever meet cads for lecturers and malicious papers as I have done in this. I hope more than ever for a first, if only to defeat the old men.

Afterwards I had tea with Jenkin in Merton St. He showed me the diary of Dr Dee who was a noted astrologer and occultist. It was very funny, tho’ very natural, that his diary should consist almost entirely of the most hum drum and ordinary events.

Tuesday 19 June: Paper on the Eighteenth Century in the morning, the first really catholic and comprehensive one we have had—tho’ even this left out Johnson: no disappointment to me, but bad examining all the same.

At lunch a little dark man whose name I don’t know but whom I met at the Greats dinner sat opposite me. He talked to me about ordinary things till the end of the meal and then asked ‘What is this Fellowship at Exeter which has just been awarded?’ ‘Oh, has it?’ said I. I then heard that Mr Studdert Clarke of Balliol had got it. I rather disliked the way in which my informant had broached it: perhaps after all it was only his way of ‘breaking’ the news and I am beginning to suffer from a conspiracy complex.

After I had left hall and was in the porch, up comes Ewing pattering along like a little dog under the shade of his large homburg hat, swinging his watch chain: shows his teeth, titters, looks as if he were going to trot away again and suddenly blurts out in a high falsetto ‘I suppose we shall have to condole with each other now.’

On my way back to School I met Coghill who told me that Strict had had a nervous breakdown. In the afternoon an easy paper on the nineteenth century which I did pretty badly because it was easy and tempted you to impossible undertakings . . .

Wednesday 20 June: . . . I biked down Cowley Road to Strick’s address at 390, which is one of the new white council houses beyond Magdalen Rd. I found him in bed. He is not allowed to read, stammers a good deal, is pale and drained dry of all good. Luckily the trouble seems to have gone to his stomach and produced no ‘horrors’. He was obviously not fit to talk and I soon came away.

Rode home and read Wycherley’s Country Wife before lunch. The Country Wife herself is really funny: but I must admit the sulphurous brutality of all the characters is about as much as I can stomach. Clever stuff.

After lunch I rode out to Stanton St John and tried to find my way into the woods where I once went with Baker. The fields were very beautiful with the yellow weed. I could not find the wood. I was depressed: full of worries and near the kingdom of Wanhope—or Dulcarnon. I went into a church in the village and in quite a whimsical mood tried Sortes Virgilianae out of a Prayer Book. The answer well repaid me for my tomfoolery, for the first thing I saw was an injunction to administer the sacraments in the sense etc. etc. I came out: surveyed with interest the tomb of Mary Annie Lewis, whoever she was, and rode home.

Found D and Dorothy polishing in D’s room. Had hardly left them when I heard an awful crash and rushed back thoroughly frightened and half believing that the wardrobe had fallen on D. I found however that it was only she herself who had fallen and hurt her elbow: she was badly shaken. All attempts to get her to stop polishing and rest on her laurels were treated in the usual way. After tea she went on again and said I could not help: finally she came down quite breathless and exhausted.

This put me into such a rage against poverty and fear and all the infernal net I seemed to be in that I went out and mowed the lawn and cursed all the gods for half an hour. After that (and it was about as far down as I have got yet) I had to help with rolling linoleums and by the time we got to supper a little before ten, I was tired and sane again.

Decided at whatever cost of labour to start my diary rigorously again, wh. has been dropped during Schools, as I think the day to day continuity helps one to see the larger movement and pay less attention to each damned day in itself . . .

Thursday 21 June: After breakfast I wrote up arrears of diary since the 9th. When I had finished that I went upstairs and laid linoleums in the odd corners of D’s room which were still bare. This took me till lunch.

Immediately after lunch I went round to Stile Road and saw Aunt Lily. She is not going to Stratford after all but has taken an unfurnished house beyond Gt. Milton for £25 a year: the curious thing being that her landlord will turn her out in three months if his beloved agrees to marry him, but he has proposed so often before that he thinks Aunt Lily will have every chance of staying.

I remarked, in answer to some question, how rushed I had been by the shortened time in wh. I had taken this School. She said ‘Why did you?’ and that it wasn’t fair either to my father or myself, who had nothing to do with his money and only wanted to keep me there. I said that, on the contrary, he wanted to retire: she said that W and I had been provided for and my father had been in a position to retire long ago before my mother’s death but she (my mother) had persuaded him to continue his police court work and make more. Who knows? She then told me some very funny yarns about the Suffern family. . . .

After tea I walked through old Headington, down the cemetery lane and joining Elsfield Rd. near the bridge and cross road: then up to Elsfield and home across the fields with great pleasure. When I emerged into Western Rd. again it was beginning to rain and I almost ran into Aunt Lily who stood looking into the shop window at the corner. I passed straight on and trusted to luck that she would either not look round or would not recognise my back. I ‘fetched a compass’ thro’ Windmill Rd. and round again and this time succeeded in getting home . . .

Friday 22 June: In the morning I read Venice Preserved which contains more loathsome sentimentality, flat language, and bad verse than I should have imagined possible.

Later I scraped and began to stain the exposed passages of floor in the hall, which was work both hot and hard. After lunch I finished the hall and did the same for the drawing room and helped D with some changes of furniture in the dining room. Sheila Gonner and Helen Munro were here for tea and I made a fourth at croquet with them afterwards. It was a warmish day with a pleasant wind.

At six I walked out to find a new field path that I had heard of . . . This brought me up hill beside a very fine hedge with wild roses in it. This, in the cool of the evening, together with some curious illusion of being on the slope of a much bigger hill than I really was, and the wind in the hedge, gave me intense pleasure with a lot of vague reminiscences . . .

Saturday 23 June: A glorious summer day at last. After breakfast I biked to Margaret Rd. and saw Miss Wardale and went over my language papers. She thought them ‘unexpected’ and had been making representations to Craigie. His question, ‘Give the definite forms of the adjective’ was unintelligible to her. She said I ought to come through alright on my translation and thought I should probably be viva’d on my literary papers, while advising me to look up the grammar as a precaution . . .

At quarter to five Jenkin arrived for tea, bringing his mother as had been arranged. She is a very cheery old soul and was soon going off in fits of ‘inextinguishable laughter’. After tea we sat in the garden and I tried to teach Jenkin croquet. Time passed on and after a very complicated discussion they agreed to stay to supper—I mean there was some difficulty which induced them to stay on as they wd. not probably otherwise have done, but what it was all about I couldn’t gather. Supper was an uproarious meal, recalling Arthur’s visits . . .

Monday 25 June: After making up my diary I had a look at the fourth canto of ‘Dymer’ and got some ideas for a better ending. As I had promised to paint this morning, I then had to leave it. It took me till lunch time painting the two hall doors and some things in the bathroom.

After lunch I set out to bike to Aunt Lily’s new abode at Lower Farm, Thame Road. It was a case of ‘heaven uphalt but ugly thereunder’ when I started and had developed into a Scotch mist before I arrived. Her new cottage is in rather dull and flat country, but being absolutely surrounded by meadow, is rather attractive. The railway is in sight, and Aunt Lily agrees with me about the romance of a train in a lonely place.

She had provided strawberries and cream. We talked chiefly about Archibald Allan and she showed me the letter he had written her—a letter very like the book except that it was much more dogmatic and appeared to be the work either of a fool or of a confident genius.

I biked home in torrents of rain. Later I played croquet with Maureen. She got an enormous lead but threw most of it away and I nearly won in the end. After supper I wrote two new stanzas for ‘Dymer’—I think they will do. D in good form.

Tuesday 26 June: This morning I biked into town and called on Wilson whom I found newly returned from a long week end. We discussed Schools. Apparently the Spenser question in the Age of Shakespeare was marked compulsory by a printer’s error and the examiners have their tails very much between their legs over it. He agreed that this was a rotten question. He promised to try and get me some work examining for the Oxford Local, but warned me that it was probably too late. He is to come to tea on Thursday . . .

Wednesday 27 June: Went to my own room after breakfast and re-copied the whole of Canto V with the alterations and additions. It is I hope very much improved: at any rate it was delightful to have a whole morning’s self pleasing work on poetry after so long . . .

After lunch I went out. It was now very warm after a misty morning and the flies were troublesome. I walked nearly to Forest Hill by the field path and then turned into the road and left it again at the stile on my right beyond the turn to Forest Hill. From here the path led up through a field where the mowers were at work and there was a first rate smell: then up by the side of a spinney through a field alive with rabbits, most of them mere babies who let me get quite close to them. Of the full grown ones I was amused to notice how some would always sit out and face me a good minute after the commonalty had galloped into the spinney . . .

I came home after a very enjoyable walk, but disappointingly tired and with a headache—wh. I thought a poor reward for my recent drastic reductions in smoking . . .

Thursday 28 June: To my own room after breakfast where I began an opening for a new Canto introducing the semi-Kirkian character who has been in my mind lately. Some stanzas of colloquial dialogue wrote themselves with extraordinary ease and for the times I was pleased with them . . .

Wilson came shortly before five and he and I had tea in the garden. We talked of wounds, pensions, income tax, and Farquharson: Wilson agreed with the usual view of the latter’s insincerity, but doubted if he were quite sane. I asked him if he cared for Doughty. He had read only The Cliffs and thought poorly of it. Of Childe Harold he said he had enjoyed it very much as a kind of verse guide book after visiting some of the scenes. He is a great admirer of Bridges. He asked me if I wrote poetry and I said that I did. I wondered if this was an opening made for me at Coghill’s mediation but I hardly felt justified in taking it that way . . .

Friday 29 June: A glorious day and the best we have had yet. After breakfast I sat in the garden and tried to go on with ‘Dymer’: I was soon displeased with the colloquial dialogue and judged the Kirkian figure both beyond me and unnecessary—I must beware of too much philosophy . . .

I turned along Cowley Road and went on beyond Garsington to a turn to Cuddesdon. By the roadside I met a man hedging who had a white beard and a scarlet face. He shouted out to me ‘It’s a warm day sir!’ and burst into roars of laughter. I said yes, but we wanted rain. He said ‘That we do sir!’ and went off into huge guffaws again. It did one good to look at him . . .

Saturday 30 June: I dreamed several people in the English School, of whom Martley was the most conspicuous, including myself, had done very badly in the exam and been imprisoned in a kind of barracks as a punishment. The dream was chiefly occupied by my adventures in a strange town into which I got leave to go for a few hours.

After breakfast I cleared out all the furniture from the dining room and sand papered the varnish off the floor preparatory to staining . . . Just as I was finishing D’s room I was brought down in a great fright by a noise in the garden and found that D had had a bad fall in the garden: having tripped over some bundles of pea stakes. Providentially she had not hurt her ankle. She was badly shaken and I begged her to stop gardening—uselessly of course. I then went back and finished my staining. After that I had the garden to water. Supper about 10.45. I was very tired and had a bad headache.

Today came a very decent letter from my father discussing the future and offering to keep me here some years longer if I thought it advisable.

The post-war ‘bulge’ of men reading for degrees and looking for jobs was at its worst, and Lewis had already failed to secure a Fellowship in Philosophy at two colleges. He was now facing the prospect that even with a Double First in Classics and a possible First in English it might be some time before a Fellowship fell vacant. Because of this, his tutor, F. P. Wilson, suggested that he work towards a post-graduate degree. Albert offered to extend his son’s allowance for some time longer, and Jack wrote to him on 1 July explaining his position:

‘The number of other hungry suitors with qualifications equal to mine, tho’ not very large, is large enough to put up a well filled “field” for every event: and the number of vacancies depends, as in other spheres, on all sorts of accidents.

‘What it comes to is that there is a pretty healthy chance here which would, on the whole, be increased by a few years more residence in which I should have time to make myself more known and to take some research degree such as B.Litt. or Doc. Phil. and which would be, perhaps, indefinitely or permanently lost if I now left. On the other hand, even apart from the financial point of view, I very keenly realise the dangers of hanging on too long for what might not come in the end. Speaking, for the moment, purely for myself, I should be inclined to put three years as a suitable term for waiting before beating a retreat,’ Letters of C. S. Lewis (Revised Edition), p. 185.

Tuesday 3 July: Woke very tired this morning and with some headache: a cool grey day. There was no job to be found for me after breakfast so I sat in the garden hoping to get over my tiredness. This of course was the worst thing I could do, and I tried to write ‘Dymer’ and read Wordsworth equally in vain. I managed however to read the next story in Rubezahl. I find German, particularly in fairy tales, a language saturated with romance—it smells good . . .

Read a little more Ovid in the evening and am now in the middle of Orpheus’ song. I feel that Ovid’s powers are much greater than he shows: if only he had bucked up and kept clear of dirt and rhetoric and stuck to the pure fabling at which he is unsurpassed: he is a literary waster.

Wednesday 4 July: I spent most of the morning with D seeing to the stair carpet. We were chiefly concerned with the mathematical problem of making a right angled corner in a straight strip of carpet. D managed it in the end by the help of a model in folded paper—very cunningly I thought. Later on I gave first coatings to the worst parts of the stairs.

After lunch I biked to town via Divinity Road and Cowley Road in order to change a cheque at Robertson’s. As I came down past Warneford Road I thought how quickly those parts had changed . . . I wondered that they had not been more unpleasant to live in than they were—for indeed they looked very squalid today.

(This set me thinking of all our different homes, and most of them vile, since 1919. They were, (1) Miss Featherstone’s at 28 Warneford Rd. when I first came up and was living in College. That was during the very cold winter when Miss Drew was coming to teach Maureen.

(2) Mrs Adam’s, Invermore, a very jolly little house, but very small and with no bathroom. We did a lot of gardening there that summer. There Rob came to stay with us in a very bad state of nerves, contemplating suicide, and used to keep D up nearly all night talking. Arthur also came and got ill and that was the first time he and D met. There I wrote and destroyed over seven hundred lines of a poem on Medea.

(3) Mrs Morris’s in [76] Windmill Road where we had two rooms and I slept on a sofa. The Morris’s had been in India—he was an engine driver. She was mad I think, and gave us an account of the centaur (she didn’t call it centaur of course) ‘with the most beautiful face you ever saw’ that came begging round her bungalow in India.

(4) Rooms (called a flat) at Mrs Jeffrey’s in [58] Windmill Road, where we were bullied and slandered and abused and so haunted by that butcher woman with her stone coloured funny face that D and I dreamed of her for months afterwards. Here Cranny came to see us first and here I first read The Prelude. Just before I left this I took Mods.

(5) Then came one month at Old Cleeve in a cottage smothered in flowers, where I walked every day on the big moors and this was the happiest four weeks of my life. There I wrote the blank verse version of ‘Nimue’.

(6) Courtfield Cottage where we had rooms with that filthy whore Mrs Marshall and her daughter got diphtheria.

(7) Lindon Cottage on the other side of Headington where we were very happy for a time.

(8) Old Cleeve were we had rooms with the Hobbs. It was a cold summer and D had a very miserable time there while I was ‘doing time’ in Ireland.

(9) Miss Featherstone’s again where we remained until the beginning of this diary.) . . .

Thursday 5 July: A glorious summer day. In the morning I read Rubezahl in the garden. A Miss Bone, a possible P.G., had written to say she would come and see D this evening so our afternoon was spent in clearing out the yellow room and putting it to rights—hanging pictures and curtains, airing blankets and the like. We had tea late, after I had had a cold bath and changed.

Later on Jenkin appeared. He has been up again since Saturday but protested that he had not had a moment to come to Headington. Our talk was not very exciting. He said that the authorities here loved nothing better than to keep young men who were promising hanging on for research degrees and so forth all their life, if possible, with vague promises of work in the future, as this secured a supply of theses which kept up an appearance of activity in the outer world . . .

Afterwards D and I started hanging photos over Paddy’s desk . . .

Saturday 7 July: Another exquisite day: best of all there had been a little rain very early in the morning, when I was awake for a few minutes and there was a delicious cool and freshness reminding one of the appropriate passage in The Ancient Mariner . . .

I went in by bus . . . to the Station where I met Harwood. He is working on a temporary job connected with the British Empire Exhibition and says that he is becoming the complete business man. He was in excellent form. Our easy wandering conversation and our perfect satisfaction in it was a glorious contrast to the disappointment of my recent meetings with Baker. We walked to Parson’s Pleasure to bathe. It was the first time I have been there this year. They had finished mowing in the meadows beyond the water: all was cool and green and lovely beyond anything. We had a glorious bathe and then lay on the grass talking of a hundred things till we got hot and had to bathe again.

After a long time we came away and back to the Union where he had left his suitcase and thence bussed up to Headington. D and Maureen had of course got home before us and we all had tea on the lawn.

Afterwards Harwood and I lay under the trees and talked. He told me of his new philosopher, Rudolf Steiner, who has ‘made the burden roll from his back’. Steiner seems to be a sort of panpsychist, with a vein of posing superstition, and I was very much disappointed to hear that both Harwood and Barfield were impressed by him. The comfort they got from him (apart from the sugar plum of promised immortality, which is really the bait with which he has caught Harwood) seemed something I could get much better without him.

I argued that the ‘spiritual forces’ which Steiner found everywhere were either shamelessly mythological people or else no-one-knows-what. Harwood said this was nonsense and that he understood perfectly what he meant by a spiritual force. I also protested that Pagan animism was an anthropomorphic failure of imagination and that we should prefer a knowledge of the real unhuman life which is in the trees etc. He accused me of a materialistic way of thinking when I said that the similarity of all languages probably depended on the similarity of all throats.

The best thing about Steiner seems to be the Goetheanum which he has built up in the Alps: Harwood described to me its use of the qualities of concrete which everyone else has treated in imitation of stone till Steiner has realised its plasticity and made it flow. Unfortunately the building (which must have been very wonderful) has been burned by the Catholics . . .

Sunday 8 July: . . . After lunch I lay on the lawn reading Boswell while Harwood and Maureen played duets to their great satisfaction. Just before tea I had gone into the house when I saw someone at the hall door and opening it found Stead. I talked to him in the drawing room for a few minutes and then brought him out and introduced him to Harwood and disappeared to get tea. He talked philosophy to Harwood and I threw in impertinent interruptions whenever I came out to put a cup or a cake on the table. Presently D came and we had tea.

Stead, fresh back from Venice and Rome, gave as his verdict that ‘Italy was a pleasant surprise to him. He had always imagined the Italians a degenerate people but found that they were really quite go ahead and up to date.’ They were also more patriotic than the English, for they were always waving flags and went mad over the name of Italy whereas ‘he had never found that Englishmen showed any great enthusiasm over the mention of England’. They and their landscape were, he said, hardy and vigorous whereas one always felt the softness of England. Stead is an American and has not been to the war.

We also talked of Fascismo. We were all inclined to favour it except Harwood who said it was only a more successful version of the Ku Klux Klan and that Mussolini had the face of a villain. Asked if he believed in Fascist atrocities, Stead said that they committed atrocities only when they were deserved.

Harwood and I then bussed in to Long Wall and went for another delightful bathe at Parson’s Pleasure: thence to the Cathedral to hear the organ recital. The organ is a thing I cannot learn to like.

After supper we played croquet—all four of us. Later Harwood read ‘Dymer’ up to date and covered me with enough praise to satisfy the vainest of men.

Monday 9 July: Harwood went off immediately after breakfast: I think we all enjoyed his visit. In the morning I sat in the garden and made an attempt at looking up odd points for my viva—but it was a gloriously hot day, I was very sleepy and the net result was pretty small. After lunch I continued the experiment. In the morning I had been idle because I was half asleep, in the afternoon I was equally idle for the opposite reason, because my brain teemed with new and fascinating projects for the next canto of ‘Dymer’ . . .

After tea I rode in to the Union where I read nearly all of Turner’s Journey to Cytherea, a very second rate production in the erotic-metaphysical manner tho’ some of the imitations of Yeats were pleasant and there was occasionally a bright thought—but give me the Lays of Ancient Rome for choice. Afterwards I took out Raleigh’s excellent Six Essays on Johnson and read them in the Union Garden . . .

Tuesday 10 July: Up betimes and dressed in sub fusc and white tie. Arrived at the Schools at 9.30 and met Martley and Lloyd Jones who were also vivaed today: Smudge, who was up today too, was not to be seen. At 9.30 we entered the viva room and after the names had been called, six of us were told to stay, of whom I was one.

I then sat in the fearful heat, in my gown and rabbit skin, on a hard chair, unable to smoke, talk, read, or write, until 11.50. I had plenty of leisure to examine my examiners. Brett-Smith seemed a pleasant man: so, in his grim surgical manner, was Craigie, the Scotchman.

Most of the vivas were long and discouraging. My own—by Brett-Smith—lasted about two minutes. I was asked my authority, if any, for the word ‘little-est’. I gave it—the Coleridge-Poole correspondence in Thomas Poole and His Friends. I was then asked if I had not been rather severe on Dryden and after we had discussed this for a little Simpson said they need not bother me any more.

I came away much encouraged, and delighted to escape the language people—one of whom, not a don, was a foul creature yawning insolently at his victims and rubbing his small puffy eyes. He had the face of a pork butcher and the manners of a village boy on a Sunday afternoon, when he has grown bored but not yet quite arrived at the quarrelsome stage.

From Schools I went to the Union and took out The Egoist: thence home and read a good deal of it in the garden before lunch. It is worth twenty of Beauchamp’s Career and I think I shall like it immensely . . .

Wednesday 11 July: Hotter than ever. D was in very bad form today. She and I spent most of the morning working putting up blinds—a very troublesome job. Just after lunch I finished what I think is the last picture for her room.

I then bussed in to the station where I met Arthur. We took, or rather he took, a taxi out, stopping for some shopping of mine at Eaglestone’s. I was delighted to see him: we renewed our earlier youths and laughed together like two schoolgirls. We arrived out here and both had cold baths—I am keeping off bathes since 4d a day would soon counterbalance any saving effected by my big reductions in smoking. Afterwards we all had tea in the drawing room—the garden being much too hot to sit in.

Arthur and I were alone for a long time and he told me his various adventures since we last met, particularly round about last Christmas. It was a depressing story and in many ways not easy to sympathise with but, I suppose ‘Homo sum etc.’ We had supper outside and after watering, Arthur, Maureen and I had an uproarious game of croquet.

Thursday 12 July: Arthur said he was faint and called for brandy in the morning. Today was the hottest for twelve years. Bathed this evening with Arthur after tea and met Wilson on the way back. He said that he had been told that Coghill and I were the best men in Schools this year. Earlyish to bed.

On the 16th July the examiners’ awards for the English School were published—the only two Firsts going to Lewis and Nevill Coghill.

Sometime later, when compiling the Lewis Papers Warren Lewis had this to say about his brother’s achievement: ‘When we reflect on the circumstances of Clive’s life during the time he was reading this School—the shortness of the period at his disposal, his ill health, the constant anxiety inseparable from supporting a family out of an undergraduate’s allowance, his fears for the future, the unceasing domestic drudgery, the hideous episode of Dr John Askins’ final illness, and the move to Hillsboro—we are astounded at the extent of an achievement which must rank as easily the most brilliant of his academic career’ (vol. VIII, p. 140).

Friday–Wednesday 13–25 July: Arthur was with us for a fortnight. He is greatly changed . . . Someone has put into his head the ideal of ‘being himself’ and ‘following nature’. I tried on one occasion to point out to him the ambiguity of that kind of maxim: but he seems to attach a very clear meaning to it—namely that the whole duty of man is to swim with the tide and obey his desires . . . He has taken over from psychoanalysis the doctrine that repression is bad and cannot be brought to see that repression in the technical sense is something quite different from self control. I tried to put him on to Baker’s distinction between will-men and desire-men but he took no interest in it.

I argued that immortality—which he believes in—was not likely to fall to the lot of everyone, since ‘gift is contrary to the nature of the universe’. He on the other hand is confident that we should all be immortal anyway: he gave me the impression of believing in Heaven but not in Hell, nor in any conditions attaching to Heaven. On morals he thought that our whole duty consisted in being kind to others. I pointed out that a man who was ‘natural’ could not be kind except by accident.

I soon introduced him to Parson’s Pleasure and after that he spent a good deal of his time there bathing and sketching. He showed a remarkable facility for picking up new acquaintances. One day when we were lying on the grass, Thring of Univ., whom I had quite forgotten, came up and spoke to me. I had to ask him his name before I introduced him to Arthur. When he left us I saw that Arthur had something on his mind. It came out gradually. ‘I say Jack, that man had a tennis racquet. Pity we didn’t . . . Och well I may meet him tomorrow. I might get talking to him about tennis and he might give me an invitation.’ I devoutly hoped he would not meet Thring again, as I hardly knew the man myself and did not want him exposed to such naked cadging . . .

His old besetting sin of greed came out several times at our table. Like other poor families, we usually eat margerine with jam—except Dorothy of course, who ‘CAN’T’ eat margerine. Arthur soon made his position plain, stretching across to the butter and remarking that he much preferred it.

Another good example of ‘nature’ occurred in the first two days of his visit when we had tropical weather. D, being the most free and easy of mortals, had made no objection to Arthur wearing pyjamas till lunch time. It was left to Arthur to take the one step further from freedom to beastly familiarity by taking off his slippers in the dining room and laying his bare feet on the table. His feet are very long and he perspires freely. After that I did not repeat the pyjama stunt.

It was during the first week of his stay that I discovered that I had got a First in English. Shortly after this I went to tea with Wilson. He asked me if I had a book in my head. I said at first ‘No—unless you mean an epic poem,’ but afterwards trotted out various schemes which have been more or less in my mind. He thought my idea of a study of the Romantic Epic from its beginning down to Spenser with a side glance at Ovid, a good one: but too long for a research degree. For that, he liked rather my idea of a study of the German element in the Romantic movement—tho’ that depends of course on the speed with which I can learn German.

All this time D has been very overworked, worried and miserable. Dorothy it appears has turned out very badly since we moved up here. Poor D complains that she has to keep a dog and bark herself: and indeed Dorothy has been the exclusive subject of conversation when we are alone together. I do not blame D for this in the least, but of course it makes things very miserable. D has also done a lot more painting: and I, tho’ very seldom allowed to help, have had a day sandpapering the stairs.

I continued some work on ‘Dymer’, but coming across my old poem on ‘Sigrid’, I began to turn it into a new version in couplets with great and wholly unexpected success. Next morning Arthur and I walked up Shotover . . . He talked about the Ring and said how, with all its huge attraction, it left you discontented and ragged—not satisfied and tuned up as by Beethoven. We agreed that this was because the Ring was pure nature, the alogical, without the human and rational control of Beethoven. I am almost sure this is what he was trying to say, though of course he expressed it quite differently. The only good talk I had with Arthur was this one and some discussions for the design of his summer picture. But he was quite obviously discontented from the first day of his visit till the last, and often (unintentionally) very rude and objectionable—miserably changed since last year.

On Saturday last after bathing I walked through the Park—the first time I think since 1917—and happened to meet Poynton in the Parks Road. He had a long talk with me: he is far honester than the other dons. He told me he was very doubtful how the vacancy at Univ. would be filled up . . . He promised to try and get me some tutoring among the women and seemed confident of doing so.

When I left him and come up I was pleasantly surprised to find Harwood here—he, D, Arthur and Maureen being all on the lawn. Harwood had been at Long Crendon seeing the Barfields: but B had been called unexpectedly up to town and Harwood had biked hither. Arthur and he were alone together for some time while I was getting up the supper and they didn’t much take to each other.

Afterwards Harwood and I walked up and down the lawn and talked—or rather he did most of it. He said he had recently met the most beautiful woman he had ever seen in his life.

He said ‘I was asked by some people whom I hardly knew to come and sing glees and told to “come just as I was”. When I got there I found everyone else dressed. They were quite beyond me in music and I made rather a fool of myself. This was where the lady was so sympathetic. She was about forty—very beautiful and with an extraordinary graciousness—you know how they sometimes are at that age. About a week later I was asked quite unexpectedly to go somewhere where I should have seen her. Do you know, I refused, tho’ my wishes were quite opposite the minute before I spoke. Do you understand that?’

SELF: ‘I suppose something subconscious takes you in hand . . . ?’

HARW.: ‘No, no. It is when something you have longed for intensely but considered impossible is suddenly put into your hands—you can’t believe it.’

SELF: ‘Speaking purely for myself, I can’t quite imagine a case in which that language would not be hyperbolical—for me, mind you.’

HARW.: ‘Are you like Dymer—do you always know what you want and go for it?’

SELF: ‘No, I am not like Dymer.’

HARW.: ‘I admit my story is rather mediaeval. I don’t suppose that anyone who has not had such an experience can even begin to understand the Divine Comedy.’

This was said without the least element of a snub, tho’ it looks rather like one, written down. The whole episode was a revelation to me. Harwood stayed till Monday afternoon and was a real sunbeam—perpetually cheerful, interesting and companionable. D likes him immensely and he and Maureen are great friends.

Monday–Tuesday 30–31 July: The whole of this week end I was working all day correcting English essays—about 150—for the Higher Certificate. As I had never done the work before I could get my standard only by going through the whole lot and dividing them into three classes, and then going through each class and so sorting them into a final order. The work was of course interesting in a way but very tiring when done against time. There were very few really good essays and much ridiculous blundering, with ignorance and vulgarity beyond what I would have expected: I was particularly ill impressed with the almost illiterate Upper VIth of Lancing.

On Monday 30th I was still hard at it and D had to go into town to meet Maurice Delanges of Valenciennes who was coming to us as a paying guest. After she had been gone about half an hour, Dorothy came to my room where I was working and told me that the French gentleman had arrived—alone. I came down and found a very dark skinned, shockheaded youth in knickerbockers and Norfolk jacket. He spoke quite intelligible English—though nothing like so good as Andrée. He explained that he had come by an earlier train.

I sat with him for a few minutes in the dining room and we made conversation with fair success. Finding the work on which I was engaged, he asked me not to let him interrupt me, and after showing him to his room I left him to unpack and returned to my job fairly well satisfied with what I had seen of him. That afternoon I walked with him into town—we talked mainly of educational matters.

Next day I was still at my exams and he and Maureen went out otter hunting with the Rowells. They returned very tired after a boring day and poor Maureen had had a very uncomfortable time as Maurice showed his boredom very plainly. It was that evening that we began to wonder whether we could endure for five weeks the amazing noises he made over his food—chewing with his mouth open, smacking his lips, and sucking like a pig—but we still tried to put it down to the difference of foreign manners and hoped all was well.

Wednesday–Monday 1–6 August: This was a wasted and comfortless period. I finished my exam. work: I also finished Middlemarch (by far the best of G. Eliot’s books) and began Carlyle’s French Revolution. These three items, and these only, can be put down to the credit side. On the other there is a good deal.

In the first place Dorothy, after being sulky and idle for months, has given notice. How or when this state of affairs began it is impossible to say. She was out every evening and often till near eleven: she was treated as one of ourselves and I do not think it is our fault. D has been generous with her and all her family. Dorothy has however visibly been getting discontented for a long time and complained that D had ‘never been the same to her since Ivy was here’—whatever that may mean. Now she has revenged herself (I don’t know for what) by leaving us in this time of stress when we are saddled with Maurice. She is to go on Friday next—and may now be included with the Dud, Frank, and Moppie in the list of people who have never forgiven kindness from D.

Maurice, who behaved tolerably for the first few days, has now thoroughly settled down and shown his true colours . . . His bestial way of feeding was bad enough, but his habit of stretching across everyone to grasp everything on the table was worse. Then his familiarities began. He started pulling Maureen’s hair and digging her in the ribs and jeering at her during meals. We put a stop to this by setting them at different ends of the table: but he continues to be very offensive to her when they go out to tennis.

Then there was the evening of the sunset when we all went out to see a most beautiful crimson cloud effect from the lawn. The little blackguard presently came sidling out after us and finding me looking at the sky, prodded me in the stomach. I pretended to think that he was nudging me for the matches, and handed them to him with a look which said as plainly as words how dearly I should love to smack his face. As I continued to look at the sky he enquired ‘Have you never seen it before?’ This question really beat me: for I almost think it was asked in good faith.

Next day I took him out in the morning in Smudge’s sister’s punt from St Clement’s. I punted with fair success. He told me that English girls were very different from French. I said nothing.

BLACKGUARD: ‘Those girls at the otter hunting yesterday, they jump over streams, they lift their skirts up so—so high. In France now they would rather have stayed where they were than show their legs so.’

SELF: ‘A possible explanation is that in France the young men would have been looking at their legs more attentively.’

BLACKGUARD (after a grin that made me retch): ‘Ahh . . . They are not girls in England, they are boys. In France at that age they always thinks of love.’

We punted on . . .

On Friday Warnie arrived by the 5.58. I went in to meet him and we repaired as usual to the courtyard of the Mitre for a drink and a talk. We were there some time: the beer was good, we were both in fine humour and it was a cool evening—the whole scene a delightful moment’s relief from dancing attendance on the Blackguard. We bussed out to Headington and had time to turn round before Maureen came back from tennis with the Blackguard.

I think it was this evening that the latter began kicking the footstool away from D under the table—also urging his chair up against that of Smudge who sits next him and making the strangest grimaces at her. Whether he is trying to conduct a very primitive kind of flirtation or whether he is mad I don’t know. On the whole he was a little quieter this evening.

On Saturday morning W and I escaped for a book hunt and drink in Oxford, on condition of meeting the Blackguard at Longwall corner at 11.45 and bathing with him. We were a few minutes late at our rendezvous and apologised to the Blackguard, asking, in the usual way, if he had been waiting long. He replied emphatically that he had, adding as a rider that English people were always late. We went on to Parson’s Pleasure. Maurice of course wore a bathing suit, and apropos of the rest’s nudity, remarked to W that ‘in France no man could undress himself in that way’. This of course is merely a difference of custom and no one could blame him for it. The water was rather cold. The Blackguard complained that it was very shallow and that he had touched the bottom when he dived.

On the way home he told us about his school days in Paris: they used to drink champagne and play poker all night: when he smoked in form he was told to do so on the other side of the room so that it would be invisible from the street. These schools are all run and inspected by the state . . .

Lewis did not keep a diary during 7 August–7 September.

Saturday 8 September: Last night D expostulated with me for having let so many weeks pass without my diary, specially as the record of Maurice’s insolence and vulgarity would some day make good reading. He is still with us and goes, thank God, next Monday.

Most of this time we have suffered intolerable slavery. He rowed every morning as long as we had the boat and every morning I had to go and steer for him: sometimes I had some pleasure from the sunshine and the wind on the water, but everything was spoiled by his hideous face in front of me. I honestly believe that I am not carried away by my hatred and contempt when I say that it is one of the most unredeemed animal and vicious faces I ever saw . . .

Yet sometimes I feel I could endure his grossness and filthiness if only he were not, in addition, such a fool. Though he loves to pose as a man of the world he has the intellect of a child. When, on one or two dreadful occasions I have walked with him, he has told me the make and merits of every car that passed—a thing I have never had to endure since I left Cherbourg.

He is forever telling me pointless stories about himself, designed to show either how much money his father has or what a fine, dashing, reckless young fellow he is himself. Conversation he has none in the proper sense of the word.

The joke of the thing is that I half believe he thinks I like him. I ply him with irony and veiled insult but he is such a fool that I lose my pains. Lately he has taken to playing croquet. When he was still learning and I of course could still beat him, I discovered that I could not with comfort allow myself to get too much ahead as he at once began to get ill tempered: and once or twice he really sounded as if he were going to burst into tears.

Now he can beat me two times out of three: but he still asks seriously, nay pathetically, for sympathy whenever he misses a shot and attributes all his failures to the unevenness of the ground or to the fact that the balls are not spheres. The other day I was stung into pointing out that if his bad shots were accidents resulting from the imperfection of the balls, then, by a parity of reasoning, his good shots must be similar accidents. This however was too subtle for the little Blackg. and I daresay he was quite honest in his failure to follow me . . .

Early during this period a postcard came to D from the Beast asking for the name of Maureen’s school which he wanted for an income tax return. This had been forwarded from Bristol, but next day another came addressed direct to Hillsboro. This was naturally worrying. D and I had a conversation on the various troubles that have pursued us: losses for the past, fears for the future, and for the present, all the humiliations, the hardships, and the waste of time that come from poverty.

Poor D feels keenly (what is always on my mind) how the creative years are slipping past me without a chance to get to my real work, so that I was sorry I had ever mentioned this to her. I told her not to take too seriously what might be after all only the excuses I make to myself. What is far more serious is the continual overwork and worry to which she is exposed. Everyone, friends and enemies alike, seem to conspire against her. This was a bad time.

I began again to think of the pleasures of death, as I used to: not melodramatically, as of suicide, but with the longing for the state of an old, successful man of genius, sitting with all his work behind him, waiting to drop off.

This of course was nonsense, as D with her usual sanity told me: we had so little life and plenty of the other thing anyway. So far, thank God, (and touch wood) the Beast’s card has been followed by no evil results.

We have also been very lucky in getting another girl to replace Dorothy: an enormous girl of fifteen, called Ada, who never speaks but beams all over her large face and works very well and intelligently.

Since we stopped having the boat I have had a good many mornings to myself: and, as if to refute my fears, have had a burst of good form which has carried me through two very difficult cantos of ‘Dymer’—the sixth and seventh. I have written about twenty stanzas (good I hope) for the eighth and am now stopped by structural difficulties—how to work my ‘peripety’: so I am afraid the push is over . . .

Sunday 9 September: . . . My head was very full of my old idea of a poem on my own version of the Cupid and Psyche story in which Psyche’s sister would not be jealous, but unable to see anything but moors when Psyche showed her the Palace. I have tried it twice before, once in couplet and once in ballad form.

Monday 10 September: A very beautiful morning with thick dew and a grey sky with the sun breaking through—it might, at eight o’clock, have been mistaken for five on a midsummer morning. We had breakfast a little early to let the Blackguard catch the char-a-banc to London. He parted with D very civilly. I carried one of his bags to the bus stopping place, bade him a very short goodbye, and went down to the fields beyond Mrs Seymour’s to look for mushrooms . . .

It was delightful to be by ourselves and to feel free. The spare room was thoroughly done out this morning and has been left with doors and windows wide open ever since, but it still has an atmosphere—moral and material—hanging about it. After tea I read two more tales in Crabbe with much enjoyment and started the second volume of Richard Feverel.

At about six o’clock D and I walked down to the fields to look for mushrooms. On the way we passed several children returning with loaded baskets, and naturally we found no mushrooms. It was dusk when we reached home and Ada had been nervous. I remarked how common this seemed to be among people of the servant class. D at once gave what is the obvious and true explanation, tho’ I had never thought of it before: namely that in their ordinary life in small houses with large families, they are never alone either by day or by night . . .

Wednesday 12 September: I had a most horrible dream. By a certain poetic justice it turned on the idea which Jenkin and I were going to use in our shocker play: namely that of a scientist discovering how to keep consciousness and some motor nerves alive in a corpse, at the same time arresting decay, so that you really had an immortal dead man. I dreamed that the horrible thing was sent to us—in a coffin of course—to take care of.

D and Maureen both came into the dream and it was perfectly ordinary and as vivid as life. Finally the thing escaped and I fancy ran amuck. It pursued me into a lift in the Tube in London. I got away all right but the liftman had seen it and was terribly frightened and, when I saw how he was behaving, I said to myself, ‘There’s going to be an accident in this lift.’ Just at that moment I noticed the window by my bed and found myself awake.

I had a moment of intense relief but found myself hopelessly rattled and as nervous as a child. I found I had no matches. Groped my way to those on the landing, lit my candle, went downstairs and returned with a pipe and a book. My head was very bad. I got restored to sanity pretty soon and slept, tho’ with several breaks before morning. I thought at first that this was a good example of the falsity of the rule given by L. P. Jacks that authors never dream about their own inventions: but on second thoughts I am not sure that the idea of the play did not originate in another dream I had some years ago—unless the whole thing comes from Edgar Allan Poe . . .

Thursday 13 September: Thank goodness I had a dreamless sleep all night through . . . I decided to go for a walk in the hope that this was the best cure for my recent feebleness. I went through Mesopotamia and then to Marston where I had some beer and a packet of cigarettes—an extravagance of which I have not been guilty this many a day . . .

Coming home, I found D hanging up washing—much to my annoyance as I had hoped (it is these hopes that are the pest) she would do very little now the Blackguard is gone . . . I found that D had been making jam and had not yet sat down though when I left she promised me she would be done in a minute or two. Even the kindly fruits of the earth become one more enemy in this hopeless business of trying to save D from overwork.

After tea I went on with Fairfax’s Tasso. As a story it beats all the other poems of this sort. It manages somehow to combine the important and serious unity of a real epic with the mazey charm of a romance. It is always just not losing itself in the episodic adventures and one is never allowed to forget the central thread. His whole heroic world is firmly imagined—not a mere kaleidescope like Spenser . . . I am delighted with everything. It is very interesting to see how Tasso was before Milton with the epic management of Christian mythology . . .

D and I went out for our usual little stroll before supper. Afterwards I read some more Repington aloud. No headache this evening, tho’ I had it earlier in the day. I was slightly threatened with the bogey mood this evening, but I think I now have the situation in hand.

Friday 14 September: A pouring wet morning. Mr Allchin came to see D shortly after ten and later on I was called into the conclave. He asked me if I agreed with D that it would be a good thing for Maureen to drop the Oxford Local if she could do so without damaging her musical career. I asked whether, apart from the possibility of her earning her living at music, she was good enough to find it a sufficient intellectual resource—whether, in short, after giving up a general education, she might find herself a fifth rate musician with no interest in life. He thought she could be ‘first rate’ as a teacher—which I suppose he regarded as an answer by implication to my question: whether she could be a pianist was always impossible to predict.

With regard to the question of earning a living the difficulty was that registration was now demanded in all music teachers. Of course one could not say how long this would last: but he was afraid the tendency would increase rather than diminish. This year there are still other paths to registration than the Oxford Local—such as a Teacher’s Course for adults. He promised to ask Sir Hugh Allen if there were any such alternatives offered for the future. We all agreed that Maureen should drop the Oxford Local if there were any loophole.

After this the conversation drifted on to more general subjects—chiefly the modern practice of teaching ‘musical appreciation’ to those who don’t do music. I asked if he thought it a good thing. He said it depended entirely on the individual—and mentioned Peppin of Rugby (formerly of Clifton) as a very successful teacher in this kind. I said that one was always afraid ‘teaching appreciation’ would end in sentimentalism. He agreed that this was a danger, that is he said so, but I had the impression that he did not really agree or else was not interested and wanted to change the subject . . . I feel that Mr Allchin is inclined to talk down to one and at the same time to be a little subservient in expressions of opinion: at the same time (which is funny) I like him . . .

Monday 17 September: Great excitement today over the arrival of the puppy who is to be called Pat. He is quite ready to be friendly to the cats who maintain an armed neutrality.

In the morning I began re-reading Bergson’s L’Évolution Créatrice more thoroughly than I had done yet. I spent most of the afternoon gardening. Before supper we all went for a stroll through Old Headington and Barton End. This evening we had a fire and sat in the drawing room for the first time. D in rather poor form. My coming journey to Ireland cast its familiar shadow over us both.

Lewis did not keep a diary during 19 September–10 October. On 22 September he arrived at ‘Little Lea’ for a visit with his father, and he remained in Belfast until 10 October. In his own diary Mr Lewis recorded on 11 October: ‘While Jacks was at home I repeated my promise to provide for him at Oxford if I possibly could, for a maximum of three years from this summer. I again pointed out to him the difficulty of getting anything to do at 28 if he had ultimately to leave Oxford.’

Thursday 11 October: I crossed last night from Ireland after nearly three weeks at Little Lea. In two respects my compulsory holiday was a great improvement on most that I have had, for I got on very well with my father and held the usual mental inertia at arm’s length by working steadily at my Italian.

Before I left I had just time to finish Tasso’s Gerusalemme, reading the twentieth canto on my last day. This was in the edition which I bought at Charing Cross in 1917. On the whole I was pleased with Tasso. As a narrative poet he stands high, the Jerusalem being really a very good historical novel. He quite fails to reach sublimity or even grandeur but there is a fine noble simple spirit. He believes in chivalry with a boyish faith which I don’t find in Spenser. His third great merit is that he knows something about fighting: his single combats read like the real thing, not like what I find in Spenser and Malory. He loves a good scientific swordsman.

This is the good side of my story in Ireland: in revenge, I was never really well, suffering from headaches and indigestion. In the loneliness of that house I became hypochondriacal and for a time imagined that I was getting appendicitis or something worse. This worried me terribly, not only chiefly for its own sake but because I didn’t see how I could manage to get back here in time. I had one or two dreadful nights of panic.

I did many long walks hoping to make myself sleep. I was twice up the Cave Hill where I intend to go often in future. The view down the chasm between Napoleon’s Head and the main body of the cliffs is almost the best I have seen. I had one other delightful walk over the Castlereigh hills where I got the real joy—the only time for many years that I have had it in Ireland.

This morning I was called at 7. I had a single berth room on the boat deck. It had been so rough that, tho’ I am never sea sick, I was woken up by the rolling and kept awake most of the night. I had breakfast on board and crossed by ferry to catch the 9.35 from Woodside, an excellent train which brought me without change to Oxford at 2.18. I had lunch on the train. I travelled most of the way with a very pleasant boy who was coming up to Queen’s, having left Shrewsbury last term.

On getting out at Oxford I found myself in a crisp wintry air and as I bussed up to Headington I felt the horrors of the last week or so going off like a dream. At home I found Maureen with her leg in splints, having broken a cartilage at hockey. D and she had had very little sleep last night. Poor old Tibbie [the cat] after a long illness, had had to be chloroformed. We shall miss her. Miss Pearce came to tea. Afterwards D and I went out for a stroll with Pat: then after an early supper we bussed into town to see Allchin about putting off Maureen’s lessons. He was out. The evening was very mild now and we both took a childish delight in our little outing. On the way back we met Jenkin, whom I was glad to see. So home, full of happiness, and early to bed, both being very tired and sleepy.

Friday 12 October: . . . D and I went into town before lunch . . . she going to Allchin and I to College. There I met Curtis and Allen, the don from whom I heard that Salveson had been elected to a Fellowship at New College. I had no sooner come out of the Porch than I ran into ‘Doctor’ Ewing who is up for this term. Even the pouring rain did not induce him to hurry past me and I was walking brisky along, followed as briskly by him, when I saw Carritt. The latter stopped to speak to us and when the group thus formed had broken up, from it I shot away up the High hoping I had left Ewing behind. He followed me, however, pestering me to go for a walk with him. When I had finally escaped I went to Parkers and ordered Boiardo in two volumes . . .

I went into town again and visited Poynton in the Bursary . . . He then led me into his rooms beyond the bridge and told me he was writing to two women to see if they cd. get me any pupils. I asked him if the ‘stinks party’ were winning the day over the Fellowship. He said nothing further had been done. He said he was not without hopes for me and if they decided to elect a member of their own body they would prefer no one to me. On the other hand they might find that they had to elect by examination for a non-teaching fellowship. He said I had many friends in college. On the whole his remarks were fairly encouraging . . .

Saturday 13 October: This morning came a note from Stevenson offering to mention me to the new Master in the hope that the latter might get me some journalistic work for the time being. After breakfast I went in to College and returned some books to the library. I called at Stevenson’s rooms but he was out.

I then walked to Manor Place to see Wilson and waited downstairs so long that I had time to read several chapters of a translation of Candide with which I was rather disappointed.

Wilson welcomed me very kindly. I gave him back Archibald Marshall’s The Eldest Son wh. he had lent me with strong recommendations. I explained that I had thought it very bad and we both laughed over this impasse. He thought my idea of ‘Translation of the VIIIth Century’ as a subject for a B.Litt. very promising. After a little chat I came away, did some shopping, looking again for Stevenson and bussed home.

We had a bread and cheese lunch as we shall always do now on Saturday. Poor D still worried with indigestion but less than yesterday. Jenkin arrived and he and I went for a walk to the copse this side of Stowe Woods. Taking example from the autumn sky we fell into a conversation on the difficulty of describing all save the most blatant and obvious sky effects. We also talked of ‘homeliness’ in landscape, which he hardly appreciates.

Home to tea and afterwards D went out alone: not before an accident in the kitchen—the clothes horse falling into the soup pot. Jenkin helped me to clean the stove while D mopped up the floor. D came back rather late after Jenkin had gone, having had a nasty fall in the dark. She was covered with mud and a little hurt, but there seems no harm done. She said (and I agreed with her) that Jenkin had been rather dull today.

This evening we sat in the dining room. I continued reading The Ring and the Book wh. I began in Ireland—I am now at Pompilia’s monologue. The whole poem is strangely above Browning’s other work and contains, I am certain, some of the very greatest poetry I have ever read. The Prologue and ‘Caponsacchi’ are the best books so far . . .

Sunday 14 October: . . . Before lunch I started gilding an old frame for a reproduction of Leyden’s portrait of a young man, which we have cut out of the Queen. From the same source we have already cut out and framed a ‘Gentleman’ by Vandyke and a ‘Head of a Poet’ by Palma Vecchio.

After lunch I went on with the job for half an hour or so and then helped D to give Pat a bath—my first experience of dog bathing, and a very memorable one. Miss Baker came for tea and Maureen came downstairs for the first time and lay on the drawing room sofa. After tea, when I had removed the things (Ada being out) I went back to my picture framing and finished the job . . .

Tuesday 16 October: A note from Stevenson this morning saying that the Master would see me at 9.30. I bussed in after a very hasty breakfast. I found that the new Master, Sadler, is living in poor Emmet’s old rooms in the Radcliffe Tower. Allen was with him when I arrived and I was shown on to his dining room where I waited for a few moments. When I came back he greeted me very kindly indeed, congratulating me on my past career and adding ‘We will do whatever we can for you.’ He is a short, clean shaven, white headed man, honest looking I think, and very easy in his manners: also very direct and economical in his speech. I was very well impressed with him.

He asked me if I wanted journalism as a career. I said that I did not: [he] said he thought I was wise: but that reviewing etc was a good thing as it put one in touch with many important people. He said that at my age ‘he had got a great deal out of it’: He asked me what paper I would prefer: this rather nonplussed me and I said that I had been wishing rather than willing in the matter and made no plans. He gave me Garrod’s Wordsworth (which I have been wanting to read for some time) and asked me to bring him a trial review of it. He would then talk it over with me and see which paper I was nearest the ‘tang’ of.

After leaving him I went to see Stevenson and thank him for opening the thing. We had about ten minutes’ talk. He exclaimed ‘I don’t mind telling you that it will be a scandal if this College or some College doesn’t give you a fellowship soon.’ We compared notes over examining for the Higher Oxford [Certificate]. He ended up by saying that he was now going to give a Pass Mods. lecture and hadn’t thought a word about it yet. I felt like adding, from my recollections of his style, ‘I can quite believe it.’ . . .

In the drawing room I began Garrod’s book and read it for most of the afternoon and evening. It seems pretty good . . .

Wednesday 17 October: Rather warmer today. After breakfast I went to my own room and got to work on a first draft of Garrod’s book. I continued the same after lunch and by four o’clock had produced what I think will have to do . . . I took up Herodotus and read a good deal of the first book with much enjoyment. I find that the words whose English I wrote in the margin in 1920 (when first reading Herodotus) are still those I don’t know! . . .

Thursday 18 October: After breakfast I looked over my review again and wrote up my diary and so into town where I went to see the Master. He read the review and pronounced it ‘much to the point’ and really suitable for any of the papers he had mentioned. He advised me to see Gordon about the Times Literary Supplement: in the meantime I was to get my review typed and he would send it, with a personal letter, to five editors. He agreed with my main view over Garrod. He asked me about my previous education and when I told him of Kirk exclaimed ‘Oh, then you are the Lockian private pupil! Now that’s very interesting.’ He advised me to read Locke’s On Education (I had already done so at Grendon in 1921) and Rousseau’s Emile in the light of my own experience. I left him, took Locke from the College library, did some shopping and came home after leaving the review to be typed in Cornmarket . . .

Friday 19 October: Soon after breakfast I went into town and taxed the typists office with not having sent my MS to Univ. as was promised but they insisted that they had. I went round to College and there found to my relief that it had, after all, come yesterday and the Master had already taken it to his own room . . .

I had an early tea and caught the 4.30 to Paddington, Harwood having invited me up for the week end. The country about the Chilterns where it is most wooded was far gone in autumn colours and was very delightful. Reaching Paddington I came by Metro to Victoria and there waited in a downpour of rain, until, in despair of the bus, I took a taxi and so came to 2 Lupus St., Pimlico, S.W.1.

It was very good to see Harwood again. The flat which he shares with Beckett is very nice and furnished, tho’ sparsely, with great taste and comfort. Harwood was cooking potatoes when I arrived and told me there would be a guest for dinner—Miss Olivier, one of his folk dancing friends whose father was formerly Governor of Jamaica.

The lady when she arrived proved very pleasant. About 40 I should imagine, good looking, and well able to talk. After dinner (which was eaten in the white kitchen) we had coffee in the study and read Comus together—each taking a part. Miss Olivier (Harwood addresses her as Ariel) reads well: Harwood himself not so well. They made me Comus. When this was done we had some tea and talked—mainly about Steiner, both the others being disciples.

He and I then accompanied her home: our route lay mostly along the Embankment. The rain had stopped: on the far side of the river we saw the tree tops of Battersea Park. We became very merry. On the return journey I told Harwood how much I liked his friend: he said ‘I am very fond of her.’ We got back at 12.45 and so to bed. Beckett’s bed in which I slept was very luxurious, but I was wakeful for some time.

Saturday 20 October: Was called by Harwood and we breakfasted at 8.45. A beautiful morning and as we are above the surrounding houses it has the effect of being on a mountain top—I never before realised the beauty of garret landscapes. After breakfast Harwood went out to his ‘breadwinning’.

I went by bus to Hyde Park corner and walked through Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens to Arthur’s studio at 119 Westbourne Terrace. Arthur was away for the week end. Having walked and bussed back, I began to read Barfield’s faery tale ‘The Silver Trumpet’ in which with prodigality he squirts out the most suggestive ideas, the loveliest pictures, and the raciest new coined words in wonderful succession. Nothing in its kind can be imagined better.

Harwood returned and after lunch and a smoke we went for a walk. He took me along the embankment to Westminster, our main objective being Rodin’s group of the Burghers of Calais. The individual figures are very strong but we agreed that it is not much of a group. We were forced to walk through the Houses of Parliament in order to reach Westminster Hall—as Harwood said ‘we had sugar cake shoved down our throats before we were allowed to eat our honest bread and butter’. The Hall was very like my recollection of it and as ‘cool, sweet, sudden’ as you could ask for.

We walked on and leaned over Westminster Bridge a long while looking at the County Hall—by a new architect in almost a new style. We crossed and investigated it closer. It is the finest modern building I have seen and, as I said, almost realises one’s Babylonian dream. We also attached ourselves to a party that was being guided through it: the interior is very nearly as good—specially the courtyard. On the front to the river there is a monster of a new kind—all arms wh. gave me an idea for Dymer’s son.

We had tea and so home to the flat. After an early supper we set out to wait in the pit queue for Hassan: but we found that there was no possibility of getting in and went instead to Munro’s At Mrs Bean’s which had been recommended to him by Barfield. It turned out to be the worst play we had ever seen and we were amazed at Barfield. We had beer after the first act. Harwood said ‘We have tried it sober and we have tried it drunk but it’s no use.’ I said ‘like the Persians in Herodotus’. We walked home, probably deriving as much pleasure from damning it as we would have had from the recollection of a good play. Then a glass of whiskey and a chat and to bed.

Sunday 21 October: Began reading Butler’s Erewhon in bed this morning. After breakfast wh. we had v. late, we set out for a walk. We took the Metropolitan to Richmond, in the streets of which we were held up by rain for ten minutes. How delightful all expeditions are with people who don’t mind rain! We then went into Richmond Park. I was quite unprepared for it. There was hardly anyone to be seen. In a few minutes we were in an absolutely deserted open rolling country full of bracken, standing pools and all kinds of woods and groves under a splendid grey autumn sky. We had as good a walk as ever I have had, coming down at about 2 o’clock into Kingston on Thames. Here we were overtaken by sharp rain and finding all the hotels shut were reduced to a very hasty lunch for ten pence each in ‘a low eating house’—a phrase I never really understood before.

After lunch we walked into Hampton Court Park. This was at first less beautiful than the other: then gradually we came to the end of a very long sheet of water with huge trees in autumn colouring on each side and Wren’s ‘back’ of Hampton Court just visible at the end. At the same moment the sun broke out: the grass (very level) and the dead leaves on it, the trees, the swans, and one little stag that did not run away, took on glorious colours. We were alone: the silence was intense. It was all just like one of those luminous dreams I have so seldom dreamed. We walked up the whole length of the water to the fine old ironwork gates—still not a soul about and into the Palace gardens. This approach will be a great memory to me

The diary breaks off here, the last sentence uncompleted. Lewis supplied the following ‘Note’, but did not resume his diary until 1 January 1924.

NOTE

My last diary, after fluttering for some time on a broken wing, came to an end on 21 October 1923 when I was with Harwood at his flat in Pimlico. On that Sunday evening he read and condemned in no measured terms the two new cantos of ‘Dymer’ (VI and VII) which I had brought to show him. After discussion I largely agreed with him and decided to cut them out: in spite of the work I had put into them I felt surprisingly little disappointment at giving them up. I suppose that in the expulsion of anything bad from the mental system there is always pleasure.

Sometime after my visit to Harwood I cycled to Long Crendon to spend a night at Barfield’s cottage there, thus meeting his wife and mother in law for the first time. His wife is plain, and undistinguished in manner—which I take for a good sign in a marriage so unequal in age. She is very quiet, a little shy, I think: ‘homely’ both in the good and the bad sense of the word. I like her, and I think I should like her more, the more I saw of her. His mother in law, Mrs Dewey [Douie], is a ‘character part’: a very caustic old Scotch lady.

Barfield has, if anything, improved by marriage. I enjoyed my little stay greatly. We talked a great deal, about Steiner, the Douglas Scheme, and the changes we had gone through even in the short time we had known each other.

He made one excellent remark. ‘I am not bored,’ he said. ‘I still have always a waiting list of things to do, even if it’s only walking to the bottom of the garden to see how a bud is coming on.’ He saw me as far as Stanton St John on the way back. While I was with him I saw several of his new poems, some of which are very fine. He approved of ‘Dymer’ V and tolerated my new version of VI.

I saw little of Jenkin this term. D began to be very poorly about this time and started a course of medicines for indigestion at the advice of Dr McCay. The latter was often here doctoring Maureen’s mysteriously damaged ankle: he soon proved himself a fool, promising her that it would be all right next week and changing his promises often.

Harwood came down for a very jolly week end, during which we played Boys’ Names, walked, talked and laughed, keeping entirely free from shop. D and Maureen both like him very much, and indeed, in many ways, he is an ideal companion. It was during this stay that he met Jenkin again and they became friends—Jenkin having been rather repelled by his manner when they met before.

Later on Barfield came to stay for one night. He and I talked till three o’clock: one of the most satisfying conversations I have ever had. Although the subject of his marriage was naturally never mentioned, a lot was understood and we each saw that the other felt the same way about women and the home life and the unimportance of all the things that are advertised in common literature. He agreed that, as I said, ‘either women or men are mad’: he said we could see the woman’s point of view absolutely at times—as if we had never had any other—and this was a sort of relief.

He has completely lost his materialism and ‘the night sky is no longer horrible’. I read to him in my diary the description of the talk I had with him in Wadham gardens when he was still in pessimism, and we enjoyed it. Although he agreed with several Bergsonianisms of mine (specially that ‘the materiality is the intelligibility’) he has not read Bergson. He was surprised that I shared most of his views on the nature of thought.

It was shortly before this that I read Flecker’s Hassan. It made a great impression on me and I believe it is really a great work. Carritt (whom I met at the Martlets shortly after) thinks that its dwelling on physical pain puts it as much outside literature as is pornography in another: that it works on the nervous system rather than the imagination. I find this hard to answer: but I am almost sure he is wrong. At that same meeting of the Martlets Sadler read an excellent paper on Day, the author of Sandford and Merton.

Soon after this I had to leave—at an unusually early date in order to conform with W’s time of leave. The usual wretchedness of going away was increased by D’s state of health: and to crown all, Maureen had to be sent to Bristol during my absence to have her foot properly seen to by Rob. Poor D, who was thus left alone had a dreadful time, and admits now that she was at times afraid it was going to be a gastric ulcer. Thank heavens she seems better now. My three weeks in Ireland, tho’ improved by W’s presence, were as usual three weeks too long. I had a good deal of toothache.

On the return journey W and I stopped for a night in town. For the first time since we were children we visited the Zoo with great gusto: but the cages are too small, and it is cruel—specially for animals like foxes, wolves, dingoes and jackals. We also went to see a musical comedy called Katherine, wh. was very bad. We had meant to go to Hassan, but after reading it W decided that it would be too harrowing for his feelings.

While I was in Ireland I read Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Masefield’s Daffodil Fields, J. Stephen’s new book Deirdre and Henry James’ Roderick Hudson.

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