1924

1924

Jack Lewis was reading the works of Henry More (1614–87), the Cambridge Platonist, with the thought of writing about him for a D.Phil. degree. Despite the fact that Lewis was not a Christian, he had chosen Henry More because of his own interest in ethics. His belief in the importance of morals and ethics was very strong and in March he read a paper to the Philosophical Society called ‘The Promethean Fallacy in Ethics’. The scholarship from University College had run out, but his father promised to keep him in Oxford while he looked for a fellowship. He failed to get either of those he applied for at St John’s College and Trinity College, and he continued to try and make ends meet by correcting essays for the School Certificate. In the spring University College offered Jack the chance to take over the tutorials and lectures of E. F. Carritt while he was spending a year at the University of Michigan. For this he was offered a salary of £ 200 a year, and in October he began tutorials and a series of lectures entitled ‘The Good: Its Position Among the Values’. Jack visited Warnie at the army base in Colchester during July, and they travelled to Belfast together in Warnie’s motorcycle to spend Christmas with their father.

Tuesday 1 January: . . . After breakfast I bought a new MS book at Hewitt’s and settled down to read through the philosophical works of Henry More and to make an abstract of them. I spent the morning on the preface general and also wrote into my book the detail of the title page . . .

Wednesday 2 January: I worked all morning on More’s Antidote to Atheism, reading and abstracting the first two books, which are very curious . . . After tea I went on with the third book of the Antidote.

Shortly before supper time I went out to pay our Income Tax and house dues (the former is fortunately deducted from our rent by Raymond) to the local ‘publican’, old Mattock, who lives in a little cottage opposite the ‘Brittania’—a cheerful, respectful old body . . .

Friday 4 January: . . . After breakfast I sat down to my work and finished Enthusiasmus and began More’s Latin correspondence with Descartes . . . I did various jobs and went to the Union where I looked at Campagnac’s Cambridge Platonists and decided it wd. be no use to me. I brought away Seth’s English Philosophers and came home by bus. It was a typical Oxford evening of frost and fog. After tea I went on with the Cartesian letters. The muddiness of poor old More’s mind becomes very striking when you see him at close quarters with a real thinker like Descartes. After supper I went on working. My throat was so sore that I did not read out to D . . .

Saturday 5 January: We were rather late getting up and almost immediately after breakfast set off all three for town where Maureen was to have a tooth drawn. It was colder than ever—frost and wind without sun. A present of three woodcock arrived today from Willie, which I left at the poulterer’s to be plucked and trussed before we went into town.

I . . . went to the Union. Here I read the opening of Bertrand Russell’s A.B.C. of Atoms and after finding that the notion of atoms which I have from general reading is sufficiently correct, decided that there was no need to go further and took up his Philosophical Essays.

In his ‘Worship of a Free Man’ I found a very clear and noble statement of what I myself believed a few years ago. But he does not face the real difficulty—that our ideals are after all a natural product, facts with a relation to all other facts, and cannot survive the condemnation of the fact as a whole. The Promethean attitude would be tenable only if we were really members of some other whole outside the real whole: wh. we’re not. His essay on ethics I found very interesting. I came away bringing out Santayana’s Winds of Doctrine . . .

Sunday 6 January: . . . After making up my diary I got a fright through not being able to find the first volume of ‘Dymer’, but soon ran it to ground. Although I disagree with all Santayana’s definite conclusions, the atmosphere of sanity and coolness which pervades his book has influenced me in the direction of discontent with the whole plan of ‘Dymer’: it seems ‘full of sound and fury, signifying nothing’. I spent the morning rewriting the opening of the ‘Wild Hunt’ and, I think, greatly improving it . . .

I . . . helped to get ready for the Thurstons—thanks to whose impertinence poor D had been busily making cakes all morning. They arrived presently. Mrs Thurston, on a fuller view, turns out to be very ugly. The children are too delicate to eat cakes, and elected to have boiled eggs instead. After tea Maureen and I played animal grab with them: the little girl climbed on the sofa and stood on the chair and tried to break the metronome and stuck my favourite pipe in her mouth . . .

We had woodcock for supper and they were a supper fit for the gods. Afterwards I worked a little more on the ‘Wild Hunt’ and then read to D. Poor Maureen was very ill after having her tooth out and had a temperature of 101. D is afraid she may get a septic mouth.

Tuesday 8 January: This morning I decided to see what I could do about writing a thesis for St John’s, D having pointed out to me a possible fellowship there. I looked over my old ‘Hegemony of Moral Values’ thinking that I might use an improved version of it: at any rate it will be useful as a fallback if I cannot get anything else ready in time. On the whole however I decided to try and write instead an answer to Bertrand Russell’s ‘Worship of a Free Man’, in fact a prose version of ‘Foster’ . . .

After lunch I walked into town and got my typescript and, in the Union, wrote to Squire telling him that I had a poem 480 lines long and asking whether, if he liked it on other grounds, its length would exclude it from the Mercury.

I then took out Huxley’s Romanes Lecture, Russell’s Philosophical Essays and Ward’s Realm of Ends. I came home and had tea. I then read Huxley’s lecture which is a very noble and tonic piece of work. After it I went on to Ward’s book. I had taken it out because I foolishly misread the title ‘Reality of Ends’ and therefore supposed that it would be on my problem. I found it to be a silly, soft kind of book. . . . After supper I sat down with paper in front of me and began to follow the argument where it would lead me, conscientiously avoiding the conclusions I desired to reach. It led me almost into impossible antimonies: but I got a lot of interesting stuff.

I then read out to D for a little and we went to bed. When I took Pat out (as I always do before going to bed) I found that it was snowing and the ground covered with snow.

Wednesday 9 January: The snow was piled very deep on all the windows this morning and had covered the arm chair in my room near the window. It was unusually dry snow—firm and powdery like sand.

I spent the morning working on my new paper which I intend to call ‘The Promethean Fallacy in Ethics’ and wrote the first draft of a section which will come near the end, in which I reject the kind of solution offered in Balfour’s Theism and Humanism . . .

I then changed my clothes and walked through Headington Quarry to the Hinckleys . . . We played various very simple games and it was really quite good fun.

I came away at 6.45 and got home to find old Taylor here who stayed to supper. Although it was an interruption for everyone’s business we were all very glad to have him. I discovered that he was a reader of Trollope and we had a good deal of talk about that. After supper he and Maureen amused themselves on their fiddles. My throat was rather bad again tonight. In bed about one o’clock.

Thursday 10 January: . . . I . . . went to the Union and took out the second volume of Martineau’s Types [of Ethical Theory] and Sorley’s Moral Values and the Idea of God: and so home . . . After lunch I settled down to work and worked for the whole of the rest of the day till 10.30 with breaks of course for meals, trying hard to curb my infernal rapidity and to write the sentences instead of letting them write themselves.

Poor D had a headache and a sick feeling most of the day and was very miserable. As soon as I stopped work at ten thirty I got a very sharp headache which however soon grew milder. I read out to D till bedtime . . .

Saturday 12 January: . . . At the Union I returned Sorley and Martineau and took out Balfour’s Theism and Humanism and Theism and Thought. It rained and blew furiously all day. After lunch I worked hard and satisfactorily till supper at 8 o’clock. In the evening I read Theism and Thought.

About 10 o’clock Maureen discovered a rash and a temperature which D pronounced to be chicken-pox. My first thought was that this would save D all the extra work connected with the party: but I am afraid it will only give her more trouble in the long run. It is infernally hard luck on Maureen after all her other troubles and will dish her chances of getting into the team this term. She was put to bed and I got coal from the cellar and carried it up and laid the fire in her room. Very late to bed, very tired.

Sunday–Wednesday, 13–16 January: Three unpleasant days. I divided my time between doing housemaid’s work for D (Ada having been sent away lest she should catch the chicken-pox) and finishing my essay as best I could. I suffered from a very bad sore throat, headache and earache, and was very tired from morning till night.

Thursday–Sunday 17–20 January: Much the same except that, praise God, I got rid of my various disorders. I decided that any effort to continue my regular work at present could only lead to exasperation and, lest the time should be wholly wasted, I began to continue the Phaedrus from the point where I left it off some years ago.

Pat however soon put an end to that project by pulling the volume of Plato off the table one day when I had left him alone for five minutes and eating most of it. Afterwards I began to have ideas and am now re-writing Canto III of ‘Dymer’ and re-reading The Life and Death of Jason.

Monday 21 January: Pouring with rain. After late breakfast, washing up, and cleaning vegetables, I corrected the typescript of my ‘Promethean Fallacy in Ethics’ and bussed into town. There I had Carritt’s and Wilson’s testimonials typed out and, enclosing them with an application and the essay, took the whole packet by hand and left it at St John’s.

Home by about two where I had a cold lunch, washed up, ‘did’ the kitchen, and the scullery and worked on ‘Dymer’ till tea, which we had in the kitchen at five and afterwards (with a few minutes of Jason) till supper time.

Maureen was bothered with her throat again tonight. D much better these days: she attributes this to the extra ‘bustling about’ and talks of getting rid of Ada, in whom many heinous sins have been discovered during the last week.

Tuesday 22 January: Up rather earlier than usual, tho’ still late: breakfast, washed up, cleaned vegetables, and was finished by eleven. I worked on my new Canto III and, finishing it, went to Hewitt’s for a MS book and began to fair copy it. Lunch about 1.30: washed up, brushed the kitchen and mopped the scullery and came back to my fair copy . . .

Thursday 24 January: After finishing my morning chores I began my work on More again, feeling that I could not remain idle for ever. After I had worked for a few minutes I had occasion to leave the drawing room for a moment: whereupon Lady Gonner was shown in and D had to go and talk to her, thus shutting me off from my books. Lady G., though charming in a way, is one of those idle and talkative women who imagine that time is as free for everyone else as it is for themselves. D and I were both annoyed at being held up in our several businesses for twenty minutes. As soon as she was gone and I was fairly started again, Mrs Wilbraham arrived. After this I went up and worked in my own room.

A very cold day. I worked again in the afternoon and read Carr’s translation of Bergson’s Energie Spirituelle in the evening, which I did not find interesting. Bergson always seems almost incoherent in English.

Friday 25 January: A cold bright morning. I walked with Pat to Stowe Woods and strolled there for some time: it was very springlike, tho’ there are no primroses yet—there is one in the garden. D found in The Times yesterday that Coghill has got a Fellowship at Exeter. Worked all afternoon . . .

Saturday 26 January: A fine day. D had to go into town in the morning and I worked on Henry More. After lunch, which was very late, I was just about to start my chores when a ring brought me to the door and there I found Ewing. Thank heavens the blessed name of chicken-pox prevented him from coming in. He wanted me to read a paper to the postgraduate philosophical group next ‘Thirsty’ as he pronounced it, which I agreed to do. While he was talking to me Jenkin arrived on his bike . . . I had to leave the washing up to D and go for a walk with Jenkin.

We went up Shotover by the Quarry path, where he had never been before, talking of architecture, parents and children, his leaving Oxford, Havelock Ellis on dreams and other things. A wonderful lurid sunset on the way back . . .

Monday 28 January ad fin: After two days during which my jobs seemed inexplicably laborious and I was always cold, D found on Wednesday afternoon that I had a temperature of 102. It turned out to be this wretched chicken-pox and I lived for the next week in the yellow room. Towards the end I took walks in the garden. If you cross the lawn seventeen times you have walked a mile. As I could not shave for fear of cutting the spots on my face, I grew a considerable beard and have—provisionally—retained the moustache.

During my illness and solitary confinement I read the first three volumes of Gibbon with great enjoyment. I also read Vanity Fair for the first time and it has largely removed my old blindness to Thackery’s merit, tho’ I still detest his horrible ‘knowingness’ and winks to the reader. He is almost wholly negative. He finds meanness in all things but he does not show us any ‘light by which he has seen that darkness’: hence his pessimism, being based not on any original vision of the ideal, but simply on ready made morality as he found it in his class and age, is of a very low order. I admire his art, but I have no affection for him.

I also read Don Juan all through. The Cantos of the shipwreck, the island, and Constantinople are not worth reading twice—the rest not worth reading once: an indefensible swimming with the tide—a mere flinging out of everything that came into Byron’s rather ordinary head. The violences in metre soon cease to be amusing.

I re-read the first book of The Faerie Queene, except the fight with the dragon, and enjoyed it as much as ever. I think I never before saw how much real beauty there is in the religious parts. I read Maurice Hewlett’s Fool Errant—over-sexed like nearly all his work, but rather distinguished: also Mrs Humphrey Ward’s Lady Rose’s Daughter which is ‘as good as the first novel you will pick up’.

I re-wrote ‘Dymer’ VI—or rather wrote an entirely new canto with which I am pleased. ‘Foster’ was sent to Squire and refused. Appleton of the Beacon wrote to me saying that he had found ‘Joy’ again and asking if I still wanted it to appear. An unknown publisher called Stockwell wrote saying that ‘a mutual friend’ had told him I would soon have enough poems for a book and telling me he would be pleased to see them.

D kept wonderfully well.

Up until now Lewis’s Scholarship at University College had paid his College fees and left him with £11 per term. To make up what was needed Mr Lewis had been giving him £67 per term as well as paying incidental expenses. This would have been enough for an undergraduate living in college, but it was not nearly enough for a householder with two dependents. Now that the Scholarship was at an end Lewis wrote to his father on 4 February asking for help:

‘You know that my Scholarship is at an end. It was nominally a scholarship of £80 a year. What I actually got out of it was about £11 a term. Sometimes it would be a little more or a little less, but it generally averaged out to £33 a year. I had hopes of being able to make up that in other ways—pupils and the like—but they have not been realised and I am afraid I must ask for help.’ Letters of C. S. Lewis, p. 191.

Lewis did not keep a diary during 1–19 February.

Wednesday 20 February: I walked into town after breakfast and called on Farquharson. There was a pupil with him and he himself was sitting by the fire looking very sleepy. I told him I wished to go for a D.Litt. He asked me if ‘I had it ready’. I replied, with some surprise, that I had not—I understood that one had to send in one’s application before, not after the work was done. He said yes, that I must make out a scheme showing the authorities and MSS I was using etc.—all in fact that I can only know when the work is done.

I thanked him and went to the Union where I began to read Haldane’s Daedalus—a diabolical little book, bloodless tho’ stained with blood. This must be read and digested—or vomited.

I met Robson-Scott and we retired into the upper room to talk. He told me that he had had the same trouble with the Farq. and that it didn’t matter. He thought poorly of the O.U.D.S. Hamlet. This led to a discussion of the whole value of presentation as a test of plays, in wh. I forgot where we were and suddenly found myself lecturing in a voice which cd. be heard all over the library. We were both reduced to laughter. I am to go to tea with him next Tuesday. He told me that once, on being asked his name suddenly in strange company, he had actually been unable to give it for one terrible moment.

I got back the typescript of a new version of ‘Joy’ for Appleton and bussed home after some shopping for D. I washed up after lunch and read Oliver Elton’s Sheaf of Papers. Miss Featherstone came for tea. In the evening I sent ‘Joy’ to the Beacon, wrote to Stockwell explaining that I was under contract to Heinemann, and to Harwood refusing an invitation to London which we cannot afford at present. Later on I started reading out The Crock of Gold to D, but I don’t think she cared greatly for it.

Thursday 21 February: . . . Immediately after breakfast I took Biddy Anne in to Gillard to be vetted. Biddy Anne is a yellow cat that has recently adopted us. I walked in from the Plain, called at College and went to the Union, coming home again by bus.

I then made up my diary since my illness. After lunch the weather changed. A startling mildness came over the air and it was like spring though there were heavy black clouds to the east. After D and I had strolled in the garden to enjoy this, I came in and read over my diary for this time last year. It is dully written—I recover the horrors from memory and not from the words.

A letter from Aunt Lily came by the afternoon post in answer to one I had written her recently protesting against her assertion that the last words of Pompilia in The Ring and the Book were the last words of his wife. I read her letter and began to answer it . . .

Friday 22 February: I had an unusually nasty dream connected with my father in the night—a dream of the clinging sort.

After breakfast I took down all the gas globes for D to clean. I spent the morning working on Henry More’s Defence of the Cabbala, a fantastic, tedious work. After lunch I crumbled a ham and swept the kitchen and scullery and then went out for a walk with Pat . . .

Saturday 23 February: A dreamful night. Up and into town to get a washer for one of the hot water bottles, and other things.

We were all of us very little pleased at the prospect of the Pasleys’ arrival today for a week end. They invited themselves and I strongly advised D not to have them, for they gave us plenty of room for escape, but she insisted. I washed up after lunch while D got their room ready: everything was in a pandemonium.

They arrived at tea time. Mrs P. seems to have got rid of a great many of her affectations. The deafness is not worse. I liked her better this time. After tea, which we had in the kitchen, we talked in the drawing room. I think he still likes his married life but he is overworked and takes little interest in his work. They have few friends, and, tho’ they are within reach of the country, they seldom take a walk for more than half an hour. He is a little fatter and a little paler. He has learned to sleep after dinner and grown sensitive to draughts. He gave me an interesting account of the diary which his great-grandfather Admiral Pasley kept while serving in the war against America. I wish he would publish it.

After supper D insisted on washing up—as indeed she insisted on doing everything during the whole week end, so that she and they hardly ever met. We played Boys’ Names in the evening—quite good fun. D and I of course were late to bed—D very tired and bothered.

Sunday 24 February: The Pasleys take a prodigious time to dress. After breakfast they and I went for a walk up Shotover, taking Pat. I would willingly have spun it out, as Maureen wanted the drawing room to practise in, but Pasley is not much of a walker, tho’ his wife is. He is quite insensible to nature—I think he always was.

Home shortly after twelve and read the papers. Then flurry and scurry in the kitchen and lunch and more washing up for D despite all that I could say or do, while Mrs P. read and Pasley tried hard not to sleep over the drawing room fire. After tea D came and sat in the drawing room for the only time during their visit—except a little in the evening. They showed us several photos taken on a delightful trip they had this summer in some birdless country of lakes and sand dunes near Bordeaux and Arcachon . . .

They also showed us others taken at Valentia last Easter and told us about their visit to a bull fight, which they enjoyed. I denounced the immorality of this cruel and cowardly business. Pasley trotted out the usual irrelevant answer that some English sports were quite as bad, and then they both actually pleaded as a justification the fact that they had enjoyed it. I said ‘What a debauch!’ and pointed out that that made no difference.

Pasley denounced me as an a priori philosopher who made human institutions subservient to my internal notions of right and wrong: but of course it took only a familiar bit of argument to show him that he did the same. I was forced to admit that the pleasure we took in action was a justification in the sense that, other things being equal, the less the temptation the greater the crime. It is fortunate that I didn’t overhear (what I was told later) Mrs P. telling D about the Spaniards sticking their darts into the bull to rouse him—‘but it doesn’t hurt him’. If I had I might have said regrettable things. It was all disgusting.

After supper I begged D to let me wash up, but she asked rather savagely, ‘Do you want me to die?’ and explained that she had been frozen in the drawing room as Mrs P. blocked up the whole fire. So I returned to the drawing room . . .

Pasley . . . complained of living in a state of tension: he always feels he must be ‘getting on’. If he sits down to read he must hurry on to get to something else: if he walks out he must hurry back. Mrs P. said to him ‘You are not so bad as you were a year ago,’ and he agreed. He knows himself that this is one of the roads to a nervous breakdown. I hardly knew what to say to him. It is hard to see where salvation can lie for a man who never loved nature and no longer loves art and for whom religion is out of the question . . .

Monday 25 February: . . . D was more affected by this week end than I had ever seen her by all Mary’s tiresomeness, and said she was getting too old to bustle about slaving for two young slips who thought such a lot of themselves . . . Pasley explained to me at great length that when he came up again to dine at All Souls he would not be able to stay with us, as he would have little enough time for dressing and going in and out. The Pasleys left me at the Plain to bus home and I walked . . .

A little wet snow was falling. Then came the cream of the day: to sit by our own fire, to chat and read, to have our own easily prepared and quickly despatched supper—all peaceful and delightful after the effort of these two days . . .

Tuesday 26 February: A bright morning that soon darkened and settled into a heavy fall of snow. I worked all morning on More, finishing his ‘Appendix to the Defence of the Philosophic Cabbala’ (a tedious work) and beginning the Defence of the Moral Cabbala. We had lunch in the kitchen. Afterwards I wrote a short letter to Aunt Lily and walked in to the Schools where I visited the English Library and found Ward’s Life of Henry More. I read it there for some time and then, taking it out, went to Robson-Scott in St John’s St.

I found him alone. We talked of W. de la Mare, the only great Georgian. He agreed with me that the common view of de la Mare as the poet of faery and fantasy leaves out all one side and that the most important one. I was sorry to find that Robson had invited Bateson (whom I used to meet at the Discussion Class) and Ziman, both of whom soon joined us. A poor conversation. Bateson told us that Gadney the bookseller had gone mad—a fact which he and Ziman seemed to regard purely as a joke. We also condemned Saintsbury. I discovered that More—the lout whom I saw yawning in candidates’ faces at my English viva—is a friend of Wyld’s: so that the latter’s ‘saeva rusticitas’ is apparently the badge of a school. Robson has two pupils whom he got through Carlyle.

I came away early and walked home. After supper I began trying to pick out a chronological framework from Ward, but it is nearly impossible. Last of all D and I fell into a talk about the bad year that is gone and all the bad years before it: but consoled outselves somehow and ended up fairly cheerfully . . .

Wednesday 27 February: A letter from my father this morning, answering my last, in which I had pointed out that my scholarship had now ceased and that I should need a little supplement to carry on. This question had been raised before. He replied with a long and pleasant letter with a sting in its tail: offering what was necessary, but saying that I had £30 extra expenses last year (which I cannot account for at all) and remarking that I can always put money in my pocket by spending more time at home. There comes the rub—this cannot be answered: yet to follow his suggestion would be nerves, loneliness and mental stagnation.

I finished More’s Philosophical Works this morning and made out a table of chronology from Ward’s Life and my old table done for the English school. After lunch I went first to the Union where I extracted several facts from the Dictionary of National Biography subvoce More and then went to Wilson to borrow his Theological Works . . . In the evening I began The Mythology of Godliness . . .

Thursday 28 February: Worked all morning. As it was blowing with ‘sharp scimitar’ and getting ready to snow, I decided to skip my provisional arrangement with Aunt Lily: I went out with Pat and walked through Barton End and down the lane: then over fields to Elsfield paths and up the edge of the big field and past the copse where the stream comes out of it. The sky was very dark ahead of me but I had some sunlight at my back which made a strange cold brassy light on the bare fields. The thick mass of bullrushes etc. on the edge of this copse made a great crackling. As I rounded it the snow came, very light and slow but gliding almost horizontally. When I turned round I saw Oxford in the sunlight. Came home past Mrs Seymour’s and through Old Headington. Worked for the rest of the day on the Mystery of Godliness.

Friday 29 February: Worked on the Mystery of Godliness in the morning. Did all that D would let me (which is to polish the stove and sweep the kitchen and scullery) after lunch and then went to Napier House to fetch Helen Rowell who is to spend her half term week end with us. She is a nice child and very little trouble, but for D’s sake I wish it had not come so soon after the Pasleys.

Shortly after tea, which was very late, I went up to dress, preparatory to dining with Carritt . . . Those at dinner were Farquharson, Carritt, an American Dr Blake, the junior fellow (Bowen I think) and an old member whose name I didn’t catch. Before we went in Farquharson approached me with some solemnity and asked if I would enter my name in a list of people who would serve in the next war. I replied at once ‘That depends Sir on who it is against and what it is about.’

At dinner Carritt put into my hand the notice of the vacancy at Trinity—an official fellowship in Philosophy, worth £500 a year. After dinner in the Common Room Farquharson became very amusing indeed, telling us anecdotes of his boyhood.

As Carritt said when he and I were walking to Allen’s digs in Holywell for the Philosophical Society, ‘F’s talk has a peculiar flavour about it. It is very good—often better than it was tonight—and yet is always within an inch of being mere silliness.’ I suggested that the face had a lot to do with it. So it has: the great bird-like nose and forehead and the eyebrows and wrinkles arched up ‘quasi enitentis’ like Vespasian. At Allen’s we found Ewing, Rink, Curtis, Ziman, Fasnacht, King and others.

Ziman read a poor paper on ‘Some Heresies’. The discussion however was very good. Ziman had said that pleasure was always adjectival to the satisfaction of desire—desire being the instinct reflected upon. We challenged him on Plato’s flower smells from the Philebus. He fell back upon unconscious or potential desire. This led to my usual move re potentiality. Then Carritt wanted to know what instinct really was. This led to Rink telling us about the wasp in Bergson, and Fasnacht caused great amusement by waiting till the whole story was over and then saying, ‘I’m very sorry but all those facts have been contradicted.’ Carritt said this was hardly fair in a philosophical society. We kept it up till about 11.15. I walked back to College with a nice man whose name I do not know.

Having got back my shoes from College I walked home, looking at the details of the Trinity fellowship as I passed the lamps. For some reason the possibility of getting it and all that would follow if I did came before my mind with unusual vividness. I saw it would involve living in and what a break up of our present life that would mean, and also how the extra money would lift terrible loads off us all. I saw that it would mean pretty full work and that I might become submerged and poetry crushed out.

With deep conviction I suddenly had an image of myself, God knows when or where, in the future looking back on these years since the war as the happiest or the only really valuable part of my life, in spite of all their disappointments and fears. Yet the longing for an income that wd. free us from anxiety was stronger than all these feelings. I was in a strange state of excitement—and all on the mere hundredth chance of getting it.

A dark night with a few stars, freezing, with a wind that would skin the bones. Before going to bed D and I had some talk about the Trinity job. She again urged me to try for an All Souls’ Fellowship and thought that the D.Phil. was a mere waste of time. If only I could get an All Souls’ Fellowship it certainly would save a great deal.

Saturday 1 March: I spent most of the morning in the kitchen cutting turnips and peeling onions for D, and then went for an hour’s walk in the fields. After lunch and jobs I took Euripides from his shelf for the first time this many a day, with some idea of reading a Greek play every week end (when I am not writing) so as to keep up my Greek. I began the Heracleidae. Coming back to Greek tragedy after so long an absence I was greatly impressed with its stiffness and rumness and also thought the choruses strangely prosaic. The effort to represent a scuffle between Iolaus and the Herald is intolerably languid. After the first shock, however, I enjoyed it.

Its noble matter of factness is really the great thing. Macaria, unless I read more into her than the poet meant, is a really well conceived character. She sees at once the real position which everyone else has hushed up, and even that her party will be ridiculous if no one steps into the lead: she knows that someone has got to make the offer and does it with very little fuss. There is no attempt to sentimentalise her: there is a sort of cold impatience in most of her speeches—as there probably is about martyrs in real life. But I wonder if Euripides meant it so, or is he merely trying to find motives for an altruism wh. he has seen in life but has no theory to account for . . . ?

Tuesday 4 March: After breakfast I walked into town. I went to the library in College and looked up in Paley three passages in the Heracleidae that had baffled me. Paley emended one of them and ‘supplied’ words and sentences to the other two. How easy it is to translate anything on these terms!

I then walked to New Inn Hall Street. Raymond alias Herr Steinshen (whom may the prophets utterly reject) has coolly sent us there to see about some rates which have been sent in to him for the second time. Loose, the tax gatherer, said it was simply a mistake and promised to write to Raymond . . .

By great ill chance, I met Aunt Lily. I followed her into Buols where she was lunching and talked to her till her food came. She has just (for the seventh or eighth time) discovered the secret of creation. It has something to do with wave lengths. She has also discovered that there is no such thing as matter but only energy: and since mind and matter are both unknown energies therefore they must be the same thing. In about ten minutes she poured forth as many misleading metaphors, paralogisms, and downright contradictions as would have made Socrates happy for a twelvemonth. Is she mad—or is this only what every active mind must come to if left without dialectical discipline? . . .

After lunch I went for a walk with Pat. It was a bright day with a blue sky full of large slow moving clouds . . . I walked along to the Horsepath lane and met Ewing with Price, who got the Fellowship I tried for at Magdalen. I had always thought that Price was the little beetle faced Jew whom I constantly see about and was glad to find my mistake, for the real Price seems a pleasant fellow . . .

Afterwards I went on with the Hippolytus—splendid stuff. I wish I knew how Euripides meant the Nurse to be taken. Some of the things she says are sublime: others appear comic to us—I fancy only because we are not simple and matter of fact enough . . .

Wednesday 5 March: I returned to Henry More this morning with considerable reluctance and went on for a little with the Mystery of Godliness. It had no flavour about it.

Ever since my conversation with D about the wisdom of a D.Phil. I have been in an unsettled state. I reflected that the degree itself would be no passport to a living and that while I worked at my old mooncalf [the thesis on Henry More], tho’ I might learn a great deal about the 17th century, I should be letting my Greek and my philosophy slip, and be losing, in part, my qualifications for any work that might come along. On the other hand if I read hard in history, philosophy, English and Greek, I should be keeping myself in readiness for anything and increasing my chance of an All Souls fellowship. However small that chance might be, non temptasse nocet. So at last I made my decision and shut up my wormy folio of mooncalf. For the rest of the morning I read through again my ‘Promethean Fallacy’. It is more intelligible and, on the whole, more cogent than I thought: but not so well written (in the literary sense) as I had hoped.

After lunch I walked into town and to the English library to return Ward’s Life of More. Simpson, with another man, was sitting at the desk and told me I would have a notice fining me half a crown for the book. I said ‘And if the notice does not arrive Sir, I presume the half crown—.’ SIMPS: ‘The half crown remains.’ He very nearly gave me 10/-short in my change, but I watched him carefully for he is a great scholar.

Hence to the Union where I studied the Ordnance Survey map of the Bookham district—having been lately haunted (as I am every now and then) by an acute memory of my excellent walks ‘in that delightful land’. I would give a good deal for a fortnight’s stay there . . .

I also looked into the Girdle of Aphrodite—a new book of translations from the Anthology, very good: and then into G. K. Chesterton’s Life of St Francis—the chapter about naturalism and what it led to among the pagans, wh. I thought pretty true: tho’ whether Christianity made any immediate difference on the masses is not so clear . . .

Thursday 6 March: I spent the whole morning composing a long and difficult letter to my father. . . .

I walked into town and went to the library in College. I looked into G. K. Chesterton’s Browning—a thoroughly bad book, full of silly generalisations. There is nothing in his chapter on The Ring and the Book to show that he has read it. I then looked into Noyes’ William Morris—the chapter on Jason. I should not have thought it possible that in half an hour I could have read so much new truth about a poet I know so well. It gave me the very feel of Morris—more than Morris himself.

When I came out of the dark library (at about 4) the air was wonderfully bright and soft in colour. It was like a summer evening at six o’clock. The stone seemed softer everywhere, the birds were singing, the air was deliciously cold and rare. I got a sort of eerie unrest and dropped into the real joy. Never have I seen Oxford look better. It looked as it used to when I saw it in my cadet days and used to long for it to be a University town again. I took two or three turns up and down the Broad. Although it is only a few hours old I see that this is already becoming transfigured by memory into something that never was anywhere and never could have been.

I then went to Manchester (after going into Mansfield by mistake) and with some difficulty found my way to the room where the Postgraduates’ Philosophical Group were meeting. There were only three there when I arrived: a nonentity, a chinless parson who talked in a kind of gobble and a very beefy man with a face black from shaving and very moist lips who crooned in his voice and was inclined to shut his eyes when he talked. They talked about Troeltsch.

Presently Price came in and then a man in gold rimmed spectacles who had negroid hair and skin but the features of a sheep. His trousers were very well creased and he was called ‘Mr Jones’. He never spoke but to say ‘Good afternoon’. Then Stout came in—a funny looking little man with a whimsical way of talking that was very attractive. Tea and bread and butter were brought: and Stout produced some cakes unexpectedly from a paper bag. He told us a good story of a female solipsist who had written to Bertrand Russell—‘Dear Mr Russell, I am so glad you have become a solipsist. I have always wondered that there were not more of us.’ Ross of Oriel came in and I was introduced to him. As there had been some hitch about tea we were very late in starting.

I read my ‘Hegemony [of Moral Values]’ paper. At one point Stout, not having heard, interrupted me to ask ‘What was the subject of that sentence?’ I imagined for a wild moment that he was going to ask what was the subject of this paper.

During the adjournment the beefy man came and crooned Browning at me. Then Stout said ‘Order, Order’ and we all sat down. Ross opened the discussion. He was very complimentary about my paper. Part of what he said may be discounted as the usual courtesy bow, but what really pleased me was that he said ‘Mr Lewis explains the precedence of moral good in a very ingenious way which I really think is quite new—and, at first sight at any way [rate?], I find it attractive.’

What was even better, when we were breaking up I overheard him saying to someone else ‘That was new.’ We had not much time for discussion and what there was was poor. The Beefy Man shut his eyes more tightly than ever and talked absolutely off the point. Stout made some good remarks. As we left, Ross asked me if I was going to publish it. I said that I certainly would if I had any chance. He advised me to send it to Mind or The Hibbert: The Hibbert would pay more, but Mind was the better thing . . .

Friday 7 March: Worked on the Hippolytus in the morning and just before lunch looked into Gilbert Murray’s Greek Epic—a great piece of imaginative work which I like as much as ever in spite of its detractors.

After lunch Ewing called for me and we walked over Shotover and thence by Horsepath and Cowley to his digs in Iffley Road where we had tea. It was a beautiful sunny day with a blue mist on the valley and I would have enjoyed it had I been alone or in congenial company. We spoke of Ziman’s paper. I said I didn’t think much of it. Ewing replied, ‘One mustn’t expect too much of an undergraduate paper.’ We spoke of Kant. I said I had not read him since Greats. Ewing tittered and said, ‘I look back with horror on the ideas I had of Kant when I took Greats.’

I found that Ewing (who was unfit for active service) had also been approached about the next war, but I was flattered to find that Farquharson had dealt with him and me rather differently, asking me simply if I would serve and pointing out to Ewing that if he would put his name down for civil service he would be safe from being put into work ‘unsuitable for him’ if conscription came in . . .

Saturday 8 March: D waked me suddenly this morning saying ‘You’ll have to get up at once.’ It turned out to be a card from Carritt asking me whether I could dine on Monday to meet Prichard and needing an immediate answer. I jumped up, flung some clothes on, wrote an acceptance, and ran to the post . . . There was also a card from Barfield asking me to meet him outside the Cadena at 11.0 today . . .

I went to the Cadena and waited. Just there, and at that time of a sunny morning, one sees the worst of Oxford—the splendid children with ‘plus fours’ and long cigarette holders, walking insolently and talking loudly with the intention of being overheard, and the corresponding girls.

After I had waited for half an hour I found Fasnacht at my elbow. We began to talk philosophy. He was very sceptical and almost an ‘instantaneous solipsist’ tho’ he denied it. After a little Rink came past with a bicycle and joined us. He told us about the paper he had written for the Jowett. He had tried to combine a sort of Bergsonian view of reality wh. was ‘not harmonious nor rational’ with a separate ‘knowable’ such as we find in mathematics. I said this left out the fact that mathematics did conform to experience wherever the nature of the case allowed them to touch it and that this was in fact the reason why we called them true.

A policeman came past and told Rink to take his bicycle off the pavement. We, as good Heracliteans, told Rink not to worry since it was impossible to step twice into the same policeman and the bicycle was already off the pavement. He preferred to act in the vulgar sense. Our argument continued and was at its height when an enormous man with a white moustache appeared behind Rink. Rink told us in a whisper, ‘This is the greatest bore in Oxford and I know he is going to catch my eye’ and continued edging his nose into the middle of us and keeping his back to the big man, explaining the while that tho’ the sense datum of two marbles plus the sense datum of two more marbles gave the datum of four marbles, none of them were really marbles in the conceptual sense.

The big man however edged round and round and finally plucked him by the sleeve saying in a hearty voice ‘I have three tickets for Katinka and I don’t know how to get rid of them so I’m going about like a fairy godmother’—at this moment I saw Barfield’s face in the distance and fled.

He had missed his train from Long Crendon and biked, calling at ‘Hillsboro’. We put his bike into the Union and walked into St John’s garden. We talked of the function of the Greek chorus, of Squire (in spite of all, Barfield advises me to send up ‘Dymer’ when it is done), of Henry More and of the difference between Dionysiac and Apolline art.

He had got from some book the idea of Dionysiac as mere wish fulfilment. I tried to formulate my own very different view, but was defeated on particulars, since whenever he asked me in which class I put a particular work I had to say ‘Oh, Dionysiac of course—well no, perhaps it is really Apolline’ or the like. This led to some talk about Steiner’s ‘polarity’. Barfield has given up the chance of a permanent £500 a year on the staff of Truth in order to have leisure for his own work. We lunched at the Cadena where his wife, who had been giving a music lesson, joined us. After lunch we did some shopping all together and then separated to meet again in Wadham gardens.

I took Alexander’s Space, Time and Deity out of the Union and went to Wadham where I sat and walked in the garden reading the introduction, enjoying the beauty of the place, and greatly interested by my author’s truthful antithesis of enjoyment and contemplation.

When the others turned up we had some talk about memories of childhood and then went to tea at Yeats’ tea rooms. I promised to come over for the night on Thursday week, and so left them after a thoroughly enjoyable day . . .

Monday 10 March: In the morning I read some more of Alexander, who grows more and more difficult as I proceed. I also started tentatively an essay on the ‘Whole’ which I thought might be a more systematic exposition of my theory of potentiality.

After lunch came a letter from Pasley to say that he had dined with Baker at Beckett’s and the former had tackled him about me. Pasley had replied as vaguely as possible and tells me that I must expect a letter from Baker.

Ever since the Doc’s death, when we heard nothing of him, our friendship has been suspended. Unfortunately, tho’ his silence on occasion was the efficient cause of the present break, my coolness, thus occasioned, was retrospective. For a long time I had been troubled by his egoism and his hardly hidden contempt of D and everyone else he met in our house. Irrespective of D’s wishes I really do not want to in any way renew my intimacy with him: but how to answer his letter when it comes, I cannot imagine. D and I had a good deal of talk about it. She urged me, and of course sincerely, not to consider her feeling about him, but that is only one chapter in the story . . .

I went to Senior Common Room where I met Carlyle who promised to write to the Trinity people about me. Carritt soon came in, ‘undressed’ because Prichard (who soon followed him) was also so. Prichard is a little weak-looking man with a straw coloured moustache. It was a very dull evening. Carlyle talked all the time about India and South Africa: and even in the pauses I failed to get into any sort of conversational touch with Prichard. Poor Carritt!

Wednesday 12 March: . . . As my old flannel trousers have worn beyond shabbiness to indecency, I have to wear my ex-best brown suit whenever I go out now and it chafes me . . .

After lunch I went to Headington cross roads and waited for the Aylesbury bus to take me out to Aunt Lily’s. As soon as I was on board I asked the conductor where I should get down for Lower Farm. He didn’t know where it was. I explained that ‘Lower Farm, Thame Road’ was the full postal address: whereupon a very respectable white whiskered man of the small farmer class exclaimed to the conductor, ‘Why, Jarge, don’t you know—it is that old girl who lives all alone.’ ‘That old girl!’ said the conductor. ‘Yes, that’ll be the place,’ said I. The white whiskered man said ‘You’ll have a job to get in there when you do get down’: and explained to the passengers in general that I was going to see ‘The old girl who lives all alone with them cats’.

The bus was very hot and very unsteady. After a while the conductor came and sat down beside me, producing a cigarette from behind his ear and remarking ‘There’s one thing about that old girl, she’s a very good sort.’

SELF: ‘Oh yes. She has her little peculiarities but she’s very decent.’

COND.: ‘That’s right. I know her very well. There’s a cat of hers I was taking in and out to the vet every day for a while. But I don’t know how she sticks it, living there all alone.’

SELF: ‘She’s very busy. She spends all her time writing.’

COND.: ‘I suppose she’d be very clever then?’

SELF: ‘Oh yes, very.’

We then had some further talk about his job and about the strike they had some time ago. When I left the bus I was struck by the ‘sweet sudden silence’ on the lonely strip of road, the clear blue sunshine and the pale, almost white beauty of the fields.

Aunt Lily came out to meet me—looking, in spite of differences, strangely like what I remember of my mother. Her cottage is now furnished and very pleasant inside. The walls of her sitting room are entirely covered with prints—mostly of the early Italians. She talked of the ‘incredible folly’ of the Socialists’ last proposal of giving full unemployment pay to every child that left school—as if this were not simply to encourage all the worst to breed like rabbits. I heartily agreed with her. We had a very rambling talk—touching hardly at all on the subjects of our recent rather fierce controversies by letter. She said that she found Lear too painful to read. We talked of Meredith, of inspiration, and of Mr Allen. She mentioned as something that had often been in her mind, the fact that we cannot be sure that consciousness really ceases in what we call a dead body.

She showed me the three prints which she had long since destined for me. The two smaller ones are a head unknown and a head of Vergil: the larger is Giotto’s Francis before Honorius. She is giving me this one because she says Honorius is a portrait of me. I could easily see what she meant, and to look at my pre-natal portrait was a very strange experience. As I could not take all three, it was arranged that I should take this one today and come back for the other two.

It is certainly a magnificent . . . present. I am only partially able to appreciate such things—I can get the satisfying, unwearying decorative effect and the sentimental pleasure and a little of the naïf pleasure in the mere seeing things wh. the people for whom they were painted had in them. Perhaps a fuller appreciation will come when I have lived with them. Just before I left we fell into a close argument on the Self, wh. she considers capable of actual coalescing with other selves or with Spirit.

I came home holding my picture on my knees: it was so high that I cd. not see over it . . . Poor D had a bad head again tonight. Early to bed, dog tired.

Thursday 13 March: . . . I . . . bussed into College to the Philosophical Society. In Ware’s beautifully panelled room I found Ware (who turns out to be the man I walked home with from Allen’s the other night) and King. The latter has just started reading The Crock of Gold and is pleased tho’ puzzled with it. Carritt, Ewing, Price of Magdalen, Rink, Ziman, Fasnacht, Curtis and several others came in. Carritt read a paper on the ‘Moral Faculty’: it was rather disconnected and hard to follow. He seemed tired and abstracted.

In the interval I had some good talk with Price, mainly about the distinction of essence and existence, with a digression on Croce’s aesthetics. We look at things from rather similar standpoints. I should like to see more of this man. He opened the discussion in a style that amused me—it was so characteristically Oxfordish and donnish. Perhaps he will outgrow it. He took up (I think only for dialectical purposes) the line that the distinction between willing, judging etc., was only ‘sophistication’: that when one said one was hungry one simply contemplated attractive food without ‘enjoying’ in Alexander’s sense, the act of wanting it. This led to some good discussion.

Later on I trotted out my ‘antinomy of the practical reason’ which also gave good sport between Allen, Ziman, Rink, and myself. Came away at 11.20 and walked home by moonlight in half an hour . . .

Friday 14 March: I spent most of the morning at my essay on the Whole, trying to tackle the question of essentia and exisentia. After lunch I washed up while D washed Maureen’s hair.

Later on I played croquet with Maureen for the first time this year, greatly to the excitement of Pat who regards the slow rolling and resonant balls with a religious feeling . . .

Sunday 16 March: Poor D had a very uneasy night and was still suffering from sickness and headache this morning.

After breakfast I set off at once and, finding no bus, walked to All Souls. It was a delicious morning with the road sparkling between the long shadows and no mist visible per se but a faint blueness and haziness over the more distant trees. The High in all its early emptiness, cleanness, light and space was a thing to make a man shout.

I went up to Sir John Simon’s rooms (very good oak panelling) wh. Beckett uses and waited there reading Russell’s Icarus till Beckett turned up from breakfasting elsewhere, followed shortly afterwards by Harwood. We were all, I hope, delighted to meet, and soon set out on our walk.

We went under the railway bridge and thence to Ferry Hinksey. I discovered that Beckett had been a brass hat in the war, first in Macedon and later in the Caucasus where he had a military government and was really a satrap and even condemned a man to death—who escaped. From Hinksey we struck into fields and went up the hill dropping down to where the three factory chimneys are, into Cumnor and so by the Long Leas down to Bablock Hythe. There was no good talk, but excellent chat all the way. At Bablock Hythe we sat down on the grass this side of the river and talked more at large of Hassan and whether the cinema could ever become an art: but the ‘clop-clop’ of the choppy water and the sunlight are more memorable.

After some time we went on to Stanton Harcourt where we were to lunch. Before we reached it the sun suddenly disappeared and the sky got white and a cold wind sprang up. In the inn parlour we consumed large quantities of bread and cheese and draft cider. Harwood found a delightful book here—a History of Rome ‘related in conversations by a father to his children with instructive comments’. The children made such comments as ‘How pleasing is filial piety, Papa!’ and ‘My dear Sir, surely you have been too indulgent in describing the vices of Honorius as weakness.’

Afterwards we went into the bar (delightfully warm after the tomb-like parlour) where Beckett talked to a discontented farmer about co-operation in a masterly manner which showed the budding man of affairs.

After investigating the church we walked back, pretty fast, and arrived for tea in Beckett’s rooms after about 15 miles of walking. I was rather footsore.

During tea Beckett talked of his mysterious colleague Lawrence. He started the Hejaz business and got a job in the Foreign Office, which he held for a time, refusing to take any salary, but soon dropped it. He then took his Fellowship, but again refused the money and hung about All Souls, never dining in Hall, and haunting the Common Room of evening in ordinary clothes, talking very well when he did talk, but far more often silent. Now he has gone back to the army as an infantry private soldier under an assumed name. He is believed to have no private means to speak of: no man is intimate with him.

I then asked Beckett for advice and information about an All Souls Fellowship. I find that it is only £200 a year and that you can never sleep anywhere else in Oxford while you hold it. This pretty well spoils it for me. He said I would have been ‘almost certain’ to get it after Greats, but that my age was now rather against me. On the whole however he spoke optimistically. He thought that Pasley had v. little chance of it. I said that Pasley was ‘dead’: Beckett said that he thought him ‘still struggling—struggling very hard’.

I left them and bussed home. D still feeling pretty rotten but not so bad as in the morning. It was unfortunate that old Taylor should select this evening to visit us, tho’ otherwise we should have been glad to see him. He stayed to supper and the conversation ranged over all things.

Monday–Tuesday 17–25 March: During this time it was unfortunate that my first spring flood of ‘Dymer’ should coincide with a burst of marmalade making and spring cleaning on D’s part which led without intermission into packing. I managed to get in a good deal of writing in the intervals of jobbing in the kitchen and doing messages in Headington. I wrote the whole of a last canto with considerable success, tho’ the ending will not do. I also kept my temper nearly all the time. Domestic drudgery is excellent as an alternative to idleness or to hateful thoughts—which is perhaps poor D’s reason for piling it on at this time: as an alternative to the work one is longing to do and able to do (at that time and heaven knows when again) it is maddening. No one’s fault: the curse of Adam.

Wednesday 26 March: Up early and finished packing. We set off by taxi at 11.30 with our two cats and Pat and all the rest. We had a very good journey. A ‘jolly’ person of the usual professional buffoon type travelled with us to Wantage Road. He knows Cranny and told us a delightful yarn of Cranny saying to him in his queer brogue gobble ‘You know I’ve been over here so long now that no one would think I was Irish.’

We got to Clevedon much earlier than we had hoped for and found Edie at the flat, who had been working like a slave or a saint to get all snug for us and had brought us edible presents enough to feed a garrison. I was delighted with the flat. As you walk into the sitting room you are faced with a window which gives you an oblong of pure sea and sky with nothing else at all. As you come nearer to it, it is spoiled by the usual pier below: yet the pier is not so vulgar as might be feared, and the little Japanese pavilion on the end is almost pretty at times. During tea Edie told us a lot about Willie and Carrie. Poor Edie, she is very run down and her rapid conversation is quite incoherent and rather reminiscent of Miss Bates’s ‘That would be so very—’ in Emma.

Lateish to bed, v. well pleased with everything. D and I both suffering from colds and coughs.

Thursday 27 March: . . . I went eastward and had almost begun to despair of ever escaping the residential streets beyond Dial Hill when suddenly as in a vision the whole thing, so to speak, fell to pieces before me. Ahead was a smooth grassed down with a ruined castle on top—Walton Castle they call it. To my right was a long level bank of wooded hill with a sudden sheer gorge through whose V shape I could see the inland country, flat as a table and blue with distance. I scrambled up the green hill to my left, which is occupied by a golf links and open to all men: that is the one good thing I know of golfers, that they keep stretches of fine country from being spoiled.

After a stiff climb over spongy, rabbitty grass with grey stone showing through here and there, I reached the castle. Its appearance and position are more like a boy’s dream of a mediaeval castle than anything I have ever seen. After I had walked all over the shaved turf of the courtyard and been into the roofless keep and watched the clouds hurrying across the circle of open sky at the top, I came out into the wind again and continued my walk on a path which runs along the very top of this long hill, so that I had a good view of the valleys on each side . . .

Thence by road to my left till I struck the coast and began coming homewards across fields that sloped down through gorse to the water’s edge. In a field inhabited by two horses and a donkey (they all moved together at intervals, carefully synchronising movements) I ran down nearly to the rocks and sat down for a moment amid the gorse. I was out of the wind. The sun grew hot. A big tramp was anchored just below me. I have seldom had a better moment . . .

Friday 28 March: My cough was so bad this morning and my temperature so far below normal that I took a day in bed. I ate enormous meals, read a good deal in an English translation of Goethe’s Dichtung und Wahrheit—wh. I began to read in the original with Kirk a long time ago. It was rather charming. I also read Thoreau’s essay on Walking and his really noble speeches on John Brown: but I can’t quite say what it is that is wrong with all that Bostonese set. I tried the White Doe of Rylstone and found the first canto really delightful, the second tolerable and the next unreadable.

In the evening I collapsed into George Moore’s Confessions of a Young Man. It may have merits of style to which I am insensible. In matter it is just the idea which any eightyish, Frenchified prig of an undergraduate would like to have of himself. In fact one cannot read it impersonally. I have met so many people exactly like George Moore and they bore and irritate me in life or in ‘confessions’ equally. In other words the book produced just that effect wh. the author wanted it to have on people like me. But it doesn’t follow that the laugh is on his side.

Saturday 29 March: . . . In the morning I did odd jobs and then, at D’s suggestion, that it would please Edie, I walked along to the church to look at the Doc’s grave. It is of course a kind of office to the dead which I would never pay to anyone of my own free will—‘wherefore all this wormy circumstance?’ It was a morning of bright sunlight and wind. The church between its two cliff hills is certainly beautiful: though the glaring ugliness of the grave stones—the crosses, the scrolls, and the female angels—rather spoils it.

Home and to lunch. Afterwards Maureen and I walked up past the post office and along a really delightful road to Strawberry Hill . . . In the little village at the bottom Maureen and Pat left me and I went on alone up the wooded side of the next hill. After a delightful ascent through thick and steep woods I came out on to a level and rabbitty place dotted with gorse and clusters of trees, with a long green path on the ridge of the hill. I followed this. On my left lay the long valley which divided me from Walton Castle and its beautiful roll of Downs: on my right a flat plain stretching out to low, but peaked, blue hills a long way off. I passed a horse that whinnied at me and rolled on its back . . .

Sunday 30 March: . . . I . . . walked out along Highdale Road past Strawberry Hill and from East Clevedon up the Court Hill. Here I spent a long time wandering in and out of the woods all round this end of the hill. The sun came out when I was at the top: the sun broke out and suddenly changed the whole landscape—the pointed tree tops of the further woods jutting out like needles where they had been flat a moment before. I became every minute more enamoured of this country. The steepness of the slopes on which I scrambled, the trees hiding the ground below me, and the suddenness of my changing views of the valleys all produced, in little space, a real mountain feeling. Sed omnia nisi vigilaveris in venerem abitura.

Home for a late tea and afterwards all three of us to call on Miss Rimington whom Mary calls ‘Dogs’—a pleasant old lady with seven cats who all have biblical names as Peter, Moses and the like. We found her in a room overlooking the sea from which we watched a fine, tho’ frosty sunset. We came home by a delightful path above the sea, all enjoying it, and had a kingly supper of sausages, fried tomatoes and chips. In the evening I worked on ‘Dymer’.

Tuesday 1 April: . . . After my jobs I finished fair copying the canto which will stand last in ‘Dymer’ when he is finished and pleased myself greatly over it.

I then began David Copperfield. I read part of it at Wynyard about 1910 and I find I remember a good deal. I can remember too how much grimmer the Salem House parts were when I myself was at a school not at all unlike it . . .

Afterwards I went out alone. I walked up towards the Castle and down between the quarries and across the valley. I climbed the Court Hill range at the place beyond the lodge where I came down the other day and continued along the top by the telegraph posts. Huge clouds kept rolling up from the Bristol direction and I was alternately met by sleety rain and by bursts of brilliant sunshine—during which the grass and moss on the downs assumed a more jewel like glittering green than I ever saw in my life. Once I had to take refuge in a small wood. I reached Cadbury camp wh., as a camp, is not to be compared to the Malvern one. But the landscape from there is wonderful: the Welsh hills (now much closer), the channel, Avonmouth and more hills, and a valley flat as a pancake reaching to the Mendips on my right. The blues and the pale, pale almost yellow greens and the reds were almost unimaginable—and changing every minute with the movement of the clouds.

I came home along the hills all the way in great delight and, arriving at 10 to 6, found the flat empty and had tea alone. Read David Copperfield till suppertime and after. At suppertime D was called down to speak to a Mrs Clarke who lives in the flat below. We call her and her little daughter the Gollywogs on account of their quite unprecedented coiffure . . .

Saturday 5 April: By this morning’s post came a letter from Wilkinson giving me some examining work in July—God be praised: also the proofs of ‘Joy’ from The Beacon. After breakfast I returned the proofs, replied to Wilkinson and wrote to Carritt for a testimonial, and also did my ordinary jobs.

In the afternoon I walked with Maureen up to Walton Castle and into the wood beyond it where I dawdled about (very little bored considering) while she picked primroses and white violets. There are so few in the woods this year that it seems wanton to take them. We then went down into Walton-in-Gordano and came home by the shore path. It was sunny and very warm out of the wind and we sat down for some time in my lately discovered alcove. After tea the others went to the churchyard: I was glad I did not know in the wood for what purpose these flowers were being picked.

I walked down into the squalid streets beyond the station to interview the gas people, and to explain that Mary was in America and would pay her bill when she came back in May. D had been afraid that they might suddenly cut off our gas for her sins. Much warmer tonight.

Sunday 6 April: For the first time since we came there was no wind blowing this morning. The channel was glassy smooth, tapering away into mist with no horizon line: and there was sunlight everywhere tho’ slightly blunted by mist, and promising a warm day.

After usual jobs (i.e. ‘run’ with Pat before breakfast, fetching earth for the cats, cleaning the bath and cleaning potatoes) I sat in the front room. I did a few minutes’ work on a new Canto VII of ‘Dymer’ and looked into Mrs Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese. They looked very good and I felt not the slightest inclination to read one of them to the end. Spent the rest of the morning over The Sunday Times and David Copperfield. The Dora parts are odious . . .

D had said at lunchtime ‘Do let’s have tea in good time today’ and as I wished particularly, and have wished all along, to get her out earlier before the sunlight is gone, I cut my walk short and was home soon after four. D however was writing letters when I arrived and we did not have tea for over an hour. Afterwards we all went out and D dropped in to say a few words to Miss Rimington. Maureen, Pat and I sat on the wooded bank opposite for about half an hour until the sun had set and it had grown chilly. When D at last reappeared I discovered that she and ‘Dogs’ had been talking on that perennial subject, the selfishness of Grace and Rob and the sufferings of Edie . . .

Tuesday 8 April: A windy morning. After fetching clay for the cats and fetching a pail of salt water for Maureen’s foot from the shore—there are forty steps to this flat—I went to Rowles the coal merchant and finding that they cd. not send today, carried home the third part of a hundred-weight on my back. D had decided to go into Bristol today, so we had lunch almost as soon as I had finished coal heaving. Maureen says I remind her of Christian with his burden in Bunyan. She and D departed after lunch and I washed up . . .

I had some tea and set to work on ‘Dymer’ and pleased myself fairly well, tho’ I now think I was writing rubbish. I had finished David Copperfield earlier in the day. I am rather glad to be quit of it. I think the bad parts outweigh the good. The set funniness of Micawber etc. is very mechanical and really I think fit only for children. The really good parts are the semi-funny little trivialities and the town scenery—but the storm is good. What a pity that it is but the overture to such claptrap!

I read some of Alice Meynell’s essays—v. good indeed—and then started to put up curtains in the kitchen. The others came back before I had finished. A flat is the worst place to be alone in and our cheerful supper and evening was a pleasant contrast.

Wednesday 9 April: . . . It was a day of bright sunshine alternating with sleety showers. I walked by road to Walton-in-Gordano and up the hill beyond it. I was then at once in unknown country and owing to the curve of the hill could not see far ahead. I was under as bright a sky of blue and white as I have ever seen. On my right hand I saw a succession of ridges like waves—their intervening valleys being invisible—getting bluer as they receded to the horizon and giving a feeling of enormous space.

Once again I was impressed with the almost dreamlike brightness of the landscape—the transparent arsenic green of the grass, the bright red of the clay. My little circle of hilltop horizon advanced as I moved and the scattered beginning of a wood began to come up above it. I passed through the outskirts into a little red path with the trees very close on each side—winding every minute so that I could never tell what I was coming to. The intense silence (once broken by a jay) increased my excitement. The path gradually led me to my left and out of the wood across a field on to the Portishead Road.

Here I saw a splendid sight. The nearer half of the channel was in brilliant sunshine and in it lay a big tramp steamer with all its shadows very sharply picked out. About a mile beyond it was a huge dust coloured cloud with very ragged edges, in the very act of stumbling face forward into the water: and behind it the Welsh coast, miraculously near, with woods and the divisions of fields visible as never before. The wind was already tearing round me and the sand banks in mid channel had a white cud of foam round them.

I walked along the Portishead Rd. till I found another running inland to my right, up which I turned. As I got over the crest of the hill I had a sudden view of the hills and valleys ahead, all chaotic from this new angle—and suggesting much bigger valleys between them than there actually are.

By now the first scudding rain was going past me. Presently I came to a notice ‘To the White Harte Inn’ and just here I found a ruined cottage where I took shelter. There was no roof left. One gable was thickly overgrown with ivy and there were brambles in the opposite corner. I got a very comfortable seat in the fireplace. The rain turned to snow. The whole thing—the rushing wind, the view of an old orchard framed in one of the empty windows, the ducks at the bottom of the orchard, and the big flakes of snow drifting over my feet while I sat in the greatest comfort—all might have been arranged to suit my taste down to the smallest detail. The snow melted as soon as it fell. After about a quarter of an hour the sun came out as bright as ever.

The various delights of my walk home—through Weston-in-Gordano, up hill to the same wood I started in and home by the sea path, are too long to describe. All was as good as can be anywhere or any time: and for the whole afternoon I was soaked in mere seeing and free from all thought and wish . . .

Thursday 10 April: Jobs and diary writing in the morning. I read through ‘Dymer’ VIII and was more satisfied than when I wrote it . . .

Edie was down today and went with D and Maureen to the churchyard. She had not time to come in for tea—tho’ I saw them all talking at the door for a space that would have done me for tea. D and Maureen went out again after tea.

I sat in the front room working at ‘Dymer’ VII—rather more successfully than before but not really well. I have always assumed that I could go back to my romantic Avalon-Hesperides-Western business whenever I wanted. Now that I need it I find it difficult . . .

Friday 11 April: . . . Had a walk on the hill beyond Walton. In the wood full of sorrel, where I met a cock pheasant, I had a wonderful moment of indefinable memories. I began Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil.

Saturday 12 April: Jobs in the morning. After lunch I set in and made a fresh start on ‘Dymer’ VII—this time much more hopefully. There was rain and a wonderful stormy sky all day . . .

More Nietzsche. So far there is nothing new about it—just what the ordinary egoist has always believed and acted on. I had a dream last night. I went out with W and saw a moon about the size of a cathedral rolling rapidly along the sky. Tho’ shining intensely, it cast no light on the landscape which remained a perfect black blank, except for the silhouettes that came up in succession against the moving moon. There were ruins, spars of rock and crosses. We were climbing among pits and broken things. I was given to understand that it was the end of the world and there was a great sense of sublimity and awe about it all.

Sunday 13 April: Today the house was turned upside down in the morning to prepare for the arrival of Ruth and Willie. After lunch I went out with Pat and got soaked with rain, tho’ sheltering for a long time in a delightful cave on the shore. Home and found the guests already here. The rest of the day is a nightmare of greasy washing up, never ceasing voices, wet clothes, headache, housemaid’s jobs, and intense heat. Got ‘down to it’ on the sofa at about quarter past two—cold and tired. Poor D, this is her ‘holiday’! Willie has many sterling qualities. His talk is of bullocks and bishops.

Monday 14 April: Woke up feeling as if I had been on a debauch for a week. Washed up after breakfast and went down to the coal merchant expecting to have to carry coal home. Luckily they agreed to send today. Home and made up my diary. Lunch very late, and I washed up after it and after tea wh. followed immediately. The guests departed after it. V. tired all evening.

Wednesday 16 April: The others went up to Bristol by an early bus. I filled my claybox, took Pat for a run, carried the blankets back to Miss Rimington, did shopping, cleaned the bath, washed up the breakfast things and got to my writing at about quarter past twelve. I got on rather better, but as soon as I reach the dialogue part the old difficulty crops up—a little hard irreducible pellet of connecting narrative that must somehow be made into an end in itself.

Lunched about two, fed the animals, wrote a little more and walked out at 3.30 along the shore with Pat, finding many soaking machines and dawdling so that I did not reach home till 6.15. I began Erewhon which is very good fun.

Friday 18 April: On this day W arrived from Colchester by motor bike, having lain the night at Oxford. I had proposed to go and meet him at Bristol, but as it was Good Friday there was no means of going there. This I discovered on the Thursday and sent him a card telling him to pick me up between two and four o’clock at Clapton-in-Gordano.

I set out shortly after breakfast to walk to this rendezvous. It was a glorious glittering day and I never felt better in my life. I walked to East Clevedon and up through the woods on Court Hill, thence along the top to Cadbury Camp where I ate an apple and lay for a smoke on the dyke of the camp. The walk down into Clapton was lovely beyond expectation: through very young fir plantations into a landscape even more shining than all the others I have seen here.

At the solitary pub of Clapton I ate my sandwiches and had a pint of beer, and tho’ I was not very long there the conversation of the villagers included one infanticide and one indecent assault.

I waited for W. in the village for two hours—very little bored, for it was quite a satisfying place. It consists of one deep cut lane with primros’d banks and a stream at the side, a few cottages, a walled rectory with a castellated gate house, and a church up on a little hill. It was here that I found W at last, seated under a tree. He had gone as far as East Clevedon before thinking to look for Clapton and then come back: thus entering the village from the home end, not the Bristol end where I naturally looked for him. He is fatter than ever before. We had tea in the village and I came home in the sidecar.

Saturday-Saturday 19–26 April: W’s visit was on the whole a pleasant time: tho’ there are always little discomforts when anyone but ourselves is in the house. Maureen left on Saturday to stay with Valerie Evans at Chipping Norton. The manner of our life was this. In the morning I did my usual jobs and shopping if necessary, and then walked out with W and Pat, usually along the coast, stopping to soak in a cove and stopping for beer at the Pier Hotel on the return journey. They keep there one of the best beers I have ever drunk.

In the afternoon W generally read: I often went out to get something, or else read and wrote. After tea all three of us went for a most excellent ride in divine weather. We rode through Yatton and Wrington into the Mendips, passing within sight of D’s well beloved Winscombe—a steeple on a hillside seen for a moment in the heart of a beautiful long ridged wooded crooked country. After that we ran through a small gorge out on to the barer southern slope of the Mendips and down into the narrow little streets and beetling houses of Axbridge—glory! what a town and how placed!

Thence on to Cheddar by a road that skirts the hills. Here I saw many fields and trees quite white with blossom and daisies. At Cheddar we caught sight of the gorge up to our left quite unexpectedly: and then while I was still in a confused impression—the speed of a motor cycle is sometimes a great aesthetic advantage—W suddenly turned and ran up it. I lay back in the side car and watched the huge coloured cliffs pushing up further round us and closer till it seemed like going into a tunnel. I was quite unprepared for anything of the sort. It was a great moment.

We turned on our tracks and went on to Wells. Just before reaching it we turned off left at a signpost ‘To Wookey Hole’ to find some quiet pub where we cd. eat our lunch. The lane wound on so long that we began to fear that Wookey Hole was a natural feature, a devil’s punch bowl or the like, and not a village. A village however it turned out to be, with a pub where we sat on a curiously comfortless bench and ate our sandwiches and drank cider. We then went back and into Wells where W was charged 6d. for leaving the bike in Wells Square by the town authorities, who however ‘took no responsibility of any sort’ for it.

W was delighted with the outside of the Cathedral but less pleased with the interior. I think I agreed with him. I also agreed with his view that King’s Chapel, Cambridge, is the perfect building. We then strolled all round the Palace talking of all things that arose therefrom—Barchester, abbots, mediaeval siege tactics. Our ease and freedom and pleasant chat made this visit to Wells far better than my first when I came here on the motor tour with my father and the Hamiltons. In many ways W is the ideal person to go for a jaunt with . . .

It was shortly before W’s arrival that I had a long letter from Baker, giving me his news, and saying that it was apparent there had been some considerable misunderstanding between us—wh. he had also gathered from his conversation with Pasley. He said he had written to D at the time of the Doc’s death and then, later, to me, and had had no answer to either of them. I was in considerable doubt how to answer this. My only alternatives seemed to be silence, insincere acceptance of his account with mental reservations on my part, or the whole truth.

In the end I wrote accepting his explanation (i.e. that he had sent letters tho’ I had never got them) but adding that this was only the occasion of my coolness: the real reasons were certain qualities in him with wh. I was growing more and more discontented. I explained quite bluntly what those were, adding, at the same time, that I hoped we shd. find it possible to take up our old friendship again.

On Saturday 26th we all came back to Oxford. It had been arranged that I shd. travel in the sidecar. It was obvious that one of us shd. do so to save fares and D, of course, refused to be that one. I therefore trained with her to Yatton and saw her into a through train to Bristol with the luggage, and W, Pat and I got aboard the bike. As we were making all snug outside Yatton station, a hamper, wh. had just been taken out of the train, was suddenly opened just beside us to release a cloud of pigeons that filled the air with an amazing noise before we knew what was forward. It was a curious experience for I had not suspected the hamper of containing anything live. It was raining when we started but soon cleared up. We got into the main road shortly before Wrington and entered Bristol by Bedminster . . .

From Faringdon we came along at a very good speed thro’ Bickland, Kingston Bagpuize, Fyfield, Bessels, Leigh, Cumnor and Botley to Oxford. It is a tame, well combed, cheerful country of tidy well growing woods, white gates, dark tarred roads, comfortable cottages, sometimes exeedingly beautiful, green hedges and flat blue distances. The speed, the sunlight, and the sense of coming home put me into an unusually prolonged fit of ‘joy’. Home by about five to find D quite well, tho’ after a rather uncomfortable journey. Maureen turned up at eight o’clock. In the evening I introduced W to the poems of W. de la Mare and made him, I think, a convert.

Sunday–Wednesday 27–30 April: W left by bike for Colchester soon after breakfast, in pouring rain. His departure left me disquieted and unsettled for an hour or so—it is bad for me to get into the way of living with anyone who has leisure and money and ease of mind—until I came to my senses and was glad enough to be settled down to our own ordinary life again. There is always a pleasure in being to ourselves after anyone has been here for a while.

In the course of the next few days I had an invitation to dine at Trinity, and also a mysterious wire from the Master asking me to come to his lodgings at 9.30 on Monday evening ‘to meet Farquharson and Carritt’.

Pat became very ill and Gillard came out one day and pronounced it to be valvular disease of the heart and ordered him whiskey. At this time I took to using the attic (where Ada used to sleep) as a study. I finished and fair copied Canto VII of ‘Dymer’, and so, for the first time there was actually a text of the whole thing in existence. Domestic interruptions (nobody’s fault) made it impossible for me to get a chance of reading it all through at one sitting: but even without that I soon found that there was something wrong. It lacks unity. I came to the conclusion that Canto VI wd. have to be altered, and started a new one.

Sunday 4 May: Dined at Trinity this evening. I went first to the President’s house and he brought me along to Hall. His manner was rather repellent at first, but I think unintentionally so and he became better later on. I found that he knew my old form master at Malvern, H. W. Smith, ‘Smugy’ of blessed memory: but I couldn’t get him to talk much about him.

We were a very full table. I talked to my neighbour who was a scientist newly imported from Cambridge and seemingly a pleasant fellow: also to my opposite number who is their law tutor—a very dark, smooth skinned, clever looking, laughing, serpentine man whom I took a dislike to. He was however very agreeable.

At dessert I was beside Pritchard who condemned Jane Austen, or rather the life presented by Jane Austen, for its narrowness and triviality. I, and a very nice man with one arm, tried to defend her and pleaded that one had to use historical imagination to get over this, as one did to get over the vices in Plato. But we did not make much of it.

We then went to have coffee and smokes in an upper room, for the President will allow no smoking in the Common Room proper. Here I had some talk with their Mods Tutor about Mods, Poynton, Bailey, and Myres, whom this man had known in the Aegean. An elderly man in holy orders and in liquor came and sat by me (Patterson, senior Tutor) and, after taking me for someone else, discovered I was from Univ. and said ‘Ah . . . ! then you’ll know my dear friend Farki’. He proceeded to tell me how Farki’s daughter had just got the sack from a London hospital for feeding a child who had diabetes on plum cake in the article of death. He also told us some stories from Jeremy Bentham’s letters.

After him came Kirk, their chaplain. Conversation became general. We talked of Dickens and of the grace Benedictus benedicatur wh. no one cd. translate. Came away after a very enjoyable evening and discovered when I got into the open air that I was not quite sober.

Monday 5 May: Spent the morning working at a new version of my ‘Hegemony of Moral Values’ for Mind. D and I took Pat out for a gentle walk in Cuckoo Lane after tea.

After supper I bussed in to College and found Carritt and Farquharson with the Master. The latter laid before me the proposal that I shd. take over part of Carritt’s work during the next year, wh. Carritt is to spend in America. He said he recognised that there must be two things in my mind: the Trinity job and the ultimate possibility of a Fellowship at Univ: but perhaps for the moment we had best leave these in the air and without prejudice. I said that for me it came down to one question ‘Does my undertaking this work involve my withdrawing my candidature for Trinity?’ The Master said that no one had contemplated making any such demand of me. If Trinity elected me it was quite possible that Trinity wd. not object to my doing the Univ. work as well: if they did object Univ. wd. release me. ‘Or,’ added Carritt, ‘if you, although Trinity allows it, find the double work too much.’

I thanked them for taking such a liberal attitude and said that this removed the only objection I cd. have. We then proceeded to finance and what I made out after many convolutions of Farquharson’s tongue was that I cd. be sure of £200 for the year, as a minimum. Needless to say I agreed to everything and came away at about ten. It was arranged that I should lecture twice a week next term.

Tuesday 6 May: Worked on my paper again in the morning. After lunch and my usual jobs I went in to have tea with Robson-Scott in his rooms in Beaumont St. It was just what happened last time: we were just getting into a really interesting talk when in came his friend Bateson. I cannot imagine why Robson always insists on asking this young prodigy to meet me. We talked of Yates, W. de la Mare, Walter Scott, and Marlowe: I was glad to find this much good in Bateson, that he really does feel the speed and spring of Marlowe’s blank verse.

Sometime after this he observed that as he progressed he found his interest in a poem centred more and more round the author. I said this seemed to me inconsistent with real aesthetic experience. In a few minutes, by some circumbendibus I can’t remember, he was saying that his enjoyment of a poem consisted in understanding and watching and analysing the effect it had on himself. He said that on my basis of mere direct alogical enjoyment one cd. never prove that a thing was good—one cd. only say ‘I like it.’

I asked him if it was possible to prove goodness on his basis: to wh. he made the egregious reply ‘It may not be possible, but it’s easier than on yours.’ I asked him whether this pleasure (of analysis etc.) cd. not be derived just as well from bad poetry as from good: to wh. at first he assented, but afterwards said that the effects to be analysed were more complex and intense in the case of good poetry. Asked how his enjoyment could be called enjoyment of the poetry, he said ‘Because the poetry is necessary to it.’ I asked him if oxygen and digestion and other things were not just as necessary. He ended up by saying that at any rate other people felt as he did, people like W. Pater and J. A. Symonds: so I suppose these are his gods. Needless to say he is a follower, or believes himself to be a follower, of Croce, and cares almost nothing for nature.

Home by about eight after calling in the Union to take out Leibnitz.

Wednesday 7 May: I spent the morning in my attic reading the Monadologie, the first book of Sur L’Entendement Humain and the Systeme Nouveau of Leibnitz. There is more subtlety in him than I expected.

After lunch I had time to sweep out the kitchen and shake out the mats and do my other jobs before Ziman, who had really forced the engagement on me, appeared to take me for a walk. We went by field path to Stowe Woods road and home by Elsfield etc. It was a beautiful day and a fine bit of country—blue and white sky, cuckoos everywhere and innumerable colours in the hedges. I don’t think Ziman cared twopence for it, tho’ he was able to talk well enough about a cloud effect that I mentioned. After all, they teach them that here.

By dint of taking everything steadily au pied de la lettre I fairly soon induced him to stop being clever and some conversation resulted. Came home and [had] tea: afterwards he sat with me till 7.30, talking of what he called ‘happiness’ by wh. he apparently means my ‘real joy’, and of many other things. Not a bad fellow, but what a waste of an afternoon!

Thursday 8 May: This evening to the Univ. Philosophical Society after dinner to hear McMurray of Balliol read a paper. He is Lindsay’s successor, a Scotsman, with a mind that seems to me curiously perverse.

The moral judgement for him is primarily the judgement ‘This is evil’, wh., since he is a Bradleyan, means ‘the whole is such that this is evil’ and he finds a difficulty about the universe being logically coherent and morally incoherent. A good discussion afterwards.

Sunday 11 May: A short walk to Stowe Woods with Pat in the morning. Washed up after lunch and read Malory for the first time since I was about sixteen. I read the book about Balin and Balan, and tho’ I have often called Malory ‘dreamy’ in a loose sense I now saw for the first time how strictly like a dream the whole scene in King Pellam’s castle is, and indeed the whole story of Balin’s inexplicable superhuman guilt and bad luck. I enjoyed it greatly.

Monday 12 May: . . . I washed up etc after lunch and then locked up the house and went down to Ewing’s digs in Iffley Road—he having invited me, for my sins, to walk with him. We went to Iffley and back. I asked him if he suffered as I did periodically from a sense of the vanity of learning: he had no notion of what I meant. He said that Price (of Magdalen) was a dangerous man for the Trinity hope, as he had been asked to dinner there. I said ‘Won’t all the candidates be asked?’ He replied ‘Oh dear no, only those in the running.’ Back for tea in his digs and a long talk on Theism. I don’t know how it is that Ewing can talk quite well and yet he never interests one.

On the way back I called to see Miss Featherstone because D had had a bad dream about her last night. Miss F said the dream was postdated, for she had been very ill about five weeks ago but was now better. She is a great heart . . .

Tuesday 13 May: I spent the morning in the attic reading through the new version of my ‘Hegemony’ paper which I am sending to Mind and altering the ending. I also wrote a few stanzas of ‘Dymer’ VI.

After lunch I went out with Pat and walked over the allotments to Quarry, thence up Shotover and down into Pullen’s Gap wh. is now a sea of green and white. It was a bright warm day with an endless succession of clouds crossing the sky. The ground covered with blue bells and some gorse, tho’ much less brilliant in colour than down at Clevedon . . .

Thursday 15 May: Went into town shopping in the morning and sat for a long time in the Union reading Bosanquet’s Suggestions in Ethics wh. I brought out for the sake of the beautiful passage about the Absolute eating out of your hand. Bosanquet has apparently the right point of view about most things . . . but a little bit woolly.

Home again, lunch and chores, and then to the attic where I worked on Locke (with a break for tea) till supper.

In the evening I read Masefield’s Right Royal with intense enjoyment and excitement—but of course one can’t really tell what it is worth till it has been re-read without the excitement.

Sunday 18 May: A lovely summer day. After breakfast D had the sudden idea that we ought ourselves to lay down linoleum in the kitchen instead of waiting for Knight to come and do it—why, I don’t know. All that hot day which ended in a thunderstorm we worked on our knees in the kitchen with short intervals for rather squalid meals in the scullery till half past ten in the evening. Then we went to bed.

Monday 19 May: D very tired and cross today. Went into town after breakfast and did shopping for her. Hurried home and was immediately sent out into Headington on another message: when I came back from this D turned on me rather savagely for having forgotten to take Pat out with me. I made no reply, knowing that it was in my power to speak or not to speak but fearing that if I once began I might say regrettable things. In practice however I think my silence had an unkind and sulky appearance and was not really the right line to take. Poor D—I was probably as bad or worse for the rest of the day, though I honestly tried not to be disagreeable. I am afraid I have a good deal of my father’s unhappy nature in me.

After lunch the nervous irritation bottled up inside me reached such a pitch and my thoughts became so irresponsible and foolish and so out of control that for a moment I was really afraid that I was going into hysteria.

I spent the afternoon finishing the linoleum job in the kitchen: another hot day. Poor D was busy making cakes for the sake of her cousin Norah Murray who is coming to stay tomorrow. This was Edie’s suggestion: she thought it would be ‘so nice’ for us to get to know her.

This night I began again to have the same pains that frightened me so in Ireland last summer: the imperfectly localised pain which makes its headquarters near the appendix and which I hope is indigestion.

Tuesday 20 May: Norah Murray arrived today—tall, plain, very Scotch, uneducated, an earnest bridge player and golfer. A storm came on at tea time and she was so afraid of the thunder that D put her to bed in the yellow room and went to sit with her. She is about thirty five and as a child was one of Rob’s ‘girls’.

Friday 23 May: The Holmes children arrived after breakfast and D soon took me aside and told me that Mrs Holmes was dying and that the children would stay with us for the night and until further notice. She and I went upstairs in haste to arrange beds and so forth. Afterwards I washed up. I suggested sending a wire to put off Harwood (who was to come for the week end) lest his arrival should only mean fresh trouble for her and his visit moreover be wasted in these conditions. But D would not let me . . .

We had supper in good time and were finishing (D and I) when Harwood arrived. Tho’ I wished exceedingly that his visit could have come at a better time, I was delighted to see him—such a breath from the comfortable, easy outside world. While I washed up he talked to me of his walking tour with Beckett in the Tyrol. I got so much vicarious enjoyment that it was only afterwards that I felt the pains of envy. Later on all three of us sat in the dining room. Harwood and I had a good talk of books and of friends and every sentence brought me back to sanity. He is setting up a publishing business with one Lewis May, a great Vergilian who had resource to the Sortes Vergilianae before committing himself and fell upon the words Una salus ambobus erit.

Tonight I slept in my garret. My pains were pretty bad and of course the case of Mrs Holmes so near to hand brings certain thoughts rather prominently into my mind: but it makes an enormous difference being at home and not exiled in Ireland. I was also very cold until I went downstairs to get my overcoat.

Saturday 24 May: I washed up after breakfast while Harwood did Trojan service in amusing the children and tho’ he admitted it was a strain in the end, you could see he had a natural aptitude for it. I did various jobs till about twelve when he and I set off to carry Norah’s luggage by bus to the station—a welcome task—and thence went to All Souls to lunch with Beckett.

We had lunch (as before) in the ‘round house’ and afterwards sat in a small walled garden surrounded by fig trees, outside the smoking room. We were all rather sleepy and the talk did not go well: indeed I always find it hard to establish much contact with Beckett, tho’ I both like and admire him.

At about 3 we left and Harwood looked to see if Bodley had a copy of Traherne’s Christian Ethics wh. he thinks of reprinting. We walked home by Mesopotamia and Cuckoo Lane, stopping at every bridge to watch the water. It bore down infinite hordes of drowned and drowning insects. We talked of the horrors that occurred in one square mile of the insect world every month. Harwood thought that their consciousness might be so rudimentary that their death struggles might mean no more than a confused malaise. At the rollers the Cherwell was very flooded and turbid.

Reaching home we found not only the boys but Joy Holmes here for tea. D told me that Mrs H. had died this morning: after the last few days it was a great relief to know that she was safely out of the reach of pain. From what was said at tea I gathered that the two boys were leaving us this evening: but I soon discovered that they were taking the elder one and leaving the younger—wh. seemed an extraordinary arrangement. After I had washed up the tea things I came out to the lawn where Harwood was still gallantly amusing the children: at their age how I would have rejected grown up interference as an interruption of my own endless drawing and soliloquies. Presently however the Holmes’ car appeared and I found that they had changed their minds and were going to take both the children away. I was very relieved, chiefly for D’s sake, and then for Harwood’s and my own. When they were gone Harwood told me a wonderful example of childish obtuseness: Bobbie (aged seven) had come up and asked him ‘Guess who died today?’ But I think this argues a defect in mental age.

D and I then went out shopping and later Harwood and I took Pat for a stroll. In the evening we enjoyed blessed peace and leisure free from the boys and Norah.

After supper Harwood read most of ‘Dymer’ and gave me a budget of his new poems to read—‘Epitaph on Sudden Death’ in which he really touches sublimity and classical perfection . . . a little poem about a lark which is almost perfect too, tho’ in a much slighter style: octosyllabics to ‘R.M.’ a most interesting poem containing real titbits (‘The table spread / Lacked all things lacking common bread’—‘A triple fate designed / Jump with the chord our eyes aligned’) but still in need of revision: ‘At ille labitur’ wh. fails at the end: ‘A modern journey’ wh. is good: and two other pieces of less interest.

He has advanced splendidly. I still think my poetry better than his, but I envy his grace, his courtliness, and a certain choiceness and nicety. It is all so clean, so dapper, so humorous, so exquisitely ‘right’ in his good things.

He approved strongly of ‘Dymer’ VI. Of VIII he said that the whole thing was overshadowed by the ‘natural history’ difficulties of the brute as Dymer’s son: he wd. prefer a Caliban sort of person.

Late to bed in the attic. Pains a good deal better.

Sunday 25 May: A cool, grey skied summer day. Harwood and I with Pat had a delightful walk—to Stanton St John where we lunched off bread and cheese and shandy, thence through the woods and by field path to Beckley, passing one of the loveliest country ‘places’ I ever saw (at Woodferry I think)—a Georgian house with great gates, smothered in lilic, and far retired from a lane that was far retired itself: surrounded by deep meadows overhung with chestnut trees and full of black pigs that were as clean and strokeable as young horses. Home by Stowe Woods and Barton End. Harwood left us after supper.

Sunday 1 June: Up betimes and did the hall and dining room before breakfast. It had rained all night but was now a bright morning. After breakfast I went out with Pat and crossed the fields to Stowe Woods and thence by road down the hill towards Islip. At the bottom of the hill I struck in to my left across the field I had reached on Wednesday and got to the corner of the wood after great difficulty and floundering in the mud. I then came home by Elsfield and Old Headington after a very unenjoyable walk—or rather ‘unenjoyed’ for there was plenty of beauty if I had been in the right mood.

After lunch I did my usual jobs and washed up and then took down all the pictures from the drawing room preparatory to the sweep’s coming tomorrow. D spent most of the afternoon making further preparations and would not let me help.

After tea I wrote to my father and finished the first part of the Pilgrim’s Progress. The end is poor: indeed nothing shows the lowness (in one respect) of the original Christians so much as their idea of Heaven wh. they have handed down. Compare this glummery of golden streets and hymn singing with Vergil’s ‘largior hic campos’ or the isle of the Hesperides or Isaiah or even Nirvanah . . .

Wednesday 4 June: Raining all day, as usual now. Worked in the attic after breakfast at my essay on Locke. In the afternoon, it being too wet for walking, I bussed in to the Union where I read with great delight in Oddenowski’s Man and Mystery in Asia. It is extraordinary to read the mixture of Rider Haggard and Algernon Blackwood and know that it is true. The story of the Black Monk at first struck me as a capital theme for a poem—but really there is nothing left for the poet to do.

Home again and up to the attic after tea where I worked on my paper for Mind, turning, as I thought, a very difficult corner where I have stuck this long time.

Then, after an early supper, we all went: D and Maureen to the staff play at the school and I to the Martlets. Arriving early in King’s rooms I found only Ware and King present and had a little talk with the latter about the Crock of Gold. Presently others turned up, Carritt, Fasnacht, Dawson, Ewing, Allen, Carlyle, Stevenson. Carritt read a delightful paper on Arnold, of which he announced that I was ‘the begetter’. The discussion afterwards was not very good.

I walked home with Ewing. He asked me if I knew what was happening about Carritt’s pupils. I said, ‘They have asked me to take some of them.’

EWING: ‘How many?’

SELF: ‘About thirteen.’

EWING: ‘How many does that leave?’

SELF: ‘I’m not sure but I’m afraid the Farq is taking them.’

EWING: ‘Oh, I had hoped to get some of them.’

SELF: Yes. I always feel this position is degrading for all of us, but we can’t help it. I’m very sorry.’

EWING: ‘Congratulations.’

A horribly uncomfortable dialogue . . .

Thursday 5 June: Worked on my essay on Locke in the morning. D woke up today with a shocking headache but it got better during the morning.

After lunch I walked out with Pat along the lane that turns off to your right and so over the fields nearly to Horsepath. When I was in sight of it I turned up to my left and so through the bracken to my favourite fir grove where I sat down for a long time and had the ‘joy’—or rather came just within sight of it but didn’t arrive.

In the evening to Touche’s and King’s rooms in Beaumont Street where the Phil. Soc. met and Fasnacht read a paper on the General Will. In the interval I asked how the habit of applauding at these societies had arisen—for it was unknown when I first came up. King said it had started with Curtis who had gone to sleep one night, and, waking up suddenly as the paper stopped, applauded through mere force of habit. Carritt agreed with me that it was a bad habit.

Saturday 7 June: Letter from the Pres. of Trinity saying that they had made their decision. . . .

Monday 9 June: . . . I dined with Carritt in hall. While I was waiting about in the Lodge, having arrived rather too early, I had a conversation with Rink. We were joined by the Master who first of all asked if I were in for Schools—thus showing how little he remembers me: which is very natural and by no means culpable. Then came Raymond the doctor, who was up here in old days.

With him I went into Common Room. It was a big night. Poynton was in the chair: with him was Miles of Merton, Leys, Bowen, two unknowns, Allen, Farquharson, Raymond, a third unknown, Carritt and myself made up the party. But there must have been one more whom I can’t remember.

Poynton was in great form. He told us that the only people who really pronounced the Latin AE as AI came from Praeneste and spoke through the nose. Farquharson told us some stories about the late Master at golf. I had some talk with Leys and also with Allen about Antic Hay.

In the Common Room afterwards Poynton rose to hand the wine and then observed, ‘I am for the outward passage. We are thirteen and I got up first. It was just how it happened with poor Emmet. The only thing to do is to drink as much port as possible.’ After that he became very good and gave us an imitation of his idea of a Greek chorus. Leys, Carritt and I had a really good little talk about Wordsworth. Later on I went up to Carritt’s rooms and he gave me a lot of wrinkles for my forthcoming duties . . .

Thursday 12 June: Started Berkeley this morning. After an early lunch Maureen and I bussed in to Oxford and joined the queue outside the Sheldonian for the Bach choir. We had a very hot wait, the sun being for that moment out and strong, and I was rather worried by catching sight of Aunt Lily: but I think she did not see us.

We got seats in one of the windows—the best place to be, but still very uncomfortable. They gave us first of all the Kyrie, Credo and Agnus from Beethoven’s Mass in D. I was bored with the Credo but enjoyed the rest pretty well: they then proceeded to the Choral Symphony. The first three movements I enjoyed greatly—the second ‘even to rapture’: the fourth with its choir I didn’t care for. The finale—such is my ignorance—sounded to me like something from a Revue.

Maureen then bussed out and I wrote a note for Coghill in the Union, saying that I would come in after dinner on Sunday: I left this in Exeter and bussed home to find Jenkin at tea with the others in the kitchen. I was delighted to see him. He is just home from Switzerland and the Italian lakes—terque quaterque beatum! He has also been to Wembley and denounces my lack of interest in exhibitions as a fashionable affectation . . .

We had supper in good time and I bussed into town and went to W. H. Sutton’s rooms in Christ Church to attend a meeting of the Postgraduates. I was the first there. Presently Stout and some others arrived. Stout was the only person I knew and as he neither spoke to me himself nor introduced me to anyone else (not even to our host) I was reduced to the entertainment of my own thoughts. This did not matter at first, but by the time the others had stood talking in semi whispers about jobs and the famous men they had met for half an hour, and my head had begun to ache and my tobacco had run out, I began to think I might have meditated more comfortably elsewhere.

I was seriously thinking of getting up and saying ‘Good night. Thank you for a pleasant evening’ when at last they showed signs of starting the meeting proper. The reader turned out to be Mr Catlin whom I met at the Encaenia in 1921 when we were both prizemen. The man before him on that occasion had read rather too long an extract from his composition, and Catlin had whispered to me with a shake of his head, ‘Much too long’. He had then risen and read twice as long himself in a very parsonical voice with strong rhetorical rhythm.

He is pale and slight with a long yet bulbous nose and very thick pale lips: his hands, which are large, he holds before him and washes ‘in invisible soap’. His smile is the most fascinating thing about him: when he is spoken to he suddenly twitches his head over to one side till his nose is nearly horizontal. Then there is a rapid extension of his mouth as far as possible in each direction: this grin begins and ends quite suddenly and does not affect any other part of his face. He varies the intensity of the smile by maintaining the contortion for a longer or shorter time: thus when someone asked him to tea it lasted for about forty seconds. He stands sometimes on one leg, sometimes on the other: never on both. The continued contortions of face, hands and body reminded me of Uriah Heep.

He read a paper called ‘Prometheus’, modelled on Haldane’s Daedalus. Just as he was starting a man (the most gentlemanly one there I am sorry to say) came and squashed himself in between me and my neighbour on a Chesterfield, so that I was in great discomfort. It was at this point that I really got angry: I can stand mental isolation but not physical proximity.

Catlin’s paper however gave me intense enjoyment—tho’ not of the sort he had intended. I don’t know what his thesis was: only that we must avoid the prejudices of the ‘vulga—a—a’, and that ‘there is no permanent social evil’ (not evil but iv-il—pronouncing all your letters) ‘for that would mean a normal abnormality’, that we should distinguish between ‘the adultery of the heart and the passing peccancy of the body’ and ‘that the future of religion lay between Christianity, and some religion yet unknown’. I was hard put to it to keep a straight face at times—tho’ there was sense in the paper and plenty of it amid the affectation.

A man near me—a great coarse blackish thing, negroid or Jewish, I don’t know which—gave up the attempt and lay face downwards with his face in a cushion. My neighbour put his feet up on the sofa on which I was sitting.

As soon as the paper was over I went over to Sutton and said ‘Thank you. I have a bus to catch. I’m afraid I must go.’ Sutton looked up and made no answer at all: so I went out and home by bus from Carfax. The only other people there I can remember were Mr Dickie (one feels that all of them should always have the ‘Mr’ somehow) and the ‘crooning’ man whom I met there before.

Friday 13 June: This morning was a good deal colder and the sky full of clouds: but a strong damp wind from the North West had chased away this horrible heaviness that has hung over us so long. This exhilarated me so much that I went out after breakfast with Pat and walked on Shotover.

From eating indiscreetly on a rather tough bit of bacon at breakfast I had set my left jaw and the whole of that side of my face aching: and tho’ the pain was slight in itself, the fear that it would localise into a definite toothache and the effort of will to prevent this kept me from enjoying my walk. On reaching home I took some aspirin and wrote up my diary: by lunch time I was alright. After lunch D went into town and I, after washing up and usual jobs, went to my attic and worked on Berkeley.

Maureen, Aideen and I had tea alone in the kitchen at 4.45. Shortly afterwards D came back in very good form and loaded us as usual with presents for everyone. The dining room table was soon covered up with foodstuffs, new dressing slippers, notebooks and paper fasteners for me, shoes and umbrella for D, pads, toilet paper and what not.

I did a little more Berkeley before supper: after wh. I washed up and took Pat down Cuckoo Lane. In the evening I read a little in Th. Browne’s Urn Burial. All very merry and earli-ish to bed.

Saturday 14 June: A great drop in the temperature this morning. After breakfast I finished Berkeley’s Principles and wrote a little critique on it. I then began Hume: and greatly enjoyed the perfect clarity, ease, humanity and quietness of his manner. This is the proper way to write philosophy.

After lunch I half expected Jenkin to turn up, but when I had finished my jobs and still he had not appeared, I set off alone with Pat. The sun had now come out with a sudden autumn like intensity and it was hotter than it has been for many days. The heat quivered on the grass: I went through Quarry and up Shotover. There was a sort of whiteness over the landscape. I strolled along ‘the plain’ and down the little alley that leads to the railway bridge—enjoying everything very much. On my return journey I went down into the bottom of Pullen’s Gap and rested for a long time under a clump of young silver birches wh. made around me a curiously crisp rustling.

Reaching home I found tea set on the lawn and Jenkin there with D. He showed us many photos collected in his travels—Lemone, Benacus, Venice, and places in the mountains. He had just been reading Masefield’s Philip the King. He said that the part in which rumour of victory arrives is a failure, because, knowing the history, one feels all the time that this is only being done to heighten the climax. I said I didn’t feel that myself. He told me of a new letter of Sir Thomas Browne’s recently discovered and quoted a fine passage—‘every hour so addeth to that dark society’.

He also talked of Oxford—how quickly he had got out of touch with it. ‘When I lunched with Ziman and Curtis the other day,’ he said, ‘I felt firstly that everything they said was silly: and secondly that there was an intellectual gloss which I had absolutely lost in a few months.’ He was afraid that he was really ‘rusticating’ but I told him (wh. was the truth) that I found no change and that to talk with him was like slipping into a well worn shoe.

When he left I found that Maureen and D had disappeared somewhere, so I brought Wordsworth out to the garden and there in the delicious coolness I read Book I of The Prelude. This poem is really beginning to replace Paradise Lost as my literary metropolis. D and Maureen turned up from shopping in Headington with loads much too heavy for them. D of course made light of it: but I was rather sickened to find that my hour or so’s talk and read, enjoyed all innocently, had led unawares to this. So exacting is ordinary life: one cannot turn aside for a moment . . .

Sunday 15 June: . . . After supper I bussed into Exeter and went to Coghill’s rooms where, after a short wait, I was joined by Coghill and Morrah. The latter is very dark, slight, and vivacious: such a man as might be begotten by the marriage of a firefly with a rat. He is a Fellow of All Souls. He told me of some Canadian university who wants a young man as Professor of English and offers £1000 a year: they need not elect anyone and are in no hurry. He gave me an address to write to about it.

The talk fell on Catlin, whom Morrah had examined when he tried for an All Souls Fellowship. Catlin had filled his papers with quotations from the Vulgate. ‘It was his misfortune,’ said Morrah, ‘to fall into my hands, who am the only Papist in the society. I saw at once what he was doing—taking the Authorised Version and translating it into Latin: but the trouble was that he did it in Ciceronian Latin.’ I then remembered how Catlin had quoted a Papal Bull in his paper the other night: and felt ‘sudden glory’.

I happened to remark jokingly that All Souls was an indefensible institution. Morrah said its function was to keep the University in touch with the grande monde: and in developing this thesis became just a little too like an after dinner speaker (of the serious kind).

He told us a good story of how H. G. Wells had dined at All Souls and said that Oxford wasted too much time over Latin and Greek. Why should these two literatures have it all to themselves? Now Russian and Persian literature were far superior to the Classics. Someone (I forget the name) asked a few questions. It soon became apparent that Wells knew neither Greek, Latin, Persian, or Russian. ‘I think,’ said someone, ‘I am the only person present here tonight who knows these four languages: and I can assure you, Mr Wells, that you are mistaken: neither Russian nor Persian literature are as great as the literatures of Greece or Rome.’

I asked Morrah if he believed in the usual cant about dons being so much in need of humanizing and the grande monde: he gave an answer so carefully balanced that the result was nil. After a little talk about Gilbert Murray, Lindsay and other things, he left us: a man distinguished in manner, ready with the tongue, but somehow lacking something that wd. make him a really agreeable fellow.

Coghill and I then had a long and pleasant tête-à-tête until interrupted by the arrival of Dawson, a Professor in Exeter and a great friend of Coghill. We had very good talk triangular, chiefly on books, till I left at 11.30 and came home in great haste through milk white moonlight . . .

Monday 16 June: . . . Lunch was very late and by the time I had finished my jobs it was after three. I then bussed into town to do some shopping. I also went to the Union where I read the whole of De la Mare’s Ding Dong Bell, a beautiful little book in prose.

Bussed home and had tea alone in the garden with D: after which I set out to take Pat for a run and was unexpectedly pleased to meet Jenkin just turning into our road. We walked together down Cuckoo Lane—which is also called ‘The back of the hill’ and ‘Joe Pullen’s lane’. I spoke of the Pasleys’ action in going to a bull fight. Jenkin strongly disapproved of it and said that the fact of their being foreigners and English made their behaviour more important for, strange as it may seem, disapproval of strangers, specially of Englishmen, had altered the feeling about animals in some places before now. He instanced the Italian marble quarries and said also that the presence of the English armies in France had done something to improve the French treatment of animals since the war. I shd. be glad to believe this . . .

Tuesday 17 June: I dreamed in the night that I had a painful and (I understood) final parting from D and shortly afterwards found myself in a large swimming bath whose sides and bottom were of green turf. Here I discovered that a group of particularly unpleasant undergraduates—aesthetes of Satanic sneer—became very rude and violent. One of them however I converted and he came with me to an hotel where, being wakened in the night, we looked out and saw the streets all lit up with red fire. I knew it was the aesthetes who had done it and woke up remarking ‘I suppose this is the second fire of London.’ . . .

Wednesday 18 June: . . . In the evening I bussed into College to read my paper on J. Stephens in Donald’s rooms—Edwards’ old rooms. Here I met King who told me that Carritt had been run into by a motor bicycle and had seemed all right for two days except for a black eye: but that now he had retired to bed.

We were a small meeting—King, Donald, Fasnacht, Dawson and two young strangers. My quotations from Stephens produced much mirth and I think I made some converts.

During the interval Fasnacht told me about Sutton—my host of the other evening at Christ Church. He was given a Studentship there before Schools and afterwards got only a Second. Fasnacht said he was the worst bore and the worst reasoner of all people whom one met at philosophical societies . . .

Saturday–Tuesday 21–24 June: I left Oxford by the 10.50 for my week end with Harwood and travelled to London in a train crowded with undergraduates going down. There was one in my compartment who added the words ‘I mean’ at the end of his every sentence, and, what was more inexcusable, kept the window shut.

From Paddington I Metro’ed to Victoria and thence, after some difficulty, caught a 24 bus to Lupus St. I had been in the flat for some time before Harwood arrived. He discovered that I had never seen the Elgin marbles, so after lunch he ‘carried’ me to the British Museum.

Our attention was caught and held for a long time by the bull gates of the Assyrian Palace. I said ‘What cruelty—Hassan—one can imagine it all inside those gates.’ ‘No,’ said Harwood, ‘it’s more the cruelty of nature.’

By contrast the Greek things were all the more effective. We sat down for a long time opposite the pediment from Aegina, wondering what on earth it looked like to a company of streetboys who were wandering there. The best of all were the busts just outside the Elgin room: specially those of Pericles, Homer and Chrysippus.

The things from the Parthenon I appreciated more than I had hoped. If only the whole sweep of the pediment which has the horses rising at one end and diving at the other had survived. Besides that what impressed me most was the Artemis among the reliefs of the other gods—the only one that I have ever seen that is virginal but not in the way that appeals to a man’s base love of virginity—and without being girlish or insignificant. It is just thoughtful, unconscious of itself, serious, inhuman and (so to speak) irrelevant—out of our world.

The other gods, so far as I could see, had nothing divine about them. After this the Assyrian things, as we passed them on our way out, were simply savage and stupid.

We had tea in the garden of a little teashop near the Museum. I forgot to mention that Harwood had taken me into the reading room at the Museum. He is a reader, but I am not: he managed it admirably, saying, ‘Now walk on as if you came here every day.’ Then an official shouted something at us and Harwood cried ‘That’s all right’ over his shoulder and so we were in—a most depressing place it is. We sat over our tea in the garden a long time and had some good talk.

Then home to supper and afterwards to the pit of the New Oxford to see the Old Vic people perform As You Like It. They were dreadfully bad and it is a bad play. We remarked (the word ‘came into existence’ somehow between us and I do not know who is the author) adapting Boswell, ‘We’ll go no more before your scenes Baker: the white bosoms of your actresses fail to excite our amorous propensities.’

After the show we went round to the stage door to see Baker. I consented because I thought it easiest to get my first meeting over in the presence of a third party. We were admitted after a long wait and led down many stairs to a long narrow stone passage in the bowels of the earth wh. reminded me of nothing so much as an underground lavatory: then finally into a little greenwashed cell where we found Baker unmaking his face.

He greeted us both warmly and asked our opinion of the play. We hedged rather, saying we hadn’t been able to hear well—wh. was true. Baker, very typically, took charge of the whole play in a seigneural manner and apologised for it—like a host apologising for some hitch in one’s dinner. One other amusing and characteristic thing occurred. ‘These are fine boots,’ said Harwood picking up a pair of strange gambadoes. ‘No, they’re not,’ said Baker with much seriousness, ‘but these,’ (producing another pair from his cupboard) ‘these are the real boots.’

We then emerged from our den. A crowd of people were waiting outside the stage door and as I came past someone asked me ‘Do you know when Cyril is coming out?’ I might have been thrilled at this my identification with the theatrical world if Baker had not assured me that I had been mistaken for an electrician.

These stage electricians he told us have no efficient trades union and are horribly sweated: some of the men in this theatre had not had their boots off for eight days. Their driver is the same Cochran who is responsible for the notorious Rodeo. He seems one of the worst nibelungs in London. Harwood said it was wonderful that the crowd had spontaneously objected to the cruelties of steer roping. It showed that we were not yet decadent, that even if gladiators and bull fights were introduced, the people themselves would reject them.

The three of us went for some coffee to a place near by and then parted, arranging to meet Baker in Kew Gardens next day. That night I was again bothered with indigestion.

On Sunday morning we were late in rising and did nothing till lunch time. After feeding we trained to Kew and found Baker under the Pagoda—an ugly erection. It was a day almost intolerably bright and the light and shade on the cedars was wonderful. After walking about for some time we found a shady place and sat down. We talked of savage religion, the Russian stage with its mad, one dimensional business on ladders and of Shakespeare—how far he really believed in people like Romeo and Coriolanus—how often he had his tongue in his cheek.

We had tea in the gardens and then walked thro’ the rockeries—Baker has become a gardener. We then came back by train and had supper at a restaurant ‘Espagnole’ in Soho, where Baker stood us a bottle of Chianti. It was here that he announced his engagement in a very amusing manner.

Harwood and I left him soon after this as he had persuaded me to go with him to the Anthroposophical Society—chiefly I think to pull my leg. We had to take a taxi. Arriving at a quite innocent looking house we climbed many stairs into a small and insufferably hot room where some twelve people of various sexes and ages sat together.

I was introduced to a plain and rather crushed looking woman, Mrs Kauffman. Harwood told her I was quite new to the game. She said it would be rather difficult for me, having my first lecture at this stage in the course, but added ‘perhaps I shouldn’t say that. I don’t know how much you have done.’ Self: ‘I am an absolute neophyte at this sort of business.’ Mrs K.: ‘Oh. That means that you have condemned it beforehand.’ Self: ‘I don’t think you can really take that meaning out of my words.’ Shortly after this Barfield came in and sat between him and Miss Olivier.

Kauffman himself now appeared, a very dark, smooth shaven, broad browed man with a sort of unction about him. He sat down at a desk with his wife just beside him and read us his lecture in a very impressive manner, letting his dark eyes rest on everyone in turn with a sort of sugar sweet, spiritual familiarity. A priestly type beyond doubt.

But he came out best in question time after the lecture, when a number of very shy, rather silly and quite good hearted, ordinary girls put questions to him beginning with stammers and hesitations and ending with little bursts of gush—and then they would dart back into their holes, frightened at the sound of their own voices. At this time he would lean forward with an indescribable expression of encouragement, helping them out and saying by every gesture, ‘Yes—yes—I at least understand you my dear—what a lovely soul you have.’ It disgusted me.

Harwood said afterwards that my objection was not to spiritual conquests in general but to spiritual conquests made by anyone but me: that I disliked Kauffman because I was a rival Kauffman. ‘Thought horrid if true!’

We arranged to meet Barfield at the Truth offices on Tuesday and lunch with him. We then ‘carried’ Miss Olivier home to the flat by bus and she had coffee with us, and after some good talk Harwood saw her home.

On Monday we decided suddenly after breakfast to go to The Valkyrie at His Majesty’s tonight. This proposal raised me to the heavens and I was surprised to find how warm my old Wagnerian enthusiasm came back to me—it was like revisiting one’s native town. When Harwood had gone to his work I went out and was so afraid we might not get into the gallery tonight that I went to His Majesty’s and got two tickets for the upper circle. On my way home I went into the Tate and saw a lot of things which interested me, but I have forgotten what they were.

What happened in the afternoon I don’t remember clearly. I think it was then that Harwood showed me some of his new poems including the excellent one on Donne’s saying that ‘it is no where recorded that our Lord Jesus laughed’. It has a very fine and specially Harwoodian flavour about it. In the refrain he accepted my emendation of ‘Fac tecum nos maerere’ for his ‘Fac nos tecum’. It was also this afternoon I think that we passed through Charing Cross Rd on our return from somewhere forgotten and looked into many bookshops.

Despite great heat the hours at His Majesty’s were as glorious as any I have passed. It is not art—it is an irresistible sin or a religious expression. It is wonderful how in all the long scenes between Wotan and Brynhild or Wotan and Fricka (wh. some people find dull) he really gives us the feeling of assisting at the debates of the gods, of seeing the very most ultimate things hammering it out between them. ‘Thou great Argument heardest and the large design that brings the world out of the ill to good.’ Edna Thornton as Fricka was immense: the only one that really gave you the feeling of divinity.

In answer to a question of Harwood’s about the plot I explained that Fricka was my ‘old, old matriarchal dreadfulness’ wh. he repeated to Barfield next day at lunch, and everyone roared with laughter.

We walked home through Pall Mall striking the stars with our sublime heads. Beckett had returned so I slept on the camp bed (a v. comfortable one).

On Monday we lunched with Barfield in a little underground restaurant near the offices of Truth. They both attacked me about my scepticism about anthroposophy and I defended myself vigorously. Barfield and I turned out to be pretty much in agreement in the end. I was glad, for (as I said) it was always a shock to come up against something irreducibly different from oneself in any human being: that one had to believe that every thou was only a disguised me. Harwood said that I wanted to do away with all human personality, but Barfield agreed with me.

Barfield had to go to a theatrical garden party of all things, and Harwood to his work. I dawdled about for a bit, got my suitcase from Truth office and then, driven by thirst and curiosity, went for the first time in my life to a soda fountain—and the last. A more disgusting drink I never tasted. I then Metroed to Paddington and so home after a capital holiday: and yet glad, as usual, to be back.

Wednesday–Monday 25–30 June: A quiet time. I took Pat to bathe in Parson’s Pleasure wh. they have rather spoiled by clipping the tops of the trees.

D and I had some delightful evening walks after supper down by the cemetery. Maureen goes regularly every evening to walk with Joy Holmes. Mrs Phipps, our charlady, has been ill and D took her her meals (whatever we have been having) daily.

Thursday 3 July: Today I went to Colchester in order to travel back in W’s sidecar. I left by the 10.50 and metroed from Paddington to that desolating place Liverpool St., where I had a rather poor lunch for 4/6d in the G.E.R. Hotel. I travelled down to Colchester in the same compartment with some soldiers and a man of the poorer classes who was apparently an invalid (neurasthenia I think) and had a horribly pathetic parting with his wife—‘Lord send them summer sometime.’

A brisk shower of rain came down as I reached Colchester where I was met at the station by W and driven to the Red Lion where I had tea. This is one of the oldest hotels in England, curiously and beautifully beamed. W tells me that the American who insulted Kipling at the Rhodes dinner in Oxford has made a great name for himself (of a sort) in the army. W had just been reading Puck of Pook’s Hill for the first time: he praised it highly and I agreed with him.

While we were sitting under the roof of a kind of courtyard after tea waiting for the rain to stop, a Major came up, to whom W introduced me, telling me afterwards that he was a very well preserved specimen of the real old type of army bore.

When it cleared a little we walked out to see the town, which is a very pleasant sprawling old world place, not unlike Guildford. The Roman castle is very fine in a kind quite new to me, as also the remains of the old gate of Camolodunum. There is also a pleasant old house (now an office but it ought to be a pub) bullet-marked from the civil wars.

After all this we motored up out of the town to a higher, windy land, full of camps. W’s camp consists of a small old country house (‘a Jorrocks house’ he called it) and its park, now filled with huts. The C.O. lives in the Jorrocks house. I was taken into the mess (Lord, how strange to be in such a place again!) and of course given a drink. The ‘Orficers’ were really very nice to me. It was odd to me to see a mess full of people in mufti.

We then motored back to town to a civilian club of which W is a member, where he had provided a royal feast of the sort we both liked: no nonsense about soup and pudding, but a sole each, cutlets with green peas, a large portion of strawberries and cream, and a tankard of the local beer which is very good. So we gorged like Roman Emperors in a room to ourselves and had good talk. W told me he had given Dauber to a Major Falle (a friend of his) who, tho’ a hater of poetry, had enjoyed it, but made one criticism: viz. that the sailors wd. not have despised Dauber’s paintings: even if they had ragged him they would have been inwardly impressed.

We drove back to camp. W. had turned out into another hut and I had his bedroom. He has two rooms for his quarters. The sitting room with stove, easy chair, pictures, and all his French books, is very snug. I notice that a study in a hut, or a cave, or the cabin of a ship can be snug in a way that is impossible for a mere room in a house, the snugness there being a victory, a sort of defiant comfortableness—whereas in a house of course, one demands comfort and is simply annoyed at its absence. He ‘put into my hands’ Anatole France’s Revolt of the Angels in a translation, which seems an amusing squib.

Friday 4 July: We started on our Oxford journey after breakfast in the mess. The day looked threatening at first, but we had fair weather. I do not remember the names of the villages we passed, except Braintree and Dunmow (where the flitch lives).

At St Alban’s we stopped to see the Cathedral: I had been there once before in my Wynyard days about 1909 or 1910 to sit and kneel for three hours watching Wyn Capron (whom God reject!) ordained a deacon or priest, I forget which. Yet, in those days, that day without work, the journey to St Albans, the three hour’s service and a lunch of cold beef and rice in an hotel was a treat for which we counted the days beforehand and felt ‘nessun maggio dolore’ when the following day brought us back to routine. I was rather glad to find the Cathedral quite definitely the poorest English cathedral I have yet seen.

In the town we bought two pork pies to supplement what W considered the Spartan allowance of sandwiches given us by the mess, and drank some beer. I think it was here that W formed the project of going far out of the way to eat our lunch at Hunton Bridge on the L.N.W.R. where we used to sit and watch the trains when out on our walks from Wynyard. I assented eagerly. I love to exult in my happiness at being forever safe from at least one of the major ills of life—that of being a boy at school.

We bowled along very merrily in brilliant sunshine, while the country grew uglier and meaner at every turn, and therefore all the better for our purpose. We arrived at the bridge and devoured the scene—the two tunnels, wh. I hardly recognised at first, but memory came back. Of course things were changed. The spinney of little saplings had grown quite high. The countryside was no longer the howling waste it once looked to us. We ate our egg sandwiches and pork pies and drank our bottled beer. In spite of W’s fears it was as much as we could do to get through them all. But then, as he pointed out, this was appropriate to the scene. We were behaving just as we would have done fifteen years earlier. ‘Having eaten every thing in sight, we are now finished.’ We had a lot of glorious reminiscent talk. We developed our own version of ‘si jeunesse savait’: if we could only have seen as far as this out of the hell of Wynyard. I felt a half comic, half savage pleasure (Hobbe’s ‘sudden glory’) to think how by the mere laws of life we had completely won and Oldy had completely lost. For here were we with our stomachs full of sandwiches sitting in the sun and wind, while he had been in hell these ten years.

We drove on and had tea at Aylesbury—dizzy by now and stupid with fresh air—and got to Oxford before seven.

Saturday–Monday 5–7 July: On Saturday . . . W and I (after I had done the lunch wash up) biked to Wantage Road where he wanted to take a photo of the fastest train in England. We did this successfully and looked out for a suitable place for tea on the return journey.

A countryman told us that there was no pub near, but that we could get tea at the—it sounded like Dog House. We both felt sure there could be no place called the Dog House, yet presently found it. Here we had strange adventures. I rang at the closed door—it is a little red house under a woodside—and waited for ten minutes: then rang again. At last a very ancient beldame appeared. I asked if we could have some tea. She looked hard at me and asked ‘Are you golfers?’: on my answering ‘no’ she shut the door softly and I could hear her hobbling away into the bowels of the house. I felt like Arthur at Orgolio’s Castle.

Anon the ancient dame appeared again and, looking even harder at me, asked me a second time what I wanted. I repeated that we wanted some tea. She brought her face closer to mine and then with the air of one who comes at last to the real point asked ‘How long do you want it for?’ I was quite unable to answer this question but by God’s grace the witch left me multa parantem dicere and hobbled away once more.

This time she left the door open and we walked in and found our way to a comfortable dining room where a plentiful and quite unmagical tea was presently brought us. We sat here for a very long time. A storm of wind got up (raised, I make no doubt, by our hostess, who, by the by, may have been the matriarchal dreadfulness) and the ivy lashed the windows.

On the next day, Sunday, we went to bathe at Parson’s Pleasure with Pat who swam twice across the Cherwell. W. left us on Monday. While he was here I read and finished France’s Revolt of the Angels. A good book—but I can not get over real Frenchness. When a young man, on being rebuked by his father for an amour, first feels an impulse to burst into tears, secondly an inclination to fall on his knees, and finally draws a red herring across the trail by drawing the parental attention to the immoralities of his sister—one cannot remain in the aesthetic sphere. A bad smell is beyond the reach of art.

Wednesday–Wednesday 9–16 July: I spent most of this time looking up the books I was to examine in: and the books which I wrongly believed I was to examine in: Lamb, Wordsworth, Macbeth, Hamlet, Richard II, Lear, Twelfth Night, Eōthen, David Copperfield and Macaulay’s Chatham and Clive.

This is the first time I had looked into Macaulay for many years: I hope it will be many years before I read him again. It’s not the style (in the narrower sense) that’s the trouble—it’s a very good style within its own limits. But the man is a humbug—a vulgar, shallow, self satisfied mind, absolutely inaccessible to the complexities and delicacies of the real world. He has the journalist’s air of being a specialist in everything, of taking in all points of view and being always on the side of the angels: he merely annoys a reader who has had the least experience of knowing things, of what knowing is like. There is not two pence worth of real thought or real nobility in him. But he isn’t dull.

These were days of lovely sunshine and I bathed nearly every day and lay out naked in the sun.

On Wednesday I got my first batch of papers to correct—Higher Certificate Shakespeare—and began work.

Thursday–Tuesday 17–29 July: All these days I worked hard on my examining. At first I had to interrupt myself several times to go in and ‘collaborate’ with my fellow examiners for the Locals at the rooms of the Senior Examiner, one Simpson, a parson, in Museum Road. This collaboration was not such a nuisance as I expected: Simpson was v. pleasant and a help, not a hindrance. Here I met Rice-Oxley whom I knew at Keble: also an interesting Major Grey.

When this was over I settled into the following routine. I had breakfast at quarter to eight. For the first few mornings I was so sick that I had only a piece of toast, and even then I was sick a few moments later. I started work at eight and continued till lunch. While drinking my after lunch tea I walked for five minutes or so in the garden. I then began work again and continued till 6.45 or seven, taking my afternoon tea while I worked. At seven I walked over into Old Headington and had a whiskey and soda and came back for supper. Immediately after supper I began again and went on till twelve o’clock when I went to bed.

At first this routine told upon me very severely in the form of sickness, headache, and above all, nerves. I had a terrible reaction each night when I went to bed, feeling quite cowed and shaky. After a few days however I got my second wind and it became a normal and tolerable mode of life.

Poor D suffered as much, if not more than I did. For the first few days Valerie Evans was here as Maureen’s guest and of course neither she nor Maureen gave the least help. What mortal dare interrupt their pleasures. D thus had a household of four humans and five v. troublesome animals to look after single handed. In addition she was suffering from sickness, like myself, and from corns: she could get no shoes which did not hurt her.

Valerie is prettier than ever: but the knowledge of this fact is rapidly spoiling her. Her main interest is now dress and she has adopted—perhaps innocently and unconsciously (et mentem Venus ipsa dedit)—all those provocative little mannerisms which underline the fact that blind nature made her for one purpose. If only pretty women would realise with how many and with what people they share the power of attracting in this way!

Wednesday 30 July: I had now got through the worst of my papers and as there was no hurry over the rest, I took a day’s holiday. The previous routine work had however left me in no way visibly the worse: indeed I have much more horror of it in retrospect than I had at the time. Today I bought a copy of Tom Jones and began to read it . . .

Friday–Sunday 1–3 August: I continued now my old routine for morning and afternoon, but instead of continuing till midnight I usually finished at 6.30: then had my drink, washed up after supper and read Tom Jones in the evening. As I came near the end I found it harder to keep my mind on the work and instead of doing the papers. I wanted to reflect how few there were still to do.

Tom Jones is a good book. I don’t know how it got the reputation of being libidinous. The real point about it is the pure narrative power: it has such a momentum. When novels switch off from one group of characters to another one is usually irritated: Fielding always makes you feel that it is just what you want. The mock Homeric parts are capital—far better than those in The Battle of the Books. What surprised me most was the real romantic feeling in the scene wh. introduces the Man of the Hill: though of course his story is rubbish.

Dorothea (or Dotty or Toddy or Totty, for D has not yet settled her name) seems to have many good qualities. She seems plain at first, but her face improves on acquaintance and becomes really rather comely at times. She is the very antithesis of Valerie. She believes herself to be plain, always has holes in her stockings and seldom has clean hands, has girlishly violent views on powder and over interest in clothes: all of wh. is to the good. She is absolutely unaffected—a loud, floundering, untidy, excitable person, all over a room at once: in shape, to quote Stephens ‘a lank anatomy all leg and hair and stare like a young colt’. Intellectually, on the other hand, she is far older than any girls I have met from this school: has read fairly widely and is full of extreme views on all imaginable subjects—just as one ought to be at her age. She is the only one of Maureen’s friends who has ever shown the least consideration for D, for whom she has bought oranges—these being now v. hard to get.

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