discussions on everything that happens: he will draw anyone who listens into a corner and stand there exchanging husky confidences about his pupils and colleagues. He always implies that “we two (or three or four) are the only people in College who understand this matter and we must hold together”. The very same people against whom he marshals his confidants on Wednesday will themselves be taken into council on Thursday. He believes all that he says for the moment, but being weak as water, takes a new colour from every group that he falls into.’ In sharp contrast was another of the younger dons at Magdalen, T. D. (‘Harry’) Weldon, the Philosophy tutor, who was a militant atheist and who soon became the leader of the more radical dons. Of him, Lewis wrote: ‘He has great abilities, but would despise himself if he wasted them on disinterested undertakings. He would be capable of treachery and would think the victim a fool for being betrayed. He preaches what he practises: tells you openly that anyone who believes another is a fool, and holds that Hobbes alone saw the truth: tells me I am an incurable romantic and is insolent to old men and servants. He is very pale, this man, good-looking, and drinks a great deal without getting drunk. I think he is the best of our younger fellows and I would sign his death-warrant to-morrow, or he mine, without turning a hair.’
When term began, Lewis’s duties in Magdalen consisted of giving an hour’s tutorial each week, together with any extra teaching he thought necessary, to those undergraduates in the college who were reading English In his first years as a tutor he rarely had more than half a dozen pupils; and as they came to him either singly or in pairs for their tutorials, this meant some six or eight hours of teaching a week. In addition to this he gave courses of lectures to the University as a whole, which meant another hour or two’s work each week, plus the time taken to prepare the lectures. In some academic years he would also be required to serve as an examiner, which occupied a good deal of time. But much of his day was still his own, to use as he liked for private research, for helping Mrs Moore with domestic chores (which he continued to do each afternoon), and for meeting his friends.
Lewis did not find the Magdalen undergraduates much more attractive than many of the dons. He told his father that in his opinion the college was no more than ‘a country club for all the idlest “bloods” of Eton and Charterhouse’, adding, ‘I really don’t know what gifts the public schools bestow on their nurslings, beyond the mere surface of good manners: unless contempt of the things of the intellect, extravagance, insolence, self-sufficiency, and sexual perversion are to be called gifts.’ Certainly there was a Magdalen tradition of recruiting undergraduates from the smarter public schools; but here again, Lewis’s own schooling had left him sensitive to such things, particularly to homosexuality.
As to the undergraduates, this is how one Magdalen freshman responded to his surroundings in that Michaelmas term of 1925:
Balkan Sobranies in a wooden box,
The college arms upon the lid; Tokay
And sherry in the cupboard; on the shelves
The University Statutes bound in blue,
Crome Yellow, Prancing Nigger, Blunden, Keats …
Privacy after years of public school;
First college rooms, a kingdom of my own:
What words of mine can tell my gratitude?
No wonder, looking back, I never worked.
The undergraduate who wrote these lines was among Lewis’s first pupils that term, and they did not get on well. ‘Betjeman and Valentin came for Old English,’ Lewis wrote in his diary. ‘Betjeman appeared in a pair of eccentric bedroom slippers and said he hoped I didn’t mind them as he had a blister. He seemed so pleased with himself that I couldn’t help saying that I should mind them very much myself but that I had no objection to his wearing them – a view which I believe surprised him. Both had been very idle over the O.E. and I told them it wouldn’t do.’
John Betjeman found Magdalen a blessed relief after schooldays at Marlborough, where he had endured just as much discomfort as Lewis at Malvern. He was certainly prepared to pay a little desultory attention to English literature, but he had not bargained for Old English (Anglo-Saxon), nor for such a tutor. Lewis, who was going to be responsible for teaching his pupils the whole English School syllabus from The Battle of Maldon to Blake, had decided to do his best to make the early part of the course palatable by organising evenings of ‘Beer and Beowulf’ and by inventing mnemonics to teach his pupils the laws of sound-changes. Betjeman, whose taste was for Swinburne, Firbank and the Gothic Revival, could scarcely be expected to respond enthusiastically to Lewis chanting over the beer-jug:
Thus Æ to E they soon were fetchin’,
Compare such forms as þÆC and þECCEAN.
(The last word is pronounced approximately as thetchen and so provides a rhyme.) Betjeman absented himself from this ordeal whenever possible, slipping away to friends who had an exotic country house at Sezincote near Moreton-in-Marsh:
I cut tutorials with wild excuse,
For life was luncheons, luncheons all the way.
‘While in College,’ Lewis wrote in his diary, ‘I was rung up on the telephone by Betjeman speaking from Moreton-in-Marsh, to say that he hadn’t been able to read the Old English, as he was suspected for measles and forbidden to read a book. Probably a lie, but what can one do?’
When Betjeman was not lunching at Sezincote he could usually be found at the George Restaurant in Oxford with Harold Acton and the Etonian set from Christ Church, or at Wadham College in the group of young men who gathered around Maurice Bowra. But if Bowra’s hospitality and wit showed Betjeman that dons were sometimes prepared to treat undergraduates as more than pupils, Betjeman found nothing of this reflected in his relationship with his tutor. The instant the tutorial hour was over, Lewis showed Betjeman to the door, generally with a fierce admonition to work harder. It was not that Lewis behaved in this way to all his pupils: he began to make friends with one or two who liked brisk walks and whose ideas interested him. But most undergraduates found him formal and fierce, and certainly he kept his distance from those whose behaviour had overtones of homosexuality – a fashionable mannerism among Oxford undergraduates at the time. Lewis’s own attitude to homosexuality is hard to define; it was perhaps a mixture of revulsion, due to his Ulster upbringing which encouraged an Old Testament severity towards sexual deviation, and fear, even suppression, due to the fact that his own feelings for his male friends were so warmly affectionate. At all events, while many of the ‘Georgoisie’ (as Betjeman named his friends) ate their dinners in loose-knotted shantung ties and pastel shirts, Lewis seemed to be taking almost exaggerated care to be shabby, with his regular uniform of dung-coloured mackintosh and old cloth hat.
John Betjeman was sent down from Magdalen after only a few terms for failing the obligatory University examination in Divinity. He sought out Lewis ‘in his arid room’, but was told bluntly, ‘You’d have only got a Third.’
Some years later, Betjeman turned the tables on his tutor. In his volume of poems Continual Dew (1937), he wrote in the preface that he was ‘indebted to Mr C. S. Lewis for the fact on page 256’. The book consisted of only forty-five pages. And in one of the poems contained in it, ‘A Hike on the Downs’ – which might indeed be a deliberate parody of Lewis’s whole way of life – there is this stanza, supposedly spoken by a young don:
‘Objectively, our Common Room
Is like a small Athenian State –
Except for Lewis: he’s all right
