Collected Letters Volume One: Family Letters 1905–1931

By the way, that would be a rather interesting amusement, trying to find musical interpretations for all our friends. Thus Gordon61 is like the Pilgrims chorus from Tannhaüser, Kelsie a bit like the Valkyries62 only not so loud, Gundred63 like the dance-movement in Danse Macabre, and Bob like a Salvation army hymn. We might add yourself as a mazurka by Chopin, wild, rather plaintful, and disjointed, and Lily like, well–a thing of Grieg’s called ‘The Watchman’s Song’64 that you haven’t heard. I think I must write a book on it.

By the way (all my sentences seem to begin like that) I am very sorry this is a bit late, but I was writing to my father and brother last night. Now, good night, Galahad, and be good and talk sense the next time you do me the honour of arguing with me.

Yours

Jack

P.S. What about the question of ‘sensulity’?

TO HIS FATHER (LP IV: 319-20):

[Gastons]

Friday [18 June 1915]

My dear Papy,

I am writing this immediately after reading your letter, but I mean it to belong to next week. Perhaps I shall not post it till Monday to equalize the dates, but at any rate it is much easier to write to you just after reading yours. I somehow seem to be unable to write to you properly now-a-days: perhaps because we make jokes nearly all the time when we are together, and household humour, though the funniest of all things to those who understand (a propos of which, read the first Roman story in ‘Puck of Pook’s Hill’),65 can’t really be written down. Whereas if I try to be serious, I merely succeed in being ‘stuffy’. The last word describes exactly what I mean. However, as Plato says, the written word is only a poor faint shadow of real conversation, in which, among people who know each other well, the merest suggestion explains a train of thought which the most elaborate written explanation leaves obscure, lifeless and formal.66 Still, as it would be expensive to telephone to you every week with trunk calls–do you remember the lady in ‘The Whip’?67–we must do the best we can.

I think we may reasonably hope that the war will be over before it begins to concern me personally. At the same time, the knowledge that I had gone as soon as possible to the front would not, I fancy, be a very substantial comfort to me if I arrived there as a conscript. All the people on whom that name has fallen would be lumped together without distinction in the minds of our Tommies–who indeed might be excused for feeling some warmth in the circumstances. Then there is the other possibility that Europe will be at peace before I am eighteen. In that case I believe my career at Oxford would be, if anything, a little easier than usual, owing to lack of competition. It would be ghastly however to reckon up that condition as an advantage–when we remember what it means. I am sorry for your sake that ‘Mr. Carr’68 has gone, but after all, from his point of view, it was inevitable. There is not much objection made to the teeth now, it seems!

I will certainly write to the Colonel as soon as you send me his address, which I am not quite sure of. I don’t think I will make it a birthday letter, which–from me at any rate–would not appeal to him: I may find some ‘crack’ however to interest him. Isn’t it interesting to note the different things we expect from different people? If I imitated your style exactly, and could write a letter to the Colonel almost the same as a typical one of yours, the result would be merely irritating: if you tried the same experiment with my style, or absence of style, the result would be the same. Yet both, I believe, would be acceptable from the right authors.

This is a digression: to go back to Warnie, it certainly must be very depressing to see so many of the Malvern lot–for whom he had a regard as genuine as it was inexplicable–dropping off like this. ‘It is an ill wind’–the proverb is rather old. But one result of the war to us seems to be that you and W., if I may say so, understand each other better than you have done for some time.

I am learning lots of things here besides the Classics–one of them being to take cold baths: and such an artist I am becoming that you will hardly know me when I get home for the brevity of my sojourn in the bath room and the prodigious amount of noise I make over it. The weather is still hot and a trifle oppressive here, but agreeable in the morning and evening.

I have been devoting this week to the reading of Othello,69 which I like as well as any Shakesperian play I have read. The part of Iago, to my mind, is something of a blemish, and the fact that his pitiless malignity has absolutely no motive leaves him rather a monster (in the Classical, not the newspaper sense of the word), than a human character. But then of course Shakespeare at his best always works on titanic lines, and the vices and virtues of Lear, Macbeth, Hamlet, Othello, Desdemona, etc., are magnified to a pitch more splendid and terrible than anything in real life.70

If I leave here on the 30th July, so as to arrive home on the last Saturday of that month, the exact half of the term ought to have fallen about four hours ago. That will make the usual twelve weeks. Only six more now! That sounds perhaps too like the old days at Malvern, but don’t suppose that because I will be glad to see you again, I am not happy and more than happy at the K’s.

your loving,

son,

Jack

TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W):

[Gastons

29 June 1915]

Dear Galahad,

Did the Norns or Dana holy mother of them that die not, weave for us in that hour wherein our mothers bare us, that never should we write to each other without the first page being occupied by argument? Because, whether by the decree of fate or no, this has always been the case. First it was Shee v. Souteraines, then Tears v. Trousers, and now Larne v. Leeborough–which by the way means Little Lea. How you can have known me so long without picking up the words & tags which I use every day passes my understanding–unless I am to conclude that you are asleep half the time I am talking to you, which is very probably so.

Well about this infernal holyday: as your infantile brain–for which I have catered on this envelope–is incapable of swallowing my previous very elementary argument, I will explain my position once more in very simple terms, as follows:–

I have eight weeks vacations.

I have been invited to stay 10 days with Mrs Hamilton.71

I have accepted her invitation.

I intend to keep that promise

I don’t want to be any longer away than 10 days.

I don’t want to keep you at home on that account.

I therefore decline your kind proposal.

I am very sorry

I hope you understand. How’s that?

It may be true that it is easier to assign music to people we know, than to conjure up people to fit the music, but I deny that anyone’s character is really unlike their appearance. The physical appearance, to my mind, is the expression and result of the other thing–soul, ego, ψυχη, intellect–call it what you will. And this outward expression cannot really differ from the soul. If the correspondence between a soul & body is not obvious at first, then your conception either of that soul or that body must be wrong. Thus, I am ‘chubby’–to use your impertinent epithet, because I have a material side to me: because I like sleeping late, good food & clothes etc as well as sonnets & thunderstorms. The idealistic side of me must find an outlet somewhere, perhaps in my eye, my voice or anything else–you can judge better than I. And the other side of me exists in my countenance because it exists also in my character.

‘But’, I hear you saying, ‘this is all very well. Only what about the practised flirt with the innocent schoolgirl face & the murderer with a smile like an old woman?’ These are only seeming exceptions. The girl has or imagines she has that sort of disposition somewhere in her, or it wouldn’t be on her face: as a matter of fact, it is always ‘innocent’ (which means ignorant) people who do the most outrageous things. The murderer too, may be really a peaceful, kindly ‘crittur’, and if circumstances drive him to violence, the initial mould of the character and therefore of the face remain just the same.

I remember reading in a book called ‘The open Road’72 an extract from Hewlet’s ‘Pan and the Young Shepherd’73 which I thought splendid. Thanks to our Galahad’s detestable handwriting I can’t tell whether your book is the ‘Lore’ or the ‘Love’ of P. In any case I have never heard of it before, but, from your description, am very eager to read it. I also saw a copy of this author’s ‘Forest Lovers’74 in Carson’s last hols, but it did not attract me much. Is this new one in a decent edition?

I am glad to hear that you are keeping up the ‘illustrative’ side of your art, and shall want you to do some for my lyric poems. You can begin a picture of my ‘dream garden’ where the ‘West winds blow’. As directions I inform you it is ‘girt about with mists’, and is in ‘the shadowy country neither life nor sleep’, and is the home of ‘faint dreams’. With this Bädekers guide to it, you can start a picture. You remember, I scribble at pen and ink sketches a bit, and have begun to practise female faces which have always been my difficulty. I am improving a very little I think, and the margins of my old Greek lexicon as well as my pocket book now swarm with ‘studies’.

Only four weeks now till I shall be home again! Isn’t that a buck, at least for me–and no one else in the world really counts of course. What nonsense you talk about that ‘poor man’, my father. I am afraid it is true that he must bore Lily, but there is no fear of her boring him. I sympathize however, with the havoc which he must have wrought with a serious musical evening.

How is your gramaphone progressing, by the way, and how many records have you listed up to date? I am so sorry if this Liliputian writing has blinded you for life, but we have run out of the other sort of note paper.

Well

(Farewel)

Jack

P.S. Have begun the ‘Proffessor’75 and as read far as the heroe’s arrival at Brussels. It is shaping very well. I believe you have read it have you not–J.

Warnie arrived in Bookham from France on 4 July 1915 and Jack, after some resistance from Mr Kirkpatrick, was permitted to accompany him home. He returned to Bookham on 9 July.

TO HIS FATHER (LP V: 1-2):

[Gastons

10? July 1915]

My dear Papy,

In reply to your note which has just this minute been handed to me, I suggest to your notice the following considerations. In the first place you ask ‘why were you told £1-10s?’ I am not aware that I ever told you anything at all about the subject: the sum of money–whatever it was–was handed by Kirk to Warnie at the request of the latter, who took charge of it throughout, together with both tickets and every other arrangement. It never passed through my hands, and I am not prepared to say with any certainty what it amounted to. I do not remember mentioning the matter while at home. You have therefore applied to the wrong quarter.

Secondly, supposing for purposes of argument that I did tell you that it was £1-10s, what then? As I have already pointed out, I had nothing to do with the money, and Warnie not I, was responsible for its being borrowed. It follows that I could have had no conceivable motive for misrepresenting the amount. If there was to be any blame attached, it was not I who incurred it: I need never even have mentioned it. Accordingly, if I said anything untrue, it must have been through a mere error–and even at that an error by which I could gain nothing.

Thirdly, do not be annoyed if I descend to a rather crude, a fortiori line of argument. The tone of your letter, no less than the haste with which it was dispatched, suggests an ugly suspicion. This can of course be very easily answered. Setting aside all question of honour, I ask you to credit Warnie and myself with commonsense. Granted then, that for some inscrutable reason we wanted to conceal the amount he borrowed from Kirk, would we have been such fools as to have told a lie which must inevitably be detected as soon as the latter wrote to you? And of course, we would have known that K. must write to you to get his money back.

And so, it follows that either Kirk is wrong, or else if Warnie gave you the wrong figures it must have been by accident. That I knew nothing of it, and was not concerned in the transaction, has already been shown.

Last of all, if anything in this letter should seem to indicate that I am hurt or offended, I assure you it is not the case. I am perfectly convinced that your note was not meant to be insulting, though, from its nature, it could hardly help it. In any case it is as well to make things clear, even at the risk of some little superfluous violence. I am,

your loving son,

Jack

TO HIS FATHER (LP IV: 321-2):

[Gastons

19? July 1915]

My dear Papy,

I sincerely hope this silence of yours doesn’t mean anything wrong with your health. Arthur says you didn’t seem very well the last time he was over at Leeborough, so I am not quite easy in my mind. If however anything is wrong, you might tell Aunt Annie to write to me with particulars, and also to forward W’s address, which since I wrote for it in my last letter has become even more necessary as he has now written to me. I should not like him to think that he is forgotten or that his letter has not reached me, but I cannot reply to him until I hear from you.

Not even in Bookham can one be safe from the hoi polloi; a stubborn refusal to learn tennis is no longer a protection among people who will inflict croquet instead. I was out on Wednesday for tea and croquet and again today (Saturday) for the same entertainment, plus a great deal of conversation. However, this I suppose is part of the curse inherited from our first parents: my private opinion is that after the words ‘In the sweat of thy brow shalt thou earn thy bread’76 another clause has dropped out from the original text, running ‘In the exasperation of thy souls shalt thou attend social functions’. On the whole, though I do not of course know anyone as well as at home, I like a good many of those I meet: the world indeed (as you have reminded me on innumerable occasions), is full of nice people. And if it must be full at all, I suppose it is as well that they should be nice.

Talk, of course, runs mostly on the war. I have always thought it ridiculous for people to talk so much on a subject of which, in the majority of cases, they are really very ignorant. Books, art, etc., passing trivialities and even gossip are topics on which everyone can speak with more or less authority. We prefer however to pass our time in criticism of politics, or at present the war–subjects on which only specialists should speak. This endless criticism by ignorant men and women of public men, whose positions they do not understand, I always hear with annoyance.

The Colonel writes to me cheerfully though briefly, and wants an answer. I suppose he tells me nothing that you don’t know already. Bathing and a sack of books seem to be his chief consolations in ‘this detestable country.’

I have been reading nothing since Othello but a translation from the Icelandic, and stray articles etc. In Greek we have begun Demosthenes. Of course oratory is not a sort of literature that I appreciate or understand in any language, so that I am hardly qualified to express an opinion on our friend with the mouthful of pebbles. However, compared with Cicero, he strikes me as a man with something to say, intent only upon saying it clearly and shortly. One misses the beautiful roll of the Ciceronian period, but on the other hand, he is not such a—blether.77

Do try and write soon, or, if the worst comes to the worst, get Aunt Annie to do so.

your loving,

son,

Jack

TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W/LP IV: 299-300):

[Gastons

24 July 1915]

Dear Galahad,

I have debated more than once as to whether you would prefer a tired and perfunctory letter written in good time during the week, or a fresh and willing [one] a few days late on Saturday evening. Thinking that you would choose the latter, and knowing I would–here we are.

What on earth are you doing reading the Sowers?78 A Russian mystery-story full of wise diplomatists and impossible women–it ought to be clad in a bright red cover, with a crude picture of Steinmitz saying ‘The Moscow Doctor–and your prince!!!’ from the head of the stairs, and set on a railway bookstall. But, perhaps I am wrong. Of course it has points, but you are worthy of better things. Never read any George Eliot79 Myself, being no great hand at novels but admire your energy in that line.

Talking about books, I am determined to teach you to like poetry, and will begin next hols. on Coleridges ‘Christabel’. Don’t be put off by the name. It is exactly the sort of romantic strangeness and dreaminess you & I like, a sort of partner to the Ancient Mariner,80 as Danse Macabre is to the March of the Dwarfs.

Also–I hope all these schemes aren’t boring you–you are going to help me to improve my drawing next hols. Figures I can do tolerably, but from you I must learn the technique of the game–shading, curves, how to do a background without swamping the figures etc. Of course this will all be in pen and ink which is the best medium for my kind of work–I can imagine your smile at my calling such scribbles ‘work’, but no matter. I am longing to get home again now, and expect I shall arrive next Saturday.

Yes Mrs K. has played the Polonaise; we found the right one without difficulty, and tho’ she made some remarks about the hardness of it I at length persuaded her. Now, you know, I never flatter: so you may take it as solemn truth when I tell you that, if I admired your playing before, I understood its true value far better when I compared [it] with Mrs K.–by no means a contemptible craftsman. To hear the lovely galloping passages rendered correctly, even well, but without your own frank enjoyment of the work, your sympathy with the composer and your inimitable fire and abandonment (this sounds like an essay but I mean every word of it), was a revelation. You threw yourself into it, and forgot yourself in the composer: Mrs K sat there, amiable, complacent and correct, as if she were pouring out tea. Now, while they’re not all as bad as she, still you alone of the people I have heard play set to the matter properly. And for that reason, a piece, by you, if it were full of mistakes (tho’ of course it wouldn’t be) would be better than the same piece faultlessly played by–say, Hope Harding.81 This is a rare gift of yours: you should yet do great things with it: you are a fool if you don’t cultivate it. Perhaps, because you paint and read as well as play, you realize the imagination of a composer’s mind perfectly, and can always bring out to a sensible (in the old sense of the word) listener anything at all that there is in the notes. Of course, all this is the praise of an amateur: but the praise of an honest amateur who has a genuine, tho’ non-techniqual taste for music, is worth something at least.

I agree with you that the music of Lohengrin, so far as I know it is delightful: nor do I see what is wrong with the story, tho’ of course the splendid wildness of the ‘Ring’82 must be lacking. On the whole, however, I am not sure that any music from it I know, is not perhaps cast in a lower mould than ‘Parsifal’83 & the ‘Ring’. Although, indeed the prelude–which you wouldn’t listen to when I played it–is quite as fine I think as that from ‘Parsifal’.

What is your opinion of W. Jaffe–little Vee-Lee?84 He did one thing for which he can never be forgiven–dropping in and staying till eleven on the first night of my brother’s leave. The Hamiltons came over on another, so we had only one evening alone together in peace and comfort. On the whole, tho’, he is a decent crittur, I suppose. Have you ever heard their gramaphone? I wonder what its like.

Which reminds me, did you hear the new Glenmachen record–a solo by the Russian base–Chaliapin85 from ‘Robert Le Diable’.86 The orchestration is absolutely magnificent and the singing as good. I only wish I could afford ‘the like of them’, don’t you?

I shan’t write again this term now–jolly glad it’s so near the end.

Yours

Jack

TO HIS FATHER (LP V: 9):

[Gastons]

Moon Day.

A good codotta that.)

28 July 1915]

My dear Papy,

I was very glad to get both your letters, and sorry if I worried you at a busy moment. Willie’s absence must be a great discomfort, and of course I shall understand if letters are short or overdue just at present. No. A registered letter is no equivalent to ‘speaking sharply’ to one, and I am therefore in no need to the German gentleman’s remorse–or ‘again-bite’ to be Teutonic. But at sixteen we will do much for excitement, a new experience. ‘What’ said I to myself ‘tho’ the shades of Plato and Sophocles wait upon my pleasure, the treasures of Rome, the brilliance of France, the knowledge of Germany attend my nod? I am out of the world here. While the great war of all histories, nations and languages is waged hard by, shall I remain like a dormouse, inactive, apathetic. A thousand times no’, (as a friend of yours in Punch said on a memorable occasion), ‘I will have excitement I will taste of new experiences, soul-stirring adventures’–and gripping my hat with a cry of ‘D’audace et toujours d’audace’87 I rushed out into the night and–sent a registered letter!

I don’t know that there is any news here: that Macmullen girl, the theatrical lady, is staying here just at present. The summer here is one of the worst Kirk remembers, being very wet and making a special point of raining whenever the poor people are trying to mow or make hay. Fortunately the amount of corn we grow at home is insignificant as regards the country’s needs. All the same, at a time like the present every little counts, and if this sort of thing is going on all over England it is rather a pity.

(Later on.) I have spent a ghastly evening being used as a lay figure by Miss Macmullen for bandages–as she is going to volunteer to something or other. I have been treated successively for a broken arm, a sprained ankle, and a wound in the head. This, with the adjoining complement of pins, small talk etc., is a good night’s work. I can now sympathise with your attitude towards the excellent game of ‘hair cut or shaved’. Ah well, I suppose half an hour’s codotta with some bits of lint is not a great sacrifice to the war. Still, I am really too exhausted to write any longer, and everyone is going to bed.

your loving

son Jack

Jack arrived in Belfast on 31 July and was there for the next eight weeks. Mr Kirkpatrick expected him to continue with some work, and he wrote to him on 17 August saying:

I suggest you should order…the following: Plato: The Phaedo, if you have not got it. Demosthenes: De Corona. Tacitus: The Annals. Aeschylus: The Agamemnon…I expect you are browsing at present on the pastures of general literature, and this of course is as it should be. If however you find English too easy and sigh for more worlds to conquer, I recommend the perusal of any German book you may happen to come across. (LP V: 12)

During this time Lewis added six more poems to his ‘Metrical Meditations of a Cod’, at least two of which are included in his Collected Poems.

TO HIS FATHER (LP V: 128-9):

[Gastons 17?

September 1915]

My dear Papy,

After a week of mutual waiting for a letter, I suppose it is my duty to take up the pen. Things have been so developing here in various ways that I have not really had time to settle down. A wonderful thing has happened–yesterday I got a fellow pupil!88 It is a nephew of Mrs. Howard Ferguson’s who is to come and read with Kirk for the paymaster’s department of the navy, and is about my own age. Of course it is just a bit of crumpled rose leaf to have this inroad, but as he will spend nearly all his time at Leatherhead taking special classes for chemistry and solid mathematics–whatever that name of terror may mean–one cannot complain. He seems a decent poor creature, though of course not wildly interesting. Mrs. Ferguson came down with him on Saturday and went away the same evening. I suppose you have met her? I thought she was exceedingly nice, and was interested to hear all the Lurgan and Banbridge gossip which Mrs. K’s questions called forth, until Kirk could stand it no longer and broke in with a fifteen minute lecture on the Budget.