P.P.S. I chust wanted to say, Arthur, how very sorry I am.
On 17 November 1931, Warnie arrived in Shanghai where he was to serve as the officer commanding the Royal Army Service Corps. He had been here in 1927–9 as officer in command of the Supply Depot. He wrote in his diary on 23 November:
I almost feel as I had never left Shanghai, a feeling accentuated by the fact that I have bought back from Bill Wilson the identical pieces of furniture which I sold him when I went home. I am writing this at the same old desk, and in front of me are my own old curtains and mosquito windows…Now that I have got my pictures up, and bought a $30 Japanese rush carpet, unpacked all my books and the gramophone, I feel I can sit back and breathe.
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TO HIS BROTHER (W):
[The Kilns]
Nov. 22nd 1931
My dear W,
I really think your recent editorial difficulties have impressed upon me the habit of dating my letters!
(#ulink_ff0fe845-f5e5-5b4a-b49d-e6b2b607bf07) And talking of the Lewis papers, I looked into the editorial drawer the other day and made a correction, by adding to your note ‘Grace by A.J.L.’ the words ‘On the contrary, traditional Latin Grace translated by C.S.L.’ Such are the traps into which even a careful editor falls.
I am sorry I have not been able to write for some weeks. During the week it is out of the question. My ordinary day is as follows. Called (with tea) 7.15. After bath and shave I usually have time for a dozen paces or so in Addison’s walk
(#ulink_08373545-51b8-5eea-a5f0-ad7134db9ae4) (at this time of year my stroll exactly hits the sunrise) before chapel at 8. ‘Dean’s Prayers’—which I have before described to you—lasts about quarter of an hour. I then breakfast in common room with the Dean’s Prayers party (i.e. Adam Fox,
(#ulink_53d3fb6f-410c-5ac5-88fa-1969aed6f30b) the chaplain, Benecke
(#ulink_8bbe4783-68ee-5376-8e24-a5c37eee7345) and Christie) which is joined punctually by J. A. Smith
(#ulink_4a976b95-226a-549f-af13-bb2f1906fd6d) at about 8.25. I have usually left the room at about 8.40, and then saunter, go to the stool, answer notes etc till 9. From 9 till 1 is all pupils—an unconscionable long stretch for a man to act the gramaphone in. At one Lyddiatt
(#ulink_830b064a-11a7-5f88-8797-0220f1327270) or Maureen is waiting for me with the car and I am carried home.
My afternoons you know. Almost every afternoon as I set out hillwards with my spade, this place gives me all the thrill of novelty. The scurry of the waterfowl as you pass the pond, and the rich smell of autumnal litter as you leave the drive and strike into the little path, are always just as good as new. At 4.45 I am usually driven into College again, to be a gramaphone for two more hours, 5 till 7. At 7.15 comes dinner.
On Tuesday, which is my really shocking day, pupils come to me to read Beowulf at 8.30 and usually stay till about 11, so that when they have gone and I have glanced round the empty glasses and coffee cups and the chairs in the wrong places, I am glad enough to crawl to bed. Other standing engagements are on Thursday when a man called Horwood
(#ulink_958f8096-55f3-5fe8-808b-63508c01daca) (another English don) comes and reads Dante with me, every second Monday when the College literary society meets. When you have thrown in the usual irregular dinner engagements you will see that I am lucky when I have two evenings free after dinner.
The only exception to this programme (except of course Saturday when I have no pupils after tea) is Monday when I have no pupils at all. I have to employ a good deal of it in correcting transcripts done by B. Litt. pupils, and other odd jobs. It has also become a regular custom that Tolkien
(#ulink_c4b10d21-0437-5f20-9b51-a8d7a3c4b411) should drop in on me of a Monday morning and drink a glass. This is one of the pleasantest spots in the week. Sometimes we talk English school politics: sometimes we criticise one another’s poems: other days we drift into theology or ‘the state of the nation’: rarely we fly no higher than bawdy and ‘puns’.
What began as an excuse for not writing has developed into a typical diary or hebdomadal compendium. As to the last two week ends, they have both been occupied. The one before last I went to spend a night at Reading with a man called Hugo Dyson
(#ulink_0c47d650-a34a-5417-9912-5e308643594b)—now that I come to think of it, you heard all about him before you left. We had a grand evening. Rare luck to stay with a friend whose wife is so nice that one almost (I can’t say quite) almost regrets the change when he takes you up to his study for serious smoking and for the real midnight talking. You would enjoy Dyson very much for his special period is the late 17th century: he was much intrigued by your library when he was last in our room. He is a most fastidious bookman and made me (that same occasion) take out one of the big folios from the bottom shelf of the Leeboro bookcase because they were too tightly packed. He disapproved strongly of the method (wh. I confess I had always followed) of taking books out of the shelf by putting a finger at the top so—and adopts a different one: which you will find described in ‘Portrait of a Scholar’ in that book of essays you took away with you.
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At the same time he is as far from being a dilettante as anyone can be: a burly man, both in mind and body, with the stamp of the war on him, which begins to be a pleasing rarity, at any rate in civilian life. Lest anything should be lacking, he is a Christian and a lover of cats. The Dyson cat is called Mirralls, and is a Viscount. That accounts for one week end.
Last Saturday Barfield came down. He arrived unexpectedly for lunch in College—Saturday being my day for a rotatory lunch with Keir
(#ulink_adfca1fd-7a44-55d1-96de-c10813cbef3e) and Lawson.
(#ulink_4e015d11-abbe-5b15-a82f-c7ada86e6767) As it happened, Keir didn’t turn up, and the bore Lawson was neither here nor there. Barfield remarked afterwards that he went away feeling that Lawson had contributed most valuably to the conversation, though when he came to think it over he could not remember his having made a single rational remark. You know the type—the man who has an air of saying something interesting, which often carries you away.
Barfield and I then motored to the Kilns, took our packs (or rather your pack and mine) and set out to walk to the Barley Mow.
(#ulink_c955a745-b8d5-591b-90e6-e3b80db6d191) We failed to get any four o’clock [tea] at Marsh Baldon, but being both tired of work, and badly in need of a jaunt, we were too delighted to find ourselves on the road again and in each other’s company, to be dampened even by that. It was dark before we reached the B.M., and after a noble supper of ham and eggs and a little yawning at the fire in that panelled room (shared with the same couple whom you and I saw there) we went to bed. We lay in one room, mighty snug, and had a good deal of talk before it drifted off into prodigious yawns. We didn’t stir till about 9 the Sunday morning, he being delighted with the unaccustomed absence of a restless child (how do married men live?) and I glad enough not to have chapel at 8.
That day we walked up Didcot Clumps (Sinodun Hills? Wittenham Clumps?) and crossed the Thames, not at Shillingford but at a ferry near Shillingford. As we reached the bank a torrent of dogs and one cat burst from the ferryman’s house on the far shore and got as near as they could on the bows of a barge: and when finally we were ferried across they all (cat included) leaped aboard us before we were well alongside with the frantic haste of porters or customs officials. The ferryman’s only explanation was the cryptic sentence ‘Brought us all together’ which he repeated about four times.
The rest of the day was spent tramping along the route Warborough—Stadhampton-Denton-Cuddesdon-Wheatley-Kilns. It was a colourless autumn day—about a quarter of the leaves still hanging on the trees: you know—just a yellow freckle on the black timber. We had tea at Wheatley, Barfield denouncing birth control. I could not help thinking, though I hardly cared to say, that a man married to an obviously barren woman was in this matter an arm chair critic. We were both home for supper, both feeling enormously the better for our jaunt. It is curious how the actual length of a holiday and the feeling of length are almost in inverse ratio. We had the sensation of having been away from our routine for an almost endless time.
Looking back on our own last trip I feel the same. I can believe that we were only a day and two nights at Larne: as for Castlerock, we seem we have been there for weeks, in all kinds of weather and at different seasons of the year. Did we really walk only twice to the tunnel? In retrospect, by the bye, the thing that wears best of all in my mind is the narrow gauge journey: the journey back, of course, is—like a lane by a brickyard on a hot day. Before Barfield went to bed that night (in your room) I gave him your will and he is doubtless now re-writing it in unintelligible language.
Which reminds me—I have had a letter from Condlin
(#ulink_0c4e194d-dc01-5e4c-aa21-e5b14c091dcd) about the Templeton family: but what he is saying about them, or whether he has found them, I can’t for the life of me make out. Did I tell you that his acknowledgment of the £100 tip was not very enthusiastic? I don’t say it was definitely chilly—nor, by the way, do I know how far Condlin’s epistolary style is adapted for registering surprise or pleasure—or, for the matter of that, anything whatever on any subject.
I have also heard from the Tower of Glass
(#ulink_f7712529-524d-5a40-a093-112f7a43c5db) to say that they have at last got the Bishop’s authority (he doesn’t kill himself with work, does he? Prissy prelatical dog!) and also-which pleased me less, that the Rev. Chevasse
(#ulink_4bcedcd5-2dce-5126-b14a-7bc1e491a51a) had suggested that St Mark’s Tower should be included somewhere in the window.
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Clearly the proper [answer] is ‘Ah such nonsense.’ I actually replied by telling them to consult the artist, and to ask him to consider the proposal on purely aesthetic grounds. Unless the artist is a fool, that ought to safeguard us pretty well, and if he is—why then there is no help for us in any case.
It just occurs to me as I write, that Chevasse in this matter is probably the unwilling mouthpiece of the Select Vestry: I daresay even that the monstrous regiment of women,
(#ulink_9f5b6c9a-7521-5bf1-a248-73fba1f888a4) incarnated in Lily Ewart,
(#ulink_ac8fe1f5-09c3-5949-8062-cdf0311c4720) is really at the bottom of it. Zounds!—I’d like a few minutes at the bottom of her! No ‘thought infirm’ would there ‘stain my cheek’:
(#ulink_7821f055-b7a6-5ad0-a2ae-e83b89820904) a firm hand rather would stain both hers. I also sent them the (revised by Christie) inscription. That, I think, is all the business news.
As regards books—what time have I to read? Tutorial necessities have spurred me into reading another Carlyle ‘Past and Present’
(#ulink_70246e26-d475-5ef4-8e5a-c31ba8ad2ae6) which I recommend: specially the central part about Abbot Samson. Like all Carlyle it gets a little wearisome before the end—as all listening to these shouting authors does. But the pungency and humour and frequent sublimity is tip-top. It is very amusing to read the 19th century editor’s preface (in our Leeborough edition),
(#ulink_6484bb02-a1a2-53a8-9afd-dae3cf4b58c3) obviously by a P’daita:
(#ulink_4e790fdc-255f-5785-8d35-8870cac97386) pointing out that, of course, the matter of the book is out of date, but it ‘lives by its style’. ‘We can afford to smile at the pessimism with which the sage approached problems that have since vanished like a dream before the onward march etc. etc’ Actually the book is an indictment of the industrial revolution pointing out precisely the problems we have not solved and prophesying most of the things that have happened since.
I get rather annoyed at this endless talk about books ‘living by the style’. Jeremy Taylor ‘lives by the style in spite of his obsolete theology’; Thos. Browne does the same, in spite of ‘the obsolete cast of his mind’: Ruskin and Carlyle do the same in spite of their ‘obsolete social and political philosophy’. To read histories of literature one would suppose that the great authors of the past were a sort of chorus of melodious idiots who said, in beautifully cadenced language that black was white and that two and two made five. When one turns to the books themselves-well I, at any rate, find nothing obsolete. The silly things these great men say, were as silly then as they are now: the wise ones are as wise now as they were then.
At this stage in my letter I begin to be haunted by the idea of having read and experienced many interesting things which I meant to tell you but cannot now bring to mind. One un- interesting thing was being preached to in ‘mine own church’ by little ‘Clarkie’ (the m-yes man).
