Clive Lewis - Collected Letters Volume One - Family Letters 1905–1931

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–Chaliapin 85 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.