CS Lewis loathed one of his fellow Oxford academics so much that he satirised him in a series of seven previously unpublished poems that have been discovered.
The Chronicles of Narnia author simply could not stand HC Wyld, deriding his lectures as elementary and dismissing his snobbery and his bullying of students, referring to him in his diary as “the cad”.
It has now emerged that Lewis even inscribed derogatory verses about him across the blank pages of his own copy of Wyld’s 1921 textbook A Short History of English.
One poem begins: “Loud-mouthed, a bully, publicly professing / The impartial, scientific attitude, / Yet, on the point of dialects, confessing / How pruriently class-conscious was his mood.”
Wyld was the author of several influential textbooks on the history of the English language, but he was so pernickety that he censured spelling pronunciations such as “waistcoat” instead of “weskit”.
Lewis ridiculed his obsession with analysing sounds at the expense of texts themselves: “He opens and closes his glottis at pleasure,/ Explosives and stops he is able to measure,/ No grunt and no gurgle escapes his attention,/ Religiously marking each slackness and tension”.
The poems were discovered by Simon Horobin, a professor of English language and literature at Magdalen College, Oxford, where Lewis himself taught.
He said: “These were unknown until I found them in Lewis’s copy of Wyld’s A Short History of English. There’s another one [a seventh poem] which I identified in a second book by Wyld.”
Joking that an infuriated Lewis had perhaps composed them during one of Wyld’s lectures, Horobin noted that one of them identifies Wyld through an acrostic with the initial letters spelling out the name “Henry Cecil Wyld”.
He added: “On the remaining blank pages he penned a series of additional satirical verses lampooning Wyld – one in English, alongside others in Latin, Greek, French and even Old English. It’s exciting to see Lewis composing poetry in a range of languages at this early stage of his academic career.”
The translation of a Latin passage reads: “Like the peace of God that keeps our hearts and minds, this book ‘passeth all understanding’. These are the rambling remarks of a man past his prime … I could glean nothing worth learning … He is shameless, with the rude voice of a shrill scourge, cold-hearted and ungenerous to all.”
Horobin came across the Wyld volume when it was owned by the late Walter Hooper, Lewis’s former personal secretary, who had a number of books from Lewis’s own library. The volume is now in the Bodleian, Oxford.
The poems are among discoveries that Horobin features in his forthcoming book, CS Lewis’s Oxford – published by Bodleian Library Publishing this month[May] – and in an article for the latest volume of The Review of English Studies.
He writes: “Lewis took an immediate and intense dislike to Wyld, partly because he considered the content of the lectures to be elementary and self-evident. But he also objected to Wyld’s manner: his snobbery and tendency to harangue his audience for coming in late, not concentrating and not knowing the answers to the questions he fired at them.”
Lewis was one of the foremost writers of the 20th century. He is best known for his children’s fantasy classic, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the first of a series of masterpieces on the conflicts between good and evil in the kingdom of Narnia, which became known as The Chronicles of Narnia.
He was also a brilliant scholar, holding prestigious academic positions at Oxford and Cambridge.
Horobin observes that the previously unpublished poems, which are unfinished, date from the 1920s and were part of Lewis’s campaign against the study of philology at Oxford and specifically against its most eminent exponent, Wyld. He says: “It was the appointment of JRR Tolkien to the professorship of Anglo-Saxon in 1925, and their subsequent friendship, that was to convert Lewis to the study of philology and convince him of its centrality to the discipline of English studies.”
Horobin is also the co-curator of an exhibition, CS Lewis: Words and Worlds, at Magdalen College.
One of the newly discovered unfinished poems – with an acrostic whose initial letters spell out the name “Henry Cecil Wyld”:
He opens and closes his glottis at pleasure,
Explosives and stops he is able to measure,
No grunt and no gurgle escapes his attention,
Religiously marking each slackness and tension,
You find him in air-bursts beguiling his leisure.
Can any one blame him if, doomed to mistaking
Each word in its meaning, he studies the making?
Condemned to be blind to the picture, the frame
Instead let him chip at. But why, in God’s name,
Lead us from Parnassus to join your muck-raking?
Why, pray, should a squire of the Muse and Apollo
Yield thus with a living steam-organ to follow?
Leave us to the spirit and keep your phonetics,
Don’t come to the table to talk dietetics.
His Berkshire garden grows, I’m told,
Enormous marrows tinged with gold
© CS Lewis Pte Ltd