Of mice and men and Magdalen: C. S. Lewis’s Oxford | Hacker News Reader

Of mice and men and Magdalen: C. S. Lewis’s Oxford

thecritic.co.uk

61 pointsdrdee23 comments

> He was required to write an official account of his term, and did so as a five-act drama in blank verse entitled “The Tragi-Comicall Briefe Reigne of Lewis the Bald”.

Nice to see he was capable of self-deprecating humor.

> The sheer level of spartan discomfort, for instance, that university denizens were expected to endure

Sometimes* I wonder how much of the spartan discomfort in 1984 was authorial discretion characterising outer party life, and how much was just the background normal spartan discomfort of mid-XX britain.

* like when I read that Orwell had been burning furniture to stay warm

It seems like the splendor and comfort of student life varied wildly depending on class and wealth (see: the depiction of Oxford in Brideshead Revisited).

If you haven't read it Road to Wigan pier is a great work by Orwell on the status of the British poor post war.

A friend of mine in the mid 70s was reduced to burning furniture in his Edinburgh flat. Mind you, given the temperature in Edinburgh back then, and the quality of the furniture, you could hardly blame him.I always found the wardrobes intensely depressing.

My hall of residence at a North of England Uni used to turn off heating at night in the late 90s, bearing in ming the rooms' nice, old sash windows. Getting up for early lectures in winter was fun...

I don't think they do this anymore. Certainly there were apparently many complaints from students when an Oxford college proposed to do that recently to help tackle the 'climate crisis'...

Not very impressed with the writer: CS Lewis was impressed enough with JRRT that the character of Ransome in the Space Trilogy is based on him.

And Shadowlands was probably based on the book “A Grief Observed” , which was not mentioned.

Further the Space Trilogy mentioned multiple times Lewis’ dread of bureaucracy including the NICE being an agent of evil and Studdock’s wrongful desire to be part of the in crowd of the fictional school’s management.

This seems wrong - Tolkien was deeply Catholic.

Why would that stop Lewis from being impressed by him?

If anything, Lewis always seemed to me to be a guy who was, at base, an atheist, and spent a ton of time trying to convince himself not to be one by doing a lot of (frankly, pretty flaccid) apologetics. As I understand it, he was friends with Chesterton and Tolkien and I wouldn't be surprised if he envied their more robust faith.

I myself am continually perplexed by CS Lewis's popularity with Americans. From where I am sitting his fiction is just a bunch of very clumsily put together allegories and his apologetics are also not particularly great. It seems to me that Lewis is an example of the very American rule that to get really popular you have to present something that is just smart enough to make your reader feel smart, but dumb enough that they can understand it.

If CSL was popular outside of the USA, such as in Britain and other countries, would that disprove your sneering dismissals?

He is generally popular with Christians about the globe as a Christian apologist.

He's also considered a relatively softball children's Christian apologist making largely allegorical appeals for divinity rather than (say, for example) hardcore analytical Thomism.

In this specific way America and Britain are culturally in almost perfect resonance, so no, it would not improve my opinion of him.

Literally the only positive thing I've ever thought about CS Lewis is that he might have been homosexual or at least capable of entertaining complex thoughts about homosexuality.

a summary - CS Lewis urged Tolkien to publish the Hobbit etc; Tolkien had a great influence on CS Lewis also : https://oxfordvisit.com/articles/c-s-lewis-at-oxford-narnia-...

"Magdalen" is pronounced Maudlin. That's how Oxford's locals detect 'tourists' ;)

Then I got it wrong the entire time I was there, lol.

Although as any fule kno, that’s true only of the college, and not the street in the centre of town; this is how town detects gown.

Hello, Molesworth major.

Yes, I stumbled over the headline because I think the writer wants it to rhyme, but it doesn’t.

The allusion to Robbie Burns / John Steinbeck in the title felt a little odd too, notwithstanding there being a mention of mice in the body of the article.

Interesting. I thought “Till We Have Faces” was the main work that dealt with losing his wife.

"Till We Have Faces" may have some influences from his grief, but the primary subject was theological in nature, dealing with a character whose life is filled with questions and complaints against divinity and how those seem to go unanswered. The conclusion underscores this:

> I ended my first book with the words no answer. I know now, Lord, why you utter no answer. You are the answer. Before your face the questions die away. What other answer would suffice?

("Till We Have Faces", pt 2. ch. 4)

It is a novel that is more an apologetic that deals with philosophic quandaries than anything relating to personal loss.

Davidman had a lot of influence on the writing of "Till We Have Faces," but it was published before her death. "A Grief Observed" is the book Lewis wrote about the grief that followed.

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