“I enjoy monotony”

I'm tempted, but it seems rather expensive. From a review, "Of mice and men and Magdalen: C.S. Lewis’s Oxford by Simon Horobin":

The life of a dedicated Oxford don and literary figure is bound to contain few opportunities for drama, glamour, or adventure. “I enjoy monotony,” C.S. Lewis once admitted to a questioner, and that was surely a fortunate trait, given that he spent 30 years teaching at Oxford, mainly in undergraduate tutorials, before he finally moved to a non-teaching post at Cambridge.

Yet such is the fascination that many have with the author of the Screwtape Letters (1942), the Narnia Chronicles (1949-54), and the autobiographical Surprised by Joy (1955), that many readers will relish the details of his Oxford life revealed in this sympathetic and atmospheric biography.

Simon Horobin records that Lewis typically taught 24 hours of tutorials a week, a huge burden over the three Oxford terms, which then as now consisted of eight intense weeks (the standard stint of a teaching fellow in Classics today, which tutors find taxing enough, is eight hours a week). When he was finally appointed to a chair at Cambridge in 1954, Lewis commented in a letter: “29 years of pupils’ essays is enough, bless ’em” and some years later wrote delightedly to his lifelong friend Arthur Greeves, “I’ve never been so under-worked since I first went to school.” ....

“Friendship was key to Lewis’s life,” writes Horobin. “His ideal evening was staying up late in a friend’s college room, ‘talking nonsense, poetry, theology, metaphysics over beer, tea, and pipes’.” Lewis was eventually persuaded by his old friend J.R.R. Tolkien that he would still be able to live at The Kilns if he took the chair. By the time he arrived in Cambridge he was already a literary celebrity (his relationship with other literary stars such as Tolkien, T.S. Eliot and particularly John Betjeman was not entirely happy).

He correctly recognised that a large part of the success of the Narnia books was due to the marvelous illustrations by Pauline Baynes. When she wrote to congratulate him on the award of the Carnegie Medal for The Last Battle, Lewis generously responded saying that it was “our medal”: the pictures were bound to have been a factor. He was similarly generous in his letters to Dorothy Sayers, though the statement that “Lewis’s long friendship with Dorothy L. Sayers contradicts the suggestion that he sought out only members of his own sex” strikes an unduly defensive note. .... (more)

8/21/2024  I'm not very good at resisting temptation. My copy arrived today. 

Armand D’Angour, "Of mice and men and Magdalen," The Critic, July 2024.