267 From a letter to Michael Tolkien 

9-10 January 1965

My dear old protector, backer, and friend Dr C. T. Onions died on Friday at 91⅓ years. I had not seen him for a long while. He was the last of the people who were 'English' at Oxford and at large when I entered the profession. Well not quite: Kenneth Sisam (once my tutor) survives in the Scilly Isles, a mere 76. Incidentally, while on this melancholy subject, T. S. Eliot has gone. But if you want a perfect specimen of bad verse, a ludicrous 'all-time low', about [on the level] of the 'stuffed owl' revived, I could [not] find you a better than poor old John Masefield's 8 lines on Eliot in The Times of Friday Jan. 8: 'East Coker'. Almost down/up to Wordsworth's zero-standard. ....

I am neither disturbed (nor surprised) at the limitations of my 'fame'. There are lots of people in Oxford who have never heard of me, let alone of my books. But I can repay many of them with equal ignorance: neither wilful nor contemptuous, simply accidental. An amusing incident occurred in November, when I went as a courtesy to hear the last lecture of this series of his given by the Professor of Poetry: Robert Graves. (A remarkable creature, entertaining, likeable, odd, bonnet full of wild bees, half-German, half-Irish, very tall, must have looked like Siegfried/Sigurd in his youth, but an Ass.) It was the most ludicrously bad lecture I have ever heard. After it he introduced me to a pleasant young woman who had attended it: well but quietly dressed, easy and agreeable, and we got on quite well. But Graves started to laugh; and he said: 'it is obvious neither of you has ever heard of the other before'. Quite true. And I had not supposed that the lady would ever have heard of me. Her name was Ava Gardner, but it still meant nothing, till people more aware of the world informed me that she was a film-star of some magnitude, and that the press of pressmen and storm of flash-bulbs on the steps of the Schools were not directed at Graves (and cert. not at me) but at her. ....

Still the old 'ego' gets quite a lot of strong boosts now and again, which surprise me as much as ever. I met Burke Trend on September 29th, at the Merton Septcemenary Dinner – he is a recent honorary Fellow: secretary to the Cabinet then and now: and he declared himself as a 'fan', and added that most of the Cabinet was with him, and as for the House similar views were widely prevalent on both sides of it. Good enough, if they buy the book and don't merely wear out the House of Commons Library copy! No other kind of reward seems in the offing. But I suppose my greatest surprise was 4 days ago to get a warm fan-letter from Iris Murdoch. And if that name is just an 'Ava Gardner' to you, it can't be helped. ....

When I think of my mother's death (younger than Prisca) worn out with persecution, poverty, and. largely consequent, disease, in the effort to hand on to us small boys the Faith, and remember the tiny bedroom she shared with us in rented rooms in a postman's cottage at Rednal, where she died alone, too ill for viaticum, I find it very hard and bitter, when my children stray away [from the Church]. Of course Canaan seems different to those who have come into it out of the desert; and the later inhabitants of Jerusalem may often seem fools or knaves, or worse. But in hac urbe lux solemnis has seemed to me steadily true. I have met snuffy, stupid, undutiful, conceited, ignorant, hypocritical, lazy, tipsy, hardhearted, cynical, mean, grasping, vulgar, snobbish, and even (at a guess) immoral priests 'in the course of my peregrinations'; but for me one Fr. Francis outweighs them all, and he was an upper-class Welsh-Spaniard Tory, and seemed to some just a pottering old snob and gossip. He was – and he was not. I first learned charity and forgiveness from him; and in the light of it pierced even the 'liberal' darkness out of which I came, knowing more about 'Bloody Mary' than the Mother of Jesus – who was never mentioned except as an object of wicked worship by the Romanists.