C. S. Lewis and A. K. Hamilton Jenkin’s friendship

C. S. Lewis and A. K. Hamilton Jenkin’s friendship began at Oxford after Lewis returned from the war. Jenkin became his first lifelong friend there, continuing an education in perception that Arthur had begun: he taught Lewis to meet each place and atmosphere on its own terms, even when it was ugly or dismal. The friendship’s significance lies both in this discipline of attention and in the contrast Lewis draws between Jenkin’s receptive companionship and the combative friendship that followed with Owen Barfield.

Identity and Background

Lewis identifies Jenkin as the first lifelong friend he made at Oxford. By the time they met, Arthur had already shaped Lewis’s responsiveness to what he calls the Homely; Jenkin widened that education. Lewis describes him as someone who seemed able to enjoy everything, ugliness included, and presents this breadth not as irony or detached amusement but as a serious, gleeful attentiveness to what a thing actually was.

Lewis also notes that Jenkin was later known for books on Cornwall. This retrospective detail places their Oxford friendship at the beginning of a lifelong relationship, while the memoir chiefly defines Jenkin through the perceptual habit he helped Lewis acquire.

A Practice of Attention

Jenkin’s lesson was to surrender fully to the atmosphere present at a given moment. In a squalid town, Lewis learned to seek out places where the squalor rose toward grimness and almost grandeur; on a dismal day, to find the most dismal, dripping wood; on a windy day, to seek the windiest ridge. The point was not to replace an unpleasant setting with a more agreeable one, but to encounter its particular character without evasion.

Lewis emphasizes the physical directness of this method: Jenkin’s example encouraged him to rub his nose in the quiddity of a thing and rejoice in its being precisely what it was. That stance extends beyond appreciation of conventionally beautiful scenery. It makes attention an active practice of receptivity, capable of finding significance in a place without first wishing it were another place or another kind of day.

Friendship and Influence

Lewis presents Jenkin as continuing what Arthur had begun, but not simply repeating Arthur’s preference for the Homely. Where Arthur’s example had opened Lewis to familiar and intimate qualities, Jenkin’s capacity to enjoy even ugliness enlarged the range of what could receive his attention. The relationship is thus described through continuity and extension: an earlier education in perception acquired a broader and more demanding form.

The account also places this friendship in a sequence of Oxford relationships. Lewis calls Jenkin his first lifelong friend, then introduces Owen Barfield as his next. Their contrasts clarify what Jenkin’s companionship meant: the account of Jenkin centers on learning to receive the world, whereas Lewis describes Barfield as a friend who disagreed with him and altered his thinking through repeated argument. Jenkin’s place in this sequence is not that of an opponent but of a companion whose example helped shape how Lewis looked, listened, and responded.

Narrative Significance

Lewis’s description of Jenkin connects friendship to a wider habit of attending to experience rather than judging it against an imagined alternative. The same memoir recalls the sensory force of landscapes and the way contrasts between places could sharpen perception; Jenkin’s practice gives that receptivity a deliberate form. Instead of comparing an actual town, wood, or ridge with somewhere supposedly better, Lewis learns first to receive what is there.

The friendship therefore matters as an education in attention: not an abstract principle detached from daily experience, but a way of meeting the specific atmosphere of a squalid town, a dripping wood, or a windy ridge. Lewis presents Jenkin’s influence as enduring because it changed the conditions of perception itself—what could be noticed, and how fully it could be welcomed.