1 The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign ...

structure. Oxford and Cambridge was a very different kind of university in a very
different society and nation – even if the differences were often subtle.
As an American, I was a rarity, relatively speaking. It was a definitely and proudly British
university. Even with the presence of Rhodes scholars, Americans were relatively few in
number, there were only or two Americans in each college. “Ex-colonials,” was the
perception that most of my British college mates who came to Oxford had of Americans..
Oxford had war veterans, who had been in the same wars, including Korea. Many of my
best friends, English friends, were veterans of Korea. They were about the same age as I
was. The life in Magdalen was wonderful. It was a very beautiful college setting.
Magdalen, being first established in the 14 th century, had a core medieval complex of
buildings. My rooms were in a building called New Buildings which was called “new”
because it was built in the 17 th and 18 centuries. New Buildings flanked the deer park. My
rooms were on the ground floor. My very first morning, upon waking up, began with the
pleasure of seeing the deer bouncing by the window and a scout coming in with a cup of
tea to wake me up. That was the first day of a different civilization, you might say,
although the new civilization used words from my own language. The tutorial system at
Oxford was one of the most perfect ways of teaching and learning, it seemed to me. I took
to it with the greatest delight.
I had a wonderful tutor of Old English named Jack Bennett who was a New Zealander.
We read Beowulf with him and all of the difficult old English and Middle English texts
some of which are wonderful, but many unfortunately, that are not so wonderful. Word
for word, we read and tried to commit them all to memory. Jack Bennett was a great
human being and a wonderful scholar of many things. Henry James for example, but he
knew all the American authors. C. S. Lewis for me was a great feast of intellect.
Q: Because C. S. Lewis is so well known, he never was – I don’t know what you call it –
had tenure at that university.
MILLER: Oh, yes.
Q: He did? I thought that there was something …
MILLER: No, no, he was never given the full honors by the University of Oxford of the
number one literary professor although he deserved those honors. He was a Don, a senior
Don at Magdalen, a professor in the Oxford English faculty, but it was his Christianity,
his Christian writings, that got in the way of his natural scholarship reward, I’d say. There
was never any discussion of religious matters except in terms of literary texts that were
religious in subject matter.
Q: What sort of courses did you have with him?
MILLER: He was my tutor for everything from Chaucer on, till the present. So we read
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