C. S. Lewis

by A. N. Wilson

  Both boys were so unhappy at Wynyard that they wrote to their father with the suggestion that they should go to Campbell College, a day school in Belfast. ‘Jack and I have been thinking it over,’ Warnie wrote, ‘and we both think we would like to go to Campbell College. Of course, as you say the boys may not be gentlemen, but no big school is entirely composed of gentlemen, and I think English boys are not so honest or gentlemanly as most Irish ones.’6

  Poor Albert was too wrapped up in the after-effects of bereavement to give intelligent attention to the education of his sons. He continued to struggle on with his work in the police courts, and this brought solace. But in solitude he was seized with irrational fears, and hypochondria began to take a grip on him. He was convinced, for example, that he was diabetic, and no number of visits to the doctor, followed by tests and negative results, would put his mind at rest. He was just not in a position to make a decision. He wrote to Capron suggesting that he should withdraw his sons from Wynyard, but not being on the spot, and being constitutionally unable to stray from home to investigate the school for himself, he accepted Capron’s word that all was well. In the event it was to Capron, rather than to his older mentor Kirkpatrick, that Albert Lewis entrusted the choice of Warnie’s public school. Capron made the perfectly sensible suggestion that Warnie should be sent to Malvern College, and in the autumn term of 1909 to Malvern he went.

  This would have been the moment for Jack to leave Wynyard, but Capron was by now in desperate straits and he played on the gullible Mr Lewis to persuade him to leave Jack in his care. In fact, his beatings and canings had grown so extreme that a parent had brought a High Court action against Capron, and the scandal caused by this meant that his pupils dwindled to nine in number, of whom one was Jack. The case was dropped, but it left Capron a ruined man, and in the end, since he was a priest in orders, he looked about for a cure of souls. He became the rector of Radstock in Hertfordshire, and died in 1911 aged sixty. His epitaph was composed of two words – JESU MERCY.

  In 1910, then, C. S. Lewis was separated from one of the great monsters in his life, but memory lovingly cultivated Capron until, larger than life, he was ready to step on to the pages of Surprised by Joy. The very year that Wynyard collapsed, 1910, was also memorable for one of the key theatrical experiences of the Lewis brothers’ lives. In the Christmas vacation, their second cousin, Hope Ewart, took them to see Barrie’s Peter Pan. It is one of the Grand Conspicuous Omissions in Lewis’s autobiography that he says nothing about this experience which, to judge from the Lewis Papers, was momentous. For there was no children’s story more apposite to his life than that of the little boy who could not grow up, and who had to win his immortality by an assertion of metaphysical improbabilities – in this case a belief in fairies.

  After the collapse of Wynyard, Jack achieved his wish of being sent to Campbell College for the autumn term of 1910. It was here that the English master, J. A. McNeill, introduced him to Matthew Arnold’s Sohrab and Rustum – ‘much the most important thing’ to have happened to him while he was at the school, so far as Lewis himself was concerned. In Surprised by Joy he makes a point about his discovery of that poem which holds good for the development in personal literary taste of many another reader:

  Parrot critics say that Sohrab is a poem for classicists, to be enjoyed only by those who recognise the Homeric echoes … For me, the relation between Arnold and Homer worked the other way. I knew nothing of Homer; when I came, years later, to read the Iliad, I liked it partly because it was for me reminiscent of Sohrab.7

  Doubtless all this was true, but like so much else in the autobiography it throws dust in the reader’s eyes, and withholds from us the great, obvious fact about Sohrab – the fact about it which must have made its immediate and colossal appeal to Jack Lewis when he read it on the verge of his adolescence. It is the story of a father and son who have been separated. The father, without realizing Sohrab’s identity, accepts the challenge of the Tartar chieftain, who is in fact his son. On the misty banks of Oxus, fog-bound as Belfast in November, father and son fight their archetypal combat, and the son is slain. There was quite as much in this story as there was in Peter Pan for young Jack to feast upon. After only a few weeks of Campbell, however, he fell ill. Poor health had always dogged his childhood. It could be said that he had come to regard periodic bouts of illness as the norm. Even in the days of his mother’s lifetime, there had been delicious periods of fever and bad throats during which he was laid up, able to do nothing – what did he ever like doing better? – but read. At Wynyard, his health had become even worse, and in 1909 there had been an operation on his adenoids. In November 1910, Albert Lewis withdrew Jack from Campbell and decided that he should go to school in the same town as Warnie. He was not old enough yet to go to public school.

  Gabbitas & Thring were once again consulted, and this time they came up with Cherbourg, a small preparatory school directly overlooking the College where Jack was destined one day to be a scholar. In January 1911, the two brothers set off for Malvern.

  These Malvern days had, for them both, a quality of bitter-sweet when they looked back on them from the perspectives of manhood. Great Malvern is a Victorian spa town, nestling on the sunless side of a magnificent row of hills which stretch from the south-western tip of Worcestershire into Herefordshire. Those who built the town were either European mountain-dwellers (Swiss, Austrian, German) or English people who wished to recapture their own pleasure in the Alps or the Tyrol. Fanciful gables and evergreen gardens adorn the suburban roads. Opposite the Gothic railway station which (until a regrettable fire in 1985) was redolent of a mountain halt in the Vaud Canton, towers the Gothic splendour of the Ladies’ College, formerly the Imperial Hotel where Victorian gentlefolk came for the water-cure. The list of those who submitted to this obviously bogus therapy (it involves being wrapped in a wet sheet and exposed to the open air) is impressive, and includes Tennyson and Thackeray. It was the popularity of Malvern as a health spa which made parents of the middle classes believe that it would be a suitable place for their children to be educated. Hence the presence there of the Boys’ College (where Warren Lewis was), a sham medieval structure founded in 1862 in imitation of the older public schools, as well as a number of similar establishments for girls, and a host of little preparatory schools. To this day, these spawn all over the hillside as a puzzling testimony to the fact that English parents do not enjoy the company of those whom they have taken the trouble of bringing into the world.

  Cherbourg, the school where Jack Lewis spent the period from January 1911 to June 1913, was a large white stucco building overlooking the College. Its architecture was reminiscent of villas on the Italian lakes. There were seventeen boys, three assistant masters, and a matron called Miss Cowrie, to whose lax religious views (she dabbled with theosophy and what Lewis later called ‘the whole Anglo-American Occultist tradition’) readers of Surprised by Joy are invited to attribute the loss of the author’s boyhood Christian faith. This is the chapter of Lewis’s autobiography which rings least true. Three things, he tells us, contributed to the collapse of the Christianity which he had imbibed from Oldie Capron at Wynyard. One was the wishy-washy spiritual nonsense of ‘dear Miss C.’; another was the alleged sophistication of a young master called ‘Pogo’, who was ‘dressy’ and told the boys all about the famous actresses in London. The third factor was his advance in studying the classics.

  Here, especially in Virgil, one was presented with a mass of religious ideas; and all teachers and editors took it for granted from the outset that these religious ideas were sheer illusion … The impression I got was that religion in general, though utterly false, was a natural growth, a kind of endemic nonsense into which humanity tended to blunder. In the midst of a thousand religions, stood our own, the thousand and first, labelled True. But on what grounds could I believe this exception?8

  While this third objection to Christianity rings true as a thought which troubled him at the age of twelve, the
other two do not. We feel too strongly the presence of the middle-aged Lewis looking back on the Peter Pan, pubescent boy-Lewis and being horrified by his ‘loss of faith, of virtue, of simplicity’. The passages, for example, where he describes his longing to abandon Christianity because of an over-scrupulous terror that he was not sufficiently concentrating on his prayers, while they may be true in general, are far too specifically recalled to be plausible. The details are too sharp. His saying that he hates himself for becoming at this period a ‘prig’ and a ‘snob’ is really another way of saying that he hates himself for having grown up at all.

  For the truth is that he was an intelligent and gifted boy, whose range of reading and whose capacity to appreciate literature (and, to a lesser extent, music) were uncommonly advanced. For him, the great personal ‘renaissance’ or imaginative discovery of this period of his life was what he came to call Northernness. What he means by this is expounded in one of the most eloquent passages in Surprised by Joy:

  A vision of huge, clear spaces hanging above the Atlantic in the endless Twilight of a Northern summer, remoteness, severity … and almost at the same moment I knew that I had met this before, long, long ago, (it hardly seems longer now) in Tegner’s Drapa, that Siegfried (whatever it might be) belonged to the same world as Balder and the sunward-sailing cranes.

  This aesthetic experience which came upon Lewis ‘a’ most like heart-break’ was prompted merely by glimpsing in some literary periodical the words Siegfried and the Twilight of the Gods and an Arthur Rackham illustration to that volume. In the decade before the First World War, when a Victorian passion for all things Teutonic and Northern still gripped the British middle class, it is hardly surprising that all this should have come Lewis’s way. This was the era of the haunting music-hall song ‘Speak to Me, Thora’, the sentiments of which exactly coincide with Lewis’s boyhood epiphany:

  I stand in a land of roses,

  But I dream of a land of snow.

  When you and I were happy

  In the days of long ago …

  He had only to read the words Twilight of the Gods and he was able to recover ‘the knowledge that I had once had what I now lacked for years, that I was returning at last from exile and desert lands to my own country’.

  None of this would perhaps have taken root so forcefully in the imagination had Albert Lewis not been a man of some musical taste, who took the boys to the opera and the ballet whenever they were performed at the Belfast Hippodrome, and who also gave them a gramophone. It was through gramophone-record catalogues that C. S. Lewis first discovered Wagner, and his essay on ‘the great Bayreuth Master’, written when he was barely thirteen, is by far the most remarkable production of his early years – a thousand times more impressive than his plays or his Animal-land fantasies.

  One sees what the middle-aged Lewis meant about the twelve-year-old being a prig and a snob. All the same, the expressions of that priggishness and snobbery are well turned, as when he says of Wagner that ‘He has not been, nor ever will be, appreciated by the mass: there are some brains incapable of appreciation of the beautiful except when it is embodied in a sort of lyric prettiness.’ What impresses about the essay is the thoroughness with which Lewis, merely by listening to gramophone records and following the stories, had learnt to appreciate the great Wagnerian Ring cycle and Parsifal, ‘his last and greatest work’. He disdained Tannhäuser, in which Wagner was ‘led away into the tinselled realms of tunefulness’, but considered Tristan unsur-passed as drama by anything the world had ever seen. ‘Once having grown to love Wagner’s peculiar richness of tone and the deep meaning of his music and the philosophy of his dramatic poems, all other composers seem but caricatures and ghosts.’9

  The masters at Cherbourg cannot have failed to recognize that they had in their midst a child prodigy. It would seem too as if this was the period of his childhood when he was most able to mix with other boys on their own terms. He tells us that he made friends with the children at Cherbourg, as he had not at Wynyard. And the school magazine records that he even played for the school cricket eleven (though, given that there were only seventeen boys in the school, it may have been impossible to avoid this). He played twelve innings and his highest score was ten. The author of the sports page described Lewis as a ‘stonewaller … only very moderate in the field’.

  When the time came for him to sit the scholarship examination to Malvern College, Lewis once again fell ill. He had to take the exams in bed, in the school sanatorium. In spite of, or perhaps because of, this, he was awarded a scholarship to Malvern College. The boys of Cherbourg were given a holiday – which took the form of an outing to the British Camp (the Ancient British enclosure to the west of the town where Caractacus made his last stand against the Romans), followed by an excellent tea. At home, his father bought Jack an édition de luxe of Kipling’s works signed by Kipling himself. ‘I am not making too much of the scholarship,’ Albert wrote to his son. ‘It is not the scholarship I am so proud of but the circumstances in which it was won.’ He signed this letter, as he so often and truthfully did, ‘Your ever loving Paps’. But the love was no longer reciprocated. Albert, who was intensely lonely without his boys during the school terms, would wait eagerly for Warnie and Jack to return from Malvern. They would be three chums, all boys together. But this was not what his sons wanted. Albert’s ‘wheezes’, stored up in memory and written down in his notebooks, were not what they wanted to hear.

  He was bursting to tell his tales. Like the occasion in the police courts when he found himself prosecuting a girl called Maria Volento for allegedly assaulting a man in her father’s ice-cream parlour. Assuming her to be an Italian with no grasp of English, Albert was almost certain that she would need the assistance of an interpreter; but he began to question her in English, very slowly, ‘in the best nursery style’.

  ‘Just try to explain in your own words what happened to you last night.’

  Her reply, in the broadest Ulster brogue, was: ‘Thon fella [pointing at the prisoner] clodded a tumbler at me and it wud have hut me only I deuked ut.’10

  But to his sons, his self-confessed tendency to get hold of the wrong end of the stick was merely exasperating. In addition to conversational crossed wires and misapprehensions, he was capable of pure non sequiturs. ‘Did Shakespeare spell his name with an E at the end?’ asked Warnie. ‘I believe—’ said Jack, but Albert interrupted: ‘I very much doubt if he used the Italian calligraphy at all.‘11

  The portrait of Albert Lewis which emerges from Surprised by Joy is devastatingly cruel.

  ‘Liberty Hall, boys, Liberty Hall,’ as he delighted to quote. ‘What time would you like lunch?’ But we knew only too well that the meal which would otherwise have been at one had already been shifted in obedience to his lifelong preference to two or even two thirty; and that the cold meats which we had liked had been withdrawn in favour of the only food our father ever voluntarily ate – hot butcher’s meat, boiled, stewed or roast … and this to be eaten in mid afternoon in a dining room that faced south

  – on a day when the summer sun ‘was blistering the paint’ on the hot garden seats.

  In time, everything about Albert came to annoy Jack and Warnie. When Albert was dead, Jack looked back with nostalgia to ‘home and the way we hated it and the way we enjoyed hating it’. Warnie, likewise, remembered ‘Saturday evening tram-rides and visits to the Hippodrome with late supper afterwards’. But even these were a torment to Jack. He did not really enjoy the popular music-hall songs or musical comedies which gave such innocent pleasure to his father and brother. And when Albert got them tickets for some ‘popular’ opera such as Carmen, Jack could now loftily consider it completely inferior to Wagner. ‘One of the most noticeable results of the advent of Wagner’s works in England is the rather paradoxical fact that he has made much more popular than they formerly were the lyrical operas to which he was so much opposed,’ the young essayist of Cherbourg had written.12 ‘They’re doing Carmen and Marita
na,’ Albert told Jack enthusiastically, ‘and others that you and Warnie would rather like to hear.’13 Looking back on it all, Jack was to confess, ‘I thought Monday morning, when he went back to his work, the brightest jewel in the week.’14

  So much for ‘our father’, as Albert is repeatedly called in the autobiography. In the autumn term of 1913, Jack began his career at Malvern College. The Lewis family’s relations with the school were already strained. Warnie’s career there had on the whole been happy and successful. He had submitted himself to the public-school system, played games and recovered some of the ability (which had been quite lost at Wynyard) of concentrating on academic tasks. He had even had some interesting contemporaries in the school, though perhaps the most interesting, the future novelist Michael Arlen (author of such amusing comedies as The Green Hat), made almost no impression on him whatsoever. In those days Arlen ‘was still an Armenian boy called Koyoumgjain’ and, as Warnie recalled, ‘He made no mark of any kind at school, being merely one of a trinity of “dagoes” of whom the other two were also in my house.’15

  So successful was Warnie’s career at school that there had even been talk of his becoming the head boy, when, in the summer of 1913, disaster had struck. He was caught smoking (a habit to which both Lewis brothers had been devoted for a number of years now) and asked to leave. After a certain amount of special pleading by Albert Lewis, it was agreed that Warnie would not actually be sacked, on condition that he voluntarily withdrew himself from the school by the next term. It was a great blow to his pride, and potentially a great setback to his professional life. For he had decided (or it had been decided for him) that he should go into the Army, and for this it was necessary to prepare for the entrance examination to the Officer Training College at Sandhurst. Since he could no longer do this at school, where could he go? In his distress, Albert naturally turned to his old mentor Mr Kirkpatrick, who had by then moved to a house near Great Bookham in Surrey. For the first time in years, the brothers were separated. While Warnie went off to stay with Kirkpatrick, Jack began the adventure of public-school life on his own.