C. S. Lewis

by Roger Lancelyn Green

  Lewis goes on to describe at some length his father’s character and the reasons why life at home was becoming progressively more difficult. Briefly, Albert Lewis erred through a combination of egocentricity and sheer affection for his sons. He enjoyed their company so much that when he was in the house he insisted on being with them all the time: if they had a visitor of their own age, or wanted to read or study quietly by themselves, it made no difference. He must dominate the conversation and impose his own interests at the expense of theirs, usually failing to take in anything they said to him, due to the illogicality and effervescence of his mind. Only when their father was away at work could Warnie and Jack retire to ‘the little end room’ to read and write and chronicle the endless episodes in the history of Boxen.

  But the Boxonian days had come to an end in 1913 when Warnie left Malvern to stay with Kirkpatrick, who helped him win a prize cadetship at Sandhurst the following year; and Jack was already deep in ‘Northernness’, exploring it more profoundly than the late Teutonic version of the Nibelung saga adapted by Wagner, and finding his way into the genuine Norse and Icelandic originals of saga and Eddic literature. ‘I passed on from Wagner,’ he says, ‘to everything else I could get hold of about Norse mythology, Myths of the Norsemen,79 Teutonic Myth and Legend,80 Mallet’s Northern Antiquities.’81 This last he obtained in the old Bohn Library edition, with an appendix containing most of the Prose Edda, which he found the most stimulating discovery so far.

  At Malvern he found a copy of the Corpus Poeticum Boreale (1883), F. York Powell’s great edition of all the mythological poems in the Elder Edda,82 ‘and tried vainly but happily to hammer out the originals from the translation at the bottom of the page’.83 This was during the summer term of 1914, by which time Lewis was immersed in one of the most remarkable of his early works,

  a tragedy, Norse in subject and Greek in form. It was called Loki Bound and was as classical as any Humanist could have desired. The main contrast in my play was between the sad wisdom of Loki and the brutal orthodoxy of Thor … Thor was, in fact, the symbol of the Bloods [at Malvern] … Loki was a projection of myself; he voiced that sense of priggish superiority whereby I was, unfortunately, beginning to compensate myself for my unhappiness.84

  He had already begun to write this play when he first made friends with Arthur Greeves in April 1914, as graphically described in Surprised by Joy, and found another who shared his delight in things Northern. They discovered ‘in a torrent of questions that we liked not only the same thing, but the same parts of it and in the same way; that both knew the stab of Joy and that, for both, the arrow was shot from the North’.85

  Arthur Greeves (1895–1968) was the youngest of the five children of Joseph Greeves, the nearest neighbour of the Lewises at Little Lea. Arthur had been a casual acquaintance of the Lewis boys for most of their lives, but only from 1914 did he begin to become, as Jack described him in 1933, ‘after my brother, my oldest and most intimate friend’.86 In that same year Warnie wrote of him that

  his circumstances have been such that he has never been compelled to face the issues of life … But it would be unfair to blame him, for his character is the result of an accident of his youth – while he was still a boy a doctor diagnosed him as suffering from a weak heart, and by the time the diagnosis was disproved, he was already a confirmed valetudinarian. At the plastic age he was exempted from the discipline of school and the preoccupations of a career, made into an invalid by his mother, whose favourite he is, and encouraged to float rudderless and motiveless down the years.87

  The friendship with Arthur Greeves came exactly at the right moment. A temporary shadow had been cast by Malvern over Jack’s intimacy with Warnie. Warnie took his entrance examinations to Sandhurst between 25 November and 2 December 1913 and the family were elated when they learned that he had passed twenty-first out of 201 successful candidates. In February 1914 Warnie went to the Royal Military College, Sandhurst. On 30 September 1914 he was appointed a second lieutenant in the Army Service Corps, the branch of the army that supplies food, weapons and other necessities to the troops. On 4 November he was sent to France, where he served with the 4th Divisional Train of the British Expeditionary Force.

  And on Saturday, 19 September 1914, Jack had arrived in Surrey to begin his real education with Kirkpatrick. Lewis’s first impression was striking: ‘He was over six feet tall, very shabbily dressed (like a gardener, I thought), lean as a rake, and immensely muscular. His wrinkled face seemed to consist entirely of muscles, so far as it was visible; for he wore moustache and side whiskers with a clean-shaven chin.’88 ‘If ever a man came near to being a purely logical entity, that man was Kirk,’ Lewis decided.89 Lewis’s own acutely logical mind was to a great extent formed and sharpened by Kirkpatrick’s. The Great Knock’s outstanding conviction was that language was given to man solely for the purpose of communicating or discovering truth. The general banalities and ‘small-talk’ of most people did not enter into his calculations. ‘The most casual remark was taken as a summons to disputation.’ To a mere ‘torrent of verbiage’ he would cry ‘Stop!’, not from impatience, but because it was leading nowhere. More sensible observations might be interrupted by ‘Excuse!’, ushering in some parenthetical comment. Full approval would be encouraged by ‘I hear you’ – but usually followed by refutation: ‘Had I read this? Had I studied that? Had I any statistical evidence? And so to the almost inevitable conclusion: “Do you not see then that you had no right … ”’90

  ‘Some boys would not have liked it,’ Lewis comments, ‘to me it was red beef and strong beer’;91 and, toned down and adapted to possible equals rather than pupils, this became his own method of argument, his own idea of conversation throughout life. The Christian virtue that he found hardest to acquire was to suffer fools gladly; for years he failed to realize that the Kirk treatment might upset or offend; but at last he was able to turn it to glorious use, when the silliest dinner-table remark could be taken by him and manipulated gently and followed to conclusions of which you had never dreamed – and yet leaving you with the warm glow of undeserved pride at having initiated such a profoundly interesting discussion.

  Kirkpatrick’s methods of instruction were ‘red beef and strong beer’ too. Not only had Lewis been grounded more securely than he knew at Cherbourg and Malvern, but he had been blessed with a brain ready at the right stimulus to develop those prodigious powers of memory and applied knowledge which the late Austin Farrer* described as perhaps the greatest and most amazing in his generation. And so he was able to benefit fully from Kirkpatrick’s rather ‘sink or swim’ method – which may, however, have been applied intentionally to a pupil whose unusual capabilities and capacity for learning he had sized up at once.

  Two days after Lewis arrived at Great Bookham he was flung straight into Homer, of whom he had never read a word, nor had any introduction to the Epic dialect, having studied only the straight Attic of Xenophon and the dramatists. Kirkpatrick’s method was to read aloud twenty lines or so of the Greek, translate, with a few comments and explanations, for another hundred lines, and then leave his pupil to go over it with the aid of a lexicon, and make sense of as much of it as he could. It worked with Lewis, who had no difficulty in memorizing every word as he looked up its meaning. Kirkpatrick at this stage seemed to value speed more than absolute accuracy, and Lewis soon found himself understanding what he read without translating it, beginning to think in Greek: ‘That,’ he commented, ‘is the great Rubicon to cross in learning any language.’92 And so, ‘Day after day and month after month, we drove gloriously onward’, till the music of Homer ‘and the clear, bitter brightness that lives in almost every formula had become part of me’.93

  ‘After a week’s trial, I have come to the conclusion that I am going to have the time of my life,’ Lewis wrote to Arthur Greeves on 26 September.94 In his next letter (6 October) he said:

  As for my average ‘Bookham’ day, there is not much to tell. Breakfast at 8.0, where I am gl
ad to see good Irish soda-bread on the table, begins the day. I then proceed to take the air … till 9.15, when I come in & have the honour of reading that glorious Iliad, which I will not insult with my poor praise. 11–11.15 is a little break, and then we go on with Latin until luncheon, at 1.00. From 1–5.0 the time is at my own disposal to read, or write or moon about in the golden tinted woods and valleys of this country. 5–7.0, we work again. 7.30, dinner. After that I have the pleasant task of English Literature mapped out by Himself. Of course that doesn’t include novels, which I read at other times. I am at present occupied with (as Eng. Lit.) Buckle’s ‘Civilization of England’, and (of my own accord) Ibsen’s plays.95

  This routine became the archetype of a ‘normal day’ as he would choose his days to be: ‘if I could please myself I would always live as I lived there’;96 and indeed throughout his subsequent life at Oxford and Cambridge he continued whenever possible to follow this schedule as far as circumstances would allow – the main variation being that in time more evenings were spent in talk with friends or at meetings of various literary or other societies than in reading.

  Another habit contracted at Bookham was reading ‘suitable’ books during afternoon tea, which he held should be taken alone. ‘It would be a kind of blasphemy to read poetry at table: what one wants is a gossipy, formless book which can be opened anywhere’,97 and his usual choice was Boswell, Herodotus, Burton, Tristram Shandy, The Essays of Elia or Andrew Lang’s History of English Literature.

  The two and a half years thus initiated at Great Bookham, while among the most important in forming the C.S. Lewis who was to be, were years of peace and contentment such as he was hardly to know again; but they were years of mental development fed by literary discovery and sound learning. Very little actually happened in the biographical sense, beyond holidays in Ireland and occasional visits from Warnie on leave from the Western Front.

  During this time he wrote almost weekly letters to Arthur Greeves, telling mainly of the books that he was reading, many of them landmarks of importance when viewed in the light of his future career. Thus, in November 1914 he was discovering William Morris, both the poems and the prose romances; in January 1915 he first read the Morte Darthur – ‘it has opened up a new world to me’, he wrote to Arthur on 26 January 1915.98 In February 1916 he read The Faerie Queene and Grettir the Strong. A diary kept for three weeks in July 1915 shows him reading Prometheus Bound in the original Greek, ‘a red letter day in my life’,99 Keats, Ruskin, Horace, Aristotle and Virginia Woolf. And he was celebrating these delights in verse:

  And while the rain is on the leads

  What songcraft sweet shall be our fare?

  The tale where Spenser’s magic sheds

  A slumbrous sweetness on the air

  Of charmed lands, and Horace fair,

  And Malory who told the end

  Of Arthur, and the trumpet blare

  Of him who sang Patroklos’ friend.100

  On 4 March 1916 (he mistakenly dates it August 1915 in Surprised by Joy) Lewis made one of the literary discoveries which, he maintained, left the deepest and most enduring impression on both his literary and his spiritual life. He wrote to Arthur Greeves on 7 March:

  I have had a great literary experience this week. I have discovered yet another author to add to our circle – our very own set: never since I first read ‘The well at the world’s end’ have I enjoyed a book so much – and indeed I think my new ‘find’ is quite as good as Malory or Morris himself. The book, to get to the point, is George MacDonald’s ‘Faerie Romance’, Phantastes, which I picked up by hazard in a rather tired Everyman copy on our station bookstall last Saturday.101

  Thirty years later, in the preface to George MacDonald: An Anthology, Lewis wrote of MacDonald, ‘I have never concealed the fact that I regard him as my master; indeed, I fancy I have never written a book in which I did not quote from him’, and after describing the purchase of Phantastes, he continued:

  A few hours later I knew that I had crossed a great frontier. I had already been waist deep in Romanticism; and likely enough, at any moment, to flounder into its darker and more evil forms, slithering down the steep descent that leads from the love of strangeness to that of eccentricity and thence to that of perversity. Now Phantastes was romantic enough in all conscience; but there was a difference. Nothing was at that time further from my thoughts than Christianity and I therefore had no notion what this difference really was. I was only aware that if this new world was strange, it was also homely and humble; that if this was a dream, it was a dream in which one at least felt strangely vigilant; that the whole book had about it a sort of cool, morning innocence, and also, quite unmistakably, a certain quality of Death, good Death. What it actually did to me was to convert, even to baptise (that was where the Death came in) my imagination. It did nothing to my intellect nor (at that time) to my conscience. Their turn came far later with the help of many other books and men.102

  This was the highlight among Lewis’s literary discoveries at Bookham, but he continued with his explorations and was soon reporting with enthusiasm to Greeves on his first reading of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Beowulf (both still in translation), Chaucer, Sidney, Tristan (in French, so presumably the medieval ‘prose’ Tristan credited to Helie de Borron), The Song of Roland, the Argonautica of Apollonius Rhodius (in Greek) – which he compared unfavourably with The Life and Death of Jason – Paradise Lost, and Comus – ‘an absolute dream of delight’103 – Shakespeare’s fairy and romantic plays, and a curious work called Letters from Hell, written in Danish by Valdemar Adolph Thisted in 1866, and translated by Julie Sutter in 1885 with an introduction by MacDonald, which may later have given him the idea (though none of the contents) for The Screwtape Letters.

  On the more conventionally academic side he was progressing amazingly and Kirkpatrick wrote to Albert Lewis as early as 7 January 1915:

  He was born with the literary temperament and we have to face that fact with all it implies. This is not a case of early precocity showing itself in rapid assimilation of knowledge and followed by subsequent indifference or torpor. As I said before, it is the maturity and originality of his literary judgements which is so unusual and surprising. By an unerring instinct he detects first rate quality in literary workmanship, and the second rate does not interest him in any way.104

  On 28 March he added that, while still rather behind with Greek grammar, he

  has a sort of genius for translating … He has read more classics in the time than any boy I ever had, and that too, very carefully and exactly. In Homer his achievement is unique – 13 books or more of the Iliad and 9 of the Odyssey. It will not surprise you to learn that in the Sophoclean drama, which attains a high level in poetic expression, especially in the lyric portions, he could beat me easily in the happy choice of words and phrases.105

  And in a letter of 16 September 1915, he admitted, ‘He is the most brilliant translator of Greek plays I have ever met.’106

  As Jack’s time at Bookham drew towards an end much discussion passed between Kirkpatrick and Albert Lewis with regard to his future. There were suggestions that he should take up law or join the Army; but Kirkpatrick’s settled opinion, with which Lewis himself was only too eager to agree, was that he should proceed to the university with the idea of an ultimate fellowship, or failing that of becoming a schoolmaster – though his own private ambition was to be a poet and romance writer.

  But this was 1916, and with the war going badly for the Allies, conscription had come in. Lewis discovered that, as an Irishman, he could claim exemption. But he was determined to serve, and this at least gave him the opportunity to join the Officers’ Training Corps and get a commission as soon as his papers came through.

  Accordingly, on 4 December 1916 he reached Oxford for the first time, to sit for a scholarship examination, and found comfortable lodgings in ‘the first house on the right as you turn into Mansfield Road out of Holywell’.107 ‘This place has surpassed my w
ildest dreams,’ he wrote to his father on 7 December, ‘I never saw anything so beautiful, especially on these frosty moonlight nights; though the Hall at Oriel, where we do the papers, is fearfully cold at about four o’clock in the afternoons. We have most of us tried with varying success to write in our gloves.’108

  Any fears of the result he may have had were groundless, for shortly after reaching Belfast for his Christmas holidays Lewis received a letter from Reginald W. Macan, Master of University College, informing him that ‘This College elects you to a Scholarship (New College having passed you over)’; and The Times of 14 December listed among the successful candidates, besides ‘Clive S. Lewis, University College’, ‘Alfred C. Harwood, Christ Church’,* and ‘Arthur Owen Barfield, Wadham College’,† who were soon to be among his closest friends.109

  Although now a Scholar of Univ., Lewis was not yet officially a member of Oxford University, as he had still to pass Responsions, the entrance examination. This included elementary mathematics as a compulsory subject, and at the end of January 1917 he returned to Bookham for another term to see if Kirkpatrick could instil a sufficient amount of ‘the low cunning of Algebra’ into him, mathematics being a subject that he seemed eternally incapable of mastering.

  On the way he visited Oxford again, this time for an interview with the Master of Univ., who, he reported to his father on 28 January, ‘was a clean-shaven, white-haired, jolly old man, and was very nice indeed. He treated me to about half an hour’s “Oxford manner” and then came gradually round to my own business. Since writing last, he has made inquiries, and it seems that if I pass Responsions in March I could “come up” in the following term and join the O.T.C.’110