C. S. Lewis: A Biography

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To the end of his days Lewis was a brilliant parodist – always the sign of a good critic. The stories reveal not that he was trying to escape the grotesque (as he saw it) world of servants and relations, but that he would best come to terms with them when he had re-invented them in the pages of his notebooks. In addition to his parents and Miss Harper, there were Maude the maid, Martha the cook and his old grandfather Lewis, who came to live in the house in April 1907, a prematurely senile presence, muttering psalms to himself in an upstairs bedroom. For much of the time from 1905 until 1907, Jacks was left alone, wallowing in books. When he wasn’t reading he was either missing Warnie, away at school, and writing him letters, or thinking about the games they would play when he got home.

‘Hoora!’ he wrote in 1907. ‘Warnie comes home this morning. I am lying in bed waiting for him and thinking of him, before I know where I am I hear his boots pounding on the stairs, he comes into my room, we shake hands and begin to talk.’ He wrote that when he was nine, but he could easily have written it when he was twenty-nine or fifty-nine.

Little Jacks himself we can glimpse in his fragment of autobiography – ‘My life during the Xmas holidsas of 1907 by Jacks or Clive Lewis author of “Building of the Promanad”, “Toyland” “Living races of Mouse-Land” etc. Dedicated to Miss Maude Scott.’

I begin my life after my 9th birthday, on which I got a book from Papy and a post-card album from Mamy. I have a lot of enymays, however there are only 2 in this house they are called Maude and Mat. Maude is far worse than Mat but she thinks she is a saint. I rather like Mat, but I HATE Maude, she is very nasty and bad tempered, also very ugly, as you can see in the picture …

Having disposed of the servants, our young author turns his attention to his parents. ‘Mamy is like most middle-aged ladys, stout, brown hair, spectacles, kniting her chief industry etc. etc. I am like most boys of 9 and I am like Papy, bad temper, thick lips, thin and generaly wearing a jersy.’ The thick lips were to strike others later in life. ‘Oh, he was a brute,’ one of his colleagues in the English Faculty at Oxford once recalled. ‘You could always tell when he was going to start an argument, he would push forward his thick lower lip.’

His knowledge of his close resemblance to his own father was to leave Lewis. Albert would become a more and more fantastical creature in his son’s imagination – perhaps in fact. But in those tranquil Little Lea years before the great calamity befell them all, and before Jacks entered puberty, there were times of great happiness. The leisurely Irish quality of Albert’s life is captured by one of his wheezes about a neighbouring peer who annually allowed a cricket match in his park. The luncheon provided on these occasions was so generous that in the afternoon ‘there were few steady men on the field’. The wicketkeeper was one of the few who had remained sober, and when the drunken batsman lurched out several yards from the pitch to meet his ball and missed it, the wicketkeeper clearly stumped him. ‘How’s that, umpire?’ he said to the umpire, who was steadying himself on a bat. To which the umpire replied, ‘What the hell is it your business? Go on with the bloody match.’

These were not only the days when such amusing things happened; they were also the days when the family still laughed about Albert’s ‘wheezes’. The house moreover became more and more prosperous and comfortable. In May 1907, a telephone was installed.

(#litres_trial_promo) The first person Jacks tried to ring was a neighbour of about his age called Arthur Greeves who, like Warnie, was to be a constant in his life. The Greeves family were flax-spinners – the chief industry of Belfast apart from shipbuilding. Jacks’s friendship with Arthur was not to blossom until they were in their teens. In early boyhood, Warnie was really his only friend, the one with whom he shared his fantasies. And it was noticeable that from an early age the younger brother dominated over the elder. There is real forceful bossiness in the letter he wrote to Warnie in May 1907 after the telephone was installed. ‘I have got an adia [sic] you know the play I was writing. I think we will try and act it with new stage don’t say annything about it not being dark, we will have it upstairs and draw the thick curtains and the night one, the scenery is rather hard but still I think we shall do it.’

Warnie was by now twelve years old and his parents were starting to wonder about where he should be educated after Wynyard. Luckily, advice was to hand from old Mr Kirkpatrick, whose litigious nature had not been satisfied with suing a clockmaker for spoiling his clock. A few years later a parent who had entrusted Kirkpatrick with the tuition of a son had been slow in paying an agreed fee and Kirkpatrick had once more enlisted Albert Lewis’s help as a solicitor to extract the money from the defaulter. Albert Lewis himself had not required a cash payment for this service. A greater reward, as he told his old teacher, would be to hear Kirkpatrick’s views on the relation between morality and religion. Kirkpatrick wrote back that

it is a subject too wide, too vast, too dependent on time, place, heredity and social conditions to be treated adequately in a letter. It would take a SYMPOSIUM, or, as Cicero preferred to call it, a Convivium, to touch even on some aspects of what must always be the most profoundly interesting of all questions that deal with man’s spiritual nature and future destiny in the world.

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Albert had to be content, instead, with receiving Kirkpatrick’s advice about a suitable school for Warnie. Winchester was ‘out of the question’, Cheltenham and Rugby were both possibilities. Indeed, Albert even got to the point of writing to a housemaster at Rugby and seeing if his boy could have a place there. Shrewsbury looked tempting. ‘You will do worse,’ Kirkpatrick advised, ‘especially if your boy is literary.’ It looked, however, as if Rugby would be the school for Warnie. But before that time, the sky darkened over Little Lea, and the paradise which young Jacks was inhabiting there with his parents and brother and servants and books was shattered for ever. For Albert Lewis 1908 was a year of unbelievable sorrows. Flora Lewis became seriously ill, and cancer was diagnosed. Since nurses were required night and day, Albert Lewis was compelled to ask his father, who had been living with the family for a year, to move out of Little Lea. Richard Lewis made the move in March. On 24 March he suffered a serious stroke and on 2 April he died. This was the first death of the year.

Flora lasted another four months. Jack remembered the night when he was ill:

crying both with headache and toothache and distressed because my mother did not come to me. That was because she was ill too: and what was odd was that there were several doctors in her room and voices and comings and goings all over the house and doors shutting and opening. It seemed to last for hours. And then my father, in tears, came into my room and began to try to convey to my terrified mind things it had never conceived before.

It is hard to know whether it was worse to be Jacks, in the midst of all this suffering, or Warnie, away at school in England and terrified that his mother might at any minute die before he had the chance to see her for the last time.

‘My dear son,’ Albert warned him in a letter written shortly after Warnie’s thirteenth birthday, ‘it may be that God in his mercy has decided that you will have no person in the future to turn to but me.’ Warnie’s response was brave. ‘Write as often as you can and tell me all you can about Mammy. It is beastly for me here not being able to tell what is going on from day to day.’

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In the event, she was to die in the summer holidays. By 11 August it was obvious that she did not have long to live. From her bedroom she could hear in the distance the Orange Lodge practising for the Apprentices’ march, blowing pipes and banging drums with what seemed like cruel force. ‘It’s a pity that it takes so long to learn that tune,’ she murmured. By the night of 20 August she had been wandering for a while in her talk, but she suddenly grasped Albert’s hand and said to the nurse, ‘Nurse, when you get married see that you get a good man who loves you and loves God.’

The next night she was more composed, and again Albert sat up with her. ‘I spoke to her (nor was it the first time by any means that a conversation on heavenly things had taken place between us),’ he wrote, ‘sometimes begun by her, sometimes by me, of the goodness of God. Like a flash she said, “What have we done for him?” May I never forget that. She died at 6.30 on the morning of the 23rd August, my birthday. As good a woman, wife and mother, as God has ever given to man.’

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On Flora’s mantelpiece there was a calendar with a Shakespearean quotation for each day of the year. The quotation for the day on which she died was from the fifth act of King Lear:

Men must endure

Their going hence, even as their coming hither: Ripeness is all.

Albert, who had lost his father and his wife in the space of four months, was to suffer a third blow only a fortnight later when his elder brother Joe also died.

Albert’s grief over the summer had made him a poor companion to his sons, and he was now in no position, emotionally, to look after them on his own. Perhaps if he had been forced to do so by financial circumstances, things would have been different. ‘His nerves had never been of the steadiest,’ C. S. Lewis mercilessly recalled, ‘and his emotions had always been uncontrolled. Under the pressure of anxiety his temper became incalculable; he spoke wildly and acted unjustly.’ This disturbing passage in Surprised by Joy implies that in the weeks leading up to Flora’s death, the survivors all hurt one another in an irremediable way. Albert’s outbursts of rage against Jacks were not forgiven. ‘During these months the unfortunate man, had he but known it, was really losing his sons as well as his wife.’ It had already been decided that Jacks should accompany Warnie back to Wynyard School.

–FOUR– SCHOOLS 1908–1914 (#ulink_2071b1d8-5325-5589-83d2-8049319a9c0f)

Presumably there is no paediatrician or child psychologist in the world who would recommend that a nine-year-old boy, within a fortnight of his mother’s death, should be sent away from home; and not merely sent away from home, but sent to another country, to a school run on harshly unfeeling lines. But this is what happened to C. S. Lewis. The experience was made all the more painful by his father’s sobbing on the quayside in Ireland as he bade the boys farewell, and by the boys’ not having the ability to express whatever it was they felt. Forty years later, Jacks said he had felt merely ‘embarrassed and self-conscious’, and hated the discomfort of his school uniform – an Eton collar, a black coat, knickerbockers which buttoned at the knee.

After an overnight crossing of the Irish Sea, during which Warnie was seasick, they arrived at Liverpool, and C. S. Lewis ‘reacted with immediate hatred’ to the sight of England. With a deep part of himself, he was always to remain a stranger there. As the train made its progress from the North of England down to London, he felt he was entering a world of Stygian dullness. The English accents all around him ‘seemed like the voices of demons’.

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At Euston, they changed trains, and made the short journey – some twenty minutes – to Jack’s first school, Wynyard House, Watford, in the county of Hertford.

It was an unprepossessing place, being merely a couple of semi-detached, yellow-brick, suburban houses. There were fewer than twenty pupils, eight or nine of whom, like the Lewis brothers, were boarders. In his first letter home to his father, Jack was prepared to look on the bright side. ‘I cannot of course tell you yet but I think I shall like this place,’ he wrote. ‘Misis [sic] Capron and the Miss Caprons are very nice and I think I will be able to get on with Mr. Capron though to tell the truth he is rather eccentric.’

(#litres_trial_promo) This remark was an understatement. The headmaster of Wynyard House, the Reverend Robert Capron, was a bad-tempered and capricious man who was especially unkind to those boys whom he suspected of having low social origins. The boys called him Oldie. He was rather a handsome figure in a vaguely Teutonic mould, with a short grey beard, moustaches and thick grey hair. ‘I have seen him’, Warnie remembered later, ‘lift a boy of twelve or so from the floor by the back of his collar, and holding him at arm’s length as one might a dog, proceed to refresh the unfortunate youth’s memory by applying his cane to his calves.’

(#litres_trial_promo) It is hard to tell whether Warnie had told his parents of the horrors of Wynyard House and they had ignored him, or whether it took the more trenchant Jacks, who was infinitely more articulate, and used to all home comforts, to protest at Capron’s ways. Only a fortnight after relaying his sunny hope that he would like Wynyard, Jack was writing to Albert, ‘My dear Papy, Mr. Capron said something I am not likely to forget – “Curse the boy” (behind Warnie’s back) because Warnie did not bring his jam to tea, no one ever heard such a rule before. Please may we not leave on Saturday? We simply CANNOT wait in this hole until the end of term … Your loving son Jack.’

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But for one reason or another, they stayed. The brothers loathed Capron and his mincing, affected manner of speech. Oh was Eoh, beer was be-ah. For his part Capron persistently picked on Warnie. He asserted that Warnie was lazy, a cheat, and – the final outrage which nearly did cause Albert Lewis to withdraw his sons when he heard of it – that he had a cousin in the Canadian Mounted Police. It is not possible, at this distance, to discover either how Capron dreamed up this fanciful notion, or why it was deemed so offensive.

C. S. Lewis remained obsessed by Wynyard for the rest of his life. Although he spent only eighteen months as a pupil there, he devoted nearly a tenth of his autobiography to describing it, in the most lurid terms, as a ‘concentration camp’. He went further, and called it Belsen. Wynyard was important as the place where he first became conscious of two things which must have already formed part of the texture of his Irish childhood. Here he met them in unfamiliar English guises: corporal punishment and Christianity. ‘Everyone talks of sadism nowadays,’ Lewis wrote in his autobiography (Do they? the reader naturally replies), ‘ … but I question whether Capron’s cruelty had any erotic element in it.’ The question he does not ask is to what extent Capron’s floggings contributed to his own, Lewis’s, erotic development. Capron flogged the boys indiscriminately – for getting sums wrong (and there were a lot of sums on the curriculum at Wynyard), for breaking the innumerable rules of the place – and sometimes for no reason at all. During one term, Capron’s wife died, and it had the effect of making him even more indiscriminately violent: so much so that his son, known as Wee-wee to the boys, felt obliged to apologize on his father’s behalf – an apology which in itself was an excruciating torture to Jack, who had ‘learnt to fear and hate emotion’.

Almost the most interesting thing about Lewis’s memories of Wynyard, however, is his assertion that Capron was the first person to teach him undiluted Christianity, ‘as distinct from general “up-lift”’. The impression given in Surprised by Joy is that he grew up in a religiously wishy-washy household. No emphasis is given to his father’s profound piety, nor to the theological preoccupations of grandfather Lewis, who wandered about the corridors of Little Lea muttering psalms. It was at Wynyard that he began seriously to pray, to read the Bible and to attempt seriously to obey his conscience.

His initial reaction to the school religion, however, was less than favourable. Capron took the boys to worship at the church of St John’s, Watford, an Anglo-Catholic shrine very little different, when judged from the Ulster viewpoint, from the abominations of Rome herself. ‘In this abominable place of Romish hypocrites and English liars,’ Jack wrote at the time, ‘the people cross themselves, bow to the Lord’s table (which they have the vanity to call an altar) and pray to the Virgin.’ But when he looked back on it from the perspective of middle age, and when he had more or less adopted this ‘Romish’ style of religion for himself, he decided that ‘the effect … was entirely good’.

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The psychosexual effects of living under a reign of terror, where everything was punishable by the cane; the effects, moreover, of having been introduced to this system at the very moment when he had lost his mother and begun to ‘fear and hate emotion’ – all these were to make themselves felt in Lewis’s later development. For the time being, he reacted as he was always to react to grown-ups with whom he was unable to make friends. He made Capron into a monster. It may very well be the case that the man was a monster, but since we may only view him through the creative lens of the Lewis brothers’ memory, there is no knowing what he was like in other people’s minds. To judge from the fact that Warnie, of good average intelligence, had sunk back badly in his school work by the time he went on to public school, we may believe them when they bemoan the academic standard at Wynyard House. In memory the place was like Doctor Grimstone’s school in Vice Versa. The tyranny which Capron exercised, not only over the boys but also over his own grown-up children, seems like something in Victorian fiction, though in many ways he sounds more like a character in Ivy Compton-Burnett than one in F. Anstey.

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.’

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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.

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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.