C. S. Lewis: A Biography

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?

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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.’

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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.’

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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.‘

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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.

(#litres_trial_promo) ‘They’re doing Carmen and Maritana,’ Albert told Jack enthusiastically, ‘and others that you and Warnie would rather like to hear.’

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.’

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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.’

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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.

There is perhaps nowhere that the English appear more odious than within the confines of public schools. Lewis, who still nursed all his anti-English prejudice (though the beauty of the Malvern Hills did something to mitigate it), found little to love among his coevals. Above all, he hated the ‘fagging’ system – the notion, abolished now in the majority of boarding schools in England, but still widespread until ten or twenty years ago – that the junior boys of thirteen and fourteen should act as the servants of the older boys of seventeen or eighteen. Warren, who had thoroughly absorbed the public-school ethos, once remarked that ‘if junior boys weren’t fagged, they would become insufferable.’ Jack answered the charge that it was mere pride and self-conceit in the fags which made the fagging system objectionable by transferring it to an adult context.

If some neighbouring V.I.P. had irresistible authority to call on you for any service he pleased at any hour when you were not in the office – if, when you came home on a summer evening, tired from work and with more work to prepare against the morrow, he could drag you on to the links and make you his caddy till the light failed – if at last he dismissed you unthanked with a suitcase full of his clothes to brush and clean and return to him before breakfast, and a hamper full of his foul linen for your wife to wash and mend – and if, under his regime, you were not always perfectly happy and contented, where could the cause lie except in your own vanity?

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It is interesting, incidentally, that someone who could see so clearly what was wrong with the fagging system in the course of this devastating analogy could not see that to all intents and purposes this was what the privileged classes were doing to the lower classes in the first half of the twentieth century.

Coming at a moment of particularly rapid physical growth in Lewis, the whole school system exhausted him. Like his frog-hero, Lord John Big, ‘weary and depressed by over-work, despirited [sic] by his failures on the field and unpopular among his fellows who could not bear the comparison with so deligent [sic] a classmate, he led an unpleasant life. He returned home for his first holyday [sic] full of knowledge, bearing more than one prize and sadly broken in spirit.’

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Lewis’s cleverness, his academic ability, probably made it harder for him to settle into the rough and tumble of life at Malvern. He had grown used to small schools and (at Cherbourg) to being the much-prized prodigy. At the Coll (as the boys called Malvern College) numbers were much greater, and different standards applied. To be popular there, you needed to be good at games and preferably, if you were young, pretty. Lewis appears to have had no trace of homosexuality in his make-up, and he had no wish to become a Tart, as the more desirable younger boys were called. He was physically clumsy. He once remarked that his whole life would have been different if he had not had thumb joints which did not bend in the middle. This physical peculiarity, inherited from his father, made him a poor craftsman, and did not improve his skill at catching balls when they were thrown at him.

Yet however much he loathed the boorishness of his fellow-collegians (and he was nearly always to dislike colleagues), Lewis did find things to love about Malvern. First, there was the Latin master, Harry Wakelyn Smith, known to the boys as Smugy. (The first syllable was pronounced to rhyme with fugue.) Not only did he improve Jack’s Latin and start him on the road to Greek with the Bacchae of Euripides (a play Jack was to love for the rest of his days); more important than that, his lessons were little outposts of civilization in an otherwise barbarous world. Smugy was a greasy-haired, bespectacled figure, vaguely frog-like in appearance, who was a friend of the composer Sir Edward Elgar, many of whose finest pieces of music had been composed when walking or riding on the Malvern Hills. Once, on a walk, Jack came upon the cottage where Elgar had lived. Smugy ‘told us that Elgar used to say he was able to read a musical score in his hand and hear in his mind not only the main theme of the music, but also the different instruments and all the side currents of sound. What a wonderful state of mind!‘

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Smugy’s grateful pupil was to remember the honey-toned manner in which he read aloud the poets: not just Virgil, Horace and Euripides, but the great English poets too. ‘He first taught me the right sensuality of poetry, how it should be savoured and mouthed in solitude. Of Milton’s “Thrones, Dominations, Princedoms, Virtues, Powers,” he said, “That line made me happy for a week.”’

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Malvern had its good points. ‘If I had never seen the spectacle which these coarse, brainless English schoolboys present, there might be a danger of my sometimes becoming like that myself.’ Apart from Smugy’s classroom, the other welcome refuge was the well-stocked College library, known as the Gurney. There in the summer term, with bees buzzing at the open windows, Lewis discovered the Corpus Poeticum Boreale. He followed up Smugy’s suggestion and began to read Milton on his own. He read Yeats, and wrote home eagerly to Papy, or the P’daytabird as the boys had started to call Albert,

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(#litres_trial_promo) Through Yeats he discovered Celtic mythology, while on his own he continued to be possessed by Northernness, and moved on from Wagner to read Mallet’s Northern Antiquities, Myths of the Norsemen and Myths and Legends of the Teutonic Race. He was even composing a Northern tragedy of his own, in the form of a Euripidean drama. It was to be called Loki Bound. Lewis’s Loki rebels against the All-father Odin, not out of pride and malice, as in the Prose Edda, but because he loathes the cruelty of the world which Odin has made. He is the first of the great anti-father figures in Lewis’s poetry. In the drama he stands against Thor, a brutally orthodox oaf who, in his loyalty to Odin, reflects the unthinking conservatism of the powerful older boys at the Coll – ‘bloods’ as they were called.

But even as his fluent pen moved across the page in the Gurney and the bees buzzed outside the window, Lewis knew that the order of his release had been approved. He could be happy in the knowledge that his father did not insist upon his returning to Malvern in the autumn. His first summer term there was also to be his last. The P’daytabird had come up with a scheme which was almost unbelievably good news as far as Jack was concerned. At fifteen years old, he was to be withdrawn from school, and allowed to continue his education under his father’s great master, William Kirkpatrick.