C. S. Lewis: A Biography

It was the summer of 1914. More than Lewis’s schooldays were over. A whole era, not only in his life, but also in the world, had come to an end. He would always feel that he belonged to that old world. In the barbarous world which was struggling to be born, he would be an alien.

–FIVE– THE GREAT KNOCK 1914–1917 (#ulink_2d8647b4-9b70-5ae7-871d-9bc944afdf00)

Shortly before the beginning of his last term as a schoolboy, Lewis had been told that his Belfast neighbour Arthur Greeves was conva-lescing from some illness and would welcome a visit. In 1907, it may be remembered that the telephone had no sooner been installed in the house than young Jacks wanted to speak to Arthur down the line. But their friendship had remained a thing of pure neighbourliness, without blossoming into any sort of spiritual or intellectual intimacy.

It was in April or May 1914, with his head full of the epic of Loki Bound and H. M. A. Guerber’s Myths of the Norsemen, that Jack knocked on the Greeveses’ front door and was shown upstairs to Arthur’s bedroom. He found the boy sitting up in bed. On the table beside him lay a copy of … Myths of the Norsemen.

‘Do you like that?’ he asked.

‘Do you like that?’ Arthur replied.

It was not long before the two boys were exchanging their thoughts about the whole world of Norse mythology, so excited to discover this mutual interest that they were almost shouting. ‘Both knew the stab of Joy, and … for both, the arrow was shot from the North.’

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Lewis had already learnt, in his brother’s company, the joy of what he later termed the first great love, that of Affection. During his conversation with Arthur Greeves, he discovered the second love, that of Friendship. ‘Many thousands of people have had the experience of finding the first friend, and it is none the less a wonder; as great a wonder (pace the novelists) as first love, or even greater.’

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The friendship of his own sex was one of the great sources of Joy in Lewis’s life; and it was always axiomatic with him that friendship began, and perhaps continued, with two men ‘seeing the same truth’. By many people of a less cerebral disposition, it is not considered necessary to agree with their friends on points of literary judgement, or even of theology. Lewis thought that it was; or perhaps it would be truer to say that he thought that he thought that it was. In point of fact, his friendship with Arthur Greeves was to outlast many changes of view on both sides.

The friendship with Greeves occupied a position of unique importance in Lewis’s life, for geographical and practical reasons. Like Lewis, Greeves was the son of a Belfast middle-class household which had nothing to do with the world of Oxford or London, where Lewis was to achieve his fame. Greeves, though highly intelligent and bookish, was not destined to go to university. His friendship with Lewis was kept going by letter. Both were prodigiously fluent and regular correspondents, and their letters to one another continued from 1914 until a few weeks before Lewis’s death in 1963. Sadly, Arthur Greeves’ side of the correspondence has been destroyed, but the Lewis letters to Greeves (published as They Stand Together, 1979) provide an invaluable insight into Lewis’s imaginative growth. The greater part of his intellectual journeyings, as well as many of his emotional experiences, were confided to Greeves. Moreover since Lewis, already a self-confessed follower of the Romantic movement in literature, was highly self-conscious, the letters to Greeves helped him not merely to disclose but also to discover himself. It was in writing to Greeves that he decided, very often, the sort of person he wanted to be. We could very definitely say that if it had not been for Arthur Greeves, many of Lewis’s most distinctive and imaginatively successful books would not have been written. The letters were the dress rehearsal for that intimate and fluent manner which was to make Lewis such a successful author. The early stuff which he wrote for himself, such as Loki Bound, is almost entirely unreadable. In the letters to Greeves, he learnt to write for an audience.

By September 1914, the Archduke had been shot in Sarajevo, and the great European powers had drifted inexorably into war. Warren Lewis, who had been a prize cadet at Sandhurst (21st out of 201 candidates) found himself being rushed through his officers’ training course. By November he was in France with the Fourth Company of the Seventh Divisional Train of the British Expeditionary Force. It was a war which was to change everything; not only the disputed territories of the Prussian empire, but also much bigger things – like the position of the social classes in Europe and the position of women in society. Ireland, too, was to be changed irrevocably by the turmoil in which Britain found itself.

Jack Lewis, as he entered his teenage years, was put into an idyllic position of isolation, far from Belfast and the Western Front. On 19 September 1914, he stepped off the train at Great Bookham, Surrey, and encountered the legendary Mr Kirkpatrick. The old schoolmaster was sixty-six years old. He and his wife had enjoyed having Warnie to live with them while he prepared for the Sandhurst exams: ‘A nicer boy I never had in the house.’

(#litres_trial_promo) But from the beginning, the relationship with Jack was more special.

Kirkpatrick wrote to his beloved pupil Albert Lewis, ‘When I first saw him on the station I had no hesitation in addressing him. It was as though I was looking at yourself once more in the old days at Lurgan.’

(#litres_trial_promo) Kirkpatrick’s letters to Albert over the years had been fulsome and emotional: ‘A letter from you carries the mind across the vistas of the years and wakens all the cells where memory slept … ’

(#litres_trial_promo) His relationship with Albert’s sons was to be more distant and old-fashioned. It was not surprising, therefore, that the boys seized on this to provide yet another example of the P’daytabird getting things hopelessly wrong. Albert recalled being squeezed as a boy by the Great Knock and having his youthful cheeks rubbed by his ‘dear old whiskers’. But when Jack got off the train, his cheeks tingling with anticipation, something very different happened. ‘Anything more grotesquely unlike the “dear old Knock” of my father’s reminiscences could not be conceived.’

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The old man himself confessed to being deeply moved by the appearance of Clive Lewis (as far as history discovers the matter, Kirkpatrick was the only person who ever called Lewis by his baptismal name). But the Knock’s devotion to the boy took the form not of tears and kisses, but of a well-developed act which he obviously enjoyed adopting. Lewis accused his father of transforming the real Kirkpatrick into a figure hopelessly unlike the reality. From all the evidence which survives, we can see that the Great Knock of Surprised by Joy is quite as much an imaginative projection as the Victorian sentimentalist beloved of Lewis’s father.

Kirkpatrick’s letters to Albert were real enough. When they are not dripping with syrupy endearments about his former pupils, they thunder with all the irrational force of an angry man reading the newspapers about the Hun, the Catholics, the Conservative Party and anyone else he disapproves of. But for Jack Lewis, the Great Knock was to be the embodiment of pure logic, the man who sacrificed everything – social niceties, good manners, even the pleasure of conversation – to a passionate desire to get things right. Even as they were strolling from the station, Jack was discovering, or creating, this magnificent character. He remarked that he was surprised by the scenery of Surrey, which was much wilder than he had expected.

‘Stop!’ shouted the Knock. ‘What do you mean by wildness and what grounds had you for not expecting it?’ By a series of Socratic thrusts, Kirkpatrick managed to show Lewis that his remarks were wholly meaningless and that he had no grounds whatsoever for expressing an opinion about a subject (the scenery of Surrey) of which he had hitherto known nothing. As Lewis remarks, ‘Born a little later, he would have been a Logical Positivist.’

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Kirkpatrick’s teaching techniques, when it came to studying literature, were no less remarkable. Lewis arrived on a Saturday. On Monday morning at nine o’clock, Kirkpatrick opened the Iliad and read aloud the first twenty lines, chanting it in his pure Ulster brogue. Then he translated the lines into English, handed Lewis a lexicon and told him to go through as much of it as he had time for. With any less able child, this would have been a disastrously slapdash method of instruction. But it was not long before Lewis began trying to race Kirkpatrick, seeing if he could not learn a few more lines of Homer than his master. Before long, he was reading fluently and actually thinking in Greek. The same method was applied to the Latin poets. Eventually, while he was living at Gastons (as the Knock’s house was called), Lewis was to read his way through the whole of Homer, Virgil, Euripides, Sophocles and Aeschylus, as well as the great French dramas, before branching out into German and Italian. In all these areas, Kirkpatrick’s methods were the same. After the most rudimentary instruction in the grammar of the languages, Jack was reading Faust and the Inferno.

They were very happy times for Kirkpatrick himself. His letters to Albert about the boy are glowing and full of appreciation for Jack’s qualities of mind; they are exact in their analysis of what was so remarkable about him, throughout his life, as a literary critic. ‘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.’

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In religion, Kirkpatrick was an old-fashioned nineteenth-century rationalist, whose favourite reading consisted of Frazer’s Golden Bough and Schopenhauer. Nevertheless, he remained very distinctly an Ulster Presbyterian atheist. Jack noticed with amusement that Kirkpatrick always did the garden in a slightly smarter suit on Sundays.

Albert hoped that neither of his boys had been infected by the ‘Gastons heresies’. Warren’s religion appeared to have survived Kirkpatrick’s atheistical society. Indeed, when he was at Sandhurst at the beginning of 1914, he had written home to bewail the atmosphere in the chapel there – ‘that easy, bored, contemptuous indifference which is so hard to describe, but which you would understand perfectly if you had any experience of the products of the big public schools’.

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By the close of the year, Warnie was in France and so he missed Jack’s confirmation service, which was held, at Albert’s suggestion, at St Mark’s, Dundela. Jack and his father were now so estranged that Jack did not feel able to tell his father that he did not believe in God and did not wish to go through with the ceremony. Even after he had turned back to Christianity himself, Lewis did less than justice to Albert’s position.

It would have been quite impossible to drive into his head my real position. The thread would have been lost almost at once and the answer implicit in all the quotations, anecdotes, and reminiscences which would have poured over me would have been one I then valued not a straw – the beauty of the Authorised version, the beauty of the Christian tradition and character.

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This is to suggest that Albert mainly valued Christianity as an aesthetic or national tradition. His letter to Warnie at the Western Front describing Jack’s confirmation shows him, by contrast, to have been a profoundly committed Christian. After an account of the ‘very impressive’ service Albert continues:

Don’t take this further word amiss, dear Badge. I am not going to preach a sermon. I know that you are living a hard life and that a battle field is not the best place for the Christian witness to flourish. But don’t altogether forget God, and turn in thought at times to remember that you too have been confirmed in Christ.

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Jack Lewis went through the ceremony knowing that he was enacting a lie, and he hated himself for so doing. His actual belief, strengthened by contact with the ‘Gastons heresies’ and Frazer’s Golden Bough, was that religion, ‘that is all mythologies’,

(#litres_trial_promo) sprang into being in order to explain phenomena by which primitive man was terrified – thunder, pestilence or snakes. In a similar fashion, great men such as Heracles, Odin or Yeshua (‘whose name we have corrupted into Jesus’) came to be regarded as gods after their deaths. ‘Superstition of course in every age has held the common people but in every age the educated and thinking ones have stood outside it, though usually outwardly conceding to it for convenience.’ Arthur Greeves, who was a devout Christian, did not agree, and the letters between the two friends on the subject were so intense that they eventually agreed not to discuss the matter. In the letters of young C. S. Lewis the atheist we find all the bombast and dialectic which was one day to be turned on its head in defence of the faith. ‘Strange as it may appear, I am quite content to live without believing in a bogey who is prepared to torture me for ever and ever if I should fail in coming up to an almost impossible ideal.’

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It was, he believed, from Kirkpatrick that he learnt dialectic, just as it was from Smugy that he had learnt grammar and rhetoric. Kirkpatrick was in fact dismayed by how little grammar (Greek and Latin) Lewis had learnt. He was astonished, for example, that the boy did not know the Greek accents. But it may have been true that some of his forceful dialectic techniques got passed on to his pupil. For example, not many months after the outbreak of the First World War, Kirkpatrick observed of the Liberal Government:

If after eight years of experience, they did not grasp the German menace, they are convicted of stupidity: if they did know it, and never informed the nation or made military preparations to meet it, they are guilty of moral cowardice and neglect of the highest national interests. They may choose which horn of the dilemma they prefer but escape from one or the other is impossible.

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This was precisely the kind of argument Lewis was to employ later in life to persuade people to accept the divinity of Christ.

But if he learnt dialectic from Kirkpatrick, he probably did not learn much about the relations between the sexes or the emotional life. The Kirkpatricks were unsuitably matched. Tea parties, bridge and gossip were Mrs Kirkpatrick’s favourite occupations. Lewis manages to make them sound pointless, even slightly esoteric activities, but the majority of middle-class women lived in this way, and one might wonder what was wrong with their doing so. Mrs Kirkpatrick did her best to keep Jack amused. She read French novels with him in the evenings. She took him up to London to see the Russian ballet.

(#litres_trial_promo) She even introduced him to Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out, making him resolve to ‘look out for anything else she writes’. (He added, in Virginia Woolfish mode, ‘A moth has flown into my mantle and broken it.’)

(#litres_trial_promo) But none of this could stop him regarding Mrs Kirkpatrick as a ‘vulgar little woman’. He hated her when she returned from shopping expeditions and told ‘triumphantly how she snubbed some poor devil of a shopwalker. Ugh!’

Little Lea, since 1908, had been an all-male household. In the following six years Jack was at all-male boarding schools. His first opportunity to share in the life of a domestic household with a man and a woman had led him to Mrs Kirkpatrick. His scorn of her was doubtless learnt from her misogynistic husband, who, it was said, had only married her to fill the housekeeper’s room at Lurgan. It was an unhappy model to grow up with: the clever man matched with a woman who, though evidently no fool, had to be written down as a fool to satisfy her husband’s ego and explain his dislike of her.

Nor, though he wrote it up as an idyll afterwards, was life at Gastons all fun. For much of the time he was terribly bored, as he confided both to Arthur Greeves and to his pocket diary. ‘Got very bored in the morning’, ‘Am bored’, ‘A dull day’

(#litres_trial_promo) are all typical entries. However deeply studious he was, it was a strange way for a boy of sixteen or seventeen to be living. This worried Kirkpatrick, and for short spells he tried the experiment of having another pupil to live in the house with Lewis. This never worked, partly because the boy concerned was always far beneath Lewis’s intellectual level, and so could not possibly have shared lessons with him; partly because Lewis had simply grown accustomed to being on his own. ‘A damned fellow pupil of my own age and sex – isn’t it the limit!’

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Mrs Kirkpatrick tried the experiment of introducing him to girls. For example, there was a family of Belgian refugees evacuated to Great Bookham, and for a period Lewis affected to be smitten by one of the girls of the family. By now, his correspondence with Greeves contained a good deal of covert confidences about sex. ‘How could young adolescents really be friends without it?’