C. S. Lewis: A Biography

(#litres_trial_promo) as he reflected in middle age. Arthur Greeves was homosexual. Lewis, knowing that he wasn’t, assumed himself to be a simple heterosexual and even supplied Arthur with details of assignations with the Belgian girl which he afterwards admitted he had fabricated.

(#litres_trial_promo) Most of the ‘real’ sexual experiences which they shared related, unsurprisingly, to masturbation.

The ‘ordinary’ experience of going to cafes or dances and falling in love with the girl over the garden fence or at the next desk in school was not to be Lewis’s. In one of the most revealingly characteristic of all the letters he wrote in his teenage years, he said to Greeves:

You ask whether I have ever been in love: fool as I am, I am not quite such a fool as that. But if one is only to talk from first hand experience on any subject, conversation would be a very poor business. But though I have no personal experience of the thing they call love, I have what is better – the experience of Sappho, of Euripides, of Catullus, of Shakespeare, of Spenser, of Austen, of Brontë, of, of, – anyone else I have read.

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‘Jack Lewis loved books!’ his Oxford friend Hugo Dyson used to say, in his huge booming voice, causing all heads in a bar to turn in his direction.

(#litres_trial_promo) In some ways, this obvious truth was the most important thing about Lewis. ‘Though I have no personal experience … I have what is better … ’ Most of Lewis’s important experiences were, in fact, literary ones. They happened when he was holding a book or a pen in his hand.

Since Lewis died, the professional world of English Literature studies in universities and learned periodicals has been dominated by various formalist critics (most of whom he would have abominated) exploring the curious relationship between text and reader. Reading is not a simple exercise. Very often, the simplest ‘understanding’ of a text would turn out in another person’s eyes to be a ‘misreading’ of it. Reading is a creative exercise, an exercise in the imagination. It constitutes an experience in itself. Perhaps there are many imaginative, religious or emotional areas where it actually makes very little sense to distinguish between ‘real’ or ‘personal’ experiences, and things we have ‘only’ read about in books. These are matters to which Lewis, in later life, was to devote thought. How much is the bookish man distinguishable from his imagined self, the self he projects into the books he reads?

When he looked back on his life at Great Bookham, there was one great reading experience which outshone all others, and which certainly constitutes a personal experience every bit as important as his encounters with the Belgian girl or Mrs Kirkpatrick. In some ways it was more important than his acquaintanceship with Kirkpatrick himself.

This occurred at the beginning of March 1916, when quite by chance on the station bookstall at Great Bookham, he happened to pick up a copy of Phantastes by George MacDonald. After only a few pages he knew at once that he was in for ‘a great literary experience’.

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George MacDonald was to be so important a figure in Lewis’s life, and Phantastes such a great milestone in his inner journey, that some word of exposition is required here. Can we explain why the book meant so much to him, became almost a holy text in his imagination, and – most characteristic – a touchstone by which to judge whether other people were, or were not, ‘of the brethren’?

‘All was changed … I had not the faintest notion what I had let myself in for by buying Phantastes.’

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Many of Lewis’s admirers must have rushed eagerly to the pages of MacDonald and felt a grave disappointment at what they found there. For MacDonald supremely lacks Lewis’s greatest quality – that of readability, the simple ability to write prose in such a manner that one wants to keep on turning the pages. It is this which accounts for the obscurity into which MacDonald’s reputation fell after his death in 1905, at the age of seventy-nine. But Lewis was surely right to discern in him one of the most original imaginations in the whole of English literature. Phantastes is not, strictly speaking, a story. It is an imagined dream or vision in which the hero, Anodos (which means in Greek ‘No Way’), wakes up and finds that his bedroom is not as he remembered it. From the wash-basin a stream is flowing on to the carpet. The carpet is now bright-green grass, and a tiny stranger offers to lead him through a small section of his writing desk into the world of Faery (MacDonald was a friend of Lewis Carroll). In the company of this fairy, who turns out to be his lost grandmother, he enters a world of potent symbols and archetypical images, and sets out on various quests for a perfect woman, part lover, part mother-figure. One of these is the beauteous marble lady – very possibly MacDonald’s lost mother, who by a dreadful ‘weaning’ abandoned her child by dying when he was only eight.

MacDonald is the missing link between Spenser’s Faerie Queene and the writings of Freud and Jung. He seems to have the supreme gift, in his fairy stories, of writing unselfconsciously about the subconscious: not only describing what it is like to be in a subconscious dream-state, but also, without any spelling-out of the obvious, high-lighting the meaning of these mentally subterranean journeyings. One of MacDonald’s favourite sayings came from Novalis: ‘Our life is no dream, but it ought to become one and perhaps will.’ He is the great chronicler of the inner life, the mapper-out of what takes place when the subconscious is allowed free range and – in dream or fantasy – tells us stories about ourselves which with our conscious minds we would not necessarily understand or might not be strong enough to bear. MacDonald’s entire œuvre has been described as ‘a life-time effort of mourning’ the traumatic losses of his boyhood, above all the death of his mother. Lewis, when he first read Phantastes, could have had no idea that MacDonald’s early history was so like his own.

(#litres_trial_promo) MacDonald’s genius is to draw archetypes to which we all respond. But this story made a particular appeal to Lewis: the young man with No Way in the world, pursuing images of selfhood, images of womanhood, images of loss, images of death.

Later, he was to see that reading Phantastes had been something much more than a literary experience. Indeed, Lewis never blinded himself to the fact that in technical, literary terms MacDonald is not necessarily ‘a good writer’. And in one sense, the wanderings of Anodos were no different from many of the other worlds and enchanted places which he had met with in favourite authors from Spenser to William Morris and Yeats. ‘But in another sense all was changed. I did not yet know (and I was long in learning) the name of the new quality, the bright shadow that rested on the travels of Anodos. I do now. It was Holiness. For the first time the songs of the sirens sounded like the voice of my mother or my nurse.’

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For the previous eight years, Lewis had been bottling up the emotion which he had most needed to let out: grief for his mother. The experience of boarding school immediately after Flora died and the stiff-upper-lip schoolboy atmosphere in which the emotions were suspected and tears were thought cissy had led to a profound stiffening and hardening throughout his being. MacDonald was the first person who touched Lewis sufficiently to let him see what he needed. It is no surprise that, upon reading Phantastes, Lewis heard a sound like the voice of his mother. Meanwhile, his mentor and teacher Kirkpatrick was giving his mind to what the future might hold for this most gifted youth. Two things struck him as obvious and, given the way things turned out, we should commend Kirkpatrick’s foresight.

Early on, he had noted that ‘Clive is an altogether exceptional boy.’

(#litres_trial_promo) Later, he had told Albert Lewis that Clive ‘was born with the literary temperament and we have to face the 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 even torpor. As I said before it is the maturity of his literary judgements which is so unusual and surprising.’

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Albert asked what career this pointed to, and Kirkpatrick replied that they should consider the Bar (i.e. being an advocate or attorney in court) as ‘the career marked out for Clive by nature and destiny … He has every gift, a goodly presence, a clear resonant voice, an unfailing resource of clear and adequate expression.’

So, he was to turn out as a literary man and an advocate. This was true. But in neither case was he to fulfil Kirkpatrick’s prophecy as he or Albert expected. His skills as an advocate were eventually to be used in the area of Christian apologetics; his literary skills in the areas of criticism, essays, science fiction and children’s stories.

In his late teens, Jack himself was convinced that he was going to become a poet, and this was a conviction which he carried with him until the late 1920s. Between Easter 1915 and Easter 1917, he wrote fifty-two poems, all about on a par with ‘The Hills of Down’:

I will abide

And make my Dwelling here

Whatso betide

Since there is more to fear

Out yonder. Though

This world is drear and wan

I dare not go

To dreaming Avalon,

Nor look what lands

May lie beyond the last

Strange sunset strands

That gleam when day is fast

I’ the yearning west

Nor seek some faery town

Nor cloud land lest

I lose the hills of Down

The long low hills of Down.

It is extraordinary that someone who, as Kirkpatrick observed, had such an unfailing eye for the excellent in other poets could have gone on writing poetry of such appalling quality. True, large numbers of people write bad poetry in their teens. But Lewis went on and on doing so, apparently convinced that he was going to turn into a poet in the same class as W. B. Yeats.

Not that he imagined he would be able to make a living out of poetry. He realized that he was expected to do something with his life, and the next stage in the life of a clever person inevitably looked like university. By the close of 1916, when he was just eighteen years old, he was ready to sit the scholarship examination for Oxford, and on 4 December he arrived in the town where, with periods of exile, he was to spend the rest of his life. This was the Oxford which existed before the building of the Cowley motor works and the expansion of the place into a mixture of modern industrial town and ‘shopping centre’ into which the old University buildings now appear to have been slotted by chance. The Oxford which Lewis saw was an unspoilt Gothic paradise. True, there were dull suburbs growing up around what Gerard Manley Hopkins, the Oxford Jesuit poet, had called its ‘base and brickish skirt’. But encircling it all there were open fields and meadows. No motor-car disturbed its tranquil streets. From college entrances hobbled old men in gowns who had known Dr Pusey and Dr Pattison. ‘This place has surpassed my wildest dreams,’ Lewis wrote. ‘I never saw anything so beautiful, especially on these frosty moonlight nights; though the Hall at Oriel [College] 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.’

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Oxford is a collegiate university. To gain entrance there you have to be accepted by a college. The exact method of entrance to the colleges has varied over the years. When Lewis was sitting for the scholarship, there was a central pool from which the more brilliant candidates could be drawn. New College – in those days a place still very largely inhabited by boys who had been to Winchester – turned him down, but he was accepted at University College. After Christmas in Belfast, Lewis passed through Oxford for an interview with the Master of ‘Univ’ (as the college is invariably called), who explained that though he had been accepted as a scholar of the college, he had not yet matriculated as a member of the University. To do this, he would have to pass an examination called Responsions, which involved some elementary mathematics. If he passed this exam in March, then he could come up to Univ in the Trinity Term (i.e. April to June) of 1917.

It was a tedious chore, but he went back to the Kirkpatricks to brush up his (never very strong) mathematics. It was during this period that he started Italian and German. It was also during this period that he began to disclose to Arthur some of his more bizarre sexual preferences and fantasies.

In January 1917, his hand wobbles and he apologizes for his poor handwriting, poor because ‘it is being done across my knee’. The very phrase is enough to set off in his mind a train of sado-masochistic reflections: ‘“Across my knee” of course makes one think of positions for whipping: or rather not for whipping (you couldn’t get any swing) but for that torture with brushes. This position, with its childish nursery associations would have something beautifully intimate and also very humiliating for the victim.’

(#litres_trial_promo) He began to sign his name Philomastix (‘Lover of the whip’). He enjoyed fantasies about Arthur Greeves’s sister who should be ‘punished … to the general enjoyment of the operator and to the great good of her soul’, and about some other girl in Belfast whose large bottom was ‘shaped with an intolerable grace … Ah me! if she had suffered indeed half the stripes that have fallen upon her in imagination she would be well disciplined.’