C. S. Lewis: A Biography

(#ulink_c091a668-8252-52ba-b373-6aae80155d1c) I can still re-read it with delight.’

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This naturally leads on to the stories that Jack Lewis began writing before he was six and continued to elaborate for the next half-dozen years or more. After the move to Little Lea, he soon ‘staked out a claim to one of the attics’ and made it his ‘study’, decorating the walls with pictures of his own making or cut from brightly coloured Christmas editions of magazines. ‘Here,’ he records, ‘my first stories were written, and illustrated, with enormous satisfaction. They were an attempt to combine my two chief literary pleasures – “dressed animals” and “knights-in-armour”. As a result, I wrote about chivalrous mice and rabbits who rode out in complete mail to kill not giants but cats.’

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It is tempting to look here for the origin of such characters as Reepicheep the chivalric Talking Mouse, one of the most successfully developed among the higher animals of Narnia. But when discussing stories made up in childhood and their effect, or otherwise, on those written later, he told Green categorically that none of the characters or adventures in the Narnian stories was drawn from the Animal-Land of his own childhood inventions. The whole spirit of Narnia is different, as he also pointed out in Surprised by Joy: ‘Animal-Land had nothing whatever in common with Narnia except the anthropomorphic beasts. Animal-Land, by its whole quality, excluded the least hint of wonder.’

(#ulink_0e127ed1-0d7a-5760-b745-541858157370) ‘In mapping and chronicling Animal-Land I was training myself to be a novelist. Note well, a novelist; not a poet. My invented world was full (for me) of interest, bustle, humour and character; but there was no poetry, even no romance in it. It was almost astonishingly prosaic.’

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Moreover, the Animal-Land that came into action in the holidays when Warnie was at home from his English boarding-school ‘was a modern Animal-Land; it had to have trains and steamships if it was to be a country shared with him. It followed, of course, that the medieval Animal-Land about which I wrote my stories must be the same country at an earlier period; and of course the two periods must be properly connected. This led me from romancing to historiography: I set about writing a full history of Animal-Land.’ History led to geography: the world was remapped with Warnie’s ‘India’ as an island across the sea from Animal-Land, ‘And those parts of that world which we regarded as our own – Animal-Land and India – were increasingly peopled with consistent characters,’

(#ulink_4743bbf7-9a24-5b00-9d19-ad8b2ef577cd) and came to be known generally as ‘Boxen’.

Many of Lewis’s Boxonian stories have been published as Boxen: The Imaginary World of the Young C.S. Lewis (1985). The best of the stories come from the later period and were written between the ages of twelve and fourteen, when they became novels about minor characters rather than straight ‘histories’. While they show great precocity, there is little evidence of anything else and hardly any foreshadowing of what was to come: they are interesting as the earliest works of C.S. Lewis, and dull compared to his later writings. This is largely due to the careful banishment of poetic, romantic and imaginative elements and to the extra- ordinary absorption with politics. This has been explained by Warnie Lewis in his ‘Memoir’ accompanying the Letters of C.S. Lewis: here he describes the continuous political discussions current in Ireland at the time, mainly diatribes against the government of the day between men of the same political persuasions – and vituperative and unexplained condemnation of all who differed from them in politics or religion. Warnie concludes:

Any ordinary parent would have sent us boys off to amuse ourselves elsewhere when one of these symposiums took place, but not my father; he would have thought it uncivil to the guest. Consequently we had to sit in silence while the torrent of vituperation flowed over our heads. The result in Jack’s case was to convince him firstly that ‘grown-up’ conversation and politics were one and the same thing, and that therefore he must give everything he wrote a political framework; and secondly to disgust him with the very word ‘politics’ before he was out of his teens.

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Moreover, although the Boxonian characters are ‘dressed animals’, there is no attempt to keep up the fiction, and without the illustrations it would often be hard to remember that, for example, Lord John Big is a frog, James Bar a bear, Macgoullah a horse, and Viscount Puddiphat an owl. And unfortunately few of the early stories of ‘knights-in-armour’ (even if the knights were dressed animals) have survived, though there are a few early attempts at verse concerning ‘Knights and Ladyes’.

‘In mapping and chronicling Animal-Land,’ said Lewis, ‘I was training myself to be a novelist … but there was no poetry, even no romance in it.’

(#ulink_b0f98a5a-c333-5687-9b35-bb9413dce9f2) At the same time he had an inner life, invisible to all but himself, that was highly imaginative. Shortly after the family moved to Little Lea he had three experiences which initiated ‘the central story’

(#ulink_eb7bcee9-84e9-54d4-ae64-ec66f838f47d) of his life. In Surprised by Joy he told how one day, as he was standing beside a flowering currant bush, there arose in him the ‘memory of a memory’ of a day in Dundela Villas when Warnie brought his toy garden into the nursery. ‘It is difficult’, he said, ‘to find words strong enough for the sensation which came over me; Milton’s “enormous bliss” of Eden … comes somewhere near it.’

(#ulink_6bb90f39-2be2-5479-915d-7d843bab4c13) It was, he went on, ‘a sensation of desire’, but before he knew what he desired ‘the desire itself was gone, the whole glimpse withdrawn, the world turned commonplace again, or only stirred by a longing for the longing that had just ceased’.

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A second ‘glimpse’ came through Beatrix Potter’s Squirrel Nutkin which, he said, ‘troubled me with what I can only describe as the Idea of Autumn’.

(#ulink_01d9760c-ba97-50f4-ba54-d09ffd283ae7) A third glimpse came through a few lines of Longfellow’s translation of Esaias Tegner’s version (1825) of Drapa:

I heard a voice, that cried,

‘Balder the Beautiful

Is dead, is dead!’

And through the misty air

Passed like the mournful cry

Of sunward sailing cranes.

‘I knew nothing about Balder,’ said Lewis, ‘but instantly I was uplifted into huge regions of northern sky, I desired with almost sickening intensity something never to be described (except that it is cold, spacious, severe, pale, and remote) and then, as in the other examples, found myself at the very same moment already falling out of that desire and wishing I were back in it.’

(#ulink_c728695c-e53d-5705-9bf5-54edd9b4c923) The three experiences had in common, he said, ‘an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction. I call it Joy … It might almost equally well be called a particular kind of unhappiness or grief. But then it is a kind we want.’

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Meanwhile his outward life went on more or less as usual. Warnie departed to Wynyard School in England, while Jack was taught at Little Lea by a governess, Miss Annie Harper: ‘She is fairly nice for a governess, but all of them are the same,’

(#ulink_b24fb4f7-d023-565a-9f17-7ef91d43e6d1) he confided to his first diary at the end of 1907, in which he describes himself as ‘like most boys of nine, and I am like Papy, bad temper, thick lips, thin and generally wearing a jersey’.

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Other diary scraps describe the rest of the household: his grandfather, Richard Lewis, ‘who lives in a little room of his own upstairs’; Maude the housemaid and Martha the cook; several pets, ‘a dog called Tim, a black and white mouse called Tommy, and lastly a canary called Peter’.

(#ulink_aad535f0-cee6-5247-9ab1-90ca70c74731) The entry for Thursday, 5 March 1908 is typical – except for the unexpected item with which it concludes: ‘I rise. The lawn is white with frost. I have breakfast. Get on my coat and cap and see Papy off [to the office]. Miss Harper comes, lessons. [The next entry translates the opening sentence of Julius Caesar’s De Bello Gallico.] Dinner. I am carpentring at a sword. I read “Paradise Lost”, reflections there-on.’

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We do not know what these reflections were, nor how much of Milton’s Paradise Lost, the poem which was to mean so much to him in later life, was either read or understood by him in his tenth year; but even as he wrote, his own paradise was on the verge of being lost. ‘There came a night when I was ill and crying both with headache and toothache and distressed because my mother did not come to me,’ he wrote in Surprised by Joy:

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 was in fact cancer and followed the usual course; an operation (they operated in the patient’s house in those days), an apparent convalescence, a return of the disease, increasing pain, and death. My father never fully recovered from this loss.

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Flora died on 23 August 1908. The effect of her death on Albert Lewis was to alienate him from his two sons just at the time when mutual comfort was most needed. His nerves had never been of the steadiest and his emotions had always been uncontrolled: now he began to speak wildly and act unjustly. To children just entering on their teens the sight of adult grief and fear is apt to produce revulsion rather than sympathy, and adult loss of control is put down to unkindness rather than to its true cause. Warnie and Jack lost their mother slowly as her last illness shut them further and further away from her. When she was dead their father was incapable of taking her place and had already forfeited a great deal of his own, without knowing it. They were driven to rely more and more exclusively on each other for all that made life bearable, to have confidence only in each other – ‘two frightened urchins huddled for warmth in a bleak world’, as one of them was to write in Surprised by Joy. And he continues: ‘With my mother’s death all settled happiness, all that was tranquil and reliable, disappeared from my life. There was to be much fun, many pleasures, many stabs of Joy; but no more of the old security. It was sea and islands now; the great continent had sunk like Atlantis.’

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It was time for Jack to go to school and in September 1908 he accompanied Warnie to Wynyard School. Albert Lewis was probably wise to send him away from the shadow of loss at home, and strive to fill his life with the new and absorbing experiences of school life: but of all the schools in the British Isles he seems to have chosen the very worst. Wynyard School, Watford, Hertfordshire, and its ogre of a headmaster have been described fully in Surprised by Joy (as ‘Belsen’) and little more need be said of them here, save to state that the contemporary evidence of diaries and letters fully bears out the recollections of later years.

When Warnie entered the school in May 1905 it had already begun the easy descent to Avernus precipitated by a law case in 1901 when the headmaster, the Reverend Robert Capron,

(#ulink_59d0f758-bdb5-53c9-88e6-38a76a29193e) treated a boy with such brutality that the father brought a High Court action against him, which was settled out of court and against the defendant. Apart from the rapidly developing mania for inflicting punishment, Capron seems to have run the school very much on the lines of Crichton House described by F. Anstey in Vice Versa, which Lewis called ‘the only truthful school story in existence’.

(#ulink_10c7c724-1d5e-53c2-82ef-3f37915e9e17) But it was an altogether smaller and – towards the end – more squalid affair, though Capron, like Anstey’s Dr Grimstone, seems to have begun as a competent teacher whose pupils at one time gained scholarships to public schools. By the time the Lewis boys were entrusted to his care, however, the instruction had become ‘at once brutalizing and intellectually stupefying’,

(#ulink_76a7974a-9872-5d50-a20e-c6c4ac1e20e8) little was taught and still less remembered. As Warnie wrote:

In spite of Capron’s policy of terror, the school was slack and inefficient, and the time-table, if such it could be called, ridiculous. When not saying lessons, the boys spent the whole of school working out sums on slates; of this endless arithmetic there was little or no supervision. Of the remaining subjects, English and Latin consisted, the first solely and the second mainly, of grammar. History was a ceaseless circuit of the late Middle Ages; Geography was a meaningless list of rivers, towns, imports and exports.

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There was no school library at Wynyard, but the boys were by no means illiterate, though Warnie and Jack seem to have had better taste than most of their companions. A ‘Club for getting monthly magazines’ which they formed during Jack’s first term shows this: the other boys’ contributions were the Captain, the Boy’s Own Paper, the Wide World, the Royal, and the London Magazine, but Warnie’s choice was Pearson’s and Jack’s the Strand. As they all shared each other’s magazines, Jack found himself reading ‘twaddling school-stories’, which he dismissed later as ‘mere wish-fulfilment of the hero’

(#ulink_13903313-4f26-53fc-be66-d83cdecb0ae5) – surely forgivable in a school such as Capron’s establishment. The Strand, however, was offering at this time E. Nesbit’s excellent pastiches of imagination and history, The House of Arden (1908) and Harding’s Luck (1909), with the odd Sherlock Holmes story and A.E.W. Mason’s At the Villa Rose (1910) for more adult excitement, while Hall Caine’s semi-religious thriller The White Prophet (1909) may have led him on to the taste for romances of the early Christians in Rome which he developed at this time. These he found in Sienkiewicz’s Quo Vadis? (1898), Dean Farrar’s Darkness and Dawn: or, Scenes in the Days of Nero (1891), Whyte-Melville’s The Gladiators: A Tale of Rome and Judaea (1863), and Lew Wallace’s Ben Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1880).

‘They were mostly, as literature, rather bad books,’ he decided. ‘What wore better, and what I took to at the same time, is the work of Rider Haggard.’