C. S. Lewis: A Biography

(#ulink_031f7dca-5baa-5698-ac95-263933e1e3bc) He discovered Haggard’s The Ghost Kings (1908), running as a serial in Pearson’s, and Pearl Maiden, a Tale of the Fall of Jerusalem (1903) at the same time as the Christian romances. He also fell for a while under the spell of H.G. Wells’s science fiction – a taste which did not last, though he was still reading Haggard with enjoyment at the end of his life.

It is curious, however, that Lewis should have missed The Wind in the Willows, which came out in 1908 during his first term at Wynyard, at a time when his interest in ‘dressed animals’ was at its height in the heyday of Boxen. He read neither that nor E. Nesbit’s Bastable stories until he was in his twenties – but ‘I do not think I have enjoyed them any the less on that account.’

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Boxen was not, however, his only literary concern at the time. A fragment of a historical novel written in the summer of 1909 still survives, called ‘The Ajimywanian War’ – so dull that it might be an imitation of the dullest history book in use at Wynyard.

(#ulink_d5c7046c-6362-5414-9bf4-df917d83fd60) He was also attempting another diary, or ‘Autobiography’ as he calls it, of his experiences among the ‘five boarders at this ridiculous little “select academy for young gentlemen” – Squiffy [Field], Bowser, Mears, Jeyes and me … Oldy and his son Wyn are the only masters here, and Wyn can’t teach for nuts either.’

(#ulink_df2787b9-ae49-5753-95e5-ad39a5a2258f) But that too petered out after a week.

After only a week at Wynyard, on 29 September 1908, Jack wrote to his father begging to be taken away: ‘We simply cannot wait in this hole till the end of term’.

(#ulink_10ba4489-ef9a-53ea-ae0b-cdca1573f943) But the fear of losing his few remaining pupils curbed some of Capron’s excesses in the rapidly shrinking – and sinking – establishment, and Capron’s son seems to have been trying to improve relations with the parents by writing solicitously about their sons: ‘Jacko appears to be very bright and happy this term,’ he was assuring Albert Lewis on 21 October. ‘His health is excellent.’

(#ulink_4b36a101-7e6f-5396-9cb2-26d3682dfac3) He seems, nevertheless, to have suffered from a weak chest throughout childhood, though the removal of adenoids at the beginning of 1909 may have helped him to survive the following winter without any illness.

Warnie left Wynyard in July 1909 and in September arrived at Malvern College, where he was to be extremely happy. In January 1910 Jack’s second cousin on his mother’s side, Hope Ewart, accompanied him back to Wynyard, stopping in London so Jack could see Peter Pan. It impressed him deeply and remained vivid in his memory; theatre-going in Belfast consisted only of musical comedies and vaudeville beyond which Albert Lewis did not aspire.

This cousin was a member of a family that meant much to the two motherless boys. The younger describes their house in Surprised by Joy as ‘Mountbracken’. It was actually Glenmachan, the home of Sir William Quartus Ewart,

(#ulink_66c91681-5bb1-5275-8e1e-2be86045008a) whose wife, wrote Lewis, was

my mother’s first cousin and perhaps my mother’s dearest friend, and it was no doubt for my mother’s sake that she took upon herself the heroic task of civilizing my brother and me. We had a standing invitation to lunch at Mountbracken whenever we were at home; to this, almost entirely, we owe it that we did not grow up savages. The debt is not only to Lady E. (‘Cousin Mary’) but to her whole family; walks, motor-drives (in those days an exciting novelty), picnics, and invitations to the theatre were showered on us, year after year, with a kindness which our rawness, our noise, and our unpunctuality never seemed to weary. We were at home there almost as much as in our own home, but with this great difference, that a certain standard of manners had to be kept up. Whatever I know (it is not much) of courtesy and savoir faire I learned at Mountbracken.

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Wynyard having collapsed in the summer of 1910 (Capron was certified insane and died a year later), a new school was needed for Jack. Albert Lewis decided that he should go to Campbell College, not two miles from Little Lea, ‘which had been founded with the express purpose of giving Ulster boys all the advantages of a public school education without the trouble of crossing the Irish Sea’.

(#ulink_d44822cb-25cf-54b7-91a8-b3e79975e291) It was arranged that he should go as a boarder, but with the privilege of an exeat to come home every Sunday.

Although the complete lack of quiet or privacy was trying – he described it as ‘very like living permanently in a large railway station’ – Jack found Campbell College a great improvement on Wynyard, and really began to enjoy learning, and to remember what he learnt. He was particularly grateful to an ‘excellent master whom we called Octie’, who was really Lewis Alden, senior English master from 1898 until 1930. Alden introduced him in form to Arnold’s Sohrab and Rustum: ‘I loved the poem at first sight and have loved it ever since.’

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But his stay at Campbell was to be brief. On 13 November 1910 Albert Lewis was writing to Warnie at Malvern: ‘When Jacko came home this morning he had such a frightful cough that I had Dr Leslie

(#ulink_26f86aed-6239-5b95-ab78-d6263f5a46b9) up to examine him. As a result, Leslie has advised me not to send him back to school for some days’;

(#ulink_dbe1ec95-4b7e-568a-8878-7333834757c5) and he went on to ask Warnie to find out about Cherbourg, a preparatory school at Malvern, as ‘I am strongly inclined to send Jacko there until he’s old enough to go to the College.’

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After two glorious months of peace and quiet at home reading, ever reading – at this time largely fairy tales – the invalid was deemed well enough to begin at Cherbourg. And accordingly he wrote to his father near the end of January 1911: ‘Warnie and I arrived safely at Malvern after a splendid journey. Cherbourge is quite a nice place. There are 17 chaps here. There are three masters, Mr Allen, Mr Palmer and Mr Jones, who is very fat … Malvern is one of the nicest English towns I have seen yet. The hills are beautiful, but of course not so nice as ours.’

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The school was not as small as would appear from this as there were day boys as well as the seventeen boarders; and although his letters and odd scraps of diary are full of criticism of the masters, and often of the school itself, Lewis seems to have been reasonably happy at Cherbourg and recorded that ‘here indeed my education really began. The Headmaster was a clever and patient teacher;

(#ulink_dfe994e4-b181-555a-9de9-6a32dacfe79e) under him I rapidly found my feet in Latin and English, and even began to be looked on as a promising candidate for a scholarship at the College.’

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In Surprised by Joy Lewis goes on to tell how he lost his faith during his terms at Cherbourg, sparked off by the esoteric religious flounderings of the matron, Miss Cowie. Other reasons joined to make him an apostate – ‘dropping my faith with no sense of loss but with the greatest relief’.

(#ulink_7afb1a04-4287-508d-9a3d-98151eba50a8) Intense preoccupation with prayer had made the activity an increasingly unendurable penance; and a natural and induced pessimism had grown up from his own manual clumsiness, his mother’s death, the miseries of Wynyard, and his father’s exaggerated statements as to the difficulty of managing ‘to avoid the workhouse’.

Another cause had its roots in the very brilliance of Lewis’s mind, which began suddenly to blossom under the influence of the excellent teaching at Cherbourg, and in particular the classical authors:

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. No one ever attempted to show in what sense Christianity fulfilled Paganism or Paganism prefigured Christianity. The accepted position seemed to be that religions were normally a mere farrago of nonsense, though our own, by a fortunate exception, was exactly true … But on what grounds could I believe in this exception? … I was very anxious not to.

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Other influences were also at hand to shake his faith. In May 1912 a new master came to Cherbourg – ‘Pogo’, whose evil effects on the adolescent mind are well described in Surprised by Joy. Percy Gerald Kelsal Harris was to distinguish himself a few years later as a war hero. When Lewis met Harris, however, the latter had just dropped out of Oxford and was far too youthful to be in charge of boys not much younger than himself. At the same time came the sudden upsurge of puberty and an easy surrender to sexual temptation:

But this is amply accounted for by the age I had then reached and by my recent, in a sense deliberate, withdrawal of myself from Divine protection. I do not believe Pogo had anything to do with it … What attacked me through Pogo was not the Flesh (I had that of my own) but the World: the desire for glitter, swagger, distinction, the desire to be in the know … I began to labour very hard to make myself into a fop, a cad, and a snob.

Pogo’s communications, however much they helped to vulgarize my mind, had no such electric effect on my senses as the dancing mistress, nor as Bekker’s Charicles, which was given me for a prize.

(#ulink_61915120-6e01-52df-81a1-774ddf12f169)I never thought that dancing mistress as beautiful as my cousin G.,

(#ulink_7f8bd7c0-3847-5f13-97cf-df113edc611b)but she was the first woman I ever ‘looked upon to lust after her’; assuredly through no fault of her own.

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Side by side with the awakening of carnal and worldly desires came what Jack described as the real romantic passion of his life. It arrived with the sudden, overwhelming return of ‘Joy’ – that ‘unsatisfied desire more desirable than any other satisfaction’ – when he chanced upon the Christmas number of the Bookman for December 1911 with a coloured supplement reproducing several of Arthur Rackham’s illustrations to Siegfried and the Twilight of the Gods in a loosely poetic version made the same year by Margaret Armour. As Lewis records in Surprised by Joy,

A moment later, as the poet says, ‘The sky had turned round.’ I had never heard of Wagner, nor of Siegfried. I thought the Twilight of the Gods meant the twilight in which the gods lived. How did I know, at once and beyond question, that this was no Celtic, or silvan, or terrestrial twilight? But so it was. Pure ‘Northernness’ engulfed me: a vision of huge, clear spaces hanging above the Atlantic in the endless twilight of 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.

And with that plunge back into my own past there arose at once, almost like heartbreak, the memory of Joy itself, the knowledge that I had once had what I had now lacked for years, that I was returning at last from exile and desert lands to my own country; and the distance of the Twilight of the Gods and the distance of my own past Joy, both unattainable, flowed together into a single, unendurable sense of desire and loss … At once I knew (with fatal knowledge) that to ‘have it again’ was the supreme and only important object of desire.

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The craze for all things ‘Northern’ that followed this great moment of revelation and the rediscovery of Joy became the most important thing in Lewis’s life for the next two or three years. He describes it as almost a double life, particularly during the unpleasant year at Malvern College (1913–14), when mental ecstasy and physical purgatory alternated with dizzying rapidity.

By the summer of 1912 Jack had discovered the works of Wagner by means of gramophone records. He and Warnie now had a gramophone and ‘gramophone catalogues were already one of my favourite forms of reading; but I had never remotely dreamed that the records from Grand Opera with their queer German or Italian names could have anything to do with me’.

(#ulink_768b651e-b37f-5d33-b01c-a9d9b6fbba79) But a magazine called the Soundbox was doing synopses of great operas week by week, and it now did the whole Ring. ‘I read in a rapture and discovered who Siegfried was and what was the “twilight” of the gods.’

(#ulink_e3acdc45-9ecc-5f6d-a1a3-82aef858ce2b) On the strength of this he began to write a poem on the Wagnerian version of the Nibelung story, and to collect records of the operas.

Later that summer Lewis came across an actual copy of the illustrated Siegfried and the Twilight of the Gods on the drawing-room table of his cousin Hope Ewart (now Mrs George Harding) during a visit to her home at Dundrum near Dublin, and found that the Rackham pictures, ‘which seemed to me then to be the very music made visible, plunged me a few fathoms deeper into my delight. I have seldom coveted anything as I coveted that book’

(#ulink_ec77069e-b28b-5d77-a24d-aa22eb039841) – and he was able to buy the cheaper edition shortly afterwards.

This visit to Dundrum seems to have merged in his memory with one the following August when he and Warnie were bicycling ‘via Glendalough and the Vale of Avoca through the most glorious scenery possible’, after which he came to record how

this imaginative Renaissance almost at once produced a new appreciation of external nature. At first, I think, this was parasitic on the literary and musical experiences. On that holiday at Dundrum, cycling among the Wicklow mountains, I was almost involuntarily looking for scenes that might belong to the Wagnerian world … But soon (I cannot say how soon) nature ceased to be a mere reminder of books, became herself the medium of the real joy.