C. S. Lewis: A Biography

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In this great Northern Renaissance Lewis found everything else dwarfed in proportion. ‘If the Northernness seemed then a bigger thing than my religion, that may partly have been because my attitude towards it contained elements which my religion ought to have contained and did not.’

(#ulink_63ff5aec-6023-5962-8735-e39966c1c619) Years later, in a lecture to the Socratic Club at Oxford, he confessed that ‘If Christianity is only a mythology, then I find that the mythology I believe in is not the mythology I like best. I like Greek mythology much better: Irish better still: Norse best of all.’

(#ulink_85fd27fc-156f-5d8a-9f1e-6c727fe88183) And in another lecture he described himself as one who loved Balder before he loved Christ.

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Meanwhile Lewis was progressing well at school. His first printed works, two undistinguished essays, appeared in the Cherbourg School Magazine; he began to take an interest in the Shakespearean productions of Frank Benson’s company whenever it visited Malvern; and he was becoming a likely candidate for a scholarship to the College.

He was to take the entrance examination in June 1913, but ‘was obliged to retire to bed with rather a high temperature’.

(#ulink_632dd366-0aca-51bb-bdcc-d9313f23efc2) However, Canon James, the headmaster,

(#ulink_89602177-8701-5569-b7ec-2658c5a4410b) sent the papers over to Cherbourg, and Mr Allen could write to Albert Lewis on 8 June: ‘I am so glad to be able to tell you that your son has been recommended for a Junior Scholarship. This is very satisfactory, as his work was of course much handicapped by being done in bed, when he was feeling far from well.’

(#ulink_f13b3822-e9f6-5f28-bda5-d9d79cb259da) Warnie commented that ‘in the circumstances I am inclined to rate his obtaining a Scholarship as the greatest triumph of his career’,

(#ulink_4fb9a81f-df95-50db-a29b-cf4faadca6dd) while Hope Harding wrote to Albert Lewis: ‘We were delighted to hear the news, and have wired to Jacko to tell him so. I can’t say I’m surprised, however, for I always knew he was a remarkable boy, besides being one of the most lovable I ever came across. George and I are looking forward to the boys’ visit in the summer holidays very much.’

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Jack bade farewell to Cherbourg School with his first published poem, which appeared in the school magazine on 29 July 1913: ‘Quam Bene Saturno’, after Tibullus (I.iii.35–50), beginning

Alas! What happy days were those

When Saturn ruled a peaceful race,

Or yet the foolish mortals chose

With roads to track the world’s broad face …

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Certainly, if the Age of Saturn still lingered during the summer holiday at Dundrum when the Valkyries seemed to be riding over the Mountains of Mourne and Fafnir the dragon guarded the Rhinegold in a cave above the Vale of Avoca, the reign of Jove was about to claim Jack Lewis ‘with grim Array’ when he began his first term at Malvern College on 18 September 1913.

A week earlier, on 10 September, Warnie had arrived in Great Bookham to be prepared for Sandhurst by Albert’s old headmaster, William T. Kirkpatrick (1848–1921), whose teaching was to have more far-reaching effects on Jack than anyone else with whom he came in contact. He is fully described – as are his original and, at least in this case, most effective methods of teaching – in Surprised by Joy; and his most outstanding characteristics are lovingly reproduced in the person of MacPhee in That Hideous Strength (1945). Early in his life Kirkpatrick had prepared for the ministry in the Presbyterian Church. Before he was ordained, however, he lost his faith, and thereafter he described himself as a rationalist. In 1876 Kirkpatrick became headmaster of Lurgan College, a position in which he was exceptionally successful until his retirement in 1899. Albert Lewis was one of the pupils of ‘The Great Knock’, as the boys called Mr Kirkpatrick, during 1877–9, and afterwards he served as Mr Kirkpatrick’s solicitor. On retiring, Kirkpatrick began to take private pupils, and by 1912 he and his wife were settled at Gastons, Great Bookham, Surrey.

Warnie was to benefit enormously from his three months with Mr Kirkpatrick. Jack, meanwhile, entered Malvern College expecting almost a heaven on earth compared with his earlier experiences of school. For Warnie, who had left the previous term, it had been ‘a place in which it was bliss to be alive and to be young was very heaven’,

(#ulink_a1507878-fc1b-5135-9f5f-c8746cbaf03a) and he had not stinted in singing its praises. But Warnie was a cheery extrovert: good enough at games, the type of boy to be readily popular with his companions, and not particularly interested in learning – while Jack was his direct antithesis in all these respects.

To begin with he wrote hopefully to his father: ‘So far everything has been very pleasant indeed. Luckily I am going to get a study out of which the old occupants are moving today. There will be three other people in it – Hardman, Anderson and Lodge.’

(#ulink_23aa21de-cd6b-5f96-857e-361a315526f1) A week later: ‘The work here is very heavy going, and it is rather hard to find time for it in the breathless life we lead here. So far that “breathlessness” is the worst feature of the place. You never get a “wink of peace”. It is a perpetual rush at high pressure, with short intervals spent in waiting for another bell …’

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But near the end of term Warnie came back for a House Supper, ‘a noisy, cheerful function, of which all I remember is Jack’s gloom and boredom glaringly obvious to all, and not tending to increase his popularity with the House. On 22 December he and I set off together for the last time on the old, well-loved journey to Belfast via Liverpool,’

(#ulink_d78ee1de-8167-5f32-af70-d55e93b19545) described with such affectionate nostalgia in Surprised by Joy.

Jack was ill again during the holidays and forced to return to school a fortnight late – at which he did not repine, but buried himself in his dream-world of literature ‘of legendary loves and magic fears’.

(#ulink_400fb719-6b3d-5076-8c45-fccf668bba85) But he found the transition from ‘the warmth and softness and dignity of his home life to the privations, the raw and sordid ugliness of school’ – from the copy of Wagner’s The Rhinegold and the Valkyries, translated by Margaret Armour (1910) which his father had given him at Christmas to match Siegfried and the Twilight of the Gods – upset him even more than the previous term had done. Even the removal to a better study, with Hardman and W.E.H. Quennell

(#ulink_3f8e5a8d-00c9-5532-b11b-a6ebff1bc4fb) as companions, was only a temporary alleviation. By 18 March 1914 he was writing to his father:

Not only does this persecution get harder to bear as time goes on, but it is actually getting more severe. As for the work, indeed, things are now much brighter, and I have been getting on all right since half term. But, out of school, life gets more and more dreary; all the prefects detest me and lose no opportunity of venting their spite … Please take me out of this as soon as possible, but don’t, whatever you do, write to the James or the Old Boy,†as that would only make things worse.

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Albert Lewis reacted with unexpected good sense and moderation. ‘He is very uncomfortable at Malvern,’ he wrote to Warnie on 20 March. ‘He is not popular with the prefects apparently, and gets more than a fair share of the fagging and bullying. In a word, the thing is a failure and must be ended. His letters make me unhappy … I suppose the best thing I can do is to send him to “Kirk” after next term.’

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Warnie agreed, though expressing considerable natural bitterness and blaming Jack for much of his own unhappiness – he ‘started with everything in his favour,’ he replied on 24 March, ‘and if he has made himself unpopular, he has only himself to thank for it … I feel it intensely that my brother should be a social outcast in the House where I was so happy.’

(#ulink_8b637d80-bd6a-5613-9a9e-f5437ff2f8f1) But looking back with hindsight fifty years later, he wrote in his Memoir to the Letters:

The fact is that he should never have been sent to a public school at all. Already, at fourteen, his intelligence was such that he would have fitted in better among undergraduates than among schoolboys; and by his temperament he was bound to be a misfit, a heretic, an object of suspicion within the collective-minded and standardizing Public School system. He was, indeed, lucky to leave Malvern before the power of this system had done him any lasting damage.

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In Surprised by Joy Lewis sums up his troubles at Malvern and his dislike of the whole atmosphere of the place and all it stood for, first by stressing his utter exhaustion there: ‘I was – dog-tired, cab-horse tired, tired (almost) like a child in a factory.’ This was partly due to his age – he had for the moment rather outgrown his strength – and to sleeplessness caused by trouble with his teeth; but also to the fagging system which made it possible for an unpopular boy to be fagged out of virtually all his spare time – and much time, too, that should have been spent on preparation for the next lessons. He added:

And remember that, even without fagging, a school day contains hardly any leisure for a boy who does not like games. For him, to pass from the form-room to the playing field is simply to exchange work in which he can take some interest for work in which he can take none, in which failure is more severely punished, and in which (worst of all) he must feign an interest.

I think that this feigning, this ceaseless pretence of interest in matters to me supremely boring, was what wore me out more than anything else … For games (and gallantry) were the only subjects, and I cared for neither.

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‘Spiritually speaking,’ he went on, ‘the deadly thing was that school life was a life almost wholly dominated by the social struggle; to get on, to arrive, or, having reached the top, to remain there, was the absorbing preoccupation.’

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But of ‘Tarting’ and ‘Bloodery’ Lewis has written, perhaps too much, in Surprised by Joy: they were temptations that did not move him more than as his first and worst experience of the ‘Inner Ring’ which he was to attack so fiercely in later life. His study-mate, Hardman – later Air Chief Marshal Sir Donald Hardman – said of the whole picture given in Surprised by Joy:

In a word it is in my view unbalanced and exaggerated. This is not to say that some of the practices and customs he complains of did not exist; they did, but Lewis has blown them up out of all proportion. ‘Tarting’ did exist, but I’m sure, to nothing like the extent that he makes out. He has a good deal to say about fagging; it could at times be very irritating, but we took it as all in the day’s work and I have never known it leave these scars on anyone else. Every House must have its good and lean years in House Prefects and we were not particularly blessed with ours in Lewis’s day. Even so, I am sure that he was not unhappy all the time. I can remember going with him for long walks on Sundays when he was in the gayest of moods – story telling and mimicking people. It is surprising that he should forget the happy times and remember only the unhappy ones.

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However, Lewis does record that there were ‘two blessings’ at Malvern ‘that wore no disguise’: one was ‘the Grundy’ – the school library, ‘not only because it was a library, but because it was a sanctuary’;

(#ulink_6d618ae6-0eea-51f4-b731-9d1176ba3c34) and the other was ‘my form master, Smewgy as we called him’.

(#ulink_fedd74a6-eef6-5b0d-b51b-3c60d1e7e420) This was Harry Wakelyn Smith (1861–1918), who taught classics and English to the Upper Fifth during most of his time at Malvern, from 1885 until his death in 1918, and who is lovingly described in Surprised by Joy.