C. S. Lewis: A Biography

Lewis kept secret the fact that he was leaving Malvern after the summer term of 1914. But before he went he wrote some verses in imitation of Ovid’s Pars estis pauci (Ex Ponto, III.ii.25 et seq.) in the metre of the last chorus of Swinburne’s Atalanta in Calydon. ‘They were top of the form and well spoken of by Smewgy’, he wrote on 22 June when enclosing them to his father; and they read almost as a farewell to Smewgy himself:

Of the host whom I named

As friends, ye alone

Dear few! were ashamed

In troubles unknown

To leave me deserted, but boldly ye cherished my cause as your own.

But nay! for the days

Of a mortal are few;

Shall they limit your praise,

Nay rather to you

Each new generation shall offer – if aught be remembered – your due.

(#ulink_e826792b-33ef-5363-9fa6-c77d28fa8ec9)

When looking back on what he had just written in Surprised by Joy about the miseries of his year at Malvern, Lewis continued:

I find myself exclaiming, ‘Lies, lies! This was really a period of ecstasy. It consisted chiefly of moments when you were too happy to speak, when gods and heroes rioted through your head, when Satyrs danced and Maenads roamed on the mountains, when Brynhild and Sieglinde, Deirdre, Maeve and Helen were all about you, till sometimes you felt that it might break you with mere richness.’ … All this is true, but it does not make the other version a lie. I am telling a story of two lives … When I remember my inner life I see that everything mentioned in the last two chapters [about Malvern] was merely a coarse curtain which at any moment might be drawn aside to reveal all the heavens I then knew. The same duality perplexes the story of my home life …

(#ulink_a53db296-6079-53b4-bf4d-5b2f4477a0f4)

Lewis goes on to describe at some length his father’s character and the reasons why life at home was becoming progressively more difficult. Briefly, Albert Lewis erred through a combination of egocentricity and sheer affection for his sons. He enjoyed their company so much that when he was in the house he insisted on being with them all the time: if they had a visitor of their own age, or wanted to read or study quietly by themselves, it made no difference. He must dominate the conversation and impose his own interests at the expense of theirs, usually failing to take in anything they said to him, due to the illogicality and effervescence of his mind. Only when their father was away at work could Warnie and Jack retire to ‘the little end room’ to read and write and chronicle the endless episodes in the history of Boxen.

But the Boxonian days had come to an end in 1913 when Warnie left Malvern to stay with Kirkpatrick, who helped him win a prize cadetship at Sandhurst the following year; and Jack was already deep in ‘Northernness’, exploring it more profoundly than the late Teutonic version of the Nibelung saga adapted by Wagner, and finding his way into the genuine Norse and Icelandic originals of saga and Eddic literature. ‘I passed on from Wagner,’ he says, ‘to everything else I could get hold of about Norse mythology, Myths of the Norsemen,

(#ulink_ef2a7e31-833c-5ab2-9b7a-b3a08cba2589)Teutonic Myth and Legend,

(#ulink_4ef6eb49-a72b-5498-a451-f72020ec88da) Mallet’s Northern Antiquities.’

(#ulink_d2ce59ca-8dd4-5bd7-8027-c8907d07f0f0) This last he obtained in the old Bohn Library edition, with an appendix containing most of the Prose Edda, which he found the most stimulating discovery so far.

At Malvern he found a copy of the Corpus Poeticum Boreale (1883), F. York Powell’s great edition of all the mythological poems in the Elder Edda,

(#ulink_a7738f9a-49c5-5908-9c23-6c7dd9264399) ‘and tried vainly but happily to hammer out the originals from the translation at the bottom of the page’.

(#ulink_69ce0053-b0ed-5e0d-a6a9-703218ca5c39) This was during the summer term of 1914, by which time Lewis was immersed in one of the most remarkable of his early works,

a tragedy, Norse in subject and Greek in form. It was called Loki Bound and was as classical as any Humanist could have desired. The main contrast in my play was between the sad wisdom of Loki and the brutal orthodoxy of Thor … Thor was, in fact, the symbol of the Bloods [at Malvern] … Loki was a projection of myself; he voiced that sense of priggish superiority whereby I was, unfortunately, beginning to compensate myself for my unhappiness.

(#ulink_4b408ff8-f305-5a65-8599-e3339a84adee)

He had already begun to write this play when he first made friends with Arthur Greeves in April 1914, as graphically described in Surprised by Joy, and found another who shared his delight in things Northern. They discovered ‘in a torrent of questions that we liked not only the same thing, but the same parts of it and in the same way; that both knew the stab of Joy and that, for both, the arrow was shot from the North’.

(#ulink_2693ccdb-b494-524d-bd8e-4e34d8151db4)

Arthur Greeves (1895–1968) was the youngest of the five children of Joseph Greeves, the nearest neighbour of the Lewises at Little Lea. Arthur had been a casual acquaintance of the Lewis boys for most of their lives, but only from 1914 did he begin to become, as Jack described him in 1933, ‘after my brother, my oldest and most intimate friend’.

(#ulink_e847670f-2b33-560d-b5e5-1125bc9e4784) In that same year Warnie wrote of him that

his circumstances have been such that he has never been compelled to face the issues of life … But it would be unfair to blame him, for his character is the result of an accident of his youth – while he was still a boy a doctor diagnosed him as suffering from a weak heart, and by the time the diagnosis was disproved, he was already a confirmed valetudinarian. At the plastic age he was exempted from the discipline of school and the preoccupations of a career, made into an invalid by his mother, whose favourite he is, and encouraged to float rudderless and motiveless down the years.

(#ulink_744db583-5904-59cd-8fbd-979cf3430af5)

The friendship with Arthur Greeves came exactly at the right moment. A temporary shadow had been cast by Malvern over Jack’s intimacy with Warnie. Warnie took his entrance examinations to Sandhurst between 25 November and 2 December 1913 and the family were elated when they learned that he had passed twenty-first out of 201 successful candidates. In February 1914 Warnie went to the Royal Military College, Sandhurst. On 30 September 1914 he was appointed a second lieutenant in the Army Service Corps, the branch of the army that supplies food, weapons and other necessities to the troops. On 4 November he was sent to France, where he served with the 4th Divisional Train of the British Expeditionary Force.

And on Saturday, 19 September 1914, Jack had arrived in Surrey to begin his real education with Kirkpatrick. Lewis’s first impression was striking: ‘He was over six feet tall, very shabbily dressed (like a gardener, I thought), lean as a rake, and immensely muscular. His wrinkled face seemed to consist entirely of muscles, so far as it was visible; for he wore moustache and side whiskers with a clean-shaven chin.’

(#ulink_de52c1e7-bccd-50ad-9278-1aa7d2286796) ‘If ever a man came near to being a purely logical entity, that man was Kirk,’ Lewis decided.

(#ulink_0ad55604-9939-54bb-93a2-2e573041e230) Lewis’s own acutely logical mind was to a great extent formed and sharpened by Kirkpatrick’s. The Great Knock’s outstanding conviction was that language was given to man solely for the purpose of communicating or discovering truth. The general banalities and ‘small-talk’ of most people did not enter into his calculations. ‘The most casual remark was taken as a summons to disputation.’ To a mere ‘torrent of verbiage’ he would cry ‘Stop!’, not from impatience, but because it was leading nowhere. More sensible observations might be interrupted by ‘Excuse!’, ushering in some parenthetical comment. Full approval would be encouraged by ‘I hear you’ – but usually followed by refutation: ‘Had I read this? Had I studied that? Had I any statistical evidence? And so to the almost inevitable conclusion: “Do you not see then that you had no right … ”’

(#ulink_17ce5175-057b-5e33-8c41-6e4fe101754d)

‘Some boys would not have liked it,’ Lewis comments, ‘to me it was red beef and strong beer’;

(#ulink_0a91b8a9-bb99-5647-a5aa-913a72ffb151) and, toned down and adapted to possible equals rather than pupils, this became his own method of argument, his own idea of conversation throughout life. The Christian virtue that he found hardest to acquire was to suffer fools gladly; for years he failed to realize that the Kirk treatment might upset or offend; but at last he was able to turn it to glorious use, when the silliest dinner-table remark could be taken by him and manipulated gently and followed to conclusions of which you had never dreamed – and yet leaving you with the warm glow of undeserved pride at having initiated such a profoundly interesting discussion.

Kirkpatrick’s methods of instruction were ‘red beef and strong beer’ too. Not only had Lewis been grounded more securely than he knew at Cherbourg and Malvern, but he had been blessed with a brain ready at the right stimulus to develop those prodigious powers of memory and applied knowledge which the late Austin Farrer

(#ulink_39ba3dbe-8aca-56a5-8365-5031c7015f46) described as perhaps the greatest and most amazing in his generation. And so he was able to benefit fully from Kirkpatrick’s rather ‘sink or swim’ method – which may, however, have been applied intentionally to a pupil whose unusual capabilities and capacity for learning he had sized up at once.

Two days after Lewis arrived at Great Bookham he was flung straight into Homer, of whom he had never read a word, nor had any introduction to the Epic dialect, having studied only the straight Attic of Xenophon and the dramatists. Kirkpatrick’s method was to read aloud twenty lines or so of the Greek, translate, with a few comments and explanations, for another hundred lines, and then leave his pupil to go over it with the aid of a lexicon, and make sense of as much of it as he could. It worked with Lewis, who had no difficulty in memorizing every word as he looked up its meaning. Kirkpatrick at this stage seemed to value speed more than absolute accuracy, and Lewis soon found himself understanding what he read without translating it, beginning to think in Greek: ‘That,’ he commented, ‘is the great Rubicon to cross in learning any language.’

(#ulink_4a929a3c-9c57-5678-9ed4-9daf6efd59c0) And so, ‘Day after day and month after month, we drove gloriously onward’, till the music of Homer ‘and the clear, bitter brightness that lives in almost every formula had become part of me’.

(#ulink_cd9e567c-c935-5874-bb29-a4ffe433cf6d)

‘After a week’s trial, I have come to the conclusion that I am going to have the time of my life,’ Lewis wrote to Arthur Greeves on 26 September.

(#ulink_e6422109-12f9-57c2-918d-c8d19f23ae27) In his next letter (6 October) he said:

As for my average ‘Bookham’ day, there is not much to tell. Breakfast at 8.0, where I am glad to see good Irish soda-bread on the table, begins the day. I then proceed to take the air … till 9.15, when I come in & have the honour of reading that glorious Iliad, which I will not insult with my poor praise. 11–11.15 is a little break, and then we go on with Latin until luncheon, at 1.00. From 1–5.0 the time is at my own disposal to read, or write or moon about in the golden tinted woods and valleys of this country. 5–7.0, we work again. 7.30, dinner. After that I have the pleasant task of English Literature mapped out by Himself. Of course that doesn’t include novels, which I read at other times. I am at present occupied with (as Eng. Lit.) Buckle’s ‘Civilization of England’, and (of my own accord) Ibsen’s plays.

(#ulink_cedad27b-8ac8-540d-b13e-ac25744f81c4)

This routine became the archetype of a ‘normal day’ as he would choose his days to be: ‘if I could please myself I would always live as I lived there’;

(#ulink_4eadddd9-ef87-5094-86a3-04d03a18d4a1) and indeed throughout his subsequent life at Oxford and Cambridge he continued whenever possible to follow this schedule as far as circumstances would allow – the main variation being that in time more evenings were spent in talk with friends or at meetings of various literary or other societies than in reading.

Another habit contracted at Bookham was reading ‘suitable’ books during afternoon tea, which he held should be taken alone. ‘It would be a kind of blasphemy to read poetry at table: what one wants is a gossipy, formless book which can be opened anywhere’,