C. S. Lewis: A Biography

(#ulink_8a7549f8-2367-56d6-981f-aa6a4a2ea2b3) and his usual choice was Boswell, Herodotus, Burton, Tristram Shandy, The Essays of Elia or Andrew Lang’s History of English Literature.

The two and a half years thus initiated at Great Bookham, while among the most important in forming the C.S. Lewis who was to be, were years of peace and contentment such as he was hardly to know again; but they were years of mental development fed by literary discovery and sound learning. Very little actually happened in the biographical sense, beyond holidays in Ireland and occasional visits from Warnie on leave from the Western Front.

During this time he wrote almost weekly letters to Arthur Greeves, telling mainly of the books that he was reading, many of them landmarks of importance when viewed in the light of his future career. Thus, in November 1914 he was discovering William Morris, both the poems and the prose romances; in January 1915 he first read the Morte Darthur – ‘it has opened up a new world to me’, he wrote to Arthur on 26 January 1915.

(#ulink_e9b5c16c-4be4-5843-b560-d99a0854dc15) In February 1916 he read The Faerie Queene and Grettir the Strong. A diary kept for three weeks in July 1915 shows him reading Prometheus Bound in the original Greek, ‘a red letter day in my life’,

(#ulink_edd1e93c-21e9-565f-b31d-dacd03975cf8) Keats, Ruskin, Horace, Aristotle and Virginia Woolf. And he was celebrating these delights in verse:

And while the rain is on the leads

What songcraft sweet shall be our fare?

The tale where Spenser’s magic sheds

A slumbrous sweetness on the air

Of charmed lands, and Horace fair,

And Malory who told the end

Of Arthur, and the trumpet blare

Of him who sang Patroklos’ friend.

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On 4 March 1916 (he mistakenly dates it August 1915 in Surprised by Joy) Lewis made one of the literary discoveries which, he maintained, left the deepest and most enduring impression on both his literary and his spiritual life. He wrote to Arthur Greeves on 7 March:

I have had a great literary experience this week. I have discovered yet another author to add to our circle – our very own set: never since I first read ‘The well at the world’s end’ have I enjoyed a book so much – and indeed I think my new ‘find’ is quite as good as Malory or Morris himself. The book, to get to the point, is George MacDonald’s ‘Faerie Romance’, Phantastes, which I picked up by hazard in a rather tired Everyman copy on our station bookstall last Saturday.

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Thirty years later, in the preface to George MacDonald: An Anthology, Lewis wrote of MacDonald, ‘I have never concealed the fact that I regard him as my master; indeed, I fancy I have never written a book in which I did not quote from him’, and after describing the purchase of Phantastes, he continued:

A few hours later I knew that I had crossed a great frontier. I had already been waist deep in Romanticism; and likely enough, at any moment, to flounder into its darker and more evil forms, slithering down the steep descent that leads from the love of strangeness to that of eccentricity and thence to that of perversity. Now Phantastes was romantic enough in all conscience; but there was a difference. Nothing was at that time further from my thoughts than Christianity and I therefore had no notion what this difference really was. I was only aware that if this new world was strange, it was also homely and humble; that if this was a dream, it was a dream in which one at least felt strangely vigilant; that the whole book had about it a sort of cool, morning innocence, and also, quite unmistakably, a certain quality of Death, good Death. What it actually did to me was to convert, even to baptise (that was where the Death came in) my imagination. It did nothing to my intellect nor (at that time) to my conscience. Their turn came far later with the help of many other books and men.

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This was the highlight among Lewis’s literary discoveries at Bookham, but he continued with his explorations and was soon reporting with enthusiasm to Greeves on his first reading of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Beowulf (both still in translation), Chaucer, Sidney, Tristan (in French, so presumably the medieval ‘prose’ Tristan credited to Helie de Borron), The Song of Roland, the Argonautica of Apollonius Rhodius (in Greek) – which he compared unfavourably with The Life and Death of Jason – Paradise Lost, and Comus – ‘an absolute dream of delight’

(#ulink_c279eb46-a468-5d9f-b1e3-2ffefd46bd54) – Shakespeare’s fairy and romantic plays, and a curious work called Letters from Hell, written in Danish by Valdemar Adolph Thisted in 1866, and translated by Julie Sutter in 1885 with an introduction by MacDonald, which may later have given him the idea (though none of the contents) for The Screwtape Letters.

On the more conventionally academic side he was progressing amazingly and Kirkpatrick wrote to Albert Lewis as early as 7 January 1915:

He was born with the literary temperament and we have to face that 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 torpor. As I said before, it is the maturity and originality of his literary judgements which is so unusual and surprising. By an unerring instinct he detects first rate quality in literary workmanship, and the second rate does not interest him in any way.

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On 28 March he added that, while still rather behind with Greek grammar, he

has a sort of genius for translating … He has read more classics in the time than any boy I ever had, and that too, very carefully and exactly. In Homer his achievement is unique – 13 books or more of the Iliad and 9 of the Odyssey. It will not surprise you to learn that in the Sophoclean drama, which attains a high level in poetic expression, especially in the lyric portions, he could beat me easily in the happy choice of words and phrases.

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And in a letter of 16 September 1915, he admitted, ‘He is the most brilliant translator of Greek plays I have ever met.’

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As Jack’s time at Bookham drew towards an end much discussion passed between Kirkpatrick and Albert Lewis with regard to his future. There were suggestions that he should take up law or join the Army; but Kirkpatrick’s settled opinion, with which Lewis himself was only too eager to agree, was that he should proceed to the university with the idea of an ultimate fellowship, or failing that of becoming a schoolmaster – though his own private ambition was to be a poet and romance writer.

But this was 1916, and with the war going badly for the Allies, conscription had come in. Lewis discovered that, as an Irishman, he could claim exemption. But he was determined to serve, and this at least gave him the opportunity to join the Officers’ Training Corps and get a commission as soon as his papers came through.

Accordingly, on 4 December 1916 he reached Oxford for the first time, to sit for a scholarship examination, and found comfortable lodgings in ‘the first house on the right as you turn into Mansfield Road out of Holywell’.

(#ulink_2a1236da-e721-5e2e-90a2-e1c6479e5bc5) ‘This place has surpassed my wildest dreams,’ he wrote to his father on 7 December, ‘I never saw anything so beautiful, especially on these frosty moonlight nights; though the Hall at Oriel, 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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Any fears of the result he may have had were groundless, for shortly after reaching Belfast for his Christmas holidays Lewis received a letter from Reginald W. Macan, Master of University College, informing him that ‘This College elects you to a Scholarship (New College having passed you over)’; and The Times of 14 December listed among the successful candidates, besides ‘Clive S. Lewis, University College’, ‘Alfred C. Harwood, Christ Church’,

(#ulink_38ce79c2-214d-59ec-aac4-3007a5f7bf8c) and ‘Arthur Owen Barfield, Wadham College’,

(#ulink_a21d505c-656b-5b9a-93e0-cc255e380de7) who were soon to be among his closest friends.

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Although now a Scholar of Univ., Lewis was not yet officially a member of Oxford University, as he had still to pass Responsions, the entrance examination. This included elementary mathematics as a compulsory subject, and at the end of January 1917 he returned to Bookham for another term to see if Kirkpatrick could instil a sufficient amount of ‘the low cunning of Algebra’ into him, mathematics being a subject that he seemed eternally incapable of mastering.

On the way he visited Oxford again, this time for an interview with the Master of Univ., who, he reported to his father on 28 January, ‘was a clean-shaven, white-haired, jolly old man, and was very nice indeed. He treated me to about half an hour’s “Oxford manner” and then came gradually round to my own business. Since writing last, he has made inquiries, and it seems that if I pass Responsions in March I could “come up” in the following term and join the O.T.C.’

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At Bookham, besides the hated algebra, Lewis extended his studies to German and Italian. The former he found difficult – Chamisso and Fouqué he enjoyed, but Goethe was still beyond him. Italian, on the other hand, came easily to so proficient a Latinist. By 8 February, he was confident that ‘by the end of term I should be able to read it as easily as French’.

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The weekly letters to Arthur Greeves continued as before, full of what he was reading, writing and thinking. A prose romance called Bleheris had been on the stocks the previous term, but this was now cast aside in favour of a new idea which was to take final form ten years later as Dymer. This was at first also in prose, but in modern English as opposed to the archaic style devised by Morris in which his previous efforts had been couched. There was also a narrative poem, ‘The Childhood of Medea’, which, he promised Arthur on 15 February, ‘will leave off where most poems about her begin – shortly after her meeting with Jason. It will describe her lonely, frightened childhood away in a castle with the terrible old king her father, and how she is gradually made to learn magic against her will.’

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Greeves was also planning stories (which he seems never to have written) and was discussing the charms of actual women who were the prototypes of his heroines; but Lewis was still more interested in

The land where I shall never be,

The love that I shall never see,

and went on to disclaim authorship of the couplet (which was later to appear, still anonymously, on the title page of Spirits in Bondage): ‘a beauty, isn’t it,’ he wrote to Greeves on 28 February, ‘but NOT by me – I wish it were. Andrew Lang quotes it somewhere, but I have never been able to discover the author. Whoever it be, he deserves immortality for these two lines alone.’