Читать книгу C. S. Lewis: A Biography - A. Wilson N. - Страница 10

Shortly before the beginning of his last term as a schoolboy, Lewis had been told that his Belfast neighbour Arthur Greeves was conva-lescing from some illness and would welcome a visit. In 1907, it may be remembered that the telephone had no sooner been installed in the house than young Jacks wanted to speak to Arthur down the line. But their friendship had remained a thing of pure neighbourliness, without blossoming into any sort of spiritual or intellectual intimacy.

It was in April or May 1914, with his head full of the epic of Loki Bound and H. M. A. Guerber’s Myths of the Norsemen, that Jack knocked on the Greeveses’ front door and was shown upstairs to Arthur’s bedroom. He found the boy sitting up in bed. On the table beside him lay a copy of … Myths of the Norsemen.

‘Do you like that?’ he asked.

‘Do you like that?’ Arthur replied.

It was not long before the two boys were exchanging their thoughts about the whole world of Norse mythology, so excited to discover this mutual interest that they were almost shouting. ‘Both knew the stab of Joy, and … for both, the arrow was shot from the North.’¹

Lewis had already learnt, in his brother’s company, the joy of what he later termed the first great love, that of Affection. During his conversation with Arthur Greeves, he discovered the second love, that of Friendship. ‘Many thousands of people have had the experience of finding the first friend, and it is none the less a wonder; as great a wonder (pace the novelists) as first love, or even greater.’²

The friendship of his own sex was one of the great sources of Joy in Lewis’s life; and it was always axiomatic with him that friendship began, and perhaps continued, with two men ‘seeing the same truth’. By many people of a less cerebral disposition, it is not considered necessary to agree with their friends on points of literary judgement, or even of theology. Lewis thought that it was; or perhaps it would be truer to say that he thought that he thought that it was. In point of fact, his friendship with Arthur Greeves was to outlast many changes of view on both sides.

The friendship with Greeves occupied a position of unique importance in Lewis’s life, for geographical and practical reasons. Like Lewis, Greeves was the son of a Belfast middle-class household which had nothing to do with the world of Oxford or London, where Lewis was to achieve his fame. Greeves, though highly intelligent and bookish, was not destined to go to university. His friendship with Lewis was kept going by letter. Both were prodigiously fluent and regular correspondents, and their letters to one another continued from 1914 until a few weeks before Lewis’s death in 1963. Sadly, Arthur Greeves’ side of the correspondence has been destroyed, but the Lewis letters to Greeves (published as They Stand Together, 1979) provide an invaluable insight into Lewis’s imaginative growth. The greater part of his intellectual journeyings, as well as many of his emotional experiences, were confided to Greeves. Moreover since Lewis, already a self-confessed follower of the Romantic movement in literature, was highly self-conscious, the letters to Greeves helped him not merely to disclose but also to discover himself. It was in writing to Greeves that he decided, very often, the sort of person he wanted to be. We could very definitely say that if it had not been for Arthur Greeves, many of Lewis’s most distinctive and imaginatively successful books would not have been written. The letters were the dress rehearsal for that intimate and fluent manner which was to make Lewis such a successful author. The early stuff which he wrote for himself, such as Loki Bound, is almost entirely unreadable. In the letters to Greeves, he learnt to write for an audience.

By September 1914, the Archduke had been shot in Sarajevo, and the great European powers had drifted inexorably into war. Warren Lewis, who had been a prize cadet at Sandhurst (21st out of 201 candidates) found himself being rushed through his officers’ training course. By November he was in France with the Fourth Company of the Seventh Divisional Train of the British Expeditionary Force. It was a war which was to change everything; not only the disputed territories of the Prussian empire, but also much bigger things – like the position of the social classes in Europe and the position of women in society. Ireland, too, was to be changed irrevocably by the turmoil in which Britain found itself.

Jack Lewis, as he entered his teenage years, was put into an idyllic position of isolation, far from Belfast and the Western Front. On 19 September 1914, he stepped off the train at Great Bookham, Surrey, and encountered the legendary Mr Kirkpatrick. The old schoolmaster was sixty-six years old. He and his wife had enjoyed having Warnie to live with them while he prepared for the Sandhurst exams: ‘A nicer boy I never had in the house.’³ But from the beginning, the relationship with Jack was more special.

Kirkpatrick wrote to his beloved pupil Albert Lewis, ‘When I first saw him on the station I had no hesitation in addressing him. It was as though I was looking at yourself once more in the old days at Lurgan.’⁴ Kirkpatrick’s letters to Albert over the years had been fulsome and emotional: ‘A letter from you carries the mind across the vistas of the years and wakens all the cells where memory slept … ’⁵ His relationship with Albert’s sons was to be more distant and old-fashioned. It was not surprising, therefore, that the boys seized on this to provide yet another example of the P’daytabird getting things hopelessly wrong. Albert recalled being squeezed as a boy by the Great Knock and having his youthful cheeks rubbed by his ‘dear old whiskers’. But when Jack got off the train, his cheeks tingling with anticipation, something very different happened. ‘Anything more grotesquely unlike the “dear old Knock” of my father’s reminiscences could not be conceived.’⁶

The old man himself confessed to being deeply moved by the appearance of Clive Lewis (as far as history discovers the matter, Kirkpatrick was the only person who ever called Lewis by his baptismal name). But the Knock’s devotion to the boy took the form not of tears and kisses, but of a well-developed act which he obviously enjoyed adopting. Lewis accused his father of transforming the real Kirkpatrick into a figure hopelessly unlike the reality. From all the evidence which survives, we can see that the Great Knock of Surprised by Joy is quite as much an imaginative projection as the Victorian sentimentalist beloved of Lewis’s father.

Kirkpatrick’s letters to Albert were real enough. When they are not dripping with syrupy endearments about his former pupils, they thunder with all the irrational force of an angry man reading the newspapers about the Hun, the Catholics, the Conservative Party and anyone else he disapproves of. But for Jack Lewis, the Great Knock was to be the embodiment of pure logic, the man who sacrificed everything – social niceties, good manners, even the pleasure of conversation – to a passionate desire to get things right. Even as they were strolling from the station, Jack was discovering, or creating, this magnificent character. He remarked that he was surprised by the scenery of Surrey, which was much wilder than he had expected.

‘Stop!’ shouted the Knock. ‘What do you mean by wildness and what grounds had you for not expecting it?’ By a series of Socratic thrusts, Kirkpatrick managed to show Lewis that his remarks were wholly meaningless and that he had no grounds whatsoever for expressing an opinion about a subject (the scenery of Surrey) of which he had hitherto known nothing. As Lewis remarks, ‘Born a little later, he would have been a Logical Positivist.’⁷

Kirkpatrick’s teaching techniques, when it came to studying literature, were no less remarkable. Lewis arrived on a Saturday. On Monday morning at nine o’clock, Kirkpatrick opened the Iliad and read aloud the first twenty lines, chanting it in his pure Ulster brogue. Then he translated the lines into English, handed Lewis a lexicon and told him to go through as much of it as he had time for. With any less able child, this would have been a disastrously slapdash method of instruction. But it was not long before Lewis began trying to race Kirkpatrick, seeing if he could not learn a few more lines of Homer than his master. Before long, he was reading fluently and actually thinking in Greek. The same method was applied to the Latin poets. Eventually, while he was living at Gastons (as the Knock’s house was called), Lewis was to read his way through the whole of Homer, Virgil, Euripides, Sophocles and Aeschylus, as well as the great French dramas, before branching out into German and Italian. In all these areas, Kirkpatrick’s methods were the same. After the most rudimentary instruction in the grammar of the languages, Jack was reading Faust and the Inferno.

They were very happy times for Kirkpatrick himself. His letters to Albert about the boy are glowing and full of appreciation for Jack’s qualities of mind; they are exact in their analysis of what was so remarkable about him, throughout his life, as a literary critic. ‘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.’⁸

In religion, Kirkpatrick was an old-fashioned nineteenth-century rationalist, whose favourite reading consisted of Frazer’s Golden Bough and Schopenhauer. Nevertheless, he remained very distinctly an Ulster Presbyterian atheist. Jack noticed with amusement that Kirkpatrick always did the garden in a slightly smarter suit on Sundays.

Albert hoped that neither of his boys had been infected by the ‘Gastons heresies’. Warren’s religion appeared to have survived Kirkpatrick’s atheistical society. Indeed, when he was at Sandhurst at the beginning of 1914, he had written home to bewail the atmosphere in the chapel there – ‘that easy, bored, contemptuous indifference which is so hard to describe, but which you would understand perfectly if you had any experience of the products of the big public schools’.⁹

By the close of the year, Warnie was in France and so he missed Jack’s confirmation service, which was held, at Albert’s suggestion, at St Mark’s, Dundela. Jack and his father were now so estranged that Jack did not feel able to tell his father that he did not believe in God and did not wish to go through with the ceremony. Even after he had turned back to Christianity himself, Lewis did less than justice to Albert’s position.

It would have been quite impossible to drive into his head my real position. The thread would have been lost almost at once and the answer implicit in all the quotations, anecdotes, and reminiscences which would have poured over me would have been one I then valued not a straw – the beauty of the Authorised version, the beauty of the Christian tradition and character.¹⁰

This is to suggest that Albert mainly valued Christianity as an aesthetic or national tradition. His letter to Warnie at the Western Front describing Jack’s confirmation shows him, by contrast, to have been a profoundly committed Christian. After an account of the ‘very impressive’ service Albert continues:

Don’t take this further word amiss, dear Badge. I am not going to preach a sermon. I know that you are living a hard life and that a battle field is not the best place for the Christian witness to flourish. But don’t altogether forget God, and turn in thought at times to remember that you too have been confirmed in Christ.¹¹

Jack Lewis went through the ceremony knowing that he was enacting a lie, and he hated himself for so doing. His actual belief, strengthened by contact with the ‘Gastons heresies’ and Frazer’s Golden Bough, was that religion, ‘that is all mythologies’,¹² sprang into being in order to explain phenomena by which primitive man was terrified – thunder, pestilence or snakes. In a similar fashion, great men such as Heracles, Odin or Yeshua (‘whose name we have corrupted into Jesus’) came to be regarded as gods after their deaths. ‘Superstition of course in every age has held the common people but in every age the educated and thinking ones have stood outside it, though usually outwardly conceding to it for convenience.’ Arthur Greeves, who was a devout Christian, did not agree, and the letters between the two friends on the subject were so intense that they eventually agreed not to discuss the matter. In the letters of young C. S. Lewis the atheist we find all the bombast and dialectic which was one day to be turned on its head in defence of the faith. ‘Strange as it may appear, I am quite content to live without believing in a bogey who is prepared to torture me for ever and ever if I should fail in coming up to an almost impossible ideal.’¹³

It was, he believed, from Kirkpatrick that he learnt dialectic, just as it was from Smugy that he had learnt grammar and rhetoric. Kirkpatrick was in fact dismayed by how little grammar (Greek and Latin) Lewis had learnt. He was astonished, for example, that the boy did not know the Greek accents. But it may have been true that some of his forceful dialectic techniques got passed on to his pupil. For example, not many months after the outbreak of the First World War, Kirkpatrick observed of the Liberal Government:

If after eight years of experience, they did not grasp the German menace, they are convicted of stupidity: if they did know it, and never informed the nation or made military preparations to meet it, they are guilty of moral cowardice and neglect of the highest national interests. They may choose which horn of the dilemma they prefer but escape from one or the other is impossible.¹⁴

This was precisely the kind of argument Lewis was to employ later in life to persuade people to accept the divinity of Christ.

But if he learnt dialectic from Kirkpatrick, he probably did not learn much about the relations between the sexes or the emotional life. The Kirkpatricks were unsuitably matched. Tea parties, bridge and gossip were Mrs Kirkpatrick’s favourite occupations. Lewis manages to make them sound pointless, even slightly esoteric activities, but the majority of middle-class women lived in this way, and one might wonder what was wrong with their doing so. Mrs Kirkpatrick did her best to keep Jack amused. She read French novels with him in the evenings. She took him up to London to see the Russian ballet.¹⁵ She even introduced him to Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out, making him resolve to ‘look out for anything else she writes’. (He added, in Virginia Woolfish mode, ‘A moth has flown into my mantle and broken it.’)¹⁶ But none of this could stop him regarding Mrs Kirkpatrick as a ‘vulgar little woman’. He hated her when she returned from shopping expeditions and told ‘triumphantly how she snubbed some poor devil of a shopwalker. Ugh!’

Little Lea, since 1908, had been an all-male household. In the following six years Jack was at all-male boarding schools. His first opportunity to share in the life of a domestic household with a man and a woman had led him to Mrs Kirkpatrick. His scorn of her was doubtless learnt from her misogynistic husband, who, it was said, had only married her to fill the housekeeper’s room at Lurgan. It was an unhappy model to grow up with: the clever man matched with a woman who, though evidently no fool, had to be written down as a fool to satisfy her husband’s ego and explain his dislike of her.

Nor, though he wrote it up as an idyll afterwards, was life at Gastons all fun. For much of the time he was terribly bored, as he confided both to Arthur Greeves and to his pocket diary. ‘Got very bored in the morning’, ‘Am bored’, ‘A dull day’¹⁷ are all typical entries. However deeply studious he was, it was a strange way for a boy of sixteen or seventeen to be living. This worried Kirkpatrick, and for short spells he tried the experiment of having another pupil to live in the house with Lewis. This never worked, partly because the boy concerned was always far beneath Lewis’s intellectual level, and so could not possibly have shared lessons with him; partly because Lewis had simply grown accustomed to being on his own. ‘A damned fellow pupil of my own age and sex – isn’t it the limit!’¹⁸

Mrs Kirkpatrick tried the experiment of introducing him to girls. For example, there was a family of Belgian refugees evacuated to Great Bookham, and for a period Lewis affected to be smitten by one of the girls of the family. By now, his correspondence with Greeves contained a good deal of covert confidences about sex. ‘How could young adolescents really be friends without it?’¹⁹ as he reflected in middle age. Arthur Greeves was homosexual. Lewis, knowing that he wasn’t, assumed himself to be a simple heterosexual and even supplied Arthur with details of assignations with the Belgian girl which he afterwards admitted he had fabricated.²⁰ Most of the ‘real’ sexual experiences which they shared related, unsurprisingly, to masturbation.

The ‘ordinary’ experience of going to cafes or dances and falling in love with the girl over the garden fence or at the next desk in school was not to be Lewis’s. In one of the most revealingly characteristic of all the letters he wrote in his teenage years, he said to Greeves:

You ask whether I have ever been in love: fool as I am, I am not quite such a fool as that. But if one is only to talk from first hand experience on any subject, conversation would be a very poor business. But though I have no personal experience of the thing they call love, I have what is better – the experience of Sappho, of Euripides, of Catullus, of Shakespeare, of Spenser, of Austen, of Brontë, of, of, – anyone else I have read.²¹

‘Jack Lewis loved books!’ his Oxford friend Hugo Dyson used to say, in his huge booming voice, causing all heads in a bar to turn in his direction.²² In some ways, this obvious truth was the most important thing about Lewis. ‘Though I have no personal experience … I have what is better … ’ Most of Lewis’s important experiences were, in fact, literary ones. They happened when he was holding a book or a pen in his hand.

Since Lewis died, the professional world of English Literature studies in universities and learned periodicals has been dominated by various formalist critics (most of whom he would have abominated) exploring the curious relationship between text and reader. Reading is not a simple exercise. Very often, the simplest ‘understanding’ of a text would turn out in another person’s eyes to be a ‘misreading’ of it. Reading is a creative exercise, an exercise in the imagination. It constitutes an experience in itself. Perhaps there are many imaginative, religious or emotional areas where it actually makes very little sense to distinguish between ‘real’ or ‘personal’ experiences, and things we have ‘only’ read about in books. These are matters to which Lewis, in later life, was to devote thought. How much is the bookish man distinguishable from his imagined self, the self he projects into the books he reads?

When he looked back on his life at Great Bookham, there was one great reading experience which outshone all others, and which certainly constitutes a personal experience every bit as important as his encounters with the Belgian girl or Mrs Kirkpatrick. In some ways it was more important than his acquaintanceship with Kirkpatrick himself.

This occurred at the beginning of March 1916, when quite by chance on the station bookstall at Great Bookham, he happened to pick up a copy of Phantastes by George MacDonald. After only a few pages he knew at once that he was in for ‘a great literary experience’.²³

George MacDonald was to be so important a figure in Lewis’s life, and Phantastes such a great milestone in his inner journey, that some word of exposition is required here. Can we explain why the book meant so much to him, became almost a holy text in his imagination, and – most characteristic – a touchstone by which to judge whether other people were, or were not, ‘of the brethren’?

‘All was changed … I had not the faintest notion what I had let myself in for by buying Phantastes.’²⁴

Many of Lewis’s admirers must have rushed eagerly to the pages of MacDonald and felt a grave disappointment at what they found there. For MacDonald supremely lacks Lewis’s greatest quality – that of readability, the simple ability to write prose in such a manner that one wants to keep on turning the pages. It is this which accounts for the obscurity into which MacDonald’s reputation fell after his death in 1905, at the age of seventy-nine. But Lewis was surely right to discern in him one of the most original imaginations in the whole of English literature. Phantastes is not, strictly speaking, a story. It is an imagined dream or vision in which the hero, Anodos (which means in Greek ‘No Way’), wakes up and finds that his bedroom is not as he remembered it. From the wash-basin a stream is flowing on to the carpet. The carpet is now bright-green grass, and a tiny stranger offers to lead him through a small section of his writing desk into the world of Faery (MacDonald was a friend of Lewis Carroll). In the company of this fairy, who turns out to be his lost grandmother, he enters a world of potent symbols and archetypical images, and sets out on various quests for a perfect woman, part lover, part mother-figure. One of these is the beauteous marble lady – very possibly MacDonald’s lost mother, who by a dreadful ‘weaning’ abandoned her child by dying when he was only eight.

MacDonald is the missing link between Spenser’s Faerie Queene and the writings of Freud and Jung. He seems to have the supreme gift, in his fairy stories, of writing unselfconsciously about the subconscious: not only describing what it is like to be in a subconscious dream-state, but also, without any spelling-out of the obvious, high-lighting the meaning of these mentally subterranean journeyings. One of MacDonald’s favourite sayings came from Novalis: ‘Our life is no dream, but it ought to become one and perhaps will.’ He is the great chronicler of the inner life, the mapper-out of what takes place when the subconscious is allowed free range and – in dream or fantasy – tells us stories about ourselves which with our conscious minds we would not necessarily understand or might not be strong enough to bear. MacDonald’s entire œuvre has been described as ‘a life-time effort of mourning’ the traumatic losses of his boyhood, above all the death of his mother. Lewis, when he first read Phantastes, could have had no idea that MacDonald’s early history was so like his own.²⁵ MacDonald’s genius is to draw archetypes to which we all respond. But this story made a particular appeal to Lewis: the young man with No Way in the world, pursuing images of selfhood, images of womanhood, images of loss, images of death.

Later, he was to see that reading Phantastes had been something much more than a literary experience. Indeed, Lewis never blinded himself to the fact that in technical, literary terms MacDonald is not necessarily ‘a good writer’. And in one sense, the wanderings of Anodos were no different from many of the other worlds and enchanted places which he had met with in favourite authors from Spenser to William Morris and Yeats. ‘But in another sense all was changed. I did not yet know (and I was long in learning) the name of the new quality, the bright shadow that rested on the travels of Anodos. I do now. It was Holiness. For the first time the songs of the sirens sounded like the voice of my mother or my nurse.’²⁶

For the previous eight years, Lewis had been bottling up the emotion which he had most needed to let out: grief for his mother. The experience of boarding school immediately after Flora died and the stiff-upper-lip schoolboy atmosphere in which the emotions were suspected and tears were thought cissy had led to a profound stiffening and hardening throughout his being. MacDonald was the first person who touched Lewis sufficiently to let him see what he needed. It is no surprise that, upon reading Phantastes, Lewis heard a sound like the voice of his mother. Meanwhile, his mentor and teacher Kirkpatrick was giving his mind to what the future might hold for this most gifted youth. Two things struck him as obvious and, given the way things turned out, we should commend Kirkpatrick’s foresight.

Early on, he had noted that ‘Clive is an altogether exceptional boy.’²⁷ Later, he had told Albert Lewis that Clive ‘was born with the literary temperament and we have to face the 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 even torpor. As I said before it is the maturity of his literary judgements which is so unusual and surprising.’²⁸

Albert asked what career this pointed to, and Kirkpatrick replied that they should consider the Bar (i.e. being an advocate or attorney in court) as ‘the career marked out for Clive by nature and destiny … He has every gift, a goodly presence, a clear resonant voice, an unfailing resource of clear and adequate expression.’

So, he was to turn out as a literary man and an advocate. This was true. But in neither case was he to fulfil Kirkpatrick’s prophecy as he or Albert expected. His skills as an advocate were eventually to be used in the area of Christian apologetics; his literary skills in the areas of criticism, essays, science fiction and children’s stories.

In his late teens, Jack himself was convinced that he was going to become a poet, and this was a conviction which he carried with him until the late 1920s. Between Easter 1915 and Easter 1917, he wrote fifty-two poems, all about on a par with ‘The Hills of Down’:

I will abide

And make my Dwelling here

Whatso betide

Since there is more to fear

Out yonder. Though

This world is drear and wan

I dare not go

To dreaming Avalon,

Nor look what lands

May lie beyond the last

Strange sunset strands

That gleam when day is fast

I’ the yearning west

Nor seek some faery town

Nor cloud land lest

I lose the hills of Down

The long low hills of Down.

It is extraordinary that someone who, as Kirkpatrick observed, had such an unfailing eye for the excellent in other poets could have gone on writing poetry of such appalling quality. True, large numbers of people write bad poetry in their teens. But Lewis went on and on doing so, apparently convinced that he was going to turn into a poet in the same class as W. B. Yeats.

Not that he imagined he would be able to make a living out of poetry. He realized that he was expected to do something with his life, and the next stage in the life of a clever person inevitably looked like university. By the close of 1916, when he was just eighteen years old, he was ready to sit the scholarship examination for Oxford, and on 4 December he arrived in the town where, with periods of exile, he was to spend the rest of his life. This was the Oxford which existed before the building of the Cowley motor works and the expansion of the place into a mixture of modern industrial town and ‘shopping centre’ into which the old University buildings now appear to have been slotted by chance. The Oxford which Lewis saw was an unspoilt Gothic paradise. True, there were dull suburbs growing up around what Gerard Manley Hopkins, the Oxford Jesuit poet, had called its ‘base and brickish skirt’. But encircling it all there were open fields and meadows. No motor-car disturbed its tranquil streets. From college entrances hobbled old men in gowns who had known Dr Pusey and Dr Pattison. ‘This place has surpassed my wildest dreams,’ Lewis wrote. ‘I never saw anything so beautiful, especially on these frosty moonlight nights; though the Hall at Oriel [College] 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.’²⁹

Oxford is a collegiate university. To gain entrance there you have to be accepted by a college. The exact method of entrance to the colleges has varied over the years. When Lewis was sitting for the scholarship, there was a central pool from which the more brilliant candidates could be drawn. New College – in those days a place still very largely inhabited by boys who had been to Winchester – turned him down, but he was accepted at University College. After Christmas in Belfast, Lewis passed through Oxford for an interview with the Master of ‘Univ’ (as the college is invariably called), who explained that though he had been accepted as a scholar of the college, he had not yet matriculated as a member of the University. To do this, he would have to pass an examination called Responsions, which involved some elementary mathematics. If he passed this exam in March, then he could come up to Univ in the Trinity Term (i.e. April to June) of 1917.

It was a tedious chore, but he went back to the Kirkpatricks to brush up his (never very strong) mathematics. It was during this period that he started Italian and German. It was also during this period that he began to disclose to Arthur some of his more bizarre sexual preferences and fantasies.

In January 1917, his hand wobbles and he apologizes for his poor handwriting, poor because ‘it is being done across my knee’. The very phrase is enough to set off in his mind a train of sado-masochistic reflections: ‘“Across my knee” of course makes one think of positions for whipping: or rather not for whipping (you couldn’t get any swing) but for that torture with brushes. This position, with its childish nursery associations would have something beautifully intimate and also very humiliating for the victim.’³⁰ He began to sign his name Philomastix (‘Lover of the whip’). He enjoyed fantasies about Arthur Greeves’s sister who should be ‘punished … to the general enjoyment of the operator and to the great good of her soul’, and about some other girl in Belfast whose large bottom was ‘shaped with an intolerable grace … Ah me! if she had suffered indeed half the stripes that have fallen upon her in imagination she would be well disciplined.’³¹ He also enjoyed, and recommended, the Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. ‘Altogether “a really rather lovely” book. His taste is altogether for suffering rather than inflicting: which I can feel too, but it is a feeling more proper to the other sex.’

These distractions did nothing to impair Lewis’s academic achievements, and he began his first term as an undergraduate at Oxford. It might readily be supposed that there was a tremendous contrast between the total solitude of Great Bookham and the merry life of Oxford; but by its own standards Oxford was strangely deserted. At Univ there were only twelve men in college³² and the hall was no longer used for dinner. The students ate in a small lecture room. Lewis was given an enormous sitting room all for himself. It was thickly carpeted with a profusion of rugs and furnished in stupendous style, with richly carved oak tables and a grand piano. A fire was burning in the grate, and his scout (college servant) had put the kettle on to boil on a gas ring. This was his first glimpse of college life. The room he had been given, including its furniture, belonged to ‘a tremendous blood who is at the front’.³³

For the reason Oxford was so empty was that it was 1917, and nearly all the young men were in Flanders and France, fighting in the trenches. The war was going badly for the Allies, and conscription had by now been introduced. Since he was an Irishman, Lewis was not obliged to enlist, but he volunteered to do so. This meant that, although he was technically a student, he was in effect a trainee officer in the British Army. The Dean of the college refused to map out any plan of reading for Lewis ‘on the grounds that the Corps will take me all my time’.

Still, in that first Oxford term at Univ, there was a chance to wander about and drink in the atmosphere of the place. One alumnus of the college had been Percy Bysshe Shelley – another atheist poet. He had actually been sent down from Oxford for his atheism, but after his death the college had accepted a remarkable statue of him which is housed beneath a blue dome. Lewis believed that Greeves would have loved it. ‘I pass it every morning on the way to my bath. On a slab of black marble, carved underneath with weeping muses, lies in white stone the nude figure of Shelley, as he was cast up by the sea – all tossed into curious attitudes with lovely ripples of muscle and strained limbs. He is lovely.’ Then – since the thought of naked loveliness will obviously raise the question of whether Lewis has masturbated recently, he adds, ‘No – not since I came back. Somehow I haven’t thought of it.’

As well as naked figures in marble, there were naked figures in the flesh at ‘Parson’s Pleasure’, a stretch of the River Cherwell where men could bathe ‘without the tiresome convention of bathing things’. It was to be one of his favourite spots for many years to come. And, as well as the newly discovered delights of architecture, there were libraries and bookshops such as he had never known before.

It was a beautifully, unreally happy first term, made the more poignant by the knowledge that sooner or later training would start in earnest and he would be sent off to the Western Front. On 3 June, he passed Robert Bridges, the Poet Laureate, in the street and would dearly have loved to speak to him.³⁴ But by 10 June term was over and he was moved to Keble College, which had been requisitioned as a military barracks. ‘It is a great change to leave my own snug room at Univ for a carpetless room, with beds without sheets or pillows, kept miserably tidy and shared with another cadet, at Keble,’ he wrote. The other cadet was a schoolboy who had only just left Clifton College in Bristol. Like Lewis, he was an Irishman, but that was not the reason he had been put to share with him. It was simply that their names came together on the alphabetical list. The other cadet, ‘though he was a little too childish’, was ‘quite a good fellow’. His name was Edward Francis Courtenay Moore, known to his friends as Paddy. Lewis could not possibly have guessed that this purely casual arrangement was to be one of the most important things which ever happened to him, something which was to shape and influence the rest of his life.