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If any star danced at the birth of Clive Staples Lewis on 29 November 1898 in one of the semi-detached Dundela Villas near the outskirts of Belfast, the mists of time – and the predominant drizzle of Northern Ireland – have obscured it.

His brother Warren, three years old at the time, wrote, ‘Of his arrival I remember nothing, though no doubt I was introduced to him, and it was only by degrees that I became dimly conscious of him as a vociferous disturber of my domestic peace.’¹

Warren’s natural jealousy of the newcomer died away as soon as babyhood ended, and the encumbrance was able to grow into a companion. Clive seems to have matured with commendable speed, not only talking, but expressing his preferences with typical decisiveness before he was two.

The first ten years of his childhood differed little from that of any average child in a similar period and setting. Early delights were those of rail travel each summer to and from nearby seaside resorts: ‘… the selection of toys to be taken, the bustle of packing, and then the great moment when the cab arrived to take us to the station … Then came the glorious excitement of the train journey, and, supreme bliss, the first sight of the sea.’²

This month by the sea each year was their only holiday, and the single variation came in August 1907 when Mrs Lewis took the two boys to Berneval, near Dieppe, in northern France – Clive’s only holiday abroad until he went to Greece in 1960. Otherwise, as they grew older, they could bicycle out for the day into the country, and occasionally visit friends or relations at no great distance.

About his early years Clive Lewis remembered with most gratitude, after ‘good parents, good food and a garden (which then seemed large) to play in … two other blessings’: first, his nurse Lizzie Endicott, ‘in whom even the exacting memory of childhood can discover no flaw – nothing but kindness, gaiety and good sense … The other blessing was my brother. Though three years my senior, he never seemed to be an elder brother; we were allies, not to say confederates from the first.’³ When they were very young, Lizzie, drying them after a bath one day, threatened to smack their ‘pigieboties’ or ‘piggiebottoms’. The boys decided that Warnie was the ‘Archpiggiebotham’ and Jack the ‘Smallpiggiebotham’ or ‘APB’ and ‘SPB’, names they were to use for one another throughout their lives.^*4

The biggest change in their lives during Clive’s first ten years was the building of the ‘New House’ – Little Lea – at 76 Circular Road, Strandtown, and the move into it on 21 April 1905. This was on the very edge of suburbia: ‘On one side it was within twenty minutes’ walk of a tram stop, on the other within a mile of what was indisputably open hilly farm land.’⁵ And as they both had bicycles, the real country, which they now discovered for the first time, was only a few minutes’ ride away from their own front door. During these early ‘golden years’ before boarding-school Clive developed a passionate love of Co. Down that he retained all his life.

Besides this delight there was, as Warren, or ‘Warnie’ as the family called him, records, ‘the new house itself which, though perhaps the worst designed house I ever saw, was for that very reason a child’s delight. On the top floor, cupboard-like doors opened into huge, dark, wasted spaces under the roof, tunnel-like passages through which children could crawl, connecting space with space.’⁶ ‘The New House is almost a major character in my story,’ wrote Clive years later in Surprised by Joy. ‘I am a product of long corridors, empty sunlit rooms, upstair indoor silences, attics explored in solitude, distant noises of gurgling cisterns and pipes, and the noise of wind under the tiles.’⁷ And he in turn wove these recollections into much that he was to write, from Dymer to The Magician’s Nephew.

The house was full of books – ‘I had always the same certainty of finding a book that was new to me as a man who walks into a field has of finding a new blade of grass’⁸ – though all of these were the works of novelists, historians, essayists and biographers. Neither of Clive Lewis’s parents ‘had the least taste for that kind of literature to which my allegiance was given the moment I could choose books for myself. Neither had ever listened for the horns of elfland. There was no copy of Keats or Shelley in the house, and the copy of Coleridge was never (to my knowledge) opened. If I am a romantic, my parents bear no responsibility for it.’⁹

But even from his earliest days ‘Jack’ Lewis (at the age of four he had suddenly announced that his name was Jacksie – soon shortened into Jack – and refused to answer to any other ever after) had been able to find chinks at least in the magic casements, long before he could fling them wide and venture out over the perilous seas in the faery lands forlorn of which he was to add not a few to the literary atlas. To begin with, Lizzie Endicott would tell him fairy tales of her own country – of leprechauns with their pots of buried gold, of the Daoine Sidh, and of the Isle of Mell Moy which was to make him such an enthusiastic reader of James Stephens and the early Yeats.

Then came the early Beatrix Potter volumes, hot from the press. Squirrel Nutkin, his favourite, was published in 1903 before he was five. ‘I liked the Beatrix Potter illustrations at a time when the idea of humanized animals fascinated me perhaps even more than it fascinates most children,’ he wrote in An Experiment in Criticism (1961);¹⁰ and he followed up this fascination through the pages of old volumes of Punch with their animal cartoons by Tenniel and Sambourne and Partridge, besides those in Lewis Carroll, and in the old Dalziel illustrations to Mother Goose of which a copy of the 1895 reprint had been given to Warnie.

The first real introduction to romance came by chance, by way of a copy of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court in which he was able to taste something of the true Logres even through Mark Twain’s vulgar ridicule of the great Arthurian cycle. This was followed by an even more blessed discovery: the monthly Strand Magazine was serializing Conan Doyle’s Sir Nigel from December 1905 to December 1906 – a real introduction to the world of chivalry. But more important even than Mark Twain’s perverted Arthuriad and Doyle’s brightly coloured Middle Ages were the serials in the Strand by E. Nesbit with H.R. Millar’s superb and evocative illustrations: Five Children – and It (April to December 1902), The Phoenix and the Carpet (July 1903 to June 1904), and The Story of the Amulet (May 1905 to April 1906). ‘The last did most for me,’ he recollected in 1955. ‘It first opened my eyes to antiquity, the “dark backward and abysm of time”.¹¹ I can still re-read it with delight.’¹²

This naturally leads on to the stories that Jack Lewis began writing before he was six and continued to elaborate for the next half-dozen years or more. After the move to Little Lea, he soon ‘staked out a claim to one of the attics’ and made it his ‘study’, decorating the walls with pictures of his own making or cut from brightly coloured Christmas editions of magazines. ‘Here,’ he records, ‘my first stories were written, and illustrated, with enormous satisfaction. They were an attempt to combine my two chief literary pleasures – “dressed animals” and “knights-in-armour”. As a result, I wrote about chivalrous mice and rabbits who rode out in complete mail to kill not giants but cats.’¹³

It is tempting to look here for the origin of such characters as Reepicheep the chivalric Talking Mouse, one of the most successfully developed among the higher animals of Narnia. But when discussing stories made up in childhood and their effect, or otherwise, on those written later, he told Green categorically that none of the characters or adventures in the Narnian stories was drawn from the Animal-Land of his own childhood inventions. The whole spirit of Narnia is different, as he also pointed out in Surprised by Joy: ‘Animal-Land had nothing whatever in common with Narnia except the anthropomorphic beasts. Animal-Land, by its whole quality, excluded the least hint of wonder.’¹⁴ ‘In mapping and chronicling Animal-Land I was training myself to be a novelist. Note well, a novelist; not a poet. My invented world was full (for me) of interest, bustle, humour and character; but there was no poetry, even no romance in it. It was almost astonishingly prosaic.’¹⁵

Moreover, the Animal-Land that came into action in the holidays when Warnie was at home from his English boarding-school ‘was a modern Animal-Land; it had to have trains and steamships if it was to be a country shared with him. It followed, of course, that the medieval Animal-Land about which I wrote my stories must be the same country at an earlier period; and of course the two periods must be properly connected. This led me from romancing to historiography: I set about writing a full history of Animal-Land.’ History led to geography: the world was remapped with Warnie’s ‘India’ as an island across the sea from Animal-Land, ‘And those parts of that world which we regarded as our own – Animal-Land and India – were increasingly peopled with consistent characters,’¹⁶ and came to be known generally as ‘Boxen’.

Many of Lewis’s Boxonian stories have been published as Boxen: The Imaginary World of the Young C.S. Lewis (1985). The best of the stories come from the later period and were written between the ages of twelve and fourteen, when they became novels about minor characters rather than straight ‘histories’. While they show great precocity, there is little evidence of anything else and hardly any foreshadowing of what was to come: they are interesting as the earliest works of C.S. Lewis, and dull compared to his later writings. This is largely due to the careful banishment of poetic, romantic and imaginative elements and to the extra- ordinary absorption with politics. This has been explained by Warnie Lewis in his ‘Memoir’ accompanying the Letters of C.S. Lewis: here he describes the continuous political discussions current in Ireland at the time, mainly diatribes against the government of the day between men of the same political persuasions – and vituperative and unexplained condemnation of all who differed from them in politics or religion. Warnie concludes:

Any ordinary parent would have sent us boys off to amuse ourselves elsewhere when one of these symposiums took place, but not my father; he would have thought it uncivil to the guest. Consequently we had to sit in silence while the torrent of vituperation flowed over our heads. The result in Jack’s case was to convince him firstly that ‘grown-up’ conversation and politics were one and the same thing, and that therefore he must give everything he wrote a political framework; and secondly to disgust him with the very word ‘politics’ before he was out of his teens.¹⁷

Moreover, although the Boxonian characters are ‘dressed animals’, there is no attempt to keep up the fiction, and without the illustrations it would often be hard to remember that, for example, Lord John Big is a frog, James Bar a bear, Macgoullah a horse, and Viscount Puddiphat an owl. And unfortunately few of the early stories of ‘knights-in-armour’ (even if the knights were dressed animals) have survived, though there are a few early attempts at verse concerning ‘Knights and Ladyes’.

‘In mapping and chronicling Animal-Land,’ said Lewis, ‘I was training myself to be a novelist … but there was no poetry, even no romance in it.’¹⁸ At the same time he had an inner life, invisible to all but himself, that was highly imaginative. Shortly after the family moved to Little Lea he had three experiences which initiated ‘the central story’¹⁹ of his life. In Surprised by Joy he told how one day, as he was standing beside a flowering currant bush, there arose in him the ‘memory of a memory’ of a day in Dundela Villas when Warnie brought his toy garden into the nursery. ‘It is difficult’, he said, ‘to find words strong enough for the sensation which came over me; Milton’s “enormous bliss” of Eden … comes somewhere near it.’²⁰ It was, he went on, ‘a sensation of desire’, but before he knew what he desired ‘the desire itself was gone, the whole glimpse withdrawn, the world turned commonplace again, or only stirred by a longing for the longing that had just ceased’.²¹

A second ‘glimpse’ came through Beatrix Potter’s Squirrel Nutkin which, he said, ‘troubled me with what I can only describe as the Idea of Autumn’.²² A third glimpse came through a few lines of Longfellow’s translation of Esaias Tegner’s version (1825) of Drapa:

I heard a voice, that cried,

‘Balder the Beautiful

Is dead, is dead!’

And through the misty air

Passed like the mournful cry

Of sunward sailing cranes.

‘I knew nothing about Balder,’ said Lewis, ‘but instantly I was uplifted into huge regions of northern sky, I desired with almost sickening intensity something never to be described (except that it is cold, spacious, severe, pale, and remote) and then, as in the other examples, found myself at the very same moment already falling out of that desire and wishing I were back in it.’²³ The three experiences had in common, he said, ‘an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction. I call it Joy … It might almost equally well be called a particular kind of unhappiness or grief. But then it is a kind we want.’²⁴

Meanwhile his outward life went on more or less as usual. Warnie departed to Wynyard School in England, while Jack was taught at Little Lea by a governess, Miss Annie Harper: ‘She is fairly nice for a governess, but all of them are the same,’²⁵ he confided to his first diary at the end of 1907, in which he describes himself as ‘like most boys of nine, and I am like Papy, bad temper, thick lips, thin and generally wearing a jersey’.²⁶

Other diary scraps describe the rest of the household: his grandfather, Richard Lewis, ‘who lives in a little room of his own upstairs’; Maude the housemaid and Martha the cook; several pets, ‘a dog called Tim, a black and white mouse called Tommy, and lastly a canary called Peter’.²⁷ The entry for Thursday, 5 March 1908 is typical – except for the unexpected item with which it concludes: ‘I rise. The lawn is white with frost. I have breakfast. Get on my coat and cap and see Papy off [to the office]. Miss Harper comes, lessons. [The next entry translates the opening sentence of Julius Caesar’s De Bello Gallico.] Dinner. I am carpentring at a sword. I read “Paradise Lost”, reflections there-on.’²⁸

We do not know what these reflections were, nor how much of Milton’s Paradise Lost, the poem which was to mean so much to him in later life, was either read or understood by him in his tenth year; but even as he wrote, his own paradise was on the verge of being lost. ‘There came a night when I was ill and crying both with headache and toothache and distressed because my mother did not come to me,’ he wrote in Surprised by Joy:

That was because she was ill too; and what was odd was that there were several doctors in her room, and voices and comings and goings all over the house and doors shutting and opening. It seemed to last for hours. And then my father, in tears, came into my room and began to try to convey to my terrified mind things it had never conceived before. It was in fact cancer and followed the usual course; an operation (they operated in the patient’s house in those days), an apparent convalescence, a return of the disease, increasing pain, and death. My father never fully recovered from this loss.²⁹

Flora died on 23 August 1908. The effect of her death on Albert Lewis was to alienate him from his two sons just at the time when mutual comfort was most needed. His nerves had never been of the steadiest and his emotions had always been uncontrolled: now he began to speak wildly and act unjustly. To children just entering on their teens the sight of adult grief and fear is apt to produce revulsion rather than sympathy, and adult loss of control is put down to unkindness rather than to its true cause. Warnie and Jack lost their mother slowly as her last illness shut them further and further away from her. When she was dead their father was incapable of taking her place and had already forfeited a great deal of his own, without knowing it. They were driven to rely more and more exclusively on each other for all that made life bearable, to have confidence only in each other – ‘two frightened urchins huddled for warmth in a bleak world’, as one of them was to write in Surprised by Joy. And he continues: ‘With my mother’s death all settled happiness, all that was tranquil and reliable, disappeared from my life. There was to be much fun, many pleasures, many stabs of Joy; but no more of the old security. It was sea and islands now; the great continent had sunk like Atlantis.’³⁰

It was time for Jack to go to school and in September 1908 he accompanied Warnie to Wynyard School. Albert Lewis was probably wise to send him away from the shadow of loss at home, and strive to fill his life with the new and absorbing experiences of school life: but of all the schools in the British Isles he seems to have chosen the very worst. Wynyard School, Watford, Hertfordshire, and its ogre of a headmaster have been described fully in Surprised by Joy (as ‘Belsen’) and little more need be said of them here, save to state that the contemporary evidence of diaries and letters fully bears out the recollections of later years.

When Warnie entered the school in May 1905 it had already begun the easy descent to Avernus precipitated by a law case in 1901 when the headmaster, the Reverend Robert Capron,^* treated a boy with such brutality that the father brought a High Court action against him, which was settled out of court and against the defendant. Apart from the rapidly developing mania for inflicting punishment, Capron seems to have run the school very much on the lines of Crichton House described by F. Anstey in Vice Versa, which Lewis called ‘the only truthful school story in existence’.³¹ But it was an altogether smaller and – towards the end – more squalid affair, though Capron, like Anstey’s Dr Grimstone, seems to have begun as a competent teacher whose pupils at one time gained scholarships to public schools. By the time the Lewis boys were entrusted to his care, however, the instruction had become ‘at once brutalizing and intellectually stupefying’,³² little was taught and still less remembered. As Warnie wrote:

In spite of Capron’s policy of terror, the school was slack and inefficient, and the time-table, if such it could be called, ridiculous. When not saying lessons, the boys spent the whole of school working out sums on slates; of this endless arithmetic there was little or no supervision. Of the remaining subjects, English and Latin consisted, the first solely and the second mainly, of grammar. History was a ceaseless circuit of the late Middle Ages; Geography was a meaningless list of rivers, towns, imports and exports.³³

There was no school library at Wynyard, but the boys were by no means illiterate, though Warnie and Jack seem to have had better taste than most of their companions. A ‘Club for getting monthly magazines’ which they formed during Jack’s first term shows this: the other boys’ contributions were the Captain, the Boy’s Own Paper, the Wide World, the Royal, and the London Magazine, but Warnie’s choice was Pearson’s and Jack’s the Strand. As they all shared each other’s magazines, Jack found himself reading ‘twaddling school-stories’, which he dismissed later as ‘mere wish-fulfilment of the hero’³⁴ – surely forgivable in a school such as Capron’s establishment. The Strand, however, was offering at this time E. Nesbit’s excellent pastiches of imagination and history, The House of Arden (1908) and Harding’s Luck (1909), with the odd Sherlock Holmes story and A.E.W. Mason’s At the Villa Rose (1910) for more adult excitement, while Hall Caine’s semi-religious thriller The White Prophet (1909) may have led him on to the taste for romances of the early Christians in Rome which he developed at this time. These he found in Sienkiewicz’s Quo Vadis? (1898), Dean Farrar’s Darkness and Dawn: or, Scenes in the Days of Nero (1891), Whyte-Melville’s The Gladiators: A Tale of Rome and Judaea (1863), and Lew Wallace’s Ben Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1880).

‘They were mostly, as literature, rather bad books,’ he decided. ‘What wore better, and what I took to at the same time, is the work of Rider Haggard.’³⁵ 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.’³⁶

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.³⁷ 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.’³⁸ 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’.³⁹ 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.’⁴⁰ 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,^* 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.⁴¹

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’.⁴² 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.’⁴³

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^* up to examine him. As a result, Leslie has advised me not to send him back to school for some days’;⁴⁴ 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.’⁴⁵

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.’⁴⁶

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;^† 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.’⁴⁷

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’.⁴⁸ 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.⁴⁹

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.^* I never thought that dancing mistress as beautiful as my cousin G.,^† but she was the first woman I ever ‘looked upon to lust after her’; assuredly through no fault of her own.⁵⁰

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.⁵¹

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’.⁵² 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.’⁵³ 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’⁵⁴ – 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.⁵⁵

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.’⁵⁶ 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.’⁵⁷ And in another lecture he described himself as one who loved Balder before he loved Christ.⁵⁸

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’.⁵⁹ However, Canon James, the headmaster,^* 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.’⁶⁰ Warnie commented that ‘in the circumstances I am inclined to rate his obtaining a Scholarship as the greatest triumph of his career’,⁶¹ 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.’⁶²

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 … ⁶³

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’,⁶⁴ 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.’^* 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 …’⁶⁵

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,’⁶⁶ 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’.⁶⁷ 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^* 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.⁶⁸

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.’⁶⁹

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.’⁷⁰ 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.⁷¹

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.⁷²

‘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.’⁷³

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.⁷⁴

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’;⁷⁵ and the other was ‘my form master, Smewgy as we called him’.⁷⁶ 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.

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.⁷⁷

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 … ⁷⁸

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,⁷⁹ Teutonic Myth and Legend,⁸⁰ Mallet’s Northern Antiquities.’⁸¹ 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,⁸² ‘and tried vainly but happily to hammer out the originals from the translation at the bottom of the page’.⁸³ 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.⁸⁴

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’.⁸⁵

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’.⁸⁶ 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.⁸⁷

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.’⁸⁸ ‘If ever a man came near to being a purely logical entity, that man was Kirk,’ Lewis decided.⁸⁹ 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 … ”’⁹⁰

‘Some boys would not have liked it,’ Lewis comments, ‘to me it was red beef and strong beer’;⁹¹ 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^* 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.’⁹² 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’.⁹³

‘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.⁹⁴ 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.⁹⁵

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’;⁹⁶ 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’,⁹⁷ 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 1915.⁹⁸ 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’,⁹⁹ 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.¹⁰⁰

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.¹⁰¹

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.¹⁰²

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’¹⁰³ – 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.¹⁰⁴

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.¹⁰⁵

And in a letter of 16 September 1915, he admitted, ‘He is the most brilliant translator of Greek plays I have ever met.’¹⁰⁶

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’.¹⁰⁷ ‘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.’¹⁰⁸

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’,^* and ‘Arthur Owen Barfield, Wadham College’,^† who were soon to be among his closest friends.¹⁰⁹

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.’¹¹⁰

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’.¹¹¹

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.’¹¹²

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.’¹¹³ The lines, slightly misquoted, were in fact from a poem by Lang himself, inspired by a prose passage from Baudelaire, which he quotes in his History of English Literature (1912).

Religion was also discussed occasionally, though only Arthur, who was a Christian, raised the subject. It bothered Jack’s conscience in later years that he had allowed himself to be confirmed in St Mark’s on 6 December 1914 merely to please his father and to avoid argument. But at the moment Jack was still a determined atheist, and when challenged took up his stand in the anthropological field, citing ‘dying gods’ and ‘fertility rites’ from Lang’s Myth, Ritual and Religion (1899) and Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1890–1915). ‘All religions, that is all mythologies, to give them their proper name, are merely man’s own invention – Christ as much as Loki’, he wrote to Arthur on 12 October 1916.¹¹⁴ When Arthur complained, Jack distinguished between Jesus and Christ, as he wrote on 18 October:

When I say ‘Christ’, of course I mean the historical being into whom he was afterwards converted by popular imagination … That the man Yeshua or Jesus did actually exist, is as certain as that the Buddha did actually exist … But all the tomfoolery about virgin birth, magic healings, apparitions and so forth is on exactly the same footing as any other mythology … As to the immortality of the soul, though it is a fascinating theme for day-dreaming, I neither believe nor disbelieve: I simply don’t know anything at all, there is no evidence either way.¹¹⁵

This agnosticism was enshrined in a poem written in 1917 which ends:

I think, if it be truth, as some have taught

That these frail seeds of being are not caught

And blown upon the cosmic winds in vain

After our death, but bound in one again

Somewhere, we know not how, they live and thrive

Forever, and the proud gods will not give

The comfortable doom of quiet sleep,

Then doubt not but that from the starry deep

And utmost spaces lit by suns unknown

We should return again whence we were flown,

Leaving the bauble of a sainted crown,

To walk and talk upon the hills of Down.¹¹⁶

^* In later years they talked of their ‘Pigiebotie’ philosophy. ‘A pigiebotie,’ Jack wrote to Warnie on 2 August 1928, ‘must be conscious of idling and approve of it. He must not merely like to sit still, but he must also like to think of himself sitting still, or even like to think of himself liking to sit still … He is the only true “Quietist”. He sitteth down like a giant and rejoiceth not to run his course. He eateth all things, neglecteth all things, moveth not himself, is not waked up.’ (FL, p. 776)

^* Robert Capron (‘Oldy’ or ‘Oldie’) (1851–1911) was born in Brampton, Devon, and received a BA and a BSc from the University of London in 1873 and 1875 respectively. In 1878 he was ordained as curate of Wordsley, Staffordshire, and in 1881 he founded Wynyard School at what is now 99 Langley Road, Watford. In 1882 he married Ellen Barnes (1849–1909) and they had three daughters, Nora, Dorothy, and Eva, as well as one son, John Wynyard, all of whom helped with the teaching while Jack and Warnie Lewis were there. Capron was very successful in teaching the classics in the beginning. However, his increasing mental instability and eventual insanity resulted in his becoming very cruel. Reduced to a handful of students, the school closed in April 1910. Capron died in the Camberwell House Asylum, Peckham, Kent, on 18 November 1911. See his biography in CG.

^* Sir William Quartus Ewart (1844–1919), the head of a remarkable family, was the director of the family business, Wm Ewart & Son Ltd., Flax Spinners and Linen Manufacturers. In 1876 he married Mary Heard (1849–1929), who was the niece of C.S. Lewis’s maternal grandmother. Lady Ewart was, then, Flora Lewis’s first cousin. The Ewarts had five children: (1) Robert Heard Ewart (1879–1939) who succeeded to the baronetcy; (2) Charles Gordon Ewart (1885–1936) who married Lily Greeves, sister of Arthur Greeves; (3) Hope Ewart (1882–1934) who in 1911 married George Harding and moved to Dublin; (4) Kelso ‘Kelsie’ Ewart (1886–1966), who lived near Glenmachan; and (5) Gundreda ‘Gunny’ Ewart (1888–1978) who married John Forrest. See The Ewart Family in the Biographical Appendix of FL.

^* Dr Richard Whytock Leslie (1862–1931) was the Lewis family doctor.

^† Arthur Clement Allen (1868–1957), the headmaster of Cherbourg School, read Classics at New College, Oxford. He founded Cherbourg in 1907, and in 1925 he moved it to Woodnorton, Evesham. It closed when he retired in 1931.

^* This was Charicles, or Illustrations of the Private Life of the Ancient Greeks (1840) by the German archaeologist Wilhelm Becker (1769–1846), written in fictional form, with a scholarly ‘excursus’ following each chapter and footnotes citing his original Greek authorities. The passage in question was probably the scene in Corinth with accompanying excursus on the Heterae.

^† Gundreda Ewart, one of the daughters of Sir William and Lady Ewart. See The Ewart Family in the Biographical Appendix to FL.

^* The Rev. Canon Sydney Rhodes James (1855–1934) was headmaster of Malvern College from 1897 until 1914. See his autobiography, Seventy Years: Random Reminiscences and Reflections (1926).

^* Sir Donald Hardman (1899–1982) was Jack’s study-mate in School House. On leaving Malvern he went to Hertford College, Oxford, after which he became a professional serviceman. Edward Anderson (1898–1928) was a member of School House, 1913–17. He served in the war as a 2nd lieutenant. He later moved to Rhodesia. Kenneth Ernest Lodge (1899–?) was a member of School House, 1913–17, after which he served with the Duke of Lancaster’s Own Yeomanry. He remained in the Army.

^* William Eyre Hamilton Quennell (1898–?) entered School House the same term as Jack. From Malvern he went to the Royal Military College at Sandhurst, and in 1917 he was gazetted into the 7th Dragoon Guards. After the war he trained as a doctor at St Bartholomew’s Hospital, London. During the Second World War he was a medical officer with the Essex Yeomanry.

^† ‘The James’ was Canon James, the headmaster. The ‘Old Boy’ was George Gordon Fraser (1870–1958), the headmaster’s assistant in the management of School House. He was a pupil at Malvern College, 1879–85. He was appointed an assistant master at Malvern in 1901, and in 1917 he became house master of No. 9 House, a position he held until 1927.

^* Austin Farrer (1904–68), distinguished philosopher and theologian, was born in London and went up to Balliol College, Oxford in 1923. He took Firsts in Classical Honour Moderations, Literae Humaniores, and Theology. On being ordained a priest of the Church of England in 1929 he served his title in Dewsbury. He returned to Oxford in 1931 as Chaplain and Fellow of St Edmund Hall where he remained until 1935. He was afterwards Chaplain and Fellow of Trinity College, Oxford, from 1935 until 1960 when he became Warden of Keble College. His books include Finite and Infinite (1943) and The Revelation of St John the Divine (1964). He came to know Lewis through the Socratic Club, and he and his wife, Katharine Farrer, became close friends of Lewis’s wife, Joy Davidman. See his biography in CG.

^* Alfred Cecil Harwood (1898–1975), who was to become a lifelong friend, was born in London and attended Highgate School. After serving during the war with the Royal Warwickshires, he went up to Christ Church, Oxford in 1919, taking his BA in 1921. In 1923 he became a member of the Anthroposophical Movement founded by Rudolf Steiner, and in 1923 he and his fiancée, Daphne Olivier, became teachers in Michael Hall School, the first Anthroposophical school in Britain. He married in 1925 and devoted the rest of his life to teaching, lecturing and writing. See his biography in CG.

^† >Arthur Owen Barfield (1898–1997), a lifelong friend and a member of the Inklings, was born in London and attended Highgate School where he became friends with Cecil Harwood. He served with the Royal Corps of Signals during the First World War, after which he went up to Wadham College, Oxford on a Classical scholarship. He met Lewis during his first year at Wadham. After taking a BA in English in 1921 he wrote a B.Litt. thesis on ‘Poetic Diction’ which became the basis of his book of that title. He became a follower of Rudolf Steiner in 1923 and was a devoted member of the Anthroposophical Society all his life. He married Maud Douie on 11 April 1923, and settled down to a life of literature. However, in 1929 he gave it up to help in the family law firm, Barfield & Barfield, in London. His many influential books include Poetic Diction (1928), History in English Words (1926), Saving the Appearances (1957) and Worlds Apart (1963). His writings about Lewis are collected in Owen Barfield on C.S. Lewis, ed. G.B. Tennyson (1990). See his biography in CG.