C. S. Lewis – A Life Read online

  Few who know County Down can fail to recognise the veiled Irish originals which may have inspired some of Lewis’s beautifully crafted literary landscapes. Lewis’s depiction of heaven in The Great Divorce as an “emerald green” land echoes his native country, just as the dolmens at Legananny in County Down, Belfast’s Cave Hill Mountain, and the Giant’s Causeway all seem to have their Narnian equivalents—perhaps softer and brighter than their originals, but still bearing something of their imprint.

  Lewis frequently referred to Ireland as a source of literary inspiration, noting how its landscapes were a powerful stimulus to the imagination. Lewis disliked Irish politics and was prone to imagine a pastoral Ireland composed solely of soft hills, mists, loughs, and woods. Ulster, he once confided to his diary, “is very beautiful and if only I could deport the Ulstermen and fill their land with a populace of my own choosing, I should ask for no better place to live in.”17 (In certain ways, Narnia can be seen as an imaginary and idealised Ulster, populated with creatures of Lewis’s imagination, rather than Ulstermen.)

  The term Ulster needs further explanation. Just as the English county of Yorkshire was divided into three parts (the “Ridings,” from the Old Norse word for “a third part,” thrithjungr), the island of Ireland was originally divided into five regions (Gaelic cúigí, from cóiced, “a fifth part”). After the Norman conquest of 1066, these were reduced to four: Connaught, Leinster, Munster, and Ulster. The term province now came to be preferred to the Gaelic cúige. The Protestant minority in Ireland was concentrated in the northern province of Ulster, which consisted of nine counties. When Ireland was partitioned, six of these nine counties formed the new political entity of Northern Ireland. The term Ulster is today often used as synonymous with Northern Ireland, with the term Ulsterman tending to be used—though not consistently—to designate “a Protestant inhabitant of Northern Ireland.” This is done despite the fact that the original cúige of Ulster also included the three counties of Cavan, Donegal, and Monaghan, now part of the Republic of Ireland.

  1.2 C. S. Lewis’s Ireland.

  Lewis returned to Ireland for his annual vacation almost every year of his life, except when prevented by war or illness. He invariably visited the counties of Antrim, Derry, Down (his favourite), and Donegal—all within the province of Ulster, in its classic sense. At one point, Lewis even considered permanently renting a cottage in Cloghy, County Down,18 as the base for his annual walking holidays, which often included strenuous hikes in the Mountains of Mourne. (In the end, he decided that his finances would not stretch to this luxury.) Although Lewis worked in England, his heart was firmly fixed in the northern counties of Ireland, especially County Down. As he once remarked to his Irish student David Bleakley, “Heaven is Oxford lifted and placed in the middle of County Down.”19

  Where some Irish writers found their literary inspiration in the political and cultural issues surrounding their nation’s quest for independence from Great Britain, Lewis found his primarily in the landscapes of Ireland. These, he declared, had inspired and shaped the prose and poetry of many before him—perhaps most important, Edmund Spenser’s classic The Faerie Queene, an Elizabethan work that Lewis regularly expounded in his lectures at Oxford and Cambridge. For Lewis, this classic work of “quests and wanderings and inextinguishable desires” clearly reflected Spenser’s many years spent in Ireland. Who could fail to detect “the soft, wet air, the loneliness, the muffled shapes of the hills” or “the heart-rending sunsets” of Ireland? For Lewis—who here identifies himself as someone who actually is “an Irishman”—Spenser’s subsequent period in England led to a loss of his imaginative power. “The many years in Ireland lie behind Spenser’s greatest poetry, and the few years in England behind his minor poetry.”20

  Lewis’s language echoes his origins. In his correspondence, Lewis regularly uses Anglo-Irish idioms or slang derived from Gaelic, without offering a translation or explanation—for example, the phrases to “make a poor mouth” (from the Gaelic an béal bocht, meaning “to complain of poverty”), or “whisht, now!” (meaning “be quiet,” derived from the Gaelic bí i do thost). Other idioms reflect local idiosyncrasies, rather than Gaelic linguistic provenance, such as the curious phrase “as long as a Lurgan spade” (meaning “looking gloomy” or “having a long face”).21 Although Lewis’s voice in his “broadcast talks” of the 1940s is typical of the Oxford academic culture of his day, his pronunciation of words such as friend, hour, and again betrays the subtle influence of his Belfast roots.

  So why is Lewis not celebrated as one of the greatest Irish writers of all time? Why is there no entry for “Lewis, C. S.” in the 1,472 pages of the supposedly definitive Dictionary of Irish Literature (1996)? The real issue is that Lewis does not fit—and, indeed, must be said partly to have chosen not to fit—the template of Irish identity that has dominated the late twentieth century. In some ways, Lewis represents precisely the forces and influences which the advocates of a stereotypical Irish literary identity wished to reject. If Dublin stood at the centre of the demands for Home Rule and the reassertion of Irish culture in the early twentieth century, Lewis’s home city of Belfast was the heart of opposition to any such developments.

  One of the reasons why Ireland has largely chosen to forget about Lewis is that he was the wrong kind of Irishman. In 1917, Lewis certainly saw himself as sympathetic to the “New Ireland School,” and was considering sending his poetry to Maunsel and Roberts,22 a Dublin publisher with strong links to Irish nationalism, having published the collected works of the great nationalist writer Patrick Pearse (1879–1916) that same year. Conceding that they were “only a second-rate house,” Lewis expressed the hope that this might mean they would take his submission seriously.23

  Yet a year later, things seemed very different to Lewis. Writing to his longtime friend Arthur Greeves, Lewis expressed his fear that the New Ireland School would end up as little more than “a sort of little by-way of the intellectual world, off the main track.” Lewis now recognised the importance of keeping “in the broad highway of thought,” writing for a broad readership rather than one narrowly defined by certain cultural and political agendas. To be published by Maunsel would, Lewis declared, be tantamount to associating himself with what was little more than a “cult.” His Irish identity, inspired by Ireland’s landscape rather than its political history, would find its expression in the literary mainstream, not one of its “side-tracks.”24 Lewis may have chosen to rise above the provinciality of Irish literature; he nevertheless remains one of its most luminous and famous representatives.

  Surrounded by Books: Hints of a Literary Vocation

  The physical landscape of Ireland was unquestionably one of the influences that shaped Lewis’s fertile imagination. Yet there is another source which did much to inspire his youthful outlook—literature itself. One of Lewis’s most persistent memories of his youth is that of a home packed with books. Albert Lewis might have worked as a police solicitor to earn his keep, but his heart lay in the reading of literature.

  In April 1905, the Lewis family moved to a new and more spacious home that had just been constructed on the outskirts of the city of Belfast—“Leeborough House” on the Circular Road in Strandtown, known more informally as “Little Lea” or “Leaboro.” The Lewis brothers were free to roam this vast house, and allowed their imaginations to transform it into mysterious kingdoms and strange lands. Both brothers inhabited imaginary worlds, and committed something of these to writing. Lewis wrote about talking animals in “Animal-Land,” while Warnie wrote about “India” (later combined into the equally imaginary land of Boxen).

  As Lewis later recalled, wherever he looked in this new house, he saw stacks, piles, and shelves of books.25 On many rainy days, he found solace and company in reading these works and roaming freely across imagined literary landscapes. The books so liberally scattered throughout the “New House” included works of romance and mythology, which opened the windows of Lewis’s young imaginatio
n. The physical landscape of County Down was seen through a literary lens, becoming a gateway to distant realms. Warren Lewis later reflected on the imaginative stimulus offered to him and his brother by wet weather and a sense of longing for something more satisfying.26 Might his brother’s imaginative wanderings have been prompted by his childhood “staring out to unattainable hills,” seen through rain and under grey skies?

  1.3 The Lewis family at Little Lea in 1905. Back Row (left to right): Agnes Lewis (aunt), two maids, Flora Lewis (mother). Front Row (left to right): Warnie, C. S. Lewis, Leonard Lewis (cousin), Eileen Lewis (cousin), and Albert Lewis (father), holding Nero (dog).

  Ireland is the “Emerald Isle” precisely on account of its high levels of rainfall and mist, which ensure moist soils and lush green grass. It was natural for Lewis to later transfer this sense of confinement by rain to four young children, trapped in an elderly professor’s house, unable to explore outside because of a “steady rain falling, so thick that when you looked out of the window you could see neither the mountains nor the woods nor even the stream in the garden.”27 Is the professor’s house in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe modelled on Leeborough?

  From Little Lea, the young Lewis could see the distant Castlereagh Hills, which seemed to speak to him of something of heartrending significance, lying tantalizingly beyond his reach. They became a symbol of liminality, of standing on the threshold of a new, deeper, and more satisfying way of thinking and living. An unutterable sense of intense longing arose within him as he contemplated them. He could not say exactly what it was that he longed for, merely that there was a sense of emptiness within him, which the mysterious hills seemed to heighten without satisfying. In The Pilgrim’s Regress (1933), these hills reappear as a symbol of the heart’s unknown desire. But if Lewis was standing on the threshold of something wondrous and enticing, how could he enter this mysterious realm? Who would open the door and allow him through? Perhaps unsurprisingly, the image of a door became increasingly significant to Lewis’s later reflections on the deeper questions of life.

  The low, green line of the Castlereagh Hills, though actually quite close, thus came to be a symbol of something distant and unattainable. These hills were, for Lewis, distant objects of desire, marking the end of his known world, from which the whisper of the haunting “horns of elfland” could be heard. “They taught me longing—Sehnsucht; made me for good or ill, and before I was six years old, a votary of the Blue Flower.”28

  We must linger over this statement. What does Lewis mean by Sehnsucht? The German word is rich with emotional and imaginative associations, famously described by the poet Matthew Arnold as a “wistful, soft, tearful longing.” And what of the “Blue Flower”? Leading German Romantic writers, such as Novalis (1772–1801) and Joseph von Eichendorff (1788–1857), used the image of a “Blue Flower” as a symbol of the wanderings and yearnings of the human soul, especially as this sense of longing is evoked—though not satisfied—by the natural world.

  Even at this early stage, then, Lewis was probing and questioning the limits of his world. What lay beyond its horizons? Yet Lewis could not answer the questions that these longings so provocatively raised in his youthful mind. To what did they point? Was there a doorway? And if so, where was it to be found? And what did it lead to? Finding answers to these questions would preoccupy Lewis for the next twenty-five years.

  Solitude: Warnie Goes to England

  Everything we know about Lewis around 1905 suggests a lonely, introverted boy with hardly any friends, who found pleasure and fulfilment in the solitary reading of books. Why solitary? Having secured a new house for his family, Albert Lewis now turned his attention to ensuring the future prospects of his sons. As a pillar of the Protestant establishment in Belfast, Albert Lewis took the view that the interests of his sons would be best advanced by sending the boys to boarding school in England. Albert’s brother William had already sent his son to an English school, seeing this as an acceptable route to social advancement. Albert decided to do the same, and took professional advice about which school would best suit his needs.

  The London educational agents Gabbitas & Thring had been founded in 1873 to recruit suitable schoolmasters for leading English schools and provide guidance for parents wanting to secure the best possible education for their children. Schoolmasters whom they helped to find suitable positions included such future stars—now, it must be said, not chiefly remembered for having ever been schoolmasters—as W. H. Auden, John Betjeman, Edward Elgar, Evelyn Waugh, and H. G. Wells. By 1923, when the firm celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of its founding, over 120,000 teaching vacancies had been negotiated and no fewer than 50,000 parents had sought their counsel on the best school for their children. This included Albert Lewis, who asked their advice on where to send his elder son, Warren.

  Their recommendation duly came through. It turned out to be stunningly bad advice. In May 1905, without making the more critical and thorough inquiries some would have expected of a man in his position, Albert Lewis packed the nine-year-old Warren off to Wynyard School in Watford, north of London. It was perhaps the first of many mistakes that Lewis’s father would make concerning his relationship with his sons.

  Jacks—as Lewis now preferred to be called—and his brother, Warnie, had lived together in Little Lea for only a month, sharing a “Little End Room” in the top floor of the rambling house as their haven. Now, they were separated. C. S. Lewis remained at home, and was taught privately by his mother and a governess, Annie Harper. But perhaps his best teachers were the burgeoning stacks of books, none of which were forbidden to him.

  For two years, the solitary Lewis roamed the large house’s long, creaking corridors and roomy attics, with vast quantities of books as his companions. Lewis’s inner world began to take shape. Where other boys of his age were playing games on the streets or in the countryside around Belfast, Lewis constructed, inhabited, and explored his own private worlds. He was forced to become a loner—something that unquestionably catalysed his imaginative life. In Warnie’s absence, he had nobody as a soul mate with whom he could share his dreams and longings. The school vacations became of supreme importance to him. They were when Warnie came home.

  First Encounters with Joy

  At some point around this time, Lewis’s already rich imaginative life took a new turn. Lewis later recalled three early experiences which he regarded as shaping one of his life’s chief concerns. The first of these took place when the fragrance of a “flowering currant bush” in the garden at Little Lea triggered a memory of his time in the “Old House”—Dundela Villas, which Albert Lewis had then rented from a relative.29 Lewis speaks of experiencing a transitory, delectable sense of desire, which overwhelmed him. Before he had worked out what was happening, the experience had passed, leaving him “longing for the longing that had just ceased.” It seemed to Lewis to be of enormous importance. “Everything else that had ever happened to me was insignificant in comparison.” But what did it mean?

  The second experience came when reading Beatrix Potter’s Squirrel Nutkin (1903). Though Lewis admired Potter’s books in general at this time, something about this work sparked an intense longing for something he clearly struggled to describe—“the Idea of Autumn.”30 Once more, Lewis experienced the same intoxicating sense of “intense desire.”

  The third came when he read Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s translation of a few lines from the Swedish poet Esaias Tegnér (1782–1846):31

  I heard a voice that cried,

  Balder the beautiful

  Is dead, is dead—

  Lewis found the impact of these words devastating. It was as if they opened a door that he did not know existed, allowing him to see a new realm beyond his own experience, which he longed to enter and possess. For a moment, nothing else seemed to matter. “I knew nothing of Balder,” he recalled, “but instantly I was uplifted into huge regions of northern sky, [and] I desired with almost sickening intensity something never to be describ
ed (except that it is cold, spacious, severe, pale, and remote).”32 Yet even before Lewis had realised what was happening to him, the experience passed, and left him longing to be able to reenter it.

  Looking back on these three experiences, Lewis understood that they could be seen as aspects or manifestations of the same thing: “an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction. I call it Joy.”33 The quest for that Joy would become a central theme of Lewis’s life and writing.

  So how are we to make sense of these experiences, which played such a significant role in Lewis’s development, especially the shaping of his “inner life”? Perhaps we can draw on the classic study The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), in which the Harvard psychologist William James (1842–1910) tried to make sense of the complex, powerful experiences that lay at the heart of the lives of so many religious thinkers. Drawing extensively on a wide range of published writings and personal testimonies, James identified four characteristic features of such experiences.34 In the first place, such experiences are “ineffable.” They defy expression, and cannot be described adequately in words.

  In the second place, James suggests that those who experience them achieve “insight into depths of truth unplumbed by the discursive intellect.” In other words, they are experienced as “illuminations, revelations, full of significance and importance.” They evoke an “enormous sense of inner authority and illumination,” transfiguring the understanding of those who experience them, often evoking a deep sense “of being revelations of new depths of truth.” These themes clearly underlie Lewis’s early desriptions of “Joy,” such as his statement that “everything else that had ever happened to me was insignificant in comparison.”

  Third, James goes on to emphasise that these experiences are transient; they “cannot be sustained for long.” Usually they last from a few seconds to just minutes, and their quality cannot be accurately remembered, though the experience is recognised if it recurs. “When faded, their quality can but imperfectly be reproduced in memory.” This aspect of James’s typology of religious experience is clearly reflected in Lewis’s prose.