C. S. Lewis – A Life Read online

  Finally, James suggests that those who have had such an experience feel as if they have been “grasped and held by a superior power.” Such experiences are not created by active subjects; they come upon people, often with overwhelming power.

  Lewis’s eloquent descriptions of his experience of “Joy” clearly fit into James’s characterisation. Lewis’s experiences were perceived as deeply meaningful, throwing open the doors of another world, which then shut almost immediately, leaving him exhilarated at what had happened, yet longing to recover it. They are like momentary and transient epiphanies, when things suddenly seem to come acutely and sharply into focus, only for the light to fade and the vision to recede, leaving nothing but a memory and a longing.

  Lewis was left with a sense of loss, even of betrayal, in the aftermath of such experiences. Yet as frustrating and disconcerting as they may have been, they suggested to him that the visible world might be only a curtain that concealed vast, uncharted realms of mysterious oceans and islands. It was an idea that, once planted, never lost its imaginative appeal or its emotional power. Yet, as we shall see, Lewis would soon come to believe it was illusory, a childhood dream which the dawning of adult rationality exposed as a cruel delusion. Ideas of a transcendent realm or of a God might be “lies breathed through silver,”35 but they remained lies nevertheless.

  The Death of Flora Lewis

  Edward VII came to the English throne after the death of Victoria in 1901 and reigned until 1910. The Edwardian Age is now often seen as a golden period of long summer afternoons and elegant garden parties, an image which was shattered by the Great War of 1914–1918. While this highly romanticised view of the Edwardian Age largely reflects the postwar nostalgia of the 1920s, there is no doubt that many at the time saw it as a settled and secure age. There were troubling developments afoot—above all, the growing military and industrial power of Germany and the economic strength of the United States, which some realised posed significant threats to British imperial interests. Yet the dominant mood was that of an empire which was settled and strong, its trade routes protected by the greatest navy the world had ever known.

  This sense of stability is evident in Lewis’s early childhood. In May 1907, Lewis wrote to Warnie, telling him that it was nearly settled that they were going to spend part of their holidays in France. Going abroad was a significant departure for the Lewis family, who normally spent up to six weeks during the summer at northern Irish resorts such as Castlerock or Portrush. Their father, preoccupied with his legal practice, was often an intermittent presence on these occasions. As things turned out, he would not join them in France at all.

  1.4 Pension le Petit Vallon, Berneval-le-Grand, Pas-de-Calais, France. Postcard dating from around 1905.

  In the event, Lewis enjoyed an intimate and tranquil holiday with his brother and mother. On 20 August 1907, Flora Lewis took her two sons to the Pension le Petit Vallon, a family hotel in the small town of Berneval-le-Grand in Normandy, not far from Dieppe, where they would remain until 18 September. A picture postcard of the early 1900s perhaps helps us understand Flora’s choice: the reassuring words “English spoken” feature prominently above a photograph of Edwardian families relaxing happily on its grounds. Any hopes that Lewis had of learning some French were dashed when he discovered that all the other guests were English.

  It was to be an idyllic summer of the late Edwardian period, with no hints of the horrors to come. When hospitalised in France during the Great War a mere eighteen miles (29 kilometres) east of Berneval-le-Grand, Lewis found himself wistfully recalling those precious, lost golden days.36 Nobody had foreseen the political possibility of such a war, nor the destruction it would wreak—just as nobody in the Lewis family could have known that this would be the last holiday they would spend together. A year later, Flora Lewis was dead.

  Early in 1908, it became clear that Flora was seriously ill. She had developed abdominal cancer. Albert Lewis asked his father, Richard, who had been living in Little Lea for some months, to move out. They needed the space for the nurses who would attend Flora. It was too much for Richard Lewis. He suffered a stroke in late March, and died the following month.

  When it became clear that Flora was in terminal decline, Warnie was summoned home from school in England to be with his mother in her final weeks. Their mother’s illness brought the Lewis brothers even closer together. One of the most touching photographs of this period shows Warnie and C. S. Lewis standing by their bicycles, outside Glenmachan House, close to Little Lea, early in August 1908. Lewis’s world was about to change, drastically and irreversibly.

  Flora died in her bed at home on 23 August 1908—Albert Lewis’s forty-fifth birthday. The somewhat funereal quotation for that day on her bedroom calendar was from Shakespeare’s King Lear: “Men must endure their going hence.” For the rest of Albert Lewis’s life, Warnie later discovered, the calendar remained open at that page.37

  1.5 Lewis and Warnie with their bicycles in front of the Ewart family home, Glenmachan House, in August 1908.

  Following the custom of the day, Lewis was obliged to view the dead body of his mother lying in an open coffin, the gruesome marks of her illness all too visible. It was a traumatic experience for him. “With my mother’s death all settled happiness, all that was tranquil and reliable, disappeared from my life.”38

  In The Magician’s Nephew, Digory Kirke’s mother is lovingly described on her deathbed, in terms that seem to echo Lewis’s haunting memories of Flora: “There she lay, as he had seen her lie so many other times, propped up on the pillows, with a thin, pale face that would make you cry to look at.”39 There is little doubt that this passage recalls Lewis’s own distress at the death of his mother, especially the sight of her emaciated body in an open coffin. In allowing Digory’s mother to be cured of her terminal illness by the magic apple from Narnia, Lewis seems to be healing his own deep emotional wounds with an imaginative balm, trying to deal with what really happened by imagining what might have happened.

  While Lewis was clearly distressed at his mother’s death, his memories of this dark period often focus more on its broader implications for his family. As Albert Lewis tried to come to terms with his wife’s illness, he seems to have lost an awareness of the deeper needs of his sons. C. S. Lewis depicts this period as heralding the end of his family life, as the seeds of alienation were sown. Having lost his wife, Albert Lewis was in danger of losing his sons as well.40 Two weeks after Flora’s death, Albert’s elder brother, Joseph, died. The Lewis family, it seemed, was in crisis. The father and his two sons were on their own. “It was sea and islands now; the great continent had sunk like Atlantis.”41

  This could have been a time for the rebuilding of paternal affection and rekindling of filial devotion. Nothing of the sort happened. That Albert’s judgement failed him at this critical time is made abundantly clear in his decision concerning the future of his sons at this crisis in their young lives. A mere two weeks after the traumatic death of his mother, C. S. Lewis found himself standing on the Belfast quayside with Warnie, preparing to board the overnight steamer to the Lancashire port of Fleetwood. An emotionally unintelligent father bade his emotionally neglected sons an emotionally inadequate farewell. Everything that gave the young Lewis his security and identity seemed to be vanishing around him. Lewis was being sent away from Ireland—from his home and from his books—to a strange place where he would live among strangers, with his brother, Warnie, as his only companion. He was being sent to Wynyard School—the “Belsen” of Surprised by Joy.

  CHAPTER 2

  * * *

  1908–1917

  The Ugly Country of England: Schooldays

  In 1962, Francine Smithline—a schoolgirl from New York—wrote to C. S. Lewis, telling him how much she had enjoyed his Narnia books and asking him for information about his own schooldays. In reply, Lewis informed her that he had attended three boarding schools, “of which two were very horrid.”42 In fact, Lewis continues, he “never hat
ed anything as much, not even the front line trenches in World War I.” Even the most casual reader of Surprised by Joy is struck by both the vehemence of Lewis’s hatred for the schools he attended in England and the implausibility that they were worse than the death-laden trenches of the Great War.

  One of the significant sources of tension between C. S. Lewis and his brother in the late 1950s was Warnie’s belief that Lewis had significantly misrepresented his time at Malvern College in Surprised by Joy (1955). George Sayer (1914–2005), a close friend who penned one of the most revealing and perceptive biographies of Lewis, recalls Lewis admitting later in life that his account of his time at Malvern was “lies,” reflecting the complex interaction of two strands of his identity at that time.43 Sayer’s recollection leaves readers of Surprised by Joy wondering about both the extent and motivation of Lewis’s reconstruction of his past.

  Perhaps Lewis’s judgement here may have been clouded by his overwhelmingly negative initial impressions of England, which spilled over into his educational experience. As he later remarked, he “conceived a hatred for England which took many years to heal.”44 His aversion to English schools possibly reflects a deeper cultural dislike of England itself at this time, evident in some of his correspondence. In June 1914, for example, Lewis complained about being “cooped up in this hot, ugly country of England” when he could have been roaming the cool, lush countryside of County Down.45

  Yet there is clearly something deeper and more visceral here. Lewis simply does not seem to have fitted in to the public school culture of the Edwardian Age. What others saw as a necessary, if occasionally distasteful, preparation for the rigours of life in the real world was dismissed and vilified by Lewis as a “concentration camp.” What his father hoped would make him into a successful citizen came close to breaking him instead.

  Lewis’s experience of British schools, following the death of his mother, can be summarised as follows:

  Wynyard School, Watford (“Belsen”): September 1908–June 1910

  Campbell College, Belfast: September–December 1910

  Cherbourg School, Malvern (“Chartres”): January 1911–June 1913

  Malvern College (“Wyvern”): September 1913–June 1914

  Private tuition at Great Bookham: September 1914–June 1917

  The three English schools to which Lewis took exception are presumably those he chose to identify by pseudonyms: Wynyard School, Cherbourg School, and Malvern College. As we shall see, his memories of his time at Great Bookham were much more positive, as was his view of its impact on the shaping of his mind.

  Wynyard School, Watford: 1908–1910

  Lewis’s first educational experience in England was at Wynyard School, a converted pair of dreary yellow-brick houses on Langley Road, Watford. This small private boarding school had been established by Robert “Oldie” Capron in 1881, and appears to have enjoyed some small success in its early years. By the time Lewis arrived, however, it had fallen on hard times, having only about eight or nine boarders, and about the same number of “day-boys.” His brother had already studied there for two years, and had adjusted to its brutal regime with relative ease. Lewis, with little experience of the world outside the gentle cocoon of Little Lea, was shocked by Capron’s brutality, and later dubbed the school “Belsen” after the infamous Nazi concentration camp.

  While initially hoping that things would work out well, Lewis rapidly came to hate Wynyard, and regarded his period there as an almost total waste of time. Warnie left Wynyard in the summer of 1909 and went on to Malvern College, leaving his younger brother alone to cope with an institution that was clearly in terminal decline. Lewis recalled his education at Wynyard as the forced feeding and rote learning of “a jungle of dates, battles, exports, imports and the like, forgotten as soon as learned and perfectly useless had they been remembered.”46 Warnie concurred in this judgement: “I cannot remember one single piece of instruction that was imparted to me at Wynyard.”47 Nor was there any library by which Lewis might nourish the imaginative side of his life. In the end, the school was closed down in the summer of 1910 when Capron was finally certified as being insane.

  Albert Lewis was now forced to review his arrangements for his younger son’s education. While Warnie went off to resume his education at Malvern College, Lewis was sent to Campbell College, a boarding school in the city of Belfast, only a mile from Little Lea. As Lewis later remarked, Campbell had been founded to allow “Ulster boys all the advantages of a public-school education without the trouble of crossing the Irish Sea.”48 It is not clear whether his father intended this to be a permanent arrangement. In the event, Lewis developed a serious respiratory illness while at Campbell, and his father reluctantly withdrew him. It was not an unhappy time for Lewis. Indeed, Lewis seems to have wished that the arrangement could have been continued. His father, however, had other plans. Unfortunately, they turned out not to be very good.

  Cherbourg School, Malvern: 1911–1913

  After further consultation with Gabbitas & Thring, Lewis was sent to Cherbourg School (“Chartres” in Surprised by Joy) in the English Victorian spa town of Great Malvern.49 During the nineteenth century, Malvern became popular as a hydrotherapy spa on account of its spring waters. As spa tourism declined towards the end of the century, many former hotels and villas were converted to small boarding schools, such as Cherbourg. This small preparatory school, which had about twenty boys between the ages of eight and twelve during Lewis’s time, was located next to Malvern College, where Warnie was already ensconced as a student. The two brothers would at least be able to see each other once more.

  The most important outcome of Lewis’s time at Cherbourg was that he won a scholarship to Malvern College. Yet Lewis recalls a number of developments in his inner life to which his schooling at Cherbourg was essentially a backdrop, rather than a cause or stimulus. One of the most important was his discovery of what he termed “Northernness,” which took place “fairly early” during his time at Cherbourg. Lewis regarded this discovery as utterly and gloriously transformative, comparable to a silent and barren Arctic icescape turning into “a landscape of grass and primroses and orchards in bloom, deafened with bird songs and astir with running water.”50

  Lewis’s recollections of this development are as imaginatively precise as they are chronologically vague. “I can lay my hand on the very moment; there is hardly any fact I know so well, though I cannot date it.”51 The stimulus was a “literary periodical” which had been left lying around in the schoolroom. This can be identified as the Christmas edition of The Bookman, published in December 1911. This magazine included a coloured supplement reproducing some of Arthur Rackham’s suite of thirty illustrations to an English translation by Margaret Armour of the libretto of Richard Wagner’s operas Siegfried and The Twilight of the Gods, which had been published earlier that year.52

  Rackham’s highly evocative illustrations proved to be a powerful imaginative stimulus to Lewis, causing him to be overwhelmed by an experience of desire. He was engulfed by “pure ‘Northernness’”—by “a vision of huge, clear spaces hanging above the Atlantic in the endless twilight of Northern summer.”53 Lewis was thrilled to be able to experience again something that he had believed he had permanently lost. This was no “wish fulfilment and fantasy”;54 this was a vision of standing on the threshold of another world, and peering within. Hoping to recapture something of this sense of wonder, Lewis indulged his growing passion in Wagner, spending his pocket money on recordings of Wagner’s operas, and even managing to buy a copy of the original text from which the Rackham illustrations had been extracted.

  Although Lewis’s letters of his Malvern period probably conceal as much as they reveal, they nevertheless hint of some of the themes that would recur throughout his career. One of those is Lewis’s sense of being an Irishman in exile in a strange land. Lewis had not simply lost his paradise; he had been expelled from his Eden. Lewis might live in England; he did not, however, see himself as En
glish. Even in his final days at Cherbourg, Lewis had become increasingly aware of having been “born in a race rich in literary feeling and mastery of their own tongue.”55 In the 1930s, Lewis found the physical geography of his native Ireland to be a stimulus to his own literary imagination, and that of others—such as the poet Edmund Spenser. The seeds of this development can be seen in his letters home in 1913.

  A significant intellectual development which Lewis attributes to this period in his life was his explicit loss of any remnants of a Christian faith. Lewis’s account of this final erosion of faith in Surprised by Joy is less satisfactory than one might like, particularly given the importance of faith in his later life. While unable to give “an accurate chronology” of his “slow apostasy,” Lewis nevertheless identifies a number of factors that moved him in that direction.

  Perhaps the most important of these, as judged by its lingering presence in his subsequent writings, was raised by his reading of Virgil and other classical authors. Lewis noted that their religious ideas were treated by both scholars and teachers as “sheer illusion.” So what of today’s religious ideas? Were they not simply modern illusions, the contemporary counterpart to their ancient forebears? Lewis came to the view that religion, though “utterly false,” was a natural development, “a kind of endemic nonsense into which humanity tended to blunder.”56 Christianity was just one of a thousand religions, all claiming to be true. So why should he believe this one to be right, and the others wrong?