C. S. Lewis – A Life Read online

  To some, such educational methods will seem archaic, even ridiculous. For many students, they would have resulted in humiliating failure and loss of confidence. Lewis, however, saw them as a challenge, causing him to set his sights higher and raise his game. It was precisely the educational method that was best adapted to his abilities and his needs. In one of his most famous sermons, “The Weight of Glory” (1941), Lewis asks us to imagine a young boy who learned Greek in order to experience the joy of studying Sophocles. Lewis was that young boy, and Kirkpatrick was his teacher. In February 1917, Lewis wrote with great excitement to his father, telling him that he had been able to read the first two hundred lines of Dante’s Inferno in the original Italian “with much success.”80

  Yet there were other outcomes of Kirkpatrick’s rationalism that Lewis was less keen to share with his father. One of them was his increasing commitment to atheism. Lewis was clear that his atheism was “fully formed” before he went to Bookham; Kirkpatrick’s contribution was to provide him with additional arguments for his position. In December 1914, Lewis was confirmed at St. Mark’s, Dundela, the church where he had been baptised in January 1899. His relationship with his father was so poor that he felt unable to tell him that he did not wish to go through with the service, having ceased to believe in God. Lewis later used Kirkpatrick as the model for the character of MacPhee, who appears in That Hideous Strength—an articulate, intelligent, and highly opinionated Scots-Irishman, with distinctly skeptical views on matters of religious belief.

  Was Lewis inclined to agree with Kirkpatrick on this matter? The only person to whom Lewis appears to have felt able to open his heart regarding his religious beliefs was Arthur Greeves, who had by now completely displaced Warnie as Lewis’s soul mate and confidant. In October 1916, Lewis provided Greeves with a full statement of his (lack of) religious beliefs. “I believe in no religion.” All religions, he wrote, are simply mythologies invented by human beings, usually in response to natural events or emotional needs. This, he declared, “is the recognised scientific account of the growth of religions.” Religion was irrelevant to questions of morality.81

  This letter stimulated an intense debate with Greeves, who was then both a committed and reflective Christian. They exchanged at least six letters on the topic in a period of less than a month, before declaring that their views were so far apart that there was little point in continuing the discussion. Lewis later recalled that he “bombarded [Greeves] with all the thin artillery of a seventeen year old rationalist”82—but to little effect. For Lewis, there was simply no good reason to believe in God. No intelligent person would want to believe in “a bogey who is prepared to torture me for ever and ever.”83 The rational case for religion was, in Lewis’s view, totally bankrupt.

  Yet Lewis found his imagination and reason pulling him in totally different directions. He continued to find himself experiencing deep feelings of desire, to which he had attached the name “Joy.” The most important of these took place early in March 1916, when he happened to pick up a copy of George MacDonald’s fantasy novel Phantastes.84 As he read, without realising it, Lewis was led across a frontier of the imagination. Everything was changed for him as a result of reading the book. He had discovered a “new quality,” a “bright shadow,” which seemed to him like a voice calling him from the ends of the earth. “That night my imagination was, in a certain sense, baptized.”85 A new dimension to his life began to emerge. “I had not the faintest notion what I had let myself in for by buying Phantastes.” It would be some time before Lewis made a connection between MacDonald’s Christianity and his works of imagination. Yet a seed had been planted, and it was only a matter of time before it began to germinate.

  The Threat of Conscription

  A somewhat darker shadow was falling on Lewis’s life, as it was on so many others. The ravages of the first year of war meant that the British army required more recruits—more than could be secured by voluntary enlistment. In May 1915, Lewis wrote to his father, outlining how he then saw his situation. He would just have to hope that the war would come to an end before he was eighteen, or that he would be able to volunteer before he was forcibly conscripted.86 As time passed, Lewis came to realise that he probably would be going to war. It was just a matter of time. The war showed no sign of an early victory, and Lewis’s eighteenth birthday was fast approaching.

  On 27 January 1916, the Military Service Act came into force, ending voluntary enlistment. All men aged between eighteen and forty-one were deemed to have enlisted with effect from 2 March 1916, and would be called up as needed. However, the provisions of the Act did not apply to Ireland, and it included an important exemption: all men of this age who were “resident in Britain only for the purpose of their education” were exempt from its provisions. Yet Lewis was aware that this exemption might only be temporary. His correspondence suggests he came to the conclusion that his military service was inevitable.

  Shortly after the March deadline, Lewis wrote to Greeves, borrowing Shakespeare’s imagery from the prologue to Henry V: “In November comes my 18th birthday, military age, and the ‘vasty fields’ of France, which I have no ambition to face.”87 In July, Lewis received a letter from Donald Hardman, who had shared a study with him at Malvern College. Hardman informed Lewis that he was to be conscripted at Christmas. What, he asked, was happening to Lewis? Lewis replied that he didn’t yet know. Yet in a letter to Kirkpatrick dated May 1916, Albert Lewis declared that Lewis had already made the decision to serve voluntarily—but wanted to try to get into Oxford first.88

  But events in Ireland opened up another possibility for Lewis. In April 1916, Ireland was convulsed with the news of the Easter Rising—an uprising in Dublin organised by the Military Council of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, aimed at ending British rule in Ireland and establishing an independent Irish Republic. The Easter Rising lasted from 24 to 30 April 1916. It was suppressed by the British army after seven days of fighting, and its leaders were court-martialled and executed. It was now clear that more troops would need to be sent to Ireland to maintain order. Might Lewis be sent to Ireland, rather than France, if he enlisted?

  Meanwhile, Kirkpatrick had been pondering Lewis’s future. Taking his role as Lewis’s mentor very seriously, Kirkpatrick reflected on what he had discovered about his charge’s character and ability. He wrote to Albert Lewis expressing his view that Lewis had been born with a “literary temperament,” and showed a remarkable maturity in his literary judgements. He was clearly destined for a significant career. However, lacking any serious competency in science or mathematics, he might have difficulty in getting into Sandhurst. Kirkpatrick’s personal opinion was that Lewis should take up a legal career. Yet Lewis had no interest in following his father’s footsteps. He had set his sights on Oxford. He would try for a place at New College, Oxford University, to study classics.

  Lewis’s Application to Oxford University

  It is not clear why Lewis chose Oxford University in general, or New College in particular. Neither Kirkpatrick nor any of Lewis’s family had connections with either the university or the college. Lewis’s concerns about conscription had eased by this stage, and no longer preoccupied him as they once had. At Kirkpatrick’s suggestion, Lewis had consulted a solicitor about the complexities of the Military Service Act. The solicitor had advised him to write to the chief recruiting officer for the local area, based in Guildford. On 1 December, he wrote to his father to tell him that he was formally exempt from the Act, provided he register immediately. Lewis wasted no time in complying with this requirement.

  On 4 December 1916, the matter of conscription having been resolved, Lewis travelled to Oxford to sit for the college entrance examinations. Confused by the directions he had been given, he took the wrong exit on leaving the railway station and ended up in the Oxford suburb of Botley. Only when he saw the open countryside ahead of him did he turn back and finally catch a glimpse of “the fabled cluster of spires and towers.”89 (The image of ta
king a wrong turn in life would remain with him.) He returned to the railway station and took a hansom cab to a guest house run by a Mrs. Etheridge at 1 Mansfield Road, just across the street from New College. There, he shared a sitting room with another hopeful candidate.

  The next morning, it snowed. The entrance examinations took place in the Hall of Oriel College. Even during daylight hours, Oriel Hall was so cold that Lewis and his fellow candidates wrapped up in greatcoats and scarves, some even wearing gloves as they wrote their answers to the exam questions. Lewis had been so engrossed in his preparations that he had forgotten to tell his father exactly when they were taking place. He found time to write to him halfway through the exams, telling him of his delight in Oxford: it “has surpassed my wildest dreams: I never saw anything so beautiful, especially on these frosty moonlight nights.”90 After completing the examinations, Lewis returned to Belfast on 11 December, telling his father that he believed he had failed to gain a place.

  He was right—but only partially so. He had failed to gain a place at New College. But his examination papers had impressed the dons at another college. Two days later, Lewis received a letter from Reginald Macan (1848–1941), the master of University College, informing him that, since New College had decided not to offer him a place, he had been elected to a scholarship at University College instead. Would he get in touch to confirm the arrangements? Lewis’s joy knew no bounds.

  Yet there was a cloud in the sky. Shortly afterwards, Macan wrote again to Lewis, making it clear that the changing situation concerning conscription would now make it a “moral impossibility” for any fit man over the age of eighteen to pursue studies at Oxford. Everyone in that category was now expected to enlist in the forces. Albert Lewis was anxious. If his younger son did not voluntarily enlist, he might be conscripted—and that would mean becoming a private soldier, rather than being an officer. What should they do?

  In January 1917, Lewis returned to Oxford to discuss the situation further with Macan. Afterwards, he wrote to his father. A solution to their difficulty seemed to have been found. Lewis’s best chance of securing an officer’s commission in the British army was to join the Oxford University Officers’ Training Corps and apply for a commission on the basis of this training.91 Officers’ Training Corps had been established at Oxford and other leading British universities in 1908 as a means of providing “a standardized degree of elementary military training with a view to providing candidates for commissions” in the British army. By joining the Officers’ Training Corps immediately on his arrival at Oxford, Lewis would be fast-tracked towards an officer’s commission.

  Yet only members of Oxford University could join the university’s Officers’ Training Corps. The admission process to Oxford University at this time involved two stages. First, a candidate had to secure a place at one of Oxford’s colleges. Lewis, having failed to gain a position at New College, had been awarded a scholarship to University College. This element of the process was thus completed. Yet admission to an Oxford college did not automatically mean acceptance by Oxford University. In order to ensure uniformly high standards across the colleges, the university authorities required new students to pass an additional examination—known as “Responsions”—in order to ensure they met its fundamental requirements.92 Unfortunately for Lewis, Responsions included a paper in basic mathematics—a subject in which he had virtually no talent.

  Once more, Albert Lewis decided to draw on Kirkpatrick’s experience. If Kirkpatrick could help Lewis learn ancient Greek, surely he could teach him elementary mathematics. So Lewis returned to Great Bookham to complete his education. On 20 March, Lewis went back to Oxford to sit for this additional examination in the expectation that his military career would begin shortly afterwards. He then received a letter from University College informing him he could begin his studies on 26 April. The door to Oxford had been opened. But only partially.

  Before Lewis would be able to complete his studies at Oxford, he would first have to go to war.

  CHAPTER 3

  * * *

  1917–1918

  The Vasty Fields of France: War

  The French emperor Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821) once quipped that the best way of making sense of people is to find out what was happening in the world when they were twenty years old. A few weeks before 29 November 1918—the day that Lewis turned twenty—the Great War finally came to an end. Many felt guilty for surviving while their comrades had fallen. Those who served in trench warfare were permanently marked by the violence, destruction, and horrors they had experienced. Lewis’s twentieth year was shaped by his firsthand experience of armed conflict. He arrived in the trenches near Arras in northwestern France on his nineteenth birthday, and on his twentieth was still recuperating from the war wounds he had suffered.

  The Curious Case of the Unimportant War

  If Napoleon was right, Lewis’s world of thought and experience would have been irreparably and irreversibly shaped by war, trauma, and loss. We might therefore expect Lewis’s inner being to be deeply moulded by the impact of conflict and close brushes with death. Yet Lewis himself tells us otherwise. His experience of war was, he informs us, “in a way unimportant.” He seemed to view his experience at English boarding schools as much more unpleasant than the time he spent in the trenches of France.93

  While Lewis served on the battlefields of France in 1917 and 1918, experiencing the horrors of modern warfare, Surprised by Joy makes only scant reference to it. Lewis clearly believed that his woes during his year at Malvern College were of greater importance than his entire wartime experience—and, even then, seems to prefer to concentrate his narrative on the books he read and people he met. The unspeakable suffering and devastation around him had been filtered out. It had, Lewis tells us, been more than adequately written about by other people; he had nothing to add to it.94 His voluminous later writings make little mention of the war.

  Some readers will feel there is a certain sense of imbalance and disproportion here. Why did Lewis spend three chapters of Surprised by Joy detailing his relatively minor woes at Malvern College and pay so little attention to the vastly more significant violence, trauma, and horror of the Great War? This sense of imbalance is only reinforced by a reading of Lewis’s works as a whole, in which the Great War is largely passed over—or, when mentioned, is treated as something that happened to someone else. It is as if Lewis was seeking to distance or dissociate himself from his memories of conflict. Why?

  The simplest explanation is also the most plausible: Lewis could not bear to remember the trauma of his wartime experiences, whose irrationality called into question whether there was any meaning in the universe at large or in Lewis’s personal existence in particular. The literature concerning the Great War and its aftermath emphasises the physical and psychological damage it wreaked on soldiers at the time, and on their return home. Many students returning to study at Oxford University after the war experienced considerable difficulty adjusting to normal life, leading to frequent nervous breakdowns. Lewis appears to have “partitioned” or “compartmentalised” his life as a means of retaining his sanity. The potentially devastating memories of his traumatic experiences were carefully controlled so that they had a minimal impact on other areas of his life. Literature—above all, poetry—was Lewis’s firewall, keeping the chaotic and meaningless external world at a safe distance, and shielding him from the existential devastation it wreaked on others.

  We can see this process in Surprised by Joy, where we find Lewis distancing himself from the prospect of war. His thoughts about the future possibility of the horrors of conflict seem to mirror his later attitudes towards the past actuality.

  I put the war on one side to a degree which some people will think shameful and some incredible. Others will call it a flight from reality. I maintain that it was rather a treaty with reality, the fixing of a frontier.95

  Lewis was prepared to allow his country to have his body—but not his mind. A border was fi
xed and patrolled in his mental world, which certain intrusive and disturbing thoughts were not permitted to cross. Lewis would not run away from reality. Instead, he would negotiate a “treaty” by which reality could be tamed, adapted, and constrained. It would be a “frontier” that certain thoughts would not be allowed to penetrate.

  This “treaty with reality” would play a critical role in Lewis’s development, and we shall have cause to consider it further in later chapters. Lewis’s mental map of reality had difficulty accommodating the trauma of the Great War. Like so many, he found the settled way of looking at the world, taken for granted by many in the Edwardian age, to have been shattered by the most brutal and devastating war yet known. Lewis’s immediate postwar years were dominated by a search for meaning—not simply in terms of finding personal fulfilment and stability, but in terms of making sense of both his inner and outer worlds in a way that satisified his restless and probing mind.

  Arrival at Oxford: April 1917

  To make sense of Lewis’s attitude towards the Great War, we must first explore how he went into battle. Having spent the first few months of 1917 at Great Bookham, trying (somewhat unsuccessfully, as it turned out) to master mathematics, Lewis went up to University College, Oxford, on 29 April. For the first time since the English Civil War, when Charles I had made his military headquarters in the city in 1643, Oxford had become a military camp. The University Parks were turned into a parade ground and training area for new recruits. Many of the younger dons and college servants had gone to war. Lectures, if given at all, were sparsely attended. The Oxford University Gazette, normally given over to announcements of lectures and University appointments, published depressingly long lists of the fallen. These black-bordered lists spoke ominously of the carnage of the conflict.