The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings (7 page)

Lewis enjoyed the constant companionship of his brother, and when Warnie went to school in 1905, the two kept up a correspondence. Lewis also wrote about Warnie in his diary: “Hoora!! Warnie comes home this morning. I am lying in bed waiting for him and thinking of him, before I know where I am I hear his boots pounding on the stairs, he comes into the room, we shake hands and begin to talk … Well I was glad to have him but of course we had our rows afterwards…”

This loving companionship would prosper, despite separations and occasional rows, for the rest of Lewis’s life. Three years older than his brother, heavier, and more earthbound in his hobbies and interests, Warnie comes across in letters and diaries—his own as well as his brother’s—as a gentle man forever devoted to Lewis (though sometimes exasperated by him), with a character more gracious to others and less assertive of his own interests than his famous sibling possessed. John Wain, not the most tender-minded of Inklings, described Warnie as “the most courteous [man] I have ever met—and not with mere politeness, but with a genial, self-forgetful considerateness that was as instinctive to him as breathing.” Warnie would become an active Inkling in his own right, the author of several books on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French history, a dedicated diarist, a career military officer, and a chronic alcoholic. For now, it is enough to think of him as Lewis’s closest companion, and his first collaborator in literary pursuits.

*   *   *

Lewis’s boyhood reading early coalesced around fantasy literature, with its fabulous lands, mutations of time and space, and metaphysical conceits, along with a secondary concentration in sentimental historical fiction. By the age of twelve, he had scouted Edith Nesbit, Arthur Conan Doyle, Mark Twain, F. Anstey, H. Rider Haggard, and H. G. Wells, along with Henryk Sienkiewicz and Lewis Wallace; but he also swallowed large doses of poetry, especially by Longfellow and Milton. Intensive, at times compulsive, reading became for him a lifelong habit. By his late teens he was extraordinarily well versed in classical literature and English, so much so that one of his teachers, William T. Kirkpatrick, indicated that “he has read more classics in the time than any boy I ever had, and that too, very carefully and exactly.” Lewis was already acquiring the skill and taste to claim, one day, the mantle of twentieth-century heir to Samuel Johnson, the most widely read man in eighteenth-century England. To generations of students, astonished by his prodigious literary memory, he would give this simple counsel: “The great thing is to be always reading but never to get bored—treat it not like work, more as a vice!”

Lewis’s early reading delivered more than excitement, knowledge, or even deepening analytic and imaginative skills. On rare occasions, an image, a tone, a rhythm, an unexpected juxtaposition, would lift him clean out of himself, out of Little Lea, Belfast, and Boxen, translating him to the threshold of a new state of being. He called this state “Joy” and identified it with the German
Sehnsucht
: the infinitely desirable, sweetly wounding, ungraspable and unforgettable, the apotheosis of longing itself: “an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction.” Joy would become for Lewis a siren, a mirage, a lodestone, a signpost, and finally, a way to God. It came in the form of a series of shocks or epiphanies, fleeting in duration but marking Lewis forever. He first experienced it on a spring day when, standing by a flowering currant bush, he was swept up in “a memory of a memory” of Warnie carrying his miniature garden in a biscuit tin into the nursery. The recollection flooded him with a sensation he could only compare to “Milton’s ‘enormous bliss of Eden.’”

Beatrix Potter’s
The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin
administered the next shock: “It troubled me with what I can only describe as the Idea of Autumn.” Was it a sense of things passing, even passing away, of waning sunlight, cooling air, leaves erupting in color before crumpling to the ground? Lewis doesn’t say; but it is noteworthy that the minimal plot involves Squirrel Nutkin challenging Old Owl with a series of riddles, all left unsolved, evoking the mystery of existence, felt most keenly as dark and cold usurp sun and light.

The third shock came while thumbing through a volume of Longfellow, when Lewis stumbled upon the opening lines of “Tegn
é
r’s Drapa”: “I heard a voice that cried, / Balder the Beautiful / Is dead, is dead!” and immediately found himself immersed in “Northernness,” a sensation “cold, spacious, severe, pale, and remote”—spring had given way to Nutkin’s autumn, and autumn to winter as the season of epiphany. Balder is, of course, a dying-and-rising god (an idea Lewis encountered in Frazer’s
The Golden Bough
), a mythic anticipation of Christ. To have his child’s heart stirred by Balder’s death may be, then, an anticipation of his later Christian faith; in any event, it shows Lewis’s critical perspicacity at a precocious age, selecting deeply evocative lines from a sometimes thumpingly overblown Norse-inspired cycle of poems (“The Saga of King Olaf,” which initially attracted Lewis to Longfellow, begins “I am the God Thor, / I am the War God, / I am the Thunderer! / Here in my Northland, / My fastness and fortress, / Reign I forever!”).

Like the Romantic poets, Lewis sensed the numinous in words that pointed to a realm beyond, to empty sky, open landscapes, things passing, things beyond reach, dim foreshadowings of a God who is wholly Other. That the young Lewis would be so stirred by fall and winter, by the advent of cold and dark; by the death of beauty, by death itself, speaks to his essential Romanticism. Each of the epiphanies he experienced contained within it, as part of its evanescent loveliness, a memento mori: the death of Balder; the near death of Squirrel Nutkin, whom Old Owl captures and almost skins alive; and, most poignantly, the death of the happy early childhood of Warnie and himself, builder and beholder of the miniature Eden. Underlying all was the one great death: that of his mother.

The Banks of the Styx

Tolkien, after the death of his mother, found love and a home through the help of Father Francis. Lewis suffered the opposite fate. After his mother’s death, he was exiled from home, sent abroad by his father to the first of a succession of boarding schools, each disastrous in its own incomparable way. This may strike the modern reader as needlessly cruel; but at the time, for families like the Lewises and Hamiltons, boarding school seemed like the normal, obvious, and essential route to adult achievement for an Anglo-Irish boy whose prospects at home were far from secure. So off Lewis went, trussed in an Eton collar, knickerbockers, boots, and bowler, via four-wheeler and ship on September 18, 1908—less than four weeks after his mother’s death—his brother alongside, to Watford, Hertfordshire, in England, to enroll in Wynyard School, where Warnie was already a pupil.

England, at first glance, looked like “the banks of Styx,” an apt introduction to the regions of hell Lewis would soon traverse. His account of his two years there, and his subsequent stay at three other schools, occupies a large, perhaps disproportionate, chunk of his autobiography, about half of the whole, and proves a formidable obstacle to readers, especially those from foreign lands, not as entranced as British males of Lewis’s generation by the minutiae of public school existence. Nonetheless, his vivid description of the Grand Guignol he witnessed, which ranged from cruelty to sexual exploitation to outright madness, offers both literary and sensationalistic compensation and constitutes a fierce indictment of a pedagogical system that has now largely vanished.

Each school offered its own variety of moral or mental disarray. Wynyard, called Belsen (after the concentration camp) in
Surprised by Joy
, harbored a headmaster, Robert Capron (“Oldie”), who beat his charges mercilessly. A High Court action for abuse, taken by one of the boy’s parents, precipitated the school’s decline; by the time Jack arrived, Capron had been declared insane, but the school continued to operate. “I think I shall like this place,” Jack wrote to his father, “Misis Capron and the Miss Caprons are very nice and I think I will be able to get on with Mr. Capron though to tell the truth he is rather eccentric.” Ten days later he wrote, “My dear Papy … Please may we not leave on Saturday? We simply
cannot
wait in this hole till the end of term.” Albert’s answer was not encouraging: “All schools—whether for boys or the larger school of life for men—press hardly and sorely at times. Otherwise they would not be schools. But I am sure you will face the good and the bad like a brave Christian boy, for dear, dear, Mammy’s sake.”

Little in the way of real education went on at Wynyard: for the most part it was endless sums and arbitrary floggings. Capron did know how to teach geometry, thus giving Jack his first systematic introduction to critical thinking and in so doing creating an association between success in logical argument and belligerence in rhetorical style. Lewis would have to learn, by painful self-correction, how to temper his zeal for good argument with humor and charity.

It was also at Wynyard that Lewis first took Christianity seriously. The school’s Anglo-Catholic style deeply offended his Ulster Protestant sensibilities; perhaps otherwise it would not have caught his attention. “I do not like church here at all because it is so frightfully high church that it might as well be Roman Catholic,” he told his father in October 1908. Some months later, he recorded in his diary, “In this abominable place of Romish hypocrites and English liars, the people cross themselves, bow to the Lord’s Table (which they have the vanity to call an altar), and pray to the Virgin.” Eventually, though, he overcame his distaste enough to appreciate hearing “the doctrines of Christianity (as distinct from general ‘uplift’) taught by men who obviously believed them.” He began to think about hell, examine his conscience, pray earnestly, and study the Bible.

Here, too, Lewis developed his taste for the works of Rider Haggard and Wells, opening vistas both mythopoeic and extraterrestrial. These two authors, he emphasized later on, offered him “coarser” pleasures than those he associated with Joy. His hunger for their works was “ravenous, like a lust.” There was in it nothing spiritual; it was, he came to believe, an expression of deep-seated psychological forces, and he saw his adult science fantasies as an “exorcism” rather than a maturing of this passion. Nevertheless, he acknowledged Haggard’s influence and called his talent “the text-book case of the mythopoeic gift pure and simple.” He and Warnie also made plans to create a book club, fed by subscriptions to
Pearson’s Magazine
,
The Strand
, and
The Captain
, which would mean an unending stream of boys’ adventures stories, including those of Kipling, Chesterton, and Conan Doyle.

Conditions at Wynyard grew worse by fits and starts. By September 29, 1908, Warnie wrote to his father, “You have never refused me anything Papy and I know you won’t refuse me this—that I may leave Wynyard. Jack wants to too.” But on November 22, Lewis wrote, “I find school very nice but it is frightfully monotenis,” and a week later: “as to what you say about leaving I cannot know quite what to say, Warnie does not particularly want to, he says it look like being beaten in the fight”; and “in spite of all that has happened I like Mr. Capron very much indeed.” No doubt there is an element of bravado in these statements. In February 1909, Lewis reported that he had been shut out of a secret society headed by a certain “Squivy,” but that Squivy’s throne was tottering, and Capron’s pupils were fleeing one by one. Warnie abandoned ship in April, morally spent and under an indictment for incorrigible laziness, leaving Lewis to hang on with the handful of remaining pupils. In June 1910, Wynyard finally collapsed under its headmaster’s lunacies and was closed by High Court order. After a brief clerical career, cut short when he persisted in flogging the choirboys and church wardens, Capron was committed to an asylum in Kent, where he died of pneumonia in 1911.

Lewis passed the summer of 1910 with Albert and Warnie (by now a student at Malvern College, England). He then enrolled at Campbell College, a boarding school in Belfast. While there he became a devotee of Matthew Arnold’s “grave melancholy,” savoring his
Sohrab and Rustum
, an epic poem derived from the Persian
Shanameh
, in which the legendary hero Rustum inadvertently kills his son Sohrab in single combat. Looking back, Lewis prized this literary discovery as a foretaste of the
Iliad
; others will note that
Sohrab and Rustum
is the tale of a powerful father’s tragic misunderstanding of his chivalrous son.

Having developed a bad cough while at Campbell, Lewis crossed the Irish Sea again in January 1911, this time to attend Cherbourg Preparatory School (“Chartres” of
Surprised by Joy
) near Warnie’s college in Malvern, Worcestershire, a health resort with curative waters. Cherbourg proved momentous. Here he advanced in Latin and in English literature, here he came to love the miniature beauties of the English countryside—and here he abandoned Christianity. He himself evinced many causes for his loss of faith. One was the influence of that gentle Cherbourg House matron, the beloved G. E. Cowie (“Miss C.” in
Surprised by Joy
), who had a taste for occultism of the Theosophical/Rosicrucian stripe and awakened a like hunger in Lewis. But was the culprit really Miss Cowie? The real tempter, Lewis suggests in his autobiography, was the Devil, who made use of Miss Cowie’s innocent guile. Let us note in passing that this is one of the difficulties and pleasures of studying the Inklings; Christians all, they offer, along with expected twentieth-century psychosocial explanations for behavior, unexpected spiritual ones: as the biographer can neither peer into his subject’s unconscious nor interview the Enemy (as Lewis terms him), both forms of explanation must be taken, at least provisionally, on faith—or, at a minimum, faithfully recorded.

Lewis cites other reasons, too, for his newborn skepticism. One was the onslaught of scruples, a problem well attested in the spiritual life, especially among the young, where religious observances must be done perfectly and achieve a certain result. However the Enemy may turn them to his advantage, scruples can be understood psychologically as a temporary obsessive-compulsive disorder triggered by the turmoil of adolescent sexual development. In Lewis’s case, during the period of his religious awakening at Wynyard, he had come to demand of his nightly prayers a “realization,” “a certain vividness of the imagination and the affections”—a sure recipe for sleeplessness and misery, and, as Lewis says, the road to madness. Loss of faith came as blessed relief.