The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings (8 page)

Another source for Lewis’s religious doubt was his conviction that “the universe was, in the main, a rather regrettable institution.” He now harbored an inveterate pessimism born of his mother’s death, his father’s many dire announcements of impending financial ruin, his own physical clumsiness, and also, he later speculated, reading Wells’s tales of cosmic coldness and menace. Could there be anything more terrifying to an insect-phobic adolescent (as a child Lewis had been terrified by a stag beetle in a pop-up picture book) than the inexorable invasion of insectoid Martians in
War of the Worlds
, anything more bitter than the final desolation of the earth seen on a far-future beach in
The Time Machine
? Some of his skepticism may have been no more than an expression of adolescent angst; a sense of universal meaninglessness is not only common among adolescents and young adults today, but has been always a characteristic of that stage of life, at least in literate cultures, as one may glean from
Al-munqidh min al-dal
ā
l
(
The Deliverer from Error
), al-Ghaz
ā
l
ī
’s medieval predecessor to
Surprised by Joy
.

Lewis’s breach with Christianity was, by his own telling, the greatest but not the only disaster that befell him at Cherbourg. He became not only an apostate but a “fop, a cad, and a snob.” The influence of a glamorous young master (Percy Gerald Kelsall Harris, nicknamed “Pogo”) played a part; but Lewis, characteristically, later blamed not the master but the “withdrawal of myself from Divine protection.” The Devil had his due, and Lewis felt, for the first time in his recorded memories, lust (for the school’s dancing mistress) and surrendered to an unspecified “sexual temptation,” probably masturbation. Yet this fall from innocence was counterweighed, in the balance of the soul, by the rediscovery of Joy. It came about in a schoolroom at Cherbourg, while leafing through a periodical: he came across the words
“Siegfried and the Twilight of the Gods”
and, beneath it, an Arthur Rackham illustration from the volume of that name. “Pure ‘Northernness’ engulfed me,” and with it the memory, “almost like heartbreak,” of Joy. It was a spiritual earthquake; he was a dying man brought back to life. Insatiable thirst for Wagner’s music, for Wagnerian landscapes, for books about Norse mythology consumed him. Asgard, the Aesir, the Edda became his gods, with a quasi-religious adoration. His life split in two. On one track he studied, ate, enjoyed erotic fantasies and did what was expected of him; on the other, he sought for Joy. This was his “secret, imaginative” life; this was the life that won his heart, until he lost it to Christ. The quotidian and the joyous. These two lives, he wrote later, had “nothing to do with each other: oil and vinegar, a river running beside a canal, Jekyll and Hyde.”

Cherbourg was followed by a year at Malvern College (Wyvern of
Surprised by Joy
), a school Lewis despised for its odious hierarchy of Masters, Bloods (the ruling class), Tarts (catamites for the ruling class), Punts (outsiders), and proletariat, and for the way in which the incessant demands of this system—which involved “fagging,” that curious English custom, faintly echoed in American fraternity life, in which young boys must do the bidding, no matter how reckless, of elder pupils or suffer brutal retaliation—sapped his energies and will. He told his father that “all the prefects detest me and lose no opportunity of venting their spite. Today, for not being able to find a cap which one gentleman wanted, I have been sentenced to clean his boots every day after breakfast for a week … When I asked if I might clean them in the evening … I received a refusal, strengthened by being kicked downstairs.” He had some insight, at least in retrospect, into what made him so unpopular a New Boy: “I was big for my age, a great lout of a boy … I was also useless at games. Worst of all, there was my face. I am the kind of person who gets told, ‘And take that look off your face too.’”

After attending a House Supper with Jack at Malvern, Warnie’s chief impression was his brother’s “gloom and boredom.” It was a great disappointment to Warnie, who loved Malvern and had left the school for a military career reluctantly, after an embarrassing incident in which he was caught smoking: “I had an idea that Malvern would weave its influence round Jacks as it did around me, and give him four happy years and memories and friendships which he would carry with him to the grave.” On reading
Surprised by Joy
, Warnie could only say that “I find it very difficult to believe in the Malvern that he portrays. In July 1913 I had been on more or less close terms with all the brutes of prefects whom he describes, and I found them (with one exception) very pleasant fellows.” To be just, there were happy times for Lewis at Malvern, too; but mostly he escaped into his intellect, looking down upon the vulgar Bloods with withering scorn (unspoken; he was a clever lad), and at the same time climbing the ladder of literature, savoring Horace, Virgil, and Euripides under the aegis of the sublimely courteous classics master Harry Wakelyn Smith (“Smugy,” pronounced “Smewgy”), from whom he learned to study a poem with a scholar’s accuracy and recite it with a lover’s zeal. He cherished blissful interludes with Milton and Yeats in the sanctuary of the school library (where boys were “unfaggable”), discovered Celtic mythology, and wrote a tragedy, “Norse in subject and Greek in form,” called
Loki Bound
, in which the title character, a stand-in for himself, opposes both Odin, creator of a meaningless world, and Thor, who rules, like the Bloods, through tradition and violence. “Why should creatures have the burden of existence forced on them without their consent?” Lewis/Loki demanded to know of God, while with adolescent indignation he shook his fist at God—for not existing.

Wynyard, Cherbourg, Malvern: three circles of Hell. Where next? The future must have looked black to Lewis, now fifteen, an age when life blackens for so many. Nightly toothaches and a daily grind of school work, arbitrary errands, and obligatory clubs had brought him to the end of his rope, “dog-tired, cab-horse tired, tired (almost) like a child in a factory.” “Please take me out of this as soon as possible,” he wrote to his father. He even threatened to shoot himself. Happily, this time his father listened. Instead of descending into the seventh circle of suicides or blasphemers, Lewis found himself rescued by two very different but complementary figures: his “First Friend” and his greatest teacher. It was the annus mirabilis of 1914—the liberation of Jack—even while the troubles were escalating in Ireland, and Britain was on the verge of its most horrific war.

The First Friend

The friend was Arthur Greeves (1895–1966), who lived just across the road from Little Lea. Arthur was the youngest of five children. His father, Joseph Malcomson Greeves, was the patriarch of one of the great linen industry families of Belfast. Quaker by birth, Joseph had joined the Plymouth Brethren and ruled his household with an iron hand. His Brooklyn-born wife, Mary, was, at least in the opinion of the Lewis brothers, a silly goose who doted on her youngest; after an early misdiagnosis of heart trouble, Arthur lived as a semi-invalid, cosseted by the mother and preached at by the father.

The Greeves and Lewis families met often, and Arthur made several overtures of friendship to Lewis and Warnie. Each time, he had been rebuffed. But now, at the end of the Easter holidays leading up to his last term at Malvern, upon learning that Arthur was ill and requesting a visit, Lewis decided to stop by. The patient was propped up in bed, with a copy of
Myths of the Norsemen
nearby. A letter of introduction from Siegfried himself couldn’t have been more effective. Instantly, lifelong friendship blossomed, as the two boys discovered that each loved Norse myth (“‘Do
you
like that?’ said I. ‘Do
you
like that?’ said he”) and, yet more important, that each had encountered in it the same haunting, bittersweet frisson of Joy. Lewis, spreading his thanks over years, made Greeves the recipient of his first splendid cascade of letter writing: a letter a week for years, each epistle abloom with ideas, abristle with opinions, alight with portraits of people, places, and things that caught his eye.

Until Albert died, the friendship resided as much in letters as in visits. When Lewis was at home, he felt obliged to spend time with his father rather than indulge his preference to be with Arthur at Bernagh (the Greeveses’ home) or Glenmachan (his cousins’ home), and he could not think of inviting Arthur to Little Lea: “You know how I would love if I could have you any time I liked up in my little room with the gramophone and a fire of our own, to be merry and foolish to our hearts content: or even if I could always readily accept your invitations without feeling a rotter for leaving him alone.” Despite this impediment, merriment spiced with foolishness flourished, as the pals planned an operatic treatment of
Loki Bound—
Arthur, who was a painter, pianist, and composer, was to supply the music and illustrations, Lewis the plot and text—and though it never came to fruition, that did nothing to mute the delicious sense of conspiracy: “neither of us had any other outlet: we still thought that we were the only two people in the world who were interested in the right kind of things in the right kind of way.” Arthur was a willing confidant who could be counted on to keep his friend’s secrets. Hence it is from the letters that Lewis wrote to Arthur (Arthur’s letters to Lewis are not extant) that we learn of Lewis’s infatuation with a Belgian refugee girl (there is some evidence that Lewis may have made this up, perhaps to impress Arthur), his first experience of getting drunk (“The story that you have a headache after being drunk is apparently quite a lie <(like the other one about going mad from THAT)>”), and his opinions on such subjects as the difference between love and friendship and the mysteries of “Terreauty” (terror and beauty combined), expressed with unstudied and unabashed immediacy.

Arthur was both inspirer and sounding board, Lewis’s vast future readership in miniature, and a model for his conception of the ideal reader. That Arthur could be dull and lacking in original ideas meant nothing; he knew Joy, and he kept intact the love of “homely” things and the spirit of humility. On their rare walks together during the holidays, Lewis began to see things about the world around him that he had never noticed or valued before: not just the wild and distant sublime, but the small, local, and humdrum could delight. What was wonderful was the contrast; to look out at the landscapes of County Down, as Lewis now learned to do, was, in effect, as he later wrote, to see “Niflheim and Asgard, Britain and Logres, Handramit and Harandra, air and ether, the low world and the high.” Under Arthur’s influence even the factories and trams and shipyards of Belfast, even the “crowing cocks and gaggling ducks,” the “barefoot old women, the drunken men stumbling in and out of the ‘spirit grocers’” became lovable and claimed attention. “I learned charity from him and failed, for all my efforts, to teach him arrogance in return.”

Arthur was homosexual, though his sexual life, at least at this stage, was probably limited to onanistic fantasy: “My dear Galahad,” Lewis addressed him in tribute to his purity; otherwise, “Cher Ami,” “My dear Arthur,” “Dear little Archie,” “
mon vieux.
” A few writers speculate that the intimacy of the friendship points to a homosexual inclination in Lewis as well, however successful he may have been at hiding this fact from himself. But this is doubtful; even if one does not accept that Lewis had a years-long affair with Mrs. Moore (see chapter 4) or take seriously the ardor of his middle-age marriage, he was unmistakably heterosexual, with a penchant for sadism, in the fantasies he revealed to Arthur.

Yet in all these confiding letters, the greatest passion was reserved for the world of art, for literary battles fought and literary enthusiasms shared. They compared notes about the delights of book shopping (“Do you ever wake up in the morning and suddenly wonder why you have not bought such-and-such a book long ago, and then decided that life without it will be quite unbearable? I do frequently: the last attack was this morning
à
propos of Malory’s ‘Morte D’Arthur’…”), the bindings of books (“With the Chaucer I am most awfully bucked: it is in the very best Everyman style—lovely paper, strong boards, and—aren’t you envious—not one but two bits of tissue paper”), and the latest recordings (“I feel my fame as a ‘Man-about-the-Gramaphone’ greatly put out by your remarks
à
propos of Lohengrin Prelude Act III, as, I must confess, I never heard of it on Columbia”). Arthur sometimes complained that their talk was too much of books and music, not enough of inner struggles; but Lewis made light of Arthur’s sentimentality, arguing that “feelings ought to be kept for literature and art, where they are delightful and not intruded into life where they are merely a nuiscance.” He conceded (half-mockingly), however, that it was Arthur who stood, in this case, for the deeper truths of the heart: “I am a coarse-grained creature who never could follow the feelings of refined—might I say super-refined?—natures like my Galahad’s.”

Though they did not share the same sexual orientation (“That
which doesn’t appeal to me, and I in one that doesn’t appeal to you>”), there does seem to be something akin to the first blush of love in this first friendship, exclusive as it was and seasoned with occasional quarrels. Moreover, they shared a common history of a psychosexual development complicated by early experiences: Lewis had internalized as eros the boarding school culture of flogging and fagging, while his housebound friend Arthur was the stereotyped picture of the mother-engulfed homosexual youth. Lewis saw these patterns and began to worry about them; as their correspondence progressed, while he encouraged Arthur to be true to his real inclinations, he begged for restraint: “Let us talk of these things when we want, but always keep them on the side that tends to beauty, and avoid everything that tends to sordid-ness Cher ami, please, please don’t think this is preaching…” For the rest of his life, Lewis would adopt a nonjudgmental attitude: same-sex attraction wasn’t something he struggled with; better to direct his moralizing to the host of temptations that did assail him, most of which were exaggerated forms of his characteristic virtues. The cruelty and sycophancy he witnessed at Malvern were far more soul-destroying, he felt, than the pederasty which “however great an evil in itself, was, in that time and place, the only foothold or cranny left for certain good things … the only chink left through which something spontaneous and uncalculating could creep in.” He saw more moral danger for himself in the thirst to be part of the “inner ring” of the elite and in the intellectual arrogance with which he compensated himself for daily humiliations, than in any of the carnal temptations.