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1 EARLY DAYS

If any star danced at the birth of Clive Staples Lewis on 29 November 1898 in one of the semi-detached Dundela Villas near the outskirts of Belfast, the mists of time – and the predominant drizzle of Northern Ireland – have obscured it.

His brother Warren, three years old at the time, wrote, ‘Of his arrival I remember nothing, though no doubt I was introduced to him, and it was only by degrees that I became dimly conscious of him as a vociferous disturber of my domestic peace.’¹

Warren’s natural jealousy of the newcomer died away as soon as babyhood ended, and the encumbrance was able to grow into a companion. Clive seems to have matured with commendable speed, not only talking, but expressing his preferences with typical decisiveness before he was two.

The first ten years of his childhood differed little from that of any average child in a similar period and setting. Early delights were those of rail travel each summer to and from nearby seaside resorts: ‘… the selection of toys to be taken, the bustle of packing, and then the great moment when the cab arrived to take us to the station … Then came the glorious excitement of the train journey, and, supreme bliss, the first sight of the sea.’²

This month by the sea each year was their only holiday, and the single variation came in August 1907 when Mrs Lewis took the two boys to Berneval, near Dieppe, in northern France – Clive’s only holiday abroad until he went to Greece in 1960. Otherwise, as they grew older, they could bicycle out for the day into the country, and occasionally visit friends or relations at no great distance.

About his early years Clive Lewis remembered with most gratitude, after ‘good parents, good food and a garden (which then seemed large) to play in … two other blessings’: first, his nurse Lizzie Endicott, ‘in whom even the exacting memory of childhood can discover no flaw – nothing but kindness, gaiety and good sense … The other blessing was my brother. Though three years my senior, he never seemed to be an elder brother; we were allies, not to say confederates from the first.’³ When they were very young, Lizzie, drying them after a bath one day, threatened to smack their ‘pigieboties’ or ‘piggiebottoms’. The boys decided that Warnie was the ‘Archpiggiebotham’ and Jack the ‘Smallpiggiebotham’ or ‘APB’ and ‘SPB’, names they were to use for one another throughout their lives.^*4

The biggest change in their lives during Clive’s first ten years was the building of the ‘New House’ – Little Lea – at 76 Circular Road, Strandtown, and the move into it on 21 April 1905. This was on the very edge of suburbia: ‘On one side it was within twenty minutes’ walk of a tram stop, on the other within a mile of what was indisputably open hilly farm land.’⁵ And as they both had bicycles, the real country, which they now discovered for the first time, was only a few minutes’ ride away from their own front door. During these early ‘golden years’ before boarding-school Clive developed a passionate love of Co. Down that he retained all his life.

Besides this delight there was, as Warren, or ‘Warnie’ as the family called him, records, ‘the new house itself which, though perhaps the worst designed house I ever saw, was for that very reason a child’s delight. On the top floor, cupboard-like doors opened into huge, dark, wasted spaces under the roof, tunnel-like passages through which children could crawl, connecting space with space.’⁶ ‘The New House is almost a major character in my story,’ wrote Clive years later in Surprised by Joy. ‘I am a product of long corridors, empty sunlit rooms, upstair indoor silences, attics explored in solitude, distant noises of gurgling cisterns and pipes, and the noise of wind under the tiles.’⁷ And he in turn wove these recollections into much that he was to write, from Dymer to The Magician’s Nephew.

The house was full of books – ‘I had always the same certainty of finding a book that was new to me as a man who walks into a field has of finding a new blade of grass’⁸ – though all of these were the works of novelists, historians, essayists and biographers. Neither of Clive Lewis’s parents ‘had the least taste for that kind of literature to which my allegiance was given the moment I could choose books for myself. Neither had ever listened for the horns of elfland. There was no copy of Keats or Shelley in the house, and the copy of Coleridge was never (to my knowledge) opened. If I am a romantic, my parents bear no responsibility for it.’⁹

But even from his earliest days ‘Jack’ Lewis (at the age of four he had suddenly announced that his name was Jacksie – soon shortened into Jack – and refused to answer to any other ever after) had been able to find chinks at least in the magic casements, long before he could fling them wide and venture out over the perilous seas in the faery lands forlorn of which he was to add not a few to the literary atlas. To begin with, Lizzie Endicott would tell him fairy tales of her own country – of leprechauns with their pots of buried gold, of the Daoine Sidh, and of the Isle of Mell Moy which was to make him such an enthusiastic reader of James Stephens and the early Yeats.

Then came the early Beatrix Potter volumes, hot from the press. Squirrel Nutkin, his favourite, was published in 1903 before he was five. ‘I liked the Beatrix Potter illustrations at a time when the idea of humanized animals fascinated me perhaps even more than it fascinates most children,’ he wrote in An Experiment in Criticism (1961);¹⁰ and he followed up this fascination through the pages of old volumes of Punch with their animal cartoons by Tenniel and Sambourne and Partridge, besides those in Lewis Carroll, and in the old Dalziel illustrations to Mother Goose of which a copy of the 1895 reprint had been given to Warnie.

The first real introduction to romance came by chance, by way of a copy of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court in which he was able to taste something of the true Logres even through Mark Twain’s vulgar ridicule of the great Arthurian cycle. This was followed by an even more blessed discovery: the monthly Strand Magazine was serializing Conan Doyle’s Sir Nigel from December 1905 to December 1906 – a real introduction to the world of chivalry. But more important even than Mark Twain’s perverted Arthuriad and Doyle’s brightly coloured Middle Ages were the serials in the Strand by E. Nesbit with H.R. Millar’s superb and evocative illustrations: Five Children – and It (April to December 1902), The Phoenix and the Carpet (July 1903 to June 1904), and The Story of the Amulet (May 1905 to April 1906). ‘The last did most for me,’ he recollected in 1955. ‘It first opened my eyes to antiquity, the “dark backward and abysm of time”.¹¹ I can still re-read it with delight.’¹²

This naturally leads on to the stories that Jack Lewis began writing before he was six and continued to elaborate for the next half-dozen years or more. After the move to Little Lea, he soon ‘staked out a claim to one of the attics’ and made it his ‘study’, decorating the walls with pictures of his own making or cut from brightly coloured Christmas editions of magazines. ‘Here,’ he records, ‘my first stories were written, and illustrated, with enormous satisfaction. They were an attempt to combine my two chief literary pleasures – “dressed animals” and “knights-in-armour”. As a result, I wrote about chivalrous mice and rabbits who rode out in complete mail to kill not giants but cats.’¹³

It is tempting to look here for the origin of such characters as Reepicheep the chivalric Talking Mouse, one of the most successfully developed among the higher animals of Narnia. But when discussing stories made up in childhood and their effect, or otherwise, on those written later, he told Green categorically that none of the characters or adventures in the Narnian stories was drawn from the Animal-Land of his own childhood inventions. The whole spirit of Narnia is different, as he also pointed out in Surprised by Joy: ‘Animal-Land had nothing whatever in common with Narnia except the anthropomorphic beasts. Animal-Land, by its whole quality, excluded the least hint of wonder.’¹⁴ ‘In mapping and chronicling Animal-Land I was training myself to be a novelist. Note well, a novelist; not a poet. My invented world was full (for me) of interest, bustle, humour and character; but there was no poetry, even no romance in it. It was almost astonishingly prosaic.’¹⁵

Moreover, the Animal-Land that came into action in the holidays when Warnie was at home from his English boarding-school ‘was a modern Animal-Land; it had to have trains and steamships if it was to be a country shared with him. It followed, of course, that the medieval Animal-Land about which I wrote my stories must be the same country at an earlier period; and of course the two periods must be properly connected. This led me from romancing to historiography: I set about writing a full history of Animal-Land.’ History led to geography: the world was remapped with Warnie’s ‘India’ as an island across the sea from Animal-Land, ‘And those parts of that world which we regarded as our own – Animal-Land and India – were increasingly peopled with consistent characters,’¹⁶ and came to be known generally as ‘Boxen’.

Many of Lewis’s Boxonian stories have been published as Boxen: The Imaginary World of the Young C.S. Lewis (1985). The best of the stories come from the later period and were written between the ages of twelve and fourteen, when they became novels about minor characters rather than straight ‘histories’. While they show great precocity, there is little evidence of anything else and hardly any foreshadowing of what was to come: they are interesting as the earliest works of C.S. Lewis, and dull compared to his later writings. This is largely due to the careful banishment of poetic, romantic and imaginative elements and to the extra- ordinary absorption with politics. This has been explained by Warnie Lewis in his ‘Memoir’ accompanying the Letters of C.S. Lewis: here he describes the continuous political discussions current in Ireland at the time, mainly diatribes against the government of the day between men of the same political persuasions – and vituperative and unexplained condemnation of all who differed from them in politics or religion. Warnie concludes:

Any ordinary parent would have sent us boys off to amuse ourselves elsewhere when one of these symposiums took place, but not my father; he would have thought it uncivil to the guest. Consequently we had to sit in silence while the torrent of vituperation flowed over our heads. The result in Jack’s case was to convince him firstly that ‘grown-up’ conversation and politics were one and the same thing, and that therefore he must give everything he wrote a political framework; and secondly to disgust him with the very word ‘politics’ before he was out of his teens.¹⁷

Moreover, although the Boxonian characters are ‘dressed animals’, there is no attempt to keep up the fiction, and without the illustrations it would often be hard to remember that, for example, Lord John Big is a frog, James Bar a bear, Macgoullah a horse, and Viscount Puddiphat an owl. And unfortunately few of the early stories of ‘knights-in-armour’ (even if the knights were dressed animals) have survived, though there are a few early attempts at verse concerning ‘Knights and Ladyes’.

‘In mapping and chronicling Animal-Land,’ said Lewis, ‘I was training myself to be a novelist … but there was no poetry, even no romance in it.’¹⁸ At the same time he had an inner life, invisible to all but himself, that was highly imaginative. Shortly after the family moved to Little Lea he had three experiences which initiated ‘the central story’¹⁹ of his life. In Surprised by Joy he told how one day, as he was standing beside a flowering currant bush, there arose in him the ‘memory of a memory’ of a day in Dundela Villas when Warnie brought his toy garden into the nursery. ‘It is difficult’, he said, ‘to find words strong enough for the sensation which came over me; Milton’s “enormous bliss” of Eden … comes somewhere near it.’²⁰ It was, he went on, ‘a sensation of desire’, but before he knew what he desired ‘the desire itself was gone, the whole glimpse withdrawn, the world turned commonplace again, or only stirred by a longing for the longing that had just ceased’.²¹

A second ‘glimpse’ came through Beatrix Potter’s Squirrel Nutkin which, he said, ‘troubled me with what I can only describe as the Idea of Autumn’.²² A third glimpse came through a few lines of Longfellow’s translation of Esaias Tegner’s version (1825) of Drapa:

I heard a voice, that cried,

‘Balder the Beautiful

Is dead, is dead!’

And through the misty air

Passed like the mournful cry

Of sunward sailing cranes.

‘I knew nothing about Balder,’ said Lewis, ‘but instantly I was uplifted into huge regions of northern sky, I desired with almost sickening intensity something never to be described (except that it is cold, spacious, severe, pale, and remote) and then, as in the other examples, found myself at the very same moment already falling out of that desire and wishing I were back in it.’²³ The three experiences had in common, he said, ‘an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction. I call it Joy … It might almost equally well be called a particular kind of unhappiness or grief. But then it is a kind we want.’²⁴

Meanwhile his outward life went on more or less as usual. Warnie departed to Wynyard School in England, while Jack was taught at Little Lea by a governess, Miss Annie Harper: ‘She is fairly nice for a governess, but all of them are the same,’²⁵ he confided to his first diary at the end of 1907, in which he describes himself as ‘like most boys of nine, and I am like Papy, bad temper, thick lips, thin and generally wearing a jersey’.²⁶

Other diary scraps describe the rest of the household: his grandfather, Richard Lewis, ‘who lives in a little room of his own upstairs’; Maude the housemaid and Martha the cook; several pets, ‘a dog called Tim, a black and white mouse called Tommy, and lastly a canary called Peter’.²⁷ The entry for Thursday, 5 March 1908 is typical – except for the unexpected item with which it concludes: ‘I rise. The lawn is white with frost. I have breakfast. Get on my coat and cap and see Papy off [to the office]. Miss Harper comes, lessons. [The next entry translates the opening sentence of Julius Caesar’s De Bello Gallico.] Dinner. I am carpentring at a sword. I read “Paradise Lost”, reflections there-on.’²⁸

We do not know what these reflections were, nor how much of Milton’s Paradise Lost, the poem which was to mean so much to him in later life, was either read or understood by him in his tenth year; but even as he wrote, his own paradise was on the verge of being lost. ‘There came a night when I was ill and crying both with headache and toothache and distressed because my mother did not come to me,’ he wrote in Surprised by Joy:

That was because she was ill too; and what was odd was that there were several doctors in her room, and voices and comings and goings all over the house and doors shutting and opening. It seemed to last for hours. And then my father, in tears, came into my room and began to try to convey to my terrified mind things it had never conceived before. It was in fact cancer and followed the usual course; an operation (they operated in the patient’s house in those days), an apparent convalescence, a return of the disease, increasing pain, and death. My father never fully recovered from this loss.²⁹

Flora died on 23 August 1908. The effect of her death on Albert Lewis was to alienate him from his two sons just at the time when mutual comfort was most needed. His nerves had never been of the steadiest and his emotions had always been uncontrolled: now he began to speak wildly and act unjustly. To children just entering on their teens the sight of adult grief and fear is apt to produce revulsion rather than sympathy, and adult loss of control is put down to unkindness rather than to its true cause. Warnie and Jack lost their mother slowly as her last illness shut them further and further away from her. When she was dead their father was incapable of taking her place and had already forfeited a great deal of his own, without knowing it. They were driven to rely more and more exclusively on each other for all that made life bearable, to have confidence only in each other – ‘two frightened urchins huddled for warmth in a bleak world’, as one of them was to write in Surprised by Joy. And he continues: ‘With my mother’s death all settled happiness, all that was tranquil and reliable, disappeared from my life. There was to be much fun, many pleasures, many stabs of Joy; but no more of the old security. It was sea and islands now; the great continent had sunk like Atlantis.’³⁰

It was time for Jack to go to school and in September 1908 he accompanied Warnie to Wynyard School. Albert Lewis was probably wise to send him away from the shadow of loss at home, and strive to fill his life with the new and absorbing experiences of school life: but of all the schools in the British Isles he seems to have chosen the very worst. Wynyard School, Watford, Hertfordshire, and its ogre of a headmaster have been described fully in Surprised by Joy (as ‘Belsen’) and little more need be said of them here, save to state that the contemporary evidence of diaries and letters fully bears out the recollections of later years.

When Warnie entered the school in May 1905 it had already begun the easy descent to Avernus precipitated by a law case in 1901 when the headmaster, the Reverend Robert Capron,^* treated a boy with such brutality that the father brought a High Court action against him, which was settled out of court and against the defendant. Apart from the rapidly developing mania for inflicting punishment, Capron seems to have run the school very much on the lines of Crichton House described by F. Anstey in Vice Versa, which Lewis called ‘the only truthful school story in existence’.³¹ But it was an altogether smaller and – towards the end – more squalid affair, though Capron, like Anstey’s Dr Grimstone, seems to have begun as a competent teacher whose pupils at one time gained scholarships to public schools. By the time the Lewis boys were entrusted to his care, however, the instruction had become ‘at once brutalizing and intellectually stupefying’,³² little was taught and still less remembered. As Warnie wrote:

In spite of Capron’s policy of terror, the school was slack and inefficient, and the time-table, if such it could be called, ridiculous. When not saying lessons, the boys spent the whole of school working out sums on slates; of this endless arithmetic there was little or no supervision. Of the remaining subjects, English and Latin consisted, the first solely and the second mainly, of grammar. History was a ceaseless circuit of the late Middle Ages; Geography was a meaningless list of rivers, towns, imports and exports.³³

There was no school library at Wynyard, but the boys were by no means illiterate, though Warnie and Jack seem to have had better taste than most of their companions. A ‘Club for getting monthly magazines’ which they formed during Jack’s first term shows this: the other boys’ contributions were the Captain, the Boy’s Own Paper, the Wide World, the Royal, and the London Magazine, but Warnie’s choice was Pearson’s and Jack’s the Strand. As they all shared each other’s magazines, Jack found himself reading ‘twaddling school-stories’, which he dismissed later as ‘mere wish-fulfilment of the hero’³⁴ – surely forgivable in a school such as Capron’s establishment. The Strand, however, was offering at this time E. Nesbit’s excellent pastiches of imagination and history, The House of Arden (1908) and Harding’s Luck (1909), with the odd Sherlock Holmes story and A.E.W. Mason’s At the Villa Rose (1910) for more adult excitement, while Hall Caine’s semi-religious thriller The White Prophet (1909) may have led him on to the taste for romances of the early Christians in Rome which he developed at this time. These he found in Sienkiewicz’s Quo Vadis? (1898), Dean Farrar’s Darkness and Dawn: or, Scenes in the Days of Nero (1891), Whyte-Melville’s The Gladiators: A Tale of Rome and Judaea (1863), and Lew Wallace’s Ben Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1880).

‘They were mostly, as literature, rather bad books,’ he decided. ‘What wore better, and what I took to at the same time, is the work of Rider Haggard.’³⁵ He discovered Haggard’s The Ghost Kings (1908), running as a serial in Pearson’s, and Pearl Maiden, a Tale of the Fall of Jerusalem (1903) at the same time as the Christian romances. He also fell for a while under the spell of H.G. Wells’s science fiction – a taste which did not last, though he was still reading Haggard with enjoyment at the end of his life.

It is curious, however, that Lewis should have missed The Wind in the Willows, which came out in 1908 during his first term at Wynyard, at a time when his interest in ‘dressed animals’ was at its height in the heyday of Boxen. He read neither that nor E. Nesbit’s Bastable stories until he was in his twenties – but ‘I do not think I have enjoyed them any the less on that account.’³⁶

Boxen was not, however, his only literary concern at the time. A fragment of a historical novel written in the summer of 1909 still survives, called ‘The Ajimywanian War’ – so dull that it might be an imitation of the dullest history book in use at Wynyard.³⁷ He was also attempting another diary, or ‘Autobiography’ as he calls it, of his experiences among the ‘five boarders at this ridiculous little “select academy for young gentlemen” – Squiffy [Field], Bowser, Mears, Jeyes and me … Oldy and his son Wyn are the only masters here, and Wyn can’t teach for nuts either.’³⁸ But that too petered out after a week.

After only a week at Wynyard, on 29 September 1908, Jack wrote to his father begging to be taken away: ‘We simply cannot wait in this hole till the end of term’.³⁹ But the fear of losing his few remaining pupils curbed some of Capron’s excesses in the rapidly shrinking – and sinking – establishment, and Capron’s son seems to have been trying to improve relations with the parents by writing solicitously about their sons: ‘Jacko appears to be very bright and happy this term,’ he was assuring Albert Lewis on 21 October. ‘His health is excellent.’⁴⁰ He seems, nevertheless, to have suffered from a weak chest throughout childhood, though the removal of adenoids at the beginning of 1909 may have helped him to survive the following winter without any illness.

Warnie left Wynyard in July 1909 and in September arrived at Malvern College, where he was to be extremely happy. In January 1910 Jack’s second cousin on his mother’s side, Hope Ewart, accompanied him back to Wynyard, stopping in London so Jack could see Peter Pan. It impressed him deeply and remained vivid in his memory; theatre-going in Belfast consisted only of musical comedies and vaudeville beyond which Albert Lewis did not aspire.

This cousin was a member of a family that meant much to the two motherless boys. The younger describes their house in Surprised by Joy as ‘Mountbracken’. It was actually Glenmachan, the home of Sir William Quartus Ewart,^* whose wife, wrote Lewis, was

my mother’s first cousin and perhaps my mother’s dearest friend, and it was no doubt for my mother’s sake that she took upon herself the heroic task of civilizing my brother and me. We had a standing invitation to lunch at Mountbracken whenever we were at home; to this, almost entirely, we owe it that we did not grow up savages. The debt is not only to Lady E. (‘Cousin Mary’) but to her whole family; walks, motor-drives (in those days an exciting novelty), picnics, and invitations to the theatre were showered on us, year after year, with a kindness which our rawness, our noise, and our unpunctuality never seemed to weary. We were at home there almost as much as in our own home, but with this great difference, that a certain standard of manners had to be kept up. Whatever I know (it is not much) of courtesy and savoir faire I learned at Mountbracken.⁴¹

Wynyard having collapsed in the summer of 1910 (Capron was certified insane and died a year later), a new school was needed for Jack. Albert Lewis decided that he should go to Campbell College, not two miles from Little Lea, ‘which had been founded with the express purpose of giving Ulster boys all the advantages of a public school education without the trouble of crossing the Irish Sea’.⁴² It was arranged that he should go as a boarder, but with the privilege of an exeat to come home every Sunday.

Although the complete lack of quiet or privacy was trying – he described it as ‘very like living permanently in a large railway station’ – Jack found Campbell College a great improvement on Wynyard, and really began to enjoy learning, and to remember what he learnt. He was particularly grateful to an ‘excellent master whom we called Octie’, who was really Lewis Alden, senior English master from 1898 until 1930. Alden introduced him in form to Arnold’s Sohrab and Rustum: ‘I loved the poem at first sight and have loved it ever since.’⁴³

But his stay at Campbell was to be brief. On 13 November 1910 Albert Lewis was writing to Warnie at Malvern: ‘When Jacko came home this morning he had such a frightful cough that I had Dr Leslie^* up to examine him. As a result, Leslie has advised me not to send him back to school for some days’;⁴⁴ and he went on to ask Warnie to find out about Cherbourg, a preparatory school at Malvern, as ‘I am strongly inclined to send Jacko there until he’s old enough to go to the College.’⁴⁵

After two glorious months of peace and quiet at home reading, ever reading – at this time largely fairy tales – the invalid was deemed well enough to begin at Cherbourg. And accordingly he wrote to his father near the end of January 1911: ‘Warnie and I arrived safely at Malvern after a splendid journey. Cherbourge is quite a nice place. There are 17 chaps here. There are three masters, Mr Allen, Mr Palmer and Mr Jones, who is very fat … Malvern is one of the nicest English towns I have seen yet. The hills are beautiful, but of course not so nice as ours.’⁴⁶

The school was not as small as would appear from this as there were day boys as well as the seventeen boarders; and although his letters and odd scraps of diary are full of criticism of the masters, and often of the school itself, Lewis seems to have been reasonably happy at Cherbourg and recorded that ‘here indeed my education really began. The Headmaster was a clever and patient teacher;^† under him I rapidly found my feet in Latin and English, and even began to be looked on as a promising candidate for a scholarship at the College.’⁴⁷

In Surprised by Joy Lewis goes on to tell how he lost his faith during his terms at Cherbourg, sparked off by the esoteric religious flounderings of the matron, Miss Cowie. Other reasons joined to make him an apostate – ‘dropping my faith with no sense of loss but with the greatest relief’.⁴⁸ Intense preoccupation with prayer had made the activity an increasingly unendurable penance; and a natural and induced pessimism had grown up from his own manual clumsiness, his mother’s death, the miseries of Wynyard, and his father’s exaggerated statements as to the difficulty of managing ‘to avoid the workhouse’.

Another cause had its roots in the very brilliance of Lewis’s mind, which began suddenly to blossom under the influence of the excellent teaching at Cherbourg, and in particular the classical authors:

Here, especially in Virgil, one was presented with a mass of religious ideas; and all teachers and editors took it for granted from the outset that these religious ideas were sheer illusion. No one ever attempted to show in what sense Christianity fulfilled Paganism or Paganism prefigured Christianity. The accepted position seemed to be that religions were normally a mere farrago of nonsense, though our own, by a fortunate exception, was exactly true … But on what grounds could I believe in this exception? … I was very anxious not to.⁴⁹

Other influences were also at hand to shake his faith. In May 1912 a new master came to Cherbourg – ‘Pogo’, whose evil effects on the adolescent mind are well described in Surprised by Joy. Percy Gerald Kelsal Harris was to distinguish himself a few years later as a war hero. When Lewis met Harris, however, the latter had just dropped out of Oxford and was far too youthful to be in charge of boys not much younger than himself. At the same time came the sudden upsurge of puberty and an easy surrender to sexual temptation:

But this is amply accounted for by the age I had then reached and by my recent, in a sense deliberate, withdrawal of myself from Divine protection. I do not believe Pogo had anything to do with it … What attacked me through Pogo was not the Flesh (I had that of my own) but the World: the desire for glitter, swagger, distinction, the desire to be in the know … I began to labour very hard to make myself into a fop, a cad, and a snob.