1908–1917
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 hated 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–March 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 English. 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?
By the spring of 1913, Lewis had decided where he wished to go after Cherbourg. In a letter to his father of June 1913, he declares his time at Cherbourg—though initially something of a “leap in the dark”—to have been a “success.”[57] He liked Great Malvern as a town, and would like to proceed to “the Coll.”—in other words, to Malvern College, where he could join his older brother, Warnie. In late May, Warnie announced that he wanted to pursue a military career, and would spend the autumn of 1913 at Malvern College, preparing for the entrance examination at the Royal Military College at Sandhurst.
However, things did not work out quite as expected. In June, Lewis won a scholarship to Malvern College beginning in September, despite being ill and having to take the examination in Cherbourg’s sickroom. But Warnie would no longer be there. He had been asked to leave by the headmaster after being caught smoking on school premises. (Both Lewis brothers had developed their lifelong habit of smoking by this stage.) Albert Lewis now had to work out how to prepare Warnie for the Sandhurst entrance examinations without any assistance from the masters of Malvern College. He found an answer—a brilliant answer, that would have significant and positive implications for his younger son a year later.
Albert Lewis had been a pupil at Lurgan College in Ireland’s County Armagh from 1877–1879, and had developed a great respect for his former headmaster, William Thompson Kirkpatrick (1848–1921).[58] Kirkpatrick had arrived at Lurgan College in 1876, at which time it had only sixteen pupils. A decade later, it was regarded as one of the premier schools in Ireland. Kirkpatrick retired in 1899, and moved with his wife to Sharston House in Northenden, Cheshire, to be near their son, George, who was then working for Browett, Lindley & Co., Engine Makers of Patricroft, Manchester. However, it seems that Kirkpatrick’s wife had little enthusiasm for the industrialised Northwest of England, and the couple soon moved to Great Bookham in the “Stockbroker Belt” of the southern county of Surrey, where Kirkpatrick set himself up as a private tutor.
Albert Lewis acted as Kirkpatrick’s solicitor, and the two had occasion to correspond over what should be done with parents who refused to pay their sons’ school fees. Albert Lewis had asked Kirkpatrick’s advice on educational matters in the past, and he now asked for something more specific and personal: would Kirkpatrick prepare Warnie for the entrance examination to Sandhurst? The deal was done, and Warnie began his studies at Great Bookham on 10 September 1913. Eight days later, his younger brother started at Malvern College—the “Wyvern” of Surprised by Joy—without his older brother as his mentor and friend. Lewis was on his own.
Malvern College: 1913–1914
Lewis presents Malvern College as a disaster. Surprised by Joy devotes three of its fifteen chapters to railing against his experiences at “the Coll,” faulting it at point after point. Yet this accumulation of Lewis’s vivid and harsh memories curiously fails to advance his narrative of the pursuit of Joy. Why spend so much time recounting such painful and subjective memories, which others who knew the college at that time (including Warnie) criticised as distorted and unrepresentative? Perhaps Lewis saw the writing of these sections of Surprised by Joy as a cathartic exercise, allowing him to purge his painful memories by writing about them at greater length than required. Yet even a sympathetic reader of this work cannot fail to see that the pace of the book slackens in the three chapters devoted to Malvern, where the narrative detail obscures the plotline.[59]
2.1 William Thompson Kirkpatrick (1848–1921), at his home in Great Bookham in 1920, photographed by Warren Lewis during his visit when on leave from the British army. This is the only known photograph of Kirkpatrick.
Lewis declares that he became a victim of the “fagging” system, by which younger pupils were expected to act as errand boys for the older pupils (the “Bloods”). The more a boy was disliked by his peers and elders, the more he would be picked on and exploited in this way. This was customary in English public schools of this age. What most boys accepted as part of a traditional initiation rite into adulthood was seen by Lewis as a form of forced labour. Lewis suggested that the forms of service that younger boys were expected to provide to their seniors were rumoured (but never proved) to include sexual favours—something which Lewis found horrifying.
Perhaps more significantly, Lewis found himself excluded from the value system of Malvern College, which was heavily influenced by the then dominant educational philosophy of the English public school system—athleticism.[60] By the end of the Edwardian era, the “games cult” had assumed an almost unassailable position as the centrepiece of an English public school education. Athleticism was an ideology with a darker side. Boys who were not good at games were ridiculed and bullied by their peers. Athleticism devalued intellectual and artistic achievement and turned many schools into little more than training camps for the glorification of physicality. Yet the cultivation of “manliness” was seen as integral to the development of “character”—an essential trait that dominated the educational theories of this period in British culture.[61] In all these respects, Malvern was typical of the Edwardian age. It provided what it believed was needed, and what parents clearly wanted.
But it was not what Lewis wanted. His “native clumsiness,” partly arising from having only one joint in his thumbs, made excelling in anything physical a total impossibility.[62] Lewis seems to have made little attempt to fit into the school’s culture. His refusal to conform simply created the impression that Lewis was socially withdrawn and academically arrogant. As Lewis wryly remarked in a letter, Malvern helped him discover what he did not want to be: “If I had never seen the horrible spectacle which these coarse, brainless English schoolboys present, there might be a danger of my sometimes becoming like that myself.”[63] To many, these remarks simply sound arrogant and condescending. Yet Lewis was clear that one of Malvern’s relatively few positive achievements was to help him realise that he was arrogant.[64] It was an aspect of his character that he would have to deal with in the coming years.
Lewis frequently sought refuge in the school library, finding solace in books. He also developed a friendship with the classics master, Harry Wakelyn Smith (“Smewgy”). Smith worked with Lewis on his Latin and helped him begin his serious study of Greek. Perhaps more important, he taught Lewis how to analyse poetry properly, allowing its aesthetic qualities to be appreciated. Furthermore, he helped Lewis realise that poetry was to be read in such a way that its rhythm and musical qualities could be appreciated. Lewis later expressed his gratitude in a poem explaining how Smith—an “old man with a honey-sweet and singing voice”—taught him to love the “Mediterranean metres” of classical poetry.[65]
Important though such positive encounters may have been for Lewis’s later scholarly and critical development, at the time they were ultimately intellectual diversions, designed to take Lewis’s mind off what he regarded as an insufferable school culture. Warnie took the view that his brother was simply a “square peg in a round hole.” With the benefit of hindsight, he believed that Lewis ought not to have been sent to a public school at all. Lewis’s lack of athletic prowess and his strong intellectual leanings immediately identified him as a “misfit, a heretic, an object of suspicion within the collective-minded and standardizing Public School system.”[66] But at the time, Warnie was clear that the fault, if fault there were, lay in Lewis himself, not in the school.
It remains unclear why Lewis spends so much of Surprised by Joy dealing with his time at Malvern. It is true that he was invited to be a governor of the college in 1929, an invitation which caused him some amusement.[67] Yet there is no doubt of Lewis’s despair at the time concerning his circumstances there, and his desperate attempts to persuade his father to move him to a more congenial place. “Please take me out of this as soon as possible,” he wrote imploringly to his father in March 1914, as he prepared to return to Belfast for the school holidays.[68]
Albert Lewis finally realised things were not working out for his younger son. He consulted with Warnie, who was by then in his second month of training as a British army officer at Sandhurst. Warnie took the view that his younger brother had contributed significantly to his own deteriorating situation. He had hoped, he told his father, that Malvern would provide his brother with the same “happy years and memories and friendships that he would carry with him to the grave.” But it hadn’t worked out like that. Lewis had made Malvern “too hot to hold him.”[69] A radical rethink was required. Since Warnie had benefitted from personal tuition from Kirkpatrick, Lewis should be offered the same. It is not difficult to discern Warnie’s irritation with his brother when he tells his father that “he could amuse himself by detonating his cheap little stock of intellectual fireworks under old K[irkpatrick]’s nose.”[70]
Albert Lewis then wrote to Kirkpatrick, asking him for his advice. Kirkpatrick initially suggested that Lewis should resume his studies at Campbell College. But as the two men wrestled with the problem, another solution began to emerge. Albert persuaded Kirkpatrick to become Lewis’s personal tutor effective September 1914. Kirkpatrick professed himself overwhelmed by this compliment: “To have been the teacher of the father and his two sons is surely a unique experience.” It was still risky. Warnie had loved Malvern, yet Lewis had detested it. What would Lewis make of Kirkpatrick, who had been so good for Warnie? Kirkpatrick’s efforts had led to Warnie’s being ranked twenty-second out of more than two hundred successful candidates in the highly competitive entrance examination. Warnie’s military record shows that he entered Sandhurst on 4 February 1914 as a “Gentleman Cadet,” being awarded a “Prize Cadetship with emoluments.” His military career was off to a flying start.
Meanwhile, Lewis had returned home to Belfast for the vacation. In mid-April 1914, shortly before he was due to return for his final term at Malvern College, he received a message. Arthur Greeves (1895–1966) was in bed recovering from an illness and would welcome a visit. Greeves, who was the same age as Warnie, was the youngest son of Joseph Greeves, one of Belfast’s most wealthy flax-spinners. The family lived at “Bernagh,” a large house just over the road from Little Lea.
2.2 A tennis party at Glenmachan House, the Ewart family home, close to Little Lea, in the summer of 1910. Arthur Greeves is on the far left in the back row, with C. S. Lewis to the far right. Lily Greeves, Arthur’s sister, is seated second from the right, in front of Lewis
In Surprised by Joy, Lewis recalls that Greeves had been trying to initiate a friendship with him for some time, but that they had never met.[71] Yet there is evidence that Lewis’s memory may not be entirely correct here. In one of his earliest surviving letters of May 1907, Lewis informed Warnie that a telephone had just been installed at Little Lea. He had used this new piece of technology to call Arthur Greeves, but had not been able to speak to him.[72] This hints at a childhood acquaintance of some sort. If Lewis and Greeves had been friends around this time, it seems likely that Lewis’s enforced absence from Belfast at English schools had caused the existing relationship to wither.
Lewis agreed to visit Greeves with some reluctance. He found him sitting up in bed, with a book beside him: H. M. A. Guerber’s Myths of the Norsemen (1908). Lewis, whose love of “Northernness” now knew few bounds, looked at the book in astonishment: “Do you like that?” he asked—only to receive the same excited reply from Greeves.[73] Lewis had finally found a soul mate. They would remain in touch regularly until Lewis’s death, nearly fifty years later.
As his final term at Malvern drew to an end, Lewis wrote his first letter to Greeves, planning a walk together. Though he was “cooped up” in the “hot, ugly country of England,” they could watch the sun rise over the Holywood Hills and see Belfast Lough and Cave Hill.[74] Yet a month later, Lewis’s view of England had changed. “Smewgy” had invited him and another boy to drive into the country, leaving behind the “flat, plain, and ugly hills of Malvern.” In their place, Lewis discovered an “enchanted ground” of “rolling hills and valleys,” with “mysterious woods and cornfields.”[75] Perhaps England was not so bad; maybe he might stay there after all.
Bookham and the “Great Knock”: 1914–1917
On 19 September 1914, Lewis arrived at Great Bookham to begin his studies with Kirkpatrick—the “Great Knock.” Yet the world around Lewis had changed irreversibly since he had left Malvern. On 28 June, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria was assassinated in Sarajevo, creating ripples of tension and instability which gradually escalated. Grand alliances were formed. If one great nation went to war, all would follow. A month later, on 28 July, Austria launched an attack against Serbia. Germany immediately launched an attack against France. It was inevitable that Britain would be drawn into the conflict. Britain eventually declared war against Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire on 4 August.
It was Warnie who was affected most immediately by this development. His period of training was reduced from eighteen months to nine, to allow him to enter active military service as soon as possible. He was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Royal Army Service Corps on 29 September 1914, and was on active service in France with the British Expeditionary Force by 4 November. Meanwhile, Lord Kitchener (1850–1916), Secretary of State for War, set out to organise the recruitment of the largest volunteer army that the nation had ever seen. His famous recruiting poster declaring “Your country needs you!” became one of the most familiar images of the war. Lewis could hardly have failed to feel this pressure to enlist.
2.3 “Your country needs you!” The front cover of the magazine London Opinion, published on 5 September 1914, shortly after Britain’s declaration of war. This image of Lord Kitchener, designed by the artist Alfred Leete (1882–1933), quickly achieved iconic significance, and featured prominently in British military recruitment campaigns from 1915 onwards.
While England lurched into a state of war for which it was not properly prepared, Lewis was settling in at Kirkpatrick’s house, “Gastons,” in Great Bookham. His relationship with Kirkpatrick would be of central importance, especially since his relationships with both his brother and father were by now somewhat strained and distant. Lewis travelled by steamer from Belfast to Liverpool, then by train to London. There he picked up a train from Waterloo Station to Great Bookham, where Kirkpatrick awaited him. As they walked together from the station to Kirkpatrick’s house, Lewis remarked casually, as a way of breaking the conversational ice, that the scenery in Surrey was somewhat wilder than he had anticipated.
2.4 Station Road, Great Bookham, in 1924. C. S. Lewis and Kirkpatrick would have walked along this road on their way from the railway station to Kirkpatrick’s home, Gastons.
Lewis had intended merely to begin a conversation; Kirkpatrick seized the opportunity to begin an aggressive, interactive discussion demonstrating the virtues of the Socratic method. Kirkpatrick demanded that he stop immediately. What did Lewis mean by “wildness,” and what grounds had he for not expecting it? Had he studied some maps of the area? Had he read some books about it? Had he seen photographs of the landscape? Lewis conceded he had done none of these things. His views were not based on anything. Kirkpatrick duly informed him that he had no right to have any opinion on this matter.
Some would have found this approach intimidating; others might think it to lack good manners or pastoral concern. Yet Lewis quickly realised that he was being forced to develop his critical thinking, based on evidence and reason rather than his personal intuitions. This approach was, he remarked, like “red beef and strong beer.”[76] Lewis thrived on this diet of critical thinking.
Kirkpatrick was a remarkable man, and must be given credit for much of Lewis’s intellectual development, particularly in fostering a highly critical approach to ideas and sources.[77] Kirkpatrick had a distinguished academic career at Queen’s College, Belfast, from which he graduated in July 1868 with First Class Honours in English, History, and Metaphysics.[78] In his final year at Queen’s College, he had won the English Prize Essay under the nom de plume Tamerlaine. He was also awarded a Double Gold Medal by the Royal University of Ireland, the only student to gain this distinction that year. He applied unsuccessfully for the position of headmaster of Lurgan College when the college opened in 1873. There were twenty-two applications for the prestigious position. In the end, the school’s governors had to choose between Kirkpatrick and E. Vaughan Boulger of Dublin. They chose Boulger.
Undeterred, Kirkpatrick looked elsewhere for employment. He was seriously considered for the Chair of English at University College, Cork. His opportunity came, however, late in 1875, when Boulger was appointed to the Chair of Greek at University College, Cork. Kirkpatrick applied again for headmaster of Lurgan College, and was appointed to the position effective 1 January 1876. His ability to encourage and inspire his students became the substance of legend. Albert Lewis may have made many mistakes in arranging for his younger son’s education in England. But his biggest decision—based on his own judgement, rather than the flawed professional advice of Gabbitas & Thring—turned out to be his best.
Lewis’s highly condensed summary of his most significant tutors merits consideration: “Smewgy taught me Grammar and Rhetoric and Kirk taught me Dialectic.”[79] For Lewis, he was gradually learning how to use words and develop arguments. Yet Kirkpatrick’s influence was not limited to Lewis’s dialectical skills. The old headmaster forced Lewis to learn languages, living and dead, by the simple expedient of making him use them. Two days after Lewis’s arrival, Kirkpatrick sat down with him and opened a copy of Homer’s Iliad in the original Greek. He read aloud the first twenty lines in a Belfast accent (which might have puzzled Homer), offered a translation, and invited Lewis to continue. Before long, Lewis was confident enough to read fluently in the original language. Kirkpatrick extended the approach, first to Latin, and then to living languages, including German and Italian.
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 taking 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.