by C. S. Lewis
In April 1910 Robert Capron wrote to Mr Lewis to say that he was ‘giving up school work’. And when Jack arrived home in July Mr Lewis decided that until another English school could be found for him he would be sent to Campbell College in Belfast for the autumn term. However, when Jack came home from Campbell on Sunday the 13th November he had such a fearful cough that the doctor advised a complete rest. Since their mother died Mr Lewis had written weekly letters to his sons. His loathing of travel prevented him from visiting them at Wynyard, but in other respects he was both father and mother to his sons whom he loved dearly. Jack spoke of the two months he was to spend at home as a time when he and his father ‘were famously snug together’. It was never to be so ‘tranquil and reliable’ as when Mrs Lewis was alive. But love flowed from many family members. No one could have been better to Jack and Warnie than their mother’s cousins Sir William and Lady Ewart and their three grown daughters who lived at Glenmachan House (called ‘Mountbracken’ in Surprised by Joy). Glenmachan was a second home to them. When I read of that grand ball in The Locked Door in which Lord Big dances with the Duchess of Penzley I am reminded of the beautiful ball room at Glenmachan House which I saw while there were still members of the Ewart family there.
But it wasn’t that gracious home that Jack had in mind when in Chapter III of Surprised by Joy he describes those dances, really for adults, to which friends of his father felt obliged to invite him. After complaining about the ‘discomfort of one’s Eton suit and stiff shirt’ and ‘prancing about on a polished floor till the small hours of the morning’ he says ‘I positively felt that I could have torn my hostess limb from limb. Why should she pester me? I had never done her any harm, never asked her to a party.’ Had it not been for those Belfast hostesses I wonder if the dances at Boxen’s Riverside Palace could be half so amusing as they are. But when Lord Big announces in Littera Scripta Manet that ‘my dancing days are over’ he speaks for Jack as much as for himself.
More serious to Jack, in bringing Boxen up to modern times, was what to do about the clothes of that time, so heavily starched as to be almost bullet-proof. He had been considering the problem for several years and it is summed up in a little treatise from Notebook II on How to Make Man Picturesc:
In his present state it is all-most impossible to do such a a thing. For instance: ‘The hideous topper’, ‘The Loathsome frock coat.’ Ouf the beastly things, how can man continue to wear them? The dress in which boys are generally clothed are not much better. The sailor suit is awful!! Terrible! FEARFUL!! The thing is that some old-fashioned dress must be adopted, and I really think that then man might look pictures.
Mr Lewis was able to find a place for Jack at Cherbourg House, the preparatory school which overlooked Malvern College. This meant that the brothers were to be within half a mile of one another and they set out for Cherbourg and Malvern (called ‘Chartres’ and ‘Wyvern’ in Surprised by Joy) in January 1911. It was to prove a success with Jack, and he was to be there until July 1913 when he won a scholarship to Malvern College.
In a letter to Jack of the 29th January 1911, Mr Lewis said: ‘I went to the Hippodrome last night to see if it would raise the internal barometer a degree or two.’23 Mr Lewis always found his ‘internal barometer’ raised by the vaudeville of the Belfast Hippodrome and the Empire Theatre and it was something he liked to enjoy with his sons. Writing about those visits to the Hippodrome, Jack said in Chapter IV of Surprised by Joy:
My father … often of a Saturday night would take us to the Belfast Hippodrome. I recognise now that I never had the taste for vaudeville which he shared with my brother. At the time I supposed myself to be enjoying the show, but I was mistaken … What I enjoyed was merely the etcetera of the show, the bustle and lights, the sense of having a night out, the good spirits of my father in his holiday mood, and – above all – the admirable cold supper to which we came back at about ten o’clock.
A very different kind of enthusiast of the theatre was a young master Jack fell under the spell of at Cherbourg. In his description of ‘Pogo’ (the master) in that same chapter of his autobiography, Jack wrote:
Pogo was a wit, Pogo was a dressy man, Pogo was a man about town … Pogo was a great theatrical authority. We soon knew all the latest songs. We soon knew all about the famous actresses of that age – Lily Elsie, Gertie Millar, Zena Dare. Pogo was a fund of information about their private lives. We learned from him all the latest jokes; where we did not understand he was ready to give us help. He explained many things. After a term of Pogo’s society one had the feeling of being not twelve weeks but twelve years older.
I first read the Boxen ‘novels’ during that part of 1963 when I was working for Jack and living in his home in Oxford. When he discovered how charmed I was by the sartorial splendour of Viscount Puddiphat (the owner of many ‘Alhambra’ music-halls) he drew my attention to the two passages quoted above. We also talked about the absorption by so many Boxonians with politics, which he said came directly from his father and his father’s friends. But the political side of Boxen life is no where so clearly explained than in the excellent Memoir which Warnie wrote to go with his edition of Letters of C.S. Lewis (1966) and in which he said:
In the upper-middle-class society of our Belfast childhood, politics and money were the chief, almost the only subjects of grown-up conversation: and since no visitors came to our house who did not hold precisely the same political views as my father, what we heard was not discussion and the lively clash of minds, but rather an endless and one-sided torrent of grumble and vituperation. Any ordinary parent would have sent us boys off to amuse ourselves, but not my father: we had to sit in silence and endure it. The immediate result, in Jack’s case, was to convince him that grown-up conversation and politics were one and the same thing, and that everything he wrote must therefore be given a political framework: the long-term result was to fill him with a disgust and revulsion from the very idea of politics before he was out of his ’teens.
When Jack spoke of himself in his Life as having his father’s ‘bad temper’ he almost certainly meant that he shared his father’s gift for oratory. Describing this aspect of Mr Lewis in Chapter II of Surprised by Joy he said: ‘He … relied wholly on his tongue as the instrument of domestic discipline … When he opened his mouth to reprove us he no doubt intended a short well-chosen appeal to our common sense and conscience. But alas, he had been a public speaker long before he became a father. He had for many years been a public prosecutor. Words came to him and intoxicated him as they came.’ Jack realised that anyone who happened to read about the almost despotic hold Lord Big has over King Benjamin VII and Rajah Hawki V would suppose Lord Big to be a portrait of Mr Lewis. ‘The reader’, he says in Chapter V of his autobiography
will divine a certain resemblance between the life of the two kings under Lord Big and our own life under our father. He will be right. But Big was not, in origin, simply our Father first batrachised and then caricatured in some directions and glorified in others. He was in many ways a prophetic portrait of Sir Winston Churchill as Sir Winston Churchill came to be during the last war … The two soverigns who allowed themselves to be dominated by Lord Big were King Benjamin VIII of Animal-Land and Rajah Hawki (I think, VI) of India. They had much in common with my brother and myself. But their fathers, the elder Benjamin and the elder Hawki, had not. The Fifth Hawki is a shadowy figure; but the Seventh Benjamin (a rabbit, as you will have guessed) is a rounded character. I can see him still – the heaviest-jowled and squarest-builded of all rabbits, very fat in his later years … His earlier life had been dominated by the belief that he could be both a king and an amateur detective. He never succeeded in the later role, partly because the chief enemy whom he was pursuing (Mr Baddlesmere) was not really a criminal at all but a lunatic – a complication which would have thrown out the plans of Sherlock Holmes himself. But he very often got himself kidnapped … Once, on his return from such a misadventure, he had dyed him and the familiar brown figur
e reappeared as a piebald rabbit … The judgement of history cannot pronounce him either a good rabbit or a good King; but he was not a nonentity. He ate prodigiously.
Jack Lewis probably never imagined that these stories would be published. And he was only having some fun when he said in his Encyclopedia that certain problems must be left to ‘the future Boxonologist’. Honoured as I am in being appointed to edit the stories I suppose my old friend would, with his usual gaiety, call me that future Boxonologist. He might even have suggested me as the first holder of the Lord Big Chair of Boxonology. If so, then I think the inventor of Boxen would regard it as my duty to point out that the monarchs ‘dominated’ by Lord Big were Benjamin VII and Hawki V. There has not yet been a Benjamin VIII and a Hawki VI. A far more painful duty is to report that none of the stories of the Sixth Benjamin who pursued Mr Baddlesmere exist.
As already mentioned, none of these stories can be dated exactly. Even Jack could not help me with this. He did, however, say that he thought the series came to an end before he entered Malvern College. Warnie also seemed to think they had all been written before the autumn of 1913. However, a few years before Warnie died he scribbled some possible dates on the novels. On the cover of Boxen he wrote, ‘Obviously written in 1912 – see p. 26.’ What is on that page is an invitation from one of the characters which is dated April 3rd 1912. Warnie attempted to date the other novels by this same kind of ‘internal evidence’ – the years mentioned in the stories. Considering how much the handwriting changes from the first to the last of the novels and, even more, the quality of the writing, I think it unlikely that all were written in little more than a twelvemonth. The dates which appear within the stories could be as much a part of the invention as everything else. It seems unlikely that within a year Jack could, in his Life of Lord John Big, forget that Lord Big was created Little-Master before the expedition to the Tracity Island and not afterwards. My guess is that the first of the novels, Boxen, could have been written as far back as Christmas 1910.
Jack seldom re-read any of his published works. There is, however, much to suggest that of all he wrote, published and unpublished, it was the Boxen stories that he and Warnie read most often. It was a door into one of the most pleasant parts of their lives. We can’t know Boxen as they did. Even so, the remarkable thing is the amount of pleasure to which we are admitted. When I first read The Iliad as a boy and knew nothing about Homer I could not have guessed whether Homer was ‘for’ the Greeks against the Trojans or whether it was the other way round. And when I knew more about Homer it did nothing to change what I most like about The Iliad: the writer’s admiration and good will towards everyone and even every thing that is truly good in its way. So with Boxen. One would expect the young boy to make much of those steam ships and railways which he naturally liked. But what of those stupefying conversations about politics? By being dipped in his imagination the things he disliked in the real world became as much as anything a part of a single, delightful whole. The characters and their doings have their individual excellences, and nothing is despised. Finally, when the grown-up C.S. Lewis re-read the stories in preparation for beginning his Encyclopedia, he wrote to his brother saying, ‘I suppose it is only accident, but it is hard to resist the convictions that one is dealing with a sort of reality.’ Perhaps he was. Perhaps we are too.
THE BOXEN MANUSCRIPTS
* * * * * * *
C.S. ‘Jack’ Lewis wrote what there is of his Encyclopedia Boxoniana on visits to his father’s house, Little Lea in Belfast, in September 1927 and in April 1928. Albert Lewis died on the 25th September 1929 and as Jack had a home in Oxford and as Warnie was in the Army they decided to sell Little Lea. On their last day there, the 23rd April 1930, they arranged to transfer all the Boxen manuscripts to Oxford. The trunk containing all the toys which had served as models for various Boxen characters was buried in the garden of the house.
I think one of the reasons why Jack did not complete his Encyclopedia is because, in turning out the contents of his father’s house, he came across many Boxen manuscripts previously overlooked. The fragment to which I have given the name Tararo is one of the manuscripts found after Albert Lewis died. When Jack and his brother wrote to one another about the stories they referred to the longer works or ‘novels’ as the ‘ones we usually read’. They are the ones I read at Jack’s home, The Kilns, in Headington Quarry, Oxford.
Jack and Warnie had been living at The Kilns since 1930. Then, when Jack died on the 22nd November 1963, Warnie was afraid he could not afford to go on living there and he decided to move into a smaller house. One day in January 1964 I went out to see Warnie. I discovered from the gardener, Paxford, that Warnie has been burning various papers on a bonfire for the last three days. That day Paxford had been instructed to put on the bonfire a good many notebooks and papers which he recognised as being in the handwriting of C.S. Lewis. He knew that I would wish to preserve them and when he mentioned this to Warnie he was told that if I appeared that day I could have them. Otherwise they were to be burned. And so it was that I arrived in time to save many things from the flames. Amongst the papers given me by Warnie was what I’ve called Notebook II, the exercise book containing the Encyclopedia and a number of Boxen maps.
Not long after this Warnie said in his Memoir to Letters of C.S. Lewis (1966) that ‘After [Jack’s] death, we found among his papers any number of childish but ambitious beginnings of histories, stories, poems, nearly all of them dealing with our private fantasy world of Animal-Land or Boxen.’ Except for the two notebooks given me by Jack and those few items saved from the fire, what Warnie saved were those ‘novels’ which range from Boxen to Littera Scripta Manet and the two volumes of family drawings called Leborough Studies Ranging from 1905–1916, a number of which drawings appear in this book. He was very fond of these and before he died on the 9th April 1973 he arranged for all of them to go to the Marion E. Wade Collection at Wheaton College in Wheaton, Illinois. At some time before Warnie died those pages in the second volume of the Leborough Studies which contained the first act of the Unfinished Play (mentioned in Jack’s Encyclopedia) had been torn out. It is not known when this happened or why.
I am grateful that Professor Lyle Dorsett of the Marion E. Wade Collection allowed the Lewis Estate to photograph the illustrations from the Boxen ‘novels’ and the drawings by C.S. Lewis contained in the Leborough Studies. There are facsimile copies of those Boxen manuscripts owned by Wheaton College in the Bodleian Library.
WALTER HOOPER
Oxford, 23 May 1984
Copyright
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2008
1
Boxen: Childhood Chronicles before Narnia first published in Great Britain in an abridged form as Boxen by William Collins and Co. Ltd and by Fount Paperbacks, London 1985
Boxen copyright © 1985 by C.S. Lewis Pte Ltd.
‘Littera Scripta Manet’, ‘Tararo’ and ‘The Life of Lord John Big of Bigham’
copyright © 2008 by C.S. Lewis Pte Ltd.
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The Proprietor on behalf of the Authors hereby assert their respective moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
The Estate of C.S. Lewis gratefully acknowledges The Marion E. Wade Collection, Wheaton College, Illinois USA, for allowing the manuscripts in its possession to be photographed and to the Rev. Walter Hooper for making available the material in his possession.
In the UK a catalogue record for this book is available from the
British Library.
US Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
UK: ISBN-13 978-0-00-726075-1 USA: ISBN 978-0-06-169833-0
EPub Edition © OCTOBER 2012 ISBN: 9780062245755
About the Author
CLIVE STAPLES LEWIS, known as Jack to his friends, was born in 1898. Lewis and his good friend J. R. R. Tolkien, the author of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, were part of the Inklings, an informal writers’ club that met at a local pub to discuss story ideas. Lewis’s fascination with fairy tales, myths and ancient legends, coupled with inspiration drawn from his childhood, led him to write THE LION, THE WITCH AND THE WARDROBE, one of the best-loved books of all time. Six further books followed to become the immensely popular Chronicles of Narnia. The final title in the series, THE LAST BATTLE, was awarded the Carnegie Medal, one of the highest marks of excellence in children’s literature.