The Banks of the Styx
Tolkien, after the death of his mother, found love and a home through the help of Father Francis. Lewis suffered the opposite fate. After his mother’s death, he was exiled from home, sent abroad by his father to the first of a succession of boarding schools, each disastrous in its own incomparable way. This may strike the modern reader as needlessly cruel; but at the time, for families like the Lewises and Hamiltons, boarding school seemed like the normal, obvious, and essential route to adult achievement for an Anglo-Irish boy whose prospects at home were far from secure. So off Lewis went, trussed in an Eton collar, knickerbockers, boots, and bowler, via four-wheeler and ship on September 18, 1908—less than four weeks after his mother’s death—his brother alongside, to Watford, Hertfordshire, in England, to enroll in Wynyard School, where Warnie was already a pupil.
England, at first glance, looked like “the banks of Styx,” an apt introduction to the regions of hell Lewis would soon traverse. His account of his two years there, and his subsequent stay at three other schools, occupies a large, perhaps disproportionate, chunk of his autobiography, about half of the whole, and proves a formidable obstacle to readers, especially those from foreign lands, not as entranced as British males of Lewis’s generation by the minutiae of public school existence. Nonetheless, his vivid description of the Grand Guignol he witnessed, which ranged from cruelty to sexual exploitation to outright madness, offers both literary and sensationalistic compensation and constitutes a fierce indictment of a pedagogical system that has now largely vanished.
Each school offered its own variety of moral or mental disarray. Wynyard, called Belsen (after the concentration camp) in Surprised by Joy, harbored a headmaster, Robert Capron (“Oldie”), who beat his charges mercilessly. A High Court action for abuse, taken by one of the boy’s parents, precipitated the school’s decline; by the time Jack arrived, Capron had been declared insane, but the school continued to operate. “I think I shall like this place,” Jack wrote to his father, “Misis Capron and the Miss Caprons are very nice and I think I will be able to get on with Mr. Capron though to tell the truth he is rather eccentric.” Ten days later he wrote, “My dear Papy … Please may we not leave on Saturday? We simply cannot wait in this hole till the end of term.” Albert’s answer was not encouraging: “All schools—whether for boys or the larger school of life for men—press hardly and sorely at times. Otherwise they would not be schools. But I am sure you will face the good and the bad like a brave Christian boy, for dear, dear, Mammy’s sake.”
Little in the way of real education went on at Wynyard: for the most part it was endless sums and arbitrary floggings. Capron did know how to teach geometry, thus giving Jack his first systematic introduction to critical thinking and in so doing creating an association between success in logical argument and belligerence in rhetorical style. Lewis would have to learn, by painful self-correction, how to temper his zeal for good argument with humor and charity.
It was also at Wynyard that Lewis first took Christianity seriously. The school’s Anglo-Catholic style deeply offended his Ulster Protestant sensibilities; perhaps otherwise it would not have caught his attention. “I do not like church here at all because it is so frightfully high church that it might as well be Roman Catholic,” he told his father in October 1908. Some months later, he recorded in his diary, “In this abominable place of Romish hypocrites and English liars, the people cross themselves, bow to the Lord’s Table (which they have the vanity to call an altar), and pray to the Virgin.” Eventually, though, he overcame his distaste enough to appreciate hearing “the doctrines of Christianity (as distinct from general ‘uplift’) taught by men who obviously believed them.” He began to think about hell, examine his conscience, pray earnestly, and study the Bible.
Here, too, Lewis developed his taste for the works of Rider Haggard and Wells, opening vistas both mythopoeic and extraterrestrial. These two authors, he emphasized later on, offered him “coarser” pleasures than those he associated with Joy. His hunger for their works was “ravenous, like a lust.” There was in it nothing spiritual; it was, he came to believe, an expression of deep-seated psychological forces, and he saw his adult science fantasies as an “exorcism” rather than a maturing of this passion. Nevertheless, he acknowledged Haggard’s influence and called his talent “the text-book case of the mythopoeic gift pure and simple.” He and Warnie also made plans to create a book club, fed by subscriptions to Pearson’s Magazine, The Strand, and The Captain, which would mean an unending stream of boys’ adventures stories, including those of Kipling, Chesterton, and Conan Doyle.
Conditions at Wynyard grew worse by fits and starts. By September 29, 1908, Warnie wrote to his father, “You have never refused me anything Papy and I know you won’t refuse me this—that I may leave Wynyard. Jack wants to too.” But on November 22, Lewis wrote, “I find school very nice but it is frightfully monotenis,” and a week later: “as to what you say about leaving I cannot know quite what to say, Warnie does not particularly want to, he says it look like being beaten in the fight”; and “in spite of all that has happened I like Mr. Capron very much indeed.” No doubt there is an element of bravado in these statements. In February 1909, Lewis reported that he had been shut out of a secret society headed by a certain “Squivy,” but that Squivy’s throne was tottering, and Capron’s pupils were fleeing one by one. Warnie abandoned ship in April, morally spent and under an indictment for incorrigible laziness, leaving Lewis to hang on with the handful of remaining pupils. In June 1910, Wynyard finally collapsed under its headmaster’s lunacies and was closed by High Court order. After a brief clerical career, cut short when he persisted in flogging the choirboys and church wardens, Capron was committed to an asylum in Kent, where he died of pneumonia in 1911.
Lewis passed the summer of 1910 with Albert and Warnie (by now a student at Malvern College, England). He then enrolled at Campbell College, a boarding school in Belfast. While there he became a devotee of Matthew Arnold’s “grave melancholy,” savoring his Sohrab and Rustum, an epic poem derived from the Persian Shanameh, in which the legendary hero Rustum inadvertently kills his son Sohrab in single combat. Looking back, Lewis prized this literary discovery as a foretaste of the Iliad; others will note that Sohrab and Rustum is the tale of a powerful father’s tragic misunderstanding of his chivalrous son.
Having developed a bad cough while at Campbell, Lewis crossed the Irish Sea again in January 1911, this time to attend Cherbourg Preparatory School (“Chartres” of Surprised by Joy) near Warnie’s college in Malvern, Worcestershire, a health resort with curative waters. Cherbourg proved momentous. Here he advanced in Latin and in English literature, here he came to love the miniature beauties of the English countryside—and here he abandoned Christianity. He himself evinced many causes for his loss of faith. One was the influence of that gentle Cherbourg House matron, the beloved G. E. Cowie (“Miss C.” in Surprised by Joy), who had a taste for occultism of the Theosophical/Rosicrucian stripe and awakened a like hunger in Lewis. But was the culprit really Miss Cowie? The real tempter, Lewis suggests in his autobiography, was the Devil, who made use of Miss Cowie’s innocent guile. Let us note in passing that this is one of the difficulties and pleasures of studying the Inklings; Christians all, they offer, along with expected twentieth-century psychosocial explanations for behavior, unexpected spiritual ones: as the biographer can neither peer into his subject’s unconscious nor interview the Enemy (as Lewis terms him), both forms of explanation must be taken, at least provisionally, on faith—or, at a minimum, faithfully recorded.
Lewis cites other reasons, too, for his newborn skepticism. One was the onslaught of scruples, a problem well attested in the spiritual life, especially among the young, where religious observances must be done perfectly and achieve a certain result. However the Enemy may turn them to his advantage, scruples can be understood psychologically as a temporary obsessive-compulsive disorder triggered by the turmoil of adolescent sexual development.
In Lewis’s case, during the period of his religious awakening at Wynyard, he had come to demand of his nightly prayers a “realization,” “a certain vividness of the imagination and the affections”—a sure recipe for sleeplessness and misery, and, as Lewis says, the road to madness. Loss of faith came as blessed relief.
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-dalāl (The Deliverer from Error), al-Ghazālī’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 portrait
s 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.”
The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings Page 6