Becoming C. S. Lewis (1898–1918) E-Book

Harry Lee Poe

• Herausgeber: Crossway
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Serie: Lewis Trilogy
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 507

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

During his youth, the boy who would become C. S. Lewis formed his most basic impressions and tastes regarding music, art, literature, religion, sports, friendship, imagination, education, war, and more. The issues young "Jack" Lewis wrestled with drove him toward the foundation on which his life would be built. His childhood interests, influences, longings, struggles, and even failures prepared him to engage his gifts as a writer, teacher, and friend. Lewis expert Harry Lee Poe unfolds young Jack's key relationships, hobbies, spiritual conflicts, decisions, desires, and dreams. Along the way, Poe points out where these themes reappear in Lewis's later works— bringing to life the importance of his conversion and his surprising discovery of joy.

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“Harry Lee Poe’s biography of Lewis’s early years is an engaging book filled with glimpses of the celebrated author that cannot be found in any other biography of Lewis.”

Lyle W. Dorsett, Director Emeritus, Marion E. Wade Center; Billy Graham Professor of Evangelism Emeritus, Beeson Divinity School; author, And God CameIn and Seeking the Secret Place

“‘The Child is father of the Man.’ Anyone who doubts this observation by Wordsworth should read this excellent new biography of C. S. Lewis. Poe goes into great depth, drawing heavily on unpublished sources, recounting the first two decades of Lewis’s life in splendid detail. Even seasoned readers of Lewis will find much that is new and illuminating in this readable biography.”

David C. Downing, Codirector, Marion E. Wade Center

“A unique coming-of-age biography of C. S. Lewis that stands out in revealing how his early life shaped the future Lewis: body, mind, and soul. It vividly captures the whole person of Lewis—not only an aspect of him but also the variety and depth of his defining features. The result is an eye-opening, important, and rich portrait that benefits from the teeming knowledge and thorough research of the author. It includes the often-neglected, lasting significance of the people who impacted the often-solitary young Lewis, with illuminating flash-forwards to the future Lewis.”

Colin Duriez, author, C. S. Lewis: A Biography of Friendship and Tolkien and C. S. Lewis: The Gift of Friendship

“Harry Lee Poe’s Becoming C. S. Lewis breaks new ground in the study of Lewis’s life. Specifically, Poe concentrates on the early years of Lewis’s life—an area largely neglected or glossed over by other biographers—and explores in rich detail the people, ideas, and experiences that shaped Lewis’s adult life. Mining the fertile cache of material available in the Lewis Papers—the eleven-volume archive compiled by Lewis’s brother, Warren—Poe offers convincing arguments about how Lewis’s earliest interests find expression in his adult writings. The themes found later in Lewis’s magisterial works had their inception in Lewis’s youthful writings, particularly in his lifelong correspondence with his boyhood friend Arthur Greeves. Readers intent on obtaining a deeper understanding of the most important Christian writer of the last hundred years will find Becoming C. S. Lewis a welcomed treasure trove.”

Don King, author, C. S. Lewis, Poet; Plain to the Inward Eye; and The Collected Poems of C. S. Lewis

“Many fans of C. S. Lewis will savor having so much detail on his early years gathered together in one biography. This portrait of an artist as a young man is based on remarkably rich information that we have concerning Lewis’s formative experiences and influences. Harry Lee Poe adds much helpful context and commentary.”

George M. Marsden, author, C. S. Lewis’s “Mere Christianity”: A Biography

“Wordsworth famously wrote, ‘The Child is father of the Man.’ To better understand C. S. Lewis’s tremendous achievements later in life—as a writer of imaginative fiction and poetry, a literary critic, and a Christian apologist—we should look to his formative years. Harry Lee Poe’s Becoming C. S. Lewis is a valuable contribution to biographies of Lewis, providing a rich and comprehensive look at Lewis’s early years and his important relationships with figures such as his brother, Warren Lewis, his friend Arthur Greeves, and his tutor W. T. Kirkpatrick.”

Holly Ordway, Professor of English, Houston Baptist University; author, Apologetics and the Christian Imagination

“The young Jack Lewis is the Lewis whom all admirers of the mature C. S. Lewis need to know. We find it highly fitting, then, that Harry Lee Poe, who has long been a devoted guide to Lewis and the Inklings, has chosen to illuminate for us so faithfully the ardent youth who was father to the man.”

Carol and Philip Zaleski, coauthors, The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings

Becoming C. S. Lewis

Becoming C. S. Lewis

A Biography of Young Jack Lewis

(1898–1918)

Harry Lee Poe

Becoming C. S. Lewis: A Biography of Young Jack Lewis (1898–1918)

Copyright © 2019 by Harry Lee Poe

Published by Crossway1300 Crescent StreetWheaton, Illinois 60187

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, except as provided for by USA copyright law. Crossway® is a registered trademark in the United States of America.

Extracts from the following reprinted by permission: The Abolition of Man © copyright CS Lewis Pte Ltd 1943, 1946, 1978. The Allegory of Love © copyright CS Lewis Pte Ltd 1936. All My Road Before Me © copyright CS Lewis Pte Ltd 1991. The Collected Letters of CS Lewis, vol. 1 © copyright CS Lewis Pte Ltd 2000. The Collected Letters of CS Lewis, vol. 2 © copyright CS Lewis Pte Ltd 2004. The Discarded Image © copyright CS Lewis Pte Ltd 1964. “Edmund Spenser,” in Fifteen Poets © copyright CS Lewis Pte Ltd 1941. An Experiment in Criticism © copyright CS Lewis Pte Ltd 1961. The Four Loves © copyright CS Lewis Pte Ltd 1960. “Kipling’s World,” in Literature and Life © copyright CS Lewis Pte Ltd 1948. The Last Battle © copyright CS Lewis Pte Ltd 1956. Lewis Family Papers, vol. 3 © copyright CS Lewis Pte Ltd. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe © copyright CS Lewis Pte Ltd 1950. Mere Christianity © copyright CS Lewis Pte Ltd 1942, 1943, 1944, 1952. The Pilgrim’s Regress © copyright CS Lewis Pte Ltd 1933. Rehabilitations © copyright CS Lewis Pte Ltd 1939. Spenser’s Images of Life © copyright CS Lewis Pte Ltd 1967. Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature © copyright CS Lewis Pte Ltd 1966. Surprised by Joy © copyright CS Lewis Pte Ltd 1955. They Asked for a Paper © copyright CS Lewis Pte Ltd 1962. Transpositions © copyright CS Lewis Pte Ltd 1949.

Cover design: Josh Dennis

Cover image: C. S. Lewis ca. 1912, Courtesy of The Marion E. Wade Center; Tulip wallpaper design, 1875, Morris, William (1834–1896) / Private Collection / The Stapleton Collection / Bridgeman Images

First printing 2019

Printed in the United States of America

Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4335-6273-0 ePub ISBN: 978-1-4335-6276-1 PDF ISBN: 978-1-4335-6274-7 Mobipocket ISBN: 978-1-4335-6275-4

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Poe, Harry Lee, 1950– author.

Title: Becoming C. S. Lewis: a biography of young Jack Lewis (1898–1918) / Harry Lee Poe.

Description: Wheaton: Crossway, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019009167 (print) | LCCN 2019011376 (ebook) | ISBN 9781433562747 (pdf) | ISBN 9781433562754 (mobi) | ISBN 9781433562761 (epub) | ISBN 9781433562730 (hc)

Subjects: LCSH: Lewis, C. S. (Clive Staples), 1898–1963—Childhood and youth. | Authors, English—20th century—Biography.

Classification: LCC PR6023.E926 (ebook) | LCC PR6023.E926 Z839 2019 (print) | DDC 823/.912 [B] —dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019009167

Crossway is a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.

2022-02-18 04:16:52 PM

To

Don King, Nigel Goodwin, and Rebecca Hays,

who have stood alongside me

in the ministry of

the Inklings Fellowship

Contents

Acknowledgments

 1  Young Jack Lewis at Wynyard School: 1908–1910

 2  Off to Malvern: 1910–1914

 3  Making a Friend: Spring 1914

 4  Jack and War Come to Great Bookham: Fall 1914

 5  Reading for Kirkpatrick and for Pleasure: 1914

 6  War and Romance: 1915

 7  A Conflicted Soul: 1916

 8  Oxford and War: 1917–1918

 9  The End of Youth

Notes

Index

Acknowledgments

I had never planned to write this book, but it got ahead of me. On one of those odd days when I decided not to do what I should have been doing, I began to wonder what C. S. Lewis liked to eat. That he liked to eat food, he made abundantly clear. He enjoyed eating and he confessed that he ate more than he should. I decided to look through his letters to see what he said about the meals he enjoyed. As it turns out, he said precious little about the menu. He regularly mentioned eating, but he rarely discussed what he ate. When he first went to live with W. T. Kirkpatrick at Gastons, however, he mentioned that he had good old Irish soda bread.

By the time I had read that far in the letters, however, I realized that the early life of C. S. Lewis had been neglected. He expressed opinions in those letters, before he went off to war, that he might have included in any of his scholarly works. It also became clear that most of the things he liked and disliked had been settled by the time he was seventeen. It became clear to me why Lewis devoted so much of Surprised by Joy to his school days and his time with Kirkpatrick. As I read the letters, this book began to take shape in my mind.

I am grateful to my acquisitions editor at Crossway, Samuel James, for his interest in this book—the first of three projected volumes on the life of C. S. Lewis—and the support that he and his colleagues at Crossway have offered. Claire Cook and Josh Dennis in the creative department of Crossway have done a beautiful job of creating the cover and the cover design of the book, which would have been of paramount importance to seventeen-year-old Jack Lewis. Thom Notaro has done an exceptional job of editing the text.

In his biography of Lewis, Alister McGrath made much of the fact that his was the first biography of Lewis that had taken all of Lewis’s letters and diaries into account. The kind of research that he and I have undertaken would be quite impossible had not Walter Hooper done the tedious and meticulous work of editing those letters in three volumes and publishing the diary. Scholars and lovers of Lewis can now examine those letters at their leisure in their own studies without facing the massive expense of traveling to the research libraries and special collections that hold those letters. Hooper has done an enormous service to generations that will come after him.

Even with the vast amount of material that Hooper has edited, much remains unpublished at the Marion E. Wade Center of Wheaton College and in the Bodleian Library of the University of Oxford. I am indebted to the Wade Center and its staff for their great kindness, generosity of spirit, encouragement, and helpfulness during several trips for extended periods of research into the primary documents related to Lewis during his early years. Marjorie Lamp Mead has always been gracious to me and all those who come to use the resources of the Wade. Laura Schmidt and Elaine Hooker went out of their way to find things I did not know existed. David and Crystal Downing arrived at the Wade Center as the new codirectors while I was finishing my research, and they extended me the warmest of possible welcomes. I am delighted that they will be leading this important research library into the future.

I am also grateful to Oliver House, superintendent of the special collections reading rooms in the Weston Library of the Bodleian Library of Oxford, for enabling my research. Judith Priestman, curator of English literary manuscripts, and her staff helped me make maximum use of my limited time in Oxford so that I could focus on those Lewis papers not duplicated elsewhere. I also appreciate the help and courtesy given me by Rachel Churchill of the C.S. Lewis Company in securing permission to quote Lewis.

I have had the pleasure of dialogue with many colleagues over the years with whom I have shared an interest in Lewis. Insights often come in undocumented conversations long forgotten. I am particularly indebted to Don King, Colin Duriez, Rebecca Hays, Walter Hooper, William O’Flaherty, Dennis Beets, Barry Anderson, Malissa and Russ Kilpatrick, Stan Shelley, Nigel Goodwin, Joseph Pearce, and James Como. I could not undertake projects of this sort without the support of Union University, particularly our president, Samuel W. (“Dub”) Oliver; the provost, John Netland; and the dean of the school of theology and missions, Ray Van Neste. The faculty awarded me a Pew Research Grant, which helped to cover the expenses of my research, for which I am most grateful. My wife, Mary Anne Poe, has long supported my interest in Lewis and has been a great encouragement in the writing of this book. Finally, to the many students who have taken my class on C. S. Lewis, and to those many participants in the retreats sponsored by the Inklings Fellowship over the past eighteen years, I am grateful for your support and interest in the life and work of C. S. Lewis.

1

Young Jack Lewis at Wynyard School

1908–1910

Between the death of his mother in 1908 and his war service in 1918, young Jack Lewis made the transition from childhood to adolescence to young manhood. He spent this critical period of development, like so many other boys of his social class in England and Ireland, in a variety of institutional settings. During his school days, the boy who would grow to become C. S. Lewis formed his most important tastes in music, art, literature, companionship, religion, sports, and almost every other aspect of life. While his ideas and critical thought about what he liked and disliked would change, his basic preferences came together during this period and formed the foundation out of which his later life grew. The things he liked at fourteen were the things that engaged his intellect and imagination thirty, forty, and fifty years later. The things that sparked his imagination when he was an arrogant, conceited boy were the same things that influenced and motivated his change of character in the context of his conversion to Christianity, when his teenage years were half a lifetime behind him.

The transition from childhood to adolescence to young adulthood also came with critical spiritual issues. All people face the spiritual issues of growing up, but each person must deal with those issues himself or herself. People rarely recognize that they are traveling from one phase of life to another in the midst of the journey, but looking back we can see the landmarks fairly clearly. So it was for Jack Lewis. He lost something from his early childhood when he grew from childhood to boyhood. He suspected that it was the same for all boys for whom those years represent the “dark ages” of life between the two glorious ages of early childhood and adolescence. In boyhood, Lewis thought, everything grows “greedy, cruel, noisy, and prosaic, in which the imagination has slept and the most un-ideal senses and ambitions have been restlessly, even maniacally, awake.”1 Lewis thought of his boyhood as a desert characterized by greed, cruelty, noise, and the mundane—a foreign land that had intruded into the flow of his life as an interruption that did not really belong.2

As he moved into his adolescence, however, Lewis recovered some important things from his earlier childhood that his later boyhood had forgotten. He recovered the sense of wonder that comes from an experience of the transcendent. For Lewis, this experience was the most important thing of life itself, and understanding the nature and source of it would eventually lead him to faith in the God of the Bible. His conversion would come long after his adolescent years had ended; but without the path he chose while dealing with the spiritual issues raised in adolescence, Lewis might not have come to faith. At least, he would not have traveled the same path to faith.

The period of adolescence in the United States roughly corresponds to the period from the seventh grade through the twelfth grade or the years of middle school and high school. It begins around the time of the onset of puberty, when the body begins to do such strange things, and it comes to a close as young people mature enough to assume the responsibilities of adulthood. For some people, the end of adolescence comes when they take their first full-time job. College life can actually prolong adolescence for many people who use college to keep responsibility at bay. Whether college would have prolonged the adolescent period for C. S. Lewis remains a speculative question because he did not have that option. At the age when most young men of his social class would have been settling into their first full year of college, Lewis was settling into the trenches on the Western Front as an eighteen-year-old junior officer in the British Army.

Of Names and Monikers

Christened Clive Staples Lewis, the little boy announced at the age of four that he was Jacksie, soon shortened to Jacks, and finally reduced to Jack.3 For the rest of his life he was known to his friends as Jack. C. S. Lewis had a variety of nicknames as a teenaged boy. His friend Arthur Greeves called him Chubs because he was a bit chubby.4 His father, Albert, and his brother, Warren (“Warnie”), began calling him “It” in their correspondence about the time Jack went to Malvern College. By 1910, Albert had added new pet names for his sons as he started calling Jacks “Klicks” and Warnie “Badge.”5 Once Warnie entered the army during the Great War, Jack began calling him “the Colonel.” In childhood, Warnie had also been called Bruser (or Bruiser).6 Nicknames seem to have come with being a member of the Lewis family. In their letters, Flora Lewis called her husband her “dear old Bear” or Lal, while Flora was Doli to Albert Lewis. Albert’s father called him Al, while other close friends and relatives called him Ally or Allie.

Clive Staples Lewis’s first name was actually a last name, the name of one of the great heroes of Victorian England, for Robert Clive of India had beaten the French and laid the foundations for the absorption of India into the British Empire. The nineteenth century saw many young middle-class boys named Clive in the lesser public schools (what Americans would regard as private schools). When Jack was a child, his extended family on his mother’s side appear always to have called him Clive.7 Many years later, however, in a letter to Warnie Lewis after Jack died, their cousin Ruth Hamilton Parker referred to him as Jacks.8 He was also called Clive by his teacher W. T. Kirkpatrick, who prepared him for his entrance examinations to Oxford.9George Watson, a former pupil of Lewis and colleague at Cambridge, reminds us that the faculty chairman of the appointments committee at Cambridge, where Lewis had an exalted position as holder of a professorial chair, addressed Lewis as Clive.10 As an adult, on formal occasions he only used his initials, so he is known to the world as C. S. Lewis. He appears to have first used this formal signature in his first letter to his friend Arthur Greeves from Great Bookham in September 1914.11 Normally he signed his letters to Greeves from “Jack,” but when he was in a particularly pompous mood, he would sign “C. S. Lewis.” As an adult, however, he almost always signed his letters “C. S. Lewis” unless writing to close family and intimate friends. A notable exception can be found in his letters to Sister Penelope. He often signed these letters “Clive Lewis” or “Clive S. Lewis,” instead of “Jack” or “C. S. Lewis.”12

The middle name also had an important bearing on the boy who would grow up to be C. S. Lewis. Staples was a family name on his mother’s side, a name with a pedigree. Flora Lewis was a Hamilton, and the Hamiltons produced a long line of clergymen in the established church, of which her father was one. Her grandfather, the Right Reverend Hugh Hamilton, had been a bishop. The bishop’s wife was a Staples. It was an important marriage in a society where rank mattered, for Elizabeth Staples was the daughter of a member of Parliament. More important for family relations, Elizabeth’s sister married the second Marquess of Ormonde! When Flora Lewis named her firstborn child, she had given him names from her family as well. Warren was the maiden name of her mother, Mary Warren Hamilton, whose father was Sir John Borlase Warren. Like his younger brother, Warnie did not have a first name as such; he had three last names.

Thus, we see that Albert Lewis married into a family of the lesser gentry of the Protestant Ascendency of Ireland, and the names of his sons bore witness to those important family relationships, which conveyed a status that his success in the law alone could never provide. These are the kinds of people about which Jane Austen had written almost a century earlier. While English society might have moved on somewhat over the decades, Irish society was still trying to catch up to their English cousins. Knights and baronets have the dignity of a title—and in the case of a baronet, a hereditary title—but they do not have the rank of a peer. They remain commoners, but rather grand commoners. Mary Warren Hamilton had a sister, Charlotte Warren Heard, whose daughter Mary married Sir William Ewart, the second baronet.13

Why Wynyard School?

With great expectations for continued prosperity of the family and the greatest possible opportunities for their children, families of the social standing of the Albert Lewis family would be expected to send their sons to England for the kind of education that would aid their advancement in society. Flora appears to have played a major role in the decision to send the boys to England for their education. Albert had suggested a school in Armagh, but Flora countered that Armagh would be no better than Belfast “as regards accent.” For those in the Protestant Ascendancy of Ireland, overcoming the Irish accent and learning to affect an English accent was a primary aspect of a middle-class education. After Flora died, the emotional and sentimental Albert would have no choice about sending the boys to England. Their fate was sealed by Flora’s death. Albert could disagree with a living Flora, but a deceased Flora carried the argument.14 She would continue to play the dominant role in any decisions about where the boys would attend school and in Albert’s resistance to their pleas for rescue from Wynyard. Albert regularly appealed to his sons for forgiveness when he seemed harsh or difficult, and the tone generally followed the same pattern as that he expressed to Warnie in January 1910: “But if ever I appear harsh to you dear Badge, remember that I have come through great trouble and affliction, and though I may err in my methods, my one object in living is to start my sons in life as educated Christian gentlemen—worthy sons of their mother.” The appeals to Flora’s memory were endless.15

Boys of good background attended a preparatory school in preparation for admission to a good public school. An English preparatory school corresponded roughly to an American elementary school, and a public school corresponded roughly to American middle school and high school. In both cases, pupils normally boarded at the schools and returned home only during holidays. William T. Kirkpatrick began advising Albert Lewis on preparatory schools in October 1904. Kirkpatrick had been headmaster of Lurgan, the Irish public school that Albert had attended. Kirkpatrick began corresponding with Albert in 1901 after having seen him the previous summer. Kirkpatrick’s letters overflow with sage proverbs, such as “A man who forgets his promise betrays a lamentable weakness of character,” and “An old horse needs a kick to remind him to go on.” Just as his acquaintance with Jack Lewis would coincide with the commencement of the Great War, Kirkpatrick’s first letter to Albert coincided with the Boer War. In the Boer War, as in the Great War, Kirkpatrick took the view that the government and those charged with prosecuting the war had no idea what they were doing. He punctuated his first letter with the word “hopeless.” He regarded the Boers as fanatical in their political and religious beliefs and thought that the only way they would stop fighting would be if they were all exterminated. Kirkpatrick believed that the war with the Boers would never end as long as the Boers had twenty men left to wreck a railway. The letter suggests the kind of clever remark about the ignorance of government ministers that Jack Lewis would find so entertaining in his mid-adolescence. It also demonstrates that W. T. Kirkpatrick could be wrong.16

From Kirkpatrick’s perspective, there were no good schools. He was particularly dismissive of Campbell College in Belfast, near the Lewis home. Kirkpatrick claimed to have taught a former Campbell pupil more in three months than the boy had learned at Campbell in a year. Kirkpatrick gave Albert a catalog of his major teaching achievements, bordering on the miraculous, that he had wrought in his young scholars. On the surface, it sounds like bragging, but given the miracles Kirkpatrick would achieve with Warren, it was more a commentary on the status of public schools than on Kirkpatrick as a miracle worker. This view of Campbell College that Kirkpatrick embedded deeply into Albert’s mind, however, suggests one reason why Albert did not let Jack stay at Campbell several years later.

As far as what Albert might do about securing the best preparatory school placement for his boys, Kirkpatrick recommended that he write to Gabbitas Thring & Company, educational agents, Piccadilly, London. The agency would find the best school for the boys. Kirkpatrick agreed with Albert that an Irish school would not do if the boys were to have any future at all. He added the telling comment, however, that from his writing, no one could tell that Albert, the product of an Irish school, was not a public school boy.17 The faint praise would have reminded Albert that he had not arrived, but that his sons might. In later years, the Lewis boys took delight in mocking their father’s Irish accent behind his back.

In response to Kirkpatrick’s advice, Albert reasoned that if Warren got nothing from his education but “good form” and football, he would at least “learn the language” that marked a man as a gentleman.18Gabbitas Thring & Company made Albert aware of Wynyard School in Watford under the headmastership of Robert Capron, who wrote to Albert on December 12, 1904, to sweeten the deal by suggesting that a promising pupil who intended to work toward an entrance scholarship to a first-class public school could expect a reduction in fees. Capron added that his boys had enjoyed great success in winning scholarships.19

In choosing a school, Albert had other issues than the quality of education. He hoped to find a school whose fees amounted to no more than seventy pounds a year. Furthermore, he wanted a school noted for its strong discipline, owing to Warnie’s “self willed and obstinate” nature.20 Kirkpatrick considered the four recommendations of Gabbitas Thring & Company that fit the profile Albert had established. He rejected the first school because of misprints in their prospectus. He rejected the second school because it was too cheap. He rejected the third school because it was not so easy to get to from Ireland, while accepting the fourth school, Rhyl, because it was easy to reach from Ireland. In the end, Albert ignored all Kirkpatrick’s advice and sent Warnie to Wynyard.21

Flora’s Influence on Young Jacks

Before Warnie was sent off to his English school, the brothers lived a semi-idyllic existence at their home in the Holywood Hills of the Belfast suburbs with their parents and the servants. The end of Jacks’s childhood and entry into adolescence might have been different had his mother lived, but Flora Lewis died when her second son was only nine years old. She was a remarkable woman in many ways. She attended Queen’s College in Belfast and took degrees in logic and mathematics during the late Victorian era, when few women held college degrees. She even tried her hand at writing stories and magazine articles. While her husband was of a passionate and vacillating nature, Flora tended to have a steady and practical temper. Both she and Albert loved to read, but neither of them read to their children. This task was left to the nursemaid, Lizzie Endicott.

In the summers, Flora took her two boys to Castlerock, a seaside resort not far from Belfast in County Derry. During their visit to the sea in 1904, Flora wrote to Albert that Jacks was delighted with the water and that he looked so funny skipping around in his “bathing drawers.” A little later, however, she wrote that Jacksie did not care so much for the water. Perhaps his perfidious attitude arose because, as often happens with little boys, something was wrong with him all summer—first his ear, then his skin, then his foot.22 Illness and health complaints dogged Jacks throughout his childhood. During the holiday to Castlerock in 1906, Jacks suffered from “one of his nasty fever attacks.”23 Warnie caught enough shrimp in a net for them to boil for their tea, and he also began to swim without his water wings. Jacks, on the other hand, did not do well in the water, and Flora concluded that swimming did not suit him.24

Though Jacks was normally a well-tempered little boy, his older brother could throw him out of temper with his perpetual teasing. Flora complained in a letter to Albert that Warnie could be tiresome without actually being bad.25 During the 1906 holiday at Castlerock, Flora took the boys to visit Dunluce Castle for the first time. It was not important to Jacks at the time other than as somewhere to run around as little boys will, but in the years to come it would become a place shrouded in the stuff of faerie.26 These extended visits to the sea instilled in C. S. Lewis a lifelong love of the sea and swimming, even if it began with a few false starts, but also of trains, the standard means of transportation from Belfast to Castlerock.

Instead of the annual summer holiday at Castlerock, Flora took her boys on a trip to Dieppe, a French seaside resort, in August 1907. No one was seasick from the voyage, and Jacks loved the boat trip across the Irish Sea on their way to London for the first stop of the journey. Jacks fell in love with Trafalgar Square and all the green squares of London, which he thought was “a lovely place.” Flora took the boys to the zoo in Regent’s Park, where they saw all manner of animals, but Jacks was most delighted by the mice.27 In keeping with tradition, he was again sick during the vacation. They stayed at an English hotel in France. Flora was concerned about the safety of the beach at high tide, and Warnie wrote to his father that the beach was not very nice when the tide was in. Despite his prejudice against France and the French, Jacks was delighted with the village, which Warnie described as “the real old sort.”28 On the return trip from France, Flora took the boys back to London. Warnie wanted to see the British Museum, and Jacks wanted to visit the Tower of London.29 To illustrate how precocious his brother was at this age, Warnie Lewis recalled what Jacks had to say to his father upon their return. He told his father that he was prejudiced against the French. When Albert asked him why, Jacks replied, “If I knew why, it would not be a prejudice.”30

During this period, Albert’s father, Richard Lewis, lived with the family at their recently completed Leeborough house, also known as Little Lea. The declining health of Richard added an extra burden to the operation of the household in 1907.31 The burden would soon increase. On Friday, February 7, 1908, Flora consulted with a doctor about a complaint that would be diagnosed as cancer. Flora’s mother insisted that she surrender herself to the care of a certain general practitioner, but Flora tried to explain to her mother that she would follow the care of the best surgeon in Belfast. A second consultation followed on February 11. On February 12, the first nurse arrived. The operation came immediately afterward on February 15 and lasted for two hours.32 With Flora’s cancer, Albert could not look after his father as well. Richard Lewis left Little Lea on February 19, 1908, after a stay of almost eleven months.33 He suffered a stroke on March 24, 1908, and died on April 2.34

During the spring and early summer, Jacks found himself all alone in the big house with the long corridors filled with books. The mother who had always been there to attend him now needed nursing care around the clock. From the stuff of his childhood, it would not have been difficult for C. S. Lewis to create the figure of Digory in The Magician’s Nephew, except that Jacks had no playmate like Polly Plummer. Digory and Polly had a box room at the end of the attic where they could play, just like the little end room at Little Lea, where Jacks and Warnie played. Polly wrote stories, just like Jacks and Warnie. Digory had a mother who was being looked after because she was going to die, just like Jacks. Polly first encountered Digory when he was crying in the garden, but we have no written account of Jacks Lewis crying over the anticipated death of his mother. We can only imagine that C. S. Lewis knew firsthand what he was writing about.

Warnie, Albert, and Jacks Lewis, ca. 1908. Used by permission of the Marion E. Wade Center, Wheaton College, Wheaton, IL.

Warnie and his father exchanged deeply emotional letters almost daily until the end of June, when Albert ended the exchanges by saying he would not write again until he had news. By the end of July, Warnie was back home in Belfast waiting with his family for Flora’s death.35 As the inevitable day approached, Flora wanted to give each of her sons a Bible. Albert dared not leave her side to purchase the Bibles, so his brother Joe accepted the commission and sent the Bibles to Little Lea on August 18.36 Albert noted in his notebook that Flora died “at 6.30 on the morning of 23rd August, my birthday.” Warnie noted that the quotation for the day from Flora’s Shakespearean calendar was a quote from King Lear: “Men must endure their going hence, even as their coming hither; Ripeness is all.”37Fifty-five years later, Warnie would have part of this quotation placed on the gravestone of his little brother when C. S. Lewis died in 1963: “Men must endure their going hence.” Ten years after that, the name of Warren Hamilton Lewis would be added to the stone when Warnie died, and the two brothers now share a common grave.

Flora’s death did not end Albert’s misery in his annus horribilis, for less than two weeks later, on September 3, his brother Joe died as well.38 All in all, Jacks and his brother Warnie might have enjoyed a happy, secure home life during their childhood, but all of that changed when Flora died.

Life after Flora

Lady Mary Ewart took an active interest in the lives of Jack and Warnie after the death of Flora Lewis, who was Lady Ewart’s first cousin. As a result, the boys learned how to behave in august company. Through their Ewart cousins, the Lewis boys did not learn how the other half lived; they learned how the other .01 percent lived. Lady Ewart’s daughter Hope offered to accompany Jacks on his trip home for the Easter holidays in 1910. In a note to Hope thanking her for the kind offer, Albert mentioned that he had dined with her parents the previous Saturday night at Glenmachan, their substantial house near Little Lea. He also thanked her for taking Jacks to see a production of Peter Pan.39 Hope also wrote to Warnie from Bad Nauheim in Germany, where she and her sister Kelsie had spent a month, with the news that she had seen six flying machines in a fabulous competition. With his love of ships and locomotives, the news of flying machines would have thrilled Warnie and filled him with a degree of jealousy.40 Over the following years, the kindness was sometimes appreciated and sometimes tolerated by the boys, but their mother was dead and nothing could change the fact or make up for it.

The death of someone who is loved inevitably raises questions of a spiritual nature even if we do not dwell upon them. The death of a mother raises the question known to philosophers and theologians as theodicy, or the problem of suffering. It might be stated simply as “If there is a good, loving, all-powerful God, then why did my mother die?” Lewis would wrestle with this question in one way or another until the time of his own death. It is a good question, versions of which have been asked by almost everyone who has lived. For some people, it has been the guiding question of life, including the Buddha and Charles Darwin. The question raises doubt about the goodness of God, but it is an odd question. It is odd because one cannot question the goodness of God unless the category of goodness is already present, and where does the idea of goodness come from? Though many people wonder these things, not many people try to find the answers. The questions of C. S. Lewis that began to form in his mind during childhood and adolescence would compel him toward answers that resulted in his conversion to faith in Jesus Christ many years later. First, however, he had to make the journey.

School as a Concentration Camp

In September 1908, without benefit of trial by a jury of his peers, contrary to Magna Carta, and in the absence of habeas corpus, young Jacks Lewis found himself interred in a concentration camp known as Wynyard School for the crime of surviving the death of his mother.41 Deprived of his liberty, he also found himself letting go of the s at the end of his nickname, which he omitted when he signed his first letter home to his father. The young boy alternated between Jack and Jacks in his correspondence at Wynyard School, but the final s would not completely disappear until he later went to Cherbourg School in Malvern in 1911. In a notable exception, Lewis revived Jacks in his last letter home from Malvern College on July 13, 1914.42

Jack and Warnie Lewis in the doorway of their home, ca. 1910. Used by permission of the Marion E. Wade Center, Wheaton College, Wheaton, IL.

Wynyard was a very good concentration camp, complete with severe beatings of the pupils and other forms of cruelty, but it was not a very good school. The enrollment had begun to decline in the aftermath of high court proceeding against Robert Capron, the headmaster of the school, following the particularly brutal beating of a child in 1896. Jack and Warnie Lewis failed in their attempts to convince their father that he should pardon them or at least transfer them to a minimum security prison. Warnie’s sentence ended when he left for Malvern College in July 1909. In 1930, as Warnie prepared to return to his military post after leave, he wrote that the end-of-leave feeling may not be pleasant, but it was “but a pale ghost of the Wynyard feeling.”43 Upon leaving the family home at Little Lea for the last time after his father’s death, Warnie wrote in his diary that “since the days of going back to Wynyard, I cannot remember feeling so depressed.”44 The brothers carried the misery of Wynyard with them all their lives. When Jack began keeping a diary on April 1, 1922, his first entry involved a local school show he attended that enacted a scene from Nicholas Nickleby, which succeeded in calling up the “Wynyard terrors.”45 Though Warnie left Wynyard in 1909, Jack could not leave until the school finally was forced to close in July 1910 because of the continuing decline in enrollment.46

The Reverend Robert Capron, whom his students called Oldie behind his back, established Wynyard School in 1881 at the town of Watford in Hertfordshire, about seventeen miles northwest of central London. For Jack’s first journey to Wynyard, he and Warnie traveled on their own to and from school. This trip involved taking a ferry across the Irish Sea to Fleetwood in Lancashire, then taking a train from the sea to London, where they transferred at Euston Station to a train that would take them to Watford. Jack Lewis was nine years old when he first made the trip. One of the points of this book is to show that the habits and preferences of a lifetime often form during adolescence or before, and this was certainly the case with C. S. Lewis. Jack and Warnie developed a love of smoking at an early age. By the time they were making their unescorted trips between Belfast and school in England, they indulged themselves in one long wallow in tobacco. Warnie declared that they did not smoke to appear sophisticated and grown-up. He insisted that they smoked only because they liked it, but he failed to explain how and why they took up smoking in the first place. On later trips, the boys traveled by way of Liverpool, instead of Fleetwood, where they enjoyed stopping over at the Lime Street Hotel in order to eat lunch and smoke their hearts out.47

The idea of two children making such a trip is unimaginable in the twenty-first century, but that was a different time, when the vast resources of the British Empire existed seemingly for no other purpose than to ensure a safe passage for Jack and Warnie Lewis. As it turned out, Warnie had a terrible bout of seasickness, the likes of which would not be seen again until Eustace joined The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Young Jacks described the journey in a letter to his father about the trip and his arrival in Watford, where he first met Mr. Capron, whom he thought “rather eccentric.”48 Two years earlier, in 1906, a brain specialist had already diagnosed Capron as insane.49

Danger Signs at Wynyard

Warnie, as the older brother, had already been at Wynyard for three years when Flora died. She had taken him there when he first enrolled in May 1905. Twenty years after his experience at Wynyard, Warnie wrote that a boy’s letters home rarely give a true picture of their school experience: “School boys [sic] letters are not to be trusted—fear of their letters being overlooked, fear of them being opened, fear of half measures of redress on their parents part if they do complain, all conspire to make them untruthful, except in extreme unhappiness.”50 The exception to the unreliability of Warnie’s letters would be the constant references to the coming holidays and how much he looked forward to going home. He almost always mentioned how many days were left before his vacation would begin and he could come home.

The timing of Flora’s cancer coincided with a growing awareness on her part that things might not be well with Mr. Capron at Wynyard. Capron had told Warnie that his mother said he was a failure and that he was lazy. Upon hearing this devastating message, the little boy wrote to his mother. We do not have Warnie’s letter, but Warnie preserved his mother’s reply, even though she advised in a postscript to burn her letter because it might cause mischief with Capron.51

Though the Irish Ascendency aspired to social acceptance by the English establishment, the Irish tended to be looked down upon as a lower form of life by the English. Warnie’s abuse by Capron included his first experience of the English prejudice against the Irish. In a letter to his mother after she had assured him that his father and she did not regard him as a failure in spite of Mr. Capron’s assertions, Warnie began to tell her of other things Capron said, especially about his Irishness:

For instance this is what he said this morning when I missed a question. “please, don’t want any of your Irish wit”. Now no sensible person objects to having his country laughed at IN FUN out of school. But when he says things like that to me in school when I cannot say anything to him, and puts down all my mistakes to my being “an Irishman” it is rather annoying.52

At this point, Flora no longer had the strength to protect her son, and it fell to Albert to sort matters.

During June 1908, Warnie finally summoned the courage to write to his father a long letter enumerating Capron’s offenses, but it came at the worst possible time for Albert to deal with it, as Flora lay dying. Albert replied to Warnie’s letter immediately, but the substance of his response dealt with the importance of always telling his father everything that troubled him because soon he would have only his father to tell.53 Albert’s unfortunate letter left Warnie without the assurance that his father would protect him while at the same time giving him his first clear understanding that his mother was going to die.

The anti-Irish bias of his schoolmaster continued to plague Warnie, and Jack would witness the abuse when he arrived at Wynyard. They learned well of the English prejudice throughout their dreary days at Wynyard. Warnie reported to Albert that Capron’s son Wyn had hit him across the head for not changing clothes quickly enough after a football game. Capron then assigned Warnie fifty lines of Virgil as punishment for giving cheek to his son and then exclaimed of Warnie’s rebelliousness, “Soon we shall have Irish home rule here.”54 Irish home rule had been the great political issue simmering in Parliament for decades, and it had begun to come to a head in the first decade of the twentieth century. In practical terms, it meant a local Irish government dominated by Catholics. This was anathema to the Protestant minority clustered in the north around Belfast. Capron, and many Englishmen like him, could not distinguish between Protestant and Catholic issues, and tended to regard all the Irish as troublemakers who needed to be kept in their place.

Warnie’s stream of complaints finally had its impact on Albert, who must have been nearly crippled with grief at this point. He asked Flora’s sister-in-law Annie Hamilton to go to Watford and investigate matters at Wynyard. She appears to have been a formidable lady, and Warnie soon wrote to his father, “Since Aunt Annie’s arrival the matter has been greatly cleared up.” The boys still wanted to leave Wynyard, but Warnie apologized to his father for adding to his burdens after his aunt explained “the reasins [sic] why we could not leave.”55 The reasons were left unstated.

Warnie included Capron’s letters to Albert in the “Memoirs of the Lewis Family,” which he compiled and edited following Albert’s death in 1929, and juxtaposed as they are with the letters of Jacks and Warnie, they show how Albert might have doubted his sons’ reports of life at Wynyard. Capron had sent Albert Lewis several notes of sympathy and concern during the last stages of Flora’s illness and following her death. He was always diligent to remark how he looked forward not only to having young Warren return soon to Wynyard but also to having him joined by his younger brother “Jacko.” How the headmaster got Jacks’s name wrong is a wonder, since he had gone to so much trouble to ensure that he would get both boys as paying customers. Because he repeated this name in his letter of December 11, 1908, and in subsequent letters, he may have continued to believe that Jacko was Jacks’s name. In Capron’s letter of September 9, 1908, following Joe Lewis’s death, he urged Albert to “bear up bravely for the sake of the boys” and included a bill for school fees totaling just over forty-seven pounds for the coming term.56 Capron wrote elegant letters, solicitous for the welfare of Albert and his sons, and showing every concern for Warnie’s well-being and how he might be made to improve his many character defects. Jacks’s simple response to his father was “it is quite untrue, Warnie is not lazy.”57

On October 27, Albert wrote a long letter to Capron, much like a legal brief, laying out the facts and the matters in dispute. In his draft of the letter, Albert had informed Capron that he intended to remove his boys from Wynyard at the end of the term, but he struck through this declaration and replaced it with hopes that matters might improve.58 During the Christmas vacation following Flora’s death, Capron wrote a clever letter to Albert recommending that Warnie cut short his vacation and return to school as soon as possible because “prolonged holidays are most baneful” to the boy’s progress. Confident that the busy court solicitor could not take the time away from his work, he invited Albert to accompany the boys on their return to Wynyard so that he could see for himself what a fine school he had chosen. Then he added, “I believe that dear Mrs. Lewis had great confidence in my wife and myself, and I would like to prove to you that we merit yours.”59 Jack and Warnie preferred to return to Ireland and enroll in Campbell College even if Albert did not think the boys at Campbell were gentlemen. Warnie observed, “I think English boys are not so honest or gentlemanly as most Irish ones.” The boys had had enough of English schools.60

Wynyard, however, was not the end of the matter. It was barely the beginning, for Albert’s aim was to secure the best public schools for his sons. No sooner had he decided on the preparatory school than he began calculating where to send the boys to public school. By 1906, Albert had sought Kirkpatrick’s advice on how best to assure Warnie a good public school in 1910 or 1911. He had narrowed the field to Rugby, Cheltenham, Repton, Shrewsbury, Rossall, Malvern, and Winchester. The truly great schools of Eton and Harrow were far beyond his means, but he wanted Warnie to have a decent education without turning him into “an ignorant prig.” Albert was troubled by the enormity of the responsibility of choosing a good school when all he had to go by were the names and when general knowledge told him how bad some English schools could be.61

Kirkpatrick responded to Albert’s query with his usual dismissal of schools in general. The whole atmosphere of an English public school mitigates against a pupil ever becoming a scholar, though the tone would help a boy become a snob, which had its advantages in English society. Compared with the “coarseness, vulgarity, and disregard for truth” of an Irish school like Campbell, however, an English school was worth the expense. Kirkpatrick regarded Winchester as more difficult than Eton, Rugby as very good, Shrewsbury as a school where one could do worse, and Malvern as a school that would do. Rossall would not do, and the other schools were unknown to him, which is to say, would not do. Though Kirkpatrick understated the case by saying that one could do worse than Shrewsbury, he spent most of his assessment extolling the virtues of Shrewsbury. In the end, Albert wrote to Rugby, Cheltenham, Malvern, and Shrewsbury to inquire if Warnie might have a place in the summer term of 1909 or early 1910.62

Rugby regretted that it could not offer Warnie a place. Malvern, on the other hand, offered him a place in 1909 or 1910.63 In December 1907, Kirkpatrick wrote to Albert to inquire how Warnie was doing at his preparatory school and to ask if he was going to Shrewsbury, Kirkpatrick’s obvious choice.64 Kirkpatrick may have taken it upon himself to write to the headmaster of Shrewsbury, for the latter wrote to Albert several times in an effort to get a final word on his intentions of enrolling Warnie. Albert appears not to have replied to these letters.65 Likewise, the bursar at Cheltenham wrote to know Albert’s intentions.66Remarkably, Albert appears to have taken the recommendation of Malvern College from Robert Capron over Kirkpatrick’s recommendation of Shrewsbury. Capron gave as his reasoning that the head at Malvern had been at Eton and that many of Capron’s former pupils had gone to Malvern.67 By the end of May 1908, the decision was finally made, and Capron began advising Albert on the house at Malvern in which Warnie should be placed.68Though Warnie loved his time at Malvern, he was disparaging of Capron’s letter of advice in which he mentioned Edward Clifford Bullock as a head of house who would do a fine job. Warnie’s memoirs include a note to Capron’s letter in which Warnie commented that Bullock had done exceedingly well at Malvern but had only taken a third (what in the South was once known as a gentleman’s C) at Oxford, suggesting that the best students at Malvern were ill-equipped for Oxford.69

Robert Capron’s wife, Ellen, died on March 1, 1909. The Lewis boys liked her and felt sorry for her, as her life was not much different from the bleak life of the boys at Wynyard School. Her death depressed Warnie, for it reminded him of the death of his mother.70

As matters deteriorated at Wynyard and more parents withdrew their sons from Capron’s care, the headmaster grew to regret his barrage of letters to Albert in which he had criticized Warnie and held him up as a hopeless case. For Capron, Warnie gone meant one less boy paying fees. Capron wrote to Albert during the Easter break of 1909 to say that he took back everything he had said about Warnie’s behavior in the past. The boy was now everything that Capron could hope for, and he would be happy for Warnie to stay on at Wynyard rather than go to a public school. With the few boys at the school departing regularly, Capron needed all the boys he could keep to stay in business.71 Alas, Capron’s change of mind came too late. Albert already had Malvern on his mind. Warnie left Wynyard for the last time on July 28, 1909, but poor Jacks would have to return on his own for the fall term.72

Love of Animals

Young Jacks Lewis would carry with him into adolescence a love of animals. At Little Lea, the boys had a canary named Peter and an Irish terrier named Tim.73 In addition to these animals, in fact, Jacks had populated an entire world of imagination with the inhabitants of Animal Land. Before going off to Wynyard, Jacks had written and illustrated a collection of stories about Animal Land and its major citizens. He had shared with his older brother Warnie the game of making up stories about the imaginary world, and after Warnie went away to Wynyard in 1905, Jacks had written to his brother about developments in their imaginary world.74

His love of animals manifested itself as an early ethical dilemma at Wynyard when Jack began the study of entomology. In correspondence with his father, the question arose as to whether Jack would like a microscope for Christmas in order to advance his study of insects. On reflection, Jack thought he would rather have something else. It seemed to him that in order to study an insect under a microscope, it was first necessary to kill the insect. By the age of eleven, Jack thought the extermination of harmless insects purely for the “gratification of one’s own whimsical tastes” was not a very nice thing to do.75 By his criticism of the “whimsical tastes” of others, he indicated the tastes that his own independent mind had begun to mark out for him. In later years, this young judgment would lead Lewis to oppose vivisection, or experimentation on animals. Though his thought would grow in sophistication, Jack Lewis adopted the fundamental value of animals as an aspect of his character, and this valuing would find its way into his fiction.

In That Hideous Strength, C. S. Lewis painted a picture of value-free scientific experimentation in which caged animals stand alongside the revitalization of the decapitated human head of a homicidal maniac. In the end, the animals gain their freedom at the expense of their captors. A few years later, Lewis wrote The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, in which a group of children travel magically to the land of Narnia, Animal Land grown up. Narnia is a world of animals where humans are the intruders and where one of the greatest expressions of cruelty occurs when humans treat animals as mere dumb beasts.

In addition to his fictional treatment of animal experimentation, C. S. Lewis wrote an essay “Vivisection” for the New England Anti-Vivisection Society in 1947.76 In this essay, he departed both from emotional appeals that pity the suffering of animals and from emotional appeals that stress the suffering of humans. Instead, he explored the nature of suffering and the question of whether pain is an evil.77 In the brief essay, Lewis moved from the question of right and wrong from a Christian perspective to a perspective free of values in which only a utilitarian naturalistic view prevails, with humans as fair game for experimentation as well as animals. The essay on vivisection repeats much of what Lewis wrote in a chapter titled “Animal Pain” in The Problem of Pain in 1940. This chapter explored a Christian view of animal pain in relation to Christian eschatology.78 The chapter, however, came before he wrote The Abolition of Man, in which he warned of the danger of valueless science in a post-Christian world. Remarkably, the boy of eleven followed the same line as the man of forty-nine, for young Jack’s reasoning had gone immediately to the insect’s experience of pain.

The Literary Life of Boyhood

In the face of all the misery of life at Wynyard, Jacks and Warnie, together with a boy named Field, decided to start a book club.79This forerunner of the Inklings might look like a clique or “inner ring,” but Lewis would later make an important distinction between a group like his boyhood book club or the Inklings, on the one hand, and a true inner ring, on the other. The self-selecting group comes together because of something they all like, and the secrecy is accidental, the exclusiveness an innocent by-product of shared interest. Lewis said of this kind of group, of which his then current involvement in the Inklings and his boyhood book club were examples, “This is friendship.”80

As it turned out, Jacks’s book club was more of a cheap magazine club. Warnie’s description of it involved each boy subscribing to a different magazine that all the boys could share. Their friend Field would subscribe to The Captain. Peckover would get the Royal. Gerald Mears would take the B.O.P., Jeyes would get the London Magazine, and Randolph Philip Bowser would subscribe to The Wide World. That left Warnie to take Pearson’s and Jacks to take The Strand.81

A book club seemed a natural basis for association with other boys for Jacks Lewis, even at ten years of age. Books formed the environment in which he had spent his years at home in Belfast. The letters and diaries of Lewis and the diaries of his brother, Warren, flow with continual references to how much emotional and intellectual distance lay between their father and them, but books formed a bond across the generation gap in spite of the conflicts. Jacks regularly wrote to his father about what he was reading and what he thought about what he was reading. In 1910, at the end of the last term he would spend at Wynyard, Jack wrote casually to his father of this bond when he spoke of them as “Shakespearean students like you and I.”82