C. S. Lewis: A Biography. Walter Hooper

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СКАЧАТЬ This was partly due to his age – he had for the moment rather outgrown his strength – and to sleeplessness caused by trouble with his teeth; but also to the fagging system which made it possible for an unpopular boy to be fagged out of virtually all his spare time – and much time, too, that should have been spent on preparation for the next lessons. He added:

      And remember that, even without fagging, a school day contains hardly any leisure for a boy who does not like games. For him, to pass from the form-room to the playing field is simply to exchange work in which he can take some interest for work in which he can take none, in which failure is more severely punished, and in which (worst of all) he must feign an interest.

I think that this feigning, this ceaseless pretence of interest in matters to me supremely boring, was what wore me out more than anything else … For games (and gallantry) were the only subjects, and I cared for neither.⁷²

‘Spiritually speaking,’ he went on, ‘the deadly thing was that school life was a life almost wholly dominated by the social struggle; to get on, to arrive, or, having reached the top, to remain there, was the absorbing preoccupation.’⁷³

      But of ‘Tarting’ and ‘Bloodery’ Lewis has written, perhaps too much, in Surprised by Joy: they were temptations that did not move him more than as his first and worst experience of the ‘Inner Ring’ which he was to attack so fiercely in later life. His study-mate, Hardman – later Air Chief Marshal Sir Donald Hardman – said of the whole picture given in Surprised by Joy:

In a word it is in my view unbalanced and exaggerated. This is not to say that some of the practices and customs he complains of did not exist; they did, but Lewis has blown them up out of all proportion. ‘Tarting’ did exist, but I’m sure, to nothing like the extent that he makes out. He has a good deal to say about fagging; it could at times be very irritating, but we took it as all in the day’s work and I have never known it leave these scars on anyone else. Every House must have its good and lean years in House Prefects and we were not particularly blessed with ours in Lewis’s day. Even so, I am sure that he was not unhappy all the time. I can remember going with him for long walks on Sundays when he was in the gayest of moods – story telling and mimicking people. It is surprising that he should forget the happy times and remember only the unhappy ones.⁷⁴

However, Lewis does record that there were ‘two blessings’ at Malvern ‘that wore no disguise’: one was ‘the Grundy’ – the school library, ‘not only because it was a library, but because it was a sanctuary’;⁷⁵ and the other was ‘my form master, Smewgy as we called him’.⁷⁶ This was Harry Wakelyn Smith (1861–1918), who taught classics and English to the Upper Fifth during most of his time at Malvern, from 1885 until his death in 1918, and who is lovingly described in Surprised by Joy.

      Lewis kept secret the fact that he was leaving Malvern after the summer term of 1914. But before he went he wrote some verses in imitation of Ovid’s Pars estis pauci (Ex Ponto, III.ii.25 et seq.) in the metre of the last chorus of Swinburne’s Atalanta in Calydon. ‘They were top of the form and well spoken of by Smewgy’, he wrote on 22 June when enclosing them to his father; and they read almost as a farewell to Smewgy himself:

       Of the host whom I named

       As friends, ye alone

       Dear few! were ashamed

       In troubles unknown

      To leave me deserted, but boldly ye cherished my cause as your own.

       But nay! for the days

       Of a mortal are few;

      Shall they limit your praise,

       Nay rather to you

Each new generation shall offer – if aught be remembered – your due.⁷⁷

      When looking back on what he had just written in Surprised by Joy about the miseries of his year at Malvern, Lewis continued:

I find myself exclaiming, ‘Lies, lies! This was really a period of ecstasy. It consisted chiefly of moments when you were too happy to speak, when gods and heroes rioted through your head, when Satyrs danced and Maenads roamed on the mountains, when Brynhild and Sieglinde, Deirdre, Maeve and Helen were all about you, till sometimes you felt that it might break you with mere richness.’ … All this is true, but it does not make the other version a lie. I am telling a story of two lives … When I remember my inner life I see that everything mentioned in the last two chapters [about Malvern] was merely a coarse curtain which at any moment might be drawn aside to reveal all the heavens I then knew. The same duality perplexes the story of my home life … ⁷⁸

      Lewis goes on to describe at some length his father’s character and the reasons why life at home was becoming progressively more difficult. Briefly, Albert Lewis erred through a combination of egocentricity and sheer affection for his sons. He enjoyed their company so much that when he was in the house he insisted on being with them all the time: if they had a visitor of their own age, or wanted to read or study quietly by themselves, it made no difference. He must dominate the conversation and impose his own interests at the expense of theirs, usually failing to take in anything they said to him, due to the illogicality and effervescence of his mind. Only when their father was away at work could Warnie and Jack retire to ‘the little end room’ to read and write and chronicle the endless episodes in the history of Boxen.

But the Boxonian days had come to an end in 1913 when Warnie left Malvern to stay with Kirkpatrick, who helped him win a prize cadetship at Sandhurst the following year; and Jack was already deep in ‘Northernness’, exploring it more profoundly than the late Teutonic version of the Nibelung saga adapted by Wagner, and finding his way into the genuine Norse and Icelandic originals of saga and Eddic literature. ‘I passed on from Wagner,’ he says, ‘to everything else I could get hold of about Norse mythology, Myths of the Norsemen,⁷⁹ Teutonic Myth and Legend,⁸⁰ Mallet’s Northern Antiquities.’⁸¹ This last he obtained in the old Bohn Library edition, with an appendix containing most of the Prose Edda, which he found the most stimulating discovery so far.

At Malvern he found a copy of the Corpus Poeticum Boreale (1883), F. York Powell’s great edition of all the mythological poems in the Elder Edda,⁸² ‘and tried vainly but happily to hammer out the originals from the translation at the bottom of the page’.⁸³ This was during the summer term of 1914, by which time Lewis was immersed in one of the most remarkable of his early works,

a tragedy, Norse in subject and Greek in form. It was called Loki Bound and was as classical as any Humanist could have desired. The main contrast СКАЧАТЬ