The Inklings: C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien and Their Friends. Humphrey Carpenter

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СКАЧАТЬ two years Jack had to endure grossly incompetent teaching, bad food, stinking sanitation, arbitrarily inflicted beatings and perpetual fear. It was a terrible introduction to the outer world, and its only good result was to drive the two brothers closer together for mutual protection. By the time the school finally collapsed and the headmaster was certified mad, Warnie had already moved on to Malvern College; the younger boy was sent briefly to a school in Belfast, then to another in England.

      Meanwhile Jack continued to read voraciously. He had discovered most of the English poets by the time he was fifteen. He found The Faerie Queene in a big illustrated edition and loved it. He was delighted by the romances of William Morris. Best of all, one day he chanced across an Arthur Rackham illustration to Siegfried and the Twilight of the Gods, and felt the same sensation as he had known when he first read the Longfellow lines about Balder. ‘Pure “Northernness” engulfed me,’ he said; and he began a quest for everything ‘Northern’. Books of Norse myths, a synopsis of the Ring operas, Wagner’s music itself, all were food to his imagination. Soon he was writing his own poem on the Nibelung story, rhyming ‘Mime’ with ‘time’ and ‘Alberich’ with ‘ditch’ because he knew no better. He worked hard at his school-books, too, showing considerable aptitude for Latin and Greek. Yet there was no sense of stability, no ultimate feeling of safety, neither in the school term nor at home during the holidays, when even his brother’s companionship could not entirely lighten the oppressiveness of the big house, with its stuffy routine now dictated entirely by his father.

      At the age of fourteen he won a classical scholarship to Malvern College.

      *

      ‘Not only does this persecution get harder to bear as time goes on, but it is actually getting more severe.’ Fifteen-year-old Jack Lewis was writing home to his father from Malvern. ‘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. It is after breakfast that the form goes through their translation together. From this I am cut off. When I asked if I might clean them in the evening (an arrangement which you observe would have made no difference to him), I received a refusal, strengthened by being kicked downstairs. So we go on.’

      Malvern was no worse than most English public schools of the time, but it was no better. Warnie had been happy there – he left just as Jack arrived – but the elder boy was, at this stage in their lives, the more resilient. Jack almost immediately took a dislike to the place. It was not that the teaching was bad: far from it, for he was encouraged by a first-rate form master and was commended for excellent work. But academic study and the opportunity to read books seemed to play such a small part in the life of the place. Almost all the day it was bells ringing, feet running, shouted commands from older boys, little sleep and no privacy. Two things in particular alarmed him. One was homosexuality, especially the flirtations of the older boys with the younger. The other was the fact that Malvern, like many other public schools, was run not so much by the staff as by an unofficial clique of senior boys called ‘the Bloods’. Admission to this clique was not through formal qualification, but through being ‘the right sort of person’ and knowing ‘the right people’. Moreover once a senior boy became a Blood he had considerable power over his fellows. Bloods who had any tendency to be bullies would pick on those who showed resentment of their power. Jack Lewis did show such resentment. He was soon selected as an ideal victim, and after just two terms of persecution he had seen enough. What he was going through was no worse than what thousands of other boys at English public schools were enduring, but he had no intention of staying firm and enduring it. He was not that sort of person. When faced with something he hated, he did not tolerate it but went to war on it. And since he could not take on the Malvern Bloods single-handed he decided that he had better get away. He wrote to his father: ‘Please take me out of this, as soon as possible.’

      His father, a man of peculiarly disjointed thinking, was usually notable for making the wrong decisions. But for once he did the right thing. He removed Jack from Malvern and sent him to the man who had been his own headmaster, and who was now retired in Surrey and taking one or two private pupils. W. T. Kirkpatrick, tall and muscularly lean, was a strict atheist who nevertheless put on his best suit to dig the garden on Sunday. This, however, was his only recorded piece of illogical behaviour: in every other particular his life was ruled by strictly rational principles. He was fearsome in conversation, for no sentence passed his lips that was not ruthlessly logical. When Jack Lewis first met his new teacher on arrival at the railway station, the boy attempted some small talk, remarking that the Surrey countryside was more wild than he had expected. ‘Stop!’ shouted Kirkpatrick. ‘What do you mean by wildness, and what grounds had you for not expecting it?’ Jack did his best, but answer after answer was rejected as being the product of inadequate thought. ‘Do you not see’, Kirkpatrick concluded, ‘that your remark was meaningless?’

      Under the tuition of ‘Kirk’ in the two years that followed, the boy learnt to phrase all remarks as logical propositions and to defend his opinions by argument. Not that ‘opinion’ was a term admissible in that household. ‘I have’, Kirkpatrick would exclaim with raised hands, ‘no opinion on any subject whatsoever.’

      Soon, Jack Lewis was learning to match his teacher’s mind with dialects of his own, especially in his letters to a Belfast friend, Arthur Greeves, who was prone to vague and illogical statements and who in consequence found himself on the receiving end of Kirk-like arguments. Greeves adhered to the religious beliefs of his childhood, and when he mentioned this in a letter to Lewis there came back a tirade. ‘I had thought that you were gradually being emancipated from the old beliefs,’ Lewis declared. ‘You know, I think, that I believe in no religion. There is absolutely no proof for any of them, and from a philosophical standpoint Christianity is not even the best. All religions, that is all mythologies to give them their proper name, are merely man’s own invention – Christ as much as Loki.’ And Lewis offered his own interpretation of Christianity: ‘After the death of a Hebrew prophet Yesua (whose name we have corrupted into Jesus), he became regarded as a god, a cult sprang up, which was afterwards connected with the ancient Hebrew Jahweh-worship, and so Christianity came into being – one mythology among many.’

      This atheism was in fact not the result of Kirkpatrick’s teaching. Knowledge of his tutor’s opinions and access to the rationalist books in the house did encourage Jack, but he had begun to abandon religious belief some years earlier, partly because he found it impossible to make his prayers sincere, partly because he did not think that Christianity had much relation to the largely unhappy world around him, and partly because the Bible did not appeal to him as a story. Or rather, it was when reading pagan stories, especially the myths of the Norsemen, that he experienced his most profound sensations of delight. He began to write a tragedy about the Norse gods. It was in Greek form, under the title ‘Loki Bound’, and it was an attempt to express both the appeal of Northern myth and his contempt for the Christian view of the universe; for in the play Loki sets himself in opposition to Odin the creator of the world, declaring that such creation was wanton cruelty. Lewis also wrote short poems on this theme, picturing God as a brutish force whose hatred has scarred men’s lives.

      Yet his own life now was remarkably unscarred. Placid days succeeded one another. He read Homer under Kirkpatrick’s tuition, he walked in the Surrey countryside, he wrote poetry, and he sent for innumerable parcels of books from London shops. ‘How one does want to read everything,’ he remarked to Arthur Greeves, and soon there was little in English literature that he had not encountered. For an atheist, he found delight in unlikely places. Of Malory’s account of the Grail he remarked to Greeves, ‘Those mystic parts are very good to read late at night when you are drowsy and tired and get into a sort of “exalted” mood.’ And when he discovered George MacDonald’s ‘faery’ novel Phantastes on a station bookstall he declared that reading it was ‘a great literary experience’. Meanwhile his progress at academic work was good; indeed it was clear that he was suited for an academic career – and for that only. ‘While admirably adapted СКАЧАТЬ