C. S. Lewis: A Biography. A. Wilson N.

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СКАЧАТЬ to him before breakfast, and a hamper full of his foul linen for your wife to wash and mend – and if, under his regime, you were not always perfectly happy and contented, where could the cause lie except in your own vanity?¹⁶

      It is interesting, incidentally, that someone who could see so clearly what was wrong with the fagging system in the course of this devastating analogy could not see that to all intents and purposes this was what the privileged classes were doing to the lower classes in the first half of the twentieth century.

      Coming at a moment of particularly rapid physical growth in Lewis, the whole school system exhausted him. Like his frog-hero, Lord John Big, ‘weary and depressed by over-work, despirited [sic] by his failures on the field and unpopular among his fellows who could not bear the comparison with so deligent [sic] a classmate, he led an unpleasant life. He returned home for his first holyday [sic] full of knowledge, bearing more than one prize and sadly broken in spirit.’¹⁷

      Lewis’s cleverness, his academic ability, probably made it harder for him to settle into the rough and tumble of life at Malvern. He had grown used to small schools and (at Cherbourg) to being the much-prized prodigy. At the Coll (as the boys called Malvern College) numbers were much greater, and different standards applied. To be popular there, you needed to be good at games and preferably, if you were young, pretty. Lewis appears to have had no trace of homosexuality in his make-up, and he had no wish to become a Tart, as the more desirable younger boys were called. He was physically clumsy. He once remarked that his whole life would have been different if he had not had thumb joints which did not bend in the middle. This physical peculiarity, inherited from his father, made him a poor craftsman, and did not improve his skill at catching balls when they were thrown at him.

      Yet however much he loathed the boorishness of his fellow-collegians (and he was nearly always to dislike colleagues), Lewis did find things to love about Malvern. First, there was the Latin master, Harry Wakelyn Smith, known to the boys as Smugy. (The first syllable was pronounced to rhyme with fugue.) Not only did he improve Jack’s Latin and start him on the road to Greek with the Bacchae of Euripides (a play Jack was to love for the rest of his days); more important than that, his lessons were little outposts of civilization in an otherwise barbarous world. Smugy was a greasy-haired, bespectacled figure, vaguely frog-like in appearance, who was a friend of the composer Sir Edward Elgar, many of whose finest pieces of music had been composed when walking or riding on the Malvern Hills. Once, on a walk, Jack came upon the cottage where Elgar had lived. Smugy ‘told us that Elgar used to say he was able to read a musical score in his hand and hear in his mind not only the main theme of the music, but also the different instruments and all the side currents of sound. What a wonderful state of mind!‘¹⁸

      Smugy’s grateful pupil was to remember the honey-toned manner in which he read aloud the poets: not just Virgil, Horace and Euripides, but the great English poets too. ‘He first taught me the right sensuality of poetry, how it should be savoured and mouthed in solitude. Of Milton’s “Thrones, Dominations, Princedoms, Virtues, Powers,” he said, “That line made me happy for a week.”’¹⁹

      Malvern had its good points. ‘If I had never seen the spectacle which these coarse, brainless English schoolboys present, there might be a danger of my sometimes becoming like that myself.’ Apart from Smugy’s classroom, the other welcome refuge was the well-stocked College library, known as the Gurney. There in the summer term, with bees buzzing at the open windows, Lewis discovered the Corpus Poeticum Boreale. He followed up Smugy’s suggestion and began to read Milton on his own. He read Yeats, and wrote home eagerly to Papy, or the P’daytabird as the boys had started to call Albert,^* for a Yeats of his own.²⁰ Through Yeats he discovered Celtic mythology, while on his own he continued to be possessed by Northernness, and moved on from Wagner to read Mallet’s Northern Antiquities, Myths of the Norsemen and Myths and Legends of the Teutonic Race. He was even composing a Northern tragedy of his own, in the form of a Euripidean drama. It was to be called Loki Bound. Lewis’s Loki rebels against the All-father Odin, not out of pride and malice, as in the Prose Edda, but because he loathes the cruelty of the world which Odin has made. He is the first of the great anti-father figures in Lewis’s poetry. In the drama he stands against Thor, a brutally orthodox oaf who, in his loyalty to Odin, reflects the unthinking conservatism of the powerful older boys at the Coll – ‘bloods’ as they were called.

      But even as his fluent pen moved across the page in the Gurney and the bees buzzed outside the window, Lewis knew that the order of his release had been approved. He could be happy in the knowledge that his father did not insist upon his returning to Malvern in the autumn. His first summer term there was also to be his last. The P’daytabird had come up with a scheme which was almost unbelievably good news as far as Jack was concerned. At fifteen years old, he was to be withdrawn from school, and allowed to continue his education under his father’s great master, William Kirkpatrick.

      It was the summer of 1914. More than Lewis’s schooldays were over. A whole era, not only in his life, but also in the world, had come to an end. He would always feel that he belonged to that old world. In the barbarous world which was struggling to be born, he would be an alien.

       –FIVE– THE GREAT KNOCK 1914–1917

      Shortly before the beginning of his last term as a schoolboy, Lewis had been told that his Belfast neighbour Arthur Greeves was conva-lescing from some illness and would welcome a visit. In 1907, it may be remembered that the telephone had no sooner been installed in the house than young Jacks wanted to speak to Arthur down the line. But their friendship had remained a thing of pure neighbourliness, without blossoming into any sort of spiritual or intellectual intimacy.

      It was in April or May 1914, with his head full of the epic of Loki Bound and H. M. A. Guerber’s Myths of the Norsemen, that Jack knocked on the Greeveses’ front door and was shown upstairs to Arthur’s bedroom. He found the boy sitting up in bed. On the table beside him lay a copy of … Myths of the Norsemen.

      ‘Do you like that?’ he asked.

      ‘Do you like that?’ Arthur replied.

      It was not long before the two boys were exchanging their thoughts about the whole world of Norse mythology, so excited to discover this mutual interest that they were almost shouting. ‘Both knew the stab of Joy, and … for both, the arrow was shot from the North.’¹

      Lewis had already learnt, in his brother’s company, the joy of what he later termed the first great love, that of Affection. During his conversation with Arthur Greeves, he discovered the second love, that of Friendship. ‘Many thousands of people have had the experience of finding the first friend, and it is none the less a wonder; as great a wonder (pace the novelists) as first love, or even greater.’²

      The friendship of his own sex was one of the great sources of Joy in Lewis’s life; and it was always axiomatic with him that friendship began, and perhaps continued, with two men ‘seeing the same truth’. By many people of a less cerebral disposition, it is not considered necessary to agree with their friends on points of literary judgement, or even of theology. Lewis thought that it was; or perhaps it would be truer to say that he thought that he thought that it was. In point of fact, his friendship with Arthur Greeves СКАЧАТЬ