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

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ friendship with Greeves occupied a position of unique importance in Lewis’s life, for geographical and practical reasons. Like Lewis, Greeves was the son of a Belfast middle-class household which had nothing to do with the world of Oxford or London, where Lewis was to achieve his fame. Greeves, though highly intelligent and bookish, was not destined to go to university. His friendship with Lewis was kept going by letter. Both were prodigiously fluent and regular correspondents, and their letters to one another continued from 1914 until a few weeks before Lewis’s death in 1963. Sadly, Arthur Greeves’ side of the correspondence has been destroyed, but the Lewis letters to Greeves (published as They Stand Together, 1979) provide an invaluable insight into Lewis’s imaginative growth. The greater part of his intellectual journeyings, as well as many of his emotional experiences, were confided to Greeves. Moreover since Lewis, already a self-confessed follower of the Romantic movement in literature, was highly self-conscious, the letters to Greeves helped him not merely to disclose but also to discover himself. It was in writing to Greeves that he decided, very often, the sort of person he wanted to be. We could very definitely say that if it had not been for Arthur Greeves, many of Lewis’s most distinctive and imaginatively successful books would not have been written. The letters were the dress rehearsal for that intimate and fluent manner which was to make Lewis such a successful author. The early stuff which he wrote for himself, such as Loki Bound, is almost entirely unreadable. In the letters to Greeves, he learnt to write for an audience.

      By September 1914, the Archduke had been shot in Sarajevo, and the great European powers had drifted inexorably into war. Warren Lewis, who had been a prize cadet at Sandhurst (21st out of 201 candidates) found himself being rushed through his officers’ training course. By November he was in France with the Fourth Company of the Seventh Divisional Train of the British Expeditionary Force. It was a war which was to change everything; not only the disputed territories of the Prussian empire, but also much bigger things – like the position of the social classes in Europe and the position of women in society. Ireland, too, was to be changed irrevocably by the turmoil in which Britain found itself.

      Jack Lewis, as he entered his teenage years, was put into an idyllic position of isolation, far from Belfast and the Western Front. On 19 September 1914, he stepped off the train at Great Bookham, Surrey, and encountered the legendary Mr Kirkpatrick. The old schoolmaster was sixty-six years old. He and his wife had enjoyed having Warnie to live with them while he prepared for the Sandhurst exams: ‘A nicer boy I never had in the house.’³ But from the beginning, the relationship with Jack was more special.

      Kirkpatrick wrote to his beloved pupil Albert Lewis, ‘When I first saw him on the station I had no hesitation in addressing him. It was as though I was looking at yourself once more in the old days at Lurgan.’⁴ Kirkpatrick’s letters to Albert over the years had been fulsome and emotional: ‘A letter from you carries the mind across the vistas of the years and wakens all the cells where memory slept … ’⁵ His relationship with Albert’s sons was to be more distant and old-fashioned. It was not surprising, therefore, that the boys seized on this to provide yet another example of the P’daytabird getting things hopelessly wrong. Albert recalled being squeezed as a boy by the Great Knock and having his youthful cheeks rubbed by his ‘dear old whiskers’. But when Jack got off the train, his cheeks tingling with anticipation, something very different happened. ‘Anything more grotesquely unlike the “dear old Knock” of my father’s reminiscences could not be conceived.’⁶

      The old man himself confessed to being deeply moved by the appearance of Clive Lewis (as far as history discovers the matter, Kirkpatrick was the only person who ever called Lewis by his baptismal name). But the Knock’s devotion to the boy took the form not of tears and kisses, but of a well-developed act which he obviously enjoyed adopting. Lewis accused his father of transforming the real Kirkpatrick into a figure hopelessly unlike the reality. From all the evidence which survives, we can see that the Great Knock of Surprised by Joy is quite as much an imaginative projection as the Victorian sentimentalist beloved of Lewis’s father.

      Kirkpatrick’s letters to Albert were real enough. When they are not dripping with syrupy endearments about his former pupils, they thunder with all the irrational force of an angry man reading the newspapers about the Hun, the Catholics, the Conservative Party and anyone else he disapproves of. But for Jack Lewis, the Great Knock was to be the embodiment of pure logic, the man who sacrificed everything – social niceties, good manners, even the pleasure of conversation – to a passionate desire to get things right. Even as they were strolling from the station, Jack was discovering, or creating, this magnificent character. He remarked that he was surprised by the scenery of Surrey, which was much wilder than he had expected.

      ‘Stop!’ shouted the Knock. ‘What do you mean by wildness and what grounds had you for not expecting it?’ By a series of Socratic thrusts, Kirkpatrick managed to show Lewis that his remarks were wholly meaningless and that he had no grounds whatsoever for expressing an opinion about a subject (the scenery of Surrey) of which he had hitherto known nothing. As Lewis remarks, ‘Born a little later, he would have been a Logical Positivist.’⁷

      Kirkpatrick’s teaching techniques, when it came to studying literature, were no less remarkable. Lewis arrived on a Saturday. On Monday morning at nine o’clock, Kirkpatrick opened the Iliad and read aloud the first twenty lines, chanting it in his pure Ulster brogue. Then he translated the lines into English, handed Lewis a lexicon and told him to go through as much of it as he had time for. With any less able child, this would have been a disastrously slapdash method of instruction. But it was not long before Lewis began trying to race Kirkpatrick, seeing if he could not learn a few more lines of Homer than his master. Before long, he was reading fluently and actually thinking in Greek. The same method was applied to the Latin poets. Eventually, while he was living at Gastons (as the Knock’s house was called), Lewis was to read his way through the whole of Homer, Virgil, Euripides, Sophocles and Aeschylus, as well as the great French dramas, before branching out into German and Italian. In all these areas, Kirkpatrick’s methods were the same. After the most rudimentary instruction in the grammar of the languages, Jack was reading Faust and the Inferno.

      They were very happy times for Kirkpatrick himself. His letters to Albert about the boy are glowing and full of appreciation for Jack’s qualities of mind; they are exact in their analysis of what was so remarkable about him, throughout his life, as a literary critic. ‘It is the maturity and originality of his literary judgements which is so unusual and surprising. By an unerring instinct he detects first rate quality in literary workmanship and the second rate does not interest him in any way.’⁸

      In religion, Kirkpatrick was an old-fashioned nineteenth-century rationalist, whose favourite reading consisted of Frazer’s Golden Bough and Schopenhauer. Nevertheless, he remained very distinctly an Ulster Presbyterian atheist. Jack noticed with amusement that Kirkpatrick always did the garden in a slightly smarter suit on Sundays.

      Albert hoped that neither of his boys had been infected by the ‘Gastons heresies’. Warren’s religion appeared to have survived Kirkpatrick’s atheistical society. Indeed, when he was at Sandhurst at the beginning of 1914, he had written home to bewail the atmosphere in the chapel there – ‘that easy, bored, contemptuous indifference which is so hard to describe, but which you would understand perfectly if you had any experience of the products of the big public schools’.⁹

      By the close of the year, Warnie was in France and so he missed Jack’s confirmation service, which was held, at Albert’s suggestion, at St Mark’s, Dundela. Jack and his father were now so estranged that Jack did not feel able to tell his father that he СКАЧАТЬ