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

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СКАЧАТЬ Lewis did not only write theological essays. He also made up primitive science-fiction stories to amuse his children – stories, for example, in which a Mr Timothy Tumbledown advertises for ‘a good telescope that will show the inhabitants of the moon life size. Also a selenographical machine to enable the undersigned to construct an aeronautic cable from Tycho to Vesuvius as he is anxious to find out the different geological strata of the moon.’

      Once again, here are characteristics for which C. S. Lewis was conspicuous latently present in one of his grandfathers. He, like Richard Lewis, was a man whose idea of a good evening’s entertainment was reading a paper on Free Will and Divine Providence and whose private delight was in children’s literature and scientific fantasy.

      Albert Lewis, the son of Richard and the father of our subject, is one of the most important characters in the story. He was a ‘character’, and that in two senses. First, he was a strongly marked and in many ways eccentric individual, highly imaginative, bombastic, literate and eloquent. But secondly, and much more confusingly, Albert Lewis also became a ‘character’ in literature. Anyone who has read Surprised by Joy will recognize the portrait of C. S. Lewis’s father as a comic masterpiece. When we turn back from Surprised by Joy to the Lewis family papers we find not that C. S. Lewis has exactly speaking lied about his father but that he has left so much out of the picture and painted it from a position of such uncontrollable prejudice that it is something of a shock to encounter Albert Lewis on his own terms and read his speeches, poems, letters and notebooks.

      A clever, highly imaginative boy, Albert had been educated at Lurgan College, County Armagh, where his headmaster, a brilliant young logician called W. T. Kirkpatrick, formed and retained throughout life a high view of his capabilities. Perhaps Kirkpatrick, who himself enjoyed fiercely conducted intellectual contests, was responsible for fostering the direction of Albert’s career. After Lurgan, Albert went down to Dublin to study law at the firm of Maclean, Boyle & Maclean. Initially he intended to read for the Bar but, presumably because his father did not have the means to support him, he returned to Belfast after qualifying in 1885 and started his own law firm as a solicitor. The law for Albert Lewis was to have been the platform or starting point for a career in politics.

      We are speaking of a period when the whole land of Ireland, from County Kerry to County Antrim, was part of Great Britain in the way that Scotland and Wales are today. Albert Lewis, like the majority of Irish Protestants, was ardently keen that this state of things should be maintained. The talk of Home Rule for Ireland was by his standards dangerous nonsense. In 1882 he said in a speech in Dublin, when he was only nineteen, ‘I believe the cause of Irish Agitation to be on the one hand the Roman Catholic religion and on the other the weakness and vacillation and the party selfishness of English ministers [i.e. of the Crown].’ The English politician he loathed the most was Gladstone, whom he once called ‘that disingenuous and garrulous old man’ and who in his support for Irish Home Rule was, Albert Lewis thought, being simply mischievous. ‘Mr Gladstone, like another celebrated character, “cries havoc and lets loose the dogs of war”’ – i.e. the terrorists and revolutionaries of Sinn Fein.

      But Albert Lewis, in spite of his high promise, was never to sit in the House of Commons in Westminster. He spent most of his career as a prosecuting solicitor in the police courts in Belfast, pouring into the frequently trivial cases which came before him all his gifts of oratory, his considerable powers of argument and debate, and his rich vein of humour. Indeed it was his sense of humour, C. S. Lewis believed, which somehow or other made Albert Lewis’s political career unmanageable.

      He was a master of the anecdote, a fund of improbable stories, many of which for him epitomized the tragicomedy of what it meant to be Irish. One of the more bizarre ‘wheezes’ (as he habitually termed these stories and observations) concerned an occasion when he was travelling in an old-fashioned train of the kind which had no corridor, so that the passengers were imprisoned in their compartments for as long as the train was moving. He was not alone in the compartment. He found himself opposite one other character, a respectable-looking farmer in a tweed suit whose agitated manner was to be explained by the demands of nature. When the train had rattled on for a further few miles, and showed no signs of stopping at a station where a lavatory might have been available, the gentleman pulled down his trousers, squatted on the floor of the railway carriage and defecated. When this operation was complete, and the gentleman, fully clothed, was once more seated opposite Albert Lewis, the smell in the compartment was so powerful as to be almost nauseating. To vary, if not to drown the odour, Albert Lewis got a pipe from his pocket and began to light it. But at that point the stranger opposite, who had not spoken one word during the entire journey, leaned forward and censoriously tapped a sign on the window which read NO SMOKING. For C. S. Lewis, this ‘wheeze’ of his father’s always enshrined in some insane way a truth about Northern Ireland and what it was like to live there.

      Perhaps it was his ability to recite such stories which meant that Albert Lewis would never be a politician. He was a strange combination of rhetorical comedy and inner piety and emotionalism. If Albert Lewis was the mustachioed comedian whose favourite drink was whiskey and water and who could keep any company in stitches with his skills as a raconteur – imitating all the different voices as he spun out his tall stories – he was also the soulful poet who loved to be alone and to confront the mystery of things. As he wrote in 1882:

      I hate the petty strifes of men

      Their ceaseless toil for wealth and power:

      The peace of God in lonely glen

      By whispering stream at twilight hour

      Is more to me than prelates’ lawn

      Than stainless ermine, gartered knee,

      I wait Christ’s coronation morn

      And rest, my God, through faith in Thee.

      Albert Lewis’s piety was deep and unchanging. For all his political distaste for the power of the Roman church, he had none of Thomas Hamilton’s feeling that Catholics were not really Christians. This is made clear by another of his wheezes, written down after he had attended a funeral in Belfast. He came back from the cemetery in a carriage with one Protestant and two Catholics. It had been a Catholic funeral, conducted in Latin, but the Protestant was a man of sufficient learning to have understood the words Pater Noster. Leaning forward to his Catholic friends, this Protestant said – ‘I heard the priest say that old prayer “Our Father”. I should like to ask you a question. Did we steal that prayer from your church or did you steal it from us?’ Albert Lewis was astonished. He said quietly, ‘We both “stole” it from our Saviour … ’ Living in Ulster compelled the serious believer to cling to ‘mere Christianity’, that is, to those parts of the faith which both sides held in common, not those parts of it which were divisive.

      This was Albert Lewis, the man who married Flora Hamilton on 29 August 1894. ‘I wonder whether I do love you? I am not quite sure,’ she had written to him the previous year. Although she came to feel that ‘I am very fond of you and … I should never think of loving anyone else’, it would seem as though Albert was ‘the more loving one’. Perhaps because of his gifts as a comedian, or his small stature, or his thick moustaches, Albert Lewis, though a fundamentally serious man, was doomed to be regarded as a figure of fun by those whom he loved best.

       –TWO– EARLY DAYS 1898–1905

      ‘I fancy happy childhoods are usually forgotten,’ C. S. Lewis was to write in later life. ‘It is not settled comfort and heartsease but momentary joy that transfigures the past and lets the eternal quality show through.’ But his own childhood, or the first nine years of it, was happy and not so much forgotten as СКАЧАТЬ