This is a story about something that happened long ago when your grandfather was a child. . . . In those days, if you were a boy you had to wear a stiff Eton Collar every day, and schools were usually nastier than now.
—The Magician’s Nephew, chapter 1
The End of Childhood and the Old Security
In addition to the epigraph found at the beginning of his autobiography, “Surprised by Joy—impatient as the wind,” Lewis also includes an epigraph at the start of each chapter. Chapter 1, “The First Years,” opens with words from Milton’s Paradise Lost: “Happy, but for so happy ill secured.”
The reason Lewis selected this line is made plain in the chapter’s final pages.
In book 4 of Paradise Lost, Satan looks in on the Garden of Eden and comments on the fragile happiness of Adam and Eve. The line Lewis quotes is in italics:
Ah! gentle pair, ye little think how nigh
Your change approaches, when all these delights
Will vanish, and deliver ye to woe;
More woe, the more your taste is now of joy;
Happy, but for so happy ill secured
Long to continue, and this high seat, your Heaven,
Ill fenced for Heaven to keep out such a foe
As now is entered (4:366–73)
Surely the blissful world of Lewis’s childhood was “ill fenced” against tragedy, for it was only a matter of time until pain and loss would invade it. Later, in The Problem of Pain, Lewis would take as one of his main premises that all of us, young and old, are ill-secured for happiness to continue for very long in this world—at least in its normal, everyday sense.
Through his use of this epigraph—“Happy, but for so happy ill secured”—Lewis wants readers to picture the two brothers, in some sense, like the innocent Adam and Eve, a gentle pair living in an idyllic world. He does not want us to extend the comparison with Adam and Eve and to see the boys’ expulsion from their Eden as something they themselves were responsible for.
That said, the young Lewis must have felt as though his paradise had truly been lost.
In 1907 Flora began to display a number of symptoms—among them tiredness, a loss of appetite, and worsening abdominal pains. Early the following year, several doctors were called to the house for a consultation—one that would result in a dreadful diagnosis. In Surprised by Joy, Lewis begins the account of their visit to Little Lea with these words: “There came a night when I was ill and crying both with headache and toothache and distressed because my mother did not come to me. That was because she was ill too” (18). He remembers several doctors being present, many comings and goings, doors shutting and opening, and many voices, before his father finally arrived at his room in tears with the bad news of the diagnosis: Jack’s mother had cancer.
An operation was urgently advised, and Flora underwent surgery for abdominal cancer on February 15, 1908. As was normal in those days, it took place in the home. In twelve short words, Lewis records what happened next. There followed “an apparent convalescence, a return of the disease, increasing pain, and death” (18).
Flora passed away at home six months following her surgery, on the morning of August 23, 1908. She was forty-six. Her older son, Warnie, was thirteen. Jack was nine.
Flora’s gradual decline had put a strain on Albert, whose nerves had never been very steady. In fact, her death was a loss that Lewis claims his father never fully recovered from, forcing Jack and Warnie to turn to each other for comfort. In Surprised by Joy, Lewis describes himself and Warnie at this time as “two frightened urchins huddled for warmth in a bleak world” (19).
In the opening sentence of the preface, Lewis tells us that he has two purposes in Surprised by Joy. His goal was to tell how he passed from atheism to Christianity and “to correct one or two false notions that seem to have got about” (vii). We get the sense that by the time he was writing his autobiography in the late 1940s and early 1950s, there had been speculation about how his mother’s death affected his religious beliefs and that Lewis wanted to set the record straight, for at the end of chapter 1 he writes, “My mother’s death was the occasion of what some (but not I) might regard as my first religious experience” (20).
One reason people may have regarded Lewis’s loss of his mother as a religious experience was that when she was declared critically ill with cancer, young Jack prayed fervently for her to recover. After her death, he continued his prayers, but now his request was that she would miraculously return to life. Here we must turn to Lewis’s own account in Surprised by Joy:
When her case was pronounced hopeless I remembered what I had been taught; that prayers offered in faith would be granted. I accordingly set myself to produce by will power a firm belief that my prayers for her recovery would be successful; and, as I thought, I achieved it. When nevertheless she died I shifted my ground and worked myself into a belief that there was to be a miracle. (20)
Lewis explains that when he was nine, he approached God, or rather his idea of God, with neither love, nor awe, nor fear. At this time he did not view God as Savior or even as Judge but merely as a sort of Magician, an entity who, if requested in the proper way—something Lewis tried very hard to do—would grant whatever was requested of him. The young Lewis expected this genie-like Magician, after having granted the petitioner’s wish, to then go back into his bottle until needed again, allowing life to go on as usual. Lewis points out that “faith” of this sort—and he puts the word in quotation marks to indicate he does not mean genuine faith here—must often be generated by children (21).
Lewis concludes that whether the desired goal of this childish, inauthentic faith is achieved is of no religious importance, and he classifies his prayers at this time as being irreligious. In Planets in Peril, David Downing sums up young Jack’s lack of a religious experience at the time of Flora’s death this way: “The failure of his prayers did not produce a loss of belief in him because there was no genuine belief there in the first place” (27). Much later, in Letters to Malcolm, Lewis would write of the danger of seeing God as a divine vending machine and prayer merely as an attempt to “pull the right wires” (15).
If, as Lewis claims, his mother’s death had no religious effect on him, might the loss of his beloved mother—who had also been his teacher and the parent he was most attached to—have affected Lewis’s later development as a writer of a certain kind of fantasy literature?
Any speculation would be purely conjecture and precisely the sort of psychoanalyzing about authors which Lewis detested. Still, a set of coincidences which can at least be labeled remarkable confronts us. Flora Lewis died in August 1908, when Clive Staples was just short of his tenth birthday. Mabel Tolkien died in November 1904, when her son John Ronald Reuel was twelve. Helen MacDonald died in 1832, when her son George was eight years old. Three of the greatest fantasy writers in the English language each suffered the childhood loss of his mother, devastating tragedies that may have helped spur their interest in imaginative realms of their own creation.
Lewis ends chapter 1 of Surprised by Joy with what has become one of its most poignant and well-known passages: “With my mother’s death all settled happiness, all that was tranquil and reliable, disappeared from my life. There was to be much fun, many pleasures, many stabs of Joy; but no more of the old security. It was sea and islands now; the great continent had sunk like Atlantis” (21).
Lewis’s Fictional Depictions of Death
There is an old adage that writers should write about what they know. Certainly by the time Lewis was in his thirties and forties and began writing the works he would become famous for, one thing he was well acquainted with was death, through the loss of both his mother and his father, and also the death of other relatives, neighbors, and many of the men he served with in World War I. In Lewis’s fiction we find a number of depictions of death. What stands out when we compare them to the “sea and islands” passage from Surprised by Joy is their radically different tone. Lewis the middle-aged, Christian author had a very different perspective on death from young Jack, the grief-stricken nine-year-old.
Most accounts of Flora’s death and Jack’s struggle to come to terms with it also point to Lewis’s story of the young Digory Kirke and his desire to save his ailing mother in The Magician’s Nephew. In the opening pages, Digory is introduced to us as a boy who is “so miserable that he didn’t care who knew he had been crying” (4). He tells Polly Plummer, who is to become his close friend and fellow traveler to Narnia, that if she had his troubles, she would cry too. He recounts a long list of woes, ending with the worst: “And if your Mother was ill and was going to—going to—die” (6).
In the end, Lewis gives the fictional mother and son the happy ending his own childhood lacked. After having been faithful in all his tasks in Narnia, Digory receives an apple to take back home which restores his mother to health. Through the adventure, Lewis has Digory learn several important lessons which he himself learned only as an adult after his conversion. Initially Digory thinks about trying to strike some kind of deal with Aslan in exchange for his mother’s health, but he quickly realizes that Aslan is “not at all the sort of person one could try to make bargains with” (153).
Finally, with a lump in his throat and tears in his eyes, Digory blurts out a plea that is almost a prayer: “But please, please—won’t you—can’t you give me something that will cure Mother?” (154). Digory then looks up at Aslan, and we are told that what Digory sees then surprises him “as much as anything in his whole life.” Digory discovers that Aslan’s eyes are also filled with tears, tears even bigger than his own, and he realizes that the lion “must really be sorrier about his Mother than he was himself.”
Another lesson Lewis has Digory learn in The Magician’s Nephew, yet a third thing which young Jack Lewis did not see in 1908, is that “there might be things more terrible even than losing someone you love by death” (191). In fact, when the adult Lewis depicts actual death in his fiction—technically Digory’s mother is near death—he looks at death which has lost its sting.
In Surprised by Joy, Lewis tells us that the grief he felt at his mother’s death was further compounded by the horror he suffered upon being shown her lifeless body. Lewis recalls: “I was taken into the bedroom where my mother lay dead; as they say, ‘to see her,’ in reality, as I at once knew, ‘to see it.’ There was nothing that a grown-up would call disfigurement—except for that total disfigurement which is death itself. Grief was overwhelmed in terror” (20).
Four decades later, Lewis would create a very different kind of encounter at the end of The Silver Chair, when the young Eustace Scrubb views the dead body of Caspian, who in life had been his friend. In the final chapter, fittingly titled “The Healing of Harms,” Eustace and Jill find themselves in Aslan’s country alongside a stream where Caspian’s corpse—described as wrinkled and pale and having sunken cheeks—can be seen beneath the flowing water. For a time, the two children and Aslan simply stand together and weep. Then Aslan commands Eustace to pluck a thorn and drive it into his paw. A great drop of red blood splashes into the stream over the lifeless body. Then readers are told:
The dead King began to be changed. His white beard turned to gray, and from gray to yellow, and got shorter and vanished altogether; and his sunken cheeks grew round and fresh, and the wrinkles were smoothed, and his eyes opened, and his eyes and lips both laughed, and suddenly he leaped up and stood before them—a very young man or a boy. (But Jill couldn’t say which, because of people having no particular ages in Aslan’s country. . . .) And he rushed to Aslan and flung his arms as far as they would go round the huge neck; and he gave Aslan the strong kisses of a King, and Aslan gave him the wild kisses of a Lion. (238–39)
If, at Flora’s death, grief was overwhelmed by the terror of her lifeless body, at Caspian’s death and resurrection Lewis has grief overwhelmed by happiness.
Lewis provides several other depictions of death and life after death in his fiction. Notable among them is his portrait of the “Bright People” of heaven we find in The Great Divorce. But perhaps nowhere does Lewis offer a more uplifting representation of the end of this life than in the final pages of The Screwtape Letters. In this work, published in 1942, a senior devil named Screwtape offers advice to his nephew, a junior tempter named Wormwood, on the best way to lead his “patient” to hell. In the end all their plans fail, as the man is killed by an air raid while in a state of grace. In the final letter Lewis, through Screwtape, imagines what Christian death might be like—and in this description we can find aspects of Flora’s death now transformed.
Just think . . . what he felt at that moment; as if a scab had fallen from an old sore, . . . as if he shuffled off for good and all a defiled, wet, clinging garment. . . . He got through so easily! No gradual misgivings, no doctor’s sentence, no nursing home, no operating theatre, no false hopes of life; sheer instantaneous liberation. One moment it seemed to be all our world; . . . next moment all this was gone, gone like a bad dream, never again to be of any account. (172)
In an earlier letter from Screwtape, readers learned that the patient’s girlfriend and mother were praying that he be kept safe and not die—much as Jack prayed for his mother. Screwtape explained that humans had been taught by their tempters “to regard death as the prime evil and survival as the greatest good” (154). If Lewis had this perspective as a boy experiencing his mother’s death, he later came to see death in a very different light.
Near the very end of Letters to an American Lady, in a letter from June 1963, just five months before Lewis’s own death, he offers these words to Mary Willis Shelburne, who was old and frail and knew that the end of this life was not far off:
Can you not see death as the friend and deliverer? It means stripping off that body which is tormenting you: like taking off a hairshirt or getting out of a dungeon. What is there to be afraid of? You have long attempted (and none of us does more) a Christian life. Your sins are confessed and absolved. Has this world been so kind to you that you should leave it with regret? There are better things ahead than any we leave behind. (117)
There are better things ahead than any we leave behind. This would be Lewis’s position near the end of his own life. As a young boy, he found nothing about death comforting.
As we saw, in the final sentences from chapter 1 of Surprised by Joy, Lewis reports the loss of “the old security.” The “great continent” was gone. Life after his mother’s death was only “sea and islands.” Now, at the start of chapter 2, Lewis returns to this thought: “All security seemed to be taken from me; there was no solid ground beneath my feet” (39).
In Perelandra, published in 1943 as the second book in Lewis’s Space Trilogy, we find an interesting complement to these passages. Its protagonist, a philologist named Elwin Ransom, travels to the planet Venus. There he meets an Eve figure, referred to as the Green Lady, who has been forbidden not from eating a certain fruit but from staying the night on the Fixed Land. Though she may visit the stable continent during the day, Maleldil has commanded that she must return each night to one of the planet’s floating islands. In the final chapter, the Green Lady comes to understand the reason for her initial restriction to a life of sea and islands, as she tells Ransom:
The reason for not yet living on the Fixed Land is now so plain. How could I wish to live there except because it was Fixed? And why should I desire the Fixed except to make sure—to be able on one day to command where I should be the next and what should happen to me? It was to reject the wave—to draw my hands out of Maleldil’s, to say to Him, “Not thus, but thus”—to put in our own power what times should roll towards us. . . . That would have been cold love and feeble trust. (179)
Years after losing the fixed land that his mother had provided, years after he tried to say to God the Magician, “Not thus, but thus,” Lewis would find a different kind of security. This security would not be the kind that put it in his power to command what should happen to him but the kind that required trust. Years after his mother’s death, Lewis would find a way to live with confidence in a world of sea and islands.
Six Years and One Day
In the opening paragraph of The Magician’s Nephew, a story Lewis set during the time when he was a schoolboy himself, the narrator tells us, “In those days, if you were a boy you had to wear a stiff Eton collar every day, and schools were usually nastier than now” (3). This is just one of many critical observations about the British educational system we find in the Chronicles of Narnia, comments that were based on Lewis’s own dreadful experiences at school.
In the final chapter of The Last Battle, Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy learn that they have come home to their real country and will never have to leave again. “There was a real railway accident,” the lion tells them. “Your father and mother and all of you are—as you used to call it in the Shadowlands—dead” (210). Lewis then wants to express the very best news that could ever be expressed and thus, as he so frequently does, looks for the perfect metaphor to convey the profound feelings associated with this news. “The term is over,” Lewis has Aslan explain. “The holidays have begun.”
Negative statements about schools and education are so common in the Chronicles—one of the tasks Lewis assigns the children during their reign in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is to liberate young dwarfs and young satyrs from being sent to school—that readers have to look hard to find a positive one. In the relationship of the young Prince Caspian with his tutor, Doctor Cornelius, we see one of the rare depictions of the learning process as something to enjoy, not something to dread. As we will see later, their relationship has roots in Lewis’s own story as well.
On September 18, 1908, just twenty-six days after his mother’s death, young Jack Lewis was sent across the Irish Sea to Wynyard boarding school in Watford, England. He was two months shy of ten years old.
Six years and one day later, on September 19, 1914, Jack would get off the train at Great Bookham in Surrey, England, to begin three wonderful years of tutoring under William Kirkpatrick.
Though not without some bright spots, the six years he spent at the series of schools that came in between being tutored at home by his mother and governess and being tutored by Kirkpatrick were—even more so than his time at the front in World War I—the bleakest years in Lewis’s life. In a letter he wrote on March 24, 1962, one published in the collection Letters to Children, Lewis tells a young fan: “I was at three schools (all boarding schools) of which two were very horrid. I never hated anything so much, not even the front line trenches in World War I. Indeed the story is far too horrid to tell anyone of your age” (102).
Lewis simplifies his school history a bit here, for if we count the month he spent at Campbell in Belfast, he attended four schools: Wynyard (September 1908–July 1910), Campbell (September–November 1910), Cherbourg (January 1911–July 1913), and Malvern (September 1913–July 1914). While he did not really like any of the four institutions he was sent to, the two schools he found “very horrid” were the first and last ones he attended: Wynyard and Malvern.
A close look at the contents page of Surprised by Joy reveals a curious fact: Lewis devotes chapters 2 through 8—nearly half of the book’s fifteen chapters—to these six years between 1908 and 1914. On page 22 young Jack leaves for the first time to travel to Wynyard and does not arrive in Great Bookham to meet his new tutor until page 132.
Why such a disproportionate ratio? Why does Lewis allocate 110 of the 238 pages—virtually half—of an autobiography covering the first thirty-three years of his life to a period of just six years?
Lewis tells us the answer, in part, right at the start, when he explains in the preface that Surprised by Joy is not intended to be a general autobiography but the story of his conversion. It will be Lewis’s plan to include far more details from his early years. He explains his strategy this way:
In the earlier chapters the net has to be spread pretty wide in order that, when the explicitly spiritual crisis arrives, the reader may understand what sort of person my childhood and adolescence had made me. When the “build-up” is complete, I confine myself strictly to business and omit everything (however important by ordinary biographical standards) which seems, at that stage, irrelevant. (vii–viii)
If, as Lewis tells us, later in life he arrived at a spiritual crisis, these seven chapters on his school days help us to understand the origins of this crisis. In chapters 2 through 8, Lewis tells the story of a young person who got on a wrong track, how he made this wrong turn, and what led him to become so in need of a savior.
The Concentration Camp
Earlier it was claimed that Lewis’s habit of writing with a nib pen was more like that of a medieval monk than today’s methods. In that same vein, it could be argued that Wynyard School—located in Watford, England, eighteen miles northwest of London—was more like a dreadful school from a Dickens novel than a school today. If Lewis summarized his first years of childhood at Dundela Villas as good parents, good food, and a garden large enough to play in, his two years at Wynyard could be summarized as bad headmaster, bad food, no garden, and very little learning.
Sending a nine-year-old—accompanied only by his thirteen-year-old brother—to travel overnight on a steamship from Belfast to Fleetwood, England, and then by rail to Euston Station in London to connect to Watford, seems at least questionable by today’s standards. But Lewis makes it clear that the journey was enjoyable and not out of the ordinary for boys to do on their own in those days. Flora had taken Warnie on his very first trip to boarding school in England in 1905, but afterward he traveled by himself. Beginning in 1908, he and Jack traveled by themselves, making the journey six times each year at the beginning and end of each of England’s three trimesters. Scholar Richard James has estimated that by the time Lewis was eighteen and ready to enter Oxford, he would have made at least fifty-two of these trips coming or going across the Irish Sea (64).
In his autobiography, Lewis recounts how from the very start he was an excellent sailor and enjoyed traveling by ship—the reflection of the lights on the water, the warm smell of the engines, the rattle of the winches, and the taste of the salt spray on his lips. It was not the trip that was the hardship for young Jack, nor was it that he was going to boarding school at such a young age—something else that was not uncommon for the time and a practice generally considered to be good for young boys. The hardship was what awaited him at the school his father had chosen.
While undoubtedly many young boys have complained that their school was a concentration camp and the headmaster a lunatic, in Jack’s case it was actually true. Like Wackford Squeers, the fictional headmaster in Nicholas Nickleby, Robert Capron, the real-life headmaster of Wynyard, took enjoyment in tyrannizing his pupils through frequent canings. Like Squeers, Capron—whom the boys referred to as Oldie—was viciously brutal, sometimes running the length of the schoolroom to build up force for one of his drubbings, as he called them, which he very regularly administered, often for little or no reason.
Chapter 2 of Surprised by Joy is titled “Concentration Camp,” and Lewis assigns Wynyard the pseudonym “Belsen,” after the Nazi prison camp. The epigraph he uses, “Arithmetic with Colored Rods,” comes from an article Lewis had seen in the Times Educational Supplement in 1954, about the time he was finishing his autobiography. The article described an innovative and presumably fun practice of teaching arithmetic through the use of brightly colored rods with numbers on them. Lewis turns the phrase to refer to the endless sums the boys at Wynyard were forced to do every day—which was about all they did when it came to academics—and the drubbings they received from Oldie’s rods for incorrect answers.
Already in decline and down to only eight boarders when the Lewis brothers attended, Wynyard was closed in 1910—a fortunate occurrence for Jack, as it forced Albert to send him to a new school after only two years (rather than the four Warnie had to endure). Shortly after the school’s demise, Capron was declared insane and sent to an asylum.
I Became an Effective Believer
About two-thirds of the way through chapter 2 of Surprised by Joy, after telling us about Wynyard’s horrid classes, horrid living conditions, and horrid headmaster, Lewis announces, “But I have not yet mentioned the most important thing that befell me at Oldie’s” (33). One benefit came out of Lewis’s time at the concentration camp, one that had little to do with the school itself. Twice every Sunday during the two years the young Lewis was at Wynyard, he and the other pupils were taken to St. John’s Church in Watford. And there, Lewis writes, “I heard the doctrines of Christianity (as distinct from general ‘uplift’) taught by men who obviously believed them.”
Is Lewis saying that he had not heard these doctrines at St. Mark’s or that they were not believed in the obvious way they were at St. John’s? Perhaps. In his account of how he came to faith at Wynyard, Lewis goes on to record that he and his school friends soon began to discuss religion often together in a way that was “entirely healthy and profitable . . . , with great gravity and without hysteria” (34), perhaps implying that in previous discussions back in Belfast religion was not discussed profitably but with hysteria.
And is Lewis saying here that his previous religious training consisted only of general uplift? Again, perhaps. In his memoir, Warnie comments that they were offered only the “dry husks of religion” during the “semi-political” churchgoing of their childhood (39).
Alternatively, perhaps Lewis simply was not old enough to hear the doctrines of Christianity until he got to Wynyard. Or perhaps during his pleasant childhood at Little Lea, Jack simply was not open to hearing them. Perhaps the hardships at Wynyard opened him to them. In Surprised by Joy, Lewis tells us what he got from St. John’s but does not say much about what he did not get at St. Mark’s. He simply states, “The effect was to bring to life what I would already have said that I believed” (33). So something good did come from Oldie’s miserable school: “There first I became an effective believer.”
What were these first steps of real faith like? What was Lewis’s response to hearing Christian doctrines taught at St. John’s by men who really believed them? Lewis records, “In this experience there was a great deal of fear” (33–34). He recalls certain moonlit nights as he lay awake in the curtainless dormitory at Oldie’s, the eerie silence broken only by the sound of the other boys’ breathing, and states, “I feared for my soul” (34).
Some Christians might be skeptical or even critical of a faith that had a foundation not just of fear but, as we are told, “a great deal of fear.” Not Lewis. He goes on to maintain, “The effect, so far as I can judge, was entirely good” (34). While, as we will see, Lewis understands that sometimes fear can be detrimental and there is a limit to how far it can grow a person’s faith, about his religious fear at this time he insists, “I do not think there was more than was wholesome or even necessary.”
In what sense could Lewis have found his fear wholesome and necessary? Here in chapter 2 of Surprised by Joy, he describes three positive effects this fear produced: he began to pray, to read his Bible, and to obey his conscience.
If we look to his other works, we find Lewis has more to say on the positive role of fear in the initial steps of faith. In chapter 6 of The Problem of Pain, Lewis points out:
It is hardly complimentary to God that we should choose Him as an alternative to Hell: yet even this He accepts. The creature’s illusion of self-sufficiency must, for the creature’s sake, be shattered; and by trouble or fear of trouble on earth, by crude fear of the eternal flames, God shatters it “unmindful of His glory’s diminution.” (87)
It is notable that among the passages Lewis selected for George MacDonald: An Anthology, we find this one, which he titled “Fear”: “Until a man has love, it is well he should have fear. So long as there are wild beasts about, it is better to be afraid than secure” (142). Lewis came across this passage in MacDonald’s book What’s Mine’s Mine, where in a preceding sentence MacDonald uses an adjective to describe fear that Lewis would later borrow. MacDonald states, “Fear is a wholesome element in the human economy; they are merely silly who would banish it from all association with religion” (113).
I do not think there was more than was wholesome or even necessary.
In a letter dated December 8, 1941, Lewis tells his correspondent, “Fear isn’t repentance—but it’s all right as a beginning—much better at that stage than not being afraid” (CLII, 500).
In his autobiography, Lewis makes it clear that his own fear at this time was a start, a first step on his spiritual journey—not a final step. He concludes his discussion of these initial attempts at genuine faith by stating, “How I went back from this beginning you shall hear later” (34, emphasis added).
In chapter 1 we saw how when Lewis made his request to God that his mother recover, he did so “without love, without awe, even without fear” and viewed God at that time “neither as Savior nor as Judge” (21). Now at St. John’s, Lewis came to see God not as Magician but as Judge and to approach him with fear. As Lewis comments, he would later go back from this beginning—to a complete loss of faith—before going forward to approach God with love and to finally see him as Savior.
Before leaving Lewis’s first steps toward real belief at Wynyard, it should be noted that there is a kind of biography that claims to understand Lewis’s life better than Lewis himself did. When Lewis claims that the fear he felt during this time was no more than was wholesome and even necessary and had an effect that was entirely good, there is a kind of biography that knows better.
For example, when Lewis tells us that at St. John’s he heard the doctrines of Christianity, biographer Michael White leaves out Lewis’s own description and instead tells us that the sermons Lewis heard were “largely meaningless” (26). White asserts that these meaningless sermons “succeeded in their purpose, terrifying the boy into acquiescence.” White does not mention that Lewis himself says nothing about being terrified into acquiescence but instead claims to have become an “effective believer.” When Lewis tells us that what really mattered was hearing “the doctrines of Christianity . . . taught by men who obviously believed them,” White asserts that Lewis began to read his Bible at this time “thanks to the power of ritual and fear.”
There is a kind of biography that looks at what Lewis tells us in his autobiography and, following the biographer’s own set of presuppositions, claims to understand Lewis’s life in ways that Lewis himself could not.
This is not that kind of biography.
Joy’s Absence and Two Types of Books
What about the experience of Joy during the two years at Oldie’s?
Lewis simply tells us there was none.
In chapter 2 of his autobiography, he reports, “For many years Joy (as I have defined it) was not only absent but forgotten” (34). Readers already know that this hiatus will be temporary, for at the moving conclusion of chapter 1, Lewis explained that after his mother’s death there would still be many stabs of Joy. But after telling us here that Joy was not only absent but forgotten, Lewis does not mention experiencing Joy again until almost forty pages later, in chapter 5, where it will return with his discovery of Siegfried and the Twilight of the Gods.
Why were these stabs of Joy absent, beginning at Wynyard and continuing, as Lewis says, for many years? Lewis gives us a partial answer, but here we must look at his statement in the context of his life at Wynyard, about which he writes:
There was also a great decline in my imaginative life. For many years Joy (as I have defined it) was not only absent but forgotten. My reading was now mainly rubbish. . . . I read twaddling school stories in The Captain. The pleasure here was, in the proper sense, mere wish fulfillment . . . ; one enjoyed vicariously the triumphs of the hero. When the boy passes from nursery literature to school stories he is going down, not up. . . . The story of the unpromising boy who became captain of the First Eleven exists precisely to feed his real ambitions. (34–35)
Earlier, in comparing the surprise of Joy to the wind, Lewis suggested that its appearance was not something he could control—like the wind, it came or did not come as it willed. But in this passage, Lewis implies that there was something he could do to hinder the coming of Joy or to foster it—and it had to do with the kind of book he read. Lewis associates his lack of experience of Joy with the type of reading he was doing, though exactly how reading and Joy are interconnected he does not explain.
In his famous essay “On Three Ways of Writing for Children,” Lewis asks us to lay two types of books side by side for comparison. The first type he calls a Boy’s Book or a Girl’s Book—another name for the “twaddling school stories” he began reading at Oldie’s. Here, Lewis comments, we find the “immensely popular and successful schoolboy or schoolgirl” who “discovers the spy’s plot or rides the horse that none of the cowboys can manage” (38). Lewis explains the appeal of the school story this way—and here we can find echoes of his statement about his reading at Wynyard.
Its fulfillment on the level of imagination is in very truth compensatory: we run to it from the disappointments and humiliations of the real world: it sends us back to the real world undivinely discontented. For it is all flattery to the ego. The pleasure consists in picturing oneself the object of admiration.
Next in the essay, Lewis switches from the school story to the fairy tale—and in this broad category we might want to include stories like The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin, which inspired Lewis with the Idea of Autumn, and Longfellow’s poem about Balder, which so transported Lewis when he was a child at Little Lea. Lewis argues: “The other longing, that for fairy land, is very different. A child does not long for fairy land as a boy longs to be the hero of the first eleven” (38). Using words similar to his description of his experience of Joy, Lewis then goes on in the essay to describe the special kind of longing a fairy tale evokes in the reader.
It would be much truer to say that fairy land arouses a longing for he knows not what. It stirs and troubles him (to his life-long enrichment) with the dim sense of something beyond his reach and, far from dulling or emptying the actual world, gives it a new dimension of depth. He does not despise real woods because he has read of enchanted woods: the reading makes all real woods a little enchanted.
In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Lewis describes Eustace Clarence Scrubb as a boy whose problems in many ways can be traced to the fact that he had read “only the wrong books” (87). At Wynyard, Lewis stopped reading stories about enchanted woods and instead read stories about schoolboys who became the captains of their soccer team and won the unwinnable game. This change to a steady diet of only the wrong books made Jack’s actual world duller and emptier and a little less enchanted.
If we jump ahead to chapter 5 of the autobiography, where Lewis describes the return of Joy to his life, he again proposes an association between Joy and his reading, though once again exactly how they are interconnected is not fully explained. Using words that echo his statement from chapter 2, Lewis writes: “Nothing but necessity would make me reread most of the books that I read at Oldie’s or at Campbell. From that point of view it is all a sandy desert. The authentic ‘Joy’ (as I tried to describe it in an earlier chapter) had vanished from my life: so competently that not even the memory of the desire of it remained” (72).
Farewell to Wynyard: On to Campbell
The eleven-year-old Lewis said a final good-bye to Wynyard on July 12, 1910, but it took him the rest of his life to finally let go of his resentment toward Capron. In a letter included in Letters to an American Lady dated July 6, 1963, a little more than four months before his death, Lewis tells his correspondent:
Do you know, only a few weeks ago I realized suddenly that I at last had forgiven the cruel schoolmaster who so darkened my childhood. I’d been trying to do it for years: and like you, each time I thought I’d done it, I found after a week or so it all had to be attempted over again. But this time I feel sure it is the real thing. And (like learning to swim or to ride a bicycle) the moment it does happen it seems so easy and you wonder why on earth you didn’t do it years ago. (120)
Early in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the Professor muses, “I wonder what they do teach them in these schools” (50). In Surprised by Joy, Lewis describes what he was taught at Wynyard as a sea of arithmetic and a jungle of dates, battles, imports, and exports—useless facts forgotten immediately after they were memorized. Summing up the academic setback from his two years at Wynyard, he candidly writes, “Intellectually, the time I spent at Oldie’s was almost entirely wasted; if the school had not died, and if I had been left there two years more, it would probably have sealed my fate as a scholar for good” (34).
But mercifully, Wynyard did close, and in September 1910 Albert arranged to send his younger son to continue his studies at Campbell College, a school located about a mile from Little Lea. Jack would board with the other students during the week and come home on weekends. This new arrangement, Lewis notes, filled him with delight, particularly after being at Wynyard. And so it is ironic that Campbell would be the one school that his father would decide on his own to remove him from—and after less than two months.
In chapter 8 of Surprised by Joy, Lewis explains that his father’s overall goal in sending his two sons away to boarding school was to turn them into public-school boys. Readers today, especially those who are not British, may have trouble understanding not only Albert’s motivation but also what Lewis means by this statement.
Part of the problem is vocabulary. When Lewis uses the term public school, he means what in America would be called a private school. Malvern, the final school Lewis would attend before enrolling at Oxford, was a public school, as it was open to the paying public and so differed from the kind of private tutoring Lewis received at home and later with William Kirkpatrick. Malvern—the equivalent to an American high school—was Malvern College because the students lived together collegially. Adding to the confusion, universities in Great Britain are typically composed of independent, self-governing entities which are also called colleges. For example, at Oxford Lewis was part of University College. Wynyard, Campbell, and Cherbourg—the first three schools Lewis attended—were also called prep schools because they helped prepare boys for the entrance examination at a public school like Malvern.
The other part of the problem in understanding Albert’s intentions has to do with culture. George Sayer, who was not only Lewis’s friend and biographer but also senior English master at Malvern from 1949 to 1974, describes one side of Albert’s fatherly desires for Jack and Warnie this way:
He knew that a public school education would be a great advantage, even in some cases indispensable, if his sons wanted to go into the civil service or to become officers in the army or navy. In fact, as it turned out, it helped both in this way. Warren became a professional soldier, and Jack was an officer in World War I. Albert supposed that such an education would help his sons if they later wanted to go on to Oxford or Cambridge, universities that recruited their students largely from the public schools. (56)
However, if part of Albert’s motive was that his two sons would have the background needed for certain careers, Sayer suggests that it was not the biggest part: “Albert’s main motive was social, the desire for his sons to attain and preserve the status of gentlemen, to sound and look right, to talk without an accent, to wear the right sort of clothes, and to have good manners (that is, manners acceptable to older men of the same class)” (57).
During his two miserable years at Oldie’s, Jack had begged his father to be allowed to transfer to Campbell. After Wynyard closed, Albert consented, and Jack became a Campbell student in September 1910. Two months later, in early November, Jack developed a cough and was sent home.
He would never return.
In those days, boys like Lewis who were subject to frequent coughs and colds were said to have weak chests, and doctors at the time often recommended they avoid damp or rainy climates—like the one found in Belfast. So when in January 1911 Albert sent his younger son midyear to Cherbourg School in Malvern, England, rather than back to Campbell, it perhaps was to help Jack avoid the kind of illness that had sent him home. George Sayer maintains, “No doubt Albert sent Jack to Malvern because the town had a great reputation as a health resort” (65). It is unclear whether this move had any effect on Jack’s health. Near the end of his time at Cherbourg, Jack took the entrance exam for Malvern while suffering from an intense bout of the flu. In his memoir, Warnie writes, “I am inclined to rate his winning of a scholarship under these circumstances the greatest academic triumph of his career” (24).
Contributing to Jack’s frequent coughs and colds was the fact that he, like his brother, had begun smoking cigarettes, a practice the brothers worked hard to hide from their father and school authorities. Lewis would smoke a pipe and cigarettes all the rest of his life, and many of the pictures of the adult Lewis show him with a cigarette in hand.
But there was another factor in Albert’s decision besides Jack’s health.
In chapter 3 of his autobiography, where he describes his two months at Campbell, Lewis tells us that the boys there were much more socially mixed than at most English schools. At Campbell he went to classes with the sons of farmers and tradesmen. If part of the reason Albert sent his boys to English boarding schools was to make them into upper-class English gentlemen—in accent, manners, and dress—then Campbell really would not do. Whether because of the dampness, the social mix, or both, Jack was not allowed to return even after his cough was gone.
Lewis writes in Surprised by Joy that the most important thing that happened during his short time at Campbell was that, thanks to an excellent English teacher, he came to love narrative verse. He does not comment about his spiritual growth during this time—growth forward or backward. He does, however, mention that the classmate he was closest to had previously gone on rounds with his father’s van and kept the books, because he was the only one who could read. After leaving Campbell, Lewis would have few opportunities to rub shoulders as equals with working-class people. Following his conversion, this kind of egalitarianism became an important component of his faith. At Holy Trinity, the local church he attended, Lewis encountered the same sort of social mix he had found at Campbell.
Cherbourg House and Lewis’s Loss of Belief
In chapter 4 of Surprised by Joy, Lewis describes his move to Cherbourg House, a preparatory school in Malvern, England, which was also the location of Malvern College, where Warnie was a student. Jack had recently turned twelve (not thirteen, as he mistakenly tells us) and would attend Cherbourg for two and a half years, from January 1911 to July 1913. During this time he would receive a very good education, one that allowed him to more than make up for his two substandard years at Wynyard.
But at Cherbourg Jack would also lose all the Christian beliefs he had previously acquired.
Lewis uses the first five lines of George’s Herbert’s poem “The Collar” as the chapter’s epigraph.
I struck the board and cried, “No more
I will abroad!”
What? shall I ever sigh and pine?
My lines and life are free: free as the road,
Loose as the wind, as large as store.
For thirty-two of the poem’s thirty-six lines, Herbert’s speaker, arguably Herbert himself, rants and raves about the confining yoke, or collar, of Christianity.
Lewis intentionally opens with a poem about rebellion and the desire to be as free as the road and loose as the wind, for in this chapter he tells how he freed himself from what Herbert in a later line calls the cage of faith. Those who are familiar with the poem—and Lewis typically assumes his readers will be as familiar as he is with the British and classical literature he quotes—know that in the last four lines the speaker’s ravings grow “more fierce and wild at every word” until he hears a voice that calls him “Child.” His rebellion ends in humble submission as he replies, “My Lord.”
Jack grew tired of sighing and pining over the restraints he increasingly felt from Christianity. His rebellion against God would—like that of the speaker in “The Collar”—lead to more and more agitation before ultimately ending in surrender as well, but not until years after his time at Cherbourg, where he would figuratively pound on the table, Herbert’s board, and cry, “No more!”
As Lewis opens his account of the thirty months he attended Cherbourg House, he tells us that it was there he made his first real friends. Then he interrupts his narration to announce, “But there, too, something far more important happened to me” (58). What could possibly be more important to a young boy at a new school far from home than making his first friends? Lewis tells us: “I ceased to be a Christian.”
In the pages which follow, Lewis relates what he knows about the conscious reasons he abandoned his faith during this time and what he suspects about the unconscious ones.
In The Screwtape Letters, written a decade before Surprised by Joy, Lewis tells the story of a new convert and the two diabolic tempters who seek to undermine his beliefs. In the preface to the 1960 edition of Screwtape, Lewis explains that his insights into the ways a beginner’s faith might be weakened did not, as some readers suggested, come from years of studying moral and ascetic theology. Lewis makes it clear that he had available to him an equally reliable way of understanding how temptation works: his own experience. In The Screwtape Letters, Lewis incorporates many elements from the story of how he himself ceased to be a Christian.
One of the very first instructions Screwtape gives Wormwood is that he must find a way to thwart the new convert’s prayer life.
“The best thing, where it is possible,” Screwtape explains, “is to keep the patient from the serious intention of praying altogether” (15). If prayer to the Enemy (the devils’ term for God) cannot be prevented, Wormwood is told to fall back on subtler misdirection of his patient’s attention. Screwtape explains: “Whenever they are attending to the Enemy Himself we are defeated, but there are ways of preventing them from doing so. The simplest is to turn their gaze away from Him towards themselves. Keep them watching their own minds” (16). Several pages later, Screwtape makes this part of a general rule: “In all activities favorable to the Enemy bend his mind back on itself. . . . So fix his attention inward that he no longer looks beyond himself to see our Enemy or his own neighbors” (26–27).
In chapter 4 of Surprised by Joy, Lewis describes how his own prayer life was impeded at Cherbourg by this kind of excessively inward focus.
I had been told as a child that one must not only say one’s prayers but think about what one was saying. Accordingly, when (at Oldie’s) I came to serious belief, I tried to put this into practice. At first it seemed plain sailing. But soon the false conscience . . . came into play. One had no sooner reached “Amen” than it whispered, “Yes. But are you sure that you were really thinking about what you said?”; then, more subtly, “Were you, for example, thinking about it as well as you did last night?” (61)
In this way Jack set out in his nightly prayers to produce by sheer willpower something which willpower could and would never produce. The result of these efforts was, not surprisingly, repeated failure.
Before long, the mere thought of these endlessly inward-turning prayers cast a gloom over the entire evening, and young Jack began to dread bedtime. How exactly did Lewis’s mistaken ideas contribute to his loss of faith? Lewis reports that the ludicrous burden of these false duties in prayer gave him an unconscious motive for wishing to cast off his Christian beliefs, and in this way made him more susceptible to the other temptations he encountered at Cherbourg.
In letter 9, Screwtape warns Wormwood that in his efforts to weaken the patient’s faith, it is vitally important to keep him from encounters with experienced Christians who might be able to provide instruction, guidance, and correction. In Surprised by Joy, Lewis comments on the absence of mature spiritual guidance which he experienced at this crucial point in his own life. “If only someone had read to me old Walter Hilton’s warning that we must never in prayer strive to extort ‘by maistry’ what God does not give!” Lewis laments. “But no one did” (62).
No one did. And so without religious direction from more-experienced Christians, young Jack was left on his own to try to master his misguided and erroneous technique of prayer “realizations,” as he called them. Later, as a mature Christian, Lewis would spend countless hours—through books, talks, and thousands of letters—providing the very guidance on prayer and other matters of the faith that he himself failed to receive.
In his entry on prayer written for The C. S. Lewis Readers’ Encyclopedia, Perry Bramlett suggests, “It is quite possible that C. S. Lewis wrote more about prayer than any other subject” (331). In one example, the essay titled “The Efficacy of Prayer,” Lewis explains at length how prayer is neither magic nor a machine. Lewis continued to offer wise instruction about prayer right up until his death. In his final book, Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer, we find Lewis’s statement about how rare truly helpful advice on the topic can be and his implied motive for writing so much about it himself. He tells the fictional Malcolm: “My experience is the same as yours. I have never met a book on prayer which was much use to people in our position” (62).
In his autobiography, Lewis describes another occasion at Cherbourg when he lacked spiritual guidance, one which occurred as he left behind the Latin exercises he had done at Little Lea and Wynyard and began to read the classics themselves, especially Virgil. It quickly became clear to the young Lewis that his teachers and the editors of his texts simply took for granted that the religious ideas in classical literature—in this case, statements about the Roman gods and goddesses—were sheer illusion. In Jack’s mind a question arose: If all the religious stories of antiquity were simply dismissed as human attempts to explain the unknown and make a hostile universe less frightening, by what means could the stories of Christianity be declared to be an exception?
Why was Christianity treated differently? he asked, never at the time receiving an answer. “Need I, at any rate, continue to treat it differently?” he began to wonder (63). This quandary became one of the conscious causes of doubt that began to assail him.
Here again Lewis points out his lack of spiritual direction during the years at Cherbourg: “No one ever attempted to show in what sense Christianity fulfilled Paganism or how Paganism prefigured Christianity” (62). Without instruction from more-experienced Christians about what made the biblical record any different from pagan myths, Lewis took the initial steps that a number of years later would lead him to conclude, as summarized here for his friend Arthur Greeves, “All religions, that is, all mythologies to give them their proper name, are merely man’s own invention—Christ as much as Loki” (CLI, 230–31).
No one ever attempted to show in what sense Christianity fulfilled Paganism or how Paganism prefigured Christianity.
If during his time at Cherbourg Lewis was never told what made the stories of the supernatural we find in Christianity different from other ancient myths, we know exactly when, where, and by whom this deficiency was remedied.
Almost exactly fifteen years after writing to Greeves that all religions are merely man’s own invention, Lewis would pen another, very different letter to him describing a discussion he had had with two experienced Christians as they walked and talked together late into the night. On October 18, 1931, Lewis wrote to Greeves that Hugo Dyson and J. R. R. Tolkien had explained how “the Pagan stories are God expressing Himself through the minds of poets, using such images as He found there” and how the story of Christ is “a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened” (CLI, 977).
After his conversion—in part to avoid the type of spiritual missteps he made when left on his own as a schoolboy—Lewis chose to meet regularly with Walter Adams, an Anglican minister, who served as his spiritual director right up until Father Adams’s death in 1952. About Father Adams, scholar Lyle Dorsett has observed that during the years he and Lewis met together, it is doubtful that anyone had “a more profound impact on Lewis’s spiritual development” (88).
But, once more, we are getting ahead of ourselves.
Lewis describes a number of other factors which contributed to his loss of faith at Cherbourg—among them the deeply ingrained pessimism which had developed over his youth due to several causes, including his lack of manual dexterity. But perhaps the two biggest factors came from the influence of a non-Christian master and, ironically, from Lewis’s own distinctive and deep-set desire to be enchanted.
In letter 22 of The Screwtape Letters, Screwtape complains to Wormwood, “Everything has to be twisted before it’s any use to us. . . . Nothing is naturally on our side” (118–19). In the preface to Mere Christianity, Lewis provides an illustration of this principle, proposing that the bad impulse to gamble, something he himself was never tempted by, is an “excess or perversion” of some corresponding good impulse—which he also therefore lacked (xii). During his time at Cherbourg, the years when he was twelve and thirteen, Lewis’s longing for something beyond the world, a good impulse which had contributed to his experiences of Joy at Little Lea, was twisted into an unhealthy interest in the occult.
In his autobiography, Lewis goes to great lengths to tell us that the person who helped ignite his interest in “spirits other than God and man” should not be blamed for the change it brought in his life (59). He points out that Miss C.—Lewis’s name for Miss G. E. Cowie, the school matron—was still in her spiritual immaturity when she was on the staff at Cherbourg, still seeking for truth. She, too, searched without much help or religious direction, for, as Lewis reports, “Guides were even rarer then than now.”
The list of strange beliefs Miss C. floundered through included theosophy, Rosicrucianism, and spiritualism. Lewis insists that in her discussions with him, she never intended to tear down his faith. But given his profound interest in, as Lewis calls it, “the preternatural,” it was as though Miss C. had brought a candle into a room that was full of gunpowder.
Because he was without orthodox spiritual guidance, Lewis tells us, his hunger for something beyond this world turned into a passion for the occult. To let go of the stern truths of the creed and to embrace the vague speculations of spiritualism with nothing to be obeyed or believed except what was exciting or comforting—“Oh, the relief of it!” Lewis recalls (60).
If Miss C.’s ineptness inadvertently helped lead the young Lewis astray, another figure at Cherbourg did so with more cleverness and sophistication. In letter 10 of The Screwtape Letters, we learn about the desirable new acquaintances Wormwood’s convert has been introduced to—desirable in that they will be another factor to help draw him away from faith. Screwtape writes that they are “just the sort of people we want him to know—rich, smart, superficially intellectual, and brightly skeptical about everything in the world” (49). In Surprised by Joy, Lewis describes a new teacher, Percy Harris—Lewis calls him Pogo—who came to Cherbourg. Pogo was “glossy all over”—a snazzy dresser, a real wit, and very much the man about town (67).
Lewis confesses that he soon began not only to look up to Pogo but also to emulate him: “What attracted me through Pogo was not the Flesh (I had that of my own) but the World: the desire for glitter, swagger, distinction, the desire to be in the know. . . . I began to labor very hard to make myself into a fop, a cad, and a snob” (68).
Screwtape concludes letter 12 with this guiding principle: “The safest road to Hell is the gradual one—the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts” (61). Correspondingly, in chapter 4 of Surprised by Joy—which Lewis ironically titles “I Broaden My Mind”—he reports, “And so, little by little, with fluctuations which I cannot now trace, I became an apostate, dropping my faith with no sense of loss but with the greatest relief” (66).
Before leaving this stage in Lewis’s life, we might again look, as we did earlier, at a biographer who claims to know Lewis better than he knew himself. A. N. Wilson offers this corrected analysis of Lewis’s account of his loss of faith at Cherbourg as reported to us in Surprised by Joy:
We feel too strongly the presence of the middle-aged Lewis looking back on the Peter Pan, pubescent boy-Lewis and being horrified by his “loss of faith, of virtue, of simplicity.” The passages, for example, where he describes his longing to abandon Christianity because of an over-scrupulous terror that he was not sufficiently concentrating on his prayers . . . are far too specifically recalled to be plausible. The details are too sharp. His saying that he hates himself for becoming at this period a “prig” and a “snob” is really another way of saying that he hates himself for having grown up at all. (28–29)
If a biographer does not believe it is possible to have an authentic faith in God—because there is no God—then he must provide an alternative account of this so-called faith and its loss. If this same biographer sees nothing morally wrong with self-centeredness and pride, then he will call becoming a snob and a prig during adolescence simply growing up.
As was noted earlier, there is a type of biography that takes the details Lewis gives us about his life and, using a secular lens, claims to be able to see through them to what really lies behind them in a way that Lewis himself could not. There is a type of biography that sees this practice as its proper function and purpose.
This is not that type of biography.
The End of Boyhood and the Return of Joy
Lewis titles chapter 5 of his autobiography “Renaissance.” Though, as he tells us, he did not believe there had been a general cultural Renaissance as is typically described by historians, Lewis did believe in a personal renaissance—or, at least, in the possibility of one—a “wonderful reawakening which comes to most of us when puberty is complete” (71).
Alternatively, Lewis might have labeled this chapter “Recovery”—the recovery, as he notes, of “things we had in childhood and lost when we became boys” (71). Among the things recovered was the experience of Joy which Jack had known earlier as a child.
Here in chapter 5, Lewis’s real-life arc of spiritual growth becomes more complicated than the fictional one he typically gives to his protagonists. He does not move on to the next stage of his life but instead presents another strand that is concurrent with the events of chapter 4. Not only does this second strand have little relation to the story told in the previous chapter, but it also runs counter to it.
Paradoxically, for Lewis this wonderful renaissance took place at the same time as his loss of faith and his transformation into a snob.
Acknowledging the difficulty that the existence of these opposing threads presents in telling his story, and knowing that his readers may find his account harder to comprehend at this point, Lewis states: “I almost have to tell two separate stories. The two lives do not seem to influence each other at all” (78).
Here again, like the experiences of the Christian mystics mentioned earlier, Lewis’s spiritual experience may be hard to relate to. As a child, he was strangely transported by a few lines of a poem by Longfellow about the death of Balder. Now, after passing through the Dark Ages of boyhood, Lewis suddenly, in a flash, rediscovers this same Joy he knew years before. This time it comes not through lines from a Longfellow poem or a book by Beatrix Potter but through the sight of a headline and a picture from a literary periodical someone had left in the Cherbourg schoolroom.
Lewis writes that his long winter without Joy “broke up in a single moment” (72), and it is hard not to be reminded of the glorious return of spring in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe after the hundred-year reign of the White Witch, when it was always winter and never Christmas. Deep layers of what Lewis refers to as “secular ice” gave way to an inner landscape filled with flowers and trees in bloom. “I can lay my hand on the very moment,” Lewis writes. “There is hardly any fact I know so well, though I cannot date it.”
Biographers Green and Hooper identify the literary periodical Jack saw as a Christmas issue of the Bookman and so date this occurrence near the start of his second year at Cherbourg, in December of 1911. The headline was for a review of Margaret Armour’s recently published translation of Siegfried and the Twilight of the Gods. These seven words of the title and a picture Arthur Rackham had drawn for the book—just these two things—had an immediate effect on the thirteen-year-old Lewis. Quoting a line from the long poetic work Taliessin through Logres by his friend Charles Williams, Lewis tells us that in this moment, “The sky had turned round” (72).
Here we must again turn to Lewis’s own account of the incident, told in his own words, and even then what he tells us may remain, to some extent, inscrutable.
What I had read was the words Siegfried and the Twilight of the Gods. What I had seen was one of Arthur Rackham’s illustrations to that volume. . . . Pure “Northernness” engulfed me: a vision of huge, clear spaces hanging above the Atlantic in the endless twilight of Northern summer, remoteness, severity. . . . And with that plunge back into my past there arose at once, almost like heartbreak, the memory of Joy itself, the knowledge that I had once had what I now lacked for years, that I was returning at last from exile and desert lands to my own country. (72–73)
After this, Lewis was unable to contain his enthusiasm for all things Northern. He began to read everything he could find related to the Norse myths, he bought records of Wagner’s Ring operas, and he even began writing a long narrative poem of his own based on the Nibelung story. In Lewis’s discussion of this poem, we find something which may help us better understand his experience of Joy on seeing the seven words and the illustration.
Up until this time, Lewis tells us, if his lines rhymed, had the proper number of beats, and helped advance the plot, he was satisfied. But now, after this renewed experience of Joy after its long absence, Lewis wanted to do more. “I began to try to convey some of the intense excitement I was feeling,” he explains in his autobiography, “to look for expressions which would not merely state but suggest” (74).
Expressions which would not merely state but suggest. Here readers may think back to the expression Lewis was so moved by earlier: “Balder the beautiful / Is dead, is dead.”
While it is safe to say that few, if any, Lewis fans have been moved like he was by the seven words Siegfried and the Twilight of the Gods, they may have been moved by one of Lewis’s own seven-word phrases in which he himself suggests far more than he states. Early in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, shortly after Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy meet him, Mr. Beaver signals for them to come in closer so no one else will hear, and whispers, “They say Aslan is on the move” (67).
They say Aslan is on the move.
Even though Jack had no idea who Siegfried was when he read the words Siegfried and the Twilight of the Gods on the cover of the December 1911 Bookman, a very curious thing happened to him. Years later, in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Lewis would write this passage, which comes after Mr. Beaver’s statement about Aslan and reflects much of his own experience:
And now a very curious thing happened. None of the children knew who Aslan was any more than you do; but the moment the Beaver had spoken these words everyone felt quite different. Perhaps it has sometimes happened to you in a dream that someone says something which you don’t understand but in the dream it feels as if it had some enormous meaning—either a terrifying one which turns the whole dream into a nightmare or else a lovely meaning too lovely to put into words, which makes the dream so beautiful that you remember it all your life and are always wishing you could get into that dream again. It was like that now. (67–68)
In the words “any more than you do,” Lewis includes his readers in the experience, making it possible for us to have the same wonderful feeling of longing that sweeps over everyone except Edmund at this point. Through the clause “They say Aslan is on the move,” Lewis suggests more than he states and evokes a sensation similar to the one that came over him years before in the Cherbourg schoolroom.
One association between the story of the new convert’s struggles to pray in The Screwtape Letters and Lewis’s own struggles in Surprised by Joy has already been suggested, yet another interesting connection can be found. In the original preface to the 1942 Screwtape, Lewis writes: “There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them” (ix). As Lewis tells the stories of his loss of faith in chapter 4 and his renaissance and the return of Joy in chapter 5, it is clear that he believes supernatural forces—both divine and fiendish—played a role.
In describing the effect that Miss Cowie’s comments about the occult had in moving him away from Christianity, Lewis tells us, “I do not mean that Miss C. did this; better say that the Enemy did this in me, taking occasion from things she innocently said” (60, emphasis added). He continues by pointing out, “One reason why the Enemy found this so easy was that without knowing it, I was already desperately anxious to get rid of my religion.” Lewis says no more about the devil’s actions here and, in this way, follows his own principle of not taking an excessive or unhealthy interest in the enemy’s doings.
If Lewis comments about the enemy’s role in his spiritual life, he also comments on God’s role. In chapter 4, he points out that it would be inaccurate to trace his loss of virtue to the influence of Pogo. Instead, Lewis tells us, “This is amply accounted for by the age I had then reached and by my recent, in a sense, my deliberate, withdrawal of myself from Divine protection” (68). Near the end of chapter 5, Lewis reflects on the way that his interest in Norse mythology was used by God to accomplish good: “I can almost think that I was sent back to the false gods there to acquire some capacity for worship against the day when the true God should recall me to Himself” (77). While Lewis does not directly say here by whom he was sent back, we are clearly meant to see the hand of Providence at work.
Before moving on, perhaps it bears pointing out that Lewis’s interest in Norse mythology was just that—an interest, a very passionate one—but not an actual belief. Lewis closes chapter 5 with this statement about his explosion of enthusiasm for all things Northern: “Remember that it never involved the least grain of belief: I never mistook imagination for reality” (82).
In a letter written in 1941, Lewis claims that Centuries of Meditations by the seventeenth-century poet and religious writer Thomas Traherne was the most beautiful book in English prose he had ever read. A decade later he would use a sentence from one of the hundreds of short meditations from this book as the epigraph for the chapter about his renaissance. In it we can find additional explanation of what the rebirth he describes in chapter 5 was really about. Here is Traherne’s “Meditation 2,” with the passage Lewis quotes put in italics:
Though it be a maxim in the schools that there is no Love of a thing unknown, yet I have found that things unknown have a secret influence on the soul, and like the center of the earth unseen violently attract it. We love we know not what, and therefore everything allures us. As iron at a distance is drawn by the lodestone, there being some invisible communications between them, so is there in us a world of Love to somewhat, though we know not what in the world that should be. There are invisible ways of conveyance by which some great thing doth touch our souls, and by which we tend to it. Do you not feel yourself drawn with the expectation and desire of some Great Thing? (3)
Like Shasta in The Horse and His Boy, who states “I’ve been longing to go to the North all my life” though he does not know why (14), at Cherbourg Lewis felt a pull from an invisible source—like magnetism, like gravity. It was a pull that would not let go and could, like a great lodestone, draw a soul far distant, as Lewis’s certainly was, to its unseen center. At the very same time as he was abandoning his faith and gradually turning into a cad and a fop, Lewis was also being drawn to something unknown he had been created to love.
Lewis’s longing for Norse myth was really just, to use Traherne’s phrase, a way of conveyance. The unseen, unknown “Great Thing” Lewis was being drawn to was God.