I decided I had done with all that. No more Avalon, no more Hesperides. I had . . . “seen through” them. And I was never going to be taken in again.
—Surprised by Joy, chapter 13
Malvern College: Bullies and the Inner Ring
“You’ve always liked being beastly to anyone smaller than yourself,” Peter tells Edmund in chapter 5 of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. “We’ve seen that at school before now” (46). In the end, Lucy’s cordial not only heals Edmund’s battle wounds but also frees him from his desire to dominate and tyrannize others, a condition which had penetrated him much deeper and plagued him much longer. We are told that Lucy returns from her rounds to find Edmund looking better than she had seen him look in ages—in fact, “ever since his first term at that horrid school which was where he had begun to go wrong” (180).
The implication is that Edmund had fallen in with the bullies at his school, had lost his way, and has finally been set on the right path again.
Jack arrived at Malvern College on September 18, 1913, a little more than two months shy of his fifteenth birthday. From the start, he was, as Warnie points out in his memoir, a “square peg in a round hole” (24). This was partly due to the fact that Jack was neither good at nor interested in sports—called games at Malvern—and it seemed everyone else was. And it was partly due to the fact that he was keenly interested in good literature and Wagner, and it seemed everyone else was interested in magazines and ragtime. But the fact that Jack’s aesthetic sensibilities were acutely out of step with those of his peers at Malvern was not his greatest problem.
Ten days after his arrival, Jack wrote home complaining that out-of-class duties and nonacademic tasks were taking up all of his study time, but expressing hope that this constant state of hurry was only temporary. He tells Albert:
The work here is very heavy going, and it is rather hard to find time for it in the breathless life we lead here. So far that “breathlessness” is the worst feature of the place. You never get a “wink of peace.” It is a perpetual rush. . . . I suppose this sense of being eternally hustled will wear off as things settle down. (CLI, 31)
But the perpetual rush Jack encountered at Malvern did not go away. If anything, it got worse as he encountered a system of harassment and bullying which was not the work of a few malicious students who liked to oppress their weaker classmates when teachers’ backs were turned but an arrangement which was approved by the very school structure itself. At Malvern Lewis came up against a very small governing class of students in whom, as he tells us in Surprised by Joy, “every kind of power, privilege, and prestige” were officially united (85). This group of Bloods—as he calls them, since they made up Malvern’s version of the blue-blooded aristocracy—exercised the power of command over the rest of the students, forcing them to do the group’s chores, run their errands, and fetch their tea.
“When a Blood wanted his O.T.C. kit brushed and polished, or his boots cleaned, or his study ‘done out,’ or his tea made, he shouted,” Lewis recounts (95). Unfortunately, when a Blood shouted that he wanted his Officers’ Training Corps kit brushed or some other menial chore done, Jack was one of the school’s peasant class who was required to come running.
What Lewis is disparaging here is the British system of fagging. While in the United States the term has come to have a different meaning, the original meaning of fag is any tiring or unwelcome task. In England, to be fagged out still means to be exhausted. In chapter 6 of Surprised by Joy, which Lewis titles “Bloodery,” he tells readers: “No true defender of the Public Schools will believe me if I say that I was tired. But I was—dog tired, cab-horse tired, tired (almost) like a child in a factory” (96).
“Spiritually speaking,” Lewis later explains, “the deadly thing was that school life was a life almost wholly dominated by the social struggle; to get on, to arrive, or, having reached the top, to remain there, was the absorbing preoccupation. It is often, of course, the preoccupation of adult life as well” (108).
This idea of an inner circle that seeks to dominate everyone else—or as Tolkien might have said, to rule them all—is a topic that Lewis returns to again and again. From this all-absorbing preoccupation to be included among those at the very top, Lewis observes, “all sorts of meanness flow” both “at school as in the world,” including
the sycophancy that courts those higher in the scale, the cultivation of those whom it is well to know, the speedy abandonment of friendships that will not help on the upward path, the readiness to join the cry against the unpopular, the secret motive in almost every action. . . . It would perhaps not be too much to say that in some boys’ lives everything was calculated to the great end of advancement.
In That Hideous Strength, Lewis tells the story of Mark Studdock, a sociologist obsessed with being admitted to the controlling, inner ring at Bracton College, where he is a fellow. After he succeeds at this first goal, he goes on to become the writer of dishonest newspaper articles for an even more powerful inner ring—that of an evil organization calling itself, paradoxically, the N.I.C.E. Mark thinks to himself “how splendid and how triumphantly grown up” it is having all of the inner ring of the N.I.C.E. depending on him and “nobody ever again having the least right to consider him a nonentity or cipher” (132).
Lewis’s most scathing indictment of the inner ring of bullies endemic to the British educational system of his day can be found in his depiction of Experiment House, the school Eustace and Jill attend in The Silver Chair. Lewis revisits Professor Kirke’s concern about what is taught in schools, as the narrator reports that learning is out of fashion and bullying is in. Readers are told, “Owing to the curious methods of teaching at Experiment House, one did not learn much French or Math or Latin or things of that sort; but one did learn a lot about getting away quickly and quietly when They were looking for one” (10–11).
Jack continued to complain to Albert throughout his time at Malvern. In March 1914 he wrote home that the persecution was getting more severe and harder to bear.
All the prefects detest me and lose no opportunity of venting their spite. Today, for not being able to find a cap which one gentleman wanted, I have been sentenced to clean his boots every day after breakfast for a week. . . . These brutes of illiterate, ill-managed English prefects are always watching for an opportunity to drop upon you. There is no escape from them, night or day. (CLI, 50)
Looking back, Warnie concludes in his memoir that Jack should never have been sent to a public school. He goes on to offer this perceptive portrait of his younger brother’s abilities and disposition at this point in his life:
Already, at fourteen, his intelligence was such that he would have fitted in better among undergraduates than among schoolboys; and by his temperament he was bound to be a misfit, a heretic, an object of suspicion within the collective-minded and standardizing Public School System. He was, indeed, lucky to leave Malvern before the power of this system had done him any lasting damage. (25)
In The Silver Chair, Jill and Eustace manage to escape the Experiment House bullies through a door in the stone wall behind the gym, a door which, the narrator points out, was nearly always locked. In his own real-life story, Jack escaped the Bloods at Malvern through an equally unforeseen way.
Lewis titles chapter 8 of Surprised by Joy “Release.” In the chapter’s final pages, he tells us that from out of all the great unpleasantness at Malvern, “There sprang what I still reckon, by merely natural standards, the most fortunate thing that ever happened to me” (128).
What was this most fortunate thing—according to natural, or human, standards—that ever happened to Lewis? In July 1914, after just one academic year, Jack was released from the prison that Malvern had become for him, as Albert consented to allow him to resume his studies with a private tutor in September. What did Jack think about this? Lewis asks us to try to imagine waking up one morning to find that the income tax, something especially burdensome in Britain, had been completely abolished or that unrequited love had somehow totally vanished from the world.
So how did this most fortunate thing come about?
In an unforeseen turn of events, Warnie’s cigarettes played the key role in Jack’s good fortune.
One of the contributing factors which made Jack’s year at Malvern so difficult was that Warnie was no longer there. Warnie was not there because, near the end of the previous school term, he had been caught smoking by school officials and told he would not be allowed to return. Looking for a solution, Albert had asked William Kirkpatrick, who had been his own teacher years before at Belfast’s Lurgan College, to help prepare Warnie for the entrance exam to the Royal Military College at Sandhurst. Kirkpatrick did such an exceptional job that Warnie, who had turned into somewhat of a slacker at Malvern, was not only admitted, but he placed twenty-first out of 201 candidates and entered as a prize cadet.
If sending Jack to follow in Warnie’s footsteps to Malvern had been an extraordinarily bad idea, following Warnie to be tutored by Kirkpatrick would prove to be an extraordinarily good one.
Great Bookham: Red Beef and Strong Beer
On September 19, 1914, two months before his sixteenth birthday, Jack went to live at Gastons, the Kirkpatricks’ home in the little village of Great Bookham, some thirty miles south of London. He would live with the elderly, semiretired couple until March 1917. While the rest of Europe was rapidly being drawn into what would be called the Great War, for Jack these two and a half years studying under “Kirk” would be the happiest times in a long time. While other fifteen-year-olds would have missed the camaraderie of a school full of classmates their age, Jack was thrilled just to be, for the most part, left on his own.
In chapter 9 of his autobiography—titled “The Great Knock,” one of several nicknames the Lewis family used for Kirkpatrick—Lewis writes that his new tutor was the closest thing to a purely logical entity one could meet. In their discussions, including their very first talk on the way home from the train station, Kirkpatrick refused to allow any unfounded assumption to pass unchallenged. Lewis admits that most boys would not have liked this rigid insistence on objective evidence and meticulous argumentation.
“To me,” Lewis records, “it was red beef and strong beer” (136).
If at age four Lewis could insist that the entire household—including his nurse, governess, brother, and parents—call him Jacksie, it must say something that Kirkpatrick—and only Kirkpatrick, it seems—was allowed to refer to him as Clive. We find Lewis’s tribute to his beloved tutor in the Narnian character Professor Kirke and in the Professor’s famous exclamation in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe: “Logic! Why don’t they teach logic in these schools?” (48).
Red beef and strong beer. Lewis had found his perfect setting for learning, and it was under the Great Knock that his truly extraordinary talent began to manifest itself. Letters from Kirkpatrick to Albert, collected in the unpublished “Lewis Papers,” trace the gradual recognition of one of the world’s greatest writers. On January 7, 1915, just four months after Jack began his studies at Gastons, Kirkpatrick writes, “I do not think there can be much doubt as to the genuine and lasting quality of Clive’s individual abilities” (LP, 4:279). Two months later he reports to Albert: “He has read more classics in the time than any boy I ever had, and that too, very carefully and exactly. . . . In the Sophoclean drama, . . . he could beat me easily in the happy choice of words and phrases” (LP, 4:305). A year into his time with Jack, Kirkpatrick confesses, “He is the most brilliant translator of Greek plays I have ever met” (LP, 5:17).
Years before Jack came to study under him, the Great Knock had been raised in the church and had even spent three years at the Presbyterian seminary in Belfast studying for the ministry. But shortly after seminary, Kirkpatrick left the faith and even became hostile to religious beliefs—which he found irrational and superstitious. In Surprised by Joy, Lewis pauses to remind us that his tutor did not turn him into an atheist. Jack’s own atheistic beliefs were already fully formed before he went to study under Kirkpatrick. What his tutor gave to him was, as he puts it, “merely fresh ammunition for the defense of a position already chosen” (140).
In his book focusing on the mystical elements of Lewis’s faith, Into the Region of Awe, David Downing offers a description of the fresh ammunition Jack picked up during his time with Kirkpatrick.
Living with this outspokenly atheistic tutor, William Kirkpatrick, Lewis found his unbelief reinforced by his reading in the natural sciences and the social sciences. From the former he gained a sense that life on earth is just a random occurrence in a vast, empty universe. . . . From the latter he concluded that all the world’s religions, including Christianity, could be best explained not as claims to truth but as expressions of psychological needs and cultural values. (38)
Of course, not everything Jack learned from his tutor was necessarily anti-Christian. The remarkable analytical ability which Jack developed during this time could be said to be spiritually neutral, able to be used in any cause. Thus, at Gastons, we have a gifted and disciplined elderly atheist providing nearly three full academic years of rigorous one-on-one training to an even more gifted and even more disciplined young atheist, training him how to think extremely clearly and logically and how to express those thoughts with the same measure of extreme clarity and analytical precision. Years later, the converted former atheist would put this training to use in writing Mere Christianity, one of the most logical and eloquent articulations to date of the things Christians believe and why they believe them.
But this was yet to come.
During Jack’s time at Gastons, no one could have anticipated this midlife turnaround—in fact, one would have strongly suspected Lewis to continue much as he was. On Sunday, December 6, 1914, four months after beginning his tutoring, Jack went home to St. Mark’s to commit what he confesses in his autobiography to be “one of the worst acts of my life” (161). Fearing to speak up against his father’s wishes, Jack, a confirmed atheist, was confirmed as a full member of the Church of Ireland. “Cowardice drove me into hypocrisy,” Lewis reports, “and hypocrisy into blasphemy.”
In his memoir, Warnie argues that Jack’s time with the Great Knock was crucial in developing his brother’s unique talents and that it set the course for the rest of his life. Warnie writes, “The stimulation of a sharp and vigorous mind, . . . the ordered security of Jack’s life, his freedom to read widely and gratuitously—these factors combined to develop his particular gifts and determine his future” (25–26).
Lewis begins chapter 9 with this epigraph taken from Lord Chesterfield’s Letters to His Son: “You will often meet with characters in nature so extravagant, that a discreet poet would not venture to set them upon the stage” (132). Perhaps Lewis chose this passage simply intending that the readers of Surprised by Joy see Kirkpatrick as an extravagant and eccentric character—as certainly he was.
However, if we look at the sentences which come right before the section Lewis quotes, a different way to read the epigraph emerges. Here is the passage where Lord Chesterfield tells his son about people who have this extravagant nature. The part used by Lewis is in italics, and readers may notice that he has changed dramatist to poet. Lord Chesterfield makes the following observations about these unique people:
They cannot see people suffer without sympathizing with, and endeavoring to help them. They cannot see people want without relieving them, though truly their own circumstances cannot very well afford it. They cannot help speaking truth, though they know all the imprudence of it. In short, they know that, with all these weaknesses, they are not fit to live in the world, much less to thrive in it. But they are now too old to change, and must rub on as well as they can. This sounds too ridiculous and outré, almost, for the stage; and yet, take my word for it, you will frequently meet with it upon the common stage of the world. And here I will observe, by the bye, that you will often meet with characters in nature so extravagant, that a discreet dramatist would not venture to set them upon the stage in their true and high coloring. (128)
William Kirkpatrick certainly spoke the truth without worrying whether or not it was prudent. And by the time Jack came to live at Gastons, the Great Knock was certainly too old to change. Lewis ends the chapter with a moving confession: “My debt to him is very great, my reverence to this day undiminished” (148). He may well have intended the epigraph which opens the chapter to introduce readers to someone who was not merely eccentric but a man who endeavored to help others, in this case two young men from Belfast—sons of an old friend who for very different reasons were in desperate need of a very special tutor.
Kirkpatrick died at Gastons on March 22, 1921, nine days before Jack would receive a first from Oxford in Classical Honor Moderations in Greek and Latin, subjects he had been trained in by Kirk. Lewis would go on to earn two other first degrees, a spectacular achievement. In a letter written in response to his father’s telegram with the sad news, Jack tried to sum up what the Great Knock had given him:
Poor old Kirk! What shall one say of him? It would be a poor compliment to that memory to be sentimental: indeed, if it were possible he would himself return to chide the absurdity. It is no sentiment, but plainest fact to say that I at least owe to him in the intellectual sphere as much as one human being can owe another. That he enabled me to win a scholarship is the least that he did for me. It was an atmosphere of unrelenting clearness and rigid honesty of thought that one breathed from living with him—and this I shall be the better for as long as I live. (CLI, 534–35)
Arthur Greeves: You Like That Too?
Lewis reports that after moving in with the Kirkpatricks, he quickly settled into a fixed routine that suited him perfectly, so perfectly that he confesses to us in Surprised by Joy, “If I could please myself I would always live as I lived there” (141).
Jack’s ideal day would begin with breakfast at exactly eight and would have him at his desk reading or writing by nine. Except for a ten-minute break for a cup of—as he makes a point of telling us—good tea or coffee at around eleven, he would work without interruption until precisely one o’clock, when lunch would be on the table. After lunch there would be a daily walk outdoors, typically alone so he could better take in the sounds and the silences of the natural world. The walk would end and the afternoon tea be served each day at precisely the same time, no later than four fifteen. This would be proper British tea that included something to eat—again, preferably in solitude—with something suitable to read, meaning the kind of book that could be started and stopped anywhere. Then Jack would be back at his desk for more work from five until seven. The day would conclude with the evening meal and conversation, with bedtime at eleven.
But where on this schedule was there time for him to respond to all the letters he received? Lewis reminds us that he is describing an ideal day, and on his ideal day he would receive almost no mail and so have no reason to dread the postman’s knock. Later in life, including during the time he was writing Surprised by Joy, Lewis would frequently have to spend two or more hours a day replying to readers from all over the world who had written him with questions, comments, or requests for advice—a chore that was, with few exceptions, burdensome and tedious but one he felt duty-bound to perform.
Since Warnie had at this point been called up for active duty, correspondence from him came only infrequently. Lewis describes how, during his time at Gastons, he regularly received and answered only two letters a week. One, from his father, was a duty. The other, from his new friend in Belfast, was the week’s highlight. The two boys had just recently met when Jack, who had purposely avoided the task up to then, was finally persuaded to pay a visit to Arthur Greeves. Arthur, who was chronically ill and lived nearby, had sent a message saying that he was in bed again convalescing and would welcome some company.
In The Four Loves, Lewis includes a section titled “Friendship,” where he proposes:
Friendship arises out of mere Companionship when two or more of the companions discover that they have in common some insight or interest or even taste which the others do not share and which, till that moment, each believed to be his own unique treasure (or burden). The typical expression of opening Friendship would be something like, “What? You too? I thought I was the only one.” (65)
What Lewis does not say in The Four Loves is that this passage was drawn directly from his first meeting with Arthur, a meeting described in delightful detail in Surprised by Joy. What was this common interest that Jack and Arthur shared? When Jack entered Arthur’s room, he was astonished to see a copy of H. A. Guerber’s Myths of the Norsemen on the table beside Arthur. The two boys not only liked the same thing, Lewis recalls, but they liked the same parts of it and liked them in the same way.
Except for his father and his brother, there would be no one Lewis would write to more over the course of his life than Arthur. Two hundred ninety-six letters, spanning the years 1914 to 1963, in full or in part, appear in The Letters of C. S. Lewis to Arthur Greeves. The first letter was written while Jack was finishing his last weeks at Malvern. With the second letter, written just a week after Jack arrived at Gastons, we see their friendship begin to blossom. In this second letter Jack tells his new friend, “After a week’s trial I have come to the conclusion that I am going to have the time of my life” (49), and urges Arthur to write back as soon as possible.
In the description of Arthur which Jack penned for the unpublished Lewis Papers, we find not only Lewis’s portrait of Arthur but also an accurate portrayal of his own spiritual condition at that time.
During the earlier years of our acquaintance he was (as always) a Christian, and I was an atheist. But though (God forgive me) I bombarded him with all the thin artillery of a seventeen-year-old rationalist, I never made any impression on his faith. . . . He remains a victor in that debate. It is I who have come round. . . . It might seem that I had much to give him, and that he had nothing to give me. But this is not the truth. I could give concepts, logic, facts, arguments, but he had feelings to offer, feelings which most mysteriously—for he was always very inarticulate—he taught me to share. Hence, in our commerce, I dealt in superficies, but he in solids. I learned charity from him and failed, for all my efforts, to teach him arrogance in return. (LP, 10.218–20)
In Surprised by Joy, Lewis explains that besides learning charity from Arthur, he also gained an appreciation for what Arthur called the “homely”—Arthur’s way of seeing beauty in the commonplace: a row of cabbages in the garden, a cat squeezing under a barn door, coals glowing in the fireplace. Before meeting Arthur, Lewis confesses that his own feelings were too narrow, as he looked for only the majestic and awe-inspiring. Mountains and sky were his special favorites, he notes. Arthur helped open him to appreciate the very qualities that he had previously disregarded. “But for him I should never have known the beauty of the ordinary vegetables that we destine to the pot,” Lewis records (157). “Often he recalled my eyes from the horizon just to look through a hole in a hedge.”
If during this time Arthur played a major role in helping Jack to see the world differently, there would be another big factor. This second influence came from an author who had died a decade earlier and came about because Jack just happened to pick up a book from a used-book stall while waiting for a train.
Phantastes and the Sacramental Ordinary
In The Silver Chair, Puddleglum, speaking for Lewis, rejects the Green Lady’s claim that her dark, gloomy underground world is the only world there is, declaring: “Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one” (182).
In chapter 11 of Surprised by Joy, Lewis describes a similar distinction within himself. He notes that during his Great Bookham days, his imagination and his intellect stood in sharp contrast. On one side was a “many-islanded sea of poetry and myth,” and on the other a rationalism that he found to be “glib and shallow” (170). “Nearly all that I loved I believed to be imaginary,” Lewis reports. “Nearly all that I believed to be real I thought grim and meaningless.”
“And then, on top of this, in superabundance of mercy,” Lewis continues, “came that event which I have already more than once attempted to describe in other books. . . . The evening that I now speak of was in October” (178–79).
The other books Lewis refers to here are The Great Divorce and George MacDonald: An Anthology—both published in 1946, nine years before Surprised by Joy. This event of superabundant mercy actually took place in March, not October—specifically, on the evening of Saturday, March 4, 1916. We know this because we have a letter Lewis wrote to Arthur from Gastons dated March 7, 1916, in which he tells him about an amazing new book he had just bought seemingly by accident.
I have had a great literary experience this week. I have discovered yet another author to add to our circle—our very own set. . . . The book, to get to the point, is George MacDonald’s “Faerie Romance,” Phantastes, which I picked up by hazard . . . on our station bookstall last Saturday. . . . Whatever the book you are reading now, you simply MUST get this at once. (CLI, 169–70)
Jack, in his routine of regular afternoon rambles, had walked the three miles or so from Great Bookham to the next village, Leatherhead, a trek he made about once a week, and was waiting for the train to take him back. He was seventeen-and-a-half at the time and had been studying at Gastons for two years, with one more still to come. Standing on the platform in the waning light, he picked a worn book from the station’s used-book stall. He had seen it on previous walks to Leatherhead but had always put it back. Just as the train arrived, this time he decided to buy it.
In the preface to George MacDonald: An Anthology, Lewis remembers the event and the effect the book had on him.
It must be more than thirty years ago that I bought—almost unwillingly, for I had looked at the volume on that bookstall and rejected it on a dozen previous occasions—the Everyman edition of Phantastes. A few hours later I knew that I had crossed a great frontier. I had already been waist-deep in romanticism. . . . Now Phantastes was romantic enough in all conscience; but there was a difference. Nothing was at that time further from my thoughts than Christianity and I therefore had no notion what this difference really was. . . . The whole book had about it a sort of cool, morning innocence, and also, quite unmistakably, a certain quality of Death, good Death. What it actually did to me was to convert, even to baptize (that was where the Death came in) my imagination. It did nothing to my intellect nor (at the time) to my conscience. Their turn came far later and with the help of many other books and men. (xxxii–xxxiii)
As noted, Lewis also comments on this life-changing event in The Great Divorce, where he includes himself as one of the characters who is taken on a bus ride to the outskirts of heaven. As each visitor is greeted by the “Solid Person” specially chosen to serve as his or her guide—much as Dante had Virgil as his guide in The Divine Comedy—Lewis encounters the Scottish clergyman and author George MacDonald. Lewis, as the first-person narrator, offers us this report of their meeting, slightly underestimating his age at the time—perhaps because in his mind this incident occurred the previous October.
I tried, trembling, to tell this man all that his writing had done for me. I tried to tell how a certain frosty afternoon at Leatherhead Station when I first bought a copy of Phantastes (being then about sixteen years old) had been to me what the first sight of Beatrice had been to Dante: Here begins the New Life. I started to confess how long that Life had delayed in the region of imagination merely: how slowly and reluctantly I had come to admit that his Christendom had more than an accidental connection with it, how hard I had tried not to see that the true name of this quality which first met me in his books is Holiness. (65)
In Surprised by Joy, Lewis tells us that up until his discovery of Phantastes, each visitation of Joy had left the world “momentarily a desert” (181). After each of the reminders of another world that Joy provided, Lewis tells us, “I did not like the return to ours.” But the holiness—Lewis initially thought of it as a bright shadow, not recognizing it as holiness at the time—that flowed from MacDonald’s story produced a fundamentally different experience of Joy. Lewis explains: “But now I saw the bright shadow coming out of the book into the real world and resting there, transforming all common things and yet itself unchanged. Or, more accurately, I saw the common things drawn into the bright shadow.”
Back in chapter 5, Lewis reports that his early appreciation of nature was largely “parasitic” (77), meaning that he experienced Joy through nature only as he imagined a mountain or meadow as the setting for a scene from Siegfried or a Wagnerian opera. Young readers whose backyard was transformed when they pretended it was Narnia, or who saw a mouse or badger and pretended it to be Reepicheep or Trufflehunter, will understand how this works. But after reading Phantastes, Lewis tells us that nature—because he could now see the holiness infused into each individual natural element—became a medium of Joy by itself.
To some readers, Lewis’s account of the bright shadow of holiness associated with Phantastes may seem nearly as incomprehensible as his previous mystical experiences. George Sayer offers this summary of the book’s effect:
The influence of Phantastes on Jack lasted for many years, perhaps all his life. Because it was greatest at psychic depths of which he was only partly aware, he was at a loss to give a clear account of it. . . . It had a transforming influence on his attitude toward the ordinary, common things around him, imbuing them with its own spiritual quality. (107–8)
In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Eustace tells Ramandu, who in Narnia is a star at rest, “In our world, a star is a huge ball of flaming gas” (209). Ramandu corrects him, stating, “Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is but only what it is made of.” MacDonald provided Jack a similar intimation that people and things in our world cannot be reduced to just atoms and molecules.
Rather than being left with a world that had become a desert he did not want to return to, now Jack was able to see the bright light of holiness that bathed—that had always bathed, and that continued to bathe—all common things. If Arthur had helped him to see the beautiful in the ordinary, MacDonald helped him to see the holy or sacramental aspect in everything and every person—the sacramental ordinary. As Lewis tells us: “It was as though the voice which had called to me from the world’s end were now speaking at my side. It was with me in the room, or in my own body, or behind me” (180).
Writing about the converted Lewis, Sayer maintains that the most precious moments to Jack were those when he was aware “of the spiritual quality of material things, of the infusion of the supernatural into the workaday world” (317).
Near the end of the Phantastes episode of Surprised by Joy, Lewis quotes the Latin phrase unde hoc mihi? (181). This question comes from the Vulgate version of Luke 1:43, “Et unde hoc mihi ut veniat mater Domini mei ad me?” which is Elizabeth’s response when Mary enters her home, miraculously pregnant with the incarnate Son of God: “But why am I so favored, that the mother of my Lord should come to me?”
“But why am I so favored?” Lewis asks about this experience—his own version of Elizabeth’s encounter—of being enabled, through MacDonald’s writing, to see the divine manifest in the everyday things around him: in the bread on the table and the coals in the grate, and shining, as he reports, “on my own past life, and even on the quiet room where I sat and on my old teacher where he nodded about his little Tacitus” (180–81).
“But why am I so favored?” Lewis asks about being able to perceive the sacramental aspect—the holiness—in ordinary people and things. He points to the answer in the chapter’s title and epigraph.
Lewis titles chapter 11 “Check” and opens it with this line—When bale is at highest, boote is at next—from the medieval poem “Sir Aldingar.” In this chapter, Lewis informs us that he tried his best to become a strict materialist who believed in nothing but “atoms and evolution and military service” (174). But his attempts were thwarted—checked, he tells us—by the seemingly accidental discovery of a worn copy of a used book which had come to be shelved in the Leatherhead Station bookstall.
So did Jack happen on the book by hazard on that frosty March evening in 1916, as he claimed in his letter to Arthur? Looking back, the adult Lewis suggests that this event in his life was more like part of the careful strategy of a chess player than a random accident. Three chapters later Lewis will report, “My Adversary began to make His final moves” (216), moves which will lead, as the chapter title indicates, to a final checkmate. Here in chapter 11, Lewis recounts one of the earlier moves that helped set the board for what was to come. And while Lewis will refer to God as his adversary, this will be a strangely benevolent adversary, one who has Jack’s best interests in mind. Lewis’s epigraph “When bale is at highest, boote is at next” may be paraphrased as “When evil is at its greatest, help is at its closest.”
What was the source of this help? If we turn to chapter 4 of Phantastes, we find that before Lewis used this epigraph, MacDonald used it himself, though in a slightly different variation (“When bale is att hyest, boote is nyest”). By repeating MacDonald’s epigraph in Surprised by Joy, Lewis makes it clear that the help he is referring to came from MacDonald’s book.
“I have never concealed the fact that I regarded him as my master,” Lewis declares in the preface to George MacDonald: An Anthology. “Indeed, I fancy I have never written a book in which I did not quote from him” (xxxii).
But who put the book in his way and in doing so put Jack’s plan to be a strict materialist in check? Not chance or hazard, as Jack first thought, but a strategic opponent whose every move was made with intention—the intention to help and avail.
In Surprised by Joy, Lewis wraps up the section on his first encounter with MacDonald with these sentences: “That night my imagination was, in a certain sense, baptized; the rest of me, not unnaturally, took longer. I had not the faintest notion what I had let myself in for by buying Phantastes” (181).
First Taste of Oxford
Despite having lived in central England as a student since the time he was nine—at Wynyard, Cherbourg, Malvern, and Gastons—and although there were relatively easy train connections from all these places, the first time that Jack visited Oxford was when he traveled there from Great Bookham to take the university scholarship exam. The year was 1916. Lewis had just turned eighteen. The exam would last several days, from December 5 to 9.
In Surprised by Joy, Lewis reports that his very first taste of Oxford was comical. Upon getting off the train at the Oxford rail station, a small suitcase borrowed from Mrs. Kirkpatrick in hand, Jack headed into town looking for a place to stay. As he walked on and on, the streets became more and more shabby, with one dingy shop after another. Where was the city of dreaming spires that Matthew Arnold described? “But still I went on,” Lewis writes, “always expecting the next turn to reveal the beauties” (184).
Only when it became obvious that he was coming to open country and there was no town left did Jack stop and turn around. Then he saw the city in all its glory, with its grand collection of towers and spires reaching toward the sky, a picture of academic splendor unsurpassed anywhere in the world. Jack went back in the opposite direction, first retracing his steps to the train station and then heading off in the right way. And so he finally entered the magnificent city. Lewis concludes, “I did not see to what extent this little adventure was an allegory of my whole life” (184).
In a letter written from Oxford several days after his arrival, Jack told his father, “The place has surpassed my wildest dreams: I never saw anything so beautiful” (CLI, 262).
I did not see to what extent this little adventure was an allegory of my whole life.
Lewis spent the first half of his life headed in the wrong direction, living in a purely materialistic world and pursuing goals that he found shallow, grim, and meaningless. Nevertheless, he kept going in this wrong direction until he was virtually forced to turn around. Only then did he see the glorious realm he had missed, the magnificent place that had been waiting for him where he could have been living all the time.
Years after his comical introduction to Oxford, perhaps with this event in mind, Lewis would write in Mere Christianity: “We all want progress. But progress means getting nearer to the place where you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning, then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road” (28).
As Jack strolled along the streets of Oxford on that initial visit in December 1916, he was filled with dreams that he would be chosen from among the many highly talented candidates to receive one of the few scholarships available and would return as a university student. He also had dreams which extended beyond being an Oxford student to the next step of becoming a member of the Oxford faculty. In his autobiography, Lewis comments, “I knew very well by now that there was hardly any position in the world save that of a don in which I was fitted to earn a living, and that I was staking everything on a game in which few won and hundreds lost” (183).
As he saw for the first time the famous colleges and other landmarks he had previously only read about, the eighteen-year-old must have walked past the great University Church of St. Mary the Virgin on the north side of High Street and perhaps even stopped in to look around. But even in his wildest dreams, Jack could not have foreseen that twenty-five years later, in the midst of a second world war, he would climb the stairs to St. Mary’s elevated pulpit and preach a sermon he would call “The Weight of Glory.” In that sermon, perhaps remembering the worldly aspirations of his first visit, Lewis would talk about living our lives in a dismal slum instead of at the splendid seaside, telling the packed church, “We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea” (26).
The scholarship exams were administered that frigid December in the great hall of Oriel College, where Jack joined a room full of candidates who wrote their essays while still wearing their overcoats, scarves, and gloves. Though he was convinced he had done poorly and told his father so, Jack did exceptionally well on the exam and shortly before Christmas received a letter from the master of University College telling him he had been awarded one of the college’s three open scholarships in classics.
“Like much else at Oxford, the entrance procedure is odd,” writes George Sayer, a graduate of the system (116). Sayer explains:
Although Jack’s scholarship, a much-coveted distinction, entitled him to free rooms in his college and a grant of money toward his expenses there, it did not give him entrance to the university itself (his college was a semi-independent unit of Oxford). To gain admission to Oxford, he would have to pass a separate exam called Responsions. . . . For most boys of scholarship standard, Responsions was little more than a formality, an exam for which it was not necessary to work. But this was not true in Jack’s case.
Unfortunately for Jack, the exam included a mathematics section, a subject in which Jack was notoriously weak.
Knowing of the math requirement on the responsions, Jack returned after the Christmas holidays to Great Bookham and tried to improve his dreadful math skills. But where his mother Flora had been exceptionally gifted, Jack was sensationally inept. When he went back to Oxford in March for the test, he got plowed, as he reports in his autobiography. Despite this failure, Jack was provisionally admitted and allowed to move into University College on April 26, 1917, where he stayed for a brief time before joining the Officers’ Training Corps. During this interlude, he worked again on his algebra, only to fail the test for a second time in June.
With this second failure, it became clear that Lewis’s deficiencies in math were far more serious than anyone had admitted, and the world came very close to losing C. S. Lewis as a scholar, teacher, and writer. Sayer comments: “He was allowed to attend Oxford after the war only because the passing of Responsions was waived for men who had been in the service. If it had not been for this piece of academic generosity, Jack would probably never have passed and never been able to make a career at Oxford or any other British university” (118).
On June 8, 1917, after less than eight weeks at University College—during which he did little more than read on his own, become familiar with Oxford, and work some on his math—Jack officially joined the British Army and was sent across town to be billeted in Keble College, which had become the quarters for the Officers’ Training Corps. On the night of November 17, after what would today be considered scandalously little training and a month’s leave to say what could very well be his final good-byes, Jack boarded a troop transport ship at Southampton harbor and crossed the English Channel to France.
The Great War
On November 29, 1917, Second Lieutenant Clive Staples Lewis arrived in the trenches at the front line. It was his nineteenth birthday.
Lewis devotes just one short chapter of Surprised by Joy to his war experience. There are several reasons for this. First, the period of time the chapter covers is relatively short. Arriving in November, Jack was sent back to England the following May after being wounded by a misguided English shell, which meant he was in France for only six months. For more than two of these months, he was in a hospital on the coast—in February recovering from trench fever, and in April and May being treated for his shrapnel wounds. Second, Lewis notes that the war itself had already been described by many others who had seen more of it than he did. Finally, while he felt the need to report on a handful of events from this time period, since they were connected to his account of how he passed from atheism to Christianity, Lewis concludes, “The rest of my war experiences have little to do with this story” (197). And so he says nothing about these other unrelated incidents.
Lewis titles the wartime chapter of his autobiography “Guns and Good Company.” To his great surprise, Jack did not dislike the army as much as he thought he would. In fact, the company was far better than he had experienced at Malvern four years earlier, the last time he had been part of a large group. Being Lewis, he offers several speculations on why this was so. First, unlike at Malvern, no one in the army had to pretend that he liked it. “Straight tribulation is easier to bear,” Lewis explains, “than tribulation which advertises itself as pleasure” (188). Where Jack found that the hardship at Malvern had led to distrust, deceit, and resentment, the hardship of the army created camaraderie and fondness between the fellow sufferers. Second, in noting the goodwill extended to him by his military elders, Lewis comments, “Thirty is naturally kinder to nineteen than nineteen is to thirteen.”
Third, Lewis suggests that something about the look on his face had changed since his time at Malvern, where it had gotten him into a good deal of trouble. At Malvern Jack sometimes appeared insolent or disrespectful. He now had a look that elicited pity or kindly amusement. And what had brought about this change for the better? Lewis speculates that perhaps it was his reading of Phantastes.
In chapter 5 of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, when Eustace—who is not yet on the other side of his great change—finds climbing a steep hill to be less difficult than he thought, the narrator reports that, even though Eustace did not realize it, his new life in Narnia “had already done him some good” (79). At nineteen Jack was likewise a long way from his conversion, but his Christian reading had already brought about some good in him.
Lewis found good company and goodwill not only with his fellow officers in the officers’ club but also with his battalion in the trenches. Lewis reports that it was there amid the shared adversity of winter, water, warfare, and weariness that he came to “know and pity and reverence the ordinary man” (196). Years later, in “The Weight of Glory,” Lewis would conclude:
It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship. . . . There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. . . . Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your senses. (45–46)
This extraordinary reverence for so-called ordinary men was first learned by Second Lieutenant Lewis during the six months he lived and fought alongside them.
Jack spent the month of February in a hospital miles away from the front, recovering from the flu-like symptoms of trench fever. While there, he read a volume of essays by G. K. Chesterton. As with Phantastes, this discovery was made by accident, or, Lewis might say, by so-called accident. When Jack picked up Chesterton’s book, he had never heard of the author and had no idea of his strong religious beliefs. If Jack had known of Chesterton’s Christian faith, would he still have read the volume of essays he found while convalescing at Le Treport? Perhaps. Something had happened to him when he read Phantastes two years earlier—something that changed not only the look on his face but also the openness of his heart. About his first encounter with Chesterton, Lewis writes, “Strange as it may seem, I liked him for his goodness” (191).
If in his autobiography Lewis recalls that he found holiness in reading George MacDonald and goodness in reading Chesterton, we must remember that these are the names he gives to these aspects looking back years after the fact and years after his conversion. When Jack first read Phantastes and the book of Chesterton essays, he did not believe there was such a thing as holiness and meant something very different by the term goodness than he later would.
Lewis concludes with one of the more memorable passages from Surprised by Joy: “In reading Chesterton, as in reading MacDonald, I did not know what I was letting myself in for. A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading” (191). At the end of chapter 14, Lewis writes, “And so the great Angler played his fish” (211). If Lewis was hooked earlier by reading Phantastes, reading Chesterton while he convalesced in France helped to further set the hook.
In The Screwtape Letters, Screwtape cautions Wormwood not to hope for too much from the outbreak of war because it has “certain tendencies inherent in it” which are not in the devils’ favor (23). Lewis tells us that during the time he served in France, he was assailed by good books and good men. “There are traps everywhere,” he observes (191). And Jack’s assailant was very ready to use all of them. Lewis makes it clear who this assailant was, as he finishes with the statement, “God is, if I may say it, very unscrupulous.”
Though an armistice was signed which took effect November 11, 1918—in the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month—troubling memories of the Great War stayed with Jack for a long time. In a letter to Dom Bede Griffiths near the start of World War II, Lewis would write, “My memories of the last war haunted my dreams for years. . . . I think death would be much better than to live through another war” (CLII, 258). Lewis was never a pacifist, but in his fictional works he never suggested that war was not terrifying or brutal. Before his battle with the wolf in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Peter feels like he is going to be sick. Lewis describes the encounter as “a horrible, confused moment like something in a nightmare,” where everything is “blood and heat and hair” (132).
One Huge and Complex Episode
In chapter 13 of Surprised by Joy, Lewis tells us that by January 1919 he was recovered from his blighty (a wound serious enough to send him back to England but not serious enough to be life threatening), demobbed (officially retired from military service), and back in Oxford to resume—or, in some ways, to start—his studies. Then, before going on with his story, he interjects four odd sentences:
Before I say anything of my life there I must warn the reader that one huge and complex episode will be omitted. I have no choice about this reticence. All I can or need say is that my earlier hostility to the emotions was very fully and variously avenged. But even were I free to tell the story, I doubt if it has much to do with the subject of the book. (198)
The story Lewis omits here is the story of his relationship with Mrs. Janie Moore, the mother of Paddy Moore, his roommate during officers’ training. In the few weeks before shipping to the front, Jack had spent time with Paddy’s mother and sister, who provided the cheer and comfort that was lacking from Albert. Knowing that death was a real possibility, Jack and Paddy made a pact that if only one of them made it back, the survivor would care for the other’s parent. Paddy was killed. After Jack returned to Oxford, his relationship with Mrs. Moore, presumably the source of the “emotions” Lewis alludes to in the passage, became that of an adopted son taking care of an increasingly needy adopted mother.
When Lewis reports that their relationship, which lasted thirty-two years, did not have much to do with the subject of how he passed from atheism to Christianity, we must agree with him. But it certainly had a great deal to do with his growth from new Christian to mature Christian, for in the years to come, Mrs. Moore, who was hostile to his faith, would grow very difficult to live with. Under her chronic nagging and petty demands that he do a multitude of chores around the house, Lewis would learn much about patience, humility, fortitude, and hope. No doubt one reason Jack was able to remain so faithful in his promise to Paddy was that he saw Mrs. Moore’s domestic demands on him for what they really were. Given his own general ineptitude in the kitchen and dining room and his adopted mother’s growing isolation from her daughter and her increasing loneliness, her requests were better understood as appeals for attention and company, appeals which Jack would have viewed with compassion and believed it his Christian duty to respond to.
Besides, of course, the promise he had made to Paddy, another reason Jack was drawn to Mrs. Moore was that when Jack really needed his father, Albert had proved unresponsive. Despite his son’s requests, Albert did not come to England to see him—for what might have been their last meeting—before he shipped off to France. Nor did Albert come to visit Jack as he finished recuperating in London. About the factors behind their father’s unfatherly behavior, Warnie writes in his memoir:
My father was a very peculiar man in some respects: in none more than in an almost pathological hatred of taking any step which involved a break in the dull routine of his daily existence. Jack remained unvisited, and was deeply hurt at a neglect which he considered inexcusable. Feeling himself to have been rebuffed by his father, he turned to Mrs. Moore as to a mother, seeking there the affection which was apparently denied him at home. (30)
In 1931 Jack, Warnie, and Mrs. Moore bought the Kilns, a house and wooded grounds just outside of Oxford. They lived there along with Mrs. Moore’s daughter, Maureen, and one or two servants. Over the years, Mrs. Moore became not only increasingly difficult but also increasingly ill. By 1947, when Lewis was asked to join a prestigious group of thinkers and leaders to discuss the future of the Anglican Church, he could not give them a firm commitment, explaining: “My time is almost fully, and what is new, quite unpredictably, occupied by my domestic duties. My mother is old and infirm, we have little and uncertain help, and I never know when I can, even for a day, get away from my duties as a nurse and a domestic servant” (CLII, 766).
In a passage from his diary, Warnie remarks on Mrs. Moore’s death in January 1951: “And so ends the mysterious self-imposed slavery in which Jack has lived for at least thirty years. How it began, I suppose I shall never know” (264).
And so would end one huge and complex episode in Jack’s life.
Oxford Student Again
It is somewhat difficult to explain Jack’s Oxford studies in terms non-Oxonians can understand. As was seen in describing his earlier education, again part of the problem is terminology. In mid-January 1919, in what is called Hilary term, Jack began his undergraduate work in earnest. Fourteen months later—on March 31, 1920—he was awarded a first in Classical Honor Moderations. Approximately two and a half years after this—on August 4, 1922—he was awarded an additional first in Greats. For each of these degrees, Jack had a tutor he met with once a week, a set of lectures to attend, a long list of readings, and a huge final exam. Lewis scholar and Cambridge graduate John Bremer describes the rationale behind the academic track Jack chose to follow.
He could have proceeded directly to a degree in Greats, the popular name for the Honors School of Literae Humaniores, a course devoted to the classics, philosophy, and ancient history. But he thought he wanted a scholarly career, and for him that meant obtaining a fellowship at Oxford. He had confided this ambition to his tutor, A. B. Poynton, who had recommended that instead of proceeding directly to Greats he should begin with the Honor Moderations course in Greek and Latin. . . . This would give him a firmer grounding in the field of classics and a better chance to show his worth. (32)
The fellowship Bremer refers to here is a teaching position. An Oxford don is also known as a tutor or fellow. Bremer further notes, “Oxford and Cambridge undergraduates were classified as achieving First, Second, or Third Class degrees; the number of Firsts awarded was extremely small” (33).
A double first was usually the ticket to an academic career. But in 1922 the supply-and-demand ratio for academic jobs was similar to the current one, as there were far more graduates than there were university positions available, particularly positions at prestigious schools like Oxford. And so, when no position was forthcoming, like many of today’s graduates Jack decided to stay in school and get another degree. In Surprised by Joy, he explains: “In the summer of 1922 I finished Greats. As there were no philosophical posts going, or none that I could get, my long-suffering father offered me a fourth year at Oxford during which I read English so as to get a second string to my bow” (212).
Part of Jack’s strategy in going for this third degree was the diminishing prominence of classical and philosophical studies and the foreseeable rise in English literature studies. In a letter dated May 18, 1922, as he was finishing Greats, Jack writes to his father:
No one quite knows what place classics and philosophy will hold in the educational world. . . . English Literature is a “rising” subject. Thus if I could take a First or even a Second in Greats, and a First next year in English Literature, I should be in a very strong position indeed: and during the extra year I might reasonably hope to strengthen it further by adding some other University prize to my “Optimism.” (CLI, 591)
In fact, Jack did get a first in Greats and then a first in English—giving him a triple first, a true rarity. The “Optimism” he refers to was a long essay he had written which had already garnered one award, the prestigious Chancellor’s Prize, given annually to the best essay by an undergraduate.
What about Lewis’s religious beliefs during this time? In the section of Mere Christianity titled “What Lies Behind the Law,” Lewis outlines two basic views of the world.
Ever since men were able to think they have been wondering what this universe really is and how it came to be there. And, very roughly, two views have been held. First, there is what is called the materialist view. People who take that view think that matter and space just happen to exist, and always have existed, nobody knows why; and that the matter behaving in certain fixed ways, has just happened, by a sort of fluke, to produce creatures like ourselves who are able to think. . . . The other view is the religious view. According to it, what is behind the universe is more like a mind than it is like anything else we know. That is to say, it is conscious, and has purposes, and prefers one thing to another. And on this view it made the universe partly for purposes we do not know, but partly, at any rate, in order to produce creatures like itself . . . to the extent of having minds. (21–22)
During the time he was an Oxford student, Jack worked very hard to assume a purely materialistic view, to put on what, in Surprised by Joy, he calls the New Look—a view of life made up of “no flirtations with any idea of the supernatural, no romantic delusions” (201). Lewis continues: “I decided I had done with all that. No more Avalon, no more Hesperides. I had . . . ‘seen through’ them. And I was never going to be taken in again” (204).
We can see Jack’s New Look reflected in The Last Battle, a work published in 1956, a year after Surprised by Joy. In chapter 7, King Tirian invites the dwarfs to join the forces of the real Aslan. Griffle, speaking for the dwarfs, responds: “We’ve been taken in once and now you expect us to be taken in again the next minute. We’ve no more use for stories about Aslan” (82). Jack’s New Look can also be found in Eustace’s report of the much-changed Susan in chapter 12. There Eustace explains that when the topic of Narnia came up, Susan would respond, “Fancy your still thinking about all those funny games we used to play when we were children” (154). Alan Jacobs notes that during this time when Jack was formidably trying to put on his New Look, much like Susan he went “a long ways toward turning himself into someone who wouldn’t even read books such as the Narnia stories” (102).
Jack’s New Look required not merely complete disbelief in God but total disdain for such beliefs as well. In his essay for Remembering C. S. Lewis: Recollections of Those Who Knew Him, Leo Baker describes a conversation he had with Jack shortly after they both returned to Oxford from the war. When Baker asked Jack if he had been very frightened during his time in France, Jack replied, “All the time, but I never sank so low as to pray” (69).
And how did the feeling of Joy fit into Jack’s New Look? Lewis writes that he now labeled it as mere aesthetic experience—something that had value but certainly not a value that could be called spiritual, because there was of course no such thing as spiritual. Not that this really mattered that much anyway, for during this time, as Lewis tells us in his autobiography, the experience of Joy “came very seldom and when it came it didn’t amount to much” (205).
In the epigraph to chapter 13, Lewis compares his efforts to assume his New Look to Robinson Crusoe’s attempt to build his great wall around his shelter. Here again we can find Jack’s position reflected in the dwarves in The Last Battle. In chapter 13—titled “How the Dwarfs Refused to Be Taken In”—Aslan describes the wall of philosophical presuppositions they have surrounded themselves with: “They have chosen cunning instead of belief. Their prison is only in their own minds, yet they are in that prison; and so afraid of being taken in that they cannot be taken out” (169).
In the end, Robinson Crusoe’s wall was not enough to guard him from outside attack. As we will see, Jack’s New Look would also prove inadequate to shield him from his great adversary.