Here, especially in Virgil, one was presented with a mass of religious ideas; and all teachers and editors took it for granted from the outset that these religious ideas were sheer illusion … The impression I got was that religion in general, though utterly false, was a natural growth, a kind of endemic nonsense into which humanity tended to blunder. In the midst of a thousand religions, stood our own, the thousand and first, labelled True. But on what grounds could I believe this exception?8
While this third objection to Christianity rings true as a thought which troubled him at the age of twelve, the other two do not. 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, while they may be true in general, 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.
For the truth is that he was an intelligent and gifted boy, whose range of reading and whose capacity to appreciate literature (and, to a lesser extent, music) were uncommonly advanced. For him, the great personal ‘renaissance’ or imaginative discovery of this period of his life was what he came to call Northernness. What he means by this is expounded in one of the most eloquent passages in Surprised by Joy:
A vision of huge, clear spaces hanging above the Atlantic in the endless Twilight of a Northern summer, remoteness, severity … and almost at the same moment I knew that I had met this before, long, long ago, (it hardly seems longer now) in Tegner’s Drapa, that Siegfried (whatever it might be) belonged to the same world as Balder and the sunward-sailing cranes.
This aesthetic experience which came upon Lewis ‘a’ most like heart-break’ was prompted merely by glimpsing in some literary periodical the words Siegfried and the Twilight of the Gods and an Arthur Rackham illustration to that volume. In the decade before the First World War, when a Victorian passion for all things Teutonic and Northern still gripped the British middle class, it is hardly surprising that all this should have come Lewis’s way. This was the era of the haunting music-hall song ‘Speak to Me, Thora’, the sentiments of which exactly coincide with Lewis’s boyhood epiphany:
I stand in a land of roses,
But I dream of a land of snow.
When you and I were happy
In the days of long ago …
He had only to read the words Twilight of the Gods and he was able to recover ‘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’.
None of this would perhaps have taken root so forcefully in the imagination had Albert Lewis not been a man of some musical taste, who took the boys to the opera and the ballet whenever they were performed at the Belfast Hippodrome, and who also gave them a gramophone. It was through gramophone-record catalogues that C. S. Lewis first discovered Wagner, and his essay on ‘the great Bayreuth Master’, written when he was barely thirteen, is by far the most remarkable production of his early years – a thousand times more impressive than his plays or his Animal-land fantasies.
One sees what the middle-aged Lewis meant about the twelve-year-old being a prig and a snob. All the same, the expressions of that priggishness and snobbery are well turned, as when he says of Wagner that ‘He has not been, nor ever will be, appreciated by the mass: there are some brains incapable of appreciation of the beautiful except when it is embodied in a sort of lyric prettiness.’ What impresses about the essay is the thoroughness with which Lewis, merely by listening to gramophone records and following the stories, had learnt to appreciate the great Wagnerian Ring cycle and Parsifal, ‘his last and greatest work’. He disdained Tannhäuser, in which Wagner was ‘led away into the tinselled realms of tunefulness’, but considered Tristan unsur-passed as drama by anything the world had ever seen. ‘Once having grown to love Wagner’s peculiar richness of tone and the deep meaning of his music and the philosophy of his dramatic poems, all other composers seem but caricatures and ghosts.’9
The masters at Cherbourg cannot have failed to recognize that they had in their midst a child prodigy. It would seem too as if this was the period of his childhood when he was most able to mix with other boys on their own terms. He tells us that he made friends with the children at Cherbourg, as he had not at Wynyard. And the school magazine records that he even played for the school cricket eleven (though, given that there were only seventeen boys in the school, it may have been impossible to avoid this). He played twelve innings and his highest score was ten. The author of the sports page described Lewis as a ‘stonewaller … only very moderate in the field’.
When the time came for him to sit the scholarship examination to Malvern College, Lewis once again fell ill. He had to take the exams in bed, in the school sanatorium. In spite of, or perhaps because of, this, he was awarded a scholarship to Malvern College. The boys of Cherbourg were given a holiday – which took the form of an outing to the British Camp (the Ancient British enclosure to the west of the town where Caractacus made his last stand against the Romans), followed by an excellent tea. At home, his father bought Jack an édition de luxe of Kipling’s works signed by Kipling himself. ‘I am not making too much of the scholarship,’ Albert wrote to his son. ‘It is not the scholarship I am so proud of but the circumstances in which it was won.’ He signed this letter, as he so often and truthfully did, ‘Your ever loving Paps’. But the love was no longer reciprocated. Albert, who was intensely lonely without his boys during the school terms, would wait eagerly for Warnie and Jack to return from Malvern. They would be three chums, all boys together. But this was not what his sons wanted. Albert’s ‘wheezes’, stored up in memory and written down in his notebooks, were not what they wanted to hear.
He was bursting to tell his tales. Like the occasion in the police courts when he found himself prosecuting a girl called Maria Volento for allegedly assaulting a man in her father’s ice-cream parlour. Assuming her to be an Italian with no grasp of English, Albert was almost certain that she would need the assistance of an interpreter; but he began to question her in English, very slowly, ‘in the best nursery style’.
‘Just try to explain in your own words what happened to you last night.’
Her reply, in the broadest Ulster brogue, was: ‘Thon fella [pointing at the prisoner] clodded a tumbler at me and it wud have hut me only I deuked ut.’10
But to his sons, his self-confessed tendency to get hold of the wrong end of the stick was merely exasperating. In addition to conversational crossed wires and misapprehensions, he was capable of pure non sequiturs. ‘Did Shakespeare spell his name with an E at the end?’ asked Warnie. ‘I believe—’ said Jack, but Albert interrupted: ‘I very much doubt if he used the Italian calligraphy at all.‘11
The portrait of Albert Lewis which emerges from Surprised by Joy is devastatingly cruel.
‘Liberty Hall, boys, Liberty Hall,’ as he delighted to quote. ‘What time would you like lunch?’ But we knew only too well that the meal which would otherwise have been at one had already been shifted in obedience to his lifelong preference to two or even two thirty; and that the cold meats which