Kirkpatrick’s letters to Albert were real enough. When they are not dripping with syrupy endearments about his former pupils, they thunder with all the irrational force of an angry man reading the newspapers about the Hun, the Catholics, the Conservative Party and anyone else he disapproves of. But for Jack Lewis, the Great Knock was to be the embodiment of pure logic, the man who sacrificed everything – social niceties, good manners, even the pleasure of conversation – to a passionate desire to get things right. Even as they were strolling from the station, Jack was discovering, or creating, this magnificent character. He remarked that he was surprised by the scenery of Surrey, which was much wilder than he had expected.
‘Stop!’ shouted the Knock. ‘What do you mean by wildness and what grounds had you for not expecting it?’ By a series of Socratic thrusts, Kirkpatrick managed to show Lewis that his remarks were wholly meaningless and that he had no grounds whatsoever for expressing an opinion about a subject (the scenery of Surrey) of which he had hitherto known nothing. As Lewis remarks, ‘Born a little later, he would have been a Logical Positivist.’7
Kirkpatrick’s teaching techniques, when it came to studying literature, were no less remarkable. Lewis arrived on a Saturday. On Monday morning at nine o’clock, Kirkpatrick opened the Iliad and read aloud the first twenty lines, chanting it in his pure Ulster brogue. Then he translated the lines into English, handed Lewis a lexicon and told him to go through as much of it as he had time for. With any less able child, this would have been a disastrously slapdash method of instruction. But it was not long before Lewis began trying to race Kirkpatrick, seeing if he could not learn a few more lines of Homer than his master. Before long, he was reading fluently and actually thinking in Greek. The same method was applied to the Latin poets. Eventually, while he was living at Gastons (as the Knock’s house was called), Lewis was to read his way through the whole of Homer, Virgil, Euripides, Sophocles and Aeschylus, as well as the great French dramas, before branching out into German and Italian. In all these areas, Kirkpatrick’s methods were the same. After the most rudimentary instruction in the grammar of the languages, Jack was reading Faust and the Inferno.
They were very happy times for Kirkpatrick himself. His letters to Albert about the boy are glowing and full of appreciation for Jack’s qualities of mind; they are exact in their analysis of what was so remarkable about him, throughout his life, as a literary critic. ‘It is the maturity and originality of his literary judgements which is so unusual and surprising. By an unerring instinct he detects first rate quality in literary workmanship and the second rate does not interest him in any way.’8
In religion, Kirkpatrick was an old-fashioned nineteenth-century rationalist, whose favourite reading consisted of Frazer’s Golden Bough and Schopenhauer. Nevertheless, he remained very distinctly an Ulster Presbyterian atheist. Jack noticed with amusement that Kirkpatrick always did the garden in a slightly smarter suit on Sundays.
Albert hoped that neither of his boys had been infected by the ‘Gastons heresies’. Warren’s religion appeared to have survived Kirkpatrick’s atheistical society. Indeed, when he was at Sandhurst at the beginning of 1914, he had written home to bewail the atmosphere in the chapel there – ‘that easy, bored, contemptuous indifference which is so hard to describe, but which you would understand perfectly if you had any experience of the products of the big public schools’.9
By the close of the year, Warnie was in France and so he missed Jack’s confirmation service, which was held, at Albert’s suggestion, at St Mark’s, Dundela. Jack and his father were now so estranged that Jack did not feel able to tell his father that he did not believe in God and did not wish to go through with the ceremony. Even after he had turned back to Christianity himself, Lewis did less than justice to Albert’s position.
It would have been quite impossible to drive into his head my real position. The thread would have been lost almost at once and the answer implicit in all the quotations, anecdotes, and reminiscences which would have poured over me would have been one I then valued not a straw – the beauty of the Authorised version, the beauty of the Christian tradition and character.10
This is to suggest that Albert mainly valued Christianity as an aesthetic or national tradition. His letter to Warnie at the Western Front describing Jack’s confirmation shows him, by contrast, to have been a profoundly committed Christian. After an account of the ‘very impressive’ service Albert continues:
Don’t take this further word amiss, dear Badge. I am not going to preach a sermon. I know that you are living a hard life and that a battle field is not the best place for the Christian witness to flourish. But don’t altogether forget God, and turn in thought at times to remember that you too have been confirmed in Christ.11
Jack Lewis went through the ceremony knowing that he was enacting a lie, and he hated himself for so doing. His actual belief, strengthened by contact with the ‘Gastons heresies’ and Frazer’s Golden Bough, was that religion, ‘that is all mythologies’,12 sprang into being in order to explain phenomena by which primitive man was terrified – thunder, pestilence or snakes. In a similar fashion, great men such as Heracles, Odin or Yeshua (‘whose name we have corrupted into Jesus’) came to be regarded as gods after their deaths. ‘Superstition of course in every age has held the common people but in every age the educated and thinking ones have stood outside it, though usually outwardly conceding to it for convenience.’ Arthur Greeves, who was a devout Christian, did not agree, and the letters between the two friends on the subject were so intense that they eventually agreed not to discuss the matter. In the letters of young C. S. Lewis the atheist we find all the bombast and dialectic which was one day to be turned on its head in defence of the faith. ‘Strange as it may appear, I am quite content to live without believing in a bogey who is prepared to torture me for ever and ever if I should fail in coming up to an almost impossible ideal.’13
It was, he believed, from Kirkpatrick that he learnt dialectic, just as it was from Smugy that he had learnt grammar and rhetoric. Kirkpatrick was in fact dismayed by how little grammar (Greek and Latin) Lewis had learnt. He was astonished, for example, that the boy did not know the Greek accents. But it may have been true that some of his forceful dialectic techniques got passed on to his pupil. For example, not many months after the outbreak of the First World War, Kirkpatrick observed of the Liberal Government:
If after eight years of experience, they did not grasp the German menace, they are convicted of stupidity: if they did know it, and never informed the nation or made military preparations to meet it, they are guilty of moral cowardice and neglect of the highest national interests. They may choose which horn of the dilemma they prefer but escape from one or the other is impossible.14
This was precisely the kind of argument Lewis was to employ later in life to persuade people to accept the divinity of Christ.
But if he learnt dialectic from Kirkpatrick, he probably did not learn much about the relations between the sexes or the emotional life. The Kirkpatricks were unsuitably matched. Tea parties, bridge and gossip were Mrs Kirkpatrick’s favourite occupations. Lewis manages to make them sound pointless, even slightly esoteric activities, but the majority of middle-class women lived in this way, and one might wonder what was wrong with their doing so. Mrs Kirkpatrick did her best to keep Jack amused. She read French novels with him in the evenings. She took him up to London to see the Russian ballet.15 She even introduced him to Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out, making him resolve to ‘look out for anything else she writes’. (He added, in Virginia Woolfish mode, ‘A moth has flown into my mantle and broken it.’)16 But none of