Little Lea, since 1908, had been an all-male household. In the following six years Jack was at all-male boarding schools. His first opportunity to share in the life of a domestic household with a man and a woman had led him to Mrs Kirkpatrick. His scorn of her was doubtless learnt from her misogynistic husband, who, it was said, had only married her to fill the housekeeper’s room at Lurgan. It was an unhappy model to grow up with: the clever man matched with a woman who, though evidently no fool, had to be written down as a fool to satisfy her husband’s ego and explain his dislike of her.
Nor, though he wrote it up as an idyll afterwards, was life at Gastons all fun. For much of the time he was terribly bored, as he confided both to Arthur Greeves and to his pocket diary. ‘Got very bored in the morning’, ‘Am bored’, ‘A dull day’17 are all typical entries. However deeply studious he was, it was a strange way for a boy of sixteen or seventeen to be living. This worried Kirkpatrick, and for short spells he tried the experiment of having another pupil to live in the house with Lewis. This never worked, partly because the boy concerned was always far beneath Lewis’s intellectual level, and so could not possibly have shared lessons with him; partly because Lewis had simply grown accustomed to being on his own. ‘A damned fellow pupil of my own age and sex – isn’t it the limit!’18
Mrs Kirkpatrick tried the experiment of introducing him to girls. For example, there was a family of Belgian refugees evacuated to Great Bookham, and for a period Lewis affected to be smitten by one of the girls of the family. By now, his correspondence with Greeves contained a good deal of covert confidences about sex. ‘How could young adolescents really be friends without it?’19 as he reflected in middle age. Arthur Greeves was homosexual. Lewis, knowing that he wasn’t, assumed himself to be a simple heterosexual and even supplied Arthur with details of assignations with the Belgian girl which he afterwards admitted he had fabricated.20 Most of the ‘real’ sexual experiences which they shared related, unsurprisingly, to masturbation.
The ‘ordinary’ experience of going to cafes or dances and falling in love with the girl over the garden fence or at the next desk in school was not to be Lewis’s. In one of the most revealingly characteristic of all the letters he wrote in his teenage years, he said to Greeves:
You ask whether I have ever been in love: fool as I am, I am not quite such a fool as that. But if one is only to talk from first hand experience on any subject, conversation would be a very poor business. But though I have no personal experience of the thing they call love, I have what is better – the experience of Sappho, of Euripides, of Catullus, of Shakespeare, of Spenser, of Austen, of Brontë, of, of, – anyone else I have read.21
‘Jack Lewis loved books!’ his Oxford friend Hugo Dyson used to say, in his huge booming voice, causing all heads in a bar to turn in his direction.22 In some ways, this obvious truth was the most important thing about Lewis. ‘Though I have no personal experience … I have what is better … ’ Most of Lewis’s important experiences were, in fact, literary ones. They happened when he was holding a book or a pen in his hand.
Since Lewis died, the professional world of English Literature studies in universities and learned periodicals has been dominated by various formalist critics (most of whom he would have abominated) exploring the curious relationship between text and reader. Reading is not a simple exercise. Very often, the simplest ‘understanding’ of a text would turn out in another person’s eyes to be a ‘misreading’ of it. Reading is a creative exercise, an exercise in the imagination. It constitutes an experience in itself. Perhaps there are many imaginative, religious or emotional areas where it actually makes very little sense to distinguish between ‘real’ or ‘personal’ experiences, and things we have ‘only’ read about in books. These are matters to which Lewis, in later life, was to devote thought. How much is the bookish man distinguishable from his imagined self, the self he projects into the books he reads?
When he looked back on his life at Great Bookham, there was one great reading experience which outshone all others, and which certainly constitutes a personal experience every bit as important as his encounters with the Belgian girl or Mrs Kirkpatrick. In some ways it was more important than his acquaintanceship with Kirkpatrick himself.
This occurred at the beginning of March 1916, when quite by chance on the station bookstall at Great Bookham, he happened to pick up a copy of Phantastes by George MacDonald. After only a few pages he knew at once that he was in for ‘a great literary experience’.23
George MacDonald was to be so important a figure in Lewis’s life, and Phantastes such a great milestone in his inner journey, that some word of exposition is required here. Can we explain why the book meant so much to him, became almost a holy text in his imagination, and – most characteristic – a touchstone by which to judge whether other people were, or were not, ‘of the brethren’?
‘All was changed … I had not the faintest notion what I had let myself in for by buying Phantastes.’24
Many of Lewis’s admirers must have rushed eagerly to the pages of MacDonald and felt a grave disappointment at what they found there. For MacDonald supremely lacks Lewis’s greatest quality – that of readability, the simple ability to write prose in such a manner that one wants to keep on turning the pages. It is this which accounts for the obscurity into which MacDonald’s reputation fell after his death in 1905, at the age of seventy-nine. But Lewis was surely right to discern in him one of the most original imaginations in the whole of English literature. Phantastes is not, strictly speaking, a story. It is an imagined dream or vision in which the hero, Anodos (which means in Greek ‘No Way’), wakes up and finds that his bedroom is not as he remembered it. From the wash-basin a stream is flowing on to the carpet. The carpet is now bright-green grass, and a tiny stranger offers to lead him through a small section of his writing desk into the world of Faery (MacDonald was a friend of Lewis Carroll). In the company of this fairy, who turns out to be his lost grandmother, he enters a world of potent symbols and archetypical images, and sets out on various quests for a perfect woman, part lover, part mother-figure. One of these is the beauteous marble lady – very possibly MacDonald’s lost mother, who by a dreadful ‘weaning’ abandoned her child by dying when he was only eight.
MacDonald is the missing link between Spenser’s Faerie Queene and the writings of Freud and Jung. He seems to have the supreme gift, in his fairy stories, of writing unselfconsciously about the subconscious: not only describing what it is like to be in a subconscious dream-state, but also, without any spelling-out of the obvious, high-lighting the meaning of these mentally subterranean journeyings. One of MacDonald’s favourite sayings came from Novalis: ‘Our life is no dream, but it ought to become one and perhaps will.’ He is the great chronicler of the inner life, the mapper-out of what takes place when the subconscious is allowed free range and – in dream or fantasy – tells us stories about ourselves which with our conscious minds we would not necessarily understand or might not be strong enough to bear. MacDonald’s entire œuvre has been described as ‘a life-time effort of mourning’ the traumatic losses of his boyhood, above all the death of his mother. Lewis, when he first read Phantastes, could have had no idea that MacDonald’s early history was so like his own.25 MacDonald’s genius is to draw archetypes to which we all respond. But this story made a particular appeal to Lewis: the young man with No Way in the world, pursuing images of selfhood, images of womanhood, images of loss, images of death.
Later, he was to see that reading Phantastes had been something much more than a literary experience. Indeed, Lewis never blinded himself to the fact that in technical, literary terms MacDonald is not necessarily ‘a good