For the previous eight years, Lewis had been bottling up the emotion which he had most needed to let out: grief for his mother. The experience of boarding school immediately after Flora died and the stiff-upper-lip schoolboy atmosphere in which the emotions were suspected and tears were thought cissy had led to a profound stiffening and hardening throughout his being. MacDonald was the first person who touched Lewis sufficiently to let him see what he needed. It is no surprise that, upon reading Phantastes, Lewis heard a sound like the voice of his mother. Meanwhile, his mentor and teacher Kirkpatrick was giving his mind to what the future might hold for this most gifted youth. Two things struck him as obvious and, given the way things turned out, we should commend Kirkpatrick’s foresight.
Early on, he had noted that ‘Clive is an altogether exceptional boy.’27 Later, he had told Albert Lewis that Clive ‘was born with the literary temperament and we have to face the fact with all it implies. This is not a case of early precocity showing itself in rapid assimilation of knowledge and followed by subsequent indifference or even torpor. As I said before it is the maturity of his literary judgements which is so unusual and surprising.’28
Albert asked what career this pointed to, and Kirkpatrick replied that they should consider the Bar (i.e. being an advocate or attorney in court) as ‘the career marked out for Clive by nature and destiny … He has every gift, a goodly presence, a clear resonant voice, an unfailing resource of clear and adequate expression.’
So, he was to turn out as a literary man and an advocate. This was true. But in neither case was he to fulfil Kirkpatrick’s prophecy as he or Albert expected. His skills as an advocate were eventually to be used in the area of Christian apologetics; his literary skills in the areas of criticism, essays, science fiction and children’s stories.
In his late teens, Jack himself was convinced that he was going to become a poet, and this was a conviction which he carried with him until the late 1920s. Between Easter 1915 and Easter 1917, he wrote fifty-two poems, all about on a par with ‘The Hills of Down’:
I will abide
And make my Dwelling here
Whatso betide
Since there is more to fear
Out yonder. Though
This world is drear and wan
I dare not go
To dreaming Avalon,
Nor look what lands
May lie beyond the last
Strange sunset strands
That gleam when day is fast
I’ the yearning west
Nor seek some faery town
Nor cloud land lest
I lose the hills of Down
The long low hills of Down.
It is extraordinary that someone who, as Kirkpatrick observed, had such an unfailing eye for the excellent in other poets could have gone on writing poetry of such appalling quality. True, large numbers of people write bad poetry in their teens. But Lewis went on and on doing so, apparently convinced that he was going to turn into a poet in the same class as W. B. Yeats.
Not that he imagined he would be able to make a living out of poetry. He realized that he was expected to do something with his life, and the next stage in the life of a clever person inevitably looked like university. By the close of 1916, when he was just eighteen years old, he was ready to sit the scholarship examination for Oxford, and on 4 December he arrived in the town where, with periods of exile, he was to spend the rest of his life. This was the Oxford which existed before the building of the Cowley motor works and the expansion of the place into a mixture of modern industrial town and ‘shopping centre’ into which the old University buildings now appear to have been slotted by chance. The Oxford which Lewis saw was an unspoilt Gothic paradise. True, there were dull suburbs growing up around what Gerard Manley Hopkins, the Oxford Jesuit poet, had called its ‘base and brickish skirt’. But encircling it all there were open fields and meadows. No motor-car disturbed its tranquil streets. From college entrances hobbled old men in gowns who had known Dr Pusey and Dr Pattison. ‘This place has surpassed my wildest dreams,’ Lewis wrote. ‘I never saw anything so beautiful, especially on these frosty moonlight nights; though the Hall at Oriel [College] where we do the papers is fearfully cold at about four o’clock in the afternoons. We have most of us tried with varying success to write in our gloves.’29
Oxford is a collegiate university. To gain entrance there you have to be accepted by a college. The exact method of entrance to the colleges has varied over the years. When Lewis was sitting for the scholarship, there was a central pool from which the more brilliant candidates could be drawn. New College – in those days a place still very largely inhabited by boys who had been to Winchester – turned him down, but he was accepted at University College. After Christmas in Belfast, Lewis passed through Oxford for an interview with the Master of ‘Univ’ (as the college is invariably called), who explained that though he had been accepted as a scholar of the college, he had not yet matriculated as a member of the University. To do this, he would have to pass an examination called Responsions, which involved some elementary mathematics. If he passed this exam in March, then he could come up to Univ in the Trinity Term (i.e. April to June) of 1917.
It was a tedious chore, but he went back to the Kirkpatricks to brush up his (never very strong) mathematics. It was during this period that he started Italian and German. It was also during this period that he began to disclose to Arthur some of his more bizarre sexual preferences and fantasies.
In January 1917, his hand wobbles and he apologizes for his poor handwriting, poor because ‘it is being done across my knee’. The very phrase is enough to set off in his mind a train of sado-masochistic reflections: ‘“Across my knee” of course makes one think of positions for whipping: or rather not for whipping (you couldn’t get any swing) but for that torture with brushes. This position, with its childish nursery associations would have something beautifully intimate and also very humiliating for the victim.’30 He began to sign his name Philomastix (‘Lover of the whip’). He enjoyed fantasies about Arthur Greeves’s sister who should be ‘punished … to the general enjoyment of the operator and to the great good of her soul’, and about some other girl in Belfast whose large bottom was ‘shaped with an intolerable grace … Ah me! if she had suffered indeed half the stripes that have fallen upon her in imagination she would be well disciplined.’31 He also enjoyed, and recommended, the Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. ‘Altogether “a really rather lovely” book. His taste is altogether for suffering rather than inflicting: which I can feel too, but it is a feeling more proper to the other sex.’
These distractions did nothing to impair Lewis’s academic achievements, and he began his first term as an undergraduate at Oxford. It might readily be supposed that there was a tremendous contrast between the total solitude of Great Bookham and the merry life of Oxford; but by its own standards Oxford was strangely deserted. At Univ there were only twelve men in college32 and the hall was no longer used for dinner. The students ate in a small lecture room. Lewis was given an enormous sitting room all for himself. It was thickly carpeted with a profusion of rugs and furnished in stupendous style, with richly carved oak tables and a grand piano. A fire was burning in the grate, and his scout (college servant)