Lewis’s four boarding schools, woeful Wynyard, close-by Campbell, challenging Cherbourg, and memorable Malvern, helped prepare him for the educational experience that tapped his true intellectual potential—his tutelage with William T. Kirkpatrick, also known as “the Great Knock.” Kirkpatrick had also been Lewis’s father Albert’s tutor, as well as Warnie’s tutor. Arriving in Surrey on September 19, 1914, and residing with Mr. and Mrs. Kirkpatrick, Lewis quickly discovered that “The Great Knock” lived up to his name by boldly inflicting his logical and analytical skills on others. September 19 was a significant date in C. S. Lewis’s life. It was not only the date he met “The Great Knock,” but the date on which, seventeen years later, he would have a late-night conversation with Hugo Dyson and J. R. R. Tolkien that appeared to be the final push to Lewis’s believing in Christianity—what he eventually called “the true myth.”52
Lewis learned an important lesson about language, meaning, and inference during an early interaction with Kirkpatrick, whom he describes as being “over six feet tall, very shabbily dressed (like a gardener, I thought), lean as a rake, and immensely muscular … he wore moustache and side whiskers with a clean-shaven chin like the Emperor Franz Joseph.”53 Shortly after meeting Kirkpatrick, when riding in a carriage toward his new home, fifteen-year-old Lewis tried to make polite conversation. He writes in his autobiography, published on September 19, 1955 (another important September 19th), about his expectations for the landscape in Surrey: “I had been told that Surrey was ‘suburban’, and the landscape that actually flitted past the windows astonished me.”54 He casually mentioned to Kirkpatrick that the countryside of Surrey seemed wilder than he had expected. Lewis writes of Kirkpatrick’s startling retort: “ ‘Stop!’ Shouted Kirk with a suddenness that made me jump. ‘What do you mean by wildness and what grounds had you for not expecting it?’ I replied I don’t know what … As answer after answer ←44 | 45→was torn to shreds it at last dawned upon me that he really wanted to know.”55 Lewis had learned an important lesson: Words have power to describe or to reveal a lack of understanding. This first, memorable, impromptu tutorial was a lesson in both language and logic. Lewis found in Kirkpatrick a teacher who would scrutinize every sentence for its logical construction—both in use of words and in how that sentence would add to the larger argument. Lewis later noted in his autobiography that “the most casual remark was taken as a summons to disputation.”56 He says of his training in logic and argumentation by Kirkpatrick, “If ever a man came near to being a purely logical entity that man was Kirk.”57
Lewis’s time with Kirkpatrick was a turning point in his education. It was here in Surrey that Lewis learned the importance of precise communication. The Great Knock wrote to Albert Lewis in January 1915 that his son “was born with the literary temperament … By an unerring instinct he detects first rate quality in literary workmanship, and the second rate does not interest him in any way.”58 Lewis loved having the attention and being pushed to excel. Learning from Kirkpatrick, says Lewis, was like “red beef and strong beer”—substantial and stout. It was on this foundation of logic, languages, and literature that Lewis polished his communication gifts. “Here was a man,” Lewis says, “who thought not about you but about what you said.”59
Lewis’s Oxford education would certainly refine and add to his intellectual and rhetorical competencies, but without Kirkpatrick, it is questionable that Lewis would have become the communicator readers know today. Although Lewis thought orators Demosthenes and Cicero were “The Two Great Bores,” he nonetheless fine-tuned his dialectical and rhetorical skills.60 Lewis acknowledges both Smewgy and Kirk for their skill in speaking, analytical thinking, and writing: “Smewgy and Kirk were my two greatest teachers. Roughly, one might say (in medieval language) that Smewgy taught me Grammar and Rhetoric and Kirk taught me Dialectic.”61 Dialectic is the study and practice of argument and debate. From the Great Knock, Lewis learned to focus on the essence of what a book had to say. At the heart of Kirkpatrick’s educational mission was to provide Lewis with a firm grounding in the liberal arts and, through the use of the Socratic question and answer teaching method, the development of his critical thinking skills. As Lewis reflected, “If Kirk’s ruthless dialectic had been merely a pedagogic instrument I might have resented it.”62 In a letter referring to Kirkpatrick Lewis notes, “A pure agnostic is a fine thing. I have known only one and he was the man who taught me how to think.”63
Lewis also valued his education from The Great Knock in challenging ideas. In The Personal Heresy Lewis observed, “We have both [Lewis and co-author E. M. ←45 | 46→W. Tillyard] learnt our dialectic in rough academic arena where knocks that would frighten the London literary coteries are given and taken in good part.”64 Rather than intimidate, the metaphorical “great knocks” Lewis received from Kirkpatrick helped to prepare him for the next phase of his education. Kirkpatrick clearly saw Lewis’s ability to think and communicate well. By the winter of 1916, Lewis was ready to seek an Oxford education.
Oxford and the Dreaming Spires
Lewis traveled to Oxford for the first time on December 5, 1916, to take his exam to be considered for a scholarship. Although not his first choice, University College, one of the oldest Colleges at Oxford, offered him a scholarship on December 13, 1916, and he enrolled in University College in April 1917. But he still had not passed Responsions, the Oxford University entrance exam dubbed the “little go,” because it was an exam that required a prospective student to respond (hence the term responsions) to moderately easy questions from experts. It may have been called the “little go” but it was “no go” for Lewis because he failed the math portion of the exam. Lewis’s talents lay in working with words, not numbers. Nonetheless, University College honored its scholarship offer on the assumption that he would eventually pass the required exam.
In May 1917, just a few weeks after “coming up” to Oxford, Lewis joined the Officers’ Training Corps. (When accepted to Oxford one “came up”; if asked to leave one was “sent down.”) It was because he served in the military that he was ultimately not required to complete and pass Responsions—a good thing because he might never have been admitted to Oxford otherwise.
It was at Oxford that Lewis’s academic talents flourished, and his intellectual refinement at the hand of Kirkpatrick came to fruition. Lewis’s rooms at University College were in the Front Quad, Number 5, accessed through staircase number 12. He had a lovely view overlooking the Radcliffe Quad.65 He was an excellent student.66 And he loved Oxford.
At Oxford, Lewis first studied Classical Honour Moderations—Greek and Latin. Lewis excelled. He then studied what was known as “Greats,” which included ancient history and philosophy, as well as classical rhetoric and poetics (orators and poets). Lewis also read Homer, Demosthenes, Cicero, Virgil, Euripides, Sophocles, and Aeschylus as an Oxford student.67 Throughout