C S Lewis

A biography of friendships

Colin Duriez

• Publisher: Lion Books
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780745957258
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Biographies d'artistes

An Oxford student of C.S. Lewis's said he found his new tutor interesting, and was told by J.R.R. Tolkien, 'Interesting? Yes, he's certainly that. You'll never get to the bottom of him.'

You can learn a great deal about people by their friends and nowhere is this more true than in the case of C.S. Lewis, the remarkable academic, author, populariser of faith - and creator of Narnia. He lost his mother early in life, and became estranged from his father, much to his regret. Throughout his life, key relationships mattered deeply to him, from his early days in the north of Ireland and his schooldays in England, as still a teenager in the trenches of World War One, and then later in Oxford. The friendships he cultivated throughout his life proved to be vital, influencing his thoughts, his beliefs and his writings.

What did Arthur Greeves, a life-long friend from his adolescence, bring to him? How did J.R.R. Tolkien, and the other members of the now famous Inklings, shape him? Why, in his early twenties, did he move in with a single mother twice his age, Janie Moore, and live with her for so many years until her death? And why did he choose to marry so late? What of the relationship with his alcoholic and gifted brother, who eventually joined his unusual household? In this sparkling new biography, which draws on material not previously published, Colin Duriez brings C.S. Lewis and his friendships to life.

1

A Northern Irish Childhood

Lessons of the day, given by their governess, Annie Harper, were long over. The weather had improved since then. Two small boys were returning home from a walk when the younger noticed a rainbow. His face alight with excitement, he pointed it out to his older brother, Warnie (Warren). The younger was convinced that the rainbow ended by their house.

Running nearer, the two saw that the shining arc seemed indeed to touch the ground in the middle of the path from the gate to the front door.

Always persuasive, the youthful C.S. Lewis convinced his older brother that they must dig there for the crock of gold. Jack, as he insisted on being called, reminded Warnie of stories their nurse, Lizzie Endicott, had told them about buried pots of gold at the end of rainbows. It was characteristic of the younger boy that he could convince the older, and also act on what gripped his imagination. When their cousin Claire Lewis sometimes visited, Warnie did not need persuading to join his brother and Claire in the large oak wardrobe carved by their grandfather. There, as they sat on its floor, Jack would tell Warnie and Claire (who was Warnie’s age) stories of his own. In the gloom, Claire recalled years later, she and Warnie would listen silently “while Jacks told us his tales of adventure”.¹

Soon the two brothers were energetically digging up the garden path. The dense shrubbery hid their digging from watchful eyes in the house. As the dusk deepened, the boys had yet to uncover the treasure. Finally, they were forced to obey the summons for tea from the house.

It was not long before the front door was flung open and their dishevelled father burst in. In the twilight, smart-suited Albert Lewis had stumbled into the substantial hole in the path, the contents of his briefcase tumbling out. In his fury, Albert refused to listen to Jack’s explanation, perfectly reasonable to the young boy, or to his older brother. Assuming his solicitor’s role as if he were in a police court, but not measuring his anger, Albert accused his sons of deliberately creating a booby trap for him. Nothing would convince him otherwise. Their sentence is not recorded.

Clive Staples Lewis was born on 29 November 1898, on the wealthy fringes of Belfast in the north of Ireland, the second son of successful city solicitor Albert, and Florence (Flora), the daughter of a clergyman. His brother, Warnie, was three and a half years older than him. Belfast in 1898 and into the twentieth century was humming as a burgeoning industrial city. At its heart was one of the world’s greatest shipyards. It was proud to have the largest gantry in the British Isles and launched the biggest ship, the Oceanic, and later its sister, the short-lived Titanic. As the leading city economy in Ireland, Belfast’s prosperity grew, and privileged families, including the Lewises, prospered with it.

Jack’s father was the son of an evangelical Welshman and engineer, Richard Lewis, who had settled in Ireland and been a partner in a shipping company in the nearby docks. Jack’s mother, Flora, was considered to have the more cultured breeding, because of her aristocratic and highly intelligent mother, Mary Warren. Flora came from County Cork in the south of Ireland and, unusually for a woman at that time, was educated at Queen’s University, Belfast (then the Royal University of Ireland), obtaining First Class honours in algebra, geometry, and logic. She sensibly avoided her mother’s eccentric lifestyle. Jack Lewis remembered Flora as a “voracious reader of novels”. She wrote short stories and other pieces, including “The Princess Rosetta”, which was published in The Household Journal of 1889, and an accomplished parody of a sermon. Albert also had literary aspirations, including poetry writing, but it seems none of his verses were published.

As a growing and alert child, Jack soon noticed the contrast in their temperaments – Albert was passionate and emotionally unpredictable, while Flora was analytical and cool in her emotions. Sunny and stable, she was the young boy’s dependable Atlantis (as Lewis later put it), a great island continent of peacefulness. Jack’s early life was marked by the reassuring presence of his highly educated mother. Flora’s personality is captured in letters she wrote to Albert (rarely) while he was away from home, or (often) while she was away on long summer vacations with their boys. When baby Jack was nearly eighteen months old, Albert had to be away in London on business for a while. She wrote of “Babbins”: “If you ask where Daddy is, he says ‘gone’.” In another letter to Albert, in London, Flora mentions looking after “Babsie” and “Badgie” (Warnie) while suffering a headache. She tells Albert it had been a very stormy night, with hard rain. The next day her sister-in-law, Jack’s Aunt Annie, had come around, bringing her second child, baby Ruth. Flora notes that “Clive is about, and was anxious to look at it, but objected to be asked to kiss it”.²

Some months later in 1900, Flora took her sons, accompanied by their maid, for a long summer holiday in Ballycastle, on the north Antrim coast, where she relished the crisp air. Albert, as usual, remained behind, working. He hated any change in his routine, a trait that later would affect his relationship with his sons. Describing baby Jack to him in a letter, she observed, “Babsie is talking like anything. He astonished me this morning; Warren sniffled, and he turned around and said, ‘Warnie wipe nose.’”

The precocious infant was not averse to creating words. Flora continued: “There are some nice girls in the house next to us who talk to him and Warren in the garden. Baby calls them the ‘Joddies’.” She remarked that Baby enjoyed the story of the three bears that Martha, the maid, was reading to Warren. It was some time after this that the toddler declared, pointing to himself, “He is Jacksie.” Jacksie was later shortened to “Jacks” and then “Jack”. Thereafter he refused to answer to any other name, according to Warnie. “Jack” turned out to be the name by which he was known to family and close friends throughout his life

Sometime probably in the following year, 1901, Warnie brought the lid of a biscuit tin into his younger brother’s nursery. He had created a miniature garden or forest in the lid, from moss, twigs, and flowers. When he looked at it, Jack encountered beauty for the first time, an “incurably romantic” experience, or epiphany of what he called “joy”, despite the crudity of the art.

It made me aware of nature – not, indeed, as a storehouse of forms and colours but as something cool, dewy, fresh, exuberant. I do not think the impression was very important at the moment, but it soon became important in memory. As long as I live my imagination of Paradise will retain something of my brother’s toy garden.³

Warnie was always to have a more heightened perception of the ordinary natural world than his brother, and one of the gifts to Jack of Warnie’s friendship was to teach him to see more clearly the natural world. The experience of joy or longing that the adult C.S. Lewis speaks about, of which the toy garden was one of many pivotal examples, ran like a thread through his life, helping in his later return to belief in God and Christian faith from atheism in adulthood.

In June and July 1901, when Jack was two years old, he went on holiday with Flora, Warnie, and nurse/housemaid Lizzie Endicott to the small seaside resort of Castlerock, on the north coast of Ireland. Many years later, Lewis told his brother of his first experience of viewing the sea. In an unpublished memoir, Warren records that “when he first saw it he had not mastered perspective; to him then, the horizon appeared only a few yards away, and so high above his head that the effect was like looking upwards at water streaming over a weir”.⁴ This amazing infant memory may perhaps have contributed to Lewis’s beautiful imagining of the approach to Aslan’s Country in The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader”, where the very world’s end of Narnia is portrayed.

It was if a wall stood up between them and the sky, a greenish-grey, trembling, shimmering wall. Then up came the sun, and at its first rising they saw it through the wall and it turned into wonderful rainbow colours. Then they knew that the wall was really a long, tall wave – a wave endlessly fixed in one place as you may often see at the edge of a waterfall.⁵

Beyond the unmoving wave, and behind the sun, the voyagers could glimpse the vastly tall, verdant mountains of Aslan’s Country.

On showery days, Flora kept the boys near the railway station or the house in which they were staying, so as not to get caught in the rain. The station was as big an attraction as the beach, with the steam engines puffing through the small town and into the tunnel just by the station, heading in the direction of Downhill around the coast. Trains from the other way would dramatically emerge from the tunnel’s darkness.

In one of her many letters, Flora told Albert that Baby had made friends with the stationmaster. The toddler went with her to pick up a newspaper, “and as soon as he saw him in the distance he called out, ‘Hello, station master.’” Within a few weeks, Jack was insisting upon calling out, “Good morning Robert” every morning to the stationmaster, and getting a smile in return. Baby Jack continued to be “infatuated” with the steam trains stopping at Castlerock – Flora reported to Albert that if he saw a “siglan” down, he had to be taken back to the station.⁶

In another letter, Flora told a further railway tale about the toddler.

Here is a story to amuse the old people. I took him to buy a [toy] engine, and the woman asked him if she should tie a string to it for him. Baby just looked at her with great contempt and said, “Baby doesn’t see any string on the engines what baby sees on the station.” You never saw a woman so taken aback as she was.⁷

The correspondence wasn’t one-sided. A letter came for Flora from Albert that included a poem. She expressed pleasure at it in her reply, considering that it had real feeling in it, rather than (as usual with Albert, she felt) being “written for the sake of the verses”. Poignantly – in the light of her early death a little over seven years later – Flora wrote about their love:

I don’t see that there is anything else to look to in this life for comfort or happiness, at least for you and me. I don’t think either of us could ever find pleasure in outside things in which the other had not a part; it is going to be so with us always, isn’t it dear?⁸

As the family prospered, it nevertheless took a great deal of time for Flora to persuade her husband to move house from their rented accommodation – he was pathologically averse to change, as mentioned before. By 1905, however, the young family was able to move to a larger, specially built house nearby, which they called Little Lea.

The often eccentric construction of the house is not evident in an estate agent’s description over fifty years later, when structurally it still resembled the original house (though the lack of proper foundations presumably had been remedied by then).

Little Lea was advertised in 1957 as a “residence of distinction” with about two acres of land, and continues:

This Well-Built Residence is situated in a secluded position on the Circular Road, convenient to Campbell College and Stormont, and is approached by two gravel drives.

The Grounds are tastefully laid out for ease of management in lawns, rose beds, rock gardens, &c.

Lounge Hall with Fireplace; 3 Reception-rooms; 4 Principal Bedrooms; 2 Secondary Bedrooms; Dressing-room; 2 Bathrooms; Kitchen (Esse cooker); Double Garage; Greenhouses. The Rooms are spacious and the excellent woodwork includes parquet flooring in the Principal Bedrooms and oak and maple floors in the Hall and Reception-rooms….

His new home was “almost a major character in my story”, Lewis later wrote. The house was soon bursting with books, lodged into every conceivable space, even the attic. Jack was to explore unhindered, savouring books that were (he later said) suitable and unsuitable, but discovering authors connected by a hidden path that was to continue to run through his own writings. From the moment he could read, he gave his allegiance, he tells us, to books in which the horns of elfland could be heard – stories and poetry of romance, carrying tantalizing glimpses of other worlds, whether worlds of the spirit or imagined ones.⁹

The native stories told him by Lizzie Endicott reinforced this allegiance, rooted as they were, he tells us, in “the peasantry of County Down”. County Down, in fact, was a fundamental source of the later land of Narnia. As well as explaining during a snowstorm that “the old woman in the sky was plucking her goose”, the nurse told him folk and fairy tales of Ireland. The boy sat enraptured as she recounted stories of leprechauns and pots of buried gold, the sagas of Cuchulain, the champion of Ulster, and legends of the faery people and their immortal worlds, the Isle of Apples and Tir-na-nÓg, the Land of Youth.

Into this imaginative world of Lizzie Endicott’s storytelling came Jack’s discovery of the early Beatrix Potter books. Stories such as The Tale of Benjamin Bunny and The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin told of talking animals, and were accompanied by exquisite coloured illustrations. The stories were set in the Lake District in northern England. Squirrel Nutkin gave him a clear experience of beauty and what he later described as “the Idea of Autumn”, which enchanted the young Lewis and connected with his growing sense of “sweet desire” or inconsolable longing, so important in his writings as an adult. Such an enchantment was also highlighted for him, and Warnie, by the outlook from their upstairs window in their house.

The site on which Little Lea was built had been chosen by Albert and Flora because of its view. The north side of the house looked down over fields to Belfast Lough, with the “long mountain line of the Antrim shore” beyond, while the south side faced the Holywood Hills, “greener, lower, and nearer” than the Antrim slopes. As the boys grew, they were able to walk and cycle around those Holywood Hills. Here Lewis’s lifelong devotion to the countryside of County Down was shaped. From the hills one could see the expanse of S...