C. S. Lewis: A Biography. Walter Hooper
Читать онлайн книгу.
long walks on Sundays when he was in the gayest of moods – story telling and mimicking people. It is surprising that he should forget the happy times and remember only the unhappy ones.74
However, Lewis does record that there were ‘two blessings’ at Malvern ‘that wore no disguise’: one was ‘the Grundy’ – the school library, ‘not only because it was a library, but because it was a sanctuary’;75 and the other was ‘my form master, Smewgy as we called him’.76 This was Harry Wakelyn Smith (1861–1918), who taught classics and English to the Upper Fifth during most of his time at Malvern, from 1885 until his death in 1918, and who is lovingly described in Surprised by Joy.
Lewis kept secret the fact that he was leaving Malvern after the summer term of 1914. But before he went he wrote some verses in imitation of Ovid’s Pars estis pauci (Ex Ponto, III.ii.25 et seq.) in the metre of the last chorus of Swinburne’s Atalanta in Calydon. ‘They were top of the form and well spoken of by Smewgy’, he wrote on 22 June when enclosing them to his father; and they read almost as a farewell to Smewgy himself:
Of the host whom I named
As friends, ye alone
Dear few! were ashamed
In troubles unknown
To leave me deserted, but boldly ye cherished my cause as your own.
But nay! for the days
Of a mortal are few;
Shall they limit your praise,
Nay rather to you
Each new generation shall offer – if aught be remembered – your due.77
When looking back on what he had just written in Surprised by Joy about the miseries of his year at Malvern, Lewis continued:
I find myself exclaiming, ‘Lies, lies! This was really a period of ecstasy. It consisted chiefly of moments when you were too happy to speak, when gods and heroes rioted through your head, when Satyrs danced and Maenads roamed on the mountains, when Brynhild and Sieglinde, Deirdre, Maeve and Helen were all about you, till sometimes you felt that it might break you with mere richness.’ … All this is true, but it does not make the other version a lie. I am telling a story of two lives … When I remember my inner life I see that everything mentioned in the last two chapters [about Malvern] was merely a coarse curtain which at any moment might be drawn aside to reveal all the heavens I then knew. The same duality perplexes the story of my home life … 78
Lewis goes on to describe at some length his father’s character and the reasons why life at home was becoming progressively more difficult. Briefly, Albert Lewis erred through a combination of egocentricity and sheer affection for his sons. He enjoyed their company so much that when he was in the house he insisted on being with them all the time: if they had a visitor of their own age, or wanted to read or study quietly by themselves, it made no difference. He must dominate the conversation and impose his own interests at the expense of theirs, usually failing to take in anything they said to him, due to the illogicality and effervescence of his mind. Only when their father was away at work could Warnie and Jack retire to ‘the little end room’ to read and write and chronicle the endless episodes in the history of Boxen.
But the Boxonian days had come to an end in 1913 when Warnie left Malvern to stay with Kirkpatrick, who helped him win a prize cadetship at Sandhurst the following year; and Jack was already deep in ‘Northernness’, exploring it more profoundly than the late Teutonic version of the Nibelung saga adapted by Wagner, and finding his way into the genuine Norse and Icelandic originals of saga and Eddic literature. ‘I passed on from Wagner,’ he says, ‘to everything else I could get hold of about Norse mythology, Myths of the Norsemen,79 Teutonic Myth and Legend,80 Mallet’s Northern Antiquities.’81 This last he obtained in the old Bohn Library edition, with an appendix containing most of the Prose Edda, which he found the most stimulating discovery so far.
At Malvern he found a copy of the Corpus Poeticum Boreale (1883), F. York Powell’s great edition of all the mythological poems in the Elder Edda,82 ‘and tried vainly but happily to hammer out the originals from the translation at the bottom of the page’.83 This was during the summer term of 1914, by which time Lewis was immersed in one of the most remarkable of his early works,
a tragedy, Norse in subject and Greek in form. It was called Loki Bound and was as classical as any Humanist could have desired. The main contrast in my play was between the sad wisdom of Loki and the brutal orthodoxy of Thor … Thor was, in fact, the symbol of the Bloods [at Malvern] … Loki was a projection of myself; he voiced that sense of priggish superiority whereby I was, unfortunately, beginning to compensate myself for my unhappiness.84
He had already begun to write this play when he first made friends with Arthur Greeves in April 1914, as graphically described in Surprised by Joy, and found another who shared his delight in things Northern. They discovered ‘in a torrent of questions that we liked not only the same thing, but the same parts of it and in the same way; that both knew the stab of Joy and that, for both, the arrow was shot from the North’.85
Arthur Greeves (1895–1968) was the youngest of the five children of Joseph Greeves, the nearest neighbour of the Lewises at Little Lea. Arthur had been a casual acquaintance of the Lewis boys for most of their lives, but only from 1914 did he begin to become, as Jack described him in 1933, ‘after my brother, my oldest and most intimate friend’.86 In that same year Warnie wrote of him that
his circumstances have been such that he has never been compelled to face the issues of life … But it would be unfair to blame him, for his character is the result of an accident of his youth – while he was still a boy a doctor diagnosed him as suffering from a weak heart, and by the time the diagnosis was disproved, he was already a confirmed valetudinarian. At the plastic age he was exempted from the discipline of school and the preoccupations of a career, made into an invalid by his mother, whose favourite he is, and encouraged to float rudderless and motiveless down the years.87
The friendship with Arthur Greeves came exactly at the right moment. A temporary shadow had been cast by Malvern over Jack’s intimacy with Warnie. Warnie took his entrance examinations to Sandhurst between 25 November and 2 December 1913 and the family were elated when they learned that he had passed twenty-first out of 201 successful candidates. In February 1914 Warnie went to the Royal Military College, Sandhurst. On 30 September 1914 he was appointed a second lieutenant in the Army Service Corps, the branch of the army that supplies food, weapons and other necessities to the troops. On 4 November he was sent to France, where he served with the 4th Divisional Train of the British Expeditionary Force.
And on