Collected Letters Volume One: Family Letters 1905–1931. Walter Hooper
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TO HIS FATHER (LP III: 284-5):
Cherbourg.
Malvern. Postmark: 5 May 1912
My dear P.,
We arrived safely here on the Friday as you know by our telegram, and found that Cherbourg, contrary to all expectations, had come back on Wednesday and I was late. I did not weep.
On the boat after you had gone, a solid phalanx of ‘young persons’ lined up on the quay and sang ‘let’s have a game of ring of roses’. You would have enjoyed it. The Malvern weather is exactly like the home–rotten. We have two new masters this term: the 1st a monstrosity of 6 ft., 6 ins height whom I don’t like at all, so far as I have any opinion yet. He is called Eden. The other is of reasonable height, and, so far as we can see, fairly decent. But that remains to be seen. There is a new matron, Miss Gosling, who seems to be passably inoffensive–but of course is not nearly as decent as Miss Cowie.6 The small master’s name is Harris.7 I hate starting a new term with an absolutely new staff, and such a new staff too.
We left Liverpool this time by the 2.40 instead of the 12, and I think we will do so next time; it is a better train. your loving son Jack
The Lewis Papers contain no letters from Jack written between that of 5 May 1912 and the one below. The lacuna is possibly explained by the fact that whatever letters he wrote have not survived. However, a more likely explanation is that his energies were being poured into writing of a different sort. His personal ‘Renaissance’ began when he came across the Christmas issue of The Bookman for December 1911 and saw the words Siegfried and the Twilight of the Gods, with a picture by Rackham illustrating the first part of Richard Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung saga. ‘Pure “Northernness” engulfed me,’ he said, ‘a vision of huge, clear spaces hanging above the Atlantic in the endless twilight of Northern summer’ (SBJ V). This love of myth led him between the summers of 1912 and 1913 to write 819 lines of an epic called ‘Loki Bound’ which was Norse in subject and Greek in form. He was as well a frequent contributor to The Cherbourg School Magazine, in which his articles are remarkable achievements for one so young. But for the moment, however, he had his mind set on winning a Scholarship to Malvern College.
It was also at this point that Jack became an unbeliever. A major cause was the ‘Occultist fancies’ he had picked up from the matron of Cherbourg, Miss G.E. Cowie. He got into his head that ‘No clause of my prayer was to be allowed to pass muster unless it was accompanied by what I called a “realisation”, by which I meant a certain vividness of the imagination and the affections. My nightly task was to produce by sheer will-power a phenomenon which will-power could never produce’ (SBJ IV). There were also unconscious causes of doubt.
One came from reading the classics. Here, especially in Virgil, one was presented with a mass of religious ideas; and all teachers and editors took it for granted from the outset that these religious ideas were sheer illusion. No one ever attempted to show in what sense Christianity fulfilled Paganism or Paganism prefigured Christianity…Little by little, with fluctuations which I cannot now trace, I became an apostate, dropping my faith with no sense of loss but with the greatest relief. (SBJ IV)
1 Arthur Clement Allen (1868-1957), the headmaster, was educated at Repton and New College, Oxford, where he read Classics. After taking a BA in 1891 he was a teacher at Silloth School from 1902 until 1907 when he founded Cherbourg School. In 1925 he moved the school to Woodnorton, Evesham, and the school closed officially when he retired in 1931.
2 Messiah, an oratorio by George Frideric Handel, was first performed in 1752.
3 Sir Frank Robert Benson (1858-1939), English actor-manager, founded his own Shakespearean company. Beginning in 1883 he took his company on tours, producing all Shakespeare’s plays with the exception of Titus Andronicus and Troilus and Cressida.
4 William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice (1600).
5 Jack Ernest Clutterbuck (1898-1975) went from Cherbourg School to Malvern College where he was a pupil from 1912 to 1915. After training at the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, he received a commission in the Royal Engineers and served in the First World War. He went to Trinity Hall, Cambridge, and took a BA in 1922. After more than twenty years in the army, during which he reached the rank of brigadier, he was Chief Engineer of the G.I.P. Railway in Bombay, 1946-47. He retired in 1950. The photograph is reproduced in Walter Hooper, Through Joy and Beyond: A Pictorial Biography of C.S. Lewis (1982), p. 31.
6 The school matron, Miss G.E. Cowie, had been forced to leave, and she was now replaced by Miss Gosling. Writing about Miss Cowie in SBJ IV, Lewis said: ‘No school ever had a better Matron, more skilled and comforting to boys in sickness, or more cheery and companionable to boys in health…We all loved her; I, the orphan, especially. Now it so happened that Miss C, who seemed old to me, was still in her spiritual immaturity, still hunting…She was…floundering in the mazes of Theosophy, Rosicrucianism, Spiritualism; the whole Anglo-American Occultist tradition…Little by little, unconsciously, unintentionally, she loosened the whole framework, blunted all the sharp edges of my belief. The vagueness, the merely speculative character, of all this Occultism began to spread–yes, and to spread deliciously–to the stern truths of the creed. The whole thing became a matter of speculation.’
7 We meet Percy Gerald Kelsal Harris again in the letter of 16 February 1918, but it should be noted that Harris is the master referred to in SBJ IV as ‘Pogo’ and about whom Lewis said: ‘Pogo was a wit, Pogo was a dressy man, Pogo was a man about town. Pogo was even a lad. After a week or so of hesitation (for his temper was uncertain) we fell at his feet and adored. Here was sophistication, glossy all over, and (dared one believe it?) ready to impart sophistication to us…After a term of Pogo’s society one had the feeling of being not twelve weeks but twelve years older.’ P.G.K. Harris was born in Kinver, Staffordshire, on 31 August 1888. From King’s School in Taunton he went up to Exeter College, Oxford, in 1907. That he left without a degree may be explained by those very qualities which delighted his pupils at Cherbourg. But he was to show an entirely different sort of mettle in the approaching war. For a photograph of Harris see Walter Hooper, Through Joy and Beyond: A Pictorial Biography of C.S. Lewis (1982), p. 30. Harris is the man standing on the left in the back row.
TO HIS FATHER (LP IV: 1):
Cherbourg.
Sunday. Postmark: 6 January 1913
My dear Papy,
This scholarship question is going to be settled then once for all, in the coming week; the best or the worst will soon be known. It always seems to me a comforting fact before any important event concerning whose result one is anxious, that one’s own varying expectations about it can make no difference to the event. At any rate, I have tried, and the rest must remain to be seen. Tubbs was talking to our friend S.R. James1 the other