Clive Staples Lewis known as “Jack” to
his friends was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, in 1898 and died in England
in 1963. Now he is most famous for his
children’s fantasy novels with a religious theme -and for being one of the
“Inklings” - with his friends like Tolkien and Charles Williams. Although I have never been a fan of the films
or novels, I have read his exposition of Christianity with some interest Lewis spent most of his working life as a
don at Oxford and is also remembered as a writer and literary critic. He
started his writing life, wanting to be a poet, and to teach at
University.
My husband was a big fan
of the Narnia and other books and liked the fantasy genre –including Tolkien -
much more than I did. He had a much better imagination than me and was much more
inventive
My personal feeling was that that the
religious aspect of the Narnia books (admittedly I had only seen the films) was
heavy handed. He told me that Lewis had
not started to think of writing the books with a “religious” idea -but with an
image of a faun carrying an umbrella in snowy woodland. The strange way that most books start in an
author’s imagination.
Lewis was born in the North and was the
son of one of the Protestant well to do middle class… Albert Lewis was a
solicitor. He had one brother Warren,
known as Warnie. His father was rather
distant from him and his mother died when he was a child of 9, so especially
when his brother had been sent to school, Jack was a rather lonely boy.
He loved his native country and as an
adult, he visited it every year. He remembered
its beauty - but disliked the aggressiveness and sectarianism of many of the people.
He was sent to school, a few years after
Warnie but was positively traumatised by the schools. He begged his father to take him away. He found
the harshness, regimentation and emphasis on games hateful. He was an awkward intellectual child who was
no good at sports. He claimed in his autobiography,
to have hated the first schools he went to, and found them almost worse than his
experience as a solder in World War One... A recent biographer has suggested that his
hatred for the English schools was more to do with his shock at finding himself
in England, which he found ugly and over-industrialised, and he hated it, at
his first experience of it. He said later than it took years for his first
reactions to England to fade away.
Warren went to Sandhurst to prepare for
a career in the Army, while Jack (he had dropped the name Clive as a child),
finally persuaded his father to take him away from his school and find him an educator who suited him better. In 1914, Jack who had been suffering from
hill health and was utterly miserable at Malvern College, was tutored by William
Kirkpatrick, a former schoolmaster who had decided to work independently as a
private tutor. He was a highly intelligent
manm Jack found him much more congenial and intellectually stimulating. Warnie had been tutored (“crammed”) by Kirkpatrick,
to get him into Sandhurst, as he had not done well at school.
In 1916, Lewis got a
scholarship to Oxford, and entered college in 1917, but joined the Officer
Training Corps, in preparation for service in the War. He got a commission In the Somerset Light
Infantry, and was posted to France.
