C S Lewis Part I

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.