C. S. Lewis: A Biography

–ONE– ANTECEDENTS

Clive Staples Lewis was born on 29 November 1898 in the city of Belfast. More than most men, he was the product of his upbringing and ancestry. Throughout his adult life he remained constantly preoccupied with his own childhood. Moreover the companion of his infancy, Warren Hamilton Lewis, his elder brother by three years, lived with him for the greater part of his life. Their comradeship outlasted the vicissitudes of love and friendship.

But C. S. Lewis did more than carry the memories of his childhood in Northern Ireland into grown-up life. Many of his most robustly distinctive qualities were manifestly ones of inheritance.

It is always tiresome for a child to be told by older relations that his personal characteristics are the results of genetics. It implies that the child is no more than a collection of bits – one grandfather contributing the nose, another the golfing handicap, an aunt on the mother’s side contributing the ear for languages or the eye for painting. Surely the child must feel he is more than the sum of his ancestors’ parts. And indeed C. S. Lewis was very much more than a mixture of Hamilton and Lewis chromosomes. When we turn back to the close of the nineteenth century, however, and meet Lewis’s grandparents and parents, the family likenesses are too overwhelming to miss.

Lewis’s mother was Florence Hamilton, always known as Flora. Her father, Thomas Hamilton (1826–1905), was a bluff Church of Ireland clergyman whose father had been the Rector of Enniskillen and whose grandfather, the Right Reverend Hugh Hamilton, had been the Bishop of Ossory. C. S. Lewis and his brother were rather proud of this episcopal ancestor. They had more ambivalent feelings about their grandfather when they read his surviving writings and papers. He had been a naval chaplain in the Baltic during the Crimean War and he was well travelled in Europe. But his copious travel journals were repulsive to Warren, partly because of their ‘constant and irritating employment of outworn literary cliche’, but more because of ‘his intense religious bigotry, which was not … palliated as being in the spirit of his age’.

Among the beliefs which the Reverend Thomas Hamilton shared with a high proportion of Protestants in Northern Ireland was the idea that the Roman church was ‘composed of the Devil’s children’. Indeed he doubted whether it was possible for a Roman Catholic to be saved. What was so typical of Thomas Hamilton, however, was that he managed to sustain this belief for four years as Anglican chaplain in Rome. While he was there he wrote a long essay entitled ‘What saith the Scripture – an Inquiry of what it is that the Bible teaches concerning the future state of the Lost’. Hamilton advanced the interesting view that, in effect, only the saved survive. When the Bible says that the damned suffer eternal punishment it must mean punishment eternal in its effects. They do not go on suffering continuously. They are snuffed out, they cease to be. Precisely similar preoccupations were to haunt the mind of Thomas’s grandson, Clive Staples Lewis, when he came to write his theological reflections.

While Thomas Hamilton was living in Rome, incidentally, something occurred which entered into family legend and eventually formed a seed for C. S. Lewis’s most famous story. Hamilton’s daughter Flora – C. S. Lewis’s mother – was then a little girl. One afternoon she and some grown-ups escaped the scorching heat of the pavement by walking into a church. Under one of the altars there was the body of a saint lying in a glass case. While no grown-up was looking, Flora distinctly saw this figure open her eyelids. Just as when Lucy comes back from the other side of the wardrobe and discovers that everyone thinks Narnia is a product of her imagination, so the Hamiltons failed to believe in Flora’s ‘miracle’. The difference between Flora and Lucy was that Flora did not herself believe that she had witnessed anything miraculous. ‘I thought it was done by cords pulled by a priest behind the alter [sic].’ Nevertheless, the pattern of the story – a little girl who has seen a wonder in which the rest of her family refuse to believe – is structurally the same as that of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

After their spell in Rome, the Hamiltons returned to Ireland and Thomas Hamilton became the Rector of St Mark’s, Dundela, on the outskirts of Belfast, a position which he occupied until his retirement in 1900 (he died in 1905). St Mark’s is an impressively large church designed by the Tractarian architect William Butterfield. By the subdued standards of the Church of Ireland, it is rather ‘High’.

Those who knew Thomas Hamilton, while being a little overwhelmed by his theological pugnacity, were fond of his company. He was flawlessly eloquent, and he was no ascetic. He had a love of hearty eating and drinking, and was addicted to jaunts, his favourite occupation being walking tours with male friends. He could be thunderingly tactless, but he had a heart of gold. His daughter Flora was an intelligent young woman who had gained an honours degree in mathematics at the Queen’s University, Belfast – an unusual achievement for a woman in those days.

In 1894, Thomas Hamilton at length consented to give his daughter’s hand in marriage to a solicitor in the Belfast police courts called Albert Lewis. ‘Rarely has a Jacob served more arduously for his Rachel than did Albert,’ Warren Lewis was to write about his parents’ courtship. ‘And many years afterwards he frequently recited with indignant amusement the various embarrassments which he suffered on those trips.’

Perhaps one reason why the Reverend Thomas Hamilton had doubts about Albert Lewis was that he was only just a gentleman. ‘His grandfather’, C. S. Lewis remembered, ‘had been a Welsh farmer, his father, a self-made man, had begun life as a workman, emigrated to Ireland and ended as a partner in the firm of Macilwaite & Lewis, ‘Boiler makers, Engineers and Iron Ship Builders’.1 What we do not learn from Surprised by Joy, C. S. Lewis’s spiritual autobiography, is that grandfather Lewis, like grandfather Hamilton, was a fluent writer. Richard Lewis was not just an engineer or a businessman. When he was working for the Cork Steamship Company he spent his evenings reading papers to the men on such subjects as ‘A Special Providence’ and ‘On Jonah’s Mission to Nineveh’ and ‘Whether man will or no’. Richard Lewis wrote, ‘God’s purposes, whether of justice or mercy shall be carried out … True, God has threatened the sinner, but from the character the Bible gives of Him, His threatenings are all to be applied conditionally. His will is that all shall be saved … ’

Richard Lewis did not only write theological essays. He also made up primitive science-fiction stories to amuse his children – stories, for example, in which a Mr Timothy Tumbledown advertises for ‘a good telescope that will show the inhabitants of the moon life size. Also a selenographical machine to enable the undersigned to construct an aeronautic cable from Tycho to Vesuvius as he is anxious to find out the different geological strata of the moon.’

Once again, here are characteristics for which C. S. Lewis was conspicuous latently present in one of his grandfathers. He, like Richard Lewis, was a man whose idea of a good evening’s entertainment was reading a paper on Free Will and Divine Providence and whose private delight was in children’s literature and scientific fantasy.

Albert Lewis, the son of Richard and the father of our subject, is one of the most important characters in the story. He was a ‘character’, and that in two senses. First, he was a strongly marked and in many ways eccentric individual, highly imaginative, bombastic, literate and eloquent. But secondly, and much more confusingly, Albert Lewis also became a ‘character’ in literature. Anyone who has read Surprised by Joy will recognize the portrait of C. S. Lewis’s father as a comic masterpiece. When we turn back from Surprised by Joy to the Lewis family papers we find not that C. S. Lewis has exactly speaking lied about his father but that he has left so much out of the picture and painted it from a position of such uncontrollable prejudice that it is something of a shock to encounter Albert Lewis on his own terms and read his speeches, poems, letters and notebooks.

A clever, highly imaginative boy, Albert had been educated at Lurgan College, County Armagh, where his headmaster, a brilliant young logician called W. T. Kirkpatrick, formed and retained throughout life a high view of his capabilities. Perhaps Kirkpatrick, who himself enjoyed fiercely conducted intellectual contests, was responsible for fostering the direction of Albert’s career. After Lurgan, Albert went down to Dublin to study law at the firm of Maclean, Boyle & Maclean. Initially he intended to read for the Bar but, presumably because his father did not have the means to support him, he returned to Belfast after qualifying in 1885 and started his own law firm as a solicitor. The law for Albert Lewis was to have been the platform or starting point for a career in politics.

We are speaking of a period when the whole land of Ireland, from County Kerry to County Antrim, was part of Great Britain in the way that Scotland and Wales are today. Albert Lewis, like the majority of Irish Protestants, was ardently keen that this state of things should be maintained. The talk of Home Rule for Ireland was by his standards dangerous nonsense. In 1882 he said in a speech in Dublin, when he was only nineteen, ‘I believe the cause of Irish Agitation to be on the one hand the Roman Catholic religion and on the other the weakness and vacillation and the party selfishness of English ministers [i.e. of the Crown].’ The English politician he loathed the most was Gladstone, whom he once called ‘that disingenuous and garrulous old man’ and who in his support for Irish Home Rule was, Albert Lewis thought, being simply mischievous. ‘Mr Gladstone, like another celebrated character, “cries havoc and lets loose the dogs of war”’ – i.e. the terrorists and revolutionaries of Sinn Fein.

But Albert Lewis, in spite of his high promise, was never to sit in the House of Commons in Westminster. He spent most of his career as a prosecuting solicitor in the police courts in Belfast, pouring into the frequently trivial cases which came before him all his gifts of oratory, his considerable powers of argument and debate, and his rich vein of humour. Indeed it was his sense of humour, C. S. Lewis believed, which somehow or other made Albert Lewis’s political career unmanageable.

He was a master of the anecdote, a fund of improbable stories, many of which for him epitomized the tragicomedy of what it meant to be Irish. One of the more bizarre ‘wheezes’ (as he habitually termed these stories and observations) concerned an occasion when he was travelling in an old-fashioned train of the kind which had no corridor, so that the passengers were imprisoned in their compartments for as long as the train was moving. He was not alone in the compartment. He found himself opposite one other character, a respectable-looking farmer in a tweed suit whose agitated manner was to be explained by the demands of nature. When the train had rattled on for a further few miles, and showed no signs of stopping at a station where a lavatory might have been available, the gentleman pulled down his trousers, squatted on the floor of the railway carriage and defecated. When this operation was complete, and the gentleman, fully clothed, was once more seated opposite Albert Lewis, the smell in the compartment was so powerful as to be almost nauseating. To vary, if not to drown the odour, Albert Lewis got a pipe from his pocket and began to light it. But at that point the stranger opposite, who had not spoken one word during the entire journey, leaned forward and censoriously tapped a sign on the window which read NO SMOKING. For C. S. Lewis, this ‘wheeze’ of his father’s always enshrined in some insane way a truth about Northern Ireland and what it was like to live there.

Perhaps it was his ability to recite such stories which meant that Albert Lewis would never be a politician. He was a strange combination of rhetorical comedy and inner piety and emotionalism. If Albert Lewis was the mustachioed comedian whose favourite drink was whiskey and water and who could keep any company in stitches with his skills as a raconteur – imitating all the different voices as he spun out his tall stories – he was also the soulful poet who loved to be alone and to confront the mystery of things. As he wrote in 1882:

I hate the petty strifes of men

Their ceaseless toil for wealth and power:

The peace of God in lonely glen

By whispering stream at twilight hour

Is more to me than prelates’ lawn

Than stainless ermine, gartered knee,

I wait Christ’s coronation morn

And rest, my God, through faith in Thee.

Albert Lewis’s piety was deep and unchanging. For all his political distaste for the power of the Roman church, he had none of Thomas Hamilton’s feeling that Catholics were not really Christians. This is made clear by another of his wheezes, written down after he had attended a funeral in Belfast. He came back from the cemetery in a carriage with one Protestant and two Catholics. It had been a Catholic funeral, conducted in Latin, but the Protestant was a man of sufficient learning to have understood the words Pater Noster. Leaning forward to his Catholic friends, this Protestant said – ‘I heard the priest say that old prayer “Our Father”. I should like to ask you a question. Did we steal that prayer from your church or did you steal it from us?’ Albert Lewis was astonished. He said quietly, ‘We both “stole” it from our Saviour … ’ Living in Ulster compelled the serious believer to cling to ‘mere Christianity’, that is, to those parts of the faith which both sides held in common, not those parts of it which were divisive.

This was Albert Lewis, the man who married Flora Hamilton on 29 August 1894. ‘I wonder whether I do love you? I am not quite sure,’ she had written to him the previous year. Although she came to feel that ‘I am very fond of you and … I should never think of loving anyone else’, it would seem as though Albert was ‘the more loving one’. Perhaps because of his gifts as a comedian, or his small stature, or his thick moustaches, Albert Lewis, though a fundamentally serious man, was doomed to be regarded as a figure of fun by those whom he loved best.

–TWO– EARLY DAYS 1898–1905

‘I fancy happy childhoods are usually forgotten,’ C. S. Lewis was to write in later life. ‘It is not settled comfort and heartsease but momentary joy that transfigures the past and lets the eternal quality show through.’ But his own childhood, or the first nine years of it, was happy and not so much forgotten as mythologized.

Albert and Flora Lewis made their first marital home in a substantial semi-detached house called Dundela Villas. They were still within reach, if not in the parish, of St Mark’s, Dundela, the church where they were married and where Thomas Hamilton, Flora’s father, was the parson. Albert’s father, too, was nearby. Their marriage was not, like some unions, a breaking-away from parents and background. Rather it was a strengthening of their roots. Ulster, conservative, Protestant, middle-class Ulster, was the world into which their children were born and to which they completely belonged.

There were two children of the marriage – both boys. Warren Hamilton Lewis was born on 16 June 1895 and his younger brother Clive Staples on 29 November 1898. The Lewises liked nicknames and pet-names. Flora – itself a variant on her baptismal name of Florence – was sometimes called Doli by her husband. She called Albert Ali or Lal. Warren Hamilton Lewis quickly became Warnie, Badger, Badgie or Badge. Clive Staples was from an early age known as Jacks, Jacko, Jack, Kricks or Klicks, as well as being affectionately referred to by Warnie as ‘It’.

When he began to emerge from babyhood Jacks discovered that he had two great friends – Warnie and their nurse Lizzie Endicott. ‘There was no nonsense about “Lady nurses” in those days. Through Lizzie we struck our roots into the peasantry of County Down.’1 These peasant roots were as vigorously Protestant as those of the more genteel Hamiltons and the Lewises.

‘Now mind out there, Master Jacks,’ he remembered his nurse saying as she took his hand on a walk, ‘and keep your feet out of the puddles. Look at it there, all full of dirty wee popes.’ He remembered Lizzie taking his hand and peering with him into the filthy puddle, flecked with bits of mud. A ‘wee pope’ in Lizzie’s vocabulary meant anything dirty or distasteful. In later life, when he befriended English Roman Catholics, C. S. Lewis would sometimes try to explain to them what it was like to have been brought up in Protestant Ulster. It was hearing the word ‘pope’ and being supplied by the irrational involuntary part of the brain with an image not of a bishop in a triple crown but of a filthy puddle.2 Although C. S. Lewis denied that the ‘Puritania’ of his fantasy The Pilgrim’s Regress was to be identified with the North of Ireland, it plainly was so, even if his parents were not in the narrow sense ‘puritanical’. Heaven and hell, if only in a fantastical way, seemed closer here than they would have done in an English suburb of comparable date and gentility. In the suburb of Strandtown where they were living there was a mad clergyman called Russell. Once when Albert Lewis was smoking a cigarette in the road, he met Russell, who stopped, pointed down and thundered, ‘Plenty of smoke down there,’ then, pointing upwards, ‘None up there!’ and walked rapidly away.3

Yet in The Pilgrim’s Regress this dread of hell is tempered with pure humbug, as when John, the Pilgrim, is asked by the Steward (i.e. the Clergy) whether he has broken any of the rules imposed on the human race by the Landlord (i.e. God).

John’s heart began to thump and his eyes bulged more and more, and he was at his wit’s end when the Steward took the mask off and looked at John with his real face and said, ‘Better tell a lie, old chap, better tell a lie. Easier for all concerned,’ and popped the mask on his face all in a flash. John gulped and said quickly, ‘Oh no, sir.’ ‘That is just as well,’ said the Steward through the mask. ‘Because you know, if you did break any of them and the Landlord got to know of it, do you know what he’d do to you? … He’d take you and shut you up for ever and ever in a black hole full of snakes and scorpions as large as lobsters – for ever and ever. And besides that, he is such a kind, good man, so very, very kind, that I am sure you would never want to displease him.4

The caricature of Lewis’s boyhood Protestantism is here unmistakable and, as the mask of the Steward makes clear in his allegory of the matter, the very fact that the doctrine of hell was believed in by decent, amiable people, who enjoyed their beer and their whiskey, made it harder, not easier, for his imagination to absorb. This was the air he breathed as a child, the religion he imbibed with his mother’s milk. Moreover, because, by the turn of the century, the Irish crisis was reaching a head, Protestantism found itself very much on the defensive. It was clear to any intelligent observer that the Catholic Irish wanted Home Rule and that eventually they would get it. But where would this leave the Protestants, and in particular those Protestants who formed the overwhelming majority of the population in the six counties of the North of Ireland? Like the theology, this situation was something Lewis grew up with long before he was able to articulate or understand it. Before he knew what the speeches were about, he was aware of his father, a glass of whiskey and water in his hand, thunderously denouncing the English government; he was aware of his religiously obsessed old grandfather Lewis and servant Lizzie’s dread of the Catholics, who by all accounts were advancing and making gains month by month.

But there was also a growing awareness of Belfast as a place. ‘This was in the far off days when Britain was the world’s carrier and the Lough was full of shipping. The sound of a steamer’s horn at night still conjures up my whole boyhood.’5 An early treat was being taken for walks across to Harland & Wollfs the shipbuilders when the White Star Liner Cedric was being built in 1902.6

And as well as the water, Lewis could see hills from the nursery window – ‘What we called “the Green Hills”; that is, the low line of the Castlereagh Hills. They were not very far off but they were to children, quite unattainable. They taught me longing – Sebnsucht; made me for good or ill, and before I was six years old, a votary of the Blue Flower.’7

Before leaving the nursery at Dundela Villas, mention should be made of two experiences, unremarkable in themselves but striking for the manner in which Lewis’s imagination has photographed them. The first is one of horror – a book which contained a picture of a midget child, a sort of Tom Thumb, threatened by a stag beetle very much larger than himself. It was a primitive sort of ‘pop-up’ book. The horns of the beetle were strips of cardboard separate from the plate so that you could make them open and shut like pincers. From this early terror, Lewis derived his violent distaste for insects. It was his first experience of real fear and psychological pain, and interestingly enough he associates it in his own writings with his mother: How a woman ordinarily so wise as my mother could have allowed this abomination into the nursery is difficult to understand.

Lewis’s mother is a shadowy figure in his autobiography. Beyond telling us that she was well educated and rather better born than his father, he has almost nothing to say about her as a person. In the Lewis Papers, the compilation of family letters and diaries made by Warren Hamilton Lewis during the 1930s, Mamy as they called her is canonized as we should expect. The strange little association between his own terror of the beetle and the wisdom or otherwise of his mother may be without significance in the story of C. S. Lewis, but there are to be other occasions in his story where love and pain, women and fear are found in conjunction.

His second nursery memory is equally pregnant with association. The sense of longing or Sehnsucht, the dawning of that Romantic yearning which he was to call Joy, began in his memory when the nursery door opened and his brother Warnie brought in ‘the lid of a biscuit tin which he had covered with moss and garnished with twigs and flowers so as to make it a toy garden or a toy forest – that was the first beauty I ever knew … As long as I live my imagination of Paradise will retain something of my brother’s toy garden.’8

The comradeship between Warnie and Jacks was deep from the earliest days, and appears to have been largely unaffected by the three-year difference in their ages. Probably the manifest difference in their levels of intelligence helps to account for this since Jacks, by far the cleverer of the two, was from a very early age able to keep up with Warnie’s level of reading, as well as to share his toys and fantasies. Both of them looked back on their nursery days together at Dundela Villas as an idyll. And it was out of that nursery that the passion for reading and writing developed which was to be their most striking characteristic in grown-up days. For C. S. Lewis the man, the happiest times were spent either reading or writing or talking about reading and writing with his brother or brother-substitutes.

An early book-memory for C. S. Lewis was the publication of Beatrix Potter’s Squirrel Nutkin when he was five and Warnie was seven. ‘It troubled me with what I can only describe as the Idea of Autumn. It sounds fantastic to say that one can be enamoured of a season but that is something like what happened.’ To Beatrix Potter, doubtless, C. S. Lewis owed the inspiration for his earlier essays in fiction, some of which were made when he was five or six. While Warnie, the future soldier and historian, was drawing ships and trains and writing histories of India, Jacks was inventing a place called Animal-land, peopled with ‘dressed Animals’. But these creatures were wholly unlike the subdued, ironical creations of Beatrix Potter. They were full-square portraits of the grown-ups surrounding Jacks and Warnie.