LITMIR.BIZ

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six feet tall, very shabbily dressed (like a gardener, I thought), lean as a rake, and immensely muscular. His wrinkled face seemed to consist entirely of muscles, so far as it was visible; for he wore moustache and side whiskers with a clean-shaven chin.’⁸⁸ ‘If ever a man came near to being a purely logical entity, that man was Kirk,’ Lewis decided.⁸⁹ Lewis’s own acutely logical mind was to a great extent formed and sharpened by Kirkpatrick’s. The Great Knock’s outstanding conviction was that language was given to man solely for the purpose of communicating or discovering truth. The general banalities and ‘small-talk’ of most people did not enter into his calculations. ‘The most casual remark was taken as a summons to disputation.’ To a mere ‘torrent of verbiage’ he would cry ‘Stop!’, not from impatience, but because it was leading nowhere. More sensible observations might be interrupted by ‘Excuse!’, ushering in some parenthetical comment. Full approval would be encouraged by ‘I hear you’ – but usually followed by refutation: ‘Had I read this? Had I studied that? Had I any statistical evidence? And so to the almost inevitable conclusion: “Do you not see then that you had no right … ”’⁹⁰

‘Some boys would not have liked it,’ Lewis comments, ‘to me it was red beef and strong beer’;⁹¹ and, toned down and adapted to possible equals rather than pupils, this became his own method of argument, his own idea of conversation throughout life. The Christian virtue that he found hardest to acquire was to suffer fools gladly; for years he failed to realize that the Kirk treatment might upset or offend; but at last he was able to turn it to glorious use, when the silliest dinner-table remark could be taken by him and manipulated gently and followed to conclusions of which you had never dreamed – and yet leaving you with the warm glow of undeserved pride at having initiated such a profoundly interesting discussion.

Kirkpatrick’s methods of instruction were ‘red beef and strong beer’ too. Not only had Lewis been grounded more securely than he knew at Cherbourg and Malvern, but he had been blessed with a brain ready at the right stimulus to develop those prodigious powers of memory and applied knowledge which the late Austin Farrer^* described as perhaps the greatest and most amazing in his generation. And so he was able to benefit fully from Kirkpatrick’s rather ‘sink or swim’ method – which may, however, have been applied intentionally to a pupil whose unusual capabilities and capacity for learning he had sized up at once.

Two days after Lewis arrived at Great Bookham he was flung straight into Homer, of whom he had never read a word, nor had any introduction to the Epic dialect, having studied only the straight Attic of Xenophon and the dramatists. Kirkpatrick’s method was to read aloud twenty lines or so of the Greek, translate, with a few comments and explanations, for another hundred lines, and then leave his pupil to go over it with the aid of a lexicon, and make sense of as much of it as he could. It worked with Lewis, who had no difficulty in memorizing every word as he looked up its meaning. Kirkpatrick at this stage seemed to value speed more than absolute accuracy, and Lewis soon found himself understanding what he read without translating it, beginning to think in Greek: ‘That,’ he commented, ‘is the great Rubicon to cross in learning any language.’⁹² And so, ‘Day after day and month after month, we drove gloriously onward’, till the music of Homer ‘and the clear, bitter brightness that lives in almost every formula had become part of me’.⁹³

‘After a week’s trial, I have come to the conclusion that I am going to have the time of my life,’ Lewis wrote to Arthur Greeves on 26 September.⁹⁴ In his next letter (6 October) he said:

As for my average ‘Bookham’ day, there is not much to tell. Breakfast at 8.0, where I am glad to see good Irish soda-bread on the table, begins the day. I then proceed to take the air … till 9.15, when I come in & have the honour of reading that glorious Iliad, which I will not insult with my poor praise. 11–11.15 is a little break, and then we go on with Latin until luncheon, at 1.00. From 1–5.0 the time is at my own disposal to read, or write or moon about in the golden tinted woods and valleys of this country. 5–7.0, we work again. 7.30, dinner. After that I have the pleasant task of English Literature mapped out by Himself. Of course that doesn’t include novels, which I read at other times. I am at present occupied with (as Eng. Lit.) Buckle’s ‘Civilization of England’, and (of my own accord) Ibsen’s plays.⁹⁵

This routine became the archetype of a ‘normal day’ as he would choose his days to be: ‘if I could please myself I would always live as I lived there’;⁹⁶ and indeed throughout his subsequent life at Oxford and Cambridge he continued whenever possible to follow this schedule as far as circumstances would allow – the main variation being that in time more evenings were spent in talk with friends or at meetings of various literary or other societies than in reading.

Another habit contracted at Bookham was reading ‘suitable’ books during afternoon tea, which he held should be taken alone. ‘It would be a kind of blasphemy to read poetry at table: what one wants is a gossipy, formless book which can be opened anywhere’,⁹⁷ and his usual choice was Boswell, Herodotus, Burton, Tristram Shandy, The Essays of Elia or Andrew Lang’s History of English Literature.

      The two and a half years thus initiated at Great Bookham, while among the most important in forming the C.S. Lewis who was to be, were years of peace and contentment such as he was hardly to know again; but they were years of mental development fed by literary discovery and sound learning. Very little actually happened in the biographical sense, beyond holidays in Ireland and occasional visits from Warnie on leave from the Western Front.

During this time he wrote almost weekly letters to Arthur Greeves, telling mainly of the books that he was reading, many of them landmarks of importance when viewed in the light of his future career. Thus, in November 1914 he was discovering William Morris, both the poems and the prose romances; in January 1915 he first read the Morte Darthur – ‘it has opened up a new world to me’, he wrote to Arthur on 26 January 1915.⁹⁸ In February 1916 he read The Faerie Queene and Grettir the Strong. A diary kept for three weeks in July 1915 shows him reading Prometheus Bound in the original Greek, ‘a red letter day in my life’,⁹⁹ Keats, Ruskin, Horace, Aristotle and Virginia Woolf. And he was celebrating these delights in verse:

       And while the rain is on the leads

       What songcraft sweet shall be our fare?

       The tale where Spenser’s magic sheds

       A slumbrous sweetness on the air

      Of charmed lands, and Horace fair,

       And Malory who told the end

       Of Arthur, and the trumpet blare

Of him who sang Patroklos’ friend.¹⁰⁰

      On 4 March 1916 (he mistakenly dates it August 1915 in Surprised by Joy) Lewis made one of the literary discoveries which, he maintained, left the

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