Lewis Trilogy

A Biography of Young Jack Lewis

Harry Lee Poe

• Publisher: Crossway
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781433562761
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religious Biographies

During his youth, the boy who would become C. S. Lewis formed his most basic impressions and tastes regarding music, art, literature, religion, sports, friendship, imagination, education, war, and more. The issues young "Jack" Lewis wrestled with drove him toward the foundation on which his life would be built. His childhood interests, influences, longings, struggles, and even failures prepared him to engage his gifts as a writer, teacher, and friend.

Lewis expert Harry Lee Poe unfolds young Jack's key relationships, hobbies, spiritual conflicts, decisions, desires, and dreams. Along the way, Poe points out where these themes reappear in Lewis's later works— bringing to life the importance of his conversion and his surprising discovery of joy.

1

Young Jack Lewis at Wynyard School

1908–1910

Between the death of his mother in 1908 and his war service in 1918, young Jack Lewis made the transition from childhood to adolescence to young manhood. He spent this critical period of development, like so many other boys of his social class in England and Ireland, in a variety of institutional settings. During his school days, the boy who would grow to become C. S. Lewis formed his most important tastes in music, art, literature, companionship, religion, sports, and almost every other aspect of life. While his ideas and critical thought about what he liked and disliked would change, his basic preferences came together during this period and formed the foundation out of which his later life grew. The things he liked at fourteen were the things that engaged his intellect and imagination thirty, forty, and fifty years later. The things that sparked his imagination when he was an arrogant, conceited boy were the same things that influenced and motivated his change of character in the context of his conversion to Christianity, when his teenage years were half a lifetime behind him.

The transition from childhood to adolescence to young adulthood also came with critical spiritual issues. All people face the spiritual issues of growing up, but each person must deal with those issues himself or herself. People rarely recognize that they are traveling from one phase of life to another in the midst of the journey, but looking back we can see the landmarks fairly clearly. So it was for Jack Lewis. He lost something from his early childhood when he grew from childhood to boyhood. He suspected that it was the same for all boys for whom those years represent the “dark ages” of life between the two glorious ages of early childhood and adolescence. In boyhood, Lewis thought, everything grows “greedy, cruel, noisy, and prosaic, in which the imagination has slept and the most un-ideal senses and ambitions have been restlessly, even maniacally, awake.”1 Lewis thought of his boyhood as a desert characterized by greed, cruelty, noise, and the mundane—a foreign land that had intruded into the flow of his life as an interruption that did not really belong.2

As he moved into his adolescence, however, Lewis recovered some important things from his earlier childhood that his later boyhood had forgotten. He recovered the sense of wonder that comes from an experience of the transcendent. For Lewis, this experience was the most important thing of life itself, and understanding the nature and source of it would eventually lead him to faith in the God of the Bible. His conversion would come long after his adolescent years had ended; but without the path he chose while dealing with the spiritual issues raised in adolescence, Lewis might not have come to faith. At least, he would not have traveled the same path to faith.

The period of adolescence in the United States roughly corresponds to the period from the seventh grade through the twelfth grade or the years of middle school and high school. It begins around the time of the onset of puberty, when the body begins to do such strange things, and it comes to a close as young people mature enough to assume the responsibilities of adulthood. For some people, the end of adolescence comes when they take their first full-time job. College life can actually prolong adolescence for many people who use college to keep responsibility at bay. Whether college would have prolonged the adolescent period for C. S. Lewis remains a speculative question because he did not have that option. At the age when most young men of his social class would have been settling into their first full year of college, Lewis was settling into the trenches on the Western Front as an eighteen-year-old junior officer in the British Army.

Of Names and Monikers

Christened Clive Staples Lewis, the little boy announced at the age of four that he was Jacksie, soon shortened to Jacks, and finally reduced to Jack.3 For the rest of his life he was known to his friends as Jack. C. S. Lewis had a variety of nicknames as a teenaged boy. His friend Arthur Greeves called him Chubs because he was a bit chubby.4 His father, Albert, and his brother, Warren (“Warnie”), began calling him “It” in their correspondence about the time Jack went to Malvern College. By 1910, Albert had added new pet names for his sons as he started calling Jacks “Klicks” and Warnie “Badge.”5 Once Warnie entered the army during the Great War, Jack began calling him “the Colonel.” In childhood, Warnie had also been called Bruser (or Bruiser).6 Nicknames seem to have come with being a member of the Lewis family. In their letters, Flora Lewis called her husband her “dear old Bear” or Lal, while Flora was Doli to Albert Lewis. Albert’s father called him Al, while other close friends and relatives called him Ally or Allie.

Clive Staples Lewis’s first name was actually a last name, the name of one of the great heroes of Victorian England, for Robert Clive of India had beaten the French and laid the foundations for the absorption of India into the British Empire. The nineteenth century saw many young middle-class boys named Clive in the lesser public schools (what Americans would regard as private schools). When Jack was a child, his extended family on his mother’s side appear always to have called him Clive.7 Many years later, however, in a letter to Warnie Lewis after Jack died, their cousin Ruth Hamilton Parker referred to him as Jacks.8 He was also called Clive by his teacher W. T. Kirkpatrick, who prepared him for his entrance examinations to Oxford.9 George Watson, a former pupil of Lewis and colleague at Cambridge, reminds us that the faculty chairman of the appointments committee at Cambridge, where Lewis had an exalted position as holder of a professorial chair, addressed Lewis as Clive.10 As an adult, on formal occasions he only used his initials, so he is known to the world as C. S. Lewis. He appears to have first used this formal signature in his first letter to his friend Arthur Greeves from Great Bookham in September 1914.11 Normally he signed his letters to Greeves from “Jack,” but when he was in a particularly pompous mood, he would sign “C. S. Lewis.” As an adult, however, he almost always signed his letters “C. S. Lewis” unless writing to close family and intimate friends. A notable exception can be found in his letters to Sister Penelope. He often signed these letters “Clive Lewis” or “Clive S. Lewis,” instead of “Jack” or “C. S. Lewis.”12

The middle name also had an important bearing on the boy who would grow up to be C. S. Lewis. Staples was a family name on his mother’s side, a name with a pedigree. Flora Lewis was a Hamilton, and the Hamiltons produced a long line of clergymen in the established church, of which her father was one. Her grandfather, the Right Reverend Hugh Hamilton, had been a bishop. The bishop’s wife was a Staples. It was an important marriage in a society where rank mattered, for Elizabeth Staples was the daughter of a member of Parliament. More important for family relations, Elizabeth’s sister married the second Marquess of Ormonde! When Flora Lewis named her firstborn child, she had given him names from her family as well. Warren was the maiden name of her mother, Mary Warren Hamilton, whose father was Sir John Borlase Warren. Like his younger brother, Warnie did not have a first name as such; he had three last names.

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Newsletter Signup
• Endorsements
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Young Jack Lewis at Wynyard School
• 2 Off to Malvern
• 3 Making a Friend
• 4 Jack and War Come to Great Bookham
• 5 Reading for Kirkpatrick and for Pleasure
• 6 War and Romance
• 7 A Conflicted Soul
• 8 Oxford and War
• 9 The End of Youth
• Notes
• Index