Read Online The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings by Philip Zaleski, Carol Zaleski - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Philip Zaleski, Carol Zaleski
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poems (“The Saga of King Olaf,” which initially attracted Lewis to Longfellow, begins “I am the God Thor, / I am the War God, / I am the Thunderer! / Here in my Northland, / My fastness and fortress, / Reign I forever!”).
Like the Romantic poets, Lewis sensed the numinous in words that pointed to a realm beyond, to empty sky, open landscapes, things passing, things beyond reach, dim foreshadowings of a God who is wholly Other. That the young Lewis would be so stirred by fall and winter, by the advent of cold and dark; by the death of beauty, by death itself, speaks to his essential Romanticism. Each of the epiphanies he experienced contained within it, as part of its evanescent loveliness, a memento mori: the death of Balder; the near death of Squirrel Nutkin, whom Old Owl captures and almost skins alive; and, most poignantly, the death of the happy early childhood of Warnie and himself, builder and beholder of the miniature Eden. Underlying all was the one great death: that of his mother.
The Banks of the Styx
Tolkien, after the death of his mother, found love and a home through the help of Father Francis. Lewis suffered the opposite fate. After his mother’s death, he was exiled from home, sent abroad by his father to the first of a succession of boarding schools, each disastrous in its own incomparable way. This may strike the modern reader as needlessly cruel; but at the time, for families like the Lewises and Hamiltons, boarding school seemed like the normal, obvious, and essential route to adult achievement for an Anglo-Irish boy whose prospects at home were far from secure. So off Lewis went, trussed in an Eton collar, knickerbockers, boots, and bowler, via four-wheeler and ship on September 18, 1908—less than four weeks after his mother’s death—his brother alongside, to Watford, Hertfordshire, in England, to enroll in Wynyard School, where Warnie was already a pupil.
England, at first glance, looked like “the banks of Styx,” an apt introduction to the regions of hell Lewis would soon traverse. His account of his two years there, and his subsequent stay at three other schools, occupies a large, perhaps disproportionate, chunk of his autobiography, about half of the whole, and proves a formidable obstacle to readers, especially those from foreign lands, not as entranced as British males of Lewis’s generation by the minutiae of public school existence. Nonetheless, his vivid description of the Grand Guignol he witnessed, which ranged from cruelty to sexual exploitation to outright madness, offers both literary and sensationalistic compensation and constitutes a fierce indictment of a pedagogical system that has now largely vanished.
Each school offered its own variety of moral or mental disarray. Wynyard, called Belsen (after the concentration camp) in Surprised by Joy , harbored a headmaster, Robert Capron (“Oldie”), who beat his charges mercilessly. A High Court action for abuse, taken by one of the boy’s parents, precipitated the school’s decline; by the time Jack arrived, Capron had been declared insane, but the school continued to operate. “I think I shall like this place,” Jack wrote to his father, “Misis Capron and the Miss Caprons are very nice and I think I will be able to get on with Mr. Capron though to tell the truth he is rather eccentric.” Ten days later he wrote, “My dear Papy … Please may we not leave on Saturday? We simply cannot wait in this hole till the end of term.” Albert’s answer was not encouraging: “All schools—whether for boys or the larger school of life for men—press hardly and sorely at times. Otherwise they would not be schools. But I am sure you will face the good and the bad like a brave Christian boy, for dear, dear, Mammy’s sake.”
Little in the way of real education went on at Wynyard: for the most part it was endless sums and arbitrary floggings. Capron did know how to teach geometry, thus giving Jack his first systematic
Like the Romantic poets, Lewis sensed the numinous in words that pointed to a realm beyond, to empty sky, open landscapes, things passing, things beyond reach, dim foreshadowings of a God who is wholly Other. That the young Lewis would be so stirred by fall and winter, by the advent of cold and dark; by the death of beauty, by death itself, speaks to his essential Romanticism. Each of the epiphanies he experienced contained within it, as part of its evanescent loveliness, a memento mori: the death of Balder; the near death of Squirrel Nutkin, whom Old Owl captures and almost skins alive; and, most poignantly, the death of the happy early childhood of Warnie and himself, builder and beholder of the miniature Eden. Underlying all was the one great death: that of his mother.
The Banks of the Styx
Tolkien, after the death of his mother, found love and a home through the help of Father Francis. Lewis suffered the opposite fate. After his mother’s death, he was exiled from home, sent abroad by his father to the first of a succession of boarding schools, each disastrous in its own incomparable way. This may strike the modern reader as needlessly cruel; but at the time, for families like the Lewises and Hamiltons, boarding school seemed like the normal, obvious, and essential route to adult achievement for an Anglo-Irish boy whose prospects at home were far from secure. So off Lewis went, trussed in an Eton collar, knickerbockers, boots, and bowler, via four-wheeler and ship on September 18, 1908—less than four weeks after his mother’s death—his brother alongside, to Watford, Hertfordshire, in England, to enroll in Wynyard School, where Warnie was already a pupil.
England, at first glance, looked like “the banks of Styx,” an apt introduction to the regions of hell Lewis would soon traverse. His account of his two years there, and his subsequent stay at three other schools, occupies a large, perhaps disproportionate, chunk of his autobiography, about half of the whole, and proves a formidable obstacle to readers, especially those from foreign lands, not as entranced as British males of Lewis’s generation by the minutiae of public school existence. Nonetheless, his vivid description of the Grand Guignol he witnessed, which ranged from cruelty to sexual exploitation to outright madness, offers both literary and sensationalistic compensation and constitutes a fierce indictment of a pedagogical system that has now largely vanished.
Each school offered its own variety of moral or mental disarray. Wynyard, called Belsen (after the concentration camp) in Surprised by Joy , harbored a headmaster, Robert Capron (“Oldie”), who beat his charges mercilessly. A High Court action for abuse, taken by one of the boy’s parents, precipitated the school’s decline; by the time Jack arrived, Capron had been declared insane, but the school continued to operate. “I think I shall like this place,” Jack wrote to his father, “Misis Capron and the Miss Caprons are very nice and I think I will be able to get on with Mr. Capron though to tell the truth he is rather eccentric.” Ten days later he wrote, “My dear Papy … Please may we not leave on Saturday? We simply cannot wait in this hole till the end of term.” Albert’s answer was not encouraging: “All schools—whether for boys or the larger school of life for men—press hardly and sorely at times. Otherwise they would not be schools. But I am sure you will face the good and the bad like a brave Christian boy, for dear, dear, Mammy’s sake.”
Little in the way of real education went on at Wynyard: for the most part it was endless sums and arbitrary floggings. Capron did know how to teach geometry, thus giving Jack his first systematic
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