英文本 英国名家介绍之C.S. Lewis

Although C.S. Lewis published, as Peter J. Kreeft notes in his C.S. Lewis: A Critical Essay, “some sixty first-quality works of literary history, literary criticism, theology, philosophy, autobiography, Biblical studies, sermons, formal and informal essays, a spiritual diary, [and] short stories,” as well as poetry, of particular interest to readers of fantasy and science fiction are Lewis’s novels, which combine those elements with allegory, myth, romance, and satire.

A professor who won awards for his academic work and received five honorary doctorates in England and France, Lewis was a gregarious man, known for his love of tobacco and alcohol. His biographer A.N. Wilson says that “his jolly, red, honest face was that of an intellectual bruiser”; his earlier biographers Roger Lancelyn Green and Walter Hooper write of his appearance at lectures: “There strode in a big man with shabby clothes, looking like nothing so much as a prosperous butcher, who began addressing his audience in a loud, booming voice and with tremendous gusto.” Lewis’s wit and honesty attracted a wide circle of friends and thousands of admirers but alienated others, including many of his fellow writers. Passionate about his dislikes and loves, Lewis never left a neutral acquaintance, listener, or reader.

Clive Staples Lewis was born on November 29, 1898 in Dundela Villas, Belfast, the second child of Albert Lewis, a prosecuting attorney, and Florence Augusta Hamilton Lewis, known as Flora; his brother, Warren Hamilton Lewis, had been born on June 16, 1895. According to Wilson, Albert Lewis was a “soulful poet” and a skilled and funny raconteur. In Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life (1955) Lewis describes his father’s side of the family as “true Welshmen, sentimental, passionate, and rhetorical, easily moved both to anger and to tenderness; men who laughed and cried a great deal and who had not much of the talent for happiness.”

His paternal grandfather, Richard Lewis, came from a line of Welsh farmers but was born in Ireland; he was a master boilermaker for the Cork Steamship Company. He was also—though Lewis does not mention the fact in Surprised by Joy—a writer who made up science-fiction stories to amuse his children and who read essays to fellow members of the Workman’s Reading Room at the steamship company. The essays are largely theological and, Green and Hooper note, “surprisingly eloquent for a man who had so little education.”

Lewis describes his mother’s family as “a cooler race. Their minds were critical and ironic and they had the talent for happiness in a high degree.” They were of a higher social class than Lewis’s father’s family, with what Green and Hooper call “a strong ecclesiastical tradition” that included an ancestor who was bishop of Ossory. Lewis’s maternal grandfather, Thomas Hamilton, was rector of St. Mark’s in Dundela, on the outskirts of Belfast. Lewis’s mother was highly educated for a woman of her time: she had studied mathematics and logic at Queen’s College in Belfast and had written magazine articles.

The family was inclined to nicknames: Warren was usually Warnie but sometimes Badger, Badgie, or Badge, while from age four Clive was Jack, Jacks, Jacko, Kricks, or Klicks. Despite their almost three years’ difference in age, the brothers were close companions. They had a vivid imaginative life, telling stories and making up histories that C.S. Lewis began writing down when he was five. Influenced by the “humanized animals” in Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Peter Rabbit (1902) and The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin(1903) and by stories of knights and chivalry such as Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889) and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sir Nigel, which was serialized in The Strand in 1905–1906, he created a medieval Animal-Land with mice in armor. Later, Animal-Land was joined with Warren’s imaginary version of India to form a land called Boxen, about which Lewis wrote stories from age 12 to 14. Some of the Boxen stories have been published, and critics generally agree that they give little hint of Lewis’s later ability: they are dry, with little sense of wonder or of the numinous, although they do reveal a sense of humor.

Lewis’s early childhood included yearly summer trips to a seaside resort and a nurse, Lizzie Endicott, who told him Irish folktales. From his nursery window he could see the Castlereagh Hills, which he mentions in Surprised by Joy as the source of his first feelings of Sehnsucht, or romantic, bittersweet longing.

Albert Lewis had a house, Little Lea, built farther out from the city center, and the family moved into it in 1905. Soon after the move Warren was sent to Wynyard House, a boarding school near Watford in Hertfordshire, England; Lewis was taught at home by a governess and spent many hours in solitary reading. By 1907 the household included their grandfather Lewis; a housemaid and a cook; and pets such as a dog, a mouse, and a canary. In the diaries he kept from the age of nine, Lewis reports reading John Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost (1667) when he was 10, but otherwise his reading seems more normal for a boy of that age: the books of E. Nesbit, Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, and H. Rider Haggard’s exotic adventure novels, which he continued to enjoy for the rest of his life.

One of the key events that formed Lewis’s personality occurred on August 23, 1908, when his mother died of cancer. Since she had needed round-the-clock nurses, Lewis’s grandfather had had to move out in March, and he had died a month later of a stroke. According to Green and Hooper, “The effect of Flora’s death on Albert Lewis was to alienate him from his two sons just at the time when mutual comfort was most needed”; Lewis recalls in Surprised by Joy that his father “spoke wildly and acted unjustly.” Lewis was devastated: without a mother and feeling distant from his father, he felt that all security had gone.

Lewis and Warren became closer than ever—“Two frightened urchins huddled for warmth in a bleak world,” as Lewis dramatically puts it in Surprised by Joy (1955). Emotional support also came from the family of his mother’s cousin, Hope Ewart. The boys had a standing invitation to visit her nearby mansion, Glenmacken (called “Mountbracken” in Surprised by Joy), and she provided a motherly and civilizing influence. Still, the scar left by his mother’s death shaped Lewis’s life.

Lewis’s father sent him to a series of boarding schools, mostly in England. In September 1908 he joined Warren at Wynyard House; he found his brother’s presence one of the few tolerable things about the school. In Surprised by Joy he refers to it as “Belsen,” after the Nazi concentration camp. Green and Hooper characterize the school as “at once brutalizing and intellectually stupefying”; the headmaster, the Reverend Robert Capron, may have been insane and was later institutionalized.

The high-church Anglo-Catholic services held twice every Sunday, however, awakened Lewis’s religious feelings. Warren went to Malvern College in the fall of 1909; their father kept Lewis at Wynyard, where he was even more miserable, until the end of the 1909–1910 academic year, when the school was closed because of parental complaints. One bright spot for Lewis in 1910 was seeing James M. Barrie’s Peter Pan performed in London; the play left a vivid impression on him.

For the autumn term of 1910 Lewis was enrolled in Campbell College, two miles from Little Lea; he lived at the school but visited home every Sunday. His memories of his short time there were as pleasant as those of Wynyard were disagreeable. At Campbell College, Lewis began to enjoy learning. His teacher J.A. McNeill introduced him to Matthew Arnold’s poem “Sohrab and Rustum” (1853), which became a lifelong favorite. In November 1910 Lewis was sent home because of illness. He rested, reading almost constantly—especially fairy tales—for two months.

From January 1911 to June 1913 Lewis attended Cherbourg, a small preparatory school of 17 boarding students and some day students near Malvern. There, for the first time, he made friends with boys his own age. His first published works, two essays and a poem, appeared in the Cherbourg School Magazine.

Lewis also lost his faith in Christianity at Cherbourg. He was influenced by Germanic mythology, which stirred his emotions and seemed to him to have as much possibility of being true as Christianity. He first encountered the mythology in a supplement to the December 1911 issue of The Bookman in which several of Arthur Rackham’s color illustrations for Margaret Armour’s translation of Richard Wagner’s Siegfried; and The Twilight of the Gods (1911) were reproduced. Lewis read widely in Norse myth and became enamored of all things “Northern.”

In June 1913 Lewis took the entrance examination for Malvern College, despite being in bed with fever at the time, and earned a junior scholarship. Warren, however, had just withdrawn from Malvern, having been asked to leave because he had been caught smoking (both brothers had been smokers for years). At Malvern, Lewis “reacted against the whole public-school ethos,” as Joe R. Christopher writes in C.S. Lewis. 

In Surprised by Joy Lewis records his dislike of the importance placed on athletics, of the social hierarchy, and of a system in which younger students were imposed on in many ways, including sexually, by older ones. Still, he loved the school library; in later years he also fondly remembered Harry Wakelyn Smith, who taught classics and English. Lewis studied Virgil, Horace, and Euripides as well as the poetry of John Milton and William Butler Yeats. Yeats stimulated Lewis’s interest in Celtic mythology, although Northern myth was still more vital to him. During the summer term of 1914 he wrote Loki Bound, a play combining Norse mythology with Greek tragic form.

Lewis’s love of Northern mythology was shared by Arthur Greeves, a neighbor at Little Lea. The two had known each other for years, but in 1914 this common interest cemented a lifelong friendship, conducted mainly through correspondence, that was second only to the affection between Lewis and his brother. Lewis’s letters to Greeves were published as They Stand Together in 1979.

Albert Lewis had become reacquainted with his old headmaster from Lurgan College, William T. Kirkpatrick, when the teacher needed his help in a minor legal matter. Kirkpatrick had retired and was doing individual tutoring; Warren studied with him to prepare for the entrance examination to the Officer Training College at Sandhurst, and, since Lewis was ill-suited to public-school life, his father sent him to study with Kirkpatrick at the latter’s home, Gastons, in Great Bookham, Surrey.

When he arrived in September 1914, Lewis was 15 and Kirkpatrick, called “the Great Knock” by the Lewis family, was 66. Wilson describes the tutor as “an old-fashioned nineteenth-century rationalist, whose favorite reading consisted of [Sir James George] Frazer’s The Golden Bough [1890] and [the philosopher Arthur] Schopenhauer.” Under Kirkpatrick’s influence Lewis became increasingly convinced that Christianity was an attractive myth system but not true. In his correspondence with Greeves, who was a devout Christian, the arguments grew intense; Lewis was as staunch a polemicist for atheism as he later was for Christianity. Finally, the boys agreed not to write about the topic. To please his father, however, Lewis was confirmed at St. Mark’s Church on December 6, 1914. The married but misogynist Kirkpatrick reinforced not only Lewis’s atheism but also his low impression of marriage and women.

To Lewis, Kirkpatrick—who is reflected in the character MacPhee in Lewis’s novel That Hideous Strength: A Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-Ups(1945)—represented all things rational; in Surprised in Joy he credits Kirkpatrick with his own ability to argue and even to think well. During his two and a half years at Gastons, Lewis blossomed intellectually. He studied Henrik Ibsen’s plays; William Morris’s poems and prose; Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “Morte d’Arthur” (1842); Edmund Spenser’s The Fairie Queene(1590, 1596); Homer, Sophocles, and Aeschylus in Greek; and Beowulf (circa 1000) and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (circa 1375) in modern English translations. He read the works of Aristotle, Milton, John Keats, John Ruskin, and Virginia Woolf. Even Kirkpatrick thought that Lewis read too much, but he wrote glowingly in letters to Lewis’s father about the boy’s intellectual acumen.

In 1916 Lewis picked up in a bookstall a copy of Phantastes (1858), by the Christian writer George MacDonald. The archetypal myths in the novel stirred him deeply. In the introduction to an anthology of extracts from MacDonald’s works that he edited in 1946, Lewis says that what Phantastes “did to me was to convert, even to baptise … my imagination. It did nothing to my intellect nor (at that time) to my conscience. Their turn came far later and with the help of many other books and men.”

Kirkpatrick and Lewis’s father decided that Lewis should go to a university and become a fellow or, at least, a schoolmaster. Lewis agreed to the plan, though he really wanted to be a poet and romance writer. Between Easter 1915 and Easter 1917 he wrote 52 poems, none of them particularly good. In December 1916 he went to Oxford to take the scholarship examination. Though he was elected to a scholarship in University College, he had to pass another examination before matriculating. It included Lewis’s bane—mathematics—so he returned to Bookham to study algebra with Kirkpatrick; he also studied German and Italian.