even for the one semester, “Jack became acquainted, perhaps for the first time, with the power of poetic language, especially the rhythm and propulsion it can give to a story.”42
After only about three months at Campbell, Jack enrolled in Cherbourg House in Malvern, England, in January of 1911. One benefit of Cherbourg House was its being almost next door to Malvern College, where Warnie was now a pupil. Jack demonstrated promise at Cherbourg House, which was the first place where he received a consistent and proper formal education.
Jack Lewis joined his brother at Malvern College in the summer of 1913 to prepare for taking the entrance exams for university. In later years, Jack and Warnie agreed to disagree about the educational quality at Malvern College. Warnie thought that the education was quite good, but Jack was less impressed. The different recollections may have been due to their differing levels of enjoyment of athletic events. As in many boarding schools, to be part of the accepted social circle, participating in college sports teams was a must. For Jack it was a must not. While Warnie enjoyed sports, Jack did not like sports or most games. But he did like speaking and oral reading.
Friend and biographer George Sayer reports that as an adult, Lewis enjoyed good animated conversations. “How I like talking!”43 Sayer quotes Lewis as saying. This love for communication was nurtured at Malvern, where he found a role model in, and received direct instruction from, influential teacher Harry Wakelyn Smith, affectionately dubbed “Smewgy” by his students. Smewgy had a considerable dramatic flair for reading poetry. In him, Jack found someone who would develop his interest in words, language, and even performance. Smewgy taught Lewis two key communication skills: first, to analyze the grammar and syntax of a poem, and second, to read poetry with a focus on the sounds and rhythms of the poem. Sayer adds, “Although he [Lewis] did not have Smewgy’s lovely musical voice and could not read romantic poetry with Smewgy’s power to enchant, Jack excelled in reading heroic verse and such poetry as Milton’s that required a grand style.”44 Lewis biographer Harry Poe, who also noted the importance of Lewis’s love of poetry in shaping his writing “voice” noted, “Jack was learning not merely to read the lines of poetry but also to hear them ringing in his ears even when reading silently.”45
Lewis’s talent for holding an audience with his speaking perhaps began with Smewgy’s attention to not only the substance of a message, but also its sound. It was also at Malvern where Lewis developed a keen interest in Northernness—his fascination with Norse mythology. In addition to Norse mythology, Lewis was captivated by the Arthur Rackham illustrations of Wagner’s opera Der Ring des Nibelungen, inspiring a life-long love of Wagner’s music.
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Arthur Greeves: First Friend and Intimate Confidant
It was during Lewis’s time at Malvern College that he met Arthur Greeves, a trusted confidant who had a personal influence on Lewis’s experiential insights about the nature of friendship and interpersonal communication. Greeves lived just across the street from Lewis when the Lewis family moved to Little Lea in 1905, although the boys did not meet until 1914, when Greeves was home, ill, and confined to his room. When at last they did meet, they immediately discovered that they had a mutual love of Norse mythology and developed a close, personal friendship that would last for Lewis’s entire life. Lewis wrote more letters to Greeves than to anyone else, and Greeves was one of Lewis’s most loyal “audiences” and confidants. Lewis suggests that their compatible differences enriched their friendship:
Though my friendship with Arthur began from an identity of taste on a particular point [Norse mythology], we were sufficiently different to help one another. His home-life was almost the opposite of mine. His parents were members of the Plymouth Brothers, and he was the youngest of a large family; his home nevertheless, was almost as silent as ours was noisy …46
Lewis describes Greeves as a “First Friend”—someone whom Lewis describes as an “alter ego, the man who first reveals to you that you are not alone in the world by turning out (beyond hope) to share all your most secret delights.”47 Lewis further adds, “There is nothing to be overcome in making him your friend; he and you join like rain-drops on a window.”48 Lewis’s close friendship with Greeves provided a comfortable “backstage” relationship in which Lewis could be his uncensored self and fearlessly propose kernels of new ideas that eventually grew into books, lectures, and essays. Although Greeves was gay and never married, no evidence suggests that his sexual orientation was an obstacle in his and Lewis’s life-long relationship.49 Lewis remained loyal to his trusted friend and exchanged letters with him (although there were sometimes long gaps between letters over the course of their friendship) until the last few weeks of Lewis’s life.
In The Four Loves, Lewis describes the nature of friendship. He may have had Greeves in mind when he wrote, “Friendship arises out of mere Companionship when two or more of the companions discover that they have in common some insight or interest or even taste which the others do not share and which, till that moment, each believed to be his own unique treasure (or burden).”50 Perhaps recalling when he and Arthur first met and both discovered their mutual interest in Norse mythology, Lewis adds, “The typical expression ←43 | 44→of opening Friendship would be something like, ‘What? You too? I thought I was the only one.’ ”51
The correspondence between Arthur and Jack has been compiled in a book edited by Walter Hooper, aptly titled They Stand Together. Lewis used the phrase “they stand together” to describe the importance of friendship in several of his works, including both his autobiography Surprised by Joy and The Four Loves. Effective communicators need attentive sounding boards, safe places to try out new lines of thought, honest editors, and trusted confidants to share and develop ideas. Arthur was such a loyal friend to Jack. The two stood together their entire lives.
Lewis’s four boarding schools, woeful Wynyard, close-by Campbell, challenging Cherbourg, and memorable Malvern, helped prepare him for the educational experience that tapped his true intellectual potential—his tutelage with William T. Kirkpatrick, also known as “the Great Knock.” Kirkpatrick had also been Lewis’s father Albert’s tutor, as well as Warnie’s tutor. Arriving in Surrey on September 19, 1914, and residing with Mr. and Mrs. Kirkpatrick, Lewis quickly discovered that “The Great Knock” lived up to his name by boldly inflicting his logical and analytical skills on others. September 19 was a significant date in C. S. Lewis’s life. It was not only the date he met “The Great Knock,” but the date on which, seventeen years later, he would have a late-night conversation with Hugo Dyson and J. R. R. Tolkien that appeared to be the final push to Lewis’s believing in Christianity—what he eventually called “the true myth.”52
Lewis learned an important lesson about language, meaning, and inference during an early interaction with Kirkpatrick, whom he describes as being “over six feet tall, very shabbily dressed (like a gardener, I thought), lean as a rake, and immensely muscular … he wore moustache and side whiskers with a clean-shaven chin like the Emperor Franz Joseph.”
