Harry Lee Poe - Becoming C. S. Lewis: A Biography of Young Jack Lewis, 1898-1918

19171918

Jack Lewiss eighteenth year proved to be a monumental one. In 1917, he came of age in many ways. The final stage of adolescent development involves the formation of ones identity apart from parents and other associations. At eighteen, he had to decide who he was and what he would do with himself apart from what anyone else had to say. He went up to Oxford as a member of University College, which he loved. He entered the Officer Training Corps (OTC) and gained a commission as second lieutenant, in which capacity he entered military service and went to fight in the trenches of France. He developed a perverse interest in sexual bondage, which he would later discard. Finally, he met the mother of a fellow cadet, and she would come to live with him until her death in 1951. In his nineteenth year, Lieutenant Lewis served with distinction at the front in 1918 and received severe wounds that kept him in the hospital for the duration of the war. By the end of the war, Jack Lewis had grown up.

Forbidden Thoughts

During the Christmas vacation of 1916, Jack and Jack liked the idea of inflicting pain and humiliation on the object of his sexual desire.

Arthur was not interested in inflicting pain, but he appears to have had at least passing interest in receiving pain. Jack said that he had once had the same interest, but he realized that the victim would only focus on the pain while the operator would only grow more aroused.

Jack realized that his obsession with whipping beautiful women was not normal, and he was surprised that Arthur could even engage him in conversation about it when it did not appeal to him.

When Jack was home in Belfast over Christmas, he and Arthur apparently had discussed a specific girl that Jack longed to have at his disposal. She was a vision of physical perfection, especially where he wanted to lay on the lash. She would have been more than a casual acquaintance, someone both boys knew and with whom they had social involvement to the point that they observed her in the same room with them. Jack imagined laying on the lash and covering her body with stripes enough to discipline her.

This abnormal mode of arousal and sexual gratification should not be entirely surprising, given Jacks adolescent experience. He had virtually no experience with girls his own age. He had no occasion for conversation, much less the playful flirting that goes with teenage years and often leads to more explicit acting out. The females he knew were older. He had older female cousins who had shown him attention, but this was of the mothering sort. Arthur had older sisters, but of the dismissive sort. He had witnessed brutality at the hands of Capron at Wynyard School, where the whip was a normal part of daily life. He was left with no idea what to do with girls, and the brutal treatment of women in the Greek and Latin texts he had studied did not help.

While Jacks private sexual fantasies played out, he had begun the final transition from life at Gastons to life at Oxford in University College. In a letter to Warnie in early January 1917, Jack confided or confessed that he had owned up to his time at Malvern as a necessary expedient to his acceptance at Oxford and had even begun to grow sentimental over his time there after receiving a letter from his former teacher, old In January, Jack did not yet expect to go up to Oxford until October and planned to spend the next few months with Kirkpatrick preparing for Oxfords Responsions exam.

Harry Richard Lucas Cooper would have been an exception to what Jack regarded as the norm at Malvern. He mentioned him in several letters home and always as a decent fellow. In all events, leaving Gastons prompted an uncharacteristic nostalgic mood in Jack.

Life in Oxford

Cadet C. S. Lewis

Jacks application papers for acceptance into the Oxford OTC included several letters of reference from former teachers. Robert Porch, house master of School House at Malvern College, where Jack had resided, wrote a letter of reference on April 28, 1917, in which his most glowing comment was that the conduct of Mr. C. S. Lewis was entirely satisfactory.

On his application for admission to the

The Oxford Way

Jack also had to learn a new way of behaving. Oxford has its own way of doing things and a special, private vocabulary for describing all that it does. It also had traditions that were allowed to lapse during the war. Normally, meals should have been taken in the great hall, but with only twelve undergraduates still in college by the third year of the war, the undergraduates took their meals in a small lecture hall without the fellows, who presumably ate in the Senior Commons Room (a glorified version of a faculty lounge). college servant, known as a scout, who waited on him. The scout brought him his breakfast in his room each morning. The scout would also clean his room. It was a new way of life for Jack, who had known maids at Little Lea, but this was different.

Surprised by Joy after his distinguished career as air chief marshal and a knighthood.

Oxford Officer Training Corps lecture

Surprisingly, the nonathletic Jack Lewis took up

Another thing Jack liked about Butler was that he could carry on a conversation in which Edgell could not take part.

After breakfast, they all rode bicycles to philosophical idealism that Lewis adopted.

The Rhythm of Life and the Circle of Friends

At first, the demands of

The Move to Keble College

By the beginning of June, the number of undergraduates at University College had fallen to nine, and they had their class photograph taken together. By June 7, the number had fallen even more, because Jack Lewis was assigned to a cadet battalion billeted across Oxford at Keble College. He quickly became friendly with several of the other cadets. His chief friend was Martin Ashworth Somerville, who attended Eton before gaining a scholarship to Kings College, Cambridge. Somerville was the sort of person that Jack liked, because he was bookish and interesting, which to Jack meant that he knew how to talk about what Jack liked to talk about. public school system, he identified everyone in terms of where he had attended public school. People were their school, even to Jack Lewis. He was, after all, an intellectual snob at this stage of life, something that would have horrified him in his maturity.

Keble College, Oxford

As Jack moved to Keble College, his great friend Nothing more commendable needed to be mentioned than her Irish background.

Norse mythology!

Cherry appears to have been the perfect mate for Jack, who thought it a pity that she was not beautiful, even though he now realized that she was not as plain as he had originally thought.

The atheism of young Jack Lewis had given way to the agnostics open question. At this point, he probably regarded the question of God as settled and thought he was only exploring the arguments out of intellectual curiosity and the obligation of a scholar to know the intellectual history behind the controversy before science had made all things clear.

Enter Mrs. Moore

Jack managed to have a brief holiday at home in Belfast for only a few days in the second week of August before he went on maneuvers with his unit at Warwick. He was billeted with an undertaker in a small house where six cadets shared three beds. He said it was a horrible experience, with no bath and terrible food. Following the week in Warwick, Jack spent a week with his roommate Paddy Moore at the Oxford home of his mother. Jacks opinion of Moore had risen from childish to decent, but he told his father that he liked Mrs. Moore immensely. For the cynical, opinionated Jack Lewis, who rarely had a good word to say about anyone over the previous ten years, this was high praise indeed. Cherry, and a few others he liked in Oxford, but virtually nothing about Paddy, who appears not to have been a great friend as much as a means to an end.