A Shiver of Wonder Page 6

  Today, the Common Rooms at Campbell have satellite TV and DVD players. Access to the Internet is available for e-mail and research purposes. All pupils after year ten have accommodation on an individual-room basis; but in Jack’s time only senior boys had a separate study. Two of his overriding memories were the lack of privacy and the noisy Common Rooms.

  When reading the description of Lewis’s memories of Campbell College, one is reminded of the classic Alexander Sokurov film The Russian Ark. It portrays a large crowd of people flowing like a tide down a staircase after a ball, then flowing down a corridor—thinning here, fanning out there, chatting, calling to each other, gossiping, and passing on news. Suddenly, there is an open doorway through which water can be seen stretching away to the horizon. The water is said to represent eternity. Jack described out-of-school hours at Campbell College as either moving away from, or going with, a tide of boys. The description sounds much like the movement of the people in The Russian Ark. Jack also described his experience at school as living in a railway station. His metaphor will resonate with many as a childhood memory of school crowds. Eternity still flows beyond the school door; but for the pupil, life is dominated by the here and now. For Jack, the here-and-now meant watching school fights with the ever-prurient crowds. There were “seconds,” even, at these boxing matches, attendants who assisted each combatant. Jack reckoned that there was also betting going on. He surmised that fists and wit could win any pupil his place in the life of the school! For Jack, though, any bullying at Campbell amounted to once being shoved down a hatch into a coal cellar. He found himself in the company of another small boy, as part of a game being played by roving gangs of fellow pupils.

  Jack must have found Campbell College a Shangri-La in comparison to Wynyard. In the place of Oldie, he found Octie. Octie was the nickname the boys had for Lewis Alden, the Senior English Master at Campbell from 1898 until 1930. As far as Jack was concerned, the most important event to happen to him at Campbell College was to hear Octie read Matthew Arnold’s Sohrab and Rustum. With his deep, resonant voice, Octie obviously sparked something in Jack’s imagination as he read Arnold’s masterpiece of heroic, even epic poetry. By the shores of Belfast Lough, in Octie’s Form Room, from the very first lines Jack was entranced:

  And the first grey of morning fill’d the east,

  And the fog rose out of the Oxus stream.

  But all the Tartar camp along the stream

  Was hush’d, and still the men were plunged in sleep;

  Sohrab alone, he slept not; all night long

  He had lain wakeful, tossing on his bed;

  But when the grey dawn stole into his tent,

  He rose, and clad himself, and girt his sword,

  And took his horseman’s cloak, and left his tent,

  And went abroad into the cold wet fog,

  Through the dim camp to Peran-Wisa’s tent.3

  The reversal and rhetoric in Arnold’s epic story of Sohrab the Tartar and Rustum the Persian—the son and father’s edging closer to their fatal combat, in which the father unknowingly kills his son—fired Jack’s imagination. As the final lines fell on his ear, telling of the majestic Oxus River floating on, Jack felt that he was gazing at things in a very far country:

  Out of the mist and hum of that low land

  Into the frosty starlight . . .

  The long’d-for dash of waves is heard, and wide

  His luminous home of waters opens, bright

  And tranquil, from whose floor the new-bathed stars

  Emerge, and shine upon the Aral Sea.

  Jack entered into European poetry as never before. It seemed to depict something he longed for, but which was, for now, unattainable. He was only a twelve-year-old boy. He could not have known that he, like Matthew Arnold before him, would begin to have serious doubts about the veracity of the Christian faith. Matthew, son of Thomas Arnold, the famous headmaster of Rugby School and himself a pioneer of state education, found that his doubts brought him great anxiety, as he tried very hard to reconcile “traditional religion” with the conclusions of the new “higher criticism.” In his poem Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse, he wrote of “wandering between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born.”4

  In June 1851, Arnold married Frances Lucy Whiteman, daughter of Sir William Whiteman, a judge of the Queen’s Bench. At Dover on his honeymoon, Arnold heard the waves raking across the shingle outside his hotel bedroom. And in his poem “Dover Beach” he wrote:

  The sea of faith

  Was once too at the full and round Earth’s shore

  Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl’d:

  But now I only hear

  Its melancholy long withdrawing roar,

  Retreating to the breath

  Of the night wind down the vast edges drear

  And naked shingles of the world. . . . 5

  Matthew Arnold’s journey led to agnosticism; Jack Lewis’s led to atheism. Arnold was part of the great ebb of faith throughout Europe, beginning (as mentioned in the preface) particularly with the Deism of the eighteenth-century Scottish aristocrat David Hume. The loss of faith came down through the writings and beliefs of people like Thomas Carlyle, Marx and Engels, the gifted novelist George Eliot, Charles Darwin, Tennyson, Thomas Hardy, John Ruskin, and George Bernard Shaw. This loss of faith among writers, artists, and intellectuals in Western civilisation has had a seismic effect upon our culture.

  The twelve-year-old boy was not to know that one day he would be seriously considered for the position of Professor of Poetry at Oxford University, a position which Arnold held for two successive terms of five years. Nor was the boy to know that one day Sir Anthony Hopkins would unveil one of his poems, engraved on a plaque in Oxford itself. Enchanted by the poetry of Arnold at Campbell College, Jack Lewis was not to know that the living God would use him to help turn back the tide of faith once again.

  Chapter Five

  A CARELESS TONGUE

  AUTUMN HAD LOWERED HER FLAG in Ulster, and many of her bright colours were now almost out of sight. On the Circular Road in Belfast, bare boughs were standing gaunt against the November sky. The bracken on the surrounding hills was still yellow; the heather in sheltering nooks still retained a faint blush of pale purple; and the deep crimson leaves of the bramble were visible in the hedgerows. The pretty red and green moss-balls upon the wild-rose brier, known as robin’s pincushions, were flourishing. The mosses and lichens on the banks and hillsides were having their springtime; but all around winter was setting in.

  The Saxons aptly named November “wind month.” When its gales return, pines are bent, bracken is ruffled, lake and sea are lashed, and acorns fall heavily in the woods. As Christmas approached in Ireland, the holly bushes of Ulster were beating their polished leaves together.

  Early in November 1910, another kind of gale was blowing across the life of young Jack Lewis. He was brought home to Little Lea with a bad cough. The weak-chested Jack was ill and had to be kept at home for the rest of the term—not that he minded! There followed six weeks of solitude into which he entered with great pleasure. Leaving the noise of Campbell College behind, he felt his solitude to be like a refreshing bath. He was never to like crowds. When his father was out at work, Jack wrote, read, and drew to his heart’s content; and he fell in love with fairytales. He particularly liked the dwarfs of his fairytales; and one day he wondered if he hadn’t seen one darting into the shrubbery!

  Jack slept in his father’s room at night, and the two got on fine—at this point probably better than they ever would again. Lewis later claimed that, for reasons he did not quite know, his father had become dissatisfied with Campbell College. Not long after Albert’s hand influenced Jack’s life once more, but more wisely this time. Albert decided to send his weak-chested son to the spa town of Malvern, where Warren was at Malvern School. Jack was sent to its Preparatory School, Cherbourg, which stood on a hill just above Warren’s school.

  The
countryside surrounding Malvern is steeped in outstanding beauty. The College, founded in 1865, is situated in spacious grounds below the Worcestershire Beacon. In the local parish church of St. Wulfstan lies the grave of the great English musician Sir Edward Elgar. Last year, the Enigma Fountain was unveiled there in his memory by HRH The Duke of York. The pure water from the Malvern hills, a favourite of the present Queen, was first bottled about 1622, but was appreciated well before that and even long before Queen Elizabeth I granted the Holy Well to the Lord of the Manor. Dr. John Wall, a Worcester physician, first analysed the famous Malvern Water in 1756. Following the publishing of his book Experiments & Observations on the Malvern Waters, Dr. Wall concluded in a famous quotation, “The Malvern water is famous for containing just nothing at all.” Malvern became known as a curative centre in 1757 after Dr Wall published his findings. The original well was in an orchard.

  In Jack’s time, the water of Malvern was already being bottled by Schweppes and was selling all over the country. Nowadays, twelve million litres are bottled and sold annually. The source, now known as Prime Well Spring, flows at an average of approximately sixty litres per minute and has never been known to dry up.

  The area is also blessed with an almost alpine dryness; and it would appear that Albert hoped this climate would bring ease to Jack’s weak chest. So, in January 1911, Jack moved out of Ulster once more, leaving behind its frequent rainy days. Now entering his teenage years, Jack acquired a much healthier view of England. Although Jack certainly did not think that the hills around him were more beautiful than those of Ireland—and said so when writing home—he did delight in them!

  A thirteen-year-old boy who has lost his mother is in great need of somebody to mother him. That mothering he so needed was provided by Cherbourg’s gifted matron, Miss Cowie. She showed great kindness to Jack and the other boys, and Jack had a deep and tender affection for her. Jack later hinted that she had had no guide on her spiritual journey to point her to the Saviour of the World. She had turned to consider the teaching of theosophy. In 1875, Mrs. Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, and Col. Henry Steel Olcott founded the Theosophical Society in New York. The society attempted to derive an ethical core from ancient wisdom and from insights into the theory of evolution. Ireland’s greatest twentieth-century poet, W. B. Yeats, visited Mrs. Blavatsky and joined the Esoteric Section of the Theosophical Society. He became obsessed with the exploration of mystical phenomena. His biographers, Micheál MacLiammóir and Eavan Boland, said, “this [involvement with theosophy] might be said to have influenced well-nigh every subsequent action of his life. Certainly it became the leading force in his writing, and although his days and nights teemed with a hundred other interests, the quest for the unknown was to remain the changeless background.”1 All of this interest in the unknown led Yeats into the occult, and Jack was later to be influenced by his writing.

  His friend, Katherine Tynan, had taken Yeats to his very first séance. “The experience was unnerving for them both,” write MacLiammóir and Boland.

  After some chilling preliminaries, swiftly followed by a few alarming words (accompanied by actions) from the medium, Miss Tynan left the table and sank to her knees in prayer in a corner, while Yeats, who had been compelled by some unseen force to bang his neighbour’s knuckles on the table, then proceeded to break the table. After that, he felt he was going into a trance, then decided that he was not; and finally, unable to remember a prayer, started to recite the opening of Paradise Lost. He then began to sense the presence of something “very evil” in the room.2

  Did such a journey eventually lead to a lack of real hope? Hopelessness is reflected in the epitaph that he requested for his gravestone in Sligo’s Drumcliff Churchyard. The final three lines from his last poem read thus:

  Cast a cold Eye

  On Life, on Death.

  Horseman, pass by!

  Mixed with her interest in theosophy, Miss Cowie also explored Rosicrucian thinking. A Rosicrucian was a member of a secretive society devoted to the study of metaphysical, mystical, and alchemical lore. Miss Cowie was also into spiritualism—a system of belief, or religious practise, based on supposed communication with the spirits of the dead, especially through mediums.

  In the midst of her duties as matron, Miss Cowie shared her current thinking with Jack, not realising as he put it, that it was as if she was actually carrying a candle into a room full of gunpowder. And Jack was ignited. Were there other worlds that his Christian belief knew nothing about? Was this visible world only a cover for other realms? He rightly came to see his curiosity as a “spiritual lust”; it blinded him to other things. The one whom Jack Lewis later called the Enemy was prowling about and seeking to devour him.

  Miss Cowie did not set out to destroy Jack’s faith. She had no idea that the more she talked of her spiritual journey, the more she was undermining what Jack believed. Hers was an undefined world, far removed from the mighty framework of the Holy Scriptures with its Thou shalt nots, those clear boundaries set up by God to protect heart, mind, soul, and home, as well as family, public, national, and international life. Soon, Jack was altering the strong commitment of “I believe” to the vague, speculative “one does feel.” But he felt relieved. “From the tyrannous noon of revelation,” he wrote, “I passed into the cool evening of Higher Thought, where there was nothing to be obeyed, and nothing to be believed, except what was either comforting or exciting. I do not mean that Miss Cowie did this: better say the Enemy did this in me, taking occasion from the things she innocently said.”3

  At this point in this biography it is worth pondering a little statement from a publication called The Biblical Treasury:

  Suppose my watch was not working well. Would it do any good for me to travel to the town clock, and reset the hands of my watch to match those with the city clock? You know this would do no good, for the hands of my watch would soon be as far wrong as ever. I must send my watch to the watchmaker that he may put its heart right, and then the hands will go right too. So it is with ourselves and our children. We must first get our hearts right, and then our hands will go right, and our feet, and all else.4

  Sadly, through a careless tongue, the Enemy was subtly wooing Jack’s young heart away from his Maker. The Enemy was even fouling up Jack’s prayer life; Jack began to have a sense in his conscience that he was not thinking enough about what he was actually saying in his prayers. He started a process of “realisation” which drove him to deep anxiety. Had he continued with it, he reckoned the process would have driven him to insanity. He had no real concept of a Heavenly Father who loved him and who was willing through Christ to accept him just as he was. Prayer was designed to give access to the heart of God, so that we may obtain help in time of need; but the Enemy had turned it into a guilt-inducing exercise. Jack’s view of prayer had become far removed from that of his fellow Ulsterman, Joseph Scriven:

  Oh what peace we often forfeit;

  Oh what needless pain we bear;

  All because we do not carry

  Everything to God in prayer.

  Subconsciously, Jack’s struggle with prayer was now being used by the Enemy to make him want to move away from the Christian faith. He restlessly struggled through many long nights. Intellectually, he became pessimistic.

  One day in 1949 at the Edwards Air Force Base in the United States, an engineer working on an Air Force project found that a transducer had been wrongly wired. Annoyed with the technician responsible, the engineer said, “If there is any way to do it wrong, he’ll find it.” The contractor’s project manager kept a list of laws, and now added a new one that he called Murphy’s Law.5 It stated, “anything that can go wrong will go wrong.” Jack’s pessimism went much further than Murphy’s Law: he began to expect and believe that everything would do what he did not want it to do. Pondering Jack’s writing about the pessimism he had as a fourteen-year-old boy, one perceives that the behaviour of Oldie and the death of his mother had caused deep emotional wounds. The grey
fog of depression can sweep into the life of a teenager every bit as much as it can sweep into that of an adult.

  The philosophy of Miss Cowie certainly did not lift Jack’s pessimism. There was no lasting joy or peace on that road; there never has been, and there never will be. “There shall not be found among you anyone who makes his son or daughter pass through the fire,” said God to Moses, “or one who practises witchcraft, or a soothsayer, or one who interprets omens, or a Sorcerer, or one who conjures spells or a medium, or a spiritist, or one who calls up the dead; for all who do these things are an abomination to the Lord” (Deuteronomy 18:10-12).

  Is it not worth asking ourselves what we can do to help our teenagers? Sadly, the suicide rate is rising among them, especially in Western society. In the north and west of Jack’s home city at the time of writing this biography, the rate is almost sixty percent higher than it is anywhere else in the United Kingdom. Many adults are unhappy because the untreated depression from their own teenage years has persisted. It is therefore vital to reach out to teenagers with an encouraging word or kind action. It is important to encourage what gifts they have and to help them reach their potential. And it is vital to point them to the Source of all true joy and hope, Jesus Christ.

  Jack was very vulnerable in these years. He wrote of how no one took time with him to place Christianity in its context. He immersed himself in the writing of the influential Roman poet Virgil, much favoured by the Roman Emperor Caesar Augustus. Virgil’s qualities of tenderness, humanity, and deep religious sentiment prefigured Christianity; but there was no one who took the time to show Jack that what the pagans had longed for, or aspired to, was fulfilled in Christ. Christianity was taught to him as being true, but no one really attempted to show him why. A Nazi regime was about to rise up in Europe. The story is told of a prisoner in desperate thirst, who reached out to break off and suck an icicle. A guard smashed the icicle in front of him. The prisoner turned to the guard and asked, “Why?” “Here there is no why,” he answered. We must all be allowed to ask, “Why?”