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The Narnian

HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

Chapter One

"Happy, but for so happy ill secured . . ."

When Clive Staples Lewis was four years old, in 1902 or 1903, he quite suddenly announced to his mother, father, and older brother that from that day forth he would no longer be known as Clive, but rather as "Jacksie." To no other name would he answer. Eventually he allowed slight modifications -- Jacksie yielded to Jacks, and then, finally, to Jack -- but never again would he be Clive. Except to teachers and others whom he knew only formally, he remained Jack to the end of his days, sixty years later.

Such boldness indicates a precocious self-assurance, and surely the indication is correct: it was only a few years later that Jack interrupted his father in his study in order to announce, "I have a prejudice against the French." When his father asked him why, he replied, "If I knew why it would not be a prejudice." So, self-assurance, yes, but also an assurance of being loved -- the expectation of tolerance, affection, and even indulgence that is so often found in the youngest child of a family.

And the Lewis family was a happy one, according to that model of domesticity adored and nearly perfected by the Victorians: the pater-familas, his Angel in the House, and children (in this case sons) respectful of Papy and adoring of Mamy. When Jack was six they had moved from a semidetached house in Dundela, an inner suburb of Belfast, Ireland -- Northern Ireland would not exist, as such, for another few decades -- into a rambling, expansive, new brick house in more prestigious Strandtown and had filled it with books. They called it Leeborough, or, more familiarly, Little Lea. It possessed a garden, and the servants were kind. Once the family took a holiday in France. It was ideal -- but when, half a century later, Jack wrote about his childhood in his book Surprised by Joy, he prefaced the first chapter with a quote from Milton's Paradise Lost, a dark statement from Satan, musing on the occupants of the Eden into which he peers: "Happy, but for so happy ill secured."

Lewis's mother was named Florence Hamilton; she was called Flora. She had been born in County Cork in 1862, the daughter of an Anglican priest who throughout much of her childhood led a church in Rome. In 1874 he returned to Ireland to become the rector of St. Mark's Church in Dundela. The Reverend Thomas Hamilton could be so deeply moved by Christian faith and doctrine that he actually wept during his own sermons. Like many Ulster Anglicans, he despised Catholics and thought them not only un-Christian but positively Satanic, but he was not simply and uniformly reactionary. He was for his time and place unusually supportive of women's education: when the brand-new Royal University of Ireland (founded in 1878, and now called Queen's University) announced that from the outset it would accept women as students and give them the same rights and privileges as men -- something then unthinkable at Oxford or Cambridge -- he sent his daughter Flora. She performed very well indeed, in 1885 taking a first (that is, a first-class degree) in logic and a second in mathematics.

A year later a young man named Albert Lewis asked her to marry him; she refused. This appears not to have deterred him, since in 1893 she agreed to his renewed proposal, though she made no pretense of ecstatic transport or (it would seem) anything like a sense of romance. "I wonder do I love you?" she wrote to Albert, as though considering a problem in logic. "I am not quite sure. I know that at least I am very fond of you, and that I should never think of loving anyone else." She would never, in her letters at least, confess to having fallen in love with Albert, but those letters do grow much more affectionate over time, and she reveals to him more and more of her personality. Especially notable is a witty parody of some of the preaching she had heard, a careful exegesis of that famously difficult text "Old Mother Hubbard, she went to the cupboard." Given the extraordinary skills as a satirist and parodist her younger son would later exhibit, one wonders whether this sort of gift could be hereditary.

This Albert Lewis had been born in the same county as Flora, in the city of Cork itself; he was a year younger. When Albert was still an infant his father -- who was in the shipbuilding business -- moved to Dublin, and then later to Belfast. Albert was sent for his chief education to Lurgan College in County Armagh (an Irish imitation of the English prep school), whose headmaster, an Ulster Scot named W. T. Kirkpatrick, would prove to be a central figure in the later history of the Lewis family. We will hear much more of him later.

After graduating from Lurgan in 1879, Albert was "articled" to a firm of solicitors in Dublin -- that is, taken on as a kind of apprentice. Five years later he qualified as a solicitor and soon moved to Belfast to start his own practice. As an attorney he excelled. He was, his younger son would later write, "sentimental, passionate, and rhetorical," and while these qualities may have made him sometimes difficult to live with, they were of great value in the courtroom. "Woe to the poor jury man who wants to have any mind of his own," wrote Albert's former teacher Kirkpatrick; "he will find himself borne down by a resistless Niagara." Perhaps Flora Hamilton had a similar experience; at any rate, the man she married in 1894 was a man on the rise, and he would eventually become a significant figure in the public life of Belfast. At his death in 1929 the newspaper obituaries would be prominent, long, and effusive.

Continues...

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Excerpted from The Narnian by Alan Jacobs Copyright © 2005 by Alan Jacobs.
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