Surprised by Joy

Lewis continues his critique of the English public school system (note: an English “public” school is what an American would call a “private” or “prep” school) by describing how it made him into a “prig.” Through new friends he made at school, he realized that his taste in books and art, which he’d before worn innocently, could be considered “good taste,” and he used this new understanding as a way to defend his ego from the Bloods. He argues that the system that is meant to prevent intellectual snobbery in fact creates it, and that the underlying reasoning of the system—that little boys must be treated roughly by older boys to make them fit for public life—is inherently flawed. 

In this light, he says, the relationships between the Bloods and Tarts were a very minor problem and sometimes even a good, as they called on the real emotions of boys who were used to thinking only of social advancement. The world is more shocked and disapproving of these relationships, he says, only because (at the time of writing) homosexuality was illegal, and thus could harm one’s chances in the world’s social hierarchies. Lewis’s major, underlying theme is that the system that claimed to teach good and virtuous social behavior created only division and snobbery.

Lewis also found a lot of good at Wyvern. He had a legendary teacher named Smewgy who was a model of both courtesy and enthusiasm for literature: “He first taught me the right sensuality of poetry, how it should be savored and mouthed in solitude. Of Milton’s ‘Thrones, Dominations, Princedoms, Virtues, Powers,’ he said, ‘That line made me happy for a week’” (111). He spent a lot of time in the library—the one place where Bloods couldn’t touch “fags.” There he read more deeply, discovering Celtic and Greek mythology alongside his beloved Norse legends, and kept working on his own attempts at verse epics.

In spite of all the unpleasantness of his outer life at Wyvern, Lewis remembers his inner life there as riddled with Joy. His time at home grew more difficult: His father, though a funny and intelligent man, was able to misapprehend anything through excessive subtlety and had no sense of his sons’ privacy. He wanted the boys to think of him as their friend—but, as Lewis says, what they needed was not another friend, but a father. There were also tensions between Lewis and his brother, who had loved Wyvern and was dismayed at how poorly Lewis was doing there. 

Lewis’s father was outraged at his older son for having become such a classically nonchalant, rude, and careless public schoolboy, and he sent him away to his own former tutor, Mr. Kirkpatrick. Lewis’s brother’s academic work improved so impressively that Lewis’s father suggested that Lewis study with Mr. Kirkpatrick, too. Lewis was overjoyed: “If you want to know how I felt, imagine your own feelings on waking one morning to find that income tax or unrequited love had somehow vanished from the world” (129).

Before he departed to study with Mr. Kirkpatrick in Surrey, Lewis made a great friend, a boy named Arthur who shared his love of Norse myth. Lewis says of making a friend, “Nothing, I suspect, is more astonishing in any man’s life than the discovery that there do exist people very, very like himself” (131). Just before Lewis left Wyvern for good, England entered World War I.

Lewis draws a vivid portrait of his tutor, Mr. Kirkpatrick, known to his whole family as the Great Knock. The Great Knock was a dyed-in-the-wool logician who spared no one from his aggressive drive toward truth. In the middle of a polite-but-meaningless conversation, he would cry “Stop!” and demand the speaker’s reasoning for their words—for instance, objecting that to call war crimes “beastly” made no sense, because beasts don’t commit them. Instead, such crimes must be called “human.” 

Lewis at first felt rather bruised by this tendency in his tutor but quickly came to delight in it, and he felt for the Great Knock both affection and great respect. His days studying at the Great Knock’s home in Surrey were some of his happiest. There he learned to love the Greek writers, especially Homer, and spent his free time reading extensively in French and English. 

He writes that the plan of his life there—reading and writing in the morning, stepping out for a walk in the afternoon, and ending the day with friends—is still his model of perfection. However, he says it’s fortunate that he’s never been allowed to live it for long, because it’s almost entirely selfish. Here he draws a distinction between selfishness and self-centeredness: to be selfish is to live for oneself but think of other things, whereas to be self-centered is to think mostly of yourself while remaining capable of doing good works for others. Both, he says, are ultimately poisonous to the soul, but selfish people are more fun than self-centered people in the meantime.

He also reflects that, in learning to love the unfamiliar landscape of Surrey, cozier than his beloved Belfast, he learned to avoid comparison and judgment, instead teaching himself to: “Shut your mouth; open your eyes and ears. Take in what is there and give no thought to what might have been there or what is somewhere else. That can come later, if it must come at all” (146). This practice, he says, is good training for a Christian life.

During these years, when Lewis was at home, he spent much of his time with his friend Arthur. His brother was serving as a soldier in WWI, and while he was in a relatively safe post and Lewis didn’t consciously worry about him much, he was troubled by a recurring image of his ghost in the garden, trying and failing to speak.

Lewis knew that he, too, was likely to end up enlisting, but he put this knowledge out of his mind to a degree that he feels the reader might find incredible. He explains that this kind of denial was a skill he practiced as an unhappy schoolboy, when you couldn’t think about the beginning of term during the holiday if you didn’t want the holiday to be ruined.

Instead, he spent lots of time with his beloved friends. He writes of his and Arthur’s good influence on each other. Lewis taught Arthur to love poetry, and Arthur taught Lewis to love not merely what was wild and sublime in nature, but what was homey and cozy. They found new delights in the combination of their likings: 

[…] best of all we liked it when the Homely and the unhomely met in sharp juxtaposition; if a little kitchen garden ran steeply up a narrowing enclave of fertile ground surrounded by outcroppings and furze, or some shivering quarry pool under a moonrise could be seen on our left, and on our right the smoking chimney and lamplit window of a cottage that was just settling down for the night (158). 

Lewis laments how the advent of the car has diminished the feeling of liberty and adventure that he and Arthur used to get from exploring on foot: Cars eat up distance more rapidly than one can fully experience it.

He gravely admits that he allowed himself to go through his Confirmation in a state of complete unbelief, just to keep the peace at home. He and his father continued to have a difficult relationship—friendly on the surface, but with no real understanding beneath—and he knew that to object to being confirmed would only cause more miscommunications. As a believer at the time of writing, he feels profound regret for this insincerity.