Surprised by Joy

Lewis tells us about his family background. He was born in Belfast in 1898. His parents were both well-educated and thoughtful people but very different in temperament. His father, a lawyer, was passionate and emotional. His mother was cheerful and level-headed. They had two sons, and Lewis was the younger. Lewis remembers preferring his mother’s way of being from a young age: He was embarrassed by his father’s intense and mercurial feelings. While Lewis’s parents were big readers, neither of them shared his taste for what he calls “the horns of elfland”: Lewis always gravitated toward the magical and romantic (5).

Lewis was very close to his older brother. Together, they elaborated a shared imaginary world. His brother’s part of the world was based on a mythic Edwardian idea of India, and Lewis’s was called Animal-Land, a world of anthropomorphic animals. Lewis picks out two vivid memories as especially important, one beautiful and one frightening. He remembers being moved by a miniature garden his brother made out of moss and flowers in the lid of a biscuit tin: “It made me aware of nature—not, indeed, as a storehouse of forms and colors but as something cool, dewy, fresh, exuberant” (7). In the second memory, he recalls having intense nightmares about insects, triggered by “a certain detestable picture in one of my nursery books” of a tiny child being menaced by a giant beetle (9).

He remembers, too, moving to the vast and maze-like New House, whose attics, corridors, views out over Belfast Lough, and endless piles of books influenced his developing imagination. At the New House he began to write stories and had some of his first experiences of the feeling that he’ll go on to call “Joy.” One was a sudden overwhelming memory of the feeling of the biscuit-tin garden that came over him as he stood by a flowering currant-bush in summer: “It was a sensation, of course, of desire; but desire for what?” (16) Others came through books: He fell in love with “the Idea of Autumn” through Beatrix Potter’s Squirrel Nutkin and with a feeling of “Northernness” through Tegner’s Drapa (16-17). 

The “Joy” that these experiences raised in him is, he says, the heart of this book. He defines it as a feeling of intense desire that is itself desirable, that fades almost as soon as it appears, and that one wants back more than anything: “I doubt whether anyone who has tasted it would ever, if both were in his power, exchange it for all the pleasures in the world. But then Joy is never in our power and pleasure often is” (18).

Lewis’s happy childhood came to an end with the death of his mother. He recalls his mourning, his horror of her dead body, and a sad unexpected consequence: His and his brother’s confusion and upset over their father’s wild grief drove a permanent wedge between parent and children. He also remembers his simple childhood religious beliefs. He notes that he, like many children, imagined God as a sort of divine but unreliable wish-dispenser. Though he prayed for his mother to recover, he wasn’t especially surprised when it didn’t work.

This chapter tells of Lewis’s early experiences at boarding school in England. He and his brother attended a dismal institution run by a headmaster nicknamed “Oldie,” whose teaching was largely worthless; the boys were made to do endless arithmetic to keep them out of trouble. Lewis’s most vivid memories of this school are to do with beatings, doled out disproportionately to boys of lower social status. When the school at last shut down, there were rumors that Oldie had gone insane.

Within this oppressive environment, Lewis found stalwart friendship and intellectual conversation among the other boys, and he remembers:

[…] the first metaphysical argument I ever took part in. We debated whether the future was like a line you can’t see or like a line that is not yet drawn. I have forgotten which side I took though I know that I took it with great zeal (32).

He also recalls developing his first sincere religious beliefs, motivated by the High Anglican seriousness he found at school and the matter-of-factness with which it was taught to him: “I began seriously to pray and to read my Bible and to attempt to obey my conscience” (34). Some of his religious effort around this time, he writes, was motivated by a fear of Hell—and while his critics have sometimes suspected that his childhood religion must therefore have been intense and Puritanical, he attributes his interest in Hell not to the meat-and-potatoes Protestantism he was brought up with, but to this early encounter with a more baroque form of Anglicanism.

More happily, he remembers his misery at school as good training in the Christian virtue of hope: He learned that, no matter how terrible school was, term time would eventually end, and you’d get to go home. Mr. Lewis grew further and further from his sons as they spent more time at school, and he did not always know how best to talk to them. His lawyerly instincts sometimes ran away with him, and when the children misbehaved, he’d deliver elaborate monologues that terrified them when they were little and struck them as ludicrous as they grew up. However, Mr. Lewis was also often good-humored and funny, and Lewis remembers him with both fondness and regret.

Lewis’s experience of Joy largely went underground during these years, and he sees this change paralleled in his reading: mostly science fiction and wish-fulfillment school stories. He doesn’t think much of this kind of literature in retrospect. It contains, he feels, none of the “other, the more elusive, and genuinely imaginative, impulse” (36).

As Lewis and his brother grew up, they spent a lot of happy time at the house of one of their mother’s cousins. This house was called Mountbracken, and Lewis credits the time he spent there with teaching him “whatever I know (it is not much) of courtesy and savoir faire” (44). He remembers his aunt, his uncle, and his three older cousins (all beautiful and sensible women) with love and respect.

He has less fond memories of his social life at the time. He was a precocious and awkward schoolboy and often felt misunderstood. Adults believed him to be showing off with his bookish vocabulary when in fact he would very much have preferred to speak like a normal kid—he just didn’t quite know how. He remembers, in particular, hating the formal neighborhood parties he and his brother would be invited to, noting, “how a small boy who can neither flirt nor drink should be expected to enjoy prancing about on a polished floor till the small hours of the morning, is beyond my conception” (47).

His happiest times in this era came when Oldie’s terrible school closed and he was transferred to a nearby Belfast school, which he calls Campbell. While the school itself was unremarkable, it was near enough to his house that he was allowed to go home on Sundays. There he could satisfy his love of solitude, and he began again to read fairy tales: “I fell deeply under the spell of Dwarfs […]. I visualized them so intensely that […] once, walking in the garden, I was for a second not quite sure that a little man had not run past me into the shrubbery” (55).

When Lewis aged out of Campbell, he returned to England to attend a school he calls Chartres, which was next door to his brother’s prep school, which he calls Wyvern. This was a better school than his previous ones, and he has no complaints about his education there. However, he also remembers this as the time when he lost what religion he had. 

He traces some of his loss of faith to the school’s matron (or school nurse), Miss C, a kind and loving woman who, in her own spiritual seeking, had become interested in Occultism, Rosicrucianism, and other spiritualist movements of the era. Lewis became fascinated with “the idea that there might be real marvels all about us, that the visible world might be only a curtain to conceal huge realms uncharted by my very simple theology” (60). He felt the vague, undemanding excitement of these systems of thought as a huge relief; he had begun to feel his religiosity as a burden through too-strenuous efforts to really feel all his prayers. He looks back on those efforts as fundamentally misguided: Forcing yourself to feel a certain way isn’t what prayer is about and doesn’t work anyway.

He also found cause for doubt in the way he was taught the pre-Christian Classical writers: “The accepted position seemed to be that religions were normally a mere farrago of nonsense, though our own, by a fortunate exception, was exactly true. […] On what grounds could I believe in this exception?” (63). He remembers, as well, an ingrained pessimism in his young self, born not only of his bereavement but of a general sense that the world never quite works the way you want it to—and that no loving God could have made a world so imperfect as this one. 

During this time, he found himself falling into snobbery and faddishness, under the influence of a rakish young headmaster the students called “Pogo.” Lewis remembers becoming fashionable and vain, to little good effect: “I am one of those on whom Nature has laid the doom that whatever they buy and whatever they wear they will always look as if they had come out of an old clothes shop” (67). He also remembers an intense sexual passion for a dancing teacher—not at all a romantic feeling, he says, but purely lustful. These years, though happier and freer, seem to him to have turned him from what was truly important and meaningful.

Lewis remembers emerging out of this spiritually dark time in one overpowering moment: He saw an Arthur Rackham illustration for Siegfried and the Twilight of the Gods in a newspaper and was struck by a wave of that same Joy he had experienced in the feeling of “Northernness” as a child. This resurgence restored him to himself and began a whole new era of his life.

Enraptured by Norse mythology and then by Wagner’s Ring cycle, he began writing his own verse version of the Nibelung story, and his indulgent older brother chipped in to buy an edition of the stories with the Rackham illustrations. Lewis was hooked, finding in these legends what he had lacked in his desultory experience of religion: “something very like adoration, some kind of quite disinterested self-abandonment to an object which securely claimed this by simply being the object that it was” (77). This reaction arose not out of a religious belief in the Norse gods, but out of an intense aesthetic devotion that he later learned to understand in the context of his Christianity. This response also made him a deeper appreciator of the natural world. In looking for places in the countryside where he could imagine scenes from Norse myth, he discovered a feeling for natural beauty.

These events, Lewis writes, were the beginning of a split in his life: His inner imaginative life, driven by that painful-pleasurable longing he calls Joy and characterized by his love of the myths, felt increasingly distinct from his daily life. He recalls, as a point of contrast, his and his brother’s continued adventures in their imaginative world. During this period, they united their imagined Animal-Land and India into one nation, Boxen. This lovingly elaborated country was populated by distinctive characters like Lord Big, a flamboyant frog politician who bore no small resemblance to their father (and who, Lewis says, was also a prescient portrait of Winston Churchill). This world, while creative, did not contain that stab of longing: It was just a game and a part of what Lewis calls his “outer” life. At last, Lewis left Chartres and went on scholarship to join his brother at Wyvern.