The autobiographical writings of both Jack and Warnie portray Albert as a well-intentioned but irritating man. Behind his back, the boys complained about him constantly and mocked his many foibles. They invented a nickname for him, the P’daytabird, and wrote each other letters grumbling about the “rows after tea and penitentiary strolls in the garden” that dominated their home life when he was around. When Jack was an undergraduate, he described Albert to a friend as “one for whom I have little affection and whose society has for many years given me much discomfort and no pleasure.” This, as Lewis seems acutely aware in Surprised by Joy, was unkind and looks especially bad in retrospect; Albert’s peculiarities were hardly the caliber of sin that merits rejection by one’s own children.
Lewis’s most distinguished biographer, A. N. Wilson, regards the boys’ coolness toward their father as a personal failing, at least on Jack’s part. He characterizes the portrait of Albert in Surprised by Joy as “devastatingly cruel” and Jack’s resentment of his financial dependence on his father during his early Oxford years as amounting to a “venomous” hostility; Albert’s own diary confirms that he sometimes felt mistreated and disrespected by Jack. Yet in Jack and Warnie’s defense, consider how much easier it is to reconcile with a charming friend who has wronged you once (if seriously) than it is to get along with someone who aggravates you three times an hour every single hour you spend with him. People like this are not any more endurable because they’re technically harmless or mean well.
Wilson argues, plausibly, that guilt over how he’d behaved toward Albert would haunt Jack for the rest of his life; “I treated my own father abominably,” Lewis once wrote to a friend after Albert’s death in 1929, “and no sin in my whole life now seems to be so serious.” No doubt Lewis learned to value patience and forbearance in his later years because he knew all too well how difficult it can be to summon both. In his adulthood, when he would be sorely tested in this department, Lewis’s Christianity gave him a moral framework in which to place all the small annoyances of difficult relationships. Indulging a querulous person’s unreasonable little demands and eccentricities could then be transfigured in Lewis’s mind into a cross to bear, a hair shirt, an opportunity to demonstrate that his faith had humbled him.
I have more sympathy for the young Lewis (and his brother) than Lewis had for himself — more than Wilson has, too. In their memoirs, Warnie and Jack both try repeatedly to capture the particular manner that Albert had of vexing them; you can sense their frustration at not being able to get it right, at failing to convey just how bad things could be. Their grievances do sound minor, but they’re revealing all the same. In a memoir that was later condensed to serve as the introduction to a volume of his brother’s letters, Warnie explained why Jack avoided inviting Arthur Greeves, the boy who lived across the street and who would become a lifelong friend, into their family home:
My father would certainly have welcomed his son’s friend very cordially, but not for a moment would it have occurred to him that the two boys might want to talk together, alone. No: he would have joined them, inescapably, for a good talk about books, doing nine-tenths of the talking himself, eulogizing his own favorites without regard to their interests. Two bored and frustrated youths would have been subjected to long readings from Macaulay’s essays, Burke’s speeches, and the like, and my father would have gone to bed satisfied that he had given them a literary evening far more interesting than they could have contrived for themselves.
Albert Lewis was, furthermore, perpetually anxious and prone to hysteria, particularly about money. He did not hide this from his children. In Surprised by Joy, Lewis writes of how seriously he had once taken his father’s frequent, melodramatic talk of the poorhouse: “All security seemed to be taken from me; there was no solid ground beneath my feet.” Albert was exaggerating, but until Jack grew old enough to understand that these panicky warnings were mere “rhetoric,” he believed them, and was terrified that his family would soon be begging on the street.
Albert, although essentially kindhearted, didn’t really listen to Jack or Warnie, usually got whatever they told him about themselves wrong, and then could never be persuaded that he had misunderstood them. (This imperviousness occasionally became a serious problem, as when he sent the boys to a small boarding school run by a sadistic headmaster who eventually had to be institutionalized.) When they were all at home, he insisted that his sons be, in Lewis’s words, “as closely bound to his presence as if the three of us had been chained together,” whereupon his own peculiar habits and endless, overwrought lectures monopolized everything they did or talked about. “The theory,” Lewis wrote, “was that we lived together more like three brothers than like a father and two sons.” The reality, of course, was that Albert failed to become a virtual brother and neglected to behave like the father he actually was. Small wonder, then, that Lewis also wrote, “I thought Monday morning, when he went back to his work, the brightest jewel of the week.”
In modern parlance, we’d say Albert had boundary issues. His heart was in the right place, but he exposed his children to his raw grief, confusion, and fear when they were too young to be anything but frightened by it. He couldn’t grasp that they had thoughts or lives of their own, and so he never gathered that at times, he must necessarily be excluded from both, emotionally and physically. Even as an adult, Jack never entered his father’s house without first checking his pockets for anything he would prefer to keep private; Albert would go through them as casually as he’d enter his sons’ rooms without knocking. And thus, in Jack, “a habit of concealment” was formed. Unless you’ve had a parent of this sort, it’s hard to communicate how powerfully the sensation of perpetual intrusion shapes a child’s character or how fiercely an adolescent is likely to rebel against it.
Any habit of concealment inevitably leads to the division of one’s life and personality into compartments, and this, I believe, is a signal trait of the bookish child. “I am telling the story of two lives,” Lewis wrote of his early teens in Surprised by Joy, meaning that the outer story, set in the series of hateful boarding schools he attended after his mother’s death, must be contrasted with an inner story, contemporaneous with the first. In the inner story, Lewis reveled in “a period of ecstasy” fed by his discovery of classical and Norse mythology and his independent explorations of English literature and the Northern Irish countryside. At home, he soldiered through the weary hours with his father, and when Albert went to work, he would happily devise elaborate sagas set in the imaginary world he shared with Warnie. Best of all, on those rare, cherished occasions when he had the house to himself, he enjoyed the “complete satisfaction” of “a deeper solitude than I had ever known.”
Like many great readers, Lewis regarded his time alone as his real life. By the age of nine — the same age at which I was thinking that my hunger for Narnia might kill me — he, too, was “living almost entirely in my imagination; or at least … the imaginative experience of those years now seems to me more important than anything else.” Like Lewis’s, my material life often seemed to be nothing more than the drab and shadowy interludes between the hours when I could read and retreat to an interior realm furnished with the fabulous treasure I had scavenged from hundreds of books. I sometimes wonder if this kind of inward-turning, inward-dwelling, probably unhealthy temperament is acquired or inherited. Did tumbling into Lewis’s own imagined world at such an impressionable age imprint me with some of his traits? Or did I perhaps get my dreaming ways from my father, who liked nothing better than to escape the rumpus of family life and work alone in his garden?