Gastons

Gastons, Kirkpatrick’s house in Surrey, was both a place of rigorous tutoring and the setting for a way of life Lewis later remembered as his model of a normal day. Its small upstairs study became the center of an education built on plunging directly into Greek, while the household’s ordered hours and solitary walks gave Gastons an enduring place in his idea of a settled, contemplative life.

The House and Its Study

Lewis arrived at Gastons on a Saturday. Kirkpatrick announced that Homer would begin on Monday; when Lewis explained that he had read only Attic Greek, he expected preparatory lessons in the epic dialect. Kirkpatrick answered with his characteristic brief sound, and Lewis spent the weekend apprehensive about the approaching task.

At nine on Monday morning they sat down in a small upstairs study. Its furnishings were plain and specific: a sofa where tutor and pupil sat side by side, a table and chair for Lewis’s independent work, a bookcase, a gas stove, and a framed photograph of Mr. Gladstone. The room’s familiarity grew from repeated work rather than ceremony. It was here that Gastons became, for Lewis, an everyday school of concentrated attention.

Learning Greek by Immersion

Kirkpatrick opened the Iliad at Book I and read roughly the first twenty lines aloud in a pronunciation Lewis had never heard. His Ulster voice, with its full gutturals, rolling r’s, and varied vowels, gave the Bronze Age epic a sound Lewis found suited to it. Kirkpatrick then translated about a hundred lines with very few explanations, handed Lewis Crusius’s Lexicon, and left him to retrace the passage himself.

The method worked by steadily extending what Lewis could read unaided. At first he could follow only a short stretch of the trail Kirkpatrick had opened; with daily practice he covered the same ground, then began to go beyond it. The exercise became a game of seeing how far he could push his reading. Its decisive result was not merely faster translation: Lewis began to understand Greek without mentally replacing it with English. He described this as beginning to think in the language, rather than treating each line as a puzzle whose answer had to be found in a lexicon.

Homer remained the center of the work. Month after month, they read extensively through the Iliad and then the Odyssey, until the music of the verse and the clarity of its recurring formulas had become part of Lewis’s experience. His early appreciation was romanticized, shaped by William Morris, but he later considered that youthful response preferable to an overcorrected, bloodless classicism. The imaginative coloring of his Homeric reading changed with age; the force of the poems’ wanderings remained.

Studies and Household Routine

Gastons’ instruction extended well beyond Homer. Lewis read Demosthenes and Cicero, Lucretius, Catullus, Tacitus, Herodotus, Virgil, and the Greek tragedians, and did Greek and Latin composition. Virgil did not yet appeal to him. In the evenings, Mrs. Kirkpatrick taught him French by a method comparable to her husband’s approach to Homer; they read many novels, and Lewis soon began buying French books for himself.

Kirkpatrick initially directed Lewis’s English reading, then gave him freedom when he saw that Lewis would choose books seriously on his own. Later they turned to German and Italian, again moving quickly from only brief contact with grammar and exercises into works such as Faust and the Inferno. Lewis made progress in Italian, but left Gastons before he could develop his German beyond a schoolboy level. The limits of that unfinished study remained with him.

The daily pattern at Gastons became a lasting ideal. Lewis recalled breakfast at eight and work at his desk from nine until one, lunch at one, and a walk beginning by two. He valued walking alone because conversation could drown out the countryside’s sounds and silences; the rare companion he welcomed was one who shared the same response to a landscape so fully that a glance or pause could communicate it. He hoped to return from the walk in time for tea at about four fifteen, then read or work again from five until seven. Evening was for a meal, conversation, or lighter reading, with bed before eleven.

The household’s habits shaped what Lewis considered compatible pleasures. Eating and reading could be combined, especially with books that could be opened anywhere; he named Boswell, a translation of Herodotus, and Lang’s History of English Literature among the works suited to the table. Poetry, by contrast, seemed inappropriate there. The schedule was not only a timetable: it joined sustained intellectual labor to solitude, outdoor attention, and conversation, and became the pattern against which Lewis measured later days.

Memory and Significance

Lewis called Gastons’ rhythm a “normal” day even though he acknowledged how rarely such days occur. He remembered his life with Kirkpatrick as nearly the reality of a settled, calm existence, and also recognized its selfishness: its pleasures turned his mind toward many things beyond himself, but required little interruption by other people’s claims. Gastons therefore stands in his account as both a formative place of learning and an attractive ideal whose limitations he could see.

That ideal was made out of particular practices rather than abstract nostalgia: Homer read in large daily portions, a lexicon used after immersion in the text, a return to the desk after a walk, and reading fitted around meals and evening talk. Gastons gave Lewis an education in which intellectual discipline and receptive attention belonged to the same day, and left him with a durable measure of the life he wished he could lead.