The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings

by Philip Zaleski

  But there is something amiss. Lewis himself admits as much in his preface to the third edition; the tale suffers from “needless obscurity, and an uncharitable temper.” The first fault, relatively minor, Lewis ascribes to his naïve understanding of Romanticism and his equally naïve assumption that John is truly Everyman, that his (and Lewis’s) path to Christianity is that of every pilgrim; the difficulties of writing allegory, especially one that suits the modern temperament, also played a part. It is the second fault that grates. The tale abounds in straw men, set up to be knocked down. John is faced, not with a series of personified virtues and vices such as Bunyan’s Christian faces, but with a catalog of Lewis’s bêtes noires, with Theosophists, high Anglicans, scholastics, modernists, materialists, rationalists, Freudians, Hegelians, pantheists, and exponents of “Oriental pessimism and self-torture.” Satire overwhelms wit; vulgarity ensues, epitomized by Lewis’s depiction of an avant-garde party in which all the women look like men and all the men like women, and one of the “Clevers” sings to the crowd, in crude parody of the poetry of Eliot and other modernists, “Globol obol ookle ogle globol gloogle gloo.” The book, for all its good intentions and brilliant passages, lacks what Lewis himself lacked at the time: the gentleness of charity. Like many young converts, he makes too strong a case. He would spend the following decades learning how to cut his venom with honey.

  It’s noteworthy that Lewis wrote The Pilgrim’s Regress while completing The Allegory of Love. He was also experimenting with allegory in an alliterative poem, “The Planets,” written because “the character of the planets, as conceived by medieval astrology, seem to me to have a permanent value as spiritual symbols—to provide a Phänomenologie des Geistes which is specially worth while in our own generation.” For the poets of classical antiquity, Lewis observed, allegory was the sleeping chamber of the fading gods; for Christians the planetary gods could live on, in this poetically diminished form, as conduits and symbols of the moral life: “the twilight of the gods is the mid-morning of the personifications.” The idea was attractive to Lewis, the lover of myth, for why, he reasoned, should dullness be the price for monotheistic conversion? Why shouldn’t the planetary intelligences continue their dance under the all-ruling Sun, just as they did in the Christian Middle Ages? The Lewis scholar Michael Ward has suggested in his deeply insightful Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C. S. Lewis, that planetary symbolism is the key to much else in Lewis’s work, The Chronicles of Narnia above all. At the very least, Lewis never abandoned the medieval model of the cosmos, even though the lukewarm outcome of The Pilgrim’s Regress taught him to wear his allegory lightly.

  “Something Was Broken”

  Meanwhile, Barfield, uncertain about his career, had relocated to London. His passion for dancing and theater remained, but passion does not translate easily into a good income. He had enjoyed some success placing poems and essays but longed to tackle a more significant work; perhaps, he thought, he could make a go of it as a literary man. In 1929, while on holiday with Maud in Germany, he began work on a long novel of manners, English People. The book recounts the interactions of young people as they discourse on Christianity, psychoanalysis, art, literature, occultism, and other concerns of the day. It features a German seer named Karl Brockmann, obviously modeled upon Steiner, some bright prose (Lewis, in a letter to Arthur, praises Barfield’s account of falling asleep), and numerous occult ruminations. It never found a publisher. Barfield, devastated by this failure, turned his back upon a writing career. What next? With a family to support—he and Maud had adopted a child, Alexander (b. 1928), in 1929—earning money had become imperative. He found a viable if not happy solution around 1930 by joining his father’s London law firm, a small company that specialized in probate and real estate law and the like. He learned the ropes, passed the solicitor’s exam, and practiced law for the next thirty years.

  His friendship with Lewis was changing, too. At the end of 1929, Lewis had visited him and Maud for four days, and the two friends had a splendid time talking and poring over Aristotle’s Ethics and Dante’s Paradiso in “an uninterrupted feast.” But all the while, Lewis was harboring doubts about the relationship. He mentions in a letter to Arthur, while recounting staying awake with Barfield until dawn to hear the cock crow, that “Barfield doesn’t really taste a thing like that as keenly as you and I.” Barfield felt the estrangement keenly, certainly more keenly than Lewis, and “had the feeling that something was broken” between the two. The friendship was entering a new phase, still warm but more remote. In September 1931, Barfield attempted to reopen the “Great War,” but Lewis rejected the overture. “I don’t think I ever heard him speak with such emotion,” recalled Barfield. “He simply refused to talk at that sort of depth at all. I remember his saying, and again with more emotion than I ever heard him express: I can’t bear it!”

  Why should he bear it? Lewis, a newly minted Christian, had a new religious cosmos to explore and new opponents to challenge. Barfield, rooted in his old beliefs, felt hurt and half-abandoned. In the 1940s, the bitterness he experienced over the situation would erupt in satire—written in Greek and parodying the prologue of the Gospel according to John—squarely directed at his friend (whom he calls the “philosopher”). “Biographia Theologica” remains, in its portrait of Lewis as an arrogant, spiritually blind philosopher-prophet, the harshest—perhaps the only truly harsh—thing that Barfield wrote. The English translation runs:

  Lo, there was a certain philosopher, and the philosopher knew himself, that he was one. And the Word that came about in the philosopher was the one God. And the Word was the light of his philosophy. And the light shines in the philosophy, and the philosopher knew it not. It was in the philosopher, and the philosophy came about through it, and the philosopher knew it not. And indeed, the philosopher denied that anyone is ever able in any way to behold the light. But when he beheld the light, the philosopher said that its name was “Lord.” And the philosophy bore testimony to the light, that it is the Word and the life of men [anthropōn], and to the philosopher, that he was born not of blood, nor of the will of flesh, nor of the will of man [andros], nor through a command of a lord, but of God. But the philosopher did not comprehend the testimony.

  In a 1969 addendum, Barfield would note that “I don’t think I ever showed it to him, although I felt a strong impulse to do so. If I did, then he paid scant attention to it; if I didn’t, it was because I was afraid of his paying scant attention to it.”

  9

  INKLINGS ASSEMBLE

  During 1932, a precocious Oxford undergraduate by the name of Edward Tangye Lean published two novels, Of Unsound Mind and Storm in Oxford: A Fantasy, that attracted scant attention and small sales. Lean subsequently enjoyed a career as a journalist and broadcaster with the BBC, but he is remembered today for other, more adventitious accomplishments: secondarily as the younger brother of the film director David Lean; primarily as the founder, while an undergraduate, of a small literary society of students and dons that he called the Inklings. The name, which rides the seesaw between cuteness and cloying, pays homage to those who express themselves through ink as well as those who discover, through their inky labors, inklings of a higher world. Many readers will have noticed the aptness and even prescience of Lean’s book titles, the first diagnosing the modern world in very Inklings-like fashion, the second foreseeing the Inklings’ preferred literary method for effecting a cure.

  Lean’s group met in his suite at University College, and Tolkien and Lewis soon joined. In a 1967 letter, Tolkien remembered Lean as wishing to buck the general trend of clubs that come and go by producing one that would “prove more lasting.” He succeeded beyond all measure, thanks to the course the Inklings would take after his departure from the university in 1933. Lean’s original design for the group did much to ensure its longevity. Each meeting, as Tolkien recalled it, consisted of members reading aloud “unpublished compositions”—Tolkien read his poem “Errantry”
at one gathering, and it seems likely that Lean read portions of his unpublished fiction—followed by “immediate criticism” from others. This method differed from that of other Oxford literary circles of the day. The Martlets, for example, in which Lewis was active, also featured readings of unpublished compositions, but these were polished papers, like his “Is Literature an Art?” or Ronald Knox’s “Detective-Stories.” The Cave offered English School schmoozing and congenial literary chitchat (erotic doggerel dominated one meeting, Lewis told Warnie), but this sort of thing could be found almost anywhere. Lean’s innovative emphasis upon work in progress was a brilliant advance that sowed the seeds of its own success; as long as members continued to refine existing works or turn out new ones—and in Lewis, Tolkien, and Lean, among the early members, the will to write was very strong indeed—the group would have momentum. Each meeting led to the next as naturally as one sentence follows another. When Lean graduated from Oxford, the group, or at least its name, fell with seeming inevitability into Lewis’s lap. After a brief hiatus, he adopted it for his own “undetermined and unelected” (Tolkien’s description) circle of friends, and the assembly that we know today as the Inklings was born.

  Thus runs one account—one creation myth, one is tempted to say—of the origin of the Inklings. There are others. Barfield always insisted that the Inklings began, de facto if not de jure, in the late 1920s, long before the group received its formal appellation, in the walking tours and other gatherings of the early principals. If this is so, we might situate the first stirrings in the three-way debates between Lewis, Barfield, and Harwood at Harwood’s cottage outside Beckley during the Lewis-Barfield “Great War.” During Easter 1927, these three, along with the Anthroposophist Walter O. “Wof” Field, spent their days walking the beautiful Berkshire Downs and their evenings in “philosophical discussion.” By 1928, regular meetings between Lewis and Tolkien were in full swing and made for “one of the pleasantest spots of the week,” as Lewis wrote to his brother. “Sometimes we talk English school politics, sometimes we criticise one another’s poems; other days we drift into theology or ‘the state of the nation’: rarely we fly no higher than bawdy and ‘puns.’” Meanwhile, other embryonic proto-Inkling gatherings took place. In 1927, Barfield met Tolkien for the first time, at a meal sponsored by Lewis at the Eastgate Hotel; Tolkien was in a prickly mood, “ridiculously combative,” according to Barfield, who, nonetheless, hungry for intellectual companionship, enjoyed himself immensely.

  Soon a core group, consisting of Barfield, Tolkien, and Lewis, with Coghill and one or two others tossed in on occasion, began meeting regularly for long discussions in Lewis’s Magdalen quarters. Conversation was crucial to each session; if the stated purpose of the Inklings was to read and critique one another’s writings, the implicit but universally acknowledged aim was to revel in one another’s talk. Often gatherings had no readings at all, only loud, boisterous back-and-forth on a vast range of topics. Among the Inklings, pen and tongue held equal sway.

  What was discussed? Our knowledge is woefully incomplete. This is a strange circumstance, at first glance, given the loquaciousness and eventual fame of so many of the members, but it is not entirely strange when one remembers that at the time, these young men had little or no idea that their gatherings would pass into literary legend. No minutes were kept, no recordings made. In later years the Inklings’ pens, so ready to flow on other subjects, remained lamentably dry when it came to early Inklingsiana. Desire for privacy was the principal reason; the members liked and protected one another, especially from unwarranted public scrutiny, even after the group had dissolved. Warnie’s lament is seconded by many: “Had I known that I was to have outlived Jack I would have played Boswell on those Thursday evenings, but as it is, I am afraid that my diary contains only the scantiest material for reconstructing an Inklings.” Warnie’s diary was not without its revealing incidents, however; as a representative sample, he records an evening in February when conversation ran to “red-brick universities … torture, Tertullian, bores, the contractual theory of medieval kingship, and odd place-names.” Humphrey Carpenter’s vivid account of a meeting, the centerpiece of his entertaining 1978 study The Inklings, is, alas, not what many readers take it to be, a report of an actual gathering, but rather a patchwork, assembled from numerous published and unpublished memoirs and letters. Barfield considered the reconstruction “surprisingly successful,” but Havard, reflecting on his Inkling days in an interview with Lyle W. Dorsett, found it to be “quite unreal.” It may be that Tolkien came closest to capturing the flavor of these Thursday events, which went on for nearly twenty years, in his little-read, unfinished 1945 novel, The Notion Club Papers—“notion” being, of course, a synonym for “inkling,” in the sense of an idea not yet fully realized.

  The Notion Club Papers presents itself as minutes, discovered in 2012 in a waste container in the basement of the Oxford University examination rooms, of a number of meetings of a literary/philosophical circle clearly modeled upon the Inklings. The recorded conversations focus on dreams, space travel, language, and related topics, before turning into a meandering and confusing account of the legend of Númenor, an island in the Great Sea west of Middle-earth based loosely on Atlantis. Many find The Notion Club Papers difficult to read, but it contains splendid composite portraits of several of the Inklings. The club’s leading personality is Michael George Ramer, professor of Finno-Ugric philology “but better known as a writer of romances” (Tolkien originally entitled the first part of the novel “The Ramblings of Michael Ramer: Out of the Talkative Planet”). Others include Rupert Dolbear, a chemist with red hair and beard; Alwin Arundel Lowdham (originally Loudham), a lecturer in English “chiefly interested in Anglo-Saxon, Icelandic, and Comparative Philology”; and Philip Frankley (originally Franks), “a poet … intolerant of all things Northern or Germanic.” Tolkien appended a sheet of paper to an early manuscript of the book, listing correspondences between these invented characters and the Inklings. He identified Ramer as “Self,” then changed his mind and wrote “CSL” before crossing that out also. Lowdham is revealed as “HVD” (Henry Victor Dyson) and Dolbear as “Havard” (i.e., Dr. Robert Havard, Lewis’s doctor, who joined the group in 1935). Later, Tolkien abandoned these strict equivalences, warning his readers—presumably the Inklings—“not to look for their own faces in my mirror. For the mirror is cracked…” Yet resemblances peek through. Lowdham’s irascibility and penchant for cutting jokes, embodied in his original name of Loudham, perfectly captures Dyson, while Dolbear’s red hair points to Havard. What The Notion Club Papers most richly conveys, however, is the rough humor, argument, wordplay, literary passions, and freewheeling philosophical and philological speculation of the imagined club’s real-life counterpart.

  The Inklings’ reticence to describe their gatherings began early in their history. Lewis’s first written reference appears in a letter to Charles Williams dated March 11, 1936, years after meetings got under way. Tolkien remained silent on the subject, at least in his published correspondence, until February 18, 1938, when he informed his publisher, Stanley Unwin, that Lewis’s space thriller, Out of the Silent Planet, had been “read aloud to our local club (which goes in for reading things short and long aloud),” adding that the novel “was highly approved. But of course we are all rather like-minded.” Like-minded indeed, and that by design. Lewis’s letter to Williams characterizes the Inklings as a group of Christians who like to write. That might do as a description of the genus. But Inkling authenticus, the actual species, shared more precise characteristics, including intellectual vivacity, love of myth, conservative politics, memories of war, and a passion for beef, beer, and verbal battle. The Inkling David Cecil adds to this “a feeling for literature, which united, in an unusual way, scholarship and imagination.” And one had to be male. An apocryphal tale, making the rounds of Oxford to this day, tells that Dorothy L. Sayers, fed up with the group’s veto on female membership, hammered one day on the entra
nce of the Bird and Baby while a meeting of the boys was in session. An owlish Inkling peered out, recoiled, and slammed the door in her face. The tale is an invention—pub doors are not barred against visitors and, in any event, Sayers was far too subtle to confront her friends in this manner—but it does underscore the Inklings’ policy, which was hardly unique in Oxford at the time. From first meeting to last, the group remained completely, inviolately male; Lewis spoke for almost every member when he said, “There’s no sound I like better than adult male laughter.”

  Nonetheless, the Inklings were anything but monolithic. Even in the early years, the club embraced a variety of professions, including don, doctor, lawyer, and soldier; the popular image of the Inklings as sequestered academics is clearly inadequate. The members’ shared Christianity also included a wide spectrum of views. Tolkien was Catholic; Barfield, Anthroposophist; Lewis, a “mere Christian”; Charles Williams, Anglican with a dash of ritual magic. Differences notwithstanding, the members were glued together by shared adherence to the Nicene Creed (with Barfield a possible exception until the late 1940s) and a shared set of enemies, including atheists, totalitarians, modernists, and anyone with a shallow imagination. Above all, they were friends, encouraging, provoking, enlightening, and correcting one another. They enjoyed themselves immensely, and “adult male laughter” rang through every meeting. A circle of friends, as Lewis observed in 1960, enlarges each participant, making each entirely himself: