The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings

by Philip Zaleski

  Of Jabberwocks and Monsters

  Beowulf, the most celebrated of all Old English poems, dating from between the eighth and tenth centuries, recounts, in 3,182 lines of highly alliterative verse, the great battles between the titular hero of the Geats (a Germanic people) and a trio of marauding monsters. Tolkien probably encountered the poem long before entering Oxford. It appealed to him from the start, not only for the nobility of its characters and the romance of its bleak northern setting, but for the splendid monstrosities that Beowulf confronts, first the manlike but grotesque Grendel and his mother, descendents of Cain, and then an especially terrifying dragon. During the early 1930s, Tolkien wrote university lectures on the poem under the title of “The Historical and Legendary Tradition in Beowulf and other Old English Poems.” W. H. Auden, who was present at their delivery, declared them “an unforgettable experience,” no doubt in part because of the lecturer’s dramatic entrance, striding into the lecture hall and exclaiming in his most stentorian Anglo-Saxon voice the poem’s first line, Hwaet, we Gar-Dena! (“Hear, We the Spear-Danes”); Tolkien had a flair for theatrics, which would be revealed to the general public many years later in his audio recordings of excerpts from The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

  Tolkien began his Memorial Lecture with a similar flourish, attacking without mercy the old guard of Beowulf studies. “It is of their nature that the jabberwocks of historical and antiquarian research burble in the tulgy wood of conjecture, flitting from one tum-tum tree to another.” Beowulf criticism, he contended, for centuries has been philistine, irrelevant, misdirected, insensitive to the poem’s true greatness. The critics have read Beowulf as a storehouse of philology, history, allegory, archaeology, “a history of Sweden, a manual of Germanic antiquities, or a Nordic Summa Theologica,” anything but a great work of art, and yet above all Beowulf is a poem, noble and beautiful. Tolkien expressed his contempt by relating a now-celebrated allegory: A man builds a tower with the scattered stones of an ancient building; other men (critics) come along, see the antiquity of the stones, and fell the tower in their craven lust for the “carvings and inscriptions” they believe to be sequestered beneath it. Finding nothing, they turn away, declaring of the tower, “What a muddle it is in!” The tower-builder’s relatives join in the chorus, proclaiming “He is such an odd fellow! Imagine him using these old stones just to build a nonsensical tower!” “But,” Tolkien wryly pointed out, “from the top of that tower the man had been able to look out upon the sea.”

  It is this newly revealed sea, this ocean of myth teeming with symbol, meaning, and loveliness, that Tolkien held dear. Past critics, indifferent to myth, blind to its beauty and force, complained that the Beowulf author had wasted his genius on a poem about trivialities like monsters and dragons, “as if Milton had recounted the story of Jack and the Beanstalk in noble verse.” To Tolkien, however, monsters are not a secondary and unfortunate element in the poem but lie at its heart. Beowulf tells of men combating fundamental evils, “the hostile world and the offspring of the dark,” and the presence of monsters—Grendel, Grendel’s mother, and the dragon—as embodiments of chaos bestows upon the poem “its lofty tone and high seriousness.” These fantastic beasts transform an adventure story into early England’s finest example of poetry that “glimpses the cosmic”; in Beowulf “we look down as if from a visionary height upon the house of man in the valley of the world.” Beowulf is also a fundamentally Christian myth, revealing the truth that “a Christian was (and is) still like his forefathers a mortal hemmed in a hostile world.”

  Tolkien’s argument changed forever the landscape of Beowulf scholarship. He said what everyone wanted to hear but no one had mustered the courage to say: that Beowulf was a great poem, a joy to read, a masterpiece of mythopoeic art. And more: that the Beowulf author liked dragons, and so did Tolkien, and, as almost all Old English critics confessed to themselves then and since, so did they. A typically enthusiastic response came from R. W. Chambers, a Beowulf expert, who read the work in manuscript and wrote to Tolkien: “You must not delete a single word or line from your lecture. I have read it through twice over with the greatest enjoyment.”

  The talk does have flaws. Tolkien’s structural analysis, in which he argues that the presentation of each line, divided into two balanced halves, echoes the design of the poem as a whole, has not convinced some scholars. Nor do all second his jejeune complaint that criticism can never grasp the mythic imagination, for “myth is alive at once and in all its parts, and dies before it can be dissected,” a claim that his own brilliant discussion of myth contradicts. Nonetheless, Tolkien forever reclaimed Beowulf from its naysayers and returned it to those who love it. In the process, he produced the first of his two important manifestos upon the possibilities of mythic art (the second and greater would come in 1947 in the essay “On Fairy-Stories”). Few who have read “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” and absorbed its arguments will agree with those who find The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings, with their wizards and dragons and magic rings, suitable only for children.

  Barfield in Eclipse

  As Tolkien expanded his literary powers, Barfield reined his in. Legal matters, for which he had little love or aptitude, occupied most of the day. Never the most important figure in the firm—when his father died, another lawyer by the name of Reynolds became the new senior partner—Barfield toiled in the background, mired in the drudgery of mortgages, transfers of property, and other real estate transactions. Sometimes shafts of sunlight broke the dreariness: he and Maud took pleasure in their young son, Alexander, and, a few years later, in a daughter, Lucy (b. 1935), also adopted, who would become Lewis’s godchild, “a very lively and happy child—apt for instance to be seen turning somersault-wheels in the garden immediately after a meal.”

  Badly burned by his experience with English People, Barfield had given up writing long novels but mentioned to Lewis that he would like to attempt a play. “Why not take one of the myths and simply do your best with it—Orpheus for instance,” was his friend’s reply. Orpheus, the drama that resulted, displays an impressive array of poetic forms—Lewis spotted alliterative lines, trochaics, couplets, blank verse, and lyrics—and a exultant vision of Steinerian final participation in which the human race “shall ascend Parnassus awake and find his soul.” The Anthroposophical elements elevate the dialogue but weaken the dramatic flow; Lewis found act 2 “simply superb,” but other parts left him cold. Barfield also managed, during this largely fallow period, to write a handful of poems; he placed the melancholy “The Village Dance” in the London Mercury (June 1931), and “Habeas Corpus” in G.K.’s Weekly (February 27, 1932). In 1933 he coauthored, with Lewis, a comic soufflé, “Abecedarium Philosophicum” for The Oxford Magazine, skewering famous philosophers through rhymed couplets in alphabetical order (“H is for Hume, who awoke Kant from nappin’ / He said: ‘There’s no causes for things, they just happen’”). But as the Lewis scholar Don W. King points out, this conceit is borrowed—without improvement, one might add—from Lewis Carroll’s “Examination Statute,” a send-up of Oxford dignitaries (“A is for [Acland], who’d physic the masses / B is for [Brodie], who swears by the gases”). Barfield’s creative energies, so spirited in The Silver Trumpet and Poetic Diction, had fallen asleep. He was, in his own words, “under eclipse.”

  It is the nature of a solar eclipse that the moon occults the sun. During these years, Barfield’s interests turned, more forcefully than ever, to the fringe, esoteric, and occult. He joined the executive council of the English Anthroposophical Society and churned out essays and reviews for Anthroposophical journals, and helped to translate texts like Hermann Poppelbaum’s Man and Animal: Their Essential Difference (1931) and, in 1936, Steiner’s own World-Economy: The Formation of a Science of World Economics. He became intrigued by C. H. Douglas’s controversial Social Credit movement, which favored a “national dividend” to supplement regular wages. The idea generated support among intellectuals and artists, includ
ing Ezra Pound, Aldous Huxley, and A. R. Orage, but failed to sway most economists and government leaders and soon faded from view. Douglas’s anti-Semitism—he began to point a finger at an international Jewish financial conspiracy—didn’t help matters. In the heat of his Social Credit enthusiasm, Barfield enrolled in a degree program in economics at London University but left early, after failing in geography. Things seemed to be falling apart everywhere. Steiner’s followers were splintering into factions; Hitler was on the move; Barfield was trapped in a stuffy law office in the Strand and his pen was running dry. His time had not yet come.

  Life at the Kilns

  It was good to have Warnie at hand, thought Lewis. The two brothers worked in Lewis’s Magdalen digs on weekdays, heading to the Kilns every afternoon and on weekends. Once home, they gardened, housecleaned, walked the dogs, and undertook maintenance and improvement projects such as laying gravel-and-sand footpaths through the woods. Barfield and Tolkien came for visits. Warnie edited the family papers and began to study the reign of Louis XIV, a project that would bear fruit in seven acclaimed volumes of French social and political history. He also struck up a friendship with Mrs. Moore’s daughter, Maureen. She was teaching music now, first at Monmouth School for Girls and then at Oxford High School, and she gladly began to teach Warnie how to play piano. He regaled her in turn with recordings on his new gramophone. Every so often the brothers traveled afield, visiting relatives in Scotland and going on walking tours in Herefordshire, Wales, the Chilterns, and Derbyshire. Warnie proved to have an eye for landscape: “In the afternoon J and I and the dogs did the Railway walk under conditions which were sheer delight. Everything was still, and a faint blue haze, the merest suggestion of a fog, softened all the colours to a compatible shabbiness—the sort of day when the country seems more intimate, more in undress, than at any other time.”

  The fly in the ointment was Mrs. Moore. She groused, her complaints often targeting Lewis’s new Christian faith (the Eucharist, for example, she considered no more than a “blood feast”) “in much the same way,” remarked Warnie, “that P [Pudaitabird] used to nag me in his latter years about my boyish fondness for dress, and with apparently just the same inability to grasp the fact that the development of the mind does not necessarily stop with that of the body.” Warnie developed for her a fierce dislike, which he kept under wraps as best he could until after Lewis’s death. As soon as fear of offending his brother was no longer a consideration, he published a memoir blasting Mrs. Moore as “a woman of very limited mind … In twenty years I never saw a book in her hands; her conversation was chiefly about herself, and was otherwise a matter of ill-informed dogmatism.” She treated Lewis, he fumed, like a hired servant. Others spoke up in her defense, however, notably Barfield, who condemned Warnie’s “false picture” of her as a “baneful stepmother and inexorable taskmistress” and said that to his knowledge the Kilns harbored “a normal and reasonably happy family life.”

  Some light may be shed on this vexing, almost indecipherable relationship, by Lewis’s 1948 essay, “The Trouble with ‘X’…,” which seems to contain a veiled—if possibly exaggerated for pedagogical effect—description of Mrs. Moore (as “X”) and may suggest why the relationship lasted until her death:

  An outside friend asks us why we are looking so glum, and the truth comes out.

  On such occasions the outside friend usually says, “But why don’t you tell them? Why don’t you go to your wife (or husband, or father, or daughter, or boss, or landlady, or lodger) and have it all out? People are usually reasonable…” And we, whatever we say outwardly, think sadly to ourselves, “He doesn’t know ‘X.’” We do. We know how utterly hopeless it is to make “X” see reason … You know, in fact, that any attempt to talk things over with “X” will shipwreck on the old, fatal flaw in “X”’s character. And you see, looking back, how all the plans you have ever made always have shipwrecked on that fatal flaw—on “X”’s incurable jealousy, or laziness, or touchiness, or muddle-headedness, or bossiness, or ill temper, or changeableness. Up to a certain age you have perhaps had the illusion that some external stroke of good fortune—an improvement in health, a rise of salary, the end of the war—would solve your difficulty. But you know better now …

  A Christian’s duty, Lewis believed, is not simply to tolerate “X” but to make life with “X” an occasion to work on one’s own character flaws. This was the arduous task he assigned himself, and through intense self-discipline, he largely succeeded. His newfound Christianity fit him perfectly, providing him with a sturdy and subtle guide for daily living. In addition, it gave him what he had always needed, a rock-solid platform from which to declaim his philosophy and hone his art. He was now ready to convert the world.

  10

  ROMANTIC THEOLOGY

  Charles Williams was not like other Inklings. Lewis and Tolkien were solid, jocular, beef-and-potatoes men, and even Barfield, for all his dancing and esoteric flights, was practical and predictable, at home, if not fulfilled, in law and real estate. Williams was a will-o’-the-wisp, a figure glimpsed in a fever dream. To attempt his portrait is to paint on air: “Williams! How many people have tried to describe this extraordinary man, and how his essence escapes them.” Thus John Wain, who knew him well. Or Lewis, an intimate friend: “No man whom I have known was at the same time less affected and more flamboyant in his manners. The thing is very difficult to describe.” Or T. S. Eliot: “I think he was a man of unusual genius, and I regard his work as important. But it has an importance of a kind not easy to describe.” Three of the more articulate men of the century, tongue-tied—when it comes to Williams.

  How can this be? A few answers come to mind. Above all, Williams was a swirling mass of contradictions. He wrote shockers that failed to shock. He worshipped women but “liked to beat them with a ruler.” He was a faithful husband with a harem of besotted acolytes. He was orthodox but heretical, a devout Anglican who practiced magic. He had a face at once hideous and beautiful (Lewis: “His face we thought ugly: I am not sure that the word ‘monkey’ has not been murmured in this context. But the moment he spoke it became, as was also said, like the face of an angel.”). “This double-sidedness,” Lewis believed, “was the most strongly developed character of his mind. He might have appropriated Kipling’s thanks

  to Allah who gave me two

  separate sides to my head,

  except that he would have had to omit the word separate … In Williams the two sides lived in a perpetual dance or lovers’ quarrel of mutual mockery.”

  In addition, Williams liked—or felt compelled—to construct imaginary personae for himself and those around him. He called himself Taliesin, after the sixth-century Welsh bard; his wife, Florence, he renamed Michal, after King Saul’s daughter and King David’s first wife; among his female admirers and platonic lovers, he transformed Phyllis Jones into Phillida and Celia, Lois Lang-Sims into Lalage; and he referred to his distinguished superior at Oxford University Press, Sir Humphrey Milford, as Caesar. Indeed, once he joined OUP, it wasn’t long before he had turned that booming international firm into a province of his own imperial imagination. Away from work, his friends were more than friends; they and he formed a mystical community, the “Companions of the Co-inherence” (a key Williamsian idea, co-inherence is the mutual relatedness of all beings; we exist, not as isolated monads, but in and through one another). For Williams, who adored Shakespeare, the world was indeed a stage, an occasion for role-playing, for theater, and for the highest form of theater, which is religious ritual. “He was nothing if not a ritualist,” said Lewis. He would make sacred signs, such as the Sign of the Cross, over his followers as they rode the London Underground; he had a taste for sadomasochistic rituals as well. Ordinary life—the dull daily routines of marriage, of office work, of an evening’s amusement—all this bored him, even filled him with horror. Everyone and everything, with Williams, needed to be raised to its highest level—the teacher must become a mage, the husband a knight
errant, the laborer a hero in a sacred drama—intensified, reified, baptized in the turbulent waters of his restlessness, curiosity, and ardor.

  At his best, he could almost raise the dead; Dylan Thomas once said to him, “Why, you come into the room and talk about Keats and Blake as if they were alive.” This impression he gave of electric animation, of a bundle of raw nerves in a business suit, spewing ideas, images, observations in all directions, appears in many accounts of Williams. Typical is that of Theodore Maynard, a poetry reviewer for the North American Review, who visited him in London in 1919 and discovered a man “trembling with nervousness” and chattering away with “staccato eagerness.” Eliot, who knew Williams and admired him, watched him lecture and saw the same thing: “He was never still; he writhed and swayed; he jingled coins in his pocket; he sat on the edge of the table swinging his leg; in a torrent of speech he appeared to be saying whatever came into his head from one moment to the next.” He smoked heavily, walked quickly, zigzagged from one friendship to another; he was monkey, elf, jackdaw rolled into one.

  This wondrously strange man came into the world on September 20, 1886, in the pedestrian community of Holloway, a lower-middle-class suburb just north of central London. The family resided at 3 Spencer Road, a nondescript lane of narrow brick homes overshadowed by a huge iron railroad bridge. Williams’s father, Walter (Richard Walter Stansby Williams), a foreign business correspondent who worked in the city, never earned enough to make ends meet and poured out his sorrows in mournful poetry that appeared now and then in local journals (“I go to my daily work again / With a feeling of longing akin to pain / The heart beats high in this wearisome life”). His mother, Mary, was resourceful and quiet, seemingly content to be a mother and housewife.

  This bland environment, which offered little beyond lounging in front of the coal fire and watching the soot darken the windows, thrust Williams, at an early age, inside himself. He turned to books as bright companions, avenues of escape; like Lewis and Tolkien, he read avidly in romance and adventure, with a liking for Jules Verne and The Pilgrim’s Progress. As the taste for Bunyan might suggest, his other outlet was the church. His parents, devout Anglicans, recited evening prayers on a daily basis and attended services on Sunday at St. Anne’s, a cavernous Victorian-era red-brick church with a high vaulted roof. “He used to march into church as if he owned the place,” reported his mother; the church, in turn, marched into his heart. Williams never abandoned Anglicanism; he pushed at its borders, cut occult symbols in its altar cloths, called upon powers that would have amazed the seventeenth-century divines, but remained within the fold. How could he not? He adored the music, the adornments, all aspects of the liturgy; it provided the color and sparkle, and, as he grew a bit older, the meaning and direction that suburban routine lacked. He had tantrums when the family stayed home from services.