The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings

by Philip Zaleski

  Frustrated in art, in proselytizing, in friendship, in marriage, Barfield burrowed yet more deeply into Anthroposophy. But there, too, he found discord and, soon enough, internecine warfare. Following the Master’s death in 1925, his followers had split into two rival camps: those who believed that his writings constituted a definitive and changeless canon, and those who thought that his teachings could be developed further by mature disciples. Barfield, Cecil Harwood, and others in the English Anthroposophical Society held the latter view. Unfortunately, Steiner’s widow, the formidable Marie Steiner, did not. When Barfield and Harwood traveled to Dornach in the mid-1930s for a general convention, they entered a minefield. At a “very fiery meeting” filled with “strong antagonism,” Barfield spoke his mind—silenced in mainstream literary journals, he would at least have his say in this most important of arenas—arguing for a liberal interpretation of Steiner’s legacy. His courageous (or rash) act “rather flung the stone in the middle of the discussion” and disaster ensued. Frau Steiner’s allies established a new English Anthroposophical group, with its own headquarters and journal, that held copyright over Steiner’s publications in England. Suddenly Barfield found it difficult to get permission to publish his Steiner translations, and the Dornach hierarchy and its English branch made harsh demands upon him and his companions, including the dismissal from the movement of several liberal members. Even in the cozy world of Anthroposophy, there was no escape from the terrible friction inherent in the evolution of consciousness.

  The Happiness of the Cross

  Lewis, by contrast, brimmed with happiness; everything was falling into place. Since becoming a Christian, his teaching, reading, writing, and scholarship had all acquired zest and purpose. He had found his vocation: to fight the Lord’s battles in the academy and the world at large, armed with wit, dialectic, and invincible faith. True, his living arrangements remained eccentric, what with the regular commute between Magdalen and the Kilns, but he felt at home in both locales. True, Mrs. Moore continued to order him about as if he were her private manservant, but he had settled into the role. Like other intellectuals, he welcomed the mindless drudgery as a refreshing change of pace, and her irrational demands gave him a chance to practice humility, one of the Christian virtues he feared he most lacked.

  To crown his pleasures, he was surrounded by friends. “Friendship is the greatest of worldly goods. Certainly to me it is the chief happiness of life,” he wrote to Arthur. The Inklings were flourishing under his orchestration and Warnie’s kind ministrations, assembling on Thursday evenings at Magdalen and Tuesday mornings at the Bird and Baby, drinking, laughing, cajoling, and disputing; even Williams turned up now and then, grabbing the train from London, although, like Barfield, he found Oxford too distant for regular participation and sustained his friendship with Lewis largely through letters. Lewis’s correspondence with Arthur continued, but in a subdued key, Lewis sounding at times like an elder brother instructing a less-educated younger sibling, patiently tolerating Arthur’s spiritual experiments with Unitarianism, Baha’i, and the Quaker tradition of his ancestors. He continued to count Barfield a peer—this high regard never wavered—but refused to argue with him, and the letters they exchanged lacked fire. As always, though, Lewis itched for combat, and during the mid and late 1930s he found his match in Alan Griffiths (1906–93).

  The friendship between Lewis and Griffiths has drawn little attention from literary historians, largely because Griffiths never joined the Inklings. Surely he would have been invited to join if he had remained in Oxford after earning his degree, but within a few years he had become a contemplative Benedictine monk, taking the name of Bede, and later settled in India as a Catholic sannyasin (renunciant), embracing a land and lifestyle alien to the Inklings’ intransigently Western outlook. Nonetheless, he meant a great deal to Lewis; Surprised by Joy is dedicated to Griffiths, and we learn in its pages that during the months prior to Lewis’s conversion, “my chief companion … was Griffiths, with whom I kept up a copious correspondence.” Griffiths seconds this memory, writing that during this time “I was probably nearer to Lewis than anyone else.”

  Their relationship had begun in 1927, when Lewis became Griffiths’s English tutor. The two met weekly, and their talks ran late into the night. After Griffiths left Oxford, they almost never saw one another—although Griffiths joined Barfield and Lewis on a walking tour in 1932—but their correspondence blossomed. The teacher-student relationship evaporated, replaced by a rich and lively exchange of equals. “I think that it was through him,” said Griffiths, “that I really discovered the meaning of friendship.” At first the two shared literary views, but before long they turned to intense discussions on philosophy, metaphysics, the Bible, Christology, and so on, forging an intellectual and spiritual companionship that Griffiths held forever dear.

  The friendship ran aground, however, when Griffiths became a Catholic and a monk. The two ceased to see eye to eye and tempers flared over Thomism, ecclesiology, poetry, mysticism, prayer, life after death, and more. By 1934, Lewis advised Griffiths “once and for all” that he would no longer discuss “any of the questions at issue between our respective churches.” This declaration closely parallels, as readers will note, Lewis’s recent and abrupt cessation of debate with Barfield. Luckily for us—for Lewis is always most splendid when on the attack—in this case he failed to follow his own edict and his subsequent letters to Griffiths bristle with poisoned darts (“I think your specifically Catholic beliefs a mass of comparatively harmless human tradition which may be fatal to certain souls under special conditions”) along with perceptive observations on Christian discipline:

  [Obedience] appears to me more and more the whole business of life, the only road to love and peace—the cross and the crown in one … What indeed can we imagine Heaven to be but unimpeded obedience. I think this is one of the causes of our love of inanimate nature, that in it we see things which unswervingly carry out the will of their Creator, and are therefore wholly beautiful: and though their kind of obedience is infinitely lower than ours, yet the degree is so much more perfect that a Christian can see the reason that the Romantics had in feeling a certain holiness in the wood and water.

  Griffiths, however, like Barfield before him, was deeply wounded by Lewis’s ban on religious debate. To him it “was a great embarrassment. It meant that I could never really touch on much that meant more to me than anything else, and there was always a certain reserve therefore afterward in our relationship.” Eventually their friendship would have faded in any event, for in 1955 Griffiths relocated to India, and by the time of Lewis’s death in 1963, he had begun to absorb elements of Hinduism into Christian worship. Lewis disliked Eastern thought. When he learned that another former pupil, Martin Lings, had been nosing about Hinduism and wished to encourage Lewis in this direction, he shot off a letter to Griffiths slithery with condescension, in which he calls Lings “my wretched man,” laments his “confusion,” and allows that since Lings “was up till this a person of exclusively literary interests, I daresay even Hindooism [sic] is a step upwards.” Lings would later become a prominent Muslim and the author of an acclaimed English-language biography of the Prophet Muhammad based upon traditional sources.

  Lewis’s problems with Griffiths and Lings scarcely surprise; although he retained all his life a love of pagan mythology, no orthodox religion sat well with him other than what he would call “mere” Christianity. Tolkien was convinced that Lewis never wholly uprooted the anti-Catholic bias of his Ulster upbringing (his “Ulsterior motive”). According to Humphrey Carpenter, who takes Tolkien’s view of the matter, Lewis at times labeled Irish Catholics “bog-rats” or “bog-trotters”; Carpenter adds that on one occasion, when Tolkien mentioned to Lewis his devotion to St. John—John being, let us remember, Tolkien’s first name and the name of his oldest son—Lewis barked a scornful retort. It is also true that the term “papist” peppers Lewis’s letters: of Mauriac’s Vie de Jesus, “it is papist, o
f course, and contains what English and Protestant taste” (that is to say, Lewis’s taste) “would call lapses, but it is very good in spite of them”; of the publishing house of Sheed & Ward, “I don’t much like having a book of mine, and specially a religious book, brought out by a Papist publisher.” But we are more inclined to view this way of speaking as a passing vulgarism of the sort that Lewis would permit himself among friends. Lewis certainly felt discomfort with some Catholic practices—but essentially it was a discomfort he would struggle to overcome, rather than a deep-seated antipathy.

  Warnie shared in this discomfort with Catholicism but hadn’t the temper to make an issue of it. He rarely made an issue of anything, which was just as well, as it meant that he could settle into the Kilns despite Mrs. Moore’s abrasiveness. Lewis loved having his brother around; when all was said and done, Warnie was his closest companion, if not his match in scholarship or creativity. Warnie, for his part, knew the value of escape hatches and fashioned several for himself, to be used whenever the Kilns grew too claustrophobic. Digging into his savings, he bought a two-berth, twenty-foot-long boat that he named the Bosphorus, after a vessel in the Boxen tales, and on it he cruised England’s rivers and canals. Life on the water was bliss, for “no one ever knows where you are, and you have no mail.” Another escape was his diary, in which he could express safely his blossoming dislike of Mrs. Moore. His third escape was booze. Warnie had always been a binge drinker. Stuck at the Kilns or afloat on some quiet river, what better way to pass the time than by opening a bottle? His diary tells the tale. On February 22, 1935, for example, he attends a performance of Hamlet produced by Coghill, but finds the lead character to be a “snivelling, attitudinizing, platitudinizing arch bore” and notes that “if I had not been fortified by a double whiskey and soda half way through, I would not have stuck it to the end.” A few days later, he observes that the same fortifying beverage had kept his pet dog going during its final days. And so on. Lewis knew of the drinking and was deeply troubled by it, but there was nothing he could do.

  If Lewis ranked male friendship as his chief happiness, work ran a close second. He excepted tutoring, however; while he liked and even admired some of his pupils, such as Griffiths, he found others a terrible drain on his time and energy. Dr. Dimble in That Hideous Strength speaks for him: “There is my dullest pupil just ringing the bell. I must go to the study, and listen to an essay on Swift beginning ‘Swift was born.’” But writing, reading, and lecturing gave him strength. During the 1930s, as always, he absorbed books at a ferocious pace, reading intensively in early English literature while ranging afield into authors as diverse as Kafka, whom he likened to George MacDonald for mythic profundity, and David Lindsay, whose metaphysical space adventure, A Voyage to Arcturus, dazzled both him and Tolkien. In 1937, down with the flu, he managed during one “grand week in bed” to read Northanger Abbey, The Moonstone, The Vision of Judgment, Our Mutual Friend, the third volume of Ruskin’s Modern Painters, and The Egoist (“There’s a good deal of the ass about Meredith—that dreadful first chapter—Carlyle in icing sugar”). As if to balance the ledger, letters poured out at an equally prodigious pace, he cast Virgil into rhyming alexandrines, and, at the invitation of OUP, commenced work on a major investigation of sixteenth-century English literature for the multivolume Oxford History of English Literature. The book’s immense labors weighed upon him for many years, and he took to calling the series OHEL and, finally, O HELL. To top off this frenzy of activity, he fulfilled his pledge to match Tolkien’s time-travel tale with a space-travel adventure of his own by writing his first real novel and possibly his most lucid work of fiction: Out of the Silent Planet.

  A Journey to Malacandra

  The model for Out of the Silent Planet (1938) was a childhood favorite of Lewis’s: H. G. Wells’s anti-imperialist First Men in the Moon (1901). In this early science fiction tale, which Lewis considered “the best of the sort I have read,” a scientist and a young adventurer, working in secret in a remote English country setting, build a spherical spaceship out of gravity-repellent material and travel to the moon, where, captured by insectlike inhabitants who dwell beneath its inhospitable surface, they inadvertently reveal the brutality of the human race and are brought before the “Grand Lunar” for judgment.

  Lewis took his scaffolding from this tale, borrowing more than a few details of setting and plot, but the edifice he built upon it was altogether different; for he had been convinced, by reading David Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus, that the planetary romance could be a vehicle for profound “spiritual adventures.” He thought he could use this form to counter the materialistic picture of the universe that dominated popular science writing. As an adolescent, Lewis had pored over the scientific potboilers of the Victorian astronomer Sir Robert Stawell Ball, in which the universe was depicted as a vast wasteland where humans are of vanishingly little account. More recently, he had found in Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men (1930) and in the essays of the geneticist J.B.S. Haldane (Possible Worlds, 1927) an admirable speculative power allied to chilling schemes of interplanetary colonization, moral and genetic reprogramming, material advancement, and limitless life extension. He had been dismayed to discover that, for some of his own students, such utopian fantasies had supplanted both Christian realism and Christian hope. Lewis hoped, in this novel, to present an appealing imaginative alternative. “I like the whole interplanetary idea as a mythology,” he told Roger Lancelyn Green, “and simply wished to conquer for my own (Christian) pt. of view what has always hitherto been used by the opposite side.”

  The novel’s hero is Dr. Ransom (identified at first, with a suggestion of allegory, as “the Pedestrian”), a Cambridge philologist on holiday. Tolkien denied that Ransom was based on him, and Lewis put readers off the scent by stating in the epilogue that Ransom was a pseudonym, not the hero’s real name. But there are hints to the contrary: as an English surname, Ransom means “Ranolf’s son,” but as an English noun and verb, Ransom comes from Anglo-Norman for the Latin redemptio and savors of English Catholicism. It is under the title of “Our Lady of Ransom” that Catholic Oxford claims the patronage of the Virgin Mary; and the Guild of Ransomers, founded in 1887 for the purpose of asking Our Lady of Ransom to intercede for the conversion of England and Wales, was (and still is) a going concern. A painting of Our Lady of Ransom was (and still is) venerated in a special chapel in Tolkien’s parish church. Could there be a more feeling tribute to Tolkien than to create a philologist-hero with such a name? Moreover, Ransom’s Christian name, Elwin, Old English for “Elf-friend,” completes the tribute and signals the extent to which Lewis would rely on Tolkien’s inspiration in developing his un-Wellsian version of Wells.

  As the novel begins, Ransom has set out with map and pack on a solo walking tour in the English Midlands. He soon finds his ramble thwarted by a thunderstorm, an unfriendly innkeeper, and a mother worried about her retarded son, who has failed to come home from his job working for a professor and a London businessman in a desolate country house. Ransom agrees to inquire after the boy, but the dwelling is strangely forbidding, and the moment he throws his pack over the gate in order to crawl through the hedge into the garden, he realizes that there is no turning back. Like Lewis the reluctant convert in Surprised by Joy, he has been drawn in and is about to be prodigiously interfered with.

  On the other side of the hedge, Ransom discovers the missing boy trying to escape from the clutches of two men—the brilliant physicist Dr. Weston and an old schoolmate of Ransom’s, the venal, vulgar industrialist Dick Devine. Ransom intervenes and saves the boy, only to become himself a substitute victim. He is drugged, tied up, and bundled onto a spaceship of Weston’s design, which takes off for Mars (Malacandra). Weston, he learns, is a Stapledonian raised to the nth power, the architect of a grandiose experiment to tame other worlds for human habitation once Earth’s resources run out. Devine’s intentions, by contrast, are almost refreshingly crass; he plans to exploit Mars for commercia
l gain. Ransom is to be offered as a sacrifice to the Malacandrians, whom all three assume to be savages or worse (Ransom pictures insectoid monstrosities).

  His expectations are, however, quickly overturned. Space, which he had always imagined to be dark and cold, turns out to be an ocean of living light. The intense heat caresses rather than oppresses, filling him with vigor and sensual delight: “Stretched naked on his bed, a second Danaë, he found it night by night more difficult to disbelieve in old astrology: almost he felt, wholly he imagined, ‘sweet influence’ pouring or even stabbing into his surrendered body.” “Almost he felt, wholly he imagined”: the archaism of the language, with its anastrophe (inverted word order) and parallelism characteristic of heigh stile—more muted than in Tolkien’s prose, however—and its faint echo of the biblical “almost thou persuadest me to be a Christian,” presages Ransom’s coming entry into a hieratic and mythic world.

  Ransom’s first glimpse of Malacandra reveals “nothing but colours—colours that refused to form themselves into things,” but he begins to see the landscape more clearly once he opens his soul to it. When he meets his first Malacandrian and realizes that the creature possesses the gift of language, his zeal as a philologist overcomes his fear. Lewis gives a similar account in Surprised by Joy of conquering his own insect phobia by developing a scientific interest in entomology. The cure lies in the curiosity: a scientific curiosity that is genuinely objective and disinterested cleanses the vision.

  As Ransom discovers the rationality and humanity of the three Malacandrian races—the furry, childlike, poetry-loving hrossa, the froglike, technically dexterous pfifiltriggi, and the fantastically tall, white-feathered, austerely intellectual séroni—so do his own rationality and humanity expand. He exchanges fear for trust and places himself in the Malacandrians’ hands. Under their guidance, he comes to understand the high-pitched voice of a fourth type of being, the angel-like eldila, learns the value of obedience, and is brought to meet the Oyarsa, the planet’s ruling Intelligence, comparable to an archangel or to the planetary archons of Hellenistic and Gnostic lore. The Oyarsa reveals to Ransom a terrible secret, the etiology of all Earth’s woe: Ransom’s beloved home planet is Thulcandra, the silent planet, estranged from the company of the heavens by the perverse design of the fallen angel who is its ruling Intelligence and by the sin of the archetypal man, Adam. The whole human race is “bent” (incurvatus—a word favored by St. Anselm—though created to mirror God, we have become bent, like mirrors in a fun house, reflecting lower things).