The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings

by Philip Zaleski

  Subcreation, however, is clearly the theme of “Leaf by Niggle,” a short story that Tolkien wrote just before the outbreak of war and published in The Dublin Review in January 1945. The idea for the tale came to him in a dream or reverie, for one day “I awoke with it already in mind.” The story tells of a “little man called Niggle,” an artist who, although frustrated by constant interruptions, manages to paint a leaf that becomes a tree that becomes a landscape—an obvious allegorical recounting of the creation of Tolkien’s endlessly expanding legendarium. Before Niggle finishes his painting, he goes on a journey (that is, he dies), finds himself in a Workhouse (purgatory), is released, and winds up inside his own canvas, where he discovers his Tree, complete and perfect, its leaves “as he had imagined them rather than as he had made them,” and beyond them the Mountains, foretelling “something different, a further stage” (heaven). Niggle, through his long and painful artistic labors, has created something beautiful, intelligible, and good, a finite creation that points to the infinite. Tolkien tells the tale in simple, direct prose—reading Lewis’s novels may have proved beneficial—with none of the dense elegiac manner of The Lord of the Rings. “Leaf by Niggle” is his most successful short story, an evocative account of the artist’s calling and a worthy counterpart to the more theoretical presentation of the same material in “On Fairy-Stories.”

  “Blue as a Whortle-Berry”

  As the war expanded, Barfield trudged to his law office, day by tedious day. He knew by now that law would never replace literature, nor would legal discourse compensate for the loss of philosophical give-and-take with Lewis. He had fallen into a “colorless” existence. During the London Blitz, the firm moved to the suburbs, and for a time he, Maud, and the kids camped in a bus in a Buckinghamshire field. Country sights and smells offered relief from office monotony, but his frustration and boredom intensified. He tried his best to find deep meaning in legal procedures, presenting at an Inklings gathering in the early 1940s “Poetic Diction and Legal Fiction,” a paper that draws analogies between the poetic world he had regretfully abandoned and the legal world in which he was now immersed. Both worlds mature through a process Barfield calls tarning, the act of “saying one thing and meaning another”—not in the sense of lying but of using figurative language (simile, metaphor, symbol) so that a new or original poetic (or legal) understanding may result. Tarning, then, plays a role in “the long, slow movement of the human mind.” Long, complex, and wistful, the essay concludes on a note of frustration as Barfield laments modern culture’s failure to grasp the importance of metaphor, the evolution of language, and the blossoming of consciousness. Indeed, Barfield was as frustrated as a man could be, in his legal profession, in his literary vocation, in his inability to convince Lewis and the world of the value of Anthroposophy.

  He was discouraged, too, by the failure of so many to grasp the magnitude of Hitler’s threat. World War II came to him, according to his grandson, as “a great trauma,” not least because of his love for German culture and language. On May 28, 1940, his mother died at the age of seventy-nine (his father had passed away just before the war); Lewis, in a letter of condolence sent a few days later, perceptively linked “this particular desolation … to the general one in which we all are.” As the war progressed, Barfield’s depression deepened; on August 20, 1942, Lewis described his friend as being “blue as a whortle-berry.” Barfield did what he could to ameliorate his situation. He wrote a short play on Jason and Medea, which he read before the Inklings in late November 1944. The reading was well received, but Barfield recalled years later making the unsettling discovery, when he had finished his presentation, that “at least three of those present … had written poems about Medea themselves in the past”—hardly a circumstance to assuage doubts about one’s literary originality.

  During the same year, he published Romanticism Comes of Age with an obscure Anthroposophical publishing house. In 1945 he and Maud welcomed a third child into the family, Geoffrey Corbett (later Jeffrey Barfield), born June 6, 1940, a refugee from German air raids. Around the same time, he befriended Walter de la Mare, with whom he argued Steiner, poetry, and language at the Athenaeum Club and at de la Mare’s residence in Twickenham. Barfield helped his new friend improve at least one poem, “The Traveller,” and in turn de la Mare invited Barfield to lunch with T. S. Eliot, who seemed, Barfield thought, to carry around him an “aura of unhappiness”—but perhaps this was only a reflection of Barfield’s own pervasive gloom. Whatever the case, these rare upbeat moments served largely to accentuate his growing despair over powers unused, ideas spurned, a voice prematurely silenced.

  Williams Unbound

  Williams’s voice, on the other hand, was now reaching its highest development, in the lecture halls, pubs, and dons’ quarters of Oxford. In London he had lectured to night classes and weekend poets. In Oxford, within six months of arrival, he marched under Lewis’s auspices into the Divinity School to discourse on Milton’s Comus (a masque celebrating the inviolability of a true Lady’s virtue) and pulled off the remarkable and perhaps unprecedented coup of holding an undergraduate audience rapt with a paean to chastity (this was the talk that had triggered Dyson’s scornful remark about Williams being a common chastitute). Lewis, aglow with admiration, proclaimed that “that beautiful carved room had probably not witnessed anything so important since some of the great mediaeval or Reformation lectures. I have at last, if only for once, seen a university doing what it was founded to do: teaching Wisdom.”

  Williams was overjoyed. Finally he had arrived in the intellectual firmament, a heaven on earth peopled, for once in his life, by men. “Am I only to be followed by the feminine?” he asked his wife on March 5, answering the rhetorical question in the negative before adding, in high-spirited tribute to her, that “you will be attended—you—by the masculine minds, great minds, strong males, brothers of our energy—those who know our work—Lewis & Eliot & Raymond & Tolkien & the young males; and they, having read me, will look for You & walk round you, & admire, & say ‘This was the Origin of all, and the continual Friend and Supporter.’” He knew what his wife wanted to hear—sometimes it seemed to him that he knew what every woman wanted to hear—and he bragged to Florence that “it was Anne [Ridler], I think, who once wrote that I was about as aware of women as Jesus Christ; it is (omitting the comparison) largely true.”

  Male and female alike fell under his spell. He lectured at St. Mary the Virgin, the Taylor Institute, Pusey House, St. Margaret Hall, Reading University, Birmingham University, on Shakespeare, King Arthur, love, hell, religion and drama, whatever ignited his tinderbox mind. Everywhere, he triumphed. T. S. Eliot, who watched him lecture, said that Williams “held his audiences in rapt attention, and left with them the contagion of his own enthusiastic curiosity.” Flushed with success, Williams crowed to Florence, “I begin to believe I am a genius.” In February 1943, in recognition of his services at OUP, the university awarded him an honorary M.A.; afterward, husband and wife enjoyed “loftily lunching with Cabinet Ministers and V.C.s [vice chancellors].” He was the first editor of OUP’s London office to receive the honor: “It’s obvious that I’m the best person to start on,” he allowed. A less public but possibly even more satisfying triumph came the same year, when he and Tolkien scheduled university lectures for the same time slot. Williams talked on Hamlet before a packed house, while Tolkien taught Anglo-Saxon to an audience of one, his other students having migrated to hear Williams. After the event, according to at least one report, the two lecturers celebrated together with drinks. Williams was in high spirits; one wonders what Sauronian thoughts scampered through Tolkien’s mind as he lifted his glass.

  Throughout these triumphs, Williams worked tirelessly for his beloved employers. Conditions on the job were bad: “We work between gas-masks and sirens,” he complained in a letter most likely written in his new office, a converted bathroom overlooking a hedge at OUP’s Southfield House, near the Headington Road in east Oxford. He i
nsisted on keeping up appearances, even though he found Oxford to be “a kind of parody of London,” arriving at the office each morning in a sober blue suit, umbrella, and homburg. Responsibilities at the press consumed most of his energy; what remained he employed largely in writing. His output, during the last seven years of his life, was prodigious: plays, poems, a novel, a study of witchcraft, a biography. A few years before his sudden death at fifty-eight, he produced his finest book, the luminous The Figure of Beatrice (1942).

  The Way of Affirmation

  The Figure of Beatrice, like all books about Beatrice Portinari, is primarily about the man who loved her. One cannot think of Beatrice apart from Dante Alighieri, for all that we know about her comes from him; she exists for us as the great poet’s lover, muse, and means of salvation. The Figure of Beatrice remains true to this pattern, but one of its charms is that it takes Beatrice seriously in her own right and paints a plausible portrait, culled from Dantean verses, of the Florentine maiden, wife, and object of adoration as a dark-complexioned woman with green eyes, a sweet, low voice, and a disposition passionate and bright, “full of courtesies, and of amicitia.” To give the flesh-and-blood Beatrice her due was no small thing, for the tendency in Dantean studies has always been to read her as a symbol of virtue or heaven or God. For Williams, she is a symbol of goodness but also a real woman who exemplifies this goodness and inspires Dante to seek it. By merging the offices of symbol and of fleshed reality, she becomes, in Williams’s precise lexicon, a figure—the principal figure in world literature—of the Way of Affirmation.

  Beginning with Outlines of Romantic Theology in the early 1920s, Williams sought to champion this Way, which, as he understood it, describes God through positive attributes—the Good, the Beautiful—and seeks God through the things of the world, in contrast to the Way of Negation, which finds its Christian fountainhead in the writings of Pseudo-Dionysius. “Wherever any love is,” Williams writes in The Figure of Beatrice, “there is either affirmation or rejection of the image, in one or other form. If there is rejection—of that Way there are many records. Of the affirmation, for all its greater commonness, there are fewer records.” The Divine Comedy was for Williams the most perfect literary exposition of the affirmative way, a view in keeping with the high modern regard for Dante’s masterpiece. (Eliot declared it the greatest of all philosophical poems and, in a remarkably audacious phrase, its final canto “the highest point that poetry has ever reached or ever can reach.”)

  For Williams, as for Dante, the Way of Affirmation is best pursued through love between the sexes. There may be higher modes—Williams gives Christ’s healing miracles as an example—but romantic love remains the most familiar, as men and women glimpse heaven in one another’s eyes (Williams notes that “elders” may scoff at such love, adding that the reasons for their cynicism can be found “in the ditches of the Inferno”). For Dante, the Way opened at the age of nine, when he first encountered Beatrice and heard a voice say, “Now your bliss has appeared”; his subsequent experience proved a compound of bliss and pain, encompassing Beatrice’s death at twenty-four, his own exile from Florence, and the subsequent composition, over fourteen years, of the Commedia.

  What becomes apparent as one reads The Figure of Beatrice is that, in tracing Dante’s career, Williams is describing his own. He, like Dante, is a Christian poet, a devotee of the spiritual potential of courtly love; he, like Dante, trembles at the beauty of his beloved (it was his habit to explicitly liken women, especially Florence, to Beatrice, once writing to his wife that “if you substitute ‘Michal’ for ‘Beatrice,’ you get the whole thing”). Pondering Dante’s attraction, after Beatrice’s death, to a second woman, the so-called “Lady in the Window,” he declares, as if speaking to himself about Phyllis and his other extramarital passions, that such a “second image of the Beatrician kind” is “not to be denied.” He goes so far as to muse wistfully on what might be possible if a wife could learn to tolerate a husband’s other chaste ardors: “I do not know what new liberties and powers might not be achieved.” Such aspirations are never to be realized on this side of the grave, but in paradise, every longing finds its sanctified fulfillment. There Dante’s love for Beatrice is subsumed in the beatific vision. Beatrice fulfills the meaning of her name; she is revealed as not only Dante’s bliss but the very Way of his blessedness. Might not Dante’s experience be Williams’s also?

  The Figure of Beatrice is a stunning achievement that drained its author. Upon its completion, he was exhausted and frustrated. He feared that he had proved unequal to Dante’s vision; his sins had blocked his genius. The book “has slid from being what it ought to be down to what I could make it. One’s past rules one; a hundred immoralities that obscure the high things here.” He was right to think that his personal history affected his study, but this truth may be applied to almost any writer, almost any book. Sins hobbled Dante as well, at least until the catharsis of repentance recounted in the Purgatorio cleared the way to the incomparable ecstasies of the Paradiso. Williams, peering into Dante’s mind and recognizing a fellow sufferer, had been ideally placed to convey in The Figure of Beatrice his predecessor’s agonies and longings, if not his spiritual triumphs.

  Reviewers lauded his accomplishment. In The Times Literary Supplement, Dermot Michael Macgregor Morrah praised the work for its “delicate sensitiveness” and for “continually evok[ing] rays of fresh light from facets of Dante’s jewel,” while Hugo Dyson applauded it in The Spectator; the review by Christopher Hollis in The Tablet, a Catholic newspaper, found that it deserved to be “part of the furniture of the mind.” In the long run, the most significant response came from Dorothy L. Sayers. A correspondent and friend of Williams since the 1930s, Sayers read Dante for the first time in the afterglow of Williams’s study: in August 1943, she had come across a review of The Figure of Beatrice in the Sunday Times, read the book, and decided to tackle Dante’s great poem, a task she had put off for years due to her faulty Italian. The following year, huddled in a backyard shelter during an air raid, she began the Temple Classics dual-language Inferno. Dante’s brilliant imagery and lightning pace mesmerized her; she finished the poem in five days and wrote Williams immediately, exclaiming with a schoolgirl’s excitement that “I found myself panting along with my tongue hanging out, as though it were a serial thriller,” and giving Williams full credit for her new passion. Within a few years, these raptures had settled into an iron determination to translate the Commedia into English terza rima—a daunting task, given the scarcity of English rhymes—with an extensive theological and literary commentary. Her Hell and Purgatory, and her unfinished Paradise (completed by her goddaughter, the scholar and translator Barbara Reynolds) remain widely read more than half a century after publication.

  Meanwhile, Williams’s “hundred immoralities”—he identified a few of them to one young acolyte as jealousy, envy, sullenness, and pride—continued without relief. Behind them lay an inability to be at ease with either sex. Men he must impress, women he must teach or rule. He recognized these shortcomings but could not overcome them, a failure leading to internal conflicts that found outward expression in his shaking hands, his restlessness at the podium, his wandering eye, and, quite possibly, his early death. He felt isolated, estranged from his surroundings and himself. “I become more and more a figure, a name, an influence perhaps; less and less a person,” he wrote to Alice Hadfield, detailing a disassociation that grew more acute each year. To Florence he described himself as “a pattern, a voice, a name; not a person. I am Bach’s Ninth Symphony, Shakespeare’s Tempest, and Da Vinci’s Madonna of the Rocks”: little more than a set of roles and masks. His letters burn with anger and resentment, as he savages others for his inability to feel close to them: “I dislike people, & I hate being with them”; “You can’t imagine how I dislike people’s faces”; “There are wells of hate in one which are terrifying.” The dark notes of intertwined and barely controlled megalomania and alienation are unmistakable.
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  Curiously, his relationship with Florence improved, almost certainly because of the physical distance between them. His ardor for her was deep and sincere, although, in his last years, largely couched in contemplative or platonic terms, yet another mode of distancing. He addressed her as Madonna and declared his love for her to be “amor intellectualis”—an exalted phrase, to be sure, but not one that many women welcome from their lovers. He saw Phyllis, back from Java, and dashed off letters to her laced with ecstasies and incoherencies, disclosing in their rambling intensity the strain of trying to co-inhere his work, his writings, and his multiple Beatrices. More than one passage suggests a mind unraveling (“You go on in my head exactly like a trumpet—yes; a kind of sight instantaneously transmuted into sound—a silent sound, I suppose … no, of course, I have it wrong; it is sound transmuted into sight, I now realize that you are a kind of sound…”). “O, I wish I were free” of her, he cried to Alice Hadfield in a moment of clarity.

  But other enchantments and enchainments waited in the wings. In the summer of 1943, Lois Lang-Sims, a young (twenty-six-year-old) spiritual seeker fascinated by Williams’s writings, wrote him a letter about The Figure of Beatrice. He responded, as he usually did, with generosity and genuine interest. In October, he and Lang-Sims met at his lodgings at 9 South Parks Road. The young woman thought the great man “deferential and authoritarian”; he poured ideas and observations at her and over her, while she noted with wonder “the constant jerky movements of his limbs and the muscles of his face.” Walking home, she decided that Williams’s behavior revealed a man “incapable of … a human relationship on a personal basis. I sensed that he was totally identified with, and enclosed within, his own myth.” But she was drawn to him, and he to her, and some months later the two met for lunch at the Randolph Hotel, where he ticked off on her fingers the initiatory order to “Love—obey—pray—play—and be intelligent.” She was henceforth one of his acolytes, a member of the Companions of the Co-inherence, which must have numbered at least a dozen and perhaps many more by now. Soon he gave her additional instructions: to practice substitution, to dot her palm with a pencil mark each time she failed, to write three times “Sir, I am the most exquisite dunce who ever lived.” He threatened to beat her for her imperfections. In December, he struck the palm of her hand with a ruler, hard enough to hurt, after which a “torrent of words poured from his lips, while he strode around the room, his head jerking sideways as he talked.” Lang-Sims, who had never taken his threatened punishments as more than poetic imagery, was “stunned with shock.” Soon after, Williams warned her that “next year of course will be stricter.”