The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings

by Philip Zaleski

  Divorce, real estate, inheritance, and other legal cases reinforce the trap, each complication presented in high satirical mode, as Burgeon and Burden combat law firms like Pauncefoot & Mecklenburgh for the doubtful rights of their dubious clients. One chapter, “The Things That Are Caesar’s!” features a certain Ramsden (a thinly disguised Lewis, echoing “Ransom”), “a rather extraordinary sort of chap” with whom Burgeon once shared “a period of intellectual intercourse long since woven into the stuff of our lives and taken up into whatever we can claim of wisdom and insight.” Ramsden, like his real-life model, suffers from profligate generosity; in lieu of royalties, he “just writes to his publisher and says … ‘Pay the next lot to the Home for Retired Professors of Ichthyosophy.’” This practice leads (as it did with Lewis) to a staggering tax bill and an amusing account of how Burgeon’s intervention saves the day.

  The legal escapades make for entertaining farce, but as the Burgeon/Burden conflict continues, the tale darkens and turns surreal. Burden finds himself “like Alice Through the Looking Glass … out of breath with running at full speed in order to keep up with himself remaining in the same place.” He—and through him Burgeon—develops rhematophobia (from the Greek rhema, utterance or word), a fear and loathing of the spoken word—a disease, incidentally, unrecognized by both the medical profession and the Oxford English Dictionary. Rhematophobia afflicts the ability to absorb and grasp language: “The moment of pain is the effort required to convert sound into meaning and to unite that meaning … with the meanings of the preceding words and of those which are to follow.” This fantastic ailment, one of Barfield’s brightest inventions, is a psychic inversion of his own youthful stammering; instead of struggling to get the words out, one struggles to get them in. Burgeon’s deterioration accelerates, until one day he snaps and assaults his partner/alter ego with a trash can and ruler; in turn, Burden announces to Burgeon, with icy certainty, “I’m going to kill you.”

  At this desperate moment—corresponding to the real-life moment when Barfield found himself facing mental collapse—Burgeon suddenly sees the way out. It comes to him that, precisely as a poet, he is indispensable to Burden, that without poets “the very profession itself, and the law which it helps to administer, would not be there. For if it is the Burdens of this world who keep traditions alive, it is the Burgeons who create them.” Well, then, why must “we Burgeons need always remain sleeping partners. Why should not we wake up sometimes and take a hand once more in the practice both of law and of life?” A modus vivendi is achieved, a modus operandi initiated: Burgeon and Burden, art and business, inspiration and drudgery, will advance hand in hand, in a fruitful if uneasy conjunction of opposites. The ending is weak, Burgeon’s sudden self-understanding dawning as no more than a deus ex machina. It doesn’t matter—not for the tale, which is lighthearted and implausible enough to sustain this final narrative collapse, and not for Barfield, for whom the writing was as much therapy as art, paving the way to continue his legal practice without killing his creative soul.

  This Ever Diverse Pair had little difficulty in attracting a publisher, especially after Barfield’s old friend Walter de la Mare consented to write the introduction. On April 29, 1949, Sheila Hodges of the firm of Victor Gollancz bid for the book, stating that it had “enchanted” Gollancz, who was “most anxious to meet the author,” and offering a small advance. Lewis, receiving the news, was delighted. Soon he heard tidings that gave him even greater joy. A few weeks after Gollancz accepted This Ever Diverse Pair, Barfield decided to enter the Anglican Church, arranging to be baptized on June 25 at St. Saviour’s Church in Uckfield, East Sussex. Lewis, although recovering from a high fever, wrote to congratulate him, declaring that “I am humbled (I think that is the right word) by your great news. I wish I cd. be with you. Welcome and welcome and welcome.”

  He assured Barfield, oddly, that his baptism didn’t mean the end of the “Great War”—a sop to a friend, one presumes, for as far as Lewis was concerned, the war had ended decades ago—and mentioned that he didn’t resent being passed over as godfather. What he failed to bring up, although he must have wondered about it, was why Barfield had decided upon baptism after so many years outside the church, and whether this decision meant an end to his Anthroposophical involvement. Barfield’s answer to the second question would have been a very firm “no.” He remained dedicated to the cause, contributing essays and reviews to The Golden Blade, an Anthroposophical journal, and promulgating Steiner’s works; the very year of his baptism, he published a revised edition of Steiner’s World-Economy: The Formation of a Science of World-Economics. Why, then, get baptized? He may have joined the Anglican Church as a gift to Maud, to show her that Anthroposophy and Christianity were not antithetical. But his act was a gift to Lewis as well, who read the event as nothing less than Barfield’s spiritual rebirth. To think that his dear friend had finally entered the faith! He dashed off a letter to Bede Griffiths, asking him to pray for the new Christian and mentioning that “I have two lists of names in my prayers, those for whose conversion I pray, and those for whose conversion I give thanks. The little trick of transferences from List A to List B is a great comfort.”

  The baptism must have brought comfort to Barfield as well. Just as This Ever Diverse Pair signaled an accommodation between art and law, so did his baptism signal a détente between the Anglican orthodoxy that surrounded him and his own Steinerian esotericism. Accommodation and détente, however, are far from permanent peace. This Ever Diverse Pair was a small triumph but an artistic dead end, for Barfield was not a satirist. He was too sincere and ardent for that. He was a true believer. Despite embracing Anglicanism, his spiritual home remained Anthroposophy, which entailed beliefs—reincarnation, akashic realms, the evolution of consciousness, and the rest—that have never found a home in Christian orthodoxy. He remained uneasy, uncertain of what to do, whom to turn to. His friends praised This Ever Diverse Pair, Ruth Pitter saying that “your prose works are … so full of meat one could spend years on them.” Lewis told the world the same, writing in Time and Tide that the novel was “a high and sharp philosophic comedy, more fully a work of art and more original than anything I have read for a long time.” But these were sops tossed by friends, and Barfield remained frustrated and depressed.

  He also remained, despite the friendly review, vexed with Lewis. For many years, Barfield had harbored “the impression of living with, not one, but two Lewises”—one the old, direct, sincere Lewis, the other, as Barfield expressed it, somehow “voulu,” taking part in a sort of deliberate role-playing. One of the best accounts of Lewis’s strange behavior, Barfield would suggest many years later, could be found in Alan Watts’s 1971 study of mysticism, Behold the Spirit, which describes Lewis as exhibiting “a certain ill-concealed glee in adopting an old-fashioned and unpopular position.” This impression of two Lewises, the real and the contrived, disturbed Barfield greatly, until finally it “became something like an obsession.” Around 1950, he decided to address the problem through literature, just as he had addressed the problem of the law in This Ever Diverse Pair. He composed a long poem, “The Mother of Pegasus” (also known as “Riders of Pegasus”), a retelling of Greek myth in which two figures, Perseus and Bellerophon, represent the two aspects of Lewis’s personality. As Barfield summarized it, Perseus “after going through a great many difficulties arising out of a preference he had developed for dealing with the reflections of things rather than with the things themselves … made peace with … his ‘creative eros,’” while Bellerophon wound up “in increasing obscurity as a kind of aging, grumbling, earthbound, guilt-obsessed laudator temporis acti [praiser of times past].” As several Barfield scholars have remarked, the message is far from clear. Perseus appears to be Lewis face-to-face with reality and achieving a belated maturity, and Bellerophon Lewis hollowed to a shell by his taste for role-playing. But whether Barfield meant one of these to represent the “real” Lewis or whether each portends a possible future not yet
determined is difficult to discern.

  The murkiness, one can’t help feel, reflects Barfield’s literary limitations as well as his confused feelings about his friend, and indeed he wrote that he may have been “on the wrong track altogether,” giving vent to “a common bit of overelaborated psychology à la mode, our twentieth century rococo.” There is, however, no mistaking the clashing tides of love and resentment in his views of Lewis. It must have pained him, too, that no one seemed interested in publishing “The Mother of Pegasus.” His friend George Rostrevor Hamilton, a critic and poet well placed in literary circles, warned him that “it is a particularly unfavorable season for poetry, and you have had the boldness to defy fashion by writing (a) a long poem (b) a poem on a Classical subject and (c) a poem which is neither in the mode nor in an easy convention,” and then offered the coup de grâce by adding that “fine though the poem is … it is likely to frighten most of the cautious tribe of publishers.” It was a familiar story. With This Ever Diverse Pair, Barfield had reopened the possibility of being both solicitor and artist; but to what avail, if no one would accept his art?

  16

  “MAKING UP IS A VERY MYSTERIOUS THING”

  “My house is unquiet and devastated by women’s quarrels,” Lewis confided to Father Calabria in January of 1949. “I have to dwell in the tents of Kedar.” He was quoting Psalm 120, which begins with the piercing cry, “In my distress I cried unto the Lord,” as the psalmist laments his prolonged stay among the nomadic Kedar, a tribe that “hateth peace.” The Kedar had pitched their tents in the Kilns: Mrs. Moore’s arthritic legs had given out and she was confined largely to her bedroom, from which she unleashed what Warnie described as a “stifling tyranny” of demands and denunciations. “Every day had to have some kind of domestic scene or upheaval, commonly involving the maids.” Her goddaughter, Vera, over from Ireland to help with domestic chores, was sucked into the fray, as was the next-door neighbor, Miss Griggs, who on one occasion burst into Mrs. Moore’s bedroom to berate her for selfishness. Lewis, trapped and miserable, spent much of each day as her dog walker, nurse, and houseboy. She tightened her stranglehold by forbidding him afternoon access to the study, ostensibly to economize on fuel but in reality to force him into the dining room where she could keep a closer watch on him.

  “How long, oh Lord, how long,” wailed Warnie in his diary. He, at least, had an escape, albeit a poisonous one, and he used it often. In February, he awoke from another alcohol-induced stupor to find himself in Acland Nursing Home, a small hospital on the Banbury Road. While consigned to his hospital bed, he mulled over his plight and concluded that he was the victim of a cycle of “insomnia-drugs-depression-spirits-illness.” He feared, however, that his brother construed it—as Lewis correctly did—as “spirits-insomnia-drugs-depression-spirits-illness.” Like many alcoholics, Warnie refused to see “spirits” as the active agent of his dissolution and convinced himself that with proper care he could drink safely and pleasurably. At least he held no illusions about the Kilns, preferring the Acland’s friendship and warmth to his home’s cold comforts. Once back under Mrs. Moore’s roof, he tried to pray but “found the line ‘dead.’”

  In June, Lewis, too, entered the Acland, suffering a nasty streptococcal infection that left him feverish and delirious; Dr. Havard, who tended him, told Warnie that it was “a serious illness for a man of fifty.” The underlying problem, said Havard, was exhaustion, and the cure a long vacation. Lewis agreed—it would be his first in fifteen years—and asked Arthur to find him a room for a month near Belfast. Preparations went forward until it dawned on Warnie that while Lewis recuperated in Ireland, he would be left alone at the Kilns with Mrs. Moore. This proved too much to bear, the bottle rematerialized, and by July 1 he had drunk himself back into a hospital bed. Immediately Lewis canceled his vacation to oversee his brother’s recovery, which proved a complicated process that entailed a brief stay in Warneford hospital, a mental asylum, when the Acland doctor declared Warnie too “out of control” to treat. Warnie responded to Lewis’s kindness with an act of consummate (and probably unconscious) irony: shortly after leaving the hospital, he set off on his own Irish holiday, booking into his favorite Drogheda tavern to test, with initial success, his new theory that he could safely manage a nip now and then. Lewis, meanwhile, resigned himself to the Kilns, writing Arthur that “as long as [Warnie] is a dipsomaniac, it seems impossible for me to get away for more than a v. few days.” In effect, he had now not one jailor, but two.

  How did Lewis respond to these calamities? With anxiety, as one might expect, but also with forbearance and humor. As he told Dorothy L. Sayers just before Warnie’s July collapse, those who believe in easy cures often turn dour, while those who recognize ills as deep-rooted maintain a brighter disposition, “wh. is not really a paradox. If one is hurrying a hurt man into an ambulance with the knowledge that he can be saved if you get him to hospital in time, of course one doesn’t joke. But if one is alleviating (year in, year out) the sufferings of an invalid who will never be quite well till the Resurrection, then for his sake as well as one’s own cheerfulness, even gaiety, must be encouraged … the importance of not being earnest.”

  In addition to this fortunate outlook, Lewis possessed, like his brother, his own private means of escape: he could quit at once the Kilns, the Acland, and the shackles of his complex relationships by picking up his pen. Absorbed in narrative rapture, he would travel effortlessly to Mars, Venus, or whatever otherworldly realm beckoned, there to pursue, in a virgin landscape untouched by personal sorrows, the same theological and social themes that occupied him in the real world of tutorials, Inklings gatherings, and Bodleian research. He found the making of fiction so involving that for him it bypassed the ordinary analytical faculties, at least in its first stages: “a man writing a story is too excited about the story itself to sit back and notice how he is doing it,” he said.

  Nonetheless, Lewis bristled at accusations that his writing was no more than escapism. He told the science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke that he had shed all worries about the issue after a friend (surely Tolkien) had pointed out that the only people who condemn escape are jailers. But unlike Tolkien, Lewis emphasized the didactic power of fantasy, and in turning from apologetics to fairy stories and children’s literature (the genres are distinct yet overlapping), he was conscious of advancing, rather than shirking, his cause. The Anscombe debate was of minor importance in this awareness. Lewis knew there were better ways than heated debate to communicate the truths of the faith; he would title a later essay “Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What’s to Be Said.” Writing in September 1947 to Mrs. E. L. Baxter, an Episcopalian in Kentucky who along with her husband had been sending care packages of tea and food, Lewis remarked, “Don’t the ordinary fairy tales really already contain much of the Spirit, in solution? Does not Cinderella give us exaltavit humiles, and is not Redemption figured in The Sleeping Beauty?” It was only as a grown-up that he came fully to appreciate children’s fantasy; The Chronicles of Narnia—his seven-part otherworld fantasy with gospel overtones—was almost the inevitable next move. Indeed, there is evidence, in the form of a fragment discovered by Walter Hooper among Lewis’s posthumous papers, that he may have taken a stab at something like a Narnia tale as early as World War II, while young evacuees packed the Kilns and he was immersed in his BBC talks and other explicitly apologetic projects. The fragment, which does date from the war years, contains what appears to be a raw version of the first paragraph of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe:

  This book is about four children whose names were Ann, Martin, Rose and Peter. But it is most about Peter who was the youngest. They all had to go away from London suddenly because of Air Raids … They were sent to stay with a kind of relation of Mother’s who was a very old Professor who lived all by himself in the country.

  Apparently Lewis set the manuscript aside. In September 1947, responding to Mrs. Baxter’s suggestion that he should write his own child
ren’s stories, he said, “I have tried one myself but it was, by the unanimous verdict of my friends, so bad that I destroyed it.” Curiously enough, there is no record of any of Lewis’s friends reading such a story. In any event, within a year of his exchange with Mrs. Baxter, he had plunged into the tale that would become The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe: A Story for Children.

  Through the Wardrobe

  Lewis set his new fiction—the adventures of four young siblings (Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy, in descending order of age) evacuated to a country house during the London Blitz, who pass through a bedroom wardrobe into a magical land—in a precinct of Faërie that he called Narnia. He took the name, as he told Walter Hooper, from an Umbrian town (“Narni”) on an atlas of ancient Italy. The idea of the tale first came as an image, appearing unheralded in his mind: “a Faun carrying an umbrella and parcels in a snowy wood.” The picture had arisen when he was sixteen, and he had nurtured it for more than thirty years. He never could determine its origin or antecedents; he believed that such ignorance was commonplace among artists: “I don’t know where the pictures came from. And I don’t believe anyone knows exactly how he ‘makes things up.’ Making up is a very mysterious thing.”

  In the summer of 1948, Lewis told the American poet and literary scholar Chad Walsh (author, in 1949, of C. S. Lewis: Apostle to the Skeptics) that he was in the midst of writing the memoir that would become Surprised by Joy—he had gotten as far as the end of World War I—and was planning to finish a book he had begun “in the tradition of E. Nesbit.” This conjunction is worth noting: if Surprised by Joy was a way for Lewis to confess and come to terms with the spiritual crises of his youth, Narnia was a way to reclaim the best parts of his youth in the light of the spiritual convictions of his Christian maturity, freed from the burdens of the past; Narnia and Surprised by Joy are two sides of the same conversion story. Almost a year after Walsh’s visit, Lewis read two chapters of the completed manuscript of his first children’s fantasy to his former tutee Roger Lancelyn Green, whose earlier story, “The Wood That Time Forgot” about three children magically transported into a preternatural forest, had been an encouragement and a minor influence. In his diary, Green declared the chapters “very good indeed, though a trifle self-conscious.” Dr. Havard’s daughter, Mary Clare, announced her approval, as a representative child reader.