The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings

by Philip Zaleski

  In his June 14 letter, however, warmth and high spirits give way to fear and foreboding. Barfield’s “bad patch,” his ominous but unspecified “desire,” and de la Mare’s anxiety about his friend’s mental and physical state, indicate that despite the success of This Ever Diverse Pair, Barfield remained in serious distress. The failure to find a home for “The Mother of Pegasus” had been just the latest in a series of stinging defeats. His poetry attracted few readers, and his primary literary outlets had dwindled to a few Steinerian house organs. He gave two talks on the BBC Third Programme, “Goethe and Evolution” on December 1, 1949, and “The Influence of Language on Thought: The Poetic Approach” on January 10, 1951, but these opened no new doors. Reconciled to the legal profession, he still despised its daily grind.

  His friendships, too, were undergoing more painful changes. Lewis, to his eyes, had half-disappeared behind a mask, although his generosity remained undiminished. Daphne Harwood had fallen terribly ill; on June 5, 1950, a concerned Lewis wrote to Cecil Harwood that “you must be incurring a good many unusual expenses at present: and there may be other—alleviations—wh. you wd. like to incur for Daphne,” and invited him to plunge into the Agape Fund, adding in a second letter four days later, “Dip and spare not.” Daphne died of cancer on July 14, leaving behind her husband and five children. To cap this calamity afflicting one of his closest friends, Barfield faced an Anthroposophical Society fractured by ideological rifts and packed with members who found it hard to face the modern world with its rampant skepticism and materialism. “It is … within my knowledge,” he said in a lecture to the society, “that there are people within this Movement who feel that they have just about reached the end of their tether, who really do not know which way to turn; to whom life appears to be one long series of seemingly meaningless frustrations; people for whom … life really does, in one way or another, wear the mask of something like a living death.” He might have been talking about himself, although he later denied this.

  Meanwhile, he was increasingly exposed to the intimate troubles of others. Thanks to his rising prominence in Steinerian circles and his reputation as a kindly man, he received a stream of letters begging advice on matters Anthroposophical and personal. Some of the latter concerned marital difficulties. In 1951 he responded to a letter from a distraught woman regarding a situation in which, as he put it, “an appreciable number of married women, among our members, are finding themselves as they grow older”—that of a straying husband. He advised his correspondent to “get some mutual friend or relative to see him on your behalf and tell him (if that is the fact) that you are still fond of him and wish to … re-establish the marriage in the ordinary human sense. I would not recommend your explicitly insisting on absolute fidelity as a condition, but it is obvious that the present liaison would have to cease … there would have to be a genuine resolution on his part to make a true household with you…” This counsel, seemingly that of a sagacious bystander far beyond the fray, reflects Barfield’s own agonies of heart; for his marriage with Maud was in perilous disarray.

  By 1951, Barfield was in his early fifties, Maud in her midsixties. Their marriage had lasted thirty years, during which Maud’s animosity toward Steiner and his teachings had, if anything, intensified. In 1927, Lewis had recorded in his diary a conversation between Maud and Mrs. Moore: “Mrs. B has apparently been having a heart-to-heart with D. She ‘hates, hates, hates’ Barfield’s Anthroposophy, and says he ought to have told her before they were married: wh. sounds ominous.” Twenty-four years later, despite Barfield’s conversion to Anglicanism, Maud remained implacably opposed to her husband’s esoteric interests. The two maintained a peaceful veneer by avoiding all discussion of religion or metaphysics, and especially of Anthroposophy, but this scarcely constitutes a prescription for marital bliss. Frustrated in his art, unhappy in his career, uninspired in his marriage, Barfield longed desperately for … well, he hardly knew what.

  Change arrived unexpectedly, as it often does; in this case, according to the Barfield scholar Simon Blaxland–de Lange, through a chance encounter with a young woman. Susan Josephine Grant Watson, known familiarly as Josephine, was twenty-five years old and the daughter of E. L. Grant Watson, a novelist, essayist, and naturalist who admired Jung and Steiner, harbored strong reservations about Darwinian evolution, and had read with pleasure Romanticism Comes of Age, an enthusiasm that he had passed on to his daughter. Barfield and Josephine Grant Watson caught each other’s eye at an Egyptology lecture in London, discovered their mutual interests, and embarked upon a relationship pursued through meetings and letters and culminating in a sub rosa Spanish holiday. Barfield pondered divorce but was forestalled when the skittish Josephine ended the liaison and soon married another Anthroposophist, the teacher John Dymott Spence.

  Maud remained unaware of this brief idyll, according to Blaxland–de Lange. Nor did she know of another relationship that followed upon its heels, as Barfield, rejected by Grant Watson, grew close to the Anthroposophist Marguerite Lundgren, founder of the London School of Eurythmy (an Anthroposophical dance mode). Ten years older than Grant Watson, Lundgren was a committed follower of Steiner; she was also an exceptionally gifted dancer, which may have awoken in Barfield something akin to what Mircea Eliade has termed nostalgia for paradise, a yearning for lost innocence and bliss—in Barfield’s case, a rediscovery, on the threshold of old age, of the beauty, energy, and beatific abandon of those long vacations as an Oxford undergraduate dancing with Maud and Cecil Harwood on the Cornwall circuit. One of Lundgren’s chief students, Annelies Davidson, has provided a breathless account of her teacher’s magnetism that helps to explain Barfield’s interest: “Her mobility was exceptional … In a piece by Dag Hammarskjöld from his book Markings she took space into herself, transforming from a physical to an etheric level to such an extent that one person commented that she “consumed” the space around her … the way Marguerite placed herself in space could irradiate it delicately or fill it with a blaze of light.” She and Barfield seemed a perfect match. But in the end, his nostalgia for paradise kept him faithful to his union with Maud. He refused to dissolve his marriage, and Lundgren wound up in the arms of the recently widowed Cecil Harwood, whom she married.

  Despite this outcome, Barfield’s influence upon Lundgren, and upon the curious art of Eurythmy that she helped to pioneer, was substantial. An introductory text on the subject coauthored by Harwood, Lundgren, and Marjorie Raffé describes it as “the apotheosis of the dance” and contends that “whereas the experience of movement in Modern Dance is confined to the earth, Eurythmy balances earthly with spiritual and cosmic experience” as “one of the channels through which the spirit is again revealing itself to human consciousness.” High claims, indeed; in more mundane terms, Eurythmy is a performance art in which a dancer’s gestures and movements accompany and express the inner meaning of words or music. Eurythmists cloak themselves in loose, flowing robes, often of a single color—orange, yellow, blue, white—and dance with sinuous or rhythmic movements that resemble other spiritualized dances of the twentieth century, such as Dalcroze Eurhythmics and Gurdjieff’s Movements. To casual observers, these varied modes may bring to mind ancient temple rituals, Conan Doyle’s prancing fairies, or almost anything in between. Lundgren’s particular aim—here is where Barfield’s influence becomes most apparent—was to reveal, through the Eurythmic expression of passages from Shakespeare, Blake, Coleridge, and others, with particular attention to the kinesthetic manifestation of the inner life of consonants and vowels, the “spiritual soul” or “consciousness soul,” as Steiner called it, of the English people. This ambition runs, albeit in a different medium, very close to Barfield’s lifelong desire to demonstrate through philology and grammar, with particular attention to English words, the history of consciousness. Dance, for Barfield, was ever a royal road to spiritual truth.

  The Dawning of Joy

  “Oh the mails,” complained Lewis to Dorothy L. Sayers during the l
ast days of 1949. “Every bore in two continents seems to think I like getting letters.” One new correspondent proved anything but a bore. On January 10, 1950, a letter arrived from a thirty-four-year-old American, a former atheist, now a Christian convert, Mrs. W. L. Gresham, who wrote books under her maiden name of Joy Davidman. A child of secular Jews, Joy had rejected God by the age of eight; by fifteen she had learned that “men … are only apes. Virtue is only custom. Life is only an electrochemical reaction. Mind is only a set of conditioned reflexes … Love, art, and altruism are only sex.” She became a Communist and preached revolution. She might have remained on the radical fringe, but poetry, marriage, and the demands of offspring eventually opened her eyes to another world.

  Joy’s own poems proved exceptional, winning the Yale Series of Younger Poets award in 1938 and appearing in print as Letters to a Comrade the following year. She spent summers at New Hampshire’s MacDowell Colony for artists and writers, where she wrote her first novel, Anya, set among nineteenth-century Ukrainian village Jews; it debuted in 1940 to considerable applause (“a powerful, well-written novel,” ran the generic but, to the author, surely heady review in The New York Times, by, as it happened, a former lover of Dorothy L. Sayers). In 1942 she married William Lindsay Gresham, a writer, womanizer, and alcoholic. Gresham, himself a former Communist, helped Davidman clarify her doubts about the Party. They had two boys, David and Douglas; the children grounded her, and she realized “what neglected, neurotic waifs the children of so many Communists were.” In 1946, Gresham suffered an alcoholic nervous breakdown; the episode drove Davidman to despair and thence to a spiritual awakening: “All my defenses—the walls of arrogance and cocksureness and self-love behind which I had hid from God—went down momentarily. And God came in … There was a Person with me in the room, directly present to my consciousness—a Person so real that all my previous life was by comparison mere shadow play. And I myself was more alive that I had ever been; it was like waking from sleep.”

  All at once Davidman saw that “God had always been there, and that, since childhood, I had been pouring half my energy into the task of keeping him out.” She learned to pray; she forgave her enemies, or at least “some” of them—she, like Lewis, enjoyed a good battle—and, oddly, she returned to the Communist Party out of her newborn sense of “moral responsibility.” It didn’t last. She perceived the fallacies in dialectical materialism, in socialist realism, in the Soviet Union’s claim to be a worker’s paradise, until finally communism “blew away like a withered tumbleweed.” She and her husband turned religious—their new path bolstered by reading C. S. Lewis—and in time, partially through her authorial instincts (“Not Shakespeare himself could have invented the Synoptic Gospels”), she became a Christian. Her writing career continued; in 1949, the New York Post ran, over several days, her long account of her conversion from hammer and sickle to cross, under the lurid title of “Girl Communist.” In 1950, Macmillan published her second novel, Weeping Bay, a somewhat cynical, somewhat anti-Catholic portrayal of religious life on the Gaspé Peninsula; the New York Times reviewer faulted the story’s characterization but found it made “an enduring impression,” while Catholic World accused it of “pamphleteering” and Library Journal of “bursts of blasphemy.” She was becoming a figure on the American literary scene. Nonetheless, Warnie later remembered in his diary that “neither of us had ever heard of her … she appeared in the mail as just another American fan,” who “stood out from the ruck by her amusing and well-written letters.” Soon this bright, tart-tongued fan would shake Lewis’s life to its roots.

  “I Am, I Fear, a Most Unsatisfactory Person”

  On March 9, 1950, after a year’s delay, Tolkien underwent the dentist’s knife to have his perilously decayed teeth removed. Four weeks later he was fitted with a full set of dentures, which would cause problems of its own; rumor has it that once, as Tolkien opened his celebrated Beowulf lecture with his customary “Hwaet!,” the dentures flew from his mouth and clattered to the floor. In any case, another extraction proved far more vexing. By late 1949, Fr. Gervase Mathew had introduced Tolkien to Milton Waldman, a senior editor at the publishing house of William Collins, Sons, who expressed great admiration for Tolkien and his work, leading him to consider withdrawing from his long relationship with Allen & Unwin. He still resented Unwin’s refusal, in the prewar years, to publish The Silmarillion, which he considered irrevocably linked to the still-unpublished The Lord of the Rings. The two works, he felt, must see print in tandem. He sent portions of The Silmarillion to Waldman, who offered to publish it once the manuscript was complete, a pledge that inspired Tolkien to begin enlarging and refining many of its pivotal tales, including those of Túrin Turambar, and Beren and Lúthien, along with key sections on Elves, Dwarves, and Valinor. When Waldman subsequently read The Lord of the Rings, praised it, and promised to take it on as long as there was “no commitment either moral or legal to Allen & Unwin,” the die was cast. “I certainly shall try to extricate myself, or at least the Silmarillion and all its kin, from the dilatory coils of A. and U.,” Tolkien promised Waldman on February 5, 1950, in a draft for a now-lost letter that indicates his confused feelings about the affair. “I should … be glad to leave them, as I have found them in various ways unsatisfactory. But I have friendly personal relations with Stanley (whom all the same I do not much like) and with his second son Rayner (whom I do like very much)…”

  This letter marked the opening salvo in Tolkien’s campaign to repel the Unwins and shift his literary future to Waldman, a sly endeavor that shows him in a not entirely favorable light. He avoided a point-blank declaration of intentions, instead sending a string of messages to Stanley Unwin denigrating himself and his work. On February 24, he told Unwin that “I am, I fear, a most unsatisfactory person.” He derided The Lord of the Rings, declaring that “my work has escaped from my control, and I have produced a monster: an immensely long, complex, rather bitter, and very terrifying romance, quite unfit for children (if fit for anybody)…” This ungainly work, he insisted, was “tied to the Silmarillion,” and “ridiculous and tiresome as you may think me, I want to publish them both … in conjunction or in connexion”; he therefore refused to undertake major rewriting or restructuring and assured Unwin that no offense would be taken “if you decline so obviously unprofitable a proposition.” Never did Casanova so artfully separate himself from an unwanted lover.

  Unwin was not easily dissuaded. He advanced the possibility of publishing The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion together, but only if divided into three or four volumes, and he added the discouraging news that Farmer Giles of Ham had sold less than half of its first printing, a poor showing. Unwittingly, his reply played right into Tolkien’s hands. Instantly rejecting Unwin’s proposal, Tolkien agreed sarcastically that a large work could be chopped into parts—giving as an example OED divisions like “‘ONOMASTICAL-OUTING’ and ‘SIMPLE to SLEEP,’” before declaring that “the whole Saga of the Three Jewels and the Rings of Power has only one natural division into two parts (each of about 600,000 words).” Following this broadside, he again disparaged his project, speculating that few beyond his friends would tolerate so long a book, and that Unwin would likely fail to recoup the cost of publication. As compensation he offered, should Unwin decide against handling the vast opus, to produce something briefer when time allowed. Later the same day, he wrote to Waldman, detailing his letter to Unwin and declaring, “I profoundly hope that he will let go without demanding the MS. and two months for ‘reading.’”

  Unwin continued the chess match on April 3, informing Tolkien that he had discussed the matter with his son Rayner, now a student at Harvard University. Rayner wrote to his father, suggesting that an editor might incorporate the more pertinent material from the vast legendarium into The Lord of the Rings, but “if this is not workable, I would say publish The Lord of the Rings as a prestige book, and after having a second look at it, drop The Silmarillion.” Tolkien, incensed by this, coun
tered with an ultimatum demanding an immediate yes or no to his requirement that the two works be published together. Boxed in and sensing Tolkien’s unwillingness to compromise, Unwin conceded defeat on April 17, declaring himself “bitterly disappointed” and saying “the answer is ‘no’; but it might well have been yes given adequate time and the sight of the complete typescript.”

  Tolkien’s triumph was total—but terribly short-lived. A month or two later, Milton Waldman traveled to Oxford, bearing the devastating news that the Collins editors had decided that The Lord of the Rings needed severe pruning. A period of delays ensued, occasioned in part by illness and Italian sojourns on Waldman’s part, and by late 1951 the project remained in limbo. Finally Tolkien sent to Waldman, at the latter’s request, a ten-thousand-word document explaining the genesis, development, and meaning of his entire fictional oeuvre—The Silmarillion, The Hobbit, and The Lord of the Rings—a magnificent summa commencing with the poignant observation that “it is difficult to say anything without saying too much: the attempt to say a few words opens a floodgate of excitement.” Revealingly, he utilizes near the end of this letter the same arguments he had deployed to rid himself of Unwin: “It is … only too likely that I am deluded, lost in a web of vain imaginings of not much value to others—in spite of the fact that a few readers have found it good, on the whole. What I intend to say is this: I cannot substantially alter the thing. I have finished it, it is off my mind; the labour has been colossal; and it must stand or fall, practically as it is.” On some level he may already have realized that Waldman would not publish the book. In the event, his letter failed to rescue the project. In the spring of 1952, exasperated and discouraged, Tolkien insisted that Collins publish The Lord of the Rings at once or lose the right to do so. The firm responded by rejecting both it and The Silmarillion.