The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings

by Philip Zaleski

  War Against Williams

  Charles Williams, many years dead, lived still in the hearts of his friends and the spleen of his enemies. His was not a happy legacy. The first significant attack had come in 1950, in the otherwise upbeat, celebratory pages of the immensely popular Penguin Book of Contemporary Verse. The editor, poet Kenneth Allott, chose for his collection all the obvious candidates—Eliot, Yeats, Joyce—and added Charles Williams to the list, reprinting “The Calling of Arthur” from Taliessin Through Logres. Why this selection?

  According to Allott, artistic merit had nothing to do with it. Williams’s poems constitute “a literary oddity of great interest” that influenced Auden, Eliot, and Ridler; beyond this faint praise, Allott offers only condemnation. Lewis’s evaluation of his friend’s work is “wildly off the mark.” Lewis has “been hypnotized by his memories of the man” into seeing in the poems things that are “barely half-said” and poorly at that, in an Arthurian narrative so garbled that “all Mr. Lewis’s ingenuity” is needed to sort it out. Williams is “at times … metrically clumsy and in expression uncouth and, more rarely, bathetic.” One recoils at the ferocity of this onslaught, which appears, after all, in a book ostensibly dedicated to the work of the best modern poets. Nor does Allott offer any reason for his decision to guard the precincts of Parnassus with a merciless sword and make Williams his exemplary victim. And yet his conclusions seem, for the most part, incontestable. Most will agree that Lewis, blinded by friendship, passed from praise to adulation when assessing Williams’s poetry, and few will disagree with T. S. Eliot and many others that to read Williams’s Arthurian works is to enter a nearly impenetrable thicket of obscurities.

  The motives behind the next major attack, launched a year later, were more transparent. The aggressor was F. R. Leavis, the means his collection of essays, largely culled from Scrutiny, called The Common Pursuit. It appears that Leavis simply transferred his dislike of Lewis and his allied discomfort with much of Christian orthodoxy to Williams. “I can see no reason for being interested in Charles Williams,” he begins, shutting the door in his opening move. Williams “hadn’t begun to be a poet”; his analysis of Milton is “the merest attitudinizing and gesturing of a man who had nothing critically relevant to say.” These are broad judgments, made contemptuously and without textual support. Other observations, perhaps unwittingly, hit the mark. Leavis contends that Williams is not the best advertisement for Christianity, that his “preoccupation with the ‘horror of evil’ is evidence of an arrest at the schoolboy (and -girl) stage rather than of spiritual maturity,” a perspicacious remark that we can now buttress with evidence of which Leavis was almost certainly unaware, including Williams’s ritualistic behavior with his OUP colleagues and his participation in Waite’s Fellowship of the Rosy Cross. His assertion that Williams’s “dealings in ‘myth,’ mystery, the occult, and the supernatural belong essentially to the ethos of the thriller,” can be guardedly embraced. As a critic and historian, especially in The Figure of Beatrice and The Descent of the Dove, Williams is a sophisticated and judicious explorer of supernatural themes, but his novels, excepting The Place of the Lion and All Hallows’ Eve, rarely rise above highbrow pulp. Leavis’s claim that Williams is “a subject worth attention from the inquirer into the ‘sociology’ of contemporary literature” is belittling but correct: he indeed deserves attention for his unusual character and interests; that this is the only reason for studying him is doubtful.

  Williams’s prominence as a specifically Christian author occasioned the third major assault on his reputation, unleashed by the poet and historian Robert Conquest in Essays in Criticism, 1957. Conquest’s offensive differs radically from those of Allott and Leavis. He gives Williams some high marks as a poet, declaring him possessed of “in many ways an admirable talent,” producing works of genuine quality and sporadic technical brilliance. For Conquest, Williams’s sin lies elsewhere: he is a totalitarian. By this, Conquest—who would later attain fame for The Great Terror (1965), his study of Stalinist atrocities—does not mean, as most readers might assume, that Williams is Fascist or Communist. What he means is that Williams is an orthodox Christian, foisting on others a “closed system” of thought, an “ideological straightjacket.” In this perceived coercion, Conquest discerns deliberate hypocrisy or self-deception on Williams’s part, for “nowadays” all “intelligent people” know perfectly well that such systems are “ridiculous and wrong” and that “definite research exists which makes nonsense of them.” As Williams’s exegete and defender, Lewis also comes under Conquest’s scourge; both Inklings are guilty of “the tendency to terrorism,” of “smug self-congratulation,” and “the pitying sneer,” which they employ “as a substitute for the unattainable whip and labour camp.” This, then, is the voice of 1950s skepticism at high pitch and full volume, smugly confident of its own closed certainties, willing, just like the totalitarian-inspired Soviet Realism that Conquest abhors, to condemn a work on ideological as well as aesthetic grounds.

  Conquest’s anti-Christian arguments did little to dent Williams’s stature. On the other hand, neither did Williams’s friends accomplish much in their many efforts to enhance his poetic reputation. Lewis and Dorothy L. Sayers spoke and wrote on his behalf; even Eliot chipped in, calling Taliessen Through Logres “absorbing after we have got the hang of what he is after.” In 1955 the poet John Heath-Stubbs published a laudatory booklet on Williams for the British Council and the National Book League, but he was obliged, in the very first sentence, to say of his subject that “it is very difficult to arrive at a balanced estimate of his place in modern English literature.” A few other voices joined the pro-Williams choir, but few listened, while many who did, after turning to the poems themselves, gave up in bewilderment. Williams’s gravestone identifies him as “Poet,” but following Allott’s initial backhanded salute, no major collection of modern English verse has included his work. Arthurian Torso and Taliessen Through Logres flicker in and out of print, always difficult to obtain, but within fifteen years of Williams’s death, his fame came to rest upon his novels, a few works of theology and literary criticism—and his membership in the Inklings.

  18

  THE DIALECTIC OF DESIRE

  “There may be times when what is most needed is, not so much a new discovery or a new idea as a different ‘slant’; I mean a comparatively slight readjustment in our way of looking at the things and ideas on which attention is already fixed.” The opening line in Barfield’s Saving the Appearances (1957), with its gentle incitement to new perspectives, addressed the need for Western culture to acquire a new understanding of consciousness. At the same time, Barfield was talking of himself and his own desperate readiness for transformation. The patterns of a lifetime were ready to break asunder; his vita nuova was about to commence.

  What triggered the metamorphosis? The answer may lie in the accumulating pressure of thirty years of literary frustration, of watching Lewis, de la Mare, Eliot, and other friends achieve lasting fame while he remained entombed in the sepulcher of trust-and-property law. Or it may be discerned in his awareness that Maud was turning seventy while he neared sixty, driving home the frightening truth that his time was now or never. Whatever the cause, during the mid-1950s he cut back his law hours and instead frequented the British Museum Reading Room, taking copious notes on whatever caught his fancy—philology, philosophy, anthropology, history of science—with no definite plan in mind. He began to write a new book but abandoned it after one chapter, displeased by its lack of focus. His frustration mounted, until one happy day he stumbled upon the phrase “saving the appearances” in Garvin Ardley’s Aquinas and Kant (1950), a now-forgotten study of early science. “Somehow,” Barfield recalled, “around that [phrase], all these unconnected notes I’d made … from different parts of the mental world, seemed to crystallize.”

  The newly precipitated crystals took literary form as Saving the Appearances. Barfield had not attempted a full-length presentation of Anthro
posophical ideas since Poetic Diction, written during his twenties, nearly thirty years before. The skills of a solicitor—close reasoning, attention to detail, verbal agility, aggressiveness, unflagging effort—which had driven him half-mad in legal affairs, now proved invaluable in literary forensics. Saving the Appearances is sharply argued and elegantly phrased. In it, Barfield ventures far beyond the philological speculation of his earlier works, diving into philosophy, theology, occultism, prophecy, and ancient, medieval, and modern history in order to mount his fullest exposition to date of the evolution of consciousness.

  He begins with epistemology. How do we apprehend the world around us? He calls our experience a collective representation, the result of sense data interacting with the mind of the perceiver (these representations are the “appearances” of the title). “When I ‘hear a thrush singing,’” Barfield writes, “I am hearing, not with my ears alone, but with all sorts of other things like mental habits, memory, imagination, feeling, and … will.” He appeals to modern physics, which recognizes that the act of observation modifies what is observed; thus we condition our view of what we call reality. This process, of constructing the world from raw sense data interpreted by the mind, he calls figuration. So far, Barfield’s account is largely uncontroversial, resting squarely upon Kant’s insistence that we cannot get hold of the “thing-in-itself.”

  Ever the evolutionist, however, Barfield takes a further step: he argues that figuration changes over time. “Primitives”—a term that he leaves largely undefined—experienced the world differently from us; they apprehended it through what Barfield calls original participation, an intimate, extrasensory connection with the phenomena around them. Primitives were closely linked to the reality they perceive. This gave them a spiritual awareness that we have lost, a knowledge that beyond the phenomenal world (beyond collective representations) lies something deeply mysterious—a life force, gods, God—to which we are profoundly related.

  With us moderns it is different. Human consciousness has evolved and original participation has vanished, replaced by morbid self-consciousness and distancing from the world around us. We experience our collective representations (the world as we know it) as disconnected and remote from ourselves. We believe in a world out there, open to scientific investigation. Here Barfield adds another term to his specialized vocabulary, calling this kind of investigation alpha-thinking. For Barfield, alpha-thinking is fundamentally flawed, even delusional, leading to patent falsehoods, most notably in our account of evolution: “It can do no harm to recall occasionally that the prehistoric evolution of the earth, as it is described for example in the early chapters of H. G. Wells’s The Outline of History, was not merely never seen. It never occurred.” When Wells, or any modern scientist, describes the events of prehistory—the formation of the solar system, the appearance of life on earth, the rise of trilobites and dinosaurs, and so on—what he recounts is not what really happened, but rather what a modern person, with a modern person’s cramped, detached, self-conscious mode of figuration, would have perceived as happening if he or she had been a witness to prehistory. If a “primitive,” the possessor of an entirely different set of collective representations, had witnessed the same events, “we should then have to write a different pre-history altogether.”

  This is, of course, a wholesale rejection of almost all of modern science and its findings. Barfield’s objections apply equally well to disciplines other than prehistory. In astronomy, for example, experts predicate conditions in other galaxies upon data received and interpreted through modern modes of figuration. Are we, then, trapped in an illusory universe—a universe of idols, as Barfield puts it? Is everything we know a lie? For Barfield, the startling answer, to a considerable degree, is yes.

  There are, however, signs that humanity is awakening from its long, troubled collective dream. The recognition of the observer effect in quantum mechanics gives hope. We now face a choice between idolatry—enslavement to our common representations—and a conscious effort to awaken a new form of participation, final participation, through which, by means of “goodness of heart and a steady furnace in the will,” we will heal our perceptions and cultivate a renewed awareness of God. This forthcoming state of consciousness will truly “save the appearances.”

  Barfield’s spiritual reading of evolution, presented more lyrically and succinctly than ever before in Saving the Appearances, stands far outside the main current of modern thought. Few readers will rush to accept his radical rejection of orthodox science, epitomized by his scorn for standard accounts of prehistory; as he himself observes, the views of quantum physicists on the role of the observer have not been adopted by most other scientists, much less the world at large, which remains wedded to dualistic subject-object epistemology. Nor will many embrace his account of final participation, a state of consciousness brought into play, for each of us, via personal metanoia unfolding through successive reincarnations. Like other esoteric accounts of the world, Barfield’s spins in its own orbit, attracting the occasional adventurer into its eccentric field of influence but having little or no effect upon the masses. At the same time, it possesses its own coherence, internal logic, and beauty, incorporating some of humankind’s greatest religious myths—a past golden age, a present tribulation, a future new heaven and new earth—into a strange but lovely narrative, in which the powers of the imagination (in the exact Blakean sense of perceiving invisible realities) may yet save the world. As such, it takes its place, at the very least, as a remarkable example of mid-twentieth-century apocalyptic, a modern philosophical prose variant of Blake’s Jerusalem. For its author, it was a definitive breakthrough, a regrouping and expansion of scattered talents, a return to the battlefield, a harbinger of things to come.

  Saving the Appearances attracted few reviews; Barfield had been out of the literary scene far too long for his work to draw notice. The fullest response came from a clearly dissatisfied Lewis, who read the work in manuscript. He declared it “full (of course) of sap and strength, and v. much yours,” then added several pages pinpointing its weaknesses, leavened by the occasional “splendid” and “V. good.” When the book appeared in print, he told Barfield that it was a “stunner” but offered no further analysis. T. S. Eliot, on the other hand, wrote Barfield, three years after publication, to declare his “very high opinion” of the book, which he thought “too profound for our feeble generation of critics.” Barfield would later tell Valerie Eliot (the poet’s wife) that he valued this letter “highly.”

  Sufferings and Celebrations

  “I am feeling as flat as a burst tyre,” Tolkien had written to Naomi Mitchison in mid-1955. He was referring to his immediate workload at the time, especially his lecturing and the burden of shepherding The Return of the King into print, but the hyperbolic metaphor depicts fairly his state not only then but in ensuing years. He was becoming an old man, quit of his great work, feeling his creative energies dwindle. He marveled at his achievement and increasingly worried about his legacy. “[My] chief biographical fact,” he wrote to a fan, “… is the completion of The Lord of the Rings, which still astonishes me … I still wonder how and why I managed to peg away at this thing year after year, often under real difficulties, and bring it to a conclusion. I suppose, because from the beginning it began to catch up in its narrative folds visions of most of the things that I have most loved or hated.” He would spend his remaining years elucidating to family, friends, and readers, in a vast epistolary torrent, the intricacies of these narrative folds, guiding others to see his masterpiece as he did and to share in his hates and loves.

  Taken en masse, Tolkien’s late letters constitute his Apologia pro vita sua. Gripping, generous (he would answer complete strangers at great length), revelatory in their exposition of a Catholic aesthetic built upon Mary and the Eucharist, and obsessive, almost balmy, in their attention to the minutest details of Middle-earth history, folklore, geography, archaeology, linguistics, and mores, they become a platform on wh
ich Tolkien corrected misreadings of his texts, misunderstandings of his aims, and misconceptions about his life. The task was prodigious. One example—there are scores—concerned the Swedish translator of The Lord of the Rings, who gave Hobbits “feathery” soles, compared the book to Wagner’s Ring, and invented fanciful tales of Tolkien walking the Welsh borderlands during his youth. The outraged author wrote to Allen & Unwin, decrying the first error as “absurd,” the second as “a farrago of nonsense,” and answering the third with a shout that many a celebrated author would gladly echo: “Why must I be made an object of fiction while still alive?”

  The letters let off steam while correcting the record, but they also consumed Tolkien’s time and impeded his creativity. He published no new fiction for years, although “Imram,” a poem based on St. Brendan’s mythical voyages and dating, in its original version, to The Notion Club Papers, appeared in Time and Tide in December 1955. He continued to rewrite The Silmarillion, expanding or contracting earlier tales, deepening the theological subcurrents, resolving vexing problems regarding the nature, power, and destiny of Melkor, Elves, Men, and Orcs. But all this work remained, for the time, unpublished, and he complained to Rayner Unwin about the difficulty of finding time for the project. Unwin wanted to publish The Silmarillion more than ever, anticipating good sales on the coattails of Lord’s success, but he harbored reservations about the portions he had seen so far. On New Year’s Eve of 1957, he warned the author that he found the text “a bit uncompromising for the general reader,” with a “somewhat undigested form” that reminded him of the Book of Numbers, and that he was “not attracted by the rather rudimentary narrative form … nor of the variable archaism of language … [which] gave a somewhat precious feeling to the narrative.” The ameliorating adverbs cushioned the blow without disguising the message: Tolkien’s publishers were deeply worried about the future of their bestselling author’s most personal and long-lived project.