The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings

by Philip Zaleski

  Smith of Wootton Major received mixed reviews. The American writer Robert Phelps, in The New York Times Book Review, called it “a good tale, dense and engrossing,” but Naomi Mitchison, who had been an early defender of The Lord of the Rings, wrote in the Glasgow Herald that “Tolkien needs a bigger canvas and harder work on it if one is to become involved and convinced.” The book proved popular with the public, despite widespread disappointment that it was not a tale of the Shire; when Tolkien read the story before publication at Blackfriars, Oxford’s Dominican Hall and Studium, more than eight hundred people showed up in the pouring rain. By now, his name had become a magical lure and anything by him glittered. Smith appealed also to many scholars, who ventured a number of fanciful interpretations. Some saw in the hero a likeness to Tolkien, or perhaps to Anodos, MacDonald’s protagonist in Phantastes, while others read the story as an apology for the author’s failings as a philologist, or as a Christian allegory (despite Tolkien’s repudiation of that genre), or a fictional valedictory, or even a commentary upon Vatican II. In a letter to Roger Lancelyn Green, Tolkien describes it as “an old man’s book, already weighted with the presage of ‘bereavement.’” With this in mind, Smith’s surrender of the fairy star is the crux of the tale; we must let go of even the most precious things, when our time has come and gone.

  The Inklings, too, at least as a corporate entity, had reached its end. A handful of gatherings were held after Lewis’s death, attended by the stalwart few, but without the maestro’s ebullient presence they proved poor pantomimes of the original and soon ceased. From now on, members would meet one another for a beer or lunch or dinner or by chance. Ironically, just as the Inklings dwindled away, the first significant study of the group appeared, The Precincts of Felicity (1966) by Charles Moorman, an American English professor, medievalist, and Arthurian scholar. Dubbing his subjects the Oxford Christians, Moorman concentrates on Lewis, Tolkien, Williams, T. S. Eliot and Dorothy L. Sayers; the last two, he claims, may be usefully located on the “periphery” of the group. This is inaccurate, markedly so in the case of Eliot, but Moorman manages to introduce readers to the Tuesday morning and Thursday night meetings, provides a roster of the chief participants, and, among some wild hazards (predicting, for instance, that Beat writers Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg would prove a passing fad), accurately foresees that the Inklings may become “in days to come … a movement.”

  Warnie, for one, disliked Moorman’s book, as he did all accounts of the Inklings that depicted them as anything more than like-minded fellows raising glasses and voices in joyful fellowship. He called the book “silly,” misread Moorman’s account of literary alliances as suggesting a “group mind” among the Inklings, and found the inclusion of Eliot and Sayers to be, correctly, “frankly absurd.” His negative assessment should be taken with a grain of salt, however, as he was still engulfed in grief and deeply sensitive about his brother’s legacy. Lewis haunted his thoughts, day and night. Just a few days after blasting Moorman, Warnie wrote in his diary of hearing a song that swept him into the past, when he and his brother idled in the shrubbery at Little Lea, smoking cigars and listening to the gramophone; a week after that, he jotted down a dream in which he and Lewis “died at the same instant and found ourselves walking hand in hand in twilight over an immense featureless plain,” until a mysterious force drew them apart, Lewis “holding out both hands to me until the last when he was absorbed into white light which gave out no radiance.”

  No radiance: so it was, so it would be. The world had become a dark, dreary void. Rereading his diary, he stumbled on an old account (from June 1947) of panic at imagining “the empty years” if his brother should die first. “But little did I realize,” he added, in the inescapable gloom of the present, “how empty they were to be.” He fought the sorrow as best he could, even moving out of the Kilns for a time to alleviate his misery. His anguish intensified, and then his body broke down as if rent by grief. He developed terrible insomnia, then a slipped disk, and in 1965 suffered a stroke that impaired his speech and partially paralyzed his right hand. On New Year’s Day 1966, he awoke in the “Hell-hole,” his term for Warneford mental hospital. “The hospital atmosphere is killing me, and I am seriously worried at my mental decay,” he writes. “I often find myself wishing that God would send me another stroke which would carry me off painlessly in my sleep. God help me!”

  Warnie’s suffering included continued regret at not having kept a better diary. He was pleased with his histories of France, but he knew that his brother had been the finest thing in his life and still lamented his failure to “Boswellise” him while he could. In partial reparation he wrote a biography of Lewis, on the model of the seventeenth-century French “life and letters” memoir, interspersing brief narrative accounts with letters, diary entries, and poems representing the successive periods of Lewis’s life. The original resides as a 471-page typescript in the archives of the Marion E. Wade Center at Wheaton College, Illinois. Jocelyn Gibb, who acquired the rights to this material for Geoffrey Bles, hired the writer Christopher Derrick to transform the book into a collection of letters, prefaced by a heavily edited version of Warnie’s memoir. When it appeared in this reworked form in 1966, Warnie was livid; he considered Derrick a “busybody” and a “fool” and blamed him (though the decision had actually been Gibb’s) for adding to the collection letters from Lewis to Barfield consisting of “withering discourse on the nothingness of the utterness or some similar topic.”

  His French research completed, his memorials to his brother rebuffed or radically altered, Warnie withdrew into a narrow round of bad sleep, meals, naps, television, reading, visits to neighbors, and long bouts of boredom. His brother’s fans interrupted his solitude while imparting no pleasure, and he worried in his diary that “on my death bed—or at any rate the day before—I shall have some verbose American standing over me and lecturing on some little observed significance of J’s work. Oh damn, damn, DAMN!” In 1966, Clyde Kilby came to call, the two became friends—Warnie, whose diary sketches had grown increasingly acerbic, describes Kilby as “that nice type of American … [having] something of the dog which with wagging tail appeals to you to like him”—and together they visited Whipsnade Zoo. But such interruptions were rare; for the most part, no radiance ruled the day.

  “A Very Lucky Man”

  “It is rather queer, after a lifetime of writing (in so far as it was spent in writing at all) almost unread, as it seemed, and usually very nearly unpublished books, to keep on being told at the age of 70 that they have really meant something to quite a few people,” remarked Barfield to the American scholar R. J. Reilly in 1969. “I think perhaps I was a very lucky man.” Luck, or reward for years of uncompensated effort, was flying his way at last. After his Brandeis stint, he returned home to England for a year, then traveled back to America to teach, again at Drew University and then at Hamilton College, which awarded him an honorary doctorate. Hamilton’s small size and its original aim of turning “Red Indians into Christian gentleman,” as Barfield put it to Harwood, added a “not unpleasingly Gilbert & Sullivan touch to the whole proceeding, but that doesn’t prevent it from tickling my vanity.” Every bit as gratifying was an essay by G. B. Tennyson, an English professor at UCLA, in The Southern Review (Winter 1969) on “Owen Barfield and the Rebirth of Meaning.” This was the first serious academic appraisal of Barfield’s work. Tennyson provides a genial summary of his subject’s career, laying out Barfield’s views on philology and consciousness—including a dose of Anthroposophy—while contending, with an enthusiasm that edges into advocacy, that “his researches into the nature of poetry and inspiration have repeatedly taken him to the secret places of the spirit.”

  His self-confidence growing yet stronger from these intoxicating endorsements, Barfield began to renew his contact with other Inklings. Nevill Coghill expressed thanks for a “charming” message and passed along the disclosure, undoubtedly an eye-opener to Barfield, that he, too, suffered from sel
f-doubts, and that they had crippled his chances of getting as close to Lewis as Barfield and Williams had managed to do: “I always felt that there was too little I could contribute in exchange for the time it took from him,” Coghill wrote. “Towards the end … we had more frequent meetings. But it was too late to establish new kinds of insight and sympathy.” Barfield, continuing his Inkling outreach, traveled at least twice to the Kilns during the late 1960s for overnight stays with Warnie. During a visit on July 29–30, 1969, he shocked his host by admitting to a firm belief in reincarnation. That this essential feature of Anthroposophy came as news to Warnie tells us just how innocent he had been of his brother’s intellectual battles, including the Lewis-Barfield “Great War.” In the late 1970s, Barfield also revived his correspondence with Colin Hardie, who wrote that “I am so glad to hear from you again. I cannot remember when we last corresponded, but only that you deplored my acceptance of evolution” (one imagines this was not the first time Barfield received that particular response). Hardie continued, in an old man’s vein, that “since the Times (fortunately to reappear, at what price?, next week) vanished”—the newspaper was on strike—“one hasn’t known who is alive, and I am glad that you are and are still writing and thinking about Coleridge … I am feeling a slow decay (e.g. of memory and teeth).”

  Letters, in these halcyon days of the late 1960s and ’70s, now poured in to Barfield from ardent admirers, some of them major figures in the countercultural thinking that had mesmerized a large portion of the American intelligentsia. Theodore Roszak told him of the nation’s hunger for spiritual rebirth, David Bohm discussed quantum physics and polarity, and Norman O. Brown, author of the mantic, enigmatic Love’s Body, wrote that he was rereading Steiner’s Cosmic Memory and hunting for a commentary on root-races and Atlanteans. Intellectual revolution was in the air, and the soft-spoken English lawyer-philosopher who preached the evolution of consciousness fit right in. Barfield was invited to teach at the University of Missouri (Columbia), and, in later years, at SUNY Stony Brook and the University of British Columbia. Harwood wrote to say that “I heard from Walter Hooper that you were getting VIP treatment in America.” Readers sent him political manifestos, accounts of their dreams and visions, requests for spiritual guidance, and an avalanche of bulky manuscripts, many mad, poorly written, or both; he answered all courteously, often at length. Maud, impressed by her husband’s newfound fame, reassessed her rejection of his esoteric path and came to see, as he recalled, “that I wasn’t just a fanatic or a fool … when it came to anthroposophy.” Now in her eighties, she was aging rapidly and weighed down by worries, especially over their daughter Lucy, who had fallen victim to multiple sclerosis and become a shut-in. “She is not well enough to do anything or go anywhere,” wrote Barfield to an American correspondent. “What a life for a young woman of 35 or so. The thought of it gnaws at my vitals all the time.”

  Still, the fight against RUP must go on, along with the broader battle to demonstrate the spiritual basis of mind and matter. In 1971, Barfield advanced his campaign by publishing What Coleridge Thought, his last major book and the summing-up of decades of research and analysis. In what may well be his magnum opus, he sets out to demonstrate that Coleridge’s work presents an original and coherent philosophy that offers a key to the nature of consciousness. Barfield proceeds thematically, exploring—often by looking at literary fragments passed over by many earlier scholars—Coleridge’s views on thinking, nature, life, imagination, understanding, reason, law, God, society, and so on. He concludes that Coleridge’s philosophy is neither a haphazard by-product of opium, poetizing, and an overheated imagination, nor a rehash of Platonism, Protestantism, and idealism, but a rich, completely satisfying worldview resting squarely upon the law of polarity.

  That Coleridge believed in such a law seems incontestable, given this passage from his 1818 “Treatise on Method”: “Contemplating in all Electrical phenomena the operation of a Law which reigns through all Nature, viz. the law of polarity, or the manifestation of one power by opposite forces.” Barfield emphasizes that Coleridge’s view of polarity has little in common with the reconciliation of opposites so frequently evoked in modern literary and psychological studies; Barfield dismisses the latter as an academic abstraction, whereas polarity, in the Coleridgean sense, is a living, creative, fructifying power. As Barfield describes it, “Where logical opposites are contradictory, polar opposites are generative of each other—and together generative of new product.”

  Interpenetrating opposites generating a “new product” is, of course, also a description of sexual reproduction, and, from a broader perspective, of the process of evolution. Barfield argues that Coleridge provides the receptive modern thinker with “a full-fledged theory of evolution alternative to, and largely incompatible with, the one he has been taught to revere.” The incompatibility is twofold. It resides not only in the mechanism of evolution, which Coleridge ascribes to intermingling forces rather than random mutation, but also in the realization—very hard for most modern thinkers to swallow—that in nature everything, rocks as well as animals, evolves. To accept these truths requires an act of imagination, in the special (Steinerian) sense of perceiving subtle spiritual truths. Meditating on polarity leads to such truths, for “the apprehension of polarity,” Barfield argues, “is itself the basic act of imagination [Barfield’s italics],” and leads to astonishing discoveries. For example, according to Barfield, Coleridge realized, in the course of his reflections, that nature and mind are inseparable. It was no idle fancy when the poet imagined a major force in evolution to be a “Yearning” that is “hallowing, sanctifying.” This means, as Barfield explains in one of those explosive observations that he tends to unleash almost in passing, that scientific materialism is dead, that “the whole Laplace-Lyell-Darwin, closed-system universe (together with its fancied billions of earth-years and millions of ‘light-years’)” must be jettisoned.

  What takes its place, according to Barfield’s reading of Coleridge, is a spiritual vision of polar forces—God/man, man/nature, will/reason, and many more—suffusing the evolutionary process, with Christ’s advent as the pivotal event in the process. Coleridge, in other words, “Like Hegel … was moving on from the notion of a history of thought (‘history of ideas’ as it is commonly called) towards that of an evolution of consciousness.” Coleridge failed to attain this holy grail of understanding because the required imaginative leap was too great, the old way of thinking too imbedded. Nonetheless, Barfield concludes, Coleridge anticipated and came close to attaining the visionary breakthrough achieved a century later by Steiner, whose presence, as readers familiar with Barfield’s work will have perceived long ago, informs so much of the book.

  Many critics enthused over What Coleridge Thought. In the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, the historian of religion Antony C. Yu praises Barfield’s presentation as “orderly and lucid,” while in Studies in Romanticism, the literary critic G. A. Cevasco calls it (along with the highly controversial Coleridge: The Damaged Angel by Norman Fruman, which paints the poet as a plagiarist and liar) “quite indispensable to serious students of Coleridge.” Neither reviewer, however, confronted the radical conclusions of Barfield’s argument. Another Coleridge expert by the name of John Colmer did, and his report in Modern Language Review bristles with caveats. He applauds Barfield for his “admirable grasp of the totality of Coleridge’s thought” but accuses him of slighting the complexities of Coleridge’s philosophical arguments. Yet more damagingly, Colmer asserts that Coleridge was “being used” by Barfield “to combat all the aspects of modern materialism that the author most dislikes.” Colmer challenges in particular the “uncritical coupling” of Coleridge and Steiner, “minds of such dissimilar quality.” Barfield could not have been happy with this review. He welcomed intellectual disagreements but chafed at those that he thought misrepresented his views; a report in The Review of English Studies by the Wordsworth scholar W.J.B. Owen so incensed him with its failu
re to grasp his argument that he shot off protest letters to the author and to the editor of the journal.

  Despite the objections of Colmer and Owen, Barfield scored a major triumph with What Coleridge Thought. He had made his mark in Coleridge studies—while in his seventies!—and, by so doing, had sailed out of the backwaters of Anthroposophical argumentation and philological-historical analysis into the mainstream of English literary criticism, establishing himself as a serious, astute analyst of one of Romanticism’s most enigmatic poets and essayists. His scholarly stature grew apace, and for much of the next two decades he taught, lectured, and wrote with sterling credentials as an intellectual celebrity in his own right, rather than solely as Lewis’s bosom friend. He made no further advances in Coleridge studies, however. In the late 1970s, he agreed to edit the poet’s “Lectures on the History of Philosophy” for The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, but his contribution foundered, a victim of his advanced years and his lack of expertise in scholarly editing. What Coleridge Thought struck gold, and in doing so, exhausted the vein.

  Into the Dark

  On July 19, 1967, Tolkien traveled to London to receive, along with Dame Rebecca West, the A. C. Benson Silver Medal from the Royal Society of Literature. He told the audience at the ceremony that, of all the rewards of writing The Lord of the Rings, “I think that receiving this silver medal is the most astonishing as it is the most delightful.” De rigueur politeness aside, he meant it. The Royal Society was an arbiter of British literary taste; however loudly his detractors scoffed, the medal spoke more loudly still. He was now and would be forevermore a recognized figure in the history of English letters. The pleasure surrounding this triumph was in part personal, the satisfaction of someone who, considering himself an amateur “in a world of great writers,” had bested the field. But it was also sheer joy at the triumph of his kind of narrative, replete with heroes, villains, fantastic beings, imaginary lands, and an absorbing plot. “And after all that has happened,” he told two reporters for The Daily Telegraph Magazine, speaking of himself and Lewis, “the most lasting pleasure and reward for both of us has been that we provided one another with stories to hear or read that we really liked.” The decades of doubt had ended; he knew now that the world liked them, too.