The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings

by Philip Zaleski

  Yet still he kept the world at bay. Besieged by journalists, photographers, and readers, he “found none of them pleasant, nearly all of them a complete waste of time.” The portcullis descended, he refused to be photographed in his house, and he complained bitterly about interviews, even those that his publishers believed would boost sales. During the summer of 1968, Tolkien and Edith moved out of Oxford to Poole, a seaside resort on the English Channel, adjacent to Bournemouth, where they had vacationed since the early 1950s. Edith rejoiced in the change; she had felt isolated among the Oxford intelligentsia, while in Bournemouth she had friends who shared her interests in family, music, and the like. For Tolkien, the move meant the loss of friends, especially in academia, a painful sacrifice; still, he relished the prospect of escaping city bustle and, even more important, intrusions from nosy fans. He was at home in Oxford, preparing for the move, when on June 17 he tumbled down a flight of stairs. The accident resulted in an immediate operation at Nuffield Orthopaedic Centre. After a month in the hospital, fretting and fussing (and, at least at first, terrified that his leg would be amputated), he moved to Bournemouth, his leg encased in a plaster cast, where he rejoined Edith, who had preceded him.

  The Tolkiens inhabited a small bungalow at 19 Lakeside Drive in Poole for more than three years. Tolkien likened it to “a ship or ark,” an appropriate image for a haven of escape from Oxford turmoil. Seen from the garden, the house resembled a ship, surrounded by roses instead of water. During his residence there, Tolkien produced several philological, etymological, and historical studies on his legendarium, covering such arcane themes as Númenórean measurement, Rohan’s military matters, and Elvish reincarnation. Many of these pieces remained unfinished, some decaying into what Christopher Tolkien called “chaotic and illegible or unintelligible notes and jottings.” Wearing down, Tolkien was determined to pass on to the world as much knowledge of Middle-earth as possible. He longed to compile grammars of Quenya and Sindarin, and he continued to draw, in colored pencils and pen, curious Elvish heraldic designs and flowering or paisley doodles. “‘Stories’ still sprout in my mind from names,” he told his son Michael, asking for prayers that he might live long enough to record them.

  During this time, he became increasingly upset over certain developments in the Catholic Church. The liturgical changes in the wake of Vatican II disturbed him deeply. He furiously objected to the adoption of the vernacular during Mass and cringed at the casual attitude of many Catholics toward dress, prayer, and pious practices; Clyde Kilby records that the failure of some people to genuflect once distressed Tolkien so much that he “made his way awkwardly to the aisle and there made three very low bows, then stomped out of the church.” He continued to communicate, to family and friends, his own deeply held beliefs; one of the most interesting letters of his final years is addressed to Camilla Unwin, Rayner’s young daughter, who had written Tolkien to ask the purpose of life. He begins his lengthy response by pointing out that the question is really about the purpose of human beings and the “things they design and make” (that is, subcreation, although Tolkien does not employ the term). Inevitably, he continues, the discovery of design or pattern leads to the discovery of Mind, and from there to the discovery of God. Life’s purpose, then, is to know, praise, and thank God, a truth he underscores by quoting, in English and Latin, key passages of the Gloria in excelsis Deo, a Christian hymn dating to the fourth century or earlier and sung to this day in the liturgy of the Catholic Mass. Presumably, Camilla was a bright child who knew her Latin; surely, she must have been delighted by this long, eloquent testament from such a famous man, with its kindly yet serious tone and its delightful way of proceeding in logical leaps and bounds from her fundamental question to the heights of faith.

  In July 1969, Tolkien complained of pain and depression. His doctor diagnosed a diseased gallbladder and placed him on a fat-and-alcohol-free diet. This strict regimen was modified once X-rays proved negative; nonetheless, the episode left him feeling isolated, helpless, brooding over his health and that of his wife. Edith’s arthritis continued to worsen, and in April 1970, she slipped in the bath, fracturing her shoulder. The injury healed, after a stint in an arm sling, and she and Tolkien were able to resume for a while their quiet Bournemouth habits, he working with diminished energies on The Silmarillion and related projects, she enjoying the company of friends. Rayner Unwin came to visit, as did Pauline Baynes, bringing along a painted map of Bilbo’s journey in The Hobbit. In October 1971, Tolkien lost his appetite and took to his bed; he remained unfit until Christmas and told Michael he had dropped more than a stone (fourteen pounds) in weight. But the great blow fell on November 19 of that year, when Edith’s gallbladder became inflamed. After more than a week in the hospital, during which she grew better and then relapsed, she died, age eighty-two, on November 29. Three days later, a Requiem Mass was held at 9:00 a.m. in Bournemouth, and the same afternoon she was buried in Wolvercote Cemetery, Oxford. “I am utterly bereaved, and cannot yet lift up heart, but my family is gathering round me and many friends,” wrote Tolkien the day she died. By Christmas Eve, he was still engulfed in mourning and unable to work, writing to a correspondent that “she was my Lúthien Tinúviel”—the lovely Half-elven princess who exchanged her immortality for the love of the mortal hero Beren—“with her raven hair and fair face and bright starry eyes.” Almost immediately, he looked for a means to return to Oxford. A solution emerged when Christopher wrote to the warden of Merton College, describing his father’s predicament and asking for help; the school responded by offering Tolkien a resident fellowship that encompassed a suite of rooms at the school and the assistance of a caretaker and his wife. Tolkien traveled back to Oxford in March, riding with the movers in their furniture van. He dove happily into college life, reveling in the Fellows’ Garden, ablaze with butterflies and flowers, and in renewed contact with academic friends. He began to climb out of his sorrow.

  On March 22, the Oxford Mail ran a cheerful interview with him in which he said what he had been saying for decades, that The Silmarillion, or a part of it, would be published “before very long.” On March 27, he traveled to London to receive the next day the CBE (Commander of the British Empire, the same award that Lewis had rejected in 1951) from Queen Elizabeth. In June, Oxford University awarded him an honorary doctorate of letters, in a ceremony at the Sheldonian with a tribute in Latin by Colin Hardie, who was by now public orator of the university. Hardie’s address ended with the ringing if quixotic aspiration that “as the Road goes ever on, he [Tolkien] will produce from his store Simarillion and scholarship.” But as the honors accrued, creativity diminished, and Tolkien found it increasingly difficult to focus on his work. The Silmarillion would not appear during his lifetime.

  In spite of his dwindling powers, however, Tolkien fulfilled perfectly, during this first year at Merton, the role of paterfamilias and famous if aging author. He made the rounds of his scattered family, including his brother Hilary in Evesham, with whom he imbibed whiskey and television shows; donated to charity the desk upon which he had written The Hobbit; visited the offices of Allen & Unwin, who treated him royally, as befitted their principal source of income; and dealt with hundreds of letters and gifts from admirers, including a steel goblet that bore, in Sauron’s Black Speech, the “terrible words seen on the Ring. I of course have never drunk from it, but use it for tobacco ash.”

  Warnie, meanwhile, had heard of Edith Tolkien’s death by reading the Telegraph. “Peace to her ashes,” he wrote in his diary, where he often brooded over his own death and postmortem fate. The diary itself was dying, visited only at long intervals: twelve entries in 1970, six in 1971, six in 1972. He had brought his drinking under control but was prone to poor circulation and dizzy spells, which increased when a pacemaker was implanted in January 1972. The following August he sailed to Ireland for a month of rest and companionship with the sisters at Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital in Drogheda. While there, he developed gangrene in his feet, underwen
t surgery, and remained abroad for most of a year. The following April 9, back at the Kilns, he collapsed, died, and was buried beside his brother in Headington.

  Three miles away in Merton College, Tolkien was under siege. “I have been assailed by hosts of people, and worse, have been invaded by criminals, so that I live behind locked doors, and under the eye of the local C.I.D.” The assailants, as usual, were fans and journalists; the invaders were thieves, who stole his CBE medal and some of Edith’s jewelry. In addition to these aggravations, he was oppressed by physical frailty and failure to complete The Silmarillion. To a long-term friend and correspondent he confessed that he had “lost confidence,” comparing himself to an “old man” who “sits cold and unable to muster courage to go out on a journey that his heart desires to make.” During August 1973, he managed some notes revising the history of Galadriel; Christina Scull and Wayne G. Hammond speculate that this may have been the last addition to his vast creation. The same month, he sat for his last photograph, taken by his grandson Michael George in Oxford’s Botanical Garden: an image of an old man with cane, dressed in tweed jacket, flannel pants, and ornamental waistcoat, leaning against a Pinus nigra, a tree cultivated in Great Britain and South Africa, thus linking his first and final days. Three weeks later, on August 31, while in Bournemouth visiting friends, he was hospitalized with a bleeding ulcer. John and Priscilla rushed to his bedside (the other children were on the Continent). A chest infection developed, and Tolkien succumbed on September 2. After a funeral Mass in Headington concelebrated by John, Fr. Robert Murray, and the local parish priest, he was laid alongside Edith in Wolvercote Cemetery. Creation and subcreation, history and story merged into one, as the granite gravestone read “Edith Mary Tolkien, Luthien, 1889–1971. John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, Beren, 1892–1973.”

  An Unexpected Friendship

  As Barfield’s reputation continued to expand, a new crop of friends, colleagues, and acolytes emerged. The most famous—and, at first glance, one of the most unlikely—was the American novelist Saul Bellow, whose sprawling seriocomic novels would garner him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1976. On June 3, 1975, he wrote to Barfield from Chicago, explaining that he had studied Saving the Appearances and Unancestral Voice and wished to consult with Barfield about “the Meggid and about Gabriel and Michael and their antagonists.” He added, as if concerned that Barfield might suspect his motives or worry that a popular novelist lacked the delicacy of mind to apprehend spiritual truths, that “I am, I assure you, very much in earnest.” Although Barfield did not know it at the time, Bellow’s earnestness had been amply expressed in his latest novel, Humboldt’s Gift, which teemed with Anthroposophical musings.

  Barfield responded favorably, and the two met for lunch a few weeks later in London at Barfield’s club, the Athenaeum. The meeting went well, the American sitting at the Englishman’s feet, the humble disciple querying the master. “I was a totally unknown quantity,” Bellow wrote Barfield afterward, “and felt that I had failed to show why I should be taken seriously.” A telling moment occurred at this session, or possibly during a second lunch in London before Bellow returned to the States, when Barfield asked Bellow his age. Bellow answered “Sixty,” to which Barfield, with a smile, said “Sixteen?” Bellow, convinced of his spiritual immaturity, took this as an “entirely justified” joke, whereas the truth was simply that Barfield had misheard his response. As it happened, however, Barfield did harbor doubts about Bellow. He described them on October 25, writing that “of course there’s no guarantee that he will not lose interest and go on to something else. But I make that remark as applicable to any exceptionally volatile mind capable of producing ‘best-sellers,’ not as arising from my actual impression of him.”

  Despite these hesitations, the relationship mellowed into a warm, if brief, friendship. Bellow pored over Steiner’s works and tackled his spiritual exercises, which Barfield had sent him. This practice gave him “a certain daily stability,” but he found it a struggle at his age to change his ways and reimagine the world in Steiner’s visionary terms. Barfield, firmly set in his own ways, read Humboldt’s Gift and told Bellow that “I couldn’t get up enough interest in enough of what was going on to be held by it. If it’s any comfort to you … I had very much the same experience with the Lord of the Rings.” But Bellow had no interest in The Lord of the Rings, and Barfield’s comment stung. He took it with grace, however, as a good student must, and continued his esoteric research, highlighted by a university seminar during which he led discussions of Saving the Appearances and Worlds Apart. He also shipped Barfield a Parker Knoll armchair as an expression of gratitude and affection. Barfield, however, maintained his criticism of Bellow’s fiction and on August 15, 1979, the latter put his foot down, telling Barfield that “I can’t easily accept your dismissal of so much investment of soul … You don’t like novels? Very well. But novels have for forty years been my trade; and if I do acquire some wisdom it will inevitably, so I suppose, take some ‘novelistic’ expression. Why not?” Barfield wrote back immediately, saying that he had meant no harm, that he had assumed that criticizing the novels of a Nobel Prize winner was akin to the “damage … a peashooter will do to an armored car.” Bellow responded in kind, happy to return to his subordinate role, declaring that “four or five years of reading Steiner have altered me considerably” and hoping that by the time he died “I will have made some progress … and you won’t have to be quite so severe with me.”

  After this embarrassing kerfuffle, the correspondence dried up for three years. Then, in 1982, Barfield agreed to review Bellow’s new novel, The Dean’s December, for the U.S.-based Anthroposophical journal, Towards. His evaluation, largely a convoluted retelling of the story, is unforgiving and at times hostile. He complains that the tale has too little plot, too much “excruciating” self-consciousness, too many metaphors, and summarizes it, in a creaky metaphor of his own, as “a journey through fascinating country in a jerky, stopping-and-starting wagon.” As if aware that he had gone too far, he tacks on a conciliatory final sentence, noting that the book makes “a deep and lasting impression.”

  The damage had been done. Bellow, who received an advance copy of the review, was deeply wounded. He wrote to Barfield, offering the customary obeisance (“perhaps your understanding of the book is better than my own”), and then advising him that “you failed to find the key, the musical signature without which books like mine can’t be read.” Barfield and he inhabited different worlds: “I was aware from our first meeting that I was far more alien to you than you were to me”; Barfield knew nothing of the American Jewish sensibility and next to nothing about modern fiction; as a result he misread a “hard, militant and angry book” as an indulgent exercise in self-consciousness.

  The assessment is hard to dispute. The two men had attempted to traverse a perhaps unbridgeable chasm. Bellow painted the world, Barfield parsed it; Bellow sought meaning, Barfield had found it. The two had little more in common than Tolkien and Ava Gardner, and Bellow and Barfield’s friendship, although sustained for seven years rather than a single hour, produced little more in the way of lasting fruit. After the Towards review, they never spoke to each other again.

  Waning and Waxing

  Meanwhile, the ranks of the Inklings thinned rapidly. C. L. Wrenn died in 1969, Warnie, Tolkien, and R. B. McCallum in 1973, Hugo Dyson in 1975, along with Barfield’s and Lewis’s close friend Cecil Harwood. Fr. Gervase Mathew passed on in 1976, Adam Fox in 1977. Nevill Coghill died in 1980, after achieving, late in life, notoriety for codirecting Doctor Faustus, a film adaptation of Marlowe’s play with Richard Burton declaiming and Elizabeth Taylor disrobing, and accolades for cowriting a modern English musical of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales that pleased critics and audiences in London’s West End and around the world.

  As the Inklings diminished in number, however, their fame multiplied. The Lord of the Rings and the Narnia books continued to enjoy spectacular sales; in 1975, Barfield learned from a correspond
ent that Crown Princess Michiko of Japan was reading his books, along with those of Lewis and Tolkien. Two years later, The Silmarillion appeared in print and became an international bestseller. It had fallen to Christopher Tolkien to create a publishable book out of the mountain of manuscript and typescript, fragmentary and finished Silmarillion tales that his father had left behind: a nearly overwhelming task. His desire to do justice to his father’s legacy is palpable. Christopher had lived in the world of The Silmarillion since childhood; as he expressed it in an interview with Le Monde, “Si étrange que cela puisse paraître, j’ai grandi dans le monde qu’il avait créé … Pour moi, les villes du Silmarillion ont plus de réalité que Babylone” (“Strange as it may seem, I grew up in the world he created … For me, the cities of the Silmarillion possess more reality than Babylon”), and he had played a key part in every stage of its unfolding. A dream he remembered having after his father’s death speaks volumes: “J’étais dans le bureau de mon père, à Oxford. Il entrait et se mettait à chercher quelque chose avec une grande anxiété. Alors je réalisais avec horreur qu’il s’agissait du Silmarillion, et j’étais terrifié à l’idée qu’il découvre ce que j’avais fait” (“I was in my father’s office in Oxford. He came in and began searching for something with great anxiety. Then I realized with horror that it was the Silmarillion he was after, and I was terrified by the idea that he might discover what I had done”). The Silmarillion was the first fruit of his heroic labor. An unexpected harvest followed, as a vast corpus of Silmarillion material, along with other major elements of the legendarium, assembled with text-critical apparatus and commentary by Christopher from his father’s writings, would appear in the twelve-volume History of Middle-earth (1983–96). Fittingly, The Silmarillion (book) did not exhaust the contents of the Silmarillion mythology.