The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings

by Philip Zaleski

  In 1975, meanwhile, Barfield had written his only science fiction work, the novella Night Operation, a dark satire in which the human race, in Morlock fashion, has retreated underground, replacing the three Rs of traditional education with the three Es of a degenerate culture: ejaculation, (d)efecation, and eructation. Jon, a young man whose mind has been awakened by studying the nature of words, leads a few others to the Aboveground, where they undergo a mystical experience akin to Steiner’s final participation. Night Operation is familiar in its dystopian miasma and didactic in its quasi-autobiographical unfolding, but it does manage to condense familiar Barfieldian occupations into a brief, engaging narrative. The same is true of Barfield’s last fictional foray, Eager Spring, written in 1985, which examines Steinerian ideas in the context of ecological and environmental concerns. Night Operation appeared in Towards, while Eager Spring remained unpublished during Barfield’s lifetime.

  Throughout the 1970s and the first years of the ’80s, Barfield stayed active on the American lecture and conference circuit as one of the more profound voices in an arena still heavily populated, in that volatile era, by flamboyant countercultural figures. He talked and wrote about Lewis, about Coleridge, and above all, about the nature of consciousness. His American followers continued to respond as they had never done in England. “North America has shown at least ten times as much enthusiasm for my stuff as has the UK,” he wrote in a 1985 note addressed to his future literary executors. A Festschrift with the neatly encapsulating title of Evolution of Consciousness: Studies in Polarity appeared in 1976, edited, fittingly, by an American scholar, Shirley Sugerman. In 1978, Barfield delivered three talks at the University of British Columbia; the series appeared in 1979 as History, Guilt, and Habit, bearing on the cover of the paperback edition a blurb by Saul Bellow: “a clear, powerful thinker, and a subtle one.”

  At the same time, his personal life underwent significant change. Following the death of Cecil Harwood in 1975, he grew close to Marguerite, Cecil’s widow, and by 1977 she was writing him from Cornwall to declare her love. Three years later, Maud died, age ninety-four. She had faded greatly, following a stroke that had put an end to her work as a dance instructor. Photos from this era show a hunched-up woman with a cane, supported by an erect, trim husband; the two resemble mother and son. Soon after Maud’s death, Josephine Grant Watson (now Josephine Spence), with whom Barfield had remained friendly after their 1950s relationship had foundered, asked him—he was now eighty-two—why he didn’t marry Marguerite. He gave the practical reasons—“I just can’t imagine myself taking on the vast upheaval it would involve, house removal and all that, let alone the responsibility”—before acknowledging the most significant one, that “I suspect M. has a certain need of me … she is strenuous and energetic and determined, but there are times when all that fails her…” Barfield refers, in the same letter, to his strong feelings for Josephine, telling her that “Zwei Damen wohnen ach! in meiner Brust” (“two ladies live ah! in my breast”), wondering whether this means that “I am a bit of a blighter” and whether Josephine might conclude the same. Josephine, however, appeared content to guide and comfort Barfield in this matter as in others. In 1983, Marguerite died, closing the issue.

  Now death surrounded Barfield, as it does all octogenarians. J.A.W. Bennett, who, upon Lewis’s death, had succeeded him as Cambridge’s professor of medieval and Renaissance literature, died in 1981; Dr. “Humphrey” Havard and James Dundas-Grant in 1985. Lord David Cecil passed away on New Year’s Day 1986, after unleashing in his waning years a slew of biographical studies examining, with sympathetic eye and witty tongue, the life and art of Samuel Palmer and Edward Burne-Jones, Max Beerbohm, Jane Austen, Charles Lamb, and others. Cecil’s had been a happy life, braced by deep Christian faith and a loving marriage. Gerard Irvine, a family friend, described him as one of William James’s “once-born,” those who, in James’s words, “see God not as a strict Judge, not a Glorious Potentate; but as the animating Spirit of a beautiful harmonious world, beneficent and kind, merciful as well as pure.” If he had attended Inkling meetings more regularly, he might have been the fifth focus of this book. Later that same year of 1986, Barfield moved to the Walhatch, a retirement home in East Sussex. Here he continued to hold court for visiting scholars, writers, and devotees of his own work as well as that of Steiner and Lewis. As his autumn whitened into winter, he turned out an occasional Anthroposophical piece, along with Owen Barfield on C. S. Lewis, a compilation of essays, talks, and poems on the friend with whom he would be forever tied. Reporters visiting him in the 1990s would find him, as if in conscious echo or parody of both Lewis and Tolkien, wreathed in smoke, pipe in hand, happily discoursing on the pleasures of tobacco and the nature of consciousness. In 1997 he told Walter Hooper that “I don’t fear death, I fear dying.” Above all he dreaded the physical ordeal: “I’m so tired,” he told Hooper. “Imagine that someone arrives and says, ‘Get up old man, you’ve got to go to China!’ And off you go.” “He was thinking,” Hooper remarked, “of a Chinese junk, months and months on a choppy sea.” On December 14, 1997, he passed away, at home, of bronchopneumonia. Hooper was at his side and comforted the dying man by saying, “I know what you’re sad about—that trip to China! It’s here, it’s started, but it’s not going to be choppy seas, it’s going to take just a minute, and you know what’s going to happen. The pearly gates open, you enter, C. S. Lewis and you will start all over again, all the things you wanted to argue about, you’ll have it now.” Barfield smiled—and died. Colin Hardie would last another ten months, expiring on October 17, 1998, but when Barfield closed his eyes, the life of the great Inklings came to an end.

  EPILOGUE: THE RECOVERED IMAGE

  What, then, were the Inklings? Was John Wain right to call them (as we reported on the first page of this study) “a circle of instigators, almost of incendiaries, meeting to urge one another on in the task of redirecting the whole current of contemporary art and life”? Were they, rather, just a circle of friends, sharing talk, drink, jokes, and writings? Something in between or something other? The question vexed the Inklings themselves, their supporters, and their detractors during the group’s existence and after its demise.

  In 1955, David Cecil opened an informed and reasonable window upon the matter while exploring, “one fine evening in May amid the Gothic shades of New College,” in conversation with the novelist Rachel Trickett, the possible existence of an “Oxford School”; he later published a summary in dialogue form in the journal The Twentieth Century. If not exactly a school, Cecil thought, “there is something one might call an Oxford atmosphere,” and it had to do with a wide range of ideas “entertained imaginatively” in a “tradition of non-specialized cultured conversation,” a “relaxed, humane atmosphere” that gives writers room to breathe, in which bitter controversies are relatively rare. Within this happy climate, many different kinds of writers flourished; but Cecil could think of only one instance of a coherent, if informal, group or circle: the Inklings.

  The Inklings, Cecil explained, “combined voluminous learning … with a strong liking for fantasy. But this fantasy was not indulged independently of their ideas; it was fantasy about their ideas.” And it was, in the best sense of the word, “boyish fantasy; the imagination of a romantic, adventurous kind of boy.” The Inklings, then, constituted “Oxford’s nearest recent approximation to a ‘school’ … a school of ideas expressed through adventurous but learned fantasy.” In addition to erudition and boyish fantasy, Cecil thought, there was a third and paramount factor that united them: their Christianity.

  Cecil noted that “when I read writers in the Cambridge number of The Twentieth Century apparently showing pained surprise that distinguished intellectual persons should avow a belief in God, I cannot help reflecting that in Oxford this has never been at all unusual.” Rachel Trickett agreed: in Oxford, a “savour of grave and gracious piety,” as she put it, still lingered. Lewis had the impression, too, that the soldiers returning
to Oxford from World War II were more likely to be Christian than the returning soldiers of his own generation.

  Of course there were Christians at Cambridge and modernists at Oxford, and plenty of anomalies on both sides (like T. S. Eliot, both Christian and modernist, and F. W. Bateson, both Christian and Leavisite). Moreover, Lewis himself warned against making too much of Oxford’s Christian revival, pointing out in a 1946 article for The Cherwell that it could not be counted on to last: “Sooner or later it must lose the public ear; in a place like Oxford such changes are extraordinarily rapid. Bradley and the other idealists fell in a few terms, the Douglas scheme even more suddenly, the Vorticists overnight … Whatever in our present success mere Fashion has given us, mere Fashion will presently withdraw. The real conversions will remain: but nothing else will.” Lewis was well aware, too, that a Christian atmosphere is no protection against preening egos. That the Inklings may have been on the whole more decent and less vain than many other literary coteries can only be because they made a conscious effort to follow the path of real conversion.

  Lack of vanity is one reason why the Inklings vigorously resisted any account of the group as a formal school or movement. In a 1956 essay in Books on Trial, the novelist Charles A. Brady named Lewis, Tolkien, Williams, and Dorothy L. Sayers as members of an “Oxford Circle.” “Lor’ bless you,” Lewis wrote to Brady in reply, “those dear friends of mine were never ‘my school.’ They were all older than I. Miss Sayers was an established author before I was heard of. Charles influenced me, not I him. And as for anyone influencing Tolkien, you might as well (to adapt the White King) try to influence a bandersnatch.” Lewis repeated this view just two months before his death in a letter to an American correspondent who was looking for clarification on this point: “I don’t think Tolkien influenced me, and I am certain I didn’t influence him. That is, didn’t influence what he wrote. My continual encouragement, carried to the point of nagging, influenced him v. much to write at all with that gravity and at that length. In other words I acted as a midwife not as a father. The similarities between his work and mine are due, I think, (a) To nature—temperament. (b) To common sources. We are both soaked in Norse mythology, Geo. MacDonald’s fairy-tales, Homer, Beowulf, and medieval romance. Also, of course, we are both Christians (he, an R.C.).”

  All this seems definitive, although one must bear in mind that friends shape each other in myriad ways, obvious and subtle, and not always detectable to the principals involved. Tolkien and Lewis were comrades-in-arms during the Oxford English syllabus wars and planned—before their parting of ways—to coauthor a book on Language and Human Nature intended to exorcise the influence of I. A. Richards and his colleagues at Cambridge. Out of the Silent Planet might have been stillborn without Tolkien’s intervention; so, too, The Lord of the Rings, but for the persistent support and timely critiques of Lewis and others. Both Lewis and Tolkien acknowledged a debt to Owen Barfield’s Poetic Diction; and while Lewisian traces in Williams’s books may be more elusive than the Williamseque motifs that saturate That Hideous Strength, Lewis’s encouragement buoyed Williams tremendously. We know that the two friends discussed two literary collaborations, neither carried to term: one a “short Xtian Dictionary (about 40 Headings)” for a “library of Christian knowledge,” the other “a book of animal stories from the Bible, told by the animals concerned.”

  In any event, the dispute over the exact nature of the Inklings—cabal or club?—has faded as history has stepped in with a third alternative: that whatever the Inklings may have been during their most clubbable years, today they constitute a major literary force, a movement of sorts. As symbol, inspiration, guide, and rallying cry, the Inklings grow more influential each year. This acclamation has led to much grinding of teeth, not least because the Inklings never achieved the formal brilliance of the greatest of their contemporaries, such as Joyce, Woolf, Nabokov, Borges, or Eliot.

  The Australian critic Germaine Greer famously declared that “it has been my nightmare that Tolkien would turn out to be the most influential writer of the twentieth century. The bad dream has materialized … The books that come in Tolkien’s train are more or less what you would expect; flight from reality is their dominating characteristic.” And much to the chagrin of those who share Greer’s viewpoint, the books and spin-offs of various kinds that come in the Inklings’ train are legion. Without the Inklings there would be no Dungeons and Dragons (and the whole universe of online fantasy role-playing it produced), no Harry Potter, no Philip Pullman (in his role as the anti-Lewis). Hollywood, the voice and arbiter of popular culture, has shifted dramatically toward mythopoeic tales; this is widely recognized to be the legacy of Tolkien, whose influence was disseminated by the sixties (“Frodo Lives!”) drug culture, itself a neo-Romantic movement that soon overflowed its banks.

  Fan fiction, derivative fantasy novels, and sophomoric imitations aside, it is plain that Tolkien has unleashed a mythic awakening and Lewis a Christian awakening. Tolkien fans are often surprised to discover that they have entered a Christian cosmos as well as a world of Elves and Hobbits; fans of Lewis’s apologetic writings, on the other hand, are often discomfited when they learn about their hero’s personal life, his relationship with Mrs. Moore, his hearty appetite for drink and ribaldry, and his enduring affection for the pagan and planetary gods. But Tolkien’s mythology was deeply Christian and therefore had an organic order to it; and Lewis’s Christian awakening was deeply mythopoeic and therefore had an element of spontaneity and beauty often missing from conventional apologetics.

  The Inklings’ work, then, taken as a whole, has a significance that far outweighs any measure of popularity, amounting to a revitalization of Christian intellectual and imaginative life. They were twentieth-century Romantics who championed imagination as the royal road to insight and the “medieval model” as an answer to modern confusion and anomie; yet they were for the most part Romantics without rebellion, fantasists who prized reason, for whom Faërie was a habitat for the virtues and literature a sanctuary for faith. Even when they were not on speaking terms, they were at work on a shared project, to reclaim for contemporary life what Lewis called the “discarded image” of a universe created, ordered, and shot through with meaning.

  Lewis’s work was all of a piece: as literary scholar, fantasist, and apologist, he was ever on a path of rehabilitation and recovery. Tolkien, like Lewis, claimed to be a living anachronism—“I am in fact a Hobbit (in all but size)”—but anyone who troubles to create new languages and surround them with new myths for the sake of reenchanting English literature can hardly be accused of living in the past. In his fiction, Charles Williams reclaimed mysterious, numinous objects—the Holy Grail, the Stone of Suleiman, a Tarot deck, Platonic archetypes—from past epochs and relocated them in modern England to demonstrate the thinness, even today, of the barrier between natural and supernatural. His best nonfiction studies sustain this work of recovery; thus The Figure of Beatrice tells not only of the influence of a thirteenth-century Florentine girl upon a great poet, but of the lessons of this poet for modern life. Owen Barfield excavated the past embedded within language, secreted in the plainest of words, in order to illuminate the future of consciousness in all its esoteric, scarcely imaginable glory.

  There is another point that may explain the hostility of critics like Germaine Greer: the Inklings were, one and all, guilty of the heresy of the Happy Ending. A story that ends happily is, some believe, necessarily a sop to wishful thinking, a refusal to grow up. In “On Fairy-Stories”—the closest we come to a manifesto for the Inklings’ aesthetic—Tolkien turns this charge on its head, arguing that our deepest wishes, revealed by fairy stories and reawakened whenever we permit ourselves to enter with “literary belief” into a secondary world, are not compensatory fantasies but glimpses of an absolute reality. When Sam Gamgee cries out, “O great glory and splendour! And all my wishes have come true!” we are not in the realm of escapism, but of the Gospel, in all its strangeness and
beauty.

  Yet although the Inklings were guilty of the heresy of the Happy Ending, they were not optimists; they were war writers who understood that sacrifices must be made and that not all wounds will be healed in this life. Their belief in the Happy Ending was compatible with considerable anguish and uncertainty here below. One may be as gloomy as Puddleglum or as convinced as Frodo that “All my choices have proved ill” without losing hope in a final redemption.

  And it is on the strength of this hope that the Inklings’ project of recovery continues to unfold. Though surpassed in poetry and prose style by the very modernists they failed to appreciate, though surpassed in technical sophistication by any number of distinguished academic philosophers and theologians, the Inklings fulfilled what many find to be a more urgent need: not simply to restore the discarded image, but to refresh it and bring it to life for the present and future.

  Literary revolutions leave many in their wake; but some of those who excoriate the Inklings may come to see that Tolkien, Lewis, Barfield, Williams, and their associates, by returning to the fundamentals of story and exploring its relation to faith, virtue, self-transcendence, and hope, have renewed a current that runs through the heart of Western literature, beginning with Virgil and the Beowulf poet; that they have recovered archaic literary forms not as an antiquarian curiosity but as a means of squarely addressing modern anxieties and longings. From our present vantage point this looks like a signal and even unprecedented achievement; but what permanent place the Inklings may come to occupy in Christian renewal and, more broadly, in intellectual and artistic history, is for the future to decide.