The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings

by Philip Zaleski

  An Oxford Fantasia

  Everyone knows this about the Inklings: that they expressed their longing for tradition and reenchantment through the literature of fantasy. The Inklings’ penchant for the fantastic is quintessentially English; folktale, fairy-tale, and fantasy motifs permeate English literature from Beowulf through The Faerie Queene and The Tempest, to the poetry of Byron, Shelley, and Coleridge. In the middle of the nineteenth century, this national love for the fantastic gave rise to the modern fantasy novel. Immediately Oxford moved into the foreground, as John Ruskin, in his neo-Grimm fable The King of the Golden River (1841, written at Leamington Spa while he was an Oxford undergraduate), and Lewis Carroll, in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1864, the quintessential Oxford classic), laid the groundwork for a genre brought to early perfection by the Scotsman George MacDonald, their mutual friend, in his three children’s classics (At the Back of the North Wind [1871], The Princess and the Goblin [1872], and The Princess and Curdie [1883]) and his two fantasies (Phantastes [1858] and Lilith [1895]). MacDonald suffused almost all his works—which also include sermons, poems, literary criticism, translations, and more than two dozen verbose and sentimental novels—with a gentle Christian sensibility that would lead Lewis to call him “my master.” A few years later, William Morris, Edward Burne-Jones (both Oxford alumni), and other members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood produced novels, poetry, and paintings with fantastic themes, bathed with a lovely, romantic, neomedieval light that would deeply influence the artistic maturation of both Lewis and Tolkien.

  Fantasy, then, was in Oxford’s blood, and it is no wonder that the major Inklings experimented in so many fantastic subgenres (myth, science fiction, fable, epic fantasy, children’s fantasy, supernatural thriller, and more). They chose to be fantasists for a variety of reasons—or, rather, fantasy seemed to choose them, each one falling in love with the genre in youth (Lewis in Ireland, Tolkien in Birmingham, Williams and Barfield in London) many years before coming to Oxford. Their passion arose, in part, from the sheer excitement of the genre, the intoxication of entering the unknown and fleeing the everyday. For all of the leading Inklings, however, the rapture of the unknown pointed also to something more profound; it was a numinous event, an intimation of a different, higher, purer world or state of being. Fantasy literature was, for the Inklings, a pathway to this higher world and a way of describing, through myth and symbol, its felt presence. Fantasy became the voice of faith. And it made for a cracking good story.

  * * *

  Interest in the Inklings often first dawns in the minds of readers who have fallen in love with Tolkien and Lewis, and wish to enter more deeply into their spiritual and imaginative cosmos. But there are others who, though immune to the evangelizing power of Faërie, are curious to know more about a movement that arose not long ago in the colleges and pubs of Oxford and continues to cast a spell upon our culture. We have written with both kinds of readers in mind.

  Our book focuses primarily upon four Inklings: Lewis, Tolkien, Barfield, and Williams. Why these four and not that graceful flower Lord David Cecil, or the lovable, ogreish Hugo Dyson? Why not Lewis’s sidekick, his admirable alcoholic brother Warnie? Lewis, Tolkien, Barfield, and Williams are the best-known of the group, but that is only one reason for our choice. They are also the most original, as writers and as thinkers, and thus most likely to be read and studied by future generations. They make a perfect compass rose of faith: Tolkien the Catholic, Lewis the “mere Christian,” Williams the Anglican (and magus), Barfield the esotericist. In their beliefs, habits, marital arrangements, and private obsessions, they differed strikingly. From certain angles, it may appear that they had very little in common, apart from being Christian writers who lived in Oxford during the twentieth century. Yet somehow they found one another and together created one of the great literary sagas of the ages: the story of the Inklings.

  1

  “A STAR SHINES ON THE HOUR OF OUR MEETING”

  The story of the Inklings might begin with any of the company: Charles Williams, the first to be born, the first to publish, the first to die; Clive Staples Lewis, the most celebrated and execrated; Owen Barfield, the least known but, some say, the most profound; or any of the other brilliant figures who joined, reveled in, and (sometimes) quit the fellowship. We start, however, with John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, for with Tolkien the Inklings constellation began its ascent into the English literary firmament; he was the first to create work that bears the group’s special stamp of Christian faith blended with pagan beauty, of fantastic stories grounded in moral realism. And we start our portrait of Tolkien with his mother—a welcome surprise in this tale of a group that rigorously excluded women—because Mabel Tolkien set in motion her son’s madly spinning top of a mind, from which epic poems, children’s stories, fantasy novels, invented languages, literary essays, philological studies, songs, watercolors, and pen-and-ink sketches would take flight for the next eighty years.

  Mabel

  Mabel Tolkien was born an English Suffield, a family with roots in the West Midlands, an urbanized county flecked with green about one hundred miles northwest of London. Her father, John Suffield, an exuberant merchant with a luxuriant beard, looking rather like his grandson’s future portraits of Father Christmas, enthralled Mabel with his many skills, which included jesting, punning, and inking the Lord’s Prayer within a circle the size of a sixpence. He and his wife, the improbably named Emily Sparrow, had seven children. The family ran a drapery shop in downtown Birmingham. More distant ancestors had sold books and stationery; Tolkien would carry in his blood a love of paper and the words it bore.

  From this cozy mercantile background emerged a woman with a taste for adventure, a streak of independence, and an iron will. Mabel’s strong personality has given rise to many colorful legends; one, repeated in several biographies of her son, asserts that she and her sisters traveled as missionaries to Zanzibar, where they proselytized the sultan’s wives and concubines. This makes a good tale but has no basis in truth. Mabel’s brick-and-mortar life was, however, dramatic enough. She accepted, at eighteen, the ardent attentions of Arthur Tolkien, a thirty-one-year-old banker; their romance, conducted largely sub rosa, via clandestine correspondence and the occasional family gathering, survived a two-year parting begun in 1889, when Arthur quit England for southern Africa. He went to seek his fortune, a common enough event in this era of Victorian enterprise that produced a British empire that spanned the globe. Mabel followed him in 1891, sailing, with typical intrepidness, alone from Southampton on the Roslin Castle. The reunited couple married in Cape Town’s Anglican cathedral and set out for Bloemfontein, the dusty, dreary capital of the Orange Free State, a Boer republic where Arthur, having mastered Dutch, had become the assistant manager of the local branch of the Bank of Africa. Two children came in rapid succession: John Ronald Reuel on January 3, 1892, and Hilary Arthur Reuel on February 17, 1894 (the reason for the curious third name “Reuel”—“friend of God,” drawn from Exodus 2, where it is assigned to Moses’ father-in-law—remains obscure; Tolkien believed it to be the surname of an old family friend and passed it on to his own children as well).

  John Ronald Reuel had, from the start, something fey about him, a whiff of pixie, which Mabel relayed to Arthur’s parents in a letter dated March 4, 1893. Addressing her in-laws with nineteenth-century formality as “My dear Mr. & Mrs. Tolkien,” she reports on the challenges of life in this very un-English land (“the next door pet monkeys had been over & eaten 3 of Ronald’s pinafores”; “the weather is still intensely hot & trying”) and enthuses over her fifteen-month-old boy. Her baby, she reports in terms whose allusive prescience sends shivers of bliss down the spines of Tolkien aficionados, resembles “a fairy when he’s very much dressed up in white frills & white shoes,” but “when he’s very much undressed I think he looks more of an elf still.” The letter, suggesting a strong mental correspondence between mother and child, touches on many of Tolkien’s favorite future motifs: v
oyages to strange lands, nostalgia for home, imaginary beings. We may even read, in Mabel’s ornate calligraphy, with its curlicues and runic slashes, a hint of her son’s eventual love of elaborate and invented scripts, alphabets, and languages. And while the adult Tolkien didn’t resemble a fairy, he did approximate, with his long thin face and owlish eyes, one of his own fantastic inventions, a beardless Gandalf, perhaps. This is true of all the Inklings; they came to look like embodiments of their work. Lewis, with his red face, rotund figure, and bright bald pate, was the perfect model of the robust, full-bore (if not wholly muscular) Christian; Williams looked, so everyone said, like a monkey, with the wizened features of someone who has pored over too many magical tomes; Barfield was slender, soft-spoken, and ethereal, as if more at home in the rarefied atmosphere of the astral plane than the heavy miasma of the material world.

  * * *

  If we would picture Mabel, however, only one published photograph is available, taken November 16, 1892, in the garden of the house in Bloemfontein. It shows her at the center of a conventional Victorian family portrait, seated in a wicker chair, surrounded by a corona of relatives and servants. Arthur stands to her right, slouching with studied nonchalance in a white summer suit, the hard brim of his straw hat echoing the soft curve of his handlebar mustache. A trio of uniformed servants cluster in the background; one holds Ronald (as he was called), ten months old, looking like a plaster doll with his frilly petticoat, button eyes, and bright red mouth. Everyone seems at ease under the blazing African sun, pleased to pose in their Sunday finest. Everyone, that is, except Mabel. Something is amiss in her expression. She is dressed like the rest, in formal tropical wear: flowered hat, puff-shouldered blouse, long patterned skirt. But she sits erect, tense, her long fingers gripping the arms of her chair, her lean face turned to one side, her hawklike eyes looking quizzically toward the camera, as if watching some unwelcome thing loom up behind the photographer. Perhaps she glimpses the future, the catastrophe to come. For within a dozen years, everything in this photograph—father, mother, the Bloemfontein household, the great African adventure, the dreams of idyllic family life—would vanish, erased by exile, illness, and death, proving as ephemeral as Arthur’s boater or Mabel’s leg-of-mutton sleeves.

  The dismantling of Mabel’s life commenced immediately upon her arrival in Africa. From the start, she had felt out of place in this dry, merciless land, with its racism, its stifling weather, its un-British ways, its marauding animals. Monkeys, snakes, and locusts invaded the garden and a large spider, perhaps a tarantula, bit baby Ronald. Tolkien would later deny any connection between this childhood spider bite and the spider-monsters of his fiction; yet it is tempting to imagine that this horrific creature nestled in his subconscious until it reemerged, swollen to gigantic size, as the spiders of Mirkwood in The Hobbit, the insatiable Shelob in The Lord of the Rings, and Shelob’s mother, Ungoliant, in The Silmarillion, the primary collection of Tolkien’s mythopoeic tales.

  Above all, it was the intense heat that proved intolerable; as one blast-furnace day followed another, Mabel began to fear for her older boy’s life. By 1895 she had had enough and retreated to England with both children in tow. She moved in with her parents, pledging to return to Arthur as soon as possible. It was not to be. Mired in Bloemfontein, he fell ill with rheumatic fever, and by the following February he hovered on the brink of death. News of his illness arrived via telegram on the same day that Ronald, barely four years old, was preparing to post his first letter—his first literary production of any sort—a rapturous note to his father anticipating their reunion. Arthur, only thirty-nine, died of a hemorrhage the next day. The poignancy of hope denied is acute, as is the circumstantial intertwining of literature and tragedy, touchstones of much of Tolkien’s later work.

  Mabel, fighting fate, resettled with her children in a two-story semidetached house in Sarehole, a rural community near Birmingham. This was an inspired choice. Memories of the benign hamlet, with its old mill, bogs, forests, swan ponds, and sandpits, loomed large in her elder son’s imaginative universe and would become, in time, the landscape of the Shire, the idyllic homeland of the Hobbits. Here Ronald encountered the dialects that so fascinated him as a mature philologist, local variations on the King’s English, including gamgee, a regional term for cotton wool, from a surgical dressing devised by the Birmingham physician Joseph Sampson Gamgee (a name that would descend by a complicated philological route to Tolkien’s hobbit hero, Sam Gamgee, as we shall see in chapter 17).

  Mabel gave Ronald more than a lovely world in which to grow up; she gave him an array of fascinating tools to explore and interpret it. We know little of her own education, but she clearly valued learning and vigorously set about transmitting what she knew to Ronald. She instructed him in Latin, French, German, and the rudiments of linguistics, awakening in him a lifelong thirst for languages, alphabets, and etymologies. She taught him to draw and to paint, arts in which he would develop his own unmistakable style, primitive and compelling, Rousseau with a dash of Roerich. She passed on to him her peculiar calligraphy; he would later master traditional forms and invent his own. She tried to teach him piano, although that proved a failure. And she introduced him to children’s literature, including Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, The Princess and the Goblin, The Princess and Curdie, and Andrew Lang’s collections of fairy tales. In George MacDonald he encountered goblins and, although he did not realize it at the time, Christian mythopoesis; in Lang’s retelling of bits of the Old Norse Völsunga saga he met Fáfnir the dragon, a creature that excited his imagination like no other, and the prototype of Smaug of The Hobbit: “The dragon had the trade-mark Of Faërie written plain upon him … I desired dragons with a profound desire.” It was his first baptism into the enchantments of Faërie, an otherworldly realm just touching the fringes of ordinary life and leading, in its farthest reaches, to the outskirts of the supernatural.

  Bequeathing interests and skills to offspring is a means of ensuring continuity in the face of death, and we can read in Mabel’s intense tutoring of her children a response to her husband’s early demise. She may have sensed, too, that her own life would not last long. But Mabel wished to give her children more than the metaphorical immortality of transmitted gifts; she wished to give them true eternity. This she accomplished in 1900, by bringing herself and her two boys into the Roman Catholic Church.

  It is difficult for us, surveying the past from our comfortably pluralistic aerie, to grasp what Mabel’s conversion signified in England at the end of the nineteenth century. Anti-Catholicism ruled the land, the legacy of Henry VIII’s lusts, Elizabeth I’s ambitions, Pope Pius V’s machinations, and Guy Fawkes’s treason, mixing with misplaced nationalism and fear of Irish immigration. To be Catholic was, in the lurid popular understanding, to be blatantly un-English and probably a fifth columnist for the Roman pope, himself possibly the Antichrist. During the height of anti-Catholic paranoia, first in the “Catholic emancipation” debates of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and then in the “Papal Aggression” of 1850, when the Catholic hierarchy returned to England, political cartoonists such as James Gillray and John Tenniel fanned the flames of civic alarm, and one regularly heard advice of the sort proffered by Charlotte Brontë in 1842, that anyone favorable to the Catholic Church should “attend mass regularly for a time to note well the mummeries thereof also the idiotic, mercenary, aspect of all the priests and then if they are still disposed to consider Papistry in any other light than a most feeble childish piece of humbug let them turn papists at once that’s all.”

  Yet against this general backdrop of patriotic bigotry, we have to envision the counterfascination exerted by the Roman Catholic tradition among a small but influential group of British intellectuals, for whom it offered an alternative England that remained united to the broad central current of Christianity flowing from Rome. Nineteenth-century British Roman Catholics, whether of recusant families or converts, included a dazzling array of
names such as John Henry Newman, Henry Edward Manning, Nicholas Wiseman, Coventry Patmore, and Augustus Pugin—to be followed, in the years after Mabel’s entry into the Church, by G. K. Chesterton, Ronald Knox, Evelyn Waugh, Siegfried Sassoon, Graham Greene, Christopher Dawson, Eric Gill, Muriel Spark, Elizabeth Anscombe, and a host of others. This brilliant Catholic stream fascinated the unchurched as well; Virginia Woolf has one of her characters wonder “why, if people must have a religion, they didn’t all become Roman Catholics.”

  We have no record of why Mabel decided to join the Roman church; some will read in it a longing for hierarchy or authority, perhaps a replacement for a missing husband; others will see it as a genuine conversion of mind and soul. Whatever the motive, the act was not taken lightly. She had begun as an ardent high church Anglican but soon felt herself drawn from that confession’s aesthetic splendor to the liturgy of the modest Roman Catholic church of St. Anne’s on Alcester Street, in the impoverished Digbeth district. St. Anne’s was in all respects a convert’s church, having been transformed by John Henry Newman in 1849 from a gin distillery into the first chapel and residence for his fledgling congregation. Joined by her sister May Incledon, Mabel was received into the Roman Catholic Church there in June 1900.

  A further unraveling of her life instantly ensued. This time, she must have anticipated it: the Baptist Tolkiens and the Unitarian and Methodist Suffields united in furious denunciation of the conversions. Only one or two family members supported the sisters. May’s staunchly Anglican husband commanded her to renounce her new faith (she turned, instead, to Spiritualism) and severed the small allowance he had been sending Mabel. The next few years proved bitterly hard for Mabel, as she and her children moved into a succession of dreary residences, struggling to survive on the paltry remains of Arthur’s estate, the result of his amateur investments in South African mining ventures.