The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings

by Philip Zaleski

  In November 1919, Lewis forged a friendship that further challenged his skepticism—and one that has proved invaluable for those who seek to understand him, for many decades later this friend provided, in a retrospective essay, our earliest glimpse of Lewis by someone outside the family circle. Leo Kingsley Baker (1898–1986) was in some ways Lewis’s double: both were twenty-one, veterans wounded on the French battlefield, Oxford scholars, and aspiring poets; Baker, however, would enjoy a very different destiny, working as an actor, a weaver, and an Anthroposophical priest before winding up as a teacher at a drama college in South East London. Baker learned of Lewis from another University College student, Rodney Marshall Sabine Pasley, who spoke of “a strange fellow who seemed to live an almost secret life and took no part in the social life of the college”—an understandable impression, since Lewis was spending much of his free time with Mrs. Moore—and yet who was, as a scholar and poet, “right up our tree.”

  After an introduction in Pasley’s rooms, Baker and Lewis began exchanging poems and taking long afternoon walks together. Lewis wrote Arthur that his new friend was the product of a progressive school “where everyone seems to have written, painted and composed” and that he had a propensity for the spiritual and the outré: “He is so clairvoyant that in childhood ‘he was afraid to look round the room for fear of what he might see.’ He got a decoration in France for doing some work in an aeroplane over the lines under very deadly fire: but he maintains that he did nothing, for he was ‘out of his body’ and could see his own machine with ‘someone’ in it, ‘roaring with laughter.’” On the whole, Lewis said, “I like and admire him very much, though at times I have doubts on his sanity.”

  Lewis was fascinated by, yet distrusted, Baker’s spiritual side. Tongue in cheek, he offered to be Baker’s “amateur disciple in mysticism,” but received a fright on one occasion when he looked into Baker’s eyes: “presently I could hardly see anything else: and everything he said was real—incredibly real. When I came away, I moved my eyes off his, with a jerk, so to speak, and suddenly found that I had a splitting headache and was tired and nervous and pulled to pieces. I fancy I was a bit hypnotised. At any rate I had such a fit of superstitious terror as I have never known since childhood and have consequently conceived, for the present, a violent distaste for mysteries and all that kind of business.” A few months later, however, he was describing Baker, in a May 1920 letter to Arthur, as “in every way the best person I have met in Oxford.” The friends talked incessantly about their literary enthusiasms and hatreds (a resounding yea to The Mabinogion and The Crock of Gold, nay to free verse and the Sitwells), and analyzed the nature of inspiration. They joined forces with Pasley to produce an anthology whose title, “The Way’s the Way,” came from The Pilgrim’s Progess, as a “counterblast” to the “Vorticist” poetry—vers libre in form, modernist in philosophy, world-weary in spirit—that was all the rage. Eventually, Lewis drew close enough to Baker to introduce him to Mrs. Moore and invite him to her house.

  Yet always Baker sensed a deeply rooted impediment to a deeper or freer friendship. That obstacle, according to Baker, was Lewis himself. He found Lewis’s prejudices odd and his sympathies constrained: “I was interested in contemporary events, social conditions, the arts, marriage, and even politics. Lewis was not. He crossed them all out, except insofar as they bumped into him.” To Baker, Lewis was a caged beast, a dogmatic rationalist who “lived in an enclosed world with rigid walls built by his logic and intelligence, and trespassers would be prosecuted. Within these walls were his ambition and single-minded determination to get the highest class in the examinations, which in his case meant the classics and philosophy…”

  Like a caged beast, Lewis liked to pace and he liked to roar, astonishing Baker—who had never met a self-proclaimed atheist—by one day shouting over tea, “You take too many things for granted. You can’t start with God. I don’t accept God!” Had Lewis been more settled in his atheism, he might have been calmer in his denunciation; but he was already coming to suspect, as he told Baker in September 1920, that “some sort of God” (presumably an H. G. Wells or Clutton-Brock sort of God) had to be postulated; merely postulated, that is, not submitted to in faith. “Were you much frightened in France?” Baker asked Lewis. “All the time, but I never sank so low as to pray.”

  Shouting over tea was the least of Lewis’s flare-ups. Once, Baker tells us, Lewis lashed out at him for no apparent reason “with deep and uncontrollable hatred.” A second explosion, coming via letter, led to an estrangement that lasted until 1935, when Lewis, informed that Baker was seriously ill, wrote to him “to try and pick up some of the old links. That they were ever dropped was, I imagine, chiefly my fault—at least even self-love on my part cannot find any substantial respect in which it could have been yours. Will you forgive me?”

  Baker ascribes Lewis’s black moods to the three great trials of his early years: the death of his mother, the troubled relationship with his father, and the miserable years at school; the result, in Baker’s view, was a young man who rarely laughed, who worshipped only mind, and who encased his heart in lead. This seems too one-sided; Baker profoundly unsettled Lewis, and as conversation strayed into the mystical regions that alarmed him so, Lewis behaved his worst. Still, Lewis was surely unhappy. At times he exuded an aura of deeply settled sorrow, nowhere more evident than in his first book, the lyric cycle begun in 1917 and published in 1919 under a title that again recalls the caged beast: Spirits in Bondage.

  Lewis’s original title, actually, was Spirits in Prison, alluding to the belief (based on 1 Peter 3:18–20) that Christ preached the Gospel to the spirits in Hades. He changed it after his father pointed out its similarity to the title of a 1908 novel, Robert Hichens’s A Spirit in Prison. The title also nearly duplicates The Spirits in Prison, an 1884 book on the Harrowing of Hell by the celebrated dean of Wells Cathedral and former University College scholar, Edward Hayes Plumptre. We don’t know if Lewis read this work by one of his college’s alumni, but in any event, he had a more radical project in mind, for Spirits in Bondage inverts the Gospel story: in Lewis’s telling, the spirits have been imprisoned by an oppressive God, and it is the Romantic rebel-poet, Lewis himself, an inspired adversary rather than a dutiful only-begotten son, who sings of their release.

  Spirits in Bondage

  We forgive Tolkien his “Goblin Feet,” for in its whimsical conceits and singsong rhymes we discern the outlines of later, far greater work. Lewis’s early publications deserve the same indulgence. Walter Hooper, who served as Lewis’s secretary during the final months of his life and then as literary executor, editor, and custodian of Lewis’s entire intellectual legacy, begins his preface to the 1984 edition of Spirits in Bondage by remarking that “we are all young once.” This is just the right defense, for Lewis’s immaturity radiates from every page. He published the book under the pseudonym of “Clive Hamilton,” wedding his disliked first name to his mother’s maiden name, as he explained to Albert, in order to avoid sarcastic asides from his fellow soldiers about “our b____y lyrical poet.” Albert may have noticed, however, that the armistice was signed and Lewis demobilized and secure in Oxford’s ivory towers before the book appeared on March 20, 1919. A more painful explanation may have occurred to him, that his son’s pseudonym was a declaration of filial independence. The name carries, too, implications of an identity adrift. “I was at this time living,” Lewis recalls in Surprised by Joy, “in a whirl of contradictions.” He did not believe in God; he blamed God for not existing; he blamed God for making the world. From this intellectual chaos he had evolved, as we have seen, a somewhat Gnostic perspective, admitting to his picture of the cosmos, if not God, at least something he called “Spirit,” which calls to us through Beauty and is locked in battle with matter.

  This is the ideology that permeates the poetry of Spirits in Bondage. Happily, Lewis did not let it infect his aesthetic choices. Spirit may be, as he wrote to Arthur, “matter’s great enem
y,” and yet as a poet he depicted the gossamer realm of spirit with lush, earthy imagery drawn from the material world. Typical is “Death in Battle,” the last poem in the collection but the very first of his works to be professionally published, appearing in John Galsworthy’s magazine Reveille two months before Spirits in Bondage came out. Here the poet, on the battlefield, “driven and hurt beyond bearing,” petitions for admission to a higher, purer world. Lewis paints this spiritual abode in a series of vivid (if not always original) images, as “the peaceful castle, rosy in the West,” “the sweet dim Isle of Apples,” “flowery valleys,” “dewy upland places,” the “garden of God,” a “Country of Dreams!” The poem is lovely, taut, unsentimental, suffused with nostalgia for paradise. Similar is “Ballade Mystique,” identified by Warnie as expressing his brother’s “considered opinion of his own youth,” in which the poet proclaims his wretchedness among his friends and moons over a land “Beyond the western ocean’s glow / Whither the faerie galleys steer.”

  These are among the best of the matter-vs.-spirit poems. Elsewhere in the book, Lewis shows his age. In “Satan Speaks,” oddly suggestive of a later era’s heavy-metal album lyrics, the devil celebrates his own dark majesty, his seductive disguises (“I am the flower and the dewdrop fresh / I am the lust in your itching flesh”) and his cruelty (“I am the spider making her net / I am the beast with jaws blood-wet”). “De Profundis” curses God artlessly (“Come let us curse our Master ere we die, / for all our hopes in endless ruin lie. / The good is dead. Let us curse God most High”), in a vein reminiscent of A. E. Housman. Not until much later would Lewis see the justice of Chesterton’s observation that “the curse against God is ‘Exercise I’ in the primer of minor poetry.”

  Often—too often—Lewis laments the weight of life, the ravages of time, the falsity of hope (“But lo!, I am grown wiser, knowing that our own hearts / Have made a phantom called the Good…”). How weary to bear the world’s weight upon one’s shoulders! Has any twenty-year-old been as old as Lewis? Yet alongside the precocious spiritual and moral exhaustion, one spies glints and flashes of something more—not only the longing for Joy that emerges in so many images of fairies and western islands and gardens of delight, hinting at the Perelandrian and Narnian fantasies to come, but also, here and there, an appreciation of the stolid, beefy England that both Tolkien and Lewis would later defend in their writings. “In Praise of Solid People” declares

  Thank God that there are solid folk

  Who water flowers and roll the lawn,

  And sit and sew and talk and smoke,

  And snore all through the summer dawn.

  Even better is the astonishing “The Ass,” in which the poet, wandering in the heather, encounters a sleepy brown ass and wonders

  Can it be true, as the wise men tell,

  That you are a mask of God as well,

  And, as in us, so in you no less

  Speaks the eternal Loveliness.

  In its pastoral serenity, its humor (“O big, brown brother out of the waste, / How do thistles for breakfast taste?”), its Franciscan love of lowly creatureliness, this is a poem one might expect from Lewis at fifty years of age; it is a happy harbinger of things to come.

  Spirits in Bondage slipped into print with few reviews and those lukewarm at best. The Scotsman noticed the “emotional glooming” but declared the text “never unhealthy, trifling, or affected.” The Times Literary Supplement, more realistically, remarked that “the thought, when closed with, is found rather often not to rise above the commonplace.” A sharper knife thrust, from a different angle, came from Warnie, who lamented in a letter to Albert the book’s “purely academic” atheism and how it might affect Lewis’s future career. Albert, showing unusual balance, replied, “He is young and he will learn in time that a man has not absolutely solved the riddle of the heavens above and the earth beneath and the waters under the earth at twenty.”

  Nor could Lewis at twenty solve the riddle of reconciling his family to his “family.” Whenever Lewis visited Belfast he was reduced to exchanging his daily letters with Mrs. Moore on the sly, Arthur acting as intermediary. By 1921, Lewis was a permanent member of the Moore household, though he continued to hide the truth from his college and from his father. When Albert, much to everyone’s surprise, announced a plan to visit his son in Oxford in July, Lewis wrote back, “I have been moved out of College and you will probably find me sharing with a man who is up to his eyes in work. This means we can’t spend much time on my own hearth.” For the next thirty years Lewis would live with—or, as Warnie saw it, under—Mrs. Moore, moving from one dismal rented home to another, until they settled in the Kilns.

  Warnie met Mrs. Moore and her daughter, Maureen, for the first time in August 1922, while visiting Oxford during a leave from his West African tour of duty. He thoroughly enjoyed himself, writing in his diary, “I am glad to have met Mrs. M and Maureen, not only intrinsically but because it gives me a larger share in J’s real life: happy though I think we can be together at Leeborough, there cannot in the nature of things be any return to the old days, nor indeed is it to be desired.” By 1933, Warnie’s attitude toward Mrs. Moore would harden; he came to consider her “notably domineering and possessive by temperament” and thought her relationship with his brother a flagrant abuse. In particular, he was outraged to see Lewis carrying out mundane household chores. Too often, he felt, the pen played second fiddle to the broom, mop, and dish towel; what right had this thoroughly unintellectual older woman to demand such sacrifices from a young man of Lewis’s great promise? Warnie’s heart sank when he heard Mrs. Moore tell visitors that “he is as good as an extra maid in the house.” He could not see what his brother saw, that Mrs. Moore could be loving and supportive, and that during the early years of their life together the couple shared many moments of fun and gestures of tenderness and mutual encouragement.

  Thus conflicted both in his personal arrangements and his intellectual outlook, Lewis might have retreated into his fortress of argumentative unbelief and built so high those walls of restricted sympathies and dogmatic rationalism of which Baker speaks that no one could clamber over them, but for the advent of one man: “the Second Friend,” “the man who disagrees with you about everything,” who “has read all the right books but has got the wrong thing out of every one,” the great comrade with whom you engage in perpetual argument that concludes with victory—a greater access to truth—on each side. Baker introduced Lewis to his Second Friend sometime near the end of 1919, when Owen Barfield had just gone up to Wadham College as a classical scholar.

  5

  “WORDS HAVE A SOUL”

  “The good are befriended even by weakness and defect,” observed Emerson. “Our strength grows out of our weakness.” As a young child, Owen Barfield, future philologist, novelist, poet, essayist, playwright, solicitor, a man who would devote his life to the secret life of words—and an assiduous student of Emerson, who knew that “every word was once a poem. Every new relation is a new word”—had no particular strength when it came to language. It was music that captured his heart. He was six or seven years old, not yet attending school, when workers delivered a grand piano to the family home in the northern London suburbs and his mother, Elizabeth, sat down to play a romantic melody, an impromptu or nocturne by Schubert or Chopin. “I remember that awfully well,” he said as a very old man, just as he remembered and cherished everything to do with music and dance. His father, Arthur Barfield, a solicitor, was also musical. Father and mother would play piano duets, and while still a very young boy, Owen absorbed a good portion of the classical piano canon. He was, he said, “always surrounded with music.”

  Years later, he realized that in his childhood home, music had taken the place of religion, a subject in which his parents had no interest. He knew, as a child, nothing about prayer, or any sacred words, and he felt acute embarrassment when his nurse looked astonished at his failure to kneel before bedtime. It was hardly his fault; music alone
occupied the household lararium, and Owen gladly shared in its worship. This early devotion, but not the accompanying dismissal of religion, stayed with him always. When he grew up to be a philosopher and wordsmith, he came at words as a musician might, searching out the rhythm and melody in poetry, and the secret songs that language sings as it matures over centuries, songs that reveal, or so he believed, the secret history of consciousness. As an old man, he confessed that if he were forced to choose between music and poetry, music would win out.

  Owen began his formal education at seven or eight years of age, entering Highgate School, a public (nongovernmental) school for the upper middle class, founded in 1585. There he began to open to the power of words, studying Latin and Greek, reading voraciously, and discovering, in a most unexpected way, that words carry their own peculiar force. “I chalked on the wall in large letters, ‘Mr. Kelly is a fool’ … I was terrified of what I had done. I cried I think; and either my mother or my father, brother, or uncle advised me to go and wash it off very early in the morning.” He did so, but the memory proved indelible. So did that of a more significant episode, around the age of twelve, that taught him that words possess beauty as well as frightening power. He was seated in a Highgate School Latin class, pondering the line “Cato, octoginta annos natus, excessit e vita” (conservatively translated as “Cato, eighty years of age, left this life”), when the boy sitting beside him declared, “Cato, at the age of 80, walked out of life [the italics are Barfield’s]—that’s rather nice!” Barfield returned throughout his life to this episode, “the actual moment when [I] was first made aware that it was possible to enjoy language as such—the very nature of language,” and when he first realized the beauty and power of metaphor. The moment becomes more piquant when one learns that the schoolboy sitting next to him was Alfred Cecil Harwood, destined to become his lifelong friend and eventually C. S. Lewis’s as well.