The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings

by Philip Zaleski

  Dark futures began to proliferate in his mind, steeped not only in the horrors of the European and Pacific theaters but in the equivalent if imaginary monstrosities that threatened Middle-earth. He wrote to Christopher in quasi-apocalyptic tones, calling World War II “the first War of the Machines,” an assault by technology upon human values “leaving, alas, everyone the poorer, many bereaved or maimed and millions dead, and only one thing triumphant: the Machines.” A few months later, again addressing his son, he railed against the RAF and its warplanes and expressed his “grief” that Christopher had been obliged to work with these deadly inventions: “My sentiments are more or less those that Frodo would have had if he discovered some Hobbits learning to ride Nazgûl-birds, ‘for the liberation of the Shire.’” He denounced the Pacific War, for which he felt not “a glimmer of patriotism” and to which he “would not subscribe a penny … let alone a son, were I a free man.” The jeremiad continues on August 9, this time lambasting the atomic bombing of Japan by “lunatic physicists”; God, he warned, “does not look kindly on Babel-builders.”

  In these shocking tirades, one hears a man nearing the end of his tether. Illness, work, war, and worry over Edith and his children had taken their toll. The Allies, with their great engines of destruction, had become tools of Morgoth. World War II was drawing to a close, but Tolkien foresaw a greater one looming against the Machines, by which he meant not only mechanization but a panoply of evil acts and inventions epitomized by automation and automatism, by Satanic disconnection from soil, family, and faith. The truth is, he badly needed a vacation, but he refused to leave Oxford and Edith. Instead, he took refuge in work, toiling, mostly at night, on the new Hobbit, a project that by now had taken on, in its wild ambition, gargantuan size, and interminable construction, more than a few similarities to the Tower of Babel he had condemned to Christopher. During March, he had written Unwin, confiding that he had “squandered” his precious spare time by penning letters to his son, explaining that the Hobbit sequel is “simply is not the kind of stuff for odd moments,” and assuring him—as usual, he was wildly off the mark—that “three weeks with nothing else to do—and a little rest and sleep first—would probably be sufficient” to complete the project.

  The longed-for serenity, sleep, and spare time arrived months later, the sequel to a momentous change. In the summer of 1945, Tolkien resigned as Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon (he was replaced by fellow Inkling Charles Wrenn) in order to become Merton Professor of English Language and Literature, thus transferring his academic association to Merton College. The move was liberating. True, it irked him that Dyson, elected to a Merton fellowship at the same time, had secured the very rooms Tolkien had desired, overlooking the meadow. But, as he crowed to Christopher, he found it “incredible belonging to a real college (and a very large and wealthy one).” To Unwin he explained that, as he was no longer professor of Anglo-Saxon, “I shall not be left all alone to try and run our English School.” Moreover, “for the first time in 25 years, except the year I went on crutches (just before The Hobbit came out, I think), I am free of examining … I hope after this week actually to—write.”

  He encountered, when he returned to his manuscript, an unexpected obstacle. Repeated interruptions had weakened his grasp on the book’s vast, intricate architecture, and “I shall now have to study my own work in order to get back to it.” Nonetheless, he promised Unwin that the book would be completed “before the autumn term, and at any rate before the end of the year.” For a while it looked as though he could meet his pledge, and on September 30 he informed Unwin that “I picked it up again last week and wrote (a good) chapter.” But soon the interruptions returned. A few weeks before Christmas, he wrote to say that the family was relocating to a smaller house, a Merton College rental requiring less time and effort to manage. Nonetheless, his “magnum opus” would be finished and delivered, he predicted, “before long, or before January.” Seven months later, Book I—a small portion of the whole—arrived in Unwin’s hands.

  The publisher immediately turned it over to his son Rayner, who as a boy of ten, eleven years earlier, had reported so glowingly on The Hobbit. Rayner didn’t disappoint, calling the new typescript “a brilliant and gripping story” in which “the tortuous and contending currents of events in this world within a world almost overpower one.” He added, with a touch of his father’s practicality, that “quite honestly I don’t know who is expected to read it.” Tolkien wrote to thank him and to assure the elder Unwin that there would be readers, for “those that like this kind of thing at all, like it very much, and cannot get anything like enough of it, or at sufficiently great length to appease hunger.” He concluded with a cri de coeur and a new resolve, declaring that the tale was “written in my life-blood, such as that is, thick or thin; and I can no other. I fear it must stand or fall as it substantially is. It would be idle to pretend that I do not greatly desire publication, since a solitary art is no art … yet the chief thing is to complete one’s work, as far as completion has any real sense.”

  Quenched Spirits

  While Tolkien soldiered on with his magnum opus, the Inklings gathered, declaimed, and drank copiously, just as they had done throughout the war. Warnie jotted down abbreviated minutes for each meeting in his diary. On Thursday, March 28, 1946: “a good meeting of the Inklings, although scantily attended. Present, J and I, Christopher, Humphrey, Colin Hardie, Gervase Mathew. Interesting discussion on the possibility of dogs having souls.” Five days later: “To the Bird and Baby where I was joined by Humphrey, Tollers, and Chris. Tollers looking wonderfully improved by his restcure at Stonyhurst, and in great spirits (having packed his wife off to Brighton for ten days).” Thursday, August 8: “We went on to Magdalen, where there was a well attended Inklings—Stanley Bennett of Cambridge, who had been dining with J, Humphrey, Ronald, Gervase. But not the sort of evening I much enjoy, mere noise and buffoonery, although Hugo as improvisatore was very funny at times.” Special dinners supplemented or occasionally replaced the standard Tuesday-Thursday program. Thus in late July, Warnie and his brother traveled “to dine with the Hugo Dysons in their new house, 12 Holywell—very reluctantly, for with all my army experience I am still as shy of women as a hobbledehoy: and also it would otherwise have been an Inkling night.” His trepidations proved baseless, for successive glasses of sherry, hock, and whiskey along with a delicious fish salad provided a helpful buffer, and he found both Mrs. Dyson and the Dyson’s house appealing “after our slatternly straggling Kilns.” He brooded on the contrast: “I have now endured the Kilns for over fifteen years, and it is no more ‘home’ now than it was when I first entered it; I still have the feeling that it is a billet which I have marched into late in the evening and will be leaving for ever after an early breakfast.” The warmth and lavishness of the Dysons’ hospitality cast aside the shadows, and even the appearance of “two she-tutors” after dinner couldn’t mar the evening.

  Attendance at lectures and brief trips afield expanded the group’s repertoire, although the great walking tours of the 1930s had ended, as Lewis’s college and domestic responsibilities, especially tending an aging Mrs. Moore, kept him on a short leash. One July evening in 1946, Warnie and Lewis visited St. Hugh’s College to hear Father Mathew talk on Byzantine civilization; he declared, as Warnie recalled it, that “Charles [Williams] … had managed to give a much truer account of Byzantium in Taliessin than that given by Gibbon.” Earlier that year, the Lewis brothers and Dyson had taken a train to Liverpool, where Lewis was appearing on the BBC’s Brains Trust program. They visited a church or two, and in the evening, Warnie watched his brother and Dyson clash over art and philosophy until “towards the end of the first hour J and Hugo discovered that they were talking about different subjects. Each side then restated its war aims, and they set to again. When or how the argument ended I don’t know, for it was still going strong when I went to bed at eleven.” In April 1947, the same three visited Mrs. Moore’s daughter, Mau
reen, at her home in Malvern, where they hiked the hills. Dyson “blossomed out as a walker” and, fortified by wine and gin, burst into song and generally “treated the place as a rather unusually noisy Inklings. What Bernard [Maureen’s ‘French factotum’] made of the spectacle of a grey haired ‘professeur’ roaring out ‘Ta-ra-ra-boom-dy-ay’ with appropriate high kicks I don’t suppose we shall ever know.”

  Warnie controlled his drinking on this visit but it wasn’t to last. The difficulties of life at the Kilns, which meant tending for his adored younger brother while fending off Mrs. Moore’s carping ways, overwhelmed him, and in June 1947 he escaped to Ireland “feeling very guilty at leaving poor J alone with that horrid old woman in that abominable house.” The motherland, however, proved a second prison. His rental cottage had, he discovered, bad feng shui (a Chinese system used to balance subtle forces in the landscape). The term comes oddly from the mouth of a Lewis, but we must remember that Warnie passed two tours of duty, a total of more than four years, in China. Soon “great waves of depression” poured over him, which he combated with great waves of alcohol, mixed with “methylated spirit” (ethanol plus poisonous additives). By June 20, he was deathly ill and checked himself into a Catholic hospital run by the Medical Missionaries of Mary in Drogheda. The doctor in charge wired for Lewis, who arrived three days later, “anxious and travel stained.” Warnie was overjoyed to see his brother; his spirits rallied, and within a few days he was out of danger, although he remained frail for several more weeks.

  Despite the crisis, Warnie continued to drink, although moderating his intake. His first move upon leaving the hospital was to obtain a room at the nearby White Horse pub, where he could order stout before meals and sherry before bed. When Jack left for England a few days later, the bereft older brother sipped his fortified wine and brooded over “the haunting fear that is so often with me—suppose J were to die before I did. And a sheer wave of animal panic spread over me at the prospect of the empty years; but I pulled myself together, said my prayers, and tumbled into bed.” His dipsomaniacal collapse had terrified him, but the aftermath had helped him vanquish an old bogeymen. The “holy and very loveable” nuns of Drogheda had shown him, by their “radiant happiness” and the selflessness of their tender ministrations, the folly of seeing Catholicism as “almost ogreish” and a convent of nuns as “something grey and secret, with sad faced women gliding about noisily.” Warnie remained a committed Anglican, but his heart softened toward Catholics. A few days later, when Tolkien sent a letter filled with good wishes and the news that he had prayed to St. Bernadette of Lourdes to speed Warnie’s healing, he took the news without a hint of rancor. Tolkien, perhaps sensing an opening—or even two, for if he persuaded Warnie of the faith’s validity, he might sway Lewis—followed up with a letter thick with Catholic theology. Warnie’s response, again, was measured and conciliatory. He would no longer blast the Catholic Church, now that its ministering angels had saved his life. He returned to the Kilns, more or less recovered, at the end of July, but not before a farewell visit to the Mother Superior, who greeted him warmly and plied him with cakes and coffee. “This holiday has been worth while,” Warnie wrote in his diary that night, “if only for meeting her.”

  Agapargyry and Bettiana

  Success forges its own chains, one of which is importuning by the unsuccessful. Lewis was now famous and well-off, and beggars knocked regularly on his door. “He is certainly a fool and perhaps a lunatic: but he seems v. miserable,” he wrote to Barfield near the end of the war, describing a man who had contacted him for a handout. Always a soft touch thanks to his warmheartedness, his indifference to the accumulation of wealth, and his Christian principles, Lewis decided to help, even though, as he admitted to Barfield, “Almost anyone but you wd. say I was as mad as he for taking any notice of such a rhapsody.” As the rhapsodies sounded more loudly, however, and not only from fools and lunatics, he and Barfield felt the need to come up with a ready response. They devised a charitable trust called the Agape Fund, known also as the Agapony and the Agapargyry. The last is a typical Lewisian/Barfieldian witticism, a pun on St. Paul’s use in 1 Timothy 6:10 of philargyria (philos + argyros, love + silver) to mean the love of money, the root of all evil. “Agapargyry” (agape + argyros) also means love of money, but with agape (self-giving love) replacing philos, the term reverses the meaning to one of charity rather than avarice.

  Lewis had asked Barfield to establish the Agape Fund in 1942, soon after receiving an enormous tax bill from the government To avoid any future surprises, Lewis put two-thirds of all future royalties into the trust, to be dispensed, usually anonymously, to needy cases, particularly widows and orphans. Over the years, the fund handed out huge sums, customarily in small portions, to innumerable recipients; typical was Lewis’s 1946 request that Barfield send seventy-five pounds to “a poor gentlewoman forced to move house and transport invalid mother by hired ambulance.” In a letter to Cecil Harwood, Lewis explained the principle behind the fund: “The fund is in a most flourishing condition and there is no reason to stint yourself. You understand that nothing you draw impoverishes me, for all the money in that fund is already given away from me, tho’ the question ‘To whom?’ is answered at my direction from time to time.”

  Barfield liked administering these charitable donations; it was, in fact, one of his few pleasures during these years. The law office, with its rituals and petty intrigues and interminable paperwork, swallowed up time and stifled imagination; at home, Maud still decried the truth and even the value of Anthroposophy. The entry of Geoffrey into the family as a foster child had pleased both Barfield and his wife, but moments of domestic bliss failed to overcome his despair at the throttling of his creative talents. He wrote a brief essay on the Psalms, lectured on Hamlet, translated some Steineriana—all activities within the small, safe Anthroposophical orbit—and placed a review and a number of poems under the pseudonym of G.A.L. Burgeon with The New English Weekly, a magazine founded by A. R. Orage and best known for publishing portions of T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. Barfield’s poems were frothy, forgettable affairs, some of them (“Cosmetics,” “The Doppelganger”) revolving around the elusive charms of a woman named “Betty.” These works delighted Lewis, who termed them “Bettiana,” and wrote “there’s something v. wrong” when a publisher declined to print more of them.

  The Bettiana failed to advance Barfield’s reputation or assuage his sorrows. Nor did Lewis’s sudden willingness in August 1948 to reopen for a brief time the “Great War” make much difference. Lewis’s change of heart may have sprung from a dawning recognition of Barfield’s unhappiness or from the pleasure derived from a recent mock literary joust with Barfield, during which the two had exchanged letters in the personae of law firms, Barfield representing King Mark of Cornwall and Lewis Sir Tristram, figures drawn from Malory’s Arthurian romances, which Lewis had just reviewed for the TLS. This was just the sort of banter that Lewis loved and may have reminded him of the fun to be had in battling with his old friend. In any event, he and Barfield began corresponding again about the nature of creation, reason, and the like, but the skirmish was controlled and short-lived. So, too, was the apparent revival of Barfield’s dramatic career in a September 1948 production of his verse play Orpheus by the Sheffield Education Settlement, a Christian organization with a Steinerian tilt. Lewis wrote a glowing blurb for the program notes, praising the work for “a variety almost as rich as that of the Shepherd’s Calendar” (eclogues by Spenser) and declaring that “I await with great interest the public reaction to a work which has influenced me so deeply as Barfield’s Orpheus.” The public reaction, as for all of Barfield’s output during these dark years, was a smattering of applause followed by a discouraging silence.

  A Gift for Williams

  The dappled shadow of Charles Williams, bestowing darkness or light depending upon one’s memories, still loomed over the Inklings and their activities. Lewis busied himself preparing an edition of his friend’s unpub
lished Arthurian prose; Warnie continued to miss the boozy warmth of the many pub visits he and Williams had enjoyed together; others among the Inklings still felt acutely, with regret or relief, the absence of the man’s high-pitched, eccentric energies. In 1947, as homage, memorial, and final farewell, five Inklings joined forces to produce the only significant pan-Inklings publication in the group’s long history: Essays Presented to Charles Williams. Lewis had come up with the idea long before Williams’s death, intending to produce a Festschrift to be presented to Williams upon his return to London at the end of the war. Now the volume would serve other purposes, as a memorial and as a fund-raiser for Florence, who was to receive all profits.

  Lewis, as editor, already had in hand suitable pieces by himself, Barfield, and Tolkien. Two days after Williams’s passing, he wrote to T. S. Eliot and Dorothy L. Sayers, soliciting from each a contribution; he also asked Eliot if Faber & Faber would take on the book. Eliot declined to publish it, recommending instead that Lewis approach Sir Humphrey Milford at Oxford University Press, but he did agree to supply an essay. Apparently he did so reluctantly, for despite repeated pleas by Lewis, who told him that “your absence would in our view cripple the book,” the promised piece never appeared. In desperation, Lewis suggested instead that Eliot contribute a poem—an astonishing request, considering how little Lewis liked Eliot’s poetry, and an indication of how much he valued Eliot’s name as a magnet for readers and of how willing he was to thrust his own tastes aside to honor his friend. In any event, the poem also failed to materialize, and a frustrated Lewis finally sent a curt note to Eliot suggesting that “perhaps you will find your own way of honouring our friend later and no less effectively.”

  Many of Williams’s former companions did come through, however, producing a volume that offers a revealing cross-section of the Inklings and their thought in the late 1940s. The work underscores both the group’s eclecticism and its common interests. “In this book,” Lewis writes in his preface, “the reader is offered the work of one professional author, two dons, a solicitor, a friar, and a retired army officer”—that is, Dorothy L. Sayers, C. S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Owen Barfield, Gervase Mathew, and W. H. Lewis. This group constituted for Williams, wrote Lewis, “a fairly permanent nucleus among his literary friends. He read us his manuscripts and we read him ours: we smoked, talked, argued, and drank together (I must confess that with Miss Dorothy Sayers I have seen him drink only tea: but that was neither his fault nor hers).” As Lewis had informed Eliot, at least some of the essays also share a common nucleus: “They are … concerned with story, or if you will mythopoea: in fact with that element in literature wh. nearly all criticism between Aristotle and Maud Bodkin has left entirely alone. Their connection with Charles is that this was rather his own long suit.”