The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings

by Philip Zaleski

  Coghill believed that Lewis’s uncanny healing skills were but one aspect of his “life-giving generosity,” which manifested itself as well in his widespread charity, about which he also kept silence. Lewis, however, urged caution in claiming a miracle. To Sheldon Vanauken, writing on November 27, 1957, he urged, “One dreams of a Charles Williams substitution! Well, never was a gift more gladly given; but one must not be fanciful.” His expressed view of the matter fluctuated depending upon whom he was addressing. To one correspondent he wrote, after the cancer had subsided, that there was “hardly any hope for the long term issue.” To Bede Griffiths he said that Joy’s condition “has improved, if not miraculously (but who knows?) at any rate wonderfully.” To an American correspondent, however, he dropped his defenses and declared that “the improvement in my wife’s condition is, in the proper use of the word, miraculous,” while to R. W. Chapman, he called it “almost miraculous.” Warnie makes no mention of a substitutionary miracle in his diary or memoir, but then he was not always privy to his brother’s religious reflections; one wonders, then, whether he ever shared with his brother something he had learned some years ago from Tolkien: Tolkien’s dentist, it seems, had the experience of suffering, in place of his young patient, the agony of the surgery he had to perform on her infected jaw—a phenomenon which Warnie felt could only be accounted for “by supposing Charles’s theory of Substitution to be fact and not fantasy.” It seems likely that Warnie would have related this story to his brother.

  The truth is that Lewis, a firm believer in miracles, longed to believe that Joy had been the recipient of one, but he feared false optimism, as well as unwarranted claims upon God’s mercy, and so decided to guard his tongue, especially about a “Charles Williams substitution.” He did not refrain, however, from declaring how happy he was, wrapped in a felicity with beatitude at the core but bordered by tragedy. “My heart is breaking and I was never so happy before,” he told Dorothy L. Sayers. He assured Sister Penelope that she “wd. be surprised (or perhaps you would not?) to know how much of a strange sort of happiness and even gaiety” he and his wife now enjoyed, and he told Cecil Harwood that “we are often a great deal happier, merrier, delighted, than you wd. think possible.” He could see now, as he put it to Bede Griffiths, the great arc of his love as “something which began in Agape, proceeded to Philia, then became Pity, and only after that, Eros. As if the highest of these, Agape, had successfully undergone the sweet humiliation of an incarnation.” He, too, was becoming more enfleshed, by his carnal love for Joy and by his pains.

  He became a brawling defender of her—now his—family. Bill Gresham, getting wind of Joy’s condition, had written to tell her that “naturally I shall want [the boys] to be with me in the event of your death.” Immediately Lewis dashed off a response, informing Bill that the boys opposed his plan, that they “remember you as a man who fired rifles thro’ ceilings to relieve his temper, broke up chairs, wept in public, and broke a bottle over Douglas’s head.” Evidently dissatisfied that this would do the trick, Lewis wrote again the same day, blasting Bill’s behavior toward Joy (“You have tortured one who was already on the rack”), underscoring the boys’ rejection of their father (“certain scenes … make you a figure of terror to them”), and then baring his teeth: “If you do not relent, I shall of course be obliged to place every legal obstacle in your way.” The tongue-lashing and teeth baring worked; Bill dropped the idea of reclaiming his sons.

  It was shortly after this that Lewis began work on Reflections on the Psalms. The timing is apposite, for the wrenching emotions, among the most violent of his life, that he experienced during Joy’s illness and Bill’s aggression—the violent, clashing tides of anger and gratitude, fear and peace, despair and exaltation—parallel those expressed in the Psalter. Lewis knew the psalms intimately from his long experience with morning and evening prayer. Richard Ladborough remembers that he always showed up for weekday Matins at chapel, “the center of his life in college,” and this was true at Oxford as well, where he had attended services since 1933, despite his intense dislike for hymn singing. In addition, he read the evening psalms on a daily basis. Now he set to work to puzzle out, in all their lyrical and strident glory, these 150 ancient Hebrew songs of praise, thanksgiving, lament, and execration.

  Here Lewis writes, in patient and pellucid prose, “for the unlearned about things in which I am unlearned myself … one amateur to another.” This studied pose means that much of his presentation is introductory, as he explains the role of allegory, prophecy, and literary devices like parallelism. More compelling is his discussion of judgment, a major theme in the psalms, as he observes that while “Christians cry to God for mercy instead of justice; they [the ancient Israelites] cried to God for justice instead of injustice.” Christians see themselves as criminals; ancient Jews see themselves as plaintiffs. This is true, to a degree—in many psalms, the innocent party pleads divine redress for earthly transgression—but it is a partial truth, as the psalms offer self-incrimination as well (“Who can understand his errors? cleanse thou me from secret faults”—Psalms 19:12, KJV). When Lewis refers to “that typically Jewish prison of self-righteousness,” one winces at the adverb. His discussion of the multitudinous cursing psalms is more rewarding, both in its gratitude to Israel (to whom, he says, we “are indebted … beyond all possible repayment”) and in its argument that these songs, rife with hatred, echo God’s own anger at human sin. Other sections, on the psalmist’s understanding of death, nature, the law, and so on, instruct the novice and entertain the learned. Most notable, for the light it sheds on all Lewis’s religious writings, is his rejection of biblical literalism and his embrace of the manifold meaning of scripture, as well as its partial origin in earlier mythical models. The “Father of Lights,” he insists, is behind all “good work,” including the entirety of the revealed Word. By and large, reviewers saluted Reflections on the Psalms for its warmth and clarity, although a reviewer for Blackfriars, the Dominican Catholic journal, wished that “a little more technical equipment” had been employed—Lewis used almost none—and thought that the result had “only the most tenuous connection with the psalms.” This seems excessive, unless one insists upon advanced scholarship in any religious discussion; Lewis, precisely because he wrote as an amateur to amateurs, penetrated to the heart of the psalms.

  Soon after completing Reflections, Lewis received an invitation from the Episcopal Radio-TV Foundation of Atlanta, Georgia, to prepare some tape recordings for American broadcast. He agreed, indicating that he would talk about love in its assorted major forms, which “bring in nearly the whole of Christian ethics.” Lewis made the recordings in London on August 19–20, 1958, under the direction of the organization’s founder, Caroline Rakestraw, a formidable woman whose meddling manner irked both Lewis and Joy, the latter labeling her “insufferable” and the former christening her “Cartwheel,” a quasi-anagram, perhaps a reference to the contortions she tried to put him through. When Lewis resisted her editorial intrusions, which included an attempt to transform his direct “Today I want to discuss” into the hesitant “Let us think together, you and I,” she demanded that he “sit absolutely silent before the microphone for a minute and a half ‘so they could feel his living presence.’” Whether the sponsoring bishops enjoyed this moment of mystical communion is not recorded, but they vigorously objected to Lewis’s bold discussion of eros, the third love in his typology, and canned the series. Lewis, of course, immediately converted the tape recordings (which the foundation has since offered for sale as Four Talks on Love) into a book, which he completed in June 1959.

  The Four Loves sustains the avuncular tone of the recorded talks, as Lewis analyzes four forms of love: affection, friendship, eros, and charity. The first three, arising in the natural order of things, may be beautiful or good but have the potential to be twisted into something ugly and destructive. Thus storge, or affection, the warm animal love between mother and child or dog and master, may become a tyr
annous stranglehold, as Lewis explains in a passage that may reflect his experiences with Mrs. Moore: “If people are already unlovable a continual demand on their part (as of right) to be loved—their manifest sense of injury, their reproaches, whether loud and clamorous or merely implicit in every look and gesture of resentful self-pity—produce in us a sense of guilt (they are intended to do so) for a fault we could not have avoided and cannot cease to commit.” Friendship, too, may be perverted into exclusivity, yet it offers incomparable joys, as in Lewis’s glowing account of male friends gathering in an inn after a “hard day’s walking,” which doubles as an idealized portrait of the Inklings. “Those are the golden sessions … when our slippers are on, our feet spread out towards the blaze and our drinks at our elbows; when the whole world, and something beyond the world, opens itself to our minds as we talk; and … all are freemen and equals as if we had first met an hour ago, while at the same time an Affection mellowed by the years enfolds us. Life—natural life—has no better gift to give. Who could have deserved it?”

  Eros, too, which binds two individuals together, transforming them into lover and beloved, harbors its deadly snares, such as obsession and uncontrolled passion. Charity, however, stands alone. Charity (agape) is supernatural, a sheer gift, “Love Himself working in a man.” It allows us to do what we would not ordinarily do: to embrace our enemies, kiss lepers, give away money, take on the sufferings of others. Through charity we draw close both to God and to our fellow human beings. Lewis rejects the idea, which he discerns in Augustine’s account of the loss of his friend Nebridius, that one must beware of creaturely love and embrace only God, who never dies; instead, he stands with Charles Williams (without mentioning him by name), arguing that human and divine love complement and complete one another, and that in the Beatific Vision, the culmination of charity, we will find our earthly beloveds in their completion and consummation, united in God.

  The Four Loves received predictable reviews, acclaimed by most religious periodicals and praised, a tad less fervently, by their secular counterparts. The Jesuit philosopher Fr. Martin D’Arcy (whose book The Mind and Heart of Love had been published in 1945 by T. S. Eliot at Faber & Faber), writing in The New York Times Book Review, found Lewis’s categories rather “vague and fluid” but applauded the author for merging “a novelist’s insights into motives with a profound religious understanding”—a serviceable but bland comment that could apply equally well to any of Lewis’s apologetic works.

  Meanwhile, Joy’s recovery continued apace. She walked with a bad limp—surgery had shortened one leg by three inches—but otherwise was in fine fettle; the doctors declared the damaged bones reknit; to Lewis, the healing was “more like resurrection.” Joy, back at the Kilns, refurbished the ragged décor, ordering the ceiling restored and the walls painted, and hobbled around the grounds with a cane, waving a starting pistol at trespassers. She and Lewis dared a belated honeymoon in Ireland, where they became, in his words, “drunk with blue mountains, yellow beaches, dark fuchsia, breaking waves, braying donkeys, peat-smell, and the heather just then beginning to bloom.”

  This second idyll—a brief spell in an enchanted garden encircled by ravening beasts—ended as well. In October 1959, Joy’s cancer reappeared, X-rays revealing spots throughout her bones. Lewis told Roger Lancelyn Green that it was “like being recaptured by the giant when you have passed every gate and are almost out of sight of his castle.” He prayed for a second miracle but there would be none. The couple kept up appearances as best they could, mingling with friends, answering letters, checking proofs. In April, they traveled with Green and his wife, June, to Greece, feasting on fish, cheese, retsina, sunlight, and the sun-drenched landscape. Green noted in his travel diary that “Joy was often in pain, and alcohol was the best alleviation: so I had become adept at diving into the nearest taverna, ordering ‘tessera ouzo,’ and having them ready at a convenient table by the time June had helped Jack and Joy out of coach or car and brought them in.” For Joy, it was a glorious escape, and she returned to Oxford, wrote Lewis, “in a nunc dimittis frame of mind, having realized, beyond hope, her greatest lifelong, this-worldly, desire.” The final collapse followed swiftly. The breast cancer returned in force and in May, Joy, as she put it, was “made an Amazon.” She weakened and made several visits to the Acland Nursing Home. Here she befriended Edith Tolkien, also a patient (for rheumatism), and met, for the first and only time, Tolkien. What passed between them is not recorded. On July 13, 1960, she was taken by ambulance to the Radcliffe Infirmary to die. She received final rites from Austin Farrer, bequeathed her fur coat to Katharine Farrer, asked for cremation, and told Lewis, in a final burst of plain speaking, “Don’t get me a posh coffin; posh coffins are all rot.” Five days later, a funeral was held in Headington and her ashes scattered over the crematorium’s rose garden. Austin Farrer presided, with Katharine in attendance. None of Lewis’s other friends showed up.

  A Seminal Work, A Second Birth

  Invigorated by his work on Saving the Appearances, Barfield knew that only continued production, entailing a dramatic change in his daily routine, would prevent relapse into the despair and silence of past decades. He needed to retire from the law or at least restructure his job. In 1957 he wrote the firm a poignant letter, asking permission to relinquish his current responsibilities and ease into semiretirement as an advising director “on the basis that there is prima facie evidence that the literary, or more strictly philosophical, work I could do, given freedom from grind, between now and my death may be of lasting importance to the community.” He added, somewhat unconvincingly, that whatever the response “I shall survive, unembittered,” but pressed his case by observing that “it does often strike me as preposterous and wrong that my nose should be kept so long and so firmly to the grindstone, and even more preposterous and wrong that it should remain there for the rest of my life.” In 1959 he finally left the firm and plunged headlong into full-scale authorship.

  The first fruit of Barfield’s retirement was Worlds Apart (A Dialogue of the 1960’s), an entertaining transposition into fictional form of many of the ideas from Saving the Appearances. Burgeon, a solicitor—the same Burgeon who serves as Barfield’s mouthpiece in This Ever Diverse Pair—troubled by the specialization and insularity of intellectual disciplines (thus the “worlds apart” of the title), invites a group of intellectuals from different fields to spend a weekend together at a Dorchester cottage for a serious exchange of ideas. A theologian (closely based on Lewis), a psychiatrist, a philosopher, a schoolmaster, and three scientists—a biologist, a physicist, and a rocket scientist—constitute the ensemble, which resembles the Inklings in its pipe-and-flannels geniality, its male-only membership, its diversity of professions, and its love of argument.

  Spurred on by Burgeon, the group tackles epistemology, the evolution of consciousness, the nature of religious revelation, and a host of other topics. The theory of polarity—an idea that would occupy Barfield increasingly in the years to come—receives much attention. Simply put, the theory states that aspects of reality can be usefully described as two poles—heaven/earth, male/female, constancy/change, act/potency, conscious/unconscious, literal/figurative, subject/object, poetic/prosaic, and so on—interpenetrating one another in a mutually dependent relationship. The poles “exist by virtue of each other as well as at the expense of each other…” The fundamental polarity that defines reality is that of “the subjectivity of the individual mind and the objective world which it perceives”; the result of the interplay between these two elements is the world we inhabit. Polarity operates on the local level, too, affecting our personal actions and relations; Barfield considered his youthful decision to lay aside literature for the law to be a prime example of polarity; another was his adversarial but richly productive relationship with Lewis. The theory is not, of course, entirely new; aspects of it can be seen in Hegelian dialectic and, further afield, in the combinational tensions and harmonies revealed by the Chinese classic
the I Ching, as well as in the manifold clashing and reconciling forces of Taoist alchemy. Barfield traced his own elaboration of the theory, which in its fullest form he called objective idealism, to the influence of Steiner, for whom polarity is not an explicit teaching but rather the unstated “basis of his whole way of interpreting the world.” The idea receives some attention in Saving the Appearances, in a discussion of the contrapuntal balance of actus and potentia at the heart of Scholastic thought, and a richer, more nuanced treatment in Worlds Apart, where the polarities of will/thought and conscious/unconscious lie at the basis of many of the key arguments about human nature.

  For the most part, Worlds Apart unfolds as dialogue, with disputes between the theologian (Lewis) and the biologist—some of which bring to mind clashes between Ransom and Weston in Lewis’s Space Trilogy—dominating the first half, and Anthroposophical insights by the schoolmaster providing resolution in the second half. The narrative ends most curiously, with the theologian recounting a recent dream, in which a set of massive bronze doors open before him and three figures emerge: first a man with a head like a “round box” with “light … blazing out of its eye-holes” (resembling a Halloween pumpkin), then a man with a lion’s head, and finally a man without a head. In later years, Barfield would offer an interpretation of this dream, which he had based upon one told to him by Lewis: the first man represents ordinary human consciousness, the second a consciousness that combines mind and heart, and the third consciousness with “final participation,” that apotheosis in which human beings will experience fully self-aware rapport with the cosmos.