The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings

by Philip Zaleski

  Worlds Apart, or at least its Steinerian conclusions, discomfited some of the author’s friends. Lewis, by now utterly familiar with Barfield’s lines of argument, sent him a short note declaring the work “so exciting that I can’t help reading it far too quickly” before dishing out petty complaints (“Your language sometimes disgruntles me. Why must it be polyvalence instead of multivalence? And why do you use base as an intransitive verb…”). T. S. Eliot offered a blurb that pointedly sidestepped assessment of Barfield’s thesis, calling the book “an excursion into seas of thought which are very far from ordinary routes of intellectual shipping.” Real encouragement came from an unexpected and perhaps not entirely welcome source: the American theologian Thomas J. J. Altizer, just a year away from international fame for his controversial “death of God” theology. Altizer reviewed Worlds Apart and Saving the Appearances in the Journal of Bible and Religion for October 1964, and, after the astonishing gaffe of describing Barfield as “recently deceased,” praised the author for his “delightful and gracious style,” his “fully coherent and logically forceful mode of thinking,” and his “mastery of history”—“all of which,” Altizer noted, “are absent in his master Steiner.” Saving the Appearances, he wrote, is “potentially one of the truly seminal works of our age,” and Worlds Apart, although the lesser work, nonetheless forged “a fascinating link between a mystical form of theology and the natural sciences.”

  Barfield may have resented Altizer’s slur against Steiner, but he surely enjoyed the applause directed at himself. As for his reported demise, he laughed it off, for he knew that he was undergoing, if anything, a second birth. He possessed a new, inspired proficiency and fluency; he recognized his mission and trusted his skills as never before; and, to cap it off, by the time Altizer’s review appeared in print, he had quit the cold comforts of England for America’s welcoming embrace: a new continent for a new beginning. Stanley Hopper, professor of philosophy and dean of the graduate school at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey, read and enjoyed “Poetic Diction and Legal Fiction” and arranged for Barfield to teach at the school as a visiting professor in philosophy and letters, focusing upon “metaphor, symbol, language, and problems of communication.” This voyage to the New World, Barfield remarked, was “like starting a new life … a strange experience, rather like the ‘ugly duckling.’” Out of the blue, he had become the hero of his own fairy tale: the duckling was turning into a swan.

  An Act of Will Inspired by Love

  “Hwaet! We Gardena in geardagum…” Tolkien bellowed the opening lines of Beowulf, as he had done for so many decades before so many students, as he strode into a packed Merton College Hall at 5:00 p.m. on June 5, 1959, to deliver his valedictory address to the University of Oxford. He began his talk with a whimsical jest, a sly reference to his proclivity for tardiness, noting that he had never given an inaugural lecture and that he was “now about 34 years behind.” Other self-deprecatory remarks followed. He had “nothing special to say”; he was an “amateurish person” who knew nothing of the “wide view, the masterly survey.” A bit disingenuous, all this, coming from the creator of The Silmarillion, an account of the origin and early history of the cosmos and, as such, one of the twentieth century’s extreme instances of the “wide view, the masterly survey.” But it was true that Tolkien loved minutiae, especially of the philological stripe; his address consisted in a stirring defense of the discipline of philology as “the foundation of humane letters” and an impassioned attack upon those who would ban it from the curriculum. He blasted “the B.Litt. sausage-machine,” regretted “the degeneration of real curiosity and enthusiasm,” and called for research motivated by love of knowledge rather than hunger for a job. Suitably warmed up, he turned to the “lang.-lit.” debate and decried its existence, arguing that these two disciplines go hand in hand, each encompassing the other; he compared their divorce to the apartheid policies of his native South Africa. His jeremiad then faded into a nostalgic mist of memories, as he recalled Joseph Wright, William Craigie, George Stuart Gordon, and other old friends, before concluding with a valedictorian’s perfect wistful-yet-optimistic fare-thee-well, rejoicing, in words reminiscent of the Old English poems he had contributed to the 1936 collection produced with E. V. Gordon, Songs for the Philologists, that “the duguð [noble company] has not yet fallen by the wall, and the dréam [revelry] is not yet silenced.” The Oxford Mail called his presentation “vigorous,” which it was, but “disputative,” even “crotchety” suit as well. It was an old man’s talk, descrying the fallen battlements, raising the torn standards, sniping at the enemy, giving thanks for past and present blessings.

  Tolkien was old. His body was betraying him: he suffered now from frequent bouts of arthritis, and in February 1959, four months before the valedictory address, went under the knife to remove a diseased appendix, surgery that depleted him for several weeks. Retirement he found “in many ways a melancholy proceeding”; one reason was the loss of his Merton office, which forced him to convert the garage at 76 Sandfield into a makeshift study. He saw less of his colleagues and friends, suffered the common ills—loneliness, bitterness, depression, lack of energy—of the newly retired, and by July of 1960 wrote Rayner Unwin that “I am in fact utterly stuck—lost in a bottomless bog, and anything that would cheer me would be welcome.” Ostensibly freed from scholarly chores, he was chained to his desk ten hours a day in a desperate effort to wrap up his edition of the Ancrene Wisse—now nearly thirty years in the making—while laboring on The Silmarillion and dealing with assorted domestic crises, not least Edith’s fading health. His prickliness intensified; when in September Lewis sent him a copy of his latest work, Studies in Words, Tolkien wrote to Christopher that Lewis’s “ponderous silliness is becoming a fixed manner. I am deeply relieved to find I am not mentioned.” Matters hadn’t improved by the following April. “Forgive my chattiness,” he wrote to Robert Burchfield of the Early English Text Society (and later chief editor of the OED), “I am rather isolated, and it is a relief to chat even by way of typewriter to someone who has any interest in the work.” The isolation intensified in the fall, when the Tolkiens’ housekeeper quit, leaving the aging couple without adequate help.

  Still, publishing triumphs helped offset the encroaching gloom. The Lord of the Rings was selling extremely well, so much so that Stanley Unwin declared it the most important and successful book in his firm’s history. In October 1961, Tolkien’s aunt, Jane Neave, wrote to him suggesting that he produce a small book about Tom Bombadil; he seized on the idea and the volume appeared on November 22, 1962, as The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and Other Verses from the Red Book, with illustrations by Pauline Baynes. Tolkien thought it “a very pretty book.” He praised the illustrations, telling Baynes that “I do not think that they could have been more after my own heart” (although during production he had objected to her drawing of a dragon, telling Rayner Unwin that the figure itself was “excellent” but complaining that “of course no dragon, however decrepit would lie with his head away from the entrance”). Alfred Duggan, reviewing it in The Times Literary Supplement, found the verses “ingenious” but too alike with their “hurrying rhythm and a fondness for feminine endings.” The poet Anthony Thwaite, writing in The Listener, by contrast, called the book “something close to genius,” praising the same technique that Duggan derided, and declaring that it had made a convert of him. Tolkien was pleased with both reviews—he had anticipated only contempt from the literary establishment—but by now his attention was on another, even happier literary event: the appearance of a Festschrift in his honor, entitled English and Mediaeval Studies Presented to J.R.R. Tolkien on the Occasion of His Seventieth Birthday, prepared in secret by C. L. Wrenn and Norman Davis, with contributions by several Inklings (Lewis, Coghill, Bennett) and many other friends and colleagues. Tolkien received the book at a Merton College celebration on December 5. To crown this fecund autumn, the Early English Text Society published, in conjunction with the release of
the Festschrift, Tolkien’s long delayed edition of the Ancrene Wisse. The book received little or no attention in the popular press, but Arne Zettersten, a Swedish medievalist and friend of Tolkien, had kind words for it in a 1966 issue of the professional journal English Studies, and it has served since as the basis for the only scholarly concordance of this important Christian anchoretic text.

  That Tolkien’s major contribution to Christian scholarship appeared at this late stage in his life was felicitous, for old age and its cargo of worries had driven him to renewed reflection upon his faith. He continued to explain to readers the veiled place of Catholicism in The Lord of the Rings and to puzzle out its role in The Silmarillion. During this period, he wrote his most explicit statement of religious belief, a messy tangle of theology, history, memoir, apology, political invective, and paternal love, sent as a letter to his son Michael, who had recently told his father that he had been suffering from depression and “sagging faith.” Michael’s depression may have been occasioned by the shell shock he had suffered during World War II; even so, low spirits, Tolkien advises his son, are “an occupational affliction” among those, like Michael, who teach school and endemic among those Michael’s age (forty-three), just old enough to realize the hypocrisy that infects all institutions. Recalling his own experiences, he rails against administrative shortsightedness, against being forced to teach what one does not love, against professionals in school and church who dishonor their calling out of exhaustion, insincerity, and greed. However, he assures Michael, “men’s hearts are not often as bad as their acts, and very seldom as bad as their words.”

  After this prolonged outburst with its faintly cheering coda, Tolkien turns to what he perceives as Michael’s deeper problem, his crisis of faith. He begins with superbly crafted apothegms of considerable psychological penetration: “Faith is an act of will inspired by love”; “‘scandal’ at most is an occasion of temptation—as indecency is to lust, which it does not make but arouses.” Michael’s faith, it seems, had fallen victim to the scandals of sinful clergy. As readers will surely note, this is a long-standing problem, perhaps never to be resolved, and Tolkien recounts his own suffering at the hands of “stupid, tired, dimmed, and even bad priests.” But, he adds, this is scarcely reason to leave the Church, a move that would mean turning one’s back on Jesus: an inconceivable act. He echoes Lewis’s lunatic/liar/Lord trilemma, arguing that either Jesus is who he claimed to be, or he is a “demented megalomaniac.” The correct choice he considers obvious; in any event, no one with critical intelligence will swallow the canards that Jesus never existed or that his sayings were forged by others.

  How, then, can one shore up one’s faith? Through Holy Communion. The core of this remarkable letter is a sustained paean to the Eucharist. Tolkien tells his son that he “fell in love with the Blessed Sacrament from the beginning—and by the mercy of god never have fallen out again.” He urges frequent communion (he himself communicated daily whenever possible), preferably in difficult or distracting circumstances: “Choose a snuffling or gabbling priest or a proud and vulgar friar; and a church full of the usual bourgeois crowd”; it is the Eucharistic miracle that matters, not its setting. He refers to “the greatest reform of our time,” by which he means Pope Pius X’s recommendation of daily communion as the path to personal and societal salvation. The Eucharist is the center of the Church, of the faith, of the hope of all believers; Tolkien is Roman Catholic because Rome has always safeguarded the Eucharist, scrupulously abiding by Jesus’ last command to Peter, “Feed my sheep” (John 21:16–17).

  Rarely has Tolkien been so impassioned or personal. The stakes are high: he is fighting for his son’s soul. Having presented his case, he admits that “this is rather an alarming and rambling disquisition to write! It is not meant to be a sermon!” But alarm, if such he imparted, surely originated in his numerous personal confessions, not his homiletics. The letter is riddled with admissions: He is “an ignorant man, but also a lonely one.” He nearly abandoned God; he is a bad parent: “I brought you all up ill and talked to you too little…” He casts all this in biblical terms, as “one who came up out of Egypt.” He concludes these revelations with a cri de coeur that God may heal his defects “and that none of you shall ever cease to cry Benedictus qui venit in nomine Domini.” These twin prayers, for himself and for his children, say much: what had begun as a letter of assistance to his child ends as a plea to God for mercy on himself and all his flesh. His sorrow, bitterness, and depression nearly take command, nearly overwhelm the beautiful theology, diseased briars choking the rose. One wonders what Michael made of this epistle.

  The Clerk’s Tale

  Lewis responded to Joy’s death as one might expect: he grieved, he comforted his stepchildren, he notified Joy’s few friends and family of her passing—and he wrote a book. A Grief Observed stands apart from Lewis’s other works: it is a raw, choppy assemblage of about 120 jottings, ranging from a line to a page or more, largely stripped of literary effects, tracking the contours of his grief over the first few weeks of bereavement. The text was almost complete by early September, three months after Joy’s demise, when Roger Lancelyn Green perused it during a visit to the Kilns. Lewis, realizing the work was sui generis, decided to publish it under a pseudonym and settled on Dimidius, Latin for “halved.” When he turned in the manuscript to Faber & Faber, however, T. S. Eliot and others at the firm guessed the author’s identity and suggested that a “plausible English pseudonym” might make a better disguise. Lewis concurred and settled upon N. W. Clerk—N. W. for Nat Whilk (“I know not who”), the pen name he had used in the past, and Clerk for scholar.

  Walter Hooper believes A Grief Observed was “not written with publication in mind,” but another view is possible. Near the book’s end, Lewis explains that he wrote it for two reasons: as “a defence against total collapse, a safety-valve,” and to “describe a state; make a map of sorrow.” The therapeutic motive, a private concern, accords with Hooper’s evaluation, but it is difficult to imagine that Lewis, born to communicate, would chart sorrow in all its shades and not wish to pass his discoveries on to others, especially as he saw his discoveries as terra incognita. Just eight days after Joy’s death, he wrote Katharine and Austin Farrer that “there are a lot of things about sorrow which no one (least off all the tragedians) had told me. I never dreamed that, in between the moments of acute suffering, it wd. be so like somnambulism or like being slightly drunk. Nor, physically, often so like fear.” Moreover, Grief possesses qualities that suggest considerable shaping on Lewis’s part. Granted, it displays the fragmentation and staccato of an unplanned text, and we know that its length, at least, was not predesigned but determined by how much Lewis could squeeze into four small notebooks he found lying around the Kilns. Nonetheless, the book follows a clear trajectory, from undigested shock and confusion at the outset to conditional acceptance at the end, and it concludes with a poignant quotation from Dante, “Poi si tornò all’eterna fontana” (then turned again to the eternal fountain—Paradiso XXXI), marking the instant when Beatrice—and thus Joy, Lewis’s Beatrice—departs her lover to return to heaven. This ending is not only a radiant tribute to Joy but also, inter alia, an homage to Charles Williams; it is just the sort of rhetorical flourish at which Lewis excelled—when addressing others.

  Lewis divides Grief into four sections, each marking a stage in the process of his grieving for “H” (Helen, Joy’s first name). In the first section, Lewis’s self-censoring mechanism has broken down, ravaged by his loss, and what we get is undiluted anger, misery, self-pity, and doubts about God, along with flashes of the old evangelist (“For those few years H. and I feasted on love … If God were a substitute for love we ought to have lost all interest in him”). In the second section, self-criticism returns, and Lewis discovers that his jottings to date, focused on his reactions to H’s death rather than H herself, “appall” him. Can he be thinking of the real H, or only of her remembered, distorted image? Her reality was
“the most precious gift” of his marriage, and he prays piteously for its return. Does she exist anywhere? Where? When? “She is, like God, incomprehensible and unimaginable.” He is inconsolable, and God seems to be the “Cosmic Sadist.” In part three, the pressure of grief alleviates, just slightly. Lewis still erupts in anger, confusion, and sorrow, but something new happens. He is sleeping better, the weather has improved, and one morning he receives “an instantaneous, unanswerable impression” of H—something almost akin to a meeting. In the fourth and final movement of this symphony of bereavement, genuine hope dawns: “Turned to God, my mind no longer meets that locked door; turned to H., it no longer meets that vacuum.” He feels called to praise both God and H, “Him as the giver … her as the gift,” each in His or her stark reality “Not my idea of God, but God. Not my idea of H., but H.”

  A Grief Observed was published on September 29, 1961. The novelist Sylva Norman, reviewing it for The Times Literary Supplement, praised its “strange, firm magnetism” but hesitated over its religious conclusions (“Religion—reassurance—seems to conquer. But on what basis does the resolution rest?”); otherwise, the book received little notice beyond the Christian press, which, unsurprisingly, admired its courage and honesty. It remains an oddity, unique in Lewis’s oeuvre but not in English letters, for it carries distant echoes, in its personal anguish and resilient devotion, of John Donne’s Devotions and Samuel Johnson’s Prayers and Meditations.

  Lewis published two other books while working on A Grief Observed. In September 1960, he released Studies in Words, based upon his 1950s university lecture series, “Some Difficult Words,” which traces the etymology of various terms—chief among them being “nature,” “sad,” “wit,” “free,” “sense,” “simple,” “conscience,” “conscious,” “world,” and “life”—with a rich cargo of meaning and implication. Studies is a minor work, witty, erudite, and rarely read, although Lewis, in his publicity notes for the publisher, suggested that it belonged alongside Barfield’s most popular work, Poetic Diction. William Empson applauded the work’s “easy tone” and the author’s “continually interesting” details in the course of an unsigned TLS review so convoluted that Lewis judged it “unintelligible.” Few other reviewers—and almost as few book buyers—paid it any attention, and the volume is remembered mostly for Tolkien’s negative reaction, noted above, in his September 12 letter to Christopher.