The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings

by Philip Zaleski

  Yet Barfield in his mourning stood apart from Tolkien and Warnie, despite their common loss. The two older men lived in the past as much as the future: Tolkien revising his work, refining his legacy, elucidating Middle-earth minutiae to an awestruck, sometimes cranky readership; Warnie drinking, poring over memories of his brother, squeezing out one more book on French history (Memoirs of the Duc de Saint-Simon appeared in 1964), and awaiting his death. As they folded up at the edges, Barfield entered the great adventure of his life. Having set foot in America less than a year after Lewis’s death, he was aflame with hope and trepidation. “I find the prospect exciting, especially as I have never before crossed the Atlantic, but wish I were a bit younger,” he told Philip Mairet, a British writer and admirer who claimed to have read Saving the Appearances four times. At Drew University, his first port of call, he contracted to deliver “2 lectures a week, ranging as I like over the stuff in my books, and to take a seminar on Coleridge and Romanticism.” The salary was $7,200, which he “rather jumped at,” along with a travel stipend of $800. He made quick use of the latter, visiting, during his first months abroad, the evangelical stronghold of Wheaton College in Illinois, and Beloit College in Wisconsin, where he “spoke of Jack for an hour to an audience variously estimated at 800 and 1000” and basked in their “really wonderful attentiveness, warmth and response.” One attendee, he told Cecil Harwood, “flew from Los Angeles to hear the lecture, returning the following day.”

  Wherever Barfield went, crowds gathered. At first they came to see him not for his sake but for Lewis’s. Barfield’s fame, such as it was, depended upon the passage in Surprised by Joy in which Lewis identifies him as the “Second Friend,” with whom “you go at it, hammer and tongs, far into the night, night after night … out of this perpetual dogfight a community of mind and a deep affection emerge.” He never resented Lewis’s prominence. Many times Lewis had gone out of his way to laud him and his writings, and he was happy to return the favor. In talks, writings, and interviews, he focused on aspects of Lewis’s life that he alone knew well: their early friendship, the “Great War,” Lewis’s rejection of Anthroposophy. The presentations, eventually gathered into Owen Barfield on C. S. Lewis (1989), seesawed between love for his friend and exasperation at the RUP (“residue of unresolved positivism,” a favorite catchphrase) that blocked Lewis’s perception of spiritual realities. He came to see the long, warm, adversarial friendship as another example of polarity; in Barfield’s eyes, the “Great War” had never ended, nor should it have: in bello, veritas.

  The public, won over by his quiet manner and colorful memories, soon began to lend an ear to his unusual philosophical and religious views. At Drew he met Howard Nemerov, former and future United States poet laureate (holding the post twice, in 1963–64 and 1988–90), who declared himself a disciple, at least in regard to the evolution of consciousness and the dangers of positivism. Barfield in turn anointed Nemerov his “ambassador at the court of contemporary poetry.” Many other American writers and scholars contacted him, suddenly eager to discuss his work. Encouraged and inspired by this unexpected groundswell of enthusiasm, he commenced a major new project, a study of Samuel Taylor Coleridge that would come to complete fruition in 1971 with What Coleridge Thought (see below). As early as 1919, reading the Biographia Literaria, he had discerned “a strong affinity” between his own thought and that of the great poet. Now, reading extensively through Coleridge’s lesser-known works, he discerned, in the poet’s sometimes obscure presentations, foreshadowings of his own cherished views on mind and nature. Coleridge, Barfield came to believe, also thought in terms of polarity and anticipated, although he never quite realized, the truth of the evolution of consciousness. Here was a man after his own heart; even the poet’s celebrated dithering appealed to him. He perceived in it an underlying unity of thought, consisting of harmonies too complex to be passed on readily to others. He believed that Coleridge “had a muddled life but not a muddled mind” and would liken his sometimes impenetrable philosophical passages to a conceptual stammer, in veiled allusion to his own painful impediment.

  He realized, with gratitude and amazement, that against all odds, against the fierce current that was sweeping his friends into exhaustion or death, he was enjoying tremendous new intellectual and creative vitality. In February 1965, he received an invitation to be a visiting professor at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts. Immediately he wrote for advice to Cecil Harwood, still his closest friend, weighing the lure of England—“even my unsatisfactory children count for something”—against the promise of America: “I like the work and the milieu it invokes and have a sort of blossoming feeling … why do they want me so ruddy badly over here?… If I do reject it, I may never cease kicking myself spiritually, psychically and financially…”

  Barfield accepted the offer and stayed in America. Maud joined him for a time, as did their daughter Lucy, now thirty, who taught piano in Cambridge, Massachusetts, while he lectured at Brandeis, conducted a seminar on Coleridge, and gave talks published two years later as Speaker’s Meaning. For the most part, his Brandeis lectures address familiar themes of philology, polarity, and evolution. But thanks to his study of Coleridge and, no doubt, to renewed self-confidence, he assumed the role of prophet and began to elaborate with increased specificity upon the immediate past and future of consciousness. Barfield argues in Speaker’s Meaning that a turning point in human thought took place with the Romantics, a transformation whose initial stages involved, in Coleridge’s words, “an interpenetration … of spontaneous impulse and voluntary purpose”—that is, of desire and will, resulting in the triumph of active imagination over passive inspiration. Through imagination, the poet—and, in his wake, human consciousness as a whole—is learning for the first time truly to do, to make, to create. This fundamental change in the nature of thought, coupled with earlier evolutionary advances, provides Barfield with ample evidence that history has a “plot,” and a plot driven not by matter but by mind. Our ordinary understanding must be turned inside out. Science teaches us that matter precedes mind (first a barren planet, then the emergence of life, then of mind), but the truth, argues Barfield, is that mind has always been here. It is the evolution of mind, not of matter, that lies at the heart of the story of the world.

  Barfield also wears the prophet’s mantle in his novel Unancestral Voice (1965), his strangest work, published during his Brandeis stint. Burgeon, the author’s alter ego whom we first encountered in This Ever Diverse Pair, begins to receive messages from a disembodied spirit known as a Meggid, a figure drawn from the mystical experiences of the sixteenth-century Jewish seer Joseph Karo. In between discussions of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Arnold Toynbee, and the evils of Descartes, the Meggid promotes, as one expects in any Barfield book, the evolution of consciousness. This mysterious spirit also advances some of Anthroposophy’s more outré claims, such as the neognostic division of human history into angelic ages (humankind has recently progressed from the “age of Gabriel” to the “age of Michael”) and the astonishing two-Jesus theory, which asserts that the New Testament records the birth and childhood of two Jesuses—each born in Bethlehem of parents named Mary and Joseph—who merged into one at about the age of twelve. As presented by Steiner in his lecture series From Jesus to Christ, although not mentioned in Unancestral Voice, one Jesus is the reincarnation of Zarathustra, the other permeated by the spiritual influence of Buddha. The climax of Unancestral Voice comes at a lecture on quantum mechanics, as the Meggid takes control of the speaker and declares that the future of physics lies in the study of “non-spatial relationships between hierarchies of energetic beings”—in effect, in Steiner’s Spiritual Science. As the journalist/politician Ivor Thomas noted in his review for The Times Literary Supplement, Unancestral Voice offers “no lack of topics” and is “stimulating and not infrequently entertaining”; for many, it is also too thick with esoteric proselytizing and too reliant upon Meggidian angelus ex machina to satisfy as a novel. B
arfield never attempted another book-length fiction.

  The Inklings, Scattered

  “The events and troubles of this year have defeated me,” wrote Tolkien on May 28, 1964, to Rayner Unwin, who had become by now a principal recipient of his more plaintive letters, cushioning the news by adding that “I am at last recovering health and some kind of mental equilibrium.” Not least among these “events and troubles” had been Lewis’s death, which had engendered in him complex, conflicting thoughts and feelings. He sealed his lips regarding public assessment of his friend, declaring that “I feel his loss so deeply that I have since his death refused to write or speak about him.” But in private he revealed both intense loyalty and disquieting bitterness. To some he protested Lewis’s posthumous treatment by the popular press (“He was a great man of whom the cold-blooded official obituaries only scraped the surface, in places with injustice”), while he disclosed to a few select correspondents the depth of his scorn for Lewis’s religious writings. This was nothing new; previously he had declined an invitation to prepare an obituary of Lewis (newspapers and magazines stock such items years in advance of a person’s death), declaring that “a Catholic could not possibly say anything sincere about Jack’s books without giving widespread offence.” But his simmering resentment, stoked over the years not only by Lewis’s Ulster biases but also by the latter’s friendship with Williams, came to a boil with the posthumous publication in January 1964 of Lewis’s Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer. Composed during the last six months of Lewis’s life, this book consists of letters from Lewis to a fictional correspondent on topics like the afterlife, God, and, of course, prayer. Like many of his other popular works, it offers affable common sense laced with sentimentality, as in this account of heaven: “And once again, after who knows what aeons of the silence and the dark, the birds will sing and the waters flow, and lights and shadows move across the hills and the faces of our friends laugh upon us with amazed recognition.” Despite the occasionally weak imagery, Letters to Malcolm strikes most readers as a solid, pleasant presentation of fundamental Christian themes.

  Tolkien saw it differently. To him, Letters to Malcolm was a monstrosity. He wrote to a Jesuit priest that “I personally found Letters to Malcolm a distressing and in parts horrifying work. I began a commentary on it, but if finished it would not be publishable.” This commentary has never been released and is presumably lost. A. N. Wilson notes, however, that Tolkien’s personal copy of Malcolm contains the marginal observation that the book is not “about prayer, but about Lewis praying.” This sniping by Tolkien is not only based on an old-fashioned Catholic’s objection to the views of an amateur Protestant theologian, as Wilson points out; it expresses also the drear state of his mind at the time. He was still mired in the bottomless bog that he had described to Unwin in 1960, trapped fast by illness, overwork, and anxiety over his wife’s health, his children’s faith, and his own failing powers. Exhaustion and depression lowered his inhibitions and loosened his tongue, allowing festering resentments to pour forth, as they had in his earlier objection to Lewis’s “ponderous silliness” in Studies in Words. The sad truth is that the Tolkien-Lewis friendship fell victim to the insecurities of both men.

  At least one event alleviated Tolkien’s gloom. In May 1964, George Allen & Unwin published Tree and Leaf, a compendium of “Leaf by Niggle” and a revised version of “On Fairy-Stories.” Tolkien supplied the cover illustration, a line drawing of the Tree of Amalion with its serpentine truck and ornate leaves, an invention that, he told Rayner Unwin, “crops up regularly at those times when I feel driven to pattern-designing.” Most reviewers praised the work, discerning in its twinned essay-and-tale expressions of the same rich, imaginative worldview that had informed The Lord of the Rings. By now, that monumental epic had made its author a small-scale celebrity, leaving him both gratified and irked. Like any writer, he enjoyed being read and praised, but he was troubled by those who borrowed names without permission from his invented cosmos, and he railed against the cross-Channel hydrofoil, christened Shadowfax after Gandalf’s great, gray stallion. Still, his budding fame led to amusing anecdotes—some at his own expense—that he retailed with glee. In November 1964, he attended a lecture by Robert Graves (“a remarkable creature, entertaining, likeable, odd, bonnet full of wild bees, half-German, half-Irish, very tall, must have looked like Siegfried/Sigurd in his youth, but an Ass”) and was introduced to a friendly young woman, with whom he chatted merrily until Graves interrupted to declare, “it is obvious neither of you has ever heard of the other before.” The woman turned out to be Ava Gardner, the world-famous actress, utterly unknown to Tolkien “till people more aware of the world informed me that she was a film-star of some magnitude, and that the press of pressmen and storm of flash-bulbs on the steps of the Schools were not directed at Graves (and cert. not at me) but at her.”

  Money, by contrast, was never a laughing matter. Tolkien was greatly distressed when in 1965 the American science fiction publishing house Ace Books, on technically murky but possibly legal grounds, released an unauthorized version of The Lord of the Rings for which Tolkien received no royalties. His official British and American publishers protested loudly, as did the aggrieved author, who appended a note to his American correspondence urging a boycott of the Ace edition. The press soon learned of the controversy and a transcontinental uproar ensued. Tolkien prepared a lightly revised version of the book for copyright purposes, remarking to Rayner Unwin, while making changes, that “my admiration for the tightness of the author’s construction is somewhat increased. The poor fellow (who now seems to me only a remote friend) must have put a lot of work into it.” The revised, authorized version appeared in October as a Ballantine Book paperback, with the following biting statement, signed by Tolkien, on the cover: “This paperback edition, and no other, has been published with my consent and co-operation. Those who approve of courtesy (at least) to living authors will purchase it and no other.” Ace caved in, paid Tolkien a royalty, and ceased reprinting its edition. Some might suggest that Tolkien owed Ace the royalty, for the brouhaha made his fortune, transforming his epic from a literary curiosity into an enormous cause célèbre. Young readers, avid consumers of fantasy, now learned of the trilogy’s existence and devoured it in droves. By 1966, it sat atop the New York Times paperback fiction bestseller list.

  Meanwhile, The Silmarillion languished in utero. Tolkien continued to alter the text, refining its cosmogony and cosmology and bringing the assorted tales into harmony with The Lord of the Rings, but the work resisted final revision. Nonetheless, on September 12, 1965, Tolkien wrote to a member of the Tolkien Society of America, describing the book’s state as “confused” but expressing hope—an echo sounding down the decades!—that a portion might be published in 1966. This hope brightened a few months later, albeit briefly, when Clyde S. Kilby, an American professor at Wheaton College (Illinois) who had hosted talks by Barfield and had founded the C. S. Lewis Collection (which would later become the Marion E. Wade Center, devoted to research on Lewis, Tolkien, Williams, Barfield, MacDonald, Chesterton, and Sayers), volunteered to assist as needed on The Silmarillion. Tolkien accepted gratefully, and Kilby spent most of the following summer in Oxford on a mission of mixed fruits, as Tolkien spurned most of his visitor’s editorial suggestions while basking in his admiration. In the event, The Silmarillion continued its prodigious gestation.

  On March 22, 1966, Tolkien and Edith marked their golden wedding anniversary with a double celebration at Merton College: a luncheon on March 22 and a dinner the following evening at which the British composer Donald Swann performed, with the singer William Elvin, portions of a song cycle based on The Lord of the Ring (the cycle was published in 1967 as The Road Goes Ever On). As a follow-up, in mid-September the couple departed on a Mediterranean cruise. This voyage, a second honeymoon considerably more adventurous than the couple’s original weeklong stay in 1916 in Clevendon, a Victorian-era seaside resort, seemed jinxed from the start
. Edith fell on board soon after the ship left port, injuring her arthritic leg, and later on, Tolkien developed a throat infection. As a result of these setbacks, the couple rarely left the boat but did arrange to set foot on Asian soil in Izmir, Turkey; Tolkien also managed to attend a Mass at St. Mark’s in Venice. Like Kilby’s visit to Oxford a few months earlier, the Mediterranean tour was a happy occasion that failed to meet expectations. Unadulterated joy, Tolkien was reminded as his life wound down, thrived only within the precincts of the Eucharist. Every human effort, even subcreation, was vulnerable to loss and sorrow.

  This lesson suffuses Smith of Wootton Major, his last completed work of fiction, published in November 1967. He had begun the novella in late 1964, after receiving an invitation from Pantheon Books in New York to write a preface to a new edition of George MacDonald’s fairy tale, “The Golden Key.” Tolkien accepted the assignment only to discover, upon rereading the story, that he despised its vision of Faërie, which was sweeter, thinner, and less numinous than his own (Kilby recalls that during his summer in Oxford, Tolkien “frequently fired verbal cannonades at George MacDonald”). When Tolkien sat down to write his preface, he decided to illustrate the qualities of good fairy fiction by supplying a freshly minted example of his own. Soon this composition so captured him that he jettisoned the preface, which was never completed, and instead produced Smith of Wootton Major. The book recounts the adventures of the titular hero, a boy who eats a fairy star hidden in a Great Cake. When the star falls out of his mouth some months later, he fixes it to his forehead. It becomes his passport to Faërie, where he wanders at will, meeting a young maiden, the fairy queen in disguise, who dances “on a lawn beside a river bright with lilies” in a scene reminiscent of Edith’s dance for Tolkien in the woods half a century earlier. Through these and other encounters, Smith acquires humility, kindness, and insight, enabling him to make the great sacrifice of bidding farewell to Faërie and passing the star on to another deserving young boy.