Literary Giants Literary Catholics

by Joseph Pearce

  A few examples will serve to conjure up Tolkien’s ghost, enabling him to point a phantom finger of scorn at Jackson’s presumption.

  Galadriel was modeled, says Tolkien, on his Catholic devotional reverence for the Blessed Virgin; Jackson transforms her into a disturbed and disturbing witch, or an electrifying and electrocuted wench. Faramir serves as an antidote to Boromir’s folly, a veritable saint and model of heroic virtue; Jackson turns him into an ignorant rogue and kidnapper. Treebeard embodies the power and wisdom of living tradition, both etymologically and ecclesiologically; Jackson makes him a buffoon who is hoodwinked by the hobbits. Tolkien despised the emerging omnipotence of technology; Jackson allows his besotted attachment to special effects to take over, leaving the technological tail wagging the dog-eared remnants of the tale. Tolkien stated emphatically that The Lord of the Rings was “of course, a fundamentally religious and Catholic work”; Jackson barely scratches the surface of the deeper spiritual dimension of the book.

  I could go on but will desist. I will also insist, again, that this is how Tolkien the perfectionist would probably judge the imperfections of Jackson’s work. It is not how I judge it, though I acknowledge all the above as flaws. I am more inclined to accentuate the positive and turn a beneficent blind eye to the negative. After all, a Hollywood adaptation of The Lord of the Rings could have been much, much worse. Dungeons and Dragons meets Conan the Barbarian! Perish the thought!

  In asking the question that serves as the title to this article, I knew that I would have to play devil’s advocate. Perhaps I have played it badly. Perhaps Tolkien’s shade will point its accusing finger at me, muttering in reproach at my own presumption: Get thee behind me, Sauron. Perhaps. I am, however, sticking to my guns. Would Tolkien have given Peter Jackson’s movies the thumbs-up? No, I believe that he wouldn’t. Should he? Yes, I believe that he should. But then, who am I to question the great man?

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  THE FORGOTTEN INKLING

  A Personal Memoir of Owen Barfield

  I CANNOT CLAIM to have called Owen Barfield a friend. To claim such intimacy would be preposterous. I met him only once. It was in Forest Row, a small town in Sussex on the edge of the Ashdown Forest, on New Year’s Eve 1996. He was the last surviving member of the inner sanctum of the Inklings and, as such, I was anxious to interview him as part of the research for my book Literary Converts. He kindly consented to the interview, in spite of his failing health and in spite of the fact that, having recently celebrated his ninety-eighth birthday, he had reached an age at which he could be forgiven for wishing to be left in peace.

  He looked his age, a stooped figure of fatigue, frail and fragile, shuffling uneasily around the room. Having settled in an armchair, he regarded me curiously. I’m not sure what he made of me, but for my part, I regarded the skeletal frame and the time-weary face, its skin clinging scantily to the skull beneath, as a memento mori. The vision of death was contradicted by the alertness of the eyes, deep with years but shimmering with humor on the mischievous surface. The candor of those eyes exposed the cadaverous lie. I realized as those eyes met mine that the decaying body was merely an inadequate shell for the immortal soul, the husk of time hiding the kernel of eternal truth.

  In the next hour or so, the eyes glistened fondly as he shared his many memories of a literary world that had long since passed away, excepting of course its lasting legacy. With words punctuated by interjectory chuckles, he recalled attending a debate between Chesterton and Shaw at a theater in London. “They rather ragged it,” he laughed, “because each of them was trying to pretend that the other was hogging the limelight.” The antiquated quaintness of Barfield’s vocabulary heightened my own sense of nostalgia for a Chestershavian age that had passed into legend even before I was born. Since Chesterton had been dead for sixty years at the time of our interview, I found myself awestruck at the chasm of time that Barfield’s experience had straddled. The debate between Chesterton and Shaw belonged to the thirties, possibly even to the twenties, and I imagined Barfield as a vibrantly vigorous young man, hanging onto every word as the tightly packed audience guffawed and applauded.

  He spoke of the poets of the twenties, refighting the critical wars of a bygone era when, as a young man with oh-so-modern pretensions, he had held his elders in precocious contempt. “Alfred Noyes was considered very old fashioned. We were the Georgian poets. He was very Victorian.” He spoke of several meetings with T. S. Eliot, including having tea with Eliot and Walter de la Mare at the latter’s “rather nice flat” in Putney.

  Most memorable of all were the stories about his friendship with Lewis, Tolkien and their fellow Inklings. He spoke of discussing Chesterton with Lewis. “Lewis was very much influenced by Chesterton, especially by The Everlasting Man, but he didn’t mention anybody else really. We didn’t always talk about philosophy. We used to read together . . . we never argued from a doctrinal point of view.” Specifically, he recalled reading the whole of the Iliad, the whole of the Odyssey and the whole of the Divine Comedy with Lewis.

  Although Barfield was too modest to allude to the fact in our conversation, he is generally considered to have exerted an important and benign influence on Lewis throughout the 1920s. Lewis would later describe him as the wisest and best of his unofficial teachers. Barfield’s Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning, published in 1928, exerted a profound influence on both Lewis and Tolkien. It was, in fact, a discussion between Barfield, Lewis and Alan Griffiths, one of Lewis’ pupils, which was to prove instrumental in edging Lewis closer to Christianity. Barfield and Griffiths were lunching in Lewis’ room when Lewis happened to refer to philosophy as “a subject”. “It wasn’t a subject to Plato,” Barfield retorted, “it was a way.” “The quiet but fervent agreement of Griffiths, and the quick glance of understanding between these two, revealed to me my own frivolity”, Lewis wrote in Surprised by Joy. “Enough had been thought, and said, and felt, and imagined. It was about time that something should be done.”

  Even though they had unwittingly played such a crucial role in the coup de grace of Lewis’ conversion, neither Barfield nor Griffiths was a Christian at the time of this providential conversation. By a strange coincidence, however, both Lewis and Griffiths converted to Christianity and received their respective First Communions within a day of each other at Christmas 1931, Griffiths as a Catholic on Christmas Eve and Lewis as an Anglican on Christmas Day. A few months after his reception into the Church, Griffiths decided to try his vocation as a religious at Prinknash, the Benedictine priory at Winchcombe in Gloucestershire. On 20 December 1932 he was clothed as a novice and changed his name to Bede, after which he was known as Dom Bede Griffiths and became an influential, and occasionally controversial, writer of popular theology.

  In his conversation with me, Barfield recalled his friendship with Lewis and Griffiths in the days before he experienced his own somewhat idiosyncratic conversion to Anglican Christianity in 1949.

  Lewis, Griffiths and I went for long walks together. We talked a good deal about theology. . . . I was with Griffiths and I told him I was an agnostic and we got talking about being damned and some remark he made elicited the reply from me that “in that case I suppose that I am damned”. And I’ll never forget the calm, collected way he turned round and said “but of course you are”. This amused Lewis very much of course when I told him afterwards.

  During my all-too-brief encounter with Owen Barfield, he still displayed, in spite of his magisterial age, tantalizing glimpses of the genius that had so impressed his more famous friends, Tolkien and Lewis, almost seventy years earlier. As I bid him farewell, I sensed that he was not long for this world. The husk was wearing thin and its grip on the kernel within was weakening. It was on the eve of his hundredth New Year, which was to be his last, that I was blessed to have met him, and I shall remain eternally grateful for the blessing.

  “I’m not an old man, I’m a very old man”, Barfield had told our mutual friend Walter Hoope
r when Mr. Hooper had visited him on his ninety-eighth birthday, scarcely seven weeks before my own visit. Shortly afterward, he told Mr. Hooper, with characteristic wit, that “I’m not getting on, I’m getting off.” A few months later, he did indeed “get off”, leaving those who had the good fortune to have met him with many fond memories of a world that seemed to have passed away with him. Requiescat in pace.

  PART FIVE

  MORE THINGS CONSIDERED

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  THE DECADENT PATH TO CHRIST

  IT IS PERHAPS A PARADOX of Wildean, Baudelairean or even Chestertonian proportions that the road to hell can sometimes lead to heaven. Had not Baudelaire proclaimed with provocative precision that only Catholics knew the devil? Baudelaire knew, more painfully and grotesquely than most, that we must know our sins in order to know ourselves. One who does not know that he is a sinner does not know himself, nor does he know the God who made him. We must know the hell within ourselves, and the Hell to which it owes allegiance, before we can know the heaven that is promised us. This “discovery” was hardly an original innovation of the French or English Decadents. Six centuries earlier, Dante had discovered the same perennial truth, conveying it with unsurpassed genius in his descent into the inferno en route to Purgatory and paradise.

  If it is true that the road to hell is paved with good intentions, it is also true that the road to heaven is sometimes paved with bad ones. Our very sins, if we repent, can be our teachers and guides. In recollecting our sins, and in recoiling from their consequences, we can be kept on the narrow path that leads purgatorially upward toward paradise. Thus the scribes, Pharisees and hypocrites, imagining themselves on the path to heaven, might be heading for an unpleasant surprise, whereas the publicans and sinners, learning from their mistakes and amending their ways, might reach the Kingdom to which Christ has called them.

  It is, therefore, a paradoxical pleasure to be able to celebrate the Decadent path to Christ, not as a celebration of Decadence per se (heaven forbid!) but as a celebration of the path to Christ that it represents. God is always bringing good out of evil, and the Catholic literary revival has reaped a wonderful harvest from the seeds planted in Decadence during the nineteenth century. One needs only to examine the key figures of the French and English Decadence to see that the literature of death and decay can prophesy the poetry of resurrection.

  Charles Baudelaire, the father of the French Decadent movement, had, according to his fellow Decadent J. K. Huysmans, “gone further” than any other writer in exploring the darker recesses of the soul:

  He had descended to the bottom of the inexhaustible mine, had picked his way along abandoned or unexplored galleries, and had finally reached those districts of the soul where the monstrous vegetations of the sick mind flourish . . . He had laid bare the morbid psychology of the mind.

  In spite of Huysmans’ assertion, Baudelaire was by no means the first to descend into the depths of “the inexhaustible mine” of the mind’s eye. Dante had descended further, and so had Saint John of the Cross, both of whom could see deeper into the depths of the darkness because they carried the torch of holiness with them. If one is to explore the dark places properly, it helps to have a torch. Baudelaire’s originality was not in his being the first poet to visit these places; it was in the way he chose to report his experience of them. His fleurs du mal were arranged in an enticingly lurid fashion, offering their scent to a new generation of writers who quickly fell under their influence. Most prominent among Baudelaire’s French disciples were Paul Verlaine and J. K. Huysmans. Verlaine imitated Baudelaire in delicately poignant verse, whereas Huysmans picked Baudelaire’s sick-scented flowers and scattered them liberally throughout his novel A Rebours. All three men, Baudelaire, Verlaine and Huysmans, having shocked a generation with what was perceived as their perversity, became Catholics before their death. Having dipped a foot in the Phlegethon and glimpsed the Wood of Suicides beyond, they recoiled from descending further into the inexhaustible mines of the inferno, seeking sanctuary at the foot of the Cross. Baudelaire converted in extremis; Verlaine converted in prison and lived long enough to publish poems of penitential beauty; Huysmans, having depicted his path to conversion in his novel En Route, spent the final years of his life in a monastery.

  These three pillars of the French Decadence exerted a towering influence on the English Decadent movement, whose chief champion was the seductively seditious and self-destructive Oscar Wilde. Gathered around Wilde were a group of young acolytes, his Decadent disciples. These included the poets Ernest Dowson, Lionel Johnson and John Gray, and the artist Aubrey Beardsley. Dowson, Johnson and Beardsley were all doomed to die young; but not, however, before each of them had embraced the Catholic faith. John Gray, having allegedly been the model for Wilde’s “Dorian Gray”, became a Catholic priest, serving his parish in Edinburgh until his death in 1933. As for Wilde himself, he was received into the saving embrace of Holy Mother Church on his deathbed. Thus the father of the French Decadence and the father of its English equivalent shared a reconciliation with the Bride of Christ in extremis. One imagines that Dante, their great precursor, would have smiled with knowing benignity at the divine symmetry of the happy ending. The final words do not belong to Dante, however, nor do they belong to Baudelaire or Wilde; they belong to their fellow Decadent Ernest Dowson, who wrote with beauty and eloquence about the saving power of the Last Rites of the Church in his poem “Extreme Unction”:

  The feet, that lately ran so fast

  To meet desire, are soothly sealed;

  The eyes, that were so often cast

  On vanity, are touched and healed.

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  THE QUEST FOR THE REAL OSCAR

  A Century after His Death, Is the Real Oscar Wilde Finally Emerging from the Shadows?

  A CYNIC, WROTE OSCAR WILDE, is someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. Today, more than a hundred years after Wilde’s death on 30 November 1900, the cynics are having a field day. An article in the business section of the Daily Telegraph announced solemnly that paying huge sums for Wilde memorabilia was a “sensible investment”. It cited the recent sale of a catalog of Wilde’s household possessions, printed in the wake of the bankruptcy proceedings following his imprisonment in 1895, which had been sold at this year’s London Book Fair for £15,000. The same item, auctioned at Christie’s in 1981, had fetched only £2,500. Any letter of Wilde’s, however trivial the contents, will sell for at least £1,000, and many change hands for between £10,000 and £20,000. A printed copy of Wilde’s early play Vera, with extensive handwritten notes penned by Wilde as he watched an early rehearsal, sold for a staggering £50,000 at the London Book Fair. And the list continues. A questionnaire filled in by Wilde when he was at Oxford sold for £23,000; an inscribed cigarette case allegedly given to Wilde by Lord Alfred Douglas sold for £14,000 despite its doubtful authenticity; and two letters from Wilde to Philip Griffiths, described as one of his lovers, reached £16,000 at Christie’s. The letters to Griffiths were themselves innocuous, and there is no evidence that Wilde ever had a sexual relationship with him, but the letters sold nonetheless. Wilde’s grandson, Merlin Holland, is exasperated by the growing cult surrounding his grandfather, but he adds philosophically that he could “appreciate the humor of questionable pieces of memorabilia from Saint Oscar the Sinner being offered to a credulous public at absurd prices and be proud of my ancestor’s ability to take his revenge a century later.”

  A spokesman for the booksellers who sold the catalog for £15,000 believed that purchasers of Wilde memorabilia were motivated by “Wilde’s magic” and believed that the “more they spend, the closer they get” to its source.

  One wonders what Wilde himself, the subject of all this idolatry, would have made of it all. It is likely, if his own words are to be believed, that he would have been horrified by the way in which the value of his art had been debased by the sordid cult that has risen from the a
shes of the scandal surrounding his private life. “You knew what my Art was to me,” Wilde wrote from Reading jail to Lord Alfred Douglas, “the great primal note by which I had revealed, first myself to myself, and then myself to the world; the real passion of my life; the love to which all other loves were as marsh-water to red wine”. Clearly, Wilde believed that his true self, his true value, was to be found in his art. By contrast, many of his modern admirers, Judaslike, have betrayed their master with a kiss and have sold his art for the thirty pieces of silver with which they are purchasing the endless ephemera. According to Wilde’s own criteria, those who believe that they are closer to his “magic” when they clutch a cigarette case of dubious origin instead of opening the pages of one of his books have succeeded only in changing the finest of red wine into the foulest of marsh water. With “friends” like these, the ghost of Wilde could be tempted to mutter plaintively, who needs enemies?

  A century after his death, Wilde is still caught between the prurient and the puritan. To the prurient he is a war cry; to the puritan he is a warning. One betrays him with a kiss, the other with a curse. Now, as ever, Wilde is faced with an unwelcome choice between Judas and the Pharisee. George Bernard Shaw, in his preface to the 1938 edition of Frank Harris’ biography of Wilde, admitted that he had “somewhat Pharisaically” summed up Wilde’s last days in Paris as those of “an unprofitable drunkard and swindler”. Yet, he argued, those of Wilde’s admirers who had objected to this description of their hero had forgotten “that Wilde’s permanent celebrity belongs to literature, and only his transient notoriety to the police news.”