The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings (16 page)

Spirits in Bondage
slipped into print with few reviews and those lukewarm at best.
The Scotsman
noticed the “emotional glooming” but declared the text “never unhealthy, trifling, or affected.”
The Times Literary Supplement
, more realistically, remarked that “the thought, when closed with, is found rather often not to rise above the commonplace.” A sharper knife thrust, from a different angle, came from Warnie, who lamented in a letter to Albert the book’s “purely academic” atheism and how it might affect Lewis’s future career. Albert, showing unusual balance, replied, “He is young and he will learn in time that a man has not absolutely solved the riddle of the heavens above and the earth beneath and the waters under the earth at twenty.”

Nor could Lewis at twenty solve the riddle of reconciling his family to his “family.” Whenever Lewis visited Belfast he was reduced to exchanging his daily letters with Mrs. Moore on the sly, Arthur acting as intermediary. By 1921, Lewis was a permanent member of the Moore household, though he continued to hide the truth from his college and from his father. When Albert, much to everyone’s surprise, announced a plan to visit his son in Oxford in July, Lewis wrote back, “I have been moved out of College and you will probably find me sharing with a man who is up to his eyes in work. This means we can’t spend much time on my own hearth.” For the next thirty years Lewis would live with—or, as Warnie saw it, under—Mrs. Moore, moving from one dismal rented home to another, until they settled in the Kilns.

Warnie met Mrs. Moore and her daughter, Maureen, for the first time in August 1922, while visiting Oxford during a leave from his West African tour of duty. He thoroughly enjoyed himself, writing in his diary, “I am glad to have met Mrs. M and Maureen, not only intrinsically but because it gives me a larger share in J’s real life: happy though I think we can be together at Leeborough, there cannot in the nature of things be any return to the old days, nor indeed is it to be desired.” By 1933, Warnie’s attitude toward Mrs. Moore would harden; he came to consider her “notably domineering and possessive by temperament” and thought her relationship with his brother a flagrant abuse. In particular, he was outraged to see Lewis carrying out mundane household chores. Too often, he felt, the pen played second fiddle to the broom, mop, and dish towel; what right had this thoroughly unintellectual older woman to demand such sacrifices from a young man of Lewis’s great promise? Warnie’s heart sank when he heard Mrs. Moore tell visitors that “he is as good as an extra maid in the house.” He could not see what his brother saw, that Mrs. Moore could be loving and supportive, and that during the early years of their life together the couple shared many moments of fun and gestures of tenderness and mutual encouragement.

Thus conflicted both in his personal arrangements and his intellectual outlook, Lewis might have retreated into his fortress of argumentative unbelief and built so high those walls of restricted sympathies and dogmatic rationalism of which Baker speaks that no one could clamber over them, but for the advent of one man: “the Second Friend,” “the man who disagrees with you about everything,” who “has read all the right books but has got the wrong thing out of every one,” the great comrade with whom you engage in perpetual argument that concludes with victory—a greater access to truth—on each side. Baker introduced Lewis to his Second Friend sometime near the end of 1919, when Owen Barfield had just gone up to Wadham College as a classical scholar.

5

“WORDS HAVE A SOUL”

“The good are befriended even by weakness and defect,” observed Emerson. “Our strength grows out of our weakness.” As a young child, Owen Barfield, future philologist, novelist, poet, essayist, playwright, solicitor, a man who would devote his life to the secret life of words—and an assiduous student of Emerson, who knew that “every word was once a poem. Every new relation is a new word”—had no particular strength when it came to language. It was music that captured his heart. He was six or seven years old, not yet attending school, when workers delivered a grand piano to the family home in the northern London suburbs and his mother, Elizabeth, sat down to play a romantic melody, an impromptu or nocturne by Schubert or Chopin. “I remember that awfully well,” he said as a very old man, just as he remembered and cherished everything to do with music and dance. His father, Arthur Barfield, a solicitor, was also musical. Father and mother would play piano duets, and while still a very young boy, Owen absorbed a good portion of the classical piano canon. He was, he said, “always surrounded with music.”

Years later, he realized that in his childhood home, music had taken the place of religion, a subject in which his parents had no interest. He knew, as a child, nothing about prayer, or any sacred words, and he felt acute embarrassment when his nurse looked astonished at his failure to kneel before bedtime. It was hardly his fault; music alone occupied the household lararium, and Owen gladly shared in its worship. This early devotion, but not the accompanying dismissal of religion, stayed with him always. When he grew up to be a philosopher and wordsmith, he came at words as a musician might, searching out the rhythm and melody in poetry, and the secret songs that language sings as it matures over centuries, songs that reveal, or so he believed, the secret history of consciousness. As an old man, he confessed that if he were forced to choose between music and poetry, music would win out.

Owen began his formal education at seven or eight years of age, entering Highgate School, a public (nongovernmental) school for the upper middle class, founded in 1585. There he began to open to the power of words, studying Latin and Greek, reading voraciously, and discovering, in a most unexpected way, that words carry their own peculiar force. “I chalked on the wall in large letters, ‘Mr. Kelly is a fool’ … I was terrified of what I had done. I cried I think; and either my mother or my father, brother, or uncle advised me to go and wash it off very early in the morning.” He did so, but the memory proved indelible. So did that of a more significant episode, around the age of twelve, that taught him that words possess beauty as well as frightening power. He was seated in a Highgate School Latin class, pondering the line
“Cato, octoginta annos natus, excessit e vita”
(conservatively translated as “Cato, eighty years of age, left this life”), when the boy sitting beside him declared, “Cato, at the age of 80,
walked out of life
[the italics are Barfield’s]—that’s rather nice!” Barfield returned throughout his life to this episode, “the actual moment when [I] was first made aware that it was possible to enjoy language
as such
—the very nature of language,” and when he first realized the beauty and power of metaphor. The moment becomes more piquant when one learns that the schoolboy sitting next to him was Alfred Cecil Harwood, destined to become his lifelong friend and eventually C. S. Lewis’s as well.

Owen’s burgeoning interest in classical studies and in the power of words might have presaged a career as an orator or rhetorician—his mother, a feminist, attended women’s gatherings at Hyde Park, which may have demonstrated to him how well-wrought words mold minds—but a formidable problem with language itself soon undercut all ambition in this direction. He developed a stutter. It proved a devastating affliction—not an occasional disruption in the flow of words but an intense, pervasive disability that he called “a great shadow in my life.” For a time, he found that he “couldn’t say anything.”

Psychologists and medical researchers remain uncertain about the cause of stuttering; both genes and environment seem to play a part. There is no known cure. In Owen’s case, it is not difficult to see this speech defect as an expression of his struggle, common among adolescents but accentuated in the case of a sensitive, musical soul, to find a proper relationship between inner and outer world. He tried a number of therapies, all to no avail. Hope fled and one night—he was fifteen or sixteen years old—he wondered whether it might not be better to fall asleep and never awake. These somber musings had an unexpected effect: they resulted, not in an attempt on his own life, but in his first stab at poetry. “Sleep has a brother…” reads one of the lines. The brother, of course, is death; but for Owen, poetry became the means to reclaim his life. He didn’t write much at this age, but he found that while reciting poems, whether his own or others, and also when singing (what is song but musical poetry?), his stutter eased, sometimes dramatically. Poetry, then, was the hitherto unknown link between his two great loves, words and music. Naked words eluded him, but words clothed in music, rhyme, or rhythm rang forth without impediment.

At about the same time, he made a related discovery: that the body possessed its own melody and rhythm. He became an expert gymnast, swooping, spinning, flying, and springing on the parallel bars, the horse, and the other vaguely menacing implements of this mysterious new art. Soon he was Highgate’s senior gymnast. “I was rather well developed, had rather a good figure and held myself well.” Away from the gym, he continued to recite poems, particularly lyric verse. Soon he realized that poetry not only stilled his stutter but instilled hope and joy. He came to believe that it contained uncanny power; that the joy he felt was more than pleasure at a poem’s wit, beauty, or insight. It sprang from the power of poetic metaphor—that power he had first glimpsed while listening to Harwood translate—to bring new meaning into the world. “Poetry,” he now realized, “had the power to change one’s consciousness a little.” This insight would have profound implications for his later life.

World War I interrupted these breakneck youthful discoveries. For Barfield, unlike Tolkien and Lewis, the war proved a placid, even boring, affair. He entered the Officers Training Corps and then the Royal Engineers, learning Morse code and wireless telegraphy while safe on British soil. His unit, comically, set sail for the continental battlegrounds only after the armistice; once arrived in Belgium, he whiled away six months polishing his French. Then the army decided that its idle soldiers needed a useful occupation. Why not go in for education? Barfield was detailed to Oxford University for three weeks, to learn how to teach English literature to the troops. During this brief idyll he discovered Georgian poetry, including the writings of Rupert Brooke, Robert Graves, John Masefield, Walter de la Mare, and Siegfried Sassoon. He grew to love the simple lyric beauty, tinged with melancholy, that marked their work, a poetic style that would be swept away in the avant-garde floodwaters of modernism loosed by Eliot and Pound. He turned to writing verse, but his early efforts, with simple rhymes and little depth, failed to match the work of those Georgians he most admired. His first published poem, “Air Castles,” appeared anonymously in
Punch
on February 14, 1917; a comic souffl
é
, it is as insubstantial as its subject:

When I grow up to be a man and wear and wear

     Whate’er I please,

Black-cloth and serge and Harris-tweed,

                     —I shall have none of these;

            For shaggy men wear Harris-tweed …

Nonetheless, Georgian poetry had won his heart, and when he entered Wadham College, Oxford, some months later, he abandoned his plan to concentrate on Latin and Greek and chose to read English language and literature. In time, philology—in particular, what the history of words reveals about the history of mind—would become his ruling intellectual passion. But he was still very young, with an athlete’s physique and love of movement, and while he was at university and for some years beyond, he addressed the world as much through his body as through his mind. He studied the English classics, but in every spare moment, “the sort of thing my mind was full of—it wasn’t literature, it was … dancing and so forth.”

Dance became his new mistress, an advance upon gymnastics, for it added to that sport’s power and grace the incomparable spiritual beauty of music. Joining the English Folk Dance Society, he learned Morris dancing and other ancient forms, kinetic counterparts to the lyric traditionalism of Georgian poetry. Morris dancing was a revelation. A vigorous folk dance, traditionally reserved for men, that involves rhythmic arm and leg movements, foot stomps, handkerchief waving, and stick clapping, it opened to him a new realm of quasi-mystical inner experience, in which music served as his daemon or psychopomp. One day in particular, he enjoyed “a vivid experience,” a near ecstasy “at the end of one of the movements,” when, his hands caught by one rhythm and his feet by another, he “had a very strong experience of the music flowing through [him]”; he was the vessel, the music a supernormal force. “It was very strong.”

Sophianic Revelations

Music brought strength, rapture, intimations of a higher world, but something remained amiss. While still at Oxford, Barfield received an invitation to travel to Cornwall for the summer, joining a small troupe of musicians and dancers led by two young sisters named Radford. The group planned to go from village to village, making music and dancing galliards, pavanes, bourrées, and other preclassical forms. “It was a kind of new world” for Barfield, one that he found “delightful.” He reveled in the work and in boat journeys around the stunning Cornish coast. But as all Romantics know, beautiful landscapes and sunny days often harbor, like arsenic in paint, the taint of corruption. Like so many young people before him, Barfield fell prey, in the midst of joy and splendor, to Weltschmerz. The immediate catalyst was a young woman, a cousin of the Radfords, who rebuffed his timid advances; but, as he himself realized, he was not in love with her but with “the idea of love.” He was “in despair,” “very much oppressed,” with “no confidence … that life had any meaning.” No doubt growing pains triggered many of the tears; but there was something more at work. Many years later, Barfield surmised that “what was really at the root of the misery” was “being caged in the materialism of the age.” His doubts about existence forced him into a miserable solipsism. On August 20, 1920, he wrote a despairing note to a close Oxford friend, Leo Baker—the same Baker who would later introduce him to C. S. Lewis—describing his sense of cosmic solitude: