The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings (39 page)

Tolkien was a realist who would not have been interested in the Kantian idealism implicit in Coleridge’s notion of the primary imagination. It was the secondary imagination—the desire to subcreate—that interested him, and it was fantasy, he believed, that best fulfilled this desire. In “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” “Kubla Khan,” and other poems, Coleridge disclosed a taste for the fantastic, but he never granted it the privileged position that Tolkien did. Fantasy for Tolkien was “not a lower but a higher form of Art, indeed the most nearly pure form, and so (when achieved) the most potent.” Such an achievement, he readily admitted, is an “elvish craft,” for fantasy entails creation of a different world from the one that we inhabit, and yet, to succeed as art, this newly minted world must offer the “inner consistency of reality.” We must believe in the green sun, the flying horse, the diminutive hobbit. This takes surpassing skill, but when a writer succeeds in crafting a believable fantasy, he has achieved “story-making in its primary and most potent mode.”

It is precisely story making in this mode that Tolkien sought to achieve in the
Hobbit
sequel, begun fifteen months before delivering “On Fairy-Stories.” To accomplish this, he needed a fundamental change in his approach to narrative. The Lang lecture would point the way. Tolkien already knew that fairy tales appeal to adults; his own taste had settled that. Now it dawned on him that the tastes of children, while less informed than those of adults, may not be, should not be, satisfied by watered-down representations of Fa
ë
rie. He had erred, he realized, by writing
The Hobbit
as he did, modifying his tone to appease a young and na
ï
ve readership. In
The Lord of the Rings
—a book for children and adults, for all who gather beneath the Tree of Tales (a tree whose seeds, Tolkien archly comments, may sprout even in England’s unpromising soil)—he would develop to its fullest every element of the fantasist’s art.

In his Lang lecture, Tolkien analyzes the most important of these elements:
Recovery
,
Escape
, and
Consolation
(the capitals and italics are his). Recovery is regaining the ability to see things with clarity, “freed from the drab blur of triteness or familiarity—from possessiveness.” Escape is flight from the horrors of the modern world (factories, pollution, bombs, and technology ranked high on Tolkien’s list); it is not a sign of weakness, but of strength and sanity. Does not a man in prison do well to escape? To escape means also to overcome the embargo imposed by our natural limitations; in fantasy, we may fly through the clouds, talk with bees, or reach the ocean floor. Consolation is the satisfaction of desires, which include our deep-seated longing for a world, if only a secondary one, of wonder and enchantment. One desire surpasses all others, by joining Consolation to Escape: the “Escape from Death”—a theme that abounds in fairy stories around the world. Escape from death is itself the supreme instance of the greatest of all Consolations: the “Happy Ending.”

For Tolkien, the Happy Ending lies at the heart of fantasy and fairy story; it is so essential to the genre that when he revised his talk for publication in
Essays Presented to Charles Williams,
he coined the word “eucatastrophe” from
eu
(Greek for good) and
catastrophe
(Greek for overturning) to describe those glorious volte-faces in which evil, on the verge of triumph, gives way to good, corruption to innocence, grief to rejoicing, certain death to yet more certain life. It is “a sudden and miraculous grace … a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.” There are echoes here of Lewis’s idea of Joy, that painful, delicious longing that only God can fulfill. It may be that Lewis drew inspiration for his carefully constructed account of Joy in his autobiography from Tolkien’s earlier presentation. In any event, eucatastrophe is for Tolkien the crucial event in fairy tale, the hinge upon which the greatest stories turn, imparting “a catch of the breath, a beat and lifting of the heart, near to (or indeed accompanied by) tears, as keen as that given by any form of literary art, and having a peculiar quality.” There is a peculiar reason for this “peculiar quality”: the joy that floods us as eucatastrophe unfolds is not limited to the fairy story in which it originates; here art oversteps its bounds, and joy breaks into the primary world. Eucatastrophe leads us out of literature and into faith. Through it we glimpse “a far-off gleam or echo of
evangelium
in the real world.” Fairy tale, then, is a door opening upon divine truth. Recovery, Consolation, Escape, in their highest modes of Escape from Death and eucatastrophe, would play a crucial role in
The Lord of the Rings
.

The Deepening Eclipse

It’s not easy to be a missionary, even with the key to the cosmos in your hand. By 1930, Barfield knew that when he mentioned Rudolf Steiner’s ideas to persons outside the Anthroposophical fold, the response would fall somewhere between polite disbelief and outright scorn. His friends’ reaction proved the point; even Lewis, “who would never, for instance, express an opinion even on a minor but all too prolix poet of the sixteenth century without first having read the great bulk of what the man himself had actually written … on more than one occasion, broke his rule in the case of Steiner.”

Barfield was “shocked and puzzled” by the pervasive rejection of Steiner’s self-evident genius. How to get around this infuriating boycott? He hit upon the plan of presenting the seer’s teachings indirectly, by exploring their affinities to Romanticism, and he began to turn out essays (later published in
Romanticism Comes of Age
, 1944), arguing that Steiner, like the Romantics, grasped the cognitive value of imagination but that he had gone further by seeing that “Imagination” must blend with what Barfield termed “Inspiration” in order to attain “Intuition” (the capitals are Barfield’s): that is, objective knowledge of supersensible and supernatural realities. Imagination by itself offers mystical and aesthetic insights, but only Steiner’s Spiritual Science, the end of a “long, sober process” of which Imagination is but the first step, produces “exact results.” Anthroposophy, Barfield concluded, “was nothing less than Romanticism grown up.”

At about the same time that he initiated this campaign, he began to step away from regular participation in the Inklings. The difficulty of traveling from London to Oxford played a part, but so, too, one suspects, did dismay and embarrassment over his literary disappointments. He viewed the situation with bitter humor tinged with resignation, noting that by entering a law firm, he had “lost the inestimable privilege of leisure and as a result was able, as far as the lettered world was concerned, to advance cautiously from inaudibility to silence.” His Oxford jaunts dwindled to one or two per academic term; during these brief but happy interludes he would attend an Inklings meeting, to the great pleasure of the assembly, who enjoyed his soft-spoken contributions and the skill that he alone possessed to temper Lewis’s more heated outbursts; he would then pass the weekend with Lewis at the Kilns, reading together in Virgil, Homer, and Dante. Each time Lewis welcomed him warmly, but the two friends never regained their earlier intimacy: the termination of the “Great War” and Lewis’s conversion had put an end to that.

Barfield’s marriage was under strain as well. There was no mystery about the reason: Maud distrusted Anthroposophy and disliked her husband’s involvement in it. On September 27, 1928, she had written him a furious letter, describing a text by Steiner as “nauseating” and “petty,” accusing Barfield of being obsessed with his own spiritual path without “any desire to find out what my mind was like or on what high quest I was traveling” and of failing to acknowledge her prayers on his behalf. The Barfield scholar Simon Blaxland–de Lange speculates that this letter, “a private outpouring of grief and anger,” was never sent. In any event, the couple remained together. Maud continued to loathe Anthroposophy and all its trappings, while her husband nursed the wound inflicted by this “sword through the marriage knot.”

Frustrated in art, in proselytizing, in friendship, in marriage, Barfield burrowed yet more deeply into Anthroposophy. But there, too, he found discord and, soon enough, internecine warfare. Following the Master’s death in 1925, his followers had split into two rival camps: those who believed that his writings constituted a definitive and changeless canon, and those who thought that his teachings could be developed further by mature disciples. Barfield, Cecil Harwood, and others in the English Anthroposophical Society held the latter view. Unfortunately, Steiner’s widow, the formidable Marie Steiner, did not. When Barfield and Harwood traveled to Dornach in the mid-1930s for a general convention, they entered a minefield. At a “very fiery meeting” filled with “strong antagonism,” Barfield spoke his mind—silenced in mainstream literary journals, he would at least have his say in this most important of arenas—arguing for a liberal interpretation of Steiner’s legacy. His courageous (or rash) act “rather flung the stone in the middle of the discussion” and disaster ensued. Frau Steiner’s allies established a new English Anthroposophical group, with its own headquarters and journal, that held copyright over Steiner’s publications in England. Suddenly Barfield found it difficult to get permission to publish his Steiner translations, and the Dornach hierarchy and its English branch made harsh demands upon him and his companions, including the dismissal from the movement of several liberal members. Even in the cozy world of Anthroposophy, there was no escape from the terrible friction inherent in the evolution of consciousness.

The Happiness of the Cross

Lewis, by contrast, brimmed with happiness; everything was falling into place. Since becoming a Christian, his teaching, reading, writing, and scholarship had all acquired zest and purpose. He had found his vocation: to fight the Lord’s battles in the academy and the world at large, armed with wit, dialectic, and invincible faith. True, his living arrangements remained eccentric, what with the regular commute between Magdalen and the Kilns, but he felt at home in both locales. True, Mrs. Moore continued to order him about as if he were her private manservant, but he had settled into the role. Like other intellectuals, he welcomed the mindless drudgery as a refreshing change of pace, and her irrational demands gave him a chance to practice humility, one of the Christian virtues he feared he most lacked.

To crown his pleasures, he was surrounded by friends. “Friendship is the greatest of worldly goods. Certainly to me it is the chief happiness of life,” he wrote to Arthur. The Inklings were flourishing under his orchestration and Warnie’s kind ministrations, assembling on Thursday evenings at Magdalen and Tuesday mornings at the Bird and Baby, drinking, laughing, cajoling, and disputing; even Williams turned up now and then, grabbing the train from London, although, like Barfield, he found Oxford too distant for regular participation and sustained his friendship with Lewis largely through letters. Lewis’s correspondence with Arthur continued, but in a subdued key, Lewis sounding at times like an elder brother instructing a less-educated younger sibling, patiently tolerating Arthur’s spiritual experiments with Unitarianism, Baha’i, and the Quaker tradition of his ancestors. He continued to count Barfield a peer—this high regard never wavered—but refused to argue with him, and the letters they exchanged lacked fire. As always, though, Lewis itched for combat, and during the mid and late 1930s he found his match in Alan Griffiths (1906–93).

The friendship between Lewis and Griffiths has drawn little attention from literary historians, largely because Griffiths never joined the Inklings. Surely he would have been invited to join if he had remained in Oxford after earning his degree, but within a few years he had become a contemplative Benedictine monk, taking the name of Bede, and later settled in India as a Catholic
sannyasin
(renunciant), embracing a land and lifestyle alien to the Inklings’ intransigently Western outlook. Nonetheless, he meant a great deal to Lewis;
Surprised by Joy
is dedicated to Griffiths, and we learn in its pages that during the months prior to Lewis’s conversion, “my chief companion … was Griffiths, with whom I kept up a copious correspondence.” Griffiths seconds this memory, writing that during this time “I was probably nearer to Lewis than anyone else.”

Their relationship had begun in 1927, when Lewis became Griffiths’s English tutor. The two met weekly, and their talks ran late into the night. After Griffiths left Oxford, they almost never saw one another—although Griffiths joined Barfield and Lewis on a walking tour in 1932—but their correspondence blossomed. The teacher-student relationship evaporated, replaced by a rich and lively exchange of equals. “I think that it was through him,” said Griffiths, “that I really discovered the meaning of friendship.” At first the two shared literary views, but before long they turned to intense discussions on philosophy, metaphysics, the Bible, Christology, and so on, forging an intellectual and spiritual companionship that Griffiths held forever dear.

The friendship ran aground, however, when Griffiths became a Catholic and a monk. The two ceased to see eye to eye and tempers flared over Thomism, ecclesiology, poetry, mysticism, prayer, life after death, and more. By 1934, Lewis advised Griffiths “once and for all” that he would no longer discuss “any of the questions at issue between our respective churches.” This declaration closely parallels, as readers will note, Lewis’s recent and abrupt cessation of debate with Barfield. Luckily for us—for Lewis is always most splendid when on the attack—in this case he failed to follow his own edict and his subsequent letters to Griffiths bristle with poisoned darts (“I think your specifically Catholic beliefs a mass of comparatively harmless human tradition which may be fatal to certain souls under special conditions”) along with perceptive observations on Christian discipline: