The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings (56 page)

Barfield liked administering these charitable donations; it was, in fact, one of his few pleasures during these years. The law office, with its rituals and petty intrigues and interminable paperwork, swallowed up time and stifled imagination; at home, Maud still decried the truth and even the value of Anthroposophy. The entry of Geoffrey into the family as a foster child had pleased both Barfield and his wife, but moments of domestic bliss failed to overcome his despair at the throttling of his creative talents. He wrote a brief essay on the Psalms, lectured on Hamlet, translated some Steineriana—all activities within the small, safe Anthroposophical orbit—and placed a review and a number of poems under the pseudonym of G.A.L. Burgeon with
The New English Weekly
, a magazine founded by A. R. Orage and best known for publishing portions of T. S. Eliot’s
Four Quartets
. Barfield’s poems were frothy, forgettable affairs, some of them (“Cosmetics,” “The Doppelganger”) revolving around the elusive charms of a woman named “Betty.” These works delighted Lewis, who termed them “Bettiana,” and wrote “there’s something v. wrong” when a publisher declined to print more of them.

The Bettiana failed to advance Barfield’s reputation or assuage his sorrows. Nor did Lewis’s sudden willingness in August 1948 to reopen for a brief time the “Great War” make much difference. Lewis’s change of heart may have sprung from a dawning recognition of Barfield’s unhappiness or from the pleasure derived from a recent mock literary joust with Barfield, during which the two had exchanged letters in the personae of law firms, Barfield representing King Mark of Cornwall and Lewis Sir Tristram, figures drawn from Malory’s Arthurian romances, which Lewis had just reviewed for the
TLS
. This was just the sort of banter that Lewis loved and may have reminded him of the fun to be had in battling with his old friend. In any event, he and Barfield began corresponding again about the nature of creation, reason, and the like, but the skirmish was controlled and short-lived. So, too, was the apparent revival of Barfield’s dramatic career in a September 1948 production of his verse play
Orpheus
by the Sheffield Education Settlement, a Christian organization with a Steinerian tilt. Lewis wrote a glowing blurb for the program notes, praising the work for “a variety almost as rich as that of the
Shepherd’s Calendar
” (eclogues by Spenser) and declaring that “I await with great interest the public reaction to a work which has influenced me so deeply as Barfield’s
Orpheus
.” The public reaction, as for all of Barfield’s output during these dark years, was a smattering of applause followed by a discouraging silence.

A Gift for Williams

The dappled shadow of Charles Williams, bestowing darkness or light depending upon one’s memories, still loomed over the Inklings and their activities. Lewis busied himself preparing an edition of his friend’s unpublished Arthurian prose; Warnie continued to miss the boozy warmth of the many pub visits he and Williams had enjoyed together; others among the Inklings still felt acutely, with regret or relief, the absence of the man’s high-pitched, eccentric energies. In 1947, as homage, memorial, and final farewell, five Inklings joined forces to produce the only significant pan-Inklings publication in the group’s long history:
Essays Presented to Charles Williams.
Lewis had come up with the idea long before Williams’s death, intending to produce a Festschrift to be presented to Williams upon his return to London at the end of the war. Now the volume would serve other purposes, as a memorial and as a fund-raiser for Florence, who was to receive all profits.

Lewis, as editor, already had in hand suitable pieces by himself, Barfield, and Tolkien. Two days after Williams’s passing, he wrote to T. S. Eliot and Dorothy L. Sayers, soliciting from each a contribution; he also asked Eliot if Faber & Faber would take on the book. Eliot declined to publish it, recommending instead that Lewis approach Sir Humphrey Milford at Oxford University Press, but he did agree to supply an essay. Apparently he did so reluctantly, for despite repeated pleas by Lewis, who told him that “your absence would in our view cripple the book,” the promised piece never appeared. In desperation, Lewis suggested instead that Eliot contribute a poem—an astonishing request, considering how little Lewis liked Eliot’s poetry, and an indication of how much he valued Eliot’s name as a magnet for readers and of how willing he was to thrust his own tastes aside to honor his friend. In any event, the poem also failed to materialize, and a frustrated Lewis finally sent a curt note to Eliot suggesting that “perhaps you will find your own way of honouring our friend later and no less effectively.”

Many of Williams’s former companions did come through, however, producing a volume that offers a revealing cross-section of the Inklings and their thought in the late 1940s. The work underscores both the group’s eclecticism and its common interests. “In this book,” Lewis writes in his preface, “the reader is offered the work of one professional author, two dons, a solicitor, a friar, and a retired army officer”—that is, Dorothy L. Sayers, C. S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Owen Barfield, Gervase Mathew, and W. H. Lewis. This group constituted for Williams, wrote Lewis, “a fairly permanent nucleus among his
literary
friends. He read us his manuscripts and we read him ours: we smoked, talked, argued, and drank together (I must confess that with Miss Dorothy Sayers I have seen him drink only tea: but that was neither his fault nor hers).” As Lewis had informed Eliot, at least some of the essays also share a common nucleus: “They are … concerned with
story
, or if you will
mythopoea
: in fact with that element in literature wh. nearly all criticism between Aristotle and Maud Bodkin has left entirely alone. Their connection with Charles is that this was rather his own long suit.”

The anomaly among these contributors is, of course, Sayers, author of the acclaimed Lord Peter Wimsey mystery novels and two influential books of Christian apologetics,
The Mind of the Maker
(1941) and
Creed or Chaos?
(1947). She is the only non-Inkling on the title page. What is she doing there? As we know, she was excluded in principle from membership in the group by virtue of her sex. Did Lewis, by this singular honor, intend to confer on her the title of honorary Inkling? Was she, as many critics claim, almost an Inkling or “not quite an Inkling”? We can dismiss as meaningless the claim that if she had been a man she would have been an Inkling, for if she had been a man she would not have been Dorothy L. Sayers. Equally unhelpful is the speculation of one Sayers biographer that if her candidacy had been seriously proposed, some Inklings “might have been disturbed by the inclusion … of Dorothy’s transsexual mind and not-very-stimulating body.”

Sexual politics aside, however, Sayers had much in common with Lewis and Tolkien’s circle, including a love of orthodox Christianity, traditional verse, popular fiction, and debate. In
The Mind of the Maker
(1941), she presents a theory of artistic creation as an image of the Trinity that closely parallels Tolkien’s idea of subcreation. Tolkien, it is true, came to detest her aristocratic sleuth, Lord Peter Wimsey, telling Christopher that “I conceived a loathing for him (and his creatrix) not surpassed by any other character in literature known to me…,” but his objections, likely based upon Wimsey’s dandyism and Sayers’s affinity for strong female characters, seem not to have transferred wholesale to other Inklings. Lewis, for example, praised her Jesus play,
The Man Born to Be King
, a wartime BBC radio drama, which he reread “every Holy Week since it first appeared and never re-read … without being deeply moved.” She, in turn, admired his writing and was, Lewis said, “the first person of importance who ever wrote me a fan letter.”

Sayers’s most significant association among the Inklings, however, was with Charles Williams. Their friendship was long and deep, and it was chiefly for this reason that Lewis included her in the memorial volume (that she, like Eliot, would attract a flock of readers was a welcome bonus). In 1933, Williams had written to the publisher Victor Gollancz an exuberant letter upon reading an advance copy of Sayers’s
The Nine Tailors
, declaring, “Your Dorothy Sayers…! Present her some time with my profoundest compliments. It’s a marvellous book; it is high imagination … the ending is unsurpassable.” This glowing tribute was relayed to the author, who wrote Gollancz that “I only hope he isn’t pulling my leg—it sounds too good to be true!” He wasn’t, it wasn’t. The two writers met, hit it off, and continued to dine together periodically for several years.

In 1937, Williams wrote the play
Thomas Cranmer of Canterbury
for the annual Canterbury Festival and proposed Sayers as the festival’s next playwright. Sayers accepted the invitation and wrote
The Zeal of Thy House
for the 1938 season; her play, about William of Sens, the architect who rebuilt the Canterbury Cathedral choir after a devastating fire in 1174, received good notices and gave her prominence as a Christian artist as well as a creator of elegant mysteries. A few years later (as we saw in chapter 12), Williams unwittingly did Sayers a yet more profound favor by sparking her passion for Dante. Her contribution to
Essays Presented to Charles Williams
is to a great extent a summary of the many enthusiastic letters that she sent Williams during the early days of her Dante mania. Most notable and Inklings-like is her vigorous defense of story: Dante “was simply the most incomparable story-teller who ever set pen to paper”; the
Commedia
is, first and foremost, “a story of adventure,” and it is this that allows it to be also “a satire, a love-romance, a spiritual autobiography”; Dante succeeds because “nobody had taught him the strange theory of the early twentieth-century novelists, that one is a better story-teller for having no story to tell”; the
Commedia
possesses “that quality without which a tale may indeed take captive the imagination but can never root itself in the affections—the power to create a whole universe of breathing characters.” Lewis or Tolkien might have written these lines, which could serve as an aesthetic manifesto for the Space Trilogy and
The Lord of the Rings
, although the two Inklings might have adopted a more studied, less breathless tone (Lewis told Barfield that he found Sayers’s essay “perhaps a trifle vulgar in places”).

As it happens, a donnish or professorial tone emerges in
Essays
on the very heels of Sayers’s contribution, for it is followed by Tolkien’s “On Fairy-Stories” and Lewis’s “On Stories.” Together, the contributions of Sayers, Tolkien, and Lewis constitute a closely reasoned, richly illustrated defense of fantasy, Fa
ë
rie, children’s literature, and the mythopoeic imagination: that is to say, the literature of the Inklings and their colleagues. Tolkien’s essay, contending that Fa
ë
rie offers “Fantasy, Recovery, Escape, Consolation,” and “Enchantment,” and that fantasy allows the artist to “assist in the effoliation and multiple enrichment of creation,” is an expanded version of his 1939 Andrew Lang Lecture. Lewis approaches the same theme from a different angle than does Tolkien or Sayers, examining neither a particular story nor a single genre but rather “Story itself” (the capital letter is Lewis’s) and those literary forms in which “everything else”—characters, social analyses, propaganda—“is there for the sake of the story.” He rejects the popular notion that story exists to create excitement; if this were so, then
The Three Musketeers
, which is nothing but a torrent of thrills, would be the greatest of all stories. Lewis never states exactly what Dumas lacks that a good story possesses; instead, he contrasts such tales with those that join excitement to that special frisson—“sense of wonder” may be the best term for it—induced by a giant, a pirate, or an otherworldly landscape. These marvels stimulate the “deeper imagination”; they offer “something other than a process and much more like a state or quality.” H. Rider Haggard, David Lindsay, Walter de la Mare, and J.R.R. Tolkien are modern writers who have achieved this elemental quality; Charles Williams is not, for his stories remain, “despite their free use of the supernatural, much closer to the novel; a believed religion, detailed character drawing, and even social satire all come in.” Children’s literature, on the other hand, is specifically dedicated to evoking the sense of wonder, and Lewis’s argument is also a defense of this maligned genre (and thus of Tolkien’s
The Hobbit
and Barfield’s
The Silver Trumpet
). “No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally (and often far more) worth reading at the age of fifty—except, of course, books of information … A mature palate will probably not much care for
cr
ê
me de menthe
: but it ought still to enjoy bread and butter and honey.”

The final essays in the book go in other directions. Barfield’s “Poetic Diction and Legal Fiction” (see chapter 12) links the author’s twin vocations of literature and law. Gervase Mathew contributes an essay on marriage and courtly love in fourteenth-century England, while Warnie closes the volume with an account of the horrors of French galley life during the reign of Louis XIV, the Sun King being a subject that vastly interested Williams as well (“these two, and Mr. H.V.D. Dyson of Merton, could often be heard in a corner talking about Versailles,
intendants
, and the
maison du roy
,” remembers Lewis in his preface).

Signs of Decline

Essays Presented to Charles Williams
was the Inklings’ collaborative high-water mark; the tide soon began to ebb. In 1946, Merton College commenced a search for a new professor of English literature. Tolkien, one of the electors, favored Lewis or possibly Lord David Cecil for the post, but after fierce opposition from the English faculty, the position went to Lewis’s old tutor F. P. Wilson. Everyone knew the reason: the faculty feared that Lewis would turn the professorship into a bully pulpit for Christian evangelization. A month or so earlier, he had received an honorary doctor of divinity degree from the University of St. Andrews; during the ceremony, the presiding dean had said that “with his pen and with his voice on the radio Mr. Lewis has succeeded in capturing the attention of many who will not readily listen to professional theologians, and has taught them many lessons concerning the deep things of God.” At St. Andrews this passed muster, but at Oxford some academics doubted whether Lewis, now an international celebrity, would pay sufficient attention to the many vexing details that accompanied a professorship, while others fretted over how it would look to grant the author of
The Screwtape Letters
, an embarrassingly popular novel, such a prestigious chair. Tolkien’s lobbying failed to overcome these obstacles, and Christina Scull and Wayne G. Hammond speculate that his failure may have “slightly sour[ed] relations between” him and Lewis “for a while.” If so, it foreshadowed greater rifts to come.