The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings (69 page)

Meanwhile, Providence Herself, pursuing her own inscrutable aims, was engineering a tremendous change in Lewis’s life. In the spring of 1954, Cambridge University had established a new chair in Medieval and Renaissance Literature. The electors included several friends and supporters of Lewis, including his old tutor F. P. Wilson, the medievalists David Knowles and Henry Stanley Bennett, Lewis’s amiable adversary and coauthor, E.M.W. Tillyard, and, not least, J.R.R. Tolkien. This group decided, unanimously, to offer their mutual friend the post, although he had expressed no interest in it. Lewis declined the offer, tendering flimsy arguments about losing a precious servant (Fred Paxton) by moving to Cambridge, about standing in the way of another candidate (G. V. Smithers, a University College philologist who was never seriously considered for the post), and about his own flagging energies. The truth is, he was worried about Warnie, who surely would spiral down into drunken disaster if abandoned at the Kilns. The university re-tended its offer; Lewis turned it down again. At this stage, the electors approached their second choice, Dame Helen Gardner.

But this was not the end. Tolkien, dismayed at Lewis’s refusal and convinced that life in Cambridge would revitalize him emotionally as well as physically, took the offensive. On the field of friendship, this was his shining hour. He forcefully countered Lewis’s objections, assuring him that Smithers was ineligible for the professorship, which had been earmarked for a literary scholar rather than a philologist, and that the university would be content if he shuttled to and from the Kilns, living in supplied rooms in Cambridge four days of each week and passing the remainder at home in Oxford. Tolkien may also have mentioned that Lewis’s salary would triple in the new post, and that he would be quit of tutoring, a ball and chain for the past thirty years. Elated by these revelations, Lewis wrote a letter accepting the chair, adding that he had already begun composing suitable lectures in his head. The electors swallowed hard and, through the university vice-chancellor, informed him that the backup candidate had been offered the job. The situation seemed hopeless—until another eucatastrophe unfolded. Gardner turned down the post, without specifying why. The answer emerged in her 1966 memorial memoir for Lewis, in which she wrote, gracefully disguising her own role in the matter, that “fortunately, the ‘second string’ declined, partially on account of having heard that Lewis was changing his mind, for it was obvious that this ought to be Lewis’s chair.”

Lewis’s chair it became; but what was to become of his Magdalen College tutorship? Herein lies a mystery. According to Barfield, when Lewis accepted the Cambridge position, he selected Barfield as his Oxford replacement, arranged a transfer with the Master of Magdalen, and “fixed up a kind of farewell dinner for himself and an introductory dinner for me, all together.” All seemed set until the proposal was put before the dons and was voted down. So Barfield remembered the sequence of events, years later. The real reason for the rejection, he suspected, was antagonism toward Lewis, but the proffered excuse was that Barfield was close to retirement age and a new search would have to be instituted soon after his arrival. Oddly, there is no substantial corroboration for Barfield’s account in Lewis’s papers; the situation is furthermore muddled by Barfield’s belief that all this transpired in the late 1950s, several years after Lewis’s retirement. Whatever the precise details, for Barfield the result was “a pretty big disappointment, because I’d looked forward very much to living in Oxford, to the kind of society you get there—my wife was also looking forward to it very much.” It was another blow in a life of blows.

War Against Williams

Charles Williams, many years dead, lived still in the hearts of his friends and the spleen of his enemies. His was not a happy legacy. The first significant attack had come in 1950, in the otherwise upbeat, celebratory pages of the immensely popular
Penguin Book of Contemporary Verse
. The editor, poet Kenneth Allott, chose for his collection all the obvious candidates—Eliot, Yeats, Joyce—and added Charles Williams to the list, reprinting “The Calling of Arthur” from
Taliessin Through Logres
. Why this selection?

According to Allott, artistic merit had nothing to do with it. Williams’s poems constitute “a literary oddity of great interest” that influenced Auden, Eliot, and Ridler; beyond this faint praise, Allott offers only condemnation. Lewis’s evaluation of his friend’s work is “wildly off the mark.” Lewis has “been hypnotized by his memories of the man” into seeing in the poems things that are “barely half-said” and poorly at that, in an Arthurian narrative so garbled that “all Mr. Lewis’s ingenuity” is needed to sort it out. Williams is “at times … metrically clumsy and in expression uncouth and, more rarely, bathetic.” One recoils at the ferocity of this onslaught, which appears, after all, in a book ostensibly dedicated to the work of the best modern poets. Nor does Allott offer any reason for his decision to guard the precincts of Parnassus with a merciless sword and make Williams his exemplary victim. And yet his conclusions seem, for the most part, incontestable. Most will agree that Lewis, blinded by friendship, passed from praise to adulation when assessing Williams’s poetry, and few will disagree with T. S. Eliot and many others that to read Williams’s Arthurian works is to enter a nearly impenetrable thicket of obscurities.

The motives behind the next major attack, launched a year later, were more transparent. The aggressor was F. R. Leavis, the means his collection of essays, largely culled from
Scrutiny
, called
The Common Pursuit
. It appears that Leavis simply transferred his dislike of Lewis and his allied discomfort with much of Christian orthodoxy to Williams. “I can see no reason for being interested in Charles Williams,” he begins, shutting the door in his opening move. Williams “hadn’t begun to be a poet”; his analysis of Milton is “the merest attitudinizing and gesturing of a man who had nothing critically relevant to say.” These are broad judgments, made contemptuously and without textual support. Other observations, perhaps unwittingly, hit the mark. Leavis contends that Williams is not the best advertisement for Christianity, that his “preoccupation with the ‘horror of evil’ is evidence of an arrest at the schoolboy (and -girl) stage rather than of spiritual maturity,” a perspicacious remark that we can now buttress with evidence of which Leavis was almost certainly unaware, including Williams’s ritualistic behavior with his OUP colleagues and his participation in Waite’s Fellowship of the Rosy Cross. His assertion that Williams’s “dealings in ‘myth,’ mystery, the occult, and the supernatural belong essentially to the ethos of the thriller,” can be guardedly embraced. As a critic and historian, especially in
The Figure of Beatrice
and
The Descent of the Dove
, Williams is a sophisticated and judicious explorer of supernatural themes, but his novels, excepting
The Place of the Lion
and
All Hallows’ Eve
, rarely rise above highbrow pulp. Leavis’s claim that Williams is “a subject worth attention from the inquirer into the ‘sociology’ of contemporary literature” is belittling but correct: he indeed deserves attention for his unusual character and interests; that this is the only reason for studying him is doubtful.

Williams’s prominence as a specifically Christian author occasioned the third major assault on his reputation, unleashed by the poet and historian Robert Conquest in
Essays in Criticism
,
1957
. Conquest’s offensive differs radically from those of Allott and Leavis. He gives Williams some high marks as a poet, declaring him possessed of “in many ways an admirable talent,” producing works of genuine quality and sporadic technical brilliance. For Conquest, Williams’s sin lies elsewhere: he is a totalitarian. By this, Conquest—who would later attain fame for
The Great Terror
(1965), his study of Stalinist atrocities—does not mean, as most readers might assume, that Williams is Fascist or Communist. What he means is that Williams is an orthodox Christian, foisting on others a “closed system” of thought, an “ideological straightjacket.” In this perceived coercion, Conquest discerns deliberate hypocrisy or self-deception on Williams’s part, for “nowadays” all “intelligent people” know perfectly well that such systems are “ridiculous and wrong” and that “definite research exists which makes nonsense of them.” As Williams’s exegete and defender, Lewis also comes under Conquest’s scourge; both Inklings are guilty of “the tendency to terrorism,” of “smug self-congratulation,” and “the pitying sneer,” which they employ “as a substitute for the unattainable whip and labour camp.” This, then, is the voice of 1950s skepticism at high pitch and full volume, smugly confident of its own closed certainties, willing, just like the totalitarian-inspired Soviet Realism that Conquest abhors, to condemn a work on ideological as well as aesthetic grounds.

Conquest’s anti-Christian arguments did little to dent Williams’s stature. On the other hand, neither did Williams’s friends accomplish much in their many efforts to enhance his poetic reputation. Lewis and Dorothy L. Sayers spoke and wrote on his behalf; even Eliot chipped in, calling
Taliessen Through Logres
“absorbing after we have got the hang of what he is after.” In 1955 the poet John Heath-Stubbs published a laudatory booklet on Williams for the British Council and the National Book League, but he was obliged, in the very first sentence, to say of his subject that “it is very difficult to arrive at a balanced estimate of his place in modern English literature.” A few other voices joined the pro-Williams choir, but few listened, while many who did, after turning to the poems themselves, gave up in bewilderment. Williams’s gravestone identifies him as “Poet,” but following Allott’s initial backhanded salute, no major collection of modern English verse has included his work.
Arthurian Torso
and
Taliessen Through Logres
flicker in and out of print, always difficult to obtain, but within fifteen years of Williams’s death, his fame came to rest upon his novels, a few works of theology and literary criticism—and his membership in the Inklings.

18

THE DIALECTIC OF DESIRE

“There may be times when what is most needed is, not so much a new discovery or a new idea as a different ‘slant’; I mean a comparatively slight readjustment in our
way
of looking at the things and ideas on which attention is already fixed.” The opening line in Barfield’s
Saving the Appearances
(1957), with its gentle incitement to new perspectives, addressed the need for Western culture to acquire a new understanding of consciousness. At the same time, Barfield was talking of himself and his own desperate readiness for transformation. The patterns of a lifetime were ready to break asunder; his
vita nuova
was about to commence.

What triggered the metamorphosis? The answer may lie in the accumulating pressure of thirty years of literary frustration, of watching Lewis, de la Mare, Eliot, and other friends achieve lasting fame while he remained entombed in the sepulcher of trust-and-property law. Or it may be discerned in his awareness that Maud was turning seventy while he neared sixty, driving home the frightening truth that his time was now or never. Whatever the cause, during the mid-1950s he cut back his law hours and instead frequented the British Museum Reading Room, taking copious notes on whatever caught his fancy—philology, philosophy, anthropology, history of science—with no definite plan in mind. He began to write a new book but abandoned it after one chapter, displeased by its lack of focus. His frustration mounted, until one happy day he stumbled upon the phrase “saving the appearances” in Garvin Ardley’s
Aquinas and Kant
(1950), a now-forgotten study of early science. “Somehow,” Barfield recalled, “around that [phrase], all these unconnected notes I’d made … from different parts of the mental world, seemed to crystallize.”

The newly precipitated crystals took literary form as
Saving the Appearances
. Barfield had not attempted a full-length presentation of Anthroposophical ideas since
Poetic Diction
, written during his twenties, nearly thirty years before. The skills of a solicitor—close reasoning, attention to detail, verbal agility, aggressiveness, unflagging effort—which had driven him half-mad in legal affairs, now proved invaluable in literary forensics.
Saving the Appearances
is sharply argued and elegantly phrased. In it, Barfield ventures far beyond the philological speculation of his earlier works, diving into philosophy, theology, occultism, prophecy, and ancient, medieval, and modern history in order to mount his fullest exposition to date of the evolution of consciousness.

He begins with epistemology. How do we apprehend the world around us? He calls our experience a
collective representation
, the result of sense data interacting with the mind of the perceiver (these representations are the “appearances” of the title). “When I ‘hear a thrush singing,’” Barfield writes, “I am hearing, not with my ears alone, but with all sorts of other things like mental habits, memory, imagination, feeling, and … will.” He appeals to modern physics, which recognizes that the act of observation modifies what is observed; thus we condition our view of what we call reality. This process, of constructing the world from raw sense data interpreted by the mind, he calls
figuration
. So far, Barfield’s account is largely uncontroversial, resting squarely upon Kant’s insistence that we cannot get hold of the “thing-in-itself.”

Ever the evolutionist, however, Barfield takes a further step: he argues that figuration changes over time. “Primitives”—a term that he leaves largely undefined—experienced the world differently from us; they apprehended it through what Barfield calls
original participation
, an intimate, extrasensory connection with the phenomena around them. Primitives were closely linked to the reality they perceive. This gave them a spiritual awareness that we have lost, a knowledge that beyond the phenomenal world (beyond collective representations) lies something deeply mysterious—a life force, gods, God—to which we are profoundly related.