The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings (70 page)

With us moderns it is different. Human consciousness has evolved and original participation has vanished, replaced by morbid self-consciousness and distancing from the world around us. We experience our collective representations (the world as we know it) as disconnected and remote from ourselves. We believe in a world
out there
, open to scientific investigation. Here Barfield adds another term to his specialized vocabulary, calling this kind of investigation
alpha-thinking
. For Barfield, alpha-thinking is fundamentally flawed, even delusional, leading to patent falsehoods, most notably in our account of evolution: “It can do no harm to recall occasionally that the prehistoric evolution of the earth, as it is described for example in the early chapters of H. G. Wells’s
The Outline of History
, was not merely never seen. It never occurred.” When Wells, or any modern scientist, describes the events of prehistory—the formation of the solar system, the appearance of life on earth, the rise of trilobites and dinosaurs, and so on—what he recounts is not what
really
happened, but rather what a modern person, with a modern person’s cramped, detached, self-conscious mode of figuration, would have perceived as happening if he or she had been a witness to prehistory. If a “primitive,” the possessor of an entirely different set of collective representations, had witnessed the same events, “we should then have to write a different pre-history altogether.”

This is, of course, a wholesale rejection of almost all of modern science and its findings. Barfield’s objections apply equally well to disciplines other than prehistory. In astronomy, for example, experts predicate conditions in other galaxies upon data received and interpreted through modern modes of figuration. Are we, then, trapped in an illusory universe—a universe of idols, as Barfield puts it? Is everything we know a lie? For Barfield, the startling answer, to a considerable degree, is yes.

There are, however, signs that humanity is awakening from its long, troubled collective dream. The recognition of the observer effect in quantum mechanics gives hope. We now face a choice between idolatry—enslavement to our common representations—and a conscious effort to awaken a new form of participation,
final participation
, through which, by means of “goodness of heart and a steady furnace in the will,” we will heal our perceptions and cultivate a renewed awareness of God. This forthcoming state of consciousness will truly “save the appearances.”

Barfield’s spiritual reading of evolution, presented more lyrically and succinctly than ever before in
Saving the Appearances
, stands far outside the main current of modern thought. Few readers will rush to accept his radical rejection of orthodox science, epitomized by his scorn for standard accounts of prehistory; as he himself observes, the views of quantum physicists on the role of the observer have not been adopted by most other scientists, much less the world at large, which remains wedded to dualistic subject-object epistemology. Nor will many embrace his account of final participation, a state of consciousness brought into play, for each of us, via personal
metanoia
unfolding through successive reincarnations. Like other esoteric accounts of the world, Barfield’s spins in its own orbit, attracting the occasional adventurer into its eccentric field of influence but having little or no effect upon the masses. At the same time, it possesses its own coherence, internal logic, and beauty, incorporating some of humankind’s greatest religious myths—a past golden age, a present tribulation, a future new heaven and new earth—into a strange but lovely narrative, in which the powers of the imagination (in the exact Blakean sense of perceiving invisible realities) may yet save the world. As such, it takes its place, at the very least, as a remarkable example of mid-twentieth-century apocalyptic, a modern philosophical prose variant of Blake’s
Jerusalem
. For its author, it was a definitive breakthrough, a regrouping and expansion of scattered talents, a return to the battlefield, a harbinger of things to come.

Saving the Appearances
attracted few reviews; Barfield had been out of the literary scene far too long for his work to draw notice. The fullest response came from a clearly dissatisfied Lewis, who read the work in manuscript. He declared it “full (of course) of sap and strength, and v. much yours,” then added several pages pinpointing its weaknesses, leavened by the occasional “splendid” and “V. good.” When the book appeared in print, he told Barfield that it was a “stunner” but offered no further analysis. T. S. Eliot, on the other hand, wrote Barfield, three years after publication, to declare his “very high opinion” of the book, which he thought “too profound for our feeble generation of critics.” Barfield would later tell Valerie Eliot (the poet’s wife) that he valued this letter “highly.”

Sufferings and Celebrations

“I am feeling as flat as a burst tyre,” Tolkien had written to Naomi Mitchison in mid-1955. He was referring to his immediate workload at the time, especially his lecturing and the burden of shepherding
The Return of the King
into print, but the hyperbolic metaphor depicts fairly his state not only then but in ensuing years. He was becoming an old man, quit of his great work, feeling his creative energies dwindle. He marveled at his achievement and increasingly worried about his legacy. “[My] chief biographical fact,” he wrote to a fan, “… is the completion of
The Lord of the Rings
, which still astonishes me … I still wonder how and why I managed to peg away at this thing year after year, often under real difficulties, and bring it to a conclusion. I suppose, because from the beginning it began to catch up in its narrative folds visions of most of the things that I have most loved or hated.” He would spend his remaining years elucidating to family, friends, and readers, in a vast epistolary torrent, the intricacies of these narrative folds, guiding others to see his masterpiece as he did and to share in his hates and loves.

Taken en masse, Tolkien’s late letters constitute his
Apologia pro vita sua.
Gripping, generous (he would answer complete strangers at great length), revelatory in their exposition of a Catholic aesthetic built upon Mary and the Eucharist, and obsessive, almost balmy, in their attention to the minutest details of Middle-earth history, folklore, geography, archaeology, linguistics, and mores, they become a platform on which Tolkien corrected misreadings of his texts, misunderstandings of his aims, and misconceptions about his life. The task was prodigious. One example—there are scores—concerned the Swedish translator of
The Lord of the Rings
, who gave Hobbits “
fea
thery” soles, compared the book to Wagner’s Ring, and invented fanciful tales of Tolkien walking the Welsh borderlands during his youth. The outraged author wrote to Allen & Unwin, decrying the first error as “absurd,” the second as “a farrago of nonsense,” and answering the third with a shout that many a celebrated author would gladly echo: “Why must I be made an object of fiction while still alive?”

The letters let off steam while correcting the record, but they also consumed Tolkien’s time and impeded his creativity. He published no new fiction for years, although “Imram,” a poem based on St. Brendan’s mythical voyages and dating, in its original version, to
The Notion Club Papers
, appeared in
Time and Tide
in December 1955. He continued to rewrite
The Silmarillion
, expanding or contracting earlier tales, deepening the theological subcurrents, resolving vexing problems regarding the nature, power, and destiny of Melkor, Elves, Men, and Orcs. But all this work remained, for the time, unpublished, and he complained to Rayner Unwin about the difficulty of finding time for the project. Unwin wanted to publish
The Silmarillion
more than ever, anticipating good sales on the coattails of
Lord
’s success, but he harbored reservations about the portions he had seen so far. On New Year’s Eve of 1957, he warned the author that he found the text “a bit uncompromising for the general reader,” with a “somewhat undigested form” that reminded him of the Book of Numbers, and that he was “not attracted by the rather rudimentary narrative form … nor of the variable archaism of language … [which] gave a somewhat precious feeling to the narrative.” The ameliorating adverbs cushioned the blow without disguising the message: Tolkien’s publishers were deeply worried about the future of their bestselling author’s most personal and long-lived project.

Tolkien had no intention of giving up on
The Silmarillion
. Still, Unwin’s letter must have stung badly, and soon after receiving it, instead of diving back into his rewrite, he put it aside to attempt a sequel to
The Lord of the Rings.
He labored on
The New Shadow
sporadically from the late 1950s until at least 1968. Only a handful of pages resulted, with three separate versions of an aborted tale about secret societies, underground plots, and adolescent “orc-cults.” The extant fragments exude a brooding Augustinianism, not only in their unrelenting sense of ancient evil pressing in from all sides, but in their adaptation of the most famous story of Augustine’s childhood, in which the future saint and his companions wantonly eat stolen pears to satiety and beyond; here a group of boys, pretending to be Orcs, strip an orchard of unripe apples out of sheer perversity. Tolkien, unable to control the text, watched it turn in directions “sinister and depressing” and concluded the tale was “not worth doing.” His great tale of Hobbits and Elves, Wizards, and Men had already been told; only the dregs remained. Ten or twenty years earlier, he might have pulled it off, but age and illness had taken their toll.

Both he and Edith suffered from ill health during the tail end of the 1950s. Edith, beset by arthritis and rheumatism, required regular medical attention. In February 1958, she underwent a serious operation, requiring lengthy recuperation in a nursing home and then in Bournemouth. That autumn she fell and broke her arm, requiring Tolkien to rescind a promise to write a ten-thousand-word essay for the British Council on
Beowulf
. A few months later, he fainted from weariness and stress. Doctors ordered him into a nursing home, but instead he returned to Bournemouth with Edith for additional rest. He complained, during these years, of a medley of aches and pains. Almost certainly some of his ailments were psychosomatic; Rayner Unwin observed that “sometimes the less specific complaints seem to have been associated with worry.” He believed, however, that the source was usually a recognizable illness or injury. “His catalogue of physical woes grew year by year,” said Unwin. “As his retirement approached there was a crescendo, and thereafter illness was never far away … None of these ailments were life-threatening, but they were certainly distractions.”

Another unwelcome diversion came in the form of a plan, floated in 1957 by the Californian science fiction and horror entrepreneur Forrest J. Ackerman (who would go on to found
Famous Monsters of Filmland
, a garish magazine beloved by generations of American boys), to mount a cartoon version of
The Lord of the Rings.
At first Tolkien approved, largely for “the glint of money” it portended, but he balked upon seeing the written treatment, which wreaked havoc upon the book. A series of angry letters ensued, in which he denounced the proposed version in devastating detail: “Why does Z [the screenwriter] put beaks and feathers on
Orcs
!? (
Orcs
is not a form of
Auks
.)” In 1959, having destroyed Tolkien’s equanimity and consumed much of his free time, Ackerman abandoned the project.

During this creatively fallow period, Tolkien traveled three more times to Ireland. His 1958 sojourn proved especially exhausting, providing fodder for a litany of complaints sent by Tolkien to Robert Burchfield, a linguist and lexicographer whose D.Phil. he had supervised: “On Sept. 24 I was involved in an alarming tempest at sea, and began to think I should suffer the fate of Lycidas King. I arrived 5 hours overdue in Dublin at noon on 25, rather battered; and I have since crossed Eire (E-W and N-S) about 6 times, read 130 lb. (avd) of theses, assisted in the exams of 4 colleges, and finally presided at fellowship-vivas in Dublin before re-embarking (doubled up with lumbago).” He also hoped, around this time, to visit Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, a Jesuit institution that had just purchased, for £1500, the manuscripts of
The Hobbit
,
The Lord of the Rings
,
Mr. Bliss
, and
Farmer Giles of Ham
, and had offered him $600 per lecture plus travel expenses. But he was forced to scuttle the arrangement, pleading illness and exhaustion, and he never did manage to visit America.

In spite of these problems, gratifications multiplied.
The Lord of the Rings
sold well, and the Tolkiens’ lifelong concern about money abated. In April 1957, Tolkien was elected to the Royal Society of Literature, and in August
The Lord of the Rings
won the International Fantasy Award, besting future Nobel Prize winner William Golding’s
Lord of the Flies
, along with John Christopher’s
The Death of Grass.
At the festive awards lunch, Tolkien received what he described to Christopher and his first wife, Faith, as “a massive metal ‘model’ of an upended Space-rocket (combined with a Ronson lighter).” The clunky trophy amused him; his fame was spreading. The following spring, he sailed to Rotterdam for a “Hobbit Dinner,” sponsored by Dutch booksellers and attended by over two hundred fans, featuring clay pipes and pipe-weed, “maggot-soup,” “Fricandeau
À
La Gimli” (it was Friday, but the Rotterdam Catholic diocese had released the guests from the meatless Friday rule), and an avalanche of laudatory speeches, capped by remarks by Tolkien in English, Dutch, and Elvish. He found the event “remarkable” and “extremely enjoyable.”