The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings (81 page)

As the Inklings diminished in number, however, their fame multiplied.
The Lord of the Rings
and the Narnia books continued to enjoy spectacular sales; in 1975, Barfield learned from a correspondent that Crown Princess Michiko of Japan was reading his books, along with those of Lewis and Tolkien. Two years later,
The Silmarillion
appeared in print and became an international bestseller. It had fallen to Christopher Tolkien to create a publishable book out of the mountain of manuscript and typescript, fragmentary and finished
Silmarillion
tales that his father had left behind: a nearly overwhelming task. His desire to do justice to his father’s legacy is palpable. Christopher had lived in the world of
The Silmarillion
since childhood; as he expressed it in an interview with
Le Monde
, “Si
é
trange que cela puisse para
î
tre, j’ai grandi dans le monde qu’il avait cr
éé
 … Pour moi, les villes du Silmarillion ont plus de r
é
alit
é
que Babylone” (“Strange as it may seem, I grew up in the world he created … For me, the cities of the Silmarillion possess more reality than Babylon”), and he had played a key part in every stage of its unfolding. A dream he remembered having after his father’s death speaks volumes: “J’
é
tais dans le bureau de mon p
è
re,
à
Oxford. Il entrait et se mettait
à
chercher quelque chose avec une grande anxi
é
t
é
. Alors je r
é
alisais avec horreur qu’il s’agissait du Silmarillion, et j’
é
tais terrifi
é à
l’id
é
e qu’il d
é
couvre ce que j’avais fait” (“I was in my father’s office in Oxford. He came in and began searching for something with great anxiety. Then I realized with horror that it was the Silmarillion he was after, and I was terrified by the idea that he might discover what I had done”).
The Silmarillion
was the first fruit of his heroic labor. An unexpected harvest followed, as a vast corpus of
Silmarillion
material, along with other major elements of the legendarium, assembled with text-critical apparatus and commentary by Christopher from his father’s writings, would appear in the twelve-volume
History of Middle-earth
(1983–96). Fittingly,
The Silmarillion
(book) did not exhaust the contents of the
Silmarillion
mythology.

In 1975, meanwhile, Barfield had written his only science fiction work, the novella
Night Operation
, a dark satire in which the human race, in Morlock fashion, has retreated underground, replacing the three Rs of traditional education with the three Es of a degenerate culture: ejaculation, (d)efecation, and eructation. Jon, a young man whose mind has been awakened by studying the nature of words, leads a few others to the Aboveground, where they undergo a mystical experience akin to Steiner’s final participation.
Night Operation
is familiar in its dystopian miasma and didactic in its quasi-autobiographical unfolding, but it does manage to condense familiar Barfieldian occupations into a brief, engaging narrative. The same is true of Barfield’s last fictional foray,
Eager Spring
, written in 1985, which examines Steinerian ideas in the context of ecological and environmental concerns.
Night Operation
appeared in
Towards
, while
Eager Spring
remained unpublished during Barfield’s lifetime.

Throughout the 1970s and the first years of the ’80s, Barfield stayed active on the American lecture and conference circuit as one of the more profound voices in an arena still heavily populated, in that volatile era, by flamboyant countercultural figures. He talked and wrote about Lewis, about Coleridge, and above all, about the nature of consciousness. His American followers continued to respond as they had never done in England. “North America has shown at least ten times as much enthusiasm for my stuff as has the UK,” he wrote in a 1985 note addressed to his future literary executors. A Festschrift with the neatly encapsulating title of
Evolution of Consciousness: Studies in Polarity
appeared in 1976, edited, fittingly, by an American scholar, Shirley Sugerman. In 1978, Barfield delivered three talks at the University of British Columbia; the series appeared in 1979 as
History, Guilt, and Habit
, bearing on the cover of the paperback edition a blurb by Saul Bellow: “a clear, powerful thinker, and a subtle one.”

At the same time, his personal life underwent significant change. Following the death of Cecil Harwood in 1975, he grew close to Marguerite, Cecil’s widow, and by 1977 she was writing him from Cornwall to declare her love. Three years later, Maud died, age ninety-four. She had faded greatly, following a stroke that had put an end to her work as a dance instructor. Photos from this era show a hunched-up woman with a cane, supported by an erect, trim husband; the two resemble mother and son. Soon after Maud’s death, Josephine Grant Watson (now Josephine Spence), with whom Barfield had remained friendly after their 1950s relationship had foundered, asked him—he was now eighty-two—why he didn’t marry Marguerite. He gave the practical reasons—“I just can’t imagine myself taking on the vast upheaval it would involve, house removal and all that, let alone the responsibility”—before acknowledging the most significant one, that “I suspect M. has a certain need of me … she is strenuous and energetic and determined, but there are times when all that fails her…” Barfield refers, in the same letter, to his strong feelings for Josephine, telling her that “Zwei
Damen
wohnen ach! in meiner Brust” (“two ladies live ah! in my breast”), wondering whether this means that “I am a bit of a blighter” and whether Josephine might conclude the same. Josephine, however, appeared content to guide and comfort Barfield in this matter as in others. In 1983, Marguerite died, closing the issue.

Now death surrounded Barfield, as it does all octogenarians. J.A.W. Bennett, who, upon Lewis’s death, had succeeded him as Cambridge’s professor of medieval and Renaissance literature, died in 1981; Dr. “Humphrey” Havard and James Dundas-Grant in 1985. Lord David Cecil passed away on New Year’s Day 1986, after unleashing in his waning years a slew of biographical studies examining, with sympathetic eye and witty tongue, the life and art of Samuel Palmer and Edward Burne-Jones, Max Beerbohm, Jane Austen, Charles Lamb, and others. Cecil’s had been a happy life, braced by deep Christian faith and a loving marriage. Gerard Irvine, a family friend, described him as one of William James’s “once-born,” those who, in James’s words, “see God not as a strict Judge, not a Glorious Potentate; but as the animating Spirit of a beautiful harmonious world, beneficent and kind, merciful as well as pure.” If he had attended Inkling meetings more regularly, he might have been the fifth focus of this book. Later that same year of 1986, Barfield moved to the Walhatch, a retirement home in East Sussex. Here he continued to hold court for visiting scholars, writers, and devotees of his own work as well as that of Steiner and Lewis. As his autumn whitened into winter, he turned out an occasional Anthroposophical piece, along with
Owen Barfield on C. S. Lewis
, a compilation of essays, talks, and poems on the friend with whom he would be forever tied. Reporters visiting him in the 1990s would find him, as if in conscious echo or parody of both Lewis and Tolkien, wreathed in smoke, pipe in hand, happily discoursing on the pleasures of tobacco and the nature of consciousness. In 1997 he told Walter Hooper that “I don’t fear death, I fear dying.” Above all he dreaded the physical ordeal: “I’m so tired,” he told Hooper. “Imagine that someone arrives and says, ‘Get up old man, you’ve got to go to China!’ And off you go.” “He was thinking,” Hooper remarked, “of a Chinese junk, months and months on a choppy sea.” On December 14, 1997, he passed away, at home, of bronchopneumonia. Hooper was at his side and comforted the dying man by saying, “I know what you’re sad about—that trip to China! It’s here, it’s started, but it’s not going to be choppy seas, it’s going to take just a minute, and you
know
what’s going to happen. The pearly gates open, you enter, C. S. Lewis and you will start all over again, all the things you wanted to argue about, you’ll have it now.” Barfield smiled—and died. Colin Hardie would last another ten months, expiring on October 17, 1998, but when Barfield closed his eyes, the life of the great Inklings came to an end.

EPILOGUE: THE RECOVERED IMAGE

What, then, were the Inklings? Was John Wain right to call them (as we reported on the first page of this study) “a circle of instigators, almost of incendiaries, meeting to urge one another on in the task of redirecting the whole current of contemporary art and life”? Were they, rather, just a circle of friends, sharing talk, drink, jokes, and writings? Something in between or something other? The question vexed the Inklings themselves, their supporters, and their detractors during the group’s existence and after its demise.

In 1955, David Cecil opened an informed and reasonable window upon the matter while exploring, “one fine evening in May amid the Gothic shades of New College,” in conversation with the novelist Rachel Trickett, the possible existence of an “Oxford School”; he later published a summary in dialogue form in the journal
The Twentieth Century
. If not exactly a school, Cecil thought, “there
is
something one might call an Oxford atmosphere,” and it had to do with a wide range of ideas “entertained imaginatively” in a “tradition of non-specialized cultured conversation,” a “relaxed, humane atmosphere” that gives writers room to breathe, in which bitter controversies are relatively rare. Within this happy climate, many different kinds of writers flourished; but Cecil could think of only one instance of a coherent, if informal, group or circle: the Inklings.

The Inklings, Cecil explained, “combined voluminous learning … with a strong liking for fantasy. But this fantasy was not indulged independently of their ideas; it was fantasy
about
their ideas.” And it was, in the best sense of the word, “boyish fantasy; the imagination of a romantic, adventurous kind of boy.” The Inklings, then, constituted “Oxford’s nearest recent approximation to a ‘school’ … a school of ideas expressed through adventurous but learned fantasy.” In addition to erudition and boyish fantasy, Cecil thought, there was a third and paramount factor that united them: their Christianity.

Cecil noted that “when I read writers in the Cambridge number of
The Twentieth Century
apparently showing pained surprise that distinguished intellectual persons should avow a belief in God, I cannot help reflecting that in Oxford this has never been at all unusual.” Rachel Trickett agreed: in Oxford, a “savour of grave and gracious piety,” as she put it, still lingered. Lewis had the impression, too, that the soldiers returning to Oxford from World War II were more likely to be Christian than the returning soldiers of his own generation.

Of course there were Christians at Cambridge and modernists at Oxford, and plenty of anomalies on both sides (like T. S. Eliot, both Christian and modernist, and F. W. Bateson, both Christian and Leavisite). Moreover, Lewis himself warned against making too much of Oxford’s Christian revival, pointing out in a 1946 article for
The Cherwell
that it could not be counted on to last: “Sooner or later it must lose the public ear; in a place like Oxford such changes are extraordinarily rapid. Bradley and the other idealists fell in a few terms, the Douglas scheme even more suddenly, the Vorticists overnight … Whatever in our present success mere Fashion has given us, mere Fashion will presently withdraw. The real conversions will remain: but nothing else will.” Lewis was well aware, too, that a Christian atmosphere is no protection against preening egos. That the Inklings may have been on the whole more decent and less vain than many other literary coteries can only be because they made a conscious effort to follow the path of real conversion.

Lack of vanity is one reason why the Inklings vigorously resisted any account of the group as a formal school or movement. In a 1956 essay in
Books on Trial
, the novelist Charles A. Brady named Lewis, Tolkien, Williams, and Dorothy L. Sayers as members of an “Oxford Circle.” “Lor’ bless you,” Lewis wrote to Brady in reply, “those dear friends of mine were never ‘my school.’ They were all older than I. Miss Sayers was an established author before I was heard of. Charles influenced me, not I him. And as for anyone influencing Tolkien, you might as well (to adapt the White King) try to influence a bandersnatch.” Lewis repeated this view just two months before his death in a letter to an American correspondent who was looking for clarification on this point: “I don’t think Tolkien influenced me, and I am certain I didn’t influence him. That is, didn’t influence
what
he wrote. My continual encouragement, carried to the point of nagging, influenced him v. much to write at all with that gravity and at that length. In other words I acted as a midwife not as a father. The similarities between his work and mine are due, I think, (a) To nature—temperament. (b) To common sources. We are both soaked in Norse mythology, Geo. MacDonald’s fairy-tales, Homer,
Beowulf
, and medieval romance. Also, of course, we are both Christians (he, an R.C.).”

All this seems definitive, although one must bear in mind that friends shape each other in myriad ways, obvious and subtle, and not always detectable to the principals involved. Tolkien and Lewis were comrades-in-arms during the Oxford English syllabus wars and planned—before their parting of ways—to coauthor a book on
Language and Human Nature
intended to exorcise the influence of I. A. Richards and his colleagues at Cambridge.
Out of the Silent Planet
might have been stillborn without Tolkien’s intervention; so, too,
The Lord of the Rings
, but for the persistent support and timely critiques of Lewis and others. Both Lewis and Tolkien acknowledged a debt to Owen Barfield’s
Poetic Diction
; and while Lewisian traces in Williams’s books may be more elusive than the Williamseque motifs that saturate
That Hideous Strength
, Lewis’s encouragement buoyed Williams tremendously. We know that the two friends discussed two literary collaborations, neither carried to term: one a “short Xtian Dictionary (about 40 Headings)” for a “library of Christian knowledge,” the other “a book of animal stories from the Bible, told by the animals concerned.”