The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings (77 page)

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INKLINGS FIRST AND LAST

Moral compass, intellectual catalyst, best of companions: Lewis in his passing was remembered as these and more. Those close to him, reeling with loss, offered tributes brimming with admiration for their fallen friend and with self-pity for themselves. Writing to Priscilla on the day of the funeral, Tolkien recalled the “time of close communion” he and Lewis had shared but emphasized his own pain: “So far I have felt the normal feelings of a man of my age—like an old tree that is losing all its leaves one by one: this feels like an axe-blow near the roots.” Warnie suffered most, as one would expect, and he poured his anguish into his diary: “My life continues very desolate, and I seem to miss my dear SPB more rather than less as time goes on. I have no one to
chat
with.” Nor was the “perpetual ache of J’s absence” his only burden; deeply depressed, he lost track of finances and discovered again the haunting fear of impoverishment that had afflicted both brothers since childhood, along with new worries about his mental acuity: “I forget quite important names in French history even.” He slept poorly, grew bored, and drank himself in and out of the hospital (in 1964 it was discovered that he had stashed hundreds of empty whiskey bottles in the hollowed-out tops of his bookcases at the Kilns). He prayed that a stroke would kill him while he slept. Barfield, more restrained, apotheosized Lewis as “the absolutely unforgettable friend, the friend with whom I was in close touch for over forty years, the friend you might come to regard hardly as another human being, but almost as a part of the furniture of my existence,” while at the same time composing the pessimistic, self-absorbed “Moira” (Greek: fate, destiny), a poem linking Lewis’s death to his own and contrasting his friend’s posthumous enlightenment to his own earthbound ignorance: “You came to him: when will you come to me? / He knows what matters from what matters not. / I hurry to and fro and seem to be.”

Yet Barfield in his mourning stood apart from Tolkien and Warnie, despite their common loss. The two older men lived in the past as much as the future: Tolkien revising his work, refining his legacy, elucidating Middle-earth minutiae to an awestruck, sometimes cranky readership; Warnie drinking, poring over memories of his brother, squeezing out one more book on French history (
Memoirs of the Duc de Saint-Simon
appeared in 1964), and awaiting his death. As they folded up at the edges, Barfield entered the great adventure of his life. Having set foot in America less than a year after Lewis’s death, he was aflame with hope and trepidation. “I find the prospect exciting, especially as I have never before crossed the Atlantic, but wish I were a bit younger,” he told Philip Mairet, a British writer and admirer who claimed to have read
Saving the Appearances
four times. At Drew University, his first port of call, he contracted to deliver “2 lectures a week, ranging as I like over the stuff in my books, and to take a seminar on Coleridge and Romanticism.” The salary was $7,200, which he “rather jumped at,” along with a travel stipend of $800. He made quick use of the latter, visiting, during his first months abroad, the evangelical stronghold of Wheaton College in Illinois, and Beloit College in Wisconsin, where he “spoke of Jack for an hour to an audience variously estimated at 800 and 1000” and basked in their “really wonderful attentiveness, warmth and response.” One attendee, he told Cecil Harwood, “flew from Los Angeles to hear the lecture, returning the following day.”

Wherever Barfield went, crowds gathered. At first they came to see him not for his sake but for Lewis’s. Barfield’s fame, such as it was, depended upon the passage in
Surprised by Joy
in which Lewis identifies him as the “Second Friend,” with whom “you go at it, hammer and tongs, far into the night, night after night … out of this perpetual dogfight a community of mind and a deep affection emerge.” He never resented Lewis’s prominence. Many times Lewis had gone out of his way to laud him and his writings, and he was happy to return the favor. In talks, writings, and interviews, he focused on aspects of Lewis’s life that he alone knew well: their early friendship, the “Great War,” Lewis’s rejection of Anthroposophy. The presentations, eventually gathered into
Owen Barfield on C. S. Lewis
(1989), seesawed between love for his friend and exasperation at the RUP (“residue of unresolved positivism,” a favorite catchphrase) that blocked Lewis’s perception of spiritual realities. He came to see the long, warm, adversarial friendship as another example of polarity; in Barfield’s eyes, the “Great War” had never ended, nor should it have:
in bello, veritas.

The public, won over by his quiet manner and colorful memories, soon began to lend an ear to his unusual philosophical and religious views. At Drew he met Howard Nemerov, former and future United States poet laureate (holding the post twice, in 1963–64 and 1988–90), who declared himself a disciple, at least in regard to the evolution of consciousness and the dangers of positivism. Barfield in turn anointed Nemerov his “ambassador at the court of contemporary poetry.” Many other American writers and scholars contacted him, suddenly eager to discuss his work. Encouraged and inspired by this unexpected groundswell of enthusiasm, he commenced a major new project, a study of Samuel Taylor Coleridge that would come to complete fruition in 1971 with
What Coleridge Thought
(see below). As early as 1919, reading the
Biographia Literaria
, he had discerned “a strong affinity” between his own thought and that of the great poet. Now, reading extensively through Coleridge’s lesser-known works, he discerned, in the poet’s sometimes obscure presentations, foreshadowings of his own cherished views on mind and nature. Coleridge, Barfield came to believe, also thought in terms of polarity and anticipated, although he never quite realized, the truth of the evolution of consciousness. Here was a man after his own heart; even the poet’s celebrated dithering appealed to him. He perceived in it an underlying unity of thought, consisting of harmonies too complex to be passed on readily to others. He believed that Coleridge “had a muddled life but not a muddled mind” and would liken his sometimes impenetrable philosophical passages to a conceptual stammer, in veiled allusion to his own painful impediment.

He realized, with gratitude and amazement, that against all odds, against the fierce current that was sweeping his friends into exhaustion or death, he was enjoying tremendous new intellectual and creative vitality. In February 1965, he received an invitation to be a visiting professor at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts. Immediately he wrote for advice to Cecil Harwood, still his closest friend, weighing the lure of England—“even my unsatisfactory children count for something”—against the promise of America: “I like the work and the
milieu
it invokes and have a sort of blossoming feeling … why do they
want
me so ruddy badly over here?… If I do reject it, I may never cease kicking myself spiritually, psychically and financially…”

Barfield accepted the offer and stayed in America. Maud joined him for a time, as did their daughter Lucy, now thirty, who taught piano in Cambridge, Massachusetts, while he lectured at Brandeis, conducted a seminar on Coleridge, and gave talks published two years later as
Speaker’s Meaning
. For the most part, his Brandeis lectures address familiar themes of philology, polarity, and evolution. But thanks to his study of Coleridge and, no doubt, to renewed self-confidence, he assumed the role of prophet and began to elaborate with increased specificity upon the immediate past and future of consciousness. Barfield argues in
Speaker’s Meaning
that a turning point in human thought took place with the Romantics, a transformation whose initial stages involved, in Coleridge’s words, “an interpenetration … of spontaneous impulse and voluntary purpose”—that is, of desire and will, resulting in the triumph of active imagination over passive inspiration. Through imagination, the poet—and, in his wake, human consciousness as a whole—is learning for the first time truly to do, to make, to create. This fundamental change in the nature of thought, coupled with earlier evolutionary advances, provides Barfield with ample evidence that history has a “plot,” and a plot driven not by matter but by mind. Our ordinary understanding must be turned inside out. Science teaches us that matter precedes mind (first a barren planet, then the emergence of life, then of mind), but the truth, argues Barfield, is that mind has always been here. It is the evolution of mind, not of matter, that lies at the heart of the story of the world.

Barfield also wears the prophet’s mantle in his novel
Unancestral Voice
(1965), his strangest work, published during his Brandeis stint. Burgeon, the author’s alter ego whom we first encountered in
This Ever Diverse Pair
, begins to receive messages from a disembodied spirit known as a Meggid, a figure drawn from the mystical experiences of the sixteenth-century Jewish seer Joseph Karo. In between discussions of
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
, Arnold Toynbee, and the evils of Descartes, the Meggid promotes, as one expects in any Barfield book, the evolution of consciousness. This mysterious spirit also advances some of Anthroposophy’s more outr
é
claims, such as the neognostic division of human history into angelic ages (humankind has recently progressed from the “age of Gabriel” to the “age of Michael”) and the astonishing two-Jesus theory, which asserts that the New Testament records the birth and childhood of two Jesuses—each born in Bethlehem of parents named Mary and Joseph—who merged into one at about the age of twelve. As presented by Steiner in his lecture series
From Jesus to Christ
, although not mentioned in
Unancestral Voice
, one Jesus is the reincarnation of Zarathustra, the other permeated by the spiritual influence of Buddha. The climax of
Unancestral Voice
comes at a lecture on quantum mechanics, as the Meggid takes control of the speaker and declares that the future of physics lies in the study of “non-spatial relationships between hierarchies of energetic beings”—in effect, in Steiner’s Spiritual Science. As the journalist/politician Ivor Thomas noted in his review for
The Times Literary Supplement
,
Unancestral Voice
offers “no lack of topics” and is “stimulating and not infrequently entertaining”; for many, it is also too thick with esoteric proselytizing and too reliant upon Meggidian
angelus ex machina
to satisfy as a novel. Barfield never attempted another book-length fiction.

The Inklings, Scattered

“The events and troubles of this year have defeated me,” wrote Tolkien on May 28, 1964, to Rayner Unwin, who had become by now a principal recipient of his more plaintive letters, cushioning the news by adding that “I am at last recovering health and some kind of mental equilibrium.” Not least among these “events and troubles” had been Lewis’s death, which had engendered in him complex, conflicting thoughts and feelings. He sealed his lips regarding public assessment of his friend, declaring that “I feel his loss so deeply that I have since his death refused to write or speak about him.” But in private he revealed both intense loyalty and disquieting bitterness. To some he protested Lewis’s posthumous treatment by the popular press (“He was a great man of whom the cold-blooded official obituaries only scraped the surface, in places with injustice”), while he disclosed to a few select correspondents the depth of his scorn for Lewis’s religious writings. This was nothing new; previously he had declined an invitation to prepare an obituary of Lewis (newspapers and magazines stock such items years in advance of a person’s death), declaring that “a Catholic could not possibly say anything sincere about Jack’s books without giving widespread offence.” But his simmering resentment, stoked over the years not only by Lewis’s Ulster biases but also by the latter’s friendship with Williams, came to a boil with the posthumous publication in January 1964 of Lewis’s
Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer
. Composed during the last six months of Lewis’s life, this book consists of letters from Lewis to a fictional correspondent on topics like the afterlife, God, and, of course, prayer. Like many of his other popular works, it offers affable common sense laced with sentimentality, as in this account of heaven: “And once again, after who knows what aeons of the silence and the dark, the birds will sing and the waters flow, and lights and shadows move across the hills and the faces of our friends laugh upon us with amazed recognition.” Despite the occasionally weak imagery,
Letters to Malcolm
strikes most readers as a solid, pleasant presentation of fundamental Christian themes.

Tolkien saw it differently. To him,
Letters to Malcolm
was a monstrosity. He wrote to a Jesuit priest that “I personally found
Letters to Malcolm
a distressing and in parts horrifying work. I began a commentary on it, but if finished it would not be publishable.” This commentary has never been released and is presumably lost. A. N. Wilson notes, however, that Tolkien’s personal copy of
Malcolm
contains the marginal observation that the book is not “about prayer, but about Lewis praying.” This sniping by Tolkien is not only based on an old-fashioned Catholic’s objection to the views of an amateur Protestant theologian, as Wilson points out; it expresses also the drear state of his mind at the time. He was still mired in the bottomless bog that he had described to Unwin in 1960, trapped fast by illness, overwork, and anxiety over his wife’s health, his children’s faith, and his own failing powers. Exhaustion and depression lowered his inhibitions and loosened his tongue, allowing festering resentments to pour forth, as they had in his earlier objection to Lewis’s “ponderous silliness” in
Studies in Words
. The sad truth is that the Tolkien-Lewis friendship fell victim to the insecurities of both men.