The Fellowship

The Literary Lives of the Inklings: J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams, by Philip Zaleski & Carol Zaleski (Farrar Straus & Giroux, New York 2015) 644 pages

review by Fred Dennehy

If, as Virginia Woolf wrote provocatively, “on or about December 1910, human character changed,” the transformation caught C.S. Lewis and Owen Barfield on the threshold of puberty. But the adult literary output of both men, as well as the works of a number of the colleagues with whom they were to become closely associated, may be seen in large part as their response to that identified change.

Virginia Woolf was of course referring to the advent of Modernism, sensed not only in the visual arts, music and literature, but in the way you reacted to the most ordinary events, and in the questions you asked. In Britain, the Edwardian interlude of the early twentieth century was giving way to something as yet without a name—fractious, vaguely defiant, and, most discomfiting, seeming to arise from within. Old traditions were devolving into sounding brass and tinkling cymbals.

Young C.S. “Jack” Lewis

Owen Barfield, c. 1922

Less than four years later the Great War began. It revealed the sunken consciousness of the British social order. For instance, the British advance in the battle of the Somme in 1916, an attack on a larger scale than anything before in military history, was ordered by General Haig to commence at exactly 7:30 a.m., when the British always attacked. And Haig, thinking that it would somehow promote discipline, ordered his men to walk, not run, to the enemy position as if the attack were a training exercise. It was an utter catastrophe. The battle of the Somme, and the Great War itself, played themselves out in a kind of grotesque somnambulism that mimed the underlying falsehoods of an era. What ensued was the collapse of a culture, Ezra Pound’s “old bitch gone in the teeth … a botched civilization.”

Yet at the same time in the arts there would come to be a kind of aesthetic embrace, in Modernism, of the horrific experience of the ordinary soldier in the trenches—the estrangement, the emptiness of meaning and the void of any real authority.

But the time after the Great War was not simply a reflexive turning away from tradition. There is a remarkable book by Wade Davis, "Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory and the Conquest of Everest", which shows that there remained in many of the British survivors of the worst horrors of the War a longing to reclaim the old idyll of truth, beauty and goodness, to take it to a new place where it could not betray them again. And in some of the very men who had imbibed for years the trenches’ stench of “sweat, blood, vomit, excrement, cordite and putrescence,” who had grown used to the continuous and indifferent presence of death, there gathered a white hot desire to redeem the time. It was exemplified in one way by the British war veterans in the early nineteen-twenties who climbed the North Face of Everest in tweed jackets and hob-nailed boots to a height of more than 28,000 feet. These were men who had been “eye-deep in hell” and were ready to endure it all again, but this time for their own reasons and on their own terms.

In literary circles too, there were those who resisted the fashionable ironies and pessimism of Modernism, and looked back to an older tradition with a keener, and at the same time, more imaginative eye. Chief among them, in England, in the mid twentieth century, were a group of eminently gifted and educated writers who were to become known as the “Inklings.” They were (or were to become) Christians, but not Christian proselytizers. They bristled against what they saw as the rootlessness of most contemporary writing, and they celebrated instead the medieval, the arcane, the mythic, and the imaginative.

The Inklings were an informal group that met periodically from the thirties through the fifties in C.S. Lewis’s rooms at Magdalen College and at the Eagle and Child Pub (known as the Bird and Baby) in Oxford. The Fellowship focuses on four of them: J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Owen Barfield. In addition to these four, the group loosely included others such as Hugo Dyson, Bede Griffiths, Lord David Cecil, Nevill Coghill, John Wain, Lewis’s brother Warnie, and Tolkien’s son Christopher. Dorothy Sayers, the fine mystery writer and translator of Dante, was closely associated with them, but, as a woman in an old boys’ network, she was never a part of the inner sanctum.

Philip and Carol Zaleski have written the best book yet on the Inklings; readable, scholarly, drawing from a vast array of sources (the Notes and Bibliography consume nearly 100 pages) and wonderfully vivid. Humphrey Carpenter’s "The Inklings" and Gareth Knight’s "The Magical World of the Inklings" are worthy predecessors, but they provide neither the historical context nor the breadth of vision that the Zaleskis give us. You can feel the camaraderie, at once affectionate and unsparing, as Tolkien, Lewis, and others would read aloud to the group from drafts of their works, opening themselves to anything— applause, impulsive raillery (“my God, Tolkien, not another fucking elf . . .”) and shrewd constructive critiques that would permanently change their texts. For decades the gathering was a literary school, a support group, a drinking club and a haven of friendship. The magnet, the unequivocal tone-setter, was Lewis, his sonorous voice booming out praise, censure, and invitation to debate, letting no objection go unremarked and no member go undervalued.

Questions abound. When does a fellowship degrade into a clan? Wouldn’t the Inklings have been better served by a more than occasional visit from one of Oxford’s academic majority of skeptics? And when does preference pass over into prejudice? Were the Inklings impervious to the genius in Modernism—to the fiction of Joyce, Kafka, and Mann, to the poetry of Eliot, Stevens, and Rilke? Why did Owen Barfield, when approached for intellectual and spiritual guidance by the Nobel Prize winner Saul Bellow, so casually dismiss his fiction? And the exclusive men’s club atmosphere—though it doubtless put them at their ease, didn’t it deprive the Inklings of so much of the life of the world? Parenthetically, every one of the four principals of this book lived for the greater part of his life in bizarre, cold or otherwise disappointing relationships with women.

L-R: Lewis, Tolkien, Barfield, Williams

The genius was there. “The Inklings’ work,” as the authors note, “has a significance that far outweighs any measure of popularity, amounting to a revitalization of Christian intellectual and imaginative life.” They were “twentieth-century Romantics” who championed (for different reasons) “a medieval model as an answer to modern confusion and anomie; yet they were for the most part Romantics without rebellion, fantasists who prized reason, and for whom Faërie was a habitat for the virtues and literature a sanctuary for faith.”

Tolkien is largely responsible for the mythic reawakening in the twentieth century, if not for a tectonic shift in the incidence of fantasy as a literary genre and cinematic in the twenty-first century. His reclamation of the old order came through the stunningly elaborate and detailed fantasy world he created. It was Christianity (actually Catholicism for Tolkien) played out against a backdrop of the wondrous, the arcane, the numinous and the unknown. The Zaleskis, I think, are right in seeing his fantasy landscapes as distant images of The Kingdom, and in hearing, behind the archaic music of his language, “the voice of faith.” Lewis, through the force of his language and his personality, almost singlehandedly provoked a mid-century Christian recovery. The Narnia Chronicles and the Space Trilogy (Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra and That Hideous Strength) point to the miraculousness of Providence and the unfathomable cosmic stakes in the contest between good and evil.

Yet for both Tolkien and Lewis, imagination, though a gorgeous embrocation, was, after all, a story. And a story was not to be conflated with truth. Lewis the Christian apologist, the beef and ale apostle of the ordinary man, would never have tolerated a view of his own fantasy writings as somehow generating a separate reality. There was fiction—delightful and inspiring though it may be—and there was fact. There was a gulf between them. To confuse them, or worse, to attempt to merge them, was not only fallacious but playing at the threshold of idolatry, an occasion of sin.

Charles Williams was a superb medieval scholar, a Christian fantasy/suspense novelist and a stunningly charismatic speaker. His words now echo only intermittently along the corridors of time. Imagination was something more for Williams than for either Tolkien or Lewis. It had a metaphysical dimension. As a theologian, he is arguably the most radical of the four. His theory (and attempt at a personal practice) of substitution, exchange, and co-inherence is at once consoling and frightening in the way they can carve open our concepts of love and self. Substitution refers to Williams’s understanding that each of us may, in a lesser mode, repeat the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross by bearing one another’s burdens, literally removing them from another and taking them on oneself. Exchange is similar; it is a practice of humility in which we offer up our time, comfort, security, and self-esteem for the sake of someone else. Most important is co-inherence. Just as the three Persons (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) of the Trinity co-inhere in one Godhead, so are we parts of one another, co-inhering through our shared humanity in the Mystical Body of Christ. A Williams novel has the capacity to atomize the Cartesian notion of the self.

Barfield remains the anomaly. The Zaleskis are not sure what to do with him. They know he was brilliant. They understand that he was Lewis’s most important friend. They are aware that, in the “Great War” between Lewis and Barfield, Barfield was the more successful combatant. They comprehend, too, the profound and subtle meaning of imagination, myth, and metaphor that he developed, and the significance of his understanding of the evolution of consciousness. If they undervalue his poetry and fiction, they fully appreciate his eminence as a Coleridge scholar.

But Barfield was an anthroposophist, and therefore an occultist. “Like other esoteric accounts of the world,” the Zaleskis tell us, “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.” Or on the other Inklings. Or on the authors.

Barfield’s fate in "The Fellowship" is not very different from his fate when he was alive. His views are neatly summarized. His devotion to anthroposophy, if not well understood, is not caricatured. The sinew of his forensics is deeply admired. His consistency is readily acknowledged. And, like Steiner in the academy, there is no concerted effort to refute him. But the full implications of what he states explicitly in luminously clear prose are not taken seriously. His deepest convictions are left severely alone. The message to the readers of "The Inklings" is plain. “This is simply too much. If you even start to credit it, look out for what happens to all the rest of what you know.”

Why? Maybe it is the realization at some level that Barfield’s understanding of imagination shakes everything to its foundations. Taken at face value, it forces us to “unthink” the conventional distinctions between subject and object, between self and other. It relegates the very fundament of logic, the Law of Contradiction, to a “parochial interlude” in the history of philosophy. The imaginal statements Barfield prizes refuse to be fixed and are apt to change into each other through a process of evolution. Their “syntax,” as Barfield once put it, “is one of metamorphosis rather than of sequence and aggregation.” All this is hard—hard not only in what it asks us to accept, but in what it demands that we give up.

Finally, there is the immense responsibility that imagination thrusts upon us. As Georg Kühlewind has observed, we are at the end of the seventh day of creation, the end of the day of rest. From now on, the future of the world is no longer independent of human volition. There are choices to be made and consequences to be borne. The world depends on us.

There should be no surprise here. To follow Barfield, as to follow Steiner, you have to stop clinging to your past and leave very much of what you deemed essential about yourself behind. It is not an easy path. But no one promised that it would be.

Fred Dennehy is an attorney in practice in New Jersey, serving as General Counsel to a large law firm and specializing in professional responsibility. He earned a PhD in English and in recent years has performed in more than a dozen Shakespeare plays. He is a classholder in the School for Spiritual Science and editor for reviews in being human.