The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings: J. R. R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, Charles WilliamsBy Philip Zaleski and Carol ZaleskiFarrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015
This is a long book about the limitations of art. It treats with maximum sobriety the lifelong entanglement of four fantasists—with each other and with their troubled times. Taken separately, the “literary lives” of its protagonists are largely unremarkable. Taken together, as here, they make for a rough magic. However good these writers are, this book suggests that they were better talkers, and their “fellowship,” forged in a continual conversation, is its theme. Their table-talk, an intermittent affair of decades’ standing, may well prove to be their most lasting work, a fancy, in W. H. Auden’s words, of “the greatest grandest opera rendered by a very provincial touring company.” Their group-biographers have now staged a revival, a new production for the IMAX age. The images are grainy, the colors lurid, the accents outdated, but the voices ring out.The company sing in chorus of, in Auden’s words again, “the perfected Work which is not ours.” Christians all, of varying degrees of orthodoxy, the Inklings were blessed by and rejoiced in that wholly other Life, from which they felt themselves divided by an emphatic gulf. A sense of mutual unworldliness banded them together at the edge of the void (two world wars, the secular blur of Marx and Freud), into which they pitched their merry melodies. Their second-breakfast triumphs at bookstore and box office serve only to deepen the abyss. The fantasy-industrial complex sprung up around their writings has muffled their deep song. This book repeats the sounding joy of their original relationship: palaver over pipe and mug by a roaring fire in rooms at Magdalen College, The Eagle and Child, and the Lamb & Flag.The literary critic Desmond MacCarthy called the biographer “an artist under oath,” a storyteller bound to tell the truth and nothing but. As joint-biographers of the Christian writers who called themselves the Inklings, Philip and Carol Zaleski have taken a double vow: to tell the truth about a group of artists who have vowed to tell the Truth. This task takes tact, and the Zaleskis are up to it, thanks perhaps to their dogged devotion to both the truth and the Truth, whatever its distortions by the Inklings themselves. “Let us note in passing,” they write, “that this is one of the difficulties and pleasures of studying the Inklings; Christians all, they offer, along with expected twentieth-century psychosocial explanations for behavior, unexpected spiritual ones…” The Inklings’ life-stories are thrice overdetermined: first by God, the Author in Eternity; next by themselves (The Inklings did not hesitate to review each other in print.); and then by the gossip, fanned by their fans, that has spread like a sect of magic toadstools around the Inklings and of which this cinder-block of a book is the most equanimous—if not even the most recent. The Zaleskis insist that all these forms of biographical and autobiographical explanation “must be taken, at least provisionally, on faith—or, at a minimum, faithfully recorded.” If this group biography can be taken as evidence of their faithfulness, and of their faith, the Zaleskis should be put forward as candidates for canonization. They have pulled off a wizardly synthesis of Entish ambition and hobbitish intimacy.Just who were the Inklings? In a word, friends. In another, fellows. Yes—clubbable Christian scribblers to a man. Elective affinities, especially of the chummy manly variety, are the not-so-secret subject of this study, the ideal of “fellowship” its red thread. Before you start nodding, or nodding off, the epigraph from Augustine gives it away on the dedication page: nemo nisi per amicitiam cognoscitur. The crucial question our authors pose is: Whither the boon companionship of yesteryear? Might hobbitry hold a clue?The root and fruit of the fellowship under consideration here is the same: conversation, which the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins once called “the flower of the best Oxford life.” The Zaleskis call it “thrashing out the truth through verbal play.” It is hard to imagine the Inklings assembling today—certainly not, as of yore, in the Bird and Baby, now a smoke-free tourist trap. Good fellows need nooks to meet well, and few spaces today, public or private, escape the glare of the smartphone screen. The philosopher Michael Oakeshott, a contemporary countryman, felt it “not improbable” that conversation “(where talk is without a conclusion)…gave us our present appearance, man being descended from a race of apes who sat in talk so long and so late that they wore out their tails.” Half a century on we’re too busy covering our backs.“There’s no sound I like better than adult male laughter.” That’s C. S. Lewis, arch-Inkling, sounding for all the world like Colonel Kilgore of “I-love-the-smell-of-napalm-in-the-morning” fame. Friendship, for Lewis, was “the greatest of worldly goods…the chief happiness of life.” Lewis was ten years old when Kenneth Grahame published The Wind in the Willows, and in manhood he seems to have emulated the globetrotting Sea Rat, who, for all his intrepidity, relishes the “jolly times on shore…as much as any seafaring.” Listen to Lewis hold forth on the adventure of talk:
Those are the golden sessions…when our slippers are on, our feet spread out towards the blaze and our drinks at our elbows; when the whole world, and something beyond the world, opens itself to our minds as we talk; and…all are freemen and equals as if we had first met an hour ago, while at the same time an Affection mellowed by the years enfolds us. Life—natural life—has no better gift to give. Who could have deserved it?
Here we hear what Wordsworth called “a man speaking to men.” Or rather, since Lewis never amounted to much as a poet, a man speaking about speaking to men. Cultured chit-chat was much more in Lewis’s line, and few modern writers have small-talked their way into the souls of more men, women, and children. Compare Catherine Earnshaw in Wuthering Heights: “…the thing that irks me most is this shattered prison, after all. I’m tired, tired of being enclosed here. I’m wearying to escape into that glorious world, and to be always there; not seeing it dimly through tears, and yearning for it through the walls of an aching heart; but really with it, and in it.” This is the sound of a woman who never let a nicety escape her lips in her life. And one, it must be added, without a friend in the world. Lewis outlived this emotional epoch—long enough to memorialize it. “Joy,” Lewis concluded, contorting Wordsworth’s concept, exists only in the aspiration to it. That glorious world is not a “state,” the Zaleskis explain, but “an arrow pointing to something beyond all states, something objective yet unobtainable—at least during our earthly existence.”Does this constitute tergiversation? Is this the sound of someone who has given up on Joy long ago but still refuses to admit it? Just another self-deceptive slogan—“Woe is Joy”—along the lines of “WAR IS PEACE”? Since we are dealing here with an artist, or, at least, a man with oft-articulated artistic ambitions, our judgment of his Joy must follow from an encounter with his artworks. Do they bring Joy, or just joy? The Zaleskis speak of something they call “ordered innocence” to characterize the traditionalism of the Inklings. William Blake deemed something he called “Unorganized innocence” to be “an impossibility.” Perhaps the sound of adult male laughter is this contradiction in terms incarnate.“Escape,” for J. R. R. Tolkien, the other well-known Inkling, was anything but a dirty word. “Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home?” he asked. “Or if he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls?” The twentieth century taught Hans Morgenthau, a German contemporary, that “people not only strive for freedom and are willing to die for freedom but that they also strive for order and are willing to die for order.” The Zaleskis make the case for seeing Tolkien as neither a naïve optimist, with a head full of Faërie, nor a dour pessimist, down on bombs and tape recorders, but as a realist, whose profound pessimism was founded on an equally “indomitable hope.” They suggest that both sides of this worldview, light and dark, were twin-born in the grave of his mother, who had brought him with her into the Catholic Church in June 1900, four years before her death from diabetes when Tolkien was twelve.“Escape from Death” was Tolkien’s great theme, and he sought it in what he called “subcreation,” the artistic imagination’s conjuration of secondary worlds. Far from frivolous, such a quest was for him sobriety itself, its enjoyment the mark of the highest sanity. A fiercely held faith underwrote this brazen claim of Tolkien’s: that the quest would terminate—suddenly and unexpectedly, but just as certainly—in what he called a “eucatastrophe.” This is Tolkien’s term for the miraculous sight—a regular occurrence in fairy stories—of life being snatched from the jaws of death: the moment, as the Zaleskis put it, when “joy breaks into the primary world.” Tolkien can be counted a “realist” insofar as he gets us “there and back again,” to the extent that his quest for joy begins and ends in the “primary world” we all know all too well. His great feat was to imagine into existence a secondary world so “real” that the wide detour into faery feels like the shortest route home, to the joy of the hearth where a real blaze warms our weary feet. The tip-to-stern subcreation of a joyful secondary world demanded of Tolkien nearly his entire life. Long after it was published—finally—in full, the sprawling project of recovery, retrieval, and rehabilitation cried out to its author for further elaboration, the task that consumed his last years.Asked why he went to such trouble with Baggins or Boromir or Bombadil, Tolkien might well have cited Montaigne’s famous defense of friendship: “Because it was he, because it was my selfe.” Montaigne’s essay goes on: “There is beyond all my discourse, and besides what I can particularly report of it, I know not what inexplicable and fatall power, a meane and Mediatrix of this indissoluble union….I think by some secret ordinance of the heavens, we embraced one another by our names.” This hits the heart of the matter: Like the other Inklings, Tolkien found friendship with words. “Tolkien experienced words as a maddening liquor, a phonic ambrosia, tastes of an exquisite, rapturous, higher world,” the Zaleskis write. This immediately allied him with far and away the most interesting Inkling, Owen Barfield, who believed, with Maupassant, that words have a soul. Language, for Barfield, is evolving, in step with human consciousness, into an ever more “perfect medium of companionship.” We can befriend words, even love them, in confidence that they will return the gesture many times over. This is the pleasure of philology.Barfield also believed, with Blake, that “Opposition is true friendship.” This might serve as an apt motto for the Inklings’ dealings with each other down the decades. Lewis’s “mere Christianity” defined itself against the tory Catholicism of Tolkien on the one hand and the anthroposophical bent of Barfield’s creed on the other. Few knew until well after his early death of the deviations from orthodoxy indulged by the kinky sex-magus Charles Williams. But beyond the bounds of their tight-knit friend-group, just how oppositional were the Inklings really? Summing up at the end of their book, the Zaleskis convict the circle of “the heresy of the Happy Ending.” The sentence? To delight and dazzle children of all ages till Kingdom come. But what is there among the legendaria for the adults among us? Those of us who have long since traded our invisibility rings for wedding bands? Is the best we can do to rummage through it in hope of scaring our kids to sleep with the help of Smaug, or boring them to bed with Screwtape?The Zaleskis label their fellowship “Romantics without rebellion.” This phrase bears a moment’s consideration. Just what does a Romantic without his rebellion look like? One answer: a sentimentalist. Walter Benjamin defines the sentimentalist as someone who applies a principle—for instance, analogy—to pin down a felt relationship—for instance, friendship—and lets things stand so far so good. Lewis’s invocation of capital-“A” “Affection” in the course of his account of friendship is just one example of his fatal abstraction of feeling from form. Equality and freedom do not form a natural analogy with friendship. After all, observed Blake, “It is easier to forgive an Enemy than to forgive a Friend.” Tolkien’s panoramic view of Fellowship gives a greater glimpse of the internal ambiguities that afflict affection among so-called friends. Even some members of Charles Williams’s “Companions of the Co-inherence” showed belated awareness of the sticky wicket into which they let themselves be led by their charismatic leader.Romanticism without rebellion is a symptom of at once too much and not enough imagination. Enthusiasm abounds, but, as Blake would say, it remains insufficiently “organized.” It holds itself aloof from the business of critique. The Inklings’ contemporary T. E. Hulme called this sort of romanticism “spilt religion.” It comes of not giving evil its proper due, an odd omission for a group of men whose youth and maturity were branded by a pair of world wars. A clear countertype to “disorganized” imagination can be found in the art of another contemporary, David Jones, a half-Welsh Londoner who converted to Catholicism after extensive service as a private soldier in the First World War. In 1956 Jones read Lewis’s spiritual autobiography Surprised by Joy, published the year before, and declared himself “astounded” to discover there that Lewis’s childhood reading had been “virtually identical” to his own. In spite of their (in Jones’s phrase) “shared backgrounds,” the Inklings would never venture anything like the formal innovations in their respective media that won Jones a range of admirers from W. H. Auden to Louis Zukofsky. In 1937 Jones dedicated his first book, the war epic In Parenthesis, “to the enemy front-fighters who shared our pains against whom we found ourselves by misadventure.” Reading at length about the Inklings, one gets the sense that if ever any one of them had found himself anywhere “by misadventure,” none of his friends would have been the wiser for it.____Thomas Berenato is a PhD student in English at the University of Virginia; this is his first review for Open Letters Monthly.
