The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings (2 page)

Oxford at War and After

We must picture Oxford, during World War I, not as the neomedieval paradise it would like to be, but as the military compound it was obliged to become. The colleges of Oxford turned nearly overnight into hospitals and officer training camps, strangely quiet and emptied of students, “like monasteries where all the monks have died,” as Victor Gollancz remembered it. The Oxford University Roll of Service records that of 14,561 students who served in the war, 2,708—nearly 20 percent—perished. In a society known for its masculine “clubbability,” yet haunted by the memory of so many friendships severed, so many men cut down in their prime, it scarcely surprises that the surviving remnant would seek out every opportunity for male companionship. The Inklings were, to a man—and they were all men—comrades who had been touched by war, who viewed life through the lens of war, yet who looked for hope and found it, in fellowship, where so many other modern writers and intellectuals saw only broken narratives, disfigurement, and despair.

If Virginia Woolf was right that “on or about December 1910 human character changed” in the direction of modernism and daring social experiments, the Great War intensified that change; according to standard histories of this period, the rising generation of British writers reacted to the catastrophe by severing ties to tradition and embracing an aesthetic of dissonance, fragmentation, and estrangement. Yet the Great War also instilled in many a longing to reclaim the goodness, beauty, and cultural continuity that had been so violently disrupted. The Inklings came together because they shared that longing; and it was the Inklings, rather than the heirs of the Bloomsbury Group—the other great, if ill-defined, English literary circle of the twentieth century—who gave that longing its most enduring artistic form and substance. Far from breaking with tradition, they understood the Great War and its aftermath in the light of tradition, believing, as did their literary and spiritual ancestors, that ours is a fallen world yet not a forsaken one. It was a belief that set them at odds with many of their contemporaries, but kept them in the broad currents of the English literary heritage. They shared much with Bloomsbury, including love of beauty, companionship, and conversation, but they differed from their older London counterpart in their religious ardor, their social conservatism, and their embrace of fantasy, myth, and (mostly) conventional literary techniques instead of those dazzling experiments with time, character, narrative, and language that mark the modernist aesthetic.

No doubt Bloomsbury has exerted more influence over what Anthony Burgess once called “higher literary aspirations,” those giddy and often glorious assaults upon convention that have found a secure place in the twentieth century’s literary canon. And yet the Inklings have made serious inroads into that canon. The literary status of both Tolkien and Lewis and, to a lesser extent, Williams, Barfield, and other Inklings, is undergoing rapid ascent as academic courses and mature literary criticism focused upon their work blossom around the world, and—unlike Bloomsbury, which now seems part of history, a brilliant stream of art and thought that one admires over one’s shoulder—the Inklings continue to shape significant aspects of modern religion and worldwide culture.

Tolkien and Lewis wield most of this posthumous influence. That
The Lord of the Rings
was voted “Book of the Century” in a massive 1997 poll conducted by Waterstones, a British bookseller, may be dismissed as a transient phenomenon; but if we consider its sales figures (estimates of worldwide sales run from one hundred and fifty to two hundred million), it’s clear that Tolkien has a secure place in the pantheon of popular culture. Far more important, though,
The Lord of the Rings
and the vast mythology that surrounds and pervades it possess an intrinsic grandeur, breadth, and profound originality—it is simply the case that nothing like this has ever been done before—that make them, we believe, landmarks in the history of English literature. To be sure, the fan fiction, derivative fantasy novels, and sword-and-sorcery illustrations inspired by Tolkien can be artless at best; but no unprejudiced critic can deny the bracing effect of Tolkien’s rich mythopoeic imagination upon generations of readers and writers disillusioned with modernist themes and techniques, and longing for reenchantment.

Lewis has made a comparable mark. Arguably the bestselling Christian writer since John Bunyan, he is also credited with the conversion or reversion to the faith of a considerable number of twenty-first-century intellectuals and the consolation and instruction of millions more. Yet none of this would have been possible had Lewis not shared with Tolkien the sense of mission and the narrative skill to reclaim traditional storytelling values, not only through fantasy fiction but also through scholarly recovery of the literary past. These achievements have earned Lewis—to the catcalls of some, overwhelmed by the applause of many—a permanent memorial stone in Westminster Abbey’s Poets’ Corner, close by the remains of Chaucer, Spenser, Addison, and Dryden.

An Oxford Fantasia

Everyone knows this about the Inklings: that they expressed their longing for tradition and reenchantment through the literature of fantasy. The Inklings’ penchant for the fantastic is quintessentially English; folktale, fairy-tale, and fantasy motifs permeate English literature from
Beowulf
through
The Faerie Queene
and
The Tempest
, to the poetry of Byron, Shelley, and Coleridge. In the middle of the nineteenth century, this national love for the fantastic gave rise to the modern fantasy novel. Immediately Oxford moved into the foreground, as John Ruskin, in his neo-Grimm fable
The King of the Golden River
(1841, written at Leamington Spa while he was an Oxford undergraduate), and Lewis Carroll, in
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
(1864, the quintessential Oxford classic), laid the groundwork for a genre brought to early perfection by the Scotsman George MacDonald, their mutual friend, in his three children’s classics (
At the Back of the North Wind
[1871],
The Princess and the Goblin
[1872], and
The Princess and Curdie
[1883]) and his two fantasies (
Phantastes
[1858] and
Lilith
[1895]). MacDonald suffused almost all his works—which also include sermons, poems, literary criticism, translations, and more than two dozen verbose and sentimental novels—with a gentle Christian sensibility that would lead Lewis to call him “my master.” A few years later, William Morris, Edward Burne-Jones (both Oxford alumni), and other members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood produced novels, poetry, and paintings with fantastic themes, bathed with a lovely, romantic, neomedieval light that would deeply influence the artistic maturation of both Lewis and Tolkien.

Fantasy, then, was in Oxford’s blood, and it is no wonder that the major Inklings experimented in so many fantastic subgenres (myth, science fiction, fable, epic fantasy, children’s fantasy, supernatural thriller, and more). They chose to be fantasists for a variety of reasons—or, rather, fantasy seemed to choose them, each one falling in love with the genre in youth (Lewis in Ireland, Tolkien in Birmingham, Williams and Barfield in London) many years before coming to Oxford. Their passion arose, in part, from the sheer excitement of the genre, the intoxication of entering the unknown and fleeing the everyday. For all of the leading Inklings, however, the rapture of the unknown pointed also to something more profound; it was a numinous event, an intimation of a different, higher, purer world or state of being. Fantasy literature was, for the Inklings, a pathway to this higher world and a way of describing, through myth and symbol, its felt presence. Fantasy became the voice of faith. And it made for a cracking good story.

*   *   *

Interest in the Inklings often first dawns in the minds of readers who have fallen in love with Tolkien and Lewis, and wish to enter more deeply into their spiritual and imaginative cosmos. But there are others who, though immune to the evangelizing power of Fa
ë
rie, are curious to know more about a movement that arose not long ago in the colleges and pubs of Oxford and continues to cast a spell upon our culture. We have written with both kinds of readers in mind.

Our book focuses primarily upon four Inklings: Lewis, Tolkien, Barfield, and Williams. Why these four and not that graceful flower Lord David Cecil, or the lovable, ogreish Hugo Dyson? Why not Lewis’s sidekick, his admirable alcoholic brother Warnie? Lewis, Tolkien, Barfield, and Williams are the best-known of the group, but that is only one reason for our choice. They are also the most original, as writers and as thinkers, and thus most likely to be read and studied by future generations. They make a perfect compass rose of faith: Tolkien the Catholic, Lewis the “mere Christian,” Williams the Anglican (and magus), Barfield the esotericist. In their beliefs, habits, marital arrangements, and private obsessions, they differed strikingly. From certain angles, it may appear that they had very little in common, apart from being Christian writers who lived in Oxford during the twentieth century. Yet somehow they found one another and together created one of the great literary sagas of the ages: the story of the Inklings.

1

“A STAR SHINES ON THE HOUR OF OUR MEETING”

The story of the Inklings might begin with any of the company: Charles Williams, the first to be born, the first to publish, the first to die; Clive Staples Lewis, the most celebrated and execrated; Owen Barfield, the least known but, some say, the most profound; or any of the other brilliant figures who joined, reveled in, and (sometimes) quit the fellowship. We start, however, with John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, for with Tolkien the Inklings constellation began its ascent into the English literary firmament; he was the first to create work that bears the group’s special stamp of Christian faith blended with pagan beauty, of fantastic stories grounded in moral realism. And we start our portrait of Tolkien with his mother—a welcome surprise in this tale of a group that rigorously excluded women—because Mabel Tolkien set in motion her son’s madly spinning top of a mind, from which epic poems, children’s stories, fantasy novels, invented languages, literary essays, philological studies, songs, watercolors, and pen-and-ink sketches would take flight for the next eighty years.

Mabel

Mabel Tolkien was born an English Suffield, a family with roots in the West Midlands, an urbanized county flecked with green about one hundred miles northwest of London. Her father, John Suffield, an exuberant merchant with a luxuriant beard, looking rather like his grandson’s future portraits of Father Christmas, enthralled Mabel with his many skills, which included jesting, punning, and inking the Lord’s Prayer within a circle the size of a sixpence. He and his wife, the improbably named Emily Sparrow, had seven children. The family ran a drapery shop in downtown Birmingham. More distant ancestors had sold books and stationery; Tolkien would carry in his blood a love of paper and the words it bore.

From this cozy mercantile background emerged a woman with a taste for adventure, a streak of independence, and an iron will. Mabel’s strong personality has given rise to many colorful legends; one, repeated in several biographies of her son, asserts that she and her sisters traveled as missionaries to Zanzibar, where they proselytized the sultan’s wives and concubines. This makes a good tale but has no basis in truth. Mabel’s brick-and-mortar life was, however, dramatic enough. She accepted, at eighteen, the ardent attentions of Arthur Tolkien, a thirty-one-year-old banker; their romance, conducted largely sub rosa, via clandestine correspondence and the occasional family gathering, survived a two-year parting begun in 1889, when Arthur quit England for southern Africa. He went to seek his fortune, a common enough event in this era of Victorian enterprise that produced a British empire that spanned the globe. Mabel followed him in 1891, sailing, with typical intrepidness, alone from Southampton on the
Roslin Castle.
The reunited couple married in Cape Town’s Anglican cathedral and set out for Bloemfontein, the dusty, dreary capital of the Orange Free State, a Boer republic where Arthur, having mastered Dutch, had become the assistant manager of the local branch of the Bank of Africa. Two children came in rapid succession: John Ronald Reuel on January 3, 1892, and Hilary Arthur Reuel on February 17, 1894 (the reason for the curious third name “Reuel”—“friend of God,” drawn from Exodus 2, where it is assigned to Moses’ father-in-law—remains obscure; Tolkien believed it to be the surname of an old family friend and passed it on to his own children as well).

John Ronald Reuel had, from the start, something fey about him, a whiff of pixie, which Mabel relayed to Arthur’s parents in a letter dated March 4, 1893. Addressing her in-laws with nineteenth-century formality as “My dear Mr. & Mrs. Tolkien,” she reports on the challenges of life in this very un-English land (“the next door pet monkeys had been over & eaten 3 of Ronald’s pinafores”; “the weather is still intensely hot & trying”) and enthuses over her fifteen-month-old boy. Her baby, she reports in terms whose allusive prescience sends shivers of bliss down the spines of Tolkien aficionados, resembles “a fairy when he’s
very
much dressed up in white frills & white shoes,” but “when he’s very much
un
dressed I think he looks more of an elf still.” The letter, suggesting a strong mental correspondence between mother and child, touches on many of Tolkien’s favorite future motifs: voyages to strange lands, nostalgia for home, imaginary beings. We may even read, in Mabel’s ornate calligraphy, with its curlicues and runic slashes, a hint of her son’s eventual love of elaborate and invented scripts, alphabets, and languages. And while the adult Tolkien didn’t resemble a fairy, he did approximate, with his long thin face and owlish eyes, one of his own fantastic inventions, a beardless Gandalf, perhaps. This is true of all the Inklings; they came to look like embodiments of their work. Lewis, with his red face, rotund figure, and bright bald pate, was the perfect model of the robust, full-bore (if not wholly muscular) Christian; Williams looked, so everyone said, like a monkey, with the wizened features of someone who has pored over too many magical tomes; Barfield was slender, soft-spoken, and ethereal, as if more at home in the rarefied atmosphere of the astral plane than the heavy miasma of the material world.