The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings (60 page)

Clearly, Lewis was exasperated, but it is doubtful that he realized the extent of Barfield’s anguish. “I was under very heavy pressure at my office,” Barfield said later. “And it was after my father’s death, and there was also some domestic misunderstanding or trouble at home … I think I was really on the verge of a nervous breakdown.” Faced with collapse, the artist in him came to the rescue; he picked up his pen and produced his only successful mainstream novel,
This Ever Diverse Pair
, a work that “staved off” the impending disaster.

The story has a clever premise: a London solicitor, closely based on Barfield, harbors two personalities: one a dreamy, poetic, philosophically minded literary type named Burgeon, the other a plodding, detail-oriented, matter-of-fact sort named, with unfortunate heavy-handedness, Burden. Burgeon tells the tale. He explains at the outset why he is doing this: “I must now write about something or die.” He must write because he is an artist trapped in a law office; he writes about his oppressive alter ego and the occupation they share, because “the only thing upon which I am allowed, and indeed expected, to fix my attention, is Burden.” This is, of course, Barfield describing the occupational trap that, of his own volition, he has constructed, stepped inside, and snapped shut. He allows that “it was
my
doing that we ever went into the law at all,” but now Burden has become “a sort of Frankenstein,” living only for his profession and dragging the erstwhile poet along with him into “a complex of responsibilities from which there may be no way out until the shadows lengthen, the busy world is hushed and our world is done.”

Divorce, real estate, inheritance, and other legal cases reinforce the trap, each complication presented in high satirical mode, as Burgeon and Burden combat law firms like Pauncefoot & Mecklenburgh for the doubtful rights of their dubious clients. One chapter, “The Things That Are Caesar’s!” features a certain Ramsden (a thinly disguised Lewis, echoing “Ransom”), “a rather extraordinary sort of chap” with whom Burgeon once shared “a period of intellectual intercourse long since woven into the stuff of our lives and taken up into whatever we can claim of wisdom and insight.” Ramsden, like his real-life model, suffers from profligate generosity; in lieu of royalties, he “just writes to his publisher and says … ‘Pay the next lot to the Home for Retired Professors of Ichthyosophy.’” This practice leads (as it did with Lewis) to a staggering tax bill and an amusing account of how Burgeon’s intervention saves the day.

The legal escapades make for entertaining farce, but as the Burgeon/Burden conflict continues, the tale darkens and turns surreal. Burden finds himself “like Alice Through the Looking Glass … out of breath with running at full speed in order to keep up with himself remaining in the same place.” He—and through him Burgeon—develops rhematophobia (from the Greek
rhema
, utterance or word), a fear and loathing of the spoken word—a disease, incidentally, unrecognized by both the medical profession and the
Oxford English Dictionary
. Rhematophobia afflicts the ability to absorb and grasp language: “The moment of pain is the effort required to convert sound into meaning and to unite that meaning … with the meanings of the preceding words and of those which are to follow.” This fantastic ailment, one of Barfield’s brightest inventions, is a psychic inversion of his own youthful stammering; instead of struggling to get the words out, one struggles to get them in. Burgeon’s deterioration accelerates, until one day he snaps and assaults his partner/alter ego with a trash can and ruler; in turn, Burden announces to Burgeon, with icy certainty, “I’m going to kill you.”

At this desperate moment—corresponding to the real-life moment when Barfield found himself facing mental collapse—Burgeon suddenly sees the way out. It comes to him that, precisely as a poet, he is indispensable to Burden, that without poets “the very profession itself, and the law which it helps to administer, would not be there. For if it is the Burdens of this world who keep traditions alive, it is the Burgeons who create them.” Well, then, why must “we Burgeons need always remain
sleeping
partners. Why should not we wake up sometimes and take a hand once more in the practice both of law and of life?” A modus vivendi is achieved, a modus operandi initiated: Burgeon and Burden, art and business, inspiration and drudgery, will advance hand in hand, in a fruitful if uneasy conjunction of opposites. The ending is weak, Burgeon’s sudden self-understanding dawning as no more than a deus ex machina. It doesn’t matter—not for the tale, which is lighthearted and implausible enough to sustain this final narrative collapse, and not for Barfield, for whom the writing was as much therapy as art, paving the way to continue his legal practice without killing his creative soul.

This Ever Diverse Pair
had little difficulty in attracting a publisher, especially after Barfield’s old friend Walter de la Mare consented to write the introduction. On April 29, 1949, Sheila Hodges of the firm of Victor Gollancz bid for the book, stating that it had “enchanted” Gollancz, who was “most anxious to meet the author,” and offering a small advance. Lewis, receiving the news, was delighted. Soon he heard tidings that gave him even greater joy. A few weeks after Gollancz accepted
This Ever Diverse Pair
, Barfield decided to enter the Anglican Church, arranging to be baptized on June 25 at St. Saviour’s Church in Uckfield, East Sussex. Lewis, although recovering from a high fever, wrote to congratulate him, declaring that “I am humbled (I think that is the right word) by your great news. I wish I cd. be with you. Welcome and welcome and welcome.”

He assured Barfield, oddly, that his baptism didn’t mean the end of the “Great War”—a sop to a friend, one presumes, for as far as Lewis was concerned, the war had ended decades ago—and mentioned that he didn’t resent being passed over as godfather. What he failed to bring up, although he must have wondered about it, was why Barfield had decided upon baptism after so many years outside the church, and whether this decision meant an end to his Anthroposophical involvement. Barfield’s answer to the second question would have been a very firm “no.” He remained dedicated to the cause, contributing essays and reviews to
The Golden Blade
, an Anthroposophical journal, and promulgating Steiner’s works; the very year of his baptism, he published a revised edition of Steiner’s
World-Economy: The Formation of a Science of World-Economics
. Why, then, get baptized? He may have joined the Anglican Church as a gift to Maud, to show her that Anthroposophy and Christianity were not antithetical. But his act was a gift to Lewis as well, who read the event as nothing less than Barfield’s spiritual rebirth. To think that his dear friend had finally entered the faith! He dashed off a letter to Bede Griffiths, asking him to pray for the new Christian and mentioning that “I have two lists of names in my prayers, those for whose conversion I pray, and those for whose conversion I give thanks. The little trick of
transferences
from List A to List B is a great comfort.”

The baptism must have brought comfort to Barfield as well. Just as
This Ever Diverse Pair
signaled an accommodation between art and law, so did his baptism signal a détente between the Anglican orthodoxy that surrounded him and his own Steinerian esotericism. Accommodation and d
é
tente, however, are far from permanent peace.
This Ever Diverse Pair
was a small triumph but an artistic dead end, for Barfield was not a satirist. He was too sincere and ardent for that. He was a true believer. Despite embracing Anglicanism, his spiritual home remained Anthroposophy, which entailed beliefs—reincarnation, akashic realms, the evolution of consciousness, and the rest—that have never found a home in Christian orthodoxy. He remained uneasy, uncertain of what to do, whom to turn to. His friends praised
This Ever Diverse Pair
, Ruth Pitter saying that “your prose works are … so full of meat one could spend years on them.” Lewis told the world the same, writing in
Time and Tide
that the novel was “a high and sharp philosophic comedy, more fully a work of art and more original than anything I have read for a long time.” But these were sops tossed by friends, and Barfield remained frustrated and depressed.

He also remained, despite the friendly review, vexed with Lewis. For many years, Barfield had harbored “the impression of living with, not one, but two Lewises”—one the old, direct, sincere Lewis, the other, as Barfield expressed it, somehow
“voulu,”
taking part in a sort of deliberate role-playing. One of the best accounts of Lewis’s strange behavior, Barfield would suggest many years later, could be found in Alan Watts’s 1971 study of mysticism,
Behold the Spirit
, which describes Lewis as exhibiting “a certain ill-concealed glee in adopting an old-fashioned and unpopular position.” This impression of two Lewises, the real and the contrived, disturbed Barfield greatly, until finally it “became something like an obsession.” Around 1950, he decided to address the problem through literature, just as he had addressed the problem of the law in
This Ever Diverse Pair
. He composed a long poem, “The Mother of Pegasus” (also known as “Riders of Pegasus”), a retelling of Greek myth in which two figures, Perseus and Bellerophon, represent the two aspects of Lewis’s personality. As Barfield summarized it, Perseus “after going through a great many difficulties arising out of a preference he had developed for dealing with the reflections of things rather than with the things themselves … made peace with … his ‘creative eros,’” while Bellerophon wound up “in increasing obscurity as a kind of aging, grumbling, earthbound, guilt-obsessed
laudator temporis acti
[praiser of times past]
.
” As several Barfield scholars have remarked, the message is far from clear. Perseus appears to be Lewis face-to-face with reality and achieving a belated maturity, and Bellerophon Lewis hollowed to a shell by his taste for role-playing. But whether Barfield meant one of these to represent the “real” Lewis or whether each portends a possible future not yet determined is difficult to discern.

The murkiness, one can’t help feel, reflects Barfield’s literary limitations as well as his confused feelings about his friend, and indeed he wrote that he may have been “on the wrong track altogether,” giving vent to “a common bit of overelaborated psychology à la mode, our twentieth century rococo.” There is, however, no mistaking the clashing tides of love and resentment in his views of Lewis. It must have pained him, too, that no one seemed interested in publishing “The Mother of Pegasus.” His friend George Rostrevor Hamilton, a critic and poet well placed in literary circles, warned him that “it is a particularly unfavorable season for poetry, and you have had the boldness to defy fashion by writing (a) a long poem (b) a poem on a Classical subject and (c) a poem which is neither in the mode nor in an easy convention,” and then offered the coup de gr
â
ce by adding that “fine though the poem is … it is likely to frighten most of the cautious tribe of publishers.” It was a familiar story. With
This Ever Diverse Pair
, Barfield had reopened the possibility of being both solicitor and artist; but to what avail, if no one would accept his art?

16

“MAKING UP IS A VERY MYSTERIOUS THING”

“My house is unquiet and devastated by women’s quarrels,” Lewis confided to Father Calabria in January of 1949. “I have
to dwell in the tents of Kedar
.” He was quoting Psalm 120, which begins with the piercing cry, “In my distress I cried unto the Lord,” as the psalmist laments his prolonged stay among the nomadic Kedar, a tribe that “hateth peace.” The Kedar had pitched their tents in the Kilns: Mrs. Moore’s arthritic legs had given out and she was confined largely to her bedroom, from which she unleashed what Warnie described as a “stifling tyranny” of demands and denunciations. “Every day had to have some kind of domestic scene or upheaval, commonly involving the maids.” Her goddaughter, Vera, over from Ireland to help with domestic chores, was sucked into the fray, as was the next-door neighbor, Miss Griggs, who on one occasion burst into Mrs. Moore’s bedroom to berate her for selfishness. Lewis, trapped and miserable, spent much of each day as her dog walker, nurse, and houseboy. She tightened her stranglehold by forbidding him afternoon access to the study, ostensibly to economize on fuel but in reality to force him into the dining room where she could keep a closer watch on him.

“How long, oh Lord, how long,” wailed Warnie in his diary. He, at least, had an escape, albeit a poisonous one, and he used it often. In February, he awoke from another alcohol-induced stupor to find himself in Acland Nursing Home, a small hospital on the Banbury Road. While consigned to his hospital bed, he mulled over his plight and concluded that he was the victim of a cycle of “insomnia-drugs-depression-spirits-illness.” He feared, however, that his brother construed it—as Lewis correctly did—as “spirits-insomnia-drugs-depression-spirits-illness.” Like many alcoholics, Warnie refused to see “spirits” as the active agent of his dissolution and convinced himself that with proper care he could drink safely and pleasurably. At least he held no illusions about the Kilns, preferring the Acland’s friendship and warmth to his home’s cold comforts. Once back under Mrs. Moore’s roof, he tried to pray but “found the line ‘dead.’”

In June, Lewis, too, entered the Acland, suffering a nasty streptococcal infection that left him feverish and delirious; Dr. Havard, who tended him, told Warnie that it was “a serious illness for a man of fifty.” The underlying problem, said Havard, was exhaustion, and the cure a long vacation. Lewis agreed—it would be his first in fifteen years—and asked Arthur to find him a room for a month near Belfast. Preparations went forward until it dawned on Warnie that while Lewis recuperated in Ireland, he would be left alone at the Kilns with Mrs. Moore. This proved too much to bear, the bottle rematerialized, and by July 1 he had drunk himself back into a hospital bed. Immediately Lewis canceled his vacation to oversee his brother’s recovery, which proved a complicated process that entailed a brief stay in Warneford hospital, a mental asylum, when the Acland doctor declared Warnie too “out of control” to treat. Warnie responded to Lewis’s kindness with an act of consummate (and probably unconscious) irony: shortly after leaving the hospital, he set off on his own Irish holiday, booking into his favorite Drogheda tavern to test, with initial success, his new theory that he could safely manage a nip now and then. Lewis, meanwhile, resigned himself to the Kilns, writing Arthur that “as long as [Warnie] is a dipsomaniac, it
seems
impossible for me to get away for more than a v. few days.” In effect, he had now not one jailor, but two.