The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings (74 page)

Meanwhile, Joy’s recovery continued apace. She walked with a bad limp—surgery had shortened one leg by three inches—but otherwise was in fine fettle; the doctors declared the damaged bones reknit; to Lewis, the healing was “more like resurrection.” Joy, back at the Kilns, refurbished the ragged d
é
cor, ordering the ceiling restored and the walls painted, and hobbled around the grounds with a cane, waving a starting pistol at trespassers. She and Lewis dared a belated honeymoon in Ireland, where they became, in his words, “drunk with blue mountains, yellow beaches, dark fuchsia, breaking waves, braying donkeys, peat-smell, and the heather just then beginning to bloom.”

This second idyll—a brief spell in an enchanted garden encircled by ravening beasts—ended as well. In October 1959, Joy’s cancer reappeared, X-rays revealing spots throughout her bones. Lewis told Roger Lancelyn Green that it was “like being recaptured by the giant when you have passed every gate and are almost out of sight of his castle.” He prayed for a second miracle but there would be none. The couple kept up appearances as best they could, mingling with friends, answering letters, checking proofs. In April, they traveled with Green and his wife, June, to Greece, feasting on fish, cheese, retsina, sunlight, and the sun-drenched landscape. Green noted in his travel diary that “Joy was often in pain, and alcohol was the best alleviation: so I had become adept at diving into the nearest taverna, ordering ‘tessera ouzo,’ and having them ready at a convenient table by the time June had helped Jack and Joy out of coach or car and brought them in.” For Joy, it was a glorious escape, and she returned to Oxford, wrote Lewis, “in a
nunc dimittis
frame of mind, having realized, beyond hope, her greatest lifelong, this-worldly, desire.” The final collapse followed swiftly. The breast cancer returned in force and in May, Joy, as she put it, was “made an Amazon.” She weakened and made several visits to the Acland Nursing Home. Here she befriended Edith Tolkien, also a patient (for rheumatism), and met, for the first and only time, Tolkien. What passed between them is not recorded. On July 13, 1960, she was taken by ambulance to the Radcliffe Infirmary to die. She received final rites from Austin Farrer, bequeathed her fur coat to Katharine Farrer, asked for cremation, and told Lewis, in a final burst of plain speaking, “Don’t get me a posh coffin; posh coffins are all rot.” Five days later, a funeral was held in Headington and her ashes scattered over the crematorium’s rose garden. Austin Farrer presided, with Katharine in attendance. None of Lewis’s other friends showed up.

A Seminal Work, A Second Birth

Invigorated by his work on
Saving the Appearances
, Barfield knew that only continued production, entailing a dramatic change in his daily routine, would prevent relapse into the despair and silence of past decades. He needed to retire from the law or at least restructure his job. In 1957 he wrote the firm a poignant letter, asking permission to relinquish his current responsibilities and ease into semiretirement as an advising director “on the basis that there is
prima facie
evidence that the literary, or more strictly philosophical, work I could do, given freedom from grind, between now and my death may be of lasting importance to the community.” He added, somewhat unconvincingly, that whatever the response “I shall survive, unembittered,” but pressed his case by observing that “it does often strike me as preposterous and wrong that my nose should be kept so long and so firmly to the grindstone, and even more preposterous and wrong that it should remain there for the rest of my life.” In 1959 he finally left the firm and plunged headlong into full-scale authorship.

The first fruit of Barfield’s retirement was
Worlds Apart (A Dialogue of the 1960’s)
, an entertaining transposition into fictional form of many of the ideas from
Saving the Appearances
. Burgeon, a solicitor—the same Burgeon who serves as Barfield’s mouthpiece in
This Ever Diverse Pair—
troubled by the specialization and insularity of intellectual disciplines (thus the “worlds apart” of the title), invites a group of intellectuals from different fields to spend a weekend together at a Dorchester cottage for a serious exchange of ideas. A theologian (closely based on Lewis), a psychiatrist, a philosopher, a schoolmaster, and three scientists—a biologist, a physicist, and a rocket scientist—constitute the ensemble, which resembles the Inklings in its pipe-and-flannels geniality, its male-only membership, its diversity of professions, and its love of argument.

Spurred on by Burgeon, the group tackles epistemology, the evolution of consciousness, the nature of religious revelation, and a host of other topics. The theory of
polarity—
an idea that would occupy Barfield increasingly in the years to come—receives much attention. Simply put, the theory states that aspects of reality can be usefully described as two poles—heaven/earth, male/female, constancy/change, act/potency, conscious/unconscious, literal/figurative, subject/object, poetic/prosaic, and so on—interpenetrating one another in a mutually dependent relationship. The poles “exist by virtue of each other
as well as
at the expense of each other…” The fundamental polarity that defines reality is that of “the subjectivity of the individual mind and the objective world which it perceives”; the result of the interplay between these two elements is the world we inhabit. Polarity operates on the local level, too, affecting our personal actions and relations; Barfield considered his youthful decision to lay aside literature for the law to be a prime example of polarity; another was his adversarial but richly productive relationship with Lewis. The theory is not, of course, entirely new; aspects of it can be seen in Hegelian dialectic and, further afield, in the combinational tensions and harmonies revealed by the Chinese classic the
I Ching
, as well as in the manifold clashing and reconciling forces of Taoist alchemy. Barfield traced his own elaboration of the theory, which in its fullest form he called objective idealism, to the influence of Steiner, for whom polarity is not an explicit teaching but rather the unstated “basis of his whole way of interpreting the world.” The idea receives some attention in
Saving the Appearances
, in a discussion of the contrapuntal balance of
actus
and
potentia
at the heart of Scholastic thought, and a richer, more nuanced treatment in
Worlds Apart
, where the polarities of will/thought and conscious/unconscious lie at the basis of many of the key arguments about human nature.

For the most part,
Worlds Apart
unfolds as dialogue, with disputes between the theologian (Lewis) and the biologist—some of which bring to mind clashes between Ransom and Weston in Lewis’s Space Trilogy—dominating the first half, and Anthroposophical insights by the schoolmaster providing resolution in the second half. The narrative ends most curiously, with the theologian recounting a recent dream, in which a set of massive bronze doors open before him and three figures emerge: first a man with a head like a “round box” with “light … blazing out of its eye-holes” (resembling a Halloween pumpkin), then a man with a lion’s head, and finally a man without a head. In later years, Barfield would offer an interpretation of this dream, which he had based upon one told to him by Lewis: the first man represents ordinary human consciousness, the second a consciousness that combines mind and heart, and the third consciousness with “final participation,” that apotheosis in which human beings will experience fully self-aware rapport with the cosmos.

Worlds Apart
, or at least its Steinerian conclusions, discomfited some of the author’s friends. Lewis, by now utterly familiar with Barfield’s lines of argument, sent him a short note declaring the work “so exciting that I can’t help reading it far too quickly” before dishing out petty complaints (“Your language sometimes disgruntles me. Why must it be
polyvalence
instead of
multivalence
? And why do you use base as an intransitive verb…”). T. S. Eliot offered a blurb that pointedly sidestepped assessment of Barfield’s thesis, calling the book “an excursion into seas of thought which are very far from ordinary routes of intellectual shipping.” Real encouragement came from an unexpected and perhaps not entirely welcome source: the American theologian Thomas J. J. Altizer, just a year away from international fame for his controversial “death of God” theology. Altizer reviewed
Worlds Apart
and
Saving the Appearances
in the
Journal of Bible and Religion
for October 1964, and, after the astonishing gaffe of describing Barfield as “recently deceased,” praised the author for his “delightful and gracious style,” his “fully coherent and logically forceful mode of thinking,” and his “mastery of history”—“all of which,” Altizer noted, “are absent in his master Steiner.”
Saving the Appearances
, he wrote, is “potentially one of the truly seminal works of our age,” and
Worlds Apart
, although the lesser work, nonetheless forged “a fascinating link between a mystical form of theology and the natural sciences.”

Barfield may have resented Altizer’s slur against Steiner, but he surely enjoyed the applause directed at himself. As for his reported demise, he laughed it off, for he knew that he was undergoing, if anything, a second birth. He possessed a new, inspired proficiency and fluency; he recognized his mission and trusted his skills as never before; and, to cap it off, by the time Altizer’s review appeared in print, he had quit the cold comforts of England for America’s welcoming embrace: a new continent for a new beginning. Stanley Hopper, professor of philosophy and dean of the graduate school at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey, read and enjoyed “Poetic Diction and Legal Fiction” and arranged for Barfield to teach at the school as a visiting professor in philosophy and letters, focusing upon “metaphor, symbol, language, and problems of communication.” This voyage to the New World, Barfield remarked, was “like starting a new life … a strange experience, rather like the ‘ugly duckling.’” Out of the blue, he had become the hero of his own fairy tale: the duckling was turning into a swan.

An Act of Will Inspired by Love

“Hwaet! We Gardena in geardagum
…” Tolkien bellowed the opening lines of
Beowulf
, as he had done for so many decades before so many students, as he strode into a packed Merton College Hall at 5:00 p.m. on June 5, 1959, to deliver his valedictory address to the University of Oxford. He began his talk with a whimsical jest, a sly reference to his proclivity for tardiness, noting that he had never given an inaugural lecture and that he was “now about 34 years behind.” Other self-deprecatory remarks followed. He had “nothing special to say”; he was an “amateurish person” who knew nothing of the “wide view, the masterly survey.” A bit disingenuous, all this, coming from the creator of
The Silmarillion
, an account of the origin and early history of the cosmos and, as such, one of the twentieth century’s extreme instances of the “wide view, the masterly survey.” But it was true that Tolkien loved minutiae, especially of the philological stripe; his address consisted in a stirring defense of the discipline of philology as “the foundation of humane letters” and an impassioned attack upon those who would ban it from the curriculum. He blasted “the B.Litt. sausage-machine,” regretted “the degeneration of real curiosity and enthusiasm,” and called for research motivated by love of knowledge rather than hunger for a job. Suitably warmed up, he turned to the “lang.-lit.” debate and decried its existence, arguing that these two disciplines go hand in hand, each encompassing the other; he compared their divorce to the apartheid policies of his native South Africa. His jeremiad then faded into a nostalgic mist of memories, as he recalled Joseph Wright, William Craigie, George Stuart Gordon, and other old friends, before concluding with a valedictorian’s perfect wistful-yet-optimistic fare-thee-well, rejoicing, in words reminiscent of the Old English poems he had contributed to the 1936 collection produced with E. V. Gordon,
Songs for the Philologists
, that “the
dugu
ð
[noble company] has not yet fallen by the wall, and the
dr
é
am
[revelry] is not yet silenced.” The
Oxford Mail
called his presentation “vigorous,” which it was, but
“
disputative,” even “crotchety” suit as well. It was an old man’s talk, descrying the fallen battlements, raising the torn standards, sniping at the enemy, giving thanks for past and present blessings.

Tolkien
was
old. His body was betraying him: he suffered now from frequent bouts of arthritis, and in February 1959, four months before the valedictory address, went under the knife to remove a diseased appendix, surgery that depleted him for several weeks. Retirement he found “in many ways a melancholy proceeding”; one reason was the loss of his Merton office, which forced him to convert the garage at 76 Sandfield into a makeshift study. He saw less of his colleagues and friends, suffered the common ills—loneliness, bitterness, depression, lack of energy—of the newly retired, and by July of 1960 wrote Rayner Unwin that “I am in fact utterly stuck—lost in a bottomless bog, and anything that would cheer me would be welcome.” Ostensibly freed from scholarly chores, he was chained to his desk ten hours a day in a desperate effort to wrap up his edition of the
Ancrene Wisse
—now nearly thirty years in the making—while laboring on
The Silmarillion
and dealing with assorted domestic crises, not least Edith’s fading health. His prickliness intensified; when in September Lewis sent him a copy of his latest work,
Studies in Words
, Tolkien wrote to Christopher that Lewis’s “ponderous silliness is becoming a fixed manner. I am deeply relieved to find I am not mentioned.” Matters hadn’t improved by the following April. “Forgive my chattiness,” he wrote to Robert Burchfield of the Early English Text Society (and later chief editor of the
OED
), “I am rather isolated, and it is a relief to chat even by way of typewriter to someone who has any interest in the work.” The isolation intensified in the fall, when the Tolkiens’ housekeeper quit, leaving the aging couple without adequate help.