The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings (43 page)

Visions in War Time

The tensions between Inklings and guests and among Inklings themselves reveal not only ideological friction but the fraught atmosphere of the age. Britain faced an implacable, fanatical foe; as the initial euphoria of war receded, the shadow of pain, privation, disease, and death loomed ever larger. A few weeks before the outbreak of war—as if an augury of things to come—Tolkien had suffered, while on holiday in Worcestershire, a concussion whose baleful effects had lasted for months. At the same time, Edith had fallen dreadfully sick; cancer was suspected. By December, doctors had settled upon a more benign diagnosis, but Tolkien now found himself beset with worries about his children. His first concern was John, who had graduated from Exeter College in the summer of 1939 and in November had arrived at the Venerable English College in Rome to begin studies for the Roman Catholic priesthood. From the start, John’s position was precarious. Italy would not declare war upon England until June 1940, but it was already allied with Germany and hostile to British interests. The college authorities decided to evacuate, and on May 16, 1940, six days after the Nazis swept through Belgium, France, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands, John and a contingent of fellow seminarians fled Rome in disguise. They arrived in the French port of Le Havre in the nick of time, catching the last boat before German troops arrived. John’s hairbreadth escape did little to end Tolkien’s concerns, however, for a few weeks later, his son Michael quit Oxford to join the RAF. He fought as an antiaircraft gunner during the Battle of Britain, received the George Medal, and later saw combat in France and Germany. Christopher, too, entered the Royal Air Force, training as a pilot in South Africa from 1943 to 1945.

In addition to illness and worry, Tolkien felt hemmed in by the domestic routines imposed by war. A portion of the garden now housed a chicken coop, and he spent much time tending to the hens and repairing the structure. His duties as an air raid warden proved exhausting; they included preparing the neighborhood for enemy attack and checking on adherence to blackout regulations, tasks that sometimes entailed all-night encampment at local headquarters. On one occasion his fellow warden, the kindly Jewish historian Cecil Roth, awoke him from a fitful sleep just in time to attend Mass at St. Aloysius; Tolkien thought the service “seemed like a fleeting glimpse of an unfallen world.” But Eden proved elusive. As the war ground on, his spirits sank and his letters overflowed with disgust at mankind (“A small knowledge of history depresses one with the sense of the everlasting mass and weight of human iniquity”), at the world (“How stupid everything is!”), and at his own inability to fight, hampered as he was by age and responsibilities (“I feel like a lame canary in a cage”).

Still, now and then happiness broke the gloom. New friendships blossomed, notably with Robert Murray, a student at Corpus Christi College and grandson of Sir James Augustus Henry Murray, editor of the
Oxford English Dictionary
. Young Murray soon became a family favorite and under the guidance of Tolkien and others entered the Catholic Church after the war and later joined the Jesuits; Tolkien would give him a prepublication typescript of
The Lord of the Rings
to evaluate, a sign of highest esteem. There was cheerful news within the family as well. Halfway through the war, Michael and his wife, Joan, gave Tolkien and Edith their first grandchild, Michael George Reuel. At around the same time, Tolkien became godfather to David Havard, the Useless Quack’s son. Priscilla, a child when the war began, turned sixteen before its end, and Tolkien took great pleasure in observing her intellectual maturation, noting with delight that she, as he did, preferred
Perelandra
(the second volume in Lewis’s Space Trilogy) to
Out of the Silent Planet
. He cultivated a remarkable correspondence with Michael and Christopher, writing letters bursting with family gossip, literary asides, and religious reflections. To Christopher he offered what amounts to an abbreviated course in Catholic living, counseling him to recall always his guardian angel, to aspire to Christian tranquillity, and to memorize the canon of the Mass and various prayers so that he would “never need for words of joy.” To Michael he unveiled his soul, declaring, in one of the most memorable spiritual passages to be found in his letters, that “out of the darkness of my life, so much frustrated, I put before you the one great thing to love on earth: the Blessed Sacrament … There you will find romance, glory, honour, fidelity, and the true way of all your loves upon earth.”

Tolkien’s Catholic ardor, nearly always at high pitch, intensified yet more during the war, as the Luftwaffe attacked his homeland and his sons flirted with death abroad. His wartime letters on Catholicism, lengthy, closely argued, and deeply felt, sometimes surprise and even shock readers ignorant of the religious roots of his art, those who imagine him a happy pagan or nothing at all. One of the most startling proclamations came in a letter to Christopher dated November 7–8, 1944, in which Tolkien revealed that he had experienced a “sudden vision” or “apperception” of the “Light of God” (the capital letters are Tolkien’s) while deep in Eucharistic adoration at Sts. Gregory & Augustine Church on the Woodstock Road. In the vision, he saw God’s Light surrounding and bathing “one small mote,” which he realized was himself (although it could have been anyone “that I might think of with love”); he realized, too, that the Light linking God and the mote was a Guardian Angel, “not a thing interposed between God and the creature, but God’s very attention itself, personalized.” This extraordinary event brought with it a “great sense of joy” and “comfort.” Tolkien now knew with unshakable conviction that his loved ones lived always under supernatural protection.

During this period, he inundated Christopher with literary as well as spiritual confessions. He considered his youngest son the perfect sounding board on which to test works in progress: bright, insightful, sensitive to language, quick to notice small discrepancies of plot, and trustworthy as only one’s own child can be. He told Christopher that he was writing the new
Hobbit
with him in mind and regularly sent him new sections of typescript as soon as they became available. Christopher in turn responded to each installment with steady enthusiasm and trenchant criticism.

While working on his tale, Tolkien continued to experiment with pencil and paint, turning out landscapes, buildings, and other subjects based on the
Hobbit
sequel. Towers, fortresses, and mountains abound, curiously static subjects for such a swiftly moving tale; yet their dark, brooding, militaristic atmosphere reflects the fear and gloom that pervaded England during much of World War II. Scholars have long quarreled over which of the two world wars cast a greater shadow over
The Lord of the Rings.
The consensus favors World War I, for then Tolkien experienced firsthand the horrors of trench warfare, but World War II left its mark as well. Tolkien began writing the new
Hobbit
in December 1937, as prewar anxiety neared a climax, and he worked on it feverishly, albeit in bits and spurts, throughout the six years of active fighting. Parallels between Hitler and Sauron occur to almost every reader of the novel and surely occurred to Tolkien during composition. In his 1966 foreword to the second edition, he goes to great lengths to discount the influence of World War II on the book, declaring that the text contains nothing “topical” and that “little or nothing in it was modified” by the clash between Axis and Allies. One may be excused for discerning in these protestations the author’s insistent view of his work as a subcreation, an imaginative exercise in service to God, rather than an allegorical restatement of the politics of his age.

Subcreation, however, is clearly the theme of “Leaf by Niggle,” a short story that Tolkien wrote just before the outbreak of war and published in
The Dublin Review
in January 1945. The idea for the tale came to him in a dream or reverie, for one day “I awoke with it already in mind.” The story tells of a “little man called Niggle,” an artist who, although frustrated by constant interruptions, manages to paint a leaf that becomes a tree that becomes a landscape—an obvious allegorical recounting of the creation of Tolkien’s endlessly expanding legendarium. Before Niggle finishes his painting, he goes on a journey (that is, he dies), finds himself in a Workhouse (purgatory), is released, and winds up inside his own canvas, where he discovers his Tree, complete and perfect, its leaves “as he had imagined them rather than as he had made them,” and beyond them the Mountains, foretelling “something different, a further stage” (heaven). Niggle, through his long and painful artistic labors, has created something beautiful, intelligible, and good, a finite creation that points to the infinite. Tolkien tells the tale in simple, direct prose—reading Lewis’s novels may have proved beneficial—with none of the dense elegiac manner of
The Lord of the Rings.
“Leaf by Niggle” is his most successful short story, an evocative account of the artist’s calling and a worthy counterpart to the more theoretical presentation of the same material in “On Fairy-Stories.”

“Blue as a Whortle-Berry”

As the war expanded, Barfield trudged to his law office, day by tedious day. He knew by now that law would never replace literature, nor would legal discourse compensate for the loss of philosophical give-and-take with Lewis. He had fallen into a “colorless” existence. During the London Blitz, the firm moved to the suburbs, and for a time he, Maud, and the kids camped in a bus in a Buckinghamshire field. Country sights and smells offered relief from office monotony, but his frustration and boredom intensified. He tried his best to find deep meaning in legal procedures, presenting at an Inklings gathering in the early 1940s “Poetic Diction and Legal Fiction,” a paper that draws analogies between the poetic world he had regretfully abandoned and the legal world in which he was now immersed. Both worlds mature through a process Barfield calls
tarning
, the act of “saying one thing and meaning another”—not in the sense of lying but of using figurative language (simile, metaphor, symbol) so that a new or original poetic (or legal) understanding may result. Tarning, then, plays a role in “the long, slow movement of the human mind.” Long, complex, and wistful, the essay concludes on a note of frustration as Barfield laments modern culture’s failure to grasp the importance of metaphor, the evolution of language, and the blossoming of consciousness. Indeed, Barfield was as frustrated as a man could be, in his legal profession, in his literary vocation, in his inability to convince Lewis and the world of the value of Anthroposophy.

He was discouraged, too, by the failure of so many to grasp the magnitude of Hitler’s threat. World War II came to him, according to his grandson, as “a great trauma,” not least because of his love for German culture and language. On May 28, 1940, his mother died at the age of seventy-nine (his father had passed away just before the war); Lewis, in a letter of condolence sent a few days later, perceptively linked “this particular desolation … to the general one in which we all are.” As the war progressed, Barfield’s depression deepened; on August 20, 1942, Lewis described his friend as being “blue as a whortle-berry.” Barfield did what he could to ameliorate his situation. He wrote a short play on Jason and Medea, which he read before the Inklings in late November 1944. The reading was well received, but Barfield recalled years later making the unsettling discovery, when he had finished his presentation, that “at least three of those present … had written poems about Medea themselves in the past”—hardly a circumstance to assuage doubts about one’s literary originality.

During the same year, he published
Romanticism Comes of Age
with an obscure Anthroposophical publishing house. In 1945 he and Maud welcomed a third child into the family, Geoffrey Corbett (later Jeffrey Barfield), born June 6, 1940, a refugee from German air raids. Around the same time, he befriended Walter de la Mare, with whom he argued Steiner, poetry, and language at the Athenaeum Club and at de la Mare’s residence in Twickenham. Barfield helped his new friend improve at least one poem, “The Traveller,” and in turn de la Mare invited Barfield to lunch with T. S. Eliot, who seemed, Barfield thought, to carry around him an “aura of unhappiness”—but perhaps this was only a reflection of Barfield’s own pervasive gloom. Whatever the case, these rare upbeat moments served largely to accentuate his growing despair over powers unused, ideas spurned, a voice prematurely silenced.

Williams Unbound

Williams’s voice, on the other hand, was now reaching its highest development, in the lecture halls, pubs, and dons’ quarters of Oxford. In London he had lectured to night classes and weekend poets. In Oxford, within six months of arrival, he marched under Lewis’s auspices into the Divinity School to discourse on Milton’s
Comus
(a masque celebrating the inviolability of a true Lady’s virtue) and pulled off the remarkable and perhaps unprecedented coup of holding an undergraduate audience rapt with a paean to chastity (this was the talk that had triggered Dyson’s scornful remark about Williams being a common chastitute). Lewis, aglow with admiration, proclaimed that “that beautiful carved room had probably not witnessed anything so important since some of the great mediaeval or Reformation lectures. I have at last, if only for once, seen a university doing what it was founded to do: teaching Wisdom.”

Williams was overjoyed. Finally he had arrived in the intellectual firmament, a heaven on earth peopled, for once in his life, by men. “Am I only to be followed by the feminine?” he asked his wife on March 5, answering the rhetorical question in the negative before adding, in high-spirited tribute to her, that “you will be attended—you—by the masculine minds, great minds, strong males, brothers of our energy—those who know our work—Lewis & Eliot & Raymond & Tolkien & the young males; and they, having read me, will look for You & walk round you, & admire, & say ‘This was the Origin of all, and the continual Friend and Supporter.’” He knew what his wife wanted to hear—sometimes it seemed to him that he knew what every woman wanted to hear—and he bragged to Florence that “it was Anne [Ridler], I think, who once wrote that I was about as aware of women as Jesus Christ; it is (omitting the comparison) largely true.”