The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings (79 page)

“It is rather queer, after a lifetime of writing (in so far as it was spent in writing at all) almost unread, as it seemed, and usually very nearly unpublished books, to keep on being told at the age of 70 that they have really meant something to quite a few people,” remarked Barfield to the American scholar R. J. Reilly in 1969. “I think perhaps I was a very lucky man.” Luck, or reward for years of uncompensated effort, was flying his way at last. After his Brandeis stint, he returned home to England for a year, then traveled back to America to teach, again at Drew University and then at Hamilton College, which awarded him an honorary doctorate. Hamilton’s small size and its original aim of turning “Red Indians into Christian gentleman,” as Barfield put it to Harwood, added a “not unpleasingly Gilbert & Sullivan touch to the whole proceeding, but that doesn’t prevent it from tickling my vanity.” Every bit as gratifying was an essay by G. B. Tennyson, an English professor at UCLA, in
The Southern Review
(Winter 1969) on “Owen Barfield and the Rebirth of Meaning.” This was the first serious academic appraisal of Barfield’s work. Tennyson provides a genial summary of his subject’s career, laying out Barfield’s views on philology and consciousness—including a dose of Anthroposophy—while contending, with an enthusiasm that edges into advocacy, that “his researches into the nature of poetry and inspiration have repeatedly taken him to the secret places of the spirit.”

His self-confidence growing yet stronger from these intoxicating endorsements, Barfield began to renew his contact with other Inklings. Nevill Coghill expressed thanks for a “charming” message and passed along the disclosure, undoubtedly an eye-opener to Barfield, that he, too, suffered from self-doubts, and that they had crippled his chances of getting as close to Lewis as Barfield and Williams had managed to do: “I always felt that there was too little I could contribute in exchange for the time it took from him,” Coghill wrote. “Towards the end … we had more frequent meetings. But it was too late to establish
new
kinds of insight and sympathy.” Barfield, continuing his Inkling outreach, traveled at least twice to the Kilns during the late 1960s for overnight stays with Warnie. During a visit on July 29–30, 1969, he shocked his host by admitting to a firm belief in reincarnation. That this essential feature of Anthroposophy came as news to Warnie tells us just how innocent he had been of his brother’s intellectual battles, including the Lewis-Barfield “Great War.” In the late 1970s, Barfield also revived his correspondence with Colin Hardie, who wrote that “I am so glad to hear from you again. I cannot remember when we last corresponded, but only that you deplored my acceptance of evolution” (one imagines this was not the first time Barfield received that particular response). Hardie continued, in an old man’s vein, that “since the
Times
(fortunately to reappear, at what price?, next week) vanished”—the newspaper was on strike—“one hasn’t known who is alive, and I am glad that you are and are still writing and thinking about Coleridge … I am feeling a slow decay (e.g. of memory and teeth).”

Letters, in these halcyon days of the late 1960s and ’70s, now poured in to Barfield from ardent admirers, some of them major figures in the countercultural thinking that had mesmerized a large portion of the American intelligentsia. Theodore Roszak told him of the nation’s hunger for spiritual rebirth, David Bohm discussed quantum physics and polarity, and Norman O. Brown, author of the mantic, enigmatic
Love’s Body
, wrote that he was rereading Steiner’s
Cosmic Memory
and hunting for a commentary on root-races and Atlanteans. Intellectual revolution was in the air, and the soft-spoken English lawyer-philosopher who preached the evolution of consciousness fit right in. Barfield was invited to teach at the University of Missouri (Columbia), and, in later years, at SUNY Stony Brook and the University of British Columbia. Harwood wrote to say that “I heard from Walter Hooper that you were getting VIP treatment in America.” Readers sent him political manifestos, accounts of their dreams and visions, requests for spiritual guidance, and an avalanche of bulky manuscripts, many mad, poorly written, or both; he answered all courteously, often at length. Maud, impressed by her husband’s newfound fame, reassessed her rejection of his esoteric path and came to see, as he recalled, “that I wasn’t just a fanatic or a fool … when it came to anthroposophy.” Now in her eighties, she was aging rapidly and weighed down by worries, especially over their daughter Lucy, who had fallen victim to multiple sclerosis and become a shut-in. “She is not well enough to
do
anything or
go
anywhere,” wrote Barfield to an American correspondent. “What a life for a young woman of 35 or so. The thought of it gnaws at my vitals all the time.”

Still, the fight against RUP must go on, along with the broader battle to demonstrate the spiritual basis of mind and matter. In 1971, Barfield advanced his campaign by publishing
What Coleridge Thought
, his last major book and the summing-up of decades of research and analysis. In what may well be his magnum opus, he sets out to demonstrate that Coleridge’s work presents an original and coherent philosophy that offers a key to the nature of consciousness. Barfield proceeds thematically, exploring—often by looking at literary fragments passed over by many earlier scholars—Coleridge’s views on thinking, nature, life, imagination, understanding, reason, law, God, society, and so on. He concludes that Coleridge’s philosophy is neither a haphazard by-product of opium, poetizing, and an overheated imagination, nor a rehash of Platonism, Protestantism, and idealism, but a rich, completely satisfying worldview resting squarely upon the law of polarity.

That Coleridge believed in such a law seems incontestable, given this passage from his 1818 “Treatise on Method”: “Contemplating in all Electrical phenomena the operation of a Law which reigns through all Nature, viz. the law of
polarity
, or the manifestation of one power by opposite forces.” Barfield emphasizes that Coleridge’s view of polarity has little in common with the reconciliation of opposites so frequently evoked in modern literary and psychological studies; Barfield dismisses the latter as an academic abstraction, whereas polarity, in the Coleridgean sense, is a living, creative, fructifying power. As Barfield describes it, “Where logical opposites are contradictory, polar opposites are generative of each other—and together generative of new product.”

Interpenetrating opposites generating a “new product” is, of course, also a description of sexual reproduction, and, from a broader perspective, of the process of evolution. Barfield argues that Coleridge provides the receptive modern thinker with “a full-fledged theory of evolution alternative to, and largely incompatible with, the one he has been taught to revere.” The incompatibility is twofold. It resides not only in the mechanism of evolution, which Coleridge ascribes to intermingling forces rather than random mutation, but also in the realization—very hard for most modern thinkers to swallow—that in nature everything, rocks as well as animals, evolves. To accept these truths requires an act of imagination, in the special (Steinerian) sense of perceiving subtle spiritual truths. Meditating on polarity leads to such truths, for “the apprehension of polarity,” Barfield argues, “is itself
the basic act of imagination
[Barfield’s italics],” and leads to astonishing discoveries. For example, according to Barfield, Coleridge realized, in the course of his reflections, that nature and mind are inseparable. It was no idle fancy when the poet imagined a major force in evolution to be a
“Yearning”
that is “hallowing, sanctifying.” This means, as Barfield explains in one of those explosive observations that he tends to unleash almost in passing, that scientific materialism is dead, that “the whole Laplace-Lyell-Darwin, closed-system universe (together with its fancied billions of earth-years and millions of ‘light-years’)” must be jettisoned.

What takes its place, according to Barfield’s reading of Coleridge, is a spiritual vision of polar forces—God/man, man/nature, will/reason, and many more—suffusing the evolutionary process, with Christ’s advent as the pivotal event in the process. Coleridge, in other words, “Like Hegel … was moving on from the notion of a history of thought (‘history of ideas’ as it is commonly called) towards that of an evolution of consciousness.” Coleridge failed to attain this holy grail of understanding because the required imaginative leap was too great, the old way of thinking too imbedded. Nonetheless, Barfield concludes, Coleridge anticipated and came close to attaining the visionary breakthrough achieved a century later by Steiner, whose presence, as readers familiar with Barfield’s work will have perceived long ago, informs so much of the book.

Many critics enthused over
What Coleridge Thought
. In the
Journal of the American Academy of Religion
, the historian of religion Antony C. Yu praises Barfield’s presentation as “orderly and lucid,” while in
Studies in Romanticism
, the literary critic G. A. Cevasco calls it (along with the highly controversial
Coleridge: The Damaged Angel
by Norman Fruman, which paints the poet as a plagiarist and liar) “quite indispensable to serious students of Coleridge.” Neither reviewer, however, confronted the radical conclusions of Barfield’s argument. Another Coleridge expert by the name of John Colmer did, and his report in
Modern Language Review
bristles with caveats. He applauds Barfield for his “admirable grasp of the totality of Coleridge’s thought” but accuses him of slighting the complexities of Coleridge’s philosophical arguments. Yet more damagingly, Colmer asserts that Coleridge was “being used” by Barfield “to combat all the aspects of modern materialism that the author most dislikes.” Colmer challenges in particular the “uncritical coupling” of Coleridge and Steiner, “minds of such dissimilar quality.” Barfield could not have been happy with this review. He welcomed intellectual disagreements but chafed at those that he thought misrepresented his views; a report in
The Review of English Studies
by the Wordsworth scholar W.J.B. Owen so incensed him with its failure to grasp his argument that he shot off protest letters to the author and to the editor of the journal.

Despite the objections of Colmer and Owen, Barfield scored a major triumph with
What Coleridge Thought.
He had made his mark in Coleridge studies—while in his seventies!—and, by so doing, had sailed out of the backwaters of Anthroposophical argumentation and philological-historical analysis into the mainstream of English literary criticism, establishing himself as a serious, astute analyst of one of Romanticism’s most enigmatic poets and essayists. His scholarly stature grew apace, and for much of the next two decades he taught, lectured, and wrote with sterling credentials as an intellectual celebrity in his own right, rather than solely as Lewis’s bosom friend. He made no further advances in Coleridge studies, however. In the late 1970s, he agreed to edit the poet’s “Lectures on the History of Philosophy” for
The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge
, but his contribution foundered, a victim of his advanced years and his lack of expertise in scholarly editing
. What Coleridge Thought
struck gold, and in doing so, exhausted the vein.

Into the Dark

On July 19, 1967, Tolkien traveled to London to receive, along with Dame Rebecca West, the A. C. Benson Silver Medal from the Royal Society of Literature. He told the audience at the ceremony that, of all the rewards of writing
The Lord of the Rings
, “I think that receiving this silver medal is the most astonishing as it is the most delightful.” De rigueur politeness aside, he meant it. The Royal Society was an arbiter of British literary taste; however loudly his detractors scoffed, the medal spoke more loudly still. He was now and would be forevermore a recognized figure in the history of English letters. The pleasure surrounding this triumph was in part personal, the satisfaction of someone who, considering himself an amateur “in a world of great writers,” had bested the field. But it was also sheer joy at the triumph of his kind of narrative, replete with heroes, villains, fantastic beings, imaginary lands, and an absorbing plot. “And after all that has happened,” he told two reporters for
The Daily Telegraph Magazine
, speaking of himself and Lewis, “the most lasting pleasure and reward for both of us has been that we provided one another with stories to hear or read that we really liked.” The decades of doubt had ended; he knew now that the world liked them, too.

Yet still he kept the world at bay. Besieged by journalists, photographers, and readers, he “found none of them pleasant, nearly all of them a complete waste of time.” The portcullis descended, he refused to be photographed in his house, and he complained bitterly about interviews, even those that his publishers believed would boost sales. During the summer of 1968, Tolkien and Edith moved out of Oxford to Poole, a seaside resort on the English Channel, adjacent to Bournemouth, where they had vacationed since the early 1950s. Edith rejoiced in the change; she had felt isolated among the Oxford intelligentsia, while in Bournemouth she had friends who shared her interests in family, music, and the like. For Tolkien, the move meant the loss of friends, especially in academia, a painful sacrifice; still, he relished the prospect of escaping city bustle and, even more important, intrusions from nosy fans. He was at home in Oxford, preparing for the move, when on June 17 he tumbled down a flight of stairs. The accident resulted in an immediate operation at Nuffield Orthopaedic Centre. After a month in the hospital, fretting and fussing (and, at least at first, terrified that his leg would be amputated), he moved to Bournemouth, his leg encased in a plaster cast, where he rejoined Edith, who had preceded him.

The Tolkiens inhabited a small bungalow at 19 Lakeside Drive in Poole for more than three years. Tolkien likened it to “a ship or ark,” an appropriate image for a haven of escape from Oxford turmoil. Seen from the garden, the house resembled a ship, surrounded by roses instead of water. During his residence there, Tolkien produced several philological, etymological, and historical studies on his legendarium, covering such arcane themes as N
ú
men
ó
rean measurement, Rohan’s military matters, and Elvish reincarnation. Many of these pieces remained unfinished, some decaying into what Christopher Tolkien called “chaotic and illegible or unintelligible notes and jottings.” Wearing down, Tolkien was determined to pass on to the world as much knowledge of Middle-earth as possible. He longed to compile grammars of Quenya and Sindarin, and he continued to draw, in colored pencils and pen, curious Elvish heraldic designs and flowering or paisley doodles. “‘Stories’ still sprout in my mind from names,” he told his son Michael, asking for prayers that he might live long enough to record them.