An Evening with the Inklings - Owen Barfield

[MUSIC PLAYING]Well, I'd like to start, if I may.But just for this group, I need to say some wordsby way of introduction, which is thank youvery much for having us here.This is a great occasion for all of usto recreate what the Inklins are.And I think the Inklins still live, if you like.Their spirit lives.And this is what we're exploring and seeingtake that forward. In my case, I've always been Owen Barfield all my life andgrandfather's been grandfather all my life, but my journey with the Inklingshas only been 15 years or so since I was appointed as literary trustee and I kindof started looking into his work, reading his work and studying his work. And fromtime to time, very rarely I get invited to give a talk, sometimes here at Oxfordas well. And whenever I'm at Oxford, I always start or try to say, if there's anyone inthe room, any academics who can read and explain, particularly Barfield, please step forwardbecause I don't really want to be here. I'd rather somebody else be here doing this rightnow. But there just is nobody. You wouldn't have found a stand in. So I'm sorry, but ithas to be me. But who knows, maybe one day somebody will step forward. And I don't thinkit's because people at Oxford University are particularly dim. Also you might have yourown opinions about that. I think it's because it's sort of counter-cultural, you know, andit's even more counter-cultural to be an Inkling now than when the Inklings were being Inklings.So even then it was unfashionable to talk about things like Christ. Now, you know, youreally be putting yourself outside of the norm to talk about Christ. So I think there'smaybe that and we need to overcome it and find those champions that will come forward.Since in 15 years of asking I've had no response at all from anybody, I'm going to try anothertat and I'm going to say there were some clever people, their names were Lewis and Tolkien.they heard what grandfather was telling them, they listened carefully and they applied itin their fictional work, their fantasy literature incorporated Bartheldean philosophy and theywere phenomenally successful as Oxford academics. Now other people have also incorporated grandfather'sphilosophy and probably he was most popular in the 1970s because he was a professor inAmerica then. And there were some Americans like Saul Bellow and Howard Nemiroff. HowardNemiroff went off and he was poet laureate for America and Pulitzer Prize winner. Andeven right now there's a lady called Susanna Clark and she's written a novel called Piranesi.She was told about Barfield through Malcolm Gite and Piranesi's just won the 2021 Women'sprize for fiction. So if you read Barfield and understand what he said and apply it toyour fiction, I'm not saying that you will be instantly successful, but I'm saying yourlife will be incredibly enriched. You will be like Tolkien. You'll never be able to seethe world again. Everything will take on a new meaning to you. So I think I've said enough,Yeah, please can someone start looking at this? Right, when I was asked to pick something toread, I thought, okay, what do I do? And I thought, well, I'll just start at the beginning.So the first in clean book that was ever published was a fairy tale by Barfield. And Barfield sharedit with his best friend, C.S. Lewis. And Lewis had shared it with his friend, Tolkien, when Tolkienhad kids. Both of them had really admired it. Tolkien in particular, because he got the feedbackfrom the children as he read it to the children. They didn't want the book to be handed back toLewis and Lewis fed that back to Barthew. So let's start at the beginning. So this is a bookthat was published in 1925. It was published by Faber and Gwyer who are the precursors toFaber and Faber and this is the year that T.S. Eliot joined Faber and Faber and T.S. Eliot andBarfield knew each other very well and there's a sort of a long relationship there. So let's juststart with the reading and I'll stand up if you don't mind. It's not too long this reading buthere we are. The Silver Trumpet by Owen Barfield, part one, chapter one. So it starts like this.Once upon a time there were two little princesses whose names were Violetta and Gambetta and theylived in Mountaigne Castle. They were twins, and they were so like each other that when Violettacame in from a walk with her feet wet, Gambetta was sometimes told to go and change her stockingsbecause the Queen couldn't tell which from the other. But that didn't happen often because ifPrincess Violetta was out for a walk, Princess Gambetta was almost sure to be with her. Indeed,they were so fond of one another that you might have thought they were tied together with a string.All the same, the Queen used to be so fussed and worried by the confusion that, what withone thing and another, she persuaded the King to appoint a special Lord to distinguish betweenthem. And he was called the Lord Highteller of Other from Which. The first thing he didafter he was given this office was to decree that everyone should call them by shorternames because, as he said, their names both ended with -etta and that made it much harder to tell."Why does it make it harder to tell?" said the king. "I don't see why it should make it harder.""Never mind why, your majesty," the lord highteller replied firmly, "but it does.""Very well," said his majesty, "I think you are rather a fool, but I will do as you say and I willsee that my subjects do as you say because this is your job and not mine and he went off hunting.So after that one of the sisters was called princess violet and the other was calledprincess gamboy. Now as it happens the lord Hytela the other from which was not a fool at all but avery wise man and he had noticed something about the two little princesses which nobody else hadnoticed. Moreover, he knew a great deal about the magic power of names. For soon after he had giventhem these new names, everybody else began to notice the same thing too. And before very long,it was the rarest thing in the world for anybody about the court to mistake one for the other.But first, you must know how it came about that these two princesses were so much alike,even after they were quite tall girls.Right.I mean, people are probably unfamiliar with this book, and Ican't hold that against you because it's not published. Soone of the things I want to do is find a publisher, you know,there's so many things to do, but they're publishing this bookis one on my to-do list. But I was wondering, well somebody's got to say something aboutthis book so we might as well see what grandfather said about it. And so grandfather explainedthat this book, this story of his, he wanted it for general consumption, a children's story,but he wanted to bring out the importance of the romantic element in relationships betweena man and a woman. But more widely than that, the importance of the feeling element in life.And the silver trumpet of the title is a symbol of the feeling element in life, which getshidden and then is discovered again.So that feeling element as grandfather understood it is really a spiritual attribute of thesoul.There are three principal spiritual attributes.is the central one, which is bounded on both sides by thought and will, an active and apassive. So you have this idea of active, passive and rhythm with feeling in the middleas a spiritual element of the soul. And of course, there's a prince that comes into thestory and the princess marries the prince. And the princess is again, that soul unitingwith the higher ego, if you like. So this is kind of the narrative of grandfather, whichhe was consistent. Everything he wrote was the same thing. So grandfather said, "I justsaid the same thing time and time again. I just wrote it different ways. Plays, novels,fairy tales, everything. He was just saying the same thing, which is that we have a soul,a spiritual component to that soul, and there's a destiny to sort of find our ego, if youlike. Was that the only fairy tale he wrote? He wrote some others, shorter ones, but thiswas published by Faber and Fager. It's very early for the Inklings group. You think ofthem as fairy tale writers, but that precedes, I mean, you can really see it appealing toLewis and Tolkien, certainly in the way that Lewis was such a fan of the George McDonaldsort of Curdie stories. It feels in that kind of, that sort of genre to me. Proof of conceptas well, because I think they would have got the philosophy that lies behind it. Therewas already a philosophy there.Yeah. And the idea of two indistinguishable twins with similar names also makes me thinkof the horse and his boy.The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was written for and dedicated to Lucy Barthew, my aunt.And he, you know, what Lewis was the Godfather of Lucy. So he was kind of involved with theBartholdt children as well.Yeah, absolutely. Well, there's that wonderful letter at the beginning, isn't there, wherehe says, you know, I wrote this for you and you're a girl, but probably by the time, becauseyou grow up faster than I write stories. By the time I finished it, you'd be too old toread it.But they're never too old really, you know, to read the underlying message from the photo.That theme of names and the magic of names was something that all the A-pins share.Yeah, I tried to emphasize that bit, the magic of names. And Grandfather's next book wasHistory in English Words. So his theme was the evolution of consciousness, that's whathis theme was. But he looked at it in evidence in language, which is where he connected withTolkien and philology, they were both philologists and their love of language.And that book on poetic diction. Poetic diction came next. Poetic diction was his thesis at OxfordUniversity which he had written as an undergraduate but he couldn't find a supervisor. Nobody couldsupervise him writing that book so he just like hung there and then a few years later he published ithaving dedicated it to Lewis of course. And Lewis referred to it all the time in his lectures.Yes, I'd say Charles Williams, maybe we can say a bit more about this later, but he saw himselfas carrying forward a poetic tradition and he's clearly astutely older poets like Swinburne andkind of going right back to Shakespeare and Spencer and how he constructs his verse. AndI wasn't really in fashion at the time. What was in fashion was more like the love song of J. AlfredPrufrock and Elliot and that school, Pound and the rest of it. And Williams didn't see himself asdoing something that was in fashion necessarily, but really speaking to what he saw as important.Perhaps with that kind of fairytale mode being not something that Williams ever did, but in thatsame vein of wanting to find the true and represent it in a way that's startling to thecurrent age?Well, poetry is keen there because both Lewis and Barford, when they first met each other,saw themselves as poets first and foremost. They had a kind of self-image as poets, butthey were undergraduates. Neither of them were that successful as poets, it should besaid. But Grandfather wrote long narrative poems and he finally got it published twoyears ago. So the Tower, which he wrote, has only just been published. And his long novelhas yet to be published. So, you know, this is a story that's still unfolding. So hisnovel is called English People, yet to be published. So there we have it. But yeah,they were introduced together as, oh, you two are poets, you'll get on. And they kindto do. So poetry is very important and seeing themselves as a poet and the romantic elementin life as well, which is what the fairy tale brings through.I don't know how encouraging this is for the creative writing team here, who are hopingto get published within the next century.I'm just saying you had to take a long overview. I mean, grandfather always said that, well,I don't know if he always said it, he told me once. So it was 1985 and I was helpingpack up some stuff because he was moving from one place to another. And he said, you know,it'll be 50 years before my work is sort of accepted or acceptable in society. So 50 yearstakes us to 2035. So, you know, the fact that we're even talking about it now, we're aheadof the curve. So well done on being here. But I think he's, I think he was right. Youhe was right about a lot of things and I think he was right about that too. The society is just notyet ready to hear what he was saying. A few intelligent people could pick it up like Lewisand Tolkien and they could incorporate it in the word. And I always thought that Lewis was a sortof signpost to Tolkien, you know, that they worked on that level that Lewis was writing for thecontemporary audience then and through Lewis they'll find Barfield. But if you know Barfieldand then read back Lewis as I've started to do, you know, it's incredible the sort ofrichness that you can get out of Lewis because you're sort of reading back and you're seeingso much more of what he's saying, knowing what Barfield was saying.Because they were talking together all the time.And that's just starting to emerge. So there's a sort of C.S. Lewis scholar who just on FacebookI noticed he made a remark and he said when Lewis talks about language and magic in thathideous strength, that book, the hideous strength, he's dripping with Barfield. So I mean thatwas last week. I stuck that on Facebook. I'm just trying to show that people are startingto come to become aware of it. So if you want to say something original about C.S. Lewisand over dinner we would discuss in how many books we think have been published by C.S.Lewis, on C.S. Lewis and the consensus was around 10,000 books have been written abouthim. If you want to say something new, read Barfield and then talk about Lewis. I've gotanother little note that I wrote to myself which is, people were saying, "Well who isbody? Who is this body? He's really the Inklings to the Inklings, like a sort of a catchphrase,if you like. So not only the first and last Inklings, but he was the Inklings' Inklings.And in a way that refers to kind of the Apostle's Apostle, Mary Madeline,she's sort of in the background, hidden, doesn't get a prominent role, but you know,so much there, so much presence, so it's so important, bringing in an element that wouldotherwise be missing. So I quite like that phrase as well. If anyone's got something else to sayrelating to that fairy tale or fairy tales in general, speak now because otherwise we'll moveon to our next Inkling, which Colin, is you representing Tolkien?Thanks for listening to Mythmakers Podcast, brought to you by the Oxford Centre for Fantasy.Visit OxfordCentreForFantasy.org to join in the fun. Find out about our online courses,person stays in Oxford, plus visit our shop for great gifts. Tell a friend andsubscribe wherever you find your favorite podcasts worldwide.(upbeat music)