Latest / Mythmakers / An Evening with the Inklings - Owen Barfield

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An Evening with the Inklings - Owen Barfield · Mythmakers

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Well, I'd like to start, if I may, but just for this group, I need to sort of say some
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words by way of introduction, which is thank you very much for having us here.
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This is a great occasion for all of us to sort of recreate what the inklings are.
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And I think, you know, the inklings still live, if you like, you know, their spirit lives,
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and this is what we're exploring and seeing how we can take that forward.
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Now, in my case, I've always been, oh, impartial all my life, and grandfather's been grandfather
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all my life.
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But my journey with the inkling, there's only been 15 years or so since I was appointed
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as literary trustee, and I kind of started looking into his work, reading his work, and
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studying his work.
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And from time to time, very rarely I get invited to give a talk, sometimes here at Oxford
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as well.
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And whenever I'm at Oxford, I always start or try to say, if there's anyone in the room
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in the academics who can read and explain, particularly Barfield, please step forward, because
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I don't really want to be here, you know, I'd rather somebody else be here doing this
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right now.
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But there just is nobody, you know, you wouldn't have found a standing.
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So, you know, I'm sorry, but it has to be me.
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But who knows maybe one day somebody will step forward.
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And I don't think it's because people at Oxford University are particularly dim, also you
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might have your own opinions about that.
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I think it's because it's sort of countercultural, you know, and it's even more countercultural
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to be an inkling now than when the inklings were being inklings.
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So even then it was unfashionable to talk about things like Christ.
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Now, you know, you really be putting yourself outside of the norm to talk about Christ.
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So I think there's maybe that and we need to sort of overcome it and find those champs
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tunes that will come forward.
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Since in 15 years of asking, I've had no response at all from anybody, I'm going to try another
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tact.
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And I'm going to say there were some clever people, their names were Lewis and Tolkien.
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They heard what grandfather was telling them.
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They listened carefully and they applied it in their fictional work, their fantasy literature
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incorporated Barfieldian philosophy and they were phenomenally successful as Oxford academics.
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Now other people have also incorporated grandfather's philosophy and probably he was most popular
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in the 1970s because he was a professor in America then and there were some Americans
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like Saul Bello and Howard Nemerov, Howard Nemerov went off and he was poet laureate
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for America and the Pulitzer Prize winner.
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And even right now there's a lady called Susanna Clark and she's written a novel called
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Pyreneesy.
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She was told about Barfield through Malcolm Guite and Pyreneesy's just one, the 2021
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woman's prize for fiction.
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So if you read Barfield and understand what he said and apply it to your fiction, I'm
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not saying that you will be instantly successful but I'm saying your life will be incredibly
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enriched.
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You will be like Tolkien, you'll never be able to see the world again, everything will
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take on a new meaning to you.
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So I think I said enough but yeah, please can someone start looking at this, right?
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And I was asked to pick something to read, I thought, okay, what do I do?
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And I thought, well, I'll just start at the beginning.
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So the first inkling book that was ever published was a fairy tale by Barfield.
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And Barfield has shared it with his best friend, C.S. Lewis and Lewis had shared it with
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his friend Tolkien when Tolkien had kids.
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Both of them had really admired it, Tolkien in particular because you got the feedback
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from the children as you read it to the children.
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They didn't want the book to be handed back to Lewis and Lewis fed that back to Barfield.
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So let's start at the beginning.
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So this is a book that was published in 1925.
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It was published by Faber and Guaya, who the precursor to Faber and Faber.
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And this is the year that T.S. Eliot joined Faber and Faber and T.S. Eliot and Barfield
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knew each other very well, there's a long relationship there.
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So let's just start with the reading.
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And I'll stand up if you don't mind.
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It's not too long this reading.
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But here we are.
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The Silver Trump hit by Owen Barfield, part one, chapter one, so let's start like this.
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Once upon a time, there were two little princesses whose names were Violeta and Gambetta, and
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they lived in Mount Anycastle.
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They were twins, and they were so like each other that when Violeta came in from a walk
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with her feet wet, Gambetta was sometimes told to go and change her stockings, because
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the Queen couldn't tell which from the other.
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But that didn't happen often, because if Princess Violeta was out for a walk, Princess
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Gambetta was almost sure to be with her.
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Indeed, they were so fond of one another that you might have thought they were tied together
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with a string.
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All the same, the Queen used to be so fussed and worried by the confusion that, what
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with one thing and another, she persuaded the King to appoint a special Lord to distinguish
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between them.
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And he was called the Lord High Teller of Other From Which.
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The first thing he did, after he was given this office, was to decree that everyone should
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carry them, should call them by shorter names, because, as he said, their names both ended
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with etter, and that made it much harder to tell.
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Why does it make it harder to tell, said the King?
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I don't see why it should make it harder.
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Never mind why your Majesty, the Lord High Teller applied firmly, but it does.
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Very well, said his Majesty, I think you are rather a fool, but I will do as you say,
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and I will see that my subjects do as you say, because this is your job and not mine,
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and he went off hunting.
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So after that, one of the sisters was called Princess Violet, and the other was called
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Princess Gamboy.
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Now, as it happens, the Lord High Teller of Other From Which was not a fool at all, but
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a very wise man, and he had noticed something about the two little princesses, which nobody
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else had noticed.
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Moreover, he knew a great deal about the magic power of names.
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For soon, after he had given them these new names, everybody else began to notice the
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same thing too.
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And before very long, it was the rarest thing in the world for anybody about the court
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to mistake one for the other.
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But first, you must know how it came about that these two princesses were so much alike
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even after they were quite tall girls.
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Right.
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I mean, people are probably unfamiliar with this book, and I can't hold it against you,
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because it's not published.
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So one of the things I want to do is find a publisher.
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There's so many things to do about that.
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Publishing this book is one of my to-do lists.
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But I was wondering, well, somebody's got to say something about this book.
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So we might as well see what grandfather said about it.
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And so grandfather explained that this book, this story of his, he wanted it for general
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consumption, a children's story, but he wanted to bring out the importance of the romantic
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element in relationships between a man and a woman.
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But more widely than that, the importance of the feeling element in life.
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And the silver trumpet of the title is a symbol of the feeling element in life, which
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gets hidden and then is discovered again.
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So that feeling element is grandfather understood it is really a spiritual attribute of the
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soul.
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There's three principal spiritual attributes.
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Feeling is the central one, which is bounded on both side by thought and will, and active
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and a passive.
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So you have this idea of active, passive and rhythm with feeling in the middle as a spiritual
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element of the soul.
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And of course, there's a prince that comes into the story and the princess marries the
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prince.
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And the princess is again, that soul uniting with the higher ego, if you like.
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So this is kind of the narrative of grandfather, which he was consistent, everything he wrote
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was the same thing.
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So grandfather said, I just said the same thing time and time again.
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I just wrote it different ways, plays, novels, fairy tales, everything he was just saying,
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the same thing, which is that we have a soul, a spiritual component of that soul, and
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there's a destiny to sort of find our ego, if you like.
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Was that the only fairy tale that he wrote?
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He wrote some others shorter ones, but this was published by Favourite Favourite Favourite
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Favourite.
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It was very early for the inkling spirit, we think of them as fairy tale writers, but
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that pre-deceit, you know, precedes, I mean you can really see it appealing to Lewis
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and Tolkien, certainly, in the way that there was such a fan of the George McDonald's
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sort of courty stories.
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It feels in that kind of, that sort of genre to me.
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Pretty for concept as well, because I think they would have got the philosophy that lies
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behind it.
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Yeah.
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Because there was already a philosophy there.
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Yeah.
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And the idea of two indistinguishable twins with similar names also makes me think of
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the horse and his boy.
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I mean, the lion with which the wardrobe was written for and dedicated to Lucy Barfield
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my aunt, and he, you know, what Lewis was the godfather of Lucy.
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So he was kind of involved with the Barfield children as well.
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Yeah.
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Well, there's that wonderful letter at the beginning, isn't there, when he says, you
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know, I write this for you and you're a girl, but probably by the two, because you grew
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up faster than it, than I write stories, but by the time I finished it, you'd be too
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old to read it.
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Right.
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Yeah.
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But we know a two-old really, you know, to read the underlying message from the whole thing.
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Right.
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Yeah.
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And that theme of the names and the magical name was something that all the aliens know.
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Yeah.
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I try to emphasize that bit, the magic of names, that's exactly.
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And Grandfather's next book was history and English words.
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So his theme was the evolution of consciousness, that's what his theme was, but he looked
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at it in evidence in language, which is where he connected with Tolkien and philology,
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that they were both phyrongists, and their love of language.
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And that book on poetic diction.
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Poetic diction came next.
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Poetic diction was his thesis at Oxford University, which he had written as an undergraduate,
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but he couldn't find a supervisor.
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Nobody could supervise him, right?
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So he just hung there.
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Yeah.
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And then a few years later he published it, having dedicated it to Lewis, of course.
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And Lewis referred to it all the time as lectures.
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Yeah.
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As I say, Williams, Charles Williams, I'm going to say a bit more about this later, but
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he saw himself as Harry Freud, a poetic tradition, and he's clearly asleep all the poets
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like Swinburne and kind of going right back to Shakespeare and Spence and how he instructs
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his verse.
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And I wasn't really in fashion at the time, what was in fashion was more like the love song
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of jail for proofrock and Elliot and that school, pound and the rest of it, and Williams
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didn't see himself as doing something that was in fashion necessarily, but really speaking
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to what he saw is important.
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Perhaps with that kind of fairytale mode, not something that Williams ever did, but in
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that same vein of wanting to find the tree and represent it in a way that's startling
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to the current age.
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Well, poetry is keen there because both Lewis and Barford, when they first met each other,
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saw themselves as poets first and foremost, they had a kind of self-indigenous poetry,
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but they were on the graduates.
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Near then, that successful as poetry should be there, but grandfather wrote long narrative
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poems, and he finally published two years ago, so the tower which he wrote has only just
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been published.
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And his long novel has yet to be published.
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So this is a story that's still unfolded, so his novel is called English People Yet to
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be published.
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So there we have it, but yeah, they were introduced together as, oh, you two are poets, you'll
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get on.
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And they kind of did.
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So poetry is very important and seeing themselves as a poet and the romantic element in life
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as well, which is what the very suffering is through.
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I don't know how encouraging this is for the creative writing team here.
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Oh, yeah, can you get published within the next century?
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I'm just saying you have to take a long view.
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When grandfather always said that, well, I don't know if he always said it, he told me
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once.
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So it was 1985, and I was helping him pack up some stuff because he was moving from
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one place to another.
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And he said, you know, you'll be 50 years before my work is sort of accepted or acceptable
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in society.
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So 50 years takes us to 2035.
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So, you know, the fact that we're even talking about it now we're ahead of the curve.
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So well done.
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I'm being.
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But I think he's, I think he was right, you know, he was right about a lot of things and
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I think he was right about that too.
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The society is just not yet ready to hear what he was saying.
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A few intelligent people could pick it up like Lewis and Tolkien and they could incorporate
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it in the word.
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And I always thought that Lewis was a sort of signpost to Tolkien, you know, that they
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worked on that, on that level that, you know, Lewis was writing for a contemporary audience
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then.
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And through Lewis, they'll find Barfield, but if you know Barfield and then read Bar
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Lewis as I've started to do, you know, he's incredible, the sort of richness that you
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can get out of Lewis because you're sort of reading, bagging, you've seen so much more
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of what he's saying.
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You know, in what Barfield was saying.
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Because they were talking together all the time.
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They were talking together.
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Yeah.
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And that's just starting to emerge.
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So there's a sort of CS Lewis scholar who just, just on Facebook, I noticed, made a remark
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and he said, when Lewis talks about language and magic in that hideous strength, that book,
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the hideous strength, he's dripping with Barfield.
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So I mean, that was last week, stuck that on Facebook, that's anybody reads Facebook,
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it's the off.
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I'm just trying to show that people are starting to come, they've become aware of it.
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So if you want to say something original about CS Lewis and over dinner, we would discuss
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in how many books we think have been published by CS Lewis, on CS Lewis and the consensus
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was around 10,000 books have been written about him.
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If you want to say something new, Re Barfield, and then talk about Lewis, I've got another
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little note that I wrote to myself, which is, people were saying, well, who is Barfield?
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Who is this Barfield?
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He's really the inkling to the inkling, like a sort of catch phrase, if you like.
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So not only the first and last inkling, but he was the inkling's inkling.
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And in a way that refers to the apostles' apostle, Mary Madeline, she's sort of in the background
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hidden, doesn't get a prominent role, but so much there, so much presence, so important,
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bringing in an element that would otherwise be this, so I quite like that phrase as well.
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If anyone's got sunny hours to say relating to that fairy tale, fairy tales in general,
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speak now, because otherwise we'll move on to our next inkling, which Colin is you representing
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Tolkien?
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Thanks for listening to MythMaker's podcast, brought to you by the Oxford Centre for