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Owen Barfield: First and Last Inklings
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16955 |
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MODERN THOUGHT
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4 / 1990 |
5,716 Words |
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George B. Tennyson
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In 1919 two relatively new Oxford undergraduates met each other for the first time over tea in the quarters of a fellow student. They could not know that they were making literary history. They could not even know that the meeting was the beginning of a lifelong friendship that would be both social and intensely intellectual. But in retrospect tit is clear that the meeting was a notable literary event as well as the beginning of a long friendship - for it was the first encounter of two extraordinary minds. The two students were Owen Barfield and C.S. Lewis.
C.S. Lewis went on to become an enormously popular writer of fiction, theology, and literary criticism, read by millions throughout the world. Barfield is one of the most original and penetrating thinkers of our time, known to a smaller but highly discriminating and dedicated readership. From the time of their first encounter, Barfield and Lewis found that they deeply agreed and disagreed with each other on important questions. They continued doing so until Lewis's death in 1963 and, as will become clear, even beyond. The story of the friendship of Owen Barfield and C.S. Lewis is the story of their individual geniuses and, by anticipation and implication, the story of the group arising from the friendship known as the Oxford Inklings. The story of their long friendship is also a fitting way to introduce to a wider public the thought and career of Owen Barfield.
FIRST INKLINGS
When Barfield and Lewis met, each had been released only months before from military service in the conflict that had ended late in the previous year, the war then still known as the Great War. A generation later it would come to be known as the First World War, but the Great War was the current term at that time and one that Barfield and Lewis would, by the mid twenties, appropriate for an extended though unbloody debate of their own. But in 1919, when the two met in Oxford in the rooms of a mutual friend named Leo Baker, they were more interested in forgetting the unpleasantness of the late war than in reliving it. It was the stimulation of intellectual combat and exchange that they sought after having both had their earlier enrollments at Oxford interrupted by the war years. Each was a voracious reader and each had literary aspirations. Each would find in the other simultaneously a kindred spirit and a worthy intellectual antagonist.
Barfield and Lewis were exactly the same age, Barfield having preceded Lewis into the world by almost three weeks in November 1898. Both came from professional families: Barfield was from a solicitor's family in London; Lewis was also the son of a solicitor, but we was from Belfast in Ireland (not yet "Northern Ireland," with all that that implies). At the time of their meeting in 1919, both were resident in their respective Oxford colleges: Barfield at Wadham College, Lewis at University College. For the next several years, they would both believing in and around Oxford as they pursued their degrees at the heightened pace encouraged by an overcrowded postwar university. They would see each other frequently, engaging in the kind of lively discussions of topics great and small that have marked student life since at least the time of the first Academy.
But with Barfield and Lewis, there was a special quality to their exchanges, best captured in Lewis' account of his friendship with Barfield as he recalled it many years later in his
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