A Golden Anniversary: Owen Barfield in America

by Jane Hipolito

A little more than half a century ago, the Saturday Evening Post published “The Rediscovery of Meaning,” an essay by the English anthroposophist Owen Barfield which it had commissioned for its “Adventures of the Mind” series. Barfield was a surprising choice for the series, as unlike most of the other contributors, who were internationally famous artists and thinkers, his work was known only to a very few at the time. This situation changed dramatically in the early 1960s. Barfield’s Saturday Evening Post essay was swiftly followed by numerous other mainstream publications and by lectures, interviews, conference appearances, and visiting professorships at several universities and colleges in the United States and Canada. To this day, Owen Barfield’s life and work continue to enkindle interest worldwide, and particularly in North America. Two of the most striking aspects of Barfield’s biography are its scope and variety. Owen Barfield’s life encompassed almost all of the twentieth century. When he crossed the threshold in December 1997, he was in his 100th year. Born in November 1898, during the reign of Queen Victoria, he came of age during the First World War and as an adult experienced the tremendous social and cultural changes which came about in the ensuing eight decades – among them, the emancipation of women, the birth of the environmental movement, and the development of numerous innovations that we now take for granted, including the airplane, electronic media, and computer technology.

During these same eight decades Barfield had three quite different careers. The first of these was as an independent “man of letters.” He began this career while he was a student at Oxford University, where he earned a “First” in the then new subject area of English language and literature and a Master’s and a B.Litt. degree (equivalent to a Ph.D.) in the same field. During that time and for some years thereafter, he wrote prolifically, publishing lyric poems, short stories, essays and reviews on literature, language, economics, key aspects of contemporary culture, and anthroposophy, to which he was introduced in 1923. He also published three books: The Silver Trumpet (1925), a magical and very witty fairytale for children of all ages; History in English Words (1926), which lovingly explores how the evolution of consciousness can be “read” in the changing meanings of English words; and Poetic Diction (1928), a lucid, insightful study of how poetry expresses meaning. Of these three, Poetic Diction has had the deepest and most lasting effect. As the American poet Howard Nemerov appreciatively wrote in his introduction to Poetic Diction’s 1964 edition.

Mr. Barfield and his book have been very little heard of in the United States during all this while [since Poetic Diction’s first publication in 1928]. But I should add that among the few poets and teachers of my acquaintance who do know Poetic Diction it has been valued not only as a secret book, but nearly as a sacred one; with a certain sense that its teaching was quite properly esoteric, not as the possession of a few snobs but as something that would easily fail of being understood by even the most learned of those jugheads whose mouths continually pour forth but whose ears will serve only for carrying purposes.

Barfield’s second career was as an attorney with a busy London practice. He entered the legal profession in 1931 because he needed to support his family and found that the prevailing cultural and economic situation made it impossible for him to do that as an author. During his years in the family law firm, Barfield and Barfield, he published much less voluminously than he had in the 1920s, but his writings attained new depth. Among them were the essay “Poetic Diction and Legal Fiction” (1947), the verse drama Orpheus, which premiered in 1948, and the autobiographical novel This Ever Diverse Pair (1950), as well as the many essays and poems which Barfield wrote for anthroposophical journals; some of those essays were anthologized in Romanticism Comes of Age (1944, second ed. 1966). In addition to the “very few poets and teachers” in North America who knew and cherished Poetic Diction, the principal audience for Barfield’s work throughout the 1930s and 1940s was the anthroposophical community in Great Britain and, to a lesser extent, students of anthroposophy elsewhere in the English-speaking world and in Europe. This was not a large readership, but it was a staunchly loyal and encouraging one, as Barfield gratefully noted in his introductions to the first and second editions of Romanticism Comes of Age.

Barfield’s third public at that time was even tinier – one man, in fact. He wrote a verse about it:

My public, though select and small, Is crammed with taste and knowledge. It’s somewhat stout and rather tall And lives at Magdalen College.

This “select and small” public for Barfield’s writings was C. S. Lewis, with whom he had been close friends since they were students at Oxford together. Throughout their friendship, which began in November 1919 and continued until Lewis’s death in November 1963, the two read and critiqued each other’s manuscripts. During the 1920s, they profoundly strengthened each other’s thinking via vigorous debate; Lionel Adey’s book C. S. Lewis’ “Great War” with Owen Barfield (1978, second ed. 2000) describes this turning point in both men’s lives. Beginning in 1931, Barfield served as Lewis’s legal advisor, a relationship which he humorously characterizes in This Ever Diverse Pair. The quality of their friendship also is indicated in the three zestfully comic pieces that they collaboratively wrote in the 1930s and 1940s: “Abecedarium Philosophicum” (1933), A Cretaceous Perambulator (written in 1936, first published in 1983), and Mark vs. Tristram (written in 1947, first published in 1967). In the 1950s the pressures of Barfield’s legal work abated somewhat, enabling him to write what is widely considered to be his most significant book, Saving the Appearances (1957), whose breadth of scholarship and clear, thoroughly integrative exposition of the meaning of the Scientific Revolution in world history soon attracted respectful interest in academic circles, particularly in North America.

The publication of Saving the Appearances marked the beginning of Barfield’s third career: internationally sought-after author, professor, and speaker on subjects ranging from contemporary physics to the nature of language. Two brilliant works of creative nonfiction, Worlds Apart (1963) and Unancestral Voice (1965), belong to this period, as do the masterly What Coleridge Thought (1971), The Rediscovery of Meaning, and Other Essays (1976), and two fascinating fictional works, the science fiction novella Night Operation (written in the mid-1970s and first published in 1983-84), and Barfield’s ecological novel Eager Spring (written in the mid-1980s and published posthumously in 2008). Important lectures which Barfield gave at North American colleges and universities were published in Speaker’s Meaning (1969) and History, Guilt and Habit (1979), and a great many of his essays and reviews were published in mainstream journals. In addition, Barfield contributed substantially to anthroposophical publications, as author, editor, and translator; one of the most notable of those anthroposophical writings is his rendering of Rudolf Steiner’s Seelenkalender, The Calendar of the Soul: The Year Participated (1985, second ed. 2006). And throughout these four decades he spoke and wrote frequently about C. S. Lewis and the Inklings; Owen Barfield on C. S. Lewis (1989, second ed. 2011) contains several of those pieces.

One of the chief reasons that Barfield’s work continues to have widespread appeal is that it has total authenticity. Barfield consistently spoke and wrote only what he had thought through for himself. In this respect, he exemplified the “independent and critical attitude” and reliance on one’s own “first-hand perception” that he praised in his first published writing about anthroposophy, a March 1924 letter to the editor of the progressive journal The New Age. Another hallmark of Barfield’s work is that he never ever attempts to influence another’s will. Rather, he presents ideas and feelings in a way that enables his readers to develop imaginative, empathetic understanding while remaining completely free to choose their own course of action. His respect for his readers is matched by his respect for his subject-matter; he approaches each topic, no matter how familiar, with contagious wonder and delight. And his work is wonderfully well-reasoned and well-written.

Simply finding out what Barfield’s writings are was the first big challenge for students of his life and work. Now, there is a comprehensive bibliography of his published writings, posted on the website of the Owen Barfield Society (www.barfieldsociety.org).

Another helpful resource is the online listing of the Owen Barfield Papers which are on deposit in Oxford University’s Bodleian Library; this collection contains a great many of Barfield’s unpublished writings. A link to the listing is given on the website of the Owen Barfield Literary Estate (www.owenbarfield.org).

A second challenge, which is on-going, is bringing Barfield’s writings into print. In 2006 James Wetmore created a new “Barfield Press” imprint of Sophia Peren- nis in order to publish new, affordable editions of several Barfield books which had long been out of print.

Two years later, the Owen Barfield Literary Estate began issuing Barfield’s writings in freshly edited volumes under its own imprint, Barfield Press UK. The twelve books published by Barfield Press UK to date include two previously unpublished writings, Barfield’s 1929 Märchen, The Rose on the Ash-Heap, and his last full-length work, the novel Eager Spring. Each of Barfield Press UK’s editions provides something new and helpful for those who are interested in Barfield’s life and work; for instance, their edition of This Ever Diverse Pair has an illuminating introduction by Frederick Dennehy and notes by Amy Vail on the book’s classical references. All of these books, the Sophia Perennis publications as well as those of Barfield Press UK, are available from online vendors.

The biggest challenge – and opportunity – in Barfield studies continues to be compartmentalization. Each of Barfield’s three publics has its own particular focus and is largely oblivious to the activities and concerns of the other two. The aficionados of C. S. Lewis and the Inklings are interested in Barfield’s reminiscences of Lewis, his friendship with Lewis and other members of the Inklings, and his theology, which they tend to perceive as heretical. Barfield’s anthroposophical readers, on the other hand, see his work as essentially Christian; for them, Barfield’s writings directly evidence his dedicated service to the Logos and his Christ-centric view of world history, and they also value the clarity and depth of his writings on anthroposophical themes. The poets and mainstream academics who read Barfield are generally unaware of his anthroposophical writings and uninterested in anthroposophy. These readers greatly value his insights into the imaginative process and the breadth, integratedness, and sheer brilliance of his scholarship.

The Owen Barfield Society, an international scholarly association which was founded in 2007, has taken up the problem of compartmentalization in Barfield studies. As its website states, “It is hoped that the Society may become a community of scholars in which Owen Barfield’s three publics—students of the Inklings, students of anthroposophy, and mainstream academics – can all participate, communicate with each other, and even collaborate.” To this end, the Owen Barfield Society has established an online forum, and is in process of creating a refereed e-journal. It also holds annual meetings, each of which includes an informal discussion of one of Barfield’s books; the book that will be discussed in the 2012 meeting is Worlds Apart. In addition, each meeting of the Owen Barfield Society has an artistic element. In 2010, the distinguished poet and essayist William C. Johnson read aloud from his new book, A River Without Banks, which is beautifully written and deeply informed by his study of Owen Barfield’s work. In 2011, Karen Bailey gave a presentation on eurythmy; although Barfield had eurythmy centrally in mind when he wrote most of his poems, this presentation was the first time ever that a mainstream group interested in Barfield experienced this new art form.

Eurythmy will again be an element of the Owen Barfield Society’s 2012 meeting in October in Boulder, Colorado, where research on Owen Barfield’s life and work will be presented in the Owen Barfield session of the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association, a regional independent branch of the major professional organization for scholars of literature and language, the Modern Language Association. Beginning in 1998, the centenary of Barfield’s birth, an Owen Barfield session has been held in each of the RMMLA’s annual conventions. Initiated by Professor Raymond P. Tripp together with several of his former students at the University of Denver, the annual Owen Barfield sessions were the first, and for many years the only, regular venue for Barfield studies anywhere in the world. The papers presented in the Owen Barfield sessions increasingly transcend compartmentalization. Jamie Hutchinson’s paper on Lewis’s Till We Have Faces from a Barfieldian perspective and Julie Nichols’ groundbreaking research on Barfield’s work in the context of creative nonfiction, cognitive science, and anthroposophy are examples of this encouraging trend.

Jane Hipolito is Professor Emerita of English and Comparative Literature at California State University, Fullerton. She was introduced to the works of Owen Barfield in 1966, when a fellow graduate student at UCLA lent her his copy of Worlds Apart, and she has been learning from Barfield ever since. Jane chairs the Los Angeles Branch of the Anthroposophical Society and is an active member of the Section for the Literary Arts & Humanities of the School for Spiritual Science.