Owen Barfield, a close friend of C. S. Lewis, was a philosopher and writer at heart. His numerous books range from a children’s fairy tale, to a drama retelling the story of Orpheus, to deeply philosophical books on theology and literary criticism. However, Barfield earned his living as a solicitor. For thirty years he rode the train to and from his law offices and plodded determinedly through meetings with clients, court appearances, legal documents, and a daily barrage of legalese. During his years as a solicitor, Barfield suffered a great deal of frustration, even angst. In his poetry and fiction, and perhaps most overtly in his novel, This Ever Diverse Pair (1950), we can identify these feelings as Barfield depicts the threat of stagnation-or worse, the threat of complete disconnect with our birthing selves, a fragmentation in which the creative voice is lost.
Many of us can relate to Barfield’s frustration; in our often hectic and information-clogged lives, it’s all too easy to feel fragmented, frazzled, and fruitless. We have to wear too many hats, take on too many tasks, and wonder wearily when we’ll find that creative spark again. In his gentle and often playful way, Owen Barfield opens for us the door to blossoming, fruitful creativity and to personal wholeness. We read the poems and smile at our former dreams of grandeur, or gaze wistfully into our heart’s delight and promise, as Barfield does. We read This Ever Diverse Pair and bemoan the fragmentation that divides us from our best selves. However, Barfield’s work propels us, as it did him, to a vision of springtime redemption engendered by the Imagination.
Barfield began publishing during the heyday of Modernism, with its ironic, sometimes despair-driven mode of consciousness and expression. His short story, “Dope” (1923), indicates that he might have taken his place in modern letters with others like T. S. Eliot and W. B. Yeats. Thomas Kranidas notes that “Dope” was a “well-written, ironic tale of a young factory-worker whose dreary life is empty of all spiritual reality” (23). However, Barfield refused to identify with the merely ironic; Kranidas includes an excerpt from a Barfield letter to Eliot: “I am a little tired of literature which can do nothing but point out ironically that there is nothing much going on but disintegration and decay” (23). Barfield, says Kranidas, “determines to abandon neutrality toward the spiritual desiccation of his times and toward the reigning styles that portrayed that desiccation” (24). Instead Barfield chose to look at the whole picture, at a world full of polarities but grounded in love and imagination, and full of possibilities.
The quotation in my title is taken from one of Barfield’s poems, “La Dame a Licorne.”
All the world’s depth and width around her grace
Are shadows-Oh the utmost ends of space
Run inward to her, like her unicorn,
Seeking to sink in her, to be unborn,
Be time’s intensity in space’s dearth,
All generations’ appetite to birth
Caught in one miracle of personhood.
And since it doth inhabit (this great good
Clothed with the Sun his plenitude of power)
My very heart, imagination’s Earth,
How shall my spring not blossom into flower?(Hunter 24)
Shirley Sugerman notes that “Barfield asserts that not only is poetry a means of knowing, but that knowing in its most developed form also means ‘bringing into being'” (“Barspecs” 75). The “appetite to birth,” the forward-looking question, is truly characteristic of Barfield’s approach to life. He reifies this impulse again and again as he turns to words as creative medium; not only to birth his poems, fiction, and prose but truly to birth himself. For Barfield, this birthing process leads to more than mere personality, mental, or even emotional development, though its root is in the heart. Nurtured in the heart, it is imagination that allows for the resulting springtime blossoming of redemption and wholeness. In his prose and poetry, Barfield shows that hypocrisy is rooted out and all moral dilemmas find resolution through creativity and obedience to the “great One” (Pair 90), who rules by Justice and Equity (143), who heals fragmentation by drawing our polar selves into unity.
After fifteen years as a solicitor, Barfield reached the end of his tether. In This Ever Diverse Pair, he explores the relationship of his creative, idealistic self, which had come to be completely at odds with his materialist, legal persona.Scholars generally note that This Ever Diverse Pair was written to avert a nervous breakdown; as one of the characters, Burgeon, says in the novel, he “must now write about something or die” (13-14).
The novel begins with an introductory chapter on the relationship between Burgeon (his creative, moral self) and Burden (his grasping, manipulative self). Once introduced, we follow the two through eight chapter-length vignettes which deal with legal situations that Burgeon finds increasingly intolerable. Burden is the more pragmatic of the partners. He deals most closely with the clients, but he views them as mere cases to be won and values them primarily for the money they pay for his services (79). He performs his job well, if in a rather cut-throat manner, noting that “I can only help my client’s interest by relatively ‘injuring’ the other side” (126). This doesn’t cause him any moral anguish or loss of sleep. We are told that Burden at times “allowed [himself] to become infected by [his] clients’ ill temper” and had experienced “animosity” toward the other lawyers (30). While he deals with the clients face-to-face, he forces Burgeon to help in writing up the legal documents because of his “literary” talent, and he tells Burgeon to take work home after office hours and to “use [his] imagination” to sort out difficulties and find innovative ways to manipulate clients and the system (18). Burden expects Burgeon to separate his work from poetic imagination, and to isolate ethics in the poetic sphere.
Even though Burgeon, the narrator in This Ever Diverse Pair, is experiencing a mental crisis, the legal practice has some rewarding moments. For examples, he feels the pride of a job well done (85), and he enjoys the sense of efficiency when he handles financial affairs effectively (69). However, more and more, he feels a sense of futility, “like Alice in the Looking Glass, running without getting anywhere” (52). He becomes increasingly frustrated that he must always be so responsible and make all the decisions regarding the law practice. Burgeon finds that dealing with clients, and the way they use language, has resulted in a general antipathy toward words. The constant “necessity to concentrate on the words so as to apprehend meaning” is something like a “mild or incipient schizophrenia” (54). As Burgeon loses the will to focus and decipher what his clients are saying, he asks, “Is it going to prove too much for me?” (103).
Burgeon has an unsettling dream in which he sees Burden as a fragmented image of himself, separated from him. Burden, he feels, is becoming “a sort of Frankenstein” (15). Yet, Burgeon admits that he is “responsible for the professional existence, almost for the existence at all, of Burden. I deliberately called him forth from his obscurity and set him up in space and time” (14-15). He decides that he must do something to “arrest the process” of fragmentation (or “polarity,” to use one of Barfield’s own terms), and so he decides to keep a diary for Burden which he intends as his own “declaration of independence” (15).
The diary details the daily lives of solicitors along with certain irritations, perhaps not so onerous in one instance, but problematic in their constant reoccurrence. The irritations elicit in Burgeon feelings of shame, animosity, bewilderment, dislike (for Burden in particular), and, perhaps what bothers him most, hypocrisy. The use of words as weapons or cloaking devises in cleverly constructed, inextricably intricate legal documents causes his mind to wander to fantastically orchestrated mischief.
The crisis for Burgeon is a moral one. He finds that “words confuse things and make the truth difficult to discover” (40). In the materialist atmosphere imposed by Burden, Burgeon can’t really talk to the clients about their moral problems; he is prevented from addressing the heart of the issue. He feels that decisions on legal matters often devolve to a choice “between two dirty tricks” (107). Also bothersome is the inescapable mechanical nature of the legal process and profession. Burgeon bemoans those “two leprous blights on the urban life of the twentieth century, the typewriter and the telephone,” and the frequent interruptions by clients (89). We find this irritation with the modern invasion of the machine in his poetry, too. An example is his poem “Bad Day”:
They build in Station Road. A Kango hammer
Pounds in the scantlings, like a straining heart.
Drowning the drills’ pneumatic stammer,
Great buses stop and start.And all day long against this island shore,
Plash after plash, accosting, laps the main
Incessantly. Again my door
Opens and shuts again.Till back again, by catacomb, I go;
Homeward on wheels on rails through tunnels drum.
Who shouts? A dog snaps. Fret not so
For silence. It will come.(Hunter 25)
As he approaches a nervous breakdown, he says his insides quiver “practically the whole day now. I think it is the expectation of little blows and bruises” (103). In analyzing his situation he identifies two types of assault on his peace of mind: the “longus levis” or “petty jerk,” and the “gravis brevis” or “grand jerk,” which is two or more petty jerks combined, in other words multiple interruptions and or irritations (51). In addition, he suffers from “rhema-tophobia,” or the “fear and hatred of the spoken word,” which continues even at home, causing distress and distancing him from his loved ones (52-53). In final desperation, he cries: “God, what a way for a man that stands upright between the earth and sky to use the spirit that is in him!” (108).
According to Barfield,
For Coleridge, the basic polarity between two forces or energies, one of which strives to apprehend or find itself, while the other tends to expand infinitely is also the source of man’s individual consciousness. It reappears as a psychological polarity. (“Either: Or” 39)
Barfield, in “Bad Day,” admonishes us to “Fret not so for silence. It will come.” It very nearly does come for Burgeon when Burden threatens to kill him. The conflict between the two comes to a crisis when Burden reaches the end of his rope over their constant arguments about the morality of their legal practices, the “conventional lies” (104), the lack of integrity in legal language, and the devaluation of their clients. Burgeon, however, is able to avert disaster by reminding Burden of death:
I convinced him that if he should survive me, then when in his turn he came to die, that most certainly would be the end. Whereas if I survived him, there at least might, even after my death, be something more. (113-114)
Burgeon recognizes a spiritual dimension to reality although he has not discovered its life-giving power.
We see that Burden is a materialist, or at least has allowed materialist principles to guide his life and work, and has neglected, almost to the point of annihilation, the life and work of the spirit. In the last chapter, after things have reached a critical level between the two partners, Burgeon finds himself with Burden in the dock, in a prophetic dream set in the 1990s, and in a time when crime is viewed as a kind of disease (134). In the dream, Justice finds that Burden is too fond of security and has no imagination. For purgation he must leave the legal profession to perform menial tasks in a family of five (137), and he must read fairy tales aloud to the children and read Blake and other poets aloud to the lady of the house. In addition, he will be required to actually make up stories (138).
I am very grateful for the Barfield Sampler edited by Jeanne Clayton Hunter and Thomas Kranidas, and for their helpful commentary, but I have to disagree with Hunter when she says that Burgeon is “Barfield’s true self in This Ever Diverse Pair” (129). It’s obvious to readers that Burden has major problems, but perhaps because many Barfield readers are creative, moral people, it may be harder to see the flaws in Burgeon. But Barfield saw them. In the courtroom dream, Burgeon seems to fare well with Justice; he is found to be “of exceptionally high character” and with “considerable mental powers.” However, he is accused of having a mind that “soars rather too easily-like a balloon” (138-139). Burgeon, too, has selfish and unhealthy motives. He’s writing the diary, he says, “for my own salvation. Burden is eating me up, my time, my wit, my memory, my ‘shaping spirit of imagination,’ my whole me!” (19). He regrets being unable to write the sort of things he likes most to write: romantic and emotional poems that are “written to relieve my personal griefs” (17). His curiosity takes him on rabbit-trails when he is supposed to be doing legal research, and he much prefers walking by the river than completing work on cases. Yes, Burgeon is the creative, idealistic partner, but his “imagination” is colored too much by mere fancy.
Barfield chose for the epigram to What Coleridge Thought this quotation from Daniel Deronda: “Here undoubtedly lies the chief poetic energy in the force of imagination that pierces or exalts the solid fact instead of floating among cloud-pictures.” Burgeon has neglected “solid fact,” and his idealistic fancies are impotent to produce real change in his, or Burden’s, condition. Because he shrinks from any “conflict of wills,” he has pretended all was well, “and so he fell” (141). His purgation is to “continue as a solicitor until further Order” (142).
We have seen the partners are caught in a moral dilemma, evidencing itself in a psychological polarity. The only way “out” is through the birthing of a new, united self, and this can only be accomplished through willing obedience to imagination rooted in love. In the afterword to Orpheus, John Ulreich notes, “The true, organic polarity of imagination is to be found only in the interpenetration of poetic and prosaic principles [. . . ] in the creative love that suffers death in order to be reborn (132). He goes on to say, “in every case the reconciliation of opposites produces not merely recovery but a recreation of meaning” (133). This recreation is redemptive-a moral balance is reached and the true, unified self is nurtured toward wholeness. Barfield has said that “moral imagination is the dialectic, or rather the polarity, of love. It is only through moral imagination that we can become fully aware even of ourselves as subjects” (“Either: Or” 40).
For Burgeon, and presumably for Barfield himself, this awareness of the self as subject comes about through writing. In Poetic Diction, Barfield says, “Language is the storehouse of imagination” (23). Burgeon tells us, “If this partner of mine kept a real diary, there would be no need to write all this about him” (13). Kranidas notes of Barfield’s work that “There are over two hundred lyrics” (27), and in many of these poems, he says, “there is a self-effected rescue, often in the face of despair [. . .] of withdrawal, of beckoning and approaching death. The rescue is effected often through the medium of words which become the stuff of continuity” (28). And, I might add, the avenue of imagination.
Imagination provides the creative impulse which finds a path toward wholeness. Burgeon works this out through keeping a diary, as he says, “for my own salvation” (Pair 19). Barfield expresses his emotional connection to writing in the poem, “Sapphics,” with this:
O mad, O intractable mistress, English!
Time-miraculously-annihilating,
Undeserved, unpublished, aloof, astounding
Comfort of writing!
(Hunter 34)
But more than this, Barfield shows us writing as discovery and a mode of healing because, if honest, it reveals to us the truth about our fragmented selves and illuminates possible paths of action.
Shirley Sugerman, in Sin and Madness, comments that “our ‘strategies for survival’ seem paradoxically to be leading us deeper into division and closer to self-destruction” (11). Accordingly, she asks, “Why have our apparently ‘good intentions’ generated the opposite results?” (11). Barfield claims that one “way of dealing with irreconcilable opposition consists in placing the two opposites side by side, treating them as contradictories and contemplating the result with ironic detachment” (“Either: Or” 35). This is the Modernist way, and by it neither the fanciful idealist nor the empirical materialist will find true wholeness.
Returning to “La Dame a Licorne,” we see that the image of the Virgin and the Unicorn, though not necessarily religious, does have religious connotations. When Barfield was “asked if it were an annunciation poem, he responded that no poem about spiritualized love can be separated from annunciation” (Hunter 177). It is this recognition of the spiritual component that allows Barfield’s poem, and this novel, to portray the dynamic power of imagination to change reality. The Virgin’s willing obedience in love allows for the unimaginable to happen: God takes on human form and arrives to affect the redemption of his people. For the poet also, “imagination’s Earth” is prepared for fruition through loving, selfless obedience.
Barfield says that “in order to grasp the nature of polarity we are called on not to think about imagination but to use it” (“Either: Or” 29). It isn’t enough to be able to identify polarity, nor is it particularly useful to compare polarities. Barfield reminds us that “polarity is dynamic, not abstract where logical opposites are merely contradictory, polar opposites are generative of each other-and together generative of new product” (“Either: Or” 28). Burgeon tells us that he brought Burden into existence, and we’ve seen the mental havoc Burden has created in Burgeon. The Pair isn’t made up of Burgeon, the true Barfield, and Burden, the false or alien Barfield. They are-and remain-the ever-diverse pair. Barfield seems to have achieved his goal of reestablishing equilibrium; Burgeon returns to the solicitor’s office obediently, while Burden, no longer living up to his name, must be rehabilitated by being made “to hew the wood of simplicity and draw the water of imagination” (144). And, in fact, by the end of the novel, Burden has disappeared, and Burgeon is wholly free to live his life guided by a holy imagination.
Barfield speaks of “truth revealing itself either from without or from within or in both ways,” and he notes that “the source of that revelation may be, indeed must be, noumenal, that is, spiritual, whether or not it comes through a phenomenal medium” (“Concept” 123). In This Ever Diverse Pair, the truth is revealed through a dream in which Justice presides and takes root in the heart, for both Burden and Burgeon respond in willing obedience. Sugerman says that Barfield is concerned “to eliminate our subconscious foundation of materialism, and in order “to break the habit we must think with deliberation. The imagination required to break down the prison walls requires an act of will”; if we do this “we may experience self discovery” (“Barspecs” 80). And we may participate in the birthing of our selves in a new incarnation of imagination burgeoning forth in wholeness. We see an image of such a willing response in Barfield’s poem, “The Milkmaid and the Unicorn.” A milkmaid is tending to her cows when a unicorn gallops up and whinnies, “What about Philosophy?” The girl’s response is immediate: “She’s kilted her skirts for the flounder through bewilderment-She’s off to the place where unicorns grow!” (Hunter 49). Barfield, in his poems and fiction, calls us toward a way of life that values myth and imagination. This is not a negation of Reason, but the call for a holistic approach that honestly accesses, humbly hears, and whole-heartedly acts when imagination calls-in any facet of our lives. It’s up to us to give chase.
Works Cited
Barfield, Owen. “The Concept of Revelation.” Seven 1 (1980): 117-125.
__________. “Dope.” The Criterion 1 (July 1923): 322-8. Reprinted in A Barfield
Sampler. Ed. Jeanne Clayton Hunter and Thomas Kranidas. Albany: State U of
New York P, 1993.
__________. Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan U P,
1973.
__________. This Ever Diverse Pair. London: Gollancz, 1950 (appearing under the
pseudonym, G.A.L. Burgeon). The novel was republished in Edinburgh,
Scotland, by Floris Classics in 1985 under Owen Barfield’s real name.
__________. What Coleridge Thought. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan U P, 1971.
Hunter, Jeanne Clayton, and Thomas Kranidas. A Barfield Sampler: Poetry and
Fiction by Owen Barfield. Albany: State U of New York P, 1993.
Kranidas, Thomas. “The Defiant Lyricism of Owen Barfield.” Seven 6 (1985): 23-33.
Sugerman, Shirley. “‘BARSPECS’: Owen Barfield’s Vision.” Seven 11 (1994): 73-85.
____________. Sin and Madness: Studies in Narcissism. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1976.
Ulreich, John C., Jr. Orpheus: A Poetic Drama by Owen Barfield. West Stockbridge,
MA: Lindisfarne, 1983.
Works Consulted
Lavery, David. The Owen Barfield World Wide Website. 2003. 7/17/2005
<http://www.owenbarfield.com>
A wonderful repository of Barfield information.