The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings

by Philip Zaleski

  Tolkien at War

  Tolkien’s stay in France lasted five months. His experience differed little from that of other soldiers in what Robert Graves called the “soul-deadening” trenches: a nauseating diet of mud, cold, rain, lice, fleas, spoiled food, collapsing walls, soaked clothes, festering wounds, rotting corpses, packs of rats who fed on the corpses and grew large as cats, and now and then a dollop of fear or dash of pure terror. The trenches themselves were like elongated graves, ditches deep enough to hide a body, alive or dead, long and narrow, zigzagging to confound enemy shells. Paul Fussell estimates that the two opposing sides dug twenty thousand miles of trenches, nearly enough to circle the globe. “Theoretically,” he writes, “it would have been possible to walk from Belgium to Switzerland entirely below ground.”

  Tolkien arrived at the front less than four weeks before the beginning of the Battle of the Somme, an Allied offensive designed to repel German troops along the Somme River in northern France. It turned into the bloodiest conflict of the war, a prolonged tug-of-war in which clashing armies moved millimeters on the map over the course of months. The first day of the clash, July 1, 1916, was a debacle for Allied troops. Fussell calls the outcome “one of the most interesting in the whole long history of human disillusion.” Wave upon wave of British soldiers rose from the trenches to be mowed down by German machine gun fire, like hay before the scythe, with shouts and screams in the air, blood on the ground, hope evaporating in the heart. Henry Williamson, author of Tarka the Otter, was there:

  I see men arising and walking forward; and I go forward with them, in a glassy delirium wherein some seem to pause, with bowed heads, and sink carefully to their knees, and roll slowly over, and lie still. Other roll and roll, and scream and grip my legs in uttermost fear, and I have to struggle to break away … And I go on with aching feet, up and down across ground like a huge ruined honeycomb, and my wave melts away, and the second wave comes up, and also melts away, and then the third wave merges into the ruins of the first and second …

  At day’s end, twenty thousand Allied forces had died, including Rob Gilson, the first but not the last of the TCBS to be killed in the war. Thirty-five thousand more lay wounded. As the battle progressed through summer and autumn, the Allied position improved, but only incrementally. The reason for the slow advance lay, at least in part, in stout German defense, inadequate Allied artillery, and bungled Allied intelligence. Exemplifying the last, alas, is a trench map now housed in the Bodleian Library, beautifully drawn on the battlefield by Tolkien in red and black ink, and containing incorrect information on German barbed-wire placements. He wasn’t at fault—he based his map upon false descriptions supplied by German prisoners of war—but rather a victim of the iron rule that truth is the first casualty in war.

  How did Tolkien survive this unfolding nightmare? In large measure, as he had survived the deaths of his father and mother: through the love of others. There was Edith, of course, praying for him back home in England and tracking his shifting position, which he provided against army regulations by tattooing his letters to her with dots in a code that he and she had devised before his departure. And there was the TCBS—Smith in France, Wiseman aboard a ship in the North Sea—corresponding whenever the conflict allowed, reminding one another of their shared aspirations to greatness, of their shared love, of their very existence.

  Then came the delayed news of Gilson’s death, and the realization that the German war machine had ripped apart the TCBS fellowship. Tolkien wrote to Smith on August 12 that he was “hungry and lonely,” that “something has gone crack,” that he felt “a mere individual at present.” Four months later his isolation deepened, when the hounds of war turned their teeth upon Smith, dead of gangrene poisoning from a shrapnel wound.

  Cut off from his friends, from Edith, from England, Tolkien found solace in his faith, that inexhaustible well of hope that lay unperturbed beneath everything that happened, good or bad. He also made use of another means of renewal, mentioned in his August 12 letter to Smith when he refers to the “spark of fire” granted the TCBS; for Tolkien, this spark meant “finding a voice for all kinds of pent up things and a tremendous opening up of everything,” a voice that would “testify for God and Truth” through poetry, art, and language.

  The war, to borrow a phrase from Samuel Johnson, had concentrated that voice wonderfully. It did the same for many young writers, whose art quickened under gunfire: Rupert Brooke dreaming of an English heaven, Wilfred Owen recording “the monstrous anger of the guns,” Isaac Rosenberg describing the “shrieking iron and flame / Hurled through still heavens.” Why this literary flowering during World War I? World War II produced only a handful of significant English writers, and subsequent conflicts have given rise to fewer yet. It may be that what Fussell calls the ironies of this particular conflict played a role: the most horrific of wars after the most halcyon of days, the reversion to barbarism after the heyday of the myth of progress. The war may have opened a gap between expectation and fulfillment that literature was uniquely prepared to occupy and investigate. Or it may be that the poetry of World War I, at least in its lyrical mode, was itself the last flowering of the Age of Innocence that preceded the war, that the horrors of the trenches sparked this final blossoming, as friction gives rise to fire; that the daily nightmare unfolding before the soldiers sharpened their sense of beauty, prophecy, and mission. If this is so, one may regard the traditionalism of the Inklings, not as a return to the past, but as the past still alive in the present, as the spirit of World War I poetry, the last articulation of ordered innocence, finding new voice amidst the nearly incessant wars of flesh, mind, and spirit that marked the twentieth century.

  One cannot underestimate boredom, too, as an incentive to write. Men on the march or sighting along a gun barrel are unable to hold pen and pad; but the trenches meant long, desperate hours of waiting: time enough to pour out one’s heart and soul. Sometimes “you might scribble something on the back of an envelope and shove it in your back pocket but that’s all,” while on other occasions, more was possible. Tolkien pressed forward with the legendarium “in grimy canteens, at lectures in cold fogs, in huts full of blasphemy and smut, or by candle light in bell-tents, even some down in dugouts under shell fire.”

  And there was yet another motive for his obsessive attention just now to his private mythos. Tolkien longed to escape. He had no desire to shirk his job as a soldier—his sense of duty was far too strong for that—but he wished, whenever the ebb and flow of battle allowed, to flee in his imagination the sorrow, pain, and ugliness of the trenches. “It is plain,” he would say years later, “that I do not accept the tone of scorn and pity with which ‘Escape’ is now so often used … Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls?” Another Great War writer, Siegfried Sassoon, knew the same impulse; he remembers “being huddled up in a little dog-kennel of a dug-out, reading Tess of the D’Urbervilles and trying to forget about the shells which were hurrying and hurrooshing overhead.” Tolkien, lucky man, had a protected realm of his own invention to which he could flee. Robert Graves, embittered by battle, writes in his poem “Babylon”: “The child alone a poet is: Spring and Fairyland are his … Wisdom made him old and wary / Banishing the Lords of Faery.” It was not this way for Tolkien. As a child and as an adult, he escaped into Faërie and found there, if not safe harbor, at least fair dreams.

  In October 1916, Tolkien contracted trench fever, a virulent lice-borne illness. He was back in England by November 10, his days as a combatant over. During his convalescence, which lasted for the remainder of the war, he helped to edit and wrote the introduction to a posthumous—and undistinguished—collection of poems by G. B. Smith, Spring Harvest. Tolkien’s introduction is curiously businesslike, even cold, as if he knew the poems were bad and, while giving them a formal salute, wished to turn his attention to the future.
And why not? New languages, new images, new legends, and new mythologies crowded his mind; World War I had stirred the waters and the return to England would open the floodgates.

  4

  HARD KNOCKS AND DREAMING SPIRES

  As Tolkien looked to the future, Lewis rummaged in the past. A letter Lewis wrote on November 22, 1916—forty-six years to the day before his death—reveals an eighteen-year-old with the energy of a schoolboy and the tastes of an octogenarian. His lust for culture, preferably nineteenth-century or earlier, was prodigious. He chats about Aïda and The Magic Flute, enthuses over House of the Seven Gables, knocks Guy Mannering. He confesses his mad love for a radiant woman—in this case, Dorothy Osborne, a celebrated epistolarian who died in 1695. We get an early sample of his wit, as he announces that “I am desperately in love with her and have accordingly made arrangements to commit suicide from 10 till 4 to-morrow precisely.” At the same time, he senses the dangers of making the past an idol. Earlier in the year he had composed The Quest of Bleheris, a sixty-four-page romance in Morrisian mock-medieval prose; now he declares his new work, a fantasy, will be in modern English, which he hopes “will be an improvement.”

  It’s evident from this tilt toward modern idiom that, though he has been seriously misunderstood in this regard, Lewis was not an antiquarian. He had no use for modernism, a dismissal that would lead to clashes later on with writers and critics, yet he turned away from the artificial medievalism of Morris and the intricate sentences of Morris’s Victorian peers in favor of a simple, direct manner—verging on condescension in his nonfiction works—that suited perfectly the minds and ears of his twentieth- (and twenty-first-)century readers. He disliked aestheticism and pedantry, shunning both his father’s rhetorical extravagance and his own childish precocity. Most of all, he wanted to break the mold.

  He was, at least on the surface, a brilliant, energetic, and likable young man. Kirkpatrick had sent Albert glowing reports about his pupil’s literary and linguistic prowess (“He hardly realizes—how could he at his age—with what a liberal hand nature has bestowed her bounties on him … He has read more classics than any boy I ever had—or indeed I might add than any I ever heard of, unless it be an Addison or Landor or Macaulay”; moreover, “He is always cheerful, pleasant and obliging to the highest degree.”) But signs of trouble peeped out from beneath the gaiety. The letters to Arthur Greeves that speak of suicide—always worrisome in an adolescent, even if mentioned in jest—give one pause. So, too, does Lewis’s increasing fixation during this period upon sadomasochism. Four of his letters to Arthur he signs Philomastix (“whip lover”), sometimes in Greek characters to thwart snoopy readers (Lewis’s father snatched up and read his correspondence whenever possible, and Lewis may have feared that the same reign of terror prevailed in Greeves’s household). He daydreams in these letters about lashing young ladies of his acquaintance; he even wonders, baselessly, whether William Morris was also entranced by “the rod,” on the strength of a stray sentence in The Well at the World’s End. Sadomasochism may be the English vice, but Lewis’s jaunty tone, his eagerness to describe his imagined victims and their stripes, suggest a mind knocked more than usually askew by the fierce energies of teenage sexuality.

  He also stepped up his assault on Arthur’s piety, utilizing as his weapon “the recognized scientific account of the growth of religions.” It dismayed Lewis that Arthur still required instruction in these basic facts. If only his friend could be made to realize what he himself now understood with perfect clarity: that setting aside naïve belief liberates the imagination as well as the senses, making all mythic and literary universes available for unalloyed enjoyment. He could imagine himself, when reading Beowulf, “as an old Saxon thane sitting in my hall of a winter’s night, with the wolves & storm outside and the old fellow singing his story.” He could enjoy Malory as the closest thing to an English national epic and Valdemar Adolph Thisted’s lumbering afterlife fantasy, Letters from Hell, without agonies of pious fear; above all, the glorious Milton, if one overlooked the overt Christian content of Paradise Lost, could be savored for his “Leopard witches” and the like: “He is as voluptuous as Keats, as romantic as Morris, as grand as Wagner, as wierd as Poe, and a better lover of nature than even the Brontës.” With this essentially Romantic, post-Christian conception of the rewards of literary experience, Lewis was primed to embrace all that Oxford University life had to offer.

  “Absolutely Topping”

  How different, compared to Lewis’s first schoolboy glimpse of England, was the impression Oxford made on him when he arrived in December 1916 to sit for his scholarship examination. The city was hauntingly lovely; without dissembling, he could send an enthusiastic report to his father—“the place has surpassed my wildest dreams: I never saw anything so beautiful, especially on these frosty moonlight nights”—only complaining that the poor heating system at Oriel College made it necessary to write his examination papers with gloves on. To his brother in France he wrote, “Oxford is absolutely topping, I am awfully bucked with it and longing to go up…” Though he had harbored doubts about his exam performance, University College offered him a Scholarship, with the added financial support of an Exhibition. The offer was complicated, however, by the expectation that, once an Oxford man, he would present himself for military service; and there was still the hurdle of Responsions, the university entrance exam, which Lewis would have to pass before he could go up to Oxford for good.

  He returned to Kirkpatrick to continue “cramming” for the upcoming test, adding Italian, German, and Spanish to his studies so that, if all else failed, he would be eligible for the foreign service. Nonetheless, there was time to write to Arthur Greeves about “That” (and to worry that “in a way we have spoiled our paradise” by dwelling too much on sexual fancies), to work on “Dymer” (a prose precursor to the narrative poem he would labor over sporadically until the mid-1920s) and a poem about “Medea’s Childhood,” and to read as eclectically as ever, devouring Apuleius, Wilkie Collins, Victor Hugo, Maurice Maeterlinck, Anstey’s The Talking Horse, Macaulay’s History of England, Lamb, Morris, Shelley, Rousseau, and so on.

  The Latin and Greek portions of Responsions presented no problem, but Lewis failed the section on mathematics. He had a terrible head for numbers and was unable to handle even the simplest arithmetical problems—counting change was a daily ordeal—much less algebra, a prominent part of the exam. Algebra is defined by the OED as “a calculus of symbols,” and Lewis’s failure to master it is worth bearing in mind, in light of his later controversial forays into the application of logic to metaphysics and theology. Nonetheless, he was accepted into University College and returned to Oxford on April 26, 1917, enrolling as an undergraduate on April 29.

  The university had changed dramatically since Tolkien’s entry six years earlier. Now it swarmed with troops. Stripped down by the war, University College retained less than a dozen undergraduates when Lewis arrived, and many of them were anxious to head for the front. Although as an Irishman he was for the time being exempt from conscription, eventual military service seemed nearly inevitable. He signed up for the Officer’s Training Corps (better to work toward a commission, the thinking went, than to be conscripted into the lower ranks should things change) and began to gaze across the Channel to France, where Warnie, commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Royal Army Service Corps after a short course of training at Sandhurst, had already been serving, as a supply officer rather than an active combatant, since the end of 1914. Perhaps Lewis felt drawn to follow his big brother, for whom the transition from Malvern to military life, by way of Kirkpatrick, had been a wholly satisfying one; Kirkpatrick restored Warnie’s self-confidence, while Sandhurst and the Service Corps gave him a career in which he could succeed (war was one of the three realms—French history and drinking being the others—in which Warnie would outshine Jack). In any case, it was the temper of the times: unless one was too old, too young, too infirm, or—God forbid—a pacifist,
one entered the service.