The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings

by Philip Zaleski

  In addition to lecturing, Tolkien oversaw postgraduate work and graded School Certificate exam papers (administered to all British students at the age of sixteen). The latter was torture, but he kept it up for years despite the trickle of money it produced; he once estimated that earning one hundred pounds by grading exams consumed the same energy as writing a novel. At this time, he also began serious work on an edition of the Ancrene Wisse (or Ancrene Riwle), a Middle English rule for West Midland anchorites that he had started to study while at Leeds. But as always, his heart lay in telling stories, and he devoted every spare moment to his craft. In 1925, while on vacation at Filey, an old-fashioned beach resort in North Yorkshire, his son Michael lost a little leaden toy dog on the sand; Tolkien dried the boy’s sobs with a tale about the dog come to life, and a sand-magician named Psamathos Psamathides (modeled closely upon Edith Nesbit’s Psammead, or sand-fairy, who first appears in her 1902 novel, The Five Children and It). In 1927, Tolkien turned his tale into a written narrative entitled Roverandom, which would remain unpublished until 1988. Roverandom shows the influence not only of Nesbit but of Lewis Carroll, Howard Pyle, Norse and Welsh mythology, and late Victorian and Edwardian whimsical fairy lore. Although not a very original or cohesive tale—it reads like a series of set pieces—it does offer two exciting voyages, to the moon and to the depths of the sea, with fantastic characters (a wizard, the Man in the Moon, a Great White Dragon, merfolk), lyric prose (“the great indiarubber trunks of the trees bent and swayed like grasses, and the shadow of their endless branches was thronged with goldfish, and silverfish, and redfish, and bluefish, and phosphorescent fish like birds. But the fishes did not sing…”), labored humor, and a hint or two of the legendarium, as Roverandom espies “the Mountains of Elvenhome and the light of Faery upon the waves.” The best part of the production may be Tolkien’s illustrations, especially his watercolor of The Gardens of the Merking’s Palace, a rich fantasia of underwater life, in which a white whale, a writhing octopus, a jellyfish, and other sea beasts swim through a dazzling pink, green, and blue seascape of weed, fronds, and domed palaces. Tolkien’s art at this time outstripped his stories in beauty and elegance.

  A few years later, Tolkien wrote another children’s tale, Mr. Bliss, based on other playthings—a toy car and three teddy bears—belonging to his children. It is a minor effort, notable only for a cameo appearance by Gaffer Gamgee, father of Sam Gamgee, the hobbit sidekick of The Lord of the Rings. Again, Tolkien’s paintings from the time, especially those inspired by his legendarium, are far more impressive. These include images of pouncing or coiled dragons, towering peaks, undulating hills, and trees. “The Tree of Amalion,” in colored pencils, depicts a sinuous brown trunk with curvilinear branches bearing bright multicolored flowers that represent, Tolkien said, “poems and major legends”; Christina Scull and Wayne G. Hammond call it “Tolkien’s ultimate tree” and see in it the “Tree of Tales,” a symbol of the world of story later mentioned by Tolkien in his 1939 essay “On Fairy-Stories.”

  Despite his triumphal public reading at the Exeter Club, Tolkien continued to fear exposure and its terrifying sequel, ridicule, especially in relation to his legendarium (“I have exposed my heart to be shot at,” he would write years later, when The Lord of the Rings appeared). Mythology had become the very air in which he thought, taught, painted, and wrote, yet he kept his own mythological inventions almost entirely to himself. Setting aside the principal creation of his years at Leeds, a bleak, two-thousand-line alliterative poem entitled “Lay of the Children of Húrin,” he labored during this period on another version of the tale of Beren and Lúthien and—a conceptual breakthrough—a summary to date of the overall legendarium. In Sketch of the Mythology, a document of approximately ten thousand words, composed in 1926 and revised periodically until 1930, we can see for the first time the stupendous sweep of Tolkien’s vision. The Sketch represents, according to Christopher Tolkien, “a new starting-point in the history of ‘The Silmarillion.’” But it is far more than this; it marks, one can argue, a new starting point in the long European tradition of fantastic fiction. Tolkien moves, in this remarkable summary, beyond the mystical fables of Novalis, the fairy fables of George MacDonald, and the northern fables of William Morris—not to mention earlier fantastic tales from Aesop to Perrault—constructing for the first time, albeit in outline, a dense, interlocked imaginary narrative, encompassing the rise and fall of worlds, gods, and lesser beings and comprising, as he had long dreamed, a mythology for England. As fictional history on a cosmic scale, the only work that bears comparison is Blake’s. But Tolkien’s art, with its dense prose narratives, its playful extension into maps and languages, its love and admiration for ordinary people, and its pervasive Catholic sensibilities, has little in common with the inventions of the gnostic Blake, with his strange waking visions of angels and ghosts, his fascination with Swedenborg, his attacks upon conventional morality, his converse with his dead brother and other spirits, and above all, his basso profundo of Romantic rebellion.

  Tolkien wrote the Sketch at white heat, without reference to his other texts (according to Christopher Tolkien), as a summary and guide for R. W. Reynolds, a former master at King Edward’s School to whom he had been sending, since the war, his writings for critical comment. He sent it off to Reynolds in early 1926, along with portions of The Children of Húrin and The Lay of Leithian, for which it provided the mythological context. Reynolds’s response is unknown, apart from a comment in Tolkien’s diary that “Tinúviel meets with qualified approval, it is too prolix…” In any event, it is the Sketch itself that matters. Upon its choppy outline, the bulk of Tolkien’s future creative writings would rest. Although omitting the creation of the cosmos, it encompasses in truncated form much of the legendarium, from the uprising of the Satanic figure Morgoth through the retreat of the Valar to the “uttermost west,” the birth of the Elves and the rise of Elvish civilization, tales of the magical jewels known as Silmarils, and the emergence of Men and Gnomes (Dwarves), to the conquest of Morgoth and the fading of the Elves. In the Sketch, Tolkien mapped out his future course. The vein of gold had been struck, now the minting could begin in earnest.

  7

  WANTED: AN INTELLIGIBLE ABSOLUTE

  During the early 1920s, as we have seen, Lewis’s life was in disarray, both intellectually and in his family relations. There were, too, other sources of disappointment and sorrow. Not least was his encounter with William Butler Yeats, who had moved into a house across the street from Balliol College. Lewis called on him twice, a young poet visiting the old master for the “purpose of worshipping devoutly.” On his first visit, March 14, 1921, he and a fellow guest—the Jesuit writer C. C. Martindale, a “little twinkling man like a bird”—sat on hard chairs while the famous poet, fat and gray-haired, discoursed on dreams, ghosts, and magic lore. Yeats was at this time hard at work with his wife, who lounged on a nearby divan throughout the visit, on that strange, convoluted, nearly unreadable masterpiece of occult lore, A Vision. What a shame, Lewis wrote to his father, that a man who had met William Morris, Rabindranath Tagore, and Arthur William Symons should pander to the “sham romance of flame coloured curtains and mumbo-jumbo.” Describing the visit to Arthur, he said, “I have seldom felt less at my ease before anyone than I did before him: I understand the Dr Johnson atmosphere for the first time—it was just like that, you know, we all sitting round, putting in judicious questions while the great man played with some old seals on his watch chain and talked. The subjects of his talk, of course, were the very reverse of Johnsonian: it was all of magic and apparitions. That room and that voice would make you believe anything.” The man was a “Kod” (“humbug,” in Ulster slang), he told his father. Later, under the influence of Charles Williams and a concomitant reawakening of adolescent enthusiasms, Lewis’s views on Yeats would mellow, and he apologized, in the 1950 edition of Dymer, for having used the poet as the model for his portrait in this work of a deranged magician: “if he were no
w alive I would ask his pardon with shame for having repaid his hospitality by such freedom.”

  A few weeks later, on March 28, the Great Knock died. “Poor old Kirk!… I at least owe to him in the intellectual sphere as much as one human being can owe another,” Lewis wrote his father upon hearing the news. William T. Kirkpatrick had been Yeats’s opposite, a skeptic rather than a spiritualist, a hero rather than a shattered idol, delivering hard truths in place of soft imaginings—or so Lewis saw it at the time. Curiously, though, his death made Lewis warm to an idea that Yeats held but Kirkpatrick abhorred: the immortality of the soul. Kirkpatrick “is so indelibly stamped on one’s mind once known, so often present in thought,” wrote Lewis, “that he makes his own acceptance of annihilation the more unthinkable. I have seen death fairly often and never yet been able to find it anything but extraordinary and rather incredible. The real person is so very real, so obviously living and different from what is left that one cannot believe something has turned into nothing. It is not faith, it is not reason—just a ‘feeling.’ ‘Feelings’ are in the long run a pretty good match for what we call our beliefs.”

  To reconcile the mysticism of Yeats and the rationalism of Kirkpatrick would be a task for the decade to come; for now, there were too many light distractions and heavy concerns. Living far from Warnie (and not enjoying his company, when together, as in the past), deceiving his father about Mrs. Moore, bound to her by a strange contract of desire and filial obligation, anxious about present needs and future prospects, Lewis understandably fell prey to vagaries of temper and mood, which he recorded, along with the details of daily life with the Moores, in a diary he kept from April 1922 until the beginning of 1927.

  As the diary—published posthumously in abridged form by Walter Hooper from Warnie’s typescript as All My Road Before Me—opens, Lewis and the Moores have moved into a semidetached house at 28 Warneford Road, walking distance from the center of Oxford. Lewis is preparing for his June 1922 Greats examination and working on his poetry; Maureen is attending Headington Day School; Mrs. Moore is exhausting herself by putting the house in order; money is desperately short. “I wish life and death were not the only alternatives,” Lewis writes one morning, “for I don’t like either.” Yet there are other times when, thanks to a small victory at home or a brief stint out of doors, he catches a “whiff of what I used to call ‘the real joy.’”

  Throughout the diary, Lewis refers to Mrs. Moore by the Greek letter Δ (delta), transliterated to D in the published edition. Δ has a long history as an erotic symbol, and in particular it may be that Lewis was thinking of Diotima of Mantinea, priestess of eros in Plato’s Symposium and a Romantic icon ever since Friedrich Hölderlin gave the name “Diotima” to the married woman who was his paramour and muse. The Diotima of Lewis’s diary is a domestic rather than a romantic priestess, however; a figure ever-present in the log of dishes washed, guests tolerated, lawn games played, colds nursed, books read, chores done. If Lewis wrote passages that pay homage to Δ as an object of passionate love, they have not survived in the typescript.

  From the diary we learn that while Lewis was preparing for Greats, the Moore household was rarely without visitors. After exams, the pace of entertaining quickened, with frequent, extended visits from friends and relations, including Barfield, Greeves, Baker, Lewis’s aunt Lily (a voluble champion of women’s suffrage, birth control, and animal rights), the landlady, and Mrs. Moore’s brother, “Doc” Askins. Neighbors crowded in, too, along with the obligatory P.G. (paying guest) to help make ends meet. Of one P.G., Lewis writes, “A greater bore I have never met: passions and sympathies I fancy she has never known. Worst of all, she has given up her habit of going to bed immediately after supper.” Notable among the regular visitors was Vida Mary Wiblin, the admirable but chubby and plain “Smudge,” who came to give Maureen music lessons. Wiblin worked as a music teacher by day and read for her Greek and Latin exams by night. Lewis coached her for these exams and she conceived an unrequited love for him, which caused her to prolong her visits and to suffer nervous attacks and fainting spells; she never married, and eventually became musical director at the Magdalen College School.

  This household commotion meant that, whatever their degree of intimacy may have been, Lewis and Mrs. Moore had little chance of privacy (except on Sunday mornings, Maureen recalled later, when they would send her off to church by herself). Lewis grumbled about the constant visitors in his diary, but Mrs. Moore showed no inclination to curtail their hospitality; she even encouraged him to be indulgent to poor Smudge: “In the midst of all this confusion Smudge flitted from room to room saying she thought she’d better go home tonight. A thousand times I felt tempted to reply ‘Well then GO!’, but of course she always yielded to D’s pressure … there was endless delay in getting to bed and of course, as the last straw to a perfect day, I was left alone with Smudge. To bed at last, and I had a few moments alone with D, who stands this bad time wonderfully.”

  Lewis read the diary aloud to Mrs. Moore, and she must have been pleased at incidents that place her in a favorable light: D transforming an army blanket into a heraldic drawing room curtain, winning the hearts of a friend’s housemaids, holding the hand of a distraught prisoner’s wife (“very characteristically,” says Lewis) while waiting in a courthouse for jury duty. There is shared pathos—and perhaps a touch of shared pathology—in the descriptions of D suffering, in syncopation with Lewis, headaches and sore throats, shabby surroundings, gossipy neighbors, and overdrawn bank accounts. Together they anguished over the negligence of Mrs. Moore’s husband (“the Beast”) and the difficulty of surviving on Albert’s allowance. As a zealous housekeeper, Mrs. Moore would drive herself to the point of collapse, and though she encouraged Lewis in his career ambitions, she also expected him to pitch in. Lewis, who had a boyish disregard for household niceties, chafed under the necessity of handling her moods and meeting her standards, as well as coping with the “stupidity” at lessons and incipient feminism of Maureen, a teenager at the time. Occasionally, as in this entry from June 1923, he came close to the breaking point:

  Found D and Dorothy [Dorothy Broad, the maid] polishing in D’s room. Had hardly left them when I heard an awful crash and rushed back thoroughly frightened and half believing that the wardrobe had fallen on D. I found however that it was only she herself who had fallen and hurt her elbow: she was badly shaken. All attempts to get her to stop polishing and rest on her laurels were treated in the usual way. After tea she went on again and said I could not help: finally she came down quite breathless and exhausted.

  This put me into such a rage against poverty and fear and all the infernal net I seemed to be in that I went out and mowed the lawn and cursed all the gods for half an hour. After that (and it was about as far down as I have got yet) I had to help with rolling linoleums and by the time we got to supper a little before ten, I was tired and sane again.

  When Lewis and Mrs. Moore did find time apart from others, a favorite way of relieving stress was to compare notes on their grievances, the follies of their friends and relations, and the hostility of their neighbors; thus, after supper on a late November evening, “we sat in judgement on Headington and its people (whom God reject) and perhaps felt the better for it.” The mocking subjunctive “whom God reject” recurs in his letters and diaries of the early 1920s; it was merely a way to let off steam, but it was hardly charitable. On the other hand, Mrs. Moore forced Lewis to be magnanimous toward various unfortunates in whom she took an interest—a young would-be dancer named Maisie (“Moppie”) Hawes, for example, whom they sheltered at the risk of legal complications from her domineering father and his wife, identified by Lewis as “that foul hag” or simply “the Bitch.” Much later, Lewis told George Sayer that Mrs. Moore “was generous and taught me to be generous, too … If it were not for her, I should know little or nothing about ordinary domestic life as lived by most people.”

  What a paradox, then, was Lewis’s existence during the 1920s! Why wou
ld a young man who cherished autonomy, resented interference, preferred the company of males, and regarded marriage as a lamentable lapse (“that fatal tomb of all lively and interesting men”) enter into a relationship akin to marriage—and one fracturing from within—with a woman who, whatever her virtues, excelled at quarrels and giving orders? Lewis’s solemn pledge to Paddy Moore that he would look after his mother had something to do with it, of course; even while an atheist, he held some things sacred. Most likely, sexual attraction for Mrs. Moore played also a part. The war entered in as well, or rather its aftermath, when a generation sought to redefine itself by at once salvaging the past (thus Tolkien’s intensified search for England’s mythology) and beginning anew. Had Lewis been a bit younger, he might have been one of the Bright Young Things worshipping Oscar Wilde while throwing off conventional restraint; but the world lay too heavily upon Lewis and his generation of returning soldiers for ironic hedonism to present itself as a solution. And for Lewis in particular, the weight of the world meant, in large measure, his father. In Mrs. Moore he found the counterweight that would give, however painfully, a new sense of balance and the promise of a second chance. It was just that: a chance to create a world of his own away from his father and a chance to re-create the domestic paradise despoiled by his mother’s death. By surrendering to Mrs. Moore, Lewis kept his promise to Paddy, escaped his father, reclaimed his past, and built a new future, albeit in the oddest way possible: by surrendering the freedom of college life for the dictatorial matriarchy he called “ordinary domestic life.”