The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings

by Philip Zaleski

  There were a few reviewers, however, who on the basis of The Fellowship alone could foresee the total pattern of The Lord of the Rings and avoid facile misreadings. The celebrated journalist and broadcaster Bernard Levin, writing in the magazine Truth under the pen name “A. E. Cherryman,” considered Lewis’s dust-jacket endorsement a piece of “buffoonery,” but was hardly less subdued than Lewis in his praise: “it may be that in years to come the Death of Gandalf is placed beside the Death of Hector in its power to stir the mind and heart” and “it seems almost as though he has added something, not only to the world’s literature, but to its history.” Edwin Muir, the poet, critic, and novelist from Orkney, loved The Fellowship for its consistent realization of an imagined world, but considered Tolkien’s portrayal of good and evil oversimplified and his style (“alternating between the popular novel and the boy’s adventure story”) unequal to his great theme; yet he was intrigued enough to review the subsequent volumes as they appeared and defend them against the debunkers. Above all, there was W. H. Auden, confessing in The New York Times Book Review that “no fiction I have read in the last five years has given me more joy than ‘The Fellowship of the Ring’” and telling readers of Encounter that “the suspense of waiting to know what happens to the Ring Bearer is intolerable.”

  As the subsequent volumes appeared, reviews became increasingly polarized, leading Tolkien to observe that “some critics seem determined to represent me as a simple-minded adolescent, inspired with, say, a With-the-flag-to-Pretoria spirit, and wilfully distort what is said in my tale.” Reviewing the final volume in The New York Times Book Review, Auden said he could “rarely remember a book about which I have had such violent arguments”; Tolkien wrote a lengthy response, which he apparently never sent, in which he thanks Auden for the review but rebukes him for interpreting The Lord of the Rings as in part autobiographical. Edmund Wilson, whose review for The Nation will go down in history as one of the great unintentional parodies of scorched-earth literary criticism (“Oo, Those Awful Orcs!”), blamed Tolkien’s “infatuated admirers” for inflating The Lord of the Rings into something more than “an overgrown fairy story, a philological curiosity.” Auden’s love of Quest literature must have blinded him to the bad writing, Wilson surmised, but even as Quests go, The Lord of the Rings was a failure:

  The hero has no serious temptations; is lured by no insidious enchantments, perplexed by few problems. What we get here is a simple confrontation—in more or less the traditional terms of British melodrama—of the Forces of Evil with the Forces of Good, the remote and alien villain with the plucky little home-grown hero. There are streaks of imagination: the ancient tree-spirits, the Ents, with their deep eyes, twiggy beards, rumbly voices; the Elves, whose nobility and beauty is elusive and not quite human. But even these are rather clumsily handled. There is never much development in the episodes; you simply go on getting more of the same thing. Dr. Tolkien has little skill at narrative and no instinct for literary form. The characters talk a story-book language that might have come out of Howard Pyle, and as personalities they do not impose themselves. At the end of this long romance, I had still no conception of the wizard Gandalph [sic], who is a cardinal figure, had never been able to visualize him at all. For the most part such characterizations as Dr. Tolkien is able to contrive are perfectly stereotyped: Frodo the good little Englishman, Samwise, his dog-like servant, who talks lower-class and respectful, and never deserts his master.

  The success of “these long-winded volumes of what looks to this reviewer like balderdash” Wilson attributed to the fact that “certain people—especially, perhaps, in Britain—have a lifelong appetite for juvenile trash.”

  Other prominent mainstream critics agreed, considering the case against Tolkien open and shut, with Philip Toynbee writing in The Observer in 1961, with remarkably deficient prophetic skill,

  There was a time when the Hobbit fantasies of Professor Tolkien were being taken very seriously indeed by a great many distinguished literary figures. Mr. Auden is even reported to have claimed that these books were as good as War and Peace; Edwin Muir and many others were almost equally enthusiastic. I had a sense that one side or the other must be mad, for it seemed to me that these books were dull, ill-written, whimsical and childish. And for me this had a reassuring outcome, for most of his more ardent supporters were soon beginning to sell out their shares in Professor Tolkien, and today those books have passed into a merciful oblivion.

  Tolkien wisely ignored such remarks. “The only criticism that annoyed me,” he told Houghton Mifflin, “was one that it ‘contained no religion’ (and ‘no Women,’ but that does not matter, and is not true anyway)”—referring to the review by J. W. Lambert.

  In November 1955, the BBC Third Programme began a six-episode radio broadcast of The Fellowship of the Ring, with Norman Shelley, the well-known voice of Winnie-the-Pooh, speaking the parts of Gandalf and Tom Bombadil; it was followed a year later by a six-part adaptation combining The Two Towers and The Return of the King. Predictably, Tolkien wasn’t pleased: “I think the book quite unsuitable for ‘dramatization,’ and have not enjoyed the broadcasts—though they have improved. I thought Tom Bombadil dreadful—but worse still was the announcer’s preliminary remarks that Goldberry was his daughter (!), and that Willowman was an ally of Mordor (!!).”

  A Circle of Friends

  When Dr. Havard watched his wife, Grace, lose her battle with cancer in 1950, “both J and I warned him,” wrote Warnie in his diary, “of the disaster of P’s [Pudaitabird, Albert Lewis] sliding into solitude after Mammy’s death.” Sliding into solitude, or at least into small isolated units, imperiled all the Inklings throughout the 1950s. “My brother and I took a day off last week, put sandwiches in our pockets, and tramped sixteen miles or more along the old Roman road—now a mere track—which runs from Dorchester Abbey to Oxford,” Lewis wrote ten days after Grace’s death. The walk epitomized the new situation, which followed close on the heels of the final Thursday evening gathering in autumn 1949 and would run, with peaks and troughs, until Lewis’s death fourteen years later: long walking tours with a throng in attendance had become a memory; now the two brothers strolled apart from the others, along the green swards of Northern Ireland or close by the Kilns. Still, Tuesday mornings at the Bird and Baby continued, and they could be riotous affairs, even if they lacked the intensity and intimacy of Thursday evenings; sometimes they included new faces who fit in well enough, although the old guard never considered them full-blooded members. Often the best conversation arose when one Inkling met another in a neutral (non-Inkling) venue, over dinner at home or in a hotel, or at church, or at a faculty gathering. Wain’s cabal was becoming, in its early senescence, what Lewis always claimed it to be: no more than a circle of friends.

  Happily, the loosening of the band did not foretoken any diminishment in the Inklings’ individual achievements. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia spearheaded the decade’s great accomplishments, but several members produced notable, even outstanding, works. Warnie’s The Splendid Century: Life in the France of Louis XIV, dedicated “To My Brother,” appeared in Britain in 1953 and America in 1954; The New York Times gave it two reviews, the daily edition declaring it “extremely well-written … social history at its best,” the Sunday edition praising the author as a “conscientious scholar as well as a delightful writer.” David Cecil continued his string of splendid biographies with Lord M, or the Later Life of Lord Melbourne (1954), and John Wain came into flower with his first novel, Hurry on Down (1953), a comic tale of disaffected youth that misled critics into naming him one of the Angry Young Men, although on balance he exhibited, like Kingsley Amis and others so misidentified, far more wit than anger.

  During this decade, Lewis completed not only Narnia but also a second gargantuan undertaking: English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama, his contribution to the fifteen-volume Oxford History of English Literature (a.k.a. OHEL). He had shou
ldered the assignment in 1935, and by 1938 he was staggering under its weight, telling one of the two general editors of the History, Frank Percy Wilson, who had been his English tutor and who would later best him for the Merton professorship in English literature, that “The O HELL lies like a nightmare on my chest … I shan’t try to desert—anyway, I suppose the exit is thronged with dreadful faces and fiery arms—but I have a growing doubt if I ought to be doing this.” He signed the letter “Yours, in deep depression…” The problem lay in the sheer immensity of the task, which entailed surveying, with impeccable scholarship, a full century of the richest literature in the world. Later in 1938, Lewis reported to Wilson that he had already covered “Platonism, Douglas, Lyndsay, Tottel, Mulcaster’s Elementarie, Sir Thomas More, Prayer-book, Sidney, Marlowe (non-dramatic), Nashe, Watson, Barclay, Googe, Raleigh (poems), Shakespeare (poems), Webbe; and among other sources Petrarch and Machiavelli,” but even so would welcome a chance to withdraw if a suitable pretext could be found.

  Eventually Lewis scoured the complete works of every important author of the century, perhaps two hundred in all. He also pored over all the relevant secondary literature he could find, including “ploughing through back numbers of learned periodicals less in the hope of fresh knowledge than in the fear I’ve missed something … In any forgotten article the really illuminating thing might lie hid: tho’ about 90 to 10 against. So that I mostly pass the hours reading rubbish.” The prodigious research and writing advanced or flagged as he pounced on other projects, but he never lost the thread (unlike Tolkien with his epic tale), and by May 1952, the book was finished. As it wended its way through the Oxford production labyrinth, Lewis burbled with pleasure. “Joy, joy, my task is done” he told Sister Penelope. The nightmare was off his chest at last.

  The great labor produced a masterpiece. When the book appeared in print two years later, John Wain wrote in The Spectator that “Mr. Lewis, now as always, writes as if inviting us to a feast.” Ruth Pitter, writing in her journal, approached the work as nearly a universal palliative, declaring it “dear and delectable, to read for enjoyment, for relaxation, for the sense of balance & just appraisal, bringing unction.” Dame Helen Gardner summed up the book’s achievement in her 1966 memoir of Lewis for the British Academy: “The merits of this book are very great indeed. It is, to begin with, a genuine literary history … The book is also brilliantly written, compulsively readable, and constantly illuminated by sentences that are as true as they are witty. Who else could have written a literary history that continually arouses delighted laughter?” The cascade of praise notwithstanding, OHEL remains one of Lewis’s least-read books. Who, in an age of instantly available digitized data, troubles to read seven-hundred-page works on literature five centuries old?

  * * *

  Joy Davidman returned to England in November 1953, this time with her boys in tow, and settled into an apartment in the annex of a Hampstead hotel. A month later, she and her children arrived at the Kilns for a four-day pre-Christmas stay. The assembled company loped across the Headington hills, ascended Magdalen Tower, and, for a breather, read or played chess, a regimen that left the worn-out hosts, already dazzled by the mother’s unbridled tongue, marveling at the boys’ boundless vigor. It was as tiring as surf-bathing, Lewis told more than one correspondent.

  He and Joy lived in separate cities and saw one another rarely, but they shared, via letters, their ideas and enthusiasms, and the friendship ripened. Lewis paid for the boys’ schooling (room, board, tuition). Joy shepherded into print her new book, Smoke on the Mountain, a popular study of the Ten Commandments. Lewis wrote the foreword, which contains one or two unfortunate declarations—including “To us Christians the unconverted Jew (I mean no offense) must appear as a Christian manqué”—but otherwise offers a thoughtful analysis of the book as “a true bill against Western civilization,” a civilization that, it is difficult to deny, falls flat when measured against the decrees from Sinai. One suspects that his account of Joy’s literary manner (“the Jewish fierceness, being here also modern and feminine, can be very quiet; the paw looked as if it were velveted, until we felt the scratch”) is drawn from life. She had a temper, cut people badly, suffered fools poorly. Many of Lewis’s friends, feeling or fearing her scratch, rejected her. She was too American, too bold, and, at least to some, too Jewish. One could imagine Dorothy L. Sayers as an Inkling, but Joy would have never passed muster: her sex, nationality, ethnicity, and impending divorce (finalized on August 5, 1954) made her a walking catalogue of disqualifications. Of the Tuesday morning, Thursday night crowd, only the Lewis brothers embraced her.

  This was in marked contrast to the way in which Lewis’s friends, especially Barfield, Cecil, and Dyson, took to Ruth Pitter. She was in so many ways Joy’s inverse: English, shy, with soft features, and a far more gifted poet than Joy. The Ermine: Poems 1942–1952 cemented her reputation, an effusive review (by the children’s book author Theresa Furse) in The Times Literary Supplement calling it “perhaps Miss Pitter’s most beautiful book.” Lewis was bowled over, pouring on her the sort of praise he had reserved for Charles Williams: “Bright Angel! I’m in a sea of glory!… the new volume is an absolute Corker.”

  With these accolades ringing in her ears, Pitter decided to move to Oxford. Was she in love with Lewis? There is no concrete evidence to support this conjecture, but it’s likely that Pitter admired him as much as or more than she did any other man, save perhaps David Cecil. After months of searching, she and her friend and business partner, Kathleen O’Hara, moved into a villa at Long Crendon, where Barfield had once resided. “Welcome to what Tolkien calls the Little Kingdom,” wrote Lewis. He and Pitter met soon after for lunch at the Eastgate Hotel. Conditions were perfect for a romance to blossom—barring one enormous impediment: Joy Davidman was present at the lunch. Pitter and Joy did not hit it off; Lewis, no doubt sensing the friction, chose to direct his attentions to Joy. In 1955 he told George Sayer (as Sayer later remembered it) that “if he were not a confirmed bachelor, Ruth Pitter would be the woman he would like to marry. ‘One could have with her the kind of relationship described by Patmore in The Angel in the House,’ he said. ‘It’s not too late,’ I commented. ‘Oh yes it is,’ he said, ‘I’ve burnt my boats.’”

  The burnt boats, about which Sayer knew nothing, refer, of course, to his commitment to Joy, a lively companion whom no one mistook for Patmore’s idealized portrait of the sweet, selfless wife. Lewis may have tried, gently and discreetly, to convey the reality of the situation to Pitter. In August, he and Sayer visited Long Crendon, hoping to surprise her at home but finding only her housemate. “The one miss out of a thousand days that wd. have been hits,” he wrote Pitter, “certainly suggests Providence Herself, moving in a more than usually mysterious way.” The Lewis-Pitter friendship, never brought to the boil for which some Inklings wished (“Jack should have married Ruth Pitter,” Colin Hardie told his wife and Walter Hooper in 1969), settled down to occasional visits and letters. Pitter’s regard for Lewis remained high (matched by a bitter and outspoken resentment of Joy), and some years after his death she defended his relations with women, writing Hooper that “if he was mistrustful of women, it was not hatred, but a burnt child’s dread of fire … I would say he was a great & very perspicacious lover of women.”

  Meanwhile, Providence Herself, pursuing her own inscrutable aims, was engineering a tremendous change in Lewis’s life. In the spring of 1954, Cambridge University had established a new chair in Medieval and Renaissance Literature. The electors included several friends and supporters of Lewis, including his old tutor F. P. Wilson, the medievalists David Knowles and Henry Stanley Bennett, Lewis’s amiable adversary and coauthor, E.M.W. Tillyard, and, not least, J.R.R. Tolkien. This group decided, unanimously, to offer their mutual friend the post, although he had expressed no interest in it. Lewis declined the offer, tendering flimsy arguments about losing a precious servant (Fred Paxton) by moving to Cambridge, about standing in the way of another c
andidate (G. V. Smithers, a University College philologist who was never seriously considered for the post), and about his own flagging energies. The truth is, he was worried about Warnie, who surely would spiral down into drunken disaster if abandoned at the Kilns. The university re-tended its offer; Lewis turned it down again. At this stage, the electors approached their second choice, Dame Helen Gardner.

  But this was not the end. Tolkien, dismayed at Lewis’s refusal and convinced that life in Cambridge would revitalize him emotionally as well as physically, took the offensive. On the field of friendship, this was his shining hour. He forcefully countered Lewis’s objections, assuring him that Smithers was ineligible for the professorship, which had been earmarked for a literary scholar rather than a philologist, and that the university would be content if he shuttled to and from the Kilns, living in supplied rooms in Cambridge four days of each week and passing the remainder at home in Oxford. Tolkien may also have mentioned that Lewis’s salary would triple in the new post, and that he would be quit of tutoring, a ball and chain for the past thirty years. Elated by these revelations, Lewis wrote a letter accepting the chair, adding that he had already begun composing suitable lectures in his head. The electors swallowed hard and, through the university vice-chancellor, informed him that the backup candidate had been offered the job. The situation seemed hopeless—until another eucatastrophe unfolded. Gardner turned down the post, without specifying why. The answer emerged in her 1966 memorial memoir for Lewis, in which she wrote, gracefully disguising her own role in the matter, that “fortunately, the ‘second string’ declined, partially on account of having heard that Lewis was changing his mind, for it was obvious that this ought to be Lewis’s chair.”

  Lewis’s chair it became; but what was to become of his Magdalen College tutorship? Herein lies a mystery. According to Barfield, when Lewis accepted the Cambridge position, he selected Barfield as his Oxford replacement, arranged a transfer with the Master of Magdalen, and “fixed up a kind of farewell dinner for himself and an introductory dinner for me, all together.” All seemed set until the proposal was put before the dons and was voted down. So Barfield remembered the sequence of events, years later. The real reason for the rejection, he suspected, was antagonism toward Lewis, but the proffered excuse was that Barfield was close to retirement age and a new search would have to be instituted soon after his arrival. Oddly, there is no substantial corroboration for Barfield’s account in Lewis’s papers; the situation is furthermore muddled by Barfield’s belief that all this transpired in the late 1950s, several years after Lewis’s retirement. Whatever the precise details, for Barfield the result was “a pretty big disappointment, because I’d looked forward very much to living in Oxford, to the kind of society you get there—my wife was also looking forward to it very much.” It was another blow in a life of blows.