The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings

by Philip Zaleski

  Tolkien had no intention of giving up on The Silmarillion. Still, Unwin’s letter must have stung badly, and soon after receiving it, instead of diving back into his rewrite, he put it aside to attempt a sequel to The Lord of the Rings. He labored on The New Shadow sporadically from the late 1950s until at least 1968. Only a handful of pages resulted, with three separate versions of an aborted tale about secret societies, underground plots, and adolescent “orc-cults.” The extant fragments exude a brooding Augustinianism, not only in their unrelenting sense of ancient evil pressing in from all sides, but in their adaptation of the most famous story of Augustine’s childhood, in which the future saint and his companions wantonly eat stolen pears to satiety and beyond; here a group of boys, pretending to be Orcs, strip an orchard of unripe apples out of sheer perversity. Tolkien, unable to control the text, watched it turn in directions “sinister and depressing” and concluded the tale was “not worth doing.” His great tale of Hobbits and Elves, Wizards, and Men had already been told; only the dregs remained. Ten or twenty years earlier, he might have pulled it off, but age and illness had taken their toll.

  Both he and Edith suffered from ill health during the tail end of the 1950s. Edith, beset by arthritis and rheumatism, required regular medical attention. In February 1958, she underwent a serious operation, requiring lengthy recuperation in a nursing home and then in Bournemouth. That autumn she fell and broke her arm, requiring Tolkien to rescind a promise to write a ten-thousand-word essay for the British Council on Beowulf. A few months later, he fainted from weariness and stress. Doctors ordered him into a nursing home, but instead he returned to Bournemouth with Edith for additional rest. He complained, during these years, of a medley of aches and pains. Almost certainly some of his ailments were psychosomatic; Rayner Unwin observed that “sometimes the less specific complaints seem to have been associated with worry.” He believed, however, that the source was usually a recognizable illness or injury. “His catalogue of physical woes grew year by year,” said Unwin. “As his retirement approached there was a crescendo, and thereafter illness was never far away … None of these ailments were life-threatening, but they were certainly distractions.”

  Another unwelcome diversion came in the form of a plan, floated in 1957 by the Californian science fiction and horror entrepreneur Forrest J. Ackerman (who would go on to found Famous Monsters of Filmland, a garish magazine beloved by generations of American boys), to mount a cartoon version of The Lord of the Rings. At first Tolkien approved, largely for “the glint of money” it portended, but he balked upon seeing the written treatment, which wreaked havoc upon the book. A series of angry letters ensued, in which he denounced the proposed version in devastating detail: “Why does Z [the screenwriter] put beaks and feathers on Orcs!? (Orcs is not a form of Auks.)” In 1959, having destroyed Tolkien’s equanimity and consumed much of his free time, Ackerman abandoned the project.

  During this creatively fallow period, Tolkien traveled three more times to Ireland. His 1958 sojourn proved especially exhausting, providing fodder for a litany of complaints sent by Tolkien to Robert Burchfield, a linguist and lexicographer whose D.Phil. he had supervised: “On Sept. 24 I was involved in an alarming tempest at sea, and began to think I should suffer the fate of Lycidas King. I arrived 5 hours overdue in Dublin at noon on 25, rather battered; and I have since crossed Eire (E-W and N-S) about 6 times, read 130 lb. (avd) of theses, assisted in the exams of 4 colleges, and finally presided at fellowship-vivas in Dublin before re-embarking (doubled up with lumbago).” He also hoped, around this time, to visit Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, a Jesuit institution that had just purchased, for £1500, the manuscripts of The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, Mr. Bliss, and Farmer Giles of Ham, and had offered him $600 per lecture plus travel expenses. But he was forced to scuttle the arrangement, pleading illness and exhaustion, and he never did manage to visit America.

  In spite of these problems, gratifications multiplied. The Lord of the Rings sold well, and the Tolkiens’ lifelong concern about money abated. In April 1957, Tolkien was elected to the Royal Society of Literature, and in August The Lord of the Rings won the International Fantasy Award, besting future Nobel Prize winner William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, along with John Christopher’s The Death of Grass. At the festive awards lunch, Tolkien received what he described to Christopher and his first wife, Faith, as “a massive metal ‘model’ of an upended Space-rocket (combined with a Ronson lighter).” The clunky trophy amused him; his fame was spreading. The following spring, he sailed to Rotterdam for a “Hobbit Dinner,” sponsored by Dutch booksellers and attended by over two hundred fans, featuring clay pipes and pipe-weed, “maggot-soup,” “Fricandeau À La Gimli” (it was Friday, but the Rotterdam Catholic diocese had released the guests from the meatless Friday rule), and an avalanche of laudatory speeches, capped by remarks by Tolkien in English, Dutch, and Elvish. He found the event “remarkable” and “extremely enjoyable.”

  Further enhancing his happiness, and Edith’s as well, their children had matured into flourishing adulthood. John, now a Catholic priest, settled down to parish life in Stoke-on-Trent; Michael was married with three children; Priscilla had acquired certificates in social science and applied social studies at the London School of Economics. Christopher, pursuing a modified version of his father’s academic path, had become a lecturer and tutor in English at Oxford. In 1958 he delivered a talk on “Barbarians and Citizens,” suffusing his father with “great delight” and “parental pride”; the latter, Tolkien hastened to tell his son, was “a legitimate satisfaction with the least possible of egotism in it.” A few years later, Christopher published a translation of the Icelandic Saga of King Heidrek the Wise; he had become, like many another Inkling, a full-fledged Nordophile.

  Tolkien derived pleasure, too, from a project that fell unexpectedly into his lap in early 1957. At the end of January, Fr. Alexander Jones, an admirer of The Lord of the Rings, wrote to ask if Tolkien would be willing to join the translation team for The Jerusalem Bible, a new Catholic English translation of scripture for which Jones was the overall editor. The translation was to be drawn in part from an existing French version and in part from original Hebrew and Greek texts. Tolkien disliked French for its phonological and structural hauteur; he also blamed it for contaminating Old English after the Norman invasion; but he read it well enough and couldn’t pass up the opportunity to contribute to what would become the basis of the English Lectionary of the Mass for decades to come. He dashed off a translation of Isaiah 1:1–31 to Father Jones to indicate his level of competency. Father Jones, delighted with the result, asked Tolkien to tackle the Book of Jonah, a short text that he completed in about two weeks.

  Tolkien then offered to try his hand at Joshua, Judges, and a few other texts, but nothing came of this. According to Father Jones’s nephew, the philosopher Anthony Kenny, Tolkien was a “difficult collaborator”; Tolkien himself ascribed his failure to translate other texts to overwork. When published in 1966, The Jerusalem Bible received mixed reviews. Critics applauded its literary felicities while questioning, inter alia, the unfortunate use of “Yahweh,” a vocalization of the Hebrew tetragrammaton (YHWH), considered sacrilegious by many and, since 2008, forbidden in Catholic liturgical services, as well as the decision to jettison the exquisite traditional greeting of Gabriel to the Virgin, “Hail [Mary], Full of Grace,” in favor of the more literal but disconcertingly Cecil DeMille–esque “Rejoice, so highly favored!” Tolkien’s Jonah translation adheres closely to the original but is curiously sedate; compare his rendition of Jonah 2:9, “the vow I have made, I will fulfil / Salvation comes from Yahweh” to the Revised Standard Version’s “What I have vowed I will pay. Deliverance belongs to the LORD!”

  A Live Dinosaur

  “Yesterday I went up to Cambridge for Jack’s inaugural address—there was damn near as much fuss about that as a Coronation,” wrote Joy to Bill Gresham on November 30, 1954. “I lurked modestly in the crowd a
nd didn’t go near him—he was walled about with caps and gowns and yards of recording apparatus. A great success … I don’t know how the dons liked it but the students ate it up. But I think, for once, he was sacrificing accuracy in the interests of a good show.”

  Lewis put on more than a good show: his talk, “De Descriptione Temporum” (“On the Description of Times”), was audacious, original, and contrarian. His argument was that the commonly held classification of historical periods into Antiquity, the Dark Ages, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance—epochs divided by frontiers or chasms—is “greatly exaggerated, if indeed it was not a figment of Humanist propaganda.” Though such sharp demarcations, Lewis grudgingly concedes, can be useful, even necessary, for the convenience of professional historians (he is, after all, the first occupant of the new Chair in Medieval and Renaissance Literature), it is far more important to recognize the cultural, religious, and ethical continuity (or “continuity-in-mutability”) of “Old Western Culture.” There is, however, one genuinely cataclysmic break in the historical record, one division between eras that must be acknowledged: this fault line cuts across the early nineteenth century, immediately following the time of Jane Austen and Walter Scott, isolating all that comes after—the Victorians, the Edwardians, all that we call modern or postmodern—from all that came before: “somewhere between us and the Waverly Novels, somewhere between us and Persuasion, the chasm runs.”

  Lewis begins assembling his evidence for this extraordinary claim with a look at poetry. In the past, poems, even difficult ones, could be readily understood; readers agreed on what they meant. But now poetry has gone adrift. Consider, Lewis says, a recent symposium of seven experts—two of them Cambridge scholars—that had assembled to analyze the little poem “A Cooking Egg” by T. S. Eliot. The experts could find “not the slightest agreement among them as to what, in any sense of the word, it means.” Modern poetry’s rejection of meaning is, Lewis argues, unprecedented “in the whole history of the West,” comparable only to a similar revolution in the visual arts, exemplified by Cubism, Surrealism, Dadaism, and the work of Picasso. Lewis perceives, too, a parallel disruption in the history of religion, manifested by the split between Christian and post-Christian cultures. But these examples pale beside what Lewis calls his “trump card”: the nineteenth-century emergence of industrialization, with its obsequious worship of progress, its enthrallment to “a new archetypal image … of old machines being superseded by newer and better ones.” The rise of the machines—one hears echoes of Tolkien’s great fear—spells the fall of tradition. Today new trumps old; future, past; change, permanence; and “the very milestones of life are technical advances.”

  “De Descriptione Temporum” heralds, with vigor and wit, a tectonic shift in our understanding of history. For the assembled scholars squirming in their seats, many of whom had devoted their lives to detailing that old historical outline that the lecturer had just erased, this was inflammatory enough. Lewis proceeded to heap salt on the wound, however, by situating himself on the wrong side of his new map of the past. “I myself belong,” he told the Cambridge guardians of conventional wisdom, “far more to that Old Western order than to yours.” This was, he hastened to add, not a drawback but a golden opportunity. “If a live dinosaur dragged its slow length into the laboratory, would we not all look back as we fled? What a chance to know at last how it really moved and looked and smelled and what noises it made!” Henceforth, Lewis would be the dinosaur in Cambridge’s laboratory, the antiquated spokesman of a rejected past—and he would do this, paradoxically, by being the revolutionary creator of a new vision of time—and thus a thing as rare and precious as any living fossil. “Use your specimens while you can,” he exhorted the crowd, digging the knife in a little deeper. “There are not going to be many more dinosaurs.”

  Lewis was pleased with his talk and agreed to repeat it on the BBC’s Third Programme (calling it “The Great Divide”) the following April. Joy told Chad Walsh that “it was brilliant, intellectually exciting, unexpected, and funny as hell … Athanasius contra mundum, or Don Quixote against the windmills.” Others demurred. Secular humanists on the Cambridge faculty began to panic over the presence in their midst of so many prominent Christians, who now included David Knowles, exclaustrated Benedictine monk and scholar of monastic history; Basil Willey, professor of English and author of Christianity Past and Present; and Herbert Butterfield, fellow of Peterhouse College, who in The Origins of Modern Science, 1300–1800 anticipated Lewis’s theory of history by proposing that the Renaissance and Reformation were “mere episodes, mere internal displacements, within the system of medieval Christendom.” Marshaling their forces, the combined opposition struck back through The Twentieth Century, a humanist journal that devoted its February 1955 issue to deploring Lewis’s talk and all that it represented.

  E. M. Forster led the charge. Earlier, during a World War II radio talk, Forster had called Lewis “as clever as they make ’em,” comparing him to Chesterton. But the celebrated novelist no longer cared—if he ever had—for Lewis’s brand of cleverness and now warned, in his soft, elegant Bloomsbury manner with its undercurrent of despair, of the incoming tide of “obscurantism” and “authoritarian fundamentalism” threatening intellectual and social life. He singled out Lewis, and perhaps Butterfield, as the culprits, noting that things had degenerated so far that humanism’s “stronghold in history, the Renaissance, is alleged not to have existed.” Lewis shrugged off the broadside in a note to Ruth Pitter on March 5, charging that these self-proclaimed humanists were really atheists and that Forster was “the silliest of the lot.” In a letter to the mystery novelist Katharine Farrer a month later, Lewis again lambasted Forster, this time as one of those “high-minded old twaddlers” who think paganism would be a splendid thing. In the April 1955 issue of The Twentieth Century, he delivered his own broadside against the humanist idolatry of culture (and misuse of “humanism,” a word that once had real meaning). He was relishing the combat.

  Lewis felt at home in Cambridge. At Oxford, he had been a celebrity without honors; his new university, aware of the slight, granted him not only a professorship but superb fifteenth-century rooms in Magdalene College’s Old Court. He moved in on January 7, 1955. He was cautious at first, feeling out his new surroundings; Richard W. Ladborough, a lecturer in French who would eventually become Lewis’s closest friend at Cambridge, found him shy and insecure and, as a result, too eager to showcase his brilliance. But as this phase passed, Lewis made friends and settled into a comfortable daily round: an early walk in the Fellow’s Garden, chapel matins at 8:00 a.m., breakfast, letter writing, lunch, work on essays and books, an afternoon ramble, dinner in the Senior Common Room, more writing, and evening tea. His responsibilities included lecturing on medieval cosmology, religion, and literature, on the nature and meaning of words, on Spenser.

  In addition, Lewis shouldered numerous administrative chores, from supervising graduate research to serving on prize and appointment committees and the faculty board—the sort of academic busywork that Tolkien had come to abhor but that Lewis, formerly a mere don, had rarely tasted. This manifold activity brought him into frequent contact with F. R. Leavis. In 1956, Lewis backed Leavis for the faculty board in English, a magnanimous gesture that hid a cunning if benevolent agenda: Lewis wrote Basil Willey about his “wild idea of Leavis,” asking, “Is it just possible that if his nose were once rubbed in the actual working of the Faculty, if he were once the target of criticism instead of the critic, he might be cured? Of course we should suffer: but then we suffer already. I know it’s risky: but malcontents have before now been tamed by office.” But it was not to be.

  Lewis’s was, in many ways, a nearly ideal bachelor existence, made even better by the weekly run to Oxford. Every available weekend and vacation, he would return to the Kilns. To accommodate his schedule, the Inklings obligingly moved their meetings to Monday mornings, after which Lewis would stroll to the train station, accompanied often by Havard
and others, to catch the 2:34 back to Cambridge. Sometimes one or more of his companions would ride with him for dinner and an overnight stay at Magdalene, before returning to Oxford on Tuesday morning.

  The incessant travel and change in vista did nothing to impede Lewis’s literary output. During his time at Cambridge, he published at least a dozen books, including his autobiography, occasional essays, studies of love, words, reading, and the psalms, along with children’s fantasies and a novel. Warnie, too, benefited from the change, at least in terms of output, and took advantage of the empty hours created by his brother’s absence to establish himself more firmly as a historian of sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century France with a prodigious flow of biographies and cultural studies, all bearing enticing titles like The Sunset of the Splendid Century (1955), Assault on Olympus (1958), Louis XIV: An Informal Portrait (1959), The Scandalous Regent (1961), and Levantine Adventurer (1962). He wrote daily in the Kilns’s study, while complaining about the irritation of “hearing Paxford bellowing about the place all day.” Warnie missed the sheltered silence of Magdalen and, of course, Jack’s daily presence, but he believed that his brother was “undoubtedly happier and healthier” in his new environment and, in retrospect, should have chosen Cambridge over Oxford upon his return from World War I, for, despite their reputations, “it is not Cambridge, but Oxford which is the hardboiled materialistic, scientific university.”