Literary Giants Literary Catholics

by Joseph Pearce

  What he has done . . . beggars description. Here is a scion of an Ulster prot. family resident in S. Africa, most of whom fought in both wars, who became a Catholic after sheltering the Carmelite fathers in Barcelona—in vain, they are caught & butchered, and R. C. nearly lost his life. But he got the Carmelite archives from the burning library and took them through the Red country. He speaks Spanish fluently (he has been a professional bullfighter). As you know he then fought through the war on Franco’s side, and among other things was in the van of the company that chased the Reds out of Malaga. . . . But he is a patriotic man, and has fought for the B. Army since. . . I wish I could remember half the picaresque stories, about poets and musicians etc. from Peter Warlock to Aldous Huxley. . . However, it is not possible to convey an impression of such a rare character, both a soldier and a poet, and a Christian convert. How unlike the Left—the “corduroy panzers” who fled to America (Auden among them who with his friends got R. C.’s works “banned”).

  If Campbell had made a favorable impression on Tolkien, who thought him “old-looking”, “war-scarred”, and “limping from recent wounds”, Lewis’ attitude remained as combative as ever, much to Tolkien’s evident chagrin.

  C.S.L.’s reactions were odd. Nothing is a greater tribute to Red propaganda than the fact that he (who knows that they are in all other subjects liars and traducers) believes all that is said against Franco, and nothing that is said for him. . . . But hatred of our church is after all the real only final foundation of the C of E—so deep laid that it remains even when all the superstructure seems removed (C.S.L. for instance reveres the Blessed Sacrament, and admires nuns!). Yet if a Lutheran is put in jail he is up in arms; but if Catholic priests are slaughtered—he disbelieves it (and I daresay really thinks they asked for it). But R. C. shook him a bit.

  Following the meeting, Lewis stated that he “loathed . . . Roy Campbell’s particular blend of Catholicism and Fascism, and told him so”. His judgment was unfair. Campbell never considered himself a fascist, at least not in the sense in which it is usually understood, and his support for Franco’s Nationalists was based on the simple and laudatory desire to defend traditional Christian culture from the destructive atheism of the communists. Having been received into the Church in the year before the outbreak of the war, he considered it his duty to defend the culture and traditions he had recently discovered and embraced. Furthermore, having witnessed the cold-blooded murder of his friends, it is scarcely surprising that Campbell was somewhat vociferous in his attacks on communism. He was, however, as vociferous in his attacks on Nazism. Before the Spanish war had started, he had made the acquaintance of two Norwegians, also living in Spain. One was a communist and the other a Nazi, but, Campbell observed, “they were both staunchly united in their hate of Christ and Christianity”. “From the very beginning my wife and I understood the real issues in Spain”, Campbell wrote on another occasion. “Now was the time to decide whether . . . to remain half-apathetic to the great fight which was obviously approaching—or whether we should step into the front ranks of the Regular Army of Christ. Hitler himself had said, even by then, how much more easy the Protestants were to enslave and bamboozle than the Catholics.” One can imagine Tolkien nodding sagely in agreement with Campbell’s words, perceiving them as an example of Campbell’s Strideresque wisdom in comparison with Lewis’ naïve credulity.

  Happily, the differences between Campbell and Lewis did not prevent the development of a genuine friendship. Campbell’s respect for Lewis was illustrated by his request for Lewis’ advice on which selections from Milton would be best suited for broadcasting on the BBC, where Campbell was working as a talks producer. Lewis, reciprocating the expression of respect, replied that Campbell was “quite as able as I to choose”, though he proceeded to make suggestions nonetheless. “Oddly enough,” Lewis wrote in the same letter, “we were all talking about you last night. Next term you must break away and spend a Thursday night with us in College. (I can do dinner, bed, and breakfast.)”

  On 28 November 1946 Campbell returned to Oxford to attend another meeting of the Inklings at Lewis’ rooms in Magdalen College. Lewis’ brother recorded in his diary that Campbell was the main attraction of the evening. “A pretty full meeting of the Inklings to meet Roy Campbell . . . whom I was glad to see again; he is fatter and tamer than he used to be I think.” Lewis had also become somewhat tamer, and certainly far less belligerent. He seems, in fact, to have forgiven Campbell for Flowering Rifle and to have embraced him both as a friend and as a fellow Inkling. They still crossed swords at these lively literary gatherings, but they were now arguing as friends, not quarreling as enemies. The difference in their relationship can be perceived in the tone of another of Lewis’ poems, “To Roy Campbell”, in which he complained that Campbell was wrong to dismiss romantic poets such as Coleridge and Wordsworth merely because they were praised by untrustworthy critics. These poets, wrote Lewis, were “far more ours than theirs”, indicating that Campbell was now accepted by Lewis as “one of us” in the battle against common literary foes.

  One wonders, as Tolkien watched Lewis’ slow acceptance of Campbell into the inner sanctum of the Inklings, whether he ever mused further on the parallels between Campbell and Strider. The parallels are certainly striking. The hobbits had regarded the Ranger with deep suspicion when they had first met him in the convivial yet threatening surroundings of the Prancing Pony at Bree; Lewis had regarded the arrival of the Stranger with the same suspicion when they had met in the equally convivial, though hardly threatening, surroundings of the Bird and Baby in Oxford. In both cases, the suspicions gave way to a warmhearted trust. Roy “Strider” Campbell had walked out of the Prancing Pony of Tolkien’s imagination into the Bird and Baby of Lewis’ world. He had stepped out of the Fellowship of the Ring into the ring of fellowship known as the Inklings.

  32

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  J. R. R. TOLKIEN

  Truth and Myth

  J. R. R. TOLKIEN, AUTHOR of the world best seller The Lord of the Rings, qualifies, technically, as a “literary convert” because of his reception into the Church as an eight-year-old following his mother’s conversion to the Faith. It could be said, therefore, that he joins the ranks of the literary converts by creeping in through the back door or, perhaps more correctly, through the nursery door. With beguiling ambiguity he is neither a cradle Catholic nor a full-blown convert, but a charming mixture of the two—a cradle convert.

  Since, as Wordsworth reminds us, “the child is father of the man” and since, in Tolkien’s case, this is particularly true, the eight-year-old’s “cradle conversion” was destined to shape the remainder of his life in a profound manner. Indeed, it would not be an exaggeration to say that Tolkien’s conversion was crucial to both the making of the man and to the shaping of the myth he created.

  Following the death of her husband in February 1896, a few weeks after her son’s fourth birthday, Mabel Tolkien began a new love affair that would soon estrange her from her family. She became passionately devoted to Christianity, taking her two sons every Sunday on a long walk to a “high” Anglican church. Then, one Sunday, they were taken by strange roads to a different place of worship. This was Saint Anne’s, a Roman Catholic church amid the slums of Birmingham. She had been considering conversion for some time. During the spring of 1900, she received instruction and was duly received in June of the same year.

  By her conversion, she incurred the immediate wrath of her family. Her father, who had been brought up as a Methodist but had since lapsed further from orthodoxy into Unitarianism, was outraged. Her brother-in-law withdrew the little financial help that he had provided since she had become a widow, plunging her and the children into poverty. She also met with considerable opposition from her late husband’s family, many of whom were Baptists with strong anti-Catholic prejudices. The emotional strain affected her health adversely, but undaunted, she began to instruct her sons in the Faith.

  Tolkien made his F
irst Communion at Christmas 1903. The joy, however, was soon followed by tragedy. Less than a year later, his mother died, having lapsed into a coma caused by diabetes. In her will, Mabel Tolkien had appointed her friend, Father Francis Morgan, to be guardian of her two orphaned sons. He arranged for them to live with their Aunt Beatrice, not far from the Birmingham Oratory, but she showed them little attention, and the brothers soon began to consider the oratory their real home. Each morning they hurried round to serve Mass for Father Morgan at his favorite side altar in the oratory church. Afterward they would eat breakfast in the refectory before setting off for school. Tolkien remained forever grateful for all that Father Morgan did for him and his brother. “I first learned charity and forgiveness from him”. The oratory was a “good Catholic home” that contained “many learned fathers (largely ‘converts’)” and where “observance of religion was strict”.

  The charity and forgiveness that Tolkien learned from Father Morgan in the years after his mother’s death offset the pain and sorrow that her death engendered. The pain remained throughout his life, and sixty years later he compared his mother’s sacrifices for her faith with the complacency of some of his own children toward the faith they had inherited from her:

  When I think of my mother’s death . . . worn out with persecution, poverty, and, largely consequent, disease, in the effort to hand on to us small boys the Faith, and remember the tiny bedroom she shared with us in rented rooms in a postman’s cottage at Rednal, where she died alone, too ill for viaticum, I find it very hard and bitter, when my children stray away.

  Tolkien always considered his mother a martyr for the Faith. Nine years after her death, he had wrote: “My own dear mother was a martyr indeed, and it was not to everybody that God grants so easy a way to his great gifts as he did to Hilary and myself, giving us a mother who killed herself with labour and trouble to ensure us keeping the faith.”

  Following Mabel Tolkien’s death, Father Francis Morgan of the Birmingham Oratory became legal guardian to Tolkien and his brother. Father Morgan became a surrogate father to the two orphaned boys, so that Tolkien would describe him later as “a guardian who had been a father to me, more than most real fathers”.

  In June 1915 Tolkien achieved first-class Honors in English Language and Literature from Oxford University, the first significant milestone on his brilliant academic career at Oxford as a philologist and expert in Anglo-Saxon. He would later refer to his academic vocation as one of the “significant facts, which have some relation” to his work, stating that his academic pursuits had affected his “taste in languages” and that this was “obviously a large ingredient in The Lord of the Rings”.

  On 22 March 1916 Tolkien married his childhood sweetheart, Edith Bratt, and, two months later, left for what he described as the “carnage” and the “animal horror” of the battle of the Somme, surely one of the most brutal bloodbaths in human history.

  Although Tolkien was at pains to insist that his war experience was not a major influence upon The Lord of the Rings, and although some critics have indeed overemphasized its influence, there is little doubt that his experience of the “animal horror” darkened his vision to such an extent that the shadow of the First World War always lingers, vulturelike, over his work. In particular, he retained a horror of the new weapons of mass destruction, crafted by sin-stained minds, with which men now killed each other with bloodlustful abandon. Machine guns and mustard gas became a metaphor for the mindless application of new technology—the triumph of the machine over humanity. In the years between the two world wars, Tolkien befriended other like-minded academics, most notably C. S. Lewis, with whom he formed probably the most important literary relationship of the twentieth century. Lewis was “a great encourager” of Tolkien’s embryonic efforts at myth creation, and Tolkien confessed on one occasion that he might never have finished The Lord of the Rings if Lewis had not been there to encourage him and to cajole him to continue. Similarly, there is little doubt that Tolkien was the greatest single influence on Lewis’ own literary oeuvre. Tolkien’s philosophy of myth, by which Tolkien explained the deep-rooted relationship between God’s Creation and human “subcreation”, constituted the final coup de grace in Lewis’ embrace of Christianity following a long discussion on the nature and supernature of mythology in September 1931.

  Myths, Lewis had asserted during this discussion, were “lies and therefore worthless, even though breathed through silver”.

  “No”, Tolkien replied. “They are not lies.” On the contrary, they were the best way, sometimes the only way, of conveying truths that would otherwise remain inexpressible. We have come from God, Tolkien argued, and inevitably the myths woven by us, though they contain error, reflect a splintered fragment of the true light, the eternal truth that is with God. Myths may be misguided, but they steer, however shakily, toward the true harbor, whereas materialistic “progress” leads only to the abyss and the power of evil.

  “In expounding this belief in the inherent truth of mythology,” wrote Tolkien’s biographer, Humphrey Carpenter, “Tolkien had laid bare the centre of his philosophy as a writer, the creed that is at the heart of The Silmarillion.” It is also the creed at the heart of all his other work. His short novel Tree and Leaf is essentially an allegory on the concept of true myth, and his poem “Mythopoeia” is an exposition in verse of the same concept.

  Building on this philosophy of myth, Tolkien explained to Lewis that the story of Christ was the true myth at the very heart of history and at the very root of reality. Whereas the pagan myths were manifestations of God expressing Himself through the minds of poets, using the images of their “mythopoeia” to reveal fragments of His eternal truth, the true myth of Christ was a manifestation of God expressing Himself through Himself, with Himself and in Himself. God, in the Incarnation, had revealed Himself as the ultimate Poet who was creating reality, the true poem or true myth, in His own image. Thus, in a divinely inspired paradox, myth was revealed as the ultimate realism.

  Such a revelation changed Lewis’ whole conception of Christianity, precipitating his conversion.

  Lewis was one of the select group of friends known collectively as the Inklings who read the manuscript of Tolkien’s timeless classic, The Lord of the Rings, as it was being written.

  Tolkien began work in earnest on The Lord of the Rings during the dark years of the Second World War, and there is perhaps an element of irony that the war in which Tolkien did not fight is more potently present in his magnum opus than the war in which he did. It is indeed no coincidence that Sauron has been thought to represent Josef Stalin, who was described by Tolkien in 1943 as “that bloodthirsty old murderer”, and Mordor, by implication, to represent the Soviet Union. Similarly, Saruman has been said to represent Hitler, and Isengard, with its racially charged emblem of the White Hand, to represent the Third Reich. “I have spent most of my life . . . studying Germanic matters”, Tolkien wrote to one of his sons in 1941, adding that he knew “better than most what is the truth about this ‘Nordic’ nonsense”. The result was that he had “in this War a burning private grudge. . . against that ruddy little ignoramus Adolf Hitler”, adding that Hitler’s ideology was the result of “demonic inspiration and impetus”, a comment that takes on considerable significance considering Hitler’s personification as Saruman in The Lord of the Rings. In this light, Saruman’s scoffing dismissal of the difference between white and black, that is, between good and evil, declaring himself no longer Saruman the White but Saruman the many-colored, is a clear allusion to the Nietzschean boast that the “wise” must go “beyond good and evil”, a boast that lay, and lied, at the cankered heart of the Third Reich.

  Tolkien was still working on The Lord of the Rings when the world lurched uncertainly from world war to cold war, and, as such, there is more than a hint of Orwellian chill in the air of Middle Earth. It is, for instance, intriguing that the palantir stones, the seeing stones employed by Sauron, the Dark Lord, to broadcast propaganda and sow
the seeds of despair among his enemies, are uncannily similar in their mode of employment to the latest technology in mass communications media. It is even more intriguing once one realizes that palantir translates from the elvish as television!

  More perceptive than most, Tolkien had prophesied the future of globalization as early as 1943, opining about the likely triumph of Mammon over Marx in a letter to his son.

  I wonder (if we survive this war) if there will be any niche, even of sufferance, left for reactionary back numbers like me (and you). The bigger things get the smaller and duller or flatter the globe gets. It is going to be all one blasted little provincial suburb. When they have introduced American sanitation, morale-pep, feminism, and mass production throughout the Near East, Middle East, Far East, U.S.S.R., the Pampas, el Gran Chaco, the Danubian basin, Equatorial Africa, Hither Further and Inner Mumbo-land, Gondhwanaland, Lhasa, and the villages of darkest Berkshire, how happy we shall be. At any rate it ought to cut down travel. There will be nowhere to go. So people will (I opine) go all the faster. . .

  But seriously: I do find this Americo-cosmopolitanism very terrifying.

  Perhaps it is more than a little encouraging that a work by a self-confessed “reactionary back number” should emerge as the most popular and influential work of literature of the twentieth century, continuing to win converts to its wisdom and charm fifty years after it was first published. Its power lies in the way that he succeeds, through myth, in making the unseen hand of providence felt by the reader. In his mythical creations, or subcreations as he would call them, he shows how the unseen hand of God is felt far more forcefully in myth than it is ever felt in fiction. It is paradoxical that fiction works with facts, albeit invented facts, whereas myth works with truth, albeit truth dressed in fancy disguises. Furthermore, since facts are physical and truth is metaphysical, myth, being metaphysical, is, in its very essence, spiritual.