Laura Miller (29 page)

Like Lewis, Wordsworth looked back on a youth when “meadow, grove, and stream, / The earth, and every common sight” inspired a kind of ecstasy, “the glory and the freshness of a dream,” only to realize that this capacity had withered in adulthood: “there hath past away a glory from the earth.” Eventually, Lewis found the solution to what he called his “Wordsworthian predicament” in religion, and he believed that the author of
The Prelude
would have found renewal in Christianity, too, “if only he could have believed it.” Even the title of Lewis’s autobiography,
Surprised by Joy,
is taken from a Wordsworth sonnet.

In other aspects, however, Lewis played Coleridge to Tolkien’s Wordsworth. He was a great talker — if not so great as Coleridge, who bedazzled everyone who heard him — and he had a tendency to monopolize conversations. (Tolkien, like Wordsworth, was the more reserved and saturnine of the pair.) The popularity of Lewis as an Oxford lecturer, radio essayist, and apologist paralleled Coleridge’s success during his occasional stints as a public speaker; “the people here absolutely
consume
me,” Coleridge complained to a friend after a bequest enabled him to resign a position as a minister. Both Lewis and Coleridge cared little for clothes and their own appearance, and both relished herculean walks that would have exhausted mere mortals; Coleridge was known to cover forty miles in a day without thinking much of it.

Coleridge, like Lewis, was a precipitator, very keen on pulling groups of like-minded friends together to see what happened, and he had a knack for caricature and social satire that he sometimes exercised to his own disadvantage. And while Coleridge never went through a period of serious religious doubt (he was always a passionate Christian, if often an unconventional one), he shared Lewis’s conviction that the splendors of nature must necessarily point toward something beyond it. “My mind,” he wrote to a friend, “feels as if it ached to behold & know something
great
— something
one & indivisible
— and it is only in the faith of this that rocks or waterfalls, mountains or caverns give me the sense of sublimity or majesty! — But in this faith
all things
counterfeit infinity!”

Above all, Coleridge was an enthusiast; he devoted himself to encouraging and celebrating Wordsworth when his friend was still a relatively untried poet with a lesser reputation. Lewis tirelessly coaxed Tolkien to finish and publish his writings; Tolkien, like Wordsworth, tended to fuss interminably over small imperfections and would have kept much of his work to himself if not prodded to let it go. As it was,
The Prelude
(which Wordsworth originally conceived of as an
introduction
to the great work Coleridge expected of him — the great work itself, to be called
The Recluse,
he never completed) was not published until after Wordsworth’s death. Tolkien described himself as “a notorious beginner of enterprises and non-finisher,” and blamed this on the difficulty he had in concentrating. Yet he could spend days fretting over the astronomical details in
The Lord of the Rings,
worrying about getting the phases of the moon just right instead of thinking about how to get to the next scene. If the result feels more persuasive because of his meticulousness, it’s only due to Lewis’s nagging that we have an end product at all.

Coleridge is probably the greatest “non-finisher” in English literature, more famous, perhaps, for what he didn’t do (complete “Kubla Khan” or “Christabel”) than for what he did. This is an occupational hazard for artists whose efforts are fueled exclusively by gusts of creative inspiration; gusts are by definition brief. In Coleridge’s case, his changeable nature was compounded by opium addiction, a habit he fell into partly for medical reasons (laudanum was routinely prescribed by physicians in those days) and partly to escape from an unhappy marriage. The drug ruined his life, aggravating all the traits that made him uniquely exasperating even to his best friends. “He talks very much like an angel,” said one of the poet’s patrons toward the end, “and he does nothing at all.” Opium magnified Coleridge’s tendency toward self-pity and kept him from dealing sensibly with what he regarded as the great torments of his later years: his unrequited love for Wordsworth’s sister-in-law and his eventual estrangement from Wordsworth.

Finishing certainly wasn’t Lewis’s problem; considering the incessant demands and disruptions of his domestic situation, he was superhumanly productive, even during the worst days of Mrs. Moore’s decline. He wrote all seven of the Narnia books in a little over two years. During the same period he was hospitalized with a streptococcal infection (the one attributed by his doctor to exhaustion) and coped with a crisis in Mrs. Moore’s health that required moving her to a nursing home. He handled that task alone; Warnie, as was his wont when the going got tough, was off recovering from one of his inopportune alcoholic binges.

Lewis dealt with all this on top of the regular duties of an Oxford tutor. Over the previous two decades, he had produced
The Allegory of Love,
the three science-fiction novels known as the “Space Trilogy,” several books of apologetics and the radio talks that spawned them, and many articles and (often unsigned) reviews for newspapers and other popular publications. Tolkien, by contrast, had published only
The Hobbit,
which was a success — but not on the level of, say,
Mere Christianity
— and he kept getting stuck in the midsection of
The Lord of the Rings.
The two of them had cooked up a scheme in the early 1930s to write a “thriller” apiece (Lewis picked space travel as his theme; Tolkien’s was time travel), and whereas Lewis had fulfilled the plan in triplicate, Tolkien had only “a fragment” of a novel to show for himself.

This, the two men’s various biographers agree, bothered Tolkien. That is the problem with literary friendships: the commonalities that foster them can also lead to comparison, competition, friction. The fastidious Tolkien was further annoyed by Lewis’s authorial sloppiness, his uncorrected mistakes and inconsistencies, which were, like many of Coleridge’s faults, the result of an endearingly wholehearted forward momentum that blithely swept over the sort of minor problems that would inevitably trip up Tolkien.

Lewis was “a man of immense power and industry,” Tolkien wrote to a reader who had noticed some correspondences between the space trilogy and
The Lord of the Rings,
“but at last my slower and more meticulous (as well as more indolent and less organized) machine has produced its effort.” Until it did, however, only a writer of angelic forbearance could have witnessed his friend’s blossoming career without a twinge of envy. It didn’t help that when Lewis incorporated some little element of Tolkien’s mythology into his own fiction, he’d often get it wrong, such as misspelling “Númenor” (an Atlantean civilization from the distant past of Middle-earth) as “Numinor.” That, and the elvish-inflected names that Lewis invented for the supernatural entities in his science-fiction novels, irritated his friend, though he knew Lewis intended it as a tribute.

What sustained the Tolkien and Lewis friendship was their affection for old things and old ways of life, and above all their love of old literary forms. This, too, was something they had in common with the Romantics. In the preface to
Lyrical Ballads,
a groundbreaking collection of poems by both Wordsworth and Coleridge, published in 1798, Wordsworth spoke for both men in denouncing “poets, who think that they are conferring honor upon themselves and their art in proportion as they separate themselves from the sympathies of men, and indulge in arbitrary and capricious habits of expression in order to furnish food for fickle tastes and fickle appetites of their own creation.” This expresses pretty well how Lewis felt about modernism, personified for him by the poet T. S. Eliot, whose work he once repudiated as “a very great evil.”

Lewis, it must be said, never took the time to understand the modernist writers properly; he didn’t think that he needed to. He was sure that Eliot’s “poems of disintegration” were morally dangerous: “I contend that no man is fortified against chaos by reading
The Waste Land,
” he declared, “but that most men are by it infected with chaos.” As Wordsworth had in his own time, Lewis believed that the literary establishment (for that is what he considered the modernists to be) had instituted and then slavishly followed an assortment of highfalutin fashions that cut them off from “the sympathies of men.”

Lyrical Ballads
returned to songs and legends rooted in English folk culture for inspiration, rejecting the mannered, elaborate classical allusions that reigned in the poetry of the previous generation. Lewis and Tolkien weren’t as convinced as Wordsworth and Coleridge were that they had “the sympathies of men” on their side, but they knew that the stories they preferred — whether fairy tales, heroic sagas, or pulp adventure yarns — were the sort of thing people had been writing and enjoying for millennia. The modernists, by contrast, prided themselves on being original, on discarding obsolete literary forms and subject matter that imposed a false coherence on the tumult of twentieth-century life. Indeed, modernism defined itself in part by its rejection of the nineteenth-century cult of Romanticism, whose focus on the transcendent self embodied in the artist Eliot dismissed as sentimental and solipsistic. Romantic individualism, Eliot wrote, could lead its disciples “only back upon themselves.”

Lewis believed that the modernists were both snobs and parvenus. While he certainly championed “the masters” against the assaults of such upstarts, he was not a social critic in the contemporary vein of Alan Bloom, the author of
The Closing of the American Mind.
Lewis would never have defined himself as a defender of high culture against the crass rabble, the kind of conservative who trumpets “Great Books” and the work it takes to read them. Instead, he saw himself as an antimandarin, a defender of old-fashioned readerly pleasures. He had, after all, read most of the English-language classics, even the ones that make today’s undergraduates groan and reach for the Cliffs Notes, purely for the fun of it.

Modernist novelists who wanted to abandon conventional story- telling as an oppressive, arbitrary, and outdated convention, were, in Lewis’s eyes, the real enemies of both the literary classics
and
the common folk. They were the same sort of people who sneered at him for liking
The Wind in the Willows
and H. G. Wells. Reading Virginia Woolf’s
Orlando,
he admired her “astonishing power of rendering the feel both of landscapes and moods, rising sometimes to real loveliness” but complained of “a total absence of any matter on which to use the power.” He thought he detected in the modernist project a debilitating fear of vulgarity. “The reason why they don’t like either the narrative elements or low comedy,” he wrote to Dorothy Sayers, “is that these have obvious immediate entertainment value. These prigs, starting from the true proposition that great art is more than entertainment, reach the glaring
non sequitur,
‘entertainment has no place in great art.’”

But while Lewis took it upon himself to defend Shelley from the critical disapproval of Eliot and his coterie, there was one aspect of Romanticism for which he had no use: its revolutionary fervor. Shelley was a notorious atheist, Coleridge a would-be socialist, and even Wordsworth had been exhilarated by the French Revolution before it went off the rails. At no point in his life would Lewis ever have written, as Wordsworth once did, “I disapprove of monarchical and aristocratical governments, however modified. Hereditary distinctions and privileged orders of every species I think must necessarily counteract the progress of human improvement.” Lewis and Tolkien didn’t believe in progress or “human improvement.” Man had fallen and only God could fix that.

Chapter Twenty-one

Marvelous Journeys

T
olkien’s intellectual battles were more esoteric than his friend’s — he had, for example, a serious quarrel with anyone who regarded Anglo-Saxon poetry as no more than a means to study the Old English language, rather than as literature in its own right. But where he and Lewis coincided most happily was in their affinity for the venerable literary form known as the romance. (This was, of course, before the term “romance” was adopted as a label for the genre of pulp fiction devoted to fantasies of courtship.) Much that frustrates and baffles certain readers about their work has to do with confusion over what the two men intended to write. Their books may look like novels, but in essence they are romances.

When critics complain, as Edmund Wilson did, about the morally simplistic characterization in
The Lord of the Rings,
or its focus on mere adventure, or the pervasive unreality of its heroic deeds and magical beings, they are pointing out that Tolkien’s book is not a very good novel, and there is truth to that.
The Lord of the Rings
has no character to equal Jane Eyre or Raskolnikov, none of the sophisticated moral humanism of
Huckleberry Finn
— and certainly nothing approaching the stylistic bravado of
Lolita.
But if
The Lord of the Rings
doesn’t excel in any of these novelistic arenas, that’s largely because it isn’t trying to. “My work is not a ‘novel,’” Tolkien wrote testily to one would-be student of his book, “but an ‘heroic romance,’ a much older and quite different variety of literature.” As for Lewis, although he called the Chronicles “fairy tales” rather than romances, he saw the genres as deeply related, at times indistinguishable.

One “modern” author whom both Lewis and Tolkien held in esteem was William Morris. This Victorian dynamo was the founder of the Arts and Crafts movement, a political activist, historical preservationist, member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, fine-press publisher, translator, travel writer, poet, painter, designer, architect, and, in his final years, the author of eight “prose romances,” works of fiction that made him the “great author” of C. S. Lewis’s youth and first gave Tolkien the idea to write romances of his own. Morris is now best known for his textile and wallpaper designs, rich, intricate botanicals inspired by medieval tapestries, many of which you can still buy today. His role as pioneer of the socialist movement in Britain makes him interesting to political historians. The prose romances are probably the most dimly remembered of all his accomplishments; they have often been regarded as a kind of holiday he took from more significant pursuits. Nevertheless, it may well be through Morris’s tales of questing knights and valiant Germanic heroes that he has had, indirectly, the greatest influence of all.