The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings (59 page)

“Uton Herian Holbytlas”

“I actually wept at the denouement,” Tolkien recalled, years later. His great epic was finished. Well might he weep, as eleven years of intense creation, interrupted by seasons of terrible stagnation, drew to a close. In the late summer of 1948, he sequestered himself at Payables Farm, his son Michael’s nineteenth-century home at the Oratory School in the Chiltern Hills, and completed a working draft of
The Lord of the Rings
. Then came further revisions. He fiddled and fussed with this passage and that and produced much new material that would become part of a prologue and various appendices. On October 31, 1948, he wrote to Hugh Brogan, a schoolboy correspondent, that he was “happy to announce that I succeeded at last in bringing ‘the Lord of the Rings’ to a successful conclusion. Also, it has been read and approved by Rayner Unwin, who (the original reader of the ‘Hobbit’) has had time to grow up while the sequel has been made, and now here at Trinity. I think there is a chance of it being published although it will be a massive book far too large to make any money for the publisher…”

Another year would pass, however, before he completed a fair copy of the text. The intervening months saw transition, disruption, and disappointment. Priscilla moved from the family home into Lady Margaret Hall as an Oxford undergraduate, leaving her parents with an empty nest for the first time in over thirty years. Despite the extra free time this afforded, Tolkien remained frustrated, complaining to Brogan that “this university business of earning one’s living by teaching, delivering philological lectures, and daily attendance at ‘boards’ and other talk-meetings, interferes sadly with serious work.” On February 10, 1949, he contacted university officials about the possibility of a leave of absence, in order “to complete a number of writings I have on hand” and—less exalted but equally pressing—to arrange for the removal of all his teeth, “which are said to be poisoning me.”

The university granted a sabbatical for Trinity term 1949 (mid-April to the end of June), but it came to naught, thanks to unavoidable teaching and committee responsibilities. Tolkien then requested and received a lengthier leave, covering the fall and winter of 1949–50. In June 1949, he traveled for the first time to Ireland, serving as an external examiner for the National University of Ireland, work that he enjoyed, thanks to Ireland’s “curious shabby, happy-go-lucky, tumbledown charm” and, of course, its fervent Catholicism. Throughout these months the fair copy of
The Lord of the Rings
lay heavily upon his mind. When not abroad, he spent much of his spare time preparing the typescript, bending over a machine balanced on a bed in the attic of his home, a herculean task completed only in October. Instantly he passed the finished copy to Lewis for evaluation. “
Uton herian holbytlas
[let us praise hobbits] indeed,” Lewis responded on October 27. “I have drained the rich cup and satisfied a long thirst. Once it really gets under weigh the steady upward slope of grandeur and terror … is almost unequalled in the whole range of narrative art known to me.” He added a few objections, for instance, that “many passages I cd. wish you had written otherwise or omitted altogether”—Lewis possessed a finer ear for literary music and a sharper eye for overripe prose than his friend—but he hastened back to praise: “I congratulate you. All the long years you have spent on it are justified. Morris and Eddison, in so far as they are comparable, are now mere ‘precursors.’”

Nor was this the end of Tolkien’s literary triumphs in this glorious month of October 1949. On the twentieth, Allen & Unwin published
Farmer Giles of Ham
, his first book to see print in twelve years, a fantasy novella about a farmer named Giles who conquers a dragon named Chrysophylax, collects the beast’s treasure horde, and becomes a king. Tolkien had thought it up on the spot in the 1920s, to entertain his children as the family huddled under a bridge during a passing storm. After Allen & Unwin had accepted
The Hobbit
in 1936, Tolkien had sent them
Farmer Giles
for consideration, but it had been rejected as too brief to publish, despite a favorable report from Rayner Unwin. A year later, Tolkien had read a different version of the tale to the Lovelace Society at Worcester College and had been delighted to see that the audience “was apparently not bored—indeed they were generally convulsed with mirth.” One attendee recalled that Tolkien, in response to an undergraduate’s query about the truth of dragons and other legends, declared that behind such tales invariably lies something real; he then dug into his pockets and pulled out, along with a ball of string and other detritus, a small green shoe, thin and pointed in the toe, made of a leathery substance that felt like reptile skin, and declared it, “stoutly and with apparent sincerity,” to be a leprechaun’s shoe.

He pulled a rabbit out of his hat with
Farmer Giles of Ham
. In final form, it is not only a comic romp but a knowing satire, packed with philological jokes, invented etymologies, a pseudo-scholarly foreword, bits of Latin, and insider references to the “Four Wise Clerks of Oxenford” (the four editors of the
OED
). The full title of the book, setting the tone for what follows, is
Aegidii Ahenobarbi Julii Agricole de Hammo Domini de Domito Aule Draconarie comitis Regni Minimi regis et basilei mira facinora et mirabilis exortus or in the vulgar tongue The Rise and Wonderful Adventures of Farmer Giles, Lord of Tame, Count of Worminghall and King of the Little Kingdom.
When, after the war, Allen & Unwin reversed its decision and decided to publish, they insisted on illustrations to beef it up to acceptable size. The first artist did not work out, but Tolkien struck gold when, during a visit to the firm’s offices, he spied some delightful watercolor-and-ink illustrations based upon the whimsical grotesqueries of the fourteenth-century Luttrell Psalter. The illustrator, Pauline Baynes, a young woman who had been born in East Sussex and raised in India, was soon assigned to
Farmer Giles of Ham
. Her line drawings for the book, playing off medieval conventions without ridiculing them, enraptured Tolkien “beyond even the expectations aroused by the first examples. They are more than illustrations, they are a collateral theme.”

The End of Thursday Nights

October 1949 was a watershed not only for Tolkien but for all the Inklings. As the decade waned, Thursday night meetings continued at Lewis’s Magdalen rooms or at Merton under Tolkien’s auspices, but attendance was sparse. It seemed that every week, half the group had something else to do; only Tolkien, the Lewis brothers, and possibly Havard or Hardie could be relied on to make a regular appearance. Sometimes one or two less active members swelled the ranks, such as George Sayer, an English teacher at Malvern College and friend of Lewis and Tolkien, or Ronald B. McCallum, a fellow of Pembroke. The wine flowed, as did the talk, ranging from the poetics of T. S. Eliot to the ethics of cannibalism, but it was evident all around that interest was flagging. On October 27, 1949, Warnie noted in his diary: “Dined with J at College … No one turned up after dinner, which was just as well, as J had a bad cold and wanted to go to bed early.” No one would turn up ever again. From now on, Tuesday mornings at the Bird and Baby—a brilliant social hour but nothing more—would have to suffice; the Thursday night meetings had died from neglect.

What brought to an end those shining hours, rivaling or surpassing at their peak the gatherings of those magnificent eighteenth-century clubs of Johnson and Reynolds, Pope and Swift? No doubt the loss of Williams played a part, even if not as decisive a part as John Wain perceived (see chapter 14). Four years removed, his early demise still stung, and none of the new enrollees, however accomplished, could replace his feverish, enchanting mind. Lewis, ever faithful to his old friend, in 1948 had published
Arthurian Torso
, a literary diptych of Williams’s incomplete prose study of the Arthurian legend and Lewis’s commentary on Williams’s Arthurian poems. Most of the reviews ranged from lukewarm to cold. For the Shakespeare scholar Molly Mahood, writing in the
Modern Language Review
, the book’s strength lay in the idiosyncratic appeal of Williams’s poetry and theology; those seeking instruction in the history of Arthurian romance should look elsewhere. In
The Review of English Studies
, the Arthurian scholar John E. Housman declared that Williams’s share of the work “will … discredit the memory of an accomplished poet, because of its utter disregard for research and its lack of the most elementary principles of scholarship.” Few cared, really. Williams’s star, never very bright, was fading, and among the Inklings perhaps only Lewis held out hope for a Williams revival, telling Sayers that he wished to “be only the starting point of
Williamswissenschaftslehre
” (the scientific doctrine, or knowledge-theory—an expression favored by German idealists—of Williams). He never stopped boosting his friend; in
Essays Presented to Charles Williams
, he proclaimed, in an egregious example of loyalty trumping taste, Williams’s Arthurian poems to be “among the two or three most valuable books of verse produced in the century.” Lewis, of all Inklings, felt most acutely the absence of that mercurial man on Thursday evenings.

There were other things amiss with Thursday night meetings. Readings had ground almost to a halt. Tolkien, wearied by Dyson’s carping, no longer presented any of his work, and Lewis followed suit by withholding portions of his new children’s book,
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
. Perhaps he, too, anticipated a Dysonian assault; certainly he had qualms about reading the work in front of Tolkien, who already had heard parts of it in private session and had been repelled by its patchwork mythology. Without the readings and the subsequent critiques, Thursday night had become, in effect, Tuesday morning: an opportunity to chat with chums. Why not, then, drop Magdalen entirely for the Bird and Baby, with its dark, cozy, beery atmosphere? Tolkien, for one, had been thinking along these lines for some time; in his Septuagesima Sunday 1948 letter to Lewis on Dyson’s transgressions, he had made no mention of Magdalen (or the occasional Merton) gatherings but had signed off by declaring, “I know no more pleasant sound than arriving at the B. and B. and hearing a roar, and knowing that one can plunge in.”

A few Inklings specialists, notably Humphrey Carpenter, see yet another force at work, suggesting that Christianity had lost its cachet at Oxford by the late 1940s and that the resulting climate of religious indifference played a role in the demise of Magdalen meetings. But there is evidence to offset this view. When William Empson returned from his Asian travels in 1952 to take up a professorship in English literature at Sheffield, he was shocked by the resurgent Christianity among the British intelligentsia, a calamity he attributed to the influence of T. S. Eliot’s conversion and Lewis’s BBC talks and apologetic books. Kathleen Nott, a prominent poet and critic, registered her dismay at this state of affairs in her 1953 book,
The Emperor’s Clothes: An Attack on the Dogmatic Orthodoxy of T. S. Eliot, Graham Greene, Dorothy Sayers, C. S. Lewis, and Others
. At Oxford, the Student Christian Movement (SCM) continued to thrive, as did the Roman Catholic chaplaincy; church attendance remained high, and retreats, prayer meetings, charitable associations, and missions proliferated.

It would be more accurate to say that Lewis’s rise to fame as a Christian apologist (especially in the United States: he appeared on the cover of
Time
magazine on September 8, 1947, just two years before the Thursday evening lights went out) and Williams’s death were two aspects of the same overriding reason for the Inklings’ sea change: the membership was aging. In 1949, Tolkien was fifty-seven, Warnie fifty-four, Lewis and Barfield fifty-one; each was approaching that stage when many men settle into themselves and long for the armchair as much as the podium. Tolkien had finished
The Lord of the Rings
; no major projects beckoned apart from refining
The Silmarillion
, now in its fourth decade of composition; the home nest was empty of hatchlings; to complete the image of autumn setting in, he was about to acquire a full set of dentures. Lewis was smoking heavily and prone to flu, worn down by Mrs. Moore’s incessant demands and frightened by Warnie’s alcoholic binges. Barfield, with his dancer’s body, remained in excellent health but locked in literary limbo. None of these core members harbored doubts about the value of their long association with the group. It was simply time for a change.

“Why Should Not We Wake Up Sometimes?”

“I’ve read your poem with interest and sympathy, but we are obliged at present to keep our poetry list down to the shortest we can … I am therefore returning it with profound regrets.” So wrote T. S. Eliot to Barfield on June 1, 1948, rejecting his proposal that Faber & Faber publish his long narrative work, “The Unicorn.” Despite “profound regrets” and a few personal remarks (“I have been glad to see your occasional appearance in
The New English Weekly
”), Eliot’s refusal amounted to little more than a formal rejection letter and must have come as a bitter blow, especially as Barfield had convinced himself—and had notified Lewis—that publication was assured. In the event, “The Unicorn” never saw the light of day. Laid low by this letdown, by his general failure to publish, by domestic tensions, and by a job he disliked, Barfield confessed to Lewis that he was suffering from depression. Lewis, eager to buck up his friend, replied that this realization might well “mark an advance in self criticism and objectivity—i.e. that the very same experiences wh. wd. once have led you to say ‘How nasty everyone (or the weather, or the political situation) is at present’ now leads you to say ‘I am depressed.’” This newfound self-awareness, Lewis continued, amounted to “a Copernican revolution.”

He was right, Barfield was seeing things more objectively, but clear-sightedness only increased his misery. He began to question everything: his relationship with Maud, his work as a solicitor, his writings, his religious views. His spirits spiraled downward over the next several months, and he grew irritable as well as depressed. In the early spring of 1949, he sent Lewis a touchy note accusing him of not answering letters, a charge that Lewis responded “has caused me more shame and pain that it is at all likely you intended.” Once again, Lewis tried to cheer up his friend, this time with a clumsy joke crackling with resentment: “Did I ever mention that Weston, Devine, Frost, Wither, Curry and Miss Hardcastle [villains from the Space Trilogy] were all portraits of you? (If I didn’t, that may have been because it isn’t true. By gum, tho’, wait till I write another story.)”