II – Picking up the threads
That February, Tolkien’s eldest son, John, was ordained priest. Tolkien served his first Mass, in the church of St Aloysius, Oxford, on 11 February 1946.
In the middle of March 1946, Tolkien’s doctor ordered him to take a thorough rest for six months to avoid a complete physical collapse; in the event, he spent three weeks at Stonyhurst, where the English College students (John Tolkien amongst them) had been quartered during the war. This was hardly the six months off he had been prescribed; the rest did him some good, though, enough to carry him through the remainder of the academic year. He said later that at this time he came ‘near to a real breakdown’ and returned ‘to a term so troublous that it was all I could do to get through it’.9
Unwin reprinted The Hobbit again that March. He sent Tolkien advance royalties on the book, which were as ever very welcome. In the event, problems with the bookbinders meant that it did not appear for another eighteen months.
Tolkien returned to Oxford at the start of April; Edith was away, so he went to stay in an inn in Woodstock with his son Christopher, who was on leave from the Fleet Air Arm prior to returning to Oxford to finish his degree. They spent a week and a half in the Oxfordshire countryside. Then Tolkien returned to Northmoor Road, and a fortnight’s administrative work before full term started (this included superintending the election of Wrenn to Tolkien’s former chair). He also at this time published one of his few book reviews, in (of all places) The Sunday Times.10
After term ended, he and Edith spent a week at Stonyhurst, their first holiday together without children since the Great War.
At the end of June 1946, the other Merton chair, in English Literature, also fell vacant; its occupant, David Nichol Smith, had reached retirement age. Smith had held his chair for thirty-eight years; between the wars, he had been, for Tolkien and Lewis and their allies, the bad old English School personified – self-consciously ‘literary’ criticism in the Saintsbury manner, studies of older critics, elegant editions of philologically unchallenging texts. His retirement meant, for the time being, yet more administrative work for Tolkien (he would in effect be running the English School single-handed); it also involved him in selecting a successor. Tolkien’s preferred candidate was either of two of his friends and academic allies: Lord David Cecil or C.S. Lewis. Lewis was by now one of the best-known English dons in Oxford, and was a natural choice for the vacancy, and Tolkien argued for him; but he was passed over, in large part (it seems) because some of the electors were suspicious of Lewis’s activities as a Christian apologist. According to George Sayer (who probably had this directly from Tolkien), his fellow electors – H.W. Garrod, Helen Darbishire and C.H. Wilkinson – were unanimous in refusing to consider Lewis, who, they collectively reckoned, had not done enough pure scholarship, was opposed to research degrees (as indeed was Tolkien) and was best known for three novels and some books of popular theology: ‘They thought his election would lower the status of the professorship and even discredit the English School.’11 Cecil was also rejected. The job went, instead, to Lewis’s former tutor, F.P. Wilson. Wilson, who had like Tolkien attended King Edward’s, Birmingham, was three years older than Tolkien, nine years older than Lewis; at the time of his election to the Merton chair, he was fifty-eight. He was an authority on Shakespeare and Elizabethan literature, an editor of texts, co-editor of the Oxford History of English Literature series: a worthy but dull scholar, certainly not a radical-reactionary in the Tolkien–Lewis mode. Further reform of the English School was now significantly less likely, at least in the directions Lewis and Tolkien thought necessary. Tolkien pleaded this unhappy business as excuse for not writing during the summer.
It was not until September 1946 that Tolkien again took up the manuscript of The Lord of the Rings. He returned to Book V, which was finished by the end of October 1947, and also revised Books I and II. He also, as an exercise, wrote a new fifth chapter for The Hobbit (Bilbo’s finding of the Ring, and the subsequent riddle contest with Gollum), to make it better fit with the later story. Tolkien had told Unwin in July 1946 he hoped to have the whole Hobbit sequel finished perhaps by October, but certainly by the end of the year. In the event, the material of Book V (the siege of Minas Tirith, the ride of Rohan to its relief and the passage of Aragorn through the Paths of the Dead) was recast and re-ordered numerous times before Tolkien was happy with it.
Christopher Tolkien, again an undergraduate, now accompanied his father to meetings of the Inklings, although he was soon reckoned a member in his own right, ‘independent of my presence or otherwise’.12 He was deputed to read aloud chapters from The Lord of the Rings, as his delivery was generally considered better than his father’s.
Michael Tolkien spent some months doing photographic research for the Admiralty (perhaps arranged by Robert Havard?), then a year teaching at the Dragon School in Oxford before landing a job at his old school, the Oratory. He was to spend the rest of his life as a schoolmaster.
III – The shifting of friendships
The years immediately after the war saw a change in the personnel usually attending the Thursday evening Inklings: Wrenn was back in Oxford from 1946, but does not seem to have resumed his connexion; and David Cecil, as we noted, was only ever a sporadic feature. The death of Charles Williams made a definite and epochal gap in the company: thereafter, as far as the records tell us, there was a distinct shift in those attending. At least half a dozen men who had, previously, had only tangential contact with the group now started to attend more often. Much of this is an inevitable consequence of the end of the war: as the University lifted its freeze on hiring lecturers, and men returned from war service, the number of dons in Oxford grew and, with it, the pool of potential Inklings. Charles Williams’s prominence in the Oxford lecture list had been, we should remember, almost wholly a function of wartime exigency. This later version of the Inklings is the model for Tolkien’s The Notion Club Papers, written in the first half of 1946.
We have already noticed Christopher Tolkien as a new member; Colin Hardie, Magdalen Classics don and later an authority on Dante, was another. Hardie, a Scotsman from distinguished academic stock, had been at Magdalen since 1936 (he had been first undergraduate then a don at Balliol, before three years at the British School in Rome); his brother Frank had spent a year at Magdalen before moving to Corpus, where he was eventually Head of House. Hardie came to Christianity, indeed to Catholicism, after his marriage in 1940. He was finally received in 1945; he seems to have been involved in the Inklings only thereafter.
There was also, initially at Tolkien’s invitation, one of his ex-pupils, a young New Zealand research student, J.A.W. (Jack) Bennett; he attended sporadically from 1946 on. In 1947 he was elected to a tutorial fellowship at Magdalen, and took over the Old and Middle English teaching from Lewis. Another Tolkien invitee was R.B. (Ronald Buchanan) McCallum, the history don at Pembroke (elected in 1925, so exactly contemporary with Tolkien there); he was felt by some to be rather self-imposing than invited. He seems to have been active around 1948.
Another self-invited member was Fr Gervase Mathew. He was younger brother to the remarkable David Mathew: historian, sometime naval officer, would-be Carthusian and yet another of the unsettled intellectual clergymen in which the English Catholic Church has historically specialized (Newman, Adrian Fortescue, Robert Hugh Benson, Ronald Knox; in our own times Fr Ian Ker), David Mathew was first Chaplain to London University, then an auxiliary bishop in Westminster, and eventually apostolic delegate to British colonial Africa and Archbishop of a titular see in partibus. His time in Africa was successful, but on his return in 1953 he was passed over for English sees and retired to private life and the writing of history. Unlike his brother, Gervase Mathew found a congenial place in the English Dominican province, and was a habitué of the Oxford Blackfriars for half a century. More learned than his brother, even, but in recondite medieval and Byzantine bypaths, he was also an incurable collector and wielder of ‘influen
ce’ in the characteristic Oxford string-pulling-through-personal-acquaintance manner (we shall see a not wholly happy effect of this on Tolkien). In this endless quest, he sought and gained access to the Inklings; Warnie Lewis’s diaries do not mention him before 1946, although he claimed to have attended meetings as early as 1939. Mathew rather inserted himself into the circle, so we may suppose his early attendances to have been irregular and occasional; he was an enthusiast for the poems of Charles Williams, particularly in their Byzantine afflatus, which Tolkien disliked, and this, together with his efforts on Williams’s behalf during the war with the Theology Faculty, may have helped him to get closer to the group.
Mathew, Hardie and Bennett were all Catholics (although Bennett converted only in the early 1950s); there were another three men whom Lewis brought along, two of whom were from other traditions. One was C.E. Stevens, the indefatigable ancient history don at Magdalen, who was active in the Inklings from November 1947; another, a legacy of wartime, was James Dundas-Grant, a retired naval officer (and another Catholic). In 1944, he was appointed to command the Naval Division of the Oxford cadets in training, and given rooms and dining rights by Magdalen; he became friendly with Lewis, and attended occasional evening Inklings. After the war, he moved to Oxford as warden of a house for Catholic undergraduates, and joined morning pub sessions also. He remembered Tolkien ‘jumping up and down, declaiming in Anglo-Saxon’; he also described him as ‘tall, sweptback grey hair, restless’, which seems inaccurate in one (subjective) particular (Tolkien was, in fact, very slightly below average height), and possibly conflatory in another: photographs of him in the 1940s show his hair still dark, although by the end of the decade it was greying.13
Last of the trio was John Wain. One of Lewis’s quondam pupils, he was from 1946 to 1949 a Fellow of New College, and (from 1947 to 1955) also held a lectureship at Reading. He was a frequent attender between, probably, 1946 and 1951 or so, years before he found fame as a novelist. He was not, on the whole, sympathetic to the general aesthetic or theological or political tenor of the Inklings, but seems to have enjoyed their talk.14 Perhaps Wain had, then, the ambitious young man’s chameleon quality of disguising from his elders such views as he knew would offend; but it remains true that the inclusion of one so fundamentally out of sympathy with their collective dispositions suggests that the Inklings was, in some degree, running out of steam. Nevertheless it carried on, borne by habit and Lewis’s jollying, until the early 1950s.
IV – Dispersed effort, sporadic results
Tolkien was in desultory correspondence with Unwin about publishing Farmer Giles; he had no leisure to finish any stories that might, when added to it, make a big enough book to be worth making a fuss over, apart from Sellic Spell, which ‘might not seem so suitable’. He was convinced, too, that The Lord of the Rings was qualitatively so much better than these other things that any time he could spare must be devoted to it. Unwin decided that Farmer Giles might be better published on its own, bulked out with illustrations.
The academic year 1946–7 brought some alleviation of Tolkien’s workload; Wrenn assumed the Chair of Anglo-Saxon, and Tolkien also relinquished the chairmanship of the English Faculty Board. This did not by any means abolish the perpetual round of committee meetings and other administration, but it did diminish it appreciably. When Michaelmas Term ended, in early December 1946, Tolkien told Unwin he was ‘on the last chapters’ of The Lord of the Rings, and would finish it by January.15
There was another interruption early in 1947. On 14 March, Tolkien, Edith and Priscilla left their big house in Northmoor Road, where the children had grown up but which was now too large and too expensive for only three people (especially with the income tax newly raised again by Major Attlee’s socialist government, and the lack of any domestic help), and moved to a small Merton College house in Manor Road. Amongst their neighbours were Austin Farrer, Chaplain of Trinity and a very notable Anglican theologian, and his wife Katharine, who was a fan of The Hobbit and became a friend. Later Tolkien lent her texts from The Silmarillion to read.
The Farrers had one daughter, who had what would now be called learning difficulties. Katharine suffered from chronic insomnia, and became dependent on drink and barbiturates; still, in the 1950s, she wrote a series of Oxford-set detective novels. Whilst Tolkien certainly met Austin Farrer socially, they do not seem to have become friends; he may, perhaps, have detected something of Farrer’s strong anti-Papalism – ‘I dare not profess belief in the great Papal error. Christ did not found a Papacy. No such institution appeared for several hundred years. Its infalliblist claim is a blasphemy … Nor is this an old or faded scandal – the papal fact-factory has been going full blast in our own time, manufacturing history after the event’16 (this probably refers to the proclamation of the dogma of the Assumption in 1950). This sat, for Farrer, comfortably alongside his general ‘Catholicism’ in theology and liturgy.
The move to Manor Road was not a success. Uprooting from a house the Tolkiens had occupied for twenty years was physically disruptive, leaving aside the sentimental wrench of leaving a much-loved family home. Inevitably, some of Tolkien’s papers were lost during the move. Their new house was soon found to be altogether too small; Tolkien had no room to use as a study, and had to move all his working papers to his college rooms. It was three years before a larger college house became available. The move meant that February and March were lost to writing, and The Lord of the Rings remained unfinished.
It may seem tedious to mention these routine physical dislocations, let alone dwell on them; most of us, after all, are obliged by circumstance to move house from time to time. For a writer such as Tolkien, however, the physical context for his work was of great importance; he was not a man like, say, Charles Williams, who wrote his books balancing a notebook on his knee in a train carriage. Tolkien needed to have his copious drafts and working notes to hand; he had by now generated many thousand manuscript pages connected with dozens of different stories or versions of stories, most of which were interlinked and existed in numerous drafts, much overwritten and interleaved; not to mention his very extensive linguistic writings. All of these texts were kept in innumerable box files, not always in the best order. To move all of this material bodily was intensely disruptive to Tolkien’s working methods.
Nevertheless, he continued to work on The Lord of the Rings, and to bring chapters to be read to the Inklings; Hugo Dyson had however developed an intense dislike of the book (oral tradition has him exclaiming, during the reading of a chapter and the appearance of an unspecified character, ‘oh fuck, not another elf’17) and was allowed to veto the reading of it; we do not know how often he exercised his veto, but he had been elected to a Merton fellowship in 1945, and so was presumably now a regular attender. Warnie Lewis in his diary records at least one Dyson veto. Confronted with this, Tolkien was disinclined to allow his book to be read out at all.
Faced with these varied obstacles – disrupted working patterns, public discouragement, physical ailments and his private tendency to despondency – the simple fact that Tolkien persevered with The Lord of the Rings is remarkable testimony to his strength of will. The temptation to set aside this vast self-imposed burden must have been great.
Farmer Giles was still unpublished; Tolkien suggested one of Priscilla’s contacts, Milein Cosman, a young German expatriate who later married the music critic Hans Keller, as illustrator, and on the strength of this he agreed to give Unwin a completed text by the end of June 1947 (although he thought the royalty could be bigger). He sent the corrected typescript in on 5 July.
Later that month, Tolkien finally finished an introduction for E.V. Gordon’s posthumous Pearl edition, and sent it to Gordon’s widow Ida, who was readying the book for publication. He also, on a visit to London, dropped off a typescript of the first Book of The Lord of the Rings for Unwin to look at; Unwin passed it to Rayner, who was enthusiastic and asked for more.
Chapter 10 – Hyde and Jekyll
I – Unfinished business
August and early September 1947 were ‘devote[d] … mainly to philology’ – ‘Hyde (or Jekyll) has had to have his way’;1 Simonne d’Ardenne stayed again with the Tolkiens during those months, and she and Tolkien did more work on Seinte Katerine. Tolkien managed to fit in a five-day walking tour in Malvern with the Lewis brothers, who thought he dawdled, distracted by plants, insects and his own talk; they marched ahead (‘ruthless walkers’, Tolkien declared), whilst Tolkien was left to follow at his own pace in company of one of Lewis’s former pupils, who made the fourth in their party. After returning to Oxford, Tolkien took his daughter Priscilla for a week’s stay at Stonyhurst; then, in early September, he had a few days with his Incledon cousins in Sussex. Edith does not seem to have come on any of these trips.
On 21 September, he sent Book II of The Lord of the Rings to Unwin for Rayner to read and comment on. Rayner was still at Oxford as an undergraduate, and was able subsequently to visit Tolkien to collect text as it became ready. At the same time, after looking at proofs for the reprint of The Hobbit, Tolkien sent Unwin a list of corrections for future reprintings, a list he had promised in July; he also included the speculative revised text of the book’s fifth chapter (Bilbo’s finding of the Ring, and the subsequent riddle contest with Gollum) ‘for your amusement’; Unwin misunderstood, and had it inserted into the text against its next appearance.2 The new chapter meshed much better with the nature and purpose of the Ring in the Hobbit sequel. The reprint did not in fact appear until November; it did not of course incorporate any of Tolkien’s September revisions.
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