Joy’s husband divorced her for desertion, and in November 1953 she returned to England, this time, to her husband’s dismay, bringing her sons. Her visitor’s visa did not allow her to work, so her means of support are unclear; it seems very likely that Lewis volunteered to cover her rent and her sons’ school fees. It is possible that part of her motive was fear that her Communist past would, in the years of the House Un-American Activities Committee, catch up with her and make it impossible for her to live from writing in America (she had been a member of the American Communist Party between 1938 and her conversion to Christianity). This at least may be what she told Lewis; her position in England on a visitor’s visa was not, of course, much different, with one exception: Lewis. He found himself cast in the unlikely role of, as one of his biographers has put it, ‘an American divorcée’s sugar daddy’.17
She found a rented house in London, in Belsize Park, and a prep school for her boys. They all visited Lewis and his brother in December 1953. Warnie, together with other observers, was convinced she had set her cap at Lewis: ‘it was obvious what was going to happen’.18
These were years of change for Lewis; Mrs Moore had gone, and he was about to leave Oxford for Cambridge, to live there four nights each week during term: all the old routines were disarranged. Even the Tuesday morning Inklings was moved to Monday, so that Lewis could attend before, refreshed by beer, taking the train to Cambridge.
VI – A very odd marriage
Early in 1956, the Home Office declined to renew Joy Davidman’s visa, which had only ever been a temporary visitor’s one. Suggestions that she was to be deported as an ex-Communist are apparently unfounded, although she may have hinted to Lewis that this lay behind the nonrenewal of her visa. By now, her sons were at a prep school near Woking (the fees paid by Lewis) and she was living in a house in Headington (the rent, again, paid by Lewis), within walking distance of Lewis’s house. Joy and her sons moved there in the summer of 1955; the boys were sent to Dane Court as boarders, where Douglas (the younger), at least, was intensely unhappy. Given Lewis’s own miserable experience as a boarder, it is perhaps surprising that he acquiesced in this; perhaps he was not asked.
Lewis agreed to a civil marriage to allow her to stay in the country; it would also allow her to take paid work, which her previous visa had not, and so (perhaps) remove from Lewis some of the financial burden, which he had assumed, of supporting her and her children. The civil marriage took place on 23 April 1956. Here was a practical test of Lewis’s vigorously asserted claim, made in Christian Behaviour against Tolkien’s vehement objection, that civil marriage and Christian marriage were two plain different things, and should not by Christians be confused.19 Nevertheless, the civil marriage had given Joy and her sons various legal rights relative to her husband, which she now was at pains to assert. One was the right to cohabitation.
Lewis and Joy continued to live apart; she complained that their being constantly together, often until late in the evening, was causing scandal. Lewis conceded that she and her boys should come to live at The Kilns. She seems to have determined that the house would come to her and her boys after Lewis’s death, and forcibly told Mrs Moore’s daughter Maureen this; in fact, as Maureen (and Lewis) well knew, the house had been in Mrs Moore’s name, and the Lewis brothers had only a life interest in it: after their death, it was to be Maureen’s. Joy Davidman was a bossy and pushful woman, who clearly saw her civil marriage to Lewis as a meal ticket (McGrath calls her simply ‘mercenary’20). Nevertheless Lewis obviously valued her advice and enjoyed her company; during this time and under her influence, he began what is arguably his best novel, Till We Have Faces (it is dedicated to her). We may infer that Lewis’s affections were at this point unengaged from the fact that, when in July he was invited to bring a guest to a Buckingham Palace garden party, he asked not Joy, his legal wife, but his friend the poet Ruth Pitter (she couldn’t come).
In October 1956, however, before Joy and her boys could move in at The Kilns, she was diagnosed with incurable cancer, and Lewis discovered he was in love with her. Those who reckon such things significant may note that Lewis’s mother had died of cancer when she was forty-six; in 1956 Joy Davidman was forty-one. They were married by an Anglican priest (one of Lewis’s former pupils, whom Lewis rather bounced into performing the rite) on 21 March 1957, although the Bishop of Oxford had refused them leave to marry as Joy was divorced. She was also, in the eyes of the law, already married to Lewis after the civil ceremony, and thus, since the Church of England recognized any legal marriage as a valid one, in the eyes of the Church also. Lewis may be forgiven a certain confusion in sacramental theology under the circumstances: Joy was reliably said to be dying, and fast. Soon afterwards, however, her cancer went into remission.
Remarriage of divorcés was something the Church of England was at that time particular about; although the issue is complicated by the fact that Joy’s husband was himself divorced when they married. Had she been a Catholic, it is likely she would have been considered free to marry, although this would have depended on the determined status of William Gresham’s first marriage, which might not have been a valid one. But according to an Anglican understanding, as we have seen, any legal marriage (such as hers had been) was a valid one. The Bishop of Oxford concerned was Harry Carpenter, whose son Humphrey was to become Tolkien’s biographer.
Tolkien did not find out about Lewis’s marriage until eight months after the event, when he read a notice of it in The Times; this appeared on Christmas Eve of 1956, and was prompted by wild rumours of Lewis marrying one person or another. It was no more than a belated admission of the civil ceremony; no public notice of the religious service ever appeared.
Tolkien could not approve of marriage to a divorced woman, and was suspicious both of her motives and of Lewis’s gullibility: ‘Lewis has always been taken in by someone. First, it was Mrs Moore, then Charles Williams, and then Joy Davidman’;21 but mostly he was hurt to have been kept wholly in the dark. He may have taken a certain bitter pleasure in this practical sequel (he might even say, confirmation) of his carefully argued, and wholly ignored, demolition of Lewis’s views on marriage.
He did not wholly stop seeing Lewis; at the start of September 1958, Joy took her children away on holiday, and left Lewis alone. He was taken out to dinner by Havard, Tolkien and George Sayer. Whilst the dinner, according to Sayer, was ‘uproarious’, Tolkien was concerned about his old friend:
Tolkien was gloomy about the terrible strains and anxieties Jack was suffering: Warren’s drunkenness, two rather difficult boys, and ‘a strange marriage’ to ‘a sick and domineering woman’. It turned out that what worried him most was that she was a divorcée. He did not accept my argument that she could not have been divorced, since, as a Christian, she had never been married. However, the reappearance of Jack [who had been absent paying the bill] forestalled a discussion of this question.22
This meeting was exceptional. Their intimacy was now decidedly past; apart from anything else, Lewis was in Cambridge four nights each week. Tolkien may have sometimes come into central Oxford for the Monday morning pub sessions if he was not already there on University business, although his house in Headington was much further from the Eagle and Child than he had been before. But the other breaches between them were deeper than physical distance, and less easily remedied.
Part IV – Last Years
‘ragged I walk. To myself I talk;
for still they speak not, men that I meet.’1
Chapter 14 – Silmarillion and Scholarship?
I – Chairless in Oxford
In 1959, Tolkien retired, aged sixty-seven. His last few years as a professor were not hugely productive: he lectured, set and marked exams, supervised theses and went to Ireland several times as an examiner. He also worked on a transcript of Ancrene Wisse. He was on sabbatical leave for two terms in 1958 (Hilary and Trinity Terms), with the aim of finishing various projects before retiring; in the event, some of this t
ime was spent looking after Edith, who was ill, and dealing with proposals for film versions of his books. In 1959, he was ill with appendicitis and spent much of the first half of the year recovering; he retired in June.
He gave a valedictory lecture, melancholy and waspish in part, compounded of regret, nostalgia and a barely concealed frustration at the state of his subject; but all done with wit and courtesy.2 The Oxford English School was a very different beast from the one he had joined in 1913, and rejoined in 1925; the changes were not, in some part, those he would have preferred, and more of the same were clear on the horizon. At any rate, he was now free of the burdens of office as well as its emoluments. The Lord of the Rings was an established success; his public was eager for more; he now had, presumably, leisure. What, now, was to prevent him from finishing The Silmarillion, his long-prepared legendarium?
In the event, he published nothing else on the matter of Middle Earth during his lifetime.
II – Delays and frustrations
To understand why, we need to look at the state of the work by the late 1950s. Little had been done to most of the material since the 1937 Quenta Silmarillion had been left incomplete when Tolkien began serious work on the Hobbit sequel that year. We saw Tolkien begin revising some parts of The Silmarillion in the early 1950s, when he had hoped Collins would publish it alongside The Lord of the Rings, but a deal of his effort at that time went into writing extended versions of the three Great Tales, all abandoned unfinished, rather than the main narrative Silmarillion proper (which, he had decided, could be done only after the narratives of the Great Tales were fixed). He had, also, taken up some of the old texts when preparing the Appendices published with The Return of the King, and had (inevitably) introduced some changes of detail; but the great bulk of the Silmarillion stories were in a state of sometimes great confusion, with in some cases multiple partly revised versions in existence, and in others (such as the famous, and central, Fall of Gondolin) nothing completed later than the original version from the 1917 Book of Lost Tales. At every turn, his efforts at reducing this mass of text to order met with knotty problems of consistency, of nomenclature, of (in some cases) philosophical and theological uncertainty. Resolving these questions was at least as likely to lead to his beginning a wholly new text, whether story or discursive essay, as to connected revision of the existing material. Even had his time been otherwise uninterrupted and tranquil, untangling all this would have been a stiff task for a man approaching his eighth decade. And of course, Tolkien’s life, like anyone else’s, never contained only the problems and tasks of his choosing. Interruptions came thick and fast.
One problem was a series of physical dislocations. When Tolkien retired as Professor of English Language, he also had to give up his rooms as Fellow of Merton. This meant finding room to house the thousands of books and other material he had kept there. Some of his library was dispersed;3 the remainder ended up in the garage attached to his house in Headington.
Then there was the unavoidable human condition. Edith had been in poor health for years; Tolkien, too, had been often ill, and both were now old.
There were other books, long-promised and long overdue, to be finished: his translations of three Middle English poems (Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Sir Orfeo and Pearl), made some years before, had been promised to Unwin; but they needed introductions and some commentary, and these were never completed. He had also a diplomatic edition of Ancrene Wisse, a thirteenth-century guide for anchoresses (enclosed women solitaries), first promised to the EETS as early as 1935. After a quarter of a century of sporadic work, and several abortive attempts to pass the job to other, younger scholars, he finally sent in a text in late 1958; a printers’ strike meant that the proofs were not sent back to him until the summer of 1960, when he was in the thick of The Silmarillion. That work had to be put to one side, and the threads of the Middle English taken up again so an introduction (written by another hand) could be revised, his own preface written, and a number of inadvertent mistakes corrected and unapproved changes reversed. He wrote to Rayner Unwin,
I am in fact utterly stuck – lost in a bottomless bog … The crimes of omission that I committed in order to complete the ‘L. of the R.’ are being avenged.4
The principal neglected project was his long-promised edition of the Ancrene Wisse. It eventually and after much labour and frustration appeared in 1962, in time for Tolkien’s seventieth birthday. It was greeted respectfully, but was clearly not the definitive word on the text that Tolkien’s colleagues and pupils knew he was capable of giving.5
Tolkien’s seventieth birthday was marked by a Festschrift, English and Medieval Studies Presented to J.R.R. Tolkien, published by Allen & Unwin. Charles Wrenn and Norman Davis assembled twenty-two ‘former pupils, friends and colleagues’ to contribute articles. They included Lewis, who wrote on ‘The Anthropological Approach’, Simonne d’Ardenne, Nevill Coghill and Alistair Campbell; there was also an ode to Tolkien by W.H. Auden (Auden had heard Tolkien lecture as an undergraduate, had become a fan of The Lord of the Rings when it was published and later struck up a friendship with Tolkien, mostly by letter).6
In the Michaelmas Term of 1962 and the following 1963 Hilary Term, Tolkien came out of retirement to cover for C.L. Wrenn, his successor in the Chair of Anglo-Saxon, who was in America on leave (and was himself soon to retire).
The effects of all this on his work on The Silmarillion cannot be measured simply in terms of time expended; anyone who has ever worked on a complex intellectual project knows that, after it has been put aside for some time, it cannot be resumed without considerable mental effort re-familiarizing oneself with the problems involved. These are the customary perils of the scholarly life, of course; but this does not make them any less real in any given case.
Another problem for Tolkien was the lack of an audience. The role C.S. Lewis played in encouraging and accompanying the gestation of The Lord of the Rings can hardly be overstated; Tolkien, as we have seen, saw clearly that without him it would never have been finished. Now, however, Tolkien had been estranged from Lewis for some years, and he had found no one able to take his place, as audience, sympathetic critic, general encourager. Tolkien essayed various schemes to enlist one or another of his American fans to help in the preparation of The Silmarillion, but none worked out as he hoped. Probably his closest literary confidant was his son Christopher, whom he had for some years determined was his imagined audience; but Christopher, for all his sympathy and his knowledge of northern literature, did not command the same authority as Lewis did as a critic, nor the same breadth of reading, nor (crucially) the same effectiveness as cajoler, persuader and general literary midwife.
Lewis’s life, meanwhile, had continued on what, to Tolkien, was its strange path. The matter of Lewis’s marriage had made a barrier between him and Tolkien that now was hardly ever crossed. After two years of remission, Joy’s cancer eventually returned. One of Edith Tolkien’s occasional stays at the Acland Nursing Home in north Oxford coincided with one of Joy Lewis’s visits there for treatment; the two women met, discovered each other’s identity and became friendly. Their respective husbands bumped into each other whilst visiting; this was the only time on record that Tolkien met Joy.7 In July 1960 she died. The following year, Lewis published, anonymously, A Grief Observed, one of the most honest accounts of bereavement ever written. He was now responsible for Joy’s two sons, neither of whom was an easy child. Their father, William Gresham, once came to visit, but was otherwise little involved; in September 1962, with his sight failing, and after being diagnosed with cancer, he killed himself with sleeping pills.
Warnie’s drinking was no better, and, as is the way of these things, tended to get worse at times coincident with other unrelated crises. Deprived thus for long stretches of Warnie’s secretarial help, Lewis was run ragged. His health was now bad; kidney and prostate and bladder all began to fail him.
Still he and Tolkien were no longer close. In some ways, of course,
as Robert Havard remarked, ‘the surprising thing … is that they became such close friends, rather than that differences appeared and separated them’.8 Yet despite their (to him inexplicable) personal estrangement, Lewis still promoted Tolkien’s work. In 1961, he nominated Tolkien for the Nobel Prize for Literature; Tolkien was rejected, on the grounds that he did not tell stories well enough. The Prize that year went, instead, to a Bosnian folklorist.
Perhaps all this miscellaneous distraction does something to balance the impression inattentive readers of Humphrey Carpenter’s biography may have, that Tolkien spent the next fourteen years doing crossword puzzles and doodling elvishly on newspapers. Like any of us, of course, Tolkien sometimes wasted time, and newspapers and crosswords were one of his relaxations (another was interminable and complex games of Patience); but the main reasons for delay were those I have described: interruptions, dislocations, ill-health and old age.
III – Revisions and late-written works
We saw that the 1951 revision to the Silmarillion had encompassed only those parts of the text that did not derive from the three Great Tales, of Turin, Tuor, and Beren and Lúthien. Completing these narratives to his satisfaction was the necessary precursor to producing a final text of The Silmarillion.
Charles Noad has compiled a scheme of what, he reckons, a completed Silmarillion from this period might have comprised: first, as always, the Quenta proper; then Ainulindalë; then, newly split off from the Quenta, its chapter on the Valar, now considered a separate work and titled Valaquenta; then the four Great Tales, and the two tales of the Second Age, Akallabêth and The Rings of Power; last, five appended works on miscellaneous matters – The Tale of Years (in place of both sets of Annals, now abandoned and used as quarries for the later Quenta); Laws and Customs of the Eldar; Dangweth Pengolodh (or Pengoloð); Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth; Quendi and Eldar.9 Three of the last five items were recent compositions addressing controverted points.
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