by Colin Wilson
I imagine that a critic like Wilson would find the first book enjoyable enough, but might begin to grow restive at the Council of Elrond, where one feels that Tolkien is at last beginning to take himself seriously, interposing his own values and writing imitation Norse-saga. He seems to be facing his critics and asking, 'Wasn't their world preferable to ours?' And it is purely a matter of personal feeling. Like Auden, I do not mind sharing the fun, and agreeing for the sake of argument. Another reader may find the style of the speeches unbearably bogus: 'If Gondor, Boromir, has been a stalwart tower, we have played another part. Many evil things there are that your strong walls and bright swords do not stay. You know little of the lands beyond your bounds ...' and so on. It brings to mind a literary trick perfected by Chesterton, the understatement designed to make your hair tingle, fake simplicity, as in the last sentence of The Man Who Was Thursday: 'There he saw the sister of Gregory, the girl with the gold-red hair, cutting lilac before breakfast, with the great unconscious gravity of a girl.' One feels this sentence ought to begin 'And lo!' It led to all the careful heroic understatement of Bulldog Drummond, and the Saint's careless smile as he faces a dozen villainous Chinamen. Robert Graves reacted against it in his historical novels, particularly the Claudius books, making his characters speak in a blunt, colloquial style, to assure the reader that people in ancient Rome were very like people today. So when Tolkien makes his characters talk a language that might be called Heroicese, some readers feel distinctly 'turned off'. In fact, I found myself skipping these long speeches when I read the book to my children.
All the same, they do not occupy all that much space. The excitement of the book lies in the journey, and in Tolkien's invention. Like the painter Niggle, Tolkien is definitely a creator of scenery. This is all so strongly realised that one feels he ought to collaborate with an illustrator of genius, or perhaps a whole series of illustrators (as in some editions of Shakespeare that have painting by practically every major Victorian artist). If admirers of the book were asked to choose their favourite scenes for illustration, I imagine there would be hundreds, involving forests, rivers, waterfalls, mountains, nearly all of them with some great view into the distance. Wilson objects that none of the characters come alive, and this may be true; but the scenery makes up for it. Tolkien obviously has a very unusual faculty of visualising places: Helm's Deep, Lorien, the White Mountains, the Dead Marshes, the plain of Gorgoroth. Purely as an imaginary travel book, The Lord of the Rings is a very remarkable work.
Either you become involved in the fantasy or you don't. If everything in the book 'came off' as Tolkien intends it to, it would certainly be one of the masterpieces of all time. And on a first reading, most of it does come off, because the suspense keeps the reader moving so fast that he hardly notices when effects fall flat. On second reading, as he lingers over some of the excellent descriptions of forests and rivers, he begins to notice that Tom Bombadil is rather a bore (which one might expect of a man who goes around yelling 'Hey dol, merry dol' etc.), that Lothlorien and its elves are a sentimental daydream, that Minas Tirith and its brave fighting men would like an Errol Flynn movie. The core of the book remains Frodo's journey, and this continues to be exciting even after several readings. Edmund Wilson says: 'An impotence of imagination seems to me to sap the whole story. The wars are never dynamic; the ordeals give no sense of strain; the fair ladies would not stir a heartbeat; the horrors would not hurt a fly.' Obviously, a reader's response is very much his own affair; but I cannot help feeling that Tolkien has somehow caught Wilson on the raw in some early page of the book, and that this has induced a mood of bad tempered, carping incredulity that has genuinely made him loathe the whole thing. Where literature is concerned, there ought to be some disputing about tastes; it is not enough to say that one man's meat is another man's poison. Some of Wilson's criticisms are valid; Mordor is disappointing after the build-up, and one feels that the non-appearance of Sauron is rather an evasion. One might add that Tolkien could have given the story greater depth by working out why the rings exercise such power and how Sauron's kingdom depends upon them. All great art is about the difference between illusion and reality, the everyday world as it appears to us and the reality that lies beneath. The philosopher starts from the sense that there is a lot of illusion about this world, and that his task is to probe to the reality. It is like a bullfighter's cloak that continually misleads us. Great art somehow produces a sense of glimpses into a deeper order of reality, what lies behind the cloak of the present, and beyond our general narrowness of consciousness. And in spite of all the criticisms, Tolkien's book obviously does this for a very large number of people. So it is hard to see how one can accept Wilson's description of the book as 'long winded volumes of balderdash' as a fair, objective assessment.
But, 'objectively' speaking, can one explain the extraordinary appeal of The Lord of the Rings? Well, on the simplest level one might regard it as a combination of science fiction and the novel of suspense. Now science fiction is notoriously badly written. It is almost impossible to name a science fiction novel written in the past thirty or forty years (that is, since Amazing Stories made the genre so popular) that rises above the cliches of cheap pulp fiction. Even some of the genuine classics of fantasy and suspense, like Merritt's Seven Footprints to Satan or the novels of Lovecraft, are so badly written that one must simply accept the atrocious style as a sort of convention. For the average literature—if only moderately sophisticated—reader (say an American college student), Tolkien's style and erudition must make a refreshing change. His world has the charm of innocence, reviving memories of childhood, and the magic of escapism in the non-pejorative sense—the open road, danger and hardship. If one assumes that it belongs on the same shelf as Edgar Rice Burroughs, E. R. Eddison, John Taine, Lovecraft, Van Vogt, then it obviously deserves very high marks indeed. Wilson is simply misleading the reader in evoking Gogol, Poe and Swift, who are aiming at something quite different. (Gogol's early Dikanka stories have something in common with Tolkien, and will stand comparison; but fantasies like The Overcoat and The Nose are not remotely related.)
But unlike the writers of science fiction, Tolkien's purpose is not simply to 'astonish'. As we have seen in the essay on fairy stories, he dislikes the modern world, and like Eliot or Yeats, is allowing this negative feeling to trigger a creative response. Although it may sound pretentious to say so, The Lord of the Rings is a criticism of the modern world and of the values of technological civilisation. It asserts its own values, and tries to persuade the reader that they are preferable to current values. Even the 'poetry', which everybody admits to be no better than average, underlines the feeling of seriousness, that even if the landscapes and adventures bear a superficial resemblance to Edgar Rice Burroughs's Martian novels, the purpose goes deeper. This, I think, defines what my early informants about the book were unable to explain: why it can be taken so seriously. In fact, like The Waste Land, it is at once an attack on the modern world and a credo, a manifesto. It stands for a system of values; this is why teenagers write 'Gandalf lives' on the walls of London tubes. Yeats's poems about fairyland were intended to be a fist shaken in the face of the modern world. Ruskin once said to Yeats's father that as he walked to the British Museum, he saw the faces of the people grow daily more corrupt; Yeats felt the same. This explains why Auden can take Tolkien so seriously, although his own poetry seems so deliberately 'modern' and anti-escapist.
This comparison raises again the fundamental question. Yeats's fairy poems are very beautiful in their way, but if Yeats had died after he had written them, he would now be merely another minor figure in the 1890s, like Dowson and Johnson. They are valid and important in their way, but Yeats went beyond them. In Leaf by Niggle, Tolkien criticises Niggle for ineptitude, for not thinking enough, and it is hard to see any reason why this criticism should not, in the last analysis, be applied to his own work. From an essay on fairy tales to Smith of Wootton Major he is stating the same simple proposition: t
hat certain people are dreamers and visionaries, and that although they may seem relatively useless to the community, they embody values that the community cannot afford to forget. This is true enough; but the values embodied in The Lord of the Rings are on the same level as those in Yeats's fairy poems. One feels that if he were really pressed to commit himself to a practical solution, he might end in the Catholic church, like Chesterton and Belloc, or at least as a High Anglican, like Eliot. (For all I know, he may be a Catholic or High Anglican; but for the practical purposes of literary criticism, he is a pessimistic Aesthete.) If one is to treat The Lord of the Rings as a statement of values, on the same level as the poetry of Eliot or Yeats, or Toynbee's Study of History, or the novels of Mann or Hesse, then one must agree that it fails because it is soft in the centre, a romantic anachronism; it should have been published in the 1850s, not the 1950s. Judged by the standards of George MacDonald's Phantastes, or Alice in Wonderland, or The Wind in the Willows, it is a splendid piece of work that will maintain a permanent place. Judged by the standards of a real work of genius and originality, like Daved Lindsay's Voyage to Arcturus, it lacks that final cutting edge of moral perception and seriousness. It is a fine book, but it does not belong in the first rank.
Tolkien, I suspect, would not mind this judgment in the least. He obviously enjoyed writing it; millions have enjoyed reading it; that, he would say, is enough. You can't expect him to be a Tolstoy or Dostoevsky as well. His position seems to be that the business of the artist—of his type of artist—is to create a kind of tree, as green and alive as possible. The tree will serve its purpose in a world that becomes increasingly urbanised.
Within his own terms, he is obviously right. Whether you accept these terms depends upon whether, like Edmund Wilson, you feel the artist has a 'duty' to the community, to history, to literature, or whatever. My own view of art tends to be less rigorous; I am inclined to feel that there is no point in looking a gift horse in the mouth. No doubt The Lord of the Rings is less significant than it looks at first sight. Perhaps it could have been made more significant if Tolkien had seriously thought-out the ideas he expressed in Leaf by Niggle. But perhaps if he had brooded too much on the artist's relation to society, the book wouldn't have got written at all; and then everybody would be worse off.
Note on Tolkien
When I wrote this small book, Tolkien was still alive. It was written originally at the request of a British publisher—of limited editions—who said he wanted to do a book of essays on writers of fantasy; I agreed to do the piece on Tolkien, largely because I had just finished reading The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings to my children for the second or third time. The publisher then decided to issue it as a separate book—perhaps because the other contributors were less prompt than I was.
I have never met Tolkien, and never had any contact with him, except through a brief correspondence in the early sixties. I now regret it; Donald Swann, who set a number of the poems to music, told me he was an amiable and approachable man, and that I ought to call and see him when I was in Oxford. When I had written this essay, I dropped him a line to say that I intended publishing a short book on him, and suggesting that we might meet. In fact, a Dutch 'occult' magazine had suggested I interview him. Alas, the attempt at contact ended as a comedy of non-communication. I received a letter back from Tolkien's solicitor, saying that he was alarmed to hear I had written a book called Tree By Tolkien. That sounded, he said, as if it was written by Tolkien, and therefore conveyed a false impression. In any case, he said, Tolkien was an old man, not in the best of health, and highly sensitive to critical comments about his work. So would I please agree to suppress the work—at least, for the duration of Tolkien's lifetime ... ? The general tone was haughty, as befits one who has been appointed the mouthpiece of a great writer.
I replied that unfortunately it was too late to withdraw the book; it was already at the printers. However, if he was worried about harsh critical comment, he had no cause for concern. It was, on the whole, thoroughly pro-Tolkien. As to the objection that bookshop-browsers might think it a new work by Tolkien, this was unlikely because (a) it was a limited edition that would only be sold to subscribers, and (b) my name would be displayed prominently on the cover. I explained that the title was an oblique reference to Tolkien's own story Leaf by Niggle ... I ended by saying that it would be kind if he could pass my letter on to Tolkien, or at least to someone in his immediate family, just in case he might be willing to see me.
Evidently the man did not like to be crossed. A short and harsh letter said it was highly unreasonable of me to persist in publishing a book against Tolkein's wishes, and that he still felt the title conveyed a false impression. He ended irritably: 'I have mentioned it to Mr. Tolkien. He does not want to see you.'
I was sorry; not because I couldn't get to see the old man—after all, he was ill and more than eighty years old, and no doubt I shall be just as unwilling to see strangers at that age—but because it seemed a pity that a kindly and courteous man should be represented by anyone so rude. I did receive an apologetic letter from a girl at his publishers, saying that for some time he had been too ill to see anyone, and that his family were concerned in case he was upset by attacks on himself—from which I gather that some of the patronizing comments of critics had caused offense. I replied that it was a pity I hadn't been able to interview him—think how posterity would have welcomed an interview of Shakespeare by John Milton. I hoped the comment might tease her into sending the letter to Tolkien, but it didn't. A couple of weeks later, copies of the book arrived, and I sent one care of his publishers. The day after I sent it, I heard news of his death. I also sent two copies of the book to W. H. Auden, who had told me he would be seeing Tolkien in Oxford, asking him, if he got the chance, to smuggle one in to Tolkien. A few days after that, I heard on the radio that Auden had died ... .
Re-reading the book a year later, I find that I have nothing to add to it. But it strikes me that Tolkien's popularity was essentially a part of the 'occult revival' of the 1960s. Of course, he deserved it; his fantasy is a classic, and will undoubtedly live as long as Alice in Wonderland and Gulliver's Travels, and probably longer than the fantasies of George MacDonald and C. S. Lewis, being easier to read. But that is no guarantee that a book achieves the fame it deserves; Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast trilogy reached a wide audience only after his death; and David Lindsay's Voyage to Arcturus—fundamentally a greater book than The Lord of the Rings because it has more to say—is still virtually unknown, at least in England.
The reason for Tolkien's enormous popularity in the sixties was not simply that he is a fine storyteller, and one of the greatest exponents of the art of 'escapism' in the history of literature, but because his ideas suddenly struck an answering chord in young readers—I apologize for the cliche. In 2001—A Space Odyssey, Arthur C. Clarke had popularised the notion that perhaps men were not the earliest intelligent life on earth; perhaps there had been visitors from other planets who had deliberately 'helped' us. Erich von Daniken's Chariots of the Gods? (serialised in a Sunday newspaper under the title: Was God a Spaceman?) made the same suggestion in more detail, and in spite of its slapdash presentation and a tendency to harangue the reader, it became a world best-seller. At the same time, H. P. Lovecraft's stories, with their legend of 'ancient old ones' who inhabited the earth long before human beings, and who destroyed themselves through the practice of black magic, suddenly found a wider audience than he had ever known in his lifetime—or indeed, for many decades after his death. I had discovered Tolkien and Lovecraft at about the same time, in 1960, and had written of both of them in The Strength to Dream, pointing out the similarities. 'Far, far below the deepest delvings of the Dwarves, the world is gnawed by name-less things. Even Sauron knows them not. They are older than he ...' This could easily be Lovecraft. The appendices to The Lord of the Rings also carry the history of Middle Earth back to these far ages before men and hobbits. (Oddly enough, though, Tom Bombadil was supposed
to be alive then—a point that emphasizes that Tolkien's imagination is much more cheerful than Lovecraft's.) Tolkien has this desire to create a whole world, and supply it with remote origins. He is expressing a human craving to reach beyond the everyday boundaries of human existence. And this, I think, is perhaps his real significance. Brian Aldiss has a science fiction story called Outside that captures something essential about human existence. Six people are living in a windowless house; every day food appears, but no one asks where it comes from, or what they are doing there. Eventually, it turns out that five of the six are aliens from space, who can imitate the form of human beings. They have been captured and placed in the room to force them to reveal their identity. Only one is a true human being, and because he is passive and seems incurious about his situation, the aliens are also passive, thereby, the author implies, revealing that they are not human. For human beings get curious, want to know what they are doing here ... .