J. R. R. Tolkien

by Humphrey Carpenter

  Not untypically, Tolkien turned this particular depression to good effect. Just as his despair over his failure to finish The Lord of the Rings had given birth to Leaf by Niggle, so anxiety over the future and his growing grief at the approach of old age led him to write Smith of Wootton Major.

  This story arose in an odd way. An American publisher had asked Tolkien to write a preface for a new edition of George Macdonald’s The Golden Key. He usually refused invitations of this sort, but this time, for no apparent reason, he accepted. He set to work at the end of January 1965, a time when his spirits were particularly low. He found Macdonald’s book far less to his taste than he had recalled, and noted that it was ‘illwritten, incoherent, and bad, in spite of a few memorable passages’. (Indeed Tolkien had none of C. S. Lewis’s passionate devotion to Macdonald; he liked the Cur-die books, but found much of Macdonald’s writing spoilt for him by its moral allegorical content.) But despite this reaction to the story, and again uncharacteristically, he pressed on with the task, as if he had to get something finished to prove that he was not incapable of work. He began to explain, to the young readers for whom the edition was intended, the meaning of the term ‘Fairy’. He wrote:

  Fairy is very powerful. Even the bad author cannot escape it. He probably makes up his tale out of bits of older tales, or things he half remembers, and they may be too strong for him to spoil or disenchant. Someone may meet them for the first time in his silly tale, and catch a glimpse of Fairy, and go on to better things. This could be put into a short story like this. There was once a cook, and he thought of making a cake for a children’s party. His chief notion was that it must be very sweet…

  The story was meant to last only for a few paragraphs. But it went on and on, until Tolkien stopped, realising that it had a life of its own and should be completed as something separate. In the first draft it was called ‘The Great Cake’ but he soon adopted the title Smith of Wootton Major. (The Macdonald preface was never finished.)

  Smith was unusual in two ways: it was composed on the typewriter – something Tolkien did not normally do – and it was related closely and even consciously to himself. He called it ‘an old man’s story, filled with the presage of bereavement’ and elsewhere he said that it was ‘written with deep emotion, partly drawn from the experience of the bereavement of “retirement” and of advancing age’. Like Smith, the village lad who swallows a magic star and so obtains a passport to Faery, Tolkien had, in his imagination, wandered for a long while through mysterious lands; now he felt the approach of the end, and knew that he would soon have to surrender his own star, his imagination. It was indeed the last story that he ever wrote.

  Not long after it was completed, Tolkien showed it to Rayner Unwin, who was delighted with it, but felt that it needed the company of other stories to make up a sufficiently substantial volume. However, Allen & Unwin eventually decided to issue the story on its own, and it was published in Britain and America during 1967, with illustrations by Pauline Baynes. Smith of Wootton Major was generally well received by the critics, though none of them perceived its personal content nor remarked that it was uncharacteristic of its author in containing an element of allegory. Tolkien wrote of this: ‘There is no allegory in the Faery, which is conceived as having a real extramental existence. There is some trace of allegory in the Human part, which seems to me obvious though no reader or critic has yet averted to it. As usual there is no “religion” in the story; but plainly enough the Master Cook and the Great Hall, etc., are a (somewhat satirical) allegory of the village-church, and village parson: its functions steadily decaying and losing all touch with the “arts”, into mere eating and drinking – the last trace of anything “other” being left in the children.’

  During this period Tolkien completed two other books for publication. His revision of the lecture On Fairy-Stories was published in 1964 together with Leaf by Niggle under the overall title Tree and Leaf, and when in 1961 his aunt Jane Neave, then eighty-nine, wrote to ask him ‘if you wouldn’t get out a small book with Tom Bombadil at the heart of it, the sort of size of book that we old ‘uns can afford to buy for Christmas presents’ the result was The Adventures of Tom Bombadil. The verses that Tolkien selected for this book had been written by him mostly during the nineteen-twenties and thirties, the exceptions being ‘Bombadil Goes A-Boating’ which was composed especially for the book, and ‘Cat’ written in 1956 to amuse Tolkien’s granddaughter Joan Anne. The book, again illustrated by Pauline Baynes, was issued just in time to delight Jane Neave, who died a few months later.

  If life in retirement sometimes seemed ‘grey and grim’ it also had many elements that Tolkien enjoyed. For the first time he had enough money. As early as 1962, before the amazing increase in American sales, he wrote of his income: ‘It is an astonishing situation, and I hope I am sufficiently grateful to God. Only a little while ago I was wondering if we should be able to go on living here, on my inadequate pension. But saving universal catastrophe, I am not likely to be hard up again in my time.’

  Tax took a large proportion of his earnings, but on the whole he bore this philosophically; though on one occasion he crossed a cheque for a large sum payable to the tax authorities with the words ‘Not a penny for Concorde’. Near the end of his life he made a financial settlement that passed on most of his assets to his four children.

  He was generous with his new-found wealth, giving a substantial sum (anonymously) to his parish church in Headington during his last years. In particular he was always glad to provide for the needs of members of his family. He bought a house for one of his children, a car for another, gave a cello to a grandson, and paid the school fees for a granddaughter. But despite his affluence, the habit of watching every penny – a habit acquired during years of heavy expense and a small income – could not be broken easily; and his diary, besides including a daily record of the weather, invariably contained a detailed account of even the smallest amounts of cash spent: ‘Airmail Is 3d, Gillette Blades 2s 11d, postage 7½d, Steradent 6s 2d.’ He never spent money carelessly; he and Edith did not install any electrical gadgets in the home, for they had never been accustomed to them and did not imagine that they needed them now. Not only was there no television in the house, but no washing-machine or dishwasher either.

  Yet the fact that he now had plenty of money did give Tolkien much pleasure. He indulged in selected extravagances which were entirely to his taste: a good lunch with wine at a restaurant after a morning’s shopping in Oxford, a black corduroy jacket and a new waistcoat from Hall’s the tailor, and new clothes for Edith.

  He and Edith were still very different people with widely differing interests, and even after fifty years of marriage they were not always ideal company for each other. Occasionally there were moments of irritation between them, just as there had been throughout their lives. But there was still, as there had always been, great love and affection, perhaps even more now that the strain of bringing up a family had passed. Now they had time simply to sit and talk; and they often did this, especially on summer evenings after supper, on a bench in the front porch at Sandfield Road, or in the garden among their roses, he with his pipe and she smoking a cigarette, a habit that she had taken up late in life. Inevitably much of their talk would be about the family, an endless source of interest to them both. The concept of the family, something that they had scarcely known themselves as children, had always mattered to them, and they now found the role of grandparents entirely to their liking, delighting in the visits of grandchildren. Their Golden Wedding, celebrated in 1966 with much ceremony, gave them great pleasure. Among the events to mark it was a performance at their party in Merton College of Donald Swann’s Tolkien song-cycle, The Road Goes Ever On, with the composer at the piano and the songs sung by William Elvin – ‘A name of good omen!’ said Tolkien.

  The domestic arrangements at Sandfield Road were by no means ideal, and the situation deteriorated as over the years Edith’s health became worse. Despite her incre
asing lameness from arthritis she managed to do all the cooking, most of the housework, and some of the gardening; but as the nineteen-sixties advanced and she came closer to her eightieth birthday it was clear that she could not manage for much longer. A daily help generally came in for a few hours, but it was not a small house and there was much to be done, while at the same time it was not big enough for a resident housekeeper to be accommodated with convenience, even supposing that a suitable person could have been found. Tolkien himself did what he could to help, and since he was good with his hands he could mend broken furniture or repair fuses; but he too was becoming increasingly stiff, and by the beginning of 1968, when he was seventy-six and Edith seventy-nine, they had decided to move to a more convenient house. A move would also have the advantage of making it possible to keep his whereabouts secret, and so of avoiding the now almost intolerable stream of fan-mail, gifts, telephone calls, and visitors. As to where they should move to, he and Edith considered several possibilities in the Oxford area. But eventually they settled on Bournemouth.

  CHAPTER II

  BOURNEMOUTH

  Even by the standard of English seaside towns, Bournemouth is a peculiarly unlovable place, an urban sprawl that owes most of its architecture to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, an anaemic English equivalent of the French Riviera. Like the majority of south-coast resorts, it attracts the elderly in large numbers. They come to spend their last years in bungalows and villas, or as residents in faded hotels where they are welcomed in winter but where the weekly rates rise sharply during the summer season. They take the air along the sea-front at East Cliff or West Cliff; they patronise the public library, the Winter Gardens, and the golf course; they stroll among the conifers of Boscombe and Branksome Chine; and eventually they die.

  Yet Bournemouth serves its purpose. It provides a setting in which elderly people of some affluence can be comfortable, and can spend their time with others of their age and class. Edith Tolkien had come to like it very much; and not without reason, for in Bournemouth for the first time in her life she had made a large number of friends.

  Some years previously she had begun to take holidays at the Miramar Hotel on the sea-front in the west of the town, an expensive but comfortable and friendly establishment chiefly patronised by people like herself. After Tolkien had retired and had given up his examination visits to Ireland, he had begun to accompany her on these Bournemouth holidays, and he soon realised that on the whole she was far happier there than she was at home in Oxford. This was scarcely surprising, for the social setting of the Miramar was very close to what she had known in the Jessop household at Cheltenham between 1910 and 1913: upper middle-class, affluent, unintellectual, and with an easy friendliness towards its own kind. At the Miramar she felt entirely at home, back in her own milieu, as she had never been in Oxford or at any other time during her married life. True, many of the other guests at the hotel were titled, rich, and self-assured. Yet they were all essentially of the same breed: conservative, glad to talk about their own children and grandchildren and about mutual acquaintances, happy to pass most of the day in the residents’ lounge with occasional interruptions for walks by the sea, content to sit over their post-prandial coffee and watch the nine o’clock news in the television room before going to bed. Nor did Edith feel any sense of inferiority, for she was now as well off financially as any of them; and as to titles, her status as the wife of an internationally famous author cancelled out any feeling she might have of inadequacy.

  On a more practical basis, the Miramar became increasingly the ideal answer to the Tolkiens’ domestic problems. When the strain of keeping house became too much for Edith, it was easy to book their usual rooms and to arrange for their regular hire-car driver to take them down to Bournemouth. At the Miramar, Edith would soon recover much of her strength, not to say her good spirits; while Tolkien himself was often glad to initiate visits to Bournemouth simply to escape from the confines of Sandfield Road and from the despair caused by his own inability to get his work done.

  He himself was not particularly happy at the Miramar. He shared little of Edith’s delight in the type of person (as C. S. Lewis expressed it) ‘whose general conversation is almost wholly narrative’ and though he found an occasional articulate fellow male among the guests he was sometimes reduced to silent and impotent rage by the feeling of imprisonment. But in other respects the Bournemouth holidays suited him very well. He could work in his hotel room just as much (or just as little) as at Sandfield Road – providing he remembered to bring all the relevant papers with him, which was not always the case – and he enjoyed the comfort and the cooking. He and Edith had discovered a local doctor who proved unfailingly friendly and helpful if either of them should be unwell; there was a Catholic church reasonably near at hand; the hotel was close to the sea which he loved so much (albeit a rather more timid sea than he might have preferred); and above all he could see that Edith was happy. So the visits to Bournemouth continued, and when the Tolkiens decided to leave Sandfield Road and find another house it was not altogether surprising that they resolved to look for something near the Miramar.

  ‘He lives in a hideous house – I cannot tell you how hideous, with hideous pictures.’ W. H. Auden said this at a meeting of the Tolkien Society in New York, and his words were reported in a London newspaper in January 1966. Tolkien read them, and remarked: ‘Since it is some years since his sole visit, in which he only entered Edith’s room and had tea, he must be confused in his memories (if he really said just this).’ It was a calm reaction to an insulting remark, and after showing a little initial displeasure in a letter to Auden, Tolkien was soon writing cordially to him once more.

  Auden’s remark was silly, and it was not true. The Sandfield Road house (to which he was referring) was no uglier than any others in that nondescript but modest street, nor were the pictures that adorned the walls of Edith’s drawing-room any different from those in the average middle-class house of the district. But of course this is precisely what Auden was trying to say. As a man of sophisticated tastes he was astonished by the apparent ordinariness of Tolkien’s life-style, and by the conformity of the house in the suburban road. This life-style did not specifically reflect Tolkien’s own tastes; on the other hand he did not exactly object to it – indeed there was an ascetic side to him which did not even notice it. It is important to grasp this before coming to any conclusions about the life that Tolkien led in Bournemouth from 1968 until the end of 1971.

  He and Edith bought a bungalow a short taxi-ride away from the Miramar. What Auden would have thought of this plain modern house, 19 Lakeside Road, can be easily imagined, for in his terms it was quite as ‘hideous’ as the Headington house. But from the point of view of the Tolkiens – both of them – it was exactly what they wanted. It had a well-equipped kitchen in which Edith could manage to cook with some ease despite her increasing disability; and besides a sitting-room, a dining-room, and a bedroom for each of them there was also a room that served as an indoor study for Tolkien, and he could use the double garage for a library-cum-office just as he had done at Sandfield Road. There was central heating – something they had never had before – and outside there was a verandah where they could sit and smoke in the evenings, a large garden with plenty of room for their roses and even a few vegetables, and at the bottom a private gate that led into the small wooded gorge known as Branksome Chine, and so down to the sea. There were Catholic neighbours who often took Tolkien to church in their car, regular domestic help, and the Miramar always near at hand for the accommodation of friends and members of the family who came down to see them – as well as for regular lunches, and even for sleeping overnight now and then when Edith needed a rest.

  Inevitably the move to Bournemouth involved much sacrifice on Tolkien’s part. He had little wish to leave Oxford, and he knew that he was cutting himself off from all but a limited contact with his family and close friends. And again, as with his retirement to Headington, he f
ound the reality a little harsher than he had expected. ‘I fed quite well,’ he wrote to Christopher a year after moving to Bournemouth. ‘And yet; and yet. I see no men of my own kind. I miss Norman. And above all I miss you.’

  But the sacrifice had a purpose to it, and that purpose was achieved. Edith was happy at Lakeside Road, as happy as she had been during the holidays at the Miramar, and consistently happier than she had ever been before in their married life. Besides the comfort of the new house and the benefit she derived from the absence of stairs to be negotiated, there was also her continuing pleasure at visits to the Miramar and at the friendships she made there. She had ceased to be the shy, uncertain, sometimes troubled wife of an Oxford professor, and became herself once more, the sociable good-humoured Miss Bratt of the Cheltenham days. She was back in the setting where she really belonged.

  And on the whole life was better for Tolkien himself. Edith’s happiness was deeply gratifying to him, and was reflected in his own state of mind, so that the diary he kept for a brief time during these Bournemouth years shows very little of the despondency which often overtook him at Sandfield Road. The absence of what he called ‘men of my own kind’ was partly made up for by frequent visits from members of the family and friends, while the almost total lack of interruptions from fans (the address and telephone number, even the information that Tolkien was living on the south coast, were successfully kept secret) meant that a great deal more of his time was available for work. A certain amount of secretarial assistance was given by the doctor’s wife, while Joy Hill, the member of Allen & Unwin’s staff who dealt with his fan-mail, came down regularly to attend to letters. The move to Bournemouth was initially made more tiresome by a serious accident when Tolkien fell on the stairs at Sandfield Road and injured his leg badly, with the result that he had to spend some weeks in hospital and many more in plaster; but once he had recovered he was able, at least in theory, to begin to work with some thoroughness at The Silmarillion.