Predictably, Williams had a more idiosyncratic view of the matter. He was convinced that the British, outmanned and outgunned, would lose to the Germans, and as a result he refused to endorse the war effort. Late one evening, Alice Hadfield spotted Williams and her future husband, an OUP employee, marching together up Oxford Street, Williams chanting “We don’t want to fight for Czechoslovakis” and his companion replying “Hear! Hear!” Prewar gloom had overspread Amen House. Esprit de corps had vanished, due in large measure to Williams’s own conflicted views. With palpable confusion and an edge of despair, he confessed to Alice that “if there were war I could wish we could all die together—as it is we shall have to hold separately to the Doctrine by ourselves … I am as terrified of my old age as you were of your immediate future, but I reject the terror.”
Events outmarched his terror and his defiance. A day or two later, on September 1, Hitler invaded Poland. Warnie, recalled to active service, headed to Yorkshire. The next day, Lewis sent him a letter that he signed, looking ahead and fearing the worst, “God save you, brother.” On September 3 at 11:15 a.m., Britain declared war on Germany. Tolkien, just returned from daily Mass, could not hide his agitation from Priscilla. Twenty-four hours later, Amen House and its employees, including Charles Williams, relocated to Oxford.
12
WAR, AGAIN
When Charles Williams, his clothes grimy from London soot, stepped off a train onto the Oxford platform on September 4, 1939, he entered a city that had changed dramatically. With the government’s proclamation at 11:07 a.m. on August 31 to “Evacuate Forthwith!” Operation Pied Piper had gone into effect, and up to three million children, mothers of young children, pregnant women, and invalids had fled possible German air attacks by moving out of major metropolitan areas. Ten to fifteen thousand child evacuees arrived in Oxford, to be crammed in wherever room could be found, not only in professorial residences like the Kilns but in empty cinemas and university towers. Blackout conditions ruled, plunging the cobbled streets into near-absolute darkness on moonless nights. The Examination Schools became a military hospital, the Ministry of Food commandeered St. John’s College, and the Ministry of Agriculture occupied a portion of Pembroke College, delighting Tolkien with a newly erected sign, PESTS: FIRST FLOOR. The university instituted a two-year “war degree,” but even that pittance tried the patience of many students who, matriculating at seventeen, joined the armed forces at eighteen and headed to the Continent or farther afield to be mowed down by Axis guns. The death rate was shocking; Jan Morris reports, in a typical instance, that “of the Trinity boat crew which won the Eights Week races in 1939, all but two died.” This slaughter notwithstanding, the “bewildered university,” as Tolkien described it, carried on as best it could with smaller classes and periodic food shortages, contributing to the war effort not only through enlistees but through faculty research, most notably when Professor of Pathology Howard Florey and his staff developed, in the early 1940s, a technique to process penicillin for clinical use.
In the midst of this transformation the Inklings thrived. War famously induces in those far from carnage, at least for a time, a giddy excitement, a sense of living in suspension, betwixt and between, plucked by the hand of history from the suffocating confines of ordinary life. So it was for many of the Oxford intelligentsia. Lewis, describing to Warnie a Thursday night meeting in November, wrote that “I have never in my life seen Dyson so exuberant—‘a roaring cataract of nonsense.’” After dining at the Eastgate Hotel, the troupe returned to Lewis’s rooms at Magdalen to hear a chapter from the new Hobbit, a nativity play by Williams (“unusually intelligible for him, and approved by all”), and a portion of Lewis’s The Problem of Pain.
This was the usual fare: at nearly every meeting of the band, as the readings ventured into new territory (Lewis’s apologetics, Williams’s study of Dante, medical treatises by Havard), the humor delighted, the conversation sparkled, and the beer flowed freely. The exhilaration of these wartime gatherings was due in large measure to Williams. Cast up on Oxford shores, he became a regular on Thursday nights and instantly impressed his hectic personality upon the groups. He declaimed long passages from his plays, novels, and essays; he speculated, challenged, and joked, always in motion, a whirling dervish in mind and body. Lewis started to think along Williamsesque lines, acquiring a fascination for Arthurian myth and weighing the possibility of using Earth rather than outer space as a stage for fantasy fiction (these twin interests would culminate in his 1945 fantasy, That Hideous Strength). Dyson ascended to new heights of biting humor; learning of Williams’s interest in chastity, he declared that his new friend was “becoming a common chastitute.” Some of the quieter Inklings, caught up in the excitement, began to join in more vigorously: Havard read papers on mountain climbing and on the nature of pain, while Adam Fox recited poetry. Warnie, when he returned in May 1940 from the Continent, read from the manuscript of The Splendid Century: Life in the France of Louis XIV, his quirky, insightful study of seventeenth-century France, filled with a brooding sense of the dark tidal forces that rule history, altogether a surprise for those who had weighed up the elder Lewis as little more than his younger brother’s duller, boozier sidekick. Havard remembered Warnie’s reading as “very witty … very good … It took us out of the theological atmosphere into another world.” Nonetheless, Lewis and Tolkien continued to dominate meetings, Tolkien reading sections of the new Hobbit, Lewis bits of works in progress, including his translation of the Aeneid, a text that survives only in fragments, pieced together and published in 2011 as C. S. Lewis’s Lost Aeneid: Arms and the Exile.
Visitors, too, breached the gates, now and then generating friction within the core group. One Tuesday morning, Tolkien arrived at the Bird and Baby with Williams in tow and spied “a strange tall gaunt man half in khaki half in mufti with a large wide-awake hat, bright eyes and a hooked nose, sitting in the corner,” looking very much like Trotter (Strider’s original name) at the Inn of the Prancing Pony in The Lord of the Rings, as Tolkien noted in a letter to Christopher on October 6, 1944. The mysterious figure was Roy Campbell, a right-wing Catholic poet who had fought for Franco in the Spanish Civil War and had arrived in Oxford partly in order to meet Lewis. Lewis, however, despised Campbell (whom he had previously parodied in The Oxford Magazine), ostensibly for his fascism. Tolkien, who felt some kinship with Campbell over their shared faith, suspected that Lewis’s dislike was inspired in part by anti-Catholic bigotry, and he complained bitterly to Christopher that when Lewis heard of Catholic priests being murdered, as happened frequently in Spain during the 1930s, he “really thinks they asked for it.” Another odd visitor who attended several Inklings meetings was E. R. Eddison, a childhood pal of Arthur Ransome and author of The Worm Ouroboros (1922), a rococo space fantasy set on Mercury. Lewis adored Ouroboros, reading it at least six times and praising it and Eddison’s other novels as “a new literary species, a new rhetoric, a new climate of the imagination.” Eddison had crafted for his novels an artificial, dense, mock-medieval voice, first cousin to Morris’s and Tolkien’s heigh stile, and he and Lewis took to corresponding with one another in this register. His account of his first Thursday night gathering catches the flavor of the group, of his peculiar manner, and of this curious exchange of letters:
And so to that quincunciall symposium, at ease about your sea-cole fire, in your privat chaumbre, where (as it seemed to mee) good discourse made night’s horses gallop too faste; & so to our goodnight walke & adieux in the gate under your great Towre … For my self, I tasted wisdome as wel as good ale at your fireside … If our talk were battledore & shuttlecock, what matter? ’Twas merry talk, & truth will sometimes appere, better than in statu, in the swift flying to & again of the shuttlecock.
As the gaming analogy shows, Eddison grasped the essence of the Inklings’ method: thrashing out the truth through verbal play. But he never shared their vision of truth, disdaining in his fiction and in his few published letters such Chris
tian virtues as simplicity and poverty. Tolkien, who vastly admired Eddison’s literary skills, ranking him the most gifted of all inventors of imaginary worlds, described the philosophy that permeates every page of Ouroboros and his other novels as a celebration of “arrogance and cruelty.” Tolkien may be unjust in this assessment; Eddison admired grandeur, strength, brooding intelligence, and refined beauty, qualities that, under Mercury’s perverse skies, flourish in lieu of love, compassion, and hobbitlike humility. Perhaps because of Tolkien’s objections—the two butted heads from the start—Eddison never became a regular among the Inklings.
More significant—and perplexing—were Tolkien’s reservations about Charles Williams. His response to Williams seemed inversely keyed to Lewis’s; the more Lewis admired Williams, the more Tolkien demurred. Some scholars have put his disaffection down to plain jealousy of the man who displaced him as Lewis’s best friend. There is truth in this; by 1939, Lewis had absorbed most of Tolkien’s ideas and literary motifs and was ready to be dazzled by someone new. In a letter he would write to his former pupil Mary Neylan shortly after Williams’s death, Lewis refers to him as “my great friend Charles Williams, my friend of friends, the comforter of all our little set, the most angelic”; small wonder that the sensitive Tolkien felt elbowed aside.
Nonetheless, Tolkien enjoyed Williams’s company and valued his critical acumen. During the war, he wrote a poem that reveals, if not his deepest feelings about Williams, at least those he was willing to express; in it he calls Williams “dear Charles” and lauds his “subtle mind,” his “virtues,” and his “wisdom.” He and Williams drank together, went on midnight strolls together, regaled one another at Inklings gatherings. Tolkien went out of his way to help Williams lecture at the university and, most tellingly, loaned him portions of the Hobbit sequel while still in manuscript (Williams immediately put his finger on one great strength of the tale: the bucolic peace of the Shire in contrast to the wrenching horrors of war). But mutual affability notwithstanding, Tolkien disdained William’s literary works, declaring in 1965 that he found them “wholly alien, and sometimes very distasteful, occasionally ridiculous.” Whence the antipathy? Distrusting Williams’s penchant for magic, he may have suspected (correctly) that behind these plot devices lay personal occult experience kept strictly hidden from the Inklings. It is easy to understand why, when Lewis wrote in the 1947 Festschrift Essays Presented to Charles Williams that “he gave to every circle the whole man,” Tolkien scribbled in the margin of his personal copy, “No, I think not.”
Visions in War Time
The tensions between Inklings and guests and among Inklings themselves reveal not only ideological friction but the fraught atmosphere of the age. Britain faced an implacable, fanatical foe; as the initial euphoria of war receded, the shadow of pain, privation, disease, and death loomed ever larger. A few weeks before the outbreak of war—as if an augury of things to come—Tolkien had suffered, while on holiday in Worcestershire, a concussion whose baleful effects had lasted for months. At the same time, Edith had fallen dreadfully sick; cancer was suspected. By December, doctors had settled upon a more benign diagnosis, but Tolkien now found himself beset with worries about his children. His first concern was John, who had graduated from Exeter College in the summer of 1939 and in November had arrived at the Venerable English College in Rome to begin studies for the Roman Catholic priesthood. From the start, John’s position was precarious. Italy would not declare war upon England until June 1940, but it was already allied with Germany and hostile to British interests. The college authorities decided to evacuate, and on May 16, 1940, six days after the Nazis swept through Belgium, France, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands, John and a contingent of fellow seminarians fled Rome in disguise. They arrived in the French port of Le Havre in the nick of time, catching the last boat before German troops arrived. John’s hairbreadth escape did little to end Tolkien’s concerns, however, for a few weeks later, his son Michael quit Oxford to join the RAF. He fought as an antiaircraft gunner during the Battle of Britain, received the George Medal, and later saw combat in France and Germany. Christopher, too, entered the Royal Air Force, training as a pilot in South Africa from 1943 to 1945.
In addition to illness and worry, Tolkien felt hemmed in by the domestic routines imposed by war. A portion of the garden now housed a chicken coop, and he spent much time tending to the hens and repairing the structure. His duties as an air raid warden proved exhausting; they included preparing the neighborhood for enemy attack and checking on adherence to blackout regulations, tasks that sometimes entailed all-night encampment at local headquarters. On one occasion his fellow warden, the kindly Jewish historian Cecil Roth, awoke him from a fitful sleep just in time to attend Mass at St. Aloysius; Tolkien thought the service “seemed like a fleeting glimpse of an unfallen world.” But Eden proved elusive. As the war ground on, his spirits sank and his letters overflowed with disgust at mankind (“A small knowledge of history depresses one with the sense of the everlasting mass and weight of human iniquity”), at the world (“How stupid everything is!”), and at his own inability to fight, hampered as he was by age and responsibilities (“I feel like a lame canary in a cage”).
Still, now and then happiness broke the gloom. New friendships blossomed, notably with Robert Murray, a student at Corpus Christi College and grandson of Sir James Augustus Henry Murray, editor of the Oxford English Dictionary. Young Murray soon became a family favorite and under the guidance of Tolkien and others entered the Catholic Church after the war and later joined the Jesuits; Tolkien would give him a prepublication typescript of The Lord of the Rings to evaluate, a sign of highest esteem. There was cheerful news within the family as well. Halfway through the war, Michael and his wife, Joan, gave Tolkien and Edith their first grandchild, Michael George Reuel. At around the same time, Tolkien became godfather to David Havard, the Useless Quack’s son. Priscilla, a child when the war began, turned sixteen before its end, and Tolkien took great pleasure in observing her intellectual maturation, noting with delight that she, as he did, preferred Perelandra (the second volume in Lewis’s Space Trilogy) to Out of the Silent Planet. He cultivated a remarkable correspondence with Michael and Christopher, writing letters bursting with family gossip, literary asides, and religious reflections. To Christopher he offered what amounts to an abbreviated course in Catholic living, counseling him to recall always his guardian angel, to aspire to Christian tranquillity, and to memorize the canon of the Mass and various prayers so that he would “never need for words of joy.” To Michael he unveiled his soul, declaring, in one of the most memorable spiritual passages to be found in his letters, that “out of the darkness of my life, so much frustrated, I put before you the one great thing to love on earth: the Blessed Sacrament … There you will find romance, glory, honour, fidelity, and the true way of all your loves upon earth.”
Tolkien’s Catholic ardor, nearly always at high pitch, intensified yet more during the war, as the Luftwaffe attacked his homeland and his sons flirted with death abroad. His wartime letters on Catholicism, lengthy, closely argued, and deeply felt, sometimes surprise and even shock readers ignorant of the religious roots of his art, those who imagine him a happy pagan or nothing at all. One of the most startling proclamations came in a letter to Christopher dated November 7–8, 1944, in which Tolkien revealed that he had experienced a “sudden vision” or “apperception” of the “Light of God” (the capital letters are Tolkien’s) while deep in Eucharistic adoration at Sts. Gregory & Augustine Church on the Woodstock Road. In the vision, he saw God’s Light surrounding and bathing “one small mote,” which he realized was himself (although it could have been anyone “that I might think of with love”); he realized, too, that the Light linking God and the mote was a Guardian Angel, “not a thing interposed between God and the creature, but God’s very attention itself, personalized.” This extraordinary event brought with it a “great sense of joy” and “comfort.” Tolkien now knew with unshakable conviction th
at his loved ones lived always under supernatural protection.
During this period, he inundated Christopher with literary as well as spiritual confessions. He considered his youngest son the perfect sounding board on which to test works in progress: bright, insightful, sensitive to language, quick to notice small discrepancies of plot, and trustworthy as only one’s own child can be. He told Christopher that he was writing the new Hobbit with him in mind and regularly sent him new sections of typescript as soon as they became available. Christopher in turn responded to each installment with steady enthusiasm and trenchant criticism.
While working on his tale, Tolkien continued to experiment with pencil and paint, turning out landscapes, buildings, and other subjects based on the Hobbit sequel. Towers, fortresses, and mountains abound, curiously static subjects for such a swiftly moving tale; yet their dark, brooding, militaristic atmosphere reflects the fear and gloom that pervaded England during much of World War II. Scholars have long quarreled over which of the two world wars cast a greater shadow over The Lord of the Rings. The consensus favors World War I, for then Tolkien experienced firsthand the horrors of trench warfare, but World War II left its mark as well. Tolkien began writing the new Hobbit in December 1937, as prewar anxiety neared a climax, and he worked on it feverishly, albeit in bits and spurts, throughout the six years of active fighting. Parallels between Hitler and Sauron occur to almost every reader of the novel and surely occurred to Tolkien during composition. In his 1966 foreword to the second edition, he goes to great lengths to discount the influence of World War II on the book, declaring that the text contains nothing “topical” and that “little or nothing in it was modified” by the clash between Axis and Allies. One may be excused for discerning in these protestations the author’s insistent view of his work as a subcreation, an imaginative exercise in service to God, rather than an allegorical restatement of the politics of his age.
The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings Page 33